The Project Gutenberg EBook of English Translations Of Works Of Emile Zola, by
Emile Zola

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Title: English Translations Of Works Of Emile Zola
An Index to the Project Gutenberg Works of Zola in English

Author: Emile Zola

Editor: David Widger

Release Date: May 30, 2009 [EBook #29004]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ZOLA WORKS IN ENGLISH ***

Produced by David Widger

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF WORKS OF

EMILE ZOLA

AN INDEX

Edited by David Widger

Emile Zola (1840-1902)

Project Gutenberg Editions

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CONTENTS

Click on the ## before each title to go directly to a
linked index of the detailed chapters and illustrations

##  The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete: Lourdes, Rome, Paris

##  Lourdes

##  Rome

##  Paris

##  Fruitfulness

##  A Zola Dictionary

##  Fête At Coqueville

##  His Masterpiece

##  The Downfall

##  The Fortune of the Rougons

##  The Fat and the Thin

##  Therese Raquin

##  L'Assommoir

##  The Dream

##  Nana and Others

##  Doctor Pascal

##  Abbe Mouret's Transgression

VOLUMES, CHAPTERS AND STORIES

The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete

LOURDES

PREFACE

THE FIRST DAY

I. PILGRIMS AND PATIENTS

II. PIERRE AND MARIE

III. POITIERS

IV. MIRACLES

V. BERNADETTE

THE SECOND DAY

I. THE TRAIN ARRIVES

II. HOSPITAL AND GROTTO

III. FOUNTAIN AND PISCINA

IV. VERIFICATION

V. BERNADETTE'S TRIALS

THE THIRD DAY

I. BED AND BOARD

II. THE "ORDINARY."

III. THE NIGHT PROCESSION

IV. THE VIGIL

V. THE TWO VICTIMS

THE FOURTH DAY

I. THE BITTERNESS OP DEATH

II. THE SERVICE AT THE GROTTO

III. MARIE'S CURE

IV. TRIUMPH—DESPAIR

V. CRADLE AND GRAVE

THE FIFTH DAY

I. EGOTISM AND LOVE

II. PLEASANT HOURS

III. DEPARTURE

IV. MARIE'S VOW

V. THE DEATH OP BERNADETTE—THE NEW RELIGION

ROME

PREFACE

PART I.

I.

II.

III.

PART II.

IV.

V.

VI.

PART III.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

PART IV.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

PART V.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

PARIS

BOOK I.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

I. THE PRIEST AND THE POOR

II. WEALTH AND WORLDLINESS

III. RANTERS AND RULERS

IV. SOCIAL SIDELIGHTS

V. FROM RELIGION TO ANARCHY

BOOK II.

I. REVOLUTIONISTS

II. A HOME OF INDUSTRY

III. PENURY AND TOIL

IV. CULTURE AND HOPE

V. PROBLEMS

BOOK III.

I. THE RIVALS

II. SPIRIT AND FLESH

III. PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT

IV. THE MAN HUNT

V. THE GAME OF POLITICS

BOOK IV.

I. PIERRE AND MARIE

II. TOWARDS LIFE

III. THE DAWN OF LOVE

IV. TRIAL AND SENTENCE

V. SACRIFICE

BOOK V.

I. THE GUILLOTINE

II. IN VANITY FAIR

III. THE GOAL OF LABOUR

IV. THE CRISIS

V. LIFE'S WORK AND PROMISE

Lourdes

LOURDES

PREFACE

THE FIRST DAY

I. PILGRIMS AND PATIENTS

II. PIERRE AND MARIE

III. POITIERS

IV. MIRACLES

V. BERNADETTE

THE SECOND DAY

I. THE TRAIN ARRIVES

II. HOSPITAL AND GROTTO

III. FOUNTAIN AND PISCINA

IV. VERIFICATION

V. BERNADETTE'S TRIALS

THE THIRD DAY

I. BED AND BOARD

II. THE "ORDINARY."

III. THE NIGHT PROCESSION

IV. THE VIGIL

V. THE TWO VICTIMS

THE FOURTH DAY

I. THE BITTERNESS OP DEATH

II. THE SERVICE AT THE GROTTO

III. MARIE'S CURE

IV. TRIUMPH—DESPAIR

V. CRADLE AND GRAVE

THE FIFTH DAY

I. EGOTISM AND LOVE

II. PLEASANT HOURS

III. DEPARTURE

IV. MARIE'S VOW

V. THE DEATH OP BERNADETTE—THE NEW RELIGION

Rome

ROME

PREFACE

PART I.

I.

II.

III.

PART II.

IV.

V.

VI.

PART III.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

PART IV.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

PART V.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

Paris

PARIS

BOOK I.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

I. THE PRIEST AND THE POOR

II. WEALTH AND WORLDLINESS

III. RANTERS AND RULERS

IV. SOCIAL SIDELIGHTS

V. FROM RELIGION TO ANARCHY

BOOK II.

I. REVOLUTIONISTS

II. A HOME OF INDUSTRY

III. PENURY AND TOIL

IV. CULTURE AND HOPE

V. PROBLEMS

BOOK III.

I. THE RIVALS

II. SPIRIT AND FLESH

III. PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT

IV. THE MAN HUNT

V. THE GAME OF POLITICS

BOOK IV.

I. PIERRE AND MARIE

II. TOWARDS LIFE

III. THE DAWN OF LOVE

IV. TRIAL AND SENTENCE

V. SACRIFICE

BOOK V.

I. THE GUILLOTINE

II. IN VANITY FAIR

III. THE GOAL OF LABOUR

IV. THE CRISIS

V. LIFE'S WORK AND PROMISE

Fruitfulness

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

A Zola Dictionary

PREFATORY NOTE

INTRODUCTION

THE ROUGON-MACQUART GENEALOGICAL TREE.

SYNOPSES OF THE PLOTS OF THE ROUGON-MACQUART NOVELS

THE ZOLA DICTIONARY

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

V

W

Z

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PRINCIPAL SCENES

Fête At Coqueville

I

II

III

IV

V

His Masterpiece

PREFACE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

The Downfall

PART FIRST

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

PART SECOND

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

PART THIRD

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

The Fortune of the Rougons

INTRODUCTION

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

The Fat and the Thin

INTRODUCTION

THE FAT AND THE THIN

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

Therese Raquin

PREFACE

THERESE RAQUIN

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

L'Assommoir

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

The Dream

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

Nana and Others

NANA

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

THE MILLER'S DAUGHTER

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CAPTAIN BURLE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

THE DEATH OF OLIVIER BECAILLE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

Doctor Pascal

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

Abbe Mouret's Transgression

INTRODUCTION

ABBE MOURET'S TRANSGRESSION

BOOK I

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

BOOK II

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

BOOK III

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

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Title: The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete
Lourdes, Rome and Paris

Author: Emile Zola

Translator: Ernest A. Vizetelly

Release Date: March 17, 2009 [EBook #9170]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THREE CITIES TRILOGY, COMPLETE ***

Produced by David Widger and Dagny

THE THREE CITIES

LOURDES, ROME, PARIS

By Emile Zola

Translated By Ernest A. Vizetelly

Contents

LOURDES

PREFACE

THE FIRST DAY

I. PILGRIMS AND PATIENTS

II. PIERRE AND MARIE

III. POITIERS

IV. MIRACLES

V. BERNADETTE

THE SECOND DAY

I. THE TRAIN ARRIVES

II. HOSPITAL AND GROTTO

III. FOUNTAIN AND PISCINA

IV. VERIFICATION

V. BERNADETTE'S TRIALS

THE THIRD DAY

I. BED AND BOARD

II. THE "ORDINARY."

III. THE NIGHT PROCESSION

IV. THE VIGIL

V. THE TWO VICTIMS

THE FOURTH DAY

I. THE BITTERNESS OP DEATH

II. THE SERVICE AT THE GROTTO

III. MARIE'S CURE

IV. TRIUMPH—DESPAIR

V. CRADLE AND GRAVE

THE FIFTH DAY

I. EGOTISM AND LOVE

II. PLEASANT HOURS

III. DEPARTURE

IV. MARIE'S VOW

V. THE DEATH OP BERNADETTE—THE NEW RELIGION

ROME

PREFACE

PART I.

I.

II.

III.

PART II.

IV.

V.

VI.

PART III.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

PART IV.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

PART V.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

PARIS

BOOK I.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

I. THE PRIEST AND THE POOR

II. WEALTH AND WORLDLINESS

III. RANTERS AND RULERS

IV. SOCIAL SIDELIGHTS

V. FROM RELIGION TO ANARCHY

BOOK II.

I. REVOLUTIONISTS

II. A HOME OF INDUSTRY

III. PENURY AND TOIL

IV. CULTURE AND HOPE

V. PROBLEMS

BOOK III.

I. THE RIVALS

II. SPIRIT AND FLESH

III. PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT

IV. THE MAN HUNT

V. THE GAME OF POLITICS

BOOK IV.

I. PIERRE AND MARIE

II. TOWARDS LIFE

III. THE DAWN OF LOVE

IV. TRIAL AND SENTENCE

V. SACRIFICE

BOOK V.

I. THE GUILLOTINE

II. IN VANITY FAIR

III. THE GOAL OF LABOUR

IV. THE CRISIS

V. LIFE'S WORK AND PROMISE

PREFACE

BEFORE perusing this work, it is as well that the reader should understand M. Zola's aim in writing it, and his views—as distinct from those of his characters—upon Lourdes, its Grotto, and its cures. A short time before the book appeared M. Zola was interviewed upon the subject by his friend and biographer, Mr. Robert H. Sherard, to whom he spoke as follows:

"'Lourdes' came to be written by mere accident. In 1891 I happened to be travelling for my pleasure, with my wife, in the Basque country and by the Pyrenees, and being in the neighbourhood of Lourdes, included it in my tour. I spent fifteen days there, and was greatly struck by what I saw, and it then occurred to me that there was material here for just the sort of novel that I like to write—a novel in which great masses of men can be shown in motion—un grand mouvement de foule—a novel the subject of which stirred up my philosophical ideas.

"It was too late then to study the question, for I had visited Lourdes late in September, and so had missed seeing the best pilgrimage, which takes place in August, under the direction of the Peres de la Misericorde, of the Rue de l'Assomption in Paris—the National Pilgrimage, as it is called. These Fathers are very active, enterprising men, and have made a great success of this annual national pilgrimage. Under their direction thirty thousand pilgrims are transported to Lourdes, including over a thousand sick persons.

"So in the following year I went in August, and saw a national pilgrimage, and followed it during the three days which it lasts, in addition to the two days given to travelling. After its departure, I stayed on ten or twelve days, working up the subject in every detail. My book is the story of such a national pilgrimage, and is, accordingly, the story of five days. It is divided into five parts, each of which parts is limited to one day.

"There are from ninety to one hundred characters in the story: sick persons, pilgrims, priests, nuns, hospitallers, nurses, and peasants; and the book shows Lourdes under every aspect. There are the piscinas, the processions, the Grotto, the churches at night, the people in the streets. It is, in one word, Lourdes in its entirety. In this canvas is worked out a very delicate central intrigue, as in 'Dr. Pascal,' and around this are many little stories or subsidiary plots. There is the story of the sick person who gets well, of the sick person who is not cured, and so on. The philosophical idea which pervades the whole book is the idea of human suffering, the exhibition of the desperate and despairing sufferers who, abandoned by science and by man, address themselves to a higher Power in the hope of relief; as where parents have a dearly loved daughter dying of consumption, who has been given up, and for whom nothing remains but death. A sudden hope, however, breaks in upon them: 'supposing that after all there should be a Power greater than that of man, higher than that of science.' They will haste to try this last chance of safety. It is the instinctive hankering after the lie which creates human credulity.

"I will admit that I came across some instances of real cure. Many cases of nervous disorders have undoubtedly been cured, and there have also been other cures which may, perhaps be attributed to errors of diagnosis on the part of doctors who attended the patients so cured. Often a patient is described by his doctor as suffering from consumption. He goes to Lourdes, and is cured. However, the probability is that the doctor made a mistake. In my own case I was at one time suffering from a violent pain in my chest, which presented all the symptoms of angina pectoris, a mortal malady. It was nothing of the sort. Indigestion, doubtless, and, as such, curable. Remember that most of the sick persons who go to Lourdes come from the country, and that the country doctors are not usually men of either great skill or great experience. But all doctors mistake symptoms. Put three doctors together to discuss a case, and in nine cases out of ten they will disagree in their diagnosis. Look at the quantities of tumours, swellings, and sores, which cannot be properly classified. These cures are based on the ignorance of the medical profession. The sick pretend, believe, that they suffer from such and such a desperate malady, whereas it is from some other malady that they are suffering. And so the legend forms itself. And, of course, there must be cures out of so large a number of cases. Nature often cures without medical aid. Certainly, many of the workings of Nature are wonderful, but they are not supernatural. The Lourdes miracles can neither be proved nor denied. The miracle is based on human ignorance. And so the doctor who lives at Lourdes, and who is commissioned to register the cures and to tabulate the miracles, has a very careless time of it. A person comes, and gets cured. He has but to get three doctors together to examine the case. They will disagree as to what was the disease from which the patient suffered, and the only explanation left which will be acceptable to the public, with its hankering after the lie, is that a miracle has been vouchsafed.

"I interviewed a number of people at Lourdes, and could not find one who would declare that he had witnessed a miracle. All the cases which I describe in my book are real cases, in which I have only changed the names of the persons concerned. In none of these instances was I able to discover any real proof for or against the miraculous nature of the cure. Thus, in the case of Clementine Trouve, who figures in my story as Sophie—the patient who, after suffering for a long time from a horrid open sore on her foot, was suddenly cured, according to current report, by bathing her foot in the piscina, where the bandages fell off, and her foot was entirely restored to a healthy condition—I investigated that case thoroughly. I was told that there were three or four ladies living in Lourdes who could guarantee the facts as stated by little Clementine. I looked up those ladies. The first said No, she could not vouch for anything. She had seen nothing. I had better consult somebody else. The next answered in the same way, and nowhere was I able to find any corroboration of the girl's story. Yet the little girl did not look like a liar, and I believe that she was fully convinced of the miraculous nature of her cure. It is the facts themselves which lie.

"Lourdes, the Grotto, the cures, the miracles, are, indeed, the creation of that need of the Lie, that necessity for credulity, which is a characteristic of human nature. At first, when little Bernadette came with her strange story of what she had witnessed, everybody was against her. The Prefect of the Department, the Bishop, the clergy, objected to her story. But Lourdes grew up in spite of all opposition, just as the Christian religion did, because suffering humanity in its despair must cling to something, must have some hope; and, on the other hand, because humanity thirsts after illusions. In a word, it is the story of the foundation of all religions."

To the foregoing account of "Lourdes" as supplied by its author, it may be added that the present translation, first made from early proofs of the French original whilst the latter was being completed, has for the purposes of this new American edition been carefully and extensively revised by Mr. E. A. Vizetelly,—M. Zola's representative for all English-speaking countries. "Lourdes" forms the first volume of the "Trilogy of the Three Cities," the second being "Rome," and the third "Paris."

LOURDES

THE FIRST DAY

I. PILGRIMS AND PATIENTS

THE pilgrims and patients, closely packed on the hard seats of a third-class carriage, were just finishing the "Ave maris Stella," which they had begun to chant on leaving the terminus of the Orleans line, when Marie, slightly raised on her couch of misery and restless with feverish impatience, caught sight of the Paris fortifications through the window of the moving train.

"Ah, the fortifications!" she exclaimed, in a tone which was joyous despite her suffering. "Here we are, out of Paris; we are off at last!"

Her delight drew a smile from her father, M. de Guersaint, who sat in front of her, whilst Abbe Pierre Froment, who was looking at her with fraternal affection, was so carried away by his compassionate anxiety as to say aloud: "And now we are in for it till to-morrow morning. We shall only reach Lourdes at three-forty. We have more than two-and-twenty hours' journey before us."

It was half-past five, the sun had risen, radiant in the pure sky of a delightful morning. It was a Friday, the 19th of August. On the horizon, however, some small, heavy clouds already presaged a terrible day of stormy heat. And the oblique sunrays were enfilading the compartments of the railway carriage, filling them with dancing, golden dust.

"Yes, two-and-twenty hours," murmured Marie, relapsing into a state of anguish. "Mon Dieu! what a long time we must still wait!"

Then her father helped her to lie down again in the narrow box, a kind of wooden gutter, in which she had been living for seven years past. Making an exception in her favour, the railway officials had consented to take as luggage the two pairs of wheels which could be removed from the box, or fitted to it whenever it became necessary to transport her from place to place. Packed between the sides of this movable coffin, she occupied the room of three passengers on the carriage seat; and for a moment she lay there with eyes closed. Although she was three-and-twenty; her ashen, emaciated face was still delicately infantile, charming despite everything, in the midst of her marvellous fair hair, the hair of a queen, which illness had respected. Clad with the utmost simplicity in a gown of thin woollen stuff, she wore, hanging from her neck, the card bearing her name and number, which entitled her to hospitalisation, or free treatment. She herself had insisted on making the journey in this humble fashion, not wishing to be a source of expense to her relatives, who little by little had fallen into very straitened circumstances. And thus it was that she found herself in a third-class carriage of the "white train," the train which carried the greatest sufferers, the most woeful of the fourteen trains going to Lourdes that day, the one in which, in addition to five hundred healthy pilgrims, nearly three hundred unfortunate wretches, weak to the point of exhaustion, racked by suffering, were heaped together, and borne at express speed from one to the other end of France.

Sorry that he had saddened her, Pierre continued to gaze at her with the air of a compassionate elder brother. He had just completed his thirtieth year, and was pale and slight, with a broad forehead. After busying himself with all the arrangements for the journey, he had been desirous of accompanying her, and, having obtained admission among the Hospitallers of Our Lady of Salvation as an auxiliary member, wore on his cassock the red, orange-tipped cross of a bearer. M. de Guersaint on his side had simply pinned the little scarlet cross of the pilgrimage on his grey cloth jacket. The idea of travelling appeared to delight him; although he was over fifty he still looked young, and, with his eyes ever wandering over the landscape, he seemed unable to keep his head still—a bird-like head it was, with an expression of good nature and absent-mindedness.

However, in spite of the violent shaking of the train, which constantly drew sighs from Marie, Sister Hyacinthe had risen to her feet in the adjoining compartment. She noticed that the sun's rays were streaming in the girl's face.

"Pull down the blind, Monsieur l'Abbe," she said to Pierre. "Come, come, we must install ourselves properly, and set our little household in order."

Clad in the black robe of a Sister of the Assumption, enlivened by a white coif, a white wimple, and a large white apron, Sister Hyacinthe smiled, the picture of courageous activity. Her youth bloomed upon her small, fresh lips, and in the depths of her beautiful blue eyes, whose expression was ever gentle. She was not pretty, perhaps, still she was charming, slender, and tall, the bib of her apron covering her flat chest like that of a young man; one of good heart, displaying a snowy complexion, and overflowing with health, gaiety, and innocence.

"But this sun is already roasting us," said she; "pray pull down your blind as well, madame."

Seated in the corner, near the Sister, was Madame de Jonquiere, who had kept her little bag on her lap. She slowly pulled down the blind. Dark, and well built, she was still nice-looking, although she had a daughter, Raymonde, who was four-and-twenty, and whom for motives of propriety she had placed in the charge of two lady-hospitallers, Madame Desagneaux and Madame Volmar, in a first-class carriage. For her part, directress as she was of a ward of the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours at Lourdes, she did not quit her patients; and outside, swinging against the door of her compartment, was the regulation placard bearing under her own name those of the two Sisters of the Assumption who accompanied her. The widow of a ruined man, she lived with her daughter on the scanty income of four or five thousand francs a year, at the rear of a courtyard in the Rue Vanneau. But her charity was inexhaustible, and she gave all her time to the work of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation, an institution whose red cross she wore on her gown of carmelite poplin, and whose aims she furthered with the most active zeal. Of a somewhat proud disposition, fond of being flattered and loved, she took great delight in this annual journey, from which both her heart and her passion derived contentment.

"You are right, Sister," she said, "we will organise matters. I really don't know why I am encumbering myself with this bag."

And thereupon she placed it under the seat, near her.

"Wait a moment," resumed Sister Hyacinthe; "you have the water-can between your legs—it is in your way."

"No, no, it isn't, I assure you. Let it be. It must always be somewhere."

Then they both set their house in order as they expressed it, so that for a day and a night they might live with their patients as comfortably as possible. The worry was that they had not been able to take Marie into their compartment, as she wished to have Pierre and her father near her; however neighbourly intercourse was easy enough over the low partition. Moreover the whole carriage, with its five compartments of ten seats each, formed but one moving chamber, a common room as it were which the eye took in at a glance from end to end. Between its wooden walls, bare and yellow, under its white-painted panelled roof, it showed like a hospital ward, with all the disorder and promiscuous jumbling together of an improvised ambulance. Basins, brooms, and sponges lay about, half-hidden by the seats. Then, as the train only carried such luggage as the pilgrims could take with them, there were valises, deal boxes, bonnet boxes, and bags, a wretched pile of poor worn-out things mended with bits of string, heaped up a little bit everywhere; and overhead the litter began again, what with articles of clothing, parcels, and baskets hanging from brass pegs and swinging to and fro without a pause.

Amidst all this frippery the more afflicted patients, stretched on their narrow mattresses, which took up the room of several passengers, were shaken, carried along by the rumbling gyrations of the wheels; whilst those who were able to remain seated, leaned against the partitions, their faces pale, their heads resting upon pillows. According to the regulations there should have been one lady-hospitaller to each compartment. However, at the other end of the carriage there was but a second Sister of the Assumption, Sister Claire des Anges. Some of the pilgrims who were in good health were already getting up, eating and drinking. One compartment was entirely occupied by women, ten pilgrims closely pressed together, young ones and old ones, all sadly, pitifully ugly. And as nobody dared to open the windows on account of the consumptives in the carriage, the heat was soon felt and an unbearable odour arose, set free as it were by the jolting of the train as it went its way at express speed.

They had said their chaplets at Juvisy; and six o'clock was striking, and they were rushing like a hurricane past the station of Bretigny, when Sister Hyacinthe stood up. It was she who directed the pious exercises, which most of the pilgrims followed from small, blue-covered books.

"The Angelus, my children," said she with a pleasant smile, a maternal air which her great youth rendered very charming and sweet.

Then the "Aves" again followed one another, and were drawing to an end when Pierre and Marie began to feel interested in two women who occupied the other corner seats of their compartment. One of them, she who sat at Marie's feet, was a blonde of slender build and bourgeoise appearance, some thirty and odd years of age, and faded before she had grown old. She shrank back, scarcely occupying any room, wearing a dark dress, and showing colourless hair, and a long grief-stricken face which expressed unlimited self-abandonment, infinite sadness. The woman in front of her, she who sat on the same seat as Pierre, was of the same age, but belonged to the working classes. She wore a black cap and displayed a face ravaged by wretchedness and anxiety, whilst on her lap she held a little girl of seven, who was so pale, so wasted by illness, that she scarcely seemed four. With her nose contracted, her eyelids lowered and showing blue in her waxen face, the child was unable to speak, unable to give utterance to more than a low plaint, a gentle moan, which rent the heart of her mother, leaning over her, each time that she heard it.

"Would she eat a few grapes?" timidly asked the lady, who had hitherto preserved silence. "I have some in my basket."

"Thank you, madame," replied the woman, "she only takes milk, and sometimes not even that willingly. I took care to bring a bottleful with me."

Then, giving way to the desire which possesses the wretched to confide their woes to others, she began to relate her story. Her name was Vincent, and her husband, a gilder by trade, had been carried off by consumption. Left alone with her little Rose, who was the passion of her heart, she had worked by day and night at her calling as a dressmaker in order to bring the child up. But disease had come, and for fourteen months now she had had her in her arms like that, growing more and more woeful and wasted until reduced almost to nothingness. She, the mother, who never went to mass, entered a church, impelled by despair to pray for her daughter's cure; and there she had heard a voice which had told her to take the little one to Lourdes, where the Blessed Virgin would have pity on her. Acquainted with nobody, not knowing even how the pilgrimages were organised, she had had but one idea—to work, save up the money necessary for the journey, take a ticket, and start off with the thirty sous remaining to her, destitute of all supplies save a bottle of milk for the child, not having even thought of purchasing a crust of bread for herself.

"What is the poor little thing suffering from?" resumed the lady.

"Oh, it must be consumption of the bowels, madame! But the doctors have names they give it. At first she only had slight pains in the stomach. Then her stomach began to swell and she suffered, oh, so dreadfully! it made one cry to see her. Her stomach has gone down now, only she's worn out; she has got so thin that she has no legs left her, and she's wasting away with continual sweating."

Then, as Rose, raising her eyelids, began to moan, her mother leant over her, distracted and turning pale. "What is the matter, my jewel, my treasure?" she asked. "Are you thirsty?"

But the little girl was already closing her dim eyes of a hazy sky-blue hue, and did not even answer, but relapsed into her torpor, quite white in the white frock she wore—a last coquetry on the part of her mother, who had gone to this useless expense in the hope that the Virgin would be more compassionate and gentle to a little sufferer who was well dressed, so immaculately white.

There was an interval of silence, and then Madame Vincent inquired: "And you, madame, it's for yourself no doubt that you are going to Lourdes? One can see very well that you are ill."

But the lady, with a frightened look, shrank woefully into her corner, murmuring: "No, no, I am not ill. Would to God that I were! I should suffer less."

Her name was Madame Maze, and her heart was full of an incurable grief. After a love marriage to a big, gay fellow with ripe, red lips, she had found herself deserted at the end of a twelvemonth's honeymoon. Ever travelling, following the profession of a jeweller's bagman, her husband, who earned a deal of money, would disappear for six months at a stretch, deceive her from one frontier to the other of France, at times even carrying creatures about with him. And she worshipped him; she suffered so frightfully from it all that she had sought a remedy in religion, and had at last made up her mind to repair to Lourdes, in order to pray the Virgin to restore her husband to her and make him amend his ways.

Although Madame Vincent did not understand the other's words, she realised that she was a prey to great mental affliction, and they continued looking at one another, the mother, whom the sight of her dying daughter was killing, and the abandoned wife, whom her passion cast into throes of death-like agony.

However, Pierre, who, like Marie, had been listening to the conversation, now intervened. He was astonished that the dressmaker had not sought free treatment for her little patient. The Association of Our Lady of Salvation had been founded by the Augustine Fathers of the Assumption after the Franco-German war, with the object of contributing to the salvation of France and the defence of the Church by prayer in common and the practice of charity; and it was this association which had promoted the great pilgrimage movement, in particular initiating and unremittingly extending the national pilgrimage which every year, towards the close of August, set out for Lourdes. An elaborate organisation had been gradually perfected, donations of considerable amounts were collected in all parts of the world, sufferers were enrolled in every parish, and agreements were signed with the railway companies, to say nothing of the active help of the Little Sisters of the Assumption and the establishment of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation, a widespread brotherhood of the benevolent, in which one beheld men and women, mostly belonging to society, who, under the orders of the pilgrimage managers, nursed the sick, helped to transport them, and watched over the observance of good discipline. A written request was needed for the sufferers to obtain hospitalisation, which dispensed them from making the smallest payment in respect either of their journey or their sojourn; they were fetched from their homes and conveyed back thither; and they simply had to provide a few provisions for the road. By far the greater number were recommended by priests or benevolent persons, who superintended the inquiries concerning them and obtained the needful papers, such as doctors' certificates and certificates of birth. And, these matters being settled, the sick ones had nothing further to trouble about, they became but so much suffering flesh, food for miracles, in the hands of the hospitallers of either sex.

"But you need only have applied to your parish priest, madame," Pierre explained. "This poor child is deserving of all sympathy. She would have been immediately admitted."

"I did not know it, monsieur l'Abbe."

"Then how did you manage?"

"Why, Monsieur l'Abbe, I went to take a ticket at a place which one of my neighbours, who reads the newspapers, told me about."

She was referring to the tickets, at greatly reduced rates, which were issued to the pilgrims possessed of means. And Marie, listening to her, felt great pity for her, and also some shame; for she who was not entirely destitute of resources had succeeded in obtaining hospitalisation, thanks to Pierre, whereas that mother and her sorry child, after exhausting their scanty savings, remained without a copper.

However, a more violent jolt of the carriage drew a cry of pain from the girl. "Oh, father," she said, "pray raise me a little! I can't stay on my back any longer."

When M. de Guersaint had helped her into a sitting posture, she gave a deep sigh of relief. They were now at Etampes, after a run of an hour and a half from Paris, and what with the increased warmth of the sun, the dust, and the noise, weariness was becoming apparent already. Madame de Jonquiere had got up to speak a few words of kindly encouragement to Marie over the partition; and Sister Hyacinthe moreover again rose, and gaily clapped her hands that she might be heard and obeyed from one to the other end of the carriage.

"Come, come!" said she, "we mustn't think of our little troubles. Let us pray and sing, and the Blessed Virgin will be with us."

She herself then began the rosary according to the rite of Our Lady of Lourdes, and all the patients and pilgrims followed her. This was the first chaplet—the five joyful mysteries, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Purification, and Jesus found in the Temple. Then they all began to chant the canticle: "Let us contemplate the heavenly Archangel!" Their voices were lost amid the loud rumbling of the wheels; you heard but the muffled surging of that human wave, stifling within the closed carriage which rolled on and on without a pause.

Although M. de Guersaint was a worshipper, he could never follow a hymn to the end. He got up, sat down again, and finished by resting his elbow on the partition and conversing in an undertone with a patient who sat against this same partition in the next compartment. The patient in question was a thick-set man of fifty, with a good-natured face and a large head, completely bald. His name was Sabathier, and for fifteen years he had been stricken with ataxia. He only suffered pain by fits and starts, but he had quite lost the use of his legs, which his wife, who accompanied him, moved for him as though they had been dead legs, whenever they became too heavy, weighty like bars of lead.

"Yes, monsieur," he said, "such as you see me, I was formerly fifth-class professor at the Lycee Charlemagne. At first I thought that it was mere sciatica, but afterwards I was seized with sharp, lightning-like pains, red-hot sword thrusts, you know, in the muscles. For nearly ten years the disease kept on mastering me more and more. I consulted all the doctors, tried every imaginable mineral spring, and now I suffer less, but I can no longer move from my seat. And then, after long living without a thought of religion, I was led back to God by the idea that I was too wretched, and that Our Lady of Lourdes could not do otherwise than take pity on me."

Feeling interested, Pierre in his turn had leant over the partition and was listening.

"Is it not so, Monsieur l'Abbe?" continued M. Sabathier. "Is not suffering the best awakener of souls? This is the seventh year that I am going to Lourdes without despairing of cure. This year the Blessed Virgin will cure me, I feel sure of it. Yes, I expect to be able to walk about again; I now live solely in that hope."

M. Sabathier paused, he wished his wife to push his legs a little more to the left; and Pierre looked at him, astonished to find such obstinate faith in a man of intellect, in one of those university professors who, as a rule, are such Voltairians. How could the belief in miracles have germinated and taken root in this man's brain? As he himself said, great suffering alone explained this need of illusion, this blossoming of eternal and consolatory hope.

"And my wife and I," resumed the ex-professor, "are dressed, you see, as poor folks, for I wished to go as a mere pauper this year, and applied for hospitalisation in a spirit of humility in order that the Blessed Virgin might include me among the wretched, her children—only, as I did not wish to take the place of a real pauper, I gave fifty francs to the Hospitalite, and this, as you are aware, gives one the right to have a patient of one's own in the pilgrimage. I even know my patient. He was introduced to me at the railway station. He is suffering from tuberculosis, it appears, and seemed to me very low, very low."

A fresh interval of silence ensued. "Well," said M. Sabathier at last, "may the Blessed Virgin save him also, she who can do everything. I shall be so happy; she will have loaded me with favours."

Then the three men, isolating themselves from the others, went on conversing together, at first on medical subjects, and at last diverging into a discussion on romanesque architecture, a propos of a steeple which they had perceived on a hillside, and which every pilgrim had saluted with a sign of the cross. Swayed once more by the habits of cultivated intellect, the young priest and his two companions forgot themselves together in the midst of their fellow-passengers, all those poor, suffering, simple-minded folk, whom wretchedness stupefied. Another hour went by, two more canticles had just been sung, and the stations of Toury and Les Aubrais had been left behind, when, at Beaugency, they at last ceased their chat, on hearing Sister Hyacinthe clap her hands and intonate in her fresh, sonorous voice:

"Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo."

And then the chant went on; all voices became mingled in that ever-surging wave of prayer which stilled pain, excited hope, and little by little penetrated the entire being, harassed by the haunting thought of the grace and cure which one and all were going to seek so far away.

However, as Pierre sat down again, he saw that Marie was very pale, and had her eyes closed. By the painful contraction of her features he could tell that she was not asleep. "Are you in great suffering?" he asked.

"Yes, yes, I suffer dreadfully. I shall never last to the end. It is this incessant jolting."

She moaned, raised her eyelids, and, half-fainting, remained in a sitting posture, her eyes turned on the other sufferers. In the adjoining compartment, La Grivotte, hitherto stretched out, scarce breathing, like a corpse, had just raised herself up in front of M. Sabathier. She was a tall, slip-shod, singular-looking creature of over thirty, with a round, ravaged face, which her frizzy hair and flaming eyes rendered almost pretty. She had reached the third stage of phthisis.

"Eh, mademoiselle," she said, addressing herself in a hoarse, indistinct voice to Marie, "how nice it would be if we could only doze off a little. But it can't be managed; all these wheels keep on whirling round and round in one's head."

Then, although it fatigued her to speak, she obstinately went on talking, volunteering particulars about herself. She was a mattress-maker, and with one of her aunts had long gone from yard to yard at Bercy to comb and sew up mattresses. And, indeed, it was to the pestilential wool which she had combed in her youth that she ascribed her malady. For five years she had been making the round of the hospitals of Paris, and she spoke familiarly of all the great doctors. It was the Sisters of Charity, at the Lariboisiere hospital, who, finding that she had a passion for religious ceremonies, had completed her conversion, and convinced her that the Virgin awaited her at Lourdes to cure her.

"I certainly need it," said she. "The doctors say that I have one lung done for, and that the other one is scarcely any better. There are great big holes you know. At first I only felt bad between the shoulders and spat up some froth. But then I got thin, and became a dreadful sight. And now I'm always in a sweat, and cough till I think I'm going to bring my heart up. And I can no longer spit. And I haven't the strength to stand, you see. I can't eat."

A stifling sensation made her pause, and she became livid.

"All the same I prefer being in my skin instead of in that of the Brother in the compartment behind you. He has the same complaint as I have, but he is in a worse state that I am."

She was mistaken. In the farther compartment, beyond Marie, there was indeed a young missionary, Brother Isidore, who was lying on a mattress and could not be seen, since he was unable to raise even a finger. But he was not suffering from phthisis. He was dying of inflammation of the liver, contracted in Senegal. Very long and lank, he had a yellow face, with skin as dry and lifeless as parchment. The abscess which had formed in his liver had ended by breaking out externally, and amidst the continuous shivering of fever, vomiting, and delirium, suppuration was exhausting him. His eyes alone were still alive, eyes full of unextinguishable love, whose flame lighted up his expiring face, a peasant face such as painters have given to the crucified Christ, common, but rendered sublime at moments by its expression of faith and passion. He was a Breton, the last puny child of an over-numerous family, and had left his little share of land to his elder brothers. One of his sisters, Marthe, older than himself by a couple of years, accompanied him. She had been in service in Paris, an insignificant maid-of-all-work, but withal so devoted to her brother that she had left her situation to follow him, subsisting scantily on her petty savings.

"I was lying on the platform," resumed La Grivotte, "when he was put in the carriage. There were four men carrying him—"

But she was unable to speak any further, for just then an attack of coughing shook her and threw her back upon the seat. She was suffocating, and the red flush on her cheek-bones turned blue. Sister Hyacinthe, however, immediately raised her head and wiped her lips with a linen cloth, which became spotted with blood. At the same time Madame de Jonquiere gave her attention to a patient in front of her, who had just fainted. She was called Madame Vetu, and was the wife of a petty clockmaker of the Mouffetard district, who had not been able to shut up his shop in order to accompany her to Lourdes. And to make sure that she would be cared for she had sought and obtained hospitalisation. The fear of death was bringing her back to religion, although she had not set foot in church since her first communion. She knew that she was lost, that a cancer in the chest was eating into her; and she already had the haggard, orange-hued mark of the cancerous patient. Since the beginning of the journey she had not spoken a word, but, suffering terribly, had remained with her lips tightly closed. Then all at once, she had swooned away after an attack of vomiting.

"It is unbearable!" murmured Madame de Jonquiere, who herself felt faint; "we must let in a little fresh air."

Sister Hyacinthe was just then laying La Grivotte to rest on her pillows, "Certainly," said she, "we will open the window for a few moments. But not on this side, for I am afraid we might have a fresh fit of coughing. Open the window on your side, madame."

The heat was still increasing, and the occupants of the carriage were stifling in that heavy evil-smelling atmosphere. The pure air which came in when the window was opened brought relief however. For a moment there were other duties to be attended to, a clearance and cleansing. The Sister emptied the basins out of the window, whilst the lady-hospitaller wiped the shaking floor with a sponge. Next, things had to be set in order; and then came a fresh anxiety, for the fourth patient, a slender girl whose face was entirely covered by a black fichu, and who had not yet moved, was saying that she felt hungry.

With quiet devotion Madame de Jonquiere immediately tendered her services. "Don't you trouble, Sister," she said, "I will cut her bread into little bits for her."

Marie, with the need she felt of diverting her mind from her own sufferings, had already begun to take an interest in that motionless sufferer whose countenance was so thickly veiled, for she not unnaturally suspected that it was a case of some distressing facial sore. She had merely been told that the patient was a servant, which was true, but it happened that the poor creature, a native of Picardy, named Elise Rouquet, had been obliged to leave her situation, and seek a home with a sister who ill-treated her, for no hospital would take her in. Extremely devout, she had for many months been possessed by an ardent desire to go to Lourdes.

While Marie, with dread in her heart, waited for the fichu to be moved aside, Madame de Jonquiere, having cut some bread into small pieces, inquired maternally: "Are they small enough? Can you put them into your mouth?"

Thereupon a hoarse voice growled confused words under the black fichu: "Yes, yes, madame." And at last the veil fell and Marie shuddered with horror.

It was a case of lupus which had preyed upon the unhappy woman's nose and mouth. Ulceration had spread, and was hourly spreading—in short, all the hideous peculiarities of this terrible disease were in full process of development, almost obliterating the traces of what once were pleasing womanly lineaments.

"Oh, look, Pierre!" Marie murmured, trembling. The priest in his turn shuddered as he beheld Elise Rouquet cautiously slipping the tiny pieces of bread into her poor shapeless mouth. Everyone in the carriage had turned pale at sight of the awful apparition. And the same thought ascended from all those hope-inflated souls. Ah! Blessed Virgin, Powerful Virgin, what a miracle indeed if such an ill were cured!

"We must not think of ourselves, my children, if we wish to get well," resumed Sister Hyacinthe, who still retained her encouraging smile.

And then she made them say the second chaplet, the five sorrowful mysteries: Jesus in the Garden of Olives, Jesus scourged, Jesus crowned with thorns, Jesus carrying the cross, and Jesus crucified. Afterwards came the canticle: "In thy help, Virgin, do I put my trust."

They had just passed through Blois; for three long hours they had been rolling onward; and Marie, who had averted her eyes from Elise Rouquet, now turned them upon a man who occupied a corner seat in the compartment on her left, that in which Brother Isidore was lying. She had noticed this man several times already. Poorly clad in an old black frock-coat, he looked still young, although his sparse beard was already turning grey; and, short and emaciated, he seemed to experience great suffering, his fleshless, livid face being covered with sweat. However, he remained motionless, ensconced in his corner, speaking to nobody, but staring straight before him with dilated eyes. And all at once Marie noticed that his eyelids were falling, and that he was fainting away.

She thereupon drew Sister's Hyacinthe's attention to him: "Look, Sister! One would think that that gentleman is dangerously ill."

"Which one, my dear child?"

"That one, over there, with his head thrown back."

General excitement followed, all the healthy pilgrims rose up to look, and it occurred to Madame de Jonquiere to call to Marthe, Brother Isidore's sister, and tell her to tap the man's hands.

"Question him," she added; "ask what ails him."

Marthe drew near, shook the man, and questioned him.

But instead of an answer only a rattle came from his throat, and his eyes remained closed.

Then a frightened voice was heard saying, "I think he is going to die."

The dread increased, words flew about, advice was tendered from one to the other end of the carriage. Nobody knew the man. He had certainly not obtained hospitalisation, for no white card was hanging from his neck. Somebody related, however, that he had seen him arrive, dragging himself along, but three minutes or so before the train started; and that he had remained quite motionless, scarce breathing, ever since he had flung himself with an air of intense weariness into that corner, where he was now apparently dying. His ticket was at last seen protruding from under the band of an old silk hat which was hung from a peg near him.

"Ah, he is breathing again now!" Sister Hyacinthe suddenly exclaimed. "Ask him his name."

However, on being again questioned by Marthe, the man merely gave vent to a low plaint, an exclamation scarcely articulated, "Oh, how I suffer!"

And thenceforward that was the only answer that could be obtained from him. With reference to everything that they wished to know, who he was, whence he came, what his illness was, what could be done for him, he gave no information, but still and ever continued moaning, "Oh, how I suffer—how I suffer!"

Sister Hyacinthe grew restless with impatience. Ah, if she had only been in the same compartment with him! And she resolved that she would change her seat at the first station they should stop at. Only there would be no stoppage for a long time. The position was becoming terrible, the more so as the man's head again fell back.

"He is dying, he is dying!" repeated the frightened voice.

What was to be done, mon Dieu? The Sister was aware that one of the Fathers of the Assumption, Father Massias, was in the train with the Holy Oils, ready to administer extreme unction to the dying; for every year some of the patients passed away during the journey. But she did not dare to have recourse to the alarm signal. Moreover, in the cantine van where Sister Saint Francois officiated, there was a doctor with a little medicine chest. If the sufferer should survive until they reached Poitiers, where there would be half an hour's stoppage, all possible help might be given to him.

But on the other hand he might suddenly expire. However, they ended by becoming somewhat calmer. The man, though still unconscious, began to breathe in a more regular manner, and seemed to fall asleep.

"To think of it, to die before getting there," murmured Marie with a shudder, "to die in sight of the promised land!" And as her father sought to reassure her she added: "I am suffering—I am suffering dreadfully myself."

"Have confidence," said Pierre; "the Blessed Virgin is watching over you."

She could no longer remain seated, and it became necessary to replace her in a recumbent position in her narrow coffin. Her father and the priest had to take every precaution in doing so, for the slightest hurt drew a moan from her. And she lay there breathless, like one dead, her face contracted by suffering, and surrounded by her regal fair hair. They had now been rolling on, ever rolling on for nearly four hours. And if the carriage was so greatly shaken, with an unbearable spreading tendency, it was from its position at the rear part of the train. The coupling irons shrieked, the wheels growled furiously; and as it was necessary to leave the windows partially open, the dust came in, acrid and burning; but it was especially the heat which grew terrible, a devouring, stormy heat falling from a tawny sky which large hanging clouds had slowly covered. The hot carriages, those rolling boxes where the pilgrims ate and drank, where the sick lay in a vitiated atmosphere, amid dizzying moans, prayers, and hymns, became like so many furnaces.

And Marie was not the only one whose condition had been aggravated; others also were suffering from the journey. Resting in the lap of her despairing mother, who gazed at her with large, tear-blurred eyes, little Rose had ceased to stir, and had grown so pale that Madame Maze had twice leant forward to feel her hands, fearful lest she should find them cold. At each moment also Madame Sabathier had to move her husband's legs, for their weight was so great, said he, that it seemed as if his hips were being torn from him. Brother Isidore too had just begun to cry out, emerging from his wonted torpor; and his sister had only been able to assuage his sufferings by raising him, and clasping him in her arms. La Grivotte seemed to be asleep, but a continuous hiccoughing shook her, and a tiny streamlet of blood dribbled from her mouth. Madame Vetu had again vomited, Elise Rouquet no longer thought of hiding the frightful sore open on her face. And from the man yonder, breathing hard, there still came a lugubrious rattle, as though he were at every moment on the point of expiring. In vain did Madame de Jonquiere and Sister Hyacinthe lavish their attentions on the patients, they could but slightly assuage so much suffering. At times it all seemed like an evil dream—that carriage of wretchedness and pain, hurried along at express speed, with a continuous shaking and jolting which made everything hanging from the pegs—the old clothes, the worn-out baskets mended with bits of string—swing to and fro incessantly. And in the compartment at the far end, the ten female pilgrims, some old, some young, and all pitifully ugly, sang on without a pause in cracked voices, shrill and dreary.

Then Pierre began to think of the other carriages of the train, that white train which conveyed most, if not all, of the more seriously afflicted patients; these carriages were rolling along, all displaying similar scenes of suffering among the three hundred sick and five hundred healthy pilgrims crowded within them. And afterwards he thought of the other trains which were leaving Paris that day, the grey train and the blue train* which had preceded the white one, the green train, the yellow train, the pink train, the orange train which were following it. From hour to hour trains set out from one to the other end of France. And he thought, too, of those which that same morning had started from Orleans, Le Mans, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Marseilles, and Carcassonne. Coming from all parts, trains were rushing across that land of France at the same hour, all directing their course yonder towards the holy Grotto, bringing thirty thousand patients and pilgrims to the Virgin's feet. And he reflected that other days of the year witnessed a like rush of human beings, that not a week went by without Lourdes beholding the arrival of some pilgrimage; that it was not merely France which set out on the march, but all Europe, the whole world; that in certain years of great religious fervour there had been three hundred thousand, and even five hundred thousand, pilgrims and patients streaming to the spot.

* Different-coloured tickets are issued for these trains; it is for
this reason that they are called the white, blue, and grey trains,
etc.—Trans.

Pierre fancied that he could hear those flying trains, those trains from everywhere, all converging towards the same rocky cavity where the tapers were blazing. They all rumbled loudly amid the cries of pain and snatches of hymns wafted from their carriages. They were the rolling hospitals of disease at its last stage, of human suffering rushing to the hope of cure, furiously seeking consolation between attacks of increased severity, with the ever-present threat of death—death hastened, supervening under awful conditions, amidst the mob-like scramble. They rolled on, they rolled on again and again, they rolled on without a pause, carrying the wretchedness of the world on its way to the divine illusion, the health of the infirm, the consolation of the afflicted.

And immense pity overflowed from Pierre's heart, human compassion for all the suffering and all the tears that consumed weak and naked men. He was sad unto death and ardent charity burnt within him, the unextinguishable flame as it were of his fraternal feelings towards all things and beings.

When they left the station of Saint Pierre des Corps at half-past ten, Sister Hyacinthe gave the signal, and they recited the third chaplet, the five glorious mysteries, the Resurrection of Our Lord, the Ascension of Our Lord, the Mission of the Holy Ghost, the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin, the Crowning of the Most Blessed Virgin. And afterwards they sang the canticle of Bernadette, that long, long chant, composed of six times ten couplets, to which the ever recurring Angelic Salutation serves as a refrain—a prolonged lullaby slowly besetting one until it ends by penetrating one's entire being, transporting one into ecstatic sleep, in delicious expectancy of a miracle.

II. PIERRE AND MARIE

THE green landscapes of Poitou were now defiling before them, and Abbe Pierre Froment, gazing out of the window, watched the trees fly away till, little by little, he ceased to distinguish them. A steeple appeared and then vanished, and all the pilgrims crossed themselves. They would not reach Poitiers until twelve-thirty-five, and the train was still rolling on amid the growing weariness of that oppressive, stormy day. Falling into a deep reverie, the young priest no longer heard the words of the canticle, which sounded in his ears merely like a slow, wavy lullaby.

Forgetfulness of the present had come upon him, an awakening of the past filled his whole being. He was reascending the stream of memory, reascending it to its source. He again beheld the house at Neuilly, where he had been born and where he still lived, that home of peace and toil, with its garden planted with a few fine trees, and parted by a quickset hedge and palisade from the garden of the neighbouring house, which was similar to his own. He was again three, perhaps four, years old, and round a table, shaded by the big horse-chestnut tree he once more beheld his father, his mother, and his elder brother at dejeuner. To his father, Michel Froment, he could give no distinct lineaments; he pictured him but faintly, vaguely, renowned as an illustrious chemist, bearing the title of Member of the Institute, and leading a cloistered life in the laboratory which he had installed in that secluded, deserted suburb. However he could plainly see his first brother Guillaume, then fourteen years of age, whom some holiday had brought from college that morning, and then and even more vividly his mother, so gentle and so quiet, with eyes so full of active kindliness. Later on he learnt what anguish had racked that religious soul, that believing woman who, from esteem and gratitude, had resignedly accepted marriage with an unbeliever, her senior by fifteen years, to whom her relatives were indebted for great services. He, Pierre, the tardy offspring of this union, born when his father was already near his fiftieth year, had only known his mother as a respectful, conquered woman in the presence of her husband, whom she had learnt to love passionately, with the frightful torment of knowing, however, that he was doomed to perdition. And, all at once, another memory flashed upon the young priest, the terrible memory of the day when his father had died, killed in his laboratory by an accident, the explosion of a retort. He, Pierre, had then been five years old, and he remembered the slightest incidents—his mother's cry when she had found the shattered body among the remnants of the chemical appliances, then her terror, her sobs, her prayers at the idea that God had slain the unbeliever, damned him for evermore. Not daring to burn his books and papers, she had contented herself with locking up the laboratory, which henceforth nobody entered. And from that moment, haunted by a vision of hell, she had had but one idea, to possess herself of her second son, who was still so young, to give him a strictly religious training, and through him to ransom her husband—secure his forgiveness from God. Guillaume, her elder boy, had already ceased to belong to her, having grown up at college, where he had been won over by the ideas of the century; but she resolved that the other, the younger one, should not leave the house, but should have a priest as tutor; and her secret dream, her consuming hope, was that she might some day see him a priest himself, saying his first mass and solacing souls whom the thought of eternity tortured.

Then between green, leafy boughs, flecked with sunlight, another figure rose vividly before Pierre's eyes. He suddenly beheld Marie de Guersaint as he had seen her one morning through a gap in the hedge dividing the two gardens. M. de Guersaint, who belonged to the petty Norman noblesse, was a combination of architect and inventor; and he was at that time busy with a scheme of model dwellings for the poor, to which churches and schools were to be attached; an affair of considerable magnitude, planned none too well, however, and in which, with his customary impetuosity, the lack of foresight of an imperfect artist, he was risking the three hundred thousand francs that he possessed. A similarity of religious faith had drawn Madame de Guersaint and Madame Froment together; but the former was altogether a superior woman, perspicuous and rigid, with an iron hand which alone prevented her household from gliding to a catastrophe; and she was bringing up her two daughters, Blanche and Marie, in principles of narrow piety, the elder one already being as grave as herself, whilst the younger, albeit very devout, was still fond of play, with an intensity of life within her which found vent in gay peals of sonorous laughter. From their early childhood Pierre and Marie played together, the hedge was ever being crossed, the two families constantly mingled. And on that clear sunshiny morning, when he pictured her parting the leafy branches she was already ten years old. He, who was sixteen, was to enter the seminary on the following Tuesday. Never had she seemed to him so pretty. Her hair, of a pure golden hue, was so long that when it was let down it sufficed to clothe her. Well did he remember her face as it had been, with round cheeks, blue eyes, red mouth, and skin of dazzling, snowy whiteness. She was indeed as gay and brilliant as the sun itself, a transplendency. Yet there were tears at the corners of her eyes, for she was aware of his coming departure. They sat down together at the far end of the garden, in the shadow cast by the hedge. Their hands mingled, and their hearts were very heavy. They had, however, never exchanged any vows amid their pastimes, for their innocence was absolute. But now, on the eve of separation, their mutual tenderness rose to their lips, and they spoke without knowing, swore that they would ever think of one another, and find one another again, some day, even as one meets in heaven to be very, very happy. Then, without understanding how it happened, they clasped each other tightly, to the point of suffocation, and kissed each other's face, weeping, the while, hot tears. And it was that delightful memory which Pierre had ever carried with him, which he felt alive within him still, after so many years, and after so many painful renunciations.

Just then a more violent shock roused him from his reverie. He turned his eyes upon the carriage and vaguely espied the suffering beings it contained—Madame Maze motionless, overwhelmed with grief; little Rose gently moaning in her mother's lap; La Grivotte, whom a hoarse cough was choking. For a moment Sister Hyacinthe's gay face shone out amidst the whiteness of her coif and wimple, dominating all the others. The painful journey was continuing, with a ray of divine hope still and ever shining yonder. Then everything slowly vanished from Pierre's eyes as a fresh wave of memory brought the past back from afar; and nothing of the present remained save the lulling hymn, the indistinct voices of dreamland, emerging from the invisible.

Henceforth he was at the seminary. The classrooms, the recreation ground with its trees, rose up clearly before him. But all at once he only beheld, as in a mirror, the youthful face which had then been his, and he contemplated it and scrutinised it, as though it had been the face of a stranger. Tall and slender, he had an elongated visage, with an unusually developed forehead, lofty and straight like a tower; whilst his jaws tapered, ending in a small refined chin. He seemed, in fact, to be all brains; his mouth, rather large, alone retained an expression of tenderness. Indeed, when his usually serious face relaxed, his mouth and eyes acquired an exceedingly soft expression, betokening an unsatisfied, hungry desire to love, devote oneself, and live. But immediately afterwards, the look of intellectual passion would come back again, that intellectuality which had ever consumed him with an anxiety to understand and know. And it was with surprise that he now recalled those years of seminary life. How was it that he had so long been able to accept the rude discipline of blind faith, of obedient belief in everything without the slightest examination? It had been required of him that he should absolutely surrender his reasoning faculties, and he had striven to do so, had succeeded indeed in stifling his torturing need of truth. Doubtless he had been softened, weakened by his mother's tears, had been possessed by the sole desire to afford her the great happiness she dreamt of. Yet now he remembered certain quiverings of revolt; he found in the depths of his mind the memory of nights which he had spent in weeping without knowing why, nights peopled with vague images, nights through which galloped the free, virile life of the world, when Marie's face incessantly returned to him, such as he had seen it one morning, dazzling and bathed in tears, while she embraced him with her whole soul. And that alone now remained; his years of religious study with their monotonous lessons, their ever similar exercises and ceremonies, had flown away into the same haze, into a vague half-light, full of mortal silence.

Then, just as the train had passed though a station at full speed, with the sudden uproar of its rush there arose within him a succession of confused visions. He had noticed a large deserted enclosure, and fancied that he could see himself within it at twenty years of age. His reverie was wandering. An indisposition of rather long duration had, however, at one time interrupted his studies, and led to his being sent into the country. He had remained for a long time without seeing Marie; during his vacations spent at Neuilly he had twice failed to meet her, for she was almost always travelling. He knew that she was very ill, in consequence of a fall from a horse when she was thirteen, a critical moment in a girl's life; and her despairing mother, perplexed by the contradictory advice of medical men, was taking her each year to a different watering-place. Then he learnt the startling news of the sudden tragical death of that mother, who was so severe and yet so useful to her kin. She had been carried off in five days by inflammation of the lungs, which she had contracted one evening whilst she was out walking at La Bourboule, through having taken off her mantle to place it round the shoulders of Marie, who had been conveyed thither for treatment. It had been necessary that the father should at once start off to fetch his daughter, who was mad with grief, and the corpse of his wife, who had been so suddenly torn from him. And unhappily, after losing her, the affairs of the family went from bad to worse in the hands of this architect, who, without counting, flung his fortune into the yawning gulf of his unsuccessful enterprises. Marie no longer stirred from her couch; only Blanche remained to manage the household, and she had matters of her own to attend to, being busy with the last examinations which she had to pass, the diplomas which she was obstinately intent on securing, foreseeing as she did that she would someday have to earn her bread.

All at once, from amidst this mass of confused, half-forgotten incidents, Pierre was conscious of the rise of a vivid vision. Ill-health, he remembered, had again compelled him to take a holiday. He had just completed his twenty-fourth year, he was greatly behindhand, having so far only secured the four minor orders; but on his return a sub-deaconship would be conferred on him, and an inviolable vow would bind him for evermore. And the Guersaints' little garden at Neuilly, whither he had formerly so often gone to play, again distinctly appeared before him. Marie's couch had been rolled under the tall trees at the far end of the garden near the hedge, they were alone together in the sad peacefulness of an autumnal afternoon, and he saw Marie, clad in deep mourning for her mother and reclining there with legs inert; whilst he, also clad in black, in a cassock already, sat near her on an iron garden chair. For five years she had been suffering. She was now eighteen, paler and thinner than formerly, but still adorable with her regal golden hair, which illness respected. He believed from what he had heard that she was destined to remain infirm, condemned never to become a woman, stricken even in her sex. The doctors, who failed to agree respecting her case, had abandoned her. Doubtless it was she who told him these things that dreary afternoon, whilst the yellow withered leaves rained upon them. However, he could not remember the words that they had spoken; her pale smile, her young face, still so charming though already dimmed by regretfulness for life, alone remained present with him. But he realised that she had evoked the far-off day of their parting, on that same spot, behind the hedge flecked with sunlight; and all that was already as though dead—their tears, their embrace, their promise to find one another some day with a certainty of happiness. For although they had found one another again, what availed it, since she was but a corpse, and he was about to bid farewell to the life of the world? As the doctors condemned her, as she would never be woman, nor wife, nor mother, he, on his side, might well renounce manhood, and annihilate himself, dedicate himself to God, to whom his mother gave him. And he still felt within him the soft bitterness of that last interview: Marie smiling painfully at memory of their childish play and prattle, and speaking to him of the happiness which he would assuredly find in the service of God; so penetrated indeed with emotion at this thought, that she had made him promise that he would let her hear him say his first mass.

But the train was passing the station of Sainte-Maure, and just then a sudden uproar momentarily brought Pierre's attention back to the carriage and its occupants. He fancied that there had been some fresh seizure or swooning, but the suffering faces that he beheld were still the same, ever contracted by the same expression of anxious waiting for the divine succour which was so slow in coming. M. Sabathier was vainly striving to get his legs into a comfortable position, whilst Brother Isidore raised a feeble continuous moan like a dying child, and Madame Vetu, a prey to terrible agony, devoured by her disease, sat motionless, and kept her lips tightly closed, her face distorted, haggard, and almost black. The noise which Pierre had heard had been occasioned by Madame de Jonquiere, who whilst cleansing a basin had dropped the large zinc water-can. And, despite their torment, this had made the patients laugh, like the simple souls they were, rendered puerile by suffering. However, Sister Hyacinthe, who rightly called them her children, children whom she governed with a word, at once set them saying the chaplet again, pending the Angelus, which would only be said at Chatellerault, in accordance with the predetermined programme. And thereupon the "Aves" followed one after the other, spreading into a confused murmuring and mumbling amidst the rattling of the coupling irons and noisy growling of the wheels.

Pierre had meantime relapsed into his reverie, and beheld himself as he had been at six-and-twenty, when ordained a priest. Tardy scruples had come to him a few days before his ordination, a semi-consciousness that he was binding himself without having clearly questioned his heart and mind. But he had avoided doing so, living in the dizzy bewilderment of his decision, fancying that he had lopped off all human ties and feelings with a voluntary hatchet-stroke. His flesh had surely died with his childhood's innocent romance, that white-skinned girl with golden hair, whom now he never beheld otherwise than stretched upon her couch of suffering, her flesh as lifeless as his own. And he had afterwards made the sacrifice of his mind, which he then fancied even an easier one, hoping as he did that determination would suffice to prevent him from thinking. Besides, it was too late, he could not recoil at the last moment, and if when he pronounced the last solemn vow he felt a secret terror, an indeterminate but immense regret agitating him, he forgot everything, saving a divine reward for his efforts on the day when he afforded his mother the great and long-expected joy of hearing him say his first mass.

He could still see the poor woman in the little church of Neuilly, which she herself had selected, the church where the funeral service for his father had been celebrated; he saw her on that cold November morning, kneeling almost alone in the dark little chapel, her hands hiding her face as she continued weeping whilst he raised the Host. It was there that she had tasted her last happiness, for she led a sad and lonely life, no longer seeing her elder son, who had gone away, swayed by other ideas than her own, bent on breaking off all family intercourse since his brother intended to enter the Church. It was said that Guillaume, a chemist of great talent, like his father, but at the same time a Bohemian, addicted to revolutionary dreams, was living in a little house in the suburbs, where he devoted himself to the dangerous study of explosive substances; and folks added that he was living with a woman who had come no one knew whence. This it was which had severed the last tie between himself and his mother, all piety and propriety. For three years Pierre had not once seen Guillaume, whom in his childhood he had worshipped as a kind, merry, and fatherly big brother.

But there came an awful pang to his heart—he once more beheld his mother lying dead. This again was a thunderbolt, an illness of scarce three days' duration, a sudden passing away, as in the case of Madame de Guersaint. One evening, after a wild hunt for the doctor, he had found her motionless and quite white. She had died during his absence; and his lips had ever retained the icy thrill of the last kiss that he had given her. Of everything else—the vigil, the preparations, the funeral—he remembered nothing. All that had become lost in the black night of his stupor and grief, grief so extreme that he had almost died of it—seized with shivering on his return from the cemetery, struck down by a fever which during three weeks had kept him delirious, hovering between life and death. His brother had come and nursed him and had then attended to pecuniary matters, dividing the little inheritance, leaving him the house and a modest income and taking his own share in money. And as soon as Guillaume had found him out of danger he had gone off again, once more vanishing into the unknown. But then through what a long convalescence he, Pierre, had passed, buried as it were in that deserted house. He had done nothing to detain Guillaume, for he realised that there was an abyss between them. At first the solitude had brought him suffering, but afterwards it had grown very pleasant, whether in the deep silence of the rooms which the rare noises of the street did not disturb, or under the screening, shady foliage of the little garden, where he could spend whole days without seeing a soul. His favourite place of refuge, however, was the old laboratory, his father's cabinet, which his mother for twenty years had kept carefully locked up, as though to immure within it all the incredulity and damnation of the past. And despite the gentleness, the respectful submissiveness which she had shown in former times, she would perhaps have some day ended by destroying all her husband's books and papers, had not death so suddenly surprised her. Pierre, however, had once more had the windows opened, the writing-table and the bookcase dusted; and, installed in the large leather arm-chair, he now spent delicious hours there, regenerated as it were by his illness, brought back to his youthful days again, deriving a wondrous intellectual delight from the perusal of the books which he came upon.

The only person whom he remembered having received during those two months of slow recovery was Doctor Chassaigne, an old friend of his father, a medical man of real merit, who, with the one ambition of curing disease, modestly confined himself to the role of the practitioner. It was in vain that the doctor had sought to save Madame Froment, but he flattered himself that he had extricated the young priest from grievous danger; and he came to see him from time to time, to chat with him and cheer him, talking with him of his father, the great chemist, of whom he recounted many a charming anecdote, many a particular, still glowing with the flame of ardent friendship. Little by little, amidst the weak languor of convalescence, the son had thus beheld an embodiment of charming simplicity, affection, and good nature rising up before him. It was his father such as he had really been, not the man of stern science whom he had pictured whilst listening to his mother. Certainly she had never taught him aught but respect for that dear memory; but had not her husband been the unbeliever, the man who denied, and made the angels weep, the artisan of impiety who sought to change the world that God had made? And so he had long remained a gloomy vision, a spectre of damnation prowling about the house, whereas now he became the house's very light, clear and gay, a worker consumed by a longing for truth, who had never desired anything but the love and happiness of all. For his part, Doctor Chassaigne, a Pyrenean by birth, born in a far-off secluded village where folks still believed in sorceresses, inclined rather towards religion, although he had not set his foot inside a church during the forty years he had been living in Paris. However, his conviction was absolute: if there were a heaven somewhere, Michel Froment was assuredly there, and not merely there, but seated upon a throne on the Divinity's right hand.

Then Pierre, in a few minutes, again lived through the frightful torment which, during two long months, had ravaged him. It was not that he had found controversial works of an anti-religious character in the bookcase, or that his father, whose papers he sorted, had ever gone beyond his technical studies as a savant. But little by little, despite himself, the light of science dawned upon him, an ensemble of proven phenomena, which demolished dogmas and left within him nothing of the things which as a priest he should have believed. It seemed, in fact, as though illness had renewed him, as though he were again beginning to live and learn amidst the physical pleasantness of convalescence, that still subsisting weakness which lent penetrating lucidity to his brain. At the seminary, by the advice of his masters, he had always kept the spirit of inquiry, his thirst for knowledge, in check. Much of that which was taught him there had surprised him; however, he had succeeded in making the sacrifice of his mind required of his piety. But now, all the laboriously raised scaffolding of dogmas was swept away in a revolt of that sovereign mind which clamoured for its rights, and which he could no longer silence. Truth was bubbling up and overflowing in such an irresistible stream that he realised he would never succeed in lodging error in his brain again. It was indeed the total and irreparable ruin of faith. Although he had been able to kill his flesh by renouncing the romance of his youth, although he felt that he had altogether mastered carnal passion, he now knew that it would be impossible for him to make the sacrifice of his intelligence. And he was not mistaken; it was indeed his father again springing to life in the depths of his being, and at last obtaining the mastery in that dual heredity in which, during so many years, his mother had dominated. The upper part of his face, his straight, towering brow, seemed to have risen yet higher, whilst the lower part, the small chin, the affectionate mouth, were becoming less distinct. However, he suffered; at certain twilight hours when his kindliness, his need of love awoke, he felt distracted with grief at no longer believing, distracted with desire to believe again; and it was necessary that the lighted lamp should be brought in, that he should see clearly around him and within him, before he could recover the energy and calmness of reason, the strength of martyrdom, the determination to sacrifice everything to the peace of his conscience.

Then came the crisis. He was a priest and he no longer believed. This had suddenly dawned before him like a bottomless abyss. It was the end of his life, the collapse of everything. What should he do? Did not simple rectitude require that he should throw off the cassock and return to the world? But he had seen some renegade priests and had despised them. A married priest with whom he was acquainted filled him with disgust. All this, no doubt, was but a survival of his long religious training. He retained the notion that a priest cannot, must not, weaken; the idea that when one has dedicated oneself to God one cannot take possession of oneself again. Possibly, also, he felt that he was too plainly branded, too different from other men already, to prove otherwise than awkward and unwelcome among them. Since he had been cut off from them he would remain apart in his grievous pride; And, after days of anguish, days of struggle incessantly renewed, in which his thirst for happiness warred with the energies of his returning health, he took the heroic resolution to remain a priest, and an honest one. He would find the strength necessary for such abnegation. Since he had conquered the flesh, albeit unable to conquer the brain, he felt sure of keeping his vow of chastity, and that would be unshakable; therein lay the pure, upright life which he was absolutely certain of living. What mattered the rest if he alone suffered, if nobody in the world suspected that his heart was reduced to ashes, that nothing remained of his faith, that he was agonising amidst fearful falsehood? His rectitude would prove a firm prop; he would follow his priestly calling like an honest man, without breaking any of the vows he had taken; he would, in due accordance with the rites, discharge his duties as a minister of the Divinity, whom he would praise and glorify at the altar, and distribute as the Bread of Life to the faithful. Who, then, would dare to impute his loss of faith to him as a crime, even if this great misfortune should some day become known? And what more could be asked of him than lifelong devotion to his vow, regard for his ministry, and the practice of every charity without the hope of any future reward? In this wise he ended by calming himself, still upright, still bearing his head erect, with the desolate grandeur of the priest who himself no longer believes, but continues watching over the faith of others. And he certainly was not alone; he felt that he had many brothers, priests with ravaged minds, who had sunk into incredulity, and who yet, like soldiers without a fatherland, remained at the altar, and, despite, everything, found the courage to make the divine illusion shine forth above the kneeling crowds.

On recovering his health Pierre had immediately resumed his service at the little church of Neuilly. He said his mass there every morning. But he had resolved to refuse any appointment, any preferment. Months and years went by, and he obstinately insisted on remaining the least known and the most humble of those priests who are tolerated in a parish, who appear and disappear after discharging their duty. The acceptance of any appointment would have seemed to him an aggravation of his falsehood, a theft from those who were more deserving than himself. And he had to resist frequent offers, for it was impossible for his merits to remain unnoticed. Indeed, his obstinate modesty provoked astonishment at the archbishop's palace, where there was a desire to utilise the power which could be divined in him. Now and again, it is true, he bitterly regretted that he was not useful, that he did not co-operate in some great work, in furthering the purification of the world, the salvation and happiness of all, in accordance with his own ardent, torturing desire. Fortunately his time was nearly all his own, and to console himself he gave rein to his passion for work by devouring every volume in his father's bookcase, and then again resuming and considering his studies, feverishly preoccupied with regard to the history of nations, full of a desire to explore the depths of the social and religious crisis so that he might ascertain whether it were really beyond remedy.

It was at this time, whilst rummaging one morning in one of the large drawers in the lower part of the bookcase, that he discovered quite a collection of papers respecting the apparitions of Lourdes. It was a very complete set of documents, comprising detailed notes of the interrogatories to which Bernadette had been subjected, copies of numerous official documents, and police and medical reports, in addition to many private and confidential letters of the greatest interest. This discovery had surprised Pierre, and he had questioned, Doctor Chassaigne concerning it. The latter thereupon remembered that his friend, Michel Froment, had at one time passionately devoted himself to the study of Bernadette's case; and he himself, a native of the village near Lourdes, had procured for the chemist a portion of the documents in the collection. Pierre, in his turn, then became impassioned, and for a whole month continued studying the affair, powerfully attracted by the visionary's pure, upright nature, but indignant with all that had subsequently sprouted up—the barbarous fetishism, the painful superstitions, and the triumphant simony. In the access of unbelief which had come upon him, this story of Lourdes was certainly of a nature to complete the collapse of his faith. However, it had also excited his curiosity, and he would have liked to investigate it, to establish beyond dispute what scientific truth might be in it, and render pure Christianity the service of ridding it of this scoria, this fairy tale, all touching and childish as it was. But he had been obliged to relinquish his studies, shrinking from the necessity of making a journey to the Grotto, and finding that it would be extremely difficult to obtain the information which he still needed; and of it all there at last only remained within him a tender feeling for Bernadette, of whom he could not think without a sensation of delightful charm and infinite pity.

The days went by, and Pierre led a more and more lonely life. Doctor Chassaigne had just left for the Pyrenees in a state of mortal anxiety. Abandoning his patients, he had set out for Cauterets with his ailing wife, who was sinking more and more each day, to the infinite distress of both his charming daughter and himself. From that moment the little house at Neuilly fell into deathlike silence and emptiness. Pierre had no other distraction than that of occasionally going to see the Guersaints, who had long since left the neighbouring house, but whom he had found again in a small lodging in a wretched tenement of the district. And the memory of his first visit to them there was yet so fresh within him, that he felt a pang at his heart as he recalled his emotion at sight of the hapless Marie.

That pang roused him from his reverie, and on looking round he perceived Marie stretched on the seat, even as he had found her on the day which he recalled, already imprisoned in that gutter-like box, that coffin to which wheels were adapted when she was taken out-of-doors for an airing. She, formerly so brimful of life, ever astir and laughing, was dying of inaction and immobility in that box. Of her old-time beauty she had retained nothing save her hair, which clad her as with a royal mantle, and she was so emaciated that she seemed to have grown smaller again, to have become once more a child. And what was most distressing was the expression on her pale face, the blank, frigid stare of her eyes which did not see, the ever haunting absent look, as of one whom suffering overwhelmed. However, she noticed that Pierre was gazing at her, and at once desired to smile at him; but irresistible moans escaped her, and when she did at last smile, it was like a poor smitten creature who is convinced that she will expire before the miracle takes place. He was overcome by it, and, amidst all the sufferings with which the carriage abounded, hers were now the only ones that he beheld and heard, as though one and all were summed up in her, in the long and terrible agony of her beauty, gaiety, and youth.

Then by degrees, without taking his eyes from Marie, he again reverted to former days, again lived those hours, fraught with a mournful and bitter charm, which he had often spent beside her, when he called at the sorry lodging to keep her company. M. de Guersaint had finally ruined himself by trying to improve the artistic quality of the religious prints so widely sold in France, the faulty execution of which quite irritated him. His last resources had been swallowed up in the failure of a colour-printing firm; and, heedless as he was, deficient in foresight, ever trusting in Providence, his childish mind continually swayed by illusions, he did not notice the awful pecuniary embarrassment of the household; but applied himself to the study of aerial navigation, without even realising what prodigious activity his elder daughter, Blanche, was forced to display, in order to earn the living of her two children, as she was wont to call her father and her sister. It was Blanche who, by running about Paris in the dust or the mud from morning to evening in order to give French or music lessons, contrived to provide the money necessary for the unremitting attentions which Marie required. And Marie often experienced attacks of despair—bursting into tears and accusing herself of being the primary cause of their ruin, as for years and years now it had been necessary to pay for medical attendance and for taking her to almost every imaginable spring—La Bourboule, Aix, Lamalou, Amelie-les-Bains, and others. And the outcome of ten years of varied diagnosis and treatment was that the doctors had now abandoned her. Some thought her illness to be due to the rupture of certain ligaments, others believed in the presence of a tumour, others again to paralysis due to injury to the spinal cord, and as she, with maidenly revolt, refused to undergo any examination, and they did not even dare to address precise questions to her, they each contented themselves with their several opinions and declared that she was beyond cure. Moreover, she now solely relied upon the divine help, having grown rigidly pious since she had been suffering, and finding her only relief in her ardent faith. Every morning she herself read the holy offices, for to her great sorrow she was unable to go to church. Her inert limbs indeed seemed quite lifeless, and she had sunk into a condition of extreme weakness, to such a point, in fact, that on certain days it became necessary for her sister to place her food in her mouth.

Pierre was thinking of this when all at once he recalled an evening he had spent with her. The lamp had not yet been lighted, he was seated beside her in the growing obscurity, and she suddenly told him that she wished to go to Lourdes, feeling certain that she would return cured. He had experienced an uncomfortable sensation on hearing her speak in this fashion, and quite forgetting himself had exclaimed that it was folly to believe in such childishness. He had hitherto made it a rule never to converse with her on religious matters, having not only refused to be her confessor, but even to advise her with regard to the petty uncertainties of her pietism. In this respect he was influenced by feelings of mingled shame and compassion; to lie to her of all people would have made him suffer, and, moreover, he would have deemed himself a criminal had he even by a breath sullied that fervent pure faith which lent her such strength against pain. And so, regretting that he had not been able to restrain his exclamation, he remained sorely embarrassed, when all at once he felt the girl's cold hand take hold of his own. And then, emboldened by the darkness, she ventured in a gentle, faltering voice, to tell him that she already knew his secret, his misfortune, that wretchedness, so fearful for a priest, of being unable to believe.

Despite himself he had revealed everything during their chats together, and she, with the delicate intuition of a friend, had been able to read his conscience. She felt terribly distressed on his account; she deemed him, with that mortal moral malady, to be more deserving of pity than herself. And then as he, thunderstruck, was still unable to find an answer, acknowledging the truth of her words by his very silence, she again began to speak to him of Lourdes, adding in a low whisper that she wished to confide him as well as herself to the protection of the Blessed Virgin, whom she entreated to restore him to faith. And from that evening forward she did not cease speaking on the subject, repeating again and again, that if she went to Lourdes she would be surely cured. But she was prevented from making the journey by lack of means and she did not even dare to speak to her sister of the pecuniary question. So two months went by, and day by day she grew weaker, exhausted by her longing dreams, her eyes ever turned towards the flashing light of the miraculous Grotto far away. Pierre then experienced many painful days. He had at first told Marie that he would not accompany her. But his decision was somewhat shaken by the thought that if he made up his mind to go, he might profit by the journey to continue his inquiries with regard to Bernadette, whose charming image lingered in his heart. And at last he even felt penetrated by a delightful feeling, an unacknowledged hope, the hope that Marie was perhaps right, that the Virgin might take pity on him and restore to him his former blind faith, the faith of the child who loves and does not question. Oh! to believe, to believe with his whole soul, to plunge into faith for ever! Doubtless there was no other possible happiness. He longed for faith with all the joyousness of his youth, with all the love that he had felt for his mother, with all his burning desire to escape from the torment of understanding and knowing, and to slumber forever in the depths of divine ignorance. It was cowardly, and yet so delightful; to exist no more, to become a mere thing in the hands of the Divinity. And thus he was at last possessed by a desire to make the supreme experiment.

A week later the journey to Lourdes was decided upon. Pierre, however, had insisted on a final consultation of medical men in order to ascertain if it were really possible for Marie to travel; and this again was a scene which rose up before him, with certain incidents which he ever beheld whilst others were already fading from his mind. Two of the doctors who had formerly attended the patient, and one of whom believed in the rupture of certain ligaments, whilst the other asserted the case to be one of medullary paralysis, had ended by agreeing that this paralysis existed, and that there was also, possibly, some ligamentary injury. In their opinion all the symptoms pointed to this diagnosis, and the nature of the case seemed to them so evident that they did not hesitate to give certificates, each his own, agreeing almost word for word with one another, and so positive in character as to leave no room for doubt. Moreover, they thought that the journey was practicable, though it would certainly prove an exceedingly painful one. Pierre thereupon resolved to risk it, for he had found the doctors very prudent, and very desirous to arrive at the truth; and he retained but a confused recollection of the third medical man who had been called in, a distant cousin of his named De Beauclair, who was young, extremely intelligent, but little known as yet, and said by some to be rather strange in his theories. This doctor, after looking at Marie for a long time, had asked somewhat anxiously about her parents, and had seemed greatly interested by what was told him of M. de Guersaint, this architect and inventor with a weak and exuberant mind. Then he had desired to measure the sufferer's visual field, and by a slight discreet touch had ascertained the locality of the pain, which, under certain pressure, seemed to ascend like a heavy shifting mass towards the breast. He did not appear to attach importance to the paralysis of the legs; but on a direct question being put to him he exclaimed that the girl ought to be taken to Lourdes and that she would assuredly be cured there, if she herself were convinced of it. Faith sufficed, said he, with a smile; two pious lady patients of his, whom he had sent thither during the preceding year, had returned in radiant health. He even predicted how the miracle would come about; it would be like a lightning stroke, an awakening, an exaltation of the entire being, whilst the evil, that horrid, diabolical weight which stifled the poor girl would once more ascend and fly away as though emerging by her mouth. But at the same time he flatly declined to give a certificate. He had failed to agree with his two confreres, who treated him coldly, as though they considered him a wild, adventurous young fellow. Pierre confusedly remembered some shreds of the discussion which had begun again in his presence, some little part of the diagnosis framed by Beauclair. First, a dislocation of the organ, with a slight laceration of the ligaments, resulting from the patient's fall from her horse; then a slow healing, everything returning to its place, followed by consecutive nervous symptoms, so that the sufferer was now simply beset by her original fright, her attention fixed on the injured part, arrested there amidst increasing pain, incapable of acquiring fresh notions unless it were under the lash of some violent emotion. Moreover, he also admitted the probability of accidents due to nutrition, as yet unexplained, and on the course and importance of which he himself would not venture to give an opinion. However, the idea that Marie dreamt her disease, that the fearful sufferings torturing her came from an injury long since healed, appeared such a paradox to Pierre when he gazed at her and saw her in such agony, her limbs already stretched out lifeless on her bed of misery, that he did not even pause to consider it; but at that moment felt simply happy in the thought that all three doctors agreed in authorising the journey to Lourdes. To him it was sufficient that she might be cured, and to attain that result he would have followed her to the end of the world.

Ah! those last days of Paris, amid what a scramble they were spent! The national pilgrimage was about to start, and in order to avoid heavy expenses, it had occurred to him to obtain hospitalisation for Marie. Then he had been obliged to run about in order to obtain his own admission, as a helper, into the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation. M. de Guersaint was delighted with the prospect of the journey, for he was fond of nature, and ardently desired to become acquainted with the Pyrenees. Moreover, he did not allow anything to worry him, but was perfectly willing that the young priest should pay his railway fare, and provide for him at the hotel yonder as for a child; and his daughter Blanche, having slipped a twenty-franc piece into his hand at the last moment, he had even thought himself rich again. That poor brave Blanche had a little hidden store of her own, savings to the amount of fifty francs, which it had been absolutely necessary to accept, for she became quite angry in her determination to contribute towards her sister's cure, unable as she was to form one of the party, owing to the lessons which she had to give in Paris, whose hard pavements she must continue pacing, whilst her dear ones were kneeling yonder, amidst the enchantments of the Grotto. And so the others had started on, and were now rolling, ever rolling along.

As they passed the station of Chatellerault a sudden burst of voices made Pierre start, and drove away the torpor into which his reverie had plunged him. What was the matter? Were they reaching Poitiers? But it was only half-past twelve o'clock, and it was simply Sister Hyacinthe who had roused him, by making her patients and pilgrims say the Angelus, the three "Aves" thrice repeated. Then the voices burst forth, and the sound of a fresh canticle arose, and continued like a lamentation. Fully five and twenty minutes must elapse before they would reach Poitiers, where it seemed as if the half-hour's stoppage would bring relief to every suffering! They were all so uncomfortable, so roughly shaken in that malodorous, burning carriage! Such wretchedness was beyond endurance. Big tears coursed down the cheeks of Madame Vincent, a muttered oath escaped M. Sabathier usually so resigned, and Brother Isidore, La Grivotte, and Madame Vetu seemed to have become inanimate, mere waifs carried along by a torrent. Moreover, Marie no longer answered, but had closed her eyes and would not open them, pursued as she was by the horrible vision of Elise Rouquet's face, that face with its gaping cavities which seemed to her to be the image of death. And whilst the train increased its speed, bearing all this human despair onward, under the heavy sky, athwart the burning plains, there was yet another scare in the carriage. The strange man had apparently ceased to breathe, and a voice cried out that he was expiring.

III. POITIERS

AS soon as the train arrived at Poitiers, Sister Hyacinthe alighted in all haste, amidst the crowd of porters opening the carriage doors, and of pilgrims darting forward to reach the platform. "Wait a moment, wait a moment," she repeated, "let me pass first. I wish to see if all is over."

Then, having entered the other compartment, she raised the strange man's head, and seeing him so pale, with such blank eyes, she did at first think him already dead. At last, however, she detected a faint breathing. "No, no," she then exclaimed, "he still breathes. Quick! there is no time to be lost." And, perceiving the other Sister, she added: "Sister Claire des Anges, will you go and fetch Father Massias, who must be in the third or fourth carriage of the train? Tell him that we have a patient in very great danger here, and ask him to bring the Holy Oils at once."

Without answering, the other Sister at once plunged into the midst of the scramble. She was small, slender, and gentle, with a meditative air and mysterious eyes, but withal extremely active.

Pierre, who was standing in the other compartment watching the scene, now ventured to make a suggestion: "And would it not be as well to fetch the doctor?" said he.

"Yes, I was thinking of it," replied Sister Hyacinthe, "and, Monsieur l'Abbe, it would be very kind of you to go for him yourself."

It so happened that Pierre intended going to the cantine carriage to fetch some broth for Marie. Now that she was no longer being jolted she felt somewhat relieved, and had opened her eyes, and caused her father to raise her to a sitting posture. Keenly thirsting for fresh air, she would have much liked them to carry her out on to the platform for a moment, but she felt that it would be asking too much, that it would be too troublesome a task to place her inside the carriage again. So M. de Guersaint remained by himself on the platform, near the open door, smoking a cigarette, whilst Pierre hastened to the cantine van, where he knew he would find the doctor on duty, with his travelling pharmacy.

Some other patients, whom one could not think of removing, also remained in the carriage. Amongst them was La Grivotte, who was stifling and almost delirious, in such a state indeed as to detain Madame de Jonquiere, who had arranged to meet her daughter Raymonde, with Madame Volmar and Madame Desagneaux, in the refreshment-room, in order that they might all four lunch together. But that unfortunate creature seemed on the point of expiring, so how could she leave her all alone, on the hard seat of that carriage? On his side, M. Sabathier, likewise riveted to his seat, was waiting for his wife, who had gone to fetch a bunch of grapes for him; whilst Marthe had remained with her brother the missionary, whose faint moan never ceased. The others, those who were able to walk, had hustled one another in their haste to alight, all eager as they were to escape for a moment from that cage of wretchedness where their limbs had been quite numbed by the seven hours' journey which they had so far gone. Madame Maze had at once drawn apart, straying with melancholy face to the far end of the platform, where she found herself all alone; Madame Vetu, stupefied by her sufferings, had found sufficient strength to take a few steps, and sit down on a bench, in the full sunlight, where she did not even feel the burning heat; whilst Elise Rouquet, who had had the decency to cover her face with a black wrap, and was consumed by a desire for fresh water, went hither and thither in search of a drinking fountain. And meantime Madame Vincent, walking slowly, carried her little Rose about in her arms, trying to smile at her, and to cheer her by showing her some gaudily coloured picture bills, which the child gravely gazed at, but did not see.

Pierre had the greatest possible difficulty in making his way through the crowd inundating the platform. No effort of imagination could enable one to picture the living torrent of ailing and healthy beings which the train had here set down—a mob of more than a thousand persons just emerging from suffocation, and bustling, hurrying hither and thither. Each carriage had contributed its share of wretchedness, like some hospital ward suddenly evacuated; and it was now possible to form an idea of the frightful amount of suffering which this terrible white train carried along with it, this train which disseminated a legend of horror wheresoever it passed. Some infirm sufferers were dragging themselves about, others were being carried, and many remained in a heap on the platform. There were sudden pushes, violent calls, innumerable displays of distracted eagerness to reach the refreshment-room and the buvette. Each and all made haste, going wheresoever their wants called them. This stoppage of half an hour's duration, the only stoppage there would be before reaching Lourdes, was, after all, such a short one. And the only gay note, amidst all the black cassocks and the threadbare garments of the poor, never of any precise shade of colour, was supplied by the smiling whiteness of the Little Sisters of the Assumption, all bright and active in their snowy coifs, wimples, and aprons.

When Pierre at last reached the cantine van near the middle of the train, he found it already besieged. There was here a petroleum stove, with a small supply of cooking utensils. The broth prepared from concentrated meat-extract was being warmed in wrought-iron pans, whilst the preserved milk in tins was diluted and supplied as occasion required. There were some other provisions, such as biscuits, fruit, and chocolate, on a few shelves. But Sister Saint-Francois, to whom the service was entrusted, a short, stout woman of five-and-forty, with a good-natured fresh-coloured face, was somewhat losing her head in the presence of all the hands so eagerly stretched towards her. Whilst continuing her distribution, she lent ear to Pierre, as he called the doctor, who with his travelling pharmacy occupied another corner of the van. Then, when the young priest began to explain matters, speaking of the poor unknown man who was dying, a sudden desire came to her to go and see him, and she summoned another Sister to take her place.

"Oh! I wished to ask you, Sister, for some broth for a passenger who is ill," said Pierre, at that moment turning towards her.

"Very well, Monsieur l'Abbe, I will bring some. Go on in front."

The doctor and the abbe went off in all haste, rapidly questioning and answering one another, whilst behind them followed Sister Saint-Francois, carrying the bowl of broth with all possible caution amidst the jostling of the crowd. The doctor was a dark-complexioned man of eight-and-twenty, robust and extremely handsome, with the head of a young Roman emperor, such as may still be occasionally met with in the sunburnt land of Provence. As soon as Sister Hyacinthe caught sight of him, she raised an exclamation of surprise: "What! Monsieur Ferrand, is it you?" Indeed, they both seemed amazed at meeting in this manner.

It is, however, the courageous mission of the Sisters of the Assumption to tend the ailing poor, those who lie in agony in their humble garrets, and cannot pay for nursing; and thus these good women spend their lives among the wretched, installing themselves beside the sufferer's pallet in his tiny lodging, and ministering to every want, attending alike to cooking and cleaning, and living there as servants and relatives, until either cure or death supervenes. And it was in this wise that Sister Hyacinthe, young as she was, with her milky face, and her blue eyes which ever laughed, had installed herself one day in the abode of this young fellow, Ferrand, then a medical student, prostrated by typhoid fever, and so desperately poor that he lived in a kind of loft reached by a ladder, in the Rue du Four. And from that moment she had not stirred from his side, but had remained with him until she cured him, with the passion of one who lived only for others, one who when an infant had been found in a church porch, and who had no other family than that of those who suffered, to whom she devoted herself with all her ardently affectionate nature. And what a delightful month, what exquisite comradeship, fraught with the pure fraternity of suffering, had followed! When he called her "Sister," it was really to a sister that he was speaking. And she was a mother also, a mother who helped him to rise, and who put him to bed as though he were her child, without aught springing up between them save supreme pity, the divine, gentle compassion of charity. She ever showed herself gay, sexless, devoid of any instinct excepting that which prompted her to assuage and to console. And he worshipped her, venerated her, and had retained of her the most chaste and passionate of recollections.

"O Sister Hyacinthe!" he murmured in delight.

Chance alone had brought them face to face again, for Ferrand was not a believer, and if he found himself in that train it was simply because he had at the last moment consented to take the place of a friend who was suddenly prevented from coming. For nearly a twelvemonth he had been a house-surgeon at the Hospital of La Pitie. However, this journey to Lourdes, in such peculiar circumstances, greatly interested him.

The joy of the meeting was making them forget the ailing stranger. And so the Sister resumed: "You see, Monsieur Ferrand, it is for this man that we want you. At one moment we thought him dead. Ever since we passed Amboise he has been filling us with fear, and I have just sent for the Holy Oils. Do you find him so very low? Could you not revive him a little?"

The doctor was already examining the man, and thereupon the sufferers who had remained in the carriage became greatly interested and began to look. Marie, to whom Sister Saint-Francois had given the bowl of broth, was holding it with such an unsteady hand that Pierre had to take it from her, and endeavour to make her drink; but she could not swallow, and she left the broth scarce tasted, fixing her eyes upon the man waiting to see what would happen like one whose own existence is at stake.

"Tell me," again asked Sister Hyacinthe, "how do you find him? What is his illness?"

"What is his illness!" muttered Ferrand; "he has every illness."

Then, drawing a little phial from his pocket, he endeavoured to introduce a few drops of the contents between the sufferer's clenched teeth. The man heaved a sigh, raised his eyelids and let them fall again; that was all, he gave no other sign of life.

Sister Hyacinthe, usually so calm and composed, so little accustomed to despair, became impatient.

"But it is terrible," said she, "and Sister Claire des Anges does not come back! Yet I told her plainly enough where she would find Father Massias's carriage. Mon Dieu! what will become of us?"

Sister Saint-Francois, seeing that she could render no help, was now about to return to the cantine van. Before doing so, however, she inquired if the man were not simply dying of hunger; for such cases presented themselves, and indeed she had only come to the compartment with the view of offering some of her provisions. At last, as she went off, she promised that she would make Sister Claire des Anges hasten her return should she happen to meet her; and she had not gone twenty yards when she turned round and waved her arm to call attention to her colleague, who with discreet short steps was coming back alone.

Leaning out of the window, Sister Hyacinthe kept on calling to her, "Make haste, make haste! Well, and where is Father Massias?"

"He isn't there."

"What! not there?"

"No. I went as fast as I could, but with all these people about it was not possible to get there quickly. When I reached the carriage Father Massias had already alighted, and gone out of the station, no doubt."

She thereupon explained, that according to what she had heard, Father Massias and the priest of Sainte-Radegonde had some appointment together. In other years the national pilgrimage halted at Poitiers for four-and-twenty hours, and after those who were ill had been placed in the town hospital the others went in procession to Sainte-Radegonde.* That year, however, there was some obstacle to this course being followed, so the train was going straight on to Lourdes; and Father Massias was certainly with his friend the priest, talking with him on some matter of importance.

* The church of Sainte-Radegonde, built by the saint of that name
in the sixth century, is famous throughout Poitou. In the crypt
between the tombs of Ste. Agnes and St. Disciole is that of Ste.
Radegonde herself, but it now only contains some particles of her
remains, as the greater portion was burnt by the Huguenots in
1562. On a previous occasion (1412) the tomb had been violated by
Jean, Duc de Berry, who wished to remove both the saint's head
and her two rings. Whilst he was making the attempt, however, the
skeleton is said to have withdrawn its hand so that he might not
possess himself of the rings. A greater curiosity which the church
contains is a footprint on a stone slab, said to have been left
by Christ when He appeared to Ste. Radegonde in her cell. This
attracts pilgrims from many parts.—Trans.

"They promised to tell him and send him here with the Holy Oils as soon as they found him," added Sister Claire.

However, this was quite a disaster for Sister Hyacinthe. Since Science was powerless, perhaps the Holy Oils would have brought the sufferer some relief. She had often seen that happen.

"O Sister, Sister, how worried I am!" she said to her companion. "Do you know, I wish you would go back and watch for Father Massias and bring him to me as soon as you see him. It would be so kind of you to do so!"

"Yes, Sister," compliantly answered Sister Claire des Anges, and off she went again with that grave, mysterious air of hers, wending her way through the crowd like a gliding shadow.

Ferrand, meantime, was still looking at the man, sorely distressed at his inability to please Sister Hyacinthe by reviving him. And as he made a gesture expressive of his powerlessness she again raised her voice entreatingly: "Stay with me, Monsieur Ferrand, pray stay," she said. "Wait till Father Massias comes—I shall be a little more at ease with you here."

He remained and helped her to raise the man, who was slipping down upon the seat. Then, taking a linen cloth, she wiped the poor fellow's face which a dense perspiration was continually covering. And the spell of waiting continued amid the uneasiness of the patients who had remained in the carriage, and the curiosity of the folks who had begun to assemble on the platform in front of the compartment.

All at once however a girl hastily pushed the crowd aside, and, mounting on the footboard, addressed herself to Madame de Jonquiere: "What is the matter, mamma?" she said. "They are waiting for you in the refreshment-room."

It was Raymonde de Jonquiere, who, already somewhat ripe for her four-and-twenty years, was remarkably like her mother, being very dark, with a pronounced nose, large mouth, and full, pleasant-looking face.

"But, my dear, you can see for yourself. I can't leave this poor woman," replied the lady-hospitaller; and thereupon she pointed to La Grivotte, who had been attacked by a fit of coughing which shook her frightfully.

"Oh, how annoying, mamma!" retorted Raymonde, "Madame Desagneaux and Madame Volmar were looking forward with so much pleasure to this little lunch together."

"Well, it can't be helped, my dear. At all events, you can begin without waiting for me. Tell the ladies that I will come and join them as soon as I can." Then, an idea occurring to her, Madame de Jonquiere added: "Wait a moment, the doctor is here. I will try to get him to take charge of my patient. Go back, I will follow you. As you can guess, I am dying of hunger."

Raymonde briskly returned to the refreshment-room whilst her mother begged Ferrand to come into her compartment to see if he could do something to relieve La Grivotte. At Marthe's request he had already examined Brother Isidore, whose moaning never ceased; and with a sorrowful gesture he had again confessed his powerlessness. However, he hastened to comply with Madame de Jonquiere's appeal, and raised the consumptive woman to a sitting posture in the hope of thus stopping her cough, which indeed gradually ceased. And then he helped the lady-hospitaller to make her swallow a spoonful of some soothing draught. The doctor's presence in the carriage was still causing a stir among the ailing ones. M. Sabathier, who was slowly eating the grapes which his wife had been to fetch him, did not, however, question Ferrand, for he knew full well what his answer would be, and was weary, as he expressed it, of consulting all the princes of science; nevertheless he felt comforted as it were at seeing him set that poor consumptive woman on her feet again. And even Marie watched all that the doctor did with increasing interest, though not daring to call him herself, certain as she also was that he could do nothing for her.

Meantime, the crush on the platform was increasing. Only a quarter of an hour now remained to the pilgrims. Madame Vetu, whose eyes were open but who saw nothing, sat like an insensible being in the broad sunlight, in the hope possibly that the scorching heat would deaden her pains; whilst up and down, in front of her, went Madame Vincent ever with the same sleep-inducing step and ever carrying her little Rose, her poor ailing birdie, whose weight was so trifling that she scarcely felt her in her arms. Many people meantime were hastening to the water tap in order to fill their pitchers, cans, and bottles. Madame Maze, who was of refined tastes and careful of her person, thought of going to wash her hands there; but just as she arrived she found Elise Rouquet drinking, and she recoiled at sight of that disease-smitten face, so terribly disfigured and robbed of nearly all semblance of humanity. And all the others likewise shuddered, likewise hesitated to fill their bottles, pitchers, and cans at the tap from which she had drunk.

A large number of pilgrims had now begun to eat whilst pacing the platform. You could hear the rhythmical taps of the crutches carried by a woman who incessantly wended her way through the groups. On the ground, a legless cripple was painfully dragging herself about in search of nobody knew what. Others, seated there in heaps, no longer stirred. All these sufferers, momentarily unpacked as it were, these patients of a travelling hospital emptied for a brief half-hour, were taking the air amidst the bewilderment and agitation of the healthy passengers; and the whole throng had a frightfully woeful, poverty-stricken appearance in the broad noontide light.

Pierre no longer stirred from the side of Marie, for M. de Guersaint had disappeared, attracted by a verdant patch of landscape which could be seen at the far end of the station. And, feeling anxious about her, since she had not been able to finish her broth, the young priest with a smiling air tried to tempt her palate by offering to go and buy her a peach; but she refused it; she was suffering too much, she cared for nothing. She was gazing at him with her large, woeful eyes, on the one hand impatient at this stoppage which delayed her chance of cure, and on the other terrified at the thought of again being jolted along that hard and endless railroad.

Just then a stout gentleman whose full beard was turning grey, and who had a broad, fatherly kind of face, drew near and touched Pierre's arm: "Excuse me, Monsieur l'Abbe," said he, "but is it not in this carriage that there is a poor man dying?"

And on the priest returning an affirmative answer, the gentleman became quite affable and familiar.

"My name is Vigneron," he said; "I am the head clerk at the Ministry of Finances, and applied for leave in order that I might help my wife to take our son Gustave to Lourdes. The dear lad places all his hope in the Blessed Virgin, to whom we pray morning and evening on his behalf. We are in a second-class compartment of the carriage just in front of yours."

Then, turning round, he summoned his party with a wave of the hand. "Come, come!" said he, "it is here. The unfortunate man is indeed in the last throes."

Madame Vigneron was a little woman with the correct bearing of a respectable bourgeoise, but her long, livid face denoted impoverished blood, terrible evidence of which was furnished by her son Gustave. The latter, who was fifteen years of age, looked scarcely ten. Twisted out of shape, he was a mere skeleton, with his right leg so wasted, so reduced, that he had to walk with a crutch. He had a small, thin face, somewhat awry, in which one saw little excepting his eyes, clear eyes, sparkling with intelligence, sharpened as it were by suffering, and doubtless well able to dive into the human soul.

An old puffy-faced lady followed the others, dragging her legs along with difficulty; and M. Vigneron, remembering that he had forgotten her, stepped back towards Pierre so that he might complete the introduction. "That lady," said he, "is Madame Chaise, my wife's eldest sister. She also wished to accompany Gustave, whom she is very fond of." And then, leaning forward, he added in a whisper, with a confidential air: "She is the widow of Chaise, the silk merchant, you know, who left such an immense fortune. She is suffering from a heart complaint which causes her much anxiety."

The whole family, grouped together, then gazed with lively curiosity at what was taking place in the railway carriage. People were incessantly flocking to the spot; and so that the lad might be the better able to see, his father took him up in his arms for a moment whilst his aunt held the crutch, and his mother on her side raised herself on tip-toe.

The scene in the carriage was still the same; the strange man was still stiffly seated in his corner, his head resting against the hard wood. He was livid, his eyes were closed, and his mouth was twisted by suffering; and every now and then Sister Hyacinthe with her linen cloth wiped away the cold sweat which was constantly covering his face. She no longer spoke, no longer evinced any impatience, but had recovered her serenity and relied on Heaven. From time to time she would simply glance towards the platform to see if Father Massias were coming.

"Look at him, Gustave," said M. Vigneron to his son; "he must be consumptive."

The lad, whom scrofula was eating away, whose hip was attacked by an abscess, and in whom there were already signs of necrosis of the vertebrae, seemed to take a passionate interest in the agony he thus beheld. It did not frighten him, he smiled at it with a smile of infinite sadness.

"Oh! how dreadful!" muttered Madame Chaise, who, living in continual terror of a sudden attack which would carry her off, turned pale with the fear of death.

"Ah! well," replied M. Vigneron, philosophically, "it will come to each of us in turn. We are all mortal."

Thereupon, a painful, mocking expression came over Gustave's smile, as though he had heard other words than those—perchance an unconscious wish, the hope that the old aunt might die before he himself did, that he would inherit the promised half-million of francs, and then not long encumber his family.

"Put the boy down now," said Madame Vigneron to her husband. "You are tiring him, holding him by the legs like that."

Then both she and Madame Chaise bestirred themselves in order that the lad might not be shaken. The poor darling was so much in need of care and attention. At each moment they feared that they might lose him. Even his father was of opinion that they had better put him in the train again at once. And as the two women went off with the child, the old gentleman once more turned towards Pierre, and with evident emotion exclaimed: "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe, if God should take him from us, the light of our life would be extinguished—I don't speak of his aunt's fortune, which would go to other nephews. But it would be unnatural, would it not, that he should go off before her, especially as she is so ill? However, we are all in the hands of Providence, and place our reliance in the Blessed Virgin, who will assuredly perform a miracle."

Just then Madame de Jonquiere, having been reassured by Doctor Ferrand, was able to leave La Grivotte. Before going off, however, she took care to say to Pierre: "I am dying of hunger and am going to the refreshment-room for a moment. But if my patient should begin coughing again, pray come and fetch me."

When, after great difficulty, she had managed to cross the platform and reach the refreshment-room, she found herself in the midst of another scramble. The better-circumstanced pilgrims had taken the tables by assault, and a great many priests were to be seen hastily lunching amidst all the clatter of knives, forks, and crockery. The three or four waiters were not able to attend to all the requirements, especially as they were hampered in their movements by the crowd purchasing fruit, bread, and cold meat at the counter. It was at a little table at the far end of the room that Raymonde was lunching with Madame Desagneaux and Madame Volmar.

"Ah! here you are at last, mamma!" the girl exclaimed, as Madame de Jonquiere approached. "I was just going back to fetch you. You certainly ought to be allowed time to eat!"

She was laughing, with a very animated expression on her face, quite delighted as she was with the adventures of the journey and this indifferent scrambling meal. "There," said she, "I have kept you some trout with green sauce, and there's a cutlet also waiting for you. We have already got to the artichokes."

Then everything became charming. The gaiety prevailing in that little corner rejoiced the sight.

Young Madame Desagneaux was particularly adorable. A delicate blonde, with wild, wavy, yellow hair, a round, dimpled, milky face, a gay, laughing disposition, and a remarkably good heart, she had made a rich marriage, and for three years past had been wont to leave her husband at Trouville in the fine August weather, in order to accompany the national pilgrimage as a lady-hospitaller. This was her great passion, an access of quivering pity, a longing desire to place herself unreservedly at the disposal of the sick for five days, a real debauch of devotion from which she returned tired to death but full of intense delight. Her only regret was that she as yet had no children, and with comical passion, she occasionally expressed a regret that she had missed her true vocation, that of a sister of charity.

"Ah! my dear," she hastily said to Raymonde, "don't pity your mother for being so much taken up with her patients. She, at all events, has something to occupy her." And addressing herself to Madame de Jonquiere, she added: "If you only knew how long we find the time in our fine first-class carriage. We cannot even occupy ourselves with a little needlework, as it is forbidden. I asked for a place with the patients, but all were already distributed, so that my only resource will be to try to sleep tonight."

She began to laugh, and then resumed: "Yes, Madame Volmar, we will try to sleep, won't we, since talking seems to tire you?" Madame Volmar, who looked over thirty, was very dark, with a long face and delicate but drawn features. Her magnificent eyes shone out like brasiers, though every now and then a cloud seemed to veil and extinguish them. At the first glance she did not appear beautiful, but as you gazed at her she became more and more perturbing, till she conquered you and inspired you with passionate admiration. It should be said though that she shrank from all self-assertion, comporting herself with much modesty, ever keeping in the background, striving to hide her lustre, invariably clad in black and unadorned by a single jewel, although she was the wife of a Parisian diamond-merchant.

"Oh! for my part," she murmured, "as long as I am not hustled too much I am well pleased."

She had been to Lourdes as an auxiliary lady-helper already on two occasions, though but little had been seen of her there—at the hospital of Our Lady of Dolours—as, on arriving, she had been overcome by such great fatigue that she had been forced, she said, to keep her room.

However, Madame de Jonquiere, who managed the ward, treated her with good-natured tolerance. "Ah! my poor friends," said she, "there will be plenty of time for you to exert yourselves. Get to sleep if you can, and your turn will come when I can no longer keep up." Then addressing her daughter, she resumed: "And you would do well, darling, not to excite yourself too much if you wish to keep your head clear."

Raymonde smiled and gave her mother a reproachful glance: "Mamma, mamma, why do you say that? Am I not sensible?" she asked.

Doubtless she was not boasting, for, despite her youthful, thoughtless air, the air of one who simply feels happy in living, there appeared in her grey eyes an expression of firm resolution, a resolution to shape her life for herself.

"It is true," the mother confessed with a little confusion, "this little girl is at times more sensible than I am myself. Come, pass me the cutlet—it is welcome, I assure you. Lord! how hungry I was!"

The meal continued, enlivened by the constant laughter of Madame Desagneaux and Raymonde. The latter was very animated, and her face, which was already growing somewhat yellow through long pining for a suitor, again assumed the rosy bloom of twenty. They had to eat very fast, for only ten minutes now remained to them. On all sides one heard the growing tumult of customers who feared that they would not have time to take their coffee.

All at once, however, Pierre made his appearance; a fit of stifling had again come over La Grivotte; and Madame de Jonquiere hastily finished her artichoke and returned to her compartment, after kissing her daughter, who wished her "good-night" in a facetious way. The priest, however, had made a movement of surprise on perceiving Madame Volmar with the red cross of the lady-hospitallers on her black bodice. He knew her, for he still called at long intervals on old Madame Volmar, the diamond-merchant's mother, who had been one of his own mother's friends. She was the most terrible woman in the world, religious beyond all reason, so harsh and stern, moreover, as to close the very window shutters in order to prevent her daughter-in-law from looking into the street. And he knew the young woman's story, how she had been imprisoned on the very morrow of her marriage, shut up between her mother-in-law, who tyrannised over her, and her husband, a repulsively ugly monster who went so far as to beat her, mad as he was with jealousy, although he himself kept mistresses. The unhappy woman was not allowed out of the house excepting it were to go to mass. And one day, at La Trinite, Pierre had surprised her secret, on seeing her behind the church exchanging a few hasty words with a well-groomed, distinguished-looking man.

The priest's sudden appearance in the refreshment-room had somewhat disconcerted Madame Volmar.

"What an unexpected meeting, Monsieur l'Abbe!" she said, offering him her long, warm hand. "What a long time it is since I last saw you!" And thereupon she explained that this was the third year she had gone to Lourdes, her mother-in-law having required her to join the Association of Our Lady of Salvation. "It is surprising that you did not see her at the station when we started," she added. "She sees me into the train and comes to meet me on my return."

This was said in an apparently simple way, but with such a subtle touch of irony that Pierre fancied he could guess the truth. He knew that she really had no religious principles at all, and that she merely followed the rites and ceremonies of the Church in order that she might now and again obtain an hour's freedom; and all at once he intuitively realised that someone must be waiting for her yonder, that it was for the purpose of meeting him that she was thus hastening to Lourdes with her shrinking yet ardent air and flaming eyes, which she so prudently shrouded with a veil of lifeless indifference.

"For my part," he answered, "I am accompanying a friend of my childhood, a poor girl who is very ill indeed. I must ask your help for her; you shall nurse her."

Thereupon she faintly blushed, and he no longer doubted the truth of his surmise. However, Raymonde was just then settling the bill with the easy assurance of a girl who is expert in figures; and immediately afterwards Madame Desagneaux led Madame Volmar away. The waiters were now growing more distracted and the tables were fast being vacated; for, on hearing a bell ring, everybody had begun to rush towards the door.

Pierre, on his side, was hastening back to his carriage, when he was stopped by an old priest. "Ah! Monsieur le Cure," he said, "I saw you just before we started, but I was unable to get near enough to shake hands with you."

Thereupon he offered his hand to his brother ecclesiastic, who was looking and smiling at him in a kindly way. The Abbe Judaine was the parish priest of Saligny, a little village in the department of the Oise. Tall and sturdy, he had a broad pink face, around which clustered a mass of white, curly hair, and it could be divined by his appearance that he was a worthy man whom neither the flesh nor the spirit had ever tormented. He believed indeed firmly and absolutely, with a tranquil godliness, never having known a struggle, endowed as he was with the ready faith of a child who is unacquainted with human passions. And ever since the Virgin at Lourdes had cured him of a disease of the eyes, by a famous miracle which folks still talked about, his belief had become yet more absolute and tender, as though impregnated with divine gratitude.

"I am pleased that you are with us, my friend," he gently said; "for there is much in these pilgrimages for young priests to profit by. I am told that some of them at times experience a feeling of rebellion. Well, you will see all these poor people praying,—it is a sight which will make you weep. How can one do otherwise than place oneself in God's hands, on seeing so much suffering cured or consoled?"

The old priest himself was accompanying a patient; and he pointed to a first-class compartment, at the door of which hung a placard bearing the inscription: "M. l'Abbe Judaine, Reserved." Then lowering his voice, he said: "It is Madame Dieulafay, you know, the great banker's wife. Their chateau, a royal domain, is in my parish, and when they learned that the Blessed Virgin had vouchsafed me such an undeserved favour, they begged me to intercede for their poor sufferer. I have already said several masses, and most sincerely pray for her. There, you see her yonder on the ground. She insisted on being taken out of the carriage, in spite of all the trouble which one will have to place her in it again."

On a shady part of the platform, in a kind of long box, there was, as the old priest said, a woman whose beautiful, perfectly oval face, lighted up by splendid eyes, denoted no greater age than six-and-twenty. She was suffering from a frightful disease. The disappearance from her system of the calcareous salts had led to a softening of the osseous framework, the slow destruction of her bones. Three years previously, after the advent of a stillborn child, she had felt vague pains in the spinal column. And then, little by little, her bones had rarefied and lost shape, the vertebrae had sunk, the bones of the pelvis had flattened, and those of the arms and legs had contracted. Thus shrunken, melting away as it were, she had become a mere human remnant, a nameless, fluid thing, which could not be set erect, but had to be carried hither and thither with infinite care, for fear lest she should vanish between one's fingers. Her face, a motionless face, on which sat a stupefied imbecile expression, still retained its beauty of outline, and yet it was impossible to gaze at this wretched shred of a woman without feeling a heart-pang, the keener on account of all the luxury surrounding her; for not only was the box in which she lay lined with blue quilted silk, but she was covered with valuable lace, and a cap of rare valenciennes was set upon her head, her wealth thus being proclaimed, displayed, in the midst of her awful agony.

"Ah! how pitiable it is," resumed the Abbe Judaine in an undertone. "To think that she is so young, so pretty, possessed of millions of money! And if you knew how dearly loved she was, with what adoration she is still surrounded. That tall gentleman near her is her husband, that elegantly dressed lady is her sister, Madame Jousseur."

Pierre remembered having often noticed in the newspapers the name of Madame Jousseur, wife of a diplomatist, and a conspicuous member of the higher spheres of Catholic society in Paris. People had even circulated a story of some great passion which she had fought against and vanquished. She also was very prettily dressed, with marvellously tasteful simplicity, and she ministered to the wants of her sorry sister with an air of perfect devotion. As for the unhappy woman's husband, who at the age of five-and-thirty had inherited his father's colossal business, he was a clear-complexioned, well-groomed, handsome man, clad in a closely buttoned frock-coat. His eyes, however, were full of tears, for he adored his wife, and had left his business in order to take her to Lourdes, placing his last hope in this appeal to the mercy of Heaven.

Ever since the morning, Pierre had beheld many frightful sufferings in that woeful white train. But none had so distressed his soul as did that wretched female skeleton, slowly liquefying in the midst of its lace and its millions. "The unhappy woman!" he murmured with a shudder.

The Abbe Judaine, however, made a gesture of serene hope. "The Blessed Virgin will cure her," said he; "I have prayed to her so much."

Just then a bell again pealed, and this time it was really the signal for starting. Only two minutes remained. There was a last rush, and folks hurried back towards the train carrying eatables wrapped in paper, and bottles and cans which they had filled with water. Several of them quite lost their heads, and in their inability to find their carriages, ran distractedly from one to the other end of the train; whilst some of the infirm ones dragged themselves about amidst the precipitate tapping of crutches, and others, only able to walk with difficulty, strove to hasten their steps whilst leaning on the arms of some of the lady-hospitallers. It was only with infinite difficulty that four men managed to replace Madame Dieulafay in her first-class compartment. The Vignerons, who were content with second-class accommodation, had already reinstalled themselves in their quarters amidst an extraordinary heap of baskets, boxes, and valises which scarcely allowed little Gustave enough room to stretch his poor puny limbs—the limbs as it were of a deformed insect. And then all the women appeared again: Madame Maze gliding along in silence; Madame Vincent raising her dear little girl in her outstretched arms and dreading lest she should hear her cry out; Madame Vetu, whom it had been necessary to push into the train, after rousing her from her stupefying torment; and Elise Rouquet, who was quite drenched through her obstinacy in endeavouring to drink from the tap, and was still wiping her monstrous face. Whilst each returned to her place and the carriage filled once more, Marie listened to her father, who had come back delighted with his stroll to a pointsman's little house beyond the station, whence a really pleasant stretch of landscape could be discerned.

"Shall we lay you down again at once?" asked Pierre, sorely distressed by the pained expression on Marie's face.

"Oh no, no, by-and-by!" she replied. "I shall have plenty of time to hear those wheels roaring in my head as though they were grinding my bones."

Then, as Ferrand seemed on the point of returning to the cantine van, Sister Hyacinthe begged him to take another look at the strange man before he went off. She was still waiting for Father Massias, astonished at the inexplicable delay in his arrival, but not yet without hope, as Sister Claire des Anges had not returned.

"Pray, Monsieur Ferrand," said she, "tell me if this unfortunate man is in any immediate danger."

The young doctor again looked at the sufferer, felt him, and listened to his breathing. Then with a gesture of discouragement he answered in a low voice, "I feel convinced that you will not get him to Lourdes alive."

Every head was still anxiously stretched forward. If they had only known the man's name, the place he had come from, who he was! But it was impossible to extract a word from this unhappy stranger, who was about to die there, in that carriage, without anybody being able to give his face a name!

It suddenly occurred to Sister Hyacinthe to have him searched. Under the circumstances there could certainly be no harm in such a course. "Feel in his pockets, Monsieur Ferrand," she said.

The doctor thereupon searched the man in a gentle, cautious way, but the only things that he found in his pockets were a chaplet, a knife, and three sous. And nothing more was ever learnt of the man.

At that moment, however, a voice announced that Sister Claire des Anges was at last coming back with Father Massias. All this while the latter had simply been chatting with the priest of Sainte-Radegonde in one of the waiting-rooms. Keen emotion attended his arrival; for a moment all seemed saved. But the train was about to start, the porters were already closing the carriage doors, and it was necessary that extreme unction should be administered in all haste in order to avoid too long a delay.

"This way, reverend Father!" exclaimed Sister Hyacinthe; "yes, yes, pray come in; our unfortunate patient is here."

Father Massias, who was five years older than Pierre, whose fellow-student however he had been at the seminary, had a tall, spare figure with an ascetic countenance, framed round with a light-coloured beard and vividly lighted up by burning eyes, He was neither the priest harassed by doubt, nor the priest with childlike faith, but an apostle carried away by his passion, ever ready to fight and vanquish for the pure glory of the Blessed Virgin. In his black cloak with its large hood, and his broad-brimmed flossy hat, he shone resplendently with the perpetual ardour of battle.

He immediately took from his pocket the silver case containing the Holy Oils, and the ceremony began whilst the last carriage doors were being slammed and belated pilgrims were rushing back to the train; the station-master, meantime, anxiously glancing at the clock, and realising that it would be necessary for him to grant a few minutes' grace.

"Credo in unum Deum," hastily murmured the Father.

"Amen," replied Sister Hyacinthe and the other occupants of the carriage.

Those who had been able to do so, had knelt upon the seats, whilst the others joined their hands, or repeatedly made the sign of the cross; and when the murmured prayers were followed by the Litanies of the ritual, every voice rose, an ardent desire for the remission of the man's sins and for his physical and spiritual cure winging its flight heavenward with each successive Kyrie eleison. Might his whole life, of which they knew nought, be forgiven him; might he enter, stranger though he was, in triumph into the Kingdom of God!

"Christe, exaudi nos."

"Ora pro nobis, sancta Dei Genitrix."

Father Massias had pulled out the silver needle from which hung a drop of Holy Oil. In the midst of such a scramble, with the whole train waiting—many people now thrusting their heads out of the carriage windows in surprise at the delay in starting—he could not think of following the usual practice, of anointing in turn all the organs of the senses, those portals of the soul which give admittance to evil.

He must content himself, as the rules authorised him to do in pressing cases, with one anointment; and this he made upon the man's lips, those livid parted lips from between which only a faint breath escaped, whilst the rest of his face, with its lowered eyelids, already seemed indistinct, again merged into the dust of the earth.

"Per istam sanctam unctionem," said the Father, "et suam piissimam misericordiam indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per visum, auditum, odoratum, gustum, tactum, deliquisti."*

* Through this holy unction and His most tender mercy may the
Lord pardon thee whatever sins thou hast committed by thy sight,
hearing, etc.

The remainder of the ceremony was lost amid the hurry and scramble of the departure. Father Massias scarcely had time to wipe off the oil with the little piece of cotton-wool which Sister Hyacinthe held in readiness, before he had to leave the compartment and get into his own as fast as possible, setting the case containing the Holy Oils in order as he did so, whilst the pilgrims finished repeating the final prayer.

"We cannot wait any longer! It is impossible!" repeated the station-master as he bustled about. "Come, come, make haste everybody!"

At last then they were about to resume their journey. Everybody sat down, returned to his or her corner again. Madame de Jonquiere, however, had changed her place, in order to be nearer La Grivotte, whose condition still worried her, and she was now seated in front of M. Sabathier, who remained waiting with silent resignation. Moreover, Sister Hyacinthe had not returned to her compartment, having decided to remain near the unknown man so that she might watch over him and help him. By following this course, too, she was able to minister to Brother Isidore, whose sufferings his sister Marthe was at a loss to assuage. And Marie, turning pale, felt the jolting of the train in her ailing flesh, even before it had resumed its journey under the heavy sun, rolling onward once more with its load of sufferers stifling in the pestilential atmosphere of the over-heated carriages.

At last a loud whistle resounded, the engine puffed, and Sister Hyacinthe rose up to say: The Magnificat, my children!

IV. MIRACLES

JUST as the train was beginning to move, the door of the compartment in which Pierre and Marie found themselves was opened and a porter pushed a girl of fourteen inside, saying: "There's a seat here—make haste!"

The others were already pulling long faces and were about to protest, when Sister Hyacinthe exclaimed: "What, is it you, Sophie? So you are going back to see the Blessed Virgin who cured you last year!"

And at the same time Madame de Jonquiere remarked: "Ah! Sophie, my little friend, I am very pleased to see that you are grateful."

"Why, yes, Sister; why, yes, madame," answered the girl, in a pretty way.

The carriage door had already been closed again, so that it was necessary that they should accept the presence of this new pilgrim who had fallen from heaven as it were at the very moment when the train, which she had almost missed, was starting off again. She was a slender damsel and would not take up much room. Moreover these ladies knew her, and all the patients had turned their eyes upon her on hearing that the Blessed Virgin had been pleased to cure her. They had now got beyond the station, the engine was still puffing, whilst the wheels increased their speed, and Sister Hyacinthe, clapping her hands, repeated: "Come, come, my children, the Magnificat."

Whilst the joyful chant arose amidst the jolting of the train, Pierre gazed at Sophie. She was evidently a young peasant girl, the daughter of some poor husbandman of the vicinity of Poitiers, petted by her parents, treated in fact like a young lady since she had become the subject of a miracle, one of the elect, whom the priests of the district flocked to see. She wore a straw hat with pink ribbons, and a grey woollen dress trimmed with a flounce. Her round face although not pretty was a very pleasant one, with a beautifully fresh complexion and clear, intelligent eyes which lent her a smiling, modest air.

When the Magnificat had been sung, Pierre was unable to resist his desire to question Sophie. A child of her age, with so candid an air, so utterly unlike a liar, greatly interested him.

"And so you nearly missed the train, my child?" he said.

"I should have been much ashamed if I had, Monsieur l'Abbe," she replied. "I had been at the station since twelve o'clock. And all at once I saw his reverence, the priest of Sainte-Radegonde, who knows me well and who called me to him, to kiss me and tell me that it was very good of me to go back to Lourdes. But it seems the train was starting and I only just had time to run on to the platform. Oh! I ran so fast!"

She paused, laughing, still slightly out of breath, but already repenting that she had been so giddy.

"And what is your name, my child?" asked Pierre.

"Sophie Couteau, Monsieur l'Abbe."

"You do not belong to the town of Poitiers?"

"Oh no! certainly not. We belong to Vivonne, which is seven kilometres away. My father and mother have a little land there, and things would not be so bad if there were not eight children at home—I am the fifth,—fortunately the four older ones are beginning to work."

"And you, my child, what do you do?"

"I, Monsieur l'Abbe! Oh! I am no great help. Since last year, when I came home cured, I have not been left quiet a single day, for, as you can understand, so many people have come to see me, and then too I have been taken to Monseigneur's,* and to the convents and all manner of other places. And before all that I was a long time ill. I could not walk without a stick, and each step I took made me cry out, so dreadfully did my foot hurt me."

* The Bishop's residence.

"So it was of some injury to the foot that the Blessed Virgin cured you?"

Sophie did not have time to reply, for Sister Hyacinthe, who was listening, intervened: "Of caries of the bones of the left heel, which had been going on for three years," said she. "The foot was swollen and quite deformed, and there were fistulas giving egress to continual suppuration."

On hearing this, all the sufferers in the carriage became intensely interested. They no longer took their eyes off this little girl on whom a miracle had been performed, but scanned her from head to foot as though seeking for some sign of the prodigy. Those who were able to stand rose up in order that they might the better see her, and the others, the infirm ones, stretched on their mattresses, strove to raise themselves and turn their heads. Amidst the suffering which had again come upon them on leaving Poitiers, the terror which filled them at the thought that they must continue rolling onward for another fifteen hours, the sudden advent of this child, favoured by Heaven, was like a divine relief, a ray of hope whence they would derive sufficient strength to accomplish the remainder of their terrible journey. The moaning had abated somewhat already, and every face was turned towards the girl with an ardent desire to believe.

This was especially the case with Marie, who, already reviving, joined her trembling hands, and in a gentle supplicating voice said to Pierre, "Question her, pray question her, ask her to tell us everything—cured, O God! cured of such a terrible complaint!"

Madame de Jonquiere, who was quite affected, had leant over the partition to kiss the girl. "Certainly," said she, "our little friend will tell you all about it. Won't you, my darling? You will tell us what the Blessed Virgin did for you?"

"Oh, certainly! madame-as much as you like," answered Sophie with her smiling, modest air, her eyes gleaming with intelligence. Indeed, she wished to begin at once, and raised her right hand with a pretty gesture, as a sign to everybody to be attentive. Plainly enough, she had already acquired the habit of speaking in public.

She could not be seen, however, from some parts of the carriage, and an idea came to Sister Hyacinthe, who said: "Get up on the seat, Sophie, and speak loudly, on account of the noise which the train makes."

This amused the girl, and before beginning she needed time to become serious again. "Well, it was like this," said she; "my foot was past cure, I couldn't even go to church any more, and it had to be kept bandaged, because there was always a lot of nasty matter coming from it. Monsieur Rivoire, the doctor, who had made a cut in it, so as to see inside it, said that he should be obliged to take out a piece of the bone; and that, sure enough, would have made me lame for life. But when I got to Lourdes and had prayed a great deal to the Blessed Virgin, I went to dip my foot in the water, wishing so much that I might be cured that I did not even take the time to pull the bandage off. And everything remained in the water, there was no longer anything the matter with my foot when I took it out."

A murmur of mingled surprise, wonder, and desire arose and spread among those who heard this marvellous tale, so sweet and soothing to all who were in despair. But the little one had not yet finished. She had simply paused. And now, making a fresh gesture, holding her arms somewhat apart, she concluded: "When I got back to Vivonne and Monsieur Rivoire saw my foot again, he said: 'Whether it be God or the Devil who has cured this child, it is all the same to me; but in all truth she is cured.'"

This time a burst of laughter rang out. The girl spoke in too recitative a way, having repeated her story so many times already that she knew it by heart. The doctor's remark was sure to produce an effect, and she herself laughed at it in advance, certain as she was that the others would laugh also. However, she still retained her candid, touching air.

But she had evidently forgotten some particular, for Sister Hyacinthe, a glance from whom had foreshadowed the doctor's jest, now softly prompted her "And what was it you said to Madame la Comtesse, the superintendent of your ward, Sophie?"

"Ah! yes. I hadn't brought many bandages for my foot with me, and I said to her, 'It was very kind of the Blessed Virgin to cure me the first day, as I should have run out of linen on the morrow.'"

This provoked a fresh outburst of delight. They all thought her so nice, to have been cured like that! And in reply to a question from Madame de Jonquiere, she also had to tell the story of her boots, a pair of beautiful new boots which Madame la Comtesse had given her, and in which she had run, jumped, and danced about, full of childish delight. Boots! think of it, she who for three years had not even been able to wear a slipper.

Pierre, who had become grave, waxing pale with the secret uneasiness which was penetrating him, continued to look at her. And he also asked her other questions. She was certainly not lying, and he merely suspected a slow distortion of the actual truth, an easily explained embellishment of the real facts amidst all the joy she felt at being cured and becoming an important little personage. Who now knew if the cicatrisation of her injuries, effected, so it was asserted, completely, instantaneously, in a few seconds, had not in reality been the work of days? Where were the witnesses?

Just then Madame de Jonquiere began to relate that she had been at the hospital at the time referred to. "Sophie was not in my ward," said she, "but I had met her walking lame that very morning—"

Pierre hastily interrupted the lady-hospitaller. "Ah! you saw her foot before and after the immersion?"

"No, no! I don't think that anybody was able to see it, for it was bound round with bandages. She told you that the bandages had fallen into the piscina." And, turning towards the child, Madame de Jonquiere added, "But she will show you her foot—won't you, Sophie? Undo your shoe."

The girl took off her shoe, and pulled down her stocking, with a promptness and ease of manner which showed how thoroughly accustomed she had become to it all. And she not only stretched out her foot, which was very clean and very white, carefully tended indeed, with well-cut, pink nails, but complacently turned it so that the young priest might examine it at his ease. Just below the ankle there was a long scar, whose whity seam, plainly defined, testified to the gravity of the complaint from which the girl had suffered.

"Oh! take hold of the heel, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she. "Press it as hard as you like. I no longer feel any pain at all."

Pierre made a gesture from which it might have been thought that he was delighted with the power exercised by the Blessed Virgin. But he was still tortured by doubt. What unknown force had acted in this case? Or rather what faulty medical diagnosis, what assemblage of errors and exaggerations, had ended in this fine tale?

All the patients, however, wished to see the miraculous foot, that outward and visible sign of the divine cure which each of them was going in search of. And it was Marie, sitting up in her box, and already feeling less pain, who touched it first. Then Madame Maze, quite roused from her melancholy, passed it on to Madame Vincent, who would have kissed it for the hope which it restored to her. M. Sabathier had listened to all the explanations with a beatific air; Madame Vetu, La Grivotte, and even Brother Isidore opened their eyes, and evinced signs of interest; whilst the face of Elise Rouquet had assumed an extraordinary expression, transfigured by faith, almost beatified. If a sore had thus disappeared, might not her own sore close and disappear, her face retaining no trace of it save a slight scar, and again becoming such a face as other people had? Sophie, who was still standing, had to hold on to one of the iron rails, and place her foot on the partition, now on the right, now on the left. And she did not weary of it all, but felt exceedingly happy and proud at the many exclamations which were raised, the quivering admiration and religious respect which were bestowed on that little piece of her person, that little foot which had now, so to say, become sacred.

"One must possess great faith, no doubt," said Marie, thinking aloud. "One must have a pure unspotted soul." And, addressing herself to M. de Guersaint, she added: "Father, I feel that I should get well if I were ten years old, if I had the unspotted soul of a little girl."

"But you are ten years old, my darling! Is it not so, Pierre? A little girl of ten years old could not have a more spotless soul."

Possessed of a mind prone to chimeras, M. de Guersaint was fond of hearing tales of miracles. As for the young priest, profoundly affected by the ardent purity which the young girl evinced, he no longer sought to discuss the question, but let her surrender herself to the consoling illusions which Sophie's tale had wafted through the carriage.

The temperature had become yet more oppressive since their departure from Poitiers, a storm was rising in the coppery sky, and it seemed as though the train were rushing through a furnace. The villages passed, mournful and solitary under the burning sun. At Couhe-Verac they had again said their chaplets, and sung another canticle. At present, however, there was some slight abatement of the religious exercises. Sister Hyacinthe, who had not yet been able to lunch, ventured to eat a roll and some fruit in all haste, whilst still ministering to the strange man whose faint, painful breathing seemed to have become more regular. And it was only on passing Ruffec at three o'clock that they said the vespers of the Blessed Virgin.

"Ora pro nobis, sancta Dei Genitrix."

"Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi."*

* "Pray for us, O holy Mother of God,
That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ."

As they were finishing, M. Sabathier, who had watched little Sophie while she put on her shoe and stocking, turned towards M. de Guersaint.

"This child's case is interesting, no doubt," he remarked. "But it is a mere nothing, monsieur, for there have been far more marvellous cures than that. Do you know the story of Pierre de Rudder, a Belgian working-man?"

Everybody had again begun to listen.

"This man," continued M. Sabathier, "had his leg broken by the fall of a tree. Eight years afterwards the two fragments of the bone had not yet joined together again—the two ends could be seen in the depths of a sore which was continually suppurating; and the leg hung down quite limp, swaying in all directions. Well, it was sufficient for this man to drink a glassful of the miraculous water, and his leg was made whole again. He was able to walk without crutches, and the doctor said to him: 'Your leg is like that of a new-born child.' Yes, indeed, a perfectly new leg."

Nobody spoke, but the listeners exchanged glances of ecstasy.

"And, by the way," resumed M. Sabathier, "it is like the story of Louis Bouriette, a quarryman, one of the first of the Lourdes miracles. Do you know it? Bouriette had been injured by an explosion during some blasting operations. The sight of his right eye was altogether destroyed, and he was even threatened with the loss of the left one. Well, one day he sent his daughter to fetch a bottleful of the muddy water of the source, which then scarcely bubbled up to the surface. He washed his eye with this muddy liquid, and prayed fervently. And, all at once, he raised a cry, for he could see, monsieur, see as well as you and I. The doctor who was attending him drew up a detailed narrative of the case, and there cannot be the slightest doubt about its truth."

"It is marvellous," murmured M. de Guersaint in his delight.

"Would you like another example, monsieur? I can give you a famous one, that of Francois Macary, the carpenter of Lavaur. During eighteen years he had suffered from a deep varicose ulcer, with considerable enlargement of the tissues in the mesial part of the left leg. He had reached such a point that he could no longer move, and science decreed that he would forever remain infirm. Well, one evening he shuts himself up with a bottle of Lourdes water. He takes off his bandages, washes both his legs, and drinks what little water then remains in the bottle. Then he goes to bed and falls asleep; and when he awakes, he feels his legs and looks at them. There is nothing left; the varicose enlargement, the ulcers, have all disappeared. The skin of his knee, monsieur, had become as smooth, as fresh as it had been when he was twenty."

This time there was an explosion of surprise and admiration. The patients and the pilgrims were entering into the enchanted land of miracles, where impossibilities are accomplished at each bend of the pathways, where one marches on at ease from prodigy to prodigy. And each had his or her story to tell, burning with a desire to contribute a fresh proof, to fortify faith and hope by yet another example.

That silent creature, Madame Maze, was so transported that she spoke the first. "I have a friend," said she, "who knew the Widow Rizan, that lady whose cure also created so great a stir. For four-and-twenty years her left side had been entirely paralysed. Her stomach was unable to retain any solid food, and she had become an inert bag of bones which had to be turned over in bed, The friction of the sheets, too, had ended by rubbing her skin away in parts. Well, she was so low one evening that the doctor announced that she would die during the night. An hour later, however, she emerged from her torpor and asked her daughter in a faint voice to go and fetch her a glass of Lourdes water from a neighbour's. But she was only able to obtain this glass of water on the following morning; and she cried out to her daughter: 'Oh! it is life that I am drinking—rub my face with it, rub my arm and my leg, rub my whole body with it!' And when her daughter obeyed her, she gradually saw the huge swelling subside, and the paralysed, tumefied limbs recover their natural suppleness and appearance. Nor was that all, for Madame Rizan cried out that she was cured and felt hungry, and wanted bread and meat—she who had eaten none for four-and-twenty years! And she got out of bed and dressed herself, whilst her daughter, who was so overpowered that the neighbours thought she had become an orphan, replied to them: 'No, no, mamma isn't dead, she has come to life again!'"

This narrative had brought tears to Madame Vincent's eyes. Ah! if she had only been able to see her little Rose recover like that, eat with a good appetite, and run about again! At the same time, another case, which she had been told of in Paris and which had greatly influenced her in deciding to take her ailing child to Lourdes, returned to her memory.

"And I, too," said she, "know the story of a girl who was paralysed. Her name was Lucie Druon, and she was an inmate of an orphan asylum. She was quite young and could not even kneel down. Her limbs were bent like hoops. Her right leg, the shorter of the two, had ended by becoming twisted round the left one; and when any of the other girls carried her about you saw her feet hanging down quite limp, like dead ones. Please notice that she did not even go to Lourdes. She simply performed a novena; but she fasted during the nine days, and her desire to be cured was so great that she spent her nights in prayer. At last, on the ninth day, whilst she was drinking a little Lourdes water, she felt a violent commotion in her legs. She picked herself up, fell down, picked herself up again and walked. All her little companions, who were astonished, almost frightened at the sight, began to cry out 'Lucie can walk! Lucie can walk!' It was quite true. In a few seconds her legs had become straight and strong and healthy. She crossed the courtyard and was able to climb up the steps of the chapel, where the whole sisterhood, transported with gratitude, chanted the Magnificat. Ah! the dear child, how happy, how happy she must have been!"

As Madame Vincent finished, two tears fell from her cheeks on to the pale face of her little girl, whom she kissed distractedly.

The general interest was still increasing, becoming quite impassioned. The rapturous joy born of these beautiful stories, in which Heaven invariably triumphed over human reality, transported these childlike souls to such a point that those who were suffering the most grievously sat up in their turn, and recovered the power of speech. And with the narratives of one and all was blended a thought of the sufferer's own ailment, a belief that he or she would also be cured, since a malady of the same description had vanished like an evil dream beneath the breath of the Divinity.

"Ah!" stammered Madame Vetu, her articulation hindered by her sufferings, "there was another one, Antoinette Thardivail, whose stomach was being eaten away like mine. You would have said that dogs were devouring it, and sometimes there was a swelling in it as big as a child's head. Tumours indeed were ever forming in it, like fowl's eggs, so that for eight months she brought up blood. And she also was at the point of death, with nothing but her skin left on her bones, and dying of hunger, when she drank some water of Lourdes and had the pit of her stomach washed with it. Three minutes afterwards, her doctor, who on the previous day had left her almost in the last throes, scarce breathing, found her up and sitting by the fireside, eating a tender chicken's wing with a good appetite. She had no more tumours, she laughed as she had laughed when she was twenty, and her face had regained the brilliancy of youth. Ah! to be able to eat what one likes, to become young again, to cease suffering!"

"And the cure of Sister Julienne!" then exclaimed La Grivotte, raising herself on one of her elbows, her eyes glittering with fever. "In her case it commenced with a bad cold as it did with me, and then she began to spit blood. And every six months she fell ill again and had to take to her bed. The last time everybody said that she wouldn't leave it alive. The doctors had vainly tried every remedy, iodine, blistering, and cauterising. In fact, hers was a real case of phthisis, certified by half a dozen medical men. Well, she comes to Lourdes, and Heaven alone knows amidst what awful suffering—she was so bad, indeed, that at Toulouse they thought for a moment that she was about to die! The Sisters had to carry her in their arms, and on reaching the piscina the lady-hospitallers wouldn't bathe her. She was dead, they said. No matter! she was undressed at last, and plunged into the water, quite unconscious and covered with perspiration. And when they took her out she was so pale that they laid her on the ground, thinking that it was certainly all over with her at last. But, all at once, colour came back to her cheeks, her eyes opened, and she drew a long breath. She was cured; she dressed herself without any help and made a good meal after she had been to the Grotto to thank the Blessed Virgin. There! there's no gainsaying it, that was a real case of phthisis, completely cured as though by medicine!"

Thereupon Brother Isidore in his turn wished to speak; but he was unable to do so at any length, and could only with difficulty manage to say to his sister: "Marthe, tell them the story of Sister Dorothee which the priest of Saint-Sauveur related to us."

"Sister Dorothee," began the peasant girl in an awkward way, "felt her leg quite numbed when she got up one morning, and from that time she lost the use of it, for it got as cold and as heavy as a stone. Besides which she felt a great pain in the back. The doctors couldn't understand it. She saw half a dozen of them, who pricked her with pins and burnt her skin with a lot of drugs. But it was just as if they had sung to her. Sister Dorothee had well understood that only the Blessed Virgin could find the right remedy for her, and so she went off to Lourdes, and had herself dipped in the piscina. She thought at first that the water was going to kill her, for it was so bitterly cold. But by-and-by it became so soft that she fancied it was warm, as nice as milk. She had never felt so nice before, it seemed to her as if her veins were opening and the water were flowing into them. As you will understand, life was returning into her body since the Blessed Virgin was concerning herself in the case. She no longer had anything the matter with her when she came out, but walked about, ate the whole of a pigeon for her dinner, and slept all night long like the happy woman she was. Glory to the Blessed Virgin, eternal gratitude to the most Powerful Mother and her Divine Son!"

Elise Rouquet would also have liked to bring forward a miracle which she was acquainted with. Only she spoke with so much difficulty owing to the deformity of her mouth, that she had not yet been able to secure a turn. Just then, however, there was a pause, and drawing the wrap, which concealed the horror of her sore, slightly on one side, she profited by the opportunity to begin.

"For my part, I wasn't told anything about a great illness, but it was a very funny case at all events," she said. "It was about a woman, Celestine Dubois, as she was called, who had run a needle right into her hand while she was washing. It stopped there for seven years, for no doctor was able to take it out. Her hand shrivelled up, and she could no longer open it. Well, she got to Lourdes, and dipped her hand into the piscina. But as soon as she did so she began to shriek, and took it out again. Then they caught hold of her and put her hand into the water by force, and kept it there while she continued sobbing, with her face covered with sweat. Three times did they plunge her hand into the piscina, and each time they saw the needle moving along, till it came out by the tip of the thumb. She shrieked, of course, because the needle was moving though her flesh just as though somebody had been pushing it to drive it out. And after that Celestine never suffered again, and only a little scar could be seen on her hand as a mark of what the Blessed Virgin had done."

This anecdote produced a greater effect than even the miraculous cures of the most fearful illnesses. A needle which moved as though somebody were pushing it! This peopled the Invisible, showed each sufferer his Guardian Angel standing behind him, only awaiting the orders of Heaven in order to render him assistance. And besides, how pretty and childlike the story was—this needle which came out in the miraculous water after obstinately refusing to stir during seven long years. Exclamations of delight resounded from all the pleased listeners; they smiled and laughed with satisfaction, radiant at finding that nothing was beyond the power of Heaven, and that if it were Heaven's pleasure they themselves would all become healthy, young, and superb. It was sufficient that one should fervently believe and pray in order that nature might be confounded and that the Incredible might come to pass. Apart from that there was merely a question of good luck, since Heaven seemed to make a selection of those sufferers who should be cured.

"Oh! how beautiful it is, father," murmured Marie, who, revived by the passionate interest which she took in the momentous subject, had so far contented herself with listening, dumb with amazement as it were. "Do you remember," she continued, "what you yourself told me of that poor woman, Joachine Dehaut, who came from Belgium and made her way right across France with her twisted leg eaten away by an ulcer, the awful smell of which drove everybody away from her? First of all the ulcer was healed; you could press her knee and she felt nothing, only a slight redness remained to mark where it had been. And then came the turn of the dislocation. She shrieked while she was in the water, it seemed to her as if somebody were breaking her bones, pulling her leg away from her; and, at the same time, she and the woman who was bathing her, saw her deformed foot rise and extend into its natural shape with the regular movement of a clock hand. Her leg also straightened itself, the muscles extended, the knee replaced itself in its proper position, all amidst such acute pain that Joachine ended by fainting. But as soon as she recovered consciousness, she darted off, erect and agile, to carry her crutches to the Grotto."

M. de Guersaint in his turn was laughing with wonderment, waving his hand to confirm this story, which had been told him by a Father of the Assumption. He could have related a score of similar instances, said he, each more touching, more extraordinary than the other. He even invoked Pierre's testimony, and the young priest, who was unable to believe, contented himself with nodding his head. At first, unwilling as he was to afflict Marie, he had striven to divert his thoughts by gazing though the carriage window at the fields, trees, and houses which defiled before his eyes. They had just passed Angouleme, and meadows stretched out, and lines of poplar trees fled away amidst the continuous fanning of the air, which the velocity of the train occasioned.

They were late, no doubt, for they were hastening onward at full speed, thundering along under the stormy sky, through the fiery atmosphere, devouring kilometre after kilometre in swift succession. However, despite himself, Pierre heard snatches of the various narratives, and grew interested in these extravagant stories, which the rough jolting of the wheels accompanied like a lullaby, as though the engine had been turned loose and were wildly bearing them away to the divine land of dreams, They were rolling, still rolling along, and Pierre at last ceased to gaze at the landscape, and surrendered himself to the heavy, sleep-inviting atmosphere of the carriage, where ecstasy was growing and spreading, carrying everyone far from the world of reality across which they were so rapidly rushing, The sight of Marie's face with its brightened look filled the young priest with sincere joy, and he let her retain his hand, which she had taken in order to acquaint him, by the pressure of her fingers, with all the confidence which was reviving in her soul. And why should he have saddened her by his doubts, since he was so desirous of her cure? So he continued clasping her small, moist hand, feeling infinite affection for her, a dolorous brotherly love which distracted him, and made him anxious to believe in the pity of the spheres, in a superior kindness which tempered suffering to those who were plunged in despair, "Oh!" she repeated, "how beautiful it is, Pierre! How beautiful it is! And what glory it will be if the Blessed Virgin deigns to disturb herself for me! Do you really think me worthy of such a favour?"

"Assuredly I do," he exclaimed; "you are the best and the purest, with a spotless soul as your father said; there are not enough good angels in Paradise to form your escort."

But the narratives were not yet finished. Sister Hyacinthe and Madame de Jonquiere were now enumerating all the miracles with which they were acquainted, the long, long series of miracles which for more than thirty years had been flowering at Lourdes, like the uninterrupted budding of the roses on the Mystical Rose-tree. They could be counted by thousands, they put forth fresh shoots every year with prodigious verdancy of sap, becoming brighter and brighter each successive season. And the sufferers who listened to these marvellous stories with increasing feverishness were like little children who, after hearing one fine fairy tale, ask for another, and another, and yet another. Oh! that they might have more and more of those stories in which evil reality was flouted, in which unjust nature was cuffed and slapped, in which the Divinity intervened as the supreme healer, He who laughs at science and distributes happiness according to His own good pleasure.

First of all there were the deaf and the dumb who suddenly heard and spoke; such as Aurelie Bruneau, who was incurably deaf, with the drums of both ears broken, and yet was suddenly enraptured by the celestial music of a harmonium; such also as Louise Pourchet, who on her side had been dumb for five-and-twenty years, and yet, whilst praying in the Grotto, suddenly exclaimed, "Hail, Mary, full of grace!" And there were others and yet others who were completely cured by merely letting a few drops of water fall into their ears or upon their tongues. Then came the procession of the blind: Father Hermann, who felt the Blessed Virgin's gentle hand removing the veil which covered his eyes; Mademoiselle de Pontbriant, who was threatened with a total loss of sight, but after a simple prayer was enabled to see better than she had ever seen before; then a child twelve years old whose corneas resembled marbles, but who, in three seconds, became possessed of clear, deep eyes, bright with an angelic smile. However, there was especially an abundance of paralytics, of lame people suddenly enabled to walk upright, of sufferers for long years powerless to stir from their beds of misery and to whom the voice said: "Arise and walk!" Delannoy,* afflicted with ataxia, vainly cauterised and burnt, fifteen times an inmate of the Paris hospitals, whence he had emerged with the concurring diagnosis of twelve doctors, feels a strange force raising him up as the Blessed Sacrament goes by, and he begins to follow it, his legs strong and healthy once more. Marie Louise Delpon, a girl of fourteen, suffering from paralysis which had stiffened her legs, drawn back her hands, and twisted her mouth on one side, sees her limbs loosen and the distortion of her mouth disappear as though an invisible hand were severing the fearful bonds which had deformed her. Marie Vachier, riveted to her arm-chair during seventeen years by paraplegia, not only runs and flies on emerging from the piscina, but finds no trace even of the sores with which her long-enforced immobility had covered her body. And Georges Hanquet, attacked by softening of the spinal marrow, passes without transition from agony to perfect health; while Leonie Charton, likewise afflicted with softening of the medulla, and whose vertebrae bulge out to a considerable extent, feels her hump melting away as though by enchantment, and her legs rise and straighten, renovated and vigorous.

* This was one of the most notorious of the recorded cases and had
a very strange sequel subsequent to the first publication of this
work. Pierre Delannoy had been employed as a ward-assistant in one
of the large Paris hospitals from 1877 to 1881, when he came to
the conclusion that the life of an in-patient was far preferable
to the one he was leading. He, therefore, resolved to pass the
rest of his days inside different hospitals in the capacity of
invalid. He started by feigning locomotor ataxia, and for six
years deceived the highest medical experts in Paris, so curiously
did he appear to suffer. He stayed in turn in all the hospitals in
the city, being treated with every care and consideration, until
at last he met with a doctor who insisted on cauterisation and
other disagreeable remedies. Delannoy thereupon opined that the
time to be cured had arrived, and cured he became, and was
discharged. He next appeared at Lourdes, supported by crutches,
and presenting every symptom of being hopelessly crippled. With
other infirm and decrepid people he was dipped in the piscina and
so efficacious did this treatment prove that he came out another
man, threw his crutches to the ground and walked, as an onlooker
expressed it, "like a rural postman." All Lourdes rang with the
fame of the miracle, and the Church, after starring Delannoy
round the country as a specimen of what could be done at the holy
spring, placed him in charge of a home for invalids. But this was
too much like hard work, and he soon decamped with all the money
he could lay his hands on. Returning to Paris he was admitted to
the Hospital of Ste. Anne as suffering from mental debility, but
this did not prevent him from running off one night with about
$300 belonging to a dispenser. The police were put on his track
and arrested him in May, 1895, when he tried to pass himself off
as a lunatic; but he had become by this time too well known, and
was indicted in due course. At his trial he energetically denied
that he had ever shammed, but the Court would not believe him,
and sentenced him to four years' imprisonment with hard labour.
—Trans.

Then came all sorts of ailments. First those brought about by scrofula—a great many more legs long incapable of service and made anew. There was Margaret Gehier, who had suffered from coxalgia for seven-and-twenty years, whose hip was devoured by the disease, whose left knee was anchylosed, and who yet was suddenly able to fall upon her knees to thank the Blessed Virgin for healing her. There was also Philomene Simonneau, the young Vendeenne, whose left leg was perforated by three horrible sores in the depths of which her carious bones were visible, and whose bones, whose flesh, and whose skin were all formed afresh.

Next came the dropsical ones: Madame Ancelin, the swelling of whose feet, hands, and entire body subsided without anyone being able to tell whither all the water had gone; Mademoiselle Montagnon, from whom, on various occasions, nearly twenty quarts of water had been drawn, and who, on again swelling, was entirely rid of the fluid by the application of a bandage which had been dipped in the miraculous source. And, in her case also, none of the water could be found, either in her bed or on the floor. In the same way, not a complaint of the stomach resisted, all disappeared with the first glass of water. There was Marie Souchet, who vomited black blood, who had wasted to a skeleton, and who devoured her food and recovered her flesh in two days' time! There was Marie Jarlaud, who had burnt herself internally through drinking a glass of a metallic solution used for cleansing and brightening kitchen utensils, and who felt the tumour which had resulted from her injuries melt rapidly away. Moreover, every tumour disappeared in this fashion, in the piscina, without leaving the slightest trace behind. But that which caused yet greater wonderment was the manner in which ulcers, cancers, all sorts of horrible, visible sores were cicatrised as by a breath from on high. A Jew, an actor, whose hand was devoured by an ulcer, merely had to dip it in the water and he was cured. A very wealthy young foreigner, who had a wen as large as a hen's egg, on his right wrist, beheld it dissolve. Rose Duval, who, as a result of a white tumour, had a hole in her left elbow, large enough to accommodate a walnut, was able to watch and follow the prompt action of the new flesh in filling up this cavity! The Widow Fromond, with a lip half decoyed by a cancerous formation, merely had to apply the miraculous water to it as a lotion, and not even a red mark remained. Marie Moreau, who experienced fearful sufferings from a cancer in the breast, fell asleep, after laying on it a linen cloth soaked in some water of Lourdes, and when she awoke, two hours later, the pain had disappeared, and her flesh was once more smooth and pink and fresh.

At last Sister Hyacinthe began to speak of the immediate and complete cures of phthisis, and this was the triumph, the healing of that terrible disease which ravages humanity, which unbelievers defied the Blessed Virgin to cure, but which she did cure, it was said, by merely raising her little finger. A hundred instances, more extraordinary one than the other, pressed forward for citation.

Marguerite Coupel, who had suffered from phthisis for three years, and the upper part of whose lungs is destroyed by tuberculosis, rises up and goes off, radiant with health. Madame de la Riviere, who spits blood, who is ever covered with a cold perspiration, whose nails have already acquired a violet tinge, who is indeed on the point of drawing her last breath, requires but a spoonful of the water to be administered to her between her teeth, and lo! the rattles cease, she sits up, makes the responses to the litanies, and asks for some broth. Julie Jadot requires four spoonfuls; but then she could no longer hold up her head, she was of such a delicate constitution that disease had reduced her to nothing; and yet, in a few days, she becomes quite fat. Anna Catry, who is in the most advanced stage of the malady, with her left lung half destroyed by a cavity, is plunged five times into the cold water, contrary to all the dictates of prudence, and she is cured, her lung is healthy once more. Another consumptive girl, condemned by fifteen doctors, has asked nothing, has simply fallen on her knees in the Grotto, by chance as it were, and is afterwards quite surprised at having been cured au passage, through the lucky circumstance of having been there, no doubt, at the hour when the Blessed Virgin, moved to pity, allows miracles to fall from her invisible hands.

Miracles and yet more miracles! They rained down like the flowers of dreams from a clear and balmy sky. Some of them were touching, some of them were childish. An old woman, who, having her hand anchylosed, had been incapable of moving it for thirty years, washes it in the water and is at once able to make the sign of the Cross. Sister Sophie, who barked like a dog, plunges into the piscina and emerges from it with a clear, pure voice, chanting a canticle. Mustapha, a Turk, invokes the White Lady and recovers the use of his right eye by applying a compress to it. An officer of Turcos was protected at Sedan; a cuirassier of Reichsoffen would have died, pierced in the heart by a bullet, if this bullet after passing though his pocket-book had not stayed its flight on reaching a little picture of Our Lady of Lourdes! And, as with the men and women, so did the children, the poor, suffering little ones, find mercy; a paralytic boy of five rose and walked after being held for five minutes under the icy jet of the spring; another one, fifteen years of age, who, lying in bed, could only raise an inarticulate cry, sprang out of the piscina, shouting that he was cured; another one, but two years old, a poor tiny fellow who had never been able to walk, remained for a quarter of an hour in the cold water and then, invigorated and smiling, took his first steps like a little man! And for all of them, the little ones as well as the adults, the pain was acute whilst the miracle was being accomplished; for the work of repair could not be effected without causing an extraordinary shock to the whole human organism; the bones grew again, new flesh was formed, and the disease, driven away, made its escape in a final convulsion. But how great was the feeling of comfort which followed! The doctors could not believe their eyes, their astonishment burst forth at each fresh cure, when they saw the patients whom they had despaired of run and jump and eat with ravenous appetites. All these chosen ones, these women cured of their ailments, walked a couple of miles, sat down to roast fowl, and slept the soundest of sleeps for a dozen hours. Moreover, there was no convalescence, it was a sudden leap from the death throes to complete health. Limbs were renovated, sores were filled up, organs were reformed in their entirety, plumpness returned to the emaciated, all with the velocity of a lightning flash! Science was completely baffled. Not even the most simple precautions were taken, women were bathed at all times and seasons, perspiring consumptives were plunged into the icy water, sores were left to their putrefaction without any thought of employing antiseptics. And then what canticles of joy, what shouts of gratitude and love arose at each fresh miracle! The favoured one falls upon her knees, all who are present weep, conversions are effected, Protestants and Jews alike embrace Catholicism—other miracles these, miracles of faith, at which Heaven triumphs. And when the favoured one, chosen for the miracle, returns to her village, all the inhabitants crowd to meet her, whilst the bells peal merrily; and when she is seen springing lightly from the vehicle which has brought her home, shouts and sobs of joy burst forth and all intonate the Magnificat: Glory to the Blessed Virgin! Gratitude and love for ever!

Indeed, that which was more particularly evolved from the realisation of all these hopes, from the celebration of all these ardent thanksgivings, was gratitude—gratitude to the Mother most pure and most admirable. She was the great passion of every soul, she, the Virgin most powerful, the Virgin most merciful, the Mirror of Justice, the Seat of Wisdom.* All hands were stretched towards her, Mystical Rose in the dim light of the chapels, Tower of Ivory on the horizon of dreamland, Gate of Heaven leading into the Infinite. Each day at early dawn she shone forth, bright Morning Star, gay with juvenescent hope. And was she not also the Health of the weak, the Refuge of sinners, the Comforter of the afflicted? France had ever been her well-loved country, she was adored there with an ardent worship, the worship of her womanhood and her motherhood, the soaring of a divine affection; and it was particularly in France that it pleased her to show herself to little shepherdesses. She was so good to the little and the humble; she continually occupied herself with them; and if she was appealed to so willingly it was because she was known to be the intermediary of love betwixt Earth and Heaven. Every evening she wept tears of gold at the feet of her divine Son to obtain favours from Him, and these favours were the miracles which He permitted her to work,—these beautiful, flower-like miracles, as sweet-scented as the roses of Paradise, so prodigiously splendid and fragrant.

* For the information of Protestant and other non-Catholic readers
it may be mentioned that all the titles enumerated in this passage
are taken from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.—Trans.

But the train was still rolling, rolling onward. They had just passed Contras, it was six o'clock, and Sister Hyacinthe, rising to her, feet, clapped her hands together and once again repeated: "The Angelus, my children!"

Never had "Aves" impregnated with greater faith, inflamed with a more fervent desire to be heard by Heaven, winged their flight on high. And Pierre suddenly understood everything, clearly realised the meaning of all these pilgrimages, of all these trains rolling along through every country of the civilised world, of all these eager crowds, hastening towards Lourdes, which blazed over yonder like the abode of salvation for body and for mind. Ah! the poor wretches whom, ever since morning, he had heard groaning with pain, the poor wretches who exposed their sorry carcasses to the fatigues of such a journey! They were all condemned, abandoned by science, weary of consulting doctors, of having tried the torturing effects of futile remedies. And how well one could understand that, burning with a desire to preserve their lives, unable to resign themselves to the injustice and indifference of Nature, they should dream of a superhuman power, of an almighty Divinity who, in their favour, would perchance annul the established laws, alter the course of the planets, and reconsider His creation! For if the world failed them, did not the Divinity remain to them? In their cases reality was too abominable, and an immense need of illusion and falsehood sprang up within them. Oh! to believe that there is a supreme Justiciar somewhere, one who rights the apparent wrongs of things and beings; to believe that there is a Redeemer, a consoler who is the real master, who can carry the torrents back to their source, who can restore youth to the aged, and life to the dead! And when you are covered with sores, when your limbs are twisted, when your stomach is swollen by tumours, when your lungs are destroyed by disease, to be able to say that all this is of no consequence, that everything may disappear and be renewed at a sign from the Blessed Virgin, that it is sufficient that you should pray to her, touch her heart, and obtain the favour of being chosen by her. And then what a heavenly fount of hope appeared with the prodigious flow of those beautiful stories of cure, those adorable fairy tales which lulled and intoxicated the feverish imaginations of the sick and the infirm. Since little Sophie Couteau, with her white, sound foot, had climbed into that carriage, opening to the gaze of those within it the limitless heavens of the Divine and the Supernatural, how well one could understand the breath of resurrection that was passing over the world, slowly raising those who despaired the most from their beds of misery, and making their eyes shine since life was itself a possibility for them, and they were, perhaps, about to begin it afresh.

Yes, 't was indeed that. If that woeful train was rolling, rolling on, if that carriage was full, if the other carriages were full also, if France and the world, from the uttermost limits of the earth, were crossed by similar trains, if crowds of three hundred thousand believers, bringing thousands of sick along with them, were ever setting out, from one end of the year to the other, it was because the Grotto yonder was shining forth in its glory like a beacon of hope and illusion, like a sign of the revolt and triumph of the Impossible over inexorable materiality. Never had a more impassionating romance been devised to exalt the souls of men above the stern laws of life. To dream that dream, this was the great, the ineffable happiness. If the Fathers of the Assumption had seen the success of their pilgrimages increase and spread from year to year, it was because they sold to all the flocking peoples the bread of consolation and illusion, the delicious bread of hope, for which suffering humanity ever hungers with a hunger that nothing will ever appease. And it was not merely the physical sores which cried aloud for cure, the whole of man's moral and intellectual being likewise shrieked forth its wretchedness, with an insatiable yearning for happiness. To be happy, to place the certainty of life in faith, to lean till death should come upon that one strong staff of travel—such was the desire exhaled by every breast, the desire which made every moral grief bend the knee, imploring a continuance of grace, the conversion of dear ones, the spiritual salvation of self and those one loved. The mighty cry spread from pole to pole, ascended and filled all the regions of space: To be happy, happy for evermore, both in life and in death!

And Pierre saw the suffering beings around him lose all perception of the jolting and recover their strength as league by league they drew nearer to the miracle. Even Madame Maze grew talkative, certain as she felt that the Blessed Virgin would restore her husband to her. With a smile on her face Madame Vincent gently rocked her little Rose in her arms, thinking that she was not nearly so ill as those all but lifeless children who, after being plunged in the icy water, sprang out and played. M. Sabathier jested with M. de Guersaint, and explained to him that, next October, when he had recovered the use of his legs, he should go on a trip to Rome—a journey which he had been postponing for fifteen years and more. Madame Vetu, quite calmed, feeling nothing but a slight twinge in the stomach, imagined that she was hungry, and asked Madame de Jonquiere to let her dip some strips of bread in a glass of milk; whilst Elise Rouquet, forgetting her sores, ate some grapes, with face uncovered. And in La Grivotte who was sitting up and Brother Isidore who had ceased moaning, all those fine stories had left a pleasant fever, to such a point that, impatient to be cured, they grew anxious to know the time. For a minute also the man, the strange man, resuscitated. Whilst Sister Hyacinthe was again wiping the cold sweat from his brow, he raised his eyelids, and a smile momentarily brightened his pallid countenance. Yet once again he, also, had hoped.

Marie was still holding Pierre's fingers in her own small, warm hand. It was seven o'clock, they were not due at Bordeaux till half-past seven; and the belated train was quickening its pace yet more and more, rushing along with wild speed in order to make up for the minutes it had lost. The storm had ended by coming down, and now a gentle light of infinite purity fell from the vast clear heavens.

"Oh! how beautiful it is, Pierre—how beautiful it is!" Marie again repeated, pressing his hand with tender affection. And leaning towards him, she added in an undertone: "I beheld the Blessed Virgin a little while ago, Pierre, and it was your cure that I implored and shall obtain."

The priest, who understood her meaning, was thrown into confusion by the divine light which gleamed in her eyes as she fixed them on his own. She had forgotten her own sufferings; that which she had asked for was his conversion; and that prayer of faith, emanating, pure and candid, from that dear, suffering creature, upset his soul. Yet why should he not believe some day? He himself had been distracted by all those extraordinary narratives. The stifling heat of the carriage had made him dizzy, the sight of all the woe heaped up there caused his heart to bleed with pity. And contagion was doing its work; he no longer knew where the real and the possible ceased, he lacked the power to disentangle such a mass of stupefying facts, to explain such as admitted of explanation and reject the others. At one moment, indeed, as a hymn once more resounded and carried him off with its stubborn importunate rhythm, he ceased to be master of himself, and imagined that he was at last beginning to believe amidst the hallucinatory vertigo which reigned in that travelling hospital, rolling, ever rolling onward at full speed.

V. BERNADETTE

THE train left Bordeaux after a stoppage of a few minutes, during which those who had not dined hastened to purchase some provisions. Moreover, the ailing ones were constantly drinking milk, and asking for biscuits, like little children. And, as soon as they were off again, Sister Hyacinthe clapped her hands, and exclaimed: "Come, let us make haste; the evening prayer."

Thereupon, during a quarter of an hour came a confused murmuring, made up of "Paters" and "Aves," self-examinations, acts of contrition, and vows of trustful reliance in God, the Blessed Virgin, and the Saints, with thanksgiving for protection and preservation that day, and, at last, a prayer for the living and for the faithful departed.

"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen."

It was ten minutes past eight o'clock, the shades of night were already bedimming the landscape—a vast plain which the evening mist seemed to prolong into the infinite, and where, far away, bright dots of light shone out from the windows of lonely, scattered houses. In the carriage, the lights of the lamps were flickering, casting a subdued yellow glow on the luggage and the pilgrims, who were sorely shaken by the spreading tendency of the train's motion.

"You know, my children," resumed Sister Hyacinthe, who had remained standing, "I shall order silence when we get to Lamothe, in about an hour's time. So you have an hour to amuse yourselves, but you must be reasonable and not excite yourselves too much. And when we have passed Lamothe, you hear me, there must not be another word, another sound, you must all go to sleep."

This made them laugh.

"Oh! but it is the rule, you know," added the Sister, "and surely you have too much sense not to obey me."

Since the morning they had punctually fulfilled the programme of religious exercises specified for each successive hour. And now that all the prayers had been said, the beads told, the hymns chanted, the day's duties were over, and a brief interval for recreation was allowed before sleeping. They were, however, at a loss as to what they should do.

"Sister," suddenly said Marie, "if you would allow Monsieur l'Abbe to read to us—he reads extremely well,—and as it happens I have a little book with me—a history of Bernadette which is so interesting—"

The others did nor let her finish, but with the suddenly awakened desire of children to whom a beautiful story has been promised, loudly exclaimed: "Oh! yes, Sister. Oh! yes, Sister—"

"Of course I will allow it," replied Sister Hyacinthe, "since it is a question of reading something instructive and edifying."

Pierre was obliged to consent. But to be able to read the book he wished to be under the lamp, and it was necessary that he should change seats with M. de Guersaint, whom the promise of a story had delighted as much as it did the ailing ones. And when the young priest, after changing seats and declaring that he would be able to see well enough, at last opened the little book, a quiver of curiosity sped from one end of the carriage to the other, and every head was stretched out, lending ear with rapt attention. Fortunately, Pierre had a clear, powerful voice and made himself distinctly heard above the wheels, which, now that the train travelled across a vast level plain, gave out but a subdued, rumbling sound.

Before beginning, however, the young priest had examined the book. It was one of those little works of propaganda issued from the Catholic printing-presses and circulated in profusion throughout all Christendom. Badly printed, on wretched paper, it was adorned on its blue cover with a little wood-cut of Our Lady of Lourdes, a naive design alike stiff and awkward. The book itself was short, and half an hour would certainly suffice to read it from cover to cover without hurrying.

Accordingly, in his fine, clear voice, with its penetrating, musical tones, he began his perusal as follows:—

"It happened at Lourdes, a little town near the Pyrenees, on a Thursday, February 11, 1858. The weather was cold, and somewhat cloudy, and in the humble home of a poor but honest miller named Francois Soubirous there was no wood to cook the dinner. The miller's wife, Louise, said to her younger daughter Marie, 'Go and gather some wood on the bank of the Gave or on the common-land.' The Gave is a torrent which passes through Lourdes.

"Marie had an elder sister, named Bernadette, who had lately arrived from the country, where some worthy villagers had employed her as a shepherdess. She was a slender, delicate, extremely innocent child, and knew nothing except her rosary. Louise Soubirous hesitated to send her out with her sister, on account of the cold, but at last, yielding to the entreaties of Marie and a young girl of the neighbourhood called Jeanne Abadie, she consented to let her go.

"Following the bank of the torrent and gathering stray fragments of dead wood, the three maidens at last found themselves in front of the Grotto, hollowed out in a huge mass of rock which the people of the district called Massabielle."

Pierre had reached this point and was turning the page when he suddenly paused and let the little book fall on his knees. The childish character of the narrative, its ready-made, empty phraseology, filled him with impatience. He himself possessed quite a collection of documents concerning this extraordinary story, had passionately studied even its most trifling details, and in the depths of his heart retained a feeling of tender affection and infinite pity for Bernadette. He had just reflected, too, that on the very next day he would be able to begin that decisive inquiry which he had formerly dreamt of making at Lourdes. In fact, this was one of the reasons which had induced him to accompany Marie on her journey. And he was now conscious of an awakening of all his curiosity respecting the Visionary, whom he loved because he felt that she had been a girl of candid soul, truthful and ill-fated, though at the same time he would much have liked to analyse and explain her case. Assuredly, she had not lied, she had indeed beheld a vision and heard voices, like Joan of Arc; and like Joan of Arc also, she was now, in the opinion of the devout, accomplishing the deliverance of France—from sin if not from invaders. Pierre wondered what force could have produced her—her and her work. How was it that the visionary faculty had become developed in that lowly girl, so distracting believing souls as to bring about a renewal of the miracles of primitive times, as to found almost a new religion in the midst of a Holy City, built at an outlay of millions, and ever invaded by crowds of worshippers more numerous and more exalted in mind than had ever been known since the days of the Crusades?

And so, ceasing to read the book, Pierre began to tell his companions all that he knew, all that he had divined and reconstructed of that story which is yet so obscure despite the vast rivers of ink which it has already caused to flow. He knew the country and its manners and customs, through his long conversations with his friend Doctor Chassaigne. And he was endowed with charming fluency of language, an emotional power of exquisite purity, many remarkable gifts well fitting him to be a pulpit orator, which he never made use of, although he had known them to be within him ever since his seminary days. When the occupants of the carriage perceived that he knew the story, far better and in far greater detail than it appeared in Marie's little book, and that he related it also in such a gentle yet passionate way, there came an increase of attention, and all those afflicted souls hungering for happiness went forth towards him. First came the story of Bernadette's childhood at Bartres, where she had grown up in the abode of her foster-mother, Madame Lagues, who, having lost an infant of her own, had rendered those poor folks, the Soubirouses, the service of suckling and keeping their child for them. Bartres, a village of four hundred souls, at a league or so from Lourdes, lay as it were in a desert oasis, sequestered amidst greenery, and far from any frequented highway. The road dips down, the few houses are scattered over grassland, divided by hedges and planted with walnut and chestnut trees, whilst the clear rivulets, which are never silent, follow the sloping banks beside the pathways, and nothing rises on high save the small ancient romanesque church, which is perched on a hillock, covered with graves. Wooded slopes undulate upon all sides. Bartres lies in a hollow amidst grass of delicious freshness, grass of intense greenness, which is ever moist at the roots, thanks to the eternal subterraneous expanse of water which is fed by the mountain torrents. And Bernadette, who, since becoming a big girl, had paid for her keep by tending lambs, was wont to take them with her, season after season, through all the greenery where she never met a soul. It was only now and then, from the summit of some slope, that she saw the far-away mountains, the Pic du Midi, the Pic de Viscos, those masses which rose up, bright or gloomy, according to the weather, and which stretched away to other peaks, lightly and faintly coloured, vaguely and confusedly outlined, like apparitions seen in dreams.

Then came the home of the Lagueses, where her cradle was still preserved, a solitary, silent house, the last of the village. A meadow planted with pear and apple trees, and only separated from the open country by a narrow stream which one could jump across, stretched out in front of the house. Inside the latter, a low and damp abode, there were, on either side of the wooden stairway leading to the loft, but two spacious rooms, flagged with stones, and each containing four or five beds. The girls, who slept together, fell asleep at even, gazing at the fine pictures affixed to the walls, whilst the big clock in its pinewood case gravely struck the hours in the midst of the deep silence.

Ah! those years at Bartres; in what sweet peacefulness did Bernadette live them! Yet she grew up very thin, always in bad health, suffering from a nervous asthma which stifled her in the least veering of the wind; and on attaining her twelfth year she could neither read nor write, nor speak otherwise than in dialect, having remained quite infantile, behindhand in mind as in body. She was a very good little girl, very gentle and well behaved, and but little different from other children, except that instead of talking she preferred to listen. Limited as was her intelligence, she often evinced much natural common-sense, and at times was prompt in her reparties, with a kind of simple gaiety which made one smile. It was only with infinite trouble that she was taught her rosary, and when she knew it she seemed bent on carrying her knowledge no further, but repeated it all day long, so that whenever you met her with her lambs, she invariably had her chaplet between her fingers, diligently telling each successive "Pater" and "Ave." For long, long hours she lived like this on the grassy slopes of the hills, hidden away and haunted as it were amidst the mysteries of the foliage, seeing nought of the world save the crests of the distant mountains, which, for an instant, every now and then, would soar aloft in the radiant light, as ethereal as the peaks of dreamland.

Days followed days, and Bernadette roamed, dreaming her one narrow dream, repeating the sole prayer she knew, which gave her amidst her solitude, so fresh and naively infantile, no other companion and friend than the Blessed Virgin. But what pleasant evenings she spent in the winter-time in the room on the left, where a fire was kept burning! Her foster-mother had a brother, a priest, who occasionally read some marvellous stories to them—stories of saints, prodigious adventures of a kind to make one tremble with mingled fear and joy, in which Paradise appeared upon earth, whilst the heavens opened and a glimpse was caught of the splendour of the angels. The books he brought with him were often full of pictures—God the Father enthroned amidst His glory; Jesus, so gentle and so handsome with His beaming face; the Blessed Virgin, who recurred again and again, radiant with splendour, clad now in white, now in azure, now in gold, and ever so amiable that Bernadette would see her again in her dreams. But the book which was read more than all others was the Bible, an old Bible which had been in the family for more than a hundred years, and which time and usage had turned yellow. Each winter evening Bernadette's foster-father, the only member of the household who had learnt to read, would take a pin, pass it at random between the leaves of the book, open the latter, and then start reading from the top of the right-hand page, amidst the deep attention of both the women and the children, who ended by knowing the book by heart, and could have continued reciting it without a single mistake.

However, Bernadette, for her part, preferred the religious works in which the Blessed Virgin constantly appeared with her engaging smile. True, one reading of a different character amused her, that of the marvellous story of the Four Brothers Aymon. On the yellow paper cover of the little book, which had doubtless fallen from the bale of some peddler who had lost his way in that remote region, there was a naive cut showing the four doughty knights, Renaud and his brothers, all mounted on Bayard, their famous battle charger, that princely present made to them by the fairy Orlanda. And inside were narratives of bloody fights, of the building and besieging of fortresses, of the terrible swordthrusts exchanged by Roland and Renaud, who was at last about to free the Holy Land, without mentioning the tales of Maugis the Magician and his marvellous enchantments, and the Princess Clarisse, the King of Aquitaine's sister, who was more lovely than sunlight. Her imagination fired by such stories as these, Bernadette often found it difficult to get to sleep; and this was especially the case on the evenings when the books were left aside, and some person of the company related a tale of witchcraft. The girl was very superstitious, and after sundown could never be prevailed upon to pass near a tower in the vicinity, which was said to be haunted by the fiend. For that matter, all the folks of the region were superstitious, devout, and simple-minded, the whole countryside being peopled, so to say, with mysteries—trees which sang, stones from which blood flowed, cross-roads where it was necessary to say three "Paters" and three "Aves," if you did not wish to meet the seven-horned beast who carried maidens off to perdition. And what a wealth of terrifying stories there was! Hundreds of stories, so that there was no finishing on the evenings when somebody started them. First came the wehrwolf adventures, the tales of the unhappy men whom the demon forced to enter into the bodies of dogs, the great white dogs of the mountains. If you fire a gun at the dog and a single shot should strike him, the man will be delivered; but if the shot should fall on the dog's shadow, the man will immediately die. Then came the endless procession of sorcerers and sorceresses. In one of these tales Bernadette evinced a passionate interest; it was the story of a clerk of the tribunal of Lourdes who, wishing to see the devil, was conducted by a witch into an untilled field at midnight on Good Friday. The devil arrived clad in magnificent scarlet garments, and at once proposed to the clerk that he should buy his soul, an offer which the clerk pretended to accept. It so happened that the devil was carrying under his arm a register in which different persons of the town, who had already sold themselves, had signed their names. However, the clerk, who was a cunning fellow, pulled out of his pocket a pretended bottle of ink, which in reality contained holy water, and with this he sprinkled the devil, who raised frightful shrieks, whilst the clerk took to flight, carrying the register off with him. Then began a wild, mad race, which might last throughout the night, over the mountains, through the valleys, across the forests and the torrents. "Give me back my register!" shouted the fiend. "No, you sha'n't have it!" replied the clerk. And again and again it began afresh: "Give me back my register!"—"No, you sha'n't have it'!" And at last, finding himself out of breath, near the point of succumbing, the clerk, who had his plan, threw himself into the cemetery, which was consecrated ground, and was there able to deride the devil at his ease, waving the register which he had purloined so as to save the souls of all the unhappy people who had signed their names in it. On the evening when this story was told, Bernadette, before surrendering herself to sleep, would mentally repeat her rosary, delighted with the thought that hell should have been baffled, though she trembled at the idea that it would surely return to prowl around her, as soon as the lamp should have been put out.

Throughout one winter, the long evenings were spent in the church. Abbe Ader, the village priest, had authorised it, and many families came, in order to economise oil and candles. Moreover, they felt less cold when gathered together in this fashion. The Bible was read, and prayers were repeated, whilst the children ended by falling asleep. Bernadette alone struggled on to the finish, so pleased she was at being there, in that narrow nave whose slender nervures were coloured blue and red. At the farther end was the altar, also painted and gilded, with its twisted columns and its screens on which appeared the Virgin and Ste. Anne, and the beheading of St. John the Baptist—the whole of a gaudy and somewhat barbaric splendour. And as sleepiness grew upon her, the child must have often seen a mystical vision as it were of those crudely coloured designs rising before her—have seen the blood flowing from St. John's severed head, have seen the aureolas shining, the Virgin ever returning and gazing at her with her blue, living eyes, and looking as though she were on the point of opening her vermilion lips in order to speak to her. For some months Bernadette spent her evenings in this wise, half asleep in front of that sumptuous, vaguely defined altar, in the incipiency of a divine dream which she carried away with her, and finished in bed, slumbering peacefully under the watchful care of her guardian angel.

And it was also in that old church, so humble yet so impregnated with ardent faith, that Bernadette began to learn her catechism. She would soon be fourteen now, and must think of her first communion. Her foster-mother, who had the reputation of being avaricious, did not send her to school, but employed her in or about the house from morning till evening. M. Barbet, the schoolmaster, never saw her at his classes, though one day, when he gave the catechism lesson, in the place of Abbe Ader who was indisposed, he remarked her on account of her piety and modesty. The village priest was very fond of Bernadette and often spoke of her to the schoolmaster, saying that he could never look at her without thinking of the children of La Salette, since they must have been good, candid, and pious as she was, for the Blessed Virgin to have appeared to them.* On another occasion whilst the two men were walking one morning near the village, and saw Bernadette disappear with her little flock under some spreading trees in the distance, the Abbe repeatedly turned round to look for her, and again remarked "I cannot account for it, but every time I meet that child it seems to me as if I saw Melanie, the young shepherdess, little Maximin's companion." He was certainly beset by this singular idea, which became, so to say, a prediction. Moreover, had he not one day after catechism, or one evening, when the villagers were gathered in the church, related that marvellous story which was already twelve years old, that story of the Lady in the dazzling robes who walked upon the grass without even making it bend, the Blessed Virgin who showed herself to Melanie and Maximin on the banks of a stream in the mountains, and confided to them a great secret and announced the anger of her Son? Ever since that day a source had sprung up from the tears which she had shed, a source which cured all ailments, whilst the secret, inscribed on parchment fastened with three seals, slumbered at Rome! And Bernadette, no doubt, with her dreamy, silent air, had listened passionately to that wonderful tale and carried it off with her into the desert of foliage where she spent her days, so that she might live it over again as she walked along behind her lambs with her rosary, slipping bead by bead between her slender fingers.

* It was on September 19, 1846, that the Virgin is said to have
appeared in the ravine of La Sezia, adjacent to the valley of La
Salette, between Corps and Eutraigues, in the department of the
Isere. The visionaries were Melanie Mathieu, a girl of fourteen,
and Maximin Giraud, a boy of twelve. The local clergy speedily
endorsed the story of the miracle, and thousands of people still
go every year in pilgrimage to a church overlooking the valley,
and bathe and drink at a so-called miraculous source. Two priests
of Grenoble, however, Abbe Deleon and Abbe Cartellier, accused a
Mlle. de Lamerliere of having concocted the miracle, and when she
took proceedings against them for libel she lost her case.—Trans.

Thus her childhood ran its course at Bartres. That which delighted one in this Bernadette, so poor-blooded, so slight of build, was her ecstatic eyes, beautiful visionary eyes, from which dreams soared aloft like birds winging their flight in a pure limpid sky. Her mouth was large, with lips somewhat thick, expressive of kindliness; her square-shaped head had a straight brow, and was covered with thick black hair, whilst her face would have seemed rather common but for its charming expression of gentle obstinacy. Those who did not gaze into her eyes, however, gave her no thought. To them she was but an ordinary child, a poor thing of the roads, a girl of reluctant growth, timidly humble in her ways. Assuredly it was in her glance that Abbe Ader had with agitation detected the stifling ailment which filled her puny, girlish form with suffering—that ailment born of the greeny solitude in which she had grown up, the gentleness of her bleating lambs, the Angelic Salutation which she had carried with her, hither and thither, under the sky, repeating and repeating it to the point of hallucination, the prodigious stories, too, which she had heard folks tell at her foster-mother's, the long evenings spent before the living altar-screens in the church, and all the atmosphere of primitive faith which she had breathed in that far-away rural region, hemmed in by mountains.

At last, on one seventh of January, Bernadette had just reached her fourteenth birthday, when her parents, finding that she learnt nothing at Bartres, resolved to bring her back to Lourdes for good, in order that she might diligently study her catechism, and in this wise seriously prepare herself for her first communion. And so it happened that she had already been at Lourdes some fifteen or twenty days, when on February 11, a Thursday, cold and somewhat cloudy—

But Pierre could carry his narrative no further, for Sister Hyacinthe had risen to her feet and was vigorously clapping her hands. "My children," she exclaimed, "it is past nine o'clock. Silence! silence!"

The train had indeed just passed Lamothe, and was rolling with a dull rumble across a sea of darkness—the endless plains of the Landes which the night submerged. For ten minutes already not a sound ought to have been heard in the carriage, one and all ought to have been sleeping or suffering uncomplainingly. However, a mutiny broke out.

"Oh! Sister!" exclaimed Marie, whose eyes were sparkling, "allow us just another short quarter of an hour! We have got to the most interesting part."

Ten, twenty voices took up the cry: "Oh yes, Sister, please do let us have another short quarter of an hour!"

They all wished to hear the continuation, burning with as much curiosity as though they had not known the story, so captivated were they by the touches of compassionate human feeling which Pierre introduced into his narrative. Their glances never left him, all their heads were stretched towards him, fantastically illumined by the flickering light of the lamps. And it was not only the sick who displayed this interest; the ten women occupying the compartment at the far end of the carriage had also become impassioned, and, happy at not missing a single word, turned their poor ugly faces now beautified by naive faith.

"No, I cannot!" Sister Hyacinthe at first declared; "the rules are very strict—you must be silent."

However, she weakened, she herself feeling so interested in the tale that she could detect her heart beating under her stomacher. Then Marie again repeated her request in an entreating tone; whilst her father, M. de Guersaint, who had listened like one hugely amused, declared that they would all fall ill if the story were not continued. And thereupon, seeing Madame de Jonquiere smile with an indulgent air, Sister Hyacinthe ended by consenting.

"Well, then," said she, "I will allow you another short quarter of an hour; but only a short quarter of an hour, mind. That is understood, is it not? For I should otherwise be in fault."

Pierre had waited quietly without attempting to intervene. And he resumed his narrative in the same penetrating voice as before, a voice in which his own doubts were softened by pity for those who suffer and who hope.

The scene of the story was now transferred to Lourdes, to the Rue des Petits Fosses, a narrow, tortuous, mournful street taking a downward course between humble houses and roughly plastered dead walls. The Soubirous family occupied a single room on the ground floor of one of these sorry habitations, a room at the end of a dark passage, in which seven persons were huddled together, the father, the mother, and five children. You could scarcely see in the chamber; from the tiny, damp inner courtyard of the house there came but a greenish light. And in that room they slept, all of a heap; and there also they ate, when they had bread. For some time past, the father, a miller by trade, could only with difficulty obtain work as a journeyman. And it was from that dark hole, that lowly wretchedness, that Bernadette, the elder girl, with Marie, her sister, and Jeanne, a little friend of the neighbourhood, went out to pick up dead wood, on the cold February Thursday already spoken of.

Then the beautiful tale was unfolded at length; how the three girls followed the bank of the Gave from the other side of the castle, and how they ended by finding themselves on the Ile du Chalet in front of the rock of Massabielle, from which they were only separated by the narrow stream diverted from the Gave, and used for working the mill of Savy. It was a wild spot, whither the common herdsman often brought the pigs of the neighbourhood, which, when showers suddenly came on, would take shelter under this rock of Massabielle, at whose base there was a kind of grotto of no great depth, blocked at the entrance by eglantine and brambles. The girls found dead wood very scarce that day, but at last on seeing on the other side of the stream quite a gleaning of branches deposited there by the torrent, Marie and Jeanne crossed over through the water; whilst Bernadette, more delicate than they were, a trifle young-ladyfied, perhaps, remained on the bank lamenting, and not daring to wet her feet. She was suffering slightly from humour in the head, and her mother had expressly bidden her to wrap herself in her capulet,* a large white capulet which contrasted vividly with her old black woollen dress. When she found that her companions would not help her, she resignedly made up her mind to take off her sabots, and pull down her stockings. It was then about noon, the three strokes of the Angelus rang out from the parish church, rising into the broad calm winter sky, which was somewhat veiled by fine fleecy clouds. And it was then that a great agitation arose within her, resounding in her ears with such a tempestuous roar that she fancied a hurricane had descended from the mountains, and was passing over her. But she looked at the trees and was stupefied, for not a leaf was stirring. Then she thought that she had been mistaken, and was about to pick up her sabots, when again the great gust swept through her; but, this time, the disturbance in her ears reached her eyes, she no longer saw the trees, but was dazzled by a whiteness, a kind of bright light which seemed to her to settle itself against the rock, in a narrow, lofty slit above the Grotto, not unlike an ogival window of a cathedral. In her fright she fell upon her knees. What could it be, mon Dieu? Sometimes, during bad weather, when her asthma oppressed her more than usual, she spent very bad nights, incessantly dreaming dreams which were often painful, and whose stifling effect she retained on awaking, even when she had ceased to remember anything. Flames would surround her, the sun would flash before her face. Had she dreamt in that fashion during the previous night? Was this the continuation of some forgotten dream? However, little by little a form became outlined, she believed that she could distinguish a figure which the vivid light rendered intensely white. In her fear lest it should be the devil, for her mind was haunted by tales of witchcraft, she began to tell her beads. And when the light had slowly faded away, and she had crossed the canal and joined Marie and Jeanne, she was surprised to find that neither of them had seen anything whilst they were picking up the wood in front of the Grotto. On their way back to Lourdes the three girls talked together. So she, Bernadette, had seen something then? What was it? At first, feeling uneasy, and somewhat ashamed, she would not answer; but at last she said that she had seen something white.

* This is a kind of hood, more generally known among the Bearnese
peasantry as a sarot. Whilst forming a coif it also completely
covers the back and shoulders.—Trans.

From this the rumours started and grew. The Soubirouses, on being made acquainted with the circumstance, evinced much displeasure at such childish nonsense, and told their daughter that she was not to return to the rock of Massabielle. All the children of the neighbourhood, however, were already repeating the tale, and when Sunday came the parents had to give way, and allow Bernadette to betake herself to the Grotto with a bottle of holy water to ascertain if it were really the devil whom one had to deal with. She then again beheld the light, the figure became more clearly defined, and smiled upon her, evincing no fear whatever of the holy water. And, on the ensuing Thursday, she once more returned to the spot accompanied by several persons, and then for the first time the radiant lady assumed sufficient corporality to speak, and say to her: "Do me the kindness to come here for fifteen days."

Thus, little by little, the lady had assumed a precise appearance. The something clad in white had become indeed a lady more beautiful than a queen, of a kind such as is only seen in pictures. At first, in presence of the questions with which all the neighbours plied her from morning till evening, Bernadette had hesitated, disturbed, perhaps, by scruples of conscience. But then, as though prompted by the very interrogatories to which she was subjected, she seemed to perceive the figure which she had beheld, more plainly, so that it definitely assumed life, with lines and hues from which the child, in her after-descriptions, never departed. The lady's eyes were blue and very mild, her mouth was rosy and smiling, the oval of her face expressed both the grace of youth and of maternity. Below the veil covering her head and falling to her heels, only a glimpse was caught of her admirable fair hair, which was slightly curled. Her robe, which was of dazzling whiteness, must have been of some material unknown on earth, some material woven of the sun's rays. Her sash, of the same hue as the heavens, was fastened loosely about her, its long ends streaming downwards, with the light airiness of morning. Her chaplet, wound about her right arm, had beads of a milky whiteness, whilst the links and the cross were of gold. And on her bare feet, on her adorable feet of virgin snow, flowered two golden roses, the mystic roses of this divine mother's immaculate flesh.

Where was it that Bernadette had seen this Blessed Virgin, of such traditionally simple composition, unadorned by a single jewel, having but the primitive grace imagined by the painters of a people in its childhood? In which illustrated book belonging to her foster-mother's brother, the good priest, who read such attractive stories, had she beheld this Virgin? Or in what picture, or what statuette, or what stained-glass window of the painted and gilded church where she had spent so many evenings whilst growing up? And whence, above all things, had come those golden roses poised on the Virgin's feet, that piously imagined florescence of woman's flesh—from what romance of chivalry, from what story told after catechism by the Abbe Ader, from what unconscious dream indulged in under the shady foliage of Bartres, whilst ever and ever repeating that haunting Angelic Salutation?

Pierre's voice had acquired a yet more feeling tone, for if he did not say all these things to the simple-minded folks who were listening to him, still the human explanation of all these prodigies which the feeling of doubt in the depths of his being strove to supply, imparted to his narrative a quiver of sympathetic, fraternal love. He loved Bernadette the better for the great charm of her hallucination—that lady of such gracious access, such perfect amiability, such politeness in appearing and disappearing so appropriately. At first the great light would show itself, then the vision took form, came and went, leant forward, moved about, floating imperceptibly, with ethereal lightness; and when it vanished the glow lingered for yet another moment, and then disappeared like a star fading away. No lady in this world could have such a white and rosy face, with a beauty so akin to that of the Virgins on the picture-cards given to children at their first communions. And it was strange that the eglantine of the Grotto did not even hurt her adorable bare feet blooming with golden flowers.

Pierre, however, at once proceeded to recount the other apparitions. The fourth and fifth occurred on the Friday and the Saturday; but the Lady, who shone so brightly and who had not yet told her name, contented herself on these occasions with smiling and saluting without pronouncing a word. On the Sunday, however, she wept, and said to Bernadette, "Pray for sinners." On the Monday, to the child's great grief, she did not appear, wishing, no doubt, to try her. But on the Tuesday she confided to her a secret which concerned her (the girl) alone, a secret which she was never to divulge*; and then she at last told her what mission it was that she entrusted to her: "Go and tell the priests," she said, "that they must build a chapel here." On the Wednesday she frequently murmured the word "Penitence! penitence! penitence!" which the child repeated, afterwards kissing the earth. On the Thursday the Lady said to her: "Go, and drink, and wash at the spring, and eat of the grass that is beside it," words which the Visionary ended by understanding, when in the depths of the Grotto a source suddenly sprang up beneath her fingers. And this was the miracle of the enchanted fountain.

* In a like way, it will be remembered, the apparition at La
Salette confided a secret to Melanie and Maximin (see ante,
note). There can be little doubt that Bernadette was acquainted
with the story of the miracle of La Salette.—Trans.

Then the second week ran its course. The lady did not appear on the Friday, but was punctual on the five following days, repeating her commands and gazing with a smile at the humble girl whom she had chosen to do her bidding, and who, on her side, duly told her beads at each apparition, kissed the earth, and repaired on her knees to the source, there to drink and wash. At last, on Thursday, March 4, the last day of these mystical assignations, the Lady requested more pressingly than before that a chapel might be erected in order that the nations might come thither in procession from all parts of the earth. So far, however, in reply to all Bernadette's appeals, she had refused to say who she was; and it was only three weeks later, on Thursday, March 25, that, joining her hands together, and raising her eyes to Heaven, she said: "I am the Immaculate Conception." On two other occasions, at somewhat long intervals, April 7 and July 16, she again appeared: the first time to perform the miracle of the lighted taper, that taper above which the child, plunged in ecstasy, for a long time unconsciously left her hand, without burning it; and the second time to bid Bernadette farewell, to favour her with a last smile, and a last inclination of the head full of charming politeness. This made eighteen apparitions all told; and never again did the Lady show herself.

Whilst Pierre went on with his beautiful, marvellous story, so soothing to the wretched, he evoked for himself a vision of that pitiable, lovable Bernadette, whose sufferings had flowered so wonderfully. As a doctor had roughly expressed it, this girl of fourteen, at a critical period of her life, already ravaged, too, by asthma, was, after all, simply an exceptional victim of hysteria, afflicted with a degenerate heredity and lapsing into infancy. If there were no violent crises in her case, if there were no stiffening of the muscles during her attacks, if she retained a precise recollection of her dreams, the reason was that her case was peculiar to herself, and she added, so to say, a new and very curious form to all the forms of hysteria known at the time. Miracles only begin when things cannot be explained; and science, so far, knows and can explain so little, so infinitely do the phenomena of disease vary according to the nature of the patient! But how many shepherdesses there had been before Bernadette who had seen the Virgin in a similar way, amidst all the same childish nonsense! Was it not always the same story, the Lady clad in light, the secret confided, the spring bursting forth, the mission which had to be fulfilled, the miracles whose enchantments would convert the masses? And was not the personal appearance of the Virgin always in accordance with a poor child's dreams—akin to some coloured figure in a missal, an ideal compounded of traditional beauty, gentleness, and politeness. And the same dreams showed themselves in the naivete of the means which were to be employed and of the object which was to be attained—the deliverance of nations, the building of churches, the processional pilgrimages of the faithful! Then, too, all the words which fell from Heaven resembled one another, calls for penitence, promises of help; and in this respect, in Bernadette's case the only new feature was that most extraordinary declaration: "I am the Immaculate Conception," which burst forth—very usefully—as the recognition by the Blessed Virgin herself of the dogma promulgated by the Court of Rome but three years previously! It was not the Immaculate Virgin who appeared: no, it was the Immaculate Conception, the abstraction itself, the thing, the dogma, so that one might well ask oneself if really the Virgin had spoken in such a fashion. As for the other words, it was possible that Bernadette had heard them somewhere and stored them up in some unconscious nook of her memory. But these—"I am the Immaculate Conception"—whence had they come as though expressly to fortify a dogma—still bitterly discussed—with such prodigious support as the direct testimony of the Mother conceived without sin? At this thought, Pierre, who was convinced of Bernadette's absolute good faith, who refused to believe that she had been the instrument of a fraud, began to waver, deeply agitated, feeling his belief in truth totter within him.

The apparitions, however, had caused intense emotion at Lourdes; crowds flocked to the spot, miracles began, and those inevitable persecutions broke out which ensure the triumph of new religions. Abbe Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, an extremely honest man, with an upright, vigorous mind, was able in all truth to declare that he did not know this child, that she had not yet been seen at catechism. Where was the pressure, then, where the lesson learnt by heart? There was nothing but those years of childhood spent at Bartres, the first teachings of Abbe Ader, conversations possibly, religious ceremonies in honour of the recently proclaimed dogma, or simply the gift of one of those commemorative medals which had been scattered in profusion. Never did Abbe Ader reappear upon the scene, he who had predicted the mission of the future Visionary. He was destined to remain apart from Bernadette and her future career, he who, the first, had seen her little soul blossom in his pious hands. And yet all the unknown forces that had sprung from that sequestered village, from that nook of greenery where superstition and poverty of intelligence prevailed, were still making themselves felt, disturbing the brains of men, disseminating the contagion of the mysterious. It was remembered that a shepherd of Argeles, speaking of the rock of Massabielle, had prophesied that great things would take place there. Other children, moreover, now fell in ecstasy with their eyes dilated and their limbs quivering with convulsions, but these only saw the devil. A whirlwind of madness seemed to be passing over the region. An old lady of Lourdes declared that Bernadette was simply a witch and that she had herself seen the toad's foot in her eye. But for the others, for the thousands of pilgrims who hastened to the spot, she was a saint, and they kissed her garments. Sobs burst forth and frenzy seemed to seize upon the souls of the beholders, when she fell upon her knees before the Grotto, a lighted taper in her right hand, whilst with the left she told the beads of her rosary. She became very pale and quite beautiful, transfigured, so to say. Her features gently ascended in her face, lengthened into an expression of extraordinary beatitude, whilst her eyes filled with light, and her lips parted as though she were speaking words which could not be heard. And it was quite certain that she had no will of her own left her, penetrated as she was by a dream, possessed by it to such a point in the confined, exclusive sphere in which she lived, that she continued dreaming it even when awake, and thus accepted it as the only indisputable reality, prepared to testify to it even at the cost of her blood, repeating it over and over again, obstinately, stubbornly clinging to it, and never varying in the details she gave. She did not lie, for she did not know, could not and would not desire anything apart from it.

Forgetful of the flight of time, Pierre was now sketching a charming picture of old Lourdes, that pious little town, slumbering at the foot of the Pyrenees. The castle, perched on a rock at the point of intersection of the seven valleys of Lavedan, had formerly been the key of the mountain districts. But, in Bernadette's time, it had become a mere dismantled, ruined pile, at the entrance of a road leading nowhere. Modern life found its march stayed by a formidable rampart of lofty, snow-capped peaks, and only the trans-Pyrenean railway—had it been constructed—could have established an active circulation of social life in that sequestered nook where human existence stagnated like dead water. Forgotten, therefore, Lourdes remained slumbering, happy and sluggish amidst its old-time peacefulness, with its narrow, pebble-paved streets and its bleak houses with dressings of marble. The old roofs were still all massed on the eastern side of the castle; the Rue de la Grotte, then called the Rue du Bois, was but a deserted and often impassable road; no houses stretched down to the Gave as now, and the scum-laden waters rolled through a perfect solitude of pollard willows and tall grass. On week-days but few people passed across the Place du Marcadal, such as housewives hastening on errands, and petty cits airing their leisure hours; and you had to wait till Sundays or fair days to find the inhabitants rigged out in their best clothes and assembled on the Champ Commun, in company with the crowd of graziers who had come down from the distant tablelands with their cattle. During the season when people resort to the Pyrenean-waters, the passage of the visitors to Cauterets and Bagneres also brought some animation; diligences passed through the town twice a day, but they came from Pau by a wretched road, and had to ford the Lapaca, which often overflowed its banks. Then climbing the steep ascent of the Rue Basse, they skirted the terrace of the church, which was shaded by large elms. And what soft peacefulness prevailed in and around that old semi-Spanish church, full of ancient carvings, columns, screens, and statues, peopled with visionary patches of gilding and painted flesh, which time had mellowed and which you faintly discerned as by the light of mystical lamps! The whole population came there to worship, to fill their eyes with the dream of the mysterious. There were no unbelievers, the inhabitants of Lourdes were a people of primitive faith; each corporation marched behind the banner of its saint, brotherhoods of all kinds united the entire town, on festival mornings, in one large Christian family. And, as with some exquisite flower that has grown in the soil of its choice, great purity of life reigned there. There was not even a resort of debauchery for young men to wreck their lives, and the girls, one and all, grew up with the perfume and beauty of innocence, under the eyes of the Blessed Virgin, Tower of Ivory and Seat of Wisdom.

And how well one could understand that Bernadette, born in that holy soil, should flower in it, like one of nature's roses budding in the wayside bushes! She was indeed the very florescence of that region of ancient belief and rectitude; she would certainly not have sprouted elsewhere; she could only appear and develop there, amidst that belated race, amidst the slumberous peacefulness of a childlike people, under the moral discipline of religion. And what intense love at once burst forth all around her! What blind confidence was displayed in her mission, what immense consolation and hope came to human hearts on the very morrow of the first miracles! A long cry of relief had greeted the cure of old Bourriette recovering his sight, and of little Justin Bouhohorts coming to life again in the icy water of the spring. At last, then, the Blessed Virgin was intervening in favour of those who despaired, forcing that unkind mother, Nature, to be just and charitable. This was divine omnipotence returning to reign on earth, sweeping the laws of the world aside in order to work the happiness of the suffering and the poor. The miracles multiplied, blazed forth, from day to day more and more extraordinary, like unimpeachable proof of Bernadette's veracity. And she was, indeed, the rose of the divine garden, whose deeds shed perfume, the rose who beholds all the other flowers of grace and salvation spring into being around her.

Pierre had reached this point of his story, and was again enumerating the miracles, on the point of recounting the prodigious triumph of the Grotto, when Sister Hyacinthe, awaking with a start from the ecstasy into which the narrative had plunged her, hastily rose to her feet. "Really, really," said she, "there is no sense in it. It will soon be eleven o'clock."

This was true. They had left Morceux behind them, and would now soon be at Mont de Marsan. So Sister Hyacinthe clapped her hands once more, and added: "Silence, my children, silence!"

This time they did not dare to rebel, for they felt she was in the right; they were unreasonable. But how greatly they regretted not hearing the continuation, how vexed they were that the story should cease when only half told! The ten women in the farther compartment even let a murmur of disappointment escape them; whilst the sick, their faces still outstretched, their dilated eyes gazing upon the light of hope, seemed to be yet listening. Those miracles which ever and ever returned to their minds and filled them with unlimited, haunting, supernatural joy.

"And don't let me hear anyone breathe, even," added Sister Hyacinthe gaily, "or otherwise I shall impose penance on you."

Madame de Jonquiere laughed good-naturedly. "You must obey, my children," she said; "be good and get to sleep, so that you may have strength to pray at the Grotto to-morrow with all your hearts."

Then silence fell, nobody spoke any further; and the only sounds were those of the rumbling of the wheels and the jolting of the train as it was carried along at full speed through the black night.

Pierre, however, was unable to sleep. Beside him, M. de Guersaint was already snoring lightly, looking very happy despite the hardness of his seat. For a time the young priest saw Marie's eyes wide open, still full of all the radiance of the marvels that he had related. For a long while she kept them ardently fixed upon his own, but at last closed them, and then he knew not whether she was sleeping, or with eyelids simply closed was living the everlasting miracle over again. Some of the sufferers were dreaming aloud, giving vent to bursts of laughter which unconscious moans interrupted. Perhaps they beheld the Archangels opening their flesh to wrest their diseases from them. Others, restless with insomnia, turned over and over, stifling their sobs and gazing fixedly into the darkness. And, with a shudder born of all the mystery he had evoked, Pierre, distracted, no longer master of himself in that delirious sphere of fraternal suffering, ended by hating his very mind, and, drawn into close communion with all those humble folks, sought to believe like them. What could be the use of that physiological inquiry into Bernadette's case, so full of gaps and intricacies? Why should he not accept her as a messenger from the spheres beyond, as one of the elect chosen for the divine mystery? Doctors were but ignorant men with rough and brutal hands, and it would be so delightful to fall asleep in childlike faith, in the enchanted gardens of the impossible. And for a moment indeed he surrendered himself, experiencing a delightful feeling of comfort, no longer seeking to explain anything, but accepting the Visionary with her sumptuous cortege of miracles, and relying on God to think and determine for him. Then he looked out through the window, which they did not dare to open on account of the consumptive patients, and beheld the immeasurable night which enwrapped the country across which the train was fleeing. The storm must have burst forth there; the sky was now of an admirable nocturnal purity, as though cleansed by the masses of fallen water. Large stars shone out in the dark velvet, alone illumining, with their mysterious gleams, the silent, refreshed fields, which incessantly displayed only the black solitude of slumber. And across the Landes, through the valleys, between the hills, that carriage of wretchedness and suffering rolled on and on, over-heated, pestilential, rueful, and wailing, amidst the serenity of the august night, so lovely and so mild.

They had passed Riscle at one in the morning. Between the jolting, the painful, the hallucinatory silence still continued. At two o'clock, as they reached Vic-de-Bigorre, low moans were heard; the bad state of the line, with the unbearable spreading tendency of the train's motion, was sorely shaking the patients. It was only at Tarbes, at half-past two, that silence was at length broken, and that morning prayers were said, though black night still reigned around them. There came first the "Pater," and then the "Ave," the "Credo," and the supplication to God to grant them the happiness of a glorious day.

"O God, vouchsafe me sufficient strength that I may avoid all that is evil, do all that is good, and suffer uncomplainingly every pain."

And now there was to be no further stoppage until they reached Lourdes. Barely three more quarters of an hour, and Lourdes, with all its vast hopes, would blaze forth in the midst of that night, so long and cruel. Their painful awakening was enfevered by the thought; a final agitation arose amidst the morning discomfort, as the abominable sufferings began afresh.

Sister Hyacinthe, however, was especially anxious about the strange man, whose sweat-covered face she had been continually wiping. He had so far managed to keep alive, she watching him without a pause, never having once closed her eyes, but unremittingly listening to his faint breathing with the stubborn desire to take him to the holy Grotto before he died.

All at once, however, she felt frightened; and addressing Madame de Jonquiere, she hastily exclaimed, "Pray pass me the vinegar bottle at once—I can no longer hear him breathe."

For an instant, indeed, the man's faint breathing had ceased. His eyes were still closed, his lips parted; he could not have been paler, he had an ashen hue, and was cold. And the carriage was rolling along with its ceaseless rattle of coupling-irons; the speed of the train seemed even to have increased.

"I will rub his temples," resumed Sister Hyacinthe. "Help me, do!"

But, at a more violent jolt of the train, the man suddenly fell from the seat, face downward.

"Ah! mon Dieu, help me, pick him up!"

They picked him up, and found him dead. And they had to seat him in his corner again, with his back resting against the woodwork. He remained there erect, his torso stiffened, and his head wagging slightly at each successive jolt. Thus the train continued carrying him along, with the same thundering noise of wheels, while the engine, well pleased, no doubt, to be reaching its destination, began whistling shrilly, giving vent to quite a flourish of delirious joy as it sped through the calm night.

And then came the last and seemingly endless half-hour of the journey, in company with that wretched corpse. Two big tears had rolled down Sister Hyacinthe's cheeks, and with her hands joined she had begun to pray. The whole carriage shuddered with terror at sight of that terrible companion who was being taken, too late alas! to the Blessed Virgin.

Hope, however, proved stronger than sorrow or pain, and although all the sufferings there assembled awoke and grew again, irritated by overwhelming weariness, a song of joy nevertheless proclaimed the sufferers' triumphal entry into the Land of Miracles. Amidst the tears which their pains drew from them, the exasperated and howling sick began to chant the "Ave maris Stella" with a growing clamour in which lamentation finally turned into cries of hope.

Marie had again taken Pierre's hand between her little feverish fingers. "Oh, mon Dieu!" said she, "to think that poor man is dead, and I feared so much that it was I who would die before arriving. And we are there—there at last!"

The priest was trembling with intense emotion. "It means that you are to be cured, Marie," he replied, "and that I myself shall be cured if you pray for me—"

The engine was now whistling in a yet louder key in the depths of the bluish darkness. They were nearing their destination. The lights of Lourdes already shone out on the horizon. Then the whole train again sang a canticle—the rhymed story of Bernadette, that endless ballad of six times ten couplets, in which the Angelic Salutation ever returns as a refrain, all besetting and distracting, opening to the human mind the portals of the heaven of ecstasy:—

"It was the hour for ev'ning pray'r;
Soft bells chimed on the chilly air.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!

"The maid stood on the torrent's bank,
A breeze arose, then swiftly sank.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!

"And she beheld, e'en as it fell,
The Virgin on Massabielle.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!

"All white appeared the Lady chaste,
A zone of Heaven round her waist.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!

"Two golden roses, pure and sweet,
Bloomed brightly on her naked feet.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!

"Upon her arm, so white and round,
Her chaplet's milky pearls were wound.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!

"The maiden prayed till, from her eyes,
The vision sped to Paradise.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!"

THE SECOND DAY

I. THE TRAIN ARRIVES

IT was twenty minutes past three by the clock of the Lourdes railway station, the dial of which was illumined by a reflector. Under the slanting roof sheltering the platform, a hundred yards or so in length, some shadowy forms went to and fro, resignedly waiting. Only a red signal light peeped out of the black countryside, far away.

Two of the promenaders suddenly halted. The taller of them, a Father of the Assumption, none other indeed than the Reverend Father Fourcade, director of the national pilgrimage, who had reached Lourdes on the previous day, was a man of sixty, looking superb in his black cloak with its large hood. His fine head, with its clear, domineering eyes and thick grizzly beard, was the head of a general whom an intelligent determination to conquer inflames. In consequence, however, of a sudden attack of gout he slightly dragged one of his legs, and was leaning on the shoulder of his companion, Dr. Bonamy, the practitioner attached to the Miracle Verification Office, a short, thick-set man, with a square-shaped, clean-shaven face, which had dull, blurred eyes and a tranquil cast of features.

Father Fourcade had stopped to question the station-master whom he perceived running out of his office. "Will the white train be very late, monsieur?" he asked.

"No, your reverence. It hasn't lost more than ten minutes; it will be here at the half-hour. It's the Bayonne train which worries me; it ought to have passed through already."

So saying, he ran off to give an order; but soon came back again, his slim, nervous figure displaying marked signs of agitation. He lived, indeed, in a state of high fever throughout the period of the great pilgrimages. Apart from the usual service, he that day expected eighteen trains, containing more than fifteen thousand passengers. The grey and the blue trains which had started from Paris the first had already arrived at the regulation hour. But the delay in the arrival of the white train was very troublesome, the more so as the Bayonne express—which passed over the same rails—had not yet been signalled. It was easy to understand, therefore, what incessant watchfulness was necessary, not a second passing without the entire staff of the station being called upon to exercise its vigilance.

"In ten minutes, then?" repeated Father Fourcade.

"Yes, in ten minutes, unless I'm obliged to close the line!" cried the station-master as he hastened into the telegraph office.

Father Fourcade and the doctor slowly resumed their promenade. The thing which astonished them was that no serious accident had ever happened in the midst of such a fearful scramble. In past times, especially, the most terrible disorder had prevailed. Father Fourcade complacently recalled the first pilgrimage which he had organised and led, in 1875; the terrible endless journey without pillows or mattresses, the patients exhausted, half dead, with no means of reviving them at hand; and then the arrival at Lourdes, the train evacuated in confusion, no materiel in readiness, no straps, nor stretchers, nor carts. But now there was a powerful organisation; a hospital awaited the sick, who were no longer reduced to lying upon straw in sheds. What a shock for those unhappy ones! What force of will in the man of faith who led them to the scene of miracles! The reverend Father smiled gently at the thought of the work which he had accomplished.

Then, still leaning on the doctor's shoulder, he began to question him: "How many pilgrims did you have last year?" he asked.

"About two hundred thousand. That is still the average. In the year of the Coronation of the Virgin the figure rose to five hundred thousand. But to bring that about an exceptional occasion was needed with a great effort of propaganda. Such vast masses cannot be collected together every day."

A pause followed, and then Father Fourcade murmured: "No doubt. Still the blessing of Heaven attends our endeavours; our work thrives more and more. We have collected more than two hundred thousand francs in donations for this journey, and God will be with us, there will be many cures for you to proclaim to-morrow, I am sure of it." Then, breaking off, he inquired: "Has not Father Dargeles come here?"

Dr. Bonamy waved his hand as though to say that he did not know. Father Dargeles was the editor of the "Journal de la Grotte." He belonged to the Order of the Fathers of the Immaculate Conception whom the Bishop had installed at Lourdes and who were the absolute masters there; though, when the Fathers of the Assumption came to the town with the national pilgrimage from Paris, which crowds of faithful Catholics from Cambrai, Arras, Chartres, Troyes, Rheims, Sens, Orleans, Blois, and Poitiers joined, they evinced a kind of affectation in disappearing from the scene. Their omnipotence was no longer felt either at the Grotto or at the Basilica; they seemed to surrender every key together with every responsibility. Their superior, Father Capdebarthe, a tall, peasant-like man, with a knotty frame, a big head which looked as if it had been fashioned with a bill-hook, and a worn face which retained a ruddy mournful reflection of the soil, did not even show himself. Of the whole community you only saw little, insinuating Father Dargeles; but he was met everywhere, incessantly on the look-out for paragraphs for his newspaper. At the same time, however, although the Fathers of the Immaculate Conception disappeared in this fashion, it could be divined that they were behind the vast stage, like a hidden sovereign power, coining money and toiling without a pause to increase the triumphant prosperity of their business. Indeed, they turned even their humility to account.

"It's true that we have had to get up early—two in the morning," resumed Father Fourcade gaily. "But I wished to be here. What would my poor children have said, indeed, if I had not come?"

He was alluding to the sick pilgrims, those who were so much flesh for miracle-working; and it was a fact that he had never missed coming to the station, no matter what the hour, to meet that woeful white train, that train which brought such grievous suffering with it.

"Five-and-twenty minutes past three—only another five minutes now," exclaimed Dr. Bonamy repressing a yawn as he glanced at the clock; for, despite his obsequious air, he was at bottom very much annoyed at having had to get out of bed so early. However, he continued his slow promenade with Father Fourcade along that platform which resembled a covered walk, pacing up and down in the dense night which the gas jets here and there illumined with patches of yellow light. Little parties, dimly outlined, composed of priests and gentlemen in frock-coats, with a solitary officer of dragoons, went to and fro incessantly, talking together the while in discreet murmuring tones. Other people, seated on benches, ranged along the station wall, were also chatting or putting their patience to proof with their glances wandering away into the black stretch of country before them. The doorways of the offices and waiting-rooms, which were brilliantly lighted, looked like great holes in the darkness, and all was flaring in the refreshment-room, where you could see the marble tables and the counter laden with bottles and glasses and baskets of bread and fruit.

On the right hand, beyond the roofing of the platform, there was a confused swarming of people. There was here a goods gate, by which the sick were taken out of the station, and a mass of stretchers, litters, and hand-carts, with piles of pillows and mattresses, obstructed the broad walk. Three parties of bearers were also assembled here, persons of well-nigh every class, but more particularly young men of good society, all wearing red, orange-tipped crosses and straps of yellow leather. Many of them, too, had adopted the Bearnese cap, the convenient head-gear of the region; and a few, clad as though they were bound on some distant expedition, displayed wonderful gaiters reaching to their knees. Some were smoking, whilst others, installed in their little vehicles, slept or read newspapers by the light of the neighbouring gas jets. One group, standing apart, were discussing some service question.

Suddenly, however, one and all began to salute. A paternal-looking man, with a heavy but good-natured face, lighted by large blue eyes, like those of a credulous child, was approaching. It was Baron Suire, the President of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation. He possessed a great fortune and occupied a high position at Toulouse.

"Where is Berthaud?" he inquired of one bearer after another, with a busy air. "Where is Berthaud? I must speak to him."

The others answered, volunteering contradictory information. Berthaud was their superintendent, and whilst some said that they had seen him with the Reverend Father Fourcade, others affirmed that he must be in the courtyard of the station inspecting the ambulance vehicles. And they thereupon offered to go and fetch him.

"No, no, thank you," replied the Baron. "I shall manage to find him myself."

Whilst this was happening, Berthaud, who had just seated himself on a bench at the other end of the station, was talking with his young friend, Gerard de Peyrelongue, by way of occupation pending the arrival of the train. The superintendent of the bearers was a man of forty, with a broad, regular-featured, handsome face and carefully trimmed whiskers of a lawyer-like pattern. Belonging to a militant Legitimist family and holding extremely reactionary opinions, he had been Procureur de la Republique (public prosecutor) in a town of the south of France from the time of the parliamentary revolution of the twenty-fourth of May* until that of the decree of the Religious Communities,** when he had resigned his post in a blusterous fashion, by addressing an insulting letter to the Minister of Justice. And he had never since laid down his arms, but had joined the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation as a sort of protest, repairing year after year to Lourdes in order to "demonstrate"; convinced as he was that the pilgrimages were both disagreeable and hurtful to the Republic, and that God alone could re-establish the Monarchy by one of those miracles which He worked so lavishly at the Grotto. Despite all this, however, Berthaud possessed no small amount of good sense, and being of a gay disposition, displayed a kind of jovial charity towards the poor sufferers whose transport he had to provide for during the three days that the national pilgrimage remained at Lourdes.

* The parliamentary revolution of May, 1873, by which M. Thiers
was overthrown and Marshal MacMahon installed in his place with
the object of restoring the Monarchy in France.—Trans.

** M. Grevy's decree by which the Jesuits were expelled.—Trans.

"And so, my dear Gerard," he said to the young man seated beside him, "your marriage is really to come off this year?"

"Why yes, if I can find such a wife as I want," replied the other. "Come, cousin, give me some good advice."

Gerard de Peyrelongue, a short, thin, carroty young man, with a pronounced nose and prominent cheek-bones, belonged to Tarbes, where his father and mother had lately died, leaving him at the utmost some seven or eight thousand francs a year. Extremely ambitious, he had been unable to find such a wife as he desired in his native province—a well-connected young woman capable of helping him to push both forward and upward in the world; and so he had joined the Hospitality, and betook himself every summer to Lourdes, in the vague hope that amidst the mass of believers, the torrent of devout mammas and daughters which flowed thither, he might find the family whose help he needed to enable him to make his way in this terrestrial sphere. However, he remained in perplexity, for if, on the one hand, he already had several young ladies in view, on the other, none of them completely satisfied him.

"Eh, cousin? You will advise me, won't you?" he said to Berthaud. "You are a man of experience. There is Mademoiselle Lemercier who comes here with her aunt. She is very rich; according to what is said she has over a million francs. But she doesn't belong to our set, and besides I think her a bit of a madcap."

Berthaud nodded. "I told you so; if I were you I should choose little Raymonde, Mademoiselle de Jonquiere."

"But she hasn't a copper!"

"That's true—she has barely enough to pay for her board. But she is fairly good-looking, she has been well brought up, and she has no extravagant tastes. That is the really important point, for what is the use of marrying a rich girl if she squanders the dowry she brings you? Besides, I know Madame and Mademoiselle de Jonquiere very well, I meet them all through the winter in the most influential drawing-rooms of Paris. And, finally, don't forget the girl's uncle, the diplomatist, who has had the painful courage to remain in the service of the Republic. He will be able to do whatever he pleases for his niece's husband."

For a moment Gerard seemed shaken, and then he relapsed into perplexity. "But she hasn't a copper," he said, "no, not a copper. It's too stiff. I am quite willing to think it over, but it really frightens me too much."

This time Berthaud burst into a frank laugh. "Come, you are ambitious, so you must be daring. I tell you that it means the secretaryship of an embassy before two years are over. By the way, Madame and Mademoiselle de Jonquiere are in the white train which we are waiting for. Make up your mind and pay your court at once."

"No, no! Later on. I want to think it over."

At this moment they were interrupted, for Baron Suire, who had already once gone by without perceiving them, so completely did the darkness enshroud them in that retired corner, had just recognised the ex-public prosecutor's good-natured laugh. And, thereupon, with the volubility of a man whose head is easily unhinged, he gave him several orders respecting the vehicles and the transport service, deploring the circumstance that it would be impossible to conduct the patients to the Grotto immediately on their arrival, as it was yet so extremely early. It had therefore been decided that they should in the first instance be taken to the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, where they would be able to rest awhile after their trying journey.

Whilst the Baron and the superintendent were thus settling what measures should be adopted, Gerard shook hands with a priest who had sat down beside him. This was the Abbe des Hermoises, who was barely eight-and-thirty years of age and had a superb head—such a head as one might expect to find on the shoulders of a worldly priest. With his hair well combed, and his person perfumed, he was not unnaturally a great favourite among women. Very amiable and distinguished in his manners, he did not come to Lourdes in any official capacity, but simply for his pleasure, as so many other people did; and the bright, sparkling smile of a sceptic above all idolatry gleamed in the depths of his fine eyes. He certainly believed, and bowed to superior decisions; but the Church—the Holy See—had not pronounced itself with regard to the miracles; and he seemed quite ready to dispute their authenticity. Having lived at Tarbes he was already acquainted with Gerard.

"Ah!" he said to him, "how impressive it is—isn't it?—this waiting for the trains in the middle of the night! I have come to meet a lady—one of my former Paris penitents—but I don't know what train she will come by. Still, as you see, I stop on, for it all interests me so much."

Then another priest, an old country priest, having come to sit down on the same bench, the Abbe considerately began talking to him, speaking of the beauty of the Lourdes district and of the theatrical effect which would take place by-and-by when the sun rose and the mountains appeared.

However, there was again a sudden alert, and the station-master ran along shouting orders. Removing his hand from Dr. Bonamy's shoulder, Father Fourcade, despite his gouty leg, hastily drew near.

"Oh! it's that Bayonne express which is so late," answered the station-master in reply to the questions addressed to him. "I should like some information about it; I'm not at ease."

At this moment the telegraph bells rang out and a porter rushed away into the darkness swinging a lantern, whilst a distant signal began to work. Thereupon the station-master resumed: "Ah! this time it's the white train. Let us hope we shall have time to get the sick people out before the express passes."

He started off once more and disappeared. Berthaud meanwhile called to Gerard, who was at the head of a squad of bearers, and they both made haste to join their men, into whom Baron Suire was already instilling activity. The bearers flocked to the spot from all sides, and setting themselves in motion began dragging their little vehicles across the lines to the platform at which the white train would come in—an unroofed platform plunged in darkness. A mass of pillows, mattresses, stretchers, and litters was soon waiting there, whilst Father Fourcade, Dr. Bonamy, the priests, the gentlemen, and the officer of dragoons in their turn crossed over in order to witness the removal of the ailing pilgrims. All that they could as yet see, far away in the depths of the black country, was the lantern in front of the engine, looking like a red star which grew larger and larger. Strident whistles pierced the night, then suddenly ceased, and you only heard the panting of the steam and the dull roar of the wheels gradually slackening their speed. Then the canticle became distinctly audible, the song of Bernadette with the ever-recurring "Aves" of its refrain, which the whole train was chanting in chorus. And at last this train of suffering and faith, this moaning, singing train, thus making its entry into Lourdes, drew up in the station.

The carriage doors were at once opened, the whole throng of healthy pilgrims, and of ailing ones able to walk, alighted, and streamed over the platform. The few gas lamps cast but a feeble light on the crowd of poverty-stricken beings clad in faded garments, and encumbered with all sorts of parcels, baskets, valises, and boxes. And amidst all the jostling of this scared flock, which did not know in which direction to turn to find its way out of the station, loud exclamations were heard, the shouts of people calling relatives whom they had lost, mingled with the embraces of others whom relatives or friends had come to meet. One woman declared with beatifical satisfaction, "I have slept well." A priest went off carrying his travelling-bag, after wishing a crippled lady "good luck!" Most of them had the bewildered, weary, yet joyous appearance of people whom an excursion train sets down at some unknown station. And such became the scramble and the confusion in the darkness, that they did not hear the railway employes who grew quite hoarse through shouting, "This way! this way!" in their eagerness to clear the platform as soon as possible.

Sister Hyacinthe had nimbly alighted from her compartment, leaving the dead man in the charge of Sister Claire des Anges; and, losing her head somewhat, she ran off to the cantine van in the idea that Ferrand would be able to help her. Fortunately she found Father Fourcade in front of the van and acquainted him with the fatality in a low voice. Repressing a gesture of annoyance, he thereupon called Baron Suire, who was passing, and began whispering in his ear. The muttering lasted for a few seconds, and then the Baron rushed off, and clove his way through the crowd with two bearers carrying a covered litter. In this the man was removed from the carriage as though he were a patient who had simply fainted, the mob of pilgrims paying no further attention to him amidst all the emotion of their arrival. Preceded by the Baron, the bearers carried the corpse into a goods office, where they provisionally lodged it behind some barrels; one of them, a fair-haired little fellow, a general's son, remaining to watch over it.

Meanwhile, after begging Ferrand and Sister Saint-Francois to go and wait for her in the courtyard of the station, near the reserved vehicle which was to take them to the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, Sister Hyacinthe returned to the railway carriage and talked of helping her patients to alight before going away. But Marie would not let her touch her. "No, no!" said the girl, "do not trouble about me, Sister. I shall remain here the last. My father and Abbe Froment have gone to the van to fetch the wheels; I am waiting for their return; they know how to fix them, and they will take me away all right, you may be sure of it."

In the same way M. Sabathier and Brother Isidore did not desire to be moved until the crowd had decreased. Madame de Jonquiere, who had taken charge of La Grivotte, also promised to see to Madame Vetu's removal in an ambulance vehicle. And thereupon Sister Hyacinthe decided that she would go off at once so as to get everything ready at the hospital. Moreover, she took with her both little Sophie Couteau and Elise Rouquet, whose face she very carefully wrapped up. Madame Maze preceded them, while Madame Vincent, carrying her little girl, who was unconscious and quite white, struggled through the crowd, possessed by the fixed idea of running off as soon as possible and depositing the child in the Grotto at the feet of the Blessed Virgin.

The mob was now pressing towards the doorway by which passengers left the station, and to facilitate the egress of all these people it at last became necessary to open the luggage gates. The employes, at a loss how to take the tickets, held out their caps, which a downpour of the little cards speedily filled. And in the courtyard, a large square courtyard, skirted on three sides by the low buildings of the station, the most extraordinary uproar prevailed amongst all the vehicles of divers kinds which were there jumbled together. The hotel omnibuses, backed against the curb of the footway, displayed the most sacred names on their large boards—Jesus and Mary, St. Michel, the Rosary, and the Sacred Heart. Then there were ambulance vehicles, landaus, cabriolets, brakes, and little donkey carts, all entangled together, with their drivers shouting, swearing, and cracking their whips—the tumult being apparently increased by the obscurity in which the lanterns set brilliant patches of light.

Rain had fallen heavily a few hours previously. Liquid mud splashed up under the hoofs of the horses; the foot passengers sank into it to their ankles. M. Vigneron, whom Madame Vigneron and Madame Chaise were following in a state of distraction, raised Gustave, in order to place him in the omnibus from the Hotel of the Apparitions, after which he himself and the ladies climbed into the vehicle. Madame Maze, shuddering slightly, like a delicate tabby who fears to dirty the tips of her paws, made a sign to the driver of an old brougham, got into it, and quickly drove away, after giving as address the Convent of the Blue Sisters. And at last Sister Hyacinthe was able to install herself with Elise Rouquet and Sophie Couteau in a large char-a-bancs, in which Ferrand and Sisters Saint-Francois and Claire des Anges were already seated. The drivers whipped up their spirited little horses, and the vehicles went off at a breakneck pace, amidst the shouts of those left behind, and the splashing of the mire.

In presence of that rushing torrent, Madame Vincent, with her dear little burden in her arms, hesitated to cross over. Bursts of laughter rang out around her every now and then. Oh! what a filthy mess! And at sight of all the mud, the women caught up their skirts before attempting to pass through it. At last, when the courtyard had somewhat emptied, Madame Vincent herself ventured on her way, all terror lest the mire should make her fall in that black darkness. Then, on reaching a downhill road, she noticed there a number of women of the locality who were on the watch, offering furnished rooms, bed and board, according to the state of the pilgrim's purse.

"Which is the way to the Grotto, madame, if you please?" asked Madame Vincent, addressing one old woman of the party.

Instead of answering the question, however, the other offered her a cheap room. "You won't find anything in the hotels," said she, "for they are all full. Perhaps you will be able to eat there, but you certainly won't find a closet even to sleep in."

Eat, sleep, indeed! Had Madame Vincent any thought of such things; she who had left Paris with thirty sous in her pocket, all that remained to her after the expenses she had been put to!

"The way to the Grotto, if you please, madame?" she repeated.

Among the women who were thus touting for lodgers, there was a tall, well-built girl, dressed like a superior servant, and looking very clean, with carefully tended hands. She glanced at Madame Vincent and slightly shrugged her shoulders. And then, seeing a broad-chested priest with a red face go by, she rushed after him, offered him a furnished room, and continued following him, whispering in his ear.

Another girl, however, at last took pity on Madame Vincent and said to her: "Here, go down this road, and when you get to the bottom, turn to the right and you will reach the Grotto."

Meanwhile, the confusion inside the station continued. The healthy pilgrims, and those of the sick who retained the use of their legs could go off, thus, in some measure, clearing the platform; but the others, the more grievously stricken sufferers whom it was difficult to get out of the carriages and remove to the hospital, remained waiting. The bearers seemed to become quite bewildered, rushing madly hither and thither with their litters and vehicles, not knowing at what end to set about the profusion of work which lay before them.

As Berthaud, followed by Gerard, went along the platform, gesticulating, he noticed two ladies and a girl who were standing under a gas jet and to all appearance waiting. In the girl he recognised Raymonde, and with a sign of the hand he at once stopped his companion. "Ah! mademoiselle," said he, "how pleased I am to see you! Is Madame de Jonquiere quite well? You have made a good journey, I hope?" Then, without a pause, he added: "This is my friend, Monsieur Gerard de Peyrelongue."

Raymonde gazed fixedly at the young man with her clear, smiling eyes. "Oh! I already have the pleasure of being slightly acquainted with this gentleman," she said. "We have previously met one another at Lourdes."

Thereupon Gerard, who thought that his cousin Berthaud was conducting matters too quickly, and was quite resolved that he would not enter into any hasty engagement, contented himself with bowing in a ceremonious way.

"We are waiting for mamma," resumed Raymonde. "She is extremely busy; she has to see after some pilgrims who are very ill."

At this, little Madame Desagneaux, with her pretty, light wavy-haired head, began to say that it served Madame de Jonquiere right for refusing her services. She herself was stamping with impatience, eager to join in the work and make herself useful, whilst Madame Volmar, silent, shrinking back as though taking no interest in it at all, seemed simply desirous of penetrating the darkness, as though, indeed, she were seeking somebody with those magnificent eyes of hers, usually bedimmed, but now shining out like brasiers.

Just then, however, they were all pushed back. Madame Dieulafay was being removed from her first-class compartment, and Madame Desagneaux could not restrain an exclamation of pity. "Ah! the poor woman!"

There could in fact be no more distressing sight than this young woman, encompassed by luxury, covered with lace in her species of coffin, so wasted that she seemed to be a mere human shred, deposited on that platform till it could be taken away. Her husband and her sister, both very elegant and very sad, remained standing near her, whilst a man-servant and maid ran off with the valises to ascertain if the carriage which had been ordered by telegram was in the courtyard. Abbe Judaine also helped the sufferer; and when two men at last took her up he bent over her and wished her au revoir, adding some kind words which she did not seem to hear. Then as he watched her removal, he resumed, addressing himself to Berthaud, whom he knew: "Ah! the poor people, if they could only purchase their dear sufferer's cure. I told them that prayer was the most precious thing in the Blessed Virgin's eyes, and I hope that I have myself prayed fervently enough to obtain the compassion of Heaven. Nevertheless, they have brought a magnificent gift, a golden lantern for the Basilica, a perfect marvel, adorned with precious stones. May the Immaculate Virgin deign to smile upon it!"

In this way a great many offerings were brought by the pilgrims. Some huge bouquets of flowers had just gone by, together with a kind of triple crown of roses, mounted on a wooden stand. And the old priest explained that before leaving the station he wished to secure a banner, the gift of the beautiful Madame Jousseur, Madame Dieulafay's sister.

Madame de Jonquiere was at last approaching, however, and on perceiving Berthaud and Gerard she exclaimed: "Pray do go to that carriage, gentlemen—that one, there! We want some men very badly. There are three or four sick persons to be taken out. I am in despair; I can do nothing myself."

Gerard ran off after bowing to Raymonde, whilst Berthaud advised Madame de Jonquiere to leave the station with her daughter and those ladies instead of remaining on the platform. Her presence was in nowise necessary, he said; he would undertake everything, and within three quarters of an hour she would find her patients in her ward at the hospital. She ended by giving way, and took a conveyance in company with Raymonde and Madame Desagneaux. As for Madame Volmar, she had at the last moment disappeared, as though seized with a sudden fit of impatience. The others fancied that they had seen her approach a strange gentleman, with the object no doubt of making some inquiry of him. However, they would of course find her at the hospital.

Berthaud joined Gerard again just as the young man, assisted by two fellow-bearers, was endeavouring to remove M. Sabathier from the carriage. It was a difficult task, for he was very stout and very heavy, and they began to think that he would never pass through the doorway of the compartment. However, as he had been got in they ought to be able to get him out; and indeed when two other bearers had entered the carriage from the other side, they were at last able to deposit him on the platform.

The dawn was now appearing, a faint pale dawn; and the platform presented the woeful appearance of an improvised hospital. La Grivotte, who had lost consciousness, lay there on a mattress pending her removal in a litter; whilst Madame Vetu had been seated against a lamp-post, suffering so severely from another attack of her ailment that they scarcely dared to touch her. Some hospitallers, whose hands were gloved, were with difficulty wheeling their little vehicles in which were poor, sordid-looking women with old baskets at their feet. Others, with stretchers on which lay the stiffened, woeful bodies of silent sufferers, whose eyes gleamed with anguish, found themselves unable to pass; but some of the infirm pilgrims, some unfortunate cripples, contrived to slip through the ranks, among them a young priest who was lame, and a little humpbacked boy, one of whose legs had been amputated, and who, looking like a gnome, managed to drag himself with his crutches from group to group. Then there was quite a block around a man who was bent in half, twisted by paralysis to such a point that he had to be carried on a chair with his head and feet hanging downward. It seemed as though hours would be required to clear the platform.

The dismay therefore reached a climax when the station-master suddenly rushed up shouting: "The Bayonne express is signalled. Make haste! make haste! You have only three minutes left!"

Father Fourcade, who had remained in the midst of the throng, leaning on Doctor Bonamy's arm, and gaily encouraging the more stricken of the sufferers, beckoned to Berthaud and said to him: "Finish taking them out of the train; you will be able to clear the platform afterwards!"

The advice was very sensible, and in accordance with it they finished placing the sufferers on the platform. In Madame de Jonquiere's carriage Marie now alone remained, waiting patiently. M. de Guersaint and Pierre had at last returned to her, bringing the two pairs of wheels by means of which the box in which she lay was rolled about. And with Gerard's assistance Pierre in all haste removed the girl from the train. She was as light as a poor shivering bird, and it was only the box that gave them any trouble. However, they soon placed it on the wheels and made the latter fast, and then Pierre might have rolled Marie away had it not been for the crowd which hampered him.

"Make haste! make haste!" furiously repeated the station-master.

He himself lent a hand, taking hold of a sick man by the feet in order to remove him from the compartment more speedily. And he also pushed the little hand-carts back, so as to clear the edge of the platform. In a second-class carriage, however, there still remained one woman who had just been overpowered by a terrible nervous attack. She was howling and struggling, and it was impossible to think of touching her at that moment. But on the other hand the express, signalled by the incessant tinkling of the electric bells, was now fast approaching, and they had to close the door and in all haste shunt the train to the siding where it would remain for three days, until in fact it was required to convey its load of sick and healthy passengers back to Paris. As it went off to the siding the crowd still heard the cries of the suffering woman, whom it had been necessary to leave in it, in charge of a Sister, cries which grew weaker and weaker, like those of a strengthless child whom one at last succeeds in consoling.

"Good Lord!" muttered the station-master; "it was high time!"

In fact the Bayonne express was now coming along at full speed, and the next moment it rushed like a crash of thunder past that woeful platform littered with all the grievous wretchedness of a hospital hastily evacuated. The litters and little handcarts were shaken, but there was no accident, for the porters were on the watch, and pushed back the bewildered flock which was still jostling and struggling in its eagerness to get away. As soon as the express had passed, however, circulation was re-established, and the bearers were at last able to complete the removal of the sick with prudent deliberation.

Little by little the daylight was increasing—a clear dawn it was, whitening the heavens whose reflection illumined the earth, which was still black. One began to distinguish things and people clearly.

"Oh, by-and-by!" Marie repeated to Pierre, as he endeavoured to roll her away. "Let us wait till some part of the crowd has gone."

Then, looking around, she began to feel interested in a man of military bearing, apparently some sixty years of age, who was walking about among the sick pilgrims. With a square-shaped head and white bushy hair, he would still have looked sturdy if he had not dragged his left foot, throwing it inward at each step he took. With the left hand, too, he leant heavily on a thick walking-stick. When M. Sabathier, who had visited Lourdes for six years past, perceived him, he became quite gay. "Ah!" said he, "it is you, Commander!"

Commander was perhaps the old man's name. But as he was decorated with a broad red riband, he was possibly called Commander on account of his decoration, albeit the latter was that of a mere chevalier. Nobody exactly knew his story. No doubt he had relatives and children of his own somewhere, but these matters remained vague and mysterious. For the last three years he had been employed at the railway station as a superintendent in the goods department, a simple occupation, a little berth which had been given him by favour and which enabled him to live in perfect happiness. A first stroke of apoplexy at fifty-five years of age had been followed by a second one three years later, which had left him slightly paralysed in the left side. And now he was awaiting the third stroke with an air of perfect tranquillity. As he himself put it, he was at the disposal of death, which might come for him that night, the next day, or possibly that very moment. All Lourdes knew him on account of the habit, the mania he had, at pilgrimage time, of coming to witness the arrival of the trains, dragging his foot along and leaning upon his stick, whilst expressing his astonishment and reproaching the ailing ones for their intense desire to be made whole and sound again.

This was the third year that he had seen M. Sabathier arrive, and all his anger fell upon him. "What! you have come back again!" he exclaimed. "Well, you must be desirous of living this hateful life! But sacrebleu! go and die quietly in your bed at home. Isn't that the best thing that can happen to anyone?"

M. Sabathier evinced no anger, but laughed, exhausted though he was by the handling to which he had been subjected during his removal from the carriage. "No, no," said he, "I prefer to be cured."

"To be cured, to be cured! That's what they all ask for. They travel hundreds of leagues and arrive in fragments, howling with pain, and all this to be cured—to go through every worry and every suffering again. Come, monsieur, you would be nicely caught if, at your age and with your dilapidated old body, your Blessed Virgin should be pleased to restore the use of your legs to you. What would you do with them, mon Dieu? What pleasure would you find in prolonging the abomination of old age for a few years more? It's much better to die at once, while you are like that! Death is happiness!"

He spoke in this fashion, not as a believer who aspires to the delicious reward of eternal life, but as a weary man who expects to fall into nihility, to enjoy the great everlasting peace of being no more.

Whilst M. Sabathier was gaily shrugging his shoulders as though he had a child to deal with, Abbe Judaine, who had at last secured his banner, came by and stopped for a moment in order that he might gently scold the Commander, with whom he also was well acquainted.

"Don't blaspheme, my dear friend," he said. "It is an offence against God to refuse life and to treat health with contempt. If you yourself had listened to me, you would have asked the Blessed Virgin to cure your leg before now."

At this the Commander became angry. "My leg! The Virgin can do nothing to it! I'm quite at my ease. May death come and may it all be over forever! When the time comes to die you turn your face to the wall and you die—it's simple enough."

The old priest interrupted him, however. Pointing to Marie, who was lying on her box listening to them, he exclaimed: "You tell all our sick to go home and die—even mademoiselle, eh? She who is full of youth and wishes to live."

Marie's eyes were wide open, burning with the ardent desire which she felt to be, to enjoy her share of the vast world; and the Commander, who had drawn near, gazed upon her, suddenly seized with deep emotion which made his voice tremble. "If mademoiselle gets well," he said, "I will wish her another miracle, that she be happy."

Then he went off, dragging his foot and tapping the flagstones with the ferrule of his stout stick as he continued wending his way, like an angry philosopher among the suffering pilgrims.

Little by little, the platform was at last cleared. Madame Vetu and La Grivotte were carried away, and Gerard removed M. Sabathier in a little cart, whilst Baron Suire and Berthaud already began giving orders for the green train, which would be the next one to arrive. Of all the ailing pilgrims the only one now remaining at the station was Marie, of whom Pierre jealously took charge. He had already dragged her into the courtyard when he noticed that M. de Guersaint had disappeared; but a moment later he perceived him conversing with the Abbe des Hermoises, whose acquaintance he had just made. Their admiration of the beauties of nature had brought them together. The daylight had now appeared, and the surrounding mountains displayed themselves in all their majesty.

"What a lovely country, monsieur!" exclaimed M. de Guersaint. "I have been wishing to see the Cirque de Gavarnie for thirty years past. But it is some distance away and the trip must be an expensive one, so that I fear I shall not be able to make it."

"You are mistaken, monsieur," said the Abbe; "nothing is more easily managed. By making up a party the expense becomes very slight. And as it happens, I wish to return there this year, so that if you would like to join us—"

"Oh, certainly, monsieur. We will speak of it again. A thousand thanks," replied M. de Guersaint.

His daughter was now calling him, however, and he joined her after taking leave of the Abbe in a very cordial manner. Pierre had decided that he would drag Marie to the hospital so as to spare her the pain of transference to another vehicle. But as the omnibuses, landaus, and other conveyances were already coming back, again filling the courtyard in readiness for the arrival of the next train, the young priest had some difficulty in reaching the road with the little chariot whose low wheels sank deeply in the mud. Some police agents charged with maintaining order were cursing that fearful mire which splashed their boots; and indeed it was only the touts, the young and old women who had rooms to let, who laughed at the puddles, which they crossed and crossed again in every direction, pursuing the last pilgrims that emerged from the station.

When the little car had begun to roll more easily over the sloping road Marie suddenly inquired of M. de Guersaint, who was walking near her: "What day of the week is it, father?"

"Saturday, my darling."

"Ah! yes, Saturday, the day of the Blessed Virgin. Is it to-day that she will cure me?"

Then she began thinking again; while, at some distance behind her, two bearers came furtively down the road, with a covered stretcher in which lay the corpse of the man who had died in the train. They had gone to take it from behind the barrels in the goods office, and were now conveying it to a secret spot of which Father Fourcade had told them.

II. HOSPITAL AND GROTTO

BUILT, so far as it extends, by a charitable Canon, and left unfinished through lack of money, the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours is a vast pile, four storeys high, and consequently far too lofty, since it is difficult to carry the sufferers to the topmost wards. As a rule the building is occupied by a hundred infirm and aged paupers; but at the season of the national pilgrimage these old folks are for three days sheltered elsewhere, and the hospital is let to the Fathers of the Assumption, who at times lodge in it as many as five and six hundred patients. Still, however closely packed they may be, the accommodation never suffices, so that the three or four hundred remaining sufferers have to be distributed between the Hospital of Salvation and the town hospital, the men being sent to the former and the women to the latter institution.

That morning at sunrise great confusion prevailed in the sand-covered courtyard of Our Lady of Dolours, at the door of which a couple of priests were mounting guard. The temporary staff, with its formidable supply of registers, cards, and printed formulas, had installed itself in one of the ground-floor rooms on the previous day. The managers were desirous of greatly improving upon the organisation of the preceding year. The lower wards were this time to be reserved to the most helpless sufferers; and in order to prevent a repetition of the cases of mistaken identity which had occurred in the past, very great care was to be taken in filling in and distributing the admission cards, each of which bore the name of a ward and the number of a bed. It became difficult, however, to act in accordance with these good intentions in presence of the torrent of ailing beings which the white train had brought to Lourdes, and the new formalities so complicated matters that the patients had to be deposited in the courtyard as they arrived, to wait there until it became possible to admit them in something like an orderly manner. It was the scene witnessed at the railway station all over again, the same woeful camping in the open, whilst the bearers and the young seminarists who acted as the secretary's assistants ran hither and thither in bewilderment.

"We have been over-ambitious, we wanted to do things too well!" exclaimed Baron Suire in despair.

There was much truth in his remark, for never had a greater number of useless precautions been taken, and they now discovered that, by some inexplicable error, they had allotted not the lower—but the higher-placed wards to the patients whom it was most difficult to move. It was impossible to begin the classification afresh, however, and so as in former years things must be allowed to take their course, in a haphazard way. The distribution of the cards began, a young priest at the same time entering each patient's name and address in a register. Moreover, all the hospitalisation cards bearing the patients' names and numbers had to be produced, so that the names of the wards and the numbers of the beds might be added to them; and all these formalities greatly protracted the defile.

Then there was an endless coming and going from the top to the bottom of the building, and from one to the other end of each of its four floors. M. Sabathier was one of the first to secure admittance, being placed in a ground-floor room which was known as the Family Ward. Sick men were there allowed to have their wives with them; but to the other wards of the hospital only women were admitted. Brother Isidore, it is true, was accompanied by his sister; however, by a special favour it was agreed that they should be considered as conjoints, and the missionary was accordingly placed in the bed next to that allotted to M. Sabathier. The chapel, still littered with plaster and with its unfinished windows boarded up, was close at hand. There were also various wards in an unfinished state; still these were filled with mattresses, on which sufferers were rapidly placed. All those who could walk, however, were already besieging the refectory, a long gallery whose broad windows looked into an inner courtyard; and the Saint-Frai Sisters, who managed the hospital at other times, and had remained to attend to the cooking, began to distribute bowls of coffee and chocolate among the poor women whom the terrible journey had exhausted.

"Rest yourselves and try to gain a little strength," repeated Baron Suire, who was ever on the move, showing himself here, there, and everywhere in rapid succession. "You have three good hours before you, it is not yet five, and their reverences have given orders that you are not to be taken to the Grotto until eight o'clock, so as to avoid any excessive fatigue."

Meanwhile, up above on the second floor, Madame de Jonquiere had been one of the first to take possession of the Sainte-Honorine Ward of which she was the superintendent. She had been obliged to leave her daughter Raymonde downstairs, for the regulations did not allow young girls to enter the wards, where they might have witnessed sights that were scarcely proper or else too horrible for such eyes as theirs. Raymonde had therefore remained in the refectory as a helper; however, little Madame Desagneaux, being a lady-hospitaller, had not left the superintendent, and was already asking her for orders, in her delight that she should at last be able to render some assistance.

"Are all these beds properly made, madame?" she inquired; "perhaps I had better make them afresh with Sister Hyacinthe."

The ward, whose walls were painted a light yellow, and whose few windows admitted but little light from an inner yard, contained fifteen beds, standing in two rows against the walls.

"We will see by-and-by," replied Madame de Jonquiere with an absorbed air. She was busy counting the beds and examining the long narrow apartment. And this accomplished she added in an undertone: "I shall never have room enough. They say that I must accommodate twenty-three patients. We shall have to put some mattresses down."

Sister Hyacinthe, who had followed the ladies after leaving Sister Saint-Francois and Sister Claire des Anges in a small adjoining apartment which was being transformed into a linen-room, then began to lift up the coverlets and examine the bedding. And she promptly reassured Madame Desagneaux with regard to her surmises. "Oh! the beds are properly made," she said; "everything is very clean too. One can see that the Saint-Frai Sisters have attended to things themselves. The reserve mattresses are in the next room, however, and if madame will lend me a hand we can place some of them between the beds at once.

"Oh, certainly!" exclaimed young Madame Desagneaux, quite excited by the idea of carrying mattresses about with her weak slender arms.

It became necessary for Madame de Jonquiere to calm her. "By-and-by," said the lady-superintendent; "there is no hurry. Let us wait till our patients arrive. I don't much like this ward, it is so difficult to air. Last year I had the Sainte-Rosalie Ward on the first floor. However, we will organise matters, all the same."

Some other lady-hospitallers were now arriving, quite a hiveful of busy bees, all eager to start on their work. The confusion which so often arose was, in fact, increased by the excessive number of nurses, women of the aristocracy and upper-middle class, with whose fervent zeal some little vanity was blended. There were more than two hundred of them, and as each had to make a donation on joining the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation, the managers did not dare to refuse any applicants, for fear lest they might check the flow of alms-giving. Thus the number of lady-hospitallers increased year by year. Fortunately there were among them some who cared for nothing beyond the privilege of wearing the red cloth cross, and who started off on excursions as soon as they reached Lourdes. Still it must be acknowledged that those who devoted themselves were really deserving, for they underwent five days of awful fatigue, sleeping scarcely a couple of hours each night, and living in the midst of the most terrible and repulsive spectacles. They witnessed the death agonies, dressed the pestilential sores, cleaned up, changed linen, turned the sufferers over in their beds, went through a sickening and overwhelming labour to which they were in no wise accustomed. And thus they emerged from it aching all over, tired to death, with feverish eyes flaming with the joy of the charity which so excited them.

"And Madame Volmar?" suddenly asked Madame Desagneaux. "I thought we should find her here."

This was apparently a subject which Madame de Jonquiere did not care to have discussed; for, as though she were aware of the truth and wished to bury it in silence, with the indulgence of a woman who compassionates human wretchedness, she promptly retorted: "Madame Volmar isn't strong, she must have gone to the hotel to rest. We must let her sleep."

Then she apportioned the beds among the ladies present, allotting two to each of them; and this done they all finished taking possession of the place, hastening up and down and backwards and forwards in order to ascertain where the offices, the linen-room, and the kitchens were situated.

"And the dispensary?" then asked one of the ladies.

But there was no dispensary. There was no medical staff even. What would have been the use of any?—since the patients were those whom science had given up, despairing creatures who had come to beg of God the cure which powerless men were unable to promise them. Logically enough, all treatment was suspended during the pilgrimage. If a patient seemed likely to die, extreme unction was administered. The only medical man about the place was the young doctor who had come by the white train with his little medicine chest; and his intervention was limited to an endeavour to assuage the sufferings of those patients who chanced to ask for him during an attack.

As it happened, Sister Hyacinthe was just bringing Ferrand, whom Sister Saint-Francois had kept with her in a closet near the linen-room which he proposed to make his quarters. "Madame," said he to Madame de Jonquiere, "I am entirely at your disposal. In case of need you will only have to ring for me."

She barely listened to him, however, engaged as she was in a quarrel with a young priest belonging to the management with reference to a deficiency of certain utensils. "Certainly, monsieur, if we should need a soothing draught," she answered, and then, reverting to her discussion, she went on: "Well, Monsieur l'Abbe, you must certainly get me four or five more. How can we possibly manage with so few? Things are bad enough as it is."

Ferrand looked and listened, quite bewildered by the extraordinary behaviour of the people amongst whom he had been thrown by chance since the previous day. He who did not believe, who was only present out of friendship and charity, was amazed at this extraordinary scramble of wretchedness and suffering rushing towards the hope of happiness. And, as a medical man of the new school, he was altogether upset by the careless neglect of precautions, the contempt which was shown for the most simple teachings of science, in the certainty which was apparently felt that, if Heaven should so will it, cure would supervene, sudden and resounding, like a lie given to the very laws of nature. But if this were the case, what was the use of that last concession to human prejudices—why engage a doctor for the journey if none were wanted? At this thought the young man returned to his little room, experiencing a vague feeling of shame as he realised that his presence was useless, and even a trifle ridiculous.

"Get some opium pills ready all the same," said Sister Hyacinthe, as she went back with him as far as the linen-room. "You will be asked for some, for I feel anxious about some of the patients."

While speaking she looked at him with her large blue eyes, so gentle and so kind, and ever lighted by a divine smile. The constant exercise which she gave herself brought the rosy flush of her quick blood to her skin all dazzling with youthfulness. And like a good friend who was willing that he should share the work to which she gave her heart, she added: "Besides, if I should need somebody to get a patient in or out of bed, you will help me, won't you?"

Thereupon, at the idea that he might be of use to her, he was pleased that he had come and was there. In his mind's eye, he again beheld her at his bedside, at the time when he had so narrowly escaped death, nursing him with fraternal hands, with the smiling, compassionate grace of a sexless angel, in whom there was something more than a comrade, something of a woman left. However, the thought never occurred to him that there was religion, belief, behind her.

"Oh! I will help you as much as you like, Sister," he replied. "I belong to you, I shall be so happy to serve you. You know very well what a debt of gratitude I have to pay you."

In a pretty way she raised her finger to her lips so as to silence him. Nobody owed her anything. She was merely the servant of the ailing and the poor.

At this moment a first patient was making her entry into the Sainte-Honorine Ward. It was Marie, lying in her wooden box, which Pierre, with Gerard's assistance, had just brought up-stairs. The last to start from the railway station, she had secured admission before the others, thanks to the endless complications which, after keeping them all in suspense, now freed them according to the chance distribution of the admission cards. M. de Guersaint had quitted his daughter at the hospital door by her own desire; for, fearing the hotels would be very full, she had wished him to secure two rooms for himself and Pierre at once. Then, on reaching the ward, she felt so weary that, after venting her chagrin at not being immediately taken to the Grotto, she consented to be laid on a bed for a short time.

"Come, my child," repeated Madame de Jonquiere, "you have three hours before you. We will put you to bed. It will ease you to take you out of that case."

Thereupon the lady-superintendent raised her by the shoulders, whilst Sister Hyacinthe held her feet. The bed was in the central part of the ward, near a window. For a moment the poor girl remained on it with her eyes closed, as though exhausted by being moved about so much. Then it became necessary that Pierre should be readmitted, for she grew very fidgety, saying that there were things which she must explain to him.

"Pray don't go away, my friend," she exclaimed when he approached her. "Take the case out on to the landing, but stay there, because I want to be taken down as soon as I can get permission."

"Do you feel more comfortable now?" asked the young priest.

"Yes, no doubt—but I really don't know. I so much want to be taken yonder to the Blessed Virgin's feet."

However, when Pierre had removed the case, the successive arrivals of the other patients supplied her with some little diversion. Madame Vetu, whom two bearers had brought up-stairs, holding her under the arms, was laid, fully dressed, on the next bed, where she remained motionless, scarce breathing, with her heavy, yellow, cancerous mask. None of the patients, it should be mentioned, were divested of their clothes, they were simply stretched out on the beds, and advised to go to sleep if they could manage to do so. Those whose complaints were less grievous contented themselves with sitting down on their mattresses, chatting together, and putting the things they had brought with them in order. For instance, Elise Rouquet, who was also near Marie, on the other side of the latter's bed, opened her basket to take a clean fichu out of it, and seemed sorely annoyed at having no hand-glass with her. In less than ten minutes all the beds were occupied, so that when La Grivotte appeared, half carried by Sister Hyacinthe and Sister Claire des Anges, it became necessary to place some mattresses on the floor.

"Here! here is one," exclaimed Madame Desagneaux; "she will be very well here, out of the draught from the door."

Seven other mattresses were soon added in a line, occupying the space between the rows of beds, so that it became difficult to move about. One had to be very careful, and follow narrow pathways which had been left between the beds and the mattresses. Each of the patients had retained possession of her parcel, or box, or bag, and round about the improvised shakedowns were piles of poor old things, sorry remnants of garments, straying among the sheets and the coverlets. You might have thought yourself in some woeful infirmary, hastily organised after some great catastrophe, some conflagration or earthquake which had thrown hundreds of wounded and penniless beings into the streets.

Madame de Jonquiere made her way from one to the other end of the ward, ever and ever repeating, "Come, my children, don't excite yourselves; try to sleep a little."

However, she did not succeed in calming them, and indeed, she herself, like the other lady-hospitallers under her orders, increased the general fever by her own bewilderment. The linen of several patients had to be changed, and there were other needs to be attended to. One woman, suffering from an ulcer in the leg, began moaning so dreadfully that Madame Desagneaux undertook to dress her sore afresh; but she was not skilful, and despite all her passionate courage she almost fainted, so greatly was she distressed by the unbearable odour. Those patients who were in better health asked for broth, bowlfuls of which began to circulate amidst the calls, the answers, and the contradictory orders which nobody executed. And meanwhile, let loose amidst this frightful scramble, little Sophie Couteau, who remained with the Sisters, and was very gay, imagined that it was playtime, and ran, and jumped, and hopped in turn, called and petted first by one and then by another, dear as she was to all alike for the miraculous hope which she brought them.

However, amidst this agitation, the hours went by. Seven o'clock had just struck when Abbe Judaine came in. He was the chaplain of the Sainte-Honorine Ward, and only the difficulty of finding an unoccupied altar at which he might say his mass had delayed his arrival. As soon as he appeared, a cry of impatience arose from every bed.

"Oh! Monsieur le Cure, let us start, let us start at once!"

An ardent desire, which each passing minute heightened and irritated, was upbuoying them, like a more and more devouring thirst, which only the waters of the miraculous fountain could appease. And more fervently than any of the others, La Grivotte, sitting up on her mattress, and joining her hands, begged and begged that she might be taken to the Grotto. Was there not a beginning of the miracle in this—in this awakening of her will power, this feverish desire for cure which enabled her to set herself erect? Inert and fainting on her arrival, she was now seated, turning her dark glances in all directions, waiting and watching for the happy moment when she would be removed. And colour also was returning to her livid face. She was already resuscitating.

"Oh! Monsieur le Cure, pray do tell them to take me—I feel that I shall be cured," she exclaimed.

With a loving, fatherly smile on his good-natured face, Abbe Judaine listened to them all, and allayed their impatience with kind words. They would soon set out; but they must be reasonable, and allow sufficient time for things to be organised; and besides, the Blessed Virgin did not like to have violence done her; she bided her time, and distributed her divine favours among those who behaved themselves the best.

As he paused before Marie's bed and beheld her, stammering entreaties with joined hands, he again paused. "And you, too, my daughter, you are in a hurry?" he said. "Be easy, there is grace enough in heaven for you all."

"I am dying of love, Father," she murmured in reply. "My heart is so swollen with prayers, it stifles me—"

He was greatly touched by the passion of this poor emaciated child, so harshly stricken in her youth and beauty, and wishing to appease her, he called her attention to Madame Vetu, who did not move, though with her eyes wide open she stared at all who passed.

"Look at madame, how quiet she is!" he said. "She is meditating, and she does right to place herself in God's hands, like a little child."

However, in a scarcely audible voice, a mere breath, Madame Vetu stammered: "Oh! I am suffering, I am suffering."

At last, at a quarter to eight o'clock, Madame de Jonquiere warned her charges that they would do well to prepare themselves. She herself, assisted by Sister Hyacinthe and Madame Desagneaux, buttoned several dresses, and put shoes on impotent feet. It was a real toilette, for they all desired to appear to the greatest advantage before the Blessed Virgin. A large number had sufficient sense of delicacy to wash their hands. Others unpacked their parcels, and put on clean linen. On her side, Elise Rouquet had ended by discovering a little pocket-glass in the hands of a woman near her, a huge, dropsical creature, who was very coquettish; and having borrowed it, she leant it against the bolster, and then, with infinite care, began to fasten her fichu as elegantly as possible about her head, in order to hide her distorted features. Meanwhile, erect in front of her, little Sophie watched her with an air of profound interest.

It was Abbe Judaine who gave the signal for starting on the journey to the Grotto. He wished, he said, to accompany his dear suffering daughters thither, whilst the lady-hospitallers and the Sisters remained in the ward, so as to put things in some little order again. Then the ward was at once emptied, the patients being carried down-stairs amidst renewed tumult. And Pierre, having replaced Marie's box upon its wheels, took the first place in the cortege, which was formed of a score of little handcarts, bath-chairs, and litters. The other wards, however, were also emptying, the courtyard became crowded, and the defile was organised in haphazard fashion. There was soon an interminable train descending the rather steep slope of the Avenue de la Grotte, so that Pierre was already reaching the Plateau de la Merlasse when the last stretchers were barely leaving the precincts of the hospital.

It was eight o'clock, and the sun, already high, a triumphant August sun, was flaming in the great sky, which was beautifully clear. It seemed as if the blue of the atmosphere, cleansed by the storm of the previous night, were quite new, fresh with youth. And the frightful defile, a perfect "Cour des Miracles" of human woe, rolled along the sloping pavement amid all the brilliancy of that radiant morning. There was no end to the train of abominations; it appeared to grow longer and longer. No order was observed, ailments of all kinds were jumbled together; it seemed like the clearing of some inferno where the most monstrous maladies, the rare and awful cases which provoke a shudder, had been gathered together. Eczema, roseola, elephantiasis, presented a long array of doleful victims. Well-nigh vanished diseases reappeared; one old woman was affected with leprosy, another was, covered with impetiginous lichen like a tree which has rotted in the shade. Then came the dropsical ones, inflated like wine-skins; and beside some stretchers there dangled hands twisted by rheumatism, while from others protruded feet swollen by oedema beyond all recognition, looking, in fact, like bags full of rags. One woman, suffering from hydrocephalus, sat in a little cart, the dolorous motions of her head bespeaking her grievous malady. A tall girl afflicted with chorea—St. Vitus's dance—was dancing with every limb, without a pause, the left side of her face being continually distorted by sudden, convulsive grimaces. A younger one, who followed, gave vent to a bark, a kind of plaintive animal cry, each time that the tic douloureux which was torturing her twisted her mouth and her right cheek, which she seemed to throw forward. Next came the consumptives, trembling with fever, exhausted by dysentery, wasted to skeletons, with livid skins, recalling the colour of that earth in which they would soon be laid to rest; and there was one among them who was quite white, with flaming eyes, who looked indeed like a death's head in which a torch had been lighted. Then every deformity of the contractions followed in succession—twisted trunks, twisted arms, necks askew, all the distortions of poor creatures whom nature had warped and broken; and among these was one whose right hand was thrust back behind her ribs whilst her head fell to the left resting fixedly upon her shoulder. Afterwards came poor rachitic girls displaying waxen complexions and slender necks eaten away by sores, and yellow-faced women in the painful stupor which falls on those whose bosoms are devoured by cancers; whilst others, lying down with their mournful eyes gazing heavenwards, seemed to be listening to the throbs of the tumours which obstructed their organs. And still more and more went by; there was always something more frightful to come; this woman following that other one increased the general shudder of horror. From the neck of a girl of twenty who had a crushed, flattened head like a toad's, there hung so large a goitre that it fell even to her waist like the bib of an apron. A blind woman walked along, her head erect, her face pale like marble, displaying the acute inflammation of her poor, ulcerated eyes. An aged woman stricken with imbecility, afflicted with dreadful facial disfigurements, laughed aloud with a terrifying laugh. And all at once an epileptic was seized with convulsions, and began foaming on her stretcher, without, however, causing any stoppage of the procession, which never slackened its march, lashed onward as it was by the blizzard of feverish passion which impelled it towards the Grotto.

The bearers, the priests, and the ailing ones themselves had just intonated a canticle, the song of Bernadette, and all rolled along amid the besetting "Aves," so that the little carts, the litters, and the pedestrians descended the sloping road like a swollen and overflowing torrent of roaring water. At the corner of the Rue Saint-Joseph, near the Plateau de la Merlasse, a family of excursionists, who had come from Cauterets or Bagneres, stood at the edge of the footway, overcome with profound astonishment. These people were evidently well-to-do bourgeois, the father and mother very correct in appearance and demeanour, while their two big girls, attired in light-coloured dresses, had the smiling faces of happy creatures who are amusing themselves. But their first feeling of surprise was soon followed by terror, a growing terror, as if they beheld the opening of some pesthouse of ancient times, some hospital of the legendary ages, evacuated after a great epidemic. The two girls became quite pale, while the father and the mother felt icy cold in presence of that endless defile of so many horrors, the pestilential emanations of which were blown full in their faces. O God! to think that such hideousness, such filth, such suffering, should exist! Was it possible—under that magnificently radiant sun, under those broad heavens so full of light and joy whither the freshness of the Gave's waters ascended, and the breeze of morning wafted the pure perfumes of the mountains!

When Pierre, at the head of the cortege, reached the Plateau de la Merlasse, he found himself immersed in that clear sunlight, that fresh and balmy air. He turned round and smiled affectionately at Marie; and as they came out on the Place du Rosaire in the morning splendour, they were both enchanted with the lovely panorama which spread around them.

In front, on the east, was Old Lourdes, lying in a broad fold of the ground beyond a rock. The sun was rising behind the distant mountains, and its oblique rays clearly outlined the dark lilac mass of that solitary rock, which was crowned by the tower and crumbling walls of the ancient castle, once the redoubtable key of the seven valleys. Through the dancing, golden dust you discerned little of the ruined pile except some stately outlines, some huge blocks of building which looked as though reared by Cyclopean hands; and beyond the rock you but vaguely distinguished the discoloured, intermingled house-roofs of the old town. Nearer in than the castle, however, the new town—the rich and noisy city which had sprung up in a few years as though by miracle—spread out on either hand, displaying its hotels, its stylish shops, its lodging-houses all with white fronts smiling amidst patches of greenery. Then there was the Gave flowing along at the base of the rock, rolling clamorous, clear waters, now blue and now green, now deep as they passed under the old bridge, and now leaping as they careered under the new one, which the Fathers of the Immaculate Conception had built in order to connect the Grotto with the railway station and the recently opened Boulevard. And as a background to this delightful picture, this fresh water, this greenery, this gay, scattered, rejuvenated town, the little and the big Gers arose, two huge ridges of bare rock and low herbage, which, in the projected shade that bathed them, assumed delicate tints of pale mauve and green, fading softly into pink.

Then, upon the north, on the right bank of the Gave, beyond the hills followed by the railway line, the heights of La Buala ascended, their wooded slopes radiant in the morning light. On that side lay Bartres. More to the left arose the Serre de Julos, dominated by the Miramont. Other crests, far off, faded away into the ether. And in the foreground, rising in tiers among the grassy valleys beyond the Gave, a number of convents, which seemed to have sprung up in this region of prodigies like early vegetation, imparted some measure of life to the landscape. First, there was an Orphan Asylum founded by the Sisters of Nevers, whose vast buildings shone brightly in the sunlight. Next came the Carmelite convent, on the highway to Pau, just in front of the Grotto; and then that of the Assumptionists higher up, skirting the road to Poueyferre; whilst the Dominicans showed but a corner of their roofs, sequestered in the far-away solitude. And at last appeared the establishment of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, those who were called the Blue Sisters, and who had founded at the far end of the valley a home where they received well-to-do lady pilgrims, desirous of solitude, as boarders.

At that early hour all the bells of these convents were pealing joyfully in the crystalline atmosphere, whilst the bells of other convents, on the other, the southern horizon, answered them with the same silvery strains of joy. The bell of the nunnery of Sainte Clarissa, near the old bridge, rang a scale of gay, clear notes, which one might have fancied to be the chirruping of a bird. And on this side of the town, also, there were valleys that dipped down between the ridges, and mountains that upreared their bare sides, a commingling of smiling and of agitated nature, an endless surging of heights amongst which you noticed those of Visens, whose slopes the sunlight tinged ornately with soft blue and carmine of a rippling, moire-like effect.

However, when Marie and Pierre turned their eyes to the west, they were quite dazzled. The sun rays were here streaming on the large and the little Beout with their cupolas of unequal height. And on this side the background was one of gold and purple, a dazzling mountain on whose sides one could only discern the road which snaked between the trees on its way to the Calvary above. And here, too, against the sunlit background, radiant like an aureola, stood out the three superposed churches which at the voice of Bernadette had sprung from the rock to the glory of the Blessed Virgin. First of all, down below, came the church of the Rosary, squat, circular, and half cut out of the rock, at the farther end of an esplanade on either side of which, like two huge arms, were colossal gradient ways ascending gently to the Crypt church. Vast labour had been expended here, a quarryful of stones had been cut and set in position, there were arches as lofty as naves supporting the gigantic terraced avenues which had been constructed so that the processions might roll along in all their pomp, and the little conveyances containing sick children might ascend without hindrance to the divine presence. Then came the Crypt, the subterranean church within the rock, with only its low door visible above the church of the Rosary, whose paved roof, with its vast promenade, formed a continuation of the terraced inclines. And at last, from the summit sprang the Basilica, somewhat slender and frail, recalling some finely chased jewel of the Renascence, and looking very new and very white—like a prayer, a spotless dove, soaring aloft from the rocks of Massabielle. The spire, which appeared the more delicate and slight when compared with the gigantic inclines below, seemed like the little vertical flame of a taper set in the midst of the vast landscape, those endless waves of valleys and mountains. By the side, too, of the dense greenery of the Calvary hill, it looked fragile and candid, like childish faith; and at sight of it you instinctively thought of the little white arm, the little thin hand of the puny girl, who had here pointed to Heaven in the crisis of her human sufferings. You could not see the Grotto, the entrance of which was on the left, at the base of the rock. Beyond the Basilica, the only buildings which caught the eye were the heavy square pile where the Fathers of the Immaculate Conception had their abode, and the episcopal palace, standing much farther away, in a spreading, wooded valley. And the three churches were flaming in the morning glow, and the rain of gold scattered by the sun rays was sweeping the whole countryside, whilst the flying peals of the bells seemed to be the very vibration of the light, the musical awakening of the lovely day that was now beginning.

Whilst crossing the Place du Rosaire, Pierre and Marie glanced at the Esplanade, the public walk with its long central lawn skirted by broad parallel paths and extending as far as the new bridge. Here, with face turned towards the Basilica, was the great crowned statue of the Virgin. All the sufferers crossed themselves as they went by. And still passionately chanting its canticle, the fearful cortege rolled on, through nature in festive array. Under the dazzling sky, past the mountains of gold and purple, amidst the centenarian trees, symbolical of health, the running waters whose freshness was eternal, that cortege still and ever marched on with its sufferers, whom nature, if not God, had condemned, those who were afflicted with skin diseases, those whose flesh was eaten away, those who were dropsical and inflated like wine-skins, and those whom rheumatism and paralysis had twisted into postures of agony. And the victims of hydrocephalus followed, with the dancers of St. Vitus, the consumptives, the rickety, the epileptic, the cancerous, the goitrous, the blind, the mad, and the idiotic. "Ave, ave, ave, Maria!" they sang; and the stubborn plaint acquired increased volume, as nearer and nearer to the Grotto it bore that abominable torrent of human wretchedness and pain, amidst all the fright and horror of the passers-by, who stopped short, unable to stir, their hearts frozen as this nightmare swept before their eyes.

Pierre and Marie were the first to pass under the lofty arcade of one of the terraced inclines. And then, as they followed the quay of the Gave, they all at once came upon the Grotto. And Marie, whom Pierre wheeled as near to the railing as possible, was only able to raise herself in her little conveyance, and murmur: "O most Blessed Virgin, Virgin most loved!"

She had seen neither the entrances to the piscinas nor the twelve-piped fountain, which she had just passed; nor did she distinguish any better the shop on her left hand where crucifixes, chaplets, statuettes, pictures, and other religious articles were sold, or the stone pulpit on her right which Father Massias already occupied. Her eyes were dazzled by the splendour of the Grotto; it seemed to her as if a hundred thousand tapers were burning there behind the railing, filling the low entrance with the glow of a furnace and illuminating, as with star rays, the statue of the Virgin, which stood, higher up, at the edge of a narrow ogive-like cavity. And for her, apart from that glorious apparition, nothing existed there, neither the crutches with which a part of the vault had been covered, nor the piles of bouquets fading away amidst the ivy and the eglantine, nor even the altar placed in the centre near a little portable organ over which a cover had been thrown. However, as she raised her eyes above the rock, she once more beheld the slender white Basilica profiled against the sky, its slight, tapering spire soaring into the azure of the Infinite like a prayer.

"O Virgin most powerful—Queen of the Virgins—Holy Virgin of Virgins!"

Pierre had now succeeded in wheeling Marie's box to the front rank, beyond the numerous oak benches which were set out here in the open air as in the nave of a church. Nearly all these benches were already occupied by those sufferers who could sit down, while the vacant spaces were soon filled with litters and little vehicles whose wheels became entangled together, and on whose close-packed mattresses and pillows all sorts of diseases were gathered pell-mell. Immediately on arriving, the young priest had recognised the Vignerons seated with their sorry child Gustave in the middle of a bench, and now, on the flagstones, he caught sight of the lace-trimmed bed of Madame Dieulafay, beside whom her husband and sister knelt in prayer. Moreover, all the patients of Madame de Jonquiere's carriage took up position here—M. Sabathier and Brother Isidore side by side, Madame Vetu reclining hopelessly in a conveyance, Elise Rouquet seated, La Grivotte excited and raising herself on her clenched hands. Pierre also again perceived Madame Maze, standing somewhat apart from the others, and humbling herself in prayer; whilst Madame Vincent, who had fallen on her knees, still holding her little Rose in her arms, presented the child to the Virgin with ardent entreaty, the distracted gesture of a mother soliciting compassion from the mother of divine grace. And around this reserved space was the ever-growing throng of pilgrims, the pressing, jostling mob which gradually stretched to the parapet overlooking the Gave.

"O Virgin most merciful," continued Marie in an undertone, "Virgin most faithful, Virgin conceived without sin!"

Then, almost fainting, she spoke no more, but with her lips still moving, as though in silent prayer, gazed distractedly at Pierre. He thought that she wished to speak to him and leant forward: "Shall I remain here at your disposal to take you to the piscina by-and-by?" he asked.

But as soon as she understood him she shook her head. And then in a feverish way she said: "No, no, I don't want to be bathed this morning. It seems to me that one must be truly worthy, truly pure, truly holy before seeking the miracle! I want to spend the whole morning in imploring it with joined hands; I want to pray, to pray with all my strength and all my soul—" She was stifling, and paused. Then she added: "Don't come to take me back to the hospital till eleven o'clock. I will not let them take me from here till then."

However, Pierre did not go away, but remained near her. For a moment, he even fell upon his knees; he also would have liked to pray with the same burning faith, to beg of God the cure of that poor sick child, whom he loved with such fraternal affection. But since he had reached the Grotto he had felt a singular sensation invading him, a covert revolt, as it were, which hampered the pious flight of his prayer. He wished to believe; he had spent the whole night hoping that belief would once more blossom in his soul, like some lovely flower of innocence and candour, as soon as he should have knelt upon the soil of that land of miracle. And yet he only experienced discomfort and anxiety in presence of the theatrical scene before him, that pale stiff statue in the false light of the tapers, with the chaplet shop full of jostling customers on the one hand, and the large stone pulpit whence a Father of the Assumption was shouting "Aves" on the other. Had his soul become utterly withered then? Could no divine dew again impregnate it with innocence, render it like the souls of little children, who at the slightest caressing touch of the sacred legend give themselves to it entirely?

Then, while his thoughts were still wandering, he recognised Father Massias in the ecclesiastic who occupied the pulpit. He had formerly known him, and was quite stirred by his sombre ardour, by the sight of his thin face and sparkling eyes, by the eloquence which poured from his large mouth as he offered violence to Heaven to compel it to descend upon earth. And whilst he thus examined Father Massias, astonished at feeling himself so unlike the preacher, he caught sight of Father Fourcade, who, at the foot of the pulpit, was deep in conference with Baron Suire. The latter seemed much perplexed by something which Father Fourcade said to him; however he ended by approving it with a complaisant nod. Then, as Abbe Judaine was also standing there, Father Fourcade likewise spoke to him for a moment, and a scared expression came over the Abbe's broad, fatherly face while he listened; nevertheless, like the Baron, he at last bowed assent.

Then, all at once, Father Fourcade appeared in the pulpit, erect, drawing up his lofty figure which his attack of gout had slightly bent; and he had not wished that Father Massias, his well-loved brother, whom he preferred above all others, should altogether go down the narrow stairway, for he had kept him upon one of the steps, and was leaning on his shoulder. And in a full, grave voice, with an air of sovereign authority which caused perfect silence to reign around, he spoke as follows:

"My dear brethren, my dear sisters, I ask your forgiveness for interrupting your prayers, but I have a communication to make to you, and I have to ask the help of all your faithful souls. We had a very sad accident to deplore this morning, one of our brethren died in one of the trains by which you came to Lourdes, died just as he was about to set foot in the promised land."

A brief pause followed and Father Fourcade seemed to become yet taller, his handsome face beaming with fervour, amidst his long, streaming, royal beard.

"Well, my dear brethren, my dear sisters," he resumed, "in spite of everything, the idea has come to me that we ought not to despair. Who knows if God Almighty did not will that death in order that He might prove His Omnipotence to the world? It is as though a voice were speaking to me, urging me to ascend this pulpit and ask your prayers for this man, this man who is no more, but whose life is nevertheless in the hands of the most Blessed Virgin who can still implore her Divine Son in his favour. Yes, the man is here, I have caused his body to be brought hither, and it depends on you, perhaps, whether a brilliant miracle shall dazzle the universe, if you pray with sufficient ardour to touch the compassion of Heaven. We will plunge the man's body into the piscina and we will entreat the Lord, the master of the world, to resuscitate him, to give unto us this extraordinary sign of His sovereign beneficence!"

An icy thrill, wafted from the Invisible, passed through the listeners. They had all become pale, and though the lips of none of them had opened, it seemed as if a murmur sped through their ranks amidst a shudder.

"But with what ardour must we not pray!" violently resumed Father Fourcade, exalted by genuine faith. "It is your souls, your whole souls, that I ask of you, my dear brothers, my dear sisters, it is a prayer in which you must put your hearts, your blood, your very life with whatever may be most noble and loving in it! Pray with all your strength, pray till you no longer know who you are, or where you are; pray as one loves, pray as one dies, for that which we are about to ask is so precious, so rare, so astounding a grace that only the energy of our worship can induce God to answer us. And in order that our prayers may be the more efficacious, in order that they may have time to spread and ascend to the feet of the Eternal Father, we will not lower the body into the piscina until four o'clock this afternoon. And now my dear brethren, now my dear sisters, pray, pray to the most Blessed Virgin, the Queen of the Angels, the Comforter of the Afflicted!"

Then he himself, distracted by emotion, resumed the recital of the rosary, whilst near him Father Massias burst into sobs. And thereupon the great anxious silence was broken, contagion seized upon the throng, it was transported and gave vent to shouts, tears, and confused stammered entreaties. It was as though a breath of delirium were sweeping by, reducing men's wills to naught, and turning all these beings into one being, exasperated with love and seized with a mad desire for the impossible prodigy.

And for a moment Pierre had thought that the ground was giving way beneath him, that he was about to fall and faint. But with difficulty he managed to rise from his knees and slowly walked away.

III. FOUNTAIN AND PISCINA

As Pierre went off, ill at ease, mastered by invincible repugnance, unwilling to remain there any longer, he caught sight of M. de Guersaint, kneeling near the Grotto, with the absorbed air of one who is praying with his whole soul. The young priest had not seen him since the morning, and did not know whether he had managed to secure a couple of rooms in one or other of the hotels, so that his first impulse was to go and join him. Then, however, he hesitated, unwilling to disturb his meditations, for he was doubtless praying for his daughter, whom he fondly loved, in spite of the constant absent-mindedness of his volatile brain. Accordingly, the young priest passed on, and took his way under the trees. Nine o'clock was now striking, he had a couple of hours before him.

By dint of money, the wild bank where swine had formerly pastured had been transformed into a superb avenue skirting the Gave. It had been necessary to put back the river's bed in order to gain ground, and lay out a monumental quay bordered by a broad footway, and protected by a parapet. Some two or three hundred yards farther on, a hill brought the avenue to an end, and it thus resembled an enclosed promenade, provided with benches, and shaded by magnificent trees. Nobody passed along, however; merely the overflow of the crowd had settled there, and solitary spots still abounded between the grassy wall limiting the promenade on the south, and the extensive fields spreading out northward beyond the Gave, as far as the wooded slopes which the white-walled convents brightened. Under the foliage, on the margin of the running water, one could enjoy delightful freshness, even during the burning days of August.

Thus Pierre, like a man at last awakening from a painful dream, soon found rest of mind again. He had questioned himself in the acute anxiety which he felt with regard to his sensations. Had he not reached Lourdes that morning possessed by a genuine desire to believe, an idea that he was indeed again beginning to believe even as he had done in the docile days of childhood when his mother had made him join his hands, and taught him to fear God? Yet as soon as he had found himself at the Grotto, the idolatry of the worship, the violence of the display of faith, the onslaught upon human reason which he witnessed, had so disturbed him that he had almost fainted. What would become of him then? Could he not even try to contend against his doubts by examining things and convincing himself of their truth, thus turning his journey to profit? At all events, he had made a bad beginning, which left him sorely agitated, and he indeed needed the environment of those fine trees, that limpid, rushing water, that calm, cool avenue, to recover from the shock.

Still pondering, he was approaching the end of the pathway, when he most unexpectedly met a forgotten friend. He had, for a few seconds, been looking at a tall old gentleman who was coming towards him, dressed in a tightly buttoned frock-coat and broad-brimmed hat; and he had tried to remember where it was that he had previously beheld that pale face, with eagle nose, and black and penetrating eyes. These he had seen before, he felt sure of it; but the promenader's long white beard and long curly white hair perplexed him. However, the other halted, also looking extremely astonished, though he promptly exclaimed, "What, Pierre? Is it you, at Lourdes?"

Then all at once the young priest recognised Doctor Chassaigne, his father's old friend, his own friend, the man who had cured and consoled him in the terrible physical and mental crisis which had come upon him after his mother's death.

"Ah! my dear doctor, how pleased I am to see you!" he replied.

They embraced with deep emotion. And now, in presence of that snowy hair and snowy beard, that slow walk, that sorrowful demeanour, Pierre remembered with what unrelenting ferocity misfortune had fallen on that unhappy man and aged him. But a few years had gone by, and now, when they met again, he was bowed down by destiny.

"You did not know, I suppose, that I had remained at Lourdes?" said the doctor. "It's true that I no longer write to anybody; in fact, I am no longer among the living. I live in the land of the dead." Tears were gathering in his eyes, and emotion made his voice falter as he resumed: "There! come and sit down on that bench yonder; it will please me to live the old days afresh with you, just for a moment."

In his turn the young priest felt his sobs choking him. He could only murmur: "Ah! my dear doctor, my old friend, I can truly tell you that I pitied you with my whole heart, my whole soul."

Doctor Chassaigne's story was one of disaster, the shipwreck of a life. He and his daughter Marguerite, a tall and lovable girl of twenty, had gone to Cauterets with Madame Chassaigne, the model wife and mother, whose state of health had made them somewhat anxious. A fortnight had elapsed and she seemed much better, and was already planning several pleasure trips, when one morning she was found dead in her bed. Her husband and daughter were overwhelmed, stupefied by this sudden blow, this cruel treachery of death. The doctor, who belonged to Bartres, had a family vault in the Lourdes cemetery, a vault constructed at his own expense, and in which his father and mother already rested. He desired, therefore, that his wife should be interred there, in a compartment adjoining that in which he expected soon to lie himself. And after the burial he had lingered for a week at Lourdes, when Marguerite, who was with him, was seized with a great shivering, and, taking to her bed one evening, died two days afterwards without her distracted father being able to form any exact notion of the illness which had carried her off. And thus it was not himself, but his daughter, lately radiant with beauty and health, in the very flower of her youth, who was laid in the vacant compartment by the mother's side. The man who had been so happy, so worshipped by his two helpmates, whose heart had been kept so warm by the love of two dear creatures all his own, was now nothing more than an old, miserable, stammering, lost being, who shivered in his icy solitude. All the joy of his life had departed; he envied the men who broke stones upon the highways when he saw their barefooted wives and daughters bring them their dinners at noontide. And he had refused to leave Lourdes, he had relinquished everything, his studies, his practice in Paris, in order that he might live near the tomb in which his wife and his daughter slept the eternal sleep.

"Ah, my old friend," repeated Pierre, "how I pitied you! How frightful must have been your grief! But why did you not rely a little on those who love you? Why did you shut yourself up here with your sorrow?"

The doctor made a gesture which embraced the horizon. "I could not go away, they are here and keep me with them. It is all over, I am merely waiting till my time comes to join them again."

Then silence fell. Birds were fluttering among the shrubs on the bank behind them, and in front they heard the loud murmur of the Gave. The sun rays were falling more heavily in a slow, golden dust, upon the hillsides; but on that retired bench under the beautiful trees, the coolness was still delightful. And although the crowd was but a couple of hundred yards distant, they were, so to say, in a desert, for nobody tore himself away from the Grotto to stray as far as the spot which they had chosen.

They talked together for a long time, and Pierre related under what circumstances he had reached Lourdes that morning with M. de Guersaint and his daughter, all three forming part of the national pilgrimage. Then all at once he gave a start of astonishment and exclaimed: "What! doctor, so you now believe that miracles are possible? You, good heavens! whom I knew as an unbeliever, or at least as one altogether indifferent to these matters?"

He was gazing at M. Chassaigne quite stupefied by something which he had just heard him say of the Grotto and Bernadette. It was amazing, coming from a man with so strong a mind, a savant of such intelligence, whose powerful analytical faculties he had formerly so much admired! How was it that a lofty, clear mind, nourished by experience and method, had become so changed as to acknowledge the miraculous cures effected by that divine fountain which the Blessed Virgin had caused to spurt forth under the pressure of a child's fingers?

"But just think a little, my dear doctor," he resumed. "It was you yourself who supplied my father with memoranda about Bernadette, your little fellow-villager as you used to call her; and it was you, too, who spoke to me at such length about her, when, later on, I took a momentary interest in her story. In your eyes she was simply an ailing child, prone to hallucinations, infantile, but self-conscious of her acts, deficient of will-power. Recollect our chats together, my doubts, and the healthy reason which you again enabled me, to acquire!"

Pierre was feeling very moved, for was not this the strangest of adventures? He a priest, who in a spirit of resignation had formerly endeavoured to believe, had ended by completely losing all faith through intercourse with this same doctor, who was then an unbeliever, but whom he now found converted, conquered by the supernatural, whilst he himself was racked by the torture of no longer believing.

"You who would only rely on accurate facts," he said, "you who based everything on observation! Do you renounce science then?"

Chassaigne, hitherto quiet, with a sorrowful smile playing on his lips, now made a violent gesture expressive of sovereign contempt. "Science indeed!" he exclaimed. "Do I know anything? Can I accomplish anything? You asked me just now what malady it was that killed my poor Marguerite. But I do not know! I, whom people think so learned, so well armed against death, I understood nothing of it, and I could do nothing—not even prolong my daughter's life for a single hour! And my wife, whom I found in bed already cold, when on the previous evening she had lain down in much better health and quite gay—was I even capable of foreseeing what ought to have been done in her case? No, no! for me at all events, science has become bankrupt. I wish to know nothing; I am but a fool and a poor old man!"

He spoke like this in a furious revolt against all his past life of pride and happiness. Then, having become calm again, he added: "And now I only feel a frightful remorse. Yes, a remorse which haunts me, which ever brings me here, prowling around the people who are praying. It is remorse for not having in the first instance come and humbled myself at that Grotto, bringing my two dear ones with me. They would have knelt there like those women whom you see, I should have knelt beside them, and perhaps the Blessed Virgin would have cured and preserved them. But, fool that I was, I only knew how to lose them! It is my fault."

Tears were now streaming from his eyes. "I remember," he continued, "that in my childhood at Bartres, my mother, a peasant woman, made me join my hands and implore God's help each morning. The prayer she taught me came back to my mind, word for word, when I again found myself alone, as weak, as lost, as a little child. What would you have, my friend? I joined my hands as in my younger days, I felt too wretched, too forsaken, I had too keen a need of a superhuman help, of a divine power which should think and determine for me, which should lull me and carry me on with its eternal prescience. How great at first was the confusion, the aberration of my poor brain, under the frightful, heavy blow which fell upon it! I spent a score of nights without being able to sleep, thinking that I should surely go mad. All sorts of ideas warred within me; I passed through periods of revolt when I shook my fist at Heaven, and then I lapsed into humility, entreating God to take me in my turn. And it was at last a conviction that there must be justice, a conviction that there must be love, which calmed me by restoring me my faith. You knew my daughter, so tall and strong, so beautiful, so brimful of life. Would it not be the most monstrous injustice if for her, who did not know life, there should be nothing beyond the tomb? She will live again, I am absolutely convinced of it, for I still hear her at times, she tells me that we shall meet, that we shall see one another again. Oh! the dear beings whom one has lost, my dear daughter, my dear wife, to see them once more, to live with them elsewhere, that is the one hope, the one consolation for all the sorrows of this world! I have given myself to God, since God alone can restore them to me!"

He was shaking with a slight tremor, like the weak old man he had become; and Pierre was at last able to understand and explain the conversion of this savant, this man of intellect who, growing old, had reverted to belief under the influence of sentiment. First of all, and this he had previously suspected, he discovered a kind of atavism of faith in this Pyrenean, this son of peasant mountaineers, who had been brought up in belief of the legend, and whom the legend had again mastered even when fifty years, of positive study had rolled over it. Then, too, there was human weariness; this man, to whom science had not brought happiness, revolted against science on the day when it seemed to him shallow, powerless to prevent him from shedding tears. And finally there was discouragement, a doubt of all things, ending in a need of certainty on the part of one whom age had softened, and who felt happy at being able to fall asleep in credulity.

Pierre did not protest, however; he did not jeer, for his heart was rent at sight of this tall, stricken old man, with his woeful senility. Is it not indeed pitiful to see the strongest, the clearest-minded become mere children again under such blows of fate? "Ah!" he faintly sighed, "if I could only suffer enough to be able to silence my reason, and kneel yonder and believe in all those fine stories."

The pale smile, which at times still passed over Doctor Chassaigne's lips, reappeared on them. "You mean the miracles?" said he. "You are a priest, my child, and I know what your misfortune is. The miracles seem impossible to you. But what do you know of them? Admit that you know nothing, and that what to our senses seems impossible is every minute taking place. And now we have been talking together for a long time, and eleven o'clock will soon strike, so that you must return to the Grotto. However, I shall expect you, at half-past three, when I will take you to the Medical Verification Office, where I hope I shall be able to show you some surprising things. Don't forget, at half-past three."

Thereupon he sent him off, and remained on the bench alone. The heat had yet increased, and the distant hills were burning in the furnace-like glow of the sun. However, he lingered there forgetfully, dreaming in the greeny half-light amidst the foliage, and listening to the continuous murmur of the Gave, as if a voice, a dear voice from the realms beyond, were speaking to him.

Pierre meantime hastened back to Marie. He was able to join her without much difficulty, for the crowd was thinning, a good many people having already gone off to dejeuner. And on arriving he perceived the girl's father, who was quietly seated beside her, and who at once wished to explain to him the reason of his long absence. For more than a couple of hours that morning he had scoured Lourdes in all directions, applying at twenty hotels in turn without being able to find the smallest closet where they might sleep. Even the servants' rooms were let and you could not have even secured a mattress on which to stretch yourself in some passage. However, all at once, just as he was despairing, he had discovered two rooms, small ones, it is true, and just under the roof, but in a very good hotel, that of the Apparitions, one of the best patronised in the town. The persons who had retained these rooms had just telegraphed that the patient whom they had meant to bring with them was dead. Briefly, it was a piece of rare good luck, and seemed to make M. de Guersaint quite gay.

Eleven o'clock was now striking and the woeful procession of sufferers started off again through the sunlit streets and squares. When it reached the hospital Marie begged her father and Pierre to go to the hotel, lunch and rest there awhile, and return to fetch her at two o'clock, when the patients would again be conducted to the Grotto. But when, after lunching, the two men went up to the rooms which they were to occupy at the Hotel of the Apparitions, M. de Guersaint, overcome by fatigue, fell so soundly asleep that Pierre had not the heart to awaken him. What would have been the use of it? His presence was not indispensable. And so the young priest returned to the hospital alone. Then the cortege again descended the Avenue de la Grotte, again wended its way over the Plateau de la Merlasse, again crossed the Place du Rosaire, past an ever-growing crowd which shuddered and crossed itself amid all the joyousness of that splendid August day. It was now the most glorious hour of a lovely afternoon.

When Marie was again installed in front of the Grotto she inquired if her father were coming. "Yes," answered Pierre; "he is only taking a little rest."

She waved her hand as though to say that he was acting rightly, and then in a sorely troubled voice she added: "Listen, Pierre; don't take me to the piscina for another hour. I am not yet in a state to find favour from Heaven, I wish to pray, to keep on praying."

After evincing such an ardent desire to come to Lourdes, terror was agitating her now that the moment for attempting the miracle was at hand. In fact, she began to relate that she had been unable to eat anything, and a girl who overheard her at once approached saying: "If you feel too weak, my dear young lady, remember we have some broth here."

Marie looked at her and recognised Raymonde. Several young girls were in this wise employed at the Grotto to distribute cups of broth and milk among the sufferers. Some of them, indeed, in previous years had displayed so much coquetry in the matter of silk, aprons trimmed with lace, that a uniform apron, of modest linen, with a small check pattern, blue and white, had been imposed on them. Nevertheless, in spite of this enforced simplicity, Raymonde, thanks to her freshness and her active, good-natured, housewifely air, had succeeded in making herself look quite charming.

"You will remember, won't you?" she added; "you have only to make me a sign and I will serve you."

Marie thanked her, saying, however, that she felt sure she would not be able to take anything; and then, turning towards the young priest, she resumed: "One hour—you must allow me one more hour, my friend."

Pierre wished at any rate to remain near her, but the entire space was reserved to the sufferers, the bearers not being allowed there. So he had to retire, and, caught in the rolling waves of the crowd, he found himself carried towards the piscinas, where he came upon an extraordinary spectacle which stayed his steps. In front of the low buildings where the baths were, three by three, six for the women and three for the men, he perceived under the trees a long stretch of ground enclosed by a rope fastened to the tree-trunks; and here, various sufferers, some sitting in their bath-chairs and others lying on the mattresses of their litters, were drawn up in line, waiting to be bathed, whilst outside the rope, a huge, excited throng was ever pressing and surging. A Capuchin, erect in the centre of the reserved space, was at that moment conducting the prayers. "Aves" followed one after the other, repeated by the crowd in a loud confused murmur. Then, all at once, as Madame Vincent, who, pale with agony, had long been waiting, was admitted to the baths, carrying her dear burden, her little girl who looked like a waxen image of the child Christ, the Capuchin let himself fall upon his knees with his arms extended, and cried aloud: "Lord, heal our sick!" He raised this cry a dozen, twenty times, with a growing fury, and each time the crowd repeated it, growing more and more excited at each shout, till it sobbed and kissed the ground in a state of frenzy. It was like a hurricane of delirium rushing by and laying every head in the dust. Pierre was utterly distracted by the sob of suffering which arose from the very bowels of these poor folks—at first a prayer, growing louder and louder, then bursting forth like a demand in impatient, angry, deafening, obstinate accents, as though to compel the help of Heaven. "Lord, heal our sick!"—"Lord, heal our sick!" The shout soared on high incessantly.

An incident occurred, however; La Grivotte was weeping hot tears because they would not bathe her. "They say that I'm a consumptive," she plaintively exclaimed, "and that they can't dip consumptives in cold water. Yet they dipped one this morning; I saw her. So why won't they dip me? I've been wearing myself out for the last half-hour in telling them that they are only grieving the Blessed Virgin, for I am going to be cured, I feel it, I am going to be cured!"

As she was beginning to cause a scandal, one of the chaplains of the piscinas approached and endeavoured to calm her. They would see what they could do for her, by-and-by, said he; they would consult the reverend Fathers, and, if she were very good, perhaps they would bathe her all the same.

Meantime the cry continued: "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!" And Pierre, who had just perceived Madame Vetu, also waiting at the piscina entry, could no longer turn his eyes away from her hope-tortured face, whose eyes were fixed upon the doorway by which the happy ones, the elect, emerged from the divine presence, cured of all their ailments. However, a sudden increase of the crowd's frenzy, a perfect rage of entreaties, gave him such a shock as to draw tears from his eyes. Madame Vincent was now coming out again, still carrying her little girl in her arms, her wretched, her fondly loved little girl, who had been dipped in a fainting state in the icy water, and whose little face, but imperfectly wiped, was as pale as ever, and indeed even more woeful and lifeless. The mother was sobbing, crucified by this long agony, reduced to despair by the refusal of the Blessed Virgin, who had remained insensible to her child's sufferings. And yet when Madame Vetu in her turn entered, with the eager passion of a dying woman about to drink the water of life, the haunting, obstinate cry burst out again, without sign of discouragement or lassitude: "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!" The Capuchin had now fallen with his face to the ground, and the howling crowd, with arms outstretched, devoured the soil with its kisses.

Pierre wished to join Madame Vincent to soothe her with a few kind, encouraging words; however, a fresh string of pilgrims not only prevented him from passing, but threw him towards the fountain which another throng besieged. There was here quite a range of low buildings, a long stone wall with carved coping, and it had been necessary for the people to form in procession, although there were twelve taps from which the water fell into a narrow basin. Many came hither to fill bottles, metal cans, and stoneware pitchers. To prevent too great a waste of water, the tap only acted when a knob was pressed with the hand. And thus many weak-handed women lingered there a long time, the water dripping on their feet. Those who had no cans to fill at least came to drink and wash their faces. Pierre noticed one young man who drank seven small glassfuls of water, and washed his eyes seven times without wiping them. Others were drinking out of shells, tin goblets, and leather cups. And he was particularly interested by the sight of Elise Rouquet, who, thinking it useless to go to the piscinas to bathe the frightful sore which was eating away her face, had contented herself with employing the water of the fountain as a lotion, every two hours since her arrival that morning. She knelt down, threw back her fichu, and for a long time applied a handkerchief to her face—a handkerchief which she had soaked with the miraculous fluid like a sponge; and the crowd around rushed upon the fountain in such fury that folks no longer noticed her diseased face, but washed themselves and drank from the same pipe at which she constantly moistened her handkerchief.

Just then, however, Gerard, who passed by dragging M. Sabathier to the piscinas, called to Pierre, whom he saw unoccupied, and asked him to come and help him, for it would not be an easy task to move and bathe this helpless victim of ataxia. And thus Pierre lingered with the sufferer in the men's piscina for nearly half an hour, whilst Gerard returned to the Grotto to fetch another patient. These piscinas seemed to the young priest to be very well arranged. They were divided into three compartments, three baths separated by partitions, with steps leading into them. In order that one might isolate the patient, a linen curtain hug before each entry, which was reached through a kind of waiting-room having a paved floor, and furnished with a bench and a couple of chairs. Here the patients undressed and dressed themselves with an awkward haste, a nervous kind of shame. One man, whom Pierre found there when he entered, was still naked, and wrapped himself in the curtain before putting on a bandage with trembling hands. Another one, a consumptive who was frightfully emaciated, sat shivering and groaning, his livid skin mottled with violet marks. However, Pierre became more interested in Brother Isidore, who was just being removed from one of the baths. He had fainted away, and for a moment, indeed, it was thought that he was dead. But at last he began moaning again, and one's heart filled with pity at sight of his long, lank frame, which suffering had withered, and which, with his diseased hip, looked a human remnant on exhibition. The two hospitallers who had been bathing him had the greatest difficulty to put on his shirt, fearful as they were that if he were suddenly shaken he might expire in their arms.

"You will help me, Monsieur l'Abbe, won't you?" asked another hospitaller as he began to undress M. Sabathier.

Pierre hastened to give his services, and found that the attendant, discharging such humble duties, was none other than the Marquis de Salmon-Roquebert whom M. de Guersaint had pointed out to him on the way from the station to the hospital that morning. A man of forty, with a large, aquiline, knightly nose set in a long face, the Marquis was the last representative of one of the most ancient and illustrious families of France. Possessing a large fortune, a regal mansion in the Rue de Lille at Paris, and vast estates in Normandy, he came to Lourdes each year, for the three days of the national pilgrimage, influenced solely by his benevolent feelings, for he had no religious zeal and simply observed the rites of the Church because it was customary for noblemen to do so. And he obstinately declined any high functions. Resolved to remain a hospitaller, he had that year assumed the duty of bathing the patients, exhausting the strength of his arms, employing his fingers from morning till night in handling rags and re-applying dressings to sores.

"Be careful," he said to Pierre; "take off the stockings very slowly. Just now, some flesh came away when they were taking off the things of that poor fellow who is being dressed again, over yonder."

Then, leaving M. Sabathier for a moment in order to put on the shoes of the unhappy sufferer whom he alluded to, the Marquis found the left shoe wet inside. Some matter had flowed into the fore part of it, and he had to take the usual medical precautions before putting it on the patient's foot, a task which he performed with extreme care; and so as not to touch the man's leg, into which an ulcer was eating.

"And now," he said to Pierre, as he returned to M. Sabathier, "pull down the drawers at the same time I do, so that we may get them off at one pull."

In addition to the patients and the hospitallers selected for duty at the piscinas, the only person in the little dressing-room was a chaplain who kept on repeating "Paters" and "Aves," for not even a momentary pause was allowed in the prayers. Merely a loose curtain hung before the doorway leading to the open space which the rope enclosed; and the ardent clamorous entreaties of the throng were incessantly wafted into the room, with the piercing shouts of the Capuchin, who ever repeated "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!" A cold light fell from the high windows of the building and constant dampness reigned there, with the mouldy smell like that of a cellar dripping with water.

At last M. Sabathier was stripped, divested of all garments save a little apron which had been fastened about his loins for decency's sake.

"Pray don't plunge me," said he; "let me down into the water by degrees."

In point of fact that cold water quite terrified him. He was still wont to relate that he had experienced such a frightful chilling sensation on the first occasion that he had sworn never to go in again. According to his account, there could be no worse torture than that icy cold. And then too, as he put it, the water was scarcely inviting; for, through fear lest the output of the source should not suffice, the Fathers of the Grotto only allowed the water of the baths to be changed twice a day. And nearly a hundred patients being dipped in the same water, it can be imagined what a terrible soup the latter at last became. All manner of things were found in it, so that it was like a frightful consomme of all ailments, a field of cultivation for every kind of poisonous germ, a quintessence of the most dreaded contagious diseases; the miraculous feature of it all being that men should emerge alive from their immersion in such filth.

"Gently, gently," repeated M. Sabathier to Pierre and the Marquis, who had taken hold of him under the hips in order to carry him to the bath. And he gazed with childlike terror at that thick, livid water on which floated so many greasy, nauseating patches of scum. However, his dread of the cold was so great that he preferred the polluted baths of the afternoon, since all the bodies that were dipped in the water during the early part of the day ended by slightly warming it.

"We will let you slide down the steps," exclaimed the Marquis in an undertone; and then he instructed Pierre to hold the patient with all his strength under the arm-pits.

"Have no fear," replied the priest; "I will not let go."

M. Sabathier was then slowly lowered. You could now only see his back, his poor painful back which swayed and swelled, mottled by the rippling of a shiver. And when they dipped him his head fell back in a spasm, a sound like the cracking of bones was heard, and breathing hard, he almost stifled.

The chaplain, standing beside the bath, had begun calling with renewed fervour: "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!"

M. de Salmon-Roquebert repeated the cry, which the regulations required the hospitallers to raise at each fresh immersion. Pierre, therefore, had to imitate his companion, and his pitiful feelings at the sight of so much suffering were so intense that he regained some little of his faith. It was long indeed since he had prayed like this, devoutly wishing that there might be a God in heaven, whose omnipotence could assuage the wretchedness of humanity. At the end of three or four minutes, however, when with great difficulty they drew M. Sabathier, livid and shivering, out of the bath, the young priest fell into deeper, more despairing sorrow than ever at beholding how downcast, how overwhelmed the sufferer was at having experienced no relief. Again had he made a futile attempt; for the seventh time the Blessed Virgin had not deigned to listen to his prayers. He closed his eyes, from between the lids of which big tears began to roll while they were dressing him again.

Then Pierre recognised little Gustave Vigneron coming in, on his crutch, to take his first bath. His relatives, his father, his mother, and his aunt, Madame Chaise, all three of substantial appearance and exemplary piety, had just fallen on their knees at the door. Whispers ran through the crowd; it was said that the gentleman was a functionary of the Ministry of Finances. However, while the child was beginning to undress, a tumult arose, and Father Fourcade and Father Massias, suddenly arriving, gave orders to suspend the immersions. The great miracle was about to be attempted, the extraordinary favour which had been so ardently prayed for since the morning—the restoration of the dead man to life.

The prayers were continuing outside, rising in a furious appeal which died away in the sky of that warm summer afternoon. Two bearers came in with a covered stretcher, which they deposited in the middle of the dressing-room. Baron Suire, President of the Association, followed, accompanied by Berthaud, one of its principal officers, for the affair was causing a great stir among the whole staff, and before anything was done a few words were exchanged in low voices between the gentlemen and the two Fathers of the Assumption. Then the latter fell upon their knees, with arms extended, and began to pray, their faces illumined, transfigured by their burning desire to see God's omnipotence displayed.

"Lord, hear us! Lord, grant our prayer!"

M. Sabathier had just been taken away, and the only patient now present was little Gustave, who had remained on a chair, half-undressed and forgotten. The curtains of the stretcher were raised, and the man's corpse appeared, already stiff, and seemingly reduced and shrunken, with large eyes which had obstinately remained wide open. It was necessary, however, to undress the body, which was still fully clad, and this terrible duty made the bearers momentarily hesitate. Pierre noticed that the Marquis de Salmon-Roquebert, who showed such devotion to the living, such freedom from all repugnance whenever they were in question, had now drawn aside and fallen on his knees, as though to avoid the necessity of touching that lifeless corpse. And the young priest thereupon followed his example, and knelt near him in order to keep countenance.

Father Massias meanwhile was gradually becoming excited, praying in so loud a voice that it drowned that of his superior, Father Fourcade: "Lord, restore our brother to us!" he cried. "Lord, do it for Thy glory!"

One of the hospitallers had already begun to pull at the man's trousers, but his legs were so stiff that the garment would not come off. In fact the corpse ought to have been raised up; and the other hospitaller, who was unbuttoning the dead man's old frock coat, remarked in an undertone that it would be best to cut everything away with a pair of scissors. Otherwise there would be no end of the job.

Berthaud, however, rushed up to them, after rapidly consulting Baron Suire. As a politician he secretly disapproved of Father Fourcade's action in making such an attempt, only they could not now do otherwise than carry matters to an issue; for the crowd was waiting and had been entreating God on the dead man's behalf ever since the morning. The wisest course, therefore, was to finish with the affair at once, showing as much respect as possible for the remains of the deceased. In lieu, therefore, of pulling the corpse about in order to strip it bare, Berthaud was of opinion that it would be better to dip it in the piscina clad as it was. Should the man resuscitate, it would be easy to procure fresh clothes for him; and in the contrary event, no harm would have been done. This is what he hastily said to the bearers; and forthwith he helped them to pass some straps under the man's hips and arms.

Father Fourcade had nodded his approval of this course, whilst Father Massias prayed with increased fervour: "Breathe upon him, O Lord, and he shall be born anew! Restore his soul to him, O, Lord, that he may glorify Thee!"

Making an effort, the two hospitallers now raised the man by means of the straps, carried him to the bath, and slowly lowered him into the water, at each moment fearing that he would slip away from their hold. Pierre, although overcome by horror, could not do otherwise than look at them, and thus he distinctly beheld the immersion of this corpse in its sorry garments, which on being wetted clung to the bones, outlining the skeleton-like figure of the deceased, who floated like a man who has been drowned. But the repulsive part of it all was, that in spite of the rigor mortis, the head fell backward into the water, and was submerged by it. In vain did the hospitallers try to raise it by pulling the shoulder straps; as they made the attempt, the man almost sank to the bottom of the bath. And how could he have recovered his breath when his mouth was full of water, his staring eyes seemingly dying afresh, beneath that watery veil?

Then, during the three long minutes allowed for the immersion, the two Fathers of the Assumption and the chaplain, in a paroxysm of desire and faith, strove to compel the intervention of Heaven, praying in such loud voices that they seemed to choke.

"Do Thou but look on him, O Lord, and he will live again! Lord! may he rise at Thy voice to convert the earth! Lord! Thou hast but one word to say and all Thy people will acclaim Thee!"

At last, as though some vessel had broken in his throat, Father Massias fell groaning and choking on his elbows, with only enough strength left him to kiss the flagstones. And from without came the clamour of the crowd, the ever-repeated cry, which the Capuchin was still leading: "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!" This appeal seemed so singular at that moment, that Pierre's sufferings were increased. He could feel, too, that the Marquis was shuddering beside him. And so the relief was general when Berthaud, thoroughly annoyed with the whole business, curtly shouted to the hospitallers: "Take him out! Take him out at once!"

The body was removed from the bath and laid on the stretcher, looking like the corpse of a drowned man with its sorry garments clinging to its limbs. The water was trickling from the hair, and rivulets began falling on either side, spreading out in pools on the floor. And naturally, dead as the man had been, dead he remained.

The others had all risen and stood looking at him amidst a distressing silence. Then, as he was covered up and carried away, Father Fourcade followed the bier leaning on the shoulder of Father Massias and dragging his gouty leg, the painful weight of which he had momentarily forgotten. But he was already recovering his strong serenity, and as a hush fell upon the crowd outside, he could be heard saying: "My dear brothers, my dear sisters, God has not been willing to restore him to us, doubtless because in His infinite goodness He has desired to retain him among His elect."

And that was all; there was no further question of the dead man. Patients were again being brought into the dressing-room, the two other baths were already occupied. And now little Gustave, who had watched that terrible scene with his keen inquisitive eyes, evincing no sign of terror, finished undressing himself. His wretched body, the body of a scrofulous child, appeared with its prominent ribs and projecting spine, its limbs so thin that they looked like mere walking-sticks. Especially was this the case as regards the left one, which was withered, wasted to the bone; and he also had two sores, one on the hip, and the other in the loins, the last a terrible one, the skin being eaten away so that you distinctly saw the raw flesh. Yet he smiled, rendered so precocious by his sufferings that, although but fifteen years old and looking no more than ten, he seemed to be endowed with the reason and philosophy of a grown man.

The Marquis de Salmon-Roquebert, who had taken him gently in his arms, refused Pierre's offer of service: "Thanks, but he weighs no more than a bird. And don't be frightened, my dear little fellow. I will do it gently."

"Oh, I am not afraid of cold water, monsieur," replied the boy; "you may duck me."

Then he was lowered into the bath in which the dead man had been dipped. Madame Vigneron and Madame Chaise, who were not allowed to enter, had remained at the door on their knees, whilst the father, M. Vigneron, who was admitted into the dressing-room, went on making the sign of the cross.

Finding that his services were no longer required, Pierre now departed. The sudden idea that three o'clock must have long since struck and that Marie must be waiting for him made him hasten his steps. However, whilst he was endeavouring to pierce the crowd, he saw the girl arrive in her little conveyance, dragged along by Gerard, who had not ceased transporting sufferers to the piscina. She had become impatient, suddenly filled with a conviction that she was at last in a frame of mind to find grace. And at sight of Pierre she reproached him, saying, "What, my friend, did you forget me?"

He could find no answer, but watched her as she was taken into the piscina reserved for women, and then, in mortal sorrow, fell upon his knees. It was there that he would wait for her, humbly kneeling, in order that he might take her back to the Grotto, cured without doubt and singing a hymn of praise. Since she was certain of it, would she not assuredly be cured? However, it was in vain that he sought for words of prayer in the depths of his distracted being. He was still under the blow of all the terrible things that he had beheld, worn out with physical fatigue, his brain depressed, no longer knowing what he saw or what he believed. His desperate affection for Marie alone remained, making him long to humble himself and supplicate, in the thought that when little ones really love and entreat the powerful they end by obtaining favours. And at last he caught himself repeating the prayers of the crowd, in a distressful voice that came from the depths of his being "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!"

Ten minutes, a quarter of an hour perhaps, went by. Then Marie reappeared in her little conveyance. Her face was very pale and wore an expression of despair. Her beautiful hair was fastened above her head in a heavy golden coil which the water had not touched. And she was not cured. The stupor of infinite discouragement hollowed and lengthened her face, and she averted her eyes as though to avoid meeting those of the priest who thunderstruck, chilled to the heart, at last made up his mind to grasp the handle of the little vehicle, so as to take the girl back to the Grotto.

And meantime the cry of the faithful, who with open arms were kneeling there and kissing the earth, again rose with a growing fury, excited by the Capuchin's shrill voice: "Lord, heal our sick! Heal our sick, O Lord!"

As Pierre was placing Marie in position again in front of the Grotto, an attack of weakness came over her and she almost fainted. Gerard, who was there, saw Raymonde quickly hurry to the spot with a cup of broth, and at once they began zealously rivalling each other in their attentions to the ailing girl. Raymonde, holding out the cup in a pretty way, and assuming the coaxing airs of an expert nurse, especially insisted that Marie should accept the bouillon; and Gerard, glancing at this portionless girl, could not help finding her charming, already expert in the business of life, and quite ready to manage a household with a firm hand without ceasing to be amiable. Berthaud was no doubt right, this was the wife that he, Gerard, needed.

"Mademoiselle," said he to Raymonde, "shall I raise the young lady a little?"

"Thank you, monsieur, I am quite strong enough. And besides I will give it to her in spoonfuls; that will be the better way."

Marie, however, obstinately preserving her fierce silence as she recovered consciousness, refused the broth with a gesture. She wished to be left in quietness, she did not want anybody to question her. And it was only when the others had gone off smiling at one another, that she said to Pierre in a husky voice: "Has not my father come then?"

After hesitating for a moment the priest was obliged to confess the truth. "I left him sleeping and he cannot have woke up."

Then Marie relapsed into her state of languid stupor and dismissed him in his turn, with the gesture with which she declined all succour. She no longer prayed, but remained quite motionless, gazing fixedly with her large eyes at the marble Virgin, the white statue amidst the radiance of the Grotto. And as four o'clock was now striking, Pierre with his heart sore went off to the Verification Office, having suddenly remembered the appointment given him by Doctor Chassaigne.

IV. VERIFICATION

THE doctor was waiting for the young priest outside the Verification Office, in front of which a compact and feverish crowd of pilgrims was assembled, waylaying and questioning the patients who went in, and acclaiming them as they came out whenever the news spread of any miracle, such as the restoration of some blind man's sight, some deaf woman's hearing, or some paralytic's power of motion.

Pierre had no little difficulty in making his way through the throng, but at last he reached his friend. "Well," he asked, "are we going to have a miracle—a real, incontestable one I mean?"

The doctor smiled, indulgent despite his new faith. "Ah, well," said he, "a miracle is not worked to order. God intervenes when He pleases."

Some hospitallers were mounting guard at the door, but they all knew M. Chassaigne, and respectfully drew aside to let him enter with his companion. The office where the cures were verified was very badly installed in a wretched wooden shanty divided into two apartments, first a narrow ante-chamber, and then a general meeting room which was by no means so large as it should have been. However, there was a question of providing the department with better accommodation the following year; with which view some large premises, under one of the inclined ways of the Rosary, were already being fitted up.

The only article of furniture in the antechamber was a wooden bench on which Pierre perceived two female patients awaiting their turn in the charge of a young hospitaller. But on entering the meeting room the number of persons packed inside it quite surprised him, whilst the suffocating heat within those wooden walls on which the sun was so fiercely playing, almost scorched his face. It was a square bare room, painted a light yellow, with the panes of its single window covered with whitening, so that the pressing throng outside might see nothing of what went on within. One dared not even open this window to admit a little fresh air, for it was no sooner set ajar than a crowd of inquisitive heads peeped in. The furniture was of a very rudimentary kind, consisting simply of two deal tables of unequal height placed end to end and not even covered with a cloth; together with a kind of big "canterbury" littered with untidy papers, sets of documents, registers and pamphlets, and finally some thirty rush-seated chairs placed here and there over the floor and a couple of ragged arm-chairs usually reserved for the patients.

Doctor Bonamy at once hastened forward to greet Doctor Chassaigne, who was one of the latest and most glorious conquests of the Grotto. He found a chair for him and, bowing to Pierre's cassock, also made the young priest sit down. Then, in the tone of extreme politeness which was customary with him, he exclaimed: "Mon cher confrere, you will kindly allow me to continue. We were just examining mademoiselle."

He referred to a deaf peasant girl of twenty, who was seated in one of the arm-chairs. Instead of listening, however, Pierre, who was very weary, still with a buzzing in his head, contented himself with gazing at the scene, endeavouring to form some notion of the people assembled in the room. There were some fifty altogether, many of them standing and leaning against the walls. Half a dozen, however, were seated at the two tables, a central position being occupied by the superintendent of the piscinas, who was constantly consulting a thick register; whilst around him were a Father of the Assumption and three young seminarists who acted as secretaries, writing, searching for documents, passing them and classifying them again after each examination. Pierre, however, took most interest in a Father of the Immaculate Conception, Father Dargeles, who had been pointed out to him that morning as being the editor of the "Journal de la Grotte." This ecclesiastic, whose thin little face, with its blinking eyes, pointed nose, and delicate mouth was ever smiling, had modestly seated himself at the end of the lower table where he occasionally took notes for his newspaper. He alone, of the community to which he belonged, showed himself during the three days of the national pilgrimage. Behind him, however, one could divine the presence of all the others, the slowly developed hidden power which organised everything and raked in all the proceeds.

The onlookers consisted almost entirely of inquisitive people and witnesses, including a score of doctors and a few priests. The medical men, who had come from all parts, mostly preserved silence, only a few of them occasionally venturing to ask a question; and every now and then they would exchange oblique glances, more occupied apparently in watching one another than in verifying the facts submitted to their examination. Who could they be? Some names were mentioned, but they were quite unknown. Only one had caused any stir, that of a celebrated doctor, professor at a Catholic university.

That afternoon, however, Doctor Bonamy, who never sat down, busy as he was conducting the proceedings and questioning the patients, reserved most of his attentions for a short, fair-haired man, a writer of some talent who contributed to one of the most widely read Paris newspapers, and who, in the course of a holiday tour, had by chance reached Lourdes that morning. Was not this an unbeliever whom it might be possible to convert, whose influence it would be desirable to gain for advertisement's sake? Such at all events appeared to be M. Bonamy's opinion, for he had compelled the journalist to take the second arm-chair, and with an affectation of smiling good-nature was treating him to a full performance, again and again repeating that he and his patrons had nothing to hide, and that everything took place in the most open manner.

"We only desire light," he exclaimed. "We never cease to call for the investigations of all willing men."

Then, as the alleged cure of the deaf girl did not seem at all a promising case, he addressed her somewhat roughly: "Come, come, my girl, this is only a beginning. You must come back when there are more distinct signs of improvement." And turning to the journalist he added in an undertone: "If we were to believe them they would all be healed. But the only cures we accept are those which are thoroughly proven, which are as apparent as the sun itself. Pray notice moreover that I say cures and not miracles; for we doctors do not take upon ourselves to interpret and explain. We are simply here to see if the patients, who submit themselves to our examination, have really lost all symptoms of their ailments."

Thereupon he struck an attitude. Doubtless he spoke like this in order that his rectitude might not be called in question. Believing without believing, he knew that science was yet so obscure, so full of surprises, that what seemed impossible might always come to pass; and thus, in the declining years of his life, he had contrived to secure an exceptional position at the Grotto, a position which had both its inconveniences and its advantages, but which, taken for all in all, was very comfortable and pleasant.

And now, in reply to a question from the Paris journalist, he began to explain his mode of proceeding. Each patient who accompanied the pilgrimage arrived provided with papers, amongst which there was almost always a certificate of the doctor who had been attending the case. At times even there were certificates given by several doctors, hospital bulletins and so forth—quite a record of the illness in its various stages. And thus if a cure took place and the cured person came forward, it was only necessary to consult his or her set of documents in order to ascertain the nature of the ailment, and then examination would show if that ailment had really disappeared.

Pierre was now listening. Since he had been there, seated and resting himself, he had grown calmer, and his mind was clear once more. It was only the heat which at present caused him any inconvenience. And thus, interested as he was by Doctor Bonamy's explanations, and desirous of forming an opinion, he would have spoken out and questioned, had it not been for his cloth which condemned him to remain in the background. He was delighted, therefore, when the little fair-haired gentleman, the influential writer, began to bring forward the objections which at once occurred to him.* Was it not most unfortunate that one doctor should diagnose the illness and that another one should verify the cure? In this mode of proceeding there was certainly a source of frequent error. The better plan would have been for a medical commission to examine all the patients as soon as they arrived at Lourdes and draw up reports on every case, to which reports the same commission would have referred whenever an alleged cure was brought before it. Doctor Bonamy, however, did not fall in with this suggestion. He replied, with some reason, that a commission would never suffice for such gigantic labour. Just think of it! A thousand patients to examine in a single morning! And how many different theories there would be, how many contrary diagnoses, how many endless discussions, all of a nature to increase the general uncertainty! The preliminary examination of the patients, which was almost always impossible, would, even if attempted, leave the door open for as many errors as the present system. In practice, it was necessary to remain content with the certificates delivered by the medical men who had been in attendance on the patients, and these certificates accordingly acquired capital, decisive importance. Doctor Bonamy ran through the documents lying on one of the tables and gave the Paris journalist some of these certificates to read. A great many of them unfortunately were very brief. Others, more skilfully drawn up, clearly specified the nature of the complaint; and some of the doctors' signatures were even certified by the mayors of the localities where they resided. Nevertheless doubts remained, innumerable and not to be surmounted. Who were these doctors? Who could tell if they possessed sufficient scientific authority to write as they did? With all respect to the medical profession, were there not innumerable doctors whose attainments were very limited? And, besides, might not these have been influenced by circumstances that one knew nothing of, in some cases by considerations of a personal character? One was tempted to ask for an inquiry respecting each of these medical men. Since everything was based on the documents supplied by the patients, these documents ought to have been most carefully controlled; for there could be no proof of any miracle if the absolute certainty of the alleged ailments had not been demonstrated by stringent examination.

* The reader will doubtless have understood that the Parisian
journalist is none other than M. Zola himself—Trans.

Very red and covered with perspiration, Doctor Bonamy waved his arms. "But that is the course we follow, that is the course we follow!" said he. "As soon as it seems to us that a case of cure cannot be explained by natural means, we institute a minute inquiry, we request the person who has been cured to return here for further examination. And as you can see, we surround ourselves with all means of enlightenment. These gentlemen here, who are listening to us, are nearly every one of them doctors who have come from all parts of France. We always entreat them to express their doubts if they feel any, to discuss the cases with us, and a very detailed report of each discussion is drawn up. You hear me, gentlemen; by all means protest if anything occurs here of a nature to offend your sense of truth."

Not one of the onlookers spoke. Most of the doctors present were undoubtedly Catholics, and naturally enough they merely bowed. As for the others, the unbelievers, the savants pure and simple, they looked on and evinced some interest in certain phenomena, but considerations of courtesy deterred them from entering into discussions which they knew would have been useless. When as men of sense their discomfort became too great, and they felt themselves growing angry, they simply left the room.

As nobody breathed a word, Doctor Bonamy became quite triumphant, and on the journalist asking him if he were all alone to accomplish so much work, he replied: "Yes, all alone; but my functions as doctor of the Grotto are not so complicated as you may think, for, I repeat it, they simply consist in verifying cures whenever any take place." However, he corrected himself, and added with a smile: "All! I was forgetting, I am not quite alone, I have Raboin, who helps me to keep things a little bit in order here."

So saying, he pointed to a stout, grey-haired man of forty, with a heavy face and bull-dog jaw. Raboin was an ardent believer, one of those excited beings who did not allow the miracles to be called in question. And thus he often suffered from his duties at the Verification Office, where he was ever ready to growl with anger when anybody disputed a prodigy. The appeal to the doctors had made him quite lose his temper, and his superior had to calm him.

"Come, Raboin, my friend, be quiet!" said Doctor Bonamy. "All sincere opinions are entitled to a hearing."

However, the defile of patients was resumed. A man was now brought in whose trunk was so covered with eczema that when he took off his shirt a kind of grey flour fell from his skin. He was not cured, but simply declared that he came to Lourdes every year, and always went away feeling relieved. Then came a lady, a countess, who was fearfully emaciated, and whose story was an extraordinary one. Cured of tuberculosis by the Blessed Virgin, a first time, seven years previously, she had subsequently given birth to four children, and had then again fallen into consumption. At present she was a morphinomaniac, but her first bath had already relieved her so much, that she proposed taking part in the torchlight procession that same evening with the twenty-seven members of her family whom she had brought with her to Lourdes. Then there was a woman afflicted with nervous aphonia, who after months of absolute dumbness had just recovered her voice at the moment when the Blessed Sacrament went by at the head of the four o'clock procession.

"Gentlemen," declared Doctor Bonamy, affecting the graciousness of a savant of extremely liberal views, "as you are aware, we do not draw any conclusions when a nervous affection is in question. Still you will kindly observe that this woman was treated at the Salpetriere for six months, and that she had to come here to find her tongue suddenly loosened."

Despite all these fine words he displayed some little impatience, for he would have greatly liked to show the gentleman from Paris one of those remarkable instances of cure which occasionally presented themselves during the four o'clock procession—that being the moment of grace and exaltation when the Blessed Virgin interceded for those whom she had chosen. But on this particular afternoon there had apparently been none. The cures which had so far passed before them were doubtful ones, deficient in interest. Meanwhile, out-of-doors, you could hear the stamping and roaring of the crowd, goaded into a frenzy by repeated hymns, enfevered by its earnest desire for the Divine interposition, and growing more and more enervated by the delay.

All at once, however, a smiling, modest-looking young girl, whose clear eyes sparkled with intelligence, entered the office. "Ah!" exclaimed Doctor Bonamy joyously, "here is our little friend Sophie. A remarkable cure, gentlemen, which took place at the same season last year, and the results of which I will ask permission to show you."

Pierre had immediately recognized Sophie Couteau, the miraculee who had got into the train at Poitiers. And he now witnessed a repetition of the scene which had already been enacted in his presence. Doctor Bonamy began giving detailed explanations to the little fair-haired gentleman, who displayed great attention. The case, said the doctor, had been one of caries of the bones of the left heel, with a commencement of necrosis necessitating excision; and yet the frightful, suppurating sore had been healed in a minute at the first immersion in the piscina.

"Tell the gentlemen how it happened, Sophie," he added.

The little girl made her usual pretty gesture as a sign to everybody to be attentive. And then she began: "Well, it was like this; my foot was past cure, I couldn't even go to church any more, and it had to be kept bandaged because there was always a lot of matter coming from it. Monsieur Rivoire, the doctor, who had made a cut in it so as to see inside it, said that he should be obliged to take out a piece of the bone; and that, sure enough, would have made me lame for life. But when I got to Lourdes, and had prayed a great deal to the Blessed Virgin, I went to dip my foot in the water, wishing so much that I might be cured, that I did not even take the time to pull the bandages off. And everything remained in the water; there was no longer anything the matter with my foot when I took it out."

Doctor Bonamy listened, and punctuated each word with an approving nod. "And what did your doctor say, Sophie?" he asked.

"When I got back to Vivonne, and Monsieur Rivoire saw my foot again, he said: 'Whether it be God or the Devil who has cured this child, it is all the same to me; but in all truth, she is cured.'"

A burst of laughter rang out. The doctor's remark was sure to produce an effect.

"And what was it, Sophie, that you said to Madame la Comtesse, the superintendent of your ward?"

"Ah, yes! I hadn't brought many bandages for my foot with me, and I said to her, 'It was very kind of the Blessed Virgin to cure me the first day, as I should have run out of linen on the morrow.'"

Then there was fresh laughter, a general display of satisfaction at seeing her look so pretty, telling her story, which she now knew by heart, in too recitative a manner, but, nevertheless, remaining very touching and truthful in appearance.

"Take off your shoe, Sophie," now said Doctor Bonamy; "show your foot to these gentlemen. Let them feel it. Nobody must retain any doubt."

The little foot promptly appeared, very white, very clean, carefully tended indeed, with its scar just below the ankle, a long scar, whose whity seam testified to the gravity of the complaint. Some of the medical men had drawn near, and looked on in silence. Others, whose opinions, no doubt, were already formed, did not disturb themselves, though one of them, with an air of extreme politeness, inquired why the Blessed Virgin had not made a new foot while she was about it, for this would assuredly have given her no more trouble. Doctor Bonamy, however, quickly replied, that if the Blessed Virgin had left a scar, it was certainly in order that a trace, a proof of the miracle, might remain. Then he entered into technical particulars, demonstrating that a fragment of bone and flesh must have been instantly formed, and this, of course, could not be explained in any natural way.

"Mon Dieu!" interrupted the little fair-haired gentleman, "there is no need of any such complicated affair. Let me merely see a finger cut with a penknife, let me see it dipped in the water, and let it come out with the cut cicatrised. The miracle will be quite as great, and I shall bow to it respectfully." Then he added: "If I possessed a source which could thus close up sores and wounds, I would turn the world topsy-turvy. I do not know exactly how I should manage it, but at all events I would summon the nations, and the nations would come. I should cause the miracles to be verified in such an indisputable manner, that I should be the master of the earth. Just think what an extraordinary power it would be—a divine power. But it would be necessary that not a doubt should remain, the truth would have to be as patent, as apparent as the sun itself. The whole world would behold it and believe!"

Then he began discussing various methods of control with the doctor. He had admitted that, owing to the great number of patients, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to examine them all on their arrival. Only, why didn't they organise a special ward at the hospital, a ward which would be reserved for cases of visible sores? They would have thirty such cases all told, which might be subjected to the preliminary examination of a committee. Authentic reports would be drawn up, and the sores might even be photographed. Then, if a case of cure should present itself, the commission would merely have to authenticate it by a fresh report. And in all this there would be no question of any internal complaint, the diagnostication of which is difficult, and liable to be controverted. There would be visible evidence of the ailment, and cure could be proved.

Somewhat embarrassed, Doctor Bonamy replied: "No doubt, no doubt; all we ask for is enlightenment. The difficulty would be in forming the committee you speak of. If you only knew how little medical men agree! However, there is certainly an idea in what you say."

Fortunately a fresh patient now came to his assistance. Whilst little Sophie Couteau, already forgotten, was putting on, her shoes again, Elise Rouquet appeared, and, removing her wrap, displayed her diseased face to view. She related that she had been bathing it with her handkerchief ever since the morning, and it seemed to her that her sore, previously so fresh and raw, was already beginning to dry and grow paler in colour. This was true; Pierre noticed, with great surprise, that the aspect of the sore was now less horrible. This supplied fresh food for the discussion on visible sores, for the little fair-haired gentleman clung obstinately to his idea of organising a special ward. Indeed, said he, if the condition of this girl had been verified that morning, and she should be cured, what a triumph it would have been for the Grotto, which could have claimed to have healed a lupus! It would then have no longer been possible to deny that miracles were worked.

Doctor Chassaigne had so far kept in the background, motionless and silent, as though he desired that the facts alone should exercise their influence on Pierre. But he now leant forward and said to him in an undertone: "Visible sores, visible sores indeed! That gentleman can have no idea that our most learned medical men suspect many of these sores to be of nervous origin. Yes, we are discovering that complaints of this kind are often simply due to bad nutrition of the skin. These questions of nutrition are still so imperfectly studied and understood! And some medical men are also beginning to prove that the faith which heals can even cure sores, certain forms of lupus among others. And so I would ask what certainty that gentleman would obtain with his ward for visible sores? There would simply be a little more confusion and passion in arguing the eternal question. No, no! Science is vain, it is a sea of uncertainty."

He smiled sorrowfully whilst Doctor Bonamy, after advising Elise Rouquet to continue using the water as lotion and to return each day for further examination, repeated with his prudent, affable air: "At all events, gentlemen, there are signs of improvement in this case—that is beyond doubt."

But all at once the office was fairly turned topsy-turvy by the arrival of La Grivotte, who swept in like a whirlwind, almost dancing with delight and shouting in a full voice: "I am cured! I am cured!"

And forthwith she began to relate that they had first of all refused to bathe her, and that she had been obliged to insist and beg and sob in order to prevail upon them to do so, after receiving Father Fourcade's express permission. And then it had all happened as she had previously said it would. She had not been immersed in the icy water for three minutes—all perspiring as she was with her consumptive rattle—before she had felt strength returning to her like a whipstroke lashing her whole body. And now a flaming excitement possessed her; radiant, stamping her feet, she was unable to keep still.

"I am cured, my good gentlemen, I am cured!"

Pierre looked at her, this time quite stupefied. Was this the same girl whom, on the previous night, he had seen lying on the carriage seat, annihilated, coughing and spitting blood, with her face of ashen hue? He could not recognise her as she now stood there, erect and slender, her cheeks rosy, her eyes sparkling, upbuoyed by a determination to live, a joy in living already.

"Gentlemen," declared Doctor Bonamy, "the case appears to me to be a very interesting one. We will see."

Then he asked for the documents concerning La Grivotte. But they could not be found among all the papers heaped together on the tables. The young seminarists who acted as secretaries began turning everything over; and the superintendent of the piscinas who sat in their midst himself had to get up to see if these documents were in the "canterbury." At last, when he had sat down again, he found them under the register which lay open before him. Among them were three medical certificates which he read aloud. All three of them agreed in stating that the case was one of advanced phthisis, complicated by nervous incidents which invested it with a peculiar character.

Doctor Bonamy wagged his head as though to say that such an ensemble of testimony could leave no room for doubt. Forthwith, he subjected the patient to a prolonged auscultation. And he murmured: "I hear nothing—I hear nothing." Then, correcting himself, he added: "At least I hear scarcely anything."

Finally he turned towards the five-and-twenty or thirty doctors who were assembled there in silence. "Will some of you gentlemen," he asked, "kindly lend me the help of your science? We are here to study and discuss these questions."

At first nobody stirred. Then there was one who ventured to come forward and, in his turn subject the patient to auscultation. But instead of declaring himself, he continued reflecting, shaking his head anxiously. At last he stammered that in his opinion one must await further developments. Another doctor, however, at once took his place, and this one expressed a decided opinion. He could hear nothing at all, that woman could never have suffered from phthisis. Then others followed him; in fact, with the exception of five or six whose smiling faces remained impenetrable, they all joined the defile. And the confusion now attained its apogee; for each gave an opinion sensibly differing from that of his colleagues, so that a general uproar arose and one could no longer hear oneself speak. Father Dargeles alone retained the calmness of perfect serenity, for he had scented one of those cases which impassion people and redound to the glory of Our Lady of Lourdes. He was already taking notes on a corner of the table.

Thanks to all the noise of the discussion, Pierre and Doctor Chassaigne, seated at some distance from the others, were now able to talk together without being heard. "Oh! those piscinas!" said the young priest, "I have just seen them. To think that the water should be so seldom changed! What filth it is, what a soup of microbes! What a terrible blow for the present-day mania, that rage for antiseptic precautions! How is it that some pestilence does not carry off all these poor people? The opponents of the microbe theory must be having a good laugh—"

M. Chassaigne stopped him. "No, no, my child," said he. "The baths may be scarcely clean, but they offer no danger. Please notice that the temperature of the water never rises above fifty degrees, and that seventy-seven are necessary for the cultivation of germs.* Besides, scarcely any contagious diseases come to Lourdes, neither cholera, nor typhus, nor variola, nor measles, nor scarlatina. We only see certain organic affections here, paralysis, scrofula, tumours, ulcers and abscesses, cancers and phthisis; and the latter cannot be transmitted by the water of the baths. The old sores which are bathed have nothing to fear, and offer no risk of contagion. I can assure you that on this point there is even no necessity for the Blessed Virgin to intervene."

* The above are Fahrenheit degrees.—Trans.

"Then, in that case, doctor," rejoined Pierre, "when you were practising, you would have dipped all your patients in icy water—women at no matter what season, rheumatic patients, people suffering from diseases of the heart, consumptives, and so on? For instance, that unhappy girl, half dead, and covered with sweat—would you have bathed her?"

"Certainly not! There are heroic methods of treatment to which, in practice, one does not dare to have recourse. An icy bath may undoubtedly kill a consumptive; but do we know, whether, in certain circumstances, it might not save her? I, who have ended by admitting that a supernatural power is at work here, I willingly admit that some cures must take place under natural conditions, thanks to that immersion in cold water which seems to us idiotic and barbarous. Ah! the things we don't know, the things we don't know!"

He was relapsing into his anger, his hatred of science, which he scorned since it had left him scared and powerless beside the deathbed of his wife and his daughter. "You ask for certainties," he resumed, "but assuredly it is not medicine which will give you them. Listen for a moment to those gentlemen and you will be edified. Is it not beautiful, all that confusion in which so many opinions clash together? Certainly there are ailments with which one is thoroughly acquainted, even to the most minute details of their evolution; there are remedies also, the effects of which have been studied with the most scrupulous care; but the thing that one does not know, that one cannot know, is the relation of the remedy to the ailment, for there are as many cases as there may be patients, each liable to variation, so that experimentation begins afresh every time. This is why the practice of medicine remains an art, for there can be no experimental finality in it. Cure always depends on chance, on some fortunate circumstance, on some bright idea of the doctor's. And so you will understand that all the people who come and discuss here make me laugh when they talk about the absolute laws of science. Where are those laws in medicine? I should like to have them shown to me."

He did not wish to say any more, but his passion carried him away, so he went on: "I told you that I had become a believer—nevertheless, to speak the truth, I understand very well why this worthy Doctor Bonamy is so little affected, and why he continues calling upon doctors in all parts of the world to come and study his miracles. The more doctors that might come, the less likelihood there would be of the truth being established in the inevitable battle between contradictory diagnoses and methods of treatment. If men cannot agree about a visible sore, they surely cannot do so about an internal lesion the existence of which will be admitted by some, and denied by others. And why then should not everything become a miracle? For, after all, whether the action comes from nature or from some unknown power, medical men are, as a rule, none the less astonished when an illness terminates in a manner which they have not foreseen. No doubt, too, things are very badly organised here. Those certificates from doctors whom nobody knows have no real value. All documents ought to be stringently inquired into. But even admitting any absolute scientific strictness, you must be very simple, my dear child, if you imagine that a positive conviction would be arrived at, absolute for one and all. Error is implanted in man, and there is no more difficult task than that of demonstrating to universal satisfaction the most insignificant truth."

Pierre had now begun to understand what was taking place at Lourdes, the extraordinary spectacle which the world had been witnessing for years, amidst the reverent admiration of some and the insulting laughter of others. Forces as yet but imperfectly studied, of which one was even ignorant, were certainly at work—auto-suggestion, long prepared disturbance of the nerves; inspiriting influence of the journey, the prayers, and the hymns; and especially the healing breath, the unknown force which was evolved from the multitude, in the acute crisis of faith. Thus it seemed to him anything but intelligent to believe in trickery. The facts were both of a much more lofty and much more simple nature. There was no occasion for the Fathers of the Grotto to descend to falsehood; it was sufficient that they should help in creating confusion, that they should utilise the universal ignorance. It might even be admitted that everybody acted in good faith—the doctors void of genius who delivered the certificates, the consoled patients who believed themselves cured, and the impassioned witnesses who swore that they had beheld what they described. And from all this was evolved the obvious impossibility of proving whether there was a miracle or not. And such being the case, did not the miracle naturally become a reality for the greater number, for all those who suffered and who had need of hope?

Then, as Doctor Bonamy, who had noticed that they were chatting apart, came up to them, Pierre ventured to inquire: "What is about the proportion of the cures to the number of cases?"

"About ten per cent.," answered the doctor; and reading in the young priest's eyes the words that he could not utter, he added in a very cordial way: "Oh! there would be many more, they would all be cured if we chose to listen to them. But it is as well to say it, I am only here to keep an eye on the miracles, like a policeman as it were. My only functions are to check excessive zeal, and to prevent holy things from being made ridiculous. In one word, this office is simply an office where a visa is given when the cures have been verified and seem real ones."

He was interrupted, however, by a low growl. Raboin was growing angry: "The cures verified, the cures verified," he muttered. "What is the use of that? There is no pause in the working of the miracles. What is the use of verifying them so far as believers are concerned? They merely have to bow down and believe. And what is the use, too, as regards the unbelievers? They will never be convinced. The work we do here is so much foolishness."

Doctor Bonamy severely ordered him to hold his tongue. "You are a rebel, Raboin," said he; "I shall tell Father Capdebarthe that I won't have you here any longer since you pass your time in sowing disobedience."

Nevertheless, there was truth in what had just been said by this man, who so promptly showed his teeth, eager to bite whenever his faith was assailed; and Pierre looked at him with sympathy. All the work of the Verification Office—work anything but well performed—was indeed useless, for it wounded the feelings of the pious, and failed to satisfy the incredulous. Besides, can a miracle be proved? No, you must believe in it! When God is pleased to intervene, it is not for man to try to understand. In the ages of real belief, Science did not make any meddlesome attempt to explain the nature of the Divinity. And why should it come and interfere here? By doing so, it simply hampered faith and diminished its own prestige. No, no, there must be no Science, you must throw yourself upon the ground, kiss it, and believe. Or else you must take yourself off. No compromise was possible. If examination once began it must go on, and must, fatally, conduct to doubt.

Pierre's greatest sufferings, however, came from the extraordinary conversations which he heard around him. There were some believers present who spoke of the miracles with the most amazing ease and tranquillity. The most stupefying stories left their serenity entire. Another miracle, and yet another! And with smiles on their faces, their reason never protesting, they went on relating such imaginings as could only have come from diseased brains. They were evidently living in such a state of visionary fever that nothing henceforth could astonish them. And not only did Pierre notice this among folks of simple, childish minds, illiterate, hallucinated creatures like Raboin, but also among the men of intellect, the men with cultivated brains, the savants like Doctor Bonamy and others. It was incredible. And thus Pierre felt a growing discomfort arising within him, a covert anger which would doubtless end by bursting forth. His reason was struggling, like that of some poor wretch who after being flung into a river, feels the waters seize him from all sides and stifle him; and he reflected that the minds which, like Doctor Chassaigne's, sink at last into blind belief, must pass though this same discomfort and struggle before the final shipwreck.

He glanced at his old friend and saw how sorrowful he looked, struck down by destiny, as weak as a crying child, and henceforth quite alone in life. Nevertheless, he was unable to check the cry of protest which rose to his lips: "No, no, if we do not know everything, even if we shall never know everything, there is no reason why we should leave off learning. It is wrong that the Unknown should profit by man's debility and ignorance. On the contrary, the eternal hope should be that the things which now seem inexplicable will some day be explained; and we cannot, under healthy conditions, have any other ideal than this march towards the discovery of the Unknown, this victory slowly achieved by reason amidst all the miseries both of the flesh and of the mind. Ah! reason—it is my reason which makes me suffer, and it is from my reason too that I await all my strength. When reason dies, the whole being perishes. And I feel but an ardent thirst to satisfy my reason more and more, even though I may lose all happiness in doing so."

Tears were appearing in Doctor Chassaigne's eyes; doubtless the memory of his dear dead ones had again flashed upon him. And, in his turn, he murmured: "Reason, reason, yes, certainly it is a thing to be very proud of; it embodies the very dignity of life. But there is love, which is life's omnipotence, the one blessing to be won again when you have lost it."

His voice sank in a stifled sob; and as in a mechanical way he began to finger the sets of documents lying on the table, he espied among them one whose cover bore the name of Marie de Guersaint in large letters. He opened it and read the certificates of the two doctors who had inferred that the case was one of paralysis of the marrow. "Come, my child," he then resumed, "I know that you feel warm affection for Mademoiselle de Guersaint. What should you say if she were cured here? There are here some certificates, bearing honourable names, and you know that paralysis of this nature is virtually incurable. Well, if this young person should all at once run and jump about as I have seen so many others do, would you not feel very happy, would you not at last acknowledge the intervention of a supernatural power?"

Pierre was about to reply, when he suddenly remembered his cousin Beauclair's expression of opinion, the prediction that the miracle would come about like a lightning stroke, an awakening, an exaltation of the whole being; and he felt his discomfort increase and contented himself with replying: "Yes, indeed, I should be very happy. And you are right; there is doubtless only a determination to secure happiness in all the agitation one beholds here."

However, he could remain in that office no longer. The heat was becoming so great that perspiration streamed down the faces of those present. Doctor Bonamy had begun to dictate a report of the examination of La Grivotte to one of the seminarists, while Father Dargeles, watchful with regard to the phraseology employed, occasionally rose and whispered some verbal alteration in the writer's ear. Meantime, the tumult around them was continuing; the discussion among the medical men had taken another turn and now bore on certain technical points of no significance with regard to the case in question. You could no longer breathe within those wooden walls, nausea was upsetting every heart and every head. The little fair-haired gentleman, the influential writer from Paris, had already gone away, quite vexed at not having seen a real miracle.

Pierre thereupon said to Doctor Chassaigne, "Let us go; I shall be taken ill if I stay here any longer."

They left the office at the same time as La Grivotte, who was at last being dismissed. And as soon as they reached the door they found themselves caught in a torrential, surging, jostling crowd, which was eager to behold the girl so miraculously healed; for the report of the miracle must have already spread, and one and all were struggling to see the chosen one, question her, and touch her. And she, with her empurpled cheeks, her flaming eyes, her dancing gait, could do nothing but repeat, "I am cured, I am cured!"

Shouts drowned her voice, she herself was submerged, carried off amidst the eddies of the throng. For a moment one lost sight of her as though she had sunk in those tumultuous waters; then she suddenly reappeared close to Pierre and the doctor, who endeavoured to extricate her from the crush. They had just perceived the Commander, one of whose manias was to come down to the piscinas and the Grotto in order to vent his anger there. With his frock-coat tightly girding him in military fashion, he was, as usual, leaning on his silver-knobbed walking-stick, slightly dragging his left leg, which his second attack of paralysis had stiffened. And his face reddened and his eyes flashed with anger when La Grivotte, pushing him aside in order that she might pass, repeated amidst the wild enthusiasm of the crowd, "I am cured, I am cured!"

"Well!" he cried, seized with sudden fury, "so much the worse for you, my girl!"

Exclamations arose, folks began to laugh, for he was well known, and his maniacal passion for death was forgiven him. However, when he began stammering confused words, saying that it was pitiful to desire life when one was possessed of neither beauty nor fortune, and that this girl ought to have preferred to die at once rather than suffer again, people began to growl around him, and Abbe Judaine, who was passing, had to extricate him from his trouble. The priest drew him away. "Be quiet, my friend, be quiet," he said. "It is scandalous. Why do you rebel like this against the goodness of God who occasionally shows His compassion for our sufferings by alleviating them? I tell you again that you yourself ought to fall on your knees and beg Him to restore to you the use of your leg and let you live another ten years."

The Commander almost choked with anger. "What!" he replied, "ask to live for another ten years, when my finest day will be the day I die! Show myself as spiritless, as cowardly as the thousands of patients whom I see pass along here, full of a base terror of death, shrieking aloud their weakness, their passion to remain alive! Ah! no, I should feel too much contempt for myself. I want to die!—to die at once! It will be so delightful to be no more."

He was at last out of the scramble of the pilgrims, and again found himself near Doctor Chassaigne and Pierre on the bank of the Gave. And he addressed himself to the doctor, whom he often met: "Didn't they try to restore a dead man to life just now?" he asked; "I was told of it—it almost suffocated me. Eh, doctor? You understand? That man was happy enough to be dead, and they dared to dip him in their water in the criminal hope to make him alive again! But suppose they had succeeded, suppose their water had animated that poor devil once more—for one never knows what may happen in this funny world—don't you think that the man would have had a perfect right to spit his anger in the face of those corpse-menders? Had he asked them to awaken him? How did they know if he were not well pleased at being dead? Folks ought to be consulted at any rate. Just picture them playing the same vile trick on me when I at last fall into the great deep sleep. Ah! I would give them a nice reception. 'Meddle with what concerns you,' I should say, and you may be sure I should make all haste to die again!"

He looked so singular in the fit of rage which had come over him that Abbe Judaine and the doctor could not help smiling. Pierre, however, remained grave, chilled by the great quiver which swept by. Were not those words he had just heard the despairing imprecations of Lazarus? He had often imagined Lazarus emerging from the tomb and crying aloud: "Why hast Thou again awakened me to this abominable life, O Lord? I was sleeping the eternal, dreamless sleep so deeply; I was at last enjoying such sweet repose amidst the delights of nihility! I had known every wretchedness and every dolour, treachery, vain hope, defeat, sickness; as one of the living I had paid my frightful debt to suffering, for I was born without knowing why, and I lived without knowing how; and now, behold, O Lord, Thou requirest me to pay my debt yet again; Thou condemnest me to serve my term of punishment afresh! Have I then been guilty of some inexpiable transgression that thou shouldst inflict such cruel chastisement upon me? Alas! to live again, to feel oneself die a little in one's flesh each day, to have no intelligence save such as is required in order to doubt; no will, save such as one must have to be unable; no tenderness, save such as is needed to weep over one's own sorrows. Yet it was passed, I had crossed the terrifying threshold of death, I had known that second which is so horrible that it sufficeth to poison the whole of life. I had felt the sweat of agony cover me with moisture, the blood flow back from my limbs, my breath forsake me, flee away in a last gasp. And Thou ordainest that I should know this distress a second time, that I should die twice, that my human misery should exceed that of all mankind. Then may it be even now, O Lord! Yes, I entreat Thee, do also this great miracle; may I once more lay myself down in this grave, and again fall asleep without suffering from the interruption of my eternal slumber. Have mercy upon me, and forbear from inflicting on me the torture of living yet again; that torture which is so frightful that Thou hast never inflicted it on any being. I have always loved Thee and served Thee; and I beseech Thee do not make of me the greatest example of Thy wrath, a cause of terror unto all generations. But show unto me Thy gentleness and loving kindness, O Lord! restore unto me the slumber I have earned, and let me sleep once more amid the delights of Thy nihility."

While Pierre was pondering in this wise, Abbe Judaine had led the Commander away, at last managing to calm him; and now the young priest shook hands with Doctor Chassaigne, recollecting that it was past five o'clock, and that Marie must be waiting for him. On his way back to the Grotto, however, he encountered the Abbe des Hermoises deep in conversation with M. de Guersaint, who had only just left his room at the hotel, and was quite enlivened by his good nap. He and his companion were admiring the extraordinary beauty which the fervour of faith imparted to some women's countenances, and they also spoke of their projected trip to the Cirque de Gavarnie.

On learning, however, that Marie had taken a first bath with no effect, M. de Guersaint at once followed Pierre. They found the poor girl still in the same painful stupor, with her eyes still fixed on the Blessed Virgin who had not deigned to hear her. She did not answer the loving words which her father addressed to her, but simply glanced at him with her large distressful eyes, and then again turned them upon the marble statue which looked so white amid the radiance of the tapers. And whilst Pierre stood waiting to take her back to the hospital, M. de Guersaint devoutly fell upon his knees. At first he prayed with passionate ardour for his daughter's cure, and then he solicited, on his own behalf, the favour of finding some wealthy person who would provide him with the million francs that he needed for his studies on aerial navigation.

V. BERNADETTE'S TRIALS

ABOUT eleven o'clock that night, leaving M. de Guersaint in his room at the Hotel of the Apparitions, it occurred to Pierre to return for a moment to the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours before going to bed himself. He had left Marie in such a despairing state, so fiercely silent, that he was full of anxiety about her. And when he had asked for Madame de Jonquiere at the door of the Sainte-Honorine Ward he became yet more anxious, for the news was by no means good. The young girl, said the superintendent, had not even opened her mouth. She would answer nobody, and had even refused to eat. Madame de Jonquiere, insisted therefore that Pierre should come in. True, the presence of men was forbidden in the women's wards at night-time, but then a priest is not a man.

"She only cares for you and will only listen to you," said the worthy lady. "Pray come in and sit down near her till Abbe Judaine arrives. He will come at about one in the morning to administer the communion to our more afflicted sufferers, those who cannot move and who have to eat at daybreak. You will be able to assist him."

Pierre thereupon followed Madame de Jonquiere, who installed him at the head of Marie's bed. "My dear child," she said to the girl, "I have brought you somebody who is very fond of you. You will be able to chat with him, and you will be reasonable now, won't you?"

Marie, however, on recognising Pierre, gazed at him with an air of exasperated suffering, a black, stern expression of revolt.

"Would you like him to read something to you," resumed Madame de Jonquiere, "something that would ease and console you as he did in the train? No? It wouldn't interest you, you don't care for it? Well, we will see by-and-by. I will leave him with you, and I am sure you will be quite reasonable again in a few minutes."

Pierre then began speaking to her in a low voice, saying all the kind consoling things that his heart could think of, and entreating her not to allow herself to sink into such despair. If the Blessed Virgin had not cured her on the first day, it was because she reserved her for some conspicuous miracle. But he spoke in vain. Marie had turned her head away, and did not even seem to listen as she lay there with a bitter expression on her mouth and a gleam of irritation in her eyes, which wandered away into space. Accordingly he ceased speaking and began to gaze at the ward around him.

The spectacle was a frightful one. Never before had such a nausea of pity and terror affected his heart. They had long since dined, nevertheless plates of food which had been brought up from the kitchens still lay about the beds; and all through the night there were some who ate whilst others continued restlessly moaning, asking to be turned over or helped out of bed. As the hours went by a kind of vague delirium seemed to come upon almost all of them. Very few were able to sleep quietly. Some had been undressed and were lying between the sheets, but the greater number were simply stretched out on the beds, it being so difficult to get their clothes off that they did not even change their linen during the five days of the pilgrimage. In the semi-obscurity, moreover, the obstruction of the ward seemed to have increased. To the fifteen beds ranged along the walls and the seven mattresses filling the central space, some fresh pallets had been added, and on all sides there was a confused litter of ragged garments, old baskets, boxes, and valises. Indeed, you no longer knew where to step. Two smoky lanterns shed but a dim light upon this encampment of dying women, in which a sickly smell prevailed; for, instead of any freshness, merely the heavy heat of the August night came in through the two windows which had been left ajar. Nightmare-like shadows and cries sped to and fro, peopling the inferno, amidst the nocturnal agony of so much accumulated suffering.

However, Pierre recognised Raymonde, who, her duties over, had come to kiss her mother, before going to sleep in one of the garrets reserved to the Sisters of the hospital. For her own part, Madame de Jonquiere, taking her functions to heart, did not close her eyes during the three nights spent at Lourdes.

She certainly had an arm-chair in which to rest herself, but she never sat down in it for a moment with out being disturbed. It must be admitted that she was bravely seconded by little Madame Desagneaux, who displayed such enthusiastic zeal that Sister Hyacinthe asked her, with a smile: "Why don't you take the vows?" whereupon she responded, with an air of scared surprise: "Oh! I can't, I'm married, you know, and I'm very fond of my husband." As for Madame Volmar, she had not even shown herself; but it was alleged that Madame de Jonquiere had sent her to bed on hearing her complain of a frightful headache. And this had put Madame Desagneaux in quite a temper; for, as she sensibly enough remarked, a person had no business to offer to nurse the sick when the slightest exertion exhausted her. She herself, however, at last began to feel her legs and arms aching, though she would not admit it, but hastened to every patient whom she heard calling, ever ready as she was to lend a helping hand. In Paris she would have rung for a servant rather than have moved a candlestick herself; but here she was ever coming and going, bringing and emptying basins, and passing her arms around patients to hold them up, whilst Madame de Jonquiere slipped pillows behind them. However, shortly after eleven o'clock, she was all at once overpowered. Having imprudently stretched herself in the armchair for a moment's rest, she there fell soundly asleep, her pretty head sinking on one of her shoulders amidst her lovely, wavy fair hair, which was all in disorder. And from that moment neither moan nor call, indeed no sound whatever, could waken her.

Madame de Jonquiere, however, had softly approached the young priest again. "I had an idea," said she in a low voice, "of sending for Monsieur Ferrand, the house-surgeon, you know, who accompanies us. He would have given the poor girl something to calm her. Only he is busy downstairs trying to relieve Brother Isidore, in the Family Ward. Besides, as you know, we are not supposed to give medical attendance here; our work consists in placing our dear sick ones in the hands of the Blessed Virgin."

Sister Hyacinthe, who had made up her mind to spend the night with the superintendent, now drew, near. "I have just come from the Family Ward," she said; "I went to take Monsieur Sabathier some oranges which I had promised him, and I saw Monsieur Ferrand, who had just succeeded in reviving Brother Isidore. Would you like me to go down and fetch him?"

But Pierre declined the offer. "No, no," he replied, "Marie will be sensible. I will read her a few consoling pages by-and-by, and then she will rest."

For the moment, however, the girl still remained obstinately silent. One of the two lanterns was hanging from the wall close by, and Pierre could distinctly see her thin face, rigid and motionless like stone. Then, farther away, in the adjoining bed, he perceived Elise Rouquet, who was sound asleep and no longer wore her fichu, but openly displayed her face, the ulcerations of which still continued to grow paler. And on the young priest's left hand was Madame Vetu, now greatly weakened, in a hopeless state, unable to doze off for a moment, shaken as she was by a continuous rattle. He said a few kind words to her, for which she thanked him with a nod; and, gathering her remaining strength together, she was at last able to say: "There were several cures to-day; I was very pleased to hear of them."

On a mattress at the foot of her bed was La Grivotte, who in a fever of extraordinary activity kept on sitting up to repeat her favourite phrase: "I am cured, I am cured!" And she went on to relate that she had eaten half a fowl for dinner, she who had been unable to eat for long months past. Then, too, she had followed the torchlight procession on foot during nearly a couple of hours, and she would certainly have danced till daybreak had the Blessed Virgin only been pleased to give a ball. And once more she repeated: "I am cured, yes, cured, quite cured!"

Thereupon Madame Vetu found enough strength to say with childlike serenity and perfect, gladsome abnegation: "The Blessed Virgin did well to cure her since she is poor. I am better pleased than if it had been myself, for I have my little shop to depend upon and can wait. We each have our turn, each our turn."

One and all displayed a like charity, a like pleasure that others should have been cured. Seldom, indeed, was any jealousy shown; they surrendered themselves to a kind of epidemical beatitude, to a contagious hope that they would all be cured whenever it should so please the Blessed Virgin. And it was necessary that she should not be offended by any undue impatience; for assuredly she had her reasons and knew right well why she began by healing some rather than others. Thus with the fraternity born of common suffering and hope, the most grievously afflicted patients prayed for the cure of their neighbours. None of them ever despaired, each fresh miracle was the promise of another one, of the one which would be worked on themselves. Their faith remained unshakable. A story was told of a paralytic woman, some farm servant, who with extraordinary strength of will had contrived to take a few steps at the Grotto, and who while being conveyed back to the hospital had asked to be set down that she might return to the Grotto on foot. But she had gone only half the distance when she had staggered, panting and livid; and on being brought to the hospital on a stretcher, she had died there, cured, however, said her neighbours in the ward. Each, indeed, had her turn; the Blessed Virgin forgot none of her dear daughters unless it were her design to grant some chosen one immediate admission into Paradise.

All at once, at the moment when Pierre was leaning towards her, again offering to read to her, Marie burst into furious sobs. Letting her head fall upon her friend's shoulder, she vented all her rebellion in a low, terrible voice, amidst the vague shadows of that awful room. She had experienced what seldom happened to her, a collapse of faith, a sudden loss of courage, all the rage of the suffering being who can no longer wait. Such was her despair, indeed, that she even became sacrilegious.

"No, no," she stammered, "the Virgin is cruel; she is unjust, for she did not cure me just now. Yet I felt so certain that she would grant my prayer, I had prayed to her so fervently. I shall never be cured, now that the first day is past. It was a Saturday, and I was convinced that I should be cured on a Saturday. I did not want to speak—and oh! prevent me, for my heart is too full, and I might say more than I ought to do."

With fraternal hands he had quickly taken hold of her head, and he was endeavouring to stifle the cry of her rebellion. "Be quiet, Marie, I entreat you! It would never do for anyone to hear you—you so pious! Do you want to scandalise every soul?"

But in spite of her efforts she was unable to keep silence. "I should stifle, I must speak out," she said. "I no longer love her, no longer believe in her. The tales which are related here are all falsehoods; there is nothing, she does not even exist, since she does not hear when one speaks to her, and sobs. If you only knew all that I said to her! Oh! I want to go away at once. Take me away, carry me away in your arms, so that I may go and die in the street, where the passers-by, at least, will take pity on my sufferings!"

She was growing weak again, and had once more fallen on her back, stammering, talking childishly. "Besides, nobody loves me," she said. "My father was not even there. And you, my friend, forsook me. When I saw that it was another who was taking me to the piscinas, I began to feel a chill. Yes, that chill of doubt which I often felt in Paris. And that is at least certain, I doubted—perhaps, indeed, that is why she did not cure me. I cannot have prayed well enough, I am not pious enough, no doubt."

She was no longer blaspheming, but seeking for excuses to explain the non-intervention of Heaven. However, her face retained an angry expression amidst this struggle which she was waging with the Supreme Power, that Power which she had loved so well and entreated so fervently, but which had not obeyed her. When, on rare occasions, a fit of rage of this description broke out in the ward, and the sufferers, lying on their beds, rebelled against their fate, sobbing and lamenting, and at times even swearing, the lady-hospitallers and the Sisters, somewhat shocked, would content themselves with simply closing the bed-curtains. Grace had departed, one must await its return. And at last, sometimes after long hours, the rebellious complaints would die away, and peace would reign again amidst the deep, woeful silence.

"Calm yourself, calm yourself, I implore you," Pierre gently repeated to Marie, seeing that a fresh attack was coming upon her, an attack of doubt in herself, of fear that she was unworthy of the divine assistance.

Sister Hyacinthe, moreover, had again drawn near. "You will not be able to take the sacrament by-and-by, my dear child," said she, "if you continue in such a state. Come, since we have given Monsieur l'Abbe permission to read to you, why don't you let him do so?"

Marie made a feeble gesture as though to say that she consented, and Pierre at once took out of the valise at the foot of her bed, the little blue-covered book in which the story of Bernadette was so naively related. As on the previous night, however, when the train was rolling on, he did not confine himself to the bald phraseology of the book, but began improvising, relating all manner of details in his own fashion, in order to charm the simple folks who listened to him. Nevertheless, with his reasoning, analytical proclivities, he could not prevent himself from secretly re-establishing the real facts, imparting, for himself alone, a human character to this legend, whose wealth of prodigies contributed so greatly to the cure of those that suffered. Women were soon sitting up on all the surrounding beds. They wished to hear the continuation of the story, for the thought of the sacrament which they were passionately awaiting had prevented almost all of them from getting to sleep. And seated there, in the pale light of the lantern hanging from the wall above him, Pierre little by little raised his voice, so that he might be heard by the whole ward.

"The persecutions began with the very first miracles. Called a liar and a lunatic, Bernadette was threatened with imprisonment. Abbe Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, and Monseigneur Laurence, Bishop of Tarbes, like the rest of the clergy, refrained from all intervention, waiting the course of events with the greatest prudence; whilst the civil authorities, the Prefect, the Public Prosecutor, the Mayor, and the Commissary of Police, indulged in excessive anti-religious zeal."

Continuing his perusal in this fashion, Pierre saw the real story rise up before him with invincible force. His mind travelled a short distance backward and he beheld Bernadette at the time of the first apparitions, so candid, so charming in her ignorance and good faith, amidst all her sufferings. And she was truly the visionary, the saint, her face assuming an expression of superhuman beauty during her crises of ecstasy. Her brow beamed, her features seemed to ascend, her eyes were bathed with light, whilst her parted lips burnt with divine love. And then her whole person became majestic; it was in a slow, stately way that she made the sign of the cross, with gestures which seemed to embrace the whole horizon. The neighbouring valleys, the villages, the towns, spoke of Bernadette alone. Although the Lady had not yet told her name, she was recognised, and people said, "It is she, the Blessed Virgin." On the first market-day, so many people flocked into Lourdes that the town quite overflowed. All wished to see the blessed child whom the Queen of the Angels had chosen, and who became so beautiful when the heavens opened to her enraptured gaze. The crowd on the banks of the Gave grew larger each morning, and thousands of people ended by installing themselves there, jostling one another that they might lose nothing of the spectacle! As soon as Bernadette appeared, a murmur of fervour spread: "Here is the saint, the saint, the saint!" Folks rushed forward to kiss her garments. She was a Messiah, the eternal Messiah whom the nations await, and the need of whom is ever arising from generation to generation. And, moreover, it was ever the same adventure beginning afresh: an apparition of the Virgin to a shepherdess; a voice exhorting the world to penitence; a spring gushing forth; and miracles astonishing and enrapturing the crowds that hastened to the spot in larger and larger numbers.

Ah! those first miracles of Lourdes, what a spring-tide flowering of consolation and hope they brought to the hearts of the wretched, upon whom poverty and sickness were preying! Old Bourriette's restored eyesight, little Bouhohort's resuscitation in the icy water, the deaf recovering their hearing, the lame suddenly enabled to walk, and so many other cases, Blaise Maumus, Bernade Soubies,* Auguste Bordes, Blaisette Soupenne, Benoite Cazeaux, in turn cured of the most dreadful ailments, became the subject of endless conversations, and fanned the illusions of all those who suffered either in their hearts or their flesh. On Thursday, March 4th, the last day of the fifteen visits solicited by the Virgin, there were more than twenty thousand persons assembled before the Grotto. Everybody, indeed, had come down from the mountains. And this immense throng found at the Grotto the divine food that it hungered for, a feast of the Marvellous, a sufficient meed of the Impossible to content its belief in a superior Power, which deigned to bestow some attention upon poor folks, and to intervene in the wretched affairs of this lower world, in order to re-establish some measure of justice and kindness. It was indeed the cry of heavenly charity bursting forth, the invisible helping hand stretched out at last to dress the eternal sores of humanity. Ah! that dream in which each successive generation sought refuge, with what indestructible energy did it not arise among the disinherited ones of this world as soon as it found a favourable spot, prepared by circumstances! And for centuries, perhaps, circumstances had never so combined to kindle the mystical fire of faith as they did at Lourdes.

* I give this name as written by M. Zola; but in other works on
Lourdes I find it given as "Bernarde Loubie—a bed-ridden old
woman, cured of a paralytic affection by drinking the water of
the Grotto."—Trans.

A new religion was about to be founded, and persecutions at once began, for religions only spring up amidst vexations and rebellions. And even as it was long ago at Jerusalem, when the tidings of miracles spread, the civil authorities—the Public Prosecutor, the Justice of the Peace, the Mayor, and particularly the Prefect of Tarbes—were all roused and began to bestir themselves. The Prefect was a sincere Catholic, a worshipper, a man of perfect honour, but he also had the firm mind of a public functionary, was a passionate defender of order, and a declared adversary of fanaticism which gives birth to disorder and religious perversion. Under his orders at Lourdes there was a Commissary of Police, a man of great intelligence and shrewdness, who had hitherto discharged his functions in a very proper way, and who, legitimately enough, beheld in this affair of the apparitions an opportunity to put his gift of sagacious skill to the proof. So the struggle began, and it was this Commissary who, on the first Sunday in Lent, at the time of the first apparitions, summoned Bernadette to his office in order that he might question her. He showed himself affectionate, then angry, then threatening, but all in vain; the answers which the girl gave him were ever the same. The story which she related, with its slowly accumulated details, had little by little irrevocably implanted itself in her infantile mind. And it was no lie on the part of this poor suffering creature, this exceptional victim of hysteria, but an unconscious haunting, a radical lack of will-power to free herself from her original hallucination. She knew not how to exert any such will, she could not, she would not exert it. Ah! the poor child, the dear child, so amiable and so gentle, so incapable of any evil thought, from that time forward lost to life, crucified by her fixed idea, whence one could only have extricated her by changing her environment, by restoring her to the open air, in some land of daylight and human affection. But she was the chosen one, she had beheld the Virgin, she would suffer from it her whole life long and die from it at last!

Pierre, who knew Bernadette so well, and who felt a fraternal pity for her memory, the fervent compassion with which one regards a human saint, a simple, upright, charming creature tortured by her faith, allowed his emotion to appear in his moist eyes and trembling voice. And a pause in his narrative ensued. Marie, who had hitherto been lying there quite stiff, with a hard expression of revolt still upon her face, opened her clenched hands and made a vague gesture of pity. "Ah," she murmured, "the poor child, all alone to contend against those magistrates, and so innocent, so proud, so unshakable in her championship of the truth!"

The same compassionate sympathy was arising from all the beds in the ward. That hospital inferno with its nocturnal wretchedness, its pestilential atmosphere, its pallets of anguish heaped together, its weary lady-hospitallers and Sisters flitting phantom-like hither and thither, now seemed to be illumined by a ray of divine charity. Was not the eternal illusion of happiness rising once more amidst tears and unconscious falsehoods? Poor, poor Bernadette! All waxed indignant at the thought of the persecutions which she had endured in defence of her faith.

Then Pierre, resuming his story, related all that the child had had to suffer. After being questioned by the Commissary she had to appear before the judges of the local tribunal. The entire magistracy pursued her, and endeavoured to wring a retractation from her. But the obstinacy of her dream was stronger than the common sense of all the civil authorities put together. Two doctors who were sent by the Prefect to make a careful examination of the girl came, as all doctors would have done, to the honest opinion that it was a case of nervous trouble, of which the asthma was a sure sign, and which, in certain circumstances, might have induced visions. This nearly led to her removal and confinement in a hospital at Tarbes. But public exasperation was feared. A bishop had fallen on his knees before her. Some ladies had sought to buy favours from her for gold. Moreover she had found a refuge with the Sisters of Nevers, who tended the aged in the town asylum, and there she made her first communion, and was with difficulty taught to read and write. As the Blessed Virgin seemed to have chosen her solely to work the happiness of others, and she herself had not been cured, it was very sensibly decided to take her to the baths of Cauterets, which were so near at hand. However, they did her no good. And no sooner had she returned to Lourdes than the torture of being questioned and adored by a whole people began afresh, became aggravated, and filled her more and more with horror of the world. Her life was over already; she would be a playful child no more; she could never be a young girl dreaming of a husband, a young wife kissing the cheeks of sturdy children. She had beheld the Virgin, she was the chosen one, the martyr. If the Virgin, said believers, had confided three secrets to her, investing her with a triple armour as it were, it was simply in order to sustain her in her appointed course.

The clergy had for a long time remained aloof, on its own side full of doubt and anxiety. Abby Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, was a man of somewhat blunt ways, but full of infinite kindness, rectitude, and energy whenever he found himself in what he thought the right path. On the first occasion when Bernadette visited him, he received this child who had been brought up at Bartres and had not yet been seen at Catechism, almost as sternly as the Commissary of Police had done; in fact, he refused to believe her story, and with some irony told her to entreat the Lady to begin by making the briars blossom beneath her feet, which, by the way, the Lady never did. And if the Abbe ended by taking the child under his protection like a good pastor who defends his flock, it was simply through the advent of persecution and the talk of imprisoning this puny child, whose clear eyes shone so frankly, and who clung with such modest, gentle stubbornness to her original tale. Besides, why should he have continued denying the miracle after merely doubting it like a prudent priest who had no desire to see religion mixed up in any suspicious affair? Holy Writ is full of prodigies, all dogma is based on the mysterious; and that being so, there was nothing to prevent him, a priest, from believing that the Virgin had really entrusted Bernadette with a pious message for him, an injunction to build a church whither the faithful would repair in procession. Thus it was that he began loving and defending Bernadette for her charm's sake, whilst still refraining from active interference, awaiting as he did the decision of his Bishop.

This Bishop, Monseigneur Laurence, seemed to have shut himself up in his episcopal residence at Tarbes, locking himself within it and preserving absolute silence as though there were nothing occurring at Lourdes of a nature to interest him. He had given strict instructions to his clergy, and so far not a priest had appeared among the vast crowds of people who spent their days before the Grotto. He waited, and even allowed the Prefect to state in his administrative circulars that the civil and the religious authorities were acting in concert. In reality, he cannot have believed in the apparitions of the Grotto of Massabielle, which he doubtless considered to be the mere hallucinations of a sick child. This affair, which was revolutionising the region, was of sufficient importance for him to have studied it day by day, and the manner in which he disregarded it for so long a time shows how little inclined he was to admit the truth of the alleged miracles, and how greatly he desired to avoid compromising the Church in a matter which seemed destined to end badly. With all his piety, Monseigneur Laurence had a cool, practical intellect, which enabled him to govern his diocese with great good sense. Impatient and ardent people nicknamed him Saint Thomas at the time, on account of the manner in which his doubts persisted until events at last forced his hand. Indeed, he turned a deaf ear to all the stories that were being related, firmly resolved as he was that he would only listen to them if it should appear certain that religion had nothing to lose.

However, the persecutions were about to become more pronounced. The Minister of Worship in Paris, who had been informed of what was going on, required that a stop should be put to all disorders, and so the Prefect caused the approaches to the Grotto to be occupied by the military. The Grotto had already been decorated with vases of flowers offered by the zeal of the faithful and the gratitude of sufferers who had been healed. Money, moreover, was thrown into it; gifts to the Blessed Virgin abounded. Rudimentary improvements, too, were carried out in a spontaneous way; some quarrymen cut a kind of reservoir to receive the miraculous water, and others removed the large blocks of stone, and traced a path in the hillside. However, in presence of the swelling torrents of people, the Prefect, after renouncing his idea of arresting Bernadette, took the serious resolution of preventing all access to the Grotto by placing a strong palisade in front of it. Some regrettable incidents had lately occurred; various children pretended that they had seen the devil, some of them being guilty of simulation in this respect, whilst others had given way to real attacks of hysteria, in the contagious nervous unhinging which was so prevalent. But what a terrible business did the removal of the offerings from the Grotto prove! It was only towards evening that the Commissary was able to find a girl willing to let him have a cart on hire, and two hours later this girl fell from a loft and broke one of her ribs. Likewise, a man who had lent an axe had one of his feet crushed on the morrow by the fall of a block of stone.* It was in the midst of jeers and hisses that the Commissary carried off the pots of flowers, the tapers which he found burning, the coppers and the silver hearts which lay upon the sand. People clenched their fists, and covertly called him "thief" and "murderer." Then the posts for the palisades were planted in the ground, and the rails were nailed to the crossbars, no little labour being performed to shut off the Mystery, in order to bar access to the Unknown, and put the miracles in prison. And the civil authorities were simple enough to imagine that it was all over, that those few bits of boarding would suffice to stay the poor people who hungered for illusion and hope.

* Both of these accidents were interpreted as miracles.—Trans.

But as soon as the new religion was proscribed, forbidden by the law as an offence, it began to burn with an inextinguishable flame in the depths of every soul. Believers came to the river bank in far greater numbers, fell upon their knees at a short distance from the Grotto, and sobbed aloud as they gazed at the forbidden heaven. And the sick, the poor ailing folks, who were forbidden to seek cure, rushed on the Grotto despite all prohibitions, slipped in whenever they could find an aperture or climbed over the palings when their strength enabled them to do so, in the one ardent desire to steal a little of the water. What! there was a prodigious water in that Grotto, which restored the sight to the blind, which set the infirm erect upon their legs again, which instantaneously healed all ailments; and there were officials cruel enough to put that water under lock and key so that it might not cure any more poor people! Why, it was monstrous! And a cry of hatred arose from all the humble ones, all the disinherited ones who had as much need of the Marvellous as of bread to live! In accordance with a municipal decree, the names of all delinquents were to be taken by the police, and thus one soon beheld a woeful defile of old women and lame men summoned before the Justice of the Peace for the sole offence of taking a little water from the fount of life! They stammered and entreated, at their wit's end when a fine was imposed upon them. And, outside, the crowd was growling; rageful unpopularity was gathering around those magistrates who treated human wretchedness so harshly, those pitiless masters who after taking all the wealth of the world, would not even leave to the poor their dream of the realms beyond, their belief that a beneficent superior power took a maternal interest in them, and was ready to endow them with peace of soul and health of body. One day a whole band of poverty-stricken and ailing folks went to the Mayor, knelt down in his courtyard, and implored him with sobs to allow the Grotto to be reopened; and the words they spoke were so pitiful that all who heard them wept. A mother showed her child who was half-dead; would they let the little one die like that in her arms when there was a source yonder which had saved the children of other mothers? A blind man called attention to his dim eyes; a pale, scrofulous youth displayed the sores on his legs; a paralytic woman sought to join her woeful twisted hands: did the authorities wish to see them all perish, did they refuse them the last divine chance of life, condemned and abandoned as they were by the science of man? And equally great was the distress of the believers, of those who were convinced that a corner of heaven had opened amidst the night of their mournful existences, and who were indignant that they should be deprived of the chimerical delight, the supreme relief for their human and social sufferings, which they found in the belief that the Blessed Virgin had indeed come down from heaven to bring them the priceless balm of her intervention. However, the Mayor was unable to promise anything, and the crowd withdrew weeping, ready for rebellion, as though under the blow of some great act of injustice, an act of idiotic cruelty towards the humble and the simple for which Heaven would assuredly take vengeance.

The struggle went on for several months; and it was an extraordinary spectacle which those sensible men—the Minister, the Prefect, and the Commissary of Police—presented, all animated with the best intentions and contending against the ever-swelling crowd of despairing ones, who would not allow the doors of dreamland to be closed upon them, who would not be shut off from the mystic glimpse of future happiness in which they found consolation for their present wretchedness. The authorities required order, the respect of a discreet religion, the triumph of reason; whereas the need of happiness carried the people off into an enthusiastic desire for cure both in this world and in the next. Oh! to cease suffering, to secure equality in the comforts of life; to march on under the protection of a just and beneficent Mother, to die only to awaken in heaven! And necessarily the burning desire of the multitude, the holy madness of the universal joy, was destined to sweep aside the rigid, morose conceptions of a well-regulated society in which the ever-recurring epidemical attacks of religious hallucination are condemned as prejudicial to good order and healthiness of mind.

The Sainte-Honorine Ward, on hearing the story, likewise revolted. Pierre again had to pause, for many were the stifled exclamations in which the Commissary of Police was likened to Satan and Herod. La Grivotte had sat up on her mattress, stammering: "Ah! the monsters! To behave like that to the Blessed Virgin who has cured me!"

And even Madame Vetu—once more penetrated by a ray of hope amidst the covert certainty she felt that she was going to die—grew angry at the idea that the Grotto would not have existed had the Prefect won the day. "There would have been no pilgrimages," she said, "we should not be here, hundreds of us would not be cured every year."

A fit of stifling came over her, however, and Sister Hyacinthe had to raise her to a sitting posture. Madame de Jonquiere was profiting by the interruption to attend to a young woman afflicted with a spinal complaint, whilst two other women, unable to remain on their beds, so unbearable was the heat, prowled about with short, silent steps, looking quite white in the misty darkness. And from the far end of the ward, where all was black, there resounded a noise of painful breathing, which had been going on without a pause, accompanying Pierre's narrative like a rattle. Elise Rouquet alone was sleeping peacefully, still stretched upon her back, and displaying her disfigured countenance, which was slowly drying.

Midnight had struck a quarter of an hour previously, and Abbe Judaine might arrive at any moment for the communion. Grace was now again descending into Marie's heart, and she was convinced that if the Blessed Virgin had refused to cure her it was, indeed, her own fault in having doubted when she entered the piscina. And she, therefore, repented of her rebellion as of a crime. Could she ever be forgiven? Her pale face sank down among her beautiful fair hair, her eyes filled with tears, and she looked at Pierre with an expression of anguish. "Oh! how wicked I was, my friend," she said. "It was through hearing you relate how that Prefect and those magistrates sinned through pride, that I understood my transgression. One must believe, my friend; there is no happiness outside faith and love."

Then, as Pierre wished to break off at the point which he had reached, they all began protesting and calling for the continuation of his narrative, so that he had to promise to go on to the triumph of the Grotto.

Its entrance remained barred by the palisade, and you had to come secretly at night if you wished to pray and carry off a stolen bottle of water. Still, the fear of rioting increased, for it was rumoured that whole villages intended to come down from the hills in order to deliver God, as they naively expressed it. It was a levee en masse of the humble, a rush of those who hungered for the miraculous, so irresistible in its impetuosity that mere common sense, mere considerations of public order were to be swept away like chaff. And it was Monseigneur Laurence, in his episcopal residence at Tarbes, who was first forced to surrender. All his prudence, all his doubts were outflanked by the popular outburst. For five long months he had been able to remain aloof, preventing his clergy from following the faithful to the Grotto, and defending the Church against the tornado of superstition which had been let loose. But what was the use of struggling any longer? He felt the wretchedness of the suffering people committed to his care to be so great that he resigned himself to granting them the idolatrous religion for which he realised them to be eager. Some prudence remaining to him, however, he contented himself in the first instance with drawing up an ordonnance, appointing a commission of inquiry, which was to investigate the question; this implied the acceptance of the miracles after a period of longer or shorter duration. If Monseigneur Laurence was the man of healthy culture and cool reason that he is pictured to have been, how great must have been his anguish on the morning when he signed that ordonnance! He must have knelt in his oratory, and have begged the Sovereign Master of the world to dictate his conduct to him. He did not believe in the apparitions; he had a loftier, more intellectual idea of the manifestations of the Divinity. Only would he not be showing true pity and mercy in silencing the scruples of his reason, the noble prejudices of his faith, in presence of the necessity of granting that bread of falsehood which poor humanity requires in order to be happy? Doubtless, he begged the pardon of Heaven for allowing it to be mixed up in what he regarded as childish pastime, for exposing it to ridicule in connection with an affair in which there was only sickliness and dementia. But his flock suffered so much, hungered so ravenously for the marvellous, for fairy stories with which to lull the pains of life. And thus, in tears, the Bishop at last sacrificed his respect for the dignity of Providence to his sensitive pastoral charity for the woeful human flock.

Then the Emperor in his turn gave way. He was at Biarritz at the time, and was kept regularly informed of everything connected with this affair of the apparitions, with which the entire Parisian press was also occupying itself, for the persecutions would not have been complete if the pens of Voltairean newspaper-men had not meddled in them. And whilst his Minister, his Prefect, and his Commissary of Police were fighting for common sense and public order, the Emperor preserved his wonted silence—the deep silence of a day-dreamer which nobody ever penetrated. Petitions arrived day by day, yet he held his tongue. Bishops came, great personages, great ladies of his circle watched and drew him on one side, and still he held his tongue. A truceless warfare was being waged around him: on one side the believers and the men of fanciful minds whom the Mysterious strongly interested; on the other the unbelievers and the statesmen who distrusted the disturbances of the imagination;—and still and ever he held his tongue. Then, all at once, with the sudden decision of a naturally timid man, he spoke out. The rumour spread that he had yielded to the entreaties of his wife Eugenie. No doubt she did intervene, but the Emperor was more deeply influenced by a revival of his old humanitarian dreams, his genuine compassion for the disinherited.* Like the Bishop, he did not wish to close the portals of illusion to the wretched by upholding the unpopular decree which forbade despairing sufferers to go and drink life at the holy source. So he sent a telegram, a curt order to remove the palisade, so as to allow everybody free access to the Grotto.

* I think this view of the matter the right one, for, as all who
know the history of the Second Empire are aware, it was about
this time that the Emperor began taking great interest in the
erection of model dwellings for the working classes, and the
plantation and transformation of the sandy wastes of the
Landes.—Trans.

Then came a shout of joy and triumph. The decree annulling the previous one was read at Lourdes to the sound of drum and trumpet. The Commissary of Police had to come in person to superintend the removal of the palisade. He was afterwards transferred elsewhere like the Prefect.* People flocked to Lourdes from all parts, the new cultus was organised at the Grotto, and a cry of joy ascended: God had won the victory! God?—alas, no! It was human wretchedness which had won the battle, human wretchedness with its eternal need of falsehood, its hunger for the marvellous, its everlasting hope akin to that of some condemned man who, for salvation's sake, surrenders himself into the hands of an invisible Omnipotence, mightier than nature, and alone capable, should it be willing, of annulling nature's laws. And that which had also conquered was the sovereign compassion of those pastors, the merciful Bishop and merciful Emperor who allowed those big sick children to retain the fetich which consoled some of them and at times even cured others.

* The Prefect was transferred to Grenoble, and curiously enough his
new jurisdiction extended over the hills and valleys of La
Salette, whither pilgrims likewise flocked to drink, pray, and
wash themselves at a miraculous fountain. Warned by experience,
however, Baron Massy (such was the Prefect's name) was careful to
avoid any further interference in religious matters.—Trans.

In the middle of November the episcopal commission came to Lourdes to prosecute the inquiry which had been entrusted to it. It questioned Bernadette yet once again, and studied a large number of miracles. However, in order that the evidence might be absolute, it only registered some thirty cases of cure. And Monseigneur Laurence declared himself convinced. Nevertheless, he gave a final proof of his prudence, by continuing to wait another three years before declaring in a pastoral letter that the Blessed Virgin had in truth appeared at the Grotto of Massabielle and that numerous miracles had subsequently taken place there. Meantime, he had purchased the Grotto itself, with all the land around it, from the municipality of Lourdes, on behalf of his see. Work was then begun, modestly at first, but soon on a larger and larger scale as money began to flow in from all parts of Christendom. The Grotto was cleared and enclosed with an iron railing. The Gave was thrown back into a new bed, so as to allow of spacious approaches to the shrine, with lawns, paths, and walks. At last, too, the church which the Virgin had asked for, the Basilica, began to rise on the summit of the rock itself. From the very first stroke of the pick, Abbe Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, went on directing everything with even excessive zeal, for the struggle had made him the most ardent and most sincere of all believers in the work that was to be accomplished. With his somewhat rough but truly fatherly nature, he had begun to adore Bernadette, making her mission his own, and devoting himself, soul and body, to realising the orders which he had received from Heaven through her innocent mouth. And he exhausted himself in mighty efforts; he wished everything to be very beautiful and very grand, worthy of the Queen of the Angels who had deigned to visit this mountain nook. The first religious ceremony did not take place till six years after the apparitions. A marble statue of the Virgin was installed with great pomp on the very spot where she had appeared. It was a magnificent day, all Lourdes was gay with flags, and every bell rang joyously. Five years later, in 1869, the first mass was celebrated in the crypt of the Basilica, whose spire was not yet finished. Meantime, gifts flowed in without a pause, a river of gold was streaming towards the Grotto, a whole town was about to spring up from the soil. It was the new religion completing its foundations. The desire to be healed did heal; the thirst for a miracle worked the miracle. A Deity of pity and hope was evolved from man's sufferings, from that longing for falsehood and relief which, in every age of humanity, has created the marvellous palaces of the realms beyond, where an almighty Power renders justice and distributes eternal happiness.

And thus the ailing ones of the Sainte-Honorine Ward only beheld in the victory of the Grotto the triumph of their hopes of cure. Along the rows of beds there was a quiver of joy when, with his heart stirred by all those poor faces turned towards him, eager for certainty, Pierre repeated: "God had conquered. Since that day the miracles have never ceased, and it is the most humble who are the most frequently relieved."

Then he laid down the little book. Abbe Judaine was coming in, and the Sacrament was about to be administered. Marie, however, again penetrated by the fever of faith, her hands burning, leant towards Pierre. "Oh, my friend!" said she, "I pray you hear me confess my fault and absolve me. I have blasphemed, and have been guilty of mortal sin. If you do not succour me, I shall be unable to receive the Blessed Sacrament, and yet I so greatly need to be consoled and strengthened."

The young priest refused her request with a wave of the hand. He had never been willing to act as confessor to this friend, the only woman he had loved in the healthy, smiling days of youth. However, she insisted. "I beg you to do so," said she; "you will help to work the miracle of my cure."

Then he gave way and received the avowal of her fault, that impious rebellion induced by suffering, that rebellion against the Virgin who had remained deaf to her prayers. And afterwards he granted her absolution in the sacramental form.

Meanwhile Abbe Judaine had already deposited the ciborium on a little table, between two lighted tapers, which looked like woeful stars in the semi-obscurity of the ward. Madame de Jonquiere had just decided to open one of the windows quite wide, for the odour emanating from all the suffering bodies and heaped-up rags had become unbearable. But no air came in from the narrow courtyard into which the window opened; though black with night, it seemed like a well of fire. Having offered to act as server, Pierre repeated the "Confiteor." Then, after responding with the "Misereatur" and the "Indulgentiam," the chaplain, who wore his alb, raised the pyx, saying, "Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world." All the women who, writhing in agony, were impatiently awaiting the communion, like dying creatures who await life from some fresh medicine which is a long time coming, thereupon thrice repeated, in all humility, and with lips almost closed: "Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof; but only say the word and my soul shall be healed."

Abbe Judaine had begun to make the round of those woeful beds, accompanied by Pierre, and followed by Madame de Jonquiere and Sister Hyacinthe, each of whom carried one of the lighted tapers. The Sister designated those who were to communicate; and, murmuring the customary Latin words, the priest leant forward and placed the Host somewhat at random on the sufferer's tongue. Almost all were waiting for him with widely opened, glittering eyes, amidst the disorder of that hastily pitched camp. Two were found to be sound asleep, however, and had to be awakened. Several were moaning without being conscious of it, and continued moaning even after they had received the sacrament. At the far end of the ward, the rattle of the poor creature who could not be seen still resounded. And nothing could have been more mournful than the appearance of that little cortege in the semi-darkness, amidst which the yellow flames of the tapers gleamed like stars.

But Marie's face, to which an expression of ecstasy had returned, was like a divine apparition. Although La Grivotte was hungering for the bread of life, they had refused her the sacrament on this occasion, as it was to be administered to her in the morning at the Rosary; Madame Vetu, however, had received the Host on her black tongue in a hiccough. And now Marie was lying there under the pale light of the tapers, looking so beautiful amidst her fair hair, with her eyes dilated and her features transfigured by faith, that everyone admired her. She received the sacrament with rapture; Heaven visibly descended into her poor, youthful frame, reduced to such physical wretchedness. And, clasping Pierre's hand, she detained him for a moment, saying: "Oh! she will heal me, my friend, she has just promised me that she will do so. Go and take some rest. I shall sleep so soundly now!"

As he withdrew in company with Abbe Judaine, Pierre caught sight of little Madame Desagneaux stretched out in the arm-chair in which weariness had overpowered her. Nothing could awaken her. It was now half-past one in the morning; and Madame de Jonquiere and her assistant, Sister Hyacinthe, were still going backwards and forwards, turning the patients over, cleansing them, and dressing their sores. However, the ward was becoming more peaceful, its heavy darkness had grown less oppressive since Bernadette with her charm had passed through it. The visionary's little shadow was now flitting in triumph from bed to bed, completing its work, bringing a little of heaven to each of the despairing ones, each of the disinherited ones of this world; and as they all at last sank to sleep they could see the little shepherdess, so young, so ill herself, leaning over them and kissing them with a kindly smile.

THE THIRD DAY

I. BED AND BOARD

AT seven o'clock on the morning of that fine, bright, warm August Sunday, M. de Guersaint was already up and dressed in one of the two little rooms which he had fortunately been able to secure on the third floor of the Hotel of the Apparitions. He had gone to bed at eleven o'clock the night before and had awoke feeling quite fresh and gay. As soon as he was dressed he entered the adjoining room which Pierre occupied; but the young priest, who had not returned to the hotel until past one in the morning, with his blood heated by insomnia, had been unable to doze off until daybreak and was now still slumbering. His cassock flung across a chair, his other garments scattered here and there, testified to his great weariness and agitation of mind.

"Come, come, you lazybones!" cried M. de Guersaint gaily; "can't you hear the bells ringing?"

Pierre awoke with a start, quite surprised to find himself in that little hotel room into which the sunlight was streaming. All the joyous peals of the bells, the music of the chiming, happy town, moreover, came in through the window which he had left open.

"We shall never have time to get to the hospital before eight o'clock to fetch Marie," resumed M. de Guersaint, "for we must have some breakfast, eh?"

"Of course, make haste and order two cups of chocolate. I will get up at once, I sha'n't be long," replied Pierre.

In spite of the fatigue which had already stiffened his joints, he sprang out of bed as soon as he was alone, and made all haste with his toilet. However, he still had his head in the washing basin, ducking it in the fresh, cool water, when M. de Guersaint, who was unable to remain alone, came back again. "I've given the order," said he; "they will bring it up. Ah! what a curious place this hotel is! You have of course seen the landlord, Master Majeste, clad in white from head to foot and looking so dignified in his office. The place is crammed, it appears; they have never had so many people before. So it is no wonder that there should be such a fearful noise. I was wakened up three times during the night. People kept on talking in the room next to mine. And you, did you sleep well?"

"No, indeed," answered Pierre; "I was tired to death, but I couldn't close my eyes. No doubt it was the uproar you speak of that prevented me."

In his turn he then began to talk of the thin partitions, and the manner in which the house had been crammed with people until it seemed as though the floors and the walls would collapse with the strain. The place had been shaking all night long; every now and then people suddenly rushed along the passages, heavy footfalls resounded, gruff voices ascended nobody knew whence; without speaking of all the moaning and coughing, the frightful coughing which seemed to re-echo from every wall. Throughout the night people evidently came in and went out, got up and lay down again, paying no attention to time in the disorder in which they lived, amid shocks of passion which made them hurry to their devotional exercises as to pleasure parties.

"And Marie, how was she when you left her last night?" M. de Guersaint suddenly inquired.

"A great deal better," replied Pierre; "she had an attack of extreme discouragement, but all her courage and faith returned to her at last."

A pause followed; and then the girl's father resumed with his tranquil optimism: "Oh! I am not anxious. Things will go on all right, you'll see. For my own part, I am delighted. I had asked the Virgin to grant me her protection in my affairs—you know, my great invention of navigable balloons. Well, suppose I told you that she has already shown me her favour? Yes, indeed yesterday evening while I was talking with Abbe des Hermoises, he told me that at Toulouse he would no doubt be able to find a person to finance me—one of his friends, in fact, who is extremely wealthy and takes great interest in mechanics! And in this I at once saw the hand of God!" M. de Guersaint began laughing with his childish laugh, and then he added: "That Abbe des Hermoises is a charming man. I shall see this afternoon if there is any means of my accompanying him on an excursion to the Cirque de Gavarnie at small cost."

Pierre, who wished to pay everything, the hotel bill and all the rest, at once encouraged him in this idea. "Of course," said he, "you ought not to miss this opportunity to visit the mountains, since you have so great a wish to do so. Your daughter will be very happy to know that you are pleased."

Their talk, however, was now interrupted by a servant girl bringing the two cups of chocolate with a couple of rolls on a metal tray covered with a napkin. She left the door open as she entered the room, so that a glimpse was obtained of some portion of the passage. "Ah! they are already doing my neighbour's room!" exclaimed M. de Guersaint. "He is a married man, isn't he? His wife is with him?"

The servant looked astonished. "Oh, no," she replied, "he is quite alone!"

"Quite alone? Why, I heard people talking in his room this morning."

"You must be mistaken, monsieur," said the servant; "he has just gone out after giving orders that his room was to be tidied up at once." And then, while taking the cups of chocolate off the tray and placing them on the table, she continued: "Oh! he is a very respectable gentleman. Last year he was able to have one of the pavilions which Monsieur Majeste lets out to visitors, in the lane by the side of the hotel; but this year he applied too late and had to content himself with that room, which greatly worried him, for it isn't a large one, though there is a big cupboard in it. As he doesn't care to eat with everybody, he takes his meals there, and he orders good wine and the best of everything, I can tell you."

"That explains it all!" replied M. de Guersaint gaily; "he dined too well last night, and I must have heard him talking in his sleep."

Pierre had been listening somewhat inquisitively to all this chatter. "And on this side, my side," said he, "isn't there a gentleman with two ladies, and a little boy who walks about with a crutch?"

"Yes, Monsieur l'Abbe, I know them. The aunt, Madame Chaise, took one of the two rooms for herself; and Monsieur and Madame Vigneron with their son Gustave have had to content themselves with the other one. This is the second year they have come to Lourdes. They are very respectable people too."

Pierre nodded. During the night he had fancied he could recognise the voice of M. Vigneron, whom the heat doubtless had incommoded. However, the servant was now thoroughly started, and she began to enumerate the other persons whose rooms were reached by the same passage; on the left hand there was a priest, then a mother with three daughters, and then an old married couple; whilst on the right lodged another gentleman who was all alone, a young lady, too, who was unaccompanied, and then a family party which included five young children. The hotel was crowded to its garrets. The servants had had to give up their rooms the previous evening and lie in a heap in the washhouse. During the night, also, some camp bedsteads had even been set up on the landings; and one honourable ecclesiastic, for lack of other accommodation, had been obliged to sleep on a billiard-table.

When the girl had retired and the two men had drunk their chocolate, M. de Guersaint went back into his own room to wash his hands again, for he was very careful of his person; and Pierre, who remained alone, felt attracted by the gay sunlight, and stepped for a moment on to the narrow balcony outside his window. Each of the third-floor rooms on this side of the hotel was provided with a similar balcony, having a carved-wood balustrade. However, the young priest's surprise was very great, for he had scarcely stepped outside when he suddenly saw a woman protrude her head over the balcony next to him—that of the room occupied by the gentleman whom M. de Guersaint and the servant had been speaking of.

And this woman he had recognised: it was Madame Volmar. There was no mistaking her long face with its delicate drawn features, its magnificent large eyes, those brasiers over which a veil, a dimming moire, seemed to pass at times. She gave a start of terror on perceiving him. And he, extremely ill at ease, grieved that he should have frightened her, made all haste to withdraw into his apartment. A sudden light had dawned upon him, and he now understood and could picture everything. So this was why she had not been seen at the hospital, where little Madame Desagneaux was always asking for her. Standing motionless, his heart upset, Pierre fell into a deep reverie, reflecting on the life led by this woman whom he knew, that torturing conjugal life in Paris between a fierce mother-in-law and an unworthy husband, and then those three days of complete liberty spent at Lourdes, that brief bonfire of passion to which she had hastened under the sacrilegious pretext of serving the divinity. Tears whose cause he could not even explain, tears that ascended from the very depths of his being, from his own voluntary chastity, welled into his eyes amidst the feeling of intense sorrow which came over him.

"Well, are you ready?" joyously called M. de Guersaint as he came back, with his grey jacket buttoned up and his hands gloved.

"Yes, yes, let us go," replied Pierre, turning aside and pretending to look for his hat so that he might wipe his eyes.

Then they went out, and on crossing the threshold heard on their left hand an unctuous voice which they recognised; it was that of M. Vigneron, who was loudly repeating the morning prayers. A moment afterwards came a meeting which interested them. They were walking down the passage when they were passed by a middle-aged, thick-set, sturdy-looking gentleman, wearing carefully trimmed whiskers. He bent his back and passed so rapidly that they were unable to distinguish his features, but they noticed that he was carrying a carefully made parcel. And immediately afterwards he slipped a key into the lock of the room adjoining M. de Guersaint's, and opening the door disappeared noiselessly, like a shadow.

M. de Guersaint had glanced round: "Ah! my neighbour," said he; "he has been to market and has brought back some delicacies, no doubt!"

Pierre pretended not to hear, for his companion was so light-minded that he did not care to trust him with a secret which was not his own. Besides, a feeling of uneasiness was returning to him, a kind of chaste terror at the thought that the world and the flesh were there taking their revenge, amidst all the mystical enthusiasm which he could feel around him.

They reached the hospital just as the patients were being brought out to be carried to the Grotto; and they found that Marie had slept well and was very gay. She kissed her father and scolded him when she learnt that he had not yet decided on his trip to Gavarnie. She should really be displeased with him, she said, if he did not go. Still with the same restful, smiling expression, she added that she did not expect to be cured that day; and then, assuming an air of mystery, she begged Pierre to obtain permission for her to spend the following night before the Grotto. This was a favour which all the sufferers ardently coveted, but which only a few favoured ones with difficulty secured. After protesting, anxious as he felt with regard to the effect which a night spent in the open air might have upon her health, the young priest, seeing how unhappy she had suddenly become, at last promised that he would make the application. Doubtless she imagined that she would only obtain a hearing from the Virgin when they were alone together in the slumbering peacefulness of the night. That morning, indeed, she felt so lost among the innumerable patients who were heaped together in front of the Grotto, that already at ten o'clock she asked to be taken back to the hospital, complaining that the bright light tired her eyes. And when her father and the priest had again installed her in the Sainte-Honorine Ward, she gave them their liberty for the remainder of the day. "No, don't come to fetch me," she said, "I shall not go back to the Grotto this afternoon—it would be useless. But you will come for me this evening at nine o'clock, won't you, Pierre? It is agreed, you have given me your word."

He repeated that he would endeavour to secure the requisite permission, and that, if necessary, he would apply to Father Fourcade in person.

"Then, till this evening, darling," said M. de Guersaint, kissing his daughter. And he and Pierre went off together, leaving her lying on her bed, with an absorbed expression on her features, as her large, smiling eyes wandered away into space.

It was barely half-past ten when they got back to the Hotel of the Apparitions; but M. de Guersaint, whom the fine weather delighted, talked of having dejeuner at once, so that he might the sooner start upon a ramble through Lourdes. First of all, however, he wished to go up to his room, and Pierre following him, they encountered quite a drama on their way. The door of the room occupied by the Vignerons was wide open, and little Gustave could be seen lying on the sofa which served as his bed. He was livid; a moment previously he had suddenly fainted, and this had made the father and mother imagine that the end had come. Madame Vigneron was crouching on a chair, still stupefied by her fright, whilst M. Vigneron rushed about the room, thrusting everything aside in order that he might prepare a glass of sugared-water, to which he added a few drops of some elixir. This draught, he exclaimed, would set the lad right again. But all the same, it was incomprehensible. The boy was still strong, and to think that he should have fainted like that, and have turned as white as a chicken! Speaking in this wise, M. Vigneron glanced at Madame Chaise, the aunt, who was standing in front of the sofa, looking in good health that morning; and his hands shook yet more violently at the covert idea that if that stupid attack had carried off his son, they would no longer have inherited the aunt's fortune. He was quite beside himself at this thought, and eagerly opening the boy's mouth he compelled him to swallow the entire contents of the glass. Then, however, when he heard Gustave sigh, and saw him open his eyes again, his fatherly good-nature reappeared, and he shed tears, and called the lad his dear little fellow. But on Madame Chaise drawing near to offer some assistance, Gustave repulsed her with a sudden gesture of hatred, as though he understood how this woman's money unconsciously perverted his parents, who, after all, were worthy folks. Greatly offended, the old lady turned on her heel, and seated herself in a corner, whilst the father and mother, at last freed from their anxiety, returned thanks to the Blessed Virgin for having preserved their darling, who smiled at them with his intelligent and infinitely sorrowful smile, knowing and understanding everything as he did, and no longer having any taste for life, although he was not fifteen.

"Can we be of any help to you?" asked Pierre in an obliging way.

"No, no, I thank you, gentlemen," replied M. Vigneron, coming for a moment into the passage. "But oh! we did have a fright! Think of it, an only son, who is so dear to us too."

All around them the approach of the dejeuner hour was now throwing the house into commotion. Every door was banging, and the passages and the staircase resounded with the constant pitter-patter of feet. Three big girls passed by, raising a current of air with the sweep of their skirts. Some little children were crying in a neighbouring room. Then there were old people who seemed quite scared, and distracted priests who, forgetting their calling, caught up their cassocks with both hands, so that they might run the faster to the dining-room. From the top to the bottom of the house one could feel the floors shaking under the excessive weight of all the people who were packed inside the hotel.

"Oh, I hope that it is all over now, and that the Blessed Virgin will cure him," repeated M. Vigneron, before allowing his neighbours to retire. "We are going down-stairs, for I must confess that all this has made me feel faint. I need something to eat, I am terribly hungry."

When Pierre and M. de Guersaint at last left their rooms, and went down-stairs, they found to their annoyance that there was not the smallest table-corner vacant in the large dining-room. A most extraordinary mob had assembled there, and the few seats that were still unoccupied were reserved. A waiter informed them that the room never emptied between ten and one o'clock, such was the rush of appetite, sharpened by the keen mountain air. So they had to resign themselves to wait, requesting the waiter to warn them as soon as there should be a couple of vacant places. Then, scarcely knowing what to do with themselves, they went to walk about the hotel porch, whence there was a view of the street, along which the townsfolk, in their Sunday best, streamed without a pause.

All at once, however, the landlord of the Hotel of the Apparitions, Master Majeste in person, appeared before them, clad in white from head to foot; and with a great show of politeness he inquired if the gentlemen would like to wait in the drawing-room. He was a stout man of five-and-forty, and strove to bear the burden of his name in a right royal fashion. Bald and clean-shaven, with round blue eyes in a waxy face, displaying three superposed chins, he always deported himself with much dignity. He had come from Nevers with the Sisters who managed the orphan asylum, and was married to a dusky little woman, a native of Lourdes. In less than fifteen years they had made their hotel one of the most substantial and best patronised establishments in the town. Of recent times, moreover, they had started a business in religious articles, installed in a large shop on the left of the hotel porch and managed by a young niece under Madame Majeste's Supervision.

"You can wait in the drawing-room, gentlemen," again suggested the hotel-keeper whom Pierre's cassock rendered very attentive.

They replied, however, that they preferred to walk about and wait in the open air. And thereupon Majeste would not leave them, but deigned to chat with them for a moment as he was wont to do with those of his customers whom he desired to honour. The conversation turned at first on the procession which would take place that night and which promised to be a superb spectacle as the weather was so fine. There were more than fifty thousand strangers gathered together in Lourdes that day, for visitors had come in from all the neighbouring bathing stations. This explained the crush at the table d'hote. Possibly the town would run short of bread as had been the case the previous year.

"You saw what a scramble there is," concluded Majeste, "we really don't know how to manage. It isn't my fault, I assure you, if you are kept waiting for a short time."

At this moment, however, a postman arrived with a large batch of newspapers and letters which he deposited on a table in the office. He had kept one letter in his hand and inquired of the landlord, "Have you a Madame Maze here?"

"Madame Maze, Madame Maze," repeated the hotel-keeper. "No, no, certainly not."

Pierre had heard both question and answer, and drawing near he exclaimed, "I know of a Madame Maze who must be lodging with the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, the Blue Sisters as people call them here, I think."

The postman thanked him for the information and went off, but a somewhat bitter smile had risen to Majeste's lips. "The Blue Sisters," he muttered, "ah! the Blue Sisters." Then, darting a side glance at Pierre's cassock, he stopped short, as though he feared that he might say too much. Yet his heart was overflowing; he would have greatly liked to ease his feelings, and this young priest from Paris, who looked so liberal-minded, could not be one of the "band" as he called all those who discharged functions at the Grotto and coined money out of Our Lady of Lourdes. Accordingly, little by little, he ventured to speak out.

"I am a good Christian, I assure you, Monsieur l'Abbe," said he. "In fact we are all good Christians here. And I am a regular worshipper and take the sacrament every Easter. But, really, I must say that members of a religious community ought not to keep hotels. No, no, it isn't right!"

And thereupon he vented all the spite of a tradesman in presence of what he considered to be disloyal competition. Ought not those Blue Sisters, those Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, to have confined themselves to their real functions, the manufacture of wafers for sacramental purposes, and the repairing and washing of church linen? Instead of that, however, they had transformed their convent into a vast hostelry, where ladies who came to Lourdes unaccompanied found separate rooms, and were able to take their meals either in privacy or in a general dining-room. Everything was certainly very clean, very well organised and very inexpensive, thanks to the thousand advantages which the Sisters enjoyed; in fact, no hotel at Lourdes did so much business. "But all the same," continued Majeste, "I ask you if it is proper. To think of nuns selling victuals! Besides, I must tell you that the lady superior is really a clever woman, and as soon as she saw the stream of fortune rolling in, she wanted to keep it all for her own community and resolutely parted with the Fathers of the Grotto who wanted to lay their hands on it. Yes, Monsieur l'Abbe, she even went to Rome and gained her cause there, so that now she pockets all the money that her bills bring in. Think of it, nuns, yes nuns, mon Dieu! letting furnished rooms and keeping a table d'hote!"

He raised his arms to heaven, he was stifling with envy and vexation.

"But as your house is crammed," Pierre gently objected, "as you no longer have either a bed or a plate at anybody's disposal, where would you put any additional visitors who might arrive here?"

Majeste at once began protesting. "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe!" said he, "one can see very well that you don't know the place. It's quite true that there is work for all of us, and that nobody has reason to complain during the national pilgrimage. But that only lasts four or five days, and in ordinary times the custom we secure isn't nearly so great. For myself, thank Heaven, I am always satisfied. My house is well known, it occupies the same rank as the Hotel of the Grotto, where two landlords have already made their fortunes. But no matter, it is vexing to see those Blue Sisters taking all the cream of the custom, for instance the ladies of the bourgeoisie who spend a fortnight and three weeks here at a stretch; and that, too, just in the quiet season, when there are not many people here. You understand, don't you? There are people of position who dislike uproar; they go by themselves to the Grotto, and pray there all day long, for days together, and pay good prices for their accommodation without any higgling."

Madame Majeste, whom Pierre and M. de Guersaint had not noticed leaning over an account-book in which she was adding up some figures, thereupon intervened in a shrill voice: "We had a customer like that, gentlemen, who stayed here for two months last year. She went to the Grotto, came back, went there again, took her meals, and went to bed. And never did we have a word of complaint from her; she was always smiling, as though to say that she found everything very nice. She paid her bill, too, without even looking at it. Ah! one regrets people of that kind."

Short, thin, very dark, and dressed in black, with a little white collar, Madame Majeste had risen to her feet; and she now began to solicit custom: "If you would like to buy a few little souvenirs of Lourdes before you leave, gentlemen, I hope that you will not forget us. We have a shop close by, where you will find an assortment of all the articles that are most in request. As a rule, the persons who stay here are kind enough not to deal elsewhere."

However, Majeste was again wagging his head, with the air of a good Christian saddened by the scandals of the time. "Certainly," said he, "I don't want to show any disrespect to the reverend Fathers, but it must in all truth be admitted that they are too greedy. You must have seen the shop which they have set up near the Grotto, that shop which is always crowded, and where tapers and articles of piety are sold. A bishop declared that it was shameful, and that the buyers and sellers ought to be driven out of the temple afresh. It is said, too, that the Fathers run that big shop yonder, just across the street, which supplies all the petty dealers in the town. And, according to the reports which circulate, they have a finger in all the trade in religious articles, and levy a percentage on the millions of chaplets, statuettes, and medals which are sold every year at Lourdes."

Majeste had now lowered his voice, for his accusations were becoming precise, and he ended by trembling somewhat at his imprudence in talking so confidentially to strangers. However, the expression of Pierre's gentle, attentive face reassured him; and so he continued with the passion of a wounded rival, resolved to go on to the very end: "I am willing to admit that there is some exaggeration in all this. But all the same, it does religion no good for people to see the reverend Fathers keeping shops like us tradesmen. For my part, of course, I don't go and ask for a share of the money which they make by their masses, or a percentage on the presents which they receive, so why should they start selling what I sell? Our business was a poor one last year owing to them. There are already too many of us; nowadays everyone at Lourdes sells 'religious articles,' to such an extent, in fact, that there will soon be no butchers or wine merchants left—nothing but bread to eat and water to drink. Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe, it is no doubt nice to have the Blessed Virgin with us, but things are none the less very bad at times."

A person staying at the hotel at that moment disturbed him, but he returned just as a young girl came in search of Madame Majeste. The damsel, who evidently belonged to Lourdes, was very pretty, small but plump, with beautiful black hair, and a round face full of bright gaiety.

"That is our niece Apolline," resumed Majeste. "She has been keeping our shop for two years past. She is the daughter of one of my wife's brothers, who is in poor circumstances. She was keeping sheep at Ossun, in the neighbourhood of Bartres, when we were struck by her intelligence and nice looks and decided to bring her here; and we don't repent having done so, for she has a great deal of merit, and has become a very good saleswoman."

A point to which he omitted to refer, was that there were rumours current of somewhat flighty conduct on Mademoiselle Apolline's part. But she undoubtedly had her value: she attracted customers by the power, possibly, of her large black eyes, which smiled so readily. During his sojourn at Lourdes the previous year, Gerard de Peyrelongue had scarcely stirred from the shop she managed, and doubtless it was only the matrimonial ideas now flitting through his head that prevented him from returning thither. It seemed as though the Abbe des Hermoises had taken his place, for this gallant ecclesiastic brought a great many ladies to make purchases at the repository.

"Ah! you are speaking of Apolline," said Madame Majeste, at that moment coming back from the shop. "Have you noticed one thing about her, gentlemen—her extraordinary likeness to Bernadette? There, on the wall yonder, is a photograph of Bernadette when she was eighteen years old."

Pierre and M. de Guersaint drew near to examine the portrait, whilst Majeste exclaimed: "Bernadette, yes, certainly—she was rather like Apolline, but not nearly so nice; she looked so sad and poor."

He would doubtless have gone on chattering, but just then the waiter appeared and announced that there was at last a little table vacant. M. de Guersaint had twice gone to glance inside the dining-room, for he was eager to have his dejeuner and spend the remainder of that fine Sunday out-of-doors. So he now hastened away, without paying any further attention to Majeste, who remarked, with an amiable smile, that the gentlemen had not had so very long to wait after all.

To reach the table mentioned by the waiter, the architect and Pierre had to cross the dining-room from end to end. It was a long apartment, painted a light oak colour, an oily yellow, which was already peeling away in places and soiled with stains in others. You realised that rapid wear and tear went on here amidst the continual scramble of the big eaters who sat down at table. The only ornaments were a gilt zinc clock and a couple of meagre candelabra on the mantelpiece. Guipure curtains, moreover, hung at the five large windows looking on to the street, which was flooded with sunshine; some of the fierce arrow-like rays penetrating into the room although the blinds had been lowered. And, in the middle of the apartment, some forty persons were packed together at the table d'hote, which was scarcely eleven yards in length and did not supply proper accommodation for more than thirty people; whilst at the little tables standing against the walls upon either side another forty persons sat close together, hustled by the three waiters each time that they went by. You had scarcely reached the threshold before you were deafened by the extraordinary uproar, the noise of voices and the clatter of forks and plates; and it seemed, too, as if you were entering a damp oven, for a warm, steamy mist, laden with a suffocating smell of victuals, assailed the face.

Pierre at first failed to distinguish anything, but, when he was installed at the little table—a garden-table which had been brought indoors for the occasion, and on which there was scarcely room for two covers—he felt quite upset, almost sick, in fact, at the sight presented by the table d'hote, which his glance now enfiladed from end to end. People had been eating at it for an hour already, two sets of customers had followed one upon the other, and the covers were strewn about in higgledy-piggledy fashion. On the cloth were numerous stains of wine and sauce, while there was no symmetry even in the arrangement of the glass fruit-stands, which formed the only decorations of the table. And one's astonishment increased at sight of the motley mob which was collected there—huge priests, scraggy girls, mothers overflowing with superfluous fat, gentlemen with red faces, and families ranged in rows and displaying all the pitiable, increasing ugliness of successive generations. All these people were perspiring, greedily swallowing, seated slantwise, lacking room to move their arms, and unable even to use their hands deftly. And amidst this display of appetite, increased tenfold by fatigue, and of eager haste to fill one's stomach in order to return to the Grotto more quickly, there was a corpulent ecclesiastic who in no wise hurried, but ate of every dish with prudent slowness, crunching his food with a ceaseless, dignified movement of the jaws.

"Fichtre!" exclaimed M. de Guersaint, "it is by no means cool in here. All the same, I shall be glad of something to eat, for I've felt a sinking in the stomach ever since I have been at Lourdes. And you—are you hungry?"

"Yes, yes, I shall eat," replied Pierre, though, truth to tell, he felt quite upset.

The menu was a copious one. There was salmon, an omelet, mutton cutlets with mashed potatoes, stewed kidneys, cauliflowers, cold meats, and apricot tarts—everything cooked too much, and swimming in sauce which, but for its grittiness, would have been flavourless. However, there was some fairly fine fruit on the glass stands, particularly some peaches. And, besides, the people did not seem at all difficult to please; they apparently had no palates, for there was no sign of nausea. Hemmed in between an old priest and a dirty, full-bearded man, a girl of delicate build, who looked very pretty with her soft eyes and silken skin, was eating some kidneys with an expression of absolute beatitude, although the so-called "sauce" in which they swam was simply greyish water.

"Hum!" resumed even M. de Guersaint, "this salmon is not so bad. Add a little salt to it and you will find it all right."

Pierre made up his mind to eat, for after all he must take sustenance for strength's sake. At a little table close by, however, he had just caught sight of Madame Vigneron and Madame Chaise, who sat face to face, apparently waiting. And indeed, M. Vigneron and his son Gustave soon appeared, the latter still pale, and leaning more heavily than usual on his crutch. "Sit down next to your aunt," said his father; "I will take the chair beside your mother." But just then he perceived his two neighbours, and stepping up to them, he added: "Oh! he is now all right again. I have been rubbing him with some eau-de-Cologne, and by-and-by he will be able to take his bath at the piscina."

Thereupon M. Vigneron sat down and began to devour. But what an awful fright he had had! He again began talking of it aloud, despite himself, so intense had been his terror at the thought that the lad might go off before his aunt. The latter related that whilst she was kneeling at the Grotto the day before, she had experienced a sudden feeling of relief; in fact, she flattered herself that she was cured of her heart complaint, and began giving precise particulars, to which her brother-in-law listened with dilated eyes, full of involuntary anxiety. Most certainly he was a good-natured man, he had never desired anybody's death; only he felt indignant at the idea that the Virgin might cure this old woman, and forget his son, who was so young. Talking and eating, he had got to the cutlets, and was swallowing the mashed potatoes by the forkful, when he fancied he could detect that Madame Chaise was sulking with her nephew. "Gustave," he suddenly inquired, "have you asked your aunt's forgiveness?" The lad, quite astonished, began staring at his father with his large clear eyes. "Yes," added M. Vigneron, "you behaved very badly, you pushed her back just now when she wanted to help you to sit up."

Madame Chaise said nothing, but waited with a dignified air, whilst Gustave, who, without any show of appetite, was finishing the noix of his cutlet, which had been cut into small pieces, remained with his eyes lowered on his plate, this time obstinately refusing to make the sorry show of affection which was demanded of him.

"Come, Gustave," resumed his father, "be a good boy. You know how kind your aunt is, and all that she intends to do for you."

But no, he would not yield. At that moment, indeed, he really hated that woman, who did not die quickly enough, who polluted the affection of his parents, to such a point that when he saw them surround him with attentions he no longer knew whether it were himself or the inheritance which his life represented that they wished to save. However, Madame Vigneron, so dignified in her demeanour, came to her husband's help. "You really grieve me, Gustave," said she; "ask your aunt's forgiveness, or you will make me quite angry with you."

Thereupon he gave way. What was the use of resisting? Was it not better that his parents should obtain that money? Would he not himself die later on, so as to suit the family convenience? He was aware of all that; he understood everything, even when not a word was spoken. So keen was the sense of hearing with which suffering had endowed him, that he even heard the others' thoughts.

"I beg your pardon, aunt," he said, "for not having behaved well to you just now."

Then two big tears rolled from his eyes, whilst he smiled with the air of a tender-hearted man who has seen too much of life and can no longer be deceived by anything. Madame Chaise at once kissed him and told him that she was not at all angry. And the Vignerons' delight in living was displayed in all candour.

"If the kidneys are not up to much," M. de Guersaint now said to Pierre, "here at all events are some cauliflowers with a good flavour."

The formidable mastication was still going on around them. Pierre had never seen such an amount of eating, amidst such perspiration, in an atmosphere as stifling as that of a washhouse full of hot steam. The odour of the victuals seemed to thicken into a kind of smoke. You had to shout to make yourself heard, for everybody was talking in loud tones, and the scared waiters raised a fearful clatter in changing the plates and forks; not to mention the noise of all the jaw-crunching, a mill-like grinding which was distinctly audible. What most hurt the feelings of the young priest, however, was the extraordinary promiscuity of the table d'hote, at which men and women, young girls and ecclesiastics, were packed together in chance order, and satisfied their hunger like a pack of hounds snapping at offal in all haste. Baskets of bread went round and were promptly emptied. And there was a perfect massacre of cold meats, all the remnants of the victuals of the day before, leg of mutton, veal, and ham, encompassed by a fallen mass of transparent jelly which quivered like soft glue. They had all eaten too much already, but these viands seemed to whet their appetites afresh, as though the idea had come to them that nothing whatever ought to be left. The fat priest in the middle of the table, who had shown himself such a capital knife-and-fork, was now lingering over the fruit, having just got to his third peach, a huge one, which he slowly peeled and swallowed in slices with an air of compunction.

All at once, however, the whole room was thrown into agitation. A waiter had come in and begun distributing the letters which Madame Majeste had finished sorting. "Hallo!" exclaimed M. Vigneron; "a letter for me! This is surprising—I did not give my address to anybody." Then, at a sudden recollection, he added, "Yes I did, though; this must have come from Sauvageot, who is filling my place at the Ministry." He opened the letter, his hands began to tremble, and suddenly he raised a cry: "The chief clerk is dead!"

Deeply agitated, Madame Vigneron was also unable to bridle her tongue: "Then you will have the appointment!"

This was the secret dream in which they had so long and so fondly indulged: the chief clerk's death, in order that he, Vigneron, assistant chief clerk for ten years past, might at last rise to the supreme post, the bureaucratic marshalship. And so great was his delight that he cast aside all restraint. "Ah! the Blessed Virgin is certainly protecting me, my dear. Only this morning I again prayed to her for a rise, and, you see, she grants my prayer!"

However, finding Madame Chaise's eyes fixed upon his own, and seeing Gustave smile, he realised that he ought not to exult in this fashion. Each member of the family no doubt thought of his or her interests and prayed to the Blessed Virgin for such personal favours as might be desired. And so, again putting on his good-natured air, he resumed: "I mean that the Blessed Virgin takes an interest in every one of us and will send us all home well satisfied. Ah! the poor chief, I'm sorry for him. I shall have to send my card to his widow."

In spite of all his efforts he could not restrain his exultation, and no longer doubted that his most secret desires, those which he did not even confess to himself, would soon be gratified. And so all honour was done to the apricot tarts, even Gustave being allowed to eat a portion of one.

"It is surprising," now remarked M. de Guersaint, who had just ordered a cup of coffee; "it is surprising that one doesn't see more sick people here. All these folks seem to me to have first-rate appetites."

After a close inspection, however, in addition to Gustave, who ate no more than a little chicken, he ended by finding a man with a goitre seated at the table d'hote between two women, one of whom certainly suffered from cancer. Farther on, too, there was a girl so thin and pale that she must surely be a consumptive. And still farther away there was a female idiot who had made her entry leaning on two relatives, and with expressionless eyes and lifeless features was now carrying her food to her mouth with a spoon, and slobbering over her napkin. Perhaps there were yet other ailing ones present who could not be distinguished among all those noisy appetites, ailing ones whom the journey had braced, and who were eating as they had not eaten for a long time past. The apricot tarts, the cheese, the fruits were all engulfed amidst the increasing disorder of the table, where at last there only remained the stains of all the wine and sauce which had been spilt upon the cloth.

It was nearly noon. "We will go back to the Grotto at once, eh?" said M. Vigneron.

Indeed, "To the Grotto! To the Grotto!" were well-nigh the only words you now heard. The full mouths were eagerly masticating and swallowing, in order that they might repeat prayers and hymns again with all speed. "Well, as we have the whole afternoon before us," declared M. de Guersaint, "I suggest that we should visit the town a little. I want to see also if I can get a conveyance for my excursion, as my daughter so particularly wishes me to make it."

Pierre, who was stifling, was glad indeed to leave the dining-room. In the porch he was able to breathe again, though even there he found a torrent of customers, new arrivals who were waiting for places. No sooner did one of the little tables become vacant than its possession was eagerly contested, whilst the smallest gap at the table d'hote was instantly filled up. In this wise the assault would continue for more than another hour, and again would the different courses of the menu appear in procession, to be engulfed amidst the crunching of jaws, the stifling heat, and the growing nausea.

II. THE "ORDINARY."

WHEN Pierre and M. de Guersaint got outside they began walking slowly amidst the ever-growing stream of the Sundayfied crowd. The sky was a bright blue, the sun warmed the whole town, and there was a festive gaiety in the atmosphere, the keen delight that attends those great fairs which bring entire communities into the open air. When they had descended the crowded footway of the Avenue de la Grotte, and had reached the corner of the Plateau de la Merlasse, they found their way barred by a throng which was flowing backward amidst a block of vehicles and stamping of horses. "There is no hurry, however," remarked M. de Guersaint. "My idea is to go as far as the Place du Marcadal in the old town; for the servant girl at the hotel told me of a hairdresser there whose brother lets out conveyances cheaply. Do you mind going so far?"

"I?" replied Pierre. "Go wherever you like, I'll follow you."

"All right—and I'll profit by the opportunity to have a shave."

They were nearing the Place du Rosaire, and found themselves in front of the lawns stretching to the Gave, when an encounter again stopped them. Mesdames Desagneaux and Raymonde de Jonquiere were here, chatting gaily with Gerard de Peyrelongue. Both women wore light-coloured gowns, seaside dresses as it were, and their white silk parasols shone in the bright sunlight. They imparted, so to say, a pretty note to the scene—a touch of society chatter blended with the fresh laughter of youth.

"No, no," Madame Desagneaux was saying, "we certainly can't go and visit your 'ordinary' like that—at the very moment when all your comrades are eating."

Gerard, however, with a very gallant air, insisted on their accompanying him, turning more particularly towards Raymonde, whose somewhat massive face was that day brightened by the radiant charm of health.

"But it is a very curious sight, I assure you," said the young man, "and you would be very respectfully received. Trust yourself to me, mademoiselle. Besides, we should certainly find M. Berthaud there, and he would be delighted to do you the honours."

Raymonde smiled, her clear eyes plainly saying that she was quite agreeable. And just then, as Pierre and M. de Guersaint drew near in order to present their respects to the ladies, they were made acquainted with the question under discussion. The "ordinary" was a kind of restaurant or table d'hote which the members of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation—the bearers, the hospitallers of the Grotto, the piscinas, and the hospitals—had established among themselves with the view of taking their meals together at small cost. Many of them were not rich, for they were recruited among all classes; however, they had contrived to secure three good meals for the daily payment of three francs apiece. And in fact they soon had provisions to spare and distributed them among the poor. Everything was in their own management; they purchased their own supplies, recruited a cook and a few waiters, and did not disdain to lend a hand themselves, in order that everything might be comfortable and orderly.

"It must be very interesting," said M, de Guersaint, when these explanations had been given him. "Let us go and see it, if we are not in the way."

Little Madame Desagneaux thereupon gave her consent. "Well, if we are going in a party," said she, "I am quite willing. But when this gentleman first proposed to take Raymonde and me, I was afraid that it might not be quite proper."

Then, as she began to laugh, the others followed her example. She had accepted M. de Guersaint's arm, and Pierre walked beside her on the other hand, experiencing a sudden feeling of sympathy for this gay little woman, who was so full of life and so charming with her fair frizzy hair and creamy complexion.

Behind them came Raymonde, leaning upon Gerard's arm and talking to him in the calm, staid voice of a young lady who holds the best principles despite her air of heedless youth. And since here was the husband whom she had so often dreamt of, she resolved that she would this time secure him, make him beyond all question her own. She intoxicated him with the perfume of health and youth which she diffused, and at the same time astonished him by her knowledge of housewifely duties and of the manner in which money may be economised even in the most trifling matters; for having questioned him with regard to the purchases which he and his comrades made for their "ordinary," she proceeded to show him that they might have reduced their expenditure still further.

Meantime M. de Guersaint and Madame Desagneaux were also chatting together: "You must be fearfully tired, madame," said the architect.

But with a gesture of revolt, and an exclamation of genuine anger, she replied: "Oh no, indeed! Last night, it is true, fatigue quite overcame me at the hospital; I sat down and dozed off, and Madame de Jonquiere and the other ladies were good enough to let me sleep on." At this the others again began to laugh; but still with the same angry air she continued: "And so I slept like a log until this morning. It was disgraceful, especially as I had sworn that I would remain up all night." Then, merriment gaining upon her in her turn, she suddenly burst into a sonorous laugh, displaying her beautiful white teeth. "Ah! a pretty nurse I am, and no mistake! It was poor Madame de Jonquiere who had to remain on her legs all the time. I tried to coax her to come out with us just now. But she preferred to take a little rest."

Raymonde, who overheard these words, thereupon raised her voice to say: "Yes, indeed, my poor mamma could no longer keep on her feet. It was I who compelled her to lie down, telling her that she could go to sleep without any uneasiness, for we should get on all right without her—"

So saying, the girl gave Gerard a laughing glance. He even fancied that he could detect a faint squeeze of the fresh round arm which was resting on his own, as though, indeed, she had wished to express her happiness at being alone with him so that they might settle their own affairs without any interference. This quite delighted him; and he began to explain that if he had not had dejeuner with his comrades that day, it was because some friends had invited him to join them at the railway-station refreshment-room at ten o'clock, and had not given him his liberty until after the departure of the eleven-thirty train.

"Ah! the rascals!" he suddenly resumed. "Do you hear them, mademoiselle?"

The little party was now nearing its destination, and the uproarious laughter and chatter of youth rang out from a clump of trees which concealed the old zinc and plaster building in which the "ordinary" was installed. Gerard began by taking the visitors into the kitchen, a very spacious apartment, well fitted up, and containing a huge range and an immense table, to say nothing of numerous gigantic cauldrons. Here, moreover, the young man called the attention of his companions to the circumstance that the cook, a fat, jovial-looking man, had the red cross pinned on his white jacket, being himself a member of the pilgrimage. Then, pushing open a door, Gerard invited his friends to enter the common room.

It was a long apartment containing two rows of plain deal tables; and the only other articles of furniture were numerous rush-seated tavern chairs, with an additional table which served as a sideboard. The whitewashed walls and the flooring of shiny, red tiles looked, however, extremely clean amidst this intentional bareness, which was similar to that of a monkish refectory. But, the feature of the place which more particularly struck you, as you crossed the threshold, was the childish gaiety which reigned there; for, packed together at the tables, were a hundred and fifty hospitallers of all ages, eating with splendid appetites, laughing, applauding, and singing, with their mouths full. A wondrous fraternity united these men, who had flocked to Lourdes from every province of France, and who belonged to all classes, and represented every degree of fortune. Many of them knew nothing of one another, save that they met here and elbowed one another during three days every year, living together like brothers, and then going off and remaining in absolute ignorance of each other during the rest of the twelvemonth. Nothing could be more charming, however, than to meet again at the next pilgrimage, united in the same charitable work, and to spend a few days of hard labour and boyish delight in common once more; for it all became, as it were, an "outing" of a number of big fellows, let loose under a lovely sky, and well pleased to be able to enjoy themselves and laugh together. And even the frugality of the table, with the pride of managing things themselves, of eating the provisions which they had purchased and cooked, added to the general good humour.

"You see," explained Gerard, "we are not at all inclined to be sad, although we have so much hard work to get through. The Hospitality numbers more than three hundred members, but there are only about one hundred and fifty here at a time, for we have had to organise two successive services, so that there may always be some of us on duty at the Grotto and the hospitals."

The sight of the little party of visitors assembled on the threshold of the room seemed to have increased the general delight; and Berthaud, the superintendent of the bearers, who was lunching at the head of one of the tables, gallantly rose up to receive the ladies.

"But it smells very nice," exclaimed Madame Desagneaux in her giddy way. "Won't you invite us to come and taste your cookery to-morrow?"

"Oh! we can't ask ladies," replied Berthaud, laughing. "But if you gentlemen would like to join us to-morrow we should be extremely pleased to entertain you."

He had at once noticed the good understanding which prevailed between Gerard and Raymonde, and seemed delighted at it, for he greatly wished his cousin to make this match. He laughed pleasantly, at the enthusiastic gaiety which the young girl displayed as she began to question him. "Is not that the Marquis de Salmon-Roquebert," she asked, "who is sitting over yonder between those two young men who look like shop assistants?"

"They are, in fact, the sons of a small stationer at Tarbes," replied Berthaud; "and that is really the Marquis, your neighbour of the Rue de Lille, the owner of that magnificent mansion, one of the richest and most noble men of title in France. You see how he is enjoying our mutton stew!"

It was true, the millionaire Marquis seemed delighted to be able to board himself for his three francs a day, and to sit down at table in genuine democratic fashion by the side of petty bourgeois and workmen who would not have dared to accost him in the street. Was not that chance table symbolical of social communion, effected by the joint practice of charity? For his part, the Marquis was the more hungry that day, as he had bathed over sixty patients, sufferers from all the most abominable diseases of unhappy humanity, at the piscinas that morning. And the scene around him seemed like a realisation of the evangelical commonalty; but doubtless it was so charming and so gay simply because its duration was limited to three days.

Although M. de Guersaint had but lately risen from table, his curiosity prompted him to taste the mutton stew, and he pronounced it perfect. Meantime, Pierre caught sight of Baron Suire, the director of the Hospitality, walking about between the rows of tables with an air of some importance, as though he had allotted himself the task of keeping an eye on everything, even on the manner in which his staff fed itself. The young priest thereupon remembered the ardent desire which Marie had expressed to spend the night in front of the Grotto, and it occurred to him that the Baron might be willing to give the necessary authorisation.

"Certainly," replied the director, who had become quite grave whilst listening to Pierre, "we do sometimes allow it; but it is always a very delicate matter! You assure me at all events that this young person is not consumptive? Well, well, since you say that she so much desires it I will mention the matter to Father Fourcade and warn Madame de Jonquiere, so that she may let you take the young lady away."

He was in reality a very good-natured fellow, albeit so fond of assuming the air of an indispensable man weighed down by the heaviest responsibilities. In his turn he now detained the visitors, and gave them full particulars concerning the organisation of the Hospitality. Its members said prayers together every morning. Two board meetings were held each day, and were attended by all the heads of departments, as well as by the reverend Fathers and some of the chaplains. All the hospitallers took the Sacrament as frequently as possible. And, moreover, there were many complicated tasks to be attended to, a prodigious rotation of duties, quite a little world to be governed with a firm hand. The Baron spoke like a general who each year gains a great victory over the spirit of the age; and, sending Berthaud back to finish his dejeuner, he insisted on escorting the ladies into the little sanded courtyard, which was shaded by some fine trees.

"It is very interesting, very interesting," repeated Madame Desagneaux. "We are greatly obliged to you for your kindness, monsieur."

"Don't mention it, don't mention it, madame," answered the Baron. "It is I who am pleased at having had an opportunity to show you my little army."

So far Gerard had not quitted Raymonde's side; but M. de Guersaint and Pierre were already exchanging glances suggestive of leave-taking, in order that they might repair by themselves to the Place du Marcadal, when Madame Desagneaux suddenly remembered that a friend had requested her to send her a bottle of Lourdes water. And she thereupon asked Gerard how she was to execute this commission. The young man began to laugh. "Will you again accept me as a guide?" said he. "And by the way, if these gentlemen like to come as well, I will show you the place where the bottles are filled, corked, packed in cases, and then sent off. It is a curious sight."

M. de Guersaint immediately consented; and all five of them set out again, Madame Desagneaux still between the architect and the priest, whilst Raymonde and Gerard brought up the rear. The crowd in the burning sunlight was increasing; the Place du Rosaire was now overflowing with an idle sauntering mob resembling some concourse of sight-seers on a day of public rejoicing.

The bottling and packing shops were situated under one of the arches on the left-hand side of the Place. They formed a suite of three apartments of very simple aspect. In the first one the bottles were filled in the most ordinary of fashions. A little green-painted zinc barrel, not unlike a watering-cask, was dragged by a man from the Grotto, and the light-coloured bottles were then simply filled at its tap, one by one; the blouse-clad workman entrusted with the duty exercising no particular watchfulness to prevent the water from overflowing. In fact there was quite a puddle of it upon the ground. There were no labels on the bottles; the little leaden capsules placed over the corks alone bore an inscription, and they were coated with a kind of ceruse, doubtless to ensure preservation. Then came two other rooms which formed regular packing shops, with carpenters' benches, tools, and heaps of shavings. The boxes, most frequently made for one bottle or for two, were put together with great care, and the bottles were deposited inside them, on beds of fine wood parings. The scene reminded one in some degree of the packing halls for flowers at Nice and for preserved fruits at Grasse.

Gerard went on giving explanations with a quiet, satisfied air. "The water," he said, "really comes from the Grotto, as you can yourselves see, so that all the foolish jokes which one hears really have no basis. And everything is perfectly simple, natural, and goes on in the broad daylight. I would also point out to you that the Fathers don't sell the water as they are accused of doing. For instance, a bottle of water here costs twenty centimes,* which is only the price of the bottle itself. If you wish to have it sent to anybody you naturally have to pay for the packing and the carriage, and then it costs you one franc and seventy centimes.** However, you are perfectly at liberty to go to the source and fill the flasks and cans and other receptacles that you may choose to bring with you."

* Four cents, U.S.A.

** About 32 cents, U.S.A.

Pierre reflected that the profits of the reverend Fathers in this respect could not be very large ones, for their gains were limited to what they made by manufacturing the boxes and supplying the bottles, which latter, purchased by the thousand, certainly did not cost them so much as twenty centimes apiece. However, Raymonde and Madame Desagneaux, as well as M. de Guersaint, who had such a lively imagination, experienced deep disappointment at sight of the little green barrel, the capsules, sticky with ceruse, and the piles of shavings lying around the benches. They had doubtless imagined all sorts of ceremonies, the observance of certain rites in bottling the miraculous water, priests in vestments pronouncing blessings, and choir-boys singing hymns of praise in pure crystalline voices. For his part, Pierre, in presence of all this vulgar bottling and packing, ended by thinking of the active power of faith. When one of those bottles reaches some far-away sick-room, and is unpacked there, and the sufferer falls upon his knees, and so excites himself by contemplating and drinking the pure water that he actually brings about the cure of his ailment, there must truly be a most extraordinary plunge into all-powerful illusion.

"Ah!" exclaimed Gerard as they came out, "would you like to see the storehouse where the tapers are kept, before going to the offices? It is only a couple of steps away."

And then, not even waiting for their answer, he led them to the opposite side of the Place du Rosaire. His one desire was to amuse Raymonde, but, in point of fact, the aspect of the place where the tapers were stored was even less entertaining than that of the packing-rooms which they had just left. This storehouse, a kind of deep vault under one of the right-hand arches of the Place, was divided by timber into a number of spacious compartments, in which lay an extraordinary collection of tapers, classified according to size. The overplus of all the tapers offered to the Grotto was deposited here; and such was the number of these superfluous candles that the little conveyances stationed near the Grotto railing, ready to receive the pilgrims' offerings, had to be brought to the storehouse several times a day in order to be emptied there, after which they were returned to the Grotto, and were promptly filled again. In theory, each taper that was offered ought to have been burnt at the feet of the Virgin's statue; but so great was the number of these offerings, that, although a couple of hundred tapers of all sizes were kept burning by day and night, it was impossible to exhaust the supply, which went on increasing and increasing. There was a rumour that the Fathers could not even find room to store all this wax, but had to sell it over and over again; and, indeed, certain friends of the Grotto confessed, with a touch of pride, that the profit on the tapers alone would have sufficed to defray all the expenses of the business.

The quantity of these votive candles quite stupefied Raymonde and Madame Desagneaux. How many, how many there were! The smaller ones, costing from fifty centimes to a franc apiece, were piled up in fabulous numbers. M. de Guersaint, desirous of getting at the exact figures, quite lost himself in the puzzling calculation he attempted. As for Pierre, it was in silence that he gazed upon this mass of wax, destined to be burnt in open daylight to the glory of God; and although he was by no means a rigid utilitarian, and could well understand that some apparent acts of extravagance yield an illusive enjoyment and satisfaction which provide humanity with as much sustenance as bread, he could not, on the other hand, refrain from reflecting on the many benefits which might have been conferred on the poor and the ailing with the money represented by all that wax, which would fly away in smoke.

"But come, what about that bottle which I am to send off?" abruptly asked Madame Desagneaux.

"We will go to the office," replied Gerard. "In five minutes everything will be settled."

They had to cross the Place du Rosaire once more and ascend the stone stairway leading to the Basilica. The office was up above, on the left hand, at the corner of the path leading to the Calvary. The building was a paltry one, a hut of lath and plaster which the wind and the rain had reduced to a state of ruin. On a board outside was the inscription: "Apply here with reference to Masses, Offerings, and Brotherhoods. Forwarding office for Lourdes water. Subscriptions to the 'Annals of O. L. of Lourdes.'" How many millions of people must have already passed through this wretched shanty, which seemed to date from the innocent days when the foundations of the adjacent Basilica had scarcely been laid!

The whole party went in, eager to see what might be inside. But they simply found a wicket at which Madame Desagneaux had to stop in order to give her friend's name and address; and when she had paid one franc and seventy centimes, a small printed receipt was handed her, such as you receive on registering luggage at a railway station.

As soon as they were outside again Gerard pointed to a large building standing two or three hundred yards away, and resumed: "There, that is where the Fathers reside."

"But we see nothing of them," remarked Pierre.

This observation so astonished the young man that he remained for a moment without replying. "It's true," he at last said, "we do not see them, but then they give up the custody of everything—the Grotto and all the rest—to the Fathers of the Assumption during the national pilgrimage."

Pierre looked at the building which had been pointed out to him, and noticed that it was a massive stone pile resembling a fortress. The windows were closed, and the whole edifice looked lifeless. Yet everything at Lourdes came from it, and to it also everything returned. It seemed, in fact, to the young priest that he could hear the silent, formidable rake-stroke which extended over the entire valley, which caught hold of all who had come to the spot, and placed both the gold and the blood of the throng in the clutches of those reverend Fathers! However, Gerard just then resumed in a low voice "But come, they do show themselves, for here is the reverend superior, Father Capdebarthe himself."

An ecclesiastic was indeed just passing, a man with the appearance of a peasant, a knotty frame, and a large head which looked as though carved with a billhook. His opaque eyes were quite expressionless, and his face, with its worn features, had retained a loamy tint, a gloomy, russet reflection of the earth. Monseigneur Laurence had really made a politic selection in confiding the organisation and management of the Grotto to those Garaison missionaries, who were so tenacious and covetous, for the most part sons of mountain peasants and passionately attached to the soil.

However, the little party now slowly retraced its steps by way of the Plateau de la Merlasse, the broad boulevard which skirts the inclined way on the left hand and leads to the Avenue de la Grotte. It was already past one o'clock, but people were still eating their dejeuners from one to the other end of the overflowing town. Many of the fifty thousand pilgrims and sight-seers collected within it had not yet been able to sit down and eat; and Pierre, who had left the table d'hote still crowded, who had just seen the hospitallers squeezing together so gaily at the "ordinary," found more and more tables at each step he took. On all sides people were eating, eating without a pause. Hereabouts, however, in the open air, on either side of the broad road, the hungry ones were humble folk who had rushed upon the tables set up on either footway—tables formed of a couple of long boards, flanked by two forms, and shaded from the sun by narrow linen awnings. Broth and coffee were sold at these places at a penny a cup. The little loaves heaped up in high baskets also cost a penny apiece. Hanging from the poles which upheld the awnings were sausages, chitterlings, and hams. Some of the open-air restaurateurs were frying potatoes, and others were concocting more or less savoury messes of inferior meat and onions. A pungent smoke, a violent odour, arose into the sunlight, mingling with the dust which was raised by the continuous tramp of the promenaders. Rows of people, moreover, were waiting at each cantine, so that each time a party rose from table fresh customers took possession of the benches ranged beside the oilcloth-covered planks, which were so narrow that there was scarcely room for two bowls of soup to be placed side by side. And one and all made haste, and devoured with the ravenous hunger born of their fatigue, that insatiable appetite which so often follows upon great moral shocks. In fact, when the mind had exhausted itself in prayer, when everything physical had been forgotten amidst the mental flight into the legendary heavens, the human animal suddenly appeared, again asserted itself, and began to gorge. Moreover, under that dazzling Sunday sky, the scene was like that of a fair-field with all the gluttony of a merrymaking community, a display of the delight which they felt in living, despite the multiplicity of their abominable ailments and the dearth of the miracles they hoped for.

"They eat, they amuse themselves; what else can one expect?" remarked Gerard, guessing the thoughts of his amiable companions.

"Ah! poor people!" murmured Pierre, "they have a perfect right to do so."

He was greatly touched to see human nature reassert itself in this fashion. However, when they had got to the lower part of the boulevard near the Grotto, his feelings were hurt at sight of the desperate eagerness displayed by the female vendors of tapers and bouquets, who with the rough fierceness of conquerors assailed the passers-by in bands. They were mostly young women, with bare heads, or with kerchiefs tied over their hair, and they displayed extraordinary effrontery. Even the old ones were scarcely more discreet. With parcels of tapers under their arms, they brandished the one which they offered for sale and even thrust it into the hand of the promenader. "Monsieur," "madame," they called, "buy a taper, buy a taper, it will bring you luck!" One gentleman, who was surrounded and shaken by three of the youngest of these harpies, almost lost the skirts of his frock-coat in attempting to escape their clutches. Then the scene began afresh with the bouquets—large round bouquets they were, carelessly fastened together and looking like cabbages. "A bouquet, madame!" was the cry. "A bouquet for the Blessed Virgin!" If the lady escaped, she heard muttered insults behind her. Trafficking, impudent trafficking, pursued the pilgrims to the very outskirts of the Grotto. Trade was not merely triumphantly installed in every one of the shops, standing close together and transforming each street into a bazaar, but it overran the footways and barred the road with hand-carts full of chaplets, medals, statuettes, and religious prints. On all sides people were buying almost to the same extent as they ate, in order that they might take away with them some souvenir of this holy Kermesse. And the bright gay note of this commercial eagerness, this scramble of hawkers, was supplied by the urchins who rushed about through the crowd, crying the "Journal de la Grotte." Their sharp, shrill voices pierced the ear: "The 'Journal de la Grotte,' this morning's number, two sous, the 'Journal de la Grotte.'"

Amidst the continual pushing which accompanied the eddying of the ever-moving crowd, Gerard's little party became separated. He and Raymonde remained behind the others. They had begun talking together in low tones, with an air of smiling intimacy, lost and isolated as they were in the dense crowd. And Madame Desagneaux at last had to stop, look back, and call to them: "Come on, or we shall lose one another!"

As they drew near, Pierre heard the girl exclaim: "Mamma is so very busy; speak to her before we leave." And Gerard thereupon replied: "It is understood. You have made me very happy, mademoiselle."

Thus the husband had been secured, the marriage decided upon, during this charming promenade among the sights of Lourdes. Raymonde had completed her conquest, and Gerard had at last taken a resolution, realising how gay and sensible she was, as she walked beside him leaning on his arm.

M. de Guersaint, however, had raised his eyes, and was heard inquiring: "Are not those people up there, on that balcony, the rich folk who made the journey in the same train as ourselves?—You know whom I mean, that lady who is so very ill, and whose husband and sister accompany her?"

He was alluding to the Dieulafays; and they indeed were the persons whom he now saw on the balcony of a suite of rooms which they had rented in a new house overlooking the lawns of the Rosary. They here occupied a first-floor, furnished with all the luxury that Lourdes could provide, carpets, hangings, mirrors, and many other things, without mentioning a staff of servants despatched beforehand from Paris. As the weather was so fine that afternoon, the large armchair on which lay the poor ailing woman had been rolled on to the balcony. You could see her there, clad in a lace peignoir. Her husband, always correctly attired in a black frock-coat, stood beside her on her right hand, whilst her sister, in a delightful pale mauve gown, sat on her left smiling and leaning over every now and then so as to speak to her, but apparently receiving no reply.

"Oh!" declared little Madame Desagneaux, "I have often heard people speak of Madame Jousseur, that lady in mauve. She is the wife of a diplomatist who neglects her, it seems, in spite of her great beauty; and last year there was a deal of talk about her fancy for a young colonel who is well known in Parisian society. It is said, however, in Catholic salons that her religious principles enabled her to conquer it."

They all five remained there, looking up at the balcony. "To think," resumed Madame Desagneaux, "that her sister, poor woman, was once her living portrait." And, indeed, there was an expression of greater kindliness and more gentle gaiety on Madame Dieulafay's face. And now you see her—no different from a dead woman except that she is above instead of under ground—with her flesh wasted away, reduced to a livid, boneless thing which they scarcely dare to move. Ah! the unhappy woman!

Raymonde thereupon assured the others that Madame Dieulafay, who had been married scarcely two years previously, had brought all the jewellery given her on the occasion of her wedding to offer it as a gift to Our Lady of Lourdes; and Gerard confirmed this assertion, saying that the jewellery had been handed over to the treasurer of the Basilica that very morning with a golden lantern studded with gems and a large sum of money destined for the relief of the poor. However, the Blessed Virgin could not have been touched as yet, for the sufferer's condition seemed, if anything, to be worse.

From that moment Pierre no longer beheld aught save that young woman on that handsome balcony, that woeful, wealthy creature lying there high above the merrymaking throng, the Lourdes mob which was feasting and laughing in the Sunday sunshine. The two dear ones who were so tenderly watching over her—her sister who had forsaken her society triumphs, her husband who had forgotten his financial business, his millions dispersed throughout the world—increased, by their irreproachable demeanour, the woefulness of the group which they thus formed high above all other heads, and face to face with the lovely valley. For Pierre they alone remained; and they were exceedingly wealthy and exceedingly wretched.

However, lingering in this wise on the footway with their eyes upturned, the five promenaders narrowly escaped being knocked down and run over, for at every moment fresh vehicles were coming up, for the most part landaus drawn by four horses, which were driven at a fast trot, and whose bells jingled merrily. The occupants of these carriages were tourists, visitors to the waters of Pau, Bareges, and Cauterets, whom curiosity had attracted to Lourdes, and who were delighted with the fine weather and quite inspirited by their rapid drive across the mountains. They would remain at Lourdes only a few hours; after hastening to the Grotto and the Basilica in seaside costumes, they would start off again, laughing, and well pleased at having seen it all. In this wise families in light attire, bands of young women with bright parasols, darted hither and thither among the grey, neutral-tinted crowd of pilgrims, imparting to it, in a yet more pronounced manner, the aspect of a fair-day mob, amidst which folks of good society deign to come and amuse themselves.

All at once Madame Desagneaux raised a cry "What, is it you, Berthe?" And thereupon she embraced a tall, charming brunette who had just alighted from a landau with three other young women, the whole party smiling and animated. Everyone began talking at once, and all sorts of merry exclamations rang out, in the delight they felt at meeting in this fashion. "Oh! we are at Cauterets, my dear," said the tall brunette. "And as everybody comes here, we decided to come all four together. And your husband, is he here with you?"

Madame Desagneaux began protesting: "Of course not," said she. "He is at Trouville, as you ought to know. I shall start to join him on Thursday."

"Yes, yes, of course," resumed the tall brunette, who, like her friend, seemed to be an amiable, giddy creature, "I was forgetting; you are here with the pilgrimage."

Then Madame Desagneaux offered to guide her friends, promising to show them everything of interest in less than a couple of hours; and turning to Raymonde, who stood by, smiling, she added "Come with us, my dear; your mother won't be anxious."

The ladies and Pierre and M. de Guersaint thereupon exchanged bows: and Gerard also took leave, tenderly pressing Raymonde's hand, with his eyes fixed on hers, as though to pledge himself definitively. The women swiftly departed, directing their steps towards the Grotto, and when Gerard also had gone off, returning to his duties, M. de Guersaint said to Pierre: "And the hairdresser on the Place du Marcadal, I really must go and see him. You will come with me, won't you?"

"Of course I will go wherever you like. I am quite at your disposal as Marie does not need us."

Following the pathways between the large lawns which stretch out in front of the Rosary, they reached the new bridge, where they had another encounter, this time with Abbe des Hermoises, who was acting as guide to two young married ladies who had arrived that morning from Tarbes. Walking between them with the gallant air of a society priest, he was showing them Lourdes and explaining it to them, keeping them well away, however, from its more repugnant features, its poor and its ailing folk, its odour of low misery, which, it must be admitted, had well-nigh disappeared that fine, sunshiny day. At the first word which M. de Guersaint addressed to him with respect to the hiring of a vehicle for the trip to Gavarnie, the Abbe was seized with a dread lest he should be obliged to leave his pretty lady-visitors: "As you please, my dear sir," he replied. "Kindly attend to the matter, and—you are quite right, make the cheapest arrangements possible, for I shall have two ecclesiastics of small means with me. There will be four of us. Let me know at the hotel this evening at what hour we shall start."

Thereupon he again joined his lady-friends, and led them towards the Grotto, following the shady path which skirts the Gave, a cool, sequestered path well suited for lovers' walks.

Feeling somewhat tired, Pierre had remained apart from the others, leaning against the parapet of the new bridge. And now for the first time he was struck by the prodigious number of priests among the crowd. He saw all varieties of them swarming across the bridge: priests of correct mien who had come with the pilgrimage and who could be recognised by their air of assurance and their clean cassocks; poor village priests who were far more timid and badly clothed, and who, after making sacrifices in order that they might indulge in the journey, would return home quite scared and, finally, there was the whole crowd of unattached ecclesiastics who had come nobody knew whence, and who enjoyed such absolute liberty that it was difficult to be sure whether they had even said their mass that morning. They doubtless found this liberty very agreeable; and thus the greater number of them, like Abbe des Hermoises, had simply come on a holiday excursion, free from all duties, and happy at being able to live like ordinary men, lost, unnoticed as they were in the multitude around them. And from the young, carefully groomed and perfumed priest, to the old one in a dirty cassock and shoes down at heel, the entire species had its representative in the throng—there were corpulent ones, others but moderately fat, thin ones, tall ones and short ones, some whom faith had brought and whom ardour was consuming, some also who simply plied their calling like worthy men, and some, moreover, who were fond of intriguing, and who were only present in order that they might help the good cause. However, Pierre was quite surprised to see such a stream of priests pass before him, each with his special passion, and one and all hurrying to the Grotto as one hurries to a duty, a belief, a pleasure, or a task. He noticed one among the number, a very short, slim, dark man with a pronounced Italian accent, whose glittering eyes seemed to be taking a plan of Lourdes, who looked, indeed, like one of those spies who come and peer around with a view to conquest; and then he observed another one, an enormous fellow with a paternal air, who was breathing hard through inordinate eating, and who paused in front of a poor sick woman, and ended by slipping a five-franc piece into her hand.

Just then, however, M. de Guersaint returned: "We merely have to go down the boulevard and the Rue Basse," said he.

Pierre followed him without answering. He had just felt his cassock on his shoulders for the first time that afternoon, for never had it seemed so light to him as whilst he was walking about amidst the scramble of the pilgrimage. The young fellow was now living in a state of mingled unconsciousness and dizziness, ever hoping that faith would fall upon him like a lightning flash, in spite of all the vague uneasiness which was growing within him at sight of the things which he beheld. However, the spectacle of that ever-swelling stream of priests no longer wounded his heart; fraternal feelings towards these unknown colleagues had returned to him; how many of them there must be who believed no more than he did himself, and yet, like himself, honestly fulfilled their mission as guides and consolers!

"This boulevard is a new one, you know," said M. de Guersaint, all at once raising his voice. "The number of houses built during the last twenty years is almost beyond belief. There is quite a new town here."

The Lapaca flowed along behind the buildings on their right and, their curiosity inducing them to turn into a narrow lane, they came upon some strange old structures on the margin of the narrow stream. Several ancient mills here displayed their wheels; among them one which Monseigneur Laurence had given to Bernadette's parents after the apparitions. Tourists, moreover, were here shown the pretended abode of Bernadette, a hovel whither the Soubirous family had removed on leaving the Rue des Petits Fosses, and in which the young girl, as she was already boarding with the Sisters of Nevers, can have but seldom slept. At last, by way of the Rue Basse, Pierre and his companion reached the Place du Marcadal.

This was a long, triangular, open space, the most animated and luxurious of the squares of the old town, the one where the cafes, the chemists, all the finest shops were situated. And, among the latter, one showed conspicuously, coloured as it was a lively green, adorned with lofty mirrors, and surmounted by a broad board bearing in gilt letters the inscription: "Cazaban, Hairdresser".

M. de Guersaint and Pierre went in, but there was nobody in the salon and they had to wait. A terrible clatter of forks resounded from the adjoining room, an ordinary dining-room transformed into a table d'hote, in which some twenty people were having dejeuner although it was already two o'clock. The afternoon was progressing, and yet people were still eating from one to the other end of Lourdes. Like every other householder in the town, whatever his religious convictions might be, Cazaban, in the pilgrimage season, let his bedrooms, surrendered his dining-room, end sought refuge in his cellar, where, heaped up with his family, he ate and slept, although this unventilated hole was no more than three yards square. However, the passion for trading and moneymaking carried all before it; at pilgrimage time the whole population disappeared like that of a conquered city, surrendering even the beds of its women and its children to the pilgrims, seating them at its tables, and supplying them with food.

"Is there nobody here?" called M. de Guersaint after waiting a moment.

At last a little man made his appearance, Cazaban himself, a type of the knotty but active Pyrenean, with a long face, prominent cheek-bones, and a sunburned complexion spotted here and there with red. His big, glittering eyes never remained still; and the whole of his spare little figure quivered with incessant exuberance of speech and gesture.

"For you, monsieur—a shave, eh?" said he. "I must beg your pardon for keeping you waiting; but my assistant has gone out, and I was in there with my boarders. If you will kindly sit down, I will attend to you at once."

Thereupon, deigning to operate in person, Cazaban began to stir up the lather and strop the razor. He had glanced rather nervously, however, at the cassock worn by Pierre, who without a word had seated himself in a corner and taken up a newspaper in the perusal of which he appeared to be absorbed.

A short interval of silence followed; but it was fraught with suffering for Cazaban, and whilst lathering his customer's chin he began to chatter: "My boarders lingered this morning such a long time at the Grotto, monsieur, that they have scarcely sat down to dejeuner. You can hear them, eh? I was staying with them out of politeness. However, I owe myself to my customers as well, do I not? One must try to please everybody."

M. de Guersaint, who also was fond of a chat, thereupon began to question him: "You lodge some of the pilgrims, I suppose?"

"Oh! we all lodge some of them, monsieur; it is necessary for the town," replied the barber.

"And you accompany them to the Grotto?"

At this, however, Cazaban revolted, and, holding up his razor, he answered with an air of dignity "Never, monsieur, never! For five years past I have not been in that new town which they are building."

He was still seeking to restrain himself, and again glanced at Pierre, whose face was hidden by the newspaper. The sight of the red cross pinned on M. de Guersaint's jacket was also calculated to render him prudent; nevertheless his tongue won the victory. "Well, monsieur, opinions are free, are they not?" said he. "I respect yours, but for my part I don't believe in all that phantasmagoria! Oh I've never concealed it! I was already a republican and a freethinker in the days of the Empire. There were barely four men of those views in the whole town at that time. Oh! I'm proud of it."

He had begun to shave M. de Guersaint's left cheek and was quite triumphant. From that moment a stream of words poured forth from his mouth, a stream which seemed to be inexhaustible. To begin with, he brought the same charges as Majeste against the Fathers of the Grotto. He reproached them for their dealings in tapers, chaplets, prints, and crucifixes, for the disloyal manner in which they competed with those who sold those articles as well as with the hotel and lodging-house keepers. And he was also wrathful with the Blue Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, for had they not robbed him of two tenants, two old ladies, who spent three weeks at Lourdes each year? Moreover you could divine within him all the slowly accumulated, overflowing spite with which the old town regarded the new town—that town which had sprung up so quickly on the other side of the castle, that rich city with houses as big as palaces, whither flowed all the life, all the luxury, all the money of Lourdes, so that it was incessantly growing larger and wealthier, whilst its elder sister, the poor, antique town of the mountains, with its narrow, grass-grown, deserted streets, seemed near the point of death. Nevertheless the struggle still continued; the old town seemed determined not to die, and, by lodging pilgrims and opening shops on her side, endeavoured to compel her ungrateful junior to grant her a share of the spoils. But custom only flowed to the shops which were near the Grotto, and only the poorer pilgrims were willing to lodge so far away; so that the unequal conditions of the struggle intensified the rupture and turned the high town and the low town into two irreconcilable enemies, who preyed upon one another amidst continual intrigues.

"Ah, no! They certainly won't see me at their Grotto," resumed Cazaban, with his rageful air. "What an abusive use they make of that Grotto of theirs! They serve it up in every fashion! To think of such idolatry, such gross superstition in the nineteenth century! Just ask them if they have cured a single sufferer belonging to the town during the last twenty years! Yet there are plenty of infirm people crawling about our streets. It was our folk that benefited by the first miracles; but it would seem that the miraculous water has long lost all its power, so far as we are concerned. We are too near it; people have to come from a long distance if they want it to act on them. It's really all too stupid; why, I wouldn't go there even if I were offered a hundred francs!"

Pierre's immobility was doubtless irritating the barber. He had now begun to shave M. de Guersaint's right cheek; and was inveighing against the Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, whose greed for gain was the one cause of all the misunderstanding. These Fathers who were at home there, since they had purchased from the Municipality the land on which they desired to build, did not even carry out the stipulations of the contract they had signed, for there were two clauses in it forbidding all trading, such as the sale of the water and of religious articles. Innumerable actions might have been brought against them. But they snapped their fingers, and felt themselves so powerful that they no longer allowed a single offering to go to the parish, but arranged matters so that the whole harvest of money should be garnered by the Grotto and the Basilica.

And, all at once, Cazaban candidly exclaimed: "If they were only reasonable, if they would only share with us!" Then, when M. de Guersaint had washed his face, and reseated himself, the hairdresser resumed: "And if I were to tell you, monsieur, what they have done with our poor town! Forty years ago all the young girls here conducted themselves properly, I assure you. I remember that in my young days when a young man was wicked he generally had to go elsewhere. But times have changed, our manners are no longer the same. Nowadays nearly all the girls content themselves with selling candles and nosegays; and you must have seen them catching hold of the passers-by and thrusting their goods into their hands! It is really shameful to see so many bold girls about! They make a lot of money, acquire lazy habits, and, instead of working during the winter, simply wait for the return of the pilgrimage season. And I assure you that the young men don't need to go elsewhere nowadays. No, indeed! And add to all this the suspicious floating element which swells the population as soon as the first fine weather sets in—the coachmen, the hawkers, the cantine keepers, all the low-class, wandering folk reeking with grossness and vice—and you can form an idea of the honest new town which they have given us with the crowds that come to their Grotto and their Basilica!"

Greatly struck by these remarks, Pierre had let his newspaper fall and begun to listen. It was now, for the first time, that he fully realised the difference between the two Lourdes—old Lourdes so honest and so pious in its tranquil solitude, and new Lourdes corrupted, demoralised by the circulation of so much money, by such a great enforced increase of wealth, by the ever-growing torrent of strangers sweeping through it, by the fatal rotting influence of the conflux of thousands of people, the contagion of evil examples. And what a terrible result it seemed when one thought of Bernadette, the pure, candid girl kneeling before the wild primitive grotto, when one thought of all the naive faith, all the fervent purity of those who had first begun the work! Had they desired that the whole countryside should be poisoned in this wise by lucre and human filth? Yet it had sufficed that the nations should flock there for a pestilence to break out.

Seeing that Pierre was listening, Cazaban made a final threatening gesture as though to sweep away all this poisonous superstition. Then, relapsing into silence, he finished cutting M. de Guersaint's hair.

"There you are, monsieur!"

The architect rose, and it was only now that he began to speak of the conveyance which he wished to hire. At first the hairdresser declined to enter into the matter, pretending that they must apply to his brother at the Champ Commun; but at last he consented to take the order. A pair-horse landau for Gavarnie was priced at fifty francs. However, he was so pleased at having talked so much, and so flattered at hearing himself called an honest man, that he eventually agreed to charge only forty francs. There were four persons in the party, so this would make ten francs apiece. And it was agreed that they should start off at about two in the morning, so that they might get back to Lourdes at a tolerably early hour on the Monday evening.

"The landau will be outside the Hotel of the Apparitions at the appointed time," repeated Cazaban in his emphatic way. "You may rely on me, monsieur."

Then he began to listen. The clatter of crockery did not cease in the adjoining room. People were still eating there with that impulsive voracity which had spread from one to the other end of Lourdes. And all at once a voice was heard calling for more bread.

"Excuse me," hastily resumed Cazaban, "my boarders want me." And thereupon he rushed away, his hands still greasy through fingering the comb.

The door remained open for a second, and on the walls of the dining-room Pierre espied various religious prints, and notably a view of the Grotto, which surprised him; in all probability, however, the hairdresser only hung these engravings there during the pilgrimage season by way of pleasing his boarders.

It was now nearly three o'clock. When the young priest and M. de Guersaint got outside they were astonished at the loud pealing of bells which was flying through the air. The parish church had responded to the first stroke of vespers chiming at the Basilica; and now all the convents, one after another, were contributing to the swelling peals. The crystalline notes of the bell of the Carmelites mingled with the grave notes of the bell of the Immaculate Conception; and all the joyous bells of the Sisters of Nevers and the Dominicans were jingling together. In this wise, from morning till evening on fine days of festivity, the chimes winged their flight above the house-roofs of Lourdes. And nothing could have been gayer than that sonorous melody resounding in the broad blue heavens above the gluttonous town, which had at last lunched, and was now comfortably digesting as it strolled about in the sunlight.

III. THE NIGHT PROCESSION

AS soon as night had fallen Marie, still lying on her bed at the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, became extremely impatient, for she had learnt from Madame de Jonquiere that Baron Suire had obtained from Father Fourcade the necessary permission for her to spend the night in front of the Grotto. Thus she kept on questioning Sister Hyacinthe, asking her: "Pray, Sister, is it not yet nine o'clock?"

"No, my child, it is scarcely half-past eight," was the reply. "Here is a nice woollen shawl for you to wrap round you at daybreak, for the Gave is close by, and the mornings are very fresh, you know, in these mountainous parts."

"Oh! but the nights are so lovely, Sister, and besides, I sleep so little here!" replied Marie; "I cannot be worse off out-of-doors. Mon Dieu, how happy I am; how delightful it will be to spend the whole night with the Blessed Virgin!"

The entire ward was jealous of her; for to remain in prayer before the Grotto all night long was the most ineffable of joys, the supreme beatitude. It was said that in the deep peacefulness of night the chosen ones undoubtedly beheld the Virgin, but powerful protection was needed to obtain such a favour as had been granted to Marie; for nowadays the reverend Fathers scarcely liked to grant it, as several sufferers had died during the long vigil, falling asleep, as it were, in the midst of their ecstasy.

"You will take the Sacrament at the Grotto tomorrow morning, before you are brought back here, won't you, my child?" resumed Sister Hyacinthe.

However, nine o'clock at last struck, and, Pierre not arriving, the girl wondered whether he, usually so punctual, could have forgotten her? The others were now talking to her of the night procession, which she would see from beginning to end if she only started at once. The ceremonies concluded with a procession every night, but the Sunday one was always the finest, and that evening, it was said, would be remarkably splendid, such, indeed, as was seldom seen. Nearly thirty thousand pilgrims would take part in it, each carrying a lighted taper: the nocturnal marvels of the sky would be revealed; the stars would descend upon earth. At this thought the sufferers began to bewail their fate; what a wretched lot was theirs, to be tied to their beds, unable to see any of those wonders.

At last Madame de Jonquiere approached Marie's bed. "My dear girl," said she, "here is your father with Monsieur l'Abbe."

Radiant with delight, the girl at once forgot her weary waiting. "Oh! pray let us make haste, Pierre," she exclaimed; "pray let us make haste!"

They carried her down the stairs, and the young priest harnessed himself to the little car, which gently rolled along, under the star-studded heavens, whilst M. de Guersaint walked beside it. The night was moonless, but extremely beautiful; the vault above looked like deep blue velvet, spangled with diamonds, and the atmosphere was exquisitely mild and pure, fragrant with the perfumes from the mountains. Many pilgrims were hurrying along the street, all bending their steps towards the Grotto, but they formed a discreet, pensive crowd, with naught of the fair-field, lounging character of the daytime throng. And, as soon as the Plateau de la Merlasse was reached, the darkness spread out, you entered into a great lake of shadows formed by the stretching lawns and lofty trees, and saw nothing rising on high save the black, tapering spire of the Basilica.

Pierre grew rather anxious on finding that the crowd became more and more compact as he advanced. Already on reaching the Place du Rosaire it was difficult to take another forward step. "There is no hope of getting to the Grotto yet awhile," he said. "The best course would be to turn into one of the pathways behind the pilgrims' shelter-house and wait there."

Marie, however, greatly desired to see the procession start. "Oh! pray try to go as far as the Gave," said she. "I shall then see everything from a distance; I don't want to go near."

M. de Guersaint, who was equally inquisitive, seconded this proposal. "Don't be uneasy," he said to Pierre. "I am here behind, and will take care to let nobody jostle her."

Pierre had to begin pulling the little vehicle again. It took him a quarter of an hour to pass under one of the arches of the inclined way on the left hand, so great was the crush of pilgrims at that point. Then, taking a somewhat oblique course, he ended by reaching the quay beside the Gave, where there were only some spectators standing on the sidewalk, so that he was able to advance another fifty yards. At last he halted, and backed the little car against the quay parapet, in full view of the Grotto. "Will you be all right here?" he asked.

"Oh yes, thank you. Only you must sit me up; I shall then be able to see much better."

M. de Guersaint raised her into a sitting posture, and then for his part climbed upon the stonework running from one to the other end of the quay. A mob of inquisitive people had already scaled it in part, like sight-seers waiting for a display of fireworks; and they were all raising themselves on tiptoe, and craning their necks to get a better view. Pierre himself at last grew interested, although there was, so far, little to see.

Some thirty thousand people were assembled, and, every moment there were fresh arrivals. All carried candles, the lower parts of which were wrapped in white paper, on which a picture of Our Lady of Lourdes was printed in blue ink. However, these candles were not yet lighted, and the only illumination that you perceived above the billowy sea of heads was the bright, forge-like glow of the taper-lighted Grotto. A great buzzing arose, whiffs of human breath blew hither and thither, and these alone enabled you to realise that thousands of serried, stifling creatures were gathered together in the black depths, like a living sea that was ever eddying and spreading. There were even people hidden away under the trees beyond the Grotto, in distant recesses of the darkness of which one had no suspicion.

At last a few tapers began to shine forth here and there, like sudden sparks of light spangling the obscurity at random. Their number rapidly increased, eyots of stars were formed, whilst at other points there were meteoric trails, milky ways, so to say, flowing midst the constellations. The thirty thousand tapers were being lighted one by one, their beams gradually increasing in number till they obscured the bright glow of the Grotto and spread, from one to the other end of the promenade, the small yellow flames of a gigantic brasier.

"Oh! how beautiful it is, Pierre!" murmured Marie; "it is like the resurrection of the humble, the bright awakening of the souls of the poor."

"It is superb, superb!" repeated M. de Guersaint, with impassioned artistic satisfaction. "Do you see those two trails of light yonder, which intersect one another and form a cross?"

Pierre's feelings, however, had been touched by what Marie had just said. He was reflecting upon her words. There was truth in them. Taken singly, those slender flames, those mere specks of light, were modest and unobtrusive, like the lowly; it was only their great number that supplied the effulgence, the sun-like resplendency. Fresh ones were continually appearing, farther and farther away, like waifs and strays. "Ah!" murmured the young priest, "do you see that one which has just begun to flicker, all by itself, far away—do you see it, Marie? Do you see how it floats and slowly approaches until it is merged in the great lake of light?"

In the vicinity of the Grotto one could see now as clearly as in the daytime. The trees, illumined from below, were intensely green, like the painted trees in stage scenery. Above the moving brasier were some motionless banners, whose embroidered saints and silken cords showed with vivid distinctness. And the great reflection ascended to the rock, even to the Basilica, whose spire now shone out, quite white, against the black sky; whilst the hillsides across the Gave were likewise brightened, and displayed the pale fronts of their convents amidst their sombre foliage.

There came yet another moment of uncertainty. The flaming lake, in which each burning wick was like a little wave, rolled its starry sparkling as though it were about to burst from its bed and flow away in a river. Then the banners began to oscillate, and soon a regular motion set in.

"Oh! so they won't pass this way!" exclaimed M. de Guersaint in a tone of disappointment.

Pierre, who had informed himself on the matter, thereupon explained that the procession would first of all ascend the serpentine road—constructed at great cost up the hillside—and that it would afterwards pass behind the Basilica, descend by the inclined way on the right hand, and then spread out through the gardens.

"Look!" said he; "you can see the foremost tapers ascending amidst the greenery."

Then came an enchanting spectacle. Little flickering lights detached themselves from the great bed of fire, and began gently rising, without it being possible for one to tell at that distance what connected them with the earth. They moved upward, looking in the darkness like golden particles of the sun. And soon they formed an oblique streak, a streak which suddenly twisted, then extended again until it curved once more. At last the whole hillside was streaked by a flaming zigzag, resembling those lightning flashes which you see falling from black skies in cheap engravings. But, unlike the lightning, the luminous trail did not fade away; the little lights still went onward in the same slow, gentle, gliding manner. Only for a moment, at rare intervals, was there a sudden eclipse; the procession, no doubt, was then passing behind some clump of trees. But, farther on, the tapers beamed forth afresh, rising heavenward by an intricate path, which incessantly diverged and then started upward again. At last, however, the time came when the lights no longer ascended, for they had reached the summit of the hill and had begun to disappear at the last turn of the road.

Exclamations were rising from the crowd. "They are passing behind the Basilica," said one. "Oh! it will take them twenty minutes before they begin coming down on the other side," remarked another. "Yes, madame," said a third, "there are thirty thousand of them, and an hour will go by before the last of them leaves the Grotto."

Ever since the start a sound of chanting had risen above the low rumbling of the crowd. The hymn of Bernadette was being sung, those sixty couplets between which the Angelic Salutation, with its all-besetting rhythm, was ever returning as a refrain. When the sixty couplets were finished they were sung again; and that lullaby of "Ave, ave, ave Maria!" came back incessantly, stupefying the mind, and gradually transporting those thousands of beings into a kind of wide-awake dream, with a vision of Paradise before their eyes. And, indeed, at night-time when they were asleep, their beds would rock to the eternal tune, which they still and ever continued singing.

"Are we going to stop here?" asked M. de Guersaint, who speedily got tired of remaining in any one spot. "We see nothing but the same thing over and over again."

Marie, who had informed herself by listening to what was said in the crowd, thereupon exclaimed: "You were quite right, Pierre; it would be much better to go back yonder under the trees. I so much wish to see everything."

"Yes, certainly; we will seek a spot whence you may see it all," replied the priest. "The only difficulty lies in getting away from here."

Indeed, they were now inclosed within the mob of sight-seers; and, in order to secure a passage, Pierre with stubborn perseverance had to keep on begging a little room for a suffering girl.

M. de Guersaint meantime brought up the rear, screening the little conveyance so that it might not be upset by the jostling; whilst Marie turned her head, still endeavouring to see the sheet of flame spread out before the Grotto, that lake of little sparkling waves which never seemed to diminish, although the procession continued to flow from it without a pause.

At last they all three found themselves out of the crowd, near one of the arches, on a deserted spot where they were able to breathe for a moment. They now heard nothing but the distant canticle with its besetting refrain, and they only saw the reflection of the tapers, hovering like a luminous cloud in the neighbourhood of the Basilica.

"The best plan would be to climb to the Calvary," said M. de Guersaint. "The servant at the hotel told me so this morning. From up there, it seems, the scene is fairy-like."

But they could not think of making the ascent. Pierre at once enumerated the difficulties. "How could we hoist ourselves to such a height with Marie's conveyance?" he asked. "Besides, we should have to come down again, and that would be dangerous work in the darkness amidst all the scrambling."

Marie herself preferred to remain under the trees in the gardens, where it was very mild. So they started off, and reached the esplanade in front of the great crowned statue of the Virgin. It was illuminated by means of blue and yellow globes which encompassed it with a gaudy splendour; and despite all his piety M. de Guersaint could not help finding these decorations in execrable taste.

"There!" exclaimed Marie, "a good place would be near those shrubs yonder."

She was pointing to a shrubbery near the pilgrims' shelter-house; and the spot was indeed an excellent one for their purpose, as it enabled them to see the procession come down by the gradient way on the left, and watch it as it passed between the lawns to the new bridge and back again. Moreover, a delightful freshness prevailed there by reason of the vicinity of the Gave. There was nobody there as yet, and one could enjoy deep peacefulness in the dense shade which fell from the big plane-trees bordering the path.

In his impatience to see the first tapers reappear as soon as they should have passed behind the Basilica, M. de Guersaint had risen on tiptoe. "I see nothing as yet," he muttered, "so whatever the regulations may be I shall sit on the grass for a moment. I've no strength left in my legs." Then, growing anxious about his daughter, he inquired: "Shall I cover you up? It is very cool here."

"Oh, no! I'm not cold, father!" answered Marie; "I feel so happy. It is long since I breathed such sweet air. There must be some roses about—can't you smell that delicious perfume?" And turning to Pierre she asked: "Where are the roses, my friend? Can you see them?"

When M. de Guersaint had seated himself on the grass near the little vehicle, it occurred to Pierre to see if there was not some bed of roses near at hand. But is was in vain that he explored the dark lawns; he could only distinguish sundry clumps of evergreens. And, as he passed in front of the pilgrims' shelter-house on his way back, curiosity prompted him to enter it.

This building formed a long and lofty hall, lighted by large windows upon two sides. With bare walls and a stone pavement, it contained no other furniture than a number of benches, which stood here and there in haphazard fashion. There was neither table nor shelf, so that the homeless pilgrims who had sought refuge there had piled up their baskets, parcels, and valises in the window embrasures. Moreover, the place was apparently empty; the poor folk that it sheltered had no doubt joined the procession. Nevertheless, although the door stood wide open, an almost unbearable smell reigned inside. The very walls seemed impregnated with an odour of poverty, and in spite of the bright sunshine which had prevailed during the day, the flagstones were quite damp, soiled and soaked with expectorations, spilt wine, and grease. This mess had been made by the poorer pilgrims, who with their dirty skins and wretched rags lived in the hall, eating and sleeping in heaps on the benches. Pierre speedily came to the conclusion that the pleasant smell of roses must emanate from some other spot; still, he was making the round of the hall, which was lighted by four smoky lanterns, and which he believed to be altogether unoccupied, when, against the left-hand wall, he was surprised to espy the vague figure of a woman in black, with what seemed to be a white parcel lying on her lap. She was all alone in that solitude, and did not stir; however, her eyes were wide open.

He drew near and recognised Madame Vincent. She addressed him in a deep, broken voice: "Rose has suffered so dreadfully to-day! Since daybreak she has not ceased moaning. And so, as she fell asleep a couple of hours ago, I haven't dared to stir for fear lest she should awake and suffer again."

Thus the poor woman remained motionless, martyr-mother that she was, having for long months held her daughter in her arms in this fashion, in the stubborn hope of curing her. In her arms, too, she had brought her to Lourdes; in her arms she had carried her to the Grotto; in her arms she had rocked her to sleep, having neither a room of her own, nor even a hospital bed at her disposal.

"Isn't the poor little thing any better?" asked Pierre, whose heart ached at the sight.

"No, Monsieur l'Abbe; no, I think not."

"But you are very badly off here on this bench. You should have made an application to the pilgrimage managers instead of remaining like this, in the street, as it were. Some accommodation would have been found for your little girl, at any rate; that's certain."

"Oh! what would have been the use of it, Monsieur l'Abbe? She is all right on my lap. And besides, should I have been allowed to stay with her? No, no, I prefer to have her on my knees; it seems to me that it will end by curing her." Two big tears rolled down the poor woman's motionless cheeks, and in her stifled voice she continued: "I am not penniless. I had thirty sous when I left Paris, and I still have ten left. All I need is a little bread, and she, poor darling, can no longer drink any milk even. I have enough to last me till we go back, and if she gets well again, oh! we shall be rich, rich, rich!"

She had leant forward while speaking, and by the flickering light of a lantern near by, gazed at Rose, who was breathing faintly, with parted lips. "You see how soundly she is sleeping," resumed the unhappy mother. "Surely the Blessed Virgin will take pity on her and cure her, won't she, Monsieur l'Abbe? We only have one day left; still, I don't despair; and I shall again pray all night long without moving from here. She will be cured to-morrow; we must live till then."

Infinite pity was filling the heart of Pierre, who, fearing that he also might weep, now went away. "Yes, yes, my poor woman, we must hope, still hope," said he, as he left her there among the scattered benches, in that deserted, malodorous hall, so motionless in her painful maternal passion as to hold her own breath, fearful lest the heaving of her bosom should awaken the poor little sufferer. And in deepest grief, with closed lips, she prayed ardently.

On Pierre returning to Marie's side, the girl inquired of him: "Well, and those roses? Are there any near here?"

He did not wish to sadden her by telling her what he had seen, so he simply answered: "No, I have searched the lawns; there are none."

"How singular!" she rejoined, in a thoughtful way. "The perfume is both so sweet and penetrating. You can smell it, can't you? At this moment it is wonderfully strong, as though all the roses of Paradise were flowering around us in the darkness."

A low exclamation from her father interrupted her. M. de Guersaint had risen to his feet again on seeing some specks of light shine out above the gradient ways on the left side of the Basilica. "At last! Here they come!" said he.

It was indeed the head of the procession again appearing; and at once the specks of light began to swarm and extend in long, wavering double files. The darkness submerged everything except these luminous points, which seemed to be at a great elevation, and to emerge, as it were, from the black depths of the Unknown. And at the same time the everlasting canticle was again heard, but so lightly, for the procession was far away, that it seemed as yet merely like the rustle of a coming storm, stirring the leaves of the trees.

"Ah! I said so," muttered M. de Guersaint; "one ought to be at the Calvary to see everything." With the obstinacy of a child he kept on returning to his first idea, again and again complaining that they had chosen "the worst possible place."

"But why don't you go up to the Calvary, papa?" at last said Marie. "There is still time. Pierre will stay here with me." And with a mournful laugh she added: "Go; you know very well that nobody will run away with me."

He at first refused to act upon the suggestion, but, unable to resist his desire, he all at once fell in with it. And he had to hasten his steps, crossing the lawns at a run. "Don't move," he called; "wait for me under the trees. I will tell you of all that I may see up there."

Then Pierre and Marie remained alone in that dim, solitary nook, whence came such a perfume of roses, albeit no roses could be found. And they did not speak, but in silence watched the procession, which was now coming down from the hill with a gentle, continuous, gliding motion.

A double file of quivering stars leapt into view on the left-hand side of the Basilica, and then followed the monumental, gradient way, whose curve is gradually described. At that distance you were still unable to see the pilgrims themselves, and you beheld simply those well-disciplined travelling lights tracing geometrical lines amidst the darkness. Under the deep blue heavens, even the buildings at first remained vague, forming but blacker patches against the sky. Little by little, however, as the number of candles increased, the principal architectural lines—the tapering spire of the Basilica, the cyclopean arches of the gradient ways, the heavy, squat facade of the Rosary—became more distinctly visible. And with that ceaseless torrent of bright sparks, flowing slowly downward with the stubborn persistence of a stream which has overflowed its banks and can be stopped by nothing, there came as it were an aurora, a growing, invading mass of light, which would at last spread its glory over the whole horizon.

"Look, look, Pierre!" cried Marie, in an access of childish joy. "There is no end of them; fresh ones are ever shining out."

Indeed, the sudden appearances of the little lights continued with mechanical regularity, as though some inexhaustible celestial source were pouring forth all those solar specks. The head of the procession had just reached the gardens, near the crowned statue of the Virgin, so that as yet the double file of flames merely outlined the curves of the Rosary and the broad inclined way. However, the approach of the multitude was foretokened by the perturbation of the atmosphere, by the gusts of human breath coming from afar; and particularly did the voices swell, the canticle of Bernadette surging with the clamour of a rising tide, through which, with rhythmical persistence, the refrain of "Ave, ave, ave Maria!" rolled ever in a louder key.

"Ah, that refrain!" muttered Pierre; "it penetrates one's very skin. It seems to me as though my whole body were at last singing it."

Again did Marie give vent to that childish laugh of hers. "It is true," said she; "it follows me about everywhere. I heard it the other night whilst I was asleep. And now it is again taking possession of me, rocking me, wafting me above the ground." Then she broke off to say: "Here they come, just across the lawn, in front of us."

The procession had entered one of the long, straight paths; and then, turning round the lawn by way of the Breton's Cross, it came back by a parallel path. It took more than a quarter of an hour to execute this movement, during which the double file of tapers resembled two long parallel streams of flame. That which ever excited one's admiration was the ceaseless march of this serpent of fire, whose golden coils crept so gently over the black earth, winding, stretching into the far distance, without the immense body ever seeming to end. There must have been some jostling and scrambling every now and then, for some of the luminous lines shook and bent as though they were about to break; but order was soon re-established, and then the slow, regular, gliding movement set in afresh. There now seemed to be fewer stars in the heavens; it was as though a milky way had fallen from on high, rolling its glittering dust of worlds, and transferring the revolutions of the planets from the empyrean to earth. A bluish light streamed all around; there was naught but heaven left; the buildings and the trees assumed a visionary aspect in the mysterious glow of those thousands of tapers, whose number still and ever increased.

A faint sigh of admiration came from Marie. She was at a loss for words, and could only repeat "How beautiful it is! Mon Dieu! how beautiful it is! Look, Pierre, is it not beautiful?"

However, since the procession had been going by at so short a distance from them it had ceased to be a rhythmic march of stars which no human hand appeared to guide, for amidst the stream of light they could distinguish the figures of the pilgrims carrying the tapers, and at times even recognise them as they passed. First they espied La Grivotte, who, exaggerating her cure, and repeating that she had never felt in better health, had insisted upon taking part in the ceremony despite the lateness of the hour; and she still retained her excited demeanour, her dancing gait in that cool night air, which often made her shiver. Then the Vignerons appeared; the father at the head of the party, raising his taper on high, and followed by Madame Vigneron and Madame Chaise, who dragged their weary legs; whilst little Gustave, quite worn out, kept on tapping the sanded path with his crutch, his right hand covered meantime with all the wax that had dripped upon it. Every sufferer who could walk was there, among others Elise Rouquet, who, with her bare red face, passed by like some apparition from among the damned. Others were laughing; Sophie Couteau, the little girl who had been miraculously healed the previous year, was quite forgetting herself, playing with her taper as though it were a switch. Heads followed heads without a pause, heads of women especially, more often with sordid, common features, but at times wearing an exalted expression, which you saw for a second ere it vanished amidst the fantastic illumination. And there was no end to that terrible march past; fresh pilgrims were ever appearing. Among them Pierre and Marie noticed yet another little black shadowy figure, gliding along in a discreet, humble way; it was Madame Maze, whom they would not have recognised if she had not for a moment raised her pale face, down which the tears were streaming.

"Look!" exclaimed Pierre; "the first tapers in the procession are reaching the Place du Rosaire, and I am sure that half of the pilgrims are still in front of the Grotto."

Marie had raised her eyes. Up yonder, on the left-hand side of the Basilica, she could see other lights incessantly appearing with that mechanical kind of movement which seemed as though it would never cease. "Ah!" she said, "how many, how many distressed souls there are! For each of those little flames is a suffering soul seeking deliverance, is it not?"

Pierre had to lean over in order to hear her, for since the procession had been streaming by, so near to them, they had been deafened by the sound of the endless canticle, the hymn of Bernadette. The voices of the pilgrims rang out more loudly than ever amidst the increasing vertigo; the couplets became jumbled together—each batch of processionists chanted a different one with the ecstatic voices of beings possessed, who can no longer hear themselves. There was a huge indistinct clamour, the distracted clamour of a multitude intoxicated by its ardent faith. And meantime the refrain of "Ave, ave, ave Maria!" was ever returning, rising, with its frantic, importunate rhythm, above everything else.

All at once Pierre and Marie, to their great surprise, saw M. de Guersaint before them again. "Ah! my children," he said, "I did not want to linger too long up there, I cut through the procession twice in order to get back to you. But what a sight, what a sight it is! It is certainly the first beautiful thing that I have seen since I have been here!" Thereupon he began to describe the procession as he had beheld it from the Calvary height. "Imagine," said he, "another heaven, a heaven down below reflecting that above, a heaven entirely filled by a single immense constellation. The swarming stars seem to be lost, to lie in dim faraway depths; and the trail of fire is in form like a monstrance—yes, a real monstrance, the base of which is outlined by the inclined ways, the stem by the two parallel paths, and the Host by the round lawn which crowns them. It is a monstrance of burning gold, shining out in the depths of the darkness with a perpetual sparkle of moving stars. Nothing else seems to exist; it is gigantic, paramount. I really never saw anything so extraordinary before!"

He was waving his arms, beside himself, overflowing with the emotion of an artist.

"Father dear," said Marie, tenderly, "since you have come back you ought to go to bed. It is nearly eleven o'clock, and you know that you have to start at two in the morning." Then, to render him compliant, she added: "I am so pleased that you are going to make that excursion! Only, come back early to-morrow evening, because you'll see, you'll see—" She stopped short, not daring to express her conviction that she would be cured.

"You are right; I will go to bed," replied M. de Guersaint, quite calmed. "Since Pierre will be with you I sha'n't feel anxious."

"But I don't wish Pierre to pass the night out here. He will join you by-and-by after he has taken me to the Grotto. I sha'n't have any further need of anybody; the first bearer who passes can take me back to the hospital to-morrow morning."

Pierre had not interrupted her, and now he simply said: "No, no, Marie, I shall stay. Like you, I shall spend the night at the Grotto."

She opened her mouth to insist and express her displeasure. But he had spoken those words so gently, and she had detected in them such a dolorous thirst for happiness, that, stirred to the depths of her soul, she stayed her tongue.

"Well, well, my children," replied her father, "settle the matter between you. I know that you are both very sensible. And now good-night, and don't be at all uneasy about me."

He gave his daughter a long, loving kiss, pressed the young priest's hands, and then went off, disappearing among the serried ranks of the procession, which he once more had to cross.

Then they remained alone in their dark, solitary nook under the spreading trees, she still sitting up in her box, and he kneeling on the grass, with his elbow resting on one of the wheels. And it was truly sweet to linger there while the tapers continued marching past, and, after a turning movement, assembled on the Place du Rosaire. What delighted Pierre was that nothing of all the daytime junketing remained. It seemed as though a purifying breeze had come down from the mountains, sweeping away all the odour of strong meats, the greedy Sunday delights, the scorching, pestilential, fair-field dust which, at an earlier hour, had hovered above the town. Overhead there was now only the vast sky, studded with pure stars, and the freshness of the Gave was delicious, whilst the wandering breezes were laden with the perfumes of wild flowers. The mysterious Infinite spread far around in the sovereign peacefulness of night, and nothing of materiality remained save those little candle-flames which the young priest's companion had compared to suffering souls seeking deliverance. All was now exquisitely restful, instinct with unlimited hope. Since Pierre had been there all the heart-rending memories of the afternoon, of the voracious appetites, the impudent simony, and the poisoning of the old town, had gradually left him, allowing him to savour the divine refreshment of that beautiful night, in which his whole being was steeped as in some revivifying water.

A feeling of infinite sweetness had likewise come over Marie, who murmured: "Ah! how happy Blanche would be to see all these marvels."

She was thinking of her sister, who had been left in Paris to all the worries of her hard profession as a teacher forced to run hither and thither giving lessons. And that simple mention of her sister, of whom Marie had not spoken since her arrival at Lourdes, but whose figure now unexpectedly arose in her mind's eye, sufficed to evoke a vision of all the past.

Then, without exchanging a word, Marie and Pierre lived their childhood's days afresh, playing together once more in the neighbouring gardens parted by the quickset hedge. But separation came on the day when he entered the seminary and when she kissed him on the cheeks, vowing that she would never forget him. Years went by, and they found themselves forever parted: he a priest, she prostrated by illness, no longer with any hope of ever being a woman. That was their whole story—an ardent affection of which they had long been ignorant, then absolute severance, as though they were dead, albeit they lived side by side. They again beheld the sorry lodging whence they had started to come to Lourdes after so much battling, so much discussion—his doubts and her passionate faith, which last had conquered. And it seemed to them truly delightful to find themselves once more quite alone together, in that dark nook on that lovely night, when there were as many stars upon earth as there were in heaven.

Marie had hitherto retained the soul of a child, a spotless soul, as her father said, good and pure among the purest. Stricken low in her thirteenth year, she had grown no older in mind. Although she was now three-and-twenty, she was still a child, a child of thirteen, who had retired within herself, absorbed in the bitter catastrophe which had annihilated her. You could tell this by the frigidity of her glance, by her absent expression, by the haunted air she ever wore, unable as she was to bestow a thought on anything but her calamity. And never was woman's soul more pure and candid, arrested as it had been in its development. She had had no other romance in life save that tearful farewell to her friend, which for ten long years had sufficed to fill her heart. During the endless days which she had spent on her couch of wretchedness, she had never gone beyond this dream—that if she had grown up in health, he doubtless would not have become a priest, in order to live near her. She never read any novels. The pious works which she was allowed to peruse maintained her in the excitement of a superhuman love. Even the rumours of everyday life died away at the door of the room where she lived in seclusion; and, in past years, when she had been taken from one to the other end of France, from one inland spa to another, she had passed through the crowds like a somnambulist who neither sees nor hears anything, possessed, as she was, by the idea of the calamity that had befallen her, the bond which made her a sexless thing. Hence her purity and childishness; hence she was but an adorable daughter of suffering, who, despite the growth of her sorry flesh, harboured nothing in her heart save that distant awakening of passion, the unconscious love of her thirteenth year.

Her hand sought Pierre's in the darkness, and when she found it, coming to meet her own, she, for a long time, continued pressing it. Ah! how sweet it was! Never before, indeed, had they tasted such pure and perfect joy in being together, far from the world, amidst the sovereign enchantment of darkness and mystery. Around them nothing subsisted, save the revolving stars. The lulling hymns were like the very vertigo that bore them away. And she knew right well that after spending a night of rapture at the Grotto, she would, on the morrow, be cured. Of this she was, indeed, absolutely convinced; she would prevail upon the Blessed Virgin to listen to her; she would soften her, as soon as she should be alone, imploring her face to face. And she well understood what Pierre had wished to say a short time previously, when expressing his desire to spend the whole night outside the Grotto, like herself. Was it not that he intended to make a supreme effort to believe, that he meant to fall upon his knees like a little child, and beg the all-powerful Mother to restore his lost faith? Without need of any further exchange of words, their clasped hands repeated all those things. They mutually promised that they would pray for each other, and so absorbed in each other did they become that they forgot themselves, with such an ardent desire for one another's cure and happiness, that for a moment they attained to the depths of the love which offers itself in sacrifice. It was divine enjoyment.

"Ah!" murmured Pierre, "how beautiful is this blue night, this infinite darkness, which has swept away all the hideousness of things and beings, this deep, fresh peacefulness, in which I myself should like to bury my doubts!"

His voice died away, and Marie, in her turn, said in a very low voice: "And the roses, the perfume of the roses? Can't you smell them, my friend? Where can they be since you could not see them?"

"Yes, yes, I smell them, but there are none," he replied. "I should certainly have seen them, for I hunted everywhere."

"How can you say that there are no roses when they perfume the air around us, when we are steeped in their aroma? Why, there are moments when the scent is so powerful that I almost faint with delight in inhaling it! They must certainly be here, innumerable, under our very feet."

"No, no," said Pierre, "I swear to you I hunted everywhere, and there are no roses. They must be invisible, or they may be the very grass we tread and the spreading trees that are around us; their perfume may come from the soil itself, from the torrent which flows along close by, from the woods and the mountains that rise yonder."

For a moment they remained silent. Then, in an undertone, she resumed: "How sweet they smell, Pierre! And it seems to me that even our clasped hands form a bouquet."

"Yes, they smell delightfully sweet; but it is from you, Marie, that the perfume now ascends, as though the roses were budding from your hair."

Then they ceased speaking. The procession was still gliding along, and at the corner of the Basilica bright sparks were still appearing, flashing suddenly from out of the obscurity, as though spurting from some invisible source. The vast train of little flames, marching in double file, threw a riband of light across the darkness. But the great sight was now on the Place du Rosaire, where the head of the procession, still continuing its measured evolutions, was revolving and revolving in a circle which ever grew smaller, with a stubborn whirl which increased the dizziness of the weary pilgrims and the violence of their chants. And soon the circle formed a nucleus, the nucleus of a nebula, so to say, around which the endless riband of fire began to coil itself. And the brasier grew larger and larger—there was first a pool, then a lake of light. The whole vast Place du Rosaire changed at last into a burning ocean, rolling its little sparkling wavelets with the dizzy motion of a whirlpool that never rested. A reflection like that of dawn whitened the Basilica; while the rest of the horizon faded into deep obscurity, amidst which you only saw a few stray tapers journeying alone, like glowworms seeking their way with the help of their little lights. However, a straggling rear-guard of the procession must have climbed the Calvary height, for up there, against the sky, some moving stars could also be seen. Eventually the moment came when the last tapers appeared down below, marched round the lawns, flowed away, and were merged in the sea of flame. Thirty thousand tapers were burning there, still and ever revolving, quickening their sparkles under the vast calm heavens where the planets had grown pale. A luminous glow ascended in company with the strains of the canticle which never ceased. And the roar of voices incessantly repeating the refrain of "Ave, ave, ave Maria!" was like the very crackling of those hearts of fire which were burning away in prayers in order that souls might be saved.

The candles had just been extinguished, one by one, and the night was falling again, paramount, densely black, and extremely mild, when Pierre and Marie perceived that they were still there, hand in hand, hidden away among the trees. In the dim streets of Lourdes, far off, there were now only some stray, lost pilgrims inquiring their way, in order that they might get to bed. Through the darkness there swept a rustling sound—the rustling of those who prowl and fall asleep when days of festivity draw to a close. But the young priest and the girl lingered in their nook forgetfully, never stirring, but tasting delicious happiness amidst the perfume of the invisible roses.

IV. THE VIGIL

WHEN Pierre dragged Marie in her box to the front of the Grotto, and placed her as near as possible to the railing, it was past midnight, and about a hundred persons were still there, some seated on the benches, but the greater number kneeling as though prostrated in prayer. The Grotto shone from afar, with its multitude of lighted tapers, similar to the illumination round a coffin, though all that you could distinguish was a star-like blaze, from the midst of which, with visionary whiteness, emerged the statue of the Virgin in its niche. The hanging foliage assumed an emerald sheen, the hundreds of crutches covering the vault resembled an inextricable network of dead wood on the point of reflowering. And the darkness was rendered more dense by so great a brightness, the surroundings became lost in a deep shadow in which nothing, neither walls nor trees, remained; whilst all alone ascended the angry and continuous murmur of the Gave, rolling along beneath the gloomy, boundless sky, now heavy with a gathering storm.

"Are you comfortable, Marie?" gently inquired Pierre. "Don't you feel chilly?"

She had just shivered. But it was only at a breath from the other world, which had seemed to her to come from the Grotto.

"No, no, I am so comfortable! Only place the shawl over my knees. And—thank you, Pierre—don't be anxious about me. I no longer require anyone now that I am with her."

Her voice died away, she was already falling into an ecstasy, her hands clasped, her eyes raised towards the white statue, in a beatific transfiguration of the whole of her poor suffering face.

Yet Pierre remained a few minutes longer beside her. He would have liked to wrap her in the shawl, for he perceived the trembling of her little wasted hands. But he feared to annoy her, so confined himself to tucking her in like a child; whilst she, slightly raised, with her elbows on the edges of her box, and her eyes fixed on the Grotto, no longer beheld him.

A bench stood near, and he had just seated himself upon it, intending to collect his thoughts, when his glance fell upon a woman kneeling in the gloom. Dressed in black, she was so slim, so discreet, so unobtrusive, so wrapt in darkness, that at first he had not noticed her. After a while, however, he recognised her as Madame Maze. The thought of the letter which she had received during the day then recurred to him. And the sight of her filled him with pity; he could feel for the forlornness of this solitary woman, who had no physical sore to heal, but only implored the Blessed Virgin to relieve her heart-pain by converting her inconstant husband. The letter had no doubt been some harsh reply, for, with bowed head, she seemed almost annihilated, filled with the humility of some poor beaten creature. It was only at night-time that she readily forgot herself there, happy at disappearing, at being able to weep, suffer martyrdom, and implore the return of the lost caresses, for hours together, without anyone suspecting her grievous secret. Her lips did not even move; it was her wounded heart which prayed, which desperately begged for its share of love and happiness.

Ah! that inextinguishable thirst for happiness which brought them all there, wounded either in body or in spirit; Pierre also felt it parching his throat, in an ardent desire to be quenched. He longed to cast himself upon his knees, to beg the divine aid with the same humble faith as that woman. But his limbs were as though tied; he could not find the words he wanted, and it was a relief when he at last felt someone touch him on the arm. "Come with me, Monsieur l'Abbe, if you do not know the Grotto," said a voice. "I will find you a place. It is so pleasant there at this time!"

He raised his head, and recognised Baron Suire, the director of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation. This benevolent and simple man no doubt felt some affection for him. He therefore accepted his offer, and followed him into the Grotto, which was quite empty. The Baron had a key, with which he locked the railing behind them.

"You see, Monsieur l'Abbe," said he, "this is the time when one can really be comfortable here. For my part, whenever I come to spend a few days at Lourdes, I seldom retire to rest before daybreak, as I have fallen into the habit of finishing my night here. The place is deserted, one is quite alone, and is it not pleasant? How well one feels oneself to be in the abode of the Blessed Virgin!"

He smiled with a kindly air, doing the honours of the Grotto like an old frequenter of the place, somewhat enfeebled by age, but full of genuine affection for this delightful nook. Moreover, in spite of his great piety, he was in no way ill at ease there, but talked on and explained matters with the familiarity of a man who felt himself to be the friend of Heaven.

"Ah! you are looking at the tapers," he said. "There are about two hundred of them which burn together night and day; and they end by making the place warm. It is even warm here in winter."

Indeed, Pierre was beginning to feel incommoded by the warm odour of the wax. Dazzled by the brilliant light into which he was penetrating, he gazed at the large, central, pyramidal holder, all bristling with little tapers, and resembling a luminous clipped yew glistening with stars. In the background, a straight holder, on a level with the ground, upheld the large tapers, which, like the pipes of an organ, formed a row of uneven height, some of them being as large as a man's thigh. And yet other holders, resembling massive candelabra, stood here and there on the jutting parts of the rock. The vault of the Grotto sank towards the left, where the stone seemed baked and blackened by the eternal flames which had been heating it for years. And the wax was perpetually dripping like fine snow; the trays of the holders were smothered with it, whitened by its ever-thickening dust. In fact, it coated the whole rock, which had become quite greasy to the touch; and to such a degree did it cover the ground that accidents had occurred, and it had been necessary to spread some mats about to prevent persons from slipping.

"You see those large ones there," obligingly continued Baron Suire. "They are the most expensive and cost sixty francs apiece; they will continue burning for a month. The smallest ones, which cost but five sous each, only last three hours. Oh! we don't husband them; we never run short. Look here! Here are two more hampers full, which there has not yet been time to remove to the storehouse."

Then he pointed to the furniture, which comprised a harmonium covered with a cloth, a substantial dresser with several large drawers in which the sacred vestments were kept, some benches and chairs reserved for the privileged few who were admitted during the ceremonies, and finally a very handsome movable altar, which was adorned with engraved silver plates, the gift of a great lady, and—for fear of injury from dampness—was only brought out on the occasions of remunerative pilgrimages.

Pierre was disturbed by all this well-meant chatter. His religious emotion lost some of its charm. In spite of his lack of faith, he had, on entering, experienced a feeling of agitation, a heaving of the soul, as though the mystery were about to be revealed to him. It was at the same time both an anxious and a delicious feeling. And he beheld things which deeply stirred him: bunches of flowers, lying in a heap at the Virgin's feet, with the votive offerings of children—little faded shoes, a tiny iron corselet, and a doll-like crutch which almost seemed to be a toy. Beneath the natural ogival cavity in which the apparition had appeared, at the spot where the pilgrims rubbed the chaplets and medals they wished to consecrate, the rock was quite worn away and polished. Millions of ardent lips had pressed kisses on the wall with such intensity of love that the stone was as though calcined, streaked with black veins, shining like marble.

However, he stopped short at last opposite a cavity in which lay a considerable pile of letters and papers of every description.

"Ah! I was forgetting," hastily resumed Baron Suire; "this is the most interesting part of it. These are the letters which the faithful throw into the Grotto through the railing every day. We gather them up and place them there; and in the winter I amuse myself by glancing through them. You see, we cannot burn them without opening them, for they often contain money—francs, half-francs, and especially postage-stamps."

He stirred up the letters, and, selecting a few at random, showed the addresses, and opened them to read. Nearly all of them were letters from illiterate persons, with the superscription, "To Our Lady of Lourdes," scrawled on the envelopes in big, irregular handwriting. Many of them contained requests or thanks, incorrectly worded and wondrously spelt; and nothing was more affecting than the nature of some of the petitions: a little brother to be saved, a lawsuit to be gained, a lover to be preserved, a marriage to be effected. Other letters, however, were angry ones, taking the Blessed Virgin to task for not having had the politeness to acknowledge a former communication by granting the writer's prayers. Then there were still others, written in a finer hand, with carefully worded phrases containing confessions and fervent entreaties; and these were from women who confided to the Queen of Heaven things which they dared not even say to a priest in the shadow of the confessional. Finally, one envelope, selected at random, merely contained a photograph; a young girl had sent her portrait to Our Lady of Lourdes, with this dedication: "To my good Mother." In short, they every day received the correspondence of a most powerful Queen, to whom both prayers and secrets were addressed, and who was expected to reply with favours and kindnesses of every kind. The franc and half-franc pieces were simple tokens of love to propitiate her; while, as for the postage-stamps, these could only be sent for convenience' sake, in lieu of coined money; unless, indeed, they were sent guilelessly, as in the case of a peasant woman who had added a postscript to her letter to say that she enclosed a stamp for the reply.

"I can assure you," concluded the Baron, "that there are some very nice ones among them, much less foolish than you might imagine. During a period of three years I constantly found some very interesting letters from a lady who did nothing without relating it to the Blessed Virgin. She was a married woman, and entertained a most dangerous passion for a friend of her husband's. Well, Monsieur l'Abbe, she overcame it; the Blessed Virgin answered her by sending her an armour for her chastity, an all-divine power to resist the promptings of her heart." Then he broke off to say: "But come and seat yourself here, Monsieur l'Abbe. You will see how comfortable you will be."

Pierre went and placed himself beside him on a bench on the left hand, at the spot where the rock sloped down. This was a deliciously reposeful corner, and neither the one nor the other spoke; a profound silence had ensued, when, behind him, Pierre heard an indistinct murmur, a light crystalline voice, which seemed to come from the Invisible. He gave a start, which Baron Suire understood.

"That is the spring which you hear," said he; "it is there, underground, below this grating. Would you like to see it?"

And without waiting for Pierre's reply, he at once bent down to open one of the iron plates protecting the spring, mentioning that it was thus closed up in order to prevent freethinkers from throwing poison into it. For a moment this extraordinary idea quite amazed the priest; but he ended by attributing it entirely to the Baron, who was, indeed, very childish. The latter, meantime, was vainly struggling with the padlock, which opened by a combination of letters, and refused to yield to his endeavours. "It is singular," he muttered; "the word is Rome, and I am positive that it hasn't been changed. The damp destroys everything. Every two years or so we are obliged to replace those crutches up there, otherwise they would all rot away. Be good enough to bring me a taper."

By the light of the candle which Pierre then took from one of the holders, he at last succeeded in unfastening the brass padlock, which was covered with vert-de-gris. Then, the plate having been raised, the spring appeared to view. Upon a bed of muddy gravel, in a fissure of the rock, there was a limpid stream, quite tranquil, but seemingly spreading over a rather large surface. The Baron explained that it had been necessary to conduct it to the fountains through pipes coated with cement; and he even admitted that, behind the piscinas, a large cistern had been dug in which the water was collected during the night, as otherwise the small output of the source would not suffice for the daily requirements.

"Will you taste it?" he suddenly asked. "It is much better here, fresh from the earth."

Pierre did not answer; he was gazing at that tranquil, innocent water, which assumed a moire-like golden sheen in the dancing light of the taper. The falling drops of wax now and again ruffled its surface. And, as he gazed at it, the young priest pondered upon all the mystery it brought with it from the distant mountain slopes.

"Come, drink some!" said the Baron, who had already dipped and filled a glass which was kept there handy. The priest had no choice but to empty it; it was good pure, water, fresh and transparent, like that which flows from all the lofty uplands of the Pyrenees.

After refastening the padlock, they both returned to the bench. Now and again Pierre could still hear the spring flowing behind him, with a music resembling the gentle warble of some unseen bird. And now the Baron again raised his voice, giving him the history of the Grotto at all times and seasons, in a pathetic babble, replete with puerile details.

The summer was the roughest season, for then came the great itinerant pilgrimage crowds, with the uproarious fervour of thousands of eager beings, all praying and vociferating together. But with the autumn came the rain, those diluvial rains which beat against the Grotto entrance for days together; and with them arrived the pilgrims from remote countries, small, silent, and ecstatic bands of Indians, Malays, and even Chinese, who fell upon their knees in the mud at the sign from the missionaries accompanying them. Of all the old provinces of France, it was Brittany that sent the most devout pilgrims, whole parishes arriving together, the men as numerous as the women, and all displaying a pious deportment, a simple and unostentatious faith, such as might edify the world. Then came the winter, December with its terrible cold, its dense snow-drifts blocking the mountain ways. But even then families put up at the hotels, and, despite everything, faithful worshippers—all those who, fleeing the noise of the world, wished to speak to the Virgin in the tender intimacy of solitude—still came every morning to the Grotto. Among them were some whom no one knew, who appeared directly they felt certain they would be alone there to kneel and love like jealous lovers; and who departed, frightened away by the first suspicion of a crowd. And how warm and pleasant the place was throughout the foul winter weather! In spite of rain and wind and snow, the Grotto still continued flaring. Even during nights of howling tempest, when not a soul was there, it lighted up the empty darkness, blazing like a brasier of love that nothing could extinguish. The Baron related that, at the time of the heavy snowfall of the previous winter, he had spent whole afternoons there, on the bench where they were then seated. A gentle warmth prevailed, although the spot faced the north and was never reached by a ray of sunshine. No doubt the circumstance of the burning tapers continually heating the rock explained this generous warmth; but might one not also believe in some charming kindness on the part of the Virgin, who endowed the spot with perpetual springtide? And the little birds were well aware of it; when the snow on the ground froze their feet, all the finches of the neighbourhood sought shelter there, fluttering about in the ivy around the holy statue. At length came the awakening of the real spring: the Gave, swollen with melted snow, and rolling on with a voice of thunder: the trees, under the action of their sap, arraying themselves in a mantle of greenery, whilst the crowds, once more returning, noisily invaded the sparkling Grotto, whence they drove the little birds of heaven.

"Yes, yes," repeated Baron Suire, in a declining voice, "I spent some most delightful winter days here all alone. I saw no one but a woman, who leant against the railing to avoid kneeling in the snow. She was quite young, twenty-five perhaps, and very pretty—dark, with magnificent blue eyes. She never spoke, and did not even seem to pray, but remained there for hours together, looking intensely sad. I do not know who she was, nor have I ever seen her since."

He ceased speaking; and when, a couple of minutes later, Pierre, surprised at his silence, looked at him, he perceived that he had fallen asleep. With his hands clasped upon his belly, his chin resting on his chest, he slept as peacefully as a child, a smile hovering the while about his mouth. Doubtless, when he said that he spent the night there, he meant that he came thither to indulge in the early nap of a happy old man, whose dreams are of the angels. And now Pierre tasted all the charms of the solitude. It was indeed true that a feeling of peacefulness and comfort permeated the soul in this rocky nook. It was occasioned by the somewhat stifling fumes of the burning wax, by the transplendent ecstasy into which one sank amidst the glare of the tapers. The young priest could no longer distinctly see the crutches on the roof, the votive offerings hanging from the sides, the altar of engraved silver, and the harmonium in its wrapper, for a slow intoxication seemed to be stealing over him, a gradual prostration of his whole being. And he particularly experienced the divine sensation of having left the living world, of having attained to the far realms of the marvellous and the superhuman, as though that simple iron railing yonder had become the very barrier of the Infinite.

However, a slight noise on his left again disturbed him. It was the spring flowing, ever flowing on, with its bird-like warble. Ah! how he would have liked to fall upon his knees and believe in the miracle, to acquire a certain conviction that that divine water had gushed from the rock solely for the healing of suffering humanity. Had he not come there to prostrate himself and implore the Virgin to restore the faith of his childhood? Why, then, did he not pray, why did he not beseech her to bring him back to grace? His feeling of suffocation increased, the burning tapers dazzled him almost to the point of giddiness. And, all at once, the recollection came to him that for two days past, amidst the great freedom which priests enjoyed at Lourdes, he had neglected to say his mass. He was in a state of sin, and perhaps it was the weight of this transgression which was oppressing his heart. He suffered so much that he was at last compelled to rise from his seat and walk away. He gently closed the gate behind him, leaving Baron Suire still asleep do the bench. Marie, he found, had not stirred, but was still raised on her elbows, with her ecstatic eyes uplifted towards the figure of the Virgin.

"How are you, Marie?" asked Pierre. "Don't you feel cold?"

She did not reply. He felt her hands and found them warm and soft, albeit slightly trembling. "It is not the cold which makes you tremble, is it, Marie?" he asked.

In a voice as gentle as a zephyr she replied: "No, no! let me be; I am so happy! I shall see her, I feel it. Ah! what joy!"

So, after slightly pulling up her shawl, he went forth into the night, a prey to indescribable agitation. Beyond the bright glow of the Grotto was a night as black as ink, a region of darkness, into which he plunged at random. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to this gloom, he found himself near the Gave, and skirted it, following a path shaded by tall trees, where he again came upon a refreshing obscurity. This shade and coolness, both so soothing, now brought him relief. And his only surprise was that he had not fallen on his knees in the Grotto, and prayed, even as Marie was praying, with all the power of his soul. What could be the obstacle within him? Whence came the irresistible revolt which prevented him from surrendering himself to faith even when his overtaxed, tortured being longed to yield? He understood well enough that it was his reason alone which protested, and the time had come when he would gladly have killed that voracious reason, which was devouring his life and preventing him from enjoying the happiness allowed to the ignorant and the simple. Perhaps, had he beheld a miracle, he might have acquired enough strength of will to believe. For instance, would he not have bowed himself down, vanquished at last, if Marie had suddenly risen up and walked before him. The scene which he conjured up of Marie saved, Marie cured, affected him so deeply that he stopped short, his trembling arms uplifted towards the star-spangled vault of heaven. What a lovely night it was!—so deep and mysterious, so airy and fragrant; and what joy rained down at the hope that eternal health might be restored, that eternal love might ever revive, even as spring returns! Then he continued his walk, following the path to the end. But his doubts were again coming back to him; when you need a miracle to gain belief, it means that you are incapable of believing. There is no need for the Almighty to prove His existence. Pierre also felt uneasy at the thought that, so long as he had not discharged his priestly duties by saying his mass, his prayers would not be answered. Why did he not go at once to the church of the Rosary, whose altars, from midnight till noon, are placed at the disposal of the priests who come from a distance? Thus thinking, he descended by another path, again finding himself beneath the trees, near the leafy spot whence he and Marie had watched the procession of tapers. Not a light now remained, there was but a boundless expanse of gloom.

Here Pierre experienced a fresh attack of faintness, and as though to gain time, he turned mechanically into the pilgrims' shelter-house. Its door had remained wide open; still this failed to sufficiently ventilate the spacious hall, which was now full of people. On the very threshold Pierre felt oppressed by the stifling heat emanating from the multitude of bodies, the dense pestilential smell of human breath and perspiration. The smoking lanterns gave out so bad a light that he had to pick his way with extreme care in order to avoid treading upon outstretched limbs; for the overcrowding was extraordinary, and many persons, unable to find room on the benches, had stretched themselves on the pavement, on the damp stone slabs fouled by all the refuse of the day. And on all sides indescribable promiscuousness prevailed: prostrated by overpowering weariness, men, women, and priests were lying there, pell-mell, at random, open-mouthed and utterly exhausted. A large number were snoring, seated on the slabs, with their backs against the walls and their heads drooping on their chests. Others had slipped down, with limbs intermingled, and one young girl lay prostrate across an old country priest, who in his calm, childlike slumber was smiling at the angels. It was like a cattle-shed sheltering poor wanderers of the roads, all those who were homeless on that beautiful holiday night, and who had dropped in there and fallen fraternally asleep. Still, there were some who found no repose in their feverish excitement, but turned and twisted, or rose up to finish eating the food which remained in their baskets. Others could be seen lying perfectly motionless, their eyes wide open and fixed upon the gloom. The cries of dreamers, the wailing of sufferers, arose amidst general snoring. And pity came to the heart, a pity full of anguish, at sight of this flock of wretches lying there in heaps in loathsome rags, whilst their poor spotless souls no doubt were far away in the blue realm of some mystical dream. Pierre was on the point of withdrawing, feeling sick at heart, when a low continuous moan attracted his attention. He looked, and recognised Madame Vincent, on the same spot and in the same position as before, still nursing little Rose upon her lap. "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," the poor woman murmured, "you hear her; she woke up nearly an hour ago, and has been sobbing ever since. Yet I assure you I have not moved even a finger, I felt so happy at seeing her sleep."

The priest bent down, examining the little one, who had not even the strength to raise her eyelids. A plaintive cry no stronger than a breath was coming from her lips; and she was so white that he shuddered, for he felt that death was hovering near.

"Dear me! what shall I do?" continued the poor mother, utterly worn out. "This cannot last; I can no longer bear to hear her cry. And if you knew all that I have been saying to her: 'My jewel, my treasure, my angel, I beseech you cry no more. Be good; the Blessed Virgin will cure you!' And yet she still cries on."

With these words the poor creature burst out sobbing, her big tears falling on the face of the child, whose rattle still continued. "Had it been daylight," she resumed, "I would long ago have left this hall, the more especially as she disturbs the others. There is an old lady yonder who has already complained. But I fear it may be chilly outside; and besides, where could I go in the middle of the night? Ah! Blessed Virgin, Blessed Virgin, take pity upon us!"

Overcome by emotion, Pierre kissed the child's fair head, and then hastened away to avoid bursting into tears like the sorrowing mother. And he went straight to the Rosary, as though he were determined to conquer death.

He had already beheld the Rosary in broad daylight, and had been displeased by the aspect of this church, which the architect, fettered by the rockbound site, had been obliged to make circular and low, so that it seemed crushed beneath its great cupola, which square pillars supported. The worst was that, despite its archaic Byzantine style, it altogether lacked any religious appearance, and suggested neither mystery nor meditation. Indeed, with the glaring light admitted by the cupola and the broad glazed doors it was more like some brand-new corn-market. And then, too, it was not yet completed: the decorations were lacking, the bare walls against which the altars stood had no other embellishment than some artificial roses of coloured paper and a few insignificant votive offerings; and this bareness heightened the resemblance to some vast public hall. Moreover, in time of rain the paved floor became as muddy as that of a general waiting-room at a railway station. The high altar was a temporary structure of painted wood. Innumerable rows of benches filled the central rotunda, benches free to the public, on which people could come and rest at all hours, for night and day alike the Rosary remained open to the swarming pilgrims. Like the shelter-house, it was a cow-shed in which the Almighty received the poor ones of the earth.

On entering, Pierre felt himself to be in some common hall trod by the footsteps of an ever-changing crowd. But the brilliant sunlight no longer streamed on the pallid walls, the tapers burning at every altar simply gleamed like stars amidst the uncertain gloom which filled the building. A solemn high mass had been celebrated at midnight with extraordinary pomp, amidst all the splendour of candles, chants, golden vestments, and swinging, steaming censers; but of all this glorious display there now remained only the regulation number of tapers necessary for the celebration of the masses at each of the fifteen altars ranged around the edifice. These masses began at midnight and did not cease till noon. Nearly four hundred were said during those twelve hours at the Rosary alone. Taking the whole of Lourdes, where there were altogether some fifty altars, more than two thousand masses were celebrated daily. And so great was the abundance of priests, that many had extreme difficulty in fulfilling their duties, having to wait for hours together before they could find an altar unoccupied. What particularly struck Pierre that evening, was the sight of all the altars besieged by rows of priests patiently awaiting their turn in the dim light at the foot of the steps; whilst the officiating minister galloped through the Latin phrases, hastily punctuating them with the prescribed signs of the cross. And the weariness of all the waiting ones was so great, that most of them were seated on the flagstones, some even dozing on the altar steps in heaps, quite overpowered, relying on the beadle to come and rouse them.

For a moment Pierre walked about undecided. Was he going to wait like the others? However, the scene determined him against doing so. At every altar, at every mass, a crowd of pilgrims was gathered, communicating in all haste with a sort of voracious fervour. Each pyx was filled and emptied incessantly; the priests' hands grew tired in thus distributing the bread of life; and Pierre's surprise increased at the sight. Never before had he beheld a corner of this earth so watered by the divine blood, whence faith took wing in such a flight of souls. It was like a return to the heroic days of the Church, when all nations prostrated themselves beneath the same blast of credulity in their terrified ignorance which led them to place their hope of eternal happiness in an Almighty God. He could fancy himself carried back some eight or nine centuries, to the time of great public piety, when people believed in the approaching end of the world; and this he could fancy the more readily as the crowd of simple folk, the whole host that had attended high mass, was still seated on the benches, as much at ease in God's house as at home. Many had no place of refuge. Was not the church their home, the asylum where consolation awaited them both by day and by night? Those who knew not where to sleep, who had not found room even at the shelter place, came to the Rosary, where sometimes they succeeded in finding a vacant seat on a bench, at others sufficient space to lie down on the flagstones. And others who had beds awaiting them lingered there for the joy of passing a whole night in that divine abode, so full of beautiful dreams. Until daylight the concourse and promiscuity were extraordinary; every row of benches was occupied, sleeping persons were scattered in every corner and behind every pillar; men, women, children were leaning against each other, their heads on one another's shoulders, their breath mingling in calm unconsciousness. It was the break-up of a religious gathering overwhelmed by sleep, a church transformed into a chance hospital, its doors wide open to the lovely August night, giving access to all who were wandering in the darkness, the good and the bad, the weary and the lost. And all over the place, from each of the fifteen altars, the bells announcing the elevation of the Host incessantly sounded, whilst from among the mob of sleepers bands of believers now and again arose, went and received the sacrament, and then returned to mingle once more with the nameless, shepherdless flock which the semi-obscurity enveloped like a veil.

With an air of restless indecision, Pierre was still wandering through the shadowy groups, when an old priest, seated on the step of an altar, beckoned to him. For two hours he had been waiting there, and now that his turn was at length arriving he felt so faint that he feared he might not have strength to say the whole of his mass, and preferred, therefore, to surrender his place to another. No doubt the sight of Pierre, wandering so distressfully in the gloom, had moved him. He pointed the vestry out to him, waited until he returned with chasuble and chalice, and then went off and fell into a sound sleep on one of the neighbouring benches. Pierre thereupon said his mass in the same way as he said it at Paris, like a worthy man fulfilling a professional duty. He outwardly maintained an air of sincere faith. But, contrary to what he had expected from the two feverish days through which he had just gone, from the extraordinary and agitating surroundings amidst which he had spent the last few hours, nothing moved him nor touched his heart. He had hoped that a great commotion would overpower him at the moment of the communion, when the divine mystery is accomplished; that he would find himself in view of Paradise, steeped in grace, in the very presence of the Almighty; but there was no manifestation, his chilled heart did not even throb, he went on to the end pronouncing the usual words, making the regulation gestures, with the mechanical accuracy of the profession. In spite of his effort to be fervent, one single idea kept obstinately returning to his mind—that the vestry was far too small, since such an enormous number of masses had to be said. How could the sacristans manage to distribute the holy vestments and the cloths? It puzzled him, and engaged his thoughts with absurd persistency.

At length, to his surprise, he once more found himself outside. Again he wandered through the night, a night which seemed to him utterly void, darker and stiller than before. The town was lifeless, not a light was gleaming. There only remained the growl of the Gave, which his accustomed ears no longer heard. And suddenly, similar to a miraculous apparition, the Grotto blazed before him, illumining the darkness with its everlasting brasier, which burnt with a flame of inextinguishable love. He had returned thither unconsciously, attracted no doubt by thoughts of Marie. Three o'clock was about to strike, the benches before the Grotto were emptying, and only some twenty persons remained there, dark, indistinct forms, kneeling in slumberous ecstasy, wrapped in divine torpor. It seemed as though the night in progressing had increased the gloom, and imparted a remote visionary aspect to the Grotto. All faded away amidst delicious lassitude, sleep reigned supreme over the dim, far-spreading country side; whilst the voice of the invisible waters seemed to be merely the breathing of this pure slumber, upon which the Blessed Virgin, all white with her aureola of tapers, was smiling. And among the few unconscious women was Madame Maze, still kneeling, with clasped hands and bowed head, but so indistinct that she seemed to have melted away amidst her ardent prayer.

Pierre, however, had immediately gone up to Marie. He was shivering, and fancied that she must be chilled by the early morning air. "I beseech you, Marie, cover yourself up," said he. "Do you want to suffer still more?" And thereupon he drew up the shawl which had slipped off her, and endeavoured to fasten it about her neck. "You are cold, Marie," he added; "your hands are like ice."

She did not answer, she was still in the same attitude as when he had left her a couple of hours previously. With her elbows resting on the edges of her box, she kept herself raised, her soul still lifted towards the Blessed Virgin and her face transfigured, beaming with a celestial joy. Her lips moved, though no sound came from them. Perhaps she was still carrying on some mysterious conversation in the world of enchantments, dreaming wide awake, as she had been doing ever since he had placed her there. He spoke to her again, but still she answered not. At last, however, of her own accord, she murmured in a far-away voice: "Oh! I am so happy, Pierre! I have seen her; I prayed to her for you, and she smiled at me, slightly nodding her head to let me know that she heard me and would grant my prayers. And though she did not speak to me, Pierre, I understood what she wished me to know. 'Tis to-day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, when the Blessed Sacrament passes by, that I shall be cured!"

He listened to her in deep agitation. Had she been sleeping with her eyes wide open? Was it in a dream that she had seen the marble figure of the Blessed Virgin bend its head and smile? A great tremor passed through him at the thought that this poor child had prayed for him. And he walked up to the railing, and dropped upon his knees, stammering: "O Marie! O Marie!" without knowing whether this heart-cry were intended for the Virgin or for the beloved friend of his childhood. And he remained there, utterly overwhelmed, waiting for grace to come to him.

Endless minutes went by. This was indeed the superhuman effort, the waiting for the miracle which he had come to seek for himself, the sudden revelation, the thunderclap which was to sweep away his unbelief and restore him, rejuvenated and triumphant, to the faith of the simple-minded. He surrendered himself, he wished that some mighty power might ravage his being and transform it. But, even as before whilst saying his mass, he heard naught within him but an endless silence, felt nothing but a boundless vacuum. There was no divine intervention, his despairing heart almost seemed to cease beating. And although he strove to pray, to fix his mind wholly upon that powerful Virgin, so compassionate to poor humanity, his thoughts none the less wandered, won back by the outside world, and again turning to puerile trifles. Within the Grotto, on the other side of the railing, he had once more caught sight of Baron Suire, still asleep, still continuing his pleasant nap with his hands clasped in front of him. Other things also attracted his attention: the flowers deposited at the feet of the Virgin, the letters cast there as though into a heavenly letter-box, the delicate lace-like work of wax which remained erect around the flames of the larger tapers, looking like some rich silver ornamentation. Then, without any apparent reason, his thoughts flew away to the days of his childhood, and his brother Guillaume's face rose before him with extreme distinctness. He had not seen him since their mother's death. He merely knew that he led a very secluded life, occupying himself with scientific matters, in a little house in which he had buried himself with a mistress and two big dogs; and he would have known nothing more about him, but for having recently read his name in a newspaper in connection with some revolutionary attempt. It was stated that he was passionately devoting himself to the study of explosives, and in constant intercourse with the leaders of the most advanced parties. Why, however, should Guillaume appear to him in this wise, in this ecstatic spot, amidst the mystical light of the tapers,—appear to him, moreover, such as he had formerly known him, so good, affectionate, and brotherly, overflowing with charity for every affliction! The thought haunted him for a moment, and filled him with painful regret for that brotherliness now dead and gone. Then, with hardly a moment's pause, his mind reverted to himself, and he realised that he might stubbornly remain there for hours without regaining faith. Nevertheless, he felt a sort of tremor pass through him, a final hope, a feeling that if the Blessed Virgin should perform the great miracle of curing Marie, he would at last believe. It was like a final delay which he allowed himself, an appointment with Faith for that very day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, when, according to what the girl had told him, the Blessed Sacrament would pass by. And at this thought his anguish at once ceased, he remained kneeling, worn out with fatigue and overcome by invincible drowsiness.

The hours passed by, the resplendent illumination of the Grotto was still projected into the night, its reflection stretching to the neighbouring hillsides and whitening the walls of the convents there. However, Pierre noticed it grow paler and paler, which surprised him, and he roused himself, feeling thoroughly chilled; it was the day breaking, beneath a leaden sky overcast with clouds. He perceived that one of those storms, so sudden in mountainous regions, was rapidly rising from the south. The thunder could already be heard rumbling in the distance, whilst gusts of wind swept along the roads. Perhaps he also had been sleeping, for he no longer beheld Baron Suire, whose departure he did not remember having witnessed. There were scarcely ten persons left before the Grotto, though among them he again recognised Madame Maze with her face hidden in her hands. However, when she noticed that it was daylight and that she could be seen, she rose up, and vanished at a turn of the narrow path leading to the convent of the Blue Sisters.

Feeling anxious, Pierre went up to Marie to tell her she must not remain there any longer, unless she wished to get wet through. "I will take you back to the hospital," said he.

She refused and then entreated: "No, no! I am waiting for mass; I promised to communicate here. Don't trouble about me, return to the hotel at once, and go to bed, I implore you. You know very well that covered vehicles are sent here for the sick whenever it rains."

And she persisted in refusing to leave, whilst on his side he kept on repeating that he did not wish to go to bed. A mass, it should be mentioned, was said at the Grotto early every morning, and it was a divine joy for the pilgrims to be able to communicate, amidst the glory of the rising sun, after a long night of ecstasy. And now, just as some large drops of rain were beginning to fall, there came the priest, wearing a chasuble and accompanied by two acolytes, one of whom, in order to protect the chalice, held a large white silk umbrella, embroidered with gold, over him.

Pierre, after pushing Marie's little conveyance close to the railing, so that the girl might be sheltered by the overhanging rock, under which the few other worshippers had also sought refuge, had just seen her receive the sacrament with ardent fervour, when his attention was attracted by a pitiful spectacle which quite wrung his heart.

Beneath a dense, heavy deluge of rain, he caught sight of Madame Vincent, still with that precious, woeful burden, her little Rose, whom with outstretched arms she was offering to the Blessed Virgin. Unable to stay any longer at the shelter-house owing to the complaints caused by the child's constant moaning, she had carried her off into the night, and during two hours had roamed about in the darkness, lost, distracted, bearing this poor flesh of her flesh, which she pressed to her bosom, unable to give it any relief. She knew not what road she had taken, beneath what trees she had strayed, so absorbed had she been in her revolt against the unjust sufferings which had so sorely stricken this poor little being, so feeble and so pure, and as yet quite incapable of sin. Was it not abominable that the grip of disease should for weeks have been incessantly torturing her child, whose cry she knew not how to quiet? She carried her about, rocking her in her arms as she went wildly along the paths, obstinately hoping that she would at last get her to sleep, and so hush that wail which was rending her heart. And suddenly, utterly worn-out, sharing each of her daughter's death pangs, she found herself opposite the Grotto, at the feet of the miracle-working Virgin, she who forgave and who healed.

"O Virgin, Mother most admirable, heal her! O Virgin, Mother of Divine Grace, heal her!"

She had fallen on her knees, and with quivering, outstretched arms was still offering her expiring daughter, in a paroxysm of hope and desire which seemed to raise her from the ground. And the rain, which she never noticed, beat down behind her with the fury of an escaped torrent, whilst violent claps of thunder shook the mountains. For one moment she thought her prayer was granted, for Rose had slightly shivered as though visited by the archangel, her face becoming quite white, her eyes and mouth opening wide; and with one last little gasp she ceased to cry.

"O Virgin, Mother of Our Redeemer, heal her! O Virgin, All-powerful Mother, heal her!"

But the poor woman felt her child become even lighter in her extended arms. And now she became afraid at no longer hearing her moan, at seeing her so white, with staring eyes and open mouth, without a sign of life. How was it that she did not smile if she were cured? Suddenly a loud heart-rending cry rang out, the cry of the mother, surpassing even the din of the thunder in the storm, whose violence was increasing. Her child was dead. And she rose up erect, turned her back on that deaf Virgin who let little children die, and started off like a madwoman beneath the lashing downpour, going straight before her without knowing whither, and still and ever carrying and nursing that poor little body which she had held in her arms during so many days and nights. A thunderbolt fell, shivering one of the neighbouring trees, as though with the stroke of a giant axe, amidst a great crash of twisted and broken branches.

Pierre had rushed after Madame Vincent, eager to guide and help her. But he was unable to follow her, for he at once lost sight of her behind the blurring curtain of rain. When he returned, the mass was drawing to an end, and, as soon as the rain fell less violently, the officiating priest went off under the white silk umbrella embroidered with gold. Meantime a kind of omnibus awaited the few patients to take them back to the hospital.

Marie pressed Pierre's hands. "Oh! how happy I am!" she said. "Do not come for me before three o'clock this afternoon."

On being left amidst the rain, which had now become an obstinate fine drizzle, Pierre re-entered the Grotto and seated himself on the bench near the spring. He would not go to bed, for in spite of his weariness he dreaded sleep in the state of nervous excitement in which he had been plunged ever since the day before. Little Rose's death had increased his fever; he could not banish from his mind the thought of that heart-broken mother, wandering along the muddy paths with the dead body of her child. What could be the reasons which influenced the Virgin? He was amazed that she could make a choice. Divine Mother as she was, he wondered how her heart could decide upon healing only ten out of a hundred sufferers—that ten per cent. of miracles which Doctor Bonamy had proved by statistics. He, Pierre, had already asked himself the day before which ones he would have chosen had he possessed the power of saving ten. A terrible power in all truth, a formidable selection, which he would never have had the courage to make. Why this one, and not that other? Where was the justice, where the compassion? To be all-powerful and heal every one of them, was not that the desire which rose from each heart? And the Virgin seemed to him to be cruel, badly informed, as harsh and indifferent as even impassible nature, distributing life and death at random, or in accordance with laws which mankind knew nothing of.

The rain was at last leaving off, and Pierre had been there a couple of hours when he felt that his feet were damp. He looked down, and was greatly surprised, for the spring was overflowing through the gratings. The soil of the Grotto was already covered; whilst outside a sheet of water was flowing under the benches, as far as the parapet against the Gave. The late storms had swollen the waters in the neighbourhood. Pierre thereupon reflected that this spring, in spite of its miraculous origin, was subject to the laws that governed other springs, for it certainly communicated with some natural reservoirs, wherein the rain penetrated and accumulated. And then, to keep his ankles dry, he left the place.

V. THE TWO VICTIMS

PIERRE walked along thirsting for fresh air, his head so heavy that he took off his hat to relieve his burning brow. Despite all the fatigue of that terrible night of vigil, he did not think of sleeping. He was kept erect by that rebellion of his whole being which he could not quiet. Eight o'clock was striking, and he walked at random under the glorious morning sun, now shining forth in a spotless sky, which the storm seemed to have cleansed of all the Sunday dust.

All at once, however, he raised his head, anxious to know where he was; and he was quite astonished, for he found that he had already covered a deal of ground, and was now below the station, near the municipal hospital. He was hesitating at a point where the road forked, not knowing which direction to take, when a friendly hand was laid on his shoulder, and a voice inquired: "Where are you going at this early hour?"

It was Doctor Chassaigne who addressed him, drawing up his lofty figure, clad in black from head to foot. "Have you lost yourself?" he added; "do you want to know your way?"

"No, thanks, no," replied Pierre, somewhat disturbed. "I spent the night at the Grotto with that young patient to whom I am so much attached, and my heart was so upset that I have been walking about in the hope it would do me good, before returning to the hotel to take a little sleep."

The doctor continued looking at him, clearly detecting the frightful struggle which was raging within him, the despair which he felt at being unable to sink asleep in faith, the suffering which the futility of all his efforts brought him. "Ah, my poor child!" murmured M. Chassaigne; and in a fatherly way he added: "Well, since you are walking, suppose we take a walk together? I was just going down yonder, to the bank of the Gave. Come along, and on our way back you will see what a lovely view we shall have."

For his part, the doctor took a walk of a couple of hours' duration each morning, ever alone, seeking, as it were, to tire and exhaust his grief. First of all, as soon as he had risen, he repaired to the cemetery, and knelt on the tomb of his wife and daughter, which, at all seasons, he decked with flowers. And afterwards he would roam along the roads, with tearful eyes, never returning home until fatigue compelled him.

With a wave of the hand, Pierre accepted his proposal, and in perfect silence they went, side by side, down the sloping road. They remained for a long time without speaking; the doctor seemed more overcome than was his wont that morning; it was as though his chat with his dear lost ones had made his heart bleed yet more copiously. He walked along with his head bowed; his face, round which his white hair streamed, was very pale, and tears still blurred his eyes. And yet it was so pleasant, so warm in the sunlight on that lovely morning. The road now followed the Gave on its right bank, on the other side of the new town; and you could see the gardens, the inclined ways, and the Basilica. And, all at once, the Grotto appeared, with the everlasting flare of its tapers, now paling in the broad light.

Doctor Chassaigne, who had turned his head, made the sign of the cross, which Pierre did not at first understand. And when, in his turn, he had perceived the Grotto, he glanced in surprise at his old friend, and once more relapsed into the astonishment which had come over him a couple of days previously on finding this man of science, this whilom atheist and materialist, so overwhelmed by grief that he was now a believer, longing for the one delight of meeting his dear ones in another life. His heart had swept his reason away; old and lonely as he was, it was only the illusion that he would live once more in Paradise, where loving souls meet again, that prolonged his life on earth. This thought increased the young priest's discomfort. Must he also wait until he had grown old and endured equal sufferings in order to find a refuge in faith?

Still walking beside the Gave, leaving the town farther and farther behind them, they were lulled as it were by the noise of those clear waters rolling over the pebbles between banks shaded by trees. And they still remained silent, walking on with an equal step, each, on his own side, absorbed in his sorrows.

"And Bernadette," Pierre suddenly inquired; "did you know her?"

The doctor raised his head. "Bernadette? Yes, yes," said he. "I saw her once—afterwards." He relapsed into silence for a moment, and then began chatting: "In 1858, you know, at the time of the apparitions, I was thirty years of age. I was in Paris, still young in my profession, and opposed to all supernatural notions, so that I had no idea of returning to my native mountains to see a girl suffering from hallucinations. Five or six years later, however, some time about 1864, I passed through Lourdes, and was inquisitive enough to pay Bernadette a visit. She was then still at the asylum with the Sisters of Nevers."

Pierre remembered that one of the reasons of his journey had been his desire to complete his inquiry respecting Bernadette. And who could tell if grace might not come to him from that humble, lovable girl, on the day when he should be convinced that she had indeed fulfilled a mission of divine love and forgiveness? For this consummation to ensue it would perhaps suffice that he should know her better and learn to feel that she was really the saint, the chosen one, as others believed her to have been.

"Tell me about her, I pray you," he said; "tell me all you know of her."

A faint smile curved the doctor's lips. He understood, and would have greatly liked to calm and comfort the young priest whose soul was so grievously tortured by doubt. "Oh! willingly, my poor child!" he answered. "I should be so happy to help you on the path to light. You do well to love Bernadette—that may save you; for since all those old-time things I have deeply reflected on her case, and I declare to you that I never met a more charming creature, or one with a better heart."

Then, to the slow rhythm of their footsteps along the well-kept, sunlit road, in the delightful freshness of morning, the doctor began to relate his visit to Bernadette in 1864. She had then just attained her twentieth birthday, the apparitions had taken place six years previously, and she had astonished him by her candid and sensible air, her perfect modesty. The Sisters of Nevers, who had taught her to read, kept her with them at the asylum in order to shield her from public inquisitiveness. She found an occupation there, helping them in sundry petty duties; but she was very often taken ill, and would spend weeks at a time in her bed. The doctor had been particularly struck by her beautiful eyes, pure, candid, and frank, like those of a child. The rest of her face, said he, had become somewhat spoilt; her complexion was losing its clearness, her features had grown less delicate, and her general appearance was that of an ordinary servant-girl, short, puny, and unobtrusive. Her piety was still keen, but she had not seemed to him to be the ecstatical, excitable creature that many might have supposed; indeed, she appeared to have a rather positive mind which did not indulge in flights of fancy; and she invariably had some little piece of needlework, some knitting, some embroidery in her hand. In a word, she appeared to have entered the common path, and in nowise resembled the intensely passionate female worshippers of the Christ. She had no further visions, and never of her own accord spoke of the eighteen apparitions which had decided her life. To learn anything it was necessary to interrogate her, to address precise questions to her. These she would briefly answer, and then seek to change the conversation, as though she did not like to talk of such mysterious things. If wishing to probe the matter further, you asked her the nature of the three secrets which the Virgin had confided to her, she would remain silent, simply averting her eyes. And it was impossible to make her contradict herself; the particulars she gave invariably agreed with her original narrative, and, indeed, she always seemed to repeat the same words, with the same inflections of the voice.

"I had her in hand during the whole of one afternoon," continued Doctor Chassaigne, "and there was not the variation of a syllable in her story. It was disconcerting. Still, I am prepared to swear that she was not lying, that she never lied, that she was altogether incapable of falsehood."

Pierre boldly ventured to discuss this point. "But won't you admit, doctor, the possibility of some disorder of the will?" he asked. "Has it not been proved, is it not admitted nowadays, that when certain degenerate creatures with childish minds fall into an hallucination, a fancy of some kind or other, they are often unable to free themselves from it, especially when they remain in the same environment in which the phenomenon occurred? Cloistered, living alone with her fixed idea, Bernadette, naturally enough, obstinately clung to it."

The doctor's faint smile returned to his lips, and vaguely waving his arm, he replied: "Ah! my child, you ask me too much. You know very well that I am now only a poor old man, who prides himself but little on his science, and no longer claims to be able to explain anything. However, I do of course know of that famous medical-school example of the young girl who allowed herself to waste away with hunger at home, because she imagined that she was suffering from a serious complaint of the digestive organs, but who nevertheless began to eat when she was taken elsewhere. However, that is but one circumstance, and there are so many contradictory cases."

For a moment they became silent, and only the rhythmical sound of their steps was heard along the road. Then the doctor resumed: "Moreover, it is quite true that Bernadette shunned the world, and was only happy in her solitary corner. She was never known to have a single intimate female friend, any particular human love for anybody. She was kind and gentle towards all, but it was only for children that she showed any lively affection. And as, after all, the medical man is not quite dead within me, I will confess to you that I have sometimes wondered if she remained as pure in mind, as, most undoubtedly, she did remain in body. However, I think it quite possible, given her sluggish, poor-blooded temperament, not to speak of the innocent sphere in which she grew up, first Bartres, and then the convent. Still, a doubt came to me when I heard of the tender interest which she took in the orphan asylum built by the Sisters of Nevers, farther along this very road. Poor little girls are received into it, and shielded from the perils of the highways. And if Bernadette wished it to be extremely large, so as to lodge all the little lambs in danger, was it not because she herself remembered having roamed the roads with bare feet, and still trembled at the idea of what might have become of her but for the help of the Blessed Virgin?"

Then, resuming his narrative, he went on telling Pierre of the crowds that flocked to see Bernadette and pay her reverence in her asylum at Lourdes. This had proved a source of considerable fatigue to her. Not a day went by without a stream of visitors appearing before her. They came from all parts of France, some even from abroad; and it soon proved necessary to refuse the applications of those who were actuated by mere inquisitiveness, and to grant admittance only to the genuine believers, the members of the clergy, and the people of mark on whom the doors could not well have been shut. A Sister was always present to protect Bernadette against the excessive indiscretion of some of her visitors, for questions literally rained upon her, and she often grew faint through having to repeat her story so many times. Ladies of high position fell on their knees, kissed her gown, and would have liked to carry a piece of it away as a relic. She also had to defend her chaplet, which in their excitement they all begged her to sell to them for a fabulous amount. One day a certain marchioness endeavoured to secure it by giving her another one which she had brought with her—a chaplet with a golden cross and beads of real pearls. Many hoped that she would consent to work a miracle in their presence; children were brought to her in order that she might lay her hands upon them; she was also consulted in cases of illness, and attempts were made to purchase her influence with the Virgin. Large sums were offered to her. At the slightest sign, the slightest expression of a desire to be a queen, decked with jewels and crowned with gold, she would have been overwhelmed with regal presents. And while the humble remained on their knees on her threshold, the great ones of the earth pressed round her, and would have counted it a glory to act as her escort. It was even related that one among them, the handsomest and wealthiest of princes, came one clear sunny April day to ask her hand in marriage.

"But what always struck and displeased me," said Pierre, "was her departure from Lourdes when she was two-and-twenty, her sudden disappearance and sequestration in the convent of Saint Gildard at Nevers, whence she never emerged. Didn't that give a semblance of truth to those spurious rumours of insanity which were circulated? Didn't it help people to suppose that she was being shut up, whisked away for fear of some indiscretion on her part, some naive remark or other which might have revealed the secret of a prolonged fraud? Indeed, to speak plainly, I will confess to you that for my own part I still believe that she was spirited away."

Doctor Chassaigne gently shook his head. "No, no," said he, "there was no story prepared in advance in this affair, no big melodrama secretly staged and afterwards performed by more or less unconscious actors. The developments came of themselves, by the sole force of circumstances; and they were always very intricate, very difficult to analyse. Moreover, it is certain that it was Bernadette herself who wished to leave Lourdes. Those incessant visits wearied her, she felt ill at ease amidst all that noisy worship. All that she desired was a dim nook where she might live in peace, and so fierce was she at times in her disinterestedness, that when money was handed to her, even with the pious intent of having a mass said or a taper burnt, she would fling it upon the floor. She never accepted anything for herself or for her family, which remained in poverty. And with such pride as she possessed, such natural simplicity, such a desire to remain in the background, one can very well understand that she should have wished to disappear and cloister herself in some lonely spot so as to prepare herself to make a good death. Her work was accomplished; she had initiated this great movement scarcely knowing how or why; and she could really be of no further utility. Others were about to conduct matters to an issue and insure the triumph of the Grotto."

"Let us admit, then, that she went off of her own accord," said Pierre; "still, what a relief it must have been for the people you speak of, who thenceforth became the real masters, whilst millions of money were raining down on Lourdes from the whole world."

"Oh! certainly; I don't pretend that any attempt was made to detain her here!" exclaimed the doctor. "Frankly, I even believe that she was in some degree urged into the course she took. She ended by becoming somewhat of an incumbrance. It was not that any annoying revelations were feared from her; but remember that with her extreme timidity and frequent illnesses she was scarcely ornamental. Besides, however small the room which she took up at Lourdes, however obedient she showed herself, she was none the less a power, and attracted the multitude, which made her, so to say, a competitor of the Grotto. For the Grotto to remain alone, resplendent in its glory, it was advisable that Bernadette should withdraw into the background, become as it were a simple legend. Such, indeed, must have been the reasons which induced Monseigneur Laurence, the Bishop of Tarbes, to hasten her departure. The only mistake that was made was in saying that it was a question of screening her from the enterprises of the world, as though it were feared that she might fall into the sin of pride, by growing vain of the saintly fame with which the whole of Christendom re-echoed. And this was doing her a grave injury, for she was as incapable of pride as she was of falsehood. Never, indeed, was there a more candid or more modest child."

The doctor was growing impassioned, excited. But all at once he became calm again, and a pale smile returned to his lips. "'Tis true," said he, "I love her; the more I have thought of her, the more have I learned to love her. But you must not think, Pierre, that I am completely brutified by belief. If I nowadays acknowledge the existence of an unseen power, if I feel a need of believing in another, better, and more just life, I nevertheless know right well that there are men remaining in this world of ours; and at times, even when they wear the cowl or the cassock, the work they do is vile."

There came another interval of silence. Each was continuing his dream apart from the other. Then the doctor resumed: "I will tell you of a fancy which has often haunted me. Suppose we admit that Bernadette was not the shy, simple child we knew her to be; let us endow her with a spirit of intrigue and domination, transform her into a conqueress, a leader of nations, and try to picture what, in that case, would have happened. It is evident that the Grotto would be hers, the Basilica also. We should see her lording it at all the ceremonies, under a dais, with a gold mitre on her head. She would distribute the miracles; with a sovereign gesture her little hand would lead the multitudes to heaven. All the lustre and glory would come from her, she being the saint, the chosen one, the only one that had been privileged to see the Divinity face to face. And indeed nothing would seem more just, for she would triumph after toiling, enjoy the fruit of her labour in all glory. But you see, as it happens, she is defrauded, robbed. The marvellous harvests sown by her are reaped by others. During the twelve years which she lived at Saint Gildard, kneeling in the gloom, Lourdes was full of victors, priests in golden vestments chanting thanksgivings, and blessing churches and monuments erected at a cost of millions. She alone did not behold the triumph of the new faith, whose author she had been. You say that she dreamt it all. Well, at all events, what a beautiful dream it was, a dream which has stirred the whole world, and from which she, dear girl, never awakened!"

They halted and sat down for a moment on a rock beside the road, before returning to the town. In front of them the Gave, deep at this point of its course, was rolling blue waters tinged with dark moire-like reflections, whilst, farther on, rushing hurriedly over a bed of large stones, the stream became so much foam, a white froth, light like snow. Amidst the gold raining from the sun, a fresh breeze came down from the mountains.

Whilst listening to that story of how Bernadette had been exploited and suppressed, Pierre had simply found in it all a fresh motive for revolt; and, with his eyes fixed on the ground, he began to think of the injustice of nature, of that law which wills that the strong should devour the weak. Then, all at once raising his head, he inquired: "And did you also know Abbe Peyramale?"

The doctor's eyes brightened once more, and he eagerly replied: "Certainly I did! He was an upright, energetic man, a saint, an apostle. He and Bernadette were the great makers of Our Lady of Lourdes. Like her, he endured frightful sufferings, and, like her, he died from them. Those who do not know his story can know nothing, understand nothing, of the drama enacted here."

Thereupon he related that story at length. Abbe Peyramale was the parish priest of Lourdes at the time of the apparitions. A native of the region, tall, broad-shouldered, with a powerful leonine head, he was extremely intelligent, very honest and goodhearted, though at times violent and domineering. He seemed built for combat. An enemy of all pious exaggerations, discharging the duties of his ministry in a broad, liberal spirit, he regarded the apparitions with distrust when he first heard of them, refused to believe in Bernadette's stories, questioned her, and demanded proofs. It was only at a later stage, when the blast of faith became irresistible, upsetting the most rebellious minds and mastering the multitude, that he ended, in his turn, by bowing his head; and when he was finally conquered, it was more particularly by his love for the humble and the oppressed which he could not restrain when he beheld Bernadette threatened with imprisonment. The civil authorities were persecuting one of his flock; at this his shepherd's heart awoke, and, in her defence, he gave full reign to his ardent passion for justice. Moreover, the charm which the child diffused had worked upon him; he felt her to be so candid, so truthful, that he began to place a blind faith in her and love her even as everybody else loved her. Moreover, why should he have curtly dismissed all questions of miracles, when miracles abound in the pages of Holy Writ? It was not for a minister of religion, whatever his prudence, to set himself up as a sceptic when entire populations were falling on their knees and the Church seemed to be on the eve of another great triumph. Then, too, he had the nature of one who leads men, who stirs up crowds, who builds, and in this affair he had really found his vocation, the vast field in which he might exercise his energy, the great cause to which he might wholly devote himself with all his passionate ardour and determination to succeed.

From that moment, then, Abbe Peyramale had but one thought, to execute the orders which the Virgin had commissioned Bernadette to transmit to him. He caused improvements to be carried out at the Grotto. A railing was placed in front of it; pipes were laid for the conveyance of the water from the source, and a variety of work was accomplished in order to clear the approaches. However, the Virgin had particularly requested that a chapel might be built; and he wished to have a church, quite a triumphal Basilica. He pictured everything on a grand scale, and, full of confidence in the enthusiastic help of Christendom, he worried the architects, requiring them to design real palaces worthy of the Queen of Heaven. As a matter of fact, offerings already abounded, gold poured from the most distant dioceses, a rain of gold destined to increase and never end. Then came his happy years: he was to be met among the workmen at all hours, instilling activity into them like the jovial, good-natured fellow he was, constantly on the point of taking a pick or trowel in hand himself, such was his eagerness to behold the realisation of his dream. But days of trial were in store for him: he fell ill, and lay in danger of death on the fourth of April, 1864, when the first procession started from his parish church to the Grotto, a procession of sixty thousand pilgrims, which wound along the streets amidst an immense concourse of spectators.

On the day when Abbe Peyramale rose from his bed, saved, a first time, from death, he found himself despoiled. To second him in his heavy task, Monseigneur Laurence, the Bishop, had already given him as assistant a former episcopal secretary, Father Sempe, whom he had appointed warden of the Missionaries of Geraison, a community founded by himself. Father Sempe was a sly, spare little man, to all appearance most disinterested and humble, but in reality consumed by all the thirst of ambition. At the outset he kept in his place, serving the parish priest of Lourdes like a faithful subordinate, attending to matters of all kinds in order to lighten the other's work, and acquiring information on every possible subject in his desire to render himself indispensable. He must soon have realised what a rich farm the Grotto was destined to become, and what a colossal revenue might be derived from it, if only a little skill were exercised. And thenceforth he no longer stirred from the episcopal residence, but ended by acquiring great influence over the calm, practical Bishop, who was in great need of money for the charities of his diocese. And thus it was that during Abbe Peyramale's illness Father Sempe succeeded in effecting a separation between the parish of Lourdes and the domain of the Grotto, which last he was commissioned to manage at the head of a few Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, over whom the Bishop placed him as Father Superior.

The struggle soon began, one of those covert, desperate, mortal struggles which are waged under the cloak of ecclesiastical discipline. There was a pretext for rupture all ready, a field of battle on which the longer purse would necessarily end by conquering. It was proposed to build a new parish church, larger and more worthy of Lourdes than the old one already in existence, which was admitted to have become too small since the faithful had been flocking into the town in larger and larger numbers. Moreover, it was an old idea of Abbe Peyramale, who desired to carry out the Virgin's orders with all possible precision. Speaking of the Grotto, she had said that people would go "thither in procession"; and the Abbe had always seen the pilgrims start in procession from the town, whither they were expected to return in the same fashion, as indeed had been the practice on the first occasions after the apparitions. A central point, a rallying spot, was therefore required, and the Abbe's dream was to erect a magnificent church, a cathedral of gigantic proportions, which would accommodate a vast multitude. Builder as he was by temperament, impassioned artisan working for the glory of Heaven, he already pictured this cathedral springing from the soil, and rearing its clanging belfry in the sunlight. And it was also his own house that he wished to build, the edifice which would be his act of faith and adoration, the temple where he would be the pontiff, and triumph in company with the sweet memory of Bernadette, in full view of the spot of which both he and she had been so cruelly dispossessed. Naturally enough, bitterly as he felt that act of spoliation, the building of this new parish church was in some degree his revenge, his share of all the glory, besides being a task which would enable him to utilise both his militant activity and the fever that had been consuming him ever since he had ceased going to the Grotto, by reason of his soreness of heart.

At the outset of the new enterprise there was again a flash of enthusiasm. At the prospect of seeing all the life and all the money flow into the new city which was springing from the ground around the Basilica, the old town, which felt itself thrust upon one side, espoused the cause of its priest. The municipal council voted a sum of one hundred thousand francs, which, unfortunately, was not to be paid until the new church should be roofed in. Abbe Peyramale had already accepted the plans of his architect—plans which, he had insisted, should be on a grand scale—and had also treated with a contractor of Chartres, who engaged to complete the church in three or four years if the promised supplies of funds should be regularly forthcoming. The Abbe believed that offerings would assuredly continue raining down from all parts, and so he launched into this big enterprise without any anxiety, overflowing with a careless bravery, and fully expecting that Heaven would not abandon him on the road. He even fancied that he could rely upon the support of Monseigneur Jourdan, who had now succeeded Monseigneur Laurence as Bishop of Tarbes, for this prelate, after blessing the foundation-stone of the new church, had delivered an address in which he admitted that the enterprise was necessary and meritorious. And it seemed, too, as though Father Sempe, with his customary humility, had bowed to the inevitable and accepted this vexatious competition, which would compel him to relinquish a share of the plunder; for he now pretended to devote himself entirely to the management of the Grotto, and even allowed a collection-box for contributions to the building of the new parish church to be placed inside the Basilica.

Then, however, the secret, rageful struggle began afresh. Abbe Peyramale, who was a wretched manager, exulted on seeing his new church so rapidly take shape. The work was being carried on at a fast pace, and he troubled about nothing else, being still under the delusion that the Blessed Virgin would find whatever money might be needed. Thus he was quite stupefied when he at last perceived that the offerings were falling off, that the money of the faithful no longer reached him, as though, indeed, someone had secretly diverted its flow. And eventually the day came when he was unable to make the stipulated payments. In all this there had been so much skilfully combined strangulation, of which he only became aware later on. Father Sempe, however, had once more prevailed on the Bishop to grant his favour exclusively to the Grotto. There was even a talk of some confidential circulars distributed through the various dioceses, so that the many sums of money offered by the faithful should no longer be sent to the parish. The voracious, insatiable Grotto was bent upon securing everything, and to such a point were things carried that five hundred franc notes slipped into the collection-box at the Basilica were kept back; the box was rifled and the parish robbed. Abbe Peyramale, however, in his passion for the rising church, his child, continued fighting most desperately, ready if need were to give his blood. He had at first treated with the contractor in the name of the vestry; then, when he was at a loss how to pay, he treated in his own name. His life was bound up in the enterprise, he wore himself out in the heroic efforts which he made. Of the four hundred thousand francs that he had promised, he had only been able to pay two hundred thousand; and the municipal council still obstinately refused to hand over the hundred thousand francs which it had voted, until the new church should be covered in. This was acting against the town's real interests. However, it was said that Father Sempe was trying to bring influence to bear on the contractor. And, all at once, the work was stopped.

From that moment the death agony began. Wounded in the heart, the Abbe Peyramale, the broad-shouldered mountaineer with the leonine face, staggered and fell like an oak struck down by a thunderbolt. He took to his bed, and never left it alive. Strange stories circulated: it was said that Father Sempe had sought to secure admission to the parsonage under some pious pretext, but in reality to see if his much-dreaded adversary were really mortally stricken; and it was added, that it had been necessary to drive him from the sick-room, where his presence was an outrageous scandal. Then, when the unhappy priest, vanquished and steeped in bitterness, was dead, Father Sempe was seen triumphing at the funeral, from which the others had not dared to keep him away. It was affirmed that he openly displayed his abominable delight, that his face was radiant that day with the joy of victory. He was at last rid of the only man who had been an obstacle to his designs, whose legitimate authority he had feared. He would no longer be forced to share anything with anybody now that both the founders of Our Lady of Lourdes had been suppressed—Bernadette placed in a convent, and Abbe Peyramale lowered into the ground. The Grotto was now his own property, the alms would come to him alone, and he could do what he pleased with the eight hundred thousand francs* or so which were at his disposal every year. He would complete the gigantic works destined to make the Basilica a self-supporting centre, and assist in embellishing the new town in order to increase the isolation of the old one and seclude it behind its rock, like an insignificant parish submerged beneath the splendour of its all-powerful neighbour. All the money, all the sovereignty, would be his; he henceforth would reign.

* About 145,000 dollars.

However, although the works had been stopped, and the new parish church was slumbering inside its wooden fence, it was none the less more than half built. The vaulted aisles were already erected. And the imperfect pile remained there like a threat, for the town might some day attempt to finish it. Like Abbe Peyramale, therefore, it must be killed for good, turned into an irreparable ruin. The secret labour therefore continued, a work of refined cruelty and slow destruction. To begin with, the new parish priest, a simple-minded creature, was cowed to such a point that he no longer opened the envelopes containing remittances for the parish; all the registered letters were at once taken to the Fathers. Then the site selected for the new parish church was criticised, and the diocesan architect was induced to draw up a report stating that the old church was still in good condition and of ample size for the requirements of the community. Moreover, influence was brought to bear on the Bishop, and representations were made to him respecting the annoying features of the pecuniary difficulties which had arisen with the contractor. With a little imagination poor Peyramale was transformed into a violent, obstinate madman, through whose undisciplined zeal the Church had almost been compromised. And, at last, the Bishop, forgetting that he himself had blessed the foundation-stone, issued a pastoral letter laying the unfinished church under interdict, and prohibiting all religious services in it. This was the supreme blow. Endless lawsuits had already begun; the contractor, who had only received two hundred thousand francs for the five hundred thousand francs' worth of work which had been executed, had taken proceedings against Abbe Peyramale's heir-at-law, the vestry, and the town, for the last still refused to pay over the amount which it had voted. At first the Prefect's Council declared itself incompetent to deal with the case, and when it was sent back to it by the Council of State, it rendered a judgment by which the town was condemned to pay the hundred thousand francs and the heir-at-law to finish the church. At the same time the vestry was put out of court. However, there was a fresh appeal to the Council of State, which quashed this judgment, and condemned the vestry, and, in default, the heir-at-law, to pay the contractor. Neither party being solvent, matters remained in this position. The lawsuits had lasted fifteen years. The town had now resignedly paid over the hundred thousand francs, and only two hundred thousand remained owing to the contractor. However, the costs and the accumulated interest had so increased the amount of indebtedness that it had risen to six hundred thousand francs; and as, on the other hand, it was estimated that four hundred thousand francs would be required to finish the church, a million was needed to save this young ruin from certain destruction. The Fathers of the Grotto were thenceforth able to sleep in peace; they had assassinated the poor church; it was as dead as Abbe Peyramale himself.

The bells of the Basilica rang out triumphantly, and Father Sempe reigned as a victor at the conclusion of that great struggle, that dagger warfare in which not only a man but stones also had been done to death in the shrouding gloom of intriguing sacristies. And old Lourdes, obstinate and unintelligent, paid a hard penalty for its mistake in not giving more support to its minister, who had died struggling, killed by his love for his parish, for now the new town did not cease to grow and prosper at the expense of the old one. All the wealth flowed to the former: the Fathers of the Grotto coined money, financed hotels and candle shops, and sold the water of the source, although a clause of their agreement with the municipality expressly prohibited them from carrying on any commercial pursuits.

The whole region began to rot and fester; the triumph of the Grotto had brought about such a passion for lucre, such a burning, feverish desire to possess and enjoy, that extraordinary perversion set in, growing worse and worse each day, and changing Bernadette's peaceful Bethlehem into a perfect Sodom or Gomorrah. Father Sempe had ensured the triumph of his Divinity by spreading human abominations all around and wrecking thousands of souls. Gigantic buildings rose from the ground, five or six millions of francs had already been expended, everything being sacrificed to the stern determination to leave the poor parish out in the cold and keep the entire plunder for self and friends. Those costly, colossal gradient ways had only been erected in order to avoid compliance with the Virgin's express desire that the faithful should come to the Grotto in procession. For to go down from the Basilica by the incline on the left, and climb up to it again by the incline on the right, could certainly not be called going to the Grotto in procession: it was simply so much revolving in a circle. However, the Fathers cared little about that; they had succeeded in compelling people to start from their premises and return to them, in order that they might be the sole proprietors of the affair, the opulent farmers who garnered the whole harvest. Abbe Peyramale lay buried in the crypt of his unfinished, ruined church, and Bernadette, who had long since dragged out her life of suffering in the depths of a convent far away, was now likewise sleeping the eternal sleep under a flagstone in a chapel.

Deep silence fell when Doctor Chassaigne had finished this long narrative. Then, with a painful effort, he rose to his feet again: "It will soon be ten o'clock, my dear child," said he, "and I want you to take a little rest. Let us go back."

Pierre followed him without speaking; and they retraced their steps toward the town at a more rapid pace.

"Ah! yes," resumed the doctor, "there were great iniquities and great sufferings in it all. But what else could you expect? Man spoils and corrupts the most beautiful things. And you cannot yet understand all the woeful sadness of the things of which I have been talking to you. You must see them, lay your hand on them. Would you like me to show you Bernadette's room and Abbe Peyramale's unfinished church this evening?"

"Yes, I should indeed," replied Pierre.

"Well, I will meet you in front of the Basilica after the four-o'clock procession, and you can come with me."

Then they spoke no further, each becoming absorbed in his reverie once more.

The Gave, now upon their right hand, was flowing through a deep gorge, a kind of cleft into which it plunged, vanishing from sight among the bushes. But at intervals a clear stretch of it, looking like unburnished silver, would appear to view; and, farther on, after a sudden turn in the road, they found it flowing in increased volume across a plain, where it spread at times into glassy sheets which must often have changed their beds, for the gravelly soil was ravined on all sides. The sun was now becoming very hot, and was already high in the heavens, whose limpid azure assumed a deeper tinge above the vast circle of mountains.

And it was at this turn of the road that Lourdes, still some distance away, reappeared to the eyes of Pierre and Doctor Chassaigne. In the splendid morning atmosphere, amid a flying dust of gold and purple rays, the town shone whitely on the horizon, its houses and monuments becoming more and more distinct at each step which brought them nearer. And the doctor, still silent, at last waved his arm with a broad, mournful gesture in order to call his companion's attention to this growing town, as though to a proof of all that he had been telling him. There, indeed, rising up in the dazzling daylight, was the evidence which confirmed his words.

The flare of the Grotto, fainter now that the sun was shining, could already be espied amidst the greenery. And soon afterwards the gigantic monumental works spread out: the quay with its freestone parapet skirting the Gave, whose course had been diverted; the new bridge connecting the new gardens with the recently opened boulevard; the colossal gradient ways, the massive church of the Rosary, and, finally, the slim, tapering Basilica, rising above all else with graceful pride. Of the new town spread all around the monuments, the wealthy city which had sprung, as though by enchantment, from the ancient impoverished soil, the great convents and the great hotels, you could, at this distance, merely distinguish a swarming of white facades and a scintillation of new slates; whilst, in confusion, far away, beyond the rocky mass on which the crumbling castle walls were profiled against the sky, appeared the humble roofs of the old town, a jumble of little time-worn roofs, pressing timorously against one another. And as a background to this vision of the life of yesterday and to-day, the little and the big Gers rose up beneath the splendour of the everlasting sun, and barred the horizon with their bare slopes, which the oblique rays were tingeing with streaks of pink and yellow.

Doctor Chassaigne insisted on accompanying Pierre to the Hotel of the Apparitions, and only parted from him at its door, after reminding him of their appointment for the afternoon. It was not yet eleven o'clock. Pierre, whom fatigue had suddenly mastered, forced himself to eat before going to bed, for he realised that want of food was one of the chief causes of the weakness which had come over him. He fortunately found a vacant seat at the table d'hote, and made some kind of a dejeuner, half asleep all the time, and scarcely knowing what was served to him. Then he went up-stairs and flung himself on his bed, after taking care to tell the servant to awake him at three o'clock.

However, on lying down, the fever that consumed him at first prevented him from closing his eyes. A pair of gloves, forgotten in the next room, had reminded him of M. de Guersaint, who had left for Gavarnie before daybreak, and would only return in the evening. What a delightful gift was thoughtlessness, thought Pierre. For his own part, with his limbs worn out by weariness and his mind distracted, he was sad unto death. Everything seemed to conspire against his willing desire to regain the faith of his childhood. The tale of Abbe Peyramale's tragic adventures had simply aggravated the feeling of revolt which the story of Bernadette, chosen and martyred, had implanted in his breast. And thus he asked himself whether his search after the truth, instead of restoring his faith, would not rather lead him to yet greater hatred of ignorance and credulity, and to the bitter conviction that man is indeed all alone in the world, with naught to guide him save his reason.

At last he fell asleep, but visions continued hovering around him in his painful slumber. He beheld Lourdes, contaminated by Mammon, turned into a spot of abomination and perdition, transformed into a huge bazaar, where everything was sold, masses and souls alike! He beheld also Abbe Peyramale, dead and slumbering under the ruins of his church, among the nettles which ingratitude had sown there. And he only grew calm again, only tasted the delights of forgetfulness when a last pale, woeful vision had faded from his gaze—a vision of Bernadette upon her knees in a gloomy corner at Nevers, dreaming of her far-away work, which she was never, never to behold.

THE FOURTH DAY

I. THE BITTERNESS OP DEATH

AT the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, that morning, Marie remained seated on her bed, propped up by pillows. Having spent the whole night at the Grotto, she had refused to let them take her back there. And, as Madame de Jonquiere approached her, to raise one of the pillows which was slipping from its place, she asked: "What day is it, madame?"

"Monday, my dear child."

"Ah! true. One so soon loses count of time. And, besides, I am so happy! It is to-day that the Blessed Virgin will cure me!"

She smiled divinely, with the air of a day-dreamer, her eyes gazing into vacancy, her thoughts so far away, so absorbed in her one fixed idea, that she beheld nothing save the certainty of her hope. Round about her, the Sainte-Honorine Ward was now quite deserted, all the patients, excepting Madame Vetu, who lay at the last extremity in the next bed, having already started for the Grotto. But Marie did not even notice her neighbour; she was delighted with the sudden stillness which had fallen. One of the windows overlooking the courtyard had been opened, and the glorious morning sunshine entered in one broad beam, whose golden dust was dancing over her bed and streaming upon her pale hands. It was indeed pleasant to find this room, so dismal at nighttime with its many beds of sickness, its unhealthy atmosphere, and its nightmare groans, thus suddenly filled with sunlight, purified by the morning air, and wrapped in such delicious silence! "Why don't you try to sleep a little?" maternally inquired Madame de Jonquiere. "You must be quite worn out by your vigil."

Marie, who felt so light and cheerful that she no longer experienced any pain, seemed surprised.

"But I am not at all tired, and I don't feel a bit sleepy. Go to sleep? Oh! no, that would be too sad. I should no longer know that I was going to be cured!"

At this the superintendent laughed. "Then why didn't you let them take you to the Grotto?" she asked. "You won't know what to do with yourself all alone here."

"I am not alone, madame, I am with her," replied Marie; and thereupon, her vision returning to her, she clasped her hands in ecstasy. "Last night, you know, I saw her bend her head towards me and smile. I quite understood her, I could hear her voice, although she never opened her lips. When the Blessed Sacrament passes at four o'clock I shall be cured."

Madame de Jonquiere tried to calm her, feeling rather anxious at the species of somnambulism in which she beheld her. However, the sick girl went on: "No, no, I am no worse, I am waiting. Only, you must surely see, madame, that there is no need for me to go to the Grotto this morning, since the appointment which she gave me is for four o'clock." And then the girl added in a lower tone: "Pierre will come for me at half-past three. At four o'clock I shall be cured."

The sunbeam slowly made its way up her bare arms, which were now almost transparent, so wasted had they become through illness; whilst her glorious fair hair, which had fallen over her shoulders, seemed like the very effulgence of the great luminary enveloping her. The trill of a bird came in from the courtyard, and quite enlivened the tremulous silence of the ward. Some child who could not be seen must also have been playing close by, for now and again a soft laugh could be heard ascending in the warm air which was so delightfully calm.

"Well," said Madame de Jonquiere by way of conclusion, "don't sleep then, as you don't wish to. But keep quite quiet, and it will rest you all the same."

Meantime Madame Vetu was expiring in the adjoining bed. They had not dared to take her to the Grotto, for fear they should see her die on the way. For some little time she had lain there with her eyes closed; and Sister Hyacinthe, who was watching, had beckoned to Madame Desagneaux in order to acquaint her with the bad opinion she had formed of the case. Both of them were now leaning over the dying woman, observing her with increasing anxiety. The mask upon her face had turned more yellow than ever, and now looked like a coating of mud; her eyes too had become more sunken, her lips seemed to have grown thinner, and the death rattle had begun, a slow, pestilential wheezing, polluted by the cancer which was finishing its destructive work. All at once she raised her eyelids, and was seized with fear on beholding those two faces bent over her own. Could her death be near, that they should thus be gazing at her? Immense sadness showed itself in her eyes, a despairing regret of life. It was not a vehement revolt, for she no longer had the strength to struggle; but what a frightful fate it was to have left her shop, her surroundings, and her husband, merely to come and die so far away; to have braved the abominable torture of such a journey, to have prayed both day and night, and then, instead of having her prayer granted, to die when others recovered!

However, she could do no more than murmur "Oh! how I suffer; oh! how I suffer. Do something, anything, to relieve this pain, I beseech you."

Little Madame Desagneaux, with her pretty milk-white face showing amidst her mass of fair, frizzy hair, was quite upset. She was not used to deathbed scenes, she would have given half her heart, as she expressed it, to see that poor woman recover. And she rose up and began to question Sister Hyacinthe, who was also in tears but already resigned, knowing as she did that salvation was assured when one died well. Could nothing really be done, however? Could not something be tried to ease the dying woman? Abbe Judaine had come and administered the last sacrament to her a couple of hours earlier that very morning. She now only had Heaven to look to; it was her only hope, for she had long since given up expecting aid from the skill of man.

"No, no! we must do something," exclaimed Madame Desagneaux. And thereupon she went and fetched Madame de Jonquiere from beside Marie's bed. "Look how this poor creature is suffering, madame!" she exclaimed. "Sister Hyacinthe says that she can only last a few hours longer. But we cannot leave her moaning like this. There are things which give relief. Why not call that young doctor who is here?"

"Of course we will," replied the superintendent. "We will send for him at once."

They seldom thought of the doctor in the wards. It only occurred to the ladies to send for him when a case was at its very worst, when one of their patients was howling with pain. Sister Hyacinthe, who herself felt surprised at not having thought of Ferrand, whom she believed to be in an adjoining room, inquired if she should fetch him.

"Certainly," was the reply. "Bring him as quickly as possible."

When the Sister had gone off, Madame de Jonquiere made Madame Desagneaux help her in slightly raising the dying woman's head, thinking that this might relieve her. The two ladies happened to be alone there that morning, all the other lady-hospitallers having gone to their devotions or their private affairs. However, from the end of the large deserted ward, where, amidst the warm quiver of the sunlight such sweet tranquillity prevailed, there still came at intervals the light laughter of the unseen child.

"Can it be Sophie who is making such a noise?" suddenly asked the lady-superintendent, whose nerves were somewhat upset by all the worry of the death which she foresaw. Then quickly walking to the end of the ward, she found that it was indeed Sophie Couteau—the young girl so miraculously healed the previous year—who, seated on the floor behind a bed, had been amusing herself, despite her fourteen years, in making a doll out of a few rags. She was now talking to it, so happy, so absorbed in her play, that she laughed quite heartily. "Hold yourself up, mademoiselle," said she. "Dance the polka, that I may see how you can do it! One! two! dance, turn, kiss the one you like best!"

Madame de Jonquiere, however, was now coming up. "Little girl," she said, "we have one of our patients here in great pain, and not expected to recover. You must not laugh so loud."

"Ah! madame, I didn't know," replied Sophie, rising up, and becoming quite serious, although still holding the doll in her hand. "Is she going to die, madame?"

"I fear so, my poor child."

Thereupon Sophie became quite silent. She followed the superintendent, and seated herself on an adjoining bed; whence, without the slightest sign of fear, but with her large eyes burning with curiosity, she began to watch Madame Vetu's death agony. In her nervous state, Madame Desagneaux was growing impatient at the delay in the doctor's arrival; whilst Marie, still enraptured, and resplendent in the sunlight, seemed unconscious of what was taking place about her, wrapt as she was in delightful expectancy of the miracle.

Not having found Ferrand in the small apartment near the linen-room which he usually occupied, Sister Hyacinthe was now searching for him all over the building. During the past two days the young doctor had become more bewildered than ever in that extraordinary hospital, where his assistance was only sought for the relief of death pangs. The small medicine-chest which he had brought with him proved quite useless; for there could be no thought of trying any course of treatment, as the sick were not there to be doctored, but simply to be cured by the lightning stroke of a miracle. And so he mainly confined himself to administering a few opium pills, in order to deaden the severer sufferings. He had been fairly amazed when accompanying Doctor Bonamy on a round through the wards. It had resolved itself into a mere stroll, the doctor, who had only come out of curiosity, taking no interest in the patients, whom he neither questioned nor examined. He solely concerned himself with the pretended cases of cure, stopping opposite those women whom he recognised from having seen them at his office where the miracles were verified. One of them had suffered from three complaints, only one of which the Blessed Virgin had so far deigned to cure; but great hopes were entertained respecting the other two. Sometimes, when a wretched woman, who the day before had claimed to be cured, was questioned with reference to her health, she would reply that her pains had returned to her. However, this never disturbed the doctor's serenity; ever conciliatory, the good man declared that Heaven would surely complete what Heaven had begun. Whenever there was an improvement in health, he would ask if it were not something to be thankful for. And, indeed, his constant saying was: "There's an improvement already; be patient!" What he most dreaded were the importunities of the lady-superintendents, who all wished to detain him to show him sundry extraordinary cases. Each prided herself on having the most serious illnesses, the most frightful, exceptional cases in her ward; so that she was eager to have them medically authenticated, in order that she might share in the triumph should cure supervene. One caught the doctor by the arm and assured him that she felt confident she had a leper in her charge; another entreated him to come and look at a young girl whose back, she said, was covered with fish's scales; whilst a third, whispering in his ear, gave him some terrible details about a married lady of the best society. He hastened away, however, refusing to see even one of them, or else simply promising to come back later on when he was not so busy. As he himself said, if he listened to all those ladies, the day would pass in useless consultations. However, he at last suddenly stopped opposite one of the miraculously cured inmates, and, beckoning Ferrand to his side, exclaimed: "Ah! now here is an interesting cure!" and Ferrand, utterly bewildered, had to listen to him whilst he described all the features of the illness, which had totally disappeared at the first immersion in the piscina.

At last Sister Hyacinthe, still wandering about, encountered Abbe Judaine, who informed her that the young doctor had just been summoned to the Family Ward. It was the fourth time he had gone thither to attend to Brother Isidore, whose sufferings were as acute as ever, and whom he could only fill with opium. In his agony, the Brother merely asked to be soothed a little, in order that he might gather together sufficient strength to return to the Grotto in the afternoon, as he had not been able to do so in the morning. However, his pains increased, and at last he swooned away.

When the Sister entered the ward she found the doctor seated at the missionary's bedside. "Monsieur Ferrand," she said, "come up-stairs with me to the Sainte-Honorine Ward at once. We have a patient there at the point of death."

He smiled at her; indeed, he never beheld her without feeling brighter and comforted. "I will come with you, Sister," he replied. "But you'll wait a minute, won't you? I must try to restore this poor man."

She waited patiently and made herself useful. The Family Ward, situated on the ground-floor, was also full of sunshine and fresh air which entered through three large windows opening on to a narrow strip of garden. In addition to Brother Isidore, only Monsieur Sabathier had remained in bed that morning, with the view of obtaining a little rest; whilst Madame Sabathier, taking advantage of the opportunity, had gone to purchase a few medals and pictures, which she intended for presents. Comfortably seated on his bed, his back supported by some pillows, the ex-professor was rolling the beads of a chaplet between his fingers. He was no longer praying, however, but merely continuing the operation in a mechanical manner, his eyes, meantime, fixed upon his neighbour, whose attack he was following with painful interest.

"Ah! Sister," said he to Sister Hyacinthe, who had drawn near, "that poor Brother fills me with admiration. Yesterday I doubted the Blessed Virgin for a moment, seeing that she did not deign to hear me, though I have been coming here for seven years past; but the example set me by that poor martyr, so resigned amidst his torments, has quite shamed me for my want of faith. You can have no idea how grievously he suffers, and you should see him at the Grotto, with his eyes glowing with divine hope! It is really sublime! I only know of one picture at the Louvre—a picture by some unknown Italian master—in which there is the head of a monk beatified by a similar faith."

The man of intellect, the ex-university-professor, reared on literature and art, was reappearing in this poor old fellow, whose life had been blasted, and who had desired to become a free patient, one of the poor of the earth, in order to move the pity of Heaven. He again began thinking of his own case, and with tenacious hopefulness, which the futility of seven journeys to Lourdes had failed to destroy, he added: "Well, I still have this afternoon, since we sha'n't leave till to-morrow. The water is certainly very cold, but I shall let them dip me a last time; and all the morning I have been praying and asking pardon for my revolt of yesterday. When the Blessed Virgin chooses to cure one of her children, it only takes her a second to do so; is that not so, Sister? May her will be done, and blessed be her name!"

Passing the beads of the chaplet more slowly between his fingers, he again began saying his "Aves" and "Paters," whilst his eyelids drooped on his flabby face, to which a childish expression had been returning during the many years that he had been virtually cut off from the world.

Meantime Ferrand had signalled to Brother Isidore's sister, Marthe, to come to him. She had been standing at the foot of the bed with her arms hanging down beside her, showing the tearless resignation of a poor, narrow-minded girl whilst she watched that dying man whom she worshipped. She was no more than a faithful dog; she had accompanied her brother and spent her scanty savings, without being of any use save to watch him suffer. Accordingly, when the doctor told her to take the invalid in her arms and raise him up a little, she felt quite happy at being of some service at last. Her heavy, freckled, mournful face actually grew bright.

"Hold him," said the doctor, "whilst I try to give him this."

When she had raised him, Ferrand, with the aid of a small spoon, succeeded in introducing a few drops of liquid between his set teeth. Almost immediately the sick man opened his eyes and heaved a deep sigh. He was calmer already; the opium was taking effect and dulling the pain which he felt burning his right side, as though a red-hot iron were being applied to it. However, he remained so weak that, when he wished to speak, it became necessary to place one's ear close to his mouth in order to catch what he said. With a slight sign he had begged Ferrand to bend over him. "You are the doctor, monsieur, are you not?" he faltered. "Give me sufficient strength that I may go once more to the Grotto, this afternoon. I am certain that, if I am able to go, the Blessed Virgin will cure me."

"Why, of course you shall go," replied the young man. "Don't you feel ever so much better?"

"Oh! ever so much better—no! I know very well what my condition is, because I saw many of our Brothers die, out there in Senegal. When the liver is attacked and the abscess has worked its way outside, it means the end. Sweating, fever, and delirium follow. But the Blessed Virgin will touch the sore with her little finger and it will be healed. Oh! I implore you all, take me to the Grotto, even if I should be unconscious!"

Sister Hyacinthe had also approached, and leant over him. "Be easy, dear Brother," said she. "You shall go to the Grotto after dejeuner, and we will all pray for you."

At length, in despair at these delays and extremely anxious about Madame Vetu, she was able to get Ferrand away. Still, the Brother's state filled her with pity; and, as they ascended the stairs, she questioned the doctor, asking him if there were really no more hope. The other made a gesture expressive of absolute hopelessness. It was madness to come to Lourdes when one was in such a condition. However, he hastened to add, with a smile: "I beg your pardon, Sister. You know that I am unfortunate enough not to be a believer."

But she smiled in her turn, like an indulgent friend who tolerates the shortcomings of those she loves. "Oh! that doesn't matter," she replied. "I know you; you're all the same a good fellow. Besides, we see so many people, we go amongst such pagans that it would be difficult to shock us."

Up above, in the Sainte-Honorine Ward, they found Madame Vetu still moaning, a prey to most intolerable suffering. Madame de Jonquiere and Madame Desagneaux had remained beside the bed, their faces turning pale, their hearts distracted by that death-cry, which never ceased. And when they consulted Ferrand in a whisper, he merely replied, with a slight shrug of the shoulders, that she was a lost woman, that it was only a question of hours, perhaps merely of minutes. All he could do was to stupefy her also, in order to ease the atrocious death agony which he foresaw. She was watching him, still conscious, and also very obedient, never refusing the medicine offered her. Like the others, she now had but one ardent desire—to go back to the Grotto—and she gave expression to it in the stammering accents of a child who fears that its prayer may not be granted: "To the Grotto—will you? To the Grotto!"

"You shall be taken there by-and-by, I promise you," said Sister Hyacinthe. "But you must be good. Try to sleep a little to gain some strength."

The sick woman appeared to sink into a doze, and Madame de Jonquiere then thought that she might take Madame Desagneaux with her to the other end of the ward to count the linen, a troublesome business, in which they became quite bewildered, as some of the articles were missing. Meantime Sophie, seated on the bed opposite Madame Vetu, had not stirred. She had laid her doll on her lap, and was waiting for the lady's death, since they had told her that she was about to die. Sister Hyacinthe, moreover, had remained beside the dying woman, and, unwilling to waste her time, had taken a needle and cotton to mend some patient's bodice which had a hole in the sleeve.

"You'll stay a little while with us, won't you?" she asked Ferrand.

The latter, who was still watching Madame Vetu, replied: "Yes, yes. She may go off at any moment. I fear hemorrhage." Then, catching sight of Marie on the neighbouring bed, he added in a lower voice: "How is she? Has she experienced any relief?"

"No, not yet. Ah, dear child! we all pray for her very sincerely. She is so young, so sweet, and so sorely afflicted. Just look at her now! Isn't she pretty? One might think her a saint amid all this sunshine, with her large, ecstatic eyes, and her golden hair shining like an aureola!"

Ferrand watched Marie for a moment with interest. Her absent air, her indifference to all about her, the ardent faith, the internal joy which so completely absorbed her, surprised him. "She will recover," he murmured, as though giving utterance to a prognostic. "She will recover."

Then he rejoined Sister Hyacinthe, who had seated herself in the embrasure of the lofty window, which stood wide open, admitting the warm air of the courtyard. The sun was now creeping round, and only a narrow golden ray fell upon her white coif and wimple. Ferrand stood opposite to her, leaning against the window bar and watching her while she sewed. "Do you know, Sister," said he, "this journey to Lourdes, which I undertook to oblige a friend, will be one of the few delights of my life."

She did not understand him, but innocently asked: "Why so?"

"Because I have found you again, because I am here with you, assisting you in your admirable work. And if you only knew how grateful I am to you, what sincere affection and reverence I feel for you!"

She raised her head to look him straight in the face, and began jesting without the least constraint. She was really delicious, with her pure lily-white complexion, her small laughing mouth, and adorable blue eyes which ever smiled. And you could realise that she had grown up in all innocence and devotion, slender and supple, with all the appearance of a girl hardly in her teens.

"What! You are so fond of me as all that!" she exclaimed. "Why?"

"Why I'm fond of you? Because you are the best, the most consoling, the most sisterly of beings. You are the sweetest memory in my life, the memory I evoke whenever I need to be encouraged and sustained. Do you no longer remember the month we spent together, in my poor room, when I was so ill and you so affectionately nursed me?"

"Of course, of course I remember it! Why, I never had so good a patient as you. You took all I offered you; and when I tucked you in, after changing your linen, you remained as still as a little child."

So speaking, she continued looking at him, smiling ingenuously the while. He was very handsome and robust, in the very prime of youth, with a rather pronounced nose, superb eyes, and red lips showing under his black moustache. But she seemed to be simply pleased at seeing him there before her moved almost to tears.

"Ah! Sister, I should have died if it hadn't been for you," he said. "It was through having you that I was cured."

Then, as they gazed at one another, with tender gaiety of heart, the memory of that adorable month recurred to them. They no longer heard Madame Vetu's death moans, nor beheld the ward littered with beds, and, with all its disorder, resembling some infirmary improvised after a public catastrophe. They once more found themselves in a small attic at the top of a dingy house in old Paris, where air and light only reached them through a tiny window opening on to a sea of roofs. And how charming it was to be alone there together—he who had been prostrated by fever, she who had appeared there like a good angel, who had quietly come from her convent like a comrade who fears nothing! It was thus that she nursed women, children, and men, as chance ordained, feeling perfectly happy so long as she had something to do, some sufferer to relieve. She never displayed any consciousness of her sex; and he, on his side, never seemed to have suspected that she might be a woman, except it were for the extreme softness of her hands, the caressing accents of her voice, the beneficent gentleness of her manner; and yet all the tender love of a mother, all the affection of a sister, radiated from her person. During three weeks, as she had said, she had nursed him like a child, helping him in and out of bed, and rendering him every necessary attention, without the slightest embarrassment or repugnance, the holy purity born of suffering and charity shielding them both the while. They were indeed far removed from the frailties of life. And when he became convalescent, what a happy existence began, how joyously they laughed, like two old friends! She still watched over him, scolding him and gently slapping his arms when he persisted in keeping them uncovered. He would watch her standing at the basin, washing him a shirt in order to save him the trifling expense of employing a laundress. No one ever came up there; they were quite alone, thousands of miles away from the world, delighted with this solitude, in which their youth displayed such fraternal gaiety.

"Do you remember, Sister, the morning when I was first able to walk about?" asked Ferrand. "You helped me to get up, and supported me whilst I awkwardly stumbled about, no longer knowing how to use my legs. We did laugh so."

"Yes, yes, you were saved, and I was very pleased."

"And the day when you brought me some cherries—I can see it all again: myself reclining on my pillows, and you seated at the edge of the bed, with the cherries lying between us in a large piece of white paper. I refused to touch them unless you ate some with me. And then we took them in turn, one at a time, until the paper was emptied; and they were very nice."

"Yes, yes, very nice. It was the same with the currant syrup: you would only drink it when I took some also."

Thereupon they laughed yet louder; these recollections quite delighted them. But a painful sigh from Madame Vetu brought them back to the present. Ferrand leant over and cast a glance at the sick woman, who had not stirred. The ward was still full of a quivering peacefulness, which was only broken by the clear voice of Madame Desagneaux counting the linen. Stifling with emotion, the young man resumed in a lower tone: "Ah! Sister, were I to live a hundred years, to know every joy, every pleasure, I should never love another woman as I love you!"

Then Sister Hyacinthe, without, however, showing any confusion, bowed her head and resumed her sewing. An almost imperceptible blush tinged her lily-white skin with pink.

"I also love you well, Monsieur Ferrand," she said, "but you must not make me vain. I only did for you what I do for so many others. It is my business, you see. And there was really only one pleasant thing about it all, that the Almighty cured you."

They were now again interrupted. La Grivotte and Elise Rouquet had returned from the Grotto before the others. La Grivotte at once squatted down on her mattress on the floor, at the foot of Madame Vetu's bed, and, taking a piece of bread from her pocket, proceeded to devour it. Ferrand, since the day before, had felt some interest in this consumptive patient, who was traversing such a curious phase of agitation, a prey to an inordinate appetite and a feverish need of motion. For the moment, however, Elise Rouquet's case interested him still more; for it had now become evident that the lupus, the sore which was eating away her face, was showing signs of cure. She had continued bathing her face at the miraculous fountain, and had just come from the Verification Office, where Doctor Bonamy had triumphed. Ferrand, quite surprised, went and examined the sore, which, although still far from healed, was already paler in colour and slightly desiccated, displaying all the symptoms of gradual cure. And the case seemed to him so curious, that he resolved to make some notes upon it for one of his old masters at the medical college, who was studying the nervous origin of certain skin diseases due to faulty nutrition.

"Have you felt any pricking sensation?" he asked.

"Not at all, monsieur," she replied. "I bathe my face and tell my beads with my whole soul, and that is all."

La Grivotte, who was vain and jealous, and ever since the day before had been going in triumph among the crowds, thereupon called to the doctor. "I say, monsieur, I am cured, cured, cured completely!"

He waved his hand to her in a friendly way, but refused to examine her. "I know, my girl. There is nothing more the matter with you."

Just then Sister Hyacinthe called to him. She had put her sewing down on seeing Madame Vetu raise herself in a frightful fit of nausea. In spite of her haste, however, she was too late with the basin; the sick woman had brought up another discharge of black matter, similar to soot; but, this time, some blood was mixed with it, little specks of violet-coloured blood. It was the hemorrhage coming, the near end which Ferrand had been dreading.

"Send for the superintendent," he said in a low voice, seating himself at the bedside.

Sister Hyacinthe ran for Madame de Jonquiere. The linen having been counted, she found her deep in conversation with her daughter Raymonde, at some distance from Madame Desagneaux, who was washing her hands.

Raymonde had just escaped for a few minutes from the refectory, where she was on duty. This was the roughest of her labours. The long narrow room, with its double row of greasy tables, its sickening smell of food and misery, quite disgusted her. And taking advantage of the half-hour still remaining before the return of the patients, she had hurried up-stairs, where, out of breath, with a rosy face and shining eyes, she had thrown her arms around her mother's neck.

"Ah! mamma," she cried, "what happiness! It's settled!"

Amazed, her head buzzing, busy with the superintendence of her ward, Madame de Jonquiere did not understand. "What's settled, my child?" she asked.

Then Raymonde lowered her voice, and, with a faint blush, replied: "My marriage!"

It was now the mother's turn to rejoice. Lively satisfaction appeared upon her face, the fat face of a ripe, handsome, and still agreeable woman. She at once beheld in her mind's eye their little lodging in the Rue Vaneau, where, since her husband's death, she had reared her daughter with great difficulty upon the few thousand francs he had left her. This marriage, however, meant a return to life, to society, the good old times come back once more.

"Ah! my child, how happy you make me!" she exclaimed.

But a feeling of uneasiness suddenly restrained her. God was her witness that for three years past she had been coming to Lourdes through pure motives of charity, for the one great joy of nursing His beloved invalids. Perhaps, had she closely examined her conscience, she might, behind her devotion, have found some trace of her fondness for authority, which rendered her present managerial duties extremely pleasant to her. However, the hope of finding a husband for her daughter among the suitable young men who swarmed at the Grotto was certainly her last thought. It was a thought which came to her, of course, but merely as something that was possible, though she never mentioned it. However, her happiness, wrung an avowal from her:

"Ah! my child, your success doesn't surprise me. I prayed to the Blessed Virgin for it this morning."

Then she wished to be quite sure, and asked for further information. Raymonde had not yet told her of her long walk leaning on Gerard's arm the day before, for she did not wish to speak of such things until she was triumphant, certain of having at last secured a husband. And now it was indeed settled, as she had exclaimed so gaily: that very morning she had again seen the young man at the Grotto, and he had formally become engaged to her. M. Berthaud would undoubtedly ask for her hand on his cousin's behalf before they took their departure from Lourdes.

"Well," declared Madame de Jonquiere, who was now convinced, smiling, and delighted at heart, "I hope you will be happy, since you are so sensible and do not need my aid to bring your affairs to a successful issue. Kiss me."

It was at this moment that Sister Hyacinthe arrived to announce Madame Vetu's imminent death. Raymonde at once ran off. And Madame Desagneaux, who was wiping her hands, began to complain of the lady-assistants, who had all disappeared precisely on the morning when they were most wanted. "For instance," said she, "there's Madame Volmar. I should like to know where she can have got to. She has not been seen, even for an hour, ever since our arrival."

"Pray leave Madame Volmar alone!" replied Madame de Jonquiere with some asperity. "I have already told you that she is ill."

They both hastened to Madame Vetu. Ferrand stood there waiting; and Sister Hyacinthe having asked him if there were indeed nothing to be done, he shook his head. The dying woman, relieved by her first emesis, now lay inert, with closed eyes. But, a second time, the frightful nausea returned to her, and she brought up another discharge of black matter mingled with violet-coloured blood. Then she had another short interval of calm, during which she noticed La Grivotte, who was greedily devouring her hunk of bread on the mattress on the floor.

"She is cured, isn't she?" the poor woman asked, feeling that she herself was dying.

La Grivotte heard her, and exclaimed triumphantly: "Oh, yes, madame, cured, cured, cured completely!"

For a moment Madame Vetu seemed overcome by a miserable feeling of grief, the revolt of one who will not succumb while others continue to live. But almost immediately she became resigned, and they heard her add very faintly, "It is the young ones who ought to remain."

Then her eyes, which remained wide open, looked round, as though bidding farewell to all those persons, whom she seemed surprised to see about her. She attempted to smile as she encountered the eager gaze of curiosity which little Sophie Couteau still fixed upon her: the charming child had come to kiss her that very morning, in her bed. Elise Rouquet, who troubled herself about nobody, was meantime holding her hand-glass, absorbed in the contemplation of her face, which seemed to her to be growing beautiful, now that the sore was healing. But what especially charmed the dying woman was the sight of Marie, so lovely in her ecstasy. She watched her for a long time, constantly attracted towards her, as towards a vision of light and joy. Perhaps she fancied that she already beheld one of the saints of Paradise amid the glory of the sun.

Suddenly, however, the fits of vomiting returned, and now she solely brought up blood, vitiated blood, the colour of claret. The rush was so great that it bespattered the sheet, and ran all over the bed. In vain did Madame de Jonquiere and Madame Desagneaux bring cloths; they were both very pale and scarce able to remain standing. Ferrand, knowing how powerless he was, had withdrawn to the window, to the very spot where he had so lately experienced such delicious emotion; and with an instinctive movement, of which she was surely unconscious, Sister Hyacinthe had likewise returned to that happy window, as though to be near him.

"Really, can you do nothing?" she inquired.

"No, nothing! She will go off like that, in the same way as a lamp that has burnt out."

Madame Vetu, who was now utterly exhausted, with a thin red stream still flowing from her mouth, looked fixedly at Madame de Jonquiere whilst faintly moving her lips. The lady-superintendent thereupon bent over her and heard these slowly uttered words:

"About my husband, madame—the shop is in the Rue Mouffetard—oh! it's quite a tiny one, not far from the Gobelins.—He's a clockmaker, he is; he couldn't come with me, of course, having to attend to the business; and he will be very much put out when he finds I don't come back.—Yes, I cleaned the jewelry and did the errands—" Then her voice grew fainter, her words disjointed by the death rattle, which began. "Therefore, madame, I beg you will write to him, because I haven't done so, and now here's the end.—Tell him my body had better remain here at Lourdes, on account of the expense.—And he must marry again; it's necessary for one in trade—his cousin—tell him his cousin—"

The rest became a confused murmur. Her weakness was too great, her breath was halting. Yet her eyes continued open and full of life, amid her pale, yellow, waxy mask. And those eyes seemed to fix themselves despairingly on the past, on all that which soon would be no more: the little clockmaker's shop hidden away in a populous neighbourhood; the gentle humdrum existence, with a toiling husband who was ever bending over his watches; the great pleasures of Sunday, such as watching children fly their kites upon the fortifications. And at last these staring eyes gazed vainly into the frightful night which was gathering.

A last time did Madame de Jonquiere lean over her, seeing that her lips were again moving. There came but a faint breath, a voice from far away, which distantly murmured in an accent of intense grief: "She did not cure me."

And then Madame Vetu expired, very gently.

As though this were all that she had been waiting for, little Sophie Couteau jumped from the bed quite satisfied, and went off to play with her doll again at the far end of the ward. Neither La Grivotte, who was finishing her bread, nor Elise Rouquet, busy with her mirror, noticed the catastrophe. However, amidst the cold breath which seemingly swept by, while Madame de Jonquiere and Madame Desagneaux—the latter of whom was unaccustomed to the sight of death—were whispering together in agitation, Marie emerged from the expectant rapture in which the continuous, unspoken prayer of her whole being had plunged her so long. And when she understood what had happened, a feeling of sisterly compassion—the compassion of a suffering companion, on her side certain of cure—brought tears to her eyes.

"Ah! the poor woman!" she murmured; "to think that she has died so far from home, in such loneliness, at the hour when others are being born anew!"

Ferrand, who, in spite of professional indifference, had also been stirred by the scene, stepped forward to verify the death; and it was on a sign from him that Sister Hyacinthe turned up the sheet, and threw it over the dead woman's face, for there could be no question of removing the corpse at that moment. The patients were now returning from the Grotto in bands, and the ward, hitherto so calm, so full of sunshine, was again filling with the tumult of wretchedness and pain—deep coughing and feeble shuffling, mingled with a noisome smell—a pitiful display, in fact, of well-nigh every human infirmity.

II. THE SERVICE AT THE GROTTO

ON that day, Monday, the crowd at the Grotto, was enormous. It was the last day that the national pilgrimage would spend at Lourdes, and Father Fourcade, in his morning address, had said that it would be necessary to make a supreme effort of fervour and faith to obtain from Heaven all that it might be willing to grant in the way of grace and prodigious cure. So, from two o'clock in the afternoon, twenty thousand pilgrims were assembled there, feverish, and agitated by the most ardent hopes. From minute to minute the throng continued increasing, to such a point, indeed, that Baron Suire became alarmed, and came out of the Grotto to say to Berthaud: "My friend, we shall be overwhelmed, that's certain. Double your squads, bring your men closer together."

The Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation was alone entrusted with the task of keeping order, for there were neither guardians nor policemen, of any sort present; and it was for this reason that the President of the Association was so alarmed. However, Berthaud, under grave circumstances, was a leader whose words commanded attention, and who was endowed with energy that could be relied on.

"Be easy," said he; "I will be answerable for everything. I shall not move from here until the four-o'clock procession has passed by."

Nevertheless, he signalled to Gerard to approach.

"Give your men the strictest instructions," he said to him. "Only those persons who have cards should be allowed to pass. And place your men nearer each other; tell them to hold the cord tight."

Yonder, beneath the ivy which draped the rock, the Grotto opened, with the eternal flaring of its candles. From a distance it looked rather squat and misshapen, a very narrow and modest aperture for the breath of the Infinite which issued from it, turning all faces pale and bowing every head. The statue of the Virgin had become a mere white spot, which seemed to move amid the quiver of the atmosphere, heated by the small yellow flames. To see everything it was necessary to raise oneself; for the silver altar, the harmonium divested of its housing, the heap of bouquets flung there, and the votive offerings streaking the smoky walls were scarcely distinguishable from behind the railing. And the day was lovely; never yet had a purer sky expanded above the immense crowd; the softness of the breeze in particular seemed delicious after the storm of the night, which had brought down the over-oppressive heat of the two first days.

Gerard had to fight his way with his elbows in order to repeat the orders to his men. The crowd had already begun pushing. "Two more men here!" he called. "Come, four together, if necessary, and hold the rope well!"

The general impulse was instinctive and invincible; the twenty thousand persons assembled there were drawn towards the Grotto by an irresistible attraction, in which burning curiosity mingled with the thirst for mystery. All eyes converged, every mouth, hand, and body was borne towards the pale glitter of the candles and the white moving speck of the marble Virgin. And, in order that the large space reserved to the sick, in front of the railings, might not be invaded by the swelling mob, it had been necessary to inclose it with a stout rope which the bearers at intervals of two or three yards grasped with both hands. Their orders were to let nobody pass excepting the sick provided with hospital cards and the few persons to whom special authorisations had been granted. They limited themselves, therefore, to raising the cords and then letting them fall behind the chosen ones, without heeding the supplications of the others. In fact they even showed themselves somewhat rough, taking a certain pleasure in exercising the authority with which they were invested for a day. In truth, however, they were very much pushed about, and had to support each other and resist with all the strength of their loins to avoid being swept away.

While the benches before the Grotto and the vast reserved space were filling with sick people, handcarts, and stretchers, the crowd, the immense crowd, swayed about on the outskirts. Starting from the Place du Rosaire, it extended to the bottom of the promenade along the Gave, where the pavement throughout its entire length was black with people, so dense a human sea that all circulation was prevented. On the parapet was an interminable line of women—most of them seated, but some few standing so as to see the better—and almost all carrying silk parasols, which, with holiday-like gaiety, shimmered in the sunlight. The managers had wished to keep a path open in order that the sick might be brought along; but it was ever being invaded and obstructed, so that the carts and stretchers remained on the road, submerged and lost until a bearer freed them. Nevertheless, the great tramping was that of a docile flock, an innocent, lamb-like crowd; and it was only the involuntary pushing, the blind rolling towards the light of the candles that had to be contended against. No accident had ever happened there, notwithstanding the excitement, which gradually increased and threw the people into the unruly delirium of faith.

However, Baron Suire again forced his way through the throng. "Berthaud! Berthaud!" he called, "see that the defile is conducted less rapidly. There are women and children stifling."

This time Berthaud gave a sign of impatience. "Ah! hang it, I can't be everywhere! Close the gate for a moment if it's necessary."

It was a question of the march through the Grotto which went on throughout the afternoon. The faithful were permitted to enter by the door on the left, and made their exit by that on the right.

"Close the gate!" exclaimed the Baron. "But that would be worse; they would all get crushed against it!"

As it happened Gerard was there, thoughtlessly talking for an instant with Raymonde, who was standing on the other side of the cord, holding a bowl of milk which she was about to carry to a paralysed old woman; and Berthaud ordered the young fellow to post two men at the entrance gate of the iron railing, with instructions only to allow the pilgrims to enter by tens. When Gerard had executed this order, and returned, he found Berthaud laughing and joking with Raymonde. She went off on her errand, however, and the two men stood watching her while she made the paralysed woman drink.

"She is charming, and it's settled, eh?" said Berthaud. "You are going to marry her, aren't you?"

"I shall ask her mother to-night. I rely upon you to accompany me."

"Why, certainly. You know what I told you. Nothing could be more sensible. The uncle will find you a berth before six months are over."

A push of the crowd separated them, and Berthaud went off to make sure whether the march through the Grotto was now being accomplished in a methodical manner, without any crushing. For hours the same unbroken tide rolled in—women, men, and children from all parts of the world, all who chose, all who passed that way. As a result, the crowd was singularly mixed: there were beggars in rags beside neat bourgeois, peasants of either sex, well dressed ladies, servants with bare hair, young girls with bare feet, and others with pomatumed hair and foreheads bound with ribbons. Admission was free; the mystery was open to all, to unbelievers as well as to the faithful, to those who were solely influenced by curiosity as well as to those who entered with their hearts faint with love. And it was a sight to see them, all almost equally affected by the tepid odour of the wax, half stifling in the heavy tabernacle air which gathered beneath the rocky vault, and lowering their eyes for fear of slipping on the gratings. Many stood there bewildered, not even bowing, examining the things around with the covert uneasiness of indifferent folks astray amidst the redoubtable mysteries of a sanctuary. But the devout crossed themselves, threw letters, deposited candles and bouquets, kissed the rock below the Virgin's statue, or else rubbed their chaplets, medals, and other small objects of piety against it, as the contact sufficed to bless them. And the defile continued, continued without end during days and months as it had done for years; and it seemed as if the whole world, all the miseries and sufferings of humanity, came in turn and passed in the same hypnotic, contagious kind of round, through that rocky nook, ever in search of happiness.

When Berthaud had satisfied himself that everything was working well, he walked about like a mere spectator, superintending his men. Only one matter remained to trouble him: the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, during which such frenzy burst forth that accidents were always to be feared.

This last day seemed likely to be a very fervent one, for he already felt a tremor of exalted faith rising among the crowd. The treatment needed for miraculous care was drawing to an end; there had been the fever of the journey, the besetting influence of the same endlessly repeated hymns, and the stubborn continuation of the same religious exercises; and ever and ever the conversation had been turned on miracles, and the mind fixed on the divine illumination of the Grotto. Many, not having slept for three nights, had reached a state of hallucination, and walked about in a rageful dream. No repose was granted them, the continual prayers were like whips lashing their souls. The appeals to the Blessed Virgin never ceased; priest followed priest in the pulpit, proclaiming the universal dolour and directing the despairing supplications of the throng, during the whole time that the sick remained with hands clasped and eyes raised to heaven before the pale, smiling, marble statue.

At that moment the white stone pulpit against the rock on the right of the Grotto was occupied by a priest from Toulouse, whom Berthaud knew, and to whom he listened for a moment with an air of approval. He was a stout man with an unctuous diction, famous for his rhetorical successes. However, all eloquence here consisted in displaying the strength of one's lungs in a violent delivery of the phrase or cry which the whole crowd had to repeat; for the addresses were nothing more than so much vociferation interspersed with "Ayes" and "Paters."

The priest, who had just finished the Rosary, strove to increase his stature by stretching his short legs, whilst shouting the first appeal of the litanies which he improvised, and led in his own way, according to the inspiration which possessed him.

"Mary, we love thee!" he called.

And thereupon the crowd repeated in a lower, confused, and broken tone: "Mary, we love thee!"

From that moment there was no stopping. The voice of the priest rang out at full swing, and the voices of the crowd responded in a dolorous murmur:

"Mary, thou art our only hope!"

"Mary, thou art our only hope!"

"Pure Virgin, make us purer, among the pure!"

"Pure Virgin, make us purer, among the pure!"

"Powerful Virgin, save our sick!"

"Powerful Virgin, save our sick!"

Often, when the priest's imagination failed him, or he wished to thrust a cry home with greater force, he would repeat it thrice; while the docile crowd would do the same, quivering under the enervating effect of the persistent lamentation, which increased the fever.

The litanies continued, and Berthaud went back towards the Grotto. Those who defiled through it beheld an extraordinary sight when they turned and faced the sick. The whole of the large space between the cords was occupied by the thousand or twelve hundred patients whom the national pilgrimage had brought with it; and beneath the vast, spotless sky on that radiant day there was the most heart-rending jumble of sufferers that one could behold. The three hospitals of Lourdes had emptied their chambers of horror. To begin with, those who were still able to remain seated had been piled upon the benches. Many of them, however, were propped up with cushions, whilst others kept shoulder to shoulder, the strong ones supporting the weak. Then, in front of the benches, before the Grotto itself, were the more grievously afflicted sufferers lying at full length; the flagstones disappearing from view beneath this woeful assemblage, which was like a large, stagnant pool of horror. There was an indescribable block of vehicles, stretchers, and mattresses. Some of the invalids in little boxes not unlike coffins had raised themselves up and showed above the others, but the majority lay almost on a level with the ground. There were some lying fully dressed on the check-patterned ticks of mattresses; whilst others had been brought with their bedding, so that only their heads and pale hands were seen outside the sheets. Few of these pallets were clean. Some pillows of dazzling whiteness, which by a last feeling of coquetry had been trimmed with embroidery, alone shone out among all the filthy wretchedness of all the rest—a fearful collection of rags, worn-out blankets, and linen splashed with stains. And all were pushed, squeezed, piled up by chance as they came, women, men, children, and priests, people in nightgowns beside people who were fully attired being jumbled together in the blinding light of day.

And all forms of disease were there, the whole frightful procession which, twice a day, left the hospitals to wend its way through horrified Lourdes. There were the heads eaten away by eczema, the foreheads crowned with roseola, and the noses and mouths which elephantiasis had transformed into shapeless snouts. Next, the dropsical ones, swollen out like leathern bottles; the rheumatic ones with twisted hands and swollen feet, like bags stuffed full of rags; and a sufferer from hydrocephalus, whose huge and weighty skull fell backwards. Then the consumptive ones, with livid skins, trembling with fever, exhausted by dysentery, wasted to skeletons. Then the deformities, the contractions, the twisted trunks, the twisted arms, the necks all awry; all the poor broken, pounded creatures, motionless in their tragic, marionette-like postures. Then the poor rachitic girls displaying their waxen complexions and slender necks eaten into by sores; the yellow-faced, besotted-looking women in the painful stupor which falls on unfortunate creatures devoured by cancer; and the others who turned pale, and dared not move, fearing as they did the shock of the tumours whose weighty pain was stifling them. On the benches sat bewildered deaf women, who heard nothing, but sang on all the same, and blind ones with heads erect, who remained for hours turned toward the statue of the Virgin which they could not see. And there was also the woman stricken with imbecility, whose nose was eaten away, and who laughed with a terrifying laugh, displaying the black, empty cavern of her mouth; and then the epileptic woman, whom a recent attack had left as pale as death, with froth still at the corners of her lips.

But sickness and suffering were no longer of consequence, since they were all there, seated or stretched with their eyes upon the Grotto. The poor, fleshless, earthy-looking faces became transfigured, and began to glow with hope. Anchylosed hands were joined, heavy eyelids found the strength to rise, exhausted voices revived as the priest shouted the appeals. At first there was nothing but indistinct stuttering, similar to slight puffs of air rising, here and there above the multitude. Then the cry ascended and spread through the crowd itself from one to the other end of the immense square.

"Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us!" cried the priest in his thundering voice.

And the sick and the pilgrims repeated louder and louder: "Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us!"

Then the flow of the litany set in, and continued with increasing speed:

"Most pure Mother, most chaste Mother, thy children are at thy feet!"

"Most pure Mother, most chaste Mother, thy children are at thy feet!"

"Queen of the Angels, say but a word, and our sick shall be healed!"

"Queen of the Angels, say but a word, and our sick shall be healed!"

In the second row of sufferers, near the pulpit, was M. Sabathier, who had asked to be brought there early, wishing to choose his place like an old habitue who knew the cosy corners. Moreover, it seemed to him that it was of paramount importance that he should be as near as possible, under the very eyes of the Virgin, as though she required to see her faithful in order not to forget them. However, for the seven years that he had been coming there he had nursed this one hope of being some day noticed by her, of touching her, and of obtaining his cure, if not by selection, at least by seniority. This merely needed patience on his part without the firmness of his faith being in the least shaken by his way of thinking. Only, like a poor, resigned man just a little weary of being always put off, he sometimes allowed himself diversions. For instance, he had obtained permission to keep his wife near him, seated on a camp-stool, and he liked to talk to her, and acquaint her with his reflections.

"Raise me a little, my dear," said he. "I am slipping. I am very uncomfortable."

Attired in trousers and a coarse woollen jacket, he was sitting upon his mattress, with his back leaning against a tilted chair.

"Are you better?" asked his wife, when she had raised him.

"Yes, yes," he answered; and then began to take an interest in Brother Isidore, whom they had succeeded in bringing in spite of everything, and who was lying upon a neighbouring mattress, with a sheet drawn up to his chin, and nothing protruding but his wasted hands, which lay clasped upon the blanket.

"Ah! the poor man," said M. Sabathier. "It's very imprudent, but the Blessed Virgin is so powerful when she chooses!"

He took up his chaplet again, but once more broke off from his devotions on perceiving Madame Maze, who had just glided into the reserved space—so slender and unobtrusive that she had doubtless slipped under the ropes without being noticed. She had seated herself at the end of a bench and, very quiet and motionless, did not occupy more room there than a child. And her long face, with its weary features, the face of a woman of two-and-thirty faded before her time, wore an expression of unlimited sadness, infinite abandonment.

"And so," resumed M. Sabathier in a low voice, again addressing his wife after attracting her attention by a slight movement of the chin, "it's for the conversion of her husband that this lady prays. You came across her this morning in a shop, didn't you?"

"Yes, yes," replied Madame Sabathier. "And, besides, I had some talk about her with another lady who knows her. Her husband is a commercial-traveller. He leaves her for six months at a time, and goes about with other people. Oh! he's a very gay fellow, it seems, very nice, and he doesn't let her want for money; only she adores him, she cannot accustom herself to his neglect, and comes to pray the Blessed Virgin to give him back to her. At this moment, it appears, he is close by, at Luchon, with two ladies—two sisters."

M. Sabathier signed to his wife to stop. He was now looking at the Grotto, again becoming a man of intellect, a professor whom questions of art had formerly impassioned. "You see, my dear," he said, "they have spoilt the Grotto by endeavouring to make it too beautiful. I am certain it looked much better in its original wildness. It has lost its characteristic features—and what a frightful shop they have stuck there, on the left!"

However, he now experienced sudden remorse for his thoughtlessness. Whilst he was chatting away, might not the Blessed Virgin be noticing one of his neighbours, more fervent, more sedate than himself? Feeling anxious on the point, he reverted to his customary modesty and patience, and with dull, expressionless eyes again began waiting for the good pleasure of Heaven.

Moreover, the sound of a fresh voice helped to bring him back to this annihilation, in which nothing was left of the cultured reasoner that he had formerly been. It was another preacher who had just entered the pulpit, a Capuchin this time, whose guttural call, persistently repeated, sent a tremor through the crowd.

"Holy Virgin of virgins, be blessed!"

"Holy Virgin of virgins, be blessed!"

"Holy Virgin of virgins, turn not thy face from thy children!"

"Holy Virgin of virgins, turn not thy face from thy children!"

"Holy Virgin of virgins, breathe upon our sores, and our sores shall heal!"

"Holy Virgin of virgins, breathe upon our sores, and our sores shall heal!"

At the end of the first bench, skirting the central path, which was becoming crowded, the Vigneron family had succeeded in finding room for themselves. They were all there: little Gustave, seated in a sinking posture, with his crutch between his legs; his mother, beside him, following the prayers like a punctilious bourgeoise; his aunt, Madame Chaise, on the other side, so inconvenienced by the crowd that she was stifling; and M. Vigneron, who remained silent and, for a moment, had been examining Madame Chaise attentively.

"What is the matter with you, my dear?" he inquired. "Do you feel unwell?"

She was breathing with difficulty. "Well, I don't know," she answered; "but I can't feel my limbs, and my breath fails me."

At that very moment the thought had occurred to him that all the agitation, fever, and scramble of a pilgrimage could not be very good for heart-disease. Of course he did not desire anybody's death, he had never asked the Blessed Virgin for any such thing. If his prayer for advancement had already been granted through the sudden death of his chief, it must certainly be because Heaven had already ordained the latter's death. And, in the same way, if Madame Chaise should die first, leaving her fortune to Gustave, he would only have to bow before the will of God, which generally requires that the aged should go off before the young. Nevertheless, his hope unconsciously became so keen that he could not help exchanging a glance with his wife, to whom had come the same involuntary thought.

"Gustave, draw back," he exclaimed; "you are inconveniencing your aunt." And then, as Raymonde passed, he asked; "Do you happen to have a glass of water, mademoiselle? One of our relatives here is losing consciousness."

But Madame Chaise refused the offer with a gesture. She was getting better, recovering her breath with an effort. "No, I want nothing, thank you," she gasped. "There, I'm better—still, I really thought this time that I should stifle!"

Her fright left her trembling, with haggard eyes in her pale face. She again joined her hands, and begged the Blessed Virgin to save her from other attacks and cure her; while the Vignerons, man and wife, honest folk both of them, reverted to the covert prayer for happiness that they had come to offer up at Lourdes: a pleasant old age, deservedly gained by twenty years of honesty, with a respectable fortune which in later years they would go and enjoy in the country, cultivating flowers. On the other hand, little Gustave, who had seen and noted everything with his bright eyes and intelligence sharpened by suffering, was not praying, but smiling at space, with his vague enigmatical smile. What could be the use of his praying? He knew that the Blessed Virgin would not cure him, and that he would die.

However, M. Vigneron could not remain long without busying himself about his neighbours. Madame Dieulafay, who had come late, had been deposited in the crowded central pathway; and he marvelled at the luxury about the young woman, that sort of coffin quilted with white silk, in which she was lying, attired in a pink dressing-gown trimmed with Valenciennes lace. The husband in a frock-coat, and the sister in a black gown of simple but marvellous elegance, were standing by; while Abbe Judaine, kneeling near the sufferer, finished offering up a fervent prayer.

When the priest had risen, M. Vigneron made him a little room on the bench beside him; and he then took the liberty of questioning him. "Well, Monsieur le Cure, does that poor young woman feel a little better?"

Abbe Judaine made a gesture of infinite sadness.

"Alas! no. I was full of so much hope! It was I who persuaded the family to come. Two years ago the Blessed Virgin showed me such extraordinary grace by curing my poor lost eyes, that I hoped to obtain another favour from her. However, I will not despair. We still have until to-morrow."

M. Vigneron again looked towards Madame Dieulafay and examined her face, still of a perfect oval and with admirable eyes; but it was expressionless, with ashen hue, similar to a mask of death, amidst the lace. "It's really very sad," he murmured.

"And if you had seen her last summer!" resumed the priest. "They have their country seat at Saligny, my parish, and I often dined with them. I cannot help feeling sad when I look at her elder sister, Madame Jousseur, that lady in black who stands there, for she bears a strong resemblance to her; and the poor sufferer was even prettier, one of the beauties of Paris. And now compare them together—observe that brilliancy, that sovereign grace, beside that poor, pitiful creature—it oppresses one's heart—ah! what a frightful lesson!"

He became silent for an instant. Saintly man that he was naturally, altogether devoid of passions, with no keen intelligence to disturb him in his faith, he displayed a naive admiration for beauty, wealth, and power, which he had never envied. Nevertheless, he ventured to express a doubt, a scruple, which troubled his usual serenity. "For my part, I should have liked her to come here with more simplicity, without all that surrounding of luxury, because the Blessed Virgin prefers the humble—But I understand very well that there are certain social exigencies. And, then, her husband and sister love her so! Remember that he has forsaken his business and she her pleasures in order to come here with her; and so overcome are they at the idea of losing her that their eyes are never dry, they always have that bewildered look which you can notice. So they must be excused for trying to procure her the comfort of looking beautiful until the last hour."

M. Vigneron nodded his head approvingly. Ah! it was certainly not the wealthy who had the most luck at the Grotto! Servants, country folk, poor beggars, were cured, while ladies returned home with their ailments unrelieved, notwithstanding their gifts and the big candles they had burnt. And, in spite of himself, Vigneron then looked at Madame Chaise, who, having recovered from her attack, was now reposing with a comfortable air.

But a tremor passed through the crowd and Abbe Judaine spoke again: "Here is Father Massias coming towards the pulpit. He is a saint; listen to him."

They knew him, and were aware that he could not make his appearance without every soul being stirred by sudden hope, for it was reported that the miracles were often brought to pass by his great fervour. His voice, full of tenderness and strength, was said to be appreciated by the Virgin.

All heads were therefore uplifted and the emotion yet further increased when Father Fourcade was seen coming to the foot of the pulpit, leaning on the shoulder of his well-beloved brother, the preferred of all; and he stayed there, so that he also might hear him. His gouty foot had been paining him more acutely since the morning, so that it required great courage on his part to remain thus standing and smiling. The increasing exaltation of the crowd made him happy, however; he foresaw prodigies and dazzling cures which would redound to the glory of Mary and Jesus.

Having ascended the pulpit, Father Massias did not at once speak. He seemed, very tall, thin, and pale, with an ascetic face, elongated the more by his discoloured beard. His eyes sparkled, and his large eloquent mouth protruded passionately.

"Lord, save us, for we perish!" he suddenly cried; and in a fever, which increased minute by minute, the transported crowd repeated: "Lord, save us, for we perish!"

Then he opened his arms and again launched forth his flaming cry, as if he had torn it from his glowing heart: "Lord, if it be Thy will, Thou canst heal me!"

"Lord, if it be Thy will, Thou canst heal me!"

"Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof, but only say the word, and I shall be healed!"

"Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof, but only say the word, and I shall be healed!"

Marthe, Brother Isidore's sister, had now begun to talk in a whisper to Madame Sabathier, near whom she had at last seated herself. They had formed an acquaintance at the hospital; and, drawn together by so much suffering, the servant had familiarly confided to the bourgeoise how anxious she felt about her brother; for she could plainly see that he had very little breath left in him. The Blessed Virgin must be quick indeed if she desired to save him. It was already a miracle that they had been able to bring him alive as far as the Grotto.

In her resignation, poor, simple creature that she was, she did not weep; but her heart was so swollen that her infrequent words came faintly from her lips. Then a flood of past memories suddenly returned to her; and with her utterance thickened by prolonged silence, she began to relieve her heart: "We were fourteen at home, at Saint Jacut, near Vannes. He, big as he was, has always been delicate, and that was why he remained with our priest, who ended by placing him among the Christian Brothers. The elder ones took over the property, and, for my part, I preferred going out to service. Yes, it was a lady who took me with her to Paris, five years ago already. Ah! what a lot of trouble there is in life! Everyone has so much trouble!"

"You are quite right, my girl," replied Madame Sabathier, looking the while at her husband, who was devoutly repeating each of Father Massias's appeals.

"And then," continued Marthe, "there I learned last month that Isidore, who had returned from a hot climate where he had been on a mission, had brought a bad sickness back with him. And, when I ran to see him, he told me he should die if he did not leave for Lourdes, but that he couldn't make the journey, because he had nobody to accompany him. Then, as I had eighty francs saved up, I gave up my place, and we set out together. You see, madame, if I am so fond of him, it's because he used to bring me gooseberries from the parsonage, whereas all the others beat me."

She relapsed into silence for a moment, her countenance swollen by grief, and her poor eyes so scorched by watching that no tears could come from them. Then she began to stutter disjointed words: "Look at him, madame. It fills one with pity. Ah! my God, his poor cheeks, his poor chin, his poor face—"

It was, in fact, a lamentable spectacle. Madame Sabathier's heart was quite upset when she observed Brother Isidore so yellow, cadaverous, steeped in a cold sweat of agony. Above the sheet he still only showed his clasped hands and his face encircled with long scanty hair; but if those wax-like hands seemed lifeless, if there was not a feature of that long-suffering face that stirred, its eyes were still alive, inextinguishable eyes of love, whose flame sufficed to illumine the whole of his expiring visage—the visage of a Christ upon the cross. And never had the contrast been so clearly marked between his low forehead and unintelligent, loutish, peasant air, and the divine splendour which came from his poor human mask, ravaged and sanctified by suffering, sublime at this last hour in the passionate radiance of his faith. His flesh had melted, as it were; he was no longer a breath, nothing but a look, a light.

Since he had been set down there his eyes had not strayed from the statue of the Virgin. Nothing else existed around him. He did not see the enormous multitude, he did not even hear the wild cries of the priests, the incessant cries which shook this quivering crowd. His eyes alone remained to him, his eyes burning with infinite tenderness, and they were fixed upon the Virgin, never more to turn from her. They drank her in, even unto death; they made a last effort of will to disappear, die out in her. For an instant, however, his mouth half opened and his drawn visage relaxed as an expression of celestial beatitude came over it. Then nothing more stirred, his eyes remained wide open, still obstinately fixed upon the white statue.

A few seconds elapsed. Marthe had felt a cold breath, chilling the roots of her hair. "I say, madame, look!" she stammered.

Madame Sabathier, who felt anxious, pretended that she did not understand. "What is it, my girl?"

"My brother! look! He no longer moves. He opened his mouth, and has not stirred since." Then they both shuddered, feeling certain he was dead. He had, indeed, just passed away, without a rattle, without a breath, as if life had escaped in his glance, through his large, loving eyes, ravenous with passion. He had expired gazing upon the Virgin, and nothing could have been so sweet; and he still continued to gaze upon her with his dead eyes, as though with ineffable delight.

"Try to close his eyes," murmured Madame Sabathier. "We shall soon know then."

Marthe had already risen, and, leaning forward, so as not to be observed, she endeavoured to close the eyes with a trembling finger. But each time they reopened, and again looked at the Virgin with invincible obstinacy. He was dead, and Marthe had to leave his eyes wide open, steeped in unbounded ecstasy.

"Ah! it's finished, it's quite finished, madame!" she stuttered.

Two tears then burst from her heavy eyelids and ran down her cheeks; while Madame Sabathier caught hold of her hand to keep her quiet. There had been whisperings, and uneasiness was already spreading. But what course could be adopted? It was impossible to carry off the corpse amidst such a mob, during the prayers, without incurring the risk of creating a disastrous effect. The best plan would be to leave it there, pending a favourable moment. The poor fellow scandalised no one, he did not seem any more dead now than he had seemed ten minutes previously, and everybody would think that his flaming eyes were still alive, ardently appealing to the divine compassion of the Blessed Virgin.

Only a few persons among those around knew the truth. M. Sabathier, quite scared, had made a questioning sign to his wife, and on being answered by a prolonged affirmative nod, he had returned to his prayers without any rebellion, though he could not help turning pale at the thought of the mysterious almighty power which sent death when life was asked for. The Vignerons, who were very much interested, leaned forward, and whispered as though in presence of some street accident, one of those petty incidents which in Paris the father sometimes related on returning home from the Ministry, and which sufficed to occupy them all, throughout the evening. Madame Jousseur, for her part, had simply turned round and whispered a word or two in M. Dieulafay's ear, and then they had both reverted to the heart-rending contemplation of their own dear invalid; whilst Abbe Judaine, informed by M. Vigneron, knelt down, and in a low, agitated voice recited the prayers for the dead. Was he not a Saint, that missionary who had returned from a deadly climate, with a mortal wound in his side, to die there, beneath the smiling gaze of the Blessed Virgin? And Madame Maze, who also knew what had happened, suddenly felt a taste for death, and resolved that she would implore Heaven to suppress her also, in unobtrusive fashion, if it would not listen to her prayer and give her back her husband.

But the cry of Father Massias rose into a still higher key, burst forth with a strength of terrible despair, with a rending like that of a sob: "Jesus, son of David, I am perishing, save me!"

And the crowd sobbed after him in unison "Jesus, son of David, I am perishing, save me!"

Then, in quick succession, and in higher and higher keys, the appeals went on proclaiming the intolerable misery of the world:

"Jesus, son of David, take pity on Thy sick children!"

"Jesus, son of David, take pity on Thy sick children!"

"Jesus, son of David, come, heal them, that they may live!"

"Jesus, son of David, come, heal them, that they may live!"

It was delirium. At the foot of the pulpit Father Fourcade, succumbing to the extraordinary passion which overflowed from all hearts, had likewise raised his arms, and was shouting the appeals in his thundering voice as though to compel the intervention of Heaven. And the exaltation was still increasing beneath this blast of desire, whose powerful breath bowed every head in turn, spreading even to the young women who, in a spirit of mere curiosity, sat watching the scene from the parapet of the Gave; for these also turned pale under their sunshades.

Miserable humanity was clamouring from the depths of its abyss of suffering, and the clamour swept along, sending a shudder down every spine, for one and all were plunged in agony, refusing to die, longing to compel God to grant them eternal life. Ah! life, life! that was what all those unfortunates, who had come so far, amid so many obstacles, wanted—that was the one boon they asked for in their wild desire to live it over again, to live it always! O Lord, whatever our misery, whatever the torment of our life may be, cure us, grant that we may begin to live again and suffer once more what we have suffered already. However unhappy we may be, to be is what we wish. It is not heaven that we ask Thee for, it is earth; and grant that we may leave it at the latest possible moment, never leave it, indeed, if such be Thy good pleasure. And even when we no longer implore a physical cure, but a moral favour, it is still happiness that we ask Thee for; happiness, the thirst for which alone consumes us. O Lord, grant that we may be happy and healthy; let us live, ay, let us live forever!

This wild cry, the cry of man's furious desire for life, came in broken accents, mingled with tears, from every breast.

"O Lord, son of David, heal our sick!"

"O Lord, son of David, heal our sick!"

Berthaud had twice been obliged to dash forward to prevent the cords from giving way under the unconscious pressure of the crowd. Baron Suire, in despair, kept on making signs, begging someone to come to his assistance; for the Grotto was now invaded, and the march past had become the mere trampling of a flock rushing to its passion. In vain did Gerard again leave Raymonde and post himself at the entrance gate of the iron railing, so as to carry out the orders, which were to admit the pilgrims by tens. He was hustled and swept aside, while with feverish excitement everybody rushed in, passing like a torrent between the flaring candles, throwing bouquets and letters to the Virgin, and kissing the rock, which the pressure of millions of inflamed lips had polished. It was faith run wild, the great power that nothing henceforth could stop.

And now, whilst Gerard stood there, hemmed in against the iron railing, he heard two countrywomen, whom the advance was bearing onward, raise loud exclamations at sight of the sufferers lying on the stretchers before them. One of them was so greatly impressed by the pallid face of Brother Isidore, whose large dilated eyes were still fixed on the statue of the Virgin, that she crossed herself, and, overcome by devout admiration, murmured: "Oh! look at that one; see how he is praying with his whole heart, and how he gazes on Our Lady of Lourdes!"

The other peasant woman thereupon replied "Oh! she will certainly cure him, he is so beautiful!"

Indeed, as the dead man lay there, his eyes still fixedly staring whilst he continued his prayer of love and faith, his appearance touched every heart. No one in that endless, streaming throng could behold him without feeling edified.

III. MARIE'S CURE

IT was good Abbe Judaine who was to carry the Blessed Sacrament in the four-o'clock procession. Since the Blessed Virgin had cured him of a disease of the eyes, a miracle with which the Catholic press still resounded, he had become one of the glories of Lourdes, was given the first place, and honoured with all sorts of attentions.

At half-past three he rose, wishing to leave the Grotto, but the extraordinary concourse of people quite frightened him, and he feared he would be late if he did not succeed in getting out of it. Fortunately help came to him in the person of Berthaud. "Monsieur le Cure," exclaimed the superintendent of the bearers, "don't attempt to pass out by way of the Rosary; you would never arrive in time. The best course is to ascend by the winding paths—and come! follow me; I will go before you."

By means of his elbows, he thereupon parted the dense throng and opened a path for the priest, who overwhelmed him with thanks. "You are too kind. It's my fault; I had forgotten myself. But, good heavens! how shall we manage to pass with the procession presently?"

This procession was Berthaud's remaining anxiety. Even on ordinary days it provoked wild excitement, which forced him to take special measures; and what would now happen, as it wended its way through this dense multitude of thirty thousand persons, consumed by such a fever of faith, already on the verge of divine frenzy? Accordingly, in a sensible way, he took advantage of this opportunity to give Abbe Judaine the best advice.

"Ah! Monsieur le Cure, pray impress upon your colleagues of the clergy that they must not leave any space between their ranks; they should come on slowly, one close behind the other. And, above all, the banners should be firmly grasped, so that they may not be overthrown. As for yourself, Monsieur le Cure, see that the canopy-bearers are strong, tighten the cloth around the monstrance, and don't be afraid to carry it in both hands with all your strength."

A little frightened by this advice, the priest went on expressing his thanks. "Of course, of course; you are very good," said he. "Ah! monsieur, how much I am indebted to you for having helped me to escape from all those people!"

Then, free at last, he hastened towards the Basilica by the narrow serpentine path which climbs the hill; while his companion again plunged into the mob, to return to his post of inspection.

At that same moment Pierre, who was bringing Marie to the Grotto in her little cart, encountered on the other side, that of the Place du Rosaire, the impenetrable wall formed by the crowd. The servant at the hotel had awakened him at three o'clock, so that he might go and fetch the young girl at the hospital. There seemed to be no hurry; they apparently had plenty of time to reach the Grotto before the procession. However, that immense throng, that resisting, living wall, through which he did not know how to break, began to cause him some uneasiness. He would never succeed in passing with the little car if the people did not evince some obligingness. "Come, ladies, come!" he appealed. "I beg of you! You see, it's for a patient!"

The ladies, hypnotised as they were by the spectacle of the Grotto sparkling in the distance, and standing on tiptoe so as to lose nothing of the sight, did not move, however. Besides, the clamour of the litanies was so loud at this moment that they did not even hear the young priest's entreaties.

Then Pierre began again: "Pray stand on one side, gentlemen; allow me to pass. A little room for a sick person. Come, please, listen to what I am saying!"

But the men, beside themselves, in a blind, deaf rapture, would stir no more than the women.

Marie, however, smiled serenely, as if ignorant of the impediments, and convinced that nothing in the world could prevent her from going to her cure. However, when Pierre had found an aperture, and begun to work his way through the moving mass, the situation became more serious. From all parts the swelling human waves beat against the frail chariot, and at times threatened to submerge it. At each step it became necessary to stop, wait, and again entreat the people. Pierre had never before felt such an anxious sensation in a crowd. True, it was not a threatening mob, it was as innocent as a flock of sheep; but he found a troubling thrill in its midst, a peculiar atmosphere that upset him. And, in spite of his affection for the humble, the ugliness of the features around him, the common, sweating faces, the evil breath, and the old clothes, smelling of poverty, made him suffer even to nausea.

"Now, ladies, now, gentlemen, it's for a patient," he repeated. "A little room, I beg of you!"

Buffeted about in this vast ocean, the little vehicle continued to advance by fits and starts, taking long minutes to get over a few yards of ground. At one moment you might have thought it swamped, for no sign of it could be detected. Then, however, it reappeared near the piscinas. Tender sympathy had at length been awakened for this sick girl, so wasted by suffering, but still so beautiful. When people had been compelled to give way before the priest's stubborn pushing, they turned round, but did not dare to get angry, for pity penetrated them at sight of that thin, suffering face, shining out amidst a halo of fair hair. Words of compassion and admiration were heard on all sides: "Ah, the poor child!"—"Was it not cruel to be infirm at her age?"—"Might the Blessed Virgin be merciful to her!" Others, however, expressed surprise, struck as they were by the ecstasy in which they saw her, with her clear eyes open to the spheres beyond, where she had placed her hope. She beheld Heaven, she would assuredly be cured. And thus the little car left, as it were, a feeling of wonder and fraternal charity behind it, as it made its way with so much difficulty through that human ocean.

Pierre, however, was in despair and at the end of his strength, when some of the stretcher-bearers came to his aid by forming a path for the passage of the procession—a path which Berthaud had ordered them to keep clear by means of cords, which they were to hold at intervals of a couple of yards. From that moment the young priest was able to drag Marie along in a fairly easy manner, and at last place her within the reserved space, where he halted, facing the Grotto on the left side. You could no longer move in this reserved space, where the crowd seemed to increase every minute. And, quite exhausted by the painful journey he had just accomplished, Pierre reflected what a prodigious concourse of people there was; it had seemed to him as if he were in the midst of an ocean, whose waves he had heard heaving around him without a pause.

Since leaving the hospital Marie had not opened her lips. He now realised, however, that she wished to speak to him, and accordingly bent over her. "And my father," she inquired, "is he here? Hasn't he returned from his excursion?"

Pierre had to answer that M. de Guersaint had not returned, and that he had doubtless been delayed against his will. And thereupon she merely added with a smile: "Ah I poor father, won't he be pleased when he finds me cured!"

Pierre looked at her with tender admiration. He did not remember having ever seen her looking so adorable since the slow wasting of sickness had begun. Her hair, which alone disease had respected, clothed her in gold. Her thin, delicate face had assumed a dreamy expression, her eyes wandering away to the haunting thought of her sufferings, her features motionless, as if she had fallen asleep in a fixed thought until the expected shock of happiness should waken her. She was absent from herself, ready, however, to return to consciousness whenever God might will it. And, indeed, this delicious infantile creature, this little girl of three-and-twenty, still a child as when an accident had struck her, delaying her growth, preventing her from becoming a woman, was at last ready to receive the visit of the angel, the miraculous shock which would draw her out of her torpor and set her upright once more. Her morning ecstasy continued; she had clasped her hands, and a leap of her whole being had ravished her from earth as soon as she had perceived the image of the Blessed Virgin yonder. And now she prayed and offered herself divinely.

It was an hour of great mental trouble for Pierre. He felt that the drama of his priestly life was about to be enacted, and that if he did not recover faith in this crisis, it would never return to him. And he was without bad thoughts, without resistance, hoping with fervour, he also, that they might both be healed! Oh! that he might be convinced by her cure, that he might believe like her, that they might be saved together! He wished to pray, ardently, as she herself did. But in spite of himself he was preoccupied by the crowd, that limitless crowd, among which he found it so difficult to drown himself, disappear, become nothing more than a leaf in the forest, lost amidst the rustle of all the leaves. He could not prevent himself from analysing and judging it. He knew that for four days past it had been undergoing all the training of suggestion; there had been the fever of the long journey, the excitement of the new landscapes, the days spent before the splendour of the Grotto, the sleepless nights, and all the exasperating suffering, ravenous for illusion. Then, again, there had been the all-besetting prayers, those hymns, those litanies, which agitated it without a pause. Another priest had followed Father Massias in the pulpit, a little thin, dark Abbe, whom Pierre heard hurling appeals to the Virgin and Jesus in a lashing voice which resounded like a whip. Father Massias and Father Fourcade had remained at the foot of the pulpit, and were now directing the cries of the crowd, whose lamentations rose in louder and louder tones beneath the limpid sunlight. The general exaltation had yet increased; it was the hour when the violence done to Heaven at last produced the miracles.

All at once a paralytic rose up and walked towards the Grotto, holding his crutch in the air; and this crutch, waving like a flag above the swaying heads, wrung loud applause from the faithful. They were all on the look-out for prodigies, they awaited them with the certainty that they would take place, innumerable and wonderful. Some eyes seemed to behold them, and feverish voices pointed them out. Another woman had been cured! Another! Yet another! A deaf person had heard, a mute had spoken, a consumptive had revived! What, a consumptive? Certainly, that was a daily occurrence! Surprise was no longer possible; you might have certified that an amputated leg was growing again without astonishing anyone. Miracle-working became the actual state of nature, the usual thing, quite commonplace, such was its abundance. The most incredible stories seemed quite simple to those overheated imaginations, given what they expected from the Blessed Virgin. And you should have heard the tales that went about, the quiet affirmations, the expressions of absolute certainty which were exchanged whenever a delirious patient cried out that she was cured. Another! Yet another! However, a piteous voice would at times exclaim: "Ah! she's cured; that one; she's lucky, she is!"

Already, at the Verification Office, Pierre had suffered from this credulity of the folk among whom he lived. But here it surpassed everything he could have imagined; and he was exasperated by the extravagant things he heard people say in such a placid fashion, with the open smiles of children. Accordingly he tried to absorb himself in his thoughts and listen to nothing. "O God!" he prayed, "grant that my reason may be annihilated, that I may no longer desire to understand, that I may accept the unreal and impossible." For a moment he thought the spirit of inquiry dead within him, and allowed the cry of supplication to carry him away: "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!" He repeated this appeal with all his charity, clasped his hands, and gazed fixedly at the statue of the Virgin, until he became quite giddy, and imagined that the figure moved. Why should he not return to a state of childhood like the others, since happiness lay in ignorance and falsehood? Contagion would surely end by acting; he would become nothing more than a grain of sand among innumerable other grains, one of the humblest among the humble ones under the millstone, who trouble not about the power that crushes them. But just at that second, when he hoped that he had killed the old man in him, that he had annihilated himself along with his will and intelligence, the stubborn work of thought, incessant and invincible, began afresh in the depths of his brain. Little by little, notwithstanding his efforts to the contrary, he returned to his inquiries, doubted, and sought the truth. What was the unknown force thrown off by this crowd, the vital fluid powerful enough to work the few cures that really occurred? There was here a phenomenon that no physiologist had yet studied. Ought one to believe that a multitude became a single being, as it were, able to increase the power of auto-suggestion tenfold upon itself? Might one admit that, under certain circumstances of extreme exaltation, a multitude became an agent of sovereign will compelling the obedience of matter? That would have explained how sudden cure fell at times upon the most sincerely excited of the throng. The breaths of all of them united in one breath, and the power that acted was a power of consolation, hope, and life.

This thought, the outcome of his human charity, filled Pierre with emotion. For another moment he was able to regain possession of himself, and prayed for the cure of all, deeply touched by the belief that he himself might in some degree contribute towards the cure of Marie. But all at once, without knowing what transition of ideas led to it, a recollection returned to him of the medical consultation which he had insisted upon prior to the young girl's departure for Lourdes. The scene rose before him with extraordinary clearness and precision; he saw the room with its grey, blue-flowered wall-paper, and he heard the three doctors discuss and decide. The two who had given certificates diagnosticating paralysis of the marrow spoke discreetly, slowly, like esteemed, well-known, perfectly honourable practitioners; but Pierre still heard the warm, vivacious voice of his cousin Beauclair, the third doctor, a young man of vast and daring intelligence, who was treated coldly by his colleagues as being of an adventurous turn of mind. And at this supreme moment Pierre was surprised to find in his memory things which he did not know were there; but it was only an instance of that singular phenomenon by which it sometimes happens that words scarce listened to, words but imperfectly heard, words stored away in the brain almost in spite of self, will awaken, burst forth, and impose themselves on the mind after they have long been forgotten. And thus it now seemed to him that the very approach of the miracle was bringing him a vision of the conditions under which—according to Beauclair's predictions—the miracle would be accomplished.

In vain did Pierre endeavour to drive away this recollection by praying with an increase of fervour. The scene again appeared to him, and the old words rang out, filling his ears like a trumpet-blast. He was now again in the dining-room, where Beauclair and he had shut themselves up after the departure of the two others, and Beauclair recapitulated the history of the malady: the fall from a horse at the age of fourteen; the dislocation and displacement of the organ, with doubtless a slight laceration of the ligaments, whence the weight which the sufferer had felt, and the weakness of the legs leading to paralysis. Then, a slow healing of the disorder, everything returning to its place of itself, but without the pain ceasing. In fact this big, nervous child, whose mind had been so grievously impressed by her accident, was unable to forget it; her attention remained fixed on the part where she suffered, and she could not divert it, so that, even after cure, her sufferings had continued—a neuropathic state, a consecutive nervous exhaustion, doubtless aggravated by accidents due to faulty nutrition as yet imperfectly understood. And further, Beauclair easily explained the contrary and erroneous diagnosis of the numerous doctors who had attended her, and who, as she would not submit to examination, had groped in the dark, some believing in a tumour, and the others, the more numerous, convinced of some lesion of the marrow. He alone, after inquiring into the girl's parentage, had just begun to suspect a simple state of auto-suggestion, in which she had obstinately remained ever since the first violent shock of pain; and among the reasons which he gave for this belief were the contraction of her visual field, the fixity of her eyes, the absorbed, inattentive expression of her face, and above all the nature of the pain she felt, which, leaving the organ, had borne to the left, where it continued in the form of a crushing, intolerable weight, which sometimes rose to the breast in frightful fits of stifling. A sudden determination to throw off the false notion she had formed of her complaint, the will to rise, breathe freely, and suffer no more, could alone place her on her feet again, cured, transfigured, beneath the lash of some intense emotion.

A last time did Pierre endeavour to see and hear no more, for he felt that the irreparable ruin of all belief in the miraculous was in him. And, in spite of his efforts, in spite of the ardour with which he began to cry, "Jesus, son of David, heal our sick!" he still saw, he still heard Beauclair telling him, in his calm, smiling manner how the miracle would take place, like a lightning flash, at the moment of extreme emotion, under the decisive circumstance which would complete the loosening of the muscles. The patient would rise and walk in a wild transport of joy, her legs would all at once be light again, relieved of the weight which had so long made them like lead, as though this weight had melted, fallen to the ground. But above all, the weight which bore upon the lower part of the trunk, which rose, ravaged the breast, and strangled the throat, would this time depart in a prodigious soaring flight, a tempest blast bearing all the evil away with it. And was it not thus that, in the Middle Ages, possessed women had by the mouth cast up the Devil, by whom their flesh had so long been tortured? And Beauclair had added that Marie would at last become a woman, that in that moment of supreme joy she would cease to be a child, that although seemingly worn out by her prolonged dream of suffering, she would all at once be restored to resplendent health, with beaming face, and eyes full of life.

Pierre looked at her, and his trouble increased still more on seeing her so wretched in her little cart, so distractedly imploring health, her whole being soaring towards Our Lady of Lourdes, who gave life. Ah! might she be saved, at the cost even of his own damnation! But she was too ill; science lied like faith; he could not believe that this child, whose limbs had been dead for so many years, would indeed return to life. And, in the bewildered doubt into which he again relapsed, his bleeding heart clamoured yet more loudly, ever and ever repeating with the delirious crowd: "Lord, son of David, heal our sick!—Lord, son of David, heal our sick!"

At that moment a tumult arose agitating one and all. People shuddered, faces were turned and raised. It was the cross of the four-o'clock procession, a little behind time that day, appearing from beneath one of the arches of the monumental gradient way. There was such applause and such violent, instinctive pushing that Berthaud, waving his arms, commanded the bearers to thrust the crowd back by pulling strongly on the cords. Overpowered for a moment, the bearers had to throw themselves backward with sore hands; however, they ended by somewhat enlarging the reserved path, along which the procession was then able to slowly wend its way. At the head came a superb beadle, all blue and gold, followed by the processional cross, a tall cross shining like a star. Then followed the delegations of the different pilgrimages with their banners, standards of velvet and satin, embroidered with metal and bright silk, adorned with painted figures, and bearing the names of towns: Versailles, Rheims, Orleans, Poitiers, and Toulouse. One, which was quite white, magnificently rich, displayed in red letters the inscription "Association of Catholic Working Men's Clubs." Then came the clergy, two or three hundred priests in simple cassocks, about a hundred in surplices, and some fifty clothed in golden chasubles, effulgent like stars. They all carried lighted candles, and sang the "Laudate Sion Salvatorem" in full voices. And then the canopy appeared in royal pomp, a canopy of purple silk, braided with gold, and upheld by four ecclesiastics, who, it could be seen, had been selected from among the most robust. Beneath it, between two other priests who assisted him, was Abbe Judaine, vigorously clasping the Blessed Sacrament with both hands, as Berthaud had recommended him to do; and the somewhat uneasy glances that he cast on the encroaching crowd right and left showed how anxious he was that no injury should befall the heavy divine monstrance, whose weight was already straining his wrists. When the slanting sun fell upon him in front, the monstrance itself looked like another sun. Choir-boys meantime were swinging censers in the blinding glow which gave splendour to the entire procession; and, finally, in the rear, there was a confused mass of pilgrims, a flock-like tramping of believers and sightseers all aflame, hurrying along, and blocking the track with their ever-rolling waves.

Father Massias had returned to the pulpit a moment previously; and this time he had devised another pious exercise. After the burning cries of faith, hope, and love that he threw forth, he all at once commanded absolute silence, in order that one and all might, with closed lips, speak to God in secret for a few minutes. These sudden spells of silence falling upon the vast crowd, these minutes of mute prayer, in which all souls unbosomed their secrets, were deeply, wonderfully impressive. Their solemnity became formidable; you heard desire, the immense desire for life, winging its flight on high. Then Father Massias invited the sick alone to speak, to implore God to grant them what they asked of His almighty power. And, in response, came a pitiful lamentation, hundreds of tremulous, broken voices rising amidst a concert of sobs. "Lord Jesus, if it please Thee, Thou canst cure me!"—"Lord Jesus take pity on Thy child, who is dying of love!"—"Lord Jesus, grant that I may see, grant that I may hear, grant that I may walk!" And, all at once, the shrill voice of a little girl, light and vivacious as the notes of a flute, rose above the universal sob, repeating in the distance: "Save the others, save the others, Lord Jesus!" Tears streamed from every eye; these supplications upset all hearts, threw the hardest into the frenzy of charity, into a sublime disorder which would have impelled them to open their breasts with both hands, if by doing so they could have given their neighbours their health and youth. And then Father Massias, not letting this enthusiasm abate, resumed his cries, and again lashed the delirious crowd with them; while Father Fourcade himself sobbed on one of the steps of the pulpit, raising his streaming face to heaven as though to command God to descend on earth.

But the procession had arrived; the delegations, the priests, had ranged themselves on the right and left; and, when the canopy entered the space reserved to the sick in front of the Grotto, when the sufferers perceived Jesus the Host, the Blessed Sacrament, shining like a sun, in the hands of Abbe Judaine, it became impossible to direct the prayers, all voices mingled together, and all will was borne away by vertigo. The cries, calls, entreaties broke, lapsing into groans. Human forms rose from pallets of suffering; trembling arms were stretched forth; clenched hands seemingly desired to clutch at the miracle on the way. "Lord Jesus, save us, for we perish!"—"Lord Jesus, we worship Thee; heal us!"—"Lord Jesus, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God; heal us!" Thrice did the despairing, exasperated voices give vent to the supreme lamentation in a clamour which rushed up to Heaven; and the tears redoubled, flooding all the burning faces which desire transformed. At one moment, the delirium became so great, the instinctive leap toward the Blessed Sacrament seemed so irresistible, that Berthaud placed the bearers who were there in a chain about it. This was the extreme protective manoeuvre, a hedge of bearers drawn up on either side of the canopy, each placing an arm firmly round his neighbour's neck, so as to establish a sort of living wall. Not the smallest aperture was left in it; nothing whatever could pass. Still, these human barriers staggered under the pressure of the unfortunate creatures who hungered for life, who wished to touch, to kiss Jesus; and, oscillating and recoiling, the bearers were at last thrust against the canopy they were defending, and the canopy itself began swaying among the crowd, ever in danger of being swept away like some holy bark in peril of being wrecked.

Then, at the very climax of this holy frenzy, the miracles began amidst supplications and sobs, as when the heavens open during a storm, and a thunderbolt falls on earth. A paralytic woman rose and cast aside her crutches. There was a piercing yell, and another woman appeared erect on her mattress, wrapped in a white blanket as in a winding sheet; and people said it was a half-dead consumptive who had thus been resuscitated. Then grace fell upon two others in quick succession: a blind woman suddenly perceived the Grotto in a flame; a dumb woman fell on both her knees, thanking the Blessed Virgin in a loud, clear voice. And all in a like way prostrated themselves at the feet of Our Lady of Lourdes, distracted with joy and gratitude.

But Pierre had not taken his eyes off Marie, and he was overcome with tender emotion at what he saw. The sufferer's eyes were still expressionless, but they had dilated, while her poor, pale face, with its heavy mask, was contracted as if she were suffering frightfully. She did not speak in her despair; she undoubtedly thought that she was again in the clutches of her ailment. But all at once, when the Blessed Sacrament passed by, and she saw the star-like monstrance sparkling in the sun, a sensation of dizziness came over her. She imagined herself struck by lightning. Her eyes caught fire from the glare which flashed upon her, and at last regained their flame of life, shining out like stars. And under the influence of a wave of blood her face became animated, suffused with colour, beaming with a smile of joy and health. And, suddenly, Pierre saw her rise, stand upright in her little car, staggering, stuttering, and finding in her mind only these caressing words: "Oh, my friend! Oh, my friend!"

He hurriedly drew near in order to support her. But she drove him back with a gesture. She was regaining strength, looking so touching, so beautiful, in the little black woollen gown and slippers which she always wore; tall and slender, too, and crowned as with a halo of gold by her beautiful flaxen hair, which was covered with a simple piece of lace. The whole of her virgin form was quivering as if some powerful fermentation had regenerated her. First of all, it was her legs that were relieved of the chains that bound them; and then, while she felt the spirit of life—the life of woman, wife, and mother—within her, there came a final agony, an enormous weight that rose to her very throat. Only, this time, it did not linger there, did not stifle her, but burst from her open mouth, and flew away in a cry of sublime joy.

"I am cured!—I am cured!"

Then there was an extraordinary sight. The blanket lay at her feet, she was triumphant, she had a superb, glowing face. And her cry of cure had resounded with such rapturous delight that the entire crowd was distracted by it. She had become the sole point of interest, the others saw none but her, erect, grown so radiant and so divine.

"I am cured!—I am cured!"

Pierre, at the violent shock his heart had received, had begun to weep. Indeed, tears glistened again in every eye. Amidst exclamations of gratitude and praise, frantic enthusiasm passed from one to another, throwing the thousands of pilgrims who pressed forward to see into a state of violent emotion. Applause broke out, a fury of applause, whose thunder rolled from one to the other end of the valley.

However, Father Fourcade began waving his arms, and Father Massias was at last able to make himself heard from the pulpit: "God has visited us, my dear brothers, my dear sisters!" said he. "Magnificat anima mea Dominum, My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour."

And then all the voices, the thousands of voices, began the chant of adoration and gratitude. The procession found itself at a stand-still. Abbe Judaine had been able to reach the Grotto with the monstrance, but he patiently remained there before giving the Benediction. The canopy was awaiting him outside the railings, surrounded by priests in surplices and chasubles, all a glitter of white and gold in the rays of the setting sun.

Marie, however, had knelt down, sobbing; and, whilst the canticle lasted, a burning prayer of faith and love ascended from her whole being. But the crowd wanted to see her walk, delighted women called to her, a group surrounded her, and swept her towards the Verification Office, so that the miracle might be proved true, as patent as the very light of the sun. Her box was forgotten, Pierre followed her, while she, stammering and hesitating, she who for seven years had not used her legs, advanced with adorable awkwardness, the uneasy, charming gait of a little child making its first steps; and it was so affecting, so delicious, that the young priest thought of nothing but the immense happiness of seeing her thus return to her childhood. Ah! the dear friend of infancy, the dear tenderness of long ago, so she would at last be the beautiful and charming woman that she had promised to be as a young girl when, in the little garden at Neuilly, she had looked so gay and pretty beneath the tall trees flecked with sunlight!

The crowd continued to applaud her furiously, a huge wave of people accompanied her; and all remained awaiting her egress, swarming in a fever before the door, when she had entered the office, whither Pierre only was admitted with her.

That particular afternoon there were few people at the Verification Office. The small square room, with its hot wooden walls and rudimentary furniture, its rush-bottomed chairs, and its two tables of unequal height, contained, apart from the usual staff only some five or six doctors, seated and silent. At the tables were the inspector of the piscinas and two young Abbes making entries in the registers, and consulting the sets of documents; while Father Dargeles, at one end, wrote a paragraph for his newspaper. And, as it happened, Doctor Bonamy was just then examining Elise Rouquet, who, for the third time, had come to have the increasing cicatrisation of her sore certified.

"Anyhow, gentlemen," exclaimed the doctor, "have you ever seen a lupus heal in this way so rapidly? I am aware that a new work has appeared on faith healing in which it is stated that certain sores may have a nervous origin. Only that is by no means proved in the case of lupus, and I defy a committee of doctors to assemble and explain mademoiselle's cure by ordinary means."

He paused, and turning towards Father Dargeles, inquired: "Have you noted, Father, that the suppuration has completely disappeared, and that the skin is resuming its natural colour?"

However, he did not wait for the reply, for just then Marie entered, followed by Pierre; and by her beaming radiance he immediately guessed what good-fortune was befalling him. She looked superb, admirably fitted to transport and convert the multitude. He therefore promptly dismissed Elise Rouquet, inquired the new arrival's name, and asked one of the young priests to look for her papers. Then, as she slightly staggered, he wished to seat her in the arm-chair.

"Oh no! oh no!" she exclaimed. "I am so happy to be able to use my legs!"

Pierre, with a glance, had sought for Doctor Chassaigne, whom he was sorry not to see there. He remained on one side, waiting while they rummaged in the untidy drawers without being able to place their hands on the required papers. "Let's see," repeated Dr. Bonamy; "Marie de Guersaint, Marie de Guersaint. I have certainly seen that name before."

At last Raboin discovered the documents classified under a wrong letter; and when the doctor had perused the two medical certificates he became quite enthusiastic. "Here is something very interesting, gentlemen," said he. "I beg you to listen attentively. This young lady, whom you see standing here, was afflicted with a very serious lesion of the marrow. And, if one had the least doubt of it, these two certificates would suffice to convince the most incredulous, for they are signed by two doctors of the Paris faculty, whose names are well known to us all."

Then he passed the certificates to the doctors present, who read them, wagging their heads the while. It was beyond dispute; the medical men who had drawn up these documents enjoyed the reputation of being honest and clever practitioners.

"Well, gentlemen, if the diagnosis is not disputed—and it cannot be when a patient brings us documents of this value—we will now see what change has taken place in the young lady's condition."

However, before questioning her he turned towards Pierre. "Monsieur l'Abbe," said he, "you came from Paris with Mademoiselle de Guersaint, I think. Did you converse with the doctors before your departure?"

The priest shuddered amidst all his great delight.

"I was present at the consultation, monsieur," he replied.

And again the scene rose up before him. He once more saw the two doctors, so serious and rational, and he once more saw Beauclair smiling, while his colleagues drew up their certificates, which were identical. And was he, Pierre, to reduce these certificates to nothing, reveal the other diagnosis, the one that allowed of the cure being explained scientifically? The miracle had been predicted, shattered beforehand.

"You will observe, gentlemen," now resumed Dr. Bonamy, "that the presence of the Abbe gives these proofs additional weight. However, mademoiselle will now tell us exactly what she felt."

He had leant over Father Dargeles's shoulder to impress upon him that he must not forget to make Pierre play the part of a witness in the narrative.

"Mon Dieu! gentlemen, how can I tell you?" exclaimed Marie in a halting voice, broken by her surging happiness. "Since yesterday I had felt certain that I should be cured. And yet, a little while ago, when the pins and needles seized me in the legs again, I was afraid it might only be another attack. For an instant I doubted. Then the feeling stopped. But it began again as soon as I recommenced praying. Oh! I prayed, I prayed with all my soul! I ended by surrendering myself like a child. 'Blessed Virgin, Our Lady of Lourdes, do with me as thou wilt,' I said. But the feeling did not cease, it seemed as if my blood were boiling; a voice cried to me: 'Rise! Rise!' And I felt the miracle fall on me in a cracking of all my bones, of all my flesh, as if I had been struck by lightning."

Pierre, very pale, listened to her. Beauclair had positively told him that the cure would come like a lightning flash, that under the influence of extreme excitement a sudden awakening of will so long somnolent would take place within her.

"It was my legs which the Holy Virgin first of all delivered," she continued. "I could well feel that the iron bands which bound them were gliding along my skin like broken chains. Then the weight which still suffocated me, there, in the left side, began to ascend; and I thought I was going to die, it hurt me so. But it passed my chest, it passed my throat, and I felt it there in my mouth, and spat it out violently. It was all over, I no longer had any pain, it had flown away!"

She had made a gesture expressive of the motion of a night bird beating its wings, and, lapsing into silence, stood smiling at Pierre, who was bewildered. Beauclair had told him all that beforehand, using almost the same words and the same imagery. Point by point, his prognostics were realised, there was nothing more in the case than natural phenomena, which had been foreseen.

Raboin, however, had followed Marie's narrative with dilated eyes and the passion of a pietist of limited intelligence, ever haunted by the idea of hell. "It was the devil," he cried; "it was the devil that she spat out!"

Doctor Bonamy, who was more wary, made him hold his tongue. And turning towards the doctors he said: "Gentlemen, you know that we always avoid pronouncing the big word of miracle here. Only here is a fact, and I am curious to know how any of you can explain it by natural means. Seven years ago this young lady was struck with serious paralysis, evidently due to a lesion of the marrow. And that cannot be denied; the certificates are there, irrefutable. She could no longer walk, she could no longer make a movement without a cry of pain, she had reached that extreme state of exhaustion which precedes but by little an unfortunate issue. All at once, however, here she rises, walks, laughs, and beams on us. The paralysis has completely disappeared, no pain remains, she is as well as you and I. Come, gentlemen, approach, examine her, and tell me what has happened."

He triumphed. Not one of the doctors spoke. Two, who were doubtless true Catholics, had shown their approval of his speech by their vigorous nods, while the others remained motionless, with a constrained air, not caring to mix themselves up in the business. However, a little thin man, whose eyes shone behind the glasses he was wearing, ended by rising to take a closer look at Marie. He caught hold of her hand, examined the pupils of her eyes, and merely seemed preoccupied by the air of transfiguration which she wore. Then, in a very courteous manner, without even showing a desire to discuss the matter, he came back and sat down again.

"The case is beyond science, that is all I can assume," concluded Doctor Bonamy, victoriously. "I will add that we have no convalescence here; health is at once restored, full, entire. Observe the young lady. Her eyes are bright, her colour is rosy, her physiognomy has recovered its lively gaiety. Without doubt, the healing of the tissues will proceed somewhat slowly, but one can already say that mademoiselle has been born again. Is it not so, Monsieur l'Abbe, you who have seen her so frequently; you no longer recognise her, eh?"

"That's true, that's true," stammered Pierre.

And, in fact, she already appeared strong to him, her cheeks full and fresh, gaily blooming. But Beauclair had also foreseen this sudden joyful change, this straightening and resplendency of her invalid frame, when life should re-enter it, with the will to be cured and be happy. Once again, however, had Doctor Bonamy leant over Father Dargeles, who was finishing his note, a brief but fairly complete account of the affair. They exchanged a few words in low tones, consulting together, and the doctor ended by saying: "You have witnessed these marvels, Monsieur l'Abbe, so you will not refuse to sign the careful report which the reverend Father has drawn up for publication in the 'Journal de la Grotte.'"

He—Pierre—sign that page of error and falsehood! A revolt roused him, and he was on the point of shouting out the truth. But he felt the weight of his cassock on his shoulders; and, above all, Marie's divine joy filled his heart. He was penetrated with deep happiness at seeing her saved. Since they had ceased questioning her she had come and leant on his arm, and remained smiling at him with eyes full of enthusiasm.

"Oh, my, friend, thank the Blessed Virgin!" she murmured in a low voice. "She has been so good to me; I am now so well, so beautiful, so young! And how pleased my father, my poor father, will be!"

Then Pierre signed. Everything was collapsing within him, but it was enough that she should be saved; he would have thought it sacrilegious to interfere with the faith of that child, the great pure faith which had healed her.

When Marie reappeared outside the office, the applause began afresh, the crowd clapped their hands. It now seemed that the miracle was official. However, certain charitable persons, fearing that she might again fatigue herself and again require her little car, which she had abandoned before the Grotto, had brought it to the office, and when she found it there she felt deeply moved. Ah! that box in which she had lived so many years, that rolling coffin in which she had sometimes imagined herself buried alive, how many tears, how much despair, how many bad days it had witnessed! And, all at once, the idea occurred to her that it had so long been linked with her sufferings, it ought also to share her triumph. It was a sudden inspiration, a kind of holy folly, that made her seize the handle.

At that moment the procession passed by, returning from the Grotto, where Abbe Judaine had pronounced the Benediction. And thereupon Marie, dragging the little car, placed herself behind the canopy. And, in her slippers, her head covered with a strip of lace, her bosom heaving, her face erect, glowing, and superb, she walked on behind the clergy, dragging after her that car of misery, that rolling coffin, in which she had endured so much agony. And the crowd which acclaimed her, the frantic crowd, followed in her wake.

IV. TRIUMPH—DESPAIR

PIERRE also had followed Marie, and like her was behind the canopy, carried along as it were by the blast of glory which made her drag her little car along in triumph. Every moment, however, there was so much tempestuous pushing that the young priest would assuredly have fallen if a rough hand had not upheld him.

"Don't be alarmed," said a voice; "give me your arm, otherwise you won't be able to remain on your feet."

Pierre turned round, and was surprised to recognise Father Massias, who had left Father Fourcade in the pulpit in order to accompany the procession. An extraordinary fever was sustaining him, throwing him forward, as solid as a rock, with eyes glowing like live coals, and an excited face covered with perspiration.

"Take care, then!" he again exclaimed; "give me your arm."

A fresh human wave had almost swept them away. And Pierre now yielded to the support of this terrible enthusiast, whom he remembered as a fellow-student at the seminary. What a singular meeting it was, and how greatly he would have liked to possess that violent faith, that mad faith, which was making Massias pant, with his throat full of sobs, whilst he continued giving vent to the ardent entreaty "Lord Jesus, heal our sick! Lord Jesus, heal our sick!"

There was no cessation of this cry behind the canopy, where there was always a crier whose duty it was to accord no respite to the slow clemency of Heaven. At times a thick voice full of anguish, and at others a shrill and piercing voice, would arise. The Father's, which was an imperious one, was now at last breaking through sheer emotion.

"Lord Jesus, heal our sick! Lord Jesus, heal our sick!"

The rumour of Marie's wondrous cure, of the miracle whose fame would speedily fill all Christendom, had already spread from one to the other end of Lourdes; and from this had come the increased vertigo of the multitude, the attack of contagious delirium which now caused it to whirl and rush toward the Blessed Sacrament like the resistless flux of a rising tide. One and all yielded to the desire of beholding the Sacrament and touching it, of being cured and becoming happy. The Divinity was passing; and now it was not merely a question of ailing beings glowing with a desire for life, but a longing for happiness which consumed all present and raised them up with bleeding, open hearts and eager hands.

Berthaud, who feared the excesses of this religious adoration, had decided to accompany his men. He commanded them, carefully watching over the double chain of bearers beside the canopy in order that it might not be broken.

"Close your ranks—closer—closer!" he called, "and keep your arms firmly linked!"

These young men, chosen from among the most vigorous of the bearers, had an extremely difficult duty to discharge. The wall which they formed, shoulder to shoulder, with arms linked at the waist and the neck, kept on giving way under the involuntary assaults of the throng. Nobody, certainly, fancied that he was pushing, but there was constant eddying, and deep waves of people rolled towards the procession from afar and threatened to submerge it.

When the canopy had reached the middle of the Place du Rosaire, Abbe Judaine really thought that he would be unable to go any farther. Numerous conflicting currents had set in over the vast expanse, and were whirling, assailing him from all sides, so that he had to halt under the swaying canopy, which shook like a sail in a sudden squall on the open sea. He held the Blessed Sacrament aloft with his numbed hands, each moment fearing that a final push would throw him over; for he fully realised that the golden monstrance, radiant like a sun, was the one passion of all that multitude, the Divinity they demanded to kiss, in order that they might lose themselves in it, even though they should annihilate it in doing so. Accordingly, while standing there, the priest anxiously turned his eyes on Berthaud.

"Let nobody pass!" called the latter to the bearers—"nobody! The orders are precise; you hear me?"

Voices, however, were rising in supplication on all sides, wretched beings were sobbing with arms outstretched and lips protruding, in the wild desire that they might be allowed to approach and kneel at the priest's feet. What divine grace it would be to be thrown upon the ground and trampled under foot by the whole procession!* An infirm old man displayed his withered hand in the conviction that it would be made sound again were he only allowed to touch the monstrance. A dumb woman wildly pushed her way through the throng with her broad shoulders, in order that she might loosen her tongue by a kiss. Others were shouting, imploring, and even clenching their fists in their rage with those cruel men who denied cure to their bodily sufferings and their mental wretchedness. The orders to keep them back were rigidly enforced, however, for the most serious accidents were feared.

* One is here irresistibly reminded of the car of Juggernaut, and
of the Hindoo fanatics throwing themselves beneath its wheels
in the belief that they would thus obtain an entrance into
Paradise.—Trans.

"Nobody, nobody!" repeated Berthaud; "let nobody whatever pass!"

There was a woman there, however, who touched every heart with compassion. Clad in wretched garments, bareheaded, her face wet with tears, she was holding in her arms a little boy of ten years or so, whose limp, paralysed legs hung down inertly. The lad's weight was too great for one so weak as herself, still she did not seem to feel it. She had brought the boy there, and was now entreating the bearers with an invincible obstinacy which neither words nor hustling could conquer.

At last, as Abbe Judaine, who felt deeply moved, beckoned to her to approach, two of the bearers, in deference to his compassion, drew apart, despite all the danger of opening a breach, and the woman then rushed forward with her burden, and fell in a heap before the priest. For a moment he rested the foot of the monstrance on the child's head, and the mother herself pressed her eager, longing lips to it; and, as they started off again, she wished to remain behind the canopy, and followed the procession, with streaming hair and panting breast, staggering the while under the heavy burden, which was fast exhausting her strength.

They managed, with great difficulty, to cross the remainder of the Place du Rosaire, and then the ascent began, the glorious ascent by way of the monumental incline; whilst upon high, on the fringe of heaven, the Basilica reared its slim spire, whence pealing bells were winging their flight, sounding the triumphs of Our Lady of Lourdes. And now it was towards an apotheosis that the canopy slowly climbed, towards the lofty portal of the high-perched sanctuary which stood open, face to face with the Infinite, high above the huge multitude whose waves continued soaring across the valley's squares and avenues. Preceding the processional cross, the magnificent beadle, all blue and silver, was already rearing the level of the Rosary cupola, the spacious esplanade formed by the roof of the lower church, across which the pilgrimage deputations began to wind, with their bright-coloured silk and velvet banners waving in the ruddy glow of the sunset. Then came the clergy, the priests in snowy surplices, and the priests in golden chasubles, likewise shining out like a procession of stars. And the censers swung, and the canopy continued climbing, without anything of its bearers being seen, so that it seemed as though a mysterious power, some troop of invisible angels, were carrying it off in this glorious ascension towards the open portal of heaven.

A sound of chanting had burst forth; the voices in the procession no longer called for the healing of the sick, now that the cortege had extricated itself from amidst the crowd. The miracle had been worked, and they were celebrating it with the full power of their lungs, amidst the pealing of the bells and the quivering gaiety of the atmosphere.

"Magnificat anima mea Dominum"—they began. "My soul doth magnify the Lord."

'Twas the song of gratitude, already chanted at the Grotto, and again springing from every heart: "Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo." "And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour."

Meantime it was with increasing, overflowing joy that Marie took part in that radiant ascent, by the colossal gradient way, towards the glowing Basilica. It seemed to her, as she continued climbing, that she was growing stronger and stronger, that her legs, so long lifeless, became firmer at each step. The little car which she victoriously dragged behind her was like the earthly tenement of her illness, the inferno whence the Blessed Virgin had extricated her, and although its handle was making her hands sore, she nevertheless wished to pull it up yonder with her, in order that she might cast it at last at the feet of the Almighty. No obstacle could stay her course, she laughed through the big tears which were falling on her cheeks, her bosom was swelling, her demeanour becoming warlike. One of her slippers had become unfastened, and the strip of lace had fallen from her head to her shoulders. Nevertheless, with her lovely fair hair crowning her like a helmet and her face beaming brightly, she still marched on and on with such an awakening of will and strength that, behind her, you could hear her car leap and rattle over the rough slope of the flagstones, as though it had been a mere toy.

Near Marie was Pierre, still leaning on the arm of Father Massias, who had not relinquished his hold. Lost amidst the far-spreading emotion, the young priest was unable to reflect. Moreover his companion's sonorous voice quite deafened him.

"Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles." "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble."

On Pierre's other side, the right, Berthaud, who no longer had any cause for anxiety, was now also following the canopy. He had given his bearers orders to break their chain, and was gazing with an expression of delight on the human sea through which the procession had lately passed. The higher they the incline, the more did the Place du Rosaire and the avenues and paths of the gardens expand below them, black with the swarming multitude. It was a bird's-eye view of a whole nation, an ant-hill which ever increased in size, spreading farther and farther away. "Look!" Berthaud at last exclaimed to Pierre. "How vast and how beautiful it is! Ah! well, the year won't have been a bad one after all."

Looking upon Lourdes as a centre of propaganda, where his political rancour found satisfaction, he always rejoiced when there was a numerous pilgrimage, as in his mind it was bound to prove unpleasant to the Government. Ah! thought he, if they had only been able to bring the working classes of the towns thither, and create a Catholic democracy. "Last year we scarcely reached the figure of two hundred thousand pilgrims," he continued, "but we shall exceed it this year, I hope." And then, with the gay air of the jolly fellow that he was, despite his sectarian passions, he added: "Well, 'pon my word, I was really pleased just now when there was such a crush. Things are looking up, I thought, things are looking up."

Pierre, however, was not listening to him; his mind had been struck by the grandeur of the spectacle. That multitude, which spread out more and more as the procession rose higher and higher above it, that magnificent valley which was hollowed out below and ever became more and more extensive, displaying afar off its gorgeous horizon of mountains, filled him with quivering admiration. His mental trouble was increased by it all, and seeking Marie's glance, he waved his arm to draw her attention to the vast circular expanse of country. And his gesture deceived her, for in the purely spiritual excitement that possessed her she did not behold the material spectacle he pointed at, but thought that he was calling earth to witness the prodigious favours which the Blessed Virgin had heaped upon them both; for she imagined that he had had his share of the miracle, and that in the stroke of grace which had set her erect with her flesh healed, he, so near to her that their hearts mingled, had felt himself enveloped and raised by the same divine power, his soul saved from doubt, conquered by faith once more. How could he have witnessed her wondrous cure, indeed, without being convinced? Moreover, she had prayed so fervently for him outside the Grotto on the previous night. And now, therefore, to her excessive delight, she espied him transfigured like herself, weeping and laughing, restored to God again. And this lent increased force to her blissful fever; she dragged her little car along with unwearying hands, and—as though it were their double cross, her own redemption and her friend's redemption which she was carrying up that incline with its resounding flagstones—she would have liked to drag it yet farther, for leagues and leagues, ever higher and higher, to the most inaccessible summits, to the transplendent threshold of Paradise itself.

"O Pierre, Pierre!" she stammered, "how sweet it is that this great happiness should have fallen on us together—yes, together! I prayed for it so fervently, and she granted my prayer, and saved you even in saving me. Yes, I felt your soul mingling with my own. Tell me that our mutual prayers have been granted, tell me that I have won your salvation even as you have won mine!"

He understood her mistake and shuddered.

"If you only knew," she continued, "how great would have been my grief had I thus ascended into light alone. Oh! to be chosen without you, to soar yonder without you! But with you, Pierre, it is rapturous delight! We have been saved together, we shall be happy forever! I feel all needful strength for happiness, yes, strength enough to raise the world!"

And in spite of everything, he was obliged to answer her and lie, revolting at the idea of spoiling, dimming that great and pure felicity. "Yes, yes, be happy, Marie," he said, "for I am very happy myself, and all our sufferings are redeemed."

But even while he spoke he felt a deep rending within him, as though a brutal hatchet-stroke were parting them forever. Amidst their common sufferings, she had hitherto remained the little friend of childhood's days, the first artlessly loved woman, whom he knew to be still his own, since she could belong to none. But now she was cured, and he remained alone in his hell, repeating to himself that she would never more be his! This sudden thought so upset him that he averted his eyes, in despair at reaping such suffering from the prodigious felicity with which she exulted.

However the chant went on, and Father Massias, hearing nothing and seeing nothing, absorbed as he was in his glowing gratitude to God, shouted the final verse in a thundering voice: "Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham, et semini ejus in saecula." "As He spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever!"

Yet another incline had to be climbed, yet another effort had to be made up that rough acclivity, with its large slippery flagstones. And the procession rose yet higher, and the ascent still went on in the full, bright light. There came a last turn, and the wheels of Marie's car grated against a granite curb. Then, still higher, still and ever higher, did it roll until it finally reached what seemed to be the very fringe of heaven.

And all at once the canopy appeared on the summit of the gigantic inclined ways, on the stone balcony overlooking the stretch of country outside the portal of the Basilica. Abbe Judaine stepped forward holding the Blessed Sacrament aloft with both hands. Marie, who had pulled her car up the balcony steps, was near him, her heart beating from her exertion, her face all aglow amidst the gold of her loosened hair. Then all the clergy, the snowy surplices, and the dazzling chasubles ranged themselves behind, whilst the banners waved like bunting decking the white balustrades. And a solemn minute followed.

From on high there could have been no grander spectacle. First, immediately below, there was the multitude, the human sea with its dark waves, its heaving billows, now for a moment stilled, amidst which you only distinguished the small pale specks of the faces uplifted towards the Basilica, in expectation of the Benediction; and as far as the eye could reach, from the place du Rosaire to the Gave, along the paths and avenues and across the open spaces, even to the old town in the distance; those little pale faces multiplied and multiplied, all with lips parted, and eyes fixed upon the august heaven was about to open to their gaze.

Then the vast amphitheatre of slopes and hills and mountains surged aloft, ascended upon all sides, crests following crests, until they faded away in the far blue atmosphere. The numerous convents among the trees on the first of the northern slopes, beyond the torrent—those of the Carmelites, the Dominicans, the Assumptionists, and the Sisters of Nevers—were coloured by a rosy reflection from the fire-like glow of the sunset. Then wooded masses rose one above the other, until they reached the heights of Le Buala, which were surmounted by the Serre de Julos, in its turn capped by the Miramont.

Deep valleys opened on the south, narrow gorges between piles of gigantic rocks whose bases were already steeped in lakes of bluish shadow, whilst the summits sparkled with the smiling farewell of the sun. The hills of Visens upon this side were empurpled, and shewed like a promontory of coral, in front of the stagnant lake of the ether, which was bright with a sapphire-like transparency. But, on the east, in front of you, the horizon again spread out to the very point of intersection of the seven valleys. The castle which had formerly guarded them still stood with its keep, its lofty walls, its black outlines—the outlines of a fierce fortress of feudal time,—upon the rock whose base was watered by the Gave; and upon this side of the stern old pile was the new town, looking quite gay amidst its gardens, with its swarm of white house-fronts, its large hotels, its lodging-houses, and its fine shops, whose windows were glowing like live embers; whilst, behind the castle, the discoloured roofs of old Lourdes spread out in confusion, in a ruddy light which hovered over them like a cloud of dust. At this late hour, when the declining luminary was sinking in royal splendour behind the little Gers and the big Gers, those two huge ridges of bare rock, spotted with patches of short herbage, formed nothing but a neutral, somewhat violet, background, as though, indeed, they were two curtains of sober hue drawn across the margin of the horizon.

And higher and still higher, in front of this immensity, did Abbe Judaine with both hands raise the Blessed Sacrament. He moved it slowly from one to the other horizon, causing it to describe a huge sign of the cross against the vault of heaven. He saluted the convents, the heights of Le Buala, the Serre de Julos, and the Miramont, upon his left; he saluted the huge fallen rocks of the dim valleys, and the empurpled hills of Visens, on his right; he saluted the new and the old town, the castle bathed by the Gave, the big and the little Gers, already drowsy, in front of him; and he saluted the woods, the torrents, the mountains, the faint chains linking the distant peaks, the whole earth, even beyond the visible horizon: Peace upon earth, hope and consolation to mankind! The multitude below had quivered beneath that great sign of the cross which enveloped it. It seemed as though a divine breath were passing, rolling those billows of little pale faces which were as numerous as the waves of an ocean. A loud murmur of adoration ascended; all those parted lips proclaimed the glory of God when, in the rays of the setting sun, the illumined monstrance again shone forth like another sun, a sun of pure gold, describing the sign of the cross in streaks of flame upon the threshold of the Infinite.

The banners, the clergy, with Abbe Judaine under the canopy, were already returning to the Basilica, when Marie, who was also entering it, still dragging her car by the handle, was stopped by two ladies, who kissed her, weeping. They were Madame de Jonquiere and her daughter Raymonde, who had come thither to witness the Benediction, and had been told of the miracle.

"Ah! my dear child, what happiness!" repeated the lady-hospitaller; "and how proud I am to have you in my ward! It is so precious a favour for all of us that the Blessed Virgin should have been pleased to select you."

Raymonde, meanwhile, had kept one of the young girl's hands in her own. "Will you allow me to call you my friend, mademoiselle?" said she. "I felt so much pity for you, and I am now so pleased to see you walking, so strong and beautiful already. Let me kiss you again. It will bring me happiness."

"Thank you, thank you with all my heart," Marie stammered amidst her rapture. "I am so happy, so very happy!"

"Oh! we will not leave you," resumed Madame de Jonquiere. "You hear me, Raymonde? We must follow her, and kneel beside her, and we will take her back after the ceremony."

Thereupon the two ladies joined the cortege, and, following the canopy, walked beside Pierre and Father Massias, between the rows of chairs which the deputations already occupied, to the very centre of the choir. The banners alone were allowed on either side of the high altar; but Marie advanced to its steps, still dragging her car, whose wheels resounded over the flagstones. She had at last brought it to the spot whither the sacred madness of her desire had longingly impelled her to drag it. She had brought it, indeed, woeful, wretched-looking as it was, into the splendour of God's house, so that it might there testify to the truth of the miracle. The threshold had scarcely been crossed when the organs burst into a hymn of triumph, the sonorous acclamation of a happy people, from amidst which there soon arose a celestial, angelic voice, of joyful shrillness and crystalline purity. Abbe Judaine had placed the Blessed Sacrament upon the altar, and the crowd was streaming into the nave, each taking a seat, installing him or herself in a corner, pending the commencement of the ceremony. Marie had at once fallen on her knees between Madame de Jonquiere and Raymonde, whose eyes were moist with tender emotion; whilst Father Massias, exhausted by the extraordinary tension of the nerves which had been sustaining him ever since his departure from the Grotto, had sunk upon the ground, sobbing, with his head between his hands. Behind him Pierre and Berthaud remained standing, the latter still busy with his superintendence, his eyes ever on the watch, seeing that good order was preserved even during the most violent outbursts of emotion.

Then, amidst all his mental confusion, increased by the deafening strains of the organ, Pierre raised his head and examined the interior of the Basilica. The nave was narrow and lofty, and streaked with bright colours, which numerous windows flooded with light. There were scarcely any aisles; they were reduced to the proportions of a mere passage running between the side-chapels and the clustering columns, and this circumstance seemed to increase the slim loftiness of the nave, the soaring of the stonework in perpendicular lines of infantile, graceful slenderness. A gilded railing, as transparent as lace, closed the choir, where the high altar, of white marble richly sculptured, arose in all its lavish chasteness. But the feature of the building which astonished you was the mass of extraordinary ornamentation which transformed the whole of it into an overflowing exhibition of embroidery and jewellery. What with all the banners and votive offerings, the perfect river of gifts which had flowed into it and remained clinging to its walls in a stream of gold and silver, velvet and silk, covering it from top to bottom, it was, so to say, the ever-glowing sanctuary of gratitude, whose thousand rich adornments seemed to be chanting a perpetual canticle of faith and thankfulness.

The banners, in particular, abounded, as innumerable as the leaves of trees. Some thirty hung from the vaulted roof, whilst others were suspended, like pictures, between the little columns around the triforium. And others, again, displayed themselves on the walls, waved in the depths of the side-chapels, and encompassed the choir with a heaven of silk, satin, and velvet. You could count them by hundreds, and your eyes grew weary of admiring them. Many of them were quite celebrated, so renowned for their skilful workmanship that talented embroideresses took the trouble to come to Lourdes on purpose to examine them. Among these were the banner of our Lady of Fourvieres, bearing the arms of the city of Lyons; the banner of Alsace, of black velvet embroidered with gold; the banner of Lorraine, on which you beheld the Virgin casting her cloak around two children; and the white and blue banner of Brittany, on which bled the sacred heart of Jesus in the midst of a halo. All empires and kingdoms of the earth were represented; the most distant lands—Canada, Brazil, Chili, Haiti—here had their flags, which, in all piety, were being offered as a tribute of homage to the Queen of Heaven.

Then, after the banners, there were other marvels, the thousands and thousands of gold and silver hearts which were hanging everywhere, glittering on the walls like stars in the heavens. Some were grouped together in the form of mystical roses, others described festoons and garlands, others, again, climbed up the pillars, surrounded the windows, and constellated the deep, dim chapels. Below the triforium somebody had had the ingenious idea of employing these hearts to trace in tall letters the various words which the Blessed Virgin had addressed to Bernadette; and thus, around the nave, there extended a long frieze of words, the delight of the infantile minds which busied themselves with spelling them. It was a swarming, a prodigious resplendency of hearts, whose infinite number deeply impressed you when you thought of all the hands, trembling with gratitude, which had offered them. Moreover, the adornments comprised many other votive offerings, and some of quite an unexpected description. There were bridal wreaths and crosses of honour, jewels and photographs, chaplets, and even spurs, in glass cases or frames. There were also the epaulets and swords of officers, together with a superb sabre, left there in memory of a miraculous conversion.

But all this was not sufficient; other riches, riches of every kind, shone out on all sides—marble statues, diadems enriched with brilliants, a marvellous carpet designed at Blois and embroidered by ladies of all parts of France, and a golden palm with ornaments of enamel, the gift of the sovereign pontiff. The lamps suspended from the vaulted roof, some of them of massive gold and the most delicate workmanship, were also gifts. They were too numerous to be counted, they studded the nave with stars of great price. Immediately in front of the tabernacle there was one, a masterpiece of chasing, offered by Ireland. Others—one from Lille, one from Valence, one from Macao in far-off China—were veritable jewels, sparkling with precious stones. And how great was the resplendency when the choir's score of chandeliers was illumined, when the hundreds of lamps and the hundreds of candles burned all together, at the great evening ceremonies! The whole church then became a conflagration, the thousands of gold and silver hearts reflecting all the little flames with thousands of fiery scintillations. It was like a huge and wondrous brasier; the walls streamed with live flakes of light; you seemed to be entering into the blinding glory of Paradise itself; whilst on all sides the innumerable banners spread out their silk, their satin, and their velvet, embroidered with sanguifluous sacred hearts, victorious saints, and Virgins whose kindly smiles engendered miracles.

Ah! how many ceremonies had already displayed their pomp in that Basilica! Worship, prayer, chanting, never ceased there. From one end of the year to the other incense smoked, organs roared, and kneeling multitudes prayed there with their whole souls. Masses, vespers, sermons, were continually following one upon another; day by day the religious exercises began afresh, and each festival of the Church was celebrated with unparalleled magnificence. The least noteworthy anniversary supplied a pretext for pompous solemnities. Each pilgrimage was granted its share of the dazzling resplendency. It was necessary that those suffering ones and those humble ones who had come from such long distances should be sent home consoled and enraptured, carrying with them a vision of Paradise espied through its opening portals. They beheld the luxurious surroundings of the Divinity, and would forever remain enraptured by the sight. In the depths of bare, wretched rooms, indeed, by the side of humble pallets of suffering throughout all Christendom, a vision of the Basilica with its blazing riches continually arose like a vision of fortune itself, like a vision of the wealth of that life to be, into which the poor would surely some day enter after their long, long misery in this terrestrial sphere.

Pierre, however, felt no delight; no consolation, no hope, came to him as he gazed upon all the splendour. His frightful feeling of discomfort was increasing, all was becoming black within him, with that blackness of the tempest which gathers when men's thoughts and feelings pant and shriek. He had felt immense desolation rising in his soul ever since Marie, crying that she was healed, had risen from her little car and walked along with such strength and fulness of life. Yet he loved her like a passionately attached brother, and had experienced unlimited happiness on seeing that she no longer suffered. Why, therefore, should her felicity bring him such agony? He could now no longer gaze at her, kneeling there, radiant amidst her tears, with beauty recovered and increased, without his poor heart bleeding as from some mortal wound. Still he wished to remain there, and so, averting his eyes, he tried to interest himself in Father Massias, who was still shaking with violent sobbing on the flagstones, and whose prostration and annihilation, amidst the consuming illusion of divine love, he sorely envied. For a moment, moreover, he questioned Berthaud, feigning to admire some banner and requesting information respecting it.

"Which one?" asked the superintendent of the bearers; "that lace banner over there?"

"Yes, that one on the left."

"Oh! it is a banner offered by Le Puy. The arms are those of Le Puy and Lourdes linked together by the Rosary. The lace is so fine that if you crumpled the banner up, you could hold it in the hollow of your hand."

However, Abbe Judaine was now stepping forward; the ceremony was about to begin. Again did the organs resound, and again was a canticle chanted, whilst, on the altar, the Blessed Sacrament looked like the sovereign planet amidst the scintillations of the gold and silver hearts, as innumerable as stars. And then Pierre lacked the strength to remain there any longer. Since Marie had Madame de Jonquiere and Raymonde with her, and they would accompany her back, he might surely go off by himself, vanish into some shadowy corner, and there, at last, vent his grief. In a few words he excused himself, giving his appointment with Doctor Chassaigne as a pretext for his departure. However, another fear suddenly came to him, that of being unable to leave the building, so densely did the serried throng of believers bar the open doorway. But immediately afterwards he had an inspiration, and, crossing the sacristy, descended into the crypt by the narrow interior stairway.

Deep silence and sepulchral gloom suddenly succeeded to the joyous chants and prodigious radiance of the Basilica above. Cut in the rock, the crypt formed two narrow passages, parted by a massive block of stone which upheld the nave, and conducting to a subterranean chapel under the apse, where some little lamps remained burning both day and night. A dim forest of pillars rose up there, a mystic terror reigned in that semi-obscurity where the mystery ever quivered. The chapel walls remained bare, like the very stones of the tomb, in which all men must some day sleep the last sleep. And along the passages, against their sides, covered from top to bottom with marble votive offerings, you only saw a double row of confessionals; for it was here, in the lifeless tranquillity of the bowels of the earth, that sins were confessed; and there were priests, speaking all languages, to absolve the sinners who came thither from the four corners of the world.

At that hour, however, when the multitude was thronging the Basilica above, the crypt had become quite deserted. Not a soul, save Pierre's, throbbed there ever so faintly; and he, amidst that deep silence, that darkness, that coolness of the grave, fell upon his knees. It was not, however, through any need of prayer and worship, but because his whole being was giving way beneath his crushing mental torment. He felt a torturing longing to be able to see clearly within himself. Ah! why could he not plunge even more deeply into the heart of things, reflect, understand, and at last calm himself.

And it was a fearful agony that he experienced. He tried to remember all the minutes that had gone by since Marie, suddenly springing from her pallet of wretchedness, had raised her cry of resurrection. Why had he even then, despite his fraternal joy in seeing her erect, felt such an awful sensation of discomfort, as though, indeed, the greatest of all possible misfortunes had fallen upon him? Was he jealous of the divine grace? Did he suffer because the Virgin, whilst healing her, had forgotten him, whose soul was so afflicted? He remembered how he had granted himself a last delay, fixed a supreme appointment with Faith for the moment when the Blessed Sacrament should pass by, were Marie only cured; and she was cured, and still he did not believe, and henceforth there was no hope, for never, never would he be able to believe. Therein lay the bare, bleeding sore. The truth burst upon him with blinding cruelty and certainty—she was saved, he was lost. That pretended miracle which had restored her to life had, in him, completed the ruin of all belief in the supernatural. That which he had, for a moment, dreamed of seeking, and perhaps finding, at Lourdes,—naive faith, the happy faith of a little child,—was no longer possible, would never bloom again after that collapse of the miraculous, that cure which Beauclair had foretold, and which had afterwards come to pass, exactly as had been predicted. Jealous! No—he was not jealous; but he was ravaged, full of mortal sadness at thus remaining all alone in the icy desert of his intelligence, regretting the illusion, the lie, the divine love of the simpleminded, for which henceforth there was no room in his heart.

A flood of bitterness stifled him, and tears started from his eyes. He had slipped on to the flagstones, prostrated by his anguish. And, by degrees, he remembered the whole delightful story, from the day when Marie, guessing how he was tortured by doubt, had become so passionately eager for his conversion, taking hold of his hand in the gloom, retaining it in her own, and stammering that she would pray for him—oh! pray for him with her whole soul. She forgot herself, she entreated the Blessed Virgin to save her friend rather than herself if there were but one grace that she could obtain from her Divine Son. Then came another memory, the memory of the delightful hours which they had spent together amid the dense darkness of the trees during the night procession. There, again, they had prayed for one another, mingled one in the other with so ardent a desire for mutual happiness that, for a moment, they had attained to the very depths of the love which gives and immolates itself. And now their long, tear-drenched tenderness, their pure idyl of suffering, was ending in this brutal separation; she on her side saved, radiant amidst the hosannas of the triumphant Basilica; and he lost, sobbing with wretchedness, bowed down in the depths of the dark crypt in an icy, grave-like solitude. It was as though he had just lost her again, and this time forever and forever.

All at once Pierre felt the sharp stab which this thought dealt his heart. He at last understood his pain—a sudden light illumined the terrible crisis of woe amidst which he was struggling. He had lost Marie for the first time on the day when he had become a priest, saying to himself that he might well renounce his manhood since she, stricken in her sex by incurable illness, would never be a woman. But behold! she was cured. Behold! she had become a woman. She had all at once appeared to him very strong, very beautiful, living, and desirable. He, who was dead, however, could not become a man again. Never more would he be able to raise the tombstone which crushed and imprisoned his flesh. She fled away alone, leaving him in the cold grave. The whole wide world was opening before her with smiling happiness, with the love which laughs in the sunlit paths, with the husband, with children, no doubt. Whereas he, buried, as it were to his shoulders, had naught of his body free, save his brain, and that remained free, no doubt, in order that he might suffer the more. She had still been his so long as she had not belonged to another; and if he had been enduring such agony during the past hour, it was only through this final rending which, this time, parted her from him forever and forever.

Then rage shook Pierre from head to foot. He was tempted to return to the Basilica, and cry the truth aloud to Marie. The miracle was a lie! The helpful beneficence of an all-powerful Divinity was but so much illusion! Nature alone had acted, life had conquered once again. And he would have given proofs: he would have shown how life, the only sovereign, worked for health amid all the sufferings of this terrestrial sphere. And then they would have gone off together; they would have fled far, far away, that they might be happy. But a sudden terror took possession of him. What! lay hands upon that little spotless soul, kill all belief in it, fill it with the ruins which worked such havoc in his own soul? It all at once occurred to him that this would be odious sacrilege. He would afterwards become horrified with himself, he would look upon himself as her murderer were he some day to realise that he was unable to give her a happiness equal to that which she would have lost. Perhaps, too, she would not believe him. And, moreover, would she ever consent to marry a priest who had broken his vows? She who would always retain the sweet and never-to be-forgotten memory of how she had been healed in ecstasy! His design then appeared to him insane, monstrous, polluting. And his revolt rapidly subsided, until he only retained a feeling of infinite weariness, a sensation of a burning, incurable wound—the wound of his poor, bruised, lacerated heart.

Then, however, amidst his abandonment, the void in which he was whirling, a supreme struggle began, filling him again with agony. What should he do? His sufferings made a coward of him, and he would have liked to flee, so that he might never see Marie again. For he understood very well that he would now have to lie to her, since she thought that he was saved like herself, converted, healed in soul, even as she had been healed in body. She had told him of her joy while dragging her car up the colossal gradient way. Oh! to have had that great happiness together, together; to have felt their hearts melt and mingle one in the other! And even then he had already lied, as he would always be obliged to lie in order that he might not spoil her pure and blissful illusion. He let the last throbbings of his veins subside, and vowed that he would find sufficient strength for the sublime charity of feigning peacefulness of soul, the rapture of one who is redeemed. For he wished her to be wholly happy—without a regret, without a doubt—in the full serenity of faith, convinced that the blessed Virgin had indeed given her consent to their purely mystical union. What did his torments matter? Later on, perhaps, he might recover possession of himself. Amidst his desolate solitude of mind would there not always be a little joy to sustain him, all that joy whose consoling falsity he would leave to her?

Several minutes again elapsed, and Pierre, still overwhelmed, remained on the flagstones, seeking to calm his fever. He no longer thought, he no longer lived; he was a prey to that prostration of the entire being which follows upon great crises. But, all at once, he fancied he could hear a sound of footsteps, and thereupon he painfully rose to his feet, and feigned to be reading the inscriptions graven in the marble votive slabs along the walls. He had been mistaken—nobody was there; nevertheless, seeking to divert his mind, he continued perusing the inscriptions, at first in a mechanical kind of way, and then, little by little, feeling a fresh emotion steal over him.

The sight was almost beyond imagination. Faith, love, and gratitude displayed themselves in a hundred, a thousand ways on these marble slabs with gilded lettering. Some of the inscriptions were so artless as to provoke a smile. A colonel had sent a sculptured representation of his foot with the words: "Thou hast preserved it; grant that it may serve Thee." Farther on you read the line: "May Her protection extend to the glass trade." And then, by the frankness of certain expressions of thanks, you realised of what a strange character the appeals had been. "To Mary the Immaculate," ran one inscription, "from a father of a family, in recognition of health restored, a lawsuit won, and advancement gained." However, the memory of these instances faded away amidst the chorus of soaring, fervent cries. There was the cry of the lovers: "Paul and Anna entreat Our Lady of Lourdes to bless their union." There was the cry of the mothers in various forms: "Gratitude to Mary, who has thrice healed my child."—"Gratitude to Mary for the birth of Antoinette, whom I dedicate, like myself and all my kin, to Her."—"P. D., three years old, has been preserved to the love of his parents." And then came the cry of the wives, the cry, too, of the sick restored to health, and of the souls restored to happiness: "Protect my husband; grant that my husband may enjoy good health."—"I was crippled in both legs, and now I am healed."—"We came, and now we hope."—"I prayed, I wept, and She heard me." And there were yet other cries, cries whose veiled glow conjured up thoughts of long romances: "Thou didst join us together; protect us, we pray Thee."—"To Mary, for the greatest of all blessings." And the same cries, the same words—gratitude, thankfulness, homage, acknowledgment,—occurred again and again, ever with the same passionate fervour. All! those hundreds, those thousands of cries which were forever graven on that marble, and from the depths of the crypt rose clamorously to the Virgin, proclaiming the everlasting devotion of the unhappy beings whom she had succoured.

Pierre did not weary of reading them, albeit his mouth was bitter and increasing desolation was filling him. So it was only he who had no succour to hope for! When so many sufferers were listened to, he alone had been unable to make himself heard! And he now began to think of the extraordinary number of prayers which must be said at Lourdes from one end of the year to the other. He tried to cast them up; those said during the days spent at the Grotto and during the nights spent at the Rosary, those said at the ceremonies at the Basilica, and those said at the sunlight and the starlight processions. But this continual entreaty of every second was beyond computation. It seemed as if the faithful were determined to weary the ears of the Divinity, determined to extort favours and forgiveness by the very multitude, the vast multitude of their prayers. The priests said that it was necessary to offer to God the acts of expiation which the sins of France required, and that when the number of these acts of expiation should be large enough, God would smite France no more. What a harsh belief in the necessity of chastisement! What a ferocious idea born of the gloomiest pessimism! How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to Heaven!

In the midst of all his sadness, Pierre felt deep compassion penetrate his heart. He was upset by the thought that mankind should be so wretched, reduced to such a state of woe, so bare, so weak, so utterly forsaken, that it renounced its own reason to place the one sole possibility of happiness in the hallucinatory intoxication of dreams. Tears once more filled his eyes; he wept for himself and for others, for all the poor tortured beings who feel a need of stupefying and numbing their pains in order to escape from the realities of the world. He again seemed to hear the swarming, kneeling crowd of the Grotto, raising the glowing entreaty of its prayer to Heaven, the multitude of twenty and thirty thousand souls from whose midst ascended such a fervour of desire that you seemed to see it smoking in the sunlight like incense. Then another form of the exaltation of faith glowed, beneath the crypt, in the Church of the Rosary, where nights were spent in a paradise of rapture, amidst the silent delights of the communion, the mute appeals in which the whole being pines, burns, and soars aloft. And as though the cries raised before the Grotto and the perpetual adoration of the Rosary were not sufficient, that clamour of ardent entreaty burst forth afresh on the walls of the crypt around him; and here it was eternised in marble, here it would continue shrieking the sufferings of humanity even into the far-away ages. It was the marble, it was the walls themselves praying, seized by that shudder of universal woe which penetrated even the world's stones. And, at last, the prayers ascended yet higher, still higher, soared aloft from the radiant Basilica, which was humming and buzzing above him, full as it now was of a frantic multitude, whose mighty voice, bursting into a canticle of hope, he fancied he could hear through the flagstones of the nave. And it finally seemed to him that he was being whirled away, transported, as though he were indeed amidst the very vibrations of that huge wave of prayer, which, starting from the dust of the earth, ascended the tier of superposed churches, spreading from tabernacle to tabernacle, and filling even the walls with such pity that they sobbed aloud, and that the supreme cry of wretchedness pierced its way into heaven with the white spire, the lofty golden cross, above the steeple. O Almighty God, O Divinity, Helpful Power, whoever, whatever Thou mayst be, take pity upon poor mankind and make human suffering cease!

All at once Pierre was dazzled. He had followed the left-hand passage, and was coming out into broad daylight, above the inclined ways, and two affectionate arms at once caught hold of him and clasped him. It was Doctor Chassaigne, whose appointment he had forgotten, and who had been waiting there to take him to visit Bernadette's room and Abbe Peyramale's church. "Oh! what joy must be yours, my child!" exclaimed the good old man. "I have just learnt the great news, the extraordinary favour which Our Lady of Lourdes has granted to your young friend. Recollect what I told you the day before yesterday. I am now at ease—you are saved!"

A last bitterness came to the young priest who was very pale. However, he was able to smile, and he gently answered: "Yes, we are saved, we are very happy."

It was the lie beginning; the divine illusion which in a spirit of charity he wished to give to others.

And then one more spectacle met Pierre's eyes. The principal door of the Basilica stood wide open, and a red sheet of light from the setting sun was enfilading the nave from one to the other end. Everything was flaring with the splendour of a conflagration—the gilt railings of the choir, the votive offerings of gold and silver, the lamps enriched with precious stones, the banners with their bright embroideries, and the swinging censers, which seemed like flying jewels. And yonder, in the depths of this burning splendour, amidst the snowy surplices and the golden chasubles, he recognised Marie, with hair unbound, hair of gold like all else, enveloping her in a golden mantle. And the organs burst into a hymn of triumph; and the delirious people acclaimed God; and Abbe Judaine, who had again just taken the Blessed Sacrament from off the altar, raised it aloft and presented it to their gaze for the last time; and radiantly magnificent it shone out like a glory amidst the streaming gold of the Basilica, whose prodigious triumph all the bells proclaimed in clanging, flying peals.

V. CRADLE AND GRAVE

IMMEDIATELY afterwards, as they descended the steps, Doctor Chassaigne said to Pierre: "You have just seen the triumph; I will now show you two great injustices."

And he conducted him into the Rue des Petits-Fosses to visit Bernadette's room, that low, dark chamber whence she set out on the day the Blessed Virgin appeared to her.

The Rue des Petits-Fosses starts from the former Rue des Bois, now the Rue de la Grotte, and crosses the Rue du Tribunal. It is a winding lane, slightly sloping and very gloomy. The passers-by are few; it is skirted by long walls, wretched-looking houses, with mournful facades in which never a window opens. All its gaiety consists in an occasional tree in a courtyard.

"Here we are," at last said the doctor.

At the part where he had halted, the street contracted, becoming very narrow, and the house faced the high, grey wall of a barn. Raising their heads, both men looked up at the little dwelling, which seemed quite lifeless, with its narrow casements and its coarse, violet pargeting, displaying the shameful ugliness of poverty. The entrance passage down below was quite black; an old light iron gate was all that closed it; and there was a step to mount, which in rainy weather was immersed in the water of the gutter.

"Go in, my friend, go in," said the doctor. "You have only to push the gate."

The passage was long, and Pierre kept on feeling the damp wall with his hand, for fear of making a false step. It seemed to him as if he were descending into a cellar, in deep obscurity, and he could feel a slippery soil impregnated with water beneath his feet. Then at the end, in obedience to the doctor's direction, he turned to the right.

"Stoop, or you may hurt yourself," said M. Chassaigne; "the door is very low. There, here we are."

The door of the room, like the gate in the street, stood wide open, as if the place had been carelessly abandoned; and Pierre, who had stopped in the middle of the chamber, hesitating, his eyes still full of the bright daylight outside, could distinguish absolutely nothing. He had fallen into complete darkness, and felt an icy chill about the shoulders similar to the sensation that might be caused by a wet towel.

But, little by little, his eyes became accustomed to the dimness. Two windows of unequal size opened on to a narrow, interior courtyard, where only a greenish light descended, as at the bottom of a well; and to read there, in the middle of the day, it would be necessary to have a candle. Measuring about fifteen feet by twelve, the room was flagged with large uneven stones; while the principal beam and the rafters of the roof, which were visible, had darkened with time and assumed a dirty, sooty hue. Opposite the door was the chimney, a miserable plaster chimney, with a mantelpiece formed of a rotten old plank. There was a sink between this chimney and one of the windows. The walls, with their decaying, damp-stained plaster falling off by bits, were full of cracks, and turning a dirty black like the ceiling. There was no longer any furniture there; the room seemed abandoned; you could only catch a glimpse of some confused, strange objects, unrecognisable in the heavy obscurity that hung about the corners.

After a spell of silence, the doctor exclaimed "Yes, this is the room; all came from here. Nothing has been changed, with the exception that the furniture has gone. I have tried to picture how it was placed: the beds certainly stood against this wall, opposite the windows; there must have been three of them at least, for the Soubirouses were seven—the father, mother, two boys, and three girls. Think of that! Three beds filling this room! Seven persons living in this small space! All of them buried alive, without air, without light, almost without bread! What frightful misery! What lowly, pity-awaking poverty!"

But he was interrupted. A shadowy form, which Pierre at first took for an old woman, entered. It was a priest, however, the curate of the parish, who now occupied the house. He was acquainted with the doctor.

"I heard your voice, Monsieur Chassaigne, and came down," said he. "So there you are, showing the room again?"

"Just so, Monsieur l' Abbe; I took the liberty. It does not inconvenience you?"

"Oh! not at all, not at all! Come as often as you please, and bring other people."

He laughed in an engaging manner, and bowed to Pierre, who, astonished by this quiet carelessness, observed: "The people who come, however, must sometimes plague you?"

The curate in his turn seemed surprised. "Indeed, no! Nobody comes. You see the place is scarcely known. Every one remains over there at the Grotto. I leave the door open so as not to be worried. But days and days often pass without my hearing even the sound of a mouse."

Pierre's eyes were becoming more and more accustomed to the obscurity; and among the vague, perplexing objects which filled the corners, he ended by distinguishing some old barrels, remnants of fowl cages, and broken tools, a lot of rubbish such as is swept away and thrown to the bottom of cellars. Hanging from the rafters, moreover, were some provisions, a salad basket full of eggs, and several bunches of big pink onions.

"And, from what I see," resumed Pierre, with a slight shudder, "you have thought that you might make use of the room?"

The curate was beginning to feel uncomfortable. "Of course, that's it," said he. "What can one do? The house is so small, I have so little space. And then you can't imagine how damp it is here; it is altogether impossible to occupy the room. And so, mon Dieu, little by little all this has accumulated here by itself, contrary to one's own desire."

"It has become a lumber-room," concluded Pierre.

"Oh no! hardly that. An unoccupied room, and yet in truth, if you insist on it, it is a lumber-room!"

His uneasiness was increasing, mingled with a little shame. Doctor Chassaigne remained silent and did not interfere; but he smiled, and was visibly delighted at his companion's revolt against human ingratitude. Pierre, unable to restrain himself, now continued: "You must excuse me, Monsieur l'Abbe, if I insist. But just reflect that you owe everything to Bernadette; but for her Lourdes would still be one of the least known towns of France. And really it seems to me that out of mere gratitude the parish ought to have transformed this wretched room into a chapel."

"Oh! a chapel!" interrupted the curate. "It is only a question of a human creature: the Church could not make her an object of worship."

"Well, we won't say a chapel, then; but at all events there ought to be some lights and flowers—bouquets of roses constantly renewed by the piety of the inhabitants and the pilgrims. In a word, I should like some little show of affection—a touching souvenir, a picture of Bernadette—something that would delicately indicate that she deserves to have a place in all hearts. This forgetfulness and desertion are shocking. It is monstrous that so much dirt should have been allowed to accumulate!"

The curate, a poor, thoughtless, nervous man, at once adopted Pierre's views: "In reality, you are a thousand times right," said he; "but I myself have no power, I can do nothing. Whenever they ask me for the room, to set it to rights, I will give it up and remove my barrels, although I really don't know where else to put them. Only, I repeat, it does not depend on me. I can do nothing, nothing at all!" Then, under the pretext that he had to go out, he hastened to take leave and run away again, saying to Doctor Chassaigne: "Remain, remain as long as you please; you are never in my way."

When the doctor once more found himself alone with Pierre he caught hold of both his hands with effusive delight. "Ah, my dear child," said he, "how pleased you have made me! How admirably you expressed to him all that has been boiling in my own heart so long! Like you, I thought of bringing some roses here every morning. I should have simply had the room cleaned, and would have contented myself with placing two large bunches of roses on the mantelpiece; for you know that I have long felt deep affection for Bernadette, and it seemed to me that those roses would be like the very flowering and perfume of her memory. Only—only—" and so saying he made a despairing gesture, "only courage failed me. Yes, I say courage, no one having yet dared to declare himself openly against the Fathers of the Grotto. One hesitates and recoils in the fear of stirring up a religious scandal. Fancy what a deplorable racket all this would create. And so those who are as indignant as I am are reduced to the necessity of holding their tongues—preferring a continuance of silence to anything else." Then, by way of conclusion, he added: "The ingratitude and rapacity of man, my dear child, are sad things to see. Each time I come into this dim wretchedness, my heart swells and I cannot restrain my tears."

He ceased speaking, and neither of them said another word, both being overcome by the extreme melancholy which the surroundings fostered. They were steeped in gloom. The dampness made them shudder as they stood there amidst the dilapidated walls and the dust of the old rubbish piled upon either side. And the idea returned to them that without Bernadette none of the prodigies which had made Lourdes a town unique in the world would have existed. It was at her voice that the miraculous spring had gushed forth, that the Grotto, bright with candles, had opened. Immense works were executed, new churches rose from the ground, giant-like causeways led up to God. An entire new city was built, as if by enchantment, with gardens, walks, quays, bridges, shops, and hotels. And people from the uttermost parts of the earth flocked thither in crowds, and the rain of millions fell with such force and so abundantly that the young city seemed likely to increase indefinitely—to fill the whole valley, from one to the other end of the mountains. If Bernadette had been suppressed none of those things would have existed, the extraordinary story would have relapsed into nothingness, old unknown Lourdes would still have been plunged in the sleep of ages at the foot of its castle. Bernadette was the sole labourer and creatress; and yet this room, whence she had set out on the day she beheld the Virgin, this cradle, indeed, of the miracle and of all the marvellous fortune of the town, was disdained, left a prey to vermin, good only for a lumber-room, where onions and empty barrels were put away.

Then the other side of the question vividly appeared in Pierre's mind, and he again seemed to see the triumph which he had just witnessed, the exaltation of the Grotto and Basilica, while Marie, dragging her little car, ascended behind the Blessed Sacrament, amidst the clamour of the multitude. But the Grotto especially shone out before him. It was no longer the wild, rocky cavity before which the child had formerly knelt on the deserted bank of the torrent; it was a chapel, transformed and enriched, a chapel illumined by a vast number of candles, where nations marched past in procession. All the noise, all the brightness, all the adoration, all the money, burst forth there in a splendour of constant victory. Here, at the cradle, in this dark, icy hole, there was not a soul, not a taper, not a hymn, not a flower. Of the infrequent visitors who came thither, none knelt or prayed. All that a few tender-hearted pilgrims had done in their desire to carry away a souvenir had been to reduce to dust, between their fingers, the half-rotten plank serving as a mantelshelf. The clergy ignored the existence of this spot of misery, which the processions ought to have visited as they might visit a station of glory. It was there that the poor child had begun her dream, one cold night, lying in bed between her two sisters, and seized with a fit of her ailment while the whole family was fast asleep. It was thence, too, that she had set out, unconsciously carrying along with her that dream, which was again to be born within her in the broad daylight and to flower so prettily in a vision such as those of the legends. And no one now followed in her footsteps. The manger was forgotten, and left in darkness—that manger where had germed the little humble seed which over yonder was now yielding such prodigious harvests, reaped by the workmen of the last hour amidst the sovereign pomp of ceremonies.

Pierre, whom the great human emotion of the story moved to tears, at last summed up his thoughts in three words, saying in a low voice, "It is Bethlehem."

"Yes," remarked Doctor Chassaigne, in his turn, "it is the wretched lodging, the chance refuge, where new religions are born of suffering and pity. And at times I ask myself if all is not better thus: if it is not better that this room should remain in its actual state of wretchedness and abandonment. It seems to me that Bernadette has nothing to lose by it, for I love her all the more when I come to spend an hour here."

He again became silent, and then made a gesture of revolt: "But no, no! I cannot forgive it—this ingratitude sets me beside myself. I told you I was convinced that Bernadette had freely gone to cloister herself at Nevers. But although no one smuggled her away, what a relief it was for those whom she had begun to inconvenience here! And they are the same men, so anxious to be the absolute masters, who at the present time endeavour by all possible means to wrap her memory in silence. Ah! my dear child, if I were to tell you all!"

Little by little he spoke out and relieved himself. Those Fathers of the Grotto, who showed such greed in trading on the work of Bernadette, dreaded her still more now that she was dead than they had done whilst she was alive. So long as she had lived, their great terror had assuredly been that she might return to Lourdes to claim a portion of the spoil; and her humility alone reassured them, for she was in nowise of a domineering disposition, and had herself chosen the dim abode of renunciation where she was destined to pass away. But at present their fears had increased at the idea that a will other than theirs might bring the relics of the visionary back to Lourdes; that, thought had, indeed, occurred to the municipal council immediately after her death; the town had wished to raise a tomb, and there had been talk of opening a subscription. The Sisters of Nevers, however, formally refused to give up the body, which they said belonged to them. Everyone felt that the Sisters were acting under the influence of the Fathers, who were very uneasy, and energetically bestirred themselves to prevent by all means in their power the return of those venerated ashes, in whose presence at Lourdes they foresaw a possible competition with the Grotto itself. Could they have imagined some such threatening occurrence as this—a monumental tomb in the cemetery, pilgrims proceeding thither in procession, the sick feverishly kissing the marble, and miracles being worked there amidst a holy fervour? This would have been disastrous rivalry, a certain displacement of all the present devotion and prodigies. And the great, the sole fear, still and ever returned to them, that of having to divide the spoils, of seeing the money go elsewhere should the town, now taught by experience, know how to turn the tomb to account.

The Fathers were even credited with a scheme of profound craftiness. They were supposed to have the secret idea of reserving Bernadette's remains for themselves; the Sisters of Nevers having simply undertaken to keep it for them within the peaceful precincts of their chapel. Only, they were waiting, and would not bring it back until the affluence of the pilgrims should decrease. What was the use of a solemn return at present, when crowds flocked to the place without interruption and in increasing numbers? Whereas, when the extraordinary success of Our Lady of Lourdes should decline, like everything else in this world, one could imagine what a reawakening of faith would attend the solemn, resounding ceremony at which Christendom would behold the relics of the chosen one take possession of the soil whence she had made so many marvels spring. And the miracles would then begin again on the marble of her tomb before the Grotto or in the choir of the Basilica.

"You may search," continued Doctor Chassaigne, "but you won't find a single official picture of Bernadette at Lourdes. Her portrait is sold, but it is hung no where, in no sanctuary. It is systematic forgetfulness, the same sentiment of covert uneasiness as that which has wrought silence and abandonment in this sad chamber where we are. In the same way as they are afraid of worship at her tomb, so are they afraid of crowds coming and kneeling here, should two candles burn or a couple of bouquets of roses bloom upon this chimney. And if a paralytic woman were to rise shouting that she was cured, what a scandal would arise, how disturbed would be those good traders of the Grotto on seeing their monopoly seriously threatened! They are the masters, and the masters they intend to remain; they will not part with any portion of the magnificent farm that they have acquired and are working. Nevertheless they tremble—yes, they tremble at the memory of the workers of the first hour, of that little girl who is still so great in death, and for whose huge inheritance they burn with such greed that after having sent her to live at Nevers, they dare not even bring back her corpse, but leave it imprisoned beneath the flagstones of a convent!"

Ah! how wretched was the fate of that poor creature, who had been cut off from among the living, and whose corpse in its turn was condemned to exile! And how Pierre pitied her, that daughter of misery, who seemed to have been chosen only that she might suffer in her life and in her death! Even admitting that an unique, persistent will had not compelled her to disappear, still guarding her even in her tomb, what a strange succession of circumstances there had been—how it seemed as if someone, uneasy at the idea of the immense power she might grasp, had jealously sought to keep her out of the way! In Pierre's eyes she remained the chosen one, the martyr; and if he could no longer believe, if the history of this unfortunate girl sufficed to complete within him the ruin of his faith, it none the less upset him in all his brotherly love for mankind by revealing a new religion to him, the only one which might still fill his heart, the religion of life, of human sorrow.

Just then, before leaving the room, Doctor Chassaigne exclaimed: "And it's here that one must believe, my dear child. Do you see this obscure hole, do you think of the resplendent Grotto, of the triumphant Basilica, of the town built, of the world created, the crowds that flock to Lourdes! And if Bernadette was only hallucinated, only an idiot, would not the outcome be more astonishing, more inexplicable still? What! An idiot's dream would have sufficed to stir up nations like this! No! no! The Divine breath which alone can explain prodigies passed here."

Pierre was on the point of hastily replying "Yes!" It was true, a breath had passed there, the sob of sorrow, the inextinguishable yearning towards the Infinite of hope. If the dream of a suffering child had sufficed to attract multitudes, to bring about a rain of millions and raise a new city from the soil, was it not because this dream in a measure appeased the hunger of poor mankind, its insatiable need of being deceived and consoled? She had once more opened the Unknown, doubtless at a favourable moment both socially and historically; and the crowds had rushed towards it. Oh! to take refuge in mystery, when reality is so hard, to abandon oneself to the miraculous, since cruel nature seems merely one long injustice! But although you may organise the Unknown, reduce it to dogmas, make revealed religions of it, there is never anything at the bottom of it beyond the appeal of suffering, the cry of life, demanding health, joy, and fraternal happiness, and ready to accept them in another world if they cannot be obtained on earth. What use is it to believe in dogmas? Does it not suffice to weep and love?

Pierre, however, did not discuss the question. He withheld the answer that was on his lips, convinced, moreover, that the eternal need of the supernatural would cause eternal faith to abide among sorrowing mankind. The miraculous, which could not be verified, must be a food necessary to human despair. Besides, had he not vowed in all charity that he would not wound anyone with his doubts?

"What a prodigy, isn't it?" repeated the doctor.

"Certainly," Pierre ended by answering. "The whole human drama has been played, all the unknown forces have acted in this poor room, so damp and dark."

They remained there a few minutes more in silence; they walked round the walls, raised their eyes toward the smoky ceiling, and cast a final glance at the narrow, greenish yard. Truly it was a heart-rending sight, this poverty of the cobweb level, with its dirty old barrels, its worn-out tools, its refuse of all kinds rotting in the corners in heaps. And without adding a word they at last slowly retired, feeling extremely sad.

It was only in the street that Doctor Chassaigne seemed to awaken. He gave a slight shudder and hastened his steps, saying: "It is not finished, my dear child; follow me. We are now going to look at the other great iniquity." He referred to Abbe Peyramale and his church.

They crossed the Place du Porche and turned into the Rue Saint Pierre; a few minutes would suffice them. But their conversation had again fallen on the Fathers of the Grotto, on the terrible, merciless war waged by Father Sempe against the former Cure of Lourdes. The latter had been vanquished, and had died in consequence, overcome by feelings of frightful bitterness; and, after thus killing him by grief, they had completed the destruction of his church, which he had left unfinished, without a roof, open to the wind and to the rain. With what a glorious dream had that monumental edifice filled the last year of the Cure's life! Since he had been dispossessed of the Grotto, driven from the work of Our Lady of Lourdes, of which he, with Bernadette, had been the first artisan, his church had become his revenge, his protestation, his own share of the glory, the House of the Lord where he would triumph in his sacred vestments, and whence he would conduct endless processions in compliance with the formal desire of the Blessed Virgin. Man of authority and domination as he was at bottom, a pastor of the multitude, a builder of temples, he experienced a restless delight in hurrying on the work, with the lack of foresight of an eager man who did not allow indebtedness to trouble him, but was perfectly contented so long as he always had a swarm of workmen busy on the scaffoldings. And thus he saw his church rise up, and pictured it finished, one bright summer morning, all new in the rising sun.

Ah! that vision constantly evoked gave him courage for the struggle, amidst the underhand, murderous designs by which he felt himself to be enveloped. His church, towering above the vast square, at last rose in all its colossal majesty. He had decided that it should be in the Romanesque style, very large, very simple, its nave nearly three hundred feet long, its steeple four hundred and sixty feet high. It shone out resplendently in the clear sunlight, freed on the previous day of the last scaffolding, and looking quite smart in its newness, with its broad courses of stone disposed with perfect regularity. And, in thought, he sauntered around it, charmed with its nudity, its stupendous candour, its chasteness recalling that of a virgin child, for there was not a piece of sculpture, not an ornament that would have uselessly loaded it. The roofs of the nave, transept, and apse were of equal height above the entablature, which was decorated with simple mouldings. In the same way the apertures in the aisles and nave had no other adornments than archivaults with mouldings, rising above the piers. He stopped in thought before the great coloured glass windows of the transept, whose roses were sparkling; and passing round the building he skirted the semicircular apse against which stood the vestry building with its two rows of little windows; and then he returned, never tiring of his contemplation of that regal ordonnance, those great lines standing out against the blue sky, those superposed roofs, that enormous mass of stone, whose solidity promised to defy centuries. But, when he closed his eyes he, above all else, conjured up, with rapturous pride, a vision of the facade and steeple; down below, the three portals, the roofs of the two lateral ones forming terraces, while from the central one, in the very middle of the facade, the steeple boldly sprang. Here again columns resting on piers supported archivaults with simple mouldings. Against the gable, at a point where there was a pinnacle, and between the two lofty windows lighting the nave, was a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes under a canopy. Up above, were other bays with freshly painted luffer-boards. Buttresses started from the ground at the four corners of the steeple-base, becoming less and less massive from storey to storey, till they reached the spire, a bold, tapering spire in stone, flanked by four turrets and adorned with pinnacles, and soaring upward till it vanished in the sky. And to the parish priest of Lourdes it seemed as if it were his own fervent soul which had grown and flown aloft with this spire, to testify to his faith throughout the ages, there on high, quite close to God.

At other times another vision delighted him still more. He thought he could see the inside of his church on the day of the first solemn mass he would perform there. The coloured windows threw flashes of fire brilliant like precious stones; the twelve chapels, the aisles, were beaming with lighted candles. And he was at the high altar of marble and gold; and the fourteen columns of the nave in single blocks of Pyrenean marble, magnificent marble purchased with money that had come from the four corners of Christendom, rose up supporting the vaulted roof, while the sonorous voices of the organs filled the whole building with a hymn of joy. A multitude of the faithful was gathered there, kneeling on the flags in front of the choir, which was screened by ironwork as delicate as lace, and covered with admirably carved wood. The pulpit, the regal present of a great lady, was a marvel of art cut in massive oak. The baptismal fonts had been hewn out of hard stone by an artist of great talent. Pictures by masters ornamented the walls. Crosses, pyxes, precious monstrances, sacred vestments, similar to suns, were piled up in the vestry cupboards. And what a dream it was to be the pontiff of such a temple, to reign there after having erected it with passion, to bless the crowds who hastened to it from the entire earth, while the flying peals from the steeple told the Grotto and Basilica that they had over there, in old Lourdes, a rival, a victorious sister, in whose great nave God triumphed also!

After following the Rue Saint Pierre for a moment, Doctor Chassaigne and his companion turned into the little Rue de Langelle.

"We are coming to it," said the doctor. But though Pierre looked around him he could see no church. There were merely some wretched hovels, a whole district of poverty, littered with foul buildings. At length, however, at the bottom of a blind alley, he perceived a remnant of the half-rotten palings which still surrounded the vast square site bordered by the Rue Saint Pierre, the Rue de Bagneres, the Rue de Langelle, and the Rue des Jardins.

"We must turn to the left," continued the doctor, who had entered a narrow passage among the rubbish. "Here we are!"

And the ruin suddenly appeared amidst the ugliness and wretchedness that masked it.

The whole great carcase of the nave and the aisles, the transept and the apse was standing. The walls rose on all sides to the point where the vaulting would have begun. You entered as into a real church, you could walk about at ease, identifying all the usual parts of an edifice of this description. Only when you raised your eyes you saw the sky; the roofs were wanting, the rain could fall and the wind blow there freely. Some fifteen years previously the works had been abandoned, and things had remained in the same state as the last workman had left them. What struck you first of all were the ten pillars of the nave and the four pillars of the choir, those magnificent columns of Pyrenean marble, each of a single block, which had been covered with a casing of planks in order to protect them from damage. The bases and capitals were still in the rough, awaiting the sculptors. And these isolated columns, thus cased in wood, had a mournful aspect indeed. Moreover, a dismal sensation filled you at sight of the whole gaping enclosure, where grass had sprung up all over the ravaged, bumpy soil of the aisles and the nave, a thick cemetery grass, through which the women of the neighbourhood had ended by making paths. They came in to spread out their washing there. And even now a collection of poor people's washing—thick sheets, shirts in shreds, and babies' swaddling clothes—was fast drying in the last rays of the sun, which glided in through the broad, empty bays.

Slowly, without speaking, Pierre and Doctor Chassaigne walked round the inside of the church. The ten chapels of the aisles formed a species of compartments full of rubbish and remnants. The ground of the choir had been cemented, doubtless to protect the crypt below against infiltrations; but unfortunately the vaults must be sinking; there was a hollow there which the storm of the previous night had transformed into a little lake. However, it was these portions of the transept and the apse which had the least suffered. Not a stone had moved; the great central rose windows above the triforium seemed to be awaiting their coloured glass, while some thick planks, forgotten atop of the walls of the apse, might have made anyone think that the workmen would begin covering it the next day. But, when Pierre and the doctor had retraced their steps, and went out to look at the facade, the lamentable woefulness of the young ruin was displayed to their gaze. On this side, indeed, the works had not been carried forward to anything like the same extent: the porch with its three portals alone was built, and fifteen years of abandonment had sufficed for the winter weather to eat into the sculptures, the small columns and the archivaults, with a really singular destructive effect, as though the stones, deeply penetrated, destroyed, had melted away beneath tears. The heart grieved at the sight of the decay which had attacked the work before it was even finished. Not yet to be, and nevertheless to crumble away in this fashion under the sky! To be arrested in one's colossal growth, and simply strew the weeds with ruins!

They returned to the nave, and were overcome by the frightful sadness which this assassination of a monument provoked. The spacious plot of waste ground inside was littered with the remains of scaffoldings, which had been pulled down when half rotten, in fear lest their fall might crush people; and everywhere amidst the tall grass were boards, put-logs, moulds for arches, mingled with bundles of old cord eaten away by damp. There was also the long narrow carcase of a crane rising up like a gibbet. Spade-handles, pieces of broken wheelbarrows, and heaps of greenish bricks, speckled with moss and wild convolvuli in bloom, were still lying among the forgotten materials. In the beds of nettles you here and there distinguished the rails of a little railway laid down for the trucks, one of which was lying overturned in a corner. But the saddest sight in all this death of things was certainly the portable engine which had remained in the shed that sheltered it. For fifteen years it had been standing there cold and lifeless. A part of the roof of the shed had ended by falling in upon it, and now the rain drenched it at every shower. A bit of the leather harness by which the crane was worked hung down, and seemed to bind the engine like a thread of some gigantic spider's web. And its metal-work, its steel and copper, was also decaying, as if rusted by lichens, covered with the vegetation of old age, whose yellowish patches made it look like a very ancient, grass-grown machine which the winters had preyed upon. This lifeless engine, this cold engine with its empty firebox and its silent boiler, was like the very soul of the departed labour vainly awaiting the advent of some great charitable heart, whose coming through the eglantine and the brambles would awaken this sleeping church in the wood from its heavy slumber of ruin.

At last Doctor Chassaigne spoke: "Ah!" he said, "when one thinks that fifty thousand francs would have sufficed to prevent such a disaster! With fifty thousand francs the roof could have been put on, the heavy work would have been saved, and one could have waited patiently. But they wanted to kill the work just as they had killed the man." With a gesture he designated the Fathers of the Grotto, whom he avoided naming. "And to think," he continued, "that their annual receipts are eight hundred thousand francs. However, they prefer to send presents to Rome to propitiate powerful friends there."

In spite of himself, he was again opening hostilities against the adversaries of Cure Peyramale. The whole story caused a holy anger of justice to haunt him. Face to face with those lamentable ruins, he returned to the facts—the enthusiastic Cure starting on the building of his beloved church, and getting deeper and deeper into debt, whilst Father Sempe, ever on the lookout, took advantage of each of his mistakes, discrediting him with the Bishop, arresting the flow of offerings, and finally stopping the works. Then, after the conquered man was dead, had come interminable lawsuits, lawsuits lasting fifteen years, which gave the winters time to devour the building. And now it was in such a woeful state, and the debt had risen to such an enormous figure, that all seemed over. The slow death, the death of the stones, was becoming irrevocable. The portable engine beneath its tumbling shed would fall to pieces, pounded by the rain and eaten away by the moss.

"I know very well that they chant victory," resumed the doctor; "that they alone remain. It is just what they wanted—to be the absolute masters, to have all the power, all the money for themselves alone. I may tell you that their terror of competition has even made them intrigue against the religious Orders that have attempted to come to Lourdes. Jesuits, Dominicans, Benedictines, Capuchins, and Carmelites have made applications at various times, and the Fathers of the Grotto have always succeeded in keeping them away. They only tolerate the female Orders, and will only have one flock. And the town belongs to them; they have opened shop there, and sell God there wholesale and retail!"

Walking slowly, he had while speaking returned to the middle of the nave, amidst the ruins, and with a sweeping wave of the arm he pointed to all the devastation surrounding him. "Look at this sadness, this frightful wretchedness! Over yonder the Rosary and Basilica cost them three millions of francs."*

* About 580,000 dollars.

Then, as in Bernadette's cold, dark room, Pierre saw the Basilica rise before him, radiant in its triumph. It was not here that you found the realisation of the dream of Cure Peyramale, officiating and blessing kneeling multitudes while the organs resounded joyfully. The Basilica, over yonder, appeared, vibrating with the pealing of its bells, clamorous with the superhuman joy of an accomplished miracle, all sparkling with its countless lights, its banners, its lamps, its hearts of silver and gold, its clergy attired in gold, and its monstrance akin to a golden star. It flamed in the setting sun, it touched the heavens with its spire, amidst the soaring of the milliards of prayers which caused its walls to quiver. Here, however, was the church that had died before being born, the church placed under interdict by a mandamus of the Bishop, the church falling into dust, and open to the four winds of heaven. Each storm carried away a little more of the stones, big flies buzzed all alone among the nettles which had invaded the nave; and there were no other devotees than the poor women of the neighbourhood, who came thither to turn their sorry linen, spread upon the grass.

It seemed amidst the mournful silence as though a low voice were sobbing, perhaps the voice of the marble columns weeping over their useless beauty under their wooden shirts. At times birds would fly across the deserted apse uttering a shrill cry. Bands of enormous rats which had taken refuge under bits of the lowered scaffoldings would fight, and bite, and bound out of their holes in a gallop of terror. And nothing could have been more heart-rending than the sight of this pre-determined ruin, face to face with its triumphant rival, the Basilica, which beamed with gold.

Again Doctor Chassaigne curtly said, "Come."

They left the church, and following the left aisle, reached a door, roughly fashioned out of a few planks nailed together; and, when they had passed down a half-demolished wooden staircase, the steps of which shook beneath their feet, they found themselves in the crypt.

It was a low vault, with squat arches, on exactly the same plan as the choir. The thick, stunted columns, left in the rough, also awaited their sculptors. Materials were lying about, pieces of wood were rotting on the beaten ground, the whole vast hall was white with plaster in the abandonment in which unfinished buildings are left. At the far end, three bays, formerly glazed, but in which not a pane of glass remained, threw a clear, cold light upon the desolate bareness of the walls.

And there, in the middle, lay Cure Peyramale's corpse. Some pious friends had conceived the touching idea of thus burying him in the crypt of his unfinished church. The tomb stood on a broad step and was all marble. The inscriptions, in letters of gold, expressed the feelings of the subscribers, the cry of truth and reparation that came from the monument itself. You read on the face: "This tomb has been erected by the aid of pious offerings from the entire universe to the blessed memory of the great servant of Our Lady of Lourdes." On the right side were these words from a Brief of Pope Pius IX.: "You have entirely devoted yourself to erecting a temple to the Mother of God." And on the left were these words from the New Testament: "Happy are they who suffer persecution for justice' sake." Did not these inscriptions embody the true plaint, the legitimate hope of the vanquished man who had fought so long in the sole desire of strictly executing the commands of the Virgin as transmitted to him by Bernadette? She, Our Lady of Lourdes, was there personified by a slender statuette, standing above the commemorative inscription, against the naked wall whose only decorations were a few bead wreaths hanging from nails. And before the tomb, as before the Grotto, were five or six benches in rows, for the faithful who desired to sit down.

But with another gesture of sorrowful compassion, Doctor Chassaigne had silently pointed out to Pierre a huge damp spot which was turning the wall at the far end quite green. Pierre remembered the little lake which he had noticed up above on the cracked cement flooring of the choir—quite a quantity of water left by the storm of the previous night. Infiltration had evidently commenced, a perfect stream ran down, invading the crypt, whenever there was heavy rain. And they both felt a pang at their hearts when they perceived that the water was trickling along the vaulted roof in narrow threads, and thence falling in large, regular rhythmical drops upon the tomb. The doctor could not restrain a groan. "Now it rains," he said; "it rains on him!"

Pierre remained motionless, in a kind of awe. In the presence of that falling water, at the thought of the blasts which must rush at winter time through the glassless windows, that corpse appeared to him both woeful and tragic. It acquired a fierce grandeur, lying there alone in its splendid marble tomb, amidst all the rubbish, at the bottom of the crumbling ruins of its own church. It was the solitary guardian, the dead sleeper and dreamer watching over the empty spaces, open to all the birds of night. It was the mute, obstinate, eternal protest, and it was expectation also. Cure Peyramale, stretched in his coffin, having all eternity before him to acquire patience, there, without weariness, awaited the workmen who would perhaps return thither some fine April morning. If they should take ten years to do so, he would be there, and if it should take them a century, he would be there still. He was waiting for the rotten scaffoldings up above, among the grass of the nave, to be resuscitated like the dead, and by the force of some miracle to stand upright once more, along the walls. He was waiting, too, for the moss-covered engine to become all at once burning hot, recover its breath, and raise the timbers for the roof. His beloved enterprise, his gigantic building, was crumbling about his head, and yet with joined hands and closed eyes he was watching over its ruins, watching and waiting too.

In a low voice, the doctor finished the cruel story, telling how, after persecuting Cure Peyramale and his work, they persecuted his tomb. There had formerly been a bust of the Cure there, and pious hands had kept a little lamp burning before it. But a woman had one day fallen with her face to the earth, saying that she had perceived the soul of the deceased, and thereupon the Fathers of the Grotto were in a flutter. Were miracles about to take place there? The sick already passed entire days there, seated on the benches before the tomb. Others knelt down, kissed the marble, and prayed to be cured. And at this a feeling of terror arose: supposing they should be cured, supposing the Grotto should find a competitor in this martyr, lying all alone, amidst the old tools left there by the masons! The Bishop of Tarbes, informed and influenced, thereupon published the mandamus which placed the church under interdict, forbidding all worship there and all pilgrimages and processions to the tomb of the former priest of Lourdes. As in the case of Bernadette, his memory was proscribed, his portrait could be found, officially, nowhere. In the same manner as they had shown themselves merciless against the living man, so did the Fathers prove merciless to his memory. They pursued him even in his tomb. They alone, again nowadays, prevented the works of the church from being proceeded with, by raising continual obstacles, and absolutely refusing to share their rich harvest of alms. And they seemed to be waiting for the winter rains to fall and complete the work of destruction, for the vaulted roof of the crypt, the walls, the whole gigantic pile to crumble down upon the tomb of the martyr, upon the body of the defeated man, so that he might be buried beneath them and at last pounded to dust!

"Ah!" murmured the doctor, "I, who knew him so valiant, so enthusiastic in all noble labour! Now, you see it, it rains, it rains on him!"

Painfully, he set himself on his knees and found relief in a long prayer.

Pierre, who could not pray, remained standing. Compassionate sorrow was overflowing from his heart. He listened to the heavy drops from the roof as one by one they broke on the tomb with a slow rhythmical pit-a-pat, which seemed to be numbering the seconds of eternity, amidst the profound silence. And he reflected on the eternal misery of this world, on the choice which suffering makes in always falling on the best. The two great makers of Our Lady of Lourdes, Bernadette and Cure Peyramale, rose up in the flesh again before him, like woeful victims, tortured during their lives and exiled after their deaths. That alone, indeed, would have completed within him the destruction of his faith; for the Bernadette, whom he had just found at the end of his researches, was but a human sister, loaded with every dolour. But none the less he preserved a tender brotherly veneration for her, and two tears slowly trickled down his cheeks.

THE FIFTH DAY

I. EGOTISM AND LOVE

AGAIN that night Pierre, at the Hotel of the Apparitions, was unable to obtain a wink of sleep. After calling at the hospital to inquire after Marie, who, since her return from the procession, had been soundly enjoying the delicious, restoring sleep of a child, he had gone to bed himself feeling anxious at the prolonged absence of M. de Guersaint. He had expected him at latest at dinner-time, but probably some mischance had detained him at Gavarnie; and he thought how disappointed Marie would be if her father were not there to embrace her the first thing in the morning. With a man like M. de Guersaint, so pleasantly heedless and so hare-brained, everything was possible, every fear might be realised.

Perhaps this anxiety had at first sufficed to keep Pierre awake in spite of his great fatigue; but afterwards the nocturnal noises of the hotel had really assumed unbearable proportions. The morrow, Tuesday, was the day of departure, the last day which the national pilgrimage would spend at Lourdes, and the pilgrims no doubt were making the most of their time, coming from the Grotto and returning thither in the middle of the night, endeavouring as it were to force the grace of Heaven by their commotion, and apparently never feeling the slightest need of repose. The doors slammed, the floors shook, the entire building vibrated beneath the disorderly gallop of a crowd. Never before had the walls reverberated with such obstinate coughs, such thick, husky voices. Thus Pierre, a prey to insomnia, tossed about on his bed and continually rose up, beset with the idea that the noise he heard must have been made by M. de Guersaint who had returned. For some minutes he would listen feverishly; but he could only hear the extraordinary sounds of the passage, amid which he could distinguish nothing precisely. Was it the priest, the mother and her three daughters, or the old married couple on his left, who were fighting with the furniture? or was it rather the larger family, or the single gentleman, or the young single woman on his right, whom some incomprehensible occurrences were leading into adventures? At one moment he jumped from his bed, wishing to explore his absent friend's empty room, as he felt certain that some deeds of violence were taking place in it. But although he listened very attentively when he got there, the only sound he could distinguish was the tender caressing murmur of two voices. Then a sudden recollection of Madame Volmar came to him, and he returned shuddering to bed.

At length, when it was broad daylight and Pierre had just fallen asleep, a loud knocking at his door awoke him with a start. This time there could be no mistake, a loud voice broken by sobs was calling "Monsieur l'Abbe! Monsieur l'Abbe! for Heaven's sake wake up!"

Surely it must be M. de Guersaint who had been brought back dead, at least. Quite scared, Pierre ran and opened the door, in his night-shirt, and found himself in the presence of his neighbour, M. Vigneron.

"Oh! for Heaven's sake, Monsieur l'Abbe, dress yourself at once!" exclaimed the assistant head-clerk. "Your holy ministry is required." And he began to relate that he had just got up to see the time by his watch on the mantelpiece, when he had heard some most frightful sighs issuing from the adjoining room, where Madame Chaise slept. She had left the communicating door open in order to be more with them, as she pleasantly expressed it. Accordingly he had hastened in, and flung the shutters open so as to admit both light and air. "And what a sight, Monsieur l'Abbe!" he continued. "Our poor aunt lying on her bed, nearly purple in the face already, her mouth wide open in a vain effort to breathe, and her hands fumbling with the sheet. It's her heart complaint, you know. Come, come at once, Monsieur l'Abbe, and help her, I implore you!"

Pierre, utterly bewildered, could find neither his breeches nor his cassock. "Of course, of course I'll come with you," said he. "But I have not what is necessary for administering the last sacraments."

M. Vigneron had assisted him to dress, and was now stooping down looking for his slippers. "Never mind," he said, "the mere sight of you will assist her in her last moments, if Heaven has this affliction in store for us. Here! put these on your feet, and follow me at once—oh! at once!"

He went off like a gust of wind and plunged into the adjoining room. All the doors remained wide open. The young priest, who followed him, noticed nothing in the first room, which was in an incredible state of disorder, beyond the half-naked figure of little Gustave, who sat on the sofa serving him as a bed, motionless, very pale, forgotten, and shivering amid this drama of inexorable death. Open bags littered the floor, the greasy remains of supper soiled the table, the parents' bed seemed devastated by the catastrophe, its coverlets torn off and lying on the floor. And almost immediately afterwards he caught sight of the mother, who had hastily enveloped herself in an old yellow dressing-gown, standing with a terrified look in the inner room.

"Well, my love, well, my love?" repeated M. Vigneron, in stammering accents.

With a wave of her hand and without uttering a word Madame Vigneron drew their attention to Madame Chaise, who lay motionless, with her head sunk in the pillow and her hands stiffened and twisted. She was blue in the face, and her mouth gaped, as though with the last great gasp that had come from her.

Pierre bent over her. Then in a low voice he said: "She is dead!"

Dead! The word rang through the room where a heavy silence reigned, and the husband and wife looked at each other in amazement, bewilderment. So it was over? The aunt had died before Gustave, and the youngster inherited her five hundred thousand francs. How many times had they dwelt on that dream; whose sudden realisation dumfounded them? How many times had despair overcome them when they feared that the poor child might depart before her? Dead! Good heavens! was it their fault? Had they really prayed to the Blessed Virgin for this? She had shown herself so good to them that they trembled at the thought that they had not been able to express a wish without its being granted. In the death of the chief clerk, so suddenly carried off so that they might have his place, they had already recognised the powerful hand of Our Lady of Lourdes. Had she again loaded them with favours, listening even to the unconscious dreams of their desire? Yet they had never desired anyone's death; they were worthy people incapable of any bad action, loving their relations, fulfilling their religious duties, going to confession, partaking of the communion like other people without any ostentation. Whenever they thought of those five hundred thousand francs, of their son who might be the first to go, and of the annoyance it would be to them to see another and far less worthy nephew inherit that fortune, it was merely in the innermost recesses of their hearts, in short, quite innocently and naturally. Certainly they had thought of it when they were at the Grotto, but was not the Blessed Virgin wisdom itself? Did she not know far better than ourselves what she ought to do for the happiness of both the living and the dead?

Then Madame Vigneron in all sincerity burst into tears and wept for the sister whom she loved so much. "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," she said, "I saw her expire; she passed away before my eyes. What a misfortune that you were not here sooner to receive her soul! She died without a priest; your presence would have consoled her so much."

A prey also to emotion, his eyes full of tears, Vigneron sought to console his wife. "Your sister was a saint," said he; "she communicated again yesterday morning, and you need have no anxiety concerning her; her soul has gone straight to heaven. No doubt, if Monsieur l'Abbe had been here in time she would have been glad to see him. But what would you? Death was quicker. I went at once, and really there is nothing for us to reproach ourselves with."

Then, turning towards the priest, he added "Monsieur l'Abbe, it was her excessive piety which certainly hastened her end. Yesterday, at the Grotto, she had a bad attack, which was a warning. And in spite of her fatigue she obstinately followed the procession afterwards. I thought then that she could not last long. Yet, out of delicacy, one did not like to say anything to her, for fear of frightening her."

Pierre gently knelt down and said the customary prayers, with that human emotion which was his nearest approach to faith in the presence of eternal life and eternal death, both so pitiful. Then, as he remained kneeling a little longer, he overheard snatches of the conversation around him.

Little Gustave, forgotten on his couch amid the disorder of the other room, must have lost patience, for he had begun to cry and call out, "Mamma! mamma! mamma!"

At length Madame Vigneron went to quiet him, and it occurred to her to carry him in her arms to kiss his poor aunt for the last time. But at first he struggled and refused, crying so much that M. Vigneron was obliged to interfere and try to make him ashamed of himself. What! he who was never frightened of anything! who bore suffering with the courage of a grown-up man! And to think it was a question of kissing his poor aunt, who had always been so kind, whose last thought must most certainly have been for him!

"Give him to me," said he to his wife; "he's going to be good."

Gustave ended by clinging to his father's neck. He came shivering in his night-shirt, displaying his wretched little body devoured by scrofula. It seemed indeed as though the miraculous water of the piscinas, far from curing him, had freshened the sore on his back; whilst his scraggy leg hung down inertly like a dry stick.

"Kiss her," resumed M. Vigneron.

The child leant forward and kissed his aunt on the forehead. It was not death which upset him and caused him to struggle. Since he had been in the room he had been looking at the dead woman with an air of quiet curiosity. He did not love her, he had suffered on her account so long. He had the ideas and feelings of a man, and the weight of them was stifling him as, like his complaint, they developed and became more acute. He felt full well that he was too little, that children ought not to understand what only concerns their elders.

However, his father, seating himself out of the way, kept him on his knee, whilst his mother closed the window and lit the two candles on the mantelpiece. "Ah! my poor dear," murmured M. Vigneron, feeling that he must say something, "it's a cruel loss for all of us. Our trip is now completely spoilt; this is our last day, for we start this afternoon. And the Blessed Virgin, too, was showing herself so kind to us."

However, seeing his son's surprised look, a look of infinite sadness and reproach, he hastened to add: "Yes, of course, I know that she hasn't yet quite cured you. But we must not despair of her kindness. She loves us so well, she shows us so many favours that she will certainly end by curing you, since that is now the only favour that remains for her to grant us."

Madame Vigneron, who was listening, drew near and said: "How happy we should have been to have returned to Paris all three hale and hearty! Nothing is ever perfect!"

"I say!" suddenly observed Monsieur Vigneron, "I sha'n't be able to leave with you this afternoon, on account of the formalities which have to be gone through. I hope that my return ticket will still be available to-morrow!"

They were both getting over the frightful shock, feeling a sense of relief in spite of their affection for Madame Chaise; and, in fact, they were already forgetting her, anxious above all things to leave Lourdes as soon as possible, as though the principal object of their journey had been attained. A decorous, unavowed delight was slowly penetrating them.

"When I get back to Paris there will be so much for me to do," continued M. Vigneron. "I, who now only long for repose! All the same I shall remain my three years at the Ministry, until I can retire, especially now that I am certain of the retiring pension of chief clerk. But afterwards—oh! afterwards I certainly hope to enjoy life a bit. Since this money has come to us I shall purchase the estate of Les Billottes, that superb property down at my native place which I have always been dreaming of. And I promise you that I sha'n't find time hanging heavy on my hands in the midst of my horses, my dogs, and my flowers!"

Little Gustave was still on his father's knee, his night-shirt tucked up, his whole wretched misshapen body shivering, and displaying the scragginess of a slowly dying child. When he perceived that his father, now full of his dream of an opulent life, no longer seemed to notice that he was there, he gave one of his enigmatical smiles, in which melancholy was tinged with malice. "But what about me, father?" he asked.

M. Vigneron started, like one aroused from sleep, and did not at first seem to understand. "You, little one? You'll be with us, of course!"

But Gustave gave him a long, straight look, without ceasing to smile with his artful, though woeful lips. "Oh! do you think so?" he asked.

"Of course I think so! You'll be with us, and it will be very nice to be with us."

Uneasy, stammering, unable to find the proper words, M. Vigneron felt a chill come over him when his son shrugged his skinny shoulders with an air of philosophical disdain and answered: "Oh, no! I shall be dead."

And then the terrified father was suddenly able to detect in the child's deep glance the glance of a man who was very aged, very knowing in all things, acquainted with all the abominations of life through having gone through them. What especially alarmed him was the abrupt conviction that this child had always seen into the innermost recesses of his heart, even farther than the things he dared to acknowledge to himself. He could recall that when the little sufferer had been but a baby in his cradle his eyes would frequently be fixed upon his own—and even then those eyes had been rendered so sharp by suffering, endowed, too, with such an extraordinary power of divination, that they had seemed able to dive into the unconscious thoughts buried in the depths of his brain. And by a singular counter-effect all the things that he had never owned to himself he now found in his child's eyes—he beheld them, read them there, against his will. The story of his cupidity lay unfolded before him, his anger at having such a sorry son, his anguish at the idea that Madame Chaise's fortune depended upon such a fragile existence, his eager desire that she might make haste and die whilst the youngster was still there, in order that he might finger the legacy. It was simply a question of days, this duel as to which should go off first. And then, at the end, it still meant death—the youngster must in his turn disappear, whilst he, the father, alone pocketed the cash, and lived joyfully to a good old age. And these frightful things shone forth so clearly from the keen, melancholy, smiling eyes of the poor condemned child, passed from son to father with such evident distinctness, that for a moment it seemed to them that they were shouting them aloud.

However, M. Vigneron struggled against it all, and, averting his head, began energetically protesting: "How! You'll be dead? What an idea! It's absurd to have such ideas as that!"

Meantime, Madame Vigneron was sobbing. "You wicked child," she gasped; "how can you make us so unhappy, when we already have such a cruel loss to deplore?"

Gustave had to kiss them, and to promise them that he would live for their sakes. Yet he did not cease smiling, conscious as he was that a lie is necessary when one does not wish to be too miserable, and quite prepared, moreover, to leave his parents happy behind him, since even the Blessed Virgin herself was powerless to grant him in this world the little happy lot to which each creature should be born.

His mother took him back to bed, and Pierre at length rose up, just as M. Vigneron had finished arranging the chamber of death in a suitable manner. "You'll excuse me, won't you, Monsieur l'Abbe?" said he, accompanying the young priest to the door. "I'm not quite myself. Well, it's an unpleasant time to go through. I must get over it somehow, however."

When Pierre got into the passage he stopped for a moment, listening to a sound of voices which was ascending the stairs. He had just been thinking of M. de Guersaint again, and imagined that he could recognise his voice. However, whilst he stood there waiting, an incident occurred which caused him intense discomfort. The door of the room next to M. de Guersaint's softly opened and a woman, clad in black, slipped into the passage. As she turned, she found herself face to face with Pierre, in such a fashion that it was impossible for them to pretend not to recognise each other.

The woman was Madame Volmar. Six o'clock had not yet struck, and she was going off, hoping that nobody would notice her, with the intention of showing herself at the hospital, and there spending this last morning, in order, in some measure, to justify her journey to Lourdes. When she perceived Pierre, she began to tremble, and, at first, could only stammer: "Oh, Monsieur l'Abbe, Monsieur l'Abbe!"

Then, noticing that the priest had left his door wide open, she seemed to give way to the fever consuming her, to a need of speaking out, explaining things and justifying herself. With her face suffused by a rush of blood she entered the young man's room, whither he had to follow her, greatly disturbed by this strange adventure. And, as he still left the door open, it was she who, in her desire to confide her sorrow and her sin to him, begged that he would close it.

"Oh! I pray you, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "do not judge me too harshly."

He made a gesture as though to reply that he did not allow himself the right to pass judgment upon her.

"But yes, but yes," she responded; "I know very well that you are acquainted with my misfortune. You saw me once in Paris behind the church of La Trinite, and the other day you recognised me on the balcony here! You were aware that I was there—in that room. But if you only knew—ah, if you only knew!"

Her lips were quivering, and tears were welling into her eyes. As he looked at her he was surprised by the extraordinary beauty transfiguring her face. This woman, invariably clad in black, extremely simple, with never a jewel, now appeared to him in all the brilliancy of her passion; no longer drawing back into the gloom, no longer seeking to bedim the lustre of her eyes, as was her wont. She, who at first sight did not seem pretty, but too dark and slender, with drawn features, a large mouth and long nose, assumed, as he now examined her, a troubling charm, a powerful, irresistible beauty. Her eyes especially—her large, magnificent eyes, whose brasiers she usually sought to cover with a veil of indifference—were flaring like torches; and he understood that she should be loved, adored, to madness.

"If you only knew, Monsieur l'Abbe," she continued. "If I were only to tell you all that I have suffered. Doubtless you have suspected something of it, since you are acquainted with my mother-in-law and my husband. On the few occasions when you have called on us you cannot but have understood some of the abominable things which go on in my home, though I have always striven to appear happy in my silent little corner. But to live like that for ten years, to have no existence—never to love, never to be loved—no, no, it was beyond my power!"

And then she related the whole painful story: her marriage with the diamond merchant, a disastrous, though it seemed an advantageous one; her mother-in-law, with the stern soul of a jailer or an executioner, and her husband, a monster of physical ugliness and mental villainy. They imprisoned her, they did not even allow her to look out of a window. They had beaten her, they had pitilessly assailed her in her tastes, her inclinations, in all her feminine weaknesses. She knew that her husband wandered in his affections, and yet if she smiled to a relative, if she had a flower in her corsage on some rare day of gaiety, he would tear it from her, enter into the most jealous rage, and seize and bruise her wrists whilst shouting the most fearful threats. For years and years she had lived in that hell, hoping, hoping still, having within her such a power of life, such an ardent need of affection, that she continued waiting for happiness, ever thinking, at the faintest breath, that it was about to enter.

"I swear to you, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "that I could not do otherwise than I have done. I was too unhappy: my whole being longed for someone who would care for me. And when my friend the first time told me that he loved me it was all over—I was his forever. Ah! to be loved, to be spoken to gently, to have someone near you who is always solicitous and amiable; to know that in absence he thinks of you, that there is a heart somewhere in which you live... Ah! if it be a crime, Monsieur l'Abbe, I cannot, cannot feel remorse for it. I will not even say that I was urged to it; I simply say that it came to me as naturally as my breath, because it was as necessary to my life!"

She had carried her hand to her lips as though to throw a kiss to the world, and Pierre felt deeply disturbed in presence of this lovely woman, who personified all the ardour of human passion, and at the same time a feeling of deep pity began to arise within him.

"Poor woman!" he murmured.

"It is not to the priest that I am confessing," she resumed; "it is to the man that I am speaking, to a man by whom I should greatly like to be understood. No, I am not a believer: religion has not sufficed me. It is said that some women find contentment in it, a firm protection even against all transgressions. But I have ever felt cold in church, weary unto death. Oh! I know very well that it is wrong to feign piety, to mingle religion with my heart affairs. But what would you? I am forced to it. If you saw me in Paris behind La Trinite it was because that church is the only place to which I am allowed to go alone; and if you find me here at Lourdes it is because, in the whole long year, I have but these three days of happiness and freedom."

Again she began to tremble. Hot tears were coursing down her cheeks. A vision of it all arose in Pierre's mind, and, distracted by the thought of the ardent earthly love which possessed this unhappy creature, he again murmured: "Poor woman!"

"And, Monsieur l'Abbe," she continued, "think of the hell to which I am about to return! For weeks and months I live my life of martyrdom without complaint. Another year, another year must go by without a day, an hour of happiness! Ah! I am indeed very unhappy, Monsieur l'Abbe, yet do you not think all the same that I am a good woman?"

He had been deeply moved by her sincere display of mingled grief and passion. He felt in her the breath of universal desire—a sovereign flame. And his compassion overflowed from his heart, and his words were words of pardon. "Madame," he said, "I pity you and respect you infinitely."

Then she spoke no further, but looked at him with her large tear-blurred eyes. And suddenly catching hold of both his hands, she grasped them tightly with her burning fingers. And then she went off, vanishing down the passage as light, as ethereal, as a shadow.

However, Pierre suffered from her presence in that room even more acutely after she had departed. He opened the window wide that the fresh air might carry off the breath of passion which she had left there. Already on the Sunday when he had seen her on the balcony he had been seized with terror at the thought that she personified the revenge of the world and the flesh amidst all the mystical exaltation of immaculate Lourdes. And now his terror was returning to him. Love seemed stronger than faith, and perhaps it was only love that was divine. To love, to belong to one another, to create and continue life—was not that the one sole object of nature outside of all social and religious policies? For a moment he was conscious of the abyss before him: his chastity was his last prop, the very dignity of his spoilt life; and he realised that, if after yielding to his reason he also yielded to his flesh, he would be utterly lost. All his pride of purity, all his strength which he had placed in professional rectitude, thereupon returned to him, and he again vowed that he would never be a man, since he had voluntarily cut himself off from among men.

Seven o'clock was striking, and Pierre did not go back to bed, but began to wash himself, thoroughly enjoying the cool water, which ended by calming his fever. As he finished dressing, the anxious thought of M. de Guersaint recurred to him on hearing a sound of footsteps in the passage. These steps stopped outside his room and someone knocked. With a feeling of relief he went to open the door, but on doing so exclaimed in great surprise "What, it's you! How is it that you're already up, running about to see people?"

Marie stood on the threshold smiling, whilst behind her was Sister Hyacinthe, who had come with her, and who also was smiling, with her lovely, candid eyes.

"Ah! my friend," said the girl, "I could not remain in bed. I sprang out directly I saw the sunshine. I had such a longing to walk, to run and jump about like a child, and I begged and implored so much that Sister was good enough to come with me. I think I should have got out through the window if the door had been closed against me."

Pierre ushered them in, and an indescribable emotion oppressed him as he heard her jest so gaily and saw her move about so freely with such grace and liveliness. She, good heavens! she whom he had seen for years with lifeless legs and colourless face! Since he had left her the day before at the Basilica she had blossomed into full youth and beauty. One night had sufficed for him to find again, developed it is true, the sweet creature whom he had loved so tenderly, the superb, radiant child whom he had embraced so wildly in the by-gone days behind the flowering hedge, beneath the sun-flecked trees.

"How tall and lovely you are, Marie!" said he, in spite of himself.

Then Sister Hyacinthe interposed: "Hasn't the Blessed Virgin done things well, Monsieur l'Abbe? When she takes us in hand, you see, she turns us out as fresh as roses and smelling quite as sweet."

"Ah!" resumed Marie, "I'm so happy; I feel quite strong and well and spotless, as though I had just been born!"

All this was very delicious to Pierre. It seemed to him that the atmosphere was now truly purified of Madame Volmar's presence. Marie filled the room with her candour, with the perfume and brightness of her innocent youth. And yet the joy he felt at the sight of pure beauty and life reflowering was not exempt from sadness. For, after all, the revolt which he had felt in the crypt, the wound of his wrecked life, must forever leave him a bleeding heart. As he gazed upon all that resuscitated grace, as the woman he loved thus reappeared before him in the flower of her youth, he could not but remember that she would never be his, that he belonged no longer to the world, but to the grave. However, he no longer lamented; he experienced a boundless melancholy—a sensation of utter nothingness as he told himself that he was dead, that this dawn of beauty was rising on the tomb in which his manhood slept. It was renunciation, accepted, resolved upon amidst all the desolate grandeur attaching to those lives which are led contrary to nature's law. Then, like the other woman, the impassioned one, Marie took hold of Pierre's hands. But hers were so soft, so fresh, so soothing! She looked at him with so little confusion and a great longing which she dared not express. After a while, however, she summoned up her courage and said: "Will you kiss me, Pierre? It would please me so much."

He shuddered, his heart crushed by this last torture. Ah! the kisses of other days—those kisses which had ever lingered on his lips! Never since had he kissed her, and to-day she was like a sister flinging her arms around his neck. She kissed him with a loud smack on both his cheeks, and offering her own, insisted on his doing likewise to her. So twice, in his turn, he embraced her.

"I, too, Marie," said he, "am pleased, very pleased, I assure you." And then, overcome by emotion, his courage exhausted, whilst at the same time filled with delight and bitterness, he burst into sobs, weeping with his face buried in his hands, like a child seeking to hide its tears.

"Come, come, we must not give way," said Sister Hyacinthe, gaily. "Monsieur l'Abbe would feel too proud if he fancied that we had merely come on his account. M. de Guersaint is about, isn't he?"

Marie raised a cry of deep affection. "Ah! my dear father! After all, it's he who'll be most pleased!"

Thereupon Pierre had to relate that M. de Guersaint had not returned from his excursion to Gavarnie. His increasing anxiety showed itself while he spoke, although he sought to explain his friend's absence, surmising all sorts of obstacles and unforeseen complications. Marie, however, did not seem afraid, but again laughed, saying that her father never could be punctual. Still she was extremely eager for him to see her walking, to find her on her legs again, resuscitated, in the fresh blossoming of her youth.

All at once Sister Hyacinthe, who had gone to lean over the balcony, returned to the room, saying "Here he comes! He's down below, just alighting from his carriage."

"Ah!" cried Marie, with the eager playfulness of a school-girl, "let's give him a surprise. Yes, we must hide, and when he's here we'll show ourselves all of a sudden."

With these words, she hastily dragged Sister Hyacinthe into the adjoining room.

Almost immediately afterwards, M. de Guersaint entered like a whirlwind from the passage, the door communicating with which had been quickly opened by Pierre, and, shaking the young priest's hand, the belated excursionist exclaimed: "Here I am at last! Ah! my friend, you can't have known what to think since four o'clock yesterday, when you expected me back, eh? But you have no idea of the adventures we have had. To begin with, one of the wheels of our landau came off just as we reached Gavarnie; then, yesterday evening—though we managed to start off again—a frightful storm detained us all night long at Saint-Sauveur. I wasn't able to sleep a wink." Then, breaking off, he inquired, "And you, are you all right?"

"I wasn't able to sleep either," said the priest; "they made such a noise in the hotel."

But M. de Guersaint had already started off again: "All the same, it was delightful. I must tell you; you can't imagine it. I was with three delightful churchmen. Abbe des Hermoises is certainly the most charming man I know. Oh! we did laugh—we did laugh!"

Then he again stopped, to inquire, "And how's my daughter?"

Thereupon a clear laugh behind him caused him to turn round, and he remained with his mouth wide open. Marie was there, and was walking, with a look of rapturous delight upon her face, which was beaming with health. He had never for a moment doubted the miracle, and was not in the least surprised that it had taken place, for he had returned with the conviction that everything would end well, and that he would surely find her cured. But what so utterly astounded him was the prodigious spectacle which he had not foreseen: his daughter, looking so beautiful, so divine, in her little black gown!—his daughter, who had not even brought a hat with her, and merely had a piece of lace tied over her lovely fair hair!—his daughter, full of life, blooming, triumphant, similar to all the daughters of all the fathers whom he had envied for so many years!

"O my child! O my child!" he exclaimed.

And, as she had flown into his arms, he pressed her to his heart, and then they fell upon their knees together. Everything disappeared from before them in a radiant effusion of faith and love. This heedless, hare-brained man, who fell asleep instead of accompanying his daughter to the Grotto, who went off to Gavarnie on the day the Blessed Virgin was to cure her, overflowed with such paternal affection, with such Christian faith so exalted by thankfulness, that for a moment he appeared sublime.

"O Jesus! O Mary! let me thank you for having restored my child to me! O my child, we shall never have breath enough, soul enough, to render thanks to Mary and Jesus for the great happiness they have vouchsafed us! O my child, whom they have resuscitated, O my child, whom they have made so beautiful again, take my heart to offer it to them with your own! I am yours, I am theirs eternally, O my beloved child, my adored child!"

Kneeling before the open window they both, with uplifted eyes, gazed ardently on heaven. The daughter had rested her head on her father's shoulder; whilst he had passed an arm round her waist. They had become one. Tears slowly trickled down their enraptured faces, which were smiling with superhuman felicity, whilst they stammered together disconnected expressions of gratitude.

"O Jesus, we give Thee thanks! O Holy Mother of Jesus, we give thee thanks! We love you, we adore you both. You have rejuvenated the best blood in our veins; it is yours, it circulates only for you. O All-powerful Mother, O Divine and Well-beloved Son, behold a daughter and a father who bless you, who prostrate themselves with joy at your feet."

So affecting was this mingling of two beings, happy at last after so many dark days, this happiness, which could but stammer as though still tinged with suffering, that Pierre was again moved to tears. But this time they were soothing tears which relieved his heart. Ah! poor pitiable humanity! how pleasant it was to see it somewhat consoled and enraptured! and what did it matter, after all, if its great joys of a few seconds' duration sprang from the eternal illusion! Was not the whole of humanity, pitiable humanity, saved by love, personified by that poor childish man who suddenly became sublime because he found his daughter resuscitated?

Standing a little aside, Sister Hyacinthe was also weeping, her heart very full, full of human emotion which she had never before experienced, she who had known no other parents than the Almighty and the Blessed Virgin. Silence had now fallen in this room full of so much tearful fraternity. And it was she who spoke the first, when the father and the daughter, overcome with emotion, at length rose up.

"Now, mademoiselle," she said, "we must be quick and get back to the hospital."

But they all protested. M. de Guersaint wished to keep his daughter with him, and Marie's eyes expressed an eager desire, a longing to enjoy life, to walk and ramble through the whole vast world.

"Oh! no, no!" said the father, "I won't give her back to you. We'll each have a cup of milk, for I'm dying of thirst; then we'll go out and walk about. Yes, yes, both of us! She shall take my arm, like a little woman!"

Sister Hyacinthe laughed again. "Very well!" said she, "I'll leave her with you, and tell the ladies that you've stolen her from me. But for my own part I must be off. You've no idea what an amount of work we have to get through at the hospital if we are to be ready in time to leave: there are all the patients and things to be seen to; and all is in the greatest confusion!"

"So to-day's really Tuesday, and we leave this afternoon?" asked Monsieur de Guersaint, already absent-minded again.

"Of course we do, and don't forget! The white train starts at 3.40. And if you're sensible you'll bring your daughter back early so that she may have a little rest."

Marie walked with the Sister to the door, saying "Be easy, I will be very good. Besides, I want to go back to the Grotto, to thank the Blessed Virgin once more."

When they found themselves all three alone in the little room full of sunshine, it was delicious. Pierre called the servant and told her to bring them some milk, some chocolate, and cakes, in fact the nicest things he could think of. And although Marie had already broken her fast, she ate again, so great an appetite had come upon her since the night before. They drew the table to the window and made quite a feast amidst the keen air from the mountains, whilst the hundred bells of Lourdes, proclaimed with flying peals the glory of that radiant day. They chattered and laughed, and the young woman told her father the story of the miracle, with all the oft-repeated details. She related, too, how she had left her box at the Basilica, and how she had slept twelve hours without stirring. Then M. de Guersaint on his side wished to relate his excursion, but got mixed and kept coming back to the miracle. Finally, it appeared that the Cirque de Gavarnie was something colossal. Only, when you looked at it from a distance it seemed small, for you lost all sense of proportion. The gigantic snow-covered tiers of cliffs, the topmost ridge standing out against the sky with the outlines of some cyclopean fortress with razed keep and jagged ramparts, the great cascade, whose ceaseless jet seemed so slow when in reality it must have rushed down with a noise like thunder, the whole immensity, the forests on right and left, the torrents and the landslips, looked as though they might have been held in the palm of one's hand, when one gazed upon them from the village market-place. And what had impressed him most, what he repeatedly alluded to, were the strange figures described by the snow, which had remained up there amongst the rocks. Amongst others was a huge crucifix, a white cross, several thousand yards in length, which you might have thought had been thrown across the amphitheatre from one end to the other.

However, all at once M. de Guersaint broke off to inquire: "By the way, what's happening at our neighbour's? As I came up-stairs a little while ago I met Monsieur Vigneron running about like a madman; and, through the open doorway of their room, I fancied I saw Madame Vigneron looking very red. Has their son Gustave had another attack?"

Pierre had quite forgotten Madame Chaise lying dead on the other side of the partition. He seemed to feel a cold breath pass over him. "No, no," he answered, "the child is all right." And he said no more, preferring to remain silent. Why spoil this happy hour of new life and reconquered youth by mingling with it the image of death? However, from that moment he himself could not cease thinking of the proximity of nothingness. And he thought, too, of that other room where Madame Volmar's friend was now alone, stifling his sobs with his lips pressed upon a pair of gloves which he had stolen from her. All the sounds of the hotel were now becoming audible again—the coughs, the sighs, the indistinct voices, the continual slamming of doors, the creaking of the floors beneath the great accumulation of travellers, and all the stir in the passages, along which flying skirts were sweeping, and families galloping distractedly amidst the hurry-scurry of departure.

"On my word! you'll do yourself an injury," all at once cried Monsieur de Guersaint, on seeing his daughter take up another cake.

Marie was quite merry too. But at a sudden thought tears came into her eyes, and she exclaimed: "Ah! how glad I am! but also how sorry when I think that everybody is not as pleased as myself."

II. PLEASANT HOURS

IT was eight o'clock, and Marie was so impatient that she could not keep still, but continued going to the window, as if she wished to inhale all the air of the vast, expanse and the immense sky. Ah! what a pleasure to be able to run about the streets, across the squares, to go everywhere as far as she might wish. And to show how strong she was, to have the pride of walking leagues in the presence of everyone, now that the Blessed Virgin had cured her! It was an irresistible impulsion, a flight of her entire being, her blood, and her heart.

However, just as she was setting out she made up her mind that her first visit with her father ought to be to the Grotto, where both of them had to thank Our Lady of Lourdes. Then they would be free; they would have two long hours before them, and might walk wherever they chose, before she returned to lunch and pack up her few things at the hospital.

"Well, is everyone ready?" repeated M. de Guersaint. "Shall we make a move?"

Pierre took his hat, and all three went down-stairs, talking very loud and laughing on the staircase, like boisterous school-boys going for their holidays. They had almost reached the street, when at the doorway Madame Majeste rushed forward. She had evidently been waiting for them to go out.

"Ah! mademoiselle; ah! gentlemen, allow me to congratulate you," she said. "We have heard of the extraordinary favour that has been granted you; we are so happy, so much flattered, when the Blessed Virgin is pleased to select one of our customers!"

Her dry, harsh face was melting with amiability, and she observed the miraculously healed girl with the fondest of eyes. Then she impulsively called her husband, who was passing: "Look, my dear! It's mademoiselle; it's mademoiselle."

Majeste's clean-shaven face, puffed out with yellow fat, assumed a happy and grateful expression. "Really, mademoiselle, I cannot tell you how honoured we feel," said he. "We shall never forget that your papa put up at our place. It has already excited the envy of many people."

While he spoke Madame Majeste stopped the other travellers who were going out, and with a sign summoned the families already seated in the dining-room; indeed, she would have called in the whole street if they had given her time, to show that she had in her house the miracle at which all Lourdes had been marvelling since the previous day. People ended by collecting there, a crowd gathered little by little, while she whispered in the ear of each "Look! that's she; the young party, you know, the young party who—"

But all at once she exclaimed: "I'll go and fetch Apolline from the shop; I must show mademoiselle to Apolline."

Thereupon, however, Majeste, in a very dignified way, restrained her. "No," he said, "leave Apolline; she has three ladies to serve already. Mademoiselle and these gentlemen will certainly not leave Lourdes without making a few purchases. The little souvenirs that one carries away with one are so pleasant to look at later on! And our customers make a point of never buying elsewhere than here, in the shop which we have annexed to the hotel."

"I have already offered my services," added Madame Majeste, "and I renew them. Apolline will be so happy to show mademoiselle all our prettiest articles, at prices, too, which are incredibly low! Oh! there are some delightful things, delightful!"

Marie was becoming impatient at being detained in this manner, and Pierre was suffering from the increasing curiosity which they were arousing. As for M. de Guersaint, he enjoyed this popularity and triumph of his daughter immensely, and promised to return.

"Certainly," said he, "we will purchase a few little knick-knacks. Some souvenirs for ourselves, and some presents that we shall have to make, but later on, when we come back."

At last they escaped and descended the Avenue de la Grotte. The weather was again superb after the storms of the two preceding nights. Cooled by the rain, the morning air was delicious amidst the gaiety which the bright sun shed around. A busy crowd, well pleased with life, was already hurrying along the pavements. And what pleasure it all was for Marie, to whom everything seemed new, charming, inappreciable! In the morning she had had to allow Raymonde to lend her a pair of boots, for she had taken good care not to put any in her portmanteau, superstitiously fearing that they might bring her bad luck. However, Raymonde's boots fitted her admirably, and she listened with childish delight to the little heels tapping merrily on the flagstones. And she did not remember having ever seen houses so white, trees so green, and passers-by so happy. All her senses seemed holiday-making, endowed with a marvellously delicate sensibility; she heard music, smelt distant perfumes, savoured the air greedily, as though it were some delicious fruit. But what she considered, above all, so nice, so charming, was to walk along in this wise on her father's arm. She had never done so before, although she had felt the desire for years, as for one of those impossible pleasures with which people occupy their minds when invalided. And now her dream was realised and her heart beat with joy. She pressed against her father, and strove to walk very upright and look very handsome, so as to do him honour. And he was quite proud, as happy as she was, showing, exhibiting her, overcome with joy at the thought that she belonged to him, that she was his blood, his flesh, his daughter, henceforth beaming with youth and health.

As they were all three crossing the Plateau de la Merlasse, already obstructed by a band of candle and bouquet sellers running after the pilgrims, M. de Guersaint exclaimed, "We are surely not going to the Grotto empty-handed!"

Pierre, who was walking on the other side of Marie, himself brightened by her merry humour, thereupon stopped, and they were at once surrounded by a crowd of female hawkers, who with eager fingers thrust their goods into their faces. "My beautiful young lady! My good gentleman! Buy of me, of me, of me!" Such was the onslaught that it became necessary to struggle in order to extricate oneself. M. de Guersaint ended by purchasing the largest nosegay he could see—a bouquet of white marguerites, as round and hard as a cabbage—from a handsome, fair-haired, well developed girl of twenty, who was extremely bold both in look and manner. It only cost twenty sons, and he insisted on paying for it out of his own little purse, somewhat abashed meantime by the girl's unblushing effrontery. Then Pierre in his turn settled for the three candles which Marie had taken from an old woman, candles at two francs each, a very reasonable price, as she repeatedly said. And on being paid, the old creature, who had an angular face, covetous eyes, and a nose like the beak of a bird of prey, returned profuse and mellifluous thanks: "May Our Lady of Lourdes bless you, my beautiful young lady! May she cure you of your complaints, you and yours!" This enlivened them again, and they set out once more, all three laughing, amused like children at the idea that the good woman's wish had already been accomplished.

At the Grotto Marie wished to file off at once, in order to offer the bouquet and candles herself before even kneeling down. There were not many people there as yet, and having gone to the end of the line their turn came after waiting some three or four minutes. And with what enraptured glances did she then examine everything—the altar of engraved silver, the harmonium-organ, the votive offerings, the candle-holders, streaming with wax blazing in broad daylight. She was now inside that Grotto which she had hitherto only seen from her box of misery; she breathed there as in Paradise itself, steeped rapturously in a pleasant warmth and odour, which slightly oppressed her. When she had placed the tapers at the bottom of the large basket, and had raised herself on tiptoe to fix the bouquet on one of the spears of the iron railing, she imprinted a long kiss upon the rock, below the statue of the Blessed Virgin, at the very spot, indeed, which millions of lips had already polished. And the stone received a kiss of love in which she put forth all the strength of her gratitude, a kiss with which her heart melted.

When she was once more outside, Marie prostrated and humbled herself in an almost endless act of thanksgiving. Her father also had knelt down near her, and mingled the fervour of his gratitude with hers. But he could not remain doing the same thing for long. Little by little he became uneasy, and ended by bending down to his daughter's ear to tell her that he had a call to make which he had previously forgotten. Assuredly the best course would be for her to remain where she was, praying, and waiting for him. While she completed her devotions he would hurry along and get his troublesome errand over; and then they might walk about at ease wheresoever they liked. She did not understand him, did not even hear him, but simply nodded her head, promising that she would not move, and then such tender faith again took possession of her that her eyes, fixed on the white statue of the Virgin, filled with tears.

When M. de Guersaint had joined Pierre, who had remained a short distance off, he gave him the following explanation. "My dear fellow," he said, "it's a matter of conscience; I formally promised the coachman who drove us to Gavarnie that I would see his master and tell him the real cause of our delay. You know whom I mean—the hairdresser on the Place du Marcadal. And, besides, I want to get shaved."

Pierre, who felt uneasy at this proposal, had to give way in face of the promise that they would be back within a quarter of an hour. Only, as the distance seemed long, he on his side insisted on taking a trap which was standing at the bottom of the Plateau de la Merlasse. It was a sort of greenish cabriolet, and its driver, a fat fellow of about thirty, with the usual Basque cap on his head, was smoking a cigarette whilst waiting to be hired. Perched sideways on the seat with his knees wide apart, he drove them on with the tranquil indifference of a well-fed man who considers himself the master of the street.

"We will keep you," said Pierre as he alighted, when they had reached the Place du Marcadal.

"Very well, very well, Monsieur l'Abbe! I'll wait for you!" And then, leaving his lean horse in the hot sun, the driver went to chat and laugh with a strong, dishevelled servant-girl who was washing a dog in the basin of the neighbouring fountain.

Cazaban, as it happened, was just then on the threshold of his shop, the lofty windows and pale green painting of which enlivened the dull Place, which was so deserted on week-days. When he was not pressed with work he delighted to parade in this manner, standing between his two windows, which pots of pomatum and bottles of perfumery decorated with bright shades of colour.

He at once recognised the gentlemen. "Very flattered, very much honoured. Pray walk in, I beg of you," he said.

Then, at the first words which M. de Guersaint said to him to excuse the man who had driven him to Gavarnie, he showed himself well disposed. Of course it was not the man's fault; he could not prevent wheels coming to pieces, or storms falling. So long as the travellers did not complain all was well.

"Oh!" thereupon exclaimed M. de Guersaint, "it's a magnificent country, never to be forgotten."

"Well, monsieur, as our neighbourhood pleases you, you must come and see us again; we don't ask anything better," said Cazaban; and, on the architect seating himself in one of the arm-chairs and asking to be shaved, he began to bustle about.

His assistant was still absent, running errands for the pilgrims whom he lodged, a whole family, who were taking a case of chaplets, plaster Virgins, and framed engravings away with them. You heard a confused tramping of feet and violent bursts of conversation coming from the first floor, all the helter-skelter of people whom the approaching departure and the packing of purchases lying hither and thither drove almost crazy. In the adjoining dining-room, the door of which had remained open, two children were draining the dregs of some cups of chocolate which stood about amidst the disorder of the breakfast service. The whole of the house had been let, entirely given over, and now had come the last hours of this invasion which compelled the hairdresser and his wife to seek refuge in the narrow cellar, where they slept on a small camp-bed.

While Cazaban was rubbing M. de Guersaint's cheeks with soap-suds, the architect questioned him. "Well, are you satisfied with the season?"

"Certainly, monsieur, I can't complain. As you hear, my travellers are leaving to-day, but I am expecting others to-morrow morning; barely sufficient time for a sweep out. It will be the same up to October."

Then, as Pierre remained standing, walking about the shop and looking at the walls with an air of impatience, he turned round politely and said: "Pray be seated, Monsieur l'Abbe; take a newspaper. It will not be long."

The priest having thanked him with a nod, and refusing to sit down, the hairdresser, whose tongue was ever itching to talk, continued: "Oh! as for myself, I am always busy, my house is renowned for the cleanliness of the beds and the excellence of the fare. Only the town is not satisfied. Ah, no! I may even say that I have never known so much discontent here."

He became silent for a moment, and shaved his customer's left cheek; then again pausing in his work he suddenly declared with a cry, wrung from him by conviction, "The Fathers of the Grotto are playing with fire, monsieur, that is all I have to say."

From that moment, however, the vent-plug was withdrawn, and he talked and talked and talked again. His big eyes rolled in his long face with prominent cheek-bones and sunburnt complexion sprinkled with red, while the whole of his nervous little body continued on the jump, agitated by his growing exuberance of speech and gesture. He returned to his former indictment, and enumerated all the many grievances that the old town had against the Fathers. The hotel-keepers complained; the dealers in religious fancy articles did not take half the amount they ought to have realised; and, finally, the new town monopolised both the pilgrims and the cash; there was now no possibility for anyone but the keepers of the lodging-houses, hotels, and shops open in the neighbourhood of the Grotto to make any money whatever. It was a merciless struggle, a deadly hostility increasing from day to day, the old city losing a little of its life each season, and assuredly destined to disappear,—to be choked, assassinated, by the young town. Ah! their dirty Grotto! He would rather have his feet cut off than tread there. Wasn't it heart-rending, that knick-knack shop which they had stuck beside it? A shameful thing, at which a bishop had shown himself so indignant that it was said he had written to the Pope! He, Cazaban, who flattered himself with being a freethinker and a Republican of the old days, who already under the Empire had voted for the Opposition candidates, assuredly had the right to declare that he did not believe in their dirty Grotto, and that he did not care a fig for it!

"Look here, monsieur," he continued; "I am going to tell you a fact. My brother belongs to the municipal council, and it's through him that I know it. I must tell you first of all that we now have a Republican municipal council, which is much worried by the demoralisation of the town. You can no longer go out at night without meeting girls in the streets—you know, those candle hawkers! They gad about with the drivers who come here when the season commences, and swell the suspicious floating population which comes no one knows whence. And I must also explain to you the position of the Fathers towards the town. When they purchased the land at the Grotto they signed an agreement by which they undertook not to engage in any business there. Well, they have opened a shop in spite of their signature. Is not that an unfair rivalry, unworthy of honest people? So the new council decided on sending them a deputation to insist on the agreement being respected, and enjoining them to close their shop at once. What do you think they answered, monsieur? Oh! what they have replied twenty times before, what they will always answer, when they are reminded of their engagements: 'Very well, we consent to keep them, but we are masters at our own place, and we'll close the Grotto!'"

He raised himself up, his razor in the air, and, repeating his words, his eyes dilated by the enormity of the thing, he said, "'We'll close the Grotto.'"

Pierre, who was continuing his slow walk, suddenly stopped and said in his face, "Well! the municipal council had only to answer, 'Close it.'"

At this Cazaban almost choked; the blood rushed to his face, he was beside himself, and stammered out "Close the Grotto?—Close the Grotto?"

"Certainly! As the Grotto irritates you and rends your heart; as it's a cause of continual warfare, injustice, and corruption. Everything would be over, we should hear no more about it. That would really be a capital solution, and if the council had the power it would render you a service by forcing the Fathers to carry out their threat."

As Pierre went on speaking, Cazaban's anger subsided. He became very calm and somewhat pale, and in the depths of his big eyes the priest detected an expression of increasing uneasiness. Had he not gone too far in his passion against the Fathers? Many ecclesiastics did not like them; perhaps this young priest was simply at Lourdes for the purpose of stirring-up an agitation against them. Then who knows?—it might possibly result in the Grotto being closed later on. But it was by the Grotto that they all lived. If the old city screeched with rage at only picking up the crumbs, it was well pleased to secure even that windfall; and the freethinkers themselves, who coined money with the pilgrims, like everyone else, held their tongues, ill at ease, and even frightened, when they found people too much of their opinion with regard to the objectionable features of new Lourdes. It was necessary to be prudent.

Cazaban thereupon returned to M. de Guersaint, whose other cheek he began shaving, murmuring the while in an off-hand manner: "Oh! what I say about the Grotto is not because it troubles me much in reality, and, besides, everyone must live."

In the dining-room, the children, amidst deafening shouts, had just broken one of the bowls, and Pierre, glancing through the open doorway, again noticed the engravings of religious subjects and the plaster Virgin with which the hairdresser had ornamented the apartment in order to please his lodgers. And just then, too, a voice shouted from the first floor that the trunk was ready, and that they would be much obliged if the assistant would cord it as soon as he returned.

However, Cazaban, in the presence of these two gentlemen whom, as a matter of fact, he did not know, remained suspicious and uneasy, his brain haunted by all sorts of disquieting suppositions. He was in despair at the idea of having to let them go away without learning anything about them, especially after having exposed himself. If he had only been able to withdraw the more rabid of his biting remarks about the Fathers. Accordingly, when M. de Guersaint rose to wash his chin, he yielded to a desire to renew the conversation.

"Have you heard talk of yesterday's miracle? The town is quite upside down with it; more than twenty people have already given me an account of what occurred. Yes, it seems they obtained an extraordinary miracle, a paralytic young lady got up and dragged her invalid carriage as far as the choir of the Basilica."

M. de Guersaint, who was about to sit down after wiping himself, gave a complacent laugh. "That young lady is my daughter," he said.

Thereupon, under this sudden and fortunate flash of enlightenment, Cazaban became all smiles. He felt reassured, and combed M. de Guersaint's hair with a masterly touch, amid a returning exuberance of speech and gesture. "Ah! monsieur, I congratulate you, I am flattered at having you in my hands. Since the young lady your daughter is cured, your father's heart is at ease. Am I not right?"

And he also found a few pleasant words for Pierre. Then, when he had decided to let them go, he looked at the priest with an air of conviction, and remarked, like a sensible man, desirous of coming to a conclusion on the subject of miracles: "There are some, Monsieur l'Abbe, which are good fortunes for everybody. From time to time we require one of that description."

Outside, M. de Guersaint had to go and fetch the coachman, who was still laughing with the servant-girl, while her dog, dripping with water, was shaking itself in the sun. In five minutes the trap brought them back to the bottom of the Plateau de la Merlasse. The trip had taken a good half-hour. Pierre wanted to keep the conveyance, with the idea of showing Marie the town without giving her too much fatigue. So, while the father ran to the Grotto to fetch his daughter, he waited there beneath the trees.

The coachman at once engaged in conversation with the priest. He had lit another cigarette and showed himself very familiar. He came from a village in the environs of Toulouse, and did not complain, for he earned good round sums each day at Lourdes. You fed well there, said he, you amused yourself, it was what you might call a good neighbourhood. He said these things with the abandon of a man who was not troubled with religious scruples, but yet did not forget the respect which he owed to an ecclesiastic.

At last, from the top of his box, where he remained half lying down, dangling one of his legs, he allowed this remark to fall slowly from his lips: "Ah! yes, Monsieur l'Abbe, Lourdes has caught on well, but the question is whether it will all last long!"

Pierre, who was very much struck by the remark, was pondering on its involuntary profundity, when M. de Guersaint reappeared, bringing Marie with him. He had found her kneeling on the same spot, in the same act of faith and thankfulness, at the feet of the Blessed Virgin; and it seemed as if she had brought all the brilliant light of the Grotto away in her eyes, so vividly did they sparkle with divine joy at her cure. She would not entertain a proposal to keep the trap. No, no! she preferred to go on foot; she did not care about seeing the town, so long as she might for another hour continue walking on her father's arm through the gardens, the streets, the squares, anywhere they pleased! And, when Pierre had paid the driver, it was she who turned into a path of the Esplanade garden, delighted at being able to saunter in this wise beside the turf and the flower beds, under the great trees. The grass, the leaves, the shady solitary walks where you heard the everlasting rippling of the Gave, were so sweet and fresh! But afterwards she wished to return by way of the streets, among the crowd, that she might find the agitation, noise, and life, the need of which possessed her whole being.

In the Rue St. Joseph, on perceiving the panorama, where the former Grotto was depicted, with Bernadette kneeling down before it on the day of the miracle of the candle, the idea occurred to Pierre to go in. Marie became as happy as a child; and even M. de Guersaint was full of innocent delight, especially when he noticed that among the batch of pilgrims who dived at the same time as themselves into the depths of the obscure corridor, several recognised in his daughter the girl so miraculously healed the day before, who was already famous, and whose name flew from mouth to mouth. Up above, on the circular platform, when they came out into the diffuse light, filtering through a vellum, there was a sort of ovation around Marie; soft whispers, beatifical glances, a rapture of delight in seeing, following, and touching her. Now glory had come, she would be loved in that way wherever she went, and it was not until the showman who gave the explanations had placed himself at the head of the little party of visitors, and begun to walk round, relating the incident depicted on the huge circular canvas, nearly five hundred feet in length, that she was in some measure forgotten. The painting represented the seventeenth apparition of the Blessed Virgin to Bernadette, on the day when, kneeling before the Grotto during her vision, she had heedlessly left her hand on the flame of the candle without burning it. The whole of the old primitive landscape of the Grotto was shown, the whole scene was set out with all its historical personages: the doctor verifying the miracle watch in hand, the Mayor, the Commissary of Police, and the Public Prosecutor, whose names the showman gave out, amidst the amazement of the public following him.

Then, by an unconscious transition of ideas, Pierre recalled the remark which the driver of the cabriolet had made a short time previously: "Lourdes has caught on well, but the question is whether it will all last long." That, in fact, was the question. How many venerated sanctuaries had thus been built already, at the bidding of innocent chosen children, to whom the Blessed Virgin had shown herself! It was always the same story beginning afresh: an apparition; a persecuted shepherdess, who was called a liar; next the covert propulsion of human misery hungering after illusion; then propaganda, and the triumph of the sanctuary shining like a star; and afterwards decline, and oblivion, when the ecstatic dream of another visionary gave birth to another sanctuary elsewhere. It seemed as if the power of illusion wore away; that it was necessary in the course of centuries to displace it, set it amidst new scenery, under fresh circumstances, in order to renew its force. La Salette had dethroned the old wooden and stone Virgins that had healed; Lourdes had just dethroned La Salette, pending the time when it would be dethroned itself by Our Lady of to-morrow, she who will show her sweet, consoling features to some pure child as yet unborn. Only, if Lourdes had met with such rapid, such prodigious fortune, it assuredly owed it to the little sincere soul, the delightful charm of Bernadette. Here there was no deceit, no falsehood, merely the blossoming of suffering, a delicate sick child who brought to the afflicted multitude her dream of justice and equality in the miraculous. She was merely eternal hope, eternal consolation. Besides, all historical and social circumstances seem to have combined to increase the need of this mystical flight at the close of a terrible century of positivist inquiry; and that was perhaps the reason why Lourdes would still long endure in its triumph, before becoming a mere legend, one of those dead religions whose powerful perfume has evaporated.

Ah! that ancient Lourdes, that city of peace and belief, the only possible cradle where the legend could come into being, how easily Pierre conjured it up before him, whilst walking round the vast canvas of the Panorama! That canvas said everything; it was the best lesson of things that could be seen. The monotonous explanations of the showman were not heard; the landscape spoke for itself. First of all there was the Grotto, the rocky hollow beside the Gave, a savage spot suitable for reverie—bushy slopes and heaps of fallen stone, without a path among them; and nothing yet in the way of ornamentation—no monumental quay, no garden paths winding among trimly cut shrubs; no Grotto set in order, deformed, enclosed with iron railings; above all, no shop for the sale of religious articles, that simony shop which was the scandal of all pious souls. The Virgin could not have selected a more solitary and charming nook wherein to show herself to the chosen one of her heart, the poor young girl who came thither still possessed by the dream of her painful nights, even whilst gathering dead wood. And on the opposite side of the Gave, behind the rock of the castle, was old Lourdes, confident and asleep. Another age was then conjured up; a small town, with narrow pebble-paved streets, black houses with marble dressings, and an antique, semi-Spanish church, full of old carvings, and peopled with visions of gold and painted flesh. Communication with other places was only kept up by the Bagneres and Cauterets diligences, which twice a day forded the Lapaca to climb the steep causeway of the Rue Basse. The spirit of the century had not breathed on those peaceful roofs sheltering a belated population which had remained childish, enclosed within the narrow limits of strict religious discipline. There was no debauchery; a slow antique commerce sufficed for daily life, a poor life whose hardships were the safeguards of morality. And Pierre had never better understood how Bernadette, born in that land of faith and honesty, had flowered like a natural rose, budding on the briars of the road.

"It's all the same very curious," observed M. de Guersaint when they found themselves in the street again. "I'm not at all sorry I saw it."

Marie was also laughing with pleasure. "One would almost think oneself there. Isn't it so, father? At times it seems as if the people were going to move. And how charming Bernadette looks on her knees, in ecstasy, while the candle flame licks her fingers without burning them."

"Let us see," said the architect; "we have only an hour left, so we must think of making our purchases, if we wish to buy anything. Shall we take a look at the shops? We certainly promised Majeste to give him the preference; but that does not prevent us from making a few inquiries. Eh! Pierre, what do you say?"

"Oh! certainly, as you like," answered the priest. "Besides, it will give us a walk."

And he thereupon followed the young girl and her father, who returned to the Plateau de la Merlasse. Since he had quitted the Panorama he felt as though he no longer knew where he was. It seemed to him as if he had all at once been transported from one to another town, parted by centuries. He had left the solitude, the slumbering peacefulness of old Lourdes, which the dead light of the vellum had increased, to fall at last into new Lourdes, sparkling with brightness and noisy with the crowd. Ten o'clock had just struck, and extraordinary animation reigned on the footways, where before breakfast an entire people was hastening to complete its purchases, so that it might have nothing but its departure to think of afterwards. The thousands of pilgrims of the national pilgrimage streamed along the thoroughfares and besieged the shops in a final scramble. You would have taken the cries, the jostling, and the sudden rushes for those at some fair just breaking up amidst a ceaseless roll of vehicles. Many, providing themselves with provisions for the journey, cleared the open-air stalls where bread and slices of sausages and ham were sold. Others purchased fruit and wine; baskets were filled with bottles and greasy parcels until they almost burst. A hawker who was wheeling some cheeses about on a small truck saw his goods carried off as if swept away by the wind. But what the crowd more particularly purchased were religious articles, and those hawkers whose barrows were loaded with statuettes and sacred engravings were reaping golden gains. The customers at the shops stood in strings on the pavement; the women were belted with immense chaplets, had Blessed Virgins tucked under their arms, and were provided with cans which they meant to fill at the miraculous spring. Carried in the hand or slung from the shoulder, some of them quite plain and others daubed over with a Lady of Lourdes in blue paint, these cans held from one to ten quarts apiece; and, shining with all the brightness of new tin, clashing, too, at times with the sharp jingle of stew-pans, they added a gay note to the aspect of the noisy multitude. And the fever of dealing, the pleasure of spending one's money, of returning home with one's pockets crammed with photographs and medals, lit up all faces with a holiday expression, transforming the radiant gathering into a fair-field crowd with appetites either beyond control or satisfied.

On the Plateau de la Merlasse, M. de Guersaint for a moment felt tempted to enter one of the finest and most patronised shops, on the board over which were these words in large letters: "Soubirous, Brother of Bernadette."

"Eh! what if we were to make our purchases there? It would be more appropriate, more interesting to remember."

However, he passed on, repeating that they must see everything first of all.

Pierre had looked at the shop kept by Bernadette's brother with a heavy heart. It grieved him to find the brother selling the Blessed Virgin whom the sister had beheld. However, it was necessary to live, and he had reason to believe that, beside the triumphant Basilica resplendent with gold, the visionary's relatives were not making a fortune, the competition being so terrible. If on the one hand the pilgrims left millions behind them at Lourdes, on the other there were more than two hundred dealers in religious articles, to say nothing of the hotel and lodging-house keepers, to whom the largest part of the spoils fell; and thus the gain, so eagerly disputed, ended by being moderate enough after all. Along the Plateau on the right and left of the repository kept by Bernadette's brother, other shops appeared, an uninterrupted row of them, pressing one against the other, each occupying a division of a long wooden structure, a sort of gallery erected by the town, which derived from it some sixty thousand francs a year. It formed a regular bazaar of open stalls, encroaching on the pavements so as to tempt people to stop as they passed along. For more than three hundred yards no other trade was plied: a river of chaplets, medals, and statuettes streamed without end behind the windows; and in enormous letters on the boards above appeared the venerated names of Saint Roch, Saint Joseph, Jerusalem, The Immaculate Virgin, The Sacred Heart of Mary, all the names in Paradise that were most likely to touch and attract customers.

"Really," said M. de Guersaint, "I think it's the same thing all over the place. Let us go anywhere." He himself had had enough of it, this interminable display was quite exhausting him.

"But as you promised to make the purchases at Majeste's," said Marie, who was not, in the least tired, "the best thing will be to go back."

"That's it; let's return to Majeste's place."

But the rows of shops began again in the Avenue de la Grotte. They swarmed on both sides; and among them here were jewellers, drapers, and umbrella-makers, who also dealt in religious articles. There was even a confectioner who sold boxes of pastilles a l'eau de Lourdes, with a figure of the Virgin on the cover. A photographer's windows were crammed with views of the Grotto and the Basilica, and portraits of Bishops and reverend Fathers of all Orders, mixed up with views of famous sites in the neighbouring mountains. A bookseller displayed the last Catholic publications, volumes bearing devout titles, and among them the innumerable works published on Lourdes during the last twenty years, some of which had had a wonderful success, which was still fresh in memory. In this broad, populous thoroughfare the crowd streamed along in more open order; their cans jingled, everyone was in high spirits, amid the bright sunrays which enfiladed the road from one end to the other. And it seemed as if there would never be a finish to the statuettes, the medals, and the chaplets; one display followed another; and, indeed, there were miles of them running through the streets of the entire town, which was ever the same bazaar selling the same articles.

In front of the Hotel of the Apparitions M. de Guersaint again hesitated. "Then it's decided, we are going to make our purchases there?" he asked.

"Certainly," said Marie. "See what a beautiful shop it is!"

And she was the first to enter the establishment, which was, in fact, one of the largest in the street, occupying the ground-floor of the hotel on the left hand. M. de Guersaint and Pierre followed her.

Apolline, the niece of the Majestes, who was in charge of the place, was standing on a stool, taking some holy-water vases from a top shelf to show them to a young man, an elegant bearer, wearing beautiful yellow gaiters. She was laughing with the cooing sound of a dove, and looked charming with her thick black hair and her superb eyes, set in a somewhat square face, which had a straight forehead, chubby cheeks, and full red lips. Jumping lightly to the ground, she exclaimed: "Then you don't think that this pattern would please madame, your aunt?"

"No, no," answered the bearer, as he went off. "Obtain the other pattern. I shall not leave until to-morrow, and will come back."

When Apolline learnt that Marie was the young person visited by the miracle of whom Madame Majeste had been talking ever since the previous day, she became extremely attentive. She looked at her with her merry smile, in which there was a dash of surprise and covert incredulity. However, like the clever saleswoman that she was, she was profuse in complimentary remarks. "Ah, mademoiselle, I shall be so happy to sell to you! Your miracle is so beautiful! Look, the whole shop is at your disposal. We have the largest choice."

Marie was ill at ease. "Thank you," she replied, "you are very good. But we have only come to buy a few small things."

"If you will allow us," said M. de Guersaint, "we will choose ourselves."

"Very well. That's it, monsieur. Afterwards we will see!"

And as some other customers now came in, Apolline forgot them, returned to her duties as a pretty saleswoman, with caressing words and seductive glances, especially for the gentlemen, whom she never allowed to leave until they had their pockets full of purchases.

M. de Guersaint had only two francs left of the louis which Blanche, his eldest daughter, had slipped into his hand when he was leaving, as pocket-money; and so he did not dare to make any large selection. But Pierre declared that they would cause him great pain if they did not allow him to offer them the few things which they would like to take away with them from Lourdes. It was therefore understood that they would first of all choose a present for Blanche, and then Marie and her father should select the souvenirs that pleased them best.

"Don't let us hurry," repeated M. de Guersaint, who had become very gay. "Come, Marie, have a good look. What would be most likely to please Blanche?"

All three looked, searched, and rummaged. But their indecision increased as they went from one object to another. With its counters, show-cases, and nests of drawers, furnishing it from top to bottom, the spacious shop was a sea of endless billows, overflowing with all the religious knick-knacks imaginable. There were the chaplets: skeins of chaplets hanging along the walls, and heaps of chaplets lying in the drawers, from humble ones costing twenty sons a dozen, to those of sweet-scented wood, agate, and lapis-lazuli, with chains of gold or silver; and some of them, of immense length, made to go twice round the neck or waist, had carved beads, as large as walnuts, separated by death's-heads. Then there were the medals: a shower of medals, boxes full of medals, of all sizes, of all metals, the cheapest and the most precious. They bore different inscriptions, they represented the Basilica, the Grotto, or the Immaculate Conception; they were engraved, repoussees, or enamelled, executed with care, or made by the gross, according to the price. And next there were the Blessed Virgins, great and small, in zinc, wood, ivory, and especially plaster; some entirely white, others tinted in bright colours, in accordance with the description given by Bernadette; the amiable and smiling face, the extremely long veil, the blue sash, and the golden roses on the feet, there being, however, some slight modification in each model so as to guarantee the copyright. And there was another flood of other religious objects: a hundred varieties of scapularies, a thousand different sorts of sacred pictures: fine engravings, large chromo-lithographs in glaring colours, submerged beneath a mass of smaller pictures, which were coloured, gilded, varnished, decorated with bouquets of flowers, and bordered with lace paper. And there was also jewellery: rings, brooches, and bracelets, loaded with stars and crosses, and ornamented with saintly figures. Finally, there was the Paris article, which rose above and submerged all the rest: pencil-holders, purses, cigar-holders, paperweights, paper-knives, even snuff-boxes; and innumerable other objects on which the Basilica, Grotto, and Blessed Virgin ever and ever appeared, reproduced in every way, by every process that is known. Heaped together pell-mell in one of the cases reserved to articles at fifty centimes apiece were napkin-rings, egg-cups, and wooden pipes, on which was carved the beaming apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes.

Little by little, M. de Guersaint, with the annoyance of a man who prides himself on being an artist, became disgusted and quite sad. "But all this is frightful, frightful!" he repeated at every new article he took up to look at.

Then he relieved himself by reminding Pierre of the ruinous attempt which he had made to improve the artistic quality of religious prints. The remains of his fortune had been lost in that attempt, and the thought made him all the more angry, in presence of the wretched productions with which the shop was crammed. Had anyone ever seen things of such idiotic, pretentious, and complicated ugliness! The vulgarity of the ideas and the silliness of the expressions portrayed rivalled the commonplace character of the composition. You were reminded of fashion-plates, the covers of boxes of sweets, and the wax dolls' heads that revolve in hairdressers' windows; it was an art abounding in false prettiness, painfully childish, with no really human touch in it, no tone, and no sincerity. And the architect, who was wound up, could not stop, but went on to express his disgust with the buildings of new Lourdes, the pitiable disfigurement of the Grotto, the colossal monstrosity of the inclined ways, the disastrous lack of symmetry in the church of the Rosary and the Basilica, the former looking too heavy, like a corn market, whilst the latter had an anaemical structural leanness with no kind of style but the mongrel.

"Ah! one must really be very fond of God," he at last concluded, "to have courage enough to come and adore Him amidst such horrors! They have failed in everything, spoilt everything, as though out of pleasure. Not one of them has experienced that moment of true feeling, of real naturalness and sincere faith, which gives birth to masterpieces. They are all clever people, but all plagiarists; not one has given his mind and being to the undertaking. And what must they not require to inspire them, since they have failed to produce anything grand even in this land of miracles?"

Pierre did not reply, but he was very much struck by these reflections, which at last gave him an explanation of a feeling of discomfort that he had experienced ever since his arrival at Lourdes. This discomfort arose from the difference between the modern surroundings and the faith of past ages which it sought to resuscitate. He thought of the old cathedrals where quivered that faith of nations; he pictured the former attributes of worship—the images, the goldsmith's work, the saints in wood and stone—all of admirable power and beauty of expression. The fact was that in those ancient times the workmen had been true believers, had given their whole souls and bodies and all the candour of their feelings to their productions, just as M. de Guersaint said. But nowadays architects built churches with the same practical tranquillity that they erected five-storey houses, just as the religious articles, the chaplets, the medals, and the statuettes were manufactured by the gross in the populous quarters of Paris by merrymaking workmen who did not even follow their religion. And thus what slopwork, what toymakers', ironmongers' stuff it all was! of a prettiness fit to make you cry, a silly sentimentality fit to make your heart turn with disgust! Lourdes was inundated, devastated, disfigured by it all to such a point as to quite upset persons with any delicacy of taste who happened to stray through its streets. It clashed jarringly with the attempted resuscitation of the legends, ceremonies, and processions of dead ages; and all at once it occurred to Pierre that the social and historical condemnation of Lourdes lay in this, that faith is forever dead among a people when it no longer introduces it into the churches it builds or the chaplets it manufactures.

However, Marie had continued examining the shelves with the impatience of a child, hesitating, and finding nothing which seemed to her worthy of the great dream of ecstasy which she would ever keep within her.

"Father," she said, "it is getting late; you must take me back to the hospital; and to make up my mind, look, I will give Blanche this medal with the silver chain. After all it's the most simple and prettiest thing here. She will wear it; it will make her a little piece of jewellery. As for myself, I will take this statuette of Our Lady of Lourdes, this small one, which is rather prettily painted. I shall place it in my room and surround it with fresh flowers. It will be very nice, will it not?"

M. de Guersaint approved of her idea, and then busied himself with his own choice. "O dear! oh dear! how embarrassed I am!" said he.

He was examining some ivory-handled penholders capped with pea-like balls, in which were microscopic photographs, and while bringing one of the little holes to his eye to look in it he raised an exclamation of mingled surprise and pleasure. "Hallo! here's the Cirque de Gavarnie! Ah! it's prodigious; everything is there; how can that colossal panorama have been got into so small a space? Come, I'll take this penholder; it's curious, and will remind me of my excursion."

Pierre had simply chosen a portrait of Bernadette, the large photograph which represents her on her knees in a black gown, with a handkerchief tied over her hair, and which is said to be the only one in existence taken from life. He hastened to pay, and they were all three on the point of leaving when Madame Majeste entered, protested, and positively insisted on making Marie a little present, saying that it would bring her establishment good-fortune. "I beg of you, mademoiselle, take a scapulary," said she. "Look among those there. The Blessed Virgin who chose you will repay me in good luck."

She raised her voice and made so much fuss that the purchasers filling the shop were interested, and began gazing at the girl with envious eyes. It was popularity bursting out again around her, a popularity which ended even by reaching the street when the landlady went to the threshold of the shop, making signs to the tradespeople opposite and putting all the neighbourhood in a flutter.

"Let us go," repeated Marie, feeling more and more uncomfortable.

But her father, on noticing a priest come in, detained her. "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe des Hermoises!"

It was in fact the handsome Abbe, clad in a cassock of fine cloth emitting a pleasant odour, and with an expression of soft gaiety on his fresh-coloured face. He had not noticed his companion of the previous day, but had gone straight to Apolline and taken her on one side. And Pierre overheard him saying in a subdued tone: "Why didn't you bring me my three-dozen chaplets this morning?"

Apolline again began laughing with the cooing notes of a dove, and looked at him sideways, roguishly, without answering.

"They are for my little penitents at Toulouse. I wanted to place them at the bottom of my trunk; and you offered to help me pack my linen."

She continued laughing, and her pretty eyes sparkled.

"However, I shall not leave before to-morrow. Bring them me to-night, will you not? When you are at liberty. It's at the end of the street, at Duchene's."

Thereupon, with a slight movement of her red lips, and in a somewhat bantering way, which left him in doubt as to whether she would keep her promise, she replied: "Certainly, Monsieur l'Abbe, I will go."

They were now interrupted by M. de Guersaint, who came forward to shake the priest's hand. And the two men at once began talking again of the Cirque de Gavarnie: they had had a delightful trip, a most pleasant time, which they would never forget. Then they enjoyed a laugh at the expense of their two companions, ecclesiastics of slender means, good-natured fellows, who had much amused them. And the architect ended by reminding his new friend that he had kindly promised to induce a personage at Toulouse, who was ten times a millionaire, to interest himself in his studies on navigable balloons. "A first advance of a hundred thousand francs would be sufficient," he said.

"You can rely on me," answered Abbe des Hermoises. "You will not have prayed to the Blessed Virgin in vain."

However, Pierre, who had kept Bernadette's portrait in his hand, had just then been struck by the extraordinary likeness between Apolline and the visionary. It was the same rather massive face, the same full thick mouth, and the same magnificent eyes; and he recollected that Madame Majeste had already pointed out to him this striking resemblance, which was all the more peculiar as Apolline had passed through a similar poverty-stricken childhood at Bartres before her aunt had taken her with her to assist in keeping the shop. Bernadette! Apolline! What a strange association, what an unexpected reincarnation at thirty years' distance! And, all at once, with this Apolline, who was so flightily merry and careless, and in regard to whom there were so many odd rumours, new Lourdes rose before his eyes: the coachmen, the candle-girls, the persons who let rooms and waylaid tenants at the railway station, the hundreds of furnished houses with discreet little lodgings, the crowd of free priests, the lady hospitallers, and the simple passers-by, who came there to satisfy their appetites. Then, too, there was the trading mania excited by the shower of millions, the entire town given up to lucre, the shops transforming the streets into bazaars which devoured one another, the hotels living gluttonously on the pilgrims, even to the Blue Sisters who kept a table d'hote, and the Fathers of the Grotto who coined money with their God! What a sad and frightful course of events, the vision of pure Bernadette inflaming multitudes, making them rush to the illusion of happiness, bringing a river of gold to the town, and from that moment rotting everything. The breath of superstition had sufficed to make humanity flock thither, to attract abundance of money, and to corrupt this honest corner of the earth forever. Where the candid lily had formerly bloomed there now grew the carnal rose, in the new loam of cupidity and enjoyment. Bethlehem had become Sodom since an innocent child had seen the Virgin.

"Eh? What did I tell you?" exclaimed Madame Majeste, perceiving that Pierre was comparing her niece with the portrait. "Apolline is Bernadette all over!"

The young girl approached with her amiable smile, flattered at first by the comparison.

"Let's see, let's see!" said Abbe des Hermoises, with an air of lively interest.

He took the photograph in his turn, compared it with the girl, and then exclaimed in amazement: "It's wonderful; the same features. I had not noticed it before. Really I'm delighted—"

"Still I fancy she had a larger nose," Apolline ended by remarking.

The Abbe then raised an exclamation of irresistible admiration: "Oh! you are prettier, much prettier, that's evident. But that does not matter, anyone would take you for two sisters."

Pierre could not refrain from laughing, he thought the remark so peculiar. Ah! poor Bernadette was absolutely dead, and she had no sister. She could not have been born again; it would have been impossible for her to exist in the region of crowded life and passion which she had made.

At length Marie went off leaning on her father's arm, and it was agreed that they would both call and fetch her at the hospital to go to the station together. More than fifty people were awaiting her in the street in a state of ecstasy. They bowed to her and followed her; and one woman even made her infirm child, whom she was bringing back from the Grotto, touch her gown.

III. DEPARTURE

At half-past two o'clock the white train, which was to leave Lourdes at three-forty, was already in the station, alongside the second platform. For three days it had been waiting on a siding, in the same state as when it had come from Paris, and since it had been run into the station again white flags had been waving from the foremost and hindmost of its carriages, by way of preventing any mistakes on the part of the pilgrims, whose entraining was usually a very long and troublesome affair. Moreover, all the fourteen trains of the pilgrimage were timed to leave that day. The green train had started off at ten o'clock, followed by the pink and the yellow trains, and the others—the orange, the grey, and the blue—would start in turn after the white train had taken its departure. It was, indeed, another terrible day's work for the station staff, amidst a tumult and a scramble which altogether distracted them.

However, the departure of the white train was always the event of the day which provoked most interest and emotion, for it took away with it all the more afflicted patients, amongst whom were naturally those loved by the Virgin and chosen by her for the miraculous cures. Accordingly, a large, serried crowd was collected under the roofing of the spacious platform, a hundred yards in length, where all the benches were already covered with waiting pilgrims and their parcels. In the refreshment-room, at one end of the buildings, men were drinking beer and women ordering lemonade at the little tables which had been taken by assault, whilst at the other end bearers stood on guard at the goods entrance so as to keep the way clear for the speedy passage of the patients, who would soon be arriving. And all along the broad platform there was incessant coming and going, poor people rushing hither and thither in bewilderment, priests trotting along to render assistance, gentlemen in frock-coats looking on with quiet inquisitiveness: indeed, all the jumbling and jostling of the most mixed, most variegated throng ever elbowed in a railway station.

At three o'clock, however, the sick had not yet reached the station, and Baron Suire was in despair, his anxiety arising from the dearth of horses, for a number of unexpected tourists had arrived at Lourdes that morning and hired conveyances for Bareges, Cauterets, and Gavarnie. At last, however, the Baron espied Berthaud and Gerard arriving in all haste, after scouring the town; and when he had rushed up to them they soon pacified him by announcing that things were going splendidly. They had been able to procure the needful animals, and the removal of the patients from the hospital was now being carried out under the most favorable circumstances. Squads of bearers with their stretchers and little carts were already in the station yard, watching for the arrival of the vans, breaks, and other vehicles which had been recruited. A reserve supply of mattresses and cushions was, moreover, heaped up beside a lamp-post. Nevertheless, just as the first patients arrived, Baron Suire again lost his head, whilst Berthaud and Gerard hastened to the platform from which the train would start. There they began to superintend matters, and gave orders amidst an increasing scramble.

Father Fourcade was on this platform, walking up and down alongside the train, on Father Massias's arm. Seeing Doctor Bonamy approach, he stopped short to speak to him: "Ah, doctor," said he, "I am pleased to see you. Father Massias, who is about to leave us, was again telling me just now of the extraordinary favor granted by the Blessed Virgin to that interesting young person, Mademoiselle Marie de Guersaint. There has not been such a brilliant miracle for years! It is signal good-fortune for us—a blessing which should render our labours fruitful. All Christendom will be illumined, comforted, enriched by it."

He was radiant with pleasure, and forthwith the doctor with his clean-shaven face, heavy, peaceful features, and usually tired eyes, also began to exult: "Yes, your reverence, it is prodigious, prodigious! I shall write a pamphlet about it. Never was cure produced by supernatural means in a more authentic manner. Ah! what a stir it will create!"

Then, as they had begun walking to and fro again, all three together, he noticed that Father Fourcade was dragging his leg with increased difficulty, leaning heavily the while on his companion's arm. "Is your attack of gout worse, your reverence?" he inquired. "You seem to be suffering a great deal."

"Oh! don't speak of it; I wasn't able to close my eyes all night! It is very annoying that this attack should have come on me the very day of my arrival here! It might as well have waited. But there is nothing to be done, so don't let us talk of it any more. I am, at all events, very pleased with this year's result."

"Ah! yes, yes indeed," in his turn said Father Massias, in a voice which quivered with fervour; "we may all feel proud, and go away with our hearts full of enthusiasm and gratitude. How many prodigies there have been, in addition to the healing of that young woman you spoke of! There is no counting all the miracles: deaf women and dumb women have recovered their faculties, faces disfigured by sores have become as smooth as the hand, moribund consumptives have come to life again and eaten and danced! It is not a train of sufferers, but a train of resurrection, a train of glory, that I am about to take back to Paris!"

He had ceased to see the ailing creatures around him, and in the blindness of his faith was soaring triumphantly.

Then, alongside the carriages, whose compartments were beginning to fill, they all three continued their slow saunter, smiling at the pilgrims who bowed to them, and at times again stopping to address a kind word to some mournful woman who, pale and shivering, passed by upon a stretcher. They boldly declared that she was looking much better, and would assuredly soon get well.

However, the station-master, who was incessantly bustling about, passed by, calling in a shrill voice: "Don't block up the platform, please; don't block up the platform!" And on Berthaud pointing out to him that it was, at all events, necessary to deposit the stretchers on the platform before hoisting the patients into the carriages, he became quite angry: "But, come, come; is it reasonable?" he asked. "Look at that little hand-cart which has been left on the rails over yonder. I expect the train to Toulouse in a few minutes. Do you want your people to be crushed to death?"

Then he went off at a run to instruct some porters to keep the bewildered flock of pilgrims away from the rails. Many of them, old and simple people, did not even recognise the colour of their train, and this was the reason why one and all wore cards of some particular hue hanging from their necks, so that they might be led and entrained like marked cattle. And what a constant state of excitement it was, with the starting of these fourteen special trains, in addition to all the ordinary traffic, in which no change had been made.

Pierre arrived, valise in hand, and found some difficulty in reaching the platform. He was alone, for Marie had expressed an ardent desire to kneel once more at the Grotto, so that her soul might burn with gratitude before the Blessed Virgin until the last moment; and so he had left M. de Guersaint to conduct her thither whilst he himself settled the hotel bill. Moreover, he had made them promise that they would take a fly to the station, and they would certainly arrive within a quarter of an hour. Meantime, his idea was to seek their carriage, and there rid himself of his valise. This, however, was not an easy task, and he only recognised the carriage eventually by the placard which had been swinging from it in the sunlight and the storms during the last three days—a square of pasteboard bearing the names of Madame de Jonquiere and Sisters Hyacinthe and Claire des Anges. There could be no mistake, and Pierre again pictured the compartments full of his travelling companions. Some cushions already marked M. Sabathier's corner, and on the seat where Marie had experienced such suffering he still found some scratches caused by the ironwork of her box. Then, having deposited his valise in his own place, he remained on the platform waiting and looking around him, with a slight feeling of surprise at not perceiving Doctor Chassaigne, who had promised to come and embrace him before the train started.

Now that Marie was well again, Pierre had laid his bearer straps aside, and merely wore the red cross of the pilgrimage on his cassock. The station, of which he had caught but a glimpse, in the livid dawn amidst the anguish of the terrible morning of their arrival, now surprised him by its spacious platforms, its broad exits, and its clear gaiety. He could not see the mountains, but some verdant slopes rose up on the other side, in front of the waiting-rooms; and that afternoon the weather was delightfully mild, the sky of a milky whiteness, with light fleecy clouds veiling the sun, whence there fell a broad diffuse light, like a nacreous, pearly dust: "maiden's weather," as country folk are wont to say.

The big clock had just struck three, and Pierre was looking at it when he saw Madame Desagneaux and Madame Volmar arrive, followed by Madame de Jonquiere and her daughter. These ladies, who had driven from the hospital in a landau, at once began looking for their carriage, and it was Raymonde who first recognised the first-class compartment in which she had travelled from Paris. "Mamma, mamma, here; here it is!" she called. "Stay a little while with us; you have plenty of time to install yourself among your patients, since they haven't yet arrived."

Pierre now again found himself face to face with Madame Volmar, and their glances met. However, he gave no sign of recognition, and on her side there was but a slight sudden drooping of the eyelids. She had again assumed the air of a languid, indolent, black-robed woman, who modestly shrinks back, well pleased to escape notice. Her brasier-like eyes no longer glowed; it was only at long intervals that they kindled into a spark beneath the veil of indifference, the moire-like shade, which dimmed them.

"Oh! it was a fearful sick headache!" she was repeating to Madame Desagneaux. "And, you can see, I've hardly recovered the use of my poor head yet. It's the journey which brings it on. It's the same thing every year."

However, Berthaud and Gerard, who had just perceived the ladies, were hurrying up to them. That morning they had presented themselves at the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, and Madame de Jonquiere had received them in a little office near the linen-room. Thereupon, apologising with smiling affability for making his request amidst such a hurly-burly, Berthaud had solicited the hand of Mademoiselle Raymonde for his cousin, Gerard. They at once felt themselves at ease, the mother, with some show of emotion, saying that Lourdes would bring the young couple good luck. And so the marriage was arranged in a few words, amidst general satisfaction. A meeting was even appointed for the fifteenth of September at the Chateau of Berneville, near Caen, an estate belonging to Raymonde's uncle, the diplomatist, whom Berthaud knew, and to whom he promised to introduce Gerard. Then Raymonde was summoned, and blushed with pleasure as she placed her little hand in those of her betrothed.

Binding her now upon the platform, the latter began paying her every attention, and asking, "Would you like some pillows for the night? Don't make any ceremony about it; I can give you plenty, both for yourself and for these ladies who are accompanying you."

However, Raymonde gaily refused the offer, "No, no," said she, "we are not so delicate. Keep them for the poor sufferers."

All the ladies were now talking together. Madame de Jonquiere declared that she was so tired, so tired that she no longer felt alive; and yet she displayed great happiness, her eyes smiling as she glanced at her daughter and the young man she was engaged to. But neither Berthaud nor Gerard could remain there; they had their duties to perform, and accordingly took their leave, after reminding Madame de Jonquiere and Raymonde of the appointed meeting. It was understood, was it not, on September 15th, at the Chateau of Berneville? Yes, yes, it was understood! And then came fresh smiles and handshakes, whilst the eyes of the newly engaged couple—caressing, delighted eyes—added all that they dared not say aloud in the midst of such a throng.

"What!" exclaimed little Madame Desagneaux, "you will go to Berneville on the 15th? But if we stay at Trouville till the 10th, as my husband wishes to do, we will go to see you!" And then, turning towards Madame Volmar, who stood there silent, she added, "You ought to come as well, my dear. It would be so nice to meet there all together."

But, with a slow wave of the hand and an air of weary indifference, Madame Volmar answered, "Oh! my holiday is all over; I am going home."

Just then her eyes again met those of Pierre, who had remained standing near the party, and he fancied that she became confused, whilst an expression of indescribable suffering passed over her lifeless face.

The Sisters of the Assumption were now arriving, and the ladies joined them in front of the cantine van. Ferrand, who had come with the Sisters from the hospital, got into the van, and then helped Sister Saint-Francois to mount upon the somewhat high footboard. Then he remained standing on the threshold of the van—transformed into a kitchen and containing all sorts of supplies for the journey, such as bread, broth, milk, and chocolate,—whilst Sister Hyacinthe and Sister Claire des Anges, who were still on the platform, passed him his little medicine-chest and some small articles of luggage.

"You are sure you have everything?" Sister Hyacinthe asked him. "All right. Well, now you only have to go and lie down in your corner and get to sleep, since you complain that your services are not utilised."

Ferrand began to laugh softly. "I shall help Sister Saint-Francois," said he. "I shall light the oil-stove, wash the crockery, carry the cups of broth and milk to the patients whenever we stop, according to the time-table hanging yonder; and if, all the same, you should require a doctor, you will please come to fetch me."

Sister Hyacinthe had also begun to laugh. "But we no longer require a doctor since all our patients are cured," she replied; and, fixing her eyes on his, with her calm, sisterly air, she added, "Good-bye, Monsieur Ferrand."

He smiled again, whilst a feeling of deep emotion brought moisture to his eyes. The tremulous accents of his voice expressed his conviction that he would never be able to forget this journey, his joy at having seen her again, and the souvenir of divine and eternal affection which he was taking away with him. "Good-bye, Sister," said he.

Then Madame de Jonquiere talked of going to her carriage with Sister Claire des Anges and Sister Hyacinthe; but the latter assured her that there was no hurry, since the sick pilgrims were as yet scarcely arriving. She left her, therefore, taking the other Sister with her, and promising to see to everything. Moreover, she even insisted on ridding the superintendent of her little bag, saying that she would find it on her seat when it was time for her to come. Thus the ladies continued walking and chatting gaily on the broad platform, where the atmosphere was so pleasant.

Pierre, however, his eyes fixed upon the big clock, watched the minutes hasten by on the dial, and began to feel surprised at not seeing Marie arrive with her father. It was to be hoped that M. de Guersaint would not lose himself on the road!

The young priest was still watching, when, to his surprise, he caught sight of M. Vigneron, in a state of perfect exasperation, pushing his wife and little Gustave furiously before him.

"Oh, Monsieur l'Abbe," he exclaimed, "tell me where our carriage is! Help me to put our luggage and this child in it. I am at my wit's end! They have made me altogether lose my temper."

Then, on reaching the second-class compartment, he caught hold of Pierre's hands, just as the young man was about to place little Gustave inside, and quite an outburst followed. "Could you believe it? They insist on my starting. They tell me that my return-ticket will not be available if I wait here till to-morrow. It was of no use my telling them about the accident. As it is, it's by no means pleasant to have to stay with that corpse, watch over it, see it put in a coffin, and remove it to-morrow within the regulation time. But they pretend that it doesn't concern them, that they already make large enough reductions on the pilgrimage tickets, and that they can't enter into any questions of people dying."

Madame Vigneron stood all of a tremble listening to him, whilst Gustave, forgotten, staggering on his crutch with fatigue, raised his poor, inquisitive, suffering face.

"But at all events," continued the irate father, "as I told them, it's a case of compulsion. What do they expect me to do with that corpse? I can't take it under my arm, and bring it them to-day, like an article of luggage! I am therefore absolutely obliged to remain behind. But no! ah! how many stupid and wicked people there are!"

"Have you spoken to the station-master?" asked Pierre.

"The station-master! Oh! he's somewhere about, in the midst of the scramble. They were never able to find him. How could you have anything done properly in such a bear-garden? Still, I mean to rout him out, and give him a bit of my mind!"

Then, perceiving his wife standing beside him motionless, glued as it were to the platform, he cried: "What are you doing there? Get in, so that we may pass you the youngster and the parcels!"

With these words he pushed her in, and threw the parcels after her, whilst the young priest took Gustave in his arms. The poor little fellow, who was as light as a bird, seemingly thinner than before, consumed by sores, and so full of pain, raised a faint cry. "Oh, my dear child, have I hurt you?" asked Pierre.

"No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe, but I've been moved about so much to-day, and I'm very tired this afternoon." As he spoke, he smiled with his usual intelligent and mournful expression, and then, sinking back into his corner, closed his eyes, exhausted, indeed done for, by this fearful trip to Lourdes.

"As you can very well understand," now resumed M. Vigneron, "it by no means amuses me to stay here, kicking my heels, while my wife and my son go back to Paris without me. They have to go, however, for life at the hotel is no longer bearable; and besides, if I kept them with me, and the railway people won't listen to reason, I should have to pay three extra fares. And to make matters worse, my wife hasn't got much brains. I'm afraid she won't be able to manage things properly."

Then, almost breathless, he overwhelmed Madame Vigneron with the most minute instructions—what she was to do during the journey, how she was to get back home on arriving in Paris, and what steps she was to take if Gustave was to have another attack. Somewhat scared, she responded, in all docility, to each recommendation: "Yes, yes, dear—of course, dear, of course."

But all at once her husband's rage came back to him. "After all," he shouted, "what I want to know is whether my return ticket be good or not! I must know for certain! They must find that station-master for me!"

He was already on the point of rushing away through the crowd, when he noticed Gustave's crutch lying on the platform. This was disastrous, and he raised his eyes to heaven as though to call Providence to witness that he would never be able to extricate himself from such awful complications. And, throwing the crutch to his wife, he hurried off, distracted and shouting, "There, take it! You forget everything!"

The sick pilgrims were now flocking into the station, and, as on the occasion of their arrival, there was plenty of disorderly carting along the platform and across the lines. All the abominable ailments, all the sores, all the deformities, went past once more, neither their gravity nor their number seeming to have decreased; for the few cures which had been effected were but a faint inappreciable gleam of light amidst the general mourning. They were taken back as they had come. The little carts, laden with helpless old women with their bags at their feet, grated over the rails. The stretchers on which you saw inflated bodies and pale faces with glittering eyes, swayed amidst the jostling of the throng. There was wild and senseless haste, indescribable confusion, questions, calls, sudden running, all the whirling of a flock which cannot find the entrance to the pen. And the bearers ended by losing their heads, no longer knowing which direction to take amidst the warning cries of the porters, who at each moment were frightening people, distracting them with anguish. "Take care, take care over there! Make haste! No, no, don't cross! The Toulouse train, the Toulouse train!"

Retracing his steps, Pierre again perceived the ladies, Madame de Jonquiere and the others, still gaily chatting together. Lingering near them, he listened to Berthaud, whom Father Fourcade had stopped, to congratulate him on the good order which had been maintained throughout the pilgrimage. The ex-public prosecutor was now bowing his thanks, feeling quite flattered by this praise. "Is it not a lesson for their Republic, your reverence?" he asked. "People get killed in Paris when such crowds as these celebrate some bloody anniversary of their hateful history. They ought to come and take a lesson here."

He was delighted with the thought of being disagreeable to the Government which had compelled him to resign. He was never so happy as when women were just saved from being knocked over amidst the great concourse of believers at Lourdes. However, he did not seem to be satisfied with the results of the political propaganda which he came to further there, during three days, every year. Fits of impatience came over him, things did not move fast enough. When did Our Lady of Lourdes mean to bring back the monarchy?

"You see, your reverence," said he, "the only means, the real triumph, would be to bring the working classes of the towns here en masse. I shall cease dreaming, I shall devote myself to that entirely. Ah! if one could only create a Catholic democracy!"

Father Fourcade had become very grave. His fine, intelligent eyes filled with a dreamy expression, and wandered far away. How many times already had he himself made the creation of that new people the object of his efforts! But was not the breath of a new Messiah needed for the accomplishment of such a task? "Yes, yes," he murmured, "a Catholic democracy; ah! the history of humanity would begin afresh!"

But Father Massias interrupted him in a passionate voice, saying that all the nations of the earth would end by coming; whilst Doctor Bonamy, who already detected a slight subsidence of fervour among the pilgrims, wagged his head and expressed the opinion that the faithful ones of the Grotto ought to increase their zeal. To his mind, success especially depended on the greatest possible measure of publicity being given to the miracles. And he assumed a radiant air and laughed complacently whilst pointing to the tumultuous defile of the sick. "Look at them!" said he. "Don't they go off looking better? There are a great many who, although they don't appear to be cured, are nevertheless carrying the germs of cure away with them; of that you may be certain! Ah! the good people; they do far more than we do all together for the glory of Our Lady of Lourdes!"

However, he had to check himself, for Madame Dieulafay was passing before them, in her box lined with quilted silk. She was deposited in front of the door of the first-class carriage, in which a maid was already placing the luggage. Pity came to all who beheld the unhappy woman, for she did not seem to have awakened from her prostration during her three days' sojourn at Lourdes. What she had been when they had removed her from the carriage on the morning of her arrival, that she also was now when the bearers were about to place her inside it again—clad in lace, covered with jewels, still with the lifeless, imbecile face of a mummy slowly liquefying; and, indeed, one might have thought that she had become yet more wasted, that she was being taken back diminished, shrunken more and more to the proportions of a child, by the march of that horrible disease which, after destroying her bones, was now dissolving the softened fibres of her muscles. Inconsolable, bowed down by the loss of their last hope, her husband and sister, their eyes red, were following her with Abbe Judaine, even as one follows a corpse to the grave.

"No, no! not yet!" said the old priest to the bearers, in order to prevent them from placing the box in the carriage. "She will have time enough to roll along in there. Let her have the warmth of that lovely sky above her till the last possible moment."

Then, seeing Pierre near him, he drew him a few steps aside, and, in a voice broken by grief, resumed: "Ah! I am indeed distressed. Again this morning I had a hope. I had her taken to the Grotto, I said my mass for her, and came back to pray till eleven o'clock. But nothing came of it; the Blessed Virgin did not listen to me. Although she cured me, a poor, useless old man like me, I could not obtain from her the cure of this beautiful, young, and wealthy woman, whose life ought to be a continual fete. Undoubtedly the Blessed Virgin knows what she ought to do better than ourselves, and I bow and bless her name. Nevertheless, my soul is full of frightful sadness."

He did not tell everything; he did not confess the thought which was upsetting him, simple, childish, worthy man that he was, whose life had never been troubled by either passion or doubt. But his thought was that those poor weeping people, the husband and the sister, had too many millions, that the presents they had brought were too costly, that they had given far too much money to the Basilica. A miracle is not to be bought. The wealth of the world is a hindrance rather than an advantage when you address yourself to God. Assuredly, if the Blessed Virgin had turned a deaf ear to their entreaties, had shown them but a stern, cold countenance, it was in order that she might the more attentively listen to the weak voices of the lowly ones who had come to her with empty hands, with no other wealth than their love, and these she had loaded with grace, flooded with the glowing affection of her Divine Motherhood. And those poor wealthy ones, who had not been heard, that sister and that husband, both so wretched beside the sorry body they were taking away with them, they themselves felt like pariahs among the throng of the humble who had been consoled or healed; they seemed embarrassed by their very luxury, and recoiled, awkward and ill at ease, covered with shame at the thought that Our Lady of Lourdes had relieved beggars whilst never casting a glance upon that beautiful and powerful lady agonising unto death amidst all her lace!

All at once it occurred to Pierre that he might have missed seeing M. de Guersaint and Marie arrive, and that they were perhaps already in the carriage. He returned thither, but there was still only his valise on the seat. Sister Hyacinthe and Sister Claire des Anges, however, had begun to install themselves, pending the arrival of their charges, and as Gerard just then brought up M. Sabathier in a little handcart, Pierre helped to place him in the carriage, a laborious task which put both the young priest and Gerard into a perspiration. The ex-professor, who looked disconsolate though very calm, at once settled himself in his corner.

"Thank you, gentlemen," said he. "That's over, thank goodness. And now they'll only have to take me out at Paris."

After wrapping a rug round his legs, Madame Sabathier, who was also there, got out of the carriage and remained standing near the open door. She was talking to Pierre when all at once she broke off to say: "Ah! here's Madame Maze coming to take her seat. She confided in me the other day, you know. She's a very unhappy little woman."

Then, in an obliging spirit, she called to her and offered to watch over her things. But Madame Maze shook her head, laughed, and gesticulated as though she were out of her senses.

"No, no, I am not going," said she.

"What! you are not going back?"

"No, no, I am not going—that is, I am, but not with you, not with you!"

She wore such an extraordinary air, she looked so bright, that Pierre and Madame Sabathier found it difficult to recognise her. Her fair, prematurely faded face was radiant, she seemed to be ten years younger, suddenly aroused from the infinite sadness into which desertion had plunged her. And, at last, her joy overflowing, she raised a cry: "I am going off with him! Yes, he has come to fetch me, he is taking me with him. Yes, yes, we are going to Luchon together, together!"

Then, with a rapturous glance, she pointed out a dark, sturdy-looking young man, with gay eyes and bright red lips, who was purchasing some newspapers. "There! that's my husband," said she, "that handsome man who's laughing over there with the newspaper-girl. He turned up here early this morning, and he's carrying me off. We shall take the Toulouse train in a couple of minutes. Ah! dear madame, I told you of all my worries, and you can understand my happiness, can't you?"

However, she could not remain silent, but again spoke of the frightful letter which she had received on Sunday, a letter in which he had declared to her that if she should take advantage of her sojourn at Lourdes to come to Luchon after him, he would not open the door to her. And, think of it, theirs had been a love match! But for ten years he had neglected her, profiting by his continual journeys as a commercial traveller to take friends about with him from one to the other end of France. Ah! that time she had thought it all over, she had asked the Blessed Virgin to let her die, for she knew that the faithless one was at that very moment at Luchon with two friends. What was it then that had happened? A thunderbolt must certainly have fallen from heaven. Those two friends must have received a warning from on high—perhaps they had dreamt that they were already condemned to everlasting punishment. At all events they had fled one evening without a word of explanation, and he, unable to live alone, had suddenly been seized with a desire to fetch his wife and keep her with him for a week. Grace must have certainly fallen on him, though he did not say it, for he was so kind and pleasant that she could not do otherwise than believe in a real beginning of conversion.

"Ah! how grateful I am to the Blessed Virgin," she continued; "she alone can have acted, and I well understood her last evening. It seemed to me that she made me a little sign just at the very moment when my husband was making up his mind to come here to fetch me. I asked him at what time it was that the idea occurred to him, and the hours fit in exactly. Ah! there has been no greater miracle. The others make me smile with their mended legs and their vanished sores. Blessed be Our Lady of Lourdes, who has healed my heart!"

Just then the sturdy young man turned round, and she darted away to join him, so full of delight that she forgot to bid the others good-bye. And it was at this moment, amidst the growing crowd of patients whom the bearers were bringing, that the Toulouse train at last came in. The tumult increased, the confusion became extraordinary. Bells rang and signals worked, whilst the station-master was seen rushing up, shouting with all the strength of his lungs: "Be careful there! Clear the line at once!"

A railway employe had to rush from the platform to push a little vehicle, which had been forgotten on the line, with an old woman in it, out of harm's way; however, yet another scared band of pilgrims ran across when the steaming, growling engine was only thirty yards distant. Others, losing their heads, would have been crushed by the wheels if porters had not roughly caught them by the shoulders. Then, without having pounded anybody, the train at last stopped alongside the mattresses, pillows, and cushions lying hither and thither, and the bewildered, whirling groups of people. The carriage doors opened and a torrent of travellers alighted, whilst another torrent climbed in, these two obstinately contending currents bringing the tumult to a climax. Faces, first wearing an inquisitive expression, and then overcome by stupefaction at the astonishing sight, showed themselves at the windows of the doors which remained closed; and, among them, one especially noticed the faces of two remarkably pretty girls, whose large candid eyes ended by expressing the most dolorous compassion.

Followed by her husband, however, Madame Maze had climbed into one of the carriages, feeling as happy and buoyant as if she were in her twentieth year again, as on the already distant evening of her honeymoon journey. And the doors having been slammed, the engine gave a loud whistle and began to move, going off slowly and heavily between the throng, which, in the rear of the train, flowed on to the lines again like an invading torrent whose flood-gates have been swept away.

"Bar the platform!" shouted the station-master to his men. "Keep watch when the engine comes up!"

The belated patients and pilgrims had arrived during this alert. La Grivotte passed by with her feverish eyes and excited, dancing gait, followed by Elise Rouquet and Sophie Couteau, who were very gay, and quite out of breath through running. All three hastened to their carriage, where Sister Hyacinthe scolded them. They had almost been left behind at the Grotto, where, at times, the pilgrims lingered forgetfully, unable to tear themselves away, still imploring and entreating the Blessed Virgin, when the train was waiting for them at the railway-station.

All at once Pierre, who likewise was anxious, no longer knowing what to think, perceived M. de Guersaint and Marie quietly talking with Abbe Judaine on the covered platform. He hastened to join them, and told them of his impatience. "What have you been doing?" he asked. "I was losing all hope."

"What have we been doing?" responded M. de Guersaint, with quiet astonishment. "We were at the Grotto, as you know very well. There was a priest there, preaching in a most remarkable manner, and we should still be there if I hadn't remembered that we had to leave. And we took a fly here, as we promised you we would do."

He broke off to look at the clock. "But hang it all!" he added, "there's no hurry. The train won't start for another quarter of an hour."

This was true. Then Marie, smiling with divine joy, exclaimed: "Oh! if you only knew, Pierre, what happiness I have brought away from that last visit to the Blessed Virgin. I saw her smile at me, I felt her giving me strength to live. Really, that farewell was delightful, and you must not scold us, Pierre."

He himself had begun to smile, somewhat ill at ease, however, as he thought of his nervous fidgeting. Had he, then, experienced so keen a desire to get far away from Lourdes? Had he feared that the Grotto might keep Marie, that she might never come away from it again? Now that she was there beside him, he was astonished at having indulged such thoughts, and felt himself to be very calm.

However, whilst he was advising them to go and take their seats in the carriage, he recognised Doctor Chassaigne hastily approaching. "Ah! my dear doctor," he said, "I was waiting for you. I should have been sorry indeed to have gone away without embracing you."

But the old doctor, who was trembling with emotion, interrupted him. "Yes, yes, I am late. But ten minutes ago, just as I arrived, I caught sight of that eccentric fellow, the Commander, and had a talk with him over yonder. He was sneering at the sight of your people taking the train again to go and die at home, when, said he, they ought to have done so before coming to Lourdes. Well, all at once, while he was talking like this, he fell on the ground before me. It was his third attack of paralysis; the one he had long been expecting."

"Oh! mon Dieu," murmured Abbe Judaine, who heard the doctor, "he was blaspheming. Heaven has punished him."

M. de Guersaint and Marie were listening, greatly interested and deeply moved.

"I had him carried yonder, into that shed," continued the doctor. "It is all over; I can do nothing. He will doubtless be dead before a quarter of an hour has gone by. But I thought of a priest, and hastened up to you."

Then, turning towards Abbe Judaine, M. Chassaigne added: "Come with me, Monsieur le Cure; you know him. We cannot let a Christian depart unsuccoured. Perhaps he will be moved, recognise his error, and become reconciled with God."

Abbe Judaine quickly followed the doctor, and in the rear went M. de Guersaint, leading Marie and Pierre, whom the thought of this tragedy impassioned. All five entered the goods shed, at twenty paces from the crowd which was still bustling and buzzing, without a soul in it expecting that there was a man dying so near by.

In a solitary corner of the shed, between two piles of sacks filled with oats, lay the Commander, on a mattress borrowed from the Hospitality reserve supply. He wore his everlasting frock-coat, with its buttonhole decked with a broad red riband, and somebody who had taken the precaution to pick up his silver-knobbed walking-stick had carefully placed it on the ground beside the mattress.

Abbe Judaine at once leant over him. "You recognise us, you can hear us, my poor friend, can't you?" asked the priest.

Only the Commander's eyes now appeared to be alive; but they were alive, still glittering brightly with a stubborn flame of energy. The attack had this time fallen on his right side, almost entirely depriving him of the power of speech. He could only stammer a few words, by which he succeeded in making them understand that he wished to die there, without being moved or worried any further. He had no relative at Lourdes, where nobody knew anything either of his former life or his family. For three years he had lived there happily on the salary attached to his little post at the station, and now he at last beheld his ardent, his only desire, approaching fulfilment—the desire that he might depart and fall into the eternal sleep. His eyes expressed the great joy he felt at being so near his end.

"Have you any wish to make known to us?" resumed Abbe Judaine. "Cannot we be useful to you in any way?"

No, no; his eyes replied that he was all right, well pleased. For three years past he had never got up in the morning without hoping that by night time he would be sleeping in the cemetery. Whenever he saw the sun shine he was wont to say in an envious tone: "What a beautiful day for departure!" And now that death was at last at hand, ready to deliver him from his hateful existence, it was indeed welcome.

"I can do nothing, science is powerless. He is condemned," said Doctor Chassaigne in a low, bitter tone to the old priest, who begged him to attempt some effort.

However, at that same moment it chanced that an aged woman, a pilgrim of fourscore years, who had lost her way and knew not whither she was going, entered the shed. Lame and humpbacked, reduced to the stature of childhood's days, afflicted with all the ailments of extreme old age, she was dragging herself along with the assistance of a stick, and at her side was slung a can full of Lourdes water, which she was taking away with her, in the hope of yet prolonging her old age, in spite of all its frightful decay. For a moment her senile, imbecile mind was quite scared. She stood looking at that outstretched, stiffened man, who was dying. Then a gleam of grandmotherly kindliness appeared in the depths of her dim, vague eyes; and with the sisterly feelings of one who was very aged and suffered very grievously she drew nearer, and, taking hold of her can with her hands, which never ceased shaking, she offered it to the man.

To Abbe Judaine this seemed like a sudden flash of light, an inspiration from on high. He, who had prayed so fervently and so often for the cure of Madame Dieulafay without being heard by the Blessed Virgin, now glowed with fresh faith in the conviction that if the Commander would only drink that water he would be cured.

The old priest fell upon his knees beside the mattress. "O brother!" he said, "it is God who has sent you this woman. Reconcile yourself with God, drink and pray, whilst we ourselves implore the divine mercy with our whole souls. God will prove His power to you; God will work the great miracle of setting you erect once more, so that you may yet spend many years upon this earth, loving Him and glorifying Him."

No, no! the Commander's sparkling eyes cried no! He, indeed, show himself as cowardly as those flocks of pilgrims who came from afar, through so many fatigues, in order to drag themselves on the ground and sob and beg Heaven to let them live a month, a year, ten years longer! It was so pleasant, so simple to die quietly in your bed. You turned your face to the wall and you died.

"Drink, O my brother, I implore you!" continued the old priest. "It is life that you will drink, it is strength and health, the very joy of living. Drink that you may become young again, that you may begin a new and pious life; drink that you may sing the praises of the Divine Mother, who will have saved both your body and your soul. She is speaking to me, your resurrection is certain."

But no! but no! The eyes refused, repelled the offer of life with growing obstinacy, and in their expression now appeared a covert fear of the miraculous. The Commander did not believe; for three years he had been shrugging his shoulders at the pretended cases of cure. But could one ever tell in this strange world of ours? Such extraordinary things did sometimes happen. And if by chance their water should really have a supernatural power, and if by force they should make him drink some of it, it would be terrible to have to live again—to endure once more the punishment of a galley-slave existence, that abomination which Lazarus—the pitiable object of the great miracle—had suffered twice. No, no, he would not drink; he would not incur the fearful risk of resurrection.

"Drink, drink, my brother," repeated Abbe Judaine, who was now in tears; "do not harden your heart to refuse the favours of Heaven."

And then a terrible thing was seen; this man, already half dead, raised himself, shaking off the stifling bonds of paralysis, loosening for a second his tied tongue, and stammering, growling in a hoarse voice: "No, no, NO!"

Pierre had to lead the stupefied old woman away and put her in the right direction again. She had failed to understand that refusal of the water which she herself was taking home with her like an inestimable treasure, the very gift of God's eternity to the poor who did not wish to die. Lame of one leg, humpbacked, dragging the sorry remnants of her fourscore years along by the assistance of her stick, she disappeared among the tramping crowd, consumed by the passion of being, eager for space, air, sunshine, and noise.

Marie and her father had shuddered in presence of that appetite for death, that greedy hungering for the end which the Commander showed. Ah! to sleep, to sleep without a dream, in the infinite darkness forever and ever—nothing in the world could have seemed so sweet to him. He did not hope in a better life; he had no desire to become happy, at last, in Paradise where equality and justice would reign. His sole longing was for black night and endless sleep, the joy of being no more, of never, never being again. And Doctor Chassaigne also had shuddered, for he also nourished but one thought, the thought of the happy moment when he would depart. But, in his case, on the other side of this earthly existence he would find his dear lost ones awaiting him, at the spot where eternal life began; and how icy cold all would have seemed had he but for a single moment thought that he might not meet them there.

Abbe Judaine painfully rose up. It had seemed to him that the Commander was now fixing his bright eyes upon Marie. Deeply grieved that his entreaties should have been of no avail, the priest wished to show the dying man an example of that goodness of God which he repulsed.

"You recognise her, do you not?" he asked. "Yes, it is the young lady who arrived here on Saturday so ill, with both legs paralysed. And you see her now, so full of health, so strong, so beautiful. Heaven has taken pity on her, and now she is reviving to youth, to the long life she was born to live. Do you feel no regret in seeing her? Would you also like her to be dead? would you have advised her not to drink the water?"

The Commander could not answer; but his eyes no longer strayed from Marie's young face, on which one read such great happiness at having resuscitated, such vast hopes in countless morrows; and tears appeared in those fixed eyes of his, gathered under their lids, and rolled down his cheeks, which were already cold. He was certainly weeping for her; he must have been thinking of that other miracle which he had wished her—that if she should be cured, she might be happy. It was the tenderness of an old man, who knows the miseries of this world, stirred to pity by the thought of all the sorrows which awaited this young creature. Ah! poor woman, how many times; perhaps, might she regret that she had not died in her twentieth year!

Then the Commander's eyes grew very dim, as though those last pitiful tears had dissolved them. It was the end; coma was coming; the mind was departing with the breath. He slightly turned, and died.

Doctor Chassaigne at once drew Marie aside. "The train's starting," he said; "make haste, make haste!"

Indeed, the loud ringing of a bell was clearly resounding above the growing tumult of the crowd. And the doctor, having requested two bearers to watch the body, which would be removed later on when the train had gone, desired to accompany his friends to their carriage.

They hastened their steps. Abbe Judaine, who was in despair, joined them after saying a short prayer for the repose of that rebellious soul. However, while Marie, followed by Pierre and M. de Guersaint, was running along the platform, she was stopped once more, and this time by Doctor Bonamy, who triumphantly presented her to Father Fourcade. "Here is Mademoiselle de Guersaint, your reverence, the young lady who was healed so marvellously yesterday."

The radiant smile of a general who is reminded of his most decisive victory appeared on Father Fourcade's face. "I know, I know; I was there," he replied. "God has blessed you among all women, my dear daughter; go, and cause His name to be worshipped."

Then he congratulated M. de Guersaint, whose paternal pride savoured divine enjoyment. It was the ovation beginning afresh—the concert of loving words and enraptured glances which had followed the girl through the streets of Lourdes that morning, and which again surrounded her at the moment of departure. The bell might go on ringing; a circle of delighted pilgrims still lingered around her; it seemed as if she were carrying away in her person all the glory of the pilgrimage, the triumph of religion, which would echo and echo to the four corners of the earth.

And Pierre was moved as he noticed the dolorous group which Madame Jousseur and M. Dieulafay formed near by. Their eyes were fixed upon Marie; like the others, they were astonished by the resurrection of this beautiful girl, whom they had seen lying inert, emaciated, with ashen face. Why should that child have been healed? Why not the young woman, the dear woman, whom they were taking home in a dying state? Their confusion, their sense of shame, seemed to increase; they drew back, uneasy, like pariahs burdened with too much wealth; and it was a great relief for them when, three bearers having with difficulty placed Madame Dieulafay in the first-class compartment, they themselves were able to vanish into it in company with Abbe Judaine.

The employes were already shouting, "Take your seats! take your seats," and Father Massias, the spiritual director of the train, had returned to his compartment, leaving Father Fourcade on the platform leaning on Doctor Bonamy's shoulder. In all haste Gerard and Berthaud again saluted the ladies, while Raymonde got in to join Madame Desagneaux and Madame Volmar in their corner; and Madame de Jonquiere at last ran off to her carriage, which she reached at the same time as the Guersaints. There was hustling, and shouting, and wild running from one to the other end of the long train, to which the engine, a copper engine, glittering like a star, had just been coupled.

Pierre was helping Marie into the carriage, when M. Vigneron, coming back at a gallop, shouted to him: "It'll be good to-morrow, it'll be good tomorrow!" Very red in the face, he showed and waved his ticket, and then galloped off again to the compartment where his wife and son had their seats, in order to announce the good news to them.

When Marie and her father were installed in their places, Pierre lingered for another moment on the platform with Doctor Chassaigne, who embraced him paternally. The young man wished to induce the doctor to return to Paris and take some little interest in life again. But M. Chassaigne shook his head. "No, no, my dear child," he replied. "I shall remain here. They are here, they keep me here." He was speaking of his dear lost ones. Then, very gently and lovingly, he said, "Farewell."

"Not farewell, my dear doctor; till we meet again."

"Yes, yes, farewell. The Commander was right, you know; nothing can be so sweet as to die, but to die in order to live again."

Baron Suire was now giving orders for the removal of the white flags on the foremost and hindmost carriages of the train; the shouts of the railway employes were ringing out in more and more imperious tones, "Take your seats! take your seats!" and now came the supreme scramble, the torrent of belated pilgrims rushing up distracted, breathless, and covered with perspiration. Madame de Jonquiere and Sister Hyacinthe were counting their party in the carriage. La Grivotte, Elise Rouquet, and Sophie Couteau were all three there. Madame Sabathier, too, had taken her seat in front of her husband, who, with his eyes half closed, was patiently awaiting the departure. However, a voice inquired, "And Madame Vincent, isn't she going back with us?"

Thereupon Sister Hyacinthe, who was leaning out of the window exchanging a last smile with Ferrand, who stood at the door of the cantine van, exclaimed: "Here she comes!"

Madame Vincent crossed the lines, rushed up, the last of all, breathless and haggard. And at once, by an involuntary impulse, Pierre glanced at her arms. They carried nothing now.

All the doors were being closed, slammed one after the other; the carriages were full, and only the signal for departure was awaited. Panting and smoking, the engine gave vent to a first loud whistle, shrill and joyous; and at that moment the sun, hitherto veiled from sight, dissipated the light cloudlets and made the whole train resplendent, gilding the engine, which seemed on the point of starting for the legendary Paradise. No bitterness, but a divine, infantile gaiety attended the departure. All the sick appeared to be healed. Though most of them were being taken away in the same condition as they had been brought, they went off relieved and happy, at all events, for an hour. And not the slightest jealousy tainted their brotherly and sisterly feelings; those who were not cured waxed quite gay, triumphant at the cure of the others. Their own turns would surely come; yesterday's miracle was the formal promise of to-morrow's. Even after those three days of burning entreaty their fever of desire remained within them; the faith of the forgotten ones continued as keen as ever in the conviction that the Blessed Virgin had simply deferred a cure for their souls' benefit. Inextinguishable love, invincible hope glowed within all those wretched ones thirsting for life. And so a last outburst of joy, a turbulent display of happiness, laughter and shouts, overflowed from all the crowded carriages. "Till next year! We'll come back, we'll come back again!" was the cry; and then the gay little Sisters of the Assumption clapped their hands, and the hymn of gratitude, the "Magnificat," began, sung by all the eight hundred pilgrims: "Magnificat anima mea Dominum." "My soul doth magnify the Lord."

Thereupon the station-master, his mind at last at ease, his arms hanging beside him, caused the signal to be given. The engine whistled once again and then set out, rolling along in the dazzling sunlight as amidst a glory. Although his leg was causing him great suffering, Father Fourcade had remained on the platform, leaning upon Doctor Bonamy's shoulder, and, in spite of everything, saluting the departure of his dear children with a smile. Berthaud, Gerard, and Baron Suire formed another group, and near them were Doctor Chassaigne and M. Vigneron waving their handkerchiefs. Heads were looking joyously out of the windows of the fleeing carriages, whence other handkerchiefs were streaming in the current of air produced by the motion of the train. Madame Vigneron compelled Gustave to show his pale little face, and for a long time Raymonde's small hand could be seen waving good wishes; but Marie remained the last, looking back on Lourdes as it grew smaller and smaller amidst the trees.

Across the bright countryside the train triumphantly disappeared, resplendent, growling, chanting at the full pitch of its eight hundred voices: "Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo." "And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour!"

IV. MARIE'S VOW

ONCE more was the white train rolling, rolling towards Paris on its way home; and the third-class carriage, where the shrill voices singing the "Magnificat" at full pitch rose above the growling of the wheels, had again become a common room, a travelling hospital ward, full of disorder, littered like an improvised ambulance. Basins and brooms and sponges lay about under the seats, which half concealed them. Articles of luggage, all the wretched mass of poor worn-out things, were heaped together, a little bit everywhere; and up above, the litter began again, what with the parcels, the baskets, and the bags hanging from the brass pegs and swinging to and fro without a moment's rest. The same Sisters of the Assumption and the same lady-hospitallers were there with their patients, amidst the contingent of healthy pilgrims, who were already suffering from the overpowering heat and unbearable odour. And at the far end there was again the compartment full of women, the ten close-packed female pilgrims, some young, some old, and all looking pitifully ugly as they violently chanted the canticle in cracked and woeful voices.

"At what time shall we reach Paris?" M. de Guersaint inquired of Pierre.

"To-morrow at about two in the afternoon, I think," the priest replied.

Since starting, Marie had been looking at the latter with an air of anxious preoccupation, as though haunted by a sudden sorrow which she could not reveal. However, she found her gay, healthful smile again to say: "Twenty-two hours' journey! Ah! it won't be so long and trying as it was coming."

"Besides," resumed her father, "we have left some of our people behind. We have plenty of room now."

In fact Madame Maze's absence left a corner free at the end of the seat which Marie, now sitting up like any other passenger, no longer encumbered with her box. Moreover, little Sophie had this time been placed in the next compartment, where there was neither Brother Isidore nor his sister Marthe. The latter, it was said, had remained at Lourdes in service with a pious lady. On the other side, Madame de Jonquiere and Sister Hyacinthe also had the benefit of a vacant seat, that of Madame Vetu; and it had further occurred to them to get rid of Elise Rouquet by placing her with Sophie, so that only La Grivotte and the Sabathier couple were with them in their compartment. Thanks to these new arrangements, they were better able to breathe, and perhaps they might manage to sleep a little.

The last verse of the "Magnificat" having been sung, the ladies finished installing themselves as comfortably as possible by setting their little household in order. One of the most important matters was to put the zinc water-can, which interfered with their legs, out of the way. All the blinds of the left-hand windows had been pulled down, for the oblique sunrays were falling on the train, and had poured into it in sheets of fire. The last storms, however, must have laid the dust, and the night would certainly be cool. Moreover, there was less suffering: death had carried off the most afflicted ones, and only stupefied ailments, numbed by fatigue and lapsing into a slow torpor, remained. The overpowering reaction which always follows great moral shocks was about to declare itself. The souls had made the efforts required of them, the miracles had been worked, and now the relaxing was beginning amidst a hebetude tinged with profound relief.

Until they got to Tarbes they were all very much occupied in setting things in order and making themselves comfortable. But as they left that station Sister Hyacinthe rose up and clapped her hands. "My children," said she, "we must not forget the Blessed Virgin who has been so kind to us. Let us begin the Rosary."

Then the whole carriage repeated the first chaplet—the five joyful mysteries, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Purification, and the Finding of Jesus in the Temple. And afterwards they intoned the canticle, "Let us contemplate the heavenly Archangel," in such loud voices that the peasants working in the fields raised their heads to look at this singing train as it rushed past them at full speed.

Marie was at the window, gazing with admiration at the vast landscape and the immense stretch of sky, which had gradually freed itself of its mist and was now of a dazzling blue. It was the delicious close of a fine day. However, she at last looked back into the carriage, and her eyes were fixing themselves on Pierre with that mute sadness which had previously dimmed them, when all at once a sound of furious sobbing burst forth in front of her. The canticle was finished, and it was Madame Vincent who was crying, stammering confused words, half-choked by her tears: "Ah, my poor little one!" she gasped. "Ah, my jewel, my treasure, my life!"

She had previously remained in her corner, shrinking back into it as though anxious to disappear. With a fierce face, her lips tightly set, and her eyes closed, as though to isolate herself in the depths of her cruel grief, she had hitherto not said a word. But, chancing to open her eyes, she had espied the leathern window-strap hanging down beside the door, and the sight of that strap, which her daughter had touched, almost played with at one moment during the previous journey, had overwhelmed her with a frantic despair which swept away her resolution to remain silent.

"Ah! my poor little Rose," she continued. "Her little hand touched that strap, she turned it, and looked at it—ah, it was her last plaything! And we were there both together then; she was still alive, I still had her on my lap, in my arms. It was still so nice, so nice! But now I no longer have her; I shall never, never have her again, my poor little Rose, my poor little Rose!"

Distracted, sobbing bitterly, she looked at her knees and her arms, on which nothing now rested, and which she was at a loss how to employ. She had so long rocked her daughter on her knees, so long carried her in her arms, that it now seemed to her as if some portion of her being had been amputated, as if her body had been deprived of one of its functions, leaving her diminished, unoccupied, distracted at being unable to fulfil that function any more. Those useless arms and knees of hers quite embarrassed her.

Pierre and Marie, who were deeply moved, had drawn near, uttering kind words and striving to console the unhappy mother. And, little by little, from the disconnected sentences which mingled with her sobs, they learned what a Calvary she had ascended since her daughter's death. On the morning of the previous day, when she had carried the body off in her arms amidst the storm, she must have long continued walking, blind and deaf to everything, whilst the torrential rain beat down upon her. She no longer remembered what squares she had crossed, what streets she had traversed, as she roamed through that infamous Lourdes, that Lourdes which killed little children, that Lourdes which she cursed.

"Ah! I can't remember, I can't remember," she faltered. "But some people took me in, had pity upon me, some people whom I don't know, but who live somewhere. Ah! I can't remember where, but it was somewhere high up, far away, at the other end of the town. And they were certainly very poor folk, for I can still see myself in a poor-looking room with my dear little one who was quite cold, and whom they laid upon their bed."

At this recollection a fresh attack of sobbing shook her, in fact almost stifled her.

"No, no," she at last resumed, "I would not part with her dear little body by leaving it in that abominable town. And I can't tell exactly how it happened, but it must have been those poor people who took me with them. We did a great deal of walking, oh! a great deal of walking; we saw all those gentlemen of the pilgrimage and the railway. 'What can it matter to you?' I repeated to them. 'Let me take her back to Paris in my arms. I brought her here like that when she was alive, I may surely take her back dead? Nobody will notice anything, people will think that she is asleep.'"

"And all of them, all those officials, began shouting and driving me away as though I were asking them to let me do something wicked. Then I ended by telling them my mind. When people make so much fuss, and bring so many agonising sick to a place like that, they surely ought to send the dead ones home again, ought they not? And do you know how much money they ended by asking of me at the station? Three hundred francs! Yes, it appears it is the price! Three hundred francs, good Lord! of me, who came here with thirty sous in my pocket and have only five left. Why, I don't earn that amount of money by six months' sewing. They ought to have asked me for my life; I would have given it so willingly. Three hundred francs! three hundred francs for that poor little bird-like body, which it would have consoled me so much to have brought away on my knees!"

Then she began stammering and complaining in a confused, husky voice: "Ah, if you only knew how sensibly those poor people talked to me to induce me to go back. A work-woman like myself, with work waiting, ought to return to Paris, they said; and, besides, I couldn't afford to sacrifice my return ticket; I must take the three-forty train. And they told me, too, that people are compelled to put up with things when they are not rich. Only the rich can keep their dead, do what they like with them, eh? And I can't remember—no, again I can't remember! I didn't even know the time; I should never have been able to find my way back to the station. After the funeral over there, at a place where there were two trees, it must have been those poor people who led me away, half out of my senses, and brought me to the station, and pushed me into the carriage just at the moment when the train was starting. But what a rending it was—as if my heart had remained there underground, and it is frightful, that it is, frightful, my God!"

"Poor woman!" murmured Marie. "Take courage, and pray to the Blessed Virgin for the succour which she never refuses to the afflicted."

But at this Madame Vincent shook with rage. "It isn't true!" she cried. "The Blessed Virgin doesn't care a rap about me. She doesn't tell the truth! Why did she deceive me? I should never have gone to Lourdes if I hadn't heard that voice in a church. My little girl would still be alive, and perhaps the doctors would have saved her. I, who would never set my foot among the priests formerly! Ah! I was right! I was right! There's no Blessed Virgin at all!"

And in this wise, without resignation, without illusion, without hope, she continued blaspheming with the coarse fury of a woman of the people, shrieking the sufferings of her heart aloud in such rough fashion that Sister Hyacinthe had to intervene: "Be quiet, you unhappy woman! It is God who is making you suffer, to punish you."

The scene had already lasted a long time, and as they passed Riscle at full speed the Sister again clapped her hands and gave the signal for the chanting of the "Laudate Mariam." "Come, come, my children," she exclaimed, "all together, and with all your hearts:

"In heav'n, on earth,
All voices raise,
In concert sing
My Mother's praise:
Laudate, laudate, laudate Mariam!"

Madame Vincent, whose voice was drowned by this canticle of love, now only sobbed, with her hands pressed to her face. Her revolt was over, she was again strengthless, weak like a suffering woman whom grief and weariness have stupefied.

After the canticle, fatigue fell more or less heavily upon all the occupants of the carriage. Only Sister Hyacinthe, so quick and active, and Sister Claire des Anges, so gentle, serious, and slight, retained, as on their departure from Paris and during their sojourn at Lourdes, the professional serenity of women accustomed to everything, amidst the bright gaiety of their white coifs and wimples. Madame de Jonquiere, who had scarcely slept for five days past, had to make an effort to keep her poor eyes open; and yet she was delighted with the journey, for her heart was full of joy at having arranged her daughter's marriage, and at bringing back with her the greatest of all the miracles, a miraculee whom everybody was talking of. She decided in her own mind that she would get to sleep that night, however bad the jolting might be; though on the other hand she could not shake off a covert fear with regard to La Grivotte, who looked very strange, excited, and haggard, with dull eyes, and cheeks glowing with patches of violet colour. Madame de Jonquiere had tried a dozen times to keep her from fidgeting, but had not been able to induce her to remain still, with joined hands and closed eyes. Fortunately, the other patients gave her no anxiety; most of them were either so relieved or so weary that they were already dozing off. Elise Rouquet, however, had bought herself a pocket mirror, a large round one, in which she did not weary of contemplating herself, finding herself quite pretty, and verifying from minute to minute the progress of her cure with a coquetry which, now that her monstrous face was becoming human again, made her purse her lips and try a variety of smiles. As for Sophie Couteau, she was playing very prettily; for finding that nobody now asked to examine her foot, she had taken off her shoe and stocking of her own accord, repeating that she must surely have a pebble in one or the other of them; and as her companions still paid no attention to that little foot which the Blessed Virgin had been pleased to visit, she kept it in her hands, caressing it, seemingly delighted to touch it and turn it into a plaything.

M. de Guersaint had meantime risen from his seat, and, leaning on the low partition between the compartments, he was glancing at M. Sabathier, when all of a sudden Marie called: "Oh! father, father, look at this notch in the seat; it was the ironwork of my box that made it!"

The discovery of this trace rendered her so happy that for a moment she forgot the secret sorrow which she seemed anxious to keep to herself. And in the same way as Madame Vincent had burst out sobbing on perceiving the leather strap which her little girl had touched, so she burst into joy at the sight of this scratch, which reminded her of her long martyrdom in this same carriage, all the abomination which had now disappeared, vanished like a nightmare. "To think that four days have scarcely gone by," she said; "I was lying there, I could not stir, and now, now I come and go, and feel so comfortable!"

Pierre and M. de Guersaint were smiling at her; and M. Sabathier, who had heard her, slowly said: "It is quite true. We leave a little of ourselves in things, a little of our sufferings and our hopes, and when we find them again they speak to us, and once more tell us the things which sadden us or make us gay."

He had remained in his corner silent, with an air of resignation, ever since their departure from Lourdes. Even his wife whilst wrapping up his legs had only been able to obtain sundry shakes of the head from him in response to her inquiries whether he was suffering. In point of fact he was not suffering, but extreme dejection was overcoming him.

"Thus for my own part," he continued, "during our long journey from Paris I tried to divert my thoughts by counting the bands in the roofing up there. There were thirteen from the lamp to the door. Well, I have just been counting them again, and naturally enough there are still thirteen. It's like that brass knob beside me. You can't imagine what dreams I had whilst I watched it shining at night-time when Monsieur l'Abbe was reading the story of Bernadette to us. Yes, I saw myself cured; I was making that journey to Rome which I have been talking of for twenty years past; I walked and travelled the world—briefly, I had all manner of wild and delightful dreams. And now here we are on our way back to Paris, and there are thirteen bands across the roofing there, and the knob is still shining—all of which tells me that I am again on the same seat, with my legs lifeless. Well, well, it's understood, I'm a poor, old, used-up animal, and such I shall remain."

Two big tears appeared in his eyes; he must have been passing through an hour of frightful bitterness. However, he raised his big square head, with its jaw typical of patient obstinacy, and added: "This is the seventh year that I have been to Lourdes, and the Blessed Virgin has not listened to me. No matter! It won't prevent me from going back next year. Perhaps she will at last deign to hear me."

For his part he did not revolt. And Pierre, whilst chatting with him, was stupefied to find persistent, tenacious credulity springing up once more, in spite of everything, in the cultivated brain of this man of intellect. What ardent desire of cure and life was it that had led to this refusal to accept evidence, this determination to remain blind? He stubbornly clung to the resolution to be saved when all human probabilities were against him, when the experiment of the miracle itself had failed so many times already; and he had reached such a point that he wished to explain his fresh rebuff, urging moments of inattention at the Grotto, a lack of sufficient contrition, and all sorts of little transgressions which must have displeased the Blessed Virgin. Moreover, he was already deciding in his mind that he would perform a novena somewhere next year, before again repairing to Lourdes.

"Ah! by the way," he resumed, "do you know of the good-luck which my substitute has had? Yes, you must remember my telling you about that poor fellow suffering from tuberculosis, for whom I paid fifty francs when I obtained hospitalisation for myself. Well, he has been thoroughly cured."

"Really! And he was suffering from tuberculosis!" exclaimed M. de Guersaint.

"Certainly, monsieur, perfectly cured I had seen him looking so low, so yellow, so emaciated, when we started; but when he came to pay me a visit at the hospital he was quite a new man; and, dear me, I gave him five francs."

Pierre had to restrain a smile, for be had heard the story from Doctor Chassaigne. This miraculously healed individual was a feigner, who had eventually been recognised at the Medical Verification Office. It was, apparently, the third year that he had presented himself there, the first time alleging paralysis and the second time a tumour, both of which had been as completely healed as his pretended tuberculosis. On each occasion he obtained an outing, lodging and food, and returned home loaded with alms. It appeared that he had formerly been a hospital nurse, and that he transformed himself, "made-up" a face suited to his pretended ailment, in such an extremely artistic manner that it was only by chance that Doctor Bonamy had detected the imposition. Moreover, the Fathers had immediately required that the incident should be kept secret. What was the use of stirring up a scandal which would only have led to jocular remarks in the newspapers? Whenever any fraudulent miracles of this kind were discovered, the Fathers contented themselves with forcing the guilty parties to go away. Moreover, these feigners were far from numerous, despite all that was related of them in the amusing stories concocted by Voltairean humourists. Apart from faith, human stupidity and ignorance, alas! were quite sufficient to account for the miracles.

M. Sabathier, however, was greatly stirred by the idea that Heaven had healed this man who had gone to Lourdes at his expense, whereas he himself was returning home still helpless, still in the same woeful state. He sighed, and, despite all his resignation, could not help saying, with a touch of envy: "What would you, however? The Blessed Virgin must know very well what she's about. Neither you nor I can call her to account to us for her actions. Whenever it may please her to cast her eyes on me she will find me at her feet."

After the "Angelus" when they got to Mont-de-Marsan, Sister Hyacinthe made them repeat the second chaplet, the five sorrowful mysteries, Jesus in the Garden of Olives, Jesus scourged, Jesus crowned with thorns, Jesus carrying the cross, and Jesus crucified. Then they took dinner in the carriage, for there would be no stopping until they reached Bordeaux, where they would only arrive at eleven o'clock at night. All the pilgrims' baskets were crammed with provisions, to say nothing of the milk, broth, chocolate, and fruit which Sister Saint-Francois had sent from the cantine. Then, too, there was fraternal sharing: they sat with their food on their laps and drew close together, every compartment becoming, as it were, the scene of a picnic, to which each contributed his share. And they had finished their meal and were packing up the remaining bread again when the train passed Morceux.

"My children," now said Sister Hyacinthe, rising up, "the evening prayer!"

Thereupon came a confused murmuring made up of "Paters" and "Aves," self-examinations, acts of contrition and vows of trustful reliance in God, the Blessed Virgin, and the Saints, with thanksgivings for that happy day, and, at last, a prayer for the living and for the faithful departed.

"I warn you," then resumed the Sister, "that when we get to Lamothe, at ten o'clock, I shall order silence. However, I think you will all be very good and won't require any rocking to get to sleep."

This made them laugh. It was now half-past eight o'clock, and the night had slowly covered the country-side. The hills alone retained a vague trace of the twilight's farewell, whilst a dense sheet of darkness blotted out all the low ground. Rushing on at full speed, the train entered an immense plain, and then there was nothing but a sea of darkness, through which they ever and ever rolled under a blackish sky, studded with stars.

For a moment or so Pierre had been astonished by the demeanour of La Grivotte. While the other pilgrims and patients were already dozing off, sinking down amidst the luggage, which the constant jolting shook, she had risen to her feet and was clinging to the partition in a sudden spasm of agony. And under the pale, yellow, dancing gleam of the lamp she once more looked emaciated, with a livid, tortured face.

"Take care, madame, she will fall!" the priest called to Madame de Jonquiere, who, with eyelids lowered, was at last giving way to sleep.

She made all haste to intervene, but Sister Hyacinthe had turned more quickly and caught La Grivotte in her arms. A frightful fit of coughing, however, prostrated the unhappy creature upon the seat, and for five minutes she continued stifling, shaken by such an attack that her poor body seemed to be actually cracking and rending. Then a red thread oozed from between her lips, and at last she spat up blood by the throatful.

"Good heavens! good heavens! it's coming on her again!" repeated Madame de Jonquiere in despair. "I had a fear of it; I was not at ease, seeing her looking so strange. Wait a moment; I will sit down beside her."

But the Sister would not consent: "No, no, madame, sleep a little. I'll watch over her. You are not accustomed to it: you would end by making yourself ill as well."

Then she settled herself beside La Grivotte, made her rest her head against her shoulder, and wiped the blood from her lips. The attack subsided, but weakness was coming back, so extreme that the wretched woman was scarcely able to stammer: "Oh, it is nothing, nothing at all; I am cured, I am cured, completely cured!"

Pierre was thoroughly upset: This sudden, overwhelming relapse had sent an icy chill through the whole carriage. Many of the passengers raised themselves up and looked at La Grivotte with terror in their eyes. Then they dived down into their corners again, and nobody spoke, nobody stirred any further. Pierre, for his part, reflected on the curious medical aspect of this girl's case. Her strength had come back to her over yonder. She had displayed a ravenous appetite, she had walked long distances with a dancing gait, her face quite radiant the while; and now she had spat blood, her cough had broken out afresh, she again had the heavy ashen face of one in the last agony. Her ailment had returned to her with brutal force, victorious over everything. Was this, then, some special case of phthisis complicated by neurosis? Or was it some other malady, some unknown disease, quietly continuing its work in the midst of contradictory diagnosis? The sea of error and ignorance, the darkness amidst which human science is still struggling, again appeared to Pierre. And he once more saw Doctor Chassaigne shrugging his shoulders with disdain, whilst Doctor Bonamy, full of serenity, quietly continued his verification work, absolutely convinced that nobody would be able to prove to him the impossibility of his miracles any more than he himself could have proved their possibility.

"Oh! I am not frightened," La Grivotte continued, stammering. "I am cured, completely cured; they all told me so, over yonder."

Meantime the carriage was rolling, rolling along, through the black night. Each of its occupants was making preparations, stretching himself out in order to sleep more comfortably. They compelled Madame Vincent to lie down on the seat, and gave her a pillow on which to rest her poor pain-racked head; and then, as docile as a child, quite stupefied, she fell asleep in a nightmare-like torpor, with big, silent tears still flowing from her closed eyes. Elise Rouquet, who had a whole seat to herself, was also getting ready to lie down, but first of all she made quite an elaborate toilet, tying the black wrap which had served to hide her sore about her head, and then again peering into her glass to see if this headgear became her, now that the swelling of her lip had subsided. And again did Pierre feel astonished at sight of that sore, which was certainly healing, if not already healed—that face, so lately a monster's face, which one could now look at without feeling horrified. The sea of incertitude stretched before him once more. Was it even a real lupus? Might it not rather be some unknown form of ulcer of hysterical origin? Or ought one to admit that certain forms of lupus, as yet but imperfectly studied and arising from faulty nutrition of the skin, might be benefited by a great moral shock? At all events there here seemed to be a miracle, unless, indeed, the sore should reappear again in three weeks', three months', or three years' time, like La Grivotte's phthisis.

It was ten o'clock, and the people in the carriage were falling asleep when they left Lamothe. Sister Hyacinthe, upon whose knees La Grivotte was now drowsily resting her head, was unable to rise, and, for form's sake, merely said, "Silence, silence, my children!" in a low voice, which died away amidst the growling rumble of the wheels.

However, something continued stirring in an adjoining compartment; she heard a noise which irritated her nerves, and the cause of which she at last fancied she could understand.

"Why do you keep on kicking the seat, Sophie?" she asked. "You must get to sleep, my child."

"I'm not kicking, Sister. It's a key that was rolling about under my foot."

"A key!—how is that? Pass it to me."

Then she examined it. A very old, poor-looking key it was—blackened, worn away, and polished by long use, its ring bearing the mark of where it had been broken and resoldered. However, they all searched their pockets, and none of them, it seemed, had lost a key.

"I found it in the corner," now resumed Sophie; "it must have belonged to the man."

"What man?" asked Sister Hyacinthe.

"The man who died there."

They had already forgotten him. But it had surely been his, for Sister Hyacinthe recollected that she had heard something fall while she was wiping his forehead. And she turned the key over and continued looking at it, as it lay in her hand, poor, ugly, wretched key that it was, no longer of any use, never again to open the lock it belonged to—some unknown lock, hidden far away in the depths of the world. For a moment she was minded to put it in her pocket, as though by a kind of compassion for this little bit of iron, so humble and so mysterious, since it was all that remained of that unknown man. But then the pious thought came to her that it is wrong to show attachment to any earthly thing; and, the window being half-lowered, she threw out the key, which fell into the black night.

"You must not play any more, Sophie," she resumed. "Come, come, my children, silence!"

It was only after the brief stay at Bordeaux, however, at about half-past eleven o'clock, that sleep came back again and overpowered all in the carriage. Madame de Jonquiere had been unable to contend against it any longer, and her head was now resting against the partition, her face wearing an expression of happiness amidst all her fatigue. The Sabathiers were, in a like fashion, calmly sleeping; and not a sound now came from the compartment which Sophie Couteau and Elise Rouquet occupied, stretched in front of each other, on the seats. From time to time a low plaint would rise, a strangled cry of grief or fright, escaping from the lips of Madame Vincent, who, amidst her prostration, was being tortured by evil dreams. Sister Hyacinthe was one of the very few who still had their eyes open, anxious as she was respecting La Grivotte, who now lay quite motionless, like a felled animal, breathing painfully, with a continuous wheezing sound. From one to the other end of this travelling dormitory, shaken by the rumbling of the train rolling on at full speed, the pilgrims and the sick surrendered themselves to sleep, and limbs dangled and heads swayed under the pale, dancing gleams from the lamps. At the far end, in the compartment occupied by the ten female pilgrims, there was a woeful jumbling of poor, ugly faces, old and young, and all open-mouthed, as though sleep had suddenly fallen upon them at the moment they were finishing some hymn. Great pity came to the heart at the sight of all those mournful, weary beings, prostrated by five days of wild hope and infinite ecstasy, and destined to awaken, on the very morrow, to the stern realities of life.

And now Pierre once more felt himself to be alone with Marie. She had not consented to stretch herself on the seat—she had been lying down too long, she said, for seven years, alas! And in order that M. de Guersaint, who on leaving Bordeaux had again fallen into his childlike slumber, might be more at ease, Pierre came and sat down beside the girl. As the light of the lamp annoyed her he drew the little screen, and they thus found themselves in the shade, a soft and transparent shade. The train must now have been crossing a plain, for it glided through the night as in an endless flight, with a sound like the regular flapping of huge wings. Through the window, which they had opened, a delicious coolness came from the black fields, the fathomless fields, where not even any lonely little village lights could be seen gleaming. For a moment Pierre had turned towards Marie and had noticed that her eyes were closed. But he could divine that she was not sleeping, that she was savouring the deep peacefulness which prevailed around them amidst the thundering roar of their rush through the darkness, and, like her, he closed his eyelids and began dreaming.

Yet once again did the past arise before him: the little house at Neuilly, the embrace which they had exchanged near the flowering hedge under the trees flecked with sunlight. How far away all that already was, and with what perfume had it not filled his life! Then bitter thoughts returned to him at the memory of the day when he had become a priest. Since she would never be a woman, he had consented to be a man no more; and that was to prove their eternal misfortune, for ironical Nature was to make her a wife and a mother after all. Had he only been able to retain his faith he might have found eternal consolation in it. But all his attempts to regain it had been in vain. He had gone to Lourdes, he had striven his utmost at the Grotto, he had hoped for a moment that he would end by believing should Marie be miraculously healed; but total and irremediable ruin had come when the predicted cure had taken place even as science had foretold. And their idyl, so pure and so painful, the long story of their affection bathed in tears, likewise spread out before him. She, having penetrated his sad secret, had come to Lourdes to pray to Heaven for the miracle of his conversion. When they had remained alone under the trees amidst the perfume of the invisible roses, during the night procession, they had prayed one for the other, mingling one in the other, with an ardent desire for their mutual happiness. Before the Grotto, too, she had entreated the Blessed Virgin to forget her and to save him, if she could obtain but one favour from her Divine Son. Then, healed, beside herself, transported with love and gratitude, whirled with her little car up the inclined ways to the Basilica, she had thought her prayers granted, and had cried aloud the joy she felt that they should have both been saved, together, together! Ah! that lie which he, prompted by affection and charity, had told, that error in which he had from that moment suffered her to remain, with what a weight did it oppress his heart! It was the heavy slab which walled him in his voluntarily chosen sepulchre. He remembered the frightful attack of grief which had almost killed him in the gloom of the crypt, his sobs, his brutal revolt, his longing to keep her for himself alone, to possess her since he knew her to be his own—all that rising passion of his awakened manhood, which little by little had fallen asleep again, drowned by the rushing river of his tears; and in order that he might not destroy the divine illusion which possessed her, yielding to brotherly compassion, he had taken that heroic vow to lie to her, that vow which now filled him with such anguish.

Pierre shuddered amidst his reverie. Would he have the strength to keep that vow forever? Had he not detected a feeling of impatience in his heart even whilst he was waiting for her at the railway station, a jealous longing to leave that Lourdes which she loved too well, in the vague hope that she might again become his own, somewhere far away? If he had not been a priest he would have married her. And what rapture, what felicity would then have been his! He would have given himself wholly unto her, she would have been wholly his own, and he and she would have lived again in the dear child that would doubtless have been born to them. Ah! surely that alone was divine, the life which is complete, the life which creates life! And then his reverie strayed: he pictured himself married, and the thought filled him with such delight that he asked why such a dream should be unrealisable? She knew no more than a child of ten; he would educate her, form her mind. She would then understand that this cure for which she thought herself indebted to the Blessed Virgin, had in reality come to her from the Only Mother, serene and impassive Nature. But even whilst he was thus settling things in his mind, a kind of terror, born of his religious education, arose within him. Could he tell if that human happiness with which he desired to endow her would ever be worth as much as the holy ignorance, the infantile candour in which she now lived? How bitterly he would reproach himself afterwards if she should not be happy. Then, too, what a drama it would all be; he to throw off the cassock, and marry this girl healed by an alleged miracle—ravage her faith sufficiently to induce her to consent to such sacrilege? Yet therein lay the brave course; there lay reason, life, real manhood, real womanhood. Why, then, did he not dare? Horrible sadness was breaking upon his reverie, he became conscious of nothing beyond the sufferings of his poor heart.

The train was still rolling along with its great noise of flapping wings. Beside Pierre and Marie, only Sister Hyacinthe was still awake amidst the weary slumber of the carriage; and just then, Marie leant towards Pierre, and softly said to him: "It's strange, my friend; I am so sleepy, and yet I can't sleep." Then, with alight laugh, she added: "I've got Paris in my head!"

"How is that—Paris?"

"Yes, yes. I'm thinking that it's waiting for me, that I am about to return to it—that Paris which I know nothing of, and where I shall have to live!"

These words brought fresh anguish to Pierre's heart. He had well foreseen it; she could no longer belong to him, she would belong to others. If Lourdes had restored her to him, Paris was about to take her from him again. And he pictured this ignorant little being fatally acquiring all the education of woman. That little spotless soul which had remained so candid in the frame of a big girl of three-and-twenty, that soul which illness had kept apart from others, far from life, far even from novels, would soon ripen, now that it could fly freely once more. He beheld her, a gay, healthy young girl, running everywhere, looking and learning, and, some day, meeting the husband who would finish her education.

"And so," said he, "you propose to amuse yourself in Paris?"

"Oh! what are you saying, my friend? Are we rich enough to amuse ourselves?" she replied. "No, I was thinking of my poor sister Blanche, and wondering what I should be able to do in Paris to help her a little. She is so good, she works so hard; I don't wish that she should have to continue earning all the money."

And, after a fresh pause, as he, deeply moved, remained silent, she added: "Formerly, before I suffered so dreadfully, I painted miniatures rather nicely. You remember, don't you, that I painted a portrait of papa which was very like him, and which everybody praised. You will help me, won't you? You will find me customers?"

Then she began talking of the new life which she was about to live. She wanted to arrange her room and hang it with cretonne, something pretty, with a pattern of little blue flowers. She would buy it out of the first money she could save. Blanche had spoken to her of the big shops where things could be bought so cheaply. To go out with Blanche and run about a little would be so amusing for her, who, confined to her bed since childhood, had never seen anything. Then Pierre, who for a moment had been calmer, again began to suffer, for he could divine all her glowing desire to live, her ardour to see everything, know everything, and taste everything. It was at last the awakening of the woman whom she was destined to be, whom he had divined in childhood's days—a dear creature of gaiety and passion, with blooming lips, starry eyes, a milky complexion, golden hair, all resplendent with the joy of being.

"Oh! I shall work, I shall work," she resumed; "but you are right, Pierre, I shall also amuse myself, because it cannot be a sin to be gay, can it?"

"No, surely not, Marie."

"On Sundays we will go into the country, oh very far away, into the woods where there are beautiful trees. And we will sometimes go to the theatre, too, if papa will take us. I have been told that there are many plays that one may see. But, after all, it's not all that. Provided I can go out and walk in the streets and see things, I shall be so happy; I shall come home so gay. It is so nice to live, is it not, Pierre?"

"Yes, yes, Marie, it is very nice."

A chill like that of death was coming over him; his regret that he was no longer a man was filling him with agony. But since she tempted him like this with her irritating candour, why should he not confess to her the truth which was ravaging his being? He would have won her, have conquered her. Never had a more frightful struggle arisen between his heart and his will. For a moment he was on the point of uttering irrevocable words.

But with the voice of a joyous child she was already resuming: "Oh! look at poor papa; how pleased he must be to sleep so soundly!"

On the seat in front of them M. de Guersaint was indeed slumbering with a comfortable expression on his face, as though he were in his bed, and had no consciousness of the continual jolting of the train. This monotonous rolling and heaving seemed, in fact, a lullaby rocking the whole carriage to sleep. All surrendered themselves to it, sinking powerless on to the piles of bags and parcels, many of which had also fallen; and the rhythmical growling of the wheels never ceased in the unknown darkness through which the train was still rolling. Now and again, as they passed through a station or under a bridge, there would be a loud rush of wind, a tempest would suddenly sweep by; and then the lulling, growling sound would begin again, ever the same for hours together.

Marie gently took hold of Pierre's hands; he and she were so lost, so completely alone among all those prostrated beings, in the deep, rumbling peacefulness of the train flying across the black night. And sadness, the sadness which she had hitherto hidden, had again come back to her, casting a shadow over her large blue eyes.

"You will often come with us, my good Pierre, won't you?" she asked.

He had started on feeling her little hand pressing his own. His heart was on his lips, he was making up his mind to speak. However, he once again restrained himself and stammered: "I am not always at liberty, Marie; a priest cannot go everywhere."

"A priest?" she repeated. "Yes, yes, a priest. I understand."

Then it was she who spoke, who confessed the mortal secret which had been oppressing her heart ever since they had started. She leant nearer, and in a lower voice resumed: "Listen, my good Pierre; I am fearfully sad. I may look pleased, but there is death in my soul. You did not tell me the truth yesterday."

He became quite scared, but did not at first understand her. "I did not tell you the truth—About what?" he asked.

A kind of shame restrained her, and she again hesitated at the moment of descending into the depths of another conscience than her own. Then, like a friend, a sister, she continued: "No, you let me believe that you had been saved with me, and it was not true, Pierre, you have not found your lost faith again."

Good Lord! she knew. For him this was desolation, such a catastrophe that he forgot his torments. And, at first, he obstinately clung to the falsehood born of his fraternal charity. "But I assure you, Marie. How can you have formed such a wicked idea?"

"Oh! be quiet, my friend, for pity's sake. It would grieve me too deeply if you were to speak to me falsely again. It was yonder, at the station, at the moment when we were starting, and that unhappy man had died. Good Abbe Judaine had knelt down to pray for the repose of that rebellious soul. And I divined everything, I understood everything when I saw that you did not kneel as well, that prayer did not rise to your lips as to his."

"But, really, I assure you, Marie—"

"No, no, you did not pray for the dead; you no longer believe. And besides, there is something else; something I can guess, something which comes to me from you, a despair which you can't hide from me, a melancholy look which comes into your poor eyes directly they meet mine. The Blessed Virgin did not grant my prayer, she did not restore your faith, and I am very, very wretched."

She was weeping, a hot tear fell upon the priest's hand, which she was still holding. It quite upset him, and he ceased struggling, confessing, in his turn letting his tears flow, whilst, in a very low voice, he stammered: "Ah! Marie, I am very wretched also. Oh! so very wretched."

For a moment they remained silent, in their cruel grief at feeling that the abyss which parts different beliefs was yawning between them. They would never belong to one another again, and they were in despair at being so utterly unable to bring themselves nearer to one another; but the severance was henceforth definitive, since Heaven itself had been unable to reconnect the bond. And thus, side by side, they wept over their separation.

"I who prayed so fervently for your conversion," she said in a dolorous voice, "I who was so happy. It had seemed to me that your soul was mingling with mine; and it was so delightful to have been saved together, together. I felt such strength for life; oh, strength enough to raise the world!"

He did not answer; his tears were still flowing, flowing without end.

"And to think," she resumed, "that I was saved all alone; that this great happiness fell upon me without you having any share in it. And to see you so forsaken, so desolate, when I am loaded with grace and joy, rends my heart. Ah! how severe the Blessed Virgin has been! Why did she not heal your soul at the same time that she healed my body?"

The last opportunity was presenting itself; he ought to have illumined this innocent creature's mind with the light of reason, have explained the miracle to her, in order that life, after accomplishing its healthful work in her body, might complete its triumph by throwing them into one another's arms. He also was healed, his mind was healthy now, and it was not for the loss of faith, but for the loss of herself, that he was weeping. However, invincible compassion was taking possession of him amidst all his grief. No, no, he would not trouble that dear soul; he would not rob her of her belief, which some day might prove her only stay amidst the sorrows of this world. One cannot yet require of children and women the bitter heroism of reason. He had not the strength to do it; he even thought that he had not the right. It would have seemed to him violation, abominable murder. And he did not speak out, but his tears flowed, hotter and hotter, in this immolation of his love, this despairing sacrifice of his own happiness in order that she might remain candid and ignorant and gay at heart.

"Oh, Marie, how wretched I am! Nowhere on the roads, nowhere at the galleys even, is there a man more wretched than myself! Oh, Marie, if you only knew; if you only knew how wretched I am!"

She was distracted, and caught him in her trembling arms, wishing to console him with a sisterly embrace. And at that moment the woman awaking within her understood everything, and she herself sobbed with sorrow that both human and divine will should thus part them. She had never yet reflected on such things, but suddenly she caught a glimpse of life, with its passions, its struggles, and its sufferings; and then, seeking for what she might say to soothe in some degree that broken heart, she stammered very faintly, distressed that she could find nothing sweet enough, "I know, I know—"

Then the words it was needful she should speak came to her; and as though that which she had to say ought only to be heard by the angels, she became anxious and looked around her. But the slumber which reigned in the carriage seemed more heavy even than before. Her father was still sleeping, with the innocent look of a big child. Not one of the pilgrims, not one of the ailing ones, had stirred amidst the rough rocking which bore them onward. Even Sister Hyacinthe, giving way to her overpowering weariness, had just closed her eyes, after drawing the lamp-screen in her own compartment. And now there were only vague shadows there, ill-defined bodies amidst nameless things, ghostly forms scarce visible, which a tempest blast, a furious rush, was carrying on and on through the darkness. And she likewise distrusted that black country-side whose unknown depths went by on either side of the train without one even being able to tell what forests, what rivers, what hills one was crossing. A short time back some bright sparks of light had appeared, possibly the lights of some distant forges, or the woeful lamps of workers or sufferers. Now, however, the night again streamed deeply all around, the obscure, infinite, nameless sea, farther and farther through which they ever went, not knowing where they were.

Then, with a chaste confusion, blushing amidst her tears, Marie placed her lips near Pierre's ear. "Listen, my friend; there is a great secret between the Blessed Virgin and myself. I had sworn that I would never tell it to anybody. But you are too unhappy, you are suffering too bitterly; she will forgive me; I will confide it to you."

And in a faint breath she went on: "During that night of love, you know, that night of burning ecstasy which I spent before the Grotto, I engaged myself by a vow: I promised the Blessed Virgin the gift of my chastity if she would but heal me.... She has healed me, and never—you hear me, Pierre, never will I marry anybody."

Ah! what unhoped-for sweetness! He thought that a balmy dew was falling on his poor wounded heart. It was a divine enchantment, a delicious relief. If she belonged to none other she would always be a little bit his own. And how well she had known his torment and what it was needful she should say in order that life might yet be possible for him.

In his turn he wished to find happy words and promise that he also would ever be hers, ever love her as he had loved her since childhood, like the dear creature she was, whose one kiss, long, long ago, had sufficed to perfume his entire life. But she made him stop, already anxious, fearing to spoil that pure moment. "No, no, my friend," she murmured, "let us say nothing more; it would be wrong, perhaps. I am very weary; I shall sleep quietly now."

And, with her head against his shoulder, she fell asleep at once, like a sister who is all confidence. He for a moment kept himself awake in that painful happiness of renunciation which they had just tasted together. It was all over, quite over now; the sacrifice was consummated. He would live a solitary life, apart from the life of other men. Never would he know woman, never would any child be born to him. And there remained to him only the consoling pride of that accepted and desired suicide, with the desolate grandeur that attaches to lives which are beyond the pale of nature.

But fatigue overpowered him also; his eyes closed, and in his turn he fell asleep. And afterwards his head slipped down, and his cheek touched the cheek of his dear friend, who was sleeping very gently with her brow against his shoulder. Then their hair mingled. She had her golden hair, her royal hair, half unbound, and it streamed over his face, and he dreamed amidst its perfume. Doubtless the same blissful dream fell upon them both, for their loving faces assumed the same expression of rapture; they both seemed to be smiling to the angels. It was chaste and passionate abandon, the innocence of chance slumber placing them in one another's arms, with warm, close lips so that their breath mingled, like the breath of two babes lying in the same cradle. And such was their bridal night, the consummation of the spiritual marriage in which they were to live, a delicious annihilation born of extreme fatigue, with scarcely a fleeting dream of mystical possession, amidst that carriage of wretchedness and suffering, which still and ever rolled along through the dense night. Hours and hours slipped by, the wheels growled, the bags and baskets swung from the brass hooks, whilst from the piled-up, crushed bodies there only arose a sense of terrible fatigue, the great physical exhaustion brought back from the land of miracles when the overworked souls returned home.

At last, at five o'clock, whilst the sun was rising, there was a sudden awakening, a resounding entry into a large station, with porters calling, doors opening, and people scrambling together. They were at Poitiers, and at once the whole carriage was on foot, amidst a chorus of laughter and exclamations. Little Sophie Couteau alighted here, and was bidding everybody farewell. She embraced all the ladies, even passing over the partition to take leave of Sister Claire des Anges, whom nobody had seen since the previous evening, for, silent and slight of build, with eyes full of mystery, she had vanished into her corner. Then the child came back again, took her little parcel, and showed herself particularly amiable towards Sister Hyacinthe and Madame de Jonquiere.

"Au revoir, Sister! Au revoir, madame! I thank you for all your kindness."

"You must come back again next year, my child."

"Oh, I sha'n't fail, Sister; it's my duty."

"And be good, my dear child, and take care of your health, so that the Blessed Virgin may be proud of you."

"To be sure, madame, she was so good to me, and it amuses me so much to go to see her."

When she was on the platform, all the pilgrims in the carriage leaned out, and with happy faces watched her go off.

"Till next year!" they called to her; "till next year!"

"Yes, yes, thank you kindly. Till next year."

The morning prayer was only to be said at Chatelherault. After the stoppage at Poitiers, when the train was once more rolling on in the fresh breeze of morning, M. de Guersaint gaily declared that he had slept delightfully, in spite of the hardness of the seat. Madame de Jonquiere also congratulated herself on the good rest which she had had, and of which she had been in so much need; though, at the same time, she was somewhat annoyed at having left Sister Hyacinthe all alone to watch over La Grivotte, who was now shivering with intense fever, again attacked by her horrible cough. Meanwhile the other female pilgrims were tidying themselves. The ten women at the far end were fastening their fichus and tying their cap strings, with a kind of modest nervousness displayed on their mournfully ugly faces. And Elise Rouquet, all attention, with her face close to her pocket glass, did not cease examining her nose, mouth, and cheeks, admiring herself with the thought that she was really and truly becoming nice-looking.

And it was then that Pierre and Marie again experienced a feeling of deep compassion on glancing at Madame Vincent, whom nothing had been able to rouse from a state of torpor, neither the tumultuous stoppage at Poitiers, nor the noise of voices which had continued ever since they had started off again. Prostrate on the seat, she had not opened her eyes, but still and ever slumbered, tortured by atrocious dreams. And, with big tears still streaming from her closed eyes, she had caught hold of the pillow which had been forced upon her, and was closely pressing it to her breast in some nightmare born of her suffering. Her poor arms, which had so long carried her dying daughter, her arms now unoccupied, forever empty, had found this cushion whilst she slept, and had coiled around them, as around a phantom, with a blind and frantic embrace.

On the other hand, M. Sabathier had woke up feeling quite joyous. Whilst his wife was pulling up his rug, carefully wrapping it round his lifeless legs; he began to chat with sparkling eyes, once more basking in illusion. He had dreamt of Lourdes, said he, and had seen the Blessed Virgin leaning towards him with a smile of kindly promise. And then, although he had before him both Madame Vincent, that mother whose daughter the Virgin had allowed to die, and La Grivotte, the wretched woman whom she had healed and who had so cruelly relapsed into her mortal disease, he nevertheless rejoiced and made merry, repeating to M. de Guersaint, with an air of perfect conviction: "Oh! I shall return home quite easy in mind, monsieur—I shall be cured next year. Yes, yes, as that dear little girl said just now: 'Till next year, till next year!'"

It was indestructible illusion, victorious even over certainty, eternal hope determined not to die, but shooting up with more life than ever, after each defeat, upon the ruins of everything.

At Chatelherault, Sister Hyacinthe made them say the morning prayer, the "Pater," the "Ave," the "Credo," and an appeal to God begging Him for the happiness of a glorious day: "O God, grant me sufficient strength that I may avoid all that is evil, do all that is good, and suffer without complaint every pain."

V. THE DEATH OP BERNADETTE—THE NEW RELIGION

AND the journey continued; the train rolled, still rolled along. At Sainte-Maure the prayers of the mass were said, and at Sainte-Pierre-des-Corps the "Credo" was chanted. However, the religious exercises no longer proved so welcome; the pilgrims' zeal was flagging somewhat in the increasing fatigue of their return journey, after such prolonged mental excitement. It occurred to Sister Hyacinthe that the happiest way of entertaining these poor worn-out folks would be for someone to read aloud; and she promised that she would allow Monsieur l'Abbe to read them the finish of Bernadette's life, some of the marvellous episodes of which he had already on two occasions related to them. However, they must wait until they arrived at Les Aubrais; there would be nearly two hours between Les Aubrais and Etampes, ample time to finish the story without being disturbed.

Then the various religious exercises followed one after the other, in a monotonous repetition of the order which had been observed whilst they crossed the same plains on their way to Lourdes. They again began the Rosary at Amboise, where they said the first chaplet, the five joyful mysteries; then, after singing the canticle, "O loving Mother, bless," at Blois, they recited the second chaplet, the five sorrowful mysteries, at Beaugency. Some little fleecy clouds had veiled the sun since morning, and the landscapes, very sweet and somewhat sad, flew by with a continuous fan-like motion. The trees and houses on either side of the line disappeared in the grey light with the fleetness of vague visions, whilst the distant hills, enveloped in mist, vanished more slowly, with the gentle rise and fall of a swelling sea. Between Beaugency and Les Aubrais the train seemed to slacken speed, though it still kept up its rhythmical, persistent rumbling, which the deafened pilgrims no longer even heard.

At length, when Les Aubrais had been left behind, they began to lunch in the carriage. It was then a quarter to twelve, and when they had said the "Angelus," and the three "Aves" had been thrice repeated, Pierre took from Marie's bag the little book whose blue cover was ornamented with an artless picture of Our Lady of Lourdes. Sister Hyacinthe clapped her hands as a signal for silence, and amidst general wakefulness and ardent curiosity like that of big children impassioned by the marvellous story, the priest was able to begin reading in his fine, penetrating voice. Now came the narrative of Bernadette's sojourn at Nevers, and then her death there. Pierre, however, as on the two previous occasions, soon ceased following the exact text of the little book, and added charming anecdotes of his own, both what he knew and what he could divine; and, for himself alone, he again evolved the true story, the human, pitiful story, that which none had ever told, but which he felt so deeply.

It was on the 8th July, 1866, that Bernadette left Lourdes. She went to take the veil at Nevers, in the convent of Saint-Gildard, the chief habitation of the Sisters on duty at the Asylum where she had learnt to read and had been living for eight years. She was then twenty-two years of age, and it was eight years since the Blessed Virgin had appeared to her. And her farewells to the Grotto, to the Basilica, to the whole town which she loved, were watered with tears. But she could no longer remain there, owing to the continuous persecution of public curiosity, the visits, the homage, and the adoration paid to her, from which, on account of her delicate health, she suffered cruelly. Her sincere humility, her timid love of shade and silence, had at last produced in her an ardent desire to disappear, to hide her resounding glory—the glory of one whom heaven had chosen and whom the world would not leave in peace—in the depth of some unknown darkness; and she longed only for simple-mindedness, for a quiet humdrum life devoted to prayer and petty daily occupations. Her departure was therefore a relief both to her and to the Grotto, which she was beginning to embarrass with her excessive innocence and burdensome complaints.

At Nevers, Saint-Gildard ought to have proved a paradise. She there found fresh air, sunshine, spacious apartments, and an extensive garden planted with fine trees. Yet she did not enjoy peace,—that utter forgetfulness of the world for which one flees to the far-away desert. Scarcely twenty days after her arrival, she donned the garb of the Order and assumed the name of Sister Marie-Bernard, for the time simply engaging herself by partial vows. However, the world still flocked around her, the persecution of the multitude began afresh. She was pursued even into the cloister through an irresistible desire to obtain favours from her saintly person. Ah! to see her, touch her, become lucky by gazing on her or surreptitiously rubbing some medal against her dress. It was the credulous passion of fetishism, a rush of believers pursuing this poor beatified being in the desire which each felt to secure a share of hope and divine illusion. She wept at it with very weariness, with impatient revolt, and often repeated: "Why do they torment me like this? What more is there in me than in others?" And at last she felt real grief at thus becoming "the raree-show," as she ended by calling herself with a sad, suffering smile. She defended herself as far as she could, refusing to see anyone. Her companions defended her also, and sometimes very sternly, showing her only to such visitors as were authorised by the Bishop. The doors of the Convent remained closed, and ecclesiastics almost alone succeeded in effecting an entrance. Still, even this was too much for her desire for solitude, and she often had to be obstinate, to request that the priests who had called might be sent away, weary as she was of always telling the same story, of ever answering the same questions. She was incensed, wounded, on behalf of the Blessed Virgin herself. Still, she sometimes had to yield, for the Bishop in person would bring great personages, dignitaries, and prelates; and she would then appear with her grave air, answering politely and as briefly as possible; only feeling at ease when she was allowed to return to her shadowy corner. Never, indeed, had distinction weighed more heavily on a mortal. One day, when she was asked if she was not proud of the continual visits paid her by the Bishop, she answered simply: "Monseigneur does not come to see me, he comes to show me." On another occasion some princes of the Church, great militant Catholics, who wished to see her, were overcome with emotion and sobbed before her; but, in her horror of being shown, in the vexation they caused her simple mind, she left them without comprehending, merely feeling very weary and very sad.

At length, however, she grew accustomed to Saint-Gildard, and spent a peaceful existence there, engaged in avocations of which she became very fond. She was so delicate, so frequently ill, that she was employed in the infirmary. In addition to the little assistance she rendered there, she worked with her needle, with which she became rather skilful, embroidering albs and altar-cloths in a delicate manner. But at times she, would lose all strength, and be unable to do even this light work. When she was not confined to her bed she spent long days in an easy-chair, her only diversion being to recite her rosary or to read some pious work. Now that she had learnt to read, books interested her, especially the beautiful stories of conversion, the delightful legends in which saints of both sexes appear, and the splendid and terrible dramas in which the devil is baffled and cast back into hell. But her great favourite, the book at which she continually marvelled, was the Bible, that wonderful New Testament of whose perpetual miracle she never wearied. She remembered the Bible at Bartres, that old book which had been in the family a hundred years, and whose pages had turned yellow; she could again see her foster-father slip a pin between the leaves to open the book at random, and then read aloud from the top of the right-hand page; and even at that time she had already known those beautiful stories so well that she could have continued repeating the narrative by heart, whatever might be the passage at which the perusal had ceased. And now that she read the book herself, she found in it a constant source of surprise, an ever-increasing delight. The story of the Passion particularly upset her, as though it were some extraordinary tragical event that had happened only the day before. She sobbed with pity; it made her poor suffering body quiver for hours. Mingled with her tears, perhaps, there was the unconscious dolour of her own passion, the desolate Calvary which she also had been ascending ever since her childhood.

When Bernadette was well and able to perform her duties in the infirmary, she bustled about, filling the building with childish liveliness. Until her death she remained an innocent, infantile being, fond of laughing, romping, and play. She was very little, the smallest Sister of the community, so that her companions always treated her somewhat like a child. Her face grew long and hollow, and lost its bloom of youth; but she retained the pure divine brightness of her eyes, the beautiful eyes of a visionary, in which, as in a limpid sky, you detected the flight of her dreams. As she grew older and her sufferings increased, she became somewhat sour-tempered and violent, cross-grained, anxious, and at times rough; little imperfections which after each attack filled her with remorse. She would humble herself, think herself damned, and beg pardon of everyone. But, more frequently, what a good little daughter of Providence she was! She became lively, alert, quick at repartee, full of mirth-provoking remarks, with a grace quite her own, which made her beloved. In spite of her great devotion, although she spent days in prayer, she was not at all bigoted or over-exacting with regard to others, but tolerant and compassionate. In fact, no nun was ever so much a woman, with distinct features, a decided personality, charming even in its puerility. And this gift of childishness which she had retained, the simple innocence of the child she still was, also made children love her, as though they recognised in her one of themselves. They all ran to her, jumped upon her lap, and passed their tiny arms round her neck, and the garden would then fill with the noise of joyous games, races, and cries; and it was not she who ran or cried the least, so happy was she at once more feeling herself a poor unknown little girl as in the far-away days of Bartres! Later on it was related that a mother had one day brought her paralysed child to the convent for the saint to touch and cure it. The woman sobbed so much that the Superior ended by consenting to make the attempt. However, as Bernadette indignantly protested whenever she was asked to perform a miracle, she was not forewarned, but simply called to take the sick child to the infirmary. And she did so, and when she stood the child on the ground it walked. It was cured.

Ah! how many times must Bartres and her free childhood spent watching her lambs—the years passed among the hills, in the long grass, in the leafy woods—have returned to her during the hours she gave to her dreams when weary of praying for sinners! No one then fathomed her soul, no one could say if involuntary regrets did not rend her wounded heart. One day she spoke some words, which her historians have preserved, with the view of making her passion more touching. Cloistered far away from her mountains, confined to a bed of sickness, she exclaimed: "It seems to me that I was made to live, to act, to be ever on the move, and yet the Lord will have me remain motionless." What a revelation, full of terrible testimony and immense sadness! Why should the Lord wish that dear being, all grace and gaiety, to remain motionless? Could she not have honoured Him equally well by living the free, healthy life that she had been born to live? And would she not have done more to increase the world's happiness and her own if, instead of praying for sinners, her constant occupation, she had given her love to the husband who might have been united to her and to the children who might have been born to her? She, so gay and so active, would, on certain evenings, become extremely depressed. She turned gloomy and remained wrapped in herself, as though overcome by excess of pain. No doubt the cup was becoming too bitter. The thought of her life's perpetual renunciation was killing her.

Did Bernadette often think of Lourdes whilst she was at Saint-Gildard? What knew she of the triumph of the Grotto, of the prodigies which were daily transforming the land of miracles? These questions were never thoroughly elucidated. Her companions were forbidden to talk to her of such matters, which remained enveloped in absolute, continual silence. She herself did not care to speak of them; she kept silent with regard to the mysterious past, and evinced no desire to know the present, however triumphant it might be. But all the same did not her heart, in imagination, fly away to the enchanted country of her childhood, where lived her kith and kin, where all her life-ties had been formed, where she had left the most extraordinary dream that ever human being dreamt? Surely she must have sometimes travelled the beautiful journey of memory, she must have known the main features of the great events that had taken place at Lourdes. What she most dreaded was to go there herself, and, she always refused to do so, knowing full well that she could not remain unrecognised, and fearful of meeting the crowds whose adoration awaited her. What glory would have been hers had she been headstrong, ambitious, domineering! She would have returned to the holy spot of her visions, have worked miracles there, have become a priestess, a female pope, with the infallibility and sovereignty of one of the elect, a friend of the Blessed Virgin. But the Fathers never really feared this, although express orders had been given to withdraw her from the world for her salvation's sake. In reality they were easy, for they knew her, so gentle and so humble in her fear of becoming divine, in her ignorance of the colossal machine which she had put in motion, and the working of which would have made her recoil with affright had she understood it. No, no! that was no longer her land, that place of crowds, of violence and trafficking. She would have suffered too much there, she would have been out of her element, bewildered, ashamed. And so, when pilgrims bound thither asked her with a smile, "Will you come with us?" she shivered slightly, and then hastily replied, "No, no! but how I should like to, were I a little bird!"

Her reverie alone was that little travelling bird, with rapid flight and noiseless wings, which continually went on pilgrimage to the Grotto. In her dreams, indeed, she must have continually lived at Lourdes, though in the flesh she had not even gone there for either her father's or her mother's funeral. Yet she loved her kin; she was anxious to procure work for her relations who had remained poor, and she had insisted on seeing her eldest brother, who, coming to Nevers to complain, had been refused admission to the convent. However, he found her weary and resigned, and she did not ask him a single question about New Lourdes, as though that rising town were no longer her own. The year of the crowning of the Virgin, a priest whom she had deputed to pray for her before the Grotto came back and told her of the never-to-be forgotten wonders of the ceremony, the hundred thousand pilgrims who had flocked to it, and the five-and-thirty bishops in golden vestments who had assembled in the resplendent Basilica. Whilst listening, she trembled with her customary little quiver of desire and anxiety. And when the priest exclaimed, "Ah! if you had only seen that pomp!" she answered: "Me! I was much better here in my little corner in the infirmary." They had robbed her of her glory; her work shone forth resplendently amidst a continuous hosanna, and she only tasted joy in forgetfulness, in the gloom of the cloister, where the opulent farmers of the Grotto forgot her. It was never the re-echoing solemnities that prompted her mysterious journeys; the little bird of her soul only winged its lonesome flight to Lourdes on days of solitude, in the peaceful hours when no one could there disturb its devotions. It was before the wild primitive Grotto that she returned to kneel, amongst the bushy eglantine, as in the days when the Gave was not walled in by a monumental quay. And it was the old town that she visited at twilight, when the cool, perfumed breezes came down from the mountains, the old painted and gilded semi-Spanish church where she had made her first communion, the old Asylum so full of suffering where during eight years she had grown accustomed to solitude—all that poor, innocent old town, whose every paving-stone awoke old affections in her memory's depths.

And did Bernadette ever extend the pilgrimage of her dreams as far as Bartres? Probably, at times when she sat in her invalid-chair and let some pious book slip from her tired hands, and closed her eyes, Bartres did appear to her, lighting up the darkness of her view. The little antique Romanesque church with sky-blue nave and blood-red altar screens stood there amidst the tombs of the narrow cemetery. Then she would find herself once more in the house of the Lagues, in the large room on the left, where the fire was burning, and where, in winter-time, such wonderful stories were told whilst the big clock gravely ticked the hours away. At times the whole countryside spread out before her, meadows without end, giant chestnut-trees beneath which you lost yourself, deserted table-lands whence you descried the distant mountains, the Pic du Midi and the Pic de Viscos soaring aloft as airy and as rose-coloured as dreams, in a paradise such as the legends have depicted. And afterwards, afterwards came her free childhood, when she scampered off whither she listed in the open air, her lonely, dreamy thirteenth year, when with all the joy of living she wandered through the immensity of nature. And now, too, perhaps, she again beheld herself roaming in the tall grass among the hawthorn bushes beside the streams on a warm sunny day in June. Did she not picture herself grown, with a lover of her own age, whom she would have loved with all the simplicity and affection of her heart? Ah! to be a child again, to be free, unknown, happy once more, to love afresh, and to love differently! The vision must have passed confusedly before her—a husband who worshipped her, children gaily growing up around her, the life that everybody led, the joys and sorrows that her own parents had known, and which her children would have had to know in their turn. But little by little all vanished, and she again found herself in her chair of suffering, imprisoned between four cold walls, with no other desire than a longing one for a speedy death, since she had been denied a share of the poor common happiness of this world.

Bernadette's ailments increased each year. It was, in fact, the commencement of her passion, the passion of this new child-Messiah, who had come to bring relief to the unhappy, to announce to mankind the religion of divine justice and equality in the face of miracles which flouted the laws of impassible nature. If she now rose it was only to drag herself from chair to chair for a few days at a time, and then she would have a relapse and be again forced to take to her bed. Her sufferings became terrible. Her hereditary nervousness, her asthma, aggravated by cloister life, had probably turned into phthisis. She coughed frightfully, each fit rending her burning chest and leaving her half dead. To complete her misery, caries of the right knee-cap supervened, a gnawing disease, the shooting pains of which caused her to cry aloud. Her poor body, to which dressings were continually being applied, became one great sore, which was irritated by the warmth of her bed, by her prolonged sojourn between sheets whose friction ended by breaking her skin. One and all pitied her; those who beheld her martyrdom said that it was impossible to suffer more, or with greater fortitude. She tried some of the Lourdes water, but it brought her no relief. Lord, Almighty King, why cure others and not cure her? To save her soul? Then dost Thou not save the souls of the others? What an inexplicable selection! How absurd that in the eternal evolution of worlds it should be necessary for this poor being to be tortured! She sobbed, and again and again said in order to keep up her courage: "Heaven is at the end, but how long the end is in coming!" There was ever the idea that suffering is the test, that it is necessary to suffer upon earth if one would triumph elsewhere, that suffering is indispensable, enviable, and blessed. But is this not blasphemous, O Lord? Hast Thou not created youth and joy? Is it Thy wish that Thy creatures should enjoy neither the sun, nor the smiling Nature which Thou hast created, nor the human affections with which Thou hast endowed their flesh? She dreaded the feeling of revolt which maddened her at times, and wished also to strengthen herself against the disease which made her groan, and she crucified herself in thought, extending her arms so as to form a cross and unite herself to Jesus, her limbs against His limbs, her mouth against His mouth, streaming the while with blood like Him, and steeped like Him in bitterness! Jesus died in three hours, but a longer agony fell to her, who again brought redemption by pain, who died to give others life. When her bones ached with agony she would sometimes utter complaints, but she reproached herself immediately. "Oh! how I suffer, oh! how I suffer! but what happiness it is to bear this pain!" There can be no more frightful words, words pregnant with a blacker pessimism. Happy to suffer, O Lord! but why, and to what unknown and senseless end? Where is the reason in this useless cruelty, in this revolting glorification of suffering, when from the whole of humanity there ascends but one desperate longing for health and happiness?

In the midst of her frightful sufferings, however, Sister Marie-Bernard took the final vows on September 22, 1878. Twenty years had gone by since the Blessed Virgin had appeared to her, visiting her as the Angel had visited the Virgin, choosing her as the Virgin had been chosen, amongst the most lowly and the most candid, that she might hide within her the secret of King Jesus. Such was the mystical explanation of that election of suffering, the raison d'etre of that being who was so harshly separated from her fellows, weighed down by disease, transformed into the pitiable field of every human affliction. She was the "garden inclosed"* that brings such pleasure to the gaze of the Spouse. He had chosen her, then buried her in the death of her hidden life. And even when the unhappy creature staggered beneath the weight of her cross, her companions would say to her: "Do you forget that the Blessed Virgin promised you that you should be happy, not in this world, but in the next?" And with renewed strength, and striking her forehead, she would answer: "Forget? no, no! it is here!" She only recovered temporary energy by means of this illusion of a paradise of glory, into which she would enter escorted by seraphims, to be forever and ever happy. The three personal secrets which the Blessed Virgin had confided to her, to arm her against evil, must have been promises of beauty, felicity, and immortality in heaven. What monstrous dupery if there were only the darkness of the earth beyond the grave, if the Blessed Virgin of her dream were not there to meet her with the prodigious guerdons she had promised! But Bernadette had not a doubt; she willingly undertook all the little commissions with which her companions naively entrusted her for Heaven: "Sister Marie-Bernard, you'll say this, you'll say that, to the Almighty." "Sister Marie-Bernard, you'll kiss my brother if you meet him in Paradise." "Sister Marie-Bernard, give me a little place beside you when I die." And she obligingly answered each one: "Have no fear, I will do it!" Ah! all-powerful illusion, delicious repose, power ever reviving and consolatory!

* Song of Solomon iv. 12.

And then came the last agony, then came death.

On Friday, March 28, 1879, it was thought that she would not last the night. She had a despairing longing for the tomb, in order that she might suffer no more, and live again in heaven. And thus she obstinately refused to receive extreme unction, saying that twice already it had cured her. She wished, in short, that God would let her die, for it was more than she could bear; it would have been unreasonable to require that she should suffer longer. Yet she ended by consenting to receive the sacraments, and her last agony was thereby prolonged for nearly three weeks. The priest who attended her frequently said: "My daughter, you must make the sacrifice of your life"; and one day, quite out of patience, she sharply answered him: "But, Father, it is no sacrifice." A terrible saying, that also, for it implied disgust at being, furious contempt for existence, and an immediate ending of her humanity, had she had the power to suppress herself by a gesture. It is true that the poor girl had nothing to regret, that she had been compelled to banish everything from her life, health, joy, and love, so that she might leave it as one casts off a soiled, worn, tattered garment. And she was right; she condemned her useless, cruel life when she said: "My passion will finish only at my death; it will not cease until I enter into eternity." And this idea of her passion pursued her, attaching her more closely to the cross with her Divine Master. She had induced them to give her a large crucifix; she pressed it vehemently against her poor maidenly breast, exclaiming that she would like to thrust it into her bosom and leave it there. Towards the end, her strength completely forsook her, and she could no longer grasp the crucifix with her trembling hands. "Let it be tightly tied to me," she prayed, "that I may feel it until my last breath!" The Redeemer upon that crucifix was the only spouse that she was destined to know; His bleeding kiss was to be the only one bestowed upon her womanhood, diverted from nature's course. The nuns took cords, passed them under her aching back, and fastened the crucifix so roughly to her bosom that it did indeed penetrate it.

At last death took pity upon her. On Easter Monday she was seized with a great fit of shivering. Hallucinations perturbed her, she trembled with fright, she beheld the devil jeering and prowling around her. "Be off, be off, Satan!" she gasped; "do not touch me, do not carry me away!" And amidst her delirium she related that the fiend had sought to throw himself upon her, that she had felt his mouth scorching her with all the flames of hell. The devil in a life so pure, in a soul without sin! what for, O Lord! and again I ask it, why this relentless suffering, intense to the very last, why this nightmare-like ending, this death troubled with such frightful fancies, after so beautiful a life of candour, purity, and innocence? Could she not fall asleep serenely in the peacefulness of her chaste soul? But doubtless so long as breath remained in her body it was necessary to leave her the hatred and dread of life, which is the devil. It was life which menaced her, and it was life which she cast out, in the same way that she denied life when she reserved to the Celestial Bridegroom her tortured, crucified womanhood. That dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which her dream had come to strengthen, was a blow dealt by the Church to woman, both wife and mother. To decree that woman is only worthy of worship on condition that she be a virgin, to imagine that virgin to be herself born without sin, is not this an insult to Nature, the condemnation of life, the denial of womanhood, whose true greatness consists in perpetuating life? "Be off, be off, Satan! let me die without fulfilling Nature's law." And she drove the sunshine from the room and the free air that entered by the window, the air that was sweet with the scent of flowers, laden with all the floating germs which transmit love throughout the whole vast world.

On the Wednesday after Easter (April 16th), the death agony commenced. It is related that on the morning of that day one of Bernadette's companions, a nun attacked with a mortal illness and lying in the infirmary in an adjoining bed, was suddenly healed upon drinking a glass of Lourdes water. But she, the privileged one, had drunk of it in vain. God at last granted her the signal favour which she desired by sending her into the good sound sleep of the earth, in which there is no more suffering. She asked pardon of everyone. Her passion was consummated; like the Saviour, she had the nails and the crown of thorns, the scourged limbs, the pierced side. Like Him she raised her eyes to heaven, extended her arms in the form of a cross, and uttered a loud cry: "My God!" And, like Him, she said, towards three o'clock: "I thirst." She moistened her lips in the glass, then bowed her head and expired.

Thus, very glorious and very holy, died the Visionary of Lourdes, Bernadette Soubirous, Sister Marie-Bernard, one of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers. During three days her body remained exposed to view, and vast crowds passed before it; a whole people hastened to the convent, an interminable procession of devotees hungering after hope, who rubbed medals, chaplets, pictures, and missals against the dead woman's dress, to obtain from her one more favour, a fetish bringing happiness. Even in death her dream of solitude was denied her: a mob of the wretched ones of this world rushed to the spot, drinking in illusion around her coffin. And it was noticed that her left eye, the eye which at the time of the apparitions had been nearest to the Blessed Virgin, remained obstinately open. Then a last miracle amazed the convent: the body underwent no change, but was interred on the third day, still supple, warm, with red lips, and a very white skin, rejuvenated as it were, and smelling sweet. And to-day Bernadette Soubirous, exiled from Lourdes, obscurely sleeps her last sleep at Saint Gildard, beneath a stone slab in a little chapel, amidst the shade and silence of the old trees of the garden, whilst yonder the Grotto shines resplendently in all its triumph.

Pierre ceased speaking; the beautiful, marvellous story was ended. And yet the whole carriage was still listening, deeply impressed by that death, at once so tragic and so touching. Compassionate tears fell from Marie's eyes, while the others, Elise Rouquet, La Grivotte herself, now calmer, clasped their hands and prayed to her who was in heaven to intercede with the Divinity to complete their cure. M. Sabathier made a big sign of the cross, and then ate a cake which his wife had bought him at Poitiers.

M. de Guersaint, whom sad things always upset, had fallen asleep again in the middle of the story. And there was only Madame Vincent, with her face buried in her pillow, who had not stirred, like a deaf and blind creature, determined to see and hear nothing more.

Meanwhile the train rolled, still rolled along. Madame de Jonquiere, after putting her head out of the window, informed them that they were approaching Etampes. And, when they had left that station behind them, Sister Hyacinthe gave the signal, and they recited the third chaplet of the Rosary, the five glorious mysteries—the Resurrection of Our Lord, the Ascension of Our Lord, the Mission of the Holy Ghost, the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin, and the Crowning of the Most Blessed Virgin. And afterwards they sang the canticle:

"O Virgin, in thy help I put my trust."

Then Pierre fell into a deep reverie. His glance had turned towards the now sunlit landscape, the continual flight of which seemed to lull his thoughts. The noise of the wheels was making him dizzy, and he ended by no longer recognising the familiar horizon of this vast suburban expanse with which he had once been acquainted. They still had to pass Bretigny and Juvisy, and then, in an hour and a half at the utmost, they would at last be at Paris. So the great journey was finished! the inquiry, which he had so much desired to make, the experiment which he had attempted with so much passion, were over! He had wished to acquire certainty, to study Bernadette's case on the spot, and see if grace would not come back to him in a lightning flash, restoring him his faith. And now he had settled the point—Bernadette had dreamed through the continual torments of her flesh, and he himself would never believe again. And this forced itself upon his mind like a brutal fact: the simple faith of the child who kneels and prays, the primitive faith of young people, bowed down by an awe born of their ignorance, was dead. Though thousands of pilgrims might each year go to Lourdes, the nations were no longer with them; this attempt to bring about the resurrection of absolute faith, the faith of dead-and-gone centuries, without revolt or examination, was fatally doomed to fail. History never retraces its steps, humanity cannot return to childhood, times have too much changed, too many new inspirations have sown new harvests for the men of to-day to become once more like the men of olden time. It was decisive; Lourdes was only an explainable accident, whose reactionary violence was even a proof of the extreme agony in which belief under the antique form of Catholicism was struggling. Never again, as in the cathedrals of the twelfth century, would the entire nation kneel like a docile flock in the hands of the Master. To blindly, obstinately cling to the attempt to bring that to pass would mean to dash oneself against the impossible, to rush, perhaps, towards great moral catastrophes.

And of his journey there already only remained to Pierre an immense feeling of compassion. Ah! his heart was overflowing with pity; his poor heart was returning wrung by all that he had seen. He recalled the words of worthy Abbe Judaine; and he had seen those thousands of unhappy beings praying, weeping, and imploring God to take pity on their suffering; and he had wept with them, and felt within himself, like an open wound, a sorrowful fraternal feeling for all their ailments. He could not think of those poor people without burning with a desire to relieve them. If it were true that the faith of the simple-minded no longer sufficed; if one ran the risk of going astray in wishing to turn back, would it become necessary to close the Grotto, to preach other efforts, other sufferings? However, his compassion revolted at that thought. No, no! it would be a crime to snatch their dream of Heaven from those poor creatures who suffered either in body or in mind, and who only found relief in kneeling yonder amidst the splendour of tapers and the soothing repetition of hymns. He had not taken the murderous course of undeceiving Marie, but had sacrificed himself in order to leave her the joy of her fancy, the divine consolation of having been healed by the Virgin. Where was the man hard enough, cruel enough, to prevent the lowly from believing, to rob them of the consolation of the supernatural, the hope that God troubled Himself about them, that He held a better life in His paradise in reserve for them? All humanity was weeping, desperate with anguish, like some despairing invalid, irrevocably condemned, and whom only a miracle could save. He felt mankind to be unhappy indeed, and he shuddered with fraternal affection in the presence of such pitiable humility, ignorance, poverty in its rags, disease with its sores and evil odour, all the lowly sufferers, in hospital, convent, and slums, amidst vermin and dirt, with ugliness and imbecility written on their faces, an immense protest against health, life, and Nature, in the triumphal name of justice, equality, and benevolence. No, no! it would never do to drive the wretched to despair. Lourdes must be tolerated, in the same way that you tolerate a falsehood which makes life possible. And, as he had already said in Bernadette's chamber, she remained the martyr, she it was who revealed to him the only religion which still filled his heart, the religion of human suffering. Ah! to be good and kindly, to alleviate all ills, to lull pain, to sleep in a dream, to lie even, so that no one might suffer any more!

The train passed at full speed through a village, and Pierre vaguely caught sight of a church nestling amidst some large apple trees. All the pilgrims in the carriage crossed themselves. But he was now becoming uneasy, scruples were tingeing his reverie with anxiety. This religion of human suffering, this redemption by pain, was not this yet another lure, a continual aggravation of pain and misery? It is cowardly and dangerous to allow superstition to live. To tolerate and accept it is to revive the dark evil ages afresh. It weakens and stupefies; the sanctimoniousness bequeathed by heredity produces humiliated, timorous generations, decadent and docile nations, who are an easy prey to the powerful of the earth. Whole nations are imposed upon, robbed, devoured, when they have devoted the whole effort of their will to the mere conquest of a future existence. Would it not, therefore, be better to cure humanity at once by boldly closing the miraculous Grottos whither it goes to weep, and thus restore to it the courage to live the real life, even in the midst of tears? And it was the same prayer, that incessant flood of prayer which ascended from Lourdes, the endless supplication in which he had been immersed and softened: was it not after all but puerile lullaby, a debasement of all one's energies? It benumbed the will, one's very being became dissolved in it and acquired disgust for life and action. Of what use could it be to will anything, do anything, when you totally resigned yourself to the caprices of an unknown almighty power? And, in another respect, what a strange thing was this mad desire for prodigies, this anxiety to drive the Divinity to transgress the laws of Nature established by Himself in His infinite wisdom! Therein evidently lay peril and unreasonableness; at the risk even of losing illusion, that divine comforter, only the habit of personal effort and the courage of truth should have been developed in man, and especially in the child.

Then a great brightness arose in Pierre's mind and dazzled him. It was Reason, protesting against the glorification of the absurd and the deposition of common-sense. Ah! reason, it was through her that he had suffered, through her alone that he was happy. As he had told Doctor Chassaigne, his one consuming longing was to satisfy reason ever more and more, although it might cost him happiness to do so. It was reason, he now well understood it, whose continual revolt at the Grotto, at the Basilica, throughout entire Lourdes, had prevented him from believing. Unlike his old friend—that stricken old man, who was afflicted with such dolorous senility, who had fallen into second childhood since the shipwreck of his affections,—he had been unable to kill reason and humiliate and annihilate himself. Reason remained his sovereign mistress, and she it was who buoyed him up even amidst the obscurities and failures of science. Whenever he met with a thing which he could not understand, it was she who whispered to him, "There is certainly a natural explanation which escapes me." He repeated that there could be no healthy ideal outside the march towards the discovery of the unknown, the slow victory of reason amidst all the wretchedness of body and mind. In the clashing of the twofold heredity which he had derived from his father, all brain, and his mother, all faith, he, a priest, found it possible to ravage his life in order that he might keep his vows. He had acquired strength enough to master his flesh, but he felt that his paternal heredity had now definitely gained the upper hand, for henceforth the sacrifice of his reason had become an impossibility; this he would not renounce and would not master. No, no, even human suffering, the hallowed suffering of the poor, ought not to prove an obstacle, enjoining the necessity of ignorance and folly. Reason before all; in her alone lay salvation. If at Lourdes, whilst bathed in tears, softened by the sight of so much affliction, he had said that it was sufficient to weep and love, he had made a dangerous mistake. Pity was but a convenient expedient. One must live, one must act; reason must combat suffering, unless it be desired that the latter should last forever.

However, as the train rolled on and the landscape flew by, a church once more appeared, this time on the fringe of heaven, some votive chapel perched upon a hill and surmounted by a lofty statue of the Virgin. And once more all the pilgrims made the sign of the cross, and once more Pierre's reverie strayed, a fresh stream of reflections bringing his anguish back to him. What was this imperious need of the things beyond, which tortured suffering humanity? Whence came it? Why should equality and justice be desired when they did not seem to exist in impassive nature? Man had set them in the unknown spheres of the Mysterious, in the supernatural realms of religious paradises, and there contented his ardent thirst for them. That unquenchable thirst for happiness had ever consumed, and would consume him always. If the Fathers of the Grotto drove such a glorious trade, it was simply because they made motley out of what was divine. That thirst for the Divine, which nothing had quenched through the long, long ages, seemed to have returned with increased violence at the close of our century of science. Lourdes was a resounding and undeniable proof that man could never live without the dream of a Sovereign Divinity, re-establishing equality and re-creating happiness by dint of miracles. When man has reached the depths of life's misfortunes, he returns to the divine illusion, and the origin of all religions lies there. Man, weak and bare, lacks the strength to live through his terrestrial misery without the everlasting lie of a paradise. To-day, thought Pierre, the experiment had been made; it seemed that science alone could not suffice, and that one would be obliged to leave a door open on the Mysterious.

All at once in the depths of his deeply absorbed mind the words rang out, A new religion! The door which must be left open on the Mysterious was indeed a new religion. To subject mankind to brutal amputation, lop off its dream, and forcibly deprive it of the Marvellous, which it needed to live as much as it needed bread, would possibly kill it. Would it ever have the philosophical courage to take life as it is, and live it for its own sake, without any idea of future rewards and penalties? It certainly seemed that centuries must elapse before the advent of a society wise enough to lead a life of rectitude without the moral control of some cultus and the consolation of superhuman equality and justice. Yes, a new religion! The call burst forth, resounded within Pierre's brain like the call of the nations, the eager, despairing desire of the modern soul. The consolation and hope which Catholicism had brought the world seemed exhausted after eighteen hundred years full of so many tears, so much blood, so much vain and barbarous agitation. It was an illusion departing, and it was at least necessary that the illusion should be changed. If mankind had long ago darted for refuge into the Christian paradise, it was because that paradise then opened before it like a fresh hope. But now a new religion, a new hope, a new paradise, yes, that was what the world thirsted for, in the discomfort in which it was struggling. And Father Fourcade, for his part, fully felt such to be the case; he had not meant to imply anything else when he had given rein to his anxiety, entreating that the people of the great towns, the dense mass of the humble which forms the nation, might be brought to Lourdes. One hundred thousand, two hundred thousand pilgrims at Lourdes each year, that was, after all, but a grain of sand. It was the people, the whole people, that was required. But the people has forever deserted the churches, it no longer puts any soul in the Blessed Virgins which it manufactures, and nothing nowadays could restore its lost faith. A Catholic democracy—yes, history would then begin afresh; only were it possible to create a new Christian people, would not the advent of a new Saviour, the mighty breath of a new Messiah, have been needed for such a task?

However, the words still sounded, still rang out in Pierre's mind with the growing clamour of pealing bells. A new religion; a new religion. Doubtless it must be a religion nearer to life, giving a larger place to the things of the world, and taking the acquired truths into due account. And, above all, it must be a religion which was not an appetite for death—Bernadette living solely in order that she might die, Doctor Chassaigne aspiring to the tomb as to the only happiness—for all that spiritualistic abandonment was so much continuous disorganisation of the will to live. At bottom of it was hatred to life, disgust with and cessation of action. Every religion, it is true, is but a promise of immortality, an embellishment of the spheres beyond, an enchanted garden to be entered on the morrow of death. Could a new religion ever place such a garden of eternal happiness on earth? Where was the formula, the dogma, that would satisfy the hopes of the mankind of to-day? What belief should be sown to blossom forth in a harvest of strength and peace? How could one fecundate the universal doubt so that it should give birth to a new faith? and what sort of illusion, what divine falsehood of any kind could be made to germinate in the contemporary world, ravaged as it had been upon all sides, broken up by a century of science?

At that moment, without any apparent transition, Pierre saw the face of his brother Guillaume arise in the troublous depths of his mind. Still, he was not surprised; some secret link must have brought that vision there. Ah! how fond they had been of one another long ago, and what a good brother that elder brother, so upright and gentle, had been! Henceforth, also, the rupture was complete; Pierre no longer saw Guillaume, since the latter had cloistered himself in his chemical studies, living like a savage in a little suburban house, with a mistress and two big dogs. Then Pierre's reverie again diverged, and he thought of that trial in which Guillaume had been mentioned, like one suspected of having compromising friendships amongst the most violent revolutionaries. It was related, too, that the young man had, after long researches, discovered the formula of a terrible explosive, one pound of which would suffice to blow up a cathedral. And Pierre then thought of those Anarchists who wished to renew and save the world by destroying it. They were but dreamers, horrible dreamers; yet dreamers in the same way as those innocent pilgrims whom he had seen kneeling at the Grotto in an enraptured flock. If the Anarchists, if the extreme Socialists, demanded with violence the equality of wealth, the sharing of all the enjoyments of the world, the pilgrims on their side demanded with tears equality of health and an equitable sharing of moral and physical peace. The latter relied on miracles, the former appealed to brute force. At bottom, however, it was but the same exasperated dream of fraternity and justice, the eternal desire for happiness—neither poor nor sick left, but bliss for one and all. And, in fact, had not the primitive Christians been terrible revolutionaries for the pagan world, which they threatened, and did, indeed, destroy? They who were persecuted, whom the others sought to exterminate, are to-day inoffensive, because they have become the Past. The frightful Future is ever the man who dreams of a future society; even as to-day it is the madman so wildly bent on social renovation that he harbours the great black dream of purifying everything by the flame of conflagrations. This seemed monstrous to Pierre. Yet, who could tell? Therein, perchance, lay the rejuvenated world of to-morrow.

Astray, full of doubts, he nevertheless, in his horror of violence, made common cause with old society now reduced to defend itself, unable though he was to say whence would come the new Messiah of Gentleness, in whose hands he would have liked to place poor ailing mankind. A new religion, yes, a new religion. But it is not easy to invent one, and he knew not to what conclusion to come between the ancient faith, which was dead, and the young faith of to-morrow, as yet unborn. For his part, in his desolation, he was only sure of keeping his vow, like an unbelieving priest watching over the belief of others, chastely and honestly discharging his duties, with the proud sadness that he had been unable to renounce his reason as he had renounced his flesh. And for the rest, he would wait.

However, the train rolled on between large parks, and the engine gave a prolonged whistle, a joyful flourish, which drew Pierre from his reflections. The others were stirring, displaying emotion around him. The train had just left Juvisy, and Paris was at last near at hand, within a short half-hour's journey. One and all were getting their things together: the Sabathiers were remaking their little parcels, Elise Rouquet was giving a last glance at her mirror. For a moment Madame de Jonquiere again became anxious concerning La Grivotte, and decided that as the girl was in such a pitiful condition she would have her taken straight to a hospital on arriving; whilst Marie endeavoured to rouse Madame Vincent from the torpor in which she seemed determined to remain. M. de Guersaint, who had been indulging in a little siesta, also had to be awakened. And at last, when Sister Hyacinthe had clapped her hands, the whole carriage intonated the "Te Deum," the hymn of praise and thanksgiving. "Te Deum, laudamus, te Dominum confitemur." The voices rose amidst a last burst of fervour. All those glowing souls returned thanks to God for the beautiful journey, the marvellous favours that He had already bestowed on them, and would bestow on them yet again.

At last came the fortifications. The two o'clock sun was slowly descending the vast, pure heavens, so serenely warm. Distant smoke, a ruddy smoke, was rising in light clouds above the immensity of Paris like the scattered, flying breath of that toiling colossus. It was Paris in her forge, Paris with her passions, her battles, her ever-growling thunder, her ardent life ever engendering the life of to-morrow. And the white train, the woeful train of every misery and every dolour, was returning into it all at full speed, sounding in higher and higher strains the piercing flourishes of its whistle-calls. The five hundred pilgrims, the three hundred patients, were about to disappear in the vast city, fall again upon the hard pavement of life after the prodigious dream in which they had just indulged, until the day should come when their need of the consolation of a fresh dream would irresistibly impel them to start once more on the everlasting pilgrimage to mystery and forgetfulness.

Ah! unhappy mankind, poor ailing humanity, hungering for illusion, and in the weariness of this waning century distracted and sore from having too greedily acquired science; it fancies itself abandoned by the physicians of both the mind and the body, and, in great danger of succumbing to incurable disease, retraces its steps and asks the miracle of its cure of the mystical Lourdes of a past forever dead! Yonder, however, Bernadette, the new Messiah of suffering, so touching in her human reality, constitutes the terrible lesson, the sacrifice cut off from the world, the victim condemned to abandonment, solitude, and death, smitten with the penalty of being neither woman, nor wife, nor mother, because she beheld the Blessed Virgin.

THE END

ROME

FROM "THE THREE CITIES"

By Emile Zola

Translated By Ernest A. Vizetelly

PREFACE

IN submitting to the English-speaking public this second volume of M. Zola's trilogy "Lourdes, Rome, Paris," I have no prefatory remarks to offer on behalf of the author, whose views on Rome, its past, present, and future, will be found fully expounded in the following pages. That a book of this character will, like its forerunner "Lourdes," provoke considerable controversy is certain, but comment or rejoinder may well be postponed until that controversy has arisen. At present then I only desire to say, that in spite of the great labour which I have bestowed on this translation, I am sensible of its shortcomings, and in a work of such length, such intricacy, and such a wide range of subject, it will not be surprising if some slips are discovered. Any errors which may be pointed out to me, however, shall be rectified in subsequent editions. I have given, I think, the whole essence of M. Zola's text; but he himself has admitted to me that he has now and again allowed his pen to run away with him, and thus whilst sacrificing nothing of his sense I have at times abbreviated his phraseology so as slightly to condense the book. I may add that there are no chapter headings in the original, and that the circumstances under which the translation was made did not permit me to supply any whilst it was passing through the press; however, as some indication of the contents of the book—which treats of many more things than are usually found in novels—may be a convenience to the reader, I have prepared a table briefly epitomising the chief features of each successive chapter.

E. A. V.

MERTON, SURREY, ENGLAND,
April, 1896.

DETAILED CONTENTS

PART I. I
"NEW ROME"—Abbe Froment in the Eternal City—His First Impressions—His
Book and the Rejuvenation of Christianity

II
"BLACK MOUTH, RED SOUL"—The Boccaneras, their Mansion, Ancestors,
History, and Friends

III
ROMANS OF THE CHURCH—Cardinals Boccanera and Sanguinetti—Abbes
Paparelli and Santobono—Don Vigilio—Monsignor Nani

CONTENTS TO PART II. IV
ROMANS OF NEW ITALY—The Pradas and the Saccos—The Corso and the Pincio

V
THE BLOOD OF AUGUSTUS—The Palaces of the Caesars—The Capitol—The
Forum—The Appian Way—The Campagna—The Catacombs—St. Peter's.

VI
VENUS AND HERCULES—The Vatican—The Sixtine Chapel—Michael Angelo and
Raffaelle—Botticelli and Bernini—Gods and Goddesses—The Gardens—Leo
XIII—The Revolt of Passion

CONTENTS TO PART III. VII
PRINCE AND PONTIFF—The International Pilgrimage—The Papal Revenue—A
Function at St. Peter's—The Pope-King—The Temporal Power

VIII
THE POOR AND THE POPE—The Building Mania—The Financial Crash—The
Horrors of the Castle Fields—The Roman Workman—May Christ's Vicar
Gamble?—Hopes and Fears of the Papacy

IX
TITO's WARNING—Aspects of Rome—The Via Giulia—The Tiber by Day—The
Gardens—The Villa Medici—-The Squares—The Fountains—Poussin and the
Campagna—The Campo Verano—The Trastevere—The "Palaces"—Aristocracy,
Middle Class, Democracy—The Tiber by Night

CONTENTS TO PART IV. X
FROM PILLAR TO POST—The Propaganda—The Index—Dominicans, Jesuits,
Franciscans—The Secular Clergy—Roman Worship—Freemasonry—Cardinal
Vicar and Cardinal Secretary—The Inquisition.

XI
POISON!—Frascati—A Cardinal and his Creature—Albano, Castel Gandolfo,
Nemi—Across the Campagna—An Osteria—Destiny on the March

XII
THE AGONY OF PASSION—A Roman Gala—The Buongiovannis—The Grey
World—The Triumph of Benedetta—King Humbert and Queen Margherita—The
Fig-tree of Judas

XIII
DESTINY!—A Happy Morning—The Mid-day Meal—Dario and the Figs—Extreme
Unction—Benedetta's Curse—The Lovers' Death

CONTENTS TO PART V. XIV
SUBMISSION—The Vatican by Night—The Papal Anterooms—Some Great
Popes—His Holiness's Bed-room—Pierre's Reception—Papal Wrath—Pierre's
Appeal—The Pope's Policy—Dogma and Lourdes—Pierre Reprobates his Book

XV
A HOUSE OF MOURNING—Lying in State—Mother and Son—Princess and
Work-girl—Nani the Jesuit—Rival Cardinals—The Pontiff of Destruction

XVI
JUDGMENT—Pierre and Orlando—Italian Rome—Wanted, a Democracy—Italy
and France—The Rome of the Anarchists—The Agony of Guilt—A
Botticelli—The Papacy Condemned—The Coming Schism—The March of
Science—The Destruction of Rome—The Victory of Reason—Justice not
Charity—Departure—The March of Civilisation—One Fatherland for All
Mankind

ROME

PART I.

I.

THE train had been greatly delayed during the night between Pisa and Civita Vecchia, and it was close upon nine o'clock in the morning when, after a fatiguing journey of twenty-five hours' duration, Abbe Pierre Froment at last reached Rome. He had brought only a valise with him, and, springing hastily out of the railway carriage amidst the scramble of the arrival, he brushed the eager porters aside, intent on carrying his trifling luggage himself, so anxious was he to reach his destination, to be alone, and look around him. And almost immediately, on the Piazza dei Cinquecento, in front of the railway station, he climbed into one of the small open cabs ranged alongside the footwalk, and placed the valise near him after giving the driver this address:

"Via Giulia, Palazzo Boccanera."*

* Boccanera mansion, Julia Street.

It was a Monday, the 3rd of September, a beautifully bright and mild morning, with a clear sky overhead. The cabby, a plump little man with sparkling eyes and white teeth, smiled on realising by Pierre's accent that he had to deal with a French priest. Then he whipped up his lean horse, and the vehicle started off at the rapid pace customary to the clean and cheerful cabs of Rome. However, on reaching the Piazza delle Terme, after skirting the greenery of a little public garden, the man turned round, still smiling, and pointing to some ruins with his whip,

"The baths of Diocletian," said he in broken French, like an obliging driver who is anxious to court favour with foreigners in order to secure their custom.

Then, at a fast trot, the vehicle descended the rapid slope of the Via Nazionale, which dips down from the summit of the Viminalis,* where the railway station is situated. And from that moment the driver scarcely ceased turning round and pointing at the monuments with his whip. In this broad new thoroughfare there were only buildings of recent erection. Still, the wave of the cabman's whip became more pronounced and his voice rose to a higher key, with a somewhat ironical inflection, when he gave the name of a huge and still chalky pile on his left, a gigantic erection of stone, overladen with sculptured work-pediments and statues.

* One of the seven hills on which Rome is built. The other six
are the Capitoline, Aventine, Quirinal, Esquiline, Coelian,
and Palatine. These names will perforce frequently occur in
the present narrative.

"The National Bank!" he said.

Pierre, however, during the week which had followed his resolve to make the journey, had spent wellnigh every day in studying Roman topography in maps and books. Thus he could have directed his steps to any given spot without inquiring his way, and he anticipated most of the driver's explanations. At the same time he was disconcerted by the sudden slopes, the perpetually recurring hills, on which certain districts rose, house above house, in terrace fashion. On his right-hand clumps of greenery were now climbing a height, and above them stretched a long bare yellow building of barrack or convent-like aspect.

"The Quirinal, the King's palace," said the driver.

Lower down, as the cab turned across a triangular square, Pierre, on raising his eyes, was delighted to perceive a sort of aerial garden high above him—a garden which was upheld by a lofty smooth wall, and whence the elegant and vigorous silhouette of a parasol pine, many centuries old, rose aloft into the limpid heavens. At this sight he realised all the pride and grace of Rome.

"The Villa Aldobrandini," the cabman called.

Then, yet lower down, there came a fleeting vision which decisively impassioned Pierre. The street again made a sudden bend, and in one corner, beyond a short dim alley, there was a blazing gap of light. On a lower level appeared a white square, a well of sunshine, filled with a blinding golden dust; and amidst all that morning glory there arose a gigantic marble column, gilt from base to summit on the side which the sun in rising had laved with its beams for wellnigh eighteen hundred years. And Pierre was surprised when the cabman told him the name of the column, for in his mind he had never pictured it soaring aloft in such a dazzling cavity with shadows all around. It was the column of Trajan.

The Via Nazionale turned for the last time at the foot of the slope. And then other names fell hastily from the driver's lips as his horse went on at a fast trot. There was the Palazzo Colonna, with its garden edged by meagre cypresses; the Palazzo Torlonia, almost ripped open by recent "improvements"; the Palazzo di Venezia, bare and fearsome, with its crenelated walls, its stern and tragic appearance, that of some fortress of the middle ages, forgotten there amidst the commonplace life of nowadays. Pierre's surprise increased at the unexpected aspect which certain buildings and streets presented; and the keenest blow of all was dealt him when the cabman with his whip triumphantly called his attention to the Corso, a long narrow thoroughfare, about as broad as Fleet Street,* white with sunshine on the left, and black with shadows on the right, whilst at the far end the Piazza del Popolo (the Square of the People) showed like a bright star. Was this, then, the heart of the city, the vaunted promenade, the street brimful of life, whither flowed all the blood of Rome?

* M. Zola likens the Corso to the Rue St. Honore in Paris, but
I have thought that an English comparison would be preferable
in the present version.—Trans.

However, the cab was already entering the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, which follows the Via Nazionale, these being the two piercings effected right across the olden city from the railway station to the bridge of St. Angelo. On the left-hand the rounded apsis of the Gesu church looked quite golden in the morning brightness. Then, between the church and the heavy Altieri palace which the "improvers" had not dared to demolish, the street became narrower, and one entered into cold, damp shade. But a moment afterwards, before the facade of the Gesu, when the square was reached, the sun again appeared, dazzling, throwing golden sheets of light around; whilst afar off at the end of the Via di Ara Coeli, steeped in shadow, a glimpse could be caught of some sunlit palm-trees.

"That's the Capitol yonder," said the cabman.

The priest hastily leant to the left, but only espied the patch of greenery at the end of the dim corridor-like street. The sudden alternations of warm light and cold shade made him shiver. In front of the Palazzo di Venezia, and in front of the Gesu, it had seemed to him as if all the night of ancient times were falling icily upon his shoulders; but at each fresh square, each broadening of the new thoroughfares, there came a return to light, to the pleasant warmth and gaiety of life. The yellow sunflashes, in falling from the house fronts, sharply outlined the violescent shadows. Strips of sky, very blue and very benign, could be perceived between the roofs. And it seemed to Pierre that the air he breathed had a particular savour, which he could not yet quite define, but it was like that of fruit, and increased the feverishness which had possessed him ever since his arrival.

The Corso Vittorio Emanuele is, in spite of its irregularity, a very fine modern thoroughfare; and for a time Pierre might have fancied himself in any great city full of huge houses let out in flats. But when he passed before the Cancelleria,* Bramante's masterpiece, the typical monument of the Roman Renascence, his astonishment came back to him and his mind returned to the mansions which he had previously espied, those bare, huge, heavy edifices, those vast cubes of stone-work resembling hospitals or prisons. Never would he have imagined that the famous Roman "palaces" were like that, destitute of all grace and fancy and external magnificence. However, they were considered very fine and must be so; he would doubtless end by understanding things, but for that he would require reflection.**

* Formerly the residence of the Papal Vice-Chancellors.

** It is as well to point out at once that a palazzo is not a
palace as we understand the term, but rather a mansion.—Trans.

All at once the cab turned out of the populous Corso Vittorio Emanuele into a succession of winding alleys, through which it had difficulty in making its way. Quietude and solitude now came back again; the olden city, cold and somniferous, followed the new city with its bright sunshine and its crowds. Pierre remembered the maps which he had consulted, and realised that he was drawing near to the Via Giulia, and thereupon his curiosity, which had been steadily increasing, augmented to such a point that he suffered from it, full of despair at not seeing more and learning more at once. In the feverish state in which he had found himself ever since leaving the station, his astonishment at not finding things such as he had expected, the many shocks that his imagination had received, aggravated his passion beyond endurance, and brought him an acute desire to satisfy himself immediately. Nine o'clock had struck but a few minutes previously, he had the whole morning before him to repair to the Boccanera palace, so why should he not at once drive to the classic spot, the summit whence one perceives the whole of Rome spread out upon her seven hills? And when once this thought had entered into his mind it tortured him until he was at last compelled to yield to it.

The driver no longer turned his head, so that Pierre rose up to give him this new address: "To San Pietro in Montorio!"

On hearing him the man at first looked astonished, unable to understand. He indicated with his whip that San Pietro was yonder, far away. However, as the priest insisted, he again smiled complacently, with a friendly nod of his head. All right! For his own part he was quite willing.

The horse then went on at a more rapid pace through the maze of narrow streets. One of these was pent between high walls, and the daylight descended into it as into a deep trench. But at the end came a sudden return to light, and the Tiber was crossed by the antique bridge of Sixtus IV, right and left of which stretched the new quays, amidst the ravages and fresh plaster-work of recent erections. On the other side of the river the Trastevere district also was ripped open, and the vehicle ascended the slope of the Janiculum by a broad thoroughfare where large slabs bore the name of Garibaldi. For the last time the driver made a gesture of good-natured pride as he named this triumphal route.

"Via Garibaldi!"

The horse had been obliged to slacken its pace, and Pierre, mastered by childish impatience, turned round to look at the city as by degrees it spread out and revealed itself behind him. The ascent was a long one; fresh districts were ever rising up, even to the most distant hills. Then, in the increasing emotion which made his heart beat, the young priest felt that he was spoiling the contentment of his desire by thus gradually satisfying it, slowly and but partially effecting his conquest of the horizon. He wished to receive the shock full in the face, to behold all Rome at one glance, to gather the holy city together, and embrace the whole of it at one grasp. And thereupon he mustered sufficient strength of mind to refrain from turning round any more, in spite of the impulses of his whole being.

There is a spacious terrace on the summit of the incline. The church of San Pietro in Montorio stands there, on the spot where, as some say, St. Peter was crucified. The square is bare and brown, baked by the hot summer suns; but a little further away in the rear, the clear and noisy waters of the Acqua Paola fall bubbling from the three basins of a monumental fountain amidst sempiternal freshness. And alongside the terrace parapet, on the very crown of the Trastevere, there are always rows of tourists, slim Englishmen and square-built Germans, agape with traditional admiration, or consulting their guide-books in order to identify the monuments.

Pierre sprang lightly from the cab, leaving his valise on the seat, and making a sign to the driver, who went to join the row of waiting cabs, and remained philosophically seated on his box in the full sunlight, his head drooping like that of his horse, both resigning themselves to the customary long stoppage.

Meantime Pierre, erect against the parapet, in his tight black cassock, and with his bare feverish hands nervously clenched, was gazing before him with all his eyes, with all his soul. Rome! Rome! the city of the Caesars, the city of the Popes, the Eternal City which has twice conquered the world, the predestined city of the glowing dream in which he had indulged for months! At last it was before him, at last his eyes beheld it! During the previous days some rainstorms had abated the intense August heat, and on that lovely September morning the air had freshened under the pale blue of the spotless far-spreading heavens. And the Rome that Pierre beheld was a Rome steeped in mildness, a visionary Rome which seemed to evaporate in the clear sunshine. A fine bluey haze, scarcely perceptible, as delicate as gauze, hovered over the roofs of the low-lying districts; whilst the vast Campagna, the distant hills, died away in a pale pink flush. At first Pierre distinguished nothing, sought no particular edifice or spot, but gave sight and soul alike to the whole of Rome, to the living colossus spread out below him, on a soil compounded of the dust of generations. Each century had renewed the city's glory as with the sap of immortal youth. And that which struck Pierre, that which made his heart leap within him, was that he found Rome such as he had desired to find her, fresh and youthful, with a volatile, almost incorporeal, gaiety of aspect, smiling as at the hope of a new life in the pure dawn of a lovely day.

And standing motionless before the sublime vista, with his hands still clenched and burning, Pierre in a few minutes again lived the last three years of his life. Ah! what a terrible year had the first been, spent in his little house at Neuilly, with doors and windows ever closed, burrowing there like some wounded animal suffering unto death. He had come back from Lourdes with his soul desolate, his heart bleeding, with nought but ashes within him. Silence and darkness fell upon the ruins of his love and his faith. Days and days went by, without a pulsation of his veins, without the faintest gleam arising to brighten the gloom of his abandonment. His life was a mechanical one; he awaited the necessary courage to resume the tenor of existence in the name of sovereign reason, which had imposed upon him the sacrifice of everything. Why was he not stronger, more resistant, why did he not quietly adapt his life to his new opinions? As he was unwilling to cast off his cassock, through fidelity to the love of one and disgust of backsliding, why did he not seek occupation in some science suited to a priest, such as astronomy or archaeology? The truth was that something, doubtless his mother's spirit, wept within him, an infinite, distracted love which nothing had yet satisfied and which ever despaired of attaining contentment. Therein lay the perpetual suffering of his solitude: beneath the lofty dignity of reason regained, the wound still lingered, raw and bleeding.

One autumn evening, however, under a dismal rainy sky, chance brought him into relations with an old priest, Abbe Rose, who was curate at the church of Ste. Marguerite, in the Faubourg St. Antoine. He went to see Abbe Rose in the Rue de Charonne, where in the depths of a damp ground floor he had transformed three rooms into an asylum for abandoned children, whom he picked up in the neighbouring streets. And from that moment Pierre's life changed, a fresh and all-powerful source of interest had entered into it, and by degrees he became the old priest's passionate helper. It was a long way from Neuilly to the Rue de Charonne, and at first he only made the journey twice a week. But afterwards he bestirred himself every day, leaving home in the morning and not returning until night. As the three rooms no longer sufficed for the asylum, he rented the first floor of the house, reserving for himself a chamber in which ultimately he often slept. And all his modest income was expended there, in the prompt succouring of poor children; and the old priest, delighted, touched to tears by the young devoted help which had come to him from heaven, would often embrace Pierre, weeping, and call him a child of God.

It was then that Pierre knew want and wretchedness—wicked, abominable wretchedness; then that he lived amidst it for two long years. The acquaintance began with the poor little beings whom he picked up on the pavements, or whom kind-hearted neighbours brought to him now that the asylum was known in the district—little boys, little girls, tiny mites stranded on the streets whilst their fathers and mothers were toiling, drinking, or dying. The father had often disappeared, the mother had gone wrong, drunkenness and debauchery had followed slack times into the home; and then the brood was swept into the gutter, and the younger ones half perished of cold and hunger on the footways, whilst their elders betook themselves to courses of vice and crime. One evening Pierre rescued from the wheels of a stone-dray two little nippers, brothers, who could not even give him an address, tell him whence they had come. On another evening he returned to the asylum with a little girl in his arms, a fair-haired little angel, barely three years old, whom he had found on a bench, and who sobbed, saying that her mother had left her there. And by a logical chain of circumstances, after dealing with the fleshless, pitiful fledglings ousted from their nests, he came to deal with the parents, to enter their hovels, penetrating each day further and further into a hellish sphere, and ultimately acquiring knowledge of all its frightful horror, his heart meantime bleeding, rent by terrified anguish and impotent charity.

Oh! the grievous City of Misery, the bottomless abyss of human suffering and degradation—how frightful were his journeys through it during those two years which distracted his whole being! In that Ste. Marguerite district of Paris, in the very heart of that Faubourg St. Antoine, so active and so brave for work, however hard, he discovered no end of sordid dwellings, whole lanes and alleys of hovels without light or air, cellar-like in their dampness, and where a multitude of wretches wallowed and suffered as from poison. All the way up the shaky staircases one's feet slipped upon filth. On every story there was the same destitution, dirt, and promiscuity. Many windows were paneless, and in swept the wind howling, and the rain pouring torrentially. Many of the inmates slept on the bare tiled floors, never unclothing themselves. There was neither furniture nor linen, the life led there was essentially an animal life, a commingling of either sex and of every age—humanity lapsing into animality through lack of even indispensable things, through indigence of so complete a character that men, women, and children fought even with tooth and nail for the very crumbs swept from the tables of the rich. And the worst of it all was the degradation of the human being; this was no case of the free naked savage, hunting and devouring his prey in the primeval forests; here civilised man was found, sunk into brutishness, with all the stigmas of his fall, debased, disfigured, and enfeebled, amidst the luxury and refinement of that city of Paris which is one of the queens of the world.

In every household Pierre heard the same story. There had been youth and gaiety at the outset, brave acceptance of the law that one must work. Then weariness had come; what was the use of always toiling if one were never to get rich? And so, by way of snatching a share of happiness, the husband turned to drink; the wife neglected her home, also drinking at times, and letting the children grow up as they might. Sordid surroundings, ignorance, and overcrowding did the rest. In the great majority of cases, prolonged lack of work was mostly to blame; for this not only empties the drawers of the savings hidden away in them, but exhausts human courage, and tends to confirmed habits of idleness. During long weeks the workshops empty, and the arms of the toilers lose strength. In all Paris, so feverishly inclined to action, it is impossible to find the slightest thing to do. And then the husband comes home in the evening with tearful eyes, having vainly offered his arms everywhere, having failed even to get a job at street-sweeping, for that employment is much sought after, and to secure it one needs influence and protectors. Is it not monstrous to see a man seeking work that he may eat, and finding no work and therefore no food in this great city resplendent and resonant with wealth? The wife does not eat, the children do not eat. And then comes black famine, brutishness, and finally revolt and the snapping of all social ties under the frightful injustice meted out to poor beings who by their weakness are condemned to death. And the old workman, he whose limbs have been worn out by half a century of hard toil, without possibility of saving a copper, on what pallet of agony, in what dark hole must he not sink to die? Should he then be finished off with a mallet, like a crippled beast of burden, on the day when ceasing to work he also ceases to eat? Almost all pass away in the hospitals, others disappear, unknown, swept off by the muddy flow of the streets. One morning, on some rotten straw in a loathsome hovel, Pierre found a poor devil who had died of hunger and had been forgotten there for a week. The rats had devoured his face.

But it was particularly on an evening of the last winter that Pierre's heart had overflowed with pity. Awful in winter time are the sufferings of the poor in their fireless hovels, where the snow penetrates by every chink. The Seine rolls blocks of ice, the soil is frost-bound, in all sorts of callings there is an enforced cessation of work. Bands of urchins, barefooted, scarcely clad, hungry and racked by coughing, wander about the ragpickers' "rents" and are carried off by sudden hurricanes of consumption. Pierre found families, women with five and six children, who had not eaten for three days, and who huddled together in heaps to try to keep themselves warm. And on that terrible evening, before anybody else, he went down a dark passage and entered a room of terror, where he found that a mother had just committed suicide with her five little ones—driven to it by despair and hunger—a tragedy of misery which for a few hours would make all Paris shudder! There was not an article of furniture or linen left in the place; it had been necessary to sell everything bit by bit to a neighbouring dealer. There was nothing but the stove where the charcoal was still smoking and a half-emptied palliasse on which the mother had fallen, suckling her last-born, a babe but three months old. And a drop of blood had trickled from the nipple of her breast, towards which the dead infant still protruded its eager lips. Two little girls, three and five years old, two pretty little blondes, were also lying there, sleeping the eternal sleep side by side; whilst of the two boys, who were older, one had succumbed crouching against the wall with his head between his hands, and the other had passed through the last throes on the floor, struggling as though he had sought to crawl on his knees to the window in order to open it. Some neighbours, hurrying in, told Pierre the fearful commonplace story; slow ruin, the father unable to find work, perchance taking to drink, the landlord weary of waiting, threatening the family with expulsion, and the mother losing her head, thirsting for death, and prevailing on her little ones to die with her, while her husband, who had been out since the morning, was vainly scouring the streets. Just as the Commissary of Police arrived to verify what had happened, the poor devil returned, and when he had seen and understood things, he fell to the ground like a stunned ox, and raised a prolonged, plaintive howl, such a poignant cry of death that the whole terrified street wept at it.

Both in his ears and in his heart Pierre carried away with him that horrible cry, the plaint of a condemned race expiring amidst abandonment and hunger; and that night he could neither eat nor sleep. Was it possible that such abomination, such absolute destitution, such black misery leading straight to death should exist in the heart of that great city of Paris, brimful of wealth, intoxicated with enjoyment, flinging millions out of the windows for mere pleasure? What! there should on one side be such colossal fortunes, so many foolish fancies gratified, with lives endowed with every happiness, whilst on the other was found inveterate poverty, lack even of bread, absence of every hope, and mothers killing themselves with their babes, to whom they had nought to offer but the blood of their milkless breast! And a feeling of revolt stirred Pierre; he was for a moment conscious of the derisive futility of charity. What indeed was the use of doing that which he did—picking up the little ones, succouring the parents, prolonging the sufferings of the aged? The very foundations of the social edifice were rotten; all would soon collapse amid mire and blood. A great act of justice alone could sweep the old world away in order that the new world might be built. And at that moment he realised so keenly how irreparable was the breach, how irremediable the evil, how deathly the cancer of misery, that he understood the actions of the violent, and was himself ready to accept the devastating and purifying whirlwind, the regeneration of the world by flame and steel, even as when in the dim ages Jehovah in His wrath sent fire from heaven to cleanse the accursed cities of the plains.

However, on hearing him sob that evening, Abbe Rose came up to remonstrate in fatherly fashion. The old priest was a saint, endowed with infinite gentleness and infinite hope. Why despair indeed when one had the Gospel? Did not the divine commandment, "Love one another," suffice for the salvation of the world? He, Abbe Rose, held violence in horror and was wont to say that, however great the evil, it would soon be overcome if humanity would but turn backward to the age of humility, simplicity, and purity, when Christians lived together in innocent brotherhood. What a delightful picture he drew of evangelical society, of whose second coming he spoke with quiet gaiety as though it were to take place on the very morrow! And Pierre, anxious to escape from his frightful recollections, ended by smiling, by taking pleasure in Abbe Rose's bright consoling tale. They chatted until a late hour, and on the following days reverted to the same subject of conversation, one which the old priest was very fond of, ever supplying new particulars, and speaking of the approaching reign of love and justice with the touching confidence of a good if simple man, who is convinced that he will not die till he shall have seen the Deity descend upon earth.

And now a fresh evolution took place in Pierre's mind. The practice of benevolence in that poor district had developed infinite compassion in his breast, his heart failed him, distracted, rent by contemplation of the misery which he despaired of healing. And in this awakening of his feelings he often thought that his reason was giving way, he seemed to be retracing his steps towards childhood, to that need of universal love which his mother had implanted in him, and dreamt of chimerical solutions, awaiting help from the unknown powers. Then his fears, his hatred of the brutality of facts at last brought him an increasing desire to work salvation by love. No time should be lost in seeking to avert the frightful catastrophe which seemed inevitable, the fratricidal war of classes which would sweep the old world away beneath the accumulation of its crimes. Convinced that injustice had attained its apogee, that but little time remained before the vengeful hour when the poor would compel the rich to part with their possessions, he took pleasure in dreaming of a peaceful solution, a kiss of peace exchanged by all men, a return to the pure morals of the Gospel as it had been preached by Jesus.

Doubts tortured him at the outset. Could olden Catholicism be rejuvenated, brought back to the youth and candour of primitive Christianity? He set himself to study things, reading and questioning, and taking a more and more passionate interest in that great problem of Catholic socialism which had made no little noise for some years past. And quivering with pity for the wretched, ready as he was for the miracle of fraternisation, he gradually lost such scruples as intelligence might have prompted, and persuaded himself that once again Christ would work the redemption of suffering humanity. At last a precise idea took possession of him, a conviction that Catholicism purified, brought back to its original state, would prove the one pact, the supreme law that might save society by averting the sanguinary crisis which threatened it.

When he had quitted Lourdes two years previously, revolted by all its gross idolatry, his faith for ever dead, but his mind worried by the everlasting need of the divine which tortures human creatures, a cry had arisen within him from the deepest recesses of his being: "A new religion! a new religion!" And it was this new religion, or rather this revived religion which he now fancied he had discovered in his desire to work social salvation—ensuring human happiness by means of the only moral authority that was erect, the distant outcome of the most admirable implement ever devised for the government of nations.

During the period of slow development through which Pierre passed, two men, apart from Abbe Rose, exercised great influence on him. A benevolent action brought him into intercourse with Monseigneur Bergerot, a bishop whom the Pope had recently created a cardinal, in reward for a whole life of charity, and this in spite of the covert opposition of the papal curia which suspected the French prelate to be a man of open mind, governing his diocese in paternal fashion. Pierre became more impassioned by his intercourse with this apostle, this shepherd of souls, in whom he detected one of the good simple leaders that he desired for the future community. However, his apostolate was influenced even more decisively by meeting Viscount Philibert de la Choue at the gatherings of certain workingmen's Catholic associations. A handsome man, with military manners, and a long noble-looking face, spoilt by a small and broken nose which seemed to presage the ultimate defeat of a badly balanced mind, the Viscount was one of the most active agitators of Catholic socialism in France. He was the possessor of vast estates, a vast fortune, though it was said that some unsuccessful agricultural enterprises had already reduced his wealth by nearly one-half. In the department where his property was situated he had been at great pains to establish model farms, at which he had put his ideas on Christian socialism into practice, but success did not seem to follow him. However, it had all helped to secure his election as a deputy, and he spoke in the Chamber, unfolding the programme of his party in long and stirring speeches.

Unwearying in his ardour, he also led pilgrimages to Rome, presided over meetings, and delivered lectures, devoting himself particularly to the people, the conquest of whom, so he privately remarked, could alone ensure the triumph of the Church. And thus he exercised considerable influence over Pierre, who in him admired qualities which himself did not possess—an organising spirit and a militant if somewhat blundering will, entirely applied to the revival of Christian society in France. However, though the young priest learnt a good deal by associating with him, he nevertheless remained a sentimental dreamer, whose imagination, disdainful of political requirements, straightway winged its flight to the future abode of universal happiness; whereas the Viscount aspired to complete the downfall of the liberal ideas of 1789 by utilising the disillusion and anger of the democracy to work a return towards the past.

Pierre spent some delightful months. Never before had neophyte lived so entirely for the happiness of others. He was all love, consumed by the passion of his apostolate. The sight of the poor wretches whom he visited, the men without work, the women, the children without bread, filled him with a keener and keener conviction that a new religion must arise to put an end to all the injustice which otherwise would bring the rebellious world to a violent death. And he was resolved to employ all his strength in effecting and hastening the intervention of the divine, the resuscitation of primitive Christianity. His Catholic faith remained dead; he still had no belief in dogmas, mysteries, and miracles; but a hope sufficed him, the hope that the Church might still work good, by connecting itself with the irresistible modern democratic movement, so as to save the nations from the social catastrophe which impended. His soul had grown calm since he had taken on himself the mission of replanting the Gospel in the hearts of the hungry and growling people of the Faubourgs. He was now leading an active life, and suffered less from the frightful void which he had brought back from Lourdes; and as he no longer questioned himself, the anguish of uncertainty no longer tortured him. It was with the serenity which attends the simple accomplishment of duty that he continued to say his mass. He even finished by thinking that the mystery which he thus celebrated—indeed, that all the mysteries and all the dogmas were but symbols—rites requisite for humanity in its childhood, which would be got rid of later on, when enlarged, purified, and instructed humanity should be able to support the brightness of naked truth.

And in his zealous desire to be useful, his passion to proclaim his belief aloud, Pierre one morning found himself at his table writing a book. This had come about quite naturally; the book proceeded from him like a heart-cry, without any literary idea having crossed his mind. One night, whilst he lay awake, its title suddenly flashed before his eyes in the darkness: "NEW ROME." That expressed everything, for must not the new redemption of the nations originate in eternal and holy Rome? The only existing authority was found there; rejuvenescence could only spring from the sacred soil where the old Catholic oak had grown. He wrote his book in a couple of months, having unconsciously prepared himself for the work by his studies in contemporary socialism during a year past. There was a bubbling flow in his brain as in a poet's; it seemed to him sometimes as if he dreamt those pages, as if an internal distant voice dictated them to him.

When he read passages written on the previous day to Viscount Philibert de la Choue, the latter often expressed keen approval of them from a practical point of view, saying that one must touch the people in order to lead them, and that it would also be a good plan to compose pious and yet amusing songs for singing in the workshops. As for Monseigneur Bergerot, without examining the book from the dogmatic standpoint, he was deeply touched by the glowing breath of charity which every page exhaled, and was even guilty of the imprudence of writing an approving letter to the author, which letter he authorised him to insert in his work by way of preface. And yet now the Congregation of the Index Expurgatorius was about to place this book, issued in the previous June, under interdict; and it was to defend it that the young priest had hastened to Rome, inflamed by the desire to make his ideas prevail, and resolved to plead his cause in person before the Holy Father, having, he was convinced of it, simply given expression to the pontiff's views.

Pierre had not stirred whilst thus living his three last years afresh: he still stood erect before the parapet, before Rome, which he had so often dreamt of and had so keenly desired to see. There was a constant succession of arriving and departing vehicles behind him; the slim Englishmen and the heavy Germans passed away after bestowing on the classic view the five minutes prescribed by their guidebooks; whilst the driver and the horse of Pierre's cab remained waiting complacently, each with his head drooping under the bright sun, which was heating the valise on the seat of the vehicle. And Pierre, in his black cassock, seemed to have grown slimmer and elongated, very slight of build, as he stood there motionless, absorbed in the sublime spectacle. He had lost flesh after his journey to Lourdes, his features too had become less pronounced. Since his mother's part in his nature had regained ascendency, the broad, straight forehead, the intellectual air which he owed to his father seemed to have grown less conspicuous, while his kind and somewhat large mouth, and his delicate chin, bespeaking infinite affection, dominated, revealing his soul, which also glowed in the kindly sparkle of his eyes.

Ah! how tender and glowing were the eyes with which he gazed upon the Rome of his book, the new Rome that he had dreamt of! If, first of all, the ensemble had claimed his attention in the soft and somewhat veiled light of that lovely morning, at present he could distinguish details, and let his glance rest upon particular edifices. And it was with childish delight that he identified them, having long studied them in maps and collections of photographs. Beneath his feet, at the bottom of the Janiculum, stretched the Trastevere district with its chaos of old ruddy houses, whose sunburnt tiles hid the course of the Tiber. He was somewhat surprised by the flattish aspect of everything as seen from the terraced summit. It was as though a bird's-eye view levelled the city, the famous hills merely showing like bosses, swellings scarcely perceptible amidst the spreading sea of house-fronts. Yonder, on the right, distinct against the distant blue of the Alban mountains, was certainly the Aventine with its three churches half-hidden by foliage; there, too, was the discrowned Palatine, edged as with black fringe by a line of cypresses. In the rear, the Coelian hill faded away, showing only the trees of the Villa Mattei paling in the golden sunshine. The slender spire and two little domes of Sta. Maria Maggiore alone indicated the summit of the Esquiline, right in front and far away at the other end of the city; whilst on the heights of the neighbouring Viminal, Pierre only perceived a confused mass of whitish blocks, steeped in light and streaked with fine brown lines—recent erections, no doubt, which at that distance suggested an abandoned stone quarry. He long sought the Capitol without being able to discover it; he had to take his bearings, and ended by convincing himself that the square tower, modestly lost among surrounding house-roofs, which he saw in front of Sta. Maria Maggiore was its campanile. Next, on the left, came the Quirinal, recognisable by the long facade of the royal palace, a barrack or hospital-like facade, flat, crudely yellow in hue, and pierced by an infinite number of regularly disposed windows. However, as Pierre was completing the circuit, a sudden vision made him stop short. Without the city, above the trees of the Botanical Garden, the dome of St. Peter's appeared to him. It seemed to be poised upon the greenery, and rose up into the pure blue sky, sky-blue itself and so ethereal that it mingled with the azure of the infinite. The stone lantern which surmounts it, white and dazzling, looked as though it were suspended on high.

Pierre did not weary, and his glances incessantly travelled from one end of the horizon to the other. They lingered on the noble outlines, the proud gracefulness of the town-sprinkled Sabine and Alban mountains, whose girdle limited the expanse. The Roman Campagna spread out in far stretches, bare and majestic, like a desert of death, with the glaucous green of a stagnant sea; and he ended by distinguishing "the stern round tower" of the tomb of Cecilia Metella, behind which a thin pale line indicated the ancient Appian Way. Remnants of aqueducts strewed the short herbage amidst the dust of the fallen worlds. And, bringing his glance nearer in, the city again appeared with its jumble of edifices, on which his eyes lighted at random. Close at hand, by its loggia turned towards the river, he recognised the huge tawny cube of the Palazzo Farnese. The low cupola, farther away and scarcely visible, was probably that of the Pantheon. Then by sudden leaps came the freshly whitened walls of San Paolo-fuori-le-Mura,* similar to those of some huge barn, and the statues crowning San Giovanni in Laterano, delicate, scarcely as big as insects. Next the swarming of domes, that of the Gesu, that of San Carlo, that of St'. Andrea della Valle, that of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini; then a number of other sites and edifices, all quivering with memories, the castle of St'. Angelo with its glittering statue of the Destroying Angel, the Villa Medici dominating the entire city, the terrace of the Pincio with its marbles showing whitely among its scanty verdure; and the thick-foliaged trees of the Villa Borghese, whose green crests bounded the horizon. Vainly however did Pierre seek the Colosseum.

* St. Paul-beyond-the-walls.

The north wind, which was blowing very mildly, had now begun to dissipate the morning haze. Whole districts vigorously disentangled themselves, and showed against the vaporous distance like promontories in a sunlit sea. Here and there, in the indistinct swarming of houses, a strip of white wall glittered, a row of window panes flared, or a garden supplied a black splotch, of wondrous intensity of hue. And all the rest, the medley of streets and squares, the endless blocks of buildings, scattered about on either hand, mingled and grew indistinct in the living glory of the sun, whilst long coils of white smoke, which had ascended from the roofs, slowly traversed the pure sky.

Guided by a secret influence, however, Pierre soon ceased to take interest in all but three points of the mighty panorama. That line of slender cypresses which set a black fringe on the height of the Palatine yonder filled him with emotion: beyond it he saw only a void: the palaces of the Caesars had disappeared, had fallen, had been razed by time; and he evoked their memory, he fancied he could see them rise like vague, trembling phantoms of gold amidst the purple of that splendid morning. Then his glances reverted to St. Peter's, and there the dome yet soared aloft, screening the Vatican which he knew was beside the colossus, clinging to its flanks. And that dome, of the same colour as the heavens, appeared so triumphant, so full of strength, so vast, that it seemed to him like a giant king, dominating the whole city and seen from every spot throughout eternity. Then he fixed his eyes on the height in front of him, on the Quirinal, and there the King's palace no longer appeared aught but a flat low barracks bedaubed with yellow paint.

And for him all the secular history of Rome, with its constant convulsions and successive resurrections, found embodiment in that symbolical triangle, in those three summits gazing at one another across the Tiber. Ancient Rome blossoming forth in a piling up of palaces and temples, the monstrous florescence of imperial power and splendour; Papal Rome, victorious in the middle ages, mistress of the world, bringing that colossal church, symbolical of beauty regained, to weigh upon all Christendom; and the Rome of to-day, which he knew nothing of, which he had neglected, and whose royal palace, so bare and so cold, brought him disparaging ideas—the idea of some out-of-place, bureaucratic effort, some sacrilegious attempt at modernity in an exceptional city which should have been left entirely to the dreams of the future. However, he shook off the almost painful feelings which the importunate present brought to him, and would not let his eyes rest on a pale new district, quite a little town, in course of erection, no doubt, which he could distinctly see near St. Peter's on the margin of the river. He had dreamt of his own new Rome, and still dreamt of it, even in front of the Palatine whose edifices had crumbled in the dust of centuries, of the dome of St. Peter's whose huge shadow lulled the Vatican to sleep, of the Palace of the Quirinal repaired and repainted, reigning in homely fashion over the new districts which swarmed on every side, while with its ruddy roofs the olden city, ripped up by improvements, coruscated beneath the bright morning sun.

Again did the title of his book, "NEW ROME," flare before Pierre's eyes, and another reverie carried him off; he lived his book afresh even as he had just lived his life. He had written it amid a flow of enthusiasm, utilising the data which he had accumulated at random; and its division into three parts, past, present, and future, had at once forced itself upon him.

The PAST was the extraordinary story of primitive Christianity, of the slow evolution which had turned this Christianity into present-day Catholicism. He showed that an economical question is invariably hidden beneath each religious evolution, and that, upon the whole, the everlasting evil, the everlasting struggle, has never been aught but one between the rich and the poor. Among the Jews, when their nomadic life was over, and they had conquered the land of Canaan, and ownership and property came into being, a class warfare at once broke out. There were rich, and there were poor; thence arose the social question. The transition had been sudden, and the new state of things so rapidly went from bad to worse that the poor suffered keenly, and protested with the greater violence as they still remembered the golden age of the nomadic life. Until the time of Jesus the prophets are but rebels who surge from out the misery of the people, proclaim its sufferings, and vent their wrath upon the rich, to whom they prophesy every evil in punishment for their injustice and their harshness. Jesus Himself appears as the claimant of the rights of the poor. The prophets, whether socialists or anarchists, had preached social equality, and called for the destruction of the world if it were unjust. Jesus likewise brings to the wretched hatred of the rich. All His teaching threatens wealth and property; and if by the Kingdom of Heaven which He promised one were to understand peace and fraternity upon this earth, there would only be a question of returning to a life of pastoral simplicity, to the dream of the Christian community, such as after Him it would seem to have been realised by His disciples. During the first three centuries each Church was an experiment in communism, a real association whose members possessed all in common—wives excepted. This is shown to us by the apologists and early fathers of the Church. Christianity was then but the religion of the humble and the poor, a form of democracy, of socialism struggling against Roman society. And when the latter toppled over, rotted by money, it succumbed far more beneath the results of frantic speculation, swindling banks, and financial disasters, than beneath the onslaught of barbarian hordes and the stealthy, termite-like working of the Christians.

The money question will always be found at the bottom of everything. And a new proof of this was supplied when Christianity, at last triumphing by virtue of historical, social, and human causes, was proclaimed a State religion. To ensure itself complete victory it was forced to range itself on the side of the rich and the powerful; and one should see by means of what artfulness and sophistry the fathers of the Church succeeded in discovering a defence of property and wealth in the Gospel of Jesus. All this, however, was a vital political necessity for Christianity; it was only at this price that it became Catholicism, the universal religion. From that time forth the powerful machine, the weapon of conquest and rule, was reared aloft: up above were the powerful and the wealthy, those whose duty it was to share with the poor, but who did not do so; while down below were the poor, the toilers, who were taught resignation and obedience, and promised the kingdom of futurity, the divine and eternal reward—an admirable monument which has lasted for ages, and which is entirely based on the promise of life beyond life, on the inextinguishable thirst for immortality and justice that consumes mankind.

Pierre had completed this first part of his book, this history of the past, by a broad sketch of Catholicism until the present time. First appeared St. Peter, ignorant and anxious, coming to Rome by an inspiration of genius, there to fulfil the ancient oracles which had predicted the eternity of the Capitol. Then came the first popes, mere heads of burial associations, the slow rise of the all-powerful papacy ever struggling to conquer the world, unremittingly seeking to realise its dream of universal domination. At the time of the great popes of the middle ages it thought for a moment that it had attained its goal, that it was the sovereign master of the nations. Would not absolute truth and right consist in the pope being both pontiff and ruler of the world, reigning over both the souls and the bodies of all men, even like the Deity whose vicar he is? This, the highest and mightiest of all ambitions, one, too, that is perfectly logical, was attained by Augustus, emperor and pontiff, master of all the known world; and it is the glorious figure of Augustus, ever rising anew from among the ruins of ancient Rome, which has always haunted the popes; it is his blood which has pulsated in their veins.

But power had become divided into two parts amidst the crumbling of the Roman empire; it was necessary to content oneself with a share, and leave temporal government to the emperor, retaining over him, however, the right of coronation by divine grant. The people belonged to God, and in God's name the pope gave the people to the emperor, and could take it from him; an unlimited power whose most terrible weapon was excommunication, a superior sovereignty, which carried the papacy towards real and final possession of the empire. Looking at things broadly, the everlasting quarrel between the pope and the emperor was a quarrel for the people, the inert mass of humble and suffering ones, the great silent multitude whose irremediable wretchedness was only revealed by occasional covert growls. It was disposed of, for its good, as one might dispose of a child. Yet the Church really contributed to civilisation, rendered constant services to humanity, diffused abundant alms. In the convents, at any rate, the old dream of the Christian community was ever coming back: one-third of the wealth accumulated for the purposes of worship, the adornment and glorification of the shrine, one-third for the priests, and one-third for the poor. Was not this a simplification of life, a means of rendering existence possible to the faithful who had no earthly desires, pending the marvellous contentment of heavenly life? Give us, then, the whole earth, and we will divide terrestrial wealth into three such parts, and you shall see what a golden age will reign amidst the resignation and the obedience of all!

However, Pierre went on to show how the papacy was assailed by the greatest dangers on emerging from its all-powerfulness of the middle ages. It was almost swept away amidst the luxury and excesses of the Renascence, the bubbling of living sap which then gushed from eternal nature, downtrodden and regarded as dead for ages past. More threatening still were the stealthy awakenings of the people, of the great silent multitude whose tongue seemed to be loosening. The Reformation burst forth like the protest of reason and justice, like a recall to the disregarded truths of the Gospel; and to escape total annihilation Rome needed the stern defence of the Inquisition, the slow stubborn labour of the Council of Trent, which strengthened the dogmas and ensured the temporal power. And then the papacy entered into two centuries of peace and effacement, for the strong absolute monarchies which had divided Europe among themselves could do without it, and had ceased to tremble at the harmless thunderbolts of excommunication or to look on the pope as aught but a master of ceremonies, controlling certain rites. The possession of the people was no longer subject to the same rules. Allowing that the kings still held the people from God, it was the pope's duty to register the donation once for all, without ever intervening, whatever the circumstances, in the government of states. Never was Rome farther away from the realisation of its ancient dream of universal dominion. And when the French Revolution burst forth, it may well have been imagined that the proclamation of the rights of man would kill that papacy to which the exercise of divine right over the nations had been committed. And so how great at first was the anxiety, the anger, the desperate resistance with which the Vatican opposed the idea of freedom, the new credo of liberated reason, of humanity regaining self-possession and control. It was the apparent denouement of the long struggle between the pope and the emperor for possession of the people: the emperor vanished, and the people, henceforward free to dispose of itself, claimed to escape from the pope—an unforeseen solution, in which it seemed as though all the ancient scaffolding of the Catholic world must fall to the very ground.

At this point Pierre concluded the first part of his book by contrasting primitive Christianity with present-day Catholicism, which is the triumph of the rich and the powerful. That Roman society which Jesus had come to destroy in the name of the poor and humble, had not Catholic Rome steadily continued rebuilding it through all the centuries, by its policy of cupidity and pride? And what bitter irony it was to find, after eighteen hundred years of the Gospel, that the world was again collapsing through frantic speculation, rotten banks, financial disasters, and the frightful injustice of a few men gorged with wealth whilst thousands of their brothers were dying of hunger! The whole redemption of the wretched had to be worked afresh. However, Pierre gave expression to all these terrible things in words so softened by charity, so steeped in hope, that they lost their revolutionary danger. Moreover, he nowhere attacked the dogmas. His book, in its sentimental, somewhat poetic form, was but the cry of an apostle glowing with love for his fellow-men.

Then came the second part of the work, the PRESENT, a study of Catholic society as it now exists. Here Pierre had painted a frightful picture of the misery of the poor, the misery of a great city, which he knew so well and bled for, through having laid his hands upon its poisonous wounds. The present-day injustice could no longer be tolerated, charity was becoming powerless, and so frightful was the suffering that all hope was dying away from the hearts of the people. And was it not the monstrous spectacle presented by Christendom, whose abominations corrupted the people, and maddened it with hatred and vengeance, that had largely destroyed its faith? However, after this picture of rotting and crumbling society, Pierre returned to history, to the period of the French Revolution, to the mighty hope with which the idea of freedom had filled the world. The middle classes, the great Liberal party, on attaining power had undertaken to bring happiness to one and all. But after a century's experience it really seemed that liberty had failed to bring any happiness whatever to the outcasts. In the political sphere illusions were departing. At all events, if the reigning third estate declares itself satisfied, the fourth estate, that of the toilers,* still suffers and continues to demand its share of fortune. The working classes have been proclaimed free; political equality has been granted them, but the gift has been valueless, for economically they are still bound to servitude, and only enjoy, as they did formerly, the liberty of dying of hunger. All the socialist revendications have come from that; between labour and capital rests the terrifying problem, the solution of which threatens to sweep away society. When slavery disappeared from the olden world to be succeeded by salaried employment the revolution was immense, and certainly the Christian principle was one of the great factors in the destruction of slavery. Nowadays, therefore, when the question is to replace salaried employment by something else, possibly by the participation of the workman in the profits of his work, why should not Christianity again seek a new principle of action? The fatal and proximate accession of the democracy means the beginning of another phase in human history, the creation of the society of to-morrow. And Rome cannot keep away from the arena; the papacy must take part in the quarrel if it does not desire to disappear from the world like a piece of mechanism that has become altogether useless.

* In England we call the press the fourth estate, but in France
and elsewhere the term is applied to the working classes, and
in that sense must be taken here.—Trans.

Hence it followed that Catholic socialism was legitimate. On every side the socialist sects were battling with their various solutions for the privilege of ensuring the happiness of the people, and the Church also must offer her solution of the problem. Here it was that New Rome appeared, that the evolution spread into a renewal of boundless hope. Most certainly there was nothing contrary to democracy in the principles of the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed she had only to return to the evangelical traditions, to become once more the Church of the humble and the poor, to re-establish the universal Christian community. She is undoubtedly of democratic essence, and if she sided with the rich and the powerful when Christianity became Catholicism, she only did so perforce, that she might live by sacrificing some portion of her original purity; so that if to-day she should abandon the condemned governing classes in order to make common cause with the multitude of the wretched, she would simply be drawing nearer to Christ, thereby securing a new lease of youth and purifying herself of all the political compromises which she formerly was compelled to accept. Without renouncing aught of her absolutism the Church has at all times known how to bow to circumstances; but she reserves her perfect sovereignty, simply tolerating that which she cannot prevent, and patiently waiting, even through long centuries, for the time when she shall again become the mistress of the world.

Might not that time come in the crisis which was now at hand? Once more, all the powers are battling for possession of the people. Since the people, thanks to liberty and education, has become strong, since it has developed consciousness and will, and claimed its share of fortune, all rulers have been seeking to attach it to themselves, to reign by it, and even with it, should that be necessary. Socialism, therein lies the future, the new instrument of government; and the kings tottering on their thrones, the middle-class presidents of anxious republics, the ambitious plotters who dream of power, all dabble in socialism! They all agree that the capitalist organisation of the State is a return to pagan times, to the olden slave-market; and they all talk of breaking for ever the iron law by which the labour of human beings has become so much merchandise, subject to supply and demand, with wages calculated on an estimate of what is strictly necessary to keep a workman from dying of hunger. And, down in the sphere below, the evil increases, the workmen agonise with hunger and exasperation, while above them discussion still goes on, systems are bandied about, and well-meaning persons exhaust themselves in attempting to apply ridiculously inadequate remedies. There is much stir without any progress, all the wild bewilderment which precedes great catastrophes. And among the many, Catholic socialism, quite as ardent as Revolutionary socialism, enters the lists and strives to conquer.

After these explanations Pierre gave an account of the long efforts made by Catholic socialism throughout the Christian world. That which particularly struck one in this connection was that the warfare became keener and more victorious whenever it was waged in some land of propaganda, as yet not completely conquered by Roman Catholicism. For instance, in the countries where Protestantism confronted the latter, the priests fought with wondrous passion, as for dear life itself, contending with the schismatical clergy for possession of the people by dint of daring, by unfolding the most audacious democratic theories. In Germany, the classic land of socialism, Mgr. Ketteler was one of the first to speak of adequately taxing the rich; and later he fomented a wide-spread agitation which the clergy now directs by means of numerous associations and newspapers. In Switzerland Mgr. Mermillod pleaded the cause of the poor so loudly that the bishops there now almost make common cause with the democratic socialists, whom they doubtless hope to convert when the day for sharing arrives. In England, where socialism penetrates so very slowly, Cardinal Manning achieved considerable success, stood by the working classes on the occasion of a famous strike, and helped on a popular movement, which was signalised by numerous conversions. But it was particularly in the United States of America that Catholic socialism proved triumphant, in a sphere of democracy where the bishops, like Mgr. Ireland, were forced to set themselves at the head of the working-class agitation. And there across the Atlantic a new Church seems to be germinating, still in confusion but overflowing with sap, and upheld by intense hope, as at the aurora of the rejuvenated Christianity of to-morrow.

Passing thence to Austria and Belgium, both Catholic countries, one found Catholic socialism mingling in the first instance with anti-semitism, while in the second it had no precise sense. And all movement ceased and disappeared when one came to Spain and Italy, those old lands of faith. The former with its intractable bishops who contented themselves with hurling excommunication at unbelievers as in the days of the Inquisition, seemed to be abandoned to the violent theories of revolutionaries, whilst Italy, immobilised in the traditional courses, remained without possibility of initiative, reduced to silence and respect by the presence of the Holy See. In France, however, the struggle remained keen, but it was more particularly a struggle of ideas. On the whole, the war was there being waged against the revolution, and to some it seemed as though it would suffice to re-establish the old organisation of monarchical times in order to revert to the golden age. It was thus that the question of working-class corporations had become the one problem, the panacea for all the ills of the toilers. But people were far from agreeing; some, those Catholics who rejected State interference and favoured purely moral action, desired that the corporations should be free; whilst others, the young and impatient ones, bent on action, demanded that they should be obligatory, each with capital of its own, and recognised and protected by the State.

Viscount Philibert de la Choue had by pen and speech carried on a vigorous campaign in favour of the obligatory corporations; and his great grief was that he had so far failed to prevail on the Pope to say whether in his opinion these corporations should be closed or open. According to the Viscount, herein lay the fate of society, a peaceful solution of the social question or the frightful catastrophe which must sweep everything away. In reality, though he refused to own it, the Viscount had ended by adopting State socialism. And, despite the lack of agreement, the agitation remained very great; attempts, scarcely happy in their results, were made; co-operative associations, companies for erecting workmen's dwellings, popular savings' banks were started; many more or less disguised efforts to revert to the old Christian community organisation were tried; while day by day, amidst the prevailing confusion, in the mental perturbation and political difficulties through which the country passed, the militant Catholic party felt its hopes increasing, even to the blind conviction of soon resuming sway over the whole world.

The second part of Pierre's book concluded by a picture of the moral and intellectual uneasiness amidst which the end of the century is struggling. While the toiling multitude suffers from its hard lot and demands that in any fresh division of wealth it shall be ensured at least its daily bread, the elite is no better satisfied, but complains of the void induced by the freeing of its reason and the enlargement of its intelligence. It is the famous bankruptcy of rationalism, of positivism, of science itself which is in question. Minds consumed by need of the absolute grow weary of groping, weary of the delays of science which recognises only proven truths; doubt tortures them, they need a complete and immediate synthesis in order to sleep in peace; and they fall on their knees, overcome by the roadside, distracted by the thought that science will never tell them all, and preferring the Deity, the mystery revealed and affirmed by faith. Even to-day, it must be admitted, science calms neither our thirst for justice, our desire for safety, nor our everlasting idea of happiness after life in an eternity of enjoyment. To one and all it only brings the austere duty to live, to be a mere contributor in the universal toil; and how well one can understand that hearts should revolt and sigh for the Christian heaven, peopled with lovely angels, full of light and music and perfumes! Ah! to embrace one's dead, to tell oneself that one will meet them again, that one will live with them once more in glorious immortality! And to possess the certainty of sovereign equity to enable one to support the abominations of terrestrial life! And in this wise to trample on the frightful thought of annihilation, to escape the horror of the disappearance of the ego, and to tranquillise oneself with that unshakable faith which postpones until the portal of death be crossed the solution of all the problems of destiny! This dream will be dreamt by the nations for ages yet. And this it is which explains why, in these last days of the century, excessive mental labour and the deep unrest of humanity, pregnant with a new world, have awakened religious feeling, anxious, tormented by thoughts of the ideal and the infinite, demanding a moral law and an assurance of superior justice. Religions may disappear, but religious feelings will always create new ones, even with the help of science. A new religion! a new religion! Was it not the ancient Catholicism, which in the soil of the present day, where all seemed conducive to a miracle, was about to spring up afresh, throw out green branches and blossom in a young yet mighty florescence?

At last, in the third part of his book and in the glowing language of an apostle, Pierre depicted the FUTURE: Catholicism rejuvenated, and bringing health and peace, the forgotten golden age of primitive Christianity, back to expiring society. He began with an emotional and sparkling portrait of Leo XIII, the ideal Pope, the Man of Destiny entrusted with the salvation of the nations. He had conjured up a presentment of him and beheld him thus in his feverish longing for the advent of a pastor who should put an end to human misery. It was perhaps not a close likeness, but it was a portrait of the needed saviour, with open heart and mind, and inexhaustible benevolence, such as he had dreamed. At the same time he had certainly searched documents, studied encyclical letters, based his sketch upon facts: first Leo's religious education at Rome, then his brief nunciature at Brussels, and afterwards his long episcopate at Perugia. And as soon as Leo became pope in the difficult situation bequeathed by Pius IX, the duality of his nature appeared: on one hand was the firm guardian of dogmas, on the other the supple politician resolved to carry conciliation to its utmost limits. We see him flatly severing all connection with modern philosophy, stepping backward beyond the Renascence to the middle ages and reviving Christian philosophy, as expounded by "the angelic doctor," St. Thomas Aquinas, in Catholic schools. Then the dogmas being in this wise sheltered, he adroitly maintains himself in equilibrium by giving securities to every power, striving to utilise every opportunity. He displays extraordinary activity, reconciles the Holy See with Germany, draws nearer to Russia, contents Switzerland, asks the friendship of Great Britain, and writes to the Emperor of China begging him to protect the missionaries and Christians in his dominions. Later on, too, he intervenes in France and acknowledges the legitimacy of the Republic.

From the very outset an idea becomes apparent in all his actions, an idea which will place him among the great papal politicians. It is moreover the ancient idea of the papacy—the conquest of every soul, Rome capital and mistress of the world. Thus Leo XIII has but one desire, one object, that of unifying the Church, of drawing all the dissident communities to it in order that it may be invincible in the coming social struggle. He seeks to obtain recognition of the moral authority of the Vatican in Russia; he dreams of disarming the Anglican Church and of drawing it into a sort of fraternal truce; and he particularly seeks to come to an understanding with the Schismatical Churches of the East, which he regards as sisters, simply living apart, whose return his paternal heart entreats. Would not Rome indeed dispose of victorious strength if she exercised uncontested sway over all the Christians of the earth?

And here the social ideas of Leo XIII come in. Whilst yet Bishop of Perugia he wrote a pastoral letter in which a vague humanitarian socialism appeared. As soon, however, as he had assumed the triple crown his opinions changed and he anathematised the revolutionaries whose audacity was terrifying Italy. But almost at once he corrected himself, warned by events and realising the great danger of leaving socialism in the hands of the enemies of the Church. Then he listened to the bishops of the lands of propaganda, ceased to intervene in the Irish quarrel, withdrew the excommunications which he had launched against the American "knights of labour," and would not allow the bold works of Catholic socialist writers to be placed in the Index. This evolution towards democracy may be traced through his most famous encyclical letters: Immortale Dei, on the constitution of States; Libertas, on human liberty; Sapientoe, on the duties of Christian citizens; Rerum novarum, on the condition of the working classes; and it is particularly this last which would seem to have rejuvenated the Church. The Pope herein chronicles the undeserved misery of the toilers, the undue length of the hours of labour, the insufficiency of salaries. All men have the right to live, and all contracts extorted by threats of starvation are unjust. Elsewhere he declares that the workman must not be left defenceless in presence of a system which converts the misery of the majority into the wealth of a few. Compelled to deal vaguely with questions of organisation, he contents himself with encouraging the corporative movement, placing it under State patronage; and after thus contributing to restore the secular power, he reinstates the Deity on the throne of sovereignty, and discerns the path to salvation more particularly in moral measures, in the ancient respect due to family ties and ownership. Nevertheless, was not the helpful hand which the august Vicar of Christ thus publicly tendered to the poor and the humble, the certain token of a new alliance, the announcement of a new reign of Jesus upon earth? Thenceforward the people knew that it was not abandoned. And from that moment too how glorious became Leo XIII, whose sacerdotal jubilee and episcopal jubilee were celebrated by all Christendom amidst the coming of a vast multitude, of endless offerings, and of flattering letters from every sovereign!

Pierre next dealt with the question of the temporal power, and this he thought he might treat freely. Naturally, he was not ignorant of the fact that the Pope in his quarrel with Italy upheld the rights of the Church over Rome as stubbornly as his predecessor; but he imagined that this was merely a necessary conventional attitude, imposed by political considerations, and destined to be abandoned when the times were ripe. For his own part he was convinced that if the Pope had never appeared greater than he did now, it was to the loss of the temporal power that he owed it; for thence had come the great increase of his authority, the pure splendour of moral omnipotence which he diffused.

What a long history of blunders and conflicts had been that of the possession of the little kingdom of Rome during fifteen centuries! Constantine quits Rome in the fourth century, only a few forgotten functionaries remaining on the deserted Palatine, and the Pope naturally rises to power, and the life of the city passes to the Lateran. However, it is only four centuries later that Charlemagne recognises accomplished facts and formally bestows the States of the Church upon the papacy. From that time warfare between the spiritual power and the temporal powers has never ceased; though often latent it has at times become acute, breaking forth with blood and fire. And to-day, in the midst of Europe in arms, is it not unreasonable to dream of the papacy ruling a strip of territory where it would be exposed to every vexation, and where it could only maintain itself by the help of a foreign army? What would become of it in the general massacre which is apprehended? Is it not far more sheltered, far more dignified, far more lofty when disentangled from all terrestrial cares, reigning over the world of souls?

In the early times of the Church the papacy from being merely local, merely Roman, gradually became catholicised, universalised, slowly acquiring dominion over all Christendom. In the same way the Sacred College, at first a continuation of the Roman Senate, acquired an international character, and in our time has ended by becoming the most cosmopolitan of assemblies, in which representatives of all the nations have seats. And is it not evident that the Pope, thus leaning on the cardinals, has become the one great international power which exercises the greater authority since it is free from all monarchical interests, and can speak not merely in the name of country but in that of humanity itself? The solution so often sought amidst such long wars surely lies in this: Either give the Pope the temporal sovereignty of the world, or leave him only the spiritual sovereignty. Vicar of the Deity, absolute and infallible sovereign by divine delegation, he can but remain in the sanctuary if, ruler already of the human soul, he is not recognised by every nation as the one master of the body also—the king of kings.

But what a strange affair was this new incursion of the papacy into the field sown by the French Revolution, an incursion conducting it perhaps towards the domination, which it has striven for with a will that has upheld it for centuries! For now it stands alone before the people. The kings are down. And as the people is henceforth free to give itself to whomsoever it pleases, why should it not give itself to the Church? The depreciation which the idea of liberty has certainly undergone renders every hope permissible. The liberal party appears to be vanquished in the sphere of economics. The toilers, dissatisfied with 1789 complain of the aggravation of their misery, bestir themselves, seek happiness despairingly. On the other hand the new regimes have increased the international power of the Church; Catholic members are numerous in the parliaments of the republics and the constitutional monarchies. All circumstances seem therefore to favour this extraordinary return of fortune, Catholicism reverting to the vigour of youth in its old age. Even science, remember, is accused of bankruptcy, a charge which saves the Syllabus from ridicule, troubles the minds of men, and throws the limitless sphere of mystery and impossibility open once more. And then a prophecy is recalled, a prediction that the papacy shall be mistress of the world on the day when she marches at the head of the democracy after reuniting the Schismatical Churches of the East to the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church. And, in Pierre's opinion, assuredly the times had come since Pope Leo XIII, dismissing the great and the wealthy of the world, left the kings driven from their thrones in exile to place himself like Jesus on the side of the foodless toilers and the beggars of the high roads. Yet a few more years, perhaps, of frightful misery, alarming confusion, fearful social danger, and the people, the great silent multitude which others have so far disposed of, will return to the cradle, to the unified Church of Rome, in order to escape the destruction which threatens human society.

Pierre concluded his book with a passionate evocation of New Rome, the spiritual Rome which would soon reign over the nations, reconciled and fraternising as in another golden age. Herein he even saw the end of superstitions. Without making a direct attack on dogma, he allowed himself to dream of an enlargement of religious feeling, freed from rites, and absorbed in the one satisfaction of human charity. And still smarting from his journey to Lourdes, he felt the need of contenting his heart. Was not that gross superstition of Lourdes the hateful symptom of the excessive suffering of the times? On the day when the Gospel should be universally diffused and practised, suffering ones would cease seeking an illusory relief so far away, assured as they would be of finding assistance, consolation, and cure in their homes amidst their brothers. At Lourdes there was an iniquitous displacement of wealth, a spectacle so frightful as to make one doubt of God, a perpetual conflict which would disappear in the truly Christian society of to-morrow. Ah! that society, that Christian community, all Pierre's work ended in an ardent longing for its speedy advent: Christianity becoming once more the religion of truth and justice which it had been before it allowed itself to be conquered by the rich and the powerful! The little ones and the poor ones reigning, sharing the wealth of earth, and owing obedience to nought but the levelling law of work! The Pope alone erect at the head of the federation of nations, prince of peace, with the simple mission of supplying the moral rule, the link of charity and love which was to unite all men! And would not this be the speedy realisation of the promises of Christ? The times were near accomplishment, secular and religious society would mingle so closely that they would form but one; and it would be the age of triumph and happiness predicted by all the prophets, no more struggles possible, no more antagonism between the mind and the body, but a marvellous equilibrium which would kill evil and set the kingdom of heaven upon earth. New Rome, the centre of the world, bestowing on the world the new religion!

Pierre felt that tears were coming to his eyes, and with an unconscious movement, never noticing how much he astonished the slim Englishmen and thick-set Germans passing along the terrace, he opened his arms and extended them towards the real Rome, steeped in such lovely sunshine and stretched out at his feet. Would she prove responsive to his dream? Would he, as he had written, find within her the remedy for our impatience and our alarms? Could Catholicism be renewed, could it return to the spirit of primitive Christianity, become the religion of the democracy, the faith which the modern world, overturned and in danger of perishing, awaits in order to be pacified and to live?

Pierre was full of generous passion, full of faith. He again beheld good Abbe Rose weeping with emotion as he read his book. He heard Viscount Philibert de la Choue telling him that such a book was worth an army. And he particularly felt strong in the approval of Cardinal Bergerot, that apostle of inexhaustible charity. Why should the Congregation of the Index threaten his work with interdiction? Since he had been officiously advised to go to Rome if he desired to defend himself, he had been turning this question over in his mind without being able to discover which of his pages were attacked. To him indeed they all seemed to glow with the purest Christianity. However, he had arrived quivering with enthusiasm and courage: he was all eagerness to kneel before the Pope, and place himself under his august protection, assuring him that he had not written a line without taking inspiration from his ideas, without desiring the triumph of his policy. Was it possible that condemnation should be passed on a book in which he imagined in all sincerity that he had exalted Leo XIII by striving to help him in his work of Christian reunion and universal peace?

For a moment longer Pierre remained standing before the parapet. He had been there for nearly an hour, unable to drink in enough of the grandeur of Rome, which, given all the unknown things she hid from him, he would have liked to possess at once. Oh! to seize hold of her, know her, ascertain at once the true word which he had come to seek from her! This again, like Lourdes, was an experiment, but a graver one, a decisive one, whence he would emerge either strengthened or overcome for evermore. He no longer sought the simple, perfect faith of the little child, but the superior faith of the intellectual man, raising himself above rites and symbols, working for the greatest happiness of humanity as based on its need of certainty. His temples throbbed responsive to his heart. What would be the answer of Rome?

The sunlight had increased and the higher districts now stood out more vigorously against the fiery background. Far away the hills became gilded and empurpled, whilst the nearer house-fronts grew very distinct and bright with their thousands of windows sharply outlined. However, some morning haze still hovered around; light veils seemed to rise from the lower streets, blurring the summits for a moment, and then evaporating in the ardent heavens where all was blue. For a moment Pierre fancied that the Palatine had vanished, for he could scarcely see the dark fringe of cypresses; it was as though the dust of its ruins concealed the hill. But the Quirinal was even more obscured; the royal palace seemed to have faded away in a fog, so paltry did it look with its low flat front, so vague in the distance that he no longer distinguished it; whereas above the trees on his left the dome of St. Peter's had grown yet larger in the limpid gold of the sunshine, and appeared to occupy the whole sky and dominate the whole city!

Ah! the Rome of that first meeting, the Rome of early morning, whose new districts he had not even noticed in the burning fever of his arrival—with what boundless hopes did she not inspirit him, this Rome which he believed he should find alive, such indeed as he had dreamed! And whilst he stood there in his thin black cassock, thus gazing on her that lovely day, what a shout of coming redemption seemed to arise from her house-roofs, what a promise of universal peace seemed to issue from that sacred soil, twice already Queen of the world! It was the third Rome, it was New Rome whose maternal love was travelling across the frontiers to all the nations to console them and reunite them in a common embrace. In the passionate candour of his dream he beheld her, he heard her, rejuvenated, full of the gentleness of childhood, soaring, as it were, amidst the morning freshness into the vast pure heavens.

But at last Pierre tore himself away from the sublime spectacle. The driver and the horse, their heads drooping under the broad sunlight, had not stirred. On the seat the valise was almost burning, hot with rays of the sun which was already heavy. And once more Pierre got into the vehicle and gave this address:

"Via Giulia, Palazzo Boccanera."

II.

THE Via Giulia, which runs in a straight line over a distance of five hundred yards from the Farnese palace to the church of St. John of the Florentines, was at that hour steeped in bright sunlight, the glow streaming from end to end and whitening the small square paving stones. The street had no footways, and the cab rolled along it almost to the farther extremity, passing the old grey sleepy and deserted residences whose large windows were barred with iron, while their deep porches revealed sombre courts resembling wells. Laid out by Pope Julius II, who had dreamt of lining it with magnificent palaces, the street, then the most regular and handsome in Rome, had served as Corso* in the sixteenth century. One could tell that one was in a former luxurious district, which had lapsed into silence, solitude, and abandonment, instinct with a kind of religious gentleness and discretion. The old house-fronts followed one after another, their shutters closed and their gratings occasionally decked with climbing plants. At some doors cats were seated, and dim shops, appropriated to humble trades, were installed in certain dependencies. But little traffic was apparent. Pierre only noticed some bare-headed women dragging children behind them, a hay cart drawn by a mule, a superb monk draped in drugget, and a bicyclist speeding along noiselessly, his machine sparkling in the sun.

* The Corso was so called on account of the horse races held in
it at carnival time.—Trans.

At last the driver turned and pointed to a large square building at the corner of a lane running towards the Tiber.

"Palazzo Boccanera."

Pierre raised his head and was pained by the severe aspect of the structure, so bare and massive and blackened by age. Like its neighbours the Farnese and Sacchetti palaces, it had been built by Antonio da Sangallo in the early part of the sixteenth century, and, as with the former of those residences, the tradition ran that in raising the pile the architect had made use of stones pilfered from the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus. The vast, square-looking facade had three upper stories, each with seven windows, and the first one very lofty and noble. Down below, the only sign of decoration was that the high ground-floor windows, barred with huge projecting gratings as though from fear of siege, rested upon large consoles, and were crowned by attics which smaller consoles supported. Above the monumental entrance, with folding doors of bronze, there was a balcony in front of the central first-floor window. And at the summit of the facade against the sky appeared a sumptuous entablature, whose frieze displayed admirable grace and purity of ornamentation. The frieze, the consoles, the attics, and the door-case were of white marble, but marble whose surface had so crumbled and so darkened that it now had the rough yellowish grain of stone. Right and left of the entrance were two antique seats upheld by griffons also of marble; and incrusted in the wall at one corner, a lovely Renascence fountain, its source dried up, still lingered; and on it a cupid riding a dolphin could with difficulty be distinguished, to such a degree had the wear and tear of time eaten into the sculpture.

Pierre's eyes, however, had been more particularly attracted by an escutcheon carved above one of the ground-floor windows, the escutcheon of the Boccaneras, a winged dragon venting flames, and underneath it he could plainly read the motto which had remained intact: "Bocca nera, Alma rossa" (black mouth, red soul). Above another window, as a pendant to the escutcheon, there was one of those little shrines which are still common in Rome, a satin-robed statuette of the Blessed Virgin, before which a lantern burnt in the full daylight.

The cabman was about to drive through the dim and gaping porch, according to custom, when the young priest, overcome by timidity, stopped him. "No, no," he said; "don't go in, it's useless."

Then he alighted from the vehicle, paid the man, and, valise in hand, found himself first under the vaulted roof, and then in the central court without having met a living soul.

It was a square and fairly spacious court, surrounded by a porticus like a cloister. Some remnants of statuary, marbles discovered in excavating, an armless Apollo, and the trunk of a Venus, were ranged against the walls under the dismal arcades; and some fine grass had sprouted between the pebbles which paved the soil as with a black and white mosaic. It seemed as if the sun-rays could never reach that paving, mouldy with damp. A dimness and a silence instinct with departed grandeur and infinite mournfulness reigned there.

Surprised by the emptiness of this silent mansion, Pierre continued seeking somebody, a porter, a servant; and, fancying that he saw a shadow flit by, he decided to pass through another arch which led to a little garden fringing the Tiber. On this side the facade of the building was quite plain, displaying nothing beyond its three rows of symmetrically disposed windows. However, the abandonment reigning in the garden brought Pierre yet a keener pang. In the centre some large box-plants were growing in the basin of a fountain which had been filled up; while among the mass of weeds, some orange-trees with golden, ripening fruit alone indicated the tracery of the paths which they had once bordered. Between two huge laurel-bushes, against the right-hand wall, there was a sarcophagus of the second century—with fauns offering violence to nymphs, one of those wild baccanali, those scenes of eager passion which Rome in its decline was wont to depict on the tombs of its dead; and this marble sarcophagus, crumbling with age and green with moisture, served as a tank into which a streamlet of water fell from a large tragic mask incrusted in the wall. Facing the Tiber there had formerly been a sort of colonnaded loggia, a terrace whence a double flight of steps descended to the river. For the construction of the new quays, however, the river bank was being raised, and the terrace was already lower than the new ground level, and stood there crumbling and useless amidst piles of rubbish and blocks of stone, all the wretched chalky confusion of the improvements which were ripping up and overturning the district.

Pierre, however, was suddenly convinced that he could see somebody crossing the court. So he returned thither and found a woman somewhat short of stature, who must have been nearly fifty, though as yet she had not a white hair, but looked very bright and active. At sight of the priest, however, an expression of distrust passed over her round face and clear eyes.

Employing the few words of broken Italian which he knew, Pierre at once sought to explain matters: "I am Abbe Pierre Froment, madame—" he began.

However, she did not let him continue, but exclaimed in fluent French, with the somewhat thick and lingering accent of the province of the Ile-de-France: "Ah! yes, Monsieur l'Abbe, I know, I know—I was expecting you, I received orders about you." And then, as he gazed at her in amazement, she added: "Oh! I'm a Frenchwoman! I've been here for five and twenty years, but I haven't yet been able to get used to their horrible lingo!"

Pierre thereupon remembered that Viscount Philibert de la Choue had spoken to him of this servant, one Victorine Bosquet, a native of Auneau in La Beauce, who, when two and twenty, had gone to Rome with a consumptive mistress. The latter's sudden death had left her in as much terror and bewilderment as if she had been alone in some land of savages; and so she had gratefully devoted herself to the Countess Ernesta Brandini, a Boccanera by birth, who had, so to say, picked her up in the streets. The Countess had at first employed her as a nurse to her daughter Benedetta, hoping in this way to teach the child some French; and Victorine—remaining for some five and twenty years with the same family—had by degrees raised herself to the position of housekeeper, whilst still remaining virtually illiterate, so destitute indeed of any linguistic gift that she could only jabber a little broken Italian, just sufficient for her needs in her intercourse with the other servants.

"And is Monsieur le Vicomte quite well?" she resumed with frank familiarity. "He is so very pleasant, and we are always so pleased to see him. He stays here, you know, each time he comes to Rome. I know that the Princess and the Contessina received a letter from him yesterday announcing you."

It was indeed Viscount Philibert de la Choue who had made all the arrangements for Pierre's sojourn in Rome. Of the ancient and once vigorous race of the Boccaneras, there now only remained Cardinal Pio Boccanera, the Princess his sister, an old maid who from respect was called "Donna" Serafina, their niece Benedetta—whose mother Ernesta had followed her husband, Count Brandini, to the tomb—and finally their nephew, Prince Dario Boccanera, whose father, Prince Onofrio, was likewise dead, and whose mother, a Montefiori, had married again. It so chanced that the Viscount de la Choue was connected with the family, his younger brother having married a Brandini, sister to Benedetta's father; and thus, with the courtesy rank of uncle, he had, in Count Brandini's time, frequently sojourned at the mansion in the Via Giulia. He had also become attached to Benedetta, especially since the advent of a private family drama, consequent upon an unhappy marriage which the young woman had contracted, and which she had petitioned the Holy Father to annul. Since Benedetta had left her husband to live with her aunt Serafina and her uncle the Cardinal, M. de la Choue had often written to her and sent her parcels of French books. Among others he had forwarded her a copy of Pierre's book, and the whole affair had originated in that wise. Several letters on the subject had been exchanged when at last Benedetta sent word that the work had been denounced to the Congregation of the Index, and that it was advisable the author should at once repair to Rome, where she graciously offered him the hospitality of the Boccanera mansion.

The Viscount was quite as much astonished as the young priest at these tidings, and failed to understand why the book should be threatened at all; however, he prevailed on Pierre to make the journey as a matter of good policy, becoming himself impassioned for the achievement of a victory which he counted in anticipation as his own. And so it was easy to understand the bewildered condition of Pierre, on tumbling into this unknown mansion, launched into an heroic adventure, the reasons and circumstances of which were beyond him.

Victorine, however, suddenly resumed: "But I am leaving you here, Monsieur l'Abbe. Let me conduct you to your rooms. Where is your luggage?"

Then, when he had shown her his valise which he had placed on the ground beside him, and explained that having no more than a fortnight's stay in view he had contented himself with bringing a second cassock and some linen, she seemed very much surprised.

"A fortnight! You only expect to remain here a fortnight? Well, well, you'll see."

And then summoning a big devil of a lackey who had ended by making his appearance, she said: "Take that up into the red room, Giacomo. Will you kindly follow me, Monsieur l'Abbe?"

Pierre felt quite comforted and inspirited by thus unexpectedly meeting such a lively, good-natured compatriot in this gloomy Roman "palace." Whilst crossing the court he listened to her as she related that the Princess had gone out, and that the Contessina—as Benedetta from motives of affection was still called in the house, despite her marriage—had not yet shown herself that morning, being rather poorly. However, added Victorine, she had her orders.

The staircase was in one corner of the court, under the porticus. It was a monumental staircase with broad, low steps, the incline being so gentle that a horse might easily have climbed it. The stone walls, however, were quite bare, the landings empty and solemn, and a death-like mournfulness fell from the lofty vault above.

As they reached the first floor, noticing Pierre's emotion, Victorine smiled. The mansion seemed to be uninhabited; not a sound came from its closed chambers. Simply pointing to a large oaken door on the right-hand, the housekeeper remarked: "The wing overlooking the court and the river is occupied by his Eminence. But he doesn't use a quarter of the rooms. All the reception-rooms on the side of the street have been shut. How could one keep up such a big place, and what, too, would be the use of it? We should need somebody to lodge."

With her lithe step she continued ascending the stairs. She had remained essentially a foreigner, a Frenchwoman, too different from those among whom she lived to be influenced by her environment. On reaching the second floor she resumed: "There, on the left, are Donna Serafina's rooms; those of the Contessina are on the right. This is the only part of the house where there's a little warmth and life. Besides, it's Monday to-day, the Princess will be receiving visitors this evening. You'll see."

Then, opening a door, beyond which was a second and very narrow staircase, she went on: "We others have our rooms on the third floor. I must ask Monsieur l'Abbe to let me go up before him."

The grand staircase ceased at the second floor, and Victorine explained that the third story was reached exclusively by this servants' staircase, which led from the lane running down to the Tiber on one side of the mansion. There was a small private entrance in this lane, which was very convenient.

At last, reaching the third story, she hurried along a passage, again calling Pierre's attention to various doors. "These are the apartments of Don Vigilio, his Eminence's secretary. These are mine. And these will be yours. Monsieur le Vicomte will never have any other rooms when he comes to spend a few days in Rome. He says that he enjoys more liberty up here, as he can come in and go out as he pleases. I gave him a key to the door in the lane, and I'll give you one too. And, besides, you'll see what a nice view there is from here!"

Whilst speaking she had gone in. The apartments comprised two rooms: a somewhat spacious salon, with wall-paper of a large scroll pattern on a red ground, and a bed-chamber, where the paper was of a flax grey, studded with faded blue flowers. The sitting-room was in one corner of the mansion overlooking the lane and the Tiber, and Victorine at once went to the windows, one of which afforded a view over the distant lower part of the river, while the other faced the Trastevere and the Janiculum across the water.

"Ah! yes, it's very pleasant!" said Pierre, who had followed and stood beside her.

Giaccomo, who did not hurry, came in behind them with the valise. It was now past eleven o'clock; and seeing that the young priest looked tired, and realising that he must be hungry after such a journey, Victorine offered to have some breakfast served at once in the sitting-room. He would then have the afternoon to rest or go out, and would only meet the ladies in the evening at dinner. At the mere suggestion of resting, however, Pierre began to protest, declaring that he should certainly go out, not wishing to lose an entire afternoon. The breakfast he readily accepted, for he was indeed dying of hunger.

However, he had to wait another full half hour. Giaccomo, who served him under Victorine's orders, did everything in a most leisurely way. And Victorine, lacking confidence in the man, remained with the young priest to make sure that everything he might require was provided.

"Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "what people! What a country! You can't have an idea of it. I should never get accustomed to it even if I were to live here for a hundred years. Ah! if it were not for the Contessina, but she's so good and beautiful."

Then, whilst placing a dish of figs on the table, she astonished Pierre by adding that a city where nearly everybody was a priest could not possibly be a good city. Thereupon the presence of this gay, active, unbelieving servant in the queer old palace again scared him.

"What! you are not religious?" he exclaimed.

"No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe, the priests don't suit me," said Victorine; "I knew one in France when I was very little, and since I've been here I've seen too many of them. It's all over. Oh! I don't say that on account of his Eminence, who is a holy man worthy of all possible respect. And besides, everybody in the house knows that I've nothing to reproach myself with. So why not leave me alone, since I'm fond of my employers and attend properly to my duties?"

She burst into a frank laugh. "Ah!" she resumed, "when I was told that another priest was coming, just as if we hadn't enough already, I couldn't help growling to myself. But you look like a good young man, Monsieur l'Abbe, and I feel sure we shall get on well together.... I really don't know why I'm telling you all this—probably it's because you've come from yonder, and because the Contessina takes an interest in you. At all events, you'll excuse me, won't you, Monsieur l'Abbe? And take my advice, stay here and rest to-day; don't be so foolish as to go running about their tiring city. There's nothing very amusing to be seen in it, whatever they may say to the contrary."

When Pierre found himself alone, he suddenly felt overwhelmed by all the fatigue of his journey coupled with the fever of enthusiasm that had consumed him during the morning. And as though dazed, intoxicated by the hasty meal which he had just made—a couple of eggs and a cutlet—he flung himself upon the bed with the idea of taking half an hour's rest. He did not fall asleep immediately, but for a time thought of those Boccaneras, with whose history he was partly acquainted, and of whose life in that deserted and silent palace, instinct with such dilapidated and melancholy grandeur, he began to dream. But at last his ideas grew confused, and by degrees he sunk into sleep amidst a crowd of shadowy forms, some tragic and some sweet, with vague faces which gazed at him with enigmatical eyes as they whirled before him in the depths of dreamland.

The Boccaneras had supplied two popes to Rome, one in the thirteenth, the other in the fifteenth century, and from those two favoured ones, those all-powerful masters, the family had formerly derived its vast fortune—large estates in the vicinity of Viterbo, several palaces in Rome, enough works of art to fill numerous spacious galleries, and a pile of gold sufficient to cram a cellar. The family passed as being the most pious of the Roman patriziato, a family of burning faith whose sword had always been at the service of the Church; but if it were the most believing family it was also the most violent, the most disputatious, constantly at war, and so fiercely savage that the anger of the Boccaneras had become proverbial. And thence came their arms, the winged dragon spitting flames, and the fierce, glowing motto, with its play on the name "Bocca sera, Alma rossa" (black mouth, red soul), the mouth darkened by a roar, the soul flaming like a brazier of faith and love.

Legends of endless passion, of terrible deeds of justice and vengeance still circulated. There was the duel fought by Onfredo, the Boccanera by whom the present palazzo had been built in the sixteenth century on the site of the demolished antique residence of the family. Onfredo, learning that his wife had allowed herself to be kissed on the lips by young Count Costamagna, had caused the Count to be kidnapped one evening and brought to the palazzo bound with cords. And there in one of the large halls, before freeing him, he compelled him to confess himself to a monk. Then he severed the cords with a stiletto, threw the lamps over and extinguished them, calling to the Count to keep the stiletto and defend himself. During more than an hour, in complete obscurity, in this hall full of furniture, the two men sought one another, fled from one another, seized hold of one another, and pierced one another with their blades. And when the doors were broken down and the servants rushed in they found among the pools of blood, among the overturned tables and broken seats, Costamagna with his nose sliced off and his hips pierced with two and thirty wounds, whilst Onfredo had lost two fingers of his right hand, and had both shoulders riddled with holes! The wonder was that neither died of the encounter.

A century later, on that same bank of the Tiber, a daughter of the Boccaneras, a girl barely sixteen years of age, the lovely and passionate Cassia, filled all Rome with terror and admiration. She loved Flavio Corradini, the scion of a rival and hated house, whose alliance her father, Prince Boccanera, roughly rejected, and whom her elder brother, Ercole, swore to slay should he ever surprise him with her. Nevertheless the young man came to visit her in a boat, and she joined him by the little staircase descending to the river. But one evening Ercole, who was on the watch, sprang into the boat and planted his dagger full in Flavio's heart. Later on the subsequent incidents were unravelled; it was understood that Cassia, wrathful and frantic with despair, unwilling to survive her love and bent on wreaking justice, had thrown herself upon her brother, had seized both murderer and victim with the same grasp whilst overturning the boat; for when the three bodies were recovered Cassia still retained her hold upon the two men, pressing their faces one against the other with her bare arms, which had remained as white as snow.

But those were vanished times. Nowadays, if faith remained, blood violence seemed to be departing from the Boccaneras. Their huge fortune also had been lost in the slow decline which for a century past has been ruining the Roman patriziato. It had been necessary to sell the estates; the palace had emptied, gradually sinking to the mediocrity and bourgeois life of the new times. For their part the Boccaneras obstinately declined to contract any alien alliances, proud as they were of the purity of their Roman blood. And poverty was as nothing to them; they found contentment in their immense pride, and without a plaint sequestered themselves amidst the silence and gloom in which their race was dwindling away.

Prince Ascanio, dead since 1848, had left four children by his wife, a Corvisieri; first Pio, the Cardinal; then Serafina, who, in order to remain with her brother, had not married; and finally Ernesta and Onofrio, both of whom were deceased. As Ernesta had merely left a daughter, Benedetta, behind her, it followed that the only male heir, the only possible continuator of the family name was Onofrio's son, young Prince Dario, now some thirty years of age. Should he die without posterity, the Boccaneras, once so full of life and whose deeds had filled Roman history in papal times, must fatally disappear.

Dario and his cousin Benedetta had been drawn together by a deep, smiling, natural passion ever since childhood. They seemed born one for the other; they could not imagine that they had been brought into the world for any other purpose than that of becoming husband and wife as soon as they should be old enough to marry. When Prince Onofrio—an amiable man of forty, very popular in Rome, where he spent his modest fortune as his heart listed—espoused La Montefiori's daughter, the little Marchesa Flavia, whose superb beauty, suggestive of a youthful Juno, had maddened him, he went to reside at the Villa Montefiori, the only property, indeed the only belonging, that remained to the two ladies. It was in the direction of St'. Agnese-fuori-le-Mura,* and there were vast grounds, a perfect park in fact, planted with centenarian trees, among which the villa, a somewhat sorry building of the seventeenth century, was falling into ruins.

* St. Agnes-without-the-walls, N.E. of Rome.

Unfavourable reports were circulated about the ladies, the mother having almost lost caste since she had become a widow, and the girl having too bold a beauty, too conquering an air. Thus the marriage had not met with the approval of Serafina, who was very rigid, or of Onofrio's elder brother Pio, at that time merely a Cameriere segreto of the Holy Father and a Canon of the Vatican basilica. Only Ernesta kept up a regular intercourse with Onofrio, fond of him as she was by reason of his gaiety of disposition; and thus, later on, her favourite diversion was to go each week to the Villa Montefiori with her daughter Benedetta, there to spend the day. And what a delightful day it always proved to Benedetta and Dario, she ten years old and he fifteen, what a fraternal loving day in that vast and almost abandoned garden with its parasol pines, its giant box-plants, and its clumps of evergreen oaks, amidst which one lost oneself as in a virgin forest.

The poor stifled soul of Ernesta was a soul of pain and passion. Born with a mighty longing for life, she thirsted for the sun—for a free, happy, active existence in the full daylight. She was noted for her large limpid eyes and the charming oval of her gentle face. Extremely ignorant, like all the daughters of the Roman nobility, having learnt the little she knew in a convent of French nuns, she had grown up cloistered in the black Boccanera palace, having no knowledge of the world than by those daily drives to the Corso and the Pincio on which she accompanied her mother. Eventually, when she was five and twenty, and was already weary and desolate, she contracted the customary marriage of her caste, espousing Count Brandini, the last-born of a very noble, very numerous and poor family, who had to come and live in the Via Giulia mansion, where an entire wing of the second floor was got ready for the young couple. And nothing changed, Ernesta continued to live in the same cold gloom, in the midst of the same dead past, the weight of which, like that of a tombstone, she felt pressing more and more heavily upon her.

The marriage was, on either side, a very honourable one. Count Brandini soon passed as being the most foolish and haughty man in Rome. A strict, intolerant formalist in religious matters, he became quite triumphant when, after innumerable intrigues, secret plottings which lasted ten long years, he at last secured the appointment of grand equerry to the Holy Father. With this appointment it seemed as if all the dismal majesty of the Vatican entered his household. However, Ernesta found life still bearable in the time of Pius IX—that is until the latter part of 1870—for she might still venture to open the windows overlooking the street, receive a few lady friends otherwise than in secrecy, and accept invitations to festivities. But when the Italians had conquered Rome and the Pope declared himself a prisoner, the mansion in the Via Giulia became a sepulchre. The great doors were closed and bolted, even nailed together in token of mourning; and during ten years the inmates only went out and came in by the little staircase communicating with the lane. It was also forbidden to open the window shutters of the facade. This was the sulking, the protest of the black world, the mansion sinking into death-like immobility, complete seclusion; no more receptions, barely a few shadows, the intimates of Donna Serafina who on Monday evenings slipped in by the little door in the lane which was scarcely set ajar. And during those ten lugubrious years, overcome by secret despair, the young woman wept every night, suffered untold agony at thus being buried alive.

Ernesta had given birth to her daughter Benedetta rather late in life, when three and thirty years of age. At first the little one helped to divert her mind. But afterwards her wonted existence, like a grinding millstone, again seized hold of her, and she had to place the child in the charge of the French nuns, by whom she herself had been educated, at the convent of the Sacred Heart of La Trinita de' Monti. When Benedetta left the convent, grown up, nineteen years of age, she was able to speak and write French, knew a little arithmetic and her catechism, and possessed a few hazy notions of history. Then the life of the two women was resumed, the life of a gynoeceum, suggestive of the Orient; never an excursion with husband or father, but day after day spent in closed, secluded rooms, with nought to cheer one but the sole, everlasting, obligatory promenade, the daily drive to the Corso and the Pincio.

At home, absolute obedience was the rule; the tie of relationship possessed an authority, a strength, which made both women bow to the will of the Count, without possible thought of rebellion; and to the Count's will was added that of Donna Serafina and that of Cardinal Pio, both of whom were stern defenders of the old-time customs. Since the Pope had ceased to show himself in Rome, the post of grand equerry had left the Count considerable leisure, for the number of equipages in the pontifical stables had been very largely reduced; nevertheless, he was constant in his attendance at the Vatican, where his duties were now a mere matter of parade, and ever increased his devout zeal as a mark of protest against the usurping monarchy installed at the Quirinal. However, Benedetta had just attained her twentieth year, when one evening her father returned coughing and shivering from some ceremony at St. Peter's. A week later he died, carried off by inflammation of the lungs. And despite their mourning, the loss was secretly considered a deliverance by both women, who now felt that they were free.

Thenceforward Ernesta had but one thought, that of saving her daughter from that awful life of immurement and entombment. She herself had sorrowed too deeply: it was no longer possible for her to remount the current of existence; but she was unwilling that Benedetta should in her turn lead a life contrary to nature, in a voluntary grave. Moreover, similar lassitude and rebellion were showing themselves among other patrician families, which, after the sulking of the first years, were beginning to draw nearer to the Quirinal. Why indeed should the children, eager for action, liberty, and sunlight, perpetually keep up the quarrel of the fathers? And so, though no reconciliation could take place between the black world and the white world,* intermediate tints were already appearing, and some unexpected matrimonial alliances were contracted.

* The "blacks" are the supporters of the papacy, the "whites"
those of the King of Italy.—Trans.

Ernesta for her part was indifferent to the political question; she knew next to nothing about it; but that which she passionately desired was that her race might at last emerge from that hateful sepulchre, that black, silent Boccanera mansion, where her woman's joys had been frozen by so long a death. She had suffered very grievously in her heart, as girl, as lover, and as wife, and yielded to anger at the thought that her life should have been so spoiled, so lost through idiotic resignation. Then, too, her mind was greatly influenced by the choice of a new confessor at this period; for she had remained very religious, practising all the rites of the Church, and ever docile to the advice of her spiritual director. To free herself the more, however, she now quitted the Jesuit father whom her husband had chosen for her, and in his stead took Abbe Pisoni, the rector of the little church of Sta. Brigida, on the Piazza Farnese, close by. He was a man of fifty, very gentle, and very good-hearted, of a benevolence seldom found in the Roman world; and archaeology, a passion for the old stones of the past, had made him an ardent patriot. Humble though his position was, folks whispered that he had on several occasions served as an intermediary in delicate matters between the Vatican and the Quirinal. And, becoming confessor not only of Ernesta but of Benedetta also, he was fond of discoursing to them about the grandeur of Italian unity, the triumphant sway that Italy would exercise when the Pope and the King should agree together.

Meantime Benedetta and Dario loved as on the first day, patiently, with the strong tranquil love of those who know that they belong to one another. But it happened that Ernesta threw herself between them and stubbornly opposed their marriage. No, no! her daughter must not espouse that Dario, that cousin, the last of the name, who in his turn would immure his wife in the black sepulchre of the Boccanera palace! Their union would be a prolongation of entombment, an aggravation of ruin, a repetition of the haughty wretchedness of the past, of the everlasting peevish sulking which depressed and benumbed one! She was well acquainted with the young man's character; she knew that he was egotistical and weak, incapable of thinking and acting, predestined to bury his race with a smile on his lips, to let the last remnant of the house crumble about his head without attempting the slightest effort to found a new family. And that which she desired was fortune in another guise, a new birth for her daughter with wealth and the florescence of life amid the victors and powerful ones of to-morrow.

From that moment the mother did not cease her stubborn efforts to ensure her daughter's happiness despite herself. She told her of her tears, entreated her not to renew her own deplorable career. Yet she would have failed, such was the calm determination of the girl who had for ever given her heart, if certain circumstances had not brought her into connection with such a son-in-law as she dreamt of. At that very Villa Montefiori where Benedetta and Dario had plighted their troth, she met Count Prada, son of Orlando, one of the heroes of the reunion of Italy. Arriving in Rome from Milan, with his father, when eighteen years of age, at the time of the occupation of the city by the Italian Government, Prada had first entered the Ministry of Finances as a mere clerk, whilst the old warrior, his sire, created a senator, lived scantily on a petty income, the last remnant of a fortune spent in his country's service. The fine war-like madness of the former comrade of Garibaldi had, however, in the son turned into a fierce appetite for booty, so that the young man became one of the real conquerors of Rome, one of those birds of prey that dismembered and devoured the city. Engaged in vast speculations on land, already wealthy according to popular report, he had—at the time of meeting Ernesta—just become intimate with Prince Onofrio, whose head he had turned by suggesting to him the idea of selling the far-spreading grounds of the Villa Montefiori for the erection of a new suburban district on the site. Others averred that he was the lover of the princess, the beautiful Flavia, who, although nine years his senior, was still superb. And, truth to tell, he was certainly a man of violent desires, with an eagerness to rush on the spoils of conquest which rendered him utterly unscrupulous with regard either to the wealth or to the wives of others.

From the first day that he beheld Benedetta he desired her. But she, at any rate, could only become his by marriage. And he did not for a moment hesitate, but broke off all connection with Flavia, eager as he was for the pure virgin beauty, the patrician youth of the other. When he realised that Ernesta, the mother, favoured him, he asked her daughter's hand, feeling certain of success. And the surprise was great, for he was some fifteen years older than the girl. However, he was a count, he bore a name which was already historical, he was piling up millions, he was regarded with favour at the Quirinal, and none could tell to what heights he might not attain. All Rome became impassioned.

Never afterwards was Benedetta able to explain to herself how it happened that she had eventually consented. Six months sooner, six months later, such a marriage would certainly have been impossible, given the fearful scandal which it raised in the black world. A Boccanera, the last maiden of that antique papal race, given to a Prada, to one of the despoilers of the Church! Was it credible? In order that the wild project might prove successful it had been necessary that it should be formed at a particular brief moment—a moment when a supreme effort was being made to conciliate the Vatican and the Quirinal. A report circulated that an agreement was on the point of being arrived at, that the King consented to recognise the Pope's absolute sovereignty over the Leonine City,* and a narrow band of territory extending to the sea. And if such were the case would not the marriage of Benedetta and Prada become, so to say, a symbol of union, of national reconciliation? That lovely girl, the pure lily of the black world, was she not the acquiescent sacrifice, the pledge granted to the whites?

* The Vatican suburb of Rome, called the Civitas Leonina,
because Leo IV, to protect it from the Saracens and Arabs,
enclosed it with walls in the ninth century.—Trans.

For a fortnight nothing else was talked of; people discussed the question, allowed their emotion rein, indulged in all sorts of hopes. The girl, for her part, did not enter into the political reasons, but simply listened to her heart, which she could not bestow since it was hers no more. From morn till night, however, she had to encounter her mother's prayers entreating her not to refuse the fortune, the life which offered. And she was particularly exercised by the counsels of her confessor, good Abbe Pisoni, whose patriotic zeal now burst forth. He weighed upon her with all his faith in the Christian destinies of Italy, and returned heartfelt thanks to Providence for having chosen one of his penitents as the instrument for hastening the reconciliation which would work God's triumph throughout the world. And her confessor's influence was certainly one of the decisive factors in shaping Benedetta's decision, for she was very pious, very devout, especially with regard to a certain Madonna whose image she went to adore every Sunday at the little church on the Piazza Farnese. One circumstance in particular struck her: Abbe Pisoni related that the flame of the lamp before the image in question whitened each time that he himself knelt there to beg the Virgin to incline his penitent to the all-redeeming marriage. And thus superior forces intervened; and she yielded in obedience to her mother, whom the Cardinal and Donna Serafina had at first opposed, but whom they left free to act when the religious question arose.

Benedetta had grown up in such absolute purity and ignorance, knowing nothing of herself, so shut off from existence, that marriage with another than Dario was to her simply the rupture of a long-kept promise of life in common. It was not the violent wrenching of heart and flesh that it would have been in the case of a woman who knew the facts of life. She wept a good deal, and then in a day of self-surrender she married Prada, lacking the strength to continue resisting everybody, and yielding to a union which all Rome had conspired to bring about.

But the clap of thunder came on the very night of the nuptials. Was it that Prada, the Piedmontese, the Italian of the North, the man of conquest, displayed towards his bride the same brutality that he had shown towards the city he had sacked? Or was it that the revelation of married life filled Benedetta with repulsion since nothing in her own heart responded to the passion of this man? On that point she never clearly explained herself; but with violence she shut the door of her room, locked it and bolted it, and refused to admit her husband. For a month Prada was maddened by her scorn. He felt outraged; both his pride and his passion bled; and he swore to master her, even as one masters a colt, with the whip. But all his virile fury was impotent against the indomitable determination which had sprung up one evening behind Benedetta's small and lovely brow. The spirit of the Boccaneras had awoke within her; nothing in the world, not even the fear of death, would have induced her to become her husband's wife.* And then, love being at last revealed to her, there came a return of her heart to Dario, a conviction that she must reserve herself for him alone, since it was to him that she had promised herself.

* Many readers will doubtless remember that the situation as
here described is somewhat akin to that of the earlier part
of M. George Ohnet's Ironmaster, which, in its form as a
novel, I translated into English many years ago. However,
all resemblance between Rome and the Ironmaster is confined
to this one point.—Trans.

Ever since that marriage, which he had borne like a bereavement, the young man had been travelling in France. She did not hide the truth from him, but wrote to him, again vowing that she would never be another's. And meantime her piety increased, her resolve to reserve herself for the lover she had chosen mingled in her mind with constancy of religious faith. The ardent heart of a great amorosa had ignited within her, she was ready for martyrdom for faith's sake. And when her despairing mother with clasped hands entreated her to resign herself to her conjugal duties, she replied that she owed no duties, since she had known nothing when she married. Moreover, the times were changing; the attempts to reconcile the Quirinal and the Vatican had failed, so completely, indeed, that the newspapers of the rival parties had, with renewed violence, resumed their campaign of mutual insult and outrage; and thus that triumphal marriage, to which every one had contributed as to a pledge of peace, crumbled amid the general smash-up, became but a ruin the more added to so many others.

Ernesta died of it. She had made a mistake. Her spoilt life—the life of a joyless wife—had culminated in this supreme maternal error. And the worst was that she alone had to bear all the responsibility of the disaster, for both her brother, the Cardinal, and her sister, Donna Serafina, overwhelmed her with reproaches. For consolation she had but the despair of Abbe Pisoni, whose patriotic hopes had been destroyed, and who was consumed with grief at having contributed to such a catastrophe. And one morning Ernesta was found, icy white and cold, in her bed. Folks talked of the rupture of a blood-vessel, but grief had been sufficient, for she had suffered frightfully, secretly, without a plaint, as indeed she had suffered all her life long.

At this time Benedetta had been married about a twelvemonth: still strong in her resistance to her husband, but remaining under the conjugal roof in order to spare her mother the terrible blow of a public scandal. However, her aunt Serafina had brought influence to bear on her, by opening to her the hope of a possible nullification of her marriage, should she throw herself at the feet of the Holy Father and entreat his intervention. And Serafina ended by persuading her of this, when, deferring to certain advice, she removed her from the spiritual control of Abbe Pisoni, and gave her the same confessor as herself. This was a Jesuit father named Lorenza, a man scarce five and thirty, with bright eyes, grave and amiable manners, and great persuasive powers. However, it was only on the morrow of her mother's death that Benedetta made up her mind, and returned to the Palazzo Boccanera, to occupy the apartments where she had been born, and where her mother had just passed away.

Immediately afterwards proceedings for annulling the marriage were instituted, in the first instance, for inquiry, before the Cardinal Vicar charged with the diocese of Rome. It was related that the Contessina had only taken this step after a secret audience with his Holiness, who had shown her the most encouraging sympathy. Count Prada at first spoke of applying to the law courts to compel his wife to return to the conjugal domicile; but, yielding to the entreaties of his old father Orlando, whom the affair greatly grieved, he eventually consented to accept the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. He was infuriated, however, to find that the nullification of the marriage was solicited on the ground of its non-consummation through impotentia mariti; this being one of the most valid and decisive pleas on which the Church of Rome consents to part those whom she has joined. And far more unhappy marriages than might be imagined are severed on these grounds, though the world only gives attention to those cases in which people of title or renown are concerned, as it did, for instance, with the famous Martinez Campos suit.

In Benedetta's case, her counsel, Consistorial-Advocate Morano, one of the leading authorities of the Roman bar, simply neglected to mention, in his memoir, that if she was still merely a wife in name, this was entirely due to herself. In addition to the evidence of friends and servants, showing on what terms the husband and wife had lived since their marriage, the advocate produced a certificate of a medical character, showing that the non-consummation of the union was certain. And the Cardinal Vicar, acting as Bishop of Rome, had thereupon remitted the case to the Congregation of the Council. This was a first success for Benedetta, and matters remained in this position. She was waiting for the Congregation to deliver its final pronouncement, hoping that the ecclesiastical dissolution of the marriage would prove an irresistible argument in favour of the divorce which she meant to solicit of the civil courts. And meantime, in the icy rooms where her mother Ernesta, submissive and desolate, had lately died, the Contessina resumed her girlish life, showing herself calm, yet very firm in her passion, having vowed that she would belong to none but Dario, and that she would not belong to him until the day when a priest should have joined them together in God's holy name.

As it happened, some six months previously, Dario also had taken up his abode at the Boccanera palace in consequence of the death of his father and the catastrophe which had ruined him. Prince Onofrio, after adopting Prada's advice and selling the Villa Montefiori to a financial company for ten million lire,* had, instead of prudently keeping his money in his pockets, succumbed to the fever of speculation which was consuming Rome. He began to gamble, buying back his own land, and ending by losing everything in the formidable krach which was swallowing up the wealth of the entire city. Totally ruined, somewhat deeply in debt even, the Prince nevertheless continued to promenade the Corso, like the handsome, smiling, popular man he was, when he accidentally met his death through falling from his horse; and four months later his widow, the ever beautiful Flavia—who had managed to save a modern villa and a personal income of forty thousand lire* from the disaster—was remarried to a man of magnificent presence, her junior by some ten years. This was a Swiss named Jules Laporte, originally a sergeant in the Papal Swiss Guard, then a traveller for a shady business in "relics," and finally Marchese Montefiore, having secured that title in securing his wife, thanks to a special brief of the Holy Father. Thus the Princess Boccanera had again become the Marchioness Montefiori.

* 400,000 pounds.
** 1,800 pounds.

It was then that Cardinal Boccanera, feeling greatly hurt, insisted on his nephew Dario coming to live with him, in a small apartment on the first floor of the palazzo. In the heart of that holy man, who seemed dead to the world, there still lingered pride of name and lineage, with a feeling of affection for his young, slightly built nephew, the last of the race, the only one by whom the old stock might blossom anew. Moreover, he was not opposed to Dario's marriage with Benedetta, whom he also loved with a paternal affection; and so proud was he of the family honour, and so convinced of the young people's pious rectitude that, in taking them to live with him, he absolutely scorned the abominable rumours which Count Prada's friends in the white world had begun to circulate ever since the two cousins had resided under the same roof. Donna Serafina guarded Benedetta, as he, the Cardinal, guarded Dario, and in the silence and the gloom of the vast deserted mansion, ensanguined of olden time by so many tragic deeds of violence, there now only remained these four with their restrained, stilled passions, last survivors of a crumbling world upon the threshold of a new one.

When Abbe Pierre Froment all at once awoke from sleep, his head heavy with painful dreams, he was worried to find that the daylight was already waning. His watch, which he hastened to consult, pointed to six o'clock. Intending to rest for an hour at the utmost, he had slept on for nearly seven hours, overcome beyond power of resistance. And even on awaking he remained on the bed, helpless, as though he were conquered before he had fought. Why, he wondered, did he experience this prostration, this unreasonable discouragement, this quiver of doubt which had come he knew not whence during his sleep, and which was annihilating his youthful enthusiasm of the morning? Had the Boccaneras any connection with this sudden weakening of his powers? He had espied dim disquieting figures in the black night of his dreams; and the anguish which they had brought him continued, and he again evoked them, scared as he was at thus awaking in a strange room, full of uneasiness in presence of the unknown. Things no longer seemed natural to him. He could not understand why Benedetta should have written to Viscount Philibert de la Choue to tell him that his, Pierre's, book had been denounced to the Congregation of the Index. What interest too could she have had in his coming to Rome to defend himself; and with what object had she carried her amiability so far as to desire that he should take up his quarters in the mansion? Pierre's stupefaction indeed arose from his being there, on that bed in that strange room, in that palace whose deep, death-like silence encompassed him. As he lay there, his limbs still overpowered and his brain seemingly empty, a flash of light suddenly came to him, and he realised that there must be certain circumstances that he knew nothing of that, simple though things appeared, they must really hide some complicated intrigue. However, it was only a fugitive gleam of enlightenment; his suspicions faded; and he rose up shaking himself and accusing the gloomy twilight of being the sole cause of the shivering and the despondency of which he felt ashamed.

In order to bestir himself, Pierre began to examine the two rooms. They were furnished simply, almost meagrely, in mahogany, there being scarcely any two articles alike, though all dated from the beginning of the century. Neither the bed nor the windows nor the doors had any hangings. On the floor of bare tiles, coloured red and polished, there were merely some little foot-mats in front of the various seats. And at sight of this middle-class bareness and coldness Pierre ended by remembering a room where he had slept in childhood—a room at Versailles, at the abode of his grandmother, who had kept a little grocer's shop there in the days of Louis Philippe. However, he became interested in an old painting which hung in the bed-room, on the wall facing the bed, amidst some childish and valueless engravings. But partially discernible in the waning light, this painting represented a woman seated on some projecting stone-work, on the threshold of a great stern building, whence she seemed to have been driven forth. The folding doors of bronze had for ever closed behind her, yet she remained there in a mere drapery of white linen; whilst scattered articles of clothing, thrown forth chance-wise with a violent hand, lay upon the massive granite steps. Her feet were bare, her arms were bare, and her hands, distorted by bitter agony, were pressed to her face—a face which one saw not, veiled as it was by the tawny gold of her rippling, streaming hair. What nameless grief, what fearful shame, what hateful abandonment was thus being hidden by that rejected one, that lingering victim of love, of whose unknown story one might for ever dream with tortured heart? It could be divined that she was adorably young and beautiful in her wretchedness, in the shred of linen draped about her shoulders; but a mystery enveloped everything else—her passion, possibly her misfortune, perhaps even her transgression—unless, indeed, she were there merely as a symbol of all that shivers and that weeps visageless before the ever closed portals of the unknown. For a long time Pierre looked at her, and so intently that he at last imagined he could distinguish her profile, divine in its purity and expression of suffering. But this was only an illusion; the painting had greatly suffered, blackened by time and neglect; and he asked himself whose work it might be that it should move him so intensely. On the adjoining wall a picture of a Madonna, a bad copy of an eighteenth-century painting, irritated him by the banality of its smile.

Night was falling faster and faster, and, opening the sitting-room window, Pierre leant out. On the other bank of the Tiber facing him arose the Janiculum, the height whence he had gazed upon Rome that morning. But at this dim hour Rome was no longer the city of youth and dreamland soaring into the early sunshine. The night was raining down, grey and ashen; the horizon was becoming blurred, vague, and mournful. Yonder, to the left, beyond the sea of roofs, Pierre could still divine the presence of the Palatine; and yonder, to the right, there still arose the Dome of St. Peter's, now grey like slate against the leaden sky; whilst behind him the Quirinal, which he could not see, must also be fading away into the misty night. A few minutes went by, and everything became yet more blurred; he realised that Rome was fading, departing in its immensity of which he knew nothing. Then his causeless doubt and disquietude again came on him so painfully that he could no longer remain at the window. He closed it and sat down, letting the darkness submerge him with its flood of infinite sadness. And his despairing reverie only ceased when the door gently opened and the glow of a lamp enlivened the room.

It was Victorine who came in quietly, bringing the light. "Ah! so you are up, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she; "I came in at about four o'clock but I let you sleep on. You have done quite right to take all the rest you required."

Then, as he complained of pains and shivering, she became anxious. "Don't go catching their nasty fevers," she said. "It isn't at all healthy near their river, you know. Don Vigilio, his Eminence's secretary, is always having the fever, and I assure you that it isn't pleasant."

She accordingly advised him to remain upstairs and lie down again. She would excuse his absence to the Princess and the Contessina. And he ended by letting her do as she desired, for he was in no state to have any will of his own. By her advice he dined, partaking of some soup, a wing of a chicken, and some preserves, which Giaccomo, the big lackey, brought up to him. And the food did him a great deal of good; he felt so restored that he refused to go to bed, desiring, said he, to thank the ladies that very evening for their kindly hospitality. As Donna Serafina received on Mondays he would present himself before her.

"Very good," said Victorine approvingly. "As you are all right again it can do you no harm, it will even enliven you. The best thing will be for Don Vigilio to come for you at nine o'clock and accompany you. Wait for him here."

Pierre had just washed and put on the new cassock he had brought with him, when, at nine o'clock precisely, he heard a discreet knock at his door. A little priest came in, a man scarcely thirty years of age, but thin and debile of build, with a long, seared, saffron-coloured face. For two years past attacks of fever, coming on every day at the same hour, had been consuming him. Nevertheless, whenever he forgot to control the black eyes which lighted his yellow face, they shone out ardently with the glow of his fiery soul. He bowed, and then in fluent French introduced himself in this simple fashion: "Don Vigilio, Monsieur l'Abbe, who is entirely at your service. If you are willing, we will go down."

Pierre immediately followed him, expressing his thanks, and Don Vigilio, relapsing into silence, answered his remarks with a smile. Having descended the small staircase, they found themselves on the second floor, on the spacious landing of the grand staircase. And Pierre was surprised and saddened by the scanty illumination, which, as in some dingy lodging-house, was limited to a few gas-jets, placed far apart, their yellow splotches but faintly relieving the deep gloom of the lofty, endless corridors. All was gigantic and funereal. Even on the landing, where was the entrance to Donna Serafina's apartments, facing those occupied by her niece, nothing indicated that a reception was being held that evening. The door remained closed, not a sound came from the rooms, a death-like silence arose from the whole palace. And Don Vigilio did not even ring, but, after a fresh bow, discreetly turned the door-handle.

A single petroleum lamp, placed on a table, lighted the ante-room, a large apartment with bare fresco-painted walls, simulating hangings of red and gold, draped regularly all around in the antique fashion. A few men's overcoats and two ladies' mantles lay on the chairs, whilst a pier table was littered with hats, and a servant sat there dozing, with his back to the wall.

However, as Don Vigilio stepped aside to allow Pierre to enter a first reception-room, hung with red brocatelle, a room but dimly lighted and which he imagined to be empty, the young priest found himself face to face with an apparition in black, a woman whose features he could not at first distinguish. Fortunately he heard his companion say, with a low bow, "Contessina, I have the honour to present to you Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre Froment, who arrived from France this morning."

Then, for a moment, Pierre remained alone with Benedetta in that deserted salon, in the sleepy glimmer of two lace-veiled lamps. At present, however, a sound of voices came from a room beyond, a larger apartment whose doorway, with folding doors thrown wide open, described a parallelogram of brighter light.

The young woman at once showed herself very affable, with perfect simplicity of manner: "Ah! I am happy to see you, Monsieur l'Abbe. I was afraid that your indisposition might be serious. You are quite recovered now, are you not?"

Pierre listened to her, fascinated by her slow and rather thick voice, in which restrained passion seemed to mingle with much prudent good sense. And at last he saw her, with her hair so heavy and so dark, her skin so white, the whiteness of ivory. She had a round face, with somewhat full lips, a small refined nose, features as delicate as a child's. But it was especially her eyes that lived, immense eyes, whose infinite depths none could fathom. Was she slumbering? Was she dreaming? Did her motionless face conceal the ardent tension of a great saint and a great amorosa? So white, so young, and so calm, her every movement was harmonious, her appearance at once very staid, very noble, and very rhythmical. In her ears she wore two large pearls of matchless purity, pearls which had come from a famous necklace of her mother's, known throughout Rome.

Pierre apologised and thanked her. "You see me in confusion, madame," said he; "I should have liked to express to you this morning my gratitude for your great kindness."

He had hesitated to call her madame, remembering the plea brought forward in the suit for the dissolution of her marriage. But plainly enough everybody must call her madame. Moreover, her face had retained its calm and kindly expression.

"Consider yourself at home here, Monsieur l'Abbe," she responded, wishing to put him at his ease. "It is sufficient that our relative, Monsieur de la Choue, should be fond of you, and take interest in your work. I have, you know, much affection for him." Then her voice faltered slightly, for she realised that she ought to speak of the book, the one reason of Pierre's journey and her proffered hospitality. "Yes," she added, "the Viscount sent me your book. I read it and found it very beautiful. It disturbed me. But I am only an ignoramus, and certainly failed to understand everything in it. We must talk it over together; you will explain your ideas to me, won't you, Monsieur l'Abbe?"

In her large clear eyes, which did not know how to lie, Pierre then read the surprise and emotion of a child's soul when confronted by disquieting and undreamt-of problems. So it was not she who had become impassioned and had desired to have him near her that she might sustain him and assist his victory. Once again, and this time very keenly, he suspected a secret influence, a hidden hand which was directing everything towards some unknown goal. However, he was charmed by so much simplicity and frankness in so beautiful, young, and noble a creature; and he gave himself to her after the exchange of those few words, and was about to tell her that she might absolutely dispose of him, when he was interrupted by the advent of another woman, whose tall, slight figure, also clad in black, stood out strongly against the luminous background of the further reception-room as seen through the open doorway.

"Well, Benedetta, have you sent Giaccomo up to see?" asked the newcomer. "Don Vigilio has just come down and he is quite alone. It is improper."

"No, no, aunt. Monsieur l'Abbe is here," was the reply of Benedetta, hastening to introduce the young priest. "Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre Froment—The Princess Boccanera."

Ceremonious salutations were exchanged. The Princess must have been nearly sixty, but she laced herself so tightly that from behind one might have taken her for a young woman. This tight lacing, however, was her last coquetry. Her hair, though still plentiful, was quite white, her eyebrows alone remaining black in her long, wrinkled face, from which projected the large obstinate nose of the family. She had never been beautiful, and had remained a spinster, wounded to the heart by the selection of Count Brandini, who had preferred her younger sister, Ernesta. From that moment she had resolved to seek consolation and satisfaction in family pride alone, the hereditary pride of the great name which she bore. The Boccaneras had already supplied two Popes to the Church, and she hoped that before she died her brother would become the third. She had transformed herself into his housekeeper, as it were, remaining with him, watching over him, and advising him, managing all the household affairs herself, and accomplishing miracles in order to conceal the slow ruin which was bringing the ceilings about their heads. If every Monday for thirty years past she had continued receiving a few intimates, all of them folks of the Vatican, it was from high political considerations, so that her drawing-room might remain a meeting-place of the black world, a power and a threat.

And Pierre divined by her greeting that she deemed him of little account, petty foreign priest that he was, not even a prelate. This too again surprised him, again brought the puzzling question to the fore: Why had he been invited, what was expected of him in this society from which the humble were usually excluded? Knowing the Princess to be austerely devout, he at last fancied that she received him solely out of regard for her kinsman, the Viscount, for in her turn she only found these words of welcome: "We are so pleased to receive good news of Monsieur de la Choue! He brought us such a beautiful pilgrimage two years ago."

Passing the first through the doorway, she at last ushered the young priest into the adjoining reception-room. It was a spacious square apartment, hung with old yellow brocatelle of a flowery Louis XIV pattern. The lofty ceiling was adorned with a very fine panelling, carved and coloured, with gilded roses in each compartment. The furniture, however, was of all sorts. There were some high mirrors, a couple of superb gilded pier tables, and a few handsome seventeenth-century arm-chairs; but all the rest was wretched. A heavy round table of first-empire style, which had come nobody knew whence, caught the eye with a medley of anomalous articles picked up at some bazaar, and a quantity of cheap photographs littered the costly marble tops of the pier tables. No interesting article of virtu was to be seen. The old paintings on the walls were with two exceptions feebly executed. There was a delightful example of an unknown primitive master, a fourteenth-century Visitation, in which the Virgin had the stature and pure delicacy of a child of ten, whilst the Archangel, huge and superb, inundated her with a stream of dazzling, superhuman love; and in front of this hung an antique family portrait, depicting a very beautiful young girl in a turban, who was thought to be Cassia Boccanera, the amorosa and avengeress who had flung herself into the Tiber with her brother Ercole and the corpse of her lover, Flavio Corradini. Four lamps threw a broad, peaceful glow over the faded room, and, like a melancholy sunset, tinged it with yellow. It looked grave and bare, with not even a flower in a vase to brighten it.

In a few words Donna Serafina at once introduced Pierre to the company; and in the silence, the pause which ensued in the conversation, he felt that every eye was fixed upon him as upon a promised and expected curiosity. There were altogether some ten persons present, among them being Dario, who stood talking with little Princess Celia Buongiovanni, whilst the elderly relative who had brought the latter sat whispering to a prelate, Monsignor Nani, in a dim corner. Pierre, however, had been particularly struck by the name of Consistorial-Advocate Morano, of whose position in the house Viscount de la Choue had thought proper to inform him in order to avert any unpleasant blunder. For thirty years past Morano had been Donna Serafina's amico. Their connection, formerly a guilty one, for the advocate had wife and children of his own, had in course of time, since he had been left a widower, become one of those liaisons which tolerant people excuse and except. Both parties were extremely devout and had certainly assured themselves of all needful "indulgences." And thus Morano was there in the seat which he had always taken for a quarter of a century past, a seat beside the chimney-piece, though as yet the winter fire had not been lighted, and when Donna Serafina had discharged her duties as mistress of the house, she returned to her own place in front of him, on the other side of the chimney.

When Pierre in his turn had seated himself near Don Vigilio, who, silent and discreet, had already taken a chair, Dario resumed in a louder voice the story which he had been relating to Celia. Dario was a handsome man, of average height, slim and elegant. He wore a full beard, dark and carefully tended, and had the long face and pronounced nose of the Boccaneras, but the impoverishment of the family blood over a course of centuries had attenuated, softened as it were, any sharpness or undue prominence of feature.

"Oh! a beauty, an astounding beauty!" he repeated emphatically.

"Whose beauty?" asked Benedetta, approaching him.

Celia, who resembled the little Virgin of the primitive master hanging above her head, began to laugh. "Oh! Dario's speaking of a poor girl, a work-girl whom he met to-day," she explained.

Thereupon Dario had to begin his narrative again. It appeared that while passing along a narrow street near the Piazza Navona, he had perceived a tall, shapely girl of twenty, who was weeping and sobbing violently, prone upon a flight of steps. Touched particularly by her beauty, he had approached her and learnt that she had been working in the house outside which she was, a manufactory of wax beads, but that, slack times having come, the workshops had closed and she did not dare to return home, so fearful was the misery there. Amidst the downpour of her tears she raised such beautiful eyes to his that he ended by drawing some money from his pocket. But at this, crimson with confusion, she sprang to her feet, hiding her hands in the folds of her skirt, and refusing to take anything. She added, however, that he might follow her if it so pleased him, and give the money to her mother. And then she hurried off towards the Ponte St'. Angelo.*

* Bridge of St. Angelo.

"Yes, she was a beauty, a perfect beauty," repeated Dario with an air of ecstasy. "Taller than I, and slim though sturdy, with the bosom of a goddess. In fact, a real antique, a Venus of twenty, her chin rather bold, her mouth and nose of perfect form, and her eyes wonderfully pure and large! And she was bare-headed too, with nothing but a crown of heavy black hair, and a dazzling face, gilded, so to say, by the sun."

They had all begun to listen to him, enraptured, full of that passionate admiration for beauty which, in spite of every change, Rome still retains in her heart.

"Those beautiful girls of the people are becoming very rare," remarked Morano. "You might scour the Trastevere without finding any. However, this proves that there is at least one of them left."

"And what was your goddess's name?" asked Benedetta, smiling, amused and enraptured like the others.

"Pierina," replied Dario, also with a laugh.

"And what did you do with her?"

At this question the young man's excited face assumed an expression of discomfort and fear, like the face of a child on suddenly encountering some ugly creature amidst its play.

"Oh! don't talk of it," said he. "I felt very sorry afterwards. I saw such misery—enough to make one ill."

Yielding to his curiosity, it seemed, he had followed the girl across the Ponte St'. Angelo into the new district which was being built over the former castle meadows*; and there, on the first floor of an abandoned house which was already falling into ruins, though the plaster was scarcely dry, he had come upon a frightful spectacle which still stirred his heart: a whole family, father and mother, children, and an infirm old uncle, dying of hunger and rotting in filth! He selected the most dignified words he could think of to describe the scene, waving his hand the while with a gesture of fright, as if to ward off some horrible vision.

* The meadows around the Castle of St. Angelo. The district, now
covered with buildings, is quite flat and was formerly greatly
subject to floods. It is known as the Quartiere dei Prati.—Trans.

"At last," he concluded, "I ran away, and you may be sure that I shan't go back again."

A general wagging of heads ensued in the cold, irksome silence which fell upon the room. Then Morano summed up the matter in a few bitter words, in which he accused the despoilers, the men of the Quirinal, of being the sole cause of all the frightful misery of Rome. Were not people even talking of the approaching nomination of Deputy Sacco as Minister of Finances—Sacco, that intriguer who had engaged in all sorts of underhand practices? His appointment would be the climax of impudence; bankruptcy would speedily and infallibly ensue.

Meantime Benedetta, who had fixed her eyes on Pierre, with his book in her mind, alone murmured: "Poor people, how very sad! But why not go back to see them?"

Pierre, out of his element and absent-minded during the earlier moments, had been deeply stirred by the latter part of Dario's narrative. His thoughts reverted to his apostolate amidst the misery of Paris, and his heart was touched with compassion at being confronted by the story of such fearful sufferings on the very day of his arrival in Rome. Unwittingly, impulsively, he raised his voice, and said aloud: "Oh! we will go to see them together, madame; you will take me. These questions impassion me so much."

The attention of everybody was then again turned upon the young priest. The others questioned him, and he realised that they were all anxious about his first impressions, his opinion of their city and of themselves. He must not judge Rome by mere outward appearances, they said. What effect had the city produced on him? How had he found it, and what did he think of it? Thereupon he politely apologised for his inability to answer them. He had not yet gone out, said he, and had seen nothing. But this answer was of no avail; they pressed him all the more keenly, and he fully understood that their object was to gain him over to admiration and love. They advised him, adjured him not to yield to any fatal disillusion, but to persist and wait until Rome should have revealed to him her soul.

"How long do you expect to remain among us, Monsieur l'Abbe?" suddenly inquired a courteous voice, with a clear but gentle ring.

It was Monsignor Nani, who, seated in the gloom, thus raised his voice for the first time. On several occasions it had seemed to Pierre that the prelate's keen blue eyes were steadily fixed upon him, though all the while he pretended to be attentively listening to the drawling chatter of Celia's aunt. And before replying Pierre glanced at him. In his crimson-edged cassock, with a violet silk sash drawn tightly around his waist, Nani still looked young, although he was over fifty. His hair had remained blond, he had a straight refined nose, a mouth very firm yet very delicate of contour, and beautifully white teeth.

"Why, a fortnight or perhaps three weeks, Monsignor," replied Pierre.

The whole salon protested. What, three weeks! It was his pretension to know Rome in three weeks! Why, six weeks, twelve months, ten years were required! The first impression was always a disastrous one, and a long sojourn was needed for a visitor to recover from it.

"Three weeks!" repeated Donna Serafina with her disdainful air. "Is it possible for people to study one another and get fond of one another in three weeks? Those who come back to us are those who have learned to know us."

Instead of launching into exclamations like the others, Nani had at first contented himself with smiling, and gently waving his shapely hand, which bespoke his aristocratic origin. Then, as Pierre modestly explained himself, saying that he had come to Rome to attend to certain matters and would leave again as soon as those matters should have been concluded, the prelate, still smiling, summed up the argument with the remark: "Oh! Monsieur l'Abbe will stay with us for more than three weeks; we shall have the happiness of his presence here for a long time, I hope."

These words, though spoken with quiet cordiality, strangely disturbed the young priest. What was known, what was meant? He leant towards Don Vigilio, who had remained near him, still and ever silent, and in a whisper inquired: "Who is Monsignor Nani?"

The secretary, however, did not at once reply. His feverish face became yet more livid. Then his ardent eyes glanced round to make sure that nobody was watching him, and in a breath he responded: "He is the Assessor of the Holy Office."*

* Otherwise the Inquisition.

This information sufficed, for Pierre was not ignorant of the fact that the assessor, who was present in silence at the meetings of the Holy Office, waited upon his Holiness every Wednesday evening after the sitting, to render him an account of the matters dealt with in the afternoon. This weekly audience, this hour spent with the Pope in a privacy which allowed of every subject being broached, gave the assessor an exceptional position, one of considerable power. Moreover the office led to the cardinalate; the only "rise" that could be given to the assessor was his promotion to the Sacred College.

Monsignor Nani, who seemed so perfectly frank and amiable, continued to look at the young priest with such an encouraging air that the latter felt obliged to go and occupy the seat beside him, which Celia's old aunt at last vacated. After all, was there not an omen of victory in meeting, on the very day of his arrival, a powerful prelate whose influence would perhaps open every door to him? He therefore felt very touched when Monsignor Nani, immediately after the first words, inquired in a tone of deep interest, "And so, my dear child, you have published a book?"

After this, gradually mastered by his enthusiasm and forgetting where he was, Pierre unbosomed himself, and recounted the birth and progress of his burning love amidst the sick and the humble, gave voice to his dream of a return to the olden Christian community, and triumphed with the rejuvenescence of Catholicism, developing into the one religion of the universal democracy. Little by little he again raised his voice, and silence fell around him in the stern, antique reception-room, every one lending ear to his words with increasing surprise, with a growing coldness of which he remained unconscious.

At last Nani gently interrupted him, still wearing his perpetual smile, the faint irony of which, however, had departed. "No doubt, no doubt, my dear child," he said, "it is very beautiful, oh! very beautiful, well worthy of the pure and noble imagination of a Christian. But what do you count on doing now?"

"I shall go straight to the Holy Father to defend myself," answered Pierre.

A light, restrained laugh went round, and Donna Serafina expressed the general opinion by exclaiming: "The Holy Father isn't seen as easily as that."

Pierre, however, was quite impassioned. "Well, for my part," he rejoined, "I hope I shall see him. Have I not expressed his views? Have I not defended his policy? Can he let my book be condemned when I believe that I have taken inspiration from all that is best in him?"

"No doubt, no doubt," Nani again hastily replied, as if he feared that the others might be too brusque with the young enthusiast. "The Holy Father has such a lofty mind. And of course it would be necessary to see him. Only, my dear child, you must not excite yourself so much; reflect a little; take your time." And, turning to Benedetta, he added, "Of course his Eminence has not seen Abbe Froment yet. It would be well, however, that he should receive him to-morrow morning to guide him with his wise counsel."

Cardinal Boccanera never attended his sister's Monday-evening receptions. Still, he was always there in the spirit, like some absent sovereign master.

"To tell the truth," replied the Contessina, hesitating, "I fear that my uncle does not share Monsieur l'Abbe's views."

Nani again smiled. "Exactly; he will tell him things which it is good he should hear."

Thereupon it was at once settled with Don Vigilio that the latter would put down the young priest's name for an audience on the following morning at ten o'clock.

However, at that moment a cardinal came in, clad in town costume—his sash and his stockings red, but his simar black, with a red edging and red buttons. It was Cardinal Sarno, a very old intimate of the Boccaneras; and whilst he apologised for arriving so late, through press of work, the company became silent and deferentially clustered round him. This was the first cardinal Pierre had seen, and he felt greatly disappointed, for the newcomer had none of the majesty, none of the fine port and presence to which he had looked forward. On the contrary, he was short and somewhat deformed, with the left shoulder higher than the right, and a worn, ashen face with lifeless eyes. To Pierre he looked like some old clerk of seventy, half stupefied by fifty years of office work, dulled and bent by incessantly leaning over his writing desk ever since his youth. And indeed that was Sarno's story. The puny child of a petty middle-class family, he had been educated at the Seminario Romano. Then later he had for ten years professed Canon Law at that same seminary, afterwards becoming one of the secretaries of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Finally, five and twenty years ago, he had been created a cardinal, and the jubilee of his cardinalate had recently been celebrated. Born in Rome, he had always lived there; he was the perfect type of the prelate who, through growing up in the shade of the Vatican, has become one of the masters of the world. Although he had never occupied any diplomatic post, he had rendered such important services to the Propaganda, by his methodical habits of work, that he had become president of one of the two commissions which furthered the interests of the Church in those vast countries of the west which are not yet Catholic. And thus, in the depths of his dim eyes, behind his low, dull-looking brow, the huge map of Christendom was stored away.

Nani himself had risen, full of covert respect for the unobtrusive but terrible man whose hand was everywhere, even in the most distant corners of the earth, although he had never left his office. As Nani knew, despite his apparent nullity, Sarno, with his slow, methodical, ably organised work of conquest, possessed sufficient power to set empires in confusion.

"Has your Eminence recovered from that cold which distressed us so much?" asked Nani.

"No, no, I still cough. There is a most malignant passage at the offices. I feel as cold as ice as soon as I leave my room."

From that moment Pierre felt quite little, virtually lost. He was not even introduced to the Cardinal. And yet he had to remain in the room for nearly another hour, looking around and observing. That antiquated world then seemed to him puerile, as though it had lapsed into a mournful second childhood. Under all the apparent haughtiness and proud reserve he could divine real timidity, unacknowledged distrust, born of great ignorance. If the conversation did not become general, it was because nobody dared to speak out frankly; and what he heard in the corners was simply so much childish chatter, the petty gossip of the week, the trivial echoes of sacristies and drawing-rooms. People saw but little of one another, and the slightest incidents assumed huge proportions. At last Pierre ended by feeling as though he were transported into some salon of the time of Charles X, in one of the episcopal cities of the French provinces. No refreshments were served. Celia's old aunt secured possession of Cardinal Sarno; but, instead of replying to her, he simply wagged his head from time to time. Don Vigilio had not opened his mouth the whole evening. However, a conversation in a very low tone was started by Nani and Morano, to whom Donna Serafina listened, leaning forward and expressing her approval by slowly nodding her head. They were doubtless speaking of the dissolution of Benedetta's marriage, for they glanced at the young woman gravely from time to time. And in the centre of the spacious room, in the sleepy glow of the lamps, there was only the young people, Benedetta, Dario, and Celia who seemed to be at all alive, chattering in undertones and occasionally repressing a burst of laughter.

All at once Pierre was struck by the great resemblance between Benedetta and the portrait of Cassia hanging on the wall. Each displayed the same delicate youth, the same passionate mouth, the same large, unfathomable eyes, set in the same round, sensible, healthy-looking face. In each there was certainly the same upright soul, the same heart of flame. Then a recollection came to Pierre, that of a painting by Guido Reni, the adorable, candid head of Beatrice Cenci, which, at that moment and to his thinking, the portrait of Cassia closely resembled. This resemblance stirred him and he glanced at Benedetta with anxious sympathy, as if all the fierce fatality of race and country were about to fall on her. But no, it could not be; she looked so calm, so resolute, and so patient! Besides, ever since he had entered that room he had noticed none other than signs of gay fraternal tenderness between her and Dario, especially on her side, for her face ever retained the bright serenity of a love which may be openly confessed. At one moment, it is true, Dario in a joking way had caught hold of her hands and pressed them; but while he began to laugh rather nervously, with a brighter gleam darting from his eyes, she on her side, all composure, slowly freed her hands, as though theirs was but the play of old and affectionate friends. She loved him, though, it was visible, with her whole being and for her whole life.

At last when Dario, after stifling a slight yawn and glancing at his watch, had slipped off to join some friends who were playing cards at a lady's house, Benedetta and Celia sat down together on a sofa near Pierre; and the latter, without wishing to listen, overheard a few words of their confidential chat. The little Princess was the eldest daughter of Prince Matteo Buongiovanni, who was already the father of five children by an English wife, a Mortimer, to whom he was indebted for a dowry of two hundred thousand pounds. Indeed, the Buongiovannis were known as one of the few patrician families of Rome that were still rich, still erect among the ruins of the past, now crumbling on every side. They also numbered two popes among their forerunners, yet this had not prevented Prince Matteo from lending support to the Quirinal without quarrelling with the Vatican. Son of an American woman, no longer having the pure Roman blood in his veins, he was a more supple politician than other aristocrats, and was also, folks said, extremely grasping, struggling to be one of the last to retain the wealth and power of olden times, which he realised were condemned to death. Yet it was in his family, renowned for its superb pride and its continued magnificence, that a love romance had lately taken birth, a romance which was the subject of endless gossip: Celia had suddenly fallen in love with a young lieutenant to whom she had never spoken; her love was reciprocated, and the passionate attachment of the officer and the girl only found vent in the glances they exchanged on meeting each day during the usual drive through the Corso. Nevertheless Celia displayed a tenacious will, and after declaring to her father that she would never take any other husband, she was waiting, firm and resolute, in the certainty that she would ultimately secure the man of her choice. The worst of the affair was that the lieutenant, Attilio Sacco, happened to be the son of Deputy Sacco, a parvenu whom the black world looked down upon, as upon one sold to the Quirinal and ready to undertake the very dirtiest job.

"It was for me that Morano spoke just now," Celia murmured in Benedetta's ear. "Yes, yes, when he spoke so harshly of Attilio's father and that ministerial appointment which people are talking about. He wanted to give me a lesson."

The two girls had sworn eternal affection in their school-days, and Benedetta, the elder by five years, showed herself maternal. "And so," she said, "you've not become a whit more reasonable. You still think of that young man?"

"What! are you going to grieve me too, dear?" replied Celia. "I love Attilio and mean to have him. Yes, him and not another! I want him and I'll have him, because I love him and he loves me. It's simple enough."

Pierre glanced at her, thunderstruck. With her gentle virgin face she was like a candid, budding lily. A brow and a nose of blossom-like purity; a mouth all innocence with its lips closing over pearly teeth, and eyes like spring water, clear and fathomless. And not a quiver passed over her cheeks of satiny freshness, no sign, however faint, of anxiety or inquisitiveness appeared in her candid glance. Did she think? Did she know? Who could have answered? She was virginity personified with all its redoubtable mystery.

"Ah! my dear," resumed Benedetta, "don't begin my sad story over again. One doesn't succeed in marrying the Pope and the King."

All tranquillity, Celia responded: "But you didn't love Prada, whereas I love Attilio. Life lies in that: one must love."

These words, spoken so naturally by that ignorant child, disturbed Pierre to such a point that he felt tears rising to his eyes. Love! yes, therein lay the solution of every quarrel, the alliance between the nations, the reign of peace and joy throughout the world! However, Donna Serafina had now risen, shrewdly suspecting the nature of the conversation which was impassioning the two girls. And she gave Don Vigilio a glance, which the latter understood, for he came to tell Pierre in an undertone that it was time to retire. Eleven o'clock was striking, and Celia went off with her aunt. Advocate Morano, however, doubtless desired to retain Cardinal Sarno and Nani for a few moments in order that they might privately discuss some difficulty which had arisen in the divorce proceedings. On reaching the outer reception-room, Benedetta, after kissing Celia on both cheeks, took leave of Pierre with much good grace.

"In answering the Viscount to-morrow morning," said she, "I shall tell him how happy we are to have you with us, and for longer than you think. Don't forget to come down at ten o'clock to see my uncle, the Cardinal."

Having climbed to the third floor again, Pierre and Don Vigilio, each carrying a candlestick which the servant had handed to them, were about to part for the night, when the former could not refrain from asking the secretary a question which had been worrying him for hours: "Is Monsignor Nani a very influential personage?"

Don Vigilio again became quite scared, and simply replied by a gesture, opening his arms as if to embrace the world. Then his eyes flashed, and in his turn he seemed to yield to inquisitiveness. "You already knew him, didn't you?" he inquired.

"I? not at all!"

"Really! Well, he knows you very well. Last Monday I heard him speak of you in such precise terms that he seemed to be acquainted with the slightest particulars of your career and your character."

"Why, I never even heard his name before."

"Then he must have procured information."

Thereupon Don Vigilio bowed and entered his room; whilst Pierre, surprised to find his door open, saw Victorine come out with her calm active air.

"Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe, I wanted to make sure that you had everything you were likely to want. There are candles, water, sugar, and matches. And what do you take in the morning, please? Coffee? No, a cup of milk with a roll. Very good; at eight o'clock, eh? And now rest and sleep well. I was awfully afraid of ghosts during the first nights I spent in this old palace! But I never saw a trace of one. The fact is, when people are dead, they are too well pleased, and don't want to break their rest!"

Then off she went, and Pierre at last found himself alone, glad to be able to shake off the strain imposed on him, to free himself from the discomfort which he had felt in that reception-room, among those people who in his mind still mingled and vanished like shadows in the sleepy glow of the lamps. Ghosts, thought he, are the old dead ones of long ago whose distressed spirits return to love and suffer in the breasts of the living of to-day. And, despite his long afternoon rest, he had never felt so weary, so desirous of slumber, confused and foggy as was his mind, full of the fear that he had hitherto not understood things aright. When he began to undress, his astonishment at being in that room returned to him with such intensity that he almost fancied himself another person. What did all those people think of his book? Why had he been brought to this cold dwelling whose hostility he could divine? Was it for the purpose of helping him or conquering him? And again in the yellow glimmer, the dismal sunset of the drawing-room, he perceived Donna Serafina and Advocate Morano on either side of the chimney-piece, whilst behind the calm yet passionate visage of Benedetta appeared the smiling face of Monsignor Nani, with cunning eyes and lips bespeaking indomitable energy.

He went to bed, but soon got up again, stifling, feeling such a need of fresh, free air that he opened the window wide in order to lean out. But the night was black as ink, the darkness had submerged the horizon. A mist must have hidden the stars in the firmament; the vault above seemed opaque and heavy like lead; and yonder in front the houses of the Trastevere had long since been asleep. Not one of all their windows glittered; there was but a single gaslight shining, all alone and far away, like a lost spark. In vain did Pierre seek the Janiculum. In the depths of that ocean of nihility all sunk and vanished, Rome's four and twenty centuries, the ancient Palatine and the modern Quirinal, even the giant dome of St. Peter's, blotted out from the sky by the flood of gloom. And below him he could not see, he could not even hear the Tiber, the dead river flowing past the dead city.

III.

AT a quarter to ten o'clock on the following morning Pierre came down to the first floor of the mansion for his audience with Cardinal Boccanera. He had awoke free of all fatigue and again full of courage and candid enthusiasm; nothing remaining of his strange despondency of the previous night, the doubts and suspicions which had then come over him. The morning was so fine, the sky so pure and so bright, that his heart once more palpitated with hope.

On the landing he found the folding doors of the first ante-room wide open. While closing the gala saloons which overlooked the street, and which were rotting with old age and neglect, the Cardinal still used the reception-rooms of one of his grand-uncles, who in the eighteenth century had risen to the same ecclesiastical dignity as himself. There was a suite of four immense rooms, each sixteen feet high, with windows facing the lane which sloped down towards the Tiber; and the sun never entered them, shut off as it was by the black houses across the lane. Thus the installation, in point of space, was in keeping with the display and pomp of the old-time princely dignitaries of the Church. But no repairs were ever made, no care was taken of anything, the hangings were frayed and ragged, and dust preyed on the furniture, amidst an unconcern which seemed to betoken some proud resolve to stay the course of time.

Pierre experienced a slight shock as he entered the first room, the servants' ante-chamber. Formerly two pontifical gente d'armi in full uniform had always stood there amidst a stream of lackeys; and the single servant now on duty seemed by his phantom-like appearance to increase the melancholiness of the vast and gloomy hall. One was particularly struck by an altar facing the windows, an altar with red drapery surmounted by a baldacchino with red hangings, on which appeared the escutcheon of the Boccaneras, the winged dragon spitting flames with the device, Bocca nera, Alma rossa. And the grand-uncle's red hat, the old huge ceremonial hat, was also there, with the two cushions of red silk, and the two antique parasols which were taken in the coach each time his Eminence went out. And in the deep silence it seemed as if one could almost hear the faint noise of the moths preying for a century past upon all this dead splendour, which would have fallen into dust at the slightest touch of a feather broom.

The second ante-room, that was formerly occupied by the secretary, was also empty, and it was only in the third one, the anticamera nobile, that Pierre found Don Vigilio. With his retinue reduced to what was strictly necessary, the Cardinal had preferred to have his secretary near him—at the door, so to say, of the old throne-room, where he gave audience. And Don Vigilio, so thin and yellow, and quivering with fever, sat there like one lost, at a small, common, black table covered with papers. Raising his head from among a batch of documents, he recognised Pierre, and in a low voice, a faint murmur amidst the silence, he said, "His Eminence is engaged. Please wait."

Then he again turned to his reading, doubtless to escape all attempts at conversation.

Not daring to sit down, Pierre examined the apartment. It looked perhaps yet more dilapidated than the others, with its hangings of green damask worn by age and resembling the faded moss on ancient trees. The ceiling, however, had remained superb. Within a frieze of gilded and coloured ornaments was a fresco representing the Triumph of Amphitrite, the work of one of Raffaelle's pupils. And, according to antique usage, it was here that the berretta, the red cap, was placed, on a credence, below a large crucifix of ivory and ebony.

As Pierre grew used to the half-light, however, his attention was more particularly attracted by a recently painted full-length portrait of the Cardinal in ceremonial costume—cassock of red moire, rochet of lace, and cappa thrown like a royal mantle over his shoulders. In these vestments of the Church the tall old man of seventy retained the proud bearing of a prince, clean shaven, but still boasting an abundance of white hair which streamed in curls over his shoulders. He had the commanding visage of the Boccaneras, a large nose and a large thin-lipped mouth in a long face intersected by broad lines; and the eyes which lighted his pale countenance were indeed the eyes of his race, very dark, yet sparkling with ardent life under bushy brows which had remained quite black. With laurels about his head he would have resembled a Roman emperor, very handsome and master of the world, as though indeed the blood of Augustus pulsated in his veins.

Pierre knew his story which this portrait recalled. Educated at the College of the Nobles, Pio Boccanera had but once absented himself from Rome, and that when very young, hardly a deacon, but nevertheless appointed oblegate to convey a berretta to Paris. On his return his ecclesiastical career had continued in sovereign fashion. Honours had fallen on him naturally, as by right of birth. Ordained by Pius IX himself, afterwards becoming a Canon of the Vatican Basilica, and Cameriere segreto, he had risen to the post of Majordomo about the time of the Italian occupation, and in 1874 had been created a Cardinal. For the last four years, moreover, he had been Papal Chamberlain (Camerlingo), and folks whispered that Leo XIII had appointed him to that post, even as he himself had been appointed to it by Pius IX, in order to lessen his chance of succeeding to the pontifical throne; for although the conclave in choosing Leo had set aside the old tradition that the Camerlingo was ineligible for the papacy, it was not probable that it would again dare to infringe that rule. Moreover, people asserted that, even as had been the case in the reign of Pius, there was a secret warfare between the Pope and his Camerlingo, the latter remaining on one side, condemning the policy of the Holy See, holding radically different opinions on all things, and silently waiting for the death of Leo, which would place power in his hands with the duty of summoning the conclave, and provisionally watching over the affairs and interests of the Church until a new Pope should be elected. Behind Cardinal Pio's broad, stern brow, however, in the glow of his dark eyes, might there not also be the ambition of actually rising to the papacy, of repeating the career of Gioachino Pecci, Camerlingo and then Pope, all tradition notwithstanding? With the pride of a Roman prince Pio knew but Rome; he almost gloried in being totally ignorant of the modern world; and verily he showed himself very pious, austerely religious, with a full firm faith into which the faintest doubt could never enter.

But a whisper drew Pierre from his reflections. Don Vigilio, in his prudent way, invited him to sit down: "You may have to wait some time: take a stool."

Then he began to cover a large sheet of yellowish paper with fine writing, while Pierre seated himself on one of the stools ranged alongside the wall in front of the portrait. And again the young man fell into a reverie, picturing in his mind a renewal of all the princely pomp of the old-time cardinals in that antique room. To begin with, as soon as nominated, a cardinal gave public festivities, which were sometimes very splendid. During three days the reception-rooms remained wide open, all could enter, and from room to room ushers repeated the names of those who came—patricians, people of the middle class, poor folks, all Rome indeed, whom the new cardinal received with sovereign kindliness, as a king might receive his subjects. Then there was quite a princely retinue; some cardinals carried five hundred people about with them, had no fewer than sixteen distinct offices in their households, lived, in fact, amidst a perfect court. Even when life subsequently became simplified, a cardinal, if he were a prince, still had a right to a gala train of four coaches drawn by black horses. Four servants preceded him in liveries, emblazoned with his arms, and carried his hat, cushion, and parasols. He was also attended by a secretary in a mantle of violet silk, a train-bearer in a gown of violet woollen stuff, and a gentleman in waiting, wearing an Elizabethan style of costume, and bearing the berretta with gloved hands. Although the household had then become smaller, it still comprised an auditore specially charged with the congregational work, a secretary employed exclusively for correspondence, a chief usher who introduced visitors, a gentleman in attendance for the carrying of the berretta, a train-bearer, a chaplain, a majordomo and a valet-de-chambre, to say nothing of a flock of underlings, lackeys, cooks, coachmen, grooms, quite a population, which filled the vast mansions with bustle. And with these attendants Pierre mentally sought to fill the three spacious ante-rooms now so deserted; the stream of lackeys in blue liveries broidered with emblazonry, the world of abbes and prelates in silk mantles appeared before him, again setting magnificent and passionate life under the lofty ceilings, illumining all the semi-gloom with resuscitated splendour.

But nowadays—particularly since the Italian occupation of Rome—nearly all the great fortunes of the Roman princes have been exhausted, and the pomp of the great dignitaries of the Church has disappeared. The ruined patricians have kept aloof from badly remunerated ecclesiastical offices to which little renown attaches, and have left them to the ambition of the petty bourgeoisie. Cardinal Boccanera, the last prince of ancient nobility invested with the purple, received scarcely more than 30,000 lire* a year to enable him to sustain his rank, that is 22,000 lire,** the salary of his post as Camerlingo, and various small sums derived from other functions. And he would never have made both ends meet had not Donna Serafina helped him with the remnants of the former family fortune which he had long previously surrendered to his sisters and his brother. Donna Serafina and Benedetta lived apart, in their own rooms, having their own table, servants, and personal expenses. The Cardinal only had his nephew Dario with him, and he never gave a dinner or held a public reception. His greatest source of expense was his carriage, the heavy pair-horse coach, which ceremonial usage compelled him to retain, for a cardinal cannot go on foot through the streets of Rome. However, his coachman, an old family servant, spared him the necessity of keeping a groom by insisting on taking entire charge of the carriage and the two black horses, which, like himself, had grown old in the service of the Boccaneras. There were two footmen, father and son, the latter born in the house. And the cook's wife assisted in the kitchen. However, yet greater reductions had been made in the ante-rooms, where the staff, once so brilliant and numerous, was now simply composed of two petty priests, Don Vigilio, who was at once secretary, auditore, and majordomo, and Abbe Paparelli, who acted as train-bearer, chaplain, and chief usher. There, where a crowd of salaried people of all ranks had once moved to and fro, filling the vast halls with bustle and colour, one now only beheld two little black cassocks gliding noiselessly along, two unobtrusive shadows flitting about amidst the deep gloom of the lifeless rooms.

* 1,200 pounds.

** 880 pounds.

And Pierre now fully understood the haughty unconcern of the Cardinal, who suffered time to complete its work of destruction in that ancestral mansion, to which he was powerless to restore the glorious life of former times! Built for that shining life, for the sovereign display of a sixteenth-century prince, it was now deserted and empty, crumbling about the head of its last master, who had no servants left him to fill it, and would not have known how to pay for the materials which repairs would have necessitated. And so, since the modern world was hostile, since religion was no longer sovereign, since men had changed, and one was drifting into the unknown, amidst the hatred and indifference of new generations, why not allow the old world to collapse in the stubborn, motionless pride born of its ancient glory? Heroes alone died standing, without relinquishing aught of their past, preserving the same faith until their final gasp, beholding, with pain-fraught bravery and infinite sadness, the slow last agony of their divinity. And the Cardinal's tall figure, his pale, proud face, so full of sovereign despair and courage, expressed that stubborn determination to perish beneath the ruins of the old social edifice rather than change a single one of its stones.

Pierre was roused by a rustling of furtive steps, a little mouse-like trot, which made him raise his head. A door in the wall had just opened, and to his surprise there stood before him an abbe of some forty years, fat and short, looking like an old maid in a black skirt, a very old maid in fact, so numerous were the wrinkles on his flabby face. It was Abbe Paparelli, the train-bearer and usher, and on seeing Pierre he was about to question him, when Don Vigilio explained matters.

"Ah! very good, very good, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment. His Eminence will condescend to receive you, but you must wait, you must wait."

Then, with his silent rolling walk, he returned to the second ante-room, where he usually stationed himself.

Pierre did not like his face—the face of an old female devotee, whitened by celibacy, and ravaged by stern observance of the rites; and so, as Don Vigilio—his head weary and his hands burning with fever—had not resumed his work, the young man ventured to question him. Oh! Abbe Paparelli, he was a man of the liveliest faith, who from simple humility remained in a modest post in his Eminence's service. On the other hand, his Eminence was pleased to reward him for his devotion by occasionally condescending to listen to his advice.

As Don Vigilio spoke, a faint gleam of irony, a kind of veiled anger appeared in his ardent eyes. However, he continued to examine Pierre, and gradually seemed reassured, appreciating the evident frankness of this foreigner who could hardly belong to any clique. And so he ended by departing somewhat from his continual sickly distrust, and even engaged in a brief chat.

"Yes, yes," he said, "there is a deal of work sometimes, and rather hard work too. His Eminence belongs to several Congregations, the Consistorial, the Holy Office, the Index, the Rites. And all the documents concerning the business which falls to him come into my hands. I have to study each affair, prepare a report on it, clear the way, so to say. Besides which all the correspondence is carried on through me. Fortunately his Eminence is a holy man, and intrigues neither for himself nor for others, and this enables us to taste a little peace."

Pierre took a keen interest in these particulars of the life led by a prince of the Church. He learnt that the Cardinal rose at six o'clock, summer and winter alike. He said his mass in his chapel, a little room which simply contained an altar of painted wood, and which nobody but himself ever entered. His private apartments were limited to three rooms—a bed-room, dining-room, and study—all very modest and small, contrived indeed by partitioning off portions of one large hall. And he led a very retired life, exempt from all luxury, like one who is frugal and poor. At eight in the morning he drank a cup of cold milk for his breakfast. Then, when there were sittings of the Congregations to which he belonged, he attended them; otherwise he remained at home and gave audience. Dinner was served at one o'clock, and afterwards came the siesta, lasting until five in summer and until four at other seasons—a sacred moment when a servant would not have dared even to knock at the door. On awaking, if it were fine, his Eminence drove out towards the ancient Appian Way, returning at sunset when the Ave Maria began to ring. And finally, after again giving audience between seven and nine, he supped and retired into his room, where he worked all alone or went to bed. The cardinals wait upon the Pope on fixed days, two or three times each month, for purposes connected with their functions. For nearly a year, however, the Camerlingo had not been received in private audience by his Holiness, and this was a sign of disgrace, a proof of secret warfare, of which the entire black world spoke in prudent whispers.

"His Eminence is sometimes a little rough," continued Don Vigilio in a soft voice. "But you should see him smile when his niece the Contessina, of whom he is very fond, comes down to kiss him. If you have a good reception, you know, you will owe it to the Contessina."

At this moment the secretary was interrupted. A sound of voices came from the second ante-room, and forthwith he rose to his feet, and bent very low at sight of a stout man in a black cassock, red sash, and black hat, with twisted cord of red and gold, whom Abbe Paparelli was ushering in with a great display of deferential genuflections. Pierre also had risen at a sign from Don Vigilio, who found time to whisper to him, "Cardinal Sanguinetti, Prefect of the Congregation of the Index."

Meantime Abbe Paparelli was lavishing attentions on the prelate, repeating with an expression of blissful satisfaction: "Your most reverend Eminence was expected. I have orders to admit your most reverend Eminence at once. His Eminence the Grand Penitentiary is already here."

Sanguinetti, loud of voice and sonorous of tread, spoke out with sudden familiarity, "Yes, yes, I know. A number of importunate people detained me! One can never do as one desires. But I am here at last."

He was a man of sixty, squat and fat, with a round and highly coloured face distinguished by a huge nose, thick lips, and bright eyes which were always on the move. But he more particularly struck one by his active, almost turbulent, youthful vivacity, scarcely a white hair as yet showing among his brown and carefully tended locks, which fell in curls about his temples. Born at Viterbo, he had studied at the seminary there before completing his education at the Universita Gregoriana in Rome. His ecclesiastical appointments showed how rapidly he had made his way, how supple was his mind: first of all secretary to the nunciature at Lisbon; then created titular Bishop of Thebes, and entrusted with a delicate mission in Brazil; on his return appointed nuncio first at Brussels and next at Vienna; and finally raised to the cardinalate, to say nothing of the fact that he had lately secured the suburban episcopal see of Frascati.* Trained to business, having dealt with every nation in Europe, he had nothing against him but his ambition, of which he made too open a display, and his spirit of intrigue, which was ever restless. It was said that he was now one of the irreconcilables who demanded that Italy should surrender Rome, though formerly he had made advances to the Quirinal. In his wild passion to become the next Pope he rushed from one opinion to the other, giving himself no end of trouble to gain people from whom he afterwards parted. He had twice already fallen out with Leo XIII, but had deemed it politic to make his submission. In point of fact, given that he was an almost openly declared candidate to the papacy, he was wearing himself out by his perpetual efforts, dabbling in too many things, and setting too many people agog.

* Cardinals York and Howard were Bishops of Frascati.—Trans.

Pierre, however, had only seen in him the Prefect of the Congregation of the Index; and the one idea which struck him was that this man would decide the fate of his book. And so, when the Cardinal had disappeared and Abbe Paparelli had returned to the second ante-room, he could not refrain from asking Don Vigilio, "Are their Eminences Cardinal Sanguinetti and Cardinal Boccanera very intimate, then?"

An irrepressible smile contracted the secretary's lips, while his eyes gleamed with an irony which he could no longer subdue: "Very intimate—oh! no, no—they see one another when they can't do otherwise."

Then he explained that considerable deference was shown to Cardinal Boccanera's high birth, and that his colleagues often met at his residence, when, as happened to be the case that morning, any grave affair presented itself, requiring an interview apart from the usual official meetings. Cardinal Sanguinetti, he added, was the son of a petty medical man of Viterbo. "No, no," he concluded, "their Eminences are not at all intimate. It is difficult for men to agree when they have neither the same ideas nor the same character, especially too when they are in each other's way."

Don Vigilio spoke these last words in a lower tone, as if talking to himself and still retaining his sharp smile. But Pierre scarcely listened, absorbed as he was in his own worries. "Perhaps they have met to discuss some affair connected with the Index?" said he.

Don Vigilio must have known the object of the meeting. However, he merely replied that, if the Index had been in question, the meeting would have taken place at the residence of the Prefect of that Congregation. Thereupon Pierre, yielding to his impatience, was obliged to put a straight question. "You know of my affair—the affair of my book," he said. "Well, as his Eminence is a member of the Congregation, and all the documents pass through your hands, you might be able to give me some useful information. I know nothing as yet and am so anxious to know!"

At this Don Vigilio relapsed into scared disquietude. He stammered, saying that he had not seen any documents, which was true. "Nothing has yet reached us," he added; "I assure you I know nothing."

Then, as the other persisted, he signed to him to keep quiet, and again turned to his writing, glancing furtively towards the second ante-room as if he believed that Abbe Paparelli was listening. He had certainly said too much, he thought, and he made himself very small, crouching over the table, and melting, fading away in his dim corner.

Pierre again fell into a reverie, a prey to all the mystery which enveloped him—the sleepy, antique sadness of his surroundings. Long minutes went by; it was nearly eleven when the sound of a door opening and a buzz of voices roused him. Then he bowed respectfully to Cardinal Sanguinetti, who went off accompanied by another cardinal, a very thin and tall man, with a grey, bony, ascetic face. Neither of them, however, seemed even to see the petty foreign priest who bent low as they went by. They were chatting aloud in familiar fashion.

"Yes! the wind is falling; it is warmer than yesterday."

"We shall certainly have the sirocco to-morrow."

Then solemn silence again fell on the large, dim room. Don Vigilio was still writing, but his pen made no noise as it travelled over the stiff yellow paper. However, the faint tinkle of a cracked bell was suddenly heard, and Abbe Paparelli, after hastening into the throne-room for a moment, returned to summon Pierre, whom he announced in a restrained voice: "Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre Froment."

The spacious throne-room was like the other apartments, a virtual ruin. Under the fine ceiling of carved and gilded wood-work, the red wall-hangings of brocatelle, with a large palm pattern, were falling into tatters. A few holes had been patched, but long wear had streaked the dark purple of the silk—once of dazzling magnificence—with pale hues. The curiosity of the room was its old throne, an arm-chair upholstered in red silk, on which the Holy Father had sat when visiting Cardinal Pio's grand-uncle. This chair was surmounted by a canopy, likewise of red silk, under which hung the portrait of the reigning Pope. And, according to custom, the chair was turned towards the wall, to show that none might sit on it. The other furniture of the apartment was made up of sofas, arm-chairs, and chairs, with a marvellous Louis Quatorze table of gilded wood, having a top of mosaic-work representing the rape of Europa.

But at first Pierre only saw Cardinal Boccanera standing by the table which he used for writing. In his simple black cassock, with red edging and red buttons, the Cardinal seemed to him yet taller and prouder than in the portrait which showed him in ceremonial costume. There was the same curly white hair, the same long, strongly marked face, with large nose and thin lips, and the same ardent eyes, illumining the pale countenance from under bushy brows which had remained black. But the portrait did not express the lofty tranquil faith which shone in this handsome face, a complete certainty of what truth was, and an absolute determination to abide by it for ever.

Boccanera had not stirred, but with black, fixed glance remained watching his visitor's approach; and the young priest, acquainted with the usual ceremonial, knelt and kissed the large ruby which the prelate wore on his hand. However, the Cardinal immediately raised him.

"You are welcome here, my dear son. My niece spoke to me about you with so much sympathy that I am happy to receive you." With these words Pio seated himself near the table, as yet not telling Pierre to take a chair, but still examining him whilst speaking slowly and with studied politeness: "You arrived yesterday morning, did you not, and were very tired?"

"Your Eminence is too kind—yes, I was worn out, as much through emotion as fatigue. This journey is one of such gravity for me."

The Cardinal seemed indisposed to speak of serious matters so soon. "No doubt; it is a long way from Paris to Rome," he replied. "Nowadays the journey may be accomplished with fair rapidity, but formerly how interminable it was!" Then speaking yet more slowly: "I went to Paris once—oh! a long time ago, nearly fifty years ago—and then for barely a week. A large and handsome city; yes, yes, a great many people in the streets, extremely well-bred people, a nation which has accomplished great and admirable things. Even in these sad times one cannot forget that France was the eldest daughter of the Church. But since that one journey I have not left Rome—"

Then he made a gesture of quiet disdain, expressive of all he left unsaid. What was the use of journeying to a land of doubt and rebellion? Did not Rome suffice—Rome, which governed the world—the Eternal City which, when the times should be accomplished, would become the capital of the world once more?

Silently glancing at the Cardinal's lofty stature, the stature of one of the violent war-like princes of long ago, now reduced to wearing that simple cassock, Pierre deemed him superb with his proud conviction that Rome sufficed unto herself. But that stubborn resolve to remain in ignorance, that determination to take no account of other nations excepting to treat them as vassals, disquieted him when he reflected on the motives that had brought him there. And as silence had again fallen he thought it politic to approach the subject he had at heart by words of homage.

"Before taking any other steps," said he, "I desired to express my profound respect for your Eminence; for in your Eminence I place my only hope; and I beg your Eminence to be good enough to advise and guide me."

With a wave of the hand Boccanera thereupon invited Pierre to take a chair in front of him. "I certainly do not refuse you my counsel, my dear son," he replied. "I owe my counsel to every Christian who desires to do well. But it would be wrong for you to rely on my influence. I have none. I live entirely apart from others; I cannot and will not ask for anything. However, this will not prevent us from chatting." Then, approaching the question in all frankness, without the slightest artifice, like one of brave and absolute mind who fears no responsibility however great, he continued: "You have written a book, have you not?—'New Rome,' I believe—and you have come to defend this book which has been denounced to the Congregation of the Index. For my own part I have not yet read it. You will understand that I cannot read everything. I only see the works that are sent to me by the Congregation which I have belonged to since last year; and, besides, I often content myself with the reports which my secretary draws up for me. However, my niece Benedetta has read your book, and has told me that it is not lacking in interest. It first astonished her somewhat, and then greatly moved her. So I promise you that I will go through it and study the incriminated passages with the greatest care."

Pierre profited by the opportunity to begin pleading his cause. And it occurred to him that it would be best to give his references at once. "Your Eminence will realise how stupefied I was when I learnt that proceedings were being taken against my book," he said. "Monsieur le Vicomte Philibert de la Choue, who is good enough to show me some friendship, does not cease repeating that such a book is worth the best of armies to the Holy See."

"Oh! De la Choue, De la Choue!" repeated the Cardinal with a pout of good-natured disdain. "I know that De la Choue considers himself a good Catholic. He is in a slight degree our relative, as you know. And when he comes to Rome and stays here, I willingly see him, on condition however that no mention is made of certain subjects on which it would be impossible for us to agree. To tell the truth, the Catholicism preached by De la Choue—worthy, clever man though he is—his Catholicism, I say, with his corporations, his working-class clubs, his cleansed democracy and his vague socialism, is after all merely so much literature!"

This pronouncement struck Pierre, for he realised all the disdainful irony contained in it—an irony which touched himself. And so he hastened to name his other reference, whose authority he imagined to be above discussion: "His Eminence Cardinal Bergerot has been kind enough to signify his full approval of my book."

At this Boccanera's face suddenly changed. It no longer wore an expression of derisive blame, tinged with the pity that is prompted by a child's ill-considered action fated to certain failure. A flash of anger now lighted up the Cardinal's dark eyes, and a pugnacious impulse hardened his entire countenance. "In France," he slowly resumed, "Cardinal Bergerot no doubt has a reputation for great piety. We know little of him in Rome. Personally, I have only seen him once, when he came to receive his hat. And I would not therefore allow myself to judge him if his writings and actions had not recently saddened my believing soul. Unhappily, I am not the only one; you will find nobody here, of the Sacred College, who approves of his doings." Boccanera paused, then in a firm voice concluded: "Cardinal Bergerot is a Revolutionary!"

This time Pierre's surprise for a moment forced him to silence. A Revolutionary—good heavens! a Revolutionary—that gentle pastor of souls, whose charity was inexhaustible, whose one dream was that Jesus might return to earth to ensure at last the reign of peace and justice! So words did not have the same signification in all places; into what religion had he now tumbled that the faith of the poor and the humble should be looked upon as a mere insurrectional, condemnable passion? As yet unable to understand things aright, Pierre nevertheless realised that discussion would be both discourteous and futile, and his only remaining desire was to give an account of his book, explain and vindicate it. But at his first words the Cardinal interposed.

"No, no, my dear son. It would take us too long and I wish to read the passages. Besides, there is an absolute rule. All books which meddle with the faith are condemnable and pernicious. Does your book show perfect respect for dogma?"

"I believe so, and I assure your Eminence that I have had no intention of writing a work of negation."

"Good: I may be on your side if that is true. Only, in the contrary case, I have but one course to advise you, which is to withdraw your work, condemn it, and destroy it without waiting until a decision of the Index compels you to do so. Whosoever has given birth to scandal must stifle it and expiate it, even if he have to cut into his own flesh. The only duties of a priest are humility and obedience, the complete annihilation of self before the sovereign will of the Church. And, besides, why write at all? For there is already rebellion in expressing an opinion of one's own. It is always the temptation of the devil which puts a pen in an author's hand. Why, then, incur the risk of being for ever damned by yielding to the pride of intelligence and domination? Your book again, my dear son—your book is literature, literature!"

This expression again repeated was instinct with so much contempt that Pierre realised all the wretchedness that would fall upon the poor pages of his apostolate on meeting the eyes of this prince who had become a saintly man. With increasing fear and admiration he listened to him, and beheld him growing greater and greater.

"Ah! faith, my dear son, everything is in faith—perfect, disinterested faith—which believes for the sole happiness of believing! How restful it is to bow down before the mysteries without seeking to penetrate them, full of the tranquil conviction that, in accepting them, one possesses both the certain and the final! Is not the highest intellectual satisfaction that which is derived from the victory of the divine over the mind, which it disciplines, and contents so completely that it knows desire no more? And apart from that perfect equilibrium, that explanation of the unknown by the divine, no durable peace is possible for man. If one desires that truth and justice should reign upon earth, it is in God that one must place them. He that does not believe is like a battlefield, the scene of every disaster. Faith alone can tranquillise and deliver."

For an instant Pierre remained silent before the great figure rising up in front of him. At Lourdes he had only seen suffering humanity rushing thither for health of the body and consolation of the soul; but here was the intellectual believer, the mind that needs certainty, finding satisfaction, tasting the supreme enjoyment of doubting no more. He had never previously heard such a cry of joy at living in obedience without anxiety as to the morrow of death. He knew that Boccanera's youth had been somewhat stormy, traversed by acute attacks of sensuality, a flaring of the red blood of his ancestors; and he marvelled at the calm majesty which faith had at last implanted in this descendant of so violent a race, who had no passion remaining in him but that of pride.

"And yet," Pierre at last ventured to say in a timid, gentle voice, "if faith remains essential and immutable, forms change. From hour to hour evolution goes on in all things—the world changes."

"That is not true!" exclaimed the Cardinal, "the world does not change. It continually tramps over the same ground, loses itself, strays into the most abominable courses, and it continually has to be brought back into the right path. That is the truth. In order that the promises of Christ may be fulfilled, is it not necessary that the world should return to its starting point, its original innocence? Is not the end of time fixed for the day when men shall be in possession of the full truth of the Gospel? Yes, truth is in the past, and it is always to the past that one must cling if one would avoid the pitfalls which evil imaginations create. All those fine novelties, those mirages of that famous so-called progress, are simply traps and snares of the eternal tempter, causes of perdition and death. Why seek any further, why constantly incur the risk of error, when for eighteen hundred years the truth has been known? Truth! why it is in Apostolic and Roman Catholicism as created by a long succession of generations! What madness to desire to change it when so many lofty minds, so many pious souls have made of it the most admirable of monuments, the one instrument of order in this world, and of salvation in the next!"

Pierre, whose heart had contracted, refrained from further protest, for he could no longer doubt that he had before him an implacable adversary of his most cherished ideas. Chilled by a covert fear, as though he felt a faint breath, as of a distant wind from a land of ruins, pass over his face, bringing with it the mortal cold of a sepulchre, he bowed respectfully whilst the Cardinal, rising to his full height, continued in his obstinate voice, resonant with proud courage: "And if Catholicism, as its enemies pretend, be really stricken unto death, it must die standing and in all its glorious integrality. You hear me, Monsieur l'Abbe—not one concession, not one surrender, not a single act of cowardice! Catholicism is such as it is, and cannot be otherwise. No modification of the divine certainty, the entire truth, is possible. The removal of the smallest stone from the edifice could only prove a cause of instability. Is this not evident? You cannot save old houses by attacking them with the pickaxe under pretence of decorating them. You only enlarge the fissures. Even if it were true that Rome were on the eve of falling into dust, the only result of all the repairing and patching would be to hasten the catastrophe. And instead of a noble death, met unflinchingly, we should then behold the basest of agonies, the death throes of a coward who struggles and begs for mercy! For my part I wait. I am convinced that all that people say is but so much horrible falsehood, that Catholicism has never been firmer, that it imbibes eternity from the one and only source of life. But should the heavens indeed fall, on that day I should be here, amidst these old and crumbling walls, under these old ceilings whose beams are being devoured by the worms, and it is here, erect, among the ruins, that I should meet my end, repeating my credo for the last time."

His final words fell more slowly, full of haughty sadness, whilst with a sweeping gesture he waved his arms towards the old, silent, deserted palace around him, whence life was withdrawing day by day. Had an involuntary presentiment come to him, did the faint cold breath from the ruins also fan his own cheeks? All the neglect into which the vast rooms had fallen was explained by his words; and a superb, despondent grandeur enveloped this prince and cardinal, this uncompromising Catholic who, withdrawing into the dim half-light of the past, braved with a soldier's heart the inevitable downfall of the olden world.

Deeply impressed, Pierre was about to take his leave when, to his surprise, a little door opened in the hangings. "What is it? Can't I be left in peace for a moment?" exclaimed Boccanera with sudden impatience.

Nevertheless, Abbe Paparelli, fat and sleek, glided into the room without the faintest sign of emotion. And he whispered a few words in the ear of the Cardinal, who, on seeing him, had become calm again. "What curate?" asked Boccanera. "Oh! yes, Santobono, the curate of Frascati. I know—tell him I cannot see him just now."

Paparelli, however, again began whispering in his soft voice, though not in so low a key as previously, for some of his words could be overheard. The affair was urgent, the curate was compelled to return home, and had only a word or two to say. And then, without awaiting consent, the train-bearer ushered in the visitor, a protege of his, whom he had left just outside the little door. And for his own part he withdrew with the tranquillity of a retainer who, whatever the modesty of his office, knows himself to be all powerful.

Pierre, who was momentarily forgotten, looked at the visitor—a big fellow of a priest, the son of a peasant evidently, and still near to the soil. He had an ungainly, bony figure, huge feet and knotted hands, with a seamy tanned face lighted by extremely keen black eyes. Five and forty and still robust, his chin and cheeks bristling, and his cassock, overlarge, hanging loosely about his big projecting bones, he suggested a bandit in disguise. Still there was nothing base about him; the expression of his face was proud. And in one hand he carried a small wicker basket carefully covered over with fig-leaves.

Santobono at once bent his knees and kissed the Cardinal's ring, but with hasty unconcern, as though only some ordinary piece of civility were in question. Then, with that commingling of respect and familiarity which the little ones of the world often evince towards the great, he said, "I beg your most reverend Eminence's forgiveness for having insisted. But there were people waiting, and I should not have been received if my old friend Paparelli had not brought me by way of that door. Oh! I have a very great service to ask of your Eminence, a real service of the heart. But first of all may I be allowed to offer your Eminence a little present?"

The Cardinal listened with a grave expression. He had been well acquainted with Santobono in the years when he had spent the summer at Frascati, at a princely residence which the Boccaneras had possessed there—a villa rebuilt in the seventeenth century, surrounded by a wonderful park, whose famous terrace overlooked the Campagna, stretching far and bare like the sea. This villa, however, had since been sold, and on some vineyards, which had fallen to Benedetta's share, Count Prada, prior to the divorce proceedings, had begun to erect quite a district of little pleasure houses. In former times, when walking out, the Cardinal had condescended to enter and rest in the dwelling of Santobono, who officiated at an antique chapel dedicated to St. Mary of the Fields, without the town. The priest had his home in a half-ruined building adjoining this chapel, and the charm of the place was a walled garden which he cultivated himself with the passion of a true peasant.

"As is my rule every year," said he, placing his basket on the table, "I wished that your Eminence might taste my figs. They are the first of the season. I gathered them expressly this morning. You used to be so fond of them, your Eminence, when you condescended to gather them from the tree itself. You were good enough to tell me that there wasn't another tree in the world that produced such fine figs."

The Cardinal could not help smiling. He was indeed very fond of figs, and Santobono spoke truly: his fig-tree was renowned throughout the district. "Thank you, my dear Abbe," said Boccanera, "you remember my little failings. Well, and what can I do for you?"

Again he became grave, for, in former times, there had been unpleasant discussions between him and the curate, a lack of agreement which had angered him. Born at Nemi, in the core of a fierce district, Santobono belonged to a violent family, and his eldest brother had died of a stab. He himself had always professed ardently patriotic opinions. It was said that he had all but taken up arms for Garibaldi; and, on the day when the Italians had entered Rome, force had been needed to prevent him from raising the flag of Italian unity above his roof. His passionate dream was to behold Rome mistress of the world, when the Pope and the King should have embraced and made cause together. Thus the Cardinal looked on him as a dangerous revolutionary, a renegade who imperilled Catholicism.

"Oh! what your Eminence can do for me, what your Eminence can do if only condescending and willing!" repeated Santobono in an ardent voice, clasping his big knotty hands. And then, breaking off, he inquired, "Did not his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti explain my affair to your most reverend Eminence?"

"No, the Cardinal simply advised me of your visit, saying that you had something to ask of me."

Whilst speaking Boccanera's face had clouded over, and it was with increased sternness of manner that he again waited. He was aware that the priest had become Sanguinetti's "client" since the latter had been in the habit of spending weeks together at his suburban see of Frascati. Walking in the shadow of every cardinal who is a candidate to the papacy, there are familiars of low degree who stake the ambition of their life on the possibility of that cardinal's election. If he becomes Pope some day, if they themselves help him to the throne, they enter the great pontifical family in his train. It was related that Sanguinetti had once already extricated Santobono from a nasty difficulty: the priest having one day caught a marauding urchin in the act of climbing his wall, had beaten the little fellow with such severity that he had ultimately died of it. However, to Santobono's credit it must be added that his fanatical devotion to the Cardinal was largely based upon the hope that he would prove the Pope whom men awaited, the Pope who would make Italy the sovereign nation of the world.

"Well, this is my misfortune," he said. "Your Eminence knows my brother Agostino, who was gardener at the villa for two years in your Eminence's time. He is certainly a very pleasant and gentle young fellow, of whom nobody has ever complained. And so it is hard to understand how such an accident can have happened to him, but it seems that he has killed a man with a knife at Genzano, while walking in the street in the evening. I am dreadfully distressed about it, and would willingly give two fingers of my right hand to extricate him from prison. However, it occurred to me that your Eminence would not refuse me a certificate stating that Agostino was formerly in your Eminence's service, and that your Eminence was always well pleased with his quiet disposition."

But the Cardinal flatly protested: "I was not at all pleased with Agostino. He was wildly violent, and I had to dismiss him precisely because he was always quarrelling with the other servants."

"Oh! how grieved I am to hear your Eminence say that! So it is true, then, my poor little Agostino's disposition has really changed! Still there is always a way out of a difficulty, is there not? You can still give me a certificate, first arranging the wording of it. A certificate from your Eminence would have such a favourable effect upon the law officers."

"No doubt," replied Boccanera; "I can understand that, but I will give no certificate."

"What! does your most reverend Eminence refuse my prayer?"

"Absolutely! I know that you are a priest of perfect morality, that you discharge the duties of your ministry with strict punctuality, and that you would be deserving of high commendation were it not for your political fancies. Only your fraternal affection is now leading you astray. I cannot tell a lie to please you."

Santobono gazed at him in real stupefaction, unable to understand that a prince, an all-powerful cardinal, should be influenced by such petty scruples, when the entire question was a mere knife thrust, the most commonplace and frequent of incidents in the yet wild land of the old Roman castles.

"A lie! a lie!" he muttered; "but surely it isn't lying just to say what is good of a man, leaving out all the rest, especially when a man has good points as Agostino certainly has. In a certificate, too, everything depends on the words one uses."

He stubbornly clung to that idea; he could not conceive that a person should refuse to soften the rigour of justice by an ingenious presentation of the facts. However, on acquiring a certainty that he would obtain nothing, he made a gesture of despair, his livid face assuming an expression of violent rancour, whilst his black eyes flamed with restrained passion.

"Well, well! each looks on truth in his own way," he said. "I shall go back to tell his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti. And I beg your Eminence not to be displeased with me for having disturbed your Eminence to no purpose. By the way, perhaps the figs are not yet quite ripe; but I will take the liberty to bring another basketful towards the end of the season, when they will be quite nice and sweet. A thousand thanks and a thousand felicities to your most reverend Eminence."

Santobono went off backwards, his big bony figure bending double with repeated genuflections. Pierre, whom the scene had greatly interested, in him beheld a specimen of the petty clergy of Rome and its environs, of whom people had told him before his departure from Paris. This was not the scagnozzo, the wretched famished priest whom some nasty affair brings from the provinces, who seeks his daily bread on the pavements of Rome; one of the herd of begowned beggars searching for a livelihood among the crumbs of Church life, voraciously fighting for chance masses, and mingling with the lowest orders in taverns of the worst repute. Nor was this the country priest of distant parts, a man of crass ignorance and superstition, a peasant among the peasants, treated as an equal by his pious flock, which is careful not to mistake him for the Divinity, and which, whilst kneeling in all humility before the parish saint, does not bend before the man who from that saint derives his livelihood. At Frascati the officiating minister of a little church may receive a stipend of some nine hundred lire a year,* and he has only bread and meat to buy if his garden yields him wine and fruit and vegetables. This one, Santobono, was not without education; he knew a little theology and a little history, especially the history of the past grandeur of Rome, which had inflamed his patriotic heart with the mad dream that universal domination would soon fall to the portion of renascent Rome, the capital of united Italy. But what an insuperable distance still remained between this petty Roman clergy, often very worthy and intelligent, and the high clergy, the high dignitaries of the Vatican! Nobody that was not at least a prelate seemed to count.

* About 36 pounds. One is reminded of Goldsmith's line: "And
passing rich with forty pounds a year."—Trans.

"A thousand thanks to your most reverend Eminence, and may success attend all your Eminence's desires."

With these words Santobono finally disappeared, and the Cardinal returned to Pierre, who also bowed preparatory to taking his leave.

"To sum up the matter, Monsieur l'Abbe," said Boccanera, "the affair of your book presents certain difficulties. As I have told you, I have no precise information, I have seen no documents. But knowing that my niece took an interest in you, I said a few words on the subject to Cardinal Sanguinetti, the Prefect of the Index, who was here just now. And he knows little more than I do, for nothing has yet left the Secretary's hands. Still he told me that the denunciation emanated from personages of rank and influence, and applied to numerous pages of your work, in which it was said there were passages of the most deplorable character as regards both discipline and dogma."

Greatly moved by the idea that he had hidden foes, secret adversaries who pursued him in the dark, the young priest responded: "Oh! denounced, denounced! If your Eminence only knew how that word pains my heart! And denounced, too, for offences which were certainly involuntary, since my one ardent desire was the triumph of the Church! All I can do, then, is to fling myself at the feet of the Holy Father and entreat him to hear my defence."

Boccanera suddenly became very grave again. A stern look rested on his lofty brow as he drew his haughty figure to its full height. "His Holiness," said he, "can do everything, even receive you, if such be his good pleasure, and absolve you also. But listen to me. I again advise you to withdraw your book yourself, to destroy it, simply and courageously, before embarking in a struggle in which you will reap the shame of being overwhelmed. Reflect on that."

Pierre, however, had no sooner spoken of the Pope than he had regretted it, for he realised that an appeal to the sovereign authority was calculated to wound the Cardinal's feelings. Moreover, there was no further room for doubt. Boccanera would be against his book, and the utmost that he could hope for was to gain his neutrality by bringing pressure to bear on him through those about him. At the same time he had found the Cardinal very plain spoken, very frank, far removed from all the secret intriguing in which the affair of his book was involved, as he now began to realise; and so it was with deep respect and genuine admiration for the prelate's strong and lofty character that he took leave of him.

"I am infinitely obliged to your Eminence," he said, "and I promise that I will carefully reflect upon all that your Eminence has been kind enough to say to me."

On returning to the ante-room, Pierre there found five or six persons who had arrived during his audience, and were now waiting. There was a bishop, a domestic prelate, and two old ladies, and as he drew near to Don Vigilio before retiring, he was surprised to find him conversing with a tall, fair young fellow, a Frenchman, who, also in astonishment, exclaimed, "What! are you here in Rome, Monsieur l'Abbe?"

For a moment Pierre had hesitated. "Ah! I must ask your pardon, Monsieur Narcisse Habert," he replied, "I did not at first recognise you! It was the less excusable as I knew that you had been an attache at our embassy here ever since last year."

Tall, slim, and elegant of appearance, Narcisse Habert had a clear complexion, with eyes of a bluish, almost mauvish, hue, a fair frizzy beard, and long curling fair hair cut short over the forehead in the Florentine fashion. Of a wealthy family of militant Catholics, chiefly members of the bar or bench, he had an uncle in the diplomatic profession, and this had decided his own career. Moreover, a place at Rome was marked out for him, for he there had powerful connections. He was a nephew by marriage of Cardinal Sarno, whose sister had married another of his uncles, a Paris notary; and he was also cousin german of Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, a Cameriere segreto, and son of one of his aunts, who had married an Italian colonel. And in some measure for these reasons he had been attached to the embassy to the Holy See, his superiors tolerating his somewhat fantastic ways, his everlasting passion for art which sent him wandering hither and thither through Rome. He was moreover very amiable and extremely well-bred; and it occasionally happened, as was the case that morning, that with his weary and somewhat mysterious air he came to speak to one or another of the cardinals on some real matter of business in the ambassador's name.

So as to converse with Pierre at his ease, he drew him into the deep embrasure of one of the windows. "Ah! my dear Abbe, how pleased I am to see you!" said he. "You must remember what pleasant chats we had when we met at Cardinal Bergerot's! I told you about some paintings which you were to see for your book, some miniatures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. And now, you know, I mean to take possession of you. I'll show you Rome as nobody else could show it to you. I've seen and explored everything. Ah! there are treasures, such treasures! But in truth there is only one supreme work; one always comes back to one's particular passion. The Botticelli in the Sixtine Chapel—ah, the Botticelli!"

His voice died away, and he made a faint gesture as if overcome by admiration. Then Pierre had to promise that he would place himself in his hands and accompany him to the Sixtine Chapel. "You know why I am here," at last said the young priest. "Proceedings have been taken against my book; it has been denounced to the Congregation of the Index."

"Your book! is it possible?" exclaimed Narcisse: "a book like that with pages recalling the delightful St. Francis of Assisi!" And thereupon he obligingly placed himself at Pierre's disposal. "But our ambassador will be very useful to you," he said. "He is the best man in the world, of charming affability, and full of the old French spirit. I will present you to him this afternoon or to-morrow morning at the latest; and since you desire an immediate audience with the Pope, he will endeavour to obtain one for you. His position naturally designates him as your intermediary. Still, I must confess that things are not always easily managed. Although the Holy Father is very fond of him, there are times when his Excellency fails, for the approaches are so extremely intricate."

Pierre had not thought of employing the ambassador's good offices, for he had naively imagined that an accused priest who came to defend himself would find every door open. However, he was delighted with Narcisse's offer, and thanked him as warmly as if the audience were already obtained.

"Besides," the young man continued, "if we encounter any difficulties I have relatives at the Vatican, as you know. I don't mean my uncle the Cardinal, who would be of no use to us, for he never stirs out of his office at the Propaganda, and will never apply for anything. But my cousin, Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, is very obliging, and he lives in intimacy with the Pope, his duties requiring his constant attendance on him. So, if necessary, I will take you to see him, and he will no doubt find a means of procuring you an interview, though his extreme prudence keeps him perpetually afraid of compromising himself. However, it's understood, you may rely on me in every respect."

"Ah! my dear sir," exclaimed Pierre, relieved and happy, "I heartily accept your offer. You don't know what balm your words have brought me; for ever since my arrival everybody has been discouraging me, and you are the first to restore my strength by looking at things in the true French way."

Then, lowering his voice, he told the attache of his interview with Cardinal Boccanera, of his conviction that the latter would not help him, of the unfavourable information which had been given by Cardinal Sanguinetti, and of the rivalry which he had divined between the two prelates. Narcisse listened, smiling, and in his turn began to gossip confidentially. The rivalry which Pierre had mentioned, the premature contest for the tiara which Sanguinetti and Boccanera were waging, impelled to it by a furious desire to become the next Pope, had for a long time been revolutionising the black world. There was incredible intricacy in the depths of the affair; none could exactly tell who was pulling the strings, conducting the vast intrigue. As regards generalities it was simply known that Boccanera represented absolutism—the Church freed from all compromises with modern society, and waiting in immobility for the Deity to triumph over Satan, for Rome to be restored to the Holy Father, and for repentant Italy to perform penance for its sacrilege; whereas Sanguinetti, extremely politic and supple, was reported to harbour bold and novel ideas: permission to vote to be granted to all true Catholics,* a majority to be gained by this means in the Legislature; then, as a fatal corollary, the downfall of the House of Savoy, and the proclamation of a kind of republican federation of all the former petty States of Italy under the august protectorate of the Pope. On the whole, the struggle was between these two antagonistic elements—the first bent on upholding the Church by a rigorous maintenance of the old traditions, and the other predicting the fall of the Church if it did not follow the bent of the coming century. But all was steeped in so much mystery that people ended by thinking that, if the present Pope should live a few years longer, his successor would certainly be neither Boccanera nor Sanguinetti.

* Since the occupation of Rome by the Italian authorities, the
supporters of the Church, obedient to the prohibition of the
Vatican, have abstained from taking part in the political
elections, this being their protest against the new order of
things which they do not recognise. Various attempts have been
made, however, to induce the Pope to give them permission to
vote, many members of the Roman aristocracy considering the
present course impolitic and even harmful to the interests of
the Church.—Trans.

All at once Pierre interrupted Narcisse: "And Monsignor Nani, do you know him? I spoke with him yesterday evening. And there he is coming in now!"

Nani was indeed just entering the ante-room with his usual smile on his amiable pink face. His cassock of fine texture, and his sash of violet silk shone with discreet soft luxury. And he showed himself very amiable to Abbe Paparelli, who, accompanying him in all humility, begged him to be kind enough to wait until his Eminence should be able to receive him.

"Oh! Monsignor Nani," muttered Narcisse, becoming serious, "he is a man whom it is advisable to have for a friend."

Then, knowing Nani's history, he related it in an undertone. Born at Venice, of a noble but ruined family which had produced heroes, Nani, after first studying under the Jesuits, had come to Rome to perfect himself in philosophy and theology at the Collegio Romano, which was then also under Jesuit management. Ordained when three and twenty, he had at once followed a nuncio to Bavaria as private secretary; and then had gone as auditore to the nunciatures of Brussels and Paris, in which latter city he had lived for five years. Everything seemed to predestine him to diplomacy, his brilliant beginnings and his keen and encyclopaedical intelligence; but all at once he had been recalled to Rome, where he was soon afterwards appointed Assessor to the Holy Office. It was asserted at the time that this was done by the Pope himself, who, being well acquainted with Nani, and desirous of having a person he could depend upon at the Holy Office, had given instructions for his recall, saying that he could render far more services at Rome than abroad. Already a domestic prelate, Nani had also lately become a Canon of St. Peter's and an apostolic prothonotary, with the prospect of obtaining a cardinal's hat whenever the Pope should find some other favourite who would please him better as assessor.

"Oh, Monsignor Nani!" continued Narcisse. "He's a superior man, thoroughly well acquainted with modern Europe, and at the same time a very saintly priest, a sincere believer, absolutely devoted to the Church, with the substantial faith of an intelligent politician—a belief different, it is true, from the narrow gloomy theological faith which we know so well in France. And this is one of the reasons why you will hardly understand things here at first. The Roman prelates leave the Deity in the sanctuary and reign in His name, convinced that Catholicism is the human expression of the government of God, the only perfect and eternal government, beyond the pales of which nothing but falsehood and social danger can be found. While we in our country lag behind, furiously arguing whether there be a God or not, they do not admit that God's existence can be doubted, since they themselves are his delegated ministers; and they entirely devote themselves to playing their parts as ministers whom none can dispossess, exercising their power for the greatest good of humanity, and devoting all their intelligence, all their energy to maintaining themselves as the accepted masters of the nations. As for Monsignor Nani, after being mixed up in the politics of the whole world, he has for ten years been discharging the most delicate functions in Rome, taking part in the most varied and most important affairs. He sees all the foreigners who come to Rome, knows everything, has a hand in everything. Add to this that he is extremely discreet and amiable, with a modesty which seems perfect, though none can tell whether, with his light silent footstep, he is not really marching towards the highest ambition, the purple of sovereignty."

"Another candidate for the tiara," thought Pierre, who had listened passionately; for this man Nani interested him, caused him an instinctive disquietude, as though behind his pink and smiling face he could divine an infinity of obscure things. At the same time, however, the young priest but ill understood his friend, for he again felt bewildered by all this strange Roman world, so different from what he had expected.

Nani had perceived the two young men and came towards them with his hand cordially outstretched "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, I am happy to meet you again. I won't ask you if you have slept well, for people always sleep well at Rome. Good-day, Monsieur Habert; your health has kept good I hope, since I met you in front of Bernini's Santa Teresa, which you admire so much.* I see that you know one another. That is very nice. I must tell you, Monsieur l'Abbe, that Monsieur Habert is a passionate lover of our city; he will be able to show you all its finest sights."

* The allusion is to a statue representing St. Theresa in ecstasy,
with the Angel of Death descending to transfix her with his dart.
It stands in a transept of Sta. Maria della Vittoria.—Trans.

Then, in his affectionate way, he at once asked for information respecting Pierre's interview with the Cardinal. He listened attentively to the young man's narrative, nodding his head at certain passages, and occasionally restraining his sharp smile. The Cardinal's severity and Pierre's conviction that he would accord him no support did not at all astonish Nani. It seemed as if he had expected that result. However, on hearing that Cardinal Sanguinetti had been there that morning, and had pronounced the affair of the book to be very serious, he appeared to lose his self-control for a moment, for he spoke out with sudden vivacity:

"It can't be helped, my dear child, my intervention came too late. Directly I heard of the proceedings I went to his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti to tell him that the result would be an immense advertisement for your book. Was it sensible? What was the use of it? We know that you are inclined to be carried away by your ideas, that you are an enthusiast, and are prompt to do battle. So what advantage should we gain by embarrassing ourselves with the revolt of a young priest who might wage war against us with a book of which some thousands of copies have been sold already? For my part I desired that nothing should be done. And I must say that the Cardinal, who is a man of sense, was of the same mind. He raised his arms to heaven, went into a passion, and exclaimed that he was never consulted, that the blunder was already committed beyond recall, and that it was impossible to prevent process from taking its course since the matter had already been brought before the Congregation, in consequence of denunciations from authoritative sources, based on the gravest motives. Briefly, as he said, the blunder was committed, and I had to think of something else."

All at once Nani paused. He had just noticed that Pierre's ardent eyes were fixed upon his own, striving to penetrate his meaning. A faint flush then heightened the pinkiness of his complexion, whilst in an easy way he continued, unwilling to reveal how annoyed he was at having said too much: "Yes, I thought of helping you with all the little influence I possess, in order to extricate you from the worries in which this affair will certainly land you."

An impulse of revolt was stirring Pierre, who vaguely felt that he was perhaps being made game of. Why should he not be free to declare his faith, which was so pure, so free from personal considerations, so full of glowing Christian charity? "Never," said he, "will I withdraw; never will I myself suppress my book, as I am advised to do. It would be an act of cowardice and falsehood, for I regret nothing, I disown nothing. If I believe that my book brings a little truth to light I cannot destroy it without acting criminally both towards myself and towards others. No, never! You hear me—never!"

Silence fell. But almost immediately he resumed: "It is at the knees of the Holy Father that I desire to make that declaration. He will understand me, he will approve me."

Nani no longer smiled; henceforth his face remained as it were closed. He seemed to be studying the sudden violence of the young priest with curiosity; then sought to calm him with his own tranquil kindliness. "No doubt, no doubt," said he. "There is certainly great sweetness in obedience and humility. Still I can understand that, before anything else, you should desire to speak to his Holiness. And afterwards you will see—is that not so?—you will see—"

Then he evinced a lively interest in the suggested application for an audience. He expressed keen regret that Pierre had not forwarded that application from Paris, before even coming to Rome: in that course would have rested the best chance of a favourable reply. Bother of any kind was not liked at the Vatican, and if the news of the young priest's presence in Rome should only spread abroad, and the motives of his journey be discussed, all would be lost. Then, on learning that Narcisse had offered to present Pierre to the French ambassador, Nani seemed full of anxiety, and deprecated any such proceeding: "No, no! don't do that—it would be most imprudent. In the first place you would run the risk of embarrassing the ambassador, whose position is always delicate in affairs of this kind. And then, too, if he failed—and my fear is that he might fail—yes, if he failed it would be all over; you would no longer have the slightest chance of obtaining an audience by any other means. For the Vatican would not like to hurt the ambassador's feelings by yielding to other influence after resisting his."

Pierre anxiously glanced at Narcisse, who wagged his head, embarrassed and hesitating. "The fact is," the attache at last murmured, "we lately solicited an audience for a high French personage and it was refused, which was very unpleasant for us. Monsignor is right. We must keep our ambassador in reserve, and only utilise him when we have exhausted all other means." Then, noticing Pierre's disappointment, he added obligingly: "Our first visit therefore shall be for my cousin at the Vatican."

Nani, his attention again roused, looked at the young man in astonishment. "At the Vatican? You have a cousin there?"

"Why, yes—Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo."

"Gamba! Gamba! Yes, yes, excuse me, I remember now. Ah! so you thought of Gamba to bring influence to bear on his Holiness? That's an idea, no doubt; one must see—one must see."

He repeated these words again and again as if to secure time to see into the matter himself, to weigh the pros and cons of the suggestion. Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo was a worthy man who played no part at the Papal Court, whose nullity indeed had become a byword at the Vatican. His childish stories, however, amused the Pope, whom he greatly flattered, and who was fond of leaning on his arm while walking in the gardens. It was during these strolls that Gamba easily secured all sorts of little favours. However, he was a remarkable poltroon, and had such an intense fear of losing his influence that he never risked a request without having convinced himself by long meditation that no possible harm could come to him through it.

"Well, do you know, the idea is not a bad one," Nani at last declared. "Yes, yes, Gamba can secure the audience for you, if he is willing. I will see him myself and explain the matter."

At the same time Nani did not cease advising extreme caution. He even ventured to say that it was necessary to be on one's guard with the papal entourage, for, alas! it was a fact his Holiness was so good, and had such a blind faith in the goodness of others, that he had not always chosen his familiars with the critical care which he ought to have displayed. Thus one never knew to what sort of man one might be applying, or in what trap one might be setting one's foot. Nani even allowed it to be understood that on no account ought any direct application to be made to his Eminence the Secretary of State, for even his Eminence was not a free agent, but found himself encompassed by intrigues of such intricacy that his best intentions were paralysed. And as Nani went on discoursing in this fashion, in a very gentle, extremely unctuous manner, the Vatican appeared like some enchanted castle, guarded by jealous and treacherous dragons—a castle where one must not take a step, pass through a doorway, risk a limb, without having carefully assured oneself that one would not leave one's whole body there to be devoured.

Pierre continued listening, feeling colder and colder at heart, and again sinking into uncertainty. "Mon Dieu!" he exclaimed, "I shall never know how to act. You discourage me, Monsignor."

At this Nani's cordial smile reappeared. "I, my dear child? I should be sorry to do so. I only want to repeat to you that you must wait and do nothing. Avoid all feverishness especially. There is no hurry, I assure you, for it was only yesterday that a consultore was chosen to report upon your book, so you have a good full month before you. Avoid everybody, live in such a way that people shall be virtually ignorant of your existence, visit Rome in peace and quietness—that is the best course you can adopt to forward your interests." Then, taking one of the priest's hands between both his own, so aristocratic, soft, and plump, he added: "You will understand that I have my reasons for speaking to you like this. I should have offered my own services; I should have made it a point of honour to take you straight to his Holiness, had I thought it advisable. But I do not wish to mix myself up in the matter at this stage; I realise only too well that at the present moment we should simply make sad work of it. Later on—you hear me—later on, in the event of nobody else succeeding, I myself will obtain you an audience; I formally promise it. But meanwhile, I entreat you, refrain from using those words 'a new religion,' which, unfortunately, occur in your book, and which I heard you repeat again only last night. There can be no new religion, my dear child; there is but one eternal religion, which is beyond all surrender and compromise—the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion. And at the same time leave your Paris friends to themselves. Don't rely too much on Cardinal Bergerot, whose lofty piety is not sufficiently appreciated in Rome. I assure you that I am speaking to you as a friend."

Then, seeing how disabled Pierre appeared to be, half overcome already, no longer knowing in what direction to begin his campaign, he again strove to comfort him: "Come, come, things will right themselves; everything will end for the best, both for the welfare of the Church and your own. And now you must excuse me, I must leave you; I shall not be able to see his Eminence to-day, for it is impossible for me to wait any longer."

Abbe Paparelli, whom Pierre had noticed prowling around with his ears cocked, now hastened forward and declared to Monsignor Nani that there were only two persons to be received before him. But the prelate very graciously replied that he would come back again at another time, for the affair which he wished to lay before his Eminence was in no wise pressing. Then he withdrew, courteously bowing to everybody.

Narcisse Habert's turn came almost immediately afterwards. However, before entering the throne-room he pressed Pierre's hand, repeating, "So it is understood. I will go to see my cousin at the Vatican to-morrow, and directly I get a reply I will let you know. We shall meet again soon I hope."

It was now past twelve o'clock, and the only remaining visitor was one of the two old ladies who seemed to have fallen asleep. At his little secretarial table Don Vigilio still sat covering huge sheets of yellow paper with fine handwriting, from which he only lifted his eyes at intervals to glance about him distrustfully, and make sure that nothing threatened him.

In the mournful silence which fell around, Pierre lingered for yet another moment in the deep embrasure of the window. Ah! what anxiety consumed his poor, tender, enthusiastic heart! On leaving Paris things had seemed so simple, so natural to him! He was unjustly accused, and he started off to defend himself, arrived and flung himself at the feet of the Holy Father, who listened to him indulgently. Did not the Pope personify living religion, intelligence to understand, justice based upon truth? And was he not, before aught else, the Father, the delegate of divine forgiveness and mercy, with arms outstretched towards all the children of the Church, even the guilty ones? Was it not meet, then, that he should leave his door wide open so that the humblest of his sons might freely enter to relate their troubles, confess their transgressions, explain their conduct, imbibe comfort from the source of eternal loving kindness? And yet on the very first day of his, Pierre's, arrival, the doors closed upon him with a bang; he felt himself sinking into a hostile sphere, full of traps and pitfalls. One and all cried out to him "Beware!" as if he were incurring the greatest dangers in setting one foot before the other. His desire to see the Pope became an extraordinary pretension, so difficult of achievement that it set the interests and passions and influences of the whole Vatican agog. And there was endless conflicting advice, long-discussed manoeuvring, all the strategy of generals leading an army to victory, and fresh complications ever arising in the midst of a dim stealthy swarming of intrigues. Ah! good Lord! how different all this was from the charitable reception that Pierre had anticipated: the pastor's house standing open beside the high road for the admission of all the sheep of the flock, both those that were docile and those that had gone astray.

That which began to frighten Pierre, however, was the evil, the wickedness, which he could divine vaguely stirring in the gloom: Cardinal Bergerot suspected, dubbed a Revolutionary, deemed so compromising that he, Pierre, was advised not to mention his name again! The young priest once more saw Cardinal Boccanera's pout of disdain while speaking of his colleague. And then Monsignor Nani had warned him not to repeat those words "a new religion," as if it were not clear to everybody that they simply signified the return of Catholicism to the primitive purity of Christianity! Was that one of the crimes denounced to the Congregation of the Index? He had begun to suspect who his accusers were, and felt alarmed, for he was now conscious of secret subterranean plotting, a great stealthy effort to strike him down and suppress his work. All that surrounded him became suspicious. If he listened to advice and temporised, it was solely to follow the same politic course as his adversaries, to learn to know them before acting. He would spend a few days in meditation, in surveying and studying that black world of Rome which to him had proved so unexpected. But, at the same time, in the revolt of his apostle-like faith, he swore, even as he had said to Nani, that he would never yield, never change either a page or a line of his book, but maintain it in its integrity in the broad daylight as the unshakable testimony of his belief. Even were the book condemned by the Index, he would not tender submission, withdraw aught of it. And should it become necessary he would quit the Church, he would go even as far as schism, continuing to preach the new religion and writing a new book, Real Rome, such as he now vaguely began to espy.

However, Don Vigilio had ceased writing, and gazed so fixedly at Pierre that the latter at last stepped up to him politely in order to take leave. And then the secretary, yielding, despite his fears, to a desire to confide in him, murmured, "He came simply on your account, you know; he wanted to ascertain the result of your interview with his Eminence."

It was not necessary for Don Vigilio to mention Nani by name; Pierre understood. "Really, do you think so?" he asked.

"Oh! there is no doubt of it. And if you take my advice you will do what he desires with a good grace, for it is absolutely certain that you will do it later on."

These words brought Pierre's disquietude and exasperation to a climax. He went off with a gesture of defiance. They would see if he would ever yield.

The three ante-rooms which he again crossed appeared to him blacker, emptier, more lifeless than ever. In the second one Abbe Paparelli saluted him with a little silent bow; in the first the sleepy lackey did not even seem to see him. A spider was weaving its web between the tassels of the great red hat under the baldacchino. Would not the better course have been to set the pick at work amongst all that rotting past, now crumbling into dust, so that the sunlight might stream in freely and restore to the purified soil the fruitfulness of youth?

PART II.

IV.

ON the afternoon of that same day Pierre, having leisure before him, at once thought of beginning his peregrinations through Rome by a visit on which he had set his heart. Almost immediately after the publication of "New Rome" he had been deeply moved and interested by a letter addressed to him from the Eternal City by old Count Orlando Prada, the hero of Italian independence and reunion, who, although unacquainted with him, had written spontaneously after a first hasty perusal of his book. And the letter had been a flaming protest, a cry of the patriotic faith still young in the heart of that aged man, who accused him of having forgotten Italy and claimed Rome, the new Rome, for the country which was at last free and united. Correspondence had ensued, and the priest, while clinging to his dream of Neo-Catholicism saving the world, had from afar grown attached to the man who wrote to him with such glowing love of country and freedom. He had eventually informed him of his journey, and promised to call upon him. But the hospitality which he had accepted at the Boccanera mansion now seemed to him somewhat of an impediment; for after Benedetta's kindly, almost affectionate, greeting, he felt that he could not, on the very first day and with out warning her, sally forth to visit the father of the man from whom she had fled and from whom she now asked the Church to part her for ever. Moreover, old Orlando was actually living with his son in a little palazzo which the latter had erected at the farther end of the Via Venti Settembre.

Before venturing on any step Pierre resolved to confide in the Contessina herself; and this seemed the easier as Viscount Philibert de la Choue had told him that the young woman still retained a filial feeling, mingled with admiration, for the old hero. And indeed, at the very first words which he uttered after lunch, Benedetta promptly retorted: "But go, Monsieur l'Abbe, go at once! Old Orlando, you know, is one of our national glories—you must not be surprised to hear me call him by his Christian name. All Italy does so, from pure affection and gratitude. For my part I grew up among people who hated him, who likened him to Satan. It was only later that I learned to know him, and then I loved him, for he is certainly the most just and gentle man in the world."

She had begun to smile, but timid tears were moistening her eyes at the recollection, no doubt, of the year of suffering she had spent in her husband's house, where her only peaceful hours had been those passed with the old man. And in a lower and somewhat tremulous voice she added: "As you are going to see him, tell him from me that I still love him, and, whatever happens, shall never forget his goodness."

So Pierre set out, and whilst he was driving in a cab towards the Via Venti Settembre, he recalled to mind the heroic story of old Orlando's life which had been told him in Paris. It was like an epic poem, full of faith, bravery, and the disinterestedness of another age.

Born of a noble house of Milan, Count Orlando Prada had learnt to hate the foreigner at such an early age that, when scarcely fifteen, he already formed part of a secret society, one of the ramifications of the antique Carbonarism. This hatred of Austrian domination had been transmitted from father to son through long years, from the olden days of revolt against servitude, when the conspirators met by stealth in abandoned huts, deep in the recesses of the forests; and it was rendered the keener by the eternal dream of Italy delivered, restored to herself, transformed once more into a great sovereign nation, the worthy daughter of those who had conquered and ruled the world. Ah! that land of whilom glory, that unhappy, dismembered, parcelled Italy, the prey of a crowd of petty tyrants, constantly invaded and appropriated by neighbouring nations—how superb and ardent was that dream to free her from such long opprobrium! To defeat the foreigner, drive out the despots, awaken the people from the base misery of slavery, to proclaim Italy free and Italy united—such was the passion which then inflamed the young with inextinguishable ardour, which made the youthful Orlando's heart leap with enthusiasm. He spent his early years consumed by holy indignation, proudly and impatiently longing for an opportunity to give his blood for his country, and to die for her if he could not deliver her.

Quivering under the yoke, wasting his time in sterile conspiracies, he was living in retirement in the old family residence at Milan, when, shortly after his marriage and his twenty-fifth birthday, tidings came to him of the flight of Pius IX and the Revolution of Rome.* And at once he quitted everything, wife and hearth, and hastened to Rome as if summoned thither by the call of destiny. This was the first time that he set out scouring the roads for the attainment of independence; and how frequently, yet again and again, was he to start upon fresh campaigns, never wearying, never disheartened! And now it was that he became acquainted with Mazzini, and for a moment was inflamed with enthusiasm for that mystical unitarian Republican. He himself indulged in an ardent dream of a Universal Republic, adopted the Mazzinian device, "Dio e popolo" (God and the people), and followed the procession which wended its way with great pomp through insurrectionary Rome. The time was one of vast hopes, one when people already felt a need of renovated religion, and looked to the coming of a humanitarian Christ who would redeem the world yet once again. But before long a man, a captain of the ancient days, Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose epic glory was dawning, made Orlando entirely his own, transformed him into a soldier whose sole cause was freedom and union. Orlando loved Garibaldi as though the latter were a demi-god, fought beside him in defence of Republican Rome, took part in the victory of Rieti over the Neapolitans, and followed the stubborn patriot in his retreat when he sought to succour Venice, compelled as he was to relinquish the Eternal City to the French army of General Oudinot, who came thither to reinstate Pius IX. And what an extraordinary and madly heroic adventure was that of Garibaldi and Venice! Venice, which Manin, another great patriot, a martyr, had again transformed into a republican city, and which for long months had been resisting the Austrians! And Garibaldi starts with a handful of men to deliver the city, charters thirteen fishing barks, loses eight in a naval engagement, is compelled to return to the Roman shores, and there in all wretchedness is bereft of his wife, Anita, whose eyes he closes before returning to America, where, once before, he had awaited the hour of insurrection. Ah! that land of Italy, which in those days rumbled from end to end with the internal fire of patriotism, where men of faith and courage arose in every city, where riots and insurrections burst forth on all sides like eruptions—it continued, in spite of every check, its invincible march to freedom!

* It was on November 24, 1848, that the Pope fled to Gaeta,
consequent upon the insurrection which had broken out nine
days previously.—Trans.

Orlando returned to his young wife at Milan, and for two years lived there, almost in concealment, devoured by impatience for the glorious morrow which was so long in coming. Amidst his fever a gleam of happiness softened his heart; a son, Luigi, was born to him, but the birth killed the mother, and joy was turned into mourning. Then, unable to remain any longer at Milan, where he was spied upon, tracked by the police, suffering also too grievously from the foreign occupation, Orlando decided to realise the little fortune remaining to him, and to withdraw to Turin, where an aunt of his wife took charge of the child. Count di Cavour, like a great statesman, was then already seeking to bring about independence, preparing Piedmont for the decisive role which it was destined to play. It was the time when King Victor Emmanuel evinced flattering cordiality towards all the refugees who came to him from every part of Italy, even those whom he knew to be Republicans, compromised and flying the consequences of popular insurrection. The rough, shrewd House of Savoy had long been dreaming of bringing about Italian unity to the profit of the Piedmontese monarchy, and Orlando well knew under what master he was taking service; but in him the Republican already went behind the patriot, and indeed he had begun to question the possibility of a united Republican Italy, placed under the protectorate of a liberal Pope, as Mazzini had at one time dreamed. Was that not indeed a chimera beyond realisation which would devour generation after generation if one obstinately continued to pursue it? For his part, he did not wish to die without having slept in Rome as one of the conquerors. Even if liberty was to be lost, he desired to see his country united and erect, returning once more to life in the full sunlight. And so it was with feverish happiness that he enlisted at the outset of the war of 1859; and his heart palpitated with such force as almost to rend his breast, when, after Magenta, he entered Milan with the French army—Milan which he had quitted eight years previously, like an exile, in despair. The treaty of Villafranca which followed Solferino proved a bitter deception: Venetia was not secured, Venice remained enthralled. Nevertheless the Milanese was conquered from the foe, and then Tuscany and the duchies of Parma and Modena voted for annexation. So, at all events, the nucleus of the Italian star was formed; the country had begun to build itself up afresh around victorious Piedmont.

Then, in the following year, Orlando plunged into epopoeia once more. Garibaldi had returned from his two sojourns in America, with the halo of a legend round him—paladin-like feats in the pampas of Uruguay, an extraordinary passage from Canton to Lima—and he had returned to take part in the war of 1859, forestalling the French army, overthrowing an Austrian marshal, and entering Como, Bergamo, and Brescia. And now, all at once, folks heard that he had landed at Marsala with only a thousand men—the Thousand of Marsala, the ever illustrious handful of braves! Orlando fought in the first rank, and Palermo after three days' resistance was carried. Becoming the dictator's favourite lieutenant, he helped him to organise a government, then crossed the straits with him, and was beside him on the triumphal entry into Naples, whose king had fled. There was mad audacity and valour at that time, an explosion of the inevitable; and all sorts of supernatural stories were current—Garibaldi invulnerable, protected better by his red shirt than by the strongest armour, Garibaldi routing opposing armies like an archangel, by merely brandishing his flaming sword! The Piedmontese on their side had defeated General Lamoriciere at Castelfidardo, and were invading the States of the Church. And Orlando was there when the dictator, abdicating power, signed the decree which annexed the Two Sicilies to the Crown of Italy; even as subsequently he took part in that forlorn attempt on Rome, when the rageful cry was "Rome or Death!"—an attempt which came to a tragic issue at Aspromonte, when the little army was dispersed by the Italian troops, and Garibaldi, wounded, was taken prisoner, and sent back to the solitude of his island of Caprera, where he became but a fisherman and a tiller of the rocky soil.*

* M. Zola's brief but glowing account of Garibaldi's glorious
achievements has stirred many memories in my mind. My uncle,
Frank Vizetelly, the war artist of the Illustrated London
News, whose bones lie bleaching somewhere in the Soudan, was
one of Garibaldi's constant companions throughout the memorable
campaign of the Two Sicilies, and afterwards he went with him
to Caprera. Later, in 1870, my brother, Edward Vizetelly, acted
as orderly-officer to the general when he offered the help of
his sword to France.—Trans.

Six years of waiting again went by, and Orlando still dwelt at Turin, even after Florence had been chosen as the new capital. The Senate had acclaimed Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy; and Italy was indeed almost built, it lacked only Rome and Venice. But the great battles seemed all over, the epic era was closed; Venice was to be won by defeat. Orlando took part in the unlucky battle of Custozza, where he received two wounds, full of furious grief at the thought that Austria should be triumphant. But at that same moment the latter, defeated at Sadowa, relinquished Venetia, and five months later Orlando satisfied his desire to be in Venice participating in the joy of triumph, when Victor Emmanuel made his entry amidst the frantic acclamations of the people. Rome alone remained to be won, and wild impatience urged all Italy towards the city; but friendly France had sworn to maintain the Pope, and this acted as a check. Then, for the third time, Garibaldi dreamt of renewing the feats of the old-world legends, and threw himself upon Rome like a soldier of fortune illumined by patriotism and free from every tie. And for the third time Orlando shared in that fine heroic madness destined to be vanquished at Mentana by the Pontifical Zouaves supported by a small French corps. Again wounded, he came back to Turin in almost a dying condition. But, though his spirit quivered, he had to resign himself; the situation seemed to have no outlet; only an upheaval of the nations could give Rome to Italy.

All at once the thunderclap of Sedan, of the downfall of France, resounded through the world; and then the road to Rome lay open, and Orlando, having returned to service in the regular army, was with the troops who took up position in the Campagna to ensure the safety of the Holy See, as was said in the letter which Victor Emmanuel wrote to Pius IX. There was, however, but the shadow of an engagement: General Kanzler's Pontifical Zouaves were compelled to fall back, and Orlando was one of the first to enter the city by the breach of the Porta Pia. Ah! that twentieth of September—that day when he experienced the greatest happiness of his life—a day of delirium, of complete triumph, which realised the dream of so many years of terrible contest, the dream for which he had sacrificed rest and fortune, and given both body and mind!

Then came more than ten happy years in conquered Rome—in Rome adored, flattered, treated with all tenderness, like a woman in whom one has placed one's entire hope. From her he awaited so much national vigour, such a marvellous resurrection of strength and glory for the endowment of the young nation. Old Republican, old insurrectional soldier that he was, he had been obliged to adhere to the monarchy, and accept a senatorship. But then did not Garibaldi himself—Garibaldi his divinity—likewise call upon the King and sit in parliament? Mazzini alone, rejecting all compromises, was unwilling to rest content with a united and independent Italy that was not Republican. Moreover, another consideration influenced Orlando, the future of his son Luigi, who had attained his eighteenth birthday shortly after the occupation of Rome. Though he, Orlando, could manage with the crumbs which remained of the fortune he had expended in his country's service, he dreamt of a splendid destiny for the child of his heart. Realising that the heroic age was over, he desired to make a great politician of him, a great administrator, a man who should be useful to the mighty nation of the morrow; and it was on this account that he had not rejected royal favour, the reward of long devotion, desiring, as he did, to be in a position to help, watch, and guide Luigi. Besides, was he himself so old, so used-up, as to be unable to assist in organisation, even as he had assisted in conquest? Struck by his son's quick intelligence in business matters, perhaps also instinctively divining that the battle would now continue on financial and economic grounds, he obtained him employment at the Ministry of Finances. And again he himself lived on, dreaming, still enthusiastically believing in a splendid future, overflowing with boundless hope, seeing Rome double her population, grow and spread with a wild vegetation of new districts, and once more, in his loving enraptured eyes, become the queen of the world.

But all at once came a thunderbolt. One morning, as he was going downstairs, Orlando was stricken with paralysis. Both his legs suddenly became lifeless, as heavy as lead. It was necessary to carry him up again, and never since had he set foot on the street pavement. At that time he had just completed his fifty-sixth year, and for fourteen years since he had remained in his arm-chair, as motionless as stone, he who had so impetuously trod every battlefield of Italy. It was a pitiful business, the collapse of a hero. And worst of all, from that room where he was for ever imprisoned, the old soldier beheld the slow crumbling of all his hopes, and fell into dismal melancholy, full of unacknowledged fear for the future. Now that the intoxication of action no longer dimmed his eyes, now that he spent his long and empty days in thought, his vision became clear. Italy, which he had desired to see so powerful, so triumphant in her unity, was acting madly, rushing to ruin, possibly to bankruptcy. Rome, which to him had ever been the one necessary capital, the city of unparalleled glory, requisite for the sovereign people of to-morrow, seemed unwilling to take upon herself the part of a great modern metropolis; heavy as a corpse she weighed with all her centuries on the bosom of the young nation. Moreover, his son Luigi distressed him. Rebellious to all guidance, the young man had become one of the devouring offsprings of conquest, eager to despoil that Italy, that Rome, which his father seemed to have desired solely in order that he might pillage them and batten on them. Orlando had vainly opposed Luigi's departure from the ministry, his participation in the frantic speculations on land and house property to which the mad building of the new districts had given rise. But at the same time he loved his son, and was reduced to silence, especially now when everything had succeeded with Luigi, even his most risky financial ventures, such as the transformation of the Villa Montefiori into a perfect town—a colossal enterprise in which many of great wealth had been ruined, but whence he himself had emerged with millions. And it was in part for this reason that Orlando, sad and silent, had obstinately restricted himself to one small room on the third floor of the little palazzo erected by Luigi in the Via Venti Settembre—a room where he lived cloistered with a single servant, subsisting on his own scanty income, and accepting nothing but that modest hospitality from his son.

As Pierre reached that new Via Venti Settembre* which climbs the side and summit of the Viminal hill, he was struck by the heavy sumptuousness of the new "palaces," which betokened among the moderns the same taste for the huge that marked the ancient Romans. In the warm afternoon glow, blent of purple and old gold, the broad, triumphant thoroughfare, with its endless rows of white house-fronts, bore witness to new Rome's proud hope of futurity and sovereign power. And Pierre fairly gasped when he beheld the Palazzo delle Finanze, or Treasury, a gigantic erection, a cyclopean cube with a profusion of columns, balconies, pediments, and sculptured work, to which the building mania had given birth in a day of immoderate pride. And on the other side of the street, a little higher up, before reaching the Villa Bonaparte, stood Count Prada's little palazzo.

* The name—Twentieth September Street—was given to the
thoroughfare to commemorate the date of the occupation
of Rome by Victor Emmanuel's army.—Trans.

After discharging his driver, Pierre for a moment remained somewhat embarrassed. The door was open, and he entered the vestibule; but, as at the mansion in the Via Giulia, no door porter or servant was to be seen. So he had to make up his mind to ascend the monumental stairs, which with their marble balustrades seemed to be copied, on a smaller scale, from those of the Palazzo Boccanera. And there was much the same cold bareness, tempered, however, by a carpet and red door-hangings, which contrasted vividly with the white stucco of the walls. The reception-rooms, sixteen feet high, were on the first floor, and as a door chanced to be ajar he caught a glimpse of two salons, one following the other, and both displaying quite modern richness, with a profusion of silk and velvet hangings, gilt furniture, and lofty mirrors reflecting a pompous assemblage of stands and tables. And still there was nobody, not a soul, in that seemingly forsaken abode, which exhaled nought of woman's presence. Indeed Pierre was on the point of going down again to ring, when a footman at last presented himself.

"Count Prada, if you please."

The servant silently surveyed the little priest, and seemed to understand. "The father or the son?" he asked.

"The father, Count Orlando Prada."

"Oh! that's on the third floor." And he condescended to add: "The little door on the right-hand side of the landing. Knock loudly if you wish to be admitted."

Pierre indeed had to knock twice, and then a little withered old man of military appearance, a former soldier who had remained in the Count's service, opened the door and apologised for the delay by saying that he had been attending to his master's legs. Immediately afterwards he announced the visitor, and the latter, after passing through a dim and narrow ante-room, was lost in amazement on finding himself in a relatively small chamber, extremely bare and bright, with wall-paper of a light hue studded with tiny blue flowers. Behind a screen was an iron bedstead, the soldier's pallet, and there was no other furniture than the arm-chair in which the cripple spent his days, with a table of black wood placed near him, and covered with books and papers, and two old straw-seated chairs which served for the accommodation of the infrequent visitors. A few planks, fixed to one of the walls, did duty as book-shelves. However, the broad, clear, curtainless window overlooked the most admirable panorama of Rome that could be desired.

Then the room disappeared from before Pierre's eyes, and with a sudden shock of deep emotion he only beheld old Orlando, the old blanched lion, still superb, broad, and tall. A forest of white hair crowned his powerful head, with its thick mouth, fleshy broken nose, and large, sparkling, black eyes. A long white beard streamed down with the vigour of youth, curling like that of an ancient god. By that leonine muzzle one divined what great passions had growled within; but all, carnal and intellectual alike, had erupted in patriotism, in wild bravery, and riotous love of independence. And the old stricken hero, his torso still erect, was fixed there on his straw-seated arm-chair, with lifeless legs buried beneath a black wrapper. Alone did his arms and hands live, and his face beam with strength and intelligence.

Orlando turned towards his servant, and gently said to him: "You can go away, Batista. Come back in a couple of hours." Then, looking Pierre full in the face, he exclaimed in a voice which was still sonorous despite his seventy years: "So it's you at last, my dear Monsieur Froment, and we shall be able to chat at our ease. There, take that chair, and sit down in front of me."

He had noticed the glance of surprise which the young priest had cast upon the bareness of the room, and he gaily added: "You will excuse me for receiving you in my cell. Yes, I live here like a monk, like an old invalided soldier, henceforth withdrawn from active life. My son long begged me to take one of the fine rooms downstairs. But what would have been the use of it? I have no needs, and I scarcely care for feather beds, for my old bones are accustomed to the hard ground. And then too I have such a fine view up here, all Rome presenting herself to me, now that I can no longer go to her."

With a wave of the hand towards the window he sought to hide the embarrassment, the slight flush which came to him each time that he thus excused his son; unwilling as he was to tell the true reason, the scruple of probity which had made him obstinately cling to his bare pauper's lodging.

"But it is very nice, the view is superb!" declared Pierre, in order to please him. "I am for my own part very glad to see you, very glad to be able to grasp your valiant hands, which accomplished so many great things."

Orlando made a fresh gesture, as though to sweep the past away. "Pooh! pooh! all that is dead and buried. Let us talk about you, my dear Monsieur Froment, you who are young and represent the present; and especially about your book, which represents the future! Ah! if you only knew how angry your book, your 'New Rome,' made me first of all."

He began to laugh, and took the book from off the table near him; then, tapping on its cover with his big, broad hand, he continued: "No, you cannot imagine with what starts of protest I read your book. The Pope, and again the Pope, and always the Pope! New Rome to be created by the Pope and for the Pope, to triumph thanks to the Pope, to be given to the Pope, and to fuse its glory in the glory of the Pope! But what about us? What about Italy? What about all the millions which we have spent in order to make Rome a great capital? Ah! only a Frenchman, and a Frenchman of Paris, could have written such a book! But let me tell you, my dear sir, if you are ignorant of it, that Rome has become the capital of the kingdom of Italy, that we here have King Humbert, and the Italian people, a whole nation which must be taken into account, and which means to keep Rome—glorious, resuscitated Rome—for itself!"

This juvenile ardour made Pierre laugh in turn. "Yes, yes," said he, "you wrote me that. Only what does it matter from my point of view? Italy is but one nation, a part of humanity, and I desire concord and fraternity among all the nations, mankind reconciled, believing, and happy. Of what consequence, then, is any particular form of government, monarchy or republic, of what consequence is any question of a united and independent country, if all mankind forms but one free people subsisting on truth and justice?"

To only one word of this enthusiastic outburst did Orlando pay attention. In a lower tone, and with a dreamy air, he resumed: "Ah! a republic. In my youth I ardently desired one. I fought for one; I conspired with Mazzini, a saintly man, a believer, who was shattered by collision with the absolute. And then, too, one had to bow to practical necessities; the most obstinate ended by submitting. And nowadays would a republic save us? In any case it would differ but little from our parliamentary monarchy. Just think of what goes on in France! And so why risk a revolution which would place power in the hands of the extreme revolutionists, the anarchists? We fear all that, and this explains our resignation. I know very well that a few think they can detect salvation in a republican federation, a reconstitution of all the former little states in so many republics, over which Rome would preside. The Vatican would gain largely by any such transformation; still one cannot say that it endeavours to bring it about; it simply regards the eventuality without disfavour. But it is a dream, a dream!"

At this Orlando's gaiety came back to him, with even a little gentle irony: "You don't know, I suppose, what it was that took my fancy in your book—for, in spite of all my protests, I have read it twice. Well, what pleased me was that Mazzini himself might almost have written it at one time. Yes! I found all my youth again in your pages, all the wild hope of my twenty-fifth year, the new religion of a humanitarian Christ, the pacification of the world effected by the Gospel! Are you aware that, long before your time, Mazzini desired the renovation of Christianity? He set dogma and discipline on one side and only retained morals. And it was new Rome, the Rome of the people, which he would have given as see to the universal Church, in which all the churches of the past were to be fused—Rome, the eternal and predestined city, the mother and queen, whose domination was to arise anew to ensure the definitive happiness of mankind! Is it not curious that all the present-day Neo-Catholicism, the vague, spiritualistic awakening, the evolution towards communion and Christian charity, with which some are making so much stir, should be simply a return of the mystical and humanitarian ideas of 1848? Alas! I saw all that, I believed and burned, and I know in what a fine mess those flights into the azure of mystery landed us! So it cannot be helped, I lack confidence."

Then, as Pierre on his side was growing impassioned and sought to reply, he stopped him: "No, let me finish. I only want to convince you how absolutely necessary it was that we should take Rome and make her the capital of Italy. Without Rome new Italy could not have existed; Rome represented the glory of ancient time; in her dust lay the sovereign power which we wished to re-establish; she brought strength, beauty, eternity to those who possessed her. Standing in the middle of our country, she was its heart, and must assuredly become its life as soon as she should be awakened from the long sleep of ruin. Ah! how we desired her, amidst victory and amidst defeat, through years and years of frightful impatience! For my part I loved her, and longed for her, far more than for any woman, with my blood burning, and in despair that I should be growing old. And when we possessed her, our folly was a desire to behold her huge, magnificent, and commanding all at once, the equal of the other great capitals of Europe—Berlin, Paris, and London. Look at her! she is still my only love, my only consolation now that I am virtually dead, with nothing alive in me but my eyes."

With the same gesture as before, he directed Pierre's attention to the window. Under the glowing sky Rome stretched out in its immensity, empurpled and gilded by the slanting sunrays. Across the horizon, far, far away, the trees of the Janiculum stretched a green girdle, of a limpid emerald hue, whilst the dome of St. Peter's, more to the left, showed palely blue, like a sapphire bedimmed by too bright a light. Then came the low town, the old ruddy city, baked as it were by centuries of burning summers, soft to the eye and beautiful with the deep life of the past, an unbounded chaos of roofs, gables, towers, campanili, and cupolas. But, in the foreground under the window, there was the new city—that which had been building for the last five and twenty years—huge blocks of masonry piled up side by side, still white with plaster, neither the sun nor history having as yet robed them in purple. And in particular the roofs of the colossal Palazzo delle Finanze had a disastrous effect, spreading out like far, bare steppes of cruel hideousness. And it was upon the desolation and abomination of all the newly erected piles that the eyes of the old soldier of conquest at last rested.

Silence ensued. Pierre felt the faint chill of hidden, unacknowledged sadness pass by, and courteously waited.

"I must beg your pardon for having interrupted you just now," resumed Orlando; "but it seems to me that we cannot talk about your book to any good purpose until you have seen and studied Rome closely. You only arrived yesterday, did you not? Well, stroll about the city, look at things, question people, and I think that many of your ideas will change. I shall particularly like to know your impression of the Vatican since you have cone here solely to see the Pope and defend your book against the Index. Why should we discuss things to-day, if facts themselves are calculated to bring you to other views, far more readily than the finest speeches which I might make? It is understood, you will come to see me again, and we shall then know what we are talking about, and, maybe, agree together."

"Why certainly, you are too kind," replied Pierre. "I only came to-day to express my gratitude to you for having read my book so attentively, and to pay homage to one of the glories of Italy."

Orlando was not listening, but remained for a moment absorbed in thought, with his eyes still resting upon Rome. And overcome, despite himself, by secret disquietude, he resumed in a low voice as though making an involuntary confession: "We have gone too fast, no doubt. There were expenses of undeniable utility—the roads, ports, and railways. And it was necessary to arm the country also; I did not at first disapprove of the heavy military burden. But since then how crushing has been the war budget—a war which has never come, and the long wait for which has ruined us. Ah! I have always been the friend of France. I only reproach her with one thing, that she has failed to understand the position in which we were placed, the vital reasons which compelled us to ally ourselves with Germany. And then there are the thousand millions of lire* swallowed up in Rome! That was the real madness; pride and enthusiasm led us astray. Old and solitary as I've been for many years now, given to deep reflection, I was one of the first to divine the pitfall, the frightful financial crisis, the deficit which would bring about the collapse of the nation. I shouted it from the housetops, to my son, to all who came near me; but what was the use? They didn't listen; they were mad, still buying and selling and building, with no thought but for gambling booms and bubbles. But you'll see, you'll see. And the worst is that we are not situated as you are; we haven't a reserve of men and money in a dense peasant population, whose thrifty savings are always at hand to fill up the gaps caused by big catastrophes. There is no social rise among our people as yet; fresh men don't spring up out of the lower classes to reinvigorate the national blood, as they constantly do in your country. And, besides, the people are poor; they have no stockings to empty. The misery is frightful, I must admit it. Those who have any money prefer to spend it in the towns in a petty way rather than to risk it in agricultural or manufacturing enterprise. Factories are but slowly built, and the land is almost everywhere tilled in the same primitive manner as it was two thousand years ago. And then, too, take Rome—Rome, which didn't make Italy, but which Italy made its capital to satisfy an ardent, overpowering desire—Rome, which is still but a splendid bit of scenery, picturing the glory of the centuries, and which, apart from its historical splendour, has only given us its degenerate papal population, swollen with ignorance and pride! Ah! I loved Rome too well, and I still love it too well to regret being now within its walls. But, good heavens! what insanity its acquisition brought us, what piles of money it has cost us, and how heavily and triumphantly it weighs us down! Look! look!"

* 40,000,000 pounds.

He waved his hand as he spoke towards the livid roofs of the Palazzo delle Finanze, that vast and desolate steppe, as though he could see the harvest of glory all stripped off and bankruptcy appear with its fearful, threatening bareness. Restrained tears were dimming his eyes, and he looked superbly pitiful with his expression of baffled hope and grievous disquietude, with his huge white head, the muzzle of an old blanched lion henceforth powerless and caged in that bare, bright room, whose poverty-stricken aspect was instinct with so much pride that it seemed, as it were, a protest against the monumental splendour of the whole surrounding district! So those were the purposes to which the conquest had been put! And to think that he was impotent, henceforth unable to give his blood and his soul as he had done in the days gone by.

"Yes, yes," he exclaimed in a final outburst; "one gave everything, heart and brain, one's whole life indeed, so long as it was a question of making the country one and independent. But, now that the country is ours, just try to stir up enthusiasm for the reorganisation of its finances! There's no ideality in that! And this explains why, whilst the old ones are dying off, not a new man comes to the front among the young ones—"

All at once he stopped, looking somewhat embarrassed, yet smiling at his feverishness. "Excuse me," he said, "I'm off again, I'm incorrigible. But it's understood, we'll leave that subject alone, and you'll come back here, and we'll chat together when you've seen everything."

From that moment he showed himself extremely pleasant, and it was apparent to Pierre that he regretted having said so much, by the seductive affability and growing affection which he now displayed. He begged the young priest to prolong his sojourn, to abstain from all hasty judgments on Rome, and to rest convinced that, at bottom, Italy still loved France. And he was also very desirous that France should love Italy, and displayed genuine anxiety at the thought that perhaps she loved her no more. As at the Boccanera mansion, on the previous evening, Pierre realised that an attempt was being made to persuade him to admiration and affection. Like a susceptible woman with secret misgivings respecting the attractive power of her beauty, Italy was all anxiety with regard to the opinion of her visitors, and strove to win and retain their love.

However, Orlando again became impassioned when he learnt that Pierre was staying at the Boccanera mansion, and he made a gesture of extreme annoyance on hearing, at that very moment, a knock at the outer door. "Come in!" he called; but at the same time he detained Pierre, saying, "No, no, don't go yet; I wish to know—"

But a lady came in—a woman of over forty, short and extremely plump, and still attractive with her small features and pretty smile swamped in fat. She was a blonde, with green, limpid eyes; and, fairly well dressed in a sober, nicely fitting mignonette gown, she looked at once pleasant, modest, and shrewd.

"Ah! it's you, Stefana," said the old man, letting her kiss him.

"Yes, uncle, I was passing by and came up to see how you were getting on."

The visitor was the Signora Sacco, niece of Prada and a Neapolitan by birth, her mother having quitted Milan to marry a certain Pagani, a Neapolitan banker, who had afterwards failed. Subsequent to that disaster Stefana had married Sacco, then merely a petty post-office clerk. He, later on, wishing to revive his father-in-law's business, had launched into all sorts of terrible, complicated, suspicious affairs, which by unforeseen luck had ended in his election as a deputy. Since he had arrived in Rome, to conquer the city in his turn, his wife had been compelled to assist his devouring ambition by dressing well and opening a salon; and, although she was still a little awkward, she rendered him many real services, being very economical and prudent, a thorough good housewife, with all the sterling, substantial qualities of Northern Italy which she had inherited from her mother, and which showed conspicuously beside the turbulence and carelessness of her husband, in whom flared Southern Italy with its perpetual, rageful appetite.

Despite his contempt for Sacco, old Orlando had retained some affection for his niece, in whose veins flowed blood similar to his own. He thanked her for her kind inquiries, and then at once spoke of an announcement which he had read in the morning papers, for he suspected that the deputy had sent his wife to ascertain his opinion.

"Well, and that ministry?" he asked.

The Signora had seated herself and made no haste to reply, but glanced at the newspapers strewn over the table. "Oh! nothing is settled yet," she at last responded; "the newspapers spoke out too soon. The Prime Minister sent for Sacco, and they had a talk together. But Sacco hesitates a good deal; he fears that he has no aptitude for the Department of Agriculture. Ah! if it were only the Finances—However, in any case, he would not have come to a decision without consulting you. What do you think of it, uncle?"

He interrupted her with a violent wave of the hand: "No, no, I won't mix myself up in such matters!"

To him the rapid success of that adventurer Sacco, that schemer and gambler who had always fished in troubled waters, was an abomination, the beginning of the end. His son Luigi certainly distressed him; but it was even worse to think that—whilst Luigi, with his great intelligence and many remaining fine qualities, was nothing at all—Sacco, on the other hand, Sacco, blunderhead and ever-famished battener that he was, had not merely slipped into parliament, but was now, it seemed, on the point of securing office! A little, swarthy, dry man he was, with big, round eyes, projecting cheekbones, and prominent chin. Ever dancing and chattering, he was gifted with a showy eloquence, all the force of which lay in his voice—a voice which at will became admirably powerful or gentle! And withal an insinuating man, profiting by every opportunity, wheedling and commanding by turn.

"You hear, Stefana," said Orlando; "tell your husband that the only advice I have to give him is to return to his clerkship at the post-office, where perhaps he may be of use."

What particularly filled the old soldier with indignation and despair was that such a man, a Sacco, should have fallen like a bandit on Rome—on that Rome whose conquest had cost so many noble efforts. And in his turn Sacco was conquering the city, was carrying it off from those who had won it by such hard toil, and was simply using it to satisfy his wild passion for power and its attendant enjoyments. Beneath his wheedling air there was the determination to devour everything. After the victory, while the spoil lay there, still warm, the wolves had come. It was the North that had made Italy, whereas the South, eager for the quarry, simply rushed upon the country, preyed upon it. And beneath the anger of the old stricken hero of Italian unity there was indeed all the growing antagonism of the North towards the South—the North industrious, economical, shrewd in politics, enlightened, full of all the great modern ideas, and the South ignorant and idle, bent on enjoying life immediately, amidst childish disorder in action, and an empty show of fine sonorous words.

Stefana had begun to smile in a placid way while glancing at Pierre, who had approached the window. "Oh, you say that, uncle," she responded; "but you love us well all the same, and more than once you have given me myself some good advice, for which I'm very thankful to you. For instance, there's that affair of Attilio's—"

She was alluding to her son, the lieutenant, and his love affair with Celia, the little Princess Buongiovanni, of which all the drawing-rooms, white and black alike, were talking.

"Attilio—that's another matter!" exclaimed Orlando. "He and you are both of the same blood as myself, and it's wonderful how I see myself again in that fine fellow. Yes, he is just the same as I was at his age, good-looking and brave and enthusiastic! I'm paying myself compliments, you see. But, really now, Attilio warms my heart, for he is the future, and brings me back some hope. Well, and what about his affair?"

"Oh! it gives us a lot of worry, uncle. I spoke to you about it before, but you shrugged your shoulders, saying that in matters of that kind all that the parents had to do was to let the lovers settle their affairs between them. Still, we don't want everybody to repeat that we are urging our son to get the little princess to elope with him, so that he may afterwards marry her money and title."

At this Orlando indulged in a frank outburst of gaiety: "That's a fine scruple! Was it your husband who instructed you to tell me of it? I know, however, that he affects some delicacy in this matter. For my own part, I believe myself to be as honest as he is, and I can only repeat that, if I had a son like yours, so straightforward and good, and candidly loving, I should let him marry whomsoever he pleased in his own way. The Buongiovannis—good heavens! the Buongiovannis—why, despite all their rank and lineage and the money they still possess, it will be a great honour for them to have a handsome young man with a noble heart as their son-in-law!"

Again did Stefana assume an expression of placid satisfaction. She had certainly only come there for approval. "Very well, uncle," she replied, "I'll repeat that to my husband, and he will pay great attention to it; for if you are severe towards him he holds you in perfect veneration. And as for that ministry—well, perhaps nothing will be done, Sacco will decide according to circumstances."

She rose and took her leave, kissing the old soldier very affectionately as on her arrival. And she complimented him on his good looks, declaring that she found him as handsome as ever, and making him smile by speaking of a lady who was still madly in love with him. Then, after acknowledging the young priest's silent salutation by a slight bow, she went off, once more wearing her modest and sensible air.

For a moment Orlando, with his eyes turned towards the door, remained silent, again sad, reflecting no doubt on all the difficult, equivocal present, so different from the glorious past. But all at once he turned to Pierre, who was still waiting. "And so, my friend," said he, "you are staying at the Palazzo Boccanera? Ah! what a grievous misfortune there has been on that side too!"

However, when the priest had told him of his conversation with Benedetta, and of her message that she still loved him and would never forget his goodness to her, no matter whatever happened, he appeared moved and his voice trembled: "Yes, she has a good heart, she has no spite. But what would you have? She did not love Luigi, and he was possibly violent. There is no mystery about the matter now, and I can speak to you freely, since to my great grief everybody knows what has happened."

Then Orlando abandoned himself to his recollections, and related how keen had been his delight on the eve of the marriage at the thought that so lovely a creature would become his daughter, and set some youth and charm around his invalid's arm-chair. He had always worshipped beauty, and would have had no other love than woman, if his country had not seized upon the best part of him. And Benedetta on her side loved him, revered him, constantly coming up to spend long hours with him, sharing his poor little room, which at those times became resplendent with all the divine grace that she brought with her. With her fresh breath near him, the pure scent she diffused, the caressing womanly tenderness with which she surrounded him, he lived anew. But, immediately afterwards, what a frightful drama and how his heart had bled at his inability to reconcile the husband and the wife! He could not possibly say that his son was in the wrong in desiring to be the loved and accepted spouse. At first indeed he had hoped to soften Benedetta, and throw her into Luigi's arms. But when she had confessed herself to him in tears, owning her old love for Dario, and her horror of belonging to another, he realised that she would never yield. And a whole year had then gone by; he had lived for a whole year imprisoned in his arm-chair, with that poignant drama progressing beneath him in those luxurious rooms whence no sound even reached his ears. How many times had he not listened, striving to hear, fearing atrocious quarrels, in despair at his inability to prove still useful by creating happiness. He knew nothing by his son, who kept his own counsel; he only learnt a few particulars from Benedetta at intervals when emotion left her defenceless; and that marriage in which he had for a moment espied the much-needed alliance between old and new Rome, that unconsummated marriage filled him with despair, as if it were indeed the defeat of every hope, the final collapse of the dream which had filled his life. And he himself had ended by desiring the divorce, so unbearable had become the suffering caused by such a situation.

"Ah! my friend!" he said to Pierre; "never before did I so well understand the fatality of certain antagonism, the possibility of working one's own misfortune and that of others, even when one has the most loving heart and upright mind!"

But at that moment the door again opened, and this time, without knocking, Count Luigi Prada came in. And after rapidly bowing to the visitor, who had risen, he gently took hold of his father's hands and felt them, as if fearing that they might be too warm or too cold.

"I've just arrived from Frascati, where I had to sleep," said he; "for the interruption of all that building gives me a lot of worry. And I'm told that you spent a bad night!"

"No, I assure you."

"Oh! I knew you wouldn't own it. But why will you persist in living up here without any comfort? All this isn't suited to your age. I should be so pleased if you would accept a more comfortable room where you might sleep better."

"No, no—I know that you love me well, my dear Luigi. But let me do as my old head tells me. That's the only way to make me happy."

Pierre was much struck by the ardent affection which sparkled in the eyes of the two men as they gazed at one another, face to face. This seemed to him very touching and beautiful, knowing as he did how many contrary ideas and actions, how many moral divergencies separated them. And he next took an interest in comparing them physically. Count Luigi Prada, shorter, more thick-set than his father, had, however, much the same strong energetic head, crowned with coarse black hair, and the same frank but somewhat stern eyes set in a face of clear complexion, barred by thick moustaches. But his mouth differed—a sensual, voracious mouth it was, with wolfish teeth—a mouth of prey made for nights of rapine, when the only question is to bite, and tear, and devour others. And for this reason, when some praised the frankness in his eyes, another would retort: "Yes, but I don't like his mouth." His feet were large, his hands plump and over-broad, but admirably cared for.

And Pierre marvelled at finding him such as he had anticipated. He knew enough of his story to picture in him a hero's son spoilt by conquest, eagerly devouring the harvest garnered by his father's glorious sword. And he particularly studied how the father's virtues had deflected and become transformed into vices in the son—the most noble qualities being perverted, heroic and disinterested energy lapsing into a ferocious appetite for possession, the man of battle leading to the man of booty, since the great gusts of enthusiasm no longer swept by, since men no longer fought, since they remained there resting, pillaging, and devouring amidst the heaped-up spoils. And the pity of it was that the old hero, the paralytic, motionless father beheld it all—beheld the degeneration of his son, the speculator and company promoter gorged with millions!

However, Orlando introduced Pierre. "This is Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre Froment, whom I spoke to you about," he said, "the author of the book which I gave you to read."

Luigi Prada showed himself very amiable, at once talking of home with an intelligent passion like one who wished to make the city a great modern capital. He had seen Paris transformed by the Second Empire; he had seen Berlin enlarged and embellished after the German victories; and, according to him, if Rome did not follow the movement, if it did not become the inhabitable capital of a great people, it was threatened with prompt death: either a crumbling museum or a renovated, resuscitated city—those were the alternatives.*

* Personally I should have thought the example of Berlin a great
deterrent. The enlargement and embellishment of the Prussian
capital, after the war of 1870, was attended by far greater
roguery and wholesale swindling than even the previous
transformation of Paris. Thousands of people too were ruined,
and instead of an increase of prosperity the result was the
very reverse.—Trans.

Greatly struck, almost gained over already, Pierre listened to this clever man, charmed with his firm, clear mind. He knew how skilfully Prada had manoeuvred in the affair of the Villa Montefiori, enriching himself when every one else was ruined, having doubtless foreseen the fatal catastrophe even while the gambling passion was maddening the entire nation. However, the young priest could already detect marks of weariness, precocious wrinkles and a fall of the lips, on that determined, energetic face, as though its possessor were growing tired of the continual struggle that he had to carry on amidst surrounding downfalls, the shock of which threatened to bring the most firmly established fortunes to the ground. It was said that Prada had recently had grave cause for anxiety; and indeed there was no longer any solidity to be found; everything might be swept away by the financial crisis which day by day was becoming more and more serious. In the case of Luigi, sturdy son though he was of Northern Italy, a sort of degeneration had set in, a slow rot, caused by the softening, perversive influence of Rome. He had there rushed upon the satisfaction of every appetite, and prolonged enjoyment was exhausting him. This, indeed, was one of the causes of the deep silent sadness of Orlando, who was compelled to witness the swift deterioration of his conquering race, whilst Sacco, the Italian of the South—served as it were by the climate, accustomed to the voluptuous atmosphere, the life of those sun-baked cities compounded of the dust of antiquity—bloomed there like the natural vegetation of a soil saturated with the crimes of history, and gradually grasped everything, both wealth and power.

As Orlando spoke of Stefana's visit to his son, Sacco's name was mentioned. Then, without another word, the two men exchanged a smile. A rumour was current that the Minister of Agriculture, lately deceased, would perhaps not be replaced immediately, and that another minister would take charge of the department pending the next session of the Chamber.

Next the Palazzo Boccanera was mentioned, and Pierre, his interest awakened, became more attentive. "Ah!" exclaimed Count Luigi, turning to him, "so you are staying in the Via Giulia? All the Rome of olden time sleeps there in the silence of forgetfulness."

With perfect ease he went on to speak of the Cardinal and even of Benedetta—"the Countess," as he called her. But, although he was careful to let no sign of anger escape him, the young priest could divine that he was secretly quivering, full of suffering and spite. In him the enthusiastic energy of his father appeared in a baser, degenerate form. Quitting the yet handsome Princess Flavia in his passion for Benedetta, her divinely beautiful niece, he had resolved to make the latter his own at any cost, determined to marry her, to struggle with her and overcome her, although he knew that she loved him not, and that he would almost certainly wreck his entire life. Rather than relinquish her, however, he would have set Rome on fire. And thus his hopeless suffering was now great indeed: this woman was but his wife in name, and so torturing was the thought of her disdain, that at times, however calm his outward demeanour, he was consumed by a jealous vindictive sensual madness that did not even recoil from the idea of crime.

"Monsieur l'Abbe is acquainted with the situation," sadly murmured old Orlando.

His son responded by a wave of the hand, as though to say that everybody was acquainted with it. "Ah! father," he added, "but for you I should never have consented to take part in those proceedings for annulling the marriage! The Countess would have found herself compelled to return here, and would not nowadays be deriding us with her lover, that cousin of hers, Dario!"

At this Orlando also waved his hand, as if in protest.

"Oh! it's a fact, father," continued Luigi. "Why did she flee from here if it wasn't to go and live with her lover? And indeed, in my opinion, it's scandalous that a Cardinal's palace should shelter such goings-on!"

This was the report which he spread abroad, the accusation which he everywhere levelled against his wife, of publicly carrying on a shameless liaison. In reality, however, he did not believe a word of it, being too well acquainted with Benedetta's firm rectitude, and her determination to belong to none but the man she loved, and to him only in marriage. However, in Prada's eyes such accusations were not only fair play but also very efficacious.

And now, although he turned pale with covert exasperation, and laughed a hard, vindictive, cruel laugh, he went on to speak in a bantering tone of the proceedings for annulling the marriage, and in particular of the plea put forward by Benedetta's advocate Morano. And at last his language became so free that Orlando, with a glance towards the priest, gently interposed: "Luigi! Luigi!"

"Yes, you are right, father, I'll say no more," thereupon added the young Count. "But it's really abominable and ridiculous. Lisbeth, you know, is highly amused at it."

Orlando again looked displeased, for when visitors were present he did not like his son to refer to the person whom he had just named. Lisbeth Kauffmann, very blonde and pink and merry, was barely thirty years of age, and belonged to the Roman foreign colony. For two years past she had been a widow, her husband having died at Rome whither he had come to nurse a complaint of the lungs. Thenceforward free, and sufficiently well off, she had remained in the city by taste, having a marked predilection for art, and painting a little, herself. In the Via Principe Amadeo, in the new Viminal district, she had purchased a little palazzo, and transformed a large apartment on its second floor into a studio hung with old stuffs, and balmy in every season with the scent of flowers. The place was well known to tolerant and intellectual society. Lisbeth was there found in perpetual jubilation, clad in a long blouse, somewhat of a gamine in her ways, trenchant too and often bold of speech, but nevertheless capital company, and as yet compromised with nobody but Prada. Their liaison had begun some four months after his wife had left him, and now Lisbeth was near the time of becoming a mother. This she in no wise concealed, but displayed such candid tranquillity and happiness that her numerous acquaintances continued to visit her as if there were nothing in question, so facile and free indeed is the life of the great cosmopolitan continental cities. Under the circumstances which his wife's suit had created, Prada himself was not displeased at the turn which events had taken with regard to Lisbeth, but none the less his incurable wound still bled.

There could be no compensation for the bitterness of Benedetta's disdain, it was she for whom his heart burned, and he dreamt of one day wreaking on her a tragic punishment.

Pierre, knowing nothing of Lisbeth, failed to understand the allusions of Orlando and his son. But realising that there was some embarrassment between them, he sought to take countenance by picking from off the littered table a thick book which, to his surprise, he found to be a French educational work, one of those manuals for the baccalaureat,* containing a digest of the knowledge which the official programmes require. It was but a humble, practical, elementary work, yet it necessarily dealt with all the mathematical, physical, chemical, and natural sciences, thus broadly outlining the intellectual conquests of the century, the present phase of human knowledge.

* The examination for the degree of bachelor, which degree is
the necessary passport to all the liberal professions in France.
M. Zola, by the way, failed to secure it, being ploughed for
"insufficiency in literature"!—Trans.

"Ah!" exclaimed Orlando, well pleased with the diversion, "you are looking at the book of my old friend Theophile Morin. He was one of the thousand of Marsala, you know, and helped us to conquer Sicily and Naples. A hero! But for more than thirty years now he has been living in France again, absorbed in the duties of his petty professorship, which hasn't made him at all rich. And so he lately published that book, which sells very well in France it seems; and it occurred to him that he might increase his modest profits on it by issuing translations, an Italian one among others. He and I have remained brothers, and thinking that my influence would prove decisive, he wishes to utilise it. But he is mistaken; I fear, alas! that I shall be unable to get anybody to take up his book."

At this Luigi Prada, who had again become very composed and amiable, shrugged his shoulders slightly, full as he was of the scepticism of his generation which desired to maintain things in their actual state so as to derive the greatest profit from them. "What would be the good of it?" he murmured; "there are too many books already!"

"No, no!" the old man passionately retorted, "there can never be too many books! We still and ever require fresh ones! It's by literature, not by the sword, that mankind will overcome falsehood and injustice and attain to the final peace of fraternity among the nations—Oh! you may smile; I know that you call these ideas my fancies of '48, the fancies of a greybeard, as people say in France. But it is none the less true that Italy is doomed, if the problem be not attacked from down below, if the people be not properly fashioned. And there is only one way to make a nation, to create men, and that is to educate them, to develop by educational means the immense lost force which now stagnates in ignorance and idleness. Yes, yes, Italy is made, but let us make an Italian nation. And give us more and more books, and let us ever go more and more forward into science and into light, if we wish to live and to be healthy, good, and strong!"

With his torso erect, with his powerful leonine muzzle flaming with the white brightness of his beard and hair, old Orlando looked superb. And in that simple, candid chamber, so touching with its intentional poverty, he raised his cry of hope with such intensity of feverish faith, that before the young priest's eyes there arose another figure—that of Cardinal Boccanera, erect and black save for his snow-white hair, and likewise glowing with heroic beauty in his crumbling palace whose gilded ceilings threatened to fall about his head! Ah! the magnificent stubborn men of the past, the believers, the old men who still show themselves more virile, more ardent than the young! Those two represented the opposite poles of belief; they had not an idea, an affection in common, and in that ancient city of Rome, where all was being blown away in dust, they alone seemed to protest, indestructible, face to face like two parted brothers, standing motionless on either horizon. And to have seen them thus, one after the other, so great and grand, so lonely, so detached from ordinary life, was to fill one's day with a dream of eternity.

Luigi, however, had taken hold of the old man's hands to calm him by an affectionate filial clasp. "Yes, yes, you are right, father, always right, and I'm a fool to contradict you. Now, pray don't move about like that, for you are uncovering yourself, and your legs will get cold again."

So saying, he knelt down and very carefully arranged the wrapper; and then remaining on the floor like a child, albeit he was two and forty, he raised his moist eyes, full of mute, entreating worship towards the old man who, calmed and deeply moved, caressed his hair with a trembling touch.

Pierre had been there for nearly two hours, when he at last took leave, greatly struck and affected by all that he had seen and heard. And again he had to promise that he would return and have a long chat with Orlando. Once out of doors he walked along at random. It was barely four o'clock, and it was his idea to ramble in this wise, without any predetermined programme, through Rome at that delightful hour when the sun sinks in the refreshed and far blue atmosphere. Almost immediately, however, he found himself in the Via Nazionale, along which he had driven on arriving the previous day. And he recognised the huge livid Banca d'Italia, the green gardens climbing to the Quirinal, and the heaven-soaring pines of the Villa Aldobrandini. Then, at the turn of the street, as he stopped short in order that he might again contemplate the column of Trajan which now rose up darkly from its low piazza, already full of twilight, he was surprised to see a victoria suddenly pull up, and a young man courteously beckon to him.

"Monsieur l'Abbe Froment! Monsieur l'Abbe Froment!"

It was young Prince Dario Boccanera, on his way to his daily drive along the Corso. He now virtually subsisted on the liberality of his uncle the Cardinal, and was almost always short of money. But, like all the Romans, he would, if necessary, have rather lived on bread and water than have forgone his carriage, horse, and coachman. An equipage, indeed, is the one indispensable luxury of Rome.

"If you will come with me, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment," said the young Prince, "I will show you the most interesting part of our city."

He doubtless desired to please Benedetta, by behaving amiably towards her protege. Idle as he was, too, it seemed to him a pleasant occupation to initiate that young priest, who was said to be so intelligent, into what he deemed the inimitable side, the true florescence of Roman life.

Pierre was compelled to accept, although he would have preferred a solitary stroll. Yet he was interested in this young man, the last born of an exhausted race, who, while seemingly incapable of either thought or action, was none the less very seductive with his high-born pride and indolence. Far more a Roman than a patriot, Dario had never had the faintest inclination to rally to the new order of things, being well content to live apart and do nothing; and passionate though he was, he indulged in no follies, being very practical and sensible at heart, as are all his fellow-citizens, despite their apparent impetuosity. As soon as his carriage, after crossing the Piazza di Venezia, entered the Corso, he gave rein to his childish vanity, his desire to shine, his passion for gay, happy life in the open under the lovely sky. All this, indeed, was clearly expressed in the simple gesture which he made whilst exclaiming: "The Corso!"

As on the previous day, Pierre was filled with astonishment. The long narrow street again stretched before him as far as the white dazzling Piazza del Popolo, the only difference being that the right-hand houses were now steeped in sunshine, whilst those on the left were black with shadow. What! was that the Corso then, that semi-obscure trench, close pressed by high and heavy house-fronts, that mean roadway where three vehicles could scarcely pass abreast, and which serried shops lined with gaudy displays? There was neither space, nor far horizon, nor refreshing greenery such as the fashionable drives of Paris could boast! Nothing but jostling, crowding, and stifling on the little footways under the narrow strip of sky. And although Dario named the pompous and historical palaces, Bonaparte, Doria, Odescalchi, Sciarra, and Chigi; although he pointed out the column of Marcus Aurelius on the Piazza Colonna, the most lively square of the whole city with its everlasting throng of lounging, gazing, chattering people; although, all the way to the Piazza del Popolo, he never ceased calling attention to churches, houses, and side-streets, notably the Via dei Condotti, at the far end of which the Trinity de' Monti, all golden in the glory of the sinking sun, appeared above that famous flight of steps, the triumphal Scala di Spagna—Pierre still and ever retained the impression of disillusion which the narrow, airless thoroughfare had conveyed to him: the "palaces" looked to him like mournful hospitals or barracks, the Piazza Colonna suffered terribly from a lack of trees, and the Trinity de' Monti alone took his fancy by its distant radiance of fairyland.

But it was necessary to come back from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza di Venezia, then return to the former square, and come back yet again, following the entire Corso three and four times without wearying. The delighted Dario showed himself and looked about him, exchanging salutations. On either footway was a compact crowd of promenaders whose eyes roamed over the equipages and whose hands could have shaken those of the carriage folks. So great at last became the number of vehicles that both lines were absolutely unbroken, crowded to such a point that the coachmen could do no more than walk their horses. Perpetually going up and coming down the Corso, people scrutinised and jostled one another. It was open-air promiscuity, all Rome gathered together in the smallest possible space, the folks who knew one another and who met here as in a friendly drawing-room, and the folks belonging to adverse parties who did not speak together but who elbowed each other, and whose glances penetrated to each other's soul. Then a revelation came to Pierre, and he suddenly understood the Corso, the ancient custom, the passion and glory of the city. Its pleasure lay precisely in the very narrowness of the street, in that forced elbowing which facilitated not only desired meetings but the satisfaction of curiosity, the display of vanity, and the garnering of endless tittle-tattle. All Roman society met here each day, displayed itself, spied on itself, offering itself in spectacle to its own eyes, with such an indispensable need of thus beholding itself that the man of birth who missed the Corso was like one out of his element, destitute of newspapers, living like a savage. And withal the atmosphere was delightfully balmy, and the narrow strip of sky between the heavy, rusty mansions displayed an infinite azure purity.

Dario never ceased smiling, and slightly inclining his head while he repeated to Pierre the names of princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses—high-sounding names whose flourish had filled history, whose sonorous syllables conjured up the shock of armour on the battlefield and the splendour of papal pomp with robes of purple, tiaras of gold, and sacred vestments sparkling with precious stones. And as Pierre listened and looked he was pained to see merely some corpulent ladies or undersized gentlemen, bloated or shrunken beings, whose ill-looks seemed to be increased by their modern attire. However, a few pretty women went by, particularly some young, silent girls with large, clear eyes. And just as Dario had pointed out the Palazzo Buongiovanni, a huge seventeenth-century facade, with windows encompassed by foliaged ornamentation deplorably heavy in style, he added gaily:

"Ah! look—that's Attilio there on the footway. Young Lieutenant Sacco—you know, don't you?"

Pierre signed that he understood. Standing there in uniform, Attilio, so young, so energetic and brave of appearance, with a frank countenance softly illumined by blue eyes like his mother's, at once pleased the priest. He seemed indeed the very personification of youth and love, with all their enthusiastic, disinterested hope in the future.

"You'll see by and by, when we pass the palace again," said Dario. "He'll still be there and I'll show you something."

Then he began to talk gaily of the girls of Rome, the little princesses, the little duchesses, so discreetly educated at the convent of the Sacred Heart, quitting it for the most part so ignorant and then completing their education beside their mothers, never going out but to accompany the latter on the obligatory drive to the Corso, and living through endless days, cloistered, imprisoned in the depths of sombre mansions. Nevertheless what tempests raged in those mute souls to which none had ever penetrated! what stealthy growth of will suddenly appeared from under passive obedience, apparent unconsciousness of surroundings! How many there were who stubbornly set their minds on carving out their lives for themselves, on choosing the man who might please them, and securing him despite the opposition of the entire world! And the lover was chosen there from among the stream of young men promenading the Corso, the lover hooked with a glance during the daily drive, those candid eyes speaking aloud and sufficing for confession and the gift of all, whilst not a breath was wafted from the lips so chastely closed. And afterwards there came love letters, furtively exchanged in church, and the winning-over of maids to facilitate stolen meetings, at first so innocent. In the end, a marriage often resulted.

Celia, for her part, had determined to win Attilio on the very first day when their eyes had met. And it was from a window of the Palazzo Buongiovanni that she had perceived him one afternoon of mortal weariness. He had just raised his head, and she had taken him for ever and given herself to him with those large, pure eyes of hers as they rested on his own. She was but an amorosa—nothing more; he pleased her; she had set her heart on him—him and none other. She would have waited twenty years for him, but she relied on winning him at once by quiet stubbornness of will. People declared that the terrible fury of the Prince, her father, had proved impotent against her respectful, obstinate silence. He, man of mixed blood as he was, son of an American woman, and husband of an English woman, laboured but to retain his own name and fortune intact amidst the downfall of others; and it was rumoured that as the result of a quarrel which he had picked with his wife, whom he accused of not sufficiently watching over their daughter, the Princess had revolted, full not only of the pride of a foreigner who had brought a huge dowry in marriage, but also of such plain, frank egotism that she had declared she no longer found time enough to attend to herself, let alone another. Had she not already done enough in bearing him five children? She thought so; and now she spent her time in worshipping herself, letting Celia do as she listed, and taking no further interest in the household through which swept stormy gusts.

However, the carriage was again about to pass the Buongiovanni mansion, and Dario forewarned Pierre. "You see," said he, "Attilio has come back. And now look up at the third window on the first floor."

It was at once rapid and charming. Pierre saw the curtain slightly drawn aside and Celia's gentle face appear. Closed, candid lily, she did not smile, she did not move. Nothing could be read on those pure lips, or in those clear but fathomless eyes of hers. Yet she was taking Attilio to herself, and giving herself to him without reserve. And soon the curtain fell once more.

"Ah, the little mask!" muttered Dario. "Can one ever tell what there is behind so much innocence?"

As Pierre turned round he perceived Attilio, whose head was still raised, and whose face was also motionless and pale, with closed mouth, and widely opened eyes. And the young priest was deeply touched, for this was love, absolute love in its sudden omnipotence, true love, eternal and juvenescent, in which ambition and calculation played no part.

Then Dario ordered the coachman to drive up to the Pincio; for, before or after the Corso, the round of the Pincio is obligatory on fine, clear afternoons. First came the Piazza del Popolo, the most airy and regular square of Rome, with its conjunction of thoroughfares, its churches and fountains, its central obelisk, and its two clumps of trees facing one another at either end of the small white paving-stones, betwixt the severe and sun-gilt buildings. Then, turning to the right, the carriage began to climb the inclined way to the Pincio—a magnificent winding ascent, decorated with bas-reliefs, statues, and fountains—a kind of apotheosis of marble, a commemoration of ancient Rome, rising amidst greenery. Up above, however, Pierre found the garden small, little better than a large square, with just the four necessary roadways to enable the carriages to drive round and round as long as they pleased. An uninterrupted line of busts of the great men of ancient and modern Italy fringed these roadways. But what Pierre most admired was the trees—trees of the most rare and varied kinds, chosen and tended with infinite care, and nearly always evergreens, so that in winter and summer alike the spot was adorned with lovely foliage of every imaginable shade of verdure. And beside these trees, along the fine, breezy roadways, Dario's victoria began to turn, following the continuous, unwearying stream of the other carriages.

Pierre remarked one young woman of modest demeanour and attractive simplicity who sat alone in a dark-blue victoria, drawn by a well-groomed, elegantly harnessed horse. She was very pretty, short, with chestnut hair, a creamy complexion, and large gentle eyes. Quietly robed in dead-leaf silk, she wore a large hat, which alone looked somewhat extravagant. And seeing that Dario was staring at her, the priest inquired her name, whereat the young Prince smiled. Oh! she was nobody, La Tonietta was the name that people gave her; she was one of the few demi-mondaines that Roman society talked of. Then, with the freeness and frankness which his race displays in such matters, Dario added some particulars. La Tonietta's origin was obscure; some said that she was the daughter of an innkeeper of Tivoli, and others that of a Neapolitan banker. At all events, she was very intelligent, had educated herself, and knew thoroughly well how to receive and entertain people at the little palazzo in the Via dei Mille, which had been given to her by old Marquis Manfredi now deceased. She made no scandalous show, had but one protector at a time, and the princesses and duchesses who paid attention to her at the Corso every afternoon, considered her nice-looking. One peculiarity had made her somewhat notorious. There was some one whom she loved and from whom she never accepted aught but a bouquet of white roses; and folks would smile indulgently when at times for weeks together she was seen driving round the Pincio with those pure, white bridal flowers on the carriage seat.

Dario, however, suddenly paused in his explanations to address a ceremonious bow to a lady who, accompanied by a gentleman, drove by in a large landau. Then he simply said to the priest: "My mother."

Pierre already knew of her. Viscount de la Choue had told him her story, how, after Prince Onofrio Boccanera's death, she had married again, although she was already fifty; how at the Corso, just like some young girl, she had hooked with her eyes a handsome man to her liking—one, too, who was fifteen years her junior. And Pierre also knew who that man was, a certain Jules Laporte, an ex-sergeant of the papal Swiss Guard, an ex-traveller in relics, compromised in an extraordinary "false relic" fraud; and he was further aware that Laporte's wife had made a fine-looking Marquis Montefiori of him, the last of the fortunate adventurers of romance, triumphing as in the legendary lands where shepherds are wedded to queens.

At the next turn, as the large landau again went by, Pierre looked at the couple. The Marchioness was really wonderful, blooming with all the classical Roman beauty, tall, opulent, and very dark, with the head of a goddess and regular if somewhat massive features, nothing as yet betraying her age except the down upon her upper lip. And the Marquis, the Romanised Swiss of Geneva, really had a proud bearing, with his solid soldierly figure and long wavy moustaches. People said that he was in no wise a fool but, on the contrary, very gay and very supple, just the man to please women. His wife so gloried in him that she dragged him about and displayed him everywhere, having begun life afresh with him as if she were still but twenty, spending on him the little fortune which she had saved from the Villa Montefiori disaster, and so completely forgetting her son that she only saw the latter now and again at the promenade and acknowledged his bow like that of some chance acquaintance.

"Let us go to see the sun set behind St. Peter's," all at once said Dario, conscientiously playing his part as a showman of curiosities.

The victoria thereupon returned to the terrace, where a military band was now playing with a terrific blare of brass instruments. In order that their occupants might hear the music, a large number of carriages had already drawn up, and a growing crowd of loungers on foot had assembled there. And from that beautiful terrace, so broad and lofty, one of the most wonderful views of Rome was offered to the gaze. Beyond the Tiber, beyond the pale chaos of the new district of the castle meadows,* and between the greenery of Monte Mario and the Janiculum arose St. Peter's. Then on the left came all the olden city, an endless stretch of roofs, a rolling sea of edifices as far as the eye could reach. But one's glances always came back to St. Peter's, towering into the azure with pure and sovereign grandeur. And, seen from the terrace, the slow sunsets in the depths of the vast sky behind the colossus were sublime.

* See ante note on castle meadows.

Sometimes there are topplings of sanguineous clouds, battles of giants hurling mountains at one another and succumbing beneath the monstrous ruins of flaming cities. Sometimes only red streaks or fissures appear on the surface of a sombre lake, as if a net of light has been flung to fish the submerged orb from amidst the seaweed. Sometimes, too, there is a rosy mist, a kind of delicate dust which falls, streaked with pearls by a distant shower, whose curtain is drawn across the mystery of the horizon. And sometimes there is a triumph, a cortege of gold and purple chariots of cloud rolling along a highway of fire, galleys floating upon an azure sea, fantastic and extravagant pomps slowly sinking into the less and less fathomable abyss of the twilight.

But that night the sublime spectacle presented itself to Pierre with a calm, blinding, desperate grandeur. At first, just above the dome of St. Peter's, the sun, descending in a spotless, deeply limpid sky, proved yet so resplendent that one's eyes could not face its brightness. And in this resplendency the dome seemed to be incandescent, you would have said a dome of liquid silver; whilst the surrounding districts, the house-roofs of the Borgo, were as though changed into a lake of live embers. Then, as the sun was by degrees inclined, it lost some of its blaze, and one could look; and soon afterwards sinking with majestic slowness it disappeared behind the dome, which showed forth darkly blue, while the orb, now entirely hidden, set an aureola around it, a glory like a crown of flaming rays. And then began the dream, the dazzling symbol, the singular illumination of the row of windows beneath the cupola which were transpierced by the light and looked like the ruddy mouths of furnaces, in such wise that one might have imagined the dome to be poised upon a brazier, isolated, in the air, as though raised and upheld by the violence of the fire. It all lasted barely three minutes. Down below the jumbled roofs of the Borgo became steeped in violet vapour, sank into increasing gloom, whilst from the Janiculum to Monte Mario the horizon showed its firm black line. And it was the sky then which became all purple and gold, displaying the infinite placidity of a supernatural radiance above the earth which faded into nihility. Finally the last window reflections were extinguished, the glow of the heavens departed, and nothing remained but the vague, fading roundness of the dome of St. Peter's amidst the all-invading night.

And, by some subtle connection of ideas, Pierre at that moment once again saw rising before him the lofty, sad, declining figures of Cardinal Boccanera and old Orlando. On the evening of that day when he had learnt to know them, one after the other, both so great in the obstinacy of their hope, they seemed to be there, erect on the horizon above their annihilated city, on the fringe of the heavens which death apparently was about to seize. Was everything then to crumble with them? was everything to fade away and disappear in the falling night following upon accomplished Time?

V.

ON the following day Narcisse Habert came in great worry to tell Pierre that Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo complained of being unwell, and asked for a delay of two or three days before receiving the young priest and considering the matter of his audience. Pierre was thus reduced to inaction, for he dared not make any attempt elsewhere in view of seeing the Pope. He had been so frightened by Nani and others that he feared he might jeopardise everything by inconsiderate endeavours. And so he began to visit Rome in order to occupy his leisure.

His first visit was for the ruins of the Palatine. Going out alone one clear morning at eight o'clock, he presented himself at the entrance in the Via San Teodoro, an iron gateway flanked by the lodges of the keepers. One of the latter at once offered his services, and though Pierre would have preferred to roam at will, following the bent of his dream, he somehow did not like to refuse the offer of this man, who spoke French very distinctly, and smiled in a very good-natured way. He was a squatly built little man, a former soldier, some sixty years of age, and his square-cut, ruddy face was barred by thick white moustaches.

"Then will you please follow me, Monsieur l'Abbe," said he. "I can see that you are French, Monsieur l'Abbe. I'm a Piedmontese myself, but I know the French well enough; I was with them at Solferino. Yes, yes, whatever people may say, one can't forget old friendships. Here, this way, please, to the right."

Raising his eyes, Pierre had just perceived the line of cypresses edging the plateau of the Palatine on the side of the Tiber; and in the delicate blue atmosphere the intense greenery of these trees showed like a black fringe. They alone attracted the eye; the slope, of a dusty, dirty grey, stretched out bare and devastated, dotted by a few bushes, among which peeped fragments of ancient walls. All was instinct with the ravaged, leprous sadness of a spot handed over to excavation, and where only men of learning could wax enthusiastic.

"The palaces of Tiberius, Caligula, and the Flavians are up above," resumed the guide. "We must keep then for the end and go round." Nevertheless he took a few steps to the left, and pausing before an excavation, a sort of grotto in the hillside, exclaimed: "This is the Lupercal den where the wolf suckled Romulus and Remus. Just here at the entry used to stand the Ruminal fig-tree which sheltered the twins."

Pierre could not restrain a smile, so convinced was the tone in which the old soldier gave these explanations, proud as he was of all the ancient glory, and wont to regard the wildest legends as indisputable facts. However, when the worthy man pointed out some vestiges of Roma Quadrata—remnants of walls which really seemed to date from the foundation of the city—Pierre began to feel interested, and a first touch of emotion made his heart beat. This emotion was certainly not due to any beauty of scene, for he merely beheld a few courses of tufa blocks, placed one upon the other and uncemented. But a past which had been dead for seven and twenty centuries seemed to rise up before him, and those crumbling, blackened blocks, the foundation of such a mighty eclipse of power and splendour, acquired extraordinary majesty.

Continuing their inspection, they went on, skirting the hillside. The outbuildings of the palaces must have descended to this point; fragments of porticoes, fallen beams, columns and friezes set up afresh, edged the rugged path which wound through wild weeds, suggesting a neglected cemetery; and the guide repeated the words which he had used day by day for ten years past, continuing to enunciate suppositions as facts, and giving a name, a destination, a history, to every one of the fragments.

"The house of Augustus," he said at last, pointing towards some masses of earth and rubbish.

Thereupon Pierre, unable to distinguish anything, ventured to inquire: "Where do you mean?"

"Oh!" said the man, "it seems that the walls were still to be seen at the end of the last century. But it was entered from the other side, from the Sacred Way. On this side there was a huge balcony which overlooked the Circus Maximus so that one could view the sports. However, as you can see, the greater part of the palace is still buried under that big garden up above, the garden of the Villa Mills. When there's money for fresh excavations it will be found again, together with the temple of Apollo and the shrine of Vesta which accompanied it."

Turning to the left, he next entered the Stadium, the arena erected for foot-racing, which stretched beside the palace of Augustus; and the priest's interest was now once more awakened. It was not that he found himself in presence of well-preserved and monumental remains, for not a column had remained erect, and only the right-hand walls were still standing. But the entire plan of the building had been traced, with the goals at either end, the porticus round the course, and the colossal imperial tribune which, after being on the left, annexed to the house of Augustus, had afterwards opened on the right, fitting into the palace of Septimius Severus. And while Pierre looked on all the scattered remnants, his guide went on chattering, furnishing the most copious and precise information, and declaring that the gentlemen who directed the excavations had mentally reconstructed the Stadium in each and every particular, and were even preparing a most exact plan of it, showing all the columns in their proper order and the statues in their niches, and even specifying the divers sorts of marble which had covered the walls.

"Oh! the directors are quite at ease," the old soldier eventually added with an air of infinite satisfaction. "There will be nothing for the Germans to pounce on here. They won't be allowed to set things topsy-turvy as they did at the Forum, where everybody's at sea since they came along with their wonderful science!"

Pierre—a Frenchman—smiled, and his interest increased when, by broken steps and wooden bridges thrown over gaps, he followed the guide into the great ruins of the palace of Severus. Rising on the southern point of the Palatine, this palace had overlooked the Appian Way and the Campagna as far as the eye could reach. Nowadays, almost the only remains are the substructures, the subterranean halls contrived under the arches of the terraces, by which the plateau of the hill was enlarged; and yet these dismantled substructures suffice to give some idea of the triumphant palace which they once upheld, so huge and powerful have they remained in their indestructible massiveness. Near by arose the famous Septizonium, the tower with the seven tiers of arcades, which only finally disappeared in the sixteenth century. One of the palace terraces yet juts out upon cyclopean arches and from it the view is splendid. But all the rest is a commingling of massive yet crumbling walls, gaping depths whose ceilings have fallen, endless corridors and vast halls of doubtful destination. Well cared for by the new administration, swept and cleansed of weeds, the ruins have lost their romantic wildness and assumed an aspect of bare and mournful grandeur. However, flashes of living sunlight often gild the ancient walls, penetrate by their breaches into the black halls, and animate with their dazzlement the mute melancholy of all this dead splendour now exhumed from the earth in which it slumbered for centuries. Over the old ruddy masonry, stripped of its pompous marble covering, is the purple mantle of the sunlight, draping the whole with imperial glory once more.

For more than two hours already Pierre had been walking on, and yet he still had to visit all the earlier palaces on the north and east of the plateau. "We must go back," said the guide, "the gardens of the Villa Mills and the convent of San Bonaventura stop the way. We shall only be able to pass on this side when the excavations have made a clearance. Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe, if you had walked over the Palatine merely some fifty years ago! I've seen some plans of that time. There were only some vineyards and little gardens with hedges then, a real campagna, where not a soul was to be met. And to think that all these palaces were sleeping underneath!"

Pierre followed him, and after again passing the house of Augustus, they ascended the slope and reached the vast Flavian palace,* still half buried by the neighbouring villa, and composed of a great number of halls large and small, on the nature of which scholars are still arguing. The aula regia, or throne-room, the basilica, or hall of justice, the triclinium, or dining-room, and the peristylium seem certainties; but for all the rest, and especially the small chambers of the private part of the structure, only more or less fanciful conjectures can be offered. Moreover, not a wall is entire; merely foundations peep out of the ground, mutilated bases describing the plan of the edifice. The only ruin preserved, as if by miracle, is the house on a lower level which some assert to have been that of Livia,* a house which seems very small beside all the huge palaces, and where are three halls comparatively intact, with mural paintings of mythological scenes, flowers, and fruits, still wonderfully fresh. As for the palace of Tiberius, not one of its stones can be seen; its remains lie buried beneath a lovely public garden; whilst of the neighbouring palace of Caligula, overhanging the Forum, there are only some huge substructures, akin to those of the house of Severus—buttresses, lofty arcades, which upheld the palace, vast basements, so to say, where the praetorians were posted and gorged themselves with continual junketings. And thus this lofty plateau dominating the city merely offered some scarcely recognisable vestiges to the view, stretches of grey, bare soil turned up by the pick, and dotted with fragments of old walls; and it needed a real effort of scholarly imagination to conjure up the ancient imperial splendour which once had triumphed there.

* Begun by Vespasian and finished by Domitian.—Trans.

** Others assert it to have been the house of Germanicus,
father of Caligula.—Trans.

Nevertheless Pierre's guide, with quiet conviction, persisted in his explanations, pointing to empty space as though the edifices still rose before him. "Here," said he, "we are in the Area Palatina. Yonder, you see, is the facade of Domitian's palace, and there you have that of Caligula's palace, while on turning round the temple of Jupiter Stator is in front of you. The Sacred Way came up as far as here, and passed under the Porta Mugonia, one of the three gates of primitive Rome."

He paused and pointed to the northwest portion of the height. "You will have noticed," he resumed, "that the Caesars didn't build yonder. And that was evidently because they had to respect some very ancient monuments dating from before the foundation of the city and greatly venerated by the people. There stood the temple of Victory built by Evander and his Arcadians, the Lupercal grotto which I showed you, and the humble hut of Romulus constructed of reeds and clay. Oh! everything has been found again, Monsieur l'Abbe; and, in spite of all that the Germans say there isn't the slightest doubt of it."

Then, quite abruptly, like a man suddenly remembering the most interesting thing of all, he exclaimed: "Ah! to wind up we'll just go to see the subterranean gallery where Caligula was murdered."

Thereupon they descended into a long crypto-porticus, through the breaches of which the sun now casts bright rays. Some ornaments of stucco and fragments of mosaic-work are yet to be seen. Still the spot remains mournful and desolate, well fitted for tragic horror. The old soldier's voice had become graver as he related how Caligula, on returning from the Palatine games, had been minded to descend all alone into this gallery to witness certain sacred dances which some youths from Asia were practising there. And then it was that the gloom gave Cassius Chaereas, the chief of the conspirators, an opportunity to deal him the first thrust in the abdomen. Howling with pain, the emperor sought to flee; but the assassins, his creatures, his dearest friends, rushed upon him, threw him down, and dealt him blow after blow, whilst he, mad with rage and fright, filled the dim, deaf gallery with the howling of a slaughtered beast. When he had expired, silence fell once more, and the frightened murderers fled.

The classical visit to the Palatine was now over, and when Pierre came up into the light again, he wished to rid himself of his guide and remain alone in the pleasant, dreamy garden on the summit of the height. For three hours he had been tramping about with the guide's voice buzzing in his ears. The worthy man was now talking of his friendship for France and relating the battle of Magenta in great detail. He smiled as he took the piece of silver which Pierre offered him, and then started on the battle of Solferino. Indeed, it seemed impossible to stop him, when fortunately a lady came up to ask for some information. And, thereupon, he went off with her. "Good-evening, Monsieur l'Abbe," he said; "you can go down by way of Caligula's palace."

Delightful was Pierre's relief when he was at last able to rest for a moment on one of the marble seats in the garden. There were but few clumps of trees, cypresses, box-trees, palms, and some fine evergreen oaks; but the latter, sheltering the seat, cast a dark shade of exquisite freshness around. The charm of the spot was also largely due to its dreamy solitude, to the low rustle which seemed to come from that ancient soil saturated with resounding history. Here formerly had been the pleasure grounds of the Villa Farnese which still exists though greatly damaged, and the grace of the Renascence seems to linger here, its breath passing caressingly through the shiny foliage of the old evergreen oaks. You are, as it were, enveloped by the soul of the past, an ethereal conglomeration of visions, and overhead is wafted the straying breath of innumerable generations buried beneath the sod.

After a time, however, Pierre could no longer remain seated, so powerful was the attraction of Rome, scattered all around that august summit. So he rose and approached the balustrade of a terrace; and beneath him appeared the Forum, and beyond it the Capitoline hill. To the eye the latter now only presented a commingling of grey buildings, lacking both grandeur and beauty. On the summit one saw the rear of the Palace of the Senator, flat, with little windows, and surmounted by a high, square campanile. The large, bare, rusty-looking walls hid the church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli and the spot where the temple of Capitoline Jove had formerly stood, radiant in all its royalty. On the left, some ugly houses rose terrace-wise upon the slope of Monte Caprino, where goats were pastured in the middle ages; while the few fine trees in the grounds of the Caffarelli palace, the present German embassy, set some greenery above the ancient Tarpeian rock now scarcely to be found, lost, hidden as it is, by buttress walls. Yet this was the Mount of the Capitol, the most glorious of the seven hills, with its citadel and its temple, the temple to which universal dominion was promised, the St. Peter's of pagan Rome; this indeed was the hill—steep on the side of the Forum, and a precipice on that of the Campus Martius—where the thunder of Jupiter fell, where in the dimmest of the far-off ages the Asylum of Romulus rose with its sacred oaks, a spot of infinite savage mystery. Here, later, were preserved the public documents of Roman grandeur inscribed on tablets of brass; hither climbed the heroes of the triumphs; and here the emperors became gods, erect in statues of marble. And nowadays the eye inquires wonderingly how so much history and so much glory can have had for their scene so small a space, such a rugged, jumbled pile of paltry buildings, a mole-hill, looking no bigger, no loftier than a hamlet perched between two valleys.

Then another surprise for Pierre was the Forum, starting from the Capitol and stretching out below the Palatine: a narrow square, close pressed by the neighbouring hills, a hollow where Rome in growing had been compelled to rear edifice close to edifice till all stifled for lack of breathing space. It was necessary to dig very deep—some fifty feet—to find the venerable republican soil, and now all you see is a long, clean, livid trench, cleared of ivy and bramble, where the fragments of paving, the bases of columns, and the piles of foundations appear like bits of bone. Level with the ground the Basilica Julia, entirely mapped out, looks like an architect's ground plan. On that side the arch of Septimius Severus alone rears itself aloft, virtually intact, whilst of the temple of Vespasian only a few isolated columns remain still standing, as if by miracle, amidst the general downfall, soaring with a proud elegance, with sovereign audacity of equilibrium, so slender and so gilded, into the blue heavens. The column of Phocas is also erect; and you see some portions of the Rostra fitted together out of fragments discovered near by. But if the eye seeks a sensation of extraordinary vastness, it must travel beyond the three columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux, beyond the vestiges of the house of the Vestals, beyond the temple of Faustina, in which the Christian Church of San Lorenzo has so composedly installed itself, and even beyond the round temple of Romulus, to light upon the Basilica of Constantine with its three colossal, gaping archways. From the Palatine they look like porches built for a nation of giants, so massive that a fallen fragment resembles some huge rock hurled by a whirlwind from a mountain summit. And there, in that illustrious, narrow, overflowing Forum the history of the greatest of nations held for centuries, from the legendary time of the Sabine women, reconciling their relatives and their ravishers, to that of the proclamation of public liberty, so slowly wrung from the patricians by the plebeians. Was not the Forum at once the market, the exchange, the tribunal, the open-air hall of public meeting? The Gracchi there defended the cause of the humble; Sylla there set up the lists of those whom he proscribed; Cicero there spoke, and there, against the rostra, his bleeding head was hung. Then, under the emperors, the old renown was dimmed, the centuries buried the monuments and temples with such piles of dust that all that the middle ages could do was to turn the spot into a cattle market! Respect has come back once more, a respect which violates tombs, which is full of feverish curiosity and science, which is dissatisfied with mere hypotheses, which loses itself amidst this historical soil where generations rise one above the other, and hesitates between the fifteen or twenty restorations of the Forum that have been planned on paper, each of them as plausible as the other. But to the mere passer-by, who is not a professional scholar and has not recently re-perused the history of Rome, the details have no significance. All he sees on this searched and scoured spot is a city's cemetery where old exhumed stones are whitening, and whence rises the intense sadness that envelops dead nations. Pierre, however, noting here and there fragments of the Sacred Way, now turning, now running down, and now ascending with their pavement of silex indented by the chariot-wheels, thought of the triumphs, of the ascent of the triumpher, so sorely shaken as his chariot jolted over that rough pavement of glory.

But the horizon expanded towards the southeast, and beyond the arches of Titus and Constantine he perceived the Colosseum. Ah! that colossus, only one-half or so of which has been destroyed by time as with the stroke of a mighty scythe, it rises in its enormity and majesty like a stone lace-work with hundreds of empty bays agape against the blue of heaven! There is a world of halls, stairs, landings, and passages, a world where one loses oneself amidst death-like silence and solitude. The furrowed tiers of seats, eaten into by the atmosphere, are like shapeless steps leading down into some old extinct crater, some natural circus excavated by the force of the elements in indestructible rock. The hot suns of eighteen hundred years have baked and scorched this ruin, which has reverted to a state of nature, bare and golden-brown like a mountain-side, since it has been stripped of its vegetation, the flora which once made it like a virgin forest. And what an evocation when the mind sets flesh and blood and life again on all that dead osseous framework, fills the circus with the 90,000 spectators which it could hold, marshals the games and the combats of the arena, gathers a whole civilisation together, from the emperor and the dignitaries to the surging plebeian sea, all aglow with the agitation and brilliancy of an impassioned people, assembled under the ruddy reflection of the giant purple velum. And then, yet further, on the horizon, were other cyclopean ruins, the baths of Caracalla, standing there like relics of a race of giants long since vanished from the world: halls extravagantly and inexplicably spacious and lofty; vestibules large enough for an entire population; a frigidarium where five hundred people could swim together; a tepidarium and a calidarium* on the same proportions, born of a wild craving for the huge; and then the terrific massiveness of the structures, the thickness of the piles of brick-work, such as no feudal castle ever knew; and, in addition, the general immensity which makes passing visitors look like lost ants; such an extraordinary riot of the great and the mighty that one wonders for what men, for what multitudes, this monstrous edifice was reared. To-day, you would say a mass of rocks in the rough, thrown from some height for building the abode of Titans.

* Tepidarium, warm bath; calidarium, vapour bath.—Trans.

And as Pierre gazed, he became more and more immersed in the limitless past which encompassed him. On all sides history rose up like a surging sea. Those bluey plains on the north and west were ancient Etruria; those jagged crests on the east were the Sabine Mountains; while southward, the Alban Mountains and Latium spread out in the streaming gold of the sunshine. Alba Longa was there, and so was Monte Cavo, with its crown of old trees, and the convent which has taken the place of the ancient temple of Jupiter. Then beyond the Forum, beyond the Capitol, the greater part of Rome stretched out, whilst behind Pierre, on the margin of the Tiber, was the Janiculum. And a voice seemed to come from the whole city, a voice which told him of Rome's eternal life, resplendent with past greatness. He remembered just enough of what he had been taught at school to realise where he was; he knew just what every one knows of Rome with no pretension to scholarship, and it was more particularly his artistic temperament which awoke within him and gathered warmth from the flame of memory. The present had disappeared, and the ocean of the past was still rising, buoying him up, carrying him away.

And then his mind involuntarily pictured a resurrection instinct with life. The grey, dismal Palatine, razed like some accursed city, suddenly became animated, peopled, crowned with palaces and temples. There had been the cradle of the Eternal City, founded by Romulus on that summit overlooking the Tiber. There assuredly the seven kings of its two and a half centuries of monarchical rule had dwelt, enclosed within high, strong walls, which had but three gateways. Then the five centuries of republican sway spread out, the greatest, the most glorious of all the centuries, those which brought the Italic peninsula and finally the known world under Roman dominion. During those victorious years of social and war-like struggle, Rome grew and peopled the seven hills, and the Palatine became but a venerable cradle with legendary temples, and was even gradually invaded by private residences. But at last Caesar, the incarnation of the power of his race, after Gaul and after Pharsalia triumphed in the name of the whole Roman people, having completed the colossal task by which the five following centuries of imperialism were to profit, with a pompous splendour and a rush of every appetite. And then Augustus could ascend to power; glory had reached its climax; millions of gold were waiting to be filched from the depths of the provinces; and the imperial gala was to begin in the world's capital, before the eyes of the dazzled and subjected nations. Augustus had been born on the Palatine, and after Actium had given him the empire, he set his pride in reigning from the summit of that sacred mount, venerated by the people. He bought up private houses and there built his palace with luxurious splendour: an atrium upheld by four pilasters and eight columns; a peristylium encompassed by fifty-six Ionic columns; private apartments all around, and all in marble; a profusion of marble, brought at great cost from foreign lands, and of the brightest hues, resplendent like gems. And he lodged himself with the gods, building near his own abode a large temple of Apollo and a shrine of Vesta in order to ensure himself divine and eternal sovereignty. And then the seed of the imperial palaces was sown; they were to spring up, grow and swarm, and cover the entire mount.

Ah! the all-powerfulness of Augustus, his four and forty years of total, absolute, superhuman power, such as no despot has known even in his dreams! He had taken to himself every title, united every magistracy in his person. Imperator and consul, he commanded the armies and exercised executive power; pro-consul, he was supreme in the provinces; perpetual censor and princeps, he reigned over the senate; tribune, he was the master of the people. And, formerly called Octavius, he had caused himself to be declared Augustus, sacred, god among men, having his temples and his priests, worshipped in his lifetime like a divinity deigning to visit the earth. And finally he had resolved to be supreme pontiff, annexing religious to civil power, and thus by a stroke of genius attaining to the most complete dominion to which man can climb. As the supreme pontiff could not reside in a private house, he declared his abode to be State property. As the supreme pontiff could not leave the vicinity of the temple of Vesta, he built a temple to that goddess near his own dwelling, leaving the guardianship of the ancient altar below the Palatine to the Vestal virgins. He spared no effort, for he well realised that human omnipotence, the mastery of mankind and the world, lay in that reunion of sovereignty, in being both king and priest, emperor and pope. All the sap of a mighty race, all the victories achieved, and all the favours of fortune yet to be garnered, blossomed forth in Augustus, in a unique splendour which was never again to shed such brilliant radiance. He was really the master of the world, amidst the conquered and pacified nations, encompassed by immortal glory in literature and in art. In him would seem to have been satisfied the old intense ambition of his people, the ambition which it had pursued through centuries of patient conquest, to become the people-king. The blood of Rome, the blood of Augustus, at last coruscated in the sunlight, in the purple of empire. And the blood of Augustus, of the divine, triumphant, absolute sovereign of bodies and souls, of the man in whom seven centuries of national pride had culminated, was to descend through the ages, through an innumerable posterity with a heritage of boundless pride and ambition. For it was fatal: the blood of Augustus was bound to spring into life once more and pulsate in the veins of all the successive masters of Rome, ever haunting them with the dream of ruling the whole world. And later on, after the decline and fall, when power had once more become divided between the king and the priest, the popes—their hearts burning with the red, devouring blood of their great forerunner—had no other passion, no other policy, through the centuries, than that of attaining to civil dominion, to the totality of human power.

But Augustus being dead, his palace having been closed and consecrated, Pierre saw that of Tiberius spring up from the soil. It had stood where his feet now rested, where the beautiful evergreen oaks sheltered him. He pictured it with courts, porticoes, and halls, both substantial and grand, despite the gloomy bent of the emperor who betook himself far from Rome to live amongst informers and debauchees, with his heart and brain poisoned by power to the point of crime and most extraordinary insanity. Then the palace of Caligula followed, an enlargement of that of Tiberius, with arcades set up to increase its extent, and a bridge thrown over the Forum to the Capitol, in order that the prince might go thither at his ease to converse with Jove, whose son he claimed to be. And sovereignty also rendered this one ferocious—a madman with omnipotence to do as he listed! Then, after Claudius, Nero, not finding the Palatine large enough, seized upon the delightful gardens climbing the Esquiline in order to set up his Golden House, a dream of sumptuous immensity which he could not complete and the ruins of which disappeared in the troubles following the death of this monster whom pride demented. Next, in eighteen months, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius fell one upon the other, in mire and in blood, the purple converting them also into imbeciles and monsters, gorged like unclean beasts at the trough of imperial enjoyment. And afterwards came the Flavians, at first a respite, with commonsense and human kindness: Vespasian; next Titus, who built but little on the Palatine; but then Domitian, in whom the sombre madness of omnipotence burst forth anew amidst a regime of fear and spying, idiotic atrocities and crimes, debauchery contrary to nature, and building enterprises born of insane vanity instinct with a desire to outvie the temples of the gods. The palace of Domitian, parted by a lane from that of Tiberius, arose colossal-like—a palace of fairyland. There was the hall of audience, with its throne of gold, its sixteen columns of Phrygian and Numidian marble and its eight niches containing colossal statues; there were the hall of justice, the vast dining-room, the peristylium, the sleeping apartments, where granite, porphyry, and alabaster overflowed, carved and decorated by the most famous artists, and lavished on all sides in order to dazzle the world. And finally, many years later, a last palace was added to all the others—that of Septimius Severus: again a building of pride, with arches supporting lofty halls, terraced storeys, towers o'er-topping the roofs, a perfect Babylonian pile, rising up at the extreme point of the mount in view of the Appian Way, so that the emperor's compatriots—those from the province of Africa, where he was born—might, on reaching the horizon, marvel at his fortune and worship him in his glory.

And now Pierre beheld all those palaces which he had conjured up around him, resuscitated, resplendent in the full sunlight. They were as if linked together, parted merely by the narrowest of passages. In order that not an inch of that precious summit might be lost, they had sprouted thickly like the monstrous florescence of strength, power, and unbridled pride which satisfied itself at the cost of millions, bleeding the whole world for the enjoyment of one man. And in truth there was but one palace altogether, a palace enlarged as soon as one emperor died and was placed among the deities, and another, shunning the consecrated pile where possibly the shadow of death frightened him, experienced an imperious need to build a house of his own and perpetuate in everlasting stone the memory of his reign. All the emperors were seized with this building craze; it was like a disease which the very throne seemed to carry from one occupant to another with growing intensity, a consuming desire to excel all predecessors by thicker and higher walls, by a more and more wonderful profusion of marbles, columns, and statues. And among all these princes there was the idea of a glorious survival, of leaving a testimony of their greatness to dazzled and stupefied generations, of perpetuating themselves by marvels which would not perish but for ever weigh heavily upon the earth, when their own light ashes should long since have been swept away by the winds. And thus the Palatine became but the venerable base of a monstrous edifice, a thick vegetation of adjoining buildings, each new pile being like a fresh eruption of feverish pride; while the whole, now showing the snowy brightness of white marble and now the glowing hues of coloured marble, ended by crowning Rome and the world with the most extraordinary and most insolent abode of sovereignty—whether palace, temple, basilica, or cathedral—that omnipotence and dominion have ever reared under the heavens.

But death lurked beneath this excess of strength and glory. Seven hundred and thirty years of monarchy and republic had sufficed to make Rome great; and in five centuries of imperial sway the people-king was to be devoured down to its last muscles. There was the immensity of the territory, the more distant provinces gradually pillaged and exhausted; there was the fisc consuming everything, digging the pit of fatal bankruptcy; and there was the degeneration of the people, poisoned by the scenes of the circus and the arena, fallen to the sloth and debauchery of their masters, the Caesars, while mercenaries fought the foe and tilled the soil. Already at the time of Constantine, Rome had a rival, Byzantium; disruption followed with Honorius; and then some ten emperors sufficed for decomposition to be complete, for the bones of the dying prey to be picked clean, the end coming with Romulus Augustulus, the sorry creature whose name is, so to say, a mockery of the whole glorious history, a buffet for both the founder of Rome and the founder of the empire.

The palaces, the colossal assemblage of walls, storeys, terraces, and gaping roofs, still remained on the deserted Palatine; many ornaments and statues, however, had already been removed to Byzantium. And the empire, having become Christian, had afterwards closed the temples and extinguished the fire of Vesta, whilst yet respecting the ancient Palladium. But in the fifth century the barbarians rush upon Rome, sack and burn it, and carry the spoils spared by the flames away in their chariots. As long as the city was dependent on Byzantium a custodian of the imperial palaces remained there watching over the Palatine. Then all fades and crumbles in the night of the middle ages. It would really seem that the popes then slowly took the place of the Caesars, succeeding them both in their abandoned marble halls and their ever-subsisting passion for domination. Some of them assuredly dwelt in the palace of Septimius Severus; a council of the Church was held in the Septizonium; and, later on, Gelasius II was elected in a neighbouring monastery on the sacred mount. It was as if Augustus were again rising from the tomb, once more master of the world, with a Sacred College of Cardinals resuscitating the Roman Senate. In the twelfth century the Septizonium belonged to some Benedictine monks, and was sold by them to the powerful Frangipani family, who fortified it as they had already fortified the Colosseum and the arches of Constantine and Titus, thus forming a vast fortress round about the venerable cradle of the city. And the violent deeds of civil war and the ravages of invasion swept by like whirlwinds, throwing down the walls, razing the palaces and towers. And afterwards successive generations invaded the ruins, installed themselves in them by right of trover and conquest, turned them into cellars, store-places for forage, and stables for mules. Kitchen gardens were formed, vines were planted on the spots where fallen soil had covered the mosaics of the imperial halls. All around nettles and brambles grew up, and ivy preyed on the overturned porticoes, till there came a day when the colossal assemblage of palaces and temples, which marble was to have rendered eternal, seemed to dive beneath the dust, to disappear under the surging soil and vegetation which impassive Nature threw over it. And then, in the hot sunlight, among the wild flowerets, only big, buzzing flies remained, whilst herds of goats strayed in freedom through the throne-room of Domitian and the fallen sanctuary of Apollo.

A great shudder passed through Pierre. To think of so much strength, pride, and grandeur, and such rapid ruin—a world for ever swept away! He wondered how entire palaces, yet peopled by admirable statuary, could thus have been gradually buried without any one thinking of protecting them. It was no sudden catastrophe which had swallowed up those masterpieces, subsequently to be disinterred with exclamations of admiring wonder; they had been drowned, as it were—caught progressively by the legs, the waist, and the neck, till at last the head had sunk beneath the rising tide. And how could one explain that generations had heedlessly witnessed such things without thought of putting forth a helping hand? It would seem as if, at a given moment, a black curtain were suddenly drawn across the world, as if mankind began afresh, with a new and empty brain which needed moulding and furnishing. Rome had become depopulated; men ceased to repair the ruins left by fire and sword; the edifices which by their very immensity had become useless were utterly neglected, allowed to crumble and fall. And then, too, the new religion everywhere hunted down the old one, stole its temples, overturned its gods. Earthly deposits probably completed the disaster—there were, it is said, both earthquakes and inundations—and the soil was ever rising, the alluvia of the young Christian world buried the ancient pagan society. And after the pillaging of the temples, the theft of the bronze roofs and marble columns, the climax came with the filching of the stones torn from the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus, with the pounding of the statuary and sculpture-work, thrown into kilns to procure the lime needed for the new monuments of Catholic Rome.

It was nearly one o'clock, and Pierre awoke as from a dream. The sun-rays were streaming in a golden rain between the shiny leaves of the ever-green oaks above him, and down below Rome lay dozing, overcome by the great heat. Then he made up his mind to leave the garden, and went stumbling over the rough pavement of the Clivus Victoriae, his mind still haunted by blinding visions. To complete his day, he had resolved to visit the old Appian Way during the afternoon, and, unwilling to return to the Via Giulia, he lunched at a suburban tavern, in a large, dim room, where, alone with the buzzing flies, he lingered for more than two hours, awaiting the sinking of the sun.

Ah! that Appian Way, that ancient queen of the high roads, crossing the Campagna in a long straight line with rows of proud tombs on either hand—to Pierre it seemed like a triumphant prolongation of the Palatine. He there found the same passion for splendour and domination, the same craving to eternise the memory of Roman greatness in marble and daylight. Oblivion was vanquished; the dead refused to rest, and remained for ever erect among the living, on either side of that road which was traversed by multitudes from the entire world. The deified images of those who were now but dust still gazed on the passers-by with empty eyes; the inscriptions still spoke, proclaiming names and titles. In former times the rows of sepulchres must have extended without interruption along all the straight, level miles between the tomb of Caecilia Metella and that of Casale Rotondo, forming an elongated cemetery where the powerful and wealthy competed as to who should leave the most colossal and lavishly decorated mausoleum: such, indeed, was the craving for survival, the passion for pompous immortality, the desire to deify death by lodging it in temples; whereof the present-day monumental splendour of the Genoese Campo Santo and the Roman Campo Verano is, so to say, a remote inheritance. And what a vision it was to picture all the tremendous tombs on the right and left of the glorious pavement which the legions trod on their return from the conquest of the world! That tomb of Caecilia Metella, with its bond-stones so huge, its walls so thick that the middle ages transformed it into the battlemented keep of a fortress! And then all the tombs which follow, the modern structures erected in order that the marble fragments discovered might be set in place, the old blocks of brick and concrete, despoiled of their sculptured-work and rising up like seared rocks, yet still suggesting their original shapes as shrines, cippi, and sarcophagi. There is a wondrous succession of high reliefs figuring the dead in groups of three and five; statues in which the dead live deified, erect; seats contrived in niches in order that wayfarers may rest and bless the hospitality of the dead; laudatory epitaphs celebrating the dead, both the known and the unknown, the children of Sextius Pompeius Justus, the departed Marcus Servilius Quartus, Hilarius Fuscus, Rabirius Hermodorus; without counting the sepulchres venturously ascribed to Seneca and the Horatii and Curiatii. And finally there is the most extraordinary and gigantic of all the tombs, that known as Casale Rotondo, which is so large that it has been possible to establish a farmhouse and an olive garden on its substructures, which formerly upheld a double rotunda, adorned with Corinthian pilasters, large candelabra, and scenic masks.*

* Some believe this tomb to have been that of Messalla Corvinus,
the historian and poet, a friend of Augustus and Horace; others
ascribe it to his son, Aurelius Messallinus Cotta.—Trans.

Pierre, having driven in a cab as far as the tomb of Caecilia Metella, continued his excursion on foot, going slowly towards Casale Rotondo. In many places the old pavement appears—large blocks of basaltic lava, worn into deep ruts that jolt the best-hung vehicles. Among the ruined tombs on either hand run bands of grass, the neglected grass of cemeteries, scorched by the summer suns and sprinkled with big violet thistles and tall sulphur-wort. Parapets of dry stones, breast high, enclose the russet roadsides, which resound with the crepitation of grasshoppers; and, beyond, the Campagna stretches, vast and bare, as far as the eye can see. A parasol pine, a eucalyptus, some olive or fig trees, white with dust, alone rise up near the road at infrequent intervals. On the left the ruddy arches of the Acqua Claudia show vigorously in the meadows, and stretches of poorly cultivated land, vineyards, and little farms, extend to the blue and lilac Sabine and Alban hills, where Frascati, Rocca di Papa, and Albano set bright spots, which grow and whiten as one gets nearer to them. Then, on the right, towards the sea, the houseless, treeless plain grows and spreads with vast, broad ripples, extraordinary ocean-like simplicity and grandeur, a long, straight line alone parting it from the sky. At the height of summer all burns and flares on this limitless prairie, then of a ruddy gold; but in September a green tinge begins to suffuse the ocean of herbage, which dies away in the pink and mauve and vivid blue of the fine sunsets.

As Pierre, quite alone and in a dreary mood, slowly paced the endless, flat highway, that resurrection of the past which he had beheld on the Palatine again confronted his mind's eye. On either hand the tombs once more rose up intact, with marble of dazzling whiteness. Had not the head of a colossal statue been found, mingled with fragments of huge sphinxes, at the foot of yonder vase-shaped mass of bricks? He seemed to see the entire colossal statue standing again between the huge, crouching beasts. Farther on a beautiful headless statue of a woman had been discovered in the cella of a sepulchre, and he beheld it, again whole, with features expressive of grace and strength smiling upon life. The inscriptions also became perfect; he could read and understand them at a glance, as if living among those dead ones of two thousand years ago. And the road, too, became peopled: the chariots thundered, the armies tramped along, the people of Rome jostled him with the feverish agitation of great communities. It was a return of the times of the Flavians or the Antonines, the palmy years of the empire, when the pomp of the Appian Way, with its grand sepulchres, carved and adorned like temples, attained its apogee. What a monumental Street of Death, what an approach to Rome, that highway, straight as an arrow, where with the extraordinary pomp of their pride, which had survived their dust, the great dead greeted the traveller, ushered him into the presence of the living! He may well have wondered among what sovereign people, what masters of the world, he was about to find himself—a nation which had committed to its dead the duty of telling strangers that it allowed nothing whatever to perish—that its dead, like its city, remained eternal and glorious in monuments of extraordinary vastness! To think of it—the foundations of a fortress, and a tower sixty feet in diameter, that one woman might be laid to rest! And then, far away, at the end of the superb, dazzling highway, bordered with the marble of its funereal palaces, Pierre, turning round, distinctly beheld the Palatine, with the marble of its imperial palaces—the huge assemblage of palaces whose omnipotence had dominated the world!

But suddenly he started: two carabiniers had just appeared among the ruins. The spot was not safe; the authorities watched over tourists even in broad daylight. And later on came another meeting which caused him some emotion. He perceived an ecclesiastic, a tall old man, in a black cassock, edged and girt with red; and was surprised to recognise Cardinal Boccanera, who had quitted the roadway, and was slowly strolling along the band of grass, among the tall thistles and sulphur-wort. With his head lowered and his feet brushing against the fragments of the tombs, the Cardinal did not even see Pierre. The young priest courteously turned aside, surprised to find him so far from home and alone. Then, on perceiving a heavy coach, drawn by two black horses, behind a building, he understood matters. A footman in black livery was waiting motionless beside the carriage, and the coachman had not quitted his box. And Pierre remembered that the Cardinals were not expected to walk in Rome, so that they were compelled to drive into the country when they desired to take exercise. But what haughty sadness, what solitary and, so to say, ostracised grandeur there was about that tall, thoughtful old man, thus forced to seek the desert, and wander among the tombs, in order to breathe a little of the evening air!

Pierre had lingered there for long hours; the twilight was coming on, and once again he witnessed a lovely sunset. On his left the Campagna became blurred, and assumed a slaty hue, against which the yellowish arcades of the aqueduct showed very plainly, while the Alban hills, far away, faded into pink. Then, on the right, towards the sea, the planet sank among a number of cloudlets, figuring an archipelago of gold in an ocean of dying embers. And excepting the sapphire sky, studded with rubies, above the endless line of the Campagna, which was likewise changed into a sparkling lake, the dull green of the herbage turning to a liquid emerald tint, there was nothing to be seen, neither a hillock nor a flock—nothing, indeed, but Cardinal Boccanera's black figure, erect among the tombs, and looking, as it were, enlarged as it stood out against the last purple flush of the sunset.

Early on the following morning Pierre, eager to see everything, returned to the Appian Way in order to visit the catacomb of St. Calixtus, the most extensive and remarkable of the old Christian cemeteries, and one, too, where several of the early popes were buried. You ascend through a scorched garden, past olives and cypresses, reach a shanty of boards and plaster in which a little trade in "articles of piety" is carried on, and there a modern and fairly easy flight of steps enables you to descend. Pierre fortunately found there some French Trappists, who guard these catacombs and show them to strangers. One brother was on the point of going down with two French ladies, the mother and daughter, the former still comely and the other radiant with youth. They stood there smiling, though already slightly frightened, while the monk lighted some long, slim candles. He was a man with a bossy brow, the large, massive jaw of an obstinate believer and pale eyes bespeaking an ingenuous soul.

"Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," he said to Pierre, "you've come just in time. If the ladies are willing, you had better come with us; for three Brothers are already below with people, and you would have a long time to wait. This is the great season for visitors."

The ladies politely nodded, and the Trappist handed a candle to the priest. In all probability neither mother nor daughter was devout, for both glanced askance at their new companion's cassock, and suddenly became serious. Then they all went down and found themselves in a narrow subterranean corridor. "Take care, mesdames," repeated the Trappist, lighting the ground with his candle. "Walk slowly, for there are projections and slopes."

Then, in a shrill voice full of extraordinary conviction, he began his explanations. Pierre had descended in silence, his heart beating with emotion. Ah! how many times, indeed, in his innocent seminary days, had he not dreamt of those catacombs of the early Christians, those asylums of the primitive faith! Even recently, while writing his book, he had often thought of them as of the most ancient and venerable remains of that community of the lowly and simple, for the return of which he called. But his brain was full of pages written by poets and great prose writers. He had beheld the catacombs through the magnifying glass of those imaginative authors, and had believed them to be vast, similar to subterranean cities, with broad highways and spacious halls, fit for the accommodation of vast crowds. And now how poor and humble the reality!

"Well, yes," said the Trappist in reply to the ladies' questions, "the corridor is scarcely more than a yard in width; two persons could not pass along side by side. How they dug it? Oh! it was simple enough. A family or a burial association needed a place of sepulchre. Well, a first gallery was excavated with pickaxes in soil of this description—granular tufa, as it is called—a reddish substance, as you can see, both soft and yet resistant, easy to work and at the same time waterproof. In a word, just the substance that was needed, and one, too, that has preserved the remains of the buried in a wonderful way." He paused and brought the flamelet of his candle near to the compartments excavated on either hand of the passage. "Look," he continued, "these are the loculi. Well, a subterranean gallery was dug, and on both sides these compartments were hollowed out, one above the other. The bodies of the dead were laid in them, for the most part simply wrapped in shrouds. Then the aperture was closed with tiles or marble slabs, carefully cemented. So, as you can see, everything explains itself. If other families joined the first one, or the burial association became more numerous, fresh galleries were added to those already filled. Passages were excavated on either hand, in every sense; and, indeed, a second and lower storey, at times even a third, was dug out. And here, you see, we are in a gallery which is certainly thirteen feet high. Now, you may wonder how they raised the bodies to place them in the compartments of the top tier. Well, they did not raise them to any such height; in all their work they kept on going lower and lower, removing more and more of the soil as the compartments became filled. And in this wise, in these catacombs of St. Calixtus, in less than four centuries, the Christians excavated more than ten miles of galleries, in which more than a million of their dead must have been laid to rest. Now, there are dozens of catacombs; the environs of Rome are honeycombed with them. Think of that, and perhaps you will be able to form some idea of the vast number of people who were buried in this manner."

Pierre listened, feeling greatly impressed. He had once visited a coal pit in Belgium, and he here found the same narrow passages, the same heavy, stifling atmosphere, the same nihility of darkness and silence. The flamelets of the candles showed merely like stars in the deep gloom; they shed no radiance around. And he at last understood the character of this funereal, termite-like labour—these chance burrowings continued according to requirements, without art, method, or symmetry. The rugged soil was ever ascending and descending, the sides of the gallery snaked: neither plumb-line nor square had been used. All this, indeed, had simply been a work of charity and necessity, wrought by simple, willing grave-diggers, illiterate craftsmen, with the clumsy handiwork of the decline and fall. Proof thereof was furnished by the inscriptions and emblems on the marble slabs. They reminded one of the childish drawings which street urchins scrawl upon blank walls.

"You see," the Trappist continued, "most frequently there is merely a name; and sometimes there is no name, but simply the words In Pace. At other times there is an emblem, the dove of purity, the palm of martyrdom, or else the fish whose name in Greek is composed of five letters which, as initials, signify: 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.'"

He again brought his candle near to the marble slabs, and the palm could be distinguished: a central stroke, whence started a few oblique lines; and then came the dove or the fish, roughly outlined, a zigzag indicating a tail, two bars representing the bird's feet, while a round point simulated an eye. And the letters of the short inscriptions were all askew, of various sizes, often quite misshapen, as in the coarse handwriting of the ignorant and simple.

However, they reached a crypt, a sort of little hall, where the graves of several popes had been found; among others that of Sixtus II, a holy martyr, in whose honour there was a superbly engraved metrical inscription set up by Pope Damasus. Then, in another hall, a family vault of much the same size, decorated at a later stage, with naive mural paintings, the spot where St. Cecilia's body had been discovered was shown. And the explanations continued. The Trappist dilated on the paintings, drawing from them a confirmation of every dogma and belief, baptism, the Eucharist, the resurrection, Lazarus arising from the tomb, Jonas cast up by the whale, Daniel in the lions' den, Moses drawing water from the rock, and Christ—shown beardless, as was the practice in the early ages—accomplishing His various miracles.

"You see," repeated the Trappist, "all those things are shown there; and remember that none of the paintings was specially prepared: they are absolutely authentic."

At a question from Pierre, whose astonishment was increasing, he admitted that the catacombs had been mere cemeteries at the outset, when no religious ceremonies had been celebrated in them. It was only later, in the fourth century, when the martyrs were honoured, that the crypts were utilised for worship. And in the same way they only became places of refuge during the persecutions, when the Christians had to conceal the entrances to them. Previously they had remained freely and legally open. This was indeed their true history: cemeteries four centuries old becoming places of asylum, ravaged at times during the persecutions; afterwards held in veneration till the eighth century; then despoiled of their holy relics, and subsequently blocked up and forgotten, so that they remained buried during more than seven hundred years, people thinking of them so little that at the time of the first searches in the fifteenth century they were considered an extraordinary discovery—an intricate historical problem—one, moreover, which only our own age has solved.

"Please stoop, mesdames," resumed the Trappist. "In this compartment here is a skeleton which has not been touched. It has been lying here for sixteen or seventeen hundred years, and will show you how the bodies were laid out. Savants say that it is the skeleton of a female, probably a young girl. It was still quite perfect last spring; but the skull, as you can see, is now split open. An American broke it with his walking stick to make sure that it was genuine."

The ladies leaned forward, and the flickering light illumined their pale faces, expressive of mingled fright and compassion. Especially noticeable was the pitiful, pain-fraught look which appeared on the countenance of the daughter, so full of life with her red lips and large black eyes. Then all relapsed into gloom, and the little candles were borne aloft and went their way through the heavy darkness of the galleries. The visit lasted another hour, for the Trappist did not spare a detail, fond as he was of certain nooks and corners, and as zealous as if he desired to work the redemption of his visitors.

While Pierre followed the others, a complete evolution took place within him. As he looked about him, and formed a more and more complete idea of his surroundings, his first stupefaction at finding the reality so different from the embellished accounts of story-tellers and poets, his disillusion at being plunged into such rudely excavated mole-burrows, gave way to fraternal emotion. It was not that he thought of the fifteen hundred martyrs whose sacred bones had rested there. But how humble, resigned, yet full of hope had been those who had chosen such a place of sepulchre! Those low, darksome galleries were but temporary sleeping-places for the Christians. If they did not burn the bodies of their dead, as the Pagans did, it was because, like the Jews, they believed in the resurrection of the body; and it was that lovely idea of sleep, of tranquil rest after a just life, whilst awaiting the celestial reward, which imparted such intense peacefulness, such infinite charm, to the black, subterranean city. Everything there spoke of calm and silent night; everything there slumbered in rapturous quiescence, patient until the far-off awakening. What could be more touching than those terra-cotta tiles, those marble slabs, which bore not even a name—nothing but the words In Pace—at peace. Ah! to be at peace—life's work at last accomplished; to sleep in peace, to hope in peace for the advent of heaven! And the peacefulness seemed the more delightful as it was enjoyed in such deep humility. Doubtless the diggers worked chance-wise and clumsily; the craftsmen no longer knew how to engrave a name or carve a palm or a dove. Art had vanished; but all the feebleness and ignorance were instinct with the youth of a new humanity. Poor and lowly and meek ones swarmed there, reposing beneath the soil, whilst up above the sun continued its everlasting task. You found there charity and fraternity and death; husband and wife often lying together with their offspring at their feet; the great mass of the unknown submerging the personage, the bishop, or the martyr; the most touching equality—that springing from modesty—prevailing amidst all that dust, with compartments ever similar and slabs destitute of ornament, so that rows and rows of the sleepers mingled without distinctive sign. The inscriptions seldom ventured on a word of praise, and then how prudent, how delicate it was: the men were very worthy, very pious: the women very gentle, very beautiful, very chaste. A perfume of infancy arose, unlimited human affection spread: this was death as understood by the primitive Christians—death which hid itself to await the resurrection, and dreamt no more of the empire of the world!

And all at once before Pierre's eyes arose a vision of the sumptuous tombs of the Appian Way, displaying the domineering pride of a whole civilisation in the sunlight—tombs of vast dimensions, with a profusion of marbles, grandiloquent inscriptions, and masterpieces of sculptured-work. Ah! what an extraordinary contrast between that pompous avenue of death, conducting, like a highway of triumph, to the regal Eternal City, when compared with the subterranean necropolis of the Christians, that city of hidden death, so gentle, so beautiful, and so chaste! Here only quiet slumber, desired and accepted night, resignation and patience were to be found. Millions of human beings had here laid themselves to rest in all humility, had slept for centuries, and would still be sleeping here, lulled by the silence and the gloom, if the living had not intruded on their desire to remain in oblivion so long as the trumpets of the Judgment Day did not awaken them. Death had then spoken of Life: nowhere had there been more intimate and touching life than in these buried cities of the unknown, lowly dead. And a mighty breath had formerly come from them—the breath of a new humanity destined to renew the world. With the advent of meekness, contempt for the flesh, terror and hatred of nature, relinquishment of terrestrial joys, and a passion for death, which delivers and opens the portals of Paradise, another world had begun. And the blood of Augustus, so proud of purpling in the sunlight, so fired by the passion for sovereign dominion, seemed for a moment to disappear, as if, indeed, the new world had sucked it up in the depths of its gloomy sepulchres.

However, the Trappist insisted on showing the ladies the steps of Diocletian, and began to tell them the legend. "Yes," said he, "it was a miracle. One day, under that emperor, some soldiers were pursuing several Christians, who took refuge in these catacombs; and when the soldiers followed them inside the steps suddenly gave way, and all the persecutors were hurled to the bottom. The steps remain broken to this day. Come and see them; they are close by."

But the ladies were quite overcome, so affected by their prolonged sojourn in the gloom and by the tales of death which the Trappist had poured into their ears that they insisted on going up again. Moreover, the candles were coming to an end. They were all dazzled when they found themselves once more in the sunlight, outside the little hut where articles of piety and souvenirs were sold. The girl bought a paper weight, a piece of marble on which was engraved the fish symbolical of "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour of Mankind."

On the afternoon of that same day Pierre decided to visit St. Peter's. He had as yet only driven across the superb piazza with its obelisk and twin fountains, encircled by Bernini's colonnades, those four rows of columns and pilasters which form a girdle of monumental majesty. At the far end rises the basilica, its facade making it look smaller and heavier than it really is, but its sovereign dome nevertheless filling the heavens.

Pebbled, deserted inclines stretched out, and steps followed steps, worn and white, under the burning sun; but at last Pierre reached the door and went in. It was three o'clock. Broad sheets of light streamed in through the high square windows, and some ceremony—the vesper service, no doubt—was beginning in the Capella Clementina on the left. Pierre, however, heard nothing; he was simply struck by the immensity of the edifice, as with raised eyes he slowly walked along. At the entrance came the giant basins for holy water with their boy-angels as chubby as Cupids; then the nave, vaulted and decorated with sunken coffers; then the four cyclopean buttress-piers upholding the dome, and then again the transepts and apsis, each as large as one of our churches. And the proud pomp, the dazzling, crushing splendour of everything, also astonished him: he marvelled at the cupola, looking like a planet, resplendent with the gold and bright colours of its mosaic-work, at the sumptuous baldacchino of bronze, crowning the high altar raised above the very tomb of St. Peter, and whence descend the double steps of the Confession, illumined by seven and eighty lamps, which are always kept burning. And finally he was lost in astonishment at the extraordinary profusion of marble, both white and coloured. Oh! those polychromatic marbles, Bernini's luxurious passion! The splendid pavement reflecting the entire edifice, the facings of the pilasters with their medallions of popes, the tiara and the keys borne aloft by chubby angels, the walls covered with emblems, particularly the dove of Innocent X, the niches with their colossal statues uncouth in taste, the loggie and their balconies, the balustrade and double steps of the Confession, the rich altars and yet richer tombs—all, nave, aisles, transepts, and apsis, were in marble, resplendent with the wealth of marble; not a nook small as the palm of one's hand appearing but it showed the insolent opulence of marble. And the basilica triumphed, beyond discussion, recognised and admired by every one as the largest and most splendid church in the whole world—the personification of hugeness and magnificence combined.

Pierre still wandered on, gazing, overcome, as yet not distinguishing details. He paused for a moment before the bronze statue of St. Peter, seated in a stiff, hierarchical attitude on a marble pedestal. A few of the faithful were there kissing the large toe of the Saint's right foot. Some of them carefully wiped it before applying their lips; others, with no thought of cleanliness, kissed it, pressed their foreheads to it, and then kissed it again. Next, Pierre turned into the transept on the left, where stand the confessionals. Priests are ever stationed there, ready to confess penitents in every language. Others wait, holding long staves, with which they lightly tap the heads of kneeling sinners, who thereby obtain thirty days' indulgence. However, there were few people present, and inside the small wooden boxes the priests occupied their leisure time in reading and writing, as if they were at home. Then Pierre again found himself before the Confession, and gazed with interest at the eighty lamps, scintillating like stars. The high altar, at which the Pope alone can officiate, seemed wrapped in the haughty melancholy of solitude under its gigantic, flowery baldacchino, the casting and gilding of which cost two and twenty thousand pounds. But suddenly Pierre remembered the ceremony in the Capella Clementina, and felt astonished, for he could hear nothing of it. As he drew near a faint breath, like the far-away piping of a flute, was wafted to him. Then the volume of sound slowly increased, but it was only on reaching the chapel that he recognised an organ peal. The sunlight here filtered through red curtains drawn before the windows, and thus the chapel glowed like a furnace whilst resounding with the grave music. But in that huge pile all became so slight, so weak, that at sixty paces neither voice nor organ could be distinguished.

On entering the basilica Pierre had fancied that it was quite empty and lifeless. There were, however, some people there, but so few and far between that their presence was not noticed. A few tourists wandered about wearily, guide-book in hand. In the grand nave a painter with his easel was taking a view, as in a public gallery. Then a French seminary went by, conducted by a prelate who named and explained the tombs. But in all that space these fifty or a hundred people looked merely like a few black ants who had lost themselves and were vainly seeking their way. And Pierre pictured himself in some gigantic gala hall or tremendous vestibule in an immeasurable palace of reception. The broad sheets of sunlight streaming through the lofty square windows of plain white glass illumined the church with blending radiance. There was not a single stool or chair: nothing but the superb, bare pavement, such as you might find in a museum, shining mirror-like under the dancing shower of sunrays. Nor was there a single corner for solitary reflection, a nook of gloom and mystery, where one might kneel and pray. In lieu thereof the sumptuous, sovereign dazzlement of broad daylight prevailed upon every side. And, on thus suddenly finding himself in this deserted opera-house, all aglow with flaring gold and purple, Pierre could but remember the quivering gloom of the Gothic cathedrals of France, where dim crowds sob and supplicate amidst a forest of pillars. In presence of all this ceremonial majesty—this huge, empty pomp, which was all Body—he recalled with a pang the emaciate architecture and statuary of the middle ages, which were all Soul. He vainly sought for some poor, kneeling woman, some creature swayed by faith or suffering, yielding in a modest half-light to thoughts of the unknown, and with closed lips holding communion with the invisible. These he found not: there was but the weary wandering of the tourists, and the bustle of the prelates conducting the young priests to the obligatory stations; while the vesper service continued in the left-hand chapel, nought of it reaching the ears of the visitors save, perhaps, a confused vibration, as of the peal of a bell penetrating from outside through the vaults above.

And Pierre then understood that this was the splendid skeleton of a colossus whence life was departing. To fill it, to animate it with a soul, all the gorgeous display of great religious ceremonies was needed; the eighty thousand worshippers which it could hold, the great pontifical pomps, the festivals of Christmas and Easter, the processions and corteges displaying all the luxury of the Church amidst operatic scenery and appointments. And he tried to conjure up a picture of the past magnificence—the basilica overflowing with an idolatrous multitude, and the superhuman cortege passing along whilst every head was lowered; the cross and the sword opening the march, the cardinals going two by two, like twin divinities, in their rochets of lace and their mantles and robes of red moire, which train-bearers held up behind them; and at last, with Jove-like pomp, the Pope, carried on a stage draped with red velvet, seated in an arm-chair of red velvet and gold, and dressed in white velvet, with cope of gold, stole of gold, and tiara of gold. The bearers of the Sedia gestatoria* shone bravely in red tunics broidered with gold. Above the one and only Sovereign Pontiff of the world the flabelli waved those huge fans of feathers which formerly were waved before the idols of pagan Rome. And around the seat of triumph what a dazzling, glorious court there was! The whole pontifical family, the stream of assistant prelates, the patriarchs, the archbishops, and the bishops, with vestments and mitres of gold, the Camerieri segreti partecipanti in violet silk, the Camerieri partecipanti of the cape and the sword in black velvet Renascence costumes, with ruffs and golden chains, the whole innumerable ecclesiastical and laical suite, which not even a hundred pages of the "Gerarchia" can completely enumerate, the prothonotaries, the chaplains, the prelates of every class and degree, without mentioning the military household, the gendarmes with their busbies, the Palatine Guards in blue trousers and black tunics, the Swiss Guards costumed in red, yellow, and black, with breastplates of silver, suggesting the men at arms of some drama of the Romantic school, and the Noble Guards, superb in their high boots, white pigskins, red tunics, gold lace, epaulets, and helmets! However, since Rome had become the capital of Italy the doors were no longer thrown wide open; on the rare occasions when the Pope yet came down to officiate, to show himself as the supreme representative of the Divinity on earth, the basilica was filled with chosen ones. To enter it you needed a card of invitation. You no longer saw the people—a throng of fifty, even eighty, thousand Christians—flocking to the Church and swarming within it promiscuously; there was but a select gathering, a congregation of friends convened as for a private function. Even when, by dint of effort, thousands were collected together there, they formed but a picked audience invited to the performance of a monster concert.

* The chair and stage are known by that name.—Trans.

And as Pierre strolled among the bright, crude marbles in that cold if gorgeous museum, the feeling grew upon him that he was in some pagan temple raised to the deity of Light and Pomp. The larger temples of ancient Rome were certainly similar piles, upheld by the same precious columns, with walls covered with the same polychromatic marbles and vaulted ceilings having the same gilded panels. And his feeling was destined to become yet more acute after his visits to the other basilicas, which could but reveal the truth to him. First one found the Christian Church quietly, audaciously quartering itself in a pagan church, as, for instance, San Lorenzo in Miranda installed in the temple of Antoninus and Faustina, and retaining the latter's rare porticus in cipollino marble and its handsome white marble entablature. Then there was the Christian Church springing from the ruins of the destroyed pagan edifice, as, for example, San Clemente, beneath which centuries of contrary beliefs are stratified: a very ancient edifice of the time of the kings or the republic, then another of the days of the empire identified as a temple of Mithras, and next a basilica of the primitive faith. Then, too, there was the Christian Church, typified by that of Saint Agnes-beyond-the-walls which had been built on exactly the same pattern as the Roman secular basilica—that Tribunal and Exchange which accompanied every Forum. And, in particular, there was the Christian Church erected with material stolen from the demolished pagan temples. To this testified the sixteen superb columns of that same Saint Agnes, columns of various marbles filched from various gods; the one and twenty columns of Santa Maria in Trastevere, columns of all sorts of orders torn from a temple of Isis and Serapis, who even now are represented on their capitals; also the six and thirty white marble Ionic columns of Santa Maria Maggiore derived from the temple of Juno Lucina; and the two and twenty columns of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, these varying in substance, size, and workmanship, and certain of them said to have been stolen from Jove himself, from the famous temple of Jupiter Capitolinus which rose upon the sacred summit. In addition, the temples of the opulent Imperial period seemed to resuscitate in our times at San Giovanni in Laterano and San Paolo-fuori-le-mura. Was not that Basilica of San Giovanni—"the Mother and Head of all the churches of the city and the earth"—like the abode of honour of some pagan divinity whose splendid kingdom was of this world? It boasted five naves, parted by four rows of columns; it was a profusion of bas-reliefs, friezes, and entablatures, and its twelve colossal statues of the Apostles looked like subordinate deities lining the approach to the master of the gods! And did not San Paolo, lately completed, its new marbles shimmering like mirrors, recall the abode of the Olympian immortals, typical temple as it was with its majestic colonnade, its flat, gilt-panelled ceiling, its marble pavement incomparably beautiful both in substance and workmanship, its violet columns with white bases and capitals, and its white entablature with violet frieze: everywhere, indeed, you found, the mingling of those two colours so divinely carnal in their harmony. And there, as at St. Peter's, not one patch of gloom, not one nook of mystery where one might peer into the invisible, could be found! And, withal, St. Peter's remained the monster, the colossus, larger than the largest of all others, an extravagant testimony of what the mad passion for the huge can achieve when human pride, by dint of spending millions, dreams of lodging the divinity in an over-vast, over-opulent palace of stone, where in truth that pride itself, and not the divinity, triumphs!

And to think that after long centuries that gala colossus had been the outcome of the fervour of primitive faith! You found there a blossoming of that ancient sap, peculiar to the soil of Rome, which in all ages has thrown up preposterous edifices, of exaggerated hugeness and dazzling and ruinous luxury. It would seem as if the absolute masters successively ruling the city brought that passion for cyclopean building with them, derived it from the soil in which they grew, for they transmitted it one to the other, without a pause, from civilisation to civilisation, however diverse and contrary their minds. It has all been, so to say, a continuous blossoming of human vanity, a passionate desire to set one's name on an imperishable wall, and, after being master of the world, to leave behind one an indestructible trace, a tangible proof of one's passing glory, an eternal edifice of bronze and marble fit to attest that glory until the end of time. At the bottom the spirit of conquest, the proud ambition to dominate the world, subsists; and when all has crumbled, and a new society has sprung up from the ruins of its predecessor, men have erred in imagining it to be cured of the sin of pride, steeped in humility once more, for it has had the old blood in its veins, and has yielded to the same insolent madness as its ancestors, a prey to all the violence of its heredity directly it has become great and strong. Among the illustrious popes there has not been one that did not seek to build, did not revert to the traditions of the Caesars, eternising their reigns in stone and raising temples for resting-places, so as to rank among the gods. Ever the same passion for terrestrial immortality has burst forth: it has been a battle as to who should leave the highest, most substantial, most gorgeous monument; and so acute has been the disease that those who, for lack of means and opportunity, have been unable to build, and have been forced to content themselves with repairing, have, nevertheless, desired to bequeath the memory of their modest achievements to subsequent generations by commemorative marble slabs engraved with pompous inscriptions! These slabs are to be seen on every side: not a wall has ever been strengthened but some pope has stamped it with his arms, not a ruin has been restored, not a palace repaired, not a fountain cleaned, but the reigning pope has signed the work with his Roman and pagan title of "Pontifex Maximus." It is a haunting passion, a form of involuntary debauchery, the fated florescence of that compost of ruins, that dust of edifices whence new edifices are ever arising. And given the perversion with which the old Roman soil almost immediately tarnished the doctrines of Jesus, that resolute passion for domination and that desire for terrestrial glory which wrought the triumph of Catholicism in scorn of the humble and pure, the fraternal and simple ones of the primitive Church, one may well ask whether Rome has ever been Christian at all!

And whilst Pierre was for the second time walking round the huge basilica, admiring the tombs of the popes, truth, like a sudden illumination, burst upon him and filled him with its glow. Ah! those tombs! Yonder in the full sunlight, in the rosy Campagna, on either side of the Appian Way—that triumphal approach to Rome, conducting the stranger to the august Palatine with its crown of circling palaces—there arose the gigantic tombs of the powerful and wealthy, tombs of unparalleled artistic splendour, perpetuating in marble the pride and pomp of a strong race that had mastered the world. Then, near at hand, beneath the sod, in the shrouding night of wretched mole-holes, other tombs were hidden—the tombs of the lowly, the poor, and the suffering—tombs destitute of art or display, but whose very humility proclaimed that a breath of affection and resignation had passed by, that One had come preaching love and fraternity, the relinquishment of the wealth of the earth for the everlasting joys of a future life, and committing to the soil the good seed of His Gospel, sowing the new humanity which was to transform the olden world. And, behold, from that seed, buried in the soil for centuries, behold, from those humble, unobtrusive tombs, where martyrs slept their last and gentle sleep whilst waiting for the glorious call, yet other tombs had sprung, tombs as gigantic and as pompous as the ancient, destroyed sepulchres of the idolaters, tombs uprearing their marbles among a pagan-temple-like splendour, proclaiming the same superhuman pride, the same mad passion for universal sovereignty. At the time of the Renascence Rome became pagan once more; the old imperial blood frothed up and swept Christianity away with the greatest onslaught ever directed against it. Ah! those tombs of the popes at St. Peter's, with their impudent, insolent glorification of the departed, their sumptuous, carnal hugeness, defying death and setting immortality upon this earth. There are giant popes of bronze, allegorical figures and angels of equivocal character wearing the beauty of lovely girls, of passion-compelling women with the thighs and the breasts of pagan goddesses! Paul III is seated on a high pedestal, Justice and Prudence are almost prostrate at his feet. Urban VIII is between Prudence and Religion, Innocent XI between Religion and Justice, Innocent XII between Justice and Charity, Gregory XIII between Religion and Strength. Attended by Prudence and Justice, Alexander VII appears kneeling, with Charity and Truth before him, and a skeleton rises up displaying an empty hour-glass. Clement XIII, also on his knees, triumphs above a monumental sarcophagus, against which leans Religion bearing the Cross; while the Genius of Death, his elbow resting on the right-hand corner, has two huge, superb lions, emblems of omnipotence, beneath him. Bronze bespeaks the eternity of the figures, white marble describes opulent flesh, and coloured marble winds around in rich draperies, deifying the monuments under the bright, golden glow of nave and aisles.

And Pierre passed from one tomb to the other on his way through the magnificent, deserted, sunlit basilica. Yes, these tombs, so imperial in their ostentation, were meet companions for those of the Appian Way. Assuredly it was Rome, the soil of Rome, that soil where pride and domination sprouted like the herbage of the fields that had transformed the humble Christianity of primitive times, the religion of fraternity, justice, and hope into what it now was: victorious Catholicism, allied to the rich and powerful, a huge implement of government, prepared for the conquest of every nation. The popes had awoke as Caesars. Remote heredity had acted, the blood of Augustus had bubbled forth afresh, flowing through their veins and firing their minds with immeasurable ambition. As yet none but Augustus had held the empire of the world, had been both emperor and pontiff, master of the body and the soul. And thence had come the eternal dream of the popes in despair at only holding the spiritual power, and obstinately refusing to yield in temporal matters, clinging for ever to the ancient hope that their dream might at last be realised, and the Vatican become another Palatine, whence they might reign with absolute despotism over all the conquered nations.

VI.

PIERRE had been in Rome for a fortnight, and yet the affair of his book was no nearer solution. He was still possessed by an ardent desire to see the Pope, but could in no wise tell how to satisfy it, so frequent were the delays and so greatly had he been frightened by Monsignor Nani's predictions of the dire consequences which might attend any imprudent action. And so, foreseeing a prolonged sojourn, he at last betook himself to the Vicariate in order that his "celebret" might be stamped, and afterwards said his mass each morning at the Church of Santa Brigida, where he received a kindly greeting from Abbe Pisoni, Benedetta's former confessor.

One Monday evening he resolved to repair early to Donna Serafina's customary reception in the hope of learning some news and expediting his affairs. Perhaps Monsignor Nani would look in; perhaps he might be lucky enough to come across some cardinal or domestic prelate willing to help him. It was in vain that he had tried to extract any positive information from Don Vigilio, for, after a short spell of affability and willingness, Cardinal Pio's secretary had relapsed into distrust and fear, and avoided Pierre as if he were resolved not to meddle in a business which, all considered, was decidedly suspicious and dangerous. Moreover, for a couple of days past a violent attack of fever had compelled him to keep his room.

Thus the only person to whom Pierre could turn for comfort was Victorine Bosquet, the old Beauceronne servant who had been promoted to the rank of housekeeper, and who still retained a French heart after thirty years' residence in Rome. She often spoke to the young priest of Auneau, her native place, as if she had left it only the previous day; but on that particular Monday even she had lost her wonted gay vivacity, and when she heard that he meant to go down in the evening to see the ladies she wagged her head significantly. "Ah! you won't find them very cheerful," said she. "My poor Benedetta is greatly worried. Her divorce suit is not progressing at all well."

All Rome, indeed, was again talking of this affair. An extraordinary revival of tittle-tattle had set both white and black worlds agog. And so there was no need for reticence on Victorine's part, especially in conversing with a compatriot. It appeared, then, that, in reply to Advocate Morano's memoir setting forth that the marriage had not been consummated, there had come another memoir, a terrible one, emanating from Monsignor Palma, a doctor in theology, whom the Congregation of the Council had selected to defend the marriage. As a first point, Monsignor Palma flatly disputed the alleged non-consummation, questioned the certificate put forward on Benedetta's behalf, and quoted instances recorded in scientific text-books which showed how deceptive appearances often were. He strongly insisted, moreover, on the narrative which Count Prada supplied in another memoir, a narrative well calculated to inspire doubt; and, further, he so turned and twisted the evidence of Benedetta's own maid as to make that evidence also serve against her. Finally he argued in a decisive way that, even supposing the marriage had not been consummated, this could only be ascribed to the resistance of the Countess, who had thus set at defiance one of the elementary laws of married life, which was that a wife owed obedience to her husband.

Next had come a fourth memoir, drawn up by the reporter of the Congregation, who analysed and discussed the three others, and subsequently the Congregation itself had dealt with the matter, opining in favour of the dissolution of the marriage by a majority of one vote—such a bare majority, indeed, that Monsignor Palma, exercising his rights, had hastened to demand further inquiry, a course which brought the whole procedure again into question, and rendered a fresh vote necessary.

"Ah! the poor Contessina!" exclaimed Victorine, "she'll surely die of grief, for, calm as she may seem, there's an inward fire consuming her. It seems that Monsignor Palma is the master of the situation, and can make the affair drag on as long as he likes. And then a deal of money had already been spent, and one will have to spend a lot more. Abbe Pisoni, whom you know, was very badly inspired when he helped on that marriage; and though I certainly don't want to soil the memory of my good mistress, Countess Ernesta, who was a real saint, it's none the less true that she wrecked her daughter's life when she gave her to Count Prada."

The housekeeper paused. Then, impelled by an instinctive sense of justice, she resumed. "It's only natural that Count Prada should be annoyed, for he's really being made a fool of. And, for my part, as there is no end to all the fuss, and this divorce is so hard to obtain, I really don't see why the Contessina shouldn't live with her Dario without troubling any further. Haven't they loved one another ever since they were children? Aren't they both young and handsome, and wouldn't they be happy together, whatever the world might say? Happiness, mon Dieu! one finds it so seldom that one can't afford to let it pass."

Then, seeing how greatly surprised Pierre was at hearing such language, she began to laugh with the quiet composure of one belonging to the humble classes of France, whose only desire is a quiet and happy life, irrespective of matrimonial ties. Next, in more discreet language, she proceeded to lament another worry which had fallen on the household, another result of the divorce affair. A rupture had come about between Donna Serafina and Advocate Morano, who was very displeased with the ill success of his memoir to the congregation, and accused Father Lorenza—the confessor of the Boccanera ladies—of having urged them into a deplorable lawsuit, whose only fruit could be a wretched scandal affecting everybody. And so great had been Morano's annoyance that he had not returned to the Boccanera mansion, but had severed a connection of thirty years' standing, to the stupefaction of all the Roman drawing-rooms, which altogether disapproved of his conduct. Donna Serafina was, for her part, the more grieved as she suspected the advocate of having purposely picked the quarrel in order to secure an excuse for leaving her; his real motive, in her estimation, being a sudden, disgraceful passion for a young and intriguing woman of the middle classes.

That Monday evening, when Pierre entered the drawing-room, hung with yellow brocatelle of a flowery Louis XIV pattern, he at once realised that melancholy reigned in the dim light radiating from the lace-veiled lamps. Benedetta and Celia, seated on a sofa, were chatting with Dario, whilst Cardinal Sarno, ensconced in an arm-chair, listened to the ceaseless chatter of the old relative who conducted the little Princess to each Monday gathering. And the only other person present was Donna Serafina, seated all alone in her wonted place on the right-hand side of the chimney-piece, and consumed with secret rage at seeing the chair on the left-hand side unoccupied—that chair which Morano had always taken during the thirty years that he had been faithful to her. Pierre noticed with what anxious and then despairing eyes she observed his entrance, her glance ever straying towards the door, as though she even yet hoped for the fickle one's return. Withal her bearing was erect and proud; she seemed to be more tightly laced than ever; and there was all the wonted haughtiness on her hard-featured face, with its jet-black eyebrows and snowy hair.

Pierre had no sooner paid his respects to her than he allowed his own worry to appear by inquiring whether they would not have the pleasure of seeing Monsignor Nani that evening. Thereupon Donna Serafina could not refrain from answering: "Oh! Monsignor Nani is forsaking us like the others. People always take themselves off when they can be of service."

She harboured a spite against the prelate for having done so little to further the divorce in spite of his many promises. Beneath his outward show of extreme willingness and caressing affability he doubtless concealed some scheme of his own which he was tenaciously pursuing. However, Donna Serafina promptly regretted the confession which anger had wrung from her, and resumed: "After all, he will perhaps come. He is so good-natured, and so fond of us."

In spite of the vivacity of her temperament she really wished to act diplomatically, so as to overcome the bad luck which had recently set in. Her brother the Cardinal had told her how irritated he was by the attitude of the Congregation of the Council; he had little doubt that the frigid reception accorded to his niece's suit had been due in part to the desire of some of his brother cardinals to be disagreeable to him. Personally, he desired the divorce, as it seemed to him the only means of ensuring the perpetuation of the family; for Dario obstinately refused to marry any other woman than his cousin. And thus there was an accumulation of disasters; the Cardinal was wounded in his pride, his sister shared his sufferings and on her own side was stricken in the heart, whilst both lovers were plunged in despair at finding their hopes yet again deferred.

As Pierre approached the sofa where the young folks were chatting he found that they were speaking of the catastrophe. "Why should you be so despondent?" asked Celia in an undertone. "After all, there was a majority of a vote in favour of annulling the marriage. Your suit hasn't been rejected; there is only a delay."

But Benedetta shook her head. "No, no! If Monsignor Palma proves obstinate his Holiness will never consent. It's all over."

"Ah! if one were only rich, very rich!" murmured Dario, with such an air of conviction that no one smiled. And, turning to his cousin, he added in a whisper: "I must really have a talk with you. We cannot go on living like this."

In a breath she responded: "Yes, you are right. Come down to-morrow evening at five. I will be here alone."

Then dreariness set in; the evening seemed to have no end. Pierre was greatly touched by the evident despair of Benedetta, who as a rule was so calm and sensible. The deep eyes which illumined her pure, delicate, infantile face were now blurred as by restrained tears. He had already formed a sincere affection for her, pleased as he was with her equable if somewhat indolent disposition, the semblance of discreet good sense with which she veiled her soul of fire. That Monday even she certainly tried to smile while listening to the pretty secrets confided to her by Celia, whose love affairs were prospering far more than her own. There was only one brief interval of general conversation, and that was brought about by the little Princess's aunt, who, suddenly raising her voice, began to speak of the infamous manner in which the Italian newspapers referred to the Holy Father. Never, indeed, had there been so much bad feeling between the Vatican and the Quirinal. Cardinal Sarno felt so strongly on the subject that he departed from his wonted silence to announce that on the occasion of the sacrilegious festivities of the Twentieth of September, celebrating the capture of Rome, the Pope intended to cast a fresh letter of protest in the face of all the Christian powers, whose indifference proved their complicity in the odious spoliation of the Church.

"Yes, indeed! what folly to try and marry the Pope and the King," bitterly exclaimed Donna Serafina, alluding to her niece's deplorable marriage.

The old maid now seemed quite beside herself; it was already so late that neither Monsignor Nani nor anybody else was expected. However, at the unhoped-for sound of footsteps her eyes again brightened and turned feverishly towards the door. But it was only to encounter a final disappointment. The visitor proved to be Narcisse Habert, who stepped up to her, apologising for making so late a call. It was Cardinal Sarno, his uncle by marriage, who had introduced him into this exclusive salon, where he had received a cordial reception on account of his religious views, which were said to be most uncompromising. If, however, despite the lateness of the hour, he had ventured to call there that evening, it was solely on account of Pierre, whom he at once drew on one side.

"I felt sure I should find you here," he said. "Just now I managed to see my cousin, Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, and I have some good news for you. He will see us to-morrow at about eleven in his rooms at the Vatican." Then, lowering his voice: "I think he will endeavour to conduct you to the Holy Father. Briefly, the audience seems to me assured."

Pierre was greatly delighted by this promised certainty, which came to him so suddenly in that dreary drawing-room, where for a couple of hours he had been gradually sinking into despair! So at last a solution was at hand!

Meantime Narcisse, after shaking hands with Dario and bowing to Benedetta and Celia, approached his uncle the Cardinal, who, having rid himself of the old relation, made up his mind to talk. But his conversation was confined to the state of his health, and the weather, and sundry insignificant anecdotes which he had lately heard. Not a word escaped him respecting the thousand complicated matters with which he dealt at the Propaganda. It was as though, once outside his office, he plunged into the commonplace and the unimportant by way of resting from the anxious task of governing the world. And after he had spoken for a time every one got up, and the visitors took leave.

"Don't forget," Narcisse repeated to Pierre, "you will find me at the Sixtine Chapel to-morrow at ten. And I will show you the Botticellis before we go to our appointment."

At half-past nine on the following morning Pierre, who had come on foot, was already on the spacious Piazza of St. Peter's; and before turning to the right, towards the bronze gate near one corner of Bernini's colonnade, he raised his eyes and lingered, gazing at the Vatican. Nothing to his mind could be less monumental than the jumble of buildings which, without semblance of architectural order or regularity of any kind, had grown up in the shadow cast by the dome of the basilica. Roofs rose one above the other and broad, flat walls stretched out chance-wise, just as wings and storeys had been added. The only symmetry observable above the colonnade was that of the three sides of the court of San Damaso, where the lofty glass-work which now encloses the old loggie sparkled in the sun between the ruddy columns and pilasters, suggesting, as it were, three huge conservatories.

And this was the most beautiful palace in the world, the largest of all palaces, comprising no fewer than eleven thousand apartments and containing the most admirable masterpieces of human genius! But Pierre, disillusioned as he was, had eyes only for the lofty facade on the right, overlooking the piazza, for he knew that the second-floor windows there were those of the Pope's private apartments. And he contemplated those windows for a long time, and remembered having been told that the fifth one on the right was that of the Pope's bed-room, and that a lamp could always be seen burning there far into the night.

What was there, too, behind that gate of bronze which he saw before him—that sacred portal by which all the kingdoms of the world communicated with the kingdom of heaven, whose august vicar had secluded himself behind those lofty, silent walls? From where he stood Pierre gazed on that gate with its metal panels studded with large square-headed nails, and wondered what it defended, what it concealed, what it shut off from the view, with its stern, forbidding air, recalling that of the gate of some ancient fortress. What kind of world would he find behind it, what treasures of human charity jealously preserved in yonder gloom, what revivifying hope for the new nations hungering for fraternity and justice? He took pleasure in fancying, in picturing the one holy pastor of humanity, ever watching in the depths of that closed palace, and, while the nations strayed into hatred, preparing all for the final reign of Jesus, and at last proclaiming the advent of that reign by transforming our democracies into the one great Christian community promised by the Saviour. Assuredly the world's future was being prepared behind that bronze portal; assuredly it was that future which would issue forth.

But all at once Pierre was amazed to find himself face to face with Monsignor Nani, who had just left the Vatican on his way to the neighbouring Palace of the Inquisition, where, as Assessor, he had his residence.

"Ah! Monsignor," said Pierre, "I am very pleased. My friend Monsieur Habert is going to present me to his cousin, Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, and I think I shall obtain the audience I so greatly desire."

Monsignor Nani smiled with his usual amiable yet keen expression. "Yes, yes, I know." But, correcting himself as it were, he added: "I share your satisfaction, my dear son. Only, you must be prudent." And then, as if fearing that the young priest might have understood by his first words that he had just seen Monsignor Gamba, the most easily terrified prelate of the whole prudent pontifical family, he related that he had been running about since an early hour on behalf of two French ladies, who likewise were dying of a desire to see the Pope. However, he greatly feared that the help he was giving them would not prove successful.

"I will confess to you, Monsignor," replied Pierre, "that I myself was getting very discouraged. Yes, it is high time I should find a little comfort, for my sojourn here is hardly calculated to brace my soul."

He went on in this strain, allowing it to be seen that the sights of Rome were finally destroying his faith. Such days as those which he had spent on the Palatine and along the Appian Way, in the Catacombs and at St. Peter's, grievously disturbed him, spoilt his dream of Christianity rejuvenated and triumphant. He emerged from them full of doubt and growing lassitude, having already lost much of his usually rebellious enthusiasm.

Still smiling, Monsignor Nani listened and nodded approvingly. Yes, no doubt that was the fatal result. He seemed to have foreseen it, and to be well satisfied thereat. "At all events, my dear son," said he, "everything is going on well, since you are now certain that you will see his Holiness."

"That is true, Monsignor; I have placed my only hope in the very just and perspicacious Leo XIII. He alone can judge me, since he alone can recognise in my book his own ideas, which I think I have very faithfully set forth. Ah! if he be willing he will, in Jesus' name and by democracy and science, save this old world of ours!"

Pierre's enthusiasm was returning again, and Nani, smiling more and more affably with his piercing eyes and thin lips, again expressed approval: "Certainly; quite so, my dear son. You will speak to him, you will see."

Then as they both raised their heads and looked towards the Vatican, Nani carried his amiability so far as to undeceive Pierre with respect to the Pope's bed-room. No, the window where a light was seen every evening was simply that of a landing where the gas was kept burning almost all night. The window of his Holiness's bed-chamber was the second one farther on. Then both relapsed into silence, equally grave as they continued to gaze at the facade.

"Well, till we meet again, my dear son," said Nani at last. "You will tell me of your interview, I hope."

As soon as Pierre was alone he went in by the bronze portal, his heart beating violently, as if he were entering some redoubtable sanctuary where the future happiness of mankind was elaborated. A sentry was on duty there, a Swiss guard, who walked slowly up and down in a grey-blue cloak, below which one only caught a glimpse of his baggy red, black, and yellow breeches; and it seemed as if this cloak of sober hue were purposely cast over a disguise in order to conceal its strangeness, which had become irksome. Then, on the right-hand, came the covered stairway conducting to the Court of San Damaso; but to reach the Sixtine Chapel it was necessary to follow a long gallery, with columns on either hand, and ascend the royal staircase, the Scala Regia. And in this realm of the gigantic, where every dimension is exaggerated and replete with overpowering majesty, Pierre's breath came short as he ascended the broad steps.

He was much surprised on entering the Sixtine Chapel, for it at first seemed to him small, a sort of rectangular and lofty hall, with a delicate screen of white marble separating the part where guests congregate on the occasion of great ceremonies from the choir where the cardinals sit on simple oaken benches, while the inferior prelates remain standing behind them. On a low platform to the right of the soberly adorned altar is the pontifical throne; while in the wall on the left opens the narrow singing gallery with its balcony of marble. And for everything suddenly to spread out and soar into the infinite one must raise one's head, allow one's eyes to ascend from the huge fresco of the Last Judgment, occupying the whole of the end wall, to the paintings which cover the vaulted ceiling down to the cornice extending between the twelve windows of white glass, six on either hand.

Fortunately there were only three or four quiet tourists there; and Pierre at once perceived Narcisse Habert occupying one of the cardinals' seats above the steps where the train-bearers crouch. Motionless, and with his head somewhat thrown back, the young man seemed to be in ecstasy. But it was not the work of Michael Angelo that he thus contemplated. His eyes never strayed from one of the earlier frescoes below the cornice; and on recognising the priest he contented himself with murmuring: "Ah! my friend, just look at the Botticelli." Then, with dreamy eyes, he relapsed into a state of rapture.

Pierre, for his part, had received a great shock both in heart and in mind, overpowered as he was by the superhuman genius of Michael Angelo. The rest vanished; there only remained, up yonder, as in a limitless heaven, the extraordinary creations of the master's art. That which at first surprised one was that the painter should have been the sole artisan of the mighty work. No marble cutters, no bronze workers, no gilders, no one of another calling had intervened. The painter with his brush had sufficed for all—for the pilasters, columns, and cornices of marble, for the statues and the ornaments of bronze, for the fleurons and roses of gold, for the whole of the wondrously rich decorative work which surrounded the frescoes. And Pierre imagined Michael Angelo on the day when the bare vault was handed over to him, covered with plaster, offering only a flat white surface, hundreds of square yards to be adorned. And he pictured him face to face with that huge white page, refusing all help, driving all inquisitive folks away, jealously, violently shutting himself up alone with his gigantic task, spending four and a half years in fierce solitude, and day by day adding to his colossal work of creation. Ah! that mighty work, a task to fill a whole lifetime, a task which he must have begun with quiet confidence in his own will and power, drawing, as it were, an entire world from his brain and flinging it there with the ceaseless flow of creative virility in the full heyday of its omnipotence.

And Pierre was yet more overcome when he began to examine these presentments of humanity, magnified as by the eyes of a visionary, overflowing in mighty sympathetic pages of cyclopean symbolisation. Royal grace and nobility, sovereign peacefulness and power—every beauty shone out like natural florescence. And there was perfect science, the most audacious foreshortening risked with the certainty of success—an everlasting triumph of technique over the difficulty which an arched surface presented. And, in particular, there was wonderful simplicity of medium; matter was reduced almost to nothingness; a few colours were used broadly without any studied search for effect or brilliancy. Yet that sufficed, the blood seethed freely, the muscles projected, the figures became animated and stood out of their frames with such energy and dash that it seemed as if a flame were flashing by aloft, endowing all those beings with superhuman and immortal life. Life, aye, it was life, which burst forth and triumphed—mighty, swarming life, miraculous life, the creation of one sole hand possessed of the supreme gift—simplicity blended with power.

That a philosophical system, a record of the whole of human destiny, should have been found therein, with the creation of the world, of man, and of woman, the fall, the chastisement, then the redemption, and finally God's judgment on the last day—this was a matter on which Pierre was unable to dwell, at this first visit, in the wondering stupor into which the paintings threw him. But he could not help noticing how the human body, its beauty, its power, and its grace were exalted! Ah! that regal Jehovah, at once terrible and paternal, carried off amid the whirlwind of his creation, his arms outstretched and giving birth to worlds! And that superb and nobly outlined Adam, with extended hand, whom Jehovah, though he touch him not, animates with his finger—a wondrous and admirable gesture, leaving a sacred space between the finger of the Creator and that of the created—a tiny space, in which, nevertheless, abides all the infinite of the invisible and the mysterious. And then that powerful yet adorable Eve, that Eve with the sturdy flanks fit for the bearing of humanity, that Eve with the proud, tender grace of a woman bent on being loved even to perdition, that Eve embodying the whole of woman with her fecundity, her seductiveness, her empire! Moreover, even the decorative figures of the pilasters at the corners of the frescoes celebrate the triumph of the flesh: there are the twenty young men radiant in their nakedness, with incomparable splendour of torso and of limb, and such intensity of life that a craze for motion seems to carry them off, bend them, throw them over in superb attitudes. And between the windows are the giants, the prophets and the sibyls—man and woman deified, with inordinate wealth of muscle and grandeur of intellectual expression. There is Jeremiah with his elbow resting on his knee and his chin on his hand, plunged as he is in reflection—in the very depths of his visions and his dreams; there is the Sibylla Erithraea, so pure of profile, so young despite the opulence of her form, and with one finger resting on the open book of destiny; there is Isaiah with the thick lips of truth, virile and haughty, his head half turned and his hand raised with a gesture of command; there is the Sibylla Cumaea, terrifying with her science and her old age, her wrinkled countenance, her vulture's nose, her square protruding chin; there is Jonah cast forth by the whale, and wondrously foreshortened, his torso twisted, his arms bent, his head thrown back, and his mouth agape and shouting: and there are the others, all of the same full-blown, majestic family, reigning with the sovereignty of eternal health and intelligence, and typifying the dream of a broader, loftier, and indestructible humanity. Moreover, in the lunettes and the arches over the windows other figures of grace, power, and beauty appear and throng, the ancestors of the Christ, thoughtful mothers with lovely nude infants, men with wondering eyes peering into the future, representatives of the punished weary race longing for the promised Redeemer; while in the pendentives of the four corners various biblical episodes, the victories of Israel over the Spirit of Evil, spring into life. And finally there is the gigantic fresco at the far end, the Last Judgment with its swarming multitude, so numerous that days and days are needed to see each figure aright, a distracted crowd, full of the hot breath of life, from the dead rising in response to the furious trumpeting of the angels, from the fearsome groups of the damned whom the demons fling into hell, even to Jesus the justiciar, surrounded by the saints and apostles, and to the radiant concourse of the blessed who ascend upheld by angels, whilst higher and still higher other angels, bearing the instruments of the Passion, triumph as in full glory. And yet, above this gigantic composition, painted thirty years subsequently, in the full ripeness of age, the ceiling retains its ethereality, its unquestionable superiority, for on it the artist bestowed all his virgin power, his whole youth, the first great flare of his genius.

And Pierre found but one word to express his feelings: Michael Angelo was the monster dominating and crushing all others. Beneath his immense achievement you had only to glance at the works of Perugino, Pinturicchio, Roselli, Signorelli, and Botticelli, those earlier frescoes, admirable in their way, which below the cornice spread out around the chapel.

Narcisse for his part had not raised his eyes to the overpowering splendour of the ceiling. Wrapt in ecstasy, he did not allow his gaze to stray from one of the three frescoes of Botticelli. "Ah! Botticelli," he at last murmured; "in him you have the elegance and the grace of the mysterious; a profound feeling of sadness even in the midst of voluptuousness, a divination of the whole modern soul, with the most troublous charm that ever attended artist's work."

Pierre glanced at him in amazement, and then ventured to inquire: "You come here to see the Botticellis?"

"Yes, certainly," the young man quietly replied; "I only come here for him, and five hours every week I only look at his work. There, just study that fresco, Moses and the daughters of Jethro. Isn't it the most penetrating work that human tenderness and melancholy have produced?"

Then, with a faint, devout quiver in his voice and the air of a priest initiating another into the delightful but perturbing atmosphere of a sanctuary, he went on repeating the praises of Botticelli's art; his women with long, sensual, yet candid faces, supple bearing, and rounded forms showing from under light drapery; his young men, his angels of doubtful sex, blending stateliness of muscle with infinite delicacy of outline; next the mouths he painted, fleshy, fruit-like mouths, at times suggesting irony, at others pain, and often so enigmatical with their sinuous curves that one knew not whether the words they left unuttered were words of purity or filth; then, too, the eyes which he bestowed on his figures, eyes of languor and passion, of carnal or mystical rapture, their joy at times so instinct with grief as they peer into the nihility of human things that no eyes in the world could be more impenetrable. And finally there were Botticelli's hands, so carefully and delicately painted, so full of life, wantoning so to say in a free atmosphere, now joining, caressing, and even, as it were, speaking, the whole evincing such intense solicitude for gracefulness that at times there seems to be undue mannerism, though every hand has its particular expression, each varying expression of the enjoyment or pain which the sense of touch can bring. And yet there was nothing effeminate or false about the painter's work: on all sides a sort of virile pride was apparent, an atmosphere of superb passionate motion, absolute concern for truth, direct study from life, conscientiousness, veritable realism, corrected and elevated by a genial strangeness of feeling and character that imparted a never-to-be-forgotten charm even to ugliness itself.

Pierre's stupefaction, however, increased as he listened to Narcisse, whose somewhat studied elegance, whose curly hair cut in the Florentine fashion, and whose blue, mauvish eyes paling with enthusiasm he now for the first time remarked. "Botticelli," he at last said, "was no doubt a marvellous artist, only it seems to me that here, at any rate, Michael Angelo—"

But Narcisse interrupted him almost with violence. "No! no! Don't talk of him! He spoilt everything, ruined everything! A man who harnessed himself to his work like an ox, who laboured at his task like a navvy, at the rate of so many square yards a day! And a man, too, with no sense of the mysterious and the unknown, who saw everything so huge as to disgust one with beauty, painting girls like the trunks of oak-trees, women like giant butchers, with heaps and heaps of stupid flesh, and never a gleam of a divine or infernal soul! He was a mason—a colossal mason, if you like—but he was nothing more."

Weary "modern" that Narcisse was, spoilt by the pursuit of the original and the rare, he thus unconsciously gave rein to his fated hate of health and power. That Michael Angelo who brought forth without an effort, who had left behind him the most prodigious of all artistic creations, was the enemy. And his crime precisely was that he had created life, produced life in such excess that all the petty creations of others, even the most delightful among them, vanished in presence of the overflowing torrent of human beings flung there all alive in the sunlight.

"Well, for my part," Pierre courageously declared, "I'm not of your opinion. I now realise that life is everything in art; that real immortality belongs only to those who create. The case of Michael Angelo seems to me decisive, for he is the superhuman master, the monster who overwhelms all others, precisely because he brought forth that magnificent living flesh which offends your sense of delicacy. Those who are inclined to the curious, those who have minds of a pretty turn, whose intellects are ever seeking to penetrate things, may try to improve on the equivocal and invisible, and set all the charm of art in some elaborate stroke or symbolisation; but, none the less, Michael Angelo remains the all-powerful, the maker of men, the master of clearness, simplicity, and health."

At this Narcisse smiled with indulgent and courteous disdain. And he anticipated further argument by remarking: "It's already eleven. My cousin was to have sent a servant here as soon as he could receive us. I am surprised to have seen nobody as yet. Shall we go up to see the stanze of Raffaelle while we wait?"

Once in the rooms above, he showed himself perfect, both lucid in his remarks and just in his appreciations, having recovered all his easy intelligence as soon as he was no longer upset by his hatred of colossal labour and cheerful decoration.

It was unfortunate that Pierre should have first visited the Sixtine Chapel; for it was necessary he should forget what he had just seen and accustom himself to what he now beheld in order to enjoy its pure beauty. It was as if some potent wine had confused him, and prevented any immediate relish of a lighter vintage of delicate fragrance. Admiration did not here fall upon one with lightning speed; it was slowly, irresistibly that one grew charmed. And the contrast was like that of Racine beside Corneille, Lamartine beside Hugo, the eternal pair, the masculine and feminine genius coupled through centuries of glory. With Raffaelle it is nobility, grace, exquisiteness, and correctness of line, and divineness of harmony that triumph. You do not find in him merely the materialist symbolism so superbly thrown off by Michael Angelo; he introduces psychological analysis of deep penetration into the painter's art. Man is shown more purified, idealised; one sees more of that which is within him. And though one may be in presence of an artist of sentimental bent, a feminine genius whose quiver of tenderness one can feel, it is also certain that admirable firmness of workmanship confronts one, that the whole is very strong and very great. Pierre gradually yielded to such sovereign masterliness, such virile elegance, such a vision of supreme beauty set in supreme perfection. But if the "Dispute on the Sacrament" and the so-called "School of Athens," both prior to the paintings of the Sixtine Chapel, seemed to him to be Raffaelle's masterpieces, he felt that in the "Burning of the Borgo," and particularly in the "Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple," and "Pope St. Leo staying Attila at the Gates of Rome," the artist had lost the flower of his divine grace, through the deep impression which the overwhelming grandeur of Michael Angelo had wrought upon him. How crushing indeed had been the blow when the Sixtine Chapel was thrown open and the rivals entered! The creations of the monster then appeared, and the greatest of the humanisers lost some of his soul at sight of them, thenceforward unable to rid himself of their influence.

From the stanze Narcisse took Pierre to the loggie, those glazed galleries which are so high and so delicately decorated. But here you only find work which pupils executed after designs left by Raffaelle at his death. The fall was sudden and complete, and never had Pierre better understood that genius is everything—that when it disappears the school collapses. The man of genius sums up his period; at a given hour he throws forth all the sap of the social soil, which afterwards remains exhausted often for centuries. So Pierre became more particularly interested in the fine view that the loggie afford, and all at once he noticed that the papal apartments were in front of him, just across the Court of San Damaso. This court, with its porticus, fountain, and white pavement, had an aspect of empty, airy, sunlit solemnity which surprised him. There was none of the gloom or pent-up religious mystery that he had dreamt of with his mind full of the surroundings of the old northern cathedrals. Right and left of the steps conducting to the rooms of the Pope and the Cardinal Secretary of State four or five carriages were ranged, the coachmen stiffly erect and the horses motionless in the brilliant light; and nothing else peopled that vast square desert of a court which, with its bareness gilded by the coruscations of its glass-work and the ruddiness of its stones, suggested a pagan temple dedicated to the sun. But what more particularly struck Pierre was the splendid panorama of Rome, for he had not hitherto imagined that the Pope from his windows could thus behold the entire city spread out before him as if he merely had to stretch forth his hand to make it his own once more.

While Pierre contemplated the scene a sound of voices caused him to turn; and he perceived a servant in black livery who, after repeating a message to Narcisse, was retiring with a deep bow. Looking much annoyed, the attache approached the young priest. "Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo," said he, "has sent word that he can't see us this morning. Some unexpected duties require his presence." However, Narcisse's embarrassment showed that he did not believe in the excuse, but rather suspected some one of having so terrified his cousin that the latter was afraid of compromising himself. Obliging and courageous as Habert himself was, this made him indignant. Still he smiled and resumed: "Listen, perhaps there's a means of forcing an entry. If your time is your own we can lunch together and then return to visit the Museum of Antiquities. I shall certainly end by coming across my cousin and we may, perhaps, be lucky enough to meet the Pope should he go down to the gardens."

At the news that his audience was yet again postponed Pierre had felt keenly disappointed. However, as the whole day was at his disposal, he willingly accepted the attache's offer. They lunched in front of St. Peter's, in a little restaurant of the Borgo, most of whose customers were pilgrims, and the fare, as it happened, was far from good. Then at about two o'clock they set off for the museum, skirting the basilica by way of the Piazza della Sagrestia. It was a bright, deserted, burning district; and again, but in a far greater degree, did the young priest experience that sensation of bare, tawny, sun-baked majesty which had come upon him while gazing into the Court of San Damaso. Then, as he passed the apse of St. Peter's, the enormity of the colossus was brought home to him more strongly than ever: it rose like a giant bouquet of architecture edged by empty expanses of pavement sprinkled with fine weeds. And in all the silent immensity there were only two children playing in the shadow of a wall. The old papal mint, the Zecca, now an Italian possession, and guarded by soldiers of the royal army, is on the left of the passage leading to the museums, while on the right, just in front, is one of the entrances of honour to the Vatican where the papal Swiss Guard keeps watch and ward; and this is the entrance by which, according to etiquette, the pair-horse carriages convey the Pope's visitors into the Court of San Damaso.

Following the long lane which ascends between a wing of the palace and its garden wall, Narcisse and Pierre at last reached the Museum of Antiquities. Ah! what a museum it is, with galleries innumerable, a museum compounded of three museums, the Pio-Clementino, Chiaramonti, and the Braccio-Nuovo, and containing a whole world found beneath the soil, then exhumed, and now glorified in full sunlight. For more than two hours Pierre went from one hall to another, dazzled by the masterpieces, bewildered by the accumulation of genius and beauty. It was not only the celebrated examples of statuary, the Laocoon and the Apollo of the cabinets of the Belvedere, the Meleager, or even the torso of Hercules—that astonished him. He was yet more impressed by the ensemble, by the innumerable quantities of Venuses, Bacchuses, and deified emperors and empresses, by the whole superb growth of beautiful or August flesh celebrating the immortality of life. Three days previously he had visited the Museum of the Capitol, where he had admired the Venus, the Dying Gaul,* the marvellous Centaurs of black marble, and the extraordinary collection of busts, but here his admiration became intensified into stupor by the inexhaustible wealth of the galleries. And, with more curiosity for life than for art, perhaps, he again lingered before the busts which so powerfully resuscitate the Rome of history—the Rome which, whilst incapable of realising the ideal beauty of Greece, was certainly well able to create life. The emperors, the philosophers, the learned men, the poets are all there, and live such as they really were, studied and portrayed in all scrupulousness with their deformities, their blemishes, the slightest peculiarities of their features. And from this extreme solicitude for truth springs a wonderful wealth of character and an incomparable vision of the past. Nothing, indeed, could be loftier: the very men live once more, and retrace the history of their city, that history which has been so falsified that the teaching of it has caused generations of school-boys to hold antiquity in horror. But on seeing the men, how well one understands, how fully one can sympathise! And indeed the smallest bits of marble, the maimed statues, the bas-reliefs in fragments, even the isolated limbs—whether the divine arm of a nymph or the sinewy, shaggy thigh of a satyr—evoke the splendour of a civilisation full of light, grandeur, and strength.

* Best known in England, through Byron's lines, as the
Dying Gladiator, though that appellation is certainly
erroneous.—Trans.

At last Narcisse brought Pierre back into the Gallery of the Candelabra, three hundred feet in length and full of fine examples of sculpture. "Listen, my dear Abbe," said he. "It is scarcely more than four o'clock, and we will sit down here for a while, as I am told that the Holy Father sometimes passes this way to go down to the gardens. It would be really lucky if you could see him, perhaps even speak to him—who can tell? At all events, it will rest you, for you must be tired out."

Narcisse was known to all the attendants, and his relationship to Monsignor Gamba gave him the run of almost the entire Vatican, where he was fond of spending his leisure time. Finding two chairs, they sat down, and the attache again began to talk of art.

How astonishing had been the destiny of Rome, what a singular, borrowed royalty had been hers! She seemed like a centre whither the whole world converged, but where nothing grew from the soil itself, which from the outset appeared to be stricken with sterility. The arts required to be acclimatised there; it was necessary to transplant the genius of neighbouring nations, which, once there, however, flourished magnificently. Under the emperors, when Rome was the queen of the earth, the beauty of her monuments and sculpture came to her from Greece. Later, when Christianity arose in Rome, it there remained impregnated with paganism; it was on another soil that it produced Gothic art, the Christian Art par excellence. Later still, at the Renascence, it was certainly at Rome that the age of Julius II and Leo X shone forth; but the artists of Tuscany and Umbria prepared the evolution, brought it to Rome that it might thence expand and soar. For the second time, indeed, art came to Rome from without, and gave her the royalty of the world by blossoming so triumphantly within her walls. Then occurred the extraordinary awakening of antiquity, Apollo and Venus resuscitated worshipped by the popes themselves, who from the time of Nicholas V dreamt of making papal Rome the equal of the imperial city. After the precursors, so sincere, tender, and strong in their art—Fra Angelico, Perugino, Botticelli, and so many others—came the two sovereigns, Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, the superhuman and the divine. Then the fall was sudden, years elapsed before the advent of Caravaggio with power of colour and modelling, all that the science of painting could achieve when bereft of genius. And afterwards the decline continued until Bernini was reached—Bernini, the real creator of the Rome of the present popes, the prodigal child who at twenty could already show a galaxy of colossal marble wenches, the universal architect who with fearful activity finished the facade, built the colonnade, decorated the interior of St. Peter's, and raised fountains, churches, and palaces innumerable. And that was the end of all, for since then Rome has little by little withdrawn from life, from the modern world, as though she, who always lived on what she derived from others, were dying of her inability to take anything more from them in order to convert it to her own glory.

"Ah! Bernini, that delightful Bernini!" continued Narcisse with his rapturous air. "He is both powerful and exquisite, his verve always ready, his ingenuity invariably awake, his fecundity full of grace and magnificence. As for their Bramante with his masterpiece, that cold, correct Cancelleria, we'll dub him the Michael Angelo and Raffaelle of architecture and say no more about it. But Bernini, that exquisite Bernini, why, there is more delicacy and refinement in his pretended bad taste than in all the hugeness and perfection of the others! Our own age ought to recognise itself in his art, at once so varied and so deep, so triumphant in its mannerisms, so full of a perturbing solicitude for the artificial and so free from the baseness of reality. Just go to the Villa Borghese to see the group of Apollo and Daphne which Bernini executed when he was eighteen,* and in particular see his statue of Santa Teresa in ecstasy at Santa Maria della Vittoria! Ah! that Santa Teresa! It is like heaven opening, with the quiver that only a purely divine enjoyment can set in woman's flesh, the rapture of faith carried to the point of spasm, the creature losing breath and dying of pleasure in the arms of the Divinity! I have spent hours and hours before that work without exhausting the infinite scope of its precious, burning symbolisation."

* There is also at the Villa Borghese Bernini's Anchises carried
by Aeneas, which he sculptured when only sixteen. No doubt his
faults were many; but it was his misfortune to belong to a
decadent period.—Trans.

Narcisse's voice died away, and Pierre, no longer astonished at his covert, unconscious hatred of health, simplicity, and strength, scarcely listened to him. The young priest himself was again becoming absorbed in the idea he had formed of pagan Rome resuscitating in Christian Rome and turning it into Catholic Rome, the new political, sacerdotal, domineering centre of earthly government. Apart from the primitive age of the Catacombs, had Rome ever been Christian? The thoughts that had come to him on the Palatine, in the Appian Way, and in St. Peter's were gathering confirmation. Genius that morning had brought him fresh proof. No doubt the paganism which reappeared in the art of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle was tempered, transformed by the Christian spirit. But did it not still remain the basis? Had not the former master peered across Olympus when snatching his great nudities from the terrible heavens of Jehovah? Did not the ideal figures of Raffaelle reveal the superb, fascinating flesh of Venus beneath the chaste veil of the Virgin? It seemed so to Pierre, and some embarrassment mingled with his despondency, for all those beautiful forms glorifying the ardent passions of life, were in opposition to his dream of rejuvenated Christianity giving peace to the world and reviving the simplicity and purity of the early ages.

All at once he was surprised to hear Narcisse, by what transition he could not tell, speaking to him of the daily life of Leo XIII. "Yes, my dear Abbe, at eighty-four* the Holy Father shows the activity of a young man and leads a life of determination and hard work such as neither you nor I would care for! At six o'clock he is already up, says his mass in his private chapel, and drinks a little milk for breakfast. Then, from eight o'clock till noon, there is a ceaseless procession of cardinals and prelates, all the affairs of the congregations passing under his eyes, and none could be more numerous or intricate. At noon the public and collective audiences usually begin. At two he dines. Then comes the siesta which he has well earned, or else a promenade in the gardens until six o'clock. The private audiences then sometimes keep him for an hour or two. He sups at nine and scarcely eats, lives on nothing, in fact, and is always alone at his little table. What do you think, eh, of the etiquette which compels him to such loneliness? There you have a man who for eighteen years has never had a guest at his table, who day by day sits all alone in his grandeur! And as soon as ten o'clock strikes, after saying the Rosary with his familiars, he shuts himself up in his room. But, although he may go to bed, he sleeps very little; he is frequently troubled by insomnia, and gets up and sends for a secretary to dictate memoranda or letters to him. When any interesting matter requires his attention he gives himself up to it heart and soul, never letting it escape his thoughts. And his life, his health, lies in all this. His mind is always busy; his will and strength must always be exerting themselves. You may know that he long cultivated Latin verse with affection; and I believe that in his days of struggle he had a passion for journalism, inspired the articles of the newspapers he subsidised, and even dictated some of them when his most cherished ideas were in question."

* The reader should remember that the period selected for this
narrative is the year 1894. Leo XIII was born in 1810.—Trans.

Silence fell. At every moment Narcisse craned his neck to see if the little papal cortege were not emerging from the Gallery of the Tapestries to pass them on its way to the gardens. "You are perhaps aware," he resumed, "that his Holiness is brought down on a low chair which is small enough to pass through every doorway. It's quite a journey, more than a mile, through the loggie, the stanze of Raffaelle, the painting and sculpture galleries, not to mention the numerous staircases, before he reaches the gardens, where a pair-horse carriage awaits him. It's quite fine this evening, so he will surely come. We must have a little patience."

Whilst Narcisse was giving these particulars Pierre again sank into a reverie and saw the whole extraordinary history pass before him. First came the worldly, ostentatious popes of the Renascence, those who resuscitated antiquity with so much passion and dreamt of draping the Holy See with the purple of empire once more. There was Paul II, the magnificent Venetian who built the Palazzo di Venezia; Sixtus IV, to whom one owes the Sixtine Chapel; and Julius II and Leo X, who made Rome a city of theatrical pomp, prodigious festivities, tournaments, ballets, hunts, masquerades, and banquets. At that time the papacy had just rediscovered Olympus amidst the dust of buried ruins, and as though intoxicated by the torrent of life which arose from the ancient soil, it founded the museums, thus reviving the superb temples of the pagan age, and restoring them to the cult of universal admiration. Never had the Church been in such peril of death, for if the Christ was still honoured at St. Peter's, Jupiter and all the other gods and goddesses, with their beauteous, triumphant flesh, were enthroned in the halls of the Vatican. Then, however, another vision passed before Pierre, one of the modern popes prior to the Italian occupation—notably Pius IX, who, whilst yet free, often went into his good city of Rome. His huge red and gold coach was drawn by six horses, surrounded by Swiss Guards and followed by Noble Guards; but now and again he would alight in the Corso, and continue his promenade on foot, and then the mounted men of the escort galloped forward to give warning and stop the traffic. The carriages drew up, the gentlemen had to alight and kneel on the pavement, whilst the ladies simply rose and devoutly inclined their heads, as the Holy Father, attended by his Court, slowly wended his way to the Piazza del Popolo, smiling and blessing at every step. And now had come Leo XIII, the voluntary prisoner, shut up in the Vatican for eighteen years, and he, behind the high, silent walls, in the unknown sphere where each of his days flowed by so quietly, had acquired a more exalted majesty, instinct with sacred and redoubtable mysteriousness.

Ah! that Pope whom you no longer meet or see, that Pope hidden from the common of mankind like some terrible divinity whom the priests alone dare to approach! It is in that sumptuous Vatican which his forerunners of the Renascence built and adorned for giant festivities that he has secluded himself; it is there he lives, far from the crowd, in prison with the handsome men and the lovely women of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, with the gods and goddesses of marble, with the whole of resplendent Olympus celebrating around him the religion of life and light. With him the entire Papacy is there steeped in paganism. What a spectacle when the slender, weak old man, all soul, so purely white, passes along the galleries of the Museum of Antiquities on his way to the gardens. Right and left the statues behold him pass with all their bare flesh. There is Jupiter, there is Apollo, there is Venus the dominatrix, there is Pan, the universal god in whose laugh the joys of earth ring out. Nereids bathe in transparent water. Bacchantes roll, unveiled, in the warm grass. Centaurs gallop by carrying lovely girls, faint with rapture, on their steaming haunches. Ariadne is surprised by Bacchus, Ganymede fondles the eagle, Adonis fires youth and maiden with his flame. And on and on passes the weak, white old man, swaying on his low chair, amidst that splendid triumph, that display and glorification of the flesh, which shouts aloud the omnipotence of Nature, of everlasting matter! Since they have found it again, exhumed it, and honoured it, that it is which once more reigns there imperishable; and in vain have they set vine leaves on the statues, even as they have swathed the huge figures of Michael Angelo; sex still flares on all sides, life overflows, its germs course in torrents through the veins of the world. Near by, in that Vatican library of incomparable wealth, where all human science lies slumbering, there lurks a yet more terrible danger—the danger of an explosion which would sweep away everything, Vatican and St. Peter's also, if one day the books in their turn were to awake and speak aloud as speak the beauty of Venus and the manliness of Apollo. But the white, diaphanous old man seems neither to see nor to hear, and the huge heads of Jupiter, the trunks of Hercules, the equivocal statues of Antinous continue to watch him as he passes on!

However, Narcisse had become impatient, and, going in search of an attendant, he learnt from him that his Holiness had already gone down. To shorten the distance, indeed, the cortege often passes along a kind of open gallery leading towards the Mint. "Well, let us go down as well," said Narcisse to Pierre; "I will try to show you the gardens."

Down below, in the vestibule, a door of which opened on to a broad path, he spoke to another attendant, a former pontifical soldier whom he personally knew. The man at once let him pass with Pierre, but was unable to tell him whether Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo had accompanied his Holiness that day.

"No matter," resumed Narcisse when he and his companion were alone in the path; "I don't despair of meeting him—and these, you see, are the famous gardens of the Vatican."

They are very extensive grounds, and the Pope can go quite two and a half miles by passing along the paths of the wood, the vineyard, and the kitchen garden. Occupying the plateau of the Vatican hill, which the medieval wall of Leo IV still girdles, the gardens are separated from the neighbouring valleys as by a fortified rampart. The wall formerly stretched to the castle of Sant' Angelo, thereby forming what was known as the Leonine City. No inquisitive eyes can peer into the grounds excepting from the dome of St. Peter's, which casts its huge shadow over them during the hot summer weather. They are, too, quite a little world, which each pope has taken pleasure in embellishing. There is a large parterre with lawns of geometrical patterns, planted with handsome palms and adorned with lemon and orange trees in pots; there is a less formal, a shadier garden, where, amidst deep plantations of yoke-elms, you find Giovanni Vesanzio's fountain, the Aquilone, and Pius IV's old Casino; then, too, there are the woods with their superb evergreen oaks, their thickets of plane-trees, acacias, and pines, intersected by broad avenues, which are delightfully pleasant for leisurely strolls; and finally, on turning to the left, beyond other clumps of trees, come the kitchen garden and the vineyard, the last well tended.

Whilst walking through the wood Narcisse told Pierre of the life led by the Holy Father in these gardens. He strolls in them every second day when the weather allows. Formerly the popes left the Vatican for the Quirinal, which is cooler and healthier, as soon as May arrived; and spent the dog days at Castle Gandolfo on the margins of the Lake of Albano. But nowadays the only summer residence possessed by his Holiness is a virtually intact tower of the old rampart of Leo IV. He here spends the hottest days, and has even erected a sort of pavilion beside it for the accommodation of his suite. Narcisse, like one at home, went in and secured permission for Pierre to glance at the one room occupied by the Pope, a spacious round chamber with semispherical ceiling, on which are painted the heavens with symbolical figures of the constellations; one of the latter, the lion, having two stars for eyes—stars which a system of lighting causes to sparkle during the night. The walls of the tower are so thick that after blocking up a window, a kind of room, for the accommodation of a couch, has been contrived in the embrasure. Beside this couch the only furniture is a large work-table, a dining-table with flaps, and a large regal arm-chair, a mass of gilding, one of the gifts of the Pope's episcopal jubilee. And you dream of the days of solitude and perfect silence, spent in that low donjon hall, where the coolness of a tomb prevails whilst the heavy suns of August are scorching overpowered Rome.

An astronomical observatory has been installed in another tower, surmounted by a little white cupola, which you espy amidst the greenery; and under the trees there is also a Swiss chalet, where Leo XIII is fond of resting. He sometimes goes on foot to the kitchen garden, and takes much interest in the vineyard, visiting it to see if the grapes are ripening and if the vintage will be a good one. What most astonished Pierre, however, was to learn that the Holy Father had been very fond of "sport" before age had weakened him. He was indeed passionately addicted to bird snaring. Broad-meshed nets were hung on either side of a path on the fringe of a plantation, and in the middle of the path were placed cages containing the decoys, whose songs soon attracted all the birds of the neighbourhood—red-breasts, white-throats, black-caps, nightingales, fig-peckers of all sorts. And when a numerous company of them was gathered together Leo XIII, seated out of sight and watching, would suddenly clap his hands and startle the birds, which flew up and were caught by the wings in the meshes of the nets. All that then remained to be done was to take them out of the nets and stifle them by a touch of the thumb. Roast fig-peckers are delicious.*

* Perhaps so; but what a delightful pastime for the Vicar of the
Divinity!—Trans.

As Pierre came back through the wood he had another surprise. He suddenly lighted on a "Grotto of Lourdes," a miniature imitation of the original, built of rocks and blocks of cement. And such was his emotion at the sight that he could not conceal it. "It's true, then!" said he. "I was told of it, but I thought that the Holy Father was of loftier mind—free from all such base superstitions!"

"Oh!" replied Narcisse, "I fancy that the grotto dates from Pius IX, who evinced especial gratitude to our Lady of Lourdes. At all events, it must be a gift, and Leo XIII simply keeps it in repair."

For a few moments Pierre remained motionless and silent before that imitation grotto, that childish plaything. Some zealously devout visitors had left their visiting cards in the cracks of the cement-work! For his part, he felt very sad, and followed his companion with bowed head, lamenting the wretched idiocy of the world. Then, on emerging from the wood, on again reaching the parterre, he raised his eyes.

Ah! how exquisite in spite of everything was that decline of a lovely day, and what a victorious charm ascended from the soil in that part of the gardens. There, in front of that bare, noble, burning parterre, far more than under the languishing foliage of the wood or among the fruitful vines, Pierre realised the strength of Nature. Above the grass growing meagrely over the compartments of geometrical pattern which the pathways traced there were barely a few low shrubs, dwarf roses, aloes, rare tufts of withering flowers. Some green bushes still described the escutcheon of Pius IX in accordance with the strange taste of former times. And amidst the warm silence one only heard the faint crystalline murmur of the water trickling from the basin of the central fountain. But all Rome, its ardent heavens, sovereign grace, and conquering voluptuousness, seemed with their own soul to animate this vast rectangular patch of decorative gardening, this mosaic of verdure, which in its semi-abandonment and scorched decay assumed an aspect of melancholy pride, instinct with the ever returning quiver of a passion of fire that could not die. Some antique vases and statues, whitely nude under the setting sun, skirted the parterres. And above the aroma of eucalyptus and of pine, stronger even than that of the ripening oranges, there rose the odour of the large, bitter box-shrubs, so laden with pungent life that it disturbed one as one passed as if indeed it were the very scent of the fecundity of that ancient soil saturated with the dust of generations.

"It's very strange that we have not met his Holiness," exclaimed Narcisse. "Perhaps his carriage took the other path through the wood while we were in the tower."

Then, reverting to Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, the attache explained that the functions of Copiere, or papal cup-bearer, which his cousin should have discharged as one of the four Camerieri segreti partecipanti had become purely honorary since the dinners offered to diplomatists or in honour of newly consecrated bishops had been given by the Cardinal Secretary of State. Monsignor Gamba, whose cowardice and nullity were legendary, seemed therefore to have no other role than that of enlivening Leo XIII, whose favour he had won by his incessant flattery and the anecdotes which he was ever relating about both the black and the white worlds. Indeed this fat, amiable man, who could even be obliging when his interests were not in question, was a perfect newspaper, brimful of tittle-tattle, disdaining no item of gossip whatever, even if it came from the kitchens. And thus he was quietly marching towards the cardinalate, certain of obtaining the hat without other exertion than that of bringing a budget of gossip to beguile the pleasant hours of the promenade. And Heaven knew that he was always able to garner an abundant harvest of news in that closed Vatican swarming with prelates of every kind, in that womanless pontifical family of old begowned bachelors, all secretly exercised by vast ambitions, covert and revolting rivalries, and ferocious hatreds, which, it is said, are still sometimes carried as far as the good old poison of ancient days.

All at once Narcisse stopped. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "I was certain of it. There's the Holy Father! But we are not in luck. He won't even see us; he is about to get into his carriage again."

As he spoke a carriage drew up at the verge of the wood, and a little cortege emerging from a narrow path, went towards it.

Pierre felt as if he had received a great blow in the heart. Motionless beside his companion, and half hidden by a lofty vase containing a lemon-tree, it was only from a distance that he was able to see the white old man, looking so frail and slender in the wavy folds of his white cassock, and walking so very slowly with short, gliding steps. The young priest could scarcely distinguish the emaciated face of old diaphanous ivory, emphasised by a large nose which jutted out above thin lips. However, the Pontiff's black eyes were glittering with an inquisitive smile, while his right ear was inclined towards Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, who was doubtless finishing some story at once rich and short, flowery and dignified. And on the left walked a Noble Guard; and two other prelates followed.

It was but a familiar apparition; Leo XIII was already climbing into the closed carriage. And Pierre, in the midst of that large, odoriferous, burning garden, again experienced the singular emotion which had come upon him in the Gallery of the Candelabra while he was picturing the Pope on his way between the Apollos and Venuses radiant in their triumphant nudity. There, however, it was only pagan art which had celebrated the eternity of life, the superb, almighty powers of Nature. But here he had beheld the Pontiff steeped in Nature itself, in Nature clad in the most lovely, most voluptuous, most passionate guise. Ah! that Pope, that old man strolling with his Divinity of grief, humility, and renunciation along the paths of those gardens of love, in the languid evenings of the hot summer days, beneath the caressing scents of pine and eucalyptus, ripe oranges, and tall, acrid box-shrubs! The whole atmosphere around him proclaimed the powers of the great god Pan. How pleasant was the thought of living there, amidst that magnificence of heaven and of earth, of loving the beauty of woman and of rejoicing in the fruitfulness of all! And suddenly the decisive truth burst forth that from a land of such joy and light it was only possible for a temporal religion of conquest and political domination to rise; not the mystical, pain-fraught religion of the North—the religion of the soul!

However, Narcisse led the young priest away, telling him other anecdotes as they went—anecdotes of the occasional bonhomie of Leo XIII, who would stop to chat with the gardeners, and question them about the health of the trees and the sale of the oranges. And he also mentioned the Pope's former passion for a pair of gazelles, sent him from Africa, two graceful creatures which he had been fond of caressing, and at whose death he had shed tears. But Pierre no longer listened. When they found themselves on the Piazza of St. Peter's, he turned round and gazed at the Vatican once more.

His eyes had fallen on the gate of bronze, and he remembered having wondered that morning what there might be behind these metal panels ornamented with big nails. And he did not yet dare to answer the question, and decide if the new nations thirsting for fraternity and justice would really find there the religion necessary for the democracies of to-morrow; for he had not been able to probe things, and only carried a first impression away with him. But how keen it was, and how ill it boded for his dreams! A gate of bronze! Yes, a hard, impregnable gate, so completely shutting the Vatican off from the rest of the world that nothing new had entered the palace for three hundred years. Behind that portal the old centuries, as far as the sixteenth, remained immutable. Time seemed to have stayed its course there for ever; nothing more stirred; the very costumes of the Swiss Guards, the Noble Guards, and the prelates themselves were unchanged; and you found yourself in the world of three hundred years ago, with its etiquette, its costumes, and its ideas. That the popes in a spirit of haughty protest should for five and twenty years have voluntarily shut themselves up in their palace was already regrettable; but this imprisonment of centuries within the past, within the grooves of tradition, was far more serious and dangerous. It was all Catholicism which was thus imprisoned, whose dogmas and sacerdotal organisation were obstinately immobilised. Perhaps, in spite of its apparent flexibility, Catholicism was really unable to yield in anything, under peril of being swept away, and therein lay both its weakness and its strength. And then what a terrible world was there, how great the pride and ambition, how numerous the hatreds and rivalries! And how strange the prison, how singular the company assembled behind the bars—the Crucified by the side of Jupiter Capitolinus, all pagan antiquity fraternising with the Apostles, all the splendours of the Renascence surrounding the pastor of the Gospel who reigns in the name of the humble and the poor!

The sun was sinking, the gentle, luscious sweetness of the Roman evenings was falling from the limpid heavens, and after that splendid day spent with Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, the ancients, and the Pope, in the finest palace of the world, the young priest lingered, distracted, on the Piazza of St. Peter's.

"Well, you must excuse me, my dear Abbe," concluded Narcisse. "But I will now confess to you that I suspect my worthy cousin of a fear that he might compromise himself by meddling in your affair. I shall certainly see him again, but you will do well not to put too much reliance on him."

It was nearly six o'clock when Pierre got back to the Boccanera mansion. As a rule, he passed in all modesty down the lane, and entered by the little side door, a key of which had been given him. But he had that morning received a letter from M. de la Choue, and desired to communicate it to Benedetta. So he ascended the grand staircase, and on reaching the anteroom was surprised to find nobody there. As a rule, whenever the man-servant went out Victorine installed herself in his place and busied herself with some needlework. Her chair was there, and Pierre even noticed some linen which she had left on a little table when probably summoned elsewhere. Then, as the door of the first reception-room was ajar, he at last ventured in. It was almost night there already, the twilight was softly dying away, and all at once the young priest stopped short, fearing to take another step, for, from the room beyond, the large yellow salon, there came a murmur of feverish, distracted words, ardent entreaties, fierce panting, a rustling and a shuffling of footsteps. And suddenly Pierre no longer hesitated, urged on despite himself by the conviction that the sounds he heard were those of a struggle, and that some one was hard pressed.

And when he darted into the further room he was stupefied, for Dario was there, no longer showing the degenerate elegance of the last scion of an exhausted race, but maddened by the hot, frantic blood of the Boccaneras which had bubbled up within him. He had clasped Benedetta by the shoulders in a frenzy of passion and was scorching her face with his hot, entreating words: "But since you say, my darling, that it is all over, that your marriage will never be dissolved—oh! why should we be wretched for ever! Love me as you do love me, and let me love you—let me love you!"

But the Contessina, with an indescribable expression of tenderness and suffering on her tearful face, repulsed him with her outstretched arms, she likewise evincing a fierce energy as she repeated: "No, no; I love you, but it must not, it must not be."

At that moment, amidst the roar of his despair, Dario became conscious that some one was entering the room. He turned and gazed at Pierre with an expression of stupefied insanity, scarce able even to recognise him. Then he carried his two hands to his face, to his bloodshot eyes and his cheeks wet with scalding tears, and fled, heaving a terrible, pain-fraught sigh in which baffled passion mingled with grief and repentance.

Benedetta seated herself, breathing hard, her strength and courage wellnigh exhausted. But as Pierre, too much embarrassed to speak, turned towards the door, she addressed him in a calmer voice: "No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe, do not go away—sit down, I pray you; I should like to speak to you for a moment."

He thereupon thought it his duty to account for his sudden entrance, and explained that he had found the door of the first salon ajar, and that Victorine was not in the ante-room, though he had seen her work lying on the table there.

"Yes," exclaimed the Contessina, "Victorine ought to have been there; I saw her there but a short time ago. And when my poor Dario lost his head I called her. Why did she not come?" Then, with sudden expansion, leaning towards Pierre, she continued: "Listen, Monsieur l'Abbe, I will tell you what happened, for I don't want you to form too bad an opinion of my poor Dario. It was all in some measure my fault. Last night he asked me for an appointment here in order that we might have a quiet chat, and as I knew that my aunt would be absent at this time to-day I told him to come. It was only natural—wasn't it?—that we should want to see one another and come to an agreement after the grievous news that my marriage will probably never be annulled. We suffer too much, and must form a decision. And so when he came this evening we began to weep and embrace, mingling our tears together. I kissed him again and again, telling him how I adored him, how bitterly grieved I was at being the cause of his sufferings, and how surely I should die of grief at seeing him so unhappy. Ah! no doubt I did wrong; I ought not to have caught him to my heart and embraced him as I did, for it maddened him, Monsieur l'Abbe; he lost his head, and would have made me break my vow to the Blessed Virgin."

She spoke these words in all tranquillity and simplicity, without sign of embarrassment, like a young and beautiful woman who is at once sensible and practical. Then she resumed: "Oh! I know my poor Dario well, but it does not prevent me from loving him; perhaps, indeed, it only makes me love him the more. He looks delicate, perhaps rather sickly, but in truth he is a man of passion. Yes, the old blood of my people bubbles up in him. I know something of it myself, for when I was a child I sometimes had fits of angry passion which left me exhausted on the floor, and even now, when the gusts arise within me, I have to fight against myself and torture myself in order that I may not act madly. But my poor Dario does not know how to suffer. He is like a child whose fancies must be gratified. And yet at bottom he has a good deal of common sense; he waits for me because he knows that the only real happiness lies with the woman who adores him."

As Pierre listened he was able to form a more precise idea of the young prince, of whose character he had hitherto had but a vague perception. Whilst dying of love for his cousin, Dario had ever been a man of pleasure. Though he was no doubt very amiable, the basis of his temperament was none the less egotism. And, in particular, he was unable to endure suffering; he loathed suffering, ugliness, and poverty, whether they affected himself or others. Both his flesh and his soul required gaiety, brilliancy, show, life in the full sunlight. And withal he was exhausted, with no strength left him but for the idle life he led, so incapable of thought and will that the idea of joining the new regime had not even occurred to him. Yet he had all the unbounded pride of a Roman; sagacity—a keen, practical perception of the real—was mingled with his indolence; while his inveterate love of woman, more frequently displayed in charm of manner, burst forth at times in attacks of frantic sensuality.

"After all he is a man," concluded Benedetta in a low voice, "and I must not ask impossibilities of him." Then, as Pierre gazed at her, his notions of Italian jealousy quite upset, she exclaimed, aglow with passionate adoration: "No, no. Situated as we are, I am not jealous. I know very well that he will always return to me, and that he will be mine alone whenever I please, whenever it may be possible."

Silence followed; shadows were filling the room, the gilding of the large pier tables faded away, and infinite melancholy fell from the lofty, dim ceiling and the old hangings, yellow like autumn leaves. But soon, by some chance play of the waning light, a painting stood out above the sofa on which the Contessina was seated. It was the portrait of the beautiful young girl with the turban—Cassia Boccanera the forerunner, the amorosa and avengeress. Again was Pierre struck by the portrait's resemblance to Benedetta, and, thinking aloud, he resumed: "Passion always proves the stronger; there invariably comes a moment when one succumbs—"

But Benedetta violently interrupted him: "I! I! Ah! you do not know me; I would rather die!" And with extraordinary exaltation, all aglow with love, as if her superstitious faith had fired her passion to ecstasy, she continued: "I have vowed to the Madonna that I will belong to none but the man I love, and to him only when he is my husband. And hitherto I have kept that vow, at the cost of my happiness, and I will keep it still, even if it cost me my life! Yes, we will die, my poor Dario and I, if it be necessary; but the holy Virgin has my vow, and the angels shall not weep in heaven!"

She was all in those words, her nature all simplicity, intricate, inexplicable though it might seem. She was doubtless swayed by that idea of human nobility which Christianity has set in renunciation and purity; a protest, as it were, against eternal matter, against the forces of Nature, the everlasting fruitfulness of life. But there was more than this; she reserved herself, like a divine and priceless gift, to be bestowed on the one being whom her heart had chosen, he who would be her lord and master when God should have united them in marriage. For her everything lay in the blessing of the priest, in the religious solemnisation of matrimony. And thus one understood her long resistance to Prada, whom she did not love, and her despairing, grievous resistance to Dario, whom she did love, but who was not her husband. And how torturing it was for that soul of fire to have to resist her love; how continual was the combat waged by duty in the Virgin's name against the wild, passionate blood of her race! Ignorant, indolent though she might be, she was capable of great fidelity of heart, and, moreover, she was not given to dreaming: love might have its immaterial charms, but she desired it complete.

As Pierre looked at her in the dying twilight he seemed to see and understand her for the first time. The duality of her nature appeared in her somewhat full, fleshy lips, in her big black eyes, which suggested a dark, tempestuous night illumined by flashes of lightning, and in the calm, sensible expression of the rest of her gentle, infantile face. And, withal, behind those eyes of flame, beneath that pure, candid skin, one divined the internal tension of a superstitious, proud, and self-willed woman, who was obstinately intent on reserving herself for her one love. And Pierre could well understand that she should be adored, that she should fill the life of the man she chose with passion, and that to his own eyes she should appear like the younger sister of that lovely, tragic Cassia who, unwilling to survive the blow that had rendered self-bestowal impossible, had flung herself into the Tiber, dragging her brother Ercole and the corpse of her lover Flavio with her.

However, with a gesture of kindly affection Benedetta caught hold of Pierre's hands. "You have been here a fortnight, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "and I have come to like you very much, for I feel you to be a friend. If at first you do not understand us, at least pray do not judge us too severely. Ignorant as I may be, I always strive to act for the best, I assure you."

Pierre was greatly touched by her affectionate graciousness, and thanked her whilst for a moment retaining her beautiful hands in his own, for he also was becoming much attached to her. A fresh dream was carrying him off, that of educating her, should he have the time, or, at all events, of not returning home before winning her soul over to his own ideas of future charity and fraternity. Did not that adorable, unoccupied, indolent, ignorant creature, who only knew how to defend her love, personify the Italy of yesterday? The Italy of yesterday, so lovely and so sleepy, instinct with a dying grace, charming one even in her drowsiness, and retaining so much mystery in the fathomless depths of her black, passionate eyes! And what a role would be that of awakening her, instructing her, winning her over to truth, making her the rejuvenated Italy of to-morrow such as he had dreamt of! Even in that disastrous marriage with Count Prada he tried to see merely a first attempt at revival which had failed, the modern Italy of the North being over-hasty, too brutal in its eagerness to love and transform that gentle, belated Rome which was yet so superb and indolent. But might he not take up the task? Had he not noticed that his book, after the astonishment of the first perusal, had remained a source of interest and reflection with Benedetta amidst the emptiness of her days given over to grief? What! was it really possible that she might find some appeasement for her own wretchedness by interesting herself in the humble, in the happiness of the poor? Emotion already thrilled her at the idea, and he, quivering at the thought of all the boundless love that was within her and that she might bestow, vowed to himself that he would draw tears of pity from her eyes.

But the night had now almost completely fallen, and Benedetta rose to ask for a lamp. Then, as Pierre was about to take leave, she detained him for another moment in the gloom. He could no longer see her; he only heard her grave voice: "You will not go away with too bad an opinion of us, will you, Monsieur l'Abbe? We love one another, Dario and I, and that is no sin when one behaves as one ought. Ah! yes, I love him, and have loved him for years. I was barely thirteen, he was eighteen, and we already loved one another wildly in those big gardens of the Villa Montefiori which are now all broken up. Ah! what days we spent there, whole afternoons among the trees, hours in secret hiding-places, where we kissed like little angels. When the oranges ripened their perfume intoxicated us. And the large box-plants, ah, Dio! how they enveloped us, how their strong, acrid scent made our hearts beat! I can never smell then nowadays without feeling faint!"

A man-servant brought in the lamp, and Pierre ascended to his room. But when half-way up the little staircase he perceived Victorine, who started slightly, as if she had posted herself there to watch his departure from the salon. And now, as she followed him up, talking and seeking for information, he suddenly realised what had happened. "Why did you not go to your mistress instead of running off," he asked, "when she called you, while you were sewing in the ante-room?"

At first she tried to feign astonishment and reply that she had heard nothing. But her good-natured, frank face did not know how to lie, and she ended by confessing, with a gay, courageous air. "Well," she said, "it surely wasn't for me to interfere between lovers! Besides, my poor little Benedetta is simply torturing herself to death with those ideas of hers. Why shouldn't they be happy, since they love one another? Life isn't so amusing as some may think. And how bitterly one regrets not having seized hold of happiness when the time for it has gone!"

Once alone in his room, Pierre suddenly staggered, quite overcome. The great box-plants, the great box-plants with their acrid, perturbing perfume! She, Benedetta, like himself, had quivered as she smelt them; and he saw them once more in a vision of the pontifical gardens, the voluptuous gardens of Rome, deserted, glowing under the August sun. And now his whole day crystallised, assumed clear and full significance. It spoke to him of the fruitful awakening, of the eternal protest of Nature and life, Venus and Hercules, whom one may bury for centuries beneath the soil, but who, nevertheless, one day arise from it, and though one may seek to wall them up within the domineering, stubborn, immutable Vatican, reign yet even there, and rule the whole, wide world with sovereign power!

PART III.

VII.

On the following day as Pierre, after a long ramble, once more found himself in front of the Vatican, whither a harassing attraction ever led him, he again encountered Monsignor Nani. It was a Wednesday evening, and the Assessor of the Holy Office had just come from his weekly audience with the Pope, whom he had acquainted with the proceedings of the Congregation at its meeting that morning. "What a fortunate chance, my dear sir," said he; "I was thinking of you. Would you like to see his Holiness in public while you are waiting for a private audience?"

Nani had put on his pleasant expression of smiling civility, beneath which one would barely detect the faint irony of a superior man who knew everything, prepared everything, and could do everything.

"Why, yes, Monsignor," Pierre replied, somewhat astonished by the abruptness of the offer. "Anything of a nature to divert one's mind is welcome when one loses one's time in waiting."

"No, no, you are not losing your time," replied the prelate. "You are looking round you, reflecting, and enlightening yourself. Well, this is the point. You are doubtless aware that the great international pilgrimage of the Peter's Pence Fund will arrive in Rome on Friday, and be received on Saturday by his Holiness. On Sunday, moreover, the Holy Father will celebrate mass at the Basilica. Well, I have a few cards left, and here are some very good places for both ceremonies." So saying he produced an elegant little pocketbook bearing a gilt monogram and handed Pierre two cards, one green and the other pink. "If you only knew how people fight for them," he resumed. "You remember that I told you of two French ladies who are consumed by a desire to see his Holiness. Well, I did not like to support their request for an audience in too pressing a way, and they have had to content themselves with cards like these. The fact is, the Holy Father is somewhat fatigued at the present time. I found him looking yellow and feverish just now. But he has so much courage; he nowadays only lives by force of soul." Then Nani's smile came back with its almost imperceptible touch of derision as he resumed: "Impatient ones ought to find a great example in him, my dear son. I heard that Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo had been unable to help you. But you must not be too much distressed on that account. This long delay is assuredly a grace of Providence in order that you may instruct yourself and come to understand certain things which you French priests do not, unfortunately, realise when you arrive in Rome. And perhaps it will prevent you from making certain mistakes. Come, calm yourself, and remember that the course of events is in the hands of God, who, in His sovereign wisdom, fixes the hour for all things."

Thereupon Nani offered Pierre his plump, supple, shapely hand, a hand soft like a woman's but with the grasp of a vice. And afterwards he climbed into his carriage, which was waiting for him.

It so happened that the letter which Pierre had received from Viscount Philibert de la Choue was a long cry of spite and despair in connection with the great international pilgrimage of the Peter's Pence Fund. The Viscount wrote from his bed, to which he was confined by a very severe attack of gout, and his grief at being unable to come to Rome was the greater as the President of the Committee, who would naturally present the pilgrims to the Pope, happened to be Baron de Fouras, one of his most bitter adversaries of the old conservative, Catholic party. M. de la Choue felt certain that the Baron would profit by his opportunity to win the Pope over to the theory of free corporations; whereas he, the Viscount, believed that the salvation of Catholicism and the world could only be worked by a system in which the corporations should be closed and obligatory. And so he urged Pierre to exert himself with such cardinals as were favourable, to secure an audience with the Holy Father whatever the obstacles, and to remain in Rome until he should have secured the Pontiff's approbation, which alone could decide the victory. The letter further mentioned that the pilgrimage would be made up of a number of groups headed by bishops and other ecclesiastical dignitaries, and would comprise three thousand people from France, Belgium, Spain, Austria, and even Germany. Two thousand of these would come from France alone. An international committee had assembled in Paris to organise everything and select the pilgrims, which last had proved a delicate task, as a representative gathering had been desired, a commingling of members of the aristocracy, sisterhood of middle-class ladies, and associations of the working classes, among whom all social differences would be forgotten in the union of a common faith. And the Viscount added that the pilgrimage would bring the Pope a large sum of money, and had settled the date of its arrival in the Eternal City in such wise that it would figure as a solemn protest of the Catholic world against the festivities of September 20, by which the Quirinal had just celebrated the anniversary of the occupation of Rome.

The reception of the pilgrimage being fixed for noon, Pierre in all simplicity thought that he would be sufficiently early if he reached St. Peter's at eleven. The function was to take place in the Hall of Beatifications, which is a large and handsome apartment over the portico, and has been arranged as a chapel since 1890. One of its windows opens on to the central balcony, whence the popes formerly blessed the people, the city, and the world. To reach the apartment you pass through two other halls of audience, the Sala Regia and Sala Ducale, and when Pierre wished to gain the place to which his green card entitled him he found both those rooms so extremely crowded that he could only elbow his way forward with the greatest difficulty. For an hour already the three or four thousand people assembled there had been stifling, full of growing emotion and feverishness. At last the young priest managed to reach the threshold of the third hall, but was so discouraged at sight of the extraordinary multitude of heads before him that he did not attempt to go any further.

The apartment, which he could survey at a glance by rising on tip-toe, appeared to him to be very rich of aspect, with walls gilded and painted under a severe and lofty ceiling. On a low platform, where the altar usually stood, facing the entry, the pontifical throne had now been set: a large arm-chair upholstered in red velvet with glittering golden back and arms; whilst the hangings of the baldacchino, also of red velvet, fell behind and spread out on either side like a pair of huge purple wings. However, what more particularly interested Pierre was the wildly passionate concourse of people whose hearts he could almost hear beating and whose eyes sought to beguile their feverish impatience by contemplating and adoring the empty throne. As if it had been some golden monstrance which the Divinity in person would soon deign to occupy, that throne dazzled them, disturbed them, filled them all with devout rapture. Among the throng were workmen rigged out in their Sunday best, with clear childish eyes and rough ecstatic faces; ladies of the upper classes wearing black, as the regulations required, and looking intensely pale from the sacred awe which mingled with their excessive desire; and gentlemen in evening dress, who appeared quite glorious, inflated with the conviction that they were saving both the Church and the nations. One cluster of dress-coats assembled near the throne, was particularly noticeable; it comprised the members of the International Committee, headed by Baron de Fouras, a very tall, stout, fair man of fifty, who bestirred and exerted himself and issued orders like some commander on the morning of a decisive victory. Then, amidst the general mass of grey, neutral hue, there gleamed the violet silk of some bishop's cassock, for each pastor had desired to remain with his flock; whilst members of various religious orders, superiors in brown, black, and white habits, rose up above all others with lofty bearded or shaven heads. Right and left drooped banners which associations and congregations had brought to present to the Pope. And the sea of pilgrims ever waved and surged with a growing clamour: so much impatient love being exhaled by those perspiring faces, burning eyes, and hungry mouths that the atmosphere, reeking with the odour of the throng, seemed thickened and darkened.

All at once, however, Pierre perceived Monsignor Nani standing near the throne and beckoning him to approach; and although the young priest replied by a modest gesture, implying that he preferred to remain where he was, the prelate insisted and even sent an usher to make way for him. Directly the usher had led him forward, Nani inquired: "Why did you not come to take your place? Your card entitled you to be here, on the left of the throne."

"The truth is," answered the priest, "I did not like to disturb so many people. Besides, this is an undue honour for me."

"No, no; I gave you that place in order that you should occupy it. I want you to be in the first rank, so that you may see everything of the ceremony."

Pierre could not do otherwise than thank him. Then, on looking round, he saw that several cardinals and many other prelates were likewise waiting on either side of the throne. But it was in vain that he sought Cardinal Boccanera, who only came to St. Peter's and the Vatican on the days when his functions required his presence there. However, he recognised Cardinal Sanguinetti, who, broad and sturdy and red of face, was talking in a loud voice to Baron de Fouras. And Nani, with his obliging air, stepped up again to point out two other Eminences who were high and mighty personages—the Cardinal Vicar, a short, fat man, with a feverish countenance scorched by ambition, and the Cardinal Secretary, who was robust and bony, fashioned as with a hatchet, suggesting a romantic type of Sicilian bandit, who, to other courses, had preferred the discreet, smiling diplomacy of the Church. A few steps further on, and quite alone, the Grand Penitentiary, silent and seemingly suffering, showed his grey, lean, ascetic profile.

Noon had struck. There was a false alert, a burst of emotion, which swept in like a wave from the other halls. But it was merely the ushers opening a passage for the cortege. Then, all at once, acclamations arose in the first hall, gathered volume, and drew nearer. This time it was the cortege itself. First came a detachment of the Swiss Guard in undress, headed by a sergeant; then a party of chair-bearers in red; and next the domestic prelates, including the four Camerieri segreti partecipanti. And finally, between two rows of Noble Guards, in semi-gala uniforms, walked the Holy Father, alone, smiling a pale smile, and slowly blessing the pilgrims on either hand. In his wake the clamour which had risen in the other apartments swept into the Hall of Beatifications with the violence of delirious love; and, under his slender, white, benedictive hand, all those distracted creatures fell upon both knees, nought remaining but the prostration of a devout multitude, overwhelmed, as it were, by the apparition of its god.

Quivering, carried away, Pierre had knelt like the others. Ah! that omnipotence, that irresistible contagion of faith, of the redoubtable current from the spheres beyond, increased tenfold by a scenario and a pomp of sovereign grandeur! Profound silence fell when Leo XIII was seated on the throne surrounded by the cardinals and his court; and then the ceremony proceeded according to rite and usage. First a bishop spoke, kneeling and laying the homage of the faithful of all Christendom at his Holiness's feet. The President of the Committee, Baron de Fouras, followed, remaining erect whilst he read a long address in which he introduced the pilgrimage and explained its motive, investing it with all the gravity of a political and religious protest. This stout man had a shrill and piercing voice, and his words jarred like the grating of a gimlet as he proclaimed the grief of the Catholic world at the spoliation which the Holy See had endured for a quarter of a century, and the desire of all the nations there represented by the pilgrims to console the supreme and venerated Head of the Church by bringing him the offerings of rich and poor, even to the mites of the humblest, in order that the Papacy might retain the pride of independence and be able to treat its enemies with contempt. And he also spoke of France, deplored her errors, predicted her return to healthy traditions, and gave it to be understood that she remained in spite of everything the most opulent and generous of the Christian nations, the donor whose gold and presents flowed into Rome in a never ending stream. At last Leo XIII arose to reply to the bishop and the baron. His voice was full, with a strong nasal twang, and surprised one coming from a man so slight of build. In a few sentences he expressed his gratitude, saying how touched he was by the devotion of the nations to the Holy See. Although the times might be bad, the final triumph could not be delayed much longer. There were evident signs that mankind was returning to faith, and that iniquity would soon cease under the universal dominion of the Christ. As for France, was she not the eldest daughter of the Church, and had she not given too many proofs of her affection for the Holy See for the latter ever to cease loving her? Then, raising his arm, he bestowed on all the pilgrims present, on the societies and enterprises they represented, on their families and friends, on France, on all the nations of the Catholic world, his apostolic benediction, in gratitude for the precious help which they sent him. And whilst he was again seating himself applause burst forth, frantic salvoes of applause lasting for ten minutes and mingling with vivats and inarticulate cries—a passionate, tempestuous outburst, which made the very building shake.

Amidst this blast of frantic adoration Pierre gazed at Leo XIII, now again motionless on his throne. With the papal cap on his head and the red cape edged with ermine about his shoulders, he retained in his long white cassock the rigid, sacerdotal attitude of an idol venerated by two hundred and fifty millions of Christians. Against the purple background of the hangings of the baldacchino, between the wing-like drapery on either side, enclosing, as it were, a brasier of glory, he assumed real majesty of aspect. He was no longer the feeble old man with the slow, jerky walk and the slender, scraggy neck of a poor ailing bird. The simious ugliness of his face, the largeness of his nose, the long slit of his mouth, the hugeness of his ears, the conflicting jumble of his withered features disappeared. In that waxen countenance you only distinguished the admirable, dark, deep eyes, beaming with eternal youth, with extraordinary intelligence and penetration. And then there was a resolute bracing of his entire person, a consciousness of the eternity which he represented, a regal nobility, born of the very circumstance that he was now but a mere breath, a soul set in so pellucid a body of ivory that it became visible as though it were already freed from the bonds of earth. And Pierre realised what such a man—the Sovereign Pontiff, the king obeyed by two hundred and fifty millions of subjects—must be for the devout and dolent creatures who came to adore him from so far, and who fell at his feet awestruck by the splendour of the powers incarnate in him. Behind him, amidst the purple of the hangings, what a gleam was suddenly afforded of the spheres beyond, what an Infinite of ideality and blinding glory! So many centuries of history from the Apostle Peter downward, so much strength and genius, so many struggles and triumphs to be summed up in one being, the Elect, the Unique, the Superhuman! And what a miracle, incessantly renewed, was that of Heaven deigning to descend into human flesh, of the Deity fixing His abode in His chosen servant, whom He consecrated above and beyond all others, endowing him with all power and all science! What sacred perturbation, what emotion fraught with distracted love might one not feel at the thought of the Deity being ever there in the depths of that man's eyes, speaking with his voice and emanating from his hand each time that he raised it to bless! Could one imagine the exorbitant absoluteness of that sovereign who was infallible, who disposed of the totality of authority in this world and of salvation in the next! At all events, how well one understood that souls consumed by a craving for faith should fly towards him, that those who at last found the certainty they had so ardently sought should seek annihilation in him, the consolation of self-bestowal and disappearance within the Deity Himself.

Meantime, the ceremony was drawing to an end; Baron de Fouras was now presenting the members of the committee and a few other persons of importance. There was a slow procession with trembling genuflections and much greedy kissing of the papal ring and slipper. Then the banners were offered, and Pierre felt a pang on seeing that the finest and richest of them was one of Lourdes, an offering no doubt from the Fathers of the Immaculate Conception. On one side of the white, gold-bordered silk Our Lady of Lourdes was painted, while on the other appeared a portrait of Leo XIII. Pierre saw the Pope smile at the presentment of himself, and was greatly grieved thereat, as though, indeed, his whole dream of an intellectual, evangelical Pope, disentangled from all low superstition, were crumbling away. And just then his eyes met those of Nani, who from the outset had been watching him with the inquisitive air of a man who is making an experiment.

"That banner is superb, isn't it?" said Nani, drawing near. "How it must please his Holiness to be so nicely painted in company with so pretty a virgin." And as the young priest, turning pale, did not reply, the prelate added, with an air of devout enjoyment: "We are very fond of Lourdes in Rome; that story of Bernadette is so delightful."

However, the scene which followed was so extraordinary that for a long time Pierre remained overcome by it. He had beheld never-to-be-forgotten idolatry at Lourdes, incidents of naive faith and frantic religious passion which yet made him quiver with alarm and grief. But the crowds rushing on the grotto, the sick dying of divine love before the Virgin's statue, the multitudes delirious with the contagion of the miraculous—nothing of all that gave an idea of the blast of madness which suddenly inflamed the pilgrims at the feet of the Pope. Some bishops, superiors of religious orders, and other delegates of various kinds had stepped forward to deposit near the throne the offerings which they brought from the whole Catholic world, the universal "collection" of St. Peter's Pence. It was the voluntary tribute of the nations to their sovereign: silver, gold, and bank notes in purses, bags, and cases. Ladies came and fell on their knees to offer silk and velvet alms-bags which they themselves had embroidered. Others had caused the note cases which they tendered to be adorned with the monogram of Leo XIII in diamonds. And at one moment the enthusiasm became so intense that several women stripped themselves of their adornments, flung their own purses on to the platform, and emptied their pockets even to the very coppers they had about them. One lady, tall and slender, very beautiful and very dark, wrenched her watch from about her neck, pulled off her rings, and threw everything upon the carpet. Had it been possible, they would have torn away their flesh to pluck out their love-burnt hearts and fling them likewise to the demi-god. They would even have flung themselves, have given themselves without reserve. It was a rain of presents, an explosion of the passion which impels one to strip oneself for the object of one's cult, happy at having nothing of one's own that shall not belong to him. And meantime the clamour grew, vivats and shrill cries of adoration arose amidst pushing and jostling of increased violence, one and all yielding to the irresistible desire to kiss the idol!

But a signal was given, and Leo XIII made haste to quit the throne and take his place in the cortege in order to return to his apartments. The Swiss Guards energetically thrust back the throng, seeking to open a way through the three halls. But at sight of his Holiness's departure a lamentation of despair arose and spread, as if heaven had suddenly closed again and shut out those who had not yet been able to approach. What a frightful disappointment—to have beheld the living manifestation of the Deity and to see it disappear before gaining salvation by just touching it! So terrible became the scramble, so extraordinary the confusion, that the Swiss Guards were swept away. And ladies were seen to dart after the Pope, to drag themselves on all fours over the marble slabs and kiss his footprints and lap up the dust of his steps! The tall dark lady suddenly fell at the edge of the platform, raised a loud shriek, and fainted; and two gentlemen of the committee had to hold her so that she might not do herself an injury in the convulsions of the hysterical fit which had come upon her. Another, a plump blonde, was wildly, desperately kissing one of the golden arms of the throne-chair, on which the old man's poor, bony elbow had just rested. And others, on seeing her, came to dispute possession, seized both arms, gilding and velvet, and pressed their mouths to wood-work or upholstery, their bodies meanwhile shaking with their sobs. Force had to be employed in order to drag them away.

When it was all over Pierre went off, emerging as it were from a painful dream, sick at heart, and with his mind revolting. And again he encountered Nani's glance, which never left him. "It was a superb ceremony, was it not?" said the prelate. "It consoles one for many iniquities."

"Yes, no doubt; but what idolatry!" the young priest murmured despite himself.

Nani, however, merely smiled, as if he had not heard the last word. At that same moment the two French ladies whom he had provided with tickets came up to thank him, and. Pierre was surprised to recognise the mother and daughter whom he had met at the Catacombs. Charming, bright, and healthy as they were, their enthusiasm was only for the spectacle: they declared that they were well pleased at having seen it—that it was really astonishing, unique.

As the crowd slowly withdrew Pierre all at once felt a tap on his shoulder, and, on turning his head, perceived Narcisse Habert, who also was very enthusiastic. "I made signs to you, my dear Abbe," said he, "but you didn't see me. Ah! how superb was the expression of that dark woman who fell rigid beside the platform with her arms outstretched. She reminded me of a masterpiece of one of the primitives, Cimabue, Giotto, or Fra Angelico. And the others, those who devoured the chair arms with their kisses, what suavity, beauty, and love! I never miss these ceremonies: there are always some fine scenes, perfect pictures, in which souls reveal themselves."

The long stream of pilgrims slowly descended the stairs, and Pierre, followed by Nani and Narcisse, who had begun to chat, tried to bring the ideas which were tumultuously throbbing in his brain into something like order. There was certainly grandeur and beauty in that Pope who had shut himself up in his Vatican, and who, the more he became a purely moral, spiritual authority, freed from all terrestrial cares, had grown in the adoration and awe of mankind. Such a flight into the ideal deeply stirred Pierre, whose dream of rejuvenated Christianity rested on the idea of the supreme Head of the Church exercising only a purified, spiritual authority. He had just seen what an increase of majesty and power was in that way gained by the Supreme Pontiff of the spheres beyond, at whose feet the women fainted, and behind whom they beheld a vision of the Deity. But at the same moment the pecuniary side of the question had risen before him and spoilt his joy. If the enforced relinquishment of the temporal power had exalted the Pope by freeing him from the worries of a petty sovereignty which was ever threatened, the need of money still remained like a chain about his feet tying him to earth. As he could not accept the proffered subvention of the Italian Government,* there was certainly in the Peter's Pence a means of placing the Holy See above all material cares, provided, however, that this Peter's Pence were really the Catholic sou, the mite of each believer, levied on his daily income and sent direct to Rome. Such a voluntary tribute paid by the flock to its pastor would, moreover, suffice for the wants of the Church if each of the 250,000,000 of Catholics gave his or her sou every week. In this wise the Pope, indebted to each and all of his children, would be indebted to none in particular. A sou was so little and so easy to give, and there was also something so touching about the idea. But, unhappily, things were not worked in that way; the great majority of Catholics gave nothing whatever, while the rich ones sent large sums from motives of political passion; and a particular objection was that the gifts were centralised in the hands of certain bishops and religious orders, so that these became ostensibly the benefactors of the papacy, the indispensable cashiers from whom it drew the sinews of life. The lowly and humble whose mites filled the collection boxes were, so to say, suppressed, and the Pope became dependent on the intermediaries, and was compelled to act cautiously with them, listen to their remonstrances, and even at times obey their passions, lest the stream of gifts should suddenly dry up. And so, although he was disburdened of the dead weight of the temporal power, he was not free; but remained the tributary of his clergy, with interests and appetites around him which he must needs satisfy. And Pierre remembered the "Grotto of Lourdes" in the Vatican gardens, and the banner which he had just seen, and he knew that the Lourdes fathers levied 200,000 francs a year on their receipts to send them as a present to the Holy Father. Was not that the chief reason of their great power? He quivered, and suddenly became conscious that, do what he might, he would be defeated, and his book would be condemned.

* 110,000 pounds per annum. It has never been accepted, and the
accumulations lapse to the Government every five years, and
cannot afterwards be recovered.—Trans.

At last, as he was coming out on to the Piazza of St. Peter's, he heard Narcisse asking Monsignor Nani: "Indeed! Do you really think that to-day's gifts exceeded that figure?"

"Yes, more than three millions,* I'm convinced of it," the prelate replied.

* All the amounts given on this and the following pages are
calculated in francs. The reader will bear in mind that a
million francs is equivalent to 40,000 pounds.—Trans.

For a moment the three men halted under the right-hand colonnade and gazed at the vast, sunlit piazza where the pilgrims were spreading out like little black specks hurrying hither and thither—an ant-hill, as it were, in revolution.

Three millions! The words had rung in Pierre's ears. And, raising his head, he gazed at the Vatican, all golden in the sunlight against the expanse of blue sky, as if he wished to penetrate its walls and follow the steps of Leo XIII returning to his apartments. He pictured him laden with those millions, with his weak, slender arms pressed to his breast, carrying the silver, the gold, the bank notes, and even the jewels which the women had flung him. And almost unconsciously the young priest spoke aloud: "What will he do with those millions? Where is he taking them?"

Narcisse and even Nani could not help being amused by this strangely expressed curiosity. It was the young attache who replied. "Why, his Holiness is taking them to his room; or, at least, is having them carried there before him. Didn't you see two persons of his suite picking up everything and filling their pockets? And now his Holiness has shut himself up quite alone; and if you could see him you would find him counting and recounting his treasure with cheerful care, ranging the rolls of gold in good order, slipping the bank notes into envelopes in equal quantities, and then putting everything away in hiding-places which are only known to himself."

While his companion was speaking Pierre again raised his eyes to the windows of the Pope's apartments, as if to follow the scene. Moreover, Narcisse gave further explanations, asserting that the money was put away in a certain article of furniture, standing against the right-hand wall in the Holy Father's bedroom. Some people, he added, also spoke of a writing table or secretaire with deep drawers; and others declared that the money slumbered in some big padlocked trunks stored away in the depths of the alcove, which was very roomy. Of course, on the left side of the passage leading to the Archives there was a large room occupied by a general cashier and a monumental safe; but the funds kept there were simply those of the Patrimony of St. Peter, the administrative receipts of Rome; whereas the Peter's Pence money, the voluntary donations of Christendom, remained in the hands of Leo XIII: he alone knew the exact amount of that fund, and lived alone with its millions, which he disposed of like an absolute master, rendering account to none. And such was his prudence that he never left his room when the servants cleaned and set it in order. At the utmost he would consent to remain on the threshold of the adjoining apartment in order to escape the dust. And whenever he meant to absent himself for a few hours, to go down into the gardens, for instance, he double-locked the doors and carried the keys away with him, never confiding them to another.

At this point Narcisse paused and, turning to Nani, inquired: "Is not that so, Monsignor? These are things known to all Rome."

The prelate, ever smiling and wagging his head without expressing either approval or disapproval, had begun to study on Pierre's face the effect of these curious stories. "No doubt, no doubt," he responded; "so many things are said! I know nothing myself, but you seem to be certain of it all, Monsieur Habert."

"Oh!" resumed the other, "I don't accuse his Holiness of sordid avarice, such as is rumoured. Some fabulous stories are current, stories of coffers full of gold in which the Holy Father is said to plunge his hands for hours at a time; treasures which he has heaped up in corners for the sole pleasure of counting them over and over again. Nevertheless, one may well admit that his Holiness is somewhat fond of money for its own sake, for the pleasure of handling it and setting it in order when he happens to be alone—and after all that is a very excusable mania in an old man who has no other pastime. But I must add that he is yet fonder of money for the social power which it brings, the decisive help which it will give to the Holy See in the future, if the latter desires to triumph."

These words evoked the lofty figure of a wise and prudent Pope, conscious of modern requirements, inclined to utilise the powers of the century in order to conquer it, and for this reason venturing on business and speculation. As it happened, the treasure bequeathed by Pius IX had nearly been lost in a financial disaster, but ever since that time Leo XIII had sought to repair the breach and make the treasure whole again, in order that he might leave it to his successor intact and even enlarged. Economical he certainly was, but he saved for the needs of the Church, which, as he knew, increased day by day; and money was absolutely necessary if Atheism was to be met and fought in the sphere of the schools, institutions, and associations of all sorts. Without money, indeed, the Church would become a vassal at the mercy of the civil powers, the Kingdom of Italy and other Catholic states; and so, although he liberally helped every enterprise which might contribute to the triumph of the Faith, Leo XIII had a contempt for all expenditure without an object, and treated himself and others with stern closeness. Personally, he had no needs. At the outset of his pontificate he had set his small private patrimony apart from the rich patrimony of St. Peter, refusing to take aught from the latter for the purpose of assisting his relatives. Never had pontiff displayed less nepotism: his three nephews and his two nieces had remained poor—in fact, in great pecuniary embarrassment. Still he listened neither to complaints nor accusations, but remained inflexible, proudly resolved to bequeath the sinews of life, the invincible weapon money, to the popes of future times, and therefore vigorously defending the millions of the Holy See against the desperate covetousness of one and all.

"But, after all, what are the receipts and expenses of the Holy See?" inquired Pierre.

In all haste Nani again made his amiable, evasive gesture. "Oh! I am altogether ignorant in such matters," he replied. "Ask Monsieur Habert, who is so well informed."

"For my part," responded the attache, "I simply know what is known to all the embassies here, the matters which are the subject of common report. With respect to the receipts there is, first of all, the treasure left by Pius IX, some twenty millions, invested in various ways and formerly yielding about a million a year in interest. But, as I said before, a disaster happened, and there must then have been a falling off in the income. Still, nowadays it is reported that nearly all deficiencies have been made good. Well, besides the regular income from the invested money, a few hundred thousand francs are derived every year from chancellery dues, patents of nobility, and all sorts of little fees paid to the Congregations. However, as the annual expenses exceed seven millions, it has been necessary to find quite six millions every year; and certainly it is the Peter's Pence Fund that has supplied, not the six millions, perhaps, but three or four of them, and with these the Holy See has speculated in the hope of doubling them and making both ends meet. It would take me too long just now to relate the whole story of these speculations, the first huge gains, then the catastrophe which almost swept everything away, and finally the stubborn perseverance which is gradually supplying all deficiencies. However, if you are anxious on the subject, I will one day tell you all about it."

Pierre had listened with deep interest. "Six millions—even four!" he exclaimed, "what does the Peter's Pence Fund bring in, then?"

"Oh! I can only repeat that nobody has ever known the exact figures. In former times the Catholic Press published lists giving the amounts of different offerings, and in this way one could frame an approximate estimate. But the practice must have been considered unadvisable, for no documents nowadays appear, and it is absolutely impossible for people to form any real idea of what the Pope receives. He alone knows the correct amount, keeps the money, and disposes of it with absolute authority. Still I believe that in good years the offerings have amounted to between four and five millions. Originally France contributed one-half of the sum; but nowadays it certainly gives much less. Then come Belgium and Austria, England and Germany. As for Spain and Italy—oh! Italy—"

Narcisse paused and smiled at Monsignor Nani, who was wagging his head with the air of a man delighted at learning some extremely curious things of which he had previously had no idea.

"Oh, you may proceed, you may proceed, my dear son," said he.

"Well, then, Italy scarcely distinguishes itself. If the Pope had to provide for his living out of the gifts of the Italian Catholics there would soon be a famine at the Vatican. Far from helping him, indeed, the Roman nobility has cost him dear; for one of the chief causes of his pecuniary losses was his folly in lending money to the princes who speculated. It is really only from France and England that rich people, noblemen and so forth, have sent royal gifts to the imprisoned and martyred Pontiff. Among others there was an English nobleman who came to Rome every year with a large offering, the outcome of a vow which he had made in the hope that Heaven would cure his unhappy idiot son. And, of course, I don't refer to the extraordinary harvest garnered during the sacerdotal and the episcopal jubilees—the forty millions which then fell at his Holiness's feet."

"And the expenses?" asked Pierre.

"Well, as I told you, they amount to about seven millions. We may reckon two of them for the pensions paid to former officials of the pontifical government who were unwilling to take service under Italy; but I must add that this source of expense is diminishing every year as people die off and their pensions become extinguished. Then, broadly speaking, we may put down one million for the Italian sees, another for the Secretariate and the Nunciatures, and another for the Vatican. In this last sum I include the expenses of the pontifical Court, the military establishment, the museums, and the repair of the palace and the Basilica. Well, we have reached five millions, and the two others may be set down for the various subsidised enterprises, the Propaganda, and particularly the schools, which Leo XIII, with great practical good sense, subsidises very handsomely, for he is well aware that the battle and the triumph be in that direction—among the children who will be men to-morrow, and who will then defend their mother the Church, provided that they have been inspired with horror for the abominable doctrines of the age."

A spell of silence ensued, and the three men slowly paced the majestic colonnade. The swarming crowd had gradually disappeared, leaving the piazza empty, so that only the obelisk and the twin fountains now arose from the burning desert of symmetrical paving; whilst on the entablature of the porticus across the square a noble line of motionless statues stood out in the bright sunlight. And Pierre, with his eyes still raised to the Pope's windows, again fancied that he could see Leo XIII amidst all the streaming gold that had been spoken of, his whole, white, pure figure, his poor, waxen, transparent form steeped amidst those millions which he hid and counted and expended for the glory of God alone. "And so," murmured the young priest, "he has no anxiety, he is not in any pecuniary embarrassment."

"Pecuniary embarrassment!" exclaimed Monsignor Nani, his patience so sorely tried by the remark that he could no longer retain his diplomatic reserve. "Oh! my dear son! Why, when Cardinal Mocenni, the treasurer, goes to his Holiness every month, his Holiness always gives him the sum he asks for; he would give it, and be able to give it, however large it might be! His Holiness has certainly had the wisdom to effect great economies; the Treasure of St. Peter is larger than ever. Pecuniary embarrassment, indeed! Why, if a misfortune should occur, and the Sovereign Pontiff were to make a direct appeal to all his children, the Catholics of the entire world, do you know that in that case a thousand millions would fall at his feet just like the gold and the jewels which you saw raining on the steps of his throne just now?" Then suddenly calming himself and recovering his pleasant smile, Nani added: "At least, that is what I sometimes hear said; for, personally, I know nothing, absolutely nothing; and it is fortunate that Monsieur Habert should have been here to give you information. Ah! Monsieur Habert, Monsieur Habert! Why, I fancied that you were always in the skies absorbed in your passion for art, and far removed from all base mundane interests! But you really understand these things like a banker or a notary. Nothing escapes you, nothing. It is wonderful."

Narcisse must have felt the sting of the prelate's delicate sarcasm. At bottom, beneath this make-believe Florentine all-angelicalness, with long curly hair and mauve eyes which grew dim with rapture at sight of a Botticelli, there was a thoroughly practical, business-like young man, who took admirable care of his fortune and was even somewhat miserly. However, he contented himself with lowering his eyelids and assuming a languorous air. "Oh!" said he, "I'm all reverie; my soul is elsewhere."

"At all events," resumed Nani, turning towards Pierre, "I am very glad that you were able to see such a beautiful spectacle. A few more such opportunities and you will understand things far better than you would from all the explanations in the world. Don't miss the grand ceremony at St. Peter's to-morrow. It will be magnificent, and will give you food for useful reflection; I'm sure of it. And now allow me to leave you, delighted at seeing you in such a fit frame of mind."

Darting a last glance at Pierre, Nani seemed to have observed with pleasure the weariness and uncertainty which were paling his face. And when the prelate had gone off, and Narcisse also had taken leave with a gentle hand-shake, the young priest felt the ire of protest rising within him. What fit frame of mind did Nani mean? Did that man hope to weary him and drive him to despair by throwing him into collision with obstacles, so that he might afterwards overcome him with perfect ease? For the second time Pierre became suddenly and briefly conscious of the stealthy efforts which were being made to invest and crush him. But, believing as he did in his own strength of resistance, pride filled him with disdain. Again he swore that he would never yield, never withdraw his book, no matter what might happen. And then, before crossing the piazza, he once more raised his eyes to the windows of the Vatican, all his impressions crystallising in the thought of that much-needed money which like a last bond still attached the Pope to earth. Its chief evil doubtless lay in the manner in which it was provided; and if indeed the only question were to devise an improved method of collection, his dream of a pope who should be all soul, the bond of love, the spiritual leader of the world, would not be seriously affected. At this thought, Pierre felt comforted and was unwilling to look on things otherwise than hopefully, moved as he was by the extraordinary scene which he had just beheld, that feeble old man shining forth like the symbol of human deliverance, obeyed and venerated by the multitudes, and alone among all men endowed with the moral omnipotence that might at last set the reign of charity and peace on earth.

For the ceremony on the following day, it was fortunate that Pierre held a private ticket which admitted him to a reserved gallery, for the scramble at the entrances to the Basilica proved terrible. The mass, which the Pope was to celebrate in person, was fixed for ten o'clock, but people began to pour into St. Peter's four hours earlier, as soon, indeed, as the gates had been thrown open. The three thousand members of the International Pilgrimage were increased tenfold by the arrival of all the tourists in Italy, who had hastened to Rome eager to witness one of those great pontifical functions which nowadays are so rare. Moreover, the devotees and partisans whom the Holy See numbered in Rome itself and in other great cities of the kingdom, helped to swell the throng, all alacrity at the prospect of a demonstration. Judging by the tickets distributed, there would be a concourse of 40,000 people. And, indeed, at nine o'clock, when Pierre crossed the piazza on his way to the Canons' Entrance in the Via Santa Marta, where the holders of pink tickets were admitted, he saw the portico of the facade still thronged with people who were but slowly gaining admittance, while several gentlemen in evening dress, members of some Catholic association, bestirred themselves to maintain order with the help of a detachment of Pontifical Guards. Nevertheless, violent quarrels broke out in the crowd, and blows were exchanged amidst the involuntary scramble. Some people were almost stifled, and two women were carried off half crushed to death.

A disagreeable surprise met Pierre on his entry into the Basilica. The huge edifice was draped; coverings of old red damask with bands of gold swathed the columns and pilasters, seventy-five feet high; even the aisles were hung with the same old and faded silk; and the shrouding of those pompous marbles, of all the superb dazzling ornamentation of the church bespoke a very singular taste, a tawdry affectation of pomposity, extremely wretched in its effect. However, he was yet more amazed on seeing that even the statue of St. Peter was clad, costumed like a living pope in sumptuous pontifical vestments, with a tiara on its metal head. He had never imagined that people could garment statues either for their glory or for the pleasure of the eyes, and the result seemed to him disastrous.

The Pope was to say mass at the papal altar of the Confession, the high altar which stands under the dome. On a platform at the entrance of the left-hand transept was the throne on which he would afterwards take his place. Then, on either side of the nave, tribunes had been erected for the choristers of the Sixtine Chapel, the Corps Diplomatique, the Knights of Malta, the Roman nobility, and other guests of various kinds. And, finally, in the centre, before the altar, there were three rows of benches covered with red rugs, the first for the cardinals and the other two for the bishops and the prelates of the pontifical court. All the rest of the congregation was to remain standing.

Ah! that huge concert-audience, those thirty, forty thousand believers from here, there, and everywhere, inflamed with curiosity, passion, or faith, bestirring themselves, jostling one another, rising on tip-toe to see the better! The clamour of a human sea arose, the crowd was as gay and familiar as if it had found itself in some heavenly theatre where it was allowable for one to chat aloud and recreate oneself with the spectacle of religious pomp! At first Pierre was thunderstruck, he who only knew of nervous, silent kneeling in the depths of dim cathedrals, who was not accustomed to that religion of light, whose brilliancy transformed a religious celebration into a morning festivity. Around him, in the same tribune as himself, were gentlemen in dress-coats and ladies gowned in black, carrying glasses as in an opera-house. There were German and English women, and numerous Americans, all more or less charming, displaying the grace of thoughtless, chirruping birds. In the tribune of the Roman nobility on the left he recognised Benedetta and Donna Serafina, and there the simplicity of the regulation attire for ladies was relieved by large lace veils rivalling one another in richness and elegance. Then on the right was the tribune of the Knights of Malta, where the Grand Master stood amidst a group of commanders: while across the nave rose the diplomatic tribune where Pierre perceived the ambassadors of all the Catholic nations, resplendent in gala uniforms covered with gold lace. However, the young priest's eyes were ever returning to the crowd, the great surging throng in which the three thousand pilgrims were lost amidst the multitude of other spectators. And yet as the Basilica was so vast that it could easily contain eighty thousand people, it did not seem to be more than half full. People came and went along the aisles and took up favourable positions without impediment. Some could be seen gesticulating, and calls rang out above the ceaseless rumble of voices. From the lofty windows of plain white glass fell broad sheets of sunlight, which set a gory glow upon the faded damask hangings, and these cast a reflection as of fire upon all the tumultuous, feverish, impatient faces. The multitude of candles, and the seven-and-eighty lamps of the Confession paled to such a degree that they seemed but glimmering night-lights in the blinding radiance; and everything proclaimed the worldly gala of the imperial Deity of Roman pomp.

All at once there came a premature shock of delight, a false alert. Cries burst forth and circulated through the crowd: "Eccolo! eccolo! Here he comes!" And then there was pushing and jostling, eddying which made the human sea whirl and surge, all craning their necks, raising themselves to their full height, darting forward in a frenzied desire to see the Holy Father and the cortege. But only a detachment of Noble Guards marched by and took up position right and left of the altar. A flattering murmur accompanied them, their fine impassive bearing with its exaggerated military stiffness, provoking the admiration of the throng. An American woman declared that they were superb-looking fellows; and a Roman lady gave an English friend some particulars about the select corps to which they belonged. Formerly, said she, young men of the aristocracy had greatly sought the honour of forming part of it, for the sake of wearing its rich uniform and caracoling in front of the ladies. But recruiting was now such a difficult matter that one had to content oneself with good-looking young men of doubtful or ruined nobility, whose only care was for the meagre "pay" which just enabled them to live.

When another quarter of an hour of chatting and scrutinising had elapsed, the papal cortege at last made its appearance, and no sooner was it seen than applause burst forth as in a theatre—furious applause it was which rose and rolled along under the vaulted ceilings, suggesting the acclamations which ring out when some popular, idolised actor makes his entry on the stage. As in a theatre, too, everything had been very skilfully contrived so as to produce all possible effect amidst the magnificent scenery of the Basilica. The cortege was formed in the wings, that is in the Cappella della Pieta, the first chapel of the right aisle, and in order to reach it, the Holy Father, coming from his apartments by the way of the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, had been stealthily carried behind the hangings of the aisle which served the purpose of a drop-scene. Awaiting him in all readiness in the Cappella della Pieta were the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, the whole pontifical prelacy, hierarchically classified and grouped. And then, as at a signal from a ballet master, the cortege made its entry, reaching the nave and ascending it in triumph from the closed Porta Santa to the altar of the Confession. On either hand were the rows of spectators whose applause at the sight of so much magnificence grew louder and louder as their delirious enthusiasm increased.

It was the cortege of the olden solemnities, the cross and sword, the Swiss Guard in full uniform, the valets in scarlet simars, the Knights of the Cape and the Sword in Renascence costumes, the Canons in rochets of lace, the superiors of the religious communities, the apostolic prothonotaries, the archbishops, and bishops, all the pontifical prelates in violet silk, the cardinals, each wearing the cappa magna and draped in purple, walking solemnly two by two with long intervals between each pair. Finally, around his Holiness were grouped the officers of the military household, the chamber prelates, Monsignor the Majordomo, Monsignor the Grand Chamberlain, and all the other high dignitaries of the Vatican, with the Roman prince assistant of the throne, the traditional, symbolical defender of the Church. And on the sedia gestatoria, screened by the flabelli with their lofty triumphal fans of feathers and carried on high by the bearers in red tunics broidered with silk, sat the Pope, clad in the sacred vestments which he had assumed in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, the amict, the alb, the stole, and the white chasuble and white mitre enriched with gold, two gifts of extraordinary sumptuousness that had come from France. And, as his Holiness drew near, all hands were raised and clapped yet more loudly amidst the waves of living sunlight which streamed from the lofty windows.

Then a new and different impression of Leo XIII came to Pierre. The Pope, as he now beheld him, was no longer the familiar, tired, inquisitive old man, leaning on the arm of a talkative prelate as he strolled through the loveliest gardens in the world. He no longer recalled the Holy Father, in red cape and papal cap, giving a paternal welcome to a pilgrimage which brought him a fortune. He was here the Sovereign Pontiff, the all-powerful Master whom Christendom adored. His slim waxen form seemed to have stiffened within his white vestments, heavy with golden broidery, as in a reliquary of precious metal; and he retained a rigid, haughty, hieratic attitude, like that of some idol, gilded, withered for centuries past by the smoke of sacrifices. Amidst the mournful stiffness of his face only his eyes lived—eyes like black sparkling diamonds gazing afar, beyond earth, into the infinite. He gave not a glance to the crowd, he lowered his eyes neither to right nor to left, but remained soaring in the heavens, ignoring all that took place at his feet.

And as that seemingly embalmed idol, deaf and blind, in spite of the brilliancy of his eyes, was carried through the frantic multitude which it appeared neither to hear nor to see, it assumed fearsome majesty, disquieting grandeur, all the rigidity of dogma, all the immobility of tradition exhumed with its fascioe which alone kept it erect. Still Pierre fancied he could detect that the Pope was ill and weary, suffering from the attack of fever which Nani had spoken of when glorifying the courage of that old man of eighty-four, whom strength of soul alone now kept alive.

The service began. Alighting from the sedia gestatoria before the altar of the Confession, his Holiness slowly celebrated a low mass, assisted by four prelates and the pro-prefect of the ceremonies. When the time came for washing his fingers, Monsignor the Majordomo and Monsignor the Grand Chamberlain, accompanied by two cardinals, poured the water on his august hands; and shortly before the elevation of the host all the prelates of the pontifical court, each holding a lighted taper, came and knelt around the altar. There was a solemn moment, the forty thousand believers there assembled shuddered as if they could feel the terrible yet delicious blast of the invisible sweeping over them when during the elevation the silver clarions sounded the famous chorus of angels which invariably makes some women swoon. Almost immediately an aerial chant descended from the cupola, from a lofty gallery where one hundred and twenty choristers were concealed, and the enraptured multitude marvelled as though the angels had indeed responded to the clarion call. The voices descended, taking their flight under the vaulted ceilings with the airy sweetness of celestial harps; then in suave harmony they died away, reascended to the heavens as with a faint flapping of wings. And, after the mass, his Holiness, still standing at the altar, in person started the Te Deum, which the singers of the Sixtine Chapel and the other choristers took up, each party chanting a verse alternately. But soon the whole congregation joined them, forty thousand voices were raised, and a hymn of joy and glory spread through the vast nave with incomparable splendour of effect. And then the scene became one of extraordinary magnificence: there was Bernini's triumphal, flowery, gilded baldacchino, surrounded by the whole pontifical court with the lighted tapers showing like starry constellations, there was the Sovereign Pontiff in the centre, radiant like a planet in his gold-broidered chasuble, there were the benches crowded with cardinals in purple and archbishops and bishops in violet silk, there were the tribunes glittering with official finery, the gold lace of the diplomatists, the variegated uniforms of foreign officers, and then there was the throng flowing and eddying on all sides, rolling billows after billows of heads from the most distant depths of the Basilica. And the hugeness of the temple increased one's amazement; and even the glorious hymn which the multitude repeated became colossal, ascended like a tempest blast amidst the great marble tombs, the superhuman statues and gigantic pillars, till it reached the vast vaulted heavens of stone, and penetrated into the firmament of the cupola where the Infinite seemed to open resplendent with the gold-work of the mosaics.

A long murmur of voices followed the Te Deum, whilst Leo XIII, after donning the tiara in lieu of the mitre, and exchanging the chasuble for the pontifical cope, went to occupy his throne on the platform at the entry of the left transept. He thence dominated the whole assembly, through which a quiver sped when after the prayers of the ritual, he once more rose erect. Beneath the symbolic, triple crown, in the golden sheathing of his cope, he seemed to have grown taller. Amidst sudden and profound silence, which only feverish heart-beats interrupted, he raised his arm with a very noble gesture and pronounced the papal benediction in a slow, loud, full voice, which seemed, as it were, the very voice of the Deity, so greatly did its power astonish one, coming from such waxen lips, from such a bloodless, lifeless frame. And the effect was prodigious: as soon as the cortege reformed to return whence it had come, applause again burst forth, a frenzy of enthusiasm which the clapping of hands could no longer content. Acclamations resounded and gradually gained upon the whole multitude. They began among a group of ardent partisans stationed near the statue of St. Peter: "Evviva il Papa-Re! evviva il Papa-Re! Long live the Pope-King!" as the cortege went by the shout rushed along like leaping fire, inflaming heart after heart, and at last springing from every mouth in a thunderous protest against the theft of the states of the Church. All the faith, all the love of those believers, overexcited by the regal spectacle they had just beheld, returned once more to the dream, to the rageful desire that the Pope should be both King and Pontiff, master of men's bodies as he was of their souls—in one word, the absolute sovereign of the earth. Therein lay the only truth, the only happiness, the only salvation! Let all be given to him, both mankind and the world! "Evviva il Papa-Re! evviva il Papa-Re! Long live the Pope-King!"

Ah! that cry, that cry of war which had caused so many errors and so much bloodshed, that cry of self-abandonment and blindness which, realised, would have brought back the old ages of suffering, it shocked Pierre, and impelled him in all haste to quit the tribune where he was in order that he might escape the contagion of idolatry. And while the cortege still went its way and the deafening clamour of the crowd continued, he for a moment followed the left aisle amidst the general scramble. This, however, made him despair of reaching the street, and anxious to escape the crush of the general departure, it occurred to him to profit by a door which he saw open and which led him into a vestibule, whence ascended the steps conducting to the dome. A sacristan standing in the doorway, both bewildered and delighted at the demonstration, looked at him for a moment, hesitating whether he should stop him or not. However, the sight of the young priest's cassock combined with his own emotion rendered the man tolerant. Pierre was allowed to pass, and at once began to climb the staircase as rapidly as he could, in order that he might flee farther and farther away, ascend higher and yet higher into peace and silence.

And the silence suddenly became profound, the walls stifled the cry of the multitude. The staircase was easy and light, with broad paved steps turning within a sort of tower. When Pierre came out upon the roofs of nave and aisles, he was delighted to find himself in the bright sunlight and the pure keen air which blew there as in the open country. And it was with astonishment that he gazed upon the huge expanse of lead, zinc, and stone-work, a perfect aerial city living a life of its own under the blue sky. He saw cupolas, spires, terraces, even houses and gardens, houses bright with flowers, the residences of the workmen who live atop of the Basilica, which is ever and ever requiring repair. A little population here bestirs itself, labours, loves, eats, and sleeps. However, Pierre desired to approach the balustrade so as to get a near view of the colossal statues of the Saviour and the Apostles which surmount the facade on the side of the piazza. These giants, some nineteen feet in height, are constantly being mended; their arms, legs, and heads, into which the atmosphere is ever eating, nowadays only hold together by the help of cement, bars, and hooks. And having examined them, Pierre was leaning forward to glance at the Vatican's jumble of ruddy roofs, when it seemed to him that the shout from which he had fled was rising from the piazza, and thereupon, in all haste, he resumed his ascent within the pillar conducting to the dome. There was first a staircase, and then came some narrow, oblique passages, inclines intersected by a few steps, between the inner and outer walls of the cupola. Yielding to curiosity, Pierre pushed a door open, and suddenly found himself inside the Basilica again, at nearly 200 feet from the ground. A narrow gallery there ran round the dome just above the frieze, on which, in letters five feet high, appeared the famous inscription: Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram oedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi dabo claves regni coelorum.* And then, as Pierre leant over to gaze into the fearful cavity beneath him and the wide openings of nave, and aisles, and transepts, the cry, the delirious cry of the multitude, yet clamorously swarming below, struck him full in the face. He fled once more; but, higher up, yet a second time he pushed another door open and found another gallery, one perched above the windows, just where the splendid mosaics begin, and whence the crowd seemed to him lost in the depths of a dizzy abyss, altar and baldacchino alike looking no larger than toys. And yet the cry of idolatry and warfare arose again, and smote him like the buffet of a tempest which gathers increase of strength the farther it rushes. So to escape it he had to climb higher still, even to the outer gallery which encircles the lantern, hovering in the very heavens.

* Thou art Peter (Petrus) and on that rock (Petram) will I build
my church, and to thee will I give the keys of the Kingdom of
Heaven.

How delightful was the relief which that bath of air and sunlight at first brought him! Above him now there only remained the ball of gilt copper into which emperors and queens have ascended, as is testified by the pompous inscriptions in the passages; a hollow ball it is, where the voice crashes like thunder, where all the sounds of space reverberate. As he emerged on the side of the apse, his eyes at first plunged into the papal gardens, whose clumps of trees seemed mere bushes almost level with the soil; and he could retrace his recent stroll among them, the broad parterre looking like a faded Smyrna rug, the large wood showing the deep glaucous greenery of a stagnant pool. Then there were the kitchen garden and the vineyard easily identified and tended with care. The fountains, the observatory, the casino, where the Pope spent the hot days of summer, showed merely like little white spots in those undulating grounds, walled in like any other estate, but with the fearsome rampart of the fourth Leo, which yet retained its fortress-like aspect. However, Pierre took his way round the narrow gallery and abruptly found himself in front of Rome, a sudden and immense expanse, with the distant sea on the west, the uninterrupted mountain chains on the east and the south, the Roman Campagna stretching to the horizon like a bare and greenish desert, while the city, the Eternal City, was spread out at his feet. Never before had space impressed him so majestically. Rome was there, as a bird might see it, within the glance, as distinct as some geographical plan executed in relief. To think of it, such a past, such a history, so much grandeur, and Rome so dwarfed and contracted by distance! Houses as lilliputian and as pretty as toys; and the whole a mere mouldy speck upon the earth's face! What impassioned Pierre was that he could at a glance understand the divisions of Rome: the antique city yonder with the Capitol, the Forum, and the Palatine; the papal city in that Borgo which he overlooked, with St. Peter's and the Vatican gazing across the city of the middle ages—which was huddled together in the right angle described by the yellow Tiber—towards the modern city, the Quirinal of the Italian monarchy. And particularly did he remark the chalky girdle with which the new districts encompassed the ancient, central, sun-tanned quarters, thus symbolising an effort at rejuvenescence, the old heart but slowly mended, whereas the outlying limbs were renewed as if by miracle.

In that ardent noontide glow, however, Pierre no longer beheld the pure ethereal Rome which had met his eyes on the morning of his arrival in the delightfully soft radiance of the rising sun. That smiling, unobtrusive city, half veiled by golden mist, immersed as it were in some dream of childhood, now appeared to him flooded with a crude light, motionless, hard of outline and silent like death. The distance was as if devoured by too keen a flame, steeped in a luminous dust in which it crumbled. And against that blurred background the whole city showed with violent distinctness in great patches of light and shade, their tracery harshly conspicuous. One might have fancied oneself above some very ancient, abandoned stone quarry, which a few clumps of trees spotted with dark green. Of the ancient city one could see the sunburnt tower of the Capitol, the black cypresses of the Palatine, and the ruins of the palace of Septimius Severus, suggesting the white osseous carcase of some fossil monster, left there by a flood. In front, was enthroned the modern city with the long, renovated buildings of the Quirinal, whose yellow walls stood forth with wondrous crudity amidst the vigorous crests of the garden trees. And to right and left on the Viminal, beyond the palace, the new districts appeared like a city of chalk and plaster mottled by innumerable windows as with a thousand touches of black ink. Then here and there were the Pincio showing like a stagnant mere, the Villa Medici uprearing its campanili, the castle of Sant' Angelo brown like rust, the spire of Santa Maria Maggiore aglow like a burning taper, the three churches of the Aventine drowsy amidst verdure, the Palazzo Farnese with its summer-baked tiles showing like old gold, the domes of the Gesu, of Sant' Andrea della Valle, of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, and yet other domes and other domes, all in fusion, incandescent in the brazier of the heavens. And Pierre again felt a heart-pang in presence of that harsh, stern Rome, so different from the Rome of his dream, the Rome of rejuvenescence and hope, which he had fancied he had found on his first morning, but which had now faded away to give place to the immutable city of pride and domination, stubborn under the sun even unto death.

And there on high, all alone with his thoughts, Pierre suddenly understood. It was as if a dart of flaming light fell on him in that free, unbounded expanse where he hovered. Had it come from the ceremony which he had just beheld, from the frantic cry of servitude still ringing in his ears? Had it come from the spectacle of that city beneath him, that city which suggested an embalmed queen still reigning amidst the dust of her tomb? He knew not; but doubtless both had acted as factors, and at all events the light which fell upon his mind was complete: he felt that Catholicism could not exist without the temporal power, that it must fatally disappear whenever it should no longer be king over this earth. A first reason of this lay in heredity, in the forces of history, the long line of the heirs of the Caesars, the popes, the great pontiffs, in whose veins the blood of Augustus, demanding the empire of the world, had never ceased to flow. Though they might reside in the Vatican they had come from the imperial abodes on the Palatine, from the palace of Septimius Severus, and throughout the centuries their policy had ever pursued the dream of Roman mastery, of all the nations vanquished, submissive, and obedient to Rome. If its sovereignty were not universal, extending alike over bodies and over souls, Catholicism would lose its raison d'etre; for the Church cannot recognise any empire or kingdom otherwise than politically—the emperors and the kings being purely and simply so many temporary delegates placed in charge of the nations pending the time when they shall be called upon to relinquish their trust. All the nations, all humanity, and the whole world belong to the Church to whom they have been given by God. And if real and effective possession is not hers to-day, this is only because she yields to force, compelled to face accomplished facts, but with the formal reserve that she is in presence of guilty usurpation, that her possessions are unjustly withheld from her, and that she awaits the realisation of the promises of the Christ, who, when the time shall be accomplished, will for ever restore to her both the earth and mankind. Such is the real future city which time is to bring: Catholic Rome, sovereign of the world once more. And Rome the city forms a substantial part of the dream, Rome whose eternity has been predicted, Rome whose soil has imparted to Catholicism the inextinguishable thirst of absolute power. And thus the destiny of the papacy is linked to that of Rome, to such a point indeed that a pope elsewhere than at Rome would no longer be a Catholic pope. The thought of all this frightened Pierre; a great shudder passed through him as he leant on the light iron balustrade, gazing down into the abyss where the stern mournful city was even now crumbling away under the fierce sun.

There was, however, evidence of the facts which had dawned on him. If Pius IX and Leo XIII had resolved to imprison themselves in the Vatican, it was because necessity bound them to Rome. A pope is not free to leave the city, to be the head of the Church elsewhere; and in the same way a pope, however well he may understand the modern world, has not the right to relinquish the temporal power. This is an inalienable inheritance which he must defend, and it is moreover a question of life, peremptory, above discussion. And thus Leo XIII has retained the title of Master of the temporal dominions of the Church, and this he has done the more readily since as a cardinal—like all the members of the Sacred College when elected—he swore that he would maintain those dominions intact. Italy may hold Rome as her capital for another century or more, but the coming popes will never cease to protest and claim their kingdom. If ever an understanding should be arrived at, it must be based on the gift of a strip of territory. Formerly, when rumours of reconciliation were current, was it not said that the papacy exacted, as a formal condition, the possession of at least the Leonine City with the neutralisation of a road leading to the sea? Nothing is not enough, one cannot start from nothing to attain to everything, whereas that Civitas Leonina, that bit of a city, would already be a little royal ground, and it would then only be necessary to conquer the rest, first Rome, next Italy, then the neighbouring states, and at last the whole world. Never has the Church despaired, even when, beaten and despoiled, she seemed to be at the last gasp. Never will she abdicate, never will she renounce the promises of the Christ, for she believes in a boundless future and declares herself to be both indestructible and eternal. Grant her but a pebble on which to rest her head, and she will hope to possess, first the field in which that pebble lies, and then the empire in which the field is situated. If one pope cannot achieve the recovery of the inheritance, another pope, ten, twenty other popes will continue the work. The centuries do not count. And this explains why an old man of eighty-four has undertaken colossal enterprises whose achievement requires several lives, certain as he is that his successors will take his place, and that the work will ever and ever be carried forward and completed.

As these thoughts coursed through his mind, Pierre, overlooking that ancient city of glory and domination, so stubbornly clinging to its purple, realised that he was an imbecile with his dream of a purely spiritual pope. The notion seemed to him so different from the reality, so out of place, that he experienced a sort of shame-fraught despair. The new pope, consonant to the teachings of the Gospel, such as a purely spiritual pope reigning over souls alone, would be, was virtually beyond the ken of a Roman prelate. At thought of that papal court congealed in ritual, pride, and authority, Pierre suddenly understood what horror and repugnance such a pastor would inspire. How great must be the astonishment and contempt of the papal prelates for that singular notion of the northern mind, a pope without dominions or subjects, military household or royal honours, a pope who would be, as it were, a spirit, exercising purely moral authority, dwelling in the depths of God's temple, and governing the world solely with gestures of benediction and deeds of kindliness and love! All that was but a misty Gothic invention for this Latin clergy, these priests of light and magnificence, who were certainly pious and even superstitious, but who left the Deity well sheltered within the tabernacle in order to govern in His name, according to what they considered the interests of Heaven. Thence it arose that they employed craft and artifice like mere politicians, and lived by dint of expedients amidst the great battle of human appetites, marching with the prudent, stealthy steps of diplomatists towards the final terrestrial victory of the Christ, who, in the person of the Pope, was one day to reign over all the nations. And how stupefied must a French prelate have been—a prelate like Monseigneur Bergerot, that apostle of renunciation and charity—when he lighted amidst that world of the Vatican! How difficult must it have been for him to understand and focus things, and afterwards how great his grief at finding himself unable to come to any agreement with those men without country, without fatherland, those "internationals," who were ever poring over the maps of both hemispheres, ever absorbed in schemes which were to bring them empire. Days and days were necessary, one needed to live in Rome, and he, Pierre himself, had only seen things clearly after a month's sojourn, whilst labouring under the violent shock of the royal pomp of St. Peter's, and standing face to face with the ancient city as it slumbered heavily in the sunlight and dreamt its dream of eternity.

But on lowering his eyes to the piazza in front of the Basilica he perceived the multitude, the 40,000 believers streaming over the pavement like insects. And then he thought that he could hear the cry again rising: "Evviva il Papa-Re! evviva il Papa-Re! Long live the Pope-King!" Whilst ascending those endless staircases a moment previously it had seemed to him as if the colossus of stone were quivering with the frantic shout raised beneath its ceilings. And now that he had climbed even into cloudland that shout apparently was traversing space. If the colossal pile beneath him still vibrated with it, was it not as with a last rise of sap within its ancient walls, a reinvigoration of that Catholic blood which formerly had demanded that the pile should be a stupendous one, the veritable king of temples, and which now was striving to reanimate it with the powerful breath of life, and this at the very hour when death was beginning to fall upon its over-vast, deserted nave and aisles? The crowd was still streaming forth, filling the piazza, and Pierre's heart was wrung by frightful anguish, for that throng with its shout had just swept his last hope away. On the previous afternoon, after the reception of the pilgrimage, he had yet been able to deceive himself by overlooking the necessity for money which bound the Pope to earth in order that he might see nought but the feeble old man, all spirituality, resplendent like the symbol of moral authority. But his faith in such a pastor of the Gospel, free from all considerations of earthly wealth, and king of none other than a heavenly kingdom, had fled. Not only did the Peter's Pence impose hard servitude upon Leo XIII but he was also the prisoner of papal tradition—the eternal King of Rome, riveted to the soil of Rome, unable either to quit the city or to renounce the temporal power. The fatal end would be collapse on the spot, the dome of St. Peter's falling even as the temple of Olympian Jupiter had fallen, Catholicism strewing the grass with its ruins whilst elsewhere schism burst forth: a new faith for the new nations. Of this Pierre had a grandiose and tragical vision: he beheld his dream destroyed, his book swept away amidst that cry which spread around him as if flying to the four corners of the Catholic world "Evviva il Papa-Re! evviva il Papa-Re! Long live the Pope-King!" But even in that hour of the papacy's passing triumph he already felt that the giant of gold and marble on which he stood was oscillating, even as totter all old and rotten societies.

At last he took his way down again, and a fresh shock of emotion came to him as he reached the roofs, that sunlit expanse of lead and zinc, large enough for the site of a town. Monsignor Nani was there, in company with the two French ladies, the mother and the daughter, both looking very happy and highly amused. No doubt the prelate had good-naturedly offered to conduct them to the dome. However, as soon as he recognised the young priest he went towards him: "Well, my dear son," he inquired, "are you pleased? Have you been impressed, edified?" As he spoke, his searching eyes dived into Pierre's soul, as if to ascertain the present result of his experiments. Then, satisfied with what he detected, he began to laugh softly: "Yes, yes, I see—come, you are a sensible fellow after all. I begin to think that the unfortunate affair which brought you here will have a happy ending."

VIII.

WHEN Pierre remained in the morning at the Boccanera mansion he often spent some hours in the little neglected garden which had formerly ended with a sort of colonnaded loggia, whence two flights of steps descended to the Tiber. This garden was a delightful, solitary nook, perfumed by the ripe fruit of the centenarian orange-trees, whose symmetrical lines were the only indication of the former pathways, now hidden beneath rank weeds. And Pierre also found there the acrid scent of the large box-shrubs growing in the old central fountain basin, which had been filled up with loose earth and rubbish.

On those luminous October mornings, full of such tender and penetrating charm, the spot was one where all the joy of living might well be savoured, but Pierre brought thither his northern dreaminess, his concern for suffering, his steadfast feeling of compassion, which rendered yet sweeter the caress of the sunlight pervading that atmosphere of love. He seated himself against the right-hand wall on a fragment of a fallen column over which a huge laurel cast a deep-black shadow, fresh and aromatic. In the antique greenish sarcophagus beside him, on which fauns offered violence to nymphs, the streamlet of water trickling from the mask incrusted in the wall, set the unchanging music of its crystal note, whilst he read the newspapers and the letters which he received, all the communications of good Abbe Rose, who kept him informed of his mission among the wretched ones of gloomy Paris, now already steeped in fog and mud.

One morning however, Pierre unexpectedly found Benedetta seated on the fallen column which he usually made his chair. She raised a light cry of surprise on seeing him, and for a moment remained embarrassed, for she had with her his book "New Rome," which she had read once already, but had then imperfectly understood. And overcoming her embarrassment she now hastened to detain him, making him sit down beside her, and frankly owning that she had come to the garden in order to be alone and apply herself to an attentive study of the book, in the same way as some ignorant school-girl. Then they began to chat like a pair of friends, and the young priest spent a delightful hour. Although Benedetta did not speak of herself, he realised that it was her grief alone which brought her nearer to him, as if indeed her own sufferings enlarged her heart and made her think of all who suffered in the world. Patrician as she was, regarding social hierarchy as a divine law, she had never previously thought of such things, and some pages of Pierre's book greatly astonished her. What! one ought to take interest in the lowly, realise that they had the same souls and the same griefs as oneself, and seek in brotherly or sisterly fashion to make them happy? She certainly sought to acquire such an interest, but with no great success, for she secretly feared that it might lead her into sin, as it could not be right to alter aught of the social system which had been established by God and consecrated by the Church. Charitable she undoubtedly was, wont to bestow small sums in alms, but she did not give her heart, she felt no true sympathy for the humble, belonging as she did to such a different race, which looked to a throne in heaven high above the seats of all the plebeian elect.

She and Pierre, however, found themselves on other mornings side by side in the shade of the laurels near the trickling, singing water; and he, lacking occupation, weary of waiting for a solution which seemed to recede day by day, fervently strove to animate this young and beautiful woman with some of his own fraternal feelings. He was impassioned by the idea that he was catechising Italy herself, the queen of beauty, who was still slumbering in ignorance, but who would recover all her past glory if she were to awake to the new times with soul enlarged, swelling with pity for men and things. Reading good Abbe Rose's letters to Benedetta, he made her shudder at the frightful wail of wretchedness which ascends from all great cities. With such deep tenderness in her eyes, with the happiness of love reciprocated emanating from her whole being, why should she not recognise, even as he did, that the law of love was the sole means of saving suffering humanity, which, through hatred, incurred the danger of death? And to please him she did try to believe in democracy, in the fraternal remodelling of society, but among other nations only—not at Rome, for an involuntary, gentle laugh came to her lips whenever his words evoked the idea of the poor still remaining in the Trastevere district fraternising with those who yet dwelt in the old princely palaces. No, no, things had been as they were so long; they could not, must not, be altered! And so, after all, Pierre's pupil made little progress: she was, in reality, simply touched by the wealth of ardent love which the young priest had chastely transferred from one alone to the whole of human kind. And between him and her, as those sunlit October mornings went by, a tie of exquisite sweetness was formed; they came to love one another with deep, pure, fraternal affection, amidst the great glowing passion which consumed them both.

Then, one day, Benedetta, her elbow resting on the sarcophagus, spoke of Dario, whose name she had hitherto refrained from mentioning. Ah! poor amico, how circumspect and repentant he had shown himself since that fit of brutal insanity! At first, to conceal his embarrassment, he had gone to spend three days at Naples, and it was said that La Tonietta, the sentimental demi-mondaine, had hastened to join him there, wildly in love with him. Since his return to the mansion he had avoided all private meetings with his cousin, and scarcely saw her except at the Monday receptions, when he wore a submissive air, and with his eyes silently entreated forgiveness.

"Yesterday, however," continued Benedetta, "I met him on the staircase and gave him my hand. He understood that I was no longer angry with him and was very happy. What else could I have done? One must not be severe for ever. Besides, I do not want things to go too far between him and that woman. I want him to remember that I still love him, and am still waiting for him. Oh! he is mine, mine alone. But alas! I cannot say the word: our affairs are in such sorry plight."

She paused, and two big tears welled into her eyes. The divorce proceedings to which she alluded had now come to a standstill, fresh obstacles ever arising to stay their course.

Pierre was much moved by her tears, for she seldom wept. She herself sometimes confessed, with her calm smile, that she did not know how to weep. But now her heart was melting, and for a moment she remained overcome, leaning on the mossy, crumbling sarcophagus, whilst the clear water falling from the gaping mouth of the tragic mask still sounded its flutelike note. And a sudden thought of death came to the priest as he saw her, so young and so radiant with beauty, half fainting beside that marble resting-place where fauns were rushing upon nymphs in a frantic bacchanal which proclaimed the omnipotence of love—that omnipotence which the ancients were fond of symbolising on their tombs as a token of life's eternity. And meantime a faint, warm breeze passed through the sunlit, silent garden, wafting hither and thither the penetrating scent of box and orange.

"One has so much strength when one loves," Pierre at last murmured.

"Yes, yes, you are right," she replied, already smiling again. "I am childish. But it is the fault of your book. It is only when I suffer that I properly understand it. But all the same I am making progress, am I not? Since you desire it, let all the poor, all those who suffer, as I do, be my brothers and sisters."

Then for a while they resumed their chat.

On these occasions Benedetta was usually the first to return to the house, and Pierre would linger alone under the laurels, vaguely dreaming of sweet, sad things. Often did he think how hard life proved for poor creatures whose only thirst was for happiness!

One Monday evening, at a quarter-past ten, only the young folks remained in Donna Serafina's reception-room. Monsignor Nani had merely put in an appearance that night, and Cardinal Sarno had just gone off.

Even Donna Serafina, in her usual seat by the fireplace, seemed to have withdrawn from the others, absorbed as she was in contemplation of the chair which the absent Morano still stubbornly left unoccupied. Chatting and laughing in front of the sofa on which sat Benedetta and Celia were Dario, Pierre, and Narcisse Habert, the last of whom had begun to twit the young Prince, having met him, so he asserted, a few days previously, in the company of a very pretty girl.

"Oh! don't deny it, my dear fellow," continued Narcisse, "for she was really superb. She was walking beside you, and you turned into a lane together—the Borgo Angelico, I think."

Dario listened smiling, quite at his ease and incapable of denying his passionate predilection for beauty. "No doubt, no doubt; it was I, I don't deny it," he responded. "Only the inferences you draw are not correct." And turning towards Benedetta, who, without a thought of jealous anxiety, wore as gay a look as himself, as though delighted that he should have enjoyed that passing pleasure of the eyes, he went on: "It was the girl, you know, whom I found in tears six weeks ago. Yes, that bead-worker who was sobbing because the workshop was shut up, and who rushed along, all blushing, to conduct me to her parents when I offered her a bit of silver. Pierina her name is, as you, perhaps, remember."

"Oh! yes, Pierina."

"Well, since then I've met her in the street on four or five occasions. And, to tell the truth, she is so very beautiful that I've stopped and spoken to her. The other day, for instance, I walked with her as far as a manufacturer's. But she hasn't yet found any work, and she began to cry, and so, to console her a little, I kissed her. She was quite taken aback at it, but she seemed very well pleased."

At this all the others began to laugh. But suddenly Celia desisted and said very gravely, "You know, Dario, she loves you; you must not be hard on her."

Dario, no doubt, was of Celia's opinion, for he again looked at Benedetta, but with a gay toss of the head, as if to say that, although the girl might love him, he did not love her. A bead-worker indeed, a girl of the lowest classes, pooh! She might be a Venus, but she could be nothing to him. And he himself made merry over his romantic adventure, which Narcisse sought to arrange in a kind of antique sonnet: A beautiful bead-worker falling madly in love with a young prince, as fair as sunlight, who, touched by her misfortune, hands her a silver crown; then the beautiful bead-worker, quite overcome at finding him as charitable as handsome, dreaming of him incessantly, and following him everywhere, chained to his steps by a link of flame; and finally the beautiful bead-worker, who has refused the silver crown, so entreating the handsome prince with her soft, submissive eyes, that he at last deigns to grant her the alms of his heart. This pastime greatly amused Benedetta; but Celia, with her angelic face and the air of a little girl who ought to have been ignorant of everything, remained very grave and repeated sadly, "Dario, Dario, she loves you; you must not make her suffer."

Then the Contessina, in her turn, was moved to pity. "And those poor folks are not happy!" said she.

"Oh!" exclaimed the Prince, "it's misery beyond belief. On the day she took me to the Quartiere dei Prati* I was quite overcome; it was awful, astonishingly awful!"

* The district of the castle meadows—see ante note.—Trans.

"But I remember that we promised to go to see the poor people," resumed Benedetta, "and we have done wrong in delaying our visit so long. For your studies, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, you greatly desired to accompany us and see the poor of Rome—was that not so?"

As she spoke she raised her eyes to Pierre, who for a moment had been silent. He was much moved by her charitable thought, for he realised, by the faint quiver of her voice, that she desired to appear a docile pupil, progressing in affection for the lowly and the wretched. Moreover, his passion for his apostolate had at once returned to him. "Oh!" said he, "I shall not quit Rome without having seen those who suffer, those who lack work and bread. Therein lies the malady which affects every nation; salvation can only be attained by the healing of misery. When the roots of the tree cannot find sustenance the tree dies."

"Well," resumed the Contessina, "we will fix an appointment at once; you shall come with us to the Quartiere dei Prati—Dario will take us there."

At this the Prince, who had listened to the priest with an air of stupefaction, unable to understand the simile of the tree and its roots, began to protest distressfully, "No, no, cousin, take Monsieur l'Abbe for a stroll there if it amuses you. But I've been, and don't want to go back. Why, when I got home the last time I was so upset that I almost took to my bed. No, no; such abominations are too awful—it isn't possible."

At this moment a voice, bitter with displeasure, arose from the chimney corner. Donna Serafina was emerging from her long silence. "Dario is quite right! Send your alms, my dear, and I will gladly add mine. There are other places where you might take Monsieur l'Abbe, and which it would be far more useful for him to see. With that idea of yours you would send him away with a nice recollection of our city."

Roman pride rang out amidst the old lady's bad temper. Why, indeed, show one's sores to foreigners, whose visit is possibly prompted by hostile curiosity? One always ought to look beautiful; Rome should not be shown otherwise than in the garb of glory.

Narcisse, however, had taken possession of Pierre. "It's true, my dear Abbe," said he; "I forgot to recommend that stroll to you. You really must visit the new district built over the castle meadows. It's typical, and sums up all the others. And you won't lose your time there, I'll warrant you, for nowhere can you learn more about the Rome of the present day. It's extraordinary, extraordinary!" Then, addressing Benedetta, he added, "Is it decided? Shall we say to-morrow morning? You'll find the Abbe and me over there, for I want to explain matters to him beforehand, in order that he may understand them. What do you say to ten o'clock?"

Before answering him the Contessina turned towards her aunt and respectfully opposed her views. "But Monsieur l'Abbe, aunt, has met enough beggars in our streets already, so he may well see everything. Besides, judging by his book, he won't see worse things than he has seen in Paris. As he says in one passage, hunger is the same all the world over." Then, with her sensible air, she gently laid siege to Dario. "You know, Dario," said she, "you would please me very much by taking me there. We can go in the carriage and join these gentlemen. It will be a very pleasant outing for us. It is such a long time since we went out together."

It was certainly that idea of going out with Dario, of having a pretext for a complete reconciliation with him, that enchanted her; he himself realised it, and, unable to escape, he tried to treat the matter as a joke. "Ah! cousin," he said, "it will be your fault; I shall have the nightmare for a week. An excursion like that spoils all the enjoyment of life for days and days."

The mere thought made him quiver with revolt. However, laughter again rang out around him, and, in spite of Donna Serafina's mute disapproval, the appointment was finally fixed for the following morning at ten o'clock. Celia as she went off expressed deep regret that she could not form one of the party; but, with the closed candour of a budding lily, she really took interest in Pierina alone. As she reached the ante-room she whispered in her friend's ear: "Take a good look at that beauty, my dear, so as to tell me whether she is so very beautiful—beautiful beyond compare."

When Pierre met Narcisse near the Castle of Sant' Angelo on the morrow, at nine o'clock, he was surprised to find him again languid and enraptured, plunged anew in artistic enthusiasm. At first not a word was said of the excursion. Narcisse related that he had risen at sunrise in order that he might spend an hour before Bernini's "Santa Teresa." It seemed that when he did not see that statue for a week he suffered as acutely as if he were parted from some cherished mistress. And his adoration varied with the time of day, according to the light in which he beheld the figure: in the morning, when the pale glow of dawn steeped it in whiteness, he worshipped it with quite a mystical transport of the soul, whilst in the afternoon, when the glow of the declining sun's oblique rays seemed to permeate the marble, his passion became as fiery red as the blood of martyrs. "Ah! my friend," said he with a weary air whilst his dreamy eyes faded to mauve, "you have no idea how delightful and perturbing her awakening was this morning—how languorously she opened her eyes, like a pure, candid virgin, emerging from the embrace of the Divinity. One could die of rapture at the sight!"

Then, growing calm again when he had taken a few steps, he resumed in the voice of a practical man who does not lose his balance in the affairs of life: "We'll walk slowly towards the castle-fields district—the buildings yonder; and on our way I'll tell you what I know of the things we shall see there. It was the maddest affair imaginable, one of those delirious frenzies of speculation which have a splendour of their own, just like the superb, monstrous masterpiece of a man of genius whose mind is unhinged. I was told of it all by some relatives of mine, who took part in the gambling, and, in point of fact, made a good deal of money by it."

Thereupon, with the clearness and precision of a financier, employing technical terms with perfect ease, he recounted the extraordinary adventure. That all Italy, on the morrow of the occupation of Rome, should have been delirious with enthusiasm at the thought of at last possessing the ancient and glorious city, the eternal capital to which the empire of the world had been promised, was but natural. It was, so to say, a legitimate explosion of the delight and the hopes of a young nation anxious to show its power. The question was to make Rome a modern capital worthy of a great kingdom, and before aught else there were sanitary requirements to be dealt with: the city needed to be cleansed of all the filth which disgraced it. One cannot nowadays imagine in what abominable putrescence the city of the popes, the Roma sporca which artists regret, was then steeped: the vast majority of the houses lacked even the most primitive arrangements, the public thoroughfares were used for all purposes, noble ruins served as store-places for sewage, the princely palaces were surrounded by filth, and the streets were perfect manure beds which fostered frequent epidemics. Thus vast municipal works were absolutely necessary, the question was one of health and life itself. And in much the same way it was only right to think of building houses for the newcomers, who would assuredly flock into the city. There had been a precedent at Berlin, whose population, after the establishment of the German empire, had suddenly increased by some hundreds of thousands. In the same way the population of Rome would certainly be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, for as the new centre of national life the city would necessarily attract all the vis viva of the provinces. And at this thought pride stepped in: the fallen government of the Vatican must be shown what Italy was capable of achieving, what splendour she would bestow on the new and third Rome, which, by the magnificence of its thoroughfares and the multitude of its people, would far excel either the imperial or the papal city.

True, during the early years some prudence was observed; wisely enough, houses were only built in proportion as they were required. The population had doubled at one bound, rising from two to four hundred thousand souls, thanks to the arrival of the little world of employees and officials of the public services—all those who live on the State or hope to live on it, without mentioning the idlers and enjoyers of life whom a Court always carries in its train. However, this influx of newcomers was a first cause of intoxication, for every one imagined that the increase would continue, and, in fact, become more and more rapid. And so the city of the day before no longer seemed large enough; it was necessary to make immediate preparations for the morrow's need by enlarging Rome on all sides. Folks talked, too, of the Paris of the second empire, which had been so extended and transformed into a city of light and health. But unfortunately on the banks of the Tiber there was neither any preconcerted general plan nor any clear-seeing man, master of the situation, supported by powerful financial organisations. And the work, begun by pride, prompted by the ambition of surpassing the Rome of the Caesars and the Popes, the determination to make the eternal, predestined city the queen and centre of the world once more, was completed by speculation, one of those extraordinary gambling frenzies, those tempests which arise, rage, destroy, and carry everything away without premonitory warning or possibility of arresting their course. All at once it was rumoured that land bought at five francs the metre had been sold again for a hundred francs the metre; and thereupon the fever arose—the fever of a nation which is passionately fond of gambling. A flight of speculators descending from North Italy swooped down upon Rome, the noblest and easiest of preys. Those needy, famished mountaineers found spoils for every appetite in that voluptuous South where life is so benign, and the very delights of the climate helped to corrupt and hasten moral gangrene. At first, too; it was merely necessary to stoop; money was to be found by the shovelful among the rubbish of the first districts which were opened up. People who were clever enough to scent the course which the new thoroughfares would take and purchase buildings threatened with demolition increased their capital tenfold in a couple of years. And after that the contagion spread, infecting all classes—the princes, burgesses, petty proprietors, even the shop-keepers, bakers, grocers, and boot-makers; the delirium rising to such a pitch that a mere baker subsequently failed for forty-five millions.* Nothing, indeed, was left but rageful gambling, in which the stakes were millions, whilst the lands and the houses became mere fictions, mere pretexts for stock-exchange operations. And thus the old hereditary pride, which had dreamt of transforming Rome into the capital of the world, was heated to madness by the high fever of speculation—folks buying, and building, and selling without limit, without a pause, even as one might throw shares upon the market as fast and as long as presses can be found to print them.

* 1,800,000 pounds. See ante note.—Trans.

No other city in course of evolution has ever furnished such a spectacle. Nowadays, when one strives to penetrate things one is confounded. The population had increased to five hundred thousand, and then seemingly remained stationary; nevertheless, new districts continued to sprout up more thickly than ever. Yet what folly it was not to wait for a further influx of inhabitants! Why continue piling up accommodation for thousands of families whose advent was uncertain? The only excuse lay in having beforehand propounded the proposition that the third Rome, the triumphant capital of Italy, could not count less than a million souls, and in regarding that proposition as indisputable fact. The people had not come, but they surely would come: no patriot could doubt it without being guilty of treason. And so houses were built and built without a pause, for the half-million citizens who were coming. There was no anxiety as to the date of their arrival; it was sufficient that they should be expected. Inside Rome the companies which had been formed in connection with the new thoroughfares passing through the old, demolished, pestiferous districts, certainly sold or let their house property, and thereby realised large profits. But, as the craze increased, other companies were established for the purpose of erecting yet more and more districts outside Rome—veritable little towns, of which there was no need whatever. Beyond the Porta San Giovanni and the Porta San Lorenzo, suburbs sprang up as by miracle. A town was sketched out over the vast estate of the Villa Ludovisi, from the Porta Pia to the Porta Salaria and even as far as Sant' Agnese. And then came an attempt to make quite a little city, with church, school, and market, arise all at once on the fields of the Castle of Sant' Angelo. And it was no question of small dwellings for labourers, modest flats for employees, and others of limited means; no, it was a question of colossal mansions three and four storeys high, displaying uniform and endless facades which made these new excentral quarters quite Babylonian, such districts, indeed, as only capitals endowed with intense life, like Paris and London, could contrive to populate. However, such were the monstrous products of pride and gambling; and what a page of history, what a bitter lesson now that Rome, financially ruined, is further disgraced by that hideous girdle of empty, and, for the most part, uncompleted carcases, whose ruins already strew the grassy streets!

The fatal collapse, the disaster proved a frightful one. Narcisse explained its causes and recounted its phases so clearly that Pierre fully understood. Naturally enough, numerous financial companies had sprouted up: the Immobiliere, the Society d'Edilizia e Construzione, the Fondaria, the Tiberiana, and the Esquilino. Nearly all of them built, erected huge houses, entire streets of them, for purposes of sale; but they also gambled in land, selling plots at large profit to petty speculators, who also dreamt of making large profits amidst the continuous, fictitious rise brought about by the growing fever of agiotage. And the worst was that the petty speculators, the middle-class people, the inexperienced shop-keepers without capital, were crazy enough to build in their turn by borrowing of the banks or applying to the companies which had sold them the land for sufficient cash to enable them to complete their structures. As a general rule, to avoid the loss of everything, the companies were one day compelled to take back both land and buildings, incomplete though the latter might be, and from the congestion which resulted they were bound to perish. If the expected million of people had arrived to occupy the dwellings prepared for them the gains would have been fabulous, and in ten years Rome might have become one of the most flourishing capitals of the world. But the people did not come, and the dwellings remained empty. Moreover, the buildings erected by the companies were too large and costly for the average investor inclined to put his money into house property. Heredity had acted, the builders had planned things on too huge a scale, raising a series of magnificent piles whose purpose was to dwarf those of all other ages; but, as it happened, they were fated to remain lifeless and deserted, testifying with wondrous eloquence to the impotence of pride.

So there was no private capital that dared or could take the place of that of the companies. Elsewhere, in Paris for instance, new districts have been erected and embellishments have been carried out with the capital of the country—the money saved by dint of thrift. But in Rome all was built on the credit system, either by means of bills of exchange at ninety days, or—and this was chiefly the case—by borrowing money abroad. The huge sum sunk in these enterprises is estimated at a milliard, four-fifths of which was French money. The bankers did everything; the French ones lent to the Italian bankers at 3 1-2 or 4 per cent.; and the Italian bankers accommodated the speculators, the Roman builders, at 6, 7, and even 8 per cent. And thus the disaster was great indeed when France, learning of Italy's alliance with Germany, withdrew her 800,000,000 francs in less than two years. The Italian banks were drained of their specie, and the land and building companies, being likewise compelled to reimburse their loans, were compelled to apply to the banks of issue, those privileged to issue notes. At the same time they intimidated the Government, threatening to stop all work and throw 40,000 artisans and labourers starving on the pavement of Rome if it did not compel the banks of issue to lend them the five or six millions of paper which they needed. And this the Government at last did, appalled by the possibility of universal bankruptcy. Naturally, however, the five or six millions could not be paid back at maturity, as the newly built houses found neither purchasers nor tenants; and so the great fall began, and continued with a rush, heaping ruin upon ruin. The petty speculators fell on the builders, the builders on the land companies, the land companies on the banks of issue, and the latter on the public credit, ruining the nation. And that was how a mere municipal crisis became a frightful disaster: a whole milliard sunk to no purpose, Rome disfigured, littered with the ruins of the gaping and empty dwellings which had been prepared for the five or six hundred thousand inhabitants for whom the city yet waits in vain!

Moreover, in the breeze of glory which swept by, the state itself took a colossal view of things. It was a question of at once making Italy triumphant and perfect, of accomplishing in five and twenty years what other nations have required centuries to effect. So there was feverish activity and a prodigious outlay on canals, ports, roads, railway lines, and improvements in all the great cities. Directly after the alliance with Germany, moreover, the military and naval estimates began to devour millions to no purpose. And the ever growing financial requirements were simply met by the issue of paper, by a fresh loan each succeeding year. In Rome alone, too, the building of the Ministry of War cost ten millions, that of the Ministry of Finances fifteen, whilst a hundred was spent on the yet unfinished quays, and two hundred and fifty were sunk on works of defence around the city. And all this was a flare of the old hereditary pride, springing from that soil whose sap can only blossom in extravagant projects; the determination to dazzle and conquer the world which comes as soon as one has climbed to the Capitol, even though one's feet rest amidst the accumulated dust of all the forms of human power which have there crumbled one above the other.

"And, my dear friend," continued Narcisse, "if I could go into all the stories that are current, that are whispered here and there, you would be stupefied at the insanity which overcame the whole city amidst the terrible fever to which the gambling passion gave rise. Folks of small account, and fools and ignorant people were not the only ones to be ruined; nearly all the Roman nobles lost their ancient fortunes, their gold and their palaces and their galleries of masterpieces, which they owed to the munificence of the popes. The colossal wealth which it had taken centuries of nepotism to pile up in the hands of a few melted away like wax, in less than ten years, in the levelling fire of modern speculation." Then, forgetting that he was speaking to a priest, he went on to relate one of the whispered stories to which he had alluded: "There's our good friend Dario, Prince Boccanera, the last of the name, reduced to live on the crumbs which fall to him from his uncle the Cardinal, who has little beyond his stipend left him. Well, Dario would be a rich man had it not been for that extraordinary affair of the Villa Montefiori. You have heard of it, no doubt; how Prince Onofrio, Dario's father, speculated, sold the villa grounds for ten millions, then bought them back and built on them, and how, at last, not only the ten millions were lost, but also all that remained of the once colossal fortune of the Boccaneras. What you haven't been told, however, is the secret part which Count Prada—our Contessina's husband—played in the affair. He was the lover of Princess Boccanera, the beautiful Flavia Montefiori, who had brought the villa as dowry to the old Prince. She was a very fine woman, much younger than her husband, and it is positively said that it was through her that Prada mastered the Prince—for she held her old doting husband at arm's length whenever he hesitated to give a signature or go farther into the affair of which he scented the danger. And in all this Prada gained the millions which he now spends, while as for the beautiful Flavia, you are aware, no doubt, that she saved a little fortune from the wreck and bought herself a second and much younger husband, whom she turned into a Marquis Montefiori. In the whole affair the only victim is our good friend Dario, who is absolutely ruined, and wishes to marry his cousin, who is as poor as himself. It's true that she's determined to have him, and that it's impossible for him not to reciprocate her love. But for that he would have already married some American girl with a dowry of millions, like so many of the ruined princes, on the verge of starvation, have done; that is, unless the Cardinal and Donna Serafina had opposed such a match, which would not have been surprising, proud and stubborn as they are, anxious to preserve the purity of their old Roman blood. However, let us hope that Dario and the exquisite Benedetta will some day be happy together."

Narcisse paused; but, after taking a few steps in silence, he added in a lower tone: "I've a relative who picked up nearly three millions in that Villa Montefiori affair. Ah! I regret that I wasn't here in those heroic days of speculation. It must have been very amusing; and what strokes there were for a man of self-possession to make!"

However, all at once, as he raised his head, he saw before him the Quartiere dei Prati—the new district of the castle fields; and his face thereupon changed: he again became an artist, indignant with the modern abominations with which old Rome had been disfigured. His eyes paled, and a curl of his lips expressed the bitter disdain of a dreamer whose passion for the vanished centuries was sorely hurt: "Look, look at it all!" he exclaimed. "To think of it, in the city of Augustus, the city of Leo X, the city of eternal power and eternal beauty!"

Pierre himself was thunderstruck. The meadows of the Castle of Sant' Angelo, dotted with a few poplar trees, had here formerly stretched alongside the Tiber as far as the first slopes of Monte Mario, thus supplying, to the satisfaction of artists, a foreground or greenery to the Borgo and the dome of St. Peter's. But now, amidst the white, leprous, overturned plain, there stood a town of huge, massive houses, cubes of stone-work, invariably the same, with broad streets intersecting one another at right angles. From end to end similar facades appeared, suggesting series of convents, barracks, or hospitals. Extraordinary and painful was the impression produced by this town so suddenly immobilised whilst in course of erection. It was as if on some accursed morning a wicked magician had with one touch of his wand stopped the works and emptied the noisy stone-yards, leaving the buildings in mournful abandonment. Here on one side the soil had been banked up; there deep pits dug for foundations had remained gaping, overrun with weeds. There were houses whose halls scarcely rose above the level of the soil; others which had been raised to a second or third floor; others, again, which had been carried as high as was intended, and even roofed in, suggesting skeletons or empty cages. Then there were houses finished excepting that their walls had not been plastered, others which had been left without window frames, shutters, or doors; others, again, which had their doors and shutters, but were nailed up like coffins with not a soul inside them; and yet others which were partly, and in a few cases fully, inhabited—animated by the most unexpected of populations. And no words could describe the fearful mournfulness of that City of the Sleeping Beauty, hushed into mortal slumber before it had even lived, lying annihilated beneath the heavy sun pending an awakening which, likely enough, would never come.

Following his companion, Pierre walked along the broad, deserted streets, where all was still as in a cemetery. Not a vehicle nor a pedestrian passed by. Some streets had no foot ways; weeds were covering the unpaved roads, turning them once more into fields; and yet there were temporary gas lamps, mere leaden pipes bound to poles, which had been there for years. To avoid payment of the door and window tax, the house owners had generally closed all apertures with planks; while some houses, of which little had been built, were surrounded by high palings for fear lest their cellars should become the dens of all the bandits of the district. But the most painful sight of all was that of the young ruins, the proud, lofty structures, which, although unfinished, were already cracking on all sides, and required the support of an intricate arrangement of timbers to prevent them from falling in dust upon the ground. A pang came to one's heart as though one was in a city which some scourge had depopulated—pestilence, war, or bombardment, of which these gaping carcases seem to retain the mark. Then at the thought that this was abortment, not death—that destruction would complete its work before the dreamt-of, vainly awaited denizens would bring life to the still-born houses, one's melancholy deepened to hopeless discouragement. And at each corner, moreover, there was the frightful irony of the magnificent marble slabs which bore the names of the streets, illustrious historical names, Gracchus, Scipio, Pliny, Pompey, Julius Caesar, blazing forth on those unfinished, crumbling walls like a buffet dealt by the Past to modern incompetency.

Then Pierre was once more struck by this truth—that whosoever possesses Rome is consumed by the building frenzy, the passion for marble, the boastful desire to build and leave his monument of glory to future generations. After the Caesars and the Popes had come the Italian Government, which was no sooner master of the city than it wished to reconstruct it, make it more splendid, more huge than it had ever been before. It was the fatal suggestion of the soil itself—the blood of Augustus rushing to the brain of these last-comers and urging them to a mad desire to make the third Rome the queen of the earth. Thence had come all the vast schemes such as the cyclopean quays and the mere ministries struggling to outvie the Colosseum; and thence had come all the new districts of gigantic houses which had sprouted like towns around the ancient city. It was not only on the castle fields, but at the Porta San Giovanni, the Porta San Lorenzo, the Villa Ludovisi, and on the heights of the Viminal and the Esquiline that unfinished, empty districts were already crumbling amidst the weeds of their deserted streets. After two thousand years of prodigious fertility the soil really seemed to be exhausted. Even as in very old fruit gardens newly planted plum and cherry trees wither and die, so the new walls, no doubt, found no life in that old dust of Rome, impoverished by the immemorial growth of so many temples, circuses, arches, basilicas, and churches. And thus the modern houses, which men had sought to render fruitful, the useless, over-huge houses, swollen with hereditary ambition, had been unable to attain maturity, and remained there sterile like dry bushes on a plot of land exhausted by over-cultivation. And the frightful sadness that one felt arose from the fact that so creative and great a past had culminated in such present-day impotency—Rome, who had covered the world with indestructible monuments, now so reduced that she could only generate ruins.

"Oh, they'll be finished some day!" said Pierre.

Narcisse gazed at him in astonishment: "For whom?"

That was the cruel question! Only by dint of patriotic enthusiasm on the morrow of the conquest had one been able to indulge in the hope of a mighty influx of population, and now singular blindness was needed for the belief that such an influx would ever take place. The past experiments seemed decisive; moreover, there was no reason why the population should double: Rome offered neither the attraction of pleasure nor that of gain to be amassed in commerce and industry for those she had not, nor of intensity of social and intellectual life, since of this she seemed no longer capable. In any case, years and years would be requisite. And, meantime, how could one people those houses which were finished; and for whom was one to finish those which had remained mere skeletons, falling to pieces under sun and rain? Must they all remain there indefinitely, some gaunt and open to every blast and others closed and silent like tombs, in the wretched hideousness of their inutility and abandonment? What a terrible proof of error they offered under the radiant sky! The new masters of Rome had made a bad start, and even if they now knew what they ought to have done would they have the courage to undo what they had done? Since the milliard sunk there seemed to be definitely lost and wasted, one actually hoped for the advent of a Nero, endowed with mighty, sovereign will, who would take torch and pick and burn and raze everything in the avenging name of reason and beauty.

"Ah!" resumed Narcisse, "here are the Contessina and the Prince."

Benedetta had told the coachman to pull up in one of the open spaces intersecting the deserted streets, and now along the broad, quiet, grassy road—well fitted for a lovers' stroll—she was approaching on Dario's arm, both of them delighted with their outing, and no longer thinking of the sad things which they had come to see. "What a nice day it is!" the Contessina gaily exclaimed as she reached Pierre and Narcisse. "How pleasant the sunshine is! It's quite a treat to be able to walk about a little as if one were in the country!"

Dario was the first to cease smiling at the blue sky, all the delight of his stroll with his cousin on his arm suddenly departing. "My dear," said he, "we must go to see those people, since you are bent on it, though it will certainly spoil our day. But first I must take my bearings. I'm not particularly clever, you know, in finding my way in places where I don't care to go. Besides, this district is idiotic with all its dead streets and dead houses, and never a face or a shop to serve as a reminder. Still I think the place is over yonder. Follow me; at all events, we shall see."

The four friends then wended their way towards the central part of the district, the part facing the Tiber, where a small nucleus of a population had collected. The landlords turned the few completed houses to the best advantage they could, letting the rooms at very low rentals, and waiting patiently enough for payment. Some needy employees, some poverty-stricken families—had thus installed themselves there, and in the long run contrived to pay a trifle for their accommodation. In consequence, however, of the demolition of the ancient Ghetto and the opening of the new streets by which air had been let into the Trastevere district, perfect hordes of tatterdemalions, famished and homeless, and almost without garments, had swooped upon the unfinished houses, filling them with wretchedness and vermin; and it had been necessary to tolerate this lawless occupation lest all the frightful misery should remain displayed in the public thoroughfares. And so it was to those frightful tenants that had fallen the huge four and five storeyed palaces, entered by monumental doorways flanked by lofty statues and having carved balconies upheld by caryatides all along their fronts. Each family had made its choice, often closing the frameless windows with boards and the gaping doorways with rags, and occupying now an entire princely flat and now a few small rooms, according to its taste. Horrid-looking linen hung drying from the carved balconies, foul stains already degraded the white walls, and from the magnificent porches, intended for sumptuous equipages, there poured a stream of filth which rotted in stagnant pools in the roads, where there was neither pavement nor footpath.

On two occasions already Dario had caused his companions to retrace their steps. He was losing his way and becoming more and more gloomy. "I ought to have taken to the left," said he, "but how is one to know amidst such a set as that!"

Parties of verminous children were now to be seen rolling in the dust;

they were wondrously dirty, almost naked, with black skins and tangled locks as coarse as horsehair. There were also women in sordid skirts and with their loose jackets unhooked. Many stood talking together in yelping voices, whilst others, seated on old chairs with their hands on their knees, remained like that idle for hours. Not many men were met; but a few lay on the scorched grass, sleeping heavily in the sunlight. However, the stench was becoming unbearable—a stench of misery as when the human animal eschews all cleanliness to wallow in filth. And matters were made worse by the smell from a small, improvised market—the emanations of the rotting fruit, cooked and sour vegetables, and stale fried fish which a few poor women had set out on the ground amidst a throng of famished, covetous children.

"Ah! well, my dear, I really don't know where it is," all at once exclaimed the Prince, addressing his cousin. "Be reasonable; we've surely seen enough; let's go back to the carriage."

He was really suffering, and, as Benedetta had said, he did not know how to suffer. It seemed to him monstrous that one should sadden one's life by such an excursion as this. Life ought to be buoyant and benign under the clear sky, brightened by pleasant sights, by dance and song. And he, with his naive egotism, had a positive horror of ugliness, poverty, and suffering, the sight of which caused him both mental and physical pain.

Benedetta shuddered even as he did, but in presence of Pierre she desired to be brave. Glancing at him, and seeing how deeply interested and compassionate he looked, she desired to persevere in her effort to sympathise with the humble and the wretched. "No, no, Dario, we must stay. These gentlemen wish to see everything—is it not so?"

"Oh, the Rome of to-day is here," exclaimed Pierre; "this tells one more about it than all the promenades among the ruins and the monuments."

"You exaggerate, my dear Abbe," declared Narcisse. "Still, I will admit that it is very interesting. Some of the old women are particularly expressive."

At this moment Benedetta, seeing a superbly beautiful girl in front of her, could not restrain a cry of enraptured admiration: "O che bellezza!"

And then Dario, having recognised the girl, exclaimed with the same delight: "Why, it's La Pierina; she'll show us the way."

The girl had been following the party for a moment already without daring to approach. Her eyes, glittering with the joy of a loving slave, had at first darted towards the Prince, and then had hastily scrutinised the Contessina—not, however, with any show of jealous anger, but with an expression of affectionate submission and resigned happiness at seeing that she also was very beautiful. And the girl fully answered to the Prince's description of her—tall, sturdy, with the bust of a goddess, a real antique, a Juno of twenty, her chin somewhat prominent, her mouth and nose perfect in contour, her eyes large and full like a heifer's, and her whole face quite dazzling—gilded, so to say, by a sunflash—beneath her casque of heavy jet-black hair.

"So you will show us the way?" said Benedetta, familiar and smiling, already consoled for all the surrounding ugliness by the thought that there should be such beautiful creatures in the world.

"Oh yes, signora, yes, at once!" And thereupon Pierina ran off before them, her feet in shoes which at any rate had no holes, whilst the old brown woollen dress which she wore appeared to have been recently washed and mended. One seemed to divine in her a certain coquettish care, a desire for cleanliness, which none of the others displayed; unless, indeed, it were simply that her great beauty lent radiance to her humble garments and made her appear a goddess.

"Che bellezza! the bellezza!" the Contessina repeated without wearying. "That girl, Dario mio, is a real feast for the eyes!"

"I knew she would please you," he quietly replied, flattered at having discovered such a beauty, and no longer talking of departure, since he could at last rest his eyes on something pleasant.

Behind them came Pierre, likewise full of admiration, whilst Narcisse spoke to him of the scrupulosity of his own tastes, which were for the rare and the subtle. "She's beautiful, no doubt," said he; "but at bottom nothing can be more gross than the Roman style of beauty; there's no soul, none of the infinite in it. These girls simply have blood under their skins without ever a glimpse of heaven."

Meantime Pierina had stopped, and with a wave of the hand directed attention to her mother, who sat on a broken box beside the lofty doorway of an unfinished mansion. She also must have once been very beautiful, but at forty she was already a wreck, with dim eyes, drawn mouth, black teeth, broadly wrinkled countenance, and huge fallen bosom. And she was also fearfully dirty, her grey wavy hair dishevelled and her skirt and jacket soiled and slit, revealing glimpses of grimy flesh. On her knees she held a sleeping infant, her last-born, at whom she gazed like one overwhelmed and courageless, like a beast of burden resigned to her fate.

"Bene, bene," said she, raising her head, "it's the gentleman who came to give me a crown because he saw you crying. And he's come back to see us with some friends. Well, well, there are some good hearts in the world after all."

Then she related their story, but in a spiritless way, without seeking to move her visitors. She was called Giacinta, it appeared, and had married a mason, one Tomaso Gozzo, by whom she had had seven children, Pierina, then Tito, a big fellow of eighteen, then four more girls, each at an interval of two years, and finally the infant, a boy, whom she now had on her lap. They had long lived in the Trastevere district, in an old house which had lately been pulled down; and their existence seemed to have then been shattered, for since they had taken refuge in the Quartiere dei Prati the crisis in the building trade had reduced Tomaso and Tito to absolute idleness, and the bead factory where Pierina had earned as much as tenpence a day—just enough to prevent them from dying of hunger—had closed its doors. At present not one of them had any work; they lived purely by chance.

"If you like to go up," the woman added, "you'll find Tomaso there with his brother Ambrogio, whom we've taken to live with us. They'll know better than I what to say to you. Tomaso is resting; but what else can he do? It's like Tito—he's dozing over there."

So saying she pointed towards the dry grass amidst which lay a tall young fellow with a pronounced nose, hard mouth, and eyes as admirable as Pierina's. He had raised his head to glance suspiciously at the visitors, a fierce frown gathering on his forehead when he remarked how rapturously his sister contemplated the Prince. Then he let his head fall again, but kept his eyes open, watching the pair stealthily.

"Take the lady and gentlemen upstairs, Pierina, since they would like to see the place," said the mother.

Other women had now drawn near, shuffling along with bare feet in old shoes; bands of children, too, were swarming around; little girls but half clad, amongst whom, no doubt, were Giacinta's four. However, with their black eyes under their tangled mops they were all so much alike that only their mothers could identify them. And the whole resembled a teeming camp of misery pitched on that spot of majestic disaster, that street of palaces, unfinished yet already in ruins.

With a soft, loving smile, Benedetta turned to her cousin. "Don't you come up," she gently said; "I don't desire your death, Dario mio. It was very good of you to come so far. Wait for me here in the pleasant sunshine: Monsieur l'Abbe and Monsieur Habert will go up with me."

Dario began to laugh, and willingly acquiesced. Then lighting a cigarette, he walked slowly up and down, well pleased with the mildness of the atmosphere.

La Pierina had already darted into the spacious porch whose lofty, vaulted ceiling was adorned with coffers displaying a rosaceous pattern. However, a veritable manure heap covered such marble slabs as had already been laid in the vestibule, whilst the steps of the monumental stone staircase with sculptured balustrade were already cracked and so grimy that they seemed almost black. On all sides appeared the greasy stains of hands; the walls, whilst awaiting the painter and gilder, had been smeared with repulsive filth.

On reaching the spacious first-floor landing Pierina paused, and contented herself with calling through a gaping portal which lacked both door and framework: "Father, here's a lady and two gentlemen to see you." Then to the Contessina she added: "It's the third room at the end." And forthwith she herself rapidly descended the stairs, hastening back to her passion.

Benedetta and her companions passed through two large rooms, bossy with plaster under foot and having frameless windows wide open upon space; and at last they reached a third room, where the whole Gozzo family had installed itself with the remnants it used as furniture. On the floor, where the bare iron girders showed, no boards having been laid down, were five or six leprous-looking palliasses. A long table, which was still strong, occupied the centre of the room, and here and there were a few old, damaged, straw-seated chairs mended with bits of rope. The great business had been to close two of the three windows with boards, whilst the third one and the door were screened with some old mattress ticking studded with stains and holes.

Tomaso's face expressed the surprise of a man who is unaccustomed to visits of charity. Seated at the table, with his elbows resting on it and his chin supported by his hands, he was taking repose, as his wife Giacinta had said. He was a sturdy fellow of five and forty, bearded and long-haired; and, in spite of all his misery and idleness, his large face had remained as serene as that of a Roman senator. However, the sight of the two foreigners—for such he at once judged Pierre and Narcisse to be, made him rise to his feet with sudden distrust. But he smiled on recognising Benedetta, and as she began to speak of Dario, and to explain the charitable purpose of their visit, he interrupted her: "Yes, yes, I know, Contessina. Oh! I well know who you are, for in my father's time I once walled up a window at the Palazzo Boccanera."

Then he complaisantly allowed himself to be questioned, telling Pierre, who was surprised, that although they were certainly not happy they would have found life tolerable had they been able to work two days a week. And one could divine that he was, at heart, fairly well content to go on short commons, provided that he could live as he listed without fatigue. His narrative and his manner suggested the familiar locksmith who, on being summoned by a traveller to open his trunk, the key of which was lost, sent word that he could not possibly disturb himself during the hour of the siesta. In short, there was no rent to pay, as there were plenty of empty mansions open to the poor, and a few coppers would have sufficed for food, easily contented and sober as one was.

"But oh, sir," Tomaso continued, "things were ever so much better under the Pope. My father, a mason like myself, worked at the Vatican all his life, and even now, when I myself get a job or two, it's always there. We were spoilt, you see, by those ten years of busy work, when we never left our ladders and earned as much as we pleased. Of course, we fed ourselves better, and bought ourselves clothes, and took such pleasure as we cared for; so that it's all the harder nowadays to have to stint ourselves. But if you'd only come to see us in the Pope's time! No taxes, everything to be had for nothing, so to say—why, one merely had to let oneself live."

At this moment a growl arose from one of the palliasses lying in the shade of the boarded windows, and the mason, in his slow, quiet way, resumed: "It's my brother Ambrogio, who isn't of my opinion.

"He was with the Republicans in '49, when he was fourteen. But it doesn't matter; we took him with us when we heard that he was dying of hunger and sickness in a cellar."

The visitors could not help quivering with pity. Ambrogio was the elder by some fifteen years; and now, though scarcely sixty, he was already a ruin, consumed by fever, his legs so wasted that he spent his days on his palliasse without ever going out. Shorter and slighter, but more turbulent than his brother, he had been a carpenter by trade. And, despite his physical decay, he retained an extraordinary head—the head of an apostle and martyr, at once noble and tragic in its expression, and encompassed by bristling snowy hair and beard.

"The Pope," he growled; "I've never spoken badly of the Pope. Yet it's his fault if tyranny continues. He alone in '49 could have given us the Republic, and then we shouldn't have been as we are now."

Ambrogio had known Mazzini, whose vague religiosity remained in him—the dream of a Republican pope at last establishing the reign of liberty and fraternity. But later on his passion for Garibaldi had disturbed these views, and led him to regard the papacy as worthless, incapable of achieving human freedom. And so, between the dream of his youth and the stern experience of his life, he now hardly knew in which direction the truth lay. Moreover, he had never acted save under the impulse of violent emotion, but contented himself with fine words—vague, indeterminate wishes.

"Brother Ambrogio," replied Tomaso, all tranquillity, "the Pope is the Pope, and wisdom lies in putting oneself on his side, because he will always be the Pope—that is to say, the stronger. For my part, if we had to vote to-morrow I'd vote for him."

Calmed by the shrewd prudence characteristic of his race, the old carpenter made no haste to reply. At last he said, "Well, as for me, brother Tomaso, I should vote against him—always against him. And you know very well that we should have the majority. The Pope-king indeed! That's all over. The very Borgo would revolt. Still, I won't say that we oughtn't to come to an understanding with him, so that everybody's religion may be respected."

Pierre listened, deeply interested, and at last ventured to ask: "Are there many socialists among the Roman working classes?"

This time the answer came after a yet longer pause. "Socialists? Yes, there are some, no doubt, but much fewer than in other places. All those things are novelties which impatient fellows go in for without understanding much about them. We old men, we were for liberty; we don't believe in fire and massacre."

Then, fearing to say too much in presence of that lady and those gentlemen, Ambrogio began to moan on his pallet, whilst the Contessina, somewhat upset by the smell of the place, took her departure, after telling the young priest that it would be best for them to leave their alms with the wife downstairs. Meantime Tomaso resumed his seat at the table, again letting his chin rest on his hands as he nodded to his visitors, no more impressed by their departure than he had been by their arrival: "To the pleasure of seeing you again, and am happy to have been able to oblige you."

On the threshold, however, Narcisse's enthusiasm burst forth; he turned to cast a final admiring glance at old Ambrogio's head, "a perfect masterpiece," which he continued praising whilst he descended the stairs.

Down below Giacinta was still sitting on the broken box with her infant across her lap, and a few steps away Pierina stood in front of Dario, watching him with an enchanted air whilst he finished his cigarette. Tito, lying low in the grass like an animal on the watch for prey, did not for a moment cease to gaze at them.

"Ah, signora!" resumed the woman, in her resigned, doleful voice, "the place is hardly inhabitable, as you must have seen. The only good thing is that one gets plenty of room. But there are draughts enough to kill me, and I'm always so afraid of the children falling down some of the holes."

Thereupon she related a story of a woman who had lost her life through mistaking a window for a door one evening and falling headlong into the street. Then, too, a little girl had broken both arms by tumbling from a staircase which had no banisters. And you could die there without anybody knowing how bad you were and coming to help you. Only the previous day the corpse of an old man had been found lying on the plaster in a lonely room. Starvation must have killed him quite a week previously, yet he would still have been stretched there if the odour of his remains had not attracted the attention of neighbours.

"If one only had something to eat things wouldn't be so bad!" continued Giacinta. "But it's dreadful when there's a baby to suckle and one gets no food, for after a while one has no milk. This little fellow wants his titty and gets angry with me because I can't give him any. But it isn't my fault. He has sucked me till the blood came, and all I can do is to cry."

As she spoke tears welled into her poor dim eyes. But all at once she flew into a tantrum with Tito, who was still wallowing in the grass like an animal instead of rising by way of civility towards those fine people, who would surely leave her some alms. "Eh! Tito, you lazy fellow, can't you get up when people come to see you?" she called.

After some pretence of not hearing, the young fellow at last rose with an air of great ill-humour; and Pierre, feeling interested in him, tried to draw him out as he had done with the father and uncle upstairs. But Tito only returned curt answers, as if both bored and suspicious. Since there was no work to be had, said he, the only thing was to sleep. It was of no use to get angry; that wouldn't alter matters. So the best was to live as one could without increasing one's worry. As for socialists—well, yes, perhaps there were a few, but he didn't know any. And his weary, indifferent manner made it quite clear that, if his father was for the Pope and his uncle for the Republic, he himself was for nothing at all. In this Pierre divined the end of a nation, or rather the slumber of a nation in which democracy has not yet awakened. However, as the priest continued, asking Tito his age, what school he had attended, and in what district he had been born, the young man suddenly cut the questions short by pointing with one finger to his breast and saying gravely, "Io son' Romano di Roma."

And, indeed, did not that answer everything? "I am a Roman of Rome." Pierre smiled sadly and spoke no further. Never had he more fully realised the pride of that race, the long-descending inheritance of glory which was so heavy to bear. The sovereign vanity of the Caesars lived anew in that degenerate young fellow who was scarcely able to read and write. Starveling though he was, he knew his city, and could instinctively have recounted the grand pages of its history. The names of the great emperors and great popes were familiar to him. And why should men toil and moil when they had been the masters of the world? Why not live nobly and idly in the most beautiful of cities, under the most beautiful of skies? "Io son' Romano di Roma!"

Benedetta had slipped her alms into the mother's hand, and Pierre and Narcisse were following her example when Dario, who had already done so, thought of Pierina. He did not like to offer her money, but a pretty, fanciful idea occurred to him. Lightly touching his lips with his finger-tips, he said, with a faint laugh, "For beauty!"

There was something really pretty and pleasing in the kiss thus wafted with a slightly mocking laugh by that familiar, good-natured young Prince who, as in some love story of the olden time, was touched by the beautiful bead-worker's mute adoration. Pierina flushed with pleasure, and, losing her head, darted upon Dario's hand and pressed her warm lips to it with unthinking impulsiveness, in which there was as much divine gratitude as tender passion. But Tito's eyes flashed with anger at the sight, and, brutally seizing his sister by the skirt, he threw her back, growling between his teeth, "None of that, you know, or I'll kill you, and him too!"

It was high time for the visitors to depart, for other women, scenting the presence of money, were now coming forward with outstretched hands, or despatching tearful children in their stead. The whole wretched, abandoned district was in a flutter, a distressful wail ascended from those lifeless streets with high resounding names. But what was to be done? One could not give to all. So the only course lay in flight—amidst deep sadness as one realised how powerless was charity in presence of such appalling want.

When Benedetta and Dario had reached their carriage they hastened to take their seats and nestle side by side, glad to escape from all such horrors. Still the Contessina was well pleased with her bravery in the presence of Pierre, whose hand she pressed with the emotion of a pupil touched by the master's lesson, after Narcisse had told her that he meant to take the young priest to lunch at the little restaurant on the Piazza of St. Peter's whence one obtained such an interesting view of the Vatican.

"Try some of the light white wine of Genzano," said Dario, who had become quite gay again. "There's nothing better to drive away the blues."

However, Pierre's curiosity was insatiable, and on the way he again questioned Narcisse about the people of modern Rome, their life, habits, and manners. There was little or no education, he learnt; no large manufactures and no export trade existed. The men carried on the few trades that were current, all consumption being virtually limited to the city itself. Among the women there were bead-workers and embroiderers; and the manufacture of religious articles, such as medals and chaplets, and of certain popular jewellery had always occupied a fair number of hands. But after marriage the women, invariably burdened with numerous offspring, attempted little beyond household work. Briefly, the population took life as it came, working just sufficiently to secure food, contenting itself with vegetables, pastes, and scraggy mutton, without thought of rebellion or ambition. The only vices were gambling and a partiality for the red and white wines of the Roman province—wines which excited to quarrel and murder, and on the evenings of feast days, when the taverns emptied, strewed the streets with groaning men, slashed and stabbed with knives. The girls, however, but seldom went wrong; one could count those who allowed themselves to be seduced; and this arose from the great union prevailing in each family, every member of which bowed submissively to the father's absolute authority. Moreover, the brothers watched over their sisters even as Tito did over Pierina, guarding them fiercely for the sake of the family honour. And amidst all this there was no real religion, but simply a childish idolatry, all hearts going forth to Madonna and the Saints, who alone were entreated and regarded as having being: for it never occurred to anybody to think of God.

Thus the stagnation of the lower orders could easily be understood. Behind them were the many centuries during which idleness had been encouraged, vanity flattered, and nerveless life willingly accepted. When they were neither masons, nor carpenters, nor bakers, they were servants serving the priests, and more or less directly in the pay of the Vatican. Thence sprang the two antagonistic parties, on the one hand the more numerous party composed of the old Carbonari, Mazzinians, and Garibaldians, the elite of the Trastevere; and on the other the "clients" of the Vatican, all who lived on or by the Church and regretted the Pope-King. But, after all, the antagonism was confined to opinions; there was no thought of making an effort or incurring a risk. For that, some sudden flare of passion, strong enough to overcome the sturdy calmness of the race, would have been needed. But what would have been the use of it? The wretchedness had lasted for so many centuries, the sky was so blue, the siesta preferable to aught else during the hot hours! And only one thing seemed positive—that the majority was certainly in favour of Rome remaining the capital of Italy. Indeed, rebellion had almost broken out in the Leonine City when the cession of the latter to the Holy See was rumoured. As for the increase of want and poverty, this was largely due to the circumstance that the Roman workman had really gained nothing by the many works carried on in his city during fifteen years. First of all, over 40,000 provincials, mostly from the North, more spirited and resistant than himself, and working at cheaper rates, had invaded Rome; and when he, the Roman, had secured his share of the labour, he had lived in better style, without thought of economy; so that after the crisis, when the 40,000 men from the provinces were sent home again, he had found himself once more in a dead city where trade was always slack. And thus he had relapsed into his antique indolence, at heart well pleased at no longer being hustled by press of work, and again accommodating himself as best he could to his old mistress, Want, empty in pocket yet always a grand seigneur.

However, Pierre was struck by the great difference between the want and wretchedness of Rome and Paris. In Rome the destitution was certainly more complete, the food more loathsome, the dirt more repulsive. Yet at the same time the Roman poor retained more ease of manner and more real gaiety. The young priest thought of the fireless, breadless poor of Paris, shivering in their hovels at winter time; and suddenly he understood. The destitution of Rome did not know cold. What a sweet and eternal consolation; a sun for ever bright, a sky for ever blue and benign out of charity to the wretched! And what mattered the vileness of the dwelling if one could sleep under the sky, fanned by the warm breeze! What mattered even hunger if the family could await the windfall of chance in sunlit streets or on the scorched grass! The climate induced sobriety; there was no need of alcohol or red meat to enable one to face treacherous fogs. Blissful idleness smiled on the golden evenings, poverty became like the enjoyment of liberty in that delightful atmosphere where the happiness of living seemed to be all sufficient. Narcisse told Pierre that at Naples, in the narrow odoriferous streets of the port and Santa Lucia districts, the people spent virtually their whole lives out-of-doors, gay, childish, and ignorant, seeking nothing beyond the few pence that were needed to buy food. And it was certainly the climate which fostered the prolonged infancy of the nation, which explained why such a democracy did not awaken to social ambition and consciousness of itself. No doubt the poor of Naples and Rome suffered from want; but they did not know the rancour which cruel winter implants in men's hearts, the dark rancour which one feels on shivering with cold while rich people are warming themselves before blazing fires. They did not know the infuriated reveries in snow-swept hovels, when the guttering dip burns low, the passionate need which then comes upon one to wreak justice, to revolt, as from a sense of duty, in order that one may save wife and children from consumption, in order that they also may have a warm nest where life shall be a possibility! Ah! the want that shivers with the bitter cold—therein lies the excess of social injustice, the most terrible of schools, where the poor learn to realise their sufferings, where they are roused to indignation, and swear to make those sufferings cease, even if in doing so they annihilate all olden society!

And in that same clemency of the southern heavens Pierre also found an explanation of the life of St. Francis,* that divine mendicant of love who roamed the high roads extolling the charms of poverty. Doubtless he was an unconscious revolutionary, protesting against the overflowing luxury of the Roman court by his return to the love of the humble, the simplicity of the primitive Church. But such a revival of innocence and sobriety would never have been possible in a northern land. The enchantment of Nature, the frugality of a people whom the sunlight nourished, the benignity of mendicancy on roads for ever warm, were needed to effect it. And yet how was it possible that a St. Francis, glowing with brotherly love, could have appeared in a land which nowadays so seldom practises charity, which treats the lowly so harshly and contemptuously, and cannot even bestow alms on its own Pope? Is it because ancient pride ends by hardening all hearts, or because the experience of very old races leads finally to egotism, that one now beholds Italy seemingly benumbed amidst dogmatic and pompous Catholicism, whilst the return to the ideals of the Gospel, the passionate interest in the poor and the suffering comes from the woeful plains of the North, from the nations whose sunlight is so limited? Yes, doubtless all that has much to do with the change, and the success of St. Francis was in particular due to the circumstance that, after so gaily espousing his lady, Poverty, he was able to lead her, bare-footed and scarcely clad, during endless and delightful spring-tides, among communities whom an ardent need of love and compassion then consumed.

* St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the famous order of
mendicant friars.—Trans.

While conversing, Pierre and Narcisse had reached the Piazza of St. Peter's, and they sat down at one of the little tables skirting the pavement outside the restaurant where they had lunched once before. The linen was none too clean, but the view was splendid. The Basilica rose up in front of them, and the Vatican on the right, above the majestic curve of the colonnade. Just as the waiter was bringing the hors-d'oeuvre, some finocchio* and anchovies, the young priest, who had fixed his eyes on the Vatican, raised an exclamation to attract Narcisse's attention: "Look, my friend, at that window, which I am told is the Holy Father's. Can't you distinguish a pale figure standing there, quite motionless?"

* Fennel-root, eaten raw, a favourite "appetiser" in Rome during
the spring and autumn.—Trans.

The young man began to laugh. "Oh! well," said he, "it must be the Holy Father in person. You are so anxious to see him that your very anxiety conjures him into your presence."

"But I assure you," repeated Pierre, "that he is over there behind the window-pane. There is a white figure looking this way."

Narcisse, who was very hungry, began to eat whilst still indulging in banter. All at once, however, he exclaimed: "Well, my dear Abbe, as the Pope is looking at us, this is the moment to speak of him. I promised to tell you how he sunk several millions of St. Peter's Patrimony in the frightful financial crisis of which you have just seen the ruins; and, indeed, your visit to the new district of the castle fields would not be complete without this story by way of appendix."

Thereupon, without losing a mouthful, Narcisse spoke at considerable length. At the death of Pius IX the Patrimony of St. Peter, it seemed, had exceeded twenty millions of francs. Cardinal Antonelli, who speculated, and whose ventures were usually successful, had for a long time left a part of this money with the Rothschilds and a part in the hands of different nuncios, who turned it to profit abroad. After Antonelli's death, however, his successor, Cardinal Simeoni, withdrew the money from the nuncios to invest it at Rome; and Leo XIII on his accession entrusted the administration of the Patrimony to a commission of cardinals, of which Monsignor Folchi was appointed secretary. This prelate, who for twelve years played such an important role, was the son of an employee of the Dataria, who, thanks to skilful financial operations, had left a fortune of a million francs. Monsignor Folchi inherited his father's cleverness, and revealed himself to be a financier of the first rank in such wise that the commission gradually relinquished its powers to him, letting him act exactly as he pleased and contenting itself with approving the reports which he laid before it at each meeting. The Patrimony, however, yielded scarcely more than a million francs per annum, and, as the expenditure amounted to seven millions, six had to be found. Accordingly, from that other source of income, the Peter's Pence, the Pope annually gave three million francs to Monsignor Folchi, who, by skilful speculations and investments, was able to double them every year, and thus provide for all disbursements without ever breaking into the capital of the Patrimony. In the earlier times he realised considerable profit by gambling in land in and about Rome. He took shares also in many new enterprises, speculated in mills, omnibuses, and water-services, without mentioning all the gambling in which he participated with the Banca di Roma, a Catholic institution. Wonderstruck by his skill, the Pope, who, on his own side, had hitherto speculated through the medium of a confidential employee named Sterbini, dismissed the latter, and entrusted Monsignor Folchi with the duty of turning his money to profit in the same way as he turned that of the Holy See. This was the climax of the prelate's favour, the apogee of his power. Bad days were dawning, things were tottering already, and the great collapse was soon to come, sudden and swift like lightning. One of Leo XIII's practices was to lend large sums to the Roman princes who, seized with the gambling frenzy, and mixed up in land and building speculations, were at a loss for money. To guarantee the Pope's advances they deposited shares with him, and thus, when the downfall came, he was left with heaps of worthless paper on his hands. Then another disastrous affair was an attempt to found a house of credit in Paris in view of working off the shares which could not be disposed of in Italy among the French aristocracy and religious people. To egg these on it was said that the Pope was interested in the venture; and the worst was that he dropped three millions of francs in it.* The situation then became the more critical as he had gradually risked all the money he disposed of in the terrible agiotage going on in Rome, tempted thereto by the prospect of huge profits and perhaps indulging in the hope that he might win back by money the city which had been torn from him by force. His own responsibility remained complete, for Monsignor Folchi never made an important venture without consulting him; and he must have been therefore the real artisan of the disaster, mastered by his passion for gain, his desire to endow the Church with a huge capital, that great source of power in modern times. As always happens, however, the prelate was the only victim. He had become imperious and difficult to deal with; and was no longer liked by the cardinals of the commission, who were merely called together to approve such transactions as he chose to entrust to them. So, when the crisis came, a plot was laid; the cardinals terrified the Pope by telling him of all the evil rumours which were current, and then forced Monsignor Folchi to render a full account of his speculations. The situation proved to be very bad; it was no longer possible to avoid heavy losses. And so Monsignor Folchi was disgraced, and since then has vainly solicited an audience of Leo XIII, who has always refused to receive him, as if determined to punish him for their common fault—that passion for lucre which blinded them both. Very pious and submissive, however, Monsignor Folchi has never complained, but has kept his secrets and bowed to fate. Nobody can say exactly how many millions the Patrimony of St. Peter lost when Rome was changed into a gambling-hell, but if some prelates only admit ten, others go as far as thirty. The probability is that the loss was about fifteen millions.**

* The allusion is evidently to the famous Union Generale, on
which the Pope bestowed his apostolic benediction, and with
which M. Zola deals at length in his novel Money. Certainly
a very brilliant idea was embodied in the Union Generale, that
of establishing a great international Catholic bank which
would destroy the Jewish financial autocracy throughout Europe,
and provide both the papacy and the Legitimist cause in several
countries with the sinews of war. But in the battle which
ensued the great Jew financial houses proved the stronger, and
the disaster which overtook the Catholic speculators was a
terrible one.—Trans.

** That is 600,000 pounds.

Whilst Narcisse was giving this account he and Pierre had despatched their cutlets and tomatoes, and the waiter was now serving them some fried chicken. "At the present time," said Narcisse by way of conclusion, "the gap has been filled up; I told you of the large sums yielded by the Peter's Pence Fund, the amount of which is only known by the Pope, who alone fixes its employment. And, by the way, he isn't cured of speculating: I know from a good source that he still gambles, though with more prudence. Moreover, his confidential assistant is still a prelate. And, when all is said, my dear Abbe, he's in the right: a man must belong to his times—dash it all!"

Pierre had listened with growing surprise, in which terror and sadness mingled. Doubtless such things were natural, even legitimate; yet he, in his dream of a pastor of souls free from all terrestrial cares, had never imagined that they existed. What! the Pope—the spiritual father of the lowly and the suffering—had speculated in land and in stocks and shares! He had gambled, placed funds in the hands of Jew bankers, practised usury, extracted hard interest from money—he, the successor of the Apostle, the Pontiff of Christ, the representative of Jesus, of the Gospel, that divine friend of the poor! And, besides, what a painful contrast: so many millions stored away in those rooms of the Vatican, and so many millions working and fructifying, constantly being diverted from one speculation to another in order that they might yield the more gain; and then down below, near at hand, so much want and misery in those abominable unfinished buildings of the new districts, so many poor folks dying of hunger amidst filth, mothers without milk for their babes, men reduced to idleness by lack of work, old ones at the last gasp like beasts of burden who are pole-axed when they are of no more use! Ah! God of Charity, God of Love, was it possible! The Church doubtless had material wants; she could not live without money; prudence and policy had dictated the thought of gaining for her such a treasure as would enable her to fight her adversaries victoriously. But how grievously this wounded one's feelings, how it soiled the Church, how she descended from her divine throne to become nothing but a party, a vast international association organised for the purpose of conquering and possessing the world!

And the more Pierre thought of the extraordinary adventure the greater was his astonishment. Could a more unexpected, startling drama be imagined? That Pope shutting himself up in his palace—a prison, no doubt, but one whose hundred windows overlooked immensity; that Pope who, at all hours of the day and night, in every season, could from his window see his capital, the city which had been stolen from him, and the restitution of which he never ceased to demand; that Pope who, day by day, beheld the changes effected in the city—the opening of new streets, the demolition of ancient districts, the sale of land, and the gradual erection of new buildings which ended by forming a white girdle around the old ruddy roofs; that Pope who, in presence of this daily spectacle, this building frenzy, which he could follow from morn till eve, was himself finally overcome by the gambling passion, and, secluded in his closed chamber, began to speculate on the embellishments of his old capital, seeking wealth in the spurt of work and trade brought about by that very Italian Government which he reproached with spoliation; and finally that Pope losing millions in a catastrophe which he ought to have desired, but had been unable to foresee! No, never had dethroned monarch yielded to a stranger idea, compromised himself in a more tragical venture, the result of which fell upon him like divine punishment. And it was no mere king who had done this, but the delegate of God, the man who, in the eyes of idolatrous Christendom, was the living manifestation of the Deity!

Dessert had now been served—a goat's cheese and some fruit—and Narcisse was just finishing some grapes when, on raising his eyes, he in turn exclaimed: "Well, you are quite right, my dear Abbe, I myself can see a pale figure at the window of the Holy Father's room."

Pierre, who scarcely took his eyes from the window, answered slowly: "Yes, yes, it went away, but has just come back, and stands there white and motionless."

"Well, after all, what would you have the Pope do?" resumed Narcisse with his languid air. "He's like everybody else; he looks out of the window when he wants a little distraction, and certainly there's plenty for him to look at."

The same idea had occurred to Pierre, and was filling him with emotion. People talked of the Vatican being closed, and pictured a dark, gloomy palace, encompassed by high walls, whereas this palace overlooked all Rome, and the Pope from his window could see the world. Pierre himself had viewed the panorama from the summit of the Janiculum, the loggie of Raffaelle, and the dome of St. Peter's, and so he well knew what it was that Leo XIII was able to behold. In the centre of the vast desert of the Campagna, bounded by the Sabine and Alban mountains, the seven illustrious hills appeared to him with their trees and edifices. His eyes ranged also over all the basilicas, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano, the cradle of the papacy, San Paolo-fuori-le-Mura, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Sant' Agnese, and the others; they beheld, too, the domes of the Gesu of Sant' Andrea della Valle, San Carlo and San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, and indeed all those four hundred churches of Rome which make the city like a campo santo studded with crosses. And Leo XIII could moreover see the famous monuments testifying to the pride of successive centuries—the Castle of Sant' Angelo, that imperial mausoleum which was transformed into a papal fortress, the distant white line of the tombs of the Appian Way, the scattered ruins of the baths of Caracalla and the abode of Septimius Severus; and then, after the innumerable columns, porticoes, and triumphal arches, there were the palaces and villas of the sumptuous cardinals of the Renascence, the Palazzo Farnese, the Palazzo Borghese, the Villa Medici, and others, amidst a swarming of facades and roofs. But, in particular, just under his window, on the left, the Pope was able to see the abominations of the unfinished district of the castle fields. In the afternoon, when he strolled through his gardens, bastioned by the wall of the fourth Leo like the plateau of a citadel, his view stretched over the ravaged valley at the foot of Monte Mario, where so many brick-works were established during the building frenzy. The green slopes are still ripped up, yellow trenches intersect them in all directions, and the closed works and factories have become wretched ruins with lofty, black, and smokeless chimneys. And at any other hour of the day Leo XIII could not approach his window without beholding the abandoned houses for which all those brick-fields had worked, those houses which had died before they even lived, and where there was now nought but the swarming misery of Rome, rotting there like some decomposition of olden society.

However, Pierre more particularly thought of Leo XIII, forgetting the rest of the city to let his thoughts dwell on the Palatine, now bereft of its crown of palaces and rearing only its black cypresses towards the blue heavens. Doubtless in his mind he rebuilt the palaces of the Caesars, whilst before him rose great shadowy forms arrayed in purple, visions of his real ancestors, those emperors and Supreme Pontiffs who alone could tell him how one might reign over every nation and be the absolute master of the world. Then, however, his glances strayed to the Quirinal, and there he could contemplate the new and neighbouring royalty. How strange the meeting of those two palaces, the Quirinal and the Vatican, which rise up and gaze at one another across the Rome of the middle ages and the Renascence, whose roofs, baked and gilded by the burning sun, are jumbled in confusion alongside the Tiber. When the Pope and the King go to their windows they can with a mere opera-glass see each other quite distinctly. True, they are but specks in the boundless immensity, and what a gulf there is between them—how many centuries of history, how many generations that battled and suffered, how much departed greatness, and how much new seed for the mysterious future! Still, they can see one another, and they are yet waging the eternal fight, the fight as to which of them—the pontiff and shepherd of the soul or the monarch and master of the body—shall possess the people whose stream rolls beneath them, and in the result remain the absolute sovereign. And Pierre wondered also what might be the thoughts and dreams of Leo XIII behind those window-panes where he still fancied he could distinguish his pale, ghostly figure. On surveying new Rome, the ravaged olden districts and the new ones laid waste by the blast of disaster, the Pope must certainly rejoice at the colossal failure of the Italian Government. His city had been stolen from him; the newcomers had virtually declared that they would show him how a great capital was created, and their boast had ended in that catastrophe—a multitude of hideous and useless buildings which they did not even know how to finish! He, the Pope, could moreover only be delighted with the terrible worries into which the usurping regime had fallen, the political crisis, and the financial crisis, the whole growing national unrest amidst which that regime seemed likely to sink some day; and yet did not he himself possess a patriotic soul? was he not a loving son of that Italy whose genius and ancient ambition coursed in the blood of his veins? Ah! no, nothing against Italy; rather everything that would enable her to become once more the mistress of the world. And so, even amidst the joy of hope, he must have been grieved to see her thus ruined, threatened with bankruptcy, displaying like a sore that overturned, unfinished Rome which was a confession of her impotency. But, on the other hand, if the House of Savoy were to be swept away, would he not be there to take its place, and at last resume possession of his capital, which, from his window, for fifteen years past, he had beheld in the grip of masons and demolishers? And then he would again be the master and reign over the world, enthroned in the predestined city to which prophecy has ensured eternity and universal dominion.

But the horizon spread out, and Pierre wondered what Leo XIII beheld beyond Rome, beyond the Campagna and the Sabine and Alban mountains. What had he seen for eighteen years past from that window whence he obtained his only view of the world? What echoes of modern society, its truths and certainties, had reached his ears? From the heights of the Viminal, where the railway terminus stands, the prolonged whistling of engines must have occasionally been carried towards him, suggesting our scientific civilisation, the nations brought nearer together, free humanity marching on towards the future. Did he himself ever dream of liberty when, on turning to the right, he pictured the sea over yonder, past the tombs of the Appian Way? Had he ever desired to go off, quit Rome and her traditions, and found the Papacy of the new democracies elsewhere? As he was said to possess so clear and penetrating a mind he ought to have understood and trembled at the far-away stir and noise that came from certain lands of battle, from those United States of America, for instance, where revolutionary bishops were conquering, winning over the people. Were they working for him or for themselves? If he could not follow them, if he remained stubborn within his Vatican, bound on every side by dogma and tradition, might not rupture some day become unavoidable? And, indeed, the fear of a blast of schism, coming from afar, must have filled him with growing anguish. It was assuredly on that account that he had practised the diplomacy of conciliation, seeking to unite in his hands all the scattered forces of the Church, overlooking the audacious proceedings of certain bishops as far as possible, and himself striving to gain the support of the people by putting himself on its side against the fallen monarchies. But would he ever go any farther? Shut up in that Vatican, behind that bronze portal, was he not bound to the strict formulas of Catholicism, chained to them by the force of centuries? There obstinacy was fated; it was impossible for him to resign himself to that which was his real and surpassing power, the purely spiritual power, the moral authority which brought mankind to his feet, made thousands of pilgrims kneel and women swoon. Departure from Rome and the renunciation of the temporal power would not displace the centre of the Catholic world, but would transform him, the head of the Catholic Church, into the head of something else. And how anxious must have been his thoughts if the evening breeze ever brought him a vague presentiment of that something else, a fear of the new religion which was yet dimly, confusedly dawning amidst the tramp of the nations on the march, and the sound of which must have reached him at one and the same time from every point of the compass.

At this precise moment, however, Pierre felt that the white and motionless shadow behind those windowpanes was held erect by pride, by the ever present conviction of victory. If man could not achieve it, a miracle would intervene. He, the Pope, was absolutely convinced that he or some successor would recover possession of Rome. Had not the Church all eternity before it? And, moreover, why should not the victor be himself? Could not God accomplish the impossible? Why, if it so pleased God, on the very morrow his city would be restored to him, in spite of all the objections of human reason, all the apparent logic of facts. Ah! how he would welcome the return of that prodigal daughter whose equivocal adventures he had ever watched with tears bedewing his paternal eyes! He would soon forget the excesses which he had beheld during eighteen years at all hours and in all seasons. Perhaps he dreamt of what he would do with those new districts with which the city had been soiled. Should they be razed, or left as evidence of the insanity of the usurpers? At all events, Rome would again become the august and lifeless city, disdainful of such vain matters as material cleanliness and comfort, and shining forth upon the world like a pure soul encompassed by the traditional glory of the centuries. And his dream continued, picturing the course which events would take on the very morrow, no doubt. Anything, even a republic was preferable to that House of Savoy. Why not a federal republic, reviving the old political divisions of Italy, restoring Rome to the Church, and choosing him, the Pope, as the natural protector of the country thus reorganised? But his eyes travelled beyond Rome and Italy, and his dream expanded, embracing republican France, Spain which might become republican again, Austria which would some day be won, and indeed all the Catholic nations welded into the United States of Europe, and fraternising in peace under his high presidency as Sovereign Pontiff. And then would follow the supreme triumph, all the other churches at last vanishing, and all the dissident communities coming to him as to the one and only pastor, who would reign in the name of Jesus over the universal democracy.

However, whilst Pierre was immersed in this dream which he attributed to Leo XIII, he was all at once interrupted by Narcisse, who exclaimed: "Oh! my dear Abbe, just look at those statues on the colonnade." The young fellow had ordered a cup of coffee and was languidly smoking a cigar, deep once more in the subtle aesthetics which were his only preoccupation. "They are rosy, are they not?" he continued; "rosy, with a touch of mauve, as if the blue blood of angels circulated in their stone veins. It is the sun of Rome which gives them that supra-terrestrial life; for they live, my friend; I have seen them smile and hold out their arms to me during certain fine sunsets. Ah! Rome, marvellous, delicious Rome! One could live here as poor as Job, content with the very atmosphere, and in everlasting delight at breathing it!"

This time Pierre could not help feeling surprised at Narcisse's language, for he remembered his incisive voice and clear, precise, financial acumen when speaking of money matters. And, at this recollection, the young priest's mind reverted to the castle fields, and intense sadness filled his heart as for the last time all the want and suffering rose before him. Again he beheld the horrible filth which was tainting so many human beings, that shocking proof of the abominable social injustice which condemns the greater number to lead the joyless, breadless lives of accursed beasts. And as his glance returned yet once more to the window of the Vatican, and he fancied he could see a pale hand uplifted behind the glass panes, he thought of that papal benediction which Leo XIII gave from that height, over Rome, and over the plain and the hills, to the faithful of all Christendom. And that papal benediction suddenly seemed to him a mockery, destitute of all power, since throughout such a multitude of centuries it had not once been able to stay a single one of the sufferings of mankind, and could not even bring a little justice for those poor wretches who were agonising yonder beneath the very window.

IX.

THAT evening at dusk, as Benedetta had sent Pierre word that she desired to see him, he went down to her little salon, and there found her chatting with Celia.

"I've seen your Pierina, you know," exclaimed the latter, just as the young priest came in. "And with Dario, too. Or rather, she must have been watching for him; he found her waiting in a path on the Pincio and smiled at her. I understood at once. What a beauty she is!"

Benedetta smiled at her friend's enthusiasm; but her lips twitched somewhat painfully, for, however sensible she might be, this passion, which she realised to be so naive and so strong, was beginning to make her suffer. She certainly made allowances for Dario, but the girl was too much in love with him, and she feared the consequences. Even in turning the conversation she allowed the secret of her heart to escape her. "Pray sit down, Monsieur l'Abbe," she said, "we are talking scandal, you see. My poor Dario is accused of making love to every pretty woman in Rome. People say that it's he who gives La Tonietta those white roses which she has been exhibiting at the Corso every afternoon for a fortnight past."

"That's certain, my dear," retorted Celia impetuously. "At first people were in doubt, and talked of little Pontecorvo and Lieutenant Moretta. But every one now knows that La Tonietta's caprice is Dario. Besides, he joined her in her box at the Costanzi the other evening."

Pierre remembered that the young Prince had pointed out La Tonietta at the Pincio one afternoon. She was one of the few demi-mondaines that the higher-class society of Rome took an interest in. For a month or so the rich Englishman to whom she owed her means had been absent, travelling.

"Ah!" resumed Benedetta, whose budding jealousy was entirely confined to La Pierina, "so my poor Dario is ruining himself in white roses! Well, I shall have to twit him about it. But one or another of these beauties will end by robbing me of him if our affairs are not soon settled. Fortunately, I have had some better news. Yes, my suit is to be taken in hand again, and my aunt has gone out to-day on that very account."

Then, as Victorine came in with a lamp, and Celia rose to depart, Benedetta turned towards Pierre, who also was rising from his chair: "Please stay," said she; "I wish to speak to you."

However, Celia still lingered, interested by the mention of the divorce suit, and eager to know if the cousins would soon be able to marry. And at last throwing her arms round Benedetta, she kissed her passionately. "So you are hopeful, my dear," she exclaimed. "You think that the Holy Father will give you back your liberty? Oh! I am so pleased; it will be so nice for you to marry Dario! And I'm well pleased on my own account, for my father and mother are beginning to yield. Only yesterday I said to them with that quiet little air of mine, 'I want Attilio, and you must give him me.' And then my father flew into a furious passion and upbraided me, and shook his fist at me, saying that if he'd made my head as hard as his own he would know how to break it. My mother was there quite silent and vexed, and all at once he turned to her and said: 'Here, give her that Attilio she wants, and then perhaps we shall have some peace!' Oh yes! I'm well pleased, very well pleased indeed!"

As she spoke her pure virginal face beamed with so much innocent, celestial joy that Pierre and Benedetta could not help laughing. And at last she went off attended by a maid who had waited for her in the first salon.

When they were alone Benedetta made the priest sit down again: "I have been asked to give you some important advice, my friend," she said. "It seems that the news of your presence in Rome is spreading, and that bad reports of you are circulated. Your book is said to be a fierce appeal to schism, and you are spoken of as a mere ambitious, turbulent schismatic. After publishing your book in Paris you have come to Rome, it is said, to raise a fearful scandal over it in order to make it sell. Now, if you still desire to see his Holiness, so as to plead your cause before him, you are advised to make people forget you, to disappear altogether for a fortnight or three weeks."

Pierre was stupefied. Why, they would end by maddening him with all the obstacles they raised to exhaust his patience; they would actually implant in him an idea of schism, of an avenging, liberating scandal! He wished to protest and refuse the advice, but all at once he made a gesture of weariness. What would be the good of it, especially with that young woman, who was certainly sincere and affectionate. "Who asked you to give me this advice?" he inquired. She did not answer, but smiled, and with sudden intuition he resumed: "It was Monsignor Nani, was it not?"

Thereupon, still unwilling to give a direct reply, she began to praise the prelate. He had at last consented to guide her in her divorce affair; and Donna Serafina had gone to the Palace of the Inquisition that very afternoon in order to acquaint him with the result of certain steps she had taken. Father Lorenza, the confessor of both the Boccanera ladies, was to be present at the interview, for the idea of the divorce was in reality his own. He had urged the two women to it in his eagerness to sever the bond which the patriotic priest Pisoni had tied full of such fine illusions. Benedetta became quite animated as she explained the reasons of her hopefulness. "Monsignor Nani can do everything," she said, "and I am very happy that my affair should be in his hands. You must be reasonable also, my friend; do as you are requested. I'm sure you will some day be well pleased at having taken this advice."

Pierre had bowed his head and remained thoughtful. There was nothing unpleasant in the idea of remaining for a few more weeks in Rome, where day by day his curiosity found so much fresh food. Of course, all these delays were calculated to discourage him and bend his will. Yet what did he fear, since he was still determined to relinquish nothing of his book, and to see the Holy Father for the sole purpose of proclaiming his new faith? Once more, in silence, he took that oath, then yielded to Benedetta's entreaties. And as he apologised for being a source of embarrassment in the house she exclaimed: "No, no, I am delighted to have you here. I fancy that your presence will bring us good fortune now that luck seems to be changing in our favour."

It was then agreed that he would no longer prowl around St. Peter's and the Vatican, where his constant presence must have attracted attention. He even promised that he would virtually spend a week indoors, desirous as he was of reperusing certain books, certain pages of Rome's history. Then he went on chatting for a moment, lulled by the peacefulness which reigned around him, since the lamp had illumined the salon with its sleepy radiance. Six o'clock had just struck, and outside all was dark.

"Wasn't his Eminence indisposed to-day?" the young man asked.

"Yes," replied the Contessina. "But we are not anxious: it is only a little fatigue. He sent Don Vigilio to tell me that he intended to shut himself up in his room and dictate some letters. So there can be nothing much the matter, you see."

Silence fell again. For a while not a sound came from the deserted street or the old empty mansion, mute and dreamy like a tomb. But all at once the soft somnolence, instinct with all the sweetness of a dream of hope, was disturbed by a tempestuous entry, a whirl of skirts, a gasp of terror. It was Victorine, who had gone off after bringing the lamp, but now returned, scared and breathless: "Contessina! Contessina!"

Benedetta had risen, suddenly quite white and cold, as at the advent of a blast of misfortune. "What, what is it? Why do you run and tremble?" she asked.

"Dario, Monsieur Dario—down below. I went down to see if the lantern in the porch were alight, as it is so often forgotten. And in the dark, in the porch, I stumbled against Monsieur Dario. He is on the ground; he has a knife-thrust somewhere."

A cry leapt from the amorosa's heart: "Dead!"

"No, no, wounded."

But Benedetta did not hear; in a louder and louder voice she cried: "Dead! dead!"

"No, no, I tell you, he spoke to me. And for Heaven's sake, be quiet. He silenced me because he did not want any one to know; he told me to come and fetch you—only you. However, as Monsieur l'Abbe is here, he had better help us. We shall be none too many."

Pierre listened, also quite aghast. And when Victorine wished to take the lamp her trembling hand, with which she had no doubt felt the prostrate body, was seen to be quite bloody. The sight filled Benedetta with so much horror that she again began to moan wildly.

"Be quiet, be quiet!" repeated Victorine. "We ought not to make any noise in going down. I shall take the lamp, because we must at all events be able to see. Now, quick, quick!"

Across the porch, just at the entrance of the vestibule, Dario lay prone upon the slabs, as if, after being stabbed in the street, he had only had sufficient strength to take a few steps before falling. And he had just fainted, and lay there with his face very pale, his lips compressed, and his eyes closed. Benedetta, recovering the energy of her race amidst her excessive grief, no longer lamented or cried out, but gazed at him with wild, tearless, dilated eyes, as though unable to understand. The horror of it all was the suddenness and mysteriousness of the catastrophe, the why and wherefore of this murderous attempt amidst the silence of the old deserted palace, black with the shades of night. The wound had as yet bled but little, for only the Prince's clothes were stained.

"Quick, quick!" repeated Victorine in an undertone after lowering the lamp and moving it around. "The porter isn't there—he's always at the carpenter's next door—and you see that he hasn't yet lighted the lantern. Still he may come back at any moment. So the Abbe and I will carry the Prince into his room at once." She alone retained her head, like a woman of well-balanced mind and quiet activity. The two others, whose stupor continued, listened to her and obeyed her with the docility of children. "Contessina," she continued, "you must light us. Here, take the lamp and lower it a little so that we may see the steps. You, Abbe, take the feet; I'll take hold of him under the armpits. And don't be alarmed, the poor dear fellow isn't heavy."

Ah! that ascent of the monumental staircase with its low steps and its landings as spacious as guardrooms. They facilitated the cruel journey, but how lugubrious looked the little cortege under the flickering glimmer of the lamp which Benedetta held with arm outstretched, stiffened by determination! And still not a sound came from the old lifeless dwelling, nothing but the silent crumbling of the walls, the slow decay which was making the ceilings crack. Victorine continued to whisper words of advice whilst Pierre, afraid of slipping on the shiny slabs, put forth an excess of strength which made his breath come short. Huge, wild shadows danced over the big expanse of bare wall up to the very vaults decorated with sunken panels. So endless seemed the ascent that at last a halt became necessary; but the slow march was soon resumed. Fortunately Dario's apartments—bed-chamber, dressing-room, and sitting-room—were on the first floor adjoining those of the Cardinal in the wing facing the Tiber; so, on reaching the landing, they only had to walk softly along the corridor, and at last, to their great relief, laid the wounded man upon his bed.

Victorine vented her satisfaction in a light laugh. "That's done," said she; "put the lamp on that table, Contessina. I'm sure nobody heard us. It's lucky that Donna Serafina should have gone out, and that his Eminence should have shut himself up with Don Vigilio. I wrapped my skirt round Monsieur Dario's shoulders, you know, so I don't think any blood fell on the stairs. By and by, too, I'll go down with a sponge and wipe the slabs in the porch—" She stopped short, looked at Dario, and then quickly added: "He's breathing—now I'll leave you both to watch over him while I go for good Doctor Giordano, who saw you come into the world, Contessina. He's a man to be trusted."

Alone with the unconscious sufferer in that dim chamber, which seemed to quiver with the frightful horror that filled their hearts, Benedetta and Pierre remained on either side of the bed, as yet unable to exchange a word. The young woman first opened her arms and wrung her hands whilst giving vent to a hollow moan, as if to relieve and exhale her grief; and then, leaning forward, she watched for some sign of life on that pale face whose eyes were closed. Dario was certainly breathing, but his respiration was slow and very faint, and some time went by before a touch of colour returned to his cheeks. At last, however, he opened his eyes, and then she at once took hold of his hand and pressed it, instilling into the pressure all the anguish of her heart. Great was her happiness on feeling that he feebly returned the clasp.

"Tell me," she said, "you can see me and hear me, can't you? What has happened, good God?"

He did not at first answer, being worried by the presence of Pierre. On recognising the young priest, however, he seemed content that he should be there, and then glanced apprehensively round the room to see if there were anybody else. And at last he murmured: "No one saw me, no one knows?"

"No, no; be easy. We carried you up with Victorine without meeting a soul. Aunt has just gone out, uncle is shut up in his rooms."

At this Dario seemed relieved, and he even smiled. "I don't want anybody to know, it is so stupid," he murmured.

"But in God's name what has happened?" she again asked him.

"Ah! I don't know, I don't know," was his response, as he lowered his eyelids with a weary air as if to escape the question. But he must have realised that it was best for him to confess some portion of the truth at once, for he resumed: "A man was hidden in the shadow of the porch—he must have been waiting for me. And so, when I came in, he dug his knife into my shoulder, there."

Forthwith she again leant over him, quivering, and gazing into the depths of his eyes: "But who was the man, who was he?" she asked. Then, as he, in a yet more weary way, began to stammer that he didn't know, that the man had fled into the darkness before he could recognise him, she raised a terrible cry: "It was Prada! it was Prada, confess it, I know it already!" And, quite delirious, she went on: "I tell you that I know it! Ah! I would not be his, and he is determined that we shall never belong to one another. Rather than have that he will kill you on the day when I am free to be your wife! Oh! I know him well; I shall never, never be happy. Yes, I know it well, it was Prada, Prada!"

But sudden energy upbuoyed the wounded man, and he loyally protested: "No, no, it was not Prada, nor was it any one working for him. That I swear to you. I did not recognise the man, but it wasn't Prada—no, no!"

There was such a ring of truth in Dario's words that Benedetta must have been convinced by them. But terror once more overpowered her, for the hand she held was suddenly growing soft, moist, and powerless. Exhausted by his effort, Dario had fallen back, again fainting, his face quite white and his eyes closed. And it seemed to her that he was dying. Distracted by her anguish, she felt him with trembling, groping hands: "Look, look, Monsieur l'Abbe!" she exclaimed. "But he is dying, he is dying; he is already quite cold. Ah! God of heaven, he is dying!"

Pierre, terribly upset by her cries, sought to reassure her, saying: "He spoke too much; he has lost consciousness, as he did before. But I assure you that I can feel his heart beating. Here, put your hand here, Contessina. For mercy's sake don't distress yourself like that; the doctor will soon be here, and everything will be all right."

But she did not listen to him, and all at once he was lost in amazement, for she flung herself upon the body of the man she adored, caught it in a frantic embrace, bathed it with tears and covered it with kisses whilst stammering words of fire: "Ah! if I were to lose you, if I were to lose you! And to think that I repulsed you, that I would not accept happiness when it was yet possible! Yes, that idea of mine, that vow I made to the Madonna! Yet how could she be offended by our happiness? And then, and then, if she has deceived me, if she takes you from me, ah! then I can have but one regret—that I did not damn myself with you—yes, yes, damnation rather than that we should never, never be each other's!"

Was this the woman who had shown herself so calm, so sensible, so patient the better to ensure her happiness? Pierre was terrified, and no longer recognised her. He had hitherto seen her so reserved, so modest, with a childish charm that seemed to come from her very nature! But under the threatening blow she feared, the terrible blood of the Boccaneras had awoke within her with a long heredity of violence, pride, frantic and exasperated longings. She wished for her share of life, her share of love! And she moaned and she clamoured, as if death, in taking her lover from her, were tearing away some of her own flesh.

"Calm yourself, I entreat you, madame," repeated the priest. "He is alive, his heart beats. You are doing yourself great harm."

But she wished to die with her lover: "O my darling! if you must go, take me, take me with you. I will lay myself on your heart, I will clasp you so tightly with my arms that they shall be joined to yours, and then we must needs be buried together. Yes, yes, we shall be dead, and we shall be wedded all the same—wedded in death! I promised that I would belong to none but you, and I will be yours in spite of everything, even in the grave. O my darling, open your eyes, open your mouth, kiss me if you don't want me to die as soon as you are dead!"

A blaze of wild passion, full of blood and fire, had passed through that mournful chamber with old, sleepy walls. But tears were now overcoming Benedetta, and big gasping sobs at last threw her, blinded and strengthless, on the edge of the bed. And fortunately an end was put to the terrible scene by the arrival of the doctor whom Victorine had fetched.

Doctor Giordano was a little old man of over sixty, with white curly hair, and fresh-looking, clean-shaven countenance. By long practice among Churchmen he had acquired the paternal appearance and manner of an amiable prelate. And he was said to be a very worthy man, tending the poor for nothing, and displaying ecclesiastical reserve and discretion in all delicate cases. For thirty years past the whole Boccanera family, children, women, and even the most eminent Cardinal himself, had in all cases of sickness been placed in the hands of this prudent practitioner. Lighted by Victorine and helped by Pierre, he undressed Dario, who was roused from his swoon by pain; and after examining the wound he declared with a smile that it was not at all dangerous. The young Prince would at the utmost have to spend three weeks in bed, and no complications were to be feared. Then, like all the doctors of Rome, enamoured of the fine thrusts and cuts which day by day they have to dress among chance patients of the lower classes, he complacently lingered over the wound, doubtless regarding it as a clever piece of work, for he ended by saying to the Prince in an undertone: "That's what we call a warning. The man didn't want to kill, the blow was dealt downwards so that the knife might slip through the flesh without touching the bone. Ah! a man really needs to be skilful to deal such a stab; it was very neatly done."

"Yes, yes," murmured Dario, "he spared me; had he chosen he could have pierced me through."

Benedetta did not hear. Since the doctor had declared the case to be free from danger, and had explained that the fainting fits were due to nervous shock, she had fallen in a chair, quite prostrated. Gradually, however, some gentle tears coursed from her eyes, bringing relief after her frightful despair, and then, rising to her feet, she came and kissed Dario with mute and passionate delight.

"I say, my dear doctor," resumed the Prince, "it's useless for people to know of this. It's so ridiculous. Nobody has seen anything, it seems, excepting Monsieur l'Abbe, whom I ask to keep the matter secret. And in particular I don't want anybody to alarm the Cardinal or my aunt, or indeed any of our friends."

Doctor Giordano indulged in one of his placid smiles. "Bene, bene," said he, "that's natural; don't worry yourself. We will say that you have had a fall on the stairs and have dislocated your shoulder. And now that the wound is dressed you must try to sleep, and don't get feverish. I will come back to-morrow morning."

That evening of excitement was followed by some very tranquil days, and a new life began for Pierre, who at first remained indoors, reading and writing, with no other recreation than that of spending his afternoons in Dario's room, where he was certain to find Benedetta. After a somewhat intense fever lasting for eight and forty hours, cure took its usual course, and the story of the dislocated shoulder was so generally believed, that the Cardinal insisted on Donna Serafina departing from her habits of strict economy, to have a second lantern lighted on the landing in order that no such accident might occur again. And then the monotonous peacefulness was only disturbed by a final incident, a threat of trouble, as it were, with which Pierre found himself mixed up one evening when he was lingering beside the convalescent patient.

Benedetta had absented herself for a few minutes, and as Victorine, who had brought up some broth, was leaning towards the Prince to take the empty cup from him, she said in a low voice: "There's a girl, Monsieur, La Pierina, who comes here every day, crying and asking for news of you. I can't get rid of her, she's always prowling about the place, so I thought it best to tell you of it."

Unintentionally, Pierre heard her and understood everything. Dario, who was looking at him, at once guessed his thoughts, and without answering Victorine exclaimed: "Yes, Abbe, it was that brute Tito! How idiotic, eh?" At the same time, although the young man protested that he had done nothing whatever for the girl's brother to give him such a "warning," he smiled in an embarrassed way, as if vexed and even somewhat ashamed of being mixed up in an affair of the kind. And he was evidently relieved when the priest promised that he would see the girl, should she come back, and make her understand that she ought to remain at home.

"It was such a stupid affair!" the Prince repeated, with an exaggerated show of anger. "Such things are not of our times."

But all at once he ceased speaking, for Benedetta entered the room. She sat down again beside her dear patient, and the sweet, peaceful evening then took its course in the old sleepy chamber, the old, lifeless palace, whence never a sound arose.

When Pierre began to go out again he at first merely took a brief airing in the district. The Via Giulia interested him, for he knew how splendid it had been in the time of Julius II, who had dreamt of lining it with sumptuous palaces. Horse and foot races then took place there during the carnival, the Palazzo Farnese being the starting-point, and the Piazza of St. Peter's the goal. Pierre had also lately read that a French ambassador, D'Estree, Marquis de Coure, had resided at the Palazzo Sacchetti, and in 1638 had given some magnificent entertainments in honour of the birth of the Dauphin,* when on three successive days there had been racing from the Ponte Sisto to San Giovanni dei Fiorentini amidst an extraordinary display of sumptuosity: the street being strewn with flowers, and rich hangings adorning every window. On the second evening there had been fireworks on the Tiber, with a machine representing the ship Argo carrying Jason and his companions to the recovery of the Golden Fleece; and, on another occasion, the Farnese fountain, the Mascherone, had flowed with wine. Nowadays, however, all was changed. The street, bright with sunshine or steeped in shadow according to the hour, was ever silent and deserted. The heavy, ancient palatial houses, their old doors studded with plates and nails, their windows barred with huge iron gratings, always seemed to be asleep, whole storeys showing nothing but closed shutters as if to keep out the daylight for evermore. Now and again, when a door was open, you espied deep vaults, damp, cold courts, green with mildew, and encompassed by colonnades like cloisters. Then, in the outbuildings of the mansions, the low structures which had collected more particularly on the side of the Tiber, various small silent shops had installed themselves. There was a baker's, a tailor's, and a bookbinder's, some fruiterers' shops with a few tomatoes and salad plants set out on boards, and some wine-shops which claimed to sell the vintages of Frascati and Genzano, but whose customers seemed to be dead. Midway along the street was a modern prison, whose horrid yellow wall in no wise enlivened the scene, whilst, overhead, a flight of telegraph wires stretched from the arcades of the Farnese palace to the distant vista of trees beyond the river. With its infrequent traffic the street, even in the daytime, was like some sepulchral corridor where the past was crumbling into dust, and when night fell its desolation quite appalled Pierre. You did not meet a soul, you did not see a light in any window, and the glimmering gas lamps, few and far between, seemed powerless to pierce the gloom. On either hand the doors were barred and bolted, and not a sound, not a breath came from within. Even when, after a long interval, you passed a lighted wine-shop, behind whose panes of frosted glass a lamp gleamed dim and motionless, not an exclamation, not a suspicion of a laugh ever reached your ear. There was nothing alive save the two sentries placed outside the prison, one before the entrance and the other at the corner of the right-hand lane, and they remained erect and still, coagulated, as it were, in that dead street.

* Afterwards Louis XIV.—Trans.

Pierre's interest, however, was not merely confined to the Via Giulia; it extended to the whole district, once so fine and fashionable, but now fallen into sad decay, far removed from modern life, and exhaling a faint musty odour of monasticism. Towards San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, where the new Corso Vittorio Emanuele has ripped up every olden district, the lofty five-storeyed houses with their dazzling sculptured fronts contrasted violently with the black sunken dwellings of the neighbouring lanes. In the evening the globes of the electric lamps on the Corso shone out with such dazzling whiteness that the gas lamps of the Via Giulia and other streets looked like smoky lanterns. There were several old and famous thoroughfares, the Via Banchi Vecchi, the Via del Pellegrino, the Via di Monserrato, and an infinity of cross-streets which intersected and connected the others, all going towards the Tiber, and for the most part so narrow that vehicles scarcely had room to pass. And each street had its church, a multitude of churches all more or less alike, highly decorated, gilded, and painted, and open only at service time when they were full of sunlight and incense. In the Via Giulia, in addition to San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, San Biagio della Pagnotta, San Eligio degli Orefici, and three or four others, there was the so-called Church of the Dead, Santa Maria dell' Orazione; and this church, which is at the lower end behind the Farnese palace, was often visited by Pierre, who liked to dream there of the wild life of Rome, and of the pious brothers of the Confraternita della Morte, who officiate there, and whose mission is to search for and bury such poor outcasts as die in the Campagna. One evening he was present at the funeral of two unknown men, whose bodies, after remaining unburied for quite a fortnight, had been discovered in a field near the Appian Way.

However, Pierre's favourite promenade soon became the new quay of the Tiber beyond the Palazzo Boccanera. He had merely to take the narrow lane skirting the mansion to reach a spot where he found much food for reflection. Although the quay was not yet finished, the work seemed to be quite abandoned. There were heaps of rubbish, blocks of stone, broken fences, and dilapidated tool-sheds all around. To such a height had it been necessary to carry the quay walls—designed to protect the city from floods, for the river bed has been rising for centuries past—that the old terrace of the Boccanera gardens, with its double flight of steps to which pleasure boats had once been moored, now lay in a hollow, threatened with annihilation whenever the works should be finished. But nothing had yet been levelled; the soil, brought thither for making up the bank, lay as it had fallen from the carts, and on all sides were pits and mounds interspersed with the abandoned building materials. Wretched urchins came to play there, workmen without work slept in the sunshine, and women after washing ragged linen spread it out to dry upon the stones. Nevertheless the spot proved a happy, peaceful refuge for Pierre, one fruitful in inexhaustible reveries when for hours at a time he lingered gazing at the river, the quays, and the city, stretching in front of him and on either hand.

At eight in the morning the sun already gilded the vast opening. On turning to the left he perceived the roofs of the Trastevere, of a misty, bluish grey against the dazzling sky. Then, just beyond the apse of San Giovanni, on the right, the river curved, and on its other bank the poplars of the Ospedale di Santo Spirito formed a green curtain, while the castle of Sant' Angelo showed brightly in the distance. But Pierre's eyes dwelt more particularly on the bank just in front of him, for there he found some lingering vestiges of old Rome. On that side indeed between the Ponte Sisto and the Ponte Sant' Angelo, the quays, which were to imprison the river within high, white, fortress-like walls, had not yet been raised, and the bank with its remnants of the old papal city conjured up an extraordinary vision of the middle ages. The houses, descending to the river brink, were cracked, scorched, rusted by innumerable burning summers, like so many antique bronzes. Down below there were black vaults into which the water flowed, piles upholding walls, and fragments of Roman stone-work plunging into the river bed; then, rising from the shore, came steep, broken stairways, green with moisture, tiers of terraces, storeys with tiny windows pierced here and their in hap-hazard fashion, houses perched atop of other houses, and the whole jumbled together with a fantastic commingling of balconies and wooden galleries, footbridges spanning courtyards, clumps of trees growing apparently on the very roofs, and attics rising from amidst pinky tiles. The contents of a drain fell noisily into the river from a worn and soiled gorge of stone; and wherever the houses stood back and the bank appeared, it was covered with wild vegetation, weeds, shrubs, and mantling ivy, which trailed like a kingly robe of state. And in the glory of the sun the wretchedness and dirt vanished, the crooked, jumbled houses seemed to be of gold, draped with the purple of the red petticoats and the dazzling white of the shifts which hung drying from their windows; while higher still, above the district, the Janiculum rose into all the luminary's dazzlement, uprearing the slender profile of Sant' Onofrio amidst cypresses and pines.

Leaning on the parapet of the quay wall, Pierre sadly gazed at the Tiber for hours at a time. Nothing could convey an idea of the weariness of those old waters, the mournful slowness of their flow along that Babylonian trench where they were confined within huge, bare, livid prison-like walls. In the sunlight their yellowness was gilded, and the faint quiver of the current brought ripples of green and blue; but as soon as the shade spread over it the stream became opaque like mud, so turbid in its venerable old age that it no longer even gave back a reflection of the houses lining it. And how desolate was its abandonment, what a stream of silence and solitude it was! After the winter rains it might roll furiously and threateningly, but during the long months of bright weather it traversed Rome without a sound, and Pierre could remain there all day long without seeing either a skiff or a sail. The two or three little steam-boats which arrived from the coast, the few tartanes which brought wine from Sicily, never came higher than the Aventine, beyond which there was only a watery desert in which here and there, at long intervals, a motionless angler let his line dangle. All that Pierre ever saw in the way of shipping was a sort of ancient, covered pinnace, a rotting Noah's ark, moored on the right beside the old bank, and he fancied that it might be used as a washhouse, though on no occasion did he see any one in it. And on a neck of mud there also lay a stranded boat with one side broken in, a lamentable symbol of the impossibility and the relinquishment of navigation. Ah! that decay of the river, that decay of father Tiber, as dead as the famous ruins whose dust he is weary of laving! And what an evocation! all the centuries of history, so many things, so many men, that those yellow waters have reflected till, full of lassitude and disgust, they have grown heavy, silent and deserted, longing only for annihilation.

One morning on the river bank Pierre found La Pierina standing behind an abandoned tool-shed. With her neck extended, she was looking fixedly at the window of Dario's room, at the corner of the quay and the lane. Doubtless she had been frightened by Victorine's severe reception, and had not dared to return to the mansion; but some servant, possibly, had told her which was the young Prince's window, and so she now came to this spot, where without wearying she waited for a glimpse of the man she loved, for some sign of life and salvation, the mere hope of which made her heart leap. Deeply touched by the way in which she hid herself, all humility and quivering with adoration, the priest approached her, and instead of scolding her and driving her away as he had been asked to do, spoke to her in a gentle, cheerful manner, asking her for news of her people as though nothing had happened, and at last contriving to mention Dario's name in order that she might understand that he would be up and about again within a fortnight. On perceiving Pierre, La Pierina had started with timidity and distrust as if anxious to flee; but when she understood him, tears of happiness gushed from her eyes, and with a bright smile she kissed her hand to him, calling: "Grazie, grazie, thanks, thanks!" And thereupon she darted away, and he never saw her again.

On another morning at an early hour, as Pierre was going to say mass at Santa Brigida on the Piazza Farnese, he was surprised to meet Benedetta coming out of the church and carrying a small phial of oil. She evinced no embarrassment, but frankly told him that every two or three days she went thither to obtain from the beadle a few drops of the oil used for the lamp that burnt before an antique wooden statue of the Madonna, in which she had perfect confidence. She even confessed that she had never had confidence in any other Madonna, having never obtained anything from any other, though she had prayed to several of high repute, Madonnas of marble and even of silver. And so her heart was full of ardent devotion for the holy image which refused her nothing. And she declared in all simplicity, as though the matter were quite natural and above discussion, that the few drops of oil which she applied, morning and evening, to Dario's wound, were alone working his cure, so speedy a cure as to be quite miraculous. Pierre, fairly aghast, distressed indeed to find such childish, superstitious notions in one so full of sense and grace and passion, did not even venture to smile.

In the evenings, when he came back from his strolls and spent an hour or so in Dario's room, he would for a time divert the patient by relating what he had done and seen and thought of during the day. And when he again ventured to stray beyond the district, and became enamoured of the lovely gardens of Rome, which he visited as soon as they opened in the morning in order that he might be virtually alone, he delighted the young prince and Benedetta with his enthusiasm, his rapturous passion for the splendid trees, the plashing water, and the spreading terraces whence the views were so sublime. It was not the most extensive of these gardens which the more deeply impressed his heart. In the grounds of the Villa Borghese, the little Roman Bois de Boulogne, there were certainly some majestic clumps of greenery, some regal avenues where carriages took a turn in the afternoon before the obligatory drive to the Pincio; but Pierre was more touched by the reserved garden of the villa—that villa dazzling with marble and now containing one of the finest museums in the world. There was a simple lawn of fine grass with a vast central basin surmounted by a figure of Venus, nude and white; and antique fragments, vases, statues, columns, and sarcophagi were ranged symmetrically all around the deserted, sunlit yet melancholy, sward. On returning on one occasion to the Pincio Pierre spent a delightful morning there, penetrated by the charm of this little nook with its scanty evergreens, and its admirable vista of all Rome and St. Peter's rising up afar off in the soft limpid radiance. At the Villa Albani and the Villa Pamphili he again came upon superb parasol pines, tall, stately, and graceful, and powerful elm-trees with twisted limbs and dusky foliage. In the Pamphili grounds, the elm-trees steeped the paths in a delicious half-light, the lake with its weeping willows and tufts of reeds had a dreamy aspect, while down below the parterre displayed a fantastic floral mosaic bright with the various hues of flowers and foliage. That which most particularly struck Pierre, however, in this, the noblest, most spacious, and most carefully tended garden of Rome, was the novel and unexpected view that he suddenly obtained of St. Peter's, whilst skirting a low wall: a view whose symbolism for ever clung to him. Rome had completely vanished, and between the slopes of Monte Mario and another wooded height which hid the city, there only appeared the colossal dome which seemed to be poised on an infinity of scattered blocks, now white, now red. These were the houses of the Borgo, the jumbled piles of the Vatican and the Basilica which the huge dome surmounted and annihilated, showing greyly blue in the light blue of the heavens, whilst far away stretched a delicate, boundless vista of the Campagna, likewise of a bluish tint.

It was, however, more particularly in the less sumptuous gardens, those of a more homely grace, that Pierre realised that even things have souls. Ah! that Villa Mattei on one side of the Coelius with its terraced grounds, its sloping alleys edged with laurel, aloe, and spindle tree, its box-plants forming arbours, its oranges, its roses, and its fountains! Pierre spent some delicious hours there, and only found a similar charm on visiting the Aventine, where three churches are embowered in verdure. The little garden of Santa Sabina, the birthplace of the Dominican order, is closed on all sides and affords no view: it slumbers in quiescence, warm and perfumed by its orange-trees, amongst which that planted by St. Dominic stands huge and gnarled but still laden with ripe fruit. At the adjoining Priorato, however, the garden, perched high above the Tiber, overlooks a vast expanse, with the river and the buildings on either bank as far as the summit of the Janiculum. And in these gardens of Rome Pierre ever found the same clipped box-shrubs, the same eucalypti with white trunks and pale leaves long like hair, the same ilex-trees squat and dusky, the same giant pines, the same black cypresses, the same marbles whitening amidst tufts of roses, and the same fountains gurgling under mantling ivy. Never did he enjoy more gentle, sorrow-tinged delight than at the Villa of Pope Julius, where all the life of a gay and sensual period is suggested by the semi-circular porticus opening on the gardens, a porticus decorated with paintings, golden trellis-work laden with flowers, amidst which flutter flights of smiling Cupids. Then, on the evening when he returned from the Farnesina, he declared that he had brought all the dead soul of ancient Rome away with him, and it was not the paintings executed after Raffaelle's designs that had touched him, it was rather the pretty hall on the river side decorated in soft blue and pink and lilac, with an art devoid of genius yet so charming and so Roman; and in particular it was the abandoned garden once stretching down to the Tiber, and now shut off from it by the new quay, and presenting an aspect of woeful desolation, ravaged, bossy and weedy like a cemetery, albeit the golden fruit of orange and citron tree still ripened there.

And for the last time a shock came to Pierre's heart on the lovely evening when he visited the Villa Medici. There he was on French soil.* And again what a marvellous garden he found with box-plants, and pines, and avenues full of magnificence and charm! What a refuge for antique reverie was that wood of ilex-trees, so old and so sombre, where the sun in declining cast fiery gleams of red gold amidst the sheeny bronze of the foliage. You ascend by endless steps, and from the crowning belvedere on high you embrace all Rome at a glance as though by opening your arms you could seize it in its entirety. From the villa's dining-room, decorated with portraits of all the artists who have successfully sojourned there, and from the spacious peaceful library one beholds the same splendid, broad, all-conquering panorama, a panorama of unlimited ambition, whose infinite ought to set in the hearts of the young men dwelling there a determination to subjugate the world. Pierre, who came thither opposed to the principle of the "Prix de Rome," that traditional, uniform education so dangerous for originality, was for a moment charmed by the warm peacefulness, the limpid solitude of the garden, and the sublime horizon where the wings of genius seemed to flutter. Ah! how delightful, to be only twenty and to live for three years amidst such infinite sweetness, encompassed by the finest works of man; to say to oneself that one is as yet too young to produce, and to reflect, and seek, and learn how to enjoy, suffer, and love! But Pierre afterwards reflected that this was not a fit task for youth, and that to appreciate the divine enjoyment of such a retreat, all art and blue sky, ripe age was needed, age with victories already gained and weariness following upon the accomplishment of work. He chatted with some of the young pensioners, and remarked that if those who were inclined to dreaminess and contemplation, like those who could merely claim mediocrity, accommodated themselves to this life cloistered in the art of the past, on the other hand artists of active bent and personal temperament pined with impatience, their eyes ever turned towards Paris, their souls eager to plunge into the furnace of battle and production.

* Here is the French Academy, where winners of the "Prix de
Rome" in painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving, and
music are maintained by the French Government for three
years. The creation dates from Louis XIV.—Trans.

All those gardens of which Pierre spoke to Dario and Benedetta with so much rapture, awoke within them the memory of the garden of the Villa Montefiori, now a waste, but once so green, planted with the finest orange-trees of Rome, a grove of centenarian orange-trees where they had learnt to love one another. And the memory of their early love brought thoughts of their present situation and their future prospects. To these the conversation always reverted, and evening after evening Pierre witnessed their delight, and heard them talk of coming happiness like lovers transported to the seventh heaven. The suit for the dissolution of Benedetta's marriage was now assuming a more and more favourable aspect. Guided by a powerful hand, Donna Serafina was apparently acting very vigorously, for almost every day she had some further good news to report. She was indeed anxious to finish the affair both for the continuity and for the honour of the name, for on the one hand Dario refused to marry any one but his cousin, and on the other this marriage would explain everything and put an end to an intolerable situation. The scandalous rumours which circulated both in the white and the black world quite incensed her, and a victory was the more necessary as Leo XIII, already so aged, might be snatched away at any moment, and in the Conclave which would follow she desired that her brother's name should shine forth with untarnished, sovereign radiance. Never had the secret ambition of her life, the hope that her race might give a third pope to the Church, filled her with so much passion. It was as if she therein sought a consolation for the harsh abandonment of Advocate Morano. Invariably clad in sombre garb, ever active and slim, so tightly laced that from behind one might have taken her for a young girl, she was so to say the black soul of that old palace; and Pierre, who met her everywhere, prowling and inspecting like a careful house-keeper, and jealously watching over her brother the Cardinal, bowed to her in silence, chilled to the heart by the stern look of her withered wrinkled face in which was set the large, opiniative nose of her family. However she barely returned his bows, for she still disdained that paltry foreign priest, and only tolerated him in order to please Monsignor Nani and Viscount Philibert de la Choue.

A witness every evening of the anxious delight and impatience of Benedetta and Dario, Pierre by degrees became almost as impassioned as themselves, as desirous for an early solution. Benedetta's suit was about to come before the Congregation of the Council once more. Monsignor Palma, the defender of the marriage, had demanded a supplementary inquiry after the favourable decision arrived at in the first instance by a bare majority of one vote—a majority which the Pope would certainly not have thought sufficient had he been asked for his ratification. So the question now was to gain votes among the ten cardinals who formed the Congregation, to persuade and convince them, and if possible ensure an almost unanimous pronouncement. The task was arduous, for, instead of facilitating matters, Benedetta's relationship to Cardinal Boccanera raised many difficulties, owing to the intriguing spirit rife at the Vatican, the spite of rivals who, by perpetuating the scandal, hoped to destroy Boccanera's chance of ever attaining to the papacy. Every afternoon, however, Donna Serafina devoted herself to the task of winning votes under the direction of her confessor, Father Lorenza, whom she saw daily at the Collegio Germanico, now the last refuge of the Jesuits in Rome, for they have ceased to be masters of the Gesu. The chief hope of success lay in Prada's formal declaration that he would not put in an appearance. The whole affair wearied and irritated him; the imputations levelled against him as a man, seemed to him supremely odious and ridiculous; and he no longer even took the trouble to reply to the assignations which were sent to him. He acted indeed as if he had never been married, though deep in his heart the wound dealt to his passion and his pride still lingered, bleeding afresh whenever one or another of the scandalous rumours in circulation reached his ears. However, as their adversary desisted from all action, one can understand that the hopes of Benedetta and Dario increased, the more so as hardly an evening passed without Donna Serafina telling them that she believed she had gained the support of another cardinal.

But the man who terrified them all was Monsignor Palma, whom the Congregation had appointed to defend the sacred ties of matrimony. His rights and privileges were almost unlimited, he could appeal yet again, and in any case would make the affair drag on as long as it pleased him. His first report, in reply to Morano's memoir, had been a terrible blow, and it was now said that a second one which he was preparing would prove yet more pitiless, establishing as a fundamental principle of the Church that it could not annul a marriage whose nonconsummation was purely and simply due to the action of the wife in refusing obedience to her husband. In presence of such energy and logic, it was unlikely that the cardinals, even if sympathetic, would dare to advise the Holy Father to dissolve the marriage. And so discouragement was once more overcoming Benedetta when Donna Serafina, on returning from a visit to Monsignor Nani, calmed her somewhat by telling her that a mutual friend had undertaken to deal with Monsignor Palma. However, said she, even if they succeeded, it would doubtless cost them a large sum.

Monsignor Palma, a theologist expert in all canonical affairs, and a perfectly honest man in pecuniary matters, had met with a great misfortune in his life. He had a niece, a poor and lovely girl, for whom, unhappily, in his declining years he conceived an insensate passion, with the result that to avoid a scandal he was compelled to marry her to a rascal who now preyed upon her and even beat her. And the prelate was now passing through a fearful crisis, weary of reducing himself to beggary, and indeed no longer having the money necessary to extricate his nephew by marriage from a very nasty predicament, the result of cheating at cards. So the idea was to save the young man by a considerable pecuniary payment, and then to procure him employment without asking aught of his uncle, who, as if offering complicity, came in tears one evening, when night had fallen, to thank Donna Serafina for her exceeding goodness.

Pierre was with Dario that evening when Benedetta entered the room, laughing and joyfully clapping her bands. "It's done, it's done!" she said, "he has just left aunt, and vowed eternal gratitude to her. He will now be obliged to show himself amiable."

However Dario distrustfully inquired: "But was he made to sign anything, did he enter into a formal engagement?"

"Oh! no; how could one do that? It's such a delicate matter," replied Benedetta. "But people say that he is a very honest man." Nevertheless, in spite of these words, she herself became uneasy. What if Monsignor Palma should remain incorruptible in spite of the great service which had been rendered him? Thenceforth this idea haunted them, and their suspense began once more.

Dario, eager to divert his mind, was imprudent enough to get up before he was perfectly cured, and, his wound reopening, he was obliged to take to his bed again for a few days. Every evening, as previously, Pierre strove to enliven him with an account of his strolls. The young priest was now getting bolder, rambling in turn through all the districts of Rome, and discovering the many "classical" curiosities catalogued in the guide-books. One evening he spoke with a kind of affection of the principal squares of the city which he had first thought commonplace, but which now seemed to him very varied, each with original features of its own. There was the noble Piazza del Popolo of such monumental symmetry and so full of sunlight; there was the Piazza di Spagna, the lively meeting-place of foreigners, with its double flight of a hundred and thirty steps gilded by the sun; there was the vast Piazza Colonna, always swarming with people, and the most Italian of all the Roman squares from the presence of the idle, careless crowd which ever lounged round the column of Marcus Aurelius as if waiting for fortune to fall from heaven; there was also the long and regular Piazza Navona, deserted since the market was no longer held there, and retaining a melancholy recollection of its former bustling life; and there was the Campo dei Fiori, which was invaded each morning by the tumultuous fruit and vegetable markets, quite a plantation of huge umbrellas sheltering heaps of tomatoes, pimentoes, and grapes amidst a noisy stream of dealers and housewives. Pierre's great surprise, however, was the Piazza del Campidoglio—the "Square of the Capitol"—which to him suggested a summit, an open spot overlooking the city and the world, but which he found to be small and square, and on three sides enclosed by palaces, whilst on the fourth side the view was of little extent.* There are no passers-by there; visitors usually come up by a flight of steps bordered by a few palm-trees, only foreigners making use of the winding carriage-ascent. The vehicles wait, and the tourists loiter for a while with their eyes raised to the admirable equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, in antique bronze, which occupies the centre of the piazza. Towards four o'clock, when the sun gilds the left-hand palace, and the slender statues of its entablature show vividly against the blue sky, you might think yourself in some warm cosy square of a little provincial town, what with the women of the neighbourhood who sit knitting under the arcade, and the bands of ragged urchins who disport themselves on all sides like school-boys in a playground.

* The Piazza del Campidoglio is really a depression between the
Capitolium proper and the northern height called the Arx. It is
supposed to have been the exact site of Romulus's traditional
Asylum.—Trans.

Then, on another evening Pierre told Benedetta and Dario of his admiration for the Roman fountains, for in no other city of the world does water flow so abundantly and magnificently in fountains of bronze and marble, from the boat-shaped Fontana della Barcaccia on the Piazza di Spagna, the Triton on the Piazza Barberini, and the Tortoises which give their name to the Piazza delle Tartarughe, to the three fountains of the Piazza Navona where Bernini's vast central composition of rock and river-gods rises so triumphantly, and to the colossal and pompous fountain of Trevi, where King Neptune stands on high attended by lofty figures of Health and Fruitfulness. And on yet another evening Pierre came home quite pleased, relating that he had at last discovered why it was that the old streets around the Capitol and along the Tiber seemed to him so strange: it was because they had no footways, and pedestrians, instead of skirting the walls, invariably took the middle of the road, leisurely wending their way among the vehicles. Pierre was very fond of those old districts with their winding lanes, their tiny squares so irregular in shape, and their huge square mansions swamped by a multitudinous jumble of little houses. He found a charm, too, in the district of the Esquiline, where, besides innumerable flights of ascending steps, each of grey pebbles edged with white stone, there were sudden sinuous slopes, tiers of terraces, seminaries and convents, lifeless, with their windows ever closed, and lofty, blank walls above which a superb palm-tree would now and again soar into the spotless blue of the sky. And on yet another evening, having strolled into the Campagna beside the Tiber and above the Ponte Molle, he came back full of enthusiasm for a form of classical art which hitherto he had scarcely appreciated. Along the river bank, however, he had found the very scenery that Poussin so faithfully depicted: the sluggish, yellow stream fringed with reeds; low riven cliffs, whose chalky whiteness showed against the ruddy background of a far-stretching, undulating plain, bounded by blue hills; a few spare trees with a ruined porticus opening on to space atop of the bank, and a line of pale-hued sheep descending to drink, whilst the shepherd, with an elbow resting on the trunk of an ilex-tree, stood looking on. It was a special kind of beauty, broad and ruddy, made up of nothing, sometimes simplified into a series of low, horizontal lines, but ever ennobled by the great memories it evoked: the Roman legions marching along the paved highways across the bare Campagna; the long slumber of the middle ages; and then the awakening of antique nature in the midst of Catholicism, whereby, for the second time, Rome became ruler of the world.

One day when Pierre came back from seeing the great modern cemetery, the Campo Verano, he found Celia, as well as Benedetta, by the side of Dario's bed. "What, Monsieur l'Abbe!" exclaimed the little Princess when she learnt where he had been; "it amuses you to visit the dead?"

"Oh those Frenchmen," remarked Dario, to whom the mere idea of a cemetery was repulsive; "those Frenchmen seem to take a pleasure in making their lives wretched with their partiality for gloomy scenes."

"But there is no escaping the reality of death," gently replied Pierre; "the best course is to look it in the face."

This made the Prince quite angry. "Reality, reality," said he, "when reality isn't pleasant I don't look at it; I try never to think of it even."

In spite of this rejoinder, Pierre, with his smiling, placid air, went on enumerating the things which had struck him: first, the admirable manner in which the cemetery was kept, then the festive appearance which it derived from the bright autumn sun, and the wonderful profusion in which marble was lavished in slabs, statues, and chapels. The ancient atavism had surely been at work, the sumptuous mausoleums of the Appian Way had here sprung up afresh, making death a pretext for the display of pomp and pride. In the upper part of the cemetery the Roman nobility had a district of its own, crowded with veritable temples, colossal statues, groups of several figures; and if at times the taste shown in these monuments was deplorable, it was none the less certain that millions had been expended on them. One charming feature of the place, said Pierre, was that the marbles, standing among yews and cypresses were remarkably well preserved, white and spotless; for, if the summer sun slowly gilded them, there were none of those stains of moss and rain which impart an aspect of melancholy decay to the statues of northern climes.

Touched by the discomfort of Dario, Benedetta, hitherto silent, ended by interrupting Pierre. "And was the hunt interesting?" she asked, turning to Celia.

The little Princess had been taken by her mother to see a fox-hunt, and had been speaking of it when the priest entered the room.

"Yes, it was very interesting, my dear," she replied; "the meet was at noon near the tomb of Caecilia Metella, where a buffet had been arranged under a tent. And there was such a number of people—the foreign colony, the young men of the embassies, and some officers, not to mention ourselves—all the men in scarlet and a great many ladies in habits. The 'throw-off' was at one o'clock, and the gallop lasted more than two hours and a half, so that the fox had a very long run. I wasn't able to follow, but all the same I saw some extraordinary things—a great wall which the whole hunt had to leap, and then ditches and hedges—a mad race indeed in the rear of the hounds. There were two accidents, but nothing serious; one gentleman, who was unseated, sprained his wrist badly, and another broke his leg."*

* The Roman Hunt, which counts about one hundred subscribers,
has flourished since 1840. There is a kennel of English
hounds, an English huntsman and whip, and a stable of
English hunters.—Trans.

Dario had listened to Celia with passionate interest, for fox-hunting is one of the great pleasures of Rome, and the Campagna, flat and yet bristling with obstacles, is certainly well adapted to the sport. "Ah!" said the young Prince in a despairing tone, "how idiotic it is to be riveted to this room! I shall end by dying of ennui!"

Benedetta contented herself with smiling; neither reproach nor expression of sadness came from her at this candid display of egotism. Her own happiness at having him all to herself in the room where she nursed him was great indeed; still her love, at once full of youth and good sense, included a maternal element, and she well understood that he hardly amused himself, deprived as he was of his customary pleasures and severed from his friends, few of whom he was willing to receive, for he feared that they might think the story of the dislocated shoulder suspicious. Of course there were no more fetes, no more evenings at the theatre, no more flirtations. But above everything else Dario missed the Corso, and suffered despairingly at no longer seeing or learning anything by watching the procession of Roman society from four to five each afternoon. Accordingly, as soon as an intimate called, there were endless questions: Had the visitor seen so and so? Had such a one reappeared? How had a certain friend's love affair ended? Was any new adventure setting the city agog? And so forth; all the petty frivolities, nine days' wonders, and puerile intrigues in which the young Prince had hitherto expended his manly energy.

After a pause Celia, who was fond of coming to him with innocent gossip, fixed her candid eyes on him—the fathomless eyes of an enigmatical virgin, and resumed: "How long it takes to set a shoulder right!"

Had she, child as she was, with love her only business, divined the truth? Dario in his embarrassment glanced at Benedetta, who still smiled. However, the little Princess was already darting to another subject: "Ah! you know, Dario, at the Corso yesterday I saw a lady—" Then she stopped short, surprised and embarrassed that these words should have escaped her. However, in all bravery she resumed like one who had been a friend since childhood, sharing many a little love secret: "Yes, a very pretty person whom you know. Well, she had a bouquet of white roses with her all the same."

At this Benedetta indulged in a burst of frank merriment, and Dario, still looking at her, also laughed. She had twitted him during the early days because no young woman ever sent to make inquiries about him. For his part, he was not displeased with the rupture, for the continuance of the connection might have proved embarrassing; and so, although his vanity may have been slightly hurt, the news that he was already replaced in La Tonietta's affections was welcome rather than otherwise. "Ah!" he contented himself with saying, "the absent are always in the wrong."

"The man one loves is never absent," declared Celia with her grave, candid air.

However, Benedetta had stepped up to the bed to raise the young man's pillows: "Never mind, Dario mio," said she, "all those things are over; I mean to keep you, and you will only have me to love."

He gave her a passionate glance and kissed her hair. She spoke the truth: he had never loved any one but her, and she was not mistaken in her anticipation of keeping him always to herself alone, as soon as they should be wedded. To her great delight, since she had been nursing him he had become quite childish again, such as he had been when she had learnt to love him under the orange-trees of the Villa Montefiori. He retained a sort of puerility, doubtless the outcome of impoverished blood, that return to childhood which one remarks amongst very ancient races; and he toyed on his bed with pictures, gazed for hours at photographs, which made him laugh. Moreover, his inability to endure suffering had yet increased; he wished Benedetta to be gay and sing, and amused her with his petty egotism which led him to dream of a life of continual joy with her. Ah! how pleasant it would be to live together and for ever in the sunlight, to do nothing and care for nothing, and even if the world should crumble somewhere to heed it not!

"One thing which greatly pleases me," suddenly said the young Prince, "is that Monsieur l'Abbe has ended by falling in love with Rome."

Pierre admitted it with a good grace.

"We told you so," remarked Benedetta. "A great deal of time is needed for one to understand and love Rome. If you had only stayed here for a fortnight you would have gone off with a deplorable idea of us, but now that you have been here for two full months we are quite at ease, for you will never think of us without affection."

She looked exceedingly charming as she spoke these words, and Pierre again bowed. However, he had already given thought to the phenomenon, and fancied he could explain it. When a stranger comes to Rome he brings with him a Rome of his own, a Rome such as he dreams of, so ennobled by imagination that the real Rome proves a terrible disenchantment. And so it is necessary to wait for habituation, for the mediocrity of the reality to soften, and for the imagination to have time to kindle again, and only behold things such as they are athwart the prodigious splendour of the past.

However, Celia had risen and was taking leave. "Good-bye, dear," she said; "I hope the wedding will soon take place. You know, Dario, that I mean to be betrothed before the end of the month. Oh yes, I intend to make my father give a grand entertainment. And how nice it would be if the two weddings could take place at the same time!"

Two days later, after a long ramble through the Trastevere district, followed by a visit to the Palazzo Farnese, Pierre felt that he could at last understand the terrible, melancholy truth about Rome. He had several times already strolled through the Trastevere, attracted towards its wretched denizens by his compassion for all who suffered. Ah! that quagmire of wretchedness and ignorance! He knew of abominable nooks in the faubourgs of Paris, frightful "rents" and "courts" where people rotted in heaps, but there was nothing in France to equal the listless, filthy stagnation of the Trastevere. On the brightest days a dank gloom chilled the sinuous, cellar-like lanes, and the smell of rotting vegetables, rank oil, and human animality brought on fits of nausea. Jumbled together in a confusion which artists of romantic turn would admire, the antique, irregular houses had black, gaping entrances diving below ground, outdoor stairways conducting to upper floors, and wooden balconies which only a miracle upheld. There were crumbling fronts, shored up with beams; sordid lodgings whose filth and bareness could be seen through shattered windows; and numerous petty shops, all the open-air cook-stalls of a lazy race which never lighted a fire at home: you saw frying-shops with heaps of polenta, and fish swimming in stinking oil, and dealers in cooked vegetables displaying huge turnips, celery, cauliflowers, and spinach, all cold and sticky. The butcher's meat was black and clumsily cut up; the necks of the animals bristled with bloody clots, as though the heads had simply been torn away. The baker's loaves, piled on planks, looked like little round paving stones; at the beggarly greengrocers' merely a few pimentoes and fir-apples were shown under the strings of dry tomatoes which festooned the doorways; and the only shops which were at all attractive were those of the pork butchers with their salted provisions and their cheese, whose pungent smell slightly attenuated the pestilential reek of the gutters. Lottery offices, displaying lists of winning numbers, alternated with wine-shops, of which latter there was a fresh one every thirty yards with large inscriptions setting forth that the best wines of Genzano, Marino, and Frascati were to be found within. And the whole district teemed with ragged, grimy denizens, children half naked and devoured by vermin, bare-headed, gesticulating and shouting women, whose skirts were stiff with grease, old men who remained motionless on benches amidst swarms of hungry flies; idleness and agitation appearing on all sides, whilst cobblers sat on the sidewalks quietly plying their trade, and little donkeys pulled carts hither and thither, and men drove turkeys along, whip in hand, and hands of beggars rushed upon the few anxious tourists who had timorously ventured into the district. At the door of a little tailor's shop an old house-pail dangled full of earth, in which a succulent plant was flowering. And from every window and balcony, as from the many cords which stretched across the street from house to house, all the household washing hung like bunting, nameless drooping rags, the symbolical banners of abominable misery.

Pierre's fraternal, soul filled with pity at the sight. Ah! yes, it was necessary to demolish all those pestilential districts where the populace had wallowed for centuries as in a poisonous gaol! He was for demolition and sanitary improvement, even if old Rome were killed and artists scandalised. Doubtless the Trastevere was already greatly changed, pierced with several new thoroughfares which let the sun stream in. And amidst the abattis of rubbish and the spacious clearings, where nothing new had yet been erected, the remaining portions of the old district seemed even blacker and more loathsome. Some day, no doubt, it would all be rebuilt, but how interesting was this phase of the city's evolution: old Rome expiring and new Rome just dawning amidst countless difficulties! To appreciate the change it was necessary to have known the filthy Rome of the past, swamped by sewage in every form. The recently levelled Ghetto had, over a course of centuries, so rotted the soil on which it stood that an awful pestilential odour yet arose from its bare site. It was only fitting that it should long remain waste, so that it might dry and become purified in the sun. In all the districts on either side of the Tiber where extensive improvements have been undertaken you find the same scenes. You follow some narrow, damp, evil-smelling street with black house-fronts and overhanging roofs, and suddenly come upon a clearing as in a forest of ancient leprous hovels. There are squares, broad footways; lofty white carved buildings yet in the rough, littered with rubbish and fenced off. On every side you find as it were a huge building yard, which the financial crisis perpetuates; the city of to-morrow arrested in its growth, stranded there in its monstrous, precocious, surprising infancy. Nevertheless, therein lies good and healthful work, such as was and is absolutely necessary if Rome is to become a great modern city, instead of being left to rot, to dwindle into a mere ancient curiosity, a museum show-piece.

That day, as Pierre went from the Trastevere to the Palazzo Farnese, where he was expected, he chose a roundabout route, following the Via di Pettinari and the Via dei Giubbonari, the former so dark and narrow with a great hospital wall on one side and a row of wretched houses on the other, and the latter animated by a constant stream of people and enlivened by the jewellers' windows, full of big gold chains, and the displays of the drapers' shops, where stuffs hung in bright red, blue, green, and yellow lengths. And the popular district through which he had roamed and the trading district which he was now crossing reminded him of the castle fields with their mass of workpeople reduced to mendicity by lack of employment and forced to camp in the superb, unfinished, abandoned mansions. Ah! the poor, sad people, who were yet so childish, kept in the ignorance and credulity of a savage race by centuries of theocracy, so habituated to mental night and bodily suffering that even to-day they remained apart from the social awakening, simply desirous of enjoying their pride, indolence, and sunlight in peace! They seemed both blind and deaf in their decadence, and whilst Rome was being overturned they continued to lead the stagnant life of former times, realising nought but the worries of the improvements, the demolition of the old favourite districts, the consequent change in habits, and the rise in the cost of food, as if indeed they would rather have gone without light, cleanliness, and health, since these could only be secured by a great financial and labour crisis. And yet, at bottom, it was solely for the people, the populace, that Rome was being cleansed and rebuilt with the idea of making it a great modern capital, for democracy lies at the end of these present day transformations; it is the people who will inherit the cities whence dirt and disease are being expelled, and where the law of labour will end by prevailing and killing want. And so, though one may curse the dusting and repairing of the ruins and the stripping of all the wild flora from the Colosseum, though one may wax indignant at sight of the hideous fortress like ramparts which imprison the Tiber, and bewail the old romantic banks with their greenery and their antique dwellings dipping into the stream, one must at the same time acknowledge that life springs from death, and that to-morrow must perforce blossom in the dust of the past.

While thinking of all these things Pierre had reached the deserted, stern-looking Piazza Farnese, and for a moment he looked up at the bare monumental facade of the heavy square Palazzo, its lofty entrance where hung the tricolour, its rows of windows and its famous cornice sculptured with such marvellous art. Then he went in. A friend of Narcisse Habert, one of the attaches of the embassy to the King of Italy, was waiting for him, having offered to show him over the huge pile, the finest palace in Rome, which France had leased as a lodging for her ambassador.* Ah! that colossal, sumptuous, deadly dwelling, with its vast court whose porticus is so dark and damp, its giant staircase with low steps, its endless corridors, its immense galleries and halls. All was sovereign pomp blended with death. An icy, penetrating chill fell from the walls. With a discreet smile the attache owned that the embassy was frozen in winter and baked in summer. The only part of the building which was at all lively and pleasant was the first storey, overlooking the Tiber, which the ambassador himself occupied. From the gallery there, containing the famous frescoes of Annibale Caracci, one can see the Janiculum, the Corsini gardens, and the Acqua Paola above San Pietro in Montorio. Then, after a vast drawing-room comes the study, peaceful and pleasant, and enlivened by sunshine. But the dining-room, the bed-chambers, and other apartments occupied by the personnel look out on to the mournful gloom of a side street. All these vast rooms, twenty and four-and-twenty feet high, have admirable carved or painted ceilings, bare walls, a few of them decorated with frescoes, and incongruous furniture, superb pier tables mingling with modern bric-a-brac. And things become abominable when you enter the gala reception-rooms overlooking the piazza, for there you no longer find an article of furniture, no longer a hanging, nothing but disaster, a series of magnificent deserted halls given over to rats and spiders. The embassy occupies but one of them, where it heaps up its dusty archives. Near by is a huge hall occupying the height of two floors, and thus sixty feet in elevation. Reserved by the owner of the palace, the ex-King of Naples, it has become a mere lumber-room where maquettes, unfinished statues, and a very fine sarcophagus are stowed away amidst all kinds of remnants. And this is but a part of the palace. The ground floor is altogether uninhabited; the French "Ecole de Rome" occupies a corner of the second floor; while the embassy huddles in chilly fashion in the most habitable corner of the first floor, compelled to abandon everything else and lock the doors to spare itself the useless trouble of sweeping. No doubt it is grand to live in the Palazzo Farnese, built by Pope Paul III and for more than a century inhabited by cardinals; but how cruel the discomfort and how frightful the melancholy of this huge ruin, three-fourths of whose rooms are dead, useless, impossible, cut off from life. And the evenings, oh! the evenings, when porch, court, stairs, and corridors are invaded by dense gloom, against which a few smoky gas lamps struggle in vain, when a long, long journey lies before one through the lugubrious desert of stone, before one reaches the ambassador's warm and cheerful drawing-room!

* The French have two embassies at Rome: one at the Palazzo
Farnese, to the Italian Court, and the other at the Palazzo
Rospigliosi, to the Vatican.—Trans.

Pierre came away quite aghast. And, as he walked along, the many other grand palaces which he had seen during his strolls rose before him, one and all of them stripped of their splendour, shorn of their princely establishments, let out in uncomfortable flats! What could be done with those grandiose galleries and halls now that no fortune could defray the cost of the pompous life for which they had been built, or even feed the retinue needed to keep them up? Few indeed were the nobles who, like Prince Aldobrandini, with his numerous progeny, still occupied their entire mansions. Almost all of them let the antique dwellings of their forefathers to companies or individual tenants, reserving only a storey, and at times a mere lodging in some dark corner, for themselves. The Palazzo Chigi was let: the ground floor to bankers and the first floor to the Austrian ambassador, while the Prince and his family divided the second floor with a cardinal. The Palazzo Sciarra was let: the first floor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the second to a senator, while the Prince and his mother merely occupied the ground floor. The Palazzo Barberini was let: its ground floor, first floor, and second floor to various families, whilst the Prince found a refuge on the third floor in the rooms which had been occupied by his ancestors' lackeys. The Palazzo Borghese was let: the ground floor to a dealer in antiquities, the first floor to a Lodge of Freemasons, and the rest to various households, whilst the Prince only retained the use of a small suite of apartments. And the Palazzo Odescalchi, the Palazzo Colonna, the Palazzo Doria were let: their Princes reduced to the position of needy landlords eager to derive as much profit as possible from their property in order to make both ends meet. A blast of ruin was sweeping over the Roman patriziato, the greatest fortunes had crumbled in the financial crisis, very few remained wealthy, and what a wealth it was, stagnant and dead, which neither commerce nor industry could renew. The numerous princes who had tried speculation were stripped of their fortunes. The others, terrified, called upon to pay enormous taxes, amounting to nearly one-third of their incomes, could henceforth only wait and behold their last stagnant millions dwindle away till they were exhausted or distributed according to the succession laws. Such wealth as remained to these nobles must perish, for, like everything else, wealth perishes when it lacks a soil in which it may fructify. In all this there was solely a question of time: eventual ruin was a foregone and irremediable conclusion, of absolute, historical certainty. Those who resigned themselves to the course of letting their deserted mansions still struggled for life, seeking to accommodate themselves to present-day exigencies; whilst death already dwelt among the others, those stubborn, proud ones who immured themselves in the tombs of their race, like that appalling Palazzo Boccanera, which was falling into dust amidst such chilly gloom and silence, the latter only broken at long intervals when the Cardinal's old coach rumbled over the grassy court.

The point which most struck Pierre, however, was that his visits to the Trastevere and the Palazzo Farnese shed light one on the other, and led him to a conclusion which had never previously seemed so manifest. As yet no "people," and soon no aristocracy. He had found the people so wretched, ignorant, and resigned in its long infancy induced by historic and climatic causes that many years of instruction and culture were necessary for it to become a strong, healthy, and laborious democracy, conscious of both its rights and its duties. As for the aristocracy, it was dwindling to death in its crumbling palaces, no longer aught than a finished, degenerate race, with such an admixture also of American, Austrian, Polish, and Spanish blood that pure Roman blood became a rare exception; and, moreover, it had ceased to belong either to sword or gown, unwilling to serve constitutional Italy and forsaking the Sacred College, where only parvenus now donned the purple. And between the lowly and the aristocracy there was as yet no firmly seated middle class, with the vigour of fresh sap and sufficient knowledge, and good sense to act as the transitional educator of the nation. The middle class was made up in part of the old servants and clients of the princes, the farmers who rented their lands, the stewards, notaries, and solicitors who managed their fortunes; in part, too, of all the employees, the functionaries of every rank and class, the deputies and senators, whom the new Government had brought from the provinces; and, in particular, of the voracious hawks who had swooped down upon Rome, the Pradas, the men of prey from all parts of the kingdom, who with beak and talon devoured both people and aristocracy. For whom, then, had one laboured? For whom had those gigantic works of new Rome been undertaken? A shudder of fear sped by, a crack as of doom was heard, arousing pitiful disquietude in every fraternal heart. Yes, a threat of doom and annihilation: as yet no people, soon no aristocracy, and only a ravenous middle class, quarrying, vulture-like, among the ruins.

On the evening of that day, when all was dark, Pierre went to spend an hour on the river quay beyond the Boccanera mansion. He was very fond of meditating on that deserted spot in spite of the warnings of Victorine, who asserted that it was not safe. And, indeed, on such inky nights as that one, no cutthroat place ever presented a more tragic aspect. Not a soul, not a passer-by; a dense gloom, a void in front and on either hand. At a corner of the mansion, now steeped in darkness, there was a gas lamp which stood in a hollow since the river margin had been banked up, and this lamp cast an uncertain glimmer upon the quay, level with the latter's bossy soil. Thus long vague shadows stretched from the various materials, piles of bricks and piles of stone, which were strewn around. On the right a few lights shone upon the bridge near San Giovanni and in the windows of the hospital of the Santo Spirito. On the left, amidst the dim recession of the river, the distant districts were blotted out. Then yonder, across the stream, was the Trastevere, the houses on the bank looking like vague, pale phantoms, with infrequent window-panes showing a blurred yellow glimmer, whilst on high only a dark band shadowed the Janiculum, near whose summit the lamps of some promenade scintillated like a triangle of stars. But it was the Tiber which impassioned Pierre; such was its melancholy majesty during those nocturnal hours. Leaning over the parapet, he watched it gliding between the new walls, which looked like those of some black and monstrous prison built for a giant. So long as lights gleamed in the windows of the houses opposite he saw the sluggish water flow by, showing slow, moire-like ripples there where the quivering reflections endowed it with a mysterious life. And he often mused on the river's famous past and evoked the legends which assert that fabulous wealth lies buried in its muddy bed. At each fresh invasion of the barbarians, and particularly when Rome was sacked, the treasures of palaces and temples are said to have been cast into the water to prevent them from falling into the hands of the conquerors. Might not those golden bars trembling yonder in the glaucous stream be the branches of the famous candelabrum which Titus brought from Jerusalem? Might not those pale patches whose shape remained uncertain amidst the frequent eddies indicate the white marble of statues and columns? And those deep moires glittering with little flamelets, were they not promiscuous heaps of precious metal, cups, vases, ornaments enriched with gems? What a dream was that of the swarming riches espied athwart the old river's bosom, of the hidden life of the treasures which were said to have slumbered there for centuries; and what a hope for the nation's pride and enrichment centred in the miraculous finds which might be made in the Tiber if one could some day dry it up and search its bed, as had already been suggested! Therein, perchance, lay Rome's new fortune.

However, on that black night, whilst Pierre leant over the parapet, it was stern reality alone which occupied his mind. He was still pursuing the train of thought suggested by his visits to the Trastevere and the Farnese palace, and in presence of that lifeless water was coming to the conclusion that the selection of Rome for transformation into a modern capital was the great misfortune to which the sufferings of young Italy were due. He knew right well that the selection had been inevitable: Rome being the queen of glory, the antique ruler of the world to whom eternity had been promised, and without whom the national unity had always seemed an impossibility. And so the problem was a terrible one, since without Rome Italy could not exist, and with Rome it seemed difficult for it to exist. Ah! that dead river, how it symbolised disaster! Not a boat upon its surface, not a quiver of the commercial and industrial activity of those waters which bear life to the very hearts of great modern cities! There had been fine schemes, no doubt—Rome a seaport, gigantic works, canalisation to enable vessels of heavy tonnage to come up to the Aventine; but these were mere delusions; the authorities would scarcely be able to clear the river mouth, which deposits were continually choking. And there was that other cause of mortal languishment, the Campagna—the desert of death which the dead river crossed and which girdled Rome with sterility. There was talk of draining and planting it; much futile discussion on the question whether it had been fertile in the days of the old Romans; and even a few experiments were made; but, all the same, Rome remained in the midst of a vast cemetery like a city of other times, for ever separated from the modern world by that lande or moor where the dust of centuries had accumulated. The geographical considerations which once gave the city the empire of the world no longer exist. The centre of civilisation has been displaced. The basin of the Mediterranean has been divided among powerful nations. In Italy all roads now lead to Milan, the city of industry and commerce, and Rome is but a town of passage. And so the most valiant efforts have failed to rouse it from its invincible slumber. The capital which the newcomers sought to improvise with such extreme haste has remained unfinished, and has almost ruined the nation. The Government, legislators, and functionaries only camp there, fleeing directly the warm weather sets in so as to escape the pernicious climate. The hotels and shops even put up their shutters, and the streets and promenades become deserts, the city having failed to acquire any life of its own, and relapsing into death as soon as the artificial life instilled into it is withdrawn. So all remains in suspense in this purely decorative capital, where only a fresh growth of men and money can finish and people the huge useless piles of the new districts. If it be true that to-morrow always blooms in the dust of the past, one ought to force oneself to hope; but Pierre asked himself if the soil were not exhausted, and since mere buildings could no longer grow on it, if it were not for ever drained of the sap which makes a race healthy, a nation powerful.

As the night advanced the lights in the houses of the Trastevere went out one by one: yet Pierre for a long time lingered on the quay, leaning over the blackened river and yielding to hopelessness. There was now no distance to the gloom; all had become dense; no longer did any reflections set a moire-like, golden quiver in the water, or reveal beneath its mystery-concealing current a fantastic, dancing vision of fabulous wealth. Gone was the legend, gone the seven-branched golden candelabrum, gone the golden vases, gone the golden jewellery, the whole dream of antique treasure that had vanished into night, even like the antique glory of Rome. Not a glimmer, nothing but slumber, disturbed solely by the heavy fall of sewage from the drain on the right-hand, which could not be seen. The very water had disappeared, and Pierre no longer espied its leaden flow through the darkness, no longer had any perception of the sluggish senility, the long-dating weariness, the intense sadness of that ancient and glorious Tiber, whose waters now rolled nought but death. Only the vast, opulent sky, the eternal, pompous sky displayed the dazzling life of its milliards of planets above that river of darkness, bearing away the ruins of wellnigh three thousand years.

Before returning to his own chamber that evening Pierre entered Dario's room, and found Victorine there preparing things for the night. And as soon as she heard where he had been she raised her voice in protest: "What! you have again been to the quay at this time of night, Monsieur l'Abbe? You want to get a good knife thrust yourself, it seems. Well, for my part, I certainly wouldn't take the air at such a late hour in this dangerous city." Then, with her wonted familiarity, she turned and spoke to the Prince, who was lying back in an arm-chair and smiling: "That girl, La Pierina," she said, "hasn't been back here, but all the same I've lately seen her prowling about among the building materials."

Dario raised his hand to silence her, and, addressing Pierre, exclaimed: "But you spoke to her, didn't you? It's becoming idiotic! Just fancy that brute Tito coming back to dig his knife into my other shoulder—"

All at once he paused, for he had just perceived Benedetta standing there and listening to him; she had slipped into the room a moment previously in order to wish him good-night. At sight of her his embarrassment was great indeed; he wished to speak, explain his words, and swear that he was wholly innocent in the affair. But she, with a smiling face, contented herself with saying, "I knew all about it, Dario mio. I am not so foolish as not to have thought it all over and understood the truth. If I ceased questioning you it was because I knew, and loved you all the same."

The young woman looked very happy as she spoke, and for this she had good cause, for that very evening she had learnt that Monsignor Palma had shown himself grateful for the service rendered to his nephew by laying a fresh and favourable memoir on the marriage affair before the Congregation of the Council. He had been unwilling to recall his previous opinions so far as to range himself completely on the Contessina's side, but the certificates of two doctors whom she had recently seen had enabled him to conclude that her own declarations were accurate. And gliding over the question of wifely obedience, on which he had previously laid stress, he had skilfully set forth the reasons which made a dissolution of the marriage desirable. No hope of reconciliation could be entertained, so it was certain that both parties were constantly exposed to temptation and sin. He discreetly alluded to the fact that the husband had already succumbed to this danger, and praised the wife's lofty morality and piety, all the virtues which she displayed, and which guaranteed her veracity. Then, without formulating any conclusion of his own, he left the decision to the wisdom of the Congregation. And as he virtually repeated Advocate Morano's arguments, and Prada stubbornly refused to enter an appearance, it now seemed certain that the Congregation would by a great majority pronounce itself in favour of dissolution, a result which would enable the Holy Father to act benevolently.

"Ah! Dario mio!" said Benedetta, "we are at the end of our worries. But what a lot of money, what a lot of money it all costs! Aunt says that they will scarcely leave us water to drink."

So speaking she laughed with the happy heedlessness of an impassioned amorosa. It was not that the jurisdiction of the Congregations was in itself ruinous; indeed, in principle, it was gratuitous. Still there were a multitude of petty expenses, payments to subaltern employees, payments for medical consultations and certificates, copies of documents, and the memoirs and addresses of counsel. And although the votes of the cardinals were certainly not bought direct, some of them ended by costing considerable sums, for it often became necessary to win over dependants, to induce quite a little world to bring influence to bear upon their Eminences; without mentioning that large pecuniary gifts, when made with tact, have a decisive effect in clearing away the greatest difficulties in that sphere of the Vatican. And, briefly, Monsignor Palma's nephew by marriage had cost the Boccaneras a large sum.

"But it doesn't matter, does it, Dario mio?" continued Benedetta. "Since you are now cured, they must make haste to give us permission to marry. That's all we ask of them. And if they want more, well, I'll give them my pearls, which will be all I shall have left me."

He also laughed, for money had never held any place in his life. He had never had it at his pleasure, and simply hoped that he would always live with his uncle the cardinal, who would certainly not leave him and his young wife in the streets. Ruined as the family was, one or two hundred thousand francs represented nothing to his mind, and he had heard that certain dissolutions of marriage had cost as much as half a million. So, by way of response, he could only find a jest: "Give them my ring as well," said he; "give them everything, my dear, and we shall still be happy in this old palace even if we have to sell the furniture!"

His words filled her with enthusiasm; she took his head between both hands and kissed him madly on the eyes in an extraordinary transport of passion. Then, suddenly turning to Pierre, she said: "Oh! excuse me, Monsieur l'Abbe. I was forgetting that I have a commission for you. Yes, Monsignor Nani, who brought us that good news, bade me tell you that you are making people forget you too much, and that you ought to set to work to defend your book."

The priest listened in astonishment; then replied: "But it was he who advised me to disappear."

"No doubt—only it seems that the time has now come for you to see people and plead your cause. And Monsignor Nani has been able to learn that the reporter appointed to examine your book is Monsignor Fornaro, who lives on the Piazza Navona."

Pierre's stupefaction was increasing, for a reporter's name is never divulged, but kept quite secret, in order to ensure a free exercise of judgment. Was a new phase of his sojourn in Rome about to begin then? His mind was all wonderment. However, he simply answered: "Very good, I will set to work and see everybody."

PART IV.

X.

IN his anxiety to bring things to a finish, Pierre wished to begin his campaign on the very next day. But on whom should he first call if he were to steer clear of blunders in that intricate and conceited ecclesiastical world? The question greatly perplexed him; however, on opening his door that morning he luckily perceived Don Vigilio in the passage, and with a sudden inspiration asked him to step inside. He realised that this thin little man with the saffron face, who always trembled with fever and displayed such exaggerated, timorous discretion, was in reality well informed, mixed up in everything. At one period it had seemed to Pierre that the secretary purposely avoided him, doubtless for fear of compromising himself; but recently Don Vigilio had proved less unsociable, as though he were not far from sharing the impatience which must be consuming the young Frenchman amidst his long enforced inactivity. And so, on this occasion, he did not seek to avoid the chat on which Pierre was bent.

"I must apologise," said the latter, "for asking you in here when things are in such disorder. But I have just received some more linen and some winter clothing from Paris. I came, you know, with just a little valise, meaning to stay for a fortnight, and yet I've now been here for nearly three months, and am no more advanced than I was on the morning of my arrival."

Don Vigilio nodded. "Yes, yes, I know," said he.

Thereupon Pierre explained to him that Monsignor Nani had informed him, through the Contessina, that he now ought to act and see everybody for the defence of his book. But he was much embarrassed, as he did not know in what order to make his visits so that they might benefit him. For instance, ought he to call in the first place on Monsignor Fornaro, the consultore selected to report on his book, and whose name had been given him?

"Ah!" exclaimed Don Vigilio, quivering; "has Monsignor Nani gone as far as that—given you the reporter's name? That's even more than I expected." Then, forgetting his prudence, yielding to his secret interest in the affair, he resumed: "No, no; don't begin with Monsignor Fornaro. Your first visit should be a very humble one to the Prefect of the Congregation of the Index—his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti; for he would never forgive you for having offered your first homage to another should he some day hear of it." And, after a pause, Don Vigilio added, in a low voice, amidst a faint, feverish shiver: "And he would hear of it; everything becomes known."

Again he hesitated, and then, as if yielding to sudden, sympathetic courage, he took hold of the young Frenchman's hands. "I swear to you, my dear Monsieur Froment," he said, "that I should be very happy to help you, for you are a man of simple soul, and I really begin to feel worried for you. But you must not ask me for impossibilities. Ah! if you only knew—if I could only tell you of all the perils which surround us! However, I think I can repeat to you that you must in no wise rely on my patron, his Eminence Cardinal Boccanera. He has expressed absolute disapproval of your book in my presence on several occasions. Only he is a saint, a most worthy, honourable man; and, though he won't defend you, he won't attack you—he will remain neutral out of regard for his niece, whom he loves so dearly, and who protects you. So, when you see him, don't plead your cause; it would be of no avail, and might even irritate him."

Pierre was not particularly distressed by this news, for at his first interview with the Cardinal, and on the few subsequent occasions when he had respectfully visited him, he had fully understood that his Eminence would never be other than an adversary. "Well," said he, "I will wait on him to thank him for his neutrality."

But at this all Don Vigilio's terrors returned. "No, no, don't do that; he would perhaps realise that I have spoken to you, and then what a disaster—my position would be compromised. I've said nothing, nothing! See the cardinals to begin with, see all the cardinals. Let it be understood between us that I've said nothing more." And, on that occasion at any rate, Don Vigilio would speak no further, but left the room shuddering and darting fiery, suspicious glances on either side of the corridor.

Pierre at once went out to call on Cardinal Sanguinetti. It was ten o'clock, and there was a chance that he might find him at home. This cardinal resided on the first floor of a little palazzo in a dark, narrow street near San Luigi dei Francesi.* There was here none of the giant ruin full of princely and melancholy grandeur amidst which Cardinal Boccanera so stubbornly remained. The old regulation gala suite of rooms had been cut down just like the number of servants. There was no throne-room, no red hat hanging under a baldacchino, no arm-chair turned to the wall pending a visit from the Pope. A couple of apartments served as ante-rooms, and then came a salon where the Cardinal received; and there was no luxury, indeed scarcely any comfort; the furniture was of mahogany, dating from the empire period, and the hangings and carpets were dusty and faded by long use. Moreover, Pierre had to wait a long time for admittance, and when a servant, leisurely putting on his jacket, at last set the door ajar, it was only to say that his Eminence had been away at Frascati since the previous day.

* This is the French church of Rome, and is under the protection
of the French Government.—Trans.

Pierre then remembered that Cardinal Sanguinetti was one of the suburban bishops. At his see of Frascati he had a villa where he occasionally spent a few days whenever a desire for rest or some political motive impelled him to do so.

"And will his Eminence soon return?" Pierre inquired.

"Ah! we don't know. His Eminence is poorly, and expressly desired us to send nobody to worry him."

When Pierre reached the street again he felt quite bewildered by this disappointment. At first he wondered whether he had not better call on Monsignor Fornaro without more ado, but he recollected Don Vigilio's advice to see the cardinals first of all, and, an inspiration coming to him, he resolved that his next visit should be for Cardinal Sarno, whose acquaintance he had eventually made at Donna Serafina's Mondays. In spite of Cardinal Sarno's voluntary self-effacement, people looked upon him as one of the most powerful and redoubtable members of the Sacred College, albeit his nephew Narcisse Habert declared that he knew no man who showed more obtuseness in matters which did not pertain to his habitual occupations. At all events, Pierre thought that the Cardinal, although not a member of the Congregation of the Index, might well give him some good advice, and possibly bring his great influence to bear on his colleagues.

The young man straightway betook himself to the Palace of the Propaganda, where he knew he would find the Cardinal. This palace, which is seen from the Piazza di Spagna, is a bare, massive corner pile between two streets. And Pierre, hampered by his faulty Italian, quite lost himself in it, climbing to floors whence he had to descend again, and finding himself in a perfect labyrinth of stairs, passages, and halls. At last he luckily came across the Cardinal's secretary, an amiable young priest, whom he had already seen at the Boccanera mansion. "Why, yes," said the secretary, "I think that his Eminence will receive you. You did well to come at this hour, for he is always here of a morning. Kindly follow me, if you please."

Then came a fresh journey. Cardinal Sarno, long a Secretary of the Propaganda, now presided over the commission which controlled the organisation of worship in those countries of Europe, Africa, America, and Oceanica where Catholicism had lately gained a footing; and he thus had a private room of his own with special officers and assistants, reigning there with the ultra-methodical habits of a functionary who had grown old in his arm-chair, closely surrounded by nests of drawers, and knowing nothing of the world save the usual sights of the street below his window.

The secretary left Pierre on a bench at the end of a dark passage, which was lighted by gas even in full daylight. And quite a quarter of an hour went by before he returned with his eager, affable air. "His Eminence is conferring with some missionaries who are about to leave Rome," he said; "but it will soon be over, and he told me to take you to his room, where you can wait for him."

As soon as Pierre was alone in the Cardinal's sanctum he examined it with curiosity. Fairly spacious, but in no wise luxurious, it had green paper on its walls, and its furniture was of black wood and green damask. From two windows overlooking a narrow side street a mournful light reached the dark wall-paper and faded carpets. There were a couple of pier tables and a plain black writing-table, which stood near one window, its worn mole-skin covering littered with all sorts of papers. Pierre drew near to it for a moment, and glanced at the arm-chair with damaged, sunken seat, the screen which sheltered it from draughts, and the old inkstand splotched with ink. And then, in the lifeless and oppressive atmosphere, the disquieting silence, which only the low rumbles from the street disturbed, he began to grow impatient.

However, whilst he was softly walking up and down he suddenly espied a map affixed to one wall, and the sight of it filled him with such absorbing thoughts that he soon forgot everything else. It was a coloured map of the world, the different tints indicating whether the territories belonged to victorious Catholicism or whether Catholicism was still warring there against unbelief; these last countries being classified as vicariates or prefectures, according to the general principles of organisation. And the whole was a graphic presentment of the long efforts of Catholicism in striving for the universal dominion which it has sought so unremittingly since its earliest hour. God has given the world to His Church, but it is needful that she should secure possession of it since error so stubbornly abides. From this has sprung the eternal battle, the fight which is carried on, even in our days, to win nations over from other religions, as it was in the days when the Apostles quitted Judaea to spread abroad the tidings of the Gospel. During the middle ages the great task was to organise conquered Europe, and this was too absorbing an enterprise to allow of any attempt at reconciliation with the dissident churches of the East. Then the Reformation burst forth, schism was added to schism, and the Protestant half of Europe had to be reconquered as well as all the orthodox East.

War-like ardour, however, awoke at the discovery of the New World. Rome was ambitious of securing that other side of the earth, and missions were organised for the subjection of races of which nobody had known anything the day before, but which God had, nevertheless, given to His Church, like all the others. And by degrees the two great divisions of Christianity were formed, on one hand the Catholic nations, those where the faith simply had to be kept up, and which the Secretariate of State installed at the Vatican guided with sovereign authority, and on the other the schismatical or pagan nations which were to be brought back to the fold or converted, and over which the Congregation of the Propaganda sought to reign. Then this Congregation had been obliged to divide itself into two branches in order to facilitate its work—the Oriental branch, which dealt with the dissident sects of the East, and the Latin branch, whose authority extended over all the other lands of mission: the two forming a vast organisation—a huge, strong, closely meshed net cast over the whole world in order that not a single soul might escape.

It was in presence of that map that Pierre for the first time became clearly conscious of the mechanism which for centuries had been working to bring about the absorption of humanity. The Propaganda, richly dowered by the popes, and disposing of a considerable revenue, appeared to him like a separate force, a papacy within the papacy, and he well understood that the Prefect of the Congregation should be called the "Red Pope," for how limitless were the powers of that man of conquest and domination, whose hands stretched from one to the other end of the earth. Allowing that the Cardinal Secretary held Europe, that diminutive portion of the globe, did not he, the Prefect, hold all the rest—the infinity of space, the distant countries as yet almost unknown? Besides, statistics showed that Rome's uncontested dominion was limited to 200 millions of Apostolic and Roman Catholics; whereas the schismatics of the East and the Reformation, if added together, already exceeded that number, and how small became the minority of the true believers when, besides the schismatics, one brought into line the 1000 millions of infidels who yet remained to be converted. The figures struck Pierre with a force which made him shudder. What! there were 5 million Jews, nearly 200 million Mahommedans, more than 700 million Brahmanists and Buddhists, without counting another 100 million pagans of divers creeds, the whole making 1000 millions, and against these the Christians could marshal barely more than 400 millions, who were divided among themselves, ever in conflict, one half with Rome and the other half against her?* Was it possible that in 1800 years Christianity had not proved victorious over even one-third of mankind, and that Rome, the eternal and all-powerful, only counted a sixth part of the nations among her subjects? Only one soul saved out of every six—how fearful was the disproportion! However, the map spoke with brutal eloquence: the red-tinted empire of Rome was but a speck when compared with the yellow-hued empire of the other gods—the endless countries which the Propaganda still had to conquer. And the question arose: How many centuries must elapse before the promises of the Christ were realised, before the whole world were gained to Christianity, before religious society spread over secular society, and there remained but one kingdom and one belief? And in presence of this question, in presence of the prodigious labour yet to be accomplished, how great was one's astonishment when one thought of Rome's tranquil serenity, her patient stubbornness, which has never known doubt or weariness, her bishops and ministers toiling without cessation in the conviction that she alone will some day be the mistress of the world!

* Some readers may question certain of the figures given by M.
Zola, but it must be remembered that all such calculations
(even those of the best "authorities") are largely guesswork.
I myself think that there are more than 5 million Jews, and
more than 200 millions of Mahommedans, but I regard the alleged
number of Brahmanists and Buddhists as exaggerated. On the
other hand, some statistical tables specify 80 millions of
Confucianists, of whom M. Zola makes no separate mention.
However, as regards the number of Christians in the world, the
figures given above are, within a few millions, probably
accurate.—Trans.

Narcisse had told Pierre how carefully the embassies at Rome watched the doings of the Propaganda, for the missions were often the instruments of one or another nation, and exercised decisive influence in far-away lands. And so there was a continual struggle, in which the Congregation did all it could to favour the missionaries of Italy and her allies. It had always been jealous of its French rival, "L'Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi," installed at Lyons, which is as wealthy in money as itself, and richer in men of energy and courage. However, not content with levelling tribute on this French association, the Propaganda thwarted it, sacrificed it on every occasion when it had reason to think it might achieve a victory. Not once or twice, but over and over again had the French missionaries, the French orders, been driven from the scenes of their labours to make way for Italians or Germans. And Pierre, standing in that mournful, dusty room, which the sunlight never brightened, pictured the secret hot-bed of political intrigue masked by the civilising ardour of faith. Again he shuddered as one shudders when monstrous, terrifying things are brought home to one. And might not the most sensible be overcome? Might not the bravest be dismayed by the thought of that universal engine of conquest and domination, which worked with the stubbornness of eternity, not merely content with the gain of souls, but ever seeking to ensure its future sovereignty over the whole of corporeal humanity, and—pending the time when it might rule the nations itself—disposing of them, handing them over to the charge of this or that temporary master, in accordance with its good pleasure. And then, too, what a prodigious dream! Rome smiling and tranquilly awaiting the day when she will have united Christians, Mahommedans, Brahmanists, and Buddhists into one sole nation, of whom she will be both the spiritual and the temporal queen!

However, a sound of coughing made Pierre turn, and he started on perceiving Cardinal Sarno, whom he had not heard enter. Standing in front of that map, he felt like one caught in the act of prying into a secret, and a deep flush overspread his face. The Cardinal, however, after looking at him fixedly with his dim eyes, went to his writing-table, and let himself drop into the arm-chair without saying a word. With a gesture he dispensed Pierre of the duty of kissing his ring.

"I desired to offer my homage to your Eminence," said the young man. "Is your Eminence unwell?"

"No, no, it's nothing but a dreadful cold which I can't get rid of. And then, too, I have so many things to attend to just now."

Pierre looked at the Cardinal as he appeared in the livid light from the window, puny, lopsided, with the left shoulder higher than the right, and not a sign of life on his worn and ashen countenance. The young priest was reminded of one of his uncles, who, after thirty years spent in the offices of a French public department, displayed the same lifeless glance, parchment-like skin, and weary hebetation. Was it possible that this withered old man, so lost in his black cassock with red edging, was really one of the masters of the world, with the map of Christendom so deeply stamped on his mind, albeit he had never left Rome, that the Prefect of the Propaganda did not take a decision without asking his opinion?

"Sit down, Monsieur l'Abbe," said the Cardinal. "So you have come to see me—you have something to ask of me!" And, whilst disposing himself to listen, he stretched out his thin bony hands to finger the documents heaped up before him, glancing at each of them like some general, some strategist, profoundly versed in the science of his profession, who, although his army is far away, nevertheless directs it to victory from his private room, never for a moment allowing it to escape his mind.

Pierre was somewhat embarrassed by such a plain enunciation of the interested object of his visit; still, he decided to go to the point. "Yes, indeed," he answered, "it is a liberty I have taken to come and appeal to your Eminence's wisdom for advice. Your Eminence is aware that I am in Rome for the purpose of defending a book of mine, and I should be grateful if your Eminence would help and guide me." Then he gave a brief account of the present position of the affair, and began to plead his cause; but as he continued speaking he noticed that the Cardinal gave him very little attention, as though indeed he were thinking of something else, and failed to understand.

"Ah! yes," the great man at last muttered, "you have written a book. There was some question of it at Donna Serafina's one evening. But a priest ought not to write; it is a mistake for him to do so. What is the good of it? And the Congregation of the Index must certainly be in the right if it is prosecuting your book. At all events, what can I do? I don't belong to the Congregation, and I know nothing, nothing about the matter."

Pierre, pained at finding him so listless and indifferent, went on trying to enlighten and move him. But he realised that this man's mind, so far-reaching and penetrating in the field in which it had worked for forty years, closed up as soon as one sought to divert it from its specialty. It was neither an inquisitive nor a supple mind. All trace of life faded from the Cardinal's eyes, and his entire countenance assumed an expression of mournful imbecility. "I know nothing, nothing," he repeated, "and I never recommend anybody." However, at last he made an effort: "But Nani is mixed up in this," said he. "What does Nani advise you to do?"

"Monsignor Nani has been kind enough to reveal to me that the reporter is Monsignor Fornaro, and advises me to see him."

At this Cardinal Sarno seemed surprised and somewhat roused. A little light returned to his eyes. "Ah! really," he rejoined, "ah! really—Well, if Nani has done that he must have some idea. Go and see Monsignor Fornaro." Then, after rising and dismissing his visitor, who was compelled to thank him, bowing deeply, he resumed his seat, and a moment later the only sound in the lifeless room was that of his bony fingers turning over the documents before him.

Pierre, in all docility, followed the advice given him, and immediately betook himself to the Piazza Navona, where, however, he learnt from one of Monsignor Fornaro's servants that the prelate had just gone out, and that to find him at home it was necessary to call in the morning at ten o'clock. Accordingly it was only on the following day that Pierre was able to obtain an interview. He had previously made inquiries and knew what was necessary concerning Monsignor Fornaro. Born at Naples, he had there begun his studies under the Barnabites, had finished them at the Seminario Romano, and had subsequently, for many years, been a professor at the University Gregoriana. Nowadays Consultor to several Congregations and a Canon of Santa Maria Maggiore, he placed his immediate ambition in a Canonry at St. Peter's, and harboured the dream of some day becoming Secretary of the Consistorial Congregation, a post conducting to the cardinalate. A theologian of remarkable ability, Monsignor Fornaro incurred no other reproach than that of occasionally sacrificing to literature by contributing articles, which he carefully abstained from signing, to certain religious reviews. He was also said to be very worldly.

Pierre was received as soon as he had sent in his card, and perhaps he would have fancied that his visit was expected had not an appearance of sincere surprise, blended with a little anxiety, marked his reception.

"Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment," repeated the prelate, looking at the card which he still held. "Kindly step in—I was about to forbid my door, for I have some urgent work to attend to. But no matter, sit down."

Pierre, however, remained standing, quite charmed by the blooming appearance of this tall, strong, handsome man who, although five and forty years of age, was quite fresh and rosy, with moist lips, caressing eyes, and scarcely a grey hair among his curly locks. Nobody more fascinating and decorative could be found among the whole Roman prelacy. Careful of his person undoubtedly, and aiming at a simple elegance, he looked really superb in his black cassock with violet collar. And around him the spacious room where he received his visitors, gaily lighted as it was by two large windows facing the Piazza Navona, and furnished with a taste nowadays seldom met with among the Roman clergy, diffused a pleasant odour and formed a setting instinct with kindly cheerfulness.

"Pray sit down, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment," he resumed, "and tell me to what I am indebted for the honour of your visit."

He had already recovered his self-possession and assumed a naif, purely obliging air; and Pierre, though the question was only natural, and he ought to have foreseen it, suddenly felt greatly embarrassed, more embarrassed indeed than in Cardinal Sarno's presence. Should he go to the point at once, confess the delicate motive of his visit? A moment's reflection showed him that this would be the best and worthier course. "Dear me, Monseigneur," he replied, "I know very well that the step I have taken in calling on you is not usually taken, but it has been advised me, and it has seemed to me that among honest folks there can never be any harm in seeking in all good faith to elucidate the truth."

"What is it, what is it, then?" asked the prelate with an expression of perfect candour, and still continuing to smile.

"Well, simply this. I have learnt that the Congregation of the Index has handed you my book 'New Rome,' and appointed you to examine it; and I have ventured to present myself before you in case you should have any explanations to ask of me."

But Monsignor Fornaro seemed unwilling to hear any more. He had carried both hands to his head and drawn back, albeit still courteous. "No, no," said he, "don't tell me that, don't continue, you would grieve me dreadfully. Let us say, if you like, that you have been deceived, for nothing ought to be known, in fact nothing is known, either by others or myself. I pray you, do not let us talk of such matters."

Pierre, however, had fortunately remarked what a decisive effect was produced when he had occasion to mention the name of the Assessor of the Holy Office. So it occurred to him to reply: "I most certainly do not desire to give you the slightest cause for embarrassment, Monseigneur, and I repeat to you that I would never have ventured to importune you if Monsignor Nani himself had not acquainted me with your name and address."

This time the effect was immediate, though Monsignor Fornaro, with that easy grace which he introduced into all things, made some ceremony about surrendering. He began by a demurrer, speaking archly with subtle shades of expression. "What! is Monsignor Nani the tattler! But I shall scold him, I shall get angry with him! And what does he know? He doesn't belong to the Congregation; he may have been led into error. You must tell him that he has made a mistake, and that I have nothing at all to do with your affair. That will teach him not to reveal needful secrets which everybody respects!" Then, in a pleasant way, with winning glance and flowery lips, he went on: "Come, since Monsignor Nani desires it, I am willing to chat with you for a moment, my dear Monsieur Froment, but on condition that you shall know nothing of my report or of what may have been said or done at the Congregation."

Pierre in his turn smiled, admiring how easy things became when forms were respected and appearances saved. And once again he began to explain his case, the profound astonishment into which the prosecution of his book had thrown him, and his ignorance of the objections which were taken to it, and for which he had vainly sought a cause.

"Really, really," repeated the prelate, quite amazed at so much innocence. "The Congregation is a tribunal, and can only act when a case is brought before it. Proceedings have been taken against your book simply because it has been denounced."

"Yes, I know, denounced."

"Of course. Complaint was laid by three French bishops, whose names you will allow me to keep secret, and it consequently became necessary for the Congregation to examine the incriminated work."

Pierre looked at him quite scared. Denounced by three bishops? Why? With what object? Then he thought of his protector. "But Cardinal Bergerot," said he, "wrote me a letter of approval, which I placed at the beginning of my work as a preface. Ought not a guarantee like that to have been sufficient for the French episcopacy?"

Monsignor Fornaro wagged his head in a knowing way before making up his mind to reply: "Ah! yes, no doubt, his Eminence's letter, a very beautiful letter. I think, however, that it would have been much better if he had not written it, both for himself and for you especially." Then as the priest, whose surprise was increasing, opened his mouth to urge him to explain himself, he went on: "No, no, I know nothing, I say nothing. His Eminence Cardinal Bergerot is a saintly man whom everybody venerates, and if it were possible for him to sin it would only be through pure goodness of heart."

Silence fell. Pierre could divine that an abyss was opening, and dared not insist. However, he at last resumed with some violence: "But, after all, why should my book be prosecuted, and the books of others be left untouched? I have no intention of acting as a denouncer myself, but how many books there are to which Rome closes her eyes, and which are far more dangerous than mine can be!"

This time Monsignor Fornaro seemed glad to be able to support Pierre's views. "You are right," said he, "we cannot deal with every bad book, and it greatly distresses us. But you must remember what an incalculable number of works we should be compelled to read. And so we have to content ourselves with condemning the worst en bloc."

Then he complacently entered into explanations. In principle, no printer ought to send any work to press without having previously submitted the manuscript to the approval of the bishop of the diocese. Nowadays, however, with the enormous output of the printing trade, one could understand how terribly embarrassed the bishops would be if the printers were suddenly to conform to the Church's regulation. There was neither the time nor the money, nor were there the men necessary for such colossal labour. And so the Congregation of the Index condemned en masse, without examination, all works of certain categories: first, books which were dangerous for morals, all erotic writings, and all novels; next the various bibles in the vulgar tongue, for the perusal of Holy Writ without discretion was not allowable; then the books on magic and sorcery, and all works on science, history, or philosophy that were in any way contrary to dogma, as well as the writings of heresiarchs or mere ecclesiastics discussing religion, which should never be discussed. All these were wise laws made by different popes, and were set forth in the preface to the catalogue of forbidden books which the Congregation published, and without them this catalogue, to have been complete, would in itself have formed a large library. On turning it over one found that the works singled out for interdiction were chiefly those of priests, the task being so vast and difficult that Rome's concern extended but little beyond the observance of good order within the Church. And Pierre and his book came within the limit.

"You will understand," continued Monsignor Fornaro, "that we have no desire to advertise a heap of unwholesome writings by honouring them with special condemnation. Their name is legion in every country, and we should have neither enough paper nor enough ink to deal with them all. So we content ourselves with condemning one from time to time, when it bears a famous name and makes too much noise, or contains disquieting attacks on the faith. This suffices to remind the world that we exist and defend ourselves without abandoning aught of our rights or duties."

"But my book, my book," exclaimed Pierre, "why these proceedings against my book?"

"I am explaining that to you as far as it is allowable for me to do, my dear Monsieur Froment. You are a priest, your book is a success, you have published a cheap edition of it which sells very readily; and I don't speak of its literary merit, which is remarkable, for it contains a breath of real poetry which transported me, and on which I must really compliment you. However, under the circumstances which I have enumerated, how could we close our eyes to such a work as yours, in which the conclusion arrived at is the annihilation of our holy religion and the destruction of Rome?"

Pierre remained open-mouthed, suffocating with surprise. "The destruction of Rome!" he at last exclaimed; "but I desire to see Rome rejuvenated, eternal, again the queen of the world." And, once more mastered by his glowing enthusiasm, he defended himself and confessed his faith: Catholicism reverting to the principles and practices of the primitive Church, drawing the blood of regeneration from the fraternal Christianity of Jesus; the Pope, freed from all terrestrial royalty, governing the whole of humanity with charity and love, and saving the world from the frightful social cataclysm that threatens it by leading it to the real Kingdom of God: the Christian communion of all nations united in one nation only. "And can the Holy Father disavow me?" he continued. "Are not these his secret ideas, which people are beginning to divine, and does not my only offence lie in having expressed them perhaps too soon and too freely? And if I were allowed to see him should I not at once obtain from him an order to stop these proceedings?"

Monsignor Fornaro no longer spoke, but wagged his head without appearing offended by the priest's juvenile ardour. On the contrary, he smiled with increasing amiability, as though highly amused by so much innocence and imagination. At last he gaily responded, "Oh! speak on, speak on; it isn't I who will stop you. I'm forbidden to say anything. But the temporal power, the temporal power."

"Well, what of the temporal power?" asked Pierre.

The prelate had again become silent, raising his amiable face to heaven and waving his white hands with a pretty gesture. And when he once more opened his mouth it was to say: "Then there's your new religion—for the expression occurs twice: the new religion, the new religion—ah, Dio!"

Again he became restless, going off into an ecstasy of wonderment, at sight of which Pierre impatiently exclaimed: "I do not know what your report will be, Monseigneur, but I declare to you that I have had no desire to attack dogma. And, candidly now, my whole book shows that I only sought to write a work of pity and salvation. It is only justice that some account should be taken of one's intentions."

Monsignor Fornaro had become very calm and paternal again. "Oh! intentions! intentions!" he said as he rose to dismiss his visitor. "You may be sure, my dear Monsieur Froment, that I feel much honoured by your visit. Naturally I cannot tell you what my report will be; as it is, we have talked too much about it, and, in fact, I ought to have refused to listen to your defence. At the same time, you will always find me ready to be of service to you in anything that does not go against my duty. But I greatly fear that your book will be condemned." And then, as Pierre again started, he added: "Well, yes. It is facts that are judged, you know, not intentions. So all defence is useless; the book is there, and we take it such as it is. However much you may try to explain it, you cannot alter it. And this is why the Congregation never calls the accused parties before it, and never accepts from them aught but retraction pure and simple. And, indeed, the wisest course would be for you to withdraw your book and make your submission. No? You won't? Ah! how young you are, my friend!"

He laughed yet more loudly at the gesture of revolt, of indomitable pride which had just escaped his young friend, as he called him. Then, on reaching the door, he again threw off some of his reserve, and said in a low voice, "Come, my dear Abbe, there is something I will do for you. I will give you some good advice. At bottom, I myself am nothing. I deliver my report, and it is printed, and the members of the Congregation read it, but are quite free to pay no attention to it. However, the Secretary of the Congregation, Father Dangelis, can accomplish everything, even impossibilities. Go to see him; you will find him at the Dominican convent behind the Piazza di Spagna. Don't name me. And for the present good-bye, my dear fellow, good-bye."

Pierre once more found himself on the Piazza Navona, quite dazed, no longer knowing what to believe or hope. A cowardly idea was coming over him; why should he continue this struggle, in which his adversaries remained unknown and indiscernible? Why carry obstinacy any further, why linger any longer in that impassionating but deceptive Rome? He would flee that very evening, return to Paris, disappear there, and forget his bitter disillusion in the practice of humble charity. He was traversing one of those hours of weakness when the long-dreamt-of task suddenly seems to be an impossibility. However, amidst his great confusion he was nevertheless walking on, going towards his destination. And when he found himself in the Corso, then in the Via dei Condotti, and finally in the Piazza di Spagna, he resolved that he would at any rate see Father Dangelis. The Dominican convent is there, just below the Trinity de' Monti.

Ah! those Dominicans! Pierre had never thought of them without a feeling of respect with which mingled a little fear. What vigorous pillars of the principle of authority and theocracy they had for centuries proved themselves to be! To them the Church had been indebted for its greatest measure of authority; they were the glorious soldiers of its triumph. Whilst St. Francis won the souls of the humble over to Rome, St. Dominic, on Rome's behalf, subjected all the superior souls—those of the intelligent and powerful. And this he did with passion, amidst a blaze of faith and determination, making use of all possible means, preachings, writings, and police and judicial pressure. Though he did not found the Inquisition, its principles were his, and it was with fire and sword that his fraternal, loving heart waged war on schism. Living like his monks, in poverty, chastity, and obedience—the great virtues of those times of pride and licentiousness—he went from city to city, exhorting the impious, striving to bring them back to the Church and arraigning them before the ecclesiastical courts when his preachings did not suffice. He also laid siege to science, sought to make it his own, dreamt of defending God with the weapons of reason and human knowledge like a true forerunner of the angelic St. Thomas, that light of the middle ages, who joined the Dominican order and set everything in his "Summa Theologiae," psychology, logic, policy, and morals. And thus it was that the Dominicans filled the world, upholding the doctrines of Rome in the most famous pulpits of every nation, and contending almost everywhere against the free sprit of the Universities, like the vigilant guardians of dogma that they were, the unwearying artisans of the fortunes of the popes, the most powerful amongst all the artistic, scientific, and literary workers who raised the huge edifice of Catholicism such as it exists to-day.

However, Pierre, who could feel that this edifice was even now tottering, though it had been built, people fancied, so substantially as to last through all eternity, asked himself what could be the present use of the Dominicans, those toilers of another age, whose police system and whose tribunals had perished beneath universal execration, whose voices were no longer listened to, whose books were but seldom read, and whose role as savants and civilisers had come to an end in presence of latter-day science, the truths of which were rending dogma on all sides. Certainly the Dominicans still form an influential and prosperous order; but how far one is from the times when their general reigned in Rome, Master of the Holy Palace, with convents and schools, and subjects throughout Europe! Of all their vast inheritance, so far as the Roman curia is concerned, only a few posts now remain to them, and among others the Secretaryship of the Congregation of the Index, a former dependency of the Holy Office where they once despotically ruled.

Pierre was immediately ushered into the presence of Father Dangelis. The convent parlour was vast, bare, and white, flooded with bright sunshine. The only furniture was a table and some stools; and a large brass crucifix hung from the wall. Near the table stood the Father, a very thin man of about fifty, severely draped in his ample white habit and black mantle. From his long ascetic face, with thin lips, thin nose, and pointed, obstinate chin, his grey eyes shone out with a fixity that embarrassed one. And, moreover, he showed himself very plain and simple of speech, and frigidly polite in manner.

"Monsieur l'Abbe Froment—the author of 'New Rome,' I suppose?" Then seating himself on one stool and pointing to another, he added: "Pray acquaint me with the object of your visit, Monsieur l'Abbe."

Thereupon Pierre had to begin his explanation, his defence, all over again; and the task soon became the more painful as his words fell from his lips amidst death-like silence and frigidity. Father Dangelis did not stir; with his hands crossed upon his knees he kept his sharp, penetrating eyes fixed upon those of the priest. And when the latter had at last ceased speaking, he slowly said: "I did not like to interrupt you, Monsieur l'Abbe, but it was not for me to hear all this. Process against your book has begun, and no power in the world can stay or impede its course. I do not therefore realise what it is that you apparently expect of me."

In a quivering voice Pierre was bold enough to answer: "I look for some kindness and justice."

A pale smile, instinct with proud humility, arose to the Dominican's lips. "Be without fear," he replied, "God has ever deigned to enlighten me in the discharge of my modest duties. Personally, be it said, I have no justice to render; I am but an employee whose duty is to classify matters and draw up documents concerning them. Their Eminences, the members of the Congregation, will alone pronounce judgment on your book. And assuredly they will do so with the help of the Holy Spirit. You will only have to bow to their sentence when it shall have been ratified by his Holiness."

Then he broke off the interview by rising, and Pierre was obliged to do the same. The Dominican's words were virtually identical with those that had fallen from Monsignor Fornaro, but they were spoken with cutting frankness, a sort of tranquil bravery. On all sides Pierre came into collision with the same anonymous force, the same powerful engine whose component parts sought to ignore one another. For a long time yet, no doubt, he would be sent from one to the other, without ever finding the volitional element which reasoned and acted. And the only thing that he could do was to bow to it all.

However, before going off, it occurred to him once more to mention the name of Monsignor Nani, the powerful effect of which he had begun to realise. "I ask your pardon," he said, "for having disturbed you to no purpose, but I simply deferred to the kind advice of Monsignor Nani, who has condescended to show me some interest."

The effect of these words was unexpected. Again did Father Dangelis's thin face brighten into a smile, but with a twist of the lips, sharp with ironical contempt. He had become yet paler, and his keen intelligent eyes were flaming. "Ah! it was Monsignor Nani who sent you!" he said. "Well, if you think you need a protector, it is useless for you to apply to any other than himself. He is all-powerful. Go to see him; go to see him!"

And that was the only encouragement Pierre derived from his visit: the advice to go back to the man who had sent him. At this he felt that he was losing ground, and he resolved to return home in order to reflect on things and try to understand them before taking any further steps. The idea of questioning Don Vigilio at once occurred to him, and that same evening after supper he luckily met the secretary in the corridor, just as, candle in hand, he was on his way to bed.

"I have so many things that I should like to say to you," Pierre said to him. "Can you kindly come to my rooms for a moment?"

But the other promptly silenced him with a gesture, and then whispered: "Didn't you see Abbe Paparelli on the first floor? He was following us, I'm sure."

Pierre often saw the train-bearer roaming about the house, and greatly disliked his stealthy, prying ways. However, he had hitherto attached no importance to him, and was therefore much surprised by Don Vigilio's question. The other, without awaiting his reply, had returned to the end of the corridor, where for a long while he remained listening. Then he came back on tip-toe, blew out his candle, and darted into Pierre's sitting-room. "There—that's done," he murmured directly the door was shut. "But if it is all the same to you, we won't stop in this sitting-room. Let us go into your bed-room. Two walls are better than one."

When the lamp had been placed on the table and they found themselves seated face to face in that bare, faded bed-chamber, Pierre noticed that the secretary was suffering from a more violent attack of fever than usual. His thin puny figure was shivering from head to foot, and his ardent eyes had never before blazed so blackly in his ravaged, yellow face. "Are you poorly?" asked Pierre. "I don't want to tire you."

"Poorly, yes, I am on fire—but I want to talk. I can't bear it any longer. One always has to relieve oneself some day or other."

Was it his complaint that he desired to relieve; or was he anxious to break his long silence in order that it might not stifle him? This at first remained uncertain. He immediately asked for an account of the steps that Pierre had lately taken, and became yet more restless when he heard how the other had been received by Cardinal Sarno, Monsignor Fornaro, and Father Dangelis. "Yes, that's quite it," he repeated, "nothing astonishes me nowadays, and yet I feel indignant on your account. Yes, it doesn't concern me, but all the same it makes me ill, for it reminds me of all my own troubles. You must not rely on Cardinal Sarno, remember, for he is always elsewhere, with his mind far away, and has never helped anybody. But that Fornaro, that Fornaro!"

"He seemed to me very amiable, even kindly disposed," replied Pierre; "and I really think that after our interview, he will considerably soften his report."

"He! Why, the gentler he was with you the more grievously he will saddle you! He will devour you, fatten himself with such easy prey. Ah! you don't know him, dilizioso that he is, ever on the watch to rear his own fortune on the troubles of poor devils whose defeat is bound to please the powerful. I prefer the other one, Father Dangelis, a terrible man, no doubt, but frank and brave and of superior mind. I must admit, however, that he would burn you like a handful of straw if he were the master. And ah! if I could tell you everything, if I could show you the frightful under-side of this world of ours, the monstrous, ravenous ambition, the abominable network of intrigues, venality, cowardice, treachery, and even crime!"

On seeing Don Vigilio so excited, in such a blaze of spite, Pierre thought of extracting from him some of the many items of information which he had hitherto sought in vain. "Well, tell me merely what is the position of my affair," he responded. "When I questioned you on my arrival here you said that nothing had yet reached Cardinal Boccanera. But all information must now have been collected, and you must know of it. And, by the way, Monsignor Fornaro told me that three French bishops had asked that my book should be prosecuted. Three bishops, is it possible?"

Don Vigilio shrugged his shoulders. "Ah!" said he, "yours is an innocent soul! I'm surprised that there were only three! Yes, several documents relating to your affair are in our hands; and, moreover, things have turned out much as I suspected. The three bishops are first the Bishop of Tarbes, who evidently carries out the vengeance of the Fathers of Lourdes; and then the Bishops of Poitiers and Evreux, who are both known as uncompromising Ultramontanists and passionate adversaries of Cardinal Bergerot. The Cardinal, you know, is regarded with disfavour at the Vatican, where his Gallican ideas and broad liberal mind provoke perfect anger. And don't seek for anything else. The whole affair lies in that: an execution which the powerful Fathers of Lourdes demand of his Holiness, and a desire to reach and strike Cardinal Bergerot through your book, by means of the letter of approval which he imprudently wrote to you and which you published by way of preface. For a long time past the condemnations of the Index have largely been secret knock-down blows levelled at Churchmen. Denunciation reigns supreme, and the law applied is that of good pleasure. I could tell you some almost incredible things, how perfectly innocent books have been selected among a hundred for the sole object of killing an idea or a man; for the blow is almost always levelled at some one behind the author, some one higher than he is. And there is such a hot-bed of intrigue, such a source of abuses in this institution of the Index, that it is tottering, and even among those who surround the Pope it is felt that it must soon be freshly regulated if it is not to fall into complete discredit. I well understand that the Church should endeavour to retain universal power, and govern by every fit weapon, but the weapons must be such as one can use without their injustice leading to revolt, or their antique childishness provoking merriment!"

Pierre listened with dolorous astonishment in his heart. Since he had been at Rome and had seen the Fathers of the Grotto saluted and feared there, holding an authoritative position, thanks to the large alms which they contributed to the Peter's Pence, he had felt that they were behind the proceedings instituted against him, and realised that he would have to pay for a certain page of his book in which he had called attention to an iniquitous displacement of fortune at Lourdes, a frightful spectacle which made one doubt the very existence of the Divinity, a continual cause of battle and conflict which would disappear in the truly Christian society of to-morrow. And he could also now understand that his delight at the loss of the temporal power must have caused a scandal, and especially that the unfortunate expression "a new religion" had alone been sufficient to arm delatores against him. But that which amazed and grieved him was to learn that Cardinal Bergerot's letter was looked upon as a crime, and that his (Pierre's) book was denounced and condemned in order that adversaries who dared not attack the venerable pastor face to face might, deal him a cowardly blow from behind. The thought of afflicting that saintly man, of serving as the implement to strike him in his ardent charity, cruelly grieved Pierre. And how bitter and disheartening it was to find the most hideous questions of pride and money, ambition and appetite, running riot with the most ferocious egotism, beneath the quarrels of those leaders of the Church who ought only to have contended together in love for the poor!

And then Pierre's mind revolted against that supremely odious and idiotic Index. He now understood how it worked, from the arrival of the denunciations to the public posting of the titles of the condemned works. He had just seen the Secretary of the Congregation, Father Dangelis, to whom the denunciations came, and who then investigated the affair, collecting all documents and information concerning it with the passion of a cultivated authoritarian monk, who dreamt of ruling minds and consciences as in the heroic days of the Inquisition. Then, too, Pierre had visited one of the consultive prelates, Monsignor Fornaro, who was so ambitious and affable, and so subtle a theologian that he would have discovered attacks against the faith in a treatise on algebra, had his interests required it. Next there were the infrequent meetings of the cardinals, who at long intervals voted for the interdiction of some hostile book, deeply regretting that they could not suppress them all; and finally came the Pope, approving and signing the decrees, which was a mere formality, for were not all books guilty? But what an extraordinary wretched Bastille of the past was that aged Index, that senile institution now sunk into second childhood. One realised that it must have been a formidable power when books were rare and the Church had tribunals of blood and fire to enforce her edicts. But books had so greatly multiplied, the written, printed thoughts of mankind had swollen into such a deep broad river, that they had swept all opposition away, and now the Index was swamped and reduced to powerlessness, compelled more and more to limit its field of action, to confine itself to the examination of the writings of ecclesiastics, and even in this respect it was becoming corrupt, fouled by the worst passions and changed into an instrument of intrigue, hatred, and vengeance. Ah! that confession of decay, of paralysis which grew more and more complete amidst the scornful indifference of the nations. To think that Catholicism, the once glorious agent of civilisation, had come to such a pass that it cast books into hell-fire by the heap; and what books they were, almost the entire literature, history, philosophy, and science of the past and the present! Few works, indeed, are published nowadays that would not fall under the ban of the Church. If she seems to close her eyes, it is in order to avoid the impossible task of hunting out and destroying everything. Yet she stubbornly insists on retaining a semblance of sovereign authority over human intelligence, just as some very aged queen, dispossessed of her states and henceforth without judges or executioners, might continue to deliver vain sentences to which only an infinitesimal minority would pay heed. But imagine the Church momentarily victorious, miraculously mastering the modern world, and ask yourself what she, with her tribunals to condemn and her gendarmes to enforce, would do with human thought. Imagine a strict application of the Index regulations: no printer able to put anything whatever to press without the approval of his bishop, and even then every book laid before the Congregation, the past expunged, the present throttled, subjected to an intellectual Reign of Terror! Would not the closing of every library perforce ensue, would not the long heritage of written thought be cast into prison, would not the future be barred, would not all progress, all conquest of knowledge, be totally arrested? Rome herself is nowadays a terrible example of such a disastrous experiment—Rome with her congealed soil, her dead sap, killed by centuries of papal government, Rome which has become so barren that not a man, not a work has sprung from her midst even after five and twenty years of awakening and liberty! And who would accept such a state of things, not among people of revolutionary mind, but among those of religious mind that might possess any culture and breadth of view? Plainly enough it was all mere childishness and absurdity.

Deep silence reigned, and Pierre, quite upset by his reflections, made a gesture of despair whilst glancing at Don Vigilio, who sat speechless in front of him. For a moment longer, amidst the death-like quiescence of that old sleeping mansion, both continued silent, seated face to face in the closed chamber which the lamp illumined with a peaceful glow. But at last Don Vigilio leant forward, his eyes sparkling, and with a feverish shiver murmured: "It is they, you know, always they, at the bottom of everything."

Pierre, who did not understand, felt astonished, indeed somewhat anxious at such a strange remark coming without any apparent transition. "Who are they?" he asked.

"The Jesuits!"

In this reply the little, withered, yellow priest had set all the concentrated rage of his exploding passion. Ah! so much the worse if he had perpetrated a fresh act of folly. The cat was out of the bag at last! Nevertheless, he cast a final suspicious glance around the walls. And then he relieved his mind at length, with a flow of words which gushed forth the more irresistibly since he had so long held them in check. "Ah! the Jesuits, the Jesuits! You fancy that you know them, but you haven't even an idea of their abominable actions and incalculable power. They it is whom one always comes upon, everywhere, in every circumstance. Remember that whenever you fail to understand anything, if you wish to understand it. Whenever grief or trouble comes upon you, whenever you suffer, whenever you weep, say to yourself at once: 'It is they; they are there!' Why, for all I know, there may be one of them under that bed, inside that cupboard. Ah! the Jesuits, the Jesuits! They have devoured me, they are devouring me still, they will leave nothing of me at last, neither flesh nor bone."

Then, in a halting voice, he related the story of his life, beginning with his youth, which had opened so hopefully. He belonged to the petty provincial nobility, and had been dowered with a fairly large income, besides a keen, supple intelligence, which looked smilingly towards the future. Nowadays, he would assuredly have been a prelate, on the road to high dignities, but he had been foolish enough to speak ill of the Jesuits and to thwart them in two or three circumstances. And from that moment, if he were to be believed, they had caused every imaginable misfortune to rain upon him: his father and mother had died, his banker had robbed him and fled, good positions had escaped him at the very moment when he was about to occupy them, the most awful misadventures had pursued him amidst the duties of his ministry to such a point indeed, that he had narrowly escaped interdiction. It was only since Cardinal Boccanera, compassionating his bad luck, had taken him into his house and attached him to his person, that he had enjoyed a little repose. "Here I have a refuge, an asylum," he continued. "They execrate his Eminence, who has never been on their side, but they haven't yet dared to attack him or his servants. Oh! I have no illusions, they will end by catching me again, all the same. Perhaps they will even hear of our conversation this evening, and make me pay dearly for it; for I do wrong to speak, I speak in spite of myself. They have stolen all my happiness, and brought all possible misfortune on me, everything that was possible, everything—you hear me!"

Increasing discomfort was taking possession of Pierre, who, seeking to relieve himself by a jest, exclaimed: "Come, come, at any rate it wasn't the Jesuits who gave you the fever."

"Yes, yes, it was!" Don Vigilio violently declared. "I caught it on the bank of the Tiber one evening, when I went to weep there in my grief at having been driven from the little church where I officiated."

Pierre, hitherto, had never believed in the terrible legend of the Jesuits. He belonged to a generation which laughed at the idea of wehr-wolves, and considered the bourgeois fear of the famous black men, who hid themselves in walls and terrorised families, to be a trifle ridiculous. To him all such things seemed to be nursery tales, exaggerated by religious and political passion. And so it was with amazement that he examined Don Vigilio, suddenly fearing that he might have to deal with a maniac.

Nevertheless he could not help recalling the extraordinary story of the Jesuits. If St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic are the very soul and spirit of the middle ages, its masters and teachers, the former a living expression of all the ardent, charitable faith of the humble, and the other defending dogma and fixing doctrines for the intelligent and the powerful, on the other hand Ignatius de Loyola appeared on the threshold of modern times to save the tottering heritage by accommodating religion to the new developments of society, thereby ensuring it the empire of the world which was about to appear.

At the advent of the modern era it seemed as if the Deity were to be vanquished in the uncompromising struggle with sin, for it was certain that the old determination to suppress Nature, to kill the man within man, with his appetites, passions, heart, and blood, could only result in a disastrous defeat, in which, indeed, the Church found herself on the very eve of sinking; and it was the Jesuits who came to extricate her from this peril and reinvigorate her by deciding that it was she who now ought to go to the world, since the world seemed unwilling to go any longer to her. All lay in that; you find the Jesuits declaring that one can enter into arrangements with heaven; they bend and adjust themselves to the customs, prejudices, and even vices of the times; they smile, all condescension, cast rigourism aside, and practice the diplomacy of amiability, ever ready to turn the most awful abominations "to the greater glory of God." That is their motto, their battle-cry, and thence springs the moral principle which many regard as their crime: that all means are good to attain one's end, especially when that end is the furtherance of the Deity's interests as represented by those of the Church. And what overwhelming success attends the efforts of the Jesuits! they swarm and before long cover the earth, on all sides becoming uncontested masters. They shrive kings, they acquire immense wealth, they display such victorious power of invasion that, however humbly they may set foot in any country, they soon wholly possess it: souls, bodies, power, and fortune alike falling to them. And they are particularly zealous in founding schools, they show themselves to be incomparable moulders of the human brain, well understanding that power always belongs to the morrow, to the generations which are growing up and whose master one must be if one desire to reign eternally. So great is their power, based on the necessity of compromise with sin, that, on the morrow of the Council of Trent, they transform the very spirit of Catholicism, penetrate it, identify it with themselves and become the indispensable soldiers of the papacy which lives by them and for them. And from that moment Rome is theirs, Rome where their general so long commands, whence so long go forth the directions for the obscure tactics which are blindly followed by their innumerable army, whose skilful organisation covers the globe as with an iron network hidden by the velvet of hands expert in dealing gently with poor suffering humanity. But, after all, the most prodigious feature is the stupefying vitality of the Jesuits who are incessantly tracked, condemned, executed, and yet still and ever erect. As soon as their power asserts itself, their unpopularity begins and gradually becomes universal. Hoots of execration arise around them, abominable accusations, scandalous law cases in which they appear as corruptors and felons. Pascal devotes them to public contempt, parliaments condemn their books to be burnt, universities denounce their system of morals and their teaching as poisonous. They foment such disturbances, such struggles in every kingdom, that organised persecution sets in, and they are soon driven from everywhere. During more than a century they become wanderers, expelled, then recalled, passing and repassing frontiers, leaving a country amidst cries of hatred to return to it as soon as quiet has been restored. Finally, for supreme disaster, they are suppressed by one pope, but another re-establishes them, and since then they have been virtually tolerated everywhere. And in the diplomatic self-effacement, the shade in which they have the prudence to sequester themselves, they are none the less triumphant, quietly confident of their victory like soldiers who have once and for ever subdued the earth.

Pierre was aware that, judging by mere appearances, the Jesuits were nowadays dispossessed of all influence in Rome. They no longer officiated at the Gesu, they no longer directed the Collegio Romano, where they formerly fashioned so many souls; and with no abode of their own, reduced to accept foreign hospitality, they had modestly sought a refuge at the Collegio Germanico, where there is a little chapel. There they taught and there they still confessed, but without the slightest bustle or display. Was one to believe, however, that this effacement was but masterly cunning, a feigned disappearance in order that they might really remain secret, all-powerful masters, the hidden hand which directs and guides everything? People certainly said that the proclamation of papal Infallibility had been their work, a weapon with which they had armed themselves whilst feigning to bestow it on the papacy, in readiness for the coming decisive task which their genius foresaw in the approaching social upheavals. And thus there might perhaps be some truth in what Don Vigilio, with a shiver of mystery, related about their occult sovereignty, a seizin, as it were, of the government of the Church, a royalty ignored but nevertheless complete.

As this idea occurred to Pierre, a dim connection between certain of his experiences arose in his mind and he all at once inquired: "Is Monsignor Nani a Jesuit, then?"

These words seemed to revive all Don Vigilio's anxious passion. He waved his trembling hand, and replied: "He? Oh, he's too clever, too skilful by far to have taken the robe. But he comes from that Collegio Romano where his generation grew up, and he there imbibed that Jesuit genius which adapted itself so well to his own. Whilst fully realising the danger of wearing an unpopular and embarrassing livery, and wishing to be free, he is none the less a Jesuit in his flesh, in his bones, in his very soul. He is evidently convinced that the Church can only triumph by utilising the passions of mankind, and withal he is very fond of the Church, very pious at bottom, a very good priest, serving God without weakness in gratitude for the absolute power which God gives to His ministers. And besides, he is so charming, incapable of any brutal action, full of the good breeding of his noble Venetian ancestors, and deeply versed in knowledge of the world, thanks to his experiences at the nunciatures of Paris, Vienna, and other places, without mentioning that he knows everything that goes on by reason of the delicate functions which he has discharged for ten years past as Assessor of the Holy Office. Yes, he is powerful, all-powerful, and in him you do not have the furtive Jesuit whose robe glides past amidst suspicion, but the head, the brain, the leader whom no uniform designates."

This reply made Pierre grave, for he was quite willing to admit that an opportunist code of morals, like that of the Jesuits, was inoculable and now predominated throughout the Church. Indeed, the Jesuits might disappear, but their doctrine would survive them, since it was the one weapon of combat, the one system of strategy which might again place the nations under the dominion of Rome. And in reality the struggle which continued lay precisely in the attempts to accommodate religion to the century, and the century to religion. Such being the case, Pierre realised that such men as Monsignor Nani might acquire vast and even decisive importance.

"Ah! if you knew, if you knew," continued Don Vigilio, "he's everywhere, he has his hand in everything. For instance, nothing has ever happened here, among the Boccaneras, but I've found him at the bottom of it, tangling or untangling the threads according to necessities with which he alone is acquainted."

Then, in the unquenchable fever for confiding things which was now consuming him, the secretary related how Monsignor Nani had most certainly brought on Benedetta's divorce case. The Jesuits, in spite of their conciliatory spirit, have always taken up a hostile position with regard to Italy, either because they do not despair of reconquering Rome, or because they wait to treat in due season with the ultimate and real victor, whether King or Pope. And so Nani, who had long been one of Donna Serafina's intimates, had helped to precipitate the rupture with Prada as soon as Benedetta's mother was dead. Again, it was he who, to prevent any interference on the part of the patriotic Abbe Pisoni, the young woman's confessor and the artisan of her marriage, had urged her to take the same spiritual director as her aunt, Father Lorenza, a handsome Jesuit with clear and kindly eyes, whose confessional in the chapel of the Collegio Germanico was incessantly besieged by penitents. And it seemed certain that this manoeuvre had brought about everything; what one cleric working for Italy had done, was to be undone by another working against Italy. Why was it, however, that Nani, after bringing about the rupture, had momentarily ceased to show all interest in the affair to the point even of jeopardising the suit for the dissolution of the marriage? And why was he now again busying himself with it, setting Donna Serafina in action, prompting her to buy Monsignor Palma's support, and bringing his own influence to bear on the cardinals of the Congregation? There was mystery in all this, as there was in everything he did, for his schemes were always complicated and distant in their effects. However, one might suppose that he now wished to hasten the marriage of Benedetta and Dario, in order to stop all the abominable rumours which were circulating in the white world; unless, indeed, this divorce secured by pecuniary payments and the pressure of notorious influences were an intentional scandal at first spun out and now hastened, in order to harm Cardinal Boccanera, whom the Jesuits might desire to brush aside in certain eventualities which were possibly near at hand.

"To tell the truth, I rather incline to the latter view," said Don Vigilio, "the more so indeed as I learnt this evening that the Pope is not well. With an old man of eighty-four the end may come at any moment, and so the Pope can never catch cold but what the Sacred College and the prelacies are all agog, stirred by sudden ambitious rivalries. Now, the Jesuits have always opposed Cardinal Boccanera's candidature. They ought to be on his side, on account of his rank, and his uncompromising attitude towards Italy, but the idea of giving themselves such a master disquiets them, for they consider him unseasonably rough and stern, too violent in his faith, which unbending as it is would prove dangerous in these diplomatic times through which the Church is passing. And so I should in no wise be astonished if there were an attempt to discredit him and render his candidature impossible, by employing the most underhand and shameful means."

A little quiver of fear was coming over Pierre. The contagion of the unknown, of the black intrigues plotted in the dark, was spreading amidst the silence of the night in the depths of that palace, near that Tiber, in that Rome so full of legendary tragedies. But all at once the young man's mind reverted to himself, to his own affair. "But what is my part in all this?" he asked: "why does Monsignor Nani seem to take an interest in me? Why is he mixed up in the proceedings against my book?"

"Oh! one never knows, one never knows exactly!" replied Don Vigilio, waving his arms. "One thing I can say, that he only knew of the affair when the denunciations of the three bishops were already in the hands of Father Dangelis; and I have also learnt that he then tried to stop the proceedings, which he no doubt thought both useless and impolitic. But when a matter is once before the Congregation it is almost impossible for it to be withdrawn, and Monsignor Nani must also have come into collision with Father Dangelis who, like a faithful Dominican, is the passionate adversary of the Jesuits. It was then that he caused the Contessina to write to Monsieur de la Choue, requesting him to tell you to hasten here in order to defend yourself, and to arrange for your acceptance of hospitality in this mansion, during your stay."

This revelation brought Pierre's emotion to a climax. "You are sure of that?" he asked.

"Oh! quite sure. I heard Nani speak of you one Monday, and some time ago I told you that he seemed to know all about you, as if he had made most minute inquiries. My belief is that he had already read your book, and was extremely preoccupied about it."

"Do you think that he shares my ideas, then? Is he sincere, is he defending himself while striving to defend me?"

"Oh! no, no, not at all. Your ideas, why he certainly hates them, and your book and yourself as well. You have no idea what contempt for the weak, what hatred of the poor, and love of authority and domination he conceals under his caressing amiability. Lourdes he might abandon to you, though it embodies a marvellous weapon of government; but he will never forgive you for being on the side of the little ones of the world, and for pronouncing against the temporal power. If you only heard with what gentle ferocity he derides Monsieur de la Choue, whom he calls the weeping willow of Neo-Catholicism!"

Pierre carried his hands to his temples and pressed his head despairingly. "Then why, why, tell me I beg of you, why has he brought me here and kept me here in this house at his disposal? Why has he promenaded me up and down Rome for three long months, throwing me against obstacles and wearying me, when it was so easy for him to let the Index condemn my book if it embarrassed him? It's true, of course, that things would not have gone quietly, for I was disposed to refuse submission and openly confess my new faith, even against the decisions of Rome."

Don Vigilio's black eyes flared in his yellow face: "Perhaps it was that which he wished to prevent. He knows you to be very intelligent and enthusiastic, and I have often heard him say that intelligence and enthusiasm should not be fought openly."

Pierre, however, had risen to his feet, and instead of listening, was striding up and down the room as though carried away by the whirlwind of his thoughts. "Come, come," he said at last, "it is necessary that I should know and understand things if I am to continue the struggle. You must be kind enough to give me some detailed particulars about each of the persons mixed up in my affair. Jesuits, Jesuits everywhere? Mon Dieu, it may be so, you are perhaps right! But all the same you must point out the different shades to me. Now, for instance, what of that Fornaro?"

"Monsignor Fornaro, oh! he's whatever you like. Still he also was brought up at the Collegio Romano, so you may be certain that he is a Jesuit, a Jesuit by education, position, and ambition. He is longing to become a cardinal, and if he some day becomes one, he'll long to be the next pope. Besides, you know, every one here is a candidate to the papacy as soon as he enters the seminary."

"And Cardinal Sanguinetti?"

"A Jesuit, a Jesuit! To speak plainly, he was one, then ceased to be one, and is now undoubtedly one again. Sanguinetti has flirted with every influence. It was long thought that he was in favour of conciliation between the Holy See and Italy; but things drifted into a bad way, and he violently took part against the usurpers. In the same style he has frequently fallen out with Leo XIII and then made his peace. To-day at the Vatican, he keeps on a footing of diplomatic reserve. Briefly he only has one object, the tiara, and even shows it too plainly, which is a mistake, for it uses up a candidate. Still, just at present the struggle seems to be between him and Cardinal Boccanera. And that's why he has gone over to the Jesuits again, utilising their hatred of his rival, and anticipating that they will be forced to support him in order to defeat the other. But I doubt it, they are too shrewd, they will hesitate to patronise a candidate who is already so compromised. He, blunder-head, passionate and proud as he is, doubts nothing, and since you say that he is now at Frascati, I'm certain that he made all haste to shut himself up there with some grand strategical object in view, as soon as he heard of the Pope's illness."

"Well, and the Pope himself, Leo XIII?" asked Pierre.

This time Don Vigilio slightly hesitated, his eyes blinking. Then he said: "Leo XIII? He is a Jesuit, a Jesuit! Oh! I know it is said that he sides with the Dominicans, and this is in a measure true, for he fancies that he is animated with their spirit and he has brought St. Thomas into favour again, and has restored all the ecclesiastical teaching of doctrine. But there is also the Jesuit, remember, who is one involuntarily and without knowing it, and of this category the present Pope will prove the most famous example. Study his acts, investigate his policy, and you will find that everything in it emanates from the Jesuit spirit. The fact is that he has unwittingly become impregnated with that spirit, and that all the influence, directly or indirectly brought to bear on him comes from a Jesuit centre. Ah! why don't you believe me? I repeat that the Jesuits have conquered and absorbed everything, that all Rome belongs to them from the most insignificant cleric to his Holiness in person."

Then he continued, replying to each fresh name that Pierre gave with the same obstinate, maniacal cry: "Jesuit, Jesuit!" It seemed as if a Churchman could be nothing else, as if each answer were a confirmation of the proposition that the clergy must compound with the modern world if it desired to preserve its Deity. The heroic age of Catholicism was accomplished, henceforth it could only live by dint of diplomacy and ruses, concessions and arrangements. "And that Paparelli, he's a Jesuit too, a Jesuit!" Don Vigilio went on, instinctively lowering his voice. "Yes, the humble but terrible Jesuit, the Jesuit in his most abominable role as a spy and a perverter! I could swear that he has merely been placed here in order to keep watch on his Eminence! And you should see with what supple talent and craft he has performed his task, to such a point indeed that it is now he alone who wills and orders things. He opens the door to whomsoever he pleases, uses his master like something belonging to him, weighs on each of his resolutions, and holds him in his power by dint of his stealthy unremitting efforts. Yes! it's the lion conquered by the insect; the infinitesimally small disposing of the infinitely great; the train-bearer—whose proper part is to sit at his cardinal's feet like a faithful hound—in reality reigning over him, and impelling him in whatsoever direction he chooses. Ah! the Jesuit! the Jesuit! Mistrust him when you see him gliding by in his shabby old cassock, with the flabby wrinkled face of a devout old maid. And make sure that he isn't behind the doors, or in the cupboards, or under the beds. Ah! I tell you that they'll devour you as they've devoured me; and they'll give you the fever too, perhaps even the plague if you are not careful!"

Pierre suddenly halted in front of his companion. He was losing all assurance, both fear and rage were penetrating him. And, after all, why not? These extraordinary stories must be true. "But in that case give me some advice," he exclaimed, "I asked you to come in here this evening precisely because I no longer know what to do, and need to be set in the right path—" Then he broke off and again paced to and fro, as if urged into motion by his exploding passion. "Or rather no, tell me nothing!" he abruptly resumed. "It's all over; I prefer to go away. The thought occurred to me before, but it was in a moment of cowardice and with the idea of disappearing and of returning to live in peace in my little nook: whereas now, if I go off, it will be as an avenger, a judge, to cry aloud to all the world from Paris, to proclaim what I have seen in Rome, what men have done there with the Christianity of Jesus, the Vatican falling into dust, the corpse-like odour which comes from it, the idiotic illusions of those who hope that they will one day see a renascence of the modern soul arise from a sepulchre where the remnants of dead centuries rot and slumber. Oh! I will not yield, I will not make my submission, I will defend my book by a fresh one. And that book, I promise you, will make some noise in the world, for it will sound the last agony of a dying religion, which one must make all haste to bury lest its remains should poison the nations!"

All this was beyond Don Vigilio's mind. The Italian priest, with narrow belief and ignorant terror of the new ideas, awoke within him. He clasped his hands, affrighted. "Be quiet, be quiet! You are blaspheming! And, besides, you cannot go off like that without again trying to see his Holiness. He alone is sovereign. And I know that I shall surprise you; but Father Dangelis has given you in jest the only good advice that can be given: Go back to see Monsignor Nani, for he alone will open the door of the Vatican for you."

Again did Pierre give a start of anger: "What! It was with Monsignor Nani that I began, from him that I set out; and I am to go back to him? What game is that? Can I consent to be a shuttlecock sent flying hither and thither by every battledore? People are having a game with me!"

Then, harassed and distracted, the young man fell on his chair in front of Don Vigilio, who with his face drawn by his prolonged vigil, and his hands still and ever faintly trembling, remained for some time silent. At last he explained that he had another idea. He was slightly acquainted with the Pope's confessor, a Franciscan father, a man of great simplicity, to whom he might recommend Pierre. This Franciscan, despite his self-effacement, would perhaps prove of service to him. At all events he might be tried. Then, once more, silence fell, and Pierre, whose dreamy eyes were turned towards the wall, ended by distinguishing the old picture which had touched him so deeply on the day of his arrival. In the pale glow of the lamp it gradually showed forth and lived, like an incarnation of his own case, his own futile despair before the sternly closed portal of truth and justice. Ah! that outcast woman, that stubborn victim of love, weeping amidst her streaming hair, her visage hidden whilst with pain and grief she sank upon the steps of that palace whose door was so pitilessly shut—how she resembled him! Draped with a mere strip of linen, she was shivering, and amidst the overpowering distress of her abandonment she did not reveal her secret, misfortune, or transgression, whichever it might be. But he, behind her close-pressed hands, endowed her with a face akin to his own: she became his sister, as were all the poor creatures without roof or certainty who weep because they are naked and alone, and wear out their strength in seeking to force the wicked thresholds of men. He could never gaze at her without pitying her, and it stirred him so much that evening to find her ever so unknown, nameless and visageless, yet steeped in the most bitter tears, that he suddenly began to question his companion.

"Tell me," said he, "do you know who painted that old picture? It stirs me to the soul like a masterpiece."

Stupefied by this unexpected question, the secretary raised his head and looked, feeling yet more astonished when he had examined the blackened, forsaken panel in its sorry frame.

"Where did it come from?" resumed Pierre; "why has it been stowed away in this room?"

"Oh!" replied Don Vigilio, with a gesture of indifference, "it's nothing. There are heaps of valueless old paintings everywhere. That one, no doubt, has always been here. But I don't know; I never noticed it before."

Whilst speaking he had at last risen to his feet, and this simple action had brought on such a fit of shivering that he could scarcely take leave, so violently did his teeth chatter with fever. "No, no, don't show me out," he stammered, "keep the lamp here. And to conclude: the best course is for you to leave yourself in the hands of Monsignor Nani, for he, at all events, is a superior man. I told you on your arrival that, whether you would or not, you would end by doing as he desired. And so what's the use of struggling? And mind, not a word of our conversation to-night; it would mean my death."

Then he noiselessly opened the doors, glanced distrustfully into the darkness of the passage, and at last ventured out and disappeared, regaining his own room with such soft steps that not the faintest footfall was heard amidst the tomb-like slumber of the old mansion.

On the morrow, Pierre, again mastered by a desire to fight on to the very end, got Don Vigilio to recommend him to the Pope's confessor, the Franciscan friar with whom the secretary was slightly acquainted. However, this friar proved to be an extremely timid if worthy man, selected precisely on account of his great modesty, simplicity, and absolute lack of influence in order that he might not abuse his position with respect to the Holy Father. And doubtless there was an affectation of humility on the latter's part in taking for confessor a member of the humblest of the regular orders, a friend of the poor, a holy beggar of the roads. At the same time the friar certainly enjoyed a reputation for oratory; and hidden by a veil the Pope at times listened to his sermons; for although as infallible Sovereign Pontiff Leo XIII could not receive lessons from any priest, it was admitted that as a man he might reap profit by listening to good discourse. Nevertheless apart from his natural eloquence, the worthy friar was really a mere washer of souls, a confessor who listens and absolves without even remembering the impurities which he removes in the waters of penitence. And Pierre, finding him really so poor and such a cipher, did not insist on an intervention which he realised would be futile.

All that day the young priest was haunted by the figure of that ingenuous lover of poverty, that delicious St. Francis, as Narcisse Habert was wont to say. Pierre had often wondered how such an apostle, so gentle towards both animate and inanimate creation, and so full of ardent charity for the wretched, could have arisen in a country of egotism and enjoyment like Italy, where the love of beauty alone has remained queen. Doubtless the times have changed; yet what a strong sap of love must have been needed in the old days, during the great sufferings of the middle ages, for such a consoler of the humble to spring from the popular soil and preach the gift of self to others, the renunciation of wealth, the horror of brutal force, the equality and obedience which would ensure the peace of the world. St. Francis trod the roads clad as one of the poorest, a rope girdling his grey gown and his bare feet shod with sandals, and he carried with him neither purse nor staff. And he and his brethren spoke aloud and freely, with sovereign florescence of poetry and boldness of truth, attacking the rich and the powerful, and daring even to denounce the priests of evil life, the debauched, simoniacal, and perjured bishops. A long cry of relief greeted the Franciscans, the people followed them in crowds—they were the friends, the liberators of all the humble ones who suffered. And thus, like revolutionaries, they at first so alarmed Rome, that the popes hesitated to authorise their Order. When they at last gave way it was assuredly with the hope of using this new force for their own profit, by conquering the whole vague mass of the lowly whose covert threats have ever growled through the ages, even in the most despotic times. And thenceforward in the sons of St. Francis the Church possessed an ever victorious army—a wandering army which spread over the roads, in the villages and through the towns, penetrating to the firesides of artisan and peasant, and gaining possession of all simple hearts. How great the democratic power of such an Order which had sprung from the very entrails of the people! And thence its rapid prosperity, its teeming growth in a few years, friaries arising upon all sides, and the third Order* so invading the secular population as to impregnate and absorb it. And that there was here a genuine growth of the soil, a vigorous vegetation of the plebeian stock was shown by an entire national art arising from it—the precursors of the Renascence in painting and even Dante himself, the soul of Italia's genius.

* The Franciscans, like the Dominicans and others, admit, in
addition to the two Orders of friars and nuns, a third Order
comprising devout persons of either sex who have neither the
vocation nor the opportunity for cloistered life, but live in
the world, privately observing the chief principles of the
fraternity with which they are connected. In central and
southern Europe members of these third Orders are still
numerous.—Trans.

For some days now, in the Rome of the present time, Pierre had been coming into contact with those great Orders of the past. The Franciscans and the Dominicans were there face to face in their vast convents of prosperous aspect. But it seemed as if the humility of the Franciscans had in the long run deprived them of influence. Perhaps, too, their role as friends and liberators of the people was ended since the people now undertook to liberate itself. And so the only real remaining battle was between the Dominicans and the Jesuits, both of whom still claimed to mould the world according to their particular views. Warfare between them was incessant, and Rome—the supreme power at the Vatican—was ever the prize for which they contended. But, although the Dominicans had St. Thomas on their side, they must have felt that their old dogmatic science was crumbling, compelled as they were each day to surrender a little ground to the Jesuits whose principles accorded better with the spirit of the century. And, in addition to these, there were the white-robed Carthusians, those very holy, pure, and silent meditators who fled from the world into quiet cells and cloisters, those despairing and consoled ones whose numbers may decrease but whose Order will live for ever, even as grief and desire for solitude will live. And then there were the Benedictines whose admirable rules have sanctified labour, passionate toilers in literature and science, once powerful instruments of civilisation, enlarging universal knowledge by their immense historical and critical works. These Pierre loved, and with them would have sought a refuge two centuries earlier, yet he was astonished to find them building on the Aventine a huge dwelling, for which Leo XIII has already given millions, as if the science of to-day and to-morrow were yet a field where they might garner harvests. But cui bono, when the workmen have changed, and dogmas are there to bar the road—dogmas which totter, no doubt, but which believers may not fling aside in order to pass onward? And finally came the swarm of less important Orders, hundreds in number; there were the Carmelites, the Trappists, the Minims, the Barnabites, the Lazzarists, the Eudists, the Mission Fathers, the Servites, the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine; there were the Bernadines, the Augustinians, the Theatines, the Observants, the Passionists, the Celestines, and the Capuchins, without counting the corresponding Orders of women or the Poor Clares, or the innumerable nuns like those of the Visitation and the Calvary. Each community had its modest or sumptuous dwelling, certain districts of Rome were entirely composed of convents, and behind the silent lifeless facades all those people buzzed, intrigued, and waged the everlasting warfare of rival interests and passions. The social evolution which produced them had long since ceased, still they obstinately sought to prolong their life, growing weaker and more useless day by day, destined to a slow agony until the time shall come when the new development of society will leave them neither foothold nor breathing space.

And it was not only with the regulars that Pierre came in contact during his peregrinations through Rome; indeed, he more particularly had to deal with the secular clergy, and learnt to know them well. A hierarchical system which was still vigorously enforced maintained them in various ranks and classes. Up above, around the Pope, reigned the pontifical family, the high and noble cardinals and prelates whose conceit was great in spite of their apparent familiarity. Below them the parish clergy formed a very worthy middle class of wise and moderate minds; and here patriot priests were not rare. Moreover, the Italian occupation of a quarter of a century, by installing in the city a world of functionaries who saw everything that went on, had, curiously enough, greatly purified the private life of the Roman priesthood, in which under the popes women, beyond all question, played a supreme part. And finally one came to the plebeian clergy whom Pierre studied with curiosity, a collection of wretched, grimy, half-naked priests who like famished animals prowled around in search of masses, and drifted into disreputable taverns in the company of beggars and thieves. However, he was more interested by the floating population of foreign priests from all parts of Christendom—the adventurers, the ambitious ones, the believers, the madmen whom Rome attracted just as a lamp at night time attracts the insects of the gloom. Among these were men of every nationality, position, and age, all lashed on by their appetites and scrambling from morn till eve around the Vatican, in order to snap at the prey which they hoped to secure. He found them everywhere, and told himself with some shame that he was one of them, that the unit of his own personality served to increase the incredible number of cassocks that one encountered in the streets. Ah! that ebb and flow, that ceaseless tide of black gowns and frocks of every hue! With their processions of students ever walking abroad, the seminaries of the different nations would alone have sufficed to drape and decorate the streets, for there were the French and the English all in black, the South Americans in black with blue sashes, the North Americans in black with red sashes, the Poles in black with green sashes, the Greeks in blue, the Germans in red, the Scots in violet, the Romans in black or violet or purple, the Bohemians with chocolate sashes, the Irish with red lappets, the Spaniards with blue cords, to say nothing of all the others with broidery and bindings and buttons in a hundred different styles. And in addition there were the confraternities, the penitents, white, black, blue, and grey, with sleeveless frocks and capes of different hue, grey, blue, black, or white. And thus even nowadays Papal Rome at times seemed to resuscitate, and one could realise how tenaciously and vivaciously she struggled on in order that she might not disappear in the cosmopolitan Rome of the new era. However, Pierre, whilst running about from one prelate to another, frequenting priests and crossing churches, could not accustom himself to the worship, the Roman piety which astonished him when it did not wound him. One rainy Sunday morning, on entering Santa Maria Maggiore, he fancied himself in some waiting-room, a very splendid one, no doubt, but where God seemed to have no habitation. There was not a bench, not a chair in the nave, across which people passed, as they might pass through a railway station, wetting and soiling the precious mosaic pavement with their muddy shoes; and tired women and children sat round the bases of the columns, even as in railway stations one sees people sitting and waiting for their trains during the great crushes of the holiday season. And for this tramping throng of folks of small degree, who had looked in en passant, a priest was saying a low mass in a side chapel, before which a narrow file of standing people had gathered, extending across the nave, and recalling the crowds which wait in front of theatres for the opening of the doors. At the elevation of the host one and all inclined themselves devoutly, but almost immediately afterwards the gathering dispersed. And indeed why linger? The mass was said. Pierre everywhere found the same form of attendance, peculiar to the countries of the sun; the worshippers were in a hurry and only favoured the Deity with short familiar visits, unless it were a question of some gala scene at San Paolo or San Giovanni in Laterano or some other of the old basilicas. It was only at the Gesu, on another Sunday morning, that the young priest came upon a high-mass congregation, which reminded him of the devout throngs of the North. Here there were benches and women seated, a worldly warmth and cosiness under the luxurious, gilded, carved, and painted roof, whose tawny splendour is very fine now that time has toned down the eccentricities of the decoration. But how many of the churches were empty, among them some of the most ancient and venerable, San Clemente, Sant' Agnese, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, where during the offices one saw but a few believers of the neighbourhood. Four hundred churches were a good many for even Rome to people; and, indeed, some were merely attended on fixed ceremonial occasions, and a good many merely opened their doors once every year—on the feast day, that is, of their patron saint. Some also subsisted on the lucky possession of a fetish, an idol compassionate to human sufferings. Santa Maria in Ara Coeli possessed the miraculous little Jesus, the "Bambino," who healed sick children, and Sant' Agostino had the "Madonna del Parto," who grants a happy delivery to mothers. Then others were renowned for the holy water of their fonts, the oil of their lamps, the power of some wooden saint or marble virgin. Others again seemed forsaken, given up to tourists and the perquisites of beadles, like mere museums peopled with dead gods: Finally others disturbed one's faith by the suggestiveness of their aspects, as, for instance, that Santa Maria Rotonda, which is located in the Pantheon, a circular hall recalling a circus, where the Virgin remains the evident tenant of the Olympian deities.

Pierre took no little interest in the churches of the poor districts, but did not find there the keen faith and the throngs he had hoped for. One afternoon, at Santa Maria in Trastevere, he heard the choir in full song, but the church was quite empty, and the chant had a most lugubrious sound in such a desert. Then, another day, on entering San Crisogono, he found it draped, probably in readiness for some festival on the morrow. The columns were cased with red damask, and between them were hangings and curtains alternately yellow and blue, white and red; and the young man fled from such a fearful decoration as gaudy as that of a fair booth. Ah! how far he was from the cathedrals where in childhood he had believed and prayed! On all sides he found the same type of church, the antique basilica accommodated to the taste of eighteenth-century Rome. Though the style of San Luigi dei Francesi is better, more soberly elegant, the only thing that touched him even there was the thought of the heroic or saintly Frenchmen, who sleep in foreign soil beneath the flags. And as he sought for something Gothic, he ended by going to see Santa Maria sopra Minerva,* which, he was told, was the only example of the Gothic style in Rome. Here his stupefaction attained a climax at sight of the clustering columns cased in stucco imitating marble, the ogives which dared not soar, the rounded vaults condemned to the heavy majesty of the dome style. No, no, thought he, the faith whose cooling cinders lingered there was no longer that whose brazier had invaded and set all Christendom aglow! However, Monsignor Fornaro whom he chanced to meet as he was leaving the church, inveighed against the Gothic style as rank heresy. The first Christian church, said the prelate, had been the basilica, which had sprung from the temple, and it was blasphemy to assert that the Gothic cathedral was the real Christian house of prayer, for Gothic embodied the hateful Anglo-Saxon spirit, the rebellious genius of Luther. At this a passionate reply rose to Pierre's lips, but he said nothing for fear that he might say too much. However, he asked himself whether in all this there was not a decisive proof that Catholicism was the very vegetation of Rome, Paganism modified by Christianity. Elsewhere Christianity has grown up in quite a different spirit, to such a point that it has risen in rebellion and schismatically turned against the mother-city. And the breach has ever gone on widening, the dissemblance has become more and more marked; and amidst the evolution of new societies, yet a fresh schism appears inevitable and proximate in spite of all the despairing efforts to maintain union.

* So called because it occupies the site of a temple to
Minerva.—Trans.

While Pierre thus visited the Roman churches, he also continued his efforts to gain support in the matter of his book, his irritation tending to such stubbornness, that if in the first instance he failed to obtain an interview, he went back again and again to secure one, steadfastly keeping his promise to call in turn upon each cardinal of the Congregation of the Index. And as a cardinal may belong to several Congregations, it resulted that he gradually found himself roaming through those former ministries of the old pontifical government which, if less numerous than formerly, are still very intricate institutions, each with its cardinal-prefect, its cardinal-members, its consultative prelates, and its numerous employees. Pierre repeatedly had to return to the Cancelleria, where the Congregation of the Index meets, and lost himself in its world of staircases, corridors, and halls. From the moment he passed under the porticus he was overcome by the icy shiver which fell from the old walls, and was quite unable to appreciate the bare, frigid beauty of the palace, Bramante's masterpiece though it be, so purely typical of the Roman Renascence. He also knew the Propaganda where he had seen Cardinal Sarno; and, sent as he was hither and thither, in his efforts to gain over influential prelates, chance made him acquainted with the other Congregations, that of the Bishops and Regulars, that of the Rites and that of the Council. He even obtained a glimpse of the Consistorial, the Dataria,* and the sacred Penitentiary. All these formed part of the administrative mechanism of the Church under its several aspects—the government of the Catholic world, the enlargement of the Church's conquests, the administration of its affairs in conquered countries, the decision of all questions touching faith, morals, and individuals, the investigation and punishment of offences, the grant of dispensations and the sale of favours. One can scarcely imagine what a fearful number of affairs are each morning submitted to the Vatican, questions of the greatest gravity, delicacy, and intricacy, the solution of which gives rise to endless study and research. It is necessary to reply to the innumerable visitors who flock to Rome from all parts, and to the letters, the petitions, and the batches of documents which are submitted and require to be distributed among the various offices. And Pierre was struck by the deep and discreet silence in which all this colossal labour was accomplished; not a sound reaching the streets from the tribunals, parliaments, and factories for the manufacture of saints and nobles, whose mechanism was so well greased, that in spite of the rust of centuries and the deep and irremediable wear and tear, the whole continued working without clank or creak to denote its presence behind the walls. And did not that silence embody the whole policy of the Church, which is to remain mute and await developments? Nevertheless what a prodigious mechanism it was, antiquated no doubt, but still so powerful! And amidst those Congregations how keenly Pierre felt himself to be in the grip of the most absolute power ever devised for the domination of mankind. However much he might notice signs of decay and coming ruin he was none the less seized, crushed, and carried off by that huge engine made up of vanity and venality, corruption and ambition, meanness and greatness. And how far, too, he now was from the Rome that he had dreamt of, and what anger at times filled him amidst his weariness, as he persevered in his resolve to defend himself!

* It is from the Dataria that bulls, rescripts, letters of
appointment to benefices, and dispensations of marriage,
are issued, after the affixture of the date and formula
Datum Romae, "Given at Rome."—Trans.

All at once certain things which he had never understood were explained to him. One day, when he returned to the Propaganda, Cardinal Sarno spoke to him of Freemasonry with such icy rage that he was abruptly enlightened. Freemasonry had hitherto made him smile; he had believed in it no more than he had believed in the Jesuits. Indeed, he had looked upon the ridiculous stories which were current—the stories of mysterious, shadowy men who governed the world with secret incalculable power—as mere childish legends. In particular he had been amazed by the blind hatred which maddened certain people as soon as Freemasonry was mentioned. However, a very distinguished and intelligent prelate had declared to him, with an air of profound conviction, that at least on one occasion every year each masonic Lodge was presided over by the Devil in person, incarnate in a visible shape! And now, by Cardinal Sarno's remarks, he understood the rivalry, the furious struggle of the Roman Catholic Church against that other Church, the Church of over the way.* Although the former counted on her own triumph, she none the less felt that the other, the Church of Freemasonry, was a competitor, a very ancient enemy, who indeed claimed to be more ancient than herself, and whose victory always remained a possibility. And the friction between them was largely due to the circumstance that they both aimed at universal sovereignty, and had a similar international organisation, a similar net thrown over the nations, and in a like way mysteries, dogmas, and rites. It was deity against deity, faith against faith, conquest against conquest: and so, like competing tradesmen in the same street, they were a source of mutual embarrassment, and one of them was bound to kill the other. But if Roman Catholicism seemed to Pierre to be worn out and threatened with ruin, he remained quite as sceptical with regard to the power of Freemasonry. He had made inquiries as to the reality of that power in Rome, where both Grand Master and Pope were enthroned, one in front of the other. He was certainly told that the last Roman princes had thought themselves compelled to become Freemasons in order to render their own difficult position somewhat easier and facilitate the future of their sons. But was this true? had they not simply yielded to the force of the present social evolution? And would not Freemasonry eventually be submerged by its own triumph—that of the ideas of justice, reason, and truth, which it had defended through the dark and violent ages of history? It is a thing which constantly happens; the victory of an idea kills the sect which has propagated it, and renders the apparatus with which the members of the sect surrounded themselves, in order to fire imaginations, both useless and somewhat ridiculous. Carbonarism did not survive the conquest of the political liberties which it demanded; and on the day when the Catholic Church crumbles, having accomplished its work of civilisation, the other Church, the Freemasons' Church of across the road, will in a like way disappear, its task of liberation ended. Nowadays the famous power of the Lodges, hampered by traditions, weakened by a ceremonial which provokes laughter, and reduced to a simple bond of brotherly agreement and mutual assistance, would be but a sorry weapon of conquest for humanity, were it not that the vigorous breath of science impels the nations onwards and helps to destroy the old religions.

* Some readers may think the above passages an exaggeration, but
such is not the case. The hatred with which the Catholic
priesthood, especially in Italy, Spain, and France, regards
Freemasonry is remarkable. At the moment of writing these lines
I have before me several French clerical newspapers, which
contain the most abusive articles levelled against President
Faure solely because he is a Freemason. One of these prints, a
leading journal of Lyons, tells the French President that he
cannot serve both God and the Devil; and that if he cannot give
up Freemasonry he would do well to cease desecrating the abode
of the Deity by his attendance at divine service.—Trans.

However, all Pierre's journeyings and applications brought him no certainty; and, while stubbornly clinging to Rome, intent on fighting to the very end, like a soldier who will not believe in the possibility of defeat, he remained as anxious as ever. He had seen all the cardinals whose influence could be of use to him. He had seen the Cardinal Vicar, entrusted with the diocese of Rome, who, like the man of letters he was, had spoken to him of Horace, and, like a somewhat blundering politician, had questioned him about France, the Republic, the Army, and the Navy Estimates, without dealing in the slightest degree with the incriminated book. He had also seen the Grand Penitentiary, that tall old man, with fleshless, ascetic face, of whom he had previously caught a glimpse at the Boccanera mansion, and from whom he now only drew a long and severe sermon on the wickedness of young priests, whom the century had perverted and who wrote most abominable books. Finally, at the Vatican, he had seen the Cardinal Secretary, in some wise his Holiness's Minister of Foreign Affairs, the great power of the Holy See, whom he had hitherto been prevented from approaching by terrifying warnings as to the possible result of an unfavourable reception. However, whilst apologising for calling at such a late stage, he had found himself in presence of a most amiable man, whose somewhat rough appearance was softened by diplomatic affability, and who, after making him sit down, questioned him with an air of interest, listened to him, and even spoke some words of comfort. Nevertheless, on again reaching the Piazza of St. Peter's, Pierre well understood that his affair had not made the slightest progress, and that if he ever managed to force the Pope's door, it would not be by way of the Secretariate of State. And that evening he returned home quite exhausted by so many visits, in such distraction at feeling that little by little he had been wholly caught in that huge mechanism with its hundred wheels, that he asked himself in terror what he should do on the morrow now that there remained nothing for him to do—unless, indeed, it were to go mad.

However, meeting Don Vigilio in a passage of the house, he again wished to ask him for some good advice. But the secretary, who had a gleam of terror in his eyes, silenced him, he knew not why, with an anxious gesture. And then in a whisper, in Pierre's ear, he said: "Have you seen Monsignor Nani? No! Well, go to see him, go to see him. I repeat that you have nothing else to do!"

Pierre yielded. And indeed why should he have resisted? Apart from the motives of ardent charity which had brought him to Rome to defend his book, was he not there for a self-educating, experimental purpose? It was necessary that he should carry his attempts to the very end.

On the morrow, when he reached the colonnade of St. Peter's, the hour was so early that he had to wait there awhile. He had never better realised the enormity of those four curving rows of columns, forming a forest of gigantic stone trunks among which nobody ever promenades. In fact, the spot is a grandiose and dreary desert, and one asks oneself the why and wherefore of such a majestic porticus. Doubtless, however, it was for its sole majesty, for the mere pomp of decoration, that this colonnade was reared; and therein, again, one finds the whole Roman spirit. However, Pierre at last turned into the Via di Sant' Offizio, and passing the sacristy of St. Peter's, found himself before the Palace of the Holy Office in a solitary silent district, which the footfall of pedestrians or the rumble of wheels but seldom disturbs. The sun alone lives there, in sheets of light which spread slowly over the small, white paving. You divine the vicinity of the Basilica, for there is a smell as of incense, a cloisteral quiescence as of the slumber of centuries. And at one corner the Palace of the Holy Office rises up with heavy, disquieting bareness, only a single row of windows piercing its lofty, yellow front. The wall which skirts a side street looks yet more suspicious with its row of even smaller casements, mere peep-holes with glaucous panes. In the bright sunlight this huge cube of mud-coloured masonry ever seems asleep, mysterious, and closed like a prison, with scarcely an aperture for communication with the outer world.

Pierre shivered, but then smiled as at an act of childishness, for he reflected that the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, nowadays the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, was no longer the institution it had been, the purveyor of heretics for the stake, the occult tribunal beyond appeal which had right of life and death over all mankind. True, it still laboured in secrecy, meeting every Wednesday, and judging and condemning without a sound issuing from within its walls. But on the other hand if it still continued to strike at the crime of heresy, if it smote men as well as their works, it no longer possessed either weapons or dungeons, steel or fire to do its bidding, but was reduced to a mere role of protest, unable to inflict aught but disciplinary penalties even upon the ecclesiastics of its own Church.

When Pierre on entering was ushered into the reception-room of Monsignor Nani who, as assessor, lived in the palace, he experienced an agreeable surprise. The apartment faced the south, and was spacious and flooded with sunshine. And stiff as was the furniture, dark as were the hangings, an exquisite sweetness pervaded the room, as though a woman had lived in it and accomplished the prodigy of imparting some of her own grace to all those stern-looking things. There were no flowers, yet there was a pleasant smell. A charm expanded and conquered every heart from the very threshold.

Monsignor Nani at once came forward, with a smile on his rosy face, his blue eyes keenly glittering, and his fine light hair powdered by age. With hands outstretched, he exclaimed: "Ah! how kind of you to have come to see me, my dear son! Come, sit down, let us have a friendly chat." Then with an extraordinary display of affection, he began to question Pierre: "How are you getting on? Tell me all about it, exactly what you have done."

Touched in spite of Don Vigilio's revelations, won over by the sympathy which he fancied he could detect, Pierre thereupon confessed himself, relating his visits to Cardinal Sarno, Monsignor Fornaro and Father Dangelis, his applications to all the influential cardinals, those of the Index, the Grand Penitentiary, the Cardinal Vicar, and the Cardinal Secretary; and dwelling on his endless journeys from door to door through all the Congregations and all the clergy, that huge, active, silent bee-hive amidst which he had wearied his feet, exhausted his limbs, and bewildered his poor brain. And at each successive Station of this Calvary of entreaty, Monsignor Nani, who seemed to listen with an air of rapture, exclaimed: "But that's very good, that's capital! Oh! your affair is progressing. Yes, yes, it's progressing marvellously well."

He was exultant, though he allowed no unseemly irony to appear, while his pleasant, penetrating eyes fathomed the young priest, to ascertain if he had been brought to the requisite degree of obedience. Had he been sufficiently wearied, disillusioned and instructed in the reality of things, for one to finish with him? Had three months' sojourn in Rome sufficed to turn the somewhat mad enthusiast of the first days into an unimpassioned or at least resigned being?

However, all at once Monsignor Nani remarked: "But, my dear son, you tell me nothing of his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti."

"The fact is, Monseigneur, that his Eminence is at Frascati, so I have been unable to see him."

Thereupon the prelate, as if once more postponing the denouement with the secret enjoyment of an artistic diplomate, began to protest, raising his little plump hands with the anxious air of a man who considers everything lost: "Oh! but you must see his Eminence; it is absolutely necessary! Think of it! The Prefect of the Index! We can only act after your visit to him, for as you have not seen him it is as if you had seen nobody. Go, go to Frascati, my dear son."

And thereupon Pierre could only bow and reply: "I will go, Monseigneur."

XI.

ALTHOUGH Pierre knew that he would be unable to see Cardinal Sanguinetti before eleven o'clock, he nevertheless availed himself of an early train, so that it was barely nine when he alighted at the little station of Frascati. He had already visited the place during his enforced idleness, when he had made the classical excursion to the Roman castles which extend from Frascati to Rocco di Papa, and from Rocco di Papa to Monte Cavo, and he was now delighted with the prospect of strolling for a couple of hours along those first slopes of the Alban hills, where, amidst rushes, olives, and vines, Frascati, like a promontory, overlooks the immense ruddy sea of the Campagna even as far as Rome, which, six full leagues away, wears the whitish aspect of a marble isle.

Ah! that charming Frascati, on its greeny knoll at the foot of the wooded Tusculan heights, with its famous terrace whence one enjoys the finest view in the world, its old patrician villas with proud and elegant Renascence facades and magnificent parks, which, planted with cypress, pine, and ilex, are for ever green! There was a sweetness, a delight, a fascination about the spot, of which Pierre would have never wearied. And for more than an hour he had wandered blissfully along roads edged with ancient, knotty olive-trees, along dingle ways shaded by the spreading foliage of neighbouring estates, and along perfumed paths, at each turn of which the Campagna was seen stretching far away, when all at once he was accosted by a person whom he was both surprised and annoyed to meet. He had strolled down to some low ground near the railway station, some old vineyards where a number of new houses had been built of recent years, and suddenly saw a stylish pair-horse victoria, coming from the direction of Rome, draw up close by, whilst its occupant called to him: "What! Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, are you taking a walk here, at this early hour?"

Thereupon Pierre recognised Count Luigi Prada, who alighted, shook hands with him and began to walk beside him, whilst the empty carriage went on in advance. And forthwith the Count explained his tastes: "I seldom take the train," he said, "I drive over. It gives my horses an outing. I have interests over here as you may know, a big building enterprise which is unfortunately not progressing very well. And so, although the season is advanced, I'm obliged to come rather more frequently than I care to do."

As Prada suggested, Pierre was acquainted with the story. The Boccaneras had been obliged to sell a sumptuous villa which a cardinal of their family had built at Frascati in accordance with the plans of Giacomo della Porta, during the latter part of the sixteenth century: a regal summer-residence it had been, finely wooded, with groves and basins and cascades, and in particular a famous terrace projecting like a cape above the Roman Campagna whose expanse stretches from the Sabine mountains to the Mediterranean sands. Through the division of the property, Benedetta had inherited from her mother some very extensive vineyards below Frascati, and these she had brought as dowry to Prada at the very moment when the building mania was extending from Rome into the provinces. And thereupon Prada had conceived the idea of erecting on the spot a number of middle-class villas like those which litter the suburbs of Paris. Few purchasers, however, had come forward, the financial crash had supervened, and he was now with difficulty liquidating this unlucky business, having indemnified his wife at the time of their separation.

"And then," he continued, addressing Pierre, "one can come and go as one likes with a carriage, whereas, on taking the train, one is at the mercy of the time table. This morning, for instance, I have appointments with contractors, experts, and lawyers, and I have no notion how long they will keep me. It's a wonderful country, isn't it? And we are quite right to be proud of it in Rome. Although I may have some worries just now, I can never set foot here without my heart beating with delight."

A circumstance which he did not mention, was that his amica, Lisbeth Kauffmann, had spent the summer in one of the newly erected villas, where she had installed her studio and had been visited by all the foreign colony, which tolerated her irregular position on account of her gay spirits and artistic talent. Indeed, people had even ended by accepting the outcome of her connection with Prada, and a fortnight previously she had returned to Rome, and there given birth to a son—an event which had again revived all the scandalous tittle-tattle respecting Benedetta's divorce suit. And Prada's attachment to Frascati doubtless sprang from the recollection of the happy hours he had spent there, and the joyful pride with which the birth of the boy inspired him.

Pierre, for his part, felt ill at ease in the young Count's presence, for he had an instinctive hatred of money-mongers and men of prey. Nevertheless, he desired to respond to his amiability, and so inquired after his father, old Orlando, the hero of the Liberation.

"Oh!" replied Prada, "excepting for his legs he's in wonderfully good health. He'll live a hundred years. Poor father! I should so much have liked to install him in one of these little houses, last summer. But I could not get him to consent; he's determined not to leave Rome; he's afraid, perhaps, that it might be taken away from him during his absence." Then the young Count burst into a laugh, quite merry at the thought of jeering at the heroic but no longer fashionable age of independence. And afterwards he said, "My father was speaking of you again only yesterday, Monsieur l'Abbe. He is astonished that he has not seen you lately."

This distressed Pierre, for he had begun to regard Orlando with respectful affection. Since his first visit, he had twice called on the old hero, but the latter had refused to broach the subject of Rome so long as his young friend should not have seen, felt, and understood everything. There would be time for a talk later on, said he, when they were both in a position to formulate their conclusions.

"Pray tell Count Orlando," responded Pierre, "that I have not forgotten him, and that, if I have deferred a fresh visit, it is because I desire to satisfy him. However, I certainly will not leave Rome without going to tell him how deeply his kind greeting has touched me."

Whilst talking, the two men slowly followed the ascending road past the newly erected villas, several of which were not yet finished. And when Prada learned that the priest had come to call on Cardinal Sanguinetti, he again laughed, with the laugh of a good-natured wolf, showing his white fangs. "True," he exclaimed, "the Cardinal has been here since the Pope has been laid up. Ah! you'll find him in a pretty fever."

"Why?"

"Why, because there's bad news about the Holy Father this morning. When I left Rome it was rumoured that he had spent a fearful night."

So speaking, Prada halted at a bend of the road, not far from an antique chapel, a little church of solitary, mournful grace of aspect, on the verge of an olive grove. Beside it stood a ruinous building, the old parsonage, no doubt, whence there suddenly emerged a tall, knotty priest with coarse and earthy face, who, after roughly locking the door, went off in the direction of the town.

"Ah!" resumed the Count in a tone of raillery, "that fellow's heart also must be beating violently; he's surely gone to your Cardinal in search of news."

Pierre had looked at the priest. "I know him," he replied; "I saw him, I remember, on the day after my arrival at Cardinal Boccanera's. He brought the Cardinal a basket of figs and asked him for a certificate in favour of his young brother, who had been sent to prison for some deed of violence—a knife thrust if I recollect rightly. However, the Cardinal absolutely refused him the certificate."

"It's the same man," said Prada, "you may depend on it. He was often at the Villa Boccanera formerly; for his young brother was gardener there. But he's now the client, the creature of Cardinal Sanguinetti. Santobono his name is, and he's a curious character, such as you wouldn't find in France, I fancy. He lives all alone in that falling hovel, and officiates at that old chapel of St. Mary in the Fields, where people don't go to hear mass three times in a year. Yes, it's a perfect sinecure, which with its stipend of a thousand francs enables him to live there like a peasant philosopher, cultivating the somewhat extensive garden whose big walls you see yonder."

The close to which he called attention stretched down the slope behind the parsonage, without an aperture, like some savage place of refuge into which not even the eye could penetrate. And all that could be seen above the left-hand wall was a superb, gigantic fig-tree, whose big leaves showed blackly against the clear sky. Prada had moved on again, and continued to speak of Santobono, who evidently interested him. Fancy, a patriot priest, a Garibaldian! Born at Nemi, in that yet savage nook among the Alban hills, he belonged to the people and was still near to the soil. However, he had studied, and knew sufficient history to realise the past greatness of Rome, and dream of the re-establishment of Roman dominion as represented by young Italy. And he had come to believe, with passionate fervour, that only a great pope could realise his dream by seizing upon power, and then conquering all the other nations. And what could be easier, since the Pope commanded millions of Catholics? Did not half Europe belong to him? France, Spain, and Austria would give way as soon as they should see him powerful, dictating laws to the world. Germany and Great Britain, indeed all the Protestant countries, would also inevitably be conquered, for the papacy was the only dike that could be opposed to error, which must some day fatally succumb in its efforts against such a barrier. Politically, however, Santobono had declared himself for Germany, for he considered that France needed to be crushed before she would throw herself into the arms of the Holy Father. And thus contradictions and fancies clashed in his foggy brain, whose burning ideas swiftly turned to violence under the influence of primitive, racial fierceness. Briefly, the priest was a barbarian upholder of the Gospel, a friend of the humble and woeful, a sectarian of that school which is capable alike of great virtues and great crimes.

"Yes," concluded Prada, "he is now devoted to Cardinal Sanguinetti because he believes that the latter will prove the great pope of to-morrow, who is to make Rome the one capital of the nations. At the same time he doubtless harbours a lower personal ambition, that of attaining to a canonry or of gaining assistance in the little worries of life, as when he wished to extricate his brother from trouble. Here, you know, people stake their luck on a cardinal just as they nurse a 'trey' in the lottery, and if their cardinal proves the winning number and becomes pope they gain a fortune. And that's why you now see Santobono striding along yonder, all anxiety to know if Leo XIII will die and Sanguinetti don the tiara."

"Do you think the Pope so very ill, then?" asked Pierre, both anxious and interested.

The Count smiled and raised both arms: "Ah!" said he, "can one ever tell? They all get ill when their interest lies that way. However, I believe that the Pope is this time really indisposed; a complaint of the bowels, it is said; and at his age, you know, the slightest indisposition may prove fatal."

The two men took a few steps in silence, then the priest again asked a question: "Would Cardinal Sanguinetti have a great chance if the Holy See were vacant?"

"A great chance! Ah! that's another of those things which one never knows. The truth is people class Sanguinetti among the acceptable candidates, and if personal desire sufficed he would certainly be the next pope, for ambition consumes him to the marrow, and he displays extraordinary passion and determination in his efforts to succeed. But therein lies his very weakness; he is using himself up, and he knows it. And so he must be resolved to every step during the last days of battle. You may be quite sure that if he has shut himself up here at this critical time, it is in order that he may the better direct his operations from a distance, whilst at the same time feigning a retreat, a disinterestedness which is bound to have a good effect."

Then Prada began to expatiate on Sanguinetti with no little complacency, for he liked the man's spirit of intrigue, his keen, conquering appetite, his excessive, and even somewhat blundering activity. He had become acquainted with him on his return from the nunciature at Vienna, when he had already resolved to win the tiara. That ambition explained everything, his quarrels and reconciliations with the reigning pope, his affection for Germany, followed by a sudden evolution in the direction of France, his varying attitude with regard to Italy, at first a desire for agreement, and then absolute rejection of all compromises, a refusal to grant any concession, so long as Rome should not be evacuated. This, indeed, seemed to be Sanguinetti's definite position; he made a show of disliking the wavering sway of Leo XIII, and of retaining a fervent admiration for Pius IX, the great, heroic pope of the days of resistance, whose goodness of heart had proved no impediment to unshakable firmness. And all this was equivalent to a promise that he, Sanguinetti, would again make kindliness exempt from weakness, the rule of the Church, and would steer clear of the dangerous compounding of politics. At bottom, however, politics were his only dream, and he had even formulated a complete programme of intentional vagueness, which his clients and creatures spread abroad with an air of rapturous mystery. However, since a previous indisposition of the Pope's, during the spring, he had been living in mortal disquietude, for it had then been rumoured that the Jesuits would resign themselves to support Cardinal Pio Boccanera, although the latter scarcely favoured them. He was rough and stern, no doubt, and his extreme bigotry might be a source of danger in this tolerant age; but, on the other hand, was he not a patrician, and would not his election imply that the papacy would never cease to claim the temporal power? From that moment Boccanera had been the one man whom Sanguinetti feared, for he beheld himself despoiled of his prize, and spent his time in devising plans to rid himself of such a powerful rival, repeating abominable stories of Cardinal Pio's alleged complaisance with regard to Benedetta and Dario, and incessantly representing him as Antichrist, the man of sin, whose reign would consummate the ruin of the papacy. Finally, to regain the support of the Jesuits, Sanguinetti's last idea was to repeat through his familiars that for his part he would not merely maintain the principle of the temporal power intact, but would even undertake to regain that power. And he had a full plan on the subject, which folks confided to one another in whispers, a plan which, in spite of its apparent concessions, would lead to the overwhelming victory of the Church. It was to raise the prohibition which prevented Catholics from voting or becoming candidates at the Italian elections; to send a hundred, then two hundred, and then three hundred deputies to the Chamber, and in that wise to overthrow the House of Savoy, and establish a Federation of the Italian provinces, whereof the Holy Father, once more placed in possession of Rome, would become the august and sovereign President.

As Prada finished he again laughed, showing his white teeth—teeth which would never readily relinquish the prey they held. "So you see," he added, "we need to defend ourselves, since it's a question of turning us out. Fortunately, there are some little obstacles in the way of that. Nevertheless, such dreams naturally have great influence on excited minds, such as that of Santobono, for instance. He's a man whom one word from Sanguinetti would lead far indeed. Ah! he has good legs. Look at him up yonder, he has already reached the Cardinal's little palace—that white villa with the sculptured balconies."

Pierre raised his eyes and perceived the episcopal residence, which was one of the first houses of Frascati. Of modern construction and Renascence style, it overlooked the immensity of the Roman Campagna.

It was now eleven o'clock, and as the young priest, before going up to pay his own visit, bade the Count good-bye, the latter for a moment kept hold of his hand. "Do you know," said he, "it would be very kind of you to lunch with me—will you? Come and join me at that restaurant yonder with the pink front as soon as you are at liberty. I shall have settled my own business in an hour's time, and I shall be delighted to have your company at table."

Pierre began by declining, but he could offer no possible excuse, and at last surrendered, won over, despite himself, by Prada's real charm of manner. When they had parted, the young priest only had to climb a street in order to reach the Cardinal's door. With his natural expansiveness and craving for popularity, Sanguinetti was easy of access, and at Frascati in particular his doors were flung open even to the most humble cassocks. So Pierre was at once ushered in, a circumstance which somewhat surprised him, for he remembered the bad humour of the servant whom he had seen on calling at the Cardinal's residence in Rome, when he had been advised to forego the journey, as his Eminence did not like to be disturbed when he was ill. However, nothing spoke of illness in that pleasant villa, flooded with sunshine. True, the waiting-room, where he was momentarily left alone, displayed neither luxury nor comfort; but it was brightened by the finest light in the world, and overlooked that extraordinary Campagna, so flat, so bare, and so unique in its beauty, for in front of it one ever dreams and sees the past arise. And so, whilst waiting, Pierre stationed himself at an open window, conducting on to a balcony, and his eyes roamed over the endless sea of herbage to the far-away whiteness of Rome, above which rose the dome of St. Peter's, at that distance a mere sparkling speck, barely as large as the nail of one's little finger.

However, the young man had scarcely taken up this position when he was surprised to hear some people talking, their words reaching him with great distinctness. And on leaning forward he realised that his Eminence in person was standing on another balcony close by, and conversing with a priest, only a portion of whose cassock could be seen. Still, this sufficed for Pierre to recognise Santobono. His first impulse, dictated by natural discretion, was to withdraw from the window, but the words he next heard riveted him to the spot.

"We shall know in a moment," his Eminence was saying in his full voice. "I sent Eufemio to Rome, for he is the only person in whom I've any confidence. And see, there is the train bringing him back."

A train, still as small as a plaything, could in fact be seen approaching over the vast plain, and doubtless it was to watch for its arrival that Sanguinetti had stationed himself on the balcony. And there he lingered, with his eyes fixed on distant Rome. Then Santobono, in a passionate voice, spoke some words which Pierre imperfectly understood, but the Cardinal with clear articulation rejoined, "Yes, yes, my dear fellow, a catastrophe would be a great misfortune. Ah! may his Holiness long be preserved to us." Then he paused, and as he was no hypocrite, gave full expression to the thoughts which were in his mind: "At least, I hope that he will be preserved just now, for the times are bad, and I am in frightful anguish. The partisans of Antichrist have lately gained much ground."

A cry escaped Santobono: "Oh! your Eminence will act and triumph."

"I, my dear fellow? What would you have me do? I am simply at the disposal of my friends, those who are willing to believe in me, with the sole object of ensuring the victory of the Holy See. It is they who ought to act, it is they—each according to the measure of his means—who ought to bar the road to the wicked in order that the righteous may succeed. Ah! if Antichrist should reign—"

The recurrence of this word Antichrist greatly disturbed Pierre; but he suddenly remembered what the Count had told him: Antichrist was Cardinal Boccanera.

"Think of that, my dear fellow," continued Sanguinetti. "Picture Antichrist at the Vatican, consummating the ruin of religion by his implacable pride, his iron will, his gloomy passion for nihility; for there can be no doubt of it, he is the Beast of Death announced by the prophecies, the Beast who will expose one and all to the danger of being swallowed up with him in his furious rush into abysmal darkness. I know him; he only dreams of obstinacy and destruction, he will seize the pillars of the temple and shake them in order that he may sink beneath the ruins, he and the whole Catholic world! In less than six months he will be driven from Rome, at strife with all the nations, execrated by Italy, and roaming the world like the phantom of the last pope!"

It was with a low growl, suggestive of a stifled oath, that Santobono responded to this frightful prediction. But the train had now reached the station, and among the few passengers who had alighted, Pierre could distinguish a little Abbe, who was walking so fast that his cassock flapped against his hips. It was Abbe Eufemio, the Cardinal's secretary, and when he had perceived his Eminence on the balcony he lost all self-respect, and broke into a run, in order that he might the sooner ascend the sloping street. "Ah! here's Eufemio," exclaimed the Cardinal, quivering with anxiety. "We shall know now, we shall know now."

The secretary had plunged into the doorway below, and he climbed the stairs with such rapidity that almost immediately afterwards Pierre saw him rush breathlessly across the waiting-room, and vanish into the Cardinal's sanctum. Sanguinetti had quitted the balcony to meet his messenger, but soon afterwards he returned to it asking questions, venting exclamations, raising, in fact, quite a tumult over the news which he had received. "And so it's really true, the night was a bad one. His Holiness scarcely slept! Colic, you were told? But nothing could be worse at his age; it might carry him off in a couple of hours. And the doctors, what do they say?"

The answer did not reach Pierre, but he understood its purport as the Cardinal in his naturally loud voice resumed: "Oh! the doctors never know. Besides, when they refuse to speak death is never far off. Dio! what a misfortune if the catastrophe cannot be deferred for a few days!"

Then he became silent, and Pierre realised that his eyes were once more travelling towards Rome, gazing with ambitious anguish at the dome of St. Peter's, that little, sparkling speck above the vast, ruddy plain. What a commotion, what agitation if the Pope were dead! And he wished that it had merely been necessary for him to stretch forth his arm in order to take and hold the Eternal City, the Holy City, which, yonder on the horizon, occupied no more space than a heap of gravel cast there by a child's spade. And he was already dreaming of the coming Conclave, when the canopy of each other cardinal would fall, and his own, motionless and sovereign, would crown him with purple.

"But you are right, my friend!" he suddenly exclaimed, addressing Santobono, "one must act, the salvation of the Church is at stake. And, besides, it is impossible that Heaven should not be with us, since our sole desire is its triumph. If necessary, at the supreme moment, Heaven will know how to crush Antichrist."

Then, for the first time, Pierre distinctly heard the voice of Santobono, who, gruffly, with a sort of savage decision, responded: "Oh! if Heaven is tardy it shall be helped."

That was all; the young man heard nothing further save a confused murmur of voices. The speakers quitted the balcony, and his spell of waiting began afresh in the sunlit salon so peaceful and delightful in its brightness. But all at once the door of his Eminence's private room was thrown wide open and a servant ushered him in; and he was surprised to find the Cardinal alone, for he had not witnessed the departure of the two priests, who had gone off by another door. The Cardinal, with his highly coloured face, big nose, thick lips, square-set, vigorous figure, which still looked young despite his sixty years, was standing near a window in the bright golden light. He had put on the paternal smile with which he greeted even the humblest from motives of good policy, and as soon as Pierre had knelt and kissed his ring, he motioned him to a chair. "Sit down, dear son, sit down. You have come of course about that unfortunate affair of your book. I am very pleased indeed to be able to speak with you about it."

He himself then took a chair in front of that window overlooking Rome whence he seemed unable to drag himself. And the young priest, whilst apologising for coming to disturb his rest, perceived that he scarcely listened, for his eyes again sought the prey which he so ardently coveted. Yet the semblance of good-natured attention was perfect, and Pierre marvelled at the force of will which this man must possess to appear so calm, so interested in the affairs of others, when such a tempest was raging in him.

"Your Eminence will, I hope, kindly forgive me," continued the young priest.

"But you have done right to come, since I am kept here by my failing health," said the Cardinal. "Besides, I am somewhat better, and it is only natural that you should wish to give me some explanations and defend your work and enlighten my judgment. In fact, I was astonished at not yet having seen you, for I know that your faith in your cause is great and that you spare no steps to convert your judges. So speak, my dear son, I am listening and shall be pleased indeed if I can absolve you."

Pierre was caught by these kind words, and a hope returned to him, that of winning the support of the all-powerful Prefect of the Index. He already regarded this ex-nuncio—who at Brussels and Vienna had acquired the worldly art of sending people away satisfied with indefinite promises though he meant to grant them nothing—as a man of rare intelligence and exquisite cordiality. And so once more he regained the fervour of his apostolate to express his views respecting the future Rome, the Rome he dreamt of, which was destined yet again to become the mistress of the world if she would return to the Christianity of Jesus, to an ardent love for the weak and the humble.

Sanguinetti smiled, wagged his head, and raised exclamations of rapture: "Very good, very good indeed, perfect! Oh! I agree with you, dear son. One cannot put things better. It is quite evident; all good minds must agree with you." And then, said he, the poetic side deeply touched him. Like Leo XIII—and doubtless in a spirit of rivalry—he courted the reputation of being a very distinguished Latinist, and professed a special and boundless affection for Virgil. "I know, I know," he exclaimed, "I remember your page on the return of spring, which consoles the poor whom winter has frozen. Oh! I read it three times over! And are you aware that your writing is full of Latin turns of style. I noticed more than fifty expressions which could be found in the 'Bucolics.' Your book is a charm, a perfect charm!"

As he was no fool, and realised that the little priest before him was a man of high intelligence, he ended by interesting himself, not in Pierre personally, but in the profit which he might possibly derive from him. Amidst his feverish intrigues, he unceasingly sought to utilise all the qualities possessed by those whom God sent to him that might in any way be conducive to his own triumph. So, for a moment, he turned away from Rome and looked his companion in the face, listening to him and asking himself in what way he might employ him—either at once in the crisis through which he was passing, or later on when he should be pope. But the young priest again made the mistake of attacking the temporal power, and of employing that unfortunate expression, "a new religion." Thereupon the Cardinal stopped him with a gesture, still smiling, still retaining all his amiability, although the resolution which he had long since formed became from that moment definitive. "You are certainly in the right on many points, my dear son," he said, "and I often share your views—share them completely. But come, you are doubtless not aware that I am the protector of Lourdes here at Rome. And so, after the page which you have written about the Grotto, how can I possibly pronounce in your favour and against the Fathers?"

Pierre was utterly overcome by this announcement, for he was indeed unaware of the Cardinal's position with respect to Lourdes, nobody having taken the precaution to warn him. However, each of the Catholic enterprises distributed throughout the world has a protector at Rome, a cardinal who is designated by the Pope to represent it and, if need be, to defend it.

"Those good Fathers!" Sanguinetti continued in a gentle voice, "you have caused them great grief, and really our hands are tied, we cannot add to their sorrow. If you only knew what a number of masses they send us! I know more than one of our poor priests who would die of hunger if it were not for them."

Pierre could only bow beneath the blow. Once more he found himself in presence of the pecuniary question, the necessity in which the Holy See is placed to secure the revenue it requires one year with another. And thus the Pope was ever in servitude, for if the loss of Rome had freed him of the cares of state, his enforced gratitude for the alms he received still riveted him to earth. So great, indeed, were the requirements, that money was the ruler, the sovereign power, before which all bowed at the Court of Rome.

And now Sanguinetti rose to dismiss his visitor. "You must not despair, dear son," he said effusively. "I have only my own vote, you know, and I promise you that I will take into account the excellent explanations which you have just given me. And who can tell? If God be with you, He will save you even in spite of all!" This speech formed part of the Cardinal's usual tactics; for one of his principles was never to drive people to extremes by sending them away hopeless. What good, indeed, would it do to tell this one that the condemnation of his book was a foregone conclusion, and that his only prudent course would be to disavow it? Only a savage like Boccanera breathed anger upon fiery souls and plunged them into rebellion. "You must hope, hope!" repeated Sanguinetti with a smile, as if implying a multitude of fortunate things which he could not plainly express.

Thereupon Pierre, who was deeply touched, felt born anew. He even forgot the conversation he had surprised, the Cardinal's keen ambition and covert rage with his redoubtable rival. Besides, might not intelligence take the place of heart among the powerful? If this man should some day become pope, and had understood him, might he not prove the pope who was awaited, the pope who would accept the task of reorganising the Church of the United States of Europe, and making it the spiritual sovereign of the world? So he thanked him with emotion, bowed, and left him to his dream, standing before that widely open window whence Rome appeared to him, glittering like a jewel, even indeed as the tiara of gold and gems, in the splendour of the autumn sun.

It was nearly one o'clock when Pierre and Count Prada were at last able to sit down to dejeuner in the little restaurant where they had agreed to meet. They had both been delayed by their affairs. However, the Count, having settled some worrying matters to his own advantage, was very lively, whilst the priest on his side was again hopeful, and yielded to the delightful charm of that last fine day. And so the meal proved a very pleasant one in the large, bright room, which, as usual at that season of the year, was quite deserted. Pink and blue predominated in the decoration, but Cupids fluttered on the ceiling, and landscapes, vaguely recalling the Roman castles, adorned the walls. The things they ate were fresh, and they drank the wine of Frascati, to which the soil imparts a kind of burnt flavour as if the old volcanoes of the region had left some little of their fire behind.

For a long while the conversation ranged over those wild and graceful Alban hills, which, fortunately for the pleasure of the eye, overlook the flat Roman Campagna. Pierre, who had made the customary carriage excursion from Frascati to Nemi, still felt its charm and spoke of it in glowing language. First came the lovely road from Frascati to Albano, ascending and descending hillsides planted with reeds, vines, and olive-trees, amongst which one obtained frequent glimpses of the Campagna's wavy immensity. On the right-hand the village of Rocca di Papa arose in amphitheatrical fashion, showing whitely on a knoll below Monte Cavo, which was crowned by lofty and ancient trees. And from this point of the road, on looking back towards Frascati, one saw high up, on the verge of a pine wood the ruins of Tusculum, large ruddy ruins, baked by centuries of sunshine, and whence the boundless panorama must have been superb. Next one passed through Marino, with its sloping streets, its large cathedral, and its black decaying palace belonging to the Colonnas. Then, beyond a wood of ilex-trees, the lake of Albano was skirted with scenery which has no parallel in the world. In front, beyond the clear mirror of motionless water, were the ruins of Alba Longa; on the left rose Monte Cavo with Rocca di Papa and Palazzuolo; whilst on the right Castel Gandolfo overlooked the lake as from the summit of a cliff. Down below in the extinct crater, as in the depths of a gigantic cup of verdure, the lake slept heavy and lifeless: a sheet of molten metal, which the sun on one side streaked with gold, whilst the other was black with shade. And the road then ascended all the way to Castel Gandolfo, which was perched on its rock, like a white bird betwixt the lake and the sea. Ever refreshed by breezes, even in the most burning hours of summer, the little place was once famous for its papal villa, where Pius IX loved to spend hours of indolence, and whither Leo XIII has never come. And next the road dipped down, and the ilex-trees appeared again, ilex-trees famous for their size, a double row of monsters with twisted limbs, two and three hundred years old. Then one at last reached Albano, a small town less modernised and less cleansed than Frascati, a patch of the old land which has retained some of its ancient wildness; and afterwards there was Ariccia with the Palazzo Chigi, and hills covered with forests and viaducts spanning ravines which overflowed with foliage; and there was yet Genzano, and yet Nemi, growing still wilder and more remote, lost in the midst of rocks and trees.

Ah! how ineffaceable was the recollection which Pierre had retained of Nemi, Nemi on the shore of its lake, Nemi so delicious and fascinating from afar, conjuring up all the ancient legends of fairy towns springing from amidst the greenery of mysterious waters, but so repulsively filthy when one at last reaches it, crumbling on all sides but yet dominated by the Orsini tower, as by the evil genius of the middle ages, which there seems to perpetuate the ferocious habits, the violent passions, the knife thrusts of the past! Thence came that Santobono whose brother had killed, and who himself, with his eyes of crime glittering like live embers, seemed to be consumed by a murderous flame. And the lake, that lake round like an extinguished moon fallen into the depths of a former crater, a deeper and less open cup than that of the lake of Albano, a cup rimmed with trees of wondrous vigour and density! Pines, elms, and willows descend to the very margin, with a green mass of tangled branches which weigh each other down. This formidable fecundity springs from the vapour which constantly arises from the water under the parching action of the sun, whose rays accumulate in this hollow till it becomes like a furnace. There is a warm, heavy dampness, the paths of the adjacent gardens grow green with moss, and in the morning dense mists often fill the large cup with white vapour, as with the steaming milk of some sorceress of malevolent craft. And Pierre well remembered how uncomfortable he had felt before that lake where ancient atrocities, a mysterious religion with abominable rites, seemed to slumber amidst the superb scenery. He had seen it at the approach of evening, looking, in the shade of its forest girdle, like a plate of dull metal, black and silver, motionless by reason of its weight. And that water, clear and yet so deep, that water deserted, without a bark upon its surface, that water august, lifeless, and sepulchral, had left him a feeling of inexpressible sadness, of mortal melancholy, the hopelessness of great solitary passion, earth and water alike swollen by the mute spasms of germs, troublous in their fecundity. Ah! those black and plunging banks, and that black mournful lake prone at the bottom!*

* Some literary interest attaches to M. Zola's account of Nemi,
whose praises have been sung by a hundred poets. It will be
observed that he makes no mention of Egeria. The religion
distinguished by abominable practices to which he alludes,
may perhaps be the worship of the Egyptian Diana, who had a
famous temple near Nemi, which was excavated by Lord Savile
some ten years ago, when all the smaller objects discovered
were presented to the town of Nottingham. At this temple,
according to some classical writers, the chief priest was
required to murder his predecessor, and there were other
abominable usages.—Trans.

Count Prada began to laugh when Pierre told him of these impressions. "Yes, yes," said he, "it's true, Nemi isn't always gay. In dull weather I have seen the lake looking like lead, and even the full sunshine scarcely animates it. For my part, I know I should die of ennui if I had to live face to face with that bare water. But it is admired by poets and romantic women, those who adore great tragedies of passion."

Then, as he and Pierre rose from the table to go and take coffee on the terrace of the restaurant, the conversation changed: "Do you mean to attend Prince Buongiovanni's reception this evening?" the Count inquired. "It will be a curious sight, especially for a foreigner, and I advise you not to miss it."

"Yes, I have an invitation," Pierre replied. "A friend of mine, Monsieur Narcisse Habert, an attache at our embassy, procured it for me, and I am going with him."

That evening, indeed, there was to be a fete at the Palazzo Buongiovanni on the Corso, one of the few galas that take place in Rome each winter. People said that this one would surpass all others in magnificence, for it was to be given in honour of the betrothal of little Princess Celia. The Prince, her father, after boxing her ears, it was rumoured, and narrowly escaping an attack of apoplexy as the result of a frightful fit of anger, had, all at once, yielded to her quiet, gentle stubbornness, and consented to her marriage with Lieutenant Attilio, the son of Minister Sacco. And all the drawing-rooms of Rome, those of the white world quite as much as those of the black, were thoroughly upset by the tidings.

Count Prada made merry over the affair. "Ah! you'll see a fine sight!" he exclaimed. "Personally, I'm delighted with it all for the sake of my good cousin Attilio, who is really a very nice and worthy fellow. And nothing in the world would keep me from going to see my dear uncle Sacco make his entry into the ancient salons of the Buongiovanni. It will be something extraordinary and superb. He has at last become Minister of Agriculture, you know. My father, who always takes things so seriously, told me this morning that the affair so worried him he hadn't closed his eyes all night."

The Count paused, but almost immediately added: "I say, it is half-past two and you won't have a train before five o'clock. Do you know what you ought to do? Why, drive back to Rome with me in my carriage."

"No, no," rejoined Pierre, "I'm deeply obliged to you but I'm to dine with my friend Narcisse this evening, and I mustn't be late."

"But you won't be late—on the contrary! We shall start at three and reach Rome before five o'clock. There can't be a more pleasant promenade when the light falls; and, come, I promise you a splendid sunset."

He was so pressing that the young priest had to accept, quite subjugated by so much amiability and good humour. They spent another half-hour very pleasantly in chatting about Rome, Italy, and France. Then, for a moment, they went up into Frascati where the Count wished to say a few words to a contractor, and just as three o'clock was striking they started off, seated side by side on the soft cushions and gently rocked by the motion of the victoria as the two horses broke into a light trot. As Prada had predicted, that return to Rome across the bare Campagna under the vast limpid heavens at the close of such a mild autumn day proved most delightful. First of all, however, the victoria had to descend the slopes of Frascati between vineyards and olive-trees. The paved road snaked, and was but little frequented; they merely saw a few peasants in old felt hats, a white mule, and a cart drawn by a donkey, for it is only upon Sundays that the osterie or wine-shops are filled and that artisans in easy circumstances come to eat a dish of kid at the surrounding bastides. However, at one turn of the road they passed a monumental fountain. Then a flock of sheep momentarily barred the way before defiling past. And beyond the gentle undulations of the ruddy Campagna Rome appeared amidst the violet vapours of evening, sinking by degrees as the carriage itself descended to a lower and lower level. There came a moment when the city was a mere thin grey streak, speckled whitely here and there by a few sunlit house-fronts. And then it seemed to plunge below the ground—to be submerged by the swell of the far-spreading fields.

The victoria was now rolling over the plain, leaving the Alban hills behind, whilst before it and on either hand came the expanse of meadows and stubbles. And then it was that the Count, after leaning forward, exclaimed: "Just look ahead, yonder, there's our man of this morning, Santobono in person—what a strapping fellow he is, and how fast he walks! My horses can scarcely overtake him."

Pierre in his turn leant forward and likewise perceived the priest of St. Mary in the Fields, looking tall and knotty, fashioned as it were with a bill-hook. Robed in a long black cassock, he showed like a vigorous splotch of ink amidst the bright sunshine streaming around him; and he was walking on at such a fast, stern, regular pace that he suggested Destiny on the march. Something, which could not be well distinguished, was hanging from his right arm.

When the carriage had at last overtaken him Prada told the coachman to slacken speed, and then entered into conversation.

"Good-day, Abbe; you are well, I hope?" he asked.

"Very well, Signor Conte, I thank you."

"And where are you going so bravely?"

"Signor Conte, I am going to Rome."

"What! to Rome, at this late hour?"

"Oh! I shall be there nearly as soon as yourself. The distance doesn't frighten me, and money's quickly earned by walking."

Scarcely turning his head to reply, stepping out beside the wheels, Santobono did not miss a stride. And Prada, diverted by the meeting, whispered to Pierre: "Wait a bit, he'll amuse us." Then he added aloud: "Since you are going to Rome, Abbe, you had better get in here; there's room for you."

Santobono required no pressing, but at once accepted the offer. "Willingly; a thousand thanks," he said. "It's still better to save one's shoe leather."

Then he got in and installed himself on the bracket-seat, declining with abrupt humility the place which Pierre politely offered him beside the Count. The young priest and the latter now saw that the object he was carrying was a little basket of fresh figs, nicely arranged and covered with leaves.

The horses set off again at a faster trot, and the carriage rolled on and on over the superb, flat plain. "So you are going to Rome?" the Count resumed in order to make Santobono talk.

"Yes," the other replied, "I am taking his Eminence Cardinal Boccanera these few figs, the last of the season: a little present which I had promised him." He had placed the basket on his knees and was holding it between his big knotty hands as if it were something rare and fragile.

"Ah! some of the famous figs of your garden," said Prada. "It's quite true, they are like honey. But why don't you rid yourself of them. You surely don't mean to keep them on your knees all the way to Rome. Give them to me, I'll put them in the hood."

However, Santobono became quite agitated, and vigorously declined the offer. "No, no, a thousand thanks! They don't embarrass me in the least; they are very well here; and in this way I shall be sure that no accident will befall them."

His passion for the fruit he grew quite amused Prada, who nudged Pierre, and then inquired: "Is the Cardinal fond of your figs?"

"Oh! his Eminence condescends to adore them. In former years, when he spent the summer at the villa, he would never touch the figs from other trees. And so, you see, knowing his tastes, it costs me very little to gratify him."

Whilst making this reply Santobono had shot such a keen glance in the direction of Pierre that the Count felt it necessary to introduce them to one another. This he did saying: "As it happens, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment is stopping at the Palazzo Boccanera; he has been there for three months or so."

"Yes, I'm aware of it," Santobono quietly replied; "I found Monsieur l'Abbe with his Eminence one day when I took some figs to the Palazzo. Those were less ripe, but these are perfect." So speaking he gave the little basket a complacent glance, and seemed to press it yet more closely between his huge and hairy fingers.

Then came a spell of silence, whilst on either hand the Campagna spread out as far as the eye could reach. All houses had long since disappeared; there was not a wall, not a tree, nothing but the undulating expanse whose sparse, short herbage was, with the approach of winter, beginning to turn green once more. A tower, a half-fallen ruin which came into sight on the left, rising in solitude into the limpid sky above the flat, boundless line of the horizon, suddenly assumed extraordinary importance. Then, on the right, the distant silhouettes of cattle and horses were seen in a large enclosure with wooden rails. Urged on by the goad, oxen, still yoked, were slowly coming back from ploughing; whilst a farmer, cantering beside the ploughed land on a little sorrel nag, gave a final look round for the night. Now and again the road became peopled. A biroccino, an extremely light vehicle with two huge wheels and a small seat perched upon the springs, whisked by like a gust of wind. From time to time also the victoria passed a carrotino, one of the low carts in which peasants, sheltered by a kind of bright-hued tent, bring the wine, vegetables, and fruit of the castle-lands to Rome. The shrill tinkling of horses' bells was heard afar off as the animals followed the well-known road of their own accord, their peasant drivers usually being sound asleep. Women with bare, black hair, scarlet neckerchiefs, and skirts caught up, were seen going home in groups of three and four. And then the road again emptied, and the solitude became more and more complete, without a wayfarer or an animal appearing for miles and miles, whilst yonder, at the far end of the lifeless sea, so grandiose and mournful in its monotony, the sun continued to descend from the infinite vault of heaven.

"And the Pope, Abbe, is he dead?" Prada suddenly inquired.

Santobono did not even start. "I trust," he replied in all simplicity, "that his Holiness still has many long years to live for the triumph of the Church."

"So you had good news this morning when you called on your bishop, Cardinal Sanguinetti?"

This time the priest was unable to restrain a slight start. Had he been seen, then? In his haste he had failed to notice the two men following the road behind him. However, he at once regained self-possession, and replied: "Oh! one can never tell exactly whether news is good or bad. It seems that his Holiness passed a somewhat painful night, but I devoutly hope that the next will be a better one." Then he seemed to meditate for a moment, and added: "Moreover, if God should have deemed it time to call his Holiness to Himself, He would not leave His flock without a shepherd. He would have already chosen and designated the Sovereign Pontiff of to-morrow."

This superb answer increased Prada's gaiety. "You are really extraordinary, Abbe," he said. "So you think that popes are solely created by the grace of the Divinity! The pope of to-morrow is chosen up in heaven, eh, and simply waits? Well, I fancied that men had something to do with the matter. But perhaps you already know which cardinal it is that the divine favour has thus elected in advance?"

Then, like the unbeliever he was, he went on with his facile jests, which left the priest unruffled. In fact, the latter also ended by laughing when the Count, after alluding to the gambling passion which at each fresh Conclave sets wellnigh the whole population of Rome betting for or against this or that candidate, told him that he might easily make his fortune if he were in the divine secret. Next the talk turned on the three white cassocks of different sizes which are always kept in readiness in a cupboard at the Vatican. Which of them would be required on this occasion?—the short one, the long one, or the one of medium size? Each time that the reigning pope falls somewhat seriously ill there is in this wise an extraordinary outburst of emotion, a keen awakening of all ambitions and intrigues, to such a point that not merely in the black world, but throughout the city, people have no other subject of curiosity, conversation, and occupation than that of discussing the relative claims of the cardinals and predicting which of them will be elected.

"Come, come," Prada resumed, "since you know the truth, I'm determined that you shall tell me. Will it be Cardinal Moretta?"

Santobono, in spite of his evident desire to remain dignified and disinterested, like a good, pious priest, was gradually growing impassioned, yielding to the hidden fire which consumed him. And this interrogatory finished him off; he could no longer restrain himself, but replied: "Moretta! What an idea! Why, he is sold to all Europe!"

"Well, will it be Cardinal Bartolini?"

"Oh! you can't think that. Bartolini has used himself up in striving for everything and getting nothing."

"Will it be Cardinal Dozio, then?"

"Dozio, Dozio! Why, if Dozio were to win one might altogether despair of our Holy Church, for no man can have a baser mind than he!"

Prada raised his hands, as if he had exhausted the serious candidates. In order to increase the priest's exasperation he maliciously refrained from naming Cardinal Sanguinetti, who was certainly Santobono's nominee. All at once, however, he pretended to make a good guess, and gaily exclaimed: "Ah! I have it; I know your man—Cardinal Boccanera!"

The blow struck Santobono full in the heart, wounding him both in his rancour and his patriotic faith. His terrible mouth was already opening, and he was about to shout "No! no!" with all his strength, but he managed to restrain the cry, compelled as he was to silence by the present on his knees—that little basket of figs which he pressed so convulsively with both hands; and the effort which he was obliged to make left him quivering to such a point that he had to wait some time before he could reply in a calm voice: "His most reverend Eminence Cardinal Boccanera is a saintly man, well worthy of the throne, and my only fear is that, with his hatred of new Italy, he might bring us warfare."

Prada, however, desired to enlarge the wound. "At all events," said he, "you accept him and love him too much not to rejoice over his chances of success. And I really think that we have arrived at the truth, for everybody is convinced that the Conclave's choice cannot fall elsewhere. Come, come; Boccanera is a very tall man, so it's the long white cassock which will be required."

"The long cassock, the long cassock," growled Santobono, despite himself; "that's all very well, but—"

Then he stopped short, and, again overcoming his passion, left his sentence unfinished. Pierre, listening in silence, marvelled at the man's self-restraint, for he remembered the conversation which he had overheard at Cardinal Sanguinetti's. Those figs were evidently a mere pretext for gaining admission to the Boccanera mansion, where some friend—Abbe Paparelli, no doubt—could alone supply certain positive information which was needed. But how great was the command which the hot-blooded priest exercised over himself amidst the riotous impulses of his soul!

On either side of the road the Campagna still and ever spread its expanse of verdure, and Prada, who had become grave and dreamy, gazed before him without seeing anything. At last, however, he gave expression to his thoughts. "You know, Abbe, what will be said if the Pope should die this time. That sudden illness, those colics, those refusals to make any information public, mean nothing good—Yes, yes, poison, just as for the others!"

Pierre gave a start of stupefaction. The Pope poisoned! "What! Poison? Again?" he exclaimed as he gazed at his companions with dilated eyes. Poison at the end of the nineteenth century, as in the days of the Borgias, as on the stage in a romanticist melodrama! To him the idea appeared both monstrous and ridiculous.

Santobono, whose features had become motionless and impenetrable, made no reply. But Prada nodded, and the conversation was henceforth confined to him and the young priest. "Why, yes, poison," he replied. "The fear of it has remained very great in Rome. Whenever a death seems inexplicable, either by reason of its suddenness or the tragic circumstances which attend it, the unanimous thought is poison. And remark this: in no city, I believe, are sudden deaths so frequent. The causes I don't exactly know, but some doctors put everything down to the fevers. Among the people, however, the one thought is poison, poison with all its legends, poison which kills like lightning and leaves no trace, the famous recipe bequeathed from age to age, through the emperors and the popes, down to these present times of middle-class democracy."

As he spoke he ended by smiling, for he was inclined to be somewhat sceptical on the point, despite the covert terror with which he was inspired by racial and educational causes. However, he quoted instances. The Roman matrons had rid themselves of their husbands and lovers by employing the venom of red toads. Locusta, in a more practical spirit, sought poison in plants, one of which, probably aconite, she was wont to boil. Then, long afterwards, came the age of the Borgias, and subsequently, at Naples, La Toffana sold a famous water, doubtless some preparation of arsenic, in phials decorated with a representation of St. Nicholas of Bari. There were also extraordinary stories of pins, a prick from which killed one like lightning, of cups of wine poisoned by the infusion of rose petals, of woodcocks cut in half with prepared knives, which poisoned but one-half of the bird, so that he who partook of that half was killed. "I myself, in my younger days," continued Prada, "had a friend whose bride fell dead in church during the marriage service through simply inhaling a bouquet of flowers. And so isn't it possible that the famous recipe may really have been handed down, and have remained known to a few adepts?"

"But chemistry has made too much progress," Pierre replied. "If mysterious poisons were believed in by the ancients and remained undetected in their time it was because there were no means of analysis. But the drug of the Borgias would now lead the simpleton who might employ it straight to the Assizes. Such stories are mere nonsense, and at the present day people scarcely tolerate them in newspaper serials and shockers."

"Perhaps so," resumed the Count with his uneasy smile. "You are right, no doubt—only go and tell that to your host, for instance, Cardinal Boccanera, who last summer held in his arms an old and deeply-loved friend, Monsignor Gallo, who died after a seizure of a couple of hours."

"But apoplexy may kill one in two hours, and aneurism only takes two minutes."

"True, but ask the Cardinal what he thought of his friend's prolonged shudders, the leaden hue which overcame his face, the sinking of his eyes, and the expression of terror which made him quite unrecognisable. The Cardinal is convinced that Monsignor Gallo was poisoned, because he was his dearest confidant, the counsellor to whom he always listened, and whose wise advice was a guarantee of success."

Pierre's bewilderment was increasing, and, irritated by the impassibility of Santobono, he addressed him direct. "It's idiotic, it's awful! Does your reverence also believe in these frightful stories?"

But the priest of Frascati gave no sign. His thick, passionate lips remained closed while his black glowing eyes never ceased to gaze at Prada. The latter, moreover, was quoting other instances. There was the case of Monsignor Nazzarelli, who had been found in bed, shrunken and calcined like carbon. And there was that of Monsignor Brando, struck down in his sacerdotal vestments at St. Peter's itself, in the very sacristy, during vespers!

"Ah! Mon Dieu!" sighed Pierre, "you will tell me so much that I myself shall end by trembling, and sha'n't dare to eat anything but boiled eggs as long as I stay in this terrible Rome of yours."

For a moment this whimsical reply enlivened both the Count and Pierre. But it was quite true that their conversation showed Rome under a terrible aspect, for it conjured up the Eternal City of Crime, the city of poison and the knife, where for more than two thousand years, ever since the raising of the first bit of wall, the lust of power, the frantic hunger for possession and enjoyment, had armed men's hands, ensanguined the pavements, and cast victims into the river and the ground. Assassinations and poisonings under the emperors, poisonings and assassinations under the popes, ever did the same torrent of abominations strew that tragic soil with death amidst the sovereign glory of the sun.

"All the same," said the Count, "those who take precautions are perhaps not ill advised. It is said that more than one cardinal shudders and mistrusts people. One whom I know will never eat anything that has not been bought and prepared by his own cook. And as for the Pope, if he is anxious—"

Pierre again raised a cry of stupefaction. "What, the Pope himself! The Pope afraid of being poisoned!"

"Well, my dear Abbe, people commonly assert it. There are certainly days when he considers himself more menaced than anybody else. And are you not aware of the old Roman view that a pope ought never to live till too great an age, and that when he is so obstinate as not to die at the right time he ought to be assisted? As soon as a pope begins to fall into second childhood, and by reason of his senility becomes a source of embarrassment, and possibly even danger, to the Church, his right place is heaven. Moreover, matters are managed in a discreet manner; a slight cold becomes a decent pretext to prevent him from tarrying any longer on the throne of St. Peter."

Prada then gave some curious details. One prelate, it was said, wishing to dispel his Holiness's fears, had devised an elaborate precautionary system which, among other things, was to comprise a little padlocked vehicle, in which the food destined for the frugal pontifical table was to be securely placed before leaving the kitchen, so that it might not be tampered with on its way to the Pope's apartments. However, this project had not yet been carried into effect.

"After all," the Count concluded with a laugh, "every pope has to die some day, especially when his death is needful for the welfare of the Church. Isn't that so, Abbe?"

Santobono, whom he addressed, had a moment previously lowered his eyes as if to contemplate the little basket of figs which he held on his lap with as much care as if it had been the Blessed Sacrament. On being questioned in such a direct, sharp fashion he could not do otherwise than look up. However, he did not depart from his prolonged silence, but limited his answer to a slow nod.

"And it is God alone, and not poison, who causes one to die. Is that not so, Abbe?" repeated Prada. "It is said that those were the last words of poor Monsignor Gallo before he expired in the arms of his friend Cardinal Boccanera."

For the second time Santobono nodded without speaking. And then silence fell, all three sinking into a dreamy mood.

Meantime, without a pause, the carriage rolled on across the immensity of the Campagna. The road, straight as an arrow, seemed to extend into the infinite. As the sun descended towards the horizon the play of light and shade became more marked on the broad undulations of the ground which stretched away, alternately of a pinky green and a violet grey, till they reached the distant fringe of the sky. At the roadside on either hand there were still and ever tall withered thistles and giant fennel with yellow umbels. Then, after a time, came a team of four oxen, that had been kept ploughing until late, and stood forth black and huge in the pale atmosphere and mournful solitude. Farther on some flocks of sheep, whence the breeze wafted a tallowy odour, set patches of brown amidst the herbage, which once more was becoming verdant; whilst at intervals a dog was heard to bark, his voice the only distinct sound amidst the low quivering of that silent desert where the sovereign peacefulness of death seemed to reign. But all at once a light melody arose and some larks flew up, one of them soaring into the limpid golden heavens. And ahead, at the far extremity of the pure sky, Rome, with her towers and domes, grew larger and larger, like a city of white marble springing from a mirage amidst the greenery of some enchanted garden.

"Matteo!" Prada called to his coachman, "pull up at the Osteria Romana." And to his companions he added: "Pray excuse me, but I want to see if I can get some new-laid eggs for my father. He is so fond of them."

A few minutes afterwards the carriage stopped. At the very edge of the road stood a primitive sort of inn, bearing the proud and sonorous name of "Antica Osteria Romana." It had now become a mere house of call for carters and chance sportsmen, who ventured to drink a flagon of white wine whilst eating an omelet and a slice of ham. Occasionally, on Sundays, some of the humble classes would walk over from Rome and make merry there; but the week days often went by without a soul entering the place, such was its isolation amidst the bare Campagna.

The Count was already springing from the carriage. "I shall only be a minute," said he as he turned away.

The osteria was a long, low pile with a ground floor and one upper storey, the last being reached by an outdoor stairway built of large blocks of stone which had been scorched by the hot suns. The entire place, indeed, was corroded, tinged with the hue of old gold. On the ground floor one found a common room, a cart-house, and a stable with adjoining sheds. At one side, near a cluster of parasol pines—the only trees that could grow in that ungrateful soil—there was an arbour of reeds where five or six rough wooden tables were set out. And, as a background to this sorry, mournful nook of life, there arose a fragment of an ancient aqueduct whose arches, half fallen and opening on to space, alone interrupted the flat line of the horizon.

All at once, however, the Count retraced his steps, and, addressing Santobono, exclaimed: "I say, Abbe, you'll surely accept a glass of white wine. I know that you are a bit of a vine grower, and they have a little white wine here which you ought to make acquaintance with."

Santobono again required no pressing, but quietly alighted. "Oh! I know it," said he; "it's a wine from Marino; it's grown in a lighter soil than ours at Frascati."

Then, as he would not relax his hold on his basket of figs, but even now carried it along with him, the Count lost patience. "Come, you don't want that basket," said he; "leave it in the carriage."

The priest gave no reply, but walked ahead, whilst Pierre also made up his mind to descend from the carriage in order to see what a suburban osteria was like. Prada was known at this place, and an old woman, tall, withered, but looking quite queenly in her wretched garments, had at once presented herself. On the last occasion when the Count had called she had managed to find half a dozen eggs. This time she said she would go to see, but could promise nothing, for the hens laid here and there all over the place, and she could never tell what eggs there might be.

"All right!" Prada answered, "go and look; and meantime we will have a caraffa of white wine."

The three men entered the common room, which was already quite dark. Although the hot weather was now over, one heard the buzzing of innumerable flies immediately one reached the threshold, and a pungent odour of acidulous wine and rancid oil caught one at the throat. As soon as their eyes became accustomed to the dimness they were able to distinguish the spacious, blackened, malodorous chamber, whose only furniture consisted of some roughly made tables and benches. It seemed to be quite empty, so complete was the silence, apart from the buzz of the flies. However, two men were seated there, two wayfarers who remained mute and motionless before their untouched, brimming glasses. Moreover, on a low chair near the door, in the little light which penetrated from without, a thin, sallow girl, the daughter of the house, sat idle, trembling with fever, her hands close pressed between her knees.

Realising that Pierre felt uncomfortable there, the Count proposed that they should drink their wine outside. "We shall be better out of doors," said he, "it's so very in mild this evening."

Accordingly, whilst the mother looked for the eggs, and the father mended a wheel in an adjacent shed, the daughter was obliged to get up shivering to carry the flagon of wine and the three glasses to the arbour, where she placed them on one of the tables. And, having pocketed the price of the wine—threepence—in silence, she went back to her seat with a sullen look, as if annoyed at having been compelled to make such a long journey. Meanwhile the three men had sat down, and Prada gaily filled each of the glasses, although Pierre declared that he was quite unable to drink wine between his meals. "Pooh, pooh," said the Count, "you can always clink glasses with us. And now, Abbe, isn't this little wine droll? Come, here's to the Pope's better health, since he's unwell!"

Santobono at one gulp emptied his glass and clacked his tongue. With gentle, paternal care he had deposited his basket on the ground beside him: and, taking off his hat, he drew a long breath. The evening was really delightful. A superb sky of a soft golden hue stretched over that endless sea of the Campagna which was soon to fall asleep with sovereign quiescence. And the light breeze which went by amidst the deep silence brought with it an exquisite odour of wild herbs and flowers.

"How pleasant it is!" muttered Pierre, affected by the surrounding charm. "And what a desert for eternal rest, forgetfulness of all the world!"

Prada, who had emptied the flagon by filling Santobono's glass a second time, made no reply; he was silently amusing himself with an occurrence which at first he was the only one to observe. However, with a merry expression of complicity, he gave the young priest a wink, and then they both watched the dramatic incidents of the affair. Some scraggy fowls were wandering round them searching the yellow turf for grasshoppers; and one of these birds, a little shiny black hen with an impudent manner, had caught sight of the basket of figs and was boldly approaching it. When she got near, however, she took fright, and retreated somewhat, with neck stiffened and head turned, so as to cast suspicious glances at the basket with her round sparkling eye. But at last covetousness gained the victory, for she could see one of the figs between the leaves, and so she slowly advanced, lifting her feet very high at each step; and, all at once, stretching out her neck, she gave the fig a formidable peck, which ripped it open and made the juice exude.

Prada, who felt as happy as a child, was then able to give vent to the laughter which he had scarcely been able to restrain: "Look out, Abbe," he called, "mind your figs!"

At that very moment Santobono was finishing his second glass of wine with his head thrown back and his eyes blissfully raised to heaven. He gave a start, looked round, and on seeing the hen at once understood the position. And then came a terrible outburst of anger, with sweeping gestures and terrible invectives. But the hen, who was again pecking, would not be denied; she dug her beak into the fig and carried it off, flapping her wings, so quick and so comical that Prada, and Pierre as well, laughed till tears came into their eyes, their merriment increasing at sight of the impotent fury of Santobono, who, for a moment, pursued the thief, threatening her with his fist.

"Ah!" said the Count, "that's what comes of not leaving the basket in the carriage. If I hadn't warned you the hen would have eaten all the figs."

The priest did not reply, but, growling out vague imprecations, placed the basket on the table, where he raised the leaves and artistically rearranged the fruit so as to fill up the void. Then, the harm having been repaired as far as was possible, he at last calmed down.

It was now time for them to resume their journey, for the sun was sinking towards the horizon, and night would soon fall. Thus the Count ended by getting impatient. "Well, and those eggs?" he called.

Then, as the woman did not return, he went to seek her. He entered the stable, and afterwards the cart-house, but she was neither here nor there. Next he went towards the rear of the osteria in order to look in the sheds. But all at once an unexpected spectacle made him stop short. The little black hen was lying on the ground, dead, killed as by lightning. She showed no sign of hurt; there was nothing but a little streamlet of violet blood still trickling from her beak. Prada was at first merely astonished. He stooped and touched the hen. She was still warm and soft like a rag. Doubtless some apoplectic stroke had killed her. But immediately afterwards he became fearfully pale; the truth appeared to him, and turned him as cold as ice. In a moment he conjured up everything: Leo XIII attacked by illness, Santobono hurrying to Cardinal Sanguinetti for tidings, and then starting for Rome to present a basket of figs to Cardinal Boccanera. And Prada also remembered the conversation in the carriage: the possibility of the Pope's demise, the candidates for the tiara, the legendary stories of poison which still fostered terror in and around the Vatican; and he once more saw the priest, with his little basket on his knees, lavishing paternal attention on it, and he saw the little black hen pecking at the fruit and fleeing with a fig on her beak. And now that little black hen lay there, suddenly struck down, dead!

His conviction was immediate and absolute. But he did not have time to decide what course he should take, for a voice behind him exclaimed: "Why, it's the little hen; what's the matter with her?"

The voice was that of Pierre, who, letting Santobono climb into the carriage alone, had in his turn come round to the rear of the house in order to obtain a better view of the ruined aqueduct among the parasol pines.

Prada, who shuddered as if he himself were the culprit, answered him with a lie, a lie which he did not premeditate, but to which he was impelled by a sort of instinct. "But she's dead," he said.... "Just fancy, there was a fight. At the moment when I got here that other hen, which you see yonder, sprang upon this one to get the fig, which she was still holding, and with a thrust of the beak split her head open.... The blood's flowing, as you can see yourself."

Why did he say these things? He himself was astonished at them whilst he went on inventing them. Was it then that he wished to remain master of the situation, keep the abominable secret entirely to himself, in order that he might afterwards act in accordance with his own desires? Certainly his feelings partook of shame and embarrassment in presence of that foreigner, whilst his personal inclination for violence set some admiration amidst the revolt of his conscience, and a covert desire arose within him to examine the matter from the standpoint of his interests before he came to a decision. But, on the other hand, he claimed to be a man of integrity, and would assuredly not allow people to be poisoned.

Pierre, who was compassionately inclined towards all creation, looked at the hen with the emotion which he always felt at the sudden severance of life. However, he at once accepted Prada's story. "Ah! those fowls!" said he. "They treat one another with an idiotic ferocity which even men can scarcely equal. I kept fowls at home at one time, and one of the hens no sooner hurt her leg than all the others, on seeing the blood oozing, would flock round and peck at the limb till they stripped it to the bone."

Prada, however, did not listen, but at once went off; and it so happened that the woman was, on her side, looking for him in order to hand him four eggs which, after a deal of searching, she had discovered in odd corners about the house. The Count made haste to pay for them, and called to Pierre, who was lingering behind: "We must look sharp! We sha'n't reach Rome now until it is quite dark."

They found Santobono quietly waiting in the carriage, where he had again installed himself on the bracket with his spine resting against the box-seat and his long legs drawn back under him, and he again had the little basket of figs on his knees, and clasped it with his big knotty hands as though it were something fragile and rare which the slightest jolting might damage. His cassock showed like a huge blot, and in his coarse ashen face, that of a peasant yet near to the wild soil and but slightly polished by a few years of theological studies, his eyes alone seemed to live, glowing with the dark flame of a devouring passion. On seeing him seated there in such composure Prada could not restrain a slight shudder. Then, as soon as the victoria was again rolling along the road, he exclaimed: "Well, Abbe, that glass of wine will guarantee us against the malaria. The Pope would soon be cured if he could imitate our example."

Santobono's only reply was a growl. He was in no mood for conversation, but wrapped himself in perfect silence, as in the night which was slowly falling. And Prada in his turn ceased to speak, and, with his eyes still fixed upon the other, reflected on the course that he should follow.

The road turned, and then the carriage rolled on and on over another interminable straight highway with white paving, whose brilliancy made the road look like a ribbon of snow stretching across the Campagna, where delicate shadows were slowly falling. Gloom gathered in the hollows of the broad undulations whence a tide of violet hue seemed to spread over the short herbage until all mingled and the expanse became an indistinct swell of neutral hue from one to the other horizon. And the solitude was now yet more complete; a last indolent cart had gone by and a last tinkling of horses' bells had subsided in the distance. There was no longer a passer-by, no longer a beast of the fields to be seen, colour and sound died away, all forms of life sank into slumber, into the serene stillness of nihility. Some fragments of an aqueduct were still to be seen at intervals on the right hand, where they looked like portions of gigantic millepeds severed by the scythe of time; next, on the left, came another tower, whose dark and ruined pile barred the sky as with a huge black stake; and then the remains of another aqueduct spanned the road, assuming yet greater dimensions against the sunset glow. Ah! that unique hour, the hour of twilight in the Campagna, when all is blotted out and simplified, the hour of bare immensity, of the infinite in its simplest expression! There is nothing, nothing all around you, but the flat line of the horizon with the one splotch of an isolated tower, and yet that nothing is instinct with sovereign majesty.

However, on the left, towards the sea, the sun was setting, descending in the limpid sky like a globe of fire of blinding redness. It slowly plunged beneath the horizon, and the only sign of cloud was some fiery vapour, as if indeed the distant sea had seethed at contact with that royal and flaming visit. And directly the sun had disappeared the heavens above it purpled and became a lake of blood, whilst the Campagna turned to grey. At the far end of the fading plain there remained only that purple lake whose brasier slowly died out behind the black arches of the aqueduct, while in the opposite direction the scattered arches remained bright and rosy against a pewter-like sky. Then the fiery vapour was dissipated, and the sunset ended by fading away. One by one the stars came out in the pacified vault, now of an ashen blue, while the lights of Rome, still far away on the verge of the horizon, scintillated like the lamps of light-houses.

And Prada, amidst the dreamy silence of his companions and the infinite melancholy of the evening and the inexpressible distress which even he experienced, continued to ask himself what course he should adopt. Again and again he mentally repeated that he could not allow people to be poisoned. The figs were certainly intended for Cardinal Boccanera, and on the whole it mattered little to him whether there were a cardinal the more or the fewer in the world. Moreover, it had always seemed to him best to let Destiny follow its course; and, infidel that he was, he saw no harm in one priest devouring another. Again, it might be dangerous for him to intervene in that abominable affair, to mix himself up in the base, fathomless intrigues of the black world. But on the other hand the Cardinal was not the only person who lived in the Boccanera mansion, and might not the figs go to others, might they not be eaten by people to whom no harm was intended? This idea of a treacherous chance haunted him, and in spite of every effort the figures of Benedetta and Dario rose up before him, returned and imposed themselves on him though he again and again sought to banish them from his mind. What if Benedetta, what if Dario should partake of that fruit? For Benedetta he felt no fear, for he knew that she and her aunt ate their meals by themselves, and that their cuisine and the Cardinal's had nothing in common. But Dario sat at his uncle's table every day, and for a moment Prada, pictured the young Prince suddenly seized with a spasm, then falling, like poor Monsignor Gallo, into the Cardinal's arms with livid face and receding eyes, and dying within two hours.

But no, no! That would be frightful, he could not suffer such an abomination. And thereupon he made up his mind. He would wait till the night had completely gathered round and would then simply take the basket from Santobono's lap and fling it into some dark hollow without saying a word. The priest would understand him. The other one, the young Frenchman, would perhaps not even notice the incident. Besides, that mattered little, for he would not even attempt to explain his action. And he felt quite calm again when the idea occurred to him to throw the basket away while the carriage passed through the Porta Furba, a couple of miles or so before reaching Rome. That would suit him exactly; in the darkness of the gateway nothing whatever would be seen.

"We stopped too long at that osteria," he suddenly exclaimed aloud, turning towards Pierre. "We sha'n't reach Rome much before six o'clock. Still you will have time to dress and join your friend." And then without awaiting the young man's reply he said to Santobono: "Your figs will arrive very late, Abbe."

"Oh!" answered the priest, "his Eminence receives until eight o'clock. And, besides, the figs are not for this evening. People don't eat figs in the evening. They will be for to-morrow morning." And thereupon he again relapsed into silence.

"For to-morrow morning—yes, yes, no doubt," repeated Prada. "And the Cardinal will be able to thoroughly regale himself if nobody helps him to eat the fruit."

Thereupon Pierre, without pausing to reflect, exclaimed: "He will no doubt eat it by himself, for his nephew, Prince Dario, must have started to-day for Naples on a little convalescence trip to rid himself of the effects of the accident which laid him up during the last month." Then, having got so far, the young priest remembered to whom he was speaking, and abruptly stopped short.

The Count noticed his embarrassment. "Oh! speak on, my dear Monsieur Froment," said he, "you don't offend me. It's an old affair now. So that young man has left, you say?"

"Yes, unless he has postponed his departure. However, I don't expect to find him at the palazzo when I get there."

For a moment the only sound was that of the continuous rumble of the wheels. Prada again felt worried, a prey to the discomfort of uncertainty. Why should he mix himself up in the affair if Dario were really absent? All the ideas which came to him tired his brain, and he ended by thinking aloud: "If he has gone away it must be for propriety's sake, so as to avoid attending the Buongiovanni reception, for the Congregation of the Council met this morning to give its decision in the suit which the Countess has brought against me. Yes, I shall know by and by whether our marriage is to be dissolved."

It was in a somewhat hoarse voice that he spoke these words, and one could realise that the old wound was again bleeding within him. Although Lisbeth had borne him a son, the charge levelled against him in his wife's petition for divorce still filled him with blind fury each time that he thought of it. And all at once he shuddered violently, as if an icy blast had darted through his frame. Then, turning the conversation, he added: "It's not at all warm this evening. This is the dangerous hour of the Roman climate, the twilight hour when it's easy to catch a terrible fever if one isn't prudent. Here, pull the rug over your legs, wrap it round you as carefully as you can."

Then, as they drew near the Porta Furba, silence again fell, more profound, like the slumber which was invincibly spreading over the Campagna, now steeped in night. And at last, in the bright starlight, appeared the gate, an arch of the Acqua Felice, under which the road passed. From a distance, this fragment seemed to bar the way with its mass of ancient half-fallen walls. But afterwards the gigantic arch where all was black opened like a gaping porch. And the carriage passed under it in darkness whilst the wheels rumbled with increased sonority.

When the victoria emerged on the other side, Santobono still had the little basket of figs upon his knees and Prada looked at it, quite overcome, asking himself what sudden paralysis of the hands had prevented him from seizing it and throwing it into the darkness. Such had still been his intention but a few seconds before they passed under the arch. He had even given the basket a final glance in order that he might the better realise what movements he should make. What had taken place within him then? At present he was yielding to increasing irresolution, henceforth incapable of decisive action, feeling a need of delay in order that he might, before everything else, fully satisfy himself as to what was likely to happen. And as Dario had doubtless gone away and the figs would certainly not be eaten until the following morning, what reason was there for him to hurry? He would know that evening if the Congregation of the Council had annulled his marriage, he would know how far the so-called "Justice of God" was venal and mendacious! Certainly he would suffer nobody to be poisoned, not even Cardinal Boccanera, though the latter's life was of little account to him personally. But had not that little basket, ever since leaving Frascati, been like Destiny on the march? And was it not enjoyment, the enjoyment of omnipotence, to be able to say to himself that he was the master who could stay that basket's course, or allow it to go onward and accomplish its deadly purpose? Moreover, he yielded to the dimmest of mental struggles, ceasing to reason, unable to raise his hand, and yet convinced that he would drop a warning note into the letter-box at the palazzo before he went to bed, though at the same time he felt happy in the thought that if his interest directed otherwise he would not do so.

And the remainder of the journey was accomplished in silent weariness, amidst the shiver of evening which seemed to have chilled all three men. In vain did the Count endeavour to escape from the battle of his thoughts, by reverting to the Buongiovanni reception, and giving particulars of the splendours which would be witnessed at it: his words fell sparsely in an embarrassed and absent-minded way. Then he sought to inspirit Pierre by speaking to him of Cardinal Sanguinetti's amiable manner and fair words, but although the young priest was returning home well pleased with his journey, in the idea that with a little help he might yet triumph, he scarcely answered the Count, so wrapt he was in his reverie. And Santobono, on his side, neither spoke nor moved. Black like the night itself, he seemed to have vanished. However, the lights of Rome were increasing in number, and houses again appeared on either hand, at first at long intervals, and then in close succession. They were suburban houses, and there were yet more fields of reeds, quickset hedges, olive-trees overtopping long walls, and big gateways with vase-surmounted pillars; but at last came the city with its rows of small grey houses, its petty shops and its dingy taverns, whence at times came shouts and rumours of battle.

Prada insisted on setting his companions down in the Via Giulia, at fifty paces from the palazzo. "It doesn't inconvenience me at all," said he to Pierre. "Besides, with the little time you have before you, it would never do for you to go on foot."

The Via Giulia was already steeped in slumber, and wore a melancholy aspect of abandonment in the dreary light of the gas lamps standing on either hand. And as soon as Santobono had alighted from the carriage, he took himself off without waiting for Pierre, who, moreover, always went in by the little door in the side lane.

"Good-bye, Abbe," exclaimed Prada.

"Good-bye, Count, a thousand thanks," was Santobono's response.

Then the two others stood watching him as he went towards the Boccanera mansion, whose old, monumental entrance, full of gloom, was still wide open. For a moment they saw his tall, rugged figure erect against that gloom. Then in he plunged, he and his little basket, bearing Destiny.

XII.

IT was ten o'clock when Pierre and Narcisse, after dining at the Caffe di Roma, where they had long lingered chatting, at last walked down the Corso towards the Palazzo Buongiovanni. They had the greatest difficulty to reach its entrance, for carriages were coming up in serried files, and the inquisitive crowd of on-lookers, who pressed even into the roadway, in spite of the injunctions of the police, was growing so compact that even the horses could no longer approach. The ten lofty windows on the first floor of the long monumental facade shone with an intense white radiance, the radiance of electric lamps, which illumined the street like sunshine, spreading over the equipages aground in that human sea, whose billows of eager, excited faces rolled to and fro amidst an extraordinary tumult.

And in all this there was not merely the usual curiosity to see uniforms go by and ladies in rich attire alight from their carriages, for Pierre soon gathered from what he heard that the crowd had come to witness the arrival of the King and Queen, who had promised to appear at the ball given by Prince Buongiovanni, in celebration of the betrothal of his daughter Celia to Lieutenant Attilio Sacco, the son of one of his Majesty's ministers. Moreover, people were enraptured with this marriage, the happy ending of a love story which had impassioned the whole city: to begin with, love at first sight, with the suddenness of a lightning-flash, and then stubborn fidelity triumphing over all obstacles, amidst romantic circumstances whose story sped from lip to lip, moistening every eye and stirring every heart.

It was this story that Narcisse had related at dessert to Pierre, who already knew some portion of it. People asserted that if the Prince had ended by yielding after a final terrible scene, it was only from fear of seeing Celia elope from the palace with her lover. She did not threaten to do so, but, amidst her virginal calmness, there was so much contempt for everything foreign to her love, that her father felt her to be capable of acting with the greatest folly in all ingenuousness. Only indifference was manifested by the Prince's wife, a phlegmatic and still beautiful Englishwoman, who considered that she had done quite enough for the household by bringing her husband a dowry of five millions, and bearing him five children. The Prince, anxious and weak despite his violence, in which one found a trace of the old Roman blood, already spoilt by mixture with that of a foreign race, was nowadays ever influenced in his actions by the fear that his house and fortune—which hitherto had remained intact amidst the accumulated ruins of the patriziato—might suddenly collapse. And in finally yielding to Celia, he must have been guided by the idea of rallying to the new regime through his daughter, so as to have one foot firmly set at the Quirinal, without withdrawing the other from the Vatican. It was galling, no doubt; his pride must have bled at the idea of allying his name with that of such low folks as the Saccos. But then Sacco was a minister, and had sped so quickly from success to success that it seemed likely he would rise yet higher, and, after the portfolio of Agriculture, secure that of Finances, which he had long coveted. And an alliance with Sacco meant the certain favour of the King, an assured retreat in that direction should the papacy some day collapse. Then, too, the Prince had made inquiries respecting the son, and was somewhat disarmed by the good looks, bravery, and rectitude of young Attilio, who represented the future, and possibly the glorious Italy of to-morrow. He was a soldier, and could be helped forward to the highest rank. And people spitefully added that the last reason which had influenced the Prince, who was very avaricious, and greatly worried by the thought that his fortune must be divided among his five children,* was that an opportunity presented itself for him to bestow a ridiculously small dowry on Celia. However, having consented to the marriage, he resolved to give a splendid fete, such as was now seldom witnessed in Rome, throwing his doors open to all the rival sections of society, inviting the sovereigns, and setting the palazzo ablaze as in the grand days of old. In doing this he would necessarily have to expend some of the money to which he clung, but a boastful spirit incited him to show the world that he at any rate had not been vanquished by the financial crisis, and that the Buongiovannis had nothing to hide and nothing to blush for. To tell the truth, some people asserted that this bravado had not originated with himself, but had been instilled into him without his knowledge by the quiet and innocent Celia, who wished to exhibit her happiness to all applauding Rome.

* The Italian succession law is similar to the French. Children
cannot be disinherited. All property is divided among them,
and thus the piling up of large hereditary fortunes is
prevented.—Trans.

"Dear me!" said Narcisse, whom the throng prevented from advancing. "We shall never get in. Why, they seem to have invited the whole city." And then, as Pierre seemed surprised to see a prelate drive up in his carriage, the attache added: "Oh! you will elbow more than one of them upstairs. The cardinals won't like to come on account of the presence of the King and Queen, but the prelates are sure to be here. This, you know, is a neutral drawing-room where the black and the white worlds can fraternise. And then too, there are so few fetes that people rush on them."

He went on to explain that there were two grand balls at Court every winter, but that it was only under exceptional circumstances that the patriziato gave similar galas. Two or three of the black salons were opened once in a way towards the close of the Carnival, but little dances among intimates replaced the pompous entertainments of former times. Some princesses moreover merely had their day. And as for the few white salons that existed, these likewise retained the same character of intimacy, more or less mixed, for no lady had yet become the undisputed queen of the new society.

"Well, here we are at last," resumed Narcisse as they eventually climbed the stairs.

"Let us keep together," Pierre somewhat anxiously replied. "My only acquaintance is with the fiancee, and I want you to introduce me."

However, a considerable effort was needed even to climb the monumental staircase, so great was the crush of arriving guests. Never, in the old days of wax candles and oil lamps, had this staircase offered such a blaze of light. Electric lamps, burning in clusters in superb bronze candelabra on the landings, steeped everything in a white radiance. The cold stucco of the walls was hidden by a series of lofty tapestries depicting the story of Cupid and Psyche, marvels which had remained in the family since the days of the Renascence. And a thick carpet covered the worn marble steps, whilst clumps of evergreens and tall spreading palms decorated every corner. An affluence of new blood warmed the antique mansion that evening; there was a resurrection of life, so to say, as the women surged up the staircase, smiling and perfumed, bare-shouldered, and sparkling with diamonds.

At the entrance of the first reception-room Pierre at once perceived Prince and Princess Buongiovanni, standing side by side and receiving their guests. The Prince, a tall, slim man with fair complexion and hair turning grey, had the pale northern eyes of his American mother in an energetic face such as became a former captain of the popes. The Princess, with small, delicate, and rounded features, looked barely thirty, though she had really passed her fortieth year. And still pretty, displaying a smiling serenity which nothing could disconcert, she purely and simply basked in self-adoration. Her gown was of pink satin, and a marvellous parure of large rubies set flamelets about her dainty neck and in her fine, fair hair. Of her five children, her son, the eldest, was travelling, and three of the girls, mere children, were still at school, so that only Celia was present, Celia in a modest gown of white muslin, fair like her mother, quite bewitching with her large innocent eyes and her candid lips, and retaining to the very end of her love story the semblance of a closed lily of impenetrable, virginal mysteriousness. The Saccos had but just arrived, and Attilio, in his simple lieutenant's uniform, had remained near his betrothed, so naively and openly delighted with his great happiness that his handsome face, with its caressing mouth and brave eyes, was quite resplendent with youth and strength. Standing there, near one another, in the triumph of their passion they appeared like life's very joy and health, like the personification of hope in the morrow's promises; and the entering guests who saw them could not refrain from smiling and feeling moved, momentarily forgetting their loquacious and malicious curiosity to give their hearts to those chosen ones of love who looked so handsome and so enraptured.

Narcisse stepped forward in order to present Pierre, but Celia anticipated him. Going to meet the young priest she led him to her father and mother, saying: "Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre Froment, a friend of my dear Benedetta." Ceremonious salutations followed. Then the young girl, whose graciousness greatly touched Pierre, said to him: "Benedetta is coming with her aunt and Dario. She must be very happy this evening! And you will also see how beautiful she will be."

Pierre and Narcisse next began to congratulate her, but they could not remain there, the throng was ever jostling them; and the Prince and Princess, quite lost in the crush, had barely time to answer the many salutations with amiable, continuous nods. And Celia, after conducting the two friends to Attilio, was obliged to return to her parents so as to take her place beside them as the little queen of the fete.

Narcisse was already slightly acquainted with Attilio, and so fresh congratulations ensued. Then the two friends manoeuvred to find a spot where they might momentarily tarry and contemplate the spectacle which this first salon presented. It was a vast hall, hung with green velvet broidered with golden flowers, and contained a very remarkable collection of weapons and armour, breast-plates, battle-axes, and swords, almost all of which had belonged to the Buongiovannis of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And amidst those stern implements of war there was a lovely sedan-chair of the last century, gilded and decorated with delicate paintings. It was in this chair that the Prince's great-grandmother, the celebrated Bettina, whose beauty was historical, had usually been carried to mass. On the walls, moreover, there were numerous historical paintings: battles, peace congresses, and royal receptions in which the Buongiovannis had taken part, without counting the many family portraits, tall and proud figures of sea-captains, commanders in the field, great dignitaries of the Church, prelates and cardinals, amongst whom, in the place of honour, appeared the family pope, the white-robed Buongiovanni whose accession to the pontifical throne had enriched a long line of descendants. And it was among those armours, near that coquettish sedan, and below those antique portraits, that the Saccos, husband and wife, had in their turn just halted, at a few steps from the master and mistress of the house, in order to secure their share of congratulations and bows.

"Look over there!" Narcisse whispered to Pierre, "those are the Saccos in front of us, that dark little fellow and the lady in mauve silk."

Pierre promptly recognised the bright face and pleasant smile of Stefana, whom he had already met at old Orlando's. But he was more interested in her husband, a dark dry man, with big eyes, sallow complexion, prominent chin, and vulturine nose. Like some gay Neapolitan "Pulcinello," he was dancing, shouting, and displaying such infectious good humour that it spread to all around him. He possessed a wonderful gift of speech, with a voice that was unrivalled as an instrument of fascination and conquest; and on seeing how easily he ingratiated himself with the people in that drawing-room, one could understand his lightning-like successes in the political world. He had manoeuvered with rare skill in the matter of his son's marriage, affecting such exaggerated delicacy of feeling as to set himself against the lovers, and declare that he would never consent to their union, as he had no desire to be accused of stealing a dowry and a title. As a matter of fact, he had only yielded after the Buongiovannis had given their consent, and even then he had desired to take the opinion of old Orlando, whose lofty integrity was proverbial. However, he knew right well that he would secure the old hero's approval in this particular affair, for Orlando made no secret of his opinion that the Buongiovannis ought to be glad to admit his grand-nephew into their family, as that handsome young fellow, with brave and healthy heart, would help to regenerate their impoverished blood. And throughout the whole affair, Sacco had shrewdly availed himself of Orlando's famous name, for ever talking of the relationship between them, and displaying filial veneration for this glorious founder of the country, as if indeed he had no suspicion that the latter despised and execrated him and mourned his accession to power in the conviction that he would lead Italy to shame and ruin.

"Ah!" resumed Narcisse addressing Pierre, "he's one of those supple, practical men who care nothing for a smack in the face. It seems that unscrupulous individuals like himself become necessary when states get into trouble and have to pass through political, financial, and moral crises. It is said that Sacco with his imperturbable assurance and ingenious and resourceful mind has quite won the King's favour. Just look at him! Why, with that crowd of courtiers round him, one might think him the master of this palace!"

And indeed the guests, after passing the Prince and Princess with a bow, at once congregated around Sacco, for he represented power, emoluments, pensions, and crosses; and if folks still smiled at seeing his dark, turbulent, and scraggy figure amidst that framework of family portraits which proclaimed the mighty ancestry of the Buongiovannis, they none the less worshipped him as the personification of the new power, the democratic force which was confusedly rising even from the old Roman soil where the patriziato lay in ruins.

"What a crowd!" muttered Pierre. "Who are all these people?"

"Oh!" replied Narcisse, "it is a regular mixture. These people belong neither to the black nor the white world; they form a grey world as it were. The evolution was certain; a man like Cardinal Boccanera may retain an uncompromising attitude, but a whole city, a nation can't. The Pope alone will always say no and remain immutable. But everything around him progresses and undergoes transformation, so that in spite of all resistance, Rome will become Italian in a few years' time. Even now, whenever a prince has two sons only one of them remains on the side of the Vatican, the other goes over to the Quirinal. People must live, you see; and the great families threatened with annihilation have not sufficient heroism to carry obstinacy to the point of suicide. And I have already told you that we are here on neutral ground, for Prince Buongiovanni was one of the first to realise the necessity of conciliation. He feels that his fortune is perishing, he does not care to risk it either in industry or in speculation, and already sees it portioned out among his five children, by whose descendants it will be yet further divided; and this is why he prudently makes advances to the King without, however, breaking with the Pope. In this salon, therefore, you see a perfect picture of the debacle, the confusion which reigns in the Prince's ideas and opinions." Narcisse paused, and then began to name some of the persons who were coming in. "There's a general," said he, "who has become very popular since his last campaign in Africa. There will be a great many military men here this evening, for all Attilio's superiors have been invited, so as to give the young man an entourage of glory. Ah! and there's the German ambassador. I fancy that nearly all the Corps Diplomatique will come on account of their Majesties' presence. But, by way of contrast, just look at that stout fellow yonder. He's a very influential deputy, a parvenu of the new middle class. Thirty years ago he was merely one of Prince Albertini's farmers, one of those mercanti di campagna who go about the environs of Rome in stout boots and a soft felt hat. And now look at that prelate coming in—"

"Oh! I know him," Pierre interrupted. "He's Monsignor Fornaro."

"Exactly, Monsignor Fornaro, a personage of some importance. You told me, I remember, that he is the reporter of the Congregation in that affair of your book. A most delightful man! Did you see how he bowed to the Princess? And what a noble and graceful bearing he has in his little mantle of violet silk!"

Then Narcisse went on enumerating the princes and princesses, the dukes and duchesses, the politicians and functionaries, the diplomatists and ministers, and the officers and well-to-do middle-class people, who of themselves made up a most wonderful medley of guests, to say nothing of the representatives of the various foreign colonies, English people, Americans, Germans, Spaniards, and Russians, in a word, all ancient Europe, and both Americas. And afterwards the young man reverted to the Saccos, to the little Signora Sacco in particular, in order to tell Pierre of the heroic efforts which she had made to open a salon for the purpose of assisting her husband's ambition. Gentle and modest as she seemed, she was also very shrewd, endowed with genuine qualities, Piedmontese patience and strength of resistance, orderly habits and thriftiness. And thus it was she who re-established the equilibrium in household affairs which her husband by his exuberance so often disturbed. He was indeed greatly indebted to her, though nobody suspected it. At the same time, however, she had so far failed in her attempts to establish a white salon which should take the lead in influencing opinion. Only the people of her own set visited her, not a single prince ever came, and her Monday dances were the same as in a score of other middle-class homes, having no brilliancy and no importance. In fact, the real white salon, which should guide men and things and sway all Rome was still in dreamland.

"Just notice her keen smile as she examines everything here," resumed Narcisse. "She's teaching herself and forming plans, I'm sure of it. Now that she is about to be connected with a princely family she probably hopes to receive some of the best society."

Large as was the room, the crowd in it had by this time grown so dense that the two friends were pressed back to a wall, and felt almost stifled. The attache therefore decided to lead the priest elsewhere, and as they walked along he gave him some particulars concerning the palace, which was one of the most sumptuous in Rome, and renowned for the magnificence of its reception-rooms. Dancing took place in the picture gallery, a superb apartment more than sixty feet long, with eight windows overlooking the Corso; while the buffet was installed in the Hall of the Antiques, a marble hall, which among other precious things contained a statue of Venus, rivalling the one at the Capitol. Then there was a suite of marvellous salons, still resplendent with ancient luxury, hung with the rarest stuffs, and retaining some unique specimens of old-time furniture, on which covetous antiquaries kept their eyes fixed, whilst waiting and hoping for the inevitable future ruin. And one of these apartments, the little Saloon of the Mirrors, was particularly famous. Of circular shape and Louis XV style, it was surrounded by mirrors in rococo frames, extremely rich, and most exquisitely carved.

"You will see all that by and by," continued Narcisse. "At present we had better go in here if we want to breathe a little. It is here that the arm-chairs from the adjacent gallery have been brought for the accommodation of the ladies who desire to sit down and be seen and admired."

The apartment they entered was a spacious one, draped with the most superb Genoese velvet, that antique jardiniere velvet with pale satin ground, and flowers once of dazzling brightness, whose greens and blues and reds had now become exquisitely soft, with the subdued, faded tones of old floral love-tokens. On the pier tables and in the cabinets all around were some of the most precious curios in the palace, ivory caskets, gilt and painted wood carvings, pieces of antique plate—briefly, a collection of marvels. And several ladies, fleeing the crush, had already taken refuge on the numerous seats, clustering in little groups, and laughing and chatting with the few gentlemen who had discovered this retreat of grace and galanterie. In the bright glow of the lamps nothing could be more delightful than the sight of all those bare, sheeny shoulders, and those supple necks, above whose napes were coiled tresses of fair or raven hair. Bare arms emerged like living flowers of flesh from amidst the mingling lace and silk of soft-hued bodices. The fans played slowly, as if to heighten the fires of the precious stones, and at each beat wafted around an odore di femina blended with a predominating perfume of violets.

"Hallo!" exclaimed Narcisse, "there's our good friend Monsignor Nani bowing to the Austrian ambassadress."

As soon as Nani perceived the young priest and his companion he came towards them, and the trio then withdrew into the embrasure of a window in order that they might chat for a moment at their ease. The prelate was smiling like one enchanted with the beauty of the fete, but at the same time he retained all the serenity of innocence, as if he had not even noticed the exhibition of bare shoulders by which he was surrounded. "Ah, my dear son!" he said to Pierre, "I am very pleased to see you! Well, and what do you think of our Rome when she makes up her mind to give fetes?"

"Why, it is superb, Monseigneur."

Then, in an emotional manner, Nani spoke of Celia's lofty piety; and, in order to give the Vatican the credit of this sumptuous gala, affected to regard the Prince and Princess as staunch adherents of the Church, as if he were altogether unaware that the King and Queen were presently coming. And afterwards he abruptly exclaimed: "I have been thinking of you all day, my dear son. Yes, I heard that you had gone to see his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti. Well, and how did he receive you?"

"Oh! in a most paternal manner," Pierre replied. "At first he made me understand the embarrassment in which he was placed by his position as protector of Lourdes; but just as I was going off he showed himself charming, and promised me his help with a delicacy which deeply touched me."

"Did he indeed, my dear son? But it doesn't surprise me, his Eminence is so good-hearted!"

"And I must add, Monseigneur, that I came back with a light and hopeful heart. It now seems to me as if my suit were half gained."

"Naturally, I understand it," replied Nani, who was still smiling with that keen, intelligent smile of his, sharpened by a touch of almost imperceptible irony. And after a short pause he added in a very simple way: "The misfortune is that on the day before yesterday your book was condemned by the Congregation of the Index, which was convoked by its Secretary expressly for that purpose. And the judgment will be laid before his Holiness, for him to sign it, on the day after to-morrow."

Pierre looked at the prelate in bewilderment. Had the old mansion fallen on his head he would not have felt more overcome. What! was it all over? His journey to Rome, the experiment he had come to attempt there, had resulted in that defeat, of which he was thus suddenly apprised amidst that betrothal fete. And he had not even been able to defend himself, he had sacrificed his time without finding any one to whom he might speak, before whom he might plead his cause! Anger was rising within him, and he could not prevent himself from muttering bitterly: "Ah! how I have been duped! And that Cardinal who said to me only this morning: 'If God be with you he will save you in spite of everything.' Yes, yes, I now understand him; he was juggling with words, he only desired a disaster in order that submission might lead me to Heaven! Submit, indeed, ah! I cannot, I cannot yet! My heart is too full of indignation and grief."

Nani examined and studied him with curiosity. "But my dear son," he said, "nothing is final so long as the Holy Father has not signed the judgment. You have all to-morrow and even the morning of the day after before you. A miracle is always possible." Then, lowering his voice and drawing Pierre on one side whilst Narcisse in an aesthetical spirit examined the ladies, he added: "Listen, I have a communication to make to you in great secrecy. Come and join me in the little Saloon of the Mirrors by and by, during the Cotillon. We shall be able to talk there at our ease."

Pierre nodded, and thereupon the prelate discreetly withdrew and disappeared in the crowd. However, the young man's ears were buzzing; he could no longer hope; what indeed could he accomplish in one day since he had lost three months without even being able to secure an audience with the Pope? And his bewilderment increased as he suddenly heard Narcisse speaking to him of art. "It's astonishing how the feminine figure has deteriorated in these dreadful democratic days. It's all fat and horribly common. Not one of those women yonder shows the Florentine contour, with small bosom and slender, elegant neck. Ah! that one yonder isn't so bad perhaps, the fair one with her hair coiled up, whom Monsignor Fornaro has just approached."

For a few minutes indeed Monsignor Fornaro had been fluttering from beauty to beauty, with an amiable air of conquest. He looked superb that evening with his lofty decorative figure, blooming cheeks, and victorious affability. No unpleasant scandal was associated with his name; he was simply regarded as a prelate of gallant ways who took pleasure in the society of ladies. And he paused and chatted, and leant over their bare shoulders with laughing eyes and humid lips as if experiencing a sort of devout rapture. However, on perceiving Narcisse whom he occasionally met, he at once came forward and the attache had to bow to him. "You have been in good health I hope, Monseigneur, since I had the honour of seeing you at the embassy."

"Oh! yes, I am very well, very well indeed. What a delightful fete, is it not?"

Pierre also had bowed. This was the man whose report had brought about the condemnation of his book; and it was with resentment that he recalled his caressing air and charming greeting, instinct with such lying promise. However, the prelate, who was very shrewd, must have guessed that the young priest was already acquainted with the decision of the Congregation, and have thought it more dignified to abstain from open recognition; for on his side he merely nodded and smiled at him. "What a number of people!" he went on, "and how many charming persons there are! It will soon be impossible for one to move in this room."

All the seats in fact were now occupied by ladies, and what with the strong perfume of violets and the exhalations of warm necks and shoulders the atmosphere was becoming most oppressive. The fans flapped more briskly, and clear laughter rang out amidst a growing hubbub of conversation in which the same words constantly recurred. Some news, doubtless, had just arrived, some rumour was being whispered from group to group, throwing them all into feverish excitement. As it happened, Monsignor Fornaro, who was always well informed, desired to be the proclaimer of this news, which nobody as yet had ventured to announce aloud.

"Do you know what is exciting them all?" he inquired.

"Is it the Holy Father's illness?" asked Pierre in his anxiety. "Is he worse this evening?"

The prelate looked at him in astonishment, and then somewhat impatiently replied: "Oh, no, no. His Holiness is much better, thank Heaven. A person belonging to the Vatican was telling me just now that he was able to get up this afternoon and receive his intimates as usual."

"All the same, people have been alarmed," interrupted Narcisse. "I must confess that we did not feel easy at the embassy, for a Conclave at the present time would be a great worry for France. She would exercise no influence at it. It is a great mistake on the part of our Republican Government to treat the Holy See as of no importance! However, can one ever tell whether the Pope is ill or not? I know for a certainty that he was nearly carried off last winter when nobody breathed a word about any illness, whereas on the last occasion when the newspapers killed him and talked about a dreadful attack of bronchitis, I myself saw him quite strong and in the best of spirits! His reported illnesses are mere matters of policy, I fancy."*

* There is much truth in this; but the reader must not imagine
that the Pope is never ill. At his great age, indispositions
are only natural.—Trans.

With a hasty gesture, however, Monsignor Fornaro brushed this importunate subject aside. "No, no," said he, "people are tranquillised and no longer talk of it. What excites all those ladies is that the Congregation of the Council to-day voted the dissolution of the Prada marriage by a great majority."

Again did Pierre feel moved. However, not having had time to see any members of the Boccanera family on his return from Frascati he feared that the news might be false and said so. Thereupon the prelate gave his word of honour that things were as he stated. "The news is certain," he declared. "I had it from a member of the Congregation." And then, all at once, he apologised and hurried off: "Excuse me but I see a lady whom I had not yet caught sight of, and desire to pay my respects to her."

He at once hastened to the lady in question, and, being unable to sit down, inclined his lofty figure as if to envelop her with his gallant courtesy; whilst she, young, fresh, and bare-shouldered, laughed with a pearly laugh as his cape of violet silk lightly brushed her sheeny skin.

"You know that person, don't you?" Narcisse inquired of Pierre. "No! Really? Why, that is Count Prada's inamorata, the charming Lisbeth Kauffmann, by whom he has just had a son. It's her first appearance in society since that event. She's a German, you know, and lost her husband here. She paints a little; in fact, rather nicely. A great deal is forgiven to the ladies of the foreign colony, and this one is particularly popular on account of the very affable manner in which she receives people at her little palazzo in the Via Principe Amedeo. As you may imagine, the news of the dissolution of that marriage must amuse her!"

She looked really exquisite, that Lisbeth, very fair, rosy, and gay, with satiny skin, soft blue eyes, and lips wreathed in an amiable smile, which was renowned for its grace. And that evening, in her gown of white silk spangled with gold, she showed herself so delighted with life, so securely happy in the thought that she was free, that she loved and was loved in return, that the whispered tidings, the malicious remarks exchanged behind the fans of those around her, seemed to turn to her personal triumph. For a moment all eyes had sought her, and people talked of the outcome of her connection with Prada, the man whose manhood the Church solemnly denied by its decision of that very day! And there came stifled laughter and whispered jests, whilst she, radiant in her insolent serenity, accepted with a rapturous air the gallantry of Monsignor Fornaro, who congratulated her on a painting of the Virgin with the lily, which she had lately sent to a fine-art show.

Ah! that matrimonial nullity suit, which for a year had supplied Rome with scandal, what a final hubbub it occasioned as the tidings of its termination burst forth amidst that ball! The black and white worlds had long chosen it as a battlefield for the exchange of incredible slander, endless gossip, the most nonsensical tittle-tattle. And now it was over; the Vatican with imperturbable impudence had pronounced the marriage null and void on the ground that the husband was no man, and all Rome would laugh over the affair, with that free scepticism which it displayed as soon as the pecuniary affairs of the Church came into question. The incidents of the struggle were already common property: Prada's feelings revolting to such a point that he had withdrawn from the contest, the Boccaneras moving heaven and earth in their feverish anxiety, the money which they had distributed among the creatures of the various cardinals in order to gain their influence, and the large sum which they had indirectly paid for the second and favourable report of Monsignor Palma. People said that, altogether, more than a hundred thousand francs had been expended, but this was not thought over-much, as a well-known French countess had been obliged to disburse nearly ten times that amount to secure the dissolution of her marriage. But then the Holy Father's need was so great! And, moreover, nobody was angered by this venality; it merely gave rise to malicious witticisms; and the fans continued waving in the increasing heat, and the ladies quivered with contentment as the whispered pleasantries took wing and fluttered over their bare shoulders.

"Oh! how pleased the Contessina must be!" Pierre resumed. "I did not understand what her little friend, Princess Celia, meant by saying when we came in that she would be so happy and beautiful this evening. It is doubtless on that account that she is coming here, after cloistering herself all the time the affair lasted, as if she were in mourning."

However, Lisbeth's eyes had chanced to meet those of Narcisse, and as she smiled at him he was, in his turn, obliged to pay his respects to her, for, like everybody else of the foreign colony, he knew her through having visited her studio. He was again returning to Pierre when a fresh outburst of emotion stirred the diamond aigrettes and the flowers adorning the ladies' hair. People turned to see what was the matter, and again did the hubbub increase. "Ah! it's Count Prada in person!" murmured Narcisse, with an admiring glance. "He has a fine bearing, whatever folks may say. Dress him up in velvet and gold, and what a splendid, unscrupulous, fifteenth-century adventurer he would make!"

Prada entered the room, looking quite gay, in fact, almost triumphant. And above his large, white shirtfront, edged by the black of his coat, he really had a commanding, predacious expression, with his frank, stern eyes, and his energetic features barred by a large black moustache. Never had a more rapturous smile of sensuality revealed the wolfish teeth of his voracious mouth. With rapid glances he took stock of the women, dived into their very souls. Then, on seeing Lisbeth, who looked so pink, and fair, and girlish, his expression softened, and he frankly went up to her, without troubling in the slightest degree about the ardent, inquisitive eyes which were turned upon him. As soon as Monsignor Fornaro had made room, he stooped and conversed with the young woman in a low tone. And she no doubt confirmed the news which was circulating, for as he again drew himself erect, he laughed a somewhat forced laugh, and made an involuntary gesture.

However, he then caught sight of Pierre, and joined him in the embrasure of the window; and when he had also shaken hands with Narcisse, he said to the young priest with all his wonted bravura: "You recollect what I told you as we were coming back from Frascati? Well, it's done, it seems, they've annulled my marriage. It's such an impudent, such an imbecile decision, that I still doubted it a moment ago!"

"Oh! the news is certain," Pierre made bold to reply. "It has just been confirmed to us by Monsignor Fornaro, who had it from a member of the Congregation. And it is said that the majority was very large."

Prada again shook with laughter. "No, no," said he, "such a farce is beyond belief! It's the finest smack given to justice and common-sense that I know of. Ah! if the marriage can also be annulled by the civil courts, and if my friend whom you see yonder be only willing, we shall amuse ourselves in Rome! Yes, indeed, I'd marry her at Santa Maria Maggiore with all possible pomp. And there's a dear little being in the world who would take part in the fete in his nurse's arms!"

He laughed too loud as he spoke, alluded in too brutal a fashion to his child, that living proof of his manhood. Was it suffering that made his lips curve upwards and reveal his white teeth? It could be divined that he was quivering, fighting against an awakening of covert, tumultuous passion, which he would not acknowledge even to himself.

"And you, my dear Abbe?" he hastily resumed. "Do you know the other report? Do you know that the Countess is coming here?" It was thus, by force of habit, that he designated Benedetta, forgetting that she was no longer his wife.

"Yes, I have just been told so," Pierre replied; and then he hesitated for a moment before adding, with a desire to prevent any disagreeable surprise: "And we shall no doubt see Prince Dario also, for he has not started for Naples as I told you. Something prevented his departure at the last moment, I believe. At least so I gathered from a servant."

Prada no longer laughed. His face suddenly became grave, and he contented himself with murmuring: "Ah! so the cousin is to be of the party. Well, we shall see them, we shall see them both!"

Then, whilst the two friends went on chatting, he became silent, as if serious considerations impelled him to reflect. And suddenly making a gesture of apology he withdrew yet farther into the embrasure in which he stood, pulled a note-book out of his pocket, and tore from it a leaf on which, without modifying his handwriting otherwise than by slightly enlarging it, he pencilled these four lines: "A legend avers that the fig tree of Judas now grows at Frascati, and that its fruit is deadly for him who may desire to become Pope. Eat not the poisoned figs, nor give them either to your servants or your fowls." Then he folded the paper, fastened it with a postage stamp, and wrote on it the address: "To his most Reverend and most Illustrious Eminence, Cardinal Boccanera." And when he had placed everything in his pocket again, he drew a long breath and once more called back his laugh.

A kind of invincible discomfort, a far-away terror had momentarily frozen him. Without being guided by any clear train of reasoning, he had felt the need of protecting himself against any cowardly temptation, any possible abomination. He could not have told what course of ideas had induced him to write those four lines without a moment's delay, on the very spot where he stood, under penalty of contributing to a great catastrophe. But one thought was firmly fixed in his brain, that on leaving the ball he would go to the Via Giulia and throw that note into the letter-box at the Palazzo Boccanera. And that decided, he was once more easy in mind.

"Why, what is the matter with you, my dear Abbe?" he inquired on again joining in the conversation of the two friends. "You are quite gloomy." And on Pierre telling him of the bad news which he had received, the condemnation of his book, and the single day which remained to him for action if he did not wish his journey to Rome to result in defeat, he began to protest as if he himself needed agitation and diversion in order to continue hopeful and bear the ills of life. "Never mind, never mind, don't worry yourself," said he, "one loses all one's strength by worrying. A day is a great deal, one can do ever so many things in a day. An hour, a minute suffices for Destiny to intervene and turn defeat into victory!" He grew feverish as he spoke, and all at once added, "Come, let's go to the ball-room. It seems that the scene there is something prodigious."

Then he exchanged a last loving glance with Lisbeth whilst Pierre and Narcisse followed him, the three of them extricating themselves from their corner with the greatest difficulty, and then wending their way towards the adjoining gallery through a sea of serried skirts, a billowy expanse of necks and shoulders whence ascended the passion which makes life, the odour alike of love and of death.

With its eight windows overlooking the Corso, their panes uncurtained and throwing a blaze of light upon the houses across the road, the picture gallery, sixty-five feet in length and more than thirty in breadth, spread out with incomparable splendour. The illumination was dazzling. Clusters of electric lamps had changed seven pairs of huge marble candelabra into gigantic torcheres, akin to constellations; and all along the cornice up above, other lamps set in bright-hued floral glasses formed a marvellous garland of flaming flowers: tulips, paeonies, and roses. The antique red velvet worked with gold, which draped the walls, glowed like a furnace fire. About the doors and windows there were hangings of old lace broidered with flowers in coloured silk whose hues had the very intensity of life. But the sight of sights beneath the sumptuous panelled ceiling adorned with golden roses, the unique spectacle of a richness not to be equalled, was the collection of masterpieces such as no museum could excel. There were works of Raffaelle and Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens, Velasquez and Ribera, famous works which in this unexpected illumination suddenly showed forth, triumphant with youth regained, as if awakened to the immortal life of genius. And, as their Majesties would not arrive before midnight, the ball had just been opened, and flights of soft-hued gowns were whirling in a waltz past all the pompous throng, the glittering jewels and decorations, the gold-broidered uniforms and the pearl-broidered robes, whilst silk and satin and velvet spread and overflowed upon every side.

"It is prodigious, really!" declared Prada with his excited air; "let us go this way and place ourselves in a window recess again. There is no better spot for getting a good view without being too much jostled."

They lost Narcisse somehow or other, and on reaching the desired recess found themselves but two, Pierre and the Count. The orchestra, installed on a little platform at the far end of the gallery, had just finished the waltz, and the dancers, with an air of giddy rapture, were slowly walking through the crowd when a fresh arrival caused every head to turn. Donna Serafina, arrayed in a robe of purple silk as if she had worn the colours of her brother the Cardinal, was making a royal entry on the arm of Consistorial-Advocate Morano. And never before had she laced herself so tightly, never had her waist looked so slim and girlish; and never had her stern, wrinkled face, which her white hair scarcely softened, expressed such stubborn and victorious domination. A discreet murmur of approval ran round, a murmur of public relief as it were, for all Roman society had condemned the unworthy conduct of Morano in severing a connection of thirty years to which the drawing-rooms had grown as accustomed as if it had been a legal marriage. The rupture had lasted for two months, to the great scandal of Rome where the cult of long and faithful affections still abides. And so the reconciliation touched every heart and was regarded as one of the happiest consequences of the victory which the Boccaneras had that day gained in the affair of Benedetta's marriage. Morano repentant and Donna Serafina reappearing on his arm, nothing could have been more satisfactory; love had conquered, decorum was preserved and good order re-established.

But there was a deeper sensation as soon as Benedetta and Dario were seen to enter, side by side, behind the others. This tranquil indifference for the ordinary forms of propriety, on the very day when the marriage with Prada had been annulled, this victory of love, confessed and celebrated before one and all, seemed so charming in its audacity, so full of the bravery of youth and hope, that the pair were at once forgiven amidst a murmur of universal admiration. And as in the case of Celia and Attilio, all hearts flew to them, to their radiant beauty, to the wondrous happiness that made their faces so resplendent. Dario, still pale after his long convalescence, somewhat slight and delicate of build, with the fine clear eyes of a big child, and the dark curly beard of a young god, bore himself with a light pride, in which all the old princely blood of the Boccaneras could be traced. And Benedetta, she so white under her casque of jetty hair, she so calm and so sensible, wore her lovely smile, that smile so seldom seen on her face but which was irresistibly fascinating, transfiguring her, imparting the charm of a flower to her somewhat full mouth, and filling the infinite of her dark and fathomless eyes with a radiance as of heaven. And in this gay return of youth and happiness, an exquisite instinct had prompted her to put on a white gown, a plain girlish gown which symbolised her maidenhood, which told that she had remained through all a pure untarnished lily for the husband of her choice. And nothing of her form was to be seen, not a glimpse of bosom or shoulder. It was as if the impenetrable, redoubtable mystery of love, the sovereign beauty of woman slumbered there, all powerful, but veiled with white. Again, not a jewel appeared on her fingers or in her ears. There was simply a necklace falling about her corsage, but a necklace fit for royalty, the famous pearl necklace of the Boccaneras, which she had inherited from her mother, and which was known to all Rome—pearls of fabulous size cast negligently about her neck, and sufficing, simply as she was gowned, to make her queen of all.

"Oh!" murmured Pierre in ecstasy, "how happy and how beautiful she is!"

But he at once regretted that he had expressed his thoughts aloud, for beside him he heard a low plaint, an involuntary growl which reminded him of the Count's presence. However, Prada promptly stifled this cry of returning anguish, and found strength enough to affect a brutish gaiety: "The devil!" said he, "they have plenty of impudence. I hope we shall see them married and bedded at once!" Then regretting this coarse jest which had been prompted by the revolt of passion, he sought to appear indifferent: "She looks very nice this evening," he said; "she has the finest shoulders in the world, you know, and its a real success for her to hide them and yet appear more beautiful than ever."

He went on speaking, contriving to assume an easy tone, and giving various little particulars about the Countess as he still obstinately called the young woman. However, he had drawn rather further into the recess, for fear, no doubt, that people might remark his pallor, and the painful twitch which contracted his mouth. He was in no state to fight, to show himself gay and insolent in presence of the joy which the lovers so openly and naively expressed. And he was glad of the respite which the arrival of the King and Queen at this moment offered him. "Ah! here are their Majesties!" he exclaimed, turning towards the window. "Look at the scramble in the street!"

Although the windows were closed, a tumult could be heard rising from the footways. And Pierre on looking down saw, by the light of the electric lamps, a sea of human heads pour over the road and encompass the carriages. He had several times already seen the King during the latter's daily drives to the grounds of the Villa Borghese, whither he came like any private gentleman—unguarded, unescorted, with merely an aide-de-camp accompanying him in his victoria. At other times he drove a light phaeton with only a footman in black livery to attend him. And on one occasion Pierre had seen him with the Queen, the pair of them seated side by side like worthy middle-class folks driving abroad for pleasure. And, as the royal couple went by, the busy people in the streets and the promenaders in the public gardens contented themselves with wafting them an affectionate wave of the hand, the most expansive simply approaching to smile at them, and no one importuning them with acclamations. Pierre, who harboured the traditional idea of kings closely guarded and passing processionally with all the accompaniment of military pomp, was therefore greatly surprised and touched by the amiable bonhomie of this royal pair, who went wherever they listed in full security amidst the smiling affection of their people. Everybody, moreover, had told him of the King's kindliness and simplicity, his desire for peace, and his passion for sport, solitude, and the open air, which, amidst the worries of power, must often have made him dream of a life of freedom far from the imperious duties of royalty for which he seemed unfitted.* But the Queen was yet more tenderly loved. So naturally and serenely virtuous that she alone remained ignorant of the scandals of Rome, she was also a woman of great culture and great refinement, conversant with every field of literature, and very happy in being so intelligent, so superior to those around her—a pre-eminence which she realised and which she was fond of showing, but in the most natural and most graceful of ways.

* King Humbert inherited these tastes from his father Victor
Emanuel, who was likewise a great sportsman and had a perfect
horror of court life, pageantry, and the exigencies of
politics.—Trans.

Like Pierre, Prada had remained with his face to the window, and suddenly pointing to the crowd he said: "Now that they have seen the Queen they will go to bed well pleased. And there isn't a single police agent there, I'm sure. Ah! to be loved, to be loved!" Plainly enough his distress of spirit was coming back, and so, turning towards the gallery again, he tried to play the jester. "Attention, my dear Abbe, we mustn't miss their Majesties' entry. That will be the finest part of the fete!"

A few minutes went by, and then, in the very midst of a polka, the orchestra suddenly ceased playing. But a moment afterwards, with all the blare of its brass instruments, it struck up the Royal March. The dancers fled in confusion, the centre of the gallery was cleared, and the King and Queen entered, escorted by the Prince and Princess Buongiovanni, who had received them at the foot of the staircase. The King was in ordinary evening dress, while the Queen wore a robe of straw-coloured satin, covered with superb white lace; and under the diadem of brilliants which encircled her beautiful fair hair, she looked still young, with a fresh and rounded face, whose expression was all amiability, gentleness, and wit. The music was still sounding with the enthusiastic violence of welcome. Behind her father and mother, Celia appeared amidst the press of people who were following to see the sight; and then came Attilio, the Saccos, and various relatives and official personages. And, pending the termination of the Royal March, only salutations, glances, and smiles were exchanged amidst the sonorous music and dazzling light; whilst all the guests crowded around on tip-toe, with outstretched necks and glittering eyes—a rising tide of heads and shoulders, flashing with the fires of precious stones.

At last the march ended and the presentations began. Their Majesties were already acquainted with Celia, and congratulated her with quite affectionate kindliness. However, Sacco, both as minister and father, was particularly desirous of presenting his son Attilio. He bent his supple spine, and summoned to his lips the fine words which were appropriate, in such wise that he contrived to make the young man bow to the King in the capacity of a lieutenant in his Majesty's army, whilst his homage as a handsome young man, so passionately loved by his betrothed was reserved for Queen Margherita. Again did their Majesties show themselves very gracious, even towards the Signora Sacco who, ever modest and prudent, had remained in the background. And then occurred an incident that was destined to give rise to endless gossip. Catching sight of Benedetta, whom Count Prada had presented to her after his marriage, the Queen, who greatly admired her beauty and charm of manner, addressed her a smile in such wise that the young woman was compelled to approach. A conversation of some minutes' duration ensued, and the Contessina was favoured with some extremely amiable expressions which were perfectly audible to all around. Most certainly the Queen was ignorant of the event of the day, the dissolution of Benedetta's marriage with Prada, and her coming union with Dario so publicly announced at this gala, which now seemed to have been given to celebrate a double betrothal. Nevertheless that conversation caused a deep impression; the guests talked of nothing but the compliments which Benedetta had received from the most virtuous and intelligent of queens, and her triumph was increased by it all, she became yet more beautiful and more victorious amidst the happiness she felt at being at last able to bestow herself on the spouse of her choice, that happiness which made her look so radiant.

But, on the other hand, the torture which Prada experienced now became intense. Whilst the sovereigns continued conversing, the Queen with the ladies who came to pay her their respects, the King with the officers, diplomatists, and other important personages who approached him, Prada saw none but Benedetta—Benedetta congratulated, caressed, exalted by affection and glory. Dario was near her, flushing with pleasure, radiant like herself. It was for them that this ball had been given, for them that the lamps shone out, for them that the music played, for them that the most beautiful women of Rome had bared their bosoms and adorned them with precious stones. It was for them that their Majesties had entered to the strains of the Royal March, for them that the fete was becoming like an apotheosis, for them that a fondly loved queen was smiling, appearing at that betrothal gala like the good fairy of the nursery tales, whose coming betokens life-long happiness. And for Prada, this wondrously brilliant hour when good fortune and joyfulness attained their apogee, was one of defeat. It was fraught with the victory of that woman who had refused to be his wife in aught but name, and of that man who now was about to take her from him: such a public, ostentatious, insulting victory that it struck him like a buffet in the face. And not merely did his pride and passion bleed for that: he felt that the triumph of the Saccos dealt a blow to his fortune. Was it true, then, that the rough conquerors of the North were bound to deteriorate in the delightful climate of Rome, was that the reason why he already experienced such a sensation of weariness and exhaustion? That very morning at Frascati in connection with that disastrous building enterprise he had realised that his millions were menaced, albeit he refused to admit that things were going badly with him, as some people rumoured. And now, that evening, amidst that fete he beheld the South victorious, Sacco winning the day like one who feeds at his ease on the warm prey so gluttonously pounced upon under the flaming sun.

And the thought of Sacco being a minister, an intimate of the King, allying himself by marriage to one of the noblest families of the Roman aristocracy, and already laying hands on the people and the national funds with the prospect of some day becoming the master of Rome and Italy—that thought again was a blow for the vanity of this man of prey, for the ever voracious appetite of this enjoyer, who felt as if he were being pushed away from table before the feast was over! All crumbled and escaped him, Sacco stole his millions, and Benedetta tortured his flesh, stirring up that awful wound of unsatisfied passion which never would be healed.

Again did Pierre hear that dull plaint, that involuntary despairing growl, which had upset him once before. And he looked at the Count, and asked him: "Are you suffering?" But on seeing how livid was the face of Prada, who only retained his calmness by a superhuman effort, he regretted his indiscreet question, which, moreover, remained unanswered. And then to put the other more at ease, the young priest went on speaking, venting the thoughts which the sight before him inspired: "Your father was right," said he, "we Frenchmen whose education is so full of the Catholic spirit, even in these days of universal doubt, we never think of Rome otherwise than as the old Rome of the popes. We scarcely know, we can scarcely understand the great changes which, year by year, have brought about the Italian Rome of the present day. Why, when I arrived here, the King and his government and the young nation working to make a great capital for itself, seemed to me of no account whatever! Yes, I dismissed all that, thought nothing of it, in my dream of resuscitating a Christian and evangelical Rome, which should assure the happiness of the world."

He laughed as he spoke, pitying his own artlessness, and then pointed towards the gallery where Prince Buongiovanni was bowing to the King whilst the Princess listened to the gallant remarks of Sacco: a scene full of symbolism, the old papal aristocracy struck down, the parvenus accepted, the black and white worlds so mixed together that one and all were little else than subjects, on the eve of forming but one united nation. That conciliation between the Quirinal and the Vatican which in principle was regarded as impossible, was it not in practice fatal, in face of the evolution which went on day by day? People must go on living, loving, and creating life throughout the ages. And the marriage of Attilio and Celia would be the symbol of the needful union: youth and love triumphing over ancient hatred, all quarrels forgotten as a handsome lad goes by, wins a lovely girl, and carries her off in his arms in order that the world may last.

"Look at them!" resumed Pierre, "how handsome and young and gay both the fiances are, all confidence in the future. Ah! I well understand that your King should have come here to please his minister and win one of the old Roman families over to his throne; it is good, brave, and fatherly policy. But I like to think that he has also realised the touching significance of that marriage—old Rome, in the person of that candid, loving child giving herself to young Italy, that upright, enthusiastic young man who wears his uniform so jauntily. And may their nuptials be definitive and fruitful; from them and from all the others may there arise the great nation which, now that I begin to know you, I trust you will soon become!"

Amidst the tottering of his former dream of an evangelical and universal Rome, Pierre expressed these good wishes for the Eternal City's future fortune with such keen and deep emotion that Prada could not help replying: "I thank you; that wish of yours is in the heart of every good Italian."

But his voice quavered, for even whilst he was looking at Celia and Attilio, who stood smiling and talking together, he saw Benedetta and Dario approach them, wearing the same joyful expression of perfect happiness. And when the two couples were united, so radiant and so triumphant, so full of superb and happy life, he no longer had strength to stay there, see them, and suffer.

"I am frightfully thirsty," he hoarsely exclaimed. "Let's go to the buffet to drink something." And, thereupon, in order to avoid notice, he so manoeuvred as to glide behind the throng, skirting the windows in the direction of the entrance to the Hall of the Antiques, which was beyond the gallery.

Whilst Pierre was following him they were parted by an eddy of the crowd, and the young priest found himself carried towards the two loving couples who still stood chatting together. And Celia, on recognising him, beckoned to him in a friendly way. With her passionate cult for beauty, she was enraptured with the appearance of Benedetta, before whom she joined her little lily hands as before the image of the Madonna. "Oh! Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "to please me now, do tell her how beautiful she is, more beautiful than anything on earth, more beautiful than even the sun, and the moon and stars. If you only knew, my dear, it makes me quiver to see you so beautiful as that, as beautiful as happiness, as beautiful as love itself!"

Benedetta began to laugh, while the two young men made merry. "But you are as beautiful as I am, darling," said the Contessina. "And if we are beautiful it is because we are happy."

"Yes, yes, happy," Celia gently responded. "Do you remember the evening when you told me that one didn't succeed in marrying the Pope and the King? But Attilio and I are marrying them, and yet we are very happy."

"But we don't marry them, Dario and I! On the contrary!" said Benedetta gaily. "No matter; as you answered me that same evening, it is sufficient that we should love one another, love saves the world."

When Pierre at last succeeded in reaching the door of the Hall of the Antiques, where the buffet was installed, he found Prada there, motionless, gazing despite himself on the galling spectacle which he desired to flee. A power stronger than his will had kept him there, forcing him to turn round and look, and look again. And thus, with a bleeding heart, he still lingered and witnessed the resumption of the dancing, the first figure of a quadrille which the orchestra began to play with a lively flourish of its brass instruments. Benedetta and Dario, Celia and Attilio were vis-à-vis. And so charming and delightful was the sight which the two couples presented dancing in the white blaze, all youth and joy, that the King and Queen drew near to them and became interested. And soon bravos of admiration rang out, while from every heart spread a feeling of infinite tenderness.

"I'm dying of thirst, let's go!" repeated Prada, at last managing to wrench himself away from the torturing sight.

He called for some iced lemonade and drank the glassful at one draught, gulping it down with the greedy eagerness of a man stricken with fever, who will never more be able to quench the burning fire within him.

The Hall of the Antiques was a spacious room with mosaic pavement, and decorations of stucco; and a famous collection of vases, bas-reliefs, and statues, was disposed along its walls. The marbles predominated, but there were a few bronzes, and among them a dying gladiator of extreme beauty. The marvel however was the famous statue of Venus, a companion to that of the Capitol, but with a more elegant and supple figure and with the left arm falling loosely in a gesture of voluptuous surrender. That evening a powerful electric reflector threw a dazzling light upon the statue, which, in its divine and pure nudity, seemed to be endowed with superhuman, immortal life. Against the end-wall was the buffet, a long table covered with an embroidered cloth and laden with fruit, pastry, and cold meats. Sheaves of flowers rose up amidst bottles of champagne, hot punch, and iced sorbetto, and here and there were marshalled armies of glasses, tea-cups, and broth-bowls, a perfect wealth of sparkling crystal, porcelain, and silver. And a happy innovation had been to fill half of the hall with rows of little tables, at which the guests, in lieu of being obliged to refresh themselves standing, were able to sit down and order what they desired as in a cafe.

At one of these little tables, Pierre perceived Narcisse seated near a young woman, whom Prada, on approaching, recognised to be Lisbeth. "You find me, you see, in delightful company," gallantly exclaimed the attache. "As we lost one another, I could think of nothing better than of offering madame my arm to bring her here."

"It was, in fact, a good idea," said Lisbeth with her pretty laugh, "for I was feeling very thirsty."

They had ordered some iced coffee, which they were slowly sipping out of little silver-gilt spoons.

"I have a terrible thirst, too," declared the Count, "and I can't quench it. You will allow us to join you, will you not, my dear sir? Some of that coffee will perhaps calm me." And then to Lisbeth he added, "Ah! my dear, allow me to introduce to you Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, a young French priest of great distinction."

Then for a long time they all four remained seated at that table, chatting and making merry over certain of the guests who went by. Prada, however, in spite of his usual gallantry towards Lisbeth, frequently became absent-minded; at times he quite forgot her, being again mastered by his anguish, and, in spite of all his efforts, his eyes ever turned towards the neighbouring gallery whence the sound of music and dancing reached him.

"Why, what are you thinking of, caro mio?" Lisbeth asked in her pretty way, on seeing him at one moment so pale and lost. "Are you indisposed?"

He did not reply, however, but suddenly exclaimed, "Ah! look there, that's the real pair, there's real love and happiness for you!"

With a jerk of the hand he designated Dario's mother, the Marchioness Montefiori and her second husband, Jules Laporte—that ex-sergeant of the papal Swiss Guard, her junior by fifteen years, whom she had one day hooked at the Corso with her eyes of fire, which yet had remained superb, and whom she had afterwards triumphantly transformed into a Marquis Montefiori in order to have him entirely to herself. Such was her passion that she never relaxed her hold on him whether at ball or reception, but, despite all usages, kept him beside her, and even made him escort her to the buffet, so much did she delight in being able to exhibit him and say that this handsome man was her own exclusive property. And standing there side by side, the pair of them began to drink champagne and eat sandwiches, she yet a marvel of massive beauty although she was over fifty, and he with long wavy moustaches, and proud bearing, like a fortunate adventurer whose jovial impudence pleased the ladies.

"You know that she had to extricate him from a nasty affair," resumed the Count in a lower tone. "Yes, he travelled in relics; he picked up a living by supplying relics on commission to convents in France and Switzerland; and he had launched quite a business in false relics with the help of some Jews here who concocted little ancient reliquaries out of mutton bones, with everything sealed and signed by the most genuine authorities. The affair was hushed up, as three prelates were also compromised in it! Ah! the happy man! Do you see how she devours him with her eyes? And he, doesn't he look quite a grand seigneur by the mere way in which he holds that plate for her whilst she eats the breast of a fowl out of it!"

Then, in a rough way and with biting irony, he went on to speak of the amours of Rome. The Roman women, said he, were ignorant, obstinate, and jealous. When a woman had managed to win a man, she kept him for ever, he became her property, and she disposed of him as she pleased. By way of proof, he cited many interminable liaisons, such as that of Donna Serafina and Morano which, in time became virtual marriages; and he sneered at such a lack of fancy, such an excess of fidelity whose only ending, when it did end, was some very disagreeable unpleasantness.

At this, Lisbeth interrupted him. "But what is the matter with you this evening, my dear?" she asked with a laugh. "What you speak of is on the contrary very nice and pretty! When a man and a woman love one another they ought to do so for ever!"

She looked delightful as she spoke, with her fine wavy blonde hair and delicate fair complexion; and Narcisse with a languorous expression in his half-closed eyes compared her to a Botticelli which he had seen at Florence. However, the night was now far advanced, and Pierre had once more sunk into gloomy thoughtfulness when he heard a passing lady remark that they had already begun to dance the Cotillon in the gallery; and thereupon he suddenly remembered that Monsignor Nani had given him an appointment in the little Saloon of the Mirrors.

"Are you leaving?" hastily inquired Prada on seeing him rise and bow to Lisbeth.

"No, no, not yet," Pierre answered.

"Oh! all right. Don't go away without me. I want to walk a little, and I'll see you home. It's agreed, eh? You will find me here."

The young priest had to cross two rooms, one hung with yellow and the other with blue, before he at last reached the mirrored salon. This was really an exquisite example of the rococo style, a rotunda as it were of pale mirrors framed with superb gilded carvings. Even the ceiling was covered with mirrors disposed slantwise so that on every side things multiplied, mingled, and appeared under all possible aspects. Discreetly enough no electric lights had been placed in the room, the only illumination being that of some pink tapers burning in a pair of candelabra. The hangings and upholstery were of soft blue silk, and the impression on entering was very sweet and charming, as if one had found oneself in the abode of some fairy queen of the rills, a palace of limpid water, illumined to its farthest depths by clusters of stars.

Pierre at once perceived Monsignor Nani, who was sitting on a low couch, and, as the prelate had hoped, he was quite alone, for the Cotillon had attracted almost everybody to the picture gallery. And the silence in the little salon was nearly perfect, for at that distance the blare of the orchestra subsided into a faint, flute-like murmur. The young priest at once apologised to the prelate for having kept him waiting.

"No, no, my dear son," said Nani, with his inexhaustible amiability. "I was very comfortable in this retreat—when the press of the crowd became over-threatening I took refuge here." He did not speak of the King and Queen, but he allowed it to be understood that he had politely avoided their company. If he had come to the fete it was on account of his sincere affection for Celia and also with a very delicate diplomatic object, for the Church wished to avoid any appearance of having entirely broken with the Buongiovanni family, that ancient house which was so famous in the annals of the papacy. Doubtless the Vatican was unable to subscribe to this marriage which seemed to unite old Rome with the young Kingdom of Italy, but on the other hand it did not desire people to think that it abandoned old and faithful supporters and took no interest in what befell them.

"But come, my dear son," the prelate resumed, "it is you who are now in question. I told you that although the Congregation of the Index had pronounced itself for the condemnation of your book, the sentence would only be submitted to the Holy Father and signed by him on the day after to-morrow. So you still have a whole day before you."

At this Pierre could not refrain from a dolorous and vivacious interruption.

"Alas! Monseigneur, what can I do?" said he; "I have thought it all over, and I see no means, no opportunity of defending myself. How could I even see his Holiness now that he is so ill?"

"Oh! ill, ill!" muttered Nani with his shrewd expression. "His Holiness is ever so much better, for this very day, like every other Wednesday, I had the honour to be received by him. When his Holiness is a little tired and people say that he is very ill, he often lets them do so, for it gives him a rest and enables him to judge certain ambitions and manifestations of impatience around him."

Pierre, however, was too upset to listen attentively. "No, it's all over," he continued, "I'm in despair. You spoke to me of the possibility of a miracle, but I am no great believer in miracles. Since I am defeated here at Rome, I shall go away, I shall return to Paris, and continue the struggle there. Oh! I cannot resign myself, my hope in salvation by the practice of love cannot die, and I shall answer my denouncers in a new book, in which I shall tell in what new soil the new religion will grow up!"

Silence fell. Nani looked at him with his clear eyes in which intelligence shone distinct and sharp like steel. And amidst the deep calm, the warm heavy atmosphere of the little salon, whose mirrors were starred with countless reflections of candles, a more sonorous burst of music was suddenly wafted from the gallery, a rhythmical waltz melody, which slowly expanded, then died away.

"My dear son," said Nani, "anger is always harmful. You remember that on your arrival here I promised that if your own efforts to obtain an interview with the Holy Father should prove unavailing, I would myself endeavour to secure an audience for you." Then, seeing how agitated the young priest was getting, he went on: "Listen to me and don't excite yourself. His Holiness, unfortunately, is not always prudently advised. Around him are persons whose devotion, however great, is at times deficient in intelligence. I told you that, and warned you against inconsiderate applications. And this is why, already three weeks ago, I myself handed your book to his Holiness in the hope that he would deign to glance at it. I rightly suspected that it had not been allowed to reach him. And this is what I am instructed to tell you: his Holiness, who has had the great kindness to read your book, expressly desires to see you."

A cry of joy and gratitude died away in Pierre's throat: "Ah! Monseigneur. Ah! Monseigneur!"

But Nani quickly silenced him and glanced around with an expression of keen anxiety as if he feared that some one might hear them. "Hush! Hush!" said he, "it is a secret. His Holiness wishes to see you privately, without taking anybody else into his confidence. Listen attentively. It is now two o'clock in the morning. Well, this very day, at nine in the evening precisely, you must present yourself at the Vatican and at every door ask for Signor Squadra. You will invariably be allowed to pass. Signor Squadra will be waiting for you upstairs, and will introduce you. And not a word, mind; not a soul must have the faintest suspicion of these things."

Pierre's happiness and gratitude at last flowed forth. He had caught hold of the prelate's soft, plump hands, and stammered, "Ah! Monseigneur, how can I express my gratitude to you? If you only knew how full my soul was of night and rebellion since I realised that I had been a mere plaything in the hands of those powerful cardinals. But you have saved me, and again I feel sure that I shall win the victory, for I shall at last be able to fling myself at the feet of his Holiness the father of all truth and all justice. He can but absolve me, I who love him, I who admire him, I who have never battled for aught but his own policy and most cherished ideas. No, no, it is impossible; he will not sign that judgment; he will not condemn my book!"

Releasing his hands, Nani sought to calm him with a fatherly gesture, whilst retaining a faint smile of contempt for such a useless expenditure of enthusiasm. At last he succeeded, and begged him to retire. The orchestra was again playing more loudly in the distance. And when the young priest at last withdrew, thanking him once more, he said very simply, "Remember, my dear son, that only obedience is great."

Pierre, whose one desire now was to take himself off, found Prada almost immediately afterwards in the first reception-room. Their Majesties had just left the ball in grand ceremony, escorted to the threshold by the Buongiovannis and the Saccos. And before departing the Queen had maternally kissed Celia, whilst the King shook hands with Attilio—honours instinct with a charming good nature which made the members of both families quite radiant. However, a good many of the guests were following the example of the sovereigns and disappearing in small batches. And the Count, who seemed strangely nervous, and showed more sternness and bitterness than ever, was, on his side, also eager to be gone. "Ah! it's you at last. I was waiting for you," he said to Pierre. "Well, let's get off at once, eh? Your compatriot Monsieur Narcisse Habert asked me to tell you not to look for him. The fact is, he has gone to see my friend Lisbeth to her carriage. I myself want a breath of fresh air, a stroll, and so I'll go with you as far as the Via Giulia."

Then, as they took their things from the cloak-room, he could not help sneering and saying in his brutal way: "I saw your good friends go off, all four together. It's lucky that you prefer to go home on foot, for there was no room for you in the carriage. What superb impudence it was on the part of that Donna Serafina to drag herself here, at her age, with that Morano of hers, so as to triumph over the return of the fickle one! And the two others, the two young ones—ah! I confess that I can hardly speak calmly of them, for in parading here together as they did this evening, they have shown an impudence and a cruelty such as is rarely seen!" Prada's hands trembled, and he murmured: "A good journey, a good journey to the young man, since he is going to Naples. Yes, I heard Celia say that he was starting for Naples this evening at six o'clock. Well, my wishes go with him; a good journey!"

The two men found the change delightful when they at last emerged from the stifling heat of the reception-rooms into the lovely, cool, and limpid night. It was a night illumined by a superb full moon, one of those matchless Roman nights when the city slumbers in Elysian radiance, steeped in a dream of the Infinite, under the vast vault of heaven. And they took the most agreeable route, going down the Corso proper and then turning into the Corso Vittorio Emanuele.

Prada had grown somewhat calmer, but remained full of irony. To divert his mind, no doubt, he talked on in the most voluble manner, reverting to the women of Rome and to that fete which he had at first found splendid, but at which he now began to rail.

"Oh! of course they have very fine gowns," said he, speaking of the women; "but gowns which don't fit them, gowns which are sent them from Paris, and which, of course, they can't try on. It's just the same with their jewels; they still have diamonds and pearls, in particular, which are very fine, but they are so wretchedly, so heavily mounted that they look frightful. And if you only knew how ignorant and frivolous these women are, despite all their conceit! Everything is on the surface with them, even religion: there's nothing beneath. I looked at them eating at the buffet. Oh! they at least have fine appetites. This evening some decorum was observed, there wasn't too much gorging. But at one of the Court balls you would see a general pillage, the buffets besieged, and everything swallowed up amidst a scramble of amazing voracity!"

To all this talk Pierre only returned monosyllabic responses. He was wrapped in overflowing delight at the thought of that audience with the Pope, which, unable as he was to confide in any one, he strove to arrange and picture in his own mind, even in its pettiest details. And meantime the footsteps of the two men rang out on the dry pavement of the clear, broad, deserted thoroughfare, whose black shadows were sharply outlined by the moonlight.

All at once Prada himself became silent. His loquacious bravura was exhausted, the frightful struggle going on in his mind wholly possessed and paralysed him. Twice already he had dipped his hand into his coat pocket and felt the pencilled note whose four lines he mentally repeated: "A legend avers that the fig-tree of Judas now grows at Frascati, and that its fruit is deadly for him who may desire to become pope. Eat not the poisoned figs, nor give them either to your servants or your fowls." The note was there; he could feel it; and if he had desired to accompany Pierre, it was in order that he might drop it into the letter-box at the Palazzo Boccanera. And he continued to step out briskly, so that within another ten minutes that note would surely be in the box, for no power in the world could prevent it, since such was his express determination. Never would he commit such a crime as to allow people to be poisoned.

But he was suffering such abominable torture. That Benedetta and that Dario had raised such a tempest of jealous hatred within him! For them he forgot Lisbeth whom he loved, and even that flesh of his flesh, the child of whom he was so proud. All sex as he was, eager to conquer and subdue, he had never cared for facile loves. His passion was to overcome. And now there was a woman in the world who defied him, a woman forsooth whom he had bought, whom he had married, who had been handed over to him, but who would never, never be his. Ah! in the old days, to subdue her, he would if needful have fired Rome like a Nero; but now he asked himself what he could possibly do to prevent her from belonging to another. That galling thought made the blood gush from his gaping wound. How that woman and her lover must deride him! And to think that they had sought to turn him to ridicule by a baseless charge, an arrant lie which still and ever made him smart, all proof of its falsity to the contrary. He, on his side, had accused them in the past without much belief in what he said, but now the charges he had imputed to them must come true, for they were free, freed at all events of the religious bond, and that no doubt was their only care. And then visions of their happiness passed before his eyes, infuriating him. Ah! no, ah! no, it was impossible, he would rather destroy the world!

Then, as he and Pierre turned out of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele to thread the old narrow tortuous streets leading to the Via Giulia, he pictured himself dropping the note into the letter-box at the palazzo. And next he conjured up what would follow. The note would lie in the letter-box till morning. At an early hour Don Vigilio, the secretary, who by the Cardinal's express orders kept the key of the box, would come down, find the note, and hand it to his Eminence, who never allowed another to open any communication addressed to him. And then the figs would be thrown away, there would be no further possibility of crime, the black world would in all prudence keep silent. But if the note should not be in the letter-box, what would happen then? And admitting that supposition he pictured the figs placed on the table at the one o'clock meal, in their pretty little leaf-covered basket. Dario would be there as usual, alone with his uncle, since he was not to leave for Naples till the evening. And would both the uncle and the nephew eat the figs, or would only one of them partake of the fruit, and which of them would that be? At this point Prada's clearness of vision failed him; again he conjured up Destiny on the march, that Destiny which he had met on the road from Frascati, going on towards its unknown goal, athwart all obstacles without possibility of stoppage. Aye, the little basket of figs went ever on and on to accomplish its fateful purpose, which no hand in the world had power enough to prevent.

And at last, on either hand of Pierre and Prada, the Via Giulia stretched away in a long line white with moonlight, and the priest emerged as if from a dream at sight of the Palazzo Boccanera rising blackly under the silver sky. Three o'clock struck at a neighbouring church. And he felt himself quivering slightly as once again he heard near him the dolorous moan of a lion wounded unto death, that low involuntary growl which the Count, amidst the frightful struggle of his feelings, had for the third time allowed to escape him. But immediately afterwards he burst into a sneering laugh, and pressing the priest's hands, exclaimed: "No, no, I am not going farther. If I were seen here at this hour, people would think that I had fallen in love with my wife again."

And thereupon he lighted a cigar, and retraced his steps in the clear night, without once looking round.

XIII.

WHEN Pierre awoke he was much surprised to hear eleven o'clock striking. Fatigued as he was by that ball where he had lingered so long, he had slept like a child in delightful peacefulness, and as soon as he opened his eyes the radiant sunshine filled him with hope. His first thought was that he would see the Pope that evening at nine o'clock. Ten more hours to wait! What would he be able to do with himself during that lovely day, whose radiant sky seemed to him of such happy augury? He rose and opened the windows to admit the warm air which, as he had noticed on the day of his arrival, had a savour of fruit and flowers, a blending, as it were, of the perfume of rose and orange. Could this possibly be December? What a delightful land, that the spring should seem to flower on the very threshold of winter! Then, having dressed, he was leaning out of the window to glance across the golden Tiber at the evergreen slopes of the Janiculum, when he espied Benedetta seated in the abandoned garden of the mansion. And thereupon, unable to keep still, full of a desire for life, gaiety, and beauty, he went down to join her.

With radiant visage and outstretched hands, she at once vented the cry he had expected: "Ah! my dear Abbe, how happy I am!"

They had often spent their mornings in that quiet, forsaken nook; but what sad mornings those had been, hopeless as they both were! To-day, however, the weed-grown paths, the box-plants growing in the old basin, the orange-trees which alone marked the outline of the beds—all seemed full of charm, instinct with a sweet and dreamy cosiness in which it was very pleasant to lull one's joy. And it was so warm, too, beside the big laurel-bush, in the corner where the streamlet of water ever fell with flute-like music from the gaping, tragic mask.

"Ah!" repeated Benedetta, "how happy I am! I was stifling upstairs, and my heart felt such a need of space, and air, and sunlight, that I came down here!"

She was seated on the fallen column beside the old marble sarcophagus, and desired the priest to place himself beside her. Never had he seen her looking so beautiful, with her black hair encompassing her pure face, which in the sunshine appeared pinky and delicate as a flower. Her large, fathomless eyes showed in the light like braziers rolling gold, and her childish mouth, all candour and good sense, laughed the laugh of one who was at last free to love as her heart listed, without offending either God or man. And, dreaming aloud, she built up plans for the future. "It's all simple enough," said she; "I have already obtained a separation, and shall easily get that changed into civil divorce now that the Church has annulled my marriage. And I shall marry Dario next spring, perhaps sooner, if the formalities can be hastened. He is going to Naples this evening about the sale of some property which we still possess there, but which must now be sold, for all this business has cost us a lot of money. Still, that doesn't matter since we now belong to one another. And when he comes back in a few days, what a happy time we shall have! I could not sleep when I got back from that splendid ball last night, for my head was so full of plans—oh! splendid plans, as you shall see, for I mean to keep you in Rome until our marriage."

Like herself, Pierre began to laugh, so gained upon by this explosion of youth and happiness that he had to make a great effort to refrain from speaking of his own delight, his hopefulness at the thought of his coming interview with the Pope. Of that, however, he had sworn to speak to nobody.

Every now and again, amidst the quivering silence of the sunlit garden, the cry of a bird persistently rang out; and Benedetta, raising her head and looking at a cage hanging beside one of the first-floor windows, jestingly exclaimed: "Yes, yes, Tata, make a good noise, show that you are pleased, my dear. Everybody in the house must be pleased now." Then, turning towards Pierre, she added gaily: "You know Tata, don't you? What! No? Why, Tata is my uncle's parrot. I gave her to him last spring; he's very fond of her, and lets her help herself out of his plate. And he himself attends to her, puts her out and takes her in, and keeps her in his dining-room, for fear lest she should take cold, as that is the only room of his which is at all warm."

Pierre in his turn looked up and saw the bird, one of those pretty little parrots with soft, silky, dull-green plumage. It was hanging by the beak from a bar of its cage, swinging itself and flapping its wings, all mirth in the bright sunshine.

"Does the bird talk?" he asked.

"No, she only screams," replied Benedetta, laughing. "Still my uncle pretends that he understands her." And then the young woman abruptly darted to another subject, as if this mention of her uncle the Cardinal had made her think of the uncle by marriage whom she had in Paris. "I suppose you have heard from Viscount de la Choue," said she. "I had a letter from him yesterday, in which he said how grieved he was that you were unable to see the Holy Father, as he had counted on you for the triumph of his ideas."

Pierre indeed frequently heard from the Viscount, who was greatly distressed by the importance which his adversary, Baron de Fouras, had acquired since his success with the International Pilgrimage of the Peter's Pence. The old, uncompromising Catholic party would awaken, said the Viscount, and all the conquests of Neo-Catholicism would be threatened, if one could not obtain the Holy Father's formal adhesion to the proposed system of free guilds, in order to overcome the demand for closed guilds which was brought forward by the Conservatives. And the Viscount overwhelmed Pierre with injunctions, and sent him all sorts of complicated plans in his eagerness to see him received at the Vatican. "Yes, yes," muttered the young priest in reply to Benedetta. "I had a letter on Sunday, and found another waiting for me on my return from Frascati yesterday. Ah! it would make me very happy to be able to send the Viscount some good news." Then again Pierre's joy overflowed at the thought that he would that evening see the Pope, and, on opening his loving heart to the Pontiff, receive the supreme encouragement which would strengthen him in his mission to work social salvation in the name of the lowly and the poor. And he could not restrain himself any longer, but let his secret escape him: "It's settled, you know," said he. "My audience is for this evening."

Benedetta did not understand at first. "What audience?" she asked.

"Oh! Monsignor Nani was good enough to tell me at the ball this morning, that the Holy Father has read my book and desires to see me. I shall be received this evening at nine o'clock."

At this the Contessina flushed with pleasure, participating in the delight of the young priest to whom she had grown much attached. And this success of his, coming in the midst of her own felicity, acquired extraordinary importance in her eyes as if it were an augury of complete success for one and all. Superstitious as she was, she raised a cry of rapture and excitement: "Ah! Dio, that will bring us good luck. How happy I am, my friend, to see happiness coming to you at the same time as to me! You cannot think how pleased I am! And all will go well now, it's certain, for a house where there is any one whom the Pope welcomes is blessed, the thunder of Heaven falls on it no more!"

She laughed yet more loudly as she spoke, and clapped her hands with such exuberant gaiety that Pierre became anxious. "Hush! hush!" said he, "it's a secret. Pray don't mention it to any one, either your aunt or even his Eminence. Monsignor Nani would be much annoyed."

She thereupon promised to say nothing, and in a kindly voice spoke of Nani as a benefactor, for was she not indebted to him for the dissolution of her marriage? Then, with a fresh explosion of gaiety, she went on: "But come, my friend, is not happiness the only good thing? You don't ask me to weep over the suffering poor to-day! Ah! the happiness of life, that's everything. People don't suffer or feel cold or hungry when they are happy."

He looked at her in stupefaction at the idea of that strange solution of the terrible question of human misery. And suddenly he realised that, with that daughter of the sun who had inherited so many centuries of sovereign aristocracy, all his endeavours at conversion were vain. He had wished to bring her to a Christian love for the lowly and the wretched, win her over to the new, enlightened, and compassionate Italy that he had dreamt of; but if she had been moved by the sufferings of the multitude at the time when she herself had suffered, when grievous wounds had made her own heart bleed, she was no sooner healed than she proclaimed the doctrine of universal felicity like a true daughter of a clime of burning summers, and winters as mild as spring. "But everybody is not happy!" said he.

"Yes, yes, they are!" she exclaimed. "You don't know the poor! Give a girl of the Trastevere the lad she loves, and she becomes as radiant as a queen, and finds her dry bread quite sweet. The mothers who save a child from sickness, the men who conquer in a battle, or who win at the lottery, one and all in fact are like that, people only ask for good fortune and pleasure. And despite all your striving to be just and to arrive at a more even distribution of fortune, the only satisfied ones will be those whose hearts sing—often without their knowing the cause—on a fine sunny day like this."

Pierre made a gesture of surrender, not wishing to sadden her by again pleading the cause of all the poor ones who at that very moment were somewhere agonising with physical or mental pain. But, all at once, through the luminous mild atmosphere a shadow seemed to fall, tingeing joy with sadness, the sunshine with despair. And the sight of the old sarcophagus, with its bacchanal of satyrs and nymphs, brought back the memory that death lurks even amidst the bliss of passion, the unsatiated kisses of love. For a moment the clear song of the water sounded in Pierre's ears like a long-drawn sob, and all seemed to crumble in the terrible shadow which had fallen from the invisible.

Benedetta, however, caught hold of his hands and roused him once more to the delight of being there beside her. "Your pupil is rebellious, is she not, my friend?" said she. "But what would you have? There are ideas which can't enter into our heads. No, you will never get those things into the head of a Roman girl. So be content with loving us as we are, beautiful with all our strength, as beautiful as we can be."

She herself, in her resplendent happiness, looked at that moment so beautiful that he trembled as in presence of a divinity whose all-powerfulness swayed the world. "Yes, yes," he stammered, "beauty, beauty, still and ever sovereign. Ah! why can it not suffice to satisfy the eternal longings of poor suffering men?"

"Never mind!" she gaily responded. "Do not distress yourself; it is pleasant to live. And now let us go upstairs, my aunt must be waiting."

The midday meal was served at one o'clock, and on the few occasions when Pierre did not eat at one or another restaurant a cover was laid for him at the ladies' table in the little dining-room of the second floor, overlooking the courtyard. At the same hour, in the sunlit dining-room of the first floor, whose windows faced the Tiber, the Cardinal likewise sat down to table, happy in the society of his nephew Dario, for his secretary, Don Vigilio, who also was usually present, never opened his mouth unless to reply to some question. And the two services were quite distinct, each having its own kitchen and servants, the only thing at all common to them both being a large room downstairs which served as a pantry and store-place.

Although the second-floor dining-room was so gloomy, saddened by the greeny half-light of the courtyard, the meal shared that day by the two ladies and the young priest proved a very gay one. Even Donna Serafina, usually so rigid, seemed to relax under the influence of great internal felicity. She was no doubt still enjoying her triumph of the previous evening, and it was she who first spoke of the ball and sung its praises, though the presence of the King and Queen had much embarrassed her, said she. According to her account, she had only avoided presentation by skilful strategy; however she hoped that her well-known affection for Celia, whose god-mother she was, would explain her presence in that neutral mansion where Vatican and Quirinal had met. At the same time she must have retained certain scruples, for she declared that directly after dinner she was going to the Vatican to see the Cardinal Secretary, to whom she desired to speak about an enterprise of which she was lady-patroness. This visit would compensate for her attendance at the Buongiovanni entertainment. And on the other hand never had Donna Serafina seemed so zealous and hopeful of her brother's speedy accession to the throne of St. Peter: therein lay a supreme triumph, an elevation of her race, which her pride deemed both needful and inevitable; and indeed during Leo XIII's last indisposition she had actually concerned herself about the trousseau which would be needed and which would require to be marked with the new Pontiff's arms.

On her side, Benedetta was all gaiety during the repast, laughing at everything, and speaking of Celia and Attilio with the passionate affection of a woman whose own happiness delights in that of her friends. Then, just as the dessert had been served, she turned to the servant with an air of surprise: "Well, and the figs, Giacomo?" she asked.

Giacomo, slow and sleepy of notion, looked at her without understanding. However, Victorine was crossing the room, and Benedetta's next question was for her: "Why are the figs not served, Victorine?" she inquired.

"What figs, Contessina?"

"Why the figs I saw in the pantry as I passed through it this morning on my way to the garden. They were in a little basket and looked superb. I was even astonished to see that there were still some fresh figs left at this season. I'm very fond of them, and felt quite pleased at the thought that I should eat some at dinner."

Victorine began to laugh: "Ah! yes, Contessina, I understand," she replied. "They were some figs which that priest of Frascati, whom you know very well, brought yesterday evening as a present for his Eminence. I was there, and I heard him repeat three or four times that they were a present, and were to be put on his Eminence's table without a leaf being touched. And so one did as he said."

"Well, that's nice," retorted Benedetta with comical indignation. "What gourmands my uncle and Dario are to regale themselves without us! They might have given us a share!"

Donna Serafina thereupon intervened, and asked Victorine: "You are speaking, are you not, of that priest who used to come to the villa at Frascati?"

"Yes, yes, Abbe Santobono his name is, he officiates at the little church of St. Mary in the Fields. He always asks for Abbe Paparelli when he calls; I think they were at the seminary together. And it was Abbe Paparelli who brought him to the pantry with his basket last night. To tell the truth, the basket was forgotten there in spite of all the injunctions, so that nobody would have eaten the figs to-day if Abbe Paparelli hadn't run down just now and carried them upstairs as piously as if they were the Blessed Sacrament. It's true though that his Eminence is so fond of them."

"My brother won't do them much honour to-day," remarked the Princess. "He is slightly indisposed. He passed a bad night." The repeated mention of Abbe Paparelli had made the old lady somewhat thoughtful. She had regarded the train-bearer with displeasure ever since she had noticed the extraordinary influence he was gaining over the Cardinal, despite all his apparent humility and self-effacement. He was but a servant and apparently a very insignificant one, yet he governed, and she could feel that he combated her own influence, often undoing things which she had done to further her brother's interests. Twice already, moreover, she had suspected him of having urged the Cardinal to courses which she looked upon as absolute blunders. But perhaps she was wrong; she did the train-bearer the justice to admit that he had great merits and displayed exemplary piety.

However, Benedetta went on laughing and jesting, and as Victorine had now withdrawn, she called the man-servant: "Listen, Giacomo, I have a commission for you." Then she broke off to say to her aunt and Pierre: "Pray let us assert our rights. I can see them at table almost underneath us. Uncle is taking the leaves off the basket and serving himself with a smile; then he passes the basket to Dario, who passes it on to Don Vigilio. And all three of them eat and enjoy the figs. You can see them, can't you?" She herself could see them well. And it was her desire to be near Dario, the constant flight of her thoughts to him that now made her picture him at table with the others. Her heart was down below, and there was nothing there that she could not see, and hear, and smell, with such keenness of the senses did her love endow her. "Giacomo," she resumed, "you are to go down and tell his Eminence that we are longing to taste his figs, and that it will be very kind of him if he will send us such as he can spare."

Again, however, did Donna Serafina intervene, recalling her wonted severity of voice: "Giacomo, you will please stay here." And to her niece she added: "That's enough childishness! I dislike such silly freaks."

"Oh! aunt," Benedetta murmured. "But I'm so happy, it's so long since I laughed so good-heartedly."

Pierre had hitherto remained listening, enlivened by the sight of her gaiety. But now, as a little chill fell, he raised his voice to say that on the previous day he himself had been astonished to see the famous fig-tree of Frascati still bearing fruit so late in the year. This was doubtless due, however, to the tree's position and the protection of a high wall.

"Ah! so you saw the tree?" said Benedetta.

"Yes, and I even travelled with those figs which you would so much like to taste."

"Why, how was that?"

The young man already regretted the reply which had escaped him. However, having gone so far, he preferred to say everything. "I met somebody at Frascati who had come there in a carriage and who insisted on driving me back to Rome," said he. "On the way we picked up Abbe Santobono, who was bravely making the journey on foot with his basket in his hand. And afterwards we stopped at an osteria—" Then he went on to describe the drive and relate his impressions whilst crossing the Campagna amidst the falling twilight. But Benedetta gazed at him fixedly, aware as she was of Prada's frequent visits to the land and houses which he owned at Frascati; and suddenly she murmured: "Somebody, somebody, it was the Count, was it not?"

"Yes, madame, the Count," Pierre answered. "I saw him again last night; he was overcome, and really deserves to be pitied."

The two women took no offence at this charitable remark which fell from the young priest with such deep and natural emotion, full as he was of overflowing love and compassion for one and all. Donna Serafina remained motionless as if she had not even heard him, and Benedetta made a gesture which seemed to imply that she had neither pity nor hatred to express for a man who had become a perfect stranger to her. However, she no longer laughed, but, thinking of the little basket which had travelled in Prada's carriage, she said: "Ah! I don't care for those figs at all now, I am even glad that I haven't eaten any of them."

Immediately after the coffee Donna Serafina withdrew, saying that she was at once going to the Vatican; and the others, being left to themselves, lingered at table, again full of gaiety, and chatting like friends. The priest, with his feverish impatience, once more referred to the audience which he was to have that evening. It was now barely two o'clock, and he had seven more hours to wait. How should he employ that endless afternoon? Thereupon Benedetta good-naturedly made him a proposal. "I'll tell you what," said she, "as we are all in such good spirits we mustn't leave one another. Dario has his victoria, you know. He must have finished lunch by now, and I'll ask him to take us for a long drive along the Tiber."

This fine project so delighted her that she began to clap her hands; but just then Don Vigilio appeared with a scared look on his face. "Isn't the Princess here?" he inquired.

"No, my aunt has gone out. What is the matter?"

"His Eminence sent me. The Prince has just felt unwell on rising from table. Oh! it's nothing—nothing serious, no doubt."

Benedetta raised a cry of surprise rather than anxiety: "What, Dario! Well, we'll all go down. Come with me, Monsieur l'Abbe. He mustn't get ill if he is to take us for a drive!" Then, meeting Victorine on the stairs, she bade her follow. "Dario isn't well," she said. "You may be wanted."

They all four entered the spacious, antiquated, and simply furnished bed-room where the young Prince had lately been laid up for a whole month. It was reached by way of a small salon, and from an adjoining dressing-room a passage conducted to the Cardinal's apartments, the relatively small dining-room, bed-room, and study, which had been devised by subdividing one of the huge galleries of former days. In addition, the passage gave access to his Eminence's private chapel, a bare, uncarpeted, chairless room, where there was nothing beyond the painted, wooden altar, and the hard, cold tiles on which to kneel and pray.

On entering, Benedetta hastened to the bed where Dario was lying, still fully dressed. Near him, in fatherly fashion, stood Cardinal Boccanera, who, amidst his dawning anxiety, retained his proud and lofty bearing—the calmness of a soul beyond reproach. "Why, what is the matter, Dario mio?" asked the young woman.

He smiled, eager to reassure her. One only noticed that he was very pale, with a look as of intoxication on his face.

"Oh! it's nothing, mere giddiness," he replied. "It's just as if I had drunk too much. All at once things swam before my eyes, and I thought I was going to fall. And then I only had time to come and fling myself on the bed."

Then he drew a long breath, as though talking exhausted him, and the Cardinal in his turn gave some details. "We had just finished our meal," said he, "I was giving Don Vigilio some orders for this afternoon, and was about to rise when I saw Dario get up and reel. He wouldn't sit down again, but came in here, staggering like a somnambulist, and fumbling at the doors to open them. We followed him without understanding. And I confess that I don't yet comprehend it."

So saying, the Cardinal punctuated his surprise by waving his arm towards the rooms, through which a gust of misfortune seemed to have suddenly swept. All the doors had remained wide open: the dressing-room could be seen, and then the passage, at the end of which appeared the dining-room, in a disorderly state, like an apartment suddenly vacated; the table still laid, the napkins flung here and there, and the chairs pushed back. As yet, however, there was no alarm.

Benedetta made the remark which is usually made in such cases: "I hope you haven't eaten anything which has disagreed with you."

The Cardinal, smiling, again waved his hand as if to attest the frugality of his table. "Oh!" said he, "there were only some eggs, some lamb cutlets, and a dish of sorrel—they couldn't have overloaded his stomach. I myself only drink water; he takes just a sip of white wine. No, no, the food has nothing to do with it."

"Besides, in that case his Eminence and I would also have felt indisposed," Don Vigilio made bold to remark.

Dario, after momentarily closing his eyes, opened them again, and once more drew a long breath, whilst endeavouring to laugh. "Oh, it will be nothing;" he said. "I feel more at ease already. I must get up and stir myself."

"In that case," said Benedetta, "this is what I had thought of. You will take Monsieur l'Abbe Froment and me for a long drive in the Campagna."

"Willingly. It's a nice idea. Victorine, help me."

Whilst speaking he had raised himself by means of one arm; but, before the servant could approach, a slight convulsion seized him, and he fell back again as if overcome by a fainting fit. It was the Cardinal, still standing by the bedside, who caught him in his arms, whilst the Contessina this time lost her head: "Dio, Dio! It has come on him again. Quick, quick, a doctor!"

"Shall I run for one?" asked Pierre, whom the scene was also beginning to upset.

"No, no, not you; stay with me. Victorine will go at once. She knows the address. Doctor Giordano, Victorine."

The servant hurried away, and a heavy silence fell on the room where the anxiety became more pronounced every moment. Benedetta, now quite pale, had again approached the bed, whilst the Cardinal looked down at Dario, whom he still held in his arms. And a terrible suspicion, vague, indeterminate as yet, had just awoke in the old man's mind: Dario's face seemed to him to be ashen, to wear that mask of terrified anguish which he had already remarked on the countenance of his dearest friend, Monsignor Gallo, when he had held him in his arms, in like manner, two hours before his death. There was also the same swoon and the same sensation of clasping a cold form whose heart ceases to beat. And above everything else there was in Boccanera's mind the same growing thought of poison, poison coming one knew not whence or how, but mysteriously striking down those around him with the suddenness of lightning. And for a long time he remained with his head bent over the face of his nephew, that last scion of his race, seeking, studying, and recognising the signs of the mysterious, implacable disorder which once already had rent his heart atwain.

But Benedetta addressed him in a low, entreating voice: "You will tire yourself, uncle. Let me take him a little, I beg you. Have no fear, I'll hold him very gently, he will feel that it is I, and perhaps that will rouse him."

At last the Cardinal raised his head and looked at her, and allowed her to take his place after kissing her with distracted passion, his eyes the while full of tears—a sudden burst of emotion in which his great love for the young woman melted the stern frigidity which he usually affected. "Ah! my poor child, my poor child!" he stammered, trembling from head to foot like an oak-tree about to fall. Immediately afterwards, however, he mastered himself, and whilst Pierre and Don Vigilio, mute and motionless, regretted that they could be of no help, he walked slowly to and fro. Soon, moreover, that bed-chamber became too small for all the thoughts revolving in his mind, and he strayed first into the dressing-room and then down the passage as far as the dining-room. And again and again he went to and fro, grave and impassible, his head low, ever lost in the same gloomy reverie. What were the multitudinous thoughts stirring in the brain of that believer, that haughty Prince who had given himself to God and could do naught to stay inevitable Destiny? From time to time he returned to the bedside, observed the progress of the disorder, and then started off again at the same slow regular pace, disappearing and reappearing, carried along as it were by the monotonous alternations of forces which man cannot control. Possibly he was mistaken, possibly this was some mere indisposition at which the doctor would smile. One must hope and wait. And again he went off and again he came back; and amidst the heavy silence nothing more clearly bespoke the torture of anxious fear than the rhythmical footsteps of that tall old man who was thus awaiting Destiny.

The door opened, and Victorine came in breathless. "I found the doctor, here he is," she gasped.

With his little pink face and white curls, his discreet paternal bearing which gave him the air of an amiable prelate, Doctor Giordano came in smiling; but on seeing that room and all the anxious people waiting in it, he turned very grave, at once assuming the expression of profound respect for all ecclesiastical secrets which he had acquired by long practice among the clergy. And when he had glanced at the sufferer he let but a low murmur escape him: "What, again! Is it beginning again!"

He was probably alluding to the knife thrust for which he had recently tended Dario. Who could be thus relentlessly pursuing that poor and inoffensive young prince? However no one heard the doctor unless it were Benedetta, and she was so full of feverish impatience, so eager to be tranquillised, that she did not listen but burst into fresh entreaties: "Oh! doctor, pray look at him, examine him, tell us that it is nothing. It can't be anything serious, since he was so well and gay but a little while ago. It's nothing serious, is it?"

"You are right no doubt, Contessina, it can be nothing dangerous. We will see."

However, on turning round, Doctor Giordano perceived the Cardinal, who with regular, thoughtful footsteps had come back from the dining-room to place himself at the foot of the bed. And while bowing, the doctor doubtless detected a gleam of mortal anxiety in the dark eyes fixed upon his own, for he added nothing but began to examine Dario like a man who realises that time is precious. And as his examination progressed the affable optimism which usually appeared upon his countenance gave place to ashen gravity, a covert terror which made his lips slightly tremble. It was he who had attended Monsignor Gallo when the latter had been carried off so mysteriously; it was he who for imperative reasons had then delivered a certificate stating the cause of death to be infectious fever; and doubtless he now found the same terrible symptoms as in that case, a leaden hue overspreading the sufferer's features, a stupor as of excessive intoxication; and, old Roman practitioner that he was, accustomed to sudden deaths, he realised that the malaria which kills was passing, that malaria which science does not yet fully understand, which may come from the putrescent exhalations of the Tiber unless it be but a name for the ancient poison of the legends.

As the doctor raised his head his glance again encountered the black eyes of the Cardinal, which never left him. "Signor Giordano," said his Eminence, "you are not over-anxious, I hope? It is only some case of indigestion, is it not?"

The doctor again bowed. By the slight quiver of the Cardinal's voice he understood how acute was the anxiety of that powerful man, who once more was stricken in his dearest affections.

"Your Eminence must be right," he said, "there's a bad digestion certainly. Such accidents sometimes become dangerous when fever supervenes. I need not tell your Eminence how thoroughly you may rely on my prudence and zeal." Then he broke off and added in a clear professional voice: "We must lose no time; the Prince must be undressed. I should prefer to remain alone with him for a moment."

Whilst speaking in this way, however, Doctor Giordano detained Victorine, who would be able to help him, said he; should he need any further assistance he would take Giacomo. His evident desire was to get rid of the members of the family in order that he might have more freedom of action. And the Cardinal, who understood him, gently led Benedetta into the dining-room, whither Pierre and Don Vigilio followed.

When the doors had been closed, the most mournful and oppressive silence reigned in that dining-room, which the bright sun of winter filled with such delightful warmth and radiance. The table was still laid, its cloth strewn here and there with bread-crumbs; and a coffee cup had remained half full. In the centre stood the basket of figs, whose covering of leaves had been removed. However, only two or three of the figs were missing. And in front of the window was Tata, the female parrot, who had flown out of her cage and perched herself on her stand, where she remained, dazzled and enraptured, amidst the dancing dust of a broad yellow sunray. In her astonishment however, at seeing so many people enter, she had ceased to scream and smooth her feathers, and had turned her head the better to examine the newcomers with her round and scrutinising eye.

The minutes went by slowly amidst all the feverish anxiety as to what might be occurring in the neighbouring room. Don Vigilio had taken a corner seat in silence, whilst Benedetta and Pierre, who had remained standing, preserved similar muteness, and immobility. But the Cardinal had reverted to that instinctive, lulling tramp by which he apparently hoped to quiet his impatience and arrive the sooner at the explanation for which he was groping through a tumultuous maze of ideas. And whilst his rhythmical footsteps resounded with mechanical regularity, dark fury was taking possession of his mind, exasperation at being unable to understand the why and wherefore of that sickness. As he passed the table he had twice glanced at the things lying on it in confusion, as if seeking some explanation from them. Perhaps the harm had been done by that unfinished coffee, or by that bread whose crumbs lay here and there, or by those cutlets, a bone of which remained? Then as for the third time he passed by, again glancing, his eyes fell upon the basket of figs, and at once he stopped, as if beneath the shock of a revelation. An idea seized upon him and mastered him, without any plan, however, occurring to him by which he might change his sudden suspicion into certainty. For a moment he remained puzzled with his eyes fixed upon the basket. Then he took a fig and examined it, but, noticing nothing strange, was about to put it back when Tata, the parrot, who was very fond of figs, raised a strident cry. And this was like a ray of light; the means of changing suspicion into certainty was found.

Slowly, with grave air and gloomy visage, the Cardinal carried the fig to the parrot and gave it to her without hesitation or regret. She was a very pretty bird, the only being of the lower order of creation to which he had ever really been attached. Stretching out her supple, delicate form, whose silken feathers of dull green here and there assumed a pinky tinge in the sunlight, she took hold of the fig with her claws, then ripped it open with her beak. But when she had raked it she ate but little, and let all the rest fall upon the floor. Still grave and impassible, the Cardinal looked at her and waited. Quite three minutes went by, and then feeling reassured, he began to scratch the bird's poll, whilst she, taking pleasure in the caress, turned her neck and fixed her bright ruby eye upon her master. But all at once she sank back without even a flap of the wings, and fell like a bullet. She was dead, killed as by a thunderbolt.

Boccanera made but a gesture, raising both hands to heaven as if in horror at what he now knew. Great God! such a terrible crime, and such a fearful mistake, such an abominable trick of Destiny! No cry of grief came from him, but the gloom upon his face grew black and fierce. Yet there was a cry, a piercing cry from Benedetta, who like Pierre and Don Vigilio had watched the Cardinal with an astonishment which had changed into terror: "Poison! poison! Ah! Dario, my heart, my soul!"

But the Cardinal violently caught his niece by the wrist, whilst darting a suspicious glance at the two petty priests, the secretary and the foreigner, who were present: "Be quiet, be quiet!" said he.

She shook herself free, rebelling, frantic with rage and hatred: "Why should I be quiet!" she cried. "It is Prada's work, I shall denounce him, he shall die as well! I tell you it is Prada, I know it, for yesterday Abbe Froment came back with him from Frascati in his carriage with that priest Santobono and that basket of figs! Yes, yes, I have witnesses, it is Prada, Prada!"

"No, no, you are mad, be quiet!" said the Cardinal, who had again taken hold of the young woman's hands and sought to master her with all his sovereign authority. He, who knew the influence which Cardinal Sanguinetti exercised over Santobono's excitable mind, had just understood the whole affair; no direct complicity but covert propulsion, the animal excited and then let loose upon the troublesome rival at the moment when the pontifical throne seemed likely to be vacant. The probability, the certainty of all this flashed upon Boccanera who, though some points remained obscure, did not seek to penetrate them. It was not necessary indeed that he should know every particular: the thing was as he said, since it was bound to be so. "No, no, it was not Prada," he exclaimed, addressing Benedetta. "That man can bear me no personal grudge, and I alone was aimed at, it was to me that those figs were given. Come, think it out! Only an unforeseen indisposition prevented me from eating the greater part of the fruit, for it is known that I am very fond of figs, and while my poor Dario was tasting them, I jested and told him to leave the finer ones for me to-morrow. Yes, the abominable blow was meant for me, and it is on him that it has fallen by the most atrocious of chances, the most monstrous of the follies of fate. Ah! Lord God, Lord God, have you then forsaken us!"

Tears came into the old man's eyes, whilst she still quivered and seemed unconvinced: "But you have no enemies, uncle," she said. "Why should that Santobono try to take your life?"

For a moment he found no fitting reply. With supreme grandeur he had already resolved to keep the truth secret. Then a recollection came to him, and he resigned himself to the telling of a lie: "Santobono's mind has always been somewhat unhinged," said he, "and I know that he has hated me ever since I refused to help him to get a brother of his, one of our former gardeners, out of prison. Deadly spite often has no more serious cause. He must have thought that he had reason to be revenged on me."

Thereupon Benedetta, exhausted, unable to argue any further, sank upon a chair with a despairing gesture: "Ah! God, God! I no longer know—and what matters it now that my Dario is in such danger? There's only one thing to be done, he must be saved. How long they are over what they are doing in that room—why does not Victorine come for us!"

The silence again fell, full of terror. Without speaking the Cardinal took the basket of figs from the table and carried it to a cupboard in which he locked it. Then he put the key in his pocket. No doubt, when night had fallen, he himself would throw the proofs of the crime into the Tiber. However, on coming back from the cupboard he noticed the two priests, who naturally had watched him; and with mingled grandeur and simplicity he said to them: "Gentlemen, I need not ask you to be discreet. There are scandals which we must spare the Church, which is not, cannot be guilty. To deliver one of ourselves, even when he is a criminal, to the civil tribunals, often means a blow for the whole Church, for men of evil mind may lay hold of the affair and seek to impute the responsibility of the crime even to the Church itself. We therefore have but to commit the murderer to the hands of God, who will know more surely how to punish him. Ah! for my part, whether I be struck in my own person or whether the blow be directed against my family, my dearest affections, I declare in the name of the Christ who died upon the cross, that I feel neither anger, nor desire for vengeance, that I efface the murderer's name from my memory and bury his abominable act in the eternal silence of the grave."

Tall as he was, he seemed of yet loftier stature whilst with hand upraised he took that oath to leave his enemies to the justice of God alone; for he did not refer merely to Santobono, but to Cardinal Sanguinetti, whose evil influence he had divined. And amidst all the heroism of his pride, he was rent by tragic dolour at thought of the dark battle which was waged around the tiara, all the evil hatred and voracious appetite which stirred in the depths of the gloom. Then, as Pierre and Don Vigilio bowed to him as a sign that they would preserve silence, he almost choked with invincible emotion, a sob of loving grief which he strove to keep down rising to his throat, whilst he stammered: "Ah! my poor child, my poor child, the only scion of our race, the only love and hope of my heart! Ah! to die, to die like this!"

But Benedetta, again all violence, sprang up: "Die! Who, Dario? I won't have it! We'll nurse him, we'll go back to him. We will take him in our arms and save him. Come, uncle, come at once! I won't, I won't, I won't have him die!"

She was going towards the door, and nothing would have prevented her from re-entering the bed-room, when, as it happened, Victorine appeared with a wild look on her face, for, despite her wonted serenity, all her courage was now exhausted. "The doctor begs madame and his Eminence to come at once, at once," said she.

Stupefied by all these things, Pierre did not follow the others, but lingered for a moment in the sunlit dining-room with Don Vigilio. What! poison? Poison as in the time of the Borgias, elegantly hidden away, served up with luscious fruit by a crafty traitor, whom one dared not even denounce! And he recalled the conversation on his way back from Frascati, and his Parisian scepticism with respect to those legendary drugs, which to his mind had no place save in the fifth acts of melodramas. Yet those abominable stories were true, those tales of poisoned knives and flowers, of prelates and even dilatory popes being suppressed by a drop or a grain of something administered to them in their morning chocolate. That passionate tragical Santobono was really a poisoner, Pierre could no longer doubt it, for a lurid light now illumined the whole of the previous day: there were the words of ambition and menace which had been spoken by Cardinal Sanguinetti, the eagerness to act in presence of the probable death of the reigning pope, the suggestion of a crime for the sake of the Church's salvation, then that priest with his little basket of figs encountered on the road, then that basket carried for hours so carefully, so devoutly, on the priest's knees, that basket which now haunted Pierre like a nightmare, and whose colour, and odour, and shape he would ever recall with a shudder. Aye, poison, poison, there was truth in it; it existed and still circulated in the depths of the black world, amidst all the ravenous, rival longings for conquest and sovereignty.

And all at once the figure of Prada likewise arose in Pierre's mind. A little while previously, when Benedetta had so violently accused the Count, he, Pierre, had stepped forward to defend him and cry aloud what he knew, whence the poison had come, and what hand had offered it. But a sudden thought had made him shiver: though Prada had not devised the crime, he had allowed it to be perpetrated. Another memory darted keen like steel through the young priest's mind—that of the little black hen lying lifeless beside the shed, amidst the dismal surroundings of the osteria, with a tiny streamlet of violet blood trickling from her beak. And here again, Tata, the parrot, lay still soft and warm at the foot of her stand, with her beak stained by oozing blood. Why had Prada told that lie about a battle between two fowls? All the dim intricacy of passion and contention bewildered Pierre, he could not thread his way through it; nor was he better able to follow the frightful combat which must have been waged in that man's mind during the night of the ball. At the same time he could not again picture him by his side during their nocturnal walk towards the Boccanera mansion without shuddering, dimly divining what a frightful decision had been taken before that mansion's door. Moreover, whatever the obscurities, whether Prada had expected that the Cardinal alone would be killed, or had hoped that some chance stroke of fate might avenge him on others, the terrible fact remained—he had known, he had been able to stay Destiny on the march, but had allowed it to go onward and blindly accomplish its work of death.

Turning his head Pierre perceived Don Vigilio still seated on the corner chair whence he had not stirred, and looking so pale and haggard that perhaps he also had swallowed some of the poison. "Do you feel unwell?" the young priest asked.

At first the secretary could not reply, for terror had gripped him at the throat. Then in a low voice he said: "No, no, I didn't eat any. Ah, Heaven, when I think that I so much wanted to taste them, and that merely deference kept me back on seeing that his Eminence did not take any!" Don Vigilio's whole body shivered at the thought that his humility alone had saved him; and on his face and his hands there remained the icy chill of death which had fallen so near and grazed him as it passed.

Then twice he heaved a sigh, and with a gesture of affright sought to brush the horrid thing away while murmuring: "Ah! Paparelli, Paparelli!"

Pierre, deeply stirred, and knowing what he thought of the train-bearer, tried to extract some information from him: "What do you mean?" he asked. "Do you accuse him too? Do you think they urged him on, and that it was they at bottom?"

The word Jesuits was not even spoken, but a big black shadow passed athwart the gay sunlight of the dining-room, and for a moment seemed to fill it with darkness. "They! ah yes!" exclaimed Don Vigilio, "they are everywhere; it is always they! As soon as one weeps, as soon as one dies, they are mixed up in it. And this is intended for me too; I am quite surprised that I haven't been carried off." Then again he raised a dull moan of fear, hatred, and anger: "Ah! Paparelli, Paparelli!" And he refused to reply any further, but darted scared glances at the walls as if from one or another of them he expected to see the train-bearer emerge, with his wrinkled flabby face like that of an old maid, his furtive mouse-like trot, and his mysterious, invading hands which had gone expressly to bring the forgotten figs from the pantry and deposit them on the table.

At last the two priests decided to return to the bedroom, where perhaps they might be required; and Pierre on entering was overcome by the heart-rending scene which the chamber now presented. Doctor Giordano, suspecting poison, had for half an hour been trying the usual remedies, an emetic and then magnesia. Just then, too, he had made Victorine whip some whites of eggs in water. But the disorder was progressing with such lightning-like rapidity that all succour was becoming futile. Undressed and lying on his back, his bust propped up by pillows and his arms lying outstretched over the sheets, Dario looked quite frightful in the sort of painful intoxication which characterised that redoubtable and mysterious disorder to which already Monsignor Gallo and others had succumbed. The young man seemed to be stricken with a sort of dizzy stupor, his eyes receded farther and farther into the depth of their dark sockets, whilst his whole face became withered, aged as it were, and covered with an earthy pallor. A moment previously he had closed his eyes, and the only sign that he still lived was the heaving of his chest induced by painful respiration. And leaning over his poor dying face stood Benedetta, sharing his sufferings, and mastered by such impotent grief that she also was unrecognisable, so white, so distracted by anguish, that it seemed as if death were gradually taking her at the same time as it was taking him.

In the recess by the window whither Cardinal Boccanera had led Doctor Giordano, a few words were exchanged in low tones. "He is lost, is he not?"

The doctor made the despairing gesture of one who is vanquished: "Alas! yes. I must warn your Eminence that in an hour all will be over."

A short interval of silence followed. "And the same malady as Gallo, is it not?" asked the Cardinal; and as the doctor trembling and averting his eyes did not answer he added: "At all events of an infectious fever!"

Giordano well understood what the Cardinal thus asked of him: silence, the crime for ever hidden away for the sake of the good renown of his mother, the Church. And there could be no loftier, no more tragical grandeur than that of this old man of seventy, still so erect and sovereign, who would neither suffer a slur to be cast upon his spiritual family, nor consent to his human family being dragged into the inevitable mire of a sensational murder trial. No, no, there must be none of that, there must be silence, the eternal silence in which all becomes forgotten.

At last the doctor bowed with his gentle air of discretion. "Evidently, of an infectious fever as your Eminence so well says," he replied.

Two big tears then again appeared in Boccanera's eyes. Now that he had screened the Deity from attack in the person of the Church, his heart as a man again bled. He begged the doctor to make a supreme effort, to attempt the impossible; but, pointing to the dying man with trembling hands, Giordano shook his head. For his own father, his own mother he could have done nothing. Death was there. So why weary, why torture a dying man, whose sufferings he would only have increased? And then, as the Cardinal, finding the end so near at hand, thought of his sister Serafina, and lamented that she would not be able to kiss her nephew for the last time if she lingered at the Vatican, the doctor offered to fetch her in his carriage which was waiting below. It would not take him more than twenty minutes, said he, and he would be back in time for the end, should he then be needed.

Left to himself in the window recess the Cardinal remained there motionless for another moment. With eyes blurred by tears, he gazed towards heaven. And his quivering arms were suddenly raised in a gesture of ardent entreaty. O God, since the science of man was so limited and vain, since that doctor had gone off happy to escape the embarrassment of his impotence, O God, why not a miracle which should proclaim the splendour of Thy Almighty Power! A miracle, a miracle! that was what the Cardinal asked from the depths of his believing soul, with the insistence, the imperious entreaty of a Prince of the Earth, who deemed that he had rendered considerable services to Heaven by dedicating his whole life to the Church. And he asked for that miracle in order that his race might be perpetuated, in order that its last male scion might not thus miserably perish, but be able to marry that fondly loved cousin, who now stood there all woe and tears. A miracle, a miracle for the sake of those two dear children! A miracle which would endow the family with fresh life: a miracle which would eternise the glorious name of Boccanera by enabling an innumerable posterity of valiant ones and faithful ones to spring from that young couple!

When the Cardinal returned to the centre of the room he seemed transfigured. Faith had dried his eyes, his soul had become strong and submissive, exempt from all human weakness. He had placed himself in the hands of God, and had resolved that he himself would administer extreme unction to Dario. With a gesture he summoned Don Vigilio and led him into the little room which served as a chapel, and the key of which he always carried. A cupboard had been contrived behind the altar of painted wood, and the Cardinal went to it to take both stole and surplice. The coffer containing the Holy Oils was likewise there, a very ancient silver coffer bearing the Boccanera arms. And on Don Vigilio following the Cardinal back into the bed-room they in turn pronounced the Latin words:

"Pax huic domui."

"Et omnibus habitantibus in ea."*

* "Peace unto this house and unto all who dwell in it."—Trans.

Death was coming so fast and threatening, that all the usual preparations were perforce dispensed with. Neither the two lighted tapers, nor the little table covered with white cloth had been provided. And, in the same way, Don Vigilio the assistant, having failed to bring the Holy Water basin and sprinkler, the Cardinal, as officiating priest, could merely make the gesture of blessing the room and the dying man, whilst pronouncing the words of the ritual: "Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor; lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor."*

* "Sprinkle me, Lord, with hyssop, and purify me; wash me, and
make me whiter than snow."—Trans.

Benedetta on seeing the Cardinal appear carrying the Holy Oils, had with a long quiver fallen on her knees at the foot of the bed, whilst, somewhat farther away, Pierre and Victorine likewise knelt, overcome by the dolorous grandeur of the scene. And the dilated eyes of the Contessina, whose face was pale as snow, never quitted her Dario, whom she no longer recognised, so earthy was his face, its skin tanned and wrinkled like that of an old man. And it was not for their marriage which he so much desired that their uncle, the all-powerful Prince of the Church, was bringing the Sacrament, but for the supreme rupture, the end of all pride, Death which finishes off the haughtiest races, and sweeps them away, even as the wind sweeps the dust of the roads.

It was needful that there should be no delay, so the Cardinal promptly repeated the Credo in an undertone, "Credo in unum Deum—"

"Amen," responded Don Vigilio, who, after the prayers of the ritual, stammered the Litanies in order that Heaven might take pity on the wretched man who was about to appear before God, if God by a prodigy did not spare him.

Then, without taking time to wash his fingers, the Cardinal opened the case containing the Holy Oils, and limiting himself to one anointment, as is permissible in pressing cases, he deposited a single drop of the oil on Dario's parched mouth which was already withered by death. And in doing so he repeated the words of the formula, his heart all aglow with faith as he asked that the divine mercy might efface each and every sin that the young man had committed by either of his five senses, those five portals by which everlasting temptation assails the soul. And the Cardinal's fervour was also instinct with the hope that if God had smitten the poor sufferer for his offences, perhaps He would make His indulgence entire and even restore him to life as soon as He should have forgiven his sins. Life, O Lord, life in order that the ancient line of the Boccaneras might yet multiply and continue to serve Thee in battle and at the altar until the end of time!

For a moment the Cardinal remained with quivering hands, gazing at the mute face, the closed eyes of the dying man, and waiting for the miracle. But no sign appeared, not the faintest glimmer brightened that haggard countenance, nor did a sigh of relief come from the withered lips as Don Vigilio wiped them with a little cotton wool. And the last prayer was said, and whilst the frightful silence fell once more the Cardinal, followed by his assistant, returned to the chapel. There they both knelt, the Cardinal plunging into ardent prayer upon the bare tiles. With his eyes raised to the brass crucifix upon the altar he saw nothing, heard nothing, but gave himself wholly to his entreaties, supplicating God to take him in place of his nephew, if a sacrifice were necessary, and yet clinging to the hope that so long as Dario retained a breath of life and he himself thus remained on his knees addressing the Deity, he might succeed in pacifying the wrath of Heaven. He was both so humble and so great. Would not accord surely be established between God and a Boccanera? The old palace might have fallen to the ground, he himself would not even have felt the toppling of its beams.

In the bed-room, however, nothing had yet stirred beneath the weight of tragic majesty which the ceremony had left there. It was only now that Dario raised his eyelids, and when on looking at his hands he saw them so aged and wasted the depths of his eyes kindled with an expression of immense regretfulness that life should be departing. Doubtless it was at this moment of lucidity amidst the kind of intoxication with which the poison overwhelmed him, that he for the first time realised his perilous condition. Ah! to die, amidst such pain, such physical degradation, what a revolting horror for that frivolous and egotistical man, that lover of beauty, joy, and light, who knew not how to suffer! In him ferocious fate chastised racial degeneracy with too heavy a hand. He became horrified with himself, seized with childish despair and terror, which lent him strength enough to sit up and gaze wildly about the room, in order to see if every one had not abandoned him. And when his eyes lighted on Benedetta still kneeling at the foot of the bed, a supreme impulse carried him towards her, he stretched forth both arms as passionately as his strength allowed and stammered her name: "O Benedetta, Benedetta!"

She, motionless in the stupor of her anxiety, had not taken her eyes from his face. The horrible disorder which was carrying off her lover, seemed also to possess and annihilate her more and more, even as he himself grew weaker and weaker. Her features were assuming an immaterial whiteness; and through the void of her clear eyeballs one began to espy her soul. However, when she perceived him thus resuscitating and calling her with arms outstretched, she in her turn arose and standing beside the bed made answer: "I am coming, my Dario, here I am."

And then Pierre and Victorine, still on their knees, beheld a sublime deed of such extraordinary grandeur that they remained rooted to the floor, spell-bound as in the presence of some supra-terrestrial spectacle in which human beings may not intervene. Benedetta herself spoke and acted like one freed from all social and conventional ties, already beyond life, only seeing and addressing beings and things from a great distance, from the depths of the unknown in which she was about to disappear.

"Ah! my Dario, so an attempt has been made to part us! It was in order that I might never belong to you—that we might never be happy, that your death was resolved upon, and it was known that with your life my own must cease! And it is that man who is killing you! Yes, he is your murderer, even if the actual blow has been dealt by another. He is the first cause—he who stole me from you when I was about to become yours, he who ravaged our lives, and who breathed around us the hateful poison which is killing us. Ah! how I hate him, how I hate him; how I should like to crush him with my hate before I die with you!"

She did not raise her voice, but spoke those terrible words in a deep murmur, simply and passionately. Prada was not even named, and she scarcely turned towards Pierre—who knelt, paralysed, behind her—to add with a commanding air: "You will see his father, I charge you to tell him that I cursed his son! That kind-hearted hero loved me well—I love him even now, and the words you will carry to him from me will rend his heart. But I desire that he should know—he must know, for the sake of truth and justice."

Distracted by terror, sobbing amidst a last convulsion, Dario again stretched forth his arms, feeling that she was no longer looking at him, that her clear eyes were no longer fixed upon his own: "Benedetta, Benedetta!"

"I am coming, I am coming, my Dario—I am here!" she responded, drawing yet nearer to the bedside and almost touching him. "Ah!" she went on, "that vow which I made to the Madonna to belong to none, not even you, until God should allow it by the blessing of one of his priests! Ah! I set a noble, a divine pride in remaining immaculate for him who should be the one master of my soul and body. And that chastity which I was so proud of, I defended it against the other as one defends oneself against a wolf, and I defended it against you with tears for fear of sacrilege. And if you only knew what terrible struggles I was forced to wage with myself, for I loved you and longed to be yours, like a woman who accepts the whole of love, the love that makes wife and mother! Ah! my vow to the Madonna—with what difficulty did I keep it when the old blood of our race arose in me like a tempest; and now what a disaster!" She drew yet nearer, and her low voice became more ardent: "You remember that evening when you came back with a knife-thrust in your shoulder. I thought you dead, and cried aloud with rage at the idea of losing you like that. I insulted the Madonna and regretted that I had not damned myself with you that we might die together, so tightly clasped that we must needs be buried together also. And to think that such a terrible warning was of no avail! I was blind and foolish; and now you are again stricken, again being taken from my love. Ah! my wretched pride, my idiotic dream!"

That which now rang out in her stifled voice was the anger of the practical woman that she had ever been, all superstition notwithstanding. Could the Madonna, who was so maternal, desire the woe of lovers? No, assuredly not. Nor did the angels make the mere absence of a priest a cause for weeping over the transports of true and mutual love. Was not such love holy in itself, and did not the angels rather smile upon it and burst into gladsome song! And ah! how one cheated oneself by not loving to heart's content under the sun, when the blood of life coursed through one's veins!

"Benedetta! Benedetta!" repeated the dying man, full of child-like terror at thus going off all alone into the depths of the black and everlasting night.

"Here I am, my Dario, I am coming!"

Then, as she fancied that the servant, albeit motionless, had stirred, as if to rise and interfere, she added: "Leave me, leave me, Victorine, nothing in the world can henceforth prevent it. A moment ago, when I was on my knees, something roused me and urged me on. I know whither I am going. And besides, did I not swear on the night of the knife thrust? Did I not promise to belong to him alone, even in the earth if it were necessary? I must embrace him, and he will carry me away! We shall be dead, and we shall be wedded in spite of all, and for ever and for ever!"

She stepped back to the dying man, and touched him: "Here I am, my Dario, here I am!"

Then came the apogee. Amidst growing exaltation, buoyed up by a blaze of love, careless of glances, candid like a lily, she divested herself of her garments and stood forth so white, that neither marble statue, nor dove, nor snow itself was ever whiter. "Here I am, my Dario, here I am!"

Recoiling almost to the ground as at sight of an apparition, the glorious flash of a holy vision, Pierre and Victorine gazed at her with dazzled eyes. The servant had not stirred to prevent this extraordinary action, seized as she was with that shrinking reverential terror which comes upon one in presence of the wild, mad deeds of faith and passion. And the priest, whose limbs were paralysed, felt that something so sublime was passing that he could only quiver in distraction. And no thought of impurity came to him on beholding that lily, snowy whiteness. All candour and all nobility as she was, that virgin shocked him no more than some sculptured masterpiece of genius.

"Here I am, my Dario, here I am."

She had lain herself down beside the spouse whom she had chosen, she had clasped the dying man whose arms only had enough strength left to fold themselves around her. Death was stealing him from her, but she would go with him; and again she murmured: "My Dario, here I am."

And at that moment, against the wall at the head of the bed, Pierre perceived the escutcheon of the Boccaneras, embroidered in gold and coloured silks on a groundwork of violet velvet. There was the winged dragon belching flames, there was the fierce and glowing motto "Bocca nera, Alma rossa" (black mouth, red soul), the mouth darkened by a roar, the soul flaming like a brazier of faith and love. And behold! all that old race of passion and violence with its tragic legends had reappeared, its blood bubbling up afresh to urge that last and adorable daughter of the line to those terrifying and prodigious nuptials in death. And to Pierre that escutcheon recalled another memory, that of the portrait of Cassia Boccanera the amorosa and avengeress who had flung herself into the Tiber with her brother Ercole and the corpse of her lover Flavio. Was there not here even with Benedetta the same despairing clasp seeking to vanquish death, the same savagery in hurling oneself into the abyss with the corpse of the one's only love? Benedetta and Cassia were as sisters, Cassia, who lived anew in the old painting in the salon overhead, Benedetta who was here dying of her lover's death, as though she were but the other's spirit. Both had the same delicate childish features, the same mouth of passion, the same large dreamy eyes set in the same round, practical, and stubborn head.

"My Dario, here I am!"

For a second, which seemed an eternity, they clasped one another, she neither repelled nor terrified by the disorder which made him so unrecognisable, but displaying a delirious passion, a holy frenzy as if to pass beyond life, to penetrate with him into the black Unknown. And beneath the shock of the felicity at last offered to him he expired, with his arms yet convulsively wound around her as though indeed to carry her off. Then, whether from grief or from bliss amidst that embrace of death, there came such a rush of blood to her heart that the organ burst: she died on her lover's neck, both tightly and for ever clasped in one another's arms.

There was a faint sigh. Victorine understood and drew near, while Pierre, also erect, remained quivering with the tearful admiration of one who has beheld the sublime.

"Look, look!" whispered the servant, "she no longer moves, she no longer breathes. Ah! my poor child, my poor child, she is dead!"

Then the priest murmured: "Oh! God, how beautiful they are."

It was true, never had loftier and more resplendent beauty appeared on the faces of the dead. Dario's countenance, so lately aged and earthen, had assumed the pallor and nobility of marble, its features lengthened and simplified as by a transport of ineffable joy. Benedetta remained very grave, her lips curved by ardent determination, whilst her whole face was expressive of dolorous yet infinite beatitude in a setting of infinite whiteness. Their hair mingled, and their eyes, which had remained open, continued gazing as into one another's souls with eternal, caressing sweetness. They were for ever linked, soaring into immortality amidst the enchantment of their union, vanquishers of death, radiant with the rapturous beauty of love, the conqueror, the immortal.

But Victorine's sobs at last burst forth, mingled with such lamentations that great confusion followed. Pierre, now quite beside himself, in some measure failed to understand how it was that the room suddenly became invaded by terrified people. The Cardinal and Don Vigilio, however, must have hastened in from the chapel; and at the same moment, no doubt, Doctor Giordano must have returned with Donna Serafina, for both were now there, she stupefied by the blows which had thus fallen on the house in her absence, whilst he, the doctor, displayed the perturbation and astonishment which comes upon the oldest practitioners when facts seem to give the lie to their experience. However, he sought an explanation of Benedetta's death, and hesitatingly ascribed it to aneurism, or possibly embolism.

Thereupon Victorine, like a servant whose grief makes her the equal of her employers, boldly interrupted him: "Ah! Sir," said she, "they loved each other too fondly; did not that suffice for them to die together?"

Meantime Donna Serafina, after kissing the poor children on the brow, desired to close their eyes; but she could not succeed in doing so, for the lids lifted directly she removed her finger and once more the eyes began to smile at one another, to exchange in all fixity their loving and eternal glance. And then as she spoke of parting the bodies, Victorine again protested: "Oh! madame, oh! madame," she said, "you would have to break their arms. Cannot you see that their fingers are almost dug into one another's shoulders? No, they can never be parted!"

Thereupon Cardinal Boccanera intervened. God had not granted the miracle; and he, His minister, was livid, tearless, and full of icy despair. But he waved his arm with a sovereign gesture of absolution and sanctification, as if, Prince of the Church that he was, disposing of the will of Heaven, he consented that the lovers should appear in that embrace before the supreme tribunal. In presence of such wondrous love, indeed, profoundly stirred by the sufferings of their lives and the beauty of their death, he showed a broad and lofty contempt for mundane proprieties. "Leave them, leave me, my sister," said he, "do not disturb their slumber. Let their eyes remain open since they desire to gaze on one another till the end of time without ever wearying. And let them sleep in one another's arms since in their lives they did not sin, and only locked themselves in that embrace in order that they might be laid together in the ground."

And then, again becoming a Roman Prince whose proud blood was yet hot with old-time deeds of battle and passion, he added: "Two Boccaneras may well sleep like that; all Rome will admire them and weep for them. Leave them, leave them together, my sister. God knows them and awaits them!"

All knelt, and the Cardinal himself repeated the prayers for the dead. Night was coming, increasing gloom stole into the chamber, where two burning tapers soon shone out like stars.

And then, without knowing how, Pierre again found himself in the little deserted garden on the bank of the Tiber. Suffocating with fatigue and grief, he must have come thither for fresh air. Darkness shrouded the charming nook where the streamlet of water falling from the tragic mask into the ancient sarcophagus ever sang its shrill and flute-like song; and the laurel-bush which shaded it, and the bitter box-plants and the orange-trees skirting the paths now formed but vague masses under the blue-black sky. Ah! how gay and sweet had that melancholy garden been in the morning, and what a desolate echo it retained of Benedetta's winsome laughter, all that fine delight in coming happiness which now lay prone upstairs, steeped in the nothingness of things and beings! So dolorous was the pang which came to Pierre's heart that he burst into sobs, seated on the same broken column where she had sat, and encompassed by the same atmosphere that she had breathed, in which still lingered the perfume of her presence.

But all at once a distant clock struck six, and the young priest started on remembering that he was to be received by the Pope that very evening at nine. Yet three more hours! He had not thought of that interview during the terrifying catastrophe, and it seemed to him now as if months and months had gone by, as if the appointment were some very old one which a man is only able to keep after years of absence, when he has grown aged and had his heart and brain modified by innumerable experiences. However, he made an effort and rose to his feet. In three hours' time he would go to the Vatican and at last he would see the Pope.

PART V.

XIV.

THAT evening, when Pierre emerged from the Borgo in front of the Vatican, a sonorous stroke rang out from the clock amidst the deep silence of the dark and sleepy district. It was only half-past eight, and being in advance the young priest resolved to wait some twenty minutes in order to reach the doors of the papal apartments precisely at nine, the hour fixed for his audience.

This respite brought him some relief amidst the infinite emotion and grief which gripped his heart. That tragic afternoon which he had spent in the chamber of death, where Dario and Benedetta now slept the eternal sleep in one another's arms, had left him very weary. He was haunted by a wild, dolorous vision of the two lovers, and involuntary sighs came from his lips whilst tears continually moistened his eyes. He had been altogether unable to eat that evening. Ah! how he would have liked to hide himself and weep at his ease! His heart melted at each fresh thought. The pitiful death of the lovers intensified the grievous feeling with which his book was instinct, and impelled him to yet greater compassion, a perfect anguish of charity for all who suffered in the world. And he was so distracted by the thought of the many physical and moral sores of Paris and of Rome, where he had beheld so much unjust and abominable suffering, that at each step he took he feared lest he should burst into sobs with arms upstretched towards the blackness of heaven.

In the hope of somewhat calming himself he began to walk slowly across the Piazza of St. Peter's, now all darkness and solitude. On arriving he had fancied that he was losing himself in a murky sea, but by degrees his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness. The vast expanse was only lighted by the four candelabra at the corners of the obelisk and by infrequent lamps skirting the buildings which run on either hand towards the Basilica. Under the colonnade, too, other lamps threw yellow gleams across the forest of pillars, showing up their stone trunks in fantastic fashion; while on the piazza only the pale, ghostly obelisk was at all distinctly visible. Pierre could scarcely perceive the dim, silent facade of St. Peter's; whilst of the dome he merely divined a gigantic, bluey roundness faintly shadowed against the sky. In the obscurity he at first heard the plashing of the fountains without being at all able to see them, but on approaching he at last distinguished the slender phantoms of the ever rising jets which fell again in spray. And above the vast square stretched the vast and moonless sky of a deep velvety blue, where the stars were large and radiant like carbuncles; Charles's Wain, with golden wheels and golden shaft tilted back as it were, over the roof of the Vatican, and Orion, bedizened with the three bright stars of his belt, showing magnificently above Rome, in the direction of the Via Giulia.

At last Pierre raised his eyes to the Vatican, but facing the piazza there was here merely a confused jumble of walls, amidst which only two gleams of light appeared on the floor of the papal apartments. The Court of San Damaso was, however, lighted, for the conservatory-like glass-work of two of its sides sparkled as with the reflection of gas lamps which could not be seen. For a time there was not a sound or sign of movement, but at last two persons crossed the expanse of the piazza, and then came a third who in his turn disappeared, nothing remaining but a rhythmical far-away echo of steps. The spot was indeed a perfect desert, there were neither promenaders nor passers-by, nor was there even the shadow of a prowler in the pillared forest of the colonnade, which was as empty as the wild primeval forests of the world's infancy. And what a solemn desert it was, full of the silence of haughty desolation. Never had so vast and black a presentment of slumber, so instinct with the sovereign nobility of death, appeared to Pierre.

At ten minutes to nine he at last made up his mind and went towards the bronze portal. Only one of the folding doors was now open at the end of the right-hand porticus, where the increasing density of the gloom steeped everything in night. Pierre remembered the instructions which Monsignor Nani had given him; at each door that he reached he was to ask for Signor Squadra without adding a word, and thereupon each door would open and he would have nothing to do but to let himself be guided on. No one but the prelate now knew that he was there, since Benedetta, the only being to whom he had confided the secret, was dead. When he had crossed the threshold of the bronze doors and found himself in presence of the motionless, sleeping Swiss Guard, who was on duty there, he simply spoke the words agreed upon: "Signor Squadra." And as the Guard did not stir, did not seek to bar his way, he passed on, turning into the vestibule of the Scala Pia, the stone stairway which ascends to the Court of San Damaso. And not a soul was to be seen: there was but the faint sound of his own light footsteps and the sleepy glow of the gas jets whose light was softly whitened by globes of frosted glass. Up above, on reaching the courtyard he found it a solitude, whose slumber seemed sepulchral amidst the mournful gleams of the gas lamps which cast a pallid reflection on the lofty glass-work of the facades. And feeling somewhat nervous, affected by the quiver which pervaded all that void and silence, Pierre hastened on, turning to the right, towards the low flight of steps which leads to the staircase of the Pope's private apartments.

Here stood a superb gendarme in full uniform. "Signor Squadra," said Pierre, and without a word the gendarme pointed to the stairs.

The young man went up. It was a broad stairway, with low steps, balustrade of white marble, and walls covered with yellowish stucco. The gas, burning in globes of round glass, seemed to have been already turned down in a spirit of prudent economy. And in the glimmering light nothing could have been more mournfully solemn than that cold and pallid staircase. On each landing there was a Swiss Guard, halbard in hand, and in the heavy slumber spreading through the palace one only heard the regular monotonous footsteps of these men, ever marching up and down, in order no doubt that they might not succumb to the benumbing influence of their surroundings.

Amidst the invading dimness and the quivering silence the ascent of the stairs seemed interminable to Pierre, who by the time he reached the second-floor landing imagined that he had been climbing for ages. There, outside the glass door of the Sala Clementina, only the right-hand half of which was open, a last Swiss Guard stood watching.

"Signor Squadra," Pierre said again, and the Guard drew back to let him pass.

The Sala Clementina, spacious enough by daylight, seemed immense at that nocturnal hour, in the twilight glimmer of its lamps. All the opulent decorative-work, sculpture, painting, and gilding became blended, the walls assuming a tawny vagueness amidst which appeared bright patches like the sparkle of precious stones. There was not an article of furniture, nothing but the endless pavement stretching away into the semi-darkness. At last, however, near a door at the far end Pierre espied some men dozing on a bench. They were three Swiss Guards. "Signor Squadra," he said to them.

One of the Guards thereupon slowly rose and left the hall, and Pierre understood that he was to wait. He did not dare to move, disturbed as he was by the sound of his own footsteps on the paved floor, so he contented himself with gazing around and picturing the crowds which at times peopled that vast apartment, the first of the many papal ante-chambers. But before long the Guard returned, and behind him, on the threshold of the adjoining room, appeared a man of forty or thereabouts, who was clad in black from head to foot and suggested a cross between a butler and a beadle. He had a good-looking, clean-shaven face, with somewhat pronounced nose and large, clear, fixed eyes. "Signor Squadra," said Pierre for the last time.

The man bowed as if to say that he was Signor Squadra, and then, with a fresh reverence, he invited the priest to follow him. Thereupon at a leisurely step, one behind the other, they began to thread the interminable suite of waiting-rooms. Pierre, who was acquainted with the ceremonial, of which he had often spoken with Narcisse, recognised the different apartments as he passed through them, recalling their names and purpose, and peopling them in imagination with the various officials of the papal retinue who have the right to occupy them. These according to their rank cannot go beyond certain doors, so that the persons who are to have audience of the Pope are passed on from the servants to the Noble Guards, from the Noble Guards to the honorary Camerieri, and from the latter to the Camerieri segreti, until they at last reach the presence of the Holy Father. At eight o'clock, however, the ante-rooms empty and become both deserted and dim, only a few lamps being left alight upon the pier tables standing here and there against the walls.

And first Pierre came to the ante-room of the bussolanti, mere ushers clad in red velvet broidered with the papal arms, who conduct visitors to the door of the ante-room of honour. At that late hour only one of them was left there, seated on a bench in such a dark corner that his purple tunic looked quite black. Then the Hall of the Gendarmes was crossed, where according to the regulations the secretaries of cardinals and other high personages await their masters' return; and this was now completely empty, void both of the handsome blue uniforms with white shoulder belts and the cassocks of fine black cloth which mingled in it during the brilliant reception hours. Empty also was the following room, a smaller one reserved to the Palatine Guards, who are recruited among the Roman middle class and wear black tunics with gold epaulets and shakoes surmounted by red plumes. Then Pierre and his guide turned into another series of apartments, and again was the first one empty. This was the Hall of the Arras, a superb waiting-room with lofty painted ceiling and admirable Gobelins tapestry designed by Audran and representing the miracles of Jesus. And empty also was the ante-chamber of the Noble Guards which followed, with its wooden stools, its pier table on the right-hand surmounted by a large crucifix standing between two lamps, and its large door opening at the far end into another but smaller room, a sort of alcove indeed, where there is an altar at which the Holy Father says mass by himself whilst those privileged to be present remain kneeling on the marble slabs of the outer apartment which is resplendent with the dazzling uniforms of the Guards. And empty likewise was the ensuing ante-room of honour, otherwise the grand throne-room, where the Pope receives two or three hundred people at a time in public audience. The throne, an arm-chair of elaborate pattern, gilded, and upholstered with red velvet, stands under a velvet canopy of the same hue, in front of the windows. Beside it is the cushion on which the Pope rests his foot in order that it may be kissed. Then facing one another, right and left of the room, there are two pier tables, on one of which is a clock and on the other a crucifix between lofty candelabra with feet of gilded wood. The wall hangings, of red silk damask with a Louis XIV palm pattern, are topped by a pompous frieze, framing a ceiling decorated with allegorical figures and attributes, and it is only just in front of the throne that a Smyrna carpet covers the magnificent marble pavement. On the days of private audience, when the Pope remains in the little throne-room or at times in his bed-chamber, the grand throne-room becomes simply the ante-room of honour, where high dignitaries of the Church, ambassadors, and great civilian personages, wait their turns. Two Camerieri, one in violet coat, the other of the Cape and the Sword, here do duty, receiving from the bussolanti the persons who are to be honoured with audiences and conducting them to the door of the next room, the secret or private ante-chamber, where they hand them over to the Camerieri segreti.

Signor Squadra who, walking on with slow and silent steps, had not yet once turned round, paused for a moment on reaching the door of the anticamera segreta so as to give Pierre time to breathe and recover himself somewhat before crossing the threshold of the sanctuary. The Camerieri segreti alone had the right to occupy that last ante-chamber, and none but the cardinals might wait there till the Pope should condescend to receive them. And so when Signor Squadra made up his mind to admit Pierre, the latter could not restrain a slight nervous shiver as if he were passing into some redoubtable mysterious sphere beyond the limits of the lower world. In the daytime a Noble Guard stood on sentry duty before the door, but the latter was now free of access, and the room within proved as empty as all the others. It was rather narrow, almost like a passage, with two windows overlooking the new district of the castle fields and a third one facing the Piazza of St. Peter's. Near the last was a door conducting to the little throne-room, and between this door and the window stood a small table at which a secretary, now absent, usually sat. And here again, as in all the other rooms, one found a gilded pier table surmounted by a crucifix flanked by a pair of lamps. In a corner too there was a large clock, loudly ticking in its ebony case incrusted with brass-work. Still there was nothing to awaken curiosity under the panelled and gilded ceiling unless it were the wall-hangings of red damask, on which yellow scutcheons displaying the Keys and the Tiara alternated with armorial lions, each with a paw resting on a globe.

Signor Squadra, however, now noticed that Pierre still carried his hat in his hand, whereas according to etiquette he should have left it in the hall of the bussolanti, only cardinals being privileged to carry their hats with them into the Pope's presence. Accordingly he discreetly took the young priest's from him, and deposited it on the pier table to indicate that it must at least remain there. Then, without a word, by a simple bow he gave Pierre to understand that he was about to announce him to his Holiness, and that he must be good enough to wait for a few minutes in that room.

On being left to himself Pierre drew a long breath. He was stifling; his heart was beating as though it would burst. Nevertheless his mind remained clear, and in spite of the semi-obscurity he had been able to form some idea of the famous and magnificent apartments of the Pope, a suite of splendid salons with tapestried or silken walls, gilded or painted friezes, and frescoed ceilings. By way of furniture, however, there were only pier table, stools,* and thrones. And the lamps and the clocks, and the crucifixes, even the thrones, were all presents brought from the four quarters of the world in the great fervent days of jubilee. There was no sign of comfort, everything was pompous, stiff, cold, and inconvenient. All olden Italy was there, with its perpetual display and lack of intimate, cosy life. It had been necessary to lay a few carpets over the superb marble slabs which froze one's feet; and some caloriferes had even lately been installed, but it was not thought prudent to light them lest the variations of temperature should give the Pope a cold. However, that which more particularly struck Pierre now that he stood there waiting was the extraordinary silence which prevailed all around, silence so deep that it seemed as if all the dark quiescence of that huge, somniferous Vatican were concentrated in that one suite of lifeless, sumptuous rooms, which the motionless flamelets of the lamps as dimly illumined.

* M. Zola seems to have fallen into error here. Many of the seats,
which are of peculiar antique design, do, in the lower part,
resemble stools, but they have backs, whereas a stool proper has
none. Briefly, these seats, which are entirely of wood, are not
unlike certain old-fashioned hall chairs.—Trans.

All at once the ebony clock struck nine and the young man felt astonished. What! had only ten minutes elapsed since he had crossed the threshold of the bronze doors below? He felt as if he had been walking on for days and days. Then, desiring to overcome the nervous feeling which oppressed him—for he ever feared lest his enforced calmness should collapse amidst a flood of tears—he began to walk up and down, passing in front of the clock, glancing at the crucifix on the pier table, and the globe of the lamp on which had remained the mark of a servant's greasy fingers. And the light was so faint and yellow that he felt inclined to turn the lamp up, but did not dare. Then he found himself with his brow resting against one of the panes of the window facing the Piazza of St. Peter's, and for a moment he was thunderstruck, for between the imperfectly closed shutters he could see all Rome, as he had seen it one day from the loggie of Raffaelle, and as he had pictured Leo XIII contemplating it from the window of his bed-room. However, it was now Rome by night, Rome spreading out into the depths of the gloom, as limitless as the starry sky. And in that sea of black waves one could only with certainty identify the larger thoroughfares which the white brightness of electric lights turned, as it were, into Milky Ways. All the rest showed but a swarming of little yellow sparks, the crumbs, as it were, of a half-extinguished heaven swept down upon the earth. Occasional constellations of bright stars, tracing mysterious figures, vainly endeavoured to show forth distinctly, but they were submerged, blotted out by the general chaos which suggested the dust of some old planet that had crumbled there, losing its splendour and reduced to mere phosphorescent sand. And how immense was the blackness thus sprinkled with light, how huge the mass of obscurity and mystery into which the Eternal City with its seven and twenty centuries, its ruins, its monuments, its people, its history seemed to have been merged. You could no longer tell where it began or where it ended, whether it spread to the farthest recesses of the gloom, or whether it were so reduced that the sun on rising would illumine but a little pile of ashes.

However, in spite of all Pierre's efforts, his nervous anguish increased each moment, even in presence of that ocean of darkness which displayed such sovereign quiescence. He drew away from the window and quivered from head to foot on hearing a faint footfall and thinking it was that of Signor Squadra approaching to fetch him. The sound came from an adjacent apartment, the little throne-room, whose door, he now perceived, had remained ajar. And at last, as he heard nothing further, he yielded to his feverish impatience and peeped into this room which he found to be fairly spacious, again hung with red damask, and containing a gilded arm-chair, covered with red velvet under a canopy of the same material. And again there was the inevitable pier table, with a tall ivory crucifix, a clock, a pair of lamps, a pair of candelabra, a pair of large vases on pedestals, and two smaller ones of Sevres manufacture decorated with the Holy Father's portrait. At the same time, however, the room displayed rather more comfort, for a Smyrna carpet covered the whole of the marble floor, while a few arm-chairs stood against the walls, and an imitation chimney-piece, draped with damask, served as counterpart to the pier table. As a rule the Pope, whose bed-chamber communicated with this little throne-room, received in the latter such persons as he desired to honour. And Pierre's shiver became more pronounced at the idea that in all likelihood he would merely have the throne-room to cross and that Leo XIII was yonder behind its farther door. Why was he kept waiting, he wondered? He had been told of mysterious audiences granted at a similar hour to personages who had been received in similar silent fashion, great personages whose names were only mentioned in the lowest whispers. With regard to himself no doubt, it was because he was considered compromising that there was a desire to receive him in this manner unknown to the personages of the Court, and so as to speak with him at ease. Then, all at once, he understood the cause of the noise he had recently heard, for beside the lamp on the pier table of the little throne-room he saw a kind of butler's tray containing some soiled plates, knives, forks, and spoons, with a bottle and a glass, which had evidently just been removed from a supper table. And he realised that Signor Squadra, having seen these things in the Pope's room, had brought them there, and had then gone in again, perhaps to tidy up. He knew also of the Pope's frugality, how he took his meals all alone at a little round table, everything being brought to him in that tray, a plate of meat, a plate of vegetables, a little Bordeaux claret as prescribed by his doctor, and a large allowance of beef broth of which he was very fond. In the same way as others might offer a cup of tea, he was wont to offer cups of broth to the old cardinals his friends and favourites, quite an invigorating little treat which these old bachelors much enjoyed. And, O ye orgies of Alexander VI, ye banquets and galas of Julius II and Leo X, only eight lire a day—six shillings and fourpence—were allowed to defray the cost of Leo XIII's table! However, just as that recollection occurred to Pierre, he again heard a slight noise, this time in his Holiness's bed-chamber, and thereupon, terrified by his indiscretion, he hastened to withdraw from the entrance of the throne-room which, lifeless and quiescent though it was, seemed in his agitation to flare as with sudden fire.

Then, quivering too violently to be able to remain still, he began to walk up and down the ante-chamber. He remembered that Narcisse had spoken to him of that Signor Squadra, his Holiness's cherished valet, whose importance and influence were so great. He alone, on reception days, was able to prevail on the Pope to don a clean cassock if the one he was wearing happened to be soiled by snuff. And though his Holiness stubbornly shut himself up alone in his bed-room every night from a spirit of independence, which some called the anxiety of a miser determined to sleep alone with his treasure, Signor Squadra at all events occupied an adjoining chamber, and was ever on the watch, ready to respond to the faintest call. Again, it was he who respectfully intervened whenever his Holiness sat up too late or worked too long. But on this point it was difficult to induce the Pope to listen to reason. During his hours of insomnia he would often rise and send Squadra to fetch a secretary in order that he might detail some memoranda or sketch out an encyclical letter. When the drafting of one of the latter impassioned him he would have spent days and nights over it, just as formerly, when claiming proficiency in Latin verse, he had often let the dawn surprise him whilst he was polishing a line. But, indeed, he slept very little, his brain ever being at work, ever scheming out the realisation of some former ideas. His memory alone seemed to have slightly weakened during recent times.

Pierre, as he slowly paced to and fro, gradually became absorbed in his thoughts of that lofty and sovereign personality. From the petty details of the Pope's daily existence, he passed to his intellectual life, to the role which he was certainly bent on playing as a great pontiff. And Pierre asked himself which of his two hundred and fifty-seven predecessors, the long line of saints and criminals, men of mediocrity and men of genius, he most desired to resemble. Was it one of the first humble popes, those who followed on during the first three centuries, mere heads of burial guilds, fraternal pastors of the Christian community? Was it Pope Damasus, the first great builder, the man of letters who took delight in intellectual matters, the ardent believer who is said to have opened the Catacombs to the piety of the faithful? Was it Leo III, who by crowning Charlemagne boldly consummated the rupture with the schismatic East and conveyed the Empire to the West by the all-powerful will of God and His Church, which thenceforth disposed of the crowns of monarchs? Was it the terrible Gregory VII, the purifier of the temple, the sovereign of kings; was it Innocent III or Boniface VIII, those masters of souls, nations, and thrones, who, armed with the fierce weapon of excommunication, reigned with such despotism over the terrified middle ages that Catholicism was never nearer the attainment of its dream of universal dominion? Was it Urban II or Gregory IX or another of those popes in whom flared the red Crusading passion which urged the nations on to the conquest of the unknown and the divine? Was it Alexander III, who defended the Holy See against the Empire, and at last conquered and set his foot on the neck of Frederick Barbarossa? Was it, long after the sorrows of Avignon, Julius II, who wore the cuirass and once more strengthened the political power of the papacy? Was it Leo X, the pompous, glorious patron of the Renascence, of a whole great century of art, whose mind, however, was possessed of so little penetration and foresight that he looked on Luther as a mere rebellious monk? Was it Pius V, who personified dark and avenging reaction, the fire of the stakes that punished the heretic world? Was it some other of the popes who reigned after the Council of Trent with faith absolute, belief re-established in its full integrity, the Church saved by pride and the stubborn upholding of every dogma? Or was it a pope of the decline, such as Benedict XIV, the man of vast intelligence, the learned theologian who, as his hands were tied, and he could not dispose of the kingdoms of the world, spent a worthy life in regulating the affairs of heaven?

In this wise, in Pierre's mind there spread out the whole history of the popes, the most prodigious of all histories, showing fortune in every guise, the lowest, the most wretched, as well as the loftiest and most dazzling; whilst an obstinate determination to live enabled the papacy to survive everything—conflagrations, massacres, and the downfall of many nations, for always did it remain militant and erect in the persons of its popes, that most extraordinary of all lines of absolute, conquering, and domineering sovereigns, every one of them—even the puny and humble—masters of the world, every one of them glorious with the imperishable glory of heaven when they were thus evoked in that ancient Vatican, where their spirits assuredly awoke at night and prowled about the endless galleries and spreading halls in that tomb-like silence whose quiver came no doubt from the light touch of their gliding steps over the marble slabs.

However, Pierre was now thinking that he indeed knew which of the great popes Leo XIII most desired to resemble. It was first Gregory the Great, the conqueror and organiser of the early days of Catholic power. He had come of ancient Roman stock, and in his heart there was a little of the blood of the emperors. He administered Rome after it had been saved from the Goths, cultivated the ecclesiastical domains, and divided earthly wealth into thirds, one for the poor, one for the clergy, and one for the Church. Then too he was the first to establish the Propaganda, sending his priests forth to civilise and pacify the nations, and carrying his conquests so far as to win Great Britain over to the divine law of Christ. And the second pope whom Leo XIII took as model was one who had arisen after a long lapse of centuries, Sixtus V, the pope financier and politician, the vine-dresser's son, who, when he had donned the tiara, revealed one of the most extensive and supple minds of a period fertile in great diplomatists. He heaped up treasure and displayed stern avarice, in order that he might ever have in his coffers all the money needful for war or for peace. He spent years and years in negotiations with kings, never despairing of his own triumph; and never did he display open hostility for his times, but took them as they were and then sought to modify them in accordance with the interests of the Holy See, showing himself conciliatory in all things and with every one, already dreaming of an European balance of power which he hoped to control. And withal a very saintly pope, a fervent mystic, yet a pope of the most absolute and domineering mind blended with a politician ready for whatever courses might most conduce to the rule of God's Church on earth.

And, after all, Pierre amidst his rising enthusiasm, which despite his efforts at calmness was sweeping away all prudence and doubt, Pierre asked himself why he need question the past. Was not Leo XIII the pope whom he had depicted in his book, the great pontiff, who was desired and expected? No doubt the portrait which he had sketched was not accurate in every detail, but surely its main lines must be correct if mankind were to retain a hope of salvation. Whole pages of that book of his arose before him, and he again beheld the Leo XIII that he had portrayed, the wise and conciliatory politician, labouring for the unity of the Church and so anxious to make it strong and invincible against the day of the inevitable great struggle. He again beheld him freed from the cares of the temporal power, elevated, radiant with moral splendour, the only authority left erect above the nations; he beheld him realising what mortal danger would be incurred if the solution of the social question were left to the enemies of Christianity, and therefore resolving to intervene in contemporary quarrels for the defence of the poor and the lowly, even as Jesus had intervened once before. And he again beheld him putting himself on the side of the democracies, accepting the Republic in France, leaving the dethroned kings in exile, and verifying the prediction which promised the empire of the world to Rome once more when the papacy should have unified belief and have placed itself at the head of the people. The times indeed were near accomplishment, Caesar was struck down, the Pope alone remained, and would not the people, the great silent multitude, for whom the two powers had so long contended, give itself to its Father now that it knew him to be both just and charitable, with heart aglow and hand outstretched to welcome all the penniless toilers and beggars of the roads! Given the catastrophe which threatened our rotten modern societies, the frightful misery which ravaged every city, there was surely no other solution possible: Leo XIII, the predestined, necessary redeemer, the pastor sent to save the flock from coming disaster by re-establishing the true Christian community, the forgotten golden age of primitive Christianity. The reign of justice would at last begin, all men would be reconciled, there would be but one nation living in peace and obeying the equalising law of work, under the high patronage of the Pope, sole bond of charity and love on earth!

And at this thought Pierre was upbuoyed by fiery enthusiasm. At last he was about to see the Holy Father, empty his heart and open his soul to him! He had so long and so passionately looked for the advent of that moment! To secure it he had fought with all his courage through ever recurring obstacles, and the length and difficulty of the struggle and the success now at last achieved, increased his feverishness, his desire for final victory. Yes, yes, he would conquer, he would confound his enemies. As he had said to Monsignor Fornaro, could the Pope disavow him? Had he not expressed the Holy Father's secret ideas? Perhaps he might have done so somewhat prematurely, but was not that a fault to be forgiven? And then too, he remembered his declaration to Monsignor Nani, that he himself would never withdraw and suppress his book, for he neither regretted nor disowned anything that was in it. At this very moment he again questioned himself, and felt that all his valour and determination to defend his book, all his desire to work the triumph of his belief, remained intact. Yet his mental perturbation was becoming great, he had to seek for ideas, wondering how he should enter the Pope's presence, what he should say, what precise terms he should employ. Something heavy and mysterious which he could hardly account for seemed to weigh him down. At bottom he was weary, already exhausted, only held up by his dream, his compassion for human misery. However, he would enter in all haste, he would fall upon his knees and speak as he best could, letting his heart flow forth. And assuredly the Holy Father would smile on him, and dismiss him with a promise that he would not sign the condemnation of a work in which he had found the expression of his own most cherished thoughts.

Then, again, such an acute sensation as of fainting came over Pierre that he went up to the window to press his burning brow against the cold glass. His ears were buzzing, his legs staggering, whilst his brain throbbed violently. And he was striving to forget his thoughts by gazing upon the black immensity of Rome, longing to be steeped in night himself, total, healing night, the night in which one sleeps on for ever, knowing neither pain nor wretchedness, when all at once he became conscious that somebody was standing behind him; and thereupon, with a start, he turned round.

And there, indeed, stood Signor Squadra in his black livery. Again he made one of his customary bows to invite the visitor to follow him, and again he walked on in front, crossing the little throne-room, and slowly opening the farther door. Then he drew aside, allowed Pierre to enter, and noiselessly closed the door behind him.

Pierre was in his Holiness's bed-room. He had feared one of those overwhelming attacks of emotion which madden or paralyse one. He had been told of women reaching the Pope's presence in a fainting condition, staggering as if intoxicated, while others came with a rush, as though upheld and borne along by invisible pinions. And suddenly the anguish of his own spell of waiting, his intense feverishness, ceased in a sort of astonishment, a reaction which rendered him very calm and so restored his clearness of vision, that he could see everything. As he entered he distinctly realised the decisive importance of such an audience, he, a mere petty priest in presence of the Supreme Pontiff, the Head of the Church. All his religious and moral life would depend on it; and possibly it was this sudden thought that thus chilled him on the threshold of the redoubtable sanctuary, which he had approached with such quivering steps, and which he would not have thought to enter otherwise than with distracted heart and loss of senses, unable to do more than stammer the simple prayers of childhood.

Later on, when he sought to classify his recollections he remembered that his eyes had first lighted on Leo XIII, not, however, to the exclusion of his surroundings, but in conjunction with them, that spacious room hung with yellow damask whose alcove, adorned with fluted marble columns, was so deep that the bed was quite hidden away in it, as well as other articles of furniture, a couch, a wardrobe, and some trunks, those famous trunks in which the treasure of the Peter's Pence was said to be securely locked. A sort of Louis XIV writing-desk with ornaments of engraved brass stood face to face with a large gilded and painted Louis XV pier table on which a lamp was burning beside a lofty crucifix. The room was virtually bare, only three arm-chairs and four or five other chairs, upholstered in light silk, being disposed here and there over the well-worn carpet. And on one of the arm-chairs sat Leo XIII, near a small table on which another lamp with a shade had been placed. Three newspapers, moreover, lay there, two of them French and one Italian, and the last was half unfolded as if the Pope had momentarily turned from it to stir a glass of syrup, standing beside him, with a long silver-gilt spoon.

In the same way as Pierre saw the Pope's room, he saw his costume, his cassock of white cloth with white buttons, his white skull-cap, his white cape and his white sash fringed with gold and broidered at either end with golden keys. His stockings were white, his slippers were of red velvet, and these again were broidered with golden keys. What surprised the young priest, however, was his Holiness's face and figure, which now seemed so shrunken that he scarcely recognised them. This was his fourth meeting with the Pope. He had seen him walking in the Vatican gardens, enthroned in the Hall of Beatifications, and pontifying at St. Peter's, and now he beheld him on that arm-chair, in privacy, and looking so slight and fragile that he could not restrain a feeling of affectionate anxiety. Leo's neck was particularly remarkable, slender beyond belief, suggesting the neck of some little, aged, white bird. And his face, of the pallor of alabaster, was characteristically transparent, to such a degree, indeed, that one could see the lamplight through his large commanding nose, as if the blood had entirely withdrawn from that organ. A mouth of great length, with white bloodless lips, streaked the lower part of the papal countenance, and the eyes alone had remained young and handsome. Superb eyes they were, brilliant like black diamonds, endowed with sufficient penetration and strength to lay souls open and force them to confess the truth aloud. Some scanty white curls emerged from under the white skull-cap, thus whitely crowning the thin white face, whose ugliness was softened by all this whiteness, this spiritual whiteness in which Leo XIII's flesh seemed as it were but pure lily-white florescence.

At the first glance, however, Pierre noticed that if Signor Squadra had kept him waiting, it had not been in order to compel the Holy Father to don a clean cassock, for the one he was wearing was badly soiled by snuff. A number of brown stains had trickled down the front of the garment beside the buttons, and just like any good bourgeois, his Holiness had a handkerchief on his knees to wipe himself. Apart from all this he seemed in good health, having recovered from his recent indisposition as easily as he usually recovered from such passing illnesses, sober, prudent old man that he was, quite free from organic disease, and simply declining by reason of progressive natural exhaustion.

Immediately on entering Pierre had felt that the Pope's sparkling eyes, those two black diamonds, were fixed upon him. The silence was profound, and the lamps burned with motionless, pallid flames. He had to approach, and after making the three genuflections prescribed by etiquette, he stooped over one of the Pope's feet resting on a cushion in order to kiss the red velvet slipper. And on the Pope's side there was not a word, not a gesture, not a movement. When the young man drew himself up again he found the two black diamonds, those two eyes which were all brightness and intelligence, still riveted on him.

But at last Leo XIII, who had been unwilling to spare the young priest the humble duty of kissing his foot and who now left him standing, began to speak, whilst still examining him, probing, as it were, his very soul. "My son," he said, "you greatly desired to see me, and I consented to afford you that satisfaction."

He spoke in French, somewhat uncertain French, pronounced after the Italian fashion, and so slowly did he articulate each sentence that one could have written it down like so much dictation. And his voice, as Pierre had previously noticed, was strong and nasal, one of those full voices which people are surprised to hear coming from debile and apparently bloodless and breathless frames.

In response to the Holy Father's remark Pierre contented himself with bowing, knowing that respect required him to wait for a direct answer before speaking. However, this question promptly came. "You live in Paris?" asked Leo XIII.

"Yes, Holy Father."

"Are you attached to one of the great parishes of the city?"

"No, Holy Father. I simply officiate at the little church of Neuilly."

"Ah, yes, Neuilly, that is in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne, is it not? And how old are you, my son?"

"Thirty-four, Holy Father."

A short interval followed. Leo XIII had at last lowered his eyes. With frail, ivory hand he took up the glass beside him, again stirred the syrup with the long spoon, and then drank a little of it. And all this he did gently and slowly, with a prudent, judicious air, as was his wont no doubt in everything. "I have read your book, my son," he resumed. "Yes, the greater part of it. As a rule only fragments are submitted to me. But a person who is interested in you handed me the volume, begging me to glance through it. And that is how I was able to look into it."

As he spoke he made a slight gesture in which Pierre fancied he could detect a protest against the isolation in which he was kept by those surrounding him, who, as Monsignor Nani had said, maintained a strict watch in order that nothing they objected to might reach him. And thereupon the young priest ventured to say: "I thank your Holiness for having done me so much honour. No greater or more desired happiness could have befallen me." He was indeed so happy! On seeing the Pope so calm, so free from all signs of anger, and on hearing him speak in that way of his book, like one well acquainted with it, he imagined that his cause was won.

"You are in relations with Monsieur le Vicomte Philibert de la Choue, are you not, my son?" continued Leo XIII. "I was struck by the resemblance between some of your ideas and those of that devoted servant of the Church, who has in other ways given us previous testimony of his good feelings."

"Yes, indeed, Holy Father, Monsieur de la Choue is kind enough to show me some affection. We have often talked together, so it is not surprising that I should have given expression to some of his most cherished ideas."

"No doubt, no doubt. For instance, there is that question of the working-class guilds with which he largely occupies himself—with which, in fact, he occupies himself rather too much. At the time of his last journey to Rome he spoke to me of it in the most pressing manner. And in the same way, quite recently, another of your compatriots, one of the best and worthiest of men, Monsieur le Baron de Fouras, who brought us that superb pilgrimage of the St. Peter's Pence Fund, never ceased his efforts until I consented to receive him, when he spoke to me on the same subject during nearly an hour. Only it must be said that they do not agree in the matter, for one begs me to do things which the other will not have me do on any account."

Pierre realised that the conversation was straying away from his book, but he remembered having promised the Viscount that if he should see the Pope he would make an attempt to obtain from him a decisive expression of opinion on the famous question as to whether the working-class guilds or corporations should be free or obligatory, open or closed. And the unhappy Viscount, kept in Paris by the gout, had written the young priest letter after letter on the subject, whilst his rival the Baron, availing himself of the opportunity offered by the international pilgrimage, endeavoured to wring from the Pope an approval of his own views, with which he would have returned in triumph to France. Pierre conscientiously desired to keep his promise, and so he answered: "Your Holiness knows better than any of us in which direction true wisdom lies. Monsieur de Fouras is of opinion that salvation, the solution of the labour question, lies simply in the re-establishment of the old free corporations, whilst Monsieur de la Choue desires the corporations to be obligatory, protected by the state and governed by new regulations. This last conception is certainly more in agreement with the social ideas now prevalent in France. Should your Holiness condescend to express a favourable opinion in that sense, the young French Catholic party would certainly know how to turn it to good result, by producing quite a movement of the working classes in favour of the Church."

In his quiet way Leo XIII responded: "But I cannot. Frenchmen always ask things of me which I cannot, will not do. What I will allow you to say on my behalf to Monsieur de la Choue is, that though I cannot content him I have not contented Monsieur de Fouras. He obtained from me nothing beyond the expression of my sincere good-will for the French working classes, who are so dear to me and who can do so much for the restoration of the faith. You must surely understand, however, that among you Frenchmen there are questions of detail, of mere organisation, so to say, into which I cannot possibly enter without imparting to them an importance which they do not have, and at the same time greatly discontenting some people should I please others."

As the Pope pronounced these last words he smiled a pale smile, in which the shrewd, conciliatory politician, who was determined not to allow his infallibility to be compromised in useless and risky ventures, was fully revealed. And then he drank a little more syrup and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, like a sovereign whose Court day is over and who takes his ease, having chosen this hour of solitude and silence to chat as long as he may be so inclined.

Pierre, however, sought to bring him back to the subject of his book. "Monsieur de la Choue," said he, "has shown me so much kindness and is so anxious to know the fate reserved to my book—as if, indeed, it were his own—that I should have been very happy to convey to him an expression of your Holiness's approval."

However, the Pope continued wiping his mouth and did not reply.

"I became acquainted with the Viscount," continued Pierre, "at the residence of his Eminence Cardinal Bergerot, another great heart whose ardent charity ought to suffice to restore the faith in France."

This time the effect was immediate. "Ah! yes, Monsieur le Cardinal Bergerot!" said Leo XIII. "I read that letter of his which is printed at the beginning of your book. He was very badly inspired in writing it to you; and you, my son, acted very culpably on the day you published it. I cannot yet believe that Monsieur le Cardinal Bergerot had read some of your pages when he sent you an expression of his complete and full approval. I prefer to charge him with ignorance and thoughtlessness. How could he approve of your attacks on dogma, your revolutionary theories which tend to the complete destruction of our holy religion? If it be a fact that he had read your book, the only excuse he can invoke is sudden and inexplicable aberration. It is true that a very bad spirit prevails among a small portion of the French clergy. What are called Gallican ideas are ever sprouting up like noxious weeds; there is a malcontent Liberalism rebellious to our authority which continually hungers for free examination and sentimental adventures."

The Pope grew animated as he spoke. Italian words mingled with his hesitating French, and every now and again his full nasal voice resounded with the sonority of a brass instrument. "Monsieur le Cardinal Bergerot," he continued, "must be given to understand that we shall crush him on the day when we see in him nothing but a rebellious son. He owes the example of obedience; we shall acquaint him with our displeasure, and we hope that he will submit. Humility and charity are great virtues doubtless, and we have always taken pleasure in recognising them in him. But they must not be the refuge of a rebellious heart, for they are as nothing unless accompanied by obedience—obedience, obedience, the finest adornment of the great saints!"

Pierre listened thunderstruck, overcome. He forgot himself to think of the apostle of kindliness and tolerance upon whose head he had drawn this all-powerful anger. So Don Vigilio had spoken the truth: over and above his—Pierre's—head the denunciations of the Bishops of Evreux and Poitiers were about to fall on the man who opposed their Ultramontane policy, that worthy and gentle Cardinal Bergerot, whose heart was open to all the woes of the lowly and the poor. This filled the young priest with despair; he could accept the denunciation of the Bishop of Tarbes acting on behalf of the Fathers of the Grotto, for that only fell on himself, as a reprisal for what he had written about Lourdes; but the underhand warfare of the others exasperated him, filled him with dolorous indignation. And from that puny old man before him with the slender, scraggy neck of an aged bird, he had suddenly seen such a wrathful, formidable Master arise that he trembled. How could he have allowed himself to be deceived by appearances on entering? How could he have imagined that he was simply in presence of a poor old man, worn out by age, desirous of peace, and ready for every concession? A blast had swept through that sleepy chamber, and all his doubts and his anguish awoke once more. Ah! that Pope, how thoroughly he answered to all the accounts that he, Pierre, had heard but had refused to believe; so many people had told him in Rome that he would find Leo XIII a man of intellect rather than of sentiment, a man of the most unbounded pride, who from his very youth had nourished the supreme ambition, to such a point indeed that he had promised eventual triumph to his relatives in order that they might make the necessary sacrifices for him, while since he had occupied the pontifical throne his one will and determination had been to reign, to reign in spite of all, to be the sole absolute and omnipotent master of the world! And now here was reality arising with irresistible force and confirming everything. And yet Pierre struggled, stubbornly clutching at his dream once more.

"Oh! Holy Father," said he, "I should be grieved indeed if his Eminence should have a moment's worry on account of my unfortunate book. If I be guilty I can answer for my error, but his Eminence only obeyed the dictates of his heart and can only have transgressed by excess of love for the disinherited of the world!"

Leo XIII made no reply. He had again raised his superb eyes, those eyes of ardent life, set, as it were, in the motionless countenance of an alabaster idol; and once more he was fixedly gazing at the young priest.

And Pierre, amidst his returning feverishness, seemed to behold him growing in power and splendour, whilst behind him arose a vision of the ages, a vision of that long line of popes whom the young priest had previously evoked, the saintly and the proud ones, the warriors and the ascetics, the theologians and the diplomatists, those who had worn armour, those who had conquered by the Cross, those who had disposed of empires as of mere provinces which God had committed to their charge. And in particular Pierre beheld the great Gregory, the conqueror and founder, and Sixtus V, the negotiator and politician, who had first foreseen the eventual victory of the papacy over all the vanquished monarchies. Ah! what a throng of magnificent princes, of sovereign masters with powerful brains and arms, there was behind that pale, motionless, old man! What an accumulation of inexhaustible determination, stubborn genius, and boundless domination! The whole history of human ambition, the whole effort of the ages to subject the nations to the pride of one man, the greatest force that has ever conquered, exploited, and fashioned mankind in the name of its happiness! And even now, when territorial sovereignty had come to an end, how great was the spiritual sovereignty of that pale and slender old man, in whose presence women fainted, as if overcome by the divine splendour radiating from his person. Not only did all the resounding glories, the masterful triumphs of history spread out behind him, but heaven opened, the very spheres beyond life shone out in their dazzling mystery. He—the Pope—stood at the portals of heaven, holding the keys and opening those portals to human souls; all the ancient symbolism was revived, freed at last from the stains of royalty here below.

"Oh! I beg you, Holy Father," resumed Pierre, "if an example be needed strike none other than myself. I have come, and am here; decide my fate, but do not aggravate my punishment by filling me with remorse at having brought condemnation on the innocent."

Leo XIII still refrained from replying, though he continued to look at the young priest with burning eyes. And he, Pierre, no longer beheld Leo XIII, the last of a long line of popes, the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the East, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Temporal Domains of the Holy Church; he saw the Leo XIII that he had dreamt of, the awaited saviour who would dispel the frightful cataclysm in which rotten society was sinking. He beheld him with his supple, lofty intelligence and fraternal, conciliatory tactics, avoiding friction and labouring to bring about unity whilst with his heart overflowing with love he went straight to the hearts of the multitude, again giving the best of his blood in sign of the new alliance. He raised him aloft as the sole remaining moral authority, the sole possible bond of charity and peace—as the Father, in fact, who alone could stamp out injustice among his children, destroy misery, and re-establish the liberating Law of Work by bringing the nations back to the faith of the primitive Church, the gentleness and the wisdom of the true Christian community. And in the deep silence of that room the great figure which he thus set up assumed invincible all-powerfulness, extraordinary majesty.

"Oh, I beseech you, Holy Father, listen to me," he said. "Do not even strike me, strike no one, neither a being nor a thing, anything that can suffer under the sun. Show kindness and indulgence to all, show all the kindness and indulgence which the sight of the world's sufferings must have set in you!"

And then, seeing that Leo XIII still remained silent and still left him standing there, he sank down upon his knees, as if felled by the growing emotion which rendered his heart so heavy. And within him there was a sort of debacle; all his doubts, all his anguish and sadness burst forth in an irresistible stream. There was the memory of the frightful day that he had just spent, the tragic death of Dario and Benedetta, which weighed on him like lead; there were all the sufferings that he had experienced since his arrival in Rome, the destruction of his illusions, the wounds dealt to his delicacy, the buffets with which men and things had responded to his young enthusiasm; and, lying yet more deeply within his heart, there was the sum total of human wretchedness, the thought of famished ones howling for food, of mothers whose breasts were drained and who sobbed whilst kissing their hungry babes, of fathers without work, who clenched their fists and revolted—indeed, the whole of that hateful misery which is as old as mankind itself, which has preyed upon mankind since its earliest hour, and which he now had everywhere found increasing in horror and havoc, without a gleam of hope that it would ever be healed. And withal, yet more immense and more incurable, he felt within him a nameless sorrow to which he could assign no precise cause or name—an universal, an illimitable sorrow with which he melted despairingly, and which was perhaps the very sorrow of life.

"O Holy Father!" he exclaimed, "I myself have no existence and my book has no existence. I desired, passionately desired to see your Holiness that I might explain and defend myself. But I no longer know, I can no longer recall a single one of the things that I wished to say, I can only weep, weep the tears which are stifling me. Yes, I am but a poor man, and the only need I feel is to speak to you of the poor. Oh! the poor ones, oh! the lowly ones, whom for two years past I have seen in our faubourgs of Paris, so wretched and so full of pain; the poor little children that I have picked out of the snow, the poor little angels who had eaten nothing for two days; the women too, consumed by consumption, without bread or fire, shivering in filthy hovels; and the men thrown on the street by slackness of trade, weary of begging for work as one begs for alms, sinking back into night, drunken with rage and harbouring the sole avenging thought of setting the whole city afire! And that night too, that terrible night, when in a room of horror I beheld a mother who had just killed herself with her five little ones, she lying on a palliasse suckling her last-born, and two little girls, two pretty little blondes, sleeping the last sleep beside her, while the two boys had succumbed farther away, one of them crouching against a wall, and the other lying upon the floor, distorted as though by a last effort to avoid death!... O Holy Father! I am but an ambassador, the messenger of those who suffer and who sob, the humble delegate of the humble ones who die of want beneath the hateful harshness, the frightful injustice of our present-day social system! And I bring your Holiness their tears, and I lay their tortures at your Holiness's feet, I raise their cry of woe, like a cry from the abyss, that cry which demands justice unless indeed the very heavens are to fall! Oh! show your loving kindness, Holy Father, show compassion!"

The young man had stretched out his arms and implored Leo XIII with a gesture as of supreme appeal to the divine compassion. Then he continued: "And here, Holy Father, in this splendid and eternal Rome, is not the want and misery as frightful! During the weeks that I have roamed hither and thither among the dust of famous ruins, I have never ceased to come in contact with evils which demand cure. Ah! to think of all that is crumbling, all that is expiring, the agony of so much glory, the fearful sadness of a world which is dying of exhaustion and hunger! Yonder, under your Holiness's windows, have I not seen a district of horrors, a district of unfinished palaces stricken like rickety children who cannot attain to full growth, palaces which are already in ruins and have become places of refuge for all the woeful misery of Rome? And here, as in Paris, what a suffering multitude, what a shameless exhibition too of the social sore, the devouring cancer openly tolerated and displayed in utter heedlessness! There are whole families leading idle and hungry lives in the splendid sunlight; fathers waiting for work to fall to them from heaven; sons listlessly spending their days asleep on the dry grass; mothers and daughters, withered before their time, shuffling about in loquacious idleness. O Holy Father, already to-morrow at dawn may your Holiness open that window yonder and with your benediction awaken that great childish people, which still slumbers in ignorance and poverty! May your Holiness give it the soul it lacks, a soul with the consciousness of human dignity, of the necessary law of work, of free and fraternal life regulated by justice only! Yes, may your Holiness make a people out of that heap of wretches, whose excuse lies in all their bodily suffering and mental night, who live like the beasts that go by and die, never knowing nor understanding, yet ever lashed onward with the whip!"

Pierre's sobs were gradually choking him, and it was only the impulse of his passion which still enabled him to speak. "And, Holy Father," he continued, "is it not to you that I ought to address myself in the name of all these wretched ones? Are you not the Father, and is it not before the Father that the messenger of the poor and the lowly should kneel as I am kneeling now? And is it not to the Father that he should bring the huge burden of their sorrows and ask for pity and help and justice? Yes, particularly for justice! And since you are the Father throw the doors wide open so that all may enter, even the humblest of your children, the faithful, the chance passers, even the rebellious ones and those who have gone astray but who will perhaps enter and whom you will save from the errors of abandonment! Be as the house of refuge on the dangerous road, the loving greeter of the wayfarer, the lamp of hospitality which ever burns, and is seen afar off and saves one in the storm! And since, O Father, you are power be salvation also! You can do all; you have centuries of domination behind you; you have nowadays risen to a moral authority which has rendered you the arbiter of the world; you are there before me like the very majesty of the sun which illumines and fructifies! Oh! be the star of kindness and charity, be the redeemer; take in hand once more the purpose of Jesus, which has been perverted by being left in the hands of the rich and the powerful who have ended by transforming the work of the Gospel into the most hateful of all monuments of pride and tyranny! And since the work has been spoilt, take it in hand, begin it afresh, place yourself on the side of the little ones, the lowly ones, the poor ones, and bring them back to the peace, the fraternity, and the justice of the original Christian communion. And say, O Father, that I have understood you, that I have sincerely expressed in this respect your most cherished ideas, the sole living desire of your reign! The rest, oh! the rest, my book, myself, what matter they! I do not defend myself, I only seek your glory and the happiness of mankind. Say that from the depths of this Vatican you have heard the rending of our corrupt modern societies! Say that you have quivered with loving pity, say that you desire to prevent the awful impending catastrophe by recalling the Gospel to the hearts of your children who are stricken with madness, and by bringing them back to the age of simplicity and purity when the first Christians lived together in innocent brotherhood! Yes, it is for that reason, is it not, that you have placed yourself, Father, on the side of the poor, and for that reason I am here and entreat you for pity and kindness and justice with my whole soul!"

Then the young man gave way beneath his emotion, and fell all of a heap upon the floor amidst a rush of sobs—loud, endless sobs, which flowed forth in billows, coming as it were not only from himself but from all the wretched, from the whole world in whose veins sorrow coursed mingled with the very blood of life. He was there as the ambassador of suffering, as he had said. And indeed, at the foot of that mute and motionless pope, he was like the personification of the whole of human woe.

Leo XIII, who was extremely fond of talking and could only listen to others with an effort, had twice raised one of his pallid hands to interrupt the young priest. Then, gradually overcome by astonishment, touched by emotion himself, he had allowed him to continue, to go on to the end of his outburst. A little blood even had suffused the snowy whiteness of the Pontiff's face whilst his eyes shone out yet more brilliantly. And as soon as he saw the young man speechless at his feet, shaken by those sobs which seemed to be wrenching away his heart, he became anxious and leant forward: "Calm yourself, my son, raise yourself," he said.

But the sobs still continued, still flowed forth, all reason and respect being swept away amidst that distracted plaint of a wounded soul, that moan of suffering, dying flesh.

"Raise yourself, my son, it is not proper," repeated Leo XIII. "There, take that chair." And with a gesture of authority he at last invited the young man to sit down.

Pierre rose with pain, and at once seated himself in order that he might not fall. He brushed his hair back from his forehead, and wiped his scalding tears away with his hands, unable to understand what had just happened, but striving to regain his self-possession.

"You appeal to the Holy Father," said Leo XIII. "Ah! rest assured that his heart is full of pity and affection for those who are unfortunate. But that is not the point, it is our holy religion which is in question. I have read your book, a bad book, I tell you so at once, the most dangerous and culpable of books, precisely on account of its qualities, the pages in which I myself felt interested. Yes, I was often fascinated, I should not have continued my perusal had I not felt carried away, transported by the ardent breath of your faith and enthusiasm. The subject 'New Rome' is such a beautiful one and impassions me so much! and certainly there is a book to be written under that title, but in a very different spirit to yours. You think that you have understood me, my son, that you have so penetrated yourself with my writings and actions that you simply express my most cherished ideas. But no, no, you have not understood me, and that is why I desired to see you, explain things to you, and convince you."

It was now Pierre who sat listening, mute and motionless. Yet he had only come thither to defend himself; for three months past he had been feverishly desiring this interview, preparing his arguments and feeling confident of victory; and now although he heard his book spoken of as dangerous and culpable he did not protest, did not reply with any one of those good reasons which he had deemed so irresistible. But the fact was that intense weariness had come upon him, the appeal that he had made, the tears that he had shed had left him utterly exhausted. By and by, however, he would be brave and would say what he had resolved to say.

"People do not understand me, do not understand me!" resumed Leo XIII with an air of impatient irritation. "It is incredible what trouble I have to make myself understood, in France especially! Take the temporal power for instance; how can you have fancied that the Holy See would ever enter into any compromise on that question? Such language is unworthy of a priest, it is the chimerical dream of one who is ignorant of the conditions in which the papacy has hitherto lived and in which it must still live if it does not desire to disappear. Cannot you see the sophistry of your argument that the Church becomes the loftier the more it frees itself from the cares of terrestrial sovereignty? A purely spiritual royalty, a sway of charity and love, indeed, 'tis a fine imaginative idea! But who will ensure us respect? Who will grant us the alms of a stone on which to rest our head if we are ever driven forth and forced to roam the highways? Who will guarantee our independence when we are at the mercy of every state?... No, no! this soil of Rome is ours, we have inherited it from the long line of our ancestors, and it is the indestructible, eternal soil on which the Church is built, so that any relinquishment would mean the downfall of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church. And, moreover, we could not relinquish it; we are bound by our oath to God and man."

He paused for a moment to allow Pierre to answer him. But the latter to his stupefaction could say nothing, for he perceived that this pope spoke as he was bound to speak. All the heavy mysterious things which had weighed the young priest down whilst he was waiting in the ante-room, now became more and more clearly defined. They were, indeed, the things which he had seen and learnt since his arrival in Rome, the disillusions, the rebuffs which he had experienced, all the many points of difference between existing reality and imagination, whereby his dream of a return to primitive Christianity was already half shattered. And in particular he remembered the hour which he had spent on the dome of St. Peter's, when, in presence of the old city of glory so stubbornly clinging to its purple, he had realised that he was an imbecile with his idea of a purely spiritual pope. He had that day fled from the furious shouts of the pilgrims acclaiming the Pope-King. He had only accepted the necessity for money, that last form of servitude still binding the Pope to earth. But all had crumbled afterwards, when he had beheld the real Rome, the ancient city of pride and domination where the papacy can never be complete without the temporal power. Too many bonds, dogma, tradition, environment, the very soil itself rendered the Church for ever immutable. It was only in appearances that she could make concessions, and a time would even arrive when her concessions would cease, in presence of the impossibility of going any further without committing suicide. If his, Pierre's, dream of a New Rome were ever to be realised, it would only be faraway from ancient Rome. Only in some distant region could the new Christianity arise, for Catholicism was bound to die on the spot when the last of the popes, riveted to that land of ruins, should disappear beneath the falling dome of St. Peter's, which would fall as surely as the temple of Jupiter had fallen! And, as for that pope of the present day, though he might have no kingdom, though age might have made him weak and fragile, though his bloodless pallor might be that of some ancient idol of wax, he none the less flared with the red passion for universal sovereignty, he was none the less the stubborn scion of his ancestry, the Pontifex Maximus, the Caesar Imperator in whose veins flowed the blood of Augustus, master of the world.

"You must be fully aware," resumed Leo XIII, "of the ardent desire for unity which has always possessed us. We were very happy on the day when we unified the rite, by imposing the Roman rite throughout the whole Catholic world. This is one of our most cherished victories, for it can do much to uphold our authority. And I hope that our efforts in the East will end by bringing our dear brethren of the dissident communions back to us, in the same way as I do not despair of convincing the Anglican sects, without speaking of the other so-called Protestant sects who will be compelled to return to the bosom of the only Church, the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, when the times predicted by the Christ shall be accomplished. But a thing which you did not say in your book is that the Church can relinquish nothing whatever of dogma. On the contrary, you seem to fancy that an agreement might be effected, concessions made on either side, and that, my son, is a culpable thought, such language as a priest cannot use without being guilty of a crime. No, the truth is absolute, not a stone of the edifice shall be changed. Oh! in matters of form, we will do whatever may be asked. We are ready to adopt the most conciliatory courses if it be only a question of turning certain difficulties and weighing expressions in order to facilitate agreement.. .. Again, there is the part we have taken in contemporary socialism, and here too it is necessary that we should be understood. Those whom you have so well called the disinherited of the world, are certainly the object of our solicitude. If socialism be simply a desire for justice, and a constant determination to come to the help of the weak and the suffering, who can claim to give more thought to the matter and work with more energy than ourselves? Has not the Church always been the mother of the afflicted, the helper and benefactress of the poor? We are for all reasonable progress, we admit all new social forms which will promote peace and fraternity.... Only we can but condemn that socialism which begins by driving away God as a means of ensuring the happiness of mankind. Therein lies simple savagery, an abominable relapse into the primitive state in which there can only be catastrophe, conflagration, and massacre. And that again is a point on which you have not laid sufficient stress, for you have not shown in your book that there can be no progress outside the pale of the Church, that she is really the only initiatory and guiding power to whom one may surrender oneself without fear. Indeed, and in this again you have sinned, it seemed to me as if you set God on one side, as if for you religion lay solely in a certain bent of the soul, a florescence of love and charity, which sufficed one to work one's salvation. But that is execrable heresy. God is ever present, master of souls and bodies; and religion remains the bond, the law, the very governing power of mankind, apart from which there can only be barbarism in this world and damnation in the next. And, once again, forms are of no importance; it is sufficient that dogma should remain. Thus our adhesion to the French Republic proves that we in no wise mean to link the fate of religion to that of any form of government, however august and ancient the latter may be. Dynasties may have done their time, but God is eternal. Kings may perish, but God lives! And, moreover, there is nothing anti-Christian in the republican form of government; indeed, on the contrary, it would seem like an awakening of that Christian commonwealth to which you have referred in some really charming pages. The worst is that liberty at once becomes license, and that our desire for conciliation is often very badly requited.... But ah! what a wicked book you have written, my son,—with the best intentions, I am willing to believe,—and how your silence shows that you are beginning to recognise the disastrous consequences of your error."

Pierre still remained silent, overcome, feeling as if his arguments would fall against some deaf, blind, and impenetrable rock, which it was useless to assail since nothing could enter it. And only one thing now preoccupied him; he wondered how it was that a man of such intelligence and such ambition had not formed a more distinct and exact idea of the modern world. He could divine that the Pope possessed much information and carried the map of Christendom with many of the needs, deeds, and hopes of the nations, in his mind amidst his complicated diplomatic enterprises; but at the same time what gaps there were in his knowledge! The truth, no doubt, was that his personal acquaintance with the world was confined to his brief nunciature at Brussels.*

* That too, was in 1843-44, and the world is now utterly unlike
what it was then!—Trans.

During his occupation of the see of Perugia, which had followed, he had only mingled with the dawning life of young Italy. And for eighteen years now he had been shut up in the Vatican, isolated from the rest of mankind and communicating with the nations solely through his entourage, which was often most unintelligent, most mendacious, and most treacherous. Moreover, he was an Italian priest, a superstitious and despotic High Pontiff, bound by tradition, subjected to the influences of race environment, pecuniary considerations, and political necessities, not to speak of his great pride, the conviction that he ought to be implicitly obeyed in all things as the one sole legitimate power upon earth. Therein lay fatal causes of mental deformity, of errors and gaps in his extraordinary brain, though the latter certainly possessed many admirable qualities, quickness of comprehension and patient stubbornness of will and strength to draw conclusions and act. Of all his powers, however, that of intuition was certainly the most wonderful, for was it not this alone which, owing to his voluntary imprisonment, enabled him to divine the vast evolution of humanity at the present day? He was thus keenly conscious of the dangers surrounding him, of the rising tide of democracy and the boundless ocean of science which threatened to submerge the little islet where the dome of St. Peter's yet triumphed. And the object of all his policy, of all his labour, was to conquer so that he might reign. If he desired the unity of the Church it was in order that the latter might become strong and inexpugnable in the contest which he foresaw. If he preached conciliation, granting concessions in matters of form, tolerating audacious actions on the part of American bishops, it was because he deeply and secretly feared the dislocation of the Church, some sudden schism which might hasten disaster. And this fear explained his returning affection for the people, the concern which he displayed respecting socialism, and the Christian solution which he offered to the woes of earthly life. As Caesar was stricken low, was not the long contest for possession of the people over, and would not the people, the great silent multitude, speak out, and give itself to him, the Pope? He had begun experiments with France, forsaking the lost cause of the monarchy and recognising the Republic which he hoped might prove strong and victorious, for in spite of everything France remained the eldest daughter of the Church, the only Catholic nation which yet possessed sufficient strength to restore the temporal power at some propitious moment. And briefly Leo's desire was to reign. To reign by the support of France since it seemed impossible to do so by the support of Germany! To reign by the support of the people, since the people was now becoming the master, the bestower of thrones! To reign by means even of an Italian Republic, if only that Republic could wrest Rome from the House of Savoy and restore her to him, a federal Republic which would make him President of the United States of Italy pending the time when he should be President of the United States of Europe! To reign in spite of everybody and everything, such was his ambition, to reign over the world, even as Augustus had reigned, Augustus whose devouring blood alone upheld this expiring old man, yet so stubbornly clinging to power!

"And another crime of yours, my son," resumed Leo XIII, "is that you have dared to ask for a new religion. That is impious, blasphemous, sacrilegious. There is but one religion in the world, our Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Religion, apart from which there can be but darkness and damnation. I quite understand that what you mean to imply is a return to early Christianity. But the error of so-called Protestantism, so culpable and so deplorable in its consequences, never had any other pretext. As soon as one departs from the strict observance of dogma and absolute respect for tradition one sinks into the most frightful precipices.... Ah! schism, schism, my son, is a crime beyond forgiveness, an assassination of the true God, a device of the loathsome Beast of Temptation which Hell sends into the world to work the ruin of the faithful! If your book contained nothing beyond those words 'a new religion,' it would be necessary to destroy and burn it like so much poison fatal in its effects upon the human soul."

He continued at length on this subject, while Pierre recalled what Don Vigilio had told him of those all-powerful Jesuits who at the Vatican as elsewhere remained in the background, secretly but none the less decisively governing the Church. Was it true then that this pope, whose opportunist tendencies were so freely displayed, was one of them, a mere docile instrument in their hands, though he fancied himself penetrated with the doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas? In any case, like them he compounded with the century, made approaches to the world, and was willing to flatter it in order that he might possess it. Never before had Pierre so cruelly realised that the Church was now so reduced that she could only live by dint of concessions and diplomacy. And he could at last distinctly picture that Roman clergy which at first is so difficult of comprehension to a French priest, that Government of the Church, represented by the pope, the cardinals, and the prelates, whom the Deity has appointed to govern and administer His mundane possessions—mankind and the earth. They begin by setting that very Deity on one side, in the depths of the tabernacle, and impose whatever dogmas they please as so many essential truths. That the Deity exists is evident, since they govern in His name which is sufficient for everything. And being by virtue of their charge the masters, if they consent to sign covenants, Concordats, it is only as matters of form; they do not observe them, and never yield to anything but force, always reserving the principle of their absolute sovereignty which must some day finally triumph. Pending that day's arrival, they act as diplomatists, slowly carrying on their work of conquest as the Deity's functionaries; and religion is but the public homage which they pay to the Deity, and which they organise with all the pomp and magnificence that is likely to influence the multitude. Their only object is to enrapture and conquer mankind in order that the latter may submit to the rule of the Deity, that is the rule of themselves, since they are the Deity's visible representatives, expressly delegated to govern the world. In a word, they straightway descend from Roman law, they are still but the offspring of the old pagan soul of Rome, and if they have lasted until now and if they rely on lasting for ever, until the awaited hour when the empire of the world shall be restored to them, it is because they are the direct heirs of the purple-robed Caesars, the uninterrupted and living progeny of the blood of Augustus.

And thereupon Pierre felt ashamed of his tears. Ah! those poor nerves of his, that outburst of sentiment and enthusiasm to which he had given way! His very modesty was appalled, for he felt as if he had exhibited his soul in utter nakedness. And so uselessly too, in that room where nothing similar had ever been said before, and in presence of that Pontiff-King who could not understand him. His plan of the popes reigning by means of the poor and lowly now horrified him. His idea of the papacy going to the people, at last rid of its former masters, seemed to him a suggestion worthy of a wolf, for if the papacy should go to the people it would only be to prey upon it as the others had done. And really he, Pierre, must have been mad when he had imagined that a Roman prelate, a cardinal, a pope, was capable of admitting a return to the Christian commonwealth, a fresh florescence of primitive Christianity to pacify the aged nations whom hatred consumed. Such a conception indeed was beyond the comprehension of men who for centuries had regarded themselves as masters of the world, so heedless and disdainful of the lowly and the suffering, that they had at last become altogether incapable of either love or charity.*

* The reader should bear in mind that these remarks apply to the
Italian cardinals and prelates, whose vanity and egotism are
remarkable.—Trans.

Leo XIII, however, was still holding forth in his full, unwearying voice. And the young priest heard him saying: "Why did you write that page on Lourdes which shows such a thoroughly bad spirit? Lourdes, my son, has rendered great services to religion. To the persons who have come and told me of the touching miracles which are witnessed at the Grotto almost daily, I have often expressed my desire to see those miracles confirmed, proved by the most rigorous scientific tests. And, indeed, according to what I have read, I do not think that the most evilly disposed minds can entertain any further doubt on the matter, for the miracles are proved scientifically in the most irrefutable manner. Science, my son, must be God's servant. It can do nothing against Him, it is only by His grace that it arrives at the truth. All the solutions which people nowadays pretend to discover and which seemingly destroy dogma will some day be recognised as false, for God's truth will remain victorious when the times shall be accomplished. That is a very simple certainty, known even to little children, and it would suffice for the peace and salvation of mankind, if mankind would content itself with it. And be convinced, my son, that faith and reason are not incompatible. Have we not got St. Thomas who foresaw everything, explained everything, regulated everything? Your faith has been shaken by the onslaught of the spirit of examination, you have known trouble and anguish which Heaven has been pleased to spare our priests in this land of ancient belief, this city of Rome which the blood of so many martyrs has sanctified. However, we have no fear of the spirit of examination, study St. Thomas, read him thoroughly and your faith will return, definitive and triumphant, firmer than ever."

These remarks caused Pierre as much dismay as if fragments of the celestial vault were raining on his head. O God of truth, miracles—the miracles of Lourdes!—proved scientifically, faith in the dogmas compatible with reason, and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas sufficient to instil certainty into the minds of this present generation! How could one answer that, and indeed why answer it at all?

"Yes, yours is a most culpable and dangerous book," concluded Leo XIII; "its very title 'New Rome' is mendacious and poisonous, and the work is the more to be condemned as it offers every fascination of style, every perversion of generous fancy. Briefly it is such a book that a priest, if he conceived it in an hour of error, can have no other duty than that of burning it in public with the very hand which traced the pages of error and scandal."

All at once Pierre rose up erect. He was about to exclaim: "'Tis true, I had lost my faith, but I thought I had found it again in the compassion which the woes of the world set in my heart. You were my last hope, the awaited saviour. But, behold, that again is a dream, you cannot take the work of Jesus in hand once more and pacify mankind so as to avert the frightful fratricidal war which is preparing. You cannot leave your throne and come along the roads with the poor and the humble to carry out the supreme work of fraternity. Well, it is all over with you, your Vatican and your St. Peter's. All is falling before the onslaught of the rising multitude and growing science. You no longer exist, there are only ruins and remnants left here."

However, he did not speak those words. He simply bowed and said: "Holy Father, I make my submission and reprobate my book." And as he thus replied his voice trembled with disgust, and his open hands made a gesture of surrender as though he were yielding up his soul. The words he had chosen were precisely those of the required formula: Auctor laudabiliter se subjecit et opus reprobavit. "The author has laudably made his submission and reprobated his work." No error could have been confessed, no hope could have accomplished self-destruction with loftier despair, more sovereign grandeur. But what frightful irony: that book which he had sworn never to withdraw, and for whose triumph he had fought so passionately, and which he himself now denied and suppressed, not because he deemed it guilty, but because he had just realised that it was as futile, as chimerical as a lover's desire, a poet's dream. Ah! yes, since he had been mistaken, since he had merely dreamed, since he had found there neither the Deity nor the priest that he had desired for the happiness of mankind, why should he obstinately cling to the illusion of an awakening which was impossible! 'Twere better to fling his book on the ground like a dead leaf, better to deny it, better to cut it away like a dead limb that could serve no purpose whatever!

Somewhat surprised by such a prompt victory Leo XIII raised a slight exclamation of content. "That is well said, my son, that is well said! You have spoken the only words that can become a priest."

And in his evident satisfaction, he who left nothing to chance, who carefully prepared each of his audiences, deciding beforehand what words he would say, what gestures even he would make, unbent somewhat and displayed real bonhomie. Unable to understand, mistaking the real motives of this rebellious priest's submission, he tasted positive delight in having so easily reduced him to silence, the more so as report had stated the young man to be a terrible revolutionary. And thus his Holiness felt quite proud of such a conversion. "Moreover, my son," he said, "I did not expect less of one of your distinguished mind. There can be no loftier enjoyment than that of owning one's error, doing penance, and submitting."

He had again taken the glass off the little table beside him and was stirring the last spoonful of syrup before drinking it. And Pierre was amazed at again finding him as he had found him at the outset, shrunken, bereft of sovereign majesty, and simply suggestive of some aged bourgeois drinking his glass of sugared water before getting into bed. It was as if after growing and radiating, like a planet ascending to the zenith, he had again sunk to the level of the soil in all human mediocrity. Again did Pierre find him puny and fragile, with the slender neck of a little sick bird, and all those marks of senile ugliness which rendered him so exacting with regard to his portraits, whether they were oil paintings or photographs, gold medals, or marble busts, for of one and the other he would say that the artist must not portray "Papa Pecci" but Leo XIII, the great Pope, of whom he desired to leave such a lofty image to posterity. And Pierre, after momentarily ceasing to see them, was again embarrassed by the handkerchief which lay on the Pope's lap, and the dirty cassock soiled by snuff. His only feelings now were affectionate pity for such white old age, deep admiration for the stubborn power of life which had found a refuge in those dark black eyes, and respectful deference, such as became a worker, for that large brain which harboured such vast projects and overflowed with such innumerable ideas and actions.

The audience was over, and the young man bowed low: "I thank your Holiness for having deigned to give me such a fatherly reception," he said.

However, Leo XIII detained him for a moment longer, speaking to him of France and expressing his sincere desire to see her prosperous, calm, and strong for the greater advantage of the Church. And Pierre, during that last moment, had a singular vision, a strange haunting fancy. As he gazed at the Holy Father's ivory brow and thought of his great age and of his liability to be carried off by the slightest chill, he involuntarily recalled the scene instinct with a fierce grandeur which is witnessed each time a pope dies. He recalled Pius IX, Giovanni Mastai, two hours after death, his face covered by a white linen cloth, while the pontifical family surrounded him in dismay; and then Cardinal Pecci, the Camerlingo, approaching the bed, drawing aside the veil and dealing three taps with his silver hammer on the forehead of the deceased, repeating at each tap the call, "Giovanni! Giovanni! Giovanni!" And as the corpse made no response, turning, after an interval of a few seconds, and saying: "The Pope is dead!" And at the same time, yonder in the Via Giulia Pierre pictured Cardinal Boccanera, the present Camerlingo, awaiting his turn with his silver hammer, and he imagined Leo XIII, otherwise Gioachino Pecci, dead, like his predecessor, his face covered by a white linen cloth and his corpse surrounded by his prelates in that very room. And he saw the Camerlingo approach, draw the veil aside and tap the ivory forehead, each time repeating the call: "Gioachino! Gioachino! Gioachino!" Then, as the corpse did not answer, he waited for a few seconds and turned and said "The Pope is dead!" Did Leo XIII remember how he had thrice tapped the forehead of Pius IX, and did he ever feel on the brow an icy dread of the silver hammer with which he had armed his own Camerlingo, the man whom he knew to be his implacable adversary, Cardinal Boccanera?

"Go in peace, my son," at last said his Holiness by way of parting benediction. "Your transgression will be forgiven you since you have confessed and testify your horror for it."

With distressful spirit, accepting humiliation as well-deserved chastisement for his chimerical fancies, Pierre retired, stepping backwards according to the customary ceremonial. He made three deep bows and crossed the threshold without turning, followed by the black eyes of Leo XIII, which never left him. Still he saw the Pope stretch his arm towards the table to take up the newspaper which he had been reading prior to the audience, for Leo retained a great fancy for newspapers, and was very inquisitive as to news, though in the isolation in which he lived he frequently made mistakes respecting the relative importance of articles. And once more the chamber sank into deep quietude, whilst the two lamps continued to diffuse a soft and steady light.

In the centre of the anticamera segreta Signor Squadra stood waiting black and motionless. And on noticing that Pierre in his flurry forgot to take his hat from the pier table, he himself discreetly fetched it and handed it to the young priest with a silent bow. Then without any appearance of haste, he walked ahead to conduct the visitor back to the Sala Clementina. The endless promenade through the interminable ante-rooms began once more, and there was still not a soul, not a sound, not a breath. In each empty room stood the one solitary lamp, burning low amidst a yet deeper silence than before. The wilderness seemed also to have grown larger as the night advanced, casting its gloom over the few articles of furniture scattered under the lofty gilded ceilings, the thrones, the stools, the pier tables, the crucifixes, and the candelabra which recurred in each succeeding room. And at last the Sala Clementina which the Swiss Guards had just quitted was reached again, and Signor Squadra, who hitherto had not turned his head, thereupon drew aside without word or gesture, and, saluting Pierre with a last bow, allowed him to pass on. Then he himself disappeared.

And Pierre descended the two flights of the monumental staircase where the gas jets in their globes of ground glass glimmered like night lights amidst a wondrously heavy silence now that the footsteps of the sentries no longer resounded on the landings. And he crossed the Court of St. Damasus, empty and lifeless in the pale light of the lamps above the steps, and descended the Scala Pia, that other great stairway as dim, deserted, and void of life as all the rest, and at last passed beyond the bronze door which a porter slowly shut behind him. And with what a rumble, what a fierce roar did the hard metal close upon all that was within; all the accumulated darkness and silence; the dead, motionless centuries perpetuated by tradition; the indestructible idols, the dogmas, bound round for preservation like mummies; every chain which may weigh on one or hamper one, the whole apparatus of bondage and sovereign domination, with whose formidable clang all the dark, deserted halls re-echoed.

Once more the young man found himself alone on the gloomy expanse of the Piazza of St. Peter's. Not a single belated pedestrian was to be seen. There was only the lofty, livid, ghost-like obelisk, emerging between its four candelabra, from the mosaic pavement of red and serpentine porphyry. The facade of the Basilica also showed vaguely, pale as a vision, whilst from it on either side like a pair of giant arms stretched the quadruple colonnade, a thicket of stone, steeped in obscurity. The dome was but a huge roundness scarcely discernible against the moonless sky; and only the jets of the fountains, which could at last be detected rising like slim phantoms ever on the move, lent a voice to the silence, the endless murmur of a plaint of sorrow coming one knew not whence. Ah! how great was the melancholy grandeur of that slumber, that famous square, the Vatican and St. Peter's, thus seen by night when wrapped in silence and darkness! But suddenly the clock struck ten with so slow and loud a chime that never, so it seemed, had more solemn and decisive an hour rung out amidst blacker and more unfathomable gloom. All Pierre's poor weary frame quivered at the sound as he stood motionless in the centre of the expanse. What! had he spent barely three-quarters of an hour, chatting up yonder with that white old man who had just wrenched all his soul away from him! Yes, it was the final wrench; his last belief had been torn from his bleeding heart and brain. The supreme experiment had been made, a world had collapsed within him. And all at once he thought of Monsignor Nani, and reflected that he alone had been right. He, Pierre, had been told that in any case he would end by doing what Monsignor Nani might desire, and he was now stupefied to find that he had done so.

But sudden despair seized upon him, such atrocious distress of spirit that, from the depths of the abyss of darkness where he stood, he raised his quivering arms into space and spoke aloud: "No, no, Thou art not here, O God of life and love, O God of Salvation! But come, appear since Thy children are perishing because they know neither who Thou art, nor where to find Thee amidst the Infinite of the worlds!"

Above the vast square spread the vast sky of dark-blue velvet, the silent disturbing Infinite, where the constellations palpitated. Over the roofs of the Vatican, Charles's Wain seemed yet more tilted, its golden wheels straying from the right path, its golden shaft upreared in the air; whilst yonder, over Rome towards the Via Giulia, Orion was about to disappear and already showed but one of the three golden stars which bedecked his belt.

XV.

IT was nearly daybreak when Pierre fell asleep, exhausted by emotion and hot with fever. And at nine o'clock, when he had risen and breakfasted, he at once wished to go down into Cardinal Boccanera's rooms where the bodies of Dario and Benedetta had been laid in state in order that the members of the family, its friends and clients, might bring them their tears and prayers.

Whilst he breakfasted, Victorine who, showing an active bravery amidst her despair, had not been to bed at all, told him of what had taken place in the house during the night and early morning. Donna Serafina, prude that she was, had again made an attempt to have the bodies separated; but this had proved an impossibility, as rigor mortis had set in, and to part the lovers it would have been necessary to break their limbs. Moreover, the Cardinal, who had interposed once before, almost quarrelled with his sister on the subject, unwilling as he was that any one should disturb the lovers' last slumber, their union of eternity. Beneath his priestly garb there coursed the blood of his race, a pride in the passions of former times; and he remarked that if the family counted two popes among its forerunners, it had also been rendered illustrious by great captains and ardent lovers. Never would he allow any one to touch those two children, whose dolorous lives had been so pure and whom the grave alone had united. He was the master in his house, and they should be sewn together in the same shroud, and nailed together in the same coffin. Then too the religious service should take place at the neighbouring church of San Carlo, of which he was Cardinal-priest and where again he was the master. And if needful he would address himself to the Pope. And such being his sovereign will, so authoritatively expressed, everybody in the house had to bow submissively.

Donna Serafina at once occupied herself with the laying-out. According to the Roman custom the servants were present, and Victorine as the oldest and most appreciated of them, assisted the relatives. All that could be done in the first instance was to envelop both corpses in Benedetta's unbound hair, thick and odorous hair, which spread out into a royal mantle; and they were then laid together in one shroud of white silk, fastened about their necks in such wise that they formed but one being in death. And again the Cardinal imperatively ordered that they should be brought into his apartments and placed on a state bed in the centre of the throne-room, so that a supreme homage might be rendered to them as to the last scions of the name, the two tragic lovers with whom the once resounding glory of the Boccaneras was about to return to earth. The story which had been arranged was already circulating through Rome; folks related how Dario had been carried off in a few hours by infectious fever, and how Benedetta, maddened by grief, had expired whilst clasping him in her arms to bid him a last farewell; and there was talk too of the royal honours which the bodies were to receive, the superb funeral nuptials which were to be accorded them as they lay clasped on their bed of eternal rest. All Rome, quite overcome by this tragic story of love and death, would talk of nothing else for several weeks.

Pierre would have started for France that same night, eager as he was to quit the city of disaster where he had lost the last shreds of his faith, but he desired to attend the obsequies, and therefore postponed his departure until the following evening. And thus he would spend one more day in that old crumbling palace, near the corpse of that unhappy young woman to whom he had been so much attached and for whom he would try to find some prayers in the depths of his empty and lacerated heart.

When he reached the threshold of the Cardinal's reception-rooms, he suddenly remembered his first visit to them. They still presented the same aspect of ancient princely pomp falling into decay and dust. The doors of the three large ante-rooms were wide open, and the rooms themselves were at that early hour still empty. In the first one, the servants' anteroom, there was nobody but Giacomo who stood motionless in his black livery in front of the old red hat hanging under the baldacchino where spiders spun their webs between the crumbling tassels. In the second room, which the secretary formerly had occupied, Abbe Paparelli, the train-bearer, was softly walking up and down whilst waiting for visitors; and with his conquering humility, his all-powerful obsequiousness, he had never before so closely resembled an old maid, whitened and wrinkled by excess of devout observances. Finally, in the third ante-room, the anticamera nobile, where the red cap lay on a credence facing the large imperious portrait of the Cardinal in ceremonial costume, there was Don Vigilio who had left his little work-table to station himself at the door of the throne-room and there bow to those who crossed the threshold. And on that gloomy winter morning the rooms appeared more mournful and dilapidated than ever, the hangings frayed and ragged, the few articles of furniture covered with dust, the old wood-work crumbling beneath the continuous onslaught of worms, and the ceilings alone retaining their pompous show of gilding and painting.

However, Pierre, to whom Abbe Paparelli addressed a profound bow, in which one divined the irony of a sort of dismissal given to one who was vanquished, felt more impressed by the mournful grandeur which those three dilapidated rooms presented that day, conducting as they did to the old throne-room, now a chamber of death, where the two last children of the house slept their last sleep. What a superb and sorrowful gala of death! Every door wide open and all the emptiness of those over-spacious rooms, void of the throngs of ancient days and leading to the supreme affliction—the end of a race! The Cardinal had shut himself up in his little work-room where he received the relatives and intimates who desired to present their condolences to him, whilst Donna Serafina had chosen an adjoining apartment to await her lady friends who would come in procession until evening. And Pierre, informed of the ceremonial by Victorine, had in the first place to enter the throne-room, greeted as he passed by a deep bow from Don Vigilio who, pale and silent, did not seem to recognise him.

A surprise awaited the young priest. He had expected such a lying-in-state as is seen in France and elsewhere, all windows closed so as to steep the room in night, and hundreds of candles burning round a catafalco, whilst from ceiling to floor the walls were hung with black drapery. He had been told that the bodies would lie in the throne-room because the antique chapel on the ground floor of the palazzo had been shut up for half a century and was in no condition to be used, whilst the Cardinal's little private chapel was altogether too small for any such ceremony. And thus it had been necessary to improvise an altar in the throne-room, an altar at which masses had been said ever since dawn. Masses and other religious services were moreover to be celebrated all day long in the private chapel; and two additional altars had even been set up, one in a small room adjoining the anticamera nobile and the other in a sort of alcove communicating with the second anteroom: and in this wise priests, Franciscans, and members of other Orders bound by the vow of poverty, would simultaneously and without intermission celebrate the divine sacrifice on those four altars. The Cardinal, indeed, had desired that the Divine Blood should flow without pause under his roof for the redemption of those two dear souls which had flown away together. And thus in that mourning mansion, through those funeral halls the bells scarcely stopped tinkling for the elevation of the host, whilst the quivering murmur of Latin words ever continued, and consecrated wafers were continually broken and chalices drained, in such wise that the Divine Presence could not for a moment quit the heavy atmosphere all redolent of death.

On the other hand, however, Pierre, to his great astonishment, found the throne-room much as it had been on the day of his first visit. The curtains of the four large windows had not even been drawn, and the grey, cold, subdued light of the gloomy winter morning freely entered. Under the ceiling of carved and gilded wood-work there were the customary red wall-hangings of brocatelle, worn away by long usage; and there was the old throne with the arm-chair turned to the wall, uselessly waiting for a visit from the Pope which would never more come. The principal changes in the aspect of the room were that its seats and tables had been removed, and that, in addition to the improvised altar arranged beside the throne, it now contained the state bed on which lay the bodies of Benedetta and Dario, amidst a profusion of flowers. The bed stood in the centre of the room on a low platform, and at its head were two lighted candles, one on either side. There was nothing else, nothing but that wealth of flowers, such a harvest of white roses that one wondered in what fairy garden they had been culled, sheaves of them on the bed, sheaves of them toppling from the bed, sheaves of them covering the step of the platform, and falling from that step on to the magnificent marble paving of the room.

Pierre drew near to the bed, his heart faint with emotion. Those tapers whose little yellow flamelets scarcely showed in the pale daylight, that continuous low murmur of the mass being said at the altar, that penetrating perfume of roses which rendered the atmosphere so heavy, filled the antiquated, dusty room with a spirit of infinite woe, a lamentation of boundless mourning. And there was not a gesture, not a word spoken, save by the priest officiating at the altar, nothing but an occasional faint sound of stifled sobbing among the few persons present. Servants of the house constantly relieved one another, four always standing erect and motionless at the head of the bed, like faithful, familiar guards. From time to time Consistorial-Advocate Morano who, since early morning had been attending to everything, crossed the room with a silent step and the air of a man in a hurry. And at the edge of the platform all who entered, knelt, prayed, and wept. Pierre perceived three ladies there, their faces hidden by their handkerchiefs; and there was also an old priest who trembled with grief and hung his head in such wise that his face could not be distinguished. However, the young man was most moved by the sight of a poorly clad girl, whom he took for a servant, and whom sorrow had utterly prostrated on the marble slabs.

Then in his turn he knelt down, and with the professional murmur of the lips sought to repeat the Latin prayers which, as a priest, he had so often said at the bedside of the departed. But his growing emotion confused his memory, and he became wrapt in contemplation of the lovers whom his eyes were unable to quit. Under the wealth of flowers which covered them the clasped bodies could scarcely be distinguished, but the two heads emerged from the silken shroud, and lying there on the same cushion, with their hair mingling, they were still beautiful, beautiful as with satisfied passion. Benedetta had kept her divinely gay, loving, and faithful face for eternity, transported with rapture at having rendered up her last breath in a kiss of love; whilst Dario retained a more dolorous expression amidst his final joy. And their eyes were still wide open, gazing at one another with a persistent and caressing sweetness which nothing would ever more disturb.

Oh! God, was it true that yonder lay that Benedetta whom he, Pierre, had loved with such pure, brotherly affection? He was stirred to the very depths of his soul by the recollection of the delightful hours which he had spent with her. She had been so beautiful, so sensible, yet so full of passion! And he had indulged in so beautiful a dream, that of animating with his own liberating fraternal feelings that admirable creature with soul of fire and indolent air, in whom he had pictured all ancient Rome, and whom he would have liked to awaken and win over to the Italy of to-morrow. He had dreamt of enlarging her brain and heart by filling her with love for the lowly and the poor, with all present-day compassion for things and beings. How he would now have smiled at such a dream had not his tears been flowing! Yet how charming she had shown herself in striving to content him despite the invincible obstacles of race, education, and environment. She had been a docile pupil, but was incapable of any real progress. One day she had certainly seemed to draw nearer to him, as though her own sufferings had opened her soul to every charity; but the illusion of happiness had come back, and then she had lost all understanding of the woes of others, and had gone off in the egotism of her own hope and joy. Did that mean then that this Roman race must finish in that fashion, beautiful as it still often is, and fondly adored but so closed to all love for others, to those laws of charity and justice which, by regulating labour, can henceforth alone save this world of ours?

Then there came another great sorrow to Pierre which left him stammering, unable to speak any precise prayer. He thought of the overwhelming reassertion of Nature's powers which had attended the death of those two poor children. Was it not awful? To have taken that vow to the Virgin, to have endured torment throughout life, and to end by plunging into death, on the loved one's neck, distracted by vain regret and eager for self-bestowal! The brutal fact of impending separation had sufficed for Benedetta to realise how she had duped herself, and to revert to the universal instinct of love. And therein, again once more, was the Church vanquished; therein again appeared the great god Pan, mating the sexes and scattering life around! If in the days of the Renascence the Church did not fall beneath the assault of the Venuses and Hercules then exhumed from the old soil of Rome, the struggle at all events continued as bitterly as ever; and at each and every hour new nations, overflowing with sap, hungering for life, and warring against a religion which was nothing more than an appetite for death, threatened to sweep away that old Holy Apostolic Roman and Catholic edifice whose walls were already tottering on all sides.

And at that moment Pierre felt that the death of that adorable Benedetta was for him the supreme disaster. He was still looking at her and tears were scorching his eyes. She was carrying off his chimera. This time 'twas really the end. Rome the Catholic and the Princely was dead, lying there like marble on that funeral bed. She had been unable to go to the humble, the suffering ones of the world, and had just expired amidst the impotent cry of her egotistical passion when it was too late either to love or to create. Never more would children be born of her, the old Roman house was henceforth empty, sterile, beyond possibility of awakening. Pierre whose soul mourned such a splendid dream, was so grieved at seeing her thus motionless and frigid, that he felt himself fainting. He feared lest he might fall upon the step beside the bed, and so struggled to his feet and drew aside.

Then, as he sought refuge in a window recess in order that he might try to recover self-possession, he was astonished to perceive Victorine seated there on a bench which the hangings half concealed. She had come thither by Donna Serafina's orders, and sat watching her two dear children as she called them, whilst keeping an eye upon all who came in and went out. And, on seeing the young priest so pale and nearly swooning, she at once made room for him to sit down beside her. "Ah!" he murmured after drawing a long breath, "may they at least have the joy of being together elsewhere, of living a new life in another world."

Victorine, however, shrugged her shoulders, and in an equally low voice responded, "Oh! live again, Monsieur l'Abbe, why? When one's dead the best is to remain so and to sleep. Those poor children had enough torments on earth, one mustn't wish that they should begin again elsewhere."

This naive yet deep remark on the part of an ignorant unbelieving woman sent a shudder through Pierre's very bones. To think that his own teeth had chattered with fear at night time at the sudden thought of annihilation. He deemed her heroic at remaining so undisturbed by any ideas of eternity and the infinite. And she, as she felt he was quivering, went on: "What can you suppose there should be after death? We've deserved a right to sleep, and nothing to my thinking can be more desirable and consoling."

"But those two did not live," murmured Pierre, "so why not allow oneself the joy of believing that they now live elsewhere, recompensed for all their torments?"

Victorine, however, again shook her head; "No, no," she replied. "Ah! I was quite right in saying that my poor Benedetta did wrong in torturing herself with all those superstitious ideas of hers when she was really so fond of her lover. Yes, happiness is rarely found, and how one regrets having missed it when it's too late to turn back! That's the whole story of those poor little ones. It's too late for them, they are dead." Then in her turn she broke down and began to sob. "Poor little ones! poor little ones! Look how white they are, and think what they will be when only the bones of their heads lie side by side on the cushion, and only the bones of their arms still clasp one another. Ah! may they sleep, may they sleep; at least they know nothing and feel nothing now."

A long interval of silence followed. Pierre, amidst the quiver of his own doubts, the anxious desire which in common with most men he felt for a new life beyond the grave, gazed at this woman who did not find priests to her fancy, and who retained all her Beauceronne frankness of speech, with the tranquil, contented air of one who has ever done her duty in her humble station as a servant, lost though she had been for five and twenty years in a land of wolves, whose language she had not even been able to learn. Ah! yes, tortured as the young man was by his doubts, he would have liked to be as she was, a well-balanced, healthy, ignorant creature who was quite content with what the world offered, and who, when she had accomplished her daily task, went fully satisfied to bed, careless as to whether she might never wake again!

However, as Pierre's eyes once more sought the state bed, he suddenly recognised the old priest, who was kneeling on the step of the platform, and whose features he had hitherto been unable to distinguish. "Isn't that Abbe Pisoni, the priest of Santa Brigida, where I sometimes said mass?" he inquired. "The poor old man, how he weeps!"

In her quiet yet desolate voice Victorine replied, "He has good reason to weep. He did a fine thing when he took it into his head to marry my poor Benedetta to Count Prada. All those abominations would never have happened if the poor child had been given her Dario at once. But in this idiotic city they are all mad with their politics; and that old priest, who is none the less a very worthy man, thought he had accomplished a real miracle and saved the world by marrying the Pope and the King as he said with a soft laugh, poor old savant that he is, who for his part has never been in love with anything but old stones—you know, all that antiquated rubbish of theirs of a hundred thousand years ago. And now, you see, he can't keep from weeping. The other one too came not twenty minutes ago, Father Lorenza, the Jesuit who became the Contessina's confessor after Abbe Pisoni, and who undid what the other had done. Yes, a handsome man he is, but a fine bungler all the same, a perfect killjoy with all the crafty hindrances which he brought into that divorce affair. I wish you had been here to see what a big sign of the cross he made after he had knelt down. He didn't cry, he didn't: he seemed to be saying that as things had ended so badly it was evident that God had withdrawn from all share in the business. So much the worse for the dead!"

Victorine spoke gently and without a pause, as it relieved her, to empty her heart after the terrible hours of bustle and suffocation which she had spent since the previous day. "And that one yonder," she resumed in a lower voice, "don't you recognise her?"

She glanced towards the poorly clad girl whom Pierre had taken for a servant, and whom intensity of grief had prostrated beside the bed. With a gesture of awful suffering this girl had just thrown back her head, a head of extraordinary beauty, enveloped by superb black hair.

"La Pierina!" said Pierre. "Ah! poor girl."

Victorine made a gesture of compassion and tolerance.

"What would you have?" said she, "I let her come up. I don't know how she heard of the trouble, but it's true that she is always prowling round the house. She sent and asked me to come down to her, and you should have heard her sob and entreat me to let her see her Prince once more! Well, she does no harm to anybody there on the floor, looking at them both with her beautiful loving eyes full of tears. She's been there for half an hour already, and I had made up my mind to turn her out if she didn't behave properly. But since she's so quiet and doesn't even move, she may well stop and fill her heart with the sight of them for her whole life long."

It was really sublime to see that ignorant, passionate, beautiful Pierina thus overwhelmed below the nuptial couch on which the lovers slept for all eternity. She had sunk down on her heels, her arms hanging heavily beside her, and her hands open. And with raised face, motionless as in an ecstasy of suffering, she did not take her eyes from that adorable and tragic pair. Never had human face displayed such beauty, such a dazzling splendour of suffering and love; never had there been such a portrayal of ancient Grief, not however cold like marble but quivering with life. What was she thinking of, what were her sufferings, as she thus fixedly gazed at her Prince now and for ever locked in her rival's arms? Was it some jealousy which could have no end that chilled the blood of her veins? Or was it mere suffering at having lost him, at realising that she was looking at him for the last time, without thought of hatred for that other woman who vainly sought to warm him with her arms as icy cold as his own? There was still a soft gleam in the poor girl's blurred eyes, and her lips were still lips of love though curved in bitterness by grief. She found the lovers so pure and beautiful as they lay there amidst that profusion of flowers! And beautiful herself, beautiful like a queen, ignorant of her own charms, she remained there breathless, a humble servant, a loving slave as it were, whose heart had been wrenched away and carried off by her dying master.

People were now constantly entering the room, slowly approaching with mournful faces, then kneeling and praying for a few minutes, and afterwards retiring with the same mute, desolate mien. A pang came to Pierre's heart when he saw Dario's mother, the ever beautiful Flavia, enter, accompanied by her husband, the handsome Jules Laporte, that ex-sergeant of the Swiss Guard whom she had turned into a Marquis Montefiori. Warned of the tragedy directly it had happened, she had already come to the mansion on the previous evening; but now she returned in grand ceremony and full mourning, looking superb in her black garments which were well suited to her massive, Juno-like style of beauty. When she had approached the bed with a queenly step, she remained for a moment standing with two tears at the edges of her eyelids, tears which did not fall. Then, at the moment of kneeling, she made sure that Jules was beside her, and glanced at him as if to order him to kneel as well. They both sank down beside the platform and remained in prayer for the proper interval, she very dignified in her grief and he even surpassing her, with the perfect sorrow-stricken bearing of a man who knew how to conduct himself in every circumstance of life, even the gravest. And afterwards they rose together, and slowly betook themselves to the entrance of the private apartments where the Cardinal and Donna Serafina were receiving their relatives and friends.

Five ladies then came in one after the other, while two Capuchins and the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See went off. And Victorine, who for a few minutes had remained silent, suddenly resumed. "Ah! there's the little Princess, she's much afflicted too, and, no wonder, she was so fond of our Benedetta."

Pierre himself had just noticed Celia coming in. She also had attired herself in full mourning for this abominable visit of farewell. Behind her was a maid, who carried on either arm a huge sheaf of white roses.

"The dear girl!" murmured Victorine, "she wanted her wedding with her Attilio to take place on the same day as that of the poor lovers who lie there. And they, alas! have forestalled her, their wedding's over; there they sleep in their bridal bed."

Celia had at once crossed herself and knelt down beside the bed, but it was evident that she was not praying. She was indeed looking at the lovers with desolate stupefaction at finding them so white and cold with a beauty as of marble. What! had a few hours sufficed, had life departed, would those lips never more exchange a kiss! She could again see them at the ball of that other night, so resplendent and triumphant with their living love. And a feeling of furious protest rose from her young heart, so open to life, so eager for joy and sunlight, so angry with the hateful idiocy of death. And her anger and affright and grief, as she thus found herself face to face with the annihilation which chills every passion, could be read on her ingenuous, candid, lily-like face. She herself stood on the threshold of a life of passion of which she yet knew nothing, and behold! on that very threshold she encountered the corpses of those dearly loved ones, the loss of whom racked her soul with grief.

She gently closed her eyes and tried to pray, whilst big tears fell from under her lowered eyelids. Some time went by amidst the quivering silence, which only the murmur of the mass near by disturbed. At last she rose and took the sheaves of flowers from her maid; and standing on the platform she hesitated for a moment, then placed the roses to the right and left of the cushion on which the lovers' heads were resting, as if she wished to crown them with those blossoms, perfume their young brows with that sweet and powerful aroma. Then, though her hands remained empty she did not retire, but remained there leaning over the dead ones, trembling and seeking what she might yet say to them, what she might leave them of herself for ever more. An inspiration came to her, and she stooped forward, and with her whole, deep, loving soul set a long, long kiss on the brow of either spouse.

"Ah! the dear girl!" said Victorine, whose tears were again flowing. "You saw that she kissed them, and nobody had yet thought of that, not even the poor young Prince's mother. Ah! the dear little heart, she surely thought of her Attilio."

However, as Celia turned to descend from the platform she perceived La Pierina, whose figure was still thrown back in an attitude of mute and dolorous adoration. And she recognised the girl and melted with pity on seeing such a fit of sobbing come over her that her whole body, her goddess-like hips and bosom, shook as with frightful anguish. That agony of love quite upset the little Princess, and she could be heard murmuring in a tone of infinite compassion, "Calm yourself, my dear, calm yourself. Be reasonable, my dear, I beg you."

Then as La Pierina, thunderstruck at thus being pitied and succoured, began to sob yet more loudly so as to create quite a stir in the room, Celia raised her and held her up with both arms, for fear lest she should fall again. And she led her away in a sisterly clasp, like a sister of affection and despair, lavishing the most gentle, consoling words upon her as they went.

"Follow them, go and see what becomes of them," Victorine said to Pierre. "I do not want to stir from here, it quiets me to watch over my two poor children."

A Capuchin was just beginning a fresh mass at the improvised altar, and the low Latin psalmody went on again, while in the adjoining ante-chamber, where another mass was being celebrated, a bell was heard tinkling for the elevation of the host. The perfume of the flowers was becoming more violent and oppressive amidst the motionless and mournful atmosphere of the spacious throne-room. The four servants standing at the head of the bed, as for a gala reception, did not stir, and the procession of visitors ever continued, men and women entering in silence, suffocating there for a moment, and then withdrawing, carrying away with them the never-to-be-forgotten vision of the two tragic lovers sleeping their eternal sleep.

Pierre joined Celia and La Pierina in the anticamera nobile, where stood Don Vigilio. The few seats belonging to the throne-room had there been placed in a corner, and the little Princess had just compelled the work-girl to sit down in an arm-chair, in order that she might recover self-possession. Celia was in ecstasy before her, enraptured at finding her so beautiful, more beautiful than any other, as she said. Then she spoke of the two dead ones, who also had seemed to her very beautiful, endowed with an extraordinary beauty, at once superb and sweet; and despite all her tears, she still remained in a transport of admiration. On speaking with La Pierina, Pierre learnt that her brother Tito was at the hospital in great danger from the effects of a terrible knife thrust dealt him in the side; and since the beginning of the winter, said the girl, the misery in the district of the castle fields had become frightful. It was a source of great suffering to every one, and those whom death carried off had reason to rejoice.

Celia, however, with a gesture of invincible hopefulness, brushed all idea of suffering, even of death, aside. "No, no, we must live," she said. "And beauty is sufficient for life. Come, my dear, do not remain here, do not weep any more; live for the delight of being beautiful."

Then she led La Pierina away, and Pierre remained seated in one of the arm-chairs, overcome by such sorrow and weariness that he would have liked to remain there for ever. Don Vigilio was still bowing to each fresh visitor that arrived. A severe attack of fever had come on him during the night, and he was shivering from it, with his face very yellow, and his eyes ablaze and haggard. He constantly glanced at Pierre, as if anxious to speak to him, but his dread lest he should be seen by Abbe Paparelli, who stood in the next ante-room, the door of which was wide open, doubtless restrained him, for he did not cease to watch the train-bearer. At last the latter was compelled to absent himself for a moment, and the secretary thereupon approached the young Frenchman.

"You saw his Holiness last night," he said; and as Pierre gazed at him in stupefaction he added: "Oh! everything gets known, I told you so before. Well, and you purely and simply withdrew your book, did you not?" The young priest's increasing stupor was sufficient answer, and without leaving him time to reply, Don Vigilio went on: "I suspected it, but I wished to make certain. Ah! that's just the way they work! Do you believe me now, have you realised that they stifle those whom they don't poison?"

He was no doubt referring to the Jesuits. However, after glancing into the adjoining room to make sure that Abbe Paparelli had not returned thither, he resumed: "And what has Monsignor Nani just told you?"

"But I have not yet seen Monsignor Nani," was Pierre's reply.

"Oh! I thought you had. He passed through before you arrived. If you did not see him in the throne-room he must have gone to pay his respects to Donna Serafina and his Eminence. However, he will certainly pass this way again; you will see him by and by." Then with the bitterness of one who was weak, ever terror-smitten and vanquished, Don Vigilio added: "I told you that you would end by doing what Monsignor Nani desired."

With these words, fancying that he heard the light footfall of Abbe Paparelli, he hastily returned to his place and bowed to two old ladies who just then walked in. And Pierre, still seated, overcome, his eyes wearily closing, at last saw the figure of Nani arise before him in all its reality so typical of sovereign intelligence and address. He remembered what Don Vigilio, on the famous night of his revelations, had told him of this man who was far too shrewd to have labelled himself, so to say, with an unpopular robe, and who, withal, was a charming prelate with thorough knowledge of the world, acquired by long experience at different nunciatures and at the Holy Office, mixed up in everything, informed with regard to everything, one of the heads, one of the chief minds in fact of that modern black army, which by dint of Opportunism hopes to bring this century back to the Church. And all at once, full enlightenment fell on Pierre, he realised by what supple, clever strategy that man had led him to the act which he desired of him, the pure and simple withdrawal of his book, accomplished with every appearance of free will. First there had been great annoyance on Nani's part on learning that the book was being prosecuted, for he feared lest its excitable author might be prompted to some dangerous revolt; then plans had at once been formed, information had been collected concerning this young priest who seemed so capable of schism, he had been urged to come to Rome, invited to stay in an ancient mansion whose very walls would chill and enlighten him. And afterwards had come the ever recurring obstacles, the system of prolonging his sojourn in Rome by preventing him from seeing the Pope, but promising him the much-desired interview when the proper time should come, that is after he had been sent hither and thither and brought into collision with one and all. And finally, when every one and everything had shaken, wearied, and disgusted him, and he was restored once more to his old doubts, there had come the audience for which he had undergone all this preparation, that visit to the Pope which was destined to shatter whatever remained to him of his dream. Pierre could picture Nani smiling at him and speaking to him, declaring that the repeated delays were a favour of Providence, which would enable him to visit Rome, study and understand things, reflect, and avoid blunders. How delicate and how profound had been the prelate's diplomacy in thus crushing his feelings beneath his reason, appealing to his intelligence to suppress his work without any scandalous struggle as soon as his knowledge of the real Rome should have shown him how supremely ridiculous it was to dream of a new one!

At that moment Pierre perceived Nani in person just coming from the throne-room, and did not feel the irritation and rancour which he had anticipated. On the contrary he was glad when the prelate, in his turn seeing him, drew near and held out his hand. Nani, however, did not wear his wonted smile, but looked very grave, quite grief-stricken. "Ah! my dear son," he said, "what a frightful catastrophe! I have just left his Eminence, he is in tears. It is horrible, horrible!"

He seated himself on one of the chairs, inviting the young priest, who had risen, to do the same; and for a moment he remained silent, weary with emotion no doubt, and needing a brief rest to free himself of the weight of thoughts which visibly darkened his usually bright face. Then, with a gesture, he strove to dismiss that gloom, and recover his amiable cordiality. "Well, my dear son," he began, "you saw his Holiness?"

"Yes, Monseigneur, yesterday evening; and I thank you for your great kindness in satisfying my desire."

Nani looked at him fixedly, and his invincible smile again returned to his lips. "You thank me.... I can well see that you behaved sensibly and laid your full submission at his Holiness's feet. I was certain of it, I did not expect less of your fine intelligence. But, all the same, you render me very happy, for I am delighted to find that I was not mistaken concerning you." And then, setting aside his reserve, the prelate went on: "I never discussed things with you. What would have been the good of it, since facts were there to convince you? And now that you have withdrawn your book a discussion would be still more futile. However, just reflect that if it were possible for you to bring the Church back to her early period, to that Christian community which you have sketched so delightfully, she could only again follow the same evolutions as those in which God the first time guided her; so that, at the end of a similar number of centuries, she would find herself exactly in the position which she occupies to-day. No, what God has done has been well done, the Church such as she is must govern the world, such as it is; it is for her alone to know how she will end by firmly establishing her reign here below. And this is why your attack upon the temporal power was an unpardonable fault, a crime even, for by dispossessing the papacy of her domains you hand her over to the mercy of the nations. Your new religion is but the final downfall of all religion, moral anarchy, the liberty of schism, in a word, the destruction of the divine edifice, that ancient Catholicism which has shown such prodigious wisdom and solidity, which has sufficed for the salvation of mankind till now, and will alone be able to save it to-morrow and always."

Pierre felt that Nani was sincere, pious even, and really unshakable in his faith, loving the Church like a grateful son, and convinced that she was the only social organisation which could render mankind happy. And if he were bent on governing the world, it was doubtless for the pleasure of governing, but also in the conviction that no one could do so better than himself.

"Oh! certainly," said he, "methods are open to discussion. I desire them to be as affable and humane as possible, as conciliatory as can be with this present century, which seems to be escaping us, precisely because there is a misunderstanding between us. But we shall bring it back, I am sure of it. And that is why, my dear son, I am so pleased to see you return to the fold, thinking as we think, and ready to battle on our side, is that not so?"

In Nani's words the young priest once more found the arguments of Leo XIII. Desiring to avoid a direct reply, for although he now felt no anger the wrenching away of his dream had left him a smarting wound, he bowed, and replied slowly in order to conceal the bitter tremble of his voice: "I repeat, Monseigneur, that I deeply thank you for having amputated my vain illusions with the skill of an accomplished surgeon. A little later, when I shall have ceased to suffer, I shall think of you with eternal gratitude."

Monsignor Nani still looked at him with a smile. He fully understood that this young priest would remain on one side, that as an element of strength he was lost to the Church. What would he do now? Something foolish no doubt. However, the prelate had to content himself with having helped him to repair his first folly; he could not foresee the future. And he gracefully waved his hand as if to say that sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.

"Will you allow me to conclude, my dear son?" he at last exclaimed. "Be sensible, your happiness as a priest and a man lies in humility. You will be terribly unhappy if you use the great intelligence which God has given you against Him."

Then with another gesture he dismissed this affair, which was all over, and with which he need busy himself no more. And thereupon the other affair came back to make him gloomy, that other affair which also was drawing to a close, but so tragically, with those two poor children slumbering in the adjoining room. "Ah!" he resumed, "that poor Princess and that poor Cardinal quite upset my heart! Never did catastrophe fall so cruelly on a house. No, no, it is indeed too much, misfortune goes too far—it revolts one's soul!"

Just as he finished a sound of voices came from the second ante-room, and Pierre was thunderstruck to see Cardinal Sanguinetti go by, escorted with the greatest obsequiousness by Abbe Paparelli.

"If your most Reverend Eminence will have the extreme kindness to follow me," the train-bearer was saying, "I will conduct your most Reverend Eminence myself."

"Yes," replied Sanguinetti, "I arrived yesterday evening from Frascati, and when I heard the sad news, I at once desired to express my sorrow and offer consolation."

"Your Eminence will perhaps condescend to remain for a moment near the bodies. I will afterwards escort your Eminence to the private apartments."

"Yes, by all means. I desire every one to know how greatly I participate in the sorrow which has fallen on this illustrious house."

Then Sanguinetti entered the throne-room, leaving Pierre quite aghast at his quiet audacity. The young priest certainly did not accuse him of direct complicity with Santobono, he did not even dare to measure how far his moral complicity might go. But on seeing him pass by like that, his brow so lofty, his speech so clear, he had suddenly felt convinced that he knew the truth. How or through whom, he could not have told; but doubtless crimes become known in those shady spheres by those whose interest it is to know of them. And Pierre remained quite chilled by the haughty fashion in which that man presented himself, perhaps to stifle suspicion and certainly to accomplish an act of good policy by giving his rival a public mark of esteem and affection.

"The Cardinal! Here!" Pierre murmured despite himself.

Nani, who followed the young man's thoughts in his childish eyes, in which all could be read, pretended to mistake the sense of his exclamation. "Yes," said he, "I learnt that the Cardinal returned to Rome yesterday evening. He did not wish to remain away any longer; the Holy Father being so much better that he might perhaps have need of him."

Although these words were spoken with an air of perfect innocence, Pierre was not for a moment deceived by them. And having in his turn glanced at the prelate, he was convinced that the latter also knew the truth. Then, all at once, the whole affair appeared to him in its intricacy, in the ferocity which fate had imparted to it. Nani, an old intimate of the Palazzo Boccanera, was not heartless, he had surely loved Benedetta with affection, charmed by so much grace and beauty. One could thus explain the victorious manner in which he had at last caused her marriage to be annulled. But if Don Vigilio were to be believed, that divorce, obtained by pecuniary outlay, and under pressure of the most notorious influences, was simply a scandal which he, Nani, had in the first instance spun out, and then precipitated towards a resounding finish with the sole object of discrediting the Cardinal and destroying his chances of the tiara on the eve of the Conclave which everybody thought imminent. It seemed certain, too, that the Cardinal, uncompromising as he was, could not be the candidate of Nani, who was so desirous of universal agreement, and so the latter's long labour in that house, whilst conducing to the happiness of the Contessina, had been designed to frustrate Donna Serafina and Cardinal Pio in their burning ambition, that third triumphant elevation to the papacy which they sought to secure for their ancient family. However, if Nani had always desired to baulk this ambition, and had even at one moment placed his hopes in Sanguinetti and fought for him, he had never imagined that Boccanera's foes would go to the point of crime, to such an abomination as poison which missed its mark and killed the innocent. No, no, as he himself said, that was too much, and made one's soul rebel. He employed more gentle weapons; such brutality filled him with indignation; and his face, so pinky and carefully tended, still wore the grave expression of his revolt in presence of the tearful Cardinal and those poor lovers stricken in his stead.

Believing that Sanguinetti was still the prelate's secret candidate, Pierre was worried to know how far their moral complicity in this baleful affair might go. So he resumed the conversation by saying: "It is asserted that his Holiness is on bad terms with his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti. Of course the reigning pope cannot look on the future pope with a very kindly eye."

At this, Nani for a moment became quite gay in all frankness. "Oh," said he, "the Cardinal has quarrelled and made things up with the Vatican three or four times already. And, in any event, the Holy Father has no motive for posthumous jealousy; he knows very well that he can give his Eminence a good greeting." Then, regretting that he had thus expressed a certainty, he added: "I am joking, his Eminence is altogether worthy of the high fortune which perhaps awaits him."

Pierre knew what to think however; Sanguinetti was certainly Nani's candidate no longer. It was doubtless considered that he had used himself up too much by his impatient ambition, and was too dangerous by reason of the equivocal alliances which in his feverishness he had concluded with every party, even that of patriotic young Italy. And thus the situation became clearer. Cardinals Sanguinetti and Boccanera devoured and suppressed one another; the first, ever intriguing, accepting every compromise, dreaming of winning Rome back by electoral methods; and the other, erect and motionless in his stern maintenance of the past, excommunicating the century, and awaiting from God alone the miracle which would save the Church. And, indeed, why not leave the two theories, thus placed face to face, to destroy one another, including all the extreme, disquieting views which they respectively embodied? If Boccanera had escaped the poison, he had none the less become an impossible candidate, killed by all the stories which had set Rome buzzing; while if Sanguinetti could say that he was rid of a rival, he had at the same time dealt a mortal blow to his own candidature, by displaying such passion for power, and such unscrupulousness with regard to the methods he employed, as to be a danger for every one. Monsignor Nani was visibly delighted with this result; neither candidate was left, it was like the legendary story of the two wolves who fought and devoured one another so completely that nothing of either of them was found left, not even their tails! And in the depths of the prelate's pale eyes, in the whole of his discreet person, there remained nothing but redoubtable mystery: the mystery of the yet unknown, but definitively selected candidate who would be patronised by the all-powerful army of which he was one of the most skilful leaders. A man like him always had a solution ready. Who, then, who would be the next pope?

However, he now rose and cordially took leave of the young priest. "I doubt if I shall see you again, my dear son," he said; "I wish you a good journey."

Still he did not go off, but continued to look at Pierre with his penetrating eyes, and finally made him sit down again and did the same himself. "I feel sure," he said, "that you will go to pay your respects to Cardinal Bergerot as soon as you have returned to France. Kindly tell him that I respectfully desired to be reminded to him. I knew him a little at the time when he came here for his hat. He is one of the great luminaries of the French clergy. Ah! a man of such intelligence would only work for a good understanding in our holy Church. Unfortunately I fear that race and environment have instilled prejudices into him, for he does not always help us."

Pierre, who was surprised to hear Nani speak of the Cardinal for the first time at this moment of farewell, listened with curiosity. Then in all frankness he replied: "Yes, his Eminence has very decided ideas about our old Church of France. For instance, he professes perfect horror of the Jesuits."

With a light exclamation Nani stopped the young man. And he wore the most sincerely, frankly astonished air that could be imagined. "What! horror of the Jesuits! In what way can the Jesuits disquiet him? The Jesuits, there are none, that's all over! Have you seen any in Rome? Have they troubled you in any way, those poor Jesuits who haven't even a stone of their own left here on which to lay their heads? No, no, that bogey mustn't be brought up again, it's childish."

Pierre in his turn looked at him, marvelling at his perfect ease, his quiet courage in dealing with this burning subject. He did not avert his eyes, but displayed an open face like a book of truth. "Ah!" he continued, "if by Jesuits you mean the sensible priests who, instead of entering into sterile and dangerous struggles with modern society, seek by human methods to bring it back to the Church, why, then of course we are all of us more or less Jesuits, for it would be madness not to take into account the times in which one lives. And besides, I won't haggle over words; they are of no consequence! Jesuits, well, yes, if you like, Jesuits!" He was again smiling with that shrewd smile of his in which there was so much raillery and so much intelligence. "Well, when you see Cardinal Bergerot tell him that it is unreasonable to track the Jesuits and treat them as enemies of the nation. The contrary is the truth. The Jesuits are for France, because they are for wealth, strength, and courage. France is the only great Catholic country which has yet remained erect and sovereign, the only one on which the papacy can some day lean. Thus the Holy Father, after momentarily dreaming of obtaining support from victorious Germany, has allied himself with France, the vanquished, because he has understood that apart from France there can be no salvation for the Church. And in this he has only followed the policy of the Jesuits, those frightful Jesuits, whom your Parisians execrate. And tell Cardinal Bergerot also that it would be grand of him to work for pacification by making people understand how wrong it is for your Republic to help the Holy Father so little in his conciliatory efforts. It pretends to regard him as an element in the world's affairs that may be neglected; and that is dangerous, for although he may seem to have no political means of action he remains an immense moral force, and can at any moment raise consciences in rebellion and provoke a religious agitation of the most far-reaching consequences. It is still he who disposes of the nations, since he disposes of their souls, and the Republic acts most inconsiderately, from the standpoint of its own interests, in showing that it no longer even suspects it. And tell the Cardinal too, that it is really pitiful to see in what a wretched way your Republic selects its bishops, as though it intentionally desired to weaken its episcopacy. Leaving out a few fortunate exceptions, your bishops are men of small brains, and as a result your cardinals, likewise mere mediocrities, have no influence, play no part here in Rome. Ah! what a sorry figure you Frenchmen will cut at the next Conclave! And so why do you show such blind and foolish hatred of those Jesuits, who, politically, are your friends? Why don't you employ their intelligent zeal, which is ready to serve you, so that you may assure yourselves the help of the next, the coming pope? It is necessary for you that he should be on your side, that he should continue the work of Leo XIII, which is so badly judged and so much opposed, but which cares little for the petty results of to-day, since its purpose lies in the future, in the union of all the nations under their holy mother the Church. Tell Cardinal Bergerot, tell him plainly that he ought to be with us, that he ought to work for his country by working for us. The coming pope, why the whole question lies in that, and woe to France if in him she does not find a continuator of Leo XIII!"

Nani had again risen, and this time he was going off. Never before had he unbosomed himself at such length. But most assuredly he had only said what he desired to say, for a purpose that he alone knew of, and in a firm, gentle, and deliberate voice by which one could tell that each word had been weighed and determined beforehand. "Farewell, my dear son," he said, "and once again think over all you have seen and heard in Rome. Be as sensible as you can, and do not spoil your life."

Pierre bowed, and pressed the small, plump, supple hand which the prelate offered him. "Monseigneur," he replied, "I again thank you for all your kindness; you may be sure that I shall forget nothing of my journey."

Then he watched Nani as he went off, with a light and conquering step as if marching to all the victories of the future. No, no, he, Pierre, would forget nothing of his journey! He well knew that union of all the nations under their holy mother the Church, that temporal bondage in which the law of Christ would become the dictatorship of Augustus, master of the world! And as for those Jesuits, he had no doubt that they did love France, the eldest daughter of the Church, and the only daughter that could yet help her mother to reconquer universal sovereignty, but they loved her even as the black swarms of locusts love the harvests which they swoop upon and devour. Infinite sadness had returned to the young man's heart as he dimly realised that in that sorely-stricken mansion, in all that mourning and downfall, it was they, they again, who must have been the artisans of grief and disaster.

As this thought came to him he turned round and perceived Don Vigilio leaning against the credence in front of the large portrait of the Cardinal. Holding his hands to his face as if he desired to annihilate himself, the secretary was shivering in every limb as much with fear as with fever. At a moment when no fresh visitors were arriving he had succumbed to an attack of terrified despair.

"Mon Dieu! What is the matter with you?" asked Pierre stepping forward, "are you ill, can I help you?"

But Don Vigilio, suffocating and still hiding his face, could only gasp between his close-pressed hands "Ah! Paparelli, Paparelli!"

"What is it? What has he done to you?" asked the other astonished.

Then the secretary disclosed his face, and again yielded to his quivering desire to confide in some one. "Eh? what he has done to me? Can't you feel anything, can't you see anything then? Didn't you notice the manner in which he took possession of Cardinal Sanguinetti so as to conduct him to his Eminence? To impose that suspected, hateful rival on his Eminence at such a moment as this, what insolent audacity! And a few minutes previously did you notice with what wicked cunning he bowed out an old lady, a very old family friend, who only desired to kiss his Eminence's hand and show a little real affection which would have made his Eminence so happy! Ah! I tell you that he's the master here, he opens or closes the door as he pleases, and holds us all between his fingers like a pinch of dust which one throws to the wind!"

Pierre became anxious, seeing how yellow and feverish Don Vigilio was: "Come, come, my dear fellow," he said, "you are exaggerating!"

"Exaggerating? Do you know what happened last night, what I myself unwillingly witnessed? No, you don't know it; well, I will tell you."

Thereupon he related that Donna Serafina, on returning home on the previous day to face the terrible catastrophe awaiting her, had already been overcome by the bad news which she had learnt when calling on the Cardinal Secretary and various prelates of her acquaintance. She had then acquired a certainty that her brother's position was becoming extremely bad, for he had made so many fresh enemies among his colleagues of the Sacred College, that his election to the pontifical throne, which a year previously had seemed probable, now appeared an impossibility. Thus, all at once, the dream of her life collapsed, the ambition which she had so long nourished lay in dust at her feet. On despairingly seeking the why and wherefore of this change, she had been told of all sorts of blunders committed by the Cardinal, acts of rough sternness, unseasonable manifestations of opinion, inconsiderate words or actions which had sufficed to wound people, in fact such provoking demeanour that one might have thought it adopted with the express intention of spoiling everything. And the worst was that in each of the blunders she had recognised errors of judgment which she herself had blamed, but which her brother had obstinately insisted on perpetrating under the unacknowledged influence of Abbe Paparelli, that humble and insignificant train-bearer, in whom she detected a baneful and powerful adviser who destroyed her own vigilant and devoted influence. And so, in spite of the mourning in which the house was plunged, she did not wish to delay the punishment of the traitor, particularly as his old friendship with that terrible Santobono, and the story of that basket of figs which had passed from the hands of the one to those of the other, chilled her blood with a suspicion which she even recoiled from elucidating. However, at the first words she spoke, directly she made a formal request that the traitor should be immediately turned out of the house, she was confronted by invincible resistance on her brother's part. He would not listen to her, but flew into one of those hurricane-like passions which swept everything away, reproaching her for laying blame on so modest, pious, and saintly a man, and accusing her of playing into the hands of his enemies, who, after killing Monsignor Gallo, were seeking to poison his sole remaining affection for that poor, insignificant priest. He treated all the stories he was told as abominable inventions, and swore that he would keep the train-bearer in his service if only to show his disdain for calumny. And she was thereupon obliged to hold her peace.

However, Don Vigilio's shuddering fit had again come back; he carried his hands to his face stammering: "Ah! Paparelli, Paparelli!" And muttered invectives followed: the train-bearer was an artful hypocrite who feigned modesty and humility, a vile spy appointed to pry into everything, listen to everything, and pervert everything that went on in the palace; he was a loathsome, destructive insect, feeding on the most noble prey, devouring the lion's mane, a Jesuit—the Jesuit who is at once lackey and tyrant, in all his base horror as he accomplishes the work of vermin.

"Calm yourself, calm yourself," repeated Pierre, who whilst allowing for foolish exaggeration on the secretary's part could not help shivering at thought of all the threatening things which he himself could divine astir in the gloom.

However, since Don Vigilio had so narrowly escaped eating those horrible figs, his fright was such that nothing could calm it. Even when he was alone at night, in bed, with his door locked and bolted, sudden terror fell on him and made him hide his head under the sheet and vent stifled cries as if he thought that men were coming through the wall to strangle him. In a faint, breathless voice, as if just emerging from a struggle, he now resumed: "I told you what would happen on the evening when we had a talk together in your room. Although all the doors were securely shut, I did wrong to speak of them to you, I did wrong to ease my heart by telling you all that they were capable of. I was sure they would learn it, and you see they did learn it, since they tried to kill me.... Why it's even wrong of me to tell you this, for it will reach their ears and they won't miss me the next time. Ah! it's all over, I'm as good as dead; this house which I thought so safe will be my tomb."

Pierre began to feel deep compassion for this ailing man, whose feverish brain was haunted by nightmares, and whose life was being finally wrecked by the anguish of persecution mania. "But you must run away in that case!" he said. "Don't stop here; come to France."

Don Vigilio looked at him, momentarily calmed by surprise. "Run away, why? Go to France? Why, they are there! No matter where I might go, they would be there. They are everywhere, I should always be surrounded by them! No, no, I prefer to stay here and would rather die at once if his Eminence can no longer defend me." With an expression of ardent entreaty in which a last gleam of hope tried to assert itself, he raised his eyes to the large painting in which the Cardinal stood forth resplendent in his cassock of red moire; but his attack came back again and overwhelmed him with increased intensity of fever. "Leave me, I beg you, leave me," he gasped. "Don't make me talk any more. Ah! Paparelli, Paparelli! If he should come back and see us and hear me speak.... Oh! I'll never say anything again. I'll tie up my tongue, I'll cut it off. Leave me, you are killing me, I tell you, he'll be coming back and that will mean my death. Go away, oh! for mercy's sake, go away!"

Thereupon Don Vigilio turned towards the wall as if to flatten his face against it, and immure his lips in tomb-like silence; and Pierre resolved to leave him to himself, fearing lest he should provoke a yet more serious attack if he went on endeavouring to succour him.

On returning to the throne-room the young priest again found himself amidst all the frightful mourning. Mass was following mass; without cessation murmured prayers entreated the divine mercy to receive the two dear departed souls with loving kindness. And amidst the dying perfume of the fading roses, in front of the pale stars of the lighted candles, Pierre thought of that supreme downfall of the Boccaneras. Dario was the last of the name, and one could well understand that the Cardinal, whose only sin was family pride, should have loved that one remaining scion by whom alone the old stock might yet blossom afresh. And indeed, if he and Donna Serafina had desired the divorce, and then the marriage of the cousins, it had been less with the view of putting an end to scandal than with the hope of seeing a new line of Boccaneras spring up. But the lovers were dead, and the last remains of a long series of dazzling princes of sword and of gown lay there on that bed, soon to rot in the grave. It was all over; that old maid and that aged Cardinal could leave no posterity. They remained face to face like two withered oaks, sole remnants of a vanished forest, and their fall would soon leave the plain quite clear. And how terrible the grief of surviving in impotence, what anguish to have to tell oneself that one is the end of everything, that with oneself all life, all hope for the morrow will depart! Amidst the murmur of the prayers, the dying perfume of the roses, the pale gleams of the two candies, Pierre realised what a downfall was that bereavement, how heavy was the gravestone which fell for ever on an extinct house, a vanished world.

He well understood that as one of the familiars of the mansion he must pay his respects to Donna Serafina and the Cardinal, and he at once sought admission to the neighbouring room where the Princess was receiving her friends. He found her robed in black, very slim and very erect in her arm-chair, whence she rose with slow dignity to respond to the bow of each person that entered. She listened to the condolences but answered never a word, overcoming her physical pain by rigidity of bearing. Pierre, who had learnt to know her, could divine, however, by the hollowness of her cheeks, the emptiness of her eyes, and the bitter twinge of her mouth, how frightful was the collapse within her. Not only was her race ended, but her brother would never be pope, never secure the elevation which she had so long fancied she was winning for him by dint of devotion, dint of feminine renunciation, giving brain and heart, care and money, foregoing even wifehood and motherhood, spoiling her whole life, in order to realise that dream. And amidst all the ruin of hope, it was perhaps the nonfulfilment of that ambition which most made her heart bleed. She rose for the young priest, her guest, as she rose for the other persons who presented themselves; but she contrived to introduce shades of meaning into the manner in which she quitted her chair, and Pierre fully realised that he had remained in her eyes a mere petty French priest, an insignificant domestic of the Divinity who had not known how to acquire even the title of prelate. When she had again seated herself after acknowledging his compliment with a slight inclination of the head, he remained for a moment standing, out of politeness. Not a word, not a sound disturbed the mournful quiescence of the room, for although there were four or five lady visitors seated there they remained motionless and silent as with grief. Pierre was most struck, however, by the sight of Cardinal Sarno, who was lying back in an arm-chair with his eyes closed. The poor puny lopsided old man had lingered there forgetfully after expressing his condolences, and, overcome by the heavy silence and close atmosphere, had just fallen asleep. And everybody respected his slumber. Was he dreaming as he dozed of that map of Christendom which he carried behind his low obtuse-looking brow? Was he continuing in dreamland his terrible work of conquest, that task of subjecting and governing the earth which he directed from his dark room at the Propaganda? The ladies glanced at him affectionately and deferentially; he was gently scolded at times for over-working himself, the sleepiness which nowadays frequently overtook him in all sorts of places being attributed to excess of genius and zeal. And of this all-powerful Eminence Pierre was destined to carry off only this last impression: an exhausted old man, resting amidst the emotion of a mourning-gathering, sleeping there like a candid child, without any one knowing whether this were due to the approach of senile imbecility, or to the fatigues of a night spent in organising the reign of God over some distant continent.

Two ladies went off and three more arrived. Donna Serafina rose, bowed, and then reseated herself, reverting to her rigid attitude, her bust erect, her face stern and full of despair. Cardinal Sarno was still asleep. Then Pierre felt as if he would stifle, a kind of vertigo came on him, and his heart beat violently. So he bowed and withdrew: and on passing through the dining-room on his way to the little study where Cardinal Boccanera received his visitors, he found himself in the presence of Paparelli who was jealously guarding the door. When the train-bearer had sniffed at the young man, he seemed to realise that he could not refuse him admittance. Moreover, as this intruder was going away the very next day, defeated and covered with shame, there was nothing to be feared from him.

"You wish to see his Eminence?" said Paparelli. "Good, good. By and by, wait." And opining that Pierre was too near the door, he pushed him back to the other end of the room, for fear no doubt lest he should overhear anything. "His Eminence is still engaged with his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti. Wait, wait there!"

Sanguinetti indeed had made a point of kneeling for a long time in front of the bodies in the throne-room, and had then spun out his visit to Donna Serafina in order to mark how largely he shared the family sorrow. And for more than ten minutes now he had been closeted with Cardinal Boccanera, nothing but an occasional murmur of their voices being heard through the closed door.

Pierre, however, on finding Paparelli there, was again haunted by all that Don Vigilio had told him. He looked at the train-bearer, so fat and short, puffed out with bad fat in his dirty cassock, his face flabby and wrinkled, and his whole person at forty years of age suggestive of that of a very old maid: and he felt astonished. How was it that Cardinal Boccanera, that superb prince who carried his head so high, and who was so supremely proud of his name, had allowed himself to be captured and swayed by such a frightful creature reeking of baseness and abomination? Was it not the man's very physical degradation and profound humility that had struck him, disturbed him, and finally fascinated him, as wondrous gifts conducing to salvation, which he himself lacked? Paparelli's person and disposition were like blows dealt to his own handsome presence and his own pride. He, who could not be so deformed, he who could not vanquish his passion for glory, must, by an effort of faith, have grown jealous of that man who was so extremely ugly and so extremely insignificant, he must have come to admire him as a superior force of penitence and human abasement which threw the portals of heaven wide open. Who can ever tell what ascendency is exercised by the monster over the hero; by the horrid-looking saint covered with vermin over the powerful of this world in their terror at having to endure everlasting flames in payment of their terrestrial joys? And 'twas indeed the lion devoured by the insect, vast strength and splendour destroyed by the invisible. Ah! to have that fine soul which was so certain of paradise, which for its welfare was enclosed in such a disgusting body, to possess the happy humility of that wide intelligence, that remarkable theologian, who scourged himself with rods each morning on rising, and was content to be the lowest of servants.

Standing there a heap of livid fat, Paparelli on his side watched Pierre with his little grey eyes blinking amidst the myriad wrinkles of his face. And the young priest began to feel uneasy, wondering what their Eminences could be saying to one another, shut up together like that for so long a time. And what an interview it must be if Boccanera suspected Sanguinetti of counting Santobono among his clients. What serene audacity it was on Sanguinetti's part to have dared to present himself in that house, and what strength of soul there must be on Boccanera's part, what empire over himself, to prevent all scandal by remaining silent and accepting the visit as a simple mark of esteem and affection! What could they be saying to one another, however? How interesting it would have been to have seen them face to face, and have heard them exchange the diplomatic phrases suited to such an interview, whilst their souls were raging with furious hatred!

All at once the door opened and Cardinal Sanguinetti appeared with calm face, no ruddier than usual, indeed a trifle paler, and retaining the fitting measure of sorrow which he had thought it right to assume. His restless eyes alone revealed his delight at being rid of a difficult task. And he was going off, all hope, in the conviction that he was the only eligible candidate to the papacy that remained.

Abbe Paparelli had darted forward: "If your Eminence will kindly follow me—I will escort your Eminence to the door." Then, turning towards Pierre, he added: "You may go in now."

Pierre watched them walk away, the one so humble behind the other, who was so triumphant. Then he entered the little work-room, furnished simply with a table and three chairs, and in the centre of it he at once perceived Cardinal Boccanera still standing in the lofty, noble attitude which he had assumed to take leave of Sanguinetti, his hated rival to the pontifical throne. And, visibly, Boccanera also believed himself the only possible pope, the one whom the coming Conclave would elect.

However, when the door had been closed, and the Cardinal beheld that young priest, his guest, who had witnessed the death of those two dear children lying in the adjoining room, he was again mastered by emotion, an unexpected attack of weakness in which all his energy collapsed. His human feelings were taking their revenge now that his rival was no longer there to see him. He staggered like an old tree smitten with the axe, and sank upon a chair, stifling with sobs.

And as Pierre, according to usage, was about to stoop and kiss his ring, he raised him and at once made him sit down, stammering in a halting voice: "No, no, my dear son! Seat yourself there, wait—Excuse me, leave me to myself for a moment, my heart is bursting."

He sobbed with his hands to his face, unable to master himself, unable to drive back his grief with those yet vigorous fingers which were pressed to his cheeks and temples.

Tears came into Pierre's eyes, for he also lived through all that woe afresh, and was much upset by the weeping of that tall old man, that saint and prince, usually so haughty, so fully master of himself, but now only a poor, suffering, agonising man, as weak and as lost as a child. However, although the young priest was likewise stifling with grief, he desired to present his condolences, and sought for kindly words by which he might soothe the other's despair. "I beg your Eminence to believe in my profound grief," he said. "I have been overwhelmed with kindness here, and desired at once to tell your Eminence how much that irreparable loss—"

But with a brave gesture the Cardinal silenced him. "No, no, say nothing, for mercy's sake say nothing!"

And silence reigned while he continued weeping, shaken by the struggle he was waging, his efforts to regain sufficient strength to overcome himself. At last he mastered his quiver and slowly uncovered his face, which had again become calm, like that of a believer strong in his faith, and submissive to the will of God. In refusing a miracle, in dealing so hard a blow to that house, God had doubtless had His reasons, and he, the Cardinal, one of God's ministers, one of the high dignitaries of His terrestrial court, was in duty bound to bow to it. The silence lasted for another moment, and then, in a voice which he managed to render natural and cordial, Boccanera said: "You are leaving us, you are going back to France to-morrow, are you not, my dear son?"

"Yes, I shall have the honour to take leave of your Eminence to-morrow, again thanking your Eminence for your inexhaustible kindness."

"And you have learnt that the Congregation of the Index has condemned your book, as was inevitable?"

"Yes, I obtained the signal favour of being received by his Holiness, and in his presence made my submission and reprobated my book."

The Cardinal's moist eyes again began to sparkle. "Ah! you did that, ah! you did well, my dear son," he said. "It was only your strict duty as a priest, but there are so many nowadays who do not even do their duty! As a member of the Congregation I kept the promise I gave you to read your book, particularly the incriminated pages. And if I afterwards remained neutral, to such a point even as to miss the sitting in which judgment was pronounced, it was only to please my poor, dear niece, who was so fond of you, and who pleaded your cause to me."

Tears were coming into his eyes again, and he paused, feeling that he would once more be overcome if he evoked the memory of that adored and lamented Benedetta. And so it was with a pugnacious bitterness that he resumed: "But what an execrable book it was, my dear son, allow me to tell you so. You told me that you had shown respect for dogma, and I still wonder what aberration can have come over you that you should have been so blind to all consciousness of your offences. Respect for dogma—good Lord! when the entire work is the negation of our holy religion! Did you not realise that by asking for a new religion you absolutely condemned the old one, the only true one, the only good one, the only one that can be eternal? And that sufficed to make your book the most deadly of poisons, one of those infamous books which in former times were burnt by the hangman, and which one is nowadays compelled to leave in circulation after interdicting them and thereby designating them to evil curiosity, which explains the contagious rottenness of the century. Ah! I well recognised there some of the ideas of our distinguished and poetical relative, that dear Viscount Philibert de la Choue. A man of letters, yes! a man of letters! Literature, mere literature! I beg God to forgive him, for he most surely does not know what he is doing, or whither he is going with his elegiac Christianity for talkative working men and young persons of either sex, to whom scientific notions have given vagueness of soul. And I only feel angry with his Eminence Cardinal Bergerot, for he at any rate knows what he does, and does as he pleases. No, say nothing, do not defend him. He personifies Revolution in the Church, and is against God."

Although Pierre had resolved that he would not reply or argue, he had allowed a gesture of protest to escape him on hearing this furious attack upon the man whom he most respected in the whole world. However, he yielded to Cardinal Boccanera's injunction and again bowed.

"I cannot sufficiently express my horror," the Cardinal roughly continued; "yes, my horror for all that hollow dream of a new religion! That appeal to the most hideous passions which stir up the poor against the rich, by promising them I know not what division of wealth, what community of possession which is nowadays impossible! That base flattery shown to the lower orders to whom equality and justice are promised but never given, for these can come from God alone, it is only He who can finally make them reign on the day appointed by His almighty power! And there is even that interested charity which people abuse of to rail against Heaven itself and accuse it of iniquity and indifference, that lackadaisical weakening charity and compassion, unworthy of strong firm hearts, for it is as if human suffering were not necessary for salvation, as if we did not become more pure, greater and nearer to the supreme happiness, the more and more we suffer!"

He was growing excited, full of anguish, and superb. It was his bereavement, his heart wound, which thus exasperated him, the great blow which had felled him for a moment, but against which he again rose erect, defying grief, and stubborn in his stoic belief in an omnipotent God, who was the master of mankind, and reserved felicity to those whom He selected. Again, however, he made an effort to calm himself, and resumed in a more gentle voice: "At all events the fold is always open, my dear son, and here you are back in it since you have repented. You cannot imagine how happy it makes me."

In his turn Pierre strove to show himself conciliatory in order that he might not further ulcerate that violent, grief-stricken soul: "Your Eminence," said he, "may be sure that I shall endeavour to remember every one of the kind words which your Eminence has spoken to me, in the same way as I shall remember the fatherly greeting of his Holiness Leo XIII."

This sentence seemed to throw Boccanera into agitation again. At first only murmured, restrained words came from him, as if he were struggling against a desire to question the young priest. "Ah yes! you saw his Holiness, you spoke to him, and he told you I suppose, as he tells all the foreigners who go to pay their respects to him, that he desires conciliation and peace. For my part I now only see him when it is absolutely necessary; for more than a year I have not been received in private audience."

This proof of disfavour, of the covert struggle which as in the days of Pius IX kept the Holy Father and the Camerlingo at variance, filled the latter with bitterness. He was unable to restrain himself and spoke out, reflecting no doubt that he had a familiar before him, one whose discretion was certain, and who moreover was leaving Rome on the morrow. "One may go a long way," said he, "with those fine words, peace and conciliation, which are so often void of real wisdom and courage. The terrible truth is that Leo XIII's eighteen years of concessions have shaken everything in the Church, and should he long continue to reign Catholicism would topple over and crumble into dust like a building whose pillars have been undermined."

Interested by this remark, Pierre in his desire for knowledge began to raise objections. "But hasn't his Holiness shown himself very prudent?" he asked; "has he not placed dogma on one side in an impregnable fortress? If he seems to have made concessions on many points, have they not always been concessions in mere matters of form?"

"Matters of form; ah, yes!" the Cardinal resumed with increasing passion. "He told you, no doubt, as he tells others, that whilst in substance he will make no surrender, he will readily yield in matters of form! It's a deplorable axiom, an equivocal form of diplomacy even when it isn't so much low hypocrisy! My soul revolts at the thought of that Opportunism, that Jesuitism which makes artifice its weapon, and only serves to cast doubt among true believers, the confusion of a sauve-qui-peut, which by and by must lead to inevitable defeat. It is cowardice, the worst form of cowardice, abandonment of one's weapons in order that one may retreat the more speedily, shame of oneself, assumption of a mask in the hope of deceiving the enemy, penetrating into his camp, and overcoming him by treachery! No, no, form is everything in a traditional and immutable religion, which for eighteen hundred years has been, is now, and till the end of time will be the very law of God!"

The Cardinal's feelings so stirred him that he was unable to remain seated, and began to walk about the little room. And it was the whole reign, the whole policy of Leo XIII which he discussed and condemned. "Unity too," he continued, "that famous unity of the Christian Church which his Holiness talks of bringing about, and his desire for which people turn to his great glory, why, it is only the blind ambition of a conqueror enlarging his empire without asking himself if the new nations that he subjects may not disorganise, adulterate, and impregnate his old and hitherto faithful people with every error. What if all the schismatical nations on returning to the Catholic Church should so transform it as to kill it and make it a new Church? There is only one wise course, which is to be what one is, and that firmly. Again, isn't there both shame and danger in that pretended alliance with the democracy which in itself gives the lie to the ancient spirit of the papacy? The right of kings is divine, and to abandon the monarchical principle is to set oneself against God, to compound with revolution, and harbour a monstrous scheme of utilising the madness of men the better to establish one's power over them. All republics are forms of anarchy, and there can be no more criminal act, one which must for ever shake the principle of authority, order, and religion itself, than that of recognising a republic as legitimate for the sole purpose of indulging a dream of impossible conciliation. And observe how this bears on the question of the temporal power. He continues to claim it, he makes a point of no surrender on that question of the restoration of Rome; but in reality, has he not made the loss irreparable, has he not definitively renounced Rome, by admitting that nations have the right to drive away their kings and live like wild beasts in the depths of the forest?"

All at once the Cardinal stopped short and raised his arms to Heaven in a burst of holy anger. "Ah! that man, ah! that man who by his vanity and craving for success will have proved the ruin of the Church, that man who has never ceased corrupting everything, dissolving everything, crumbling everything in order to reign over the world which he fancies he will reconquer by those means, why, Almighty God, why hast Thou not already called him to Thee?"

So sincere was the accent in which that appeal to Death was raised, to such a point was hatred magnified by a real desire to save the Deity imperilled here below, that a great shudder swept through Pierre also. He now understood that Cardinal Boccanera who religiously and passionately hated Leo XIII; he saw him in the depths of his black palace, waiting and watching for the Pope's death, that death which as Camerlingo he must officially certify. How feverishly he must wait, how impatiently he must desire the advent of the hour, when with his little silver hammer he would deal the three symbolic taps on the skull of Leo XIII, while the latter lay cold and rigid on his bed surrounded by his pontifical Court. Ah! to strike that wall of the brain, to make sure that nothing more would answer from within, that nothing beyond night and silence was left there. And the three calls would ring out: "Gioachino! Gioachino! Gioachino!" And, the corpse making no answer, the Camerlingo after waiting for a few seconds would turn and say: "The Pope is dead!"

"Conciliation, however, is the weapon of the times," remarked Pierre, wishing to bring the Cardinal back to the present, "and it is in order to make sure of conquering that the Holy Father yields in matters of form."

"He will not conquer, he will be conquered," cried Boccanera. "Never has the Church been victorious save in stubbornly clinging to its integrality, the immutable eternity of its divine essence. And it would for a certainty fall on the day when it should allow a single stone of its edifice to be touched. Remember the terrible period through which it passed at the time of the Council of Trent. The Reformation had just deeply shaken it, laxity of discipline and morals was everywhere increasing, there was a rising tide of novelties, ideas suggested by the spirit of evil, unhealthy projects born of the pride of man, running riot in full license. And at the Council itself many members were disturbed, poisoned, ready to vote for the wildest changes, a fresh schism added to all the others. Well, if Catholicism was saved at that critical period, under the threat of such great danger, it was because the majority, enlightened by God, maintained the old edifice intact, it was because with divinely inspired obstinacy it kept itself within the narrow limits of dogma, it was because it made no concession, none, whether in substance or in form! Nowadays the situation is certainly not worse than it was at the time of the Council of Trent. Let us suppose it to be much the same, and tell me if it is not nobler, braver, and safer for the Church to show the courage which she showed before and declare aloud what she is, what she has been, and what she will be. There is no salvation for her otherwise than in her complete, indisputable sovereignty; and since she has always conquered by non-surrender, all attempts to conciliate her with the century are tantamount to killing her!"

The Cardinal had again begun to walk to and fro with thoughtful step. "No, no," said he, "no compounding, no surrender, no weakness! Rather the wall of steel which bars the road, the block of granite which marks the limit of a world! As I told you, my dear son, on the day of your arrival, to try to accommodate Catholicism to the new times is to hasten its end, if really it be threatened, as atheists pretend. And in that way it would die basely and shamefully instead of dying erect, proud, and dignified in its old glorious royalty! Ah! to die standing, denying nought of the past, braving the future and confessing one's whole faith!"

That old man of seventy seemed to grow yet loftier as he spoke, free from all dread of final annihilation, and making the gesture of a hero who defies futurity. Faith had given him serenity of peace; he believed, he knew, he had neither doubt nor fear of the morrow of death. Still his voice was tinged with haughty sadness as he resumed, "God can do all, even destroy His own work should it seem evil in His eyes. But though all should crumble to-morrow, though the Holy Church should disappear among the ruins, though the most venerated sanctuaries should be crushed by the falling stars, it would still be necessary for us to bow and adore God, who after creating the world might thus annihilate it for His own glory. And I wait, submissive to His will, for nothing happens unless He wills it. If really the temples be shaken, if Catholicism be fated to fall to-morrow into dust, I shall be here to act as the minister of death, even as I have been the minister of life! It is certain, I confess it, that there are hours when terrible signs appear to me. Perhaps, indeed, the end of time is nigh, and we shall witness that fall of the old world with which others threaten us. The worthiest, the loftiest are struck down as if Heaven erred, and in them punished the crimes of the world. Have I not myself felt the blast from the abyss into which all must sink, since my house, for transgressions that I am ignorant of, has been stricken with that frightful bereavement which precipitates it into the gulf which casts it back into night everlasting!"

He again evoked those two dear dead ones who were always present in his mind. Sobs were once more rising in his throat, his hands trembled, his lofty figure quivered with the last revolt of grief. Yes, if God had stricken him so severely by suppressing his race, if the greatest and most faithful were thus punished, it must be that the world was definitively condemned. Did not the end of his house mean the approaching end of all? And in his sovereign pride as priest and as prince, he found a cry of supreme resignation, once more raising his hands on high: "Almighty God, Thy will be done! May all die, all fall, all return to the night of chaos! I shall remain standing in this ruined palace, waiting to be buried beneath its fragments. And if Thy will should summon me to bury Thy holy religion, be without fear, I shall do nothing unworthy to prolong its life for a few days! I will maintain it erect, like myself, as proud, as uncompromising as in the days of all its power. I will yield nothing, whether in discipline, or in rite, or in dogma. And when the day shall come I will bury it with myself, carrying it whole into the grave rather than yielding aught of it, encompassing it with my cold arms to restore it to Thee, even as Thou didst commit it to the keeping of Thy Church. O mighty God and sovereign Master, dispose of me, make me if such be Thy good pleasure the pontiff of destruction, the pontiff of the death of the world."

Pierre, who was thunderstruck, quivered with fear and admiration at the extraordinary vision this evoked: the last of the popes interring Catholicism. He understood that Boccanera must at times have made that dream; he could see him in the Vatican, in St. Peter's which the thunderbolts had riven asunder, he could see him erect and alone in the spacious halls whence his terrified, cowardly pontifical Court had fled. Clad in his white cassock, thus wearing white mourning for the Church, he once more descended to the sanctuary, there to wait for heaven to fall on the evening of Time's accomplishment and annihilate the earth. Thrice he raised the large crucifix, overthrown by the supreme convulsions of the soil. Then, when the final crack rent the steps apart, he caught it in his arms and was annihilated with it beneath the falling vaults. And nothing could be more instinct with fierce and kingly grandeur.

Voiceless, but without weakness, his lofty stature invincible and erect in spite of all, Cardinal Boccanera made a gesture dismissing Pierre, who yielding to his passion for truth and beauty found that he alone was great and right, and respectfully kissed his hand.

It was in the throne-room, with closed doors, at nightfall, after the visits had ceased, that the two bodies were laid in their coffin. The religious services had come to an end, and in the close silent atmosphere there only lingered the dying perfume of the roses and the warm odour of the candles. As the latter's pale stars scarcely lighted the spacious room, some lamps had been brought, and servants held them in their hands like torches. According to custom, all the servants of the house were present to bid a last farewell to the departed.

There was a little delay. Morano, who had been giving himself no end of trouble ever since morning, was forced to run off again as the triple coffin did not arrive. At last it came, some servants brought it up, and then they were able to begin. The Cardinal and Donna Serafina stood side by side near the bed. Pierre also was present, as well as Don Vigilio. It was Victorine who sewed the lovers up in the white silk shroud, which seemed like a bridal robe, the gay pure robe of their union. Then two servants came forward and helped Pierre and Don Vigilio to lay the bodies in the first coffin, of pine wood lined with pink satin. It was scarcely broader than an ordinary coffin, so young and slim were the lovers and so tightly were they clasped in their last embrace. When they were stretched inside they there continued their eternal slumber, their heads half hidden by their odorous, mingling hair. And when this first coffin had been placed in the second one, a leaden shell, and the second had been enclosed in the third, of stout oak, and when the three lids had been soldered and screwed down, the lovers' faces could still be seen through the circular opening, covered with thick glass, which in accordance with the Roman custom had been left in each of the coffins. And then, for ever parted from the living, alone together, they still gazed at one another with their eyes obstinately open, having all eternity before them wherein to exhaust their infinite love.

XVI.

ON the following day, on his return from the funeral Pierre lunched alone in his room, having decided to take leave of the Cardinal and Donna Serafina during the afternoon. He was quitting Rome that evening by the train which started at seventeen minutes past ten. There was nothing to detain him any longer; there was only one visit which he desired to make, a visit to old Orlando, with whom he had promised to have a long chat prior to his departure. And so a little before two o'clock he sent for a cab which took him to the Via Venti Settembre. A fine rain had fallen all night, its moisture steeping the city in grey vapour; and though this rain had now ceased the sky remained very dark, and the huge new mansions of the Via Venti Settembre were quite livid, interminably mournful with their balconies ever of the same pattern and their regular and endless rows of windows. The Ministry of Finances, that colossal pile of masonry and sculpture, looked in particular like a dead town, a huge bloodless body whence all life had withdrawn. On the other hand, although all was so gloomy the rain had made the atmosphere milder, in fact it was almost warm, damply and feverishly warm.

In the hall of Prada's little palazzo Pierre was surprised to find four or five gentlemen taking off their overcoats; however he learnt from a servant that Count Luigi had a meeting that day with some contractors. As he, Pierre, wished to see the Count's father he had only to ascend to the third floor, added the servant. He must knock at the little door on the right-hand side of the landing there.

On the very first landing, however, the priest found himself face to face with the young Count who was there receiving the contractors, and who on recognising him became frightfully pale. They had not met since the tragedy at the Boccanera mansion, and Pierre well realised how greatly his glance disturbed that man, what a troublesome recollection of moral complicity it evoked, and what mortal dread lest he should have guessed the truth.

"Have you come to see me, have you something to tell me?" the Count inquired.

"No, I am leaving Rome, I have come to wish your father good-bye."

Prada's pallor increased at this, and his whole face quivered: "Ah! it is to see my father. He is not very well, be gentle with him," he replied, and as he spoke, his look of anguish clearly proclaimed what he feared from Pierre, some imprudent word, perhaps even a final mission, the malediction of that man and woman whom he had killed. And surely if his father knew, he would die as well. "Ah! how annoying it is," he resumed, "I can't go up with you! There are gentlemen waiting for me. Yes, how annoyed I am. As soon as possible, however, I will join you, yes, as soon as possible."

He knew not how to stop the young priest, whom he must evidently allow to remain with his father, whilst he himself stayed down below, kept there by his pecuniary worries. But how distressful were the eyes with which he watched Pierre climb the stairs, how he seemed to supplicate him with his whole quivering form. His father, good Lord, the only true love, the one great, pure, faithful passion of his life!

"Don't make him talk too much, brighten him, won't you?" were his parting words.

Up above it was not Batista, the devoted ex-soldier, who opened the door, but a very young fellow to whom Pierre did not at first pay any attention. The little room was bare and light as on previous occasions, and from the broad curtainless window there was the superb view of Rome, Rome crushed that day beneath a leaden sky and steeped in shade of infinite mournfulness. Old Orlando, however, had in no wise changed, but still displayed the superb head of an old blanched lion, a powerful muzzle and youthful eyes, which yet sparkled with the passions which had growled in a soul of fire. Pierre found the stricken hero in the same arm-chair as previously, near the same table littered with newspapers, and with his legs buried in the same black wrapper, as if he were there immobilised in a sheath of stone, to such a point that after months and years one was sure to perceive him quite unchanged, with living bust, and face glowing with strength and intelligence.

That grey day, however, he seemed gloomy, low in spirits. "Ah! so here you are, my dear Monsieur Froment," he exclaimed, "I have been thinking of you these three days past, living the awful days which you must have lived in that tragic Palazzo Boccanera. Ah, God! What a frightful bereavement! My heart is quite overwhelmed, these newspapers have again just upset me with the fresh details they give!" He pointed as he spoke to the papers scattered over the table. Then with a gesture he strove to brush aside the gloomy story, and banish that vision of Benedetta dead, which had been haunting him. "Well, and yourself?" he inquired.

"I am leaving this evening," replied Pierre, "but I did not wish to quit Rome without pressing your brave hands."

"You are leaving? But your book?"

"My book—I have been received by the Holy Father, I have made my submission and reprobated my book."

Orlando looked fixedly at the priest. There was a short interval of silence, during which their eyes told one another all that they had to tell respecting the affair. Neither felt the necessity of any longer explanation. The old man merely spoke these concluding words: "You have done well, your book was a chimera."

"Yes, a chimera, a piece of childishness, and I have condemned it myself in the name of truth and reason."

A smile appeared on the dolorous lips of the impotent hero. "Then you have seen things, you understand and know them now?"

"Yes, I know them; and that is why I did not wish to go off without having that frank conversation with you which we agreed upon."

Orlando was delighted, but all at once he seemed to remember the young fellow who had opened the door to Pierre, and who had afterwards modestly resumed his seat on a chair near the window. This young fellow was a youth of twenty, still beardless, of a blonde handsomeness such as occasionally flowers at Naples, with long curly hair, a lily-like complexion, a rosy mouth, and soft eyes full of a dreamy languor. The old man presented him in fatherly fashion, Angiolo Mascara his name was, and he was the grandson of an old comrade in arms, the epic Mascara of the Thousand, who had died like a hero, his body pierced by a hundred wounds.

"I sent for him to scold him," continued Orlando with a smile. "Do you know that this fine fellow with his girlish airs goes in for the new ideas? He is an Anarchist, one of the three or four dozen Anarchists that we have in Italy. He's a good little lad at bottom, he has only his mother left him, and supports her, thanks to the little berth which he holds, but which he'll lose one of these fine days if he is not careful. Come, come, my child, you must promise me to be reasonable."

Thereupon Angiolo, whose clean but well-worn garments bespoke decent poverty, made answer in a grave and musical voice: "I am reasonable, it is the others, all the others who are not. When all men are reasonable and desire truth and justice, the world will be happy."

"Ah! if you fancy that he'll give way!" cried Orlando. "But, my poor child, just ask Monsieur l'Abbe if one ever knows where truth and justice are. Well, well, one must leave you the time to live, and see, and understand things."

Then, paying no more attention to the young man, he returned to Pierre, while Angiolo, remaining very quiet in his corner, kept his eyes ardently fixed on them, and with open, quivering ears lost not a word they said.

"I told you, my dear Monsieur Froment," resumed Orlando, "that your ideas would change, and that acquaintance with Rome would bring you to accurate views far more readily than any fine speeches I could make to you. So I never doubted but what you would of your own free will withdraw your book as soon as men and things should have enlightened you respecting the Vatican at the present day. But let us leave the Vatican on one side, there is nothing to be done but to let it continue falling slowly and inevitably into ruin. What interests me is our Italian Rome, which you treated as an element to be neglected, but which you have now seen and studied, so that we can both speak of it with the necessary knowledge!"

He thereupon at once granted a great many things, acknowledged that blunders had been committed, that the finances were in a deplorable state, and that there were serious difficulties of all kinds. They, the Italians, had sinned by excess of legitimate pride, they had proceeded too hastily with their attempt to improvise a great nation, to change ancient Rome into a great modern capital as by the mere touch of a wand. And thence had come that mania for erecting new districts, that mad speculation in land and shares, which had brought the country within a hair's breadth of bankruptcy.

At this Pierre gently interrupted him to tell him of the view which he himself had arrived at after his peregrinations and studies through Rome. "That fever of the first hour, that financial debacle," said he, "is after all nothing. All pecuniary sores can be healed. But the grave point is that your Italy still remains to be created. There is no aristocracy left, and as yet there is no people, nothing but a devouring middle class, dating from yesterday, which preys on the rich harvest of the future before it is ripe."

Silence fell. Orlando sadly wagged his old leonine head. The cutting harshness of Pierre's formula struck him in the heart. "Yes, yes," he said at last, "that is so, you have seen things plainly; and why say no when facts are there, patent to everybody? I myself had already spoken to you of that middle class which hungers so ravenously for place and office, distinctions and plumes, and which at the same time is so avaricious, so suspicious with regard to its money which it invests in banks, never risking it in agriculture or manufactures or commerce, having indeed the one desire to enjoy life without doing anything, and so unintelligent that it cannot see it is killing its country by its loathing for labour, its contempt for the poor, its one ambition to live in a petty way with the barren glory of belonging to some official administration. And, as you say, the aristocracy is dying, discrowned, ruined, sunk into the degeneracy which overtakes races towards their close, most of its members reduced to beggary, the others, the few who have clung to their money, crushed by heavy imposts, possessing nought but dead fortunes which constant sharing diminishes and which must soon disappear with the princes themselves. And then there is the people, which has suffered so much and suffers still, but is so used to suffering that it can seemingly conceive no idea of emerging from it, blind and deaf as it is, almost regretting its ancient bondage, and so ignorant, so abominably ignorant, which is the one cause of its hopeless, morrowless misery, for it has not even the consolation of understanding that if we have conquered and are trying to resuscitate Rome and Italy in their ancient glory, it is for itself, the people, alone. Yes, yes, no aristocracy left, no people as yet, and a middle class which really alarms one. How can one therefore help yielding at times to the terrors of the pessimists, who pretend that our misfortunes are as yet nothing, that we are going forward to yet more awful catastrophes, as though, indeed, what we now behold were but the first symptoms of our race's end, the premonitory signs of final annihilation!"

As he spoke he raised his long quivering arms towards the window, towards the light, and Pierre, deeply moved, remembered how Cardinal Boccanera on the previous day had made a similar gesture of supplicant distress when appealing to the divine power. And both men, Cardinal and patriot, so hostile in their beliefs, were instinct with the same fierce and despairing grandeur.

"As I told you, however, on the first day," continued Orlando, "we only sought to accomplish logical and inevitable things. As for Rome, with her past history of splendour and domination which weighs so heavily upon us, we could not do otherwise than take her for capital, for she alone was the bond, the living symbol of our unity at the same time as the promise of eternity, the renewal offered to our great dream of resurrection and glory."

He went on, recognising the disastrous conditions under which Rome laboured as a capital. She was a purely decorative city with exhausted soil, she had remained apart from modern life, she was unhealthy, she offered no possibility of commerce or industry, she was invincibly preyed upon by death, standing as she did amidst that sterile desert of the Campagna. Then he compared her with the other cities which are jealous of her; first Florence, which, however, has become so indifferent and so sceptical, impregnated with a happy heedlessness which seems inexplicable when one remembers the frantic passions, and the torrents of blood rolling through her history; next Naples, which yet remains content with her bright sun, and whose childish people enjoy their ignorance and wretchedness so indolently that one knows not whether one ought to pity them; next Venice, which has resigned herself to remaining a marvel of ancient art, which one ought to put under glass so as to preserve her intact, slumbering amid the sovereign pomp of her annals; next Genoa, which is absorbed in trade, still active and bustling, one of the last queens of that Mediterranean, that insignificant lake which was once the opulent central sea, whose waters carried the wealth of the world; and then particularly Turin and Milan, those industrial and commercial centres, which are so full of life and so modernised that tourists disdain them as not being "Italian" cities, both of them having saved themselves from ruin by entering into that Western evolution which is preparing the next century. Ah! that old land of Italy, ought one to leave it all as a dusty museum for the pleasure of artistic souls, leave it to crumble away, even as its little towns of Magna Graecia, Umbria, and Tuscany are already crumbling, like exquisite bibelots which one dares not repair for fear that one might spoil their character. At all events, there must either be death, death soon and inevitable, or else the pick of the demolisher, the tottering walls thrown to the ground, and cities of labour, science, and health created on all sides; in one word, a new Italy really rising from the ashes of the old one, and adapted to the new civilisation into which humanity is entering.

"However, why despair?" Orlando continued energetically. "Rome may weigh heavily on our shoulders, but she is none the less the summit we coveted. We are here, and we shall stay here awaiting events. Even if the population does not increase it at least remains stationary at a figure of some 400,000 souls, and the movement of increase may set in again when the causes which stopped it shall have ceased. Our blunder was to think that Rome would become a Paris or Berlin; but, so far, all sorts of social, historical, even ethnical considerations seem opposed to it; yet who can tell what may be the surprises of to-morrow? Are we forbidden to hope, to put faith in the blood which courses in our veins, the blood of the old conquerors of the world? I, who no longer stir from this room, impotent as I am, even I at times feel my madness come back, believe in the invincibility and immortality of Rome, and wait for the two millions of people who must come to populate those dolorous new districts which you have seen so empty and already falling into ruins! And certainly they will come! Why not? You will see, you will see, everything will be populated, and even more houses will have to be built. Moreover, can you call a nation poor, when it possesses Lombardy? Is there not also inexhaustible wealth in our southern provinces? Let peace settle down, let the South and the North mingle together, and a new generation of workers grow up. Since we have the soil, such a fertile soil, the great harvest which is awaited will surely some day sprout and ripen under the burning sun!"

Enthusiasm was upbuoying him, all the furia of youth inflamed his eyes. Pierre smiled, won over; and as soon as he was able to speak, he said: "The problem must be tackled down below, among the people. You must make men!"

"Exactly!" cried Orlando. "I don't cease repeating it, one must make Italy. It is as if a wind from the East had blown the seed of humanity, the seed which makes vigorous and powerful nations, elsewhere. Our people is not like yours in France, a reservoir of men and money from which one can draw as plentifully as one pleases. It is such another inexhaustible reservoir that I wish to see created among us. And one must begin at the bottom. There must be schools everywhere, ignorance must be stamped out, brutishness and idleness must be fought with books, intellectual and moral instruction must give us the industrious people which we need if we are not to disappear from among the great nations. And once again for whom, if not for the democracy of to-morrow, have we worked in taking possession of Rome? And how easily one can understand that all should collapse here, and nothing grow up vigorously since such a democracy is absolutely absent. Yes, yes, the solution of the problem does not lie elsewhere; we must make a people, make an Italian democracy."

Pierre had grown calm again, feeling somewhat anxious yet not daring to say that it is by no means easy to modify a nation, that Italy is such as soil, history, and race have made her, and that to seek to transform her so radically and all at once might be a dangerous enterprise. Do not nations like beings have an active youth, a resplendent prime, and a more or less prolonged old age ending in death? A modern democratic Rome, good heavens! The modern Romes are named Paris, London, Chicago. So he contented himself with saying: "But pending this great renovation of the people, don't you think that you ought to be prudent? Your finances are in such a bad condition, you are passing through such great social and economic difficulties, that you run the risk of the worst catastrophes before you secure either men or money. Ah! how prudent would that minister be who should say in your Chamber: 'Our pride has made a mistake, it was wrong of us to try to make ourselves a great nation in one day; more time, labour, and patience are needed; and we consent to remain for the present a young nation, which will quietly reflect and labour at self-formation, without, for a long time yet, seeking to play a dominant part. So we intend to disarm, to strike out the war and naval estimates, all the estimates intended for display abroad, in order to devote ourselves to our internal prosperity, and to build up by education, physically and morally, the great nation which we swear we will be fifty years hence!' Yes, yes, strike out all needless expenditure, your salvation lies in that!"

But Orlando, while listening, had become gloomy again, and with a vague, weary gesture he replied in an undertone: "No, no, the minister who should use such language would be hooted. It would be too hard a confession, such as one cannot ask a nation to make. Every heart would bound, leap forth at the idea. And, besides, would not the danger perhaps be even greater if all that has been done were allowed to crumble? How many wrecked hopes, how much discarded, useless material there would be! No, we can now only save ourselves by patience and courage—and forward, ever forward! We are a very young nation, and in fifty years we desired to effect the unity which others have required two hundred years to arrive at. Well, we must pay for our haste, we must wait for the harvest to ripen, and fill our barns." Then, with another and more sweeping wave of the arm, he stubbornly strengthened himself in his hopes. "You know," said he, "that I was always against the alliance with Germany. As I predicted, it has ruined us. We were not big enough to march side by side with such a wealthy and powerful person, and it is in view of a war, always near at hand and inevitable, that we now suffer so cruelly from having to support the budgets of a great nation. Ah! that war which has never come, it is that which has exhausted the best part of our blood and sap and money without the slightest profit. To-day we have nothing before us but the necessity of breaking with our ally, who speculated on our pride, who has never helped us in any way, who has never given us anything but bad advice, and treated us otherwise than with suspicion. But it was all inevitable, and that's what people won't admit in France. I can speak freely of it all, for I am a declared friend of France, and people even feel some spite against me on that account. However, explain to your compatriots, that on the morrow of our conquest of Rome, in our frantic desire to resume our ancient rank, it was absolutely necessary that we should play our part in Europe and show that we were a power with whom the others must henceforth count. And hesitation was not allowable, all our interests impelled us toward Germany, the evidence was so binding as to impose itself. The stern law of the struggle for life weighs as heavily on nations as on individuals, and this it is which explains and justifies the rupture between the two sisters, France and Italy, the forgetting of so many ties, race, commercial intercourse, and, if you like, services also. The two sisters, ah! they now pursue each other with so much hatred that all common sense even seems at an end. My poor old heart bleeds when I read the articles which your newspapers and ours exchange like poisoned darts. When will this fratricidal massacre cease, which of the two will first realise the necessity of peace, the necessity of the alliance of the Latin races, if they are to remain alive amidst those torrents of other races which more and more invade the world?" Then gaily, with the bonhomie of a hero disarmed by old age, and seeking a refuge in his dreams, Orlando added: "Come, you must promise to help me as soon as you are in Paris. However small your field of action may be, promise me you will do all you can to promote peace between France and Italy; there can be no more holy task. Relate all you have seen here, all you have heard, oh! as frankly as possible. If we have faults, you certainly have faults as well. And, come, family quarrels can't last for ever!"

"No doubt," Pierre answered in some embarrassment. "Unfortunately they are the most tenacious. In families, when blood becomes exasperated with blood, hate goes as far as poison and the knife. And pardon becomes impossible."

He dared not fully express his thoughts. Since he had been in Rome, listening, and considering things, the quarrel between Italy and France had resumed itself in his mind in a fine tragic story. Once upon a time there were two princesses, daughters of a powerful queen, the mistress of the world. The elder one, who had inherited her mother's kingdom, was secretly grieved to see her sister, who had established herself in a neighbouring land, gradually increase in wealth, strength, and brilliancy, whilst she herself declined as if weakened by age, dismembered, so exhausted, and so sore, that she already felt defeated on the day when she attempted a supreme effort to regain universal power. And so how bitter were her feelings, how hurt she always felt on seeing her sister recover from the most frightful shocks, resume her dazzling gala, and continue to reign over the world by dint of strength and grace and wit. Never would she forgive it, however well that envied and detested sister might act towards her. Therein lay an incurable wound, the life of one poisoned by that of the other, the hatred of old blood for young blood, which could only be quieted by death. And even if peace, as was possible, should soon be restored between them in presence of the younger sister's evident triumph, the other would always harbour deep within her heart an endless grief at being the elder yet the vassal.

"However, you may rely on me," Pierre affectionately resumed. "This quarrel between the two countries is certainly a great source of grief and a great peril. And assuredly I will only say what I think to be the truth about you. At the same time I fear that you hardly like the truth, for temperament and custom have hardly prepared you for it. The poets of every nation who at various times have written on Rome have intoxicated you with so much praise that you are scarcely fitted to hear the real truth about your Rome of to-day. No matter how superb a share of praise one may accord you, one must all the same look at the reality of things, and this reality is just what you won't admit, lovers of the beautiful as you ever are, susceptible too like women, whom the slightest hint of a wrinkle sends into despair."

Orlando began to laugh. "Well, certainly, one must always beautify things a little," said he. "Why speak of ugly faces at all? We in our theatres only care for pretty music, pretty dancing, pretty pieces which please one. As for the rest, whatever is disagreeable let us hide it, for mercy's sake!"

"On the other hand," the priest continued, "I will cheerfully confess the great error of my book. The Italian Rome which I neglected and sacrificed to papal Rome not only exists but is already so powerful and triumphant that it is surely the other one which is bound to disappear in course of time. However much the Pope may strive to remain immutable within his Vatican, a steady evolution goes on around him, and the black world, by mingling with the white, has already become a grey world. I never realised that more acutely than at the fete given by Prince Buongiovanni for the betrothal of his daughter to your grand-nephew. I came away quite enchanted, won over to the cause of your resurrection."

The old man's eyes sparkled. "Ah! you were present?" said he, "and you witnessed a never-to-be-forgotten scene, did you not, and you no longer doubt our vitality, our growth into a great people when the difficulties of to-day are overcome? What does a quarter of a century, what does even a century matter! Italy will again rise to her old glory, as soon as the great people of to-morrow shall have sprung from the soil. And if I detest that man Sacco it is because to my mind he is the incarnation of all the enjoyers and intriguers whose appetite for the spoils of our conquest has retarded everything. But I live again in my dear grand-nephew Attilio, who represents the future, the generation of brave and worthy men who will purify and educate the country. Ah! may some of the great ones of to-morrow spring from him and that adorable little Princess Celia, whom my niece Stefana, a sensible woman at bottom, brought to see me the other day. If you had seen that child fling her arms about me, call me endearing names, and tell me that I should be godfather to her first son, so that he might bear my name and once again save Italy! Yes, yes, may peace be concluded around that coming cradle; may the union of those dear children be the indissoluble marriage of Rome and the whole nation, and may all be repaired, and all blossom anew in their love!"

Tears came to his eyes, and Pierre, touched by his inextinguishable patriotism, sought to please him. "I myself," said he, "expressed to your son much the same wish on the evening of the betrothal fete, when I told him I trusted that their nuptials might be definitive and fruitful, and that from them and all the others there might arise the great nation which, now that I begin to know you, I hope you will soon become!"

"You said that!" exclaimed Orlando. "Well, I forgive your book, for you have understood at last; and new Rome, there she is, the Rome which is ours, which we wish to make worthy of her glorious past, and for the third time the queen of the world."

With one of those broad gestures into which he put all his remaining life, he pointed to the curtainless window where Rome spread out in solemn majesty from one horizon to the other. But, suddenly he turned his head and in a fit of paternal indignation began to apostrophise young Angiolo Mascara. "You young rascal!" said he, "it's our Rome which you dream of destroying with your bombs, which you talk of razing like a rotten, tottering house, so as to rid the world of it for ever!"

Angiolo had hitherto remained silent, passionately listening to the others. His pretty, girlish, beardless face reflected the slightest emotion in sudden flashes; and his big blue eyes also had glowed on hearing what had been said of the people, the new people which it was necessary to create. "Yes!" he slowly replied in his pure and musical voice, "we mean to raze it and not leave a stone of it, but raze it in order to build it up again."

Orlando interrupted him with a soft, bantering laugh: "Oh! you would build it up again; that's fortunate!" he said.

"I would build it up again," the young man replied, in the trembling voice of an inspired prophet. "I would build it up again oh, so vast, so beautiful, and so noble! Will not the universal democracy of to-morrow, humanity when it is at last freed, need an unique city, which shall be the ark of alliance, the very centre of the world? And is not Rome designated, Rome which the prophecies have marked as eternal and immortal, where the destinies of the nations are to be accomplished? But in order that it may become the final definitive sanctuary, the capital of the destroyed kingdoms, where the wise men of all countries shall meet once every year, one must first of all purify it by fire, leave nothing of its old stains remaining. Then, when the sun shall have absorbed all the pestilence of the old soil, we will rebuild the city ten times more beautiful and ten times larger than it has ever been. And what a city of truth and justice it will at last be, the Rome that has been announced and awaited for three thousand years, all in gold and all in marble, filling the Campagna from the sea to the Sabine and the Alban mountains, and so prosperous and so sensible that its twenty millions of inhabitants after regulating the law of labour will live with the unique joy of being. Yes, yes, Rome the Mother, Rome the Queen, alone on the face of the earth and for all eternity!"

Pierre listened to him, aghast. What! did the blood of Augustus go to such a point as this? The popes had not become masters of Rome without feeling impelled to rebuild it in their passion to rule over the world; young Italy, likewise yielding to the hereditary madness of universal domination, had in its turn sought to make the city larger than any other, erecting whole districts for people who had never come, and now even the Anarchists were possessed by the same stubborn dream of the race, a dream beyond all measure this time, a fourth and monstrous Rome, whose suburbs would invade continents in order that liberated humanity, united in one family, might find sufficient lodging! This was the climax. Never could more extravagant proof be given of the blood of pride and sovereignty which had scorched the veins of that race ever since Augustus had bequeathed it the inheritance of his absolute empire, with the furious instinct that the world legally belonged to it, and that its mission was to conquer it again. This idea had intoxicated all the children of that historic soil, impelling all of them to make their city The City, the one which had reigned and which would reign again in splendour when the days predicted by the oracles should arrive. And Pierre remembered the four fatidical letters, the S.P.Q.R. of old and glorious Rome, which like an order of final triumph given to Destiny he had everywhere found in present-day Rome, on all the walls, on all the insignia, even on the municipal dust-carts! And he understood the prodigious vanity of these people, haunted by the glory of their ancestors, spellbound by the past of their city, declaring that she contains everything, that they themselves cannot know her thoroughly, that she is the sphinx who will some day explain the riddle of the universe, that she is so great and noble that all within her acquires increase of greatness and nobility, in such wise that they demand for her the idolatrous respect of the entire world, so vivacious in their minds is the illusive legend which clings to her, so incapable are they of realising that what was once great may be so no longer.

"But I know your fourth Rome," resumed Orlando, again enlivened. "It's the Rome of the people, the capital of the Universal Republic, which Mazzini dreamt of. Only he left the pope in it. Do you know, my lad, that if we old Republicans rallied to the monarchy, it was because we feared that in the event of revolution the country might fall into the hands of dangerous madmen such as those who have upset your brain? Yes, that was why we resigned ourselves to our monarchy, which is not much different from a parliamentary republic. And now, goodbye and be sensible, remember that your poor mother would die of it if any misfortune should befall you. Come, let me embrace you all the same."

On receiving the hero's affectionate kiss Angiolo coloured like a girl. Then he went off with his gentle, dreamy air, never adding a word but politely inclining his head to the priest. Silence continued till Orlando's eyes encountered the newspapers scattered on the table, when he once more spoke of the terrible bereavement of the Boccaneras. He had loved Benedetta like a dear daughter during the sad days when she had dwelt near him; and finding the newspaper accounts of her death somewhat singular, worried in fact by the obscure points which he could divine in the tragedy, he was asking Pierre for particulars, when his son Luigi suddenly entered the room, breathless from having climbed the stairs so quickly and with his face full of anxious fear. He had just dismissed his contractors with impatient roughness, giving no thought to his serious financial position, the jeopardy in which his fortune was now placed, so anxious was he to be up above beside his father. And when he was there his first uneasy glance was for the old man, to make sure whether the priest by some imprudent word had not dealt him his death blow.

He shuddered on noticing how Orlando quivered, moved to tears by the terrible affair of which he was speaking; and for a moment he thought he had arrived too late, that the harm was done. "Good heavens, father!" he exclaimed, "what is the matter with you, why are you crying?" And as he spoke he knelt at the old man's feet, taking hold of his hands and giving him such a passionate, loving glance that he seemed to be offering all the blood of his heart to spare him the slightest grief.

"It is about the death of that poor woman," Orlando sadly answered. "I was telling Monsieur Froment how it grieved me, and I added that I could not yet understand it all. The papers talk of a sudden death which is always so extraordinary."

The young Count rose again looking very pale. The priest had not yet spoken. But what a frightful moment was this! What if he should reply, what if he should speak out?

"You were present, were you not?" continued the old man addressing Pierre. "You saw everything. Tell me then how the thing happened."

Luigi Prada looked at Pierre. Their eyes met fixedly, plunging into one another's souls. All began afresh in their minds, Destiny on the march, Santobono encountered with his little basket, the drive across the melancholy Campagna, the conversation about poison while the little basket was gently rocked on the priest's knees; then, in particular, the sleepy osteria, and the little black hen, so suddenly killed, lying on the ground with a tiny streamlet of violet blood trickling from her beak. And next there was that splendid ball at the Buongiovanni mansion, with all its odore di femina and its triumph of love: and finally, before the Palazzo Boccanera, so black under the silvery moon, there was the man who lighted a cigar and went off without once turning his head, allowing dim Destiny to accomplish its work of death. Both of them, Pierre and Prada, knew that story and lived it over again, having no need to recall it aloud in order to make certain that they had fully penetrated one another's soul.

Pierre did not immediately answer the old man. "Oh!" he murmured at last, "there were frightful things, yes, frightful things."

"No doubt—that is what I suspected," resumed Orlando. "You can tell us all. In presence of death my son has freely forgiven."

The young Count's gaze again sought that of Pierre with such weight, such ardent entreaty that the priest felt deeply stirred. He had just remembered that man's anguish during the ball, the atrocious torture of jealousy which he had undergone before allowing Destiny to avenge him. And he pictured also what must have been his feelings after the terrible outcome of it all: at first stupefaction at Destiny's harshness, at this full vengeance which he had never desired so ferocious; then icy calmness like that of the cool gambler who awaits events, reading the newspapers, and feeling no other remorse than that of the general whose victory has cost him too many men. He must have immediately realised that the Cardinal would stifle the affair for the sake of the Church's honour; and only retained one weight on his heart, regret possibly for that woman whom he had never won, with perhaps a last horrible jealousy which he did not confess to himself but from which he would always suffer, jealousy at knowing that she lay in another's arms in the grave, for all eternity. But behold, after that victorious effort to remain calm, after that cold and remorseless waiting, Punishment arose, the fear that Destiny, travelling on with its poisoned figs, might have not yet ceased its march, and might by a rebound strike down his own father. Yet another thunderbolt, yet another victim, the most unexpected, the being he most adored! At that thought all his strength of resistance had in one moment collapsed, and he was there, in terror of Destiny, more at a loss, more trembling than a child.

"The newspapers, however," slowly said Pierre as if he were seeking his words, "the newspapers must have told you that the Prince succumbed first, and that the Contessina died of grief whilst embracing him for the last time.... As for the cause of death, mon Dieu, you know that doctors themselves in sudden cases scarcely dare to pronounce an exact opinion—"

He stopped short, for within him he had suddenly heard the voice of Benedetta giving him just before she died that terrible order: "You, who will see his father, I charge you to tell him that I cursed his son. I wish that he should know, it is necessary that he should know, for the sake of truth and justice." And was he, oh! Lord, about to obey that order, was it one of those divine commands which must be executed even if the result be a torrent of blood and tears? For a few seconds Pierre suffered from a heart-rending combat within him, hesitating between the act of truth and justice which the dead woman had called for and his own personal desire for forgiveness, and the horror he would feel should he kill that poor old man by fulfilling his implacable mission which could benefit nobody. And certainly the other one, the son, must have understood what a supreme struggle was going on in the priest's mind, a struggle which would decide his own father's fate, for his glance became yet more suppliant than ever.

"One first thought that it was merely indigestion," continued Pierre, "but the Prince became so much worse, that one was alarmed, and the doctor was sent for—"

Ah! Prada's eyes, they had become so despairing, so full of the most touching and weightiest things, that the priest could read in them all the decisive reasons which were about to stay his tongue. No, no, he would not strike an innocent old man, he had promised nothing, and to obey the last expression of the dead woman's hatred would have seemed to him like charging her memory with a crime. The young Count, too, during those few minutes of anguish, had suffered a whole life of such abominable torture, that after all some little justice was done.

"And then," Pierre concluded, "when the doctor arrived he at once recognised that it was a case of infectious fever. There can be no doubt of it. This morning I attended the funeral, it was very splendid and very touching."

Orlando did not insist, but contented himself with saying that he also had felt much emotion all the morning on thinking of that funeral. Then, as he turned to set the papers on the table in order with his trembling hands, his son, icy cold with perspiration, staggering and clinging to the back of a chair in order that he might not fall, again gave Pierre a long glance, but a very soft one, full of distracted gratitude.

"I am leaving this evening," resumed Pierre, who felt exhausted and wished to break off the conversation, "and I must now bid you farewell. Have you any commission to give me for Paris?"

"No, none," replied Orlando; and then, with sudden recollection, he added, "Yes, I have, though! You remember that book written by my old comrade in arms, Theophile Morin, one of Garibaldi's Thousand, that manual for the bachelor's degree which he desired to see translated and adopted here. Well, I am pleased to say that I have a promise that it shall be used in our schools, but on condition that he makes some alterations in it. Luigi, give me the book, it is there on that shelf."

Then, when his son had handed him the volume, he showed Pierre some notes which he had pencilled on the margins, and explained to him the modifications which were desired in the general scheme of the work. "Will you be kind enough," he continued, "to take this copy to Morin himself? His address is written inside the cover. If you can do so you will spare me the trouble of writing him a very long letter; in ten minutes you can explain matters to him more clearly and completely than I could do in ten pages.... And you must embrace Morin for me, and tell him that I still love him, oh! with all my heart of the bygone days, when I could still use my legs and we two fought like devils side by side under a hail of bullets."

A short silence followed, that pause, that embarrassment tinged with emotion which precedes the moment of farewell. "Come, good-bye," said Orlando, "embrace me for him and for yourself, embrace me affectionately like that lad did just now. I am so old and so near my end, my dear Monsieur Froment, that you will allow me to call you my child and to kiss you like a grandfather, wishing you all courage and peace, and that faith in life which alone helps one to live."

Pierre was so touched that tears rose to his eyes, and when with all his soul he kissed the stricken hero on either cheek, he felt that he likewise was weeping. With a hand yet as vigorous as a vice, Orlando detained him for a moment beside his arm-chair, whilst with his other hand waving in a supreme gesture, he for the last time showed him Rome, so immense and mournful under the ashen sky. And his voice came low, quivering and suppliant. "For mercy's sake swear to me that you will love her all the same, in spite of all, for she is the cradle, the mother! Love her for all that she no longer is, love her for all that she desires to be! Do not say that her end has come, love her, love her so that she may live again, that she may live for ever!"

Pierre again embraced him, unable to find any other response, upset as he was by all the passion displayed by that old warrior, who spoke of his city as a man of thirty might speak of the woman he adores. And he found him so handsome and so lofty with his old blanched, leonine mane and his stubborn belief in approaching resurrection, that once more the other old Roman, Cardinal Boccanera, arose before him, equally stubborn in his faith and relinquishing nought of his dream, even though he might be crushed on the spot by the fall of the heavens. These twain ever stood face to face, at either end of their city, alone rearing their lofty figures above the horizon, whilst awaiting the future.

Then, when Pierre had bowed to Count Luigi, and found himself outside again in the Via Venti Settembre he was all eagerness to get back to the Boccanera mansion so as to pack up his things and depart. His farewell visits were made, and he now only had to take leave of Donna Serafina and the Cardinal, and to thank them for all their kind hospitality. For him alone did their doors open, for they had shut themselves up on returning from the funeral, resolved to see nobody. At twilight, therefore, Pierre had no one but Victorine to keep him company in the vast, black mansion, for when he expressed a desire to take supper with Don Vigilio she told him that the latter had also shut himself in his room. Desirous as he was of at least shaking hands with the secretary for the last time, Pierre went to knock at the door, which was so near his own, but could obtain no reply, and divined that the poor fellow, overcome by a fresh attack of fever and suspicion, desired not to see him again, in terror at the idea that he might compromise himself yet more than he had done already. Thereupon, it was settled that as the train only started at seventeen minutes past ten Victorine should serve Pierre his supper on the little table in his sitting-room at eight o'clock. She brought him a lamp and spoke of putting his linen in order, but he absolutely declined her help, and she had to leave him to pack up quietly by himself.

He had purchased a little box, since his valise could not possibly hold all the linen and winter clothing which had been sent to him from Paris as his stay in Rome became more and more protracted. However, the packing was soon accomplished; the wardrobe was emptied, the drawers were visited, the box and valise filled and securely locked by seven o'clock. An hour remained to him before supper and he sat there resting, when his eyes whilst travelling round the walls to make sure that he had forgotten nothing, encountered that old painting by some unknown master, which had so often filled him with emotion. The lamplight now shone full upon it; and this time again as he gazed at it he felt a blow in the heart, a blow which was all the deeper, as now, at his parting hour, he found a symbol of his defeat at Rome in that dolent, tragic, half-naked woman, draped in a shred of linen, and weeping between her clasped hands whilst seated on the threshold of the palace whence she had been driven. Did not that rejected one, that stubborn victim of love, who sobbed so bitterly, and of whom one knew nothing, neither what her face was like, nor whence she had come, nor what her fault had been—did she not personify all man's useless efforts to force the doors of truth, and all the frightful abandonment into which he falls as soon as he collides with the wall which shuts the unknown off from him? For a long while did Pierre look at her, again worried at being obliged to depart without having seen her face behind her streaming golden hair, that face of dolorous beauty which he pictured radiant with youth and delicious in its mystery. And as he gazed he was just fancying that he could see it, that it was becoming his at last, when there was a knock at the door and Narcisse Habert entered.

Pierre was surprised to see the young attache, for three days previously he had started for Florence, impelled thither by one of the sudden whims of his artistic fancy. However, he at once apologised for his unceremonious intrusion. "Ah! there is your luggage!" he said; "I heard that you were going away this evening, and I was unwilling to let you leave Rome without coming to shake hands with you. But what frightful things have happened since we met! I only returned this afternoon, so that I could not attend the funeral. However, you may well imagine how thunderstruck I was by the news of those frightful deaths."

Then, suspecting some unacknowledged tragedy, like a man well acquainted with the legendary dark side of Rome, he put some questions to Pierre but did not insist on them, being at bottom far too prudent to burden himself uselessly with redoubtable secrets. And after Pierre had given him such particulars as he thought fit, the conversation changed and they spoke at length of Italy, Rome, Naples, and Florence. "Ah! Florence, Florence!" Narcisse repeated languorously. He had lighted a cigarette and his words fell more slowly, as he glanced round the room. "You were very well lodged here," he said, "it is very quiet. I had never come up to this floor before."

His eyes continued wandering over the walls until they were at last arrested by the old painting which the lamp illumined, and thereupon he remained for a moment blinking as if surprised. And all at once he rose and approached the picture. "Dear me, dear me," said he, "but that's very good, that's very fine."

"Isn't it?" rejoined Pierre. "I know nothing about painting but I was stirred by that picture on the very day of my arrival, and over and over again it has kept me here with my heart beating and full of indescribable feelings."

Narcisse no longer spoke but examined the painting with the care of a connoisseur, an expert, whose keen glance decides the question of authenticity, and appraises commercial value. And the most extraordinary delight appeared upon the young man's fair, rapturous face, whilst his fingers began to quiver. "But it's a Botticelli, it's a Botticelli! There can be no doubt about it," he exclaimed. "Just look at the hands, and look at the folds of the drapery! And the colour of the hair, and the technique, the flow of the whole composition. A Botticelli, ah! mon Dieu, a Botticelli."

He became quite faint, overflowing with increasing admiration as he penetrated more and more deeply into the subject, at once so simple and so poignant. Was it not acutely modern? The artist had foreseen our pain-fraught century, our anxiety in presence of the invisible, our distress at being unable to cross the portal of mystery which was for ever closed. And what an eternal symbol of the world's wretchedness was that woman, whose face one could not see, and who sobbed so distractedly without it being possible for one to wipe away her tears. Yes, a Botticelli, unknown, uncatalogued, what a discovery! Then he paused to inquire of Pierre: "Did you know it was a Botticelli?"

"Oh no! I spoke to Don Vigilio about it one day, but he seemed to think it of no account. And Victorine, when I spoke to her, replied that all those old things only served to harbour dust."

Narcisse protested, quite stupefied: "What! they have a Botticelli here and don't know it! Ah! how well I recognise in that the Roman princes who, unless their masterpieces have been labelled, are for the most part utterly at sea among them! No doubt this one has suffered a little, but a simple cleaning would make a marvel, a famous picture of it, for which a museum would at least give—"

He abruptly stopped, completing his sentence with a wave of the hand and not mentioning the figure which was on his lips. And then, as Victorine came in followed by Giacomo to lay the little table for Pierre's supper, he turned his back upon the Botticelli and said no more about it. The young priest's attention was aroused, however, and he could well divine what was passing in the other's mind. Under that make-believe Florentine, all angelicalness, there was an experienced business man, who well knew how to look after his pecuniary interests and was even reported to be somewhat avaricious. Pierre, who was aware of it, could not help smiling therefore when he saw him take his stand before another picture—a frightful Virgin, badly copied from some eighteenth-century canvas—and exclaim: "Dear me! that's not at all bad! I've a friend, I remember, who asked me to buy him some old paintings. I say, Victorine, now that Donna Serafina and the Cardinal are left alone do you think they would like to rid themselves of a few valueless pictures?"

The servant raised her arms as if to say that if it depended on her, everything might be carried away. Then she replied: "Not to a dealer, sir, on account of the nasty rumours which would at once spread about, but I'm sure they would be happy to please a friend. The house costs a lot to keep up, and money would be welcome."

Pierre then vainly endeavoured to persuade Narcisse to stay and sup with him, but the young man gave his word of honour that he was expected elsewhere and was even late. And thereupon he ran off, after pressing the priest's hands and affectionately wishing him a good journey.

Eight o'clock was striking, and Pierre seated himself at the little table, Victorine remaining to serve him after dismissing Giacomo, who had brought the supper things upstairs in a basket. "The people here make me wild," said the worthy woman after the other had gone, "they are so slow. And besides, it's a pleasure for me to serve you your last meal, Monsieur l'Abbe. I've had a little French dinner cooked for you, a sole au gratin and a roast fowl."

Pierre was touched by this attention, and pleased to have the company of a compatriot whilst he partook of his final meal amidst the deep silence of the old, black, deserted mansion. The buxom figure of Victorine was still instinct with mourning, with grief for the loss of her dear Contessina, but her daily toil was already setting her erect again, restoring her quick activity; and she spoke almost cheerfully whilst passing plates and dishes to Pierre. "And to think Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "that you'll be in Paris on the morning of the day after to-morrow! As for me, you know, it seems as if I only left Auneau yesterday. Ah! what fine soil there is there; rich soil yellow like gold, not like their poor stuff here which smells of sulphur! And the pretty fresh willows beside our stream, too, and the little wood so full of moss! They've no moss here, their trees look like tin under that stupid sun of theirs which burns up the grass. Mon Dieu! in the early times I would have given I don't know what for a good fall of rain to soak me and wash away all the dust. Ah! I shall never get used to their awful Rome. What a country and what people!"

Pierre was quite enlivened by her stubborn fidelity to her own nook, which after five and twenty years of absence still left her horrified with that city of crude light and black vegetation, true daughter as she was of a smiling and temperate clime which of a morning was steeped in rosy mist. "But now that your young mistress is dead," said he, "what keeps you here? Why don't you take the train with me?"

She looked at him in surprise: "Go off with you, go back to Auneau! Oh! it's impossible, Monsieur l'Abbe. It would be too ungrateful to begin with, for Donna Serafina is accustomed to me, and it would be bad on my part to forsake her and his Eminence now that they are in trouble. And besides, what could I do elsewhere? No, my little hole is here now."

"So you will never see Auneau again?"

"No, never, that's certain."

"And you don't mind being buried here, in their ground which smells of sulphur?"

She burst into a frank laugh. "Oh!" she said, "I don't mind where I am when I'm dead. One sleeps well everywhere. And it's funny that you should be so anxious as to what there may be when one's dead. There's nothing, I'm sure. That's what tranquillises me, to feel that it will be all over and that I shall have a rest. The good God owes us that after we've worked so hard. You know that I'm not devout, oh! dear no. Still that doesn't prevent me from behaving properly, and, true as I stand here, I've never had a lover. It seems foolish to say such a thing at my age, still I say it because it's the sober truth."

She continued laughing like the worthy woman she was, having no belief in priests and yet without a sin upon her conscience. And Pierre once more marvelled at the simple courage and great practical common sense of this laborious and devoted creature, who for him personified the whole unbelieving lowly class of France, those who no longer believe and will believe never more. Ah! to be as she was, to do one's work and lie down for the eternal sleep without any revolt of pride, satisfied with the one joy of having accomplished one's share of toil!

When Pierre had finished his supper Victorine summoned Giacomo to clear the things away. And as it was only half-past eight she advised the priest to spend another quiet hour in his room. Why go and catch a chill by waiting at the station? She could send for a cab at half-past nine, and as soon as it arrived she would send word to him and have his luggage carried down. He might be easy as to that, and need trouble himself about nothing.

When she had gone off Pierre soon sank into a deep reverie. It seemed to him, indeed, as if he had already quitted Rome, as if the city were far away and he could look back on it, and his experiences within it. His book, "New Rome," arose in his mind; and he remembered his first morning on the Janiculum, his view of Rome from the terrace of San Pietro in Montorio, a Rome such as he had dreamt of, so young and ethereal under the pure sky. It was then that he had asked himself the decisive question: Could Catholicism be renewed? Could it revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity, become the religion of the democracy, the faith which the distracted modern world, in danger of death, awaits in order that it may be pacified and live? His heart had then beaten with hope and enthusiasm. After his disaster at Lourdes from which he had scarcely recovered, he had come to attempt another and supreme experiment by asking Rome what her reply to his question would be. And now the experiment had failed, he knew what answer Rome had returned him through her ruins, her monuments, her very soil, her people, her prelates, her cardinals, her pope! No, Catholicism could not be renewed: no, it could not revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity; no, it could not become the religion of the democracy, the new faith which might save the old toppling societies in danger of death. Though it seemed to be of democratic origin, it was henceforth riveted to that Roman soil, it remained kingly in spite of everything, forced to cling to the principle of temporal power under penalty of suicide, bound by tradition, enchained by dogma, its evolutions mere simulations whilst in reality it was reduced to such immobility that, behind the bronze doors of the Vatican, the papacy was the prisoner, the ghost of eighteen centuries of atavism, indulging the ceaseless dream of universal dominion. There, where with priestly faith exalted by love of the suffering and the poor, he had come to seek life and a resurrection of the Christian communion, he had found death, the dust of a destroyed world in which nothing more could germinate, an exhausted soil whence now there could never grow aught but that despotic papacy, the master of bodies as it was of souls. To his distracted cry asking for a new religion, Rome had been content to reply by condemning his book as a work tainted with heresy, and he himself had withdrawn it amidst the bitter grief of his disillusions. He had seen, he had understood, and all had collapsed. And it was himself, his soul and his brain, which lay among the ruins.

Pierre was stifling. He rose, threw the window overlooking the Tiber wide open, and leant out. The rain had begun to fall again at the approach of evening, but now it had once more ceased. The atmosphere was very mild, moist, even oppressive. The moon must have arisen in the ashen grey sky, for her presence could be divined behind the clouds which she illumined with a vague, yellow, mournful light. And under that slumberous glimmer the vast horizon showed blackly and phantom-like: the Janiculum in front with the close-packed houses of the Trastevere; the river flowing away yonder on the left towards the dim height of the Palatine; whilst on the right the dome of St. Peter's showed forth, round and domineering in the pale atmosphere. Pierre could not see the Quirinal but divined it to be behind him, and could picture its long facade shutting off part of the sky. And what a collapsing Rome, half-devoured by the gloom, was this, so different from the Rome all youth and dreamland which he had beheld and passionately loved on the day of his arrival! He remembered the three symbolic summits which had then summed up for him the whole long history of Rome, the ancient, the papal, and the Italian city. But if the Palatine had remained the same discrowned mount on which there only rose the phantom of the ancestor, Augustus, emperor and pontiff, master of the world, he now pictured St. Peter's and the Quirinal as strangely altered. To that royal palace which he had so neglected, and which had seemed to him like a flat, low barrack, to that new Government which had brought him the impression of some attempt at sacrilegious modernity, he now accorded the large, increasing space that they occupied in the panorama, the whole of which they would apparently soon fill; whilst, on the contrary, St. Peter's, that dome which he had found so triumphal, all azure, reigning over the city like a gigantic and unshakable monarch, at present seemed to him full of cracks and already shrinking, as if it were one of those huge old piles, which, through the secret, unsuspected decay of their timbers, at times fall to the ground in one mass.

A murmur, a growling plaint rose from the swollen Tiber, and Pierre shivered at the icy abysmal breath which swept past his face. And his thoughts of the three summits and their symbolic triangle aroused within him the memory of the sufferings of the great silent multitude of poor and lowly for whom pope and king had so long disputed. It all dated from long ago, from the day when, in dividing the inheritance of Augustus, the emperor had been obliged to content himself with men's bodies, leaving their souls to the pope, whose one idea had henceforth been to gain the temporal power of which God, in his person, was despoiled. All the middle ages had been disturbed and ensanguined by the quarrel, till at last the silent multitude weary of vexations and misery spoke out; threw off the papal yoke at the Reformation, and later on began to overthrow its kings. And then, as Pierre had written in his book, a new fortune had been offered to the pope, that of reverting to the ancient dream, by dissociating himself from the fallen thrones and placing himself on the side of the wretched in the hope that this time he would conquer the people, win it entirely for himself. Was it not prodigious to see that man, Leo XIII, despoiled of his kingdom and allowing himself to be called a socialist, assembling under his banner the great flock of the disinherited, and marching against the kings at the head of that fourth estate to whom the coming century will belong? The eternal struggle for possession of the people continued as bitterly as ever even in Rome itself, where pope and king, who could see each other from their windows, contended together like falcon and hawk for the little birds of the woods. And in this for Pierre lay the reason why Catholicism was fatally condemned; for it was of monarchical essence to such a point that the Apostolic and Roman papacy could not renounce the temporal power under penalty of becoming something else and disappearing. In vain did it feign a return to the people, in vain did it seek to appear all soul; there was no room in the midst of the world's democracies for any such total and universal sovereignty as that which it claimed to hold from God. Pierre ever beheld the Imperator sprouting up afresh in the Pontifex Maximus, and it was this in particular which had killed his dream, destroyed his book, heaped up all those ruins before which he remained distracted without either strength or courage.

The sight of that ashen Rome, whose edifices faded away into the night, at last brought him such a heart-pang that he came back into the room and fell on a chair near his luggage. Never before had he experienced such distress of spirit, it seemed like the death of his soul. After his disaster at Lourdes he had not come to Rome in search of the candid and complete faith of a little child, but the superior faith of an intellectual being, rising above rites and symbols, and seeking to ensure the greatest possible happiness of mankind based on its need of certainty. And if this collapsed, if Catholicism could not be rejuvenated and become the religion and moral law of the new generations, if the Pope at Rome and with Rome could not be the Father, the arch of alliance, the spiritual leader whom all hearkened to and obeyed, why then, in Pierre's eyes, the last hope was wrecked, the supreme rending which must plunge present-day society into the abyss was near at hand. That scaffolding of Catholic socialism which had seemed to him so happily devised for the consolidation of the old Church, now appeared to him lying on the ground; and he judged it severely as a mere passing expedient which might perhaps for some years prop up the ruined edifice, but which was simply based on an intentional misunderstanding, on a skilful lie, on politics and diplomacy. No, no, that the people should once again, as so many times before, be duped and gained over, caressed in order that it might be enthralled—this was repugnant to one's reason, and the whole system appeared degenerate, dangerous, temporary, calculated to end in the worst catastrophes. So this then was the finish, nothing remained erect and stable, the old world was about to disappear amidst the frightful sanguinary crisis whose approach was announced by such indisputable signs. And he, before that chaos near at hand, had no soul left him, having once more lost his faith in that decisive experiment which, he had felt beforehand, would either strengthen him or strike him down for ever. The thunderbolt had fallen, and now, O God, what should he do?

To shake off his anguish he began to walk across the room. Aye, what should he do now that he was all doubt again, all dolorous negation, and that his cassock weighed more heavily than it had ever weighed upon his shoulders? He remembered having told Monsignor Nani that he would never submit, would never be able to resign himself and kill his hope in salvation by love, but would rather reply by a fresh book, in which he would say in what new soil the new religion would spring up. Yes, a flaming book against Rome, in which he would set down all he had seen, a book which would depict the real Rome, the Rome which knows neither charity nor love, and is dying in the pride of its purple! He had spoken of returning to Paris, leaving the Church and going to the point of schism. Well, his luggage now lay there packed, he was going off and he would write that book, he would be the great schismatic who was awaited! Did not everything foretell approaching schism amidst that great movement of men's minds, weary of old mummified dogmas and yet hungering for the divine? Even Leo XIII must be conscious of it, for his whole policy, his whole effort towards Christian unity, his assumed affection for the democracy had no other object than that of grouping the whole family around the papacy, and consolidating it so as to render the Pope invincible in the approaching struggle. But the times had come, Catholicism would soon find that it could grant no more political concessions without perishing, that at Rome it was reduced to the immobility of an ancient hieratic idol, and that only in the lands of propaganda, where it was fighting against other religions, could further evolution take place. It was, indeed, for this reason that Rome was condemned, the more so as the abolition of the temporal power, by accustoming men's minds to the idea of a purely spiritual papacy, seemed likely to conduce to the rise of some anti-pope, far away, whilst the successor of St. Peter was compelled to cling stubbornly to his Apostolic and Roman fiction. A bishop, a priest would arise—where, who could tell? Perhaps yonder in that free America, where there are priests whom the struggle for life has turned into convinced socialists, into ardent democrats, who are ready to go forward with the coming century. And whilst Rome remains unable to relinquish aught of her past, aught of her mysteries and dogmas, that priest will relinquish all of those things which fall from one in dust. Ah! to be that priest, to be that great reformer, that saviour of modern society, what a vast dream, what a part, akin to that of a Messiah summoned by the nations in distress. For a moment Pierre was transported as by a breeze of hope and triumph. If that great change did not come in France, in Paris, it would come elsewhere, yonder across the ocean, or farther yet, wherever there might be a sufficiently fruitful soil for the new seed to spring from it in overflowing harvests. A new religion! a new religion! even as he had cried on returning from Lourdes, a religion which in particular should not be an appetite for death, a religion which should at last realise here below that Kingdom of God referred to in the Gospel, and which should equitably divide terrestrial wealth, and with the law of labour ensure the rule of truth and justice.

In the fever of this fresh dream Pierre already saw the pages of his new book flaring before him when his eyes fell on an object lying upon a chair, which at first surprised him. This also was a book, that work of Theophile Morin's which Orlando had commissioned him to hand to its author, and he felt annoyed with himself at having left it there, for he might have forgotten it altogether. Before putting it into his valise he retained it for a moment in his hand turning its pages over, his ideas changing as by a sudden mental revolution. The work was, however, a very modest one, one of those manuals for the bachelor's degree containing little beyond the first elements of the sciences; still all the sciences were represented in it, and it gave a fair summary of the present state of human knowledge. And it was indeed Science which thus burst upon Pierre's reverie with the energy of sovereign power. Not only was Catholicism swept away from his mind, but all his religious conceptions, every hypothesis of the divine tottered and fell. Only that little school book, nothing but the universal desire for knowledge, that education which ever extends and penetrates the whole people, and behold the mysteries became absurdities, the dogmas crumbled, and nothing of ancient faith was left. A nation nourished upon Science, no longer believing in mysteries and dogmas, in a compensatory system of reward and punishment, is a nation whose faith is for ever dead: and without faith Catholicism cannot be. Therein is the blade of the knife, the knife which falls and severs. If one century, if two centuries be needed, Science will take them. She alone is eternal. It is pure naivete to say that reason is not contrary to faith. The truth is, that now already in order to save mere fragments of the sacred writings, it has been necessary to accommodate them to the new certainties, by taking refuge in the assertion that they are simply symbolical! And what an extraordinary attitude is that of the Catholic Church, expressly forbidding all those who may discover a truth contrary to the sacred writings to pronounce upon it in definitive fashion, and ordering them to await events in the conviction that this truth will some day be proved an error! Only the Pope, says the Church, is infallible; Science is fallible, her constant groping is exploited against her, and divines remain on the watch striving to make it appear that her discoveries of to-day are in contradiction with her discoveries of yesterday. What do her sacrilegious assertions, what do her certainties rending dogma asunder, matter to a Catholic since it is certain that at the end of time, she, Science, will again join Faith, and become the latter's very humble slave! Voluntary blindness and impudent denial of things as evident as the sunlight, can no further go. But all the same the insignificant little book, the manual of truth travels on continuing its work, destroying error and building up the new world, even as the infinitesimal agents of life built up our present continents.

In the sudden great enlightenment which had come on him Pierre at last felt himself upon firm ground. Has Science ever retreated? It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat. Never does Science stop, step by step she wrests truth from error, and to say that she is bankrupt because she cannot explain the world in one word and at one effort, is pure and simple nonsense. If she leaves, and no doubt will always leave a smaller and smaller domain to mystery, and if supposition may always strive to explain that mystery, it is none the less certain that she ruins, and with each successive hour will add to the ruin of the ancient hypotheses, those which crumble away before the acquired truths. And Catholicism is in the position of those ancient hypotheses, and will be in it yet more thoroughly to-morrow. Like all religions it is, at the bottom, but an explanation of the world, a superior social and political code, intended to bring about the greatest possible sum of peace and happiness on earth. This code which embraces the universality of things thenceforth becomes human, and mortal like everything that is human. One cannot put it on one side and say that it exists on one side by itself, whilst Science does the same on the other. Science is total and has already shown Catholicism that such is the case, and will show it again and again by compelling it to repair the breaches incessantly effected in its ramparts till the day of victory shall come with the final assault of resplendent truth. Frankly, it makes one laugh to hear people assign a role to Science, forbid her to enter such and such a domain, predict to her that she shall go no further, and declare that at this end of the century she is already so weary that she abdicates! Oh! you little men of shallow or distorted brains, you politicians planning expedients, you dogmatics at bay, you authoritarians so obstinately clinging to the ancient dreams, Science will pass on, and sweep you all away like withered leaves!

Pierre continued glancing through the humble little book, listening to all it told him of sovereign Science. She cannot become bankrupt, for she does not promise the absolute, she is simply the progressive conquest of truth. Never has she pretended that she could give the whole truth at one effort, that sort of edifice being precisely the work of metaphysics, of revelation, of faith. The role of Science, on the contrary, is only to destroy error as she gradually advances and increases enlightenment. And thus, far from becoming bankrupt, in her march which nothing stops, she remains the only possible truth for well-balanced and healthy minds. As for those whom she does not satisfy, who crave for immediate and universal knowledge, they have the resource of seeking refuge in no matter what religious hypothesis, provided, if they wish to appear in the right, that they build their fancy upon acquired certainties. Everything which is raised on proven error falls. However, although religious feeling persists among mankind, although the need of religion may be eternal, it by no means follows that Catholicism is eternal, for it is, after all, but one form of religion, which other forms preceded and which others will follow. Religions may disappear, but religious feeling will create new ones even with the help of Science. Pierre thought of that alleged repulse of Science by the present-day awakening of mysticism, the causes of which he had indicated in his book: the discredit into which the idea of liberty has fallen among the people, duped in the last social reorganisation, and the uneasiness of the elite, in despair at the void in which their liberated minds and enlarged intelligences have left them. It is the anguish of the Unknown springing up again; but it is also only a natural and momentary reaction after so much labour, on finding that Science does not yet calm our thirst for justice, our desire for security, or our ancient idea of an eternal after-life of enjoyment. In order, however, that Catholicism might be born anew, as some seem to think it will be, the social soil would have to change, and it cannot change; it no longer possesses the sap needful for the renewal of a decaying formula which schools and laboratories destroy more and more each day. The ground is other than it once was, a different oak must spring from it. May Science therefore have her religion, for such a religion will soon be the only one possible for the coming democracies, for the nations, whose knowledge ever increases whilst their Catholic faith is already nought but dust.

And all at once, by way of conclusion, Pierre bethought himself of the idiocy of the Congregation of the Index. It had condemned his book, and would surely condemn the other one that he had thought of, should he ever write it. A fine piece of work truly! To fall tooth and nail on the poor books of an enthusiastic dreamer, in which chimera contended with chimera! Yet the Congregation was so foolish as not to interdict that little book which he held in his hands, that humble book which alone was to be feared, which was the ever triumphant enemy that would surely overthrow the Church. Modest it was in its cheap "get up" as a school manual, but that did not matter: danger began with the very alphabet, increased as knowledge was acquired, and burst forth with those resumes of the physical, chemical, and natural sciences which bring the very Creation, as described by Holy Writ, into question. However, the Index dared not attempt to suppress those humble volumes, those terrible soldiers of truth, those destroyers of faith. What was the use, then, of all the money which Leo XIII drew from his hidden treasure of the Peter's Pence to subvention Catholic schools, with the thought of forming the believing generations which the papacy needed to enable it to conquer? What was the use of that precious money if it was only to serve for the purchase of similar insignificant yet formidable volumes, which could never be sufficiently "cooked" and expurgated, but would always contain too much Science, that growing Science which one day would blow up both Vatican and St. Peter's? Ah! that idiotic and impotent Index, what wretchedness and what derision!

Then, when Pierre had placed Theophile Morin's book in his valise, he once more returned to the window, and while leaning out, beheld an extraordinary vision. Under the cloudy, coppery sky, in the mild and mournful night, patches of wavy mist had risen, hiding many of the house-roofs with trailing shreds which looked like shrouds. Entire edifices had disappeared, and he imagined that the times were at last accomplished, and that truth had at last destroyed St. Peter's dome. In a hundred or a thousand years, it would be like that, fallen, obliterated from the black sky. One day, already, he had felt it tottering and cracking beneath him, and had foreseen that this temple of Catholicism would fall even as Jove's temple had fallen on the Capitol. And it was over now, the dome had strewn the ground with fragments, and all that remained standing, in addition to a portion of the apse, where five columns of the central nave, still upholding a shred of entablature, and four cyclopean buttress-piers on which the dome had rested—piers which still arose, isolated and superb, looking indestructible among all the surrounding downfall. But a denser mist flowed past, another thousand years no doubt went by, and then nothing whatever remained. The apse, the last pillars, the giant piers themselves were felled! The wind had swept away their dust, and it would have been necessary to search the soil beneath the brambles and the nettles to find a few fragments of broken statues, marbles with mutilated inscriptions, on the sense of which learned men were unable to agree. And, as formerly, on the Capitol, among the buried remnants of Jupiter's temple, goats strayed and climbed through the solitude, browsing upon the bushes, amidst the deep silence of the oppressive summer sunlight, which only the buzzing flies disturbed.

Then, only then, did Pierre feel the supreme collapse within him. It was really all over, Science was victorious, nothing of the old world remained. What use would it be then to become the great schismatic, the reformer who was awaited? Would it not simply mean the building up of a new dream? Only the eternal struggle of Science against the Unknown, the searching, pursuing inquiry which incessantly moderated man's thirst for the divine, now seemed to him of import, leaving him waiting to know if she would ever triumph so completely as to suffice mankind, by satisfying all its wants. And in the disaster which had overcome his apostolic enthusiasm, in presence of all those ruins, having lost his faith, and even his hope of utilising old Catholicism for social and moral salvation, there only remained reason that held him up. She had at one moment given way. If he had dreamt that book, and had just passed through that terrible crisis, it was because sentiment had once again overcome reason within him. It was his mother, so to say, who had wept in his heart, who had filled him with an irresistible desire to relieve the wretched and prevent the massacres which seemed near at hand; and his passion for charity had thus swept aside the scruples of his intelligence. But it was his father's voice that he now heard, lofty and bitter reason which, though it had fled, at present came back in all sovereignty. As he had done already after Lourdes, he protested against the glorification of the absurd and the downfall of common sense. Reason alone enabled him to walk erect and firm among the remnants of the old beliefs, even amidst the obscurities and failures of Science. Ah! Reason, it was through her alone that he suffered, through her alone that he could content himself, and he swore that he would now always seek to satisfy her, even if in doing so he should lose his happiness.

At that moment it would have been vain for him to ask what he ought to do. Everything remained in suspense, the world stretched before him still littered with the ruins of the past, of which, to-morrow, it would perhaps be rid. Yonder, in that dolorous faubourg of Paris, he would find good Abbe Rose, who but a few days previously had written begging him to return and tend, love, and save his poor, since Rome, so dazzling from afar, was dead to charity. And around the good and peaceful old priest he would find the ever growing flock of wretched ones; the little fledglings who had fallen from their nests, and whom he found pale with hunger and shivering with cold; the households of abominable misery in which the father drank and the mother became a prostitute, while the sons and the daughters sank into vice and crime; the dwellings, too, through which famine swept, where all was filth and shameful promiscuity, where there was neither furniture nor linen, nothing but purely animal life. And then there would also come the cold blasts of winter, the disasters of slack times, the hurricanes of consumption carrying off the weak, whilst the strong clenched their fists and dreamt of vengeance. One evening, too, perhaps, he might again enter some room of horror and find that another mother had killed herself and her five little ones, her last-born in her arms clinging to her drained breast, and the others scattered over the bare tiles, at last contented, feeling hunger no more, now that they were dead! But no, no, such awful things were no longer possible: such black misery conducting to suicide in the heart of that great city of Paris, which is brimful of wealth, intoxicated with enjoyment, and flings millions out of window for mere pleasure! The very foundations of the social edifice were rotten; all would soon collapse amidst mire and blood. Never before had Pierre so acutely realised the derisive futility of Charity. And all at once he became conscious that the long-awaited word, the word which was at last springing from the great silent multitude, the crushed and gagged people was Justice! Aye, Justice not Charity! Charity had only served to perpetuate misery, Justice perhaps would cure it. It was for Justice that the wretched hungered; an act of Justice alone could sweep away the olden world so that the new one might be reared. After all, the great silent multitude would belong neither to Vatican nor to Quirinal, neither to pope nor to king. If it had covertly growled through the ages in its long, sometimes mysterious, and sometimes open contest; if it had struggled betwixt pontiff and emperor who each had wished to retain it for himself alone, it had only done so in order that it might free itself, proclaim its resolve to belong to none on the day when it should cry Justice! Would to-morrow then at last prove that day of Justice and Truth? For his part, Pierre amidst his anguish—having on one hand that need of the divine which tortures man, and on the other sovereignty of reason which enables man to remain erect—was only sure of one thing, that he would keep his vows, continue a priest, watching over the belief of others though he could not himself believe, and would thus chastely and honestly follow his profession, amidst haughty sadness at having been unable to renounce his intelligence in the same way as he had renounced his flesh and his dream of saving the nations. And again, as after Lourdes, he would wait.

So deeply was he plunged in reflection at that window, face to face with the mist which seemed to be destroying the dark edifices of Rome, that he did not hear himself called. At last, however, he felt a tap on the shoulder: "Monsieur l'Abbe!" And then as he turned he saw Victorine, who said to him: "It is half-past nine; the cab is there. Giacomo has already taken your luggage down. You must come away, Monsieur l'Abbe."

Then seeing him blink, still dazed as it were, she smiled and added: "You were bidding Rome goodbye. What a frightful sky there is."

"Yes, frightful," was his reply.

Then they descended the stairs. He had handed her a hundred-franc note to be shared between herself and the other servants. And she apologised for going down before him with the lamp, explaining that the old palace was so dark that evening one could scarcely see.

Ah! that departure, that last descent through the black and empty mansion, it quite upset Pierre's heart. He gave his room that glance of farewell which always saddened him, even when he was leaving a spot where he had suffered. Then, on passing Don Vigilio's chamber, whence there only came a quivering silence, he pictured the secretary with his head buried in his pillows, holding his breath for fear lest he should speak and attract vengeance. But it was in particular on the second and first floor landings, on passing the closed doors of Donna Serafina and the Cardinal, that Pierre quivered with apprehension at hearing nothing but the silence of the grave. And as he followed Victorine, who, lamp in hand, was still descending, he thought of the brother and sister who were left alone in the ruined palace, last relics of a world which had half passed away. All hope of life had departed with Benedetta and Dario, no resurrection could come from that old maid and that priest who was bound to chastity. Ah! those interminable and lugubrious passages, that frigid and gigantic staircase which seemed to descend into nihility, those huge halls with cracking walls where all was wretchedness and abandonment! And that inner court, looking like a cemetery with its weeds and its damp porticus, where remnants of Apollos and Venuses were rotting! And the little deserted garden, fragrant with ripe oranges, whither nobody now would ever stray, where none would ever meet that adorable Contessina under the laurels near the sarcophagus! All was now annihilated in abominable mourning, in a death-like silence, amidst which the two last Boccaneras must wait, in savage grandeur, till their palace should fall about their heads. Pierre could only just detect a faint sound, the gnawing of a mouse perhaps, unless it were caused by Abbe Paparelli attacking the walls of some out-of-the-way rooms, preying on the old edifice down below, so as to hasten its fall.

The cab stood at the door, already laden with the luggage, the box beside the driver, the valise on the seat; and the priest at once got in.

"Oh! You have plenty of time," said Victorine, who had remained on the foot-pavement. "Nothing has been forgotten. I'm glad to see you go off comfortably."

And indeed at that last moment Pierre was comforted by the presence of that worthy woman, his compatriot, who had greeted him on his arrival and now attended his departure. "I won't say 'till we meet again,' Monsieur l'Abbe," she exclaimed, "for I don't fancy that you'll soon be back in this horrid city. Good-bye, Monsieur l'Abbe."

"Good-bye, Victorine, and thank you with all my heart."

The cab was already going off at a fast trot, turning into the narrow sinuous street which leads to the Corso Vittoria Emanuele. It was not raining and so the hood had not been raised, but although the damp atmosphere was comparatively mild, Pierre at once felt a chill. However, he was unwilling to stop the driver, a silent fellow whose only desire seemingly was to get rid of his fare as soon as possible. When the cab came out into the Corso Vittoria Emanuele, the young man was astonished to find it already quite deserted, the houses shut, the footways bare, and the electric lamps burning all alone in melancholy solitude. In truth, however, the temperature was far from warm and the fog seemed to be increasing, hiding the house-fronts more and more. When Pierre passed the Cancelleria, that stern colossal pile seemed to him to be receding, fading away; and farther on, upon the right, at the end of the Via di Ara Coeli, starred by a few smoky gas lamps, the Capitol had quite vanished in the gloom. Then the thoroughfare narrowed, and the cab went on between the dark heavy masses of the Gesu and the Altieri palace; and there in that contracted passage, where even on fine sunny days one found all the dampness of old times, the quivering priest yielded to a fresh train of thought. It was an idea which had sometimes made him feel anxious, the idea that mankind, starting from over yonder in Asia, had always marched onward with the sun. An east wind had always carried the human seed for future harvest towards the west. And for a long while now the cradle of humanity had been stricken with destruction and death, as if indeed the nations could only advance by stages, leaving exhausted soil, ruined cities, and degenerate populations behind, as they marched from orient to occident, towards their unknown goal. Nineveh and Babylon on the banks of the Euphrates, Thebes and Memphis on the banks of the Nile, had been reduced to dust, sinking from old age and weariness into a deadly numbness beyond possibility of awakening. Then decrepitude had spread to the shores of the great Mediterranean lake, burying both Tyre and Sidon with dust, and afterwards striking Carthage with senility whilst it yet seemed in full splendour. In this wise as mankind marched on, carried by the hidden forces of civilisation from east to west, it marked each day's journey with ruins; and how frightful was the sterility nowadays displayed by the cradle of History, that Asia and that Egypt, which had once more lapsed into childhood, immobilised in ignorance and degeneracy amidst the ruins of ancient cities that once had been queens of the world!

It was thus Pierre reflected as the cab rolled on. Still he was not unconscious of his surroundings. As he passed the Palazzo di Venezia it seemed to him to be crumbling beneath some assault of the invisible, for the mist had already swept away its battlements, and the lofty, bare, fearsome walls looked as if they were staggering from the onslaught of the growing darkness. And after passing the deep gap of the Corso, which was also deserted amidst the pallid radiance of its electric lights, the Palazzo Torlonia appeared on the right-hand, with one wing ripped open by the picks of demolishers, whilst on the left, farther up, the Palazzo Colonna showed its long, mournful facade and closed windows, as if, now that it was deserted by its masters and void of its ancient pomp, it awaited the demolishers in its turn.

Then, as the cab at a slower pace began to climb the ascent of the Via Nazionale, Pierre's reverie continued. Was not Rome also stricken, had not the hour come for her to disappear amidst that destruction which the nations on the march invariably left behind them? Greece, Athens, and Sparta slumbered beneath their glorious memories, and were of no account in the world of to-day. Moreover, the growing paralysis had already invaded the lower portion of the Italic peninsula; and after Naples certainly came the turn of Rome. She was on the very margin of the death spot which ever extends over the old continent, that margin where agony begins, where the impoverished soil will no longer nourish and support cities, where men themselves seem stricken with old age as soon as they are born. For two centuries Rome had been declining, withdrawing little by little from modern life, having neither manufactures nor trade, and being incapable even of science, literature, or art. And in Pierre's thoughts it was no longer St. Peter's only that fell, but all Rome—basilicas, palaces, and entire districts—which collapsed amidst a supreme rending, and covered the seven hills with a chaos of ruins. Like Nineveh and Babylon, and like Thebes and Memphis, Rome became but a plain, bossy with remnants, amidst which one vainly sought to identify the sites of ancient edifices, whilst its sole denizens were coiling serpents and bands of rats.

The cab turned, and on the right, in a huge gap of darkness Pierre recognised Trajan's column, but it was no longer gilded by the sun as when he had first seen it; it now rose up blackly like the dead trunk of a giant tree whose branches have fallen from old age. And farther on, when he raised his eyes while crossing the little triangular piazza, and perceived a real tree against the leaden sky, that parasol pine of the Villa Aldobrandini which rises there like a symbol of Rome's grace and pride, it seemed to him but a smear, a little cloud of soot ascending from the downfall of the whole city.

With the anxious, fraternal turn of his feelings, fear was coming over him as he reached the end of his tragic dream. When the numbness which spreads across the aged world should have passed Rome, when Lombardy should have yielded to it, and Genoa, Turin, and Milan should have fallen asleep as Venice has fallen already, then would come the turn of France. The Alps would be crossed, Marseilles, like Tyre and Sidon, would see its port choked up by sand, Lyons would sink into desolation and slumber, and at last Paris, invaded by the invincible torpor, and transformed into a sterile waste of stones bristling with nettles, would join Rome and Nineveh and Babylon in death, whilst the nations continued their march from orient to occident following the sun. A great cry sped through the gloom, the death cry of the Latin races! History, which seemed to have been born in the basin of the Mediterranean, was being transported elsewhere, and the ocean had now become the centre of the world. How many hours of the human day had gone by? Had mankind, starting from its cradle over yonder at daybreak, strewing its road with ruins from stage to stage, now accomplished one-half of its day and reached the dazzling hour of noon? If so, then the other half of the day allotted to it was beginning, the new world was following the old one, the new world of those American cities where democracy was forming and the religion of to-morrow was sprouting, those sovereign queens of the coming century, with yonder, across another ocean, on the other side of the globe, that motionless Far East, mysterious China and Japan, and all the threatening swarm of the yellow races.

However, while the cab climbed higher and higher up the Via Nazionale, Pierre felt his nightmare dissipating. There was here a lighter atmosphere, and he came back into a renewal of hope and courage. Yet the Banca d'Italia, with its brand-new ugliness, its chalky hugeness, looked to him like a phantom in a shroud; whilst above a dim expanse of gardens the Quirinal formed but a black streak barring the heavens. However, the street ever ascended and broadened, and on the summit of the Viminal, on the Piazza delle Terme, when he passed the ruins of Diocletian's baths, he could breathe as his lungs listed. No, no, the human day could not finish, it was eternal, and the stages of civilisation would follow and follow without end! What mattered that eastern wind which carried the nations towards the west, as if borne on by the power of the sun! If necessary, they would return across the other side of the globe, they would again and again make the circuit of the earth, until the day should come when they could establish themselves in peace, truth, and justice. After the next civilisation on the shores of the Atlantic, which would become the world's centre, skirted by queenly cities, there would spring up yet another civilisation, having the Pacific for its centre, with seaport capitals that could not be yet foreseen, whose germs yet slumbered on unknown shores. And in like way there would be still other civilisations and still others! And at that last moment, the inspiriting thought came to Pierre that the great movement of the nations was the instinct, the need which impelled them to return to unity. Originating in one sole family, afterwards parted and dispersed in tribes, thrown into collision by fratricidal hatred, their tendency was none the less to become one sole family again. The provinces united in nations, the nations would unite in races, and the races would end by uniting in one immortal mankind—mankind at last without frontiers, or possibility of wars, mankind living by just labour amidst an universal commonwealth. Was not this indeed the evolution, the object of the labour progressing everywhere, the finish reserved to History? Might Italy then become a strong and healthy nation, might concord be established between her and France, and might that fraternity of the Latin races become the beginning of universal fraternity! Ah! that one fatherland, the whole earth pacified and happy, in how many centuries would that come—and what a dream!

Then, on reaching the station the scramble prevented Pierre from thinking any further. He had to take his ticket and register his luggage, and afterwards he at once climbed into the train. At dawn on the next day but one, he would be back in Paris.

END

PARIS

FROM THE THREE CITIES

By Emile Zola

Translated By Ernest A. Vizetelly

BOOK I.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

WITH the present work M. Zola completes the "Trilogy of the Three Cities," which he began with "Lourdes" and continued with "Rome"; and thus the adventures and experiences of Abbe Pierre Froment, the doubting Catholic priest who failed to find faith at the miraculous grotto by the Cave, and hope amidst the crumbling theocracy of the Vatican, are here brought to what, from M. Zola's point of view, is their logical conclusion. From the first pages of "Lourdes," many readers will have divined that Abbe Froment was bound to finish as he does, for, frankly, no other finish was possible from a writer of M. Zola's opinions.

Taking the Trilogy as a whole, one will find that it is essentially symbolical. Abbe Froment is Man, and his struggles are the struggles between Religion, as personified by the Roman Catholic Church, on the one hand, and Reason and Life on the other. In the Abbe's case the victory ultimately rests with the latter; and we may take it as being M. Zola's opinion that the same will eventually be the case with the great bulk of mankind. English writers are often accused of treating subjects from an insular point of view, and certainly there may be good ground for such a charge. But they are not the only writers guilty of the practice. The purview of French authors is often quite as limited: they regard French opinion as the only good opinion, and judge the rest of the world by their own standard. In the present case, if we leave the world and mankind generally on one side, and apply M. Zola's facts and theories to France alone, it will be found, I think, that he has made out a remarkably good case for himself. For it is certain that Catholicism, I may say Christianity, is fast crumbling in France. There may be revivals in certain limited circles, efforts of the greatest energy to prop up the tottering edifice by a "rallying" of believers to the democratic cause, and by a kindling of the most bitter anti-Semitic warfare; but all these revivals and efforts, although they are extremely well-advertised and create no little stir, produce very little impression on the bulk of the population. So far as France is concerned, the policy of Leo XIII. seems to have come too late. The French masses regard Catholicism or Christianity, whichever one pleases, as a religion of death,—a religion which, taking its stand on the text "There shall always be poor among you," condemns them to toil and moil in poverty and distress their whole life long, with no other consolation than the promise of happiness in heaven. And, on the other hand, they see the ministers of the Deity, "whose kingdom is not of this world," supporting the wealthy and powerful, and striving to secure wealth and power for themselves. Charity exists, of course, but the masses declare that it is no remedy; they do not ask for doles, they ask for Justice. It is largely by reason of all this that Socialism and Anarchism have made such great strides in France of recent years. Robespierre, as will be remembered, once tried to suppress Christianity altogether, and for a time certainly there was a virtually general cessation of religious observances in France. But no such Reign of Terror prevails there to-day. Men are perfectly free to believe if they are inclined to do so; and yet never were there fewer religious marriages, fewer baptisms or smaller congregations in the French churches. I refer not merely to Paris and other large cities, but to the smaller towns, and even the little hamlets of many parts. Old village priests, men practising what they teach and possessed of the most loving, benevolent hearts, have told me with tears in their eyes of the growing infidelity of their parishioners.

I have been studying this matter for some years, and write without prejudice, merely setting down what I believe to be the truth. Of course we are all aware that the most stupendous efforts are being made by the Catholic clergy and zealous believers to bring about a revival of the faith, and certainly in some circles there has been a measure of success. But the reconversion of a nation is the most formidable of tasks; and, in my own opinion, as in M. Zola's, France as a whole is lost to the Christian religion. On this proposition, combined with a second one, namely, that even as France as a nation will be the first to discard Christianity, so she will be the first to promulgate a new faith based on reason, science and the teachings of life, is founded the whole argument of M. Zola's Trilogy.

Having thus dealt with the Trilogy's religious aspects, I would now speak of "Paris," its concluding volume. This is very different from "Lourdes" and "Rome." Whilst recounting the struggles and fate of Abbe Froment and his brother Guillaume, and entering largely into the problem of Capital and Labour, which problem has done so much to turn the masses away from Christianity, it contains many an interesting and valuable picture of the Parisian world at the close of the nineteenth century. It is no guide-book to Paris; but it paints the city's social life, its rich and poor, its scandals and crimes, its work and its pleasures. Among the households to which the reader is introduced are those of a banker, an aged Countess of the old noblesse, a cosmopolitan Princess, of a kind that Paris knows only too well, a scientist, a manufacturer, a working mechanician, a priest, an Anarchist, a petty clerk and an actress of a class that so often dishonours the French stage. Science and art and learning and religion, all have their representatives. Then, too, the political world is well to the front. There are honest and unscrupulous Ministers of State, upright and venal deputies, enthusiastic and cautious candidates for power, together with social theoreticians of various schools. And the blase, weak-minded man of fashion is here, as well as the young "symbolist" of perverted, degraded mind. The women are of all types, from the most loathsome to the most lovable. Then, too, the journalists are portrayed in such life-like fashion that I might give each of them his real name. And journalism, Parisian journalism, is flagellated, shown as it really is,—if just a few well-conducted organs be excepted,—that is, venal and impudent, mendacious and even petty.

The actual scenes depicted are quite as kaleidoscopic as are the characters in their variety. We enter the banker's gilded saloon and the hovel of the pauper, the busy factory, the priest's retired home and the laboratory of the scientist. We wait in the lobbies of the Chamber of Deputies, and afterwards witness "a great debate"; we penetrate into the private sanctum of a Minister of the Interior; we attend a fashionable wedding at the Madeleine and a first performance at the Comedie Francaise; we dine at the Cafe Anglais and listen to a notorious vocalist in a low music hall at Montmartre; we pursue an Anarchist through the Bois de Boulogne; we slip into the Assize Court and see that Anarchist tried there; we afterwards gaze upon his execution by the guillotine; we are also on the boulevards when the lamps are lighted for a long night of revelry, and we stroll along the quiet streets in the small hours of the morning, when crime and homeless want are prowling round.

And ever the scene changes; the whole world of Paris passes before one. Yet the book, to my thinking, is far less descriptive than analytical. The souls of the principal characters are probed to their lowest depths. Many of the scenes, too, are intensely dramatic, admirably adapted for the stage; as, for instance, Baroness Duvillard's interview with her daughter in the chapter which I have called "The Rivals." And side by side with baseness there is heroism, while beauty of the flesh finds its counterpart in beauty of the mind. M. Zola has often been reproached for showing us the vileness of human nature; and no doubt such vileness may be found in "Paris," but there are contrasting pictures. If some of M. Zola's characters horrify the reader, there are others that the latter can but admire. Life is compounded of good and evil, and unfortunately it is usually the evil that makes the most noise and attracts the most attention. Moreover, in M. Zola's case, it has always been his purpose to expose the evils from which society suffers in the hope of directing attention to them and thereby hastening a remedy, and thus, in the course of his works, he could not do otherwise than drag the whole frightful mass of human villany and degradation into the full light of day. But if there are, again, black pages in "Paris," others, bright and comforting, will be found near them. And the book ends in no pessimist strain. Whatever may be thought of the writer's views on religion, most readers will, I imagine, agree with his opinion that, despite much social injustice, much crime, vice, cupidity and baseness, we are ever marching on to better things.

In the making of the coming, though still far-away, era of truth and justice, Paris, he thinks, will play the leading part, for whatever the stains upon her, they are but surface-deep; her heart remains good and sound; she has genius and courage and energy and wit and fancy. She can be generous, too, when she chooses, and more than once her ideas have irradiated the world. Thus M. Zola hopes much from her, and who will gainsay him? Not I, who can apply to her the words which Byron addressed to the home of my own and M. Zola's forefathers:—

"I loved her from my boyhood; she to me
Was as a fairy city of the heart."

Thus I can but hope that Paris, where I learnt the little I know, where I struggled and found love and happiness, whose every woe and disaster and triumph I have shared for over thirty years, may, however dark the clouds that still pass over her, some day fully justify M. Zola's confidence, and bring to pass his splendid dream of perfect truth and perfect justice.

E. A. V.

MERTON, SURREY, ENGLAND,

Feb. 5, 1898.

I. THE PRIEST AND THE POOR

THAT morning, one towards the end of January, Abbe Pierre Froment, who had a mass to say at the Sacred Heart at Montmartre, was on the height, in front of the basilica, already at eight o'clock. And before going in he gazed for a moment upon the immensity of Paris spread out below him.

After two months of bitter cold, ice and snow, the city was steeped in a mournful, quivering thaw. From the far-spreading, leaden-hued heavens a thick mist fell like a mourning shroud. All the eastern portion of the city, the abodes of misery and toil, seemed submerged beneath ruddy steam, amid which the panting of workshops and factories could be divined; while westwards, towards the districts of wealth and enjoyment, the fog broke and lightened, becoming but a fine and motionless veil of vapour. The curved line of the horizon could scarcely be divined, the expanse of houses, which nothing bounded, appeared like a chaos of stone, studded with stagnant pools, which filled the hollows with pale steam; whilst against them the summits of the edifices, the housetops of the loftier streets, showed black like soot. It was a Paris of mystery, shrouded by clouds, buried as it were beneath the ashes of some disaster, already half-sunken in the suffering and the shame of that which its immensity concealed.

Thin and sombre in his flimsy cassock, Pierre was looking on when Abbe Rose, who seemed to have sheltered himself behind a pillar of the porch on purpose to watch for him, came forward: "Ah! it's you at last, my dear child," said he, "I have something to ask you."

He seemed embarrassed and anxious, and glanced round distrustfully to make sure that nobody was near. Then, as if the solitude thereabouts did not suffice to reassure him, he led Pierre some distance away, through the icy, biting wind, which he himself did not seem to feel. "This is the matter," he resumed, "I have been told that a poor fellow, a former house-painter, an old man of seventy, who naturally can work no more, is dying of hunger in a hovel in the Rue des Saules. So, my dear child, I thought of you. I thought you would consent to take him these three francs from me, so that he may at least have some bread to eat for a few days."

"But why don't you take him your alms yourself?"

At this Abbe Rose again grew anxious, and cast vague, frightened glances about him. "Oh, no, oh, no!" he said, "I can no longer do that after all the worries that have befallen me. You know that I am watched, and should get another scolding if I were caught giving alms like this, scarcely knowing to whom I give them. It is true that I had to sell something to get these three francs. But, my dear child, render me this service, I pray you."

Pierre, with heart oppressed, stood contemplating the old priest, whose locks were quite white, whose full lips spoke of infinite kindliness, and whose eyes shone clear and childlike in his round and smiling face. And he bitterly recalled the story of that lover of the poor, the semi-disgrace into which he had fallen through the sublime candour of his charitable goodness. His little ground-floor of the Rue de Charonne, which he had turned into a refuge where he offered shelter to all the wretchedness of the streets, had ended by giving cause for scandal. His naivete and innocence had been abused; and abominable things had gone on under his roof without his knowledge. Vice had turned the asylum into a meeting-place; and at last, one night, the police had descended upon it to arrest a young girl accused of infanticide. Greatly concerned by this scandal, the diocesan authorities had forced Abbe Rose to close his shelter, and had removed him from the church of Ste. Marguerite to that of St. Pierre of Montmartre, where he now again acted as curate. Truth to tell, it was not a disgrace but a removal to another spot. However, he had been scolded and was watched, as he said; and he was much ashamed of it, and very unhappy at being only able to give alms by stealth, much like some harebrained prodigal who blushes for his faults.

Pierre took the three francs. "I promise to execute your commission, my friend, oh! with all my heart," he said.

"You will go after your mass, won't you? His name is Laveuve, he lives in the Rue des Saules in a house with a courtyard, just before reaching the Rue Marcadet. You are sure to find it. And if you want to be very kind you will tell me of your visit this evening at five o'clock, at the Madeleine, where I am going to hear Monseigneur Martha's address. He has been so good to me! Won't you also come to hear him?"

Pierre made an evasive gesture. Monseigneur Martha, Bishop of Persepolis and all powerful at the archiepiscopal palace, since, like the genial propagandist he was, he had been devoting himself to increasing the subscriptions for the basilica of the Sacred Heart, had indeed supported Abbe Rose; in fact, it was by his influence that the abbe had been kept in Paris, and placed once more at St. Pierre de Montmartre.

"I don't know if I shall be able to hear the address," said Pierre, "but in any case I will go there to meet you."

The north wind was blowing, and the gloomy cold penetrated both of them on that deserted summit amidst the fog which changed the vast city into a misty ocean. However, some footsteps were heard, and Abbe Rose, again mistrustful, saw a man go by, a tall and sturdy man, who wore clogs and was bareheaded, showing his thick and closely-cut white hair. "Is not that your brother?" asked the old priest.

Pierre had not stirred. "Yes, it is my brother Guillaume," he quietly responded. "I have found him again since I have been coming occasionally to the Sacred Heart. He owns a house close by, where he has been living for more than twenty years, I think. When we meet we shake hands, but I have never even been to his house. Oh! all is quite dead between us, we have nothing more in common, we are parted by worlds."

Abbe Rose's tender smile again appeared, and he waved his hand as if to say that one must never despair of love. Guillaume Froment, a savant of lofty intelligence, a chemist who lived apart from others, like one who rebelled against the social system, was now a parishioner of the abbe's, and when the latter passed the house where Guillaume lived with his three sons—a house all alive with work—he must often have dreamt of leading him back to God.

"But, my dear child," he resumed, "I am keeping you here in this dark cold, and you are not warm. Go and say your mass. Till this evening, at the Madeleine." Then, in entreating fashion, after again making sure that none could hear them, he added, still with the air of a child at fault: "And not a word to anybody about my little commission—it would again be said that I don't know how to conduct myself."

Pierre watched the old priest as he went off towards the Rue Cartot, where he lived on a damp ground-floor, enlivened by a strip of garden. The veil of disaster, which was submerging Paris, now seemed to grow thicker under the gusts of the icy north wind. And at last Pierre entered the basilica, his heart upset, overflowing with the bitterness stirred up by the recollection of Abbe Rose's story—that bankruptcy of charity, the frightful irony of a holy man punished for bestowing alms, and hiding himself that he might still continue to bestow them. Nothing could calm the smart of the wound reopened in Pierre's heart—neither the warm peacefulness into which he entered, nor the silent solemnity of the broad, deep fabric, whose new stonework was quite bare, without a single painting or any kind of decoration; the nave being still half-barred by the scaffoldings which blocked up the unfinished dome. At that early hour the masses of entreaty had already been said at several altars, under the grey light falling from the high and narrow windows, and the tapers of entreaty were burning in the depths of the apse. So Pierre made haste to go to the sacristy, there to assume his vestments in order that he might say his mass in the chapel of St. Vincent de Paul.

But the floodgates of memory had been opened, and he had no thought but for his distress whilst, in mechanical fashion, he performed the rites and made the customary gestures. Since his return from Rome three years previously, he had been living in the very worst anguish that can fall on man. At the outset, in order to recover his lost faith, he had essayed a first experiment: he had gone to Lourdes, there to seek the innocent belief of the child who kneels and prays, the primitive faith of young nations bending beneath the terror born of ignorance; but he had rebelled yet more than ever in presence of what he had witnessed at Lourdes: that glorification of the absurd, that collapse of common sense; and was convinced that salvation, the peace of men and nations nowadays, could not lie in that puerile relinquishment of reason. And afterwards, again yielding to the need of loving whilst yet allowing reason, so hard to satisfy, her share in his intellect, he had staked his final peace on a second experiment, and had gone to Rome to see if Catholicism could there be renewed, could revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity and become the religion of the democracy, the faith which the modern world, upheaving and in danger of death, was awaiting in order to calm down and live. And he had found there naught but ruins, the rotted trunk of a tree that could never put forth another springtide; and he had heard there naught but the supreme rending of the old social edifice, near to its fall. Then it was, that, relapsing into boundless doubt, total negation, he had been recalled to Paris by Abbe Rose, in the name of their poor, and had returned thither that he might forget and immolate himself and believe in them—the poor—since they and their frightful sufferings alone remained certain. And then it was too, that for three years he came into contact with that collapse, that very bankruptcy of goodness itself: charity a derision, charity useless and flouted.

Those three years had been lived by Pierre amidst ever-growing torments, in which his whole being had ended by sinking. His faith was forever dead; dead, too, even his hope of utilising the faith of the multitudes for the general salvation. He denied everything, he anticipated nothing but the final, inevitable catastrophe: revolt, massacre and conflagration, which would sweep away a guilty and condemned world. Unbelieving priest that he was, yet watching over the faith of others, honestly, chastely discharging his duties, full of haughty sadness at the thought that he had been unable to renounce his mind as he had renounced his flesh and his dream of being a saviour of the nations, he withal remained erect, full of fierce yet solitary grandeur. And this despairing, denying priest, who had dived to the bottom of nothingness, retained such a lofty and grave demeanour, perfumed by such pure kindness, that in his parish of Neuilly he had acquired the reputation of being a young saint, one beloved by Providence, whose prayers wrought miracles. He was but a personification of the rules of the Church; of the priest he retained only the gestures; he was like an empty sepulchre in which not even the ashes of hope remained; yet grief-stricken weeping women worshipped him and kissed his cassock; and it was a tortured mother whose infant was in danger of death, who had implored him to come and ask that infant's cure of Jesus, certain as she felt that Jesus would grant her the boon in that sanctuary of Montmartre where blazed the prodigy of His heart, all burning with love.

Clad in his vestments, Pierre had reached the chapel of St. Vincent de Paul. He there ascended the altar-step and began the mass; and when he turned round with hands spread out to bless the worshippers he showed his hollow cheeks, his gentle mouth contracted by bitterness, his loving eyes darkened by suffering. He was no longer the young priest whose countenance had glowed with tender fever on the road to Lourdes, whose face had been illumined by apostolic fervour when he started for Rome. The two hereditary influences which were ever at strife within him—that of his father to whom he owed his impregnable, towering brow, that of his mother who had given him his love-thirsting lips, were still waging war, the whole human battle of sentiment and reason, in that now ravaged face of his, whither in moments of forgetfulness ascended all the chaos of internal suffering. The lips still confessed that unquenched thirst for love, self-bestowal and life, which he well thought he could nevermore content, whilst the solid brow, the citadel which made him suffer, obstinately refused to capitulate, whatever might be the assaults of error. But he stiffened himself, hid the horror of the void in which he struggled, and showed himself superb, making each gesture, repeating each word in sovereign fashion. And gazing at him through her tears, the mother who was there among the few kneeling women, the mother who awaited a supreme intercession from him, who thought him in communion with Jesus for the salvation of her child, beheld him radiant with angelic beauty like some messenger of the divine grace.

When, after the offertory, Pierre uncovered the chalice he felt contempt for himself. The shock had been too great, and he thought of those things in spite of all. What puerility there had been in his two experiments at Lourdes and Rome, the naivete of a poor distracted being, consumed by desire to love and believe. To have imagined that present-day science would in his person accommodate itself to the faith of the year One Thousand, and in particular to have foolishly believed that he, petty priest that he was, would be able to indoctrinate the Pope and prevail on him to become a saint and change the face of the world! It all filled him with shame; how people must have laughed at him! Then, too, his idea of a schism made him blush. He again beheld himself at Rome, dreaming of writing a book by which he would violently sever himself from Catholicism to preach the new religion of the democracies, the purified, human and living Gospel. But what ridiculous folly! A schism? He had known in Paris an abbe of great heart and mind who had attempted to bring about that famous, predicted, awaited schism. Ah! the poor man, the sad, the ludicrous labour in the midst of universal incredulity, the icy indifference of some, the mockery and the reviling of others! If Luther were to come to France in our days he would end, forgotten and dying of hunger, on a Batignolles fifth-floor. A schism cannot succeed among a people that no longer believes, that has ceased to take all interest in the Church, and sets its hope elsewhere. And it was all Catholicism, in fact all Christianity, that would be swept away, for, apart from certain moral maxims, the Gospel no longer supplied a possible code for society. And this conviction increased Pierre's torment on the days when his cassock weighed more heavily on his shoulders, when he ended by feeling contempt for himself at thus celebrating the divine mystery of the mass, which for him had become but the formula of a dead religion.

Having half filled the chalice with wine from the vase, Pierre washed his hands and again perceived the mother with her face of ardent entreaty. Then he thought it was for her that, with the charitable leanings of a vow-bound man, he had remained a priest, a priest without belief, feeding the belief of others with the bread of illusion. But this heroic conduct, the haughty spirit of duty in which he imprisoned himself, was not practised by him without growing anguish. Did not elementary probity require that he should cast aside the cassock and return into the midst of men? At certain times the falsity of his position filled him with disgust for his useless heroism; and he asked himself if it were not cowardly and dangerous to leave the masses in superstition. Certainly the theory of a just and vigilant Providence, of a future paradise where all these sufferings of the world would receive compensation, had long seemed necessary to the wretchedness of mankind; but what a trap lay in it, what a pretext for the tyrannical grinding down of nations; and how far more virile it would be to undeceive the nations, however brutally, and give them courage to live the real life, even if it were in tears. If they were already turning aside from Christianity was not this because they needed a more human ideal, a religion of health and joy which should not be a religion of death? On the day when the idea of charity should crumble, Christianity would crumble also, for it was built upon the idea of divine charity correcting the injustice of fate, and offering future rewards to those who might suffer in this life. And it was crumbling; for the poor no longer believed in it, but grew angry at the thought of that deceptive paradise, with the promise of which their patience had been beguiled so long, and demanded that their share of happiness should not always be put off until the morrow of death. A cry for justice arose from every lip, for justice upon this earth, justice for those who hunger and thirst, whom alms are weary of relieving after eighteen hundred years of Gospel teaching, and who still and ever lack bread to eat.

When Pierre, with his elbows on the altar, had emptied the chalice after breaking the sacred wafer, he felt himself sinking into yet greater distress. And so a third experiment was beginning for him, the supreme battle of justice against charity, in which his heart and his mind would struggle together in that great Paris, so full of terrible, unknown things. The need for the divine still battled within him against domineering intelligence. How among the masses would one ever be able to content the thirst for the mysterious? Leaving the elite on one side, would science suffice to pacify desire, lull suffering, and satisfy the dream? And what would become of himself in the bankruptcy of that same charity, which for three years had alone kept him erect by occupying his every hour, and giving him the illusion of self-devotion, of being useful to others? It seemed, all at once, as if the ground sank beneath him, and he heard nothing save the cry of the masses, silent so long, but now demanding justice, growling and threatening to take their share, which was withheld from them by force and ruse. Nothing more, it seemed, could delay the inevitable catastrophe, the fratricidal class warfare that would sweep away the olden world, which was condemned to disappear beneath the mountain of its crimes. Every hour with frightful sadness he expected the collapse, Paris steeped in blood, Paris in flames. And his horror of all violence froze him; he knew not where to seek the new belief which might dissipate the peril. Fully conscious, though he was, that the social and religious problems are but one, and are alone in question in the dreadful daily labour of Paris, he was too deeply troubled himself, too far removed from ordinary things by his position as a priest, and too sorely rent by doubt and powerlessness to tell as yet where might be truth, and health, and life. Ah! to be healthy and to live, to content at last both heart and reason in the peace, the certain, simply honest labour, which man has come to accomplish upon this earth!

The mass was finished, and Pierre descended from the altar, when the weeping mother, near whom he passed, caught hold of a corner of the chasuble with her trembling hands, and kissed it with wild fervour, as one may kiss some relic of a saint from whom one expects salvation. She thanked him for the miracle which he must have accomplished, certain as she felt that she would find her child cured. And he was deeply stirred by that love, that ardent faith of hers, in spite of the sudden and yet keener distress which he felt at being in no wise the sovereign minister that she thought him, the minister able to obtain a respite from Death. But he dismissed her consoled and strengthened, and it was with an ardent prayer that he entreated the unknown but conscious Power to succour the poor creature. Then, when he had divested himself in the sacristy, and found himself again out of doors before the basilica, lashed by the keen wintry wind, a mortal shiver came upon him, and froze him, while through the mist he looked to see if a whirlwind of anger and justice had not swept Paris away: that catastrophe which must some day destroy it, leaving under the leaden heavens only the pestilential quagmire of its ruins.

Pierre wished to fulfil Abbe Rose's commission immediately. He followed the Rue des Norvins, on the crest of Montmartre; and, reaching the Rue des Saules, descended by its steep slope, between mossy walls, to the other side of Paris. The three francs which he was holding in his cassock's pocket, filled him at once with gentle emotion and covert anger against the futility of charity. But as he gradually descended by the sharp declivities and interminable storeys of steps, the mournful nooks of misery which he espied took possession of him, and infinite pity wrung his heart. A whole new district was here being built alongside the broad thoroughfares opened since the great works of the Sacred Heart had begun. Lofty middle-class houses were already rising among ripped-up gardens and plots of vacant land, still edged with palings. And these houses with their substantial frontages, all new and white, lent a yet more sombre and leprous aspect to such of the old shaky buildings as remained, the low pot-houses with blood-coloured walls, the cites of workmen's dwellings, those abodes of suffering with black, soiled buildings in which human cattle were piled. Under the low-hanging sky that day, the pavement, dented by heavily-laden carts, was covered with mud; the thaw soaked the walls with an icy dampness, whilst all the filth and destitution brought terrible sadness to the heart.

After going as far as the Rue Marcadet, Pierre retraced his steps; and in the Rue des Saules, certain that he was not mistaken, he entered the courtyard of a kind of barracks or hospital, encompassed by three irregular buildings. This court was a quagmire, where filth must have accumulated during the two months of terrible frost; and now all was melting, and an abominable stench arose. The buildings were half falling, the gaping vestibules looked like cellar holes, strips of paper streaked the cracked and filthy window-panes, and vile rags hung about like flags of death. Inside a shanty which served as the door-keeper's abode Pierre only saw an infirm man rolled up in a tattered strip of what had once been a horse-cloth.

"You have an old workman named Laveuve here," said the priest. "Which staircase is it, which floor?"

The man did not answer, but opened his anxious eyes, like a scared idiot. The door-keeper, no doubt, was in the neighbourhood. For a moment the priest waited; then seeing a little girl on the other side of the courtyard, he risked himself, crossed the quagmire on tip-toe, and asked: "Do you know an old workman named Laveuve in the house, my child?"

The little girl, who only had a ragged gown of pink cotton stuff about her meagre figure, stood there shivering, her hands covered with chilblains. She raised her delicate face, which looked pretty though nipped by the cold: "Laveuve," said she, "no, don't know, don't know." And with the unconscious gesture of a beggar child she put out one of her poor, numbed and disfigured hands. Then, when the priest had given her a little bit of silver, she began to prance through the mud like a joyful goat, singing the while in a shrill voice: "Don't know, don't know."

Pierre decided to follow her. She vanished into one of the gaping vestibules, and, in her rear, he climbed a dark and fetid staircase, whose steps were half-broken and so slippery, on account of the vegetable parings strewn over them, that he had to avail himself of the greasy rope by which the inmates hoisted themselves upwards. But every door was closed; he vainly knocked at several of them, and only elicited, at the last, a stifled growl, as though some despairing animal were confined within. Returning to the yard, he hesitated, then made his way to another staircase, where he was deafened by piercing cries, as of a child who is being butchered. He climbed on hearing this noise and at last found himself in front of an open room where an infant, who had been left alone, tied in his little chair, in order that he might not fall, was howling and howling without drawing breath. Then Pierre went down again, upset, frozen by the sight of so much destitution and abandonment.

But a woman was coming in, carrying three potatoes in her apron, and on being questioned by him she gazed distrustfully at his cassock. "Laveuve, Laveuve? I can't say," she replied. "If the door-keeper were there, she might be able to tell you. There are five staircases, you see, and we don't all know each other. Besides, there are so many changes. Still try over there; at the far end."

The staircase at the back of the yard was yet more abominable than the others, its steps warped, its walls slimy, as if soaked with the sweat of anguish. At each successive floor the drain-sinks exhaled a pestilential stench, whilst from every lodging came moans, or a noise of quarrelling, or some frightful sign of misery. A door swung open, and a man appeared dragging a woman by the hair whilst three youngsters sobbed aloud. On the next floor, Pierre caught a glimpse of a room where a young girl in her teens, racked by coughing, was hastily carrying an infant to and fro to quiet it, in despair that all the milk of her breast should be exhausted. Then, in an adjoining lodging, came the poignant spectacle of three beings, half clad in shreds, apparently sexless and ageless, who, amidst the dire bareness of their room, were gluttonously eating from the same earthen pan some pottage which even dogs would have refused. They barely raised their heads to growl, and did not answer Pierre's questions.

He was about to go down again, when right atop of the stairs, at the entry of a passage, it occurred to him to make a last try by knocking at the door. It was opened by a woman whose uncombed hair was already getting grey, though she could not be more than forty; while her pale lips, and dim eyes set in a yellow countenance, expressed utter lassitude, the shrinking, the constant dread of one whom wretchedness has pitilessly assailed. The sight of Pierre's cassock disturbed her, and she stammered anxiously: "Come in, come in, Monsieur l'Abbe."

However, a man whom Pierre had not at first seen—a workman also of some forty years, tall, thin and bald, with scanty moustache and beard of a washed-out reddish hue—made an angry gesture—a threat as it were—to turn the priest out of doors. But he calmed himself, sat down near a rickety table and pretended to turn his back. And as there was also a child present—a fair-haired girl, eleven or twelve years old, with a long and gentle face and that intelligent and somewhat aged expression which great misery imparts to children—he called her to him, and held her between his knees, doubtless to keep her away from the man in the cassock.

Pierre—whose heart was oppressed by his reception, and who realised the utter destitution of this family by the sight of the bare, fireless room, and the distressed mournfulness of its three inmates—decided all the same to repeat his question: "Madame, do you know an old workman named Laveuve in the house?"

The woman—who now trembled at having admitted him, since it seemed to displease her man—timidly tried to arrange matters. "Laveuve, Laveuve? no, I don't. But Salvat, you hear? Do you know a Laveuve here?"

Salvat merely shrugged his shoulders; but the little girl could not keep her tongue still: "I say, mamma Theodore, it's p'raps the Philosopher."

"A former house-painter," continued Pierre, "an old man who is ill and past work."

Madame Theodore was at once enlightened. "In that case it's him, it's him. We call him the Philosopher, a nickname folks have given him in the neighbourhood. But there's nothing to prevent his real name from being Laveuve."

With one of his fists raised towards the ceiling, Salvat seemed to be protesting against the abomination of a world and a Providence that allowed old toilers to die of hunger just like broken-down beasts. However, he did not speak, but relapsed into the savage, heavy silence, the bitter meditation in which he had been plunged when the priest arrived. He was a journeyman engineer, and gazed obstinately at the table where lay his little leather tool-bag, bulging with something it contained—something, perhaps, which he had to take back to a work-shop. He might have been thinking of a long, enforced spell of idleness, of a vain search for any kind of work during the two previous months of that terrible winter. Or perhaps it was the coming bloody reprisals of the starvelings that occupied the fiery reverie which set his large, strange, vague blue eyes aglow. All at once he noticed that his daughter had taken up the tool-bag and was trying to open it to see what it might contain. At this he quivered and at last spoke, his voice kindly, yet bitter with sudden emotion, which made him turn pale. "Celine, you must leave that alone. I forbade you to touch my tools," said he; then taking the bag, he deposited it with great precaution against the wall behind him.

"And so, madame," asked Pierre, "this man Laveuve lives on this floor?"

Madame Theodore directed a timid, questioning glance at Salvat. She was not in favour of hustling priests when they took the trouble to call, for at times there was a little money to be got from them. And when she realised that Salvat, who had once more relapsed into his black reverie, left her free to act as she pleased, she at once tendered her services. "If Monsieur l'Abbe is agreeable, I will conduct him. It's just at the end of the passage. But one must know the way, for there are still some steps to climb."

Celine, finding a pastime in this visit, escaped from her father's knees and likewise accompanied the priest. And Salvat remained alone in that den of poverty and suffering, injustice and anger, without a fire, without bread, haunted by his burning dream, his eyes again fixed upon his bag, as if there, among his tools, he possessed the wherewithal to heal the ailing world.

It indeed proved necessary to climb a few more steps; and then, following Madame Theodore and Celine, Pierre found himself in a kind of narrow garret under the roof, a loft a few yards square, where one could not stand erect. There was no window, only a skylight, and as the snow still covered it one had to leave the door wide open in order that one might see. And the thaw was entering the place, the melting snow was falling drop by drop, and coming over the tiled floor. After long weeks of intense cold, dark dampness rained quivering over all. And there, lacking even a chair, even a plank, Laveuve lay in a corner on a little pile of filthy rags spread upon the bare tiles; he looked like some animal dying on a dung-heap.

"There!" said Celine in her sing-song voice, "there he is, that's the Philosopher!"

Madame Theodore had bent down to ascertain if he still lived. "Yes, he breathes; he's sleeping I think. Oh! if he only had something to eat every day, he would be well enough. But what would you have? He has nobody left him, and when one gets to seventy the best is to throw oneself into the river. In the house-painting line it often happens that a man has to give up working on ladders and scaffoldings at fifty. He at first found some work to do on the ground level. Then he was lucky enough to get a job as night watchman. But that's over, he's been turned away from everywhere, and, for two months now, he's been lying in this nook waiting to die. The landlord hasn't dared to fling him into the street as yet, though not for want of any inclination that way. We others sometimes bring him a little wine and a crust, of course; but when one has nothing oneself, how can one give to others?"

Pierre, terrified, gazed at that frightful remnant of humanity, that remnant into which fifty years of toil, misery and social injustice had turned a man. And he ended by distinguishing Laveuve's white, worn, sunken, deformed head. Here, on a human face, appeared all the ruin following upon hopeless labour. Laveuve's unkempt beard straggled over his features, suggesting an old horse that is no longer cropped; his toothless jaws were quite askew, his eyes were vitreous, and his nose seemed to plunge into his mouth. But above all else one noticed his resemblance to some beast of burden, deformed by hard toil, lamed, worn to death, and now only good for the knackers.

"Ah! the poor fellow," muttered the shuddering priest. "And he is left to die of hunger, all alone, without any succour? And not a hospital, not an asylum has given him shelter?"

"Well," resumed Madame Theodore in her sad yet resigned voice, "the hospitals are built for the sick, and he isn't sick, he's simply finishing off, with his strength at an end. Besides he isn't always easy to deal with. People came again only lately to put him in an asylum, but he won't be shut up. And he speaks coarsely to those who question him, not to mention that he has the reputation of liking drink and talking badly about the gentle-folks. But, thank Heaven, he will now soon be delivered."

Pierre had leant forward on seeing Laveuve's eyes open, and he spoke to him tenderly, telling him that he had come from a friend with a little money to enable him to buy what he might most pressingly require. At first, on seeing Pierre's cassock, the old man had growled some coarse words; but, despite his extreme feebleness, he still retained the pert chaffing spirit of the Parisian artisan: "Well, then, I'll willingly drink a drop," he said distinctly, "and have a bit of bread with it, if there's the needful; for I've lost taste of both for a couple of days past."

Celine offered her services, and Madame Theodore sent her to fetch a loaf and a quart of wine with Abbe Rose's money. And in the interval she told Pierre how Laveuve was at one moment to have entered the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour, a charitable enterprise whose lady patronesses were presided over by Baroness Duvillard. However, the usual regulation inquiries had doubtless led to such an unfavourable report that matters had gone no further.

"Baroness Duvillard! but I know her, and will go to see her to-day!" exclaimed Pierre, whose heart was bleeding. "It is impossible for a man to be left in such circumstances any longer."

Then, as Celine came back with the loaf and the wine, the three of them tried to make Laveuve more comfortable, raised him on his heap of rags, gave him to eat and to drink, and then left the remainder of the wine and the loaf—a large four-pound loaf—near him, recommending him to wait awhile before he finished the bread, as otherwise he might stifle.

"Monsieur l'Abbe ought to give me his address in case I should have any news to send him," said Madame Theodore when she again found herself at her door.

Pierre had no card with him, and so all three went into the room. But Salvat was no longer alone there. He stood talking in a low voice very quickly, and almost mouth to mouth, with a young fellow of twenty. The latter, who was slim and dark, with a sprouting beard and hair cut in brush fashion, had bright eyes, a straight nose and thin lips set in a pale and slightly freckled face, betokening great intelligence. With stern and stubborn brow, he stood shivering in his well-worn jacket.

"Monsieur l'Abbe wants to leave me his address for the Philosopher's affair," gently explained Madame Theodore, annoyed to find another there with Salvat.

The two men had glanced at the priest and then looked at one another, each with terrible mien. And they suddenly ceased speaking in the bitter cold which fell from the ceiling. Then, again with infinite precaution, Salvat went to take his tool-bag from alongside the wall.

"So you are going down, you are again going to look for work?" asked Madame Theodore.

He did not answer, but merely made an angry gesture, as if to say that he would no longer have anything to do with work since work for so long a time had not cared to have anything to do with him.

"All the same," resumed the woman, "try to bring something back with you, for you know there's nothing. At what time will you be back?"

With another gesture he seemed to answer that he would come back when he could, perhaps never. And tears rising, despite all his efforts, to his vague, blue, glowing eyes he caught hold of his daughter Celine, kissed her violently, distractedly, and then went off, with his bag under his arm, followed by his young companion.

"Celine," resumed Madame Theodore, "give Monsieur l'Abbe your pencil, and, see, monsieur, seat yourself here, it will be better for writing."

Then, when Pierre had installed himself at the table, on the chair previously occupied by Salvat, she went on talking, seeking to excuse her man for his scanty politeness: "He hasn't a bad heart, but he's had so many worries in life that he has become a bit cracked. It's like that young man whom you just saw here, Monsieur Victor Mathis. There's another for you, who isn't happy, a young man who was well brought up, who has a lot of learning, and whose mother, a widow, has only just got the wherewithal to buy bread. So one can understand it, can't one? It all upsets their heads, and they talk of blowing up everybody. For my part those are not my notions, but I forgive them, oh! willingly enough."

Perturbed, yet interested by all the mystery and vague horror which he could divine around him, Pierre made no haste to write his address, but lingered listening, as if inviting confidence.

"If you only knew, Monsieur l'Abbe, that poor Salvat was a forsaken child, without father or mother, and had to scour the roads and try every trade at first to get a living. Then afterwards he became a mechanician, and a very good workman, I assure you, very skilful and very painstaking. But he already had those ideas of his, and quarrelled with people, and tried to bring his mates over to his views; and so he was unable to stay anywhere. At last, when he was thirty, he was stupid enough to go to America with an inventor, who traded on him to such a point that after six years of it he came back ill and penniless. I must tell you that he had married my younger sister Leonie, and that she died before he went to America, leaving him little Celine, who was then only a year old. I was then living with my husband, Theodore Labitte, a mason; and it's not to brag that I say it, but however much I wore out my eyes with needlework he used to beat me till he left me half-dead on the floor. But he ended by deserting me and going off with a young woman of twenty, which, after all, caused me more pleasure than grief. And naturally when Salvat came back he sought me out and found me alone with his little Celine, whom he had left in my charge when he went away, and who called me mamma. And we've all three been living together since then—"

She became somewhat embarrassed, and then, as if to show that she did not altogether lack some respectable family connections, she went on to say: "For my part I've had no luck; but I've another sister, Hortense, who's married to a clerk, Monsieur Chretiennot, and lives in a pretty lodging on the Boulevard Rochechouart. There were three of us born of my father's second marriage,—Hortense, who's the youngest, Leonie, who's dead, and myself, Pauline, the eldest. And of my father's first marriage I've still a brother Eugene Toussaint, who is ten years older than me and is an engineer like Salvat, and has been working ever since the war in the same establishment, the Grandidier factory, only a hundred steps away in the Rue Marcadet. The misfortune is that he had a stroke lately. As for me, my eyes are done for; I ruined them by working ten hours a day at fine needlework. And now I can no longer even try to mend anything without my eyes filling with water till I can't see at all. I've tried to find charwoman's work, but I can't get any; bad luck always follows us. And so we are in need of everything; we've nothing but black misery, two or three days sometimes going by without a bite, so that it's like the chance life of a dog that feeds on what it can find. And with these last two months of bitter cold to freeze us, it's sometimes made us think that one morning we should never wake up again. But what would you have? I've never been happy, I was beaten to begin with, and now I'm done for, left in a corner, living on, I really don't know why."

Her voice had begun to tremble, her red eyes moistened, and Pierre could realise that she thus wept through life, a good enough woman but one who had no will, and was already blotted out, so to say, from existence.

"Oh! I don't complain of Salvat," she went on. "He's a good fellow; he only dreams of everybody's happiness, and he doesn't drink, and he works when he can. Only it's certain that he'd work more if he didn't busy himself with politics. One can't discuss things with comrades, and go to public meetings and be at the workshop at the same time. In that he's at fault, that's evident. But all the same he has good reason to complain, for one can't imagine such misfortunes as have pursued him. Everything has fallen on him, everything has beaten him down. Why, a saint even would have gone mad, so that one can understand that a poor beggar who has never had any luck should get quite wild. For the last two months he has only met one good heart, a learned gentleman who lives up yonder on the height, Monsieur Guillaume Froment, who has given him a little work, just something to enable us to have some soup now and then."

Much surprised by this mention of his brother, Pierre wished to ask certain questions; but a singular feeling of uneasiness, in which fear and discretion mingled, checked his tongue. He looked at Celine, who stood before him, listening in silence with her grave, delicate air; and Madame Theodore, seeing him smile at the child, indulged in a final remark: "It's just the idea of that child," said she, "that throws Salvat out of his wits. He adores her, and he'd kill everybody if he could, when he sees her go supperless to bed. She's such a good girl, she was learning so nicely at the Communal School! But now she hasn't even a shift to go there in."

Pierre, who had at last written his address, slipped a five-franc piece into the little girl's hand, and, desirous as he was of curtailing any thanks, he hastily said: "You will know now where to find me if you need me for Laveuve. But I'm going to busy myself about him this very afternoon, and I really hope that he will be fetched away this evening."

Madame Theodore did not listen, but poured forth all possible blessings; whilst Celine, thunderstruck at seeing five francs in her hand, murmured: "Oh! that poor papa, who has gone to hunt for money! Shall I run after him to tell him that we've got enough for to-day?"

Then the priest, who was already in the passage, heard the woman answer: "Oh! he's far away if he's still walking. He'll p'raps come back right enough."

However, as Pierre, with buzzing head and grief-stricken heart, hastily escaped out of that frightful house of suffering, he perceived to his astonishment Salvat and Victor Mathis standing erect in a corner of the filthy courtyard, where the stench was so pestilential. They had come downstairs, there to continue their interrupted colloquy. And again, they were talking in very low tones, and very quickly, mouth to mouth, absorbed in the violent thoughts which made their eyes flare. But they heard the priest's footsteps, recognised him, and suddenly becoming cold and calm, exchanged an energetic hand-shake without uttering another word. Victor went up towards Montmartre, whilst Salvat hesitated like a man who is consulting destiny. Then, as if trusting himself to stern chance, drawing up his thin figure, the figure of a weary, hungry toiler, he turned into the Rue Marcadet, and walked towards Paris, his tool-bag still under his arm.

For an instant Pierre felt a desire to run and call to him that his little girl wished him to go back again. But the same feeling of uneasiness as before came over the priest—a commingling of discretion and fear, a covert conviction that nothing could stay destiny. And he himself was no longer calm, no longer experienced the icy, despairing distress of the early morning. On finding himself again in the street, amidst the quivering fog, he felt the fever, the glow of charity which the sight of such frightful wretchedness had ignited, once more within him. No, no! such suffering was too much; he wished to struggle still, to save Laveuve and restore a little joy to all those poor folk. The new experiment presented itself with that city of Paris which he had seen shrouded as with ashes, so mysterious and so perturbing beneath the threat of inevitable justice. And he dreamed of a huge sun bringing health and fruitfulness, which would make of the huge city the fertile field where would sprout the better world of to-morrow.

II. WEALTH AND WORLDLINESS

THAT same morning, as was the case nearly every day, some intimates were expected to dejeuner at the Duvillards', a few friends who more or less invited themselves. And on that chilly day, all thaw and fog, the regal mansion in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy near the Boulevard de la Madeleine bloomed with the rarest flowers, for flowers were the greatest passion of the Baroness, who transformed the lofty, sumptuous rooms, littered with marvels, into warm and odoriferous conservatories, whither the gloomy, livid light of Paris penetrated caressingly with infinite softness.

The great reception rooms were on the ground-floor looking on to the spacious courtyard, and preceded by a little winter garden, which served as a vestibule where two footmen in liveries of dark green and gold were invariably on duty. A famous gallery of paintings, valued at millions of francs, occupied the whole of the northern side of the house. And the grand staircase, of a sumptuousness which also was famous, conducted to the apartments usually occupied by the family, a large red drawing-room, a small blue and silver drawing-room, a study whose walls were hung with old stamped leather, and a dining-room in pale green with English furniture, not to mention the various bedchambers and dressing-rooms. Built in the time of Louis XIV. the mansion retained an aspect of noble grandeur, subordinated to the epicurean tastes of the triumphant bourgeoisie, which for a century now had reigned by virtue of the omnipotence of money.

Noon had not yet struck, and Baron Duvillard, contrary to custom, found himself the first in the little blue and silver salon. He was a man of sixty, tall and sturdy, with a large nose, full cheeks, broad, fleshy lips, and wolfish teeth, which had remained very fine. He had, however, become bald at an early age, and dyed the little hair that was left him. Moreover, since his beard had turned white, he had kept his face clean-shaven. His grey eyes bespoke his audacity, and in his laugh there was a ring of conquest, while the whole of his face expressed the fact that this conquest was his own, that he wielded the sovereignty of an unscrupulous master, who used and abused the power stolen and retained by his caste.

He took a few steps, and then halted in front of a basket of wonderful orchids near the window. On the mantel-piece and table tufts of violets sent forth their perfume, and in the warm, deep silence which seemed to fall from the hangings, the Baron sat down and stretched himself in one of the large armchairs, upholstered in blue satin striped with silver. He had taken a newspaper from his pocket, and began to re-peruse an article it contained, whilst all around him the entire mansion proclaimed his immense fortune, his sovereign power, the whole history of the century which had made him the master. His grandfather, Jerome Duvillard, son of a petty advocate of Poitou, had come to Paris as a notary's clerk in 1788, when he was eighteen; and very keen, intelligent and hungry as he was, he had gained the family's first three millions—at first in trafficking with the emigres' estates when they were confiscated and sold as national property, and later, in contracting for supplies to the imperial army. His father, Gregoire Duvillard, born in 1805, and the real great man of the family—he who had first reigned in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, after King Louis Philippe had granted him the title of Baron—remained one of the recognized heroes of modern finance by reason of the scandalous profits which he had made in every famous thieving speculation of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, such as mines, railroads, and the Suez Canal. And he, the present Baron, Henri by name, and born in 1836, had only seriously gone into business on Baron Gregoire's death soon after the Franco-German War. However, he had done so with such a rageful appetite, that in a quarter of a century he had again doubled the family fortune. He rotted and devoured, corrupted, swallowed everything that he touched; and he was also the tempter personified—the man who bought all consciences that were for sale—having fully understood the new times and its tendencies in presence of the democracy, which in its turn had become hungry and impatient. Inferior though he was both to his father and his grandfather, being a man of enjoyment, caring less for the work of conquest than the division of the spoil, he nevertheless remained a terrible fellow, a sleek triumpher, whose operations were all certainties, who amassed millions at each stroke, and treated with governments on a footing of equality, able as he was to place, if not France, at least a ministry in his pocket. In one century and three generations, royalty had become embodied in him: a royalty already threatened, already shaken by the tempest close ahead. And at times his figure grew and expanded till it became, as it were, an incarnation of the whole bourgeoisie—that bourgeoisie which at the division of the spoils in 1789 appropriated everything, and has since fattened on everything at the expense of the masses, and refuses to restore anything whatever.

The article which the Baron was re-perusing in a halfpenny newspaper interested him. "La Voix du Peuple" was a noisy sheet which, under the pretence of defending outraged justice and morality, set a fresh scandal circulating every morning in the hope of thereby increasing its sales. And that morning, in big type on its front page, this sub-title was displayed: "The Affair of the African Railways. Five Millions spent in Bribes: Two Ministers Bought, Thirty Deputies and Senators Compromised." Then in an article of odious violence the paper's editor, the famous Sagnier, announced that he possessed and intended to publish the list of the thirty-two members of Parliament, whose support Baron Duvillard had purchased at the time when the Chambers had voted the bill for the African Railway Lines. Quite a romantic story was mingled with all this, the adventures of a certain Hunter, whom the Baron had employed as his go-between and who had now fled. The Baron, however, re-perused each sentence and weighed each word of the article very calmly; and although he was alone he shrugged his shoulders and spoke aloud with the tranquil assurance of a man whose responsibility is covered and who is, moreover, too powerful to be molested.

"The idiot," he said, "he knows even less than he pretends."

Just then, however, a first guest arrived, a man of barely four and thirty, elegantly dressed, dark and good looking, with a delicately shaped nose, and curly hair and beard. As a rule, too, he had laughing eyes, and something giddy, flighty, bird-like in his demeanour; but that morning he seemed nervous, anxious even, and smiled in a scared way.

"Ah! it's you, Duthil," said the Baron, rising. "Have you read this?" And he showed the new comer the "Voix du Peuple," which he was folding up to replace it in his pocket.

"Why yes, I've read it. It's amazing. How can Sagnier have got hold of the list of names? Has there been some traitor?"

The Baron looked at his companion quietly, amused by his secret anguish. Duthil, the son of a notary of Angouleme, almost poor and very honest, had been sent to Paris as deputy for that town whilst yet very young, thanks to the high reputation of his father; and he there led a life of pleasure and idleness, even as he had formerly done when a student. However, his pleasant bachelor's quarters in the Rue de Suresnes, and his success as a handsome man in the whirl of women among whom he lived, cost him no little money; and gaily enough, devoid as he was of any moral sense, he had already glided into all sorts of compromising and lowering actions, like a light-headed, superior man, a charming, thoughtless fellow, who attached no importance whatever to such trifles.

"Bah!" said the Baron at last. "Has Sagnier even got a list? I doubt it, for there was none; Hunter wasn't so foolish as to draw one up. And then, too, it was merely an ordinary affair; nothing more was done than is always done in such matters of business."

Duthil, who for the first time in his life had felt anxious, listened like one that needs to be reassured. "Quite so, eh?" he exclaimed. "That's what I thought. There isn't a cat to be whipped in the whole affair."

He tried to laugh as usual, and no longer exactly knew how it was that he had received some ten thousand francs in connection with the matter, whether it were in the shape of a vague loan, or else under some pretext of publicity, puffery, or advertising, for Hunter had acted with extreme adroitness so as to give no offence to the susceptibilities of even the least virginal consciences.

"No, there's not a cat to be whipped," repeated Duvillard, who decidedly seemed amused by the face which Duthil was pulling. "And besides, my dear fellow, it's well known that cats always fall on their feet. But have you seen Silviane?"

"I just left her. I found her in a great rage with you. She learnt this morning that her affair of the Comedie is off."

A rush of anger suddenly reddened the Baron's face. He, who could scoff so calmly at the threat of the African Railways scandal, lost his balance and felt his blood boiling directly there was any question of Silviane, the last, imperious passion of his sixtieth year. "What! off?" said he. "But at the Ministry of Fine Arts they gave me almost a positive promise only the day before yesterday."

He referred to a stubborn caprice of Silviane d'Aulnay, who, although she had hitherto only reaped a success of beauty on the stage, obstinately sought to enter the Comedie Francaise and make her debut there in the part of "Pauline" in Corneille's "Polyeucte," which part she had been studying desperately for several months past. Her idea seemed an insane one, and all Paris laughed at it; but the young woman, with superb assurance, kept herself well to the front, and imperiously demanded the role, feeling sure that she would conquer.

"It was the minister who wouldn't have it," explained Duthil.

The Baron was choking. "The minister, the minister! Ah! well, I will soon have that minister sent to the rightabout."

However, he had to cease speaking, for at that moment Baroness Duvillard came into the little drawing-room. At forty-six years of age she was still very beautiful. Very fair and tall, having hitherto put on but little superfluous fat, and retaining perfect arms and shoulders, with speckless silky skin, it was only her face that was spoiling, colouring slightly with reddish blotches. And these blemishes were her torment, her hourly thought and worry. Her Jewish origin was revealed by her somewhat long and strangely charming face, with blue and softly voluptuous eyes. As indolent as an Oriental slave, disliking to have to move, walk, or even speak, she seemed intended for a harem life, especially as she was for ever tending her person. That day she was all in white, gowned in a white silk toilette of delicious and lustrous simplicity.

Duthil complimented her, and kissed her hand with an enraptured air. "Ah! madame, you set a little springtide in my heart. Paris is so black and muddy this morning."

However, a second guest entered the room, a tall and handsome man of five or six and thirty; and the Baron, still disturbed by his passion, profited by this opportunity to make his escape. He carried Duthil away into his study, saying, "Come here an instant, my dear fellow. I have a few more words to say to you about the affair in question. Monsieur de Quinsac will keep my wife company for a moment."

The Baroness, as soon as she was alone with the new comer, who, like Duthil, had most respectfully kissed her hand, gave him a long, silent look, while her soft eyes filled with tears. Deep silence, tinged with some slight embarrassment, had fallen, but she ended by saying in a very low voice: "How happy I am, Gerard, to find myself alone with you for a moment. For a month past I have not had that happiness."

The circumstances in which Henri Duvillard had married the younger daughter of Justus Steinberger, the great Jew banker, formed quite a story which was often recalled. The Steinbergers—after the fashion of the Rothschilds—were originally four brothers—Justus, residing in Paris, and the three others at Berlin, Vienna, and London, a circumstance which gave their secret association most formidable power in the financial markets of Europe. Justus, however, was the least wealthy of the four, and in Baron Gregoire Duvillard he had a redoubtable adversary against whom he was compelled to struggle each time that any large prey was in question. And it was after a terrible encounter between the pair, after the eager sharing of the spoils, that the crafty idea had come to Justus of giving his younger daughter Eve in marriage, by way of douceur, to the Baron's son, Henri. So far the latter had only been known as an amiable fellow, fond of horses and club life; and no doubt Justus's idea was that, at the death of the redoubtable Baron, who was already condemned by his physicians, he would be able to lay his hands on the rival banking-house, particularly if he only had in front of him a son-in-law whom it was easy to conquer. As it happened, Henri had been mastered by a violent passion for Eve's blond beauty, which was then dazzling. He wished to marry her, and his father, who knew him, consented, in reality greatly amused to think that Justus was making an execrably bad stroke of business. The enterprise became indeed disastrous for Justus when Henri succeeded his father and the man of prey appeared from beneath the man of pleasure and carved himself his own huge share in exploiting the unbridled appetites of the middle-class democracy, which had at last secured possession of power. Not only did Eve fail to devour Henri, who in his turn had become Baron Duvillard, the all-powerful banker, more and more master of the market; but it was the Baron who devoured Eve, and this in less than four years' time. After she had borne him a daughter and a son in turn, he suddenly drew away from her, neglected her, as if she were a mere toy that he no longer cared for. She was at first both surprised and distressed by the change, especially on learning that he was resuming his bachelor's habits, and had set his fickle if ardent affections elsewhere. Then, however, without any kind of recrimination, any display of anger, or even any particular effort to regain her ascendency over him, she, on her side, imitated his example. She could not live without love, and assuredly she had only been born to be beautiful, to fascinate and reap adoration. To the lover whom she chose when she was five and twenty she remained faithful for more than fifteen years, as faithful as she might have been to a husband; and when he died her grief was intense, it was like real widowhood. Six months later, however, having met Count Gerard de Quinsac she had again been unable to resist her imperative need of adoration, and an intrigue had followed.

"Have you been ill, my dear Gerard?" she inquired, noticing the young man's embarrassment. "Are you hiding some worry from me?"

She was ten years older than he was; and she clung desperately to this last passion of hers, revolting at the thought of growing old, and resolved upon every effort to keep the young man beside her.

"No, I am hiding nothing, I assure you," replied the Count. "But my mother has had much need of me recently."

She continued looking at him, however, with anxious passion, finding him so tall and aristocratic of mien, with his regular features and dark hair and moustaches which were always most carefully tended. He belonged to one of the oldest families of France, and resided on a ground-floor in the Rue St. Dominique with his widowed mother, who had been ruined by her adventurously inclined husband, and had at most an income of some fifteen thousand francs* to live upon. Gerard for his part had never done anything; contenting himself with his one year of obligatory military service, he had renounced the profession of arms in the same way as he had renounced that of diplomacy, the only one that offered him an opening of any dignity. He spent his days in that busy idleness common to all young men who lead "Paris life." And his mother, haughtily severe though she was, seemed to excuse this, as if in her opinion a man of his birth was bound by way of protest to keep apart from official life under a Republic. However, she no doubt had more intimate, more disturbing reasons for indulgence. She had nearly lost him when he was only seven, through an attack of brain fever. At eighteen he had complained of his heart, and the doctors had recommended that he should be treated gently in all respects. She knew, therefore, what a lie lurked behind his proud demeanour, within his lofty figure, that haughty facade of his race. He was but dust, ever threatened with illness and collapse. In the depths of his seeming virility there was merely girlish abandon; and he was simply a weak, good-natured fellow, liable to every stumble. It was on the occasion of a visit which he had paid with his mother to the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour that he had first seen Eve, whom he continued to meet; his mother, closing her eyes to this culpable connection in a sphere of society which she treated with contempt, in the same way as she had closed them to so many other acts of folly which she had forgiven because she regarded them as the mere lapses of an ailing child. Moreover, Eve had made a conquest of Madame de Quinsac, who was very pious, by an action which had recently amazed society. It had been suddenly learnt that she had allowed Monseigneur Martha to convert her to the Roman Catholic faith. This thing, which she had refused to do when solicited by her lawful husband, she had now done in the hope of ensuring herself a lover's eternal affection. And all Paris was still stirred by the magnificence exhibited at the Madeleine, on the occasion of the baptism of this Jewess of five and forty, whose beauty and whose tears had upset every heart.

* About 3000 dollars.

Gerard, on his side, was still flattered by the deep and touching tenderness shown to him; but weariness was coming, and he had already sought to break off the connection by avoiding any further assignations. He well understood Eve's glances and her tears, and though he was moved at sight of them he tried to excuse himself. "I assure you," said he, "my mother has kept me so busy that I could not get away." But she, without a word, still turned her tearful glance on him, and weak, like herself, in despair that he should have been left alone with her in this fashion, he yielded, unable to continue refusing. "Well, then," said he, "this afternoon at four o'clock if you are free."

He had lowered his voice in speaking, but a slight rustle made him turn his head and start like one in fault. It was the Baroness's daughter Camille entering the room. She had heard nothing; but by the smile which the others had exchanged, by the very quiver of the air, she understood everything; an assignation for that very day and at the very spot which she suspected. Some slight embarrassment followed, an exchange of anxious and evil glances.

Camille, at three and twenty, was a very dark young woman, short of stature and somewhat deformed, with her left shoulder higher than the right. There seemed to be nothing of her father or mother in her. Her case was one of those unforeseen accidents in family heredity which make people wonder whence they can arise. Her only pride lay in her beautiful black eyes and superb black hair, which, short as she was, would, said she, have sufficed to clothe her. But her nose was long, her face deviated to the left, and her chin was pointed. Her thin, witty, and malicious lips bespoke all the rancour and perverse anger stored in the heart of this uncomely creature, whom the thought of her uncomeliness enraged. However, the one whom she most hated in the whole world was her own mother, that amorosa who was so little fitted to be a mother, who had never loved her, never paid attention to her, but had abandoned her to the care of servants from her very infancy. In this wise real hatred had grown up between the two women, mute and frigid on the one side, and active and passionate on the other. The daughter hated her mother because she found her beautiful, because she had not been created in the same image: beautiful with the beauty with which her mother crushed her. Day by day she suffered at being sought by none, at realising that the adoration of one and all still went to her mother. As she was amusing in her maliciousness, people listened to her and laughed; however, the glances of all the men—even and indeed especially the younger ones—soon reverted to her triumphant mother, who seemingly defied old age. In part for this reason Camille, with ferocious determination, had decided that she would dispossess her mother of her last lover Gerard, and marry him herself, conscious that such a loss would doubtless kill the Baroness. Thanks to her promised dowry of five millions of francs, the young woman did not lack suitors; but, little flattered by their advances, she was accustomed to say, with her malicious laugh: "Oh! of course; why for five millions they would take a wife from a mad-house." However, she, herself, had really begun to love Gerard, who, good-natured as he was, evinced much kindness towards this suffering young woman whom nature had treated so harshly. It worried him to see her forsaken by everyone, and little by little he yielded to the grateful tenderness which she displayed towards him, happy, handsome man that he was, at being regarded as a demi-god and having such a slave. Indeed, in his attempt to quit the mother there was certainly a thought of allowing the daughter to marry him, which would be an agreeable ending to it all, though he did not as yet acknowledge this, ashamed as he felt and embarrassed by his illustrious name and all the complications and tears which he foresaw.

The silence continued. Camille with her piercing glance, as sharp as any knife, had told her mother that she knew the truth; and then with another and pain-fraught glance she had complained to Gerard. He, in order to re-establish equilibrium, could only think of a compliment: "Good morning, Camille. Ah! that havana-brown gown of yours looks nice! It's astonishing how well rather sombre colours suit you."

Camille glanced at her mother's white robe, and then at her own dark gown, which scarcely allowed her neck and wrists to be seen. "Yes," she replied laughing, "I only look passable when I don't dress as a young girl."

Eve, ill at ease, worried by the growth of a rivalry in which she did not as yet wish to believe, changed the conversation. "Isn't your brother there?" she asked.

"Why yes, we came down together."

Hyacinthe, who came in at that moment, shook hands with Gerard in a weary way. He was twenty, and had inherited his mother's pale blond hair, and her long face full of Oriental languor; while from his father he had derived his grey eyes and thick lips, expressive of unscrupulous appetites. A wretched scholar, regarding every profession with the same contempt, he had decided to do nothing. Spoilt by his father, he took some little interest in poetry and music, and lived in an extraordinary circle of artists, low women, madmen and bandits; boasting himself of all sorts of crimes and vices, professing the very worst philosophical and social ideas, invariably going to extremes, becoming in turn a Collectivist, an Individualist, an Anarchist, a Pessimist, a Symbolist, and what not besides; without, however, ceasing to be a Catholic, as this conjunction of Catholicity with something else seemed to him the supreme bon ton. In reality he was simply empty and rather a fool. In four generations the vigorous hungry blood of the Duvillards, after producing three magnificent beasts of prey, had, as if exhausted by the contentment of every passion, ended in this sorry emasculated creature, who was incapable alike of great knavery or great debauchery.

Camille, who was too intelligent not to realise her brother's nothingness, was fond of teasing him; and looking at him as he stood there, tightly buttoned in his long frock coat with pleated skirt—a resurrection of the romantic period, which he carried to exaggeration, she resumed: "Mamma has been asking for you, Hyacinthe. Come and show her your gown. You are the one who would look nice dressed as a young girl."

However, he eluded her without replying. He was covertly afraid of her, though they lived together in great intimacy, frankly exchanging confidences respecting their perverse views of life. And he directed a glance of disdain at the wonderful basket of orchids which seemed to him past the fashion, far too common nowadays. For his part he had left the lilies of life behind him, and reached the ranunculus, the flower of blood.

The two last guests who were expected now arrived almost together. The first was the investigating magistrate Amadieu, a little man of five and forty, who was an intimate of the household and had been brought into notoriety by a recent anarchist affair. Between a pair of fair, bushy whiskers he displayed a flat, regular judicial face, to which he tried to impart an expression of keenness by wearing a single eyeglass behind which his glance sparkled. Very worldly, moreover, he belonged to the new judicial school, being a distinguished psychologist and having written a book in reply to the abuses of criminalist physiology. And he was also a man of great, tenacious ambition, fond of notoriety and ever on the lookout for those resounding legal affairs which bring glory. Behind him, at last appeared General de Bozonnet, Gerard's uncle on the maternal side, a tall, lean old man with a nose like an eagle's beak. Chronic rheumatism had recently compelled him to retire from the service. Raised to a colonelcy after the Franco-German War in reward for his gallant conduct at St. Privat, he had, in spite of his extremely monarchical connections, kept his sworn faith to Napoleon III. And he was excused in his own sphere of society for this species of military Bonapartism, on account of the bitterness with which he accused the Republic of having ruined the army. Worthy fellow that he was, extremely fond of his sister, Madame de Quinsac, it seemed as though he acted in accordance with some secret desire of hers in accepting the invitations of Baroness Duvillard by way of rendering Gerard's constant presence in her house more natural and excusable.

However, the Baron and Duthil now returned from the study, laughing loudly in an exaggerated way, doubtless to make the others believe that they were quite easy in mind. And one and all passed into the large dining-room where a big wood fire was burning, its gay flames shining like a ray of springtide amid the fine mahogany furniture of English make laden with silver and crystal. The room, of a soft mossy green, had an unassuming charm in the pale light, and the table which in the centre displayed the richness of its covers and the immaculate whiteness of its linen adorned with Venetian point, seemed to have flowered miraculously with a wealth of large tea roses, most admirable blooms for the season, and of delicious perfume.

The Baroness seated the General on her right, and Amadieu on her left. The Baron on his right placed Duthil, and on his left Gerard. Then the young people installed themselves at either end, Camille between Gerard and the General, and Hyacinthe between Duthil and Amadieu. And forthwith, from the moment of starting on the scrambled eggs and truffles, conversation began, the usual conversation of Parisian dejeuners, when every event, great or little, of the morning or the day before is passed in review: the truths and the falsehoods current in every social sphere, the financial scandal, and the political adventure of the hour, the novel that has just appeared, the play that has just been produced, the stories which should only be retailed in whispers, but which are repeated aloud. And beneath all the light wit which circulates, beneath all the laughter, which often has a false ring, each retains his or her particular worry, or distress of mind, at times so acute that it becomes perfect agony.

With his quiet and wonted impudence, the Baron, bravely enough, was the first to speak of the article in the "Voix du Peuple." "I say, have you read Sagnier's article this morning? It's a good one; he has verve you know, but what a dangerous lunatic he is!"

This set everybody at ease, for the article would certainly have weighed upon the dejeuner had no one mentioned it.

"It's the 'Panama' dodge over again!" cried Duthil. "But no, no, we've had quite enough of it!"

"Why," resumed the Baron, "the affair of the African Railway Lines is as clear as spring water! All those whom Sagnier threatens may sleep in peace. The truth is that it's a scheme to upset Barroux's ministry. Leave to interpellate will certainly be asked for this afternoon. You'll see what a fine uproar there'll be in the Chamber."

"That libellous, scandal-seeking press," said Amadieu gravely, "is a dissolving agent which will bring France to ruin. We ought to have laws against it."

The General made an angry gesture: "Laws, what's the use of them, since nobody has the courage to enforce them."

Silence fell. With a light, discreet step the house-steward presented some grilled mullet. So noiseless was the service amid the cheerful perfumed warmth that not even the faintest clatter of crockery was heard. Without anyone knowing how it had come about, however, the conversation had suddenly changed; and somebody inquired: "So the revival of the piece is postponed?"

"Yes," said Gerard, "I heard this morning that 'Polyeucte' wouldn't get its turn till April at the earliest."

At this Camille, who had hitherto remained silent, watching the young Count and seeking to win him back, turned her glittering eyes upon her father and mother. It was a question of that revival in which Silviane was so stubbornly determined to make her debut. However, the Baron and the Baroness evinced perfect serenity, having long been acquainted with all that concerned each other. Moreover Eve was too much occupied with her own passion to think of anything else; and the Baron too busy with the fresh application which he intended to make in tempestuous fashion at the Ministry of Fine Arts, so as to wrest Silviane's engagement from those in office. He contented himself with saying: "How would you have them revive pieces at the Comedie! They have no actresses left there."

"Oh, by the way," the Baroness on her side simply remarked, "yesterday, in that play at the Vaudeville, Delphine Vignot wore such an exquisite gown. She's the only one too who knows how to arrange her hair."

Thereupon Duthil, in somewhat veiled language, began to relate a story about Delphine and a well-known senator. And then came another scandal, the sudden and almost suspicious death of a lady friend of the Duvillards'; whereupon the General, without any transition, broke in to relieve his bitter feelings by denouncing the idiotic manner in which the army was nowadays organised. Meantime the old Bordeaux glittered like ruby blood in the delicate crystal glasses. A truffled fillet of venison had just cast its somewhat sharp scent amidst the dying perfume of the roses, when some asparagus made its appearance, a primeur which once had been so rare but which no longer caused any astonishment.

"Nowadays we get it all through the winter," said the Baron with a gesture of disenchantment.

"And so," asked Gerard at the same moment, "the Princess de Harn's matinee is for this afternoon?"

Camille quickly intervened. "Yes, this afternoon. Shall you go?"

"No, I don't think so, I shan't be able," replied the young man in embarrassment.

"Ah! that little Princess, she's really deranged you know," exclaimed Duthil. "You are aware that she calls herself a widow? But the truth, it seems, is that her husband, a real Prince, connected with a royal house and very handsome, is travelling about the world in the company of a singer. She with her vicious urchin-like face preferred to come and reign in Paris, in that mansion of the Avenue Hoche, which is certainly the most extraordinary Noah's ark imaginable, with its swarming of cosmopolitan society indulging in every extravagance!"

"Be quiet, you malicious fellow," the Baroness gently interrupted. "We, here, are very fond of Rosemonde, who is a charming woman."

"Oh! certainly," Camille again resumed. "She invited us; and we are going to her place by-and-by, are we not, mamma?"

To avoid replying, the Baroness pretended that she did not hear, whilst Duthil, who seemed to be well-informed concerning the Princess, continued to make merry over her intended matinee, at which she meant to produce some Spanish dancing girls, whose performance was so very indecorous that all Paris, forewarned of the circumstance, would certainly swarm to her house. And he added: "You've heard that she has given up painting. Yes, she busies herself with chemistry. Her salon is full of Anarchists now—and, by the way, it seemed to me that she had cast her eyes on you, my dear Hyacinthe."

Hyacinthe had hitherto held his tongue, as if he took no interest in anything. "Oh! she bores me to death," he now condescended to reply. "If I'm going to her matinee it's simply in the hope of meeting my friend young Lord George Eldrett, who wrote to me from London to give me an appointment at the Princess's. And I admit that hers is the only salon where I find somebody to talk to."

"And so," asked Amadieu in an ironical way, "you have now gone over to Anarchism?"

With his air of lofty elegance Hyacinthe imperturbably confessed his creed: "But it seems to me, monsieur, that in these times of universal baseness and ignominy, no man of any distinction can be other than an Anarchist."

A laugh ran round the table. Hyacinthe was very much spoilt, and considered very entertaining. His father in particular was immensely amused by the notion that he of all men should have an Anarchist for a son. However, the General, in his rancorous moments, talked anarchically enough of blowing up a society which was so stupid as to let itself be led by half a dozen disreputable characters. And, indeed, the investigating magistrate, who was gradually making a specialty of Anarchist affairs, proved the only one who opposed the young man, defending threatened civilisation and giving terrifying particulars concerning what he called the army of devastation and massacre. The others, while partaking of some delicious duck's-liver pate, which the house-steward handed around, continued smiling. There was so much misery, said they; one must take everything into account: things would surely end by righting themselves. And the Baron himself declared, in a conciliatory manner: "It's certain that one might do something, though nobody knows exactly what. As for all sensible and moderate claims, oh! I agree to them in advance. For instance, the lot of the working classes may be ameliorated, charitable enterprises may be undertaken, such, for instance, as our Asylum for the Invalids of Labour, which we have reason to be proud of. But we must not be asked for impossibilities."

With the dessert came a sudden spell of silence; it was as if, amidst the restless fluttering of the conversation, and the dizziness born of the copious meal, each one's worry or distress was again wringing the heart and setting an expression of perturbation on the countenance. The nervous unconscientiousness of Duthil, threatened with denunciation, was seen to revive; so, too, the anxious anger of the Baron, who was meditating how he might possibly manage to content Silviane. That woman was this sturdy, powerful man's taint, the secret sore which would perhaps end by eating him away and destroying him. But it was the frightful drama in which the Baroness, Camille and Gerard were concerned that flitted by most visibly across the faces of all three of them: that hateful rivalry of mother and daughter, contending for the man they loved. And, meantime, the silver-gilt blades of the dessert-knives were delicately peeling choice fruit. And there were bunches of golden grapes looking beautifully fresh, and a procession of sweetmeats, little cakes, an infinity of dainties, over which the most satiated appetites lingered complacently.

Then, just as the finger-glasses were being served, a footman came and bent over the Baroness, who answered in an undertone, "Well, show him into the salon, I will join him there." And aloud to the others she added: "It's Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, who has called and asks most particularly to see me. He won't be in our way; I think that almost all of you know him. Oh! he's a genuine saint, and I have much sympathy for him."

For a few minutes longer they loitered round the table, and then at last quitted the dining-room, which was full of the odours of viands, wines, fruits and roses; quite warm, too, with the heat thrown out by the big logs of firewood, which were falling into embers amidst the somewhat jumbled brightness of all the crystal and silver, and the pale, delicate light which fell upon the disorderly table.

Pierre had remained standing in the centre of the little blue and silver salon. Seeing a tray on which the coffee and the liqueurs were in readiness, he regretted that he had insisted upon being received. And his embarrassment increased when the company came in rather noisily, with bright eyes and rosy cheeks. However, his charitable fervour had revived so ardently within him that he overcame this embarrassment, and all that remained to him of it was a slight feeling of discomfort at bringing the whole frightful morning which he had just spent amid such scenes of wretchedness, so much darkness and cold, so much filth and hunger, into this bright, warm, perfumed affluence, where the useless and the superfluous overflowed around those folks who seemed so gay at having made a delightful meal.

However, the Baroness at once came forward with Gerard, for it was through the latter, whose mother he knew, that the priest had been presented to the Duvillards at the time of the famous conversion. And as he apologised for having called at such an inconvenient hour, the Baroness responded: "But you are always welcome, Monsieur l'Abbe. You will allow me just to attend to my guests, won't you? I will be with you in an instant."

She thereupon returned to the table on which the tray had been placed, in order to serve the coffee and the liqueurs, with her daughter's assistance. Gerard, however, remained with Pierre; and, it so chanced, began to speak to him of the Asylum for the Invalids of Labour, where they had met one another at the recent laying of the foundation-stone of a new pavilion which was being erected, thanks to a handsome donation of 100,000 francs made by Baron Duvillard. So far, the enterprise only comprised four pavilions out of the fourteen which it was proposed to erect on the vast site given by the City of Paris on the peninsula of Gennevilliers*; and so the subscription fund remained open, and, indeed, no little noise was made over this charitable enterprise, which was regarded as a complete and peremptory reply to the accusations of those evilly disposed persons who charged the satiated bourgeoisie with doing nothing for the workers. But the truth was that a magnificent chapel, erected in the centre of the site, had absorbed two-thirds of the funds hitherto collected. Numerous lady patronesses, chosen from all the "worlds" of Paris—the Baroness Duvillard, the Countess de Quinsac, the Princess Rosemonde de Harn, and a score of others—were entrusted with the task of keeping the enterprise alive by dint of collections and fancy bazaars. But success had been chiefly obtained, thanks to the happy idea of ridding the ladies of all the weighty cares of organisation, by choosing as managing director a certain Fonsegue, who, besides being a deputy and editor of the "Globe" newspaper, was a prodigious promoter of all sorts of enterprises. And the "Globe" never paused in its propaganda, but answered the attacks of the revolutionaries by extolling the inexhaustible charity of the governing classes in such wise that, at the last elections, the enterprise had served as a victorious electoral weapon.

* This so-called peninsula lies to the northwest of Paris, and
is formed by the windings of the Seine.—Trans.

However, Camille was walking about with a steaming cup of coffee in her hand: "Will you take some coffee, Monsieur l'Abbe?" she inquired.

"No, thank you, mademoiselle."

"A glass of Chartreuse then?"

"No, thank you."

Then everybody being served, the Baroness came back and said amiably: "Come, Monsieur l'Abbe, what do you desire of me?"

Pierre began to speak almost in an undertone, his throat contracting and his heart beating with emotion. "I have come, madame, to appeal to your great kindness of heart. This morning, in a frightful house, in the Rue des Saules, behind Montmartre, I beheld a sight which utterly upset me. You can have no idea what an abode of misery and suffering it was; its inmates without fire or bread, the men reduced to idleness because there is no work, the mothers having no more milk for their babes, the children barely clad, coughing and shivering. And among all these horrors I saw the worst, the most abominable of all, an old workman, laid on his back by age, dying of hunger, huddled on a heap of rags, in a nook which a dog would not even accept as kennel."

He tried to recount things as discreetly as possible, frightened by the very words he spoke, the horrors he had to relate in that sphere of superlative luxury and enjoyment, before those happy ones who possessed all the gifts of this world; for—to use a slang expression—he fully realised that he sang out of tune, and in most uncourteous fashion. What a strange idea of his to have called at the hour when one has just finished dejeuner, when the aroma of hot coffee flatters happy digestion. Nevertheless he went on, and even ended by raising his voice, yielding to the feeling of revolt which gradually stirred him, going to the end of his terrible narrative, naming Laveuve, insisting on the unjust abandonment in which the old man was left, and asking for succour in the name of human compassion. And the whole company approached to listen to him; he could see the Baron and the General, and Duthil and Amadieu, in front of him, sipping their coffee, in silence, without a gesture.

"Well, madame," he concluded, "it seemed to me that one could not leave that old man an hour longer in such a frightful position, and that this very evening you would have the extreme goodness to have him admitted into the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour, which is, I think, the proper and only place for him."

Tears had moistened Eve's beautiful eyes. She was in consternation at so sad a story coming to her to spoil her afternoon when she was looking forward to her assignation with Gerard. Weak and indolent as she was, lacking all initiative, too much occupied moreover with her own person, she had only accepted the presidency of the Committee on the condition that all administrative worries were to fall on Fonsegue. "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," she murmured, "you rend my heart. But I can do nothing, nothing at all, I assure you. Moreover, I believe that we have already inquired into the affair of that man Laveuve. With us, you know, there must be the most serious guarantees with regard to every admission. A reporter is chosen who has to give us full information. Wasn't it you, Monsieur Duthil, who was charged with this man Laveuve's affair?"

The deputy was finishing a glass of Chartreuse. "Yes, it was I. That fine fellow played you a comedy, Monsieur l'Abbe. He isn't at all ill, and if you left him any money you may be sure he went down to drink it as soon as you were gone. For he is always drunk; and, besides that, he has the most hateful disposition imaginable, crying out from morning till evening against the bourgeois, and saying that if he had any strength left in his arms he would undertake to blow up the whole show. And, moreover, he won't go into the asylum; he says that it's a real prison where one's guarded by Beguins who force one to hear mass, a dirty convent where the gates are shut at nine in the evening! And there are so many of them like that, who rather than be succoured prefer their liberty, with cold and hunger and death. Well then, let the Laveuves die in the street, since they refuse to be with us, and be warm and eat in our asylums!"

The General and Amadieu nodded their heads approvingly. But Duvillard showed himself more generous. "No, no, indeed! A man's a man after all, and should be succoured in spite of himself."

Eve, however, in despair at the idea that she would be robbed of her afternoon, struggled and sought for reasons. "I assure you that my hands are altogether tied. Monsieur l'Abbe does not doubt my heart or my zeal. But how call I possibly assemble the Committee without a few days' delay? And I have particular reasons for coming to no decision, especially in an affair which has already been inquired into and pronounced upon, without the Committee's sanction." Then, all at once she found a solution: "What I advise you to do, Monsieur l'Abbe, is to go at once to see Monsieur Fonsegue, our managing director. He alone can act in an urgent case, for he knows that the ladies have unlimited confidence in him and approve everything he does."

"You will find Fonsegue at the Chamber," added Duthil smiling, "only the sitting will be a warm one, and I doubt whether you will be able to have a comfortable chat with him."

Pierre, whose heart had contracted yet more painfully, insisted on the subject no further; but at once made up his mind to see Fonsegue, and in any event obtain from him a promise that the wretched Laveuve should be admitted to the Asylum that very evening. Then he lingered in the saloon for a few minutes listening to Gerard, who obligingly pointed out to him how he might best convince the deputy, which was by alleging how bad an effect such a story could have, should it be brought to light by the revolutionary newspapers. However, the guests were beginning to take their leave. The General, as he went off, came to ask his nephew if he should see him that afternoon at his mother's, Madame de Quinsac, whose "day" it was: a question which the young man answered with an evasive gesture when he noticed that both Eve and Camille were looking at him. Then came the turn of Amadieu, who hurried off saying that a serious affair required his presence at the Palace of Justice. And Duthil soon followed him in order to repair to the Chamber.

"I'll see you between four and five at Silviane's, eh?" said the Baron as he conducted him to the door. "Come and tell me what occurs at the Chamber in consequence of that odious article of Sagnier's. I must at all events know. For my part I shall go to the Ministry of Fine Arts, to settle that affair of the Comedie; and besides I've some calls to make, some contractors to see, and a big launching and advertisement affair to settle."

"It's understood then, between four and five, at Silviane's," said the deputy, who went off again mastered by his vague uneasiness, his anxiety as to what turn that nasty affair of the African Railway Lines might take.

And all of them had forgotten Laveuve, the miserable wretch who lay at death's door; and all of them were hastening away to their business or their passions, caught in the toils, sinking under the grindstone and whisked away by that rush of all Paris, whose fever bore them along, throwing one against another in an ardent scramble, in which the sole question was who should pass over the others and crush them.

"And so, mamma," said Camille, who continued to scrutinise her mother and Gerard, "you are going to take us to the Princess's matinee?"

"By-and-by, yes. Only I shan't be able to stay there with you. I received a telegram from Salmon about my corsage this morning, and I must absolutely go to try it on at four o'clock."

By the slight trembling of her mother's voice, the girl felt certain that she was telling a falsehood. "Oh!" said she, "I thought you were only going to try it on to-morrow? In that case I suppose we are to go and call for you at Salmon's with the carriage on leaving the matinee?"

"Oh! no my dear! One never knows when one will be free; and besides, if I have a moment, I shall call at the modiste's."

Camille's secret rage brought almost a murderous glare to her dark eyes. The truth was evident. But however passionately she might desire to set some obstacle across her mother's path, she could not, dared not, carry matters any further. In vain had she attempted to implore Gerard with her eyes. He was standing to take his leave, and turned away his eyes. Pierre, who had become acquainted with many things since he had frequented the house, noticed how all three of them quivered, and divined thereby the mute and terrible drama.

At this moment, however, Hyacinthe, stretched in an armchair, and munching an ether capsule, the only liqueur in which he indulged, raised his voice: "For my part, you know, I'm going to the Exposition du Lis. All Paris is swarming there. There's one painting in particular, 'The Rape of a Soul,' which it's absolutely necessary for one to have seen."

"Well, but I don't refuse to drive you there," resumed the Baroness. "Before going to the Princess's we can look in at that exhibition."

"That's it, that's it," hastily exclaimed Camille, who, though she harshly derided the symbolist painters as a rule, now doubtless desired to delay her mother. Then, forcing herself to smile, she asked: "Won't you risk a look-in at the Exposition du Lis with us, Monsieur Gerard?"

"Well, no," replied the Count, "I want to walk. I shall go with Monsieur l'Abbe Froment to the Chamber."

Thereupon he took leave of mother and daughter, kissing the hand of each in turn. It had just occurred to him that to while away his time he also might call for a moment at Silviane's, where, like the others, he had his entrees. On reaching the cold and solemn courtyard he said to the priest, "Ah! it does one good to breathe a little cool air. They keep their rooms too hot, and all those flowers, too, give one the headache."

Pierre for his part was going off with his brain in a whirl, his hands feverish, his senses oppressed by all the luxury which he left behind him, like the dream of some glowing, perfumed paradise where only the elect had their abode. At the same time his reviving thirst for charity had become keener than ever, and without listening to the Count, who was speaking very affectionately of his mother, he reflected as to how he might obtain Laveuve's admission to the Asylum from Fonsegue. However, when the door of the mansion had closed behind them and they had taken a few steps along the street, it occurred to Pierre that a moment previously a sudden vision had met his gaze. Had he not seen a workman carrying a tool-bag, standing and waiting on the foot pavement across the road, gazing at that monumental door, closed upon so much fabulous wealth—a workman in whom he fancied he had recognised Salvat, that hungry fellow who had gone off that morning in search of work? At this thought Pierre hastily turned round. Such wretchedness in face of so much affluence and enjoyment made him feel anxious. But the workman, disturbed in his contemplation, and possibly fearing that he had been recognised, was going off with dragging step. And now, getting only a back view of him, Pierre hesitated, and ended by thinking that he must have been mistaken.

III. RANTERS AND RULERS

WHEN Abbe Froment was about to enter the Palais-Bourbon he remembered that he had no card, and he was making up his mind that he would simply ask for Fonsegue, though he was not known to him, when, on reaching the vestibule, he perceived Mege, the Collectivist deputy, with whom he had become acquainted in his days of militant charity in the poverty-stricken Charonne district.

"What, you here? You surely have not come to evangelise us?" said Mege.

"No, I've come to see Monsieur Fonsegue on an urgent matter, about a poor fellow who cannot wait."

"Fonsegue? I don't know if he has arrived. Wait a moment." And stopping a short, dark young fellow with a ferreting, mouse-like air, Mege said to him: "Massot, here's Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, who wants to speak to your governor at once."

"The governor? But he isn't here. I left him at the office of the paper, where he'll be detained for another quarter of an hour. However, if Monsieur l'Abbe likes to wait he will surely see him here."

Thereupon Mege ushered Pierre into the large waiting-hall, the Salle des Pas Perdus, which in other moments looked so vast and cold with its bronze Minerva and Laocoon, and its bare walls on which the pale mournful winter light fell from the glass doors communicating with the garden. Just then, however, it was crowded, and warmed, as it were, by the feverish agitation of the many groups of men that had gathered here and there, and the constant coming and going of those who hastened through the throng. Most of these were deputies, but there were also numerous journalists and inquisitive visitors. And a growing uproar prevailed: colloquies now in undertones, now in loud voices, exclamations and bursts of laughter, amidst a deal of passionate gesticulation, Mege's return into the tumult seemed to fan it. He was tall, apostolically thin, and somewhat neglectful of his person, looking already old and worn for his age, which was but five and forty, though his eyes still glowed with youth behind the glasses which never left his beak-like nose. And he had a warm but grating voice, and had always been known to cough, living on solely because he was bitterly intent on doing so in order to realise the dream of social re-organisation which haunted him. The son of an impoverished medical man of a northern town, he had come to Paris when very young, living there during the Empire on petty newspaper and other unknown work, and first making a reputation as an orator at the public meetings of the time. Then, after the war, having become the chief of the Collectivist party, thanks to his ardent faith and the extraordinary activity of his fighting nature, he had at last managed to enter the Chamber, where, brimful of information, he fought for his ideas with fierce determination and obstinacy, like a doctrinaire who has decided in his own mind what the world ought to be, and who regulates in advance, and bit by bit, the whole dogma of Collectivism. However, since he had taken pay as a deputy, the outside Socialists had looked upon him as a mere rhetorician, an aspiring dictator who only tried to cast society in a new mould for the purpose of subordinating it to his personal views and ruling it.

"You know what is going on?" he said to Pierre. "This is another nice affair, is it not? But what would you have? We are in mud to our very ears."

He had formerly conceived genuine sympathy for the priest, whom he had found so gentle with all who suffered, and so desirous of social regeneration. And the priest himself had ended by taking an interest in this authoritarian dreamer, who was resolved to make men happy in spite even of themselves. He knew that he was poor, and led a retired life with his wife and four children, to whom he was devoted.

"You can well understand that I am no ally of Sagnier's," Mege resumed. "But as he chose to speak out this morning and threaten to publish the names of all those who have taken bribes, we can't allow ourselves to pass as accomplices any further. It has long been said that there was some nasty jobbery in that suspicious affair of the African railways. And the worst is that two members of the present Cabinet are in question, for three years ago, when the Chambers dealt with Duvillard's emission, Barroux was at the Home Department, and Monferrand at that of Public Works. Now that they have come back again, Monferrand at the Home Department, and Barroux at that of Finance, with the Presidency of the Council, it isn't possible, is it, for us to do otherwise than compel them to enlighten us, in their own interest even, about their former goings-on? No, no, they can no longer keep silence, and I've announced that I intend to interpellate them this very day."

It was the announcement of Mege's interpellation, following the terrible article of the "Voix du Peuple," which thus set the lobbies in an uproar. And Pierre remained rather scared at this big political affair falling into the midst of his scheme to save a wretched pauper from hunger and death. Thus he listened without fully understanding the explanations which the Socialist deputy was passionately giving him, while all around them the uproar increased, and bursts of laughter rang out, testifying to the astonishment which the others felt at seeing Mege in conversation with a priest.

"How stupid they are!" said Mege disdainfully. "Do they think then that I eat a cassock for dejeuner every morning? But I beg your pardon, my dear Monsieur Froment. Come, take a place on that seat and wait for Fonsegue."

Then he himself plunged into all the turmoil, and Pierre realised that his best course was to sit down and wait quietly. His surroundings began to influence and interest him, and he gradually forgot Laveuve for the passion of the Parliamentary crisis amidst which he found himself cast. The frightful Panama adventure was scarcely over; he had followed the progress of that tragedy with the anguish of a man who every night expects to hear the tocsin sound the last hour of olden, agonising society. And now a little Panama was beginning, a fresh cracking of the social edifice, an affair such as had been frequent in all parliaments in connection with big financial questions, but one which acquired mortal gravity from the circumstances in which it came to the front. That story of the African Railway Lines, that little patch of mud, stirred up and exhaling a perturbing odour, and suddenly fomenting all that emotion, fear, and anger in the Chamber, was after all but an opportunity for political strife, a field on which the voracious appetites of the various "groups" would take exercise and sharpen; and, at bottom, the sole question was that of overthrowing the ministry and replacing it by another. Only, behind all that lust of power, that continuous onslaught of ambition, what a distressful prey was stirring—the whole people with all its poverty and its sufferings!

Pierre noticed that Massot, "little Massot," as he was generally called, had just seated himself on the bench beside him. With his lively eye and ready ear listening to everything and noting it, gliding everywhere with his ferret-like air, Massot was not there in the capacity of a gallery man, but had simply scented a stormy debate, and come to see if he could not pick up material for some occasional "copy." And this priest lost in the midst of the throng doubtless interested him.

"Have a little patience, Monsieur l'Abbe," said he, with the amiable gaiety of a young gentleman who makes fun of everything. "The governor will certainly come, for he knows well enough that they are going to heat the oven here. You are not one of his constituents from La Correze, are you?"

"No, no! I belong to Paris; I've come on account of a poor fellow whom I wish to get admitted into the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour."

"Oh! all right. Well, I'm a child of Paris, too."

Then Massot laughed. And indeed he was a child of Paris, son of a chemist of the St. Denis district, and an ex-dunce of the Lycee Charlemagne, where he had not even finished his studies. He had failed entirely, and at eighteen years of age had found himself cast into journalism with barely sufficient knowledge of orthography for that calling. And for twelve years now, as he often said, he had been a rolling stone wandering through all spheres of society, confessing some and guessing at others. He had seen everything, and become disgusted with everything, no longer believing in the existence of great men, or of truth, but living peacefully enough on universal malice and folly. He naturally had no literary ambition, in fact he professed a deliberate contempt for literature. Withal, he was not a fool, but wrote in accordance with no matter what views in no matter what newspaper, having neither conviction nor belief, but quietly claiming the right to say whatever he pleased to the public on condition that he either amused or impassioned it.

"And so," said he, "you know Mege, Monsieur l'Abbe? What a study in character, eh? A big child, a dreamer of dreams in the skin of a terrible sectarian! Oh! I have had a deal of intercourse with him, I know him thoroughly. You are no doubt aware that he lives on with the everlasting conviction that he will attain to power in six months' time, and that between evening and morning he will have established that famous Collectivist community which is to succeed capitalist society, just as day follows night. And, by the way, as regards his interpellation to-day, he is convinced that in overthrowing the Barroux ministry he'll be hastening his own turn. His system is to use up his adversaries. How many times haven't I heard him making his calculations: there's such a one to be used up, then such a one, and then such a one, so that he himself may at last reign. And it's always to come off in six months at the latest. The misfortune is, however, that others are always springing up, and so his turn never comes at all."

Little Massot openly made merry over it. Then, slightly lowering his voice, he asked: "And Sagnier, do you know him? No? Do you see that red-haired man with the bull's neck—the one who looks like a butcher? That one yonder who is talking in a little group of frayed frock-coats."

Pierre at last perceived the man in question. He had broad red ears, a hanging under-lip, a large nose, and big, projecting dull eyes.

"I know that one thoroughly, as well," continued Massot; "I was on the 'Voix du Peuple' under him before I went on the 'Globe.' The one thing that nobody is exactly aware of is whence Sagnier first came. He long dragged out his life in the lower depths of journalism, doing nothing at all brilliant, but wild with ambition and appetite. Perhaps you remember the first hubbub he made, that rather dirty affair of a new Louis XVII. which he tried to launch, and which made him the extraordinary Royalist that he still is. Then it occurred to him to espouse the cause of the masses, and he made a display of vengeful Catholic socialism, attacking the Republic and all the abominations of the times in the name of justice and morality, under the pretext of curing them. He began with a series of sketches of financiers, a mass of dirty, uncontrolled, unproved tittle-tattle, which ought to have led him to the dock, but which met, as you know, with such wonderful success when gathered together in a volume. And he goes on in the same style in the 'Voix du Peuple,' which he himself made a success at the time of the Panama affair by dint of denunciation and scandal, and which to-day is like a sewer-pipe pouring forth all the filth of the times. And whenever the stream slackens, why, he invents things just to satisfy his craving for that hubbub on which both his pride and his pocket subsist."

Little Massot spoke without bitterness; indeed, he had even begun to laugh again. Beneath his thoughtless ferocity he really felt some respect for Sagnier. "Oh! he's a bandit," he continued, "but a clever fellow all the same. You can't imagine how full of vanity he is. Lately it occurred to him to get himself acclaimed by the populace, for he pretends to be a kind of King of the Markets, you know. Perhaps he has ended by taking his fine judge-like airs in earnest, and really believes that he is saving the people and helping the cause of virtue. What astonishes me is his fertility in the arts of denunciation and scandalmongering. Never a morning comes but he discovers some fresh horror, and delivers fresh culprits over to the hatred of the masses. No! the stream of mud never ceases; there is an incessant, unexpected spurt of infamy, an increase of monstrous fancies each time that the disgusted public shows any sign of weariness. And, do you know, there's genius in that, Monsieur l'Abbe; for he is well aware that his circulation goes up as soon as he threatens to speak out and publish a list of traitors and bribe-takers. His sales are certain now for some days to come."

Listening to Massot's gay, bantering voice, Pierre began to understand certain things, the exact meaning of which had hitherto escaped him. He ended by questioning the young journalist, surprised as he was that so many deputies should be in the lobbies when the sitting was in progress. Oh! the sitting indeed. The gravest matters, some bill of national interest, might be under discussion, yet every member fled from it at the sudden threat of an interpellation which might overturn the ministry. And the passion stirring there was the restrained anger, the growing anxiety of the present ministry's clients, who feared that they might have to give place to others; and it was also the sudden hope, the eager hunger of all who were waiting—the clients of the various possible ministries of the morrow.

Massot pointed to Barroux, the head of the Cabinet, who, though he was out of his element in the Department of Finances, had taken it simply because his generally recognised integrity was calculated to reassure public opinion after the Panama crisis. Barroux was chatting in a corner with the Minister of Public Instruction, Senator Taboureau, an old university man with a shrinking, mournful air, who was extremely honest, but totally ignorant of Paris, coming as he did from some far-away provincial faculty. Barroux for his part was of decorative aspect, tall, and with a handsome, clean-shaven face, which would have looked quite noble had not his nose been rather too small. Although he was sixty, he still had a profusion of curly snow-white hair completing the somewhat theatrical majesty of his appearance, which he was wont to turn to account when in the tribune. Coming of an old Parisian family, well-to-do, an advocate by profession, then a Republican journalist under the Empire, he had reached office with Gambetta, showing himself at once honest and romantic, loud of speech, and somewhat stupid, but at the same time very brave and very upright, and still clinging with ardent faith to the principles of the great Revolution. However, his Jacobinism was getting out of fashion, he was becoming an "ancestor," as it were, one of the last props of the middle-class Republic, and the new comers, the young politicians with long teeth, were beginning to smile at him. Moreover, beneath the ostentation of his demeanour, and the pomp of his eloquence, there was a man of hesitating, sentimental nature, a good fellow who shed tears when re-perusing the verses of Lamartine.

However, Monferrand, the minister for the Home Department, passed by and drew Barroux aside to whisper a few words in his ear. He, Monferrand, was fifty, short and fat, with a smiling, fatherly air; nevertheless a look of keen intelligence appeared at times on his round and somewhat common face fringed by a beard which was still dark. In him one divined a man of government, with hands which were fitted for difficult tasks, and which never released a prey. Formerly mayor of the town of Tulle, he came from La Correze, where he owned a large estate. He was certainly a force in motion, one whose constant rise was anxiously watched by keen observers. He spoke in a simple quiet way, but with extraordinary power of conviction. Having apparently no ambition, affecting indeed the greatest disinterestedness, he nevertheless harboured the most ferocious appetites. Sagnier had written that he was a thief and a murderer, having strangled two of his aunts in order to inherit their property. But even if he were a murderer, he was certainly not a vulgar one.

Then, too, came another personage of the drama which was about to be performed—deputy Vignon, whose arrival agitated the various groups. The two ministers looked at him, whilst he, at once surrounded by his friends, smiled at them from a distance. He was not yet thirty-six. Slim, and of average height, very fair, with a fine blond beard of which he took great care, a Parisian by birth, having rapidly made his way in the government service, at one time Prefect at Bordeaux, he now represented youth and the future in the Chamber. He had realised that new men were needed in the direction of affairs in order to accomplish the more urgent, indispensable reforms; and very ambitious and intelligent as he was, knowing many things, he already had a programme, the application of which he was quite capable of attempting, in part at any rate. However, he evinced no haste, but was full of prudence and shrewdness, convinced that his day would dawn, strong in the fact that he was as yet compromised in nothing, but had all space before him. At bottom he was merely a first-class administrator, clear and precise in speech, and his programme only differed from Barroux's by the rejuvenation of its formulas, although the advent of a Vignon ministry in place of a Barroux ministry appeared an event of importance. And it was of Vignon that Sagnier had written that he aimed at the Presidency of the Republic, even should he have to march through blood to reach the Elysee Palace.

"Mon Dieu!" Massot was explaining, "it's quite possible that Sagnier isn't lying this time, and that he has really found a list of names in some pocket-book of Hunter's that has fallen into his hands. I myself have long known that Hunter was Duvillard's vote-recruiter in the affair of the African Railways. But to understand matters one must first realise what his mode of proceeding was, the skill and the kind of amiable delicacy which he showed, which were far from the brutal corruption and dirty trafficking that people imagine. One must be such a man as Sagnier to picture a parliament as an open market, where every conscience is for sale and is impudently knocked down to the highest bidder. Oh! things happened in a very different way indeed; and they are explainable, and at times even excusable. Thus the article is levelled in particular against Barroux and Monferrand, who are designated in the clearest possible manner although they are not named. You are no doubt aware that at the time of the vote Barroux was at the Home Department and Monferrand at that of Public Works, and so now they are accused of having betrayed their trusts, the blackest of all social crimes. I don't know into what political combinations Barroux may have entered, but I am ready to swear that he put nothing in his pocket, for he is the most honest of men. As for Monferrand, that's another matter; he's a man to carve himself his share, only I should be much surprised if he had put himself in a bad position. He's incapable of a blunder, particularly of a stupid blunder, like that of taking money and leaving a receipt for it lying about."

Massot paused, and with a jerk of his head called Pierre's attention to Duthil, who, feverish, but nevertheless smiling, stood in a group which had just collected around the two ministers. "There! do you see that young man yonder, that dark handsome fellow whose beard looks so triumphant?"

"I know him," said Pierre.

"Oh! you know Duthil. Well, he's one who most certainly took money. But he's a mere bird. He came to us from Angouleme to lead the pleasantest of lives here, and he has no more conscience, no more scruples, than the pretty finches of his native part, who are ever love-making. Ah! for Duthil, Hunter's money was like manna due to him, and he never even paused to think that he was dirtying his fingers. You may be quite sure he feels astonished that people should attach the slightest importance to the matter."

Then Massot designated another deputy in the same group, a man of fifty or thereabouts, of slovenly aspect and lachrymose mien, lanky, too, like a maypole, and somewhat bent by the weight of his head, which was long and suggestive of a horse's. His scanty, straight, yellowish hair, his drooping moustaches, in fact the whole of his distracted countenance, expressed everlasting distress.

"And Chaigneux, do you know him?" continued Massot, referring to the deputy in question. "No? Well, look at him and ask yourself if it isn't quite as natural that he, too, should have taken money. He came from Arras. He was a solicitor there. When his division elected him he let politics intoxicate him, and sold his practice to make his fortune in Paris, where he installed himself with his wife and his three daughters. And you can picture his bewilderment amidst those four women, terrible women ever busy with finery, receiving and paying visits, and running after marriageable men who flee away. It's ill-luck with a vengeance, the daily defeat of a poor devil of mediocre attainments, who imagined that his position as a deputy would facilitate money-making, and who is drowning himself in it all. And so how can Chaigneux have done otherwise than take money, he who is always hard up for a five-hundred-franc note! I admit that originally he wasn't a dishonest man. But he's become one, that's all."

Massot was now fairly launched, and went on with his portraits, the series which he had, at one moment, dreamt of writing under the title of "Deputies for Sale." There were the simpletons who fell into the furnace, the men whom ambition goaded to exasperation, the low minds that yielded to the temptation of an open drawer, the company-promoters who grew intoxicated and lost ground by dint of dealing with big figures. At the same time, however, Massot admitted that these men were relatively few in number, and that black sheep were to be found in every parliament of the world. Then Sagnier's name cropped up again, and Massot remarked that only Sagnier could regard the French Chambers as mere dens of thieves.

Pierre, meantime, felt most interested in the tempest which the threat of a ministerial crisis was stirring up before him. Not only the men like Duthil and Chaigneux, pale at feeling the ground tremble beneath them, and wondering whether they would not sleep at the Mazas prison that night, were gathered round Barroux and Monferrand; all the latters' clients were there, all who enjoyed influence or office through them, and who would collapse and disappear should they happen to fall. And it was something to see the anxious glances and the pale dread amidst all the whispered chatter, the bits of information and tittle-tattle which were carried hither and thither. Then, in a neighbouring group formed round Vignon, who looked very calm and smiled, were the other clients, those who awaited the moment to climb to the assault of power, in order that they, in their turn, might at last possess influence or office. Eyes glittered with covetousness, hopeful delight could be read in them, pleasant surprise at the sudden opportunity now offered. Vignon avoided replying to the over-direct questions of his friends, and simply announced that he did not intend to intervene. Evidently enough his plan was to let Mege interpellate and overthrow the ministry, for he did not fear him, and in his own estimation would afterwards simply have to stoop to pick up the fallen portfolios.

"Ah! Monferrand now," little Massot was saying, "there's a rascal who trims his sails! I knew him as an anti-clerical, a devourer of priests, Monsieur l'Abbe, if you will allow me so to express myself; however, I don't say this to be agreeable to you, but I think I may tell you for certain that he has become reconciled to religion. At least, I have been told that Monseigneur Martha, who is a great converter, now seldom leaves him. This is calculated to please one in these new times, when science has become bankrupt, and religion blooms afresh with delicious mysticism on all sides, whether in art, literature, or society itself."

Massot was jesting, according to his wont; but he spoke so amiably that the priest could not do otherwise than bow. However, a great stir had set in before them; it was announced that Mege was about to ascend the tribune, and thereupon all the deputies hastened into the assembly hall, leaving only the inquisitive visitors and a few journalists in the Salle des Pas Perdus.

"It's astonishing that Fonsegue hasn't yet arrived," resumed Massot; "he's interested in what's going on. However, he's so cunning, that when he doesn't behave as others do, one may be sure that he has his reasons for it. Do you know him?" And as Pierre gave a negative answer, Massot went on: "Oh! he's a man of brains and real power—I speak with all freedom, you know, for I don't possess the bump of veneration; and, as for my editors, well, they're the very puppets that I know the best and pick to pieces with the most enjoyment. Fonsegue, also, is clearly designated in Sagnier's article. Moreover, he's one of Duvillard's usual clients. There can be no doubt that he took money, for he takes money in everything. Only he always protects himself, and takes it for reasons which may be acknowledged—as payment or commission on account of advertising, and so forth. And if I left him just now, looking, as it seemed to me, rather disturbed, and if he delays his arrival here to establish, as it were, a moral alibi, the truth must be that he has committed the first imprudent action in his life."

Then Massot rattled on, telling all there was to tell about Fonsegue. He, too, came from the department of La Correze, and had quarrelled for life with Monferrand after some unknown underhand affairs. Formerly an advocate at Tulle, his ambition had been to conquer Paris; and he had really conquered it, thanks to his big morning newspaper, "Le Globe," of which he was both founder and director. He now resided in a luxurious mansion in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and no enterprise was launched but he carved himself a princely share in it. He had a genius for "business," and employed his newspaper as a weapon to enable him to reign over the market. But how very carefully he had behaved, what long and skilful patience he had shown, before attaining to the reputation of a really serious man, who guided authoritatively the most virtuous and respected of the organs of the press! Though in reality he believed neither in God nor in Devil, he had made this newspaper the supporter of order, property, and family ties; and though he had become a Conservative Republican, since it was to his interest to be such, he had remained outwardly religious, affecting a Spiritualism which reassured the bourgeoisie. And amidst all his accepted power, to which others bowed, he nevertheless had one hand deep in every available money-bag.

"Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," said Massot, "see to what journalism may lead a man. There you have Sagnier and Fonsegue: just compare them a bit. In reality they are birds of the same feather: each has a quill and uses it. But how different the systems and the results. Sagnier's print is really a sewer which rolls him along and carries him to the cesspool; while the other's paper is certainly an example of the best journalism one can have, most carefully written, with a real literary flavour, a treat for readers of delicate minds, and an honour to the man who directs it. But at the bottom, good heavens! in both cases the farce is precisely the same!"

Massot burst out laughing, well pleased with this final thrust. Then all at once: "Ah! here's Fonsegue at last!" said he.

Quite at his ease, and still laughing, he forthwith introduced the priest. "This is Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, my dear patron, who has been waiting more than twenty minutes for you—I'm just going to see what is happening inside. You know that Mege is interpellating the government."

The new comer started slightly: "An interpellation!" said he. "All right, all right, I'll go to it."

Pierre was looking at him. He was about fifty years of age, short of stature, thin and active, still looking young without a grey hair in his black beard. He had sparkling eyes, too, but his mouth, said to be a terrible one, was hidden by his moustaches. And withal he looked a pleasant companion, full of wit to the tip of his little pointed nose, the nose of a sporting dog that is ever scenting game. "What can I do for you, Monsieur l'Abbe?" he inquired.

Then Pierre briefly presented his request, recounting his visit to Laveuve that morning, giving every heart-rending particular, and asking for the poor wretch's immediate admittance to the Asylum.

"Laveuve!" said the other, "but hasn't his affair been examined? Why, Duthil drew up a report on it, and things appeared to us of such a nature that we could not vote for the man's admittance."

But the priest insisted: "I assure you, monsieur, that your heart would have burst with compassion had you been with me this morning. It is revolting that an old man should be left in such frightful abandonment even for another hour. He must sleep at the Asylum to-night."

Fonsegue began to protest. "To-night! But it's impossible, altogether impossible! There are all sorts of indispensable formalities to be observed. And besides I alone cannot take such responsibility. I haven't the power. I am only the manager; all that I do is to execute the orders of the committee of lady patronesses."

"But it was precisely Baroness Duvillard who sent me to you, monsieur, telling me that you alone had the necessary authority to grant immediate admittance in an exceptional case."

"Oh! it was the Baroness who sent you? Ah! that is just like her, incapable of coming to any decision herself, and far too desirous of her own quietude to accept any responsibility. Why is it that she wants me to have the worries? No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe, I certainly won't go against all our regulations; I won't give an order which would perhaps embroil me with all those ladies. You don't know them, but they become positively terrible directly they attend our meetings."

He was growing lively, defending himself with a jocular air, whilst in secret he was fully determined to do nothing. However, just then Duthil abruptly reappeared, darting along bareheaded, hastening from lobby to lobby to recruit absent members, particularly those who were interested in the grave debate at that moment beginning. "What, Fonsegue!" he cried, "are you still here? Go, go to your seat at once, it's serious!" And thereupon he disappeared.

His colleague evinced no haste, however. It was as if the suspicious affair which was impassioning the Chamber had no concern for him. And he still smiled, although a slight feverish quiver made him blink. "Excuse me, Monsieur l'Abbe," he said at last. "You see that my friends have need of me. I repeat to you that I can do absolutely nothing for your protege."

But Pierre would not accept this reply as a final one. "No, no, monsieur," he rejoined, "go to your affairs, I will wait for you here. Don't come to a decision without full reflection. You are wanted, and I feel that your mind is not sufficiently at liberty for you to listen to me properly. By-and-by, when you come back and give me your full attention, I am sure that you will grant me what I ask."

And, although Fonsegue, as he went off, repeated that he could not alter his decision, the priest stubbornly resolved to make him do so, and sat down on the bench again, prepared, if needful, to stay there till the evening. The Salle des Pas Perdus was now almost quite empty, and looked yet more frigid and mournful with its Laocoon and its Minerva, its bare commonplace walls like those of a railway-station waiting-room, between which all the scramble of the century passed, though apparently without even warming the lofty ceiling. Never had paler and more callous light entered by the large glazed doors, behind which one espied the little slumberous garden with its meagre, wintry lawns. And not an echo of the tempest of the sitting near at hand reached the spot; from the whole heavy pile there fell but death-like silence, and a covert quiver of distress that had come from far away, perhaps from the entire country.

It was that which now haunted Pierre's reverie. The whole ancient, envenomed sore spread out before his mind's eye, with its poison and virulence. Parliamentary rottenness had slowly increased till it had begun to attack society itself. Above all the low intrigues and the rush of personal ambition there certainly remained the loftier struggle of the contending principles, with history on the march, clearing the past away and seeking to bring more truth, justice, and happiness in the future. But in practice, if one only considered the horrid daily cuisine of the sphere, what an unbridling of egotistical appetite one beheld, what an absorbing passion to strangle one's neighbour and triumph oneself alone! Among the various groups one found but an incessant battle for power and the satisfactions that it gives. "Left," "Right," "Catholics," "Republicans," "Socialists," the names given to the parties of twenty different shades, were simply labels classifying forms of the one burning thirst to rule and dominate. All questions could be reduced to a single one, that of knowing whether this man, that man, or that other man should hold France in his grasp, to enjoy it, and distribute its favours among his creatures. And the worst was that the outcome of the great parliamentary battles, the days and the weeks lost in setting this man in the place of that man, and that other man in the place of this man, was simply stagnation, for not one of the three men was better than his fellows, and there were but vague points of difference between them; in such wise that the new master bungled the very same work as the previous one had bungled, forgetful, perforce, of programmes and promises as soon as ever he began to reign.

However, Pierre's thoughts invincibly reverted to Laveuve, whom he had momentarily forgotten, but who now seized hold of him again with a quiver as of anger and death. Ah! what could it matter to that poor old wretch, dying of hunger on his bed of rags, whether Mege should overthrow Barroux's ministry, and whether a Vignon ministry should ascend to power or not! At that rate, a century, two centuries, would be needed before there would be bread in the garrets where groan the lamed sons of labour, the old, broken-down beasts of burden. And behind Laveuve there appeared the whole army of misery, the whole multitude of the disinherited and the poor, who agonised and asked for justice whilst the Chamber, sitting in all pomp, grew furiously impassioned over the question as to whom the nation should belong to, as to who should devour it. Mire was flowing on in a broad stream, the hideous, bleeding, devouring sore displayed itself in all impudence, like some cancer which preys upon an organ and spreads to the heart. And what disgust, what nausea must such a spectacle inspire; and what a longing for the vengeful knife that would bring health and joy!

Pierre could not have told for how long he had been plunged in this reverie, when uproar again filled the hall. People were coming back, gesticulating and gathering in groups. And suddenly he heard little Massot exclaim near him: "Well, if it isn't down it's not much better off. I wouldn't give four sous for its chance of surviving."

He referred to the ministry, and began to recount the sitting to a fellow journalist who had just arrived. Mege had spoken very eloquently, with extraordinary fury of indignation against the rotten bourgeoisie, which rotted everything it touched; but, as usual, he had gone much too far, alarming the Chamber by his very violence. And so, when Barroux had ascended the tribune to ask for a month's adjournment of the interpellation, he had merely had occasion to wax indignant, in all sincerity be it said, full of lofty anger that such infamous campaigns should be carried on by a certain portion of the press. Were the shameful Panama scandals about to be renewed? Were the national representatives going to let themselves be intimidated by fresh threats of denunciation? It was the Republic itself which its adversaries were seeking to submerge beneath a flood of abominations. No, no, the hour had come for one to collect one's thoughts, and work in quietude without allowing those who hungered for scandal to disturb the public peace. And the Chamber, impressed by these words, fearing, too, lest the electorate should at last grow utterly weary of the continuous overflow of filth, had adjourned the interpellation to that day month. However, although Vignon had not personally intervened in the debate, the whole of his group had voted against the ministry, with the result that the latter had merely secured a majority of two votes—a mockery.

"But in that case they will resign," said somebody to Massot.

"Yes, so it's rumoured. But Barroux is very tenacious. At all events if they show any obstinacy they will be down before a week is over, particularly as Sagnier, who is quite furious, declares that he will publish the list of names to-morrow."

Just then, indeed, Barroux and Monferrand were seen to pass, hastening along with thoughtful, busy mien, and followed by their anxious clients. It was said that the whole Cabinet was about to assemble to consider the position and come to a decision. And then Vignon, in his turn, reappeared amidst a stream of friends. He, for his part, was radiant, with a joy which he sought to conceal, calming his friends in his desire not to cry victory too soon. However, the eyes of the band glittered, like those of a pack of hounds when the moment draws near for the offal of the quarry to be distributed. And even Mege also looked triumphant. He had all but overthrown the ministry. That made another one that was worn out, and by-and-by he would wear out Vignon's, and at last govern in his turn.

"The devil!" muttered little Massot, "Chaigneux and Duthil look like whipped dogs. And see, there's nobody who is worth the governor. Just look at him, how superb he is, that Fonsegue! But good-by, I must now be off!"

Then he shook hands with his brother journalist unwilling as he was to remain any longer, although the sitting still continued, some bill of public importance again being debated before the rows of empty seats.

Chaigneux, with his desolate mien, had gone to lean against the pedestal of the high figure of Minerva; and never before had he been more bowed down by his needy distress, the everlasting anguish of his ill-luck. On the other hand, Duthil, in spite of everything, was perorating in the centre of a group with an affectation of scoffing unconcern; nevertheless nervous twitches made his nose pucker and distorted his mouth, while the whole of his handsome face was becoming moist with fear. And even as Massot had said, there really was only Fonsegue who showed composure and bravery, ever the same with his restless little figure, and his eyes beaming with wit, though at times they were just faintly clouded by a shadow of uneasiness.

Pierre had risen to renew his request; but Fonsegue forestalled him, vivaciously exclaiming: "No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe, I repeat that I cannot take on myself such an infraction of our rules. There was an inquiry, and a decision was arrived at. How would you have me over-rule it?"

"Monsieur," said the priest, in a tone of deep grief, "it is a question of an old man who is hungry and cold, and in danger of death if he be not succoured."

With a despairing gesture, the director of "Le Globe" seemed to take the very walls as witnesses of his powerlessness. No doubt he feared some nasty affair for his newspaper, in which he had abused the Invalids of Labour enterprise as an electoral weapon. Perhaps, too, the secret terror into which the sitting of the Chamber had just thrown him was hardening his heart. "I can do nothing," he repeated. "But naturally I don't ask better than to have my hands forced by the ladies of the Committee. You already have the support of the Baroness Duvillard, secure that of some others."

Pierre, who was determined to fight on to the very end, saw in this suggestion a supreme chance. "I know the Countess de Quinsac," he said, "I can go to see her at once."

"Quite so! an excellent idea, the Countess de Quinsac! Take a cab and go to see the Princess de Harn as well. She bestirs herself a great deal, and is becoming very influential. Secure the approval of these ladies, go back to the Baroness's at seven, get a letter from her to cover me, and then call on me at the office of my paper. That done, your man shall sleep at the Asylum at nine o'clock!"

He evinced in speaking a kind of joyous good nature, as though he no longer doubted of success now that he ran no risk of compromising himself. And great hope again came back to the priest: "Ah! thank you, monsieur," he said; "it is a work of salvation that you will accomplish."

"But you surely know that I ask nothing better. Ah! if we could only cure misery, prevent hunger and thirst by a mere word. However, make haste, you have not a minute to lose."

They shook hands, and Pierre at once tried to get out of the throng. This, however, was no easy task, for the various groups had grown larger as all the anger and anguish, roused by the recent debate, ebbed back there amid a confused tumult. It was as when a stone, cast into a pool, stirs the ooze below, and causes hidden, rotting things to rise once more to the surface. And Pierre had to bring his elbows into play and force a passage athwart the throng, betwixt the shivering cowardice of some, the insolent audacity of others, and the smirchings which sullied the greater number, given the contagion which inevitably prevailed. However, he carried away a fresh hope, and it seemed to him that if he should save a life, make but one man happy that day, it would be like a first instalment of redemption, a sign that a little forgiveness would be extended to the many follies and errors of that egotistical and all-devouring political world.

On reaching the vestibule a final incident detained him for a moment longer. Some commotion prevailed there following upon a quarrel between a man and an usher, the latter of whom had prevented the former from entering on finding that the admission ticket which he tendered was an old one, with its original date scratched out. The man, very rough at the outset, had then refrained from insisting, as if indeed sudden timidity had come upon him. And in this ill-dressed fellow Pierre was astonished to recognise Salvat, the journeyman engineer, whom he had seen going off in search of work that same morning. This time it was certainly he, tall, thin and ravaged, with dreamy yet flaming eyes, which set his pale starveling's face aglow. He no longer carried his tool-bag; his ragged jacket was buttoned up and distended on the left side by something that he carried in a pocket, doubtless some hunk of bread. And on being repulsed by the ushers, he walked away, taking the Concorde bridge, slowly, as if chancewise, like a man who knows not whither he is going.

IV. SOCIAL SIDELIGHTS

IN her old faded drawing-room—a Louis Seize salon with grey woodwork—the Countess de Quinsac sat near the chimney-piece in her accustomed place. She was singularly like her son, with a long and noble face, her chin somewhat stern, but her eyes still beautiful beneath her fine snowy hair, which was arranged in the antiquated style of her youth. And whatever her haughty coldness, she knew how to be amiable, with perfect, kindly graciousness.

Slightly waving her hand after a long silence, she resumed, addressing herself to the Marquis de Morigny, who sat on the other side of the chimney, where for long years he had always taken the same armchair. "Ah! you are right, my friend, Providence has left us here forgotten, in a most abominable epoch."

"Yes, we passed by the side of happiness and missed it," the Marquis slowly replied, "and it was your fault, and doubtless mine as well."

Smiling sadly, she stopped him with another wave of her hand. And the silence fell once more; not a sound from the streets reached that gloomy ground floor at the rear of the courtyard of an old mansion in the Rue St. Dominique, almost at the corner of the Rue de Bourgogne.

The Marquis was an old man of seventy-five, nine years older than the Countess. Short and thin though he was, he none the less had a distinguished air, with his clean-shaven face, furrowed by deep, aristocratic wrinkles. He belonged to one of the most ancient families of France, and remained one of the last hopeless Legitimists, of very pure and lofty views, zealously keeping his faith to the dead monarchy amidst the downfall of everything. His fortune, still estimated at several millions of francs, remained, as it were, in a state of stagnation, through his refusal to invest it in any of the enterprises of the century. It was known that in all discretion he had loved the Countess, even when M. de Quinsac was alive, and had, moreover, offered marriage after the latter's death, at the time when the widow had sought a refuge on that damp ground floor with merely an income of some 15,000 francs, saved with great difficulty from the wreck of the family fortune. But she, who adored her son Gerard, then in his tenth year, and of delicate health, had sacrificed everything to the boy from a kind of maternal chasteness and a superstitious fear that she might lose him should she set another affection and another duty in her life. And the Marquis, while bowing to her decision, had continued to worship her with his whole soul, ever paying his court as on the first evening when he had seen her, still gallant and faithful after a quarter of a century had passed. There had never been anything between them, not even the exchange of a kiss.

Seeing how sad she looked, he feared that he might have displeased her, and so he asked: "I should have liked to render you happy, but I didn't know how, and the fault can certainly only rest with me. Is Gerard giving you any cause for anxiety?"

She shook her head, and then replied: "As long as things remain as they are we cannot complain of them, my friend, since we accepted them."

She referred to her son's culpable connection with Baroness Duvillard. She had ever shown much weakness with regard to that son whom she had had so much trouble to rear, for she alone knew what exhaustion, what racial collapse was hidden behind his proud bearing. She tolerated his idleness, the apathetic disgust which, man of pleasure that he was, had turned him from the profession of diplomacy as from that of arms. How many times had she not repaired his acts of folly and paid his petty debts, keeping silent concerning them, and refusing all pecuniary help from the Marquis, who no longer dared offer his millions, so stubbornly intent she was on living upon the remnants of her own fortune. And thus she had ended by closing her eyes to her son's scandalous love intrigue, divining in some measure how things had happened, through self-abandonment and lack of conscience—the man weak, unable to resume possession of himself, and the woman holding and retaining him. The Marquis, however, strangely enough, had only forgiven the intrigue on the day when Eve had allowed herself to be converted.

"You know, my friend, how good-natured Gerard is," the Countess resumed. "In that lie both his strength and weakness. How would you have me scold him when he weeps over it all with me? He will tire of that woman."

M. de Morigny wagged his head. "She is still very beautiful," said he. "And then there's the daughter. It would be graver still if he were to marry her—"

"But the daughter's infirm?"

"Yes, and you know what would be said: A Quinsac marrying a monster for the sake of her millions."

This was their mutual terror. They knew everything that went on at the Duvillards, the affectionate friendship of the uncomely Camille and the handsome Gerard, the seeming idyll beneath which lurked the most awful of dramas. And they protested with all their indignation. "Oh! that, no, no, never!" the Countess declared. "My son in that family, no, I will never consent to it."

Just at that moment General de Bozonnet entered. He was much attached to his sister and came to keep her company on the days when she received, for the old circle had gradually dwindled down till now only a few faithful ones ventured into that grey gloomy salon, where one might have fancied oneself at thousands of leagues from present-day Paris. And forthwith, in order to enliven the room, he related that he had been to dejeuner at the Duvillards, and named the guests, Gerard among them. He knew that he pleased his sister by going to the banker's house whence he brought her news, a house, too, which he cleansed in some degree by conferring on it the great honour of his presence. And he himself in no wise felt bored there, for he had long been gained over to the century and showed himself of a very accommodating disposition in everything that did not pertain to military art.

"That poor little Camille worships Gerard," said he; "she was devouring him with her eyes at table."

But M. de Morigny gravely intervened: "There lies the danger, a marriage would be absolutely monstrous from every point of view."

The General seemed astonished: "Why, pray? She isn't beautiful, but it's not only the beauties who marry! And there are her millions. However, our dear child would only have to put them to a good use. True, there is also the mother; but, mon Dieu! such things are so common nowadays in Paris society."

This revolted the Marquis, who made a gesture of utter disgust. What was the use of discussion when all collapsed? How could one answer a Bozonnet, the last surviving representative of such an illustrious family, when he reached such a point as to excuse the infamous morals that prevailed under the Republic; after denying his king, too, and serving the Empire, faithfully and passionately attaching himself to the fortunes and memory of Caesar? However, the Countess also became indignant: "Oh! what are you saying, brother? I will never authorize such a scandal, I swore so only just now."

"Don't swear, sister," exclaimed the General; "for my part I should like to see our Gerard happy. That's all. And one must admit that he's not good for much. I can understand that he didn't go into the Army, for that profession is done for. But I do not so well understand why he did not enter the diplomatic profession, or accept some other occupation. It is very fine, no doubt, to run down the present times and declare that a man of our sphere cannot possibly do any clean work in them. But, as a matter of fact, it is only idle fellows who still say that. And Gerard has but one excuse, his lack of aptitude, will and strength."

Tears had risen to the mother's eyes. She even trembled, well knowing how deceitful were appearances: a mere chill might carry her son off, however tall and strong he might look. And was he not indeed a symbol of that old-time aristocracy, still so lofty and proud in appearance, though at bottom it is but dust?

"Well," continued the General, "he's thirty-six now; he's constantly hanging on your hands, and he must make an end of it all."

However, the Countess silenced him and turned to the Marquis: "Let us put our confidence in God, my friend," said she. "He cannot but come to my help, for I have never willingly offended Him."

"Never!" replied the Marquis, who in that one word set an expression of all his grief, all his affection and worship for that woman whom he had adored for so many years.

But another faithful friend came in and the conversation changed. M. de Larombiere, Vice-President of the Appeal Court, was an old man of seventy-five, thin, bald and clean shaven but for a pair of little white whiskers. And his grey eyes, compressed mouth and square and obstinate chin lent an expression of great austerity to his long face. The grief of his life was that, being afflicted with a somewhat childish lisp, he had never been able to make his full merits known when a public prosecutor, for he esteemed himself to be a great orator. And this secret worry rendered him morose. In him appeared an incarnation of that old royalist France which sulked and only served the Republic against its heart, that old stern magistracy which closed itself to all evolution, to all new views of things and beings. Of petty "gown" nobility, originally a Legitimist but now supporting Orleanism, he believed himself to be the one man of wisdom and logic in that salon, where he was very proud to meet the Marquis.

They talked of the last events; but with them political conversation was soon exhausted, amounting as it did to a mere bitter condemnation of men and occurrences, for all three were of one mind as to the abominations of the Republican regime. They themselves, however, were only ruins, the remnants of the old parties now all but utterly powerless. The Marquis for his part soared on high, yielding in nothing, ever faithful to the dead past; he was one of the last representatives of that lofty obstinate noblesse which dies when it finds itself without an effort to escape its fate. The judge, who at least had a pretender living, relied on a miracle, and demonstrated the necessity for one if France were not to sink into the depths of misfortune and completely disappear. And as for the General, all that he regretted of the two Empires was their great wars; he left the faint hope of a Bonapartist restoration on one side to declare that by not contenting itself with the Imperial military system, and by substituting thereto obligatory service, the nation in arms, the Republic had killed both warfare and the country.

When the Countess's one man-servant came to ask her if she would consent to receive Abbe Froment she seemed somewhat surprised. "What can he want of me? Show him in," she said.

She was very pious, and having met Pierre in connection with various charitable enterprises, she had been touched by his zeal as well as by the saintly reputation which he owed to his Neuilly parishioners.

He, absorbed by his fever, felt intimidated directly he crossed the threshold. He could at first distinguish nothing, but fancied he was entering some place of mourning, a shadowy spot where human forms seemed to melt away, and voices were never raised above a whisper. Then, on perceiving the persons present, he felt yet more out of his element, for they seemed so sad, so far removed from the world whence he had just come, and whither he was about to return. And when the Countess had made him sit down beside her in front of the chimney-piece, it was in a low voice that he told her the lamentable story of Laveuve, and asked her support to secure the man's admittance to the Asylum for the Invalids of Labour.

"Ah! yes," said she, "that enterprise which my son wished me to belong to. But, Monsieur l'Abbe, I have never once attended the Committee meetings. So how could I intervene, having assuredly no influence whatever?"

Again had the figures of Eve and Gerard arisen before her, for it was at this asylum that the pair had first met. And influenced by her sorrowful maternal love she was already weakening, although it was regretfully that she had lent her name to one of those noisy charitable enterprises, which people abused to further their selfish interests in a manner she condemned.

"But, madame," Pierre insisted, "it is a question of a poor starving old man. I implore you to be compassionate."

Although the priest had spoken in a low voice the General drew near. "It's for your old revolutionary that you are running about, is it not," said he. "Didn't you succeed with the manager, then? The fact is that it's difficult to feel any pity for fellows who, if they were the masters, would, as they themselves say, sweep us all away."

M. de Larombiere jerked his chin approvingly. For some time past he had been haunted by the Anarchist peril. But Pierre, distressed and quivering, again began to plead his cause. He spoke of all the frightful misery, the homes where there was no food, the women and children shivering with cold, and the fathers scouring muddy, wintry Paris in search of a bit of bread. All that he asked for was a line on a visiting card, a kindly word from the Countess, which he would at once carry to Baroness Duvillard to prevail on her to set the regulations aside. And his words fell one by one, tremulous with stifled tears, in that mournful salon, like sounds from afar, dying away in a dead world where there was no echo left.

Madame de Quinsac turned towards M. de Morigny, but he seemed to take no interest in it all. He was gazing fixedly at the fire, with the haughty air of a stranger who was indifferent to the things and beings in whose midst an error of time compelled him to live. But feeling that the glance of the woman he worshipped was fixed upon him he raised his head; and then their eyes met for a moment with an expression of infinite gentleness, the mournful gentleness of their heroic love.

"Mon Dieu!" said she, "I know your merits, Monsieur l'Abbe, and I won't refuse my help to one of your good works."

Then she went off for a moment, and returned with a card on which she had written that she supported with all her heart Monsieur l'Abbe Froment in the steps he was taking. And he thanked her and went off delighted, as if he carried yet a fresh hope of salvation from that drawing-room where, as he retired, gloom and silence once more seemed to fall on that old lady and her last faithful friends gathered around the fire, last relics of a world that was soon to disappear.

Once outside, Pierre joyfully climbed into his cab again, after giving the Princess de Harn's address in the Avenue Kleber. If he could also obtain her approval he would no longer doubt of success. However, there was such a crush on the Concorde bridge, that the driver had to walk his horse. And, on the foot-pavement, Pierre again saw Duthil, who, with a cigar between his lips, was smiling at the crowd, with his amiable bird-like heedlessness, happy as he felt at finding the pavement dry and the sky blue on leaving that worrying sitting of the Chamber. Seeing how gay and triumphant he looked, a sudden inspiration came to the priest, who said to himself that he ought to win over this young man, whose report had had such a disastrous effect. As it happened, the cab having been compelled to stop altogether, the deputy had just recognized him and was smiling at him.

"Where are you going, Monsieur Duthil?" Pierre asked.

"Close by, in the Champs Elysees."

"I'm going that way, and, as I should much like to speak to you for a moment, it would be very kind of you to take a seat beside me. I will set you down wherever you like."

"Willingly, Monsieur l'Abbe. It won't inconvenience you if I finish my cigar?"

"Oh! not at all."

The cab found its way out of the crush, crossed the Place de la Concorde and began to ascend the Champs Elysees. And Pierre, reflecting that he had very few minutes before him, at once attacked Duthil, quite ready for any effort to convince him. He remembered what a sortie the young deputy had made against Laveuve at the Baron's; and thus he was astonished to hear him interrupt and say quite pleasantly, enlivened as he seemed by the bright sun which was again beginning to shine: "Ah, yes! your old drunkard! So you didn't settle his business with Fonsegue? And what is it you want? To have him admitted to-day? Well, you know I don't oppose it?"

"But there's your report."

"My report, oh, my report! But questions change according to the way one looks at them. And if you are so anxious about your Laveuve I won't refuse to help you."

Pierre looked at him in astonishment, at bottom extremely well pleased. And there was no further necessity even for him to speak.

"You didn't take the matter in hand properly," continued Duthil, leaning forward with a confidential air. "It's the Baron who's the master at home, for reasons which you may divine, which you may very likely know. The Baroness does all that he asks without even discussing the point; and this morning,—instead of starting on a lot of useless visits, you only had to gain his support, particularly as he seemed to be very well disposed. And she would then have given way immediately." Duthil began to laugh. "And so," he continued, "do you know what I'll do? Well, I'll gain the Baron over to your cause. Yes, I am this moment going to a house where he is, where one is certain to find him every day at this time." Then he laughed more loudly. "And perhaps you are not ignorant of it, Monsieur l'Abbe. When he is there you may be certain he never gives a refusal. I promise you I'll make him swear that he will compel his wife to grant your man admission this very evening. Only it will, perhaps, be rather late."

Then all at once, as if struck by a fresh idea, Duthil went on: "But why shouldn't you come with me? You secure a line from the Baron, and thereupon, without losing a minute, you go in search of the Baroness. Ah! yes, the house embarrasses you a little, I understand it. Would you like to see only the Baron there? You can wait for him in a little salon downstairs; I will bring him to you."

This proposal made Duthil altogether merry, but Pierre, quite scared, hesitated at the idea of thus going to Silviane d'Aulnay's. It was hardly a place for him. However, to achieve his purpose, he would have descended into the very dwelling of the fiend, and had already done so sometimes with Abbe Rose, when there was hope of assuaging wretchedness. So he turned to Duthil and consented to accompany him.

Silviane d'Aulnay's little mansion, a very luxurious one, displaying, too, so to say, the luxury of a temple, refined but suggestive of gallantry, stood in the Avenue d'Antin, near the Champs Elysees. The inmate of this sanctuary, where the orfrays of old dalmaticas glittered in the mauve reflections from the windows of stained-glass, had just completed her twenty-fifth year. Short and slim she was, of an adorable, dark beauty, and all Paris was acquainted with her delicious, virginal countenance of a gentle oval, her delicate nose, her little mouth, her candid cheeks and artless chin, above all which she wore her black hair in thick, heavy bands, which hid her low brow. Her notoriety was due precisely to her pretty air of astonishment, the infinite purity of her blue eyes, the whole expression of chaste innocence which she assumed when it so pleased her, an expression which contrasted powerfully with her true nature, shameless creature that she really was, of the most monstrous, confessed, and openly-displayed perversity; such as, in fact, often spring up from the rotting soil of great cities. Extraordinary things were related about Silviane's tastes and fancies. Some said that she was a door-keeper's, others a doctor's, daughter. In any case she had managed to acquire instruction and manners, for when occasion required she lacked neither wit, nor style, nor deportment. She had been rolling through the theatres for ten years or so, applauded for her beauty's sake, and she had even ended by obtaining some pretty little successes in such parts as those of very pure young girls or loving and persecuted young women. Since there had been a question, though, of her entering the Comedie Francaise to play the role of Pauline in "Polyeucte," some people had waxed indignant and others had roared with laughter, so ridiculous did the idea appear, so outrageous for the majesty of classic tragedy. She, however, quiet and stubborn, wished this thing to be, was resolved that it should be, certain as she was that she would secure it, insolent like a creature to whom men had never yet been able to refuse anything.

That day, at three o'clock, Gerard de Quinsac, not knowing how to kill the time pending the appointment he had given Eve in the Rue Matignon, had thought of calling at Silviane's, which was in the neighbourhood. She was an old caprice of his, and even nowadays he would sometimes linger at the little mansion if its pretty mistress felt bored. But he had this time found her in a fury; and, reclining in one of the deep armchairs of the salon where "old gold" formed the predominant colour, he was listening to her complaints. She, standing in a white gown, white indeed from head to foot like Eve herself at the dejeuner, was speaking passionately, and fast convincing the young man, who, won over by so much youth and beauty, unconsciously compared her to his other flame, weary already of his coming assignation, and so mastered by supineness, both moral and physical, that he would have preferred to remain all day in the depths of that armchair.

"You hear me, Gerard!" she at last exclaimed, "I'll have nothing whatever to do with him, unless he brings me my nomination."

Just then Baron Duvillard came in, and forthwith she changed to ice and received him like some sorely offended young queen who awaits an explanation; whilst he, who foresaw the storm and brought moreover disastrous tidings, forced a smile, though very ill at ease. She was the stain, the blemish attaching to that man who was yet so sturdy and so powerful amidst the general decline of his race. And she was also the beginning of justice and punishment, taking all his piled-up gold from him by the handful, and by her cruelty avenging those who shivered and who starved. And it was pitiful to see that feared and flattered man, beneath whom states and governments trembled, here turn pale with anxiety, bend low in all humility, and relapse into the senile, lisping infancy of acute passion.

"Ah! my dear friend," said he, "if you only knew how I have been rushing about. I had a lot of worrying business, some contractors to see, a big advertisement affair to settle, and I feared that I should never be able to come and kiss your hand."

He kissed it, but she let her arm fall, coldly, indifferently, contenting herself with looking at him, waiting for what he might have to say to her, and embarrassing him to such a point that he began to perspire and stammer, unable to express himself. "Of course," he began, "I also thought of you, and went to the Fine Arts Office, where I had received a positive promise. Oh! they are still very much in your favour at the Fine Arts Office! Only, just fancy, it's that idiot of a minister, that Taboureau,* an old professor from the provinces who knows nothing about our Paris, that has expressly opposed your nomination, saying that as long as he is in office you shall not appear at the Comedie."

* Taboureau is previously described as Minister of Public
Instruction. It should be pointed out, however, that
although under the present Republic the Ministries of
Public Instruction and Fine Arts have occasionally been
distinct departments, at other times they have been
united, one minister, as in Taboureau's case, having
charge of both.—Trans.

Erect and rigid, she spoke but two words: "And then?"

"And then—well, my dear, what would you have me do? One can't after all overthrow a ministry to enable you to play the part of Pauline."

"Why not?"

He pretended to laugh, but his blood rushed to his face, and the whole of his sturdy figure quivered with anguish. "Come, my little Silviane," said he, "don't be obstinate. You can be so nice when you choose. Give up the idea of that debut. You, yourself, would risk a great deal in it, for what would be your worries if you were to fail? You would weep all the tears in your body. And besides, you can ask me for so many other things which I should be so happy to give you. Come now, at once, make a wish and I will gratify it immediately."

In a frolicsome way he sought to take her hand again. But she drew back with an air of much dignity. "No, you hear me, my dear fellow, I will have nothing whatever to do with you—nothing, so long as I don't play Pauline."

He understood her fully, and he knew her well enough to realise how rigorously she would treat him. Only a kind of grunt came from his contracted throat, though he still tried to treat the matter in a jesting way. "Isn't she bad-tempered to-day!" he resumed at last, turning towards Gerard. "What have you done to her that I find her in such a state?"

But the young man, who kept very quiet for fear lest he himself might be bespattered in the course of the dispute, continued to stretch himself out in a languid way and gave no answer.

But Silviane's anger burst forth. "What has he done to me? He has pitied me for being at the mercy of such a man as you—so egotistical, so insensible to the insults heaped upon me. Ought you not to be the first to bound with indignation? Ought you not to have exacted my admittance to the Comedie as a reparation for the insult? For, after all, it is a defeat for you; if I'm considered unworthy, you are struck at the same time as I am. And so I'm a drab, eh? Say at once that I'm a creature to be driven away from all respectable houses."

She went on in this style, coming at last to vile words, the abominable words which, in moments of anger, always ended by returning to her innocent-looking lips. The Baron, who well knew that a syllable from him would only increase the foulness of the overflow, vainly turned an imploring glance on the Count to solicit his intervention. Gerard, with his keen desire for peace and quietness, often brought about a reconciliation, but this time he did not stir, feeling too lazy and sleepy to interfere. And Silviane all at once came to a finish, repeating her trenchant, severing words: "Well, manage as you can, secure my debut, or I'll have nothing more to do with you, nothing!"

"All right! all right!" Duvillard at last murmured, sneering, but in despair, "we'll arrange it all."

However, at that moment a servant came in to say that M. Duthil was downstairs and wished to speak to the Baron in the smoking-room. Duvillard was astonished at this, for Duthil usually came up as though the house were his own. Then he reflected that the deputy had doubtless brought him some serious news from the Chamber which he wished to impart to him confidentially at once. So he followed the servant, leaving Gerard and Silviane together.

In the smoking-room, an apartment communicating with the hall by a wide bay, the curtain of which was drawn up, Pierre stood with his companion, waiting and glancing curiously around him. What particularly struck him was the almost religious solemnness of the entrance, the heavy hangings, the mystic gleams of the stained-glass, the old furniture steeped in chapel-like gloom amidst scattered perfumes of myrrh and incense. Duthil, who was still very gay, tapped a low divan with his cane and said: "She has a nicely-furnished house, eh? Oh! she knows how to look after her interests."

Then the Baron came in, still quite upset and anxious. And without even perceiving the priest, desirous as he was of tidings, he began: "Well, what did they do? Is there some very bad news, then?"

"Mege interpellated and applied for a declaration of urgency so as to overthrow Barroux. You can imagine what his speech was."

"Yes, yes, against the bourgeois, against me, against you. It's always the same thing—And then?"

"Then—well, urgency wasn't voted, but, in spite of a very fine defence, Barroux only secured a majority of two votes."

"Two votes, the devil! Then he's down, and we shall have a Vignon ministry next week."

"That's what everybody said in the lobbies."

The Baron frowned, as if he were estimating what good or evil might result to the world from such a change. Then, with a gesture of displeasure, he said: "A Vignon ministry! The devil! that would hardly be any better. Those young democrats pretend to be virtuous, and a Vignon ministry wouldn't admit Silviane to the Comedie."

This, at first, was his only thought in presence of the crisis which made the political world tremble. And so the deputy could not refrain from referring to his own anxiety. "Well, and we others, what is our position in it all?"

This brought Duvillard back to the situation. With a fresh gesture, this time a superbly proud one, he expressed his full and impudent confidence. "We others, why we remain as we are; we've never been in peril, I imagine. Oh! I am quite at ease. Sagnier can publish his famous list if it amuses him to do so. If we haven't long since bought Sagnier and his list, it's because Barroux is a thoroughly honest man, and for my part I don't care to throw money out of the window—I repeat to you that we fear nothing."

Then, as he at last recognised Abbe Froment, who had remained in the shade, Duthil explained what service the priest desired of him. And Duvillard, in his state of emotion, his heart still rent by Silviane's sternness, must have felt a covert hope that a good action might bring him luck; so he at once consented to intervene in favour of Laveuve's admission. Taking a card and a pencil from his pocket-book he drew near to the window. "Oh! whatever you desire, Monsieur l'Abbe," he said, "I shall be very happy to participate in this good work. Here, this is what I have written: 'My dear, please do what M. l'Abbe Froment solicits in favour of this unfortunate man, since our friend Fonsegue only awaits a word from you to take proper steps.'"

At this moment through the open bay Pierre caught sight of Gerard, whom Silviane, calm once more, and inquisitive no doubt to know why Duthil had called, was escorting into the hall. And the sight of the young woman filled him with astonishment, so simple and gentle did she seem to him, full of the immaculate candour of a virgin. Never had he dreamt of a lily of more unobtrusive yet delicious bloom in the whole garden of innocence.

"Now," continued Duvillard, "if you wish to hand this card to my wife at once, you must go to the Princess de Harn's, where there is a matinee—"

"I was going there, Monsieur le Baron."

"Very good. You will certainly find my wife there; she is to take the children there." Then he paused, for he too had just seen Gerard; and he called him: "I say, Gerard, my wife said that she was going to that matinee, didn't she? You feel sure—don't you?—that Monsieur l'Abbe will find her there?"

Although the young man was then going to the Rue Matignon, there to wait for Eve, it was in the most natural manner possible that he replied: "If Monsieur l'Abbe makes haste, I think he will find her there, for she was certainly going there before trying on a corsage at Salmon's."

Then he kissed Silviane's hand, and went off with the air of a handsome, indolent man, who knows no malice, and is even weary of pleasure.

Pierre, feeling rather embarrassed, was obliged to let Duvillard introduce him to the mistress of the house. He bowed in silence, whilst she, likewise silent, returned his bow with modest reserve, the tact appropriate to the occasion, such as no ingenue, even at the Comedie, was then capable of. And while the Baron accompanied the priest to the door, she returned to the salon with Duthil, who was scarcely screened by the door-curtain before he passed his arm round her waist.

When Pierre, who at last felt confident of success, found himself, still in his cab, in front of the Princess de Harn's mansion in the Avenue Kleber, he suddenly relapsed into great embarrassment. The avenue was crowded with carriages brought thither by the musical matinee, and such a throng of arriving guests pressed round the entrance, decorated with a kind of tent with scallopings of red velvet, that he deemed the house unapproachable. How could he manage to get in? And how in his cassock could he reach the Princess, and ask for a minute's conversation with Baroness Duvillard? Amidst all his feverishness he had not thought of these difficulties. However, he was approaching the door on foot, asking himself how he might glide unperceived through the throng, when the sound of a merry voice made him turn: "What, Monsieur l'Abbe! Is it possible! So now I find you here!"

It was little Massot who spoke. He went everywhere, witnessed ten sights a day,—a parliamentary sitting, a funeral, a wedding, any festive or mourning scene,—when he wanted a good subject for an article. "What! Monsieur l'Abbe," he resumed, "and so you have come to our amiable Princess's to see the Mauritanians dance!"

He was jesting, for the so-called Mauritanians were simply six Spanish dancing-girls, who by the sensuality of their performance were then making all Paris rush to the Folies-Bergere. For drawing-room entertainments these girls reserved yet more indecorous dances—dances of such a character indeed that they would certainly not have been allowed in a theatre. And the beau monde rushed to see them at the houses of the bolder lady-entertainers, the eccentric and foreign ones like the Princess, who in order to draw society recoiled from no "attraction."

But when Pierre had explained to little Massot that he was still running about on the same business, the journalist obligingly offered to pilot him. He knew the house, obtained admittance by a back door, and brought Pierre along a passage into a corner of the hall, near the very entrance of the grand drawing-room. Lofty green plants decorated this hall, and in the spot selected Pierre was virtually hidden. "Don't stir, my dear Abbe," said Massot, "I will try to ferret out the Princess for you. And you shall know if Baroness Duvillard has already arrived."

What surprised Pierre was that every window-shutter of the mansion was closed, every chink stopped up so that daylight might not enter, and that every room flared with electric lamps, an illumination of supernatural intensity. The heat was already very great, the atmosphere heavy with a violent perfume of flowers and odore di femina. And to Pierre, who felt both blinded and stifled, it seemed as if he were entering one of those luxurious, unearthly Dens of the Flesh such as the pleasure-world of Paris conjures from dreamland. By rising on tiptoes, as the drawing-room entrance was wide open, he could distinguish the backs of the women who were already seated, rows of necks crowned with fair or dark hair. The Mauritanians were doubtless executing their first dance. He did not see them, but he could divine the lascivious passion of the dance from the quiver of all those women's necks, which swayed as beneath a great gust of wind. Then laughter arose and a tempest of bravos, quite a tumult of enjoyment.

"I can't put my hand on the Princess; you must wait a little," Massot returned to say. "I met Janzen and he promised to bring her to me. Don't you know Janzen?"

Then, in part because his profession willed it, and in part for pleasure's sake, he began to gossip. The Princess was a good friend of his. He had described her first soiree during the previous year, when she had made her debut at that mansion on her arrival in Paris. He knew the real truth about her so far as it could be known. Rich? yes, perhaps she was, for she spent enormous sums. Married she must have been, and to a real prince, too; no doubt she was still married to him, in spite of her story of widowhood. Indeed, it seemed certain that her husband, who was as handsome as an archangel, was travelling about with a vocalist. As for having a bee in her bonnet that was beyond discussion, as clear as noonday. Whilst showing much intelligence, she constantly and suddenly shifted. Incapable of any prolonged effort, she went from one thing that had awakened her curiosity to another, never attaching herself anywhere. After ardently busying herself with painting, she had lately become impassioned for chemistry, and was now letting poetry master her.

"And so you don't know Janzen," continued Massot. "It was he who threw her into chemistry, into the study of explosives especially, for, as you may imagine, the only interest in chemistry for her is its connection with Anarchism. She, I think, is really an Austrian, though one must always doubt anything she herself says. As for Janzen, he calls himself a Russian, but he's probably German. Oh! he's the most unobtrusive, enigmatical man in the world, without a home, perhaps without a name—a terrible fellow with an unknown past. I myself hold proofs which make me think that he took part in that frightful crime at Barcelona. At all events, for nearly a year now I've been meeting him in Paris, where the police no doubt are watching him. And nothing can rid me of the idea that he merely consented to become our lunatic Princess's lover in order to throw the detectives off the scent. He affects to live in the midst of fetes, and he has introduced to the house some extraordinary people, Anarchists of all nationalities and all colours—for instance, one Raphanel, that fat, jovial little man yonder, a Frenchman he is, and his companions would do well to mistrust him. Then there's a Bergaz, a Spaniard, I think, an obscure jobber at the Bourse, whose sensual, blobber-lipped mouth is so disquieting. And there are others and others, adventurers and bandits from the four corners of the earth!... Ah! the foreign colonies of our Parisian pleasure-world! There are a few spotless fine names, a few real great fortunes among them, but as for the rest, ah! what a herd!"

Rosemonde's own drawing-room was summed up in those words: resounding titles, real millionaires, then, down below, the most extravagant medley of international imposture and turpitude. And Pierre thought of that internationalism, that cosmopolitanism, that flight of foreigners which, ever denser and denser, swooped down upon Paris. Most certainly it came thither to enjoy it, as to a city of adventure and delight, and it helped to rot it a little more. Was it then a necessary thing, that decomposition of the great cities which have governed the world, that affluxion of every passion, every desire, every gratification, that accumulation of reeking soil from all parts of the world, there where, in beauty and intelligence, blooms the flower of civilisation?

However, Janzen appeared, a tall, thin fellow of about thirty, very fair with grey, pale, harsh eyes, and a pointed beard and flowing curly hair which elongated his livid, cloudy face. He spoke indifferent French in a low voice and without a gesture. And he declared that the Princess could not be found; he had looked for her everywhere. Possibly, if somebody had displeased her, she had shut herself up in her room and gone to bed, leaving her guests to amuse themselves in all freedom in whatever way they might choose.

"Why, but here she is!" suddenly said Massot.

Rosemonde was indeed there, in the vestibule, watching the door as if she expected somebody. Short, slight, and strange rather than pretty, with her delicate face, her sea-green eyes, her small quivering nose, her rather large and over-ruddy mouth, which was parted so that one could see her superb teeth, she that day wore a sky-blue gown spangled with silver; and she had silver bracelets on her arms and a silver circlet in her pale brown hair, which rained down in curls and frizzy, straggling locks as though waving in a perpetual breeze.

"Oh! whatever you desire, Monsieur l'Abbe," she said to Pierre as soon as she knew his business. "If they don't take your old man in at our asylum, send him to me, I'll take him, I will; I will sleep him somewhere here."

Still, she remained disturbed, and continually glanced towards the door. And on the priest asking if Baroness Duvillard had yet arrived, "Why no!" she cried, "and I am much surprised at it. She is to bring her son and daughter. Yesterday, Hyacinthe positively promised me that he would come."

There lay her new caprice. If her passion for chemistry was giving way to a budding taste for decadent, symbolical verse, it was because one evening, whilst discussing Occultism with Hyacinthe, she had discovered an extraordinary beauty in him: the astral beauty of Nero's wandering soul! At least, said she, the signs of it were certain.

And all at once she quitted Pierre: "Ah, at last!" she cried, feeling relieved and happy. Then she darted forward: Hyacinthe was coming in with his sister Camille.

On the very threshold, however, he had just met the friend on whose account he was there, young Lord George Eldrett, a pale and languid stripling with the hair of a girl; and he scarcely condescended to notice the tender greeting of Rosemonde, for he professed to regard woman as an impure and degrading creature. Distressed by such coldness, she followed the two young men, returning in their rear into the reeking, blinding furnace of the drawing-room.

Massot, however, had been obliging enough to stop Camille and bring her to Pierre, who at the first words they exchanged relapsed into despair. "What, mademoiselle, has not madame your mother accompanied you here?"

The girl, clad according to her wont in a dark gown, this time of peacock-blue, was nervous, with wicked eyes and sibilant voice. And as she ragefully drew up her little figure, her deformity, her left shoulder higher than the right one, became more apparent than ever. "No," she rejoined, "she was unable. She had something to try on at her dressmaker's. We stopped too long at the Exposition du Lis, and she requested us to set her down at Salmon's door on our way here."

It was Camille herself who had skilfully prolonged the visit to the art show, still hoping to prevent her mother from meeting Gerard. And her rage arose from the ease with which her mother had got rid of her, thanks to that falsehood of having something to try on.

"But," ingenuously said Pierre, "if I went at once to this person Salmon, I might perhaps be able to send up my card."

Camille gave a shrill laugh, so funny did the idea appear to her. Then she retorted: "Oh! who knows if you would still find her there? She had another pressing appointment, and is no doubt already keeping it!"

"Well, then, I will wait for her here. She will surely come to fetch you, will she not?"

"Fetch us? Oh no! since I tell you that she has other important affairs to attend to. The carriage will take us home alone, my brother and I."

Increasing bitterness was infecting the girl's pain-fraught irony. Did he not understand her then, that priest who asked such naive questions which were like dagger-thrusts in her heart? Yet he must know, since everybody knew the truth.

"Ah! how worried I am," Pierre resumed, so grieved indeed that tears almost came to his eyes. "It's still on account of that poor man about whom I have been busying myself since this morning. I have a line from your father, and Monsieur Gerard told me—" But at this point he paused in confusion, and amidst all his thoughtlessness of the world, absorbed as he was in the one passion of charity, he suddenly divined the truth. "Yes," he added mechanically, "I just now saw your father again with Monsieur de Quinsac."

"I know, I know," replied Camille, with the suffering yet scoffing air of a girl who is ignorant of nothing. "Well, Monsieur l'Abbe, if you have a line from papa for mamma, you must wait till mamma has finished her business. You might come to the house about six o'clock, but I doubt if you'll find her there, as she may well be detained."

While Camille thus spoke, her murderous eyes glistened, and each word she uttered, simple as it seemed, became instinct with ferocity, as if it were a knife, which she would have liked to plunge into her mother's breast. In all certainty she had never before hated her mother to such a point as this in her envy of her beauty and her happiness in being loved. And the irony which poured from the girl's virgin lips, before that simple priest, was like a flood of mire with which she sought to submerge her rival.

Just then, however, Rosemonde came back again, feverish and flurried as usual. And she led Camille away: "Ah, my dear, make haste. They are extraordinary, delightful, intoxicating!"

Janzen and little Massot also followed the Princess. All the men hastened from the adjoining rooms, scrambled and plunged into the salon at the news that the Mauritanians had again begun to dance. That time it must have been the frantic, lascivious gallop that Paris whispered about, for Pierre saw the rows of necks and heads, now fair, now dark, wave and quiver as beneath a violent wind. With every window-shutter closed, the conflagration of the electric lamps turned the place into a perfect brazier, reeking with human effluvia. And there came a spell of rapture, fresh laughter and bravos, all the delight of an overflowing orgy.

When Pierre again found himself on the footwalk, he remained for a moment bewildered, blinking, astonished to be in broad daylight once more. Half-past four would soon strike, but he had nearly two hours to wait before calling at the house in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy. What should he do? He paid his driver; preferring to descend the Champs Elysees on foot, since he had some time to lose. A walk, moreover, might calm the fever which was burning his hands, in the passion of charity which ever since the morning had been mastering him more and more, in proportion as he encountered fresh and fresh obstacles. He now had but one pressing desire, to complete his good work, since success henceforth seemed certain. And he tried to restrain his steps and walk leisurely down the magnificent avenue, which had now been dried by the bright sun, and was enlivened by a concourse of people, while overhead the sky was again blue, lightly blue, as in springtime.

Nearly two hours to lose while, yonder, the wretched Laveuve lay with life ebbing from him on his bed of rags, in his icy den. Sudden feelings of revolt, of well-nigh irresistible impatience ascended from Pierre's heart, making him quiver with desire to run off and at once find Baroness Duvillard so as to obtain from her the all-saving order. He felt sure that she was somewhere near, in one of those quiet neighbouring streets, and great was his perturbation, his grief-fraught anger at having to wait in this wise to save a human life until she should have attended to those affairs of hers, of which her daughter spoke with such murderous glances! He seemed to hear a formidable cracking, the family life of the bourgeoisie was collapsing: the father was at a hussy's house, the mother with a lover, the son and daughter knew everything; the former gliding to idiotic perversity, the latter enraged and dreaming of stealing her mother's lover to make a husband of him. And meantime the splendid equipages descended the triumphal avenue, and the crowd with its luxury flowed along the sidewalks, one and all joyous and superb, seemingly with no idea that somewhere at the far end there was a gaping abyss wherein everyone of them would fall and be annihilated!

When Pierre got as far as the Summer Circus he was much surprised at again seeing Salvat, the journeyman engineer, on one of the avenue seats. He must have sunk down there, overcome by weariness and hunger, after many a vain search. However, his jacket was still distended by something he carried in or under it, some bit of bread, no doubt, which he meant to take home with him. And leaning back, with his arms hanging listlessly, he was watching with dreamy eyes the play of some very little children, who, with the help of their wooden spades, were laboriously raising mounds of sand, and then destroying them by dint of kicks. As he looked at them his red eyelids moistened, and a very gentle smile appeared on his poor discoloured lips. This time Pierre, penetrated by disquietude, wished to approach and question him. But Salvat distrustfully rose and went off towards the Circus, where a concert was drawing to a close; and he prowled around the entrance of that festive edifice in which two thousand happy people were heaped up together listening to music.

V. FROM RELIGION TO ANARCHY

AS Pierre was reaching the Place de la Concorde he suddenly remembered the appointment which Abbe Rose had given him for five o'clock at the Madeleine, and which he was forgetting in the feverishness born of his repeated steps to save Laveuve. And at thought of it he hastened on, well pleased at having this appointment to occupy and keep him patient.

When he entered the church he was surprised to find it so dark. There were only a few candles burning, huge shadows were flooding the nave, and amidst the semi-obscurity a very loud, clear voice spoke on with a ceaseless streaming of words. All that one could at first distinguish of the numerous congregation was a pale, vague mass of heads, motionless with extreme attention. In the pulpit stood Monseigneur Martha, finishing his third address on the New Spirit. The two former ones had re-echoed far and wide, and so what is called "all Paris" was there—women of society, politicians, and writers, who were captivated by the speaker's artistic oratory, his warm, skilful language, and his broad, easy gestures, worthy of a great actor.

Pierre did not wish to disturb the solemn attention, the quivering silence above which the prelate's voice alone rang out. Accordingly he resolved to wait before seeking Abbe Rose, and remained standing near a pillar. A parting gleam of daylight fell obliquely on Monseigneur Martha, who looked tall and sturdy in his white surplice, and scarcely showed a grey hair, although he was more than fifty. He had handsome features: black, keen eyes, a commanding nose, a mouth and chin of the greatest firmness of contour. What more particularly struck one, however, what gained the heart of every listener, was the expression of extreme amiability and anxious sympathy which ever softened the imperious haughtiness of the prelate's face.

Pierre had formerly known him as Cure, or parish priest, of Ste. Clotilde. He was doubtless of Italian origin, but he had been born in Paris, and had quitted the seminary of St. Sulpice with the best possible record. Very intelligent and very ambitious, he had evinced an activity which even made his superiors anxious. Then, on being appointed Bishop of Persepolis, he had disappeared, gone to Rome, where he had spent five years engaged in work of which very little was known. However, since his return he had been astonishing Paris by his brilliant propaganda, busying himself with the most varied affairs, and becoming much appreciated and very powerful at the archiepiscopal residence. He devoted himself in particular, and with wonderful results, to the task of increasing the subscriptions for the completion of the basilica of the Sacred Heart. He recoiled from nothing, neither from journeys, nor lectures, nor collections, nor applications to Government, nor even endeavours among Israelites and Freemasons. And at last, again enlarging his sphere of action, he had undertaken to reconcile Science with Catholicism, and to bring all Christian France to the Republic, on all sides expounding the policy of Pope Leo XIII., in order that the Church might finally triumph.

However, in spite of the advances of this influential and amiable man, Pierre scarcely liked him. He only felt grateful to him for one thing, the appointment of good Abbe Rose as curate at St. Pierre de Montmartre, which appointment he had secured for him no doubt in order to prevent such a scandal as the punishment of an old priest for showing himself too charitable. On thus finding and hearing the prelate speak in that renowned pulpit of the Madeleine, still and ever pursuing his work of conquest, Pierre remembered how he had seen him at the Duvillards' during the previous spring, when, with his usual maestria, he had achieved his greatest triumph—the conversion of Eve to Catholicism. That church, too, had witnessed her baptism, a wonderfully pompous ceremony, a perfect gala offered to the public which figures in all the great events of Parisian life. Gerard had knelt down, moved to tears, whilst the Baron triumphed like a good-natured husband who was happy to find religion establishing perfect harmony in his household. It was related among the spectators that Eve's family, and particularly old Justus Steinberger, her father, was not in reality much displeased by the affair. The old man sneeringly remarked, indeed, that he knew his daughter well enough to wish her to belong to his worst enemy. In the banking business there is a class of security which one is pleased to see discounted by one's rivals. With the stubborn hope of triumph peculiar to his race, Justus, consoling himself for the failure of his first scheme, doubtless considered that Eve would prove a powerful dissolving agent in the Christian family which she had entered, and thus help to make all wealth and power fall into the hands of the Jews.

However, Pierre's vision faded. Monseigneur Martha's voice was rising with increase of volume, celebrating, amidst the quivering of the congregation, the benefits that would accrue from the New Spirit, which was at last about to pacify France and restore her to her due rank and power. Were there not certain signs of this resurrection on every hand? The New Spirit was the revival of the Ideal, the protest of the soul against degrading materialism, the triumph of spirituality over filthy literature; and it was also Science accepted, but set in its proper place, reconciled with Faith, since it no longer pretended to encroach on the latter's sacred domain; and it was further the Democracy welcomed in fatherly fashion, the Republic legitimated, recognised in her turn as Eldest Daughter of the Church. A breath of poetry passed by. The Church opened her heart to all her children, there would henceforth be but concord and delight if the masses, obedient to the New Spirit, would give themselves to the Master of love as they had given themselves to their kings, recognising that the Divinity was the one unique power, absolute sovereign of both body and soul.

Pierre was now listening attentively, wondering where it was that he had previously heard almost identical words. And suddenly he remembered; and could fancy that he was again at Rome, listening to the last words of Monsignor Nani, the Assessor of the Holy Office. Here, again, he found the dream of a democratic Pope, ceasing to support the compromised monarchies, and seeking to subdue the masses. Since Caesar was down, or nearly so, might not the Pope realise the ancient ambition of his forerunners and become both emperor and pontiff, the sovereign, universal divinity on earth? This, too, was the dream in which Pierre himself, with apostolic naivete, had indulged when writing his book, "New Rome": a dream from which the sight of the real Rome had so roughly roused him. At bottom it was merely a policy of hypocritical falsehood, the priestly policy which relies on time, and is ever tenacious, carrying on the work of conquest with extraordinary suppleness, resolved to profit by everything. And what an evolution it was, the Church of Rome making advances to Science, to the Democracy, to the Republican regimes, convinced that it would be able to devour them if only it were allowed the time! Ah! yes, the New Spirit was simply the Old Spirit of Domination, incessantly reviving and hungering to conquer and possess the world.

Pierre thought that he recognised among the congregation certain deputies whom he had seen at the Chamber. Wasn't that tall gentleman with the fair beard, who listened so devoutly, one of Monferrand's creatures? It was said that Monferrand, once a devourer of priests, was now smilingly coquetting with the clergy. Quite an underhand evolution was beginning in the sacristies, orders from Rome flitted hither and thither; it was a question of accepting the new form of government, and absorbing it by dint of invasion. France was still the Eldest Daughter of the Church, the only great nation which had sufficient health and strength to place the Pope in possession of his temporal power once more. So France must be won; it was well worth one's while to espouse her, even if she were Republican. In the eager struggle of ambition the bishop made use of the minister, who thought it to his interest to lean upon the bishop. But which of the two would end by devouring the other? And to what a role had religion sunk: an electoral weapon, an element in a parliamentary majority, a decisive, secret reason for obtaining or retaining a ministerial portfolio! Of divine charity, the basis of religion, there was no thought, and Pierre's heart filled with bitterness as he remembered the recent death of Cardinal Bergerot, the last of the great saints and pure minds of the French episcopacy, among which there now seemed to be merely a set of intriguers and fools.

However, the address was drawing to a close. In a glowing peroration, which evoked the basilica of the Sacred Heart dominating Paris with the saving symbol of the Cross from the sacred Mount of the Martyrs,* Monseigneur Martha showed that great city of Paris Christian once more and master of the world, thanks to the moral omnipotence conferred upon it by the divine breath of the New Spirit. Unable to applaud, the congregation gave utterance to a murmur of approving rapture, delighted as it was with this miraculous finish which reassured both pocket and conscience. Then Monseigneur Martha quitted the pulpit with a noble step, whilst a loud noise of chairs broke upon the dark peacefulness of the church, where the few lighted candles glittered like the first stars in the evening sky. A long stream of men, vague, whispering shadows, glided away. The women alone remained, praying on their knees.

* Montmartre.

Pierre, still in the same spot, was rising on tip-toes, looking for Abbe Rose, when a hand touched him. It was that of the old priest, who had seen him from a distance. "I was yonder near the pulpit," said he, "and I saw you plainly, my dear child. Only I preferred to wait so as to disturb nobody. What a beautiful address dear Monseigneur delivered!"

He seemed, indeed, much moved. But there was deep sadness about his kindly mouth and clear childlike eyes, whose smile as a rule illumined his good, round white face. "I was afraid you might go off without seeing me," he resumed, "for I have something to tell you. You know that poor old man to whom I sent you this morning and in whom I asked you to interest yourself? Well, on getting home I found a lady there, who sometimes brings me a little money for my poor. Then I thought to myself that the three francs I gave you were really too small a sum, and as the thought worried me like a kind of remorse, I couldn't resist the impulse, but went this afternoon to the Rue des Saules myself."

He lowered his voice from a feeling of respect, in order not to disturb the deep, sepulchral silence of the church. Covert shame, moreover, impeded his utterance, shame at having again relapsed into the sin of blind, imprudent charity, as his superiors reproachfully said. And, quivering, he concluded in a very low voice indeed: "And so, my child, picture my grief. I had five francs more to give the poor old man, and I found him dead."

Pierre suddenly shuddered. But he was unwilling to understand: "What, dead!" he cried. "That old man dead! Laveuve dead?"

"Yes, I found him dead—ah! amidst what frightful wretchedness, like an old animal that has laid itself down for the finish on a heap of rags in the depths of a hole. No neighbours had assisted him in his last moments; he had simply turned himself towards the wall. And ah! how bare and cold and deserted it was! And what a pang for a poor creature to go off like that without a word, a caress. Ah! my heart bounded within me and it is still bleeding!"

Pierre in his utter amazement at first made but a gesture of revolt against imbecile social cruelty. Had the bread left near the unfortunate wretch, and devoured too eagerly, perhaps, after long days of abstinence, been the cause of his death? Or was not this rather the fatal denouement of an ended life, worn away by labour and privation? However, what did the cause signify? Death had come and delivered the poor man. "It isn't he that I pity," Pierre muttered at last; "it is we—we who witness all that, we who are guilty of these abominations."

But good Abbe Rose was already becoming resigned, and would only think of forgiveness and hope. "No, no, my child, rebellion is evil. If we are all guilty we can only implore Providence to forget our faults. I had given you an appointment here hoping for good news; and it's I who come to tell you of that frightful thing. Let us be penitent and pray."

Then he knelt upon the flagstones near the pillar, in the rear of the praying women, who looked black and vague in the gloom. And he inclined his white head, and for a long time remained in a posture of humility.

But Pierre was unable to pray, so powerfully did revolt stir him. He did not even bend his knees, but remained erect and quivering. His heart seemed to have been crushed; not a tear came to his ardent eyes. So Laveuve had died yonder, stretched on his litter of rags, his hands clenched in his obstinate desire to cling to his life of torture, whilst he, Pierre, again glowing with the flame of charity, consumed by apostolic zeal, was scouring Paris to find him for the evening a clean bed on which he might be saved. Ah! the atrocious irony of it all! He must have been at the Duvillards' in the warm salon, all blue and silver, whilst the old man was expiring; and it was for a wretched corpse that he had then hastened to the Chamber of Deputies, to the Countess de Quinsac's, to that creature Silviane's, and to that creature Rosemonde's. And it was for that corpse, freed from life, escaped from misery as from prison, that he had worried people, broken in upon their egotism, disturbed the peace of some, threatened the pleasures of others! What was the use of hastening from the parliamentary den to the cold salon where the dust of the past was congealing; of going from the sphere of middle-class debauchery to that of cosmopolitan extravagance, since one always arrived too late, and saved people when they were already dead? How ridiculous to have allowed himself to be fired once more by that blaze of charity, that final conflagration, only the ashes of which he now felt within him? This time he thought he was dead himself; he was naught but an empty sepulchre.

And all the frightful void and chaos which he had felt that morning at the basilica of the Sacred Heart after his mass became yet deeper, henceforth unfathomable. If charity were illusory and useless the Gospel crumbled, the end of the Book was nigh. After centuries of stubborn efforts, Redemption through Christianity failed, and another means of salvation was needed by the world in presence of the exasperated thirst for justice which came from the duped and wretched nations. They would have no more of that deceptive paradise, the promise of which had so long served to prop up social iniquity; they demanded that the question of happiness should be decided upon this earth. But how? By means of what new religion, what combination between the sentiment of the Divine and the necessity for honouring life in its sovereignty and its fruitfulness? Therein lay the grievous, torturing problem, into the midst of which Pierre was sinking; he, a priest, severed by vows of chastity and superstition from the rest of mankind.

He had ceased to believe in the efficacy of alms; it was not sufficient that one should be charitable, henceforth one must be just. Given justice, indeed, horrid misery would disappear, and no such thing as charity would be needed. Most certainly there was no lack of compassionate hearts in that grievous city of Paris; charitable foundations sprouted forth there like green leaves at the first warmth of springtide. There were some for every age, every peril, every misfortune. Through the concern shown for mothers, children were succoured even before they were born; then came the infant and orphan asylums lavishly provided for all sorts of classes; and, afterwards, man was followed through his life, help was tendered on all sides, particularly as he grew old, by a multiplicity of asylums, almshouses, and refuges. And there were all the hands stretched out to the forsaken ones, the disinherited ones, even the criminals, all sorts of associations to protect the weak, societies for the prevention of crime, homes that offered hospitality to those who repented. Whether as regards the propagation of good deeds, the support of the young, the saving of life, the bestowal of pecuniary help, or the promotion of guilds, pages and pages would have been needed merely to particularise the extraordinary vegetation of charity that sprouted between the paving-stones of Paris with so fine a vigour, in which goodness of soul was mingled with social vanity. Still that could not matter, since charity redeemed and purified all. But how terrible the proposition that this charity was a useless mockery! What! after so many centuries of Christian charity not a sore had healed. Misery had only grown and spread, irritated even to rage. Incessantly aggravated, the evil was reaching the point when it would be impossible to tolerate it for another day, since social injustice was neither arrested nor even diminished thereby. And besides, if only one single old man died of cold and hunger, did not the social edifice, raised on the theory of charity, collapse? But one victim, and society was condemned, thought Pierre.

He now felt such bitterness of heart that he could remain no longer in that church where the shadows ever slowly fell, blurring the sanctuaries and the large pale images of Christ nailed upon the Cross. All was about to sink into darkness, and he could hear nothing beyond an expiring murmur of prayers, a plaint from the women who were praying on their knees, in the depths of the shrouding gloom.

At the same time he hardly liked to go off without saying a word to Abbe Rose, who in his entreaties born of simple faith left the happiness and peace of mankind to the good pleasure of the Invisible. However, fearing that he might disturb him, Pierre was making up his mind to retire, when the old priest of his own accord raised his head. "Ah, my child," said he, "how difficult it is to be good in a reasonable manner. Monseigneur Martha has scolded me again, and but for the forgiveness of God I should fear for my salvation."

For a moment Pierre paused under the porticus of the Madeleine, on the summit of the great flight of steps which, rising above the railings, dominates the Place. Before him was the Rue Royale dipping down to the expanse of the Place de la Concorde, where rose the obelisk and the pair of plashing fountains. And, farther yet, the paling colonnade of the Chamber of Deputies bounded the horizon. It was a vista of sovereign grandeur under that pale sky over which twilight was slowly stealing, and which seemed to broaden the thoroughfares, throw back the edifices, and lend them the quivering, soaring aspect of the palaces of dreamland. No other capital in the world could boast a scene of such aerial pomp, such grandiose magnificence, at that hour of vagueness, when falling night imparts to cities a dreamy semblance, the infinite of human immensity.

Motionless and hesitating in presence of the opening expanse, Pierre distressfully pondered as to whither he should go now that all which he had so passionately sought to achieve since the morning had suddenly crumbled away. Was he still bound for the Duvillard mansion in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy? He no longer knew. Then the exasperating remembrance, with its cruel irony, returned to him. Since Laveuve was dead, of what use was it for him to kill time and perambulate the pavements pending the arrival of six o'clock? The idea that he had a home, and that the most simple course would be to return to it, did not even occur to him. He felt as if there were something of importance left for him to do, though he could not possibly tell what it might be. It seemed to him to be everywhere and yet very far away, to be so vague and so difficult of accomplishment that he would certainly never be in time or have sufficient power to do it. However, with heavy feet and tumultuous brain he descended the steps and, yielding to some obstinate impulse, began to walk through the flower-market, a late winter market where the first azaleas were opening with a little shiver. Some women were purchasing Nice roses and violets; and Pierre looked at them as if he were interested in all that soft, delicate, perfumed luxury. But suddenly he felt a horror of it and went off, starting along the Boulevards.

He walked straight before him without knowing why or whither. The falling darkness surprised him as if it were an unexpected phenomenon. Raising his eyes to the sky he felt astonished at seeing its azure gently pale between the slender black streaks of the chimney funnels. And the huge golden letters by which names or trades were advertised on every balcony also seemed to him singular in the last gleams of the daylight. Never before had he paid attention to the motley tints seen on the house-fronts, the painted mirrors, the blinds, the coats of arms, the posters of violent hues, the magnificent shops, like drawing-rooms and boudoirs open to the full light. And then, both in the roadway and along the foot-pavements, between the blue, red or yellow columns and kiosks, what mighty traffic there was, what an extraordinary crowd! The vehicles rolled along in a thundering stream: on all sides billows of cabs were parted by the ponderous tacking of huge omnibuses, which suggested lofty, bright-hued battle-ships. And on either hand, and farther and farther, and even among the wheels, the flood of passengers rushed on incessantly, with the conquering haste of ants in a state of revolution. Whence came all those people, and whither were all those vehicles going? How stupefying and torturing it all was.

Pierre was still walking straight ahead, mechanically, carried on by his gloomy reverie. Night was coming, the first gas-burners were being lighted; it was the dusk of Paris, the hour when real darkness has not yet come, when the electric lights flame in the dying day. Lamps shone forth on all sides, the shop-fronts were being illumined. Soon, moreover, right along the Boulevards the vehicles would carry their vivid starry lights, like a milky way on the march betwixt the foot-pavements all glowing with lanterns and cordons and girandoles, a dazzling profusion of radiance akin to sunlight. And the shouts of the drivers and the jostling of the foot passengers re-echoed the parting haste of the Paris which is all business or passion, which is absorbed in the merciless struggle for love and for money. The hard day was over, and now the Paris of Pleasure was lighting up for its night of fete. The cafes, the wine shops, the restaurants, flared and displayed their bright metal bars, and their little white tables behind their clear and lofty windows, whilst near their doors, by way of temptation, were oysters and choice fruits. And the Paris which was thus awaking with the first flashes of the gas was already full of the gaiety of enjoyment, already yielding to an unbridled appetite for whatsoever may be purchased.

However, Pierre had a narrow escape from being knocked down. A flock of newspaper hawkers came out of a side street, and darted through the crowd shouting the titles of the evening journals. A fresh edition of the "Voix du Peuple" gave rise, in particular, to a deafening clamour, which rose above all the rumbling of wheels. At regular intervals hoarse voices raised and repeated the cry: "Ask for the 'Voix du Peuple'—the new scandal of the African Railway Lines, the repulse of the ministry, the thirty-two bribe-takers of the Chamber and the Senate!" And these announcements, set in huge type, could be read on the copies of the paper, which the hawkers flourished like banners. Accustomed as it was to such filth, saturated with infamy, the crowd continued on its way without paying much attention. Still a few men paused and bought the paper, while painted women, who had come down to the Boulevards in search of a dinner, trailed their skirts and waited for some chance lover, glancing interrogatively at the outside customers of the cafes. And meantime the dishonouring shout of the newspaper hawkers, that cry in which there was both smirch and buffet, seemed like the last knell of the day, ringing the nation's funeral at the outset of the night of pleasure which was beginning.

Then Pierre once more remembered his morning and that frightful house in the Rue des Saules, where so much want and suffering were heaped up. He again saw the yard filthy like a quagmire, the evil-smelling staircases, the sordid, bare, icy rooms, the families fighting for messes which even stray dogs would not have eaten; the mothers, with exhausted breasts, carrying screaming children to and fro; the old men who fell in corners like brute beasts, and died of hunger amidst filth. And then came his other hours with the magnificence or the quietude or the gaiety of the salons through which he had passed, the whole insolent display of financial Paris, and political Paris, and society Paris. And at last he came to the dusk, and to that Paris-Sodom and Paris-Gomorrah before him, which was lighting itself up for the night, for the abominations of that accomplice night which, like fine dust, was little by little submerging the expanse of roofs. And the hateful monstrosity of it all howled aloud under the pale sky where the first pure, twinkling stars were gleaming.

A great shudder came upon Pierre as he thought of all that mass of iniquity and suffering, of all that went on below amid want and crime, and all that went on above amid wealth and vice. The bourgeoisie, wielding power, would relinquish naught of the sovereignty which it had conquered, wholly stolen, while the people, the eternal dupe, silent so long, clenched its fists and growled, claiming its legitimate share. And it was that frightful injustice which filled the growing gloom with anger. From what dark-breasted cloud would the thunderbolt fall? For years he had been waiting for that thunderbolt which low rumbles announced on all points of the horizon. And if he had written a book full of candour and hope, if he had gone in all innocence to Rome, it was to avert that thunderbolt and its frightful consequences. But all hope of the kind was dead within him; he felt that the thunderbolt was inevitable, that nothing henceforth could stay the catastrophe. And never before had he felt it to be so near, amidst the happy impudence of some, and the exasperated distress of others. And it was gathering, and it would surely fall over that Paris, all lust and bravado, which, when evening came, thus stirred up its furnace.

Tired out and distracted, Pierre raised his eyes as he reached the Place de l'Opera. Where was he then? The heart of the great city seemed to beat on this spot, in that vast expanse where met so many thoroughfares, as if from every point the blood of distant districts flowed thither along triumphal avenues. Right away to the horizon stretched the great gaps of the Avenue de l'Opera, the Rue du Quatre-Septembre, and the Rue de la Paix, still showing clearly in a final glimpse of daylight, but already starred with swarming sparks. The torrent of the Boulevard traffic poured across the Place, where clashed, too, all that from the neighbouring streets, with a constant turning and eddying which made the spot the most dangerous of whirlpools. In vain did the police seek to impose some little prudence, the stream of pedestrians still overflowed, wheels became entangled and horses reared amidst all the uproar of the human tide, which was as loud, as incessant, as the tempest voice of an ocean. Then there was the detached mass of the opera-house, slowly steeped in gloom, and rising huge and mysterious like a symbol, its lyre-bearing figure of Apollo, right aloft, showing a last reflection of daylight amidst the livid sky. And all the windows of the house-fronts began to shine, gaiety sprang from those thousands of lamps which coruscated one by one, a universal longing for ease and free gratification of each desire spread with the increasing darkness; whilst, at long intervals, the large globes of the electric lights shone as brightly as the moons of the city's cloudless nights.

But why was he, Pierre, there, he asked himself, irritated and wondering. Since Laveuve was dead he had but to go home, bury himself in his nook, and close up door and windows, like one who was henceforth useless, who had neither belief nor hope, and awaited naught save annihilation. It was a long journey from the Place de l'Opera to his little house at Neuilly. Still, however great his weariness, he would not take a cab, but retraced his steps, turning towards the Madeleine again, and plunging into the scramble of the pavements, amidst the deafening uproar from the roadway, with a bitter desire to aggravate his wound and saturate himself with revolt and anger. Was it not yonder at the corner of that street, at the end of that Boulevard, that he would find the expected abyss into which that rotten world, whose old society he could hear rending at each step, must soon assuredly topple?

However, when Pierre wished to cross the Rue Scribe a block in the traffic made him halt. In front of a luxurious cafe two tall, shabbily-clad and very dirty fellows were alternately offering the "Voix du Peuple" with its account of the scandals and the bribe-takers of the Chamber and the Senate, in voices so suggestive of cracked brass that passers-by clustered around them. And here, in a hesitating, wandering man, who after listening drew near to the large cafe and peered through its windows, Pierre was once again amazed to recognise Salvat. This time the meeting struck him forcibly, filled him with suspicion to such a point that he also stopped and resolved to watch the journeyman engineer. He did not expect that one of such wretched aspect, with what seemed to be a hunk of bread distending his old ragged jacket, would enter and seat himself at one of the cafe's little tables amidst the warm gaiety of the lamps. However, he waited for a moment, and then saw him wander away with slow and broken steps as if the cafe, which was nearly empty, did not suit him. What could he have been seeking, whither had he been going, since the morning, ever on a wild, solitary chase through the Paris of wealth and enjoyment while hunger dogged his steps? It was only with difficulty that he now dragged himself along, his will and energy seemed to be exhausted. As if quite overcome, he drew near to a kiosk, and for a moment leant against it. Then, however, he drew himself up again, and walked on further, still as it were in search of something.

And now came an incident which brought Pierre's emotion to a climax. A tall sturdy man on turning out of the Rue Caumartin caught sight of Salvat, and approached him. And just as the new comer without false pride was shaking the workman's hand, Pierre recognised him as his brother Guillaume. Yes, it was indeed he, with his thick bushy hair already white like snow, though he was but seven and forty. However, his heavy moustaches had remained quite dark without one silver thread, thus lending an expression of vigorous life to his full face with its lofty towering brow. It was from his father that he had inherited that brow of impregnable logic and reason, similar to that which Pierre himself possessed. But the lower part of the elder brother's countenance was fuller than that of his junior; his nose was larger, his chin was square, and his mouth broad and firm of contour. A pale scar, the mark of an old wound, streaked his left temple. And his physiognomy, though it might at first seem very grave, rough, and unexpansive, beamed with masculine kindliness whenever a smile revealed his teeth, which had remained extremely white.

While looking at his brother, Pierre remembered what Madame Theodore had told him that morning. Guillaume, touched by Salvat's dire want, had arranged to give him a few days' employment. And this explained the air of interest with which he now seemed to be questioning him, while the engineer, whom the meeting disturbed, stamped about as if eager to resume his mournful ramble. For a moment Guillaume appeared to notice the other's perturbation, by the embarrassed answers which he obtained from him. Still, they at last parted as if each were going his way. Then, however, almost immediately, Guillaume turned round again and watched the other, as with harassed stubborn mien he went off through the crowd. And the thoughts which had come to Guillaume must have been very serious and very pressing, for he all at once began to retrace his steps and follow the workman from a distance, as if to ascertain for certain what direction he would take.

Pierre had watched the scene with growing disquietude. His nervous apprehension of some great unknown calamity, the suspicions born of his frequent and inexplicable meetings with Salvat, his surprise at now seeing his brother mingled with the affair, all helped to fill him with a pressing desire to know, witness, and perhaps prevent. So he did not hesitate, but began to follow the others in a prudent way.

Fresh perturbation came upon him when first Salvat and then Guillaume suddenly turned into the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy. What destiny was thus bringing him back to that street whither a little time previously he had wished to return in feverish haste, and whence only the death of Laveuve had kept him? And his consternation increased yet further when, after losing sight of Salvat for a moment, he saw him standing in front of the Duvillard mansion, on the same spot where he had fancied he recognised him that morning. As it happened the carriage entrance of the mansion was wide open. Some repairs had been made to the paving of the porch, and although the workmen had now gone off, the doorway remained gaping, full of the falling night. The narrow street, running from the glittering Boulevard, was steeped in bluish gloom, starred at long intervals by a few gas-lamps. Some women went by, compelling Salvat to step off the foot-pavement. But he returned to it again, lighted the stump of a cigar, some remnant which he had found under a table outside a cafe, and then resumed his watch, patient and motionless, in front of the mansion.

Disturbed by his dim conjectures, Pierre gradually grew frightened, and asked himself if he ought not to approach that man. The chief thing that detained him was the presence of his brother, whom he had seen disappear into a neighbouring doorway, whence he also was observing the engineer, ready to intervene. And so Pierre contented himself with not losing sight of Salvat, who was still waiting and watching, merely taking his eyes from the mansion in order to glance towards the Boulevard as though he expected someone or something which would come from that direction. And at last, indeed, the Duvillards' landau appeared, with coachman and footman in livery of green and gold—a closed landau to which a pair of tall horses of superb build were harnessed in stylish fashion.

Contrary to custom, however, the carriage, which at that hour usually brought the father and mother home, was only occupied that evening by the son and daughter, Hyacinthe and Camille. Returning from the Princess de Harn's matinee, they were chatting freely, with that calm immodesty by which they sought to astonish one another. Hyacinthe, influenced by his perverted ideas, was attacking women, whilst Camille openly counselled him to respond to the Princess's advances. However, she was visibly irritated and feverish that evening, and, suddenly changing the subject, she began to speak of their mother and Gerard de Quinsac.

"But what can it matter to you?" quietly retorted Hyacinthe; and, seeing that she almost bounded from the seat at this remark, he continued: "Are you still in love with him, then? Do you still want to marry him?"

"Yes, I do, and I will!" she cried with all the jealous rage of an uncomely girl, who suffered so acutely at seeing herself spurned whilst her yet beautiful mother stole from her the man she wanted.

"You will, you will!" resumed Hyacinthe, well pleased to have an opportunity of teasing his sister, whom he somewhat feared. "But you won't unless he is willing—And he doesn't care for you."

"He does!" retorted Camille in a fury. "He's kind and pleasant with me, and that's enough."

Her brother felt afraid as he noticed the blackness of her glance, and the clenching of her weak little hands, whose fingers bent like claws. And after a pause he asked: "And papa, what does he say about it?"

"Oh, papa! All that he cares about is the other one."

Then Hyacinthe began to laugh.

But the landau, with its tall horses trotting on sonorously, had turned into the street and was approaching the house, when a slim fair-haired girl of sixteen or seventeen, a modiste's errand girl with a large bandbox on her arm, hastily crossed the road in order to enter the arched doorway before the carriage. She was bringing a bonnet for the Baroness, and had come all along the Boulevard musing, with her soft blue eyes, her pinky nose, and her mouth which ever laughed in the most adorable little face that one could see. And it was at this same moment that Salvat, after another glance at the landau, sprang forward and entered the doorway. An instant afterwards he reappeared, flung his lighted cigar stump into the gutter; and without undue haste went off, slinking into the depths of the vague gloom of the street.

And then what happened? Pierre, later on, remembered that a dray of the Western Railway Company in coming up stopped and delayed the landau for a moment, whilst the young errand girl entered the doorway. And with a heart-pang beyond description he saw his brother Guillaume in his turn spring forward and rush into the mansion as though impelled to do so by some revelation, some sudden certainty. He, Pierre, though he understood nothing clearly, could divine the approach of some frightful horror. But when he would have run, when he would have shouted, he found himself as if nailed to the pavement, and felt his throat clutched as by a hand of lead. Then suddenly came a thunderous roar, a formidable explosion, as if the earth was opening, and the lightning-struck mansion was being annihilated. Every window-pane of the neighbouring houses was shivered, the glass raining down with the loud clatter of hail. For a moment a hellish flame fired the street, and the dust and the smoke were such that the few passers-by were blinded and howled with affright, aghast at toppling, as they thought, into that fiery furnace.

And that dazzling flare brought Pierre enlightenment. He once more saw the bomb distending the tool-bag, which lack of work had emptied and rendered useless. He once more saw it under the ragged jacket, a protuberance caused, he had fancied, by some hunk of bread, picked up in a corner and treasured that it might be carried home to wife and child. After wandering and threatening all happy Paris, it was there that it had flared, there that it had burst with a thunder-clap, there on the threshold of the sovereign bourgeoisie to whom all wealth belonged. He, however, at that moment thought only of his brother Guillaume, and flung himself into that porch where a volcanic crater seemed to have opened. And at first he distinguished nothing, the acrid smoke streamed over all. Then he perceived the walls split, the upper floor rent open, the paving broken up, strewn with fragments. Outside, the landau which had been on the point of entering, had escaped all injury; neither of the horses had been touched, nor was there even a scratch on any panel of the vehicle. But the young girl, the pretty, slim, fair-haired errand girl, lay there on her back, her stomach ripped open, whilst her delicate face remained intact, her eyes clear, her smile full of astonishment, so swiftly and lightning-like had come the catastrophe. And near her, from the fallen bandbox, whose lid had merely come unfastened, had rolled the bonnet, a very fragile pink bonnet, which still looked charming in its flowery freshness.

By a prodigy Guillaume was alive and already on his legs again. His left hand alone streamed with blood, a projectile seemed to have broken his wrist. His moustaches moreover had been burnt, and the explosion by throwing him to the ground had so shaken and bruised him that he shivered from head to feet as with intense cold. Nevertheless, he recognised his brother without even feeling astonished to see him there, as indeed often happens after great disasters, when the unexplained becomes providential. That brother, of whom he had so long lost sight, was there, naturally enough, because it was necessary that he should be there. And Guillaume, amidst the wild quivers by which he was shaken, at once cried to him "Take me away! take me away! To your house at Neuilly, oh! take me away!"

Then, for sole explanation, and referring to Salvat, he stammered: "I suspected that he had stolen a cartridge from me; only one, most fortunately, for otherwise the whole district would have been blown to pieces. Ah! the wretched fellow! I wasn't in time to set my foot upon the match."

With perfect lucidity of mind, such as danger sometimes imparts, Pierre, neither speaking nor losing a moment, remembered that the mansion had a back entrance fronting the Rue Vignon. He had just realised in what serious peril his brother would be if he were found mixed up in that affair. And with all speed, when he had led him into the gloom of the Rue Vignon, he tied his handkerchief round his wrist, which he bade him press to his chest, under his coat, as that would conceal it.

But Guillaume, still shivering and haunted by the horror he had witnessed, repeated: "Take me away—to your place at Neuilly—not to my home."

"Of course, of course, be easy. Come, wait here a second, I will stop a cab."

In his eagerness to procure a conveyance, Pierre had brought his brother down to the Boulevard again. But the terrible thunderclap of the explosion had upset the whole neighbourhood, horses were still rearing, and people were running demented, hither and thither. And numerous policemen had hastened up, and a rushing crowd was already blocking the lower part of the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, which was now as black as a pit, every light in it having been extinguished; whilst on the Boulevard a hawker of the "Voix du Peuple" still stubbornly vociferated: "The new scandal of the African Railway Lines! The thirty-two bribe-takers of the Chamber and the Senate! The approaching fall of the ministry!"

Pierre was at last managing to stop a cab when he heard a person who ran by say to another, "The ministry? Ah, well! that bomb will mend it right enough!"

Then the brothers seated themselves in the cab, which carried them away. And now, over the whole of rumbling Paris black night had gathered, an unforgiving night, in which the stars foundered amidst the mist of crime and anger that had risen from the house-roofs. The great cry of justice swept by amidst the same terrifying flapping of wings which Sodom and Gomorrah once heard bearing down upon them from all the black clouds of the horizon.

BOOK II.

I. REVOLUTIONISTS

IN that out-of-the-way street at Neuilly, along which nobody passed after dusk, Pierre's little house was now steeped in deep slumber under the black sky; each of its shutters closed, and not a ray of light stealing forth from within. And one could divine, too, the profound quietude of the little garden in the rear, a garden empty and lifeless, benumbed by the winter cold.

Pierre had several times feared that his brother would faint away in the cab in which they were journeying. Leaning back, and often sinking down, Guillaume spoke not a word. And terrible was the silence between them—a silence fraught with all the questions and answers which they felt it would be useless and painful to exchange at such a time. However, the priest was anxious about the wound, and wondered to what surgeon he might apply, desirous as he was of admitting only a sure, staunch man into the secret, for he had noticed with how keen a desire to disappear his brother had sought to hide himself.

Until they reached the Arc de Triomphe the silence remained unbroken. It was only there that Guillaume seemed to emerge from the prostration of his reverie. "Mind, Pierre," said he, "no doctor. We will attend to this together."

Pierre was on the point of protesting, but he realised that it would be useless to discuss the subject at such a moment, and so he merely waved his hand to signify that he should act in spite of the prohibition were it necessary. In point of fact, his anxiety had increased, and, when the cab at last drew up before the house, it was with real relief that he saw his brother alight without evincing any marked feebleness. He himself quickly paid the driver, well-pleased, too, at finding that nobody, not even a neighbour, was about. And having opened the door with his latch key, he helped the injured man to ascend the steps.

A little night lamp glimmered faintly in the vestibule. On hearing the door open, Pierre's servant, Sophie, had at once emerged from the kitchen. A short, thin, dark woman of sixty, she had formed part of the household for more than thirty years, having served the mother before serving the son. She knew Guillaume, having seen him when he was a young man, and doubtless she now recognised him, although well-nigh ten years had gone by since he had last crossed that threshold. Instead of evincing any surprise, she seemed to consider his extraordinary return quite natural, and remained as silent and discreet as usual. She led, indeed, the life of a recluse, never speaking unless her work absolutely required it. And thus she now contented herself with saying: "Monsieur l'Abbe, Monsieur Bertheroy is in the study, and has been waiting there for a quarter of an hour."

At this Guillaume intervened, as if the news revived him: "Does Bertheroy still come here, then? I'll see him willingly. His is one of the best, the broadest, minds of these days. He has still remained my master."

A former friend of their father,—the illustrious chemist, Michel Froment,—Bertheroy had now, in his turn, become one of the loftiest glories of France, one to whom chemistry owed much of the extraordinary progress that has made it the mother-science, by which the very face of the earth is being changed. A member of the Institute, laden with offices and honours, he had retained much affection for Pierre, and occasionally visited him in this wise before dinner, by way of relaxation, he would say.

"You showed him into the study? All right, then, we will go there," said the Abbe to the servant. "Light a lamp and take it into my room, and get my bed ready so that my brother may go to bed at once."

While Sophie, without a word or sign of surprise, was obeying these instructions, the brothers went into their father's former laboratory, of which the priest had now made a spacious study. And it was with a cry of joyous astonishment that the savant greeted them on seeing them enter the room side by side, the one supporting the other. "What, together!" he exclaimed. "Ah! my dear children, you could not have caused me greater pleasure! I who have so often deplored your painful misunderstanding."

Bertheroy was a tall and lean septuagenarian, with angular features. His yellow skin clung like parchment to the projecting bones of his cheeks and jaw. Moreover, there was nothing imposing about him; he looked like some old shop-keeping herbalist. At the same time he had a fine, broad, smooth brow, and his eyes still glittered brightly beneath his tangled hair.

"What, have you injured yourself, Guillaume?" he continued, as soon as he saw the bandaged hand.

Pierre remained silent, so as to let his brother tell the story as he chose. Guillaume had realised that he must confess the truth, but in simple fashion, without detailing the circumstances. "Yes, in an explosion," he answered, "and I really think that I have my wrist broken."

At this, Bertheroy, whose glance was fixed upon him, noticed that his moustaches were burnt, and that there was an expression of bewildered stupor, such as follows a catastrophe, in his eyes. Forthwith the savant became grave and circumspect; and, without seeking to compel confidence by any questions, he simply said: "Indeed! an explosion! Will you let me see the injury? You know that before letting chemistry ensnare me I studied medicine, and am still somewhat of a surgeon."

On hearing these words Pierre could not restrain a heart-cry: "Yes, yes, master! Look at the injury—I was very anxious, and to find you here is unhoped-for good fortune!"

The savant glanced at him, and divined that the hidden circumstances of the accident must be serious. And then, as Guillaume, smiling, though paling with weakness, consented to the suggestion, Bertheroy retorted that before anything else he must be put to bed. The servant just then returned to say the bed was ready, and so they all went into the adjoining room, where the injured man was soon undressed and helped between the sheets.

"Light me, Pierre," said Bertheroy, "take the lamp; and let Sophie give me a basin full of water and some cloths." Then, having gently washed the wound, he resumed: "The devil! The wrist isn't broken, but it's a nasty injury. I am afraid there must be a lesion of the bone. Some nails passed through the flesh, did they not?"

Receiving no reply, he relapsed into silence. But his surprise was increasing, and he closely examined the hand, which the flame of the explosion had scorched, and even sniffed the shirt cuff as if seeking to understand the affair better. He evidently recognised the effects of one of those new explosives which he himself had studied, almost created. In the present case, however, he must have been puzzled, for there were characteristic signs and traces the significance of which escaped him.

"And so," he at last made up his mind to ask, carried away by professional curiosity, "and so it was a laboratory explosion which put you in this nice condition? What devilish powder were you concocting then?"

Guillaume, ever since he had seen Bertheroy thus studying his injury, had, in spite of his sufferings, given marked signs of annoyance and agitation. And as if the real secret which he wished to keep lay precisely in the question now put to him, in that powder, the first experiment with which had thus injured him, he replied with an air of restrained ardour, and a straight frank glance: "Pray do not question me, master. I cannot answer you. You have, I know, sufficient nobility of nature to nurse me and care for me without exacting a confession."

"Oh! certainly, my friend," exclaimed Bertheroy; "keep your secret. Your discovery belongs to you if you have made one; and I know that you are capable of putting it to the most generous use. Besides, you must be aware that I have too great a passion for truth to judge the actions of others, whatever their nature, without knowing every circumstance and motive."

So saying, he waved his hand as if to indicate how broadly tolerant and free from error and superstition was that lofty sovereign mind of his, which in spite of all the orders that bedizened him, in spite of all the academical titles that he bore as an official savant, made him a man of the boldest and most independent views, one whose only passion was truth, as he himself said.

He lacked the necessary appliances to do more than dress the wound, after making sure that no fragment of any projectile had remained in the flesh. Then he at last went off, promising to return at an early hour on the morrow; and, as the priest escorted him to the street door, he spoke some comforting words: if the bone had not been deeply injured all would be well.

On returning to the bedside, Pierre found his brother still sitting up and seeking fresh energy in his desire to write home and tranquillise his loved ones. So the priest, after providing pen and paper, again had to take up the lamp and light him. Guillaume fortunately retained full use of his right hand, and was thus able to pen a few lines to say that he would not be home that night. He addressed the note to Madame Leroi, the mother of his deceased mistress, who, since the latter's death, had remained with him and had reared his three sons. Pierre was aware also that the household at Montmartre included a young woman of five or six and twenty, the daughter of an old friend, to whom Guillaume had given shelter on her father's death, and whom he was soon to marry, in spite of the great difference in their ages. For the priest, however, all these were vague, disturbing things, condemnable features of disorderly life, and he had invariably pretended to be ignorant of them.

"So you wish this note to be taken to Montmartre at once?" he said to his brother.

"Yes, at once. It is scarcely more than seven o'clock now, and it will be there by eight. And you will choose a reliable man, won't you?"

"The best course will be for Sophie to take a cab. We need have no fear with her. She won't chatter. Wait a moment, and I will settle everything."

Sophie, on being summoned, at once understood what was wanted of her, and promised to say, in reply to any questions, that M. Guillaume had come to spend the night at his brother's, for reasons which she did not know. And without indulging in any reflections herself, she left the house, saying simply: "Monsieur l'Abbe's dinner is ready; he will only have to take the broth and the stew off the stove."

However, when Pierre this time returned to the bedside to sit down there, he found that Guillaume had fallen back with his head resting on both pillows. And he looked very weary and pale, and showed signs of fever. The lamp, standing on a corner of a side table, cast a soft light around, and so deep was the quietude that the big clock in the adjoining dining-room could be heard ticking. For a moment the silence continued around the two brothers, who, after so many years of separation, were at last re-united and alone together. Then the injured man brought his right hand to the edge of the sheet, and the priest grasped it, pressed it tenderly in his own. And the clasp was a long one, those two brotherly hands remaining locked, one in the other.

"My poor little Pierre," Guillaume faintly murmured, "you must forgive me for falling on you in this fashion. I've invaded the house and taken your bed, and I'm preventing you from dining."

"Don't talk, don't tire yourself any more," interrupted Pierre. "Is not this the right place for you when you are in trouble?"

A warmer pressure came from Guillaume's feverish hand, and tears gathered in his eyes. "Thanks, my little Pierre. I've found you again, and you are as gentle and loving as you always were. Ah! you cannot know how delightful it seems to me."

Then the priest's eyes also were dimmed by tears. Amidst the deep quietude, the great sense of comfort which had followed their violent emotion, the brothers found an infinite charm in being together once more in the home of their childhood.* It was there that both their father and mother had died—the father tragically, struck down by an explosion in his laboratory; the mother piously, like a very saint. It was there, too, in that same bed, that Guillaume had nursed Pierre, when, after their mother's death, the latter had nearly died; and it was there now that Pierre in his turn was nursing Guillaume. All helped to bow them down and fill them with emotion: the strange circumstances of their meeting, the frightful catastrophe which had caused them such a shock, the mysteriousness of the things which remained unexplained between them. And now that after so long a separation they were tragically brought together again, they both felt their memory awaking. The old house spoke to them of their childhood, of their parents dead and gone, of the far-away days when they had loved and suffered there. Beneath the window lay the garden, now icy cold, which once, under the sunbeams, had re-echoed with their play. On the left was the laboratory, the spacious room where their father had taught them to read. On the right, in the dining-room, they could picture their mother cutting bread and butter for them, and looking so gentle with her big, despairing eyes—those of a believer mated to an infidel. And the feeling that they were now alone in that home, and the pale, sleepy gleam of the lamp, and the deep silence of the garden and the house, and the very past itself, all filled them with the softest of emotion blended with the keenest bitterness.

* See M. Zola's "Lourdes," Day I., Chapter II.

They would have liked to talk and unbosom themselves. But what could they say to one another? Although their hands remained so tightly clasped, did not the most impassable of chasms separate them? In any case, they thought so. Guillaume was convinced that Pierre was a saint, a priest of the most robust faith, without a doubt, without aught in common with himself, whether in the sphere of ideas or in that of practical life. A hatchet-stroke had parted them, and each lived in a different world. And in the same way Pierre pictured Guillaume as one who had lost caste, whose conduct was most suspicious, who had never even married the mother of his three children, but was on the point of marrying that girl who was far too young for him, and who had come nobody knew whence. In him, moreover, were blended the passionate ideas of a savant and a revolutionist, ideas in which one found negation of everything, acceptance and possibly provocation of the worst forms of violence, with a glimpse of the vague monster of Anarchism underlying all. And so, on what basis could there be any understanding between them, since each retained his prejudices against the other, and saw him on the opposite side of the chasm, without possibility of any plank being thrown across it to enable them to unite? Thus, all alone in that room, their poor hearts bled with distracted brotherly love.

Pierre knew that, on a previous occasion, Guillaume had narrowly escaped being compromised in an Anarchist affair. He asked him no questions, but he could not help reflecting that he would not have hidden himself in this fashion had he not feared arrest for complicity. Complicity with Salvat? Was he really an accomplice? Pierre shuddered, for the only materials on which he could found a contrary opinion were, on one hand, the words that had escaped his brother after the crime, the cry he had raised accusing Salvat of having stolen a cartridge from him; and, on the other hand, his heroic rush into the doorway of the Duvillard mansion in order to extinguish the match. A great deal still remained obscure; but if a cartridge of that frightful explosive had been stolen from Guillaume the fact must be that he manufactured such cartridges and had others at home. Of course, even if he were not an accomplice, the injury to his wrist had made it needful for him to disappear. Given his bleeding hand, and the previous suspicions levelled against him, he would never have convinced anybody of his innocence. And yet, even allowing for these surmises, the affair remained wrapt in darkness: a crime on Guillaume's part seemed a possibility, and to Pierre it was all dreadful to think of.

Guillaume, by the trembling of his brother's moist, yielding hand, must in some degree have realised the prostration of his poor mind, already shattered by doubt and finished off by this calamity. Indeed, the sepulchre was empty now, the very ashes had been swept out of it.

"My poor little Pierre," the elder brother slowly said. "Forgive me if I do not tell you anything. I cannot do so. And besides, what would be the use of it? We should certainly not understand one another.... So let us keep from saying anything, and let us simply enjoy the delight of being together and loving one another in spite of all."

Pierre raised his eyes, and for a long time their glances lingered, one fixed on the other. "Ah!" stammered the priest, "how frightful it all is!"

Guillaume, however, had well understood the mute inquiry of Pierre's eyes. His own did not waver but replied boldly, beaming with purity and loftiness: "I can tell you nothing. Yet, all the same, let us love each other, my little Pierre."

And then Pierre for a moment felt that his brother was above all base anxiety, above the guilty fear of the man who trembles for himself. In lieu thereof he seemed to be carried away by the passion of some great design, the noble thought of concealing some sovereign idea, some secret which it was imperative for him to save. But, alas! this was only the fleeting vision of a vague hope; for all vanished, and again came the doubt, the suspicion, of a mind dealing with one that it knew nothing of.

And all at once a souvenir, a frightful spectacle, arose before Pierre's eyes and distracted him: "Did you see, brother," he stammered, "did you see that fair-haired girl lying under the archway, ripped open, with a smile of astonishment on her face?"

Guillaume in his turn quivered, and in a low and dolorous voice replied: "Yes, I saw her! Ah, poor little thing! Ah! the atrocious necessities, the atrocious errors, of justice!"

Then, amidst the frightful shudder that seemed to sweep by, Pierre, with his horror of all violence, succumbed, and let his face sink upon the counterpane at the edge of the bed. And he sobbed distractedly: a sudden attack of weakness, overflowing in tears, cast him there exhausted, with no more strength than a child. It was as if all his sufferings since the morning, the deep grief with which universal injustice and woe inspired him, were bursting forth in that flood of tears which nothing now could stay. And Guillaume, who, to calm his little brother, had set his hand upon his head, in the same way as he had often caressingly stroked his hair in childhood's days, likewise felt upset and remained silent, unable to find a word of consolation, resigned, as he was, to the eruption which in life is always possible, the cataclysm by which the slow evolution of nature is always liable to be precipitated. But how hard a fate for the wretched ones whom the lava sweeps away in millions! And then his tears also began to flow amidst the profound silence.

"Pierre," he gently exclaimed at last, "you must have some dinner. Go, go and have some. And screen the lamp; leave me by myself, and let me close my eyes. It will do me good."

Pierre had to content him. Still, he left the dining-room door open; and, weak for want of food, though he had not hitherto noticed it, he ate standing, with his ears on the alert, listening lest his brother should complain or call him. And the silence seemed to have become yet more complete, the little house sank, as it were, into annihilation, instinct with all the melancholy charm of the past.

At about half-past eight, when Sophie returned from her errand to Montmartre, Guillaume heard her step, light though it was. And he at once became restless and wanted to know what news she brought. It was Pierre, however, who enlightened him. "Don't be anxious. Sophie was received by an old lady who, after reading your note, merely answered, 'Very well.' She did not even ask Sophie a question, but remained quite composed without sign of curiosity."

Guillaume, realising that this fine serenity perplexed his brother, thereupon replied with similar calmness: "Oh! it was only necessary that grandmother should be warned. She knows well enough that if I don't return home it is because I can't."

However, from that moment it was impossible for the injured man to rest. Although the lamp was hidden away in a corner, he constantly opened his eyes, glanced round him, and seemed to listen, as if for sounds from the direction of Paris. And it at last became necessary for the priest to summon the servant and ask her if she had noticed anything strange on her way to or from Montmartre. She seemed surprised by the question, and answered that she had noticed nothing. Besides, the cab had followed the outer boulevards, which were almost deserted. A slight fog had again begun to fall, and the streets were steeped in icy dampness.

By the time it was nine o'clock Pierre realised that his brother would never be able to sleep if he were thus left without news. Amidst his growing feverishness the injured man experienced keen anxiety, a haunting desire to know if Salvat were arrested and had spoken out. He did not confess this; indeed he sought to convey the impression that he had no personal disquietude, which was doubtless true. But his great secret was stifling him; he shuddered at the thought that his lofty scheme, all his labour and all his hope, should be at the mercy of that unhappy man whom want had filled with delusions and who had sought to set justice upon earth by the aid of a bomb. And in vain did the priest try to make Guillaume understand that nothing certain could yet be known. He perceived that his impatience increased every minute, and at last resolved to make some effort to satisfy him.

But where could he go, of whom could he inquire? Guillaume, while talking and trying to guess with whom Salvat might have sought refuge, had mentioned Janzen, the Princess de Harn's mysterious lover; and for a moment he had even thought of sending to this man for information. But he reflected that if Janzen had heard of the explosion he was not at all the individual to wait for the police at home.

Meantime Pierre repeated: "I will willingly go to buy the evening papers for you—but there will certainly be nothing in them. Although I know almost everyone in Neuilly I can think of nobody who is likely to have any information, unless perhaps it were Bache—"

"You know Bache, the municipal councillor?" interrupted Guillaume.

"Yes, we have both had to busy ourselves with charitable work in the neighbourhood."

"Well, Bache is an old friend of mine, and I know no safer man. Pray go to him and bring him back with you."

A quarter of an hour later Pierre returned with Bache, who resided in a neighbouring street. And it was not only Bache whom he brought with him, for, much to his surprise, he had found Janzen at Bache's house. As Guillaume had suspected, Janzen, while dining at the Princess de Harn's, had heard of the crime, and had consequently refrained from returning to his little lodging in the Rue des Martyrs, where the police might well have set a trap for him. His connections were known, and he was aware that he was watched and was liable at any moment to arrest or expulsion as a foreign Anarchist. And so he had thought it prudent to solicit a few days' hospitality of Bache, a very upright and obliging man, to whom he entrusted himself without fear. He would never have remained with Rosemonde, that adorable lunatic who for a month past had been exhibiting him as her lover, and whose useless and dangerous extravagance of conduct he fully realised.

Guillaume was so delighted on seeing Bache and Janzen that he wished to sit up in bed again. But Pierre bade him remain quiet, rest his head on the pillows, and speak as little as possible. Then, while Janzen stood near, erect and silent, Bache took a chair and sat down by the bedside with many expressions of friendly interest. He was a stout man of sixty, with a broad, full face, a large white beard and long white hair. His little, gentle eyes had a dim, dreamy expression, while a pleasant, hopeful smile played round his thick lips. His father, a fervent St. Simonian, had brought him up in the doctrines of that belief. While retaining due respect for it, however, his personal inclinations towards orderliness and religion had led him to espouse the ideas of Fourier, in such wise that one found in him a succession and an abridgment, so to say, of two doctrines. Moreover, when he was about thirty, he had busied himself with spiritualism. Possessed of a comfortable little fortune, his only adventure in life had been his connection with the Paris Commune of 1871. How or why he had become a member of it he could now scarcely tell. Condemned to death by default, although he had sat among the Moderates, he had resided in Belgium until the amnesty; and since then Neuilly had elected him as its representative on the Paris Municipal Council, less by way of glorifying in him a victim of reaction than as a reward for his worthiness, for he was really esteemed by the whole district.

Guillaume, with his desire for tidings, was obliged to confide in his two visitors, tell them of the explosion and Salvat's flight, and how he himself had been wounded while seeking to extinguish the match. Janzen, with curly beard and hair, and a thin, fair face such as painters often attribute to the Christ, listened coldly, as was his wont, and at last said slowly in a gentle voice: "Ah! so it was Salvat! I thought it might be little Mathis—I'm surprised that it should be Salvat—for he hadn't made up his mind." Then, as Guillaume anxiously inquired if he thought that Salvat would speak out, he began to protest: "Oh! no; oh! no."

However, he corrected himself with a gleam of disdain in his clear, harsh eyes: "After all, there's no telling. Salvat is a man of sentiment."

Then Bache, who was quite upset by the news of the explosion, tried to think how his friend Guillaume, to whom he was much attached, might be extricated from any charge of complicity should he be denounced. And Guillaume, at sight of Janzen's contemptuous coldness, must have suffered keenly, for the other evidently believed him to be trembling, tortured by the one desire to save his own skin. But what could he say, how could he reveal the deep concern which rendered him so feverish without betraying the secret which he had hidden even from his brother?

However, at this moment Sophie came to tell her master that M. Theophile Morin had called with another gentleman. Much astonished by this visit at so late an hour, Pierre hastened into the next room to receive the new comers. He had become acquainted with Morin since his return from Rome, and had helped him to introduce a translation of an excellent scientific manual, prepared according to the official programmes, into the Italian schools.* A Franc-Comtois by birth, a compatriot of Proudhon, with whose poor family he had been intimate at Besancon, Morin, himself the son of a journeyman clockmaker, had grown up with Proudhonian ideas, full of affection for the poor and an instinctive hatred of property and wealth. Later on, having come to Paris as a school teacher, impassioned by study, he had given his whole mind to Auguste Comte. Beneath the fervent Positivist, however, one might yet find the old Proudhonian, the pauper who rebelled and detested want. Moreover, it was scientific Positivism that he clung to; in his hatred of all mysticism he would have naught to do with the fantastic religious leanings of Comte in his last years. And in Morin's brave, consistent, somewhat mournful life, there had been but one page of romance: the sudden feverish impulse which had carried him off to fight in Sicily by Garibaldi's side. Afterwards he had again become a petty professor in Paris, obscurely earning a dismal livelihood.

* See M. Zola's "Rome," Chapters IV. and XVI.

When Pierre returned to the bedroom he said to his brother in a tone of emotion: "Morin has brought me Barthes, who fancies himself in danger and asks my hospitality."

At this Guillaume forgot himself and became excited: "Nicholas Barthes, a hero with a soul worthy of antiquity. Oh! I know him; I admire and love him. You must set your door open wide for him."

Bache and Janzen, however, had glanced at one another smiling. And the latter, with his cold ironical air, slowly remarked: "Why does Monsieur Barthes hide himself? A great many people think he is dead; he is simply a ghost who no longer frightens anybody."

Four and seventy years of age as he now was, Barthes had spent nearly half a century in prison. He was the eternal prisoner, the hero of liberty whom each successive Government had carried from citadel to fortress. Since his youth he had been marching on amidst his dream of fraternity, fighting for an ideal Republic based on truth and justice, and each and every endeavour had led him to a dungeon; he had invariably finished his humanitarian reverie under bolts and bars. Carbonaro, Republican, evangelical sectarian, he had conspired at all times and in all places, incessantly struggling against the Power of the day, whatever it might be. And when the Republic at last had come, that Republic which had cost him so many years of gaol, it had, in its own turn, imprisoned him, adding fresh years of gloom to those which already had lacked sunlight. And thus he remained the martyr of freedom: freedom which he still desired in spite of everything; freedom, which, strive as he might, never came, never existed.

"But you are mistaken," replied Guillaume, wounded by Janzen's raillery. "There is again a thought of getting rid of Barthes, whose uncompromising rectitude disturbs our politicians; and he does well to take his precautions!"

Nicholas Barthes came in, a tall, slim, withered old man, with a nose like an eagle's beak, and eyes that still burned in their deep sockets, under white and bushy brows. His mouth, toothless but still refined, was lost to sight between his moustaches and snowy beard; and his hair, crowning him whitely like an aureola, fell in curls over his shoulders. Behind him with all modesty came Theophile Morin, with grey whiskers, grey, brush-like hair, spectacles, and yellow, weary mien—that of an old professor exhausted by years of teaching. Neither of them seemed astonished or awaited an explanation on finding that man in bed with an injured wrist. And there were no introductions: those who were acquainted merely smiled at one another.

Barthes, for his part, stooped and kissed Guillaume on both cheeks. "Ah!" said the latter, almost gaily, "it gives me courage to see you."

However, the new comers had brought a little information. The boulevards were in an agitated state, the news of the crime had spread from cafe to cafe, and everybody was anxious to see the late edition which one paper had published giving a very incorrect account of the affair, full of the most extraordinary details. Briefly, nothing positive was as yet known.

On seeing Guillaume turn pale Pierre compelled him to lie down again, and even talked of taking the visitors into the next room. But the injured man gently replied: "No, no, I promise you that I won't stir again, that I won't open my mouth. But stay there and chat together. I assure you that it will do me good to have you near me and hear you."

Then, under the sleepy gleams of the lamp, the others began to talk in undertones. Old Barthes, who considered that bomb to be both idiotic and abominable, spoke of it with the stupefaction of one who, after fighting like a hero through all the legendary struggles for liberty, found himself belated, out of his element, in a new era, which he could not understand. Did not the conquest of freedom suffice for everything? he added. Was there any other problem beyond that of founding the real Republic? Then, referring to Mege and his speech in the Chamber that afternoon, he bitterly arraigned Collectivism, which he declared to be one of the democratic forms of tyranny. Theophile Morin, for his part, also spoke against the Collectivist enrolling of the social forces, but he professed yet greater hatred of the odious violence of the Anarchists; for it was only by evolution that he expected progress, and he felt somewhat indifferent as to what political means might bring about the scientific society of to-morrow. And in like way Bache did not seem particularly fond of the Anarchists, though he was touched by the idyllic dream, the humanitarian hope, whose germs lay beneath their passion for destruction. And, like Barthes, he also flew into a passion with Mege, who since entering the Chamber had become, said he, a mere rhetorician and theorist, dreaming of dictatorship. Meantime Janzen, still erect, his face frigid and his lips curling ironically, listened to all three of them, and vented a few trenchant words to express his own Anarchist faith; the uselessness of drawing distinctions, and the necessity of destroying everything in order that everything might be rebuilt on fresh lines.

Pierre, who had remained near the bed, also listened with passionate attention. Amidst the downfall of his own beliefs, the utter void which he felt within him, here were these four men, who represented the cardinal points of this century's ideas, debating the very same terrible problem which brought him so much suffering, that of the new belief which the democracy of the coming century awaits. And, ah! since the days of the immediate ancestors, since the days of Voltaire and Diderot and Rousseau how incessantly had billows of ideas followed and jostled one another, the older ones giving birth to new ones, and all breaking and bounding in a tempest in which it was becoming so difficult to distinguish anything clearly! Whence came the wind, and whither was the ship of salvation going, for what port ought one to embark? Pierre had already thought that the balance-sheet of the century ought to be drawn up, and that, after accepting the legacies of Rousseau and the other precursors, he ought to study the ideas of St. Simon, Fourier and even Cabet; of Auguste Comte, Proudhon and Karl Marx as well, in order, at any rate, to form some idea of the distance that had been travelled, and of the cross-ways which one had now reached. And was not this an opportunity, since chance had gathered those men together in his house, living exponents of the conflicting doctrines which he wished to examine?

On turning round, however, he perceived that Guillaume was now very pale and had closed his eyes. Had even he, with his faith in science, felt the doubt which is born of contradictory theories, and the despair which comes when one sees the fight for truth resulting in growth of error?

"Are you in pain?" the priest anxiously inquired.

"Yes, a little. But I will try to sleep."

At this they all went off with silent handshakes. Nicholas Barthes alone remained in the house and slept in a room on the first floor which Sophie had got ready for him. Pierre, unwilling to quit his brother, dozed off upon a sofa. And the little house relapsed into its deep quietude, the silence of solitude and winter, through which passed the melancholy quiver of the souvenirs of childhood.

In the morning, as soon as it was seven o'clock, Pierre had to go for the newspapers. Guillaume had passed a bad night and intense fever had set in. Nevertheless, his brother was obliged to read him the articles on the explosion. There was an amazing medley of truths and inventions, of precise information lost amidst the most unexpected extravagance. Sagnier's paper, the "Voix du Peuple," distinguished itself by its sub-titles in huge print and a whole page of particulars jumbled together chance-wise. It had at once decided to postpone the famous list of the thirty-two deputies and senators compromised in the African Railways affair; and there was no end to the details it gave of the aspect of the entrance to the Duvillard mansion after the explosion the pavement broken up, the upper floor rent open, the huge doors torn away from their hinges. Then came the story of the Baron's son and daughter preserved as by a miracle, the landau escaping the slightest injury, while the banker and his wife, it was alleged, owed their preservation to the circumstance that they had lingered at the Madeleine after Monseigneur Martha's remarkable address there. An entire column was given to the one victim, the poor, pretty, fair-haired errand girl, whose identity did not seem to be clearly established, although a flock of reporters had rushed first to the modiste employing her, in the Avenue de l'Opera, and next to the upper part of the Faubourg St. Denis, where it was thought her grandmother resided. Then, in a gravely worded article in "Le Globe," evidently inspired by Fonsegue, an appeal was made to the Chamber's patriotism to avoid giving cause for any ministerial crisis in the painful circumstances through which the country was passing. Thus the ministry might last, and live in comparative quietude, for a few weeks longer.

Guillaume, however, was struck by one point only: the culprit was not known; Salvat, it appeared certain, was neither arrested nor even suspected. It seemed, indeed, as if the police were starting on a false scent—that of a well-dressed gentleman wearing gloves, whom a neighbour swore he had seen entering the mansion at the moment of the explosion. Thus Guillaume became a little calmer. But his brother read to him from another paper some particulars concerning the engine of destruction that had been employed. It was a preserved-meat can, and the fragments of it showed that it had been comparatively small. And Guillaume relapsed into anxiety on learning that people were much astonished at the violent ravages of such a sorry appliance, and that the presence of some new explosive of incalculable power was already suspected.

At eight o'clock Bertheroy put in an appearance. Although he was sixty-eight, he showed as much briskness and sprightliness as any young sawbones calling in a friendly way to perform a little operation. He had brought an instrument case, some linen bands and some lint. However, he became angry on finding the injured man nervous, flushed and hot with fever.

"Ah! I see that you haven't been reasonable, my dear child," said he. "You must have talked too much, and have bestirred and excited yourself." Then, having carefully probed the wound, he added, while dressing it: "The bone is injured, you know, and I won't answer for anything unless you behave better. Any complications would make amputation necessary."

Pierre shuddered, but Guillaume shrugged his shoulders, as if to say that he might just as well be amputated since all was crumbling around him. Bertheroy, who had sat down, lingering there for another moment, scrutinised both brothers with his keen eyes. He now knew of the explosion, and must have thought it over. "My dear child," he resumed in his brusque way, "I certainly don't think that you committed that abominable act of folly in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy. But I fancy that you were in the neighbourhood—no, no, don't answer me, don't defend yourself. I know nothing and desire to know nothing, not even the formula of that devilish powder of which your shirt cuff bore traces, and which has wrought such terrible havoc."

And then as the brothers remained surprised, turning cold with anxiety, in spite of his assurances, he added with a sweeping gesture: "Ah! my friends, I regard such an action as even more useless than criminal! I only feel contempt for the vain agitation of politics, whether they be revolutionary or conservative. Does not science suffice? Why hasten the times when one single step of science brings humanity nearer to the goal of truth and justice than do a hundred years of politics and social revolt? Why, it is science alone which sweeps away dogmas, casts down gods, and creates light and happiness. And I, Member of the Institute as I am, decorated and possessed of means, I am the only true Revolutionist."

Then he began to laugh and Guillaume realised all the good-natured irony of his laugh. While admiring him as a great savant, he had hitherto suffered at seeing him lead such a bourgeois life, accepting whatever appointments and honours were offered him, a Republican under the Republic, but quite ready to serve science under no matter what master. But now, from beneath this opportunist, this hieratical savant, this toiler who accepted wealth and glory from all hands, there appeared a quiet yet terrible evolutionist, who certainly expected that his own work would help to ravage and renew the world!

However, Bertheroy rose and took his leave: "I'll come back; behave sensibly, and love one another as well as you can."

When the brothers again found themselves alone, Pierre seated at Guillaume's bedside, their hands once more sought each other and met in a burning clasp instinct with all their anguish. How much threatening mystery and distress there was both around and within them! The grey wintry daylight came into the room, and they could see the black trees in the garden, while the house remained full of quivering silence, save that overhead a faint sound of footsteps was audible. They were the steps of Nicholas Barthes, the heroic lover of freedom, who, rising at daybreak, had, like a caged lion, resumed his wonted promenade, the incessant coming and going of one who had ever been a prisoner. And as the brothers ceased listening to him their eyes fell on a newspaper which had remained open on the bed, a newspaper soiled by a sketch in outline which pretended to portray the poor dead errand girl, lying, ripped open, beside the bandbox and the bonnet it had contained. It was so frightful, so atrociously hideous a scene, that two big tears again fell upon Pierre's cheeks, whilst Guillaume's blurred, despairing eyes gazed wistfully far away, seeking for the Future.

II. A HOME OF INDUSTRY

THE little house in which Guillaume had dwelt for so many years, a home of quietude and hard work, stood in the pale light of winter up yonder at Montmartre, peacefully awaiting his return. He reflected, however, after dejeuner that it might not be prudent for him to go back thither for some three weeks, and so he thought of sending Pierre to explain the position of affairs. "Listen, brother," he said. "You must render me this service. Go and tell them the truth—that I am here, slightly injured, and do not wish them to come to see me, for fear lest somebody should follow them and discover my retreat. After the note I wrote them last evening they would end by getting anxious if I did not send them some news." Then, yielding to the one worry which, since the previous night, had disturbed his clear, frank glance, he added: "Just feel in the right-hand pocket of my waistcoat; you will find a little key there. Good! that's it. Now you must give it to Madame Leroi, my mother-in-law, and tell her that if any misfortune should happen to me, she is to do what is understood between us. That will suffice, she will understand you."

At the first moment Pierre had hesitated; but he saw how even the slight effort of speaking exhausted his brother, so he silenced him, saying: "Don't talk, but put your mind at ease. I will go and reassure your people, since you wish that this commission should be undertaken by me."

Truth to tell, the errand was so distasteful to Pierre that he had at first thought of sending Sophie in his place. All his old prejudices were reviving; it was as if he were going to some ogre's den. How many times had he not heard his mother say "that creature!" in referring to the woman with whom her elder son cohabited. Never had she been willing to kiss Guillaume's boys; the whole connection had shocked her, and she was particularly indignant that Madame Leroi, the woman's mother, should have joined the household for the purpose of bringing up the little ones. Pierre retained so strong a recollection of all this that even nowadays, when he went to the basilica of the Sacred Heart and passed the little house on his way, he glanced at it distrustfully, and kept as far from it as he could, as if it were some abode of vice and error. Undoubtedly, for ten years now, the boys' mother had been dead, but did not another scandal-inspiring creature dwell there, that young orphan girl to whom his brother had given shelter, and whom he was going to marry, although a difference of twenty years lay between them? To Pierre all this was contrary to propriety, abnormal and revolting, and he pictured a home given over to social rebellion, where lack of principle led to every kind of disorder.

However, he was leaving the room to start upon his journey, when Guillaume called him back. "Tell Madame Leroi," said he, "that if I should die you will let her know of it, so that she may immediately do what is necessary."

"Yes, yes," answered Pierre. "But calm yourself, and don't move about. I'll say everything. And in my absence Sophie will stop here with you in case you should need her."

Having given full instructions to the servant, Pierre set out to take a tramcar, intending to alight from it on the Boulevard de Rochechouart, and then climb the height on foot. And on the road, lulled by the gliding motion of the heavy vehicle, he began to think of his brother's past life and connections, with which he was but vaguely, imperfectly, acquainted. It was only at a later date that details of everything came to his knowledge. In 1850 a young professor named Leroi, who had come from Paris to the college of Montauban with the most ardent republican ideas, had there married Agathe Dagnan, the youngest of the five girls of an old Protestant family from the Cevennes. Young Madame Leroi was enceinte when her husband, threatened with arrest for contributing some violent articles to a local newspaper, immediately after the "Coup d'Etat," found himself obliged to seek refuge at Geneva. It was there that the young couple's daughter, Marguerite, a very delicate child, was born in 1852. For seven years, that is until the Amnesty of 1859, the household struggled with poverty, the husband giving but a few ill-paid lessons, and the wife absorbed in the constant care which the child required. Then, after their return to Paris, their ill-luck became even greater. For a long time the ex-professor vainly sought regular employment; it was denied him on account of his opinions, and he had to run about giving lessons in private houses. When he was at last on the point of being received back into the University a supreme blow, an attack of paralysis, fell upon him. He lost the use of both legs. And then came utter misery, every kind of sordid drudgery, the writing of articles for dictionaries, the copying of manuscripts, and even the addressing of newspaper wrappers, on the fruits of which the household barely contrived to live, in a little lodging in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince.

It was there that Marguerite grew up. Leroi, embittered by injustice and suffering, predicted the advent of a Republic which would avenge the follies of the Empire, and a reign of science which would sweep away the deceptive and cruel divinity of religious dogmas. On the other hand, Agathe's religious faith had collapsed at Geneva, at sight of the narrow and imbecile practices of Calvinism, and all that she retained of it was the old Protestant leaven of rebellion. She had become at once the head and the arm of the house; she went for her husband's work, took it back when completed, and even did much of it herself, whilst, at the same time, performing her house duties, and rearing and educating her daughter. The latter, who attended no school, was indebted for all she learnt to her father and mother, on whose part there was never any question of religious instruction. Through contact with her husband, Madame Leroi had lost all belief, and her Protestant heredity inclining her to free inquiry and examination, she had arranged for herself a kind of peaceful atheism, based on paramount principles of human duty and justice, which she applied courageously, irrespective of all social conventionalities. The long iniquity of her husband's fate, the undeserved misfortunes which struck her through him and her daughter, ended by endowing her with wonderful fortitude and devotion, which made her, whether as a judge, a manager, or a consoler, a woman of incomparable energy and nobleness of character.

It was in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince that Guillaume became acquainted with the Leroi family, after the war of 1870. On the same floor as their little lodging he occupied a large room, where he devoted himself passionately to his studies. At the outset there was only an occasional bow, for Guillaume's neighbours were very proud and very grave, leading their life of poverty in fierce silence and retirement. Then intercourse began with the rendering of little services, such as when the young man procured the ex-professor a commission to write a few articles for a new encyclopaedia. But all at once came the catastrophe: Leroi died in his armchair one evening while his daughter was wheeling him from his table to his bed. The two distracted women had not even the money to bury him. The whole secret of their bitter want flowed forth with their tears, and they were obliged to accept the help of Guillaume, who, from that moment, became the necessary confidant and friend. And the thing which was bound to happen did happen, in the most simple and loving manner, permitted by the mother herself, who, full of contempt for a social system which allowed those of good hearts to die of hunger, refused to admit the necessity of any social tie. Thus there was no question of a regular marriage. One day Guillaume, who was twenty-three years old, found himself mated to Marguerite, who was twenty; both of them handsome, healthy, and strong, adoring one another, loving work, and full of hope in the future.

From that moment a new life began. Since his father's death, Guillaume, who had broken off all intercourse with his mother, had been receiving an allowance of two hundred francs a month. This just represented daily bread; however, he was already doubling the amount by his work as a chemist,—his analyses and researches, which tended to the employment of certain chemical products in industry. So he and Marguerite installed themselves on the very summit of Montmartre, in a little house, at a rental of eight hundred francs a year, the great convenience of the place being a strip of garden, where one might, later on, erect a wooden workshop. In all tranquillity Madame Leroi took up her abode with the young people, helping them, and sparing them the necessity of keeping a second servant. And at successive intervals of two years, her three grandchildren were born, three sturdy boys: first Thomas, then Francois, and then Antoine. And in the same way as she had devoted herself to her husband and daughter, and then to Guillaume, so did she now devote herself to the three children. She became "Mere-Grand"—an emphatic and affectionate way of expressing the term "grandmother"—for all who lived in the house, the older as well as the younger ones. She there personified sense, and wisdom, and courage; it was she who was ever on the watch, who directed everything, who was consulted about everything, and whose opinion was always followed. Indeed, she reigned there like an all-powerful queen-mother.

For fifteen years this life went on, a life of hard work and peaceful affection, while the strictest economy was observed in contenting every need of the modest little household. Then Guillaume lost his mother, took his share of the family inheritance, and was able to satisfy his old desire, which was to buy the house he lived in, and build a spacious workshop in the garden. He was even able to build it of bricks, and add an upper story to it. But the work was scarcely finished, and life seemed to be on the point of expanding and smiling on them all, when misfortune returned, and typhoid fever, with brutal force, carried off Marguerite, after a week's illness. She was then five and thirty, and her eldest boy, Thomas, was fourteen. Thus Guillaume, distracted by his loss, found himself a widower at thirty-eight. The thought of introducing any unknown woman into that retired home, where all hearts beat in tender unison, was so unbearable to him that he determined to take no other mate. His work absorbed him, and he would know how to quiet both his heart and his flesh. Mere-Grand, fortunately, was still there, erect and courageous; the household retained its queen, and in her the children found a manageress and teacher, schooled in adversity and heroism.

Two years passed; and then came an addition to the family. A young woman, Marie Couturier, the daughter of one of Guillaume's friends, suddenly entered it. Couturier had been an inventor, a madman with some measure of genius, and had spent a fairly large fortune in attempting all sorts of fantastic schemes. His wife, a very pious woman, had died of grief at it all; and although on the rare occasions when he saw his daughter, he showed great fondness for her and loaded her with presents, he had first placed her in a boarding college, and afterwards left her in the charge of a poor female relative. Remembering her only on his death-bed, he had begged Guillaume to give her an asylum, and find her a husband. The poor relation, who dealt in ladies' and babies' linen, had just become a bankrupt. So, at nineteen, the girl, Marie, found herself a penniless outcast, possessed of nothing save a good education, health and courage. Guillaume would never allow her to run about giving lessons. He took her, in quite a natural way, to help Mere-Grand, who was no longer so active as formerly. And the latter approved the arrangement, well pleased at the advent of youth and gaiety, which would somewhat brighten the household, whose life had been one of much gravity ever since Marguerite's death. Marie would simply be an elder sister; she was too old for the boys, who were still at college, to be disturbed by her presence. And she would work in that house where everybody worked. She would help the little community pending the time when she might meet and love some worthy fellow who would marry her.

Five more years elapsed without Marie consenting to quit that happy home. The sterling education she had received was lodged in a vigorous brain, which contented itself with the acquirement of knowledge. Yet she had remained very pure and healthy, even very naive, maidenly by reason of her natural rectitude. And she was also very much a woman, beautifying and amusing herself with a mere nothing, and ever showing gaiety and contentment. Moreover, she was in no wise of a dreamy nature, but very practical, always intent on some work or other, and only asking of life such things as life could give, without anxiety as to what might lie beyond it. She lovingly remembered her pious mother, who had prepared her for her first Communion in tears, imagining that she was opening heaven's portals to her. But since she had been an orphan she had of her own accord ceased all practice of religion, her good sense revolting and scorning the need of any moral police regulations to make her do her duty. Indeed, she considered such regulations dangerous and destructive of true health. Thus, like Mere-Grand, she had come to a sort of quiet and almost unconscious atheism, not after the fashion of one who reasons, but simply like the brave, healthy girl she was, one who had long endured poverty without suffering from it, and believed in nothing save the necessity of effort. She had been kept erect, indeed, by her conviction that happiness was to be found in the normal joys of life, lived courageously. And her happy equilibrium of mind had ever guided and saved her, in such wise that she willingly listened to her natural instinct, saying, with her pleasant laugh, that this was, after all, her best adviser. She rejected two offers of marriage, and on the second occasion, as Guillaume pressed her to accept, she grew astonished, and inquired if he had had enough of her in the house. She found herself very comfortable, and she rendered service there. So why should she leave and run the risk of being less happy elsewhere, particularly as she was not in love with anybody?

Then, by degrees, the idea of a marriage between Marie and Guillaume presented itself; and indeed what could have been more reasonable and advantageous for all? If Guillaume had not mated again it was for his sons' sake, because he feared that by introducing a stranger to the house he might impair its quietude and gaiety. But now there was a woman among them who already showed herself maternal towards the boys, and whose bright youth had ended by disturbing his own heart. He was still in his prime, and had always held that it was not good for man to live alone, although, personally, thanks to his ardour for work, he had hitherto escaped excessive suffering in his bereavement. However, there was the great difference of ages to be considered; and he would have bravely remained in the background and have sought a younger husband for Marie, if his three big sons and Mere-Grand herself had not conspired to effect his happiness by doing all they could to bring about a marriage which would strengthen every home tie and impart, as it were, a fresh springtide to the house. As for Marie, touched and grateful to Guillaume for the manner in which he had treated her for five years past, she immediately consented with an impulse of sincere affection, in which, she fancied, she could detect love. And at all events, could she act in a more sensible, reasonable way, base her life on more certain prospects of happiness? So the marriage had been resolved upon; and about a month previously it had been decided that it should take place during the ensuing spring, towards the end of April.

When Pierre, after alighting from the tramcar, began to climb the interminable flights of steps leading to the Rue St. Eleuthere, a feeling of uneasiness again came over him at the thought that he was about to enter that suspicious ogre's den where everything would certainly wound and irritate him. Given the letter which Sophie had carried thither on the previous night, announcing that the master would not return, how anxious and upset must all its inmates be! However, as Pierre ascended the final flight and nervously raised his head, the little house appeared to him right atop of the hill, looking very serene and quiet under the bright wintry sun, which had peered forth as if to bestow upon the modest dwelling an affectionate caress.

There was a door in the old garden wall alongside the Rue St. Eleuthere, almost in front of the broad thoroughfare conducting to the basilica of the Sacred Heart; but to reach the house itself one had to skirt the wall and climb to the Place du Tertre, where one found the facade and the entrance. Some children were playing on the Place, which, planted as it was with a few scrubby trees, and edged with humble shops,—a fruiterer's, a grocer's and a baker's,—looked like some square in a small provincial town. In a corner, on the left, Guillaume's dwelling, which had been whitewashed during the previous spring, showed its bright frontage and five lifeless windows, for all its life was on the other, the garden, side, which overlooked Paris and the far horizon.

Pierre mustered his courage and, pulling a brass knob which glittered like gold, rang the bell. There came a gay, distant jingle; but for a moment nobody appeared, and he was about to ring again, when the door was thrown wide open, revealing a passage which ran right through the house, beyond which appeared the ocean of Paris, the endless sea of house roofs bathed in sunlight. And against this spacious, airy background, stood a young woman of twenty-six, clad in a simple gown of black woolen stuff, half covered by a large blue apron. She had her sleeves rolled up above her elbows, and her arms and hands were still moist with water which she had but imperfectly wiped away.

A moment's surprise and embarrassment ensued. The young woman, who had hastened to the door with laughing mien, became grave and covertly hostile at sight of the visitor's cassock. The priest thereupon realised that he must give his name: "I am Abbe Pierre Froment."

At this the young woman's smile of welcome came back to her. "Oh! I beg your pardon, monsieur—I ought to have recognised you, for I saw you wish Guillaume good day one morning as you passed."

She said Guillaume; she, therefore, must be Marie. And Pierre looked at her in astonishment, finding her very different from what he had imagined. She was only of average height, but she was vigorously, admirably built, broad of hip and broad of shoulder, with the small firm bosom of an amazon. By her erect and easy step, instinct with all the adorable grace of woman in her prime, one could divine that she was strong, muscular and healthy. A brunette, but very white of skin, she had a heavy helm of superb black hair, which she fastened in a negligent way, without any show of coquetry. And under her dark locks, her pure, intelligent brow, her delicate nose and gay eyes appeared full of intense life; whilst the somewhat heavier character of her lower features, her fleshy lips and full chin, bespoke her quiet kindliness. She had surely come on earth as a promise of every form of tenderness, every form of devotion. In a word, she was a true mate for man.

However, with her heavy, straying hair and superb arms, so ingenuous in their nudity, she only gave Pierre an impression of superfluous health and extreme self-assurance. She displeased him and even made him feel somewhat anxious, as if she were a creature different from all others.

"It is my brother Guillaume who has sent me," he said.

At this her face again changed; she became grave and hastened to admit him to the passage. And when the door was closed she answered: "You have brought us news of him, then! I must apologise for receiving you in this fashion. The servants have just finished some washing, and I was making sure if the work had been well done. Pray excuse me, and come in here for a moment; it is perhaps best that I should be the first to know the news."

So saying, she led him past the kitchen to a little room which served as scullery and wash-house. A tub full of soapy water stood there, and some dripping linen hung over some wooden bars. "And so, Guillaume?" she asked.

Pierre then told the truth in simple fashion: that his brother's wrist had been injured; that he himself had witnessed the accident, and that his brother had then sought an asylum with him at Neuilly, where he wished to remain and get cured of his injury in peace and quietness, without even receiving a visit from his sons. While speaking in this fashion, the priest watched the effect of his words on Marie's face: first fright and pity, and then an effort to calm herself and judge things reasonably.

"His letter quite froze me last night," she ended by replying. "I felt sure that some misfortune had happened. But one must be brave and hide one's fear from others. His wrist injured, you say; it is not a serious injury, is it?"

"No; but it is necessary that every precaution should be taken with it."

She looked him well in the face with her big frank eyes, which dived into his own as if to reach the very depths of his being, though at the same time she plainly sought to restrain the score of questions which rose to her lips. "And that is all: he was injured in an accident," she resumed; "he didn't ask you to tell us anything further about it?"

"No, he simply desires that you will not be anxious."

Thereupon she insisted no further, but showed herself obedient and respectful of the decision which Guillaume had arrived at. It sufficed that he should have sent a messenger to reassure the household—she did not seek to learn any more. And even as she had returned to her work in spite of the secret anxiety in which the letter of the previous evening had left her, so now, with her air of quiet strength, she recovered an appearance of serenity, a quiet smile and clear brave glance.

"Guillaume only gave me one other commission," resumed Pierre, "that of handing a little key to Madame Leroi."

"Very good," Marie answered, "Mere-Grand is here; and, besides, the children must see you. I will take you to them."

Once more quite tranquil, she examined Pierre without managing to conceal her curiosity, which seemed of rather a kindly nature blended with an element of vague pity. Her fresh white arms had remained bare. In all candour she slowly drew down her sleeves; then took off the large blue apron, and showed herself with her rounded figure, at once robust and elegant, in her modest black gown. He meanwhile looked at her, and most certainly he did not find her to his liking. On seeing her so natural, healthy, and courageous, quite a feeling of revolt arose within him, though he knew not why.

"Will you please follow me, Monsieur l'Abbe?" she said. "We must cross the garden."

On the ground-floor of the house, across the passage, and facing the kitchen and the scullery, there were two other rooms, a library overlooking the Place du Tertre, and a dining-room whose windows opened into the garden. The four rooms on the first floor served as bedchambers for the father and the sons. As for the garden, originally but a small one, it had now been reduced to a kind of gravelled yard by the erection of the large workshop at one end of it. Of the former greenery, however, there still remained two huge plum-trees with old knotted trunks, as well as a big clump of lilac-bushes, which every spring were covered with bloom. And in front of the latter Marie had arranged a broad flower-bed, in which she amused herself with growing a few roses, some wallflowers and some mignonette.

With a wave of her hand as she went past, she called Pierre's attention to the black plum-trees and the lilacs and roses, which showed but a few greenish spots, for winter still held the little nook in sleep. "Tell Guillaume," she said, "that he must make haste to get well and be back for the first shoots."

Then, as Pierre glanced at her, she all at once flushed purple. Much to her distress, sudden and involuntary blushes would in this wise occasionally come upon her, even at the most innocent remarks. She found it ridiculous to feel such childish emotion when she had so brave a heart. But her pure maidenly blood had retained exquisite delicacy, such natural and instinctive modesty that she yielded to it perforce. And doubtless she had merely blushed because she feared that the priest might think she had referred to her marriage in speaking of the spring.

"Please go in, Monsieur l'Abbe. The children are there, all three." And forthwith she ushered him into the workshop.

It was a very spacious place, over sixteen feet high, with a brick flooring and bare walls painted an iron grey. A sheet of light, a stream of sunshine, spread to every corner through a huge window facing the south, where lay the immensity of Paris. The Venetian shutters often had to be lowered in the summer to attenuate the great heat. From morn till night the whole family lived here, closely and affectionately united in work. Each was installed as fancy listed, having a particular chosen place. One half of the building was occupied by the father's chemical laboratory, with its stove, experiment tables, shelves for apparatus, glass cases and cupboards for phials and jars. Near all this Thomas, the eldest son, had installed a little forge, an anvil, a vice bench, in fact everything necessary to a working mechanician, such as he had become since taking his bachelor's degree, from his desire to remain with his father and help him with certain researches and inventions. Then, at the other end, the younger brothers, Francois and Antoine, got on very well together on either side of a broad table which stood amidst a medley of portfolios, nests of drawers and revolving book-stands. Francois, laden with academical laurels, first on the pass list for the Ecole Normale, had entered that college where young men are trained for university professorships, and was there preparing for his Licentiate degree, while Antoine, who on reaching the third class at the Lycee Condorcet had taken a dislike to classical studies, now devoted himself to his calling as a wood-engraver. And, in the full light under the window, Mere-Grand and Marie likewise had their particular table, where needlework, embroidery, all sorts of chiffons and delicate things lay about near the somewhat rough jumble of retorts, tools and big books.

Marie, however, on the very threshold called out in her calm voice, to which she strove to impart a gay and cheering accent: "Children! children! here is Monsieur l'Abbe with news of father!"

Children, indeed! Yet what motherliness she already set in the word as she applied it to those big fellows whose elder sister she had long considered herself to be! At three and twenty Thomas was quite a colossus, already bearded and extremely like his father. But although he had a lofty brow and energetic features, he was somewhat slow both in mind and body. And he was also taciturn, almost unsociable, absorbed in filial devotion, delighted with the manual toil which made him a mere workman at his master's orders. Francois, two years younger than Thomas, and nearly as tall, showed a more refined face, though he had the same large brow and firm mouth, a perfect blending of health and strength, in which the man of intellect, the scientific Normalian, could only be detected by the brighter and more subtle sparkle of the eyes. The youngest of the brothers, Antoine, who for his eighteen years was almost as strong as his elders, and promised to become as tall, differed from them by his lighter hair and soft, blue, dreamy eyes, which he had inherited from his mother. It had been difficult, however, to distinguish one from the other when all three were schoolboys at the Lycee Condorcet; and even nowadays people made mistakes unless they saw them side by side, so as to detect the points of difference which were becoming more marked as age progressed.

On Pierre's arrival the brothers were so absorbed in their work that they did not even hear the door open. And again, as in the case of Marie, the priest was surprised by the discipline and firmness of mind, which amidst the keenest anxiety gave the young fellows strength to take up their daily task. Thomas, who stood at his vice-bench in a blouse, was carefully filing a little piece of copper with rough but skilful hands. Francois, leaning forward, was writing in a bold, firm fashion, whilst on the other side of the table, Antoine, with a slender graver between his fingers, finished a block for an illustrated newspaper.

However, Marie's clear voice made them raise their heads: "Children, father has sent you some news!"

Then all three with the same impulse hurriedly quitted their work and came forward. One could divine that directly there was any question of their father they were drawn together, blended one with the other, so that but one and the same heart beat in their three broad chests. However, a door at the far end of the workroom opened at that moment, and Mere-Grand, coming from the upper floor where she and Marie had their bedrooms, made her appearance. She had just absented herself to fetch a skein of wool; and she gazed fixedly at the priest, unable to understand the reason of his presence.

Marie had to explain matters. "Mere-Grand," said she, "this is Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, Guillaume's brother; he has come from him."

Pierre on his side was examining the old lady, astonished to find her so erect and full of life at seventy. Her former beauty had left a stately charm on her rather long face; youthful fire still lingered in her brown eyes; and very firm was the contour of her pale lips, which in parting showed that she had retained all her teeth. A few white hairs alone silvered her black tresses, which were arranged in old-time fashion. Her cheeks had but slightly withered, and her deep, symmetrical wrinkles gave her countenance an expression of much nobility, a sovereign air as of a queen-mother, which, tall and slight of stature as she was, and invariably gowned in black woollen stuff, she always retained, no matter how humble her occupation.

"So Guillaume sent you, monsieur," she said; "he is injured, is he not?"

Surprised by this proof of intuition, Pierre repeated his story. "Yes, his wrist is injured—but oh! it's not a case of immediate gravity."

On the part of the three sons, he had divined a sudden quiver, an impulse of their whole beings to rush to the help and defence of their father. And for their sakes he sought words of comfort: "He is with me at Neuilly. And with due care it is certain that no serious complications will arise. He sent me to tell you to be in no wise uneasy about him."

Mere-Grand for her part evinced no fears, but preserved great calmness, as if the priest's tidings contained nothing beyond what she had known already. If anything, she seemed rather relieved, freed from anxiety which she had confided to none. "If he is with you, monsieur," she answered, "he is evidently as comfortable as he can be, and sheltered from all risks. We were surprised, however, by his letter last night, as it did not explain why he was detained, and we should have ended by feeling frightened. But now everything is satisfactory."

Mere-Grand and the three sons, following Marie's example, asked no explanations. On a table near at hand Pierre noticed several morning newspapers lying open and displaying column after column of particulars about the crime. The sons had certainly read these papers, and had feared lest their father should be compromised in that frightful affair. How far did their knowledge of the latter go? They must be ignorant of the part played by Salvat. It was surely impossible for them to piece together all the unforeseen circumstances which had brought about their father's meeting with the workman, and then the crime. Mere-Grand, no doubt, was in certain respects better informed than the others. But they, the sons and Marie, neither knew nor sought to know anything. And thus what a wealth of respect and affection there was in their unshakable confidence in the father, in the tranquillity they displayed directly he sent them word that they were not to be anxious about him!

"Madame," Pierre resumed, "Guillaume told me to give you this little key, and to remind you to do what he charged you to do, if any misfortune should befall him."

She started, but so slightly that it was scarcely perceptible; and taking the key she answered as if some ordinary wish on the part of a sick person were alone in question. "Very well. Tell him that his wishes shall be carried out." Then she added, "But pray take a seat, monsieur."

Pierre, indeed, had remained standing. However, he now felt it necessary to accept a chair, desirous as he was of hiding the embarrassment which he still felt in this house, although he was en famille there. Marie, who could not live without occupation for her fingers, had just returned to some embroidery, some of the fine needlework which she stubbornly executed for a large establishment dealing in baby-linen and bridal trousseaux; for she wished at any rate to earn her own pocket-money, she often said with a laugh. Mere-Grand, too, from habit, which she followed even when visitors were present, had once more started on her perpetual stocking-mending; while Francois and Antoine had again seated themselves at their table; and Thomas alone remained on his legs, leaning against his bench. All the charm of industrious intimacy pervaded the spacious, sun-lit room.

"But we'll all go to see father to-morrow," Thomas suddenly exclaimed.

Before Pierre could answer Marie raised her head. "No, no," said she, "he does not wish any of us to go to him; for if we should be watched and followed we should betray the secret of his retreat. Isn't that so, Monsieur l'Abbe?"

"It would indeed be prudent of you to deprive yourselves of the pleasure of embracing him until he himself can come back here. It will be a matter of some two or three weeks," answered Pierre.

Mere-Grand at once expressed approval of this. "No doubt," said she. "Nothing could be more sensible."

So the three sons did not insist, but bravely accepted the secret anxiety in which they must for a time live, renouncing the visit which would have caused them so much delight, because their father bade them do so and because his safety depended perhaps on their obedience.

However, Thomas resumed: "Then, Monsieur l'Abbe, will you please tell him that as work will be interrupted here, I shall return to the factory during his absence. I shall be more at ease there for the researches on which we are engaged."

"And please tell him from me," put in Francois, "that he mustn't worry about my examination. Things are going very well. I feel almost certain of success."

Pierre promised that he would forget nothing. However, Marie raised her head, smiling and glancing at Antoine, who had remained silent with a faraway look in his eyes. "And you, little one," said she, "don't you send him any message?"

Emerging from a dream, the young fellow also began to smile. "Yes, yes, a message that you love him dearly, and that he's to make haste back for you to make him happy."

At this they all became merry, even Marie, who in lieu of embarrassment showed a tranquil gaiety born of confidence in the future. Between her and the young men there was naught but happy affection. And a grave smile appeared even on the pale lips of Mere-Grand, who likewise approved of the happiness which life seemed to be promising.

Pierre wished to stay a few minutes longer. They all began to chat, and his astonishment increased. He had gone from surprise to surprise in this house where he had expected to find that equivocal, disorderly life, that rebellion against social laws, which destroy morality. But instead of this he had found loving serenity, and such strong discipline that life there partook of the gravity, almost the austerity, of convent life, tempered by youth and gaiety. The vast room was redolent of industry and quietude, warm with bright sunshine. However, what most particularly struck him was the Spartan training, the bravery of mind and heart among those sons who allowed nothing to be seen of their personal feelings, and did not presume to judge their father, but remained content with his message, ready to await events, stoical and silent, while carrying on their daily tasks. Nothing could be more simple, more dignified, more lofty. And there was also the smiling heroism of Mere-Grand and Marie, those two women who slept over that laboratory where terrible preparations were manipulated, and where an explosion was always possible.

However, such courage, orderliness and dignity merely surprised Pierre, without touching him. He had no cause for complaint, he had received a polite greeting if not an affectionate one; but then he was as yet only a stranger there, a priest. In spite of everything, however, he remained hostile, feeling that he was in a sphere where none of his own torments could be shared or even divined. How did these folks manage to be so calm and happy amidst their religious unbelief, their sole faith in science, and in presence of that terrifying Paris which spread before them the boundless sea, the growling abomination of its injustice and its want? As this thought came to him he turned his head and gazed at the city through the huge window, whence it stretched away, ever present, ever living its giant life. And at that hour, under the oblique sun-rays of the winter afternoon, all Paris was speckled with luminous dust, as if some invisible sower, hidden amidst the glory of the planet, were fast scattering seed which fell upon every side in a stream of gold. The whole field was covered with it; for the endless chaos of house roofs and edifices seemed to be land in tilth, furrowed by some gigantic plough. And Pierre in his uneasiness, stirred, despite everything, by an invincible need of hope, asked himself if this was not a good sowing, the furrows of Paris strewn with light by the divine sun for the great future harvest, that harvest of truth and justice of whose advent he had despaired.

At last he rose and took his leave, promising to return at once, if there should be any bad news. It was Marie who showed him to the front door. And there another of those childish blushes which worried her so much suddenly rose to her face, just as she, in her turn, also wished to send her loving message to the injured man. However, with her gay, candid eyes fixed on those of the priest, she bravely spoke the words: "Au revoir, Monsieur l'Abbe. Tell Guillaume that I love him and await him."

III. PENURY AND TOIL

THREE days went by, and every morning Guillaume, confined to his bed and consumed by fever and impatience, experienced fresh anxiety directly the newspapers arrived. Pierre had tried to keep them from him, but Guillaume then worried himself the more, and so the priest had to read him column by column all the extraordinary articles that were published respecting the crime.

Never before had so many rumours inundated the press. Even the "Globe," usually so grave and circumspect, yielded to the general furore, and printed whatever statements reached it. But the more unscrupulous papers were the ones to read. The "Voix du Peuple" in particular made use of the public feverishness to increase its sales. Each morning it employed some fresh device, and printed some frightful story of a nature to drive people mad with terror. It related that not a day passed without Baron Duvillard receiving threatening letters of the coarsest description, announcing that his wife, his son and his daughter would all be killed, that he himself would be butchered in turn, and that do what he might his house would none the less be blown up. And as a measure of precaution the house was guarded day and night alike by a perfect army of plain-clothes officers. Then another article contained an amazing piece of invention. Some anarchists, after carrying barrels of powder into a sewer near the Madeleine, were said to have undermined the whole district, planning a perfect volcano there, into which one half of Paris would sink. And at another time it was alleged that the police were on the track of a terrible plot which embraced all Europe, from the depths of Russia to the shores of Spain. The signal for putting it into execution was to be given in France, and there would be a three days' massacre, with grape shot sweeping everyone off the Boulevards, and the Seine running red, swollen by a torrent of blood. Thanks to these able and intelligent devices of the Press, terror now reigned in the city; frightened foreigners fled from the hotels en masse; and Paris had become a mere mad-house, where the most idiotic delusions at once found credit.

It was not all this, however, that worried Guillaume. He was only anxious about Salvat and the various new "scents" which the newspaper reporters attempted to follow up. The engineer was not yet arrested, and, so far indeed, there had been no statement in print to indicate that the police were on his track. At last, however, Pierre one morning read a paragraph which made the injured man turn pale.

"Dear me! It seems that a tool has been found among the rubbish at the entrance of the Duvillard mansion. It is a bradawl, and its handle bears the name of Grandidier, which is that of a man who keeps some well-known metal works. He is to appear before the investigating magistrate to-day."

Guillaume made a gesture of despair. "Ah!" said he, "they are on the right track at last. That tool must certainly have been dropped by Salvat. He worked at Grandidier's before he came to me for a few days. And from Grandidier they will learn all that they need to know in order to follow the scent."

Pierre then remembered that he had heard the Grandidier factory mentioned at Montmartre. Guillaume's eldest son, Thomas, had served his apprenticeship there, and even worked there occasionally nowadays.

"You told me," resumed Guillaume, "that during my absence Thomas intended to go back to the factory. It's in connection with a new motor which he's planning, and has almost hit upon. If there should be a perquisition there, he may be questioned, and may refuse to answer, in order to guard his secret. So he ought to be warned of this, warned at once!"

Without trying to extract any more precise statement from his brother, Pierre obligingly offered his services. "If you like," said he, "I will go to see Thomas this afternoon. Perhaps I may come across Monsieur Grandidier himself and learn how far the affair has gone, and what was said at the investigating magistrate's."

With a moist glance and an affectionate grasp of the hand, Guillaume at once thanked Pierre: "Yes, yes, brother, go there, it will be good and brave of you."

"Besides," continued the priest, "I really wanted to go to Montmartre to-day. I haven't told you so, but something has been worrying me. If Salvat has fled, he must have left the woman and the child all alone up yonder. On the morning of the day when the explosion took place I saw the poor creatures in such a state of destitution, such misery, that I can't think of them without a heart-pang. Women and children so often die of hunger when the man is no longer there."

At this, Guillaume, who had kept Pierre's hand in his own, pressed it more tightly, and in a trembling voice exclaimed: "Yes, yes, and that will be good and brave too. Go there, brother, go there."

That house of the Rue des Saules, that horrible home of want and agony, had lingered in Pierre's memory. To him it was like an embodiment of the whole filthy cloaca, in which the poor of Paris suffer unto death. And on returning thither that afternoon, he found the same slimy mud around it; its yard littered with the same filth, its dark, damp stairways redolent of the same stench of neglect and poverty, as before. In winter time, while the fine central districts of Paris are dried and cleansed, the far-away districts of the poor remain gloomy and miry, beneath the everlasting tramp of the wretched ones who dwell in them.

Remembering the staircase which conducted to Salvat's lodging, Pierre began to climb it amidst a loud screaming of little children, who suddenly became quiet, letting the house sink into death-like silence once more. Then the thought of Laveuve, who had perished up there like a stray dog, came back to Pierre. And he shuddered when, on the top landing, he knocked at Salvat's door, and profound silence alone answered him. Not a breath was to be heard.

However, he knocked again, and as nothing stirred he began to think that nobody could be there. Perhaps Salvat had returned to fetch the woman and the child, and perhaps they had followed him to some humble nook abroad. Still this would have astonished him; for the poor seldom quit their homes, but die where they have suffered. So he gave another gentle knock.

And at last a faint sound, the light tread of little feet, was heard amidst the silence. Then a weak, childish voice ventured to inquire: "Who is there?"

"Monsieur l'Abbe."

The silence fell again, nothing more stirred. There was evidently hesitation on the other side.

"Monsieur l'Abbe who came the other day," said Pierre again.

This evidently put an end to all uncertainty, for the door was set ajar and little Celine admitted the priest. "I beg your pardon, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "but Mamma Theodore has gone out, and she told me not to open the door to anyone."

Pierre had, for a moment, imagined that Salvat himself was hiding there. But with a glance he took in the whole of the small bare room, where man, woman and child dwelt together. At the same time, Madame Theodore doubtless feared a visit from the police. Had she seen Salvat since the crime? Did she know where he was hiding? Had he come back there to embrace and tranquillise them both?

"And your papa, my dear," said Pierre to Celine, "isn't he here either?"

"Oh! no, monsieur, he has gone away."

"What, gone away?"

"Yes, he hasn't been home to sleep, and we don't know where he is."

"Perhaps he's working."

"Oh, no! he'd send us some money if he was."

"Then he's gone on a journey, perhaps?"

"I don't know."

"He wrote to Mamma Theodore, no doubt?"

"I don't know."

Pierre asked no further questions. In fact, he felt somewhat ashamed of his attempt to extract information from this child of eleven, whom he thus found alone. It was quite possible that she knew nothing, that Salvat, in a spirit of prudence, had even refrained from sending any tidings of himself. Indeed, there was an expression of truthfulness on the child's fair, gentle and intelligent face, which was grave with the gravity that extreme misery imparts to the young.

"I am sorry that Mamma Theodore isn't here," said Pierre, "I wanted to speak to her."

"But perhaps you would like to wait for her, Monsieur l'Abbe. She has gone to my Uncle Toussaint's in the Rue Marcadet; and she can't stop much longer, for she's been away more than an hour."

Thereupon Celine cleared one of the chairs on which lay a handful of scraps of wood, picked up on some waste ground.

The bare and fireless room was assuredly also a breadless one. Pierre could divine the absence of the bread-winner, the disappearance of the man who represents will and strength in the home, and on whom one still relies even when weeks have gone by without work. He goes out and scours the city, and often ends by bringing back the indispensable crust which keeps death at bay. But with his disappearance comes complete abandonment, the wife and child in danger, destitute of all prop and help.

Pierre, who had sat down and was looking at that poor, little, blue-eyed girl, to whose lips a smile returned in spite of everything, could not keep from questioning her on another point. "So you don't go to school, my child?" said he.

She faintly blushed and answered: "I've no shoes to go in."

He glanced at her feet, and saw that she was wearing a pair of ragged old list-slippers, from which her little toes protruded, red with cold.

"Besides," she continued, "Mamma Theodore says that one doesn't go to school when one's got nothing to eat. Mamma Theodore wanted to work but she couldn't, because her eyes got burning hot and full of water. And so we don't know what to do, for we've had nothing left since yesterday, and if Uncle Toussaint can't lend us twenty sous it'll be all over."

She was still smiling in her unconscious way, but two big tears had gathered in her eyes. And the sight of the child shut up in that bare room, apart from all the happy ones of earth, so upset the priest that he again felt his anger with want and misery awakening. Then, another ten minutes having elapsed, he became impatient, for he had to go to the Grandidier works before returning home.

"I don't know why Mamma Theodore doesn't come back," repeated Celine. "Perhaps she's chatting." Then, an idea occurring to her she continued: "I'll take you to my Uncle Toussaint's, Monsieur l'Abbe, if you like. It's close by, just round the corner."

"But you have no shoes, my child."

"Oh! that don't matter, I walk all the same."

Thereupon he rose from the chair and said simply: "Well, yes, that will be better, take me there. And I'll buy you some shoes."

Celine turned quite pink, and then made haste to follow him after carefully locking the door of the room like a good little housewife, though, truth to tell, there was nothing worth stealing in the place.

In the meantime it had occurred to Madame Theodore that before calling on her brother Toussaint to try to borrow a franc from him, she might first essay her luck with her younger sister, Hortense, who had married little Chretiennot, the clerk, and occupied a flat of four rooms on the Boulevard de Rochechouart. This was quite an affair, however, and the poor woman only made the venture because Celine had been fasting since the previous day.

Eugene Toussaint, the mechanician, a man of fifty, was her stepbrother, by the first marriage contracted by her father. A young dressmaker whom the latter had subsequently wedded, had borne him three daughters, Pauline, Leonie and Hortense. And on his death, his son Eugene, who already had a wife and child of his own, had found himself for a short time with his stepmother and sisters on his hands. The stepmother, fortunately, was an active and intelligent woman, and knew how to get out of difficulties. She returned to her former workroom where her daughter Pauline was already apprenticed, and she next placed Leonie there; so that Hortense, the youngest girl, who was a spoilt child, prettier and more delicate than her sisters, was alone left at school. And, later on,—after Pauline had married Labitte the stonemason, and Leonie, Salvat the journeyman-engineer,—Hortense, while serving as assistant at a confectioner's in the Rue des Martyrs, there became acquainted with Chretiennot, a clerk, who married her. Leonie had died young, only a few weeks after her mother; Pauline, forsaken by her husband, lived with her brother-in-law Salvat, and Hortense alone wore a light silk gown on Sundays, resided in a new house, and ranked as a bourgeoise, at the price, however, of interminable worries and great privation.

Madame Theodore knew that her sister was generally short of money towards the month's end, and therefore felt rather ill at ease in thus venturing to apply for a loan. Chretiennot, moreover, embittered by his own mediocrity, had of late years accused his wife of being the cause of their spoilt life, and had ceased all intercourse with her relatives. Toussaint, no doubt, was a decent workman; but that Madame Theodore who lived in misery with her brother-in-law, and that Salvat who wandered from workshop to workshop like an incorrigible ranter whom no employer would keep; those two, with their want and dirt and rebellion, had ended by incensing the vain little clerk, who was not only a great stickler for the proprieties, but was soured by all the difficulties he encountered in his own life. And thus he had forbidden Hortense to receive her sister.

All the same, as Madame Theodore climbed the carpeted staircase of the house on the Boulevard Rochechouart, she experienced a certain feeling of pride at the thought that she had a relation living in such luxury. The Chretiennot's rooms were on the third floor, and overlooked the courtyard. Their femme-de-menage—a woman who goes out by the day or hour charring, cleaning and cooking—came back every afternoon about four o'clock to see to the dinner, and that day she was already there. She admitted the visitor, though she could not conceal her anxious surprise at her boldness in calling in such slatternly garb. However, on the very threshold of the little salon, Madame Theodore stopped short in wonderment herself, for her sister Hortense was sobbing and crouching on one of the armchairs, upholstered in blue repp, of which she was so proud.

"What is the matter? What has happened to you?" asked Madame Theodore.

Her sister, though scarcely two and thirty, was no longer "the beautiful Hortense" of former days. She retained a doll-like appearance, with a tall slim figure, pretty eyes and fine, fair hair. But she who had once taken so much care of herself, had now come down to dressing-gowns of doubtful cleanliness. Her eyelids, too, were reddening, and blotches were appearing on her skin. She had begun to fade after giving birth to two daughters, one of whom was now nine and the other seven years of age. Very proud and egotistical, she herself had begun to regret her marriage, for she had formerly considered herself a real beauty, worthy of the palaces and equipages of some Prince Charming. And at this moment she was plunged in such despair, that her sister's sudden appearance on the scene did not even astonish her: "Ah! it's you," she gasped. "Ah! if you only knew what a blow's fallen on me in the middle of all our worries!"

Madame Theodore at once thought of the children, Lucienne and Marcelle. "Are your daughters ill?" she asked.

"No, no, our neighbour has taken them for a walk on the Boulevard. But the fact is, my dear, I'm enceinte, and when I told Chretiennot of it after dejeuner, he flew into a most fearful passion, saying the most dreadful, the most cruel things!"

Then she again sobbed. Gentle and indolent by nature, desirous of peace and quietness before anything else, she was incapable of deceiving her husband, as he well knew. But the trouble was that an addition to the family would upset the whole economy of the household.

"Mon Dieu!" said Madame Theodore at last, "you brought up the others, and you'll bring up this one too."

At this an explosion of anger dried the other's eyes; and she rose, exclaiming: "You are good, you are! One can see that our purse isn't yours. How are we to bring up another child when we can scarcely make both ends meet as it is?"

And thereupon, forgetting the bourgeois pride which usually prompted her to silence or falsehood, she freely explained their embarrassment, the horrid pecuniary worries which made their life a perpetual misery. Their rent amounted to 700 francs,* so that out of the 3000 francs** which the husband earned at his office, barely a couple of hundred were left them every month. And how were they to manage with that little sum, provide food and clothes, keep up their rank and so forth? There was the indispensable black coat for monsieur, the new dress which madame must have at regular intervals, under penalty of losing caste, the new boots which the children required almost every month, in fact, all sorts of things that could not possibly be dispensed with. One might strike a dish or two out of the daily menu, and even go without wine; but evenings came when it was absolutely necessary to take a cab. And, apart from all this, one had to reckon with the wastefulness of the children, the disorder in which the discouraged wife left the house, and the despair of the husband, who was convinced that he would never extricate himself from his difficulties, even should his salary some day be raised to as high a figure as 4000 francs. Briefly, one here found the unbearable penury of the petty clerk, with consequences as disastrous as the black want of the artisan: the mock facade and lying luxury; all the disorder and suffering which lie behind intellectual pride at not earning one's living at a bench or on a scaffolding.

* $140.

** $600.

"Well, well," repeated Madame Theodore, "you can't kill the child."

"No, of course not; but it's the end of everything," answered Hortense, sinking into the armchair again. "What will become of us, mon Dieu! What will become of us!" Then she collapsed in her unbuttoned dressing gown, tears once more gushing from her red and swollen eyes.

Much vexed that circumstances should be so unpropitious, Madame Theodore nevertheless ventured to ask for the loan of twenty sons; and this brought her sister's despair and confusion to a climax. "I really haven't a centime in the house," said she, "just now I borrowed ten sous for the children from the servant. I had to get ten francs from the Mont de Piete on a little ring the other day. And it's always the same at the end of the month. However, Chretiennot will be paid to-day, and he's coming back early with the money for dinner. So if I can I will send you something to-morrow."

At this same moment the servant hastened in with a distracted air, being well aware that monsieur was in no wise partial to madame's relatives. "Oh madame, madame!" said she; "here's monsieur coming up the stairs."

"Quick then, quick, go away!" cried Hortense, "I should only have another scene if he met you here. To-morrow, if I can, I promise you."

To avoid Chretiennot who was coming in, Madame Theodore had to hide herself in the kitchen. As he passed, she just caught sight of him, well dressed as usual in a tight-fitting frock-coat. Short and lean, with a thin face and long and carefully tended beard, he had the bearing of one who is both vain and quarrelsome. Fourteen years of office life had withered him, and now the long evening hours which he spent at a neighbouring cafe were finishing him off.

When Madame Theodore had quitted the house she turned with dragging steps towards the Rue Marcadet where the Toussaints resided. Here, again, she had no great expectations, for she well knew what ill-luck and worry had fallen upon her brother's home. During the previous autumn Toussaint, though he was but fifty, had experienced an attack of paralysis which had laid him up for nearly five months. Prior to this mishap he had borne himself bravely, working steadily, abstaining from drink, and bringing up his three children in true fatherly fashion. One of them, a girl, was now married to a carpenter, with whom she had gone to Le Havre, while of the others, both boys—one a soldier, had been killed in Tonquin, and the other Charles, after serving his time in the army, had become a working mechanician. Still, Toussaint's long illness had exhausted the little money which he had in the Savings Bank, and now that he had been set on his legs again, he had to begin life once more without a copper before him.

Madame Theodore found her sister-in-law alone in the cleanly kept room which she and her husband occupied. Madame Toussaint was a portly woman, whose corpulence increased in spite of everything, whether it were worry or fasting. She had a round puffy face with bright little eyes; and was a very worthy woman, whose only faults were an inclination for gossiping and a fondness for good cheer. Before Madame Theodore even opened her mouth she understood the object of her visit. "You've come on us at a bad moment, my dear," she said, "we're stumped. Toussaint wasn't able to go back to the works till the day before yesterday, and he'll have to ask for an advance this evening."

As she spoke, she looked at the other with no great sympathy, hurt as she felt by her slovenly appearance. "And Salvat," she added, "is he still doing nothing?"

Madame Theodore doubtless foresaw the question, for she quietly lied: "He isn't in Paris, a friend has taken him off for some work over Belgium way, and I'm waiting for him to send us something."

Madame Toussaint still remained distrustful, however: "Ah!" she said, "it's just as well that he shouldn't be in Paris; for with all these bomb affairs we couldn't help thinking of him, and saying that he was quite mad enough to mix himself up in them."

The other did not even blink. If she knew anything she kept it to herself.

"But you, my dear, can't you find any work?" continued Madame Toussaint.

"Well, what would you have me do with my poor eyes? It's no longer possible for me to sew."

"That's true. A seamstress gets done for. When Toussaint was laid up here I myself wanted to go back to my old calling as a needlewoman. But there! I spoilt everything and did no good. Charring's about the only thing that one can always do. Why don't you get some jobs of that kind?"

"I'm trying, but I can't find any."

Little by little Madame Toussaint was softening at sight of the other's miserable appearance. She made her sit down, and told her that she would give her something if Toussaint should come home with money. Then, yielding to her partiality for gossiping, since there was somebody to listen to her, she started telling stories. The one affair, however, on which she invariably harped was the sorry business of her son Charles and the servant girl at a wine shop over the way. Before going into the army Charles had been a most hard-working and affectionate son, invariably bringing his pay home to his mother. And certainly he still worked and showed himself good-natured; but military service, while sharpening his wits, had taken away some of his liking for ordinary manual toil. It wasn't that he regretted army life, for he spoke of his barracks as a prison. Only his tools had seemed to him rather heavy when, on quitting the service, he had been obliged to take them in hand once more.

"And so, my dear," continued Madame Toussaint, "it's all very well for Charles to be kind-hearted, he can do no more for us. I knew that he wasn't in a hurry to get married, as it costs money to keep a wife. And he was always very prudent, too, with girls. But what would you have? There was that moment of folly with that Eugenie over the road, a regular baggage who's already gone off with another man, and left her baby behind. Charles has put it out to nurse, and pays for it every month. And a lot of expense it is too, perfect ruination. Yes, indeed, every possible misfortune has fallen on us."

In this wise Madame Toussaint rattled on for a full half hour. Then seeing that waiting and anxiety had made her sister-in-law turn quite pale, she suddenly stopped short. "You're losing patience, eh?" she exclaimed. "The fact is, that Toussaint won't be back for some time. Shall we go to the works together? I'll easily find out if he's likely to bring any money home."

They then decided to go down, but at the bottom of the stairs they lingered for another quarter of an hour chatting with a neighbour who had lately lost a child. And just as they were at last leaving the house they heard a call: "Mamma! mamma!"

It came from little Celine, whose face was beaming with delight. She was wearing a pair of new shoes and devouring a cake. "Mamma," she resumed, "Monsieur l'Abbe who came the other day wants to see you. Just look! he bought me all this!"

On seeing the shoes and the cake, Madame Theodore understood matters. And when Pierre, who was behind the child, accosted her she began to tremble and stammer thanks. Madame Toussaint on her side had quickly drawn near, not indeed to ask for anything herself, but because she was well pleased at such a God-send for her sister-in-law, whose circumstances were worse than her own. And when she saw the priest slip ten francs into Madame Theodore's hand she explained to him that she herself would willingly have lent something had she been able. Then she promptly started on the stories of Toussaint's attack and her son Charles's ill-luck.

But Celine broke in: "I say, mamma, the factory where papa used to work is here in this street, isn't it? Monsieur l'Abbe has some business there."*

* Although the children of the French peasantry almost
invariably address their parents as "father" and "mother,"
those of the working classes of Paris, and some other large
cities, usually employ the terms "papa" and "mamma."—Trans.

"The Grandidier factory," resumed Madame Toussaint; "well, we were just going there, and we can show Monsieur l'Abbe the way."

It was only a hundred steps off. Escorted by the two women and the child, Pierre slackened his steps and tried to extract some information about Salvat from Madame Theodore. But she at once became very prudent. She had not seen him again, she declared; he must have gone with a mate to Belgium, where there was a prospect of some work. From what she said, it appeared to the priest that Salvat had not dared to return to the Rue des Saules since his crime, in which all had collapsed, both his past life of toil and hope, and his recent existence with its duties towards the woman and the child.

"There's the factory, Monsieur l'Abbe," suddenly said Madame Toussaint, "my sister-in-law won't have to wait now, since you've been kind enough to help her. Thank you for her and for us."

Madame Theodore and Celine likewise poured forth their thanks, standing beside Madame Toussaint in the everlasting mud of that populous district, amidst the jostling of the passers-by. And lingering there as if to see Pierre enter, they again chatted together and repeated that, after all, some priests were very kind.

The Grandidier works covered an extensive plot of ground. Facing the street there was only a brick building with narrow windows and a great archway, through which one espied a long courtyard. But, in the rear, came a suite of habitations, workshops, and sheds, above whose never ending roofs arose the two lofty chimneys of the generators. From the very threshold one detected the rumbling and quivering of machinery, all the noise and bustle of work. Black water flowed by at one's feet, and up above white vapour spurted from a slender pipe with a regular strident puff, as if it were the very breath of that huge, toiling hive.

Bicycles were now the principal output of the works. When Grandidier had taken them on leaving the Dijon Arts and Trades School, they were declining under bad management, slowly building some little motive engines by the aid of antiquated machinery. Foreseeing the future, however, he had induced his elder brother, one of the managers of the Bon Marche, to finance him, on the promise that he would supply that great emporium with excellent bicycles at 150 francs apiece. And now quite a big venture was in progress, for the Bon Marche was already bringing out the new popular machine "La Lisette," the "Bicycle for the Multitude," as the advertisements asserted. Nevertheless, Grandidier was still in all the throes of a great struggle, for his new machinery had cast a heavy burden of debt on him. At the same time each month brought its effort, the perfecting or simplifying of some part of the manufacture, which meant a saving in the future. He was ever on the watch; and even now was thinking of reverting to the construction of little motors, for he thought he could divine in the near future the triumph of the motor-car.

On asking if M. Thomas Froment were there, Pierre was led by an old workman to a little shed, where he found the young fellow in the linen jacket of a mechanician, his hands black with filings. He was adjusting some piece of mechanism, and nobody would have suspected him to be a former pupil of the Lycee Condorcet, one of the three clever Froments who had there rendered the name famous. But his only desire had been to act as his father's faithful servant, the arm that forges, the embodiment of the manual toil by which conceptions are realised. And, a giant of three and twenty, ever attentive and courageous, he was likewise a man of patient, silent and sober nature.

On catching sight of Pierre he quivered with anxiety and sprang forward. "Father is no worse?" he asked.

"No, no. But he read in the papers that story of a bradawl found in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, and it made him anxious, because the police may make a perquisition here."

Thomas, his own anxiety allayed, began to smile. "Tell him he may sleep quietly," he responded. "To begin with, I've unfortunately not yet hit on our little motor such as I want it to be. In fact, I haven't yet put it together. I'm keeping the pieces at our house, and nobody here knows exactly what I come to do at the factory. So the police may search, it will find nothing. Our secret runs no risk."

Pierre promised to repeat these words to Guillaume, so as to dissipate his fears. However, when he tried to sound Thomas, and ascertain the position of affairs, what the factory people thought of the discovery of the bradawl, and whether there was as yet any suspicion of Salvat, he once more found the young man taciturn, and elicited merely a "yes" or a "no" in answer to his inquiries. The police had not been there as yet? No. But the men must surely have mentioned Salvat? Yes, of course, on account of his Anarchist opinions. But what had Grandidier, the master, said, on returning from the investigating magistrate's? As for that Thomas knew nothing. He had not seen Grandidier that day.

"But here he comes!" the young man added. "Ah! poor fellow, his wife, I fancy, had another attack this morning."

He alluded to a frightful story which Guillaume had already recounted to Pierre. Grandidier, falling in love with a very beautiful girl, had married her; but for five years now she had been insane: the result of puerperal fever and the death of an infant son. Her husband, with his ardent affection for her, had been unwilling to place her in an asylum, and had accordingly kept her with him in a little pavilion, whose windows, overlooking the courtyard of the factory, always remained closed. She was never seen; and never did he speak of her to anybody. It was said that she was usually like a child, very gentle and very sad, and still beautiful, with regal golden hair. At times, however, attacks of frantic madness came upon her, and he then had to struggle with her, and often hold her for hours in his arms to prevent her from splitting her head against the walls. Fearful shrieks would ring out for a time, and then deathlike silence would fall once more.

Grandidier came into the shed where Thomas was working. A handsome man of forty, with an energetic face, he had a dark and heavy moustache, brush-like hair and clear eyes. He was very partial to Thomas, and during the young fellow's apprenticeship there, had treated him like a son. And he now let him return thither whenever it pleased him, and placed his appliances at his disposal. He knew that he was trying to devise a new motor, a question in which he himself was extremely interested; still he evinced the greatest discretion, never questioning Thomas, but awaiting the result of his endeavours.

"This is my uncle, Abbe Froment, who looked in to wish me good day," said the young man, introducing Pierre.

An exchange of polite remarks ensued. Then Grandidier sought to cast off the sadness which made people think him stern and harsh, and in a bantering tone exclaimed: "I didn't tell you, Thomas, of my business with the investigating magistrate. If I hadn't enjoyed a good reputation we should have had all the spies of the Prefecture here. The magistrate wanted me to explain the presence of that bradawl in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, and I at once realised that, in his opinion, the culprit must have worked here. For my part I immediately thought of Salvat. But I don't denounce people. The magistrate has my hiring-book, and as for Salvat I simply answered that he worked here for nearly three months last autumn, and then disappeared. They can look for him themselves! Ah! that magistrate! you can picture him a little fellow with fair hair and cat-like eyes, very careful of his appearance, a society man evidently, but quite frisky at being mixed up in this affair."

"Isn't he Monsieur Amadieu?" asked Pierre.

"Yes, that's his name. Ah! he's certainly delighted with the present which those Anarchists have made him, with that crime of theirs."

The priest listened in deep anxiety. As his brother had feared, the true scent, the first conducting wire, had now been found. And he looked at Thomas to see if he also were disturbed. But the young man was either ignorant of the ties which linked Salvat to his father, or else he possessed great power of self-control, for he merely smiled at Grandidier's sketch of the magistrate.

Then, as Grandidier went to look at the piece of mechanism which Thomas was finishing, and they began to speak about it, Pierre drew near to an open doorway which communicated with a long workshop where engine lathes were rumbling, and the beams of press-drills falling quickly and rhythmically. Leather gearing spun along with a continuous gliding, and there was ceaseless bustle and activity amidst the odoriferous dampness of all the steam. Scores of perspiring workmen, grimy with dust and filings, were still toiling. Still this was the final effort of the day. And as three men approached a water-tap near Pierre to wash their hands, he listened to their talk, and became particularly interested in it when he heard one of them, a tall, ginger-haired fellow, call another Toussaint, and the third Charles.

Toussaint, a big, square-shouldered man with knotty arms, only showed his fifty years on his round, scorched face, which besides being roughened and wrinkled by labour, bristled with grey hairs, which nowadays he was content to shave off once a week. It was only his right arm that was affected by paralysis, and moved rather sluggishly. As for Charles, a living portrait of his father, he was now in all the strength of his six and twentieth year, with splendid muscles distending his white skin, and a full face barred by a heavy black moustache. The three men, like their employer, were speaking of the explosion at the Duvillard mansion, of the bradawl found there, and of Salvat, whom they all now suspected.

"Why, only a brigand would do such a thing!" said Toussaint. "That Anarchism disgusts me. I'll have none of it. But all the same it's for the bourgeois to settle matters. If the others want to blow them up, it's their concern. It's they who brought it about."

This indifference was undoubtedly the outcome of a life of want and social injustice; it was the indifference of an old toiler, who, weary of struggling and hoping for improvements, was now quite ready to tolerate the crumbling of a social system, which threatened him with hunger in his impotent old age.

"Well, you know," rejoined Charles, "I've heard the Anarchists talking, and they really say some very true and sensible things. And just take yourself, father; you've been working for thirty years, and isn't it abominable that you should have had to pass through all that you did pass through recently, liable to go off like some old horse that's slaughtered at the first sign of illness? And, of course, it makes me think of myself, and I can't help feeling that it won't be at all amusing to end like that. And may the thunder of God kill me if I'm wrong, but one feels half inclined to join in their great flare-up if it's really to make everybody happy!"

He certainly lacked the flame of enthusiasm, and if he had come to these views it was solely from impatience to lead a less toilsome life, for obligatory military service had given him ideas of equality among all men—a desire to struggle, raise himself and obtain his legitimate share of life's enjoyments. It was, in fact, the inevitable step which carries each generation a little more forward. There was the father, who, deceived in his hope of a fraternal republic, had grown sceptical and contemptuous; and there was the son advancing towards a new faith, and gradually yielding to ideas of violence, since political liberty had failed to keep its promises.

Nevertheless, as the big, ginger-haired fellow grew angry, and shouted that if Salvat were guilty, he ought to be caught and guillotined at once, without waiting for judges, Toussaint ended by endorsing his opinion. "Yes, yes, he may have married one of my sisters, but I renounce him.... And yet, you know, it would astonish me to find him guilty, for he isn't wicked at heart. I'm sure he wouldn't kill a fly."

"But what would you have?" put in Charles. "When a man's driven to extremities he goes mad."

They had now washed themselves; but Toussaint, on perceiving his employer, lingered there in order to ask him for an advance. As it happened, Grandidier, after cordially shaking hands with Pierre, approached the old workman of his own accord, for he held him in esteem. And, after listening to him, he gave him a line for the cashier on a card. As a rule, he was altogether against the practice of advancing money, and his men disliked him, and said he was over rigid, though in point of fact he had a good heart. But he had his position as an employer to defend, and to him concessions meant ruin. With such keen competition on all sides, with the capitalist system entailing a terrible and incessant struggle, how could one grant the demands of the workers, even when they were legitimate?

Sudden compassion came upon Pierre when, after quitting Thomas, he saw Grandidier, who had finished his round, crossing the courtyard in the direction of the closed pavilion, where all the grief of his heart-tragedy awaited him. Here was that man waging the battle of life, defending his fortune with the risk that his business might melt away amidst the furious warfare between capital and labour; and at the same time, in lieu of evening repose, finding naught but anguish it his hearth: a mad wife, an adored wife, who had sunk back into infancy, and was for ever dead to love! How incurable was his secret despair! Even on the days when he triumphed in his workshops, disaster awaited him at home. And could any more unhappy man, any man more deserving of pity, be found even among the poor who died of hunger, among those gloomy workers, those vanquished sons of labour who hated and who envied him?

When Pierre found himself in the street again he was astonished to see Madame Toussaint and Madame Theodore still there with little Celine. With their feet in the mud, like bits of wreckage against which beat the ceaseless flow of wayfarers, they had lingered there, still and ever chatting, loquacious and doleful, lulling their wretchedness to rest beneath a deluge of tittle-tattle. And when Toussaint, followed by his son, came out, delighted with the advance he had secured, he also found them on the same spot. Then he told Madame Theodore the story of the bradawl, and the idea which had occurred to him and all his mates that Salvat might well be the culprit. She, however, though turning very pale, began to protest, concealing both what she knew and what she really thought.

"I tell you I haven't seen him for several days," said she. "He must certainly be in Belgium. And as for a bomb, that's humbug. You say yourself that he's very gentle and wouldn't harm a fly!"

A little later as Pierre journeyed back to Neuilly in a tramcar he fell into a deep reverie. All the stir and bustle of that working-class district, the buzzing of the factory, the overflowing activity of that hive of labour, seemed to have lingered within him. And for the first time, amidst his worries, he realised the necessity of work. Yes, it was fatal, but it also gave health and strength. In effort which sustains and saves, he at last found a solid basis on which all might be reared. Was this, then, the first gleam of a new faith? But ah! what mockery! Work an uncertainty, work hopeless, work always ending in injustice! And then want ever on the watch for the toiler, strangling him as soon as slack times came round, and casting him into the streets like a dead dog immediately old age set in.

On reaching Neuilly, Pierre found Bertheroy at Guillaume's bedside. The old savant had just dressed the injured wrist, and was not yet certain that no complications would arise. "The fact is," he said to Guillaume, "you don't keep quiet. I always find you in a state of feverish emotion which is the worst possible thing for you. You must calm yourself, my dear fellow, and not allow anything to worry you."

A few minutes later, though, just as he was going away, he said with his pleasant smile: "Do you know that a newspaper writer came to interview me about that explosion? Those reporters imagine that scientific men know everything! I told the one who called on me that it would be very kind of him to enlighten me as to what powder was employed. And, by the way, I am giving a lesson on explosives at my laboratory to-morrow. There will be just a few persons present. You might come as well, Pierre, so as to give an account of it to Guillaume; it would interest him."

At a glance from his brother, Pierre accepted the invitation. Then, Bertheroy having gone, he recounted all he had learnt during the afternoon, how Salvat was suspected, and how the investigating magistrate had been put on the right scent. And at this news, intense fever again came over Guillaume, who, with his head buried in the pillow, and his eyes closed, stammered as if in a kind of nightmare: "Ah! then, this is the end! Salvat arrested, Salvat interrogated! Ah! that so much toil and so much hope should crumble!"

IV. CULTURE AND HOPE

ON the morrow, punctually at one o'clock, Pierre reached the Rue d'Ulm, where Bertheroy resided in a fairly large house, which the State had placed at his disposal, in order that he might install in it a laboratory for study and research. Thus the whole first floor had been transformed into one spacious apartment, where, from time to time, the illustrious chemist was fond of receiving a limited number of pupils and admirers, before whom he made experiments, and explained his new discoveries and theories.

For these occasions a few chairs were set out before the long and massive table, which was covered with jars and appliances. In the rear one saw the furnace, while all around were glass cases, full of vials and specimens. The persons present were, for the most part, fellow savants, with a few young men, and even a lady or two, and, of course, an occasional journalist. The whole made up a kind of family gathering, the visitors chatting with the master in all freedom.

Directly Bertheroy perceived Pierre he came forward, pressed his hand and seated him on a chair beside Guillaume's son Francois, who had been one of the first arrivals. The young man was completing his third year at the Ecole Normale, close by, so he only had a few steps to take to call upon his master Bertheroy, whom he regarded as one of the firmest minds of the age. Pierre was delighted to meet his nephew, for he had been greatly impressed in his favour on the occasion of his visit to Montmartre. Francois, on his side, greeted his uncle with all the cordial expansiveness of youth. He was, moreover, well pleased to obtain some news of his father.

However, Bertheroy began. He spoke in a familiar and sober fashion, but frequently employed some very happy expressions. At first he gave an account of his own extensive labours and investigations with regard to explosive substances, and related with a laugh that he sometimes manipulated powders which would have blown up the entire district. But, said he, in order to reassure his listeners, he was always extremely prudent. At last he turned to the subject of that explosion in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, which, for some days, had filled Paris with dismay. The remnants of the bomb had been carefully examined by experts, and one fragment had been brought to him, in order that he might give his opinion on it. The bomb appeared to have been prepared in a very rudimentary fashion; it had been charged with small pieces of iron, and fired by means of a match, such as a child might have devised. The extraordinary part of the affair was the formidable power of the central cartridge, which, although it must have been a small one, had wrought as much havoc as any thunderbolt. And the question was this: What incalculable power of destruction might one not arrive at if the charge were increased ten, twenty or a hundredfold. Embarrassment began, and divergencies of opinion clouded the issue directly one tried to specify what explosive had been employed. Of the three experts who had been consulted, one pronounced himself in favour of dynamite pure and simple; but the two others, although they did not agree together, believed in some combination of explosive matters. He, Bertheroy, had modestly declined to adjudicate, for the fragment submitted to him bore traces of so slight a character, that analysis became impossible. Thus he was unwilling to make any positive pronouncement. But his opinion was that one found oneself in presence of some unknown powder, some new explosive, whose power exceeded anything that had hitherto been dreamt of. He could picture some unknown savant, or some ignorant but lucky inventor, discovering the formula of this explosive under mysterious conditions. And this brought him to the point he wished to reach, the question of all the explosives which are so far unknown, and of the coming discoveries which he could foresee. In the course of his investigations he himself had found cause to suspect the existence of several such explosives, though he had lacked time and opportunity to prosecute his studies in that direction. However, he indicated the field which should be explored, and the best way of proceeding. In his opinion it was there that lay the future. And in a broad and eloquent peroration, he declared that explosives had hitherto been degraded by being employed in idiotic schemes of vengeance and destruction; whereas it was in them possibly that lay the liberating force which science was seeking, the lever which would change the face of the world, when they should have been so domesticated and subdued as to be only the obedient servants of man.

Throughout this familiar discourse Pierre could feel that Francois was growing impassioned, quivering at thought of the vast horizon which the master opened up. He himself had become extremely interested, for he could not do otherwise than notice certain allusions, and connect what he heard with what he had guessed of Guillaume's anxiety regarding that secret which he feared to see at the mercy of an investigating magistrate. And so as he, Pierre, before going off with Francois, approached Bertheroy to wish him good day, he pointedly remarked: "Guillaume will be very sorry that he was unable to hear you unfold those admirable ideas."

The old savant smiled. "Pooh!" said he; "just give him a summary of what I said. He will understand. He knows more about the matter than I do."

In presence of the illustrious chemist, Francois preserved the silent gravity of a respectful pupil, but when he and Pierre had taken a few steps down the street in silence, he remarked: "What a pity it is that a man of such broad intelligence, free from all superstition, and anxious for the sole triumph of truth, should have allowed himself to be classified, ticketed, bound round with titles and academical functions! How greatly our affection for him would increase if he took less State pay, and freed himself from all the grand cordons which tie his hands."

"What would you have!" rejoined Pierre, in a conciliatory spirit. "A man must live! At the same time I believe that he does not regard himself as tied by anything."

Then, as they had reached the entrance of the Ecole Normale, the priest stopped, thinking that his companion was going back to the college. But Francois, raising his eyes and glancing at the old place, remarked: "No, no, to-day's Thursday, and I'm at liberty! Oh! we have a deal of liberty, perhaps too much. But for my own part I'm well pleased at it, for it often enables me to go to Montmartre and work at my old little table. It's only there that I feel any real strength and clearness of mind."

His preliminary examinations had entitled him to admission at either the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale,* and he had chosen the latter, entering its scientific section with No. 1 against his name. His father had wished him to make sure of an avocation, that of professor, even if circumstances should allow him to remain independent and follow his own bent on leaving the college. Francois, who was very precocious, was now preparing for his last examination there, and the only rest he took was in walking to and from Montmartre, or in strolling through the Luxembourg gardens.

* The purposes of the Ecole Normale have been referred to on
p. 197. At the Ecole Polytechnique young men receive much
of the preliminary training which they require to become
either artillery officers, or military, naval or civil
engineers.—Trans.

From force of habit he now turned towards the latter, accompanied by Pierre and chatting with him. One found the mildness of springtime there that February afternoon; for pale sunshine streamed between the trees, which were still leafless. It was indeed one of those first fine days which draw little green gems from the branches of the lilac bushes.

The Ecole Normale was still the subject of conversation and Pierre remarked: "I must own that I hardly like the spirit that prevails there. Excellent work is done, no doubt, and the only way to form professors is to teach men the trade by cramming them with the necessary knowledge. But the worst is that although all the students are trained for the teaching profession, many of them don't remain in it, but go out into the world, take to journalism, or make it their business to control the arts, literature and society. And those who do this are for the most part unbearable. After swearing by Voltaire they have gone back to spirituality and mysticism, the last drawing-room craze. Now that a firm faith in science is regarded as brutish and inelegant, they fancy that they rid themselves of their caste by feigning amiable doubt, and ignorance, and innocence. What they most fear is that they may carry a scent of the schools about with them, so they put on extremely Parisian airs, venture on somersaults and slang, and assume all the grace of dancing bears in their eager desire to please. From that desire spring the sarcastic shafts which they aim at science, they who pretend that they know everything, but who go back to the belief of the humble, the naive idealism of Biblical legends, just because they think the latter to be more distinguished."

Francois began to laugh: "The portrait is perhaps a little overdrawn," said he, "still there's truth in it, a great deal of truth."

"I have known several of them," continued Pierre, who was growing animated. "And among them all I have noticed that a fear of being duped leads them to reaction against the entire effort, the whole work of the century. Disgust with liberty, distrust of science, denial of the future, that is what they now profess. And they have such a horror of the commonplace that they would rather believe in nothing or the incredible. It may of course be commonplace to say that two and two make four, yet it's true enough; and it is far less foolish for a man to say and repeat it than to believe, for instance, in the miracles of Lourdes."

Francois glanced at the priest in astonishment. The other noticed it and strove to restrain himself. Nevertheless, grief and anger carried him away whenever he spoke of the educated young people of the time, such as, in his despair, he imagined them to be. In the same way as he had pitied the toilers dying of hunger in the districts of misery and want, so here he overflowed with contempt for the young minds that lacked bravery in the presence of knowledge, and harked back to the consolation of deceptive spirituality, the promise of an eternity of happiness in death, which last was longed for and exalted as the very sum of life. Was not the cowardly thought of refusing to live for the sake of living so as to discharge one's simple duty in being and making one's effort, equivalent to absolute assassination of life? However, the Ego was always the mainspring; each one sought personal happiness. And Pierre was grieved to think that those young people, instead of discarding the past and marching on to the truths of the future, were relapsing into shadowy metaphysics through sheer weariness and idleness, due in part perhaps to the excessive exertion of the century, which had been overladen with human toil.

However, Francois had begun to smile again. "But you are mistaken," said he; "we are not all like that at the Ecole Normale. You only seem to know the Normalians of the Section of Letters, and your opinions would surely change if you knew those of the Section of Sciences. It is quite true that the reaction against Positivism is making itself felt among our literary fellow-students, and that they, like others, are haunted by the idea of that famous bankruptcy of science. This is perhaps due to their masters, the neo-spiritualists and dogmatical rhetoricians into whose hands they have fallen. And it is still more due to fashion, the whim of the times which, as you have very well put it, regards scientific truth as bad taste, something graceless and altogether too brutal for light and distinguished minds. Consequently, a young fellow of any shrewdness who desires to please is perforce won over to the new spirit."

"The new spirit!" interrupted Pierre, unable to restrain himself. "Oh! that is no mere innocent, passing fashion, it is a tactical device and a terrible one, an offensive return of the powers of darkness against those of light, of servitude against free thought, truth and justice."

Then, as the young man again looked at him with growing astonishment, he relapsed into silence. The figure of Monseigneur Martha had risen before his eyes, and he fancied he could again hear the prelate at the Madeleine, striving to win Paris over to the policy of Rome, to that spurious neo-Catholicism which, with the object of destroying democracy and science, accepted such portions of them as it could adapt to its own views. This was indeed the supreme struggle. Thence came all the poison poured forth to the young. Pierre knew what efforts were being made in religious circles to help on this revival of mysticism, in the mad hope of hastening the rout of science. Monseigneur Martha, who was all-powerful at the Catholic University, said to his intimates, however, that three generations of devout and docile pupils would be needed before the Church would again be absolute sovereign of France.

"Well, as for the Ecole Normale," continued Francois, "I assure you that you are mistaken. There are a few narrow bigots there, no doubt. But even in the Section of Letters the majority of the students are sceptics at bottom—sceptics of discreet and good-natured average views. Of course they are professors before everything else, though they are a trifle ashamed of it; and, as professors, they judge things with no little pedantic irony, devoured by a spirit of criticism, and quite incapable of creating anything themselves. I should certainly be astonished to see the man of genius whom we await come out of their ranks. To my thinking, indeed, it would be preferable that some barbarian genius, neither well read nor endowed with critical faculty, or power of weighing and shading things, should come and open the next century with a hatchet stroke, sending up a fine flare of truth and reality.... But, as for my comrades of the Scientific Section, I assure you that neo-Catholicism and Mysticism and Occultism, and every other branch of the fashionable phantasmagoria trouble them very little indeed. They are not making a religion of science, they remain open to doubt on many points; but they are mostly men of very clear and firm minds, whose passion is the acquirement of certainty, and who are ever absorbed in the investigations which continue throughout the whole vast field of human knowledge. They haven't flinched, they have remained Positivists, or Evolutionists, or Determinists, and have set their faith in observation and experiment to help on the final conquest of the world."

Francois himself was growing excited, as he thus confessed his faith while strolling along the quiet sunlit garden paths. "The young indeed!" he resumed. "Do people know them? It makes us laugh when we see all sorts of apostles fighting for us, trying to attract us, and saying that we are white or black or grey, according to the hue which they require for the triumph of their particular ideas! The young, the real ones, why, they're in the schools, the laboratories and the libraries. It's they who work and who'll bring to-morrow to the world. It's not the young fellows of dinner and supper clubs, manifestoes and all sorts of extravagances. The latter make a great deal of noise, no doubt; in fact, they alone are heard. But if you knew of the ceaseless efforts and passionate striving of the others, those who remain silent, absorbed in their tasks. And I know many of them: they are with their century, they have rejected none of its hopes, but are marching on to the coming century, resolved to pursue the work of their forerunners, ever going towards more light and more equity. And just speak to them of the bankruptcy of science. They'll shrug their shoulders at the mere idea, for they know well enough that science has never before inflamed so many hearts or achieved greater conquests! It is only if the schools, laboratories and libraries were closed, and the social soil radically changed, that one would have cause to fear a fresh growth of error such as weak hearts and narrow minds hold so dear!"

At this point Francois's fine flow of eloquence was interrupted. A tall young fellow stopped to shake hands with him; and Pierre was surprised to recognise Baron Duvillard's son Hyacinthe, who bowed to him in very correct style. "What! you here in our old quarter," exclaimed Francois.

"My dear fellow, I'm going to Jonas's, over yonder, behind the Observatory. Don't you know Jonas? Ah! my dear fellow, he's a delightful sculptor, who has succeeded in doing away with matter almost entirely. He has carved a figure of Woman, no bigger than the finger, and entirely soul, free from all baseness of form, and yet complete. All Woman, indeed, in her essential symbolism! Ah! it's grand, it's overpowering. A perfect scheme of aesthetics, a real religion!"

Francois smiled as he looked at Hyacinthe, buttoned up in his long pleated frock-coat, with his made-up face, and carefully cropped hair and beard. "And yourself?" said he, "I thought you were working, and were going to publish a little poem, shortly?"

"Oh! the task of creating is so distasteful to me, my dear fellow! A single line often takes me weeks.... Still, yes, I have a little poem on hand, 'The End of Woman.' And you see, I'm not so exclusive as some people pretend, since I admire Jonas, who still believes in Woman. His excuse is sculpture, which, after all, is at best such a gross materialistic art. But in poetry, good heavens, how we've been overwhelmed with Woman, always Woman! It's surely time to drive her out of the temple, and cleanse it a little. Ah! if we were all pure and lofty enough to do without Woman, and renounce all those horrid sexual questions, so that the last of the species might die childless, eh? The world would then at least finish in a clean and proper manner!"

Thereupon, Hyacinthe walked off with his languid air, well pleased with the effect which he had produced on the others.

"So you know him?" said Pierre to Francois.

"He was my school-fellow at Condorcet, we were in the same classes together. Such a funny fellow he was! A perfect dunce! And he was always making a parade of Father Duvillard's millions, while pretending to disdain them, and act the revolutionist, for ever saying that he'd use his cigarette to fire the cartridge which was to blow up the world! He was Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and Tolstoi, and Ibsen, rolled into one! And you can see what he has become with it all: a humbug with a diseased mind!"

"It's a terrible symptom," muttered Pierre, "when through ennui or lassitude, or the contagion of destructive fury, the sons of the happy and privileged ones start doing the work of the demolishers."

Francois had resumed his walk, going down towards the ornamental water, where some children were sailing their boats. "That fellow is simply grotesque," he replied; "but how would you have sane people give any heed to that mysticism, that awakening of spirituality which is alleged by the same doctrinaires who started the bankruptcy of science cry, when after so brief an evolution it produces such insanity, both in art and literature? A few years of influence have sufficed; and now Satanism, Occultism and other absurdities are flourishing; not to mention that, according to some accounts, the Cities of the Plains are reconciled with new Rome. Isn't the tree judged by its fruits? And isn't it evident that, instead of a renascence, a far-spreading social movement bringing back the past, we are simply witnessing a transitory reaction, which many things explain? The old world would rather not die, and is struggling in a final convulsion, reviving for a last hour before it is swept away by the overflowing river of human knowledge, whose waters ever increase. And yonder, in the future, is the new world, which the real young ones will bring into existence, those who work, those who are not known, who are not heard. And yet, just listen! Perhaps you will hear them, for we are among them, in their 'quarter.' This deep silence is that of the labour of all the young fellows who are leaning over their work-tables, and day by day carrying forward the conquest of truth."

So saying Francois waved his hand towards all the day-schools and colleges and high schools beyond the Luxembourg garden, towards the Faculties of Law and Medicine, the Institute and its five Academies, the innumerable libraries and museums which made up the broad domain of intellectual labour. And Pierre, moved by it all, shaken in his theories of negation, thought that he could indeed hear a low but far-spreading murmur of the work of thousands of active minds, rising from laboratories, studies and class, reading and lecture rooms. It was not like the jerky, breathless trepidation, the loud clamour of factories where manual labour toils and chafes. But here, too, there were sighs of weariness, efforts as killing, exertion as fruitful in its results. Was it indeed true that the cultured young were still and ever in their silent forge, renouncing no hope, relinquishing no conquest, but in full freedom of mind forging the truth and justice of to-morrow with the invincible hammers of observation and experiment?

Francois, however, had raised his eyes to the palace clock to ascertain the time. "I'm going to Montmartre," he said; "will you come part of the way with me?"

Pierre assented, particularly as the young man added that on his way he meant to call for his brother Antoine at the Museum of the Louvre. That bright afternoon the Louvre picture galleries were steeped in warm and dignified quietude, which one particularly noticed on coming from the tumult and scramble of the streets. The majority of the few people one found there were copyists working in deep silence, which only the wandering footsteps of an occasional tourist disturbed. Pierre and Francois found Antoine at the end of the gallery assigned to the Primitive masters. With scrupulous, almost devout care he was making a drawing of a figure by Mantegna. The Primitives did not impassion him by reason of any particular mysticism and ideality, such as fashion pretends to find in them, but on the contrary, and justifiably enough, by reason of the sincerity of their ingenuous realism, their respect and modesty in presence of nature, and the minute fidelity with which they sought to transcribe it. He spent days of hard work in copying and studying them, in order to learn strictness and probity of drawing from them—all that lofty distinction of style which they owe to their candour as honest artists.

Pierre was struck by the pure glow which a sitting of good hard work had set in Antoine's light blue eyes. It imparted warmth and even feverishness to his fair face, which was usually all dreaminess and gentleness. His lofty forehead now truly looked like a citadel armed for the conquest of truth and beauty. He was only eighteen, and his story was simply this: as he had grown disgusted with classical studies and been mastered by a passion for drawing, his father had let him leave the Lycee Condorcet when he was in the third class there. Some little time had then elapsed while he felt his way and the deep originality within him was being evolved. He had tried etching on copper, but had soon come to wood engraving, and had attached himself to it in spite of the discredit into which it had fallen, lowered as it had been to the level of a mere trade. Was there not here an entire art to restore and enlarge? For his own part he dreamt of engraving his own drawings, of being at once the brain which conceives and the hand which executes, in such wise as to obtain new effects of great intensity both as regards perception and touch. To comply with the wishes of his father, who desired each of his sons to have a trade, he earned his bread like other engravers by working for the illustrated newspapers. But, in addition to this current work, he had already engraved several blocks instinct with wonderful power and life. They were simply copies of real things, scenes of everyday existence, but they were accentuated, elevated so to say, by the essential line, with a maestria which on the part of so young a lad fairly astonished one.

"Do you want to engrave that?" Francois asked him, as he placed his copy of Mantegna's figure in his portfolio.

"Oh! no, that's merely a dip into innocence, a good lesson to teach one to be modest and sincere. Life is very different nowadays."

Then, while walking along the streets—for Pierre, who felt growing sympathy for the two young fellows, went with them in the direction of Montmartre, forgetful of all else,—Antoine, who was beside him, spoke expansively of his artistic dreams.

"Colour is certainly a power, a sovereign source of charm, and one may, indeed, say that without colour nothing can be completely represented. Yet, singularly enough, it isn't indispensable to me. It seems to me that I can picture life as intensely and definitely with mere black and white, and I even fancy that I shall be able to do so in a more essential manner, without any of the dupery which lies in colour. But what a task it is! I should like to depict the Paris of to-day in a few scenes, a few typical figures, which would serve as testimony for all time. And I should like to do it with great fidelity and candour, for an artist only lives by reason of his candour, his humility and steadfast belief in Nature, which is ever beautiful. I've already done a few figures, I will show them to you. But ah! if I only dared to tackle my blocks with the graver, at the outset, without drawing my subject beforehand. For that generally takes away one's fire. However, what I do with the pencil is a mere sketch; for with the graver I may come upon a find, some unexpected strength or delicacy of effect. And so I'm draughtsman and engraver all in one, in such a way that my blocks can only be turned out by myself. If the drawings on them were engraved by another, they would be quite lifeless.... Yes, life can spring from the fingers just as well as from the brain, when one really possesses creative power."

They walked on, and when they found themselves just below Montmartre, and Pierre spoke of taking a tramcar to return to Neuilly, Antoine, quite feverish with artistic passion, asked him if he knew Jahan, the sculptor, who was working for the Sacred Heart. And on receiving a negative reply, he added: "Well, come and see him for a moment. He has a great future before him. You'll see an angel of his which has been declined."

Then, as Francois began to praise the angel in question, Pierre agreed to accompany them. On the summit of the height, among all the sheds which the building of the basilica necessitated, Jahan had been able to set up a glazed workshop large enough for the huge angel ordered of him. His three visitors found him there in a blouse, watching a couple of assistants, who were rough-hewing the block of stone whence the angel was to emerge. Jahan was a sturdy man of thirty-six, with dark hair and beard, a large, ruddy mouth and fine bright eyes. Born in Paris, he had studied at the Fine Art School, but his impetuous temperament had constantly landed him in trouble there.

"Ah! yes," said he, "you've come to see my angel, the one which the Archbishop wouldn't take. Well, there it is."

The clay model of the figure, some three feet high, and already drying, looked superb in its soaring posture, with its large, outspread wings expanding as if with passionate desire for the infinite. The body, barely draped, was that of a slim yet robust youth, whose face beamed with the rapture of his heavenly flight.

"They found him too human," said Jahan. "And after all they were right. There's nothing so difficult to conceive as an angel. One even hesitates as to the sex; and when faith is lacking one has to take the first model one finds and copy it and spoil it. For my part, while I was modelling that one, I tried to imagine a beautiful youth suddenly endowed with wings, and carried by the intoxication of his flight into all the joy of the sunshine. But it upset them, they wanted something more religious, they said; and so then I concocted that wretched thing over there. After all, one has to earn one's living, you know."

So saying, he waved his hand towards another model, the one for which his assistants were preparing the stone. And this model represented an angel of the correct type, with symmetrical wings like those of a goose, a figure of neither sex, and commonplace features, expressing the silly ecstasy that tradition requires.

"What would you have?" continued Jahan. "Religious art has sunk to the most disgusting triteness. People no longer believe; churches are built like barracks, and decorated with saints and virgins fit to make one weep. The fact is that genius is only the fruit of the social soil; and a great artist can only send up a blaze of the faith of the time he lives in. For my part, I'm the grandson of a Beauceron peasant. My father came to Paris to set himself up in business as a marble worker for tombstones and so forth, just at the top of the Rue de la Roquette. It was there I grew up. I began as a workman, and all my childhood was spent among the masses, in the streets, without ever a thought coming to me of setting foot in a church. So few Parisians think of doing so nowadays. And so what's to become of art since there's no belief in the Divinity or even in beauty? We're forced to go forward to the new faith, which is the faith in life and work and fruitfulness, in all that labours and produces."

Then suddenly breaking off he exclaimed: "By the way, I've been doing some more work to my figure of Fecundity, and I'm fairly well pleased with it. Just come with me and I'll show it you."

Thereupon he insisted on taking them to his private studio, which was near by, just below Guillaume's little house. It was entered by way of the Rue du Calvaire, a street which is simply a succession of ladder-like flights of steps. The door opened on to one of the little landings, and one found oneself in a spacious, well-lighted apartment littered with models and casts, fragments and figures, quite an overflow of sturdy, powerful talent. On a stool was the unfinished model of Fecundity swathed in wet cloths. These Jahan removed, and then she stood forth with her rounded figure, her broad hips and her wifely, maternal bosom, full of the milk which nourishes and redeems.

"Well, what do you think of her?" asked Jahan. "Built as she is, I fancy that her children ought to be less puny than the pale, languid, aesthetic fellows of nowadays!"

While Antoine and Francois were admiring the figure, Pierre, for his part, took most interest in a young girl who had opened the door to them, and who had now wearily reseated herself at a little table to continue a book she was reading. This was Jahan's sister, Lise. A score of years younger than himself, she was but sixteen, and had been living alone with him since their father's death. Very slight and delicate looking, she had a most gentle face, with fine light hair which suggested pale gold-dust. She was almost a cripple, with legs so weak that she only walked with difficulty, and her mind also was belated, still full of childish naivete. At first this had much saddened her brother, but with time he had grown accustomed to her innocence and languor. Busy as he always was, ever in a transport, overflowing with new plans, he somewhat neglected her by force of circumstances, letting her live beside him much as she listed.

Pierre had noticed, however, the sisterly impulsiveness with which she had greeted Antoine. And the latter, after congratulating Jahan on his statue, came and sat down beside her, questioned her and wished to see the book which she was reading. During the last six months the most pure and affectionate intercourse had sprung up between them. He, from his father's garden, up yonder on the Place du Tertre, could see her through the huge window of that studio where she led so innocent a life. And noticing that she was always alone, as if forsaken, he had begun to take an interest in her. Then had come acquaintance; and, delighted to find her so simple and so charming, he had conceived the design of rousing her to intelligence and life, by loving her, by becoming at once the mind and the heart whose power fructifies. Weak plant that she was, in need of delicate care, sunshine and affection, he became for her all that her brother had, through circumstances, failed to be. He had already taught her to read, a task in which every mistress had previously failed. But him she listened to and understood. And by slow degrees a glow of happiness came to the beautiful clear eyes set in her irregular face. It was love's miracle, the creation of woman beneath the breath of a young lover who gave himself entirely. No doubt she still remained very delicate, with such poor health that one ever feared that she might expire in a faint sigh; and her legs, moreover, were still too weak to admit of her walking any distance. But all the same, she was no longer the little wilding, the little ailing flower of the previous spring.

Jahan, who marvelled at the incipient miracle, drew near to the young people. "Ah!" said he, "your pupil does you honour. She reads quite fluently, you know, and understands the fine books you send her. You read to me of an evening now, don't you, Lise?"

She raised her candid eyes, and gazed at Antoine with a smile of infinite gratitude. "Oh! whatever he'll teach me," she said, "I'll learn it, and do it."

The others laughed gently. Then, as the visitors were going off, Francois paused before a model which had cracked while drying. "Oh! that's a spoilt thing," said the sculptor. "I wanted to model a figure of Charity. It was ordered of me by a philanthropic institution. But try as I might, I could only devise something so commonplace that I let the clay spoil. Still, I must think it over and endeavour to take the matter in hand again."

When they were outside, it occurred to Pierre to go as far as the basilica of the Sacred Heart in the hope of finding Abbe Rose there. So the three of them went round by way of the Rue Gabrielle and climbed the steps of the Rue Chape. And just as they were reaching the summit where the basilica reared its forest of scaffoldings beneath the clear sky, they encountered Thomas, who, on leaving the factory, had gone to give an order to a founder in the Rue Lamarck.

He, who as a rule was so silent and discreet, now happened to be in an expansive mood, which made him look quite radiant. "Ah! I'm so pleased," he said, addressing Pierre; "I fancy that I've found what I want for our little motor. Tell father that things are going on all right, and that he must make haste to get well."

At these words his brothers, Francois and Antoine, drew close to him with a common impulse. And they stood there all three, a valiant little group, their hearts uniting and beating with one and the same delight at the idea that their father would be gladdened, that the good news they were sending him would help him towards recovery. As for Pierre, who, now that he knew them, was beginning to love them and judge them at their worth, he marvelled at the sight of these three young giants, each so strikingly like the other, and drawn together so closely and so promptly, directly their filial affection took fire.

"Tell him that we are waiting for him, and will come to him at the first sign if we are wanted."

Then each in turn shook the priest's hand vigorously. And while he remained watching them as they went off towards the little house, whose garden he perceived over the wall of the Rue Saint Eleuthere, he fancied he could there detect a delicate silhouette, a white, sunlit face under a help of dark hair. It was doubtless the face of Marie, examining the buds on her lilac bushes. At that evening hour, however, the diffuse light was so golden that the vision seemed to fade in it as in a halo. And Pierre, feeling dazzled, turned his head, and on the other side saw naught but the overwhelming, chalky mass of the basilica, whose hugeness shut out all view of the horizon.

For a moment he remained motionless on that spot, so agitated by conflicting thoughts and feelings that he could read neither heart nor mind clearly. Then, as he turned towards the city, all Paris spread itself out at his feet, a limpid, lightsome Paris, beneath the pink glow of that spring-like evening. The endless billows of house-roofs showed forth with wonderful distinctness, and one could have counted the chimney stacks and the little black streaks of the windows by the million. The edifices rising into the calm atmosphere seemed like the anchored vessels of some fleet arrested in its course, with lofty masting which glittered at the sun's farewell. And never before had Pierre so distinctly observed the divisions of that human ocean. Eastward and northward was the city of manual toil, with the rumbling and the smoke of its factories. Southward, beyond the river, was the city of study, of intellectual labour, so calm, so perfectly serene. And on all sides the passion of trade ascended from the central districts, where the crowds rolled and scrambled amidst an everlasting uproar of wheels; while westward, the city of the happy and powerful ones, those who fought for sovereignty and wealth, spread out its piles of palaces amidst the slowly reddening flare of the declining planet.

And then, from the depths of his negation, the chaos into which his loss of faith had plunged him, Pierre felt a delicious freshness pass like the vague advent of a new faith. So vague it was that he could not have expressed even his hope of it in words. But already among the rough factory workers, manual toil had appeared to him necessary and redemptive, in spite of all the misery and abominable injustice to which it led. And now the young men of intellect of whom he had despaired, that generation of the morrow which he had thought spoilt, relapsing into ancient error and rottenness, had appeared to him full of virile promise, resolved to prosecute the work of those who had gone before, and effect, by the aid of Science only, the conquest of absolute truth and absolute justice.

V. PROBLEMS

A FULL month had already gone by since Guillaume had taken refuge at his brother's little house at Neuilly. His wrist was now nearly healed. He had long ceased to keep his bed, and often strolled through the garden. In spite of his impatience to go back to Montmartre, join his loved ones and resume his work there, he was each morning prompted to defer his return by the news he found in the newspapers. The situation was ever the same. Salvat, whom the police now suspected, had been perceived one evening near the central markets, and then again lost sight of. Every day, however, his arrest was said to be imminent. And in that case what would happen? Would he speak out, and would fresh perquisitions be made?

For a whole week the press had been busy with the bradawl found under the entrance of the Duvillard mansion. Nearly every reporter in Paris had called at the Grandidier factory and interviewed both workmen and master. Some had even started on personal investigations, in the hope of capturing the culprit themselves. There was no end of jesting about the incompetence of the police, and the hunt for Salvat was followed all the more passionately by the general public, as the papers overflowed with the most ridiculous concoctions, predicting further explosions, and declaring even that all Paris would some morning be blown into the air. The "Voix du Peuple" set a fresh shudder circulating every day by its announcements of threatening letters, incendiary placards and mysterious, far-reaching plots. And never before had so base and foolish a spirit of contagion wafted insanity through a civilised city.

Guillaume, for his part, no sooner awoke of a morning than he was all impatience to see the newspapers, quivering at the idea that he would at last read of Salvat's arrest. In his state of nervous expectancy, the wild campaign which the press had started, the idiotic and the ferocious things which he found in one or another journal, almost drove him crazy. A number of "suspects" had already been arrested in a kind of chance razzia, which had swept up the usual Anarchist herd, together with sundry honest workmen and bandits, illumines and lazy devils, in fact, a most singular, motley crew, which investigating magistrate Amadieu was endeavouring to turn into a gigantic association of evil-doers. One morning, moreover, Guillaume found his own name mentioned in connection with a perquisition at the residence of a revolutionary journalist, who was a friend of his. At this his heart bounded with revolt, but he was forced to the conclusion that it would be prudent for him to remain patient a little longer, in his peaceful retreat at Neuilly, since the police might at any moment break into his home at Montmartre, to arrest him should it find him there.

Amidst all this anxiety the brothers led a most solitary and gentle life. Pierre himself now spent most of his time at home. The first days of March had come, and precocious springtide imparted delightful charm and warmth to the little garden. Guillaume, however, since quitting his bed, had more particularly installed himself in his father's old laboratory, now transformed into a spacious study. All the books and papers left by the illustrious chemist were still there, and among the latter Guillaume found a number of unfinished essays, the perusal of which greatly excited his interest, and often absorbed him from morning till night. It was this which largely enabled him to bear his voluntary seclusion patiently. Seated on the other side of the big table, Pierre also mostly occupied himself with reading; but at times his eyes would quit his book and wander away into gloomy reverie, into all the chaos into which he still and ever sank. For long hours the brothers would in this wise remain side by side, without speaking a word. Yet they knew they were together; and occasionally, when their eyes met, they would exchange a smile. The strong affection of former days was again springing up within them; their childhood, their home, their parents, all seemed to live once more in the quiet atmosphere they breathed. However, the bay window overlooked the garden in the direction of Paris, and often, when they emerged from their reading or their reverie, it was with a sudden feeling of anxiety, and in order to lend ear to the distant rumbling, the increased clamour of the great city.

On other occasions they paused as if in astonishment at hearing a continuous footfall overhead. It was that of Nicholas Barthes, who still lingered in the room above. He seldom came downstairs, and scarcely ever ventured into the garden, for fear, said he, that he might be perceived and recognised from a distant house whose windows were concealed by a clump of trees. One might laugh at the old conspirator's haunting thought of the police. Nevertheless, the caged-lion restlessness, the ceaseless promenade of that perpetual prisoner who had spent two thirds of his life in the dungeons of France in his desire to secure the liberty of others, imparted to the silence of the little house a touching melancholy, the very rhythm as it were of all the great good things which one hoped for, but which would never perhaps come.

Very few visits drew the brothers from their solitude. Bertheroy came less frequently now that Guillaume's wrist was healing. The most assiduous caller was certainly Theophile Morin, whose discreet ring was heard every other day at the same hour. Though he did not share the ideas of Barthes he worshipped him as a martyr; and would always go upstairs to spend an hour with him. However, they must have exchanged few words, for not a sound came from the room. Whenever Morin sat down for a moment in the laboratory with the brothers, Pierre was struck by his seeming weariness, his ashen grey hair and beard and dismal countenance, all the life of which appeared to have been effaced by long years spent in the teaching profession. Indeed, it was only when the priest mentioned Italy that he saw his companion's resigned eyes blaze up like live coals. One day when he spoke of the great patriot Orlando Prada, Morin's companion of victory in Garibaldi's days, he was amazed by the sudden flare of enthusiasm which lighted up the other's lifeless features. However, these were but transient flashes: the old professor soon reappeared, and all that one found in Morin was the friend of Proudhon and the subsequent disciple of Auguste Comte. Of his Proudhonian principles he had retained all a pauper's hatred of wealth, and a desire for a more equitable partition of fortune. But the new times dismayed him, and neither principle nor temperament allowed him to follow Revolutionism to its utmost limits. Comte had imparted unshakable convictions to him in the sphere of intellectual questions, and he contented himself with the clear and decisive logic of Positivism, rejecting all metaphysical hypotheses as useless, persuaded as he was that the whole human question, whether social or religious, would be solved by science alone. This faith, firm as it had remained, was, however, coupled with secret bitterness, for nothing seemed to advance in a sensible manner towards its goal. Comte himself had ended in the most cloudy mysticism; great savants recoiled from truth in terror; and now barbarians were threatening the world with fresh night; all of which made Morin almost a reactionist in politics, already resigned to the advent of a dictator, who would set things somewhat in order, so that humanity might be able to complete its education.

Other visitors who occasionally called to see Guillaume were Bache and Janzen, who invariably came together and at night-time. Every now and then they would linger chatting with Guillaume in the spacious study until two o'clock in the morning. Bache, who was fat and had a fatherly air, with his little eyes gently beaming amidst all the snowy whiteness of his hair and beard, would talk on slowly, unctuously and interminably, as soon as he had begun to explain his views. He would address merely a polite bow to Saint-Simon, the initiator, the first to lay down the law that work was a necessity for one and all according to their capacities; but on coming to Fourier his voice softened and he confessed his whole religion. To his thinking, Fourier had been the real messiah of modern times, the saviour of genius, who had sown the good seed of the future world, by regulating society such as it would certainly be organised to-morrow. The law of harmony had been promulgated; human passions, liberated and utilised in healthy fashion, would become the requisite machinery; and work, rendered pleasant and attractive, would prove the very function of life. Nothing could discourage Bache; if merely one parish began by transforming itself into a phalansterium, the whole department would soon follow, then the adjacent departments, and finally all France. Moreover, Bache even favoured the schemes of Cabet, whose Icaria, said he, had in no wise been such a foolish idea. Further, he recalled a motion he had made, when member of the Commune in 1871, to apply Fourier's ideas to the French Republic; and he was apparently convinced that the troops of Versailles had delayed the triumph of Communism for half a century. Whenever people nowadays talked of table-turning he pretended to laugh, but at bottom he had remained an impenitent "spiritist." Since he had been a municipal councillor he had been travelling from one socialist sect to another, according as their ideas offered points of resemblance to his old faith. And he was fairly consumed by his need of faith, his perplexity as to the Divine, which he was now occasionally inclined to find in the legs of some piece of furniture, after denying its presence in the churches.

Janzen, for his part, was as taciturn as his friend Bache was garrulous. Such remarks as he made were brief, but they were as galling as lashes, as cutting as sabre-strokes. At the same time his ideas and theories remained somewhat obscure, partly by reason of this brevity of his, and partly on account of the difficulty he experienced in expressing himself in French. He was from over yonder, from some far-away land—Russia, Poland, Austria or Germany, nobody exactly knew; and it mattered little, for he certainly acknowledged no country, but wandered far and wide with his dream of blood-shedding fraternity. Whenever, with his wonted frigidity, he gave utterance to one of those terrible remarks of his which, like a scythe in a meadow, cut away all before him, little less than the necessity of thus mowing down nations, in order to sow the earth afresh with a young and better community, became apparent. At each proposition unfolded by Bache, such as labour rendered agreeable by police regulations, phalansteria organised like barracks, religion transformed into pantheist or spiritist deism, he gently shrugged his shoulders. What could be the use of such childishness, such hypocritical repairing, when the house was falling and the only honest course was to throw it to the ground, and build up the substantial edifice of to-morrow with entirely new materials? On the subject of propaganda by deeds, bomb-throwing and so forth, he remained silent, though his gestures were expressive of infinite hope. He evidently approved that course. The legend which made him one of the perpetrators of the crime of Barcelona set a gleam of horrible glory in his mysterious past. One day when Bache, while speaking to him of his friend Bergaz, the shadowy Bourse jobber who had already been compromised in some piece of thieving, plainly declared that the aforesaid Bergaz was a bandit, Janzen contented himself with smiling, and replying quietly that theft was merely forced restitution. Briefly, in this man of culture and refinement, in whose own mysterious life one might perhaps have found various crimes but not a single act of base improbity, one could divine an implacable, obstinate theoretician, who was resolved to set the world ablaze for the triumph of his ideas.

On certain evenings when a visit from Theophile Morin coincided with one from Bache and Janzen, and they and Guillaume lingered chatting until far into the night, Pierre would listen to them in despair from the shadowy corner where he remained motionless, never once joining in the discussions. Distracted, by his own unbelief and thirst for truth, he had at the outset taken a passionate interest in these debates, desirous as he was of drawing up a balance-sheet of the century's ideas, so as to form some notion of the distance that had been travelled, and the profits that had accrued. But he recoiled from all this in fresh despair, on hearing the others argue, each from his own standpoint and without possibility of concession and agreement. After the repulses he had encountered at Lourdes and Rome, he well realised that in this fresh experiment which he was making with Paris, the whole brain of the century was in question, the new truths, the expected gospel which was to change the face of the world. And, burning with inconsiderate zeal, he went from one belief to another, which other he soon rejected in order to adopt a third. If he had first felt himself to be a Positivist with Morin, an Evolutionist and Determinist with Guillaume, he had afterwards been touched by the fraternal dream of a new golden age which he had found in Bache's humanitarian Communism. And indeed even Janzen had momentarily shaken him by his fierce confidence in the theory of liberative Individualism. But afterwards he had found himself out of his depth; and each and every theory had seemed to him but part of the chaotic contradictions and incoherences of humanity on its march. It was all a continuous piling up of dross, amidst which he lost himself. Although Fourier had sprung from Saint-Simon he denied him in part; and if Saint-Simon's doctrine ended in a kind of mystical sensuality, the other's conducted to an unacceptable regimenting of society. Proudhon, for his part, demolished without rebuilding anything. Comte, who created method and declared science to be the one and only sovereign, had not even suspected the advent of the social crisis which now threatened to sweep all away, and had finished personally as a mere worshipper of love, overpowered by woman. Nevertheless, these two, Comte and Proudhon, entered the lists and fought against the others, Fourier and Saint-Simon; the combat between them or their disciples becoming so bitter and so blind that the truths common to them all were obscured and disfigured beyond recognition. Thence came the extraordinary muddle of the present hour; Bache with Saint-Simon and Fourier, and Morin with Proudhon and Comte, utterly failing to understand Mege, the Collectivist deputy, whom they held up to execration, him and his State Collectivism, in the same way, moreover, as they thundered against all the other present-time Socialist sects, without realising that these also, whatever their nature, had more or less sprung from the same masters as themselves. And all this seemingly indicated that Janzen was right when he declared that the house was past repair, fast crumbling amidst rottenness and insanity, and that it ought to be levelled to the ground.

One night, after the three visitors had gone, Pierre, who had remained with Guillaume, saw him grow very gloomy as he slowly walked to and fro. He, in his turn, had doubtless felt that all was crumbling. And though his brother alone was there to hear him, he went on speaking. He expressed all his horror of the Collectivist State as imagined by Mege, a Dictator-State re-establishing ancient servitude on yet closer lines. The error of all the Socialist sects was their arbitrary organisation of Labour, which enslaved the individual for the profit of the community. And, forced to conciliate the two great currents, the rights of society and the rights of the individual, Guillaume had ended by placing his whole faith in free Communism, an anarchical state in which he dreamt of seeing the individual freed, moving and developing without restraint, for the benefit both of himself and of all others. Was not this, said he, the one truly scientific theory, unities creating worlds, atoms producing life by force of attraction, free and ardent love? All oppressive minorities would disappear; and the faculties and energies of one and all would by free play arrive at harmony amidst the equilibrium—which changed according to needs—of the active forces of advancing humanity. In this wise he pictured a nation, saved from State tutelage, without a master, almost without laws, a happy nation, each citizen of which, completely developed by the exercise of liberty, would, of his free will, come to an understanding with his neighbours with regard to the thousand necessities of life. And thence would spring society, free association, hundreds of associations which would regulate social life; though at the same time they would remain variable, in fact often opposed and hostile to one another. For progress is but the fruit of conflict and struggle; the world has only been created by the battle of opposing forces. And that was all; there would be no more oppressors, no more rich, no more poor; the domain of the earth with its natural treasures and its implements of labour would be restored to the people, its legitimate owners, who would know how to enjoy it with justice and logic, when nothing abnormal would impede their expansion. And then only would the law of love make its action felt; then would human solidarity, which, among mankind, is the living form of universal attraction, acquire all its power, bringing men closer and closer together, and uniting them in one sole family. A splendid dream it was—the noble and pure dream of absolute freedom—free man in free society. And thither a savant's superior mind was fated to come after passing on the road the many Socialist sects which one and all bore the stigma of tyranny. And, assuredly, as thus indulged, the Anarchist idea is the loftiest, the proudest, of all ideas. And how delightful to yield to the hope of harmony in life—life which restored to the full exercise of its natural powers would of itself create happiness!

When Guillaume ceased speaking, he seemed to be emerging from a dream; and he glanced at Pierre with some dismay, for he feared that he might have said too much and have hurt his feelings. Pierre—moved though he was, for a moment in fact almost won over—had just seen the terrible practical objection, which destroyed all hope, arise before his mind's eye. Why had not harmony asserted itself in the first days of the world's existence, at the time when societies were formed? How was it that tyranny had triumphed, delivering nations over to oppressors? And supposing that the apparently insolvable problem of destroying everything, and beginning everything afresh, should ever be solved, who could promise that mankind, obedient to the same laws, would not again follow the same paths as formerly? After all, mankind, nowadays, is simply what life has made it; and nothing proves that life would again make it other than it is. To begin afresh, ah, yes! but to attain another result! But could that other result really come from man? Was it not rather man himself who should be changed? To start afresh from where one was, to continue the evolution that had begun, undoubtedly meant slow travel and dismal waiting. But how great would be the danger and even the delay, if one went back without knowing by what road across the whole chaos of ruins one might regain all the lost time!

"Let us go to bed," at last said Guillaume, smiling. "It's silly of me to weary you with all these things which don't concern you."

Pierre, in his excitement, was about to reveal his own heart and mind, and the whole torturing battle within him. But a feeling of shame again restrained him. His brother only knew him as a believing priest, faithful to his faith. And so, without answering, he betook himself to his room.

On the following evening, about ten o'clock, while Guillaume and Pierre sat reading in the study, the old servant entered to announce M. Janzen and a friend. The friend was Salvat.

"He wished to see you," Janzen explained to Guillaume. "I met him, and when he heard of your injury and anxiety he implored me to bring him here. And I've done so, though it was perhaps hardly prudent of me."

Guillaume had risen, full of surprise and emotion at such a visit; Pierre, however, though equally upset by Salvat's appearance; did not stir from his chair, but kept his eyes upon the workman.

"Monsieur Froment," Salvat ended by saying, standing there in a timid, embarrassed way, "I was very sorry indeed when I heard of the worry I'd put you in; for I shall never forget that you were very kind to me when everybody else turned me away."

As he spoke he balanced himself alternately on either leg, and transferred his old felt hat from hand to hand.

"And so I wanted to come and tell you myself that if I took a cartridge of your powder one evening when you had your back turned, it's the only thing that I feel any remorse about in the whole business, since it may compromise you. And I also want to take my oath before you that you've nothing to fear from me, that I'll let my head be cut off twenty times if need be, rather than utter your name. That's all that I had in my heart."

He relapsed into silence and embarrassment, but his soft, dreamy eyes, the eyes of a faithful dog, remained fixed upon Guillaume with an expression of respectful worship. And Pierre was still gazing at him athwart the hateful vision which his arrival had conjured up, that of the poor, dead, errand girl, the fair pretty child lying ripped open under the entrance of the Duvillard mansion! Was it possible that he was there, he, that madman, that murderer, and that his eyes were actually moist!

Guillaume, touched by Salvat's words, had drawn near and pressed his hand. "I am well aware, Salvat," said he, "that you are not wicked at heart. But what a foolish and abominable thing you did!"

Salvat showed no sign of anger, but gently smiled. "Oh! if it had to be done again, Monsieur Froment, I'd do it. It's my idea, you know. And, apart from you, all is well; I am content."

He would not sit down, but for another moment continued talking with Guillaume, while Janzen, as if he washed his hands of the business, deeming this visit both useless and dangerous, sat down and turned over the leaves of a picture book. And Guillaume made Salvat tell him what he had done on the day of the crime; how like a stray dog he had wandered in distraction through Paris, carrying his bomb with him, originally in his tool-bag and then under his jacket; how he had gone a first time to the Duvillard mansion and found its carriage entrance closed; then how he had betaken himself first to the Chamber of Deputies which the ushers had prevented him from entering, and afterwards to the Circus, where the thought of making a great sacrifice of bourgeois had occurred to him too late. And finally, how he had at last come back to the Duvillard mansion, as if drawn thither by the very power of destiny. His tool-bag was lying in the depths of the Seine, he said; he had thrown it into the water with sudden hatred of work, since it had even failed to give him bread. And he next told the story of his flight; the explosion shaking the whole district behind him, while, with delight and astonishment, he found himself some distance off, in quiet streets where nothing was as yet known. And for a month past he had been living in chance fashion, how or where he could hardly tell, but he had often slept in the open, and gone for a day without food. One evening little Victor Mathis had given him five francs. And other comrades had helped him, taken him in for a night and sent him off at the first sign of peril. A far-spreading, tacit complicity had hitherto saved him from the police. As for going abroad, well, he had, at one moment, thought of doing so; but a description of his person must have been circulated, the gendarmes must be waiting for him at the frontiers, and so would not flight, instead of retarding, rather hasten his arrest? Paris, however, was an ocean; it was there that he incurred the least risk of capture. Moreover, he no longer had sufficient energy to flee. A fatalist as he was after his own fashion, he could not find strength to quit the pavements of Paris, but there awaited arrest, like a social waif carried chancewise through the multitude as in a dream.

"And your daughter, little Celine?" Guillaume inquired. "Have you ventured to go back to see her?"

Salvat waved his hand in a vague way. "No, but what would you have? She's with Mamma Theodore. Women always find some help. And then I'm done for, I can do nothing for anybody. It's as if I were already dead." However, in spite of these words, tears were rising to his eyes. "Ah! the poor little thing!" he added, "I kissed her with all my heart before I went away. If she and the woman hadn't been starving so long the idea of that business would perhaps never have come to me."

Then, in all simplicity, he declared that he was ready to die. If he had ended by depositing his bomb at the entrance of Duvillard's house, it was because he knew the banker well, and was aware that he was the wealthiest of those bourgeois whose fathers at the time of the Revolution had duped the people, by taking all power and wealth for themselves,—the power and wealth which the sons were nowadays so obstinately bent in retaining that they would not even bestow the veriest crumbs on others. As for the Revolution, he understood it in his own fashion, like an illiterate fellow who had learnt the little he knew from newspapers and speeches at public meetings. And he struck his chest with his fist as he spoke of his honesty, and was particularly desirous that none should doubt his courage because he had fled.

"I've never robbed anybody," said he, "and if I don't go and hand myself up to the police, it's because they may surely take the trouble to find and arrest me. I'm very well aware that my affair's clear enough as they've found that bradawl and know me. All the same, it would be silly of me to help them in their work. Still, they'd better make haste, for I've almost had enough of being tracked like a wild beast and no longer knowing how I live."

Janzen, yielding to curiosity, had ceased turning over the leaves of the picture book and was looking at Salvat. There was a smile of disdain in the Anarchist leader's cold eyes; and in his usual broken French he remarked: "A man fights and defends himself, kills others and tries to avoid being killed himself. That's warfare."

These words fell from his lips amidst deep silence. Salvat, however, did not seem to have heard them, but stammered forth his faith in a long sentence laden with fulsome expressions, such as the sacrifice of his life in order that want might cease, and the example of a great action, in the certainty that it would inspire other heroes to continue the struggle. And with this certainly sincere faith and illuminism of his there was blended a martyr's pride, delight at being one of the radiant, worshipped saints of the dawning Revolutionary Church.

As he had come so he went off. When Janzen had led him away, it seemed as if the night which had brought him had carried him back into its impenetrable depths. And then only did Pierre rise from his chair. He was stifling, and threw the large window of the room wide open. It was a very mild but moonless night, whose silence was only disturbed by the subsiding clamour of Paris, which stretched away, invisible, on the horizon.

Guillaume, according to his habit, had begun to walk up and down. And at last he spoke, again forgetting that his brother was a priest. "Ah! the poor fellow! How well one can understand that deed of violence and hope! His whole past life of fruitless labour and ever-growing want explains it. Then, too, there has been all the contagion of ideas; the frequentation of public meetings where men intoxicate themselves with words, and of secret meetings among comrades where faith acquires firmness and the mind soars wildly. Ah! I think I know that man well indeed! He's a good workman, sober and courageous. Injustice has always exasperated him. And little by little the desire for universal happiness has cast him out of the realities of life which he has ended by holding in horror. So how can he do otherwise than live in a dream—a dream of redemption, which, from circumstances, has turned to fire and murder as its fitting instruments. As I looked at him standing there, I fancied I could picture one of the first Christian slaves of ancient Rome. All the iniquity of olden pagan society, agonising beneath the rottenness born of debauchery and covetousness, was weighing on his shoulders, bearing him down. He had come from the dark Catacombs where he had whispered words of deliverance and redemption with his wretched brethren. And a thirst for martyrdom consumed him, he spat in the face of Caesar, he insulted the gods, he fired the pagan temples, in order that the reign of Jesus might come and abolish servitude. And he was ready to die, to be torn to pieces by the wild beasts!"

Pierre did not immediately reply. He had already been struck, however, by the fact that there were undoubted points of resemblance between the secret propaganda and militant faith of the Anarchists, and certain practices of the first Christians. Both sects abandon themselves to a new faith in the hope that the humble may thereby at last reap justice. Paganism disappears through weariness of the flesh and the need of a more lofty and pure faith. That dream of a Christian paradise opening up a future life with a system of compensations for the ills endured on earth, was the outcome of young hope dawning at its historic hour. But to-day, when eighteen centuries have exhausted that hope, when the long experiment is over and the toiler finds himself duped and still and ever a slave, he once more dreams of getting happiness upon this earth, particularly as each day Science tends more and more to show him that the happiness of the spheres beyond is a lie. And in all this there is but the eternal struggle of the poor and the rich, the eternal question of bringing more justice and less suffering to the world.

"But surely," Pierre at last replied, "you can't be on the side of those bandits, those murderers whose savage violence horrifies me. I let you talk on yesterday, when you dreamt of a great and happy people, of ideal anarchy in which each would be free amidst the freedom of all. But what abomination, what disgust both for mind and heart, when one passes from theory to propaganda and practice! If yours is the brain that thinks, whose is the hateful hand that acts, that kills children, throws down doors and empties drawers? Do you accept that responsibility? With your education, your culture, the whole social heredity behind you, does not your entire being revolt at the idea of stealing and murdering?"

Guillaume halted before his brother, quivering. "Steal and murder! no! no! I will not. But one must say everything and fully understand the history of the evil hour through which we are passing. It is madness sweeping by; and, to tell the truth, everything necessary to provoke it has been done. At the very dawn of the Anarchist theory, at the very first innocent actions of its partisans, there was such stern repression, the police so grossly ill-treating the poor devils that fell into its hands, that little by little came anger and rage leading to the most horrible reprisals. It is the Terror initiated by the bourgeois that has produced Anarchist savagery. And would you know whence Salvat and his crime have come? Why, from all our centuries of impudence and iniquity, from all that the nations have suffered, from all the sores which are now devouring us, the impatience for enjoyment, the contempt of the strong for the weak, the whole monstrous spectacle which is presented by our rotting society!"

Guillaume was again slowly walking to and fro; and as if he were reflecting aloud he continued: "Ah! to reach the point I have attained, through how much thought, through how many battles, have I not passed! I was merely a Positivist, a savant devoted to observation and experiment, accepting nothing apart from proven facts. Scientifically and socially, I admitted that simple evolution had slowly brought humanity into being. But both in the history of the globe and that of human society, I found it necessary to make allowance for the volcano, the sudden cataclysm, the sudden eruption, by which each geological phase, each historical period, has been marked. In this wise one ends by ascertaining that no forward step has ever been taken, no progress ever accomplished in the world's history, without the help of horrible catastrophes. Each advance has meant the sacrifice of millions and millions of human lives. This of course revolts us, given our narrow ideas of justice, and we regard nature as a most barbarous mother; but, if we cannot excuse the volcano, we ought to deal with it when it bursts forth, like savants forewarned of its possibility.... And then, ah, then! well, perhaps I'm a dreamer like others, but I have my own notions."

With a sweeping gesture he confessed what a social dreamer there was within him beside the methodical and scrupulous savant. His constant endeavour was to bring all back to science, and he was deeply grieved at finding in nature no scientific sign of equality or even justice, such as he craved for in the social sphere. His despair indeed came from this inability to reconcile scientific logic with apostolic love, the dream of universal happiness and brotherhood and the end of all iniquity.

Pierre, however, who had remained near the open window, gazing into the night towards Paris, whence ascended the last sounds of the evening of passionate pleasure, felt the whole flood of his own doubt and despair stifling him. It was all too much: that brother of his who had fallen upon him with his scientific and apostolic beliefs, those men who came to discuss contemporary thought from every standpoint, and finally that Salvat who had brought thither the exasperation of his mad deed. And Pierre, who had hitherto listened to them all without a word, without a gesture, who had hidden his secrets from his brother, seeking refuge in his supposed priestly views, suddenly felt such bitterness stirring his heart that he could lie no longer.

"Ah! brother, if you have your dream, I have my sore which has eaten into me and left me void! Your Anarchy, your dream of just happiness, for which Salvat works with bombs, why, it is the final burst of insanity which will sweep everything away! How is it that you can't realise it? The century is ending in ruins. I've been listening to you all for a month past. Fourier destroyed Saint-Simon, Proudhon and Comte demolished Fourier, each in turn piling up incoherences and contradictions, leaving mere chaos behind them, which nobody dares to sort out. And since then, Socialist sects have been swarming and multiplying, the more sensible of them leading simply to dictatorship, while the others indulge in most dangerous reveries. And after such a tempest of ideas there could indeed come nothing but your Anarchy, which undertakes to bring the old world to a finish by reducing it to dust.... Ah! I expected it, I was waiting for it—that final catastrophe, that fratricidal madness, the inevitable class warfare in which our civilisation was destined to collapse! Everything announced it: the want and misery below, the egotism up above, all the cracking of the old human habitation, borne down by too great a weight of crime and grief. When I went to Lourdes it was to see if the divinity of simple minds would work the awaited miracle, and restore the belief of the early ages to the people, which rebelled through excess of suffering. And when I went to Rome it was in the naive hope of there finding the new religion required by our democracies, the only one that could pacify the world by bringing back the fraternity of the golden age. But how foolish of me all that was! Both here and there, I simply lighted on nothingness. There where I so ardently dreamt of finding the salvation of others, I only sank myself, going down apeak like a ship not a timber of which is ever found again. One tie still linked me to my fellow-men, that of charity, the dressing, relieving, and perhaps, in the long run, healing, of wounds and sores; but that last cable has now been severed. Charity, to my mind, appears futile and derisive by the side of justice, to whom all supremacy belongs, and whose advent has become a necessity and can be stayed by none. And so it is all over, I am mere ashes, an empty grave as it were. I no longer believe in anything, anything, anything whatever!"

Pierre had risen to his full height, with arms outstretched as if to let all the nothingness within his heart and mind fall from them. And Guillaume, distracted by the sight of such a fierce denier, such a despairing Nihilist as was now revealed to him, drew near, quivering: "What are you saying, brother! I thought you so firm, so calm in your belief! A priest to be admired, a saint worshipped by the whole of this parish! I was unwilling even to discuss your faith, and now it is you who deny all, and believe in nothing whatever!"

Pierre again slowly stretched out his arms. "There is nothing, I tried to learn all, and only found the atrocious grief born of the nothingness that overwhelms me."

"Ah! how you must suffer, Pierre, my little brother! Can religion, then, be even more withering than science, since it has ravaged you like that, while I have yet remained an old madman, still full of fancies?"

Guillaume caught hold of Pierre's hands and pressed them, full of terrified compassion in presence of all the grandeur and horror embodied in that unbelieving priest who watched over the belief of others, and chastely, honestly discharged his duty amidst the haughty sadness born of his falsehood. And how heavily must that falsehood have weighed upon his conscience for him to confess himself in that fashion, amidst an utter collapse of his whole being! A month previously, in the unexpansiveness of his proud solitude, he would never have taken such a course. To speak out it was necessary that he should have been stirred by many things, his reconciliation with his brother, the conversations he had heard of an evening, the terrible drama in which he was mingled, as well as his reflections on labour struggling against want, and the vague hope with which the sight of intellectual youth had inspired him. And, indeed, amid the very excess of his negation was there not already the faint dawn of a new faith?

This Guillaume must have understood, on seeing how he quivered with unsatisfied tenderness as he emerged from the fierce silence which he had preserved so long. He made him sit down near the window, and placed himself beside him without releasing his hands. "But I won't have you suffer, my little brother!" he said; "I won't leave you, I'll nurse you. For I know you much better than you know yourself. You would never have suffered were it not for the battle between your heart and your mind, and you will cease to suffer on the day when they make peace, and you love what you understand." And in a lower voice, with infinite affection, he went on: "You see, it's our poor mother and our poor father continuing their painful struggle in you. You were too young at the time, you couldn't know what went on. But I knew them both very wretched: he, wretched through her, who treated him as if he were one of the damned; and she, suffering through him, tortured by his irreligion. When he died, struck down by an explosion in this very room, she took it to be the punishment of God. Yet, what an honest man he was, with a good, great heart, what a worker, seeking for truth alone, and desirous of the love and happiness of all! Since we have spent our evenings here, I have felt him coming back, reviving as it were both around and within us; and she, too, poor, saintly woman, is ever here, enveloping us with love, weeping, and yet stubbornly refusing to understand. It is they, perhaps, who have kept me here so long, and who at this very moment are present to place your hands in mine."

And, indeed, it seemed to Pierre as if he could feel the breath of vigilant affection which Guillaume evoked passing over them both. There was again a revival of all the past, all their youth, and nothing could have been more delightful.

"You hear me, brother," Guillaume resumed. "You must reconcile them, for it is only in you that they can be reconciled. You have his firm, lofty brow, and her mouth and eyes of unrealisable tenderness. So, try to bring them to agreement, by some day contenting, as your reason shall allow, the everlasting thirst for love, and self-bestowal, and life, which for lack of satisfaction is killing you. Your frightful wretchedness has no other cause. Come back to life, love, bestow yourself, be a man!"

Pierre raised a dolorous cry: "No, no, the death born of doubt has swept through me, withering and shattering everything, and nothing more can live in that cold dust!"

"But, come," resumed Guillaume, "you cannot have reached such absolute negation. No man reaches it. Even in the most disabused of minds there remains a nook of fancy and hope. To deny charity, devotion, the prodigies which love may work, ah! for my part I do not go so far as that. And now that you have shown me your sore, why should I not tell you my dream, the wild hope which keeps me alive! It is strange; but, are savants to be the last childish dreamers, and is faith only to spring up nowadays in chemical laboratories?"

Intense emotion was stirring Guillaume; there was battle waging in both his brain and his heart. And at last, yielding to the deep compassion which filled him, vanquished by his ardent affection for his unhappy brother, he spoke out. But he had drawn yet closer to Pierre, even passed one arm around him; and it was thus embracing him that he, in his turn, made his confession, lowering his voice as if he feared that someone might overhear his secret. "Why should you not know it?" he said. "My own sons are ignorant of it. But you are a man and my brother, and since there is nothing of the priest left in you, it is to the brother I will confide it. This will make me love you the more, and perhaps it may do you good."

Then he told him of his invention, a new explosive, a powder of such extraordinary force that its effects were incalculable. And he had found employment for this powder in an engine of warfare, a special cannon, hurling bombs which would assure the most overwhelming victory to the army using them. The enemy's forces would be destroyed in a few hours, and besieged cities would fall into dust at the slightest bombardment. He had long searched and doubted, calculated, recalculated and experimented; but everything was now ready: the precise formula of the powder, the drawings for the cannon and the bombs, a whole packet of precious papers stored in a safe spot. And after months of anxious reflection he had resolved to give his invention to France, so as to ensure her a certainty of victory in her coming, inevitable war with Germany!

At the same time, he was not a man of narrow patriotism; on the contrary he had a very broad, international conception of the future liberative civilisation. Only he believed in the initiatory mission of France, and particularly in that of Paris, which, even as it is to-day, was destined to be the world's brain to-morrow, whence all science and justice would proceed. The great idea of liberty and equality had already soared from it at the prodigious blast of the Revolution; and from its genius and valour the final emancipation of man would also take its flight. Thus it was necessary that Paris should be victorious in the struggle in order that the world might be saved.

Pierre understood his brother, thanks to the lecture on explosives which he had heard at Bertheroy's. And the grandeur of this scheme, this dream, particularly struck him when he thought of the extraordinary future which would open for Paris amidst the effulgent blaze of the bombs. Moreover, he was struck by all the nobility of soul which had lain behind his brother's anxiety for a month past. If Guillaume had trembled it was simply with fear that his invention might be divulged in consequence of Salvat's crime. The slightest indiscretion might compromise everything; and that little stolen cartridge, whose effects had so astonished savants, might reveal his secret. He felt it necessary to act in mystery, choosing his own time, awaiting the proper hour, until when the secret would slumber in its hiding-place, confided to the sole care of Mere-Grand, who had her orders and knew what she was to do should he, in any sudden accident, disappear.

"And, now," said Guillaume in conclusion, "you know my hopes and my anguish, and you can help me and even take my place if I am unable to reach the end of my task. Ah! to reach the end! Since I have been shut up here, reflecting, consumed by anxiety and impatience, there have been hours when I have ceased to see my way clearly! There is that Salvat, that wretched fellow for whose crime we are all of us responsible, and who is now being hunted down like a wild beast! There is also that insensate and insatiable bourgeoisie, which will let itself be crushed by the fall of the shaky old house, rather than allow the least repair to it! And there is further that avaricious, that abominable Parisian press, so harsh towards the weak and little, so fond of insulting those who have none to defend them, so eager to coin money out of public misfortune, and ready to spread insanity on all sides, simply to increase its sales! Where, therefore, shall one find truth and justice, the hand endowed with logic and health that ought to be armed with the thunderbolt? Would Paris the conqueror, Paris the master of the nations, prove the justiciar, the saviour that men await! Ah! the anguish of believing oneself to be the master of the world's destinies, and to have to choose and decide."

He had risen again quivering, full of anger and fear that human wretchedness and baseness might prevent the realisation of his dream. And amidst the heavy silence which fell in the room, the little house suddenly resounded with a regular, continuous footfall.

"Ah, yes! to save men and love them, and wish them all to be equal and free," murmured Pierre, bitterly. "But just listen! Barthes's footsteps are answering you, as if from the everlasting dungeon into which his love of liberty has thrown him!"

However, Guillaume had already regained possession of himself, and coming back in a transport of his faith, he once more took Pierre in his loving, saving arms, like an elder brother who gives himself without restraint. "No, no, I'm wrong, I'm blaspheming," he exclaimed; "I wish you to be with me, full of hope and full of certainty. You must work, you must love, you must revive to life. Life alone can give you back peace and health."

Tears returned to the eyes of Pierre, who was penetrated to the heart by this ardent affection. "Ah! how I should like to believe you," he faltered, "and try to cure myself. True, I have already felt, as it were, a vague revival within me. And yet to live again, no, I cannot; the priest that I am is dead—a lifeless, an empty tomb."

He was shaken by so frightful a sob, that Guillaume could not restrain his own tears. And clasped in one another's arms the brothers wept on, their hearts full of the softest emotion in that home of their youth, whither the dear shadows of their parents ever returned, hovering around until they should be reconciled and restored to the peace of the earth. And all the darkness and mildness of the garden streamed in through the open window, while yonder, on the horizon, Paris had fallen asleep in the mysterious gloom, beneath a very peaceful sky which was studded with stars.

BOOK III.

I. THE RIVALS

ON the Wednesday preceding the mid-Lent Thursday, a great charity bazaar was held at the Duvillard mansion, for the benefit of the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour. The ground-floor reception rooms, three spacious Louis Seize salons, whose windows overlooked the bare and solemn courtyard, were given up to the swarm of purchasers, five thousand admission cards having been distributed among all sections of Parisian society. And the opening of the bombarded mansion in this wise to thousands of visitors was regarded as quite an event, a real manifestation, although some people whispered that the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy and the adjacent streets were guarded by quite an army of police agents.

The idea of the bazaar had come from Duvillard himself, and at his bidding his wife had resigned herself to all this worry for the benefit of the enterprise over which she presided with such distinguished nonchalance. On the previous day the "Globe" newspaper, inspired by its director Fonsegue, who was also the general manager of the asylum, had published a very fine article, announcing the bazaar, and pointing out how noble, and touching, and generous was the initiative of the Baroness, who still gave her time, her money, and even her home to charity, in spite of the abominable crime which had almost reduced that home to ashes. Was not this the magnanimous answer of the spheres above to the hateful passions of the spheres below? And was it not also a peremptory answer to those who accused the capitalists of doing nothing for the wage-earners, the disabled and broken-down sons of toil?

The drawing-room doors were to be opened at two o'clock, and would only close at seven, so that there would be five full hours for the sales. And at noon, when nothing was as yet ready downstairs, when workmen and women were still decorating the stalls, and sorting the goods amidst a final scramble, there was, as usual, a little friendly dejeuner, to which a few guests had been invited, in the private rooms on the first floor. However, a scarcely expected incident had given a finishing touch to the general excitement of the house: that very morning Sagnier had resumed his campaign of denunciation in the matter of the African Railway Lines. In a virulent article in the "Voix du Peuple," he had inquired if it were the intention of the authorities to beguile the public much longer with the story of that bomb and that Anarchist whom the police did not arrest. And this time, while undertaking to publish the names of the thirty-two corrupt senators and deputies in a very early issue, he had boldly named Minister Barroux as one who had pocketed a sum of 200,000 francs. Mege would therefore certainly revive his interpellation, which might become dangerous, now that Paris had been thrown into such a distracted state by terror of the Anarchists. At the same time it was said that Vignon and his party had resolved to turn circumstances to account, with the object of overthrowing the ministry. Thus a redoubtable crisis was inevitably at hand. Fortunately, the Chamber did not meet that Wednesday; in fact, it had adjourned until the Friday, with the view of making mid-Lent a holiday. And so forty-eight hours were left one to prepare for the onslaught.

Eve, that morning, seemed more gentle and languid than ever, rather pale too, with an expression of sorrowful anxiety in the depths of her beautiful eyes. She set it all down to the very great fatigue which the preparations for the bazaar had entailed on her. But the truth was that Gerard de Quinsac, after shunning any further assignation, had for five days past avoided her in an embarrassed way. Still she was convinced that she would see him that morning, and so she had again ventured to wear the white silk gown which made her look so much younger than she really was. At the same time, beautiful as she had remained, with her delicate skin, superb figure and noble and charming countenance, her six and forty years were asserting themselves in her blotchy complexion and the little creases which were appearing about her lips, eyelids and temples.

Camille, for her part, though her position as daughter of the house made it certain that she would attract much custom as a saleswoman, had obstinately persisted in wearing one of her usual dresses, a dark "carmelite" gown, an old woman's frock, as she herself called it with a cutting laugh. However, her long and wicked-looking face beamed with some secret delight; such an expression of wit and intelligence wreathing her thin lips and shining in her big eyes that one lost sight of her deformity and thought her almost pretty.

Eve experienced a first deception in the little blue and silver sitting-room, where, accompanied by her daughter, she awaited the arrival of her guests. General de Bozonnet, whom Gerard was to have brought with him, came in alone, explaining that Madame de Quinsac had felt rather poorly that morning, and that Gerard, like a good and dutiful son, had wished to remain with her. Still he would come to the bazaar directly after dejeuner. While the Baroness listened to the General, striving to hide her disappointment and her fear that she would now be unable to obtain any explanation from Gerard that day, Camille looked at her with eager, devouring eyes. And a certain covert instinct of the misfortune threatening her must at that moment have come to Eve, for in her turn she glanced at her daughter and turned pale as if with anxiety.

Then Princess Rosemonde de Harn swept in like a whirlwind. She also was to be one of the saleswomen at the stall chosen by the Baroness, who liked her for her very turbulence, the sudden gaiety which she generally brought with her. Gowned in fire-hued satin (red shot with yellow), looking very eccentric with her curly hair and thin boyish figure, she laughed and talked of an accident by which her carriage had almost been cut in halves. Then, as Baron Duvillard and Hyacinthe came in from their rooms, late as usual, she took possession of the young man and scolded him, for on the previous evening she had vainly waited for him till ten o'clock in the expectation that he would keep his promise to escort her to a tavern at Montmartre, where some horrible things were said to occur. Hyacinthe, looking very bored, quietly replied that he had been detained at a seance given by some adepts in the New Magic, in the course of which the soul of St. Theresa had descended from heaven to recite a love sonnet.

However, Fonsegue was now coming in with his wife, a tall, thin, silent and generally insignificant woman, whom he seldom took about with him. On this occasion he had been obliged to bring her, as she was one of the lady-patronesses of the asylum, and he himself was coming to lunch with the Duvillards in his capacity as general manager. To the superficial observer he looked quite as gay as usual; but he blinked nervously, and his first glance was a questioning one in the direction of Duvillard, as if he wished to know how the latter bore the fresh thrust directed at him by Sagnier. And when he saw the banker looking perfectly composed, as superb, as rubicund as usual, and chatting in a bantering way with Rosemonde, he also put on an easy air, like a gamester who had never lost but had always known how to compel good luck, even in hours of treachery. And by way of showing his unconstraint of mind he at once addressed the Baroness on managerial matters: "Have you now succeeded in seeing M. l'Abbe Froment for the affair of that old man Laveuve, whom he so warmly recommended to us? All the formalities have been gone through, you know, and he can be brought to us at once, as we have had a bed vacant for three days past."

"Yes, I know," replied Eve; "but I can't imagine what has become of Abbe Froment, for he hasn't given us a sign of life for a month past. However, I made up my mind to write to him yesterday, and beg him to come to the bazaar to-day. In this manner I shall be able to acquaint him with the good news myself."

"It was to leave you the pleasure of doing so," said Fonsegue, "that I refrained from sending him any official communication. He's a charming priest, is he not?"

"Oh! charming, we are very fond of him."

However, Duvillard now intervened to say that they need not wait for Duthil, as he had received a telegram from him stating that he was detained by sudden business. At this Fonsegue's anxiety returned, and he once more questioned the Baron with his eyes. Duvillard smiled, however, and reassured him in an undertone: "It's nothing serious. Merely a commission for me, about which he'll only be able to bring me an answer by-and-by." Then, taking Fonsegue on one side, he added: "By the way, don't forget to insert the paragraph I told you of."

"What paragraph? Oh! yes, the one about that soiree at which Silviane recited a piece of verse. Well, I wanted to speak to you about it. It worries me a little, on account of the excessive praise it contains."

Duvillard, but a moment before so full of serenity, with his lofty, conquering, disdainful mien, now suddenly became pale and agitated. "But I absolutely want it to be inserted, my dear fellow! You would place me in the greatest embarrassment if it were not to appear, for I promised Silviane that it should."

As he spoke his lips trembled, and a scared look came into his eyes, plainly revealing his dismay.

"All right, all right," said Fonsegue, secretly amused, and well pleased at this complicity. "As it's so serious the paragraph shall go in, I promise you."

The whole company was now present, since neither Gerard nor Duthil was to be expected. So they went into the dining-room amidst a final noise of hammering in the sale-rooms below. The meal proved somewhat of a scramble, and was on three occasions disturbed by female attendants, who came to explain difficulties and ask for orders. Doors were constantly slamming, and the very walls seemed to shake with the unusual bustle which filled the house. And feverish as they all were in the dining-room, they talked in desultory, haphazard fashion on all sorts of subjects, passing from a ball given at the Ministry of the Interior on the previous night, to the popular mid-Lent festival which would take place on the morrow, and ever reverting to the bazaar, the prices that had been given for the goods which would be on sale, the prices at which they might be sold, and the probable figure of the full receipts, all this being interspersed with strange anecdotes, witticisms and bursts of laughter. On the General mentioning magistrate Amadieu, Eve declared that she no longer dared to invite him to dejeuner, knowing how busy he was at the Palace of Justice. Still, she certainly hoped that he would come to the bazaar and contribute something. Then Fonsegue amused himself with teasing Princess Rosemonde about her fire-hued gown, in which, said he, she must already feel roasted by the flames of hell; a suggestion which secretly delighted her, as Satanism had now become her momentary passion. Meantime, Duvillard lavished the most gallant politeness on that silent creature, Madame Fonsegue, while Hyacinthe, in order to astonish even the Princess, explained in a few words how the New Magic could transform a chaste young man into a real angel. And Camille, who seemed very happy and very excited, from time to time darted a hot glance at her mother, whose anxiety and sadness increased as she found the other more and more aggressive, and apparently resolved upon open and merciless warfare.

At last, just as the dessert was coming to an end, the Baroness heard her daughter exclaim in a piercing, defiant voice: "Oh! don't talk to me of the old ladies who still seem to be playing with dolls, and paint themselves, and dress as if they were about to be confirmed! All such ogresses ought to retire from the scene! I hold them in horror!"

At this, Eve nervously rose from her seat, and exclaimed apologetically: "You must forgive me for hurrying you like this. But I'm afraid that we shan't have time to drink our coffee in peace."

The coffee was served in the little blue and silver sitting-room, where bloomed some lovely yellow roses, testifying to the Baroness's keen passion for flowers, which made the house an abode of perpetual spring. Duvillard and Fonsegue, however, carrying their cups of steaming coffee with them, at once went into the former's private room to smoke a cigar there and chat in freedom. As the door remained wide open, one could hear their gruff voices more or less distinctly. Meantime, General de Bozonnet, delighted to find in Madame Fonsegue a serious, submissive person, who listened without interrupting, began to tell her a very long story of an officer's wife who had followed her husband through every battle of the war of 1870. Then Hyacinthe, who took no coffee—contemptuously declaring it to be a beverage only fit for door-keepers—managed to rid himself of Rosemonde, who was sipping some kummel, in order to come and whisper to his sister: "I say, it was very stupid of you to taunt mamma in the way you did just now. I don't care a rap about it myself. But it ends by being noticed, and, I warn you candidly, it shows ill breeding."

Camille gazed at him fixedly with her black eyes. "Pray don't you meddle with my affairs," said she.

At this he felt frightened, scented a storm, and decided to take Rosemonde into the adjoining red drawing-room in order to show her a picture which his father had just purchased. And the General, on being called by him, likewise conducted Madame Fonsegue thither.

The mother and daughter then suddenly found themselves alone and face to face. Eve was leaning on a pier-table, as if overcome; and indeed, the least sorrow bore her down, so weak at heart she was, ever ready to weep in her naive and perfect egotism. Why was it that her daughter thus hated her, and did her utmost to disturb that last happy spell of love in which her heart lingered? She looked at Camille, grieved rather than irritated; and the unfortunate idea came to her of making a remark about her dress at the very moment when the girl was on the point of following the others into the larger drawing-room.

"It's quite wrong of you, my dear," said she, "to persist in dressing like an old woman. It doesn't improve you a bit."

As Eve spoke, her soft eyes, those of a courted and worshipped handsome woman, clearly expressed the compassion she felt for that ugly, deformed girl, whom she had never been able to regard as a daughter. Was it possible that she, with her sovereign beauty, that beauty which she herself had ever adored and nursed, making it her one care, her one religion—was it possible that she had given birth to such a graceless creature, with a dark, goatish profile, one shoulder higher than the other, and a pair of endless arms such as hunchbacks often have? All her grief and all her shame at having had such a child became apparent in the quivering of her voice.

Camille, however, had stopped short, as if struck in the face with a whip. Then she came back to her mother and the horrible explanation began with these simple words spoken in an undertone: "You consider that I dress badly? Well, you ought to have paid some attention to me, have seen that my gowns suited your taste, and have taught me your secret of looking beautiful!"

Eve, with her dislike of all painful feeling, all quarrelling and bitter words, was already regretting her attack. So she sought to make a retreat, particularly as time was flying and they would soon be expected downstairs: "Come, be quiet, and don't show your bad temper when all those people can hear us. I have loved you—"

But with a quiet yet terrible laugh Camille interrupted her. "You've loved me! Oh! my poor mamma, what a comical thing to say! Have you ever loved anybody? You want others to love you, but that's another matter. As for your child, any child, do you even know how it ought to be loved? You have always neglected me, thrust me on one side, deeming me so ugly, so unworthy of you! And besides, you have not had days and nights enough to love yourself! Oh! don't deny it, my poor mamma; but even now you're looking at me as if I were some loathsome monster that's in your way."

From that moment the abominable scene was bound to continue to the end. With their teeth set, their faces close together, the two women went on speaking in feverish whispers.

"Be quiet, Camille, I tell you! I will not allow such language!"

"But I won't be quiet when you do all you can to wound me. If it's wrong of me to dress like an old woman, perhaps another is rather ridiculous in dressing like a girl, like a bride."

"Like a bride? I don't understand you."

"Oh! yes, you do. However, I would have you know that everybody doesn't find me so ugly as you try to make them believe."

"If you look amiss, it is because you don't dress properly; that is all I said."

"I dress as I please, and no doubt I do so well enough, since I'm loved as I am."

"What, really! Does someone love you? Well, let him inform us of it and marry you."

"Yes—certainly, certainly! It will be a good riddance, won't it? And you'll have the pleasure of seeing me as a bride!"

Their voices were rising in spite of their efforts to restrain them. However, Camille paused and drew breath before hissing out the words: "Gerard is coming here to ask for my hand in a day or two."

Eve, livid, with wildly staring eyes, did not seem to understand. "Gerard? why do you tell me that?"

"Why, because it's Gerard who loves me and who is going to marry me! You drive me to extremities; you're for ever repeating that I'm ugly; you treat me like a monster whom nobody will ever care for. So I'm forced to defend myself and tell you the truth in order to prove to you that everybody is not of your opinion."

Silence fell; the frightful thing which had risen between them seemed to have arrested the quarrel. But there was neither mother nor daughter left there. They were simply two suffering, defiant rivals. Eve in her turn drew a long breath and glanced anxiously towards the adjoining room to ascertain if anyone were coming in or listening to them. And then in a tone of resolution she made answer:

"You cannot marry Gerard."

"Pray, why not?"

"Because I won't have it; because it's impossible."

"That isn't a reason; give me a reason."

"The reason is that the marriage is impossible that is all."

"No, no, I'll tell you the reason since you force me to it. The reason is that Gerard is your lover! But what does that matter, since I know it and am willing to take him all the same?"

And to this retort Camille's flaming eyes added the words: "And it is particularly on that account that I want him." All the long torture born of her infirmities, all her rage at having always seen her mother beautiful, courted and adored, was now stirring her and seeking vengeance in cruel triumph. At last then she was snatching from her rival the lover of whom she had so long been jealous!

"You wretched girl!" stammered Eve, wounded in the heart and almost sinking to the floor. "You don't know what you say or what you make me suffer."

However, she again had to pause, draw herself erect and smile; for Rosemonde hastened in from the adjoining room with the news that she was wanted downstairs. The doors were about to be opened, and it was necessary she should be at her stall. Yes, Eve answered, she would be down in another moment. Still, even as she spoke she leant more heavily on the pier-table behind her in order that she might not fall.

Hyacinthe had drawn near to his sister: "You know," said he, "it's simply idiotic to quarrel like that. You would do much better to come downstairs."

But Camille harshly dismissed him: "Just you go off, and take the others with you. It's quite as well that they shouldn't be about our ears."

Hyacinthe glanced at his mother, like one who knew the truth and considered the whole affair ridiculous. And then, vexed at seeing her so deficient in energy in dealing with that little pest, his sister, he shrugged his shoulders, and leaving them to their folly, conducted the others away. One could hear Rosemonde laughing as she went off below, while the General began to tell Madame Fonsegue another story as they descended the stairs together. However, at the moment when the mother and daughter at last fancied themselves alone once more, other voices reached their ears, those of Duvillard and Fonsegue, who were still near at hand. The Baron from his room might well overhear the dispute.

Eve felt that she ought to have gone off. But she had lacked the strength to do so; it had been a sheer impossibility for her after those words which had smote her like a buffet amidst her distress at the thought of losing her lover.

"Gerard cannot marry you," she said; "he does not love you."

"He does."

"You fancy it because he has good-naturedly shown some kindness to you, on seeing others pay you such little attention. But he does not love you."

"He does. He loves me first because I'm not such a fool as many others are, and particularly because I'm young."

This was a fresh wound for the Baroness; one inflicted with mocking cruelty in which rang out all the daughter's triumphant delight at seeing her mother's beauty at last ripening and waning. "Ah! my poor mamma, you no longer know what it is to be young. If I'm not beautiful, at all events I'm young; my eyes are clear and my lips are fresh. And my hair's so long too, and I've so much of it that it would suffice to gown me if I chose. You see, one's never ugly when one's young. Whereas, my poor mamma, everything is ended when one gets old. It's all very well for a woman to have been beautiful, and to strive to keep so, but in reality there's only ruin left, and shame and disgust."

She spoke these words in such a sharp, ferocious voice that each of them entered her mother's heart like a knife. Tears rose to the eyes of the wretched woman, again stricken in her bleeding wound. Ah! it was true, she remained without weapons against youth. And all her anguish came from the consciousness that she was growing old, from the feeling that love was departing from her now, that like a fruit she had ripened and fallen from the tree.

"But Gerard's mother will never let him marry you," she said.

"He will prevail on her; that's his concern. I've a dowry of two millions, and two millions can settle many things."

"Do you now want to libel him, and say that he's marrying you for your money?"

"No, indeed! Gerard's a very nice and honest fellow. He loves me and he's marrying me for myself. But, after all, he isn't rich; he still has no assured position, although he's thirty-six; and there may well be some advantage in a wife who brings you wealth as well as happiness. For, you hear, mamma, it's happiness I'm bringing him, real happiness, love that's shared and is certain of the future."

Once again their faces drew close together. The hateful scene, interrupted by sounds around them, postponed, and then resumed, was dragging on, becoming a perfect drama full of murderous violence, although they never shouted, but still spoke on in low and gasping voices. Neither gave way to the other, though at every moment they were liable to some surprise; for not only were all the doors open, so that the servants might come in, but the Baron's voice still rang out gaily, close at hand.

"He loves you, he loves you"—continued Eve. "That's what you say. But he never told you so."

"He has told me so twenty times; he repeats it every time that we are alone together!"

"Yes, just as one says it to a little girl by way of amusing her. But he has never told you that he meant to marry you."

"He told it me the last time he came. And it's settled. I'm simply waiting for him to get his mother's consent and make his formal offer."

"You lie, you lie, you wretched girl! You simply want to make me suffer, and you lie, you lie!"

Eve's grief at last burst forth in that cry of protest. She no longer knew that she was a mother, and was speaking to her daughter. The woman, the amorosa, alone remained in her, outraged and exasperated by a rival. And with a sob she confessed the truth: "It is I he loves! Only the last time I spoke to him, he swore to me—you hear me?—he swore upon his honour that he did not love you, and that he would never marry you!"

A faint, sharp laugh came from Camille. Then, with an air of derisive compassion, she replied: "Ah! my poor mamma, you really make me sorry for you! What a child you are! Yes, really, you are the child, not I. What! you who ought to have so much experience, you still allow yourself to be duped by a man's protests! That one really has no malice; and, indeed, that's why he swears whatever you want him to swear, just to please and quiet you, for at heart he's a bit of a coward."

"You lie, you lie!"

"But just think matters over. If he no longer comes here, if he didn't come to dejeuner this morning, it is simply because he's had enough of you. He has left you for good; just have the courage to realise it. Of course he's still polite and amiable, because he's a well-bred man, and doesn't know how to break off. The fact is that he takes pity on you."

"You lie, you lie!"

"Well, question him then. Have a frank explanation with him. Ask him his intentions in a friendly way. And then show some good nature yourself, and realise that if you care for him you ought to give him me at once in his own interest. Give him back his liberty, and you will soon see that I'm the one he loves."

"You lie, you lie! You wretched child, you only want to torture and kill me!"

Then, in her fury and distress, Eve remembered that she was the mother, and that it was for her to chastise that unworthy daughter. There was no stick near her, but from a basket of the yellow roses, whose powerful scent intoxicated both of them, she plucked a handful of blooms, with long and spiny stalks, and smote Camille across the face. A drop of blood appeared on the girl's left temple, near her eyelid.

But she sprang forward, flushed and maddened by this correction, with her hand raised and ready to strike back. "Take care, mother! I swear I'd beat you like a gipsy! And now just put this into your head: I mean to marry Gerard, and I will; and I'll take him from you, even if I have to raise a scandal, should you refuse to give him to me with good grace."

Eve, after her one act of angry vigour, had sunk into an armchair, overcome, distracted. And all the horror of quarrels, which sprang from her egotistical desire to be happy, caressed, flattered and adored, was returning to her. But Camille, still threatening, still unsatiated, showed her heart as it really was, her stern, black, unforgiving heart, intoxicated with cruelty. There came a moment of supreme silence, while Duvillard's gay voice again rang out in the adjoining room.

The mother was gently weeping, when Hyacinthe, coming upstairs at a run, swept into the little salon. He looked at the two women, and made a gesture of indulgent contempt. "Ah! you're no doubt satisfied now! But what did I tell you? It would have been much better for you to have come downstairs at once! Everybody is asking for you. It's all idiotic. I've come to fetch you."

Eve and Camille would not yet have followed him, perhaps, if Duvillard and Fonsegue had not at that moment come out of the former's room. Having finished their cigars they also spoke of going downstairs. And Eve had to rise and smile and show dry eyes, while Camille, standing before a looking-glass, arranged her hair, and stanched the little drop of blood that had gathered on her temple.

There was already quite a number of people below, in the three huge saloons adorned with tapestry and plants. The stalls had been draped with red silk, which set a gay, bright glow around the goods. And no ordinary bazaar could have put forth such a show, for there was something of everything among the articles of a thousand different kinds, from sketches by recognised masters, and the autographs of famous writers, down to socks and slippers and combs. The haphazard way in which things were laid out was in itself an attraction; and, in addition, there was a buffet, where the whitest of beautiful hands poured out champagne, and two lotteries, one for an organ and another for a pony-drawn village cart, the tickets for which were sold by a bevy of charming girls, who had scattered through the throng. As Duvillard had expected, however, the great success of the bazaar lay in the delightful little shiver which the beautiful ladies experienced as they passed through the entrance where the bomb had exploded. The rougher repairing work was finished, the walls and ceilings had been doctored, in part re-constructed. However, the painters had not yet come, and here and there the whiter stone and plaster work showed like fresh scars left by all the terrible gashes. It was with mingled anxiety and rapture that pretty heads emerged from the carriages which, arriving in a continuous stream, made the flagstones of the court re-echo. And in the three saloons, beside the stalls, there was no end to the lively chatter: "Ah! my dear, did you see all those marks? How frightful, how frightful! The whole house was almost blown up. And to think it might begin again while we are here! One really needs some courage to come, but then, that asylum is such a deserving institution, and money is badly wanted to build a new wing. And besides, those monsters will see that we are not frightened, whatever they do."

When the Baroness at last came down to her stall with Camille she found the saleswomen feverishly at work already under the direction of Princess Rosemonde, who on occasions of this kind evinced the greatest cunning and rapacity, robbing the customers in the most impudent fashion. "Ah! here you are," she exclaimed. "Beware of a number of higglers who have come to secure bargains. I know them! They watch for their opportunities, turn everything topsy-turvy and wait for us to lose our heads and forget prices, so as to pay even less than they would in a real shop. But I'll get good prices from them, you shall see!"

At this, Eve, who for her own part was a most incapable saleswoman, had to laugh with the others. And in a gentle voice she made a pretence of addressing certain recommendations to Camille, who listened with a smiling and most submissive air. In point of fact the wretched mother was sinking with emotion, particularly at the thought that she would have to remain there till seven o'clock, and suffer in secret before all those people, without possibility of relief. And thus it was almost like a respite when she suddenly perceived Abbe Froment sitting and waiting for her on a settee, covered with red velvet, near her stall. Her legs were failing her, so she took a place beside him.

"You received my letter then, Monsieur l'Abbe. I am glad that you have come, for I have some good news to give you, and wished to leave you the pleasure of imparting it to your protege, that man Laveuve, whom you so warmly recommended to me. Every formality has now been fulfilled, and you can bring him to the asylum to-morrow."

Pierre gazed at her in stupefaction. "Laveuve? Why, he is dead!"

In her turn she became astonished. "What, dead! But you never informed me of it! If I told you of all the trouble that has been taken, of all that had to be undone and done again, and the discussions and the papers and the writing! Are you quite sure that he is dead?"

"Oh! yes, he is dead. He has been dead a month."

"Dead a month! Well, we could not know; you yourself gave us no sign of life. Ah! mon Dieu! what a worry that he should be dead. We shall now be obliged to undo everything again!"

"He is dead, madame. It is true that I ought to have informed you of it. But that doesn't alter the fact—he is dead."

Dead! that word which kept on returning, the thought too, that for a month past she had been busying herself for a corpse, quite froze her, brought her to the very depths of despair, like an omen of the cold death into which she herself must soon descend, in the shroud of her last passion. And, meantime, Pierre, despite himself, smiled bitterly at the atrocious irony of it all. Ah! that lame and halting Charity, which proffers help when men are dead!

The priest still lingered on the settee when the Baroness rose. She had seen magistrate Amadieu hurriedly enter like one who just wished to show himself, purchase some trifle, and then return to the Palace of Justice. However, he was also perceived by little Massot, the "Globe" reporter, who was prowling round the stalls, and who at once bore down upon him, eager for information. And he hemmed him in and forthwith interviewed him respecting the affair of that mechanician Salvat, who was accused of having deposited the bomb at the entrance of the house. Was this simply an invention of the police, as some newspapers pretended? Or was it really correct? And if so, would Salvat soon be arrested? In self-defence Amadieu answered correctly enough that the affair did not as yet concern him, and would only come within his attributions, if Salvat should be arrested and the investigation placed in his hands. At the same time, however, the magistrate's pompous and affectedly shrewd manner suggested that he already knew everything to the smallest details, and that, had he chosen, he could have promised some great events for the morrow. A circle of ladies had gathered round him as he spoke, quite a number of pretty women feverish with curiosity, who jostled one another in their eagerness to hear that brigand tale which sent a little shiver coursing under their skins. However, Amadieu managed to slip off after paying Rosemonde twenty francs for a cigarette case, which was perhaps worth thirty sous.

Massot, on recognising Pierre, came up to shake hands with him. "Don't you agree with me, Monsieur l'Abbe, that Salvat must be a long way off by now if he's got good legs? Ah! the police will always make me laugh!"

However, Rosemonde brought Hyacinthe up to the journalist. "Monsieur Massot," said she, "you who go everywhere, I want you to be judge. That Chamber of Horrors at Montmartre, that tavern where Legras sings the 'Flowers of the Streets'—"

"Oh! a delightful spot, madame," interrupted Massot, "I wouldn't take even a gendarme there."

"No, don't jest, Monsieur Massot, I'm talking seriously. Isn't it quite allowable for a respectable woman to go there when she's accompanied by a gentleman?" And, without allowing the journalist time to answer her, she turned towards Hyacinthe: "There! you see that Monsieur Massot doesn't say no! You've got to take me there this evening, it's sworn, it's sworn."

Then she darted away to sell a packet of pins to an old lady, while the young man contented himself with remarking, in the voice of one who has no illusions left: "She's quite idiotic with her Chamber of Horrors!"

Massot philosophically shrugged his shoulders. It was only natural that a woman should want to amuse herself. And when Hyacinthe had gone off, passing with perverse contempt beside the lovely girls who were selling lottery tickets, the journalist ventured to murmur: "All the same, it would do that youngster good if a woman were to take him in hand."

Then, again addressing Pierre, he resumed: "Why, here comes Duthil! What did Sagnier mean this morning by saying that Duthil would sleep at Mazas to-night?"

In a great hurry apparently, and all smiles, Duthil was cutting his way through the crowd in order to join Duvillard and Fonsegue, who still stood talking near the Baroness's stall. And he waved his hand to them in a victorious way, to imply that he had succeeded in the delicate mission entrusted to him. This was nothing less than a bold manoeuvre to hasten Silviane's admission to the Comedie Francaise. The idea had occurred to her of making the Baron give a dinner at the Cafe Anglais in order that she might meet at it an influential critic, who, according to her statements, would compel the authorities to throw the doors wide open for her as soon as he should know her. However, it did not seem easy to secure the critic's presence, as he was noted for his sternness and grumbling disposition. And, indeed, after a first repulse, Duthil had for three days past been obliged to exert all his powers of diplomacy, and bring even the remotest influence into play. But he was radiant now, for he had conquered.

"It's for this evening, my dear Baron, at half-past seven," he exclaimed. "Ah! dash it all, I've had more trouble than I should have had to secure a concession vote!" Then he laughed with the pretty impudence of a man of pleasure, whom political conscientiousness did not trouble. And, indeed, his allusion to the fresh denunciations of the "Voix du Peuple" hugely amused him.

"Don't jest," muttered Fonsegue, who for his part wished to amuse himself by frightening the young deputy. "Things are going very badly!"

Duthil turned pale, and a vision of the police and Mazas rose before his eyes. In this wise sheer funk came over him from time to time. However, with his lack of all moral sense, he soon felt reassured and began to laugh. "Bah!" he retorted gaily, winking towards Duvillard, "the governor's there to pilot the barque!"

The Baron, who was extremely pleased, had pressed his hands, thanked him, and called him an obliging fellow. And now turning towards Fonsegue, he exclaimed: "I say, you must make one of us this evening. Oh! it's necessary. I want something imposing round Silviane. Duthil will represent the Chamber, you journalism, and I finance—" But he suddenly paused on seeing Gerard, who, with a somewhat grave expression, was leisurely picking his way through the sea of skirts. "Gerard, my friend," said the Baron, after beckoning to him, "I want you to do me a service." And forthwith he told him what was in question; how the influential critic had been prevailed upon to attend a dinner which would decide Silviane's future; and how it was the duty of all her friends to rally round her.

"But I can't," the young man answered in embarrassment. "I have to dine at home with my mother, who was rather poorly this morning."

"Oh! a sensible woman like your mother will readily understand that there are matters of exceptional importance. Go home and excuse yourself. Tell her some story, tell her that a friend's happiness is in question." And as Gerard began to weaken, Duvillard added: "The fact is, that I really want you, my dear fellow; I must have a society man. Society, you know, is a great force in theatrical matters; and if Silviane has society with her, her triumph is certain."

Gerard promised, and then chatted for a moment with his uncle, General de Bozonnet, who was quite enlivened by that throng of women, among whom he had been carried hither and thither like an old rudderless ship. After acknowledging the amiability with which Madame Fonsegue had listened to his stories, by purchasing an autograph of Monseigneur Martha from her for a hundred francs, he had quite lost himself amid the bevy of girls who had passed him on, one to another. And now, on his return from them, he had his hands full of lottery tickets: "Ah! my fine fellow," said he, "I don't advise you to venture among all those young persons. You would have to part with your last copper. But, just look! there's Mademoiselle Camille beckoning to you!"

Camille, indeed, from the moment she had perceived Gerard, had been smiling at him and awaiting his approach. And when their glances met he was obliged to go to her, although, at the same moment, he felt that Eve's despairing and entreating eyes were fixed upon him. The girl, who fully realised that her mother was watching her, at once made a marked display of amiability, profiting by the license which charitable fervour authorised, to slip a variety of little articles into the young man's pockets, and then place others in his hands, which she pressed within her own, showing the while all the sparkle of youth, indulging in fresh, merry laughter, which fairly tortured her rival.

So extreme was Eve's suffering, that she wished to intervene and part them. But it so chanced that Pierre barred her way, for he wished to submit an idea to her before leaving the bazaar. "Madame," said he, "since that man Laveuve is dead, and you have taken so much trouble with regard to the bed which you now have vacant, will you be so good as to keep it vacant until I have seen our venerable friend, Abbe Rose? I am to see him this evening, and he knows so many cases of want, and would be so glad to relieve one of them, and bring you some poor protege of his."

"Yes, certainly," stammered the Baroness, "I shall be very happy,—I will wait a little, as you desire,—of course, of course, Monsieur l'Abbe."

She was trembling all over; she no longer knew what she was saying; and, unable to conquer her passion, she turned aside from the priest, unaware even that he was still there, when Gerard, yielding to the dolorous entreaty of her eyes, at last managed to escape from Camille and join her.

"What a stranger you are becoming, my friend!" she said aloud, with a forced smile. "One never sees you now."

"Why, I have been poorly," he replied, in his amiable way. "Yes, I assure you I have been ailing a little."

He, ailing! She looked at him with maternal anxiety, quite upset. And, indeed, however proud and lofty his figure, his handsome regular face did seem to her paler than usual. It was as if the nobility of the facade had, in some degree, ceased to hide the irreparable dilapidation within. And given his real good nature, it must be true that he suffered—suffered by reason of his useless, wasted life, by reason of all the money he cost his impoverished mother, and of the needs that were at last driving him to marry that wealthy deformed girl, whom at first he had simply pitied. And so weak did he seem to Eve, so like a piece of wreckage tossed hither and thither by a tempest, that, at the risk of being overheard by the throng, she let her heart flow forth in a low but ardent, entreating murmur: "If you suffer, ah! what sufferings are mine!—Gerard, we must see one another, I will have it so."

"No, I beg you, let us wait," he stammered in embarrassment.

"It must be, Gerard; Camille has told me your plans. You cannot refuse to see me. I insist on it."

He made yet another attempt to escape the cruel explanation. "But it's impossible at the usual place," he answered, quivering. "The address is known."

"Then to-morrow, at four o'clock, at that little restaurant in the Bois where we have met before."

He had to promise, and they parted. Camille had just turned her head and was looking at them. Moreover, quite a number of women had besieged the stall; and the Baroness began to attend to them with the air of a ripe and nonchalant goddess, while Gerard rejoined Duvillard, Fonsegue and Duthil, who were quite excited at the prospect of their dinner that evening.

Pierre had heard a part of the conversation between Gerard and the Baroness. He knew what skeletons the house concealed, what physiological and moral torture and wretchedness lay beneath all the dazzling wealth and power. There was here an envenomed, bleeding sore, ever spreading, a cancer eating into father, mother, daughter and son, who one and all had thrown social bonds aside. However, the priest made his way out of the salons, half stifling amidst the throng of lady-purchasers who were making quite a triumph of the bazaar. And yonder, in the depths of the gloom, he could picture Salvat still running and running on; while the corpse of Laveuve seemed to him like a buffet of atrocious irony dealt to noisy and delusive charity.

II. SPIRIT AND FLESH

How delightful was the quietude of the little ground-floor overlooking a strip of garden in the Rue Cortot, where good Abbe Rose resided! Hereabouts there was not even a rumble of wheels, or an echo of the panting breath of Paris, which one heard on the other side of the height of Montmartre. The deep silence and sleepy peacefulness were suggestive of some distant provincial town.

Seven o'clock had struck, the dusk had gathered slowly, and Pierre was in the humble dining-room, waiting for the femme-de-menage to place the soup upon the table. Abbe Rose, anxious at having seen so little of him for a month past, had written, asking him to come to dinner, in order that they might have a quiet chat concerning their affairs. From time to time Pierre still gave his friend money for charitable purposes; in fact, ever since the days of the asylum in the Rue de Charonne, they had had accounts together, which they periodically liquidated. So that evening after dinner they were to talk of it all, and see if they could not do even more than they had hitherto done. The good old priest was quite radiant at the thought of the peaceful evening which he was about to spend in attending to the affairs of his beloved poor; for therein lay his only amusement, the sole pleasure to which he persistently and passionately returned, in spite of all the worries that his inconsiderate charity had already so often brought him.

Glad to be able to procure his friend this pleasure, Pierre, on his side, grew calmer, and found relief and momentary repose in sharing the other's simple repast and yielding to all the kindliness around him, far from his usual worries. He remembered the vacant bed at the Asylum, which Baroness Duvillard had promised to keep in reserve until he should have asked Abbe Rose if he knew of any case of destitution particularly worthy of interest; and so before sitting down to table he spoke of the matter.

"Destitution worthy of interest!" replied Abbe Rose, "ah! my dear child, every case is worthy of interest. And when it's a question of old toilers without work the only trouble is that of selection, the anguish of choosing one and leaving so many others in distress." Nevertheless, painful though his scruples were, he strove to think and come to some decision. "I know the case which will suit you," he said at last. "It's certainly one of the greatest suffering and wretchedness; and, so humble a one, too—an old carpenter of seventy-five, who has been living on public charity during the eight or ten years that he has been unable to find work. I don't know his name, everybody calls him 'the big Old'un.' There are times when he does not come to my Saturday distributions for weeks together. We shall have to look for him at once. I think that he sleeps at the Night Refuge in the Rue d'Orsel when lack of room there doesn't force him to spend the night crouching behind some palings. Shall we go down the Rue d'Orsel this evening?"

Abbe Rose's eyes beamed brightly as he spoke, for this proposal of his signified a great debauch, the tasting of forbidden fruit. He had been reproached so often and so roughly with his visits to those who had fallen to the deepest want and misery, that in spite of his overflowing, apostolic compassion, he now scarcely dared to go near them. However, he continued: "Is it agreed, my child? Only this once? Besides, it is our only means of finding the big Old'un. You won't have to stop with me later than eleven. And I should so like to show you all that! You will see what terrible sufferings there are! And perhaps we may be fortunate enough to relieve some poor creature or other."

Pierre smiled at the juvenile ardour displayed by this old man with snowy hair. "It's agreed, my dear Abbe," he responded, "I shall be very pleased to spend my whole evening with you, for I feel it will do me good to follow you once more on one of those rambles which used to fill our hearts with grief and joy."

At this moment the servant brought in the soup; however, just as the two priests were taking their seats a discreet ring was heard, and when Abbe Rose learnt that the visitor was a neighbour, Madame Mathis, who had come for an answer, he gave orders that she should be shown in.

"This poor woman," he explained to Pierre, "needed an advance of ten francs to get a mattress out of pawn; and I didn't have the money by me at the time. But I've since procured it. She lives in the house, you know, in silent poverty, on so small an income that it hardly keeps her in bread."

"But hasn't she a big son of twenty?" asked Pierre, suddenly remembering the young man he had seen at Salvat's.

"Yes, yes. Her parents, I believe, were rich people in the provinces. I've been told that she married a music master, who gave her lessons, at Nantes; and who ran away with her and brought her to Paris, where he died. It was quite a doleful love-story. By selling the furniture and realising every little thing she possessed, she scraped together an income of about two thousand francs a year, with which she was able to send her son to college and live decently herself. But a fresh blow fell on her: she lost the greater part of her little fortune, which was invested in doubtful securities. So now her income amounts at the utmost to eight hundred francs; two hundred of which she has to expend in rent. For all her other wants she has to be content with fifty francs a month. About eighteen months ago her son left her so as not to be a burden on her, and he is trying to earn his living somewhere, but without success, I believe."

Madame Mathis, a short, dark woman, with a sad, gentle, retiring face, came in. Invariably clad in the same black gown, she showed all the anxious timidity of a poor creature whom the storms of life perpetually assailed. When Abbe Rose had handed her the ten francs discreetly wrapped in paper, she blushed and thanked him, promising to pay him back as soon as she received her month's money, for she was not a beggar and did not wish to encroach on the share of those who starved.

"And your son, Victor, has he found any employment?" asked the old priest.

She hesitated, ignorant as she was of what her son might be doing, for now she did not see him for weeks together. And finally, she contented herself with answering: "He has a good heart, he is very fond of me. It is a great misfortune that we should have been ruined before he could enter the Ecole Normale. It was impossible for him to prepare for the examination. But at the Lycee he was such a diligent and intelligent pupil!"

"You lost your husband when your son was ten years old, did you not?" said Abbe Rose.

At this she blushed again, thinking that her husband's story was known to the two priests. "Yes, my poor husband never had any luck," she said. "His difficulties embittered and excited his mind, and he died in prison. He was sent there through a disturbance at a public meeting, when he had the misfortune to wound a police officer. He had also fought at the time of the Commune. And yet he was a very gentle man and extremely fond of me."

Tears had risen to her eyes; and Abbe Rose, much touched, dismissed her: "Well, let us hope that your son will give you satisfaction, and be able to repay you for all you have done for him."

With a gesture of infinite sorrow, Madame Mathis discreetly withdrew. She was quite ignorant of her son's doings, but fate had pursued her so relentlessly that she ever trembled.

"I don't think that the poor woman has much to expect from her son," said Pierre, when she had gone. "I only saw him once, but the gleam in his eyes was as harsh and trenchant as that of a knife."

"Do you think so?" the old priest exclaimed, with his kindly naivete. "Well, he seemed to me very polite, perhaps a trifle eager to enjoy life; but then, all the young folks are impatient nowadays. Come, let us sit down to table, for the soup will be cold."

Almost at the same hour, on the other side of Paris, night had in like fashion slowly fallen in the drawing-room of the Countess de Quinsac, on the dismal, silent ground-floor of an old mansion in the Rue St. Dominique. The Countess was there, alone with her faithful friend, the Marquis de Morigny, she on one side, and he on the other side of the chimney-piece, where the last embers of the wood fire were dying out. The servant had not yet brought the lamp, and the Countess refrained from ringing, finding some relief from her anxiety in the falling darkness, which hid from view all the unconfessed thoughts that she was afraid of showing on her weary face. And it was only now, before that dim hearth, and in that black room, where never a sound of wheels disturbed the silence of the slumberous past, that she dared to speak.

"Yes, my friend," she said, "I am not satisfied with Gerard's health. You will see him yourself, for he promised to come home early and dine with me. Oh! I'm well aware that he looks big and strong; but to know him properly one must have nursed and watched him as I have done! What trouble I had to rear him! In reality he is at the mercy of any petty ailment. His slightest complaint becomes serious illness. And the life he leads does not conduce to good health."

She paused and sighed, hesitating to carry her confession further.

"He leads the life he can," slowly responded the Marquis de Morigny, of whose delicate profile, and lofty yet loving bearing, little could be seen in the gloom. "As he was unable to endure military life, and as even the fatigues of diplomacy frighten you, what would you have him do? He can only live apart pending the final collapse, while this abominable Republic is dragging France to the grave."

"No doubt, my friend. And yet it is just that idle life which frightens me. He is losing in it all that was good and healthy in him. I don't refer merely to the liaisons which we have had to tolerate. The last one, which I found so much difficulty in countenancing at the outset, so contrary did it seem to all my ideas and beliefs, has since seemed to me to exercise almost a good influence. Only he is now entering his thirty-sixth year, and can he continue living in this fashion without object or duties? If he is ailing it is perhaps precisely because he does nothing, holds no position, and serves no purpose." Her voice again quavered. "And then, my friend, since you force me to tell you everything, I must own that I am not in good health myself. I have had several fainting fits of late, and have consulted a doctor. The truth is, that I may go off at any moment."

With a quiver, Morigny leant forward in the still deepening gloom, and wished to take hold of her hands. "You! what, am I to lose you, my last affection!" he faltered, "I who have seen the old world I belong to crumble away, I who only live in the hope that you at all events will still be here to close my eyes!"

But she begged him not to increase her grief: "No, no, don't take my hands, don't kiss them! Remain there in the shade, where I can scarcely see you.... We have loved one another so long without aught to cause shame or regret; and that will prove our strength—our divine strength—till we reach the grave.... And if you were to touch me, if I were to feel you too near me I could not finish, for I have not done so yet."

As soon as he had relapsed into silence and immobility, she continued: "If I were to die to-morrow, Gerard would not even find here the little fortune which he still fancies is in my hands. The dear child has often cost me large sums of money without apparently being conscious of it. I ought to have been more severe, more prudent. But what would you have? Ruin is at hand. I have always been too weak a mother. And do you now understand in what anguish I live? I ever have the thought that if I die Gerard will not even possess enough to live on, for he is incapable of effecting the miracle which I renew each day, in order to keep the house up on a decent footing.... Ah! I know him, so supine, so sickly, in spite of his proud bearing, unable to do anything, even conduct himself. And so what will become of him; will he not fall into the most dire distress?"

Then her tears flowed freely, her heart opened and bled, for she foresaw what must happen after her death: the collapse of her race and of a whole world in the person of that big child. And the Marquis, still motionless but distracted, feeling that he had no title to offer his own fortune, suddenly understood her, foresaw in what disgrace this fresh disaster would culminate.

"Ah! my poor friend!" he said at last in a voice trembling with revolt and grief. "So you have agreed to that marriage—yes, that abominable marriage with that woman's daughter! Yet you swore it should never be! You would rather witness the collapse of everything, you said. And now you are consenting, I can feel it!"

She still wept on in that black, silent drawing-room before the chimney-piece where the fire had died out. Did not Gerard's marriage to Camille mean a happy ending for herself, a certainty of leaving her son wealthy, loved, and seated at the banquet of life? However, a last feeling of rebellion arose within her.

"No, no," she exclaimed, "I don't consent, I swear to you that I don't consent as yet. I am fighting with my whole strength, waging an incessant battle, the torture of which you cannot imagine."

Then, in all sincerity, she foresaw the likelihood of defeat. "If I should some day give way, my friend, at all events believe that I feel, as fully as you do, how abominable such a marriage must be. It will be the end of our race and our honour!"

This cry profoundly stirred the Marquis, and he was unable to add a word. Haughty and uncompromising Catholic and Royalist that he was, he, on his side also, expected nothing but the supreme collapse. Yet how heartrending was the thought that this noble woman, so dearly and so purely loved, would prove one of the most mournful victims of the catastrophe! And in the shrouding gloom he found courage to kneel before her, take her hand, and kiss it.

Just as the servant was at last bringing a lighted lamp Gerard made his appearance. The past-century charm of the old Louis XVI. drawing-room, with its pale woodwork, again became apparent in the soft light. In order that his mother might not be over-saddened by his failure to dine with her that evening the young man had put on an air of brisk gaiety; and when he had explained that some friends were waiting for him, she at once released him from his promise, happy as she felt at seeing him so merry.

"Go, go, my dear boy," said she, "but mind you do not tire yourself too much.... I am going to keep Morigny; and the General and Larombiere are coming at nine o'clock. So be easy, I shall have someone with me to keep me from fretting and feeling lonely."

In this wise Gerard after sitting down for a moment and chatting with the Marquis was able to slip away, dress, and betake himself to the Cafe Anglais.

When he reached it women in fur cloaks were already climbing the stairs, fashionable and merry parties were filling the private rooms, the electric lights shone brilliantly, and the walls were already vibrating with the stir of pleasure and debauchery. In the room which Baron Duvillard had engaged the young man found an extraordinary display, the most superb flowers, and a profusion of plate and crystal as for a royal gala. The pomp with which the six covers were laid called forth a smile; while the bill of fare and the wine list promised marvels, all the rarest and most expensive things that could be selected.

"It's stylish, isn't it?" exclaimed Silviane, who was already there with Duvillard, Fonsegue and Duthil. "I just wanted to make your influential critic open his eyes a little! When one treats a journalist to such a dinner as this, he has got to be amiable, hasn't he?"

In her desire to conquer, it had occurred to the young woman to array herself in the most amazing fashion. Her gown of yellow satin, covered with old Alencon lace, was cut low at the neck; and she had put on all her diamonds, a necklace, a diadem, shoulder-knots, bracelets and rings. With her candid, girlish face, she looked like some Virgin in a missal, a Queen-Virgin, laden with the offerings of all Christendom.

"Well, well, you look so pretty," said Gerard, who sometimes jested with her, "that I think it will do all the same."

"Ah!" she replied with equanimity. "You consider me a bourgeoise, I see. Your opinion is that a simple little dinner and a modest gown would have shown better taste. But ah! my dear fellow, you don't know the way to get round men!"

Duvillard signified his approval, for he was delighted to be able to show her in all her glory, adorned like an idol. Fonsegue, for his part, talked of diamonds, saying that they were now doubtful investments, as the day when they would become articles of current manufacture was fast approaching, thanks to the electrical furnace and other inventions. Meantime Duthil, with an air of ecstasy and the dainty gestures of a lady's maid, hovered around the young woman, either smoothing a rebellious bow or arranging some fold of her lace.

"But I say," resumed Silviane, "your critic seems to be an ill-bred man, for he's keeping us waiting."

Indeed, the critic arrived a quarter of an hour late, and while apologising, he expressed his regret that he should be obliged to leave at half-past nine, for he was absolutely compelled to put in an appearance at a little theatre in the Rue Pigalle. He was a big fellow of fifty with broad shoulders and a full, bearded face. His most disagreeable characteristic was the narrow dogmatic pedantry which he had acquired at the Ecole Normale, and had never since been able to shake off. All his herculean efforts to be sceptical and frivolous, and the twenty years he had spent in Paris mingling with every section of society, had failed to rid him of it. Magister he was, and magister he remained, even in his most strenuous flights of imagination and audacity. From the moment of his arrival he tried to show himself enraptured with Silviane. Naturally enough, he already knew her by sight, and had even criticised her on one occasion in five or six contemptuous lines. However, the sight of her there, in full beauty, clad like a queen, and presented by four influential protectors, filled him with emotion; and he was struck with the idea that nothing would be more Parisian and less pedantic than to assert she had some talent and give her his support.

They had seated themselves at table, and the repast proved a magnificent one, the service ever prompt and assiduous, an attendant being allotted to each diner. While the flowers scattered their perfumes through the room, and the plate and crystal glittered on the snowy cloth, an abundance of delicious and unexpected dishes were handed round—a sturgeon from Russia, prohibited game, truffles as big as eggs, and hothouse vegetables and fruit as full of flavour as if they had been naturally matured. It was money flung out of window, simply for the pleasure of wasting more than other people, and eating what they could not procure. The influential critic, though he displayed the ease of a man accustomed to every sort of festivity, really felt astonished at it all, and became servile, promising his support, and pledging himself far more than he really wished to. Moreover, he showed himself very gay, found some witty remarks to repeat, and even some rather ribald jests. But when the champagne appeared after the roast and the grand burgundies, his over-excitement brought him back perforce to his real nature. The conversation had now turned on Corneille's "Polyeucte" and the part of "Pauline," in which Silviane wished to make her debut at the Comedie Francaise. This extraordinary caprice, which had quite revolted the influential critic a week previously, now seemed to him simply a bold enterprise in which the young woman might even prove victorious if she consented to listen to his advice. And, once started, he delivered quite a lecture on the past, asserting that no actress had ever yet understood it properly, for at the outset Pauline was simply a well-meaning little creature of the middle classes, and the beauty of her conversion at the finish arose from the working of a miracle, a stroke of heavenly grace which endowed her with something divine. This was not the opinion of Silviane, who from the first lines regarded Pauline as the ideal heroine of some symbolical legend. However, as the critic talked on and on, she had to feign approval; and he was delighted at finding her so beautiful and docile beneath his ferule. At last, as ten o'clock was striking, he rose and tore out of the hot and reeking room in order to do his work.

"Ah! my dears," cried Silviane, "he's a nice bore is that critic of yours! What a fool he is with his idea of Pauline being a little bourgeoise! I would have given him a fine dressing if it weren't for the fact that I have some need of him. Ah! no, it's too idiotic! Pour me out a glass of champagne. I want something to set me right after all that!"

The fete then took quite an intimate turn between the four men who remained and that bare-armed, bare-breasted girl, covered with diamonds; while from the neighbouring passages and rooms came bursts of laughter and sounds of kissing, all the stir and mirth of the debauchery now filling the house. And beneath the windows torrents of vehicles and pedestrians streamed along the Boulevards where reigned the wild fever of pleasure and harlotry.

"No, don't open it, or I shall catch cold!" resumed Silviane, addressing Fonsegue as he stepped towards the window. "Are you so very warm, then? I'm just comfortable.... But, Duvillard, my good fellow, please order some more champagne. It's wonderful what a thirst your critic has given me!"

Amidst the blinding glare of the lamps and the perfume of the flowers and wines, one almost stifled in the room. And Silviane was seized with an irresistible desire for a spree, a desire to tipple and amuse herself in some vulgar fashion, as in her bygone days. A few glasses of champagne brought her to full pitch, and she showed the boldest and giddiest gaiety. The others, who had never before seen her so lively, began on their own side to feel amused. As Fonsegue was obliged to go to his office she embraced him "like a daughter," as she expressed it. However, on remaining alone with the others she indulged in great freedom of speech, which became more and more marked as her intoxication increased. And to the class of men with whom she consorted her great attraction, as she was well aware, lay in the circumstance that with her virginal countenance and her air of ideal purity was coupled the most monstrous perversity ever displayed by any shameless woman. Despite her innocent blue eyes and lily-like candour, she would give rein, particularly when she was drunk, to the most diabolical of fancies.

Duvillard let her drink on, but she guessed his thoughts, like she guessed those of the others, and simply smiled while concocting impossible stories and descanting fantastically in the language of the gutter. And seeing her there in her dazzling gown fit for a queenly virgin, and hearing her pour forth the vilest words, they thought her most wonderfully droll. However, when she had drunk as much champagne as she cared for and was half crazy, a novel idea suddenly occurred to her.

"I say, my children," she exclaimed, "we are surely not going to stop here. It's so precious slow! You shall take me to the Chamber of Horrors—eh? just to finish the evening. I want to hear Legras sing 'La Chemise,' that song which all Paris is running to hear him sing."

But Duvillard indignantly rebelled: "Oh! no," said he; "most certainly not. It's a vile song and I'll never take you to such an abominable place."

But she did not appear to hear him. She had already staggered to her feet and was arranging her hair before a looking-glass. "I used to live at Montmartre," she said, "and it'll amuse me to go back there. And, besides, I want to know if this Legras is a Legras that I knew, oh! ever so long ago! Come, up you get, and let us be off!"

"But, my dear girl," pleaded Duvillard, "we can't take you into that den dressed as you are! Just fancy your entering that place in a low-necked gown and covered with diamonds! Why everyone would jeer at us! Come, Gerard, just tell her to be a little reasonable."

Gerard, equally offended by the idea of such a freak, was quite willing to intervene. But she closed his mouth with her gloved hand and repeated with the gay obstinacy of intoxication: "Pooh, it will be all the more amusing if they do jeer at us! Come, let us be off, let us be off, quick!"

Thereupon Duthil, who had been listening with a smile and the air of a man of pleasure whom nothing astonishes or displeases, gallantly took her part. "But, my dear Baron, everybody goes to the Chamber of Horrors," said he. "Why, I myself have taken the noblest ladies there, and precisely to hear that song of Legras, which is no worse than anything else."

"Ah! you hear what Duthil says!" cried Silviane. "He's a deputy, he is, and he wouldn't go there if he thought it would compromise his honorability!"

Then, as Duvillard still struggled on in despair at the idea of exhibiting himself with her in such a scandalous place, she became all the merrier: "Well, my dear fellow, please yourself. I don't need you. You and Gerard can go home if you like. But I'm going to Montmartre with Duthil. You'll take charge of me, won't you, Duthil, eh?"

Still, the Baron was in no wise disposed to let the evening finish in that fashion. The mere idea of it gave him a shock, and he had to resign himself to the girl's stubborn caprice. The only consolation he could think of was to secure Gerard's presence, for the young man, with some lingering sense of decorum, still obstinately refused to make one of the party. So the Baron took his hands and detained him, repeating in urgent tones that he begged him to come as an essential mark of friendship. And at last the wife's lover and daughter's suitor had to give way to the man who was the former's husband and the latter's father.

Silviane was immensely amused by it all, and, indiscreetly thee-ing and thou-ing Gerard, suggested that he at least owed the Baron some little compliance with his wishes.

Duvillard pretended not to hear her. He was listening to Duthil, who told him that there was a sort of box in a corner of the Chamber of Horrors, in which one could in some measure conceal oneself. And then, as Silviane's carriage—a large closed landau, whose coachman, a sturdy, handsome fellow, sat waiting impassively on his box—was down below, they started off.

The Chamber of Horrors was installed in premises on the Boulevard de Rochechouart, formerly occupied by a cafe whose proprietor had become bankrupt.* It was a suffocating place, narrow, irregular, with all sorts of twists, turns, and secluded nooks, and a low and smoky ceiling. And nothing could have been more rudimentary than its decorations. The walls had simply been placarded with posters of violent hues, some of the crudest character, showing the barest of female figures. Behind a piano at one end there was a little platform reached by a curtained doorway. For the rest, one simply found a number of bare wooden forms set alongside the veriest pot-house tables, on which the glasses containing various beverages left round and sticky marks. There was no luxury, no artistic feature, no cleanliness even. Globeless gas burners flared freely, heating a dense mist compounded of tobacco smoke and human breath. Perspiring, apoplectical faces could be perceived through this veil, and an acrid odour increased the intoxication of the assembly, which excited itself with louder and louder shouts at each fresh song. It had been sufficient for an enterprising fellow to set up these boards, bring out Legras, accompanied by two or three girls, make him sing his frantic and abominable songs, and in two or three evenings overwhelming success had come, all Paris being enticed and flocking to the place, which for ten years or so had failed to pay as a mere cafe, where by way of amusement petty cits had been simply allowed their daily games at dominoes.

* Those who know Paris will identify the site selected by M. Zola
as that where 'Colonel' Lisbonne of the Commune installed his
den the 'Bagne' some years ago. Nevertheless, such places as the
'Chamber of Horrors' now abound in the neighbourhood of
Montmartre, and it must be admitted that whilst they are
frequented by certain classes of Frenchmen they owe much of
their success in a pecuniary sense to the patronage of
foreigners. Among the latter, Englishmen are particularly
conspicuous.—Trans.

And the change had been caused by the passion for filth, the irresistible attraction exercised by all that brought opprobrium and disgust. The Paris of enjoyment, the bourgeoisie which held all wealth and power, which would relinquish naught of either, though it was surfeited and gradually wearying of both, simply hastened to the place in order that obscenity and insult might be flung in its face. Hypnotised, as it were, while staggering to its fall, it felt a need of being spat upon. And what a frightful symptom there lay in it all: those condemned ones rushing upon dirt of their own accord, voluntarily hastening their own decomposition by that unquenchable thirst for the vile, which attracted men, reputed to be grave and upright, and lovely women of the most perfect grace and luxury, to all the beastliness of that low den!

At one of the tables nearest the stage sat little Princess Rosemonde de Harn, with wild eyes and quivering nostrils, delighted as she felt at now being able to satisfy her curiosity regarding the depths of Paris life. Young Hyacinthe had resigned himself to the task of bringing her, and, correctly buttoned up in his long frock-coat, he was indulgent enough to refrain from any marked expression of boredom. At a neighbouring table they had found a shadowy Spaniard of their acquaintance, a so-called Bourse jobber, Bergaz, who had been introduced to the Princess by Janzen, and usually attended her entertainments. They virtually knew nothing about him, not even if he really earned at the Bourse all the money which he sometimes spent so lavishly, and which enabled him to dress with affected elegance. His slim, lofty figure was not without a certain air of distinction, but his red lips spoke of strong passions and his bright eyes were those of a beast of prey. That evening he had two young fellows with him, one Rossi, a short, swarthy Italian, who had come to Paris as a painter's model, and had soon glided into the lazy life of certain disreputable callings, and the other, Sanfaute, a born Parisian blackguard, a pale, beardless, vicious and impudent stripling of La Chapelle, whose long curly hair fell down upon either side of his bony cheeks.

"Oh! pray now!" feverishly said Rosemonde to Bergaz; "as you seem to know all these horrid people, just show me some of the celebrities. Aren't there some thieves and murderers among them?"

He laughed shrilly, and in a bantering way replied: "But you know these people well enough, madame. That pretty, pink, delicate-looking woman over yonder is an American lady, the wife of a consul, whom, I believe, you receive at your house. That other on the right, that tall brunette who shows such queenly dignity, is a Countess, whose carriage passes yours every day in the Bois. And the thin one yonder, whose eyes glitter like those of a she-wolf, is the particular friend of a high official, who is well known for his reputation of austerity."

But she stopped him, in vexation: "I know, I know. But the others, those of the lower classes, those whom one comes to see."

Then she went on asking questions, and seeking for terrifying and mysterious countenances. At last, two men seated in a corner ended by attracting her attention; one of them a very young fellow with a pale, pinched face, and the other an ageless individual who, besides being buttoned up to his neck in an old coat, had pulled his cap so low over his eyes, that one saw little of his face beyond the beard which fringed it. Before these two stood a couple of mugs of beer, which they drank slowly and in silence.

"You are making a great mistake, my dear," said Hyacinthe with a frank laugh, "if you are looking for brigands in disguise. That poor fellow with the pale face, who surely doesn't have food to eat every day, was my schoolfellow at Condorcet!"

Bergaz expressed his amazement. "What! you knew Mathis at Condorcet! After all, though, you're right, he received a college education. Ah! and so you knew him. A very remarkable young man he is, though want is throttling him. But, I say, the other one, his companion, you don't know him?"

Hyacinthe, after looking at the man with the cap-hidden face, was already shaking his head, when Bergaz suddenly gave him a nudge as a signal to keep quiet, and by way of explanation he muttered: "Hush! Here's Raphanel. I've been distrusting him for some time past. Whenever he appears anywhere, the police is not far off."

Raphanel was another of the vague, mysterious Anarchists whom Janzen had presented to the Princess by way of satisfying her momentary passion for revolutionism. This one, though he was a fat, gay, little man, with a doll-like face and childish nose, which almost disappeared between his puffy cheeks, had the reputation of being a thorough desperado; and at public meetings he certainly shouted for fire and murder with all his lungs. Still, although he had already been compromised in various affairs, he had invariably managed to save his own bacon, whilst his companions were kept under lock and key; and this they were now beginning to think somewhat singular.

He at once shook hands with the Princess in a jovial way, took a seat near her without being invited, and forthwith denounced the dirty bourgeoisie which came to wallow in places of ill fame. Rosemonde was delighted, and encouraged him, but others near by began to get angry, and Bergaz examined him with his piercing eyes, like a man of energy who acts, and lets others talk. Now and then, too, he exchanged quick glances of intelligence with his silent lieutenants, Sanfaute and Rossi, who plainly belonged to him, both body and soul. They were the ones who found their profit in Anarchy, practising it to its logical conclusions, whether in crime or in vice.

Meantime, pending the arrival of Legras with his "Flowers of the Pavement," two female vocalists had followed one another on the stage, the first fat and the second thin, one chirruping some silly love songs with an under-current of dirt, and the other shouting the coarsest of refrains, in a most violent, fighting voice. She had just finished amidst a storm of bravos, when the assembly, stirred to merriment and eager for a laugh, suddenly exploded once more. Silviane was entering the little box at one end of the hall. When she appeared erect in the full light, with bare arms and shoulders, looking like a planet in her gown of yellow satin and her blazing diamonds, there arose a formidable uproar, shouts, jeers, hisses, laughing and growling, mingled with ferocious applause. And the scandal increased, and the vilest expressions flew about as soon as Duvillard, Gerard and Duthil also showed themselves, looking very serious and dignified with their white ties and spreading shirt fronts.

"We told you so!" muttered Duvillard, who was much annoyed with the affair, while Gerard tried to conceal himself in a dim corner.

She, however, smiling and enchanted, faced the public, accepting the storm with the candid bearing of a foolish virgin, much as one inhales the vivifying air of the open when it bears down upon one in a squall. And, indeed, she herself had sprung from the sphere before her, its atmosphere was her native air.

"Well, what of it?" she said replying to the Baron who wanted her to sit down. "They are merry. It's very nice. Oh! I'm really amusing myself!"

"Why, yes, it's very nice," declared Duthil, who in like fashion set himself at his ease. "Silviane is right, people naturally like a laugh now and then!"

Amidst the uproar, which did not cease, little Princess Rosemonde rose enthusiastically to get a better view. "Why, it's your father who's with that woman Silviane," she said to Hyacinthe. "Just look at them! Well, he certainly has plenty of bounce to show himself here with her!"

Hyacinthe, however, refused to look. It didn't interest him, his father was an idiot, only a child would lose his head over a girl in that fashion. And with his contempt for woman the young man became positively insulting.

"You try my nerves, my dear fellow," said Rosemonde as she sat down. "You are the child with your silly ideas about us. And as for your father, he does quite right to love that girl. I find her very pretty indeed, quite adorable!"

Then all at once the uproar ceased, those who had risen resumed their seats, and the only sound was that of the feverish throb which coursed through the assembly. Legras had just appeared on the platform. He was a pale sturdy fellow with a round and carefully shaven face, stern eyes, and the powerful jaws of a man who compels the adoration of women by terrorising them. He was not deficient in talent, he sang true, and his ringing voice was one of extraordinary penetration and pathetic power. And his repertoire, his "Flowers of the Pavement," completed the explanation of his success; for all the foulness and suffering of the lower spheres, the whole abominable sore of the social hell created by the rich, shrieked aloud in these songs in words of filth and fire and blood.

A prelude was played on the piano, and Legras standing there in his velvet jacket sang "La Chemise," the horrible song which brought all Paris to hear him. All the lust and vice that crowd the streets of the great city appeared with their filth and their poison; and amid the picture of Woman stripped, degraded, ill-treated, dragged through the mire and cast into a cesspool, there rang out the crime of the bourgeoisie. But the scorching insult of it all was less in the words themselves than in the manner in which Legras cast them in the faces of the rich, the happy, the beautiful ladies who came to listen to him. Under the low ceiling, amidst the smoke from the pipes, in the blinding glare of the gas, he sent his lines flying through the assembly like expectorations, projected by a whirlwind of furious contempt. And when he had finished there came delirium; the beautiful ladies did not even think of wiping away the many affronts they had received, but applauded frantically. The whole assembly stamped and shouted, and wallowed, distracted, in its ignominy.

"Bravo! bravo!" the little Princess repeated in her shrill voice. "It's astonishing, astonishing, prodigious!"

And Silviane, whose intoxication seemed to have increased since she had been there, in the depths of that fiery furnace, made herself particularly conspicuous by the manner in which she clapped her hands and shouted: "It's he, it's my Legras! I really must kiss him, he's pleased me so much!"

Duvillard, now fairly exasperated, wished to take her off by force. But she clung to the hand-rest of the box, and shouted yet more loudly, though without any show of temper. It became necessary to parley with her. Yes, she was willing to go off and let them drive her home; but, first of all, she must embrace Legras, who was an old friend of hers. "Go and wait for me in the carriage!" she said, "I will be with you in a moment."

Just as the assembly was at last becoming calmer, Rosemonde perceived that the box was emptying; and her own curiosity being satisfied, she thought of prevailing on Hyacinthe to see her home. He, who had listened to Legras in a languid way without even applauding, was now talking of Norway with Bergaz, who pretended that he had travelled in the North. Oh! the fiords! oh! the ice-bound lakes! oh! the pure lily-white, chaste coldness of the eternal winter! It was only amid such surroundings, said Hyacinthe, that he could understand woman and love, like a kiss of the very snow itself.

"Shall we go off there to-morrow?" exclaimed the Princess with her vivacious effrontery. "I'll shut up my house and slip the key under the door."

Then she added that she was jesting, of course. But Bergaz knew her to be quite capable of such a freak; and at the idea that she might shut up her little mansion and perhaps leave it unprotected he exchanged a quick glance with Sanfaute and Rossi, who still smiled in silence. Ah! what an opportunity for a fine stroke! What an opportunity to get back some of the wealth of the community appropriated by the blackguard bourgeoisie!

Meantime Raphanel, after applauding Legras, was looking all round the place with his little grey, sharp eyes. And at last young Mathis and his companion, the ill-clad individual, of whose face only a scrap of beard could be seen, attracted his attention. They had neither laughed nor applauded; they seemed to be simply a couple of tired fellows who were resting, and in whose opinion one is best hidden in the midst of a crowd.

All at once, though, Raphanel turned towards Bergaz: "That's surely little Mathis over yonder. But who's that with him?"

Bergaz made an evasive gesture; he did not know. Still, he no longer took his eyes from Raphanel. And he saw the other feign indifference at what followed, and finish his beer and take his leave, with the jesting remark that he had an appointment with a lady at a neighbouring omnibus office. No sooner had he gone than Bergaz rose, sprang over some of the forms and jostled people in order to reach little Mathis, into whose ear he whispered a few words. And the young man at once left his table, taking his companion and pushing him outside through an occasional exit. It was all so rapidly accomplished that none of the general public paid attention to the flight.

"What is it?" said the Princess to Bergaz, when he had quietly resumed his seat between Rossi and Sanfaute.

"Oh! nothing, I merely wished to shake hands with Mathis as he was going off."

Thereupon Rosemonde announced that she meant to do the same. Nevertheless, she lingered a moment longer and again spoke of Norway on perceiving that nothing could impassion Hyacinthe except the idea of the eternal snow, the intense, purifying cold of the polar regions. In his poem on the "End of Woman," a composition of some thirty lines, which he hoped he should never finish, he thought of introducing a forest of frozen pines by way of final scene. Now the Princess had risen and was gaily reverting to her jest, declaring that she meant to take him home to drink a cup of tea and arrange their trip to the Pole, when an involuntary exclamation fell from Bergaz, who, while listening, had kept his eyes on the doorway.

"Mondesir! I was sure of it!"

There had appeared at the entrance a short, sinewy, broad-backed little man, about whose round face, bumpy forehead, and snub nose there was considerable military roughness. One might have thought him a non-commissioned officer in civilian attire. He gazed over the whole room, and seemed at once dismayed and disappointed.

Bergaz, however, wishing to account for his exclamation, resumed in an easy way: "Ah! I said there was a smell of the police about the place! You see that fellow—he's a detective, a very clever one, named Mondesir, who had some trouble when he was in the army. Just look at him, sniffing like a dog that has lost scent! Well, well, my brave fellow, if you've been told of any game you may look and look for it, the bird's flown already!"

Once outside, when Rosemonde had prevailed on Hyacinthe to see her home, they hastened to get into the brougham, which was waiting for them, for near at hand they perceived Silviane's landau, with the majestic coachman motionless on his box, while Duvillard, Gerard, and Duthil still stood waiting on the curbstone. They had been there for nearly twenty minutes already, in the semi-darkness of that outer boulevard, where all the vices of the poor districts of Paris were on the prowl. They had been jostled by drunkards; and shadowy women brushed against them as they went by whispering beneath the oaths and blows of bullies. And there were couples seeking the darkness under the trees, and lingering on the benches there; while all around were low taverns and dirty lodging-houses and places of ill-fame. All the human degradation which till break of day swarms in the black mud of this part of Paris, enveloped the three men, giving them the horrors, and yet neither the Baron nor Gerard nor Duthil was willing to go off. Each hoped that he would tire out the others, and take Silviane home when she should at last appear.

But after a time the Baron grew impatient, and said to the coachman: "Jules, go and see why madame doesn't come."

"But the horses, Monsieur le Baron?"

"Oh! they will be all right, we are here."

A fine drizzle had begun to fall; and the wait went on again as if it would never finish. But an unexpected meeting gave them momentary occupation. A shadowy form, something which seemed to be a thin, black-skirted woman, brushed against them. And all of a sudden they were surprised to find it was a priest.

"What, is it you, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment?" exclaimed Gerard. "At this time of night? And in this part of Paris?"

Thereupon Pierre, without venturing either to express his own astonishment at finding them there themselves, or to ask them what they were doing, explained that he had been belated through accompanying Abbe Rose on a visit to a night refuge. Ah! to think of all the frightful want which at last drifted to those pestilential dormitories where the stench had almost made him faint! To think of all the weariness and despair which there sank into the slumber of utter prostration, like that of beasts falling to the ground to sleep off the abominations of life! No name could be given to the promiscuity; poverty and suffering were there in heaps, children and men, young and old, beggars in sordid rags, beside the shameful poor in threadbare frock-coats, all the waifs and strays of the daily shipwrecks of Paris life, all the laziness and vice, and ill-luck and injustice which the torrent rolls on, and throws off like scum. Some slept on, quite annihilated, with the faces of corpses. Others, lying on their backs with mouths agape, snored loudly as if still venting the plaint of their sorry life. And others tossed restlessly, still struggling in their slumber against fatigue and cold and hunger, which pursued them like nightmares of monstrous shape. And from all those human beings, stretched there like wounded after a battle, from all that ambulance of life reeking with a stench of rottenness and death, there ascended a nausea born of revolt, the vengeance-prompting thought of all the happy chambers where, at that same hour, the wealthy loved or rested in fine linen and costly lace.*

* Even the oldest Paris night refuges, which are the outcome
of private philanthropy—L'Oeuvre de l'Hospitalite de Nuit—
have only been in existence some fourteen or fifteen years.
Before that time, and from the period of the great Revolution
forward, there was absolutely no place, either refuge, asylum,
or workhouse, in the whole of that great city of wealth and
pleasure, where the houseless poor could crave a night's
shelter. The various royalist, imperialist and republican
governments and municipalities of modern France have often
been described as 'paternal,' but no governments and
municipalities in the whole civilised world have done less for
the very poor. The official Poor Relief Board—L'Assistance
Publique—has for fifty years been a by-word, a mockery and a
sham, in spite of its large revenue. And this neglect of the
very poor has been an important factor in every French
revolution. Each of these—even that of 1870—had its purely
economic side, though many superficial historians are content
to ascribe economic causes to the one Revolution of 1789, and
to pass them by in all other instances.—Trans.

In vain had Pierre and Abbe Rose passed all the poor wretches in review while seeking the big Old'un, the former carpenter, so as to rescue him from the cesspool of misery, and send him to the Asylum on the very morrow. He had presented himself at the refuge that evening, but there was no room left, for, horrible to say, even the shelter of that hell could only be granted to early comers. And so he must now be leaning against a wall, or lying behind some palings. This had greatly distressed poor Abbe Rose and Pierre, but it was impossible for them to search every dark, suspicious corner; and so the former had returned to the Rue Cortot, while the latter was seeking a cab to convey him back to Neuilly.

The fine drizzling rain was still falling and becoming almost icy, when Silviane's coachman, Jules, at last reappeared and interrupted the priest, who was telling the Baron and the others how his visit to the refuge still made him shudder.

"Well, Jules—and madame?" asked Duvillard, quite anxious at seeing the coachman return alone.

Impassive and respectful, with no other sign of irony than a slight involuntary twist of the lips, Jules answered: "Madame sends word that she is not going home; and she places her carriage at the gentlemen's disposal if they will allow me to drive them home."

This was the last straw, and the Baron flew into a passion. To have allowed her to drag him to that vile den, to have waited there hopefully so long, and to be treated in this fashion for the sake of a Legras! No, no, he, the Baron, had had enough of it, and she should pay dearly for her abominable conduct! Then he stopped a passing cab and pushed Gerard inside it saying, "You can set me down at my door."

"But she's left us the carriage!" shouted Duthil, who was already consoled, and inwardly laughed at the termination of it all. "Come here, there's plenty of room for three. No? you prefer the cab? Well, just as you like, you know."

For his part he gaily climbed into the landau and drove off lounging on the cushions, while the Baron, in the jolting old cab, vented his rage without a word of interruption from Gerard, whose face was hidden by the darkness. To think of it! that she, whom he had overwhelmed with gifts, who had already cost him two millions of francs, should in this fashion insult him, the master who could dispose both of fortunes and of men! Well, she had chosen to do it, and he was delivered! Then Duvillard drew a long breath like a man released from the galleys.

For a moment Pierre watched the two vehicles go off; and then took his own way under the trees, so as to shelter himself from the rain until a vacant cab should pass. Full of distress and battling thoughts he had begun to feel icy cold. The whole monstrous night of Paris, all the debauchery and woe that sobbed around him made him shiver. Phantom-like women who, when young, had led lives of infamy in wealth, and who now, old and faded, led lives of infamy in poverty, were still and ever wandering past him in search of bread, when suddenly a shadowy form grazed him, and a voice murmured in his ear: "Warn your brother, the police are on Salvat's track, he may be arrested at any moment."

The shadowy figure was already going its way, and as a gas ray fell upon it, Pierre thought that he recognised the pale, pinched face of Victor Mathis. And at the same time, yonder in Abbe Rose's peaceful dining-room, he fancied he could again see the gentle face of Madame Mathis, so sad and so resigned, living on solely by the force of the last trembling hope which she had unhappily set in her son.

III. PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT

ALREADY at eight o'clock on that holiday-making mid-Lent Thursday, when all the offices of the Home Department were empty, Monferrand, the Minister, sat alone in his private room. A single usher guarded his door, and in the first ante-chamber there were only a couple of messengers.

The Minister had experienced, on awaking, the most unpleasant of emotions. The "Voix du Peuple," which on the previous day had revived the African Railway scandal, by accusing Barroux of having pocketed 20,000 francs, had that morning published its long-promised list of the bribe-taking senators and deputies. And at the head of this list Monferrand had found his own name set down against a sum of 80,000 francs, while Fonsegue was credited with 50,000. Then a fifth of the latter amount was said to have been Duthil's share, and Chaigneux had contented himself with the beggarly sum of 3,000 francs—the lowest price paid for any one vote, the cost of each of the others ranging from 5 to 20,000.

It must be said that there was no anger in Monferrand's emotion. Only he had never thought that Sagnier would carry his passion for uproar and scandal so far as to publish this list—a page which was said to have been torn from a memorandum book belonging to Duvillard's agent, Hunter, and which was covered with incomprehensible hieroglyphics that ought to have been discussed and explained, if, indeed, the real truth was to be arrived at. Personally, Monferrand felt quite at ease, for he had written nothing, signed nothing, and knew that one could always extricate oneself from a mess by showing some audacity, and never confessing. Nevertheless, what a commotion it would all cause in the parliamentary duck-pond. He at once realised the inevitable consequences, the ministry overthrown and swept away by this fresh whirlwind of denunciation and tittle-tattle. Mege would renew his interpellation on the morrow, and Vignon and his friends would at once lay siege to the posts they coveted. And he, Monferrand, could picture himself driven out of that ministerial sanctum where, for eight months past, he had been taking his ease, not with any foolish vainglory, but with the pleasure of feeling that he was in his proper place as a born ruler, who believed he could tame and lead the multitude.

Having thrown the newspapers aside with a disdainful gesture, he rose and stretched himself, growling the while like a plagued lion. And then he began to walk up and down the spacious room, which showed all the faded official luxury of mahogany furniture and green damask hangings. Stepping to and fro, with his hands behind his back, he no longer wore his usual fatherly, good-natured air. He appeared as he really was, a born wrestler, short, but broad shouldered, with sensual mouth, fleshy nose and stern eyes, that all proclaimed him to be unscrupulous, of iron will and fit for the greatest tasks. Still, in this case, in what direction lay his best course? Must he let himself be dragged down with Barroux? Perhaps his personal position was not absolutely compromised? And yet how could he part company from the others, swim ashore, and save himself while they were being drowned? It was a grave problem, and with his frantic desire to retain power, he made desperate endeavours to devise some suitable manoeuvre.

But he could think of nothing, and began to swear at the virtuous fits of that silly Republic, which, in his opinion, rendered all government impossible. To think of such foolish fiddle-faddle stopping a man of his acumen and strength! How on earth can one govern men if one is denied the use of money, that sovereign means of sway? And he laughed bitterly; for the idea of an idyllic country where all great enterprises would be carried out in an absolutely honest manner seemed to him the height of absurdity.

At last, however, unable as he was to come to a determination, it occurred to him to confer with Baron Duvillard, whom he had long known, and whom he regretted not having seen sooner so as to urge him to purchase Sagnier's silence. At first he thought of sending the Baron a brief note by a messenger; but he disliked committing anything to paper, for the veriest scrap of writing may prove dangerous; so he preferred to employ the telephone which had been installed for his private use near his writing-table.

"It is Baron Duvillard who is speaking to me?... Quite so. It's I, the Minister, Monsieur Monferrand. I shall be much obliged if you will come to see me at once.... Quite so, quite so, I will wait for you."

Then again he walked to and fro and meditated. That fellow Duvillard was as clever a man as himself, and might be able to give him an idea. And he was still laboriously trying to devise some scheme, when the usher entered saying that Monsieur Gascogne, the Chief of the Detective Police, particularly wished to speak to him. Monferrand's first thought was that the Prefecture of Police desired to know his views respecting the steps which ought to be taken to ensure public order that day; for two mid-Lent processions—one of the Washerwomen and the other of the Students—were to march through Paris, whose streets would certainly be crowded.

"Show Monsieur Gascogne in," he said.

A tall, slim, dark man, looking like an artisan in his Sunday best, then stepped into the ministerial sanctum. Fully acquainted with the under-currents of Paris life, this Chief of the Detective Force had a cold dispassionate nature and a clear and methodical mind. Professionalism slightly spoilt him, however: he would have possessed more intelligence if he had not credited himself with so much.

He began by apologising for his superior the Prefect, who would certainly have called in person had he not been suffering from indisposition. However, it was perhaps best that he, Gascogne, should acquaint Monsieur le Ministre with the grave affair which brought him, for he knew every detail of it. Then he revealed what the grave affair was.

"I believe, Monsieur le Ministre, that we at last hold the perpetrator of the crime in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy."

At this, Monferrand, who had been listening impatiently, became quite impassioned. The fruitless searches of the police, the attacks and the jeers of the newspapers, were a source of daily worry to him. "Ah!—Well, so much the better for you Monsieur Gascogne," he replied with brutal frankness. "You would have ended by losing your post. The man is arrested?"

"Not yet, Monsieur le Ministre; but he cannot escape, and it is merely an affair of a few hours."

Then the Chief of the Detective Force told the whole story: how Detective Mondesir, on being warned by a secret agent that the Anarchist Salvat was in a tavern at Montmartre, had reached it just as the bird had flown; then how chance had again set him in presence of Salvat at a hundred paces or so from the tavern, the rascal having foolishly loitered there to watch the establishment; and afterwards how Salvat had been stealthily shadowed in the hope that they might catch him in his hiding-place with his accomplices. And, in this wise, he had been tracked to the Porte-Maillot, where, realising, no doubt, that he was pursued, he had suddenly bolted into the Bois de Boulogne. It was there that he had been hiding since two o'clock in the morning in the drizzle which had not ceased to fall. They had waited for daylight in order to organise a battue and hunt him down like some animal, whose weariness must necessarily ensure capture. And so, from one moment to another, he would be caught.

"I know the great interest you take in the arrest, Monsieur le Ministre," added Gascogne, "and it occurred to me to ask your orders. Detective Mondesir is over there, directing the hunt. He regrets that he did not apprehend the man on the Boulevard de Rochechouart; but, all the same, the idea of following him was a capital one, and one can only reproach Mondesir with having forgotten the Bois de Boulogne in his calculations."

Salvat arrested! That fellow Salvat whose name had filled the newspapers for three weeks past. This was a most fortunate stroke which would be talked of far and wide! In the depths of Monferrand's fixed eyes one could divine a world of thoughts and a sudden determination to turn this incident which chance had brought him to his own personal advantage. In his own mind a link was already forming between this arrest and that African Railways interpellation which was likely to overthrow the ministry on the morrow. The first outlines of a scheme already rose before him. Was it not his good star that had sent him what he had been seeking—a means of fishing himself out of the troubled waters of the approaching crisis?

"But tell me, Monsieur Gascogne," said he, "are you quite sure that this man Salvat committed the crime?"

"Oh! perfectly sure, Monsieur le Ministre. He'll confess everything in the cab before he reaches the Prefecture."

Monferrand again walked to and fro with a pensive air, and ideas came to him as he spoke on in a slow, meditative fashion. "My orders! well, my orders, they are, first, that you must act with the very greatest prudence. Yes, don't gather a mob of promenaders together. Try to arrange things so that the arrest may pass unperceived—and if you secure a confession keep it to yourself, don't communicate it to the newspapers. Yes, I particularly recommend that point to you, don't take the newspapers into your confidence at all—and finally, come and tell me everything, and observe secrecy, absolute secrecy, with everybody else."

Gascogne bowed and would have withdrawn, but Monferrand detained him to say that not a day passed without his friend Monsieur Lehmann, the Public Prosecutor, receiving letters from Anarchists who threatened to blow him up with his family; in such wise that, although he was by no means a coward, he wished his house to be guarded by plain-clothes officers. A similar watch was already kept upon the house where investigating magistrate Amadieu resided. And if the latter's life was precious, that of Public Prosecutor Lehmann was equally so, for he was one of those political magistrates, one of those shrewd talented Israelites, who make their way in very honest fashion by invariably taking the part of the Government in office.

Then Gascogne in his turn remarked: "There is also the Barthes affair, Monsieur le Ministre—we are still waiting. Are we to arrest Barthes at that little house at Neuilly?"

One of those chances which sometimes come to the help of detectives and make people think the latter to be men of genius had revealed to him the circumstance that Barthes had found a refuge with Abbe Pierre Froment. Ever since the Anarchist terror had thrown Paris into dismay a warrant had been out against the old man, not for any precise offence, but simply because he was a suspicious character and might, therefore, have had some intercourse with the Revolutionists. However, it had been repugnant to Gascogne to arrest him at the house of a priest whom the whole district venerated as a saint; and the Minister, whom he had consulted on the point, had warmly approved of his reserve, since a member of the clergy was in question, and had undertaken to settle the affair himself.

"No, Monsieur Gascogne," he now replied, "don't move in the matter. You know what my feelings are, that we ought to have the priests with us and not against us—I have had a letter written to Abbe Froment in order that he may call here this morning, as I shall have no other visitors. I will speak to him myself, and you may take it that the affair no longer concerns you."

Then he was about to dismiss him when the usher came back saying that the President of the Council was in the ante-room.*

* The title of President of the Council is given to the French
prime minister.—Trans.

"Barroux!—Ah! dash it, then, Monsieur Gascogne, you had better go out this way. It is as well that nobody should meet you, as I wish you to keep silent respecting Salvat's arrest. It's fully understood, is it not? I alone am to know everything; and you will communicate with me here direct, by the telephone, if any serious incident should arise."

The Chief of the Detective Police had scarcely gone off, by way of an adjoining salon, when the usher reopened the door communicating with the ante-room: "Monsieur le President du Conseil."

With a nicely adjusted show of deference and cordiality, Monferrand stepped forward, his hands outstretched: "Ah! my dear President, why did you put yourself out to come here? I would have called on you if I had known that you wished to see me."

But with an impatient gesture Barroux brushed aside all question of etiquette. "No, no! I was taking my usual stroll in the Champs Elysees, and the worries of the situation impressed me so keenly that I preferred to come here at once. You yourself must realise that we can't put up with what is taking place. And pending to-morrow morning's council, when we shall have to arrange a plan of defence, I felt that there was good reason for us to talk things over."

He took an armchair, and Monferrand on his side rolled another forward so as to seat himself with his back to the light. Whilst Barroux, the elder of the pair by ten years, blanched and solemn, with a handsome face, snowy whiskers, clean-shaven chin and upper-lip, retained all the dignity of power, the bearing of a Conventionnel of romantic views, who sought to magnify the simple loyalty of a rather foolish but good-hearted bourgeois nature into something great; the other, beneath his heavy common countenance and feigned frankness and simplicity, concealed unknown depths, the unfathomable soul of a shrewd enjoyer and despot who was alike pitiless and unscrupulous in attaining his ends.

For a moment Barroux drew breath, for in reality he was greatly moved, his blood rising to his head, and his heart beating with indignation and anger at the thought of all the vulgar insults which the "Voix du Peuple" had poured upon him again that morning. "Come, my dear colleague," said he, "one must stop that scandalous campaign. Moreover, you can realise what awaits us at the Chamber to-morrow. Now that the famous list has been published we shall have every malcontent up in arms. Vignon is bestirring himself already—"

"Ah! you have news of Vignon?" exclaimed Monferrand, becoming very attentive.

"Well, as I passed his door just now, I saw a string of cabs waiting there. All his creatures have been on the move since yesterday, and at least twenty persons have told me that the band is already dividing the spoils. For, as you must know, the fierce and ingenuous Mege is again going to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for others. Briefly, we are dead, and the others claim that they are going to bury us in mud before they fight over our leavings." With his arm outstretched Barroux made a theatrical gesture, and his voice resounded as if he were in the tribune. Nevertheless, his emotion was real, tears even were coming to his eyes. "To think that I who have given my whole life to the Republic, I who founded it, who saved it, should be covered with insults in this fashion, and obliged to defend myself against abominable charges! To say that I abused my trust! That I sold myself and took 200,000 francs from that man Hunter, simply to slip them into my pocket! Well, certainly there was a question of 200,000 francs between us. But how and under what circumstances? They were doubtless the same as in your case, with regard to the 80,000 francs that he is said to have handed you—"

But Monferrand interrupted his colleague in a clear trenchant voice: "He never handed me a centime."

The other looked at him in astonishment, but could only see his big, rough head, whose features were steeped in shadow: "Ah! But I thought you had business relations with him, and knew him particularly well."

"No, I simply knew Hunter as everyone knew him. I was not even aware that he was Baron Duvillard's agent in the African Railways matter; and there was never any question of that affair between us."

This was so improbable, so contrary to everything Barroux knew of the business, that for a moment he felt quite scared. Then he waved his hand as if to say that others might as well look after their own affairs, and reverted to himself. "Oh! as for me," he said, "Hunter called on me more than ten times, and made me quite sick with his talk of the African Railways. It was at the time when the Chamber was asked to authorise the issue of lottery stock.* And, by the way, my dear fellow, I was then here at the Home Department, while you had just taken that of Public Works. I can remember sitting at that very writing-table, while Hunter was in the same armchair that I now occupy. That day he wanted to consult me about the employment of the large sum which Duvillard's house proposed to spend in advertising; and on seeing what big amounts were set down against the Royalist journals, I became quite angry, for I realised with perfect accuracy that this money would simply be used to wage war against the Republic. And so, yielding to Hunter's entreaties, I also drew up a list allotting 200,000 francs among the friendly Republican newspapers, which were paid through me, I admit it. And that's the whole story."**

* This kind of stock is common enough in France. A part of it is
extinguished annually at a public "drawing," when all such
shares or bonds that are drawn become entitled to redemption
at "par," a percentage of them also securing prizes of various
amounts. City of Paris Bonds issued on this system are very
popular among French people with small savings; but, on the
other hand, many ventures, whose lottery stock has been
authorised by the Legislature, have come to grief and ruined
investors.—Trans.

** All who are acquainted with recent French history will be
aware that Barroux' narrative is simply a passage from the
life of the late M. Floquet, slightly modified to suit the
requirements of M. Zola's story.—Trans.

Then he sprang to his feet and struck his chest, whilst his voice again rose: "Well, I've had more than enough of all that calumny and falsehood! And I shall simply tell the Chamber my story to-morrow. It will be my only defence. An honest man does not fear the truth!"

But Monferrand, in his turn, had sprung up with a cry which was a complete confession of his principles: "It's ridiculous, one never confesses; you surely won't do such a thing!"

"I shall," retorted Barroux with superb obstinacy. "And we shall see if the Chamber won't absolve me by acclamation."

"No, you will fall beneath an explosion of hisses, and drag all of us down with you."

"What does it matter? We shall fall with dignity, like honest men!"

Monferrand made a gesture of furious anger, and then suddenly became calm. Amidst all the anxious confusion in which he had been struggling since daybreak, a gleam now dawned upon him. The vague ideas suggested by Salvat's approaching arrest took shape, and expanded into an audacious scheme. Why should he prevent the fall of that big ninny Barroux? The only thing of importance was that he, Monferrand, should not fall with him, or at any rate that he should rise again. So he protested no further, but merely mumbled a few words, in which his rebellious feeling seemingly died out. And at last, putting on his good-natured air once more, he said: "Well, after all you are perhaps right. One must be brave. Besides, you are our head, my dear President, and we will follow you."

They had now again sat down face to face, and their conversation continued till they came to a cordial agreement respecting the course which the Government should adopt in view of the inevitable interpellation on the morrow.

Meantime, Baron Duvillard was on his way to the ministry. He had scarcely slept that night. When on the return from Montmartre Gerard had set him down at his door in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, he had at once gone to bed, like a man who is determined to compel sleep, so that he may forget his worries and recover self-control. But slumber would not come; for hours and hours he vainly sought it. The manner in which he had been insulted by that creature Silviane was so monstrous! To think that she, whom he had enriched, whose every desire he had contented, should have cast such mud at him, the master, who flattered himself that he held Paris and the Republic in his hands, since he bought up and controlled consciences just as others might make corners in wool or leather for the purposes of Bourse speculation. And the dim consciousness that Silviane was the avenging sore, the cancer preying on him who preyed on others, completed his exasperation. In vain did he try to drive away his haunting thoughts, remember his business affairs, his appointments for the morrow, his millions which were working in every quarter of the world, the financial omnipotence which placed the fate of nations in his grasp. Ever, and in spite of all, Silviane rose up before him, splashing him with mud. In despair he tried to fix his mind on a great enterprise which he had been planning for months past, a Trans-Saharan railway, a colossal venture which would set millions of money at work, and revolutionise the trade of the world. And yet Silviane appeared once more, and smacked him on both cheeks with her dainty little hand, which she had dipped in the gutter. It was only towards daybreak that he at last dozed off, while vowing in a fury that he would never see her again, that he would spurn her, and order her away, even should she come and drag herself at his feet.

However, when he awoke at seven, still tired and aching, his first thought was for her, and he almost yielded to a fit of weakness. The idea came to him to ascertain if she had returned home, and if so make his peace. But he jumped out of bed, and after his ablutions he recovered all his bravery. She was a wretch, and he this time thought himself for ever cured of his passion. To tell the truth, he forgot it as soon as he opened the morning newspapers. The publication of the list of bribe-takers in the "Voix du Peuple" quite upset him, for he had hitherto thought it unlikely that Sagnier held any such list. However, he judged the document at a glance, at once separating the few truths it contained from a mass of foolishness and falsehood. And this time also he did not consider himself personally in danger. There was only one thing that he really feared: the arrest of his intermediary, Hunter, whose trial might have drawn him into the affair. As matters stood, and as he did not cease to repeat with a calm and smiling air, he had merely done what every banking-house does when it issues stock, that is, pay the press for advertisements and puffery, employ brokers, and reward services discreetly rendered to the enterprise. It was all a business matter, and for him that expression summed up everything. Moreover, he played the game of life bravely, and spoke with indignant contempt of a banker who, distracted and driven to extremities by blackmailing, had imagined that he would bring a recent scandal to an end by killing himself: a pitiful tragedy, from all the mire and blood of which the scandal had sprouted afresh with the most luxuriant and indestructible vegetation. No, no! suicide was not the course to follow: a man ought to remain erect, and struggle on to his very last copper, and the very end of his energy.

At about nine o'clock a ringing brought Duvillard to the telephone installed in his private room. And then his folly took possession of him once more: it must be Silviane who wished to speak to him. She often amused herself by thus disturbing him amidst his greatest cares. No doubt she had just returned home, realising that she had carried things too far on the previous evening and desiring to be forgiven. However, when he found that the call was from Monferrand, who wished him to go to the ministry, he shivered slightly, like a man saved from the abyss beside which he is travelling. And forthwith he called for his hat and stick, desirous as he was of walking and reflecting in the open air. And again he became absorbed in the intricacies of the scandalous business which was about to stir all Paris and the legislature. Kill himself! ah, no, that would be foolish and cowardly. A gust of terror might be sweeping past; nevertheless, for his part he felt quite firm, superior to events, and resolved to defend himself without relinquishing aught of his power.

As soon as he entered the ante-rooms of the ministry he realised that the gust of terror was becoming a tempest. The publication of the terrible list in the "Voix du Peuple" had chilled the guilty ones to the heart; and, pale and distracted, feeling the ground give way beneath them, they had come to take counsel of Monferrand, who, they hoped, might save them. The first whom Duvillard perceived was Duthil, looking extremely feverish, biting his moustaches, and constantly making grimaces in his efforts to force a smile. The banker scolded him for coming, saying that it was a great mistake to have done so, particularly with such a scared face. The deputy, however, his spirits already cheered by these rough words, began to defend himself, declaring that he had not even read Sagnier's article, and had simply come to recommend a lady friend to the Minister. Thereupon the Baron undertook this business for him and sent him away with the wish that he might spend a merry mid-Lent. However, the one who most roused Duvillard's pity was Chaigneux, whose figure swayed about as if bent by the weight of his long equine head, and who looked so shabby and untidy that one might have taken him for an old pauper. On recognising the banker he darted forward, and bowed to him with obsequious eagerness.

"Ah! Monsieur le Baron," said he, "how wicked some men must be! They are killing me, I shall die of it all; and what will become of my wife, what will become of my three daughters, who have none but me to help them?"

The whole of his woeful story lay in that lament. A victim of politics, he had been foolish enough to quit Arras and his business there as a solicitor, in order to seek triumph in Paris with his wife and daughters, whose menial he had then become—a menial dismayed by the constant rebuffs and failures which his mediocrity brought upon him. An honest deputy! ah, good heavens! yes, he would have liked to be one; but was he not perpetually "hard-up," ever in search of a hundred-franc note, and thus, perforce, a deputy for sale? And withal he led such a pitiable life, so badgered by the women folk about him, that to satisfy their demands he would have picked up money no matter where or how.

"Just fancy, Monsieur le Baron, I have at last found a husband for my eldest girl. It is the first bit of luck that I have ever had; there will only be three women left on my hands if it comes off. But you can imagine what a disastrous impression such an article as that of this morning must create in the young man's family. So I have come to see the Minister to beg him to give my future son-in-law a prefectoral secretaryship. I have already promised him the post, and if I can secure it things may yet be arranged."

He looked so terribly shabby and spoke in such a doleful voice that it occurred to Duvillard to do one of those good actions on which he ventured at times when they were likely to prove remunerative investments. It is, indeed, an excellent plan to give a crust of bread to some poor devil whom one can turn, if necessary, into a valet or an accomplice. So the banker dismissed Chaigneux, undertaking to do his business for him in the same way as he had undertaken to do Duthil's. And he added that he would be pleased to see him on the morrow, and have a chat with him, as he might be able to help him in the matter of his daughter's marriage.

At this Chaigneux, scenting a loan, collapsed into the most lavish thanks. "Ah! Monsieur le Baron, my life will not be long enough to enable me to repay such a debt of gratitude."

As Duvillard turned round he was surprised to see Abbe Froment waiting in a corner of the ante-room. Surely that one could not belong to the batch of suspects, although by the manner in which he was pretending to read a newspaper it seemed as if he were trying to hide some keen anxiety. At last the Baron stepped forward, shook hands, and spoke to him cordially. And Pierre thereupon related that he had received a letter requesting him to call on the Minister that day. Why, he could not tell; in fact, he was greatly surprised, he said, putting on a smile in order to conceal his disquietude. He had been waiting a long time already, and hoped that he would not be forgotten on that bench.

Just then the usher appeared, and hastened up to the banker. "The Minister," said he, "was at that moment engaged with the President of the Council; but he had orders to admit the Baron as soon as the President withdrew." Almost immediately afterwards Barroux came out, and as Duvillard was about to enter he recognised and detained him. And he spoke of the denunciations very bitterly, like one indignant with all the slander. Would not he, Duvillard, should occasion require it, testify that he, Barroux, had never taken a centime for himself? Then, forgetting that he was speaking to a banker, and that he was Minister of Finances, he proceeded to express all his disgust of money. Ah! what poisonous, murky, and defiling waters were those in which money-making went on! However, he repeated that he would chastise his insulters, and that a statement of the truth would suffice for the purpose.

Duvillard listened and looked at him. And all at once the thought of Silviane came back, and took possession of the Baron, without any attempt on his part to drive it away. He reflected that if Barroux had chosen to give him a helping hand when he had asked for it, Silviane would now have been at the Comedie Francaise, in which case the deplorable affair of the previous night would not have occurred; for he was beginning to regard himself as guilty in the matter; if he had only contented Silviane's whim she would never have dismissed him in so vile a fashion.

"You know, I owe you a grudge," he said, interrupting Barroux.

The other looked at him in astonishment. "And why, pray?" he asked.

"Why, because you never helped me in the matter of that friend of mine who wishes to make her debut in 'Polyeucte.'"

Barroux smiled, and with amiable condescension replied: "Ah! yes, Silviane d'Aulnay! But, my dear sir, it was Taboureau who put spokes in the wheel. The Fine Arts are his department, and the question was entirely one for him. And I could do nothing; for that very worthy and honest gentleman, who came to us from a provincial faculty, was full of scruples. For my own part I'm an old Parisian, I can understand anything, and I should have been delighted to please you."

At this fresh resistance offered to his passion Duvillard once more became excited, eager to obtain that which was denied him. "Taboureau, Taboureau!" said he, "he's a nice deadweight for you to load yourself with! Honest! isn't everybody honest? Come, my dear Minister, there's still time, get Silviane admitted, it will bring you good luck for to-morrow."

This time Barroux burst into a frank laugh: "No, no, I can't cast Taboureau adrift at this moment—people would make too much sport of it—a ministry wrecked or saved by a Silviane question!"

Then he offered his hand before going off. The Baron pressed it, and for a moment retained it in his own, whilst saying very gravely and with a somewhat pale face: "You do wrong to laugh, my dear Minister. Governments have fallen or set themselves erect again through smaller matters than that. And should you fall to-morrow I trust that you will never have occasion to regret it."

Wounded to the heart by the other's jesting air, exasperated by the idea that there was something he could not achieve, Duvillard watched Barroux as he withdrew. Most certainly the Baron did not desire a reconciliation with Silviane, but he vowed that he would overturn everything if necessary in order to send her a signed engagement for the Comedie, and this simply by way of vengeance, as a slap, so to say,—yes, a slap which would make her tingle! That moment spent with Barroux had been a decisive one.

However, whilst still following Barroux with his eyes, Duvillard was surprised to see Fonsegue arrive and manoeuvre in such a way as to escape the Prime Minister's notice. He succeeded in doing so, and then entered the ante-room with an appearance of dismay about the whole of his little figure, which was, as a rule, so sprightly. It was the gust of terror, still blowing, that had brought him thither.

"Didn't you see your friend Barroux?" the Baron asked him, somewhat puzzled.

"Barroux? No!"

This quiet lie was equivalent to a confession of everything. Fonsegue was so intimate with Barroux that he thee'd and thou'd him, and for ten years had been supporting him in his newspaper, having precisely the same views, the same political religion. But with a smash-up threatening, he doubtless realised, thanks to his wonderfully keen scent, that he must change his friendships if he did not wish to remain under the ruins himself. If he had, for long years, shown so much prudence and diplomatic virtue in order to firmly establish the most dignified and respected of Parisian newspapers, it was not for the purpose of letting that newspaper be compromised by some foolish blunder on the part of an honest man.

"I thought you were on bad terms with Monferrand," resumed Duvillard. "What have you come here for?"

"Oh! my dear Baron, the director of a leading newspaper is never on bad terms with anybody. He's at the country's service."

In spite of his emotion, Duvillard could not help smiling. "You are right," he responded. "Besides, Monferrand is really an able man, whom one can support without fear."

At this Fonsegue began to wonder whether his anguish of mind was visible. He, who usually played the game of life so well, with his own hand under thorough control, had been terrified by the article in the "Voix du Peuple." For the first time in his career he had perpetrated a blunder, and felt that he was at the mercy of some denunciation, for with unpardonable imprudence he had written a very brief but compromising note. He was not anxious concerning the 50,000 francs which Barroux had handed him out of the 200,000 destined for the Republican press. But he trembled lest another affair should be discovered, that of a sum of money which he had received as a present. It was only on feeling the Baron's keen glance upon him that he was able to recover some self-possession. How silly it was to lose the knack of lying and to confess things simply by one's demeanour!

But the usher drew near and repeated that the Minister was now waiting for the Baron; and Fonsegue went to sit down beside Abbe Froment, whom he also was astonished to find there. Pierre repeated that he had received a letter, but had no notion what the Minister might wish to say to him. And the quiver of his hands again revealed how feverishly impatient he was to know what it might be. However, he could only wait, since Monferrand was still busy discussing such grave affairs.

On seeing Duvillard enter, the Minister had stepped forward, offering his hand. However much the blast of terror might shake others, he had retained his calmness and good-natured smile. "What an affair, eh, my dear Baron!" he exclaimed.

"It's idiotic!" plainly declared the other, with a shrug of his shoulders. Then he sat down in the armchair vacated by Barroux, while the Minister installed himself in front of him. These two were made to understand one another, and they indulged in the same despairing gestures and furious complaints, declaring that government, like business, would no longer be possible if men were required to show such virtue as they did not possess. At all times, and under every regime, when a decision of the Chambers had been required in connection with some great enterprise, had not the natural and legitimate tactics been for one to do what might be needful to secure that decision? It was absolutely necessary that one should obtain influential and sympathetic support, in a word, make sure of votes. Well, everything had to be paid for, men like other things, some with fine words, others with favours or money, presents made in a more or less disguised manner. And even admitting that, in the present cases, one had gone rather far in the purchasing, that some of the bartering had been conducted in an imprudent way, was it wise to make such an uproar over it? Would not a strong government have begun by stifling the scandal, from motives of patriotism, a mere sense of cleanliness even?

"Why, of course! You are right, a thousand times right!" exclaimed Monferrand. "Ah! if I were the master you would see what a fine first-class funeral I would give it all!" Then, as Duvillard looked at him fixedly, struck by these last words, he added with his expressive smile: "Unfortunately I'm not the master, and it was to talk to you of the situation that I ventured to disturb you. Barroux, who was here just now, seemed to me in a regrettable frame of mind."

"Yes, I saw him, he has such singular ideas at times—" Then, breaking off, the Baron added: "Do you know that Fonsegue is in the ante-room? As he wishes to make his peace with you, why not send for him? He won't be in the way, in fact, he's a man of good counsel, and the support of his newspaper often suffices to give one the victory."

"What, is Fonsegue there!" cried Monferrand. "Why, I don't ask better than to shake hands with him. There were some old affairs between us that don't concern anybody! But, good heavens! if you only knew what little spite I harbour!"

When the usher had admitted Fonsegue the reconciliation took place in the simplest fashion. They had been great friends at college in their native Correze, but had not spoken together for ten years past in consequence of some abominable affair the particulars of which were not exactly known. However, it becomes necessary to clear away all corpses when one wishes to have the arena free for a fresh battle.

"It's very good of you to come back the first," said Monferrand. "So it's all over, you no longer bear me any grudge?"

"No, indeed!" replied Fonsegue. "Why should people devour one another when it would be to their interest to come to an understanding?"

Then, without further explanations, they passed to the great affair, and the conference began. And when Monferrand had announced Barroux' determination to confess and explain his conduct, the others loudly protested. That meant certain downfall, they would prevent him, he surely would not be guilty of such folly. Forthwith they discussed every imaginable plan by which the Ministry might be saved, for that must certainly be Monferrand's sole desire. He himself with all eagerness pretended to seek some means of extricating his colleagues and himself from the mess in which they were. However, a faint smile, still played around his lips, and at last as if vanquished he sought no further. "There's no help for it," said he, "the ministry's down."

The others exchanged glances, full of anxiety at the thought of another Cabinet dealing with the African Railways affair. A Vignon Cabinet would doubtless plume itself on behaving honestly.

"Well, then, what shall we do?"

But just then the telephone rang, and Monferrand rose to respond to the summons: "Allow me."

He listened for a moment and then spoke into the tube, nothing that he said giving the others any inkling of the information which had reached him. This had come from the Chief of the Detective Police, and was to the effect that Salvat's whereabouts in the Bois de Boulogne had been discovered, and that he would be hunted down with all speed. "Very good! And don't forget my orders," replied Monferrand.

Now that Salvat's arrest was certain, the Minister determined to follow the plan which had gradually taken shape in his mind; and returning to the middle of the room he slowly walked to and fro, while saying with his wonted familiarity: "But what would you have, my friends? It would be necessary for me to be the master. Ah! if I were the master! A Commission of Inquiry, yes! that's the proper form for a first-class funeral to take in a big affair like this, so full of nasty things. For my part, I should confess nothing, and I should have a Commission appointed. And then you would see the storm subside."

Duvillard and Fonsegue began to laugh. The latter, however, thanks to his intimate knowledge of Monferrand, almost guessed the truth. "Just listen!" said he; "even if the ministry falls it doesn't necessarily follow that you must be on the ground with it. Besides, a ministry can be mended when there are good pieces of it left."

Somewhat anxious at finding his thoughts guessed, Monferrand protested: "No, no, my dear fellow, I don't play that game. We are jointly responsible, we've got to keep together, dash it all!"

"Keep together! Pooh! Not when simpletons purposely drown themselves! And, besides, if we others have need of you, we have a right to save you in spite of yourself! Isn't that so, my dear Baron?"

Then, as Monferrand sat down, no longer protesting but waiting, Duvillard, who was again thinking of his passion, full of anger at the recollection of Barroux' refusal, rose in his turn, and exclaimed: "Why, certainly! If the ministry's condemned let it fall! What good can you get out of a ministry which includes such a man as Taboureau! There you have an old, worn-out professor without any prestige, who comes to Paris from Grenoble, and has never set foot in a theatre in his life! Yet the control of the theatres is handed over to him, and naturally he's ever doing the most stupid things!"

Monferrand, who was well informed on the Silviane question, remained grave, and for a moment amused himself by trying to excite the Baron. "Taboureau," said he, "is a somewhat dull and old-fashioned University man, but at the department of Public Instruction he's in his proper element."

"Oh! don't talk like that, my dear fellow! You are more intelligent than that, you are not going to defend Taboureau as Barroux did. It's quite true that I should very much like to see Silviane at the Comedie. She's a very good girl at heart, and she has an amazing lot of talent. Would you stand in her way if you were in Taboureau's place?"

"I? Good heavens, no! A pretty girl on the stage, why, it would please everybody, I'm sure. Only it would be necessary to have a man of the same views as were at the department of Instruction and Fine Arts."

His sly smile had returned to his face. The securing of that girl's debut was certainly not a high price to pay for all the influence of Duvillard's millions. Monferrand therefore turned towards Fonsegue as if to consult him. The other, who fully understood the importance of the affair, was meditating in all seriousness: "A senator is the proper man for Public Instruction," said he. "But I can think of none, none at all, such as would be wanted. A man of broad mind, a real Parisian, and yet one whose presence at the head of the University wouldn't cause too much astonishment—there's perhaps Dauvergne—"

"Dauvergne! Who's he?" exclaimed Monferrand in surprise. "Ah! yes, Dauvergne the senator for Dijon—but he's altogether ignorant of University matters, he hasn't the slightest qualification."

"Well, as for that," resumed Fonsegue, "I'm trying to think. Dauvergne is certainly a good-looking fellow, tall and fair and decorative. Besides, he's immensely rich, has a most charming young wife—which does no harm, on the contrary—and he gives real fetes at his place on the Boulevard St. Germain."

It was only with hesitation that Fonsegue himself had ventured to suggest Dauvergne. But by degrees his selection appeared to him a real "find." "Wait a bit! I recollect now that in his young days Dauvergne wrote a comedy, a one act comedy in verse, and had it performed at Dijon. And Dijon's a literary town, you know, so that piece of his sets a little perfume of 'Belles-Lettres' around him. And then, too, he left Dijon twenty years ago, and is a most determined Parisian, frequenting every sphere of society. Dauvergne will do whatever one desires. He's the man for us, I tell you."

Duvillard thereupon declared that he knew him, and considered him a very decent fellow. Besides, he or another, it mattered nothing!

"Dauvergne, Dauvergne," repeated Monferrand. "Mon Dieu, yes! After all, why not? He'll perhaps make a very good minister. Let us say Dauvergne." Then suddenly bursting into a hearty laugh: "And so we are reconstructing the Cabinet in order that that charming young woman may join the Comedie! The Silviane cabinet—well, and what about the other departments?"

He jested, well knowing that gaiety often hastens difficult solutions. And, indeed, they merrily continued settling what should be done if the ministry were defeated on the morrow. Although they had not plainly said so the plan was to let Barroux sink, even help him to do so, and then fish Monferrand out of the troubled waters. The latter engaged himself with the two others, because he had need of them, the Baron on account of his financial sovereignty, and the director of "Le Globe" on account of the press campaign which he could carry on in his favour. And in the same way the others, quite apart from the Silviane business, had need of Monferrand, the strong-handed man of government, who undertook to bury the African Railways scandal by bringing about a Commission of Inquiry, all the strings of which would be pulled by himself. There was soon a perfect understanding between the three men, for nothing draws people more closely together than common interest, fear and need. Accordingly, when Duvillard spoke of Duthil's business, the young lady whom he wished to recommend, the Minister declared that it was settled. A very nice fellow was Duthil, they needed a good many like him. And it was also agreed that Chaigneux' future son-in-law should have his secretaryship. Poor Chaigneux! He was so devoted, always ready to undertake any commission, and his four women folk led him such a hard life!

"Well, then, it's understood." And Monferrand, Duvillard and Fonsegue vigorously shook hands.

However, when the first accompanied the others to the door, he noticed a prelate, in a cassock of fine material, edged with violet, speaking to a priest in the ante-room. Thereupon he, the Minister, hastened forward, looking much distressed. "Ah! you were waiting, Monseigneur Martha! Come in, come in quick!"

But with perfect urbanity the Bishop refused. "No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment was here before me. Pray receive him first."

Monferrand had to give way; he admitted the priest, and speedily dealt with him. He who usually employed the most diplomatic reserve when he was in presence of a member of the clergy plumply unfolded the Barthes business. Pierre had experienced the keenest anguish during the two hours that he had been waiting there, for he could only explain the letter he had received by a surmise that the police had discovered his brother's presence in his house. And so when he heard the Minister simply speak of Barthes, and declare that the government would rather see him go into exile than be obliged to imprison him once more, he remained for a moment quite disconcerted. As the police had been able to discover the old conspirator in the little house at Neuilly, how was it that they seemed altogether ignorant of Guillaume's presence there? It was, however, the usual gap in the genius of great detectives.

"Pray what do you desire of me, Monsieur le Ministre?" said Pierre at last; "I don't quite understand."

"Why, Monsieur l'Abbe, I leave all this to your sense of prudence. If that man were still at your house in forty-eight hours from now, we should be obliged to arrest him there, which would be a source of grief to us, for we are aware that your residence is the abode of every virtue. So advise him to leave France. If he does that we shall not trouble him."

Then Monferrand hastily brought Pierre back to the ante-room; and, smiling and bending low, he said: "Monseigneur, I am entirely at your disposal. Come in, come in, I beg you."

The prelate, who was gaily chatting with Duvillard and Fonsegue, shook hands with them, and then with Pierre. In his desire to win all hearts, he that morning displayed the most perfect graciousness. His bright, black eyes were all smiles, the whole of his handsome face wore a caressing expression, and he entered the ministerial sanctum leisurely and gracefully, with an easy air of conquest.

And now only Monferrand and Monseigneur Martha were left, talking on and on in the deserted building. Some people had thought that the prelate wished to become a deputy. But he played a far more useful and lofty part in governing behind the scenes, in acting as the directing mind of the Vatican's policy in France. Was not France still the Eldest Daughter of the Church, the only great nation which might some day restore omnipotence to the Papacy? For that reason he had accepted the Republic, preached the duty of "rallying" to it, and inspired the new Catholic group in the Chamber. And Monferrand, on his side, struck by the progress of the New Spirit, that reaction of mysticism which flattered itself that it would bury science, showed the prelate much amiability, like a strong-handed man who, to ensure his own victory, utilised every force that was offered him.

IV. THE MAN HUNT

ON the afternoon of that same day such a keen desire for space and the open air came upon Guillaume, that Pierre consented to accompany him on a long walk in the Bois de Boulogne. The priest, upon returning from his interview with Monferrand, had informed his brother that the government once more wished to get rid of Nicholas Barthes. However, they were so perplexed as to how they should impart these tidings to the old man, that they resolved to postpone the matter until the evening. During their walk they might devise some means of breaking the news in a gentle way. As for the walk, this seemed to offer no danger; to all appearance Guillaume was in no wise threatened, so why should he continue hiding? Thus the brothers sallied forth and entered the Bois by the Sablons gate, which was the nearest to them.

The last days of March had now come, and the trees were beginning to show some greenery, so soft and light, however, that one might have thought it was pale moss or delicate lace hanging between the stems and boughs. Although the sky remained of an ashen grey, the rain, after falling throughout the night and morning, had ceased; and exquisite freshness pervaded that wood now awakening to life once more, with its foliage dripping in the mild and peaceful atmosphere. The mid-Lent rejoicings had apparently attracted the populace to the centre of Paris, for in the avenues one found only the fashionable folks of select days, the people of society who come thither when the multitude stops away. There were carriages and gentlemen on horseback; beautiful aristocratic ladies who had alighted from their broughams or landaus; and wet-nurses with streaming ribbons, who carried infants wearing the most costly lace. Of the middle-classes, however, one found only a few matrons living in the neighbourhood, who sat here and there on the benches busy with embroidery or watching their children play.

Pierre and Guillaume followed the Allee de Longchamp as far as the road going from Madrid to the lakes. Then they took their way under the trees, alongside the little Longchamp rivulet. They wished to reach the lakes, pass round them, and return home by way of the Maillot gate. But so charming and peaceful was the deserted plantation through which they passed, that they yielded to a desire to sit down and taste the delight of resting amidst all the budding springtide around them. A fallen tree served them as a bench, and it was possible for them to fancy themselves far away from Paris, in the depths of some real forest. It was, too, of a real forest that Guillaume began to think on thus emerging from his long, voluntary imprisonment. Ah! for the space; and for the health-bringing air which courses between that forest's branches, that forest of the world which by right should be man's inalienable domain! However, the name of Barthes, the perpetual prisoner, came back to Guillaume's lips, and he sighed mournfully. The thought that there should be even a single man whose liberty was thus ever assailed, sufficed to poison the pure atmosphere he breathed.

"What will you say to Barthes?" he asked his brother. "The poor fellow must necessarily be warned. Exile is at any rate preferable to imprisonment."

Pierre sadly waved his hand. "Yes, of course, I must warn him. But what a painful task it is!"

Guillaume made no rejoinder, for at that very moment, in that remote, deserted nook, where they could fancy themselves at the world's end, a most extraordinary spectacle was presented to their view. Something or rather someone leapt out of a thicket and bounded past them. It was assuredly a man, but one who was so unrecognisable, so miry, so woeful and so frightful, that he might have been taken for an animal, a boar that hounds had tracked and forced from his retreat. On seeing the rivulet, he hesitated for a moment, and then followed its course. But, all at once, as a sound of footsteps and panting breath drew nearer, he sprang into the water, which reached his thighs, bounded on to the further bank, and vanished from sight behind a clump of pines. A moment afterwards some keepers and policemen rushed by, skirting the rivulet, and in their turn disappearing. It was a man hunt that had gone past, a fierce, secret hunt with no display of scarlet or blast of horns athwart the soft, sprouting foliage.

"Some rascal or other," muttered Pierre. "Ah! the wretched fellow!"

Guillaume made a gesture of discouragement. "Gendarmes and prison!" said he. "They still constitute society's only schooling system!"

Meantime the man was still running on, farther and farther away.

When, on the previous night, Salvat had suddenly escaped from the detectives by bounding into the Bois de Boulogne, it had occurred to him to slip round to the Dauphine gate and there descend into the deep ditch* of the city ramparts. He remembered days of enforced idleness which he had spent there, in nooks where, for his own part, he had never met a living soul. Nowhere, indeed, could one find more secret places of retreat, hedged round by thicker bushes, or concealed from view by loftier herbage. Some corners of the ditch, at certain angles of the massive bastions, are favourite dens or nests for thieves and lovers. Salvat, as he made his way through the thickest of the brambles, nettles and ivy, was lucky enough to find a cavity full of dry leaves, in which he buried himself to the chin. The rain had already drenched him, and after slipping down the muddy slope, he had frequently been obliged to grope his way upon all fours. So those dry leaves proved a boon such as he had not dared to hope for. They dried him somewhat, serving as a blanket in which he coiled himself after his wild race through the dank darkness. The rain still fell, but he now only felt it on his head, and, weary as he was, he gradually sank into deep slumber beneath the continuous drizzle. When he opened his eyes again, the dawn was breaking, and it was probably about six o'clock. During his sleep the rain had ended by soaking the leaves, so that he was now immersed in a kind of chilly bath. Still he remained in it, feeling that he was there sheltered from the police, who must now surely be searching for him. None of those bloodhounds would guess his presence in that hole, for his body was quite buried, and briers almost completely hid his head. So he did not stir, but watched the rise of the dawn.

* This ditch or dry moat is about 30 feet deep and 50 feet wide.
The counterscarp by which one may descend into it has an angle
of 45 degrees.—Trans.

When at eight o'clock some policemen and keepers came by, searching the ditch, they did not perceive him. As he had anticipated, the hunt had begun at the first glimmer of light. For a time his heart beat violently; however, nobody else passed, nothing whatever stirred the grass. The only sounds that reached him were faint ones from the Bois de Boulogne, the ring of a bicyclist's bell, the thud of a horse's hoofs, the rumble of carriage wheels. And time went by, nine o'clock came, and then ten o'clock. Since the rain had ceased falling, Salvat had not suffered so much from the cold, for he was wearing a thick overcoat which little Mathis had given him. But, on the other hand, hunger was coming back; there was a burning sensation in his stomach, and leaden hoops seemed to be pressing against his ribs. He had eaten nothing for two days; he had been starving already on the previous evening, when he had accepted a glass of beer at that tavern at Montmartre. Nevertheless, his plan was to remain in the ditch until nightfall, and then slip away in the direction of the village of Boulogne, where he knew of a means of egress from the wood. He was not caught yet, he repeated, he might still manage to escape. Then he tried to get to sleep again, but failed, so painful had his sufferings become. By the time it was eleven, everything swam before his eyes. He once nearly fainted, and thought that he was going to die. Then rage gradually mastered him, and, all at once, he sprang out of his leafy hiding-place, desperately hungering for food, unable to remain there any longer, and determined to find something to eat, even should it cost him his liberty and life. It was then noon.

On leaving the ditch he found the spreading lawns of the chateau of La Muette before him. He crossed them at a run, like a madman, instinctively going towards Boulogne, with the one idea that his only means of escape lay in that direction. It seemed miraculous that nobody paid attention to his helter-skelter flight. However, when he had reached the cover of some trees he became conscious of his imprudence, and almost regretted the sudden madness which had borne him along, eager for escape. Trembling nervously, he bent low among some furze bushes, and waited for a few minutes to ascertain if the police were behind him. Then with watchful eye and ready ear, wonderful instinct and scent of danger, he slowly went his way again. He hoped to pass between the upper lake and the Auteuil race-course; but there were few trees in that part, and they formed a broad avenue. He therefore had to exert all his skill in order to avoid observation, availing himself of the slenderest stems, the smallest bushes, as screens, and only venturing onward after a lengthy inspection of his surroundings. Before long the sight of a guard in the distance revived his fears and detained him, stretched on the ground behind some brambles, for a full quarter of an hour. Then the approach first of a cab, whose driver had lost his way, and afterwards of a strolling pedestrian, in turn sufficed to stop him. He breathed once more, however, when, after passing the Mortemart hillock, he was able to enter the thickets lying between the two roads which lead to Boulogne and St. Cloud. The coppices thereabouts were dense, and he merely had to follow them, screened from view, in order to reach the outlet he knew of, which was now near at hand. So he was surely saved.

But all at once, at a distance of some five and thirty yards, he saw a keeper, erect and motionless, barring his way. He turned slightly to the left and there perceived another keeper, who also seemed to be awaiting him. And there were more and more of them; at every fifty paces or so stood a fresh one, the whole forming a cordon, the meshes as it were of a huge net. The worst was that he must have been perceived, for a light cry, like the clear call of an owl, rang out, and was repeated farther and farther off. The hunters were at last on the right scent, prudence had become superfluous, and it was only by flight that the quarry might now hope to escape. Salvat understood this so well that he suddenly began to run, leaping over all obstacles and darting between the trees, careless whether he were seen or heard. A few bounds carried him across the Avenue de St. Cloud into the plantations stretching to the Allee de la Reine Marguerite. There the undergrowth was very dense; in the whole Bois there are no more closely set thickets. In summer they become one vast entanglement of verdure, amidst which, had it been the leafy season, Salvat might well have managed to secrete himself. For a moment he did find himself alone, and thereupon he halted to listen. He could neither see nor hear the keepers now. Had they lost his track, then? Profound quietude reigned under the fresh young foliage. But the light, owlish cry arose once more, branches cracked, and he resumed his wild flight, hurrying straight before him. Unluckily he found the Allee de la Reine Marguerite guarded by policemen, so that he could not cross over, but had to skirt it without quitting the thickets. And now his back was turned towards Boulogne; he was retracing his steps towards Paris. However, a last idea came to his bewildered mind: it was to run on in this wise as far as the shady spots around Madrid, and then, by stealing from copse to copse, attempt to reach the Seine. To proceed thither across the bare expanse of the race-course and training ground was not for a moment to be thought of.

So Salvat still ran on and on. But on reaching the Allee de Longchamp he found it guarded like the other roads, and therefore had to relinquish his plan of escaping by way of Madrid and the river-bank. While he was perforce making a bend alongside the Pre Catelan, he became aware that the keepers, led by detectives, were drawing yet nearer to him, confining his movements to a smaller and smaller area. And his race soon acquired all the frenzy of despair. Haggard and breathless he leapt mounds, rushed past multitudinous obstacles. He forced a passage through brambles, broke down palings, thrice caught his feet in wire work which he had not seen, and fell among nettles, yet picked himself up went on again, spurred by the stinging of his hands and face. It was then Guillaume and Pierre saw him pass, unrecognisable and frightful, taking to the muddy water of the rivulet like a stag which seeks to set a last obstacle between itself and the hounds. There came to him a wild idea of getting to the lake, and swimming, unperceived, to the island in the centre of it. That, he madly thought, would be a safe retreat, where he might burrow and hide himself without possibility of discovery. And so he still ran on. But once again the sight of some guards made him retrace his steps, and he was compelled to go back and back in the direction of Paris, chased, forced towards the very fortifications whence he had started that morning. It was now nearly three in the afternoon. For more than two hours and a half he had been running.

At last he saw a soft, sandy ride for horsemen before him. He crossed it, splashing through the mire left by the rain, and reached a little pathway, a delightful lovers' lane, as shady in summer as any arbour. For some time he was able to follow it, concealed from observation, and with his hopes reviving. But it led him to one of those broad, straight avenues where carriages and bicycles, the whole afternoon pageant of society, swept past under the mild and cloudy sky. So he returned to the thickets, fell once more upon the keepers, lost all notion of the direction he took, and even all power of thought, becoming a mere thing carried along and thrown hither and thither by the chances of the pursuit which pressed more and more closely upon him. Star-like crossways followed one upon other, and at last he came to a broad lawn, where the full light dazzled him. And there he suddenly felt the hot, panting breath of his pursuers close in the rear. Eager, hungry breath it was, like that of hounds seeking to devour him. Shouts rang out, one hand almost caught hold of him, there was a rush of heavy feet, a scramble to seize him. But with a supreme effort he leapt upon a bank, crawled to its summit, rose again, and once more found himself alone, still running on amid the fresh and quiet greenery.

Nevertheless, this was the end. He almost fell flat upon the ground. His aching feet could no longer carry him; blood was oozing from his ears, and froth had come to his mouth. His heart beat with such violence that it seemed likely to break his ribs. Water and perspiration streamed from him, he was miry and haggard and tortured by hunger, conquered, in fact, more by hunger than by fatigue. And through the mist which seemed to have gathered before his wild eyes, he suddenly saw an open doorway, the doorway of a coach-house in the rear of a kind of chalet, sequestered among trees. Excepting a big white cat, which took to flight, there was not a living creature in the place. Salvat plunged into it and rolled over on a heap of straw, among some empty casks. He was scarcely hidden there when he heard the chase sweep by, the detectives and the keepers losing scent, passing the chalet and rushing in the direction of the Paris ramparts. The noise of their heavy boots died away, and deep silence fell, while the hunted man, who had carried both hands to his heart to stay its beating, sank into the most complete prostration, with big tears trickling from his closed eyes.

Whilst all this was going on, Pierre and Guillaume, after a brief rest, had resumed their walk, reaching the lake and proceeding towards the crossway of the Cascades, in order to return to Neuilly by the road beyond the water. However, a shower fell, compelling them to take shelter under the big leafless branches of a chestnut-tree. Then, as the rain came down more heavily and they could perceive a kind of chalet, a little cafe-restaurant amid a clump of trees, they hastened thither for better protection. In a side road, which they passed on their way, they saw a cab standing, its driver waiting there in philosophical fashion under the falling shower. Pierre, moreover, noticed a young man stepping out briskly in front of them, a young man resembling Gerard de Quinsac, who, whilst walking in the Bois, had no doubt been overtaken by the rain, and like themselves was seeking shelter in the chalet. However, on entering the latter's public room, the priest saw no sign of the gentleman, and concluded that he must have been mistaken. This public room, which had a kind of glazed verandah overlooking the Bois, contained a few chairs and tables, the latter with marble tops. On the first floor there were four or five private rooms reached by a narrow passage. Though the doors were open the place had as yet scarcely emerged from its winter's rest. There was nobody about, and on all sides one found the dampness common to establishments which, from lack of custom, are compelled to close from November until March. In the rear were some stables, a coach-house, and various mossy, picturesque outbuildings, which painters and gardeners would now soon embellish for the gay pleasure parties which the fine weather would bring.

"I really think that they haven't opened for the season yet," said Guillaume as he entered the silent house.

"At all events they will let us stay here till the rain stops," answered Pierre, seating himself at one of the little tables.

However, a waiter suddenly made his appearance seemingly in a great hurry. He had come down from the first floor, and eagerly rummaged a cupboard for a few dry biscuits, which he laid upon a plate. At last he condescended to serve the brothers two glasses of Chartreuse.

In one of the private rooms upstairs Baroness Duvillard, who had driven to the chalet in a cab, had been awaiting her lover Gerard for nearly half an hour. It was there that, during the charity bazaar, they had given each other an appointment. For them the chalet had precious memories: two years previously, on discovering that secluded nest, which was so deserted in the early, hesitating days of chilly spring, they had met there under circumstances which they could not forget. And the Baroness, in choosing the house for the supreme assignation of their dying passion, had certainly not been influenced merely by a fear that she might be spied upon elsewhere. She had, indeed, thought of the first kisses that had been showered on her there, and would fain have revived them even if they should now prove the last that Gerard would bestow on her.

But she would also have liked to see some sunlight playing over the youthful foliage. The ashen sky and threatening rain saddened her. And when she entered the private room she did not recognise it, so cold and dim it seemed with its faded furniture. Winter had tarried there, with all the dampness and mouldy smell peculiar to rooms which have long remained closed. Then, too, some of the wall paper which had come away from the plaster hung down in shreds, dead flies were scattered over the parquetry flooring; and in order to open the shutters the waiter had to engage in a perfect fight with their fastenings. However, when he had lighted a little gas-stove, which at once flamed up and diffused some warmth, the room became more cosy.

Eve had seated herself on a chair, without raising the thick veil which hid her face. Gowned, gloved, and bonneted in black, as if she were already in mourning for her last passion, she showed naught of her own person save her superb fair hair, which glittered like a helm of tawny gold. She had ordered tea for two, and when the waiter brought it with a little plateful of dry biscuits, left, no doubt, from the previous season, he found her in the same place, still veiled and motionless, absorbed, it seemed, in a gloomy reverie. If she had reached the cafe half an hour before the appointed time it was because she desired some leisure and opportunity to overcome her despair and compose herself. She resolved that of all things she would not weep, that she would remain dignified and speak calmly, like one who, whatever rights she might possess, preferred to appeal to reason only. And she was well pleased with the courage that she found within her. Whilst thinking of what she should say to dissuade Gerard from a marriage which to her mind would prove both a calamity and a blunder, she fancied herself very calm, indeed almost resigned to whatsoever might happen.

But all at once she started and began to tremble. Gerard was entering the room.

"What! are you here the first, my dear?" he exclaimed. "I thought that I myself was ten minutes before the time! And you've ordered some tea and are waiting for me!"

He forced a smile as he spoke, striving to display the same delight at seeing her as he had shown in the early golden days of their passion. But at heart he was much embarrassed, and he shuddered at the thought of the awful scene which he could foresee.

She had at last risen and raised her veil. And looking at him she stammered: "Yes, I found myself at liberty earlier than I expected.... I feared some impediment might arise... and so I came."

Then, seeing how handsome and how affectionate he still looked, she could not restrain her passion. All her skilful arguments, all her fine resolutions, were swept away. Her flesh irresistibly impelled her towards him; she loved him, she would keep him, she would never surrender him to another. And she wildly flung her arms around his neck.

"Oh! Gerard, Gerard! I suffer too cruelly; I cannot, I cannot bear it! Tell me at once that you will not marry her, that you will never marry her!"

Her voice died away in a sob, tears started from her eyes. Ah! those tears which she had sworn she would never shed! They gushed forth without cessation, they streamed from her lovely eyes like a flood of the bitterest grief.

"My daughter, O God! What! you would marry my daughter! She, here, on your neck where I am now! No, no, such torture is past endurance, it must not be, I will not have it!"

He shivered as he heard that cry of frantic jealousy raised by a mother who now was but a woman, maddened by the thought of her rival's youth, those five and twenty summers which she herself had left far behind. For his part, on his way to the assignation, he had come to what he thought the most sensible decision, resolving to break off the intercourse after the fashion of a well-bred man, with all sorts of fine consolatory speeches. But sternness was not in his nature. He was weak and soft-hearted, and had never been able to withstand a woman's tears. Nevertheless, he endeavoured to calm her, and in order to rid himself of her embrace, he made her sit down upon the sofa. And there, beside her, he replied: "Come, be reasonable, my dear. We came here to have a friendly chat, did we not? I assure you that you are greatly exaggerating matters."

But she was determined to obtain a more positive answer from him. "No, no!" she retorted, "I am suffering too dreadfully, I must know the truth at once. Swear to me that you will never, never marry her!"

He again endeavoured to avoid replying as she wished him to do. "Come, come," he said, "you will do yourself harm by giving way to such grief as this; you know that I love you dearly."

"Then swear to me that you will never, never marry her."

"But I tell you that I love you, that you are the only one I love."

Then she again threw her arms around him, and kissed him passionately upon the eyes. "Is it true?" she asked in a transport. "You love me, you love no one else? Oh! tell me so again, and kiss me, and promise me that you will never belong to her."

Weak as he was he could not resist her ardent caresses and pressing entreaties. There came a moment of supreme cowardice and passion; her arms were around him and he forgot all but her, again and again repeating that he loved none other, and would never, never marry her daughter. At last he even sank so low as to pretend that he simply regarded that poor, infirm creature with pity. His words of compassionate disdain for her rival were like nectar to Eve, for they filled her with the blissful idea that it was she herself who would ever remain beautiful in his eyes and whom he would ever love....

At last silence fell between them, like an inevitable reaction after such a tempest of despair and passion. It disturbed Gerard. "Won't you drink some tea?" he asked. "It is almost cold already."

She was not listening, however. To her the reaction had come in a different form; and as though the inevitable explanation were only now commencing, she began to speak in a sad and weary voice. "My dear Gerard, you really cannot marry my daughter. In the first place it would be so wrong, and then there is the question of your name, your position. Forgive my frankness, but the fact is that everybody would say that you had sold yourself—such a marriage would be a scandal for both your family and mine."

As she spoke she took hold of his hands, like a mother seeking to prevent her big son from committing some terrible blunder. And he listened to her, with bowed head and averted eyes. She now evinced no anger, no jealous rage; all such feelings seemed to have departed with the rapture of her passion.

"Just think of what people would say," she continued. "I don't deceive myself, I am fully aware that there is an abyss between your circle of society and ours. It is all very well for us to be rich, but money simply enlarges the gap. And it was all very fine for me to be converted, my daughter is none the less 'the daughter of the Jewess,' as folks so often say. Ah! my Gerard, I am so proud of you, that it would rend my heart to see you lowered, degraded almost, by a marriage for money with a girl who is deformed, who is unworthy of you and whom you could never love."

He raised his eyes and looked at her entreatingly, anxious as he was to be spared such painful talk. "But haven't I sworn to you, that you are the only one I love?" he said. "Haven't I sworn that I would never marry her! It's all over. Don't let us torture ourselves any longer."

Their glances met and lingered on one another, instinct with all the misery which they dared not express in words. Eve's face had suddenly aged; her eyelids were red and swollen, and blotches marbled her quivering cheeks, down which her tears again began to trickle. "My poor, poor Gerard," said she, "how heavily I weigh on you. Oh! do not deny it! I feel that I am an intolerable burden on your shoulders, an impediment in your life, and that I shall bring irreparable disaster on you by my obstinacy in wishing you to be mine alone."

He tried to speak, but she silenced him. "No, no, all is over between us. I am growing ugly, all is ended. And besides, I shut off the future from you. I can be of no help to you, whereas you bestow all on me. And yet the time has come for you to assure yourself a position. At your age you can't continue living without any certainty of the morrow, without a home and hearth of your own; and it would be cowardly and cruel of me to set myself up as an obstacle, and prevent you from ending your life happily, as I should do if I clung to you and dragged you down with me."

Gazing at him through her tears she continued speaking in this fashion. Like his mother she was well aware that he was weak and even sickly; and she therefore dreamt of arranging a quiet life for him, a life of tranquil happiness free from all fear of want. She loved him so fondly; and possessed so much genuine kindness of heart that perhaps it might be possible for her to rise even to renunciation and sacrifice. Moreover, the very egotism born of her beauty suggested that it might be well for her to think of retirement and not allow the autumn of her life to be spoilt by torturing dramas. All this she said to him, treating him like a child whose happiness she wished to ensure even at the price of her own; and he, his eyes again lowered, listened without further protest, pleased indeed to let her arrange a happy life for him.

Examining the situation from every aspect, she at last began to recapitulate the points in favour of that abominable marriage, the thought of which had so intensely distressed her. "It is certain," she said, "that Camille would bring you all that I should like you to have. With her, I need hardly say it, would come plenty, affluence. And as for the rest, well, I do not wish to excuse myself or you, but I could name twenty households in which there have been worse things. Besides, I was wrong when I said that money opened a gap between people. On the contrary, it draws them nearer together, it secures forgiveness for every fault; so nobody would dare to blame you, there would only be jealous ones around you, dazzled by your good fortune."

Gerard rose, apparently rebelling once more. "Surely," said he, "you don't insist on my marrying your daughter?"

"Ah! no indeed! But I am sensible, and I tell you what I ought to tell you. You must think it all over."

"I have done so already. It is you that I have loved, and that I love still. What you say is impossible."

She smiled divinely, rose, and again embraced him. "How good and kind you are, my Gerard. Ah! if you only knew how I love you, how I shall always love you, whatever happens."

Then she again began to weep, and even he shed tears. Their good faith was absolute; tender of heart as they were, they sought to delay the painful wrenching and tried to hope for further happiness. But they were conscious that the marriage was virtually an accomplished fact. Only tears and words were left them, while life and destiny were marching on. And if their emotion was so acute it was probably because they felt that this was the last time they would meet as lovers. Still they strove to retain the illusion that they were not exchanging their last farewell, that their lips would some day meet again in a kiss of rapture.

Eve removed her arms from the young man's neck, and they both gazed round the room, at the sofa, the table, the four chairs, and the little hissing gas-stove. The moist, hot atmosphere was becoming quite oppressive.

"And so," said Gerard, "you won't drink a cup of tea?"

"No, it's so horrid here," she answered, while arranging her hair in front of the looking-glass.

At that parting moment the mournfulness of this place, where she had hoped to find such delightful memories, filled her with distress, which was turning to positive anguish, when she suddenly heard an uproar of gruff voices and heavy feet. People were hastening along the passage and knocking at the doors. And, on darting to the window, she perceived a number of policemen surrounding the chalet. At this the wildest ideas assailed her. Had her daughter employed somebody to follow her? Did her husband wish to divorce her so as to marry Silviane? The scandal would be awful, and all her plans must crumble! She waited in dismay, white like a ghost; while Gerard, also paling and quivering, begged her to be calm. At last, when loud blows were dealt upon the door and a Commissary of Police enjoined them to open it, they were obliged to do so. Ah! what a moment, and what dismay and shame!

Meantime, for more than an hour, Pierre and Guillaume had been waiting for the rain to cease. Seated in a corner of the glazed verandah they talked in undertones of Barthes' painful affair, and ultimately decided to ask Theophile Morin to dine with them on the following evening, and inform his old friend that he must again go into exile.

"That is the best course," repeated Guillaume. "Morin is very fond of him and will know how to break the news. I have no doubt too that he will go with him as far as the frontier."

Pierre sadly looked at the falling rain. "Ah! what a choice," said he, "to be ever driven to a foreign land under penalty of being thrust into prison. Poor fellow! how awful it is to have never known a moment of happiness and gaiety in one's life, to have devoted one's whole existence to the idea of liberty, and to see it scoffed at and expire with oneself!"

Then the priest paused, for he saw several policemen and keepers approach the cafe and prowl round it. Having lost scent of the man they were hunting, they had retraced their steps with the conviction no doubt that he had sought refuge in the chalet. And in order that he might not again escape them, they now took every precaution, exerted all their skill in surrounding the place before venturing on a minute search. Covert fear came upon Pierre and Guillaume when they noticed these proceedings. It seemed to them that it must all be connected with the chase which they had caught a glimpse of some time previously. Still, as they happened to be in the chalet they might be called upon to give their names and addresses. At this thought they glanced at one another, and almost made up their minds to go off under the rain. But they realised that anything like flight might only compromise them the more. So they waited; and all at once there came a diversion, for two fresh customers entered the establishment.

A victoria with its hood and apron raised had just drawn up outside the door. The first to alight from it was a young, well-dressed man with a bored expression of face. He was followed by a young woman who was laughing merrily, as if much amused by the persistence of the downpour. By way of jesting, indeed, she expressed her regret that she had not come to the Bois on her bicycle, whereupon her companion retorted that to drive about in a deluge appeared to him the height of idiocy.

"But we were bound to go somewhere, my dear fellow," she gaily answered. "Why didn't you take me to see the maskers?"

"The maskers, indeed! No, no, my dear. I prefer the Bois, and even the bottom of the lake, to them."

Then, as the couple entered the chalet, Pierre saw that the young woman who made merry over the rain was little Princess Rosemonde, while her companion, who regarded the mid-Lent festivities as horrible, and bicycling as an utterly unaesthetic amusement, was handsome Hyacinthe Duvillard. On the previous evening, while they were taking a cup of tea together on their return from the Chamber of Horrors, the young man had responded to the Princess's blandishments by declaring that the only form of attachment he believed in was a mystic union of intellects and souls. And as such a union could only be fittingly arrived at amidst the cold, chaste snow, they had decided that they would start for Christiania on the following Monday. Their chief regret was that by the time they reached the fiords the worst part of the northern winter would be over.

They sat down in the cafe and ordered some kummel, but there was none, said the waiter, so they had to content themselves with common anisette. Then Hyacinthe, who had been a schoolfellow of Guillaume's sons, recognised both him and Pierre; and leaning towards Rosemonde told her in a whisper who the elder brother was.

Thereupon, with sudden enthusiasm, she sprang to her feet: "Guillaume Froment, indeed! the great chemist!" And stepping forward with arm outstretched, she continued: "Ah! monsieur, you must excuse me, but I really must shake hands with you. I have so much admiration for you! You have done such wonderful work in connection with explosives!" Then, noticing the chemist's astonishment, she again burst into a laugh: "I am the Princess de Harn, your brother Abbe Froment knows me, and I ought to have asked him to introduce me. However, we have mutual friends, you and I; for instance, Monsieur Janzen, a very distinguished man, as you are aware. He was to have taken me to see you, for I am a modest disciple of yours. Yes, I have given some attention to chemistry, oh! from pure zeal for truth and in the hope of helping good causes, not otherwise. So you will let me call on you—won't you?—directly I come back from Christiania, where I am going with my young friend here, just to acquire some experience of unknown emotions."

In this way she rattled on, never allowing the others an opportunity to say a word. And she mingled one thing with another; her cosmopolitan tastes, which had thrown her into Anarchism and the society of shady adventurers; her new passion for mysticism and symbolism; her belief that the ideal must triumph over base materialism; her taste for aesthetic verse; and her dream of some unimagined rapture when Hyacinthe should kiss her with his frigid lips in a realm of eternal snow.

All at once, however, she stopped short and again began to laugh. "Dear me!" she exclaimed. "What are those policemen looking for here? Have they come to arrest us? How amusing it would be!"

Police Commissary Dupot and detective Mondesir had just made up their minds to search the cafe, as their men had hitherto failed to find Salvat in any of the outbuildings. They were convinced that he was here. Dupot, a thin, bald, short-sighted, spectacled little man, wore his usual expression of boredom and weariness; but in reality he was very wide awake and extremely courageous. He himself carried no weapons; but, as he anticipated a most violent resistance, such as might be expected from a trapped wolf, he advised Mondesir to have his revolver ready. From considerations of hierarchical respect, however, the detective, who with his snub nose and massive figure had much the appearance of a bull-dog, was obliged to let his superior enter first.

From behind his spectacles the Commissary of Police quickly scrutinized the four customers whom he found in the cafe: the lady, the priest, and the two other men. And passing them in a disdainful way, he at once made for the stairs, intending to inspect the upper floor. Thereupon the waiter, frightened by the sudden intrusion of the police, lost his head and stammered: "But there's a lady and gentleman upstairs in one of the private rooms."

Dupot quietly pushed him aside. "A lady and gentleman, that's not what we are looking for.... Come, make haste, open all the doors, you mustn't leave a cupboard closed."

Then climbing to the upper floor, he and Mondesir explored in turn every apartment and corner till they at last reached the room where Eve and Gerard were together. Here the waiter was unable to admit them, as the door was bolted inside. "Open the door!" he called through the keyhole, "it isn't you that they want!"

At last the bolt was drawn back, and Dupot, without even venturing to smile, allowed the trembling lady and gentleman to go downstairs, while Mondesir, entering the room, looked under every article of furniture, and even peeped into a little cupboard in order that no neglect might be imputed to him.

Meantime, in the public room which they had to cross after descending the stairs, Eve and Gerard experienced fresh emotion; for people whom they knew were there, brought together by an extraordinary freak of chance. Although Eve's face was hidden by a thick veil, her eyes met her son's glance and she felt sure that he recognised her. What a fatality! He had so long a tongue and told his sister everything! Then, as the Count, in despair at such a scandal, hurried off with the Baroness to conduct her through the pouring rain to her cab, they both distinctly heard little Princess Rosemonde exclaim: "Why, that was Count de Quinsac! Who was the lady, do you know?" And as Hyacinthe, greatly put out, returned no answer, she insisted, saying: "Come, you must surely know her. Who was she, eh?"

"Oh! nobody. Some woman or other," he ended by replying.

Pierre, who had understood the truth, turned his eyes away to hide his embarrassment. But all at once the scene changed. At the very moment when Commissary Dupot and detective Mondesir came downstairs again, after vainly exploring the upper floor, a loud shout was raised outside, followed by a noise of running and scrambling. Then Gascogne, the Chief of the Detective Force, who had remained in the rear of the chalet, continuing the search through the outbuildings, made his appearance, pushing before him a bundle of rags and mud, which two policemen held on either side. And this bundle was the man, the hunted man, who had just been discovered in the coach-house, inside a staved cask, covered with hay.

Ah! what a whoop of victory there was after that run of two hours' duration, that frantic chase which had left them all breathless and footsore! It had been the most exciting, the most savage of all sports—a man hunt! They had caught the man at last, and they pushed him, they dragged him, they belaboured him with blows. And he, the man, what a sorry prey he looked! A wreck, wan and dirty from having spent the night in a hole full of leaves, still soaked to his waist from having rushed through a stream, drenched too by the rain, bespattered with mire, his coat and trousers in tatters, his cap a mere shred, his legs and hands bleeding from his terrible rush through thickets bristling with brambles and nettles. There no longer seemed anything human about his face; his hair stuck to his moist temples, his bloodshot eyes protruded from their sockets; fright, rage, and suffering were all blended on his wasted, contracted face. Still it was he, the man, the quarry, and they gave him another push, and he sank on one of the tables of the little cafe, still held and shaken, however, by the rough hands of the policemen.

Then Guillaume shuddered as if thunderstruck, and caught hold of Pierre's hand. At this the priest, who was looking on, suddenly understood the truth and also quivered. Salvat! the man was Salvat! It was Salvat whom they had seen rushing through the wood like a wild boar forced by the hounds. And it was Salvat who was there, now conquered and simply a filthy bundle. Then once more there came to Pierre, amidst his anguish, a vision of the errand girl lying yonder at the entrance of the Duvillard mansion, the pretty fair-haired girl whom the bomb had ripped and killed!

Dupot and Mondesir made haste to participate in Gascogne's triumph. To tell the truth, however, the man had offered no resistance; it was like a lamb that he had let the police lay hold of him. And since he had been in the cafe, still roughly handled, he had simply cast a weary and mournful glance around him.

At last he spoke, and the first words uttered by his hoarse, gasping voice were these: "I am hungry."

He was sinking with hunger and weariness. This was the third day that he had eaten nothing.

"Give him some bread," said Commissary Dupot to the waiter. "He can eat it while a cab is being fetched."

A policeman went off to find a vehicle. The rain had suddenly ceased falling, the clear ring of a bicyclist's bell was heard in the distance, some carriages drove by, and under the pale sunrays life again came back to the Bois.

Meantime, Salvat had fallen gluttonously upon the hunk of bread which had been given him, and whilst he was devouring it with rapturous animal satisfaction, he perceived the four customers seated around. He seemed irritated by the sight of Hyacinthe and Rosemonde, whose faces expressed the mingled anxiety and delight they felt at thus witnessing the arrest of some bandit or other. But all at once his mournful, bloodshot eyes wavered, for to his intense surprise he had recognised Pierre and Guillaume. When he again looked at the latter it was with the submissive affection of a grateful dog, and as if he were once more promising that he would divulge nothing, whatever might happen.

At last he again spoke, as if addressing himself like a man of courage, both to Guillaume, from whom he had averted his eyes, and to others also, his comrades who were not there: "It was silly of me to run," said he. "I don't know why I did so. It's best that it should be all ended. I'm ready."

V. THE GAME OF POLITICS

ON reading the newspapers on the following morning Pierre and Guillaume were greatly surprised at not finding in them the sensational accounts of Salvat's arrest which they had expected. All they could discover was a brief paragraph in a column of general news, setting forth that some policemen on duty in the Bois de Boulogne had there arrested an Anarchist, who was believed to have played a part in certain recent occurrences. On the other hand, the papers gave a deal of space to the questions raised by Sagnier's fresh denunciations. There were innumerable articles on the African Railways scandal, and the great debate which might be expected at the Chamber of Deputies, should Mege, the Socialist member, really renew his interpellation, as he had announced his intention of doing.

As Guillaume's wrist was now fast healing, and nothing seemed to threaten him, he had already, on the previous evening, decided that he would return to Montmartre. The police had passed him by without apparently suspecting any responsibility on his part; and he was convinced that Salvat would keep silent. Pierre, however, begged him to wait a little longer, at any rate until the prisoner should have been interrogated by the investigating magistrate, by which time they would be able to judge the situation more clearly. Pierre, moreover, during his long stay at the Home Department on the previous morning, had caught a glimpse of certain things and overheard certain words which made him suspect some dim connection between Salvat's crime and the parliamentary crisis; and he therefore desired a settlement of the latter before Guillaume returned to his wonted life.

"Just listen," he said to his brother. "I am going to Morin's to ask him to come and dine here this evening, for it is absolutely necessary that Barthes should be warned of the fresh blow which is falling on him. And then I think I shall go to the Chamber, as I want to know what takes place there. After that, since you desire it, I will let you go back to your own home."

It was not more than half-past one when Pierre reached the Palais-Bourbon. It had occurred to him that Fonsegue would be able to secure him admittance to the meeting-hall, but in the vestibule he met General de Bozonnet, who happened to possess a couple of tickets. A friend of his, who was to have accompanied him, had, at the last moment, been unable to come. So widespread was the curiosity concerning the debate now near at hand, and so general were the predictions that it would prove a most exciting one, that the demand for tickets had been extremely keen during the last twenty-four hours. In fact Pierre would never have been able to obtain admittance if the General had not good-naturedly offered to take him in. As a matter of fact the old warrior was well pleased to have somebody to chat with. He explained that he had simply come there to kill time, just as he might have killed it at a concert or a charity bazaar. However, like the ex-Legitimist and Bonapartist that he was, he had really come for the pleasure of feasting his eyes on the shameful spectacle of parliamentary ignominy.

When the General and Pierre had climbed the stairs, they were able to secure two front seats in one of the public galleries. Little Massot, who was already there, and who knew them both, placed one of them on his right and the other on his left. "I couldn't find a decent seat left in the press gallery," said he, "but I managed to get this place, from which I shall be able to see things properly. It will certainly be a big sitting. Just look at the number of people there are on every side!"

The narrow and badly arranged galleries were packed to overflowing. There were men of every age and a great many women too in the confused, serried mass of spectators, amidst which one only distinguished a multiplicity of pale white faces. The real scene, however, was down below in the meeting-hall, which was as yet empty, and with its rows of seats disposed in semi-circular fashion looked like the auditorium of a theatre. Under the cold light which fell from the glazed roofing appeared the solemn, shiny tribune, whence members address the Chamber, whilst behind it, on a higher level, and running right along the rear wall, was what is called the Bureau, with its various tables and seats, including the presidential armchair. The Bureau, like the tribune, was still unoccupied. The only persons one saw there were a couple of attendants who were laying out new pens and filling inkstands.

"The women," said Massot with a laugh, after another glance at the galleries, "come here just as they might come to a menagerie, that is, in the secret hope of seeing wild beasts devour one another. But, by the way, did you read the article in the 'Voix du Peuple' this morning? What a wonderful fellow that Sagnier is. When nobody else can find any filth left, he manages to discover some. He apparently thinks it necessary to add something new every day, in order to send his sales up. And of course it all disturbs the public, and it's thanks to him that so many people have come here in the hope of witnessing some horrid scene."

Then he laughed again, as he asked Pierre if he had read an unsigned article in the "Globe," which in very dignified but perfidious language had called upon Barroux to give the full and frank explanations which the country had a right to demand in that matter of the African Railways. This paper had hitherto vigorously supported the President of the Council, but in the article in question the coldness which precedes a rupture was very apparent. Pierre replied that the article had much surprised him, for he had imagined that Fonsegue and Barroux were linked together by identity of views and long-standing personal friendship.

Massot was still laughing. "Quite so," said he. "And you may be sure that the governor's heart bled when he wrote that article. It has been much noticed, and it will do the government a deal of harm. But the governor, you see, knows better than anybody else what line he ought to follow to save both his own position and the paper's."

Then he related what extraordinary confusion and emotion reigned among the deputies in the lobbies through which he had strolled before coming upstairs to secure a seat. After an adjournment of a couple of days the Chamber found itself confronted by this terrible scandal, which was like one of those conflagrations which, at the moment when they are supposed to be dying out, suddenly flare up again and devour everything. The various figures given in Sagnier's list, the two hundred thousand francs paid to Barroux, the eighty thousand handed to Monferrand, the fifty thousand allotted to Fonsegue, the ten thousand pocketed by Duthil, and the three thousand secured by Chaigneux, with all the other amounts distributed among So-and-so and So-and-so, formed the general subject of conversation. And at the same time some most extraordinary stories were current; there was no end of tittle-tattle in which fact and falsehood were so inextricably mingled that everybody was at sea as to the real truth. Whilst many deputies turned pale and trembled as beneath a blast of terror, others passed by purple with excitement, bursting with delight, laughing with exultation at the thought of coming victory. For, in point of fact, beneath all the assumed indignation, all the calls for parliamentary cleanliness and morality, there simply lay a question of persons—the question of ascertaining whether the government would be overthrown, and in that event of whom the new administration would consist. Barroux no doubt appeared to be in a bad way; but with things in such a muddle one was bound to allow a margin for the unexpected. From what was generally said it seemed certain that Mege would be extremely violent. Barroux would answer him, and the Minister's friends declared that he was determined to speak out in the most decisive manner. As for Monferrand he would probably address the Chamber after his colleague, but Vignon's intentions were somewhat doubtful, as, in spite of his delight, he made a pretence of remaining in the back, ground. He had been seen going from one to another of his partisans, advising them to keep calm, in order that they might retain the cold, keen coup d'oeil which in warfare generally decides the victory. Briefly, such was the plotting and intriguing that never had any witch's cauldron brimful of drugs and nameless abominations been set to boil on a more hellish fire than that of this parliamentary cook-shop.

"Heaven only knows what they will end by serving us," said little Massot by way of conclusion.

General de Bozonnet for his part anticipated nothing but disaster. If France had only possessed an army, said he, one might have swept away that handful of bribe-taking parliamentarians who preyed upon the country and rotted it. But there was no army left, there was merely an armed nation, a very different thing. And thereupon, like a man of a past age whom the present times distracted, he started on what had been his favourite subject of complaint ever since he had been retired from the service.

"Here's an idea for an article if you want one," he said to Massot. "Although France may have a million soldiers she hasn't got an army. I'll give you some notes of mine, and you will be able to tell people the truth."

Warfare, he continued, ought to be purely and simply a caste occupation, with commanders designated by divine right, leading mercenaries or volunteers into action. By democratising warfare people had simply killed it; a circumstance which he deeply regretted, like a born soldier who regarded fighting as the only really noble occupation that life offered. For, as soon as it became every man's duty to fight, none was willing to do so; and thus compulsory military service—what was called "the nation in arms"—would, at a more or less distant date, certainly bring about the end of warfare. If France had not engaged in a European war since 1870 this was precisely due to the fact that everybody in France was ready to fight. But rulers hesitated to throw a whole nation against another nation, for the loss both in life and treasure would be tremendous. And so the thought that all Europe was transformed into a vast camp filled the General with anger and disgust. He sighed for the old times when men fought for the pleasure of the thing, just as they hunted; whereas nowadays people were convinced that they would exterminate one another at the very first engagement.

"But surely it wouldn't be an evil if war should disappear," Pierre gently remarked.

This somewhat angered the General. "Well, you'll have pretty nations if people no longer fight," he answered, and then trying to show a practical spirit, he added: "Never has the art of war cost more money than since war itself has become an impossibility. The present-day defensive peace is purely and simply ruining every country in Europe. One may be spared defeat, but utter bankruptcy is certainly at the end of it all. And in any case the profession of arms is done for. All faith in it is dying out, and it will soon be forsaken, just as men have begun to forsake the priesthood."

Thereupon he made a gesture of mingled grief and anger, almost cursing that parliament, that Republican legislature before him, as if he considered it responsible for the future extinction of warfare. But little Massot was wagging his head dubiously, for he regarded the subject as rather too serious a one for him to write upon. And, all at once, in order to turn the conversation into another channel, he exclaimed: "Ah! there's Monseigneur Martha in the diplomatic gallery beside the Spanish Ambassador. It's denied, you know, that he intends to come forward as a candidate in Morbihan. He's far too shrewd to wish to be a deputy. He already pulls the strings which set most of the Catholic deputies who have 'rallied' to the Republican Government in motion."

Pierre himself had just noticed Monseigneur Martha's smiling face. And, somehow or other, however modest might be the prelate's demeanour, it seemed to him that he really played an important part in what was going on. He could hardly take his eyes from him. It was as if he expected that he would suddenly order men hither and thither, and direct the whole march of events.

"Ah!" said Massot again. "Here comes Mege. It won't be long now before the sitting begins."

The hall, down below, was gradually filling. Deputies entered and descended the narrow passages between the benches. Most of them remained standing and chatting in a more or less excited way; but some seated themselves and raised their grey, weary faces to the glazed roof. It was a cloudy afternoon, and rain was doubtless threatening, for the light became quite livid. If the hall was pompous it was also dismal with its heavy columns, its cold allegorical statues, and its stretches of bare marble and woodwork. The only brightness was that of the red velvet of the benches and the gallery hand-rests.

Every deputy of any consequence who entered was named by Massot to his companions. Mege, on being stopped by another member of the little Socialist group, began to fume and gesticulate. Then Vignon, detaching himself from a group of friends and putting on an air of smiling composure, descended the steps towards his seat. The occupants of the galleries, however, gave most attention to the accused members, those whose names figured in Sagnier's list. And these were interesting studies. Some showed themselves quite sprightly, as if they were entirely at their ease; but others had assumed a most grave and indignant demeanour. Chaigneux staggered and hesitated as if beneath the weight of some frightful act of injustice; whereas Duthil looked perfectly serene save for an occasional twitch of his lips. The most admired, however, was Fonsegue, who showed so candid a face, so open a glance, that his colleagues as well as the spectators might well have declared him innocent. Nobody indeed could have looked more like an honest man.

"Ah! there's none like the governor," muttered Massot with enthusiasm. "But be attentive, for here come the ministers. One mustn't miss Barroux' meeting with Fonsegue, after this morning's article."

Chance willed it that as Barroux came along with his head erect, his face pale, and his whole demeanour aggressive, he was obliged to pass Fonsegue in order to reach the ministerial bench. In doing so he did not speak to him, but he gazed at him fixedly like one who is conscious of defection, of a cowardly stab in the back on the part of a traitor. Fonsegue seemed quite at ease, and went on shaking hands with one and another of his colleagues as if he were altogether unconscious of Barroux' glance. Nor did he even appear to see Monferrand, who walked by in the rear of the Prime Minister, wearing a placid good-natured air, as if he knew nothing of what was impending, but was simply coming to some ordinary humdrum sitting. However, when he reached his seat, he raised his eyes and smiled at Monseigneur Martha, who gently nodded to him. Then well pleased to think that things were going as he wished them to go, he began to rub his hands, as he often did by way of expressing his satisfaction.

"Who is that grey-haired, mournful-looking gentleman on the ministerial bench?" Pierre inquired of Massot.

"Why, that's Taboureau, the Minister of Public Instruction, the excellent gentleman who is said to have no prestige. One's always hearing of him, and one never recognises him; he looks like an old, badly worn coin. Just like Barroux he can't feel very well pleased with the governor this afternoon, for to-day's 'Globe' contained an article pointing out his thorough incapacity in everything concerning the fine arts. It was an article in measured language, but all the more effective for that very reason. It would surprise me if Taboureau should recover from it."

Just then a low roll of drums announced the arrival of the President and other officials of the Chamber. A door opened, and a little procession passed by amidst an uproar of exclamations and hasty footsteps. Then, standing at his table, the President rang his bell and declared the sitting open. But few members remained silent, however, whilst one of the secretaries, a dark, lanky young man with a harsh voice, read the minutes of the previous sitting. When they had been adopted, various letters of apology for non-attendance were read, and a short, unimportant bill was passed without discussion. And then came the big affair, Mege's interpellation, and at once the whole Chamber was in a flutter, while the most passionate curiosity reigned in the galleries above. On the Government consenting to the interpellation, the Chamber decided that the debate should take place at once. And thereupon complete silence fell, save that now and again a brief quiver sped by, in which one could detect the various feelings, passions and appetites swaying the assembly.

Mege began to speak with assumed moderation, carefully setting forth the various points at issue. Tall and thin, gnarled and twisted like a vine-stock, he rested his hands on the tribune as if to support his bent figure, and his speech was often interrupted by the little dry cough which came from the tuberculosis that was burning him. But his eyes sparkled with passion behind his glasses, and little by little his voice rose in piercing accents and he drew his lank figure erect and began to gesticulate vehemently. He reminded the Chamber that some two months previously, at the time of the first denunciations published by the "Voix du Peuple," he had asked leave to interpellate the Government respecting that deplorable affair of the African Railways; and he remarked, truly enough, that if the Chamber had not yielded to certain considerations which he did not wish to discuss, and had not adjourned his proposed inquiries, full light would long since have been thrown on the whole affair, in such wise that there would have been no revival, no increase of the scandal, and no possible pretext for that abominable campaign of denunciation which tortured and disgusted the country. However, it had at last been understood that silence could be maintained no longer. It was necessary that the two ministers who were so loudly accused of having abused their trusts, should prove their innocence, throw full light upon all they had done; apart from which the Chamber itself could not possibly remain beneath the charge of wholesale venality.

Then he recounted the whole history of the affair, beginning with the grant of a concession for the African Lines to Baron Duvillard; and next passing to the proposals for the issue of lottery stock, which proposals, it was now said, had only been sanctioned by the Chamber after the most shameful bargaining and buying of votes. At this point Mege became extremely violent. Speaking of that mysterious individual Hunter, Baron Duvillard's recruiter and go-between, he declared that the police had allowed him to flee from France, much preferring to spend its time in shadowing Socialist deputies. Then, hammering the tribune with his fist, he summoned Barroux to give a categorical denial to the charges brought against him, and to make it absolutely clear that he had never received a single copper of the two hundred thousand francs specified in Hunter's list. Forthwith certain members shouted to Mege that he ought to read the whole list; but when he wished to do so others vociferated that it was abominable, that such a mendacious and slanderous document ought not to be accorded a place in the proceedings of the French legislature. Mege went on still in frantic fashion, figuratively casting Sagnier into the gutter, and protesting that there was nothing in common between himself and such a base insulter. But at the same time he demanded that justice and punishment should be meted out equally to one and all, and that if indeed there were any bribe-takers among his colleagues, they should be sent that very night to the prison of Mazas.

Meantime the President, erect at his table, rang and rang his bell without managing to quell the uproar. He was like a pilot who finds the tempest too strong for him. Among all the men with purple faces and barking mouths who were gathered in front of him, the ushers alone maintained imperturbable gravity. At intervals between the bursts of shouting, Mege's voice could still be heard. By some sudden transition he had come to the question of a Collectivist organisation of society such as he dreamt of, and he contrasted it with the criminal capitalist society of the present day, which alone, said he, could produce such scandals. And yielding more and more to his apostolic fervour, declaring that there could be no salvation apart from Collectivism, he shouted that the day of triumph would soon dawn. He awaited it with a smile of confidence. In his opinion, indeed, he merely had to overthrow that ministry and perhaps another one, and then he himself would at last take the reins of power in hand, like a reformer who would know how to pacify the nation. As outside Socialists often declared, it was evident that the blood of a dictator flowed in that sectarian's veins. His feverish, stubborn rhetoric ended by exhausting his interrupters, who were compelled to listen to him. When he at last decided to leave the tribune, loud applause arose from a few benches on the left.

"Do you know," said Massot to the General, "I met Mege taking a walk with his three little children in the Jardin des Plantes the other day. He looked after them as carefully as an old nurse. I believe he's a very worthy fellow at heart, and lives in a very modest way."

But a quiver had now sped through the assembly. Barroux had quitted his seat to ascend the tribune. He there drew himself erect, throwing his head back after his usual fashion. There was a haughty, majestic, slightly sorrowful expression on his handsome face, which would have been perfect had his nose only been a little larger. He began to express his sorrow and indignation in fine flowery language, which he punctuated with theatrical gestures. His eloquence was that of a tribune of the romantic school, and as one listened to him one could divine that in spite of all his pomposity he was really a worthy, tender-hearted and somewhat foolish man. That afternoon he was stirred by genuine emotion; his heart bled at the thought of his disastrous destiny, he felt that a whole world was crumbling with himself. Ah! what a cry of despair he stifled, the cry of the man who is buffeted and thrown aside by the course of events on the very day when he thinks that his civic devotion entitles him to triumph! To have given himself and all he possessed to the cause of the Republic, even in the dark days of the Second Empire; to have fought and struggled and suffered persecution for that Republic's sake; to have established that Republic amidst the battle of parties, after all the horrors of national and civil war; and then, when the Republic at last triumphed and became a living fact, secure from all attacks and intrigues, to suddenly feel like a survival of some other age, to hear new comers speak a new language, preach a new ideal, and behold the collapse of all he had loved, all he had reverenced, all that had given him strength to fight and conquer! The mighty artisans of the early hours were no more; it had been meet that Gambetta should die. How bitter it all was for the last lingering old ones to find themselves among the men of the new, intelligent and shrewd generation, who gently smiled at them, deeming their romanticism quite out of fashion! All crumbled since the ideal of liberty collapsed, since liberty was no longer the one desideratum, the very basis of the Republic whose existence had been so dearly purchased after so long an effort!

Erect and dignified Barroux made his confession. The Republic to him was like the sacred ark of life; the very worst deeds became saintly if they were employed to save her from peril. And in all simplicity he, told his story, how he had found the great bulk of Baron Duvillard's money going to the opposition newspapers as pretended payment for puffery and advertising, whilst on the other hand the Republican organs received but beggarly, trumpery amounts. He had been Minister of the Interior at the time, and had therefore had charge of the press; so what would have been said of him if he had not endeavoured to reestablish some equilibrium in this distribution of funds in order that the adversaries of the institutions of the country might not acquire a great increase of strength by appropriating all the sinews of war? Hands had been stretched out towards him on all sides, a score of newspapers, the most faithful, the most meritorious, had claimed their legitimate share. And he had ensured them that share by distributing among them the two hundred thousand francs set down in the list against his name. Not a centime of the money had gone into his own pocket, he would allow nobody to impugn his personal honesty, on that point his word must suffice. At that moment Barroux was really grand. All his emphatic pomposity disappeared; he showed himself, as he really was—an honest man, quivering, his heart bared, his conscience bleeding, in his bitter distress at having been among those who had laboured and at now being denied reward.

For, truth to tell, his words fell amidst icy silence. In his childish simplicity he had anticipated an outburst of enthusiasm; a Republican Chamber could but acclaim him for having saved the Republic; and now the frigidity of one and all quite froze him. He suddenly felt that he was all alone, done for, touched by the hand of death. Nevertheless, he continued speaking amidst that terrible silence with the courage of one who is committing suicide, and who, from his love of noble and eloquent attitudes, is determined to die standing. He ended with a final impressive gesture. However, as he came down from the tribune, the general coldness seemed to increase, not a single member applauded. With supreme clumsiness he had alluded to the secret scheming of Rome and the clergy, whose one object, in his opinion, was to recover the predominant position they had lost and restore monarchy in France at a more or less distant date.

"How silly of him! Ought a man ever to confess?" muttered Massot. "He's done for, and the ministry too!"

Then, amidst the general frigidity, Monferrand boldly ascended the tribune stairs. The prevailing uneasiness was compounded of all the secret fear which sincerity always causes, of all the distress of the bribe-taking deputies who felt that they were rolling into an abyss, and also of the embarrassment which the others felt at thought of the more or less justifiable compromises of politics. Something like relief, therefore, came when Monferrand started with the most emphatic denials, protesting in the name of his outraged honour, and dealing blow after blow on the tribune with one hand, while with the other he smote his chest. Short and thick-set, with his face thrust forward, hiding his shrewdness beneath an expression of indignant frankness, he was for a moment really superb. He denied everything. He was not only ignorant of what was meant by that sum of eighty thousand francs set down against his name, but he defied the whole world to prove that he had even touched a single copper of that money. He boiled over with indignation to such a point that he did not simply deny bribe-taking on his own part, he denied it on behalf of the whole assembly, of all present and past French legislatures, as if, indeed, bribe-taking on the part of a representative of the people was altogether too monstrous an idea, a crime that surpassed possibility to such an extent that the mere notion of it was absurd. And thereupon applause rang out; the Chamber, delivered from its fears, thrilled by his words, acclaimed him.

From the little Socialist group, however, some jeers arose, and voices summoned Monferrand to explain himself on the subject of the African Railways, reminding him that he had been at the head of the Public Works Department at the time of the vote, and requiring of him that he should state what he now meant to do, as Minister of the Interior, in order to reassure the country. He juggled with this question, declaring that if there were any guilty parties they would be punished, for he did not require anybody to remind him of his duty. And then, all at once, with incomparable maestria, he had recourse to the diversion which he had been preparing since the previous day. His duty, said he, was a thing which he never forgot; he discharged it like a faithful soldier of the nation hour by hour, and with as much vigilance as prudence. He had been accused of employing the police on he knew not what base spying work in such wise as to allow the man Hunter to escape. Well, as for that much-slandered police force, he would tell the Chamber on what work he had really employed it the day before, and how zealously it had laboured for the cause of law and order. In the Bois de Boulogne, on the previous afternoon, it had arrested that terrible scoundrel, the perpetrator of the crime in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, that Anarchist mechanician Salvat, who for six weeks past had so cunningly contrived to elude capture. The scoundrel had made a full confession during the evening, and the law would now take its course with all despatch. Public morality was at last avenged, Paris might now emerge in safety from its long spell of terror, Anarchism would be struck down, annihilated. And that was what he, Monferrand, had done as a Minister for the honour and safety of his country, whilst villains were vainly seeking to dishonour him by inscribing his name on a list of infamy, the outcome of the very basest political intrigues.

The Chamber listened agape and quivering. This story of Salvat's arrest, which none of the morning papers had reported; the present which Monferrand seemed to be making them of that terrible Anarchist whom many had already begun to regard as a myth; the whole mise-en-scene of the Minister's speech transported the deputies as if they were suddenly witnessing the finish of a long-interrupted drama. Stirred and flattered, they prolonged their applause, while Monferrand went on celebrating his act of energy, how he had saved society, how crime should be punished, and how he himself would ever prove that he had a strong arm and could answer for public order. He even won favour with the Conservatives and Clericals on the Right by separating himself from Barroux, addressing a few words of sympathy to those Catholics who had "rallied" to the Republic, and appealing for concord among men of different beliefs in order that they might fight the common enemy, that fierce, wild socialism which talked of overthrowing everything!

By the time Monferrand came down from the tribune, the trick was played, he had virtually saved himself. Both the Right and Left of the Chamber* applauded, drowning the protests of the few Socialists whose vociferations only added to the triumphal tumult. Members eagerly stretched out their hands to the Minister, who for a moment remained standing there and smiling. But there was some anxiety in that smile of his; his success was beginning to frighten him. Had he spoken too well, and saved the entire Cabinet instead of merely saving himself? That would mean the ruin of his plan. The Chamber ought not to vote under the effect of that speech which had thrilled it so powerfully. Thus Monferrand, though he still continued to smile, spent a few anxious moments in waiting to see if anybody would rise to answer him.

* Ever since the days of the Bourbon Restoration it has been
the practice in the French Chambers for the more conservative
members to seat themselves on the President's right, and for
the Radical ones to place themselves on his left. The central
seats of the semicircle in which the members' seats are
arranged in tiers are usually occupied by men of moderate views.
Generally speaking, such terms as Right Centre and Left Centre
are applied to groups of Moderates inclining in the first place
to Conservatism and in the latter to Radicalism. All this is of
course known to readers acquainted with French institutions, but
I give the explanation because others, after perusing French
news in some daily paper, have often asked me what was meant by
"a deputy of the Right," and so forth.—Trans.

His success had been as great among the occupants of the galleries as among the deputies themselves. Several ladies had been seen applauding, and Monseigneur Martha had given unmistakable signs of the liveliest satisfaction. "Ah, General!" said Massot to Bozonnet in a sneering way. "Those are our fighting men of the present time. And he's a bold and strong one, is Monferrand. Of course it is all what people style 'saving one's bacon,' but none the less it's very clever work."

Just then, however, Monferrand to his great satisfaction had seen Vignon rise from his seat in response to the urging of his friends. And thereupon all anxiety vanished from the Minister's smile, which became one of malicious placidity.

The very atmosphere of the Chamber seemed to change with Vignon in the tribune. He was slim, with a fair and carefully tended beard, blue eyes and all the suppleness of youth. He spoke, moreover, like a practical man, in simple, straightforward language, which made the emptiness of the other's declamatory style painfully conspicuous. His term of official service as a prefect in the provinces had endowed him with keen insight; and it was in an easy way that he propounded and unravelled the most intricate questions. Active and courageous, confident in his own star, too young and too shrewd to have compromised himself in anything so far, he was steadily marching towards the future. He had already drawn up a rather more advanced political programme than that of Barroux and Monferrand, so that when opportunity offered there might be good reasons for him to take their place. Moreover, he was quite capable of carrying out his programme by attempting some of the long-promised reforms for which the country was waiting. He had guessed that honesty, when it had prudence and shrewdness as its allies, must some day secure an innings. In a clear voice, and in a very quiet, deliberate way, he now said what it was right to say on the subject under discussion, the things that common sense dictated and that the Chamber itself secretly desired should be said. He was certainly the first to rejoice over an arrest which would reassure the country; but he failed to understand what connection there could be between that arrest and the sad business that had been brought before the Chamber. The two affairs were quite distinct and different, and he begged his colleagues not to vote in the state of excitement in which he saw them. Full light must be thrown on the African Railways question, and this, one could not expect from the two incriminated ministers. However, he was opposed to any suggestion of a committee of inquiry. In his opinion the guilty parties, if such there were, ought to be brought immediately before a court of law. And, like Barroux, he wound up with a discreet allusion to the growing influence of the clergy, declaring that he was against all unworthy compromises, and was equally opposed to any state dictatorship and any revival of the ancient theocratic spirit.

Although there was but little applause when Vignon returned to his seat, it was evident that the Chamber was again master of its emotions. And the situation seemed so clear, and the overthrow of the ministry so certain, that Mege, who had meant to reply to the others, wisely abstained from doing so. Meantime people noticed the placid demeanour of Monferrand, who had listened to Vignon with the utmost complacency, as if he were rendering homage to an adversary's talent; whereas Barroux, ever since the cold silence which had greeted his speech, had remained motionless in his seat, bowed down and pale as a corpse.

"Well, it's all over," resumed Massot, amidst the hubbub which arose as the deputies prepared to vote; "the ministry's done for. Little Vignon will go a long way, you know. People say that he dreams of the Elysee. At all events everything points to him as our next prime minister."

Then, as the journalist rose, intending to go off, the General detained him: "Wait a moment, Monsieur Massot," said he. "How disgusting all that parliamentary cooking is! You ought to point it out in an article, and show people how the country is gradually being weakened and rotted to the marrow by all such useless and degrading discussions. Why, a great battle resulting in the loss of 50,000 men would exhaust us less than ten years of this abominable parliamentary system. You must call on me some morning. I will show you a scheme of military reform, in which I point out the necessity of returning to the limited professional armies which we used to have, for this present-day national army, as folks call it, which is a semi-civilian affair and at best a mere herd of men, is like a dead weight on us, and is bound to pull us down!"

Pierre, for his part, had not spoken a word since the beginning of the debate. He had listened to everything, at first influenced by the thought of his brother's interests, and afterwards mastered by the feverishness which gradually took possession of everybody present. He had become convinced that there was nothing more for Guillaume to fear; but how curiously did one event fit into another, and how loudly had Salvat's arrest re-echoed in the Chamber! Looking down into the seething hall below him, he had detected all the clash of rival passions and interests. After watching the great struggle between Barroux, Monferrand and Vignon, he had gazed upon the childish delight of that terrible Socialist Mege, who was so pleased at having been able to stir up the depths of those troubled waters, in which he always unwittingly angled for the benefit of others. Then, too, Pierre had become interested in Fonsegue, who, knowing what had been arranged between Monferrand, Duvillard and himself, evinced perfect calmness and strove to reassure Duthil and Chaigneux, who, on their side, were quite dismayed by the ministry's impending fall. Yet, Pierre's eyes always came back to Monseigneur Martha. He had watched his serene smiling face throughout the sitting, striving to detect his impressions of the various incidents that had occurred, as if in his opinion that dramatic parliamentary comedy had only been played as a step towards the more or less distant triumph for which the prelate laboured. And now, while awaiting the result of the vote, as Pierre turned towards Massot and the General, he found that they were talking of nothing but recruiting and tactics and the necessity of a bath of blood for the whole of Europe. Ah! poor mankind, ever fighting and ever devouring one another in parliaments as well as on battle-fields, when, thought Pierre, would it decide to disarm once and for all, and live at peace according to the laws of justice and reason!

Then he again looked down into the hall, where the greatest confusion was prevailing among the deputies with regard to the coming vote. There was quite a rainfall of suggested "resolutions," from a very violent one proposed by Mege, to another, which was merely severe, emanating from Vignon. The ministry, however, would only accept the "Order of the day pure and simple," a mere decision, that is, to pass to the next business, as if Mege's interpellation had been unworthy of attention. And presently the Government was defeated, Vignon's resolution being adopted by a majority of twenty-five. Some portion of the Left had evidently joined hands with the Right and the Socialist group. A prolonged hubbub followed this result.

"Well, so we are to have a Vignon Cabinet," said Massot, as he went off with Pierre and the General. "All the same, though, Monferrand has saved himself, and if I were in Vignon's place I should distrust him."

That evening there was a very touching farewell scene at the little house at Neuilly. When Pierre returned thither from the Chamber, saddened but reassured with regard to the future, Guillaume at once made up his mind to go home on the morrow. And as Nicholas Barthes was compelled to leave, the little dwelling seemed on the point of relapsing into dreary quietude once more.

Theophile Morin, whom Pierre had informed of the painful alternative in which Barthes was placed, duly came to dinner; but he did not have time to speak to the old man before they all sat down to table at seven o'clock. As usual Barthes had spent his day in marching, like a caged lion, up and down the room in which he had accepted shelter after the fashion of a big fearless child, who never worried with regard either to his present circumstances or the troubles which the future might have in store for him. His life had ever been one of unlimited hope, which reality had ever shattered. Although all that he had loved, all that he had hoped to secure by fifty years of imprisonment or exile,—liberty, equality and a real brotherly republic,—had hitherto failed to come, such as he had dreamt of them, he nevertheless retained the candid faith of his youth, and was ever confident in the near future. He would smile indulgently when new comers, men of violent ideas, derided him and called him a poor old fellow. For his part, he could make neither head nor tail of the many new sects. He simply felt indignant with their lack of human feeling, and stubbornly adhered to his own idea of basing the world's regeneration on the simple proposition that men were naturally good and ought to be free and brotherly.

That evening at dinner, feeling that he was with friends who cared for him, Barthes proved extremely gay, and showed all his ingenuousness in talking of his ideal, which would soon be realised, said he, in spite of everything. He could tell a story well whenever he cared to chat, and on that occasion he related some delightful anecdotes about the prisons through which he had passed. He knew all the dungeons, Ste. Pelagie and Mont St. Michel, Belle-Ile-en-Mer and Clairvaux, to say nothing of temporary gaols and the evil-smelling hulks on board which political prisoners are often confined. And he still laughed at certain recollections, and related how in the direst circumstances he had always been able to seek refuge in his conscience. The others listened to him quite charmed by his conversation, but full of anguish at the thought that this perpetual prisoner or exile must again rise and take his staff to sally forth, driven from his native land once more.

Pierre did not speak out until they were partaking of dessert. Then he related how the Minister had written to him, and how in a brief interview he had stated that Barthes must cross the frontier within forty-eight hours if he did not wish to be arrested. Thereupon the old man gravely rose, with his white fleece, his eagle beak and his bright eyes still sparkling with the fire of youth. And he wished to go off at once. "What!" said he, "you have known all this since yesterday, and have still kept me here at the risk of my compromising you even more than I had done already! You must forgive me, I did not think of the worry I might cause you, I thought that everything would be satisfactorily arranged. I must thank you both—yourself and Guillaume—for the few days of quietude that you have procured to an old vagabond and madman like myself."

Then, as they tried to prevail on him to remain until the following morning, he would not listen to them. There would be a train for Brussels about midnight, and he had ample time to take it. He refused to let Morin accompany him. No, no, said he, Morin was not a rich man, and moreover he had work to attend to. Why should he take him away from his duties, when it was so easy, so simple, for him to go off alone? He was going back into exile as into misery and grief which he had long known, like some Wandering Jew of Liberty, ever driven onward through the world.

When he took leave of the others at ten o'clock, in the little sleepy street just outside the house, tears suddenly dimmed his eyes. "Ah! I'm no longer a young man," he said; "it's all over this time. I shall never come back again. My bones will rest in some corner over yonder." And yet, after he had affectionately embraced Pierre and Guillaume, he drew himself up like one who remained unconquered, and he raised a supreme cry of hope. "But after all, who knows? Triumph may perhaps come to-morrow. The future belongs to those who prepare it and wait for it!"

Then he walked away, and long after he had disappeared his firm, sonorous footsteps could be heard re-echoing in the quiet night.

BOOK IV.

I. PIERRE AND MARIE

ON the mild March morning when Pierre left his little house at Neuilly to accompany Guillaume to Montmartre, he was oppressed by the thought that on returning home he would once more find himself alone with nothing to prevent him from relapsing into negation and despair. The idea of this had kept him from sleeping, and he still found it difficult to hide his distress and force a smile.

The sky was so clear and the atmosphere so mild that the brothers had resolved to go to Montmartre on foot by way of the outer boulevards. Nine o'clock was striking when they set out. Guillaume for his part was very gay at the thought of the surprise he would give his family. It was as if he were suddenly coming back from a long journey. He had not warned them of his intentions; he had merely written to them now and again to tell them that he was recovering, and they certainly had no idea that his return was so near at hand.

When Guillaume and Pierre had climbed the sunlit slopes of Montmartre, and crossed the quiet countrified Place du Tertre, the former, by means of a latch-key, quietly opened the door of his house, which seemed to be asleep, so profound was the stillness both around and within it. Pierre found it the same as on the occasion of his previous and only visit. First came the narrow passage which ran through the ground-floor, affording a view of all Paris at the further end. Next there was the garden, reduced to a couple of plum-trees and a clump of lilac-bushes, the leaves of which had now sprouted. And this time the priest perceived three bicycles leaning against the trees. Beyond them stood the large work-shop, so gay, and yet so peaceful, with its huge window overlooking a sea of roofs.

Guillaume had reached the work-shop without meeting anybody. With an expression of much amusement he raised a finger to his lips. "Attention, Pierre," he whispered; "you'll just see!"

Then having noiselessly opened the door, they remained for a moment on the threshold.

The three sons alone were there. Near his forge stood Thomas working a boring machine, with which he was making some holes in a small brass plate. Then Francois and Antoine were seated on either side of their large table, the former reading, and the latter finishing a block. The bright sunshine streamed in, playing over all the seeming disorder of the room, where so many callings and so many implements found place. A large bunch of wallflowers bloomed on the women's work-table near the window; and absorbed as the young men were in their respective tasks the only sound was the slight hissing of the boring machine each time that the eldest of them drilled another hole.

However, although Guillaume did not stir, there suddenly came a quiver, an awakening. His sons seemed to guess his presence, for they raised their heads, each at the same moment. From each, too, came the same cry, and a common impulse brought them first to their feet and then to his arms.

"Father!"

Guillaume embraced them, feeling very happy. And that was all; there was no long spell of emotion, no useless talk. It was as if he had merely gone out the day before and, delayed by business, had now come back. Still, he looked at them with his kindly smile, and they likewise smiled with their eyes fixed on his. Those glances proclaimed everything, the closest affection and complete self-bestowal for ever.

"Come in, Pierre," called Guillaume; "shake hands with these young men."

The priest had remained near the door, overcome by a singular feeling of discomfort. When his nephews had vigorously shaken hands with him, he sat down near the window apart from them, as if he felt out of his element there.

"Well, youngsters," said Guillaume, "where's Mere-Grand, and where's Marie?"

Their grandmother was upstairs in her room, they said; and Marie had taken it into her head to go marketing. This, by the way, was one of her delights. She asserted that she was the only one who knew how to buy new-laid eggs and butter of a nutty odour. Moreover, she sometimes brought some dainty or some flowers home, in her delight at proving herself to be so good a housewife.

"And so things are going on well?" resumed Guillaume. "You are all satisfied, your work is progressing, eh?"

He addressed brief questions to each of them, like one who, on his return home, at once reverts to his usual habits. Thomas, with his rough face beaming, explained in a couple of sentences that he was now sure of perfecting his little motor; Francois, who was still preparing for his examination, jestingly declared that he yet had to lodge a heap of learning in his brain; and then Antoine produced the block which he was finishing, and which depicted his little friend Lise, Jahan's sister, reading in her garden amidst the sunshine. It was like a florescence of that dear belated creature whose mind had been awakened by his affection.

However, the three brothers speedily went back to their places, reverting to their work with a natural impulse, for discipline had made them regard work as life itself. Then Guillaume, who had glanced at what each was doing, exclaimed: "Ah! youngsters, I schemed and prepared a lot of things myself while I was laid up. I even made a good many notes. We walked here from Neuilly, but my papers and the clothes which Mere-Grand sent me will come in a cab by-and-by.... Ah! how pleased I am to find everything in order here, and to be able to take up my task with you again! Ah! I shall polish off some work now, and no mistake!"

He had already gone to his own corner, the space reserved for him between the window and the forge. He there had a chemical furnace, several glass cases and shelves crowded with appliances, and a long table, one end of which he used for writing purposes. And he once more took possession of that little world. After glancing around with delight at seeing everything in its place, he began to handle one object and another, eager to be at work like his sons.

All at once, however, Mere-Grand appeared, calm, grave and erect in her black gown, at the top of the little staircase which conducted to the bedrooms. "So it's you, Guillaume?" said she. "Will you come up for a moment?"

He immediately did so, understanding that she wished to speak to him alone and tranquillise him. It was a question of the great secret between them, that one thing of which his sons knew nothing, and which, after Salvat's crime, had brought him much anguish, through his fear that it might be divulged. When he reached Mere-Grand's room she at once took him to the hiding-place near her bed, and showed him the cartridges of the new explosive, and the plans of the terrible engine of warfare which he had invented. He found them all as he had left them. Before anyone could have reached them, she would have blown up the whole place at the risk of perishing herself in the explosion. With her wonted air of quiet heroism, she handed Guillaume the key which he had sent her by Pierre.

"You were not anxious, I hope?" she said.

He pressed her hands with a commingling of affection and respect. "My only anxiety," he replied, "was that the police might come here and treat you roughly.... You are the guardian of our secret, and it would be for you to finish my work should I disappear."

While Guillaume and Madame Leroi were thus engaged upstairs, Pierre, still seated near the window below, felt his discomfort increasing. The inmates of the house certainly regarded him with no other feeling than one of affectionate sympathy; and so how came it that he considered them hostile? The truth was that he asked himself what would become of him among those workers, who were upheld by a faith of their own, whereas he believed in nothing, and did not work. The sight of those young men, so gaily and zealously toiling, ended by quite irritating him; and the arrival of Marie brought his distress to a climax.

Joyous and full of life, she came in without seeing him, a basket on her arm. And she seemed to bring all the sunlight of the spring morning with her, so bright was the sparkle of her youth. The whole of her pink face, her delicate nose, her broad intelligent brow, her thick, kindly lips, beamed beneath the heavy coils of her black hair. And her brown eyes ever laughed with the joyousness which comes from health and strength.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, "I have brought such a lot of things, youngsters. Just come and see them; I wouldn't unpack the basket in the kitchen."

It became absolutely necessary for the brothers to draw round the basket which she had laid upon the table. "First there's the butter!" said she; "just smell if it hasn't a nice scent of nuts! It's churned especially for me, you know. Then here are the eggs. They were laid only yesterday, I'll answer for it. And, in fact, that one there is this morning's. And look at the cutlets! They're wonderful, aren't they? The butcher cuts them carefully when he sees me. And then here's a cream cheese, real cream, you know, it will be delicious! Ah! and here's the surprise, something dainty, some radishes, some pretty little pink radishes. Just fancy! radishes in March, what a luxury!"

She triumphed like the good little housewife she was, one who had followed a whole course of cookery and home duties at the Lycee Fenelon. The brothers, as merry as she herself, were obliged to compliment her.

All at once, however, she caught sight of Pierre. "What! you are there, Monsieur l'Abbe?" she exclaimed; "I beg your pardon, but I didn't see you. How is Guillaume? Have you brought us some news of him?"

"But father's come home," said Thomas; "he's upstairs with Mere-Grand."

Quite thunderstruck, she hastily placed her purchases in the basket. "Guillaume's come back, Guillaume's come back!" said she, "and you don't tell me of it, you let me unpack everything! Well, it's nice of me, I must say, to go on praising my butter and eggs when Guillaume's come back."

Guillaume, as it happened, was just coming down with Madame Leroi. Marie gaily hastened to him and offered him her cheeks, on which he planted two resounding kisses. Then she, resting her hands on his shoulders, gave him a long look, while saying in a somewhat tremulous voice: "I am pleased, very pleased to see you, Guillaume. I may confess it now, I thought I had lost you, I was very anxious and very unhappy."

Although she was still smiling, tears had gathered in her eyes, and he, likewise moved, again kissed her, murmuring: "Dear Marie! How happy it makes me to find you as beautiful and as affectionate as ever."

Pierre, who was looking at them, deemed them cold. He had doubtless expected more tears, and a more passionate embrace on the part of an affianced pair, whom so grievous an accident had separated almost on the eve of their wedding. Moreover, his feelings were hurt by the disproportion of their respective ages. No doubt his brother still seemed to him very sturdy and young, and his feeling of repulsion must have come from that young woman whom, most decidedly, he did not like. Ever since her arrival he had experienced increasing discomfort, a keener and keener desire to go off and never return.

So acute became his suffering at feeling like a stranger in his brother's home, that he at last rose and sought to take his leave, under the pretext that he had some urgent matters to attend to in town.

"What! you won't stay to dejeuner with us!" exclaimed Guillaume in perfect stupefaction. "Why, it was agreed! You surely won't distress me like that! This house is your own, remember!"

Then, as with genuine affection they all protested and pressed him to stay, he was obliged to do so. However, he soon relapsed into silence and embarrassment, seated on the same chair as before, and listening moodily to those people who, although they were his relatives, seemed to be far removed from him.

As it was barely eleven o'clock they resumed work, but every now and again there was some merry talk. On one of the servants coming for the provisions, Marie told the girl to call her as soon as it should be time to boil the eggs, for she prided herself on boiling them to a nicety, in such wise as to leave the whites like creamy milk. This gave an opportunity for a few jests from Francois, who occasionally teased her about all the fine things she had learnt at the Lycee Fenelon, where her father had placed her when she was twelve years old. However, she was not afraid of him, but gave him tit for tat by chaffing him about all the hours which he lost at the Ecole Normale over a mass of pedagogic trash.

"Ah! you big children!" she exclaimed, while still working at her embroidery. "You are all very intelligent, and you all claim to have broad minds, and yet—confess it now—it worries you a little that a girl like me should have studied at college in the same way as yourselves. It's a sexual quarrel, a question of rivalry and competition, isn't it?"

They protested the contrary, declaring that they were in favour of girls receiving as complete an education as possible. She was well aware of this; however, she liked to tease them in return for the manner in which they themselves plagued her.

"But do you know," said she, "you are a great deal behind the times? I am well aware of the reproaches which are levelled at girls' colleges by so-called right-minded people. To begin, there is no religious element whatever in the education one receives there, and this alarms many families which consider religious education to be absolutely necessary for girls, if only as a moral weapon of defence. Then, too, the education at our Lycees is being democratised—girls of all positions come to them. Thanks to the scholarships which are so liberally offered, the daughter of the lady who rents a first floor flat often finds the daughter of her door-keeper among her school-fellows, and some think this objectionable. It is said also that the pupils free themselves too much from home influence, and that too much opportunity is left for personal initiative. As a matter of fact the extensiveness of the many courses of study, all the learning that is required of pupils at the examinations, certainly does tend to their emancipation, to the coming of the future woman and future society, which you young men are all longing for, are you not?"

"Of course we are!" exclaimed Francois; "we all agree on that point."

She waved her hand in a pretty way, and then quietly continued: "I'm jesting. My views are simple enough, as you well know, and I don't ask for nearly as much as you do. As for woman's claims and rights, well, the question is clear enough; woman is man's equal so far as nature allows it. And the only point is to agree and love one another. At the same time I'm well pleased to know what I do—oh! not from any spirit of pedantry but simply because I think it has all done me good, and given me some moral as well as physical health."

It delighted her to recall the days she had spent at the Lycee Fenelon, which of the five State colleges for girls opened in Paris was the only one counting a large number of pupils. Most of these were the daughters of officials or professors, who purposed entering the teaching profession. In this case, they had to win their last diploma at the Ecole Normale of Sevres, after leaving the Lycee. Marie, for her part, though her studies had been brilliant, had felt no taste whatever for the calling of teacher. Moreover, when Guillaume had taken charge of her after her father's death, he had refused to let her run about giving lessons. To provide herself with a little money, for she would accept none as a gift, she worked at embroidery, an art in which she was most accomplished.

While she was talking to the young men Guillaume had listened to her without interfering. If he had fallen in love with her it was largely on account of her frankness and uprightness, the even balance of her nature, which gave her so forcible a charm. She knew all; but if she lacked the poetry of the shrinking, lamb-like girl who has been brought up in ignorance, she had gained absolute rectitude of heart and mind, exempt from all hypocrisy, all secret perversity such as is stimulated by what may seem mysterious in life. And whatever she might know, she had retained such child-like purity that in spite of her six-and-twenty summers all the blood in her veins would occasionally rush to her cheeks in fiery blushes, which drove her to despair.

"My dear Marie," Guillaume now exclaimed, "you know very well that the youngsters were simply joking. You are in the right, of course.... And your boiled eggs cannot be matched in the whole world."

He said this in so soft and affectionate a tone that the young woman flushed purple. Then, becoming conscious of it, she coloured yet more deeply, and as the three young men glanced at her maliciously she grew angry with herself. "Isn't it ridiculous, Monsieur l'Abbe," she said, turning towards Pierre, "for an old maid like myself to blush in that fashion? People might think that I had committed a crime. It's simply to make me blush, you know, that those children tease me. I do all I can to prevent it, but it's stronger than my will."

At this Mere-Grand raised her eyes from the shirt she was mending, and remarked: "Oh! it's natural enough, my dear. It is your heart rising to your cheeks in order that we may see it."

The dejeuner hour was now at hand; and they decided to lay the table in the work-shop, as was occasionally done when they had a guest. The simple, cordial meal proved very enjoyable in the bright sunlight. Marie's boiled eggs, which she herself brought from the kitchen covered with a napkin, were found delicious. Due honour was also done to the butter and the radishes. The only dessert that followed the cutlets was the cream cheese, but it was a cheese such as nobody else had ever partaken of. And, meantime, while they ate and chatted all Paris lay below them, stretching away to the horizon with its mighty rumbling.

Pierre had made an effort to become cheerful, but he soon relapsed into silence. Guillaume, however, was very talkative. Having noticed the three bicycles in the garden, he inquired of Marie how far she had gone that morning. She answered that Francois and Antoine had accompanied her in the direction of Orgemont. The worry of their excursions was that each time they returned to Montmartre they had to push their machines up the height. From the general point of view, however, the young woman was delighted with bicycling, which had many virtues, said she. Then, seeing Pierre glance at her in amazement, she promised that she would some day explain her opinions on the subject to him. After this bicycling became the one topic of conversation until the end of the meal. Thomas gave an account of the latest improvements introduced into Grandidier's machines; and the others talked of the excursions they had made or meant to make, with all the exuberant delight of school children eager for the open air.

In the midst of the chatter, Mere-Grand, who presided at table with the serene dignity of a queen-mother, leant towards Guillaume, who sat next to her, and spoke to him in an undertone. Pierre understood that she was referring to his marriage, which was to have taken place in April, but must now necessarily be deferred. This sensible marriage, which seemed likely to ensure the happiness of the entire household, was largely the work of Mere-Grand and the three young men, for Guillaume would never have yielded to his heart if she whom he proposed to make his wife had not already been a well-loved member of the family. At the present time the last week in June seemed, for all sorts of reasons, to be a favourable date for the wedding.

Marie, who heard the suggestion, turned gaily towards Mere-Grand.

"The end of June will suit very well, will it not, my dear?" said the latter.

Pierre expected to see a deep flush rise to the young woman's cheeks, but she remained very calm. She felt deep affection, blended with the most tender gratitude, for Guillaume, and was convinced that in marrying him she would be acting wisely and well both for herself and the others.

"Certainly, the end of June," she repeated, "that will suit very well indeed."

Then the sons, who likewise had heard the proposal, nodded their heads by way of assenting also.

When they rose from table Pierre was absolutely determined to go off. The cordial and simple meal, the sight of that family, which had been rendered so happy by Guillaume's return, and of that young woman who smiled so placidly at life, had brought him keen suffering, though why he could not tell. However, it all irritated him beyond endurance; and he therefore again pretended that he had a number of things to see to in Paris. He shook hands in turn with the young men, Mere-Grand and Marie; both of the women evincing great friendliness but also some surprise at his haste to leave the house. Guillaume, who seemed saddened and anxious, sought to detain him, and failing in this endeavour followed him into the little garden, where he stopped him in order to have an explanation.

"Come," said he, "what is the matter with you, Pierre? Why are you running off like this?"

"Oh! there's nothing the matter I assure you; but I have to attend to a few urgent affairs."

"Oh, Pierre, pray put all pretence aside. Nobody here has displeased you or hurt your feelings, I hope. They also will soon love you as I do."

"I have no doubt of it, and I complain of nobody excepting perhaps myself."

Guillaume's sorrow was increasing. "Ah! brother, little brother," he resumed, "you distress me, for I can detect that you are hiding something from me. Remember that new ties have linked us together and that we love one another as in the old days when you were in your cradle and I used to come to play with you. I know you well, remember. I know all your tortures, since you have confessed them to me; and I won't have you suffer, I want to cure you, I do!"

Pierre's heart was full, and as he heard those words he could not restrain his tears. "Oh! you must leave me to my sufferings," he responded. "They are incurable. You can do nothing for me, I am beyond the pale of nature, I am a monster."

"What do you say! Can you not return within nature's pale even if you have gone beyond it? One thing that I will not allow is that you should go and shut yourself up in that solitary little house of yours, where you madden yourself by brooding over the fall of your faith. Come and spend your time with us, so that we may again give you some taste for life."

Ah! the empty little house which awaited him! Pierre shivered at the thought of it, at the idea that he would now find himself all alone there, bereft of the brother with whom he had lately spent so many happy days. Into what solitude and torment must he not now relapse after that companionship to which he had become accustomed? However, the very thought of the latter increased his grief, and confession suddenly gushed from his lips: "To spend my time here, live with you, oh! no, that is an impossibility. Why do you compel me to speak out, and tell you things that I am ashamed of and do not even understand. Ever since this morning you must have seen that I have been suffering here. No doubt it is because you and your people work, whereas I do nothing, because you love one another and believe in your efforts, whereas I no longer know how to love or believe. I feel out of my element. I'm embarrassed here, and I embarrass you. In fact you all irritate me, and I might end by hating you. There remains nothing healthy in me, all natural feelings have been spoilt and destroyed, and only envy and hatred could sprout up from such ruins. So let me go back to my accursed hole, where death will some day come for me. Farewell, brother!"

But Guillaume, full of affection and compassion, caught hold of his arms and detained him. "You shall not go, I will not allow you to go, without a positive promise that you will come back. I don't wish to lose you again, especially now that I know all you are worth and how dreadfully you suffer. I will save you, if need be, in spite of yourself. I will cure you of your torturing doubts, oh! without catechising you, without imposing any particular faith on you, but simply by allowing life to do its work, for life alone can give you back health and hope. So I beg you, brother, in the name of our affection, come back here, come as often as you can to spend a day with us. You will then see that when folks have allotted themselves a task and work together in unison, they escape excessive unhappiness. A task of any kind—yes, that is what is wanted, together with some great passion and frank acceptance of life, so that it may be lived as it should be and loved."

"But what would be the use of my living here?" Pierre muttered bitterly. "I've no task left me, and I no longer know how to love."

"Well, I will give you a task, and as for love, that will soon be awakened by the breath of life. Come, brother, consent, consent!"

Then, seeing that Pierre still remained gloomy and sorrowful, and persisted in his determination to go away and bury himself, Guillaume added, "Ah! I don't say that the things of this world are such as one might wish them to be. I don't say that only joy and truth and justice exist. For instance, the affair of that unhappy fellow Salvat fills me with anger and revolt. Guilty he is, of course, and yet how many excuses he had, and how I shall pity him if the crimes of all of us are laid at his door, if the various political gangs bandy him from one to another, and use him as a weapon in their sordid fight for power. The thought of it all so exasperates me that at times I am as unreasonable as yourself. But now, brother, just to please me, promise that you will come and spend the day after to-morrow with us."

Then, as Pierre still kept silent, Guillaume went on: "I will have it so. It would grieve me too much to think that you were suffering from martyrdom in your solitary nook. I want to cure and save you."

Tears again rose to Pierre's eyes, and in a tone of infinite distress he answered: "Don't compel me to promise.... All I can say is that I will try to conquer myself."

The week he then spent in his little, dark, empty home proved a terrible one. Shutting himself up he brooded over his despair at having lost the companionship of that elder brother whom he once more loved with his whole soul. He had never before been so keenly conscious of his solitude; and he was a score of times on the point of hastening to Montmartre, for he vaguely felt that affection, truth and life were there. But on each occasion he was held back by a return of the discomfort which he had already experienced, discomfort compounded of shame and fear. Priest that he was, cut off from love and the avocations of other men, he would surely find nothing but hurt and suffering among creatures who were all nature, freedom and health. While he pondered thus, however, there rose before him the shades of his father and mother, those sad spirits that seemed to wander through the deserted rooms lamenting and entreating him to reconcile them in himself, as soon as he should find peace. What was he to do,—deny their prayer, and remain weeping with them, or go yonder in search of the cure which might at last lull them to sleep and bring them happiness in death by the force of his own happiness in life? At last a morning came when it seemed to him that his father enjoined him with a smile to betake himself yonder, while his mother consented with a glance of her big soft eyes, in which her sorrow at having made so bad a priest of him yielded to her desire to restore him to the life of our common humanity.

Pierre did not argue with himself that day: he took a cab and gave Guillaume's address to the driver for fear lest he should be overcome on the way and wish to turn back. And when he again found himself, as in a dream, in the large work-shop, where Guillaume and the young men welcomed him in a delicately affectionate way, he witnessed an unexpected scene which both impressed and relieved him.

Marie, who had scarcely nodded to him as he entered, sat there with a pale and frowning face. And Mere-Grand, who was also grave, said, after glancing at her: "You must excuse her, Monsieur l'Abbe; but she isn't reasonable. She is in a temper with all five of us."

Guillaume began to laugh. "Ah! she's so stubborn!" he exclaimed. "You can have no idea, Pierre, of what goes on in that little head of hers when anybody says or does anything contrary to her ideas of justice. Such absolute and lofty ideas they are, that they can descend to no compromise. For instance, we were talking of that recent affair of a father who was found guilty on his son's evidence; and she maintained that the son had only done what was right in giving evidence against his father, and that one ought invariably to tell the truth, no matter what might happen. What a terrible public prosecutor she would make, eh?"

Thereupon Marie, exasperated by Pierre's smile, which seemingly indicated that he also thought her in the wrong, flew into quite a passion: "You are cruel, Guillaume!" she cried; "I won't be laughed at like this."

"But you are losing your senses, my dear," exclaimed Francois, while Thomas and Antoine again grew merry. "We were only urging a question of humanity, father and I, for we respect and love justice as much as you do."

"There's no question of humanity, but simply one of justice. What is just and right is just and right, and you cannot alter it."

Then, as Guillaume made a further attempt to state his views and win her over to them, she rose trembling, in such a passion that she could scarcely stammer: "No, no, you are all too cruel, you only want to grieve me. I prefer to go up into my own room."

At this Mere-Grand vainly sought to restrain her. "My child, my child!" said she, "reflect a moment; this is very wrong, you will deeply regret it."

"No, no; you are not just, and I suffer too much."

Then she wildly rushed upstairs to her room overhead.

Consternation followed. Scenes of a similar character had occasionally occurred before, but there had never been so serious a one. Guillaume immediately admitted that he had done wrong in laughing at her, for she could not bear irony. Then he told Pierre that in her childhood and youth she had been subject to terrible attacks of passion whenever she witnessed or heard of any act of injustice. As she herself explained, these attacks would come upon her with irresistible force, transporting her to such a point that she would sometimes fall upon the floor and rave. Even nowadays she proved quarrelsome and obstinate whenever certain subjects were touched upon. And she afterwards blushed for it all, fully conscious that others must think her unbearable.

Indeed, a quarter of an hour later, she came downstairs again of her own accord, and bravely acknowledged her fault. "Wasn't it ridiculous of me?" she said. "To think I accuse others of being unkind when I behave like that! Monsieur l'Abbe must have a very bad opinion of me." Then, after kissing Mere-Grand, she added: "You'll forgive me, won't you? Oh! Francois may laugh now, and so may Thomas and Antoine. They are quite right, our differences are merely laughing matters."

"My poor Marie," replied Guillaume, in a tone of deep affection. "You see what it is to surrender oneself to the absolute. If you are so healthy and reasonable it's because you regard almost everything from the relative point of view, and only ask life for such gifts as it can bestow. But when your absolute ideas of justice come upon you, you lose both equilibrium and reason. At the same time, I must say that we are all liable to err in much the same manner."

Marie, who was still very flushed, thereupon answered in a jesting way: "Well, it at least proves that I'm not perfect."

"Oh, certainly! And so much the better," said Guillaume, "for it makes me love you the more."

This was a sentiment which Pierre himself would willingly have re-echoed. The scene had deeply stirred him. Had not his own frightful torments originated with his desire for the absolute both in things and beings? He had sought faith in its entirety, and despair had thrown him into complete negation. Again, was there not some evil desire for the absolute and some affectation of pride and voluntary blindness in the haughty bearing which he had retained amidst the downfall of his belief, the saintly reputation which he had accepted when he possessed no faith at all? On hearing his brother praise Marie, because she only asked life for such things as it could give, it had seemed to him that this was advice for himself. It was as if a refreshing breath of nature had passed before his face. At the same time his feelings in this respect were still vague, and the only well-defined pleasure that he experienced came from the young woman's fit of anger, that error of hers which brought her nearer to him, by lowering her in some degree from her pedestal of serene perfection. It was, perhaps, that seeming perfection which had made him suffer; however, he was as yet unable to analyse his feelings. That day, for the first time, he chatted with her for a little while, and when he went off he thought her very good-hearted and very human.

Two days later he again came to spend the afternoon in the large sunlit work-shop overlooking Paris. Ever since he had become conscious of the idle life he was leading, he had felt very bored when he was alone, and only found relief among that gay, hardworking family. His brother scolded him for not having come to dejeuner, and he promised to do so on the morrow. By the time a week had elapsed, none of the discomfort and covert hostility which had prevailed between him and Marie remained: they met and chatted on a footing of good fellowship. Although he was a priest, she was in no wise embarrassed by his presence. With her quiet atheism, indeed, she had never imagined that a priest could be different from other men. Thus her sisterly cordiality both astonished and delighted Pierre. It was as if he wore the same garments and held the same ideas as his big nephews, as if there were nothing whatever to distinguish him from other men. He was still more surprised, however, by Marie's silence on all religious questions. She seemed to live on quietly and happily, without a thought of what might be beyond life, that terrifying realm of mystery, which to him had brought such agony of mind.

Now that he came every two or three days to Montmartre she noticed that he was suffering. What could be the matter with him, she wondered. When she questioned him in a friendly manner and only elicited evasive replies, she guessed that he was ashamed of his sufferings, and that they were aggravated, rendered well-nigh incurable, by the very secrecy in which he buried them. Thereupon womanly compassion awoke within her, and she felt increasing affection for that tall, pale fellow with feverish eyes, who was consumed by grievous torments which he would confess to none. No doubt she questioned Guillaume respecting her brother's sadness, and he must have confided some of the truth to her in order that she might help him to extricate Pierre from his sufferings, and give him back some taste for life. The poor fellow always seemed so happy when she treated him like a friend, a brother!

At last, one evening, on seeing his eyes full of tears as he gazed upon the dismal twilight falling over Paris, she herself pressed him to confide his trouble to her. And thereupon he suddenly spoke out, confessing all his torture and the horrible void which the loss of faith had left within him. Ah! to be unable to believe, to be unable to love, to be nothing but ashes, to know of nothing certain by which he might replace the faith that had fled from him! She listened in stupefaction. Why, he must be mad! And she plainly told him so, such was her astonishment and revolt at hearing such a desperate cry of wretchedness. To despair, indeed, and believe in nothing and love nothing, simply because a religious hypothesis had crumbled! And this, too, when the whole, vast world was spread before one, life with the duty of living it, creatures and things to be loved and succoured, without counting the universal labour, the task which one and all came to accomplish! Assuredly he must be mad, mad with the gloomiest madness; still she vowed she would cure him.

From that time forward she felt the most compassionate affection for this extraordinary young man, who had first embarrassed and afterwards astonished her. She showed herself very gentle and gay with him; she looked after him with the greatest skill and delicacy of heart and mind. There had been certain similar features in their childhood; each had been reared in the strictest religious views by a pious mother. But afterwards how different had been their fates! Whilst he was struggling with his doubts, bound by his priestly vows, she had grown up at the Lycee Fenelon, where her father had placed her as soon as her mother died; and there, far removed from all practice of religion, she had gradually reached total forgetfulness of her early religious views. It was a constant source of surprise for him to find that she had thus escaped all distress of mind at the thought of what might come after death, whereas that same thought had so deeply tortured him. When they chatted together and he expressed his astonishment at it, she frankly laughed, saying that she had never felt any fear of hell, for she was certain that no hell existed. And she added that she lived in all quietude, without hope of going to any heaven, her one thought being to comply in a reasonable way with the requirements and necessities of earthly life. It was, perhaps, in some measure a matter of temperament with her; but it was also a matter of education. Yet, whatever that education had been, whatever knowledge she had acquired, she had remained very womanly and very loving. There was nothing stern or masculine about her.

"Ah, my friend," she said one day to Pierre, "if you only knew how easy it is for me to remain happy so long as I see those I love free from any excessive suffering. For my own part I can always adapt myself to life. I work and content myself no matter what may happen. Sorrow has only come to me from others, for I can't help wishing that everybody should be fairly happy, and there are some who won't.... I was for a long time very poor, but I remained gay. I wish for nothing, except for things that can't be purchased. Still, want is the great abomination which distresses me. I can understand that you should have felt everything crumbling when charity appeared to you so insufficient a remedy as to be contemptible. Yet it does bring relief; and, moreover, it is so sweet to be able to give. Some day, too, by dint of reason and toil, by the good and efficient working of life itself, the reign of justice will surely come. But now it's I that am preaching! Oh! I have little taste for it! It would be ridiculous for me to try to heal you with big phrases. All the same, I should like to cure you of your gloomy sufferings. To do so, all that I ask of you is to spend as much time as you can with us. You know that this is Guillaume's greatest desire. We will all love you so well, you will see us all so affectionately united, and so gay over our common work, that you will come back to truth by joining us in the school of our good mother nature. You must live and work, and love and hope."

Pierre smiled as he listened. He now came to Montmartre nearly every day. She was so nice and affectionate when she preached to him in that way with a pretty assumption of wisdom. As she had said too, life was so delightful in that big workroom; it was so pleasant to be all together, and to labour in common at the same work of health and truth. Ashamed as Pierre was of doing nothing, anxious as he was to occupy his mind and fingers, he had first taken an interest in Antoine's engraving, asking why he should not try something of the kind himself. However, he felt that he lacked the necessary gift for art. Then, too, he recoiled from Francois' purely intellectual labour, for he himself had scarcely emerged from the harrowing study of conflicting texts. Thus he was more inclined for manual toil like that of Thomas. In mechanics he found precision and clearness such as might help to quench his thirst for certainty. So he placed himself at the young man's orders, pulled his bellows and held pieces of mechanism for him. He also sometimes served as assistant to Guillaume, tying a large blue apron over his cassock in order to help in the experiments. From that time he formed part of the work-shop, which simply counted a worker the more.

One afternoon early in April, when they were all busily engaged there, Marie, who sat embroidering at the table in front of Mere-Grand, raised her eyes to the window and suddenly burst into a cry of admiration: "Oh! look at Paris under that rain of sunlight!"

Pierre drew near; the play of light was much the same as that which he had witnessed at his first visit. The sun, sinking behind some slight purple clouds, was throwing down a hail of rays and sparks which on all sides rebounded and leapt over the endless stretch of roofs. It might have been thought that some great sower, hidden amidst the glory of the planet, was scattering handfuls of golden grain from one horizon to the other.

Pierre, at sight of it, put his fancy into words: "It is the sun sowing Paris with grain for a future harvest," said he. "See how the expanse looks like ploughed land; the brownish houses are like soil turned up, and the streets are deep and straight like furrows."

"Yes, yes, that's true," exclaimed Marie gaily. "The sun is sowing Paris with grain. See how it casts the seed of light and health right away to the distant suburbs! And yet, how singular! The rich districts on the west seem steeped in a ruddy mist, whilst the good seed falls in golden dust over the left bank and the populous districts eastward. It is there, is it not, that the crop will spring up?"

They had all drawn near, and were smiling at the symbol. As Marie had said, it seemed indeed that while the sun slowly sank behind the lacework of clouds, the sower of eternal life scattered his flaming seed with a rhythmical swing of the arm, ever selecting the districts of toil and effort. One dazzling handful of grain fell over yonder on the district of the schools; and then yet another rained down to fertilise the district of the factories and work-shops.

"Ah! well," said Guillaume gaily. "May the crop soon sprout from the good ground of our great Paris, which has been turned up by so many revolutions, and enriched by the blood of so many workers! It is the only ground in the world where Ideas can germinate and bloom. Yes, yes, Pierre is quite right, it is the sun sowing Paris with the seed of the future world, which can sprout only up here!"

Then Thomas, Francois and Antoine, who stood behind their father in a row, nodded as if to say that this was also their own conviction; whilst Mere-Grand gazed afar with dreamy eyes as though she could already behold the splendid future.

"Ah! but it is only a dream; centuries must elapse. We shall never see it!" murmured Pierre with a quiver.

"But others will!" cried Marie. "And does not that suffice?"

Those lofty words stirred Pierre to the depths of his being. And all at once there came to him the memory of another Marie*—the adorable Marie of his youth, that Marie de Guersaint who had been cured at Lourdes, and the loss of whom had left such a void in his heart. Was that new Marie who stood there smiling at him, so tranquil and so charming in her strength, destined to heal that old-time wound? He felt that he was beginning to live again since she had become his friend.

* The heroine of M. Zola's "Lourdes."

Meantime, there before them, the glorious sun, with the sweep of its rays, was scattering living golden dust over Paris, still and ever sowing the great future harvest of justice and of truth.

II. TOWARDS LIFE

ONE evening, at the close of a good day's work, Pierre, who was helping Thomas, suddenly caught his foot in the skirt of his cassock and narrowly escaped falling. At this, Marie, after raising a faint cry of anxiety, exclaimed: "Why don't you take it off?"

There was no malice in her inquiry. She simply looked upon the priestly robe as something too heavy and cumbersome, particularly when one had certain work to perform. Nevertheless, her words deeply impressed Pierre, and he could not forget them. When he was at home in the evening and repeated them to himself they gradually threw him into feverish agitation. Why, indeed, had he not divested himself of that cassock, which weighed so heavily and painfully on his shoulders? Then a frightful struggle began within him, and he spent a terrible, sleepless night, again a prey to all his former torments.

At first sight it seemed a very simple matter that he should cast his priestly gown aside, for had he not ceased to discharge any priestly office? He had not said mass for some time past, and this surely meant renunciation of the priesthood. Nevertheless, so long as he retained his gown it was possible that he might some day say mass again, whereas if he cast it aside he would, as it were, strip himself, quit the priesthood entirely, without possibility of return. It was a terrible step to take, one that would prove irrevocable; and thus he paced his room for hours, in great anguish of mind.

He had formerly indulged in a superb dream. Whilst believing nothing himself he had resolved to watch, in all loyalty, over the belief of others. He would not so lower himself as to forswear his vows, he would be no base renegade, but however great the torments of the void he felt within him he would remain the minister of man's illusions respecting the Divinity. And it was by reason of his conduct in this respect that he had ended by being venerated as a saint—he who denied everything, who had become a mere empty sepulchre. For a long time his falsehood had never disturbed him, but it now brought him acute suffering. It seemed to him that he would be acting in the vilest manner if he delayed placing his life in accord with his opinions. The thought of it all quite rent his heart.

The question was a very clear one. By what right did he remain the minister of a religion in which he no longer believed? Did not elementary honesty require that he should quit a Church in which he denied the presence of the Divinity? He regarded the dogmas of that Church as puerile errors, and yet he persisted in teaching them as if they were eternal truths. Base work it was, that alarmed his conscience. He vainly sought the feverish glow of charity and martyrdom which had led him to offer himself as a sacrifice, willing to suffer all the torture of doubt and to find his own life lost and ravaged, provided that he might yet afford the relief of hope to the lowly. Truth and nature, no doubt, had already regained too much ascendancy over him for those feelings to return. The thought of such a lying apostolate now wounded him; he no longer had the hypocritical courage to call the Divinity down upon the believers kneeling before him, when he was convinced that the Divinity would not descend. Thus all the past was swept away; there remained nothing of the sublime pastoral part he would once have liked to play, that supreme gift of himself which lay in stubborn adherence to the rules of the Church, and such devotion to faith as to endure in silence the torture of having lost it.

What must Marie think of his prolonged falsehood, he wondered, and thereupon he seemed to hear her words again: "Why not take your cassock off?" His conscience bled as if those words were a stab. What contempt must she not feel for him, she who was so upright, so high-minded? Every scattered blame, every covert criticism directed against his conduct, seemed to find embodiment in her. It now sufficed that she should condemn him, and he at once felt guilty. At the same time she had never voiced her disapproval to him, in all probability because she did not think she had any right to intervene in a struggle of conscience. The superb calmness and healthiness which she displayed still astonished him. He himself was ever haunted and tortured by thoughts of the unknown, of what the morrow of death might have in store for one; but although he had studied and watched her for days together, he had never seen her give a sign of doubt or distress. This exemption from such sufferings as his own was due, said she, to the fact that she gave all her gaiety, all her energy, all her sense of duty, to the task of living, in such wise that life itself proved a sufficiency, and no time was left for mere fancies to terrify and stultify her. Well, then, since she with her air of quiet strength had asked him why he did not take off his cassock, he would take it off—yes, he would divest himself of that robe which seemed to burn and weigh him down.

He fancied himself calmed by this decision, and towards morning threw himself upon his bed; but all at once a stifling sensation, a renewal of his abominable anguish, brought him to his feet again. No, no, he could not divest himself of that gown which clung so tightly to his flesh. His skin would come away with his cloth, his whole being would be lacerated! Is not the mark of priesthood an indelible one, does it not brand the priest for ever, and differentiate him from the flock? Even should he tear off his gown with his skin, he would remain a priest, an object of scandal and shame, awkward and impotent, shut off from the life of other men. And so why tear it off, since he would still and ever remain in prison, and a fruitful life of work in the broad sunlight was no longer within his reach? He, indeed, fancied himself irremediably stricken with impotence. Thus he was unable to come to any decision, and when he returned to Montmartre two days later he had again relapsed into a state of torment.

Feverishness, moreover, had come upon the happy home. Guillaume was becoming more and more annoyed about Salvat's affair, not a day elapsing without the newspapers fanning his irritation. He had at first been deeply touched by the dignified and reticent bearing of Salvat, who had declared that he had no accomplices whatever. Of course the inquiry into the crime was what is called a secret one; but magistrate Amadieu, to whom it had been entrusted, conducted it in a very noisy way. The newspapers, which he in some degree took into his confidence, were full of articles and paragraphs about him and his interviews with the prisoner. Thanks to Salvat's quiet admissions, Amadieu had been able to retrace the history of the crime hour by hour, his only remaining doubts having reference to the nature of the powder which had been employed, and the making of the bomb itself. It might after all be true that Salvat had loaded the bomb at a friend's, as he indeed asserted was the case; but he must be lying when he added that the only explosive used was dynamite, derived from some stolen cartridges, for all the experts now declared that dynamite would never have produced such effects as those which had been witnessed. This, then, was the mysterious point which protracted the investigations. And day by day the newspapers profited by it to circulate the wildest stories under sensational headings, which were specially devised for the purpose of sending up their sales.

It was all the nonsense contained in these stories that fanned Guillaume's irritation. In spite of his contempt for Sagnier he could not keep from buying the "Voix du Peuple." Quivering with indignation, growing more and more exasperated, he was somehow attracted by the mire which he found in that scurrilous journal. Moreover, the other newspapers, including even the "Globe," which was usually so dignified, published all sorts of statements for which no proof could be supplied, and drew from them remarks and conclusions which, though couched in milder language than Sagnier's, were none the less abominably unjust. It seemed indeed as if the whole press had set itself the task of covering Salvat with mud, so as to be able to vilify Anarchism generally. According to the journalists the prisoner's life had simply been one long abomination. He had already earned his living by thievery in his childhood at the time when he had roamed the streets, an unhappy, forsaken vagrant; and later on he had proved a bad soldier and a bad worker. He had been punished for insubordination whilst he was in the army, and he had been dismissed from a dozen work-shops because he incessantly disturbed them by his Anarchical propaganda. Later still, he had fled his country and led a suspicious life of adventure in America, where, it was alleged, he must have committed all sorts of unknown crimes. Moreover there was his horrible immorality, his connection with his sister-in-law, that Madame Theodore who had taken charge of his forsaken child in his absence, and with whom he had cohabited since his return to France. In this wise Salvat's failings and transgressions were pitilessly denounced and magnified without any mention of the causes which had induced them, or of the excuses which lay in the unhappy man's degrading environment. And so Guillaume's feelings of humanity and justice revolted, for he knew the real Salvat,—a man of tender heart and dreamy mind, so liable to be impassioned by fancies,—a man cast into life when a child without weapon of defence, ever trodden down or thrust aside, then gradually exasperated by the perpetual onslaughts of want, and at last dreaming of reviving the golden age by destroying the old, corrupt world.

Unfortunately for Salvat, everything had gone against him since he had been shut up in strict confinement, at the mercy of the ambitious and worldly Amadieu. Guillaume had learnt from his son, Thomas, that the prisoner could count on no support whatever among his former mates at the Grandidier works. These works were becoming prosperous once more, thanks to their steady output of bicycles; and it was said that Grandidier was only waiting for Thomas to perfect his little motor, in order to start the manufacture of motor-cars on a large scale. However, the success which he was now for the first time achieving, and which scarcely repaid him for all his years of toil and battle, had in certain respects rendered him prudent and even severe. He did not wish any suspicion to be cast upon his business through the unpleasant affair of his former workman Salvat, and so he had dismissed such of his workmen as held Anarchist views. If he had kept the two Toussaints, one of whom was the prisoner's brother-in-law, while the other was suspected of sympathy with him, this was because they had belonged to the works for a score of years, and he did not like to cast them adrift. Moreover, Toussaint, the father, had declared that if he were called as a witness for the defence, he should simply give such particulars of Salvat's career as related to the prisoner's marriage with his sister.

One evening when Thomas came home from the works, to which he returned every now and then in order to try his little motor, he related that he had that day seen Madame Grandidier, the poor young woman who had become insane through an attack of puerperal fever following upon the death of a child. Although most frightful attacks of madness occasionally came over her, and although life beside her was extremely painful, even during the intervals when she remained downcast and gentle as a child, her husband had never been willing to send her to an asylum. He kept her with him in a pavilion near the works, and as a rule the shutters of the windows overlooking the yard remained closed. Thus Thomas had been greatly surprised to see one of these windows open, and the young woman appear at it amidst the bright sunshine of that early spring. True, she only remained there for a moment, vision-like, fair and pretty, with smiling face; for a servant who suddenly drew near closed the window, and the pavilion then again sank into lifeless silence. At the same time it was reported among the men employed at the works that the poor creature had not experienced an attack for well-nigh a month past, and that this was the reason why the "governor" looked so strong and pleased, and worked so vigorously to help on the increasing prosperity of his business.

"He isn't a bad fellow," added Thomas, "but with the terrible competition that he has to encounter, he is bent on keeping his men under control. Nowadays, says he, when so many capitalists and wage earners seem bent on exterminating one another, the latter—if they don't want to starve—ought to be well pleased when capital falls into the hands of an active, fair-minded man.... If he shows no pity for Salvat, it is because he really believes in the necessity of an example."

That same day Thomas, after leaving the works and while threading his way through the toilsome hive-like Marcadet district, had overtaken Madame Theodore and little Celine, who were wandering on in great distress. It appeared that they had just called upon Toussaint, who had been unable to lend them even such a trifle as ten sous. Since Salvat's arrest, the woman and the child had been forsaken and suspected by one and all. Driven forth from their wretched lodging, they were without food and wandered hither and thither dependent on chance alms. Never had greater want and misery fallen on defenceless creatures.

"I told them to come up here, father," said Thomas, "for I thought that one might pay their landlord a month's rent, so that they might go home again.... Ah! there's somebody coming now—it's they, no doubt."

Guillaume had felt angry with himself whilst listening to his son, for he had not thought of the poor creatures. It was the old story: the man disappears, and the woman and the child find themselves in the streets, starving. Whenever Justice strikes a man her blow travels beyond him, fells innocent beings and kills them.

Madame Theodore came in, humble and timid, scared like a luckless creature whom life never wearies of persecuting. She was becoming almost blind, and little Celine had to lead her. The girl's fair, thin face wore its wonted expression of shrewd intelligence, and even now, however woeful her rags, it was occasionally brightened by a childish smile.

Pierre and Marie, who were both there, felt extremely touched. Near them was Madame Mathis, young Victor's mother, who had come to help Mere-Grand with the mending of some house-linen. She went out by the day in this fashion among a few families, and was thus enabled to give her son an occasional franc or two. Guillaume alone questioned Madame Theodore.

"Ah! monsieur," she stammered, "who could ever have thought Salvat capable of such a thing, he who's so good and so humane? Still it's true, since he himself has admitted it to the magistrate.... For my part I told everybody that he was in Belgium. I wasn't quite sure of it, still I'm glad that he didn't come back to see us; for if he had been arrested at our place I should have lost my senses.... Well, now that they have him, they'll sentence him to death, that's certain."

At this Celine, who had been looking around her with an air of interest, piteously exclaimed: "Oh! no, oh! no, mamma, they won't hurt him!"

Big tears appeared in the child's eyes as she raised this cry. Guillaume kissed her, and then went on questioning Madame Theodore.

"Well, monsieur," she answered, "the child's not old or big enough to work as yet, and my eyes are done for, people won't even take me as a charwoman. And so it's simple enough, we starve.... Oh! of course I'm not without relations; I have a sister who married very well. Her husband is a clerk, Monsieur Chretiennot, perhaps you know him. Unfortunately he's rather proud, and as I don't want any scenes between him and my sister, I no longer go to see her. Besides, she's in despair just now, for she's expecting another baby, which is a terrible blow for a small household, when one already has two girls.... That's why the only person I can apply to is my brother Toussaint. His wife isn't a bad sort by any means, but she's no longer the same since she's been living in fear of her husband having another attack. The first one carried off all her savings, and what would become of her if Toussaint should remain on her hands, paralysed? Besides, she's threatened with another burden, for, as you may know, her son Charles got keeping company with a servant at a wine shop, who of course ran away after she had a baby, which she left him to see to. So one can understand that the Toussaints themselves are hard put. I don't complain of them. They've already lent me a little money, and of course they can't go on lending for ever."

She continued talking in this spiritless, resigned way, complaining only on account of Celine; for, said she, it was enough to make one's heart break to see such an intelligent child obliged to tramp the streets after getting on so well at the Communal School. She could feel too that everybody now kept aloof from them on account of Salvat. The Toussaints didn't want to be compromised in any such business. There was only Charles, who had said that he could well understand a man losing his head and trying to blow up the bourgeois, because they really treated the workers in a blackguard way.

"For my part, monsieur," added Madame Theodore, "I say nothing, for I'm only a woman. All the same, though, if you'd like to know what I think, well, I think that it would have been better if Salvat hadn't done what he did, for we two, the girl and I, are the real ones to suffer from it. Ah! I can't get the idea into my head, that the little one should be the daughter of a man condemned to death."

Once more Celine interrupted her, flinging her arms around her neck: "Oh! mamma, oh! mamma, don't say that, I beg you! It can't be true, it grieves me too much!"

At this Pierre and Marie exchanged compassionate glances, while Mere-Grand rose from her chair, in order to go upstairs and search her wardrobes for some articles of clothing which might be of use to the two poor creatures. Guillaume, who, for his part, had been moved to tears, and felt full of revolt against the social system which rendered such distress possible, slipped some alms into the child's little hand, and promised Madame Theodore that he would see her landlord so as to get her back her room.

"Ah! Monsieur Froment!" replied the unfortunate woman. "Salvat was quite right when he said you were a real good man! And as you employed him here for a few days you know too that he isn't a wicked one.... Now that he's been put in prison everybody calls him a brigand, and it breaks my heart to hear them." Then, turning towards Madame Mathis, who had continued sewing in discreet silence, like a respectable woman whom none of these things could concern, she went on: "I know you, madame, but I'm better acquainted with your son, Monsieur Victor, who has often come to chat at our place. Oh! you needn't be afraid, I shan't say it, I shall never compromise anybody; but if Monsieur Victor were free to speak, he'd be the man to explain Salvat's ideas properly."

Madame Mathis looked at her in stupefaction. Ignorant as she was of her son's real life and views, she experienced a vague dread at the idea of any connection between him and Salvat's family. Moreover, she refused to believe it possible. "Oh! you must be mistaken," she said. "Victor told me that he now seldom came to Montmartre, as he was always going about in search of work."

By the anxious quiver of the widow's voice, Madame Theodore understood that she ought not to have mixed her up in her troubles; and so in all humility she at once beat a retreat: "I beg your pardon, madame, I didn't think I should hurt your feelings. Perhaps, too, I'm mistaken, as you say."

Madame Mathis had again turned to her sewing as to the solitude in which she lived, that nook of decent misery where she dwelt without companionship and almost unknown, with scarcely sufficient bread to eat. Ah! that dear son of hers, whom she loved so well; however much he might neglect her, she had placed her only remaining hope in him: he was her last dream, and would some day lavish all kinds of happiness upon her!

At that moment Mere-Grand came downstairs again, laden with a bundle of linen and woollen clothing, and Madame Theodore and little Celine withdrew while pouring forth their thanks. For a long time after they had gone Guillaume, unable to resume work, continued walking to and fro in silence, with a frown upon his face.

When Pierre, still hesitating and still tortured by conflicting feelings, returned to Montmartre on the following day he witnessed with much surprise a visit of a very different kind. There was a sudden gust of wind, a whirl of skirts and a ring of laughter as little Princess Rosemonde swept in, followed by young Hyacinthe Duvillard, who, on his side, retained a very frigid bearing.

"It's I, my dear master," exclaimed the Princess. "I promised you a visit, you remember, for I am such a great admirer of your genius. And our young friend here has been kind enough to bring me. We have only just returned from Norway, and my very first visit is for you."

She turned as she spoke, and bowed in an easy and gracious way to Pierre and Marie, Francois and Antoine, who were also there. Then she resumed: "Oh! my dear master, you have no idea how beautifully virginal Norway is! We all ought to go and drink at that new source of the Ideal, and we should return purified, rejuvenated and capable of great renunciations!"

As a matter of fact she had been well-nigh bored to death there. To make one's honeymoon journey to the land of the ice and snow, instead of to Italy, the hot land of the sun, was doubtless a very refined idea, which showed that no base materialism formed part of one's affections. It was the soul alone that travelled, and naturally it was fit that only kisses of the soul should be exchanged on the journey. Unfortunately, however, Hyacinthe had carried his symbolism so far as to exasperate Rosemonde, and on one occasion they had come to blows over it, and then to tears when this lover's quarrel had ended as many such quarrels do. Briefly, they had no longer deemed themselves pure enough for the companionship of the swans and the lakes of dreamland, and had therefore taken the first steamer that was sailing for France.

As it was altogether unnecessary to confess to everybody what a failure their journey had proved, the Princess abruptly brought her rapturous references to Norway to an end, and then explained: "By the way, do you know what I found awaiting me on my return? Why, I found my house pillaged, oh! completely pillaged! And in such a filthy condition, too! We at once recognised the mark of the beast, and thought of Bergaz's young friends."

Already on the previous day Guillaume had read in the newspapers that a band of young Anarchists had entered the Princess's little house by breaking a basement window. She had left it quite deserted, unprotected even by a caretaker; and the robbers had not merely removed everything from the premises—including even the larger articles of furniture, but had lived there for a couple of days, bringing provisions in from outside, drinking all the wine in the cellars, and leaving every room in a most filthy and disgusting condition. On discovering all this, Rosemonde had immediately remembered the evening she had spent at the Chamber of Horrors in the company of Bergaz and his acolytes, Rossi and Sanfaute, who had heard her speak of her intended trip to Norway. The two young men had therefore been arrested, but Bergaz had so far escaped. The Princess was not greatly astonished by it all, for she had already been warned of the presence of dangerous characters among the mixed cosmopolitan set with which she associated. Janzen had told her in confidence of a number of villanous affairs which were attributed to Bergaz and his band. And now the Anarchist leader openly declared that Bergaz had sold himself to the police like Raphanel; and that the burglary at the Princess's residence had been planned by the police officials, who thereby hoped to cover the Anarchist cause with mire. If proof was wanted of this, added Janzen, it could be found in the fact that the police had allowed Bergaz to escape.

"I fancied that the newspapers might have exaggerated matters," said Guillaume, when the Princess had finished her story. "They are inventing such abominable things just now, in order to blacken the case of that poor devil Salvat."

"Oh! they've exaggerated nothing!" Rosemonde gaily rejoined. "As a matter of fact they have omitted a number of particulars which were too filthy for publication.... For my part, I've merely had to go to an hotel. I'm very comfortable there; I was beginning to feel bored in that house of mine.... All the same, however, Anarchism is hardly a clean business, and I no longer like to say that I have any connection with it."

She again laughed, and then passed to another subject, asking Guillaume to tell her of his most recent researches, in order, no doubt, that she might show she knew enough chemistry to understand him. He had been rendered thoughtful, however, by the story of Bergaz and the burglary, and would only answer her in a general way.

Meantime, Hyacinthe was renewing his acquaintance with his school-fellows, Francois and Antoine. He had accompanied the Princess to Montmartre against his own inclinations; but since she had taken to whipping him he had become afraid of her. The chemist's little home filled him with disdain, particularly as the chemist was a man of questionable reputation. Moreover, he thought it a duty to insist on his own superiority in the presence of those old school-fellows of his, whom he found toiling away in the common rut, like other people.

"Ah! yes," said he to Francois, who was taking notes from a book spread open before him, "you are at the Ecole Normale, I believe, and are preparing for your licentiate. Well, for my part, you know, the idea of being tied to anything horrifies me. I become quite stupid when there's any question of examination or competition. The only possible road for one to follow is that of the Infinite. And between ourselves what dupery there is in science, how it narrows our horizon! It's just as well to remain a child with eyes gazing into the invisible. A child knows more than all your learned men."

Francois, who occasionally indulged in irony, pretended to share his opinion. "No doubt, no doubt," said he, "but one must have a natural disposition to remain a child. For my part, unhappily, I'm consumed by a desire to learn and know. It's deplorable, as I'm well aware, but I pass my days racking my brain over books.... I shall never know very much, that's certain; and perhaps that's the reason why I'm ever striving to learn a little more. You must at all events grant that work, like idleness, is a means of passing life, though of course it is a less elegant and aesthetic one."

"Less aesthetic, precisely," rejoined Hyacinthe. "Beauty lies solely in the unexpressed, and life is simply degraded when one introduces anything material into it."

Simpleton though he was in spite of the enormity of his pretensions, he doubtless detected that Francois had been speaking ironically. So he turned to Antoine, who had remained seated in front of a block he was engraving. It was the one which represented Lise reading in her garden, for he was ever taking it in hand again and touching it up in his desire to emphasise his indication of the girl's awakening to intelligence and life.

"So you engrave, I see," said Hyacinthe. "Well, since I renounced versification—a little poem I had begun on the End of Woman—because words seemed to me so gross and cumbersome, mere paving-stones as it were, fit for labourers, I myself have had some idea of trying drawing, and perhaps engraving too. But what drawing can portray the mystery which lies beyond life, the only sphere that has any real existence and importance for us? With what pencil and on what kind of plate could one depict it? We should need something impalpable, something unheard of, which would merely suggest the essence of things and beings."

"But it's only by material means," Antoine somewhat roughly replied, "that art can render the essence of things and beings, that is, their full significance as we understand it. To transcribe life is my great passion; and briefly life is the only mystery that there is in things and beings. When it seems to me that an engraving of mine lives, I'm well pleased, for I feel that I have created."

Hyacinthe pouted by way of expressing his contempt of all fruitfulness. Any fool might beget offspring. It was the sexless idea, existing by itself, that was rare and exquisite. He tried to explain this, but became confused, and fell back on the conviction which he had brought back from Norway, that literature and art were done for in France, killed by baseness and excess of production.

"It's evident!" said Francois gaily by way of conclusion. "To do nothing already shows that one has some talent!"

Meantime, Pierre and Marie listened and gazed around them, somewhat embarrassed by this strange visit which had set the usually grave and peaceful workroom topsy-turvy. The little Princess, though, evinced much amiability, and on drawing near to Marie admired the wonderful delicacy of some embroidery she was finishing. Before leaving, moreover, Rosemonde insisted upon Guillaume inscribing his autograph in an album which Hyacinthe had to fetch from her carriage. The young man obeyed her with evident boredom. It could be seen that they were already weary of one another. Pending a fresh caprice, however, it amused Rosemonde to terrorize her sorry victim. When she at length led him away, after declaring to Guillaume that she should always regard that visit as a memorable incident in her life, she made the whole household smile by saying: "Oh! so your sons knew Hyacinthe at college. He's a good-natured little fellow, isn't he? and he would really be quite nice if he would only behave like other people."

That same day Janzen and Bache came to spend the evening with Guillaume. Once a week they now met at Montmartre, as they had formerly done at Neuilly. Pierre, on these occasions, went home very late, for as soon as Mere-Grand, Marie, and Guillaume's sons had retired for the night, there were endless chats in the workroom, whence Paris could be seen spangled with thousands of gas lights. Another visitor at these times was Theophile Morin, but he did not arrive before ten o'clock, as he was detained by the work of correcting his pupils' exercises or some other wearisome labour pertaining to his profession.

As soon as Guillaume had told the others of the Princess's visit that afternoon, Janzen hastily exclaimed: "But she's mad, you know. When I first met her I thought for a moment that I might perhaps utilise her for the cause. She seemed so thoroughly convinced and bold! But I soon found that she was the craziest of women, and simply hungered for new emotions!"

Janzen was at last emerging from his wonted frigidity and mysteriousness. His cheeks were quite flushed. In all probability he had suffered from his rupture with the woman whom he had once called 'the Queen of the Anarchists,' and whose fortune and extensive circle of acquaintance had seemed to him such powerful weapons of propaganda.

"You know," said he, when he had calmed down, "it was the police who had her house pillaged and turned into a pigstye. Yes, in view of Salvat's trial, which is now near at hand, the idea was to damn Anarchism beyond possibility of even the faintest sympathy on the part of the bourgeois."

"Yes, she told me so," replied Guillaume, who had become attentive. "But I scarcely credit the story. If Bergaz had merely acted under such influence as you suggest, he would have been arrested with the others, just as Raphanel was taken with those whom he betrayed. Besides, I know something of Bergaz; he's a freebooter." Guillaume made a sorrowful gesture, and then in a saddened voice continued: "Oh, I can understand all claims and all legitimate reprisals. But theft, cynical theft for the purpose of profit and enjoyment, is beyond me! It lowers my hope of a better and more equitable form of society. Yes, that burglary at the Princess's house has greatly distressed me."

An enigmatical smile, sharp like a knife, again played over Janzen's lips. "Oh! it's a matter of heredity with you!" said he. "The centuries of education and belief that lie behind you compel you to protest. All the same, however, when people won't make restoration, things must be taken from them. What worries me is that Bergaz should have sold himself just now. The public prosecutor will use that farcical burglary as a crushing argument when he asks the jury for Salvat's head."

Such was Janzen's hatred of the police that he stubbornly clung to his version of the affair. Perhaps, too, he had quarrelled with Bergaz, with whom he had at one time freely associated.

Guillaume, who understood that all discussion would be useless, contented himself with replying: "Ah! yes, Salvat! Everything is against that unhappy fellow, he is certain to be condemned. But you can't know, my friends, what a passion that affair of his puts me into. All my ideas of truth and justice revolt at the thought of it. He's a madman certainly; but there are so many excuses to be urged for him. At bottom he is simply a martyr who has followed the wrong track. And yet he has become the scapegoat, laden with the crimes of the whole nation, condemned to pay for one and all!"

Bache and Morin nodded without replying. They both professed horror of Anarchism; while Morin, forgetting that the word if not the thing dated from his first master Proudhon, clung to his Comtist doctrines, in the conviction that science alone would ensure the happiness and pacification of the nations. Bache, for his part, old mystical humanitarian that he was, claimed that the only solution would come from Fourier, who by decreeing an alliance of talent, labour and capital, had mapped out the future in a decisive manner. Nevertheless, both Bache and Morin were so discontented with the slow-paced bourgeoise Republic of the present day, and so hurt by the thought that everything was going from bad to worse through the flouting of their own particular ideas, that they were quite willing to wax indignant at the manner in which the conflicting parties of the time were striving to make use of Salvat in order to retain or acquire power.

"When one thinks," said Bache, "that this ministerial crisis of theirs has now been lasting for nearly three weeks! Every appetite is openly displayed, it's a most disgusting sight! Did you see in the papers this morning that the President has again been obliged to summon Vignon to the Elysee?"

"Oh! the papers," muttered Morin in his weary way, "I no longer read them! What's the use of doing so? They are so badly written, and they all lie!"

As Bache had said, the ministerial crisis was still dragging on. The President of the Republic, taking as his guide the debate in the Chamber of Deputies, by which the Barroux administration had been overthrown, had very properly sent for Vignon, the victor on that occasion, and entrusted him with the formation of a new ministry. It had seemed that this would be an easy task, susceptible of accomplishment in two or three days at the utmost, for the names of the friends whom the young leader of the Radical party would bring to power with him had been freely mentioned for months past. But all sorts of difficulties had suddenly arisen. For ten days or so Vignon had struggled on amidst inextricable obstacles. Then, disheartened and disgusted, fearing, too, that he might use himself up and shut off the future if he persisted in his endeavours, he had been obliged to tell the President that he renounced the task. Forthwith the President had summoned other deputies, and questioned them until he had found one brave enough to make an attempt on his own account; whereupon incidents similar to those which had marked Vignon's endeavours had once more occurred. At the outset a list was drawn up with every prospect of being ratified within a few hours, but all at once hesitation arose, some pulled one way, some another; every effort was slowly paralysed till absolute failure resulted. It seemed as though the mysterious manoeuvres which had hampered Vignon had begun again; it was as if some band of invisible plotters was, for some unknown purpose, doing its utmost to wreck every combination. A thousand hindrances arose with increasing force from every side—jealousy, dislike, and even betrayal were secretly prompted by expert agents, who employed every form of pressure, whether threats or promises, besides fanning and casting rival passions and interests into collision. Thus the President, greatly embarrassed by this posture of affairs, had again found it necessary to summon Vignon, who, after reflection and negotiation, now had an almost complete list in his pocket, and seemed likely to perfect a new administration within the next forty-eight hours.

"Still it isn't settled," resumed Bache. "Well-informed people assert that Vignon will fail again as he did the first time. For my part I can't get rid of the idea that Duvillard's gang is pulling the strings, though for whose benefit is a mystery. You may be quite sure, however, that its chief purpose is to stifle the African Railways affair. If Monferrand were not so badly compromised I should almost suspect some trick on his part. Have you noticed that the 'Globe,' after throwing Barroux overboard in all haste, now refers to Monferrand every day with the most respectful sympathy? That's a grave sign; for it isn't Fonsegue's habit to show any solicitude for the vanquished. But what can one expect from that wretched Chamber! The only point certain is that something dirty is being plotted there."

"And that big dunderhead Mege who works for every party except his own!" exclaimed Morin; "what a dupe he is with that idea that he need merely overthrow first one cabinet and then another, in order to become the leader of one himself!"

The mention of Mege brought them all to agreement, for they unanimously hated him. Bache, although his views coincided on many points with those of the apostle of State Collectivism, judged each of his speeches, each of his actions, with pitiless severity. Janzen, for his part, treated the Collectivist leader as a mere reactionary bourgeois, who ought to be swept away one of the first. This hatred of Mege was indeed the common passion of Guillaume's friends. They could occasionally show some justice for men who in no wise shared their ideas; but in their estimation it was an unpardonable crime for anybody to hold much the same views as themselves, without being absolutely in agreement with them on every possible point.

Their discussion continued, their various theories mingling or clashing till they passed from politics to the press, and grew excited over the denunciations which poured each morning from Sagnier's newspaper, like filth from the mouth of a sewer. Thereupon Guillaume, who had become absorbed in reverie while pacing to and fro according to his habit, suddenly exclaimed: "Ah! what dirty work it is that Sagnier does! Before long there won't be a single person, a single thing left on which he hasn't vomited! You think he's on your side, and suddenly he splashes you with mire!... By the way, he related yesterday that skeleton keys and stolen purses were found on Salvat when he was arrested in the Bois de Boulogne! It's always Salvat! He's the inexhaustible subject for articles. The mere mention of him suffices to send up a paper's sales! The bribe-takers of the African Railways shout 'Salvat!' to create a diversion. And the battles which wreck ministers are waged round his name. One and all set upon him and make use of him and beat him down!"

With that cry of revolt and compassion, the friends separated for the night. Pierre, who sat near the open window, overlooking the sparkling immensity of Paris, had listened to the others without speaking a word. He had once more been mastered by his doubts, the terrible struggle of his heart and mind; and no solution, no appeasement had come to him from all the contradictory views he had heard—the views of men who only united in predicting the disappearance of the old world, and could make no joint brotherly effort to rear the future world of truth and justice. In that vast city of Paris stretching below him, spangled with stars, glittering like the sky of a summer's night, Pierre also found a great enigma. It was like chaos, like a dim expanse of ashes dotted with sparks whence the coming aurora would arise. What future was being forged there, he wondered, what decisive word of salvation and happiness would come with the dawn, and wing its flight to every point of the horizon?

When Pierre, in his turn, was about to retire, Guillaume laid his hands upon his shoulders, and with much emotion gave him a long look. "Ah! my poor fellow," said he, "you've been suffering too for some days past, I have noticed it. But you are the master of your sufferings, for the struggle you have to overcome is simply in yourself, and you can subdue it; whereas one cannot subdue the world, when it is the world, its cruelty and injustice that make one suffer! Good night, be brave, act as your reason tells you, even if it makes you weep, and you will find peace surely enough."

Later on, when Pierre again found himself alone in his little house at Neuilly, where none now visited him save the shades of his father and mother, he was long kept awake by a supreme internal combat. He had never before felt so disgusted with the falsehood of his life, that cassock which he had persisted in wearing, though he was a priest in name only. Perhaps it was all that he had beheld and heard at his brother's, the want and wretchedness of some, the wild, futile agitation of others, the need of improvement among mankind which remained paramount amidst every contradiction and form of weakness, that had made him more deeply conscious of the necessity of living in loyal and normal fashion in the broad daylight. He could no longer think of his former dream of leading the solitary life of a saintly priest when he was nothing of the kind, without a shiver of shame at having lied so long. And now it was quite decided, he would lie no longer, not even from feelings of compassion in order that others might retain their religious illusions. And yet how painful it was to have to divest himself of that gown which seemed to cling to his skin, and how heartrending the thought that if he did remove it he would be skinless, lacerated, infirm, unable, do what he might, to become like other men!

It was this recurring thought which again tortured him throughout that terrible night. Would life yet allow him to enter its fold? Had he not been branded with a mark which for ever condemned him to dwell apart? He thought he could feel his priestly vows burning his very flesh like red-hot iron. What use would it be for him to dress as men dress, if in reality he was never to be a man? He had hitherto lived in such a quivering state, in a sphere of renunciation and dreams! To know manhood never, to be too late for it, that thought filled him with terror. And when at last he made up his mind to fling aside his cassock, he did so from a simple sense of rectitude, for all his anguish remained.

When he returned to Montmartre on the following day, he wore a jacket and trousers of a dark colour. Neither an exclamation nor a glance that might have embarrassed him came from Mere-Grand or the three young men. Was not the change a natural one? They greeted him therefore in the quiet way that was usual with them; perhaps, with some increase of affection, as if to set him the more at his ease. Guillaume, however, ventured to smile good-naturedly. In that change he detected his own work. Cure was coming, as he had hoped it would come, by him and in his own home, amid the full sunlight, the life which ever streamed in through yonder window.

Marie, who on her side raised her eyes and looked at Pierre, knew nothing of the sufferings which he had endured through her simple and logical inquiry: "Why not take your cassock off?" She merely felt that by removing it he would be more at ease for his work.

"Oh, Pierre, just come and look!" she suddenly exclaimed. "I have been amusing myself with watching all the smoke which the wind is laying yonder over Paris. One might take it to be a huge fleet of ships shining in the sunlight. Yes, yes, golden ships, thousands of golden ships, setting forth from the ocean of Paris to enlighten and pacify the world!"

III. THE DAWN OF LOVE

A COUPLE of days afterwards, when Pierre was already growing accustomed to his new attire, and no longer gave it a thought, it so happened that on reaching Montmartre he encountered Abbe Rose outside the basilica of the Sacred Heart. The old priest, who at first was quite thunderstruck and scarcely able to recognise him, ended by taking hold of his hands and giving him a long look. Then with his eyes full of tears he exclaimed: "Oh! my son, so you have fallen into the awful state I feared! I never mentioned it, but I felt that God had withdrawn from you. Ah! nothing could wound my heart so cruelly as this."

Then, still trembling, he began to lead Pierre away as if to hide such a scandal from the few people who passed by; and at last, his strength failing him, he sank upon a heap of bricks lying on the grass of one of the adjoining work-yards.

The sincere grief which his old and affectionate friend displayed upset Pierre far more than any angry reproaches or curses would have done. Tears had come to his own eyes, so acute was the suffering he experienced at this meeting, which he ought, however, to have foreseen. There was yet another wrenching, and one which made the best of their blood flow, in that rupture between Pierre and the saintly man whose charitable dreams and hopes of salvation he had so long shared. There had been so many divine illusions, so many struggles for the relief of the masses, so much renunciation and forgiveness practised in common between them in their desire to hasten the harvest of the future! And now they were parting; he, Pierre, still young in years, was returning to life, leaving his aged companion to his vain waiting and his dreams.

In his turn, taking hold of Abbe Rose's hands, he gave expression to his sorrow. "Ah, my friend, my father," said he, "it is you alone that I regret losing, now that I am leaving my frightful torments behind. I thought that I was cured of them, but it has been sufficient for me to meet you, and my heart is rent again.... Don't weep for me, I pray you, don't reproach me for what I have done. It was necessary that I should do it. If I had consulted you, you would yourself have told me that it was better to renounce the priesthood than to remain a priest without faith or honour."

"Yes, yes," Abbe Rose gently responded, "you no longer had any faith left. I suspected it. And your rigidity and saintliness of life, in which I detected such great despair, made me anxious for you. How many hours did I not spend at times in striving to calm you! And you must listen to me again, you must still let me save you. I am not a sufficiently learned theologian to lead you back by discussing texts and dogmas; but in the name of Charity, my child, yes, in the name of Charity alone, reflect and take up your task of consolation and hope once more."

Pierre had sat down beside Abbe Rose, in that deserted nook, at the very foot of the basilica. "Charity! charity!" he replied in passionate accents; "why, it is its nothingness and bankruptcy that have killed the priest there was in me. How can you believe that benevolence is sufficient, when you have spent your whole life in practising it without any other result than that of seeing want perpetuated and even increased, and without any possibility of naming the day when such abomination shall cease?... You think of the reward after death, do you not? The justice that is to reign in heaven? But that is not justice, it is dupery—dupery that has brought the world nothing but suffering for centuries past."

Then he reminded the old priest of their life in the Charonne district, when they had gone about together succouring children in the streets and parents in their hovels; the whole of those admirable efforts which, so far as Abbe Rose was concerned, had simply ended in blame from his superiors, and removal from proximity to his poor, under penalty of more severe punishment should he persist in compromising religion by the practice of blind benevolence without reason or object. And now, was he not, so to say, submerged beneath the ever-rising tide of want, aware that he would never, never be able to give enough even should he dispose of millions, and that he could only prolong the agony of the poor, who, even should they eat today, would starve again on the morrow? Thus he was powerless. The wound which he tried to dress and heal, immediately reopened and spread, in such wise that all society would at last be stricken and carried off by it.

Quivering as he listened, and slowly shaking his white head, the old priest ended by replying: "that does that matter, my child? what does that matter? One must give, always give, give in spite of everything! There is no other joy on earth.... If dogmas worry you, content yourself with the Gospel, and even of that retain merely the promise of salvation through charity."

But at this Pierre's feelings revolted. He forgot that he was speaking to one of simple mind, who was all love and nothing else, and could therefore not follow him. "The trial has been made," he answered, "human salvation cannot be effected by charity, nothing but justice can accomplish it. That is the gathering cry which is going up from every nation. For nearly two thousand years now the Gospel has proved a failure. There has been no redemption; the sufferings of mankind are every whit as great and unjust as they were when Jesus came. And thus the Gospel is now but an abolished code, from which society can only draw things that are troublous and hurtful. Men must free themselves from it."

This was his final conviction. How strange the idea, thought he, of choosing as the world's social legislator one who lived, as Jesus lived, amidst a social system absolutely different from that of nowadays. The age was different, the very world was different. And if it were merely a question of retaining only such of the moral teaching of Jesus as seemed human and eternal, was there not again a danger in applying immutable principles to the society of every age? No society could live under the strict law of the Gospel. Was not all order, all labour, all life destroyed by the teaching of Jesus? Did He not deny woman, the earth, eternal nature and the eternal fruitfulness of things and beings? Moreover, Catholicism had reared upon His primitive teaching such a frightful edifice of terror and oppression. The theory of original sin, that terrible heredity reviving with each creature born into the world, made no allowance as Science does for the corrective influences of education, circumstances and environment. There could be no more pessimist conception of man than this one which devotes him to the Devil from the instant of his birth, and pictures him as struggling against himself until the instant of his death. An impossible and absurd struggle, for it is a question of changing man in his entirety, killing the flesh, killing reason, destroying some guilty energy in each and every passion, and of pursuing the Devil to the very depths of the waters, mountains and forests, there to annihilate him with the very sap of the world. If this theory is accepted the world is but sin, a mere Hell of temptation and suffering, through which one must pass in order to merit Heaven. Ah! what an admirable instrument for absolute despotism is that religion of death, which the principle of charity alone has enabled men to tolerate, but which the need of justice will perforce sweep away. The poor man, who is the wretched dupe of it all, no longer believes in Paradise, but requires that each and all should be rewarded according to their deserts upon this earth; and thus eternal life becomes the good goddess, and desire and labour the very laws of the world, while the fruitfulness of woman is again honoured, and the idiotic nightmare of Hell is replaced by glorious Nature whose travail knows no end. Leaning upon modern Science, clear Latin reason sweeps away the ancient Semitic conception of the Gospel.

"For eighteen hundred years," concluded Pierre, "Christianity has been hampering the march of mankind towards truth and justice. And mankind will only resume its evolution on the day when it abolishes Christianity, and places the Gospel among the works of the wise, without taking it any longer as its absolute and final law."

But Abbe Rose raised his trembling hands: "Be quiet, be quiet, my child!" he cried; "you are blaspheming! I knew that doubt distracted you; but I thought you so patient, so able to bear suffering, that I relied on your spirit of renunciation and resignation. What can have happened to make you leave the Church in this abrupt and violent fashion? I no longer recognise you. Sudden passion has sprung up in you, an invincible force seems to carry you away. What is it? Who has changed you, tell me?"

Pierre listened in astonishment. "No," said he, "I assure you, I am such as you have known me, and in all this there is but an inevitable result and finish. Who could have influenced me, since nobody has entered my life? What new feeling could transform me, since I find none in me? I am the same as before, the same assuredly."

Still there was a touch of hesitation in his voice. Was it really true that there had been no change within him? He again questioned himself, and there came no clear answer; decidedly, he would find nothing. It was all but a delightful awakening, an overpowering desire for life, a longing to open his arms widely enough to embrace everyone and everything indeed, a breeze of joy seemed to raise him from the ground and carry him along.

Although Abbe Rose was too innocent of heart to understand things clearly, he again shook his head and thought of the snares which the Devil is ever setting for men. He was quite overwhelmed by Pierre's defection. Continuing his efforts to win him back, he made the mistake of advising him to consult Monseigneur Martha, for he hoped that a prelate of such high authority would find the words necessary to restore him to his faith. Pierre, however, boldly replied that if he was leaving the Church it was partly because it comprised such a man as Martha, such an artisan of deception and despotism, one who turned religion into corrupt diplomacy, and dreamt of winning men back to God by dint of ruses. Thereupon Abbe Rose, rising to his feet, could find no other argument in his despair than that of pointing to the basilica which stood beside them, square, huge and massive, and still waiting for its dome.

"That is God's abode, my child," said he, "the edifice of expiation and triumph, of penitence and forgiveness. You have said mass in it, and now you are leaving it sacrilegiously and forswearing yourself!"

But Pierre also had risen; and buoyed up by a sudden rush of health and strength he answered: "No, no! I am leaving it willingly, as one leaves a dark vault, to return into the open air and the broad sunlight. God does not dwell there; the only purpose of that huge edifice is to defy reason, truth and justice; it has been erected on the highest spot that could be found, like a citadel of error that dominates, insults and threatens Paris!"

Then seeing that the old priest's eyes were again filling with tears, and feeling on his own side so pained by their rupture that he began to sob, Pierre wished to go away. "Farewell! farewell!" he stammered.

But Abbe Rose caught him in his arms and kissed him, as if he were a rebellious son who yet had remained the dearest. "No, not farewell, not farewell, my child," he answered; "say rather till we meet again. Promise me that we shall see each other again, at least among those who starve and weep. It is all very well for you to think that charity has become bankrupt, but shall we not always love one another in loving our poor?"

Then they parted.

On becoming the companion of his three big nephews, Pierre had in a few lessons learnt from them how to ride a bicycle, in order that he might occasionally accompany them on their morning excursions. He went twice with them and Marie along the somewhat roughly paved roads in the direction of the Lake of Enghien. Then one morning when the young woman had promised to take him and Antoine as far as the forest of Saint-Germain, it was found at the last moment that Antoine could not come. Marie was already dressed in a chemisette of fawn-coloured silk, and a little jacket and "rationals" of black serge, and it was such a warm, bright April day that she was not inclined to renounce her trip.

"Well, so much the worse!" she gaily said to Pierre, "I shall take you with me, there will only be the pair of us. I really want you to see how delightful it is to bowl over a good road between the beautiful trees."

However, as Pierre was not yet a very expert rider, they decided that they would take the train as far as Maisons-Laffitte, whence they would proceed on their bicycles to the forest, cross it in the direction of Saint-Germain, and afterwards return to Paris by train.

"You will be here for dejeuner, won't you?" asked Guillaume, whom this freak amused, and who looked with a smile at his brother. The latter, like Marie, was in black: jacket, breeches and stockings all of the same hue.

"Oh, certainly!" replied Marie. "It's now barely eight o'clock, so we have plenty of time. Still you need not wait for us, you know, we shall always find our way back."

It was a delightful morning. When they started, Pierre could fancy himself with a friend of his own sex, so that this trip together through the warm sunlight seemed quite natural. Doubtless their costumes, which were so much alike, conduced to the gay brotherly feeling he experienced. But beyond all this there was the healthfulness of the open air, the delight which exercise brings, the pleasure of roaming in all freedom through the midst of nature.

On taking the train they found themselves alone in a compartment, and Marie once more began to talk of her college days. "Ah! you've no idea," said she, "what fine games at baseball we used to have at Fenelon! We used to tie up our skirts with string so as to run the better, for we were not allowed to wear rationals like I'm wearing now. And there were shrieks, and rushes, and pushes, till our hair waved about and we were quite red with exercise and excitement. Still that didn't prevent us from working in the class-rooms. On the contrary! Directly we were at study we fought again, each striving to learn the most and reach the top of the class!"

She laughed gaily as she thus recalled her school life, and Pierre glanced at her with candid admiration, so pink and healthy did she look under her little hat of black felt, which a long silver pin kept in position. Her fine dark hair was caught up behind, showing her neck, which looked as fresh and delicate as a child's. And never before had she seemed to him so supple and so strong.

"Ah," she continued in a jesting way, "there is nothing like rationals, you know! To think that some women are foolish and obstinate enough to wear skirts when they go out cycling!"

Then, as he declared—just by way of speaking the truth, and without the faintest idea of gallantry—that she looked very nice indeed in her costume, she responded: "Oh! I don't count. I'm not a beauty. I simply enjoy good health.... But can you understand it? To think that women have an unique opportunity of putting themselves at their ease, and releasing their limbs from prison, and yet they won't do so! If they think that they look the prettier in short skirts like schoolgirls they are vastly mistaken! And as for any question of modesty, well, it seems to me that it is infinitely less objectionable for women to wear rationals than to bare their bosoms at balls and theatres and dinners as society ladies do." Then, with a gesture of girlish impulsiveness, she added: "Besides, does one think of such things when one's rolling along? ... Yes, rationals are the only things, skirts are rank heresy!"

In her turn, she was now looking at him, and was struck by the extraordinary change which had come over him since the day when he had first appeared to her, so sombre in his long cassock, with his face emaciated, livid, almost distorted by anguish. It was like a resurrection, for now his countenance was bright, his lofty brow had all the serenity of hope, while his eyes and lips once more showed some of the confident tenderness which sprang from his everlasting thirst for love, self-bestowal and life. All mark of the priesthood had already left him, save that where he had been tonsured his hair still remained rather short.

"Why are you looking at me?" he asked.

"I was noticing how much good has been done you by work and the open air," she frankly answered; "I much prefer you as you are. You used to look so poorly. I thought you really ill."

"So I was," said he.

The train, however, was now stopping at Maisons-Laffitte. They alighted from it, and at once took the road to the forest. This road rises gently till it reaches the Maisons gate, and on market days it is often crowded with carts.

"I shall go first, eh?" said Marie gaily, "for vehicles still alarm you."

Thereupon she started ahead, but every now and again she turned with a smile to see if he were following her. And every time they overtook and passed a cart she spoke to him of the merits of their machines, which both came from the Grandidier works. They were "Lisettes," examples of those popular bicycles which Thomas had helped to perfect, and which the Bon Marche now sold in large numbers for 250 francs apiece. Perhaps they were rather heavy in appearance, but on the other hand their strength was beyond question. They were just the machines for a long journey, so Marie declared.

"Ah! here's the forest," she at last exclaimed. "We have now reached the end of the rise; and you will see what splendid avenues there are. One can bowl along them as on a velvet carpet."

Pierre had already joined her, and they rode on side by side along the broad straight avenue fringed with magnificent trees.

"I am all right now," said Pierre; "your pupil will end by doing you honour, I hope."

"Oh! I've no doubt of it. You already have a very good seat, and before long you'll leave me behind, for a woman is never a man's equal in a matter like this. At the same time, however, what a capital education cycling is for women!"

In what way?"

"Oh! I've certain ideas of my own on the subject; and if ever I have a daughter I shall put her on a bicycle as soon as she's ten years old, just to teach her how to conduct herself in life."

"Education by experience, eh?"

"Yes, why not? Look at the big girls who are brought up hanging to their mothers' apron strings. Their parents frighten them with everything, they are allowed no initiative, no exercise of judgment or decision, so that at times they hardly know how to cross a street, to such a degree does the traffic alarm them. Well, I say that a girl ought to be set on a bicycle in her childhood, and allowed to follow the roads. She will then learn to open her eyes, to look out for stones and avoid them, and to turn in the right direction at every bend or crossway. If a vehicle comes up at a gallop or any other danger presents itself, she'll have to make up her mind on the instant, and steer her course firmly and properly if she does not wish to lose a limb. Briefly, doesn't all this supply proper apprenticeship for one's will, and teach one how to conduct and defend oneself?"

Pierre had begun to laugh. "You will all be too healthy," he remarked.

"Oh, one must be healthy if one wants to be happy. But what I wish to convey is that those who learn to avoid stones and to turn properly along the highways will know how to overcome difficulties, and take the best decisions in after life. The whole of education lies in knowledge and energy."

"So women are to be emancipated by cycling?"

"Well, why not? It may seem a droll idea; but see what progress has been made already. By wearing rationals women free their limbs from prison; then the facilities which cycling affords people for going out together tend to greater intercourse and equality between the sexes; the wife and the children can follow the husband everywhere, and friends like ourselves are at liberty to roam hither and thither without astonishing anybody. In this lies the greatest advantage of all: one takes a bath of air and sunshine, one goes back to nature, to the earth, our common mother, from whom one derives fresh strength and gaiety of heart! Just look how delightful this forest is. And how healthful the breeze that inflates our lungs! Yes, it all purifies, calms and encourages one."

The forest, which was quite deserted on week days, stretched out in quietude on either hand, with sunlight filtering between its deep bands of trees. At that hour the rays only illumined one side of the avenue, there gilding the lofty drapery of verdure; on the other, the shady side, the greenery seemed almost black. It was truly delightful to skim, swallow-like, over that royal avenue in the fresh atmosphere, amidst the waving of grass and foliage, whose powerful scent swept against one's face. Pierre and Marie scarcely touched the soil: it was as if wings had come to them, and were carrying them on with a regular flight, through alternate patches of shade and sunshine, and all the scattered vitality of the far-reaching, quivering forest, with its mosses, its sources, its animal and its insect life.

Marie would not stop when they reached the crossway of the Croix de Noailles, a spot where people congregate on Sundays, for she was acquainted with secluded nooks which were far more charming resting-places. When they reached the slope going down towards Poissy, she roused Pierre, and they let their machines rush on. Then came all the joyous intoxication of speed, the rapturous feeling of darting along breathlessly while the grey road flees beneath one, and the trees on either hand turn like the opening folds of a fan. The breeze blows tempestuously, and one fancies that one is journeying yonder towards the horizon, the infinite, which ever and ever recedes. It is like boundless hope, delivery from every shackle, absolute freedom of motion through space. And nothing can inspirit one more gloriously—one's heart leaps as if one were in the very heavens.

"We are not going to Poissy, you know!" Marie suddenly cried; "we have to turn to the left."

They took the road from Acheres to the Loges, which ascends and contracts, thus bringing one closer together in the shade. Gradually slowing down, they began to exert themselves in order to make their way up the incline. This road was not so good as the others, it had been gullied by the recent heavy rains, and sand and gravel lay about. But then is there not even a pleasure in effort?

"You will get used to it," said Marie to Pierre; "it's amusing to overcome obstacles. For my part I don't like roads which are invariably smooth. A little ascent which does not try one's limbs too much rouses and inspirits one. And it is so agreeable to find oneself strong, and able to go on and on in spite of rain, or wind, or hills."

Her bright humour and courage quite charmed Pierre. "And so," said he, "we are off for a journey round France?"

"No, no, we've arrived. You won't dislike a little rest, eh? And now, tell me, wasn't it worth our while to come on here and rest in such a nice fresh, quiet spot."

She nimbly sprang off her machine and, bidding him follow her, turned into a path, along which she went some fifty paces. They placed their bicycles against some trees, and then found themselves in a little clearing, the most exquisite, leafy nest that one could dream of. The forest here assumed an aspect of secluded sovereign beauty. The springtide had endowed it with youth, the foliage was light and virginal, like delicate green lace flecked with gold by the sun-rays. And from the herbage and the surrounding thickets arose a breath of life, laden with all the powerful aroma of the earth.

"It's not too warm as yet, fortunately," exclaimed Marie, as she seated herself at the foot of a young oak-tree, against which she leant. "In July ladies get rather red by the time they reach this spot, and all the powder comes off their faces. However, one can't always be beautiful."

"Well, I'm not cold by any means," replied Pierre, as he sat at her feet wiping his forehead.

She laughed, and answered that she had never before seen him with such a colour. Then they began to talk like children, like two young friends, finding a source of gaiety in the most puerile things. She was somewhat anxious about his health, however, and would not allow him to remain in the cool shade, as he felt so very warm. In order to tranquillise her, he had to change his place and seat himself with his back to the sun. Then a little later he saved her from a large black spider, which had caught itself in the wavy hair on the nape of her neck. At this all her womanly nature reappeared, and she shrieked with terror. "How stupid it was to be afraid of a spider!" she exclaimed a moment afterwards; yet, in spite of her efforts to master herself, she remained pale and trembling.

Silence at last fell between them, and they looked at one another with a smile. In the midst of that delicate greenery they felt drawn together by frank affection—the affection of brother and sister, so it seemed to them. It made Marie very happy to think that she had taken an interest in Pierre, and that his return to health was largely her own work. However, their eyes never fell, their hands never met, even as they sat there toying with the grass, for they were as pure, as unconscious of all evil, as were the lofty oaks around them.

At last Marie noticed that time was flying. "You know that they expect us back to lunch," she exclaimed. "We ought to be off."

Thereupon they rose, wheeled their bicycles back to the highway, and starting off again at a good pace passed the Loges and reached Saint-Germain by the fine avenue which conducts to the chateau. It charmed them to take their course again side by side, like birds of equal flight. Their little bells jingled, their chains rustled lightly, and a fresh breeze swept past them as they resumed their talk, quite at ease, and so linked together by friendship that they seemed far removed from all the rest of the world.

They took the train from Saint-Germain to Paris, and on the journey Pierre suddenly noticed that Marie's cheeks were purpling. There were two ladies with them in the compartment.

"Ah!" said he, "so you feel warm in your turn now?"

But she protested the contrary, her face glowing more and more brightly as she spoke, as if some sudden feeling of shame quite upset her. "No, I'm not warm," said she; "just feel my hands.... But how ridiculous it is to blush like this without any reason for it!"

He understood her. This was one of those involuntary blushing fits which so distressed her, and which, as Mere-Grand had remarked, brought her heart to her very cheeks. There was no cause for it, as she herself said. After slumbering in all innocence in the solitude of the forest her heart had begun to beat, despite herself.

Meantime, over yonder at Montmartre, Guillaume had spent his morning in preparing some of that mysterious powder, the cartridges of which he concealed upstairs in Mere-Grand's bedroom. Great danger attended this manufacture. The slightest forgetfulness while he was manipulating the ingredients, any delay, too, in turning off a tap, might lead to a terrible explosion, which would annihilate the building and all who might be in it. For this reason he preferred to work when he was alone, so that on the one hand there might be no danger for others, and on the other less likelihood of his own attention being diverted from his task. That morning, as it happened, his three sons were working in the room, and Mere-Grand sat sewing near the furnace. Truth to tell, she did not count, for she scarcely ever left her place, feeling quite at ease there, however great might be the peril. Indeed, she had become so well acquainted with the various phases of Guillaume's delicate operations, and their terrible possibilities, that she would occasionally give him a helping hand.

That morning, as she sat there mending some house linen,—her eyesight still being so keen that in spite of her seventy years she wore no spectacles,—she now and again glanced at Guillaume as if to make sure that he forgot nothing. Then feeling satisfied, she would once more bend over her work. She remained very strong and active. Her hair was only just turning white, and she had kept all her teeth, while her face still looked refined, though it was slowly withering with age and had acquired an expression of some severity. As a rule she was a woman of few words; her life was one of activity and good management. When she opened her lips it was usually to give advice, to counsel reason, energy and courage. For some time past she had been growing more taciturn than ever, as if all her attention were claimed by the household matters which were in her sole charge; still, her fine eyes would rest thoughtfully on those about her, on the three young men, and on Guillaume, Marie and Pierre, who all obeyed her as if she were their acknowledged queen. If she looked at them in that pensive way, was it that she foresaw certain changes, and noticed certain incidents of which the others remained unconscious? Perhaps so. At all events she became even graver, and more attentive than in the past. It was as if she were waiting for some hour to strike when all her wisdom and authority would be required.

"Be careful, Guillaume," she at last remarked, as she once more looked up from her sewing. "You seem absent-minded this morning. Is anything worrying you?"

He glanced at her with a smile. "No, nothing, I assure you," he replied. "But I was thinking of our dear Marie, who was so glad to go off to the forest in this bright sunshine."

Antoine, who heard the remark, raised his head, while his brothers remained absorbed in their work. "What a pity it is that I had this block to finish," said he; "I would willingly have gone with her."

"Oh, no matter," his father quietly rejoined. "Pierre is with her, and he is very cautious."

For another moment Mere-Grand continued scrutinising Guillaume; then she once more reverted to her sewing.

If she exercised such sway over the home and all its inmates, it was by reason of her long devotion, her intelligence, and the kindliness with which she ruled. Uninfluenced by any religious faith, and disregarding all social conventionalities, her guiding principle in everything was the theory of human justice which she had arrived at after suffering so grievously from the injustice that had killed her husband. She put her views into practice with wonderful courage, knowing nothing of any prejudices, but accomplishing her duty, such as she understood it, to the very end. And in the same way as she had first devoted herself to her husband, and next to her daughter Marguerite, so at present she devoted herself to Guillaume and his sons. Pierre, whom she had first studied with some anxiety, had now, too, become a member of her family, a dweller in the little realm of happiness which she ruled. She had doubtless found him worthy of admission into it, though she did not reveal the reason why. After days and days of silence she had simply said, one evening, to Guillaume, that he had done well in bringing his brother to live among them.

Time flew by as she sat sewing and thinking. Towards noon Guillaume, who was still at work, suddenly remarked to her: "As Marie and Pierre haven't come back, we had better let the lunch wait a little while. Besides, I should like to finish what I'm about."

Another quarter of an hour then elapsed. Finally, the three young men rose from their work, and went to wash their hands at a tap in the garden.

"Marie is very late," now remarked Mere-Grand. "We must hope that nothing has happened to her."

"Oh! she rides so well," replied Guillaume. "I'm more anxious on account of Pierre."

At this the old lady again fixed her eyes on him, and said: "But Marie will have guided Pierre; they already ride very well together."

"No doubt; still I should be better pleased if they were back home."

Then all at once, fancying that he heard the ring of a bicycle bell, he called out: "There they are!" And forgetting everything else in his satisfaction, he quitted his furnace and hastened into the garden in order to meet them.

Mere-Grand, left to herself, quietly continued sewing, without a thought that the manufacture of Guillaume's powder was drawing to an end in an apparatus near her. A couple of minutes later, however, when Guillaume came back, saying that he had made a mistake, his eyes suddenly rested on his furnace, and he turned quite livid. Brief as had been his absence the exact moment when it was necessary to turn off a tap in order that no danger might attend the preparation of his powder had already gone by; and now, unless someone should dare to approach that terrible tap, and boldly turn it, a fearful explosion might take place. Doubtless it was too late already, and whoever might have the bravery to attempt the feat would be blown to pieces.

Guillaume himself had often run a similar risk of death with perfect composure. But on this occasion he remained as if rooted to the floor, unable to take a step, paralysed by the dread of annihilation. He shuddered and stammered in momentary expectation of a catastrophe which would hurl the work-shop to the heavens.

"Mere-Grand, Mere-Grand," he stammered. "The apparatus, the tap... it is all over, all over!"

The old woman had raised her head without as yet understanding him. "Eh, what?" said she; "what is the matter with you?" Then, on seeing how distorted were his features, how he recoiled as if mad with terror, she glanced at the furnace and realised the danger. "Well, but it's simple enough," said she; "it's only necessary to turn off the tap, eh?"

Thereupon, without any semblance of haste, in the most easy and natural manner possible, she deposited her needlework on a little table, rose from her chair, and turned off the tap with a light but firm hand. "There! it's done," said she. "But why didn't you do it yourself, my friend?"

He had watched her in bewilderment, chilled to the bones, as if touched by the hand of death. And when some colour at last returned to his cheeks, and he found himself still alive in front of the apparatus whence no harm could now come, he heaved a deep sigh and again shuddered. "Why did I not turn it off?" he repeated. "It was because I felt afraid."

At that very moment Marie and Pierre came into the work-shop all chatter and laughter, delighted with their excursion, and bringing with them the bright joyousness of the sunlight. The three brothers, Thomas, Francis and Antoine, were jesting with them, and trying to make them confess that Pierre had at least fought a battle with a cow on the high road, and ridden into a cornfield. All at once, however, they became quite anxious, for they noticed that their father looked terribly upset.

"My lads," said he, "I've just been a coward. Ah! it's a curious feeling, I had never experienced it before."

Thereupon he recounted his fears of an accident, and how quietly Mere-Grand had saved them all from certain death. She waved her hand, however, as if to say that there was nothing particularly heroic in turning off a tap. The young men's eyes nevertheless filled with tears, and one after the other they went to kiss her with a fervour instinct with all the gratitude and worship they felt for her. She had been devoting herself to them ever since their infancy, she had now just given them a new lease of life. Marie also threw herself into her arms, kissing her with gratitude and emotion. Mere-Grand herself was the only one who did not shed tears. She strove to calm them, begging them to exaggerate nothing and to remain sensible.

"Well, you must at all events let me kiss you as the others have done," Guillaume said to her, as he recovered his self-possession. "I at least owe you that. And Pierre, too, shall kiss you, for you are now as good for him as you have always been for us."

At table, when it was at last possible for them to lunch, he reverted to that attack of fear which had left him both surprised and ashamed. He who for years had never once thought of death had for some time past found ideas of caution in his mind. On two occasions recently he had shuddered at the possibility of a catastrophe. How was it that a longing for life had come to him in his decline? Why was it that he now wished to live? At last with a touch of tender affection in his gaiety, he remarked: "Do you know, Marie, I think it is my thoughts of you that make me a coward. If I've lost my bravery it's because I risk something precious when any danger arises. Happiness has been entrusted to my charge. Just now when I fancied that we were all going to die, I thought I could see you, and my fear of losing you froze and paralysed me."

Marie indulged in a pretty laugh. Allusions to her coming marriage were seldom made; however, she invariably greeted them with an air of happy affection.

"Another six weeks!" she simply said.

Thereupon Mere-Grand, who had been looking at them, turned her eyes towards Pierre. He, however, like the others was listening with a smile.

"That's true," said the old lady, "you are to be married in six weeks' time. So I did right to prevent the house from being blown up."

At this the young men made merry; and the repast came to an end in very joyous fashion.

During the afternoon, however, Pierre's heart gradually grew heavy. Marie's words constantly returned to him: "Another six weeks!" Yes, it was indeed true, she would then be married. But it seemed to him that he had never previously known it, never for a moment thought of it. And later on, in the evening, when he was alone in his room at Neuilly, his heart-pain became intolerable. Those words tortured him. Why was it that they had not caused him any suffering when they were spoken, why had he greeted them with a smile? And why had such cruel anguish slowly followed? All at once an idea sprang up in his mind, and became an overwhelming certainty. He loved Marie, he loved her as a lover, with a love so intense that he might die from it.

With this sudden consciousness of his passion everything became clear and plain. He had been going perforce towards that love ever since he had first met Marie. The emotion into which the young woman had originally thrown him had seemed to him a feeling of repulsion, but afterwards he had been slowly conquered, all his torments and struggles ending in this love for her. It was indeed through her that he had at last found quietude. And the delightful morning which he had spent with her that day, appeared to him like a betrothal morning, in the depths of the happy forest. Nature had resumed her sway over him, delivered him from his sufferings, made him strong and healthy once more, and given him to the woman he adored. The quiver he had experienced, the happiness he had felt, his communion with the trees, the heavens, and every living creature—all those things which he had been unable to explain, now acquired a clear meaning which transported him. In Marie alone lay his cure, his hope, his conviction that he would be born anew and at last find happiness. In her company he had already forgotten all those distressing problems which had formerly haunted him and bowed him down. For a week past he had not once thought of death, which had so long been the companion of his every hour. All the conflict of faith and doubt, the distress roused by the idea of nihility, the anger he had felt at the unjust sufferings of mankind, had been swept away by her fresh cool hands. She was so healthy herself, so glad to live, that she had imparted a taste for life even to him. Yes, it was simply that: she was making him a man, a worker, a lover once more.

Then he suddenly remembered Abbe Rose and his painful conversation with that saintly man. The old priest, whose heart was so ingenuous, and who knew nothing of love and passion, was nevertheless the only one who had understood the truth. He had told Pierre that he was changed, that there was another man in him. And he, Pierre, had foolishly and stubbornly declared that he was the same as he had always been; whereas Marie had already transformed him, bringing all nature back to his breast—all nature, with its sunlit countrysides, its fructifying breezes, and its vast heavens, whose glow ripens its crops. That indeed was why he had felt so exasperated with Catholicism, that religion of death; that was why he had shouted that the Gospel was useless, and that the world awaited another law—a law of terrestrial happiness, human justice and living love and fruitfulness!

Ah, but Guillaume? Then a vision of his brother rose before Pierre, that brother who loved him so fondly, and who had carried him to his home of toil, quietude and affection, in order to cure him of his sufferings. If he knew Marie it was simply because Guillaume had chosen that he should know her. And again Marie's words recurred to him: "Another six weeks!" Yes, in six weeks his brother would marry the young woman. This thought was like a stab in Pierre's heart. Still, he did not for one moment hesitate: if he must die of his love, he would die of it, but none should ever know it, he would conquer himself, he would flee to the ends of the earth should he ever feel the faintest cowardice. Rather than bring a moment's pain to that brother who had striven to resuscitate him, who was the artisan of the passion now consuming him, who had given him his whole heart and all he had—he would condemn himself to perpetual torture. And indeed, torture was coming back; for in losing Marie he could but sink into the distress born of the consciousness of his nothingness. As he lay in bed, unable to sleep, he already experienced a return of his abominable torments—the negation of everything, the feeling that everything was useless, that the world had no significance, and that life was only worthy of being cursed and denied. And then the shudder born of the thought of death returned to him. Ah! to die, to die without even having lived!

The struggle was a frightful one. Until daybreak he sobbed in martyrdom. Why had he taken off his cassock? He had done so at a word from Marie; and now another word from her gave him the despairing idea of donning it once more. One could not escape from so fast a prison. That black gown still clung to his skin. He fancied that he had divested himself of it, and yet it was still weighing on his shoulders, and his wisest course would be to bury himself in it for ever. By donning it again he would at least wear mourning for his manhood.

All at once, however, a fresh thought upset him. Why should he struggle in that fashion? Marie did not love him. There had been nothing between them to indicate that she cared for him otherwise than as a charming, tender-hearted sister. It was Guillaume that she loved, no doubt. Then he pressed his face to his pillow to stifle his sobs, and once more swore that he would conquer himself and turn a smiling face upon their happiness.

IV. TRIAL AND SENTENCE

HAVING returned to Montmartre on the morrow Pierre suffered so grievously that he did not show himself there on the two following days. He preferred to remain at home where there was nobody to notice his feverishness. On the third morning, however, whilst he was still in bed, strengthless and full of despair, he was both surprised and embarrassed by a visit from Guillaume.

"I must needs come to you," said the latter, "since you forsake us. I've come to fetch you to attend Salvat's trial, which takes place to-day. I had no end of trouble to secure two places. Come, get up, we'll have dejeuner in town, so as to reach the court early."

Then, while Pierre was hastily dressing, Guillaume, who on his side seemed thoughtful and worried that morning, began to question him: "Have you anything to reproach us with?" he asked.

"No, nothing. What an idea!" was Pierre's reply.

"Then why have you been staying away? We had got into the habit of seeing you every day, but all at once you disappear."

Pierre vainly sought a falsehood, and all his composure fled. "I had some work to do here," said he, "and then, too, my gloomy ideas cane back to me, and I didn't want to go and sadden you all."

At this Guillaume hastily waved his hand. "If you fancy that your absence enlivens us you're mistaken," he replied. "Marie, who is usually so well and happy, had such a bad headache on the day before yesterday that she was obliged to keep her room. And she was ill at ease and nervous and silent again yesterday. We spent a very unpleasant day."

As he spoke Guillaume looked Pierre well in the face, his frank loyal eyes clearly revealing the suspicions which had come to him, but which he would not express in words.

Pierre, quite dismayed by the news of Marie's indisposition, and frightened by the idea of betraying his secret, thereupon managed to tell a lie. "Yes, she wasn't very well on the day when we went cycling," he quietly responded. "But I assure you that I have had a lot to do here. When you came in just now I was about to get up and go to your house as usual."

Guillaume kept his eyes on him for a moment longer. Then, either believing him or deciding to postpone his search for the truth to some future time, he began speaking affectionately on other subjects. With his keen brotherly love, however, there was blended such a quiver of impending distress, of unconfessed sorrow, which possibly he did not yet realise, that Pierre in his turn began to question him. "And you," said he, "are you ill? You seem to me to have lost your usual serenity."

"I? Oh! I'm not ill. Only I can't very well retain my composure; Salvat's affair distresses me exceedingly, as you must know. They will all end by driving me mad with the monstrous injustice they show towards that unhappy fellow."

Thenceforward Guillaume went on talking of Salvat in a stubborn passionate way, as if he wished to find an explanation of all his pain and unrest in that affair. While he and Pierre were partaking of dejeuner at a little restaurant on the Boulevard du Palais he related how deeply touched he was by the silence which Salvat had preserved with regard both to the nature of the explosive employed in the bomb and the few days' work which he had once done at his house. It was, thanks to this silence, that he, Guillaume, had not been worried or even summoned as a witness. Then, in his emotion, he reverted to his invention, that formidable engine which would ensure omnipotence to France, as the great initiatory and liberative power of the world. The results of the researches which had occupied him for ten years past were now out of danger and in all readiness, so that if occasion required they might at once be delivered to the French government. And, apart from certain scruples which came to him at the thought of the unworthiness of French financial and political society; he was simply delaying any further steps in the matter until his marriage with Marie, in order that he might associate her with the gift of universal peace which he imagined he was about to bestow upon the world.

It was through Bertheroy and with great difficulty that Guillaume had managed to secure two seats in court for Salvat's trial. When he and Pierre presented themselves for admission at eleven o'clock, they fancied that they would never be able to enter. The large gates of the Palace of Justice were kept closed, several passages were fenced off, and terror seemed to reign in the deserted building, as if indeed the judges feared some sudden invasion of bomb-laden Anarchists. Each door and barrier, too, was guarded by soldiers, with whom the brothers had to parley. When they at last entered the Assize Court they found it already crowded with people, who were apparently quite willing to suffocate there for an hour before the arrival of the judges, and to remain motionless for some seven or eight hours afterwards, since it was reported that the authorities wished to get the case over in a single sitting. In the small space allotted to the standing public there was a serried mass of sightseers who had come up from the streets, a few companions and friends of Salvat having managed to slip in among them. In the other compartment, where witnesses are generally huddled together on oak benches, were those spectators who had been allowed admittance by favour, and these were so numerous and so closely packed that here and there they almost sat upon one another's knees. Then, in the well of the court and behind the bench, were rows of chairs set out as for some theatrical performance, and occupied by privileged members of society, politicians, leading journalists, and ladies. And meantime a number of gowned advocates sought refuge wherever chance offered, crowding into every vacant spot, every available corner.

Pierre had never before visited the Assize Court, and its appearance surprised him. He had expected much pomp and majesty, whereas this temple of human justice seemed to him small and dismal and of doubtful cleanliness. The bench was so low that he could scarcely see the armchairs of the presiding judge and his two assessors. Then he was struck by the profusion of old oak panels, balustrades and benches, which helped to darken the apartment, whose wall hangings were of olive green, while a further display of oak panelling appeared on the ceiling above. From the seven narrow and high-set windows with scanty little white curtains there fell a pale light which sharply divided the court. On one hand one saw the dock and the defending counsel's seat steeped in frigid light, while, on the other, was the little, isolated jury box in the shade. This contrast seemed symbolical of justice, impersonal and uncertain, face to face with the accused, whom the light stripped bare, probed as it were to his very soul. Then, through a kind of grey mist above the bench, in the depths of the stern and gloomy scene, one could vaguely distinguish the heavy painting of "Christ Crucified." A white bust of the Republic alone showed forth clearly against the dark wall above the dock where Salvat would presently appear. The only remaining seats that Guillaume and Pierre could find were on the last bench of the witnesses' compartment, against the partition which separated the latter from the space allotted to the standing public. Just as Guillaume was seating himself, he saw among the latter little Victor Mathis, who stood there with his elbows leaning on the partition, while his chin rested on his crossed hands. The young man's eyes were glowing in his pale face with thin, compressed lips. Although they recognised one another, Victor did not move, and Guillaume on his side understood that it was not safe to exchange greetings in such a place. From that moment, however, he remained conscious that Victor was there, just above him, never stirring, but waiting silently, fiercely and with flaming eyes, for what was going to happen.

Pierre, meantime, had recognised that most amiable deputy Duthil, and little Princess Rosemonde, seated just in front of him. Amidst the hubbub of the throng which chatted and laughed to while away the time, their voices were the gayest to be heard, and plainly showed how delighted they were to find themselves at a spectacle to which so many desired admittance. Duthil was explaining all the arrangements to Rosemonde, telling her to whom or to what purpose each bench and wooden box was allotted: there was the jury-box, the prisoner's dock, the seats assigned to counsel for the defence, the public prosecutor, and the clerk of the court, without forgetting the table on which material evidence was deposited and the bar to which witnesses were summoned. There was nobody as yet in any of these places; one merely saw an attendant giving a last look round, and advocates passing rapidly. One might indeed have thought oneself in a theatre, the stage of which remained deserted, while the spectators crowded the auditorium waiting for the play to begin. To fill up the interval the little Princess ended by looking about her for persons of her acquaintance among the close-pressed crowd of sight-seers whose eager faces were already reddening.

"Oh! isn't that Monsieur Fonsegue over there behind the bench, near that stout lady in yellow?" she exclaimed. "Our friend General de Bozonnet is on the other side, I see. But isn't Baron Duvillard here?"

"Oh! no," replied Duthil; "he could hardly come; it would look as if he were here to ask for vengeance." Then, in his turn questioning Rosemonde, the deputy went on: "Do you happen to have quarrelled with your handsome friend Hyacinthe? Is that the reason why you've given me the pleasure of acting as your escort to-day?"

With a slight shrug of her shoulders, the Princess replied that poets were beginning to bore her. A fresh caprice, indeed, was drawing her into politics. For a week past she had found amusement in the surroundings of the ministerial crisis, into which the young deputy for Angouleme had initiated her. "They are all a little bit crazy at the Duvillards', my dear fellow," said she. "It's decided, you know, that Gerard is to marry Camille. The Baroness has resigned herself to it, and I've heard from a most reliable quarter that Madame de Quinsac, the young man's mother, has given her consent."

At this Duthil became quite merry. He also seemed to be well informed on the subject. "Yes, yes, I know," said he. "The wedding is to take place shortly, at the Madeleine. It will be a magnificent affair, no doubt. And after all, what would you have? There couldn't be a better finish to the affair. The Baroness is really kindness personified, and I said all along that she would sacrifice herself in order to ensure the happiness of her daughter and Gerard. In point of fact that marriage will settle everything, put everything in proper order again."

"And what does the Baron say?" asked Rosemonde.

"The Baron? Why, he's delighted," replied Duthil in a bantering way. "You read no doubt this morning that Dauvergne is given the department of Public Instruction in the new Ministry. This means that Silviane's engagement at the Comedic is a certainty. Dauvergne was chosen simply on that account."

At this moment the conversation was interrupted by little Massot, who, after a dispute with one of the ushers some distance away, had perceived a vacant place by the side of the Princess. He thereupon made her a questioning sign, and she beckoned to him to approach.

"Ah!" said he, as he installed himself beside her, "I have not got here without trouble. One's crushed to death on the press bench, and I've an article to write. You are the kindest of women, Princess, to make a little room for your faithful admirer, myself." Then, after shaking hands with Duthil, he continued without any transition: "And so there's a new ministry at last, Monsieur le Depute. You have all taken your time about it, but it's really a very fine ministry, which everybody regards with surprise and admiration."

The decrees appointing the new ministers had appeared in the "Journal Officiel" that very morning. After a long deadlock, after Vignon had for the second time seen his plans fail through ever-recurring obstacles, Monferrand, as a last resource, had suddenly been summoned to the Elysee, and in four-and-twenty hours he had found the colleagues he wanted and secured the acceptance of his list, in such wise that he now triumphantly re-ascended to power after falling from it with Barroux in such wretched fashion. He had also chosen a new post for himself, relinquishing the department of the Interior for that of Finances, with the Presidency of the Council, which had long been his secret ambition. His stealthy labour, the masterly fashion in which he had saved himself while others sank, now appeared in its full beauty. First had come Salvat's arrest, and the use he had made of it, then the wonderful subterranean campaign which he had carried on against Vignon, the thousand obstacles which he had twice set across his path, and finally the sudden denouement with that list he held in readiness, that formation of a ministry in a single day as soon as his services were solicited.

"It is fine work, I must compliment you on it," added little Massot by way of a jest.

"But I've had nothing to do with it," Duthil modestly replied.

"Nothing to do with it! Oh! yes you have, my dear sir, everybody says so."

The deputy felt flattered and smiled, while the other rattled on with his insinuations, which were put in such a humorous way that nothing he said could be resented. He talked of Monferrand's followers who had so powerfully helped him on to victory. How heartily had Fonsegue finished off his old friend Barroux in the "Globe"! Every morning for a month past the paper had published an article belabouring Barroux, annihilating Vignon, and preparing the public for the return of a saviour of society who was not named. Then, too, Duvillard's millions had waged a secret warfare, all the Baron's numerous creatures had fought like an army for the good cause. Duthil himself had played the pipe and beaten the drum, while Chaigneux resigned himself to the baser duties which others would not undertake. And so the triumphant Monferrand would certainly begin by stifling that scandalous and embarrassing affair of the African Railways, and appointing a Committee of Inquiry to bury it.

By this time Duthil had assumed an important air. "Well, my dear fellow," said he, "at serious moments when society is in peril, certain strong-handed men, real men of government, become absolutely necessary. Monferrand had no need of our friendship, his presence in office was imperiously required by the situation. His hand is the only one that can save us!"

"I know," replied Massot scoffingly. "I've even been told that if everything was settled straight off so that the decrees might be published this morning, it was in order to instil confidence into the judges and jurymen here, in such wise that knowing Monferrand's fist to be behind them they would have the courage to pronounce sentence of death this evening."

"Well, public safety requires a sentence of death, and those who have to ensure that safety must not be left ignorant of the fact that the government is with them, and will know how to protect them, if need be."

At this moment a merry laugh from the Princess broke in upon the conversation. "Oh! just look over there!" said she; "isn't that Silviane who has just sat down beside Monsieur Fonsegue?"

"The Silviane ministry!" muttered Massot in a jesting way. "Well, there will be no boredom at Dauvergne's if he ingratiates himself with actresses."

Guillaume and Pierre heard this chatter, however little they cared to listen to it. Such a deluge of society tittle-tattle and political indiscretion brought the former a keen heart-pang. So Salvat was sentenced to death even before he had appeared in court. He was to pay for the transgressions of one and all, his crime was simply a favourable opportunity for the triumph of a band of ambitious people bent on power and enjoyment! Ah! what terrible social rottenness there was in it all; money corrupting one and another, families sinking to filth, politics turned into a mere treacherous struggle between individuals, and power becoming the prey of the crafty and the impudent! Must not everything surely crumble? Was not this solemn assize of human justice a derisive parody, since all that one found there was an assembly of happy and privileged people defending the shaky edifice which sheltered them, and making use of all the forces they yet retained, to crush a fly—that unhappy devil of uncertain sanity who had been led to that court by his violent and cloudy dream of another, superior and avenging justice?

Such were Guillaume's thoughts, when all at once everybody around him started. Noon was now striking, and the jurymen trooped into court in straggling fashion and took their seats in their box. Among them one saw fat fellows clad in their Sunday best and with the faces of simpletons, and thin fellows who had bright eyes and sly expressions. Some of them were bearded and some were bald. However, they all remained rather indistinct, as their side of the court was steeped in shade. After them came the judges, headed by M. de Larombiere, one of the Vice-Presidents of the Appeal Court, who in assuming the perilous honour of conducting the trial had sought to increase the majesty of his long, slender, white face, which looked the more austere as both his assessors, one dark and the other fair, had highly coloured countenances. The public prosecutor's seat was already occupied by one of the most skilful of the advocates-general, M. Lehmann, a broad-shouldered Alsatian Israelite, with cunning eyes, whose presence showed that the case was deemed exceptionally important. At last, amidst the heavy tread of gendarmes, Salvat was brought in, at once rousing such ardent curiosity that all the spectators rose to look at him. He still wore the cap and loose overcoat procured for him by Victor Mathis, and everybody was surprised to see his emaciated, sorrowful, gentle face, crowned by scanty reddish hair, which was turning grey. His soft, glowing, dreamy blue eyes glanced around, and he smiled at someone whom he recognised, probably Victor, but perhaps Guillaume. After that he remained quite motionless.

The presiding judge waited for silence to fall, and then came the formalities which attend the opening of a court of law, followed by the perusal of the lengthy indictment, which a subordinate official read in a shrill voice. The scene had now changed, and the spectators listened wearily and somewhat impatiently, as, for weeks past, the newspapers had related all that the indictment set forth. At present not a corner of the court remained unoccupied, there was scarcely space enough for the witnesses to stand in front of the bench. The closely packed throng was one of divers hues, the light gowns of ladies alternating with the black gowns of advocates, while the red robes of the judges disappeared from view, the bench being so low that the presiding judge's long face scarcely rose above the sea of heads. Many of those present became interested in the jurors, and strove to scrutinise their shadowy countenances. Others, who did not take their eyes off the prisoner, marvelled at his apparent weariness and indifference, which were so great that he scarcely answered the whispered questions of his counsel, a young advocate with a wide-awake look, who was nervously awaiting the opportunity to achieve fame. Most curiosity, however, centred in the table set apart for the material evidence. Here were to be seen all sorts of fragments, some of the woodwork torn away from the carriage-door of the Duvillard mansion, some plaster that had fallen from the ceiling, a paving-stone which the violence of the explosion had split in halves, and other blackened remnants. The more moving sights, however, were the milliner's bonnet-box, which had remained uninjured, and a glass jar in which something white and vague was preserved in spirits of wine. This was one of the poor errand girl's little hands, which had been severed at the wrist. The authorities had been unable to place her poor ripped body on the table, and so they had brought that hand!

At last Salvat rose, and the presiding judge began to interrogate him. The contrast in the aspect of the court then acquired tragic force: in the shrouding shade upon one hand were the jurors, their minds already made up beneath the pressure of public terror, while in the full, vivid light on the other side was the prisoner, alone and woeful, charged with all the crimes of his race. Four gendarmes watched over him. He was addressed by M. de Larombiere in a tone of contempt and disgust. The judge was not deficient in rectitude; he was indeed one of the last representatives of the old, scrupulous, upright French magistracy; but he understood nothing of the new times, and he treated prisoners with the severity of a Biblical Jehovah. Moreover, the infirmity which was the worry of his life, the childish lisp which, in his opinion, had alone prevented him from shining as a public prosecutor, made him ferociously ill-tempered, incapable of any intelligent indulgence. There were smiles, which he divined, as soon as he raised his sharp, shrill little voice, to ask his first questions. That droll voice of his took away whatever majesty might have remained attached to these proceedings, in which a man's life was being fought for in a hall full of inquisitive, stifling and perspiring folks, who fanned themselves and jested. Salvat answered the judge's earlier questions with his wonted weariness and politeness. While the judge did everything to vilify him, harshly reproaching him with his wretched childhood and youth, magnifying every stain and every transgression in his career, referring to the promiscuity of his life between Madame Theodore and little Celine as something bestial, he, the prisoner, quietly said yes or no, like a man who has nothing to hide and accepts the full responsibility of his actions. He had already made a complete confession of his crime, and he calmly repeated it without changing a word. He explained that if he had deposited his bomb at the entrance of the Duvillard mansion it was to give his deed its true significance, that of summoning the wealthy, the money-mongers who had so scandalously enriched themselves by dint of theft and falsehood, to restore that part of the common wealth which they had appropriated, to the poor, the working classes, their children and their wives, who perished of starvation. It was only at this moment that he grew excited; all the misery that he had endured or witnessed rose to his clouded, semi-educated brain, in which claims and theories and exasperated ideas of absolute justice and universal happiness had gathered confusedly. And from that moment he appeared such as he really was, a sentimentalist, a dreamer transported by suffering, proud and stubborn, and bent on changing the world in accordance with his sectarian logic.

"But you fled!" cried the judge in a voice such as would have befitted a grasshopper. "You must not say that you gave your life to your cause and were ready for martyrdom!"

Salvat's most poignant regret was that he had yielded in the Bois de Boulogne to the dismay and rage which come upon a tracked and hunted man and impel him to do all he can to escape capture. And on being thus taunted by the judge he became quite angry. "I don't fear death, you'll see that," he replied. "If all had the same courage as I have, your rotten society would be swept away to-morrow, and happiness would at last dawn."

Then the interrogatory dealt at great length with the composition and manufacture of the bomb. The judge, rightly enough, pointed out that this was the only obscure point of the affair. "And so," he remarked, "you persist in saying that dynamite was the explosive you employed? Well, you will presently hear the experts, who, it is true, differ on certain points, but are all of opinion that you employed some other explosive, though they cannot say precisely what it was. Why not speak out on the point, as you glory in saying everything?"

Salvat, however, had suddenly calmed down, giving only cautious monosyllabic replies. "Well, seek for whatever you like if you don't believe me," he now answered. "I made my bomb by myself, and under circumstances which I've already related a score of times. You surely don't expect me to reveal names and compromise comrades?"

From this declaration he would not depart. It was only towards the end of the interrogatory that irresistible emotion overcame him on the judge again referring to the unhappy victim of his crime, the little errand girl, so pretty and fair and gentle, whom ferocious destiny had brought to the spot to meet such an awful death. "It was one of your own class whom you struck," said M. de Larombiere; "your victim was a work girl, a poor child who, with the few pence she earned, helped to support her aged grandmother."

Salvat's voice became very husky as he answered: "That's really the only thing I regret.... My bomb certainly wasn't meant for her; and may all the workers, all the starvelings, remember that she gave her blood as I'm going to give mine!"

In this wise the interrogatory ended amidst profound agitation. Pierre had felt Guillaume shuddering beside him, whilst the prisoner quietly and obstinately refused to say a word respecting the explosive that had been employed, preferring as he did to assume full responsibility for the deed which was about to cost him his life. Moreover, Guillaume, on turning round, in compliance with an irresistible impulse, had perceived Victor Mathis still motionless behind him: his elbows ever leaning on the rail of the partition, and his chin still resting on his hands, whilst he listened with silent, concentrated passion. His face had become yet paler than before, and his eyes glowed as with an avenging fire, whose flames would never more be extinguished.

The interrogatory of the prisoner was followed by a brief commotion in court.

"That Salvat looks quite nice, he has such soft eyes," declared the Princess, whom the proceedings greatly amused. "Oh! don't speak ill of him, my dear deputy. You know that I have Anarchist ideas myself."

"I speak no ill of him," gaily replied Duthil. "Nor has our friend Amadieu any right to speak ill of him. For you know that this affair has set Amadieu on a pinnacle. He was never before talked about to such an extent as he is now; and he delights in being talked about, you know! He has become quite a social celebrity, the most illustrious of our investigating magistrates, and will soon be able to do or become whatever he pleases."

Then Massot, with his sarcastic impudence, summed up the situation. "When Anarchism flourishes, everything flourishes, eh? That bomb has helped on the affairs of a good many fine fellows that I know. Do you think that my governor Fonsegue, who's so attentive to Silviane yonder, complains of it? And doesn't Sagnier, who's spreading himself out behind the presiding judge, and whose proper place would be between the four gendarmes—doesn't he owe a debt to Salvat for all the abominable advertisements he has been able to give his paper by using the wretched fellow's back as a big drum? And I need not mention the politicians or the financiers or all those who fish in troubled waters."

"But I say," interrupted Duthil, "it seems to me that you yourself made good use of the affair. Your interview with the little girl Celine brought you in a pot of money."

Massot, as it happened, had been struck with the idea of ferreting out Madame Theodore and the child, and of relating his visit to them in the "Globe," with an abundance of curious and touching particulars. The article had met with prodigious success, Celine's pretty answers respecting her imprisoned father having such an effect on ladies with sensitive hearts that they had driven to Montmartre in their carriages in order to see the two poor creatures. Thus alms had come to them from all sides; and strangely enough the very people who demanded the father's head were the most eager to sympathise with the child.

"Well, I don't complain of my little profits," said the journalist in answer to Duthil. "We all earn what we can, you know."

At this moment Rosemonde, while glancing round her, recognised Guillaume and Pierre, but she was so amazed to see the latter in ordinary civilian garb that she did not dare to speak to him. Leaning forward she acquainted Duthil and Massot with her surprise, and they both turned round to look. From motives of discretion, however, they pretended that they did not recognise the Froments.

The heat in court was now becoming quite unbearable, and one lady had already fainted. At last the presiding judge again raised his lisping voice, and managed to restore silence. Salvat, who had remained standing, now held a few sheets of paper, and with some difficulty he made the judge understand that he desired to complete his interrogatory by reading a declaration, which he had drawn up in prison, and in which he explained his reasons for his crime. For a moment M. de Larombiere hesitated, all surprise and indignation at such a request; but he was aware that he could not legally impose silence on the prisoner, and so he signified his consent with a gesture of mingled irritation and disdain. Thereupon Salvat began his perusal much after the fashion of a schoolboy, hemming and hawing here and there, occasionally becoming confused, and then bringing out certain words with wonderful emphasis, which evidently pleased him. This declaration of his was the usual cry of suffering and revolt already raised by so many disinherited ones. It referred to all the frightful want of the lower spheres; the toiler unable to find a livelihood in his toil; a whole class, the most numerous and worthy of the classes, dying of starvation; whilst, on the other hand, were the privileged ones, gorged with wealth, and wallowing in satiety, yet refusing to part with even the crumbs from their tables, determined as they were to restore nothing whatever of the wealth which they had stolen. And so it became necessary to take everything away from them, to rouse them from their egotism by terrible warnings, and to proclaim to them even with the crash of bombs that the day of justice had come. The unhappy man spoke that word "justice" in a ringing voice which seemed to fill the whole court. But the emotion of those who heard him reached its highest pitch when, after declaring that he laid down his life for the cause, and expected nothing but a verdict of death from the jury, he added, as if prophetically, that his blood would assuredly give birth to other martyrs. They might send him to the scaffold, said he, but he knew that his example would bear fruit. After him would come another avenger, and yet another, and others still, until the old and rotten social system should have crumbled away so as to make room for the society of justice and happiness of which he was one of the apostles.

The presiding judge, in his impatience and agitation, twice endeavoured to interrupt Salvat. But the other read on and on with the imperturbable conscientiousness of one who fears that he may not give proper utterance to his most important words. He must have been thinking of that perusal ever since he had been in prison. It was the decisive act of his suicide, the act by which he proclaimed that he gave his life for the glory of dying in the cause of mankind. And when he had finished he sat down between the gendarmes with glowing eyes and flushed cheeks, as if he inwardly experienced some deep joy.

To destroy the effect which the declaration had produced—a commingling of fear and compassion—the judge at once wished to proceed with the hearing of the witnesses. Of these there was an interminable procession; though little interest attached to their evidence, for none of them had any revelations to make. Most attention perhaps was paid to the measured statements of Grandidier, who had been obliged to dismiss Salvat from his employ on account of the Anarchist propaganda he had carried on. Then the prisoner's brother-in-law, Toussaint, the mechanician, also seemed a very worthy fellow if one might judge him by the manner in which he strove to put things favourably for Salvat, without in any way departing from the truth. After Toussaint's evidence considerable time was taken up by the discussions between the experts, who disagreed in public as much as they had disagreed in their reports. Although they were all of opinion that dynamite could not have been the explosive employed in the bomb, they indulged in the most extraordinary and contradictory suppositions as to this explosive's real nature. Eventually a written opinion given by the illustrious savant Bertheroy was read; and this, after clearly setting forth the known facts, concluded that one found oneself in presence of a new explosive of prodigious power, the formula of which he himself was unable to specify.

Then detective Mondesir and commissary Dupot came in turn to relate the various phases of the man hunt in the Bois de Boulogne. In Mondesir centred all the gaiety of the proceedings, thanks to the guardroom sallies with which he enlivened his narrative. And in like way the greatest grief, a perfect shudder of revolt and compassion, was roused by the errand girl's grandmother, a poor, bent, withered old woman, whom the prosecution had cruelly constrained to attend the court, and who wept and looked quite dismayed, unable as she was to understand what was wanted of her. When she had withdrawn, the only remaining witnesses were those for the defence, a procession of foremen and comrades, who all declared that they had known Salvat as a very worthy fellow, an intelligent and zealous workman, who did not drink, but was extremely fond of his daughter, and incapable of an act of dishonesty or cruelty.

It was already four o'clock when the evidence of the witnesses came to an end. The atmosphere in court was now quite stifling, feverish fatigue flushed every face, and a kind of ruddy dust obscured the waning light which fell from the windows. Women were fanning themselves and men were mopping their foreheads. However, the passion roused by the scene still brought a glow of cruel delight to every eye. And no one stirred.

"Ah!" sighed Rosemonde all at once, "to think that I hoped to drink a cup of tea at a friend's at five o'clock. I shall die of thirst and starvation here."

"We shall certainly be kept till seven," replied Massot. "I can't offer to go and fetch you a roll, for I shouldn't be readmitted."

Then Duthil, who had not ceased shrugging his shoulders while Salvat read his declaration, exclaimed: "What childish things he said, didn't he? And to think that the fool is going to die for all that! Rich and poor, indeed! Why, there will always be rich and poor. And it's equally certain that when a man is poor his one great desire is to become rich. If that fellow is in the dock to-day it's simply because he failed to make money."

While the others were thus conversing, Pierre for his part was feeling extremely anxious about his brother, who sat beside him in silence, pale and utterly upset. Pierre sought his hand and covertly pressed it. Then in a low voice he inquired: "Do you feel ill? Shall we go away?"

Guillaume answered him by discreetly and affectionately returning his handshake. He was all right, he would remain till the end, however much he might be stirred by exasperation.

It was now Monsieur Lehmann, the public prosecutor, who rose to address the court. He had a large, stern mouth, and was squarely built, with a stubborn Jewish face. Nevertheless he was known to be a man of dexterous, supple nature, one who had a foot in every political camp, and invariably contrived to be on good terms with the powers that were. This explained his rapid rise in life, and the constant favour he enjoyed. In the very first words he spoke he alluded to the new ministry gazetted that morning, referring pointedly to the strong-handed man who had undertaken the task of reassuring peaceable citizens and making evil-doers tremble. Then he fell upon the wretched Salvat with extraordinary vehemence, recounting the whole of his life, and exhibiting him as a bandit expressly born for the perpetration of crime, a monster who was bound to end by committing some abominable and cowardly outrage. Next he flagellated Anarchism and its partisans. The Anarchists were a mere herd of vagabonds and thieves, said he. That had been shown by the recent robbery at the Princess de Harn's house. The ignoble gang that had been arrested for that affair had given the apostles of the Anarchist doctrine as their references! And that was what the application of Anarchist theories resulted in—burglary and filth, pending a favourable hour for wholesale pillage and murder! For nearly a couple of hours the public prosecutor continued in this fashion, throwing truth and logic to the winds, and exclusively striving to alarm his hearers. He made all possible use of the terror which had reigned in Paris, and figuratively brandished the corpse of the poor little victim, the pretty errand girl, as if it were a blood-red flag, before pointing to the pale hand, preserved in spirits of wine, with a gesture of compassionate horror which sent a shudder through his audience. And he ended, as he had begun, by inspiriting the jurors, and telling them that they might fearlessly do their duty now that those at the head of the State were firmly resolved to give no heed to threats.

Then the young advocate entrusted with the defence in his turn spoke. And he really said what there was to say with great clearness and precision. He was of a different school from that of the public prosecutor: his eloquence was very simple and smooth, his only passion seemed to be zeal for truth. Moreover, it was sufficient for him to show Salvat's career in its proper light, to depict him pursued by social fatalities since his childhood, and to explain the final action of his career by all that he had suffered and all that had sprung up in his dreamy brain. Was not his crime the crime of one and all? Who was there that did not feel, if only in a small degree, responsible for that bomb which a penniless, starving workman had deposited on the threshold of a wealthy man's abode—a wealthy man whose name bespoke the injustice of the social system: so much enjoyment on the one hand and so much privation on the other! If one of us happened to lose his head, and felt impelled to hasten the advent of happiness by violence in such troublous times, when so many burning problems claimed solution, ought he to be deprived of his life in the name of justice, when none could swear that they had not in some measure contributed to his madness? Following up this question, Salvat's counsel dwelt at length on the period that witnessed the crime, a period of so many scandals and collapses, when the old world was giving birth to a new one amidst the most terrible struggles and pangs. And he concluded by begging the jury to show themselves humane, to resist all passion and terror, and to pacify the rival classes by a wise verdict, instead of prolonging social warfare by giving the starvelings yet another martyr to avenge.

It was past six o'clock when M. de Larombiere began to sum up in a partial and flowery fashion, in which one detected how grieved and angry he was at having such a shrill little voice. Then the judges and the jurors withdrew, and the prisoner was led away, leaving the spectators waiting amidst an uproar of feverish impatience. Some more ladies had fainted, and it had even been necessary to carry out a gentleman who had been overcome by the cruel heat. However, the others stubbornly remained there, not one of them quitting his place.

"Ah! it won't take long now," said Massot. "The jurors brought their verdict all ready in their pockets. I was looking at them while that little advocate was telling them such sensible things. They all looked as if they were comfortably asleep in the gloom."

Then Duthil turned to the Princess and asked her, "Are you still hungry?"

"Oh! I'm starving," she replied. "I shall never be able to wait till I get home. You will have to take me to eat a biscuit somewhere.... All the same, however, it's very exciting to see a man's life staked on a yes or a no."

Meantime Pierre, finding Guillaume still more feverish and grieved, had once again taken hold of his hand. Neither of them spoke, so great was the distress that they experienced for many reasons which they themselves could not have precisely defined. It seemed to them, however, that all human misery—inclusive of their own, the affections, the hopes, the griefs which brought them suffering—was sobbing and quivering in that buzzing hall. Twilight had gradually fallen there, but as the end was now so near it had doubtless been thought unnecessary to light the chandeliers. And thus large vague shadows, dimming and shrouding the serried throng, now hovered about in the last gleams of the day. The ladies in light gowns yonder, behind the bench, looked like pale phantoms with all-devouring eyes, whilst the numerous groups of black-robed advocates formed large sombre patches which gradually spread everywhere. The greyish painting of the Christ had already vanished, and on the walls one only saw the glaring white bust of the Republic, which resembled some frigid death's head starting forth from the darkness.

"Ah!" Massot once more exclaimed, "I knew that it wouldn't take long!"

Indeed, the jurors were returning after less than a quarter of an hour's absence. Then the judges likewise came back and took their seats. Increased emotion stirred the throng, a great gust seemed to sweep through the court, a gust of anxiety, which made every head sway. Some people had risen to their feet, and others gave vent to involuntary exclamations. The foreman of the jury, a gentleman with a broad red face, had to wait a moment before speaking. At last in a sharp but somewhat sputtering voice he declared: "On my honour and my conscience, before God and before man, the verdict of the jury is: on the question of Murder, yes, by a majority of votes."*

* English readers may be reminded that in France the verdict of
a majority of the jury suffices for conviction or acquittal.
If the jury is evenly divided the prisoner is acquitted.—Trans.

The night had almost completely fallen when Salvat was once more brought in. In front of the jurors, who faded away in the gloom, he stood forth, erect, with a last ray from the windows lighting up his face. The judges themselves almost disappeared from view, their red robes seemed to have turned black. And how phantom-like looked the prisoner's emaciated face as he stood there listening, with dreamy eyes, while the clerk of the court read the verdict to him.

When silence fell and no mention was made of extenuating circumstances, he understood everything. His face, which had retained a childish expression, suddenly brightened. "That means death. Thank you, gentlemen," he said.

Then he turned towards the public, and amidst the growing darkness searched for the friendly faces which he knew were there; and this time Guillaume became fully conscious that he had recognised him, and was again expressing affectionate and grateful thanks for the crust he had received from him on a day of want. He must have also bidden farewell to Victor Mathis, for as Guillaume glanced at the young man, who had not moved, he saw that his eyes were staring wildly, and that a terrible expression rested on his lips.

As for the rest of the proceedings, the last questions addressed to the jury and the counsel, the deliberations of the judges and the delivery of sentence—these were all lost amidst the buzzing and surging of the crowd. A little compassion was unconsciously manifested; and some stupor was mingled with the satisfaction that greeted the sentence of death.

No sooner had Salvat been condemned, however, than he drew himself up to his full height, and as the guards led him away he shouted in a stentorian voice: "Long live Anarchy!"

Nobody seemed angered by the cry. The crowd went off quietly, as if weariness had lulled all its passions. The proceedings had really lasted too long and fatigued one too much. It was quite pleasant to inhale the fresh air on emerging from such a nightmare.

In the large waiting hall, Pierre and Guillaume passed Duthil and the Princess, whom General de Bozonnet had stopped while chatting with Fonsegue. All four of them were talking in very loud voices, complaining of the heat and their hunger, and agreeing that the affair had not been a particularly interesting one. Yet, all was well that ended well. As Fonsegue remarked, the condemnation of Salvat to death was a political and social necessity.

When Pierre and Guillaume reached the Pont Neuf, the latter for a moment rested his elbows on the parapet of the bridge. His brother, standing beside him, also gazed at the grey waters of the Seine, which here and there were fired by the reflections of the gas lamps. A fresh breeze ascended from the river; it was the delightful hour when night steals gently over resting Paris. Then, as the brothers stood there breathing that atmosphere which usually brings relief and comfort, Pierre on his side again became conscious of his heart-wound, and remembered his promise to return to Montmartre, a promise that he must keep in spite of the torture there awaiting him; whilst Guillaume on the other hand experienced a revival of the suspicion and disquietude that had come to him on seeing Marie so feverish, changed as it were by some new feeling, of which she herself was ignorant. Were further sufferings, struggles, and obstacles to happiness yet in store for those brothers who loved one another so dearly? At all events their hearts bled once more with all the sorrow into which they had been cast by the scene they had just witnessed: that assize of justice at which a wretched man had been condemned to pay with his head for the crimes of one and all.

Then, as they turned along the quay, Guillaume recognised young Victor going off alone in the gloom, just in front of them. The chemist stopped him and spoke to him of his mother. But the young man did not hear; his thin lips parted, and in a voice as trenchant as a knife-thrust he exclaimed: "Ah! so it's blood they want. Well, they may cut off his head, but he will be avenged!"

V. SACRIFICE

THE days which followed Salvat's trial seemed gloomy ones up yonder in Guillaume's workroom, which was usually so bright and gay. Sadness and silence filled the place. The three young men were no longer there. Thomas betook himself to the Grandidier works early every morning in order to perfect his little motor; Francois was so busy preparing for his examination that he scarcely left the Ecole Normale; while Antoine was doing some work at Jahan's, where he delighted to linger and watch his little friend Lise awakening to life. Thus Guillaume's sole companion was Mere-Grand, who sat near the window busy with her needlework; for Marie was ever going about the house, and only stayed in the workroom for any length of time when Pierre happened to be there.

Guillaume's gloom was generally attributed to the feelings of anger and revolt into which the condemnation of Salvat had thrown him. He had flown into a passion on his return from the Palace of Justice, declaring that the execution of the unhappy man would simply be social murder, deliberate provocation of class warfare. And the others had bowed on hearing that pain-fraught violent cry, without attempting to discuss the point. Guillaume's sons respectfully left him to the thoughts which kept him silent for hours, with his face pale and a dreamy expression in his eyes. His chemical furnace remained unlighted, and his only occupation from morn till night was to examine the plans and documents connected with his invention, that new explosive and that terrible engine of war, which he had so long dreamt of presenting to France in order that she might impose the reign of truth and justice upon all the nations. However, during the long hours which he spent before the papers scattered over his table, often without seeing them, for his eyes wandered far away, a multitude of vague thoughts came to him—doubts respecting the wisdom of his project, and fears lest his desire to pacify the nations should simply throw them into an endless war of extermination. Although he really believed that great city of Paris to be the world's brain, entrusted with the task of preparing the future, he could not disguise from himself that with all its folly and shame and injustice it still presented a shocking spectacle. Was it really ripe enough for the work of human salvation which he thought of entrusting to it? Then, on trying to re-peruse his notes and verify his formulas, he only recovered his former energetic determination on thinking of his marriage, whereupon the idea came to him that it was now too late for him to upset his life by changing such long-settled plans.

His marriage! Was it not the thought of this which haunted Guillaume and disturbed him far more powerfully than his scientific work or his humanitarian passion? Beneath all the worries that he acknowledged, there was another which he did not confess even to himself, and which filled him with anguish. He repeated day by day that he would reveal his invention to the Minister of War as soon as he should be married to Marie, whom he wished to associate with his glory. Married to Marie! Each time he thought of it, burning fever and secret disquietude came over him. If he now remained so silent and had lost his quiet cheerfulness, it was because he had felt new life, as it were, emanating from her. She was certainly no longer the same woman as formerly; she was becoming more and more changed and distant. He had watched her and Pierre when the latter happened to be there, which was now but seldom. He, too, appeared embarrassed, and different from what he had been. On the days when he came, however, Marie seemed transformed; it was as if new life animated the house. Certainly the intercourse between her and Pierre was quite innocent, sisterly on the one hand, brotherly on the other. They simply seemed to be a pair of good friends. And yet a radiance, a vibration, emanated from them, something more subtle even than a sun-ray or a perfume. After the lapse of a few days Guillaume found himself unable to doubt the truth any longer. And his heart bled, he was utterly upset by it. He had not found them in fault in any way, but he was convinced that these two children, as he so paternally called them, really adored one another.

One lovely morning when he happened to be alone with Mere-Grand, face to face with sunlit Paris, he fell into a yet more dolorous reverie than usual. He seemed to be gazing fixedly at the old lady, as, seated in her usual place, she continued sewing with an air of queenly serenity. Perhaps, however, he did not see her. For her part she occasionally raised her eyes and glanced at him, as if expecting a confession which did not come. At last, finding such silence unbearable, she made up her mind to address him: "What has been the matter with you, Guillaume, for some time past? Why don't you tell me what you have to tell me?"

He descended from the clouds, as it were, and answered in astonishment: "What I have to tell you?"

"Yes, I know it as well as you do, and I thought you would speak to me of it, since it pleases you to do nothing here without consulting me."

At this he turned very pale and shuddered. So he had not been mistaken in the matter, even Mere-Grand knew all about it. To talk of it, however, was to give shape to his suspicions, to transform what, hitherto, might merely have been a fancy on his part into something real and definite.

"It was inevitable, my dear son," said Mere-Grand. "I foresaw it from the outset. And if I did not warn you of it, it was because I believed in some deep design on your part. Since I have seen you suffering, however, I have realised that I was mistaken." Then, as he still looked at her quivering and distracted, she continued: "Yes, I fancied that you might have wished it, that in bringing your brother here you wished to know if Marie loved you otherwise than as a father. There was good reason for testing her—for instance, the great difference between your ages, for your life is drawing to a close, whilst hers is only beginning. And I need not mention the question of your work, the mission which I have always dreamt of for you."

Thereupon, with his hands raised in prayerful fashion, Guillaume drew near to the old lady and exclaimed: "Oh! speak out clearly, tell me what you think. I don't understand, my poor heart is so lacerated; and yet I should so much like to know everything, so as to be able to act and take a decision. To think that you whom I love, you whom I venerate as much as if you were my real mother, you whose profound good sense I know so well that I have always followed your advice—to think that you should have foreseen this frightful thing and have allowed it to happen at the risk of its killing me!... Why have you done so, tell me, why?"

Mere-Grand was not fond of talking. Absolute mistress of the house as she was, managing everything, accountable to nobody for her actions, she never gave expression to all that she thought or all that she desired. Indeed, there was no occasion for it, as Guillaume, like the children, relied upon her completely, with full confidence in her wisdom. And her somewhat enigmatical ways even helped to raise her in their estimation.

"What is the use of words, when things themselves speak?" she now gently answered, while still plying her needle. "It is quite true that I approved of the plan of a marriage between you and Marie, for I saw that it was necessary that she should be married if she was to stay here. And then, too, there were many other reasons which I needn't speak of. However, Pierre's arrival here has changed everything, and placed things in their natural order. Is not that preferable?"

He still lacked the courage to understand her. "Preferable! When I'm in agony? When my life is wrecked?"

Thereupon she rose and came to him, tall and rigid in her thin black gown, and with an expression of austerity and energy on her pale face. "My son," she said, "you know that I love you, and that I wish you to be very noble and lofty. Only the other morning, you had an attack of fright, the house narrowly escaped being blown up. Then, for some days now you have been sitting over those documents and plans in an absent-minded, distracted state, like a man who feels weak, and doubts, and no longer knows his way. Believe me, you are following a dangerous path; it is better that Pierre should marry Marie, both for their sakes and for your own."

"For my sake? No, no! What will become of me!"

"You will calm yourself and reflect, my son. You have such serious duties before you. You are on the eve of making your invention known. It seems to me that something has bedimmed your sight, and that you will perhaps act wrongly in this respect, through failing to take due account of the problem before you. Perhaps there is something better to be done.... At all events, suffer if it be necessary, but remain faithful to your ideal."

Then, quitting him with a maternal smile, she sought to soften her somewhat stern words by adding: "You have compelled me to speak unnecessarily, for I am quite at ease; with your superior mind, whatever be in question, you can but do the one right thing that none other would do."

On finding himself alone Guillaume fell into feverish uncertainty. What was the meaning of Mere-Grand's enigmatical words? He knew that she was on the side of whatever might be good, natural, and necessary. But she seemed to be urging him to some lofty heroism; and indeed what she had said threw a ray of light upon the unrest which had come to him in connection with his old plan of going to confide his secret to some Minister of War or other, whatever one might happen to be in office at the time. Growing hesitation and repugnance stirred him as he fancied he could again hear her saying that perhaps there might be some better course, that would require search and reflection. But all at once a vision of Marie rose before him, and his heart was rent by the thought that he was asked to renounce her. To lose her, to give her to another! No, no, that was beyond his strength. He would never have the frightful courage that was needed to pass by the last promised raptures of love with disdain!

For a couple of days Guillaume struggled on. He seemed to be again living the six years which the young woman had already spent beside him in that happy little house. She had been at first like an adopted daughter there; and later on, when the idea of their marriage had sprung up, he had viewed it with quiet delight in the hope that it would ensure the happiness of all around him. If he had previously abstained from marrying again it was from the fear of placing a strange mother over his children; and if he yielded to the charm of loving yet once more, and no longer leading a solitary life, it was because he had found at his very hearth one of such sensible views, who, in the flower of youth, was willing to become his wife despite the difference in their ages. Then months had gone by, and serious occurrences had compelled them to postpone the wedding, though without undue suffering on his part. Indeed, the certainty that she was waiting for him had sufficed him, for his life of hard work had rendered him patient. Now, however, all at once, at the threat of losing her, his hitherto tranquil heart ached and bled. He would never have thought the tie so close a one. But he was now almost fifty, and it was as if love and woman were being wrenched away from him, the last woman that he could love and desire, one too who was the more desirable, as she was the incarnation of youth from which he must ever be severed, should he indeed lose her. Passionate desire, mingled with rage, flared up within him at the thought that someone should have come to take her from him.

One night, alone in his room, he suffered perfect martyrdom. In order that he might not rouse the house he buried his face in his pillow so as to stifle his sobs. After all, it was a simple matter; Marie had given him her promise, and he would compel her to keep it. She would be his, and his alone, and none would be able to steal her from him. Then, however, there rose before him a vision of his brother, the long-forgotten one, whom, from feelings of affection, he had compelled to join his family. But his sufferings were now so acute that he would have driven that brother away had he been before him. He was enraged, maddened, by the thought of him. His brother—his little brother! So all their love was over; hatred and violence were about to poison their lives. For hours Guillaume continued complaining deliriously, and seeking how he might so rid himself of Pierre that what had happened should be blotted out. Now and again, when he recovered self-control, he marvelled at the tempest within him; for was he not a savant guided by lofty reason, a toiler to whom long experience had brought serenity? But the truth was that this tempest had not sprung up in his mind, it was raging in the child-like soul that he had retained, the nook of affection and dreaminess which remained within him side by side with his principles of pitiless logic and his belief in proven phenomena only. His very genius came from the duality of his nature: behind the chemist was a social dreamer, hungering for justice and capable of the greatest love. And now passion was transporting him, and he was weeping for the loss of Marie as he would have wept over the downfall of that dream of his, the destruction of war by war, that scheme for the salvation of mankind at which he had been working for ten years past.

At last, amidst his weariness, a sudden resolution calmed him. He began to feel ashamed of despairing in this wise when he had no certain grounds to go upon. He must know everything, he would question the young woman; she was loyal enough to answer him frankly. Was not this a solution worthy of them both? An explanation in all sincerity, after which they would be able to take a decision. Then he fell asleep; and, tired though he felt when he rose in the morning, he was calmer. It was as if some secret work had gone on in his heart during his few hours of repose after that terrible storm.

As it happened Marie was very gay that morning. On the previous day she had gone with Pierre and Antoine on a cycling excursion over frightful roads in the direction of Montmorency, whence they had returned in a state of mingled anger and delight. When Guillaume stopped her in the little garden, he found her humming a song while returning bare-armed from the scullery, where some washing was going on.

"Do you want to speak to me?" she asked.

"Yes, my dear child, it's necessary for us to talk of some serious matters."

She at once understood that their marriage was in question, and became grave. She had formerly consented to that marriage because she regarded it as the only sensible course she could take, and this with full knowledge of the duties which she would assume. No doubt her husband would be some twenty years older than herself, but this circumstance was one of somewhat frequent occurrence, and as a rule such marriages turned out well, rather than otherwise. Moreover, she was in love with nobody, and was free to consent. And she had consented with an impulse of gratitude and affection which seemed so sweet that she thought it the sweetness of love itself. Everybody around her, too, appeared so pleased at the prospect of this marriage, which would draw the family yet more closely together. And, on her side, she had been as it were intoxicated by the idea of making others happy.

"What is the matter?" she now asked Guillaume in a somewhat anxious voice. "No bad news, I hope?"

"No, no," he answered. "I've simply something to say to you."

Then he led her under the plum-trees to the only green nook left in the garden. An old worm-eaten bench still stood there against the lilac-bushes. And in front of them Paris spread out its sea of roofs, looking light and fresh in the morning sunlight.

They both sat down. But at the moment of speaking and questioning Marie, Guillaume experienced sudden embarrassment, while his heart beat violently at seeing her beside him, so young and adorable with her bare arms.

"Our wedding-day is drawing near," he ended by saying. And then as she turned somewhat pale, perhaps unconsciously, he himself suddenly felt cold. Had not her lips twitched as if with pain? Had not a shadow passed over her fresh, clear eyes?

"Oh! we still have some time before us," she replied.

Then, slowly and very affectionately, he resumed: "No doubt; still it is necessary to attend to the formalities. And it is as well, perhaps, that I should speak of those worries to-day, so that I may not have to bother you about them again."

Then he gently went on telling her all that would have to be done, keeping his eyes on her whilst he spoke, watching for such signs of emotion as the thought of her promise's early fulfilment might bring to her face. She sat there in silence, with her hands on her lap, and her features quite still, thus giving no certain sign of any regret or trouble. Still she seemed rather dejected, compliant, as it were, but in no wise joyous.

"You say nothing, my dear Marie," Guillaume at last exclaimed. "Does anything of all this displease you?"

"Displease me? Oh, no!"

"You must speak out frankly, if it does, you know. We will wait a little longer if you have any personal reasons for wishing to postpone the date again."

"But I've no reasons, my friend. What reasons could I have? I leave you quite free to settle everything as you yourself may desire."

Silence fell. While answering, she had looked him frankly in the face; but a little quiver stirred her lips, and gloom, for which she could not account, seemed to rise and darken her face, usually as bright and gay as spring water. In former times would she not have laughed and sung at the mere announcement of that coming wedding?

Then Guillaume, with an effort which made his voice tremble, dared to speak out: "You must forgive me for asking you a question, my dear Marie. There is still time for you to cancel your promise. Are you quite certain that you love me?"

At this she looked at him in genuine stupefaction, utterly failing to understand what he could be aiming at. And—as she seemed to be deferring her reply, he added: "Consult your heart. Is it really your old friend or is it another that you love?"

"I? I, Guillaume? Why do you say that to me? What can I have done to give you occasion to say such a thing!"

All her frank nature revolted as she spoke, and her beautiful eyes, glowing with sincerity, gazed fixedly on his.

"I love Pierre! I do, I?... Well, yes, I love him, as I love you all; I love him because he has become one of us, because he shares our life and our joys! I'm happy when he's here, certainly; and I should like him to be always here. I'm always pleased to see him and hear him and go out with him. I was very much grieved recently when he seemed to be relapsing into his gloomy ideas. But all that is natural, is it not? And I think that I have only done what you desired I should do, and I cannot understand how my affection for Pierre can in any way exercise an influence respecting our marriage."

These words, in her estimation, ought to have convinced Guillaume that she was not in love with his brother; but in lieu thereof they brought him painful enlightenment by the very ardour with which she denied the love imputed to her.

"But you unfortunate girl!" he cried. "You are betraying yourself without knowing it.... It is quite certain you do not love me, you love my brother!"

He had caught hold of her wrists and was pressing them with despairing affection as if to compel her to read her heart. And she continued struggling. A most loving and tragic contest went on between them, he seeking to convince her by the evidence of facts, and she resisting him, stubbornly refusing to open her eyes. In vain did he recount what had happened since the first day, explaining the feelings which had followed one upon another in her heart and mind: first covert hostility, next curiosity regarding that extraordinary young priest, and then sympathy and affection when she had found him so wretched and had gradually cured him of his sufferings. They were both young and mother Nature had done the rest. However, at each fresh proof and certainty which he put before her, Marie only experienced growing emotion, trembling at last from head to foot, but still unwilling to question herself.

"No, no," said she, "I do not love him. If I loved him I should know it and would acknowledge it to you; for you are well aware that I cannot tell an untruth."

Guillaume, however, had the cruelty to insist on the point, like some heroic surgeon cutting into his own flesh even more than into that of others, in order that the truth might appear and everyone be saved. "Marie," said he, "it is not I whom you love. All that you feel for me is respect and gratitude and daughterly affection. Remember what your feelings were at the time when our marriage was decided upon. You were then in love with nobody, and you accepted the offer like a sensible girl, feeling certain that I should render you happy, and that the union was a right and satisfactory one.... But since then my brother has come here; love has sprung up in your heart in quite a natural way; and it is Pierre, Pierre alone, whom you love as a lover and a husband should be loved."

Exhausted though she was, utterly distracted, too, by the light which, despite herself, was dawning within her, Marie still stubbornly and desperately protested.

"But why do you struggle like this against the truth, my child?" said Guillaume; "I do not reproach you. It was I who chose that this should happen, like the old madman I am. What was bound to come has come, and doubtless it is for the best. I only wanted to learn the truth from you in order that I might take a decision and act uprightly."

These words vanquished her, and her tears gushed forth. It seemed as though something had been rent asunder within her; and she felt quite overcome, as if by the weight of a new truth of which she had hitherto been ignorant. "Ah! it was cruel of you," she said, "to do me such violence so as to make me read my heart. I swear to you again that I did not know I loved Pierre in the way you say. But you have opened my heart, and roused what was quietly slumbering in it.... And it is true, I do love Pierre, I love him now as you have said. And so here we are, all three of us supremely wretched through your doing!"

She sobbed, and with a sudden feeling of modesty freed her wrists from his grasp. He noticed, however, that no blush rose to her face. Truth to tell, her virginal loyalty was not in question; she had no cause to reproach herself with any betrayal; it was he alone, perforce, who had awakened her to love. For a moment they looked at one another through their tears: she so strong and healthy, her bosom heaving at each heart-beat, and her white arms—arms that could both charm and sustain—bare almost to her shoulders; and he still vigorous, with his thick fleece of white hair and his black moustaches, which gave his countenance such an expression of energetic youth. But it was all over, the irreparable had swept by, and utterly changed their lives.

"Marie," he nobly said, "you do not love me, I give you back your promise."

But with equal nobility she refused to take it back. "Never will I do so," she replied. "I gave it to you frankly, freely and joyfully, and my affection and admiration for you have never changed."

Nevertheless, with more firmness in his hitherto broken voice, Guillaume retorted: "You love Pierre, and it is Pierre whom you ought to marry."

"No," she again insisted, "I belong to you. A tie which years have tightened cannot be undone in an hour. Once again, if I love Pierre I swear to you that I was ignorant of it this morning. And let us leave the matter as it is; do not torture me any more, it would be too cruel of you."

Then, quivering like a woman who suddenly perceives that she is bare, in a stranger's presence, she hastily pulled down her sleeves, and even drew them over her hands as if to leave naught of her person visible. And afterwards she rose and walked away without adding a single word.

Guillaume remained alone on the bench in that leafy corner, in front of Paris, to which the light morning sunshine lent the aspect of some quivering, soaring city of dreamland. A great weight oppressed him, and it seemed to him as if he would never be able to rise from the seat. That which brought him most suffering was Marie's assurance that she had till that morning been ignorant of the fact that she was in love with Pierre. She had been ignorant of it, and it was he, Guillaume, who had brought it to her knowledge, compelled her to confess it! He had now firmly planted it in her heart, and perhaps increased it by revealing it to her. Ah! how cruel the thought—to be the artisan of one's own torment! Of one thing he was now quite certain: there would be no more love in his life. At the idea of this, his poor, loving heart sank and bled. And yet amidst the disaster, amidst his grief at realising that he was an old man, and that renunciation was imperative, he experienced a bitter joy at having brought the truth to light. This was very harsh consolation, fit only for one of heroic soul, yet he found lofty satisfaction in it, and from that moment the thought of sacrifice imposed itself upon him with extraordinary force. He must marry his children; there lay the path of duty, the only wise and just course, the only certain means of ensuring the happiness of the household. And when his revolting heart yet leapt and shrieked with anguish, he carried his vigorous hands to his chest in order to still it.

On the morrow came the supreme explanation between Guillaume and Pierre, not in the little garden, however, but in the spacious workroom. And here again one beheld the vast panorama of Paris, a nation as it were at work, a huge vat in which the wine of the future was fermenting. Guillaume had arranged things so that he might be alone with his brother; and no sooner had the latter entered than he attacked him, going straight to the point without any of the precautions which he had previously taken with Marie.

"Haven't you something to say to me, Pierre?" he inquired. "Why won't you confide in me?"

The other immediately understood him, and began to tremble, unable to find a word, but confessing everything by the distracted, entreating expression of his face.

"You love Marie," continued Guillaume, "why did you not loyally come and tell me of your love?"

At this Pierre recovered self-possession and defended himself vehemently: "I love Marie, it's true, and I felt that I could not conceal it, that you yourself would notice it at last. But there was no occasion for me to tell you of it, for I was sure of myself, and would have fled rather than have allowed a single word to cross my lips. I suffered in silence and alone, and you cannot know how great my torture was! It is even cruel on your part to speak to me of it; for now I am absolutely compelled to leave you.... I have already, on several occasions, thought of doing so. If I have come back here, it was doubtless through weakness, but also on account of my affection for you all. And what mattered my presence here? Marie ran no risk. She does not love me."

"She does love you!" Guillaume answered. "I questioned her yesterday, and she had to confess that she loved you."

At this Pierre, utterly distracted, caught Guillaume by the shoulders and gazed into his eyes. "Oh! brother, brother! what is this you say? Why say a thing which would mean terrible misfortune for us all? Even if it were true, my grief would far exceed my joy, for I will not have you suffer. Marie belongs to you. To me she is as sacred as a sister. And if there be only my madness to part you, it will pass by, I shall know how to conquer it."

"Marie loves you," repeated Guillaume in his gentle, obstinate way. "I don't reproach you with anything. I well know that you have struggled, and have never betrayed yourself to her either by word or glance. Yesterday she herself was still ignorant that she loved you, and I had to open her eyes.... What would you have? I simply state a fact: she loves you."

This time Pierre, still quivering, made a gesture of mingled rapture and terror, as if some divine and long-desired blessing were falling upon him from heaven and crushing him beneath its weight.

"Well, then," he said, after a brief pause, "it is all over.... Let us kiss one another for the last time, and then I'll go."

"Go? Why? You must stay with us. Nothing could be more simple: you love Marie and she loves you. I give her to you."

A loud cry came from Pierre, who wildly raised his hands again with a gesture of fright and rapture. "You give me Marie?" he replied. "You, who adore her, who have been waiting for her for months? No, no, it would overcome me, it would terrify me, as if you gave me your very heart after tearing it from your breast. No, no! I will not accept your sacrifice!"

"But as it is only gratitude and affection that Marie feels for me," said Guillaume, "as it is you whom she really loves, am I to take a mean advantage of the engagements which she entered into unconsciously, and force her to a marriage when I know that she would never be wholly mine? Besides, I have made a mistake, it isn't I who give her to you, she has already given herself, and I do not consider that I have any right to prevent her from doing so."

"No, no! I will never accept, I will never bring such grief upon you... Kiss me, brother, and let me go."

Thereupon Guillaume caught hold of Pierre and compelled him to sit down by his side on an old sofa near the window. And he began to scold him almost angrily while still retaining a smile, in which suffering and kindliness were blended. "Come," said he, "we are surely not going to fight over it. You won't force me to tie you up so as to keep you here? I know what I'm about. I thought it all over before I spoke to you. No doubt, I can't tell you that it gladdens me. I thought at first that I was going to die; I should have liked to hide myself in the very depths of the earth. And then, well, it was necessary to be reasonable, and I understood that things had arranged themselves for the best, in their natural order."

Pierre, unable to resist any further, had begun to weep with both hands raised to his face.

"Don't grieve, brother, either for yourself or for me," said Guillaume. "Do you remember the happy days we lately spent together at Neuilly after we had found one another again? All our old affection revived within us, and we remained for hours, hand in hand, recalling the past and loving one another. And what a terrible confession you made to me one night, the confession of your loss of faith, your torture, the void in which you were rolling! When I heard of it my one great wish was to cure you. I advised you to work, love, and believe in life, convinced as I was that life alone could restore you to peace and health.... And for that reason I afterwards brought you here. You fought against it, and it was I who forced you to come. I was so happy when I found that you again took an interest in life, and had once more become a man and a worker! I would have given some of my blood if necessary to complete your cure.... Well, it's done now, I have given you all I had, since Marie herself has become necessary to you, and she alone can save you."

Then as Pierre again attempted to protest, he resumed: "Don't deny it. It is so true indeed, that if she does not complete the work I have begun, all my efforts will have been vain, you will fall back into your misery and negation, into all the torments of a spoilt life. She is necessary to you, I say. And do you think that I no longer know how to love you? Would you have me refuse you the very breath of life that will truly make you a man, after all my fervent wishes for your return to life? I have enough affection for you both to consent to your loving one another.... Besides, I repeat it, nature knows what she does. Instinct is a sure guide, it always tends to what is useful and trite. I should have been a sorry husband, and it is best that I should keep to my work as an old savant; whereas you are young and represent the future, all fruitful and happy life."

Pierre shuddered as he heard this, for his old fears returned to him. Had not the priesthood for ever cut him off from life, had not his long years of chaste celibacy robbed him of his manhood? "Fruitful and happy life!" he muttered, "ah! if you only knew how distressed I feel at the idea that I do not perhaps deserve the gift you so lovingly offer me! You are worth more than I am; you would have given her a larger heart, a firmer brain, and perhaps, too, you are really a younger man than myself.... There is still time, brother, keep her, if with you she is likely to be happier and more truly and completely loved. For my part I am full of doubts. Her happiness is the only thing of consequence. Let her belong to the one who will love her best!"

Indescribable emotion had now come over both men. As Guillaume heard his brother's broken words, the cry of a love that trembled at the thought of possible weakness, he did for a moment waver. With a dreadful heart-pang he stammered despairingly: "Ah! Marie, whom I love so much! Marie, whom I would have rendered so happy!"

At this Pierre could not restrain himself; he rose and cried: "Ah! you see that you love her still and cannot renounce her.... So let me go! let me go!"

But Guillaume had already caught him around the body, clasping him with an intensity of brotherly love which was increased by the renunciation he was resolved upon: "Stay!" said he. "It wasn't I that spoke, it was the other man that was in me, he who is about to die, who is already dead! By the memory of our mother and our father I swear to you that the sacrifice is consummated, and that if you two refuse to accept happiness from me you will but make me suffer."

For a moment the weeping men remained in one another's arms. They had often embraced before, but never had their hearts met and mingled as they did now. It was a delightful moment, which seemed an eternity. All the grief and misery of the world had disappeared from before them; there remained naught save their glowing love, whence sprang an eternity of love even as light comes from the sun. And that moment was compensation for all their past and future tears, whilst yonder, on the horizon before them, Paris still spread and rumbled, ever preparing the unknown future.

Just then Marie herself came in. And the rest proved very simple. Guillaume freed himself from his brother's clasp, led him forward and compelled him and Marie to take each other by the hand. At first she made yet another gesture of refusal in her stubborn resolve that she would not take her promise back. But what could she say face to face with those two tearful men, whom she had found in one another's arms, mingling together in such close brotherliness? Did not those tears and that embrace sweep away all ordinary reasons, all such arguments as she held in reserve? Even the embarrassment of the situation disappeared, it seemed as if she had already had a long explanation with Pierre, and that he and she were of one mind to accept that gift of love which Guillaume offered them with so much heroism. A gust of the sublime passed through the room, and nothing could have appeared more natural to them than this extraordinary scene. Nevertheless, Marie remained silent, she dared not give her answer, but looked at them both with her big soft eyes, which, like their own, were full of tears.

And it was Guillaume who, with sudden inspiration, ran to the little staircase conducting to the rooms overhead, and called: "Mere-Grand! Mere-Grand! Come down at once, you are wanted."

Then, as soon as she was there, looking slim and pale in her black gown, and showing the wise air of a queen-mother whom all obeyed, he said: "Tell these two children that they can do nothing better than marry one another. Tell them that we have talked it over, you and I, and that it is your desire, your will that they should do so."

She quietly nodded her assent, and then said: "That is true, it will be by far the most sensible course."

Thereupon Marie flung herself into her arms, consenting, yielding to the superior forces, the powers of life, that had thus changed the course of her existence. Guillaume immediately desired that the date of the wedding should be fixed, and accommodation provided for the young couple in the rooms overhead. And as Pierre glanced at him with some remaining anxiety and spoke of travelling, for he feared that his wound was not yet healed, and that their presence might bring him suffering, Guillaume responded: "No, no, I mean to keep you. If I'm marrying you, it is to have you both here. Don't worry about me. I have so much work to do, I shall work."

In the evening when Thomas and Francois came home and learnt the news, they did not seem particularly surprised by it. They had doubtless felt that things would end like this. And they bowed to the denouement, not venturing to say a word, since it was their father himself who announced the decision which had been taken, with his usual air of composure. As for Antoine, who on his own side quivered with love for Lise, he gazed with doubting, anxious eyes at his father, who had thus had the courage to pluck out his heart. Could he really survive such a sacrifice, must it not kill him? Then Antoine kissed his father passionately, and the elder brothers in their turn embraced him with all their hearts. Guillaume smiled and his eyes became moist. After his victory over his horrible torments nothing could have been sweeter to him than the embraces of his three big sons.

There was, however, further emotion in store for him that evening. Just as the daylight was departing, and he was sitting at his large table near the window, again checking and classifying the documents and plans connected with his invention, he was surprised to see his old master and friend Bertheroy enter the workroom. The illustrious chemist called on him in this fashion at long intervals, and Guillaume felt the honour thus conferred on him by this old man to whom eminence and fame had brought so many titles, offices and decorations. Moreover, Bertheroy, with his position as an official savant and member of the Institute, showed some courage in thus venturing to call on one whom so-called respectable folks regarded with contumely. And on this occasion, Guillaume at once understood that it was some feeling of curiosity that had brought him. And so he was greatly embarrassed, for he hardly dared to remove the papers and plans which were lying on the table.

"Oh, don't be frightened," gaily exclaimed Bertheroy, who, despite his careless and abrupt ways, was really very shrewd. "I haven't come to pry into your secrets.... Leave your papers there, I promise you that I won't read anything."

Then, in all frankness, he turned the conversation on the subject of explosives, which he was still studying, he said, with passionate interest. He had made some new discoveries which he did not conceal. Incidentally, too, he spoke of the opinion he had given in Salvat's affair. His dream was to discover some explosive of great power, which one might attempt to domesticate and reduce to complete obedience. And with a smile he pointedly concluded: "I don't know where that madman found the formula of his powder. But if you should ever discover it, remember that the future perhaps lies in the employment of explosives as motive power."

Then, all at once, he added: "By the way, that fellow Salvat will be executed on the day after to-morrow. A friend of mine at the Ministry of Justice has just told me so."

Guillaume had hitherto listened to him with an air of mingled distrust and amusement. But this announcement of Salvat's execution stirred him to anger and revolt, though for some days past he had known it to be inevitable, in spite of the sympathy which the condemned man was now rousing in many quarters.

"It will be a murder!" he cried vehemently.

Bertheroy waved his hand: "What would you have?" he answered: "there's a social system and it defends itself when it is attacked. Besides, those Anarchists are really too foolish in imagining that they will transform the world with their squibs and crackers! In my opinion, you know, science is the only revolutionist. Science will not only bring us truth but justice also, if indeed justice ever be possible on this earth. And that is why I lead so calm a life and am so tolerant."

Once again Bertheroy appeared to Guillaume as a revolutionist, one who was convinced that he helped on the ruin of the ancient abominable society of today, with its dogmas and laws, even whilst he was working in the depths of his laboratory. He was, however, too desirous of repose, and had too great a contempt for futilities to mingle with the events of the day, and he preferred to live in quietude, liberally paid and rewarded, and at peace with the government whatever it might be, whilst at the same time foreseeing and preparing for the formidable parturition of the future.

He waved his hand towards Paris, over which a sun of victory was setting, and then again spoke: "Do you hear the rumble? It is we who are the stokers, we who are ever flinging fresh fuel under the boiler. Science does not pause in her work for a single hour, and she is the artisan of Paris, which—let us hope it—will be the artisan of the future. All the rest is of no account."

But Guillaume was no longer listening to him. He was thinking of Salvat and the terrible engine of war he had invented, that engine which before long would shatter cities. And a new idea was dawning and growing in his mind. He had just freed himself of his last tie, he had created all the happiness he could create around him. Ah! to recover his courage, to be master of himself once more, and, at any rate, derive from the sacrifice of his heart the lofty delight of being free, of being able to lay down even his life, should he some day deem it necessary!

BOOK V.

I. THE GUILLOTINE

FOR some reason of his own Guillaume was bent upon witnessing the execution of Salvat. Pierre tried to dissuade him from doing so; and finding his efforts vain, became somewhat anxious. He accordingly resolved to spend the night at Montmartre, accompany his brother and watch over him. In former times, when engaged with Abbe Rose in charitable work in the Charonne district, he had learnt that the guillotine could be seen from the house where Mege, the Socialist deputy, resided at the corner of the Rue Merlin. He therefore offered himself as a guide. As the execution was to take place as soon as it should legally be daybreak, that is, about half-past four o'clock, the brothers did not go to bed but sat up in the workroom, feeling somewhat drowsy, and exchanging few words. Then as soon as two o'clock struck, they started off.

The night was beautifully serene and clear. The full moon, shining like a silver lamp in the cloudless, far-stretching heavens, threw a calm, dreamy light over the vague immensity of Paris, which was like some spell-bound city of sleep, so overcome by fatigue that not a murmur arose from it. It was as if beneath the soft radiance which spread over its roofs, its panting labour and its cries of suffering were lulled to repose until the dawn. Yet, in a far, out of the way district, dark work was even now progressing, a knife was being raised on high in order that a man might be killed.

Pierre and Guillaume paused in the Rue St. Eleuthere, and gazed at the vaporous, tremulous city spread out below then. And as they turned they perceived the basilica of the Sacred Heart, still domeless but already looking huge indeed in the moonbeams, whose clear white light accentuated its outlines and brought them into sharp relief against a mass of shadows. Under the pale nocturnal sky, the edifice showed like a colossal monster, symbolical of provocation and sovereign dominion. Never before had Guillaume found it so huge, never had it appeared to him to dominate Paris, even in the latter's hours of slumber, with such stubborn and overwhelming might.

This wounded him so keenly in the state of mind in which he found himself, that he could not help exclaiming: "Ah! they chose a good site for it, and how stupid it was to let them do so! I know of nothing more nonsensical; Paris crowned and dominated by that temple of idolatry! How impudent it is, what a buffet for the cause of reason after so many centuries of science, labour, and battle! And to think of it being reared over Paris, the one city in the world which ought never to have been soiled in this fashion! One can understand it at Lourdes and Rome; but not in Paris, in the very field of intelligence which has been so deeply ploughed, and whence the future is sprouting. It is a declaration of war, an insolent proclamation that they hope to conquer Paris also!"

Guillaume usually evinced all the tolerance of a savant, for whom religions are simply social phenomena. He even willingly admitted the grandeur or grace of certain Catholic legends. But Marie Alacoque's famous vision, which has given rise to the cult of the Sacred Heart, filled him with irritation and something like physical disgust. He suffered at the mere idea of Christ's open, bleeding breast, and the gigantic heart which the saint asserted she had seen beating in the depths of the wound—the huge heart in which Jesus placed the woman's little heart to restore it to her inflated and glowing with love. What base and loathsome materialism there was in all this! What a display of viscera, muscles and blood suggestive of a butcher's shop! And Guillaume was particularly disgusted with the engraving which depicted this horror, and which he found everywhere, crudely coloured with red and yellow and blue, like some badly executed anatomical plate.

Pierre on his side was also looking at the basilica as, white with moonlight, it rose out of the darkness like a gigantic fortress raised to crush and conquer the city slumbering beneath it. It had already brought him suffering during the last days when he had said mass in it and was struggling with his torments. "They call it the national votive offering," he now exclaimed. "But the nation's longing is for health and strength and restoration to its old position by work. That is a thing the Church does not understand. It argues that if France was stricken with defeat, it was because she deserved punishment. She was guilty, and so to-day she ought to repent. Repent of what? Of the Revolution, of a century of free examination and science, of the emancipation of her mind, of her initiatory and liberative labour in all parts of the world? That indeed is her real transgression; and it is as a punishment for all our labour, search for truth, increase of knowledge and march towards justice that they have reared that huge pile which Paris will see from all her streets, and will never be able to see without feeling derided and insulted in her labour and glory."

With a wave of his hand he pointed to the city, slumbering in the moonlight as beneath a sheet of silver, and then set off again with his brother, down the slopes, towards the black and deserted streets.

They did not meet a living soul until they reached the outer boulevard. Here, however, no matter what the hour may be, life continues with scarcely a pause. No sooner are the wine shops, music and dancing halls closed, than vice and want, cast into the street, there resume their nocturnal existence. Thus the brothers came upon all the homeless ones: low prostitutes seeking a pallet, vagabonds stretched on the benches under the trees, rogues who prowled hither and thither on the lookout for a good stroke. Encouraged by their accomplice—night, all the mire and woe of Paris had returned to the surface. The empty roadway now belonged to the breadless, homeless starvelings, those for whom there was no place in the sunlight, the vague, swarming, despairing herd which is only espied at night-time. Ah! what spectres of destitution, what apparitions of grief and fright there were! What a sob of agony passed by in Paris that morning, when as soon as the dawn should rise, a man—a pauper, a sufferer like the others—was to be guillotined!

As Guillaume and Pierre were about to descend the Rue des Martyrs, the former perceived an old man lying on a bench with his bare feet protruding from his gaping, filthy shoes. Guillaume pointed to him in silence. Then, a few steps farther on, Pierre in his turn pointed to a ragged girl, crouching, asleep with open month, in the corner of a doorway. There was no need for the brothers to express in words all the compassion and anger which stirred their hearts. At long intervals policemen, walking slowly two by two, shook the poor wretches and compelled them to rise and walk on and on. Occasionally, if they found them suspicious or refractory, they marched them off to the police-station. And then rancour and the contagion of imprisonment often transformed a mere vagabond into a thief or a murderer.

In the Rue des Martyrs and the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, the brothers found night-birds of another kind, women who slunk past them, close to the house-fronts, and men and hussies who belaboured one another with blows. Then, upon the grand boulevards, on the thresholds of lofty black houses, only one row of whose windows flared in the night, pale-faced individuals, who had just come down from their clubs, stood lighting cigars before going home. A lady with a ball wrap over her evening gown went by accompanied by a servant. A few cabs, moreover, still jogged up and down the roadway, while others, which had been waiting for hours, stood on their ranks in rows, with drivers and horses alike asleep. And as one boulevard after another was reached, the Boulevard Poissonniere, the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, the Boulevard St. Denis, and so forth, as far as the Place de la Republique, there came fresh want and misery, more forsaken and hungry ones, more and more of the human "waste" that is cast into the streets and the darkness. And on the other hand, an army of street-sweepers was now appearing to remove all the filth of the past four and twenty hours, in order that Paris, spruce already at sunrise, might not blush for having thrown up such a mass of dirt and loathsomeness in the course of a single day.

It was, however, more particularly after following the Boulevard Voltaire, and drawing near to the districts of La Roquette and Charonne, that the brothers felt they were returning to a sphere of labour where there was often lack of food, and where life was but so much pain. Pierre found himself at home here. In former days, accompanied by good Abbe Rose, visiting despairing ones, distributing alms, picking up children who had sunk to the gutter, he had a hundred times perambulated every one of those long, densely populated streets. And thus a frightful vision arose before his mind's eye; he recalled all the tragedies he had witnessed, all the shrieks he had heard, all the tears and bloodshed he had seen, all the fathers, mothers and children huddled together and dying of want, dirt and abandonment: that social hell in which he had ended by losing his last hopes, fleeing from it with a sob in the conviction that charity was a mere amusement for the rich, and absolutely futile as a remedy. It was this conviction which now returned to him as he again cast eyes upon that want and grief stricken district which seemed fated to everlasting destitution. That poor old man whom Abbe Rose had revived one night in yonder hovel, had he not since died of starvation? That little girl whom he had one morning brought in his arms to the refuge after her parents' death, was it not she whom he had just met, grown but fallen to the streets, and shrieking beneath the fist of a bully? Ah! how great was the number of the wretched! Their name was legion! There were those whom one could not save, those who were hourly born to a life of woe and want, even as one may be born infirm, and those, too, who from every side sank in the sea of human injustice, that ocean which has ever been the same for centuries past, and which though one may strive to drain it, still and for ever spreads. How heavy was the silence, how dense the darkness in those working-class streets where sleep seems to be the comrade of death! Yet hunger prowls, and misfortune sobs; vague spectral forms slink by, and then are lost to view in the depths of the night.

As Pierre and Guillaume went along they became mixed with dark groups of people, a whole flock of inquisitive folk, a promiscuous, passionate tramp, tramp towards the guillotine. It came from all Paris, urged on by brutish fever, a hankering for death and blood. In spite, however, of the dull noise which came from this dim crowd, the mean streets that were passed remained quite dark, not a light appeared at any of their windows; nor could one hear the breathing of the weary toilers stretched on their wretched pallets from which they would not rise before the morning twilight.

On seeing the jostling crowd which was already assembled on the Place Voltaire, Pierre understood that it would be impossible for him and his brother to ascend the Rue de la Roquette. Barriers, moreover, must certainly have been thrown across that street. In order therefore to reach the corner of the Rue Merlin, it occurred to him to take the Rue de la Folie Regnault, which winds round in the rear of the prison, farther on.

Here indeed they found solitude and darkness again.

The huge, massive prison with its great bare walls on which a moonray fell, looked like some pile of cold stones, dead for centuries past. At the end of the street they once more fell in with the crowd, a dim restless mass of beings, whose pale faces alone could be distinguished. The brothers had great difficulty in reaching the house in which Mege resided at the corner of the Rue Merlin. All the shutters of the fourth-floor flat occupied by the Socialist deputy were closed, though every other window was wide open and crowded with surging sightseers. Moreover, the wine shop down below and the first-floor room connected with it flared with gas, and were already crowded with noisy customers, waiting for the performance to begin.

"I hardly like to go and knock at Mege's door," said Pierre.

"No, no, you must not do so!" replied Guillaume.

"Let us go into the wine shop. We may perhaps be able to see something from the balcony."

The first-floor room was provided with a very large balcony, which women and gentlemen were already filling. The brothers nevertheless managed to reach it, and for a few minutes remained there, peering into the darkness before them. The sloping street grew broader between the two prisons, the "great" and the "little" Roquette, in such wise as to form a sort of square, which was shaded by four clumps of plane-trees, rising from the footways. The low buildings and scrubby trees, all poor and ugly of aspect, seemed almost to lie on a level with the ground, under a vast sky in which stars were appearing, as the moon gradually declined. And the square was quite empty save that on one spot yonder there seemed to be some little stir. Two rows of guards prevented the crowd from advancing, and even threw it back into the neighbouring streets. On the one hand, the only lofty houses were far away, at the point where the Rue St. Maur intersects the Rue de la Roquette; while, on the other, they stood at the corners of the Rue Merlin and the Rue de la Folie Regnault, so that it was almost impossible to distinguish anything of the execution even from the best placed windows. As for the inquisitive folk on the pavement they only saw the backs of the guards. Still this did not prevent a crush. The human tide flowed on from all sides with increasing clamour.

Guided by the remarks of some women who, leaning forward on the balcony, had been watching the square for a long time already, the brothers were at last able to perceive something. It was now half-past three, and the guillotine was nearly ready. The little stir which one vaguely espied yonder under the trees, was that of the headsman's assistants fixing the knife in position. A lantern slowly came and went, and five or six shadows danced over the ground. But nothing else could be distinguished, the square was like a large black pit, around which ever broke the waves of the noisy crowd which one could not see. And beyond the square one could only identify the flaring wine shops, which showed forth like lighthouses in the night. All the surrounding district of poverty and toil was still asleep, not a gleam as yet came from workrooms or yards, not a puff of smoke from the lofty factory chimneys.

"We shall see nothing," Guillaume remarked.

But Pierre silenced him, for he has just discovered that an elegantly attired gentleman leaning over the balcony near him was none other than the amiable deputy Duthil. He had at first fancied that a woman muffled in wraps who stood close beside the deputy was the little Princess de Harn, whom he had very likely brought to see the execution since he had taken her to see the trial. On closer inspection, however, he had found that this woman was Silviane, the perverse creature with the virginal face. Truth to tell, she made no concealment of her presence, but talked on in an extremely loud voice, as if intoxicated; and the brothers soon learnt how it was that she happened to be there. Duvillard, Duthil, and other friends had been supping with her at one o'clock in the morning, when on learning that Salvat was about to be guillotined, the fancy of seeing the execution had suddenly come upon her. Duvillard, after vainly entreating her to do nothing of the kind, had gone off in a fury, for he felt that it would be most unseemly on his part to attend the execution of a man who had endeavoured to blow up his house. And thereupon Silviane had turned to Duthil, whom her caprice greatly worried, for he held all such loathsome spectacles in horror, and had already refused to act as escort to the Princess. However, he was so infatuated with Silviane's beauty, and she made him so many promises, that he had at last consented to take her.

"He can't understand people caring for amusement," she said, speaking of the Baron. "And yet this is really a thing to see.... But no matter, you'll find him at my feet again to-morrow."

Duthil smiled and responded: "I suppose that peace has been signed and ratified now that you have secured your engagement at the Comedie."

"Peace? No!" she protested. "No, no. There will be no peace between us until I have made my debut. After that, we'll see."

They both laughed; and then Duthil, by way of paying his court, told her how good-naturedly Dauvergne, the new Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, had adjusted the difficulties which had hitherto kept the doors of the Comedie closed upon her. A really charming man was Dauvergne, the embodiment of graciousness, the very flower of the Monferrand ministry. His was the velvet hand in that administration whose leader had a hand of iron.

"He told me, my beauty," said Duthil, "that a pretty girl was in place everywhere." And then as Silviane, as if flattered, pressed closely beside him, the deputy added: "So that wonderful revival of 'Polyeucte,' in which you are going to have such a triumph, is to take place on the day after to-morrow. We shall all go to applaud you, remember."

"Yes, on the evening of the day after to-morrow," said Silviane, "the very same day when the wedding of the Baron's daughter will take place. There'll be plenty of emotion that day!"

"Ah! yes, of course!" retorted Duthil, "there'll be the wedding of our friend Gerard with Mademoiselle Camille to begin with. We shall have a crush at the Madeleine in the morning and another at the Comedie in the evening. You are quite right, too; there will be several hearts throbbing in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy."

Thereupon they again became merry, and jested about the Duvillard family—father, mother, lover and daughter—with the greatest possible ferocity and crudity of language. Then, all at once Silviane exclaimed: "Do you know, I'm feeling awfully bored here, my little Duthil. I can't distinguish anything, and I should like to be quite near so as to see it all plainly. You must take me over yonder, close to that machine of theirs."

This request threw Duthil into consternation, particularly as at that same moment Silviane perceived Massot outside the wine shop, and began calling and beckoning to him imperiously. A brief conversation then ensued between the young woman and the journalist: "I say, Massot!" she called, "hasn't a deputy the right to pass the guards and take a lady wherever he likes?"

"Not at all!" exclaimed Duthil. "Massot knows very well that a deputy ought to be the very first to bow to the laws."

This exclamation warned Massot that Duthil did not wish to leave the balcony. "You ought to have secured a card of invitation, madame," said he, in reply to Silviane. "They would then have found you room at one of the windows of La Petite Roquette. Women are not allowed elsewhere.... But you mustn't complain, you have a very good place up there."

"But I can see nothing at all, my dear Massot."

"Well, you will in any case see more than Princess de Harn will. Just now I came upon her carriage in the Rue du Chemin Vert. The police would not allow it to come any nearer."

This news made Silviane merry again, whilst Duthil shuddered at the idea of the danger he incurred, for Rosemonde would assuredly treat him to a terrible scene should she see him with another woman. Then, an idea occurring to him, he ordered a bottle of champagne and some little cakes for his "beautiful friend," as he called Silviane. She had been complaining of thirst, and was delighted with the opportunity of perfecting her intoxication. When a waiter had managed to place a little table near her, on the balcony itself, she found things very pleasant, and indeed considered it quite brave to tipple and sup afresh, while waiting for that man to be guillotined close by.

It was impossible for Pierre and Guillaume to remain up there any longer. All that they heard, all that they beheld filled them with disgust. The boredom of waiting had turned all the inquisitive folks of the balcony and the adjoining room into customers. The waiter could hardly manage to serve the many glasses of beer, bottles of expensive wine, biscuits, and plates of cold meat which were ordered of him. And yet the spectators here were all bourgeois, rich gentlemen, people of society! On the other hand, time has to be killed somehow when it hangs heavily on one's hands; and thus there were bursts of laughter and paltry and horrible jests, quite a feverish uproar arising amidst the clouds of smoke from the men's cigars. When Pierre and Guillaume passed through the wine shop on the ground-floor they there found a similar crush and similar tumult, aggravated by the disorderly behaviour of the big fellows in blouses who were drinking draught wine at the pewter bar which shone like silver. There were people, too, at all the little tables, besides an incessant coming and going of folks who entered the place for a "wet," by way of calming their impatience. And what folks they were! All the scum, all the vagabonds who had been dragging themselves about since daybreak on the lookout for whatever chance might offer them, provided it were not work!

On the pavement outside, Pierre and Guillaume felt yet a greater heart-pang. In the throng which the guards kept back, one simply found so much mire stirred up from the very depths of Paris life: prostitutes and criminals, the murderers of to-morrow, who came to see how a man ought to die. Loathsome, bareheaded harlots mingled with bands of prowlers or ran through the crowd, howling obscene refrains. Bandits stood in groups chatting and quarrelling about the more or less glorious manner in which certain famous guillotines had died. Among these was one with respect to whom they all agreed, and of whom they spoke as of a great captain, a hero whose marvellous courage was deserving of immortality. Then, as one passed along, one caught snatches of horrible phrases, particulars about the instrument of death, ignoble boasts, and filthy jests reeking with blood. And over and above all else there was bestial fever, a lust for death which made this multitude delirious, an eagerness to see life flow forth fresh and ruddy beneath the knife, so that as it coursed over the soil they might dip their feet in it. As this execution was not an ordinary one, however, there were yet spectators of another kind; silent men with glowing eyes who came and went all alone, and who were plainly thrilled by their faith, intoxicated with the contagious madness which incites one to vengeance or martyrdom.

Guillaume was just thinking of Victor Mathis, when he fancied that he saw him standing in the front row of sightseers whom the guards held in check. It was indeed he, with his thin, beardless, pale, drawn face. Short as he was, he had to raise himself on tiptoes in order to see anything. Near him was a big, red-haired girl who gesticulated; but for his part he never stirred or spoke. He was waiting motionless, gazing yonder with the round, ardent, fixed eyes of a night-bird, seeking to penetrate the darkness. At last a guard pushed him back in a somewhat brutal way; but he soon returned to his previous position, ever patient though full of hatred against the executioners, wishing indeed to see all he could in order to increase his hate.

Then Massot approached the brothers. This time, on seeing Pierre without his cassock, he did not even make a sign of astonishment, but gaily remarked: "So you felt curious to see this affair, Monsieur Froment?"

"Yes, I came with my brother," Pierre replied. "But I very much fear that we shan't see much."

"You certainly won't if you stay here," rejoined Massot. And thereupon in his usual good-natured way—glad, moreover, to show what power a well-known journalist could wield—he inquired: "Would you like me to pass you through? The inspector here happens to be a friend of mine."

Then, without waiting for an answer, he stopped the inspector and hastily whispered to him that he had brought a couple of colleagues, who wanted to report the proceedings. At first the inspector hesitated, and seemed inclined to refuse Massot's request; but after a moment, influenced by the covert fear which the police always has of the press, he made a weary gesture of consent.

"Come, quick, then," said Massot, turning to the brothers, and taking them along with him.

A moment later, to the intense surprise of Pierre and Guillaume, the guards opened their ranks to let them pass. They then found themselves in the large open space which was kept clear. And on thus emerging from the tumultuous throng they were quite impressed by the death-like silence and solitude which reigned under the little plane-trees. The night was now paling. A faint gleam of dawn was already falling from the sky.

After leading his companions slantwise across the square, Massot stopped them near the prison and resumed: "I'm going inside; I want to see the prisoner roused and got ready. In the meantime, walk about here; nobody will say anything to you. Besides, I'll come back to you in a moment."

A hundred people or so, journalists and other privileged spectators, were scattered about the dark square. Movable wooden barriers—such as are set up at the doors of theatres when there is a press of people waiting for admission—had been placed on either side of the pavement running from the prison gate to the guillotine; and some sightseers were already leaning over these barriers, in order to secure a close view of the condemned man as he passed by. Others were walking slowly to and fro, and conversing in undertones. The brothers, for their part, approached the guillotine.

It stood there under the branches of the trees, amidst the delicate greenery of the fresh leaves of spring. A neighbouring gas-lamp, whose light was turning yellow in the rising dawn, cast vague gleams upon it. The work of fixing it in position—work performed as quietly as could be, so that the only sound was the occasional thud of a mallet—had just been finished; and the headsman's "valets" or assistants, in frock-coats and tall silk hats, were waiting and strolling about in a patient way. But the instrument itself, how base and shameful it looked, squatting on the ground like some filthy beast, disgusted with the work it had to accomplish! What! those few beams lying on the ground, and those others barely nine feet high which rose from it, keeping the knife in position, constituted the machine which avenged Society, the instrument which gave a warning to evil-doers! Where was the big scaffold painted a bright red and reached by a stairway of ten steps, the scaffold which raised high bloody arms over the eager multitude, so that everybody might behold the punishment of the law in all its horror! The beast had now been felled to the ground, where it simply looked ignoble, crafty and cowardly. If on the one hand there was no majesty in the manner in which human justice condemned a man to death at its assizes: on the other, there was merely horrid butchery with the help of the most barbarous and repulsive of mechanical contrivances, on the terrible day when that man was executed.

As Pierre and Guillaume gazed at the guillotine, a feeling of nausea came over them. Daylight was now slowly breaking, and the surroundings were appearing to view: first the square itself with its two low, grey prisons, facing one another; then the distant houses, the taverns, the marble workers' establishments, and the shops selling flowers and wreaths, which are numerous hereabouts, as the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise is so near. Before long one could plainly distinguish the black lines of the spectators standing around in a circle, the heads leaning forward from windows and balconies, and the people who had climbed to the very house roofs. The prison of La Petite Roquette over the way had been turned into a kind of tribune for guests; and mounted Gardes de Paris went slowly to and fro across the intervening expanse. Then, as the sky brightened, labour awoke throughout the district beyond the crowd, a district of broad, endless streets lined with factories, work-shops and work-yards. Engines began to snort, machinery and appliances were got ready to start once more on their usual tasks, and smoke already curled away from the forest of lofty brick chimneys which, on all sides, sprang out of the gloom.

It then seemed to Guillaume that the guillotine was really in its right place in that district of want and toil. It stood in its own realm, like a terminus and a threat. Did not ignorance, poverty and woe lead to it? And each time that it was set up amidst those toilsome streets, was it not charged to overawe the disinherited ones, the starvelings, who, exasperated by everlasting injustice, were always ready for revolt? It was not seen in the districts where wealth and enjoyment reigned. It would there have seemed purposeless, degrading and truly monstrous. And it was a tragical and terrible coincidence that the bomb-thrower, driven mad by want, should be guillotined there, in the very centre of want's dominion.

But daylight had come at last, for it was nearly half-past four. The distant noisy crowd could feel that the expected moment was drawing nigh. A shudder suddenly sped through the atmosphere.

"He's coming," exclaimed little Massot, as he came back to Pierre and Guillaume. "Ah! that Salvat is a brave fellow after all."

Then he related how the prisoner had been awakened; how the governor of the prison, magistrate Amadieu, the chaplain, and a few other persons had entered the cell where Salvat lay fast asleep; and then how the condemned man had understood the truth immediately upon opening his eyes. He had risen, looking pale but quite composed. And he had dressed himself without assistance, and had declined the nip of brandy and the cigarette proffered by the good-hearted chaplain, in the same way as with a gentle but stubborn gesture he had brushed the crucifix aside. Then had come the "toilette" for death. With all rapidity and without a word being exchanged, Salvat's hands had been tied behind his back, his legs had been loosely secured with a cord, and the neckband of his shirt had been cut away. He had smiled when the others exhorted him to be brave. He only feared some nervous weakness, and had but one desire, to die like a hero, to remain the martyr of the ardent faith in truth and justice for which he was about to perish.

"They are now drawing up the death certificate in the register," continued Massot in his chattering way. "Come along, come along to the barriers if you wish a good view.... I turned paler, you know, and trembled far more than he did. I don't care a rap for anything as a rule; but, all the same, an execution isn't a pleasant business.... You can't imagine how many attempts were made to save Salvat's life. Even some of the papers asked that he might be reprieved. But nothing succeeded, the execution was regarded as inevitable, it seems, even by those who consider it a blunder. Still, they had such a touching opportunity to reprieve him, when his daughter, little Celine, wrote that fine letter to the President of the Republic, which I was the first to publish in the 'Globe.' Ah! that letter, it cost me a lot of running about!"

Pierre, who was already quite upset by this long wait for the horrible scene, felt moved to tears by Massot's reference to Celine. He could again see the child standing beside Madame Theodore in that bare, cold room whither her father would never more return. It was thence that he had set out on a day of desperation with his stomach empty and his brain on fire, and it was here that he would end, between yonder beams, beneath yonder knife.

Massot, however, was still giving particulars. The doctors, said he, were furious because they feared that the body would not be delivered to them immediately after the execution. To this Guillaume did not listen. He stood there with his elbows resting on the wooden barrier and his eyes fixed on the prison gate, which still remained shut. His hands were quivering, and there was an expression of anguish on his face as if it were he himself who was about to be executed. The headsman had again just left the prison. He was a little, insignificant-looking man, and seemed annoyed, anxious to have done with it all. Then, among a group of frock-coated gentlemen, some of the spectators pointed out Gascogne, the Chief of the Detective Police, who wore a cold, official air, and Amadieu, the investigating magistrate, who smiled and looked very spruce, early though the hour was. He had come partly because it was his duty, and partly because he wished to show himself now that the curtain was about to fall on a wonderful tragedy of which he considered himself the author. Guillaume glanced at him, and then as a growing uproar rose from the distant crowd, he looked up for an instant, and again beheld the two grey prisons, the plane-trees with their fresh young leaves, and the houses swarming with people beneath the pale blue sky, in which the triumphant sun was about to appear.

"Look out, here he comes!"

Who had spoken? A slight noise, that of the opening gate, made every heart throb. Necks were outstretched, eyes gazed fixedly, there was laboured breathing on all sides. Salvat stood on the threshold of the prison. The chaplain, stepping backwards, had come out in advance of him, in order to conceal the guillotine from his sight, but he had stopped short, for he wished to see that instrument of death, make acquaintance with it, as it were, before he walked towards it. And as he stood there, his long, aged sunken face, on which life's hardships had left their mark, seemed transformed by the wondrous brilliancy of his flaring, dreamy eyes. Enthusiasm bore him up—he was going to his death in all the splendour of his dream. When the executioner's assistants drew near to support him he once more refused their help, and again set himself in motion, advancing with short steps, but as quickly and as straightly as the rope hampering his legs permitted.

All at once Guillaume felt that Salvat's eyes were fixed upon him. Drawing nearer and nearer the condemned man had perceived and recognised his friend; and as he passed by, at a distance of no more than six or seven feet, he smiled faintly and darted such a deep penetrating glance at Guillaume, that ever afterwards the latter felt its smart. But what last thought, what supreme legacy had Salvat left him to meditate upon, perhaps to put into execution? It was all so poignant that Pierre feared some involuntary call on his brother's part; and so he laid his hand upon his arm to quiet him.

"Long live Anarchy!"

It was Salvat who had raised this cry. But in the deep silence his husky, altered voice seemed to break. The few who were near at hand had turned very pale; the distant crowd seemed bereft of life. The horse of one of the Gardes de Paris was alone heard snorting in the centre of the space which had been kept clear.

Then came a loathsome scramble, a scene of nameless brutality and ignominy. The headsman's helps rushed upon Salvat as he came up slowly with brow erect. Two of them seized him by the head, but finding little hair there, could only lower it by tugging at his neck. Next two others grasped him by the legs and flung him violently upon a plank which tilted over and rolled forward. Then, by dint of pushing and tugging, the head was got into the "lunette," the upper part of which fell in such wise that the neck was fixed as in a ship's port-hole—and all this was accomplished amidst such confusion and with such savagery that one might have thought that head some cumbrous thing which it was necessary to get rid of with the greatest speed. But the knife fell with a dull, heavy, forcible thud, and two long jets of blood spurted from the severed arteries, while the dead man's feet moved convulsively. Nothing else could be seen. The executioner rubbed his hands in a mechanical way, and an assistant took the severed blood-streaming head from the little basket into which it had fallen and placed it in the large basket into which the body had already been turned.

Ah! that dull, that heavy thud of the knife! It seemed to Guillaume that he had heard it echoing far away all over that district of want and toil, even in the squalid rooms where thousands of workmen were at that moment rising to perform their day's hard task! And there the echo of that thud acquired formidable significance; it spoke of man's exasperation with injustice, of zeal for martyrdom, and of the dolorous hope that the blood then spilt might hasten the victory of the disinherited.

Pierre, for his part, at the sight of that loathsome butchery, the abject cutthroat work of that killing machine, had suddenly felt his chilling shudder become more violent; for before him arose a vision of another corpse, that of the fair, pretty child ripped open by a bomb and stretched yonder, at the entrance of the Duvillard mansion. Blood streamed from her delicate flesh, just as it had streamed from that decapitated neck. It was blood paying for blood; it was like payment for mankind's debt of wretchedness, for which payment is everlastingly being made, without man ever being able to free himself from suffering.

Above the square and the crowd all was still silent in the clear sky. How long had the abomination lasted? An eternity, perhaps, compressed into two or three minutes. And now came an awakening: the spectators emerged from their nightmare with quivering hands, livid faces, and eyes expressive of compassion, disgust and fear.

"That makes another one. I've now seen four executions," said Massot, who felt ill at ease. "After all, I prefer to report weddings. Let us go off, I have all I want for my article."

Guillaume and Pierre followed him mechanically across the square, and again reached the corner of the Rue Merlin. And here they saw little Victor Mathis, with flaming eyes and white face, still standing in silence on the spot where they had left him. He could have seen nothing distinctly; but the thud of the knife was still echoing in his brain. A policeman at last gave him a push, and told him to move on. At this he looked the policeman in the face, stirred by sudden rage and ready to strangle him. Then, however, he quietly walked away, ascending the Rue de la Roquette, atop of which the lofty foliage of Pere-Lachaise could be seen, beneath the rising sun.

The brothers meantime fell upon a scene of explanations, which they heard without wishing to do so. Now that the sight was over, the Princess de Harn arrived, and she was the more furious as at the door of the wine shop she could see her new friend Duthil accompanying a woman.

"I say!" she exclaimed, "you are nice, you are, to have left me in the lurch like this! It was impossible for my carriage to get near, so I've had to come on foot through all those horrid people who have been jostling and insulting me."

Thereupon Duthil, with all promptitude, introduced Silviane to her, adding, in an aside, that he had taken a friend's place as the actress's escort. And then Rosemonde, who greatly wished to know Silviane, calmed down as if by enchantment, and put on her most engaging ways. "It would have delighted me, madame," said she, "to have seen this sight in the company of an artiste of your merit, one whom I admire so much, though I have never before had an opportunity of telling her so."

"Well, dear me, madame," replied Silviane, "you haven't lost much by arriving late. We were on that balcony there, and all that I could see were a few men pushing another one about.... It really isn't worth the trouble of coming."

"Well, now that we have become acquainted, madame," said the Princess, "I really hope that you will allow me to be your friend."

"Certainly, madame, my friend; and I shall be flattered and delighted to be yours."

Standing there, hand in hand, they smiled at one another. Silviane was very drunk, but her virginal expression had returned to her face; whilst Rosemonde seemed feverish with vicious curiosity. Duthil, whom the scene amused, now had but one thought, that of seeing Silviane home; so calling to Massot, who was approaching, he asked him where he should find a cab-rank. Rosemonde, however, at once offered her carriage, which was waiting in an adjacent street.

She would set the actress down at her door, said she, and the deputy at his; and such was her persistence in the matter that Duthil, greatly vexed, was obliged to accept her offer.

"Well, then, till to-morrow at the Madeleine," said Massot, again quite sprightly, as he shook hands with the Princess.

"Yes, till to-morrow, at the Madeleine and the Comedie."

"Ah! yes, of course!" he repeated, taking Silviane's hand, which he kissed. "The Madeleine in the morning and the Comedie in the evening... . We shall all be there to applaud you."

"Yes, I expect you to do so," said Silviane. "Till to-morrow, then!"

"Till to-morrow!"

The crowd was now wearily dispersing, to all appearance disappointed and ill at ease. A few enthusiasts alone lingered in order to witness the departure of the van in which Salvat's corpse would soon be removed; while bands of prowlers and harlots, looking very wan in the daylight, whistled or called to one another with some last filthy expression before returning to their dens. The headsman's assistants were hastily taking down the guillotine, and the square would soon be quite clear.

Pierre for his part wished to lead his brother away. Since the fall of the knife, Guillaume had remained as if stunned, without once opening his lips. In vain had Pierre tried to rouse him by pointing to the shutters of Mege's flat, which still remained closed, whereas every other window of the lofty house was wide open. Although the Socialist deputy hated the Anarchists, those shutters were doubtless closed as a protest against capital punishment. Whilst the multitude had been rushing to that frightful spectacle, Mege, still in bed, with his face turned to the wall, had probably been dreaming of how he would some day compel mankind to be happy beneath the rigid laws of Collectivism. Affectionate father as he was, the recent death of one of his children had quite upset his private life. His cough, too, had become a very bad one; but he ardently wished to live, for as soon as that new Monferrand ministry should have fallen beneath the interpellation which he already contemplated, his own turn would surely come: he would take the reins of power in hand, abolish the guillotine and decree justice and perfect felicity.

"Do you see, Guillaume?" Pierre gently repeated. "Mege hasn't opened his windows. He's a good fellow, after all; although our friends Bache and Morin dislike him." Then, as his brother still refrained from answering, Pierre added, "Come, let us go, we must get back home."

They both turned into the Rue de la Folie Regnault, and reached the outer Boulevards by way of the Rue du Chemin Vert. All the toilers of the district were now at work. In the long streets edged with low buildings, work-shops and factories, one heard engines snorting and machinery rumbling, while up above, the smoke from the lofty chimneys was assuming a rosy hue in the sunrise. Afterwards, when the brothers reached the Boulevard de Menilmontant and the Boulevard de Belleville, which they followed in turn at a leisurely pace, they witnessed the great rush of the working classes into central Paris. The stream poured forth from every side; from all the wretched streets of the faubourgs there was an endless exodus of toilers, who, having risen at dawn, were now hurrying, in the sharp morning air, to their daily labour. Some wore short jackets and others blouses; some were in velveteen trousers, others in linen overalls. Their thick shoes made their tramp a heavy one; their hanging hands were often deformed by work. And they seemed half asleep, not a smile was to be seen on any of those wan, weary faces turned yonder towards the everlasting task—the task which was begun afresh each day, and which—'twas their only chance—they hoped to be able to take up for ever and ever. There was no end to that drove of toilers, that army of various callings, that human flesh fated to manual labour, upon which Paris preys in order that she may live in luxury and enjoyment.

Then the procession continued across the Boulevard de la Villette, the Boulevard de la Chapelle, and the Boulevard de Rochechouart, where one reached the height of Montmartre. More and more workmen were ever coming down from their bare cold rooms and plunging into the huge city, whence, tired out, they would that evening merely bring back the bread of rancour. And now, too, came a stream of work-girls, some of them in bright skirts, some glancing at the passers-by; girls whose wages were so paltry, so insufficient, that now and again pretty ones among them never more turned their faces homewards, whilst the ugly ones wasted away, condemned to mere bread and water. A little later, moreover, came the employes, the clerks, the counter-jumpers, the whole world of frock-coated penury—"gentlemen" who devoured a roll as they hastened onward, worried the while by the dread of being unable to pay their rent, or by the problem of providing food for wife and children until the end of the month should come.* And now the sun was fast ascending on the horizon, the whole army of ants was out and about, and the toilsome day had begun with its ceaseless display of courage, energy and suffering.

* In Paris nearly all clerks and shop-assistants receive
monthly salaries, while most workmen are paid once a
fortnight.—Trans.

Never before had it been so plainly manifest to Pierre that work was a necessity, that it healed and saved. On the occasion of his visit to the Grandidier works, and later still, when he himself had felt the need of occupation, there had cone to him the thought that work was really the world's law. And after that hateful night, after that spilling of blood, after the slaughter of that toiler maddened by his dreams, there was consolation and hope in seeing the sun rise once more, and everlasting labour take up its wonted task. However hard it might prove, however unjustly it might be lotted out, was it not work which would some day bring both justice and happiness to the world?

All at once, as the brothers were climbing the steep hillside towards Guillaume's house, they perceived before and above them the basilica of the Sacred Heart rising majestically and triumphantly to the sky. This was no sublunar apparition, no dreamy vision of Domination standing face to face with nocturnal Paris. The sun now clothed the edifice with splendour, it looked golden and proud and victorious, flaring with immortal glory.

Then Guillaume, still silent, still feeling Salvat's last glance upon him, seemed to come to some sudden and final decision. He looked at the basilica with glowing eyes, and pronounced sentence upon it.

II. IN VANITY FAIR

THE wedding was to take place at noon, and for half an hour already guests had been pouring into the magnificently decorated church, which was leafy with evergreens and balmy with the scent of flowers. The high altar in the rear glowed with countless candles, and through the great doorway, which was wide open, one could see the peristyle decked with shrubs, the steps covered with a broad carpet, and the inquisitive crowd assembled on the square and even along the Rue Royale, under the bright sun.

After finding three more chairs for some ladies who had arrived rather late, Duthil remarked to Massot, who was jotting down names in his note-book: "Well, if any more come, they will have to remain standing."

"Who were those three?" the journalist inquired.

"The Duchess de Boisemont and her two daughters."

"Indeed! All the titled people of France, as well as all the financiers and politicians, are here! It's something more even than a swell Parisian wedding."

As a matter of fact all the spheres of "society" were gathered together there, and some at first seemed rather embarrassed at finding themselves beside others. Whilst Duvillard's name attracted all the princes of finance and politicians in power, Madame de Quinsac and her son were supported by the highest of the French aristocracy. The mere names of the witnesses sufficed to indicate what an extraordinary medley there was. On Gerard's side these witnesses were his uncle, General de Bozonnet, and the Marquis de Morigny; whilst on Camille's they were the great banker Louvard, and Monferrand, the President of the Council and Minister of Finances. The quiet bravado which the latter displayed in thus supporting the bride after being compromised in her father's financial intrigues imparted a piquant touch of impudence to his triumph. And public curiosity was further stimulated by the circumstance that the nuptial blessing was to be given by Monseigneur Martha, Bishop of Persepolis, the Pope's political agent in France, and the apostle of the endeavours to win the Republic over to the Church by pretending to "rally" to it.

"But, I was mistaken," now resumed Massot with a sneer. "I said a really Parisian wedding, did I not? But in point of fact this wedding is a symbol. It's the apotheosis of the bourgeoisie, my dear fellow—the old nobility sacrificing one of its sons on the altar of the golden calf in order that the Divinity and the gendarmes, being the masters of France once more, may rid us of those scoundrelly Socialists!"

Then, again correcting himself, he added: "But I was forgetting. There are no more Socialists. Their head was cut off the other morning."

Duthil found this very funny. Then in a confidential way he remarked: "You know that the marriage wasn't settled without a good deal of difficulty.... Have you read Sagnier's ignoble article this morning?"

"Yes, yes; but I knew it all before, everybody knew it."

Then in an undertone, understanding one another's slightest allusion, they went on chatting. It was only amidst a flood of tears and after a despairing struggle that Baroness Duvillard had consented to let her lover marry her daughter. And in doing so she had yielded to the sole desire of seeing Gerard rich and happy. She still regarded Camille with all the hatred of a defeated rival. Then, an equally painful contest had taken place at Madame de Quinsac's. The Countess had only overcome her revolt and consented to the marriage in order to save her son from the dangers which had threatened him since childhood; and the Marquis de Morigny had been so affected by her maternal abnegation, that in spite of all his anger he had resignedly agreed to be a witness, thus making a supreme sacrifice, that of his conscience, to the woman whom he had ever loved. And it was this frightful story that Sagnier—using transparent nicknames—had related in the "Voix du Peuple" that morning. He had even contrived to make it more horrid than it really was; for, as usual, he was badly informed, and he was naturally inclined to falsehood and invention, as by sending an ever thicker and more poisonous torrent from his sewer, he might, day by day, increase his paper's sales. Since Monferrand's victory had compelled him to leave the African Railways scandal on one side, he had fallen back on scandals in private life, stripping whole families bare and pelting them with mud.

All at once Duthil and Massot were approached by Chaigneux, who, with his shabby frock coat badly buttoned, wore both a melancholy and busy air. "Well, Monsieur Massot," said he, "what about your article on Silviane? Is it settled? Will it go in?"

As Chaigneux was always for sale, always ready to serve as a valet, it had occurred to Duvillard to make use of him to ensure Silviane's success at the Comedie. He had handed this sorry deputy over to the young woman, who entrusted him with all manner of dirty work, and sent him scouring Paris in search of applauders and advertisements. His eldest daughter was not yet married, and never had his four women folk weighed more heavily on his hands. His life had become a perfect hell; they had ended by beating him, if he did not bring a thousand-franc note home on the first day of every month.

"My article!" Massot replied; "no, it surely won't go in, my dear deputy. Fonsegue says that it's written in too laudatory a style for the 'Globe.' He asked me if I were having a joke with the paper."

Chaigneux became livid. The article in question was one written in advance, from the society point of view, on the success which Silviane would achieve in "Polyeucte," that evening, at the Comedie. The journalist, in the hope of pleasing her, had even shown her his "copy"; and she, quite delighted, now relied upon finding the article in print in the most sober and solemn organ of the Parisian press.

"Good heavens! what will become of us?" murmured the wretched Chaigneux. "It's absolutely necessary that the article should go in."

"Well, I'm quite agreeable. But speak to the governor yourself. He's standing yonder between Vignon and Dauvergne, the Minister of Public Instruction."

"Yes, I certainly will speak to him—but not here. By-and-by in the sacristy, during the procession. And I must also try to speak to Dauvergne, for our Silviane particularly wants him to be in the ministerial box this evening. Monferrand will be there; he promised Duvillard so."

Massot began to laugh, repeating the expression which had circulated through Paris directly after the actress's engagement: "The Silviane ministry.... Well, Dauvergne certainly owes that much to his godmother!" said he.

Just then the little Princess de Harn, coming up like a gust of wind, broke in upon the three men. "I've no seat, you know!" she cried.

Duthil fancied that it was a question of finding her a well-placed chair in the church. "You mustn't count on me," he answered. "I've just had no end of trouble in stowing the Duchess de Boisemont away with her two daughters."

"Oh, but I'm talking of this evening's performance. Come, my dear Duthil, you really must find me a little corner in somebody's box. I shall die, I know I shall, if I can't applaud our delicious, our incomparable friend!"

Ever since setting Silviane down at her door on the previous day, Rosemonde had been overflowing with admiration for her.

"Oh! you won't find a single remaining seat, madame," declared Chaigneux, putting on an air of importance. "We have distributed everything. I have just been offered three hundred francs for a stall."

"That's true, there has been a fight even for the bracket seats, however badly they might be placed," Duthil resumed. "I am very sorry, but you must not count on me.... Duvillard is the only person who might take you in his box. He told me that he would reserve me a seat there. And so far, I think, there are only three of us, including his son.... Ask Hyacinthe by-and-by to procure you an invitation."

Rosemonde, whom Hyacinthe had so greatly bored that she had given him his dismissal, felt the irony of Duthil's suggestion. Nevertheless, she exclaimed with an air of delight: "Ah, yes! Hyacinthe can't refuse me that. Thanks for your information, my dear Duthil. You are very nice, you are; for you settle things gaily even when they are rather sad.... And don't forget, mind, that you have promised to teach me politics. Ah! politics, my dear fellow, I feel that nothing will ever impassion me as politics do!"

Then she left them, hustled several people, and in spite of the crush ended by installing herself in the front row.

"Ah! what a crank she is!" muttered Massot with an air of amusement.

Then, as Chaigneux darted towards magistrate Amadieu to ask him in the most obsequious way if he had received his ticket, the journalist said to Duthil in a whisper: "By the way, my dear friend, is it true that Duvillard is going to launch his famous scheme for a Trans-Saharan railway? It would be a gigantic enterprise, a question of hundreds and hundreds of millions this time.... At the 'Globe' office yesterday evening, Fonsegue shrugged his shoulders and said it was madness, and would never come off!"

Duthil winked, and in a jesting way replied: "It's as good as done, my dear boy. Fonsegue will be kissing the governor's feet before another forty-eight hours are over."

Then he gaily gave the other to understand that golden manna would presently be raining down on the press and all faithful friends and willing helpers. Birds shake their feathers when the storm is over, and he, Duthil, was as spruce and lively, as joyous at the prospect of the presents he now expected, as if there had never been any African Railways scandal to upset him and make him turn pale with fright.

"The deuce!" muttered Massot, who had become serious. "So this affair here is more than a triumph: it's the promise of yet another harvest. Well, I'm no longer surprised at the crush of people."

At this moment the organs suddenly burst into a glorious hymn of greeting. The marriage procession was entering the church. A loud clamour had gone up from the crowd, which spread over the roadway of the Rue Royale and impeded the traffic there, while the cortege pompously ascended the steps in the bright sunshine. And it was now entering the edifice and advancing beneath the lofty, re-echoing vaults towards the high altar which flared with candles, whilst on either hand crowded the congregation, the men on the right and the women on the left. They had all risen and stood there smiling, with necks outstretched and eyes glowing with curiosity.

First, in the rear of the magnificent beadle, came Camille, leaning on the arm of her father, Baron Duvillard, who wore a proud expression befitting a day of victory. Veiled with superb point d'Alencon falling from her diadem of orange blossom, gowned in pleated silk muslin over an underskirt of white satin, the bride looked so extremely happy, so radiant at having conquered, that she seemed almost pretty. Moreover, she held herself so upright that one could scarcely detect that her left shoulder was higher than her right.

Next came Gerard, giving his arm to his mother, the Countess de Quinsac,—he looking very handsome and courtly, as was proper, and she displaying impassive dignity in her gown of peacock-blue silk embroidered with gold and steel beads. But it was particularly Eve whom people wished to see, and every neck was craned forward when she appeared on the arm of General Bozonnet, the bridegroom's first witness and nearest male relative. She was gowned in "old rose" taffetas trimmed with Valenciennes of priceless value, and never had she looked younger, more deliciously fair. Yet her eyes betrayed her emotion, though she strove to smile; and her languid grace bespoke her widowhood, her compassionate surrender of the man she loved. Monferrand, the Marquis de Morigny, and banker Louvard, the three other witnesses, followed the Baroness and General Bozonnet, each giving his arm to some lady of the family. A considerable sensation was caused by the appearance of Monferrand, who seemed on first-rate terms with himself, and jested familiarly with the lady he accompanied, a little brunette with a giddy air. Another who was noticed in the solemn, interminable procession was the bride's eccentric brother Hyacinthe, whose dress coat was of a cut never previously seen, with its tails broadly and symmetrically pleated.

When the affianced pair had taken their places before the prayer-stools awaiting them, and the members of both families and the witnesses had installed themselves in the rear in large armchairs, all gilding and red velvet, the ceremony was performed with extraordinary pomp. The cure of the Madeleine officiated in person; and vocalists from the Grand Opera reinforced the choir, which chanted the high mass to the accompaniment of the organs, whence came a continuous hymn of glory. All possible luxury and magnificence were displayed, as if to turn this wedding into some public festivity, a great victory, an event marking the apogee of a class. Even the impudent bravado attaching to the loathsome private drama which lay behind it all, and which was known to everybody, added a touch of abominable grandeur to the ceremony. But the truculent spirit of superiority and domination which characterised the proceedings became most manifest when Monseigneur Martha appeared in surplice and stole to pronounce the blessing. Tall of stature, fresh of face, and faintly smiling, he had his wonted air of amiable sovereignty, and it was with august unction that he pronounced the sacramental words, like some pontiff well pleased at reconciling the two great empires whose heirs he united. His address to the newly married couple was awaited with curiosity. It proved really marvellous, he himself triumphed in it. Was it not in that same church that he had baptised the bride's mother, that blond Eve, who was still so beautiful, that Jewess whom he himself had converted to the Catholic faith amidst the tears of emotion shed by all Paris society? Was it not there also that he had delivered his three famous addresses on the New Spirit, whence dated, to his thinking, the rout of science, the awakening of Christian spirituality, and that policy of rallying to the Republic which was to lead to its conquest?

So it was assuredly allowable for him to indulge in some delicate allusions, by way of congratulating himself on his work, now that he was marrying a poor scion of the old aristocracy to the five millions of that bourgeoise heiress, in whose person triumphed the class which had won the victory in 1789, and was now master of the land. The fourth estate, the duped, robbed people, alone had no place in those festivities. But by uniting the affianced pair before him in the bonds of wedlock, Monseigneur Martha sealed the new alliance, gave effect to the Pope's own policy, that stealthy effort of Jesuitical Opportunism which would take democracy, power and wealth to wife, in order to subdue and control them. When the prelate reached his peroration he turned towards Monferrand, who sat there smiling; and it was he, the Minister, whom he seemed to be addressing while he expressed the hope that the newly married pair would ever lead a truly Christian life of humility and obedience in all fear of God, of whose iron hand he spoke as if it were that of some gendarme charged with maintaining the peace of the world. Everybody was aware that there was some diplomatic understanding between the Bishop and the Minister, some secret pact or other whereby both satisfied their passion for authority, their craving to insinuate themselves into everything and reign supreme; and thus when the spectators saw Monferrand smiling in his somewhat sly, jovial way, they also exchanged smiles.

"Ah!" muttered Massot, who had remained near Duthil, "how amused old Justus Steinberger would be, if he were here to see his granddaughter marrying the last of the Quinsacs!"

"But these marriages are quite the thing, quite the fashion, my dear fellow," the deputy replied. "The Jews and the Christians, the bourgeois and the nobles, do quite right to come to an understanding, so as to found a new aristocracy. An aristocracy is needed, you know, for otherwise we should be swept away by the masses."

None the less Massot continued sneering at the idea of what a grimace Justus Steinberger would have made if he had heard Monseigneur Martha. It was rumoured in Paris that although the old Jew banker had ceased all intercourse with his daughter Eve since her conversion, he took a keen interest in everything she was reported to do or say, as if he were more than ever convinced that she would prove an avenging and dissolving agent among those Christians, whose destruction was asserted to be the dream of his race. If he had failed in his hope of overcoming Duvillard by giving her to him as a wife, he doubtless now consoled himself with thinking of the extraordinary fortune to which his blood had attained, by mingling with that of the harsh, old-time masters of his race, to whose corruption it gave a finishing touch. Therein perhaps lay that final Jewish conquest of the world of which people sometimes talked.

A last triumphal strain from the organ brought the ceremony to an end; whereupon the two families and the witnesses passed into the sacristy, where the acts were signed. And forthwith the great congratulatory procession commenced.

The bride and bridegroom at last stood side by side in the lofty but rather dim room, panelled with oak. How radiant with delight was Camille at the thought that it was all over, that she had triumphed and married that handsome man of high lineage, after wresting him with so much difficulty from one and all, her mother especially! She seemed to have grown taller. Deformed, swarthy, and ugly though she was, she drew herself up exultingly, whilst scores and scores of women, friends or acquaintances, scrambled and rushed upon her, pressing her hands or kissing her, and addressing her in words of ecstasy. Gerard, who rose both head and shoulders above his bride, and looked all the nobler and stronger beside one of such puny figure, shook hands and smiled like some Prince Charming, who good-naturedly allowed himself to be loved. Meanwhile, the relatives of the newly wedded pair, though they were drawn up in one line, formed two distinct groups past which the crowd pushed and surged with arms outstretched. Duvillard received the congratulations offered him as if he were some king well pleased with his people; whilst Eve, with a supreme effort, put on an enchanting mien, and answered one and all with scarcely a sign of the sobs which she was forcing back. Then, on the other side of the bridal pair, Madame de Quinsac stood between General de Bozonnet and the Marquis de Morigny. Very dignified, in fact almost haughty, she acknowledged most of the salutations addressed to her with a mere nod, giving her little withered hand only to those people with whom she was well acquainted. A sea of strange countenances encompassed her, and now and again when some particularly murky wave rolled by, a wave of men whose faces bespoke all the crimes of money-mongering, she and the Marquis exchanged glances of deep sadness. This tide continued sweeping by for nearly half an hour; and such was the number of those who wanted to shake hands with the bridal pair and their relatives, that the latter soon felt their arms ache.

Meantime, some folks lingered in the sacristy; little groups collected, and gay chatter rang out. Monferrand was immediately surrounded. Massot pointed out to Duthil how eagerly Public Prosecutor Lehmann rushed upon the Minister to pay him court. They were immediately joined by investigating magistrate Amadieu. And even M. de Larombiere, the judge, approached Monferrand, although he hated the Republic, and was an intimate friend of the Quinsacs. But then obedience and obsequiousness were necessary on the part of the magistracy, for it was dependent on those in power, who alone could give advancement, and appoint even as they dismissed. As for Lehmann, it was alleged that he had rendered assistance to Monferrand by spiriting away certain documents connected with the African Railways affair, whilst with regard to the smiling and extremely Parisian Amadieu, was it not to him that the government was indebted for Salvat's head?

"You know," muttered Massot, "they've all come to be thanked for guillotining that man yesterday. Monferrand owes that wretched fellow a fine taper; for in the first place his bomb prolonged the life of the Barroux ministry, and later on it made Monferrand prime minister, as a strong-handed man was particularly needed to strangle Anarchism. What a contest, eh? Monferrand on one side and Salvat on the other. It was all bound to end in a head being cut off; one was wanted.... Ah! just listen, they are talking of it."

This was true. As the three functionaries of the law drew near to pay their respects to the all-powerful Minister, they were questioned by lady friends whose curiosity had been roused by what they had read in the newspapers. Thereupon Amadieu, whom duty had taken to the execution, and who was proud of his own importance, and determined to destroy what he called "the legend of Salvat's heroic death," declared that the scoundrel had shown no true courage at all. His pride alone had kept him on his feet. Fright had so shaken and choked him that he had virtually been dead before the fall of the knife.

"Ah! that's true!" cried Duthil. "I was there myself."

Massot, however, pulled him by the arm, quite indignant at such an assertion, although as a rule he cared a rap for nothing. "You couldn't see anything, my dear fellow," said he; "Salvat died very bravely. It's really stupid to continue throwing mud at that poor devil even when he's dead."

However, the idea that Salvat had died like a coward was too pleasing a one to be rejected. It was, so to say, a last sacrifice deposited at Monferrand's feet with the object of propitiating him. He still smiled in his peaceful way, like a good-natured man who is stern only when necessity requires it. And he showed great amiability towards the three judicial functionaries, and thanked them for the bravery with which they had accomplished their painful duty to the very end. On the previous day, after the execution, he had obtained a formidable majority in the Chamber on a somewhat delicate matter of policy. Order reigned, said he, and all was for the very best in France. Then, on seeing Vignon—who like a cool gamester had made a point of attending the wedding in order to show people that he was superior to fortune—the Minister detained him, and made much of him, partly as a matter of tactics, for in spite of everything he could not help fearing that the future might belong to that young fellow, who showed himself so intelligent and cautious. When a mutual friend informed them that Barroux' health was now so bad that the doctors had given him up as lost, they both began to express their compassion. Poor Barroux! He had never recovered from that vote of the Chamber which had overthrown him. He had been sinking from day to day, stricken to the heart by his country's ingratitude, dying of that abominable charge of money-mongering and thieving; he who was so upright and so loyal, who had devoted his whole life to the Republic! But then, as Monferrand repeated, one should never confess. The public can't understand such a thing.

At this moment Duvillard, in some degree relinquishing his paternal duties, came to join the others, and the Minister then had to share the honours of triumph with him. For was not this banker the master? Was he not money personified—money, which is the only stable, everlasting force, far above all ephemeral tenure of power, such as attaches to those ministerial portfolios which pass so rapidly from hand to hand? Monferrand reigned, but he would pass away, and a like fate would some day fall on Vignon, who had already had a warning that one could not govern unless the millions of the financial world were on one's side. So was not the only real triumpher himself, the Baron—he who laid out five millions of francs on buying a scion of the aristocracy for his daughter, he who was the personification of the sovereign bourgeoisie, who controlled public fortune, and was determined to part with nothing, even were he attacked with bombs? All these festivities really centred in himself, he alone sat down to the banquet, leaving merely the crumbs from his table to the lowly, those wretched toilers who had been so cleverly duped at the time of the Revolution.

That African Railways affair was already but so much ancient history, buried, spirited away by a parliamentary commission. All who had been compromised in it, the Duthils, the Chaigneux, the Fonsegues and others, could now laugh merrily. They had been delivered from their nightmare by Monferrand's strong fist, and raised by Duvillard's triumph. Even Sagnier's ignoble article and miry revelations in the "Voix du Peuple" were of no real account, and could be treated with a shrug of the shoulders, for the public had been so saturated with denunciation and slander that it was now utterly weary of all noisy scandal. The only thing which aroused interest was the rumour that Duvillard's big affair of the Trans-Saharan Railway was soon to be launched, that millions of money would be handled, and that some of them would rain down upon faithful friends.

Whilst Duvillard was conversing in a friendly way with Monferrand and Dauvergne, the Minister of Public Instruction, who had joined them, Massot encountered Fonsegue, his editor, and said to him in an undertone: "Duthil has just assured me that the Trans-Saharan business is ready, and that they mean to chance it with the Chamber. They declare that they are certain of success."

Fonsegue, however, was sceptical on the point. "It's impossible," said he; "they won't dare to begin again so soon."

Although he spoke in this fashion, the news had made him grave. He had lately had such a terrible fright through his imprudence in the African Railways affair, that he had vowed he would take every precaution in future. Still, this did not mean that he would refuse to participate in matters of business. The best course was to wait and study them, and then secure a share in all that seemed profitable. In the present instance he felt somewhat worried. However, whilst he stood there watching the group around Duvillard and the two ministers, he suddenly perceived Chaigneux, who, flitting hither and thither, was still beating up applauders for that evening's performance. He sang Silviane's praises in every key, predicted a most tremendous success, and did his very best to stimulate curiosity. At last he approached Dauvergne, and with his long figure bent double exclaimed: "My dear Minister, I have a particular request to make to you on the part of a very charming person, whose victory will not be complete this evening if you do not condescend to favour her with your vote."

Dauvergne, a tall, fair, good-looking man, whose blue eyes smiled behind his glasses, listened to Chaigneux with an affable air. He was proving a great success at the Ministry of Public Instruction, although he knew nothing of University matters. However, like a real Parisian of Dijon, as people called him, he was possessed of some tact and skill, gave entertainments at which his young and charming wife outshone all others, and passed as being quite an enlightened friend of writers and artists. Silviane's engagement at the Comedie, which so far was his most notable achievement, and which would have shaken the position of any other minister, had by a curious chance rendered him popular. It was regarded as something original and amusing.

On understanding that Chaigneux simply wished to make sure of his presence at the Comedie that evening, he became yet more affable. "Why, certainly, I shall be there, my dear deputy," he replied. "When one has such a charming god-daughter one mustn't forsake her in a moment of danger."

At this Monferrand, who had been lending ear, turned round. "And tell her," said he, "that I shall be there, too. She may therefore rely on having two more friends in the house."

Thereupon Duvillard, quite enraptured, his eyes glistening with emotion and gratitude, bowed to the two ministers as if they had granted him some never-to-be-forgotten favour.

When Chaigneux, on his side also, had returned thanks with a low bow, he happened to perceive Fonsegue, and forthwith he darted towards him and led him aside. "Ah! my dear colleague," he declared, "it is absolutely necessary that this matter should be settled. I regard it as of supreme importance."

"What are you speaking of?" inquired Fonsegue, much surprised.

"Why, of Massot's article, which you won't insert."

Thereupon, the director of the "Globe" plumply declared that he could not insert the article. He talked of his paper's dignity and gravity; and declared that the lavishing of such fulsome praise upon a hussy—yes, a mere hussy, in a journal whose exemplary morality and austerity had cost him so much labour, would seem monstrous and degrading. Personally, he did not care a fig about it if Silviane chose to make an exhibition of herself, well, he would be there to see; but the "Globe" was sacred.

Disconcerted and almost tearful, Chaigneux nevertheless renewed his attempt. "Come, my dear colleague," said he, "pray make a little effort for my sake. If the article isn't inserted, Duvillard will think that it is my fault. And you know that I really need his help. My eldest daughter's marriage has again been postponed, and I hardly know where to turn." Then perceiving that his own misfortunes in no wise touched Fonsegue, he added: "And do it for your own sake, my dear colleague, your own sake. For when all is said Duvillard knows what is in the article, and it is precisely because it is so favourable a one that he wishes to see it in the 'Globe.' Think it over; if the article isn't published, he will certainly turn his back on you."

For a moment Fonsegue remained silent. Was he thinking of the colossal Trans-Saharan enterprise? Was he reflecting that it would be hard to quarrel at such a moment and miss his own share in the coming distribution of millions among faithful friends? Perhaps so; however, the idea that it would be more prudent to await developments gained the day with him. "No, no," he said, "I can't, it's a matter of conscience."

In the mean time congratulations were still being tendered to the newly wedded couple. It seemed as if all Paris were passing through the sacristy; there were ever the same smiles and the same hand shakes. Gerard, Camille and their relatives, however weary they might feel, were forced to retain an air of delight while they stood there against the wall, pent up by the crowd. The heat was now becoming unbearable, and a cloud of dust arose as when some big flock goes by.

All at once little Princess de Harn, who had hitherto lingered nobody knew where, sprang out of the throng, flung her arms around Camille, kissed even Eve, and then kept Gerard's hand in her own while paying him extraordinary compliments. Then, on perceiving Hyacinthe, she took possession of him and carried him off into a corner. "I say," she exclaimed, "I have a favour to ask you."

The young man was wonderfully silent that day. His sister's wedding seemed to him a contemptible ceremony, the most vulgar that one could imagine. So here, thought he, was another pair accepting the horrid sexual law by which the absurdity of the world was perpetuated! For his part, he had decided that he would witness the proceedings in rigid silence, with a haughty air of disapproval. When Rosemonde spoke to him, he looked at her rather nervously, for he was glad that she had forsaken him for Duthil, and feared some fresh caprice on her part. At last, opening his mouth for the first time that day, he replied: "Oh, as a friend, you know, I will grant you whatever favour you like."

Forthwith the Princess explained that she would surely die if she did not witness the debut of her dear friend Silviane, of whom she had become such a passionate admirer. So she begged the young man to prevail on his father to give her a seat in his box, as she knew that one was left there.

Hyacinthe smiled. "Oh, willingly, my dear," said he; "I'll warn papa, there will be a seat for you."

Then, as the procession of guests at last drew to an end and the vestry began to empty, the bridal pair and their relatives were able to go off through the chattering throng, which still lingered about to bow to them and scrutinise them once more.

Gerard and Camille were to leave for an estate which Duvillard possessed in Normandy, directly after lunch. This repast, served at the princely mansion of the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, provided an opportunity for fresh display. The dining-room on the first floor had been transformed into a buffet, where reigned the greatest abundance and the most wonderful sumptuousness. Quite a reception too was held in the drawing-rooms, the large red salon, the little blue and silver salon and all the others, whose doors stood wide open. Although it had been arranged that only family friends should be invited, there were quite three hundred people present. The ministers had excused themselves, alleging that the weighty cares of public business required their presence elsewhere. But the magistrates, the deputies and the leading journalists who had attended the wedding were again assembled together. And in that throng of hungry folks, longing for some of the spoils of Duvillard's new venture, the people who felt most out of their element were Madame de Quinsac's few guests, whom General de Bozonnet and the Marquis de Morigny had seated on a sofa in the large red salon, which they did not quit.

Eve, who for her part felt quite overcome, both her moral and physical strength being exhausted, had seated herself in the little blue and silver drawing-room, which, with her passion for flowers, she had transformed into an arbour of roses. She would have fallen had she remained standing, the very floor had seemed to sink beneath her feet. Nevertheless, whenever a guest approached her she managed to force a smile, and appear beautiful and charming. Unlooked-for help at last came to her in the person of Monseigneur Martha, who had graciously honoured the lunch with his presence. He took an armchair near her, and began to talk to her in his amiable, caressing way. He was doubtless well aware of the frightful anguish which wrung the poor woman's heart, for he showed himself quite fatherly, eager to comfort her. She, however, talked on like some inconsolable widow bent on renouncing the world for God, who alone could bring her peace. Then, as the conversation turned on the Asylum for the Invalids of Labour, she declared that she was resolved to take her presidency very seriously, and, in fact, would exclusively devote herself to it, in the future.

"And as we are speaking of this, Monseigneur," said she, "I would even ask you to give me some advice.... I shall need somebody to help me, and I thought of securing the services of a priest whom I much admire, Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre Froment."

At this the Bishop became grave and embarrassed; but Princess Rosemonde, who was passing by with Duthil, had overheard the Baroness, and drawing near with her wonted impetuosity, she exclaimed: "Abbe Pierre Froment! Oh! I forgot to tell you, my dear, that I met him going about in jacket and trousers! And I've been told too that he cycles in the Bois with some creature or other. Isn't it true, Duthil, that we met him?"

The deputy bowed and smiled, whilst Eve clasped her hands in amazement. "Is it possible! A priest who was all charitable fervour, who had the faith and passion of an apostle!"

Thereupon Monseigneur intervened: "Yes, yes, great sorrows occasionally fall upon the Church. I heard of the madness of the unhappy man you speak of. I even thought it my duty to write to him, but he left my letter unanswered. I should so much have liked to stifle such a scandal! But there are abominable forces which we cannot always overcome; and so a day or two ago the archbishop was obliged to put him under interdict.... You must choose somebody else, madame."

It was quite a disaster. Eve gazed at Rosemonde and Duthil, without daring to ask them for particulars, but wondering what creature could have been so audacious as to turn a priest from the path of duty. She must assuredly be some shameless demented woman! And it seemed to Eve as if this crime gave a finishing touch to her own misfortune. With a wave of the arm, which took in all the luxury around her, the roses steeping her in perfume, and the crush of guests around the buffet, she murmured: "Ah! decidedly there's nothing but corruption left; one can no longer rely on anybody!"

Whilst this was going on, Camille happened to be alone in her own room getting ready to leave the house with Gerard. And all at once her brother Hyacinthe joined her there. "Ah! it's you, youngster!" she exclaimed. "Well, make haste if you want to kiss me, for I'm off now, thank goodness!"

He kissed her as she suggested, and then in a doctoral way replied: "I thought you had more self-command. The delight you have been showing all this morning quite disgusts me."

A quiet glance of contempt was her only answer. However, he continued: "You know very well that she'll take your Gerard from you again, directly you come back to Paris."

At this Camille's cheeks turned white and her eyes flared. She stepped towards her brother with clenched fists: "She! you say that she will take him from me!"

The "she" they referred to was their own mother.

"Listen, my boy! I'll kill her first!" continued Camille. "Ah, no! she needn't hope for that. I shall know how to keep the man that belongs to me.... And as for you, keep your spite to yourself, for I know you, remember; you are a mere child and a fool!"

He recoiled as if a viper were rearing its sharp, slender black head before him; and having always feared her, he thought it best to beat a retreat.

While the last guests were rushing upon the buffet and finishing the pillage there, the bridal pair took their leave, before driving off to the railway station. General de Bozonnet had joined a group in order to vent his usual complaints about compulsory military service, and the Marquis de Morigny was obliged to fetch him at the moment when the Countess de Quinsac was kissing her son and daughter-in-law. The old lady trembled with so much emotion that the Marquis respectfully ventured to sustain her. Meantime, Hyacinthe had started in search of his father, and at last found him near a window with the tottering Chaigneux, whom he was violently upbraiding, for Fonsegue's conscientious scruples had put him in a fury. Indeed, if Massot's article should not be inserted in the "Globe," Silviane might lay all the blame upon him, the Baron, and wreak further punishment upon him. However, upon being summoned by his son he had to don his triumphal air once more, kiss his daughter on the forehead, shake hands with his son-in-law, jest and wish them both a pleasant journey. Then Eve, near whom Monseigneur Martha had remained, smiling, in her turn had to say farewell. In this she evinced touching bravery; her determination to remain beautiful and charming until the very end lent her sufficient strength to show herself both gay and motherly.

She took hold of the slightly quivering hand which Gerard proffered with some embarrassment, and ventured to retain it for a moment in her own, in a good-hearted, affectionate way, instinct with all the heroism of renunciation. "Good by, Gerard," she said, "keep in good health, be happy." Then turning to Camille she kissed her on both cheeks, while Monseigneur Martha sat looking at them with an air of indulgent sympathy. They wished each other "Au revoir," but their voices trembled, and their eyes in meeting gleamed like swords; in the same way as beneath the kisses they had exchanged they had felt each other's teeth. Ah! how it enraged Camille to see her mother still so beautiful and fascinating in spite of age and grief! And for Eve how great the torture of beholding her daughter's youth, that youth which had overcome her, and was for ever wresting love from within her reach! No forgiveness was possible between them; they would still hate one another even in the family tomb, where some day they would sleep side by side.

All the same, that evening Baroness Duvillard excused herself from attending the performance of "Polyeucte" at the Comedie Francaise. She felt very tired and wished to go to bed early, said she. As a matter of fact she wept on her pillow all night long. Thus the Baron's stage-box on the first balcony tier contained only himself, Hyacinthe, Duthil, and little Princess de Harn.

At nine o'clock there was a full house, one of the brilliant chattering houses peculiar to great dramatic solemnities. All the society people who had marched through the sacristy of the Madeleine that morning were now assembled at the theatre, again feverish with curiosity, and on the lookout for the unexpected. One recognised the same faces and the sane smiles; the women acknowledged one another's presence with little signs of intelligence, the men understood each other at a word, a gesture. One and all had kept the appointment, the ladies with bared shoulders, the gentlemen with flowers in their button-holes. Fonsegue occupied the "Globe's" box, with two friendly families. Little Massot had his customary seat in the stalls. Amadieu, who was a faithful patron of the Comedie, was also to be seen there, as well as General de Bozonnet and Public Prosecutor Lehmann. The man who was most looked at, however, on account of his scandalous article that morning, was Sagnier, the terrible Sagnier, looking bloated and apoplectical. Then there was Chaigneux, who had kept merely a modest bracket-seat for himself, and who scoured the passages, and climbed to every tier, for the last time preaching enthusiasm. Finally, the two ministers Monferrand and Dauvergne appeared in the box facing Duvillard's; whereupon many knowing smiles were exchanged, for everybody was aware that these personages had come to help on the success of the debutante.

On the latter point there had still been unfavourable rumours only the previous day. Sagnier had declared that the debut of such a notorious harlot as Silviane at the Comedie Francaise, in such a part too as that of "Pauline," which was one of so much moral loftiness, could only be regarded as an impudent insult to public decency. The whole press, moreover, had long been up in arms against the young woman's extraordinary caprice. But then the affair had been talked of for six months past, so that Paris had grown used to the idea of seeing Silviane at the Comedie. And now it flocked thither with the one idea of being entertained. Before the curtain rose one could tell by the very atmosphere of the house that the audience was a jovial, good-humoured one, bent on enjoying itself, and ready to applaud should it find itself at all pleased.

The performance really proved extraordinary. When Silviane, chastely robed, made her appearance in the first act, the house was quite astonished by her virginal face, her innocent-looking mouth, and her eyes beaming with immaculate candour. Then, although the manner in which she had understood her part at first amazed people, it ended by charming them. From the moment of confiding in "Stratonice," from the moment of relating her dream, she turned "Pauline" into a soaring mystical creature, some saint, as it were, such as one sees in stained-glass windows, carried along by a Wagnerian Brunhilda riding the clouds. It was a thoroughly ridiculous conception of the part, contrary to reason and truth alike. Still, it only seemed to interest people the more, partly on account of mysticism being the fashion, and partly on account of the contrast between Silviane's assumed candour and real depravity. Her success increased from act to act, and some slight hissing which was attributed to Sagnier only helped to make the victory more complete. Monferrand and Dauvergne, as the newspapers afterwards related, gave the signal for applause; and the whole house joined in it, partly from amusement and partly perhaps in a spirit of irony.

During the interval between the fourth and fifth acts there was quite a procession of visitors to Duvillard's box, where the greatest excitement prevailed. Duthil, however, after absenting himself for a moment, came back to say: "You remember our influential critic, the one whom I brought to dinner at the Cafe Anglais? Well, he's repeating to everybody that 'Pauline' is merely a little bourgeoise, and is not transformed by the heavenly grace until the very finish of the piece. To turn her into a holy virgin from the outset simply kills the part, says he."

"Pooh!" repeated Duvillard, "let him argue if he likes, it will be all the more advertisement.... The important point is to get Massot's article inserted in the 'Globe' to-morrow morning."

On this point, unfortunately, the news was by no means good. Chaigneux, who had gone in search of Fonsegue, declared that the latter still hesitated in the matter in spite of Silviane's success, which he declared to be ridiculous. Thereupon, the Baron became quite angry. "Go and tell Fonsegue," he exclaimed, "that I insist on it, and that I shall remember what he does."

Meantime Princess Rosemonde was becoming quite delirious with enthusiasm. "My dear Hyacinthe," she pleaded, "please take me to Silviane's dressing-room; I can't wait, I really must go and kiss her."

"But we'll all go!" cried Duvillard, who heard her entreaty.

The passages were crowded, and there were people even on the stage. Moreover, when the party reached the door of Silviane's dressing-room, they found it shut. When the Baron knocked at it, a dresser replied that madame begged the gentlemen to wait a moment.

"Oh! a woman may surely go in," replied Rosemonde, hastily slipping through the doorway. "And you may come, Hyacinthe," she added; "there can be no objection to you."

Silviane was very hot, and a dresser was wiping her perspiring shoulders when Rosemonde darted forward and kissed her. Then they chatted together amidst the heat and glare from the gas and the intoxicating perfumes of all the flowers which were heaped up in the little room. Finally, Hyacinthe heard them promise to see one another after the performance, Silviane even inviting Rosemonde to drink a cup of tea with her at her house. At this the young man smiled complacently, and said to the actress: "Your carriage is waiting for you at the corner of the Rue Montpensier, is it not? Well, I'll take the Princess to it. That will be the simpler plan, you can both go off together!"

"Oh! how good of you," cried Rosemonde; "it's agreed."

Just then the door was opened, and the men, being admitted, began to pour forth their congratulations. However, they had to regain their seats in all haste so as to witness the fifth act. This proved quite a triumph, the whole house bursting into applause when Silviane spoke the famous line, "I see, I know, I believe, I am undeceived," with the rapturous enthusiasm of a holy martyr ascending to heaven. Nothing could have been more soul-like, it was said. And so when the performers were called before the curtain, Paris bestowed an ovation on that virgin of the stage, who, as Sagnier put it, knew so well how to act depravity at home.

Accompanied by Duthil, Duvillard at once went behind the scenes in order to fetch Silviane, while Hyacinthe escorted Rosemonde to the brougham waiting at the corner of the Rue Montpensier. Having helped her into it, the young man stood by, waiting. And he seemed to grow quite merry when his father came up with Silviane, and was stopped by her, just as, in his turn, he wished to get into the carriage.

"There's no room for you, my dear fellow," said she. "I've a friend with me."

Rosemonde's little smiling face then peered forth from the depths of the brougham. And the Baron remained there open-mouthed while the vehicle swiftly carried the two women away!

"Well, what would you have, my dear fellow?" said Hyacinthe, by way of explanation to Duthil, who also seemed somewhat amazed by what had happened. "Rosemonde was worrying my life out, and so I got rid of her by packing her off with Silviane."

Duvillard was still standing on the pavement and still looking dazed when Chaigneux, who was going home quite tired out, recognised him, and came up to say that Fonsegue had thought the matter over, and that Massot's article would be duly inserted. In the passages, too, there had been a deal of talk about the famous Trans-Saharan project.

Then Hyacinthe led his father away, trying to comfort him like a sensible friend, who regarded woman as a base and impure creature. "Let's go home to bed," said he. "As that article is to appear, you can take it to her to-morrow. She will see you, sure enough."

Thereupon they lighted cigars, and now and again exchanging a few words, took their way up the Avenue de l'Opera, which at that hour was deserted and dismal. Meantime, above the slumbering houses of Paris the breeze wafted a prolonged sigh, the plaint, as it were, of an expiring world.

III. THE GOAL OF LABOUR

EVER since the execution of Salvat, Guillaume had become extremely taciturn. He seemed worried and absent-minded. He would work for hours at the manufacture of that dangerous powder of which he alone knew the formula, and the preparation of which was such a delicate matter that he would allow none to assist him. Then, at other times he would go off, and return tired out by some long solitary ramble. He remained very gentle at home, and strove to smile there. But whenever anybody spoke to him he started as if suddenly called back from dreamland.

Pierre imagined his brother had relied too much upon his powers of renunciation, and found the loss of Marie unbearable. Was it not some thought of her that haunted him now that the date fixed for the marriage drew nearer and nearer? One evening, therefore, Pierre ventured to speak out, again offering to leave the house and disappear.

But at the first words he uttered Guillaume stopped him, and affectionately replied: "Marie? Oh! I love her, I love her too well to regret what I have done. No, no! you only bring me happiness, I derive all my strength and courage from you now that I know you are both happy. ... And I assure you that you are mistaken, there is nothing at all the matter with me; my work absorbs me, perhaps, but that is all."

That same evening he managed to cast his gloom aside, and displayed delightful gaiety. During dinner he inquired if the upholsterer would soon call to arrange the two little rooms which Marie was to occupy with her husband over the workroom. The young woman, who since her marriage with Pierre had been decided had remained waiting with smiling patience, thereupon told Guillaume what it was she desired—first some hangings of red cotton stuff, then some polished pine furniture which would enable her to imagine she was in the country, and finally a carpet on the floor, because a carpet seemed to her the height of luxury. She laughed as she spoke, and Guillaume laughed with her in a gay and fatherly way. His good spirits brought much relief to Pierre, who concluded that he must have been mistaken in his surmises.

On the very morrow, however, Guillaume relapsed into a dreamy state. And so disquietude again came upon Pierre, particularly when he noticed that Mere-Grand also seemed to be unusually grave and silent. Not daring to address her, he tried to extract some information from his nephews, but neither Thomas nor Francois nor Antoine knew anything. Each of them quietly devoted his time to his work, respecting and worshipping his father, but never questioning him about his plans or enterprises. Whatever he might choose to do could only be right and good; and they, his sons, were ready to do the same and help him at the very first call, without pausing to inquire into his purpose. It was plain, however, that he kept them apart from anything at all perilous, that he retained all responsibility for himself, and that Mere-Grand alone was his confidante, the one whom he consulted and to whom he perhaps listened. Pierre therefore renounced his hope of learning anything from the sons, and directed his attention to the old lady, whose rigid gravity worried him the more as she and Guillaume frequently had private chats in the room she occupied upstairs. They shut themselves up there all alone, and remained together for hours without the faintest sound coming from the seemingly lifeless chamber.

One day, however, Pierre caught sight of Guillaume as he came out of it, carrying a little valise which appeared to be very heavy. And Pierre thereupon remembered both his brother's powder, one pound weight of which would have sufficed to destroy a cathedral, and the destructive engine which he had purposed bestowing upon France in order that she might be victorious over all other nations, and become the one great initiatory and liberative power. Pierre remembered too that the only person besides himself who knew his brother's secret was Mere-Grand, who, at the time when Guillaume was fearing some perquisition on the part of the police, had long slept upon the cartridges of the terrible explosive. But now why was Guillaume removing all the powder which he had been preparing for some time past? As this question occurred to Pierre, a sudden suspicion, a vague dread, came upon him, and gave him strength to ask his brother: "Have you reason to fear anything, since you won't keep things here? If they embarrass you, they can all be deposited at my house, nobody will make a search there."

Guillaume, whom these words astonished, gazed at Pierre fixedly, and then replied: "Yes, I have learnt that the arrests and perquisitions have begun afresh since that poor devil was guillotined; for they are in terror at the thought that some despairing fellow may avenge him. Moreover, it is hardly prudent to keep destructive agents of such great power here. I prefer to deposit them in a safe place. But not at Neuilly—oh! no indeed! they are not a present for you, brother." Guillaume spoke with outward calmness; and if he had started with surprise at the first moment, it had been scarcely perceptible.

"So everything is ready?" Pierre resumed. "You will soon be handing your engine of destruction over to the Minister of War, I presume?"

A gleam of hesitation appeared in the depths of Guillaume's eyes, and he was for a moment about to tell a falsehood. However, he ended by replying "No, I have renounced that intention. I have another idea."

He spoke these last words with so much energy and decision that Pierre did not dare to question him further, to ask him, for instance, what that other idea might be. From that moment, however, he quivered with anxious expectancy. From hour to hour Mere-Grand's lofty silence and Guillaume's rapt, energetic face seemed to tell him that some huge and terrifying scheme had come into being, and was growing and threatening the whole of Paris.

One afternoon, just as Thomas was about to repair to the Grandidier works, some one came to Guillaume's with the news that old Toussaint, the workman, had been stricken with a fresh attack of paralysis. Thomas thereupon decided that he would call upon the poor fellow on his way, for he held him in esteem and wished to ascertain if he could render him any help. Pierre expressed a desire to accompany his nephew, and they started off together about four o'clock.

On entering the one room which the Toussaints occupied, the room where they ate and slept, the visitors found the mechanician seated on a low chair near the table. He looked half dead, as if struck by lightning. It was a case of hemiplegia, which had paralysed the whole of his right side, his right leg and right arm, and had also spread to his face in such wise that he could no longer speak. The only sound he could raise was an incomprehensible guttural grunt. His mouth was drawn to the right, and his once round, good-natured-looking face, with tanned skin and bright eyes, had been twisted into a frightful mask of anguish. At fifty years of age, the unhappy man was utterly done for. His unkempt beard was as white as that of an octogenarian, and his knotty limbs, preyed upon by toil, were henceforth dead. Only his eyes remained alive, and they travelled around the room, going from one to another. By his side, eager to do what she could for him, was his wife, who remained stout even when she had little to eat, and still showed herself active and clear-headed, however great her misfortunes.

"It's a friendly visit, Toussaint," said she. "It's Monsieur Thomas who has come to see you with Monsieur l'Abbe." Then quietly correcting herself she added: "With Monsieur Pierre, his uncle. You see that you are not yet forsaken."

Toussaint wished to speak, but his fruitless efforts only brought two big tears to his eyes. Then he gazed at his visitors with an expression of indescribable woe, his jaws trembling convulsively.

"Don't put yourself out," repeated his wife. "The doctor told you that it would do you no good."

At the moment of entering the room, Pierre had already noticed two persons who had risen from their chairs and drawn somewhat on one side. And now to his great surprise he recognised that they were Madame Theodore and Celine, who were both decently clad, and looked as if they led a life of comfort. On hearing of Toussaint's misfortune they had come to see him, like good-hearted creatures, who, on their own side, had experienced the most cruel suffering. Pierre, on noticing that they now seemed to be beyond dire want, remembered what he had heard of the wonderful sympathy lavished on the child after her father's execution, the many presents and donations offered her, and the generous proposals that had been made to adopt her. These last had ended in her being adopted by a former friend of Salvat, who had sent her to school again, pending the time when she might be apprenticed to some trade, while, on the other hand, Madame Theodore had been placed as a nurse in a convalescent home. In such wise both had been saved.

When Pierre drew near to little Celine in order to kiss her, Madame Theodore told her to thank Monsieur l'Abbe—for so she still respectfully called him—for all that he had previously done for her. "It was you who brought us happiness, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she. "And that's a thing one can never forget. I'm always telling Celine to remember you in her prayers."

"And so, my child, you are now going to school again," said Pierre.

"Oh yes, Monsieur l'Abbe, and I'm well pleased at it. Besides, we no longer lack anything." Then, however, sudden emotion came over the girl, and she stammered with a sob: "Ah! if poor papa could only see us!"

Madame Theodore, meanwhile, had begun to take leave of Madame Toussaint. "Well, good by, we must go," said she. "What has happened to you is very sad, and we wanted to tell you how much it grieved us. The worry is that when misfortune falls on one, courage isn't enough to set things right.. .. Celine, come and kiss your uncle.... My poor brother, I hope you'll get back the use of your legs as soon as possible."

They kissed the paralysed man on the cheeks, and then went off. Toussaint had looked at them with his keen and still intelligent eyes, as if he longed to participate in the life and activity into which they were returning. And a jealous thought came to his wife, who usually was so placid and good-natured. "Ah! my poor old man!" said she, after propping him up with a pillow, "those two are luckier than we are. Everything succeeds with them since that madman, Salvat, had his head cut off. They're provided for. They've plenty of bread on the shelf."

Then, turning towards Pierre and Thomas, she continued: "We others are done for, you know, we're down in the mud, with no hope of getting out of it. But what would you have? My poor husband hasn't been guillotined, he's done nothing but work his whole life long; and now, you see, that's the end of him, he's like some old animal, no longer good for anything."

Having made her visitors sit down she next answered their compassionate questions. The doctor had called twice already, and had promised to restore the unhappy man's power of speech, and perhaps enable him to crawl round the room with the help of a stick. But as for ever being able to resume real work that must not be expected. And so what was the use of living on? Toussaint's eyes plainly declared that he would much rather die at once. When a workman can no longer work and no longer provide for his wife he is ripe for the grave.

"Savings indeed!" Madame Toussaint resumed. "There are folks who ask if we have any savings.... Well, we had nearly a thousand francs in the Savings Bank when Toussaint had his first attack. And some people don't know what a lot of prudence one needs to put by such a sum; for, after all, we're not savages, we have to allow ourselves a little enjoyment now and then, a good dish and a good bottle of wine.... Well, what with five months of enforced idleness, and the medicines, and the underdone meat that was ordered, we got to the end of our thousand francs; and now that it's all begun again we're not likely to taste any more bottled wine or roast mutton."

Fond of good cheer as she had always been, this cry, far more than the tears she was forcing back, revealed how much the future terrified her. She was there erect and brave in spite of everything; but what a downfall if she were no longer able to keep her room tidy, stew a piece of veal on Sundays, and gossip with the neighbours while awaiting her husband's return from work! Why, they might just as well be thrown into the gutter and carried off in the scavenger's cart.

However, Thomas intervened: "Isn't there an Asylum for the Invalids of Labour, and couldn't your husband get admitted to it?" he asked. "It seems to me that is just the place for him."

"Oh dear, no," the woman answered. "People spoke to me of that place before, and I got particulars of it. They don't take sick people there. When you call they tell you that there are hospitals for those who are ill."

With a wave of his hand Pierre confirmed her statement: it was useless to apply in that direction. He could again see himself scouring Paris, hurrying from the Lady President, Baroness Duvillard, to Fonsegue, the General Manager, and only securing a bed for Laveuve when the unhappy man was dead.

However, at that moment an infant was heard wailing, and to the amazement of both visitors Madame Toussaint entered the little closet where her son Charles had so long slept, and came out of it carrying a child, who looked scarcely twenty months old. "Well, yes," she explained, "this is Charles's boy. He was sleeping there in his father's old bed, and now you hear him, he's woke up.... You see, only last Wednesday, the day before Toussaint had his stroke, I went to fetch the little one at the nurse's at St. Denis, because she had threatened to cast him adrift since Charles had got into bad habits, and no longer paid her. I said to myself at the time that work was looking up, and that my husband and I would always be able to provide for a little mouth like that.... But just afterwards everything collapsed! At the same time, as the child's here now I can't go and leave him in the street."

While speaking in this fashion she walked to and fro, rocking the baby in her arms. And naturally enough she reverted to Charles's folly with the girl, who had run away, leaving that infant behind her. Things might not have been so very bad if Charles had still worked as steadily as he had done before he went soldiering. In those days he had never lost an hour, and had always brought all his pay home! But he had come back from the army with much less taste for work. He argued, and had ideas of his own. He certainly hadn't yet come to bomb-throwing like that madman Salvat, but he spent half his time with Socialists and Anarchists, who put his brain in a muddle. It was a real pity to see such a strong, good-hearted young fellow turning out badly like that. But it was said in the neighbourhood that many another was inclined the same way; that the best and most intelligent of the younger men felt tired of want and unremunerative labour, and would end by knocking everything to pieces rather than go on toiling with no certainty of food in their old age.

"Ah! yes," continued Madame Toussaint, "the sons are not like the fathers were. These fine fellows won't be as patient as my poor husband has been, letting hard work wear him away till he's become the sorry thing you see there.... Do you know what Charles said the other evening when he found his father on that chair, crippled like that, and unable to speak? Why, he shouted to him that he'd been a stupid jackass all his life, working himself to death for those bourgeois, who now wouldn't bring him so much as a glass of water. Then, as he none the less has a good heart, he began to cry his eyes out."

The baby was no longer wailing, still the good woman continued walking to and fro, rocking it in her arms and pressing it to her affectionate heart. Her son Charles could do no more for them, she said; perhaps he might be able to give them a five-franc piece now and again, but even that wasn't certain. It was of no use for her to go back to her old calling as a seamstress, she had lost all practice of it. And it would even be difficult for her to earn anything as charwoman, for she had that infant on her hands as well as her infirm husband—a big child, whom she would have to wash and feed. And so what would become of the three of them? She couldn't tell; but it made her shudder, however brave and motherly she tried to be.

For their part, Pierre and Thomas quivered with compassion, particularly when they saw big tears coursing down the cheeks of the wretched, stricken Toussaint, as he sat quite motionless in that little and still cleanly home of toil and want. The poor man had listened to his wife, and he looked at her and at the infant now sleeping in her arms. Voiceless, unable to cry his woe aloud, he experienced the most awful anguish. What dupery his long life of labour had been! how frightfully unjust it was that all his efforts should end in such sufferings! how exasperating it was to feel himself powerless, and to see those whom he loved and who were as innocent as himself suffer and die by reason of his own suffering and death! Ah! poor old man, cripple that he was, ending like some beast of burden that has foundered by the roadside—that goal of labour! And it was all so revolting and so monstrous that he tried to put it into words, and his desperate grief ended in a frightful, raucous grunt.

"Be quiet, don't do yourself harm!" concluded Madame Toussaint. "Things are like that, and there's no mending them."

Then she went to put the child to bed again, and on her return, just as Thomas and Pierre were about to speak to her of Toussaint's employer, M. Grandidier, a fresh visitor arrived. Thereupon the others decided to wait.

The new comer was Madame Chretiennot, Toussaint's other sister, eighteen years younger than himself. Her husband, the little clerk, had compelled her to break off almost all intercourse with her relatives, as he felt ashamed of them; nevertheless, having heard of her brother's misfortune, she had very properly come to condole with him. She wore a gown of cheap flimsy silk, and a hat trimmed with red poppies, which she had freshened up three times already; but in spite of this display her appearance bespoke penury, and she did her best to hide her feet on account of the shabbiness of her boots. Moreover, she was no longer the beautiful Hortense. Since a recent miscarriage, all trace of her good looks had disappeared.

The lamentable appearance of her brother and the bareness of that home of suffering chilled her directly she crossed the threshold. And as soon as she had kissed Toussaint, and said how sorry she was to find him in such a condition, she began to lament her own fate, and recount her troubles, for fear lest she should be asked for any help.

"Ah! my dear," she said to her sister-in-law, "you are certainly much to be pitied! But if you only knew! We all have our troubles. Thus in my case, obliged as I am to dress fairly well on account of my husband's position, I have more trouble than you can imagine in making both ends meet. One can't go far on a salary of three thousand francs a year, when one has to pay seven hundred francs' rent out of it. You will perhaps say that we might lodge ourselves in a more modest way; but we can't, my dear, I must have a salon on account of the visits I receive. So just count!... Then there are my two girls. I've had to send them to school; Lucienne has begun to learn the piano and Marcelle has some taste for drawing.... By the way, I would have brought them with me, but I feared it would upset them too much. You will excuse me, won't you?"

Then she spoke of all the worries which she had had with her husband on account of Salvat's ignominious death. Chretiennot, vain, quarrelsome little fellow that he was, felt exasperated at now having a guillotine in his wife's family. And he had lately begun to treat the unfortunate woman most harshly, charging her with having brought about all their troubles, and even rendering her responsible for his own mediocrity, embittered as he was more and more each day by a confined life of office work. On some evenings they had downright quarrels; she stood up for herself, and related that when she was at the confectionery shop in the Rue des Martyrs she could have married a doctor had she only chosen, for the doctor found her quite pretty enough. Now, however, she was becoming plainer and plainer, and her husband felt that he was condemned to everlasting penury; so that their life was becoming more and more dismal and quarrelsome, and as unbearable—despite the pride of being "gentleman" and "lady"—as was the destitution of the working classes.

"All the same, my dear," at last said Madame Toussaint, weary of her sister-in-law's endless narrative of worries, "you have had one piece of luck. You won't have the trouble of bringing up a third child, now."

"That's true," replied Hortense, with a sigh of relief. "How we should have managed, I don't know.... Still, I was very ill, and I'm far from being in good health now. The doctor says that I don't eat enough, and that I ought to have good food."

Then she rose for the purpose of giving her brother another kiss and taking her departure; for she feared a scene on her husband's part should he happen to come home and find her absent. Once on her feet, however, she lingered there a moment longer, saying that she also had just seen her sister, Madame Theodore, and little Celine, both of them comfortably clad and looking happy. And with a touch of jealousy she added: "Well, my husband contents himself with slaving away at his office every day. He'll never do anything to get his head cut off; and it's quite certain that nobody will think of leaving an income to Marcelle and Lucienne.... Well, good by, my dear, you must be brave, one must always hope that things will turn out for the best."

When she had gone off, Pierre and Thomas inquired if M. Grandidier had heard of Toussaint's misfortune and agreed to do anything for him. Madame Toussaint answered that he had so far made only a vague promise; and on learning this they resolved to speak to him as warmly as they could on behalf of the old mechanician, who had spent as many as five and twenty years at the works. The misfortune was that a scheme for establishing a friendly society, and even a pension fund, which had been launched before the crisis from which the works were now recovering, had collapsed through a number of obstacles and complications. Had things turned out otherwise, Thomas might have had a pittance assured him, even though he was unable to work. But under the circumstances the only hope for the poor stricken fellow lay in his employer's compassion, if not his sense of justice.

As the baby again began to cry, Madame Toussaint went to fetch it, and she was once more carrying it to and fro, when Thomas pressed her husband's sound hand between both his own. "We will come back," said the young man; "we won't forsake you, Toussaint. You know very well that people like you, for you've always been a good and steady workman. So rely on us, we will do all we can."

Then they left him tearful and overpowered, in that dismal room, while, up and down beside him, his wife rocked the squealing infant—that other luckless creature, who was now so heavy on the old folks' hands, and like them was fated to die of want and unjust toil.

Toil, manual toil, panting at every effort, this was what Pierre and Thomas once more found at the works. From the slender pipes above the roofs spurted rhythmical puffs of steam, which seemed like the very breath of all that labour. And in the work-shops one found a continuous rumbling, a whole army of men in motion, forging, filing, and piercing, amidst the spinning of leather gearing and the trembling of machinery. The day was ending with a final feverish effort to complete some task or other before the bell should ring for departure.

On inquiring for the master Thomas learnt that he had not been seen since dejeuner, which was such an unusual occurrence that the young man at once feared some terrible scene in the silent pavilion, whose shutters were ever closed upon Grandidier's unhappy wife—that mad but beautiful creature, whom he loved so passionately that he had never been willing to part from her. The pavilion could be seen from the little glazed work-shop which Thomas usually occupied, and as he and Pierre stood waiting there, it looked very peaceful and pleasant amidst the big lilac-bushes planted round about it. Surely, they thought, it ought to have been brightened by the gay gown of a young woman and the laughter of playful children. But all at once a loud, piercing shriek reached their ears, followed by howls and moans, like those of an animal that is being beaten or possibly slaughtered. Ah! those howls ringing out amidst all the stir of the toiling works, punctuated it seemed by the rhythmical puffing of the steam, accompanied too by the dull rumbling of the machinery! The receipts of the business had been doubling and doubling since the last stock-taking; there was increase of prosperity every month, the bad times were over, far behind. Grandidier was realising a large fortune with his famous bicycle for the million, the "Lisette"; and the approaching vogue of motor-cars also promised huge gains, should he again start making little motor-engines, as he meant to do, as soon as Thomas's long-projected motor should be perfected. But what was wealth when in that dismal pavilion, whose shutters were ever closed, those frightful shrieks continued, proclaiming some terrible drama, which all the stir and bustle of the prosperous works were unable to stifle?

Pierre and Thomas looked at one another, pale and quivering. And all at once, as the cries ceased and the pavilion sank into death-like silence once more, the latter said in an undertone: "She is usually very gentle, she will sometimes spend whole days sitting on a carpet like a little child. He is fond of her when she is like that; he lays her down and picks her up, caresses her and makes her laugh as if she were a baby. Ah! how dreadfully sad it is! When an attack comes upon her she gets frantic, tries to bite herself, and kill herself by throwing herself against the walls. And then he has to struggle with her, for no one else is allowed to touch her. He tries to restrain her, and holds her in his arms to calm her.... But how terrible it was just now! Did you hear? I do not think she has ever had such a frightful attack before."

For a quarter of an hour longer profound silence prevailed. Then Grandidier came out of the pavilion, bareheaded and still ghastly pale. Passing the little glazed work-shop on his way, he perceived Thomas and Pierre there, and at once came in. But he was obliged to lean against a bench like a man who is dazed, haunted by a nightmare. His good-natured, energetic face retained an expression of acute anguish; and his left ear was scratched and bleeding. However, he at once wished to talk, overcome his feelings, and return to his life of activity. "I am very pleased to see you, my dear Thomas," said he, "I have been thinking over what you told me about our little motor. We must go into the matter again."

Seeing how distracted he was, it occurred to the young man that some sudden diversion, such as the story of another's misfortunes, might perhaps draw him from his haunting thoughts. "Of course I am at your disposal," he replied; "but before talking of that matter I should like to tell you that we have just seen Toussaint, that poor old fellow who has been stricken with paralysis. His awful fate has quite distressed us. He is in the greatest destitution, forsaken as it were by the roadside, after all his years of labour."

Thomas dwelt upon the quarter of a century which the old workman had spent at the factory, and suggested that it would be only just to take some account of his long efforts, the years of his life which he had devoted to the establishment. And he asked that he might be assisted in the name both of equity and compassion.

"Ah! monsieur," Pierre in his turn ventured to say. "I should like to take you for an instant into that bare room, and show you that poor, aged, worn-out, stricken man, who no longer has even the power of speech left him to tell people his sufferings. There can be no greater wretchedness than to die in this fashion, despairing of all kindliness and justice."

Grandidier had listened to them in silence. But big tears had irresistibly filled his eyes, and when he spoke it was in a very low and tremulous voice: "The greatest wretchedness, who can tell what it is? Who can speak of it if he has not known the wretchedness of others? Yes, yes, it's sad undoubtedly that poor Toussaint should be reduced to that state at his age, not knowing even if he will have food to eat on the morrow. But I know sorrows that are just as crushing, abominations which poison one's life in a still greater degree.... Ah! yes, food indeed! To think that happiness will reign in the world when everybody has food to eat! What an idiotic hope!"

The whole grievous tragedy of his life was in the shudder which had come over him. To be the employer, the master, the man who is making money, who disposes of capital and is envied by his workmen, to own an establishment to which prosperity has returned, whose machinery coins gold, apparently leaving one no other trouble than that of pocketing one's profits; and yet at the same time to be the most wretched of men, to know no day exempt from anguish, to find each evening at one's hearth no other reward or prop than the most atrocious torture of the heart! Everything, even success, has to be paid for. And thus that triumpher, that money-maker, whose pile was growing larger at each successive inventory, was sobbing with bitter grief.

However, he showed himself kindly disposed towards Toussaint, and promised to assist him. As for a pension that was an idea which he could not entertain, as it was the negation of the wage-system such as it existed. He energetically defended his rights as an employer, repeating that the strain of competition would compel him to avail himself of them so long as the present system should endure. His part in it was to do good business in an honest way. However, he regretted that his men had never carried out the scheme of establishing a relief fund, and he said that he would do his best to induce them to take it in hand again.

Some colour had now come back to his checks; for on returning to the interests of his life of battle he felt his energy restored. He again reverted to the question of the little motor, and spoke of it for some time with Thomas, while Pierre waited, feeling quite upset. Ah! he thought, how universal was the thirst for happiness! Then, in spite of the many technical terms that were used he caught a little of what the others were saying. Small steam motors had been made at the works in former times; but they had not proved successes. In point of fact a new propelling force was needed. Electricity, though everyone foresaw its future triumph, was so far out of the question on account of the weight of the apparatus which its employment necessitated. So only petroleum remained, and the inconvenience attaching to its use was so great that victory and fortune would certainly rest with the manufacturer who should be able to replace it by some other hitherto unknown agent. In the discovery and adaptation of the latter lay the whole problem.

"Yes, I am eager about it now," at last exclaimed Grandidier in an animated way. "I allowed you to prosecute your experiments without troubling you with any inquisitive questions. But a solution is becoming imperative."

Thomas smiled: "Well, you must remain patient just a little longer," said he; "I believe that I am on the right road."

Then Grandidier shook hands with him and Pierre, and went off to make his usual round through his busy, bustling works, whilst near at hand, awaiting his return, stood the closed pavilion, where every evening he was fated to relapse into endless, incurable anguish.

The daylight was already waning when Pierre and Thomas, after re-ascending the height of Montmartre, walked towards the large work-shop which Jahan, the sculptor, had set up among the many sheds whose erection had been necessitated by the building of the Sacred Heart. There was here a stretch of ground littered with materials, an extraordinary chaos of building stone, beams and machinery; and pending the time when an army of navvies would come to set the whole place in order, one could see gaping trenches, rough flights of descending steps and fences, imperfectly closing doorways which conducted to the substructures of the basilica.

Halting in front of Jahan's work-shop, Thomas pointed to one of these doorways by which one could reach the foundation works. "Have you never had an idea of visiting the foundations?" he inquired of Pierre. "There's quite a city down there on which millions of money have been spent. They could only find firm soil at the very base of the height, and they had to excavate more than eighty shafts, fill them with concrete, and then rear their church on all those subterranean columns.... Yes, that is so. Of course the columns cannot be seen, but it is they who hold that insulting edifice aloft, right over Paris!"

Having drawn near to the fence, Pierre was looking at an open doorway beyond it, a sort of dark landing whence steps descended as if into the bowels of the earth. And he thought of those invisible columns of concrete, and of all the stubborn energy and desire for domination which had set and kept the edifice erect.

Thomas was at last obliged to call him. "Let us make haste," said he, "the twilight will soon be here. We shan't be able to see much."

They had arranged to meet Antoine at Jahan's, as the sculptor wished to show them a new model he had prepared. When they entered the work-shop they found the two assistants still working at the colossal angel which had been ordered for the basilica. Standing on a scaffolding they were rough-hewing its symmetrical wings, whilst Jahan, seated on a low chair, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his hands soiled with clay, was contemplating a figure some three feet high on which he had just been working.

"Ah! it's you," he exclaimed. "Antoine has been waiting more than half an hour for you. He's gone outside with Lise to see the sun set over Paris, I think. But they will soon be back."

Then he relapsed into silence, with his eyes fixed on his work.

This was a bare, erect, lofty female figure, of such august majesty, so simple were its lines, that it suggested something gigantic. The figure's abundant, outspread hair suggested rays around its face, which beamed with sovereign beauty like the sun. And its only gesture was one of offer and of greeting; its arms were thrown slightly forward, and its hands were open for the grasp of all mankind.

Still lingering in his dream Jahan began to speak slowly: "You remember that I wanted a pendant for my figure of Fecundity. I had modelled a Charity, but it pleased me so little and seemed so commonplace that I let the clay dry and spoil.... And then the idea of a figure of Justice came to me. But not a gowned figure with the sword and the scales! That wasn't the Justice that inspired me. What haunted my mind was the other Justice, the one that the lowly and the sufferers await, the one who alone can some day set a little order and happiness among us. And I pictured her like that, quite bare, quite simple, and very lofty. She is the sun as it were, a sun all beauty, harmony and strength; for justice is only to be found in the sun which shines in the heavens for one and all, and bestows on poor and rich alike its magnificence and light and warmth, which are the source of all life. And so my figure, you see, has her hands outstretched as if she were offering herself to all mankind, greeting it and granting it the gift of eternal life in eternal beauty. Ah! to be beautiful and strong and just, one's whole dream lies in that."

Jahan relighted his pipe and burst into a merry laugh. "Well, I think the good woman carries herself upright.... What do you fellows say?"

His visitors highly praised his work. Pierre for his part was much affected at finding in this artistic conception the very idea that he had so long been revolving in his mind—the idea of an era of Justice rising from the ruins of the world, which Charity after centuries of trial had failed to save.

Then the sculptor gaily explained that he had prepared his model there instead of at home, in order to console himself a little for his big dummy of an angel, the prescribed triteness of which disgusted him. Some fresh objections had been raised with respect to the folds of the robe, which gave some prominence to the thighs, and in the end he had been compelled to modify all of the drapery.

"Oh! it's just as they like!" he cried; "it's no work of mine, you know; it's simply an order which I'm executing just as a mason builds a wall. There's no religious art left, it has been killed by stupidity and disbelief. Ah! if social or human art could only revive, how glorious to be one of the first to bear the tidings!"

Then he paused. Where could the youngsters, Antoine and Lise, have got to, he wondered. He threw the door wide open, and, a little distance away, among the materials littering the waste ground, one could see Antoine's tall figure and Lise's short slender form standing out against the immensity of Paris, which was all golden amidst the sun's farewell. The young man's strong arm supported Lise, who with this help walked beside him without feeling any fatigue. Slender and graceful, like a girl blossoming into womanhood, she raised her eyes to his with a smile of infinite gratitude, which proclaimed that she belonged to him for evermore.

"Ah! they are coming back," said Jahan. "The miracle is now complete, you know. I'm delighted at it. I did not know what to do with her; I had even renounced all attempts to teach her to read; I left her for days together in a corner, infirm and tongue-tied like a lack-wit.... But your brother came and took her in hand somehow or other. She listened to him and understood him, and began to read and write with him, and grow intelligent and gay. Then, as her limbs still gained no suppleness, and she remained infirm, ailing and puny, he began by carrying her here, and then helped her to walk in such wise that she can now do so by herself. In a few weeks' time she has positively grown and become quite charming. Yes, I assure you, it is second birth, real creation. Just look at them!"

Antoine and Lise were still slowly approaching. The evening breeze which rose from the great city, where all was yet heat and sunshine, brought them a bath of life. If the young man had chosen that spot, with its splendid horizon, open to the full air which wafted all the germs of life, it was doubtless because he felt that nowhere else could he instil more vitality, more soul, more strength into her. And love had been created by love. He had found her asleep, benumbed, without power of motion or intellect, and he had awakened her, kindled life in her, loved her, that he might be loved by her in return. She was his work, she was part of himself.

"So you no longer feel tired, little one?" said Jahan.

She smiled divinely. "Oh! no, it's so pleasant, so beautiful, to walk straight on like this.... All I desire is to go on for ever and ever with Antoine."

The others laughed, and Jahan exclaimed in his good-natured way: "Let us hope that he won't take you so far. You've reached your destination now, and I shan't be the one to prevent you from being happy."

Antoine was already standing before the figure of Justice, to which the falling twilight seemed to impart a quiver of life. "Oh! how divinely simple, how divinely beautiful!" said he.

For his own part he had lately finished a new wood engraving, which depicted Lise holding a book in her hand, an engraving instinct with truth and emotion, showing her awakened to intelligence and love. And this time he had achieved his desire, making no preliminary drawing, but tackling the block with his graver, straight away, in presence of his model. And infinite hopefulness had come upon him, he was dreaming of great original works in which the whole period that he belonged to would live anew and for ever.

Thomas now wished to return home. So they shook hands with Jahan, who, as his day's work was over, put on his coat to take his sister back to the Rue du Calvaire.

"Till to-morrow, Lise," said Antoine, inclining his head to kiss her.

She raised herself on tip-toes, and offered him her eyes, which he had opened to life. "Till to-morrow, Antoine," said she.

Outside, the twilight was falling. Pierre was the first to cross the threshold, and as he did so, he saw so extraordinary a sight that for an instant he felt stupefied. But it was certain enough: he could plainly distinguish his brother Guillaume emerging from the gaping doorway which conducted to the foundations of the basilica. And he saw him hastily climb over the palings, and then pretend to be there by pure chance, as though he had come up from the Rue Lamarck. When he accosted his two sons, as if he were delighted to meet them, and began to say that he had just come from Paris, Pierre asked himself if he had been dreaming. However, an anxious glance which his brother cast at him convinced him that he had been right. And then he not only felt ill at ease in presence of that man whom he had never previously known to lie, but it seemed to him that he was at last on the track of all he had feared, the formidable mystery that he had for some time past felt brewing around him in the little peaceful house.

When Guillaume, his sons and his brother reached home and entered the large workroom overlooking Paris, it was so dark that they fancied nobody was there.

"What! nobody in?" said Guillaume.

But in a somewhat low, quiet voice Francois answered out of the gloom: "Why, yes, I'm here."

He had remained at his table, where he had worked the whole afternoon, and as he could no longer read, he now sat in a dreamy mood with his head resting on his hands, his eyes wandering over Paris, where night was gradually falling. As his examination was now near at hand, he was living in a state of severe mental strain.

"What, you are still working there!" said his father. "Why didn't you ask for a lamp?"

"No, I wasn't working, I was looking at Paris," Francois slowly answered. "It's singular how the night falls over it by degrees. The last district that remained visible was the Montague Ste. Genevieve, the plateau of the Pantheon, where all our knowledge and science have grown up. A sun-ray still gilds the schools and libraries and laboratories, when the low-lying districts of trade are already steeped in darkness. I won't say that the planet has a particular partiality for us at the Ecole Normale, but it's certain that its beams still linger on our roofs, when they are to be seen nowhere else."

He began to laugh at his jest. Still one could see how ardent was his faith in mental effort, how entirely he gave himself to mental labour, which, in his opinion, could alone bring truth, establish justice and create happiness.

Then came a short spell of silence. Paris sank more and more deeply into the night, growing black and mysterious, till all at once sparks of light began to appear.

"The lamps are being lighted," resumed Francois; "work is being resumed on all sides."

Then Guillaume, who likewise had been dreaming, immersed in his fixed idea, exclaimed: "Work, yes, no doubt! But for work to give a full harvest it must be fertilised by will. There is something which is superior to work."

Thomas and Antoine had drawn near. And Francois, as much for them as for himself, inquired: "What is that, father?"

"Action."

For a moment the three young men remained silent, impressed by the solemnity of the hour, quivering too beneath the great waves of darkness which rose from the vague ocean of the city. Then a young voice remarked, though whose it was one could not tell: "Action is but work."

And Pierre, who lacked the respectful quietude, the silent faith, of his nephews, now felt his nervousness increasing. That huge and terrifying mystery of which he was dimly conscious rose before him, while a great quiver sped by in the darkness, over that black city where the lamps were now being lighted for a whole passionate night of work.

IV. THE CRISIS

A GREAT ceremony was to take place that day at the basilica of the Sacred Heart. Ten thousand pilgrims were to be present there, at a solemn consecration of the Holy Sacrament; and pending the arrival of four o'clock, the hour fixed for the service, Montmartre would be invaded by people. Its slopes would be black with swarming devotees, the shops where religious emblems and pictures were sold would be besieged, the cafes and taverns would be crowded to overflowing. It would all be like some huge fair, and meantime the big bell of the basilica, "La Savoyarde," would be ringing peal on peal over the holiday-making multitude.

When Pierre entered the workroom in the morning he perceived Guillaume and Mere-Grand alone there; and a remark which he heard the former make caused him to stop short and listen from behind a tall-revolving bookstand. Mere-Grand sat sewing in her usual place near the big window, while Guillaume stood before her, speaking in a low voice.

"Mother," said he, "everything is ready, it is for to-day."

She let her work fall, and raised her eyes, looking very pale. "Ah!" she said, "so you have made up your mind."

"Yes, irrevocably. At four o'clock I shall be yonder, and it will all be over."

"'Tis well—you are the master."

Silence fell, terrible silence. Guillaume's voice seemed to come from far away, from somewhere beyond the world. It was evident that his resolution was unshakable, that his tragic dream, his fixed idea of martyrdom, wholly absorbed him. Mere-Grand looked at him with her pale eyes, like an heroic woman who had grown old in relieving the sufferings of others, and had ever shown all the abnegation and devotion of an intrepid heart, which nothing but the idea of duty could influence. She knew Guillaume's terrible scheme, and had helped him to regulate the pettiest details of it; but if on the one hand, after all the iniquity she had seen and endured, she admitted that fierce and exemplary punishment might seem necessary, and that even the idea of purifying the world by the fire of a volcano might be entertained, on the other hand, she believed too strongly in the necessity of living one's life bravely to the very end, to be able, under any circumstances, to regard death as either good or profitable.

"My son," she gently resumed, "I witnessed the growth of your scheme, and it neither surprised nor angered me. I accepted it as one accepts lightning, the very fire of the skies, something of sovereign purity and power. And I have helped you through it all, and have taken upon myself to act as the mouthpiece of your conscience.... But let me tell you once more, one ought never to desert the cause of life."

"It is useless to speak, mother," Guillaume replied: "I have resolved to give my life and cannot take it back.... Are you now unwilling to carry out my desires, remain here, and act as we have decided, when all is over?"

She did not answer this inquiry, but in her turn, speaking slowly and gravely, put a question to him: "So it is useless for me to speak to you of the children, myself and the house?" said she. "You have thought it all over, you are quite determined?" And as he simply answered "Yes," she added: "'Tis well, you are the master.... I will be the one who is to remain behind and act. And you may be without fear, your bequest is in good hands. All that we have decided together shall be done."

Once more they became silent. Then she again inquired: "At four o'clock, you say, at the moment of that consecration?"

"Yes, at four o'clock."

She was still looking at him with her pale eyes, and there seemed to be something superhuman in her simplicity and grandeur as she sat there in her thin black gown. Her glance, in which the greatest bravery and the deepest sadness mingled, filled Guillaume with acute emotion. His hands began to tremble, and he asked: "Will you let me kiss you, mother?"

"Oh! right willingly, my son," she responded. "Your path of duty may not be mine, but you see I respect your views and love you."

They kissed one another, and when Pierre, whom the scene had chilled to his heart, presented himself as if he were just arriving, Mere-Grand had quietly taken up her needlework once more, while Guillaume was going to and fro, setting one of his laboratory shelves in order with all his wonted activity.

At noon when lunch was ready, they found it necessary to wait for Thomas, who had not yet come home. His brothers Francois and Antoine complained in a jesting way, saying that they were dying of hunger, while for her part Marie, who had made a creme, and was very proud of it, declared that they would eat it all, and that those who came late would have to go without tasting it. When Thomas eventually put in an appearance he was greeted with jeers.

"But it wasn't my fault," said he; "I stupidly came up the hill by way of the Rue de la Barre, and you can have no notion what a crowd I fell upon. Quite ten thousand pilgrims must have camped there last night. I am told that as many as possible were huddled together in the St. Joseph Refuge. The others no doubt had to sleep in the open air. And now they are busy eating, here, there and everywhere, all over the patches of waste ground and even on the pavements. One can scarcely set one foot before the other without risk of treading on somebody."

The meal proved a very gay one, though Pierre found the gaiety forced and excessive. Yet the young people could surely know nothing of the frightful, invisible thing which to Pierre ever seemed to be hovering around in the bright sunlight of that splendid June day. Was it that the dim presentiment which comes to loving hearts when mourning threatens them, swept by during the short intervals of silence that followed the joyous outbursts? Although Guillaume looked somewhat pale, and spoke with unusual caressing softness, he retained his customary bright smile. But, on the other hand, never had Mere-Grand been more silent or more grave.

Marie's creme proved a great success, and the others congratulated her on it so fulsomely that they made her blush. Then, all at once, heavy silence fell once more, a deathly chill seemed to sweep by, making every face turn pale—even while they were still cleaning their plates with their little spoons.

"Ah! that bell," exclaimed Francois; "it is really intolerable. I can feel my head splitting."

He referred to "La Savoyarde," the big bell of the basilica, which had now begun to toll, sending forth deep sonorous volumes of sound, which ever and ever winged their flight over the immensity of Paris. In the workroom they were all listening to the clang.

"Will it keep on like that till four o'clock?" asked Marie.

"Oh! at four o'clock," replied Thomas, "at the moment of the consecration you will hear something much louder than that. The great peals of joy, the song of triumph will then ring out."

Guillaume was still smiling. "Yes, yes," said he, "those who don't want to be deafened for life had better keep their windows closed. The worst is, that Paris has to hear it whether it will or no, and even as far away as the Pantheon, so I'm told."

Meantime Mere-Grand remained silent and impassive. Antoine for his part expressed his disgust with the horrible religious pictures for which the pilgrims fought—pictures which in some respects suggested those on the lids of sweetmeat boxes, although they depicted the Christ with His breast ripped open and displaying His bleeding heart. There could be no more repulsive materialism, no grosser or baser art, said Antoine. Then they rose from table, talking at the top of their voices so as to make themselves heard above the incessant din which came from the big bell.

Immediately afterwards they all set to work again. Mere-Grand took her everlasting needlework in hand once more, while Marie, sitting near her, continued some embroidery. The young men also attended to their respective tasks, and now and again raised their heads and exchanged a few words. Guillaume, for his part, likewise seemed very busy; Pierre alone coming and going in a state of anguish, beholding them all as in a nightmare, and attributing some terrible meaning to the most innocent remarks. During dejeuner, in order to explain the frightful discomfort into which he was thrown by the gaiety of the meal, he had been obliged to say that he felt poorly. And now he was looking and listening and waiting with ever-growing anxiety.

Shortly before three o'clock, Guillaume glanced at his watch and then quietly took up his hat. "Well," said he, "I'm going out."

His sons, Mere-Grand and Marie raised their heads.

"I'm going out," he repeated, "au revoir."

Still he did not go off. Pierre could divine that he was struggling, stiffening himself against the frightful tempest which was raging within him, striving to prevent either shudder or pallor from betraying his awful secret. Ah! he must have suffered keenly; he dared not give his sons a last kiss, for fear lest he might rouse some suspicion in their minds, which would impel them to oppose him and prevent his death! At last with supreme heroism he managed to overcome himself.

"Au revoir, boys."

"Au revoir, father. Will you be home early?"

"Yes, yes.... Don't worry about me, do plenty of work."

Mere-Grand, still majestically silent, kept her eyes fixed upon him. Her he had ventured to kiss, and their glances met and mingled, instinct with all that he had decided and that she had promised: their common dream of truth and justice.

"I say, Guillaume," exclaimed Marie gaily, "will you undertake a commission for me if you are going down by way of the Rue des Martyrs?"

"Why, certainly," he replied.

"Well, then, please look in at my dressmaker's, and tell her that I shan't go to try my gown on till to-morrow morning."

It was a question of her wedding dress, a gown of light grey silk, the stylishness of which she considered very amusing. Whenever she spoke of it, both she and the others began to laugh.

"It's understood, my dear," said Guillaume, likewise making merry over it. "We know it's Cinderella's court robe, eh? The fairy brocade and lace that are to make you very beautiful and for ever happy."

However, the laughter ceased, and in the sudden silence which fell, it again seemed as if death were passing by with a great flapping of wings and an icy gust which chilled the hearts of everyone remaining there.

"It's understood; so now I'm really off," resumed Guillaume. "Au revoir, children."

Then he sallied forth, without even turning round, and for a moment they could hear the firm tread of his feet over the garden gravel.

Pierre having invented a pretext was able to follow him a couple of minutes afterwards. As a matter of fact there was no need for him to dog Guillaume's heels, for he knew where his brother was going. He was thoroughly convinced that he would find him at that doorway, conducting to the foundations of the basilica, whence he had seen him emerge two days before. And so he wasted no time in looking for him among the crowd of pilgrims going to the church. His only thought was to hurry on and reach Jahan's workshop. And in accordance with his expectation, just as he arrived there, he perceived Guillaume slipping between the broken palings. The crush and the confusion prevailing among the concourse of believers favored Pierre as it had his brother, in such wise that he was able to follow the latter and enter the doorway without being noticed. Once there he had to pause and draw breath for a moment, so greatly did the beating of his heart oppress him.

A precipitous flight of steps, where all was steeped in darkness, descended from the narrow entry. It was with infinite precaution that Pierre ventured into the gloom, which ever grew denser and denser. He lowered his feet gently so as to make no noise, and feeling the walls with his hands, turned round and round as he went lower and lower into a kind of well. However, the descent was not a very long one. As soon as he found beaten ground beneath his feet he paused, no longer daring to stir for fear of betraying his presence. The darkness was like ink, and there was not a sound, a breath; the silence was complete.

How should he find his way? he wondered. Which direction ought he to take? He was still hesitating when some twenty paces away he suddenly saw a bright spark, the gleam of a lucifer. Guillaume was lighting a candle. Pierre recognised his broad shoulders, and from that moment he simply had to follow the flickering light along a walled and vaulted subterranean gallery. It seemed to be interminable and to run in a northerly direction, towards the nave of the basilica.

All at once the little light at last stopped, while Pierre, anxious to see what would happen, continued to advance, treading as softly as he could and remaining in the gloom. He found that Guillaume had stood his candle upon the ground in the middle of a kind of low rotunda under the crypt, and that he had knelt down and moved aside a long flagstone which seemed to cover a cavity. They were here among the foundations of the basilica; and one of the columns or piles of concrete poured into shafts in order to support the building could be seen. The gap, which the stone slab removed by Guillaume had covered, was by the very side of the pillar; it was either some natural surface flaw, or a deep fissure caused by some subsidence or settling of the soil. The heads of other pillars could be descried around, and these the cleft seemed to be reaching, for little slits branched out in all directions. Then, on seeing his brother leaning forward, like one who is for the last time examining a mine he has laid before applying a match to the fuse, Pierre suddenly understood the whole terrifying business. Considerable quantities of the new explosive had been brought to that spot. Guillaume had made the journey a score of times at carefully selected hours, and all his powder had been poured into the gap beside the pillar, spreading to the slightest rifts below, saturating the soil at a great depth, and in this wise forming a natural mine of incalculable force. And now the powder was flush with the flagstone which Guillaume has just moved aside. It was only necessary to throw a match there, and everything would be blown into the air!

For a moment an acute chill of horror rooted Pierre to the spot. He could neither have taken a step nor raised a cry. He pictured the swarming throng above him, the ten thousand pilgrims crowding the lofty naves of the basilica to witness the solemn consecration of the Host. Peal upon peal flew from "La Savoyarde," incense smoked, and ten thousand voices raised a hymn of magnificence and praise. And all at once came thunder and earthquake, and a volcano opening and belching forth fire and smoke, and swallowing up the whole church and its multitude of worshippers. Breaking the concrete piles and rending the unsound soil, the explosion, which was certain to be one of extraordinary violence, would doubtless split the edifice atwain, and hurl one-half down the slopes descending towards Paris, whilst the other on the side of the apse would crumble and collapse upon the spot where it stood. And how fearful would be the avalanche; a broken forest of scaffoldings, a hail of stonework, rushing and bounding through the dust and smoke on to the roofs below; whilst the violence of the shock would threaten the whole of Montmartre, which, it seemed likely, must stagger and sink in one huge mass of ruins!

However, Guillaume had again risen. The candle standing on the ground, its flame shooting up, erect and slender, threw his huge shadow all over the subterranean vault. Amidst the dense blackness the light looked like some dismal stationary star. Guillaume drew near to it in order to see what time it was by his watch. It proved to be five minutes past three. So he had nearly another hour to wait. He was in no hurry, he wished to carry out his design punctually, at the precise moment he had selected; and he therefore sat down on a block of stone, and remained there without moving, quiet and patient. The candle now cast its light upon his pale face, upon his towering brow crowned with white hair, upon the whole of his energetic countenance, which still looked handsome and young, thanks to his bright eyes and dark moustaches. And not a muscle of his face stirred; he simply gazed into the void. What thoughts could be passing through his mind at that supreme moment? Who could tell? There was not a quiver; heavy night, the deep eternal silence of the earth reigned all around.

Then Pierre, having quieted his palpitating heart, drew near. At the sound of his footsteps Guillaume rose menacingly, but he immediately recognised his brother, and did not seem astonished to see him.

"Ah! it's you," he said, "you followed me.... I felt that you possessed my secret. And it grieves me that you should have abused your knowledge to join me here. You might have spared me this last sorrow."

Pierre clasped his trembling hands, and at once tried to entreat him. "Brother, brother," he began.

"No, don't speak yet," said Guillaume, "if you absolutely wish it I will listen to you by-and-by. We have nearly an hour before us, so we can chat. But I want you to understand the futility of all you may think needful to tell me. My resolution is unshakable; I was a long time coming to it, and in carrying it out I shall simply be acting in accordance with my reason and my conscience."

Then he quietly related that having decided upon a great deed he had long hesitated as to which edifice he should destroy. The opera-house had momentarily tempted him, but he had reflected that there would be no great significance in the whirlwind of anger and justice destroying a little set of enjoyers. In fact, such a deed might savour of jealousy and covetousness. Next he had thought of the Bourse, where he might strike a blow at money, the great agent of corruption, and the capitalist society in whose clutches the wage-earners groaned. Only, here again the blow would fall upon a restricted circle. Then an idea of destroying the Palace of Justice, particularly the assize court, had occurred to him. It was a very tempting thought—to wreak justice upon human justice, to sweep away the witnesses, the culprit, the public prosecutor who charges the latter, the counsel who defends him, the judges who sentence him, and the lounging public which comes to the spot as to the unfolding of some sensational serial. And then too what fierce irony there would be in the summary superior justice of the volcano swallowing up everything indiscriminately without pausing to enter into details. However, the plan over which he had most lingered was that of blowing up the Arc de Triomphe. This he regarded as an odious monument which perpetuated warfare, hatred among nations, and the false, dearly purchased, sanguineous glory of conquerors. That colossus raised to the memory of so much frightful slaughter which had uselessly put an end to so many human lives, ought, he considered, to be slaughtered in its turn. Could he so have arranged things that the earth should swallow it up, he might have achieved the glory of causing no other death than his own, of dying alone, struck down, crushed to pieces beneath that giant of stone. What a tomb, and what a memory might he thus have left to the world!

"But there was no means of approaching it," he continued, "no basement, no cellar, so I had to give up the idea.... And then, although I'm perfectly willing to die alone, I thought what a loftier and more terrible lesson there would be in the unjust death of an innocent multitude, of thousands of unknown people, of all those that might happen to be passing. In the same way as human society by dint of injustice, want and harsh regulations causes so many innocent victims, so must punishment fall as the lightning falls, indiscriminately killing and destroying whatever it may encounter in its course. When a man sets his foot on an ant-hill, he gives no heed to all the lives which he stamps out."

Pierre, whom this theory rendered quite indignant, raised a cry of protest: "Oh! brother, brother, is it you who are saying such things?"

Yet, Guillaume did not pause: "If I have ended by choosing this basilica of the Sacred Heart," he continued, "it is because I found it near at hand and easy to destroy. But it is also because it haunts and exasperates me, because I have long since condemned it.... As I have often said to you, one cannot imagine anything more preposterous than Paris, our great Paris, crowned and dominated by this temple raised to the glorification of the absurd. Is it not outrageous that common sense should receive such a smack after so many centuries of science, that Rome should claim the right of triumphing in this insolent fashion, on our loftiest height in the full sunlight? The priests want Paris to repent and do penitence for its liberative work of truth and justice. But its only right course is to sweep away all that hampers and insults it in its march towards deliverance. And so may the temple fall with its deity of falsehood and servitude! And may its ruins crush its worshippers, so that like one of the old geological revolutions of the world, the catastrophe may resound through the very entrails of mankind, and renew and change it!"

"Brother, brother!" again cried Pierre, quite beside himself, "is it you who are talking? What! you, a great scientist, a man of great heart, you have come to this! What madness is stirring you that you should think and say such abominable things? On the evening when we confessed our secrets one to the other, you told me of your proud and lofty dream of ideal Anarchy. There would be free harmony in life, which left to its natural forces would of itself create happiness. But you still rebelled against the idea of theft and murder. You would not accept them as right or necessary; you merely explained and excused them. What has happened then that you, all brain and thought, should now have become the hateful hand that acts?"

"Salvat has been guillotined," said Guillaume simply, "and I read his will and testament in his last glance. I am merely an executor.... And what has happened, you ask? Why, all that has made me suffer for four months past, the whole social evil which surrounds us, and which must be brought to an end."

Silence fell. The brothers looked at one another in the darkness. And Pierre now understood things. He saw that Guillaume was changed, that the terrible gust of revolutionary contagion sweeping over Paris had transformed him. It had all come from the duality of his nature, the presence of contradictory elements within him. On one side one found a scientist whose whole creed lay in observation and experiment, who, in dealing with nature, evinced the most cautious logic; while on the other side was a social dreamer, haunted by ideas of fraternity, equality and justice, and eager for universal happiness. Thence had first come the theoretical anarchist that he had been, one in whom science and chimeras were mingled, who dreamt of human society returning to the harmonious law of the spheres, each man free, in a free association, regulated by love alone. Neither Theophile Morin with the doctrines of Proudhon and Comte, nor Bache with those of St. Simon and Fourier, had been able to satisfy his desire for the absolute. All those systems had seemed to him imperfect and chaotic, destructive of one another, and tending to the same wretchedness of life. Janzen alone had occasionally satisfied him with some of his curt phrases which shot over the horizon, like arrows conquering the whole earth for the human family. And then in Guillaume's big heart, which the idea of want, the unjust sufferings of the lowly and the poor exasperated, Salvat's tragic adventure had suddenly found place, fomenting supreme rebellion. For long weeks he had lived on with trembling hands, with growing anguish clutching at his throat. First had come that bomb and the explosion which still made him quiver, then the vile cupidity of the newspapers howling for the poor wretch's head, then the search for him and the hunt through the Bois de Boulogne, till he fell into the hands of the police, covered with mud and dying of starvation. And afterwards there had been the assize court, the judges, the gendarmes, the witnesses, the whole of France arrayed against one man and bent on making him pay for the universal crime. And finally, there had come the guillotine, the monstrous, the filthy beast consummating irreparable injustice in human justice's name. One sole idea now remained to Guillaume, that idea of justice which maddened him, leaving naught in his mind save the thought of the just, avenging flare by which he would repair the evil and ensure that which was right for all time forward. Salvat had looked at him, and contagion had done its work; he glowed with a desire for death, a desire to give his own blood and set the blood of others flowing, in order that mankind, amidst its fright and horror, should decree the return of the golden age.

Pierre understood the stubborn blindness of such insanity; and he felt utterly upset by the fear that he should be unable to overcome it. "You are mad, brother!" he exclaimed, "they have driven you mad! It is a gust of violence passing; they were treated in a wrong way and too relentlessly at the outset, and now that they are avenging one another, it may be that blood will never cease to flow.... But, listen, brother, throw off that nightmare. You can't be a Salvat who murders or a Bergaz who steals! Remember the pillage of the Princess's house and remember the fair-haired, pretty child whom we saw lying yonder, ripped open.... You do not, you cannot belong to that set, brother—"

With a wave of his hand, Guillaume brushed these vain reasons aside. Of what consequence were a few lives, his own included? No change had ever taken place in the world without millions and millions of existences being stamped out.

"But you had a great scheme in hand," cried Pierre, hoping to save him by reviving his sense of duty. "It isn't allowable for you to go off like this."

Then he fervently strove to awaken his brother's scientific pride. He spoke to him of his secret, of that great engine of warfare, which could destroy armies and reduce cities to dust, and which he had intended to offer to France, so that on emerging victorious from the approaching war, she might afterwards become the deliverer of the world. And it was this grand scheme that he had abandoned, preferring to employ his explosive in killing innocent people and overthrowing a church, which would be built afresh, whatever the cost, and become a sanctuary of martyrs!

Guillaume smiled. "I have not relinquished my scheme," said he, "I have simply modified it. Did I not tell you of my doubts, my anxious perplexity? Ah! to believe that one holds the destiny of the world in one's grasp, and to tremble and hesitate and wonder if the intelligence and wisdom, that are needful for things to take the one wise course, will be forthcoming! At sight of all the stains upon our great Paris, all the errors and transgressions which we lately witnessed, I shuddered. I asked myself if Paris were sufficiently calm and pure for one to entrust her with omnipotence. How terrible would be the disaster if such an invention as mine should fall into the hands of a demented nation, possibly a dictator, some man of conquest, who would simply employ it to terrorize other nations and reduce them to slavery.... Ah! no, I do not wish to perpetuate warfare, I wish to kill it."

Then in a clear firm voice he explained his new plan, in which Pierre was surprised to find some of the ideas which General de Bozonnet had one day laid before him in a very different spirit. Warfare was on the road to extinction, threatened by its very excesses. In the old days of mercenaries, and afterwards with conscripts, the percentage of soldiers designated by chance, war had been a profession and a passion. But nowadays, when everybody is called upon to fight, none care to do so. By the logical force of things, the system of the whole nation in arms means the coming end of armies. How much longer will the nations remain on a footing of deadly peace, bowed down by ever increasing "estimates," spending millions and millions on holding one another in respect? Ah! how great the deliverance, what a cry of relief would go up on the day when some formidable engine, capable of destroying armies and sweeping cities away, should render war an impossibility and constrain every people to disarm! Warfare would be dead, killed in her own turn, she who has killed so many. This was Guillaume's dream, and he grew quite enthusiastic, so strong was his conviction that he would presently bring it to pass.

"Everything is settled," said he; "if I am about to die and disappear, it is in order that my idea may triumph.... You have lately seen me spend whole afternoons alone with Mere-Grand. Well, we were completing the classification of the documents and making our final arrangements. She has my orders, and will execute them even at the risk of her life, for none has a braver, loftier soul.... As soon as I am dead, buried beneath these stones, as soon as she has heard the explosion shake Paris and proclaim the advent of the new era, she will forward a set of all the documents I have confided to her—the formula of my explosive, the drawings of the bomb and gun—to each of the great powers of the world. In this wise I shall bestow on all the nations the terrible gift of destruction and omnipotence which, at first, I wished to bestow on France alone; and I do this in order that the nations, being one and all armed with the thunderbolt, may at once disarm, for fear of being annihilated, when seeking to annihilate others."

Pierre listened to him, gaping, amazed at this extraordinary idea, in which childishness was blended with genius. "Well," said he, "if you give your secret to all the nations, why should you blow up this church, and die yourself?"

"Why! In order that I may be believed!" cried Guillaume with extraordinary force of utterance. Then he added, "The edifice must lie on the ground, and I must be under it. If the experiment is not made, if universal horror does not attest and proclaim the amazing destructive power of my explosive, people will consider me a mere schemer, a visionary!... A lot of dead, a lot of blood, that is what is needed in order that blood may for ever cease to flow!" Then, with a broad sweep of his arm, he again declared that his action was necessary. "Besides," he said, "Salvat left me the legacy of carrying out this deed of justice. If I have given it greater scope and significance, utilising it as a means of hastening the end of war, this is because I happen to be a man of intellect. It would have been better possibly if my mind had been a simple one, and if I had merely acted like some volcano which changes the soil, leaving life the task of renewing humanity."

Much of the candle had now burnt away, and Guillaume at last rose from the block of stone. He had again consulted his watch, and found that he had ten minutes left him. The little current of air created by his gestures made the light flicker, while all around him the darkness seemed to grow denser. And near at hand ever lay the threatening open mine which a spark might at any moment fire.

"It is nearly time," said Guillaume. "Come, brother, kiss me and go away. You know how much I love you, what ardent affection for you has been awakened in my old heart. So love me in like fashion, and find love enough to let me die as I want to die, in carrying out my duty. Kiss me, kiss me, and go away without turning your head."

His deep affection for Pierre made his voice tremble, but he struggled on, forced back his tears, and ended by conquering himself. It was as if he were no longer of the world, no longer one of mankind.

"No, brother, you have not convinced me," said Pierre, who on his side did not seek to hide his tears, "and it is precisely because I love you as you love me, with my whole being, my whole soul, that I cannot go away. It is impossible! You cannot be the madman, the murderer you would try to be."

"Why not? Am I not free. I have rid my life of all responsibilities, all ties.... I have brought up my sons, they have no further need of me. But one heart-link remained—Marie, and I have given her to you."

At this a disturbing argument occurred to Pierre, and he passionately availed himself of it. "So you want to die because you have given me Marie," said he. "You still love her, confess it!"

"No!" cried Guillaume, "I no longer love her, I swear it. I gave her to you. I love her no more."

"So you fancied; but you can see now that you still love her, for here you are, quite upset; whereas none of the terrifying things of which we spoke just now could even move you.... Yes, if you wish to die it is because you have lost Marie!"

Guillaume quivered, shaken by what his brother said, and in low, broken words he tried to question himself. "No, no, that any love pain should have urged me to this terrible deed would be unworthy—unworthy of my great design. No, no, I decided on it in the free exercise of my reason, and I am accomplishing it from no personal motive, but in the name of justice and for the benefit of humanity, in order that war and want may cease."

Then, in sudden anguish, he went on: "Ah! it is cruel of you, brother, cruel of you to poison my delight at dying. I have created all the happiness I could, I was going off well pleased at leaving you all happy, and now you poison my death. No, no! question it how I may, my heart does not ache; if I love Marie, it is simply in the same way as I love you."

Nevertheless, he remained perturbed, as if fearing lest he might be lying to himself; and by degrees gloomy anger came over him: "Listen, that is enough, Pierre," he exclaimed, "time is flying.... For the last time, go away! I order you to do so; I will have it!"

"I will not obey you, Guillaume.... I will stay, and as all my reasoning cannot save you from your insanity, fire your mine, and I will die with you."

"You? Die? But you have no right to do so, you are not free!"

"Free, or not, I swear that I will die with you. And if it merely be a question of flinging this candle into that hole, tell me so, and I will take it and fling it there myself."

He made a gesture at which his brother thought that he was about to carry out his threat. So he caught him by the arm, crying: "Why should you die? It would be absurd. That others should die may be necessary, but you, no! Of what use could be this additional monstrosity? You are endeavouring to soften me, you are torturing my heart!" Then all at once, imagining that Pierre's offer had concealed another design, Guillaume thundered in a fury: "You don't want to take the candle in order to throw it there. What you want to do is to blow it out! And you think I shan't be able then—ah! you bad brother!"

In his turn Pierre exclaimed: "Oh! certainly, I'll use every means to prevent you from accomplishing such a frightful and foolish deed!"

"You'll prevent me!"

"Yes, I'll cling to you, I'll fasten my arms to your shoulders, I'll hold your hands if necessary."

"Ah! you'll prevent me, you bad brother! You think you'll prevent me!"

Choking and trembling with rage, Guillaume had already caught hold of Pierre, pressing his ribs with his powerful muscular arms. They were closely linked together, their eyes fixed upon one another, and their breath mingling in that kind of subterranean dungeon, where their big dancing shadows looked like ghosts. They seemed to be vanishing into the night, the candle now showed merely like a little yellow tear in the midst of the darkness; and at that moment, in those far depths, a quiver sped through the silence of the earth which weighed so heavily upon them. Distant but sonorous peals rang out, as if death itself were somewhere ringing its invisible bell.

"You hear," stammered Guillaume, "it's their bell up there. The time has come. I have vowed to act, and you want to prevent me!"

"Yes, I'll prevent you as long as I'm here alive."

"As long as you are alive, you'll prevent me!"

Guillaume could hear "La Savoyarde" pealing joyfully up yonder; he could see the triumphant basilica, overflowing with its ten thousand pilgrims, and blazing with the splendour of the Host amidst the smoke of incense; and blind frenzy came over him at finding himself unable to act, at finding an obstacle suddenly barring the road to his fixed idea.

"As long as you are alive, as long as you are alive!" he repeated, beside himself. "Well, then, die, you wretched brother!"

A fratricidal gleam had darted from his blurred eyes. He hastily stooped, picked up a large brick forgotten there, and raised it with both hands as if it were a club.

"Ah! I'm willing," cried Pierre. "Kill me, then; kill your own brother before you kill the others!"

The brick was already descending, but Guillaume's arms must have deviated, for the weapon only grazed one of Pierre's shoulders. Nevertheless, he sank upon his knees in the gloom. When Guillaume saw him there he fancied he had dealt him a mortal blow. What was it that had happened between them, what had he done? For a moment he remained standing, haggard, his mouth open, his eyes dilating with terror. He looked at his hands, fancying that blood was streaming from them. Then he pressed them to his brow, which seemed to be bursting with pain, as if his fixed idea had been torn from him, leaving his skull open. And he himself suddenly sank upon the ground with a great sob.

"Oh! brother, little brother, what have I done?" he called. "I am a monster!"

But Pierre had passionately caught him in his arms again. "It is nothing, nothing, brother, I assure you," he replied. "Ah! you are weeping now. How pleased I am! You are saved, I can feel it, since you are weeping. And what a good thing it is that you flew into such a passion, for your anger with me has dispelled your evil dream of violence."

"I am horrified with myself," gasped Guillaume, "to think that I wanted to kill you! Yes, I'm a brute beast that would kill his brother! And the others, too, all the others up yonder.... Oh! I'm cold, I feel so cold."

His teeth were chattering, and he shivered. It was as if he had awakened, half stupefied, from some evil dream. And in the new light which his fratricidal deed cast upon things, the scheme which had haunted him and goaded him to madness appeared like some act of criminal folly, projected by another.

"To kill you!" he repeated almost in a whisper. "I shall never forgive myself. My life is ended, I shall never find courage enough to live."

But Pierre clasped him yet more tightly. "What do you say?" he answered. "Will there not rather be a fresh and stronger tie of affection between us? Ah! yes, brother, let me save you as you saved me, and we shall be yet more closely united! Don't you remember that evening at Neuilly, when you consoled me and held me to your heart as I am holding you to mine? I had confessed my torments to you, and you told me that I must live and love!... And you did far more afterwards: you plucked your own love from your breast and gave it to me. You wished to ensure my happiness at the price of your own! And how delightful it is that, in my turn, I now have an opportunity to console you, save you, and bring you back to life!"

"No, no, the bloodstain is there and it is ineffaceable. I can hope no more!"

"Yes, yes, you can. Hope in life as you bade me do! Hope in love and hope in labour!"

Still weeping and clasping one another, the brothers continued speaking in low voices. The expiring candle suddenly went out unknown to them, and in the inky night and deep silence their tears of redeeming affection flowed freely. On the one hand, there was joy at being able to repay a debt of brotherliness, and on the other, acute emotion at having been led by a fanatical love of justice and mankind to the very verge of crime. And there were yet other things in the depths of those tears which cleansed and purified them; there were protests against suffering in every form, and ardent wishes that the world might some day be relieved of all its dreadful woe.

At last, after pushing the flagstone over the cavity near the pillar, Pierre groped his way out of the vault, leading Guillaume like a child.

Meantime Mere-Grand, still seated near the window of the workroom, had impassively continued sewing. Now and again, pending the arrival of four o'clock, she had looked up at the timepiece hanging on the wall on her left hand, or else had glanced out of the window towards the unfinished pile of the basilica, which a gigantic framework of scaffoldings encompassed. Slowly and steadily plying her needle, the old lady remained very pale and silent, but full of heroic serenity. On the other hand, Marie, who sat near her, embroidering, shifted her position a score of times, broke her thread, and grew impatient, feeling strangely nervous, a prey to unaccountable anxiety, which oppressed her heart. For their part, the three young men could not keep in place at all; it was as if some contagious fever disturbed them. Each had gone to his work: Thomas was filing something at his bench; Francois and Antoine were on either side of their table, the first trying to solve a mathematical problem, and the other copying a bunch of poppies in a vase before him. It was in vain, however, that they strove to be attentive. They quivered at the slightest sound, raised their heads, and darted questioning glances at one another. What could be the matter? What could possess them? What did they fear? Now and again one or the other would rise, stretch himself, and then, resume his place. However, they did not speak; it was as if they dared not say anything, and thus the heavy silence grew more and more terrible.

When it was a few minutes to four o'clock Mere-Grand felt weary, or else desired to collect her thoughts. After another glance at the timepiece, she let her needlework fall on her lap and turned towards the basilica. It seemed to her that she had only enough strength left to wait; and she remained with her eyes fixed on the huge walls and the forest of scaffolding which rose over yonder with such triumphant pride under the blue sky. Then all at once, however brave and firm she might be, she could not restrain a start, for "La Savoyarde" had raised a joyful clang. The consecration of the Host was now at hand, the ten thousand pilgrims filled the church, four o'clock was about to strike. And thereupon an irresistible impulse forced the old lady to her feet; she drew herself up, quivering, her hands clasped, her eyes ever turned yonder, waiting in mute dread.

"What is the matter?" cried Thomas, who noticed her. "Why are you trembling, Mere-Grand?"

Francois and Antoine raised their heads, and in turn sprang forward.

"Are you ill? Why are you turning so pale, you who are so courageous?"

But she did not answer. Ah! might the force of the explosion rend the earth asunder, reach the house and sweep it into the flaming crater of the volcano! Might she and the three young men, might they all die with the father, this was her one ardent wish in order that grief might be spared them. And she remained waiting and waiting, quivering despite herself, but with her brave, clear eyes ever gazing yonder.

"Mere-Grand, Mere-Grand!" cried Marie in dismay; "you frighten us by refusing to answer us, by looking over there as if some misfortune were coming up at a gallop!"

Then, prompted by the same anguish, the same cry suddenly came from Thomas, Francois and Antoine: "Father is in peril—father is going to die!"

What did they know? Nothing precise, certainly. Thomas no doubt had been astonished to see what a large quantity of the explosive his father had recently prepared, and both Francois and Antoine were aware of the ideas of revolt which he harboured in his mind. But, full of filial deference, they never sought to know anything beyond what he might choose to confide to them. They never questioned him; they bowed to whatever he might do. And yet now a foreboding came to them, a conviction that their father was going to die, that some most frightful catastrophe was impending. It must have been that which had already sent such a quiver through the atmosphere ever since the morning, making them shiver with fever, feel ill at ease, and unable to work.

"Father is going to die, father is going to die!"

The three big fellows had drawn close together, distracted by one and the same anguish, and furiously longing to know what the danger was, in order that they might rush upon it and die with their father if they could not save him. And amidst Mere-Grand's stubborn silence death once more flitted through the room: there came a cold gust such as they had already felt brushing past them during dejeuner.

At last four o'clock began to strike, and Mere-Grand raised her white hands with a gesture of supreme entreaty. It was then that she at last spoke: "Father is going to die. Nothing but the duty of living can save him."

At this the three young men again wished to rush yonder, whither they knew not; but they felt that they must throw down all obstacles and conquer. Their powerlessness rent their hearts, they were both so frantic and so woeful that their grandmother strove to calm them. "Father's own wish was to die," said she, "and he is resolved to die alone."

They shuddered as they heard her, and then, on their side, strove to be heroic. But the minutes crept by, and it seemed as if the cold gust had slowly passed away. Sometimes, at the twilight hour, a night-bird will come in by the window like some messenger of misfortune, flit round the darkened room, and then fly off again, carrying its sadness with it. And it was much like that; the gust passed, the basilica remained standing, the earth did not open to swallow it. Little by little the atrocious anguish which wrung their hearts gave place to hope. And when at last Guillaume appeared, followed by Pierre, a great cry of resurrection came from one and all: "Father!"

Their kisses, their tears, deprived him of his little remaining strength. He was obliged to sit down. He had glanced round him as if he were returning to life perforce. Mere-Grand, who understood what bitter feelings must have followed the subjugation of his will, approached him smiling, and took hold of both his hands as if to tell him that she was well pleased at seeing him again, and at finding that he accepted his task and was unwilling to desert the cause of life. For his part he suffered dreadfully, the shock had been so great. The others spared him any narrative of their feelings; and he, himself, related nothing. With a gesture, a loving word, he simply indicated that it was Pierre who had saved him.

Thereupon, in a corner of the room, Marie flung her arms round the young man's neck. "Ah! my good Pierre, I have never yet kissed you," said she; "I want it to be for something serious the first time.... I love you, my good Pierre, I love you with all my heart."

Later that same evening, after night had fallen, Guillaume and Pierre remained for a moment alone in the big workroom. The young men had gone out, and Mere-Grand and Marie were upstairs sorting some house linen, while Madame Mathis, who had brought some work back, sat patiently in a dim corner waiting for another bundle of things which might require mending. The brothers, steeped in the soft melancholy of the twilight hour, and chatting in low tones, had quite forgotten her.

But all at once the arrival of a visitor upset them. It was Janzen with the fair, Christ-like face. He called very seldom nowadays; and one never knew from what gloomy spot he had come or into what darkness he would return when he took his departure. He disappeared, indeed, for months together, and was then suddenly to be seen like some momentary passer-by whose past and present life were alike unknown.

"I am leaving to-night," he said in a voice sharp like a knife.

"Are you going back to your home in Russia?" asked Guillaume.

A faint, disdainful smile appeared on the Anarchist's lips. "Home!" said he, "I am at home everywhere. To begin with, I am not a Russian, and then I recognise no other country than the world."

With a sweeping gesture he gave them to understand what manner of man he was, one who had no fatherland of his own, but carried his gory dream of fraternity hither and thither regardless of frontiers. From some words he spoke the brothers fancied he was returning to Spain, where some fellow-Anarchists awaited him. There was a deal of work to be done there, it appeared. He had quietly seated himself, chatting on in his cold way, when all at once he serenely added: "By the by, a bomb had just been thrown into the Cafe de l'Univers on the Boulevard. Three bourgeois were killed."

Pierre and Guillaume shuddered, and asked for particulars. Thereupon Janzen related that he had happened to be there, had heard the explosion, and seen the windows of the cafe shivered to atoms. Three customers were lying on the floor blown to pieces. Two of them were gentlemen, who had entered the place by chance and whose names were not known, while the third was a regular customer, a petty cit of the neighbourhood, who came every day to play a game at dominoes. And the whole place was wrecked; the marble tables were broken, the chandeliers twisted out of shape, the mirrors studded with projectiles. And how great the terror and the indignation, and how frantic the rush of the crowd! The perpetrator of the deed had been arrested immediately—in fact, just as he was turning the corner of the Rue Caumartin.

"I thought I would come and tell you of it," concluded Janzen; "it is well you should know it."

Then as Pierre, shuddering and already suspecting the truth, asked him if he knew who the man was that had been arrested, he slowly replied: "The worry is that you happen to know him—it was little Victor Mathis."

Pierre tried to silence Janzen too late. He had suddenly remembered that Victor's mother had been sitting in a dark corner behind them a short time previously. Was she still there? Then he again pictured Victor, slight and almost beardless, with a straight, stubborn brow, grey eyes glittering with intelligence, a pointed nose and thin lips expressive of stern will and unforgiving hatred. He was no simple and lowly one from the ranks of the disinherited. He was an educated scion of the bourgeoisie, and but for circumstances would have entered the Ecole Normale. There was no excuse for his abominable deed, there was no political passion, no humanitarian insanity, in it. He was the destroyer pure and simple, the theoretician of destruction, the cold energetic man of intellect who gave his cultivated mind to arguing the cause of murder, in his desire to make murder an instrument of the social evolution. True, he was also a poet, a visionary, but the most frightful of all visionaries: a monster whose nature could only be explained by mad pride, and who craved for the most awful immortality, dreaming that the coming dawn would rise from the arms of the guillotine. Only one thing could surpass him: the scythe of death which blindly mows the world.

For a few seconds, amidst the growing darkness, cold horror reigned in the workroom. "Ah!" muttered Guillaume, "he had the daring to do it, he had."

Pierre, however, lovingly pressed his arm. And he felt that he was as distracted, as upset, as himself. Perhaps this last abomination had been needed to ravage and cure him.

Janzen no doubt had been an accomplice in the deed. He was relating that Victor's purpose had been to avenge Salvat, when all at once a great sigh of pain was heard in the darkness, followed by a heavy thud upon the floor. It was Madame Mathis falling like a bundle, overwhelmed by the news which chance had brought her. At that moment it so happened that Mere-Grand came down with a lamp, which lighted up the room, and thereupon they hurried to the help of the wretched woman, who lay there as pale as a corpse in her flimsy black gown.

And this again brought Pierre an indescribable heart-pang. Ah! the poor, sad, suffering creature! He remembered her at Abbe Rose's, so discreet, so shamefaced, in her poverty, scarce able to live upon the slender resources which persistent misfortunes had left her. Hers had indeed been a cruel lot: first, a home with wealthy parents in the provinces, a love story and elopement with the man of her choice; next, ill-luck steadily pursuing her, all sorts of home troubles, and at last her husband's death. Then, in the retirement of her widowhood, after losing the best part of the little income which had enabled her to bring up her son, naught but this son had been left to her. He had been her Victor, her sole affection, the only one in whom she had faith. She had ever striven to believe that he was very busy, absorbed in work, and on the eve of attaining to some superb position worthy of his merits. And now, all at once, she had learnt that this fondly loved son was simply the most odious of assassins, that he had flung a bomb into a cafe, and had there killed three men.

When Madame Mathis had recovered her senses, thanks to the careful tending of Mere-Grand, she sobbed on without cessation, raising such a continuous doleful wail, that Pierre's hand again sought Guillaume's, and grasped it, whilst their hearts, distracted but healed, mingled lovingly one with the other.

V. LIFE'S WORK AND PROMISE

FIFTEEN months later, one fine golden day in September, Bache and Theophile Morin were taking dejeuner at Guillaume's, in the big workroom overlooking the immensity of Paris.

Near the table was a cradle with its little curtains drawn. Behind them slept Jean, a fine boy four months old, the son of Pierre and Marie. The latter, simply in order to protect the child's social rights, had been married civilly at the town-hall of Montmartre. Then, by way of pleasing Guillaume, who wished to keep them with him, and thus enlarge the family circle, they had continued living in the little lodging over the work-shop, leaving the sleepy house at Neuilly in the charge of Sophie, Pierre's old servant. And life had been flowing on happily for the fourteen months or so that they had now belonged to one another.

There was simply peace, affection and work around the young couple. Francois, who had left the Ecole Normale provided with every degree, every diploma, was now about to start for a college in the west of France, so as to serve his term of probation as a professor, intending to resign his post afterwards and devote himself, if he pleased, to science pure and simple. Then Antoine had lately achieved great success with a series of engravings he had executed—some views and scenes of Paris life; and it was settled that he was to marry Lise Jahan in the ensuing spring, when she would have completed her seventeenth year. Of the three sons, however, Thomas was the most triumphant, for he had at last devised and constructed his little motor, thanks to a happy idea of his father's. One morning, after the downfall of all his huge chimerical schemes, Guillaume, remembering the terrible explosive which he had discovered and hitherto failed to utilise, had suddenly thought of employing it as a motive force, in the place of petroleum, in the motor which his eldest son had so long been trying to construct for the Grandidier works. So he had set to work with Thomas, devising a new mechanism, encountering endless difficulties, and labouring for a whole year before reaching success. But now the father and son had accomplished their task; the marvel was created, and stood there riveted to an oak stand, and ready to work as soon as its final toilet should have been performed.

Amidst all the changes which had occurred, Mere-Grand, in spite of her great age, continued exercising her active, silent sway over the household, which was now again so gay and peaceful. Though she seldom seemed to leave her chair in front of her work-table, she was really here, there and everywhere. Since the birth of Jean, she had talked of rearing the child in the same way as she had formerly reared Thomas, Francois and Antoine. She was indeed full of the bravery of devotion, and seemed to think that she was not at all likely to die so long as she might have others to guide, love and save. Marie marvelled at it all. She herself, though she was always gay and in good health, felt tired at times now that she was suckling her infant. Little Jean indeed had two vigilant mothers near his cradle; whilst his father, Pierre, who had become Thomas's assistant, pulled the bellows, roughened out pieces of metal, and generally completed his apprenticeship as a working mechanician.

On the particular day when Bache and Theophile Morin came to Montmartre, the dejeuner proved even gayer than usual, thanks perhaps to their presence. The meal was over, the table had been cleared, and the coffee was being served, when a little boy, the son of a doorkeeper in the Rue Cortot, came to ask for Monsieur Pierre Froment. When they inquired his business, he answered in a hesitating way that Monsieur l'Abbe Rose was very ill, indeed dying, and that he had sent him to fetch Monsieur Pierre Froment at once.

Pierre followed the lad, feeling much affected; and on reaching the Rue Cortot he there found Abbe Rose in a little damp ground-floor room overlooking a strip of garden. The old priest was in bed, dying as the boy had said, but he still retained the use of his faculties, and could speak in his wonted slow and gentle voice. A Sister of Charity was watching beside him, and she seemed so surprised and anxious at the arrival of a visitor whom she did not know, that Pierre understood she was there to guard the dying man and prevent him from having intercourse with others. The old priest must have employed some stratagem in order to send the doorkeeper's boy to fetch him. However, when Abbe Rose in his grave and kindly way begged the Sister to leave them alone for a moment, she dared not refuse this supreme request, but immediately left the room.

"Ah! my dear child," said the old man, "how much I wanted to speak to you! Sit down there, close to the bed, so that you may be able to hear me, for this is the end; I shall no longer be here to-night. And I have such a great service to ask of you."

Quite upset at finding his friend so wasted, with his face white like a sheet, and scarce a sign of life save the sparkle of his innocent, loving eyes, Pierre responded: "But I would have come sooner if I had known you were in need of me! Why did you not send for me before? Are people being kept away from you?"

A faint smile of shame and confession appeared on the old priest's embarrassed face. "Well, my dear child," said he, "you must know that I have again done some foolish things. Yes, I gave money to some people who, it seems, were not deserving of it. In fact, there was quite a scandal; they scolded me at the Archbishop's palace, and accused me of compromising the interests of religion. And when they heard that I was ill, they put that good Sister beside me, because they said that I should die on the floor, and give the very sheets off my bed if I were not prevented."

He paused to draw breath, and then continued: "So you understand, that good Sister—oh! she is a very saintly woman—is here to nurse me and prevent me from still doing foolish things. To overcome her vigilance I had to use a little deceit, for which God, I trust, will forgive me. As it happens, it's precisely my poor who are in question; it was to speak to you about them that I so particularly wished to see you."

Tears had come to Pierre's eyes. "Tell me what you want me to do," he answered; "I am yours, both heart and soul."

"Yes, yes, I know it, my dear child. It was for that reason that I thought of you—you alone. In spite of all that has happened, you are the only one in whom I have any confidence, who can understand me, and give me a promise which will enable me to die in peace."

This was the only allusion he would venture to make to the cruel rupture which had occurred after the young man had thrown off his cassock and rebelled against the Church. He had since heard of Pierre's marriage, and was aware that he had for ever severed all religious ties. But at that supreme moment nothing of this seemed of any account to the old priest. His knowledge of Pierre's loving heart sufficed him, for all that he now desired was simply the help of that heart which he had seen glowing with such passionate charity.

"Well," he resumed, again finding sufficient strength to smile, "it is a very simple matter. I want to make you my heir. Oh! it isn't a fine legacy I am leaving you; it is the legacy of my poor, for I have nothing else to bestow on you; I shall leave nothing behind me but my poor."

Of these unhappy creatures, three in particular quite upset his heart. He recoiled from the prospect of leaving them without chance of succour, without even the crumbs which he had hitherto distributed among them, and which had enabled them to live. One was the big Old'un, the aged carpenter whom he and Pierre had vainly sought one night with the object of sending him to the Asylum for the Invalids of Labour. He had been sent there a little later, but he had fled three days afterwards, unwilling as he was to submit to the regulations. Wild and violent, he had the most detestable disposition. Nevertheless, he could not be left to starve. He came to Abbe Rose's every Saturday, it seemed, and received a franc, which sufficed him for the whole week. Then, too, there was a bedridden old woman in a hovel in the Rue du Mont-Cenis. The baker, who every morning took her the bread she needed, must be paid. And in particular there was a poor young woman residing on the Place du Tertre, one who was unmarried but a mother. She was dying of consumption, unable to work, and tortured by the idea that when she should have gone, her daughter must sink to the pavement like herself. And in this instance the legacy was twofold: there was the mother to relieve until her death, which was near at hand, and then the daughter to provide for until she could be placed in some good household.

"You must forgive me, my dear child, for leaving you all these worries," added Abbe Rose. "I tried to get the good Sister, who is nursing me, to take an interest in these poor people, but when I spoke to her of the big Old'un, she was so alarmed that she made the sign of the cross. And it's the same with my worthy friend Abbe Tavernier. I know nobody of more upright mind. Still I shouldn't be at ease with him, he has ideas of his own.... And so, my dear child, there is only you whom I can rely upon, and you must accept my legacy if you wish me to depart in peace."

Pierre was weeping. "Ah! certainly, with my whole soul," he answered. "I shall regard your desires as sacred."

"Good! I knew you would accept.... So it is agreed: a franc for the big Old'un every Saturday, the bread for the bedridden woman, some help for the poor young mother, and then a home for her little girl. Ah! if you only knew what a weight it is off my heart! The end may come now, it will be welcome to me."

His kind white face had brightened as if with supreme joy. Holding Pierre's hand within his own he detained him beside the bed, exchanging a farewell full of serene affection. And his voice weakening, he expressed his whole mind in faint, impressive accents: "Yes, I shall be pleased to go off. I could do no more, I could do no more! Though I gave and gave, I felt that it was ever necessary to give more and more. And how sad to find charity powerless, to give without hope of ever being able to stamp out want and suffering! I rebelled against that idea of yours, as you will remember. I told you that we should always love one another in our poor, and that was true, since you are here, so good and affectionate to me and those whom I am leaving behind. But, all the same, I can do no more, I can do no more; and I would rather go off, since the woes of others rise higher and higher around me, and I have ended by doing the most foolish things, scandalising the faithful and making my superiors indignant with me, without even saving one single poor person from the ever-growing torrent of want. Farewell, my dear child. My poor old heart goes off aching, my old hands are weary and conquered."

Pierre embraced him with his whole soul, and then departed. His eyes were full of tears and indescribable emotion wrung his heart. Never had he heard a more woeful cry than that confession of the impotence of charity, on the part of that old candid child, whose heart was all simplicity and sublime benevolence. Ah! what a disaster, that human kindness should be futile, that the world should always display so much distress and suffering in spite of all the compassionate tears that had been shed, in spite of all the alms that had fallen from millions and millions of hands for centuries and centuries! No wonder that it should bring desire for death, no wonder that a Christian should feel pleased at escaping from the abominations of this earth!

When Pierre again reached the workroom he found that the table had long since been cleared, and that Bache and Morin were chatting with Guillaume, whilst the latter's sons had returned to their customary occupations. Marie, also, had resumed her usual place at the work-table in front of Mere-Grand; but from time to time she rose and went to look at Jean, so as to make sure that he was sleeping peacefully, with his little clenched fists pressed to his heart. And when Pierre, who kept his emotion to himself, had likewise leant over the cradle beside the young woman, whose hair he discreetly kissed, he went to put on an apron in order that he might assist Thomas, who was now, for the last time, regulating his motor.

Then, as Pierre stood there awaiting an opportunity to help, the room vanished from before his eyes; he ceased to see or hear the persons who were there. The scent of Marie's hair alone lingered on his lips amidst the acute emotion into which he had been thrown by his visit to Abbe Rose. A recollection had come to him, that of the bitterly cold morning when the old priest had stopped him outside the basilica of the Sacred Heart, and had timidly asked him to take some alms to that old man Laveuve, who soon afterwards had died of want, like a dog by the wayside. How sad a morning it had been; what battle and torture had Pierre not felt within him, and what a resurrection had come afterwards! He had that day said one of his last masses, and he recalled with a shudder his abominable anguish, his despairing doubts at the thought of nothingness. Two experiments which he had previously made had failed most miserably. First had come one at Lourdes, where the glorification of the absurd had simply filled him with pity for any such attempt to revert to the primitive faith of young nations, who bend beneath the terror born of ignorance; and, secondly, there had been an experiment at Rome, which he had found incapable of any renewal, and which he had seen staggering to its death amidst its ruins, a mere great shadow, which would soon be of no account, fast sinking, as it was, to the dust of dead religions. And, in his own mind, Charity itself had become bankrupt; he no longer believed that alms could cure the sufferings of mankind, he awaited naught but a frightful catastrophe, fire and massacre, which would sweep away the guilty, condemned world. His cassock, too, stifled him, a lie alone kept it on his shoulders, the idea, unbelieving priest though he was, that he could honestly and chastely watch over the belief of others. The problem of a new religion, a new hope, such as was needful to ensure the peace of the coming democracies tortured him, but between the certainties of science and the need of the Divine, which seemed to consume humanity, he could find no solution. If Christianity crumbled with the principle of Charity, there could remain nothing else but Justice, that cry which came from every breast, that battle of Justice against Charity in which his heart must contend in that great city of Paris. It was there that began his third and decisive experiment, the experiment which was to make truth as plain to him as the sun itself, and give him back health and strength and delight in life.

At this point of his reverie Pierre was roused by Thomas, who asked him to fetch a tool. As he did so he heard Bache remarking: "The ministry resigned this morning. Vignon has had enough of it, he wants to reserve his remaining strength."

"Well, he has lasted more than a twelvemonth," replied Morin. "That's already an achievement."

After the crime of Victor Mathis, who had been tried and executed within three weeks, Monferrand had suddenly fallen from power. What was the use of having a strong-handed man at the head of the Government if bombs still continued to terrify the country? Moreover, he had displeased the Chamber by his voracious appetite, which had prevented him from allowing others more than an infinitesimal share of all the good things. And this time he had been succeeded by Vignon, although the latter's programme of reforms had long made people tremble. He, Vignon, was honest certainly, but of all these reforms he had only been able to carry out a few insignificant ones, for he had found himself hampered by a thousand obstacles. And thus he had resigned himself to ruling the country as others had done; and people had discovered that after all there were but faint shades of difference between him and Monferrand.

"You know that Monferrand is being spoken of again?" said Guillaume.

"Yes, and he has some chance of success. His creatures are bestirring themselves tremendously," replied Bache, adding, in a bitter, jesting way, that Mege, the Collectivist leader, played the part of a dupe in overthrowing ministry after ministry. He simply gratified the ambition of each coterie in turn, without any possible chance of attaining to power himself.

Thereupon Guillaume pronounced judgment. "Oh! well, let them devour one another," said he. "Eager as they all are to reign and dispose of power and wealth, they only fight over questions of persons. And nothing they do can prevent the evolution from continuing. Ideas expand, and events occur, and, over and above everything else, mankind is marching on."

Pierre was greatly struck by these words, and he again recalled the past. His dolorous Parisian experiment had begun, and he was once more roaming through the city. Paris seemed to him to be a huge vat, in which a world fermented, something of the best and something of the worst, a frightful mixture such as sorceresses might have used; precious powders mingled with filth, from all of which was to come the philter of love and eternal youth. And in that vat Pierre first marked the scum of the political world: Monferrand who strangled Barroux, who purchased the support of hungry ones such as Fonsegue, Duthil and Chaigneux, who made use of those who attained to mediocrity, such as Taboureau and Dauvergne; and who employed even the sectarian passions of Mege and the intelligent ambition of Vignon as his weapons. Next came money the poisoner, with that affair of the African Railways, which had rotted the Parliament and turned Duvillard, the triumphant bourgeois, into a public perverter, the very cancer as it were of the financial world. Then as a just consequence of all this there was Duvillard's own home infected by himself, that frightful drama of Eve contending with her daughter Camille for the possession of Gerard, then Camille stealing him from her mother, and Hyacinthe, the son, passing his crazy mistress Rosemonde on to that notorious harlot Silviane, with whom his father publicly exhibited himself. Then there was the old expiring aristocracy, with the pale, sad faces of Madame de Quinsac and the Marquis de Morigny; the old military spirit whose funeral was conducted by General de Bozonnet; the magistracy which slavishly served the powers of the day, Amadieu thrusting himself into notoriety by means of sensational cases, Lehmann, the public prosecutor, preparing his speeches in the private room of the Minister whose policy he defended; and, finally, the mendacious and cupid Press which lived upon scandal, the everlasting flood of denunciation and filth which poured from Sagnier, and the gay impudence shown by the unscrupulous and conscienceless Massot, who attacked all and defended all, by profession and to order! And in the same way as insects, on discovering one of their own kind dying, will often finish it off and fatten upon it, so the whole swarm of appetites, interests and passions had fallen upon a wretched madman, that unhappy Salvat, whose idiotic crime had brought them all scrambling together, gluttonously eager to derive some benefit from that starveling's emaciated carcass. And all boiled in the huge vat of Paris; the desires, the deeds of violence, the strivings of one and another man's will, the whole nameless medley of the bitterest ferments, whence, in all purity, the wine of the future would at last flow.

Then Pierre became conscious of the prodigious work which went on in the depths of the vat, beneath all the impurity and waste. As his brother had just said, what mattered the stains, the egotism and greed of politicians, if humanity were still on the march, ever slowly and stubbornly stepping forward! What mattered, too, that corrupt and emasculate bourgeoisie, nowadays as moribund as the aristocracy, whose place it took, if behind it there ever came the inexhaustible reserve of men who surged up from the masses of the country-sides and the towns! What mattered the debauchery, the perversion arising from excess of wealth and power, the luxuriousness and dissoluteness of life, since it seemed a proven fact that the capitals that had been queens of the world had never reigned without extreme civilisation, a cult of beauty and of pleasure! And what mattered even the venality, the transgressions and the folly of the press, if at the same time it remained an admirable instrument for the diffusion of knowledge, the open conscience, so to say, of the nation, a river which, though there might be horrors on its surface, none the less flowed on, carrying all nations to the brotherly ocean of the future centuries! The human lees ended by sinking to the bottom of the vat, and it was not possible to expect that what was right would triumph visibly every day; for it was often necessary that years should elapse before the realisation of some hope could emerge from the fermentation. Eternal matter is ever being cast afresh into the crucible and ever coming from it improved. And if in the depths of pestilential workshops and factories the slavery of ancient times subsists in the wage-earning system, if such men as Toussaint still die of want on their pallets like broken-down beasts of burden, it is nevertheless a fact that once already, on a memorable day of tempest, Liberty sprang forth from the vat to wing her flight throughout the world. And why in her turn should not Justice spring from it, proceeding from those troubled elements, freeing herself from all dross, flowing forth with dazzling limpidity and regenerating the nations?

However, the voices of Bache and Morin, rising in the course of their chat with Guillaume, once more drew Pierre from his reverie. They were now speaking of Janzen, who after being compromised in a fresh outrage at Barcelona had fled from Spain. Bache fancied that he had recognised him in the street only the previous day. To think that a man with so clear a mind and such keen energy should waste his natural gifts in such a hateful cause!

"When I remember," said Morin slowly, "that Barthes lives in exile in a shabby little room at Brussels, ever quivering with the hope that the reign of liberty is at hand—he who has never had a drop of blood on his hands and who has spent two-thirds of his life in prison in order that the nations may be freed!"

Bache gently shrugged his shoulders: "Liberty, liberty, of course," said he; "only it is worth nothing if it is not organised."

Thereupon their everlasting discussion began afresh, with Saint-Simon and Fourier on one side and Proudhon and Auguste Comte on the other. Bache gave a long account of the last commemoration which had taken place in honour of Fourier's memory, how faithful disciples had brought wreaths and made speeches, forming quite a meeting of apostles, who all stubbornly clung to their faith, as confident in the future as if they were the messengers of some new gospel. Afterwards Morin emptied his pockets, which were always full of Positivist tracts and pamphlets, manifestos, answers and so forth, in which Comte's doctrines were extolled as furnishing the only possible basis for the new, awaited religion. Pierre, who listened, thereupon remembered the disputes in his little house at Neuilly when he himself, searching for certainty, had endeavoured to draw up the century's balance-sheet. He had lost his depth, in the end, amidst the contradictions and incoherency of the various precursors. Although Fourier had sprung from Saint-Simon, he denied him in part, and if Saint-Simon's doctrine ended in a kind of mystical sensuality, the other's conducted to an inacceptable regimenting of society. Proudhon, for his part, demolished without rebuilding anything. Comte, who created method and declared science to be the one and only sovereign, had not even suspected the advent of the social crisis which now threatened to sweep all away, and had finished personally as a mere worshipper of love, overpowered by woman. Nevertheless, these two, Comte and Proudhon, entered the lists and fought against the others, Fourier and Saint-Simon; the combat between them or their disciples becoming so bitter and so blind that the truths common to them all at first seemed obscured and disfigured beyond recognition. Now, however, that evolution had slowly transformed Pierre, those common truths seemed to him as irrefutable, as clear as the sunlight itself. Amidst the chaos of conflicting assertions which was to be found in the gospels of those social messiahs, there were certain similar phrases and principles which recurred again and again, the defence of the poor, the idea of a new and just division of the riches of the world in accordance with individual labour and merit, and particularly the search for a new law of labour which would enable this fresh distribution to be made equitably. Since all the precursory men of genius agreed so closely upon those points, must they not be the very foundations of to-morrow's new religion, the necessary faith which this century must bequeath to the coming century, in order that the latter may make of it a human religion of peace, solidarity and love?

Then, all at once, there came a leap in Pierre's thoughts. He fancied himself at the Madeleine once more, listening to the address on the New Spirit delivered by Monseigneur Martha, who had predicted that Paris, now reconverted to Christianity, would, thanks to the Sacred Heart, become the ruler of the world. But no, but no! If Paris reigned, it was because it was able to exercise its intelligence freely. To set the cross and the mystic and repulsive symbolism of a bleeding heart above it was simply so much falsehood. Although they might rear edifices of pride and domination as if to crush Paris with their very weight, although they might try to stop science in the name of a dead ideal and in the hope of setting their clutches upon the coming century, these attempts would be of no avail. Science will end by sweeping away all remnants of their ancient sovereignty, their basilica will crumble beneath the breeze of Truth without any necessity of raising a finger against it. The trial has been made, the Gospel as a social code has fallen to pieces, and human wisdom can only retain account of its moral maxims. Ancient Catholicism is on all sides crumbling into dust, Catholic Rome is a mere field of ruins from which the nations turn aside, anxious as they are for a religion that shall not be a religion of death. In olden times the overburdened slave, glowing with a new hope and seeking to escape from his gaol, dreamt of a heaven where in return for his earthly misery he would be rewarded with eternal enjoyment. But now that science has destroyed that false idea of a heaven, and shown what dupery lies in reliance on the morrow of death, the slave, the workman, weary of dying for happiness' sake, demands that justice and happiness shall find place upon this earth. Therein lies the new hope—Justice, after eighteen hundred years of impotent Charity. Ah! in a thousand years from now, when Catholicism will be naught but a very ancient superstition of the past, how amazed men will be to think that their ancestors were able to endure that religion of torture and nihility! How astonished they will feel on finding that God was regarded as an executioner, that manhood was threatened, maimed and chastised, that nature was accounted an enemy, that life was looked upon as something accursed, and that death alone was pronounced sweet and liberating! For well-nigh two thousand years the onward march of mankind has been hampered by the odious idea of tearing all that is human away from man: his desires, his passions, his free intelligence, his will and right of action, his whole strength. And how glorious will be the awakening when such virginity as is now honoured by the Church is held in derision, when fruitfulness is again recognised as a virtue, amidst the hosanna of all the freed forces of nature—man's desires which will be honoured, his passions which will be utilised, his labour which will be exalted, whilst life is loved and ever and ever creates love afresh!

A new religion! a new religion! Pierre remembered the cry which had escaped him at Lourdes, and which he had repeated at Rome in presence of the collapse of old Catholicism. But he no longer displayed the same feverish eagerness as then—a puerile, sickly desire that a new Divinity should at once reveal himself, an ideal come into being, complete in all respects, with dogmas and form of worship. The Divine certainly seemed to be as necessary to man as were bread and water; he had ever fallen back upon it, hungering for the mysterious, seemingly having no other means of consolation than that of annihilating himself in the unknown. But who can say that science will not some day quench the thirst for what lies beyond us? If the domain of science embraces the acquired truths, it also embraces, and will ever do so, the truths that remain to be acquired. And in front of it will there not ever remain a margin for the thirst of knowledge, for the hypotheses which are but so much ideality? Besides, is not the yearning for the divine simply a desire to behold the Divinity? And if science should more and more content the yearning to know all and be able to do all, will not that yearning be quieted and end by mingling with the love of acquired truth? A religion grafted on science is the indicated, certain, inevitable finish of man's long march towards knowledge. He will come to it at last as to a natural haven, as to peace in the midst of certainty, after passing every form of ignorance and terror on his road. And is there not already some indication of such a religion? Has not the idea of the duality of God and the Universe been brushed aside, and is not the principle of unity, monisme, becoming more and more evident—unity leading to solidarity, and the sole law of life proceeding by evolution from the first point of the ether that condensed to create the world? But if precursors, scientists and philosophers—Darwin, Fourier and all the others—have sown the seed of to-morrow's religion by casting the good word to the passing breeze, how many centuries will doubtless be required to raise the crop! People always forget that before Catholicism grew up and reigned in the sunlight, it spent four centuries in germinating and sprouting from the soil. Well, then, grant some centuries to this religion of science of whose sprouting there are signs upon all sides, and by-and-by the admirable ideas of some Fourier will be seen expanding and forming a new gospel, with desire serving as the lever to raise the world, work accepted by one and all, honoured and regulated as the very mechanism of natural and social life, and the passions of man excited, contented and utilised for human happiness! The universal cry of Justice, which rises louder and louder, in a growing clamour from the once silent multitude, the people that have so long been duped and preyed upon, is but a cry for this happiness towards which human beings are tending, the happiness that embodies the complete satisfaction of man's needs, and the principle of life loved for its own sake, in the midst of peace and the expansion of every force and every joy. The time will come when this Kingdom of God will be set upon the earth; so why not close that other deceptive paradise, even if the weak-minded must momentarily suffer from the destruction of their illusions; for it is necessary to operate even with cruelty on the blind if they are to be extricated from their misery, from their long and frightful night of ignorance!

All at once a feeling of deep joy came over Pierre. A child's faint cry, the wakening cry of his son Jean had drawn him from his reverie. And he had suddenly remembered that he himself was now saved, freed from falsehood and fright, restored to good and healthy nature. How he quivered as he recalled that he had once fancied himself lost, blotted out of life, and that a prodigy of love had extricated him from his nothingness, still strong and sound, since that dear child of his was there, sturdy and smiling. Life had brought forth life; and truth had burst forth, as dazzling as the sun. He had made his third experiment with Paris, and this had been conclusive; it had been no wretched miscarriage with increase of darkness and grief, like his other experiments at Lourdes and Rome. In the first place, the law of labour had been revealed to him, and he had imposed upon himself a task, as humble a one as it was, that manual calling which he was learning so late in life, but which was, nevertheless, a form of labour, and one in which he would never fail, one too that would lend him the serenity which comes from the accomplishment of duty, for life itself was but labour: it was only by effort that the world existed. And then, moreover, he had loved; and salvation had come to him from woman and from his child. Ah! what a long and circuitous journey he had made to reach this finish at once so natural and so simple! How he had suffered, how much error and anger he had known before doing what all men ought to do! That eager, glowing love which had contended against his reason, which had bled at sight of the arrant absurdities of the miraculous grotto of Lourdes, which had bled again too in presence of the haughty decline of the Vatican, had at last found contentment now that he was husband and father, now that he had confidence in work and believed in the just laws of life. And thence had come the indisputable truth, the one solution—happiness in certainty.

Whilst Pierre was thus plunged in thought, Bache and Morin had already gone off with their customary handshakes and promises to come and chat again some evening. And as Jean was now crying more loudly, Marie took him in her arms and unhooked her dress-body to give him her breast.

"Oh! the darling, it's his time, you know, and he doesn't forget it!" she said. "Just look, Pierre, I believe he has got bigger since yesterday."

She laughed; and Pierre, likewise laughing, drew near to kiss the child. And afterwards he kissed his wife, mastered as he was by emotion at the sight of that pink, gluttonous little creature imbibing life from that lovely breast so full of milk.

"Why! he'll eat you," he gaily said to Marie. "How he's pulling!"

"Oh! he does bite me a little," she replied; "but I like that the better, it shows that he profits by it."

Then Mere-Grand, she who as a rule was so serious and silent, began to talk with a smile lighting up her face: "I weighed him this morning," said she, "he weighs nearly a quarter of a pound more than he did the last time. And if you had only seen how good he was, the darling! He will be a very intelligent and well-behaved little gentleman, such as I like. When he's five years old, I shall teach him his alphabet, and when he's fifteen, if he likes, I'll tell him how to be a man.... Don't you agree with me, Thomas? And you, Antoine, and you, too, Francois?"

Raising their heads, the three sons gaily nodded their approval, grateful as they felt for the lessons in heroism which she had given them, and apparently finding no reason why she might not live another twenty years in order to give similar lessons to Jean.

Pierre still remained in front of Marie, basking in all the rapture of love, when he felt Guillaume lay his hands upon his shoulders from behind. And on turning round he saw that his brother was also radiant, like one who felt well pleased at seeing them so happy. "Ah! brother," said Guillaume softly, "do you remember my telling you that you suffered solely from the battle between your mind and your heart, and that you would find quietude again when you loved what you could understand? It was necessary that our father and mother, whose painful quarrel had continued beyond the grave, should be reconciled in you. And now it's done, they sleep in peace within you, since you yourself are pacified."

These words filled Pierre with emotion. Joy beamed upon his face, which was now so open and energetic. He still had the towering brow, that impregnable fortress of reason, which he had derived from his father, and he still had the gentle chin and affectionate eyes and mouth which his mother had given him, but all was now blended together, instinct with happy harmony and serene strength. Those two experiments of his which had miscarried, were like crises of his maternal heredity, the tearful tenderness which had come to him from his mother, and which for lack of satisfaction had made him desperate; and his third experiment had only ended in happiness because he had contented his ardent thirst for love in accordance with sovereign reason, that paternal heredity which pleaded so loudly within him. Reason remained the queen. And if his sufferings had thus always come from the warfare which his reason had waged against his heart, it was because he was man personified, ever struggling between his intelligence and his passions. And how peaceful all seemed, now that he had reconciled and satisfied them both, now that he felt healthy, perfect and strong, like some lofty oak, which grows in all freedom, and whose branches spread far away over the forest.

"You have done good work in that respect," Guillaume affectionately continued, "for yourself and for all of us, and even for our dear parents whose shades, pacified and reconciled, now abide so peacefully in the little home of our childhood. I often think of our dear house at Neuilly, which old Sophie is taking care of for us; and although, out of egotism, a desire to set happiness around me, I wished to keep you here, your Jean must some day go and live there, so as to bring it fresh youth."

Pierre had taken hold of his brother's hands, and looking into his eyes he asked: "And you—are you happy?"

"Yes, very happy, happier than I have ever been; happy at loving you as I do, and happy at being loved by you as no one else will ever love me."

Their hearts mingled in ardent brotherly affection, the most perfect and heroic affection that can blend men together. And they embraced one another whilst, with her babe on her breast, Marie, so gay, healthful and loyal, looked at them and smiled, with big tears gathering in her eyes.

Thomas, however, having finished his motor's last toilet, had just set it in motion. It was a prodigy of lightness and strength, of no weight whatever in comparison with the power it displayed. And it worked with perfect smoothness, without noise or smell. The whole family was gathered round it in delight, when there came a timely visit, one from the learned and friendly Bertheroy, whom indeed Guillaume had asked to call, in order that he might see the motor working.

The great chemist at once expressed his admiration; and when he had examined the mechanism and understood how the explosive was employed as motive power—an idea which he had long recommended,—he tendered enthusiastic congratulations to Guillaume and Thomas. "You have created a little marvel," said he, "one which may have far-reaching effects both socially and humanly. Yes, yes, pending the invention of the electrical motor which we have not yet arrived at, here is an ideal one, a system of mechanical traction for all sorts of vehicles. Even aerial navigation may now become a possibility, and the problem of force at home is finally solved. And what a grand step! What sudden progress! Distance again diminished, all roads thrown open, and men able to fraternise! This is a great boon, a splendid gift, my good friends, that you are bestowing on the world."

Then he began to jest about the new explosive, whose prodigious power he had divined, and which he now found put to such a beneficent purpose. "And to think, Guillaume," he said, "that I fancied you acted with so much mysteriousness and hid the formula of your powder from me because you had an idea of blowing up Paris!"

At this Guillaume became grave and somewhat pale. And he confessed the truth. "Well, I did for a moment think of it."

However, Bertheroy went on laughing, as if he regarded this answer as mere repartee, though truth to tell he had felt a slight chill sweep through his hair. "Well, my friend," he said, "you have done far better in offering the world this marvel, which by the way must have been both a difficult and dangerous matter. So here is a powder which was intended to exterminate people, and which in lieu thereof will now increase their comfort and welfare. In the long run things always end well, as I'm quite tired of saying."

On beholding such lofty and tolerant good nature, Guillaume felt moved. Bertheroy's words were true. What had been intended for purposes of destruction served the cause of progress; the subjugated, domesticated volcano became labour, peace and civilisation. Guillaume had even relinquished all idea of his engine of battle and victory; he had found sufficient satisfaction in this last invention of his, which would relieve men of some measure of weariness, and help to reduce their labour to just so much effort as there must always be. In this he detected some little advance towards Justice; at all events it was all that he himself could contribute to the cause. And when on turning towards the window he caught sight of the basilica of the Sacred Heart, he could not explain what insanity had at one moment cone over him, and set him dreaming of idiotic and useless destruction. Some miasmal gust must have swept by, something born of want that scattered germs of anger and vengeance. But how blind it was to think that destruction and murder could ever bear good fruit, ever sow the soil with plenty and happiness! Violence cannot last, and all it does is to rouse man's feeling of solidarity even among those on whose behalf one kills. The people, the great multitude, rebel against the isolated individual who seeks to wreak justice. No one man can take upon himself the part of the volcano; this is the whole terrestrial crust, the whole multitude which internal fire impels to rise and throw up either an Alpine chain or a better and freer society. And whatever heroism there may be in their madness, however great and contagious may be their thirst for martyrdom, murderers are never anything but murderers, whose deeds simply sow the seeds of horror. And if on the one hand Victor Mathis had avenged Salvat, he had also slain him, so universal had been the cry of reprobation roused by the second crime, which was yet more monstrous and more useless than the first.

Guillaume, laughing in his turn, replied to Bertheroy in words which showed how completely he was cured: "You are right," he said, "all ends well since all contributes to truth and justice. Unfortunately, thousands of years are sometimes needed for any progress to be accomplished.... However, for my part, I am simply going to put my new explosive on the market, so that those who secure the necessary authorisation may manufacture it and grow rich. Henceforth it belongs to one and all.... And I've renounced all idea of revolutionising the world."

But Bertheroy protested. This great official scientist, this member of the Institute laden with offices and honours, pointed to the little motor, and replied with all the vigour of his seventy years: "But that is revolution, the true, the only revolution. It is with things like that and not with stupid bombs that one revolutionises the world! It is not by destroying, but by creating, that you have just done the work of a revolutionist. And how many times already have I not told you that science alone is the world's revolutionary force, the only force which, far above all paltry political incidents, the vain agitation of despots, priests, sectarians and ambitious people of all kinds, works for the benefit of those who will come after us, and prepares the triumph of truth, justice and peace.... Ah, my dear child, if you wish to overturn the world by striving to set a little more happiness in it, you have only to remain in your laboratory here, for human happiness can spring only from the furnace of the scientist."

He spoke perhaps in a somewhat jesting way, but one could feel that he was convinced of it all, that he held everything excepting science in utter contempt. He had not even shown any surprise when Pierre had cast his cassock aside; and on finding him there with his wife and child he had not scrupled to show him as much affection as in the past.

Meantime, however, the motor was travelling hither and thither, making no more noise than a bluebottle buzzing in the sunshine. The whole happy family was gathered about it, still laughing with delight at such a victorious achievement. And all at once little Jean, Monsieur Jean, having finished sucking, turned round, displaying his milk-smeared lips, and perceived the machine, the pretty plaything which walked about by itself. At sight of it, his eyes sparkled, dimples appeared on his plump cheeks, and, stretching out his quivering chubby hands, he raised a crow of delight.

Marie, who was quietly fastening her dress, smiled at his glee and brought him nearer, in order that he might have a better view of the toy. "Ah! my darling, it's pretty, isn't it? It moves and it turns, and it's strong; it's quite alive, you see."

The others, standing around, were much amused by the amazed, enraptured expression of the child, who would have liked to touch the machine, perhaps in the hope of understanding it.

"Yes," resumed Bertheroy, "it's alive and it's powerful like the sun, like that great sun shining yonder over Paris, and ripening men and things. And Paris too is a motor, a boiler in which the future is boiling, while we scientists keep the eternal flame burning underneath. Guillaume, my good fellow, you are one of the stokers, one of the artisans of the future, with that little marvel of yours, which will still further extend the influence of our great Paris over the whole world."

These words impressed Pierre, and he again thought of a gigantic vat stretching yonder from one horizon to the other, a vat in which the coming century would emerge from an extraordinary mixture of the excellent and the vile. But now, over and above all passions, ambitions, stains and waste, he was conscious of the colossal expenditure of labour which marked the life of Paris, of the heroic manual efforts in work-shops and factories, and the splendid striving of the young men of intellect whom he knew to be hard at work, studying in silence, relinquishing none of the conquests of their elders, but glowing with desire to enlarge their domain. And in all this Paris was exalted, together with the future that was being prepared within it, and which would wing its flight over the world bright like the dawn of day. If Rome, now so near its death, had ruled the ancient world, it was Paris that reigned with sovereign sway over the modern era, and had for the time become the great centre of the nations as they were carried on from civilisation to civilisation, in a sunward course from east to west. Paris was the world's brain. Its past so full of grandeur had prepared it for the part of initiator, civiliser and liberator. Only yesterday it had cast the cry of Liberty among the nations, and to-morrow it would bring them the religion of Science, the new faith awaited by the democracies. And Paris was also gaiety, kindness and gentleness, passion for knowledge and generosity without limit. Among the workmen of its faubourgs and the peasants of its country-sides there were endless reserves of men on whom the future might freely draw. And the century ended with Paris, and the new century would begin and spread with it. All the clamour of its prodigious labour, all the light that came from it as from a beacon overlooking the earth, all the thunder and tempest and triumphant brightness that sprang from its entrails, were pregnant with that final splendour, of which human happiness would be compounded.

Marie raised a light cry of admiration as she pointed towards the city. "Look! just look!" she exclaimed; "Paris is all golden, covered with a harvest of gold!"

They all re-echoed her admiration, for the effect was really one of extraordinary magnificence. The declining sun was once more veiling the immensity of Paris with golden dust. But this was no longer the city of the sower, a chaos of roofs and edifices suggesting brown land turned up by some huge plough, whilst the sun-rays streamed over it like golden seed, falling upon every side. Nor was it the city whose divisions had one day seemed so plain to Pierre: eastward, the districts of toil, misty with the grey smoke of factories; southward, the districts of study, serene and quiet; westward, the districts of wealth, bright and open; and in the centre the districts of trade, with dark and busy streets. It now seemed as if one and the same crop had sprung up on every side, imparting harmony to everything, and making the entire expanse one sole, boundless field, rich with the same fruitfulness. There was corn, corn everywhere, an infinity of corn, whose golden wave rolled from one end of the horizon to the other. Yes, the declining sun steeped all Paris in equal splendour, and it was truly the crop, the harvest, after the sowing!

"Look! just look," repeated Marie, "there is not a nook without its sheaf; the humblest roofs are fruitful, and every blade is full-eared wherever one may look. It is as if there were now but one and the same soil, reconciled and fraternal. Ah! Jean, my little Jean, look! see how beautiful it is!"

Pierre, who was quivering, had drawn close beside her. And Mere-Grand and Bertheroy smiled upon that promise of a future which they would not see, whilst beside Guillaume, whom the sight filled with emotion, were his three big sons, the three young giants, looking quite grave, they who ever laboured and were ever hopeful. Then Marie, with a fine gesture of enthusiasm, stretched out her arms and raised her child aloft, as if offering it in gift to the huge city.

"See, Jean! see, little one," she cried, "it's you who'll reap it all, who'll store the whole crop in the barn!"

And Paris flared—Paris, which the divine sun had sown with light, and where in glory waved the great future harvest of Truth and of Justice.

THE END

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lourdes, by Emile Zola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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Title: Lourdes
From the "Three Cities"

Author: Emile Zola

Translator: Ernest A. Vizetelly

Release Date: March 17, 2009 [EBook #8516]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOURDES ***

Produced by David Widger and Dagny

LOURDES

Of the Three Cities

By Emile Zola

Translated By Ernest A. Vizetelly

Contents

LOURDES

PREFACE

THE FIRST DAY

I. PILGRIMS AND PATIENTS

II. PIERRE AND MARIE

III. POITIERS

IV. MIRACLES

V. BERNADETTE

THE SECOND DAY

I. THE TRAIN ARRIVES

II. HOSPITAL AND GROTTO

III. FOUNTAIN AND PISCINA

IV. VERIFICATION

V. BERNADETTE'S TRIALS

THE THIRD DAY

I. BED AND BOARD

II. THE "ORDINARY."

III. THE NIGHT PROCESSION

IV. THE VIGIL

V. THE TWO VICTIMS

THE FOURTH DAY

I. THE BITTERNESS OP DEATH

II. THE SERVICE AT THE GROTTO

III. MARIE'S CURE

IV. TRIUMPH—DESPAIR

V. CRADLE AND GRAVE

THE FIFTH DAY

I. EGOTISM AND LOVE

II. PLEASANT HOURS

III. DEPARTURE

IV. MARIE'S VOW

V. THE DEATH OP BERNADETTE—THE NEW RELIGION

PREFACE

BEFORE perusing this work, it is as well that the reader should understand M. Zola's aim in writing it, and his views—as distinct from those of his characters—upon Lourdes, its Grotto, and its cures. A short time before the book appeared M. Zola was interviewed upon the subject by his friend and biographer, Mr. Robert H. Sherard, to whom he spoke as follows:

"'Lourdes' came to be written by mere accident. In 1891 I happened to be travelling for my pleasure, with my wife, in the Basque country and by the Pyrenees, and being in the neighbourhood of Lourdes, included it in my tour. I spent fifteen days there, and was greatly struck by what I saw, and it then occurred to me that there was material here for just the sort of novel that I like to write—a novel in which great masses of men can be shown in motion—un grand mouvement de foule—a novel the subject of which stirred up my philosophical ideas.

"It was too late then to study the question, for I had visited Lourdes late in September, and so had missed seeing the best pilgrimage, which takes place in August, under the direction of the Peres de la Misericorde, of the Rue de l'Assomption in Paris—the National Pilgrimage, as it is called. These Fathers are very active, enterprising men, and have made a great success of this annual national pilgrimage. Under their direction thirty thousand pilgrims are transported to Lourdes, including over a thousand sick persons.

"So in the following year I went in August, and saw a national pilgrimage, and followed it during the three days which it lasts, in addition to the two days given to travelling. After its departure, I stayed on ten or twelve days, working up the subject in every detail. My book is the story of such a national pilgrimage, and is, accordingly, the story of five days. It is divided into five parts, each of which parts is limited to one day.

"There are from ninety to one hundred characters in the story: sick persons, pilgrims, priests, nuns, hospitallers, nurses, and peasants; and the book shows Lourdes under every aspect. There are the piscinas, the processions, the Grotto, the churches at night, the people in the streets. It is, in one word, Lourdes in its entirety. In this canvas is worked out a very delicate central intrigue, as in 'Dr. Pascal,' and around this are many little stories or subsidiary plots. There is the story of the sick person who gets well, of the sick person who is not cured, and so on. The philosophical idea which pervades the whole book is the idea of human suffering, the exhibition of the desperate and despairing sufferers who, abandoned by science and by man, address themselves to a higher Power in the hope of relief; as where parents have a dearly loved daughter dying of consumption, who has been given up, and for whom nothing remains but death. A sudden hope, however, breaks in upon them: 'supposing that after all there should be a Power greater than that of man, higher than that of science.' They will haste to try this last chance of safety. It is the instinctive hankering after the lie which creates human credulity.

"I will admit that I came across some instances of real cure. Many cases of nervous disorders have undoubtedly been cured, and there have also been other cures which may, perhaps be attributed to errors of diagnosis on the part of doctors who attended the patients so cured. Often a patient is described by his doctor as suffering from consumption. He goes to Lourdes, and is cured. However, the probability is that the doctor made a mistake. In my own case I was at one time suffering from a violent pain in my chest, which presented all the symptoms of angina pectoris, a mortal malady. It was nothing of the sort. Indigestion, doubtless, and, as such, curable. Remember that most of the sick persons who go to Lourdes come from the country, and that the country doctors are not usually men of either great skill or great experience. But all doctors mistake symptoms. Put three doctors together to discuss a case, and in nine cases out of ten they will disagree in their diagnosis. Look at the quantities of tumours, swellings, and sores, which cannot be properly classified. These cures are based on the ignorance of the medical profession. The sick pretend, believe, that they suffer from such and such a desperate malady, whereas it is from some other malady that they are suffering. And so the legend forms itself. And, of course, there must be cures out of so large a number of cases. Nature often cures without medical aid. Certainly, many of the workings of Nature are wonderful, but they are not supernatural. The Lourdes miracles can neither be proved nor denied. The miracle is based on human ignorance. And so the doctor who lives at Lourdes, and who is commissioned to register the cures and to tabulate the miracles, has a very careless time of it. A person comes, and gets cured. He has but to get three doctors together to examine the case. They will disagree as to what was the disease from which the patient suffered, and the only explanation left which will be acceptable to the public, with its hankering after the lie, is that a miracle has been vouchsafed.

"I interviewed a number of people at Lourdes, and could not find one who would declare that he had witnessed a miracle. All the cases which I describe in my book are real cases, in which I have only changed the names of the persons concerned. In none of these instances was I able to discover any real proof for or against the miraculous nature of the cure. Thus, in the case of Clementine Trouve, who figures in my story as Sophie—the patient who, after suffering for a long time from a horrid open sore on her foot, was suddenly cured, according to current report, by bathing her foot in the piscina, where the bandages fell off, and her foot was entirely restored to a healthy condition—I investigated that case thoroughly. I was told that there were three or four ladies living in Lourdes who could guarantee the facts as stated by little Clementine. I looked up those ladies. The first said No, she could not vouch for anything. She had seen nothing. I had better consult somebody else. The next answered in the same way, and nowhere was I able to find any corroboration of the girl's story. Yet the little girl did not look like a liar, and I believe that she was fully convinced of the miraculous nature of her cure. It is the facts themselves which lie.

"Lourdes, the Grotto, the cures, the miracles, are, indeed, the creation of that need of the Lie, that necessity for credulity, which is a characteristic of human nature. At first, when little Bernadette came with her strange story of what she had witnessed, everybody was against her. The Prefect of the Department, the Bishop, the clergy, objected to her story. But Lourdes grew up in spite of all opposition, just as the Christian religion did, because suffering humanity in its despair must cling to something, must have some hope; and, on the other hand, because humanity thirsts after illusions. In a word, it is the story of the foundation of all religions."

To the foregoing account of "Lourdes" as supplied by its author, it may be added that the present translation, first made from early proofs of the French original whilst the latter was being completed, has for the purposes of this new American edition been carefully and extensively revised by Mr. E. A. Vizetelly,—M. Zola's representative for all English-speaking countries. "Lourdes" forms the first volume of the "Trilogy of the Three Cities," the second being "Rome," and the third "Paris."

LOURDES

THE FIRST DAY

I. PILGRIMS AND PATIENTS

THE pilgrims and patients, closely packed on the hard seats of a third-class carriage, were just finishing the "Ave maris Stella," which they had begun to chant on leaving the terminus of the Orleans line, when Marie, slightly raised on her couch of misery and restless with feverish impatience, caught sight of the Paris fortifications through the window of the moving train.

"Ah, the fortifications!" she exclaimed, in a tone which was joyous despite her suffering. "Here we are, out of Paris; we are off at last!"

Her delight drew a smile from her father, M. de Guersaint, who sat in front of her, whilst Abbe Pierre Froment, who was looking at her with fraternal affection, was so carried away by his compassionate anxiety as to say aloud: "And now we are in for it till to-morrow morning. We shall only reach Lourdes at three-forty. We have more than two-and-twenty hours' journey before us."

It was half-past five, the sun had risen, radiant in the pure sky of a delightful morning. It was a Friday, the 19th of August. On the horizon, however, some small, heavy clouds already presaged a terrible day of stormy heat. And the oblique sunrays were enfilading the compartments of the railway carriage, filling them with dancing, golden dust.

"Yes, two-and-twenty hours," murmured Marie, relapsing into a state of anguish. "Mon Dieu! what a long time we must still wait!"

Then her father helped her to lie down again in the narrow box, a kind of wooden gutter, in which she had been living for seven years past. Making an exception in her favour, the railway officials had consented to take as luggage the two pairs of wheels which could be removed from the box, or fitted to it whenever it became necessary to transport her from place to place. Packed between the sides of this movable coffin, she occupied the room of three passengers on the carriage seat; and for a moment she lay there with eyes closed. Although she was three-and-twenty; her ashen, emaciated face was still delicately infantile, charming despite everything, in the midst of her marvellous fair hair, the hair of a queen, which illness had respected. Clad with the utmost simplicity in a gown of thin woollen stuff, she wore, hanging from her neck, the card bearing her name and number, which entitled her to hospitalisation, or free treatment. She herself had insisted on making the journey in this humble fashion, not wishing to be a source of expense to her relatives, who little by little had fallen into very straitened circumstances. And thus it was that she found herself in a third-class carriage of the "white train," the train which carried the greatest sufferers, the most woeful of the fourteen trains going to Lourdes that day, the one in which, in addition to five hundred healthy pilgrims, nearly three hundred unfortunate wretches, weak to the point of exhaustion, racked by suffering, were heaped together, and borne at express speed from one to the other end of France.

Sorry that he had saddened her, Pierre continued to gaze at her with the air of a compassionate elder brother. He had just completed his thirtieth year, and was pale and slight, with a broad forehead. After busying himself with all the arrangements for the journey, he had been desirous of accompanying her, and, having obtained admission among the Hospitallers of Our Lady of Salvation as an auxiliary member, wore on his cassock the red, orange-tipped cross of a bearer. M. de Guersaint on his side had simply pinned the little scarlet cross of the pilgrimage on his grey cloth jacket. The idea of travelling appeared to delight him; although he was over fifty he still looked young, and, with his eyes ever wandering over the landscape, he seemed unable to keep his head still—a bird-like head it was, with an expression of good nature and absent-mindedness.

However, in spite of the violent shaking of the train, which constantly drew sighs from Marie, Sister Hyacinthe had risen to her feet in the adjoining compartment. She noticed that the sun's rays were streaming in the girl's face.

"Pull down the blind, Monsieur l'Abbe," she said to Pierre. "Come, come, we must install ourselves properly, and set our little household in order."

Clad in the black robe of a Sister of the Assumption, enlivened by a white coif, a white wimple, and a large white apron, Sister Hyacinthe smiled, the picture of courageous activity. Her youth bloomed upon her small, fresh lips, and in the depths of her beautiful blue eyes, whose expression was ever gentle. She was not pretty, perhaps, still she was charming, slender, and tall, the bib of her apron covering her flat chest like that of a young man; one of good heart, displaying a snowy complexion, and overflowing with health, gaiety, and innocence.

"But this sun is already roasting us," said she; "pray pull down your blind as well, madame."

Seated in the corner, near the Sister, was Madame de Jonquiere, who had kept her little bag on her lap. She slowly pulled down the blind. Dark, and well built, she was still nice-looking, although she had a daughter, Raymonde, who was four-and-twenty, and whom for motives of propriety she had placed in the charge of two lady-hospitallers, Madame Desagneaux and Madame Volmar, in a first-class carriage. For her part, directress as she was of a ward of the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours at Lourdes, she did not quit her patients; and outside, swinging against the door of her compartment, was the regulation placard bearing under her own name those of the two Sisters of the Assumption who accompanied her. The widow of a ruined man, she lived with her daughter on the scanty income of four or five thousand francs a year, at the rear of a courtyard in the Rue Vanneau. But her charity was inexhaustible, and she gave all her time to the work of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation, an institution whose red cross she wore on her gown of carmelite poplin, and whose aims she furthered with the most active zeal. Of a somewhat proud disposition, fond of being flattered and loved, she took great delight in this annual journey, from which both her heart and her passion derived contentment.

"You are right, Sister," she said, "we will organise matters. I really don't know why I am encumbering myself with this bag."

And thereupon she placed it under the seat, near her.

"Wait a moment," resumed Sister Hyacinthe; "you have the water-can between your legs—it is in your way."

"No, no, it isn't, I assure you. Let it be. It must always be somewhere."

Then they both set their house in order as they expressed it, so that for a day and a night they might live with their patients as comfortably as possible. The worry was that they had not been able to take Marie into their compartment, as she wished to have Pierre and her father near her; however neighbourly intercourse was easy enough over the low partition. Moreover the whole carriage, with its five compartments of ten seats each, formed but one moving chamber, a common room as it were which the eye took in at a glance from end to end. Between its wooden walls, bare and yellow, under its white-painted panelled roof, it showed like a hospital ward, with all the disorder and promiscuous jumbling together of an improvised ambulance. Basins, brooms, and sponges lay about, half-hidden by the seats. Then, as the train only carried such luggage as the pilgrims could take with them, there were valises, deal boxes, bonnet boxes, and bags, a wretched pile of poor worn-out things mended with bits of string, heaped up a little bit everywhere; and overhead the litter began again, what with articles of clothing, parcels, and baskets hanging from brass pegs and swinging to and fro without a pause.

Amidst all this frippery the more afflicted patients, stretched on their narrow mattresses, which took up the room of several passengers, were shaken, carried along by the rumbling gyrations of the wheels; whilst those who were able to remain seated, leaned against the partitions, their faces pale, their heads resting upon pillows. According to the regulations there should have been one lady-hospitaller to each compartment. However, at the other end of the carriage there was but a second Sister of the Assumption, Sister Claire des Anges. Some of the pilgrims who were in good health were already getting up, eating and drinking. One compartment was entirely occupied by women, ten pilgrims closely pressed together, young ones and old ones, all sadly, pitifully ugly. And as nobody dared to open the windows on account of the consumptives in the carriage, the heat was soon felt and an unbearable odour arose, set free as it were by the jolting of the train as it went its way at express speed.

They had said their chaplets at Juvisy; and six o'clock was striking, and they were rushing like a hurricane past the station of Bretigny, when Sister Hyacinthe stood up. It was she who directed the pious exercises, which most of the pilgrims followed from small, blue-covered books.

"The Angelus, my children," said she with a pleasant smile, a maternal air which her great youth rendered very charming and sweet.

Then the "Aves" again followed one another, and were drawing to an end when Pierre and Marie began to feel interested in two women who occupied the other corner seats of their compartment. One of them, she who sat at Marie's feet, was a blonde of slender build and bourgeoise appearance, some thirty and odd years of age, and faded before she had grown old. She shrank back, scarcely occupying any room, wearing a dark dress, and showing colourless hair, and a long grief-stricken face which expressed unlimited self-abandonment, infinite sadness. The woman in front of her, she who sat on the same seat as Pierre, was of the same age, but belonged to the working classes. She wore a black cap and displayed a face ravaged by wretchedness and anxiety, whilst on her lap she held a little girl of seven, who was so pale, so wasted by illness, that she scarcely seemed four. With her nose contracted, her eyelids lowered and showing blue in her waxen face, the child was unable to speak, unable to give utterance to more than a low plaint, a gentle moan, which rent the heart of her mother, leaning over her, each time that she heard it.

"Would she eat a few grapes?" timidly asked the lady, who had hitherto preserved silence. "I have some in my basket."

"Thank you, madame," replied the woman, "she only takes milk, and sometimes not even that willingly. I took care to bring a bottleful with me."

Then, giving way to the desire which possesses the wretched to confide their woes to others, she began to relate her story. Her name was Vincent, and her husband, a gilder by trade, had been carried off by consumption. Left alone with her little Rose, who was the passion of her heart, she had worked by day and night at her calling as a dressmaker in order to bring the child up. But disease had come, and for fourteen months now she had had her in her arms like that, growing more and more woeful and wasted until reduced almost to nothingness. She, the mother, who never went to mass, entered a church, impelled by despair to pray for her daughter's cure; and there she had heard a voice which had told her to take the little one to Lourdes, where the Blessed Virgin would have pity on her. Acquainted with nobody, not knowing even how the pilgrimages were organised, she had had but one idea—to work, save up the money necessary for the journey, take a ticket, and start off with the thirty sous remaining to her, destitute of all supplies save a bottle of milk for the child, not having even thought of purchasing a crust of bread for herself.

"What is the poor little thing suffering from?" resumed the lady.

"Oh, it must be consumption of the bowels, madame! But the doctors have names they give it. At first she only had slight pains in the stomach. Then her stomach began to swell and she suffered, oh, so dreadfully! it made one cry to see her. Her stomach has gone down now, only she's worn out; she has got so thin that she has no legs left her, and she's wasting away with continual sweating."

Then, as Rose, raising her eyelids, began to moan, her mother leant over her, distracted and turning pale. "What is the matter, my jewel, my treasure?" she asked. "Are you thirsty?"

But the little girl was already closing her dim eyes of a hazy sky-blue hue, and did not even answer, but relapsed into her torpor, quite white in the white frock she wore—a last coquetry on the part of her mother, who had gone to this useless expense in the hope that the Virgin would be more compassionate and gentle to a little sufferer who was well dressed, so immaculately white.

There was an interval of silence, and then Madame Vincent inquired: "And you, madame, it's for yourself no doubt that you are going to Lourdes? One can see very well that you are ill."

But the lady, with a frightened look, shrank woefully into her corner, murmuring: "No, no, I am not ill. Would to God that I were! I should suffer less."

Her name was Madame Maze, and her heart was full of an incurable grief. After a love marriage to a big, gay fellow with ripe, red lips, she had found herself deserted at the end of a twelvemonth's honeymoon. Ever travelling, following the profession of a jeweller's bagman, her husband, who earned a deal of money, would disappear for six months at a stretch, deceive her from one frontier to the other of France, at times even carrying creatures about with him. And she worshipped him; she suffered so frightfully from it all that she had sought a remedy in religion, and had at last made up her mind to repair to Lourdes, in order to pray the Virgin to restore her husband to her and make him amend his ways.

Although Madame Vincent did not understand the other's words, she realised that she was a prey to great mental affliction, and they continued looking at one another, the mother, whom the sight of her dying daughter was killing, and the abandoned wife, whom her passion cast into throes of death-like agony.

However, Pierre, who, like Marie, had been listening to the conversation, now intervened. He was astonished that the dressmaker had not sought free treatment for her little patient. The Association of Our Lady of Salvation had been founded by the Augustine Fathers of the Assumption after the Franco-German war, with the object of contributing to the salvation of France and the defence of the Church by prayer in common and the practice of charity; and it was this association which had promoted the great pilgrimage movement, in particular initiating and unremittingly extending the national pilgrimage which every year, towards the close of August, set out for Lourdes. An elaborate organisation had been gradually perfected, donations of considerable amounts were collected in all parts of the world, sufferers were enrolled in every parish, and agreements were signed with the railway companies, to say nothing of the active help of the Little Sisters of the Assumption and the establishment of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation, a widespread brotherhood of the benevolent, in which one beheld men and women, mostly belonging to society, who, under the orders of the pilgrimage managers, nursed the sick, helped to transport them, and watched over the observance of good discipline. A written request was needed for the sufferers to obtain hospitalisation, which dispensed them from making the smallest payment in respect either of their journey or their sojourn; they were fetched from their homes and conveyed back thither; and they simply had to provide a few provisions for the road. By far the greater number were recommended by priests or benevolent persons, who superintended the inquiries concerning them and obtained the needful papers, such as doctors' certificates and certificates of birth. And, these matters being settled, the sick ones had nothing further to trouble about, they became but so much suffering flesh, food for miracles, in the hands of the hospitallers of either sex.

"But you need only have applied to your parish priest, madame," Pierre explained. "This poor child is deserving of all sympathy. She would have been immediately admitted."

"I did not know it, monsieur l'Abbe."

"Then how did you manage?"

"Why, Monsieur l'Abbe, I went to take a ticket at a place which one of my neighbours, who reads the newspapers, told me about."

She was referring to the tickets, at greatly reduced rates, which were issued to the pilgrims possessed of means. And Marie, listening to her, felt great pity for her, and also some shame; for she who was not entirely destitute of resources had succeeded in obtaining hospitalisation, thanks to Pierre, whereas that mother and her sorry child, after exhausting their scanty savings, remained without a copper.

However, a more violent jolt of the carriage drew a cry of pain from the girl. "Oh, father," she said, "pray raise me a little! I can't stay on my back any longer."

When M. de Guersaint had helped her into a sitting posture, she gave a deep sigh of relief. They were now at Etampes, after a run of an hour and a half from Paris, and what with the increased warmth of the sun, the dust, and the noise, weariness was becoming apparent already. Madame de Jonquiere had got up to speak a few words of kindly encouragement to Marie over the partition; and Sister Hyacinthe moreover again rose, and gaily clapped her hands that she might be heard and obeyed from one to the other end of the carriage.

"Come, come!" said she, "we mustn't think of our little troubles. Let us pray and sing, and the Blessed Virgin will be with us."

She herself then began the rosary according to the rite of Our Lady of Lourdes, and all the patients and pilgrims followed her. This was the first chaplet—the five joyful mysteries, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Purification, and Jesus found in the Temple. Then they all began to chant the canticle: "Let us contemplate the heavenly Archangel!" Their voices were lost amid the loud rumbling of the wheels; you heard but the muffled surging of that human wave, stifling within the closed carriage which rolled on and on without a pause.

Although M. de Guersaint was a worshipper, he could never follow a hymn to the end. He got up, sat down again, and finished by resting his elbow on the partition and conversing in an undertone with a patient who sat against this same partition in the next compartment. The patient in question was a thick-set man of fifty, with a good-natured face and a large head, completely bald. His name was Sabathier, and for fifteen years he had been stricken with ataxia. He only suffered pain by fits and starts, but he had quite lost the use of his legs, which his wife, who accompanied him, moved for him as though they had been dead legs, whenever they became too heavy, weighty like bars of lead.

"Yes, monsieur," he said, "such as you see me, I was formerly fifth-class professor at the Lycee Charlemagne. At first I thought that it was mere sciatica, but afterwards I was seized with sharp, lightning-like pains, red-hot sword thrusts, you know, in the muscles. For nearly ten years the disease kept on mastering me more and more. I consulted all the doctors, tried every imaginable mineral spring, and now I suffer less, but I can no longer move from my seat. And then, after long living without a thought of religion, I was led back to God by the idea that I was too wretched, and that Our Lady of Lourdes could not do otherwise than take pity on me."

Feeling interested, Pierre in his turn had leant over the partition and was listening.

"Is it not so, Monsieur l'Abbe?" continued M. Sabathier. "Is not suffering the best awakener of souls? This is the seventh year that I am going to Lourdes without despairing of cure. This year the Blessed Virgin will cure me, I feel sure of it. Yes, I expect to be able to walk about again; I now live solely in that hope."

M. Sabathier paused, he wished his wife to push his legs a little more to the left; and Pierre looked at him, astonished to find such obstinate faith in a man of intellect, in one of those university professors who, as a rule, are such Voltairians. How could the belief in miracles have germinated and taken root in this man's brain? As he himself said, great suffering alone explained this need of illusion, this blossoming of eternal and consolatory hope.

"And my wife and I," resumed the ex-professor, "are dressed, you see, as poor folks, for I wished to go as a mere pauper this year, and applied for hospitalisation in a spirit of humility in order that the Blessed Virgin might include me among the wretched, her children—only, as I did not wish to take the place of a real pauper, I gave fifty francs to the Hospitalite, and this, as you are aware, gives one the right to have a patient of one's own in the pilgrimage. I even know my patient. He was introduced to me at the railway station. He is suffering from tuberculosis, it appears, and seemed to me very low, very low."

A fresh interval of silence ensued. "Well," said M. Sabathier at last, "may the Blessed Virgin save him also, she who can do everything. I shall be so happy; she will have loaded me with favours."

Then the three men, isolating themselves from the others, went on conversing together, at first on medical subjects, and at last diverging into a discussion on romanesque architecture, a propos of a steeple which they had perceived on a hillside, and which every pilgrim had saluted with a sign of the cross. Swayed once more by the habits of cultivated intellect, the young priest and his two companions forgot themselves together in the midst of their fellow-passengers, all those poor, suffering, simple-minded folk, whom wretchedness stupefied. Another hour went by, two more canticles had just been sung, and the stations of Toury and Les Aubrais had been left behind, when, at Beaugency, they at last ceased their chat, on hearing Sister Hyacinthe clap her hands and intonate in her fresh, sonorous voice:

"Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo."

And then the chant went on; all voices became mingled in that ever-surging wave of prayer which stilled pain, excited hope, and little by little penetrated the entire being, harassed by the haunting thought of the grace and cure which one and all were going to seek so far away.

However, as Pierre sat down again, he saw that Marie was very pale, and had her eyes closed. By the painful contraction of her features he could tell that she was not asleep. "Are you in great suffering?" he asked.

"Yes, yes, I suffer dreadfully. I shall never last to the end. It is this incessant jolting."

She moaned, raised her eyelids, and, half-fainting, remained in a sitting posture, her eyes turned on the other sufferers. In the adjoining compartment, La Grivotte, hitherto stretched out, scarce breathing, like a corpse, had just raised herself up in front of M. Sabathier. She was a tall, slip-shod, singular-looking creature of over thirty, with a round, ravaged face, which her frizzy hair and flaming eyes rendered almost pretty. She had reached the third stage of phthisis.

"Eh, mademoiselle," she said, addressing herself in a hoarse, indistinct voice to Marie, "how nice it would be if we could only doze off a little. But it can't be managed; all these wheels keep on whirling round and round in one's head."

Then, although it fatigued her to speak, she obstinately went on talking, volunteering particulars about herself. She was a mattress-maker, and with one of her aunts had long gone from yard to yard at Bercy to comb and sew up mattresses. And, indeed, it was to the pestilential wool which she had combed in her youth that she ascribed her malady. For five years she had been making the round of the hospitals of Paris, and she spoke familiarly of all the great doctors. It was the Sisters of Charity, at the Lariboisiere hospital, who, finding that she had a passion for religious ceremonies, had completed her conversion, and convinced her that the Virgin awaited her at Lourdes to cure her.

"I certainly need it," said she. "The doctors say that I have one lung done for, and that the other one is scarcely any better. There are great big holes you know. At first I only felt bad between the shoulders and spat up some froth. But then I got thin, and became a dreadful sight. And now I'm always in a sweat, and cough till I think I'm going to bring my heart up. And I can no longer spit. And I haven't the strength to stand, you see. I can't eat."

A stifling sensation made her pause, and she became livid.

"All the same I prefer being in my skin instead of in that of the Brother in the compartment behind you. He has the same complaint as I have, but he is in a worse state that I am."

She was mistaken. In the farther compartment, beyond Marie, there was indeed a young missionary, Brother Isidore, who was lying on a mattress and could not be seen, since he was unable to raise even a finger. But he was not suffering from phthisis. He was dying of inflammation of the liver, contracted in Senegal. Very long and lank, he had a yellow face, with skin as dry and lifeless as parchment. The abscess which had formed in his liver had ended by breaking out externally, and amidst the continuous shivering of fever, vomiting, and delirium, suppuration was exhausting him. His eyes alone were still alive, eyes full of unextinguishable love, whose flame lighted up his expiring face, a peasant face such as painters have given to the crucified Christ, common, but rendered sublime at moments by its expression of faith and passion. He was a Breton, the last puny child of an over-numerous family, and had left his little share of land to his elder brothers. One of his sisters, Marthe, older than himself by a couple of years, accompanied him. She had been in service in Paris, an insignificant maid-of-all-work, but withal so devoted to her brother that she had left her situation to follow him, subsisting scantily on her petty savings.

"I was lying on the platform," resumed La Grivotte, "when he was put in the carriage. There were four men carrying him—"

But she was unable to speak any further, for just then an attack of coughing shook her and threw her back upon the seat. She was suffocating, and the red flush on her cheek-bones turned blue. Sister Hyacinthe, however, immediately raised her head and wiped her lips with a linen cloth, which became spotted with blood. At the same time Madame de Jonquiere gave her attention to a patient in front of her, who had just fainted. She was called Madame Vetu, and was the wife of a petty clockmaker of the Mouffetard district, who had not been able to shut up his shop in order to accompany her to Lourdes. And to make sure that she would be cared for she had sought and obtained hospitalisation. The fear of death was bringing her back to religion, although she had not set foot in church since her first communion. She knew that she was lost, that a cancer in the chest was eating into her; and she already had the haggard, orange-hued mark of the cancerous patient. Since the beginning of the journey she had not spoken a word, but, suffering terribly, had remained with her lips tightly closed. Then all at once, she had swooned away after an attack of vomiting.

"It is unbearable!" murmured Madame de Jonquiere, who herself felt faint; "we must let in a little fresh air."

Sister Hyacinthe was just then laying La Grivotte to rest on her pillows, "Certainly," said she, "we will open the window for a few moments. But not on this side, for I am afraid we might have a fresh fit of coughing. Open the window on your side, madame."

The heat was still increasing, and the occupants of the carriage were stifling in that heavy evil-smelling atmosphere. The pure air which came in when the window was opened brought relief however. For a moment there were other duties to be attended to, a clearance and cleansing. The Sister emptied the basins out of the window, whilst the lady-hospitaller wiped the shaking floor with a sponge. Next, things had to be set in order; and then came a fresh anxiety, for the fourth patient, a slender girl whose face was entirely covered by a black fichu, and who had not yet moved, was saying that she felt hungry.

With quiet devotion Madame de Jonquiere immediately tendered her services. "Don't you trouble, Sister," she said, "I will cut her bread into little bits for her."

Marie, with the need she felt of diverting her mind from her own sufferings, had already begun to take an interest in that motionless sufferer whose countenance was so thickly veiled, for she not unnaturally suspected that it was a case of some distressing facial sore. She had merely been told that the patient was a servant, which was true, but it happened that the poor creature, a native of Picardy, named Elise Rouquet, had been obliged to leave her situation, and seek a home with a sister who ill-treated her, for no hospital would take her in. Extremely devout, she had for many months been possessed by an ardent desire to go to Lourdes.

While Marie, with dread in her heart, waited for the fichu to be moved aside, Madame de Jonquiere, having cut some bread into small pieces, inquired maternally: "Are they small enough? Can you put them into your mouth?"

Thereupon a hoarse voice growled confused words under the black fichu: "Yes, yes, madame." And at last the veil fell and Marie shuddered with horror.

It was a case of lupus which had preyed upon the unhappy woman's nose and mouth. Ulceration had spread, and was hourly spreading—in short, all the hideous peculiarities of this terrible disease were in full process of development, almost obliterating the traces of what once were pleasing womanly lineaments.

"Oh, look, Pierre!" Marie murmured, trembling. The priest in his turn shuddered as he beheld Elise Rouquet cautiously slipping the tiny pieces of bread into her poor shapeless mouth. Everyone in the carriage had turned pale at sight of the awful apparition. And the same thought ascended from all those hope-inflated souls. Ah! Blessed Virgin, Powerful Virgin, what a miracle indeed if such an ill were cured!

"We must not think of ourselves, my children, if we wish to get well," resumed Sister Hyacinthe, who still retained her encouraging smile.

And then she made them say the second chaplet, the five sorrowful mysteries: Jesus in the Garden of Olives, Jesus scourged, Jesus crowned with thorns, Jesus carrying the cross, and Jesus crucified. Afterwards came the canticle: "In thy help, Virgin, do I put my trust."

They had just passed through Blois; for three long hours they had been rolling onward; and Marie, who had averted her eyes from Elise Rouquet, now turned them upon a man who occupied a corner seat in the compartment on her left, that in which Brother Isidore was lying. She had noticed this man several times already. Poorly clad in an old black frock-coat, he looked still young, although his sparse beard was already turning grey; and, short and emaciated, he seemed to experience great suffering, his fleshless, livid face being covered with sweat. However, he remained motionless, ensconced in his corner, speaking to nobody, but staring straight before him with dilated eyes. And all at once Marie noticed that his eyelids were falling, and that he was fainting away.

She thereupon drew Sister's Hyacinthe's attention to him: "Look, Sister! One would think that that gentleman is dangerously ill."

"Which one, my dear child?"

"That one, over there, with his head thrown back."

General excitement followed, all the healthy pilgrims rose up to look, and it occurred to Madame de Jonquiere to call to Marthe, Brother Isidore's sister, and tell her to tap the man's hands.

"Question him," she added; "ask what ails him."

Marthe drew near, shook the man, and questioned him.

But instead of an answer only a rattle came from his throat, and his eyes remained closed.

Then a frightened voice was heard saying, "I think he is going to die."

The dread increased, words flew about, advice was tendered from one to the other end of the carriage. Nobody knew the man. He had certainly not obtained hospitalisation, for no white card was hanging from his neck. Somebody related, however, that he had seen him arrive, dragging himself along, but three minutes or so before the train started; and that he had remained quite motionless, scarce breathing, ever since he had flung himself with an air of intense weariness into that corner, where he was now apparently dying. His ticket was at last seen protruding from under the band of an old silk hat which was hung from a peg near him.

"Ah, he is breathing again now!" Sister Hyacinthe suddenly exclaimed. "Ask him his name."

However, on being again questioned by Marthe, the man merely gave vent to a low plaint, an exclamation scarcely articulated, "Oh, how I suffer!"

And thenceforward that was the only answer that could be obtained from him. With reference to everything that they wished to know, who he was, whence he came, what his illness was, what could be done for him, he gave no information, but still and ever continued moaning, "Oh, how I suffer—how I suffer!"

Sister Hyacinthe grew restless with impatience. Ah, if she had only been in the same compartment with him! And she resolved that she would change her seat at the first station they should stop at. Only there would be no stoppage for a long time. The position was becoming terrible, the more so as the man's head again fell back.

"He is dying, he is dying!" repeated the frightened voice.

What was to be done, mon Dieu? The Sister was aware that one of the Fathers of the Assumption, Father Massias, was in the train with the Holy Oils, ready to administer extreme unction to the dying; for every year some of the patients passed away during the journey. But she did not dare to have recourse to the alarm signal. Moreover, in the cantine van where Sister Saint Francois officiated, there was a doctor with a little medicine chest. If the sufferer should survive until they reached Poitiers, where there would be half an hour's stoppage, all possible help might be given to him.

But on the other hand he might suddenly expire. However, they ended by becoming somewhat calmer. The man, though still unconscious, began to breathe in a more regular manner, and seemed to fall asleep.

"To think of it, to die before getting there," murmured Marie with a shudder, "to die in sight of the promised land!" And as her father sought to reassure her she added: "I am suffering—I am suffering dreadfully myself."

"Have confidence," said Pierre; "the Blessed Virgin is watching over you."

She could no longer remain seated, and it became necessary to replace her in a recumbent position in her narrow coffin. Her father and the priest had to take every precaution in doing so, for the slightest hurt drew a moan from her. And she lay there breathless, like one dead, her face contracted by suffering, and surrounded by her regal fair hair. They had now been rolling on, ever rolling on for nearly four hours. And if the carriage was so greatly shaken, with an unbearable spreading tendency, it was from its position at the rear part of the train. The coupling irons shrieked, the wheels growled furiously; and as it was necessary to leave the windows partially open, the dust came in, acrid and burning; but it was especially the heat which grew terrible, a devouring, stormy heat falling from a tawny sky which large hanging clouds had slowly covered. The hot carriages, those rolling boxes where the pilgrims ate and drank, where the sick lay in a vitiated atmosphere, amid dizzying moans, prayers, and hymns, became like so many furnaces.

And Marie was not the only one whose condition had been aggravated; others also were suffering from the journey. Resting in the lap of her despairing mother, who gazed at her with large, tear-blurred eyes, little Rose had ceased to stir, and had grown so pale that Madame Maze had twice leant forward to feel her hands, fearful lest she should find them cold. At each moment also Madame Sabathier had to move her husband's legs, for their weight was so great, said he, that it seemed as if his hips were being torn from him. Brother Isidore too had just begun to cry out, emerging from his wonted torpor; and his sister had only been able to assuage his sufferings by raising him, and clasping him in her arms. La Grivotte seemed to be asleep, but a continuous hiccoughing shook her, and a tiny streamlet of blood dribbled from her mouth. Madame Vetu had again vomited, Elise Rouquet no longer thought of hiding the frightful sore open on her face. And from the man yonder, breathing hard, there still came a lugubrious rattle, as though he were at every moment on the point of expiring. In vain did Madame de Jonquiere and Sister Hyacinthe lavish their attentions on the patients, they could but slightly assuage so much suffering. At times it all seemed like an evil dream—that carriage of wretchedness and pain, hurried along at express speed, with a continuous shaking and jolting which made everything hanging from the pegs—the old clothes, the worn-out baskets mended with bits of string—swing to and fro incessantly. And in the compartment at the far end, the ten female pilgrims, some old, some young, and all pitifully ugly, sang on without a pause in cracked voices, shrill and dreary.

Then Pierre began to think of the other carriages of the train, that white train which conveyed most, if not all, of the more seriously afflicted patients; these carriages were rolling along, all displaying similar scenes of suffering among the three hundred sick and five hundred healthy pilgrims crowded within them. And afterwards he thought of the other trains which were leaving Paris that day, the grey train and the blue train* which had preceded the white one, the green train, the yellow train, the pink train, the orange train which were following it. From hour to hour trains set out from one to the other end of France. And he thought, too, of those which that same morning had started from Orleans, Le Mans, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Marseilles, and Carcassonne. Coming from all parts, trains were rushing across that land of France at the same hour, all directing their course yonder towards the holy Grotto, bringing thirty thousand patients and pilgrims to the Virgin's feet. And he reflected that other days of the year witnessed a like rush of human beings, that not a week went by without Lourdes beholding the arrival of some pilgrimage; that it was not merely France which set out on the march, but all Europe, the whole world; that in certain years of great religious fervour there had been three hundred thousand, and even five hundred thousand, pilgrims and patients streaming to the spot.

* Different-coloured tickets are issued for these trains; it is for
this reason that they are called the white, blue, and grey trains,
etc.—Trans.

Pierre fancied that he could hear those flying trains, those trains from everywhere, all converging towards the same rocky cavity where the tapers were blazing. They all rumbled loudly amid the cries of pain and snatches of hymns wafted from their carriages. They were the rolling hospitals of disease at its last stage, of human suffering rushing to the hope of cure, furiously seeking consolation between attacks of increased severity, with the ever-present threat of death—death hastened, supervening under awful conditions, amidst the mob-like scramble. They rolled on, they rolled on again and again, they rolled on without a pause, carrying the wretchedness of the world on its way to the divine illusion, the health of the infirm, the consolation of the afflicted.

And immense pity overflowed from Pierre's heart, human compassion for all the suffering and all the tears that consumed weak and naked men. He was sad unto death and ardent charity burnt within him, the unextinguishable flame as it were of his fraternal feelings towards all things and beings.

When they left the station of Saint Pierre des Corps at half-past ten, Sister Hyacinthe gave the signal, and they recited the third chaplet, the five glorious mysteries, the Resurrection of Our Lord, the Ascension of Our Lord, the Mission of the Holy Ghost, the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin, the Crowning of the Most Blessed Virgin. And afterwards they sang the canticle of Bernadette, that long, long chant, composed of six times ten couplets, to which the ever recurring Angelic Salutation serves as a refrain—a prolonged lullaby slowly besetting one until it ends by penetrating one's entire being, transporting one into ecstatic sleep, in delicious expectancy of a miracle.

II. PIERRE AND MARIE

THE green landscapes of Poitou were now defiling before them, and Abbe Pierre Froment, gazing out of the window, watched the trees fly away till, little by little, he ceased to distinguish them. A steeple appeared and then vanished, and all the pilgrims crossed themselves. They would not reach Poitiers until twelve-thirty-five, and the train was still rolling on amid the growing weariness of that oppressive, stormy day. Falling into a deep reverie, the young priest no longer heard the words of the canticle, which sounded in his ears merely like a slow, wavy lullaby.

Forgetfulness of the present had come upon him, an awakening of the past filled his whole being. He was reascending the stream of memory, reascending it to its source. He again beheld the house at Neuilly, where he had been born and where he still lived, that home of peace and toil, with its garden planted with a few fine trees, and parted by a quickset hedge and palisade from the garden of the neighbouring house, which was similar to his own. He was again three, perhaps four, years old, and round a table, shaded by the big horse-chestnut tree he once more beheld his father, his mother, and his elder brother at dejeuner. To his father, Michel Froment, he could give no distinct lineaments; he pictured him but faintly, vaguely, renowned as an illustrious chemist, bearing the title of Member of the Institute, and leading a cloistered life in the laboratory which he had installed in that secluded, deserted suburb. However he could plainly see his first brother Guillaume, then fourteen years of age, whom some holiday had brought from college that morning, and then and even more vividly his mother, so gentle and so quiet, with eyes so full of active kindliness. Later on he learnt what anguish had racked that religious soul, that believing woman who, from esteem and gratitude, had resignedly accepted marriage with an unbeliever, her senior by fifteen years, to whom her relatives were indebted for great services. He, Pierre, the tardy offspring of this union, born when his father was already near his fiftieth year, had only known his mother as a respectful, conquered woman in the presence of her husband, whom she had learnt to love passionately, with the frightful torment of knowing, however, that he was doomed to perdition. And, all at once, another memory flashed upon the young priest, the terrible memory of the day when his father had died, killed in his laboratory by an accident, the explosion of a retort. He, Pierre, had then been five years old, and he remembered the slightest incidents—his mother's cry when she had found the shattered body among the remnants of the chemical appliances, then her terror, her sobs, her prayers at the idea that God had slain the unbeliever, damned him for evermore. Not daring to burn his books and papers, she had contented herself with locking up the laboratory, which henceforth nobody entered. And from that moment, haunted by a vision of hell, she had had but one idea, to possess herself of her second son, who was still so young, to give him a strictly religious training, and through him to ransom her husband—secure his forgiveness from God. Guillaume, her elder boy, had already ceased to belong to her, having grown up at college, where he had been won over by the ideas of the century; but she resolved that the other, the younger one, should not leave the house, but should have a priest as tutor; and her secret dream, her consuming hope, was that she might some day see him a priest himself, saying his first mass and solacing souls whom the thought of eternity tortured.

Then between green, leafy boughs, flecked with sunlight, another figure rose vividly before Pierre's eyes. He suddenly beheld Marie de Guersaint as he had seen her one morning through a gap in the hedge dividing the two gardens. M. de Guersaint, who belonged to the petty Norman noblesse, was a combination of architect and inventor; and he was at that time busy with a scheme of model dwellings for the poor, to which churches and schools were to be attached; an affair of considerable magnitude, planned none too well, however, and in which, with his customary impetuosity, the lack of foresight of an imperfect artist, he was risking the three hundred thousand francs that he possessed. A similarity of religious faith had drawn Madame de Guersaint and Madame Froment together; but the former was altogether a superior woman, perspicuous and rigid, with an iron hand which alone prevented her household from gliding to a catastrophe; and she was bringing up her two daughters, Blanche and Marie, in principles of narrow piety, the elder one already being as grave as herself, whilst the younger, albeit very devout, was still fond of play, with an intensity of life within her which found vent in gay peals of sonorous laughter. From their early childhood Pierre and Marie played together, the hedge was ever being crossed, the two families constantly mingled. And on that clear sunshiny morning, when he pictured her parting the leafy branches she was already ten years old. He, who was sixteen, was to enter the seminary on the following Tuesday. Never had she seemed to him so pretty. Her hair, of a pure golden hue, was so long that when it was let down it sufficed to clothe her. Well did he remember her face as it had been, with round cheeks, blue eyes, red mouth, and skin of dazzling, snowy whiteness. She was indeed as gay and brilliant as the sun itself, a transplendency. Yet there were tears at the corners of her eyes, for she was aware of his coming departure. They sat down together at the far end of the garden, in the shadow cast by the hedge. Their hands mingled, and their hearts were very heavy. They had, however, never exchanged any vows amid their pastimes, for their innocence was absolute. But now, on the eve of separation, their mutual tenderness rose to their lips, and they spoke without knowing, swore that they would ever think of one another, and find one another again, some day, even as one meets in heaven to be very, very happy. Then, without understanding how it happened, they clasped each other tightly, to the point of suffocation, and kissed each other's face, weeping, the while, hot tears. And it was that delightful memory which Pierre had ever carried with him, which he felt alive within him still, after so many years, and after so many painful renunciations.

Just then a more violent shock roused him from his reverie. He turned his eyes upon the carriage and vaguely espied the suffering beings it contained—Madame Maze motionless, overwhelmed with grief; little Rose gently moaning in her mother's lap; La Grivotte, whom a hoarse cough was choking. For a moment Sister Hyacinthe's gay face shone out amidst the whiteness of her coif and wimple, dominating all the others. The painful journey was continuing, with a ray of divine hope still and ever shining yonder. Then everything slowly vanished from Pierre's eyes as a fresh wave of memory brought the past back from afar; and nothing of the present remained save the lulling hymn, the indistinct voices of dreamland, emerging from the invisible.

Henceforth he was at the seminary. The classrooms, the recreation ground with its trees, rose up clearly before him. But all at once he only beheld, as in a mirror, the youthful face which had then been his, and he contemplated it and scrutinised it, as though it had been the face of a stranger. Tall and slender, he had an elongated visage, with an unusually developed forehead, lofty and straight like a tower; whilst his jaws tapered, ending in a small refined chin. He seemed, in fact, to be all brains; his mouth, rather large, alone retained an expression of tenderness. Indeed, when his usually serious face relaxed, his mouth and eyes acquired an exceedingly soft expression, betokening an unsatisfied, hungry desire to love, devote oneself, and live. But immediately afterwards, the look of intellectual passion would come back again, that intellectuality which had ever consumed him with an anxiety to understand and know. And it was with surprise that he now recalled those years of seminary life. How was it that he had so long been able to accept the rude discipline of blind faith, of obedient belief in everything without the slightest examination? It had been required of him that he should absolutely surrender his reasoning faculties, and he had striven to do so, had succeeded indeed in stifling his torturing need of truth. Doubtless he had been softened, weakened by his mother's tears, had been possessed by the sole desire to afford her the great happiness she dreamt of. Yet now he remembered certain quiverings of revolt; he found in the depths of his mind the memory of nights which he had spent in weeping without knowing why, nights peopled with vague images, nights through which galloped the free, virile life of the world, when Marie's face incessantly returned to him, such as he had seen it one morning, dazzling and bathed in tears, while she embraced him with her whole soul. And that alone now remained; his years of religious study with their monotonous lessons, their ever similar exercises and ceremonies, had flown away into the same haze, into a vague half-light, full of mortal silence.

Then, just as the train had passed though a station at full speed, with the sudden uproar of its rush there arose within him a succession of confused visions. He had noticed a large deserted enclosure, and fancied that he could see himself within it at twenty years of age. His reverie was wandering. An indisposition of rather long duration had, however, at one time interrupted his studies, and led to his being sent into the country. He had remained for a long time without seeing Marie; during his vacations spent at Neuilly he had twice failed to meet her, for she was almost always travelling. He knew that she was very ill, in consequence of a fall from a horse when she was thirteen, a critical moment in a girl's life; and her despairing mother, perplexed by the contradictory advice of medical men, was taking her each year to a different watering-place. Then he learnt the startling news of the sudden tragical death of that mother, who was so severe and yet so useful to her kin. She had been carried off in five days by inflammation of the lungs, which she had contracted one evening whilst she was out walking at La Bourboule, through having taken off her mantle to place it round the shoulders of Marie, who had been conveyed thither for treatment. It had been necessary that the father should at once start off to fetch his daughter, who was mad with grief, and the corpse of his wife, who had been so suddenly torn from him. And unhappily, after losing her, the affairs of the family went from bad to worse in the hands of this architect, who, without counting, flung his fortune into the yawning gulf of his unsuccessful enterprises. Marie no longer stirred from her couch; only Blanche remained to manage the household, and she had matters of her own to attend to, being busy with the last examinations which she had to pass, the diplomas which she was obstinately intent on securing, foreseeing as she did that she would someday have to earn her bread.

All at once, from amidst this mass of confused, half-forgotten incidents, Pierre was conscious of the rise of a vivid vision. Ill-health, he remembered, had again compelled him to take a holiday. He had just completed his twenty-fourth year, he was greatly behindhand, having so far only secured the four minor orders; but on his return a sub-deaconship would be conferred on him, and an inviolable vow would bind him for evermore. And the Guersaints' little garden at Neuilly, whither he had formerly so often gone to play, again distinctly appeared before him. Marie's couch had been rolled under the tall trees at the far end of the garden near the hedge, they were alone together in the sad peacefulness of an autumnal afternoon, and he saw Marie, clad in deep mourning for her mother and reclining there with legs inert; whilst he, also clad in black, in a cassock already, sat near her on an iron garden chair. For five years she had been suffering. She was now eighteen, paler and thinner than formerly, but still adorable with her regal golden hair, which illness respected. He believed from what he had heard that she was destined to remain infirm, condemned never to become a woman, stricken even in her sex. The doctors, who failed to agree respecting her case, had abandoned her. Doubtless it was she who told him these things that dreary afternoon, whilst the yellow withered leaves rained upon them. However, he could not remember the words that they had spoken; her pale smile, her young face, still so charming though already dimmed by regretfulness for life, alone remained present with him. But he realised that she had evoked the far-off day of their parting, on that same spot, behind the hedge flecked with sunlight; and all that was already as though dead—their tears, their embrace, their promise to find one another some day with a certainty of happiness. For although they had found one another again, what availed it, since she was but a corpse, and he was about to bid farewell to the life of the world? As the doctors condemned her, as she would never be woman, nor wife, nor mother, he, on his side, might well renounce manhood, and annihilate himself, dedicate himself to God, to whom his mother gave him. And he still felt within him the soft bitterness of that last interview: Marie smiling painfully at memory of their childish play and prattle, and speaking to him of the happiness which he would assuredly find in the service of God; so penetrated indeed with emotion at this thought, that she had made him promise that he would let her hear him say his first mass.

But the train was passing the station of Sainte-Maure, and just then a sudden uproar momentarily brought Pierre's attention back to the carriage and its occupants. He fancied that there had been some fresh seizure or swooning, but the suffering faces that he beheld were still the same, ever contracted by the same expression of anxious waiting for the divine succour which was so slow in coming. M. Sabathier was vainly striving to get his legs into a comfortable position, whilst Brother Isidore raised a feeble continuous moan like a dying child, and Madame Vetu, a prey to terrible agony, devoured by her disease, sat motionless, and kept her lips tightly closed, her face distorted, haggard, and almost black. The noise which Pierre had heard had been occasioned by Madame de Jonquiere, who whilst cleansing a basin had dropped the large zinc water-can. And, despite their torment, this had made the patients laugh, like the simple souls they were, rendered puerile by suffering. However, Sister Hyacinthe, who rightly called them her children, children whom she governed with a word, at once set them saying the chaplet again, pending the Angelus, which would only be said at Chatellerault, in accordance with the predetermined programme. And thereupon the "Aves" followed one after the other, spreading into a confused murmuring and mumbling amidst the rattling of the coupling irons and noisy growling of the wheels.

Pierre had meantime relapsed into his reverie, and beheld himself as he had been at six-and-twenty, when ordained a priest. Tardy scruples had come to him a few days before his ordination, a semi-consciousness that he was binding himself without having clearly questioned his heart and mind. But he had avoided doing so, living in the dizzy bewilderment of his decision, fancying that he had lopped off all human ties and feelings with a voluntary hatchet-stroke. His flesh had surely died with his childhood's innocent romance, that white-skinned girl with golden hair, whom now he never beheld otherwise than stretched upon her couch of suffering, her flesh as lifeless as his own. And he had afterwards made the sacrifice of his mind, which he then fancied even an easier one, hoping as he did that determination would suffice to prevent him from thinking. Besides, it was too late, he could not recoil at the last moment, and if when he pronounced the last solemn vow he felt a secret terror, an indeterminate but immense regret agitating him, he forgot everything, saving a divine reward for his efforts on the day when he afforded his mother the great and long-expected joy of hearing him say his first mass.

He could still see the poor woman in the little church of Neuilly, which she herself had selected, the church where the funeral service for his father had been celebrated; he saw her on that cold November morning, kneeling almost alone in the dark little chapel, her hands hiding her face as she continued weeping whilst he raised the Host. It was there that she had tasted her last happiness, for she led a sad and lonely life, no longer seeing her elder son, who had gone away, swayed by other ideas than her own, bent on breaking off all family intercourse since his brother intended to enter the Church. It was said that Guillaume, a chemist of great talent, like his father, but at the same time a Bohemian, addicted to revolutionary dreams, was living in a little house in the suburbs, where he devoted himself to the dangerous study of explosive substances; and folks added that he was living with a woman who had come no one knew whence. This it was which had severed the last tie between himself and his mother, all piety and propriety. For three years Pierre had not once seen Guillaume, whom in his childhood he had worshipped as a kind, merry, and fatherly big brother.

But there came an awful pang to his heart—he once more beheld his mother lying dead. This again was a thunderbolt, an illness of scarce three days' duration, a sudden passing away, as in the case of Madame de Guersaint. One evening, after a wild hunt for the doctor, he had found her motionless and quite white. She had died during his absence; and his lips had ever retained the icy thrill of the last kiss that he had given her. Of everything else—the vigil, the preparations, the funeral—he remembered nothing. All that had become lost in the black night of his stupor and grief, grief so extreme that he had almost died of it—seized with shivering on his return from the cemetery, struck down by a fever which during three weeks had kept him delirious, hovering between life and death. His brother had come and nursed him and had then attended to pecuniary matters, dividing the little inheritance, leaving him the house and a modest income and taking his own share in money. And as soon as Guillaume had found him out of danger he had gone off again, once more vanishing into the unknown. But then through what a long convalescence he, Pierre, had passed, buried as it were in that deserted house. He had done nothing to detain Guillaume, for he realised that there was an abyss between them. At first the solitude had brought him suffering, but afterwards it had grown very pleasant, whether in the deep silence of the rooms which the rare noises of the street did not disturb, or under the screening, shady foliage of the little garden, where he could spend whole days without seeing a soul. His favourite place of refuge, however, was the old laboratory, his father's cabinet, which his mother for twenty years had kept carefully locked up, as though to immure within it all the incredulity and damnation of the past. And despite the gentleness, the respectful submissiveness which she had shown in former times, she would perhaps have some day ended by destroying all her husband's books and papers, had not death so suddenly surprised her. Pierre, however, had once more had the windows opened, the writing-table and the bookcase dusted; and, installed in the large leather arm-chair, he now spent delicious hours there, regenerated as it were by his illness, brought back to his youthful days again, deriving a wondrous intellectual delight from the perusal of the books which he came upon.

The only person whom he remembered having received during those two months of slow recovery was Doctor Chassaigne, an old friend of his father, a medical man of real merit, who, with the one ambition of curing disease, modestly confined himself to the role of the practitioner. It was in vain that the doctor had sought to save Madame Froment, but he flattered himself that he had extricated the young priest from grievous danger; and he came to see him from time to time, to chat with him and cheer him, talking with him of his father, the great chemist, of whom he recounted many a charming anecdote, many a particular, still glowing with the flame of ardent friendship. Little by little, amidst the weak languor of convalescence, the son had thus beheld an embodiment of charming simplicity, affection, and good nature rising up before him. It was his father such as he had really been, not the man of stern science whom he had pictured whilst listening to his mother. Certainly she had never taught him aught but respect for that dear memory; but had not her husband been the unbeliever, the man who denied, and made the angels weep, the artisan of impiety who sought to change the world that God had made? And so he had long remained a gloomy vision, a spectre of damnation prowling about the house, whereas now he became the house's very light, clear and gay, a worker consumed by a longing for truth, who had never desired anything but the love and happiness of all. For his part, Doctor Chassaigne, a Pyrenean by birth, born in a far-off secluded village where folks still believed in sorceresses, inclined rather towards religion, although he had not set his foot inside a church during the forty years he had been living in Paris. However, his conviction was absolute: if there were a heaven somewhere, Michel Froment was assuredly there, and not merely there, but seated upon a throne on the Divinity's right hand.

Then Pierre, in a few minutes, again lived through the frightful torment which, during two long months, had ravaged him. It was not that he had found controversial works of an anti-religious character in the bookcase, or that his father, whose papers he sorted, had ever gone beyond his technical studies as a savant. But little by little, despite himself, the light of science dawned upon him, an ensemble of proven phenomena, which demolished dogmas and left within him nothing of the things which as a priest he should have believed. It seemed, in fact, as though illness had renewed him, as though he were again beginning to live and learn amidst the physical pleasantness of convalescence, that still subsisting weakness which lent penetrating lucidity to his brain. At the seminary, by the advice of his masters, he had always kept the spirit of inquiry, his thirst for knowledge, in check. Much of that which was taught him there had surprised him; however, he had succeeded in making the sacrifice of his mind required of his piety. But now, all the laboriously raised scaffolding of dogmas was swept away in a revolt of that sovereign mind which clamoured for its rights, and which he could no longer silence. Truth was bubbling up and overflowing in such an irresistible stream that he realised he would never succeed in lodging error in his brain again. It was indeed the total and irreparable ruin of faith. Although he had been able to kill his flesh by renouncing the romance of his youth, although he felt that he had altogether mastered carnal passion, he now knew that it would be impossible for him to make the sacrifice of his intelligence. And he was not mistaken; it was indeed his father again springing to life in the depths of his being, and at last obtaining the mastery in that dual heredity in which, during so many years, his mother had dominated. The upper part of his face, his straight, towering brow, seemed to have risen yet higher, whilst the lower part, the small chin, the affectionate mouth, were becoming less distinct. However, he suffered; at certain twilight hours when his kindliness, his need of love awoke, he felt distracted with grief at no longer believing, distracted with desire to believe again; and it was necessary that the lighted lamp should be brought in, that he should see clearly around him and within him, before he could recover the energy and calmness of reason, the strength of martyrdom, the determination to sacrifice everything to the peace of his conscience.

Then came the crisis. He was a priest and he no longer believed. This had suddenly dawned before him like a bottomless abyss. It was the end of his life, the collapse of everything. What should he do? Did not simple rectitude require that he should throw off the cassock and return to the world? But he had seen some renegade priests and had despised them. A married priest with whom he was acquainted filled him with disgust. All this, no doubt, was but a survival of his long religious training. He retained the notion that a priest cannot, must not, weaken; the idea that when one has dedicated oneself to God one cannot take possession of oneself again. Possibly, also, he felt that he was too plainly branded, too different from other men already, to prove otherwise than awkward and unwelcome among them. Since he had been cut off from them he would remain apart in his grievous pride; And, after days of anguish, days of struggle incessantly renewed, in which his thirst for happiness warred with the energies of his returning health, he took the heroic resolution to remain a priest, and an honest one. He would find the strength necessary for such abnegation. Since he had conquered the flesh, albeit unable to conquer the brain, he felt sure of keeping his vow of chastity, and that would be unshakable; therein lay the pure, upright life which he was absolutely certain of living. What mattered the rest if he alone suffered, if nobody in the world suspected that his heart was reduced to ashes, that nothing remained of his faith, that he was agonising amidst fearful falsehood? His rectitude would prove a firm prop; he would follow his priestly calling like an honest man, without breaking any of the vows he had taken; he would, in due accordance with the rites, discharge his duties as a minister of the Divinity, whom he would praise and glorify at the altar, and distribute as the Bread of Life to the faithful. Who, then, would dare to impute his loss of faith to him as a crime, even if this great misfortune should some day become known? And what more could be asked of him than lifelong devotion to his vow, regard for his ministry, and the practice of every charity without the hope of any future reward? In this wise he ended by calming himself, still upright, still bearing his head erect, with the desolate grandeur of the priest who himself no longer believes, but continues watching over the faith of others. And he certainly was not alone; he felt that he had many brothers, priests with ravaged minds, who had sunk into incredulity, and who yet, like soldiers without a fatherland, remained at the altar, and, despite, everything, found the courage to make the divine illusion shine forth above the kneeling crowds.

On recovering his health Pierre had immediately resumed his service at the little church of Neuilly. He said his mass there every morning. But he had resolved to refuse any appointment, any preferment. Months and years went by, and he obstinately insisted on remaining the least known and the most humble of those priests who are tolerated in a parish, who appear and disappear after discharging their duty. The acceptance of any appointment would have seemed to him an aggravation of his falsehood, a theft from those who were more deserving than himself. And he had to resist frequent offers, for it was impossible for his merits to remain unnoticed. Indeed, his obstinate modesty provoked astonishment at the archbishop's palace, where there was a desire to utilise the power which could be divined in him. Now and again, it is true, he bitterly regretted that he was not useful, that he did not co-operate in some great work, in furthering the purification of the world, the salvation and happiness of all, in accordance with his own ardent, torturing desire. Fortunately his time was nearly all his own, and to console himself he gave rein to his passion for work by devouring every volume in his father's bookcase, and then again resuming and considering his studies, feverishly preoccupied with regard to the history of nations, full of a desire to explore the depths of the social and religious crisis so that he might ascertain whether it were really beyond remedy.

It was at this time, whilst rummaging one morning in one of the large drawers in the lower part of the bookcase, that he discovered quite a collection of papers respecting the apparitions of Lourdes. It was a very complete set of documents, comprising detailed notes of the interrogatories to which Bernadette had been subjected, copies of numerous official documents, and police and medical reports, in addition to many private and confidential letters of the greatest interest. This discovery had surprised Pierre, and he had questioned, Doctor Chassaigne concerning it. The latter thereupon remembered that his friend, Michel Froment, had at one time passionately devoted himself to the study of Bernadette's case; and he himself, a native of the village near Lourdes, had procured for the chemist a portion of the documents in the collection. Pierre, in his turn, then became impassioned, and for a whole month continued studying the affair, powerfully attracted by the visionary's pure, upright nature, but indignant with all that had subsequently sprouted up—the barbarous fetishism, the painful superstitions, and the triumphant simony. In the access of unbelief which had come upon him, this story of Lourdes was certainly of a nature to complete the collapse of his faith. However, it had also excited his curiosity, and he would have liked to investigate it, to establish beyond dispute what scientific truth might be in it, and render pure Christianity the service of ridding it of this scoria, this fairy tale, all touching and childish as it was. But he had been obliged to relinquish his studies, shrinking from the necessity of making a journey to the Grotto, and finding that it would be extremely difficult to obtain the information which he still needed; and of it all there at last only remained within him a tender feeling for Bernadette, of whom he could not think without a sensation of delightful charm and infinite pity.

The days went by, and Pierre led a more and more lonely life. Doctor Chassaigne had just left for the Pyrenees in a state of mortal anxiety. Abandoning his patients, he had set out for Cauterets with his ailing wife, who was sinking more and more each day, to the infinite distress of both his charming daughter and himself. From that moment the little house at Neuilly fell into deathlike silence and emptiness. Pierre had no other distraction than that of occasionally going to see the Guersaints, who had long since left the neighbouring house, but whom he had found again in a small lodging in a wretched tenement of the district. And the memory of his first visit to them there was yet so fresh within him, that he felt a pang at his heart as he recalled his emotion at sight of the hapless Marie.

That pang roused him from his reverie, and on looking round he perceived Marie stretched on the seat, even as he had found her on the day which he recalled, already imprisoned in that gutter-like box, that coffin to which wheels were adapted when she was taken out-of-doors for an airing. She, formerly so brimful of life, ever astir and laughing, was dying of inaction and immobility in that box. Of her old-time beauty she had retained nothing save her hair, which clad her as with a royal mantle, and she was so emaciated that she seemed to have grown smaller again, to have become once more a child. And what was most distressing was the expression on her pale face, the blank, frigid stare of her eyes which did not see, the ever haunting absent look, as of one whom suffering overwhelmed. However, she noticed that Pierre was gazing at her, and at once desired to smile at him; but irresistible moans escaped her, and when she did at last smile, it was like a poor smitten creature who is convinced that she will expire before the miracle takes place. He was overcome by it, and, amidst all the sufferings with which the carriage abounded, hers were now the only ones that he beheld and heard, as though one and all were summed up in her, in the long and terrible agony of her beauty, gaiety, and youth.

Then by degrees, without taking his eyes from Marie, he again reverted to former days, again lived those hours, fraught with a mournful and bitter charm, which he had often spent beside her, when he called at the sorry lodging to keep her company. M. de Guersaint had finally ruined himself by trying to improve the artistic quality of the religious prints so widely sold in France, the faulty execution of which quite irritated him. His last resources had been swallowed up in the failure of a colour-printing firm; and, heedless as he was, deficient in foresight, ever trusting in Providence, his childish mind continually swayed by illusions, he did not notice the awful pecuniary embarrassment of the household; but applied himself to the study of aerial navigation, without even realising what prodigious activity his elder daughter, Blanche, was forced to display, in order to earn the living of her two children, as she was wont to call her father and her sister. It was Blanche who, by running about Paris in the dust or the mud from morning to evening in order to give French or music lessons, contrived to provide the money necessary for the unremitting attentions which Marie required. And Marie often experienced attacks of despair—bursting into tears and accusing herself of being the primary cause of their ruin, as for years and years now it had been necessary to pay for medical attendance and for taking her to almost every imaginable spring—La Bourboule, Aix, Lamalou, Amelie-les-Bains, and others. And the outcome of ten years of varied diagnosis and treatment was that the doctors had now abandoned her. Some thought her illness to be due to the rupture of certain ligaments, others believed in the presence of a tumour, others again to paralysis due to injury to the spinal cord, and as she, with maidenly revolt, refused to undergo any examination, and they did not even dare to address precise questions to her, they each contented themselves with their several opinions and declared that she was beyond cure. Moreover, she now solely relied upon the divine help, having grown rigidly pious since she had been suffering, and finding her only relief in her ardent faith. Every morning she herself read the holy offices, for to her great sorrow she was unable to go to church. Her inert limbs indeed seemed quite lifeless, and she had sunk into a condition of extreme weakness, to such a point, in fact, that on certain days it became necessary for her sister to place her food in her mouth.

Pierre was thinking of this when all at once he recalled an evening he had spent with her. The lamp had not yet been lighted, he was seated beside her in the growing obscurity, and she suddenly told him that she wished to go to Lourdes, feeling certain that she would return cured. He had experienced an uncomfortable sensation on hearing her speak in this fashion, and quite forgetting himself had exclaimed that it was folly to believe in such childishness. He had hitherto made it a rule never to converse with her on religious matters, having not only refused to be her confessor, but even to advise her with regard to the petty uncertainties of her pietism. In this respect he was influenced by feelings of mingled shame and compassion; to lie to her of all people would have made him suffer, and, moreover, he would have deemed himself a criminal had he even by a breath sullied that fervent pure faith which lent her such strength against pain. And so, regretting that he had not been able to restrain his exclamation, he remained sorely embarrassed, when all at once he felt the girl's cold hand take hold of his own. And then, emboldened by the darkness, she ventured in a gentle, faltering voice, to tell him that she already knew his secret, his misfortune, that wretchedness, so fearful for a priest, of being unable to believe.

Despite himself he had revealed everything during their chats together, and she, with the delicate intuition of a friend, had been able to read his conscience. She felt terribly distressed on his account; she deemed him, with that mortal moral malady, to be more deserving of pity than herself. And then as he, thunderstruck, was still unable to find an answer, acknowledging the truth of her words by his very silence, she again began to speak to him of Lourdes, adding in a low whisper that she wished to confide him as well as herself to the protection of the Blessed Virgin, whom she entreated to restore him to faith. And from that evening forward she did not cease speaking on the subject, repeating again and again, that if she went to Lourdes she would be surely cured. But she was prevented from making the journey by lack of means and she did not even dare to speak to her sister of the pecuniary question. So two months went by, and day by day she grew weaker, exhausted by her longing dreams, her eyes ever turned towards the flashing light of the miraculous Grotto far away. Pierre then experienced many painful days. He had at first told Marie that he would not accompany her. But his decision was somewhat shaken by the thought that if he made up his mind to go, he might profit by the journey to continue his inquiries with regard to Bernadette, whose charming image lingered in his heart. And at last he even felt penetrated by a delightful feeling, an unacknowledged hope, the hope that Marie was perhaps right, that the Virgin might take pity on him and restore to him his former blind faith, the faith of the child who loves and does not question. Oh! to believe, to believe with his whole soul, to plunge into faith for ever! Doubtless there was no other possible happiness. He longed for faith with all the joyousness of his youth, with all the love that he had felt for his mother, with all his burning desire to escape from the torment of understanding and knowing, and to slumber forever in the depths of divine ignorance. It was cowardly, and yet so delightful; to exist no more, to become a mere thing in the hands of the Divinity. And thus he was at last possessed by a desire to make the supreme experiment.

A week later the journey to Lourdes was decided upon. Pierre, however, had insisted on a final consultation of medical men in order to ascertain if it were really possible for Marie to travel; and this again was a scene which rose up before him, with certain incidents which he ever beheld whilst others were already fading from his mind. Two of the doctors who had formerly attended the patient, and one of whom believed in the rupture of certain ligaments, whilst the other asserted the case to be one of medullary paralysis, had ended by agreeing that this paralysis existed, and that there was also, possibly, some ligamentary injury. In their opinion all the symptoms pointed to this diagnosis, and the nature of the case seemed to them so evident that they did not hesitate to give certificates, each his own, agreeing almost word for word with one another, and so positive in character as to leave no room for doubt. Moreover, they thought that the journey was practicable, though it would certainly prove an exceedingly painful one. Pierre thereupon resolved to risk it, for he had found the doctors very prudent, and very desirous to arrive at the truth; and he retained but a confused recollection of the third medical man who had been called in, a distant cousin of his named De Beauclair, who was young, extremely intelligent, but little known as yet, and said by some to be rather strange in his theories. This doctor, after looking at Marie for a long time, had asked somewhat anxiously about her parents, and had seemed greatly interested by what was told him of M. de Guersaint, this architect and inventor with a weak and exuberant mind. Then he had desired to measure the sufferer's visual field, and by a slight discreet touch had ascertained the locality of the pain, which, under certain pressure, seemed to ascend like a heavy shifting mass towards the breast. He did not appear to attach importance to the paralysis of the legs; but on a direct question being put to him he exclaimed that the girl ought to be taken to Lourdes and that she would assuredly be cured there, if she herself were convinced of it. Faith sufficed, said he, with a smile; two pious lady patients of his, whom he had sent thither during the preceding year, had returned in radiant health. He even predicted how the miracle would come about; it would be like a lightning stroke, an awakening, an exaltation of the entire being, whilst the evil, that horrid, diabolical weight which stifled the poor girl would once more ascend and fly away as though emerging by her mouth. But at the same time he flatly declined to give a certificate. He had failed to agree with his two confreres, who treated him coldly, as though they considered him a wild, adventurous young fellow. Pierre confusedly remembered some shreds of the discussion which had begun again in his presence, some little part of the diagnosis framed by Beauclair. First, a dislocation of the organ, with a slight laceration of the ligaments, resulting from the patient's fall from her horse; then a slow healing, everything returning to its place, followed by consecutive nervous symptoms, so that the sufferer was now simply beset by her original fright, her attention fixed on the injured part, arrested there amidst increasing pain, incapable of acquiring fresh notions unless it were under the lash of some violent emotion. Moreover, he also admitted the probability of accidents due to nutrition, as yet unexplained, and on the course and importance of which he himself would not venture to give an opinion. However, the idea that Marie dreamt her disease, that the fearful sufferings torturing her came from an injury long since healed, appeared such a paradox to Pierre when he gazed at her and saw her in such agony, her limbs already stretched out lifeless on her bed of misery, that he did not even pause to consider it; but at that moment felt simply happy in the thought that all three doctors agreed in authorising the journey to Lourdes. To him it was sufficient that she might be cured, and to attain that result he would have followed her to the end of the world.

Ah! those last days of Paris, amid what a scramble they were spent! The national pilgrimage was about to start, and in order to avoid heavy expenses, it had occurred to him to obtain hospitalisation for Marie. Then he had been obliged to run about in order to obtain his own admission, as a helper, into the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation. M. de Guersaint was delighted with the prospect of the journey, for he was fond of nature, and ardently desired to become acquainted with the Pyrenees. Moreover, he did not allow anything to worry him, but was perfectly willing that the young priest should pay his railway fare, and provide for him at the hotel yonder as for a child; and his daughter Blanche, having slipped a twenty-franc piece into his hand at the last moment, he had even thought himself rich again. That poor brave Blanche had a little hidden store of her own, savings to the amount of fifty francs, which it had been absolutely necessary to accept, for she became quite angry in her determination to contribute towards her sister's cure, unable as she was to form one of the party, owing to the lessons which she had to give in Paris, whose hard pavements she must continue pacing, whilst her dear ones were kneeling yonder, amidst the enchantments of the Grotto. And so the others had started on, and were now rolling, ever rolling along.

As they passed the station of Chatellerault a sudden burst of voices made Pierre start, and drove away the torpor into which his reverie had plunged him. What was the matter? Were they reaching Poitiers? But it was only half-past twelve o'clock, and it was simply Sister Hyacinthe who had roused him, by making her patients and pilgrims say the Angelus, the three "Aves" thrice repeated. Then the voices burst forth, and the sound of a fresh canticle arose, and continued like a lamentation. Fully five and twenty minutes must elapse before they would reach Poitiers, where it seemed as if the half-hour's stoppage would bring relief to every suffering! They were all so uncomfortable, so roughly shaken in that malodorous, burning carriage! Such wretchedness was beyond endurance. Big tears coursed down the cheeks of Madame Vincent, a muttered oath escaped M. Sabathier usually so resigned, and Brother Isidore, La Grivotte, and Madame Vetu seemed to have become inanimate, mere waifs carried along by a torrent. Moreover, Marie no longer answered, but had closed her eyes and would not open them, pursued as she was by the horrible vision of Elise Rouquet's face, that face with its gaping cavities which seemed to her to be the image of death. And whilst the train increased its speed, bearing all this human despair onward, under the heavy sky, athwart the burning plains, there was yet another scare in the carriage. The strange man had apparently ceased to breathe, and a voice cried out that he was expiring.

III. POITIERS

AS soon as the train arrived at Poitiers, Sister Hyacinthe alighted in all haste, amidst the crowd of porters opening the carriage doors, and of pilgrims darting forward to reach the platform. "Wait a moment, wait a moment," she repeated, "let me pass first. I wish to see if all is over."

Then, having entered the other compartment, she raised the strange man's head, and seeing him so pale, with such blank eyes, she did at first think him already dead. At last, however, she detected a faint breathing. "No, no," she then exclaimed, "he still breathes. Quick! there is no time to be lost." And, perceiving the other Sister, she added: "Sister Claire des Anges, will you go and fetch Father Massias, who must be in the third or fourth carriage of the train? Tell him that we have a patient in very great danger here, and ask him to bring the Holy Oils at once."

Without answering, the other Sister at once plunged into the midst of the scramble. She was small, slender, and gentle, with a meditative air and mysterious eyes, but withal extremely active.

Pierre, who was standing in the other compartment watching the scene, now ventured to make a suggestion: "And would it not be as well to fetch the doctor?" said he.

"Yes, I was thinking of it," replied Sister Hyacinthe, "and, Monsieur l'Abbe, it would be very kind of you to go for him yourself."

It so happened that Pierre intended going to the cantine carriage to fetch some broth for Marie. Now that she was no longer being jolted she felt somewhat relieved, and had opened her eyes, and caused her father to raise her to a sitting posture. Keenly thirsting for fresh air, she would have much liked them to carry her out on to the platform for a moment, but she felt that it would be asking too much, that it would be too troublesome a task to place her inside the carriage again. So M. de Guersaint remained by himself on the platform, near the open door, smoking a cigarette, whilst Pierre hastened to the cantine van, where he knew he would find the doctor on duty, with his travelling pharmacy.

Some other patients, whom one could not think of removing, also remained in the carriage. Amongst them was La Grivotte, who was stifling and almost delirious, in such a state indeed as to detain Madame de Jonquiere, who had arranged to meet her daughter Raymonde, with Madame Volmar and Madame Desagneaux, in the refreshment-room, in order that they might all four lunch together. But that unfortunate creature seemed on the point of expiring, so how could she leave her all alone, on the hard seat of that carriage? On his side, M. Sabathier, likewise riveted to his seat, was waiting for his wife, who had gone to fetch a bunch of grapes for him; whilst Marthe had remained with her brother the missionary, whose faint moan never ceased. The others, those who were able to walk, had hustled one another in their haste to alight, all eager as they were to escape for a moment from that cage of wretchedness where their limbs had been quite numbed by the seven hours' journey which they had so far gone. Madame Maze had at once drawn apart, straying with melancholy face to the far end of the platform, where she found herself all alone; Madame Vetu, stupefied by her sufferings, had found sufficient strength to take a few steps, and sit down on a bench, in the full sunlight, where she did not even feel the burning heat; whilst Elise Rouquet, who had had the decency to cover her face with a black wrap, and was consumed by a desire for fresh water, went hither and thither in search of a drinking fountain. And meantime Madame Vincent, walking slowly, carried her little Rose about in her arms, trying to smile at her, and to cheer her by showing her some gaudily coloured picture bills, which the child gravely gazed at, but did not see.

Pierre had the greatest possible difficulty in making his way through the crowd inundating the platform. No effort of imagination could enable one to picture the living torrent of ailing and healthy beings which the train had here set down—a mob of more than a thousand persons just emerging from suffocation, and bustling, hurrying hither and thither. Each carriage had contributed its share of wretchedness, like some hospital ward suddenly evacuated; and it was now possible to form an idea of the frightful amount of suffering which this terrible white train carried along with it, this train which disseminated a legend of horror wheresoever it passed. Some infirm sufferers were dragging themselves about, others were being carried, and many remained in a heap on the platform. There were sudden pushes, violent calls, innumerable displays of distracted eagerness to reach the refreshment-room and the buvette. Each and all made haste, going wheresoever their wants called them. This stoppage of half an hour's duration, the only stoppage there would be before reaching Lourdes, was, after all, such a short one. And the only gay note, amidst all the black cassocks and the threadbare garments of the poor, never of any precise shade of colour, was supplied by the smiling whiteness of the Little Sisters of the Assumption, all bright and active in their snowy coifs, wimples, and aprons.

When Pierre at last reached the cantine van near the middle of the train, he found it already besieged. There was here a petroleum stove, with a small supply of cooking utensils. The broth prepared from concentrated meat-extract was being warmed in wrought-iron pans, whilst the preserved milk in tins was diluted and supplied as occasion required. There were some other provisions, such as biscuits, fruit, and chocolate, on a few shelves. But Sister Saint-Francois, to whom the service was entrusted, a short, stout woman of five-and-forty, with a good-natured fresh-coloured face, was somewhat losing her head in the presence of all the hands so eagerly stretched towards her. Whilst continuing her distribution, she lent ear to Pierre, as he called the doctor, who with his travelling pharmacy occupied another corner of the van. Then, when the young priest began to explain matters, speaking of the poor unknown man who was dying, a sudden desire came to her to go and see him, and she summoned another Sister to take her place.

"Oh! I wished to ask you, Sister, for some broth for a passenger who is ill," said Pierre, at that moment turning towards her.

"Very well, Monsieur l'Abbe, I will bring some. Go on in front."

The doctor and the abbe went off in all haste, rapidly questioning and answering one another, whilst behind them followed Sister Saint-Francois, carrying the bowl of broth with all possible caution amidst the jostling of the crowd. The doctor was a dark-complexioned man of eight-and-twenty, robust and extremely handsome, with the head of a young Roman emperor, such as may still be occasionally met with in the sunburnt land of Provence. As soon as Sister Hyacinthe caught sight of him, she raised an exclamation of surprise: "What! Monsieur Ferrand, is it you?" Indeed, they both seemed amazed at meeting in this manner.

It is, however, the courageous mission of the Sisters of the Assumption to tend the ailing poor, those who lie in agony in their humble garrets, and cannot pay for nursing; and thus these good women spend their lives among the wretched, installing themselves beside the sufferer's pallet in his tiny lodging, and ministering to every want, attending alike to cooking and cleaning, and living there as servants and relatives, until either cure or death supervenes. And it was in this wise that Sister Hyacinthe, young as she was, with her milky face, and her blue eyes which ever laughed, had installed herself one day in the abode of this young fellow, Ferrand, then a medical student, prostrated by typhoid fever, and so desperately poor that he lived in a kind of loft reached by a ladder, in the Rue du Four. And from that moment she had not stirred from his side, but had remained with him until she cured him, with the passion of one who lived only for others, one who when an infant had been found in a church porch, and who had no other family than that of those who suffered, to whom she devoted herself with all her ardently affectionate nature. And what a delightful month, what exquisite comradeship, fraught with the pure fraternity of suffering, had followed! When he called her "Sister," it was really to a sister that he was speaking. And she was a mother also, a mother who helped him to rise, and who put him to bed as though he were her child, without aught springing up between them save supreme pity, the divine, gentle compassion of charity. She ever showed herself gay, sexless, devoid of any instinct excepting that which prompted her to assuage and to console. And he worshipped her, venerated her, and had retained of her the most chaste and passionate of recollections.

"O Sister Hyacinthe!" he murmured in delight.

Chance alone had brought them face to face again, for Ferrand was not a believer, and if he found himself in that train it was simply because he had at the last moment consented to take the place of a friend who was suddenly prevented from coming. For nearly a twelvemonth he had been a house-surgeon at the Hospital of La Pitie. However, this journey to Lourdes, in such peculiar circumstances, greatly interested him.

The joy of the meeting was making them forget the ailing stranger. And so the Sister resumed: "You see, Monsieur Ferrand, it is for this man that we want you. At one moment we thought him dead. Ever since we passed Amboise he has been filling us with fear, and I have just sent for the Holy Oils. Do you find him so very low? Could you not revive him a little?"

The doctor was already examining the man, and thereupon the sufferers who had remained in the carriage became greatly interested and began to look. Marie, to whom Sister Saint-Francois had given the bowl of broth, was holding it with such an unsteady hand that Pierre had to take it from her, and endeavour to make her drink; but she could not swallow, and she left the broth scarce tasted, fixing her eyes upon the man waiting to see what would happen like one whose own existence is at stake.

"Tell me," again asked Sister Hyacinthe, "how do you find him? What is his illness?"

"What is his illness!" muttered Ferrand; "he has every illness."

Then, drawing a little phial from his pocket, he endeavoured to introduce a few drops of the contents between the sufferer's clenched teeth. The man heaved a sigh, raised his eyelids and let them fall again; that was all, he gave no other sign of life.

Sister Hyacinthe, usually so calm and composed, so little accustomed to despair, became impatient.

"But it is terrible," said she, "and Sister Claire des Anges does not come back! Yet I told her plainly enough where she would find Father Massias's carriage. Mon Dieu! what will become of us?"

Sister Saint-Francois, seeing that she could render no help, was now about to return to the cantine van. Before doing so, however, she inquired if the man were not simply dying of hunger; for such cases presented themselves, and indeed she had only come to the compartment with the view of offering some of her provisions. At last, as she went off, she promised that she would make Sister Claire des Anges hasten her return should she happen to meet her; and she had not gone twenty yards when she turned round and waved her arm to call attention to her colleague, who with discreet short steps was coming back alone.

Leaning out of the window, Sister Hyacinthe kept on calling to her, "Make haste, make haste! Well, and where is Father Massias?"

"He isn't there."

"What! not there?"

"No. I went as fast as I could, but with all these people about it was not possible to get there quickly. When I reached the carriage Father Massias had already alighted, and gone out of the station, no doubt."

She thereupon explained, that according to what she had heard, Father Massias and the priest of Sainte-Radegonde had some appointment together. In other years the national pilgrimage halted at Poitiers for four-and-twenty hours, and after those who were ill had been placed in the town hospital the others went in procession to Sainte-Radegonde.* That year, however, there was some obstacle to this course being followed, so the train was going straight on to Lourdes; and Father Massias was certainly with his friend the priest, talking with him on some matter of importance.

* The church of Sainte-Radegonde, built by the saint of that name
in the sixth century, is famous throughout Poitou. In the crypt
between the tombs of Ste. Agnes and St. Disciole is that of Ste.
Radegonde herself, but it now only contains some particles of her
remains, as the greater portion was burnt by the Huguenots in
1562. On a previous occasion (1412) the tomb had been violated by
Jean, Duc de Berry, who wished to remove both the saint's head
and her two rings. Whilst he was making the attempt, however, the
skeleton is said to have withdrawn its hand so that he might not
possess himself of the rings. A greater curiosity which the church
contains is a footprint on a stone slab, said to have been left
by Christ when He appeared to Ste. Radegonde in her cell. This
attracts pilgrims from many parts.—Trans.

"They promised to tell him and send him here with the Holy Oils as soon as they found him," added Sister Claire.

However, this was quite a disaster for Sister Hyacinthe. Since Science was powerless, perhaps the Holy Oils would have brought the sufferer some relief. She had often seen that happen.

"O Sister, Sister, how worried I am!" she said to her companion. "Do you know, I wish you would go back and watch for Father Massias and bring him to me as soon as you see him. It would be so kind of you to do so!"

"Yes, Sister," compliantly answered Sister Claire des Anges, and off she went again with that grave, mysterious air of hers, wending her way through the crowd like a gliding shadow.

Ferrand, meantime, was still looking at the man, sorely distressed at his inability to please Sister Hyacinthe by reviving him. And as he made a gesture expressive of his powerlessness she again raised her voice entreatingly: "Stay with me, Monsieur Ferrand, pray stay," she said. "Wait till Father Massias comes—I shall be a little more at ease with you here."

He remained and helped her to raise the man, who was slipping down upon the seat. Then, taking a linen cloth, she wiped the poor fellow's face which a dense perspiration was continually covering. And the spell of waiting continued amid the uneasiness of the patients who had remained in the carriage, and the curiosity of the folks who had begun to assemble on the platform in front of the compartment.

All at once however a girl hastily pushed the crowd aside, and, mounting on the footboard, addressed herself to Madame de Jonquiere: "What is the matter, mamma?" she said. "They are waiting for you in the refreshment-room."

It was Raymonde de Jonquiere, who, already somewhat ripe for her four-and-twenty years, was remarkably like her mother, being very dark, with a pronounced nose, large mouth, and full, pleasant-looking face.

"But, my dear, you can see for yourself. I can't leave this poor woman," replied the lady-hospitaller; and thereupon she pointed to La Grivotte, who had been attacked by a fit of coughing which shook her frightfully.

"Oh, how annoying, mamma!" retorted Raymonde, "Madame Desagneaux and Madame Volmar were looking forward with so much pleasure to this little lunch together."

"Well, it can't be helped, my dear. At all events, you can begin without waiting for me. Tell the ladies that I will come and join them as soon as I can." Then, an idea occurring to her, Madame de Jonquiere added: "Wait a moment, the doctor is here. I will try to get him to take charge of my patient. Go back, I will follow you. As you can guess, I am dying of hunger."

Raymonde briskly returned to the refreshment-room whilst her mother begged Ferrand to come into her compartment to see if he could do something to relieve La Grivotte. At Marthe's request he had already examined Brother Isidore, whose moaning never ceased; and with a sorrowful gesture he had again confessed his powerlessness. However, he hastened to comply with Madame de Jonquiere's appeal, and raised the consumptive woman to a sitting posture in the hope of thus stopping her cough, which indeed gradually ceased. And then he helped the lady-hospitaller to make her swallow a spoonful of some soothing draught. The doctor's presence in the carriage was still causing a stir among the ailing ones. M. Sabathier, who was slowly eating the grapes which his wife had been to fetch him, did not, however, question Ferrand, for he knew full well what his answer would be, and was weary, as he expressed it, of consulting all the princes of science; nevertheless he felt comforted as it were at seeing him set that poor consumptive woman on her feet again. And even Marie watched all that the doctor did with increasing interest, though not daring to call him herself, certain as she also was that he could do nothing for her.

Meantime, the crush on the platform was increasing. Only a quarter of an hour now remained to the pilgrims. Madame Vetu, whose eyes were open but who saw nothing, sat like an insensible being in the broad sunlight, in the hope possibly that the scorching heat would deaden her pains; whilst up and down, in front of her, went Madame Vincent ever with the same sleep-inducing step and ever carrying her little Rose, her poor ailing birdie, whose weight was so trifling that she scarcely felt her in her arms. Many people meantime were hastening to the water tap in order to fill their pitchers, cans, and bottles. Madame Maze, who was of refined tastes and careful of her person, thought of going to wash her hands there; but just as she arrived she found Elise Rouquet drinking, and she recoiled at sight of that disease-smitten face, so terribly disfigured and robbed of nearly all semblance of humanity. And all the others likewise shuddered, likewise hesitated to fill their bottles, pitchers, and cans at the tap from which she had drunk.

A large number of pilgrims had now begun to eat whilst pacing the platform. You could hear the rhythmical taps of the crutches carried by a woman who incessantly wended her way through the groups. On the ground, a legless cripple was painfully dragging herself about in search of nobody knew what. Others, seated there in heaps, no longer stirred. All these sufferers, momentarily unpacked as it were, these patients of a travelling hospital emptied for a brief half-hour, were taking the air amidst the bewilderment and agitation of the healthy passengers; and the whole throng had a frightfully woeful, poverty-stricken appearance in the broad noontide light.

Pierre no longer stirred from the side of Marie, for M. de Guersaint had disappeared, attracted by a verdant patch of landscape which could be seen at the far end of the station. And, feeling anxious about her, since she had not been able to finish her broth, the young priest with a smiling air tried to tempt her palate by offering to go and buy her a peach; but she refused it; she was suffering too much, she cared for nothing. She was gazing at him with her large, woeful eyes, on the one hand impatient at this stoppage which delayed her chance of cure, and on the other terrified at the thought of again being jolted along that hard and endless railroad.

Just then a stout gentleman whose full beard was turning grey, and who had a broad, fatherly kind of face, drew near and touched Pierre's arm: "Excuse me, Monsieur l'Abbe," said he, "but is it not in this carriage that there is a poor man dying?"

And on the priest returning an affirmative answer, the gentleman became quite affable and familiar.

"My name is Vigneron," he said; "I am the head clerk at the Ministry of Finances, and applied for leave in order that I might help my wife to take our son Gustave to Lourdes. The dear lad places all his hope in the Blessed Virgin, to whom we pray morning and evening on his behalf. We are in a second-class compartment of the carriage just in front of yours."

Then, turning round, he summoned his party with a wave of the hand. "Come, come!" said he, "it is here. The unfortunate man is indeed in the last throes."

Madame Vigneron was a little woman with the correct bearing of a respectable bourgeoise, but her long, livid face denoted impoverished blood, terrible evidence of which was furnished by her son Gustave. The latter, who was fifteen years of age, looked scarcely ten. Twisted out of shape, he was a mere skeleton, with his right leg so wasted, so reduced, that he had to walk with a crutch. He had a small, thin face, somewhat awry, in which one saw little excepting his eyes, clear eyes, sparkling with intelligence, sharpened as it were by suffering, and doubtless well able to dive into the human soul.

An old puffy-faced lady followed the others, dragging her legs along with difficulty; and M. Vigneron, remembering that he had forgotten her, stepped back towards Pierre so that he might complete the introduction. "That lady," said he, "is Madame Chaise, my wife's eldest sister. She also wished to accompany Gustave, whom she is very fond of." And then, leaning forward, he added in a whisper, with a confidential air: "She is the widow of Chaise, the silk merchant, you know, who left such an immense fortune. She is suffering from a heart complaint which causes her much anxiety."

The whole family, grouped together, then gazed with lively curiosity at what was taking place in the railway carriage. People were incessantly flocking to the spot; and so that the lad might be the better able to see, his father took him up in his arms for a moment whilst his aunt held the crutch, and his mother on her side raised herself on tip-toe.

The scene in the carriage was still the same; the strange man was still stiffly seated in his corner, his head resting against the hard wood. He was livid, his eyes were closed, and his mouth was twisted by suffering; and every now and then Sister Hyacinthe with her linen cloth wiped away the cold sweat which was constantly covering his face. She no longer spoke, no longer evinced any impatience, but had recovered her serenity and relied on Heaven. From time to time she would simply glance towards the platform to see if Father Massias were coming.

"Look at him, Gustave," said M. Vigneron to his son; "he must be consumptive."

The lad, whom scrofula was eating away, whose hip was attacked by an abscess, and in whom there were already signs of necrosis of the vertebrae, seemed to take a passionate interest in the agony he thus beheld. It did not frighten him, he smiled at it with a smile of infinite sadness.

"Oh! how dreadful!" muttered Madame Chaise, who, living in continual terror of a sudden attack which would carry her off, turned pale with the fear of death.

"Ah! well," replied M. Vigneron, philosophically, "it will come to each of us in turn. We are all mortal."

Thereupon, a painful, mocking expression came over Gustave's smile, as though he had heard other words than those—perchance an unconscious wish, the hope that the old aunt might die before he himself did, that he would inherit the promised half-million of francs, and then not long encumber his family.

"Put the boy down now," said Madame Vigneron to her husband. "You are tiring him, holding him by the legs like that."

Then both she and Madame Chaise bestirred themselves in order that the lad might not be shaken. The poor darling was so much in need of care and attention. At each moment they feared that they might lose him. Even his father was of opinion that they had better put him in the train again at once. And as the two women went off with the child, the old gentleman once more turned towards Pierre, and with evident emotion exclaimed: "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe, if God should take him from us, the light of our life would be extinguished—I don't speak of his aunt's fortune, which would go to other nephews. But it would be unnatural, would it not, that he should go off before her, especially as she is so ill? However, we are all in the hands of Providence, and place our reliance in the Blessed Virgin, who will assuredly perform a miracle."

Just then Madame de Jonquiere, having been reassured by Doctor Ferrand, was able to leave La Grivotte. Before going off, however, she took care to say to Pierre: "I am dying of hunger and am going to the refreshment-room for a moment. But if my patient should begin coughing again, pray come and fetch me."

When, after great difficulty, she had managed to cross the platform and reach the refreshment-room, she found herself in the midst of another scramble. The better-circumstanced pilgrims had taken the tables by assault, and a great many priests were to be seen hastily lunching amidst all the clatter of knives, forks, and crockery. The three or four waiters were not able to attend to all the requirements, especially as they were hampered in their movements by the crowd purchasing fruit, bread, and cold meat at the counter. It was at a little table at the far end of the room that Raymonde was lunching with Madame Desagneaux and Madame Volmar.

"Ah! here you are at last, mamma!" the girl exclaimed, as Madame de Jonquiere approached. "I was just going back to fetch you. You certainly ought to be allowed time to eat!"

She was laughing, with a very animated expression on her face, quite delighted as she was with the adventures of the journey and this indifferent scrambling meal. "There," said she, "I have kept you some trout with green sauce, and there's a cutlet also waiting for you. We have already got to the artichokes."

Then everything became charming. The gaiety prevailing in that little corner rejoiced the sight.

Young Madame Desagneaux was particularly adorable. A delicate blonde, with wild, wavy, yellow hair, a round, dimpled, milky face, a gay, laughing disposition, and a remarkably good heart, she had made a rich marriage, and for three years past had been wont to leave her husband at Trouville in the fine August weather, in order to accompany the national pilgrimage as a lady-hospitaller. This was her great passion, an access of quivering pity, a longing desire to place herself unreservedly at the disposal of the sick for five days, a real debauch of devotion from which she returned tired to death but full of intense delight. Her only regret was that she as yet had no children, and with comical passion, she occasionally expressed a regret that she had missed her true vocation, that of a sister of charity.

"Ah! my dear," she hastily said to Raymonde, "don't pity your mother for being so much taken up with her patients. She, at all events, has something to occupy her." And addressing herself to Madame de Jonquiere, she added: "If you only knew how long we find the time in our fine first-class carriage. We cannot even occupy ourselves with a little needlework, as it is forbidden. I asked for a place with the patients, but all were already distributed, so that my only resource will be to try to sleep tonight."

She began to laugh, and then resumed: "Yes, Madame Volmar, we will try to sleep, won't we, since talking seems to tire you?" Madame Volmar, who looked over thirty, was very dark, with a long face and delicate but drawn features. Her magnificent eyes shone out like brasiers, though every now and then a cloud seemed to veil and extinguish them. At the first glance she did not appear beautiful, but as you gazed at her she became more and more perturbing, till she conquered you and inspired you with passionate admiration. It should be said though that she shrank from all self-assertion, comporting herself with much modesty, ever keeping in the background, striving to hide her lustre, invariably clad in black and unadorned by a single jewel, although she was the wife of a Parisian diamond-merchant.

"Oh! for my part," she murmured, "as long as I am not hustled too much I am well pleased."

She had been to Lourdes as an auxiliary lady-helper already on two occasions, though but little had been seen of her there—at the hospital of Our Lady of Dolours—as, on arriving, she had been overcome by such great fatigue that she had been forced, she said, to keep her room.

However, Madame de Jonquiere, who managed the ward, treated her with good-natured tolerance. "Ah! my poor friends," said she, "there will be plenty of time for you to exert yourselves. Get to sleep if you can, and your turn will come when I can no longer keep up." Then addressing her daughter, she resumed: "And you would do well, darling, not to excite yourself too much if you wish to keep your head clear."

Raymonde smiled and gave her mother a reproachful glance: "Mamma, mamma, why do you say that? Am I not sensible?" she asked.

Doubtless she was not boasting, for, despite her youthful, thoughtless air, the air of one who simply feels happy in living, there appeared in her grey eyes an expression of firm resolution, a resolution to shape her life for herself.

"It is true," the mother confessed with a little confusion, "this little girl is at times more sensible than I am myself. Come, pass me the cutlet—it is welcome, I assure you. Lord! how hungry I was!"

The meal continued, enlivened by the constant laughter of Madame Desagneaux and Raymonde. The latter was very animated, and her face, which was already growing somewhat yellow through long pining for a suitor, again assumed the rosy bloom of twenty. They had to eat very fast, for only ten minutes now remained to them. On all sides one heard the growing tumult of customers who feared that they would not have time to take their coffee.

All at once, however, Pierre made his appearance; a fit of stifling had again come over La Grivotte; and Madame de Jonquiere hastily finished her artichoke and returned to her compartment, after kissing her daughter, who wished her "good-night" in a facetious way. The priest, however, had made a movement of surprise on perceiving Madame Volmar with the red cross of the lady-hospitallers on her black bodice. He knew her, for he still called at long intervals on old Madame Volmar, the diamond-merchant's mother, who had been one of his own mother's friends. She was the most terrible woman in the world, religious beyond all reason, so harsh and stern, moreover, as to close the very window shutters in order to prevent her daughter-in-law from looking into the street. And he knew the young woman's story, how she had been imprisoned on the very morrow of her marriage, shut up between her mother-in-law, who tyrannised over her, and her husband, a repulsively ugly monster who went so far as to beat her, mad as he was with jealousy, although he himself kept mistresses. The unhappy woman was not allowed out of the house excepting it were to go to mass. And one day, at La Trinite, Pierre had surprised her secret, on seeing her behind the church exchanging a few hasty words with a well-groomed, distinguished-looking man.

The priest's sudden appearance in the refreshment-room had somewhat disconcerted Madame Volmar.

"What an unexpected meeting, Monsieur l'Abbe!" she said, offering him her long, warm hand. "What a long time it is since I last saw you!" And thereupon she explained that this was the third year she had gone to Lourdes, her mother-in-law having required her to join the Association of Our Lady of Salvation. "It is surprising that you did not see her at the station when we started," she added. "She sees me into the train and comes to meet me on my return."

This was said in an apparently simple way, but with such a subtle touch of irony that Pierre fancied he could guess the truth. He knew that she really had no religious principles at all, and that she merely followed the rites and ceremonies of the Church in order that she might now and again obtain an hour's freedom; and all at once he intuitively realised that someone must be waiting for her yonder, that it was for the purpose of meeting him that she was thus hastening to Lourdes with her shrinking yet ardent air and flaming eyes, which she so prudently shrouded with a veil of lifeless indifference.

"For my part," he answered, "I am accompanying a friend of my childhood, a poor girl who is very ill indeed. I must ask your help for her; you shall nurse her."

Thereupon she faintly blushed, and he no longer doubted the truth of his surmise. However, Raymonde was just then settling the bill with the easy assurance of a girl who is expert in figures; and immediately afterwards Madame Desagneaux led Madame Volmar away. The waiters were now growing more distracted and the tables were fast being vacated; for, on hearing a bell ring, everybody had begun to rush towards the door.

Pierre, on his side, was hastening back to his carriage, when he was stopped by an old priest. "Ah! Monsieur le Cure," he said, "I saw you just before we started, but I was unable to get near enough to shake hands with you."

Thereupon he offered his hand to his brother ecclesiastic, who was looking and smiling at him in a kindly way. The Abbe Judaine was the parish priest of Saligny, a little village in the department of the Oise. Tall and sturdy, he had a broad pink face, around which clustered a mass of white, curly hair, and it could be divined by his appearance that he was a worthy man whom neither the flesh nor the spirit had ever tormented. He believed indeed firmly and absolutely, with a tranquil godliness, never having known a struggle, endowed as he was with the ready faith of a child who is unacquainted with human passions. And ever since the Virgin at Lourdes had cured him of a disease of the eyes, by a famous miracle which folks still talked about, his belief had become yet more absolute and tender, as though impregnated with divine gratitude.

"I am pleased that you are with us, my friend," he gently said; "for there is much in these pilgrimages for young priests to profit by. I am told that some of them at times experience a feeling of rebellion. Well, you will see all these poor people praying,—it is a sight which will make you weep. How can one do otherwise than place oneself in God's hands, on seeing so much suffering cured or consoled?"

The old priest himself was accompanying a patient; and he pointed to a first-class compartment, at the door of which hung a placard bearing the inscription: "M. l'Abbe Judaine, Reserved." Then lowering his voice, he said: "It is Madame Dieulafay, you know, the great banker's wife. Their chateau, a royal domain, is in my parish, and when they learned that the Blessed Virgin had vouchsafed me such an undeserved favour, they begged me to intercede for their poor sufferer. I have already said several masses, and most sincerely pray for her. There, you see her yonder on the ground. She insisted on being taken out of the carriage, in spite of all the trouble which one will have to place her in it again."

On a shady part of the platform, in a kind of long box, there was, as the old priest said, a woman whose beautiful, perfectly oval face, lighted up by splendid eyes, denoted no greater age than six-and-twenty. She was suffering from a frightful disease. The disappearance from her system of the calcareous salts had led to a softening of the osseous framework, the slow destruction of her bones. Three years previously, after the advent of a stillborn child, she had felt vague pains in the spinal column. And then, little by little, her bones had rarefied and lost shape, the vertebrae had sunk, the bones of the pelvis had flattened, and those of the arms and legs had contracted. Thus shrunken, melting away as it were, she had become a mere human remnant, a nameless, fluid thing, which could not be set erect, but had to be carried hither and thither with infinite care, for fear lest she should vanish between one's fingers. Her face, a motionless face, on which sat a stupefied imbecile expression, still retained its beauty of outline, and yet it was impossible to gaze at this wretched shred of a woman without feeling a heart-pang, the keener on account of all the luxury surrounding her; for not only was the box in which she lay lined with blue quilted silk, but she was covered with valuable lace, and a cap of rare valenciennes was set upon her head, her wealth thus being proclaimed, displayed, in the midst of her awful agony.

"Ah! how pitiable it is," resumed the Abbe Judaine in an undertone. "To think that she is so young, so pretty, possessed of millions of money! And if you knew how dearly loved she was, with what adoration she is still surrounded. That tall gentleman near her is her husband, that elegantly dressed lady is her sister, Madame Jousseur."

Pierre remembered having often noticed in the newspapers the name of Madame Jousseur, wife of a diplomatist, and a conspicuous member of the higher spheres of Catholic society in Paris. People had even circulated a story of some great passion which she had fought against and vanquished. She also was very prettily dressed, with marvellously tasteful simplicity, and she ministered to the wants of her sorry sister with an air of perfect devotion. As for the unhappy woman's husband, who at the age of five-and-thirty had inherited his father's colossal business, he was a clear-complexioned, well-groomed, handsome man, clad in a closely buttoned frock-coat. His eyes, however, were full of tears, for he adored his wife, and had left his business in order to take her to Lourdes, placing his last hope in this appeal to the mercy of Heaven.

Ever since the morning, Pierre had beheld many frightful sufferings in that woeful white train. But none had so distressed his soul as did that wretched female skeleton, slowly liquefying in the midst of its lace and its millions. "The unhappy woman!" he murmured with a shudder.

The Abbe Judaine, however, made a gesture of serene hope. "The Blessed Virgin will cure her," said he; "I have prayed to her so much."

Just then a bell again pealed, and this time it was really the signal for starting. Only two minutes remained. There was a last rush, and folks hurried back towards the train carrying eatables wrapped in paper, and bottles and cans which they had filled with water. Several of them quite lost their heads, and in their inability to find their carriages, ran distractedly from one to the other end of the train; whilst some of the infirm ones dragged themselves about amidst the precipitate tapping of crutches, and others, only able to walk with difficulty, strove to hasten their steps whilst leaning on the arms of some of the lady-hospitallers. It was only with infinite difficulty that four men managed to replace Madame Dieulafay in her first-class compartment. The Vignerons, who were content with second-class accommodation, had already reinstalled themselves in their quarters amidst an extraordinary heap of baskets, boxes, and valises which scarcely allowed little Gustave enough room to stretch his poor puny limbs—the limbs as it were of a deformed insect. And then all the women appeared again: Madame Maze gliding along in silence; Madame Vincent raising her dear little girl in her outstretched arms and dreading lest she should hear her cry out; Madame Vetu, whom it had been necessary to push into the train, after rousing her from her stupefying torment; and Elise Rouquet, who was quite drenched through her obstinacy in endeavouring to drink from the tap, and was still wiping her monstrous face. Whilst each returned to her place and the carriage filled once more, Marie listened to her father, who had come back delighted with his stroll to a pointsman's little house beyond the station, whence a really pleasant stretch of landscape could be discerned.

"Shall we lay you down again at once?" asked Pierre, sorely distressed by the pained expression on Marie's face.

"Oh no, no, by-and-by!" she replied. "I shall have plenty of time to hear those wheels roaring in my head as though they were grinding my bones."

Then, as Ferrand seemed on the point of returning to the cantine van, Sister Hyacinthe begged him to take another look at the strange man before he went off. She was still waiting for Father Massias, astonished at the inexplicable delay in his arrival, but not yet without hope, as Sister Claire des Anges had not returned.

"Pray, Monsieur Ferrand," said she, "tell me if this unfortunate man is in any immediate danger."

The young doctor again looked at the sufferer, felt him, and listened to his breathing. Then with a gesture of discouragement he answered in a low voice, "I feel convinced that you will not get him to Lourdes alive."

Every head was still anxiously stretched forward. If they had only known the man's name, the place he had come from, who he was! But it was impossible to extract a word from this unhappy stranger, who was about to die there, in that carriage, without anybody being able to give his face a name!

It suddenly occurred to Sister Hyacinthe to have him searched. Under the circumstances there could certainly be no harm in such a course. "Feel in his pockets, Monsieur Ferrand," she said.

The doctor thereupon searched the man in a gentle, cautious way, but the only things that he found in his pockets were a chaplet, a knife, and three sous. And nothing more was ever learnt of the man.

At that moment, however, a voice announced that Sister Claire des Anges was at last coming back with Father Massias. All this while the latter had simply been chatting with the priest of Sainte-Radegonde in one of the waiting-rooms. Keen emotion attended his arrival; for a moment all seemed saved. But the train was about to start, the porters were already closing the carriage doors, and it was necessary that extreme unction should be administered in all haste in order to avoid too long a delay.

"This way, reverend Father!" exclaimed Sister Hyacinthe; "yes, yes, pray come in; our unfortunate patient is here."

Father Massias, who was five years older than Pierre, whose fellow-student however he had been at the seminary, had a tall, spare figure with an ascetic countenance, framed round with a light-coloured beard and vividly lighted up by burning eyes, He was neither the priest harassed by doubt, nor the priest with childlike faith, but an apostle carried away by his passion, ever ready to fight and vanquish for the pure glory of the Blessed Virgin. In his black cloak with its large hood, and his broad-brimmed flossy hat, he shone resplendently with the perpetual ardour of battle.

He immediately took from his pocket the silver case containing the Holy Oils, and the ceremony began whilst the last carriage doors were being slammed and belated pilgrims were rushing back to the train; the station-master, meantime, anxiously glancing at the clock, and realising that it would be necessary for him to grant a few minutes' grace.

"Credo in unum Deum," hastily murmured the Father.

"Amen," replied Sister Hyacinthe and the other occupants of the carriage.

Those who had been able to do so, had knelt upon the seats, whilst the others joined their hands, or repeatedly made the sign of the cross; and when the murmured prayers were followed by the Litanies of the ritual, every voice rose, an ardent desire for the remission of the man's sins and for his physical and spiritual cure winging its flight heavenward with each successive Kyrie eleison. Might his whole life, of which they knew nought, be forgiven him; might he enter, stranger though he was, in triumph into the Kingdom of God!

"Christe, exaudi nos."

"Ora pro nobis, sancta Dei Genitrix."

Father Massias had pulled out the silver needle from which hung a drop of Holy Oil. In the midst of such a scramble, with the whole train waiting—many people now thrusting their heads out of the carriage windows in surprise at the delay in starting—he could not think of following the usual practice, of anointing in turn all the organs of the senses, those portals of the soul which give admittance to evil.

He must content himself, as the rules authorised him to do in pressing cases, with one anointment; and this he made upon the man's lips, those livid parted lips from between which only a faint breath escaped, whilst the rest of his face, with its lowered eyelids, already seemed indistinct, again merged into the dust of the earth.

"Per istam sanctam unctionem," said the Father, "et suam piissimam misericordiam indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per visum, auditum, odoratum, gustum, tactum, deliquisti."*

* Through this holy unction and His most tender mercy may the
Lord pardon thee whatever sins thou hast committed by thy sight,
hearing, etc.

The remainder of the ceremony was lost amid the hurry and scramble of the departure. Father Massias scarcely had time to wipe off the oil with the little piece of cotton-wool which Sister Hyacinthe held in readiness, before he had to leave the compartment and get into his own as fast as possible, setting the case containing the Holy Oils in order as he did so, whilst the pilgrims finished repeating the final prayer.

"We cannot wait any longer! It is impossible!" repeated the station-master as he bustled about. "Come, come, make haste everybody!"

At last then they were about to resume their journey. Everybody sat down, returned to his or her corner again. Madame de Jonquiere, however, had changed her place, in order to be nearer La Grivotte, whose condition still worried her, and she was now seated in front of M. Sabathier, who remained waiting with silent resignation. Moreover, Sister Hyacinthe had not returned to her compartment, having decided to remain near the unknown man so that she might watch over him and help him. By following this course, too, she was able to minister to Brother Isidore, whose sufferings his sister Marthe was at a loss to assuage. And Marie, turning pale, felt the jolting of the train in her ailing flesh, even before it had resumed its journey under the heavy sun, rolling onward once more with its load of sufferers stifling in the pestilential atmosphere of the over-heated carriages.

At last a loud whistle resounded, the engine puffed, and Sister Hyacinthe rose up to say: The Magnificat, my children!

IV. MIRACLES

JUST as the train was beginning to move, the door of the compartment in which Pierre and Marie found themselves was opened and a porter pushed a girl of fourteen inside, saying: "There's a seat here—make haste!"

The others were already pulling long faces and were about to protest, when Sister Hyacinthe exclaimed: "What, is it you, Sophie? So you are going back to see the Blessed Virgin who cured you last year!"

And at the same time Madame de Jonquiere remarked: "Ah! Sophie, my little friend, I am very pleased to see that you are grateful."

"Why, yes, Sister; why, yes, madame," answered the girl, in a pretty way.

The carriage door had already been closed again, so that it was necessary that they should accept the presence of this new pilgrim who had fallen from heaven as it were at the very moment when the train, which she had almost missed, was starting off again. She was a slender damsel and would not take up much room. Moreover these ladies knew her, and all the patients had turned their eyes upon her on hearing that the Blessed Virgin had been pleased to cure her. They had now got beyond the station, the engine was still puffing, whilst the wheels increased their speed, and Sister Hyacinthe, clapping her hands, repeated: "Come, come, my children, the Magnificat."

Whilst the joyful chant arose amidst the jolting of the train, Pierre gazed at Sophie. She was evidently a young peasant girl, the daughter of some poor husbandman of the vicinity of Poitiers, petted by her parents, treated in fact like a young lady since she had become the subject of a miracle, one of the elect, whom the priests of the district flocked to see. She wore a straw hat with pink ribbons, and a grey woollen dress trimmed with a flounce. Her round face although not pretty was a very pleasant one, with a beautifully fresh complexion and clear, intelligent eyes which lent her a smiling, modest air.

When the Magnificat had been sung, Pierre was unable to resist his desire to question Sophie. A child of her age, with so candid an air, so utterly unlike a liar, greatly interested him.

"And so you nearly missed the train, my child?" he said.

"I should have been much ashamed if I had, Monsieur l'Abbe," she replied. "I had been at the station since twelve o'clock. And all at once I saw his reverence, the priest of Sainte-Radegonde, who knows me well and who called me to him, to kiss me and tell me that it was very good of me to go back to Lourdes. But it seems the train was starting and I only just had time to run on to the platform. Oh! I ran so fast!"

She paused, laughing, still slightly out of breath, but already repenting that she had been so giddy.

"And what is your name, my child?" asked Pierre.

"Sophie Couteau, Monsieur l'Abbe."

"You do not belong to the town of Poitiers?"

"Oh no! certainly not. We belong to Vivonne, which is seven kilometres away. My father and mother have a little land there, and things would not be so bad if there were not eight children at home—I am the fifth,—fortunately the four older ones are beginning to work."

"And you, my child, what do you do?"

"I, Monsieur l'Abbe! Oh! I am no great help. Since last year, when I came home cured, I have not been left quiet a single day, for, as you can understand, so many people have come to see me, and then too I have been taken to Monseigneur's,* and to the convents and all manner of other places. And before all that I was a long time ill. I could not walk without a stick, and each step I took made me cry out, so dreadfully did my foot hurt me."

* The Bishop's residence.

"So it was of some injury to the foot that the Blessed Virgin cured you?"

Sophie did not have time to reply, for Sister Hyacinthe, who was listening, intervened: "Of caries of the bones of the left heel, which had been going on for three years," said she. "The foot was swollen and quite deformed, and there were fistulas giving egress to continual suppuration."

On hearing this, all the sufferers in the carriage became intensely interested. They no longer took their eyes off this little girl on whom a miracle had been performed, but scanned her from head to foot as though seeking for some sign of the prodigy. Those who were able to stand rose up in order that they might the better see her, and the others, the infirm ones, stretched on their mattresses, strove to raise themselves and turn their heads. Amidst the suffering which had again come upon them on leaving Poitiers, the terror which filled them at the thought that they must continue rolling onward for another fifteen hours, the sudden advent of this child, favoured by Heaven, was like a divine relief, a ray of hope whence they would derive sufficient strength to accomplish the remainder of their terrible journey. The moaning had abated somewhat already, and every face was turned towards the girl with an ardent desire to believe.

This was especially the case with Marie, who, already reviving, joined her trembling hands, and in a gentle supplicating voice said to Pierre, "Question her, pray question her, ask her to tell us everything—cured, O God! cured of such a terrible complaint!"

Madame de Jonquiere, who was quite affected, had leant over the partition to kiss the girl. "Certainly," said she, "our little friend will tell you all about it. Won't you, my darling? You will tell us what the Blessed Virgin did for you?"

"Oh, certainly! madame-as much as you like," answered Sophie with her smiling, modest air, her eyes gleaming with intelligence. Indeed, she wished to begin at once, and raised her right hand with a pretty gesture, as a sign to everybody to be attentive. Plainly enough, she had already acquired the habit of speaking in public.

She could not be seen, however, from some parts of the carriage, and an idea came to Sister Hyacinthe, who said: "Get up on the seat, Sophie, and speak loudly, on account of the noise which the train makes."

This amused the girl, and before beginning she needed time to become serious again. "Well, it was like this," said she; "my foot was past cure, I couldn't even go to church any more, and it had to be kept bandaged, because there was always a lot of nasty matter coming from it. Monsieur Rivoire, the doctor, who had made a cut in it, so as to see inside it, said that he should be obliged to take out a piece of the bone; and that, sure enough, would have made me lame for life. But when I got to Lourdes and had prayed a great deal to the Blessed Virgin, I went to dip my foot in the water, wishing so much that I might be cured that I did not even take the time to pull the bandage off. And everything remained in the water, there was no longer anything the matter with my foot when I took it out."

A murmur of mingled surprise, wonder, and desire arose and spread among those who heard this marvellous tale, so sweet and soothing to all who were in despair. But the little one had not yet finished. She had simply paused. And now, making a fresh gesture, holding her arms somewhat apart, she concluded: "When I got back to Vivonne and Monsieur Rivoire saw my foot again, he said: 'Whether it be God or the Devil who has cured this child, it is all the same to me; but in all truth she is cured.'"

This time a burst of laughter rang out. The girl spoke in too recitative a way, having repeated her story so many times already that she knew it by heart. The doctor's remark was sure to produce an effect, and she herself laughed at it in advance, certain as she was that the others would laugh also. However, she still retained her candid, touching air.

But she had evidently forgotten some particular, for Sister Hyacinthe, a glance from whom had foreshadowed the doctor's jest, now softly prompted her "And what was it you said to Madame la Comtesse, the superintendent of your ward, Sophie?"

"Ah! yes. I hadn't brought many bandages for my foot with me, and I said to her, 'It was very kind of the Blessed Virgin to cure me the first day, as I should have run out of linen on the morrow.'"

This provoked a fresh outburst of delight. They all thought her so nice, to have been cured like that! And in reply to a question from Madame de Jonquiere, she also had to tell the story of her boots, a pair of beautiful new boots which Madame la Comtesse had given her, and in which she had run, jumped, and danced about, full of childish delight. Boots! think of it, she who for three years had not even been able to wear a slipper.

Pierre, who had become grave, waxing pale with the secret uneasiness which was penetrating him, continued to look at her. And he also asked her other questions. She was certainly not lying, and he merely suspected a slow distortion of the actual truth, an easily explained embellishment of the real facts amidst all the joy she felt at being cured and becoming an important little personage. Who now knew if the cicatrisation of her injuries, effected, so it was asserted, completely, instantaneously, in a few seconds, had not in reality been the work of days? Where were the witnesses?

Just then Madame de Jonquiere began to relate that she had been at the hospital at the time referred to. "Sophie was not in my ward," said she, "but I had met her walking lame that very morning—"

Pierre hastily interrupted the lady-hospitaller. "Ah! you saw her foot before and after the immersion?"

"No, no! I don't think that anybody was able to see it, for it was bound round with bandages. She told you that the bandages had fallen into the piscina." And, turning towards the child, Madame de Jonquiere added, "But she will show you her foot—won't you, Sophie? Undo your shoe."

The girl took off her shoe, and pulled down her stocking, with a promptness and ease of manner which showed how thoroughly accustomed she had become to it all. And she not only stretched out her foot, which was very clean and very white, carefully tended indeed, with well-cut, pink nails, but complacently turned it so that the young priest might examine it at his ease. Just below the ankle there was a long scar, whose whity seam, plainly defined, testified to the gravity of the complaint from which the girl had suffered.

"Oh! take hold of the heel, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she. "Press it as hard as you like. I no longer feel any pain at all."

Pierre made a gesture from which it might have been thought that he was delighted with the power exercised by the Blessed Virgin. But he was still tortured by doubt. What unknown force had acted in this case? Or rather what faulty medical diagnosis, what assemblage of errors and exaggerations, had ended in this fine tale?

All the patients, however, wished to see the miraculous foot, that outward and visible sign of the divine cure which each of them was going in search of. And it was Marie, sitting up in her box, and already feeling less pain, who touched it first. Then Madame Maze, quite roused from her melancholy, passed it on to Madame Vincent, who would have kissed it for the hope which it restored to her. M. Sabathier had listened to all the explanations with a beatific air; Madame Vetu, La Grivotte, and even Brother Isidore opened their eyes, and evinced signs of interest; whilst the face of Elise Rouquet had assumed an extraordinary expression, transfigured by faith, almost beatified. If a sore had thus disappeared, might not her own sore close and disappear, her face retaining no trace of it save a slight scar, and again becoming such a face as other people had? Sophie, who was still standing, had to hold on to one of the iron rails, and place her foot on the partition, now on the right, now on the left. And she did not weary of it all, but felt exceedingly happy and proud at the many exclamations which were raised, the quivering admiration and religious respect which were bestowed on that little piece of her person, that little foot which had now, so to say, become sacred.

"One must possess great faith, no doubt," said Marie, thinking aloud. "One must have a pure unspotted soul." And, addressing herself to M. de Guersaint, she added: "Father, I feel that I should get well if I were ten years old, if I had the unspotted soul of a little girl."

"But you are ten years old, my darling! Is it not so, Pierre? A little girl of ten years old could not have a more spotless soul."

Possessed of a mind prone to chimeras, M. de Guersaint was fond of hearing tales of miracles. As for the young priest, profoundly affected by the ardent purity which the young girl evinced, he no longer sought to discuss the question, but let her surrender herself to the consoling illusions which Sophie's tale had wafted through the carriage.

The temperature had become yet more oppressive since their departure from Poitiers, a storm was rising in the coppery sky, and it seemed as though the train were rushing through a furnace. The villages passed, mournful and solitary under the burning sun. At Couhe-Verac they had again said their chaplets, and sung another canticle. At present, however, there was some slight abatement of the religious exercises. Sister Hyacinthe, who had not yet been able to lunch, ventured to eat a roll and some fruit in all haste, whilst still ministering to the strange man whose faint, painful breathing seemed to have become more regular. And it was only on passing Ruffec at three o'clock that they said the vespers of the Blessed Virgin.

"Ora pro nobis, sancta Dei Genitrix."

"Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi."*

* "Pray for us, O holy Mother of God,
That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ."

As they were finishing, M. Sabathier, who had watched little Sophie while she put on her shoe and stocking, turned towards M. de Guersaint.

"This child's case is interesting, no doubt," he remarked. "But it is a mere nothing, monsieur, for there have been far more marvellous cures than that. Do you know the story of Pierre de Rudder, a Belgian working-man?"

Everybody had again begun to listen.

"This man," continued M. Sabathier, "had his leg broken by the fall of a tree. Eight years afterwards the two fragments of the bone had not yet joined together again—the two ends could be seen in the depths of a sore which was continually suppurating; and the leg hung down quite limp, swaying in all directions. Well, it was sufficient for this man to drink a glassful of the miraculous water, and his leg was made whole again. He was able to walk without crutches, and the doctor said to him: 'Your leg is like that of a new-born child.' Yes, indeed, a perfectly new leg."

Nobody spoke, but the listeners exchanged glances of ecstasy.

"And, by the way," resumed M. Sabathier, "it is like the story of Louis Bouriette, a quarryman, one of the first of the Lourdes miracles. Do you know it? Bouriette had been injured by an explosion during some blasting operations. The sight of his right eye was altogether destroyed, and he was even threatened with the loss of the left one. Well, one day he sent his daughter to fetch a bottleful of the muddy water of the source, which then scarcely bubbled up to the surface. He washed his eye with this muddy liquid, and prayed fervently. And, all at once, he raised a cry, for he could see, monsieur, see as well as you and I. The doctor who was attending him drew up a detailed narrative of the case, and there cannot be the slightest doubt about its truth."

"It is marvellous," murmured M. de Guersaint in his delight.

"Would you like another example, monsieur? I can give you a famous one, that of Francois Macary, the carpenter of Lavaur. During eighteen years he had suffered from a deep varicose ulcer, with considerable enlargement of the tissues in the mesial part of the left leg. He had reached such a point that he could no longer move, and science decreed that he would forever remain infirm. Well, one evening he shuts himself up with a bottle of Lourdes water. He takes off his bandages, washes both his legs, and drinks what little water then remains in the bottle. Then he goes to bed and falls asleep; and when he awakes, he feels his legs and looks at them. There is nothing left; the varicose enlargement, the ulcers, have all disappeared. The skin of his knee, monsieur, had become as smooth, as fresh as it had been when he was twenty."

This time there was an explosion of surprise and admiration. The patients and the pilgrims were entering into the enchanted land of miracles, where impossibilities are accomplished at each bend of the pathways, where one marches on at ease from prodigy to prodigy. And each had his or her story to tell, burning with a desire to contribute a fresh proof, to fortify faith and hope by yet another example.

That silent creature, Madame Maze, was so transported that she spoke the first. "I have a friend," said she, "who knew the Widow Rizan, that lady whose cure also created so great a stir. For four-and-twenty years her left side had been entirely paralysed. Her stomach was unable to retain any solid food, and she had become an inert bag of bones which had to be turned over in bed, The friction of the sheets, too, had ended by rubbing her skin away in parts. Well, she was so low one evening that the doctor announced that she would die during the night. An hour later, however, she emerged from her torpor and asked her daughter in a faint voice to go and fetch her a glass of Lourdes water from a neighbour's. But she was only able to obtain this glass of water on the following morning; and she cried out to her daughter: 'Oh! it is life that I am drinking—rub my face with it, rub my arm and my leg, rub my whole body with it!' And when her daughter obeyed her, she gradually saw the huge swelling subside, and the paralysed, tumefied limbs recover their natural suppleness and appearance. Nor was that all, for Madame Rizan cried out that she was cured and felt hungry, and wanted bread and meat—she who had eaten none for four-and-twenty years! And she got out of bed and dressed herself, whilst her daughter, who was so overpowered that the neighbours thought she had become an orphan, replied to them: 'No, no, mamma isn't dead, she has come to life again!'"

This narrative had brought tears to Madame Vincent's eyes. Ah! if she had only been able to see her little Rose recover like that, eat with a good appetite, and run about again! At the same time, another case, which she had been told of in Paris and which had greatly influenced her in deciding to take her ailing child to Lourdes, returned to her memory.

"And I, too," said she, "know the story of a girl who was paralysed. Her name was Lucie Druon, and she was an inmate of an orphan asylum. She was quite young and could not even kneel down. Her limbs were bent like hoops. Her right leg, the shorter of the two, had ended by becoming twisted round the left one; and when any of the other girls carried her about you saw her feet hanging down quite limp, like dead ones. Please notice that she did not even go to Lourdes. She simply performed a novena; but she fasted during the nine days, and her desire to be cured was so great that she spent her nights in prayer. At last, on the ninth day, whilst she was drinking a little Lourdes water, she felt a violent commotion in her legs. She picked herself up, fell down, picked herself up again and walked. All her little companions, who were astonished, almost frightened at the sight, began to cry out 'Lucie can walk! Lucie can walk!' It was quite true. In a few seconds her legs had become straight and strong and healthy. She crossed the courtyard and was able to climb up the steps of the chapel, where the whole sisterhood, transported with gratitude, chanted the Magnificat. Ah! the dear child, how happy, how happy she must have been!"

As Madame Vincent finished, two tears fell from her cheeks on to the pale face of her little girl, whom she kissed distractedly.

The general interest was still increasing, becoming quite impassioned. The rapturous joy born of these beautiful stories, in which Heaven invariably triumphed over human reality, transported these childlike souls to such a point that those who were suffering the most grievously sat up in their turn, and recovered the power of speech. And with the narratives of one and all was blended a thought of the sufferer's own ailment, a belief that he or she would also be cured, since a malady of the same description had vanished like an evil dream beneath the breath of the Divinity.

"Ah!" stammered Madame Vetu, her articulation hindered by her sufferings, "there was another one, Antoinette Thardivail, whose stomach was being eaten away like mine. You would have said that dogs were devouring it, and sometimes there was a swelling in it as big as a child's head. Tumours indeed were ever forming in it, like fowl's eggs, so that for eight months she brought up blood. And she also was at the point of death, with nothing but her skin left on her bones, and dying of hunger, when she drank some water of Lourdes and had the pit of her stomach washed with it. Three minutes afterwards, her doctor, who on the previous day had left her almost in the last throes, scarce breathing, found her up and sitting by the fireside, eating a tender chicken's wing with a good appetite. She had no more tumours, she laughed as she had laughed when she was twenty, and her face had regained the brilliancy of youth. Ah! to be able to eat what one likes, to become young again, to cease suffering!"

"And the cure of Sister Julienne!" then exclaimed La Grivotte, raising herself on one of her elbows, her eyes glittering with fever. "In her case it commenced with a bad cold as it did with me, and then she began to spit blood. And every six months she fell ill again and had to take to her bed. The last time everybody said that she wouldn't leave it alive. The doctors had vainly tried every remedy, iodine, blistering, and cauterising. In fact, hers was a real case of phthisis, certified by half a dozen medical men. Well, she comes to Lourdes, and Heaven alone knows amidst what awful suffering—she was so bad, indeed, that at Toulouse they thought for a moment that she was about to die! The Sisters had to carry her in their arms, and on reaching the piscina the lady-hospitallers wouldn't bathe her. She was dead, they said. No matter! she was undressed at last, and plunged into the water, quite unconscious and covered with perspiration. And when they took her out she was so pale that they laid her on the ground, thinking that it was certainly all over with her at last. But, all at once, colour came back to her cheeks, her eyes opened, and she drew a long breath. She was cured; she dressed herself without any help and made a good meal after she had been to the Grotto to thank the Blessed Virgin. There! there's no gainsaying it, that was a real case of phthisis, completely cured as though by medicine!"

Thereupon Brother Isidore in his turn wished to speak; but he was unable to do so at any length, and could only with difficulty manage to say to his sister: "Marthe, tell them the story of Sister Dorothee which the priest of Saint-Sauveur related to us."

"Sister Dorothee," began the peasant girl in an awkward way, "felt her leg quite numbed when she got up one morning, and from that time she lost the use of it, for it got as cold and as heavy as a stone. Besides which she felt a great pain in the back. The doctors couldn't understand it. She saw half a dozen of them, who pricked her with pins and burnt her skin with a lot of drugs. But it was just as if they had sung to her. Sister Dorothee had well understood that only the Blessed Virgin could find the right remedy for her, and so she went off to Lourdes, and had herself dipped in the piscina. She thought at first that the water was going to kill her, for it was so bitterly cold. But by-and-by it became so soft that she fancied it was warm, as nice as milk. She had never felt so nice before, it seemed to her as if her veins were opening and the water were flowing into them. As you will understand, life was returning into her body since the Blessed Virgin was concerning herself in the case. She no longer had anything the matter with her when she came out, but walked about, ate the whole of a pigeon for her dinner, and slept all night long like the happy woman she was. Glory to the Blessed Virgin, eternal gratitude to the most Powerful Mother and her Divine Son!"

Elise Rouquet would also have liked to bring forward a miracle which she was acquainted with. Only she spoke with so much difficulty owing to the deformity of her mouth, that she had not yet been able to secure a turn. Just then, however, there was a pause, and drawing the wrap, which concealed the horror of her sore, slightly on one side, she profited by the opportunity to begin.

"For my part, I wasn't told anything about a great illness, but it was a very funny case at all events," she said. "It was about a woman, Celestine Dubois, as she was called, who had run a needle right into her hand while she was washing. It stopped there for seven years, for no doctor was able to take it out. Her hand shrivelled up, and she could no longer open it. Well, she got to Lourdes, and dipped her hand into the piscina. But as soon as she did so she began to shriek, and took it out again. Then they caught hold of her and put her hand into the water by force, and kept it there while she continued sobbing, with her face covered with sweat. Three times did they plunge her hand into the piscina, and each time they saw the needle moving along, till it came out by the tip of the thumb. She shrieked, of course, because the needle was moving though her flesh just as though somebody had been pushing it to drive it out. And after that Celestine never suffered again, and only a little scar could be seen on her hand as a mark of what the Blessed Virgin had done."

This anecdote produced a greater effect than even the miraculous cures of the most fearful illnesses. A needle which moved as though somebody were pushing it! This peopled the Invisible, showed each sufferer his Guardian Angel standing behind him, only awaiting the orders of Heaven in order to render him assistance. And besides, how pretty and childlike the story was—this needle which came out in the miraculous water after obstinately refusing to stir during seven long years. Exclamations of delight resounded from all the pleased listeners; they smiled and laughed with satisfaction, radiant at finding that nothing was beyond the power of Heaven, and that if it were Heaven's pleasure they themselves would all become healthy, young, and superb. It was sufficient that one should fervently believe and pray in order that nature might be confounded and that the Incredible might come to pass. Apart from that there was merely a question of good luck, since Heaven seemed to make a selection of those sufferers who should be cured.

"Oh! how beautiful it is, father," murmured Marie, who, revived by the passionate interest which she took in the momentous subject, had so far contented herself with listening, dumb with amazement as it were. "Do you remember," she continued, "what you yourself told me of that poor woman, Joachine Dehaut, who came from Belgium and made her way right across France with her twisted leg eaten away by an ulcer, the awful smell of which drove everybody away from her? First of all the ulcer was healed; you could press her knee and she felt nothing, only a slight redness remained to mark where it had been. And then came the turn of the dislocation. She shrieked while she was in the water, it seemed to her as if somebody were breaking her bones, pulling her leg away from her; and, at the same time, she and the woman who was bathing her, saw her deformed foot rise and extend into its natural shape with the regular movement of a clock hand. Her leg also straightened itself, the muscles extended, the knee replaced itself in its proper position, all amidst such acute pain that Joachine ended by fainting. But as soon as she recovered consciousness, she darted off, erect and agile, to carry her crutches to the Grotto."

M. de Guersaint in his turn was laughing with wonderment, waving his hand to confirm this story, which had been told him by a Father of the Assumption. He could have related a score of similar instances, said he, each more touching, more extraordinary than the other. He even invoked Pierre's testimony, and the young priest, who was unable to believe, contented himself with nodding his head. At first, unwilling as he was to afflict Marie, he had striven to divert his thoughts by gazing though the carriage window at the fields, trees, and houses which defiled before his eyes. They had just passed Angouleme, and meadows stretched out, and lines of poplar trees fled away amidst the continuous fanning of the air, which the velocity of the train occasioned.

They were late, no doubt, for they were hastening onward at full speed, thundering along under the stormy sky, through the fiery atmosphere, devouring kilometre after kilometre in swift succession. However, despite himself, Pierre heard snatches of the various narratives, and grew interested in these extravagant stories, which the rough jolting of the wheels accompanied like a lullaby, as though the engine had been turned loose and were wildly bearing them away to the divine land of dreams, They were rolling, still rolling along, and Pierre at last ceased to gaze at the landscape, and surrendered himself to the heavy, sleep-inviting atmosphere of the carriage, where ecstasy was growing and spreading, carrying everyone far from the world of reality across which they were so rapidly rushing, The sight of Marie's face with its brightened look filled the young priest with sincere joy, and he let her retain his hand, which she had taken in order to acquaint him, by the pressure of her fingers, with all the confidence which was reviving in her soul. And why should he have saddened her by his doubts, since he was so desirous of her cure? So he continued clasping her small, moist hand, feeling infinite affection for her, a dolorous brotherly love which distracted him, and made him anxious to believe in the pity of the spheres, in a superior kindness which tempered suffering to those who were plunged in despair, "Oh!" she repeated, "how beautiful it is, Pierre! How beautiful it is! And what glory it will be if the Blessed Virgin deigns to disturb herself for me! Do you really think me worthy of such a favour?"

"Assuredly I do," he exclaimed; "you are the best and the purest, with a spotless soul as your father said; there are not enough good angels in Paradise to form your escort."

But the narratives were not yet finished. Sister Hyacinthe and Madame de Jonquiere were now enumerating all the miracles with which they were acquainted, the long, long series of miracles which for more than thirty years had been flowering at Lourdes, like the uninterrupted budding of the roses on the Mystical Rose-tree. They could be counted by thousands, they put forth fresh shoots every year with prodigious verdancy of sap, becoming brighter and brighter each successive season. And the sufferers who listened to these marvellous stories with increasing feverishness were like little children who, after hearing one fine fairy tale, ask for another, and another, and yet another. Oh! that they might have more and more of those stories in which evil reality was flouted, in which unjust nature was cuffed and slapped, in which the Divinity intervened as the supreme healer, He who laughs at science and distributes happiness according to His own good pleasure.

First of all there were the deaf and the dumb who suddenly heard and spoke; such as Aurelie Bruneau, who was incurably deaf, with the drums of both ears broken, and yet was suddenly enraptured by the celestial music of a harmonium; such also as Louise Pourchet, who on her side had been dumb for five-and-twenty years, and yet, whilst praying in the Grotto, suddenly exclaimed, "Hail, Mary, full of grace!" And there were others and yet others who were completely cured by merely letting a few drops of water fall into their ears or upon their tongues. Then came the procession of the blind: Father Hermann, who felt the Blessed Virgin's gentle hand removing the veil which covered his eyes; Mademoiselle de Pontbriant, who was threatened with a total loss of sight, but after a simple prayer was enabled to see better than she had ever seen before; then a child twelve years old whose corneas resembled marbles, but who, in three seconds, became possessed of clear, deep eyes, bright with an angelic smile. However, there was especially an abundance of paralytics, of lame people suddenly enabled to walk upright, of sufferers for long years powerless to stir from their beds of misery and to whom the voice said: "Arise and walk!" Delannoy,* afflicted with ataxia, vainly cauterised and burnt, fifteen times an inmate of the Paris hospitals, whence he had emerged with the concurring diagnosis of twelve doctors, feels a strange force raising him up as the Blessed Sacrament goes by, and he begins to follow it, his legs strong and healthy once more. Marie Louise Delpon, a girl of fourteen, suffering from paralysis which had stiffened her legs, drawn back her hands, and twisted her mouth on one side, sees her limbs loosen and the distortion of her mouth disappear as though an invisible hand were severing the fearful bonds which had deformed her. Marie Vachier, riveted to her arm-chair during seventeen years by paraplegia, not only runs and flies on emerging from the piscina, but finds no trace even of the sores with which her long-enforced immobility had covered her body. And Georges Hanquet, attacked by softening of the spinal marrow, passes without transition from agony to perfect health; while Leonie Charton, likewise afflicted with softening of the medulla, and whose vertebrae bulge out to a considerable extent, feels her hump melting away as though by enchantment, and her legs rise and straighten, renovated and vigorous.

* This was one of the most notorious of the recorded cases and had
a very strange sequel subsequent to the first publication of this
work. Pierre Delannoy had been employed as a ward-assistant in one
of the large Paris hospitals from 1877 to 1881, when he came to
the conclusion that the life of an in-patient was far preferable
to the one he was leading. He, therefore, resolved to pass the
rest of his days inside different hospitals in the capacity of
invalid. He started by feigning locomotor ataxia, and for six
years deceived the highest medical experts in Paris, so curiously
did he appear to suffer. He stayed in turn in all the hospitals in
the city, being treated with every care and consideration, until
at last he met with a doctor who insisted on cauterisation and
other disagreeable remedies. Delannoy thereupon opined that the
time to be cured had arrived, and cured he became, and was
discharged. He next appeared at Lourdes, supported by crutches,
and presenting every symptom of being hopelessly crippled. With
other infirm and decrepid people he was dipped in the piscina and
so efficacious did this treatment prove that he came out another
man, threw his crutches to the ground and walked, as an onlooker
expressed it, "like a rural postman." All Lourdes rang with the
fame of the miracle, and the Church, after starring Delannoy
round the country as a specimen of what could be done at the holy
spring, placed him in charge of a home for invalids. But this was
too much like hard work, and he soon decamped with all the money
he could lay his hands on. Returning to Paris he was admitted to
the Hospital of Ste. Anne as suffering from mental debility, but
this did not prevent him from running off one night with about
$300 belonging to a dispenser. The police were put on his track
and arrested him in May, 1895, when he tried to pass himself off
as a lunatic; but he had become by this time too well known, and
was indicted in due course. At his trial he energetically denied
that he had ever shammed, but the Court would not believe him,
and sentenced him to four years' imprisonment with hard labour.
—Trans.

Then came all sorts of ailments. First those brought about by scrofula—a great many more legs long incapable of service and made anew. There was Margaret Gehier, who had suffered from coxalgia for seven-and-twenty years, whose hip was devoured by the disease, whose left knee was anchylosed, and who yet was suddenly able to fall upon her knees to thank the Blessed Virgin for healing her. There was also Philomene Simonneau, the young Vendeenne, whose left leg was perforated by three horrible sores in the depths of which her carious bones were visible, and whose bones, whose flesh, and whose skin were all formed afresh.

Next came the dropsical ones: Madame Ancelin, the swelling of whose feet, hands, and entire body subsided without anyone being able to tell whither all the water had gone; Mademoiselle Montagnon, from whom, on various occasions, nearly twenty quarts of water had been drawn, and who, on again swelling, was entirely rid of the fluid by the application of a bandage which had been dipped in the miraculous source. And, in her case also, none of the water could be found, either in her bed or on the floor. In the same way, not a complaint of the stomach resisted, all disappeared with the first glass of water. There was Marie Souchet, who vomited black blood, who had wasted to a skeleton, and who devoured her food and recovered her flesh in two days' time! There was Marie Jarlaud, who had burnt herself internally through drinking a glass of a metallic solution used for cleansing and brightening kitchen utensils, and who felt the tumour which had resulted from her injuries melt rapidly away. Moreover, every tumour disappeared in this fashion, in the piscina, without leaving the slightest trace behind. But that which caused yet greater wonderment was the manner in which ulcers, cancers, all sorts of horrible, visible sores were cicatrised as by a breath from on high. A Jew, an actor, whose hand was devoured by an ulcer, merely had to dip it in the water and he was cured. A very wealthy young foreigner, who had a wen as large as a hen's egg, on his right wrist, beheld it dissolve. Rose Duval, who, as a result of a white tumour, had a hole in her left elbow, large enough to accommodate a walnut, was able to watch and follow the prompt action of the new flesh in filling up this cavity! The Widow Fromond, with a lip half decoyed by a cancerous formation, merely had to apply the miraculous water to it as a lotion, and not even a red mark remained. Marie Moreau, who experienced fearful sufferings from a cancer in the breast, fell asleep, after laying on it a linen cloth soaked in some water of Lourdes, and when she awoke, two hours later, the pain had disappeared, and her flesh was once more smooth and pink and fresh.

At last Sister Hyacinthe began to speak of the immediate and complete cures of phthisis, and this was the triumph, the healing of that terrible disease which ravages humanity, which unbelievers defied the Blessed Virgin to cure, but which she did cure, it was said, by merely raising her little finger. A hundred instances, more extraordinary one than the other, pressed forward for citation.

Marguerite Coupel, who had suffered from phthisis for three years, and the upper part of whose lungs is destroyed by tuberculosis, rises up and goes off, radiant with health. Madame de la Riviere, who spits blood, who is ever covered with a cold perspiration, whose nails have already acquired a violet tinge, who is indeed on the point of drawing her last breath, requires but a spoonful of the water to be administered to her between her teeth, and lo! the rattles cease, she sits up, makes the responses to the litanies, and asks for some broth. Julie Jadot requires four spoonfuls; but then she could no longer hold up her head, she was of such a delicate constitution that disease had reduced her to nothing; and yet, in a few days, she becomes quite fat. Anna Catry, who is in the most advanced stage of the malady, with her left lung half destroyed by a cavity, is plunged five times into the cold water, contrary to all the dictates of prudence, and she is cured, her lung is healthy once more. Another consumptive girl, condemned by fifteen doctors, has asked nothing, has simply fallen on her knees in the Grotto, by chance as it were, and is afterwards quite surprised at having been cured au passage, through the lucky circumstance of having been there, no doubt, at the hour when the Blessed Virgin, moved to pity, allows miracles to fall from her invisible hands.

Miracles and yet more miracles! They rained down like the flowers of dreams from a clear and balmy sky. Some of them were touching, some of them were childish. An old woman, who, having her hand anchylosed, had been incapable of moving it for thirty years, washes it in the water and is at once able to make the sign of the Cross. Sister Sophie, who barked like a dog, plunges into the piscina and emerges from it with a clear, pure voice, chanting a canticle. Mustapha, a Turk, invokes the White Lady and recovers the use of his right eye by applying a compress to it. An officer of Turcos was protected at Sedan; a cuirassier of Reichsoffen would have died, pierced in the heart by a bullet, if this bullet after passing though his pocket-book had not stayed its flight on reaching a little picture of Our Lady of Lourdes! And, as with the men and women, so did the children, the poor, suffering little ones, find mercy; a paralytic boy of five rose and walked after being held for five minutes under the icy jet of the spring; another one, fifteen years of age, who, lying in bed, could only raise an inarticulate cry, sprang out of the piscina, shouting that he was cured; another one, but two years old, a poor tiny fellow who had never been able to walk, remained for a quarter of an hour in the cold water and then, invigorated and smiling, took his first steps like a little man! And for all of them, the little ones as well as the adults, the pain was acute whilst the miracle was being accomplished; for the work of repair could not be effected without causing an extraordinary shock to the whole human organism; the bones grew again, new flesh was formed, and the disease, driven away, made its escape in a final convulsion. But how great was the feeling of comfort which followed! The doctors could not believe their eyes, their astonishment burst forth at each fresh cure, when they saw the patients whom they had despaired of run and jump and eat with ravenous appetites. All these chosen ones, these women cured of their ailments, walked a couple of miles, sat down to roast fowl, and slept the soundest of sleeps for a dozen hours. Moreover, there was no convalescence, it was a sudden leap from the death throes to complete health. Limbs were renovated, sores were filled up, organs were reformed in their entirety, plumpness returned to the emaciated, all with the velocity of a lightning flash! Science was completely baffled. Not even the most simple precautions were taken, women were bathed at all times and seasons, perspiring consumptives were plunged into the icy water, sores were left to their putrefaction without any thought of employing antiseptics. And then what canticles of joy, what shouts of gratitude and love arose at each fresh miracle! The favoured one falls upon her knees, all who are present weep, conversions are effected, Protestants and Jews alike embrace Catholicism—other miracles these, miracles of faith, at which Heaven triumphs. And when the favoured one, chosen for the miracle, returns to her village, all the inhabitants crowd to meet her, whilst the bells peal merrily; and when she is seen springing lightly from the vehicle which has brought her home, shouts and sobs of joy burst forth and all intonate the Magnificat: Glory to the Blessed Virgin! Gratitude and love for ever!

Indeed, that which was more particularly evolved from the realisation of all these hopes, from the celebration of all these ardent thanksgivings, was gratitude—gratitude to the Mother most pure and most admirable. She was the great passion of every soul, she, the Virgin most powerful, the Virgin most merciful, the Mirror of Justice, the Seat of Wisdom.* All hands were stretched towards her, Mystical Rose in the dim light of the chapels, Tower of Ivory on the horizon of dreamland, Gate of Heaven leading into the Infinite. Each day at early dawn she shone forth, bright Morning Star, gay with juvenescent hope. And was she not also the Health of the weak, the Refuge of sinners, the Comforter of the afflicted? France had ever been her well-loved country, she was adored there with an ardent worship, the worship of her womanhood and her motherhood, the soaring of a divine affection; and it was particularly in France that it pleased her to show herself to little shepherdesses. She was so good to the little and the humble; she continually occupied herself with them; and if she was appealed to so willingly it was because she was known to be the intermediary of love betwixt Earth and Heaven. Every evening she wept tears of gold at the feet of her divine Son to obtain favours from Him, and these favours were the miracles which He permitted her to work,—these beautiful, flower-like miracles, as sweet-scented as the roses of Paradise, so prodigiously splendid and fragrant.

* For the information of Protestant and other non-Catholic readers
it may be mentioned that all the titles enumerated in this passage
are taken from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.—Trans.

But the train was still rolling, rolling onward. They had just passed Contras, it was six o'clock, and Sister Hyacinthe, rising to her, feet, clapped her hands together and once again repeated: "The Angelus, my children!"

Never had "Aves" impregnated with greater faith, inflamed with a more fervent desire to be heard by Heaven, winged their flight on high. And Pierre suddenly understood everything, clearly realised the meaning of all these pilgrimages, of all these trains rolling along through every country of the civilised world, of all these eager crowds, hastening towards Lourdes, which blazed over yonder like the abode of salvation for body and for mind. Ah! the poor wretches whom, ever since morning, he had heard groaning with pain, the poor wretches who exposed their sorry carcasses to the fatigues of such a journey! They were all condemned, abandoned by science, weary of consulting doctors, of having tried the torturing effects of futile remedies. And how well one could understand that, burning with a desire to preserve their lives, unable to resign themselves to the injustice and indifference of Nature, they should dream of a superhuman power, of an almighty Divinity who, in their favour, would perchance annul the established laws, alter the course of the planets, and reconsider His creation! For if the world failed them, did not the Divinity remain to them? In their cases reality was too abominable, and an immense need of illusion and falsehood sprang up within them. Oh! to believe that there is a supreme Justiciar somewhere, one who rights the apparent wrongs of things and beings; to believe that there is a Redeemer, a consoler who is the real master, who can carry the torrents back to their source, who can restore youth to the aged, and life to the dead! And when you are covered with sores, when your limbs are twisted, when your stomach is swollen by tumours, when your lungs are destroyed by disease, to be able to say that all this is of no consequence, that everything may disappear and be renewed at a sign from the Blessed Virgin, that it is sufficient that you should pray to her, touch her heart, and obtain the favour of being chosen by her. And then what a heavenly fount of hope appeared with the prodigious flow of those beautiful stories of cure, those adorable fairy tales which lulled and intoxicated the feverish imaginations of the sick and the infirm. Since little Sophie Couteau, with her white, sound foot, had climbed into that carriage, opening to the gaze of those within it the limitless heavens of the Divine and the Supernatural, how well one could understand the breath of resurrection that was passing over the world, slowly raising those who despaired the most from their beds of misery, and making their eyes shine since life was itself a possibility for them, and they were, perhaps, about to begin it afresh.

Yes, 't was indeed that. If that woeful train was rolling, rolling on, if that carriage was full, if the other carriages were full also, if France and the world, from the uttermost limits of the earth, were crossed by similar trains, if crowds of three hundred thousand believers, bringing thousands of sick along with them, were ever setting out, from one end of the year to the other, it was because the Grotto yonder was shining forth in its glory like a beacon of hope and illusion, like a sign of the revolt and triumph of the Impossible over inexorable materiality. Never had a more impassionating romance been devised to exalt the souls of men above the stern laws of life. To dream that dream, this was the great, the ineffable happiness. If the Fathers of the Assumption had seen the success of their pilgrimages increase and spread from year to year, it was because they sold to all the flocking peoples the bread of consolation and illusion, the delicious bread of hope, for which suffering humanity ever hungers with a hunger that nothing will ever appease. And it was not merely the physical sores which cried aloud for cure, the whole of man's moral and intellectual being likewise shrieked forth its wretchedness, with an insatiable yearning for happiness. To be happy, to place the certainty of life in faith, to lean till death should come upon that one strong staff of travel—such was the desire exhaled by every breast, the desire which made every moral grief bend the knee, imploring a continuance of grace, the conversion of dear ones, the spiritual salvation of self and those one loved. The mighty cry spread from pole to pole, ascended and filled all the regions of space: To be happy, happy for evermore, both in life and in death!

And Pierre saw the suffering beings around him lose all perception of the jolting and recover their strength as league by league they drew nearer to the miracle. Even Madame Maze grew talkative, certain as she felt that the Blessed Virgin would restore her husband to her. With a smile on her face Madame Vincent gently rocked her little Rose in her arms, thinking that she was not nearly so ill as those all but lifeless children who, after being plunged in the icy water, sprang out and played. M. Sabathier jested with M. de Guersaint, and explained to him that, next October, when he had recovered the use of his legs, he should go on a trip to Rome—a journey which he had been postponing for fifteen years and more. Madame Vetu, quite calmed, feeling nothing but a slight twinge in the stomach, imagined that she was hungry, and asked Madame de Jonquiere to let her dip some strips of bread in a glass of milk; whilst Elise Rouquet, forgetting her sores, ate some grapes, with face uncovered. And in La Grivotte who was sitting up and Brother Isidore who had ceased moaning, all those fine stories had left a pleasant fever, to such a point that, impatient to be cured, they grew anxious to know the time. For a minute also the man, the strange man, resuscitated. Whilst Sister Hyacinthe was again wiping the cold sweat from his brow, he raised his eyelids, and a smile momentarily brightened his pallid countenance. Yet once again he, also, had hoped.

Marie was still holding Pierre's fingers in her own small, warm hand. It was seven o'clock, they were not due at Bordeaux till half-past seven; and the belated train was quickening its pace yet more and more, rushing along with wild speed in order to make up for the minutes it had lost. The storm had ended by coming down, and now a gentle light of infinite purity fell from the vast clear heavens.

"Oh! how beautiful it is, Pierre—how beautiful it is!" Marie again repeated, pressing his hand with tender affection. And leaning towards him, she added in an undertone: "I beheld the Blessed Virgin a little while ago, Pierre, and it was your cure that I implored and shall obtain."

The priest, who understood her meaning, was thrown into confusion by the divine light which gleamed in her eyes as she fixed them on his own. She had forgotten her own sufferings; that which she had asked for was his conversion; and that prayer of faith, emanating, pure and candid, from that dear, suffering creature, upset his soul. Yet why should he not believe some day? He himself had been distracted by all those extraordinary narratives. The stifling heat of the carriage had made him dizzy, the sight of all the woe heaped up there caused his heart to bleed with pity. And contagion was doing its work; he no longer knew where the real and the possible ceased, he lacked the power to disentangle such a mass of stupefying facts, to explain such as admitted of explanation and reject the others. At one moment, indeed, as a hymn once more resounded and carried him off with its stubborn importunate rhythm, he ceased to be master of himself, and imagined that he was at last beginning to believe amidst the hallucinatory vertigo which reigned in that travelling hospital, rolling, ever rolling onward at full speed.

V. BERNADETTE

THE train left Bordeaux after a stoppage of a few minutes, during which those who had not dined hastened to purchase some provisions. Moreover, the ailing ones were constantly drinking milk, and asking for biscuits, like little children. And, as soon as they were off again, Sister Hyacinthe clapped her hands, and exclaimed: "Come, let us make haste; the evening prayer."

Thereupon, during a quarter of an hour came a confused murmuring, made up of "Paters" and "Aves," self-examinations, acts of contrition, and vows of trustful reliance in God, the Blessed Virgin, and the Saints, with thanksgiving for protection and preservation that day, and, at last, a prayer for the living and for the faithful departed.

"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen."

It was ten minutes past eight o'clock, the shades of night were already bedimming the landscape—a vast plain which the evening mist seemed to prolong into the infinite, and where, far away, bright dots of light shone out from the windows of lonely, scattered houses. In the carriage, the lights of the lamps were flickering, casting a subdued yellow glow on the luggage and the pilgrims, who were sorely shaken by the spreading tendency of the train's motion.

"You know, my children," resumed Sister Hyacinthe, who had remained standing, "I shall order silence when we get to Lamothe, in about an hour's time. So you have an hour to amuse yourselves, but you must be reasonable and not excite yourselves too much. And when we have passed Lamothe, you hear me, there must not be another word, another sound, you must all go to sleep."

This made them laugh.

"Oh! but it is the rule, you know," added the Sister, "and surely you have too much sense not to obey me."

Since the morning they had punctually fulfilled the programme of religious exercises specified for each successive hour. And now that all the prayers had been said, the beads told, the hymns chanted, the day's duties were over, and a brief interval for recreation was allowed before sleeping. They were, however, at a loss as to what they should do.

"Sister," suddenly said Marie, "if you would allow Monsieur l'Abbe to read to us—he reads extremely well,—and as it happens I have a little book with me—a history of Bernadette which is so interesting—"

The others did nor let her finish, but with the suddenly awakened desire of children to whom a beautiful story has been promised, loudly exclaimed: "Oh! yes, Sister. Oh! yes, Sister—"

"Of course I will allow it," replied Sister Hyacinthe, "since it is a question of reading something instructive and edifying."

Pierre was obliged to consent. But to be able to read the book he wished to be under the lamp, and it was necessary that he should change seats with M. de Guersaint, whom the promise of a story had delighted as much as it did the ailing ones. And when the young priest, after changing seats and declaring that he would be able to see well enough, at last opened the little book, a quiver of curiosity sped from one end of the carriage to the other, and every head was stretched out, lending ear with rapt attention. Fortunately, Pierre had a clear, powerful voice and made himself distinctly heard above the wheels, which, now that the train travelled across a vast level plain, gave out but a subdued, rumbling sound.

Before beginning, however, the young priest had examined the book. It was one of those little works of propaganda issued from the Catholic printing-presses and circulated in profusion throughout all Christendom. Badly printed, on wretched paper, it was adorned on its blue cover with a little wood-cut of Our Lady of Lourdes, a naive design alike stiff and awkward. The book itself was short, and half an hour would certainly suffice to read it from cover to cover without hurrying.

Accordingly, in his fine, clear voice, with its penetrating, musical tones, he began his perusal as follows:—

"It happened at Lourdes, a little town near the Pyrenees, on a Thursday, February 11, 1858. The weather was cold, and somewhat cloudy, and in the humble home of a poor but honest miller named Francois Soubirous there was no wood to cook the dinner. The miller's wife, Louise, said to her younger daughter Marie, 'Go and gather some wood on the bank of the Gave or on the common-land.' The Gave is a torrent which passes through Lourdes.

"Marie had an elder sister, named Bernadette, who had lately arrived from the country, where some worthy villagers had employed her as a shepherdess. She was a slender, delicate, extremely innocent child, and knew nothing except her rosary. Louise Soubirous hesitated to send her out with her sister, on account of the cold, but at last, yielding to the entreaties of Marie and a young girl of the neighbourhood called Jeanne Abadie, she consented to let her go.

"Following the bank of the torrent and gathering stray fragments of dead wood, the three maidens at last found themselves in front of the Grotto, hollowed out in a huge mass of rock which the people of the district called Massabielle."

Pierre had reached this point and was turning the page when he suddenly paused and let the little book fall on his knees. The childish character of the narrative, its ready-made, empty phraseology, filled him with impatience. He himself possessed quite a collection of documents concerning this extraordinary story, had passionately studied even its most trifling details, and in the depths of his heart retained a feeling of tender affection and infinite pity for Bernadette. He had just reflected, too, that on the very next day he would be able to begin that decisive inquiry which he had formerly dreamt of making at Lourdes. In fact, this was one of the reasons which had induced him to accompany Marie on her journey. And he was now conscious of an awakening of all his curiosity respecting the Visionary, whom he loved because he felt that she had been a girl of candid soul, truthful and ill-fated, though at the same time he would much have liked to analyse and explain her case. Assuredly, she had not lied, she had indeed beheld a vision and heard voices, like Joan of Arc; and like Joan of Arc also, she was now, in the opinion of the devout, accomplishing the deliverance of France—from sin if not from invaders. Pierre wondered what force could have produced her—her and her work. How was it that the visionary faculty had become developed in that lowly girl, so distracting believing souls as to bring about a renewal of the miracles of primitive times, as to found almost a new religion in the midst of a Holy City, built at an outlay of millions, and ever invaded by crowds of worshippers more numerous and more exalted in mind than had ever been known since the days of the Crusades?

And so, ceasing to read the book, Pierre began to tell his companions all that he knew, all that he had divined and reconstructed of that story which is yet so obscure despite the vast rivers of ink which it has already caused to flow. He knew the country and its manners and customs, through his long conversations with his friend Doctor Chassaigne. And he was endowed with charming fluency of language, an emotional power of exquisite purity, many remarkable gifts well fitting him to be a pulpit orator, which he never made use of, although he had known them to be within him ever since his seminary days. When the occupants of the carriage perceived that he knew the story, far better and in far greater detail than it appeared in Marie's little book, and that he related it also in such a gentle yet passionate way, there came an increase of attention, and all those afflicted souls hungering for happiness went forth towards him. First came the story of Bernadette's childhood at Bartres, where she had grown up in the abode of her foster-mother, Madame Lagues, who, having lost an infant of her own, had rendered those poor folks, the Soubirouses, the service of suckling and keeping their child for them. Bartres, a village of four hundred souls, at a league or so from Lourdes, lay as it were in a desert oasis, sequestered amidst greenery, and far from any frequented highway. The road dips down, the few houses are scattered over grassland, divided by hedges and planted with walnut and chestnut trees, whilst the clear rivulets, which are never silent, follow the sloping banks beside the pathways, and nothing rises on high save the small ancient romanesque church, which is perched on a hillock, covered with graves. Wooded slopes undulate upon all sides. Bartres lies in a hollow amidst grass of delicious freshness, grass of intense greenness, which is ever moist at the roots, thanks to the eternal subterraneous expanse of water which is fed by the mountain torrents. And Bernadette, who, since becoming a big girl, had paid for her keep by tending lambs, was wont to take them with her, season after season, through all the greenery where she never met a soul. It was only now and then, from the summit of some slope, that she saw the far-away mountains, the Pic du Midi, the Pic de Viscos, those masses which rose up, bright or gloomy, according to the weather, and which stretched away to other peaks, lightly and faintly coloured, vaguely and confusedly outlined, like apparitions seen in dreams.

Then came the home of the Lagueses, where her cradle was still preserved, a solitary, silent house, the last of the village. A meadow planted with pear and apple trees, and only separated from the open country by a narrow stream which one could jump across, stretched out in front of the house. Inside the latter, a low and damp abode, there were, on either side of the wooden stairway leading to the loft, but two spacious rooms, flagged with stones, and each containing four or five beds. The girls, who slept together, fell asleep at even, gazing at the fine pictures affixed to the walls, whilst the big clock in its pinewood case gravely struck the hours in the midst of the deep silence.

Ah! those years at Bartres; in what sweet peacefulness did Bernadette live them! Yet she grew up very thin, always in bad health, suffering from a nervous asthma which stifled her in the least veering of the wind; and on attaining her twelfth year she could neither read nor write, nor speak otherwise than in dialect, having remained quite infantile, behindhand in mind as in body. She was a very good little girl, very gentle and well behaved, and but little different from other children, except that instead of talking she preferred to listen. Limited as was her intelligence, she often evinced much natural common-sense, and at times was prompt in her reparties, with a kind of simple gaiety which made one smile. It was only with infinite trouble that she was taught her rosary, and when she knew it she seemed bent on carrying her knowledge no further, but repeated it all day long, so that whenever you met her with her lambs, she invariably had her chaplet between her fingers, diligently telling each successive "Pater" and "Ave." For long, long hours she lived like this on the grassy slopes of the hills, hidden away and haunted as it were amidst the mysteries of the foliage, seeing nought of the world save the crests of the distant mountains, which, for an instant, every now and then, would soar aloft in the radiant light, as ethereal as the peaks of dreamland.

Days followed days, and Bernadette roamed, dreaming her one narrow dream, repeating the sole prayer she knew, which gave her amidst her solitude, so fresh and naively infantile, no other companion and friend than the Blessed Virgin. But what pleasant evenings she spent in the winter-time in the room on the left, where a fire was kept burning! Her foster-mother had a brother, a priest, who occasionally read some marvellous stories to them—stories of saints, prodigious adventures of a kind to make one tremble with mingled fear and joy, in which Paradise appeared upon earth, whilst the heavens opened and a glimpse was caught of the splendour of the angels. The books he brought with him were often full of pictures—God the Father enthroned amidst His glory; Jesus, so gentle and so handsome with His beaming face; the Blessed Virgin, who recurred again and again, radiant with splendour, clad now in white, now in azure, now in gold, and ever so amiable that Bernadette would see her again in her dreams. But the book which was read more than all others was the Bible, an old Bible which had been in the family for more than a hundred years, and which time and usage had turned yellow. Each winter evening Bernadette's foster-father, the only member of the household who had learnt to read, would take a pin, pass it at random between the leaves of the book, open the latter, and then start reading from the top of the right-hand page, amidst the deep attention of both the women and the children, who ended by knowing the book by heart, and could have continued reciting it without a single mistake.

However, Bernadette, for her part, preferred the religious works in which the Blessed Virgin constantly appeared with her engaging smile. True, one reading of a different character amused her, that of the marvellous story of the Four Brothers Aymon. On the yellow paper cover of the little book, which had doubtless fallen from the bale of some peddler who had lost his way in that remote region, there was a naive cut showing the four doughty knights, Renaud and his brothers, all mounted on Bayard, their famous battle charger, that princely present made to them by the fairy Orlanda. And inside were narratives of bloody fights, of the building and besieging of fortresses, of the terrible swordthrusts exchanged by Roland and Renaud, who was at last about to free the Holy Land, without mentioning the tales of Maugis the Magician and his marvellous enchantments, and the Princess Clarisse, the King of Aquitaine's sister, who was more lovely than sunlight. Her imagination fired by such stories as these, Bernadette often found it difficult to get to sleep; and this was especially the case on the evenings when the books were left aside, and some person of the company related a tale of witchcraft. The girl was very superstitious, and after sundown could never be prevailed upon to pass near a tower in the vicinity, which was said to be haunted by the fiend. For that matter, all the folks of the region were superstitious, devout, and simple-minded, the whole countryside being peopled, so to say, with mysteries—trees which sang, stones from which blood flowed, cross-roads where it was necessary to say three "Paters" and three "Aves," if you did not wish to meet the seven-horned beast who carried maidens off to perdition. And what a wealth of terrifying stories there was! Hundreds of stories, so that there was no finishing on the evenings when somebody started them. First came the wehrwolf adventures, the tales of the unhappy men whom the demon forced to enter into the bodies of dogs, the great white dogs of the mountains. If you fire a gun at the dog and a single shot should strike him, the man will be delivered; but if the shot should fall on the dog's shadow, the man will immediately die. Then came the endless procession of sorcerers and sorceresses. In one of these tales Bernadette evinced a passionate interest; it was the story of a clerk of the tribunal of Lourdes who, wishing to see the devil, was conducted by a witch into an untilled field at midnight on Good Friday. The devil arrived clad in magnificent scarlet garments, and at once proposed to the clerk that he should buy his soul, an offer which the clerk pretended to accept. It so happened that the devil was carrying under his arm a register in which different persons of the town, who had already sold themselves, had signed their names. However, the clerk, who was a cunning fellow, pulled out of his pocket a pretended bottle of ink, which in reality contained holy water, and with this he sprinkled the devil, who raised frightful shrieks, whilst the clerk took to flight, carrying the register off with him. Then began a wild, mad race, which might last throughout the night, over the mountains, through the valleys, across the forests and the torrents. "Give me back my register!" shouted the fiend. "No, you sha'n't have it!" replied the clerk. And again and again it began afresh: "Give me back my register!"—"No, you sha'n't have it'!" And at last, finding himself out of breath, near the point of succumbing, the clerk, who had his plan, threw himself into the cemetery, which was consecrated ground, and was there able to deride the devil at his ease, waving the register which he had purloined so as to save the souls of all the unhappy people who had signed their names in it. On the evening when this story was told, Bernadette, before surrendering herself to sleep, would mentally repeat her rosary, delighted with the thought that hell should have been baffled, though she trembled at the idea that it would surely return to prowl around her, as soon as the lamp should have been put out.

Throughout one winter, the long evenings were spent in the church. Abbe Ader, the village priest, had authorised it, and many families came, in order to economise oil and candles. Moreover, they felt less cold when gathered together in this fashion. The Bible was read, and prayers were repeated, whilst the children ended by falling asleep. Bernadette alone struggled on to the finish, so pleased she was at being there, in that narrow nave whose slender nervures were coloured blue and red. At the farther end was the altar, also painted and gilded, with its twisted columns and its screens on which appeared the Virgin and Ste. Anne, and the beheading of St. John the Baptist—the whole of a gaudy and somewhat barbaric splendour. And as sleepiness grew upon her, the child must have often seen a mystical vision as it were of those crudely coloured designs rising before her—have seen the blood flowing from St. John's severed head, have seen the aureolas shining, the Virgin ever returning and gazing at her with her blue, living eyes, and looking as though she were on the point of opening her vermilion lips in order to speak to her. For some months Bernadette spent her evenings in this wise, half asleep in front of that sumptuous, vaguely defined altar, in the incipiency of a divine dream which she carried away with her, and finished in bed, slumbering peacefully under the watchful care of her guardian angel.

And it was also in that old church, so humble yet so impregnated with ardent faith, that Bernadette began to learn her catechism. She would soon be fourteen now, and must think of her first communion. Her foster-mother, who had the reputation of being avaricious, did not send her to school, but employed her in or about the house from morning till evening. M. Barbet, the schoolmaster, never saw her at his classes, though one day, when he gave the catechism lesson, in the place of Abbe Ader who was indisposed, he remarked her on account of her piety and modesty. The village priest was very fond of Bernadette and often spoke of her to the schoolmaster, saying that he could never look at her without thinking of the children of La Salette, since they must have been good, candid, and pious as she was, for the Blessed Virgin to have appeared to them.* On another occasion whilst the two men were walking one morning near the village, and saw Bernadette disappear with her little flock under some spreading trees in the distance, the Abbe repeatedly turned round to look for her, and again remarked "I cannot account for it, but every time I meet that child it seems to me as if I saw Melanie, the young shepherdess, little Maximin's companion." He was certainly beset by this singular idea, which became, so to say, a prediction. Moreover, had he not one day after catechism, or one evening, when the villagers were gathered in the church, related that marvellous story which was already twelve years old, that story of the Lady in the dazzling robes who walked upon the grass without even making it bend, the Blessed Virgin who showed herself to Melanie and Maximin on the banks of a stream in the mountains, and confided to them a great secret and announced the anger of her Son? Ever since that day a source had sprung up from the tears which she had shed, a source which cured all ailments, whilst the secret, inscribed on parchment fastened with three seals, slumbered at Rome! And Bernadette, no doubt, with her dreamy, silent air, had listened passionately to that wonderful tale and carried it off with her into the desert of foliage where she spent her days, so that she might live it over again as she walked along behind her lambs with her rosary, slipping bead by bead between her slender fingers.

* It was on September 19, 1846, that the Virgin is said to have
appeared in the ravine of La Sezia, adjacent to the valley of La
Salette, between Corps and Eutraigues, in the department of the
Isere. The visionaries were Melanie Mathieu, a girl of fourteen,
and Maximin Giraud, a boy of twelve. The local clergy speedily
endorsed the story of the miracle, and thousands of people still
go every year in pilgrimage to a church overlooking the valley,
and bathe and drink at a so-called miraculous source. Two priests
of Grenoble, however, Abbe Deleon and Abbe Cartellier, accused a
Mlle. de Lamerliere of having concocted the miracle, and when she
took proceedings against them for libel she lost her case.—Trans.

Thus her childhood ran its course at Bartres. That which delighted one in this Bernadette, so poor-blooded, so slight of build, was her ecstatic eyes, beautiful visionary eyes, from which dreams soared aloft like birds winging their flight in a pure limpid sky. Her mouth was large, with lips somewhat thick, expressive of kindliness; her square-shaped head had a straight brow, and was covered with thick black hair, whilst her face would have seemed rather common but for its charming expression of gentle obstinacy. Those who did not gaze into her eyes, however, gave her no thought. To them she was but an ordinary child, a poor thing of the roads, a girl of reluctant growth, timidly humble in her ways. Assuredly it was in her glance that Abbe Ader had with agitation detected the stifling ailment which filled her puny, girlish form with suffering—that ailment born of the greeny solitude in which she had grown up, the gentleness of her bleating lambs, the Angelic Salutation which she had carried with her, hither and thither, under the sky, repeating and repeating it to the point of hallucination, the prodigious stories, too, which she had heard folks tell at her foster-mother's, the long evenings spent before the living altar-screens in the church, and all the atmosphere of primitive faith which she had breathed in that far-away rural region, hemmed in by mountains.

At last, on one seventh of January, Bernadette had just reached her fourteenth birthday, when her parents, finding that she learnt nothing at Bartres, resolved to bring her back to Lourdes for good, in order that she might diligently study her catechism, and in this wise seriously prepare herself for her first communion. And so it happened that she had already been at Lourdes some fifteen or twenty days, when on February 11, a Thursday, cold and somewhat cloudy—

But Pierre could carry his narrative no further, for Sister Hyacinthe had risen to her feet and was vigorously clapping her hands. "My children," she exclaimed, "it is past nine o'clock. Silence! silence!"

The train had indeed just passed Lamothe, and was rolling with a dull rumble across a sea of darkness—the endless plains of the Landes which the night submerged. For ten minutes already not a sound ought to have been heard in the carriage, one and all ought to have been sleeping or suffering uncomplainingly. However, a mutiny broke out.

"Oh! Sister!" exclaimed Marie, whose eyes were sparkling, "allow us just another short quarter of an hour! We have got to the most interesting part."

Ten, twenty voices took up the cry: "Oh yes, Sister, please do let us have another short quarter of an hour!"

They all wished to hear the continuation, burning with as much curiosity as though they had not known the story, so captivated were they by the touches of compassionate human feeling which Pierre introduced into his narrative. Their glances never left him, all their heads were stretched towards him, fantastically illumined by the flickering light of the lamps. And it was not only the sick who displayed this interest; the ten women occupying the compartment at the far end of the carriage had also become impassioned, and, happy at not missing a single word, turned their poor ugly faces now beautified by naive faith.

"No, I cannot!" Sister Hyacinthe at first declared; "the rules are very strict—you must be silent."

However, she weakened, she herself feeling so interested in the tale that she could detect her heart beating under her stomacher. Then Marie again repeated her request in an entreating tone; whilst her father, M. de Guersaint, who had listened like one hugely amused, declared that they would all fall ill if the story were not continued. And thereupon, seeing Madame de Jonquiere smile with an indulgent air, Sister Hyacinthe ended by consenting.

"Well, then," said she, "I will allow you another short quarter of an hour; but only a short quarter of an hour, mind. That is understood, is it not? For I should otherwise be in fault."

Pierre had waited quietly without attempting to intervene. And he resumed his narrative in the same penetrating voice as before, a voice in which his own doubts were softened by pity for those who suffer and who hope.

The scene of the story was now transferred to Lourdes, to the Rue des Petits Fosses, a narrow, tortuous, mournful street taking a downward course between humble houses and roughly plastered dead walls. The Soubirous family occupied a single room on the ground floor of one of these sorry habitations, a room at the end of a dark passage, in which seven persons were huddled together, the father, the mother, and five children. You could scarcely see in the chamber; from the tiny, damp inner courtyard of the house there came but a greenish light. And in that room they slept, all of a heap; and there also they ate, when they had bread. For some time past, the father, a miller by trade, could only with difficulty obtain work as a journeyman. And it was from that dark hole, that lowly wretchedness, that Bernadette, the elder girl, with Marie, her sister, and Jeanne, a little friend of the neighbourhood, went out to pick up dead wood, on the cold February Thursday already spoken of.

Then the beautiful tale was unfolded at length; how the three girls followed the bank of the Gave from the other side of the castle, and how they ended by finding themselves on the Ile du Chalet in front of the rock of Massabielle, from which they were only separated by the narrow stream diverted from the Gave, and used for working the mill of Savy. It was a wild spot, whither the common herdsman often brought the pigs of the neighbourhood, which, when showers suddenly came on, would take shelter under this rock of Massabielle, at whose base there was a kind of grotto of no great depth, blocked at the entrance by eglantine and brambles. The girls found dead wood very scarce that day, but at last on seeing on the other side of the stream quite a gleaning of branches deposited there by the torrent, Marie and Jeanne crossed over through the water; whilst Bernadette, more delicate than they were, a trifle young-ladyfied, perhaps, remained on the bank lamenting, and not daring to wet her feet. She was suffering slightly from humour in the head, and her mother had expressly bidden her to wrap herself in her capulet,* a large white capulet which contrasted vividly with her old black woollen dress. When she found that her companions would not help her, she resignedly made up her mind to take off her sabots, and pull down her stockings. It was then about noon, the three strokes of the Angelus rang out from the parish church, rising into the broad calm winter sky, which was somewhat veiled by fine fleecy clouds. And it was then that a great agitation arose within her, resounding in her ears with such a tempestuous roar that she fancied a hurricane had descended from the mountains, and was passing over her. But she looked at the trees and was stupefied, for not a leaf was stirring. Then she thought that she had been mistaken, and was about to pick up her sabots, when again the great gust swept through her; but, this time, the disturbance in her ears reached her eyes, she no longer saw the trees, but was dazzled by a whiteness, a kind of bright light which seemed to her to settle itself against the rock, in a narrow, lofty slit above the Grotto, not unlike an ogival window of a cathedral. In her fright she fell upon her knees. What could it be, mon Dieu? Sometimes, during bad weather, when her asthma oppressed her more than usual, she spent very bad nights, incessantly dreaming dreams which were often painful, and whose stifling effect she retained on awaking, even when she had ceased to remember anything. Flames would surround her, the sun would flash before her face. Had she dreamt in that fashion during the previous night? Was this the continuation of some forgotten dream? However, little by little a form became outlined, she believed that she could distinguish a figure which the vivid light rendered intensely white. In her fear lest it should be the devil, for her mind was haunted by tales of witchcraft, she began to tell her beads. And when the light had slowly faded away, and she had crossed the canal and joined Marie and Jeanne, she was surprised to find that neither of them had seen anything whilst they were picking up the wood in front of the Grotto. On their way back to Lourdes the three girls talked together. So she, Bernadette, had seen something then? What was it? At first, feeling uneasy, and somewhat ashamed, she would not answer; but at last she said that she had seen something white.

* This is a kind of hood, more generally known among the Bearnese
peasantry as a sarot. Whilst forming a coif it also completely
covers the back and shoulders.—Trans.

From this the rumours started and grew. The Soubirouses, on being made acquainted with the circumstance, evinced much displeasure at such childish nonsense, and told their daughter that she was not to return to the rock of Massabielle. All the children of the neighbourhood, however, were already repeating the tale, and when Sunday came the parents had to give way, and allow Bernadette to betake herself to the Grotto with a bottle of holy water to ascertain if it were really the devil whom one had to deal with. She then again beheld the light, the figure became more clearly defined, and smiled upon her, evincing no fear whatever of the holy water. And, on the ensuing Thursday, she once more returned to the spot accompanied by several persons, and then for the first time the radiant lady assumed sufficient corporality to speak, and say to her: "Do me the kindness to come here for fifteen days."

Thus, little by little, the lady had assumed a precise appearance. The something clad in white had become indeed a lady more beautiful than a queen, of a kind such as is only seen in pictures. At first, in presence of the questions with which all the neighbours plied her from morning till evening, Bernadette had hesitated, disturbed, perhaps, by scruples of conscience. But then, as though prompted by the very interrogatories to which she was subjected, she seemed to perceive the figure which she had beheld, more plainly, so that it definitely assumed life, with lines and hues from which the child, in her after-descriptions, never departed. The lady's eyes were blue and very mild, her mouth was rosy and smiling, the oval of her face expressed both the grace of youth and of maternity. Below the veil covering her head and falling to her heels, only a glimpse was caught of her admirable fair hair, which was slightly curled. Her robe, which was of dazzling whiteness, must have been of some material unknown on earth, some material woven of the sun's rays. Her sash, of the same hue as the heavens, was fastened loosely about her, its long ends streaming downwards, with the light airiness of morning. Her chaplet, wound about her right arm, had beads of a milky whiteness, whilst the links and the cross were of gold. And on her bare feet, on her adorable feet of virgin snow, flowered two golden roses, the mystic roses of this divine mother's immaculate flesh.

Where was it that Bernadette had seen this Blessed Virgin, of such traditionally simple composition, unadorned by a single jewel, having but the primitive grace imagined by the painters of a people in its childhood? In which illustrated book belonging to her foster-mother's brother, the good priest, who read such attractive stories, had she beheld this Virgin? Or in what picture, or what statuette, or what stained-glass window of the painted and gilded church where she had spent so many evenings whilst growing up? And whence, above all things, had come those golden roses poised on the Virgin's feet, that piously imagined florescence of woman's flesh—from what romance of chivalry, from what story told after catechism by the Abbe Ader, from what unconscious dream indulged in under the shady foliage of Bartres, whilst ever and ever repeating that haunting Angelic Salutation?

Pierre's voice had acquired a yet more feeling tone, for if he did not say all these things to the simple-minded folks who were listening to him, still the human explanation of all these prodigies which the feeling of doubt in the depths of his being strove to supply, imparted to his narrative a quiver of sympathetic, fraternal love. He loved Bernadette the better for the great charm of her hallucination—that lady of such gracious access, such perfect amiability, such politeness in appearing and disappearing so appropriately. At first the great light would show itself, then the vision took form, came and went, leant forward, moved about, floating imperceptibly, with ethereal lightness; and when it vanished the glow lingered for yet another moment, and then disappeared like a star fading away. No lady in this world could have such a white and rosy face, with a beauty so akin to that of the Virgins on the picture-cards given to children at their first communions. And it was strange that the eglantine of the Grotto did not even hurt her adorable bare feet blooming with golden flowers.

Pierre, however, at once proceeded to recount the other apparitions. The fourth and fifth occurred on the Friday and the Saturday; but the Lady, who shone so brightly and who had not yet told her name, contented herself on these occasions with smiling and saluting without pronouncing a word. On the Sunday, however, she wept, and said to Bernadette, "Pray for sinners." On the Monday, to the child's great grief, she did not appear, wishing, no doubt, to try her. But on the Tuesday she confided to her a secret which concerned her (the girl) alone, a secret which she was never to divulge*; and then she at last told her what mission it was that she entrusted to her: "Go and tell the priests," she said, "that they must build a chapel here." On the Wednesday she frequently murmured the word "Penitence! penitence! penitence!" which the child repeated, afterwards kissing the earth. On the Thursday the Lady said to her: "Go, and drink, and wash at the spring, and eat of the grass that is beside it," words which the Visionary ended by understanding, when in the depths of the Grotto a source suddenly sprang up beneath her fingers. And this was the miracle of the enchanted fountain.

* In a like way, it will be remembered, the apparition at La
Salette confided a secret to Melanie and Maximin (see ante,
note). There can be little doubt that Bernadette was acquainted
with the story of the miracle of La Salette.—Trans.

Then the second week ran its course. The lady did not appear on the Friday, but was punctual on the five following days, repeating her commands and gazing with a smile at the humble girl whom she had chosen to do her bidding, and who, on her side, duly told her beads at each apparition, kissed the earth, and repaired on her knees to the source, there to drink and wash. At last, on Thursday, March 4, the last day of these mystical assignations, the Lady requested more pressingly than before that a chapel might be erected in order that the nations might come thither in procession from all parts of the earth. So far, however, in reply to all Bernadette's appeals, she had refused to say who she was; and it was only three weeks later, on Thursday, March 25, that, joining her hands together, and raising her eyes to Heaven, she said: "I am the Immaculate Conception." On two other occasions, at somewhat long intervals, April 7 and July 16, she again appeared: the first time to perform the miracle of the lighted taper, that taper above which the child, plunged in ecstasy, for a long time unconsciously left her hand, without burning it; and the second time to bid Bernadette farewell, to favour her with a last smile, and a last inclination of the head full of charming politeness. This made eighteen apparitions all told; and never again did the Lady show herself.

Whilst Pierre went on with his beautiful, marvellous story, so soothing to the wretched, he evoked for himself a vision of that pitiable, lovable Bernadette, whose sufferings had flowered so wonderfully. As a doctor had roughly expressed it, this girl of fourteen, at a critical period of her life, already ravaged, too, by asthma, was, after all, simply an exceptional victim of hysteria, afflicted with a degenerate heredity and lapsing into infancy. If there were no violent crises in her case, if there were no stiffening of the muscles during her attacks, if she retained a precise recollection of her dreams, the reason was that her case was peculiar to herself, and she added, so to say, a new and very curious form to all the forms of hysteria known at the time. Miracles only begin when things cannot be explained; and science, so far, knows and can explain so little, so infinitely do the phenomena of disease vary according to the nature of the patient! But how many shepherdesses there had been before Bernadette who had seen the Virgin in a similar way, amidst all the same childish nonsense! Was it not always the same story, the Lady clad in light, the secret confided, the spring bursting forth, the mission which had to be fulfilled, the miracles whose enchantments would convert the masses? And was not the personal appearance of the Virgin always in accordance with a poor child's dreams—akin to some coloured figure in a missal, an ideal compounded of traditional beauty, gentleness, and politeness. And the same dreams showed themselves in the naivete of the means which were to be employed and of the object which was to be attained—the deliverance of nations, the building of churches, the processional pilgrimages of the faithful! Then, too, all the words which fell from Heaven resembled one another, calls for penitence, promises of help; and in this respect, in Bernadette's case the only new feature was that most extraordinary declaration: "I am the Immaculate Conception," which burst forth—very usefully—as the recognition by the Blessed Virgin herself of the dogma promulgated by the Court of Rome but three years previously! It was not the Immaculate Virgin who appeared: no, it was the Immaculate Conception, the abstraction itself, the thing, the dogma, so that one might well ask oneself if really the Virgin had spoken in such a fashion. As for the other words, it was possible that Bernadette had heard them somewhere and stored them up in some unconscious nook of her memory. But these—"I am the Immaculate Conception"—whence had they come as though expressly to fortify a dogma—still bitterly discussed—with such prodigious support as the direct testimony of the Mother conceived without sin? At this thought, Pierre, who was convinced of Bernadette's absolute good faith, who refused to believe that she had been the instrument of a fraud, began to waver, deeply agitated, feeling his belief in truth totter within him.

The apparitions, however, had caused intense emotion at Lourdes; crowds flocked to the spot, miracles began, and those inevitable persecutions broke out which ensure the triumph of new religions. Abbe Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, an extremely honest man, with an upright, vigorous mind, was able in all truth to declare that he did not know this child, that she had not yet been seen at catechism. Where was the pressure, then, where the lesson learnt by heart? There was nothing but those years of childhood spent at Bartres, the first teachings of Abbe Ader, conversations possibly, religious ceremonies in honour of the recently proclaimed dogma, or simply the gift of one of those commemorative medals which had been scattered in profusion. Never did Abbe Ader reappear upon the scene, he who had predicted the mission of the future Visionary. He was destined to remain apart from Bernadette and her future career, he who, the first, had seen her little soul blossom in his pious hands. And yet all the unknown forces that had sprung from that sequestered village, from that nook of greenery where superstition and poverty of intelligence prevailed, were still making themselves felt, disturbing the brains of men, disseminating the contagion of the mysterious. It was remembered that a shepherd of Argeles, speaking of the rock of Massabielle, had prophesied that great things would take place there. Other children, moreover, now fell in ecstasy with their eyes dilated and their limbs quivering with convulsions, but these only saw the devil. A whirlwind of madness seemed to be passing over the region. An old lady of Lourdes declared that Bernadette was simply a witch and that she had herself seen the toad's foot in her eye. But for the others, for the thousands of pilgrims who hastened to the spot, she was a saint, and they kissed her garments. Sobs burst forth and frenzy seemed to seize upon the souls of the beholders, when she fell upon her knees before the Grotto, a lighted taper in her right hand, whilst with the left she told the beads of her rosary. She became very pale and quite beautiful, transfigured, so to say. Her features gently ascended in her face, lengthened into an expression of extraordinary beatitude, whilst her eyes filled with light, and her lips parted as though she were speaking words which could not be heard. And it was quite certain that she had no will of her own left her, penetrated as she was by a dream, possessed by it to such a point in the confined, exclusive sphere in which she lived, that she continued dreaming it even when awake, and thus accepted it as the only indisputable reality, prepared to testify to it even at the cost of her blood, repeating it over and over again, obstinately, stubbornly clinging to it, and never varying in the details she gave. She did not lie, for she did not know, could not and would not desire anything apart from it.

Forgetful of the flight of time, Pierre was now sketching a charming picture of old Lourdes, that pious little town, slumbering at the foot of the Pyrenees. The castle, perched on a rock at the point of intersection of the seven valleys of Lavedan, had formerly been the key of the mountain districts. But, in Bernadette's time, it had become a mere dismantled, ruined pile, at the entrance of a road leading nowhere. Modern life found its march stayed by a formidable rampart of lofty, snow-capped peaks, and only the trans-Pyrenean railway—had it been constructed—could have established an active circulation of social life in that sequestered nook where human existence stagnated like dead water. Forgotten, therefore, Lourdes remained slumbering, happy and sluggish amidst its old-time peacefulness, with its narrow, pebble-paved streets and its bleak houses with dressings of marble. The old roofs were still all massed on the eastern side of the castle; the Rue de la Grotte, then called the Rue du Bois, was but a deserted and often impassable road; no houses stretched down to the Gave as now, and the scum-laden waters rolled through a perfect solitude of pollard willows and tall grass. On week-days but few people passed across the Place du Marcadal, such as housewives hastening on errands, and petty cits airing their leisure hours; and you had to wait till Sundays or fair days to find the inhabitants rigged out in their best clothes and assembled on the Champ Commun, in company with the crowd of graziers who had come down from the distant tablelands with their cattle. During the season when people resort to the Pyrenean-waters, the passage of the visitors to Cauterets and Bagneres also brought some animation; diligences passed through the town twice a day, but they came from Pau by a wretched road, and had to ford the Lapaca, which often overflowed its banks. Then climbing the steep ascent of the Rue Basse, they skirted the terrace of the church, which was shaded by large elms. And what soft peacefulness prevailed in and around that old semi-Spanish church, full of ancient carvings, columns, screens, and statues, peopled with visionary patches of gilding and painted flesh, which time had mellowed and which you faintly discerned as by the light of mystical lamps! The whole population came there to worship, to fill their eyes with the dream of the mysterious. There were no unbelievers, the inhabitants of Lourdes were a people of primitive faith; each corporation marched behind the banner of its saint, brotherhoods of all kinds united the entire town, on festival mornings, in one large Christian family. And, as with some exquisite flower that has grown in the soil of its choice, great purity of life reigned there. There was not even a resort of debauchery for young men to wreck their lives, and the girls, one and all, grew up with the perfume and beauty of innocence, under the eyes of the Blessed Virgin, Tower of Ivory and Seat of Wisdom.

And how well one could understand that Bernadette, born in that holy soil, should flower in it, like one of nature's roses budding in the wayside bushes! She was indeed the very florescence of that region of ancient belief and rectitude; she would certainly not have sprouted elsewhere; she could only appear and develop there, amidst that belated race, amidst the slumberous peacefulness of a childlike people, under the moral discipline of religion. And what intense love at once burst forth all around her! What blind confidence was displayed in her mission, what immense consolation and hope came to human hearts on the very morrow of the first miracles! A long cry of relief had greeted the cure of old Bourriette recovering his sight, and of little Justin Bouhohorts coming to life again in the icy water of the spring. At last, then, the Blessed Virgin was intervening in favour of those who despaired, forcing that unkind mother, Nature, to be just and charitable. This was divine omnipotence returning to reign on earth, sweeping the laws of the world aside in order to work the happiness of the suffering and the poor. The miracles multiplied, blazed forth, from day to day more and more extraordinary, like unimpeachable proof of Bernadette's veracity. And she was, indeed, the rose of the divine garden, whose deeds shed perfume, the rose who beholds all the other flowers of grace and salvation spring into being around her.

Pierre had reached this point of his story, and was again enumerating the miracles, on the point of recounting the prodigious triumph of the Grotto, when Sister Hyacinthe, awaking with a start from the ecstasy into which the narrative had plunged her, hastily rose to her feet. "Really, really," said she, "there is no sense in it. It will soon be eleven o'clock."

This was true. They had left Morceux behind them, and would now soon be at Mont de Marsan. So Sister Hyacinthe clapped her hands once more, and added: "Silence, my children, silence!"

This time they did not dare to rebel, for they felt she was in the right; they were unreasonable. But how greatly they regretted not hearing the continuation, how vexed they were that the story should cease when only half told! The ten women in the farther compartment even let a murmur of disappointment escape them; whilst the sick, their faces still outstretched, their dilated eyes gazing upon the light of hope, seemed to be yet listening. Those miracles which ever and ever returned to their minds and filled them with unlimited, haunting, supernatural joy.

"And don't let me hear anyone breathe, even," added Sister Hyacinthe gaily, "or otherwise I shall impose penance on you."

Madame de Jonquiere laughed good-naturedly. "You must obey, my children," she said; "be good and get to sleep, so that you may have strength to pray at the Grotto to-morrow with all your hearts."

Then silence fell, nobody spoke any further; and the only sounds were those of the rumbling of the wheels and the jolting of the train as it was carried along at full speed through the black night.

Pierre, however, was unable to sleep. Beside him, M. de Guersaint was already snoring lightly, looking very happy despite the hardness of his seat. For a time the young priest saw Marie's eyes wide open, still full of all the radiance of the marvels that he had related. For a long while she kept them ardently fixed upon his own, but at last closed them, and then he knew not whether she was sleeping, or with eyelids simply closed was living the everlasting miracle over again. Some of the sufferers were dreaming aloud, giving vent to bursts of laughter which unconscious moans interrupted. Perhaps they beheld the Archangels opening their flesh to wrest their diseases from them. Others, restless with insomnia, turned over and over, stifling their sobs and gazing fixedly into the darkness. And, with a shudder born of all the mystery he had evoked, Pierre, distracted, no longer master of himself in that delirious sphere of fraternal suffering, ended by hating his very mind, and, drawn into close communion with all those humble folks, sought to believe like them. What could be the use of that physiological inquiry into Bernadette's case, so full of gaps and intricacies? Why should he not accept her as a messenger from the spheres beyond, as one of the elect chosen for the divine mystery? Doctors were but ignorant men with rough and brutal hands, and it would be so delightful to fall asleep in childlike faith, in the enchanted gardens of the impossible. And for a moment indeed he surrendered himself, experiencing a delightful feeling of comfort, no longer seeking to explain anything, but accepting the Visionary with her sumptuous cortege of miracles, and relying on God to think and determine for him. Then he looked out through the window, which they did not dare to open on account of the consumptive patients, and beheld the immeasurable night which enwrapped the country across which the train was fleeing. The storm must have burst forth there; the sky was now of an admirable nocturnal purity, as though cleansed by the masses of fallen water. Large stars shone out in the dark velvet, alone illumining, with their mysterious gleams, the silent, refreshed fields, which incessantly displayed only the black solitude of slumber. And across the Landes, through the valleys, between the hills, that carriage of wretchedness and suffering rolled on and on, over-heated, pestilential, rueful, and wailing, amidst the serenity of the august night, so lovely and so mild.

They had passed Riscle at one in the morning. Between the jolting, the painful, the hallucinatory silence still continued. At two o'clock, as they reached Vic-de-Bigorre, low moans were heard; the bad state of the line, with the unbearable spreading tendency of the train's motion, was sorely shaking the patients. It was only at Tarbes, at half-past two, that silence was at length broken, and that morning prayers were said, though black night still reigned around them. There came first the "Pater," and then the "Ave," the "Credo," and the supplication to God to grant them the happiness of a glorious day.

"O God, vouchsafe me sufficient strength that I may avoid all that is evil, do all that is good, and suffer uncomplainingly every pain."

And now there was to be no further stoppage until they reached Lourdes. Barely three more quarters of an hour, and Lourdes, with all its vast hopes, would blaze forth in the midst of that night, so long and cruel. Their painful awakening was enfevered by the thought; a final agitation arose amidst the morning discomfort, as the abominable sufferings began afresh.

Sister Hyacinthe, however, was especially anxious about the strange man, whose sweat-covered face she had been continually wiping. He had so far managed to keep alive, she watching him without a pause, never having once closed her eyes, but unremittingly listening to his faint breathing with the stubborn desire to take him to the holy Grotto before he died.

All at once, however, she felt frightened; and addressing Madame de Jonquiere, she hastily exclaimed, "Pray pass me the vinegar bottle at once—I can no longer hear him breathe."

For an instant, indeed, the man's faint breathing had ceased. His eyes were still closed, his lips parted; he could not have been paler, he had an ashen hue, and was cold. And the carriage was rolling along with its ceaseless rattle of coupling-irons; the speed of the train seemed even to have increased.

"I will rub his temples," resumed Sister Hyacinthe. "Help me, do!"

But, at a more violent jolt of the train, the man suddenly fell from the seat, face downward.

"Ah! mon Dieu, help me, pick him up!"

They picked him up, and found him dead. And they had to seat him in his corner again, with his back resting against the woodwork. He remained there erect, his torso stiffened, and his head wagging slightly at each successive jolt. Thus the train continued carrying him along, with the same thundering noise of wheels, while the engine, well pleased, no doubt, to be reaching its destination, began whistling shrilly, giving vent to quite a flourish of delirious joy as it sped through the calm night.

And then came the last and seemingly endless half-hour of the journey, in company with that wretched corpse. Two big tears had rolled down Sister Hyacinthe's cheeks, and with her hands joined she had begun to pray. The whole carriage shuddered with terror at sight of that terrible companion who was being taken, too late alas! to the Blessed Virgin.

Hope, however, proved stronger than sorrow or pain, and although all the sufferings there assembled awoke and grew again, irritated by overwhelming weariness, a song of joy nevertheless proclaimed the sufferers' triumphal entry into the Land of Miracles. Amidst the tears which their pains drew from them, the exasperated and howling sick began to chant the "Ave maris Stella" with a growing clamour in which lamentation finally turned into cries of hope.

Marie had again taken Pierre's hand between her little feverish fingers. "Oh, mon Dieu!" said she, "to think that poor man is dead, and I feared so much that it was I who would die before arriving. And we are there—there at last!"

The priest was trembling with intense emotion. "It means that you are to be cured, Marie," he replied, "and that I myself shall be cured if you pray for me—"

The engine was now whistling in a yet louder key in the depths of the bluish darkness. They were nearing their destination. The lights of Lourdes already shone out on the horizon. Then the whole train again sang a canticle—the rhymed story of Bernadette, that endless ballad of six times ten couplets, in which the Angelic Salutation ever returns as a refrain, all besetting and distracting, opening to the human mind the portals of the heaven of ecstasy:—

"It was the hour for ev'ning pray'r;
Soft bells chimed on the chilly air.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!

"The maid stood on the torrent's bank,
A breeze arose, then swiftly sank.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!

"And she beheld, e'en as it fell,
The Virgin on Massabielle.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!

"All white appeared the Lady chaste,
A zone of Heaven round her waist.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!

"Two golden roses, pure and sweet,
Bloomed brightly on her naked feet.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!

"Upon her arm, so white and round,
Her chaplet's milky pearls were wound.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!

"The maiden prayed till, from her eyes,
The vision sped to Paradise.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!"

THE SECOND DAY

I. THE TRAIN ARRIVES

IT was twenty minutes past three by the clock of the Lourdes railway station, the dial of which was illumined by a reflector. Under the slanting roof sheltering the platform, a hundred yards or so in length, some shadowy forms went to and fro, resignedly waiting. Only a red signal light peeped out of the black countryside, far away.

Two of the promenaders suddenly halted. The taller of them, a Father of the Assumption, none other indeed than the Reverend Father Fourcade, director of the national pilgrimage, who had reached Lourdes on the previous day, was a man of sixty, looking superb in his black cloak with its large hood. His fine head, with its clear, domineering eyes and thick grizzly beard, was the head of a general whom an intelligent determination to conquer inflames. In consequence, however, of a sudden attack of gout he slightly dragged one of his legs, and was leaning on the shoulder of his companion, Dr. Bonamy, the practitioner attached to the Miracle Verification Office, a short, thick-set man, with a square-shaped, clean-shaven face, which had dull, blurred eyes and a tranquil cast of features.

Father Fourcade had stopped to question the station-master whom he perceived running out of his office. "Will the white train be very late, monsieur?" he asked.

"No, your reverence. It hasn't lost more than ten minutes; it will be here at the half-hour. It's the Bayonne train which worries me; it ought to have passed through already."

So saying, he ran off to give an order; but soon came back again, his slim, nervous figure displaying marked signs of agitation. He lived, indeed, in a state of high fever throughout the period of the great pilgrimages. Apart from the usual service, he that day expected eighteen trains, containing more than fifteen thousand passengers. The grey and the blue trains which had started from Paris the first had already arrived at the regulation hour. But the delay in the arrival of the white train was very troublesome, the more so as the Bayonne express—which passed over the same rails—had not yet been signalled. It was easy to understand, therefore, what incessant watchfulness was necessary, not a second passing without the entire staff of the station being called upon to exercise its vigilance.

"In ten minutes, then?" repeated Father Fourcade.

"Yes, in ten minutes, unless I'm obliged to close the line!" cried the station-master as he hastened into the telegraph office.

Father Fourcade and the doctor slowly resumed their promenade. The thing which astonished them was that no serious accident had ever happened in the midst of such a fearful scramble. In past times, especially, the most terrible disorder had prevailed. Father Fourcade complacently recalled the first pilgrimage which he had organised and led, in 1875; the terrible endless journey without pillows or mattresses, the patients exhausted, half dead, with no means of reviving them at hand; and then the arrival at Lourdes, the train evacuated in confusion, no materiel in readiness, no straps, nor stretchers, nor carts. But now there was a powerful organisation; a hospital awaited the sick, who were no longer reduced to lying upon straw in sheds. What a shock for those unhappy ones! What force of will in the man of faith who led them to the scene of miracles! The reverend Father smiled gently at the thought of the work which he had accomplished.

Then, still leaning on the doctor's shoulder, he began to question him: "How many pilgrims did you have last year?" he asked.

"About two hundred thousand. That is still the average. In the year of the Coronation of the Virgin the figure rose to five hundred thousand. But to bring that about an exceptional occasion was needed with a great effort of propaganda. Such vast masses cannot be collected together every day."

A pause followed, and then Father Fourcade murmured: "No doubt. Still the blessing of Heaven attends our endeavours; our work thrives more and more. We have collected more than two hundred thousand francs in donations for this journey, and God will be with us, there will be many cures for you to proclaim to-morrow, I am sure of it." Then, breaking off, he inquired: "Has not Father Dargeles come here?"

Dr. Bonamy waved his hand as though to say that he did not know. Father Dargeles was the editor of the "Journal de la Grotte." He belonged to the Order of the Fathers of the Immaculate Conception whom the Bishop had installed at Lourdes and who were the absolute masters there; though, when the Fathers of the Assumption came to the town with the national pilgrimage from Paris, which crowds of faithful Catholics from Cambrai, Arras, Chartres, Troyes, Rheims, Sens, Orleans, Blois, and Poitiers joined, they evinced a kind of affectation in disappearing from the scene. Their omnipotence was no longer felt either at the Grotto or at the Basilica; they seemed to surrender every key together with every responsibility. Their superior, Father Capdebarthe, a tall, peasant-like man, with a knotty frame, a big head which looked as if it had been fashioned with a bill-hook, and a worn face which retained a ruddy mournful reflection of the soil, did not even show himself. Of the whole community you only saw little, insinuating Father Dargeles; but he was met everywhere, incessantly on the look-out for paragraphs for his newspaper. At the same time, however, although the Fathers of the Immaculate Conception disappeared in this fashion, it could be divined that they were behind the vast stage, like a hidden sovereign power, coining money and toiling without a pause to increase the triumphant prosperity of their business. Indeed, they turned even their humility to account.

"It's true that we have had to get up early—two in the morning," resumed Father Fourcade gaily. "But I wished to be here. What would my poor children have said, indeed, if I had not come?"

He was alluding to the sick pilgrims, those who were so much flesh for miracle-working; and it was a fact that he had never missed coming to the station, no matter what the hour, to meet that woeful white train, that train which brought such grievous suffering with it.

"Five-and-twenty minutes past three—only another five minutes now," exclaimed Dr. Bonamy repressing a yawn as he glanced at the clock; for, despite his obsequious air, he was at bottom very much annoyed at having had to get out of bed so early. However, he continued his slow promenade with Father Fourcade along that platform which resembled a covered walk, pacing up and down in the dense night which the gas jets here and there illumined with patches of yellow light. Little parties, dimly outlined, composed of priests and gentlemen in frock-coats, with a solitary officer of dragoons, went to and fro incessantly, talking together the while in discreet murmuring tones. Other people, seated on benches, ranged along the station wall, were also chatting or putting their patience to proof with their glances wandering away into the black stretch of country before them. The doorways of the offices and waiting-rooms, which were brilliantly lighted, looked like great holes in the darkness, and all was flaring in the refreshment-room, where you could see the marble tables and the counter laden with bottles and glasses and baskets of bread and fruit.

On the right hand, beyond the roofing of the platform, there was a confused swarming of people. There was here a goods gate, by which the sick were taken out of the station, and a mass of stretchers, litters, and hand-carts, with piles of pillows and mattresses, obstructed the broad walk. Three parties of bearers were also assembled here, persons of well-nigh every class, but more particularly young men of good society, all wearing red, orange-tipped crosses and straps of yellow leather. Many of them, too, had adopted the Bearnese cap, the convenient head-gear of the region; and a few, clad as though they were bound on some distant expedition, displayed wonderful gaiters reaching to their knees. Some were smoking, whilst others, installed in their little vehicles, slept or read newspapers by the light of the neighbouring gas jets. One group, standing apart, were discussing some service question.

Suddenly, however, one and all began to salute. A paternal-looking man, with a heavy but good-natured face, lighted by large blue eyes, like those of a credulous child, was approaching. It was Baron Suire, the President of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation. He possessed a great fortune and occupied a high position at Toulouse.

"Where is Berthaud?" he inquired of one bearer after another, with a busy air. "Where is Berthaud? I must speak to him."

The others answered, volunteering contradictory information. Berthaud was their superintendent, and whilst some said that they had seen him with the Reverend Father Fourcade, others affirmed that he must be in the courtyard of the station inspecting the ambulance vehicles. And they thereupon offered to go and fetch him.

"No, no, thank you," replied the Baron. "I shall manage to find him myself."

Whilst this was happening, Berthaud, who had just seated himself on a bench at the other end of the station, was talking with his young friend, Gerard de Peyrelongue, by way of occupation pending the arrival of the train. The superintendent of the bearers was a man of forty, with a broad, regular-featured, handsome face and carefully trimmed whiskers of a lawyer-like pattern. Belonging to a militant Legitimist family and holding extremely reactionary opinions, he had been Procureur de la Republique (public prosecutor) in a town of the south of France from the time of the parliamentary revolution of the twenty-fourth of May* until that of the decree of the Religious Communities,** when he had resigned his post in a blusterous fashion, by addressing an insulting letter to the Minister of Justice. And he had never since laid down his arms, but had joined the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation as a sort of protest, repairing year after year to Lourdes in order to "demonstrate"; convinced as he was that the pilgrimages were both disagreeable and hurtful to the Republic, and that God alone could re-establish the Monarchy by one of those miracles which He worked so lavishly at the Grotto. Despite all this, however, Berthaud possessed no small amount of good sense, and being of a gay disposition, displayed a kind of jovial charity towards the poor sufferers whose transport he had to provide for during the three days that the national pilgrimage remained at Lourdes.

* The parliamentary revolution of May, 1873, by which M. Thiers
was overthrown and Marshal MacMahon installed in his place with
the object of restoring the Monarchy in France.—Trans.

** M. Grevy's decree by which the Jesuits were expelled.—Trans.

"And so, my dear Gerard," he said to the young man seated beside him, "your marriage is really to come off this year?"

"Why yes, if I can find such a wife as I want," replied the other. "Come, cousin, give me some good advice."

Gerard de Peyrelongue, a short, thin, carroty young man, with a pronounced nose and prominent cheek-bones, belonged to Tarbes, where his father and mother had lately died, leaving him at the utmost some seven or eight thousand francs a year. Extremely ambitious, he had been unable to find such a wife as he desired in his native province—a well-connected young woman capable of helping him to push both forward and upward in the world; and so he had joined the Hospitality, and betook himself every summer to Lourdes, in the vague hope that amidst the mass of believers, the torrent of devout mammas and daughters which flowed thither, he might find the family whose help he needed to enable him to make his way in this terrestrial sphere. However, he remained in perplexity, for if, on the one hand, he already had several young ladies in view, on the other, none of them completely satisfied him.

"Eh, cousin? You will advise me, won't you?" he said to Berthaud. "You are a man of experience. There is Mademoiselle Lemercier who comes here with her aunt. She is very rich; according to what is said she has over a million francs. But she doesn't belong to our set, and besides I think her a bit of a madcap."

Berthaud nodded. "I told you so; if I were you I should choose little Raymonde, Mademoiselle de Jonquiere."

"But she hasn't a copper!"

"That's true—she has barely enough to pay for her board. But she is fairly good-looking, she has been well brought up, and she has no extravagant tastes. That is the really important point, for what is the use of marrying a rich girl if she squanders the dowry she brings you? Besides, I know Madame and Mademoiselle de Jonquiere very well, I meet them all through the winter in the most influential drawing-rooms of Paris. And, finally, don't forget the girl's uncle, the diplomatist, who has had the painful courage to remain in the service of the Republic. He will be able to do whatever he pleases for his niece's husband."

For a moment Gerard seemed shaken, and then he relapsed into perplexity. "But she hasn't a copper," he said, "no, not a copper. It's too stiff. I am quite willing to think it over, but it really frightens me too much."

This time Berthaud burst into a frank laugh. "Come, you are ambitious, so you must be daring. I tell you that it means the secretaryship of an embassy before two years are over. By the way, Madame and Mademoiselle de Jonquiere are in the white train which we are waiting for. Make up your mind and pay your court at once."

"No, no! Later on. I want to think it over."

At this moment they were interrupted, for Baron Suire, who had already once gone by without perceiving them, so completely did the darkness enshroud them in that retired corner, had just recognised the ex-public prosecutor's good-natured laugh. And, thereupon, with the volubility of a man whose head is easily unhinged, he gave him several orders respecting the vehicles and the transport service, deploring the circumstance that it would be impossible to conduct the patients to the Grotto immediately on their arrival, as it was yet so extremely early. It had therefore been decided that they should in the first instance be taken to the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, where they would be able to rest awhile after their trying journey.

Whilst the Baron and the superintendent were thus settling what measures should be adopted, Gerard shook hands with a priest who had sat down beside him. This was the Abbe des Hermoises, who was barely eight-and-thirty years of age and had a superb head—such a head as one might expect to find on the shoulders of a worldly priest. With his hair well combed, and his person perfumed, he was not unnaturally a great favourite among women. Very amiable and distinguished in his manners, he did not come to Lourdes in any official capacity, but simply for his pleasure, as so many other people did; and the bright, sparkling smile of a sceptic above all idolatry gleamed in the depths of his fine eyes. He certainly believed, and bowed to superior decisions; but the Church—the Holy See—had not pronounced itself with regard to the miracles; and he seemed quite ready to dispute their authenticity. Having lived at Tarbes he was already acquainted with Gerard.

"Ah!" he said to him, "how impressive it is—isn't it?—this waiting for the trains in the middle of the night! I have come to meet a lady—one of my former Paris penitents—but I don't know what train she will come by. Still, as you see, I stop on, for it all interests me so much."

Then another priest, an old country priest, having come to sit down on the same bench, the Abbe considerately began talking to him, speaking of the beauty of the Lourdes district and of the theatrical effect which would take place by-and-by when the sun rose and the mountains appeared.

However, there was again a sudden alert, and the station-master ran along shouting orders. Removing his hand from Dr. Bonamy's shoulder, Father Fourcade, despite his gouty leg, hastily drew near.

"Oh! it's that Bayonne express which is so late," answered the station-master in reply to the questions addressed to him. "I should like some information about it; I'm not at ease."

At this moment the telegraph bells rang out and a porter rushed away into the darkness swinging a lantern, whilst a distant signal began to work. Thereupon the station-master resumed: "Ah! this time it's the white train. Let us hope we shall have time to get the sick people out before the express passes."

He started off once more and disappeared. Berthaud meanwhile called to Gerard, who was at the head of a squad of bearers, and they both made haste to join their men, into whom Baron Suire was already instilling activity. The bearers flocked to the spot from all sides, and setting themselves in motion began dragging their little vehicles across the lines to the platform at which the white train would come in—an unroofed platform plunged in darkness. A mass of pillows, mattresses, stretchers, and litters was soon waiting there, whilst Father Fourcade, Dr. Bonamy, the priests, the gentlemen, and the officer of dragoons in their turn crossed over in order to witness the removal of the ailing pilgrims. All that they could as yet see, far away in the depths of the black country, was the lantern in front of the engine, looking like a red star which grew larger and larger. Strident whistles pierced the night, then suddenly ceased, and you only heard the panting of the steam and the dull roar of the wheels gradually slackening their speed. Then the canticle became distinctly audible, the song of Bernadette with the ever-recurring "Aves" of its refrain, which the whole train was chanting in chorus. And at last this train of suffering and faith, this moaning, singing train, thus making its entry into Lourdes, drew up in the station.

The carriage doors were at once opened, the whole throng of healthy pilgrims, and of ailing ones able to walk, alighted, and streamed over the platform. The few gas lamps cast but a feeble light on the crowd of poverty-stricken beings clad in faded garments, and encumbered with all sorts of parcels, baskets, valises, and boxes. And amidst all the jostling of this scared flock, which did not know in which direction to turn to find its way out of the station, loud exclamations were heard, the shouts of people calling relatives whom they had lost, mingled with the embraces of others whom relatives or friends had come to meet. One woman declared with beatifical satisfaction, "I have slept well." A priest went off carrying his travelling-bag, after wishing a crippled lady "good luck!" Most of them had the bewildered, weary, yet joyous appearance of people whom an excursion train sets down at some unknown station. And such became the scramble and the confusion in the darkness, that they did not hear the railway employes who grew quite hoarse through shouting, "This way! this way!" in their eagerness to clear the platform as soon as possible.

Sister Hyacinthe had nimbly alighted from her compartment, leaving the dead man in the charge of Sister Claire des Anges; and, losing her head somewhat, she ran off to the cantine van in the idea that Ferrand would be able to help her. Fortunately she found Father Fourcade in front of the van and acquainted him with the fatality in a low voice. Repressing a gesture of annoyance, he thereupon called Baron Suire, who was passing, and began whispering in his ear. The muttering lasted for a few seconds, and then the Baron rushed off, and clove his way through the crowd with two bearers carrying a covered litter. In this the man was removed from the carriage as though he were a patient who had simply fainted, the mob of pilgrims paying no further attention to him amidst all the emotion of their arrival. Preceded by the Baron, the bearers carried the corpse into a goods office, where they provisionally lodged it behind some barrels; one of them, a fair-haired little fellow, a general's son, remaining to watch over it.

Meanwhile, after begging Ferrand and Sister Saint-Francois to go and wait for her in the courtyard of the station, near the reserved vehicle which was to take them to the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, Sister Hyacinthe returned to the railway carriage and talked of helping her patients to alight before going away. But Marie would not let her touch her. "No, no!" said the girl, "do not trouble about me, Sister. I shall remain here the last. My father and Abbe Froment have gone to the van to fetch the wheels; I am waiting for their return; they know how to fix them, and they will take me away all right, you may be sure of it."

In the same way M. Sabathier and Brother Isidore did not desire to be moved until the crowd had decreased. Madame de Jonquiere, who had taken charge of La Grivotte, also promised to see to Madame Vetu's removal in an ambulance vehicle. And thereupon Sister Hyacinthe decided that she would go off at once so as to get everything ready at the hospital. Moreover, she took with her both little Sophie Couteau and Elise Rouquet, whose face she very carefully wrapped up. Madame Maze preceded them, while Madame Vincent, carrying her little girl, who was unconscious and quite white, struggled through the crowd, possessed by the fixed idea of running off as soon as possible and depositing the child in the Grotto at the feet of the Blessed Virgin.

The mob was now pressing towards the doorway by which passengers left the station, and to facilitate the egress of all these people it at last became necessary to open the luggage gates. The employes, at a loss how to take the tickets, held out their caps, which a downpour of the little cards speedily filled. And in the courtyard, a large square courtyard, skirted on three sides by the low buildings of the station, the most extraordinary uproar prevailed amongst all the vehicles of divers kinds which were there jumbled together. The hotel omnibuses, backed against the curb of the footway, displayed the most sacred names on their large boards—Jesus and Mary, St. Michel, the Rosary, and the Sacred Heart. Then there were ambulance vehicles, landaus, cabriolets, brakes, and little donkey carts, all entangled together, with their drivers shouting, swearing, and cracking their whips—the tumult being apparently increased by the obscurity in which the lanterns set brilliant patches of light.

Rain had fallen heavily a few hours previously. Liquid mud splashed up under the hoofs of the horses; the foot passengers sank into it to their ankles. M. Vigneron, whom Madame Vigneron and Madame Chaise were following in a state of distraction, raised Gustave, in order to place him in the omnibus from the Hotel of the Apparitions, after which he himself and the ladies climbed into the vehicle. Madame Maze, shuddering slightly, like a delicate tabby who fears to dirty the tips of her paws, made a sign to the driver of an old brougham, got into it, and quickly drove away, after giving as address the Convent of the Blue Sisters. And at last Sister Hyacinthe was able to install herself with Elise Rouquet and Sophie Couteau in a large char-a-bancs, in which Ferrand and Sisters Saint-Francois and Claire des Anges were already seated. The drivers whipped up their spirited little horses, and the vehicles went off at a breakneck pace, amidst the shouts of those left behind, and the splashing of the mire.

In presence of that rushing torrent, Madame Vincent, with her dear little burden in her arms, hesitated to cross over. Bursts of laughter rang out around her every now and then. Oh! what a filthy mess! And at sight of all the mud, the women caught up their skirts before attempting to pass through it. At last, when the courtyard had somewhat emptied, Madame Vincent herself ventured on her way, all terror lest the mire should make her fall in that black darkness. Then, on reaching a downhill road, she noticed there a number of women of the locality who were on the watch, offering furnished rooms, bed and board, according to the state of the pilgrim's purse.

"Which is the way to the Grotto, madame, if you please?" asked Madame Vincent, addressing one old woman of the party.

Instead of answering the question, however, the other offered her a cheap room. "You won't find anything in the hotels," said she, "for they are all full. Perhaps you will be able to eat there, but you certainly won't find a closet even to sleep in."

Eat, sleep, indeed! Had Madame Vincent any thought of such things; she who had left Paris with thirty sous in her pocket, all that remained to her after the expenses she had been put to!

"The way to the Grotto, if you please, madame?" she repeated.

Among the women who were thus touting for lodgers, there was a tall, well-built girl, dressed like a superior servant, and looking very clean, with carefully tended hands. She glanced at Madame Vincent and slightly shrugged her shoulders. And then, seeing a broad-chested priest with a red face go by, she rushed after him, offered him a furnished room, and continued following him, whispering in his ear.

Another girl, however, at last took pity on Madame Vincent and said to her: "Here, go down this road, and when you get to the bottom, turn to the right and you will reach the Grotto."

Meanwhile, the confusion inside the station continued. The healthy pilgrims, and those of the sick who retained the use of their legs could go off, thus, in some measure, clearing the platform; but the others, the more grievously stricken sufferers whom it was difficult to get out of the carriages and remove to the hospital, remained waiting. The bearers seemed to become quite bewildered, rushing madly hither and thither with their litters and vehicles, not knowing at what end to set about the profusion of work which lay before them.

As Berthaud, followed by Gerard, went along the platform, gesticulating, he noticed two ladies and a girl who were standing under a gas jet and to all appearance waiting. In the girl he recognised Raymonde, and with a sign of the hand he at once stopped his companion. "Ah! mademoiselle," said he, "how pleased I am to see you! Is Madame de Jonquiere quite well? You have made a good journey, I hope?" Then, without a pause, he added: "This is my friend, Monsieur Gerard de Peyrelongue."

Raymonde gazed fixedly at the young man with her clear, smiling eyes. "Oh! I already have the pleasure of being slightly acquainted with this gentleman," she said. "We have previously met one another at Lourdes."

Thereupon Gerard, who thought that his cousin Berthaud was conducting matters too quickly, and was quite resolved that he would not enter into any hasty engagement, contented himself with bowing in a ceremonious way.

"We are waiting for mamma," resumed Raymonde. "She is extremely busy; she has to see after some pilgrims who are very ill."

At this, little Madame Desagneaux, with her pretty, light wavy-haired head, began to say that it served Madame de Jonquiere right for refusing her services. She herself was stamping with impatience, eager to join in the work and make herself useful, whilst Madame Volmar, silent, shrinking back as though taking no interest in it at all, seemed simply desirous of penetrating the darkness, as though, indeed, she were seeking somebody with those magnificent eyes of hers, usually bedimmed, but now shining out like brasiers.

Just then, however, they were all pushed back. Madame Dieulafay was being removed from her first-class compartment, and Madame Desagneaux could not restrain an exclamation of pity. "Ah! the poor woman!"

There could in fact be no more distressing sight than this young woman, encompassed by luxury, covered with lace in her species of coffin, so wasted that she seemed to be a mere human shred, deposited on that platform till it could be taken away. Her husband and her sister, both very elegant and very sad, remained standing near her, whilst a man-servant and maid ran off with the valises to ascertain if the carriage which had been ordered by telegram was in the courtyard. Abbe Judaine also helped the sufferer; and when two men at last took her up he bent over her and wished her au revoir, adding some kind words which she did not seem to hear. Then as he watched her removal, he resumed, addressing himself to Berthaud, whom he knew: "Ah! the poor people, if they could only purchase their dear sufferer's cure. I told them that prayer was the most precious thing in the Blessed Virgin's eyes, and I hope that I have myself prayed fervently enough to obtain the compassion of Heaven. Nevertheless, they have brought a magnificent gift, a golden lantern for the Basilica, a perfect marvel, adorned with precious stones. May the Immaculate Virgin deign to smile upon it!"

In this way a great many offerings were brought by the pilgrims. Some huge bouquets of flowers had just gone by, together with a kind of triple crown of roses, mounted on a wooden stand. And the old priest explained that before leaving the station he wished to secure a banner, the gift of the beautiful Madame Jousseur, Madame Dieulafay's sister.

Madame de Jonquiere was at last approaching, however, and on perceiving Berthaud and Gerard she exclaimed: "Pray do go to that carriage, gentlemen—that one, there! We want some men very badly. There are three or four sick persons to be taken out. I am in despair; I can do nothing myself."

Gerard ran off after bowing to Raymonde, whilst Berthaud advised Madame de Jonquiere to leave the station with her daughter and those ladies instead of remaining on the platform. Her presence was in nowise necessary, he said; he would undertake everything, and within three quarters of an hour she would find her patients in her ward at the hospital. She ended by giving way, and took a conveyance in company with Raymonde and Madame Desagneaux. As for Madame Volmar, she had at the last moment disappeared, as though seized with a sudden fit of impatience. The others fancied that they had seen her approach a strange gentleman, with the object no doubt of making some inquiry of him. However, they would of course find her at the hospital.

Berthaud joined Gerard again just as the young man, assisted by two fellow-bearers, was endeavouring to remove M. Sabathier from the carriage. It was a difficult task, for he was very stout and very heavy, and they began to think that he would never pass through the doorway of the compartment. However, as he had been got in they ought to be able to get him out; and indeed when two other bearers had entered the carriage from the other side, they were at last able to deposit him on the platform.

The dawn was now appearing, a faint pale dawn; and the platform presented the woeful appearance of an improvised hospital. La Grivotte, who had lost consciousness, lay there on a mattress pending her removal in a litter; whilst Madame Vetu had been seated against a lamp-post, suffering so severely from another attack of her ailment that they scarcely dared to touch her. Some hospitallers, whose hands were gloved, were with difficulty wheeling their little vehicles in which were poor, sordid-looking women with old baskets at their feet. Others, with stretchers on which lay the stiffened, woeful bodies of silent sufferers, whose eyes gleamed with anguish, found themselves unable to pass; but some of the infirm pilgrims, some unfortunate cripples, contrived to slip through the ranks, among them a young priest who was lame, and a little humpbacked boy, one of whose legs had been amputated, and who, looking like a gnome, managed to drag himself with his crutches from group to group. Then there was quite a block around a man who was bent in half, twisted by paralysis to such a point that he had to be carried on a chair with his head and feet hanging downward. It seemed as though hours would be required to clear the platform.

The dismay therefore reached a climax when the station-master suddenly rushed up shouting: "The Bayonne express is signalled. Make haste! make haste! You have only three minutes left!"

Father Fourcade, who had remained in the midst of the throng, leaning on Doctor Bonamy's arm, and gaily encouraging the more stricken of the sufferers, beckoned to Berthaud and said to him: "Finish taking them out of the train; you will be able to clear the platform afterwards!"

The advice was very sensible, and in accordance with it they finished placing the sufferers on the platform. In Madame de Jonquiere's carriage Marie now alone remained, waiting patiently. M. de Guersaint and Pierre had at last returned to her, bringing the two pairs of wheels by means of which the box in which she lay was rolled about. And with Gerard's assistance Pierre in all haste removed the girl from the train. She was as light as a poor shivering bird, and it was only the box that gave them any trouble. However, they soon placed it on the wheels and made the latter fast, and then Pierre might have rolled Marie away had it not been for the crowd which hampered him.

"Make haste! make haste!" furiously repeated the station-master.

He himself lent a hand, taking hold of a sick man by the feet in order to remove him from the compartment more speedily. And he also pushed the little hand-carts back, so as to clear the edge of the platform. In a second-class carriage, however, there still remained one woman who had just been overpowered by a terrible nervous attack. She was howling and struggling, and it was impossible to think of touching her at that moment. But on the other hand the express, signalled by the incessant tinkling of the electric bells, was now fast approaching, and they had to close the door and in all haste shunt the train to the siding where it would remain for three days, until in fact it was required to convey its load of sick and healthy passengers back to Paris. As it went off to the siding the crowd still heard the cries of the suffering woman, whom it had been necessary to leave in it, in charge of a Sister, cries which grew weaker and weaker, like those of a strengthless child whom one at last succeeds in consoling.

"Good Lord!" muttered the station-master; "it was high time!"

In fact the Bayonne express was now coming along at full speed, and the next moment it rushed like a crash of thunder past that woeful platform littered with all the grievous wretchedness of a hospital hastily evacuated. The litters and little handcarts were shaken, but there was no accident, for the porters were on the watch, and pushed back the bewildered flock which was still jostling and struggling in its eagerness to get away. As soon as the express had passed, however, circulation was re-established, and the bearers were at last able to complete the removal of the sick with prudent deliberation.

Little by little the daylight was increasing—a clear dawn it was, whitening the heavens whose reflection illumined the earth, which was still black. One began to distinguish things and people clearly.

"Oh, by-and-by!" Marie repeated to Pierre, as he endeavoured to roll her away. "Let us wait till some part of the crowd has gone."

Then, looking around, she began to feel interested in a man of military bearing, apparently some sixty years of age, who was walking about among the sick pilgrims. With a square-shaped head and white bushy hair, he would still have looked sturdy if he had not dragged his left foot, throwing it inward at each step he took. With the left hand, too, he leant heavily on a thick walking-stick. When M. Sabathier, who had visited Lourdes for six years past, perceived him, he became quite gay. "Ah!" said he, "it is you, Commander!"

Commander was perhaps the old man's name. But as he was decorated with a broad red riband, he was possibly called Commander on account of his decoration, albeit the latter was that of a mere chevalier. Nobody exactly knew his story. No doubt he had relatives and children of his own somewhere, but these matters remained vague and mysterious. For the last three years he had been employed at the railway station as a superintendent in the goods department, a simple occupation, a little berth which had been given him by favour and which enabled him to live in perfect happiness. A first stroke of apoplexy at fifty-five years of age had been followed by a second one three years later, which had left him slightly paralysed in the left side. And now he was awaiting the third stroke with an air of perfect tranquillity. As he himself put it, he was at the disposal of death, which might come for him that night, the next day, or possibly that very moment. All Lourdes knew him on account of the habit, the mania he had, at pilgrimage time, of coming to witness the arrival of the trains, dragging his foot along and leaning upon his stick, whilst expressing his astonishment and reproaching the ailing ones for their intense desire to be made whole and sound again.

This was the third year that he had seen M. Sabathier arrive, and all his anger fell upon him. "What! you have come back again!" he exclaimed. "Well, you must be desirous of living this hateful life! But sacrebleu! go and die quietly in your bed at home. Isn't that the best thing that can happen to anyone?"

M. Sabathier evinced no anger, but laughed, exhausted though he was by the handling to which he had been subjected during his removal from the carriage. "No, no," said he, "I prefer to be cured."

"To be cured, to be cured! That's what they all ask for. They travel hundreds of leagues and arrive in fragments, howling with pain, and all this to be cured—to go through every worry and every suffering again. Come, monsieur, you would be nicely caught if, at your age and with your dilapidated old body, your Blessed Virgin should be pleased to restore the use of your legs to you. What would you do with them, mon Dieu? What pleasure would you find in prolonging the abomination of old age for a few years more? It's much better to die at once, while you are like that! Death is happiness!"

He spoke in this fashion, not as a believer who aspires to the delicious reward of eternal life, but as a weary man who expects to fall into nihility, to enjoy the great everlasting peace of being no more.

Whilst M. Sabathier was gaily shrugging his shoulders as though he had a child to deal with, Abbe Judaine, who had at last secured his banner, came by and stopped for a moment in order that he might gently scold the Commander, with whom he also was well acquainted.

"Don't blaspheme, my dear friend," he said. "It is an offence against God to refuse life and to treat health with contempt. If you yourself had listened to me, you would have asked the Blessed Virgin to cure your leg before now."

At this the Commander became angry. "My leg! The Virgin can do nothing to it! I'm quite at my ease. May death come and may it all be over forever! When the time comes to die you turn your face to the wall and you die—it's simple enough."

The old priest interrupted him, however. Pointing to Marie, who was lying on her box listening to them, he exclaimed: "You tell all our sick to go home and die—even mademoiselle, eh? She who is full of youth and wishes to live."

Marie's eyes were wide open, burning with the ardent desire which she felt to be, to enjoy her share of the vast world; and the Commander, who had drawn near, gazed upon her, suddenly seized with deep emotion which made his voice tremble. "If mademoiselle gets well," he said, "I will wish her another miracle, that she be happy."

Then he went off, dragging his foot and tapping the flagstones with the ferrule of his stout stick as he continued wending his way, like an angry philosopher among the suffering pilgrims.

Little by little, the platform was at last cleared. Madame Vetu and La Grivotte were carried away, and Gerard removed M. Sabathier in a little cart, whilst Baron Suire and Berthaud already began giving orders for the green train, which would be the next one to arrive. Of all the ailing pilgrims the only one now remaining at the station was Marie, of whom Pierre jealously took charge. He had already dragged her into the courtyard when he noticed that M. de Guersaint had disappeared; but a moment later he perceived him conversing with the Abbe des Hermoises, whose acquaintance he had just made. Their admiration of the beauties of nature had brought them together. The daylight had now appeared, and the surrounding mountains displayed themselves in all their majesty.

"What a lovely country, monsieur!" exclaimed M. de Guersaint. "I have been wishing to see the Cirque de Gavarnie for thirty years past. But it is some distance away and the trip must be an expensive one, so that I fear I shall not be able to make it."

"You are mistaken, monsieur," said the Abbe; "nothing is more easily managed. By making up a party the expense becomes very slight. And as it happens, I wish to return there this year, so that if you would like to join us—"

"Oh, certainly, monsieur. We will speak of it again. A thousand thanks," replied M. de Guersaint.

His daughter was now calling him, however, and he joined her after taking leave of the Abbe in a very cordial manner. Pierre had decided that he would drag Marie to the hospital so as to spare her the pain of transference to another vehicle. But as the omnibuses, landaus, and other conveyances were already coming back, again filling the courtyard in readiness for the arrival of the next train, the young priest had some difficulty in reaching the road with the little chariot whose low wheels sank deeply in the mud. Some police agents charged with maintaining order were cursing that fearful mire which splashed their boots; and indeed it was only the touts, the young and old women who had rooms to let, who laughed at the puddles, which they crossed and crossed again in every direction, pursuing the last pilgrims that emerged from the station.

When the little car had begun to roll more easily over the sloping road Marie suddenly inquired of M. de Guersaint, who was walking near her: "What day of the week is it, father?"

"Saturday, my darling."

"Ah! yes, Saturday, the day of the Blessed Virgin. Is it to-day that she will cure me?"

Then she began thinking again; while, at some distance behind her, two bearers came furtively down the road, with a covered stretcher in which lay the corpse of the man who had died in the train. They had gone to take it from behind the barrels in the goods office, and were now conveying it to a secret spot of which Father Fourcade had told them.

II. HOSPITAL AND GROTTO

BUILT, so far as it extends, by a charitable Canon, and left unfinished through lack of money, the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours is a vast pile, four storeys high, and consequently far too lofty, since it is difficult to carry the sufferers to the topmost wards. As a rule the building is occupied by a hundred infirm and aged paupers; but at the season of the national pilgrimage these old folks are for three days sheltered elsewhere, and the hospital is let to the Fathers of the Assumption, who at times lodge in it as many as five and six hundred patients. Still, however closely packed they may be, the accommodation never suffices, so that the three or four hundred remaining sufferers have to be distributed between the Hospital of Salvation and the town hospital, the men being sent to the former and the women to the latter institution.

That morning at sunrise great confusion prevailed in the sand-covered courtyard of Our Lady of Dolours, at the door of which a couple of priests were mounting guard. The temporary staff, with its formidable supply of registers, cards, and printed formulas, had installed itself in one of the ground-floor rooms on the previous day. The managers were desirous of greatly improving upon the organisation of the preceding year. The lower wards were this time to be reserved to the most helpless sufferers; and in order to prevent a repetition of the cases of mistaken identity which had occurred in the past, very great care was to be taken in filling in and distributing the admission cards, each of which bore the name of a ward and the number of a bed. It became difficult, however, to act in accordance with these good intentions in presence of the torrent of ailing beings which the white train had brought to Lourdes, and the new formalities so complicated matters that the patients had to be deposited in the courtyard as they arrived, to wait there until it became possible to admit them in something like an orderly manner. It was the scene witnessed at the railway station all over again, the same woeful camping in the open, whilst the bearers and the young seminarists who acted as the secretary's assistants ran hither and thither in bewilderment.

"We have been over-ambitious, we wanted to do things too well!" exclaimed Baron Suire in despair.

There was much truth in his remark, for never had a greater number of useless precautions been taken, and they now discovered that, by some inexplicable error, they had allotted not the lower—but the higher-placed wards to the patients whom it was most difficult to move. It was impossible to begin the classification afresh, however, and so as in former years things must be allowed to take their course, in a haphazard way. The distribution of the cards began, a young priest at the same time entering each patient's name and address in a register. Moreover, all the hospitalisation cards bearing the patients' names and numbers had to be produced, so that the names of the wards and the numbers of the beds might be added to them; and all these formalities greatly protracted the defile.

Then there was an endless coming and going from the top to the bottom of the building, and from one to the other end of each of its four floors. M. Sabathier was one of the first to secure admittance, being placed in a ground-floor room which was known as the Family Ward. Sick men were there allowed to have their wives with them; but to the other wards of the hospital only women were admitted. Brother Isidore, it is true, was accompanied by his sister; however, by a special favour it was agreed that they should be considered as conjoints, and the missionary was accordingly placed in the bed next to that allotted to M. Sabathier. The chapel, still littered with plaster and with its unfinished windows boarded up, was close at hand. There were also various wards in an unfinished state; still these were filled with mattresses, on which sufferers were rapidly placed. All those who could walk, however, were already besieging the refectory, a long gallery whose broad windows looked into an inner courtyard; and the Saint-Frai Sisters, who managed the hospital at other times, and had remained to attend to the cooking, began to distribute bowls of coffee and chocolate among the poor women whom the terrible journey had exhausted.

"Rest yourselves and try to gain a little strength," repeated Baron Suire, who was ever on the move, showing himself here, there, and everywhere in rapid succession. "You have three good hours before you, it is not yet five, and their reverences have given orders that you are not to be taken to the Grotto until eight o'clock, so as to avoid any excessive fatigue."

Meanwhile, up above on the second floor, Madame de Jonquiere had been one of the first to take possession of the Sainte-Honorine Ward of which she was the superintendent. She had been obliged to leave her daughter Raymonde downstairs, for the regulations did not allow young girls to enter the wards, where they might have witnessed sights that were scarcely proper or else too horrible for such eyes as theirs. Raymonde had therefore remained in the refectory as a helper; however, little Madame Desagneaux, being a lady-hospitaller, had not left the superintendent, and was already asking her for orders, in her delight that she should at last be able to render some assistance.

"Are all these beds properly made, madame?" she inquired; "perhaps I had better make them afresh with Sister Hyacinthe."

The ward, whose walls were painted a light yellow, and whose few windows admitted but little light from an inner yard, contained fifteen beds, standing in two rows against the walls.

"We will see by-and-by," replied Madame de Jonquiere with an absorbed air. She was busy counting the beds and examining the long narrow apartment. And this accomplished she added in an undertone: "I shall never have room enough. They say that I must accommodate twenty-three patients. We shall have to put some mattresses down."

Sister Hyacinthe, who had followed the ladies after leaving Sister Saint-Francois and Sister Claire des Anges in a small adjoining apartment which was being transformed into a linen-room, then began to lift up the coverlets and examine the bedding. And she promptly reassured Madame Desagneaux with regard to her surmises. "Oh! the beds are properly made," she said; "everything is very clean too. One can see that the Saint-Frai Sisters have attended to things themselves. The reserve mattresses are in the next room, however, and if madame will lend me a hand we can place some of them between the beds at once.

"Oh, certainly!" exclaimed young Madame Desagneaux, quite excited by the idea of carrying mattresses about with her weak slender arms.

It became necessary for Madame de Jonquiere to calm her. "By-and-by," said the lady-superintendent; "there is no hurry. Let us wait till our patients arrive. I don't much like this ward, it is so difficult to air. Last year I had the Sainte-Rosalie Ward on the first floor. However, we will organise matters, all the same."

Some other lady-hospitallers were now arriving, quite a hiveful of busy bees, all eager to start on their work. The confusion which so often arose was, in fact, increased by the excessive number of nurses, women of the aristocracy and upper-middle class, with whose fervent zeal some little vanity was blended. There were more than two hundred of them, and as each had to make a donation on joining the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation, the managers did not dare to refuse any applicants, for fear lest they might check the flow of alms-giving. Thus the number of lady-hospitallers increased year by year. Fortunately there were among them some who cared for nothing beyond the privilege of wearing the red cloth cross, and who started off on excursions as soon as they reached Lourdes. Still it must be acknowledged that those who devoted themselves were really deserving, for they underwent five days of awful fatigue, sleeping scarcely a couple of hours each night, and living in the midst of the most terrible and repulsive spectacles. They witnessed the death agonies, dressed the pestilential sores, cleaned up, changed linen, turned the sufferers over in their beds, went through a sickening and overwhelming labour to which they were in no wise accustomed. And thus they emerged from it aching all over, tired to death, with feverish eyes flaming with the joy of the charity which so excited them.

"And Madame Volmar?" suddenly asked Madame Desagneaux. "I thought we should find her here."

This was apparently a subject which Madame de Jonquiere did not care to have discussed; for, as though she were aware of the truth and wished to bury it in silence, with the indulgence of a woman who compassionates human wretchedness, she promptly retorted: "Madame Volmar isn't strong, she must have gone to the hotel to rest. We must let her sleep."

Then she apportioned the beds among the ladies present, allotting two to each of them; and this done they all finished taking possession of the place, hastening up and down and backwards and forwards in order to ascertain where the offices, the linen-room, and the kitchens were situated.

"And the dispensary?" then asked one of the ladies.

But there was no dispensary. There was no medical staff even. What would have been the use of any?—since the patients were those whom science had given up, despairing creatures who had come to beg of God the cure which powerless men were unable to promise them. Logically enough, all treatment was suspended during the pilgrimage. If a patient seemed likely to die, extreme unction was administered. The only medical man about the place was the young doctor who had come by the white train with his little medicine chest; and his intervention was limited to an endeavour to assuage the sufferings of those patients who chanced to ask for him during an attack.

As it happened, Sister Hyacinthe was just bringing Ferrand, whom Sister Saint-Francois had kept with her in a closet near the linen-room which he proposed to make his quarters. "Madame," said he to Madame de Jonquiere, "I am entirely at your disposal. In case of need you will only have to ring for me."

She barely listened to him, however, engaged as she was in a quarrel with a young priest belonging to the management with reference to a deficiency of certain utensils. "Certainly, monsieur, if we should need a soothing draught," she answered, and then, reverting to her discussion, she went on: "Well, Monsieur l'Abbe, you must certainly get me four or five more. How can we possibly manage with so few? Things are bad enough as it is."

Ferrand looked and listened, quite bewildered by the extraordinary behaviour of the people amongst whom he had been thrown by chance since the previous day. He who did not believe, who was only present out of friendship and charity, was amazed at this extraordinary scramble of wretchedness and suffering rushing towards the hope of happiness. And, as a medical man of the new school, he was altogether upset by the careless neglect of precautions, the contempt which was shown for the most simple teachings of science, in the certainty which was apparently felt that, if Heaven should so will it, cure would supervene, sudden and resounding, like a lie given to the very laws of nature. But if this were the case, what was the use of that last concession to human prejudices—why engage a doctor for the journey if none were wanted? At this thought the young man returned to his little room, experiencing a vague feeling of shame as he realised that his presence was useless, and even a trifle ridiculous.

"Get some opium pills ready all the same," said Sister Hyacinthe, as she went back with him as far as the linen-room. "You will be asked for some, for I feel anxious about some of the patients."

While speaking she looked at him with her large blue eyes, so gentle and so kind, and ever lighted by a divine smile. The constant exercise which she gave herself brought the rosy flush of her quick blood to her skin all dazzling with youthfulness. And like a good friend who was willing that he should share the work to which she gave her heart, she added: "Besides, if I should need somebody to get a patient in or out of bed, you will help me, won't you?"

Thereupon, at the idea that he might be of use to her, he was pleased that he had come and was there. In his mind's eye, he again beheld her at his bedside, at the time when he had so narrowly escaped death, nursing him with fraternal hands, with the smiling, compassionate grace of a sexless angel, in whom there was something more than a comrade, something of a woman left. However, the thought never occurred to him that there was religion, belief, behind her.

"Oh! I will help you as much as you like, Sister," he replied. "I belong to you, I shall be so happy to serve you. You know very well what a debt of gratitude I have to pay you."

In a pretty way she raised her finger to her lips so as to silence him. Nobody owed her anything. She was merely the servant of the ailing and the poor.

At this moment a first patient was making her entry into the Sainte-Honorine Ward. It was Marie, lying in her wooden box, which Pierre, with Gerard's assistance, had just brought up-stairs. The last to start from the railway station, she had secured admission before the others, thanks to the endless complications which, after keeping them all in suspense, now freed them according to the chance distribution of the admission cards. M. de Guersaint had quitted his daughter at the hospital door by her own desire; for, fearing the hotels would be very full, she had wished him to secure two rooms for himself and Pierre at once. Then, on reaching the ward, she felt so weary that, after venting her chagrin at not being immediately taken to the Grotto, she consented to be laid on a bed for a short time.

"Come, my child," repeated Madame de Jonquiere, "you have three hours before you. We will put you to bed. It will ease you to take you out of that case."

Thereupon the lady-superintendent raised her by the shoulders, whilst Sister Hyacinthe held her feet. The bed was in the central part of the ward, near a window. For a moment the poor girl remained on it with her eyes closed, as though exhausted by being moved about so much. Then it became necessary that Pierre should be readmitted, for she grew very fidgety, saying that there were things which she must explain to him.

"Pray don't go away, my friend," she exclaimed when he approached her. "Take the case out on to the landing, but stay there, because I want to be taken down as soon as I can get permission."

"Do you feel more comfortable now?" asked the young priest.

"Yes, no doubt—but I really don't know. I so much want to be taken yonder to the Blessed Virgin's feet."

However, when Pierre had removed the case, the successive arrivals of the other patients supplied her with some little diversion. Madame Vetu, whom two bearers had brought up-stairs, holding her under the arms, was laid, fully dressed, on the next bed, where she remained motionless, scarce breathing, with her heavy, yellow, cancerous mask. None of the patients, it should be mentioned, were divested of their clothes, they were simply stretched out on the beds, and advised to go to sleep if they could manage to do so. Those whose complaints were less grievous contented themselves with sitting down on their mattresses, chatting together, and putting the things they had brought with them in order. For instance, Elise Rouquet, who was also near Marie, on the other side of the latter's bed, opened her basket to take a clean fichu out of it, and seemed sorely annoyed at having no hand-glass with her. In less than ten minutes all the beds were occupied, so that when La Grivotte appeared, half carried by Sister Hyacinthe and Sister Claire des Anges, it became necessary to place some mattresses on the floor.

"Here! here is one," exclaimed Madame Desagneaux; "she will be very well here, out of the draught from the door."

Seven other mattresses were soon added in a line, occupying the space between the rows of beds, so that it became difficult to move about. One had to be very careful, and follow narrow pathways which had been left between the beds and the mattresses. Each of the patients had retained possession of her parcel, or box, or bag, and round about the improvised shakedowns were piles of poor old things, sorry remnants of garments, straying among the sheets and the coverlets. You might have thought yourself in some woeful infirmary, hastily organised after some great catastrophe, some conflagration or earthquake which had thrown hundreds of wounded and penniless beings into the streets.

Madame de Jonquiere made her way from one to the other end of the ward, ever and ever repeating, "Come, my children, don't excite yourselves; try to sleep a little."

However, she did not succeed in calming them, and indeed, she herself, like the other lady-hospitallers under her orders, increased the general fever by her own bewilderment. The linen of several patients had to be changed, and there were other needs to be attended to. One woman, suffering from an ulcer in the leg, began moaning so dreadfully that Madame Desagneaux undertook to dress her sore afresh; but she was not skilful, and despite all her passionate courage she almost fainted, so greatly was she distressed by the unbearable odour. Those patients who were in better health asked for broth, bowlfuls of which began to circulate amidst the calls, the answers, and the contradictory orders which nobody executed. And meanwhile, let loose amidst this frightful scramble, little Sophie Couteau, who remained with the Sisters, and was very gay, imagined that it was playtime, and ran, and jumped, and hopped in turn, called and petted first by one and then by another, dear as she was to all alike for the miraculous hope which she brought them.

However, amidst this agitation, the hours went by. Seven o'clock had just struck when Abbe Judaine came in. He was the chaplain of the Sainte-Honorine Ward, and only the difficulty of finding an unoccupied altar at which he might say his mass had delayed his arrival. As soon as he appeared, a cry of impatience arose from every bed.

"Oh! Monsieur le Cure, let us start, let us start at once!"

An ardent desire, which each passing minute heightened and irritated, was upbuoying them, like a more and more devouring thirst, which only the waters of the miraculous fountain could appease. And more fervently than any of the others, La Grivotte, sitting up on her mattress, and joining her hands, begged and begged that she might be taken to the Grotto. Was there not a beginning of the miracle in this—in this awakening of her will power, this feverish desire for cure which enabled her to set herself erect? Inert and fainting on her arrival, she was now seated, turning her dark glances in all directions, waiting and watching for the happy moment when she would be removed. And colour also was returning to her livid face. She was already resuscitating.

"Oh! Monsieur le Cure, pray do tell them to take me—I feel that I shall be cured," she exclaimed.

With a loving, fatherly smile on his good-natured face, Abbe Judaine listened to them all, and allayed their impatience with kind words. They would soon set out; but they must be reasonable, and allow sufficient time for things to be organised; and besides, the Blessed Virgin did not like to have violence done her; she bided her time, and distributed her divine favours among those who behaved themselves the best.

As he paused before Marie's bed and beheld her, stammering entreaties with joined hands, he again paused. "And you, too, my daughter, you are in a hurry?" he said. "Be easy, there is grace enough in heaven for you all."

"I am dying of love, Father," she murmured in reply. "My heart is so swollen with prayers, it stifles me—"

He was greatly touched by the passion of this poor emaciated child, so harshly stricken in her youth and beauty, and wishing to appease her, he called her attention to Madame Vetu, who did not move, though with her eyes wide open she stared at all who passed.

"Look at madame, how quiet she is!" he said. "She is meditating, and she does right to place herself in God's hands, like a little child."

However, in a scarcely audible voice, a mere breath, Madame Vetu stammered: "Oh! I am suffering, I am suffering."

At last, at a quarter to eight o'clock, Madame de Jonquiere warned her charges that they would do well to prepare themselves. She herself, assisted by Sister Hyacinthe and Madame Desagneaux, buttoned several dresses, and put shoes on impotent feet. It was a real toilette, for they all desired to appear to the greatest advantage before the Blessed Virgin. A large number had sufficient sense of delicacy to wash their hands. Others unpacked their parcels, and put on clean linen. On her side, Elise Rouquet had ended by discovering a little pocket-glass in the hands of a woman near her, a huge, dropsical creature, who was very coquettish; and having borrowed it, she leant it against the bolster, and then, with infinite care, began to fasten her fichu as elegantly as possible about her head, in order to hide her distorted features. Meanwhile, erect in front of her, little Sophie watched her with an air of profound interest.

It was Abbe Judaine who gave the signal for starting on the journey to the Grotto. He wished, he said, to accompany his dear suffering daughters thither, whilst the lady-hospitallers and the Sisters remained in the ward, so as to put things in some little order again. Then the ward was at once emptied, the patients being carried down-stairs amidst renewed tumult. And Pierre, having replaced Marie's box upon its wheels, took the first place in the cortege, which was formed of a score of little handcarts, bath-chairs, and litters. The other wards, however, were also emptying, the courtyard became crowded, and the defile was organised in haphazard fashion. There was soon an interminable train descending the rather steep slope of the Avenue de la Grotte, so that Pierre was already reaching the Plateau de la Merlasse when the last stretchers were barely leaving the precincts of the hospital.

It was eight o'clock, and the sun, already high, a triumphant August sun, was flaming in the great sky, which was beautifully clear. It seemed as if the blue of the atmosphere, cleansed by the storm of the previous night, were quite new, fresh with youth. And the frightful defile, a perfect "Cour des Miracles" of human woe, rolled along the sloping pavement amid all the brilliancy of that radiant morning. There was no end to the train of abominations; it appeared to grow longer and longer. No order was observed, ailments of all kinds were jumbled together; it seemed like the clearing of some inferno where the most monstrous maladies, the rare and awful cases which provoke a shudder, had been gathered together. Eczema, roseola, elephantiasis, presented a long array of doleful victims. Well-nigh vanished diseases reappeared; one old woman was affected with leprosy, another was, covered with impetiginous lichen like a tree which has rotted in the shade. Then came the dropsical ones, inflated like wine-skins; and beside some stretchers there dangled hands twisted by rheumatism, while from others protruded feet swollen by oedema beyond all recognition, looking, in fact, like bags full of rags. One woman, suffering from hydrocephalus, sat in a little cart, the dolorous motions of her head bespeaking her grievous malady. A tall girl afflicted with chorea—St. Vitus's dance—was dancing with every limb, without a pause, the left side of her face being continually distorted by sudden, convulsive grimaces. A younger one, who followed, gave vent to a bark, a kind of plaintive animal cry, each time that the tic douloureux which was torturing her twisted her mouth and her right cheek, which she seemed to throw forward. Next came the consumptives, trembling with fever, exhausted by dysentery, wasted to skeletons, with livid skins, recalling the colour of that earth in which they would soon be laid to rest; and there was one among them who was quite white, with flaming eyes, who looked indeed like a death's head in which a torch had been lighted. Then every deformity of the contractions followed in succession—twisted trunks, twisted arms, necks askew, all the distortions of poor creatures whom nature had warped and broken; and among these was one whose right hand was thrust back behind her ribs whilst her head fell to the left resting fixedly upon her shoulder. Afterwards came poor rachitic girls displaying waxen complexions and slender necks eaten away by sores, and yellow-faced women in the painful stupor which falls on those whose bosoms are devoured by cancers; whilst others, lying down with their mournful eyes gazing heavenwards, seemed to be listening to the throbs of the tumours which obstructed their organs. And still more and more went by; there was always something more frightful to come; this woman following that other one increased the general shudder of horror. From the neck of a girl of twenty who had a crushed, flattened head like a toad's, there hung so large a goitre that it fell even to her waist like the bib of an apron. A blind woman walked along, her head erect, her face pale like marble, displaying the acute inflammation of her poor, ulcerated eyes. An aged woman stricken with imbecility, afflicted with dreadful facial disfigurements, laughed aloud with a terrifying laugh. And all at once an epileptic was seized with convulsions, and began foaming on her stretcher, without, however, causing any stoppage of the procession, which never slackened its march, lashed onward as it was by the blizzard of feverish passion which impelled it towards the Grotto.

The bearers, the priests, and the ailing ones themselves had just intonated a canticle, the song of Bernadette, and all rolled along amid the besetting "Aves," so that the little carts, the litters, and the pedestrians descended the sloping road like a swollen and overflowing torrent of roaring water. At the corner of the Rue Saint-Joseph, near the Plateau de la Merlasse, a family of excursionists, who had come from Cauterets or Bagneres, stood at the edge of the footway, overcome with profound astonishment. These people were evidently well-to-do bourgeois, the father and mother very correct in appearance and demeanour, while their two big girls, attired in light-coloured dresses, had the smiling faces of happy creatures who are amusing themselves. But their first feeling of surprise was soon followed by terror, a growing terror, as if they beheld the opening of some pesthouse of ancient times, some hospital of the legendary ages, evacuated after a great epidemic. The two girls became quite pale, while the father and the mother felt icy cold in presence of that endless defile of so many horrors, the pestilential emanations of which were blown full in their faces. O God! to think that such hideousness, such filth, such suffering, should exist! Was it possible—under that magnificently radiant sun, under those broad heavens so full of light and joy whither the freshness of the Gave's waters ascended, and the breeze of morning wafted the pure perfumes of the mountains!

When Pierre, at the head of the cortege, reached the Plateau de la Merlasse, he found himself immersed in that clear sunlight, that fresh and balmy air. He turned round and smiled affectionately at Marie; and as they came out on the Place du Rosaire in the morning splendour, they were both enchanted with the lovely panorama which spread around them.

In front, on the east, was Old Lourdes, lying in a broad fold of the ground beyond a rock. The sun was rising behind the distant mountains, and its oblique rays clearly outlined the dark lilac mass of that solitary rock, which was crowned by the tower and crumbling walls of the ancient castle, once the redoubtable key of the seven valleys. Through the dancing, golden dust you discerned little of the ruined pile except some stately outlines, some huge blocks of building which looked as though reared by Cyclopean hands; and beyond the rock you but vaguely distinguished the discoloured, intermingled house-roofs of the old town. Nearer in than the castle, however, the new town—the rich and noisy city which had sprung up in a few years as though by miracle—spread out on either hand, displaying its hotels, its stylish shops, its lodging-houses all with white fronts smiling amidst patches of greenery. Then there was the Gave flowing along at the base of the rock, rolling clamorous, clear waters, now blue and now green, now deep as they passed under the old bridge, and now leaping as they careered under the new one, which the Fathers of the Immaculate Conception had built in order to connect the Grotto with the railway station and the recently opened Boulevard. And as a background to this delightful picture, this fresh water, this greenery, this gay, scattered, rejuvenated town, the little and the big Gers arose, two huge ridges of bare rock and low herbage, which, in the projected shade that bathed them, assumed delicate tints of pale mauve and green, fading softly into pink.

Then, upon the north, on the right bank of the Gave, beyond the hills followed by the railway line, the heights of La Buala ascended, their wooded slopes radiant in the morning light. On that side lay Bartres. More to the left arose the Serre de Julos, dominated by the Miramont. Other crests, far off, faded away into the ether. And in the foreground, rising in tiers among the grassy valleys beyond the Gave, a number of convents, which seemed to have sprung up in this region of prodigies like early vegetation, imparted some measure of life to the landscape. First, there was an Orphan Asylum founded by the Sisters of Nevers, whose vast buildings shone brightly in the sunlight. Next came the Carmelite convent, on the highway to Pau, just in front of the Grotto; and then that of the Assumptionists higher up, skirting the road to Poueyferre; whilst the Dominicans showed but a corner of their roofs, sequestered in the far-away solitude. And at last appeared the establishment of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, those who were called the Blue Sisters, and who had founded at the far end of the valley a home where they received well-to-do lady pilgrims, desirous of solitude, as boarders.

At that early hour all the bells of these convents were pealing joyfully in the crystalline atmosphere, whilst the bells of other convents, on the other, the southern horizon, answered them with the same silvery strains of joy. The bell of the nunnery of Sainte Clarissa, near the old bridge, rang a scale of gay, clear notes, which one might have fancied to be the chirruping of a bird. And on this side of the town, also, there were valleys that dipped down between the ridges, and mountains that upreared their bare sides, a commingling of smiling and of agitated nature, an endless surging of heights amongst which you noticed those of Visens, whose slopes the sunlight tinged ornately with soft blue and carmine of a rippling, moire-like effect.

However, when Marie and Pierre turned their eyes to the west, they were quite dazzled. The sun rays were here streaming on the large and the little Beout with their cupolas of unequal height. And on this side the background was one of gold and purple, a dazzling mountain on whose sides one could only discern the road which snaked between the trees on its way to the Calvary above. And here, too, against the sunlit background, radiant like an aureola, stood out the three superposed churches which at the voice of Bernadette had sprung from the rock to the glory of the Blessed Virgin. First of all, down below, came the church of the Rosary, squat, circular, and half cut out of the rock, at the farther end of an esplanade on either side of which, like two huge arms, were colossal gradient ways ascending gently to the Crypt church. Vast labour had been expended here, a quarryful of stones had been cut and set in position, there were arches as lofty as naves supporting the gigantic terraced avenues which had been constructed so that the processions might roll along in all their pomp, and the little conveyances containing sick children might ascend without hindrance to the divine presence. Then came the Crypt, the subterranean church within the rock, with only its low door visible above the church of the Rosary, whose paved roof, with its vast promenade, formed a continuation of the terraced inclines. And at last, from the summit sprang the Basilica, somewhat slender and frail, recalling some finely chased jewel of the Renascence, and looking very new and very white—like a prayer, a spotless dove, soaring aloft from the rocks of Massabielle. The spire, which appeared the more delicate and slight when compared with the gigantic inclines below, seemed like the little vertical flame of a taper set in the midst of the vast landscape, those endless waves of valleys and mountains. By the side, too, of the dense greenery of the Calvary hill, it looked fragile and candid, like childish faith; and at sight of it you instinctively thought of the little white arm, the little thin hand of the puny girl, who had here pointed to Heaven in the crisis of her human sufferings. You could not see the Grotto, the entrance of which was on the left, at the base of the rock. Beyond the Basilica, the only buildings which caught the eye were the heavy square pile where the Fathers of the Immaculate Conception had their abode, and the episcopal palace, standing much farther away, in a spreading, wooded valley. And the three churches were flaming in the morning glow, and the rain of gold scattered by the sun rays was sweeping the whole countryside, whilst the flying peals of the bells seemed to be the very vibration of the light, the musical awakening of the lovely day that was now beginning.

Whilst crossing the Place du Rosaire, Pierre and Marie glanced at the Esplanade, the public walk with its long central lawn skirted by broad parallel paths and extending as far as the new bridge. Here, with face turned towards the Basilica, was the great crowned statue of the Virgin. All the sufferers crossed themselves as they went by. And still passionately chanting its canticle, the fearful cortege rolled on, through nature in festive array. Under the dazzling sky, past the mountains of gold and purple, amidst the centenarian trees, symbolical of health, the running waters whose freshness was eternal, that cortege still and ever marched on with its sufferers, whom nature, if not God, had condemned, those who were afflicted with skin diseases, those whose flesh was eaten away, those who were dropsical and inflated like wine-skins, and those whom rheumatism and paralysis had twisted into postures of agony. And the victims of hydrocephalus followed, with the dancers of St. Vitus, the consumptives, the rickety, the epileptic, the cancerous, the goitrous, the blind, the mad, and the idiotic. "Ave, ave, ave, Maria!" they sang; and the stubborn plaint acquired increased volume, as nearer and nearer to the Grotto it bore that abominable torrent of human wretchedness and pain, amidst all the fright and horror of the passers-by, who stopped short, unable to stir, their hearts frozen as this nightmare swept before their eyes.

Pierre and Marie were the first to pass under the lofty arcade of one of the terraced inclines. And then, as they followed the quay of the Gave, they all at once came upon the Grotto. And Marie, whom Pierre wheeled as near to the railing as possible, was only able to raise herself in her little conveyance, and murmur: "O most Blessed Virgin, Virgin most loved!"

She had seen neither the entrances to the piscinas nor the twelve-piped fountain, which she had just passed; nor did she distinguish any better the shop on her left hand where crucifixes, chaplets, statuettes, pictures, and other religious articles were sold, or the stone pulpit on her right which Father Massias already occupied. Her eyes were dazzled by the splendour of the Grotto; it seemed to her as if a hundred thousand tapers were burning there behind the railing, filling the low entrance with the glow of a furnace and illuminating, as with star rays, the statue of the Virgin, which stood, higher up, at the edge of a narrow ogive-like cavity. And for her, apart from that glorious apparition, nothing existed there, neither the crutches with which a part of the vault had been covered, nor the piles of bouquets fading away amidst the ivy and the eglantine, nor even the altar placed in the centre near a little portable organ over which a cover had been thrown. However, as she raised her eyes above the rock, she once more beheld the slender white Basilica profiled against the sky, its slight, tapering spire soaring into the azure of the Infinite like a prayer.

"O Virgin most powerful—Queen of the Virgins—Holy Virgin of Virgins!"

Pierre had now succeeded in wheeling Marie's box to the front rank, beyond the numerous oak benches which were set out here in the open air as in the nave of a church. Nearly all these benches were already occupied by those sufferers who could sit down, while the vacant spaces were soon filled with litters and little vehicles whose wheels became entangled together, and on whose close-packed mattresses and pillows all sorts of diseases were gathered pell-mell. Immediately on arriving, the young priest had recognised the Vignerons seated with their sorry child Gustave in the middle of a bench, and now, on the flagstones, he caught sight of the lace-trimmed bed of Madame Dieulafay, beside whom her husband and sister knelt in prayer. Moreover, all the patients of Madame de Jonquiere's carriage took up position here—M. Sabathier and Brother Isidore side by side, Madame Vetu reclining hopelessly in a conveyance, Elise Rouquet seated, La Grivotte excited and raising herself on her clenched hands. Pierre also again perceived Madame Maze, standing somewhat apart from the others, and humbling herself in prayer; whilst Madame Vincent, who had fallen on her knees, still holding her little Rose in her arms, presented the child to the Virgin with ardent entreaty, the distracted gesture of a mother soliciting compassion from the mother of divine grace. And around this reserved space was the ever-growing throng of pilgrims, the pressing, jostling mob which gradually stretched to the parapet overlooking the Gave.

"O Virgin most merciful," continued Marie in an undertone, "Virgin most faithful, Virgin conceived without sin!"

Then, almost fainting, she spoke no more, but with her lips still moving, as though in silent prayer, gazed distractedly at Pierre. He thought that she wished to speak to him and leant forward: "Shall I remain here at your disposal to take you to the piscina by-and-by?" he asked.

But as soon as she understood him she shook her head. And then in a feverish way she said: "No, no, I don't want to be bathed this morning. It seems to me that one must be truly worthy, truly pure, truly holy before seeking the miracle! I want to spend the whole morning in imploring it with joined hands; I want to pray, to pray with all my strength and all my soul—" She was stifling, and paused. Then she added: "Don't come to take me back to the hospital till eleven o'clock. I will not let them take me from here till then."

However, Pierre did not go away, but remained near her. For a moment, he even fell upon his knees; he also would have liked to pray with the same burning faith, to beg of God the cure of that poor sick child, whom he loved with such fraternal affection. But since he had reached the Grotto he had felt a singular sensation invading him, a covert revolt, as it were, which hampered the pious flight of his prayer. He wished to believe; he had spent the whole night hoping that belief would once more blossom in his soul, like some lovely flower of innocence and candour, as soon as he should have knelt upon the soil of that land of miracle. And yet he only experienced discomfort and anxiety in presence of the theatrical scene before him, that pale stiff statue in the false light of the tapers, with the chaplet shop full of jostling customers on the one hand, and the large stone pulpit whence a Father of the Assumption was shouting "Aves" on the other. Had his soul become utterly withered then? Could no divine dew again impregnate it with innocence, render it like the souls of little children, who at the slightest caressing touch of the sacred legend give themselves to it entirely?

Then, while his thoughts were still wandering, he recognised Father Massias in the ecclesiastic who occupied the pulpit. He had formerly known him, and was quite stirred by his sombre ardour, by the sight of his thin face and sparkling eyes, by the eloquence which poured from his large mouth as he offered violence to Heaven to compel it to descend upon earth. And whilst he thus examined Father Massias, astonished at feeling himself so unlike the preacher, he caught sight of Father Fourcade, who, at the foot of the pulpit, was deep in conference with Baron Suire. The latter seemed much perplexed by something which Father Fourcade said to him; however he ended by approving it with a complaisant nod. Then, as Abbe Judaine was also standing there, Father Fourcade likewise spoke to him for a moment, and a scared expression came over the Abbe's broad, fatherly face while he listened; nevertheless, like the Baron, he at last bowed assent.

Then, all at once, Father Fourcade appeared in the pulpit, erect, drawing up his lofty figure which his attack of gout had slightly bent; and he had not wished that Father Massias, his well-loved brother, whom he preferred above all others, should altogether go down the narrow stairway, for he had kept him upon one of the steps, and was leaning on his shoulder. And in a full, grave voice, with an air of sovereign authority which caused perfect silence to reign around, he spoke as follows:

"My dear brethren, my dear sisters, I ask your forgiveness for interrupting your prayers, but I have a communication to make to you, and I have to ask the help of all your faithful souls. We had a very sad accident to deplore this morning, one of our brethren died in one of the trains by which you came to Lourdes, died just as he was about to set foot in the promised land."

A brief pause followed and Father Fourcade seemed to become yet taller, his handsome face beaming with fervour, amidst his long, streaming, royal beard.

"Well, my dear brethren, my dear sisters," he resumed, "in spite of everything, the idea has come to me that we ought not to despair. Who knows if God Almighty did not will that death in order that He might prove His Omnipotence to the world? It is as though a voice were speaking to me, urging me to ascend this pulpit and ask your prayers for this man, this man who is no more, but whose life is nevertheless in the hands of the most Blessed Virgin who can still implore her Divine Son in his favour. Yes, the man is here, I have caused his body to be brought hither, and it depends on you, perhaps, whether a brilliant miracle shall dazzle the universe, if you pray with sufficient ardour to touch the compassion of Heaven. We will plunge the man's body into the piscina and we will entreat the Lord, the master of the world, to resuscitate him, to give unto us this extraordinary sign of His sovereign beneficence!"

An icy thrill, wafted from the Invisible, passed through the listeners. They had all become pale, and though the lips of none of them had opened, it seemed as if a murmur sped through their ranks amidst a shudder.

"But with what ardour must we not pray!" violently resumed Father Fourcade, exalted by genuine faith. "It is your souls, your whole souls, that I ask of you, my dear brothers, my dear sisters, it is a prayer in which you must put your hearts, your blood, your very life with whatever may be most noble and loving in it! Pray with all your strength, pray till you no longer know who you are, or where you are; pray as one loves, pray as one dies, for that which we are about to ask is so precious, so rare, so astounding a grace that only the energy of our worship can induce God to answer us. And in order that our prayers may be the more efficacious, in order that they may have time to spread and ascend to the feet of the Eternal Father, we will not lower the body into the piscina until four o'clock this afternoon. And now my dear brethren, now my dear sisters, pray, pray to the most Blessed Virgin, the Queen of the Angels, the Comforter of the Afflicted!"

Then he himself, distracted by emotion, resumed the recital of the rosary, whilst near him Father Massias burst into sobs. And thereupon the great anxious silence was broken, contagion seized upon the throng, it was transported and gave vent to shouts, tears, and confused stammered entreaties. It was as though a breath of delirium were sweeping by, reducing men's wills to naught, and turning all these beings into one being, exasperated with love and seized with a mad desire for the impossible prodigy.

And for a moment Pierre had thought that the ground was giving way beneath him, that he was about to fall and faint. But with difficulty he managed to rise from his knees and slowly walked away.

III. FOUNTAIN AND PISCINA

As Pierre went off, ill at ease, mastered by invincible repugnance, unwilling to remain there any longer, he caught sight of M. de Guersaint, kneeling near the Grotto, with the absorbed air of one who is praying with his whole soul. The young priest had not seen him since the morning, and did not know whether he had managed to secure a couple of rooms in one or other of the hotels, so that his first impulse was to go and join him. Then, however, he hesitated, unwilling to disturb his meditations, for he was doubtless praying for his daughter, whom he fondly loved, in spite of the constant absent-mindedness of his volatile brain. Accordingly, the young priest passed on, and took his way under the trees. Nine o'clock was now striking, he had a couple of hours before him.

By dint of money, the wild bank where swine had formerly pastured had been transformed into a superb avenue skirting the Gave. It had been necessary to put back the river's bed in order to gain ground, and lay out a monumental quay bordered by a broad footway, and protected by a parapet. Some two or three hundred yards farther on, a hill brought the avenue to an end, and it thus resembled an enclosed promenade, provided with benches, and shaded by magnificent trees. Nobody passed along, however; merely the overflow of the crowd had settled there, and solitary spots still abounded between the grassy wall limiting the promenade on the south, and the extensive fields spreading out northward beyond the Gave, as far as the wooded slopes which the white-walled convents brightened. Under the foliage, on the margin of the running water, one could enjoy delightful freshness, even during the burning days of August.

Thus Pierre, like a man at last awakening from a painful dream, soon found rest of mind again. He had questioned himself in the acute anxiety which he felt with regard to his sensations. Had he not reached Lourdes that morning possessed by a genuine desire to believe, an idea that he was indeed again beginning to believe even as he had done in the docile days of childhood when his mother had made him join his hands, and taught him to fear God? Yet as soon as he had found himself at the Grotto, the idolatry of the worship, the violence of the display of faith, the onslaught upon human reason which he witnessed, had so disturbed him that he had almost fainted. What would become of him then? Could he not even try to contend against his doubts by examining things and convincing himself of their truth, thus turning his journey to profit? At all events, he had made a bad beginning, which left him sorely agitated, and he indeed needed the environment of those fine trees, that limpid, rushing water, that calm, cool avenue, to recover from the shock.

Still pondering, he was approaching the end of the pathway, when he most unexpectedly met a forgotten friend. He had, for a few seconds, been looking at a tall old gentleman who was coming towards him, dressed in a tightly buttoned frock-coat and broad-brimmed hat; and he had tried to remember where it was that he had previously beheld that pale face, with eagle nose, and black and penetrating eyes. These he had seen before, he felt sure of it; but the promenader's long white beard and long curly white hair perplexed him. However, the other halted, also looking extremely astonished, though he promptly exclaimed, "What, Pierre? Is it you, at Lourdes?"

Then all at once the young priest recognised Doctor Chassaigne, his father's old friend, his own friend, the man who had cured and consoled him in the terrible physical and mental crisis which had come upon him after his mother's death.

"Ah! my dear doctor, how pleased I am to see you!" he replied.

They embraced with deep emotion. And now, in presence of that snowy hair and snowy beard, that slow walk, that sorrowful demeanour, Pierre remembered with what unrelenting ferocity misfortune had fallen on that unhappy man and aged him. But a few years had gone by, and now, when they met again, he was bowed down by destiny.

"You did not know, I suppose, that I had remained at Lourdes?" said the doctor. "It's true that I no longer write to anybody; in fact, I am no longer among the living. I live in the land of the dead." Tears were gathering in his eyes, and emotion made his voice falter as he resumed: "There! come and sit down on that bench yonder; it will please me to live the old days afresh with you, just for a moment."

In his turn the young priest felt his sobs choking him. He could only murmur: "Ah! my dear doctor, my old friend, I can truly tell you that I pitied you with my whole heart, my whole soul."

Doctor Chassaigne's story was one of disaster, the shipwreck of a life. He and his daughter Marguerite, a tall and lovable girl of twenty, had gone to Cauterets with Madame Chassaigne, the model wife and mother, whose state of health had made them somewhat anxious. A fortnight had elapsed and she seemed much better, and was already planning several pleasure trips, when one morning she was found dead in her bed. Her husband and daughter were overwhelmed, stupefied by this sudden blow, this cruel treachery of death. The doctor, who belonged to Bartres, had a family vault in the Lourdes cemetery, a vault constructed at his own expense, and in which his father and mother already rested. He desired, therefore, that his wife should be interred there, in a compartment adjoining that in which he expected soon to lie himself. And after the burial he had lingered for a week at Lourdes, when Marguerite, who was with him, was seized with a great shivering, and, taking to her bed one evening, died two days afterwards without her distracted father being able to form any exact notion of the illness which had carried her off. And thus it was not himself, but his daughter, lately radiant with beauty and health, in the very flower of her youth, who was laid in the vacant compartment by the mother's side. The man who had been so happy, so worshipped by his two helpmates, whose heart had been kept so warm by the love of two dear creatures all his own, was now nothing more than an old, miserable, stammering, lost being, who shivered in his icy solitude. All the joy of his life had departed; he envied the men who broke stones upon the highways when he saw their barefooted wives and daughters bring them their dinners at noontide. And he had refused to leave Lourdes, he had relinquished everything, his studies, his practice in Paris, in order that he might live near the tomb in which his wife and his daughter slept the eternal sleep.

"Ah, my old friend," repeated Pierre, "how I pitied you! How frightful must have been your grief! But why did you not rely a little on those who love you? Why did you shut yourself up here with your sorrow?"

The doctor made a gesture which embraced the horizon. "I could not go away, they are here and keep me with them. It is all over, I am merely waiting till my time comes to join them again."

Then silence fell. Birds were fluttering among the shrubs on the bank behind them, and in front they heard the loud murmur of the Gave. The sun rays were falling more heavily in a slow, golden dust, upon the hillsides; but on that retired bench under the beautiful trees, the coolness was still delightful. And although the crowd was but a couple of hundred yards distant, they were, so to say, in a desert, for nobody tore himself away from the Grotto to stray as far as the spot which they had chosen.

They talked together for a long time, and Pierre related under what circumstances he had reached Lourdes that morning with M. de Guersaint and his daughter, all three forming part of the national pilgrimage. Then all at once he gave a start of astonishment and exclaimed: "What! doctor, so you now believe that miracles are possible? You, good heavens! whom I knew as an unbeliever, or at least as one altogether indifferent to these matters?"

He was gazing at M. Chassaigne quite stupefied by something which he had just heard him say of the Grotto and Bernadette. It was amazing, coming from a man with so strong a mind, a savant of such intelligence, whose powerful analytical faculties he had formerly so much admired! How was it that a lofty, clear mind, nourished by experience and method, had become so changed as to acknowledge the miraculous cures effected by that divine fountain which the Blessed Virgin had caused to spurt forth under the pressure of a child's fingers?

"But just think a little, my dear doctor," he resumed. "It was you yourself who supplied my father with memoranda about Bernadette, your little fellow-villager as you used to call her; and it was you, too, who spoke to me at such length about her, when, later on, I took a momentary interest in her story. In your eyes she was simply an ailing child, prone to hallucinations, infantile, but self-conscious of her acts, deficient of will-power. Recollect our chats together, my doubts, and the healthy reason which you again enabled me, to acquire!"

Pierre was feeling very moved, for was not this the strangest of adventures? He a priest, who in a spirit of resignation had formerly endeavoured to believe, had ended by completely losing all faith through intercourse with this same doctor, who was then an unbeliever, but whom he now found converted, conquered by the supernatural, whilst he himself was racked by the torture of no longer believing.

"You who would only rely on accurate facts," he said, "you who based everything on observation! Do you renounce science then?"

Chassaigne, hitherto quiet, with a sorrowful smile playing on his lips, now made a violent gesture expressive of sovereign contempt. "Science indeed!" he exclaimed. "Do I know anything? Can I accomplish anything? You asked me just now what malady it was that killed my poor Marguerite. But I do not know! I, whom people think so learned, so well armed against death, I understood nothing of it, and I could do nothing—not even prolong my daughter's life for a single hour! And my wife, whom I found in bed already cold, when on the previous evening she had lain down in much better health and quite gay—was I even capable of foreseeing what ought to have been done in her case? No, no! for me at all events, science has become bankrupt. I wish to know nothing; I am but a fool and a poor old man!"

He spoke like this in a furious revolt against all his past life of pride and happiness. Then, having become calm again, he added: "And now I only feel a frightful remorse. Yes, a remorse which haunts me, which ever brings me here, prowling around the people who are praying. It is remorse for not having in the first instance come and humbled myself at that Grotto, bringing my two dear ones with me. They would have knelt there like those women whom you see, I should have knelt beside them, and perhaps the Blessed Virgin would have cured and preserved them. But, fool that I was, I only knew how to lose them! It is my fault."

Tears were now streaming from his eyes. "I remember," he continued, "that in my childhood at Bartres, my mother, a peasant woman, made me join my hands and implore God's help each morning. The prayer she taught me came back to my mind, word for word, when I again found myself alone, as weak, as lost, as a little child. What would you have, my friend? I joined my hands as in my younger days, I felt too wretched, too forsaken, I had too keen a need of a superhuman help, of a divine power which should think and determine for me, which should lull me and carry me on with its eternal prescience. How great at first was the confusion, the aberration of my poor brain, under the frightful, heavy blow which fell upon it! I spent a score of nights without being able to sleep, thinking that I should surely go mad. All sorts of ideas warred within me; I passed through periods of revolt when I shook my fist at Heaven, and then I lapsed into humility, entreating God to take me in my turn. And it was at last a conviction that there must be justice, a conviction that there must be love, which calmed me by restoring me my faith. You knew my daughter, so tall and strong, so beautiful, so brimful of life. Would it not be the most monstrous injustice if for her, who did not know life, there should be nothing beyond the tomb? She will live again, I am absolutely convinced of it, for I still hear her at times, she tells me that we shall meet, that we shall see one another again. Oh! the dear beings whom one has lost, my dear daughter, my dear wife, to see them once more, to live with them elsewhere, that is the one hope, the one consolation for all the sorrows of this world! I have given myself to God, since God alone can restore them to me!"

He was shaking with a slight tremor, like the weak old man he had become; and Pierre was at last able to understand and explain the conversion of this savant, this man of intellect who, growing old, had reverted to belief under the influence of sentiment. First of all, and this he had previously suspected, he discovered a kind of atavism of faith in this Pyrenean, this son of peasant mountaineers, who had been brought up in belief of the legend, and whom the legend had again mastered even when fifty years, of positive study had rolled over it. Then, too, there was human weariness; this man, to whom science had not brought happiness, revolted against science on the day when it seemed to him shallow, powerless to prevent him from shedding tears. And finally there was discouragement, a doubt of all things, ending in a need of certainty on the part of one whom age had softened, and who felt happy at being able to fall asleep in credulity.

Pierre did not protest, however; he did not jeer, for his heart was rent at sight of this tall, stricken old man, with his woeful senility. Is it not indeed pitiful to see the strongest, the clearest-minded become mere children again under such blows of fate? "Ah!" he faintly sighed, "if I could only suffer enough to be able to silence my reason, and kneel yonder and believe in all those fine stories."

The pale smile, which at times still passed over Doctor Chassaigne's lips, reappeared on them. "You mean the miracles?" said he. "You are a priest, my child, and I know what your misfortune is. The miracles seem impossible to you. But what do you know of them? Admit that you know nothing, and that what to our senses seems impossible is every minute taking place. And now we have been talking together for a long time, and eleven o'clock will soon strike, so that you must return to the Grotto. However, I shall expect you, at half-past three, when I will take you to the Medical Verification Office, where I hope I shall be able to show you some surprising things. Don't forget, at half-past three."

Thereupon he sent him off, and remained on the bench alone. The heat had yet increased, and the distant hills were burning in the furnace-like glow of the sun. However, he lingered there forgetfully, dreaming in the greeny half-light amidst the foliage, and listening to the continuous murmur of the Gave, as if a voice, a dear voice from the realms beyond, were speaking to him.

Pierre meantime hastened back to Marie. He was able to join her without much difficulty, for the crowd was thinning, a good many people having already gone off to dejeuner. And on arriving he perceived the girl's father, who was quietly seated beside her, and who at once wished to explain to him the reason of his long absence. For more than a couple of hours that morning he had scoured Lourdes in all directions, applying at twenty hotels in turn without being able to find the smallest closet where they might sleep. Even the servants' rooms were let and you could not have even secured a mattress on which to stretch yourself in some passage. However, all at once, just as he was despairing, he had discovered two rooms, small ones, it is true, and just under the roof, but in a very good hotel, that of the Apparitions, one of the best patronised in the town. The persons who had retained these rooms had just telegraphed that the patient whom they had meant to bring with them was dead. Briefly, it was a piece of rare good luck, and seemed to make M. de Guersaint quite gay.

Eleven o'clock was now striking and the woeful procession of sufferers started off again through the sunlit streets and squares. When it reached the hospital Marie begged her father and Pierre to go to the hotel, lunch and rest there awhile, and return to fetch her at two o'clock, when the patients would again be conducted to the Grotto. But when, after lunching, the two men went up to the rooms which they were to occupy at the Hotel of the Apparitions, M. de Guersaint, overcome by fatigue, fell so soundly asleep that Pierre had not the heart to awaken him. What would have been the use of it? His presence was not indispensable. And so the young priest returned to the hospital alone. Then the cortege again descended the Avenue de la Grotte, again wended its way over the Plateau de la Merlasse, again crossed the Place du Rosaire, past an ever-growing crowd which shuddered and crossed itself amid all the joyousness of that splendid August day. It was now the most glorious hour of a lovely afternoon.

When Marie was again installed in front of the Grotto she inquired if her father were coming. "Yes," answered Pierre; "he is only taking a little rest."

She waved her hand as though to say that he was acting rightly, and then in a sorely troubled voice she added: "Listen, Pierre; don't take me to the piscina for another hour. I am not yet in a state to find favour from Heaven, I wish to pray, to keep on praying."

After evincing such an ardent desire to come to Lourdes, terror was agitating her now that the moment for attempting the miracle was at hand. In fact, she began to relate that she had been unable to eat anything, and a girl who overheard her at once approached saying: "If you feel too weak, my dear young lady, remember we have some broth here."

Marie looked at her and recognised Raymonde. Several young girls were in this wise employed at the Grotto to distribute cups of broth and milk among the sufferers. Some of them, indeed, in previous years had displayed so much coquetry in the matter of silk, aprons trimmed with lace, that a uniform apron, of modest linen, with a small check pattern, blue and white, had been imposed on them. Nevertheless, in spite of this enforced simplicity, Raymonde, thanks to her freshness and her active, good-natured, housewifely air, had succeeded in making herself look quite charming.

"You will remember, won't you?" she added; "you have only to make me a sign and I will serve you."

Marie thanked her, saying, however, that she felt sure she would not be able to take anything; and then, turning towards the young priest, she resumed: "One hour—you must allow me one more hour, my friend."

Pierre wished at any rate to remain near her, but the entire space was reserved to the sufferers, the bearers not being allowed there. So he had to retire, and, caught in the rolling waves of the crowd, he found himself carried towards the piscinas, where he came upon an extraordinary spectacle which stayed his steps. In front of the low buildings where the baths were, three by three, six for the women and three for the men, he perceived under the trees a long stretch of ground enclosed by a rope fastened to the tree-trunks; and here, various sufferers, some sitting in their bath-chairs and others lying on the mattresses of their litters, were drawn up in line, waiting to be bathed, whilst outside the rope, a huge, excited throng was ever pressing and surging. A Capuchin, erect in the centre of the reserved space, was at that moment conducting the prayers. "Aves" followed one after the other, repeated by the crowd in a loud confused murmur. Then, all at once, as Madame Vincent, who, pale with agony, had long been waiting, was admitted to the baths, carrying her dear burden, her little girl who looked like a waxen image of the child Christ, the Capuchin let himself fall upon his knees with his arms extended, and cried aloud: "Lord, heal our sick!" He raised this cry a dozen, twenty times, with a growing fury, and each time the crowd repeated it, growing more and more excited at each shout, till it sobbed and kissed the ground in a state of frenzy. It was like a hurricane of delirium rushing by and laying every head in the dust. Pierre was utterly distracted by the sob of suffering which arose from the very bowels of these poor folks—at first a prayer, growing louder and louder, then bursting forth like a demand in impatient, angry, deafening, obstinate accents, as though to compel the help of Heaven. "Lord, heal our sick!"—"Lord, heal our sick!" The shout soared on high incessantly.

An incident occurred, however; La Grivotte was weeping hot tears because they would not bathe her. "They say that I'm a consumptive," she plaintively exclaimed, "and that they can't dip consumptives in cold water. Yet they dipped one this morning; I saw her. So why won't they dip me? I've been wearing myself out for the last half-hour in telling them that they are only grieving the Blessed Virgin, for I am going to be cured, I feel it, I am going to be cured!"

As she was beginning to cause a scandal, one of the chaplains of the piscinas approached and endeavoured to calm her. They would see what they could do for her, by-and-by, said he; they would consult the reverend Fathers, and, if she were very good, perhaps they would bathe her all the same.

Meantime the cry continued: "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!" And Pierre, who had just perceived Madame Vetu, also waiting at the piscina entry, could no longer turn his eyes away from her hope-tortured face, whose eyes were fixed upon the doorway by which the happy ones, the elect, emerged from the divine presence, cured of all their ailments. However, a sudden increase of the crowd's frenzy, a perfect rage of entreaties, gave him such a shock as to draw tears from his eyes. Madame Vincent was now coming out again, still carrying her little girl in her arms, her wretched, her fondly loved little girl, who had been dipped in a fainting state in the icy water, and whose little face, but imperfectly wiped, was as pale as ever, and indeed even more woeful and lifeless. The mother was sobbing, crucified by this long agony, reduced to despair by the refusal of the Blessed Virgin, who had remained insensible to her child's sufferings. And yet when Madame Vetu in her turn entered, with the eager passion of a dying woman about to drink the water of life, the haunting, obstinate cry burst out again, without sign of discouragement or lassitude: "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!" The Capuchin had now fallen with his face to the ground, and the howling crowd, with arms outstretched, devoured the soil with its kisses.

Pierre wished to join Madame Vincent to soothe her with a few kind, encouraging words; however, a fresh string of pilgrims not only prevented him from passing, but threw him towards the fountain which another throng besieged. There was here quite a range of low buildings, a long stone wall with carved coping, and it had been necessary for the people to form in procession, although there were twelve taps from which the water fell into a narrow basin. Many came hither to fill bottles, metal cans, and stoneware pitchers. To prevent too great a waste of water, the tap only acted when a knob was pressed with the hand. And thus many weak-handed women lingered there a long time, the water dripping on their feet. Those who had no cans to fill at least came to drink and wash their faces. Pierre noticed one young man who drank seven small glassfuls of water, and washed his eyes seven times without wiping them. Others were drinking out of shells, tin goblets, and leather cups. And he was particularly interested by the sight of Elise Rouquet, who, thinking it useless to go to the piscinas to bathe the frightful sore which was eating away her face, had contented herself with employing the water of the fountain as a lotion, every two hours since her arrival that morning. She knelt down, threw back her fichu, and for a long time applied a handkerchief to her face—a handkerchief which she had soaked with the miraculous fluid like a sponge; and the crowd around rushed upon the fountain in such fury that folks no longer noticed her diseased face, but washed themselves and drank from the same pipe at which she constantly moistened her handkerchief.

Just then, however, Gerard, who passed by dragging M. Sabathier to the piscinas, called to Pierre, whom he saw unoccupied, and asked him to come and help him, for it would not be an easy task to move and bathe this helpless victim of ataxia. And thus Pierre lingered with the sufferer in the men's piscina for nearly half an hour, whilst Gerard returned to the Grotto to fetch another patient. These piscinas seemed to the young priest to be very well arranged. They were divided into three compartments, three baths separated by partitions, with steps leading into them. In order that one might isolate the patient, a linen curtain hug before each entry, which was reached through a kind of waiting-room having a paved floor, and furnished with a bench and a couple of chairs. Here the patients undressed and dressed themselves with an awkward haste, a nervous kind of shame. One man, whom Pierre found there when he entered, was still naked, and wrapped himself in the curtain before putting on a bandage with trembling hands. Another one, a consumptive who was frightfully emaciated, sat shivering and groaning, his livid skin mottled with violet marks. However, Pierre became more interested in Brother Isidore, who was just being removed from one of the baths. He had fainted away, and for a moment, indeed, it was thought that he was dead. But at last he began moaning again, and one's heart filled with pity at sight of his long, lank frame, which suffering had withered, and which, with his diseased hip, looked a human remnant on exhibition. The two hospitallers who had been bathing him had the greatest difficulty to put on his shirt, fearful as they were that if he were suddenly shaken he might expire in their arms.

"You will help me, Monsieur l'Abbe, won't you?" asked another hospitaller as he began to undress M. Sabathier.

Pierre hastened to give his services, and found that the attendant, discharging such humble duties, was none other than the Marquis de Salmon-Roquebert whom M. de Guersaint had pointed out to him on the way from the station to the hospital that morning. A man of forty, with a large, aquiline, knightly nose set in a long face, the Marquis was the last representative of one of the most ancient and illustrious families of France. Possessing a large fortune, a regal mansion in the Rue de Lille at Paris, and vast estates in Normandy, he came to Lourdes each year, for the three days of the national pilgrimage, influenced solely by his benevolent feelings, for he had no religious zeal and simply observed the rites of the Church because it was customary for noblemen to do so. And he obstinately declined any high functions. Resolved to remain a hospitaller, he had that year assumed the duty of bathing the patients, exhausting the strength of his arms, employing his fingers from morning till night in handling rags and re-applying dressings to sores.

"Be careful," he said to Pierre; "take off the stockings very slowly. Just now, some flesh came away when they were taking off the things of that poor fellow who is being dressed again, over yonder."

Then, leaving M. Sabathier for a moment in order to put on the shoes of the unhappy sufferer whom he alluded to, the Marquis found the left shoe wet inside. Some matter had flowed into the fore part of it, and he had to take the usual medical precautions before putting it on the patient's foot, a task which he performed with extreme care; and so as not to touch the man's leg, into which an ulcer was eating.

"And now," he said to Pierre, as he returned to M. Sabathier, "pull down the drawers at the same time I do, so that we may get them off at one pull."

In addition to the patients and the hospitallers selected for duty at the piscinas, the only person in the little dressing-room was a chaplain who kept on repeating "Paters" and "Aves," for not even a momentary pause was allowed in the prayers. Merely a loose curtain hung before the doorway leading to the open space which the rope enclosed; and the ardent clamorous entreaties of the throng were incessantly wafted into the room, with the piercing shouts of the Capuchin, who ever repeated "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!" A cold light fell from the high windows of the building and constant dampness reigned there, with the mouldy smell like that of a cellar dripping with water.

At last M. Sabathier was stripped, divested of all garments save a little apron which had been fastened about his loins for decency's sake.

"Pray don't plunge me," said he; "let me down into the water by degrees."

In point of fact that cold water quite terrified him. He was still wont to relate that he had experienced such a frightful chilling sensation on the first occasion that he had sworn never to go in again. According to his account, there could be no worse torture than that icy cold. And then too, as he put it, the water was scarcely inviting; for, through fear lest the output of the source should not suffice, the Fathers of the Grotto only allowed the water of the baths to be changed twice a day. And nearly a hundred patients being dipped in the same water, it can be imagined what a terrible soup the latter at last became. All manner of things were found in it, so that it was like a frightful consomme of all ailments, a field of cultivation for every kind of poisonous germ, a quintessence of the most dreaded contagious diseases; the miraculous feature of it all being that men should emerge alive from their immersion in such filth.

"Gently, gently," repeated M. Sabathier to Pierre and the Marquis, who had taken hold of him under the hips in order to carry him to the bath. And he gazed with childlike terror at that thick, livid water on which floated so many greasy, nauseating patches of scum. However, his dread of the cold was so great that he preferred the polluted baths of the afternoon, since all the bodies that were dipped in the water during the early part of the day ended by slightly warming it.

"We will let you slide down the steps," exclaimed the Marquis in an undertone; and then he instructed Pierre to hold the patient with all his strength under the arm-pits.

"Have no fear," replied the priest; "I will not let go."

M. Sabathier was then slowly lowered. You could now only see his back, his poor painful back which swayed and swelled, mottled by the rippling of a shiver. And when they dipped him his head fell back in a spasm, a sound like the cracking of bones was heard, and breathing hard, he almost stifled.

The chaplain, standing beside the bath, had begun calling with renewed fervour: "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!"

M. de Salmon-Roquebert repeated the cry, which the regulations required the hospitallers to raise at each fresh immersion. Pierre, therefore, had to imitate his companion, and his pitiful feelings at the sight of so much suffering were so intense that he regained some little of his faith. It was long indeed since he had prayed like this, devoutly wishing that there might be a God in heaven, whose omnipotence could assuage the wretchedness of humanity. At the end of three or four minutes, however, when with great difficulty they drew M. Sabathier, livid and shivering, out of the bath, the young priest fell into deeper, more despairing sorrow than ever at beholding how downcast, how overwhelmed the sufferer was at having experienced no relief. Again had he made a futile attempt; for the seventh time the Blessed Virgin had not deigned to listen to his prayers. He closed his eyes, from between the lids of which big tears began to roll while they were dressing him again.

Then Pierre recognised little Gustave Vigneron coming in, on his crutch, to take his first bath. His relatives, his father, his mother, and his aunt, Madame Chaise, all three of substantial appearance and exemplary piety, had just fallen on their knees at the door. Whispers ran through the crowd; it was said that the gentleman was a functionary of the Ministry of Finances. However, while the child was beginning to undress, a tumult arose, and Father Fourcade and Father Massias, suddenly arriving, gave orders to suspend the immersions. The great miracle was about to be attempted, the extraordinary favour which had been so ardently prayed for since the morning—the restoration of the dead man to life.

The prayers were continuing outside, rising in a furious appeal which died away in the sky of that warm summer afternoon. Two bearers came in with a covered stretcher, which they deposited in the middle of the dressing-room. Baron Suire, President of the Association, followed, accompanied by Berthaud, one of its principal officers, for the affair was causing a great stir among the whole staff, and before anything was done a few words were exchanged in low voices between the gentlemen and the two Fathers of the Assumption. Then the latter fell upon their knees, with arms extended, and began to pray, their faces illumined, transfigured by their burning desire to see God's omnipotence displayed.

"Lord, hear us! Lord, grant our prayer!"

M. Sabathier had just been taken away, and the only patient now present was little Gustave, who had remained on a chair, half-undressed and forgotten. The curtains of the stretcher were raised, and the man's corpse appeared, already stiff, and seemingly reduced and shrunken, with large eyes which had obstinately remained wide open. It was necessary, however, to undress the body, which was still fully clad, and this terrible duty made the bearers momentarily hesitate. Pierre noticed that the Marquis de Salmon-Roquebert, who showed such devotion to the living, such freedom from all repugnance whenever they were in question, had now drawn aside and fallen on his knees, as though to avoid the necessity of touching that lifeless corpse. And the young priest thereupon followed his example, and knelt near him in order to keep countenance.

Father Massias meanwhile was gradually becoming excited, praying in so loud a voice that it drowned that of his superior, Father Fourcade: "Lord, restore our brother to us!" he cried. "Lord, do it for Thy glory!"

One of the hospitallers had already begun to pull at the man's trousers, but his legs were so stiff that the garment would not come off. In fact the corpse ought to have been raised up; and the other hospitaller, who was unbuttoning the dead man's old frock coat, remarked in an undertone that it would be best to cut everything away with a pair of scissors. Otherwise there would be no end of the job.

Berthaud, however, rushed up to them, after rapidly consulting Baron Suire. As a politician he secretly disapproved of Father Fourcade's action in making such an attempt, only they could not now do otherwise than carry matters to an issue; for the crowd was waiting and had been entreating God on the dead man's behalf ever since the morning. The wisest course, therefore, was to finish with the affair at once, showing as much respect as possible for the remains of the deceased. In lieu, therefore, of pulling the corpse about in order to strip it bare, Berthaud was of opinion that it would be better to dip it in the piscina clad as it was. Should the man resuscitate, it would be easy to procure fresh clothes for him; and in the contrary event, no harm would have been done. This is what he hastily said to the bearers; and forthwith he helped them to pass some straps under the man's hips and arms.

Father Fourcade had nodded his approval of this course, whilst Father Massias prayed with increased fervour: "Breathe upon him, O Lord, and he shall be born anew! Restore his soul to him, O, Lord, that he may glorify Thee!"

Making an effort, the two hospitallers now raised the man by means of the straps, carried him to the bath, and slowly lowered him into the water, at each moment fearing that he would slip away from their hold. Pierre, although overcome by horror, could not do otherwise than look at them, and thus he distinctly beheld the immersion of this corpse in its sorry garments, which on being wetted clung to the bones, outlining the skeleton-like figure of the deceased, who floated like a man who has been drowned. But the repulsive part of it all was, that in spite of the rigor mortis, the head fell backward into the water, and was submerged by it. In vain did the hospitallers try to raise it by pulling the shoulder straps; as they made the attempt, the man almost sank to the bottom of the bath. And how could he have recovered his breath when his mouth was full of water, his staring eyes seemingly dying afresh, beneath that watery veil?

Then, during the three long minutes allowed for the immersion, the two Fathers of the Assumption and the chaplain, in a paroxysm of desire and faith, strove to compel the intervention of Heaven, praying in such loud voices that they seemed to choke.

"Do Thou but look on him, O Lord, and he will live again! Lord! may he rise at Thy voice to convert the earth! Lord! Thou hast but one word to say and all Thy people will acclaim Thee!"

At last, as though some vessel had broken in his throat, Father Massias fell groaning and choking on his elbows, with only enough strength left him to kiss the flagstones. And from without came the clamour of the crowd, the ever-repeated cry, which the Capuchin was still leading: "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!" This appeal seemed so singular at that moment, that Pierre's sufferings were increased. He could feel, too, that the Marquis was shuddering beside him. And so the relief was general when Berthaud, thoroughly annoyed with the whole business, curtly shouted to the hospitallers: "Take him out! Take him out at once!"

The body was removed from the bath and laid on the stretcher, looking like the corpse of a drowned man with its sorry garments clinging to its limbs. The water was trickling from the hair, and rivulets began falling on either side, spreading out in pools on the floor. And naturally, dead as the man had been, dead he remained.

The others had all risen and stood looking at him amidst a distressing silence. Then, as he was covered up and carried away, Father Fourcade followed the bier leaning on the shoulder of Father Massias and dragging his gouty leg, the painful weight of which he had momentarily forgotten. But he was already recovering his strong serenity, and as a hush fell upon the crowd outside, he could be heard saying: "My dear brothers, my dear sisters, God has not been willing to restore him to us, doubtless because in His infinite goodness He has desired to retain him among His elect."

And that was all; there was no further question of the dead man. Patients were again being brought into the dressing-room, the two other baths were already occupied. And now little Gustave, who had watched that terrible scene with his keen inquisitive eyes, evincing no sign of terror, finished undressing himself. His wretched body, the body of a scrofulous child, appeared with its prominent ribs and projecting spine, its limbs so thin that they looked like mere walking-sticks. Especially was this the case as regards the left one, which was withered, wasted to the bone; and he also had two sores, one on the hip, and the other in the loins, the last a terrible one, the skin being eaten away so that you distinctly saw the raw flesh. Yet he smiled, rendered so precocious by his sufferings that, although but fifteen years old and looking no more than ten, he seemed to be endowed with the reason and philosophy of a grown man.

The Marquis de Salmon-Roquebert, who had taken him gently in his arms, refused Pierre's offer of service: "Thanks, but he weighs no more than a bird. And don't be frightened, my dear little fellow. I will do it gently."

"Oh, I am not afraid of cold water, monsieur," replied the boy; "you may duck me."

Then he was lowered into the bath in which the dead man had been dipped. Madame Vigneron and Madame Chaise, who were not allowed to enter, had remained at the door on their knees, whilst the father, M. Vigneron, who was admitted into the dressing-room, went on making the sign of the cross.

Finding that his services were no longer required, Pierre now departed. The sudden idea that three o'clock must have long since struck and that Marie must be waiting for him made him hasten his steps. However, whilst he was endeavouring to pierce the crowd, he saw the girl arrive in her little conveyance, dragged along by Gerard, who had not ceased transporting sufferers to the piscina. She had become impatient, suddenly filled with a conviction that she was at last in a frame of mind to find grace. And at sight of Pierre she reproached him, saying, "What, my friend, did you forget me?"

He could find no answer, but watched her as she was taken into the piscina reserved for women, and then, in mortal sorrow, fell upon his knees. It was there that he would wait for her, humbly kneeling, in order that he might take her back to the Grotto, cured without doubt and singing a hymn of praise. Since she was certain of it, would she not assuredly be cured? However, it was in vain that he sought for words of prayer in the depths of his distracted being. He was still under the blow of all the terrible things that he had beheld, worn out with physical fatigue, his brain depressed, no longer knowing what he saw or what he believed. His desperate affection for Marie alone remained, making him long to humble himself and supplicate, in the thought that when little ones really love and entreat the powerful they end by obtaining favours. And at last he caught himself repeating the prayers of the crowd, in a distressful voice that came from the depths of his being "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!"

Ten minutes, a quarter of an hour perhaps, went by. Then Marie reappeared in her little conveyance. Her face was very pale and wore an expression of despair. Her beautiful hair was fastened above her head in a heavy golden coil which the water had not touched. And she was not cured. The stupor of infinite discouragement hollowed and lengthened her face, and she averted her eyes as though to avoid meeting those of the priest who thunderstruck, chilled to the heart, at last made up his mind to grasp the handle of the little vehicle, so as to take the girl back to the Grotto.

And meantime the cry of the faithful, who with open arms were kneeling there and kissing the earth, again rose with a growing fury, excited by the Capuchin's shrill voice: "Lord, heal our sick! Heal our sick, O Lord!"

As Pierre was placing Marie in position again in front of the Grotto, an attack of weakness came over her and she almost fainted. Gerard, who was there, saw Raymonde quickly hurry to the spot with a cup of broth, and at once they began zealously rivalling each other in their attentions to the ailing girl. Raymonde, holding out the cup in a pretty way, and assuming the coaxing airs of an expert nurse, especially insisted that Marie should accept the bouillon; and Gerard, glancing at this portionless girl, could not help finding her charming, already expert in the business of life, and quite ready to manage a household with a firm hand without ceasing to be amiable. Berthaud was no doubt right, this was the wife that he, Gerard, needed.

"Mademoiselle," said he to Raymonde, "shall I raise the young lady a little?"

"Thank you, monsieur, I am quite strong enough. And besides I will give it to her in spoonfuls; that will be the better way."

Marie, however, obstinately preserving her fierce silence as she recovered consciousness, refused the broth with a gesture. She wished to be left in quietness, she did not want anybody to question her. And it was only when the others had gone off smiling at one another, that she said to Pierre in a husky voice: "Has not my father come then?"

After hesitating for a moment the priest was obliged to confess the truth. "I left him sleeping and he cannot have woke up."

Then Marie relapsed into her state of languid stupor and dismissed him in his turn, with the gesture with which she declined all succour. She no longer prayed, but remained quite motionless, gazing fixedly with her large eyes at the marble Virgin, the white statue amidst the radiance of the Grotto. And as four o'clock was now striking, Pierre with his heart sore went off to the Verification Office, having suddenly remembered the appointment given him by Doctor Chassaigne.

IV. VERIFICATION

THE doctor was waiting for the young priest outside the Verification Office, in front of which a compact and feverish crowd of pilgrims was assembled, waylaying and questioning the patients who went in, and acclaiming them as they came out whenever the news spread of any miracle, such as the restoration of some blind man's sight, some deaf woman's hearing, or some paralytic's power of motion.

Pierre had no little difficulty in making his way through the throng, but at last he reached his friend. "Well," he asked, "are we going to have a miracle—a real, incontestable one I mean?"

The doctor smiled, indulgent despite his new faith. "Ah, well," said he, "a miracle is not worked to order. God intervenes when He pleases."

Some hospitallers were mounting guard at the door, but they all knew M. Chassaigne, and respectfully drew aside to let him enter with his companion. The office where the cures were verified was very badly installed in a wretched wooden shanty divided into two apartments, first a narrow ante-chamber, and then a general meeting room which was by no means so large as it should have been. However, there was a question of providing the department with better accommodation the following year; with which view some large premises, under one of the inclined ways of the Rosary, were already being fitted up.

The only article of furniture in the antechamber was a wooden bench on which Pierre perceived two female patients awaiting their turn in the charge of a young hospitaller. But on entering the meeting room the number of persons packed inside it quite surprised him, whilst the suffocating heat within those wooden walls on which the sun was so fiercely playing, almost scorched his face. It was a square bare room, painted a light yellow, with the panes of its single window covered with whitening, so that the pressing throng outside might see nothing of what went on within. One dared not even open this window to admit a little fresh air, for it was no sooner set ajar than a crowd of inquisitive heads peeped in. The furniture was of a very rudimentary kind, consisting simply of two deal tables of unequal height placed end to end and not even covered with a cloth; together with a kind of big "canterbury" littered with untidy papers, sets of documents, registers and pamphlets, and finally some thirty rush-seated chairs placed here and there over the floor and a couple of ragged arm-chairs usually reserved for the patients.

Doctor Bonamy at once hastened forward to greet Doctor Chassaigne, who was one of the latest and most glorious conquests of the Grotto. He found a chair for him and, bowing to Pierre's cassock, also made the young priest sit down. Then, in the tone of extreme politeness which was customary with him, he exclaimed: "Mon cher confrere, you will kindly allow me to continue. We were just examining mademoiselle."

He referred to a deaf peasant girl of twenty, who was seated in one of the arm-chairs. Instead of listening, however, Pierre, who was very weary, still with a buzzing in his head, contented himself with gazing at the scene, endeavouring to form some notion of the people assembled in the room. There were some fifty altogether, many of them standing and leaning against the walls. Half a dozen, however, were seated at the two tables, a central position being occupied by the superintendent of the piscinas, who was constantly consulting a thick register; whilst around him were a Father of the Assumption and three young seminarists who acted as secretaries, writing, searching for documents, passing them and classifying them again after each examination. Pierre, however, took most interest in a Father of the Immaculate Conception, Father Dargeles, who had been pointed out to him that morning as being the editor of the "Journal de la Grotte." This ecclesiastic, whose thin little face, with its blinking eyes, pointed nose, and delicate mouth was ever smiling, had modestly seated himself at the end of the lower table where he occasionally took notes for his newspaper. He alone, of the community to which he belonged, showed himself during the three days of the national pilgrimage. Behind him, however, one could divine the presence of all the others, the slowly developed hidden power which organised everything and raked in all the proceeds.

The onlookers consisted almost entirely of inquisitive people and witnesses, including a score of doctors and a few priests. The medical men, who had come from all parts, mostly preserved silence, only a few of them occasionally venturing to ask a question; and every now and then they would exchange oblique glances, more occupied apparently in watching one another than in verifying the facts submitted to their examination. Who could they be? Some names were mentioned, but they were quite unknown. Only one had caused any stir, that of a celebrated doctor, professor at a Catholic university.

That afternoon, however, Doctor Bonamy, who never sat down, busy as he was conducting the proceedings and questioning the patients, reserved most of his attentions for a short, fair-haired man, a writer of some talent who contributed to one of the most widely read Paris newspapers, and who, in the course of a holiday tour, had by chance reached Lourdes that morning. Was not this an unbeliever whom it might be possible to convert, whose influence it would be desirable to gain for advertisement's sake? Such at all events appeared to be M. Bonamy's opinion, for he had compelled the journalist to take the second arm-chair, and with an affectation of smiling good-nature was treating him to a full performance, again and again repeating that he and his patrons had nothing to hide, and that everything took place in the most open manner.

"We only desire light," he exclaimed. "We never cease to call for the investigations of all willing men."

Then, as the alleged cure of the deaf girl did not seem at all a promising case, he addressed her somewhat roughly: "Come, come, my girl, this is only a beginning. You must come back when there are more distinct signs of improvement." And turning to the journalist he added in an undertone: "If we were to believe them they would all be healed. But the only cures we accept are those which are thoroughly proven, which are as apparent as the sun itself. Pray notice moreover that I say cures and not miracles; for we doctors do not take upon ourselves to interpret and explain. We are simply here to see if the patients, who submit themselves to our examination, have really lost all symptoms of their ailments."

Thereupon he struck an attitude. Doubtless he spoke like this in order that his rectitude might not be called in question. Believing without believing, he knew that science was yet so obscure, so full of surprises, that what seemed impossible might always come to pass; and thus, in the declining years of his life, he had contrived to secure an exceptional position at the Grotto, a position which had both its inconveniences and its advantages, but which, taken for all in all, was very comfortable and pleasant.

And now, in reply to a question from the Paris journalist, he began to explain his mode of proceeding. Each patient who accompanied the pilgrimage arrived provided with papers, amongst which there was almost always a certificate of the doctor who had been attending the case. At times even there were certificates given by several doctors, hospital bulletins and so forth—quite a record of the illness in its various stages. And thus if a cure took place and the cured person came forward, it was only necessary to consult his or her set of documents in order to ascertain the nature of the ailment, and then examination would show if that ailment had really disappeared.

Pierre was now listening. Since he had been there, seated and resting himself, he had grown calmer, and his mind was clear once more. It was only the heat which at present caused him any inconvenience. And thus, interested as he was by Doctor Bonamy's explanations, and desirous of forming an opinion, he would have spoken out and questioned, had it not been for his cloth which condemned him to remain in the background. He was delighted, therefore, when the little fair-haired gentleman, the influential writer, began to bring forward the objections which at once occurred to him.* Was it not most unfortunate that one doctor should diagnose the illness and that another one should verify the cure? In this mode of proceeding there was certainly a source of frequent error. The better plan would have been for a medical commission to examine all the patients as soon as they arrived at Lourdes and draw up reports on every case, to which reports the same commission would have referred whenever an alleged cure was brought before it. Doctor Bonamy, however, did not fall in with this suggestion. He replied, with some reason, that a commission would never suffice for such gigantic labour. Just think of it! A thousand patients to examine in a single morning! And how many different theories there would be, how many contrary diagnoses, how many endless discussions, all of a nature to increase the general uncertainty! The preliminary examination of the patients, which was almost always impossible, would, even if attempted, leave the door open for as many errors as the present system. In practice, it was necessary to remain content with the certificates delivered by the medical men who had been in attendance on the patients, and these certificates accordingly acquired capital, decisive importance. Doctor Bonamy ran through the documents lying on one of the tables and gave the Paris journalist some of these certificates to read. A great many of them unfortunately were very brief. Others, more skilfully drawn up, clearly specified the nature of the complaint; and some of the doctors' signatures were even certified by the mayors of the localities where they resided. Nevertheless doubts remained, innumerable and not to be surmounted. Who were these doctors? Who could tell if they possessed sufficient scientific authority to write as they did? With all respect to the medical profession, were there not innumerable doctors whose attainments were very limited? And, besides, might not these have been influenced by circumstances that one knew nothing of, in some cases by considerations of a personal character? One was tempted to ask for an inquiry respecting each of these medical men. Since everything was based on the documents supplied by the patients, these documents ought to have been most carefully controlled; for there could be no proof of any miracle if the absolute certainty of the alleged ailments had not been demonstrated by stringent examination.

* The reader will doubtless have understood that the Parisian
journalist is none other than M. Zola himself—Trans.

Very red and covered with perspiration, Doctor Bonamy waved his arms. "But that is the course we follow, that is the course we follow!" said he. "As soon as it seems to us that a case of cure cannot be explained by natural means, we institute a minute inquiry, we request the person who has been cured to return here for further examination. And as you can see, we surround ourselves with all means of enlightenment. These gentlemen here, who are listening to us, are nearly every one of them doctors who have come from all parts of France. We always entreat them to express their doubts if they feel any, to discuss the cases with us, and a very detailed report of each discussion is drawn up. You hear me, gentlemen; by all means protest if anything occurs here of a nature to offend your sense of truth."

Not one of the onlookers spoke. Most of the doctors present were undoubtedly Catholics, and naturally enough they merely bowed. As for the others, the unbelievers, the savants pure and simple, they looked on and evinced some interest in certain phenomena, but considerations of courtesy deterred them from entering into discussions which they knew would have been useless. When as men of sense their discomfort became too great, and they felt themselves growing angry, they simply left the room.

As nobody breathed a word, Doctor Bonamy became quite triumphant, and on the journalist asking him if he were all alone to accomplish so much work, he replied: "Yes, all alone; but my functions as doctor of the Grotto are not so complicated as you may think, for, I repeat it, they simply consist in verifying cures whenever any take place." However, he corrected himself, and added with a smile: "All! I was forgetting, I am not quite alone, I have Raboin, who helps me to keep things a little bit in order here."

So saying, he pointed to a stout, grey-haired man of forty, with a heavy face and bull-dog jaw. Raboin was an ardent believer, one of those excited beings who did not allow the miracles to be called in question. And thus he often suffered from his duties at the Verification Office, where he was ever ready to growl with anger when anybody disputed a prodigy. The appeal to the doctors had made him quite lose his temper, and his superior had to calm him.

"Come, Raboin, my friend, be quiet!" said Doctor Bonamy. "All sincere opinions are entitled to a hearing."

However, the defile of patients was resumed. A man was now brought in whose trunk was so covered with eczema that when he took off his shirt a kind of grey flour fell from his skin. He was not cured, but simply declared that he came to Lourdes every year, and always went away feeling relieved. Then came a lady, a countess, who was fearfully emaciated, and whose story was an extraordinary one. Cured of tuberculosis by the Blessed Virgin, a first time, seven years previously, she had subsequently given birth to four children, and had then again fallen into consumption. At present she was a morphinomaniac, but her first bath had already relieved her so much, that she proposed taking part in the torchlight procession that same evening with the twenty-seven members of her family whom she had brought with her to Lourdes. Then there was a woman afflicted with nervous aphonia, who after months of absolute dumbness had just recovered her voice at the moment when the Blessed Sacrament went by at the head of the four o'clock procession.

"Gentlemen," declared Doctor Bonamy, affecting the graciousness of a savant of extremely liberal views, "as you are aware, we do not draw any conclusions when a nervous affection is in question. Still you will kindly observe that this woman was treated at the Salpetriere for six months, and that she had to come here to find her tongue suddenly loosened."

Despite all these fine words he displayed some little impatience, for he would have greatly liked to show the gentleman from Paris one of those remarkable instances of cure which occasionally presented themselves during the four o'clock procession—that being the moment of grace and exaltation when the Blessed Virgin interceded for those whom she had chosen. But on this particular afternoon there had apparently been none. The cures which had so far passed before them were doubtful ones, deficient in interest. Meanwhile, out-of-doors, you could hear the stamping and roaring of the crowd, goaded into a frenzy by repeated hymns, enfevered by its earnest desire for the Divine interposition, and growing more and more enervated by the delay.

All at once, however, a smiling, modest-looking young girl, whose clear eyes sparkled with intelligence, entered the office. "Ah!" exclaimed Doctor Bonamy joyously, "here is our little friend Sophie. A remarkable cure, gentlemen, which took place at the same season last year, and the results of which I will ask permission to show you."

Pierre had immediately recognized Sophie Couteau, the miraculee who had got into the train at Poitiers. And he now witnessed a repetition of the scene which had already been enacted in his presence. Doctor Bonamy began giving detailed explanations to the little fair-haired gentleman, who displayed great attention. The case, said the doctor, had been one of caries of the bones of the left heel, with a commencement of necrosis necessitating excision; and yet the frightful, suppurating sore had been healed in a minute at the first immersion in the piscina.

"Tell the gentlemen how it happened, Sophie," he added.

The little girl made her usual pretty gesture as a sign to everybody to be attentive. And then she began: "Well, it was like this; my foot was past cure, I couldn't even go to church any more, and it had to be kept bandaged because there was always a lot of matter coming from it. Monsieur Rivoire, the doctor, who had made a cut in it so as to see inside it, said that he should be obliged to take out a piece of the bone; and that, sure enough, would have made me lame for life. But when I got to Lourdes, and had prayed a great deal to the Blessed Virgin, I went to dip my foot in the water, wishing so much that I might be cured, that I did not even take the time to pull the bandages off. And everything remained in the water; there was no longer anything the matter with my foot when I took it out."

Doctor Bonamy listened, and punctuated each word with an approving nod. "And what did your doctor say, Sophie?" he asked.

"When I got back to Vivonne, and Monsieur Rivoire saw my foot again, he said: 'Whether it be God or the Devil who has cured this child, it is all the same to me; but in all truth, she is cured.'"

A burst of laughter rang out. The doctor's remark was sure to produce an effect.

"And what was it, Sophie, that you said to Madame la Comtesse, the superintendent of your ward?"

"Ah, yes! I hadn't brought many bandages for my foot with me, and I said to her, 'It was very kind of the Blessed Virgin to cure me the first day, as I should have run out of linen on the morrow.'"

Then there was fresh laughter, a general display of satisfaction at seeing her look so pretty, telling her story, which she now knew by heart, in too recitative a manner, but, nevertheless, remaining very touching and truthful in appearance.

"Take off your shoe, Sophie," now said Doctor Bonamy; "show your foot to these gentlemen. Let them feel it. Nobody must retain any doubt."

The little foot promptly appeared, very white, very clean, carefully tended indeed, with its scar just below the ankle, a long scar, whose whity seam testified to the gravity of the complaint. Some of the medical men had drawn near, and looked on in silence. Others, whose opinions, no doubt, were already formed, did not disturb themselves, though one of them, with an air of extreme politeness, inquired why the Blessed Virgin had not made a new foot while she was about it, for this would assuredly have given her no more trouble. Doctor Bonamy, however, quickly replied, that if the Blessed Virgin had left a scar, it was certainly in order that a trace, a proof of the miracle, might remain. Then he entered into technical particulars, demonstrating that a fragment of bone and flesh must have been instantly formed, and this, of course, could not be explained in any natural way.

"Mon Dieu!" interrupted the little fair-haired gentleman, "there is no need of any such complicated affair. Let me merely see a finger cut with a penknife, let me see it dipped in the water, and let it come out with the cut cicatrised. The miracle will be quite as great, and I shall bow to it respectfully." Then he added: "If I possessed a source which could thus close up sores and wounds, I would turn the world topsy-turvy. I do not know exactly how I should manage it, but at all events I would summon the nations, and the nations would come. I should cause the miracles to be verified in such an indisputable manner, that I should be the master of the earth. Just think what an extraordinary power it would be—a divine power. But it would be necessary that not a doubt should remain, the truth would have to be as patent, as apparent as the sun itself. The whole world would behold it and believe!"

Then he began discussing various methods of control with the doctor. He had admitted that, owing to the great number of patients, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to examine them all on their arrival. Only, why didn't they organise a special ward at the hospital, a ward which would be reserved for cases of visible sores? They would have thirty such cases all told, which might be subjected to the preliminary examination of a committee. Authentic reports would be drawn up, and the sores might even be photographed. Then, if a case of cure should present itself, the commission would merely have to authenticate it by a fresh report. And in all this there would be no question of any internal complaint, the diagnostication of which is difficult, and liable to be controverted. There would be visible evidence of the ailment, and cure could be proved.

Somewhat embarrassed, Doctor Bonamy replied: "No doubt, no doubt; all we ask for is enlightenment. The difficulty would be in forming the committee you speak of. If you only knew how little medical men agree! However, there is certainly an idea in what you say."

Fortunately a fresh patient now came to his assistance. Whilst little Sophie Couteau, already forgotten, was putting on, her shoes again, Elise Rouquet appeared, and, removing her wrap, displayed her diseased face to view. She related that she had been bathing it with her handkerchief ever since the morning, and it seemed to her that her sore, previously so fresh and raw, was already beginning to dry and grow paler in colour. This was true; Pierre noticed, with great surprise, that the aspect of the sore was now less horrible. This supplied fresh food for the discussion on visible sores, for the little fair-haired gentleman clung obstinately to his idea of organising a special ward. Indeed, said he, if the condition of this girl had been verified that morning, and she should be cured, what a triumph it would have been for the Grotto, which could have claimed to have healed a lupus! It would then have no longer been possible to deny that miracles were worked.

Doctor Chassaigne had so far kept in the background, motionless and silent, as though he desired that the facts alone should exercise their influence on Pierre. But he now leant forward and said to him in an undertone: "Visible sores, visible sores indeed! That gentleman can have no idea that our most learned medical men suspect many of these sores to be of nervous origin. Yes, we are discovering that complaints of this kind are often simply due to bad nutrition of the skin. These questions of nutrition are still so imperfectly studied and understood! And some medical men are also beginning to prove that the faith which heals can even cure sores, certain forms of lupus among others. And so I would ask what certainty that gentleman would obtain with his ward for visible sores? There would simply be a little more confusion and passion in arguing the eternal question. No, no! Science is vain, it is a sea of uncertainty."

He smiled sorrowfully whilst Doctor Bonamy, after advising Elise Rouquet to continue using the water as lotion and to return each day for further examination, repeated with his prudent, affable air: "At all events, gentlemen, there are signs of improvement in this case—that is beyond doubt."

But all at once the office was fairly turned topsy-turvy by the arrival of La Grivotte, who swept in like a whirlwind, almost dancing with delight and shouting in a full voice: "I am cured! I am cured!"

And forthwith she began to relate that they had first of all refused to bathe her, and that she had been obliged to insist and beg and sob in order to prevail upon them to do so, after receiving Father Fourcade's express permission. And then it had all happened as she had previously said it would. She had not been immersed in the icy water for three minutes—all perspiring as she was with her consumptive rattle—before she had felt strength returning to her like a whipstroke lashing her whole body. And now a flaming excitement possessed her; radiant, stamping her feet, she was unable to keep still.

"I am cured, my good gentlemen, I am cured!"

Pierre looked at her, this time quite stupefied. Was this the same girl whom, on the previous night, he had seen lying on the carriage seat, annihilated, coughing and spitting blood, with her face of ashen hue? He could not recognise her as she now stood there, erect and slender, her cheeks rosy, her eyes sparkling, upbuoyed by a determination to live, a joy in living already.

"Gentlemen," declared Doctor Bonamy, "the case appears to me to be a very interesting one. We will see."

Then he asked for the documents concerning La Grivotte. But they could not be found among all the papers heaped together on the tables. The young seminarists who acted as secretaries began turning everything over; and the superintendent of the piscinas who sat in their midst himself had to get up to see if these documents were in the "canterbury." At last, when he had sat down again, he found them under the register which lay open before him. Among them were three medical certificates which he read aloud. All three of them agreed in stating that the case was one of advanced phthisis, complicated by nervous incidents which invested it with a peculiar character.

Doctor Bonamy wagged his head as though to say that such an ensemble of testimony could leave no room for doubt. Forthwith, he subjected the patient to a prolonged auscultation. And he murmured: "I hear nothing—I hear nothing." Then, correcting himself, he added: "At least I hear scarcely anything."

Finally he turned towards the five-and-twenty or thirty doctors who were assembled there in silence. "Will some of you gentlemen," he asked, "kindly lend me the help of your science? We are here to study and discuss these questions."

At first nobody stirred. Then there was one who ventured to come forward and, in his turn subject the patient to auscultation. But instead of declaring himself, he continued reflecting, shaking his head anxiously. At last he stammered that in his opinion one must await further developments. Another doctor, however, at once took his place, and this one expressed a decided opinion. He could hear nothing at all, that woman could never have suffered from phthisis. Then others followed him; in fact, with the exception of five or six whose smiling faces remained impenetrable, they all joined the defile. And the confusion now attained its apogee; for each gave an opinion sensibly differing from that of his colleagues, so that a general uproar arose and one could no longer hear oneself speak. Father Dargeles alone retained the calmness of perfect serenity, for he had scented one of those cases which impassion people and redound to the glory of Our Lady of Lourdes. He was already taking notes on a corner of the table.

Thanks to all the noise of the discussion, Pierre and Doctor Chassaigne, seated at some distance from the others, were now able to talk together without being heard. "Oh! those piscinas!" said the young priest, "I have just seen them. To think that the water should be so seldom changed! What filth it is, what a soup of microbes! What a terrible blow for the present-day mania, that rage for antiseptic precautions! How is it that some pestilence does not carry off all these poor people? The opponents of the microbe theory must be having a good laugh—"

M. Chassaigne stopped him. "No, no, my child," said he. "The baths may be scarcely clean, but they offer no danger. Please notice that the temperature of the water never rises above fifty degrees, and that seventy-seven are necessary for the cultivation of germs.* Besides, scarcely any contagious diseases come to Lourdes, neither cholera, nor typhus, nor variola, nor measles, nor scarlatina. We only see certain organic affections here, paralysis, scrofula, tumours, ulcers and abscesses, cancers and phthisis; and the latter cannot be transmitted by the water of the baths. The old sores which are bathed have nothing to fear, and offer no risk of contagion. I can assure you that on this point there is even no necessity for the Blessed Virgin to intervene."

* The above are Fahrenheit degrees.—Trans.

"Then, in that case, doctor," rejoined Pierre, "when you were practising, you would have dipped all your patients in icy water—women at no matter what season, rheumatic patients, people suffering from diseases of the heart, consumptives, and so on? For instance, that unhappy girl, half dead, and covered with sweat—would you have bathed her?"

"Certainly not! There are heroic methods of treatment to which, in practice, one does not dare to have recourse. An icy bath may undoubtedly kill a consumptive; but do we know, whether, in certain circumstances, it might not save her? I, who have ended by admitting that a supernatural power is at work here, I willingly admit that some cures must take place under natural conditions, thanks to that immersion in cold water which seems to us idiotic and barbarous. Ah! the things we don't know, the things we don't know!"

He was relapsing into his anger, his hatred of science, which he scorned since it had left him scared and powerless beside the deathbed of his wife and his daughter. "You ask for certainties," he resumed, "but assuredly it is not medicine which will give you them. Listen for a moment to those gentlemen and you will be edified. Is it not beautiful, all that confusion in which so many opinions clash together? Certainly there are ailments with which one is thoroughly acquainted, even to the most minute details of their evolution; there are remedies also, the effects of which have been studied with the most scrupulous care; but the thing that one does not know, that one cannot know, is the relation of the remedy to the ailment, for there are as many cases as there may be patients, each liable to variation, so that experimentation begins afresh every time. This is why the practice of medicine remains an art, for there can be no experimental finality in it. Cure always depends on chance, on some fortunate circumstance, on some bright idea of the doctor's. And so you will understand that all the people who come and discuss here make me laugh when they talk about the absolute laws of science. Where are those laws in medicine? I should like to have them shown to me."

He did not wish to say any more, but his passion carried him away, so he went on: "I told you that I had become a believer—nevertheless, to speak the truth, I understand very well why this worthy Doctor Bonamy is so little affected, and why he continues calling upon doctors in all parts of the world to come and study his miracles. The more doctors that might come, the less likelihood there would be of the truth being established in the inevitable battle between contradictory diagnoses and methods of treatment. If men cannot agree about a visible sore, they surely cannot do so about an internal lesion the existence of which will be admitted by some, and denied by others. And why then should not everything become a miracle? For, after all, whether the action comes from nature or from some unknown power, medical men are, as a rule, none the less astonished when an illness terminates in a manner which they have not foreseen. No doubt, too, things are very badly organised here. Those certificates from doctors whom nobody knows have no real value. All documents ought to be stringently inquired into. But even admitting any absolute scientific strictness, you must be very simple, my dear child, if you imagine that a positive conviction would be arrived at, absolute for one and all. Error is implanted in man, and there is no more difficult task than that of demonstrating to universal satisfaction the most insignificant truth."

Pierre had now begun to understand what was taking place at Lourdes, the extraordinary spectacle which the world had been witnessing for years, amidst the reverent admiration of some and the insulting laughter of others. Forces as yet but imperfectly studied, of which one was even ignorant, were certainly at work—auto-suggestion, long prepared disturbance of the nerves; inspiriting influence of the journey, the prayers, and the hymns; and especially the healing breath, the unknown force which was evolved from the multitude, in the acute crisis of faith. Thus it seemed to him anything but intelligent to believe in trickery. The facts were both of a much more lofty and much more simple nature. There was no occasion for the Fathers of the Grotto to descend to falsehood; it was sufficient that they should help in creating confusion, that they should utilise the universal ignorance. It might even be admitted that everybody acted in good faith—the doctors void of genius who delivered the certificates, the consoled patients who believed themselves cured, and the impassioned witnesses who swore that they had beheld what they described. And from all this was evolved the obvious impossibility of proving whether there was a miracle or not. And such being the case, did not the miracle naturally become a reality for the greater number, for all those who suffered and who had need of hope?

Then, as Doctor Bonamy, who had noticed that they were chatting apart, came up to them, Pierre ventured to inquire: "What is about the proportion of the cures to the number of cases?"

"About ten per cent.," answered the doctor; and reading in the young priest's eyes the words that he could not utter, he added in a very cordial way: "Oh! there would be many more, they would all be cured if we chose to listen to them. But it is as well to say it, I am only here to keep an eye on the miracles, like a policeman as it were. My only functions are to check excessive zeal, and to prevent holy things from being made ridiculous. In one word, this office is simply an office where a visa is given when the cures have been verified and seem real ones."

He was interrupted, however, by a low growl. Raboin was growing angry: "The cures verified, the cures verified," he muttered. "What is the use of that? There is no pause in the working of the miracles. What is the use of verifying them so far as believers are concerned? They merely have to bow down and believe. And what is the use, too, as regards the unbelievers? They will never be convinced. The work we do here is so much foolishness."

Doctor Bonamy severely ordered him to hold his tongue. "You are a rebel, Raboin," said he; "I shall tell Father Capdebarthe that I won't have you here any longer since you pass your time in sowing disobedience."

Nevertheless, there was truth in what had just been said by this man, who so promptly showed his teeth, eager to bite whenever his faith was assailed; and Pierre looked at him with sympathy. All the work of the Verification Office—work anything but well performed—was indeed useless, for it wounded the feelings of the pious, and failed to satisfy the incredulous. Besides, can a miracle be proved? No, you must believe in it! When God is pleased to intervene, it is not for man to try to understand. In the ages of real belief, Science did not make any meddlesome attempt to explain the nature of the Divinity. And why should it come and interfere here? By doing so, it simply hampered faith and diminished its own prestige. No, no, there must be no Science, you must throw yourself upon the ground, kiss it, and believe. Or else you must take yourself off. No compromise was possible. If examination once began it must go on, and must, fatally, conduct to doubt.

Pierre's greatest sufferings, however, came from the extraordinary conversations which he heard around him. There were some believers present who spoke of the miracles with the most amazing ease and tranquillity. The most stupefying stories left their serenity entire. Another miracle, and yet another! And with smiles on their faces, their reason never protesting, they went on relating such imaginings as could only have come from diseased brains. They were evidently living in such a state of visionary fever that nothing henceforth could astonish them. And not only did Pierre notice this among folks of simple, childish minds, illiterate, hallucinated creatures like Raboin, but also among the men of intellect, the men with cultivated brains, the savants like Doctor Bonamy and others. It was incredible. And thus Pierre felt a growing discomfort arising within him, a covert anger which would doubtless end by bursting forth. His reason was struggling, like that of some poor wretch who after being flung into a river, feels the waters seize him from all sides and stifle him; and he reflected that the minds which, like Doctor Chassaigne's, sink at last into blind belief, must pass though this same discomfort and struggle before the final shipwreck.

He glanced at his old friend and saw how sorrowful he looked, struck down by destiny, as weak as a crying child, and henceforth quite alone in life. Nevertheless, he was unable to check the cry of protest which rose to his lips: "No, no, if we do not know everything, even if we shall never know everything, there is no reason why we should leave off learning. It is wrong that the Unknown should profit by man's debility and ignorance. On the contrary, the eternal hope should be that the things which now seem inexplicable will some day be explained; and we cannot, under healthy conditions, have any other ideal than this march towards the discovery of the Unknown, this victory slowly achieved by reason amidst all the miseries both of the flesh and of the mind. Ah! reason—it is my reason which makes me suffer, and it is from my reason too that I await all my strength. When reason dies, the whole being perishes. And I feel but an ardent thirst to satisfy my reason more and more, even though I may lose all happiness in doing so."

Tears were appearing in Doctor Chassaigne's eyes; doubtless the memory of his dear dead ones had again flashed upon him. And, in his turn, he murmured: "Reason, reason, yes, certainly it is a thing to be very proud of; it embodies the very dignity of life. But there is love, which is life's omnipotence, the one blessing to be won again when you have lost it."

His voice sank in a stifled sob; and as in a mechanical way he began to finger the sets of documents lying on the table, he espied among them one whose cover bore the name of Marie de Guersaint in large letters. He opened it and read the certificates of the two doctors who had inferred that the case was one of paralysis of the marrow. "Come, my child," he then resumed, "I know that you feel warm affection for Mademoiselle de Guersaint. What should you say if she were cured here? There are here some certificates, bearing honourable names, and you know that paralysis of this nature is virtually incurable. Well, if this young person should all at once run and jump about as I have seen so many others do, would you not feel very happy, would you not at last acknowledge the intervention of a supernatural power?"

Pierre was about to reply, when he suddenly remembered his cousin Beauclair's expression of opinion, the prediction that the miracle would come about like a lightning stroke, an awakening, an exaltation of the whole being; and he felt his discomfort increase and contented himself with replying: "Yes, indeed, I should be very happy. And you are right; there is doubtless only a determination to secure happiness in all the agitation one beholds here."

However, he could remain in that office no longer. The heat was becoming so great that perspiration streamed down the faces of those present. Doctor Bonamy had begun to dictate a report of the examination of La Grivotte to one of the seminarists, while Father Dargeles, watchful with regard to the phraseology employed, occasionally rose and whispered some verbal alteration in the writer's ear. Meantime, the tumult around them was continuing; the discussion among the medical men had taken another turn and now bore on certain technical points of no significance with regard to the case in question. You could no longer breathe within those wooden walls, nausea was upsetting every heart and every head. The little fair-haired gentleman, the influential writer from Paris, had already gone away, quite vexed at not having seen a real miracle.

Pierre thereupon said to Doctor Chassaigne, "Let us go; I shall be taken ill if I stay here any longer."

They left the office at the same time as La Grivotte, who was at last being dismissed. And as soon as they reached the door they found themselves caught in a torrential, surging, jostling crowd, which was eager to behold the girl so miraculously healed; for the report of the miracle must have already spread, and one and all were struggling to see the chosen one, question her, and touch her. And she, with her empurpled cheeks, her flaming eyes, her dancing gait, could do nothing but repeat, "I am cured, I am cured!"

Shouts drowned her voice, she herself was submerged, carried off amidst the eddies of the throng. For a moment one lost sight of her as though she had sunk in those tumultuous waters; then she suddenly reappeared close to Pierre and the doctor, who endeavoured to extricate her from the crush. They had just perceived the Commander, one of whose manias was to come down to the piscinas and the Grotto in order to vent his anger there. With his frock-coat tightly girding him in military fashion, he was, as usual, leaning on his silver-knobbed walking-stick, slightly dragging his left leg, which his second attack of paralysis had stiffened. And his face reddened and his eyes flashed with anger when La Grivotte, pushing him aside in order that she might pass, repeated amidst the wild enthusiasm of the crowd, "I am cured, I am cured!"

"Well!" he cried, seized with sudden fury, "so much the worse for you, my girl!"

Exclamations arose, folks began to laugh, for he was well known, and his maniacal passion for death was forgiven him. However, when he began stammering confused words, saying that it was pitiful to desire life when one was possessed of neither beauty nor fortune, and that this girl ought to have preferred to die at once rather than suffer again, people began to growl around him, and Abbe Judaine, who was passing, had to extricate him from his trouble. The priest drew him away. "Be quiet, my friend, be quiet," he said. "It is scandalous. Why do you rebel like this against the goodness of God who occasionally shows His compassion for our sufferings by alleviating them? I tell you again that you yourself ought to fall on your knees and beg Him to restore to you the use of your leg and let you live another ten years."

The Commander almost choked with anger. "What!" he replied, "ask to live for another ten years, when my finest day will be the day I die! Show myself as spiritless, as cowardly as the thousands of patients whom I see pass along here, full of a base terror of death, shrieking aloud their weakness, their passion to remain alive! Ah! no, I should feel too much contempt for myself. I want to die!—to die at once! It will be so delightful to be no more."

He was at last out of the scramble of the pilgrims, and again found himself near Doctor Chassaigne and Pierre on the bank of the Gave. And he addressed himself to the doctor, whom he often met: "Didn't they try to restore a dead man to life just now?" he asked; "I was told of it—it almost suffocated me. Eh, doctor? You understand? That man was happy enough to be dead, and they dared to dip him in their water in the criminal hope to make him alive again! But suppose they had succeeded, suppose their water had animated that poor devil once more—for one never knows what may happen in this funny world—don't you think that the man would have had a perfect right to spit his anger in the face of those corpse-menders? Had he asked them to awaken him? How did they know if he were not well pleased at being dead? Folks ought to be consulted at any rate. Just picture them playing the same vile trick on me when I at last fall into the great deep sleep. Ah! I would give them a nice reception. 'Meddle with what concerns you,' I should say, and you may be sure I should make all haste to die again!"

He looked so singular in the fit of rage which had come over him that Abbe Judaine and the doctor could not help smiling. Pierre, however, remained grave, chilled by the great quiver which swept by. Were not those words he had just heard the despairing imprecations of Lazarus? He had often imagined Lazarus emerging from the tomb and crying aloud: "Why hast Thou again awakened me to this abominable life, O Lord? I was sleeping the eternal, dreamless sleep so deeply; I was at last enjoying such sweet repose amidst the delights of nihility! I had known every wretchedness and every dolour, treachery, vain hope, defeat, sickness; as one of the living I had paid my frightful debt to suffering, for I was born without knowing why, and I lived without knowing how; and now, behold, O Lord, Thou requirest me to pay my debt yet again; Thou condemnest me to serve my term of punishment afresh! Have I then been guilty of some inexpiable transgression that thou shouldst inflict such cruel chastisement upon me? Alas! to live again, to feel oneself die a little in one's flesh each day, to have no intelligence save such as is required in order to doubt; no will, save such as one must have to be unable; no tenderness, save such as is needed to weep over one's own sorrows. Yet it was passed, I had crossed the terrifying threshold of death, I had known that second which is so horrible that it sufficeth to poison the whole of life. I had felt the sweat of agony cover me with moisture, the blood flow back from my limbs, my breath forsake me, flee away in a last gasp. And Thou ordainest that I should know this distress a second time, that I should die twice, that my human misery should exceed that of all mankind. Then may it be even now, O Lord! Yes, I entreat Thee, do also this great miracle; may I once more lay myself down in this grave, and again fall asleep without suffering from the interruption of my eternal slumber. Have mercy upon me, and forbear from inflicting on me the torture of living yet again; that torture which is so frightful that Thou hast never inflicted it on any being. I have always loved Thee and served Thee; and I beseech Thee do not make of me the greatest example of Thy wrath, a cause of terror unto all generations. But show unto me Thy gentleness and loving kindness, O Lord! restore unto me the slumber I have earned, and let me sleep once more amid the delights of Thy nihility."

While Pierre was pondering in this wise, Abbe Judaine had led the Commander away, at last managing to calm him; and now the young priest shook hands with Doctor Chassaigne, recollecting that it was past five o'clock, and that Marie must be waiting for him. On his way back to the Grotto, however, he encountered the Abbe des Hermoises deep in conversation with M. de Guersaint, who had only just left his room at the hotel, and was quite enlivened by his good nap. He and his companion were admiring the extraordinary beauty which the fervour of faith imparted to some women's countenances, and they also spoke of their projected trip to the Cirque de Gavarnie.

On learning, however, that Marie had taken a first bath with no effect, M. de Guersaint at once followed Pierre. They found the poor girl still in the same painful stupor, with her eyes still fixed on the Blessed Virgin who had not deigned to hear her. She did not answer the loving words which her father addressed to her, but simply glanced at him with her large distressful eyes, and then again turned them upon the marble statue which looked so white amid the radiance of the tapers. And whilst Pierre stood waiting to take her back to the hospital, M. de Guersaint devoutly fell upon his knees. At first he prayed with passionate ardour for his daughter's cure, and then he solicited, on his own behalf, the favour of finding some wealthy person who would provide him with the million francs that he needed for his studies on aerial navigation.

V. BERNADETTE'S TRIALS

ABOUT eleven o'clock that night, leaving M. de Guersaint in his room at the Hotel of the Apparitions, it occurred to Pierre to return for a moment to the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours before going to bed himself. He had left Marie in such a despairing state, so fiercely silent, that he was full of anxiety about her. And when he had asked for Madame de Jonquiere at the door of the Sainte-Honorine Ward he became yet more anxious, for the news was by no means good. The young girl, said the superintendent, had not even opened her mouth. She would answer nobody, and had even refused to eat. Madame de Jonquiere, insisted therefore that Pierre should come in. True, the presence of men was forbidden in the women's wards at night-time, but then a priest is not a man.

"She only cares for you and will only listen to you," said the worthy lady. "Pray come in and sit down near her till Abbe Judaine arrives. He will come at about one in the morning to administer the communion to our more afflicted sufferers, those who cannot move and who have to eat at daybreak. You will be able to assist him."

Pierre thereupon followed Madame de Jonquiere, who installed him at the head of Marie's bed. "My dear child," she said to the girl, "I have brought you somebody who is very fond of you. You will be able to chat with him, and you will be reasonable now, won't you?"

Marie, however, on recognising Pierre, gazed at him with an air of exasperated suffering, a black, stern expression of revolt.

"Would you like him to read something to you," resumed Madame de Jonquiere, "something that would ease and console you as he did in the train? No? It wouldn't interest you, you don't care for it? Well, we will see by-and-by. I will leave him with you, and I am sure you will be quite reasonable again in a few minutes."

Pierre then began speaking to her in a low voice, saying all the kind consoling things that his heart could think of, and entreating her not to allow herself to sink into such despair. If the Blessed Virgin had not cured her on the first day, it was because she reserved her for some conspicuous miracle. But he spoke in vain. Marie had turned her head away, and did not even seem to listen as she lay there with a bitter expression on her mouth and a gleam of irritation in her eyes, which wandered away into space. Accordingly he ceased speaking and began to gaze at the ward around him.

The spectacle was a frightful one. Never before had such a nausea of pity and terror affected his heart. They had long since dined, nevertheless plates of food which had been brought up from the kitchens still lay about the beds; and all through the night there were some who ate whilst others continued restlessly moaning, asking to be turned over or helped out of bed. As the hours went by a kind of vague delirium seemed to come upon almost all of them. Very few were able to sleep quietly. Some had been undressed and were lying between the sheets, but the greater number were simply stretched out on the beds, it being so difficult to get their clothes off that they did not even change their linen during the five days of the pilgrimage. In the semi-obscurity, moreover, the obstruction of the ward seemed to have increased. To the fifteen beds ranged along the walls and the seven mattresses filling the central space, some fresh pallets had been added, and on all sides there was a confused litter of ragged garments, old baskets, boxes, and valises. Indeed, you no longer knew where to step. Two smoky lanterns shed but a dim light upon this encampment of dying women, in which a sickly smell prevailed; for, instead of any freshness, merely the heavy heat of the August night came in through the two windows which had been left ajar. Nightmare-like shadows and cries sped to and fro, peopling the inferno, amidst the nocturnal agony of so much accumulated suffering.

However, Pierre recognised Raymonde, who, her duties over, had come to kiss her mother, before going to sleep in one of the garrets reserved to the Sisters of the hospital. For her own part, Madame de Jonquiere, taking her functions to heart, did not close her eyes during the three nights spent at Lourdes.

She certainly had an arm-chair in which to rest herself, but she never sat down in it for a moment with out being disturbed. It must be admitted that she was bravely seconded by little Madame Desagneaux, who displayed such enthusiastic zeal that Sister Hyacinthe asked her, with a smile: "Why don't you take the vows?" whereupon she responded, with an air of scared surprise: "Oh! I can't, I'm married, you know, and I'm very fond of my husband." As for Madame Volmar, she had not even shown herself; but it was alleged that Madame de Jonquiere had sent her to bed on hearing her complain of a frightful headache. And this had put Madame Desagneaux in quite a temper; for, as she sensibly enough remarked, a person had no business to offer to nurse the sick when the slightest exertion exhausted her. She herself, however, at last began to feel her legs and arms aching, though she would not admit it, but hastened to every patient whom she heard calling, ever ready as she was to lend a helping hand. In Paris she would have rung for a servant rather than have moved a candlestick herself; but here she was ever coming and going, bringing and emptying basins, and passing her arms around patients to hold them up, whilst Madame de Jonquiere slipped pillows behind them. However, shortly after eleven o'clock, she was all at once overpowered. Having imprudently stretched herself in the armchair for a moment's rest, she there fell soundly asleep, her pretty head sinking on one of her shoulders amidst her lovely, wavy fair hair, which was all in disorder. And from that moment neither moan nor call, indeed no sound whatever, could waken her.

Madame de Jonquiere, however, had softly approached the young priest again. "I had an idea," said she in a low voice, "of sending for Monsieur Ferrand, the house-surgeon, you know, who accompanies us. He would have given the poor girl something to calm her. Only he is busy downstairs trying to relieve Brother Isidore, in the Family Ward. Besides, as you know, we are not supposed to give medical attendance here; our work consists in placing our dear sick ones in the hands of the Blessed Virgin."

Sister Hyacinthe, who had made up her mind to spend the night with the superintendent, now drew, near. "I have just come from the Family Ward," she said; "I went to take Monsieur Sabathier some oranges which I had promised him, and I saw Monsieur Ferrand, who had just succeeded in reviving Brother Isidore. Would you like me to go down and fetch him?"

But Pierre declined the offer. "No, no," he replied, "Marie will be sensible. I will read her a few consoling pages by-and-by, and then she will rest."

For the moment, however, the girl still remained obstinately silent. One of the two lanterns was hanging from the wall close by, and Pierre could distinctly see her thin face, rigid and motionless like stone. Then, farther away, in the adjoining bed, he perceived Elise Rouquet, who was sound asleep and no longer wore her fichu, but openly displayed her face, the ulcerations of which still continued to grow paler. And on the young priest's left hand was Madame Vetu, now greatly weakened, in a hopeless state, unable to doze off for a moment, shaken as she was by a continuous rattle. He said a few kind words to her, for which she thanked him with a nod; and, gathering her remaining strength together, she was at last able to say: "There were several cures to-day; I was very pleased to hear of them."

On a mattress at the foot of her bed was La Grivotte, who in a fever of extraordinary activity kept on sitting up to repeat her favourite phrase: "I am cured, I am cured!" And she went on to relate that she had eaten half a fowl for dinner, she who had been unable to eat for long months past. Then, too, she had followed the torchlight procession on foot during nearly a couple of hours, and she would certainly have danced till daybreak had the Blessed Virgin only been pleased to give a ball. And once more she repeated: "I am cured, yes, cured, quite cured!"

Thereupon Madame Vetu found enough strength to say with childlike serenity and perfect, gladsome abnegation: "The Blessed Virgin did well to cure her since she is poor. I am better pleased than if it had been myself, for I have my little shop to depend upon and can wait. We each have our turn, each our turn."

One and all displayed a like charity, a like pleasure that others should have been cured. Seldom, indeed, was any jealousy shown; they surrendered themselves to a kind of epidemical beatitude, to a contagious hope that they would all be cured whenever it should so please the Blessed Virgin. And it was necessary that she should not be offended by any undue impatience; for assuredly she had her reasons and knew right well why she began by healing some rather than others. Thus with the fraternity born of common suffering and hope, the most grievously afflicted patients prayed for the cure of their neighbours. None of them ever despaired, each fresh miracle was the promise of another one, of the one which would be worked on themselves. Their faith remained unshakable. A story was told of a paralytic woman, some farm servant, who with extraordinary strength of will had contrived to take a few steps at the Grotto, and who while being conveyed back to the hospital had asked to be set down that she might return to the Grotto on foot. But she had gone only half the distance when she had staggered, panting and livid; and on being brought to the hospital on a stretcher, she had died there, cured, however, said her neighbours in the ward. Each, indeed, had her turn; the Blessed Virgin forgot none of her dear daughters unless it were her design to grant some chosen one immediate admission into Paradise.

All at once, at the moment when Pierre was leaning towards her, again offering to read to her, Marie burst into furious sobs. Letting her head fall upon her friend's shoulder, she vented all her rebellion in a low, terrible voice, amidst the vague shadows of that awful room. She had experienced what seldom happened to her, a collapse of faith, a sudden loss of courage, all the rage of the suffering being who can no longer wait. Such was her despair, indeed, that she even became sacrilegious.

"No, no," she stammered, "the Virgin is cruel; she is unjust, for she did not cure me just now. Yet I felt so certain that she would grant my prayer, I had prayed to her so fervently. I shall never be cured, now that the first day is past. It was a Saturday, and I was convinced that I should be cured on a Saturday. I did not want to speak—and oh! prevent me, for my heart is too full, and I might say more than I ought to do."

With fraternal hands he had quickly taken hold of her head, and he was endeavouring to stifle the cry of her rebellion. "Be quiet, Marie, I entreat you! It would never do for anyone to hear you—you so pious! Do you want to scandalise every soul?"

But in spite of her efforts she was unable to keep silence. "I should stifle, I must speak out," she said. "I no longer love her, no longer believe in her. The tales which are related here are all falsehoods; there is nothing, she does not even exist, since she does not hear when one speaks to her, and sobs. If you only knew all that I said to her! Oh! I want to go away at once. Take me away, carry me away in your arms, so that I may go and die in the street, where the passers-by, at least, will take pity on my sufferings!"

She was growing weak again, and had once more fallen on her back, stammering, talking childishly. "Besides, nobody loves me," she said. "My father was not even there. And you, my friend, forsook me. When I saw that it was another who was taking me to the piscinas, I began to feel a chill. Yes, that chill of doubt which I often felt in Paris. And that is at least certain, I doubted—perhaps, indeed, that is why she did not cure me. I cannot have prayed well enough, I am not pious enough, no doubt."

She was no longer blaspheming, but seeking for excuses to explain the non-intervention of Heaven. However, her face retained an angry expression amidst this struggle which she was waging with the Supreme Power, that Power which she had loved so well and entreated so fervently, but which had not obeyed her. When, on rare occasions, a fit of rage of this description broke out in the ward, and the sufferers, lying on their beds, rebelled against their fate, sobbing and lamenting, and at times even swearing, the lady-hospitallers and the Sisters, somewhat shocked, would content themselves with simply closing the bed-curtains. Grace had departed, one must await its return. And at last, sometimes after long hours, the rebellious complaints would die away, and peace would reign again amidst the deep, woeful silence.

"Calm yourself, calm yourself, I implore you," Pierre gently repeated to Marie, seeing that a fresh attack was coming upon her, an attack of doubt in herself, of fear that she was unworthy of the divine assistance.

Sister Hyacinthe, moreover, had again drawn near. "You will not be able to take the sacrament by-and-by, my dear child," said she, "if you continue in such a state. Come, since we have given Monsieur l'Abbe permission to read to you, why don't you let him do so?"

Marie made a feeble gesture as though to say that she consented, and Pierre at once took out of the valise at the foot of her bed, the little blue-covered book in which the story of Bernadette was so naively related. As on the previous night, however, when the train was rolling on, he did not confine himself to the bald phraseology of the book, but began improvising, relating all manner of details in his own fashion, in order to charm the simple folks who listened to him. Nevertheless, with his reasoning, analytical proclivities, he could not prevent himself from secretly re-establishing the real facts, imparting, for himself alone, a human character to this legend, whose wealth of prodigies contributed so greatly to the cure of those that suffered. Women were soon sitting up on all the surrounding beds. They wished to hear the continuation of the story, for the thought of the sacrament which they were passionately awaiting had prevented almost all of them from getting to sleep. And seated there, in the pale light of the lantern hanging from the wall above him, Pierre little by little raised his voice, so that he might be heard by the whole ward.

"The persecutions began with the very first miracles. Called a liar and a lunatic, Bernadette was threatened with imprisonment. Abbe Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, and Monseigneur Laurence, Bishop of Tarbes, like the rest of the clergy, refrained from all intervention, waiting the course of events with the greatest prudence; whilst the civil authorities, the Prefect, the Public Prosecutor, the Mayor, and the Commissary of Police, indulged in excessive anti-religious zeal."

Continuing his perusal in this fashion, Pierre saw the real story rise up before him with invincible force. His mind travelled a short distance backward and he beheld Bernadette at the time of the first apparitions, so candid, so charming in her ignorance and good faith, amidst all her sufferings. And she was truly the visionary, the saint, her face assuming an expression of superhuman beauty during her crises of ecstasy. Her brow beamed, her features seemed to ascend, her eyes were bathed with light, whilst her parted lips burnt with divine love. And then her whole person became majestic; it was in a slow, stately way that she made the sign of the cross, with gestures which seemed to embrace the whole horizon. The neighbouring valleys, the villages, the towns, spoke of Bernadette alone. Although the Lady had not yet told her name, she was recognised, and people said, "It is she, the Blessed Virgin." On the first market-day, so many people flocked into Lourdes that the town quite overflowed. All wished to see the blessed child whom the Queen of the Angels had chosen, and who became so beautiful when the heavens opened to her enraptured gaze. The crowd on the banks of the Gave grew larger each morning, and thousands of people ended by installing themselves there, jostling one another that they might lose nothing of the spectacle! As soon as Bernadette appeared, a murmur of fervour spread: "Here is the saint, the saint, the saint!" Folks rushed forward to kiss her garments. She was a Messiah, the eternal Messiah whom the nations await, and the need of whom is ever arising from generation to generation. And, moreover, it was ever the same adventure beginning afresh: an apparition of the Virgin to a shepherdess; a voice exhorting the world to penitence; a spring gushing forth; and miracles astonishing and enrapturing the crowds that hastened to the spot in larger and larger numbers.

Ah! those first miracles of Lourdes, what a spring-tide flowering of consolation and hope they brought to the hearts of the wretched, upon whom poverty and sickness were preying! Old Bourriette's restored eyesight, little Bouhohort's resuscitation in the icy water, the deaf recovering their hearing, the lame suddenly enabled to walk, and so many other cases, Blaise Maumus, Bernade Soubies,* Auguste Bordes, Blaisette Soupenne, Benoite Cazeaux, in turn cured of the most dreadful ailments, became the subject of endless conversations, and fanned the illusions of all those who suffered either in their hearts or their flesh. On Thursday, March 4th, the last day of the fifteen visits solicited by the Virgin, there were more than twenty thousand persons assembled before the Grotto. Everybody, indeed, had come down from the mountains. And this immense throng found at the Grotto the divine food that it hungered for, a feast of the Marvellous, a sufficient meed of the Impossible to content its belief in a superior Power, which deigned to bestow some attention upon poor folks, and to intervene in the wretched affairs of this lower world, in order to re-establish some measure of justice and kindness. It was indeed the cry of heavenly charity bursting forth, the invisible helping hand stretched out at last to dress the eternal sores of humanity. Ah! that dream in which each successive generation sought refuge, with what indestructible energy did it not arise among the disinherited ones of this world as soon as it found a favourable spot, prepared by circumstances! And for centuries, perhaps, circumstances had never so combined to kindle the mystical fire of faith as they did at Lourdes.

* I give this name as written by M. Zola; but in other works on
Lourdes I find it given as "Bernarde Loubie—a bed-ridden old
woman, cured of a paralytic affection by drinking the water of
the Grotto."—Trans.

A new religion was about to be founded, and persecutions at once began, for religions only spring up amidst vexations and rebellions. And even as it was long ago at Jerusalem, when the tidings of miracles spread, the civil authorities—the Public Prosecutor, the Justice of the Peace, the Mayor, and particularly the Prefect of Tarbes—were all roused and began to bestir themselves. The Prefect was a sincere Catholic, a worshipper, a man of perfect honour, but he also had the firm mind of a public functionary, was a passionate defender of order, and a declared adversary of fanaticism which gives birth to disorder and religious perversion. Under his orders at Lourdes there was a Commissary of Police, a man of great intelligence and shrewdness, who had hitherto discharged his functions in a very proper way, and who, legitimately enough, beheld in this affair of the apparitions an opportunity to put his gift of sagacious skill to the proof. So the struggle began, and it was this Commissary who, on the first Sunday in Lent, at the time of the first apparitions, summoned Bernadette to his office in order that he might question her. He showed himself affectionate, then angry, then threatening, but all in vain; the answers which the girl gave him were ever the same. The story which she related, with its slowly accumulated details, had little by little irrevocably implanted itself in her infantile mind. And it was no lie on the part of this poor suffering creature, this exceptional victim of hysteria, but an unconscious haunting, a radical lack of will-power to free herself from her original hallucination. She knew not how to exert any such will, she could not, she would not exert it. Ah! the poor child, the dear child, so amiable and so gentle, so incapable of any evil thought, from that time forward lost to life, crucified by her fixed idea, whence one could only have extricated her by changing her environment, by restoring her to the open air, in some land of daylight and human affection. But she was the chosen one, she had beheld the Virgin, she would suffer from it her whole life long and die from it at last!

Pierre, who knew Bernadette so well, and who felt a fraternal pity for her memory, the fervent compassion with which one regards a human saint, a simple, upright, charming creature tortured by her faith, allowed his emotion to appear in his moist eyes and trembling voice. And a pause in his narrative ensued. Marie, who had hitherto been lying there quite stiff, with a hard expression of revolt still upon her face, opened her clenched hands and made a vague gesture of pity. "Ah," she murmured, "the poor child, all alone to contend against those magistrates, and so innocent, so proud, so unshakable in her championship of the truth!"

The same compassionate sympathy was arising from all the beds in the ward. That hospital inferno with its nocturnal wretchedness, its pestilential atmosphere, its pallets of anguish heaped together, its weary lady-hospitallers and Sisters flitting phantom-like hither and thither, now seemed to be illumined by a ray of divine charity. Was not the eternal illusion of happiness rising once more amidst tears and unconscious falsehoods? Poor, poor Bernadette! All waxed indignant at the thought of the persecutions which she had endured in defence of her faith.

Then Pierre, resuming his story, related all that the child had had to suffer. After being questioned by the Commissary she had to appear before the judges of the local tribunal. The entire magistracy pursued her, and endeavoured to wring a retractation from her. But the obstinacy of her dream was stronger than the common sense of all the civil authorities put together. Two doctors who were sent by the Prefect to make a careful examination of the girl came, as all doctors would have done, to the honest opinion that it was a case of nervous trouble, of which the asthma was a sure sign, and which, in certain circumstances, might have induced visions. This nearly led to her removal and confinement in a hospital at Tarbes. But public exasperation was feared. A bishop had fallen on his knees before her. Some ladies had sought to buy favours from her for gold. Moreover she had found a refuge with the Sisters of Nevers, who tended the aged in the town asylum, and there she made her first communion, and was with difficulty taught to read and write. As the Blessed Virgin seemed to have chosen her solely to work the happiness of others, and she herself had not been cured, it was very sensibly decided to take her to the baths of Cauterets, which were so near at hand. However, they did her no good. And no sooner had she returned to Lourdes than the torture of being questioned and adored by a whole people began afresh, became aggravated, and filled her more and more with horror of the world. Her life was over already; she would be a playful child no more; she could never be a young girl dreaming of a husband, a young wife kissing the cheeks of sturdy children. She had beheld the Virgin, she was the chosen one, the martyr. If the Virgin, said believers, had confided three secrets to her, investing her with a triple armour as it were, it was simply in order to sustain her in her appointed course.

The clergy had for a long time remained aloof, on its own side full of doubt and anxiety. Abby Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, was a man of somewhat blunt ways, but full of infinite kindness, rectitude, and energy whenever he found himself in what he thought the right path. On the first occasion when Bernadette visited him, he received this child who had been brought up at Bartres and had not yet been seen at Catechism, almost as sternly as the Commissary of Police had done; in fact, he refused to believe her story, and with some irony told her to entreat the Lady to begin by making the briars blossom beneath her feet, which, by the way, the Lady never did. And if the Abbe ended by taking the child under his protection like a good pastor who defends his flock, it was simply through the advent of persecution and the talk of imprisoning this puny child, whose clear eyes shone so frankly, and who clung with such modest, gentle stubbornness to her original tale. Besides, why should he have continued denying the miracle after merely doubting it like a prudent priest who had no desire to see religion mixed up in any suspicious affair? Holy Writ is full of prodigies, all dogma is based on the mysterious; and that being so, there was nothing to prevent him, a priest, from believing that the Virgin had really entrusted Bernadette with a pious message for him, an injunction to build a church whither the faithful would repair in procession. Thus it was that he began loving and defending Bernadette for her charm's sake, whilst still refraining from active interference, awaiting as he did the decision of his Bishop.

This Bishop, Monseigneur Laurence, seemed to have shut himself up in his episcopal residence at Tarbes, locking himself within it and preserving absolute silence as though there were nothing occurring at Lourdes of a nature to interest him. He had given strict instructions to his clergy, and so far not a priest had appeared among the vast crowds of people who spent their days before the Grotto. He waited, and even allowed the Prefect to state in his administrative circulars that the civil and the religious authorities were acting in concert. In reality, he cannot have believed in the apparitions of the Grotto of Massabielle, which he doubtless considered to be the mere hallucinations of a sick child. This affair, which was revolutionising the region, was of sufficient importance for him to have studied it day by day, and the manner in which he disregarded it for so long a time shows how little inclined he was to admit the truth of the alleged miracles, and how greatly he desired to avoid compromising the Church in a matter which seemed destined to end badly. With all his piety, Monseigneur Laurence had a cool, practical intellect, which enabled him to govern his diocese with great good sense. Impatient and ardent people nicknamed him Saint Thomas at the time, on account of the manner in which his doubts persisted until events at last forced his hand. Indeed, he turned a deaf ear to all the stories that were being related, firmly resolved as he was that he would only listen to them if it should appear certain that religion had nothing to lose.

However, the persecutions were about to become more pronounced. The Minister of Worship in Paris, who had been informed of what was going on, required that a stop should be put to all disorders, and so the Prefect caused the approaches to the Grotto to be occupied by the military. The Grotto had already been decorated with vases of flowers offered by the zeal of the faithful and the gratitude of sufferers who had been healed. Money, moreover, was thrown into it; gifts to the Blessed Virgin abounded. Rudimentary improvements, too, were carried out in a spontaneous way; some quarrymen cut a kind of reservoir to receive the miraculous water, and others removed the large blocks of stone, and traced a path in the hillside. However, in presence of the swelling torrents of people, the Prefect, after renouncing his idea of arresting Bernadette, took the serious resolution of preventing all access to the Grotto by placing a strong palisade in front of it. Some regrettable incidents had lately occurred; various children pretended that they had seen the devil, some of them being guilty of simulation in this respect, whilst others had given way to real attacks of hysteria, in the contagious nervous unhinging which was so prevalent. But what a terrible business did the removal of the offerings from the Grotto prove! It was only towards evening that the Commissary was able to find a girl willing to let him have a cart on hire, and two hours later this girl fell from a loft and broke one of her ribs. Likewise, a man who had lent an axe had one of his feet crushed on the morrow by the fall of a block of stone.* It was in the midst of jeers and hisses that the Commissary carried off the pots of flowers, the tapers which he found burning, the coppers and the silver hearts which lay upon the sand. People clenched their fists, and covertly called him "thief" and "murderer." Then the posts for the palisades were planted in the ground, and the rails were nailed to the crossbars, no little labour being performed to shut off the Mystery, in order to bar access to the Unknown, and put the miracles in prison. And the civil authorities were simple enough to imagine that it was all over, that those few bits of boarding would suffice to stay the poor people who hungered for illusion and hope.

* Both of these accidents were interpreted as miracles.—Trans.

But as soon as the new religion was proscribed, forbidden by the law as an offence, it began to burn with an inextinguishable flame in the depths of every soul. Believers came to the river bank in far greater numbers, fell upon their knees at a short distance from the Grotto, and sobbed aloud as they gazed at the forbidden heaven. And the sick, the poor ailing folks, who were forbidden to seek cure, rushed on the Grotto despite all prohibitions, slipped in whenever they could find an aperture or climbed over the palings when their strength enabled them to do so, in the one ardent desire to steal a little of the water. What! there was a prodigious water in that Grotto, which restored the sight to the blind, which set the infirm erect upon their legs again, which instantaneously healed all ailments; and there were officials cruel enough to put that water under lock and key so that it might not cure any more poor people! Why, it was monstrous! And a cry of hatred arose from all the humble ones, all the disinherited ones who had as much need of the Marvellous as of bread to live! In accordance with a municipal decree, the names of all delinquents were to be taken by the police, and thus one soon beheld a woeful defile of old women and lame men summoned before the Justice of the Peace for the sole offence of taking a little water from the fount of life! They stammered and entreated, at their wit's end when a fine was imposed upon them. And, outside, the crowd was growling; rageful unpopularity was gathering around those magistrates who treated human wretchedness so harshly, those pitiless masters who after taking all the wealth of the world, would not even leave to the poor their dream of the realms beyond, their belief that a beneficent superior power took a maternal interest in them, and was ready to endow them with peace of soul and health of body. One day a whole band of poverty-stricken and ailing folks went to the Mayor, knelt down in his courtyard, and implored him with sobs to allow the Grotto to be reopened; and the words they spoke were so pitiful that all who heard them wept. A mother showed her child who was half-dead; would they let the little one die like that in her arms when there was a source yonder which had saved the children of other mothers? A blind man called attention to his dim eyes; a pale, scrofulous youth displayed the sores on his legs; a paralytic woman sought to join her woeful twisted hands: did the authorities wish to see them all perish, did they refuse them the last divine chance of life, condemned and abandoned as they were by the science of man? And equally great was the distress of the believers, of those who were convinced that a corner of heaven had opened amidst the night of their mournful existences, and who were indignant that they should be deprived of the chimerical delight, the supreme relief for their human and social sufferings, which they found in the belief that the Blessed Virgin had indeed come down from heaven to bring them the priceless balm of her intervention. However, the Mayor was unable to promise anything, and the crowd withdrew weeping, ready for rebellion, as though under the blow of some great act of injustice, an act of idiotic cruelty towards the humble and the simple for which Heaven would assuredly take vengeance.

The struggle went on for several months; and it was an extraordinary spectacle which those sensible men—the Minister, the Prefect, and the Commissary of Police—presented, all animated with the best intentions and contending against the ever-swelling crowd of despairing ones, who would not allow the doors of dreamland to be closed upon them, who would not be shut off from the mystic glimpse of future happiness in which they found consolation for their present wretchedness. The authorities required order, the respect of a discreet religion, the triumph of reason; whereas the need of happiness carried the people off into an enthusiastic desire for cure both in this world and in the next. Oh! to cease suffering, to secure equality in the comforts of life; to march on under the protection of a just and beneficent Mother, to die only to awaken in heaven! And necessarily the burning desire of the multitude, the holy madness of the universal joy, was destined to sweep aside the rigid, morose conceptions of a well-regulated society in which the ever-recurring epidemical attacks of religious hallucination are condemned as prejudicial to good order and healthiness of mind.

The Sainte-Honorine Ward, on hearing the story, likewise revolted. Pierre again had to pause, for many were the stifled exclamations in which the Commissary of Police was likened to Satan and Herod. La Grivotte had sat up on her mattress, stammering: "Ah! the monsters! To behave like that to the Blessed Virgin who has cured me!"

And even Madame Vetu—once more penetrated by a ray of hope amidst the covert certainty she felt that she was going to die—grew angry at the idea that the Grotto would not have existed had the Prefect won the day. "There would have been no pilgrimages," she said, "we should not be here, hundreds of us would not be cured every year."

A fit of stifling came over her, however, and Sister Hyacinthe had to raise her to a sitting posture. Madame de Jonquiere was profiting by the interruption to attend to a young woman afflicted with a spinal complaint, whilst two other women, unable to remain on their beds, so unbearable was the heat, prowled about with short, silent steps, looking quite white in the misty darkness. And from the far end of the ward, where all was black, there resounded a noise of painful breathing, which had been going on without a pause, accompanying Pierre's narrative like a rattle. Elise Rouquet alone was sleeping peacefully, still stretched upon her back, and displaying her disfigured countenance, which was slowly drying.

Midnight had struck a quarter of an hour previously, and Abbe Judaine might arrive at any moment for the communion. Grace was now again descending into Marie's heart, and she was convinced that if the Blessed Virgin had refused to cure her it was, indeed, her own fault in having doubted when she entered the piscina. And she, therefore, repented of her rebellion as of a crime. Could she ever be forgiven? Her pale face sank down among her beautiful fair hair, her eyes filled with tears, and she looked at Pierre with an expression of anguish. "Oh! how wicked I was, my friend," she said. "It was through hearing you relate how that Prefect and those magistrates sinned through pride, that I understood my transgression. One must believe, my friend; there is no happiness outside faith and love."

Then, as Pierre wished to break off at the point which he had reached, they all began protesting and calling for the continuation of his narrative, so that he had to promise to go on to the triumph of the Grotto.

Its entrance remained barred by the palisade, and you had to come secretly at night if you wished to pray and carry off a stolen bottle of water. Still, the fear of rioting increased, for it was rumoured that whole villages intended to come down from the hills in order to deliver God, as they naively expressed it. It was a levee en masse of the humble, a rush of those who hungered for the miraculous, so irresistible in its impetuosity that mere common sense, mere considerations of public order were to be swept away like chaff. And it was Monseigneur Laurence, in his episcopal residence at Tarbes, who was first forced to surrender. All his prudence, all his doubts were outflanked by the popular outburst. For five long months he had been able to remain aloof, preventing his clergy from following the faithful to the Grotto, and defending the Church against the tornado of superstition which had been let loose. But what was the use of struggling any longer? He felt the wretchedness of the suffering people committed to his care to be so great that he resigned himself to granting them the idolatrous religion for which he realised them to be eager. Some prudence remaining to him, however, he contented himself in the first instance with drawing up an ordonnance, appointing a commission of inquiry, which was to investigate the question; this implied the acceptance of the miracles after a period of longer or shorter duration. If Monseigneur Laurence was the man of healthy culture and cool reason that he is pictured to have been, how great must have been his anguish on the morning when he signed that ordonnance! He must have knelt in his oratory, and have begged the Sovereign Master of the world to dictate his conduct to him. He did not believe in the apparitions; he had a loftier, more intellectual idea of the manifestations of the Divinity. Only would he not be showing true pity and mercy in silencing the scruples of his reason, the noble prejudices of his faith, in presence of the necessity of granting that bread of falsehood which poor humanity requires in order to be happy? Doubtless, he begged the pardon of Heaven for allowing it to be mixed up in what he regarded as childish pastime, for exposing it to ridicule in connection with an affair in which there was only sickliness and dementia. But his flock suffered so much, hungered so ravenously for the marvellous, for fairy stories with which to lull the pains of life. And thus, in tears, the Bishop at last sacrificed his respect for the dignity of Providence to his sensitive pastoral charity for the woeful human flock.

Then the Emperor in his turn gave way. He was at Biarritz at the time, and was kept regularly informed of everything connected with this affair of the apparitions, with which the entire Parisian press was also occupying itself, for the persecutions would not have been complete if the pens of Voltairean newspaper-men had not meddled in them. And whilst his Minister, his Prefect, and his Commissary of Police were fighting for common sense and public order, the Emperor preserved his wonted silence—the deep silence of a day-dreamer which nobody ever penetrated. Petitions arrived day by day, yet he held his tongue. Bishops came, great personages, great ladies of his circle watched and drew him on one side, and still he held his tongue. A truceless warfare was being waged around him: on one side the believers and the men of fanciful minds whom the Mysterious strongly interested; on the other the unbelievers and the statesmen who distrusted the disturbances of the imagination;—and still and ever he held his tongue. Then, all at once, with the sudden decision of a naturally timid man, he spoke out. The rumour spread that he had yielded to the entreaties of his wife Eugenie. No doubt she did intervene, but the Emperor was more deeply influenced by a revival of his old humanitarian dreams, his genuine compassion for the disinherited.* Like the Bishop, he did not wish to close the portals of illusion to the wretched by upholding the unpopular decree which forbade despairing sufferers to go and drink life at the holy source. So he sent a telegram, a curt order to remove the palisade, so as to allow everybody free access to the Grotto.

* I think this view of the matter the right one, for, as all who
know the history of the Second Empire are aware, it was about
this time that the Emperor began taking great interest in the
erection of model dwellings for the working classes, and the
plantation and transformation of the sandy wastes of the
Landes.—Trans.

Then came a shout of joy and triumph. The decree annulling the previous one was read at Lourdes to the sound of drum and trumpet. The Commissary of Police had to come in person to superintend the removal of the palisade. He was afterwards transferred elsewhere like the Prefect.* People flocked to Lourdes from all parts, the new cultus was organised at the Grotto, and a cry of joy ascended: God had won the victory! God?—alas, no! It was human wretchedness which had won the battle, human wretchedness with its eternal need of falsehood, its hunger for the marvellous, its everlasting hope akin to that of some condemned man who, for salvation's sake, surrenders himself into the hands of an invisible Omnipotence, mightier than nature, and alone capable, should it be willing, of annulling nature's laws. And that which had also conquered was the sovereign compassion of those pastors, the merciful Bishop and merciful Emperor who allowed those big sick children to retain the fetich which consoled some of them and at times even cured others.

* The Prefect was transferred to Grenoble, and curiously enough his
new jurisdiction extended over the hills and valleys of La
Salette, whither pilgrims likewise flocked to drink, pray, and
wash themselves at a miraculous fountain. Warned by experience,
however, Baron Massy (such was the Prefect's name) was careful to
avoid any further interference in religious matters.—Trans.

In the middle of November the episcopal commission came to Lourdes to prosecute the inquiry which had been entrusted to it. It questioned Bernadette yet once again, and studied a large number of miracles. However, in order that the evidence might be absolute, it only registered some thirty cases of cure. And Monseigneur Laurence declared himself convinced. Nevertheless, he gave a final proof of his prudence, by continuing to wait another three years before declaring in a pastoral letter that the Blessed Virgin had in truth appeared at the Grotto of Massabielle and that numerous miracles had subsequently taken place there. Meantime, he had purchased the Grotto itself, with all the land around it, from the municipality of Lourdes, on behalf of his see. Work was then begun, modestly at first, but soon on a larger and larger scale as money began to flow in from all parts of Christendom. The Grotto was cleared and enclosed with an iron railing. The Gave was thrown back into a new bed, so as to allow of spacious approaches to the shrine, with lawns, paths, and walks. At last, too, the church which the Virgin had asked for, the Basilica, began to rise on the summit of the rock itself. From the very first stroke of the pick, Abbe Peyramale, the parish priest of Lourdes, went on directing everything with even excessive zeal, for the struggle had made him the most ardent and most sincere of all believers in the work that was to be accomplished. With his somewhat rough but truly fatherly nature, he had begun to adore Bernadette, making her mission his own, and devoting himself, soul and body, to realising the orders which he had received from Heaven through her innocent mouth. And he exhausted himself in mighty efforts; he wished everything to be very beautiful and very grand, worthy of the Queen of the Angels who had deigned to visit this mountain nook. The first religious ceremony did not take place till six years after the apparitions. A marble statue of the Virgin was installed with great pomp on the very spot where she had appeared. It was a magnificent day, all Lourdes was gay with flags, and every bell rang joyously. Five years later, in 1869, the first mass was celebrated in the crypt of the Basilica, whose spire was not yet finished. Meantime, gifts flowed in without a pause, a river of gold was streaming towards the Grotto, a whole town was about to spring up from the soil. It was the new religion completing its foundations. The desire to be healed did heal; the thirst for a miracle worked the miracle. A Deity of pity and hope was evolved from man's sufferings, from that longing for falsehood and relief which, in every age of humanity, has created the marvellous palaces of the realms beyond, where an almighty Power renders justice and distributes eternal happiness.

And thus the ailing ones of the Sainte-Honorine Ward only beheld in the victory of the Grotto the triumph of their hopes of cure. Along the rows of beds there was a quiver of joy when, with his heart stirred by all those poor faces turned towards him, eager for certainty, Pierre repeated: "God had conquered. Since that day the miracles have never ceased, and it is the most humble who are the most frequently relieved."

Then he laid down the little book. Abbe Judaine was coming in, and the Sacrament was about to be administered. Marie, however, again penetrated by the fever of faith, her hands burning, leant towards Pierre. "Oh, my friend!" said she, "I pray you hear me confess my fault and absolve me. I have blasphemed, and have been guilty of mortal sin. If you do not succour me, I shall be unable to receive the Blessed Sacrament, and yet I so greatly need to be consoled and strengthened."

The young priest refused her request with a wave of the hand. He had never been willing to act as confessor to this friend, the only woman he had loved in the healthy, smiling days of youth. However, she insisted. "I beg you to do so," said she; "you will help to work the miracle of my cure."

Then he gave way and received the avowal of her fault, that impious rebellion induced by suffering, that rebellion against the Virgin who had remained deaf to her prayers. And afterwards he granted her absolution in the sacramental form.

Meanwhile Abbe Judaine had already deposited the ciborium on a little table, between two lighted tapers, which looked like woeful stars in the semi-obscurity of the ward. Madame de Jonquiere had just decided to open one of the windows quite wide, for the odour emanating from all the suffering bodies and heaped-up rags had become unbearable. But no air came in from the narrow courtyard into which the window opened; though black with night, it seemed like a well of fire. Having offered to act as server, Pierre repeated the "Confiteor." Then, after responding with the "Misereatur" and the "Indulgentiam," the chaplain, who wore his alb, raised the pyx, saying, "Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world." All the women who, writhing in agony, were impatiently awaiting the communion, like dying creatures who await life from some fresh medicine which is a long time coming, thereupon thrice repeated, in all humility, and with lips almost closed: "Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof; but only say the word and my soul shall be healed."

Abbe Judaine had begun to make the round of those woeful beds, accompanied by Pierre, and followed by Madame de Jonquiere and Sister Hyacinthe, each of whom carried one of the lighted tapers. The Sister designated those who were to communicate; and, murmuring the customary Latin words, the priest leant forward and placed the Host somewhat at random on the sufferer's tongue. Almost all were waiting for him with widely opened, glittering eyes, amidst the disorder of that hastily pitched camp. Two were found to be sound asleep, however, and had to be awakened. Several were moaning without being conscious of it, and continued moaning even after they had received the sacrament. At the far end of the ward, the rattle of the poor creature who could not be seen still resounded. And nothing could have been more mournful than the appearance of that little cortege in the semi-darkness, amidst which the yellow flames of the tapers gleamed like stars.

But Marie's face, to which an expression of ecstasy had returned, was like a divine apparition. Although La Grivotte was hungering for the bread of life, they had refused her the sacrament on this occasion, as it was to be administered to her in the morning at the Rosary; Madame Vetu, however, had received the Host on her black tongue in a hiccough. And now Marie was lying there under the pale light of the tapers, looking so beautiful amidst her fair hair, with her eyes dilated and her features transfigured by faith, that everyone admired her. She received the sacrament with rapture; Heaven visibly descended into her poor, youthful frame, reduced to such physical wretchedness. And, clasping Pierre's hand, she detained him for a moment, saying: "Oh! she will heal me, my friend, she has just promised me that she will do so. Go and take some rest. I shall sleep so soundly now!"

As he withdrew in company with Abbe Judaine, Pierre caught sight of little Madame Desagneaux stretched out in the arm-chair in which weariness had overpowered her. Nothing could awaken her. It was now half-past one in the morning; and Madame de Jonquiere and her assistant, Sister Hyacinthe, were still going backwards and forwards, turning the patients over, cleansing them, and dressing their sores. However, the ward was becoming more peaceful, its heavy darkness had grown less oppressive since Bernadette with her charm had passed through it. The visionary's little shadow was now flitting in triumph from bed to bed, completing its work, bringing a little of heaven to each of the despairing ones, each of the disinherited ones of this world; and as they all at last sank to sleep they could see the little shepherdess, so young, so ill herself, leaning over them and kissing them with a kindly smile.

THE THIRD DAY

I. BED AND BOARD

AT seven o'clock on the morning of that fine, bright, warm August Sunday, M. de Guersaint was already up and dressed in one of the two little rooms which he had fortunately been able to secure on the third floor of the Hotel of the Apparitions. He had gone to bed at eleven o'clock the night before and had awoke feeling quite fresh and gay. As soon as he was dressed he entered the adjoining room which Pierre occupied; but the young priest, who had not returned to the hotel until past one in the morning, with his blood heated by insomnia, had been unable to doze off until daybreak and was now still slumbering. His cassock flung across a chair, his other garments scattered here and there, testified to his great weariness and agitation of mind.

"Come, come, you lazybones!" cried M. de Guersaint gaily; "can't you hear the bells ringing?"

Pierre awoke with a start, quite surprised to find himself in that little hotel room into which the sunlight was streaming. All the joyous peals of the bells, the music of the chiming, happy town, moreover, came in through the window which he had left open.

"We shall never have time to get to the hospital before eight o'clock to fetch Marie," resumed M. de Guersaint, "for we must have some breakfast, eh?"

"Of course, make haste and order two cups of chocolate. I will get up at once, I sha'n't be long," replied Pierre.

In spite of the fatigue which had already stiffened his joints, he sprang out of bed as soon as he was alone, and made all haste with his toilet. However, he still had his head in the washing basin, ducking it in the fresh, cool water, when M. de Guersaint, who was unable to remain alone, came back again. "I've given the order," said he; "they will bring it up. Ah! what a curious place this hotel is! You have of course seen the landlord, Master Majeste, clad in white from head to foot and looking so dignified in his office. The place is crammed, it appears; they have never had so many people before. So it is no wonder that there should be such a fearful noise. I was wakened up three times during the night. People kept on talking in the room next to mine. And you, did you sleep well?"

"No, indeed," answered Pierre; "I was tired to death, but I couldn't close my eyes. No doubt it was the uproar you speak of that prevented me."

In his turn he then began to talk of the thin partitions, and the manner in which the house had been crammed with people until it seemed as though the floors and the walls would collapse with the strain. The place had been shaking all night long; every now and then people suddenly rushed along the passages, heavy footfalls resounded, gruff voices ascended nobody knew whence; without speaking of all the moaning and coughing, the frightful coughing which seemed to re-echo from every wall. Throughout the night people evidently came in and went out, got up and lay down again, paying no attention to time in the disorder in which they lived, amid shocks of passion which made them hurry to their devotional exercises as to pleasure parties.

"And Marie, how was she when you left her last night?" M. de Guersaint suddenly inquired.

"A great deal better," replied Pierre; "she had an attack of extreme discouragement, but all her courage and faith returned to her at last."

A pause followed; and then the girl's father resumed with his tranquil optimism: "Oh! I am not anxious. Things will go on all right, you'll see. For my own part, I am delighted. I had asked the Virgin to grant me her protection in my affairs—you know, my great invention of navigable balloons. Well, suppose I told you that she has already shown me her favour? Yes, indeed yesterday evening while I was talking with Abbe des Hermoises, he told me that at Toulouse he would no doubt be able to find a person to finance me—one of his friends, in fact, who is extremely wealthy and takes great interest in mechanics! And in this I at once saw the hand of God!" M. de Guersaint began laughing with his childish laugh, and then he added: "That Abbe des Hermoises is a charming man. I shall see this afternoon if there is any means of my accompanying him on an excursion to the Cirque de Gavarnie at small cost."

Pierre, who wished to pay everything, the hotel bill and all the rest, at once encouraged him in this idea. "Of course," said he, "you ought not to miss this opportunity to visit the mountains, since you have so great a wish to do so. Your daughter will be very happy to know that you are pleased."

Their talk, however, was now interrupted by a servant girl bringing the two cups of chocolate with a couple of rolls on a metal tray covered with a napkin. She left the door open as she entered the room, so that a glimpse was obtained of some portion of the passage. "Ah! they are already doing my neighbour's room!" exclaimed M. de Guersaint. "He is a married man, isn't he? His wife is with him?"

The servant looked astonished. "Oh, no," she replied, "he is quite alone!"

"Quite alone? Why, I heard people talking in his room this morning."

"You must be mistaken, monsieur," said the servant; "he has just gone out after giving orders that his room was to be tidied up at once." And then, while taking the cups of chocolate off the tray and placing them on the table, she continued: "Oh! he is a very respectable gentleman. Last year he was able to have one of the pavilions which Monsieur Majeste lets out to visitors, in the lane by the side of the hotel; but this year he applied too late and had to content himself with that room, which greatly worried him, for it isn't a large one, though there is a big cupboard in it. As he doesn't care to eat with everybody, he takes his meals there, and he orders good wine and the best of everything, I can tell you."

"That explains it all!" replied M. de Guersaint gaily; "he dined too well last night, and I must have heard him talking in his sleep."

Pierre had been listening somewhat inquisitively to all this chatter. "And on this side, my side," said he, "isn't there a gentleman with two ladies, and a little boy who walks about with a crutch?"

"Yes, Monsieur l'Abbe, I know them. The aunt, Madame Chaise, took one of the two rooms for herself; and Monsieur and Madame Vigneron with their son Gustave have had to content themselves with the other one. This is the second year they have come to Lourdes. They are very respectable people too."

Pierre nodded. During the night he had fancied he could recognise the voice of M. Vigneron, whom the heat doubtless had incommoded. However, the servant was now thoroughly started, and she began to enumerate the other persons whose rooms were reached by the same passage; on the left hand there was a priest, then a mother with three daughters, and then an old married couple; whilst on the right lodged another gentleman who was all alone, a young lady, too, who was unaccompanied, and then a family party which included five young children. The hotel was crowded to its garrets. The servants had had to give up their rooms the previous evening and lie in a heap in the washhouse. During the night, also, some camp bedsteads had even been set up on the landings; and one honourable ecclesiastic, for lack of other accommodation, had been obliged to sleep on a billiard-table.

When the girl had retired and the two men had drunk their chocolate, M. de Guersaint went back into his own room to wash his hands again, for he was very careful of his person; and Pierre, who remained alone, felt attracted by the gay sunlight, and stepped for a moment on to the narrow balcony outside his window. Each of the third-floor rooms on this side of the hotel was provided with a similar balcony, having a carved-wood balustrade. However, the young priest's surprise was very great, for he had scarcely stepped outside when he suddenly saw a woman protrude her head over the balcony next to him—that of the room occupied by the gentleman whom M. de Guersaint and the servant had been speaking of.

And this woman he had recognised: it was Madame Volmar. There was no mistaking her long face with its delicate drawn features, its magnificent large eyes, those brasiers over which a veil, a dimming moire, seemed to pass at times. She gave a start of terror on perceiving him. And he, extremely ill at ease, grieved that he should have frightened her, made all haste to withdraw into his apartment. A sudden light had dawned upon him, and he now understood and could picture everything. So this was why she had not been seen at the hospital, where little Madame Desagneaux was always asking for her. Standing motionless, his heart upset, Pierre fell into a deep reverie, reflecting on the life led by this woman whom he knew, that torturing conjugal life in Paris between a fierce mother-in-law and an unworthy husband, and then those three days of complete liberty spent at Lourdes, that brief bonfire of passion to which she had hastened under the sacrilegious pretext of serving the divinity. Tears whose cause he could not even explain, tears that ascended from the very depths of his being, from his own voluntary chastity, welled into his eyes amidst the feeling of intense sorrow which came over him.

"Well, are you ready?" joyously called M. de Guersaint as he came back, with his grey jacket buttoned up and his hands gloved.

"Yes, yes, let us go," replied Pierre, turning aside and pretending to look for his hat so that he might wipe his eyes.

Then they went out, and on crossing the threshold heard on their left hand an unctuous voice which they recognised; it was that of M. Vigneron, who was loudly repeating the morning prayers. A moment afterwards came a meeting which interested them. They were walking down the passage when they were passed by a middle-aged, thick-set, sturdy-looking gentleman, wearing carefully trimmed whiskers. He bent his back and passed so rapidly that they were unable to distinguish his features, but they noticed that he was carrying a carefully made parcel. And immediately afterwards he slipped a key into the lock of the room adjoining M. de Guersaint's, and opening the door disappeared noiselessly, like a shadow.

M. de Guersaint had glanced round: "Ah! my neighbour," said he; "he has been to market and has brought back some delicacies, no doubt!"

Pierre pretended not to hear, for his companion was so light-minded that he did not care to trust him with a secret which was not his own. Besides, a feeling of uneasiness was returning to him, a kind of chaste terror at the thought that the world and the flesh were there taking their revenge, amidst all the mystical enthusiasm which he could feel around him.

They reached the hospital just as the patients were being brought out to be carried to the Grotto; and they found that Marie had slept well and was very gay. She kissed her father and scolded him when she learnt that he had not yet decided on his trip to Gavarnie. She should really be displeased with him, she said, if he did not go. Still with the same restful, smiling expression, she added that she did not expect to be cured that day; and then, assuming an air of mystery, she begged Pierre to obtain permission for her to spend the following night before the Grotto. This was a favour which all the sufferers ardently coveted, but which only a few favoured ones with difficulty secured. After protesting, anxious as he felt with regard to the effect which a night spent in the open air might have upon her health, the young priest, seeing how unhappy she had suddenly become, at last promised that he would make the application. Doubtless she imagined that she would only obtain a hearing from the Virgin when they were alone together in the slumbering peacefulness of the night. That morning, indeed, she felt so lost among the innumerable patients who were heaped together in front of the Grotto, that already at ten o'clock she asked to be taken back to the hospital, complaining that the bright light tired her eyes. And when her father and the priest had again installed her in the Sainte-Honorine Ward, she gave them their liberty for the remainder of the day. "No, don't come to fetch me," she said, "I shall not go back to the Grotto this afternoon—it would be useless. But you will come for me this evening at nine o'clock, won't you, Pierre? It is agreed, you have given me your word."

He repeated that he would endeavour to secure the requisite permission, and that, if necessary, he would apply to Father Fourcade in person.

"Then, till this evening, darling," said M. de Guersaint, kissing his daughter. And he and Pierre went off together, leaving her lying on her bed, with an absorbed expression on her features, as her large, smiling eyes wandered away into space.

It was barely half-past ten when they got back to the Hotel of the Apparitions; but M. de Guersaint, whom the fine weather delighted, talked of having dejeuner at once, so that he might the sooner start upon a ramble through Lourdes. First of all, however, he wished to go up to his room, and Pierre following him, they encountered quite a drama on their way. The door of the room occupied by the Vignerons was wide open, and little Gustave could be seen lying on the sofa which served as his bed. He was livid; a moment previously he had suddenly fainted, and this had made the father and mother imagine that the end had come. Madame Vigneron was crouching on a chair, still stupefied by her fright, whilst M. Vigneron rushed about the room, thrusting everything aside in order that he might prepare a glass of sugared-water, to which he added a few drops of some elixir. This draught, he exclaimed, would set the lad right again. But all the same, it was incomprehensible. The boy was still strong, and to think that he should have fainted like that, and have turned as white as a chicken! Speaking in this wise, M. Vigneron glanced at Madame Chaise, the aunt, who was standing in front of the sofa, looking in good health that morning; and his hands shook yet more violently at the covert idea that if that stupid attack had carried off his son, they would no longer have inherited the aunt's fortune. He was quite beside himself at this thought, and eagerly opening the boy's mouth he compelled him to swallow the entire contents of the glass. Then, however, when he heard Gustave sigh, and saw him open his eyes again, his fatherly good-nature reappeared, and he shed tears, and called the lad his dear little fellow. But on Madame Chaise drawing near to offer some assistance, Gustave repulsed her with a sudden gesture of hatred, as though he understood how this woman's money unconsciously perverted his parents, who, after all, were worthy folks. Greatly offended, the old lady turned on her heel, and seated herself in a corner, whilst the father and mother, at last freed from their anxiety, returned thanks to the Blessed Virgin for having preserved their darling, who smiled at them with his intelligent and infinitely sorrowful smile, knowing and understanding everything as he did, and no longer having any taste for life, although he was not fifteen.

"Can we be of any help to you?" asked Pierre in an obliging way.

"No, no, I thank you, gentlemen," replied M. Vigneron, coming for a moment into the passage. "But oh! we did have a fright! Think of it, an only son, who is so dear to us too."

All around them the approach of the dejeuner hour was now throwing the house into commotion. Every door was banging, and the passages and the staircase resounded with the constant pitter-patter of feet. Three big girls passed by, raising a current of air with the sweep of their skirts. Some little children were crying in a neighbouring room. Then there were old people who seemed quite scared, and distracted priests who, forgetting their calling, caught up their cassocks with both hands, so that they might run the faster to the dining-room. From the top to the bottom of the house one could feel the floors shaking under the excessive weight of all the people who were packed inside the hotel.

"Oh, I hope that it is all over now, and that the Blessed Virgin will cure him," repeated M. Vigneron, before allowing his neighbours to retire. "We are going down-stairs, for I must confess that all this has made me feel faint. I need something to eat, I am terribly hungry."

When Pierre and M. de Guersaint at last left their rooms, and went down-stairs, they found to their annoyance that there was not the smallest table-corner vacant in the large dining-room. A most extraordinary mob had assembled there, and the few seats that were still unoccupied were reserved. A waiter informed them that the room never emptied between ten and one o'clock, such was the rush of appetite, sharpened by the keen mountain air. So they had to resign themselves to wait, requesting the waiter to warn them as soon as there should be a couple of vacant places. Then, scarcely knowing what to do with themselves, they went to walk about the hotel porch, whence there was a view of the street, along which the townsfolk, in their Sunday best, streamed without a pause.

All at once, however, the landlord of the Hotel of the Apparitions, Master Majeste in person, appeared before them, clad in white from head to foot; and with a great show of politeness he inquired if the gentlemen would like to wait in the drawing-room. He was a stout man of five-and-forty, and strove to bear the burden of his name in a right royal fashion. Bald and clean-shaven, with round blue eyes in a waxy face, displaying three superposed chins, he always deported himself with much dignity. He had come from Nevers with the Sisters who managed the orphan asylum, and was married to a dusky little woman, a native of Lourdes. In less than fifteen years they had made their hotel one of the most substantial and best patronised establishments in the town. Of recent times, moreover, they had started a business in religious articles, installed in a large shop on the left of the hotel porch and managed by a young niece under Madame Majeste's Supervision.

"You can wait in the drawing-room, gentlemen," again suggested the hotel-keeper whom Pierre's cassock rendered very attentive.

They replied, however, that they preferred to walk about and wait in the open air. And thereupon Majeste would not leave them, but deigned to chat with them for a moment as he was wont to do with those of his customers whom he desired to honour. The conversation turned at first on the procession which would take place that night and which promised to be a superb spectacle as the weather was so fine. There were more than fifty thousand strangers gathered together in Lourdes that day, for visitors had come in from all the neighbouring bathing stations. This explained the crush at the table d'hote. Possibly the town would run short of bread as had been the case the previous year.

"You saw what a scramble there is," concluded Majeste, "we really don't know how to manage. It isn't my fault, I assure you, if you are kept waiting for a short time."

At this moment, however, a postman arrived with a large batch of newspapers and letters which he deposited on a table in the office. He had kept one letter in his hand and inquired of the landlord, "Have you a Madame Maze here?"

"Madame Maze, Madame Maze," repeated the hotel-keeper. "No, no, certainly not."

Pierre had heard both question and answer, and drawing near he exclaimed, "I know of a Madame Maze who must be lodging with the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, the Blue Sisters as people call them here, I think."

The postman thanked him for the information and went off, but a somewhat bitter smile had risen to Majeste's lips. "The Blue Sisters," he muttered, "ah! the Blue Sisters." Then, darting a side glance at Pierre's cassock, he stopped short, as though he feared that he might say too much. Yet his heart was overflowing; he would have greatly liked to ease his feelings, and this young priest from Paris, who looked so liberal-minded, could not be one of the "band" as he called all those who discharged functions at the Grotto and coined money out of Our Lady of Lourdes. Accordingly, little by little, he ventured to speak out.

"I am a good Christian, I assure you, Monsieur l'Abbe," said he. "In fact we are all good Christians here. And I am a regular worshipper and take the sacrament every Easter. But, really, I must say that members of a religious community ought not to keep hotels. No, no, it isn't right!"

And thereupon he vented all the spite of a tradesman in presence of what he considered to be disloyal competition. Ought not those Blue Sisters, those Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, to have confined themselves to their real functions, the manufacture of wafers for sacramental purposes, and the repairing and washing of church linen? Instead of that, however, they had transformed their convent into a vast hostelry, where ladies who came to Lourdes unaccompanied found separate rooms, and were able to take their meals either in privacy or in a general dining-room. Everything was certainly very clean, very well organised and very inexpensive, thanks to the thousand advantages which the Sisters enjoyed; in fact, no hotel at Lourdes did so much business. "But all the same," continued Majeste, "I ask you if it is proper. To think of nuns selling victuals! Besides, I must tell you that the lady superior is really a clever woman, and as soon as she saw the stream of fortune rolling in, she wanted to keep it all for her own community and resolutely parted with the Fathers of the Grotto who wanted to lay their hands on it. Yes, Monsieur l'Abbe, she even went to Rome and gained her cause there, so that now she pockets all the money that her bills bring in. Think of it, nuns, yes nuns, mon Dieu! letting furnished rooms and keeping a table d'hote!"

He raised his arms to heaven, he was stifling with envy and vexation.

"But as your house is crammed," Pierre gently objected, "as you no longer have either a bed or a plate at anybody's disposal, where would you put any additional visitors who might arrive here?"

Majeste at once began protesting. "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe!" said he, "one can see very well that you don't know the place. It's quite true that there is work for all of us, and that nobody has reason to complain during the national pilgrimage. But that only lasts four or five days, and in ordinary times the custom we secure isn't nearly so great. For myself, thank Heaven, I am always satisfied. My house is well known, it occupies the same rank as the Hotel of the Grotto, where two landlords have already made their fortunes. But no matter, it is vexing to see those Blue Sisters taking all the cream of the custom, for instance the ladies of the bourgeoisie who spend a fortnight and three weeks here at a stretch; and that, too, just in the quiet season, when there are not many people here. You understand, don't you? There are people of position who dislike uproar; they go by themselves to the Grotto, and pray there all day long, for days together, and pay good prices for their accommodation without any higgling."

Madame Majeste, whom Pierre and M. de Guersaint had not noticed leaning over an account-book in which she was adding up some figures, thereupon intervened in a shrill voice: "We had a customer like that, gentlemen, who stayed here for two months last year. She went to the Grotto, came back, went there again, took her meals, and went to bed. And never did we have a word of complaint from her; she was always smiling, as though to say that she found everything very nice. She paid her bill, too, without even looking at it. Ah! one regrets people of that kind."

Short, thin, very dark, and dressed in black, with a little white collar, Madame Majeste had risen to her feet; and she now began to solicit custom: "If you would like to buy a few little souvenirs of Lourdes before you leave, gentlemen, I hope that you will not forget us. We have a shop close by, where you will find an assortment of all the articles that are most in request. As a rule, the persons who stay here are kind enough not to deal elsewhere."

However, Majeste was again wagging his head, with the air of a good Christian saddened by the scandals of the time. "Certainly," said he, "I don't want to show any disrespect to the reverend Fathers, but it must in all truth be admitted that they are too greedy. You must have seen the shop which they have set up near the Grotto, that shop which is always crowded, and where tapers and articles of piety are sold. A bishop declared that it was shameful, and that the buyers and sellers ought to be driven out of the temple afresh. It is said, too, that the Fathers run that big shop yonder, just across the street, which supplies all the petty dealers in the town. And, according to the reports which circulate, they have a finger in all the trade in religious articles, and levy a percentage on the millions of chaplets, statuettes, and medals which are sold every year at Lourdes."

Majeste had now lowered his voice, for his accusations were becoming precise, and he ended by trembling somewhat at his imprudence in talking so confidentially to strangers. However, the expression of Pierre's gentle, attentive face reassured him; and so he continued with the passion of a wounded rival, resolved to go on to the very end: "I am willing to admit that there is some exaggeration in all this. But all the same, it does religion no good for people to see the reverend Fathers keeping shops like us tradesmen. For my part, of course, I don't go and ask for a share of the money which they make by their masses, or a percentage on the presents which they receive, so why should they start selling what I sell? Our business was a poor one last year owing to them. There are already too many of us; nowadays everyone at Lourdes sells 'religious articles,' to such an extent, in fact, that there will soon be no butchers or wine merchants left—nothing but bread to eat and water to drink. Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe, it is no doubt nice to have the Blessed Virgin with us, but things are none the less very bad at times."

A person staying at the hotel at that moment disturbed him, but he returned just as a young girl came in search of Madame Majeste. The damsel, who evidently belonged to Lourdes, was very pretty, small but plump, with beautiful black hair, and a round face full of bright gaiety.

"That is our niece Apolline," resumed Majeste. "She has been keeping our shop for two years past. She is the daughter of one of my wife's brothers, who is in poor circumstances. She was keeping sheep at Ossun, in the neighbourhood of Bartres, when we were struck by her intelligence and nice looks and decided to bring her here; and we don't repent having done so, for she has a great deal of merit, and has become a very good saleswoman."

A point to which he omitted to refer, was that there were rumours current of somewhat flighty conduct on Mademoiselle Apolline's part. But she undoubtedly had her value: she attracted customers by the power, possibly, of her large black eyes, which smiled so readily. During his sojourn at Lourdes the previous year, Gerard de Peyrelongue had scarcely stirred from the shop she managed, and doubtless it was only the matrimonial ideas now flitting through his head that prevented him from returning thither. It seemed as though the Abbe des Hermoises had taken his place, for this gallant ecclesiastic brought a great many ladies to make purchases at the repository.

"Ah! you are speaking of Apolline," said Madame Majeste, at that moment coming back from the shop. "Have you noticed one thing about her, gentlemen—her extraordinary likeness to Bernadette? There, on the wall yonder, is a photograph of Bernadette when she was eighteen years old."

Pierre and M. de Guersaint drew near to examine the portrait, whilst Majeste exclaimed: "Bernadette, yes, certainly—she was rather like Apolline, but not nearly so nice; she looked so sad and poor."

He would doubtless have gone on chattering, but just then the waiter appeared and announced that there was at last a little table vacant. M. de Guersaint had twice gone to glance inside the dining-room, for he was eager to have his dejeuner and spend the remainder of that fine Sunday out-of-doors. So he now hastened away, without paying any further attention to Majeste, who remarked, with an amiable smile, that the gentlemen had not had so very long to wait after all.

To reach the table mentioned by the waiter, the architect and Pierre had to cross the dining-room from end to end. It was a long apartment, painted a light oak colour, an oily yellow, which was already peeling away in places and soiled with stains in others. You realised that rapid wear and tear went on here amidst the continual scramble of the big eaters who sat down at table. The only ornaments were a gilt zinc clock and a couple of meagre candelabra on the mantelpiece. Guipure curtains, moreover, hung at the five large windows looking on to the street, which was flooded with sunshine; some of the fierce arrow-like rays penetrating into the room although the blinds had been lowered. And, in the middle of the apartment, some forty persons were packed together at the table d'hote, which was scarcely eleven yards in length and did not supply proper accommodation for more than thirty people; whilst at the little tables standing against the walls upon either side another forty persons sat close together, hustled by the three waiters each time that they went by. You had scarcely reached the threshold before you were deafened by the extraordinary uproar, the noise of voices and the clatter of forks and plates; and it seemed, too, as if you were entering a damp oven, for a warm, steamy mist, laden with a suffocating smell of victuals, assailed the face.

Pierre at first failed to distinguish anything, but, when he was installed at the little table—a garden-table which had been brought indoors for the occasion, and on which there was scarcely room for two covers—he felt quite upset, almost sick, in fact, at the sight presented by the table d'hote, which his glance now enfiladed from end to end. People had been eating at it for an hour already, two sets of customers had followed one upon the other, and the covers were strewn about in higgledy-piggledy fashion. On the cloth were numerous stains of wine and sauce, while there was no symmetry even in the arrangement of the glass fruit-stands, which formed the only decorations of the table. And one's astonishment increased at sight of the motley mob which was collected there—huge priests, scraggy girls, mothers overflowing with superfluous fat, gentlemen with red faces, and families ranged in rows and displaying all the pitiable, increasing ugliness of successive generations. All these people were perspiring, greedily swallowing, seated slantwise, lacking room to move their arms, and unable even to use their hands deftly. And amidst this display of appetite, increased tenfold by fatigue, and of eager haste to fill one's stomach in order to return to the Grotto more quickly, there was a corpulent ecclesiastic who in no wise hurried, but ate of every dish with prudent slowness, crunching his food with a ceaseless, dignified movement of the jaws.

"Fichtre!" exclaimed M. de Guersaint, "it is by no means cool in here. All the same, I shall be glad of something to eat, for I've felt a sinking in the stomach ever since I have been at Lourdes. And you—are you hungry?"

"Yes, yes, I shall eat," replied Pierre, though, truth to tell, he felt quite upset.

The menu was a copious one. There was salmon, an omelet, mutton cutlets with mashed potatoes, stewed kidneys, cauliflowers, cold meats, and apricot tarts—everything cooked too much, and swimming in sauce which, but for its grittiness, would have been flavourless. However, there was some fairly fine fruit on the glass stands, particularly some peaches. And, besides, the people did not seem at all difficult to please; they apparently had no palates, for there was no sign of nausea. Hemmed in between an old priest and a dirty, full-bearded man, a girl of delicate build, who looked very pretty with her soft eyes and silken skin, was eating some kidneys with an expression of absolute beatitude, although the so-called "sauce" in which they swam was simply greyish water.

"Hum!" resumed even M. de Guersaint, "this salmon is not so bad. Add a little salt to it and you will find it all right."

Pierre made up his mind to eat, for after all he must take sustenance for strength's sake. At a little table close by, however, he had just caught sight of Madame Vigneron and Madame Chaise, who sat face to face, apparently waiting. And indeed, M. Vigneron and his son Gustave soon appeared, the latter still pale, and leaning more heavily than usual on his crutch. "Sit down next to your aunt," said his father; "I will take the chair beside your mother." But just then he perceived his two neighbours, and stepping up to them, he added: "Oh! he is now all right again. I have been rubbing him with some eau-de-Cologne, and by-and-by he will be able to take his bath at the piscina."

Thereupon M. Vigneron sat down and began to devour. But what an awful fright he had had! He again began talking of it aloud, despite himself, so intense had been his terror at the thought that the lad might go off before his aunt. The latter related that whilst she was kneeling at the Grotto the day before, she had experienced a sudden feeling of relief; in fact, she flattered herself that she was cured of her heart complaint, and began giving precise particulars, to which her brother-in-law listened with dilated eyes, full of involuntary anxiety. Most certainly he was a good-natured man, he had never desired anybody's death; only he felt indignant at the idea that the Virgin might cure this old woman, and forget his son, who was so young. Talking and eating, he had got to the cutlets, and was swallowing the mashed potatoes by the forkful, when he fancied he could detect that Madame Chaise was sulking with her nephew. "Gustave," he suddenly inquired, "have you asked your aunt's forgiveness?" The lad, quite astonished, began staring at his father with his large clear eyes. "Yes," added M. Vigneron, "you behaved very badly, you pushed her back just now when she wanted to help you to sit up."

Madame Chaise said nothing, but waited with a dignified air, whilst Gustave, who, without any show of appetite, was finishing the noix of his cutlet, which had been cut into small pieces, remained with his eyes lowered on his plate, this time obstinately refusing to make the sorry show of affection which was demanded of him.

"Come, Gustave," resumed his father, "be a good boy. You know how kind your aunt is, and all that she intends to do for you."

But no, he would not yield. At that moment, indeed, he really hated that woman, who did not die quickly enough, who polluted the affection of his parents, to such a point that when he saw them surround him with attentions he no longer knew whether it were himself or the inheritance which his life represented that they wished to save. However, Madame Vigneron, so dignified in her demeanour, came to her husband's help. "You really grieve me, Gustave," said she; "ask your aunt's forgiveness, or you will make me quite angry with you."

Thereupon he gave way. What was the use of resisting? Was it not better that his parents should obtain that money? Would he not himself die later on, so as to suit the family convenience? He was aware of all that; he understood everything, even when not a word was spoken. So keen was the sense of hearing with which suffering had endowed him, that he even heard the others' thoughts.

"I beg your pardon, aunt," he said, "for not having behaved well to you just now."

Then two big tears rolled from his eyes, whilst he smiled with the air of a tender-hearted man who has seen too much of life and can no longer be deceived by anything. Madame Chaise at once kissed him and told him that she was not at all angry. And the Vignerons' delight in living was displayed in all candour.

"If the kidneys are not up to much," M. de Guersaint now said to Pierre, "here at all events are some cauliflowers with a good flavour."

The formidable mastication was still going on around them. Pierre had never seen such an amount of eating, amidst such perspiration, in an atmosphere as stifling as that of a washhouse full of hot steam. The odour of the victuals seemed to thicken into a kind of smoke. You had to shout to make yourself heard, for everybody was talking in loud tones, and the scared waiters raised a fearful clatter in changing the plates and forks; not to mention the noise of all the jaw-crunching, a mill-like grinding which was distinctly audible. What most hurt the feelings of the young priest, however, was the extraordinary promiscuity of the table d'hote, at which men and women, young girls and ecclesiastics, were packed together in chance order, and satisfied their hunger like a pack of hounds snapping at offal in all haste. Baskets of bread went round and were promptly emptied. And there was a perfect massacre of cold meats, all the remnants of the victuals of the day before, leg of mutton, veal, and ham, encompassed by a fallen mass of transparent jelly which quivered like soft glue. They had all eaten too much already, but these viands seemed to whet their appetites afresh, as though the idea had come to them that nothing whatever ought to be left. The fat priest in the middle of the table, who had shown himself such a capital knife-and-fork, was now lingering over the fruit, having just got to his third peach, a huge one, which he slowly peeled and swallowed in slices with an air of compunction.

All at once, however, the whole room was thrown into agitation. A waiter had come in and begun distributing the letters which Madame Majeste had finished sorting. "Hallo!" exclaimed M. Vigneron; "a letter for me! This is surprising—I did not give my address to anybody." Then, at a sudden recollection, he added, "Yes I did, though; this must have come from Sauvageot, who is filling my place at the Ministry." He opened the letter, his hands began to tremble, and suddenly he raised a cry: "The chief clerk is dead!"

Deeply agitated, Madame Vigneron was also unable to bridle her tongue: "Then you will have the appointment!"

This was the secret dream in which they had so long and so fondly indulged: the chief clerk's death, in order that he, Vigneron, assistant chief clerk for ten years past, might at last rise to the supreme post, the bureaucratic marshalship. And so great was his delight that he cast aside all restraint. "Ah! the Blessed Virgin is certainly protecting me, my dear. Only this morning I again prayed to her for a rise, and, you see, she grants my prayer!"

However, finding Madame Chaise's eyes fixed upon his own, and seeing Gustave smile, he realised that he ought not to exult in this fashion. Each member of the family no doubt thought of his or her interests and prayed to the Blessed Virgin for such personal favours as might be desired. And so, again putting on his good-natured air, he resumed: "I mean that the Blessed Virgin takes an interest in every one of us and will send us all home well satisfied. Ah! the poor chief, I'm sorry for him. I shall have to send my card to his widow."

In spite of all his efforts he could not restrain his exultation, and no longer doubted that his most secret desires, those which he did not even confess to himself, would soon be gratified. And so all honour was done to the apricot tarts, even Gustave being allowed to eat a portion of one.

"It is surprising," now remarked M. de Guersaint, who had just ordered a cup of coffee; "it is surprising that one doesn't see more sick people here. All these folks seem to me to have first-rate appetites."

After a close inspection, however, in addition to Gustave, who ate no more than a little chicken, he ended by finding a man with a goitre seated at the table d'hote between two women, one of whom certainly suffered from cancer. Farther on, too, there was a girl so thin and pale that she must surely be a consumptive. And still farther away there was a female idiot who had made her entry leaning on two relatives, and with expressionless eyes and lifeless features was now carrying her food to her mouth with a spoon, and slobbering over her napkin. Perhaps there were yet other ailing ones present who could not be distinguished among all those noisy appetites, ailing ones whom the journey had braced, and who were eating as they had not eaten for a long time past. The apricot tarts, the cheese, the fruits were all engulfed amidst the increasing disorder of the table, where at last there only remained the stains of all the wine and sauce which had been spilt upon the cloth.

It was nearly noon. "We will go back to the Grotto at once, eh?" said M. Vigneron.

Indeed, "To the Grotto! To the Grotto!" were well-nigh the only words you now heard. The full mouths were eagerly masticating and swallowing, in order that they might repeat prayers and hymns again with all speed. "Well, as we have the whole afternoon before us," declared M. de Guersaint, "I suggest that we should visit the town a little. I want to see also if I can get a conveyance for my excursion, as my daughter so particularly wishes me to make it."

Pierre, who was stifling, was glad indeed to leave the dining-room. In the porch he was able to breathe again, though even there he found a torrent of customers, new arrivals who were waiting for places. No sooner did one of the little tables become vacant than its possession was eagerly contested, whilst the smallest gap at the table d'hote was instantly filled up. In this wise the assault would continue for more than another hour, and again would the different courses of the menu appear in procession, to be engulfed amidst the crunching of jaws, the stifling heat, and the growing nausea.

II. THE "ORDINARY."

WHEN Pierre and M. de Guersaint got outside they began walking slowly amidst the ever-growing stream of the Sundayfied crowd. The sky was a bright blue, the sun warmed the whole town, and there was a festive gaiety in the atmosphere, the keen delight that attends those great fairs which bring entire communities into the open air. When they had descended the crowded footway of the Avenue de la Grotte, and had reached the corner of the Plateau de la Merlasse, they found their way barred by a throng which was flowing backward amidst a block of vehicles and stamping of horses. "There is no hurry, however," remarked M. de Guersaint. "My idea is to go as far as the Place du Marcadal in the old town; for the servant girl at the hotel told me of a hairdresser there whose brother lets out conveyances cheaply. Do you mind going so far?"

"I?" replied Pierre. "Go wherever you like, I'll follow you."

"All right—and I'll profit by the opportunity to have a shave."

They were nearing the Place du Rosaire, and found themselves in front of the lawns stretching to the Gave, when an encounter again stopped them. Mesdames Desagneaux and Raymonde de Jonquiere were here, chatting gaily with Gerard de Peyrelongue. Both women wore light-coloured gowns, seaside dresses as it were, and their white silk parasols shone in the bright sunlight. They imparted, so to say, a pretty note to the scene—a touch of society chatter blended with the fresh laughter of youth.

"No, no," Madame Desagneaux was saying, "we certainly can't go and visit your 'ordinary' like that—at the very moment when all your comrades are eating."

Gerard, however, with a very gallant air, insisted on their accompanying him, turning more particularly towards Raymonde, whose somewhat massive face was that day brightened by the radiant charm of health.

"But it is a very curious sight, I assure you," said the young man, "and you would be very respectfully received. Trust yourself to me, mademoiselle. Besides, we should certainly find M. Berthaud there, and he would be delighted to do you the honours."

Raymonde smiled, her clear eyes plainly saying that she was quite agreeable. And just then, as Pierre and M. de Guersaint drew near in order to present their respects to the ladies, they were made acquainted with the question under discussion. The "ordinary" was a kind of restaurant or table d'hote which the members of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation—the bearers, the hospitallers of the Grotto, the piscinas, and the hospitals—had established among themselves with the view of taking their meals together at small cost. Many of them were not rich, for they were recruited among all classes; however, they had contrived to secure three good meals for the daily payment of three francs apiece. And in fact they soon had provisions to spare and distributed them among the poor. Everything was in their own management; they purchased their own supplies, recruited a cook and a few waiters, and did not disdain to lend a hand themselves, in order that everything might be comfortable and orderly.

"It must be very interesting," said M, de Guersaint, when these explanations had been given him. "Let us go and see it, if we are not in the way."

Little Madame Desagneaux thereupon gave her consent. "Well, if we are going in a party," said she, "I am quite willing. But when this gentleman first proposed to take Raymonde and me, I was afraid that it might not be quite proper."

Then, as she began to laugh, the others followed her example. She had accepted M. de Guersaint's arm, and Pierre walked beside her on the other hand, experiencing a sudden feeling of sympathy for this gay little woman, who was so full of life and so charming with her fair frizzy hair and creamy complexion.

Behind them came Raymonde, leaning upon Gerard's arm and talking to him in the calm, staid voice of a young lady who holds the best principles despite her air of heedless youth. And since here was the husband whom she had so often dreamt of, she resolved that she would this time secure him, make him beyond all question her own. She intoxicated him with the perfume of health and youth which she diffused, and at the same time astonished him by her knowledge of housewifely duties and of the manner in which money may be economised even in the most trifling matters; for having questioned him with regard to the purchases which he and his comrades made for their "ordinary," she proceeded to show him that they might have reduced their expenditure still further.

Meantime M. de Guersaint and Madame Desagneaux were also chatting together: "You must be fearfully tired, madame," said the architect.

But with a gesture of revolt, and an exclamation of genuine anger, she replied: "Oh no, indeed! Last night, it is true, fatigue quite overcame me at the hospital; I sat down and dozed off, and Madame de Jonquiere and the other ladies were good enough to let me sleep on." At this the others again began to laugh; but still with the same angry air she continued: "And so I slept like a log until this morning. It was disgraceful, especially as I had sworn that I would remain up all night." Then, merriment gaining upon her in her turn, she suddenly burst into a sonorous laugh, displaying her beautiful white teeth. "Ah! a pretty nurse I am, and no mistake! It was poor Madame de Jonquiere who had to remain on her legs all the time. I tried to coax her to come out with us just now. But she preferred to take a little rest."

Raymonde, who overheard these words, thereupon raised her voice to say: "Yes, indeed, my poor mamma could no longer keep on her feet. It was I who compelled her to lie down, telling her that she could go to sleep without any uneasiness, for we should get on all right without her—"

So saying, the girl gave Gerard a laughing glance. He even fancied that he could detect a faint squeeze of the fresh round arm which was resting on his own, as though, indeed, she had wished to express her happiness at being alone with him so that they might settle their own affairs without any interference. This quite delighted him; and he began to explain that if he had not had dejeuner with his comrades that day, it was because some friends had invited him to join them at the railway-station refreshment-room at ten o'clock, and had not given him his liberty until after the departure of the eleven-thirty train.

"Ah! the rascals!" he suddenly resumed. "Do you hear them, mademoiselle?"

The little party was now nearing its destination, and the uproarious laughter and chatter of youth rang out from a clump of trees which concealed the old zinc and plaster building in which the "ordinary" was installed. Gerard began by taking the visitors into the kitchen, a very spacious apartment, well fitted up, and containing a huge range and an immense table, to say nothing of numerous gigantic cauldrons. Here, moreover, the young man called the attention of his companions to the circumstance that the cook, a fat, jovial-looking man, had the red cross pinned on his white jacket, being himself a member of the pilgrimage. Then, pushing open a door, Gerard invited his friends to enter the common room.

It was a long apartment containing two rows of plain deal tables; and the only other articles of furniture were numerous rush-seated tavern chairs, with an additional table which served as a sideboard. The whitewashed walls and the flooring of shiny, red tiles looked, however, extremely clean amidst this intentional bareness, which was similar to that of a monkish refectory. But, the feature of the place which more particularly struck you, as you crossed the threshold, was the childish gaiety which reigned there; for, packed together at the tables, were a hundred and fifty hospitallers of all ages, eating with splendid appetites, laughing, applauding, and singing, with their mouths full. A wondrous fraternity united these men, who had flocked to Lourdes from every province of France, and who belonged to all classes, and represented every degree of fortune. Many of them knew nothing of one another, save that they met here and elbowed one another during three days every year, living together like brothers, and then going off and remaining in absolute ignorance of each other during the rest of the twelvemonth. Nothing could be more charming, however, than to meet again at the next pilgrimage, united in the same charitable work, and to spend a few days of hard labour and boyish delight in common once more; for it all became, as it were, an "outing" of a number of big fellows, let loose under a lovely sky, and well pleased to be able to enjoy themselves and laugh together. And even the frugality of the table, with the pride of managing things themselves, of eating the provisions which they had purchased and cooked, added to the general good humour.

"You see," explained Gerard, "we are not at all inclined to be sad, although we have so much hard work to get through. The Hospitality numbers more than three hundred members, but there are only about one hundred and fifty here at a time, for we have had to organise two successive services, so that there may always be some of us on duty at the Grotto and the hospitals."

The sight of the little party of visitors assembled on the threshold of the room seemed to have increased the general delight; and Berthaud, the superintendent of the bearers, who was lunching at the head of one of the tables, gallantly rose up to receive the ladies.

"But it smells very nice," exclaimed Madame Desagneaux in her giddy way. "Won't you invite us to come and taste your cookery to-morrow?"

"Oh! we can't ask ladies," replied Berthaud, laughing. "But if you gentlemen would like to join us to-morrow we should be extremely pleased to entertain you."

He had at once noticed the good understanding which prevailed between Gerard and Raymonde, and seemed delighted at it, for he greatly wished his cousin to make this match. He laughed pleasantly, at the enthusiastic gaiety which the young girl displayed as she began to question him. "Is not that the Marquis de Salmon-Roquebert," she asked, "who is sitting over yonder between those two young men who look like shop assistants?"

"They are, in fact, the sons of a small stationer at Tarbes," replied Berthaud; "and that is really the Marquis, your neighbour of the Rue de Lille, the owner of that magnificent mansion, one of the richest and most noble men of title in France. You see how he is enjoying our mutton stew!"

It was true, the millionaire Marquis seemed delighted to be able to board himself for his three francs a day, and to sit down at table in genuine democratic fashion by the side of petty bourgeois and workmen who would not have dared to accost him in the street. Was not that chance table symbolical of social communion, effected by the joint practice of charity? For his part, the Marquis was the more hungry that day, as he had bathed over sixty patients, sufferers from all the most abominable diseases of unhappy humanity, at the piscinas that morning. And the scene around him seemed like a realisation of the evangelical commonalty; but doubtless it was so charming and so gay simply because its duration was limited to three days.

Although M. de Guersaint had but lately risen from table, his curiosity prompted him to taste the mutton stew, and he pronounced it perfect. Meantime, Pierre caught sight of Baron Suire, the director of the Hospitality, walking about between the rows of tables with an air of some importance, as though he had allotted himself the task of keeping an eye on everything, even on the manner in which his staff fed itself. The young priest thereupon remembered the ardent desire which Marie had expressed to spend the night in front of the Grotto, and it occurred to him that the Baron might be willing to give the necessary authorisation.

"Certainly," replied the director, who had become quite grave whilst listening to Pierre, "we do sometimes allow it; but it is always a very delicate matter! You assure me at all events that this young person is not consumptive? Well, well, since you say that she so much desires it I will mention the matter to Father Fourcade and warn Madame de Jonquiere, so that she may let you take the young lady away."

He was in reality a very good-natured fellow, albeit so fond of assuming the air of an indispensable man weighed down by the heaviest responsibilities. In his turn he now detained the visitors, and gave them full particulars concerning the organisation of the Hospitality. Its members said prayers together every morning. Two board meetings were held each day, and were attended by all the heads of departments, as well as by the reverend Fathers and some of the chaplains. All the hospitallers took the Sacrament as frequently as possible. And, moreover, there were many complicated tasks to be attended to, a prodigious rotation of duties, quite a little world to be governed with a firm hand. The Baron spoke like a general who each year gains a great victory over the spirit of the age; and, sending Berthaud back to finish his dejeuner, he insisted on escorting the ladies into the little sanded courtyard, which was shaded by some fine trees.

"It is very interesting, very interesting," repeated Madame Desagneaux. "We are greatly obliged to you for your kindness, monsieur."

"Don't mention it, don't mention it, madame," answered the Baron. "It is I who am pleased at having had an opportunity to show you my little army."

So far Gerard had not quitted Raymonde's side; but M. de Guersaint and Pierre were already exchanging glances suggestive of leave-taking, in order that they might repair by themselves to the Place du Marcadal, when Madame Desagneaux suddenly remembered that a friend had requested her to send her a bottle of Lourdes water. And she thereupon asked Gerard how she was to execute this commission. The young man began to laugh. "Will you again accept me as a guide?" said he. "And by the way, if these gentlemen like to come as well, I will show you the place where the bottles are filled, corked, packed in cases, and then sent off. It is a curious sight."

M. de Guersaint immediately consented; and all five of them set out again, Madame Desagneaux still between the architect and the priest, whilst Raymonde and Gerard brought up the rear. The crowd in the burning sunlight was increasing; the Place du Rosaire was now overflowing with an idle sauntering mob resembling some concourse of sight-seers on a day of public rejoicing.

The bottling and packing shops were situated under one of the arches on the left-hand side of the Place. They formed a suite of three apartments of very simple aspect. In the first one the bottles were filled in the most ordinary of fashions. A little green-painted zinc barrel, not unlike a watering-cask, was dragged by a man from the Grotto, and the light-coloured bottles were then simply filled at its tap, one by one; the blouse-clad workman entrusted with the duty exercising no particular watchfulness to prevent the water from overflowing. In fact there was quite a puddle of it upon the ground. There were no labels on the bottles; the little leaden capsules placed over the corks alone bore an inscription, and they were coated with a kind of ceruse, doubtless to ensure preservation. Then came two other rooms which formed regular packing shops, with carpenters' benches, tools, and heaps of shavings. The boxes, most frequently made for one bottle or for two, were put together with great care, and the bottles were deposited inside them, on beds of fine wood parings. The scene reminded one in some degree of the packing halls for flowers at Nice and for preserved fruits at Grasse.

Gerard went on giving explanations with a quiet, satisfied air. "The water," he said, "really comes from the Grotto, as you can yourselves see, so that all the foolish jokes which one hears really have no basis. And everything is perfectly simple, natural, and goes on in the broad daylight. I would also point out to you that the Fathers don't sell the water as they are accused of doing. For instance, a bottle of water here costs twenty centimes,* which is only the price of the bottle itself. If you wish to have it sent to anybody you naturally have to pay for the packing and the carriage, and then it costs you one franc and seventy centimes.** However, you are perfectly at liberty to go to the source and fill the flasks and cans and other receptacles that you may choose to bring with you."

* Four cents, U.S.A.

** About 32 cents, U.S.A.

Pierre reflected that the profits of the reverend Fathers in this respect could not be very large ones, for their gains were limited to what they made by manufacturing the boxes and supplying the bottles, which latter, purchased by the thousand, certainly did not cost them so much as twenty centimes apiece. However, Raymonde and Madame Desagneaux, as well as M. de Guersaint, who had such a lively imagination, experienced deep disappointment at sight of the little green barrel, the capsules, sticky with ceruse, and the piles of shavings lying around the benches. They had doubtless imagined all sorts of ceremonies, the observance of certain rites in bottling the miraculous water, priests in vestments pronouncing blessings, and choir-boys singing hymns of praise in pure crystalline voices. For his part, Pierre, in presence of all this vulgar bottling and packing, ended by thinking of the active power of faith. When one of those bottles reaches some far-away sick-room, and is unpacked there, and the sufferer falls upon his knees, and so excites himself by contemplating and drinking the pure water that he actually brings about the cure of his ailment, there must truly be a most extraordinary plunge into all-powerful illusion.

"Ah!" exclaimed Gerard as they came out, "would you like to see the storehouse where the tapers are kept, before going to the offices? It is only a couple of steps away."

And then, not even waiting for their answer, he led them to the opposite side of the Place du Rosaire. His one desire was to amuse Raymonde, but, in point of fact, the aspect of the place where the tapers were stored was even less entertaining than that of the packing-rooms which they had just left. This storehouse, a kind of deep vault under one of the right-hand arches of the Place, was divided by timber into a number of spacious compartments, in which lay an extraordinary collection of tapers, classified according to size. The overplus of all the tapers offered to the Grotto was deposited here; and such was the number of these superfluous candles that the little conveyances stationed near the Grotto railing, ready to receive the pilgrims' offerings, had to be brought to the storehouse several times a day in order to be emptied there, after which they were returned to the Grotto, and were promptly filled again. In theory, each taper that was offered ought to have been burnt at the feet of the Virgin's statue; but so great was the number of these offerings, that, although a couple of hundred tapers of all sizes were kept burning by day and night, it was impossible to exhaust the supply, which went on increasing and increasing. There was a rumour that the Fathers could not even find room to store all this wax, but had to sell it over and over again; and, indeed, certain friends of the Grotto confessed, with a touch of pride, that the profit on the tapers alone would have sufficed to defray all the expenses of the business.

The quantity of these votive candles quite stupefied Raymonde and Madame Desagneaux. How many, how many there were! The smaller ones, costing from fifty centimes to a franc apiece, were piled up in fabulous numbers. M. de Guersaint, desirous of getting at the exact figures, quite lost himself in the puzzling calculation he attempted. As for Pierre, it was in silence that he gazed upon this mass of wax, destined to be burnt in open daylight to the glory of God; and although he was by no means a rigid utilitarian, and could well understand that some apparent acts of extravagance yield an illusive enjoyment and satisfaction which provide humanity with as much sustenance as bread, he could not, on the other hand, refrain from reflecting on the many benefits which might have been conferred on the poor and the ailing with the money represented by all that wax, which would fly away in smoke.

"But come, what about that bottle which I am to send off?" abruptly asked Madame Desagneaux.

"We will go to the office," replied Gerard. "In five minutes everything will be settled."

They had to cross the Place du Rosaire once more and ascend the stone stairway leading to the Basilica. The office was up above, on the left hand, at the corner of the path leading to the Calvary. The building was a paltry one, a hut of lath and plaster which the wind and the rain had reduced to a state of ruin. On a board outside was the inscription: "Apply here with reference to Masses, Offerings, and Brotherhoods. Forwarding office for Lourdes water. Subscriptions to the 'Annals of O. L. of Lourdes.'" How many millions of people must have already passed through this wretched shanty, which seemed to date from the innocent days when the foundations of the adjacent Basilica had scarcely been laid!

The whole party went in, eager to see what might be inside. But they simply found a wicket at which Madame Desagneaux had to stop in order to give her friend's name and address; and when she had paid one franc and seventy centimes, a small printed receipt was handed her, such as you receive on registering luggage at a railway station.

As soon as they were outside again Gerard pointed to a large building standing two or three hundred yards away, and resumed: "There, that is where the Fathers reside."

"But we see nothing of them," remarked Pierre.

This observation so astonished the young man that he remained for a moment without replying. "It's true," he at last said, "we do not see them, but then they give up the custody of everything—the Grotto and all the rest—to the Fathers of the Assumption during the national pilgrimage."

Pierre looked at the building which had been pointed out to him, and noticed that it was a massive stone pile resembling a fortress. The windows were closed, and the whole edifice looked lifeless. Yet everything at Lourdes came from it, and to it also everything returned. It seemed, in fact, to the young priest that he could hear the silent, formidable rake-stroke which extended over the entire valley, which caught hold of all who had come to the spot, and placed both the gold and the blood of the throng in the clutches of those reverend Fathers! However, Gerard just then resumed in a low voice "But come, they do show themselves, for here is the reverend superior, Father Capdebarthe himself."

An ecclesiastic was indeed just passing, a man with the appearance of a peasant, a knotty frame, and a large head which looked as though carved with a billhook. His opaque eyes were quite expressionless, and his face, with its worn features, had retained a loamy tint, a gloomy, russet reflection of the earth. Monseigneur Laurence had really made a politic selection in confiding the organisation and management of the Grotto to those Garaison missionaries, who were so tenacious and covetous, for the most part sons of mountain peasants and passionately attached to the soil.

However, the little party now slowly retraced its steps by way of the Plateau de la Merlasse, the broad boulevard which skirts the inclined way on the left hand and leads to the Avenue de la Grotte. It was already past one o'clock, but people were still eating their dejeuners from one to the other end of the overflowing town. Many of the fifty thousand pilgrims and sight-seers collected within it had not yet been able to sit down and eat; and Pierre, who had left the table d'hote still crowded, who had just seen the hospitallers squeezing together so gaily at the "ordinary," found more and more tables at each step he took. On all sides people were eating, eating without a pause. Hereabouts, however, in the open air, on either side of the broad road, the hungry ones were humble folk who had rushed upon the tables set up on either footway—tables formed of a couple of long boards, flanked by two forms, and shaded from the sun by narrow linen awnings. Broth and coffee were sold at these places at a penny a cup. The little loaves heaped up in high baskets also cost a penny apiece. Hanging from the poles which upheld the awnings were sausages, chitterlings, and hams. Some of the open-air restaurateurs were frying potatoes, and others were concocting more or less savoury messes of inferior meat and onions. A pungent smoke, a violent odour, arose into the sunlight, mingling with the dust which was raised by the continuous tramp of the promenaders. Rows of people, moreover, were waiting at each cantine, so that each time a party rose from table fresh customers took possession of the benches ranged beside the oilcloth-covered planks, which were so narrow that there was scarcely room for two bowls of soup to be placed side by side. And one and all made haste, and devoured with the ravenous hunger born of their fatigue, that insatiable appetite which so often follows upon great moral shocks. In fact, when the mind had exhausted itself in prayer, when everything physical had been forgotten amidst the mental flight into the legendary heavens, the human animal suddenly appeared, again asserted itself, and began to gorge. Moreover, under that dazzling Sunday sky, the scene was like that of a fair-field with all the gluttony of a merrymaking community, a display of the delight which they felt in living, despite the multiplicity of their abominable ailments and the dearth of the miracles they hoped for.

"They eat, they amuse themselves; what else can one expect?" remarked Gerard, guessing the thoughts of his amiable companions.

"Ah! poor people!" murmured Pierre, "they have a perfect right to do so."

He was greatly touched to see human nature reassert itself in this fashion. However, when they had got to the lower part of the boulevard near the Grotto, his feelings were hurt at sight of the desperate eagerness displayed by the female vendors of tapers and bouquets, who with the rough fierceness of conquerors assailed the passers-by in bands. They were mostly young women, with bare heads, or with kerchiefs tied over their hair, and they displayed extraordinary effrontery. Even the old ones were scarcely more discreet. With parcels of tapers under their arms, they brandished the one which they offered for sale and even thrust it into the hand of the promenader. "Monsieur," "madame," they called, "buy a taper, buy a taper, it will bring you luck!" One gentleman, who was surrounded and shaken by three of the youngest of these harpies, almost lost the skirts of his frock-coat in attempting to escape their clutches. Then the scene began afresh with the bouquets—large round bouquets they were, carelessly fastened together and looking like cabbages. "A bouquet, madame!" was the cry. "A bouquet for the Blessed Virgin!" If the lady escaped, she heard muttered insults behind her. Trafficking, impudent trafficking, pursued the pilgrims to the very outskirts of the Grotto. Trade was not merely triumphantly installed in every one of the shops, standing close together and transforming each street into a bazaar, but it overran the footways and barred the road with hand-carts full of chaplets, medals, statuettes, and religious prints. On all sides people were buying almost to the same extent as they ate, in order that they might take away with them some souvenir of this holy Kermesse. And the bright gay note of this commercial eagerness, this scramble of hawkers, was supplied by the urchins who rushed about through the crowd, crying the "Journal de la Grotte." Their sharp, shrill voices pierced the ear: "The 'Journal de la Grotte,' this morning's number, two sous, the 'Journal de la Grotte.'"

Amidst the continual pushing which accompanied the eddying of the ever-moving crowd, Gerard's little party became separated. He and Raymonde remained behind the others. They had begun talking together in low tones, with an air of smiling intimacy, lost and isolated as they were in the dense crowd. And Madame Desagneaux at last had to stop, look back, and call to them: "Come on, or we shall lose one another!"

As they drew near, Pierre heard the girl exclaim: "Mamma is so very busy; speak to her before we leave." And Gerard thereupon replied: "It is understood. You have made me very happy, mademoiselle."

Thus the husband had been secured, the marriage decided upon, during this charming promenade among the sights of Lourdes. Raymonde had completed her conquest, and Gerard had at last taken a resolution, realising how gay and sensible she was, as she walked beside him leaning on his arm.

M. de Guersaint, however, had raised his eyes, and was heard inquiring: "Are not those people up there, on that balcony, the rich folk who made the journey in the same train as ourselves?—You know whom I mean, that lady who is so very ill, and whose husband and sister accompany her?"

He was alluding to the Dieulafays; and they indeed were the persons whom he now saw on the balcony of a suite of rooms which they had rented in a new house overlooking the lawns of the Rosary. They here occupied a first-floor, furnished with all the luxury that Lourdes could provide, carpets, hangings, mirrors, and many other things, without mentioning a staff of servants despatched beforehand from Paris. As the weather was so fine that afternoon, the large armchair on which lay the poor ailing woman had been rolled on to the balcony. You could see her there, clad in a lace peignoir. Her husband, always correctly attired in a black frock-coat, stood beside her on her right hand, whilst her sister, in a delightful pale mauve gown, sat on her left smiling and leaning over every now and then so as to speak to her, but apparently receiving no reply.

"Oh!" declared little Madame Desagneaux, "I have often heard people speak of Madame Jousseur, that lady in mauve. She is the wife of a diplomatist who neglects her, it seems, in spite of her great beauty; and last year there was a deal of talk about her fancy for a young colonel who is well known in Parisian society. It is said, however, in Catholic salons that her religious principles enabled her to conquer it."

They all five remained there, looking up at the balcony. "To think," resumed Madame Desagneaux, "that her sister, poor woman, was once her living portrait." And, indeed, there was an expression of greater kindliness and more gentle gaiety on Madame Dieulafay's face. And now you see her—no different from a dead woman except that she is above instead of under ground—with her flesh wasted away, reduced to a livid, boneless thing which they scarcely dare to move. Ah! the unhappy woman!

Raymonde thereupon assured the others that Madame Dieulafay, who had been married scarcely two years previously, had brought all the jewellery given her on the occasion of her wedding to offer it as a gift to Our Lady of Lourdes; and Gerard confirmed this assertion, saying that the jewellery had been handed over to the treasurer of the Basilica that very morning with a golden lantern studded with gems and a large sum of money destined for the relief of the poor. However, the Blessed Virgin could not have been touched as yet, for the sufferer's condition seemed, if anything, to be worse.

From that moment Pierre no longer beheld aught save that young woman on that handsome balcony, that woeful, wealthy creature lying there high above the merrymaking throng, the Lourdes mob which was feasting and laughing in the Sunday sunshine. The two dear ones who were so tenderly watching over her—her sister who had forsaken her society triumphs, her husband who had forgotten his financial business, his millions dispersed throughout the world—increased, by their irreproachable demeanour, the woefulness of the group which they thus formed high above all other heads, and face to face with the lovely valley. For Pierre they alone remained; and they were exceedingly wealthy and exceedingly wretched.

However, lingering in this wise on the footway with their eyes upturned, the five promenaders narrowly escaped being knocked down and run over, for at every moment fresh vehicles were coming up, for the most part landaus drawn by four horses, which were driven at a fast trot, and whose bells jingled merrily. The occupants of these carriages were tourists, visitors to the waters of Pau, Bareges, and Cauterets, whom curiosity had attracted to Lourdes, and who were delighted with the fine weather and quite inspirited by their rapid drive across the mountains. They would remain at Lourdes only a few hours; after hastening to the Grotto and the Basilica in seaside costumes, they would start off again, laughing, and well pleased at having seen it all. In this wise families in light attire, bands of young women with bright parasols, darted hither and thither among the grey, neutral-tinted crowd of pilgrims, imparting to it, in a yet more pronounced manner, the aspect of a fair-day mob, amidst which folks of good society deign to come and amuse themselves.

All at once Madame Desagneaux raised a cry "What, is it you, Berthe?" And thereupon she embraced a tall, charming brunette who had just alighted from a landau with three other young women, the whole party smiling and animated. Everyone began talking at once, and all sorts of merry exclamations rang out, in the delight they felt at meeting in this fashion. "Oh! we are at Cauterets, my dear," said the tall brunette. "And as everybody comes here, we decided to come all four together. And your husband, is he here with you?"

Madame Desagneaux began protesting: "Of course not," said she. "He is at Trouville, as you ought to know. I shall start to join him on Thursday."

"Yes, yes, of course," resumed the tall brunette, who, like her friend, seemed to be an amiable, giddy creature, "I was forgetting; you are here with the pilgrimage."

Then Madame Desagneaux offered to guide her friends, promising to show them everything of interest in less than a couple of hours; and turning to Raymonde, who stood by, smiling, she added "Come with us, my dear; your mother won't be anxious."

The ladies and Pierre and M. de Guersaint thereupon exchanged bows: and Gerard also took leave, tenderly pressing Raymonde's hand, with his eyes fixed on hers, as though to pledge himself definitively. The women swiftly departed, directing their steps towards the Grotto, and when Gerard also had gone off, returning to his duties, M. de Guersaint said to Pierre: "And the hairdresser on the Place du Marcadal, I really must go and see him. You will come with me, won't you?"

"Of course I will go wherever you like. I am quite at your disposal as Marie does not need us."

Following the pathways between the large lawns which stretch out in front of the Rosary, they reached the new bridge, where they had another encounter, this time with Abbe des Hermoises, who was acting as guide to two young married ladies who had arrived that morning from Tarbes. Walking between them with the gallant air of a society priest, he was showing them Lourdes and explaining it to them, keeping them well away, however, from its more repugnant features, its poor and its ailing folk, its odour of low misery, which, it must be admitted, had well-nigh disappeared that fine, sunshiny day. At the first word which M. de Guersaint addressed to him with respect to the hiring of a vehicle for the trip to Gavarnie, the Abbe was seized with a dread lest he should be obliged to leave his pretty lady-visitors: "As you please, my dear sir," he replied. "Kindly attend to the matter, and—you are quite right, make the cheapest arrangements possible, for I shall have two ecclesiastics of small means with me. There will be four of us. Let me know at the hotel this evening at what hour we shall start."

Thereupon he again joined his lady-friends, and led them towards the Grotto, following the shady path which skirts the Gave, a cool, sequestered path well suited for lovers' walks.

Feeling somewhat tired, Pierre had remained apart from the others, leaning against the parapet of the new bridge. And now for the first time he was struck by the prodigious number of priests among the crowd. He saw all varieties of them swarming across the bridge: priests of correct mien who had come with the pilgrimage and who could be recognised by their air of assurance and their clean cassocks; poor village priests who were far more timid and badly clothed, and who, after making sacrifices in order that they might indulge in the journey, would return home quite scared and, finally, there was the whole crowd of unattached ecclesiastics who had come nobody knew whence, and who enjoyed such absolute liberty that it was difficult to be sure whether they had even said their mass that morning. They doubtless found this liberty very agreeable; and thus the greater number of them, like Abbe des Hermoises, had simply come on a holiday excursion, free from all duties, and happy at being able to live like ordinary men, lost, unnoticed as they were in the multitude around them. And from the young, carefully groomed and perfumed priest, to the old one in a dirty cassock and shoes down at heel, the entire species had its representative in the throng—there were corpulent ones, others but moderately fat, thin ones, tall ones and short ones, some whom faith had brought and whom ardour was consuming, some also who simply plied their calling like worthy men, and some, moreover, who were fond of intriguing, and who were only present in order that they might help the good cause. However, Pierre was quite surprised to see such a stream of priests pass before him, each with his special passion, and one and all hurrying to the Grotto as one hurries to a duty, a belief, a pleasure, or a task. He noticed one among the number, a very short, slim, dark man with a pronounced Italian accent, whose glittering eyes seemed to be taking a plan of Lourdes, who looked, indeed, like one of those spies who come and peer around with a view to conquest; and then he observed another one, an enormous fellow with a paternal air, who was breathing hard through inordinate eating, and who paused in front of a poor sick woman, and ended by slipping a five-franc piece into her hand.

Just then, however, M. de Guersaint returned: "We merely have to go down the boulevard and the Rue Basse," said he.

Pierre followed him without answering. He had just felt his cassock on his shoulders for the first time that afternoon, for never had it seemed so light to him as whilst he was walking about amidst the scramble of the pilgrimage. The young fellow was now living in a state of mingled unconsciousness and dizziness, ever hoping that faith would fall upon him like a lightning flash, in spite of all the vague uneasiness which was growing within him at sight of the things which he beheld. However, the spectacle of that ever-swelling stream of priests no longer wounded his heart; fraternal feelings towards these unknown colleagues had returned to him; how many of them there must be who believed no more than he did himself, and yet, like himself, honestly fulfilled their mission as guides and consolers!

"This boulevard is a new one, you know," said M. de Guersaint, all at once raising his voice. "The number of houses built during the last twenty years is almost beyond belief. There is quite a new town here."

The Lapaca flowed along behind the buildings on their right and, their curiosity inducing them to turn into a narrow lane, they came upon some strange old structures on the margin of the narrow stream. Several ancient mills here displayed their wheels; among them one which Monseigneur Laurence had given to Bernadette's parents after the apparitions. Tourists, moreover, were here shown the pretended abode of Bernadette, a hovel whither the Soubirous family had removed on leaving the Rue des Petits Fosses, and in which the young girl, as she was already boarding with the Sisters of Nevers, can have but seldom slept. At last, by way of the Rue Basse, Pierre and his companion reached the Place du Marcadal.

This was a long, triangular, open space, the most animated and luxurious of the squares of the old town, the one where the cafes, the chemists, all the finest shops were situated. And, among the latter, one showed conspicuously, coloured as it was a lively green, adorned with lofty mirrors, and surmounted by a broad board bearing in gilt letters the inscription: "Cazaban, Hairdresser".

M. de Guersaint and Pierre went in, but there was nobody in the salon and they had to wait. A terrible clatter of forks resounded from the adjoining room, an ordinary dining-room transformed into a table d'hote, in which some twenty people were having dejeuner although it was already two o'clock. The afternoon was progressing, and yet people were still eating from one to the other end of Lourdes. Like every other householder in the town, whatever his religious convictions might be, Cazaban, in the pilgrimage season, let his bedrooms, surrendered his dining-room, end sought refuge in his cellar, where, heaped up with his family, he ate and slept, although this unventilated hole was no more than three yards square. However, the passion for trading and moneymaking carried all before it; at pilgrimage time the whole population disappeared like that of a conquered city, surrendering even the beds of its women and its children to the pilgrims, seating them at its tables, and supplying them with food.

"Is there nobody here?" called M. de Guersaint after waiting a moment.

At last a little man made his appearance, Cazaban himself, a type of the knotty but active Pyrenean, with a long face, prominent cheek-bones, and a sunburned complexion spotted here and there with red. His big, glittering eyes never remained still; and the whole of his spare little figure quivered with incessant exuberance of speech and gesture.

"For you, monsieur—a shave, eh?" said he. "I must beg your pardon for keeping you waiting; but my assistant has gone out, and I was in there with my boarders. If you will kindly sit down, I will attend to you at once."

Thereupon, deigning to operate in person, Cazaban began to stir up the lather and strop the razor. He had glanced rather nervously, however, at the cassock worn by Pierre, who without a word had seated himself in a corner and taken up a newspaper in the perusal of which he appeared to be absorbed.

A short interval of silence followed; but it was fraught with suffering for Cazaban, and whilst lathering his customer's chin he began to chatter: "My boarders lingered this morning such a long time at the Grotto, monsieur, that they have scarcely sat down to dejeuner. You can hear them, eh? I was staying with them out of politeness. However, I owe myself to my customers as well, do I not? One must try to please everybody."

M. de Guersaint, who also was fond of a chat, thereupon began to question him: "You lodge some of the pilgrims, I suppose?"

"Oh! we all lodge some of them, monsieur; it is necessary for the town," replied the barber.

"And you accompany them to the Grotto?"

At this, however, Cazaban revolted, and, holding up his razor, he answered with an air of dignity "Never, monsieur, never! For five years past I have not been in that new town which they are building."

He was still seeking to restrain himself, and again glanced at Pierre, whose face was hidden by the newspaper. The sight of the red cross pinned on M. de Guersaint's jacket was also calculated to render him prudent; nevertheless his tongue won the victory. "Well, monsieur, opinions are free, are they not?" said he. "I respect yours, but for my part I don't believe in all that phantasmagoria! Oh I've never concealed it! I was already a republican and a freethinker in the days of the Empire. There were barely four men of those views in the whole town at that time. Oh! I'm proud of it."

He had begun to shave M. de Guersaint's left cheek and was quite triumphant. From that moment a stream of words poured forth from his mouth, a stream which seemed to be inexhaustible. To begin with, he brought the same charges as Majeste against the Fathers of the Grotto. He reproached them for their dealings in tapers, chaplets, prints, and crucifixes, for the disloyal manner in which they competed with those who sold those articles as well as with the hotel and lodging-house keepers. And he was also wrathful with the Blue Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, for had they not robbed him of two tenants, two old ladies, who spent three weeks at Lourdes each year? Moreover you could divine within him all the slowly accumulated, overflowing spite with which the old town regarded the new town—that town which had sprung up so quickly on the other side of the castle, that rich city with houses as big as palaces, whither flowed all the life, all the luxury, all the money of Lourdes, so that it was incessantly growing larger and wealthier, whilst its elder sister, the poor, antique town of the mountains, with its narrow, grass-grown, deserted streets, seemed near the point of death. Nevertheless the struggle still continued; the old town seemed determined not to die, and, by lodging pilgrims and opening shops on her side, endeavoured to compel her ungrateful junior to grant her a share of the spoils. But custom only flowed to the shops which were near the Grotto, and only the poorer pilgrims were willing to lodge so far away; so that the unequal conditions of the struggle intensified the rupture and turned the high town and the low town into two irreconcilable enemies, who preyed upon one another amidst continual intrigues.

"Ah, no! They certainly won't see me at their Grotto," resumed Cazaban, with his rageful air. "What an abusive use they make of that Grotto of theirs! They serve it up in every fashion! To think of such idolatry, such gross superstition in the nineteenth century! Just ask them if they have cured a single sufferer belonging to the town during the last twenty years! Yet there are plenty of infirm people crawling about our streets. It was our folk that benefited by the first miracles; but it would seem that the miraculous water has long lost all its power, so far as we are concerned. We are too near it; people have to come from a long distance if they want it to act on them. It's really all too stupid; why, I wouldn't go there even if I were offered a hundred francs!"

Pierre's immobility was doubtless irritating the barber. He had now begun to shave M. de Guersaint's right cheek; and was inveighing against the Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, whose greed for gain was the one cause of all the misunderstanding. These Fathers who were at home there, since they had purchased from the Municipality the land on which they desired to build, did not even carry out the stipulations of the contract they had signed, for there were two clauses in it forbidding all trading, such as the sale of the water and of religious articles. Innumerable actions might have been brought against them. But they snapped their fingers, and felt themselves so powerful that they no longer allowed a single offering to go to the parish, but arranged matters so that the whole harvest of money should be garnered by the Grotto and the Basilica.

And, all at once, Cazaban candidly exclaimed: "If they were only reasonable, if they would only share with us!" Then, when M. de Guersaint had washed his face, and reseated himself, the hairdresser resumed: "And if I were to tell you, monsieur, what they have done with our poor town! Forty years ago all the young girls here conducted themselves properly, I assure you. I remember that in my young days when a young man was wicked he generally had to go elsewhere. But times have changed, our manners are no longer the same. Nowadays nearly all the girls content themselves with selling candles and nosegays; and you must have seen them catching hold of the passers-by and thrusting their goods into their hands! It is really shameful to see so many bold girls about! They make a lot of money, acquire lazy habits, and, instead of working during the winter, simply wait for the return of the pilgrimage season. And I assure you that the young men don't need to go elsewhere nowadays. No, indeed! And add to all this the suspicious floating element which swells the population as soon as the first fine weather sets in—the coachmen, the hawkers, the cantine keepers, all the low-class, wandering folk reeking with grossness and vice—and you can form an idea of the honest new town which they have given us with the crowds that come to their Grotto and their Basilica!"

Greatly struck by these remarks, Pierre had let his newspaper fall and begun to listen. It was now, for the first time, that he fully realised the difference between the two Lourdes—old Lourdes so honest and so pious in its tranquil solitude, and new Lourdes corrupted, demoralised by the circulation of so much money, by such a great enforced increase of wealth, by the ever-growing torrent of strangers sweeping through it, by the fatal rotting influence of the conflux of thousands of people, the contagion of evil examples. And what a terrible result it seemed when one thought of Bernadette, the pure, candid girl kneeling before the wild primitive grotto, when one thought of all the naive faith, all the fervent purity of those who had first begun the work! Had they desired that the whole countryside should be poisoned in this wise by lucre and human filth? Yet it had sufficed that the nations should flock there for a pestilence to break out.

Seeing that Pierre was listening, Cazaban made a final threatening gesture as though to sweep away all this poisonous superstition. Then, relapsing into silence, he finished cutting M. de Guersaint's hair.

"There you are, monsieur!"

The architect rose, and it was only now that he began to speak of the conveyance which he wished to hire. At first the hairdresser declined to enter into the matter, pretending that they must apply to his brother at the Champ Commun; but at last he consented to take the order. A pair-horse landau for Gavarnie was priced at fifty francs. However, he was so pleased at having talked so much, and so flattered at hearing himself called an honest man, that he eventually agreed to charge only forty francs. There were four persons in the party, so this would make ten francs apiece. And it was agreed that they should start off at about two in the morning, so that they might get back to Lourdes at a tolerably early hour on the Monday evening.

"The landau will be outside the Hotel of the Apparitions at the appointed time," repeated Cazaban in his emphatic way. "You may rely on me, monsieur."

Then he began to listen. The clatter of crockery did not cease in the adjoining room. People were still eating there with that impulsive voracity which had spread from one to the other end of Lourdes. And all at once a voice was heard calling for more bread.

"Excuse me," hastily resumed Cazaban, "my boarders want me." And thereupon he rushed away, his hands still greasy through fingering the comb.

The door remained open for a second, and on the walls of the dining-room Pierre espied various religious prints, and notably a view of the Grotto, which surprised him; in all probability, however, the hairdresser only hung these engravings there during the pilgrimage season by way of pleasing his boarders.

It was now nearly three o'clock. When the young priest and M. de Guersaint got outside they were astonished at the loud pealing of bells which was flying through the air. The parish church had responded to the first stroke of vespers chiming at the Basilica; and now all the convents, one after another, were contributing to the swelling peals. The crystalline notes of the bell of the Carmelites mingled with the grave notes of the bell of the Immaculate Conception; and all the joyous bells of the Sisters of Nevers and the Dominicans were jingling together. In this wise, from morning till evening on fine days of festivity, the chimes winged their flight above the house-roofs of Lourdes. And nothing could have been gayer than that sonorous melody resounding in the broad blue heavens above the gluttonous town, which had at last lunched, and was now comfortably digesting as it strolled about in the sunlight.

III. THE NIGHT PROCESSION

AS soon as night had fallen Marie, still lying on her bed at the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, became extremely impatient, for she had learnt from Madame de Jonquiere that Baron Suire had obtained from Father Fourcade the necessary permission for her to spend the night in front of the Grotto. Thus she kept on questioning Sister Hyacinthe, asking her: "Pray, Sister, is it not yet nine o'clock?"

"No, my child, it is scarcely half-past eight," was the reply. "Here is a nice woollen shawl for you to wrap round you at daybreak, for the Gave is close by, and the mornings are very fresh, you know, in these mountainous parts."

"Oh! but the nights are so lovely, Sister, and besides, I sleep so little here!" replied Marie; "I cannot be worse off out-of-doors. Mon Dieu, how happy I am; how delightful it will be to spend the whole night with the Blessed Virgin!"

The entire ward was jealous of her; for to remain in prayer before the Grotto all night long was the most ineffable of joys, the supreme beatitude. It was said that in the deep peacefulness of night the chosen ones undoubtedly beheld the Virgin, but powerful protection was needed to obtain such a favour as had been granted to Marie; for nowadays the reverend Fathers scarcely liked to grant it, as several sufferers had died during the long vigil, falling asleep, as it were, in the midst of their ecstasy.

"You will take the Sacrament at the Grotto tomorrow morning, before you are brought back here, won't you, my child?" resumed Sister Hyacinthe.

However, nine o'clock at last struck, and, Pierre not arriving, the girl wondered whether he, usually so punctual, could have forgotten her? The others were now talking to her of the night procession, which she would see from beginning to end if she only started at once. The ceremonies concluded with a procession every night, but the Sunday one was always the finest, and that evening, it was said, would be remarkably splendid, such, indeed, as was seldom seen. Nearly thirty thousand pilgrims would take part in it, each carrying a lighted taper: the nocturnal marvels of the sky would be revealed; the stars would descend upon earth. At this thought the sufferers began to bewail their fate; what a wretched lot was theirs, to be tied to their beds, unable to see any of those wonders.

At last Madame de Jonquiere approached Marie's bed. "My dear girl," said she, "here is your father with Monsieur l'Abbe."

Radiant with delight, the girl at once forgot her weary waiting. "Oh! pray let us make haste, Pierre," she exclaimed; "pray let us make haste!"

They carried her down the stairs, and the young priest harnessed himself to the little car, which gently rolled along, under the star-studded heavens, whilst M. de Guersaint walked beside it. The night was moonless, but extremely beautiful; the vault above looked like deep blue velvet, spangled with diamonds, and the atmosphere was exquisitely mild and pure, fragrant with the perfumes from the mountains. Many pilgrims were hurrying along the street, all bending their steps towards the Grotto, but they formed a discreet, pensive crowd, with naught of the fair-field, lounging character of the daytime throng. And, as soon as the Plateau de la Merlasse was reached, the darkness spread out, you entered into a great lake of shadows formed by the stretching lawns and lofty trees, and saw nothing rising on high save the black, tapering spire of the Basilica.

Pierre grew rather anxious on finding that the crowd became more and more compact as he advanced. Already on reaching the Place du Rosaire it was difficult to take another forward step. "There is no hope of getting to the Grotto yet awhile," he said. "The best course would be to turn into one of the pathways behind the pilgrims' shelter-house and wait there."

Marie, however, greatly desired to see the procession start. "Oh! pray try to go as far as the Gave," said she. "I shall then see everything from a distance; I don't want to go near."

M. de Guersaint, who was equally inquisitive, seconded this proposal. "Don't be uneasy," he said to Pierre. "I am here behind, and will take care to let nobody jostle her."

Pierre had to begin pulling the little vehicle again. It took him a quarter of an hour to pass under one of the arches of the inclined way on the left hand, so great was the crush of pilgrims at that point. Then, taking a somewhat oblique course, he ended by reaching the quay beside the Gave, where there were only some spectators standing on the sidewalk, so that he was able to advance another fifty yards. At last he halted, and backed the little car against the quay parapet, in full view of the Grotto. "Will you be all right here?" he asked.

"Oh yes, thank you. Only you must sit me up; I shall then be able to see much better."

M. de Guersaint raised her into a sitting posture, and then for his part climbed upon the stonework running from one to the other end of the quay. A mob of inquisitive people had already scaled it in part, like sight-seers waiting for a display of fireworks; and they were all raising themselves on tiptoe, and craning their necks to get a better view. Pierre himself at last grew interested, although there was, so far, little to see.

Some thirty thousand people were assembled, and, every moment there were fresh arrivals. All carried candles, the lower parts of which were wrapped in white paper, on which a picture of Our Lady of Lourdes was printed in blue ink. However, these candles were not yet lighted, and the only illumination that you perceived above the billowy sea of heads was the bright, forge-like glow of the taper-lighted Grotto. A great buzzing arose, whiffs of human breath blew hither and thither, and these alone enabled you to realise that thousands of serried, stifling creatures were gathered together in the black depths, like a living sea that was ever eddying and spreading. There were even people hidden away under the trees beyond the Grotto, in distant recesses of the darkness of which one had no suspicion.

At last a few tapers began to shine forth here and there, like sudden sparks of light spangling the obscurity at random. Their number rapidly increased, eyots of stars were formed, whilst at other points there were meteoric trails, milky ways, so to say, flowing midst the constellations. The thirty thousand tapers were being lighted one by one, their beams gradually increasing in number till they obscured the bright glow of the Grotto and spread, from one to the other end of the promenade, the small yellow flames of a gigantic brasier.

"Oh! how beautiful it is, Pierre!" murmured Marie; "it is like the resurrection of the humble, the bright awakening of the souls of the poor."

"It is superb, superb!" repeated M. de Guersaint, with impassioned artistic satisfaction. "Do you see those two trails of light yonder, which intersect one another and form a cross?"

Pierre's feelings, however, had been touched by what Marie had just said. He was reflecting upon her words. There was truth in them. Taken singly, those slender flames, those mere specks of light, were modest and unobtrusive, like the lowly; it was only their great number that supplied the effulgence, the sun-like resplendency. Fresh ones were continually appearing, farther and farther away, like waifs and strays. "Ah!" murmured the young priest, "do you see that one which has just begun to flicker, all by itself, far away—do you see it, Marie? Do you see how it floats and slowly approaches until it is merged in the great lake of light?"

In the vicinity of the Grotto one could see now as clearly as in the daytime. The trees, illumined from below, were intensely green, like the painted trees in stage scenery. Above the moving brasier were some motionless banners, whose embroidered saints and silken cords showed with vivid distinctness. And the great reflection ascended to the rock, even to the Basilica, whose spire now shone out, quite white, against the black sky; whilst the hillsides across the Gave were likewise brightened, and displayed the pale fronts of their convents amidst their sombre foliage.

There came yet another moment of uncertainty. The flaming lake, in which each burning wick was like a little wave, rolled its starry sparkling as though it were about to burst from its bed and flow away in a river. Then the banners began to oscillate, and soon a regular motion set in.

"Oh! so they won't pass this way!" exclaimed M. de Guersaint in a tone of disappointment.

Pierre, who had informed himself on the matter, thereupon explained that the procession would first of all ascend the serpentine road—constructed at great cost up the hillside—and that it would afterwards pass behind the Basilica, descend by the inclined way on the right hand, and then spread out through the gardens.

"Look!" said he; "you can see the foremost tapers ascending amidst the greenery."

Then came an enchanting spectacle. Little flickering lights detached themselves from the great bed of fire, and began gently rising, without it being possible for one to tell at that distance what connected them with the earth. They moved upward, looking in the darkness like golden particles of the sun. And soon they formed an oblique streak, a streak which suddenly twisted, then extended again until it curved once more. At last the whole hillside was streaked by a flaming zigzag, resembling those lightning flashes which you see falling from black skies in cheap engravings. But, unlike the lightning, the luminous trail did not fade away; the little lights still went onward in the same slow, gentle, gliding manner. Only for a moment, at rare intervals, was there a sudden eclipse; the procession, no doubt, was then passing behind some clump of trees. But, farther on, the tapers beamed forth afresh, rising heavenward by an intricate path, which incessantly diverged and then started upward again. At last, however, the time came when the lights no longer ascended, for they had reached the summit of the hill and had begun to disappear at the last turn of the road.

Exclamations were rising from the crowd. "They are passing behind the Basilica," said one. "Oh! it will take them twenty minutes before they begin coming down on the other side," remarked another. "Yes, madame," said a third, "there are thirty thousand of them, and an hour will go by before the last of them leaves the Grotto."

Ever since the start a sound of chanting had risen above the low rumbling of the crowd. The hymn of Bernadette was being sung, those sixty couplets between which the Angelic Salutation, with its all-besetting rhythm, was ever returning as a refrain. When the sixty couplets were finished they were sung again; and that lullaby of "Ave, ave, ave Maria!" came back incessantly, stupefying the mind, and gradually transporting those thousands of beings into a kind of wide-awake dream, with a vision of Paradise before their eyes. And, indeed, at night-time when they were asleep, their beds would rock to the eternal tune, which they still and ever continued singing.

"Are we going to stop here?" asked M. de Guersaint, who speedily got tired of remaining in any one spot. "We see nothing but the same thing over and over again."

Marie, who had informed herself by listening to what was said in the crowd, thereupon exclaimed: "You were quite right, Pierre; it would be much better to go back yonder under the trees. I so much wish to see everything."

"Yes, certainly; we will seek a spot whence you may see it all," replied the priest. "The only difficulty lies in getting away from here."

Indeed, they were now inclosed within the mob of sight-seers; and, in order to secure a passage, Pierre with stubborn perseverance had to keep on begging a little room for a suffering girl.

M. de Guersaint meantime brought up the rear, screening the little conveyance so that it might not be upset by the jostling; whilst Marie turned her head, still endeavouring to see the sheet of flame spread out before the Grotto, that lake of little sparkling waves which never seemed to diminish, although the procession continued to flow from it without a pause.

At last they all three found themselves out of the crowd, near one of the arches, on a deserted spot where they were able to breathe for a moment. They now heard nothing but the distant canticle with its besetting refrain, and they only saw the reflection of the tapers, hovering like a luminous cloud in the neighbourhood of the Basilica.

"The best plan would be to climb to the Calvary," said M. de Guersaint. "The servant at the hotel told me so this morning. From up there, it seems, the scene is fairy-like."

But they could not think of making the ascent. Pierre at once enumerated the difficulties. "How could we hoist ourselves to such a height with Marie's conveyance?" he asked. "Besides, we should have to come down again, and that would be dangerous work in the darkness amidst all the scrambling."

Marie herself preferred to remain under the trees in the gardens, where it was very mild. So they started off, and reached the esplanade in front of the great crowned statue of the Virgin. It was illuminated by means of blue and yellow globes which encompassed it with a gaudy splendour; and despite all his piety M. de Guersaint could not help finding these decorations in execrable taste.

"There!" exclaimed Marie, "a good place would be near those shrubs yonder."

She was pointing to a shrubbery near the pilgrims' shelter-house; and the spot was indeed an excellent one for their purpose, as it enabled them to see the procession come down by the gradient way on the left, and watch it as it passed between the lawns to the new bridge and back again. Moreover, a delightful freshness prevailed there by reason of the vicinity of the Gave. There was nobody there as yet, and one could enjoy deep peacefulness in the dense shade which fell from the big plane-trees bordering the path.

In his impatience to see the first tapers reappear as soon as they should have passed behind the Basilica, M. de Guersaint had risen on tiptoe. "I see nothing as yet," he muttered, "so whatever the regulations may be I shall sit on the grass for a moment. I've no strength left in my legs." Then, growing anxious about his daughter, he inquired: "Shall I cover you up? It is very cool here."

"Oh, no! I'm not cold, father!" answered Marie; "I feel so happy. It is long since I breathed such sweet air. There must be some roses about—can't you smell that delicious perfume?" And turning to Pierre she asked: "Where are the roses, my friend? Can you see them?"

When M. de Guersaint had seated himself on the grass near the little vehicle, it occurred to Pierre to see if there was not some bed of roses near at hand. But is was in vain that he explored the dark lawns; he could only distinguish sundry clumps of evergreens. And, as he passed in front of the pilgrims' shelter-house on his way back, curiosity prompted him to enter it.

This building formed a long and lofty hall, lighted by large windows upon two sides. With bare walls and a stone pavement, it contained no other furniture than a number of benches, which stood here and there in haphazard fashion. There was neither table nor shelf, so that the homeless pilgrims who had sought refuge there had piled up their baskets, parcels, and valises in the window embrasures. Moreover, the place was apparently empty; the poor folk that it sheltered had no doubt joined the procession. Nevertheless, although the door stood wide open, an almost unbearable smell reigned inside. The very walls seemed impregnated with an odour of poverty, and in spite of the bright sunshine which had prevailed during the day, the flagstones were quite damp, soiled and soaked with expectorations, spilt wine, and grease. This mess had been made by the poorer pilgrims, who with their dirty skins and wretched rags lived in the hall, eating and sleeping in heaps on the benches. Pierre speedily came to the conclusion that the pleasant smell of roses must emanate from some other spot; still, he was making the round of the hall, which was lighted by four smoky lanterns, and which he believed to be altogether unoccupied, when, against the left-hand wall, he was surprised to espy the vague figure of a woman in black, with what seemed to be a white parcel lying on her lap. She was all alone in that solitude, and did not stir; however, her eyes were wide open.

He drew near and recognised Madame Vincent. She addressed him in a deep, broken voice: "Rose has suffered so dreadfully to-day! Since daybreak she has not ceased moaning. And so, as she fell asleep a couple of hours ago, I haven't dared to stir for fear lest she should awake and suffer again."

Thus the poor woman remained motionless, martyr-mother that she was, having for long months held her daughter in her arms in this fashion, in the stubborn hope of curing her. In her arms, too, she had brought her to Lourdes; in her arms she had carried her to the Grotto; in her arms she had rocked her to sleep, having neither a room of her own, nor even a hospital bed at her disposal.

"Isn't the poor little thing any better?" asked Pierre, whose heart ached at the sight.

"No, Monsieur l'Abbe; no, I think not."

"But you are very badly off here on this bench. You should have made an application to the pilgrimage managers instead of remaining like this, in the street, as it were. Some accommodation would have been found for your little girl, at any rate; that's certain."

"Oh! what would have been the use of it, Monsieur l'Abbe? She is all right on my lap. And besides, should I have been allowed to stay with her? No, no, I prefer to have her on my knees; it seems to me that it will end by curing her." Two big tears rolled down the poor woman's motionless cheeks, and in her stifled voice she continued: "I am not penniless. I had thirty sous when I left Paris, and I still have ten left. All I need is a little bread, and she, poor darling, can no longer drink any milk even. I have enough to last me till we go back, and if she gets well again, oh! we shall be rich, rich, rich!"

She had leant forward while speaking, and by the flickering light of a lantern near by, gazed at Rose, who was breathing faintly, with parted lips. "You see how soundly she is sleeping," resumed the unhappy mother. "Surely the Blessed Virgin will take pity on her and cure her, won't she, Monsieur l'Abbe? We only have one day left; still, I don't despair; and I shall again pray all night long without moving from here. She will be cured to-morrow; we must live till then."

Infinite pity was filling the heart of Pierre, who, fearing that he also might weep, now went away. "Yes, yes, my poor woman, we must hope, still hope," said he, as he left her there among the scattered benches, in that deserted, malodorous hall, so motionless in her painful maternal passion as to hold her own breath, fearful lest the heaving of her bosom should awaken the poor little sufferer. And in deepest grief, with closed lips, she prayed ardently.

On Pierre returning to Marie's side, the girl inquired of him: "Well, and those roses? Are there any near here?"

He did not wish to sadden her by telling her what he had seen, so he simply answered: "No, I have searched the lawns; there are none."

"How singular!" she rejoined, in a thoughtful way. "The perfume is both so sweet and penetrating. You can smell it, can't you? At this moment it is wonderfully strong, as though all the roses of Paradise were flowering around us in the darkness."

A low exclamation from her father interrupted her. M. de Guersaint had risen to his feet again on seeing some specks of light shine out above the gradient ways on the left side of the Basilica. "At last! Here they come!" said he.

It was indeed the head of the procession again appearing; and at once the specks of light began to swarm and extend in long, wavering double files. The darkness submerged everything except these luminous points, which seemed to be at a great elevation, and to emerge, as it were, from the black depths of the Unknown. And at the same time the everlasting canticle was again heard, but so lightly, for the procession was far away, that it seemed as yet merely like the rustle of a coming storm, stirring the leaves of the trees.

"Ah! I said so," muttered M. de Guersaint; "one ought to be at the Calvary to see everything." With the obstinacy of a child he kept on returning to his first idea, again and again complaining that they had chosen "the worst possible place."

"But why don't you go up to the Calvary, papa?" at last said Marie. "There is still time. Pierre will stay here with me." And with a mournful laugh she added: "Go; you know very well that nobody will run away with me."

He at first refused to act upon the suggestion, but, unable to resist his desire, he all at once fell in with it. And he had to hasten his steps, crossing the lawns at a run. "Don't move," he called; "wait for me under the trees. I will tell you of all that I may see up there."

Then Pierre and Marie remained alone in that dim, solitary nook, whence came such a perfume of roses, albeit no roses could be found. And they did not speak, but in silence watched the procession, which was now coming down from the hill with a gentle, continuous, gliding motion.

A double file of quivering stars leapt into view on the left-hand side of the Basilica, and then followed the monumental, gradient way, whose curve is gradually described. At that distance you were still unable to see the pilgrims themselves, and you beheld simply those well-disciplined travelling lights tracing geometrical lines amidst the darkness. Under the deep blue heavens, even the buildings at first remained vague, forming but blacker patches against the sky. Little by little, however, as the number of candles increased, the principal architectural lines—the tapering spire of the Basilica, the cyclopean arches of the gradient ways, the heavy, squat facade of the Rosary—became more distinctly visible. And with that ceaseless torrent of bright sparks, flowing slowly downward with the stubborn persistence of a stream which has overflowed its banks and can be stopped by nothing, there came as it were an aurora, a growing, invading mass of light, which would at last spread its glory over the whole horizon.

"Look, look, Pierre!" cried Marie, in an access of childish joy. "There is no end of them; fresh ones are ever shining out."

Indeed, the sudden appearances of the little lights continued with mechanical regularity, as though some inexhaustible celestial source were pouring forth all those solar specks. The head of the procession had just reached the gardens, near the crowned statue of the Virgin, so that as yet the double file of flames merely outlined the curves of the Rosary and the broad inclined way. However, the approach of the multitude was foretokened by the perturbation of the atmosphere, by the gusts of human breath coming from afar; and particularly did the voices swell, the canticle of Bernadette surging with the clamour of a rising tide, through which, with rhythmical persistence, the refrain of "Ave, ave, ave Maria!" rolled ever in a louder key.

"Ah, that refrain!" muttered Pierre; "it penetrates one's very skin. It seems to me as though my whole body were at last singing it."

Again did Marie give vent to that childish laugh of hers. "It is true," said she; "it follows me about everywhere. I heard it the other night whilst I was asleep. And now it is again taking possession of me, rocking me, wafting me above the ground." Then she broke off to say: "Here they come, just across the lawn, in front of us."

The procession had entered one of the long, straight paths; and then, turning round the lawn by way of the Breton's Cross, it came back by a parallel path. It took more than a quarter of an hour to execute this movement, during which the double file of tapers resembled two long parallel streams of flame. That which ever excited one's admiration was the ceaseless march of this serpent of fire, whose golden coils crept so gently over the black earth, winding, stretching into the far distance, without the immense body ever seeming to end. There must have been some jostling and scrambling every now and then, for some of the luminous lines shook and bent as though they were about to break; but order was soon re-established, and then the slow, regular, gliding movement set in afresh. There now seemed to be fewer stars in the heavens; it was as though a milky way had fallen from on high, rolling its glittering dust of worlds, and transferring the revolutions of the planets from the empyrean to earth. A bluish light streamed all around; there was naught but heaven left; the buildings and the trees assumed a visionary aspect in the mysterious glow of those thousands of tapers, whose number still and ever increased.

A faint sigh of admiration came from Marie. She was at a loss for words, and could only repeat "How beautiful it is! Mon Dieu! how beautiful it is! Look, Pierre, is it not beautiful?"

However, since the procession had been going by at so short a distance from them it had ceased to be a rhythmic march of stars which no human hand appeared to guide, for amidst the stream of light they could distinguish the figures of the pilgrims carrying the tapers, and at times even recognise them as they passed. First they espied La Grivotte, who, exaggerating her cure, and repeating that she had never felt in better health, had insisted upon taking part in the ceremony despite the lateness of the hour; and she still retained her excited demeanour, her dancing gait in that cool night air, which often made her shiver. Then the Vignerons appeared; the father at the head of the party, raising his taper on high, and followed by Madame Vigneron and Madame Chaise, who dragged their weary legs; whilst little Gustave, quite worn out, kept on tapping the sanded path with his crutch, his right hand covered meantime with all the wax that had dripped upon it. Every sufferer who could walk was there, among others Elise Rouquet, who, with her bare red face, passed by like some apparition from among the damned. Others were laughing; Sophie Couteau, the little girl who had been miraculously healed the previous year, was quite forgetting herself, playing with her taper as though it were a switch. Heads followed heads without a pause, heads of women especially, more often with sordid, common features, but at times wearing an exalted expression, which you saw for a second ere it vanished amidst the fantastic illumination. And there was no end to that terrible march past; fresh pilgrims were ever appearing. Among them Pierre and Marie noticed yet another little black shadowy figure, gliding along in a discreet, humble way; it was Madame Maze, whom they would not have recognised if she had not for a moment raised her pale face, down which the tears were streaming.

"Look!" exclaimed Pierre; "the first tapers in the procession are reaching the Place du Rosaire, and I am sure that half of the pilgrims are still in front of the Grotto."

Marie had raised her eyes. Up yonder, on the left-hand side of the Basilica, she could see other lights incessantly appearing with that mechanical kind of movement which seemed as though it would never cease. "Ah!" she said, "how many, how many distressed souls there are! For each of those little flames is a suffering soul seeking deliverance, is it not?"

Pierre had to lean over in order to hear her, for since the procession had been streaming by, so near to them, they had been deafened by the sound of the endless canticle, the hymn of Bernadette. The voices of the pilgrims rang out more loudly than ever amidst the increasing vertigo; the couplets became jumbled together—each batch of processionists chanted a different one with the ecstatic voices of beings possessed, who can no longer hear themselves. There was a huge indistinct clamour, the distracted clamour of a multitude intoxicated by its ardent faith. And meantime the refrain of "Ave, ave, ave Maria!" was ever returning, rising, with its frantic, importunate rhythm, above everything else.

All at once Pierre and Marie, to their great surprise, saw M. de Guersaint before them again. "Ah! my children," he said, "I did not want to linger too long up there, I cut through the procession twice in order to get back to you. But what a sight, what a sight it is! It is certainly the first beautiful thing that I have seen since I have been here!" Thereupon he began to describe the procession as he had beheld it from the Calvary height. "Imagine," said he, "another heaven, a heaven down below reflecting that above, a heaven entirely filled by a single immense constellation. The swarming stars seem to be lost, to lie in dim faraway depths; and the trail of fire is in form like a monstrance—yes, a real monstrance, the base of which is outlined by the inclined ways, the stem by the two parallel paths, and the Host by the round lawn which crowns them. It is a monstrance of burning gold, shining out in the depths of the darkness with a perpetual sparkle of moving stars. Nothing else seems to exist; it is gigantic, paramount. I really never saw anything so extraordinary before!"

He was waving his arms, beside himself, overflowing with the emotion of an artist.

"Father dear," said Marie, tenderly, "since you have come back you ought to go to bed. It is nearly eleven o'clock, and you know that you have to start at two in the morning." Then, to render him compliant, she added: "I am so pleased that you are going to make that excursion! Only, come back early to-morrow evening, because you'll see, you'll see—" She stopped short, not daring to express her conviction that she would be cured.

"You are right; I will go to bed," replied M. de Guersaint, quite calmed. "Since Pierre will be with you I sha'n't feel anxious."

"But I don't wish Pierre to pass the night out here. He will join you by-and-by after he has taken me to the Grotto. I sha'n't have any further need of anybody; the first bearer who passes can take me back to the hospital to-morrow morning."

Pierre had not interrupted her, and now he simply said: "No, no, Marie, I shall stay. Like you, I shall spend the night at the Grotto."

She opened her mouth to insist and express her displeasure. But he had spoken those words so gently, and she had detected in them such a dolorous thirst for happiness, that, stirred to the depths of her soul, she stayed her tongue.

"Well, well, my children," replied her father, "settle the matter between you. I know that you are both very sensible. And now good-night, and don't be at all uneasy about me."

He gave his daughter a long, loving kiss, pressed the young priest's hands, and then went off, disappearing among the serried ranks of the procession, which he once more had to cross.

Then they remained alone in their dark, solitary nook under the spreading trees, she still sitting up in her box, and he kneeling on the grass, with his elbow resting on one of the wheels. And it was truly sweet to linger there while the tapers continued marching past, and, after a turning movement, assembled on the Place du Rosaire. What delighted Pierre was that nothing of all the daytime junketing remained. It seemed as though a purifying breeze had come down from the mountains, sweeping away all the odour of strong meats, the greedy Sunday delights, the scorching, pestilential, fair-field dust which, at an earlier hour, had hovered above the town. Overhead there was now only the vast sky, studded with pure stars, and the freshness of the Gave was delicious, whilst the wandering breezes were laden with the perfumes of wild flowers. The mysterious Infinite spread far around in the sovereign peacefulness of night, and nothing of materiality remained save those little candle-flames which the young priest's companion had compared to suffering souls seeking deliverance. All was now exquisitely restful, instinct with unlimited hope. Since Pierre had been there all the heart-rending memories of the afternoon, of the voracious appetites, the impudent simony, and the poisoning of the old town, had gradually left him, allowing him to savour the divine refreshment of that beautiful night, in which his whole being was steeped as in some revivifying water.

A feeling of infinite sweetness had likewise come over Marie, who murmured: "Ah! how happy Blanche would be to see all these marvels."

She was thinking of her sister, who had been left in Paris to all the worries of her hard profession as a teacher forced to run hither and thither giving lessons. And that simple mention of her sister, of whom Marie had not spoken since her arrival at Lourdes, but whose figure now unexpectedly arose in her mind's eye, sufficed to evoke a vision of all the past.

Then, without exchanging a word, Marie and Pierre lived their childhood's days afresh, playing together once more in the neighbouring gardens parted by the quickset hedge. But separation came on the day when he entered the seminary and when she kissed him on the cheeks, vowing that she would never forget him. Years went by, and they found themselves forever parted: he a priest, she prostrated by illness, no longer with any hope of ever being a woman. That was their whole story—an ardent affection of which they had long been ignorant, then absolute severance, as though they were dead, albeit they lived side by side. They again beheld the sorry lodging whence they had started to come to Lourdes after so much battling, so much discussion—his doubts and her passionate faith, which last had conquered. And it seemed to them truly delightful to find themselves once more quite alone together, in that dark nook on that lovely night, when there were as many stars upon earth as there were in heaven.

Marie had hitherto retained the soul of a child, a spotless soul, as her father said, good and pure among the purest. Stricken low in her thirteenth year, she had grown no older in mind. Although she was now three-and-twenty, she was still a child, a child of thirteen, who had retired within herself, absorbed in the bitter catastrophe which had annihilated her. You could tell this by the frigidity of her glance, by her absent expression, by the haunted air she ever wore, unable as she was to bestow a thought on anything but her calamity. And never was woman's soul more pure and candid, arrested as it had been in its development. She had had no other romance in life save that tearful farewell to her friend, which for ten long years had sufficed to fill her heart. During the endless days which she had spent on her couch of wretchedness, she had never gone beyond this dream—that if she had grown up in health, he doubtless would not have become a priest, in order to live near her. She never read any novels. The pious works which she was allowed to peruse maintained her in the excitement of a superhuman love. Even the rumours of everyday life died away at the door of the room where she lived in seclusion; and, in past years, when she had been taken from one to the other end of France, from one inland spa to another, she had passed through the crowds like a somnambulist who neither sees nor hears anything, possessed, as she was, by the idea of the calamity that had befallen her, the bond which made her a sexless thing. Hence her purity and childishness; hence she was but an adorable daughter of suffering, who, despite the growth of her sorry flesh, harboured nothing in her heart save that distant awakening of passion, the unconscious love of her thirteenth year.

Her hand sought Pierre's in the darkness, and when she found it, coming to meet her own, she, for a long time, continued pressing it. Ah! how sweet it was! Never before, indeed, had they tasted such pure and perfect joy in being together, far from the world, amidst the sovereign enchantment of darkness and mystery. Around them nothing subsisted, save the revolving stars. The lulling hymns were like the very vertigo that bore them away. And she knew right well that after spending a night of rapture at the Grotto, she would, on the morrow, be cured. Of this she was, indeed, absolutely convinced; she would prevail upon the Blessed Virgin to listen to her; she would soften her, as soon as she should be alone, imploring her face to face. And she well understood what Pierre had wished to say a short time previously, when expressing his desire to spend the whole night outside the Grotto, like herself. Was it not that he intended to make a supreme effort to believe, that he meant to fall upon his knees like a little child, and beg the all-powerful Mother to restore his lost faith? Without need of any further exchange of words, their clasped hands repeated all those things. They mutually promised that they would pray for each other, and so absorbed in each other did they become that they forgot themselves, with such an ardent desire for one another's cure and happiness, that for a moment they attained to the depths of the love which offers itself in sacrifice. It was divine enjoyment.

"Ah!" murmured Pierre, "how beautiful is this blue night, this infinite darkness, which has swept away all the hideousness of things and beings, this deep, fresh peacefulness, in which I myself should like to bury my doubts!"

His voice died away, and Marie, in her turn, said in a very low voice: "And the roses, the perfume of the roses? Can't you smell them, my friend? Where can they be since you could not see them?"

"Yes, yes, I smell them, but there are none," he replied. "I should certainly have seen them, for I hunted everywhere."

"How can you say that there are no roses when they perfume the air around us, when we are steeped in their aroma? Why, there are moments when the scent is so powerful that I almost faint with delight in inhaling it! They must certainly be here, innumerable, under our very feet."

"No, no," said Pierre, "I swear to you I hunted everywhere, and there are no roses. They must be invisible, or they may be the very grass we tread and the spreading trees that are around us; their perfume may come from the soil itself, from the torrent which flows along close by, from the woods and the mountains that rise yonder."

For a moment they remained silent. Then, in an undertone, she resumed: "How sweet they smell, Pierre! And it seems to me that even our clasped hands form a bouquet."

"Yes, they smell delightfully sweet; but it is from you, Marie, that the perfume now ascends, as though the roses were budding from your hair."

Then they ceased speaking. The procession was still gliding along, and at the corner of the Basilica bright sparks were still appearing, flashing suddenly from out of the obscurity, as though spurting from some invisible source. The vast train of little flames, marching in double file, threw a riband of light across the darkness. But the great sight was now on the Place du Rosaire, where the head of the procession, still continuing its measured evolutions, was revolving and revolving in a circle which ever grew smaller, with a stubborn whirl which increased the dizziness of the weary pilgrims and the violence of their chants. And soon the circle formed a nucleus, the nucleus of a nebula, so to say, around which the endless riband of fire began to coil itself. And the brasier grew larger and larger—there was first a pool, then a lake of light. The whole vast Place du Rosaire changed at last into a burning ocean, rolling its little sparkling wavelets with the dizzy motion of a whirlpool that never rested. A reflection like that of dawn whitened the Basilica; while the rest of the horizon faded into deep obscurity, amidst which you only saw a few stray tapers journeying alone, like glowworms seeking their way with the help of their little lights. However, a straggling rear-guard of the procession must have climbed the Calvary height, for up there, against the sky, some moving stars could also be seen. Eventually the moment came when the last tapers appeared down below, marched round the lawns, flowed away, and were merged in the sea of flame. Thirty thousand tapers were burning there, still and ever revolving, quickening their sparkles under the vast calm heavens where the planets had grown pale. A luminous glow ascended in company with the strains of the canticle which never ceased. And the roar of voices incessantly repeating the refrain of "Ave, ave, ave Maria!" was like the very crackling of those hearts of fire which were burning away in prayers in order that souls might be saved.

The candles had just been extinguished, one by one, and the night was falling again, paramount, densely black, and extremely mild, when Pierre and Marie perceived that they were still there, hand in hand, hidden away among the trees. In the dim streets of Lourdes, far off, there were now only some stray, lost pilgrims inquiring their way, in order that they might get to bed. Through the darkness there swept a rustling sound—the rustling of those who prowl and fall asleep when days of festivity draw to a close. But the young priest and the girl lingered in their nook forgetfully, never stirring, but tasting delicious happiness amidst the perfume of the invisible roses.

IV. THE VIGIL

WHEN Pierre dragged Marie in her box to the front of the Grotto, and placed her as near as possible to the railing, it was past midnight, and about a hundred persons were still there, some seated on the benches, but the greater number kneeling as though prostrated in prayer. The Grotto shone from afar, with its multitude of lighted tapers, similar to the illumination round a coffin, though all that you could distinguish was a star-like blaze, from the midst of which, with visionary whiteness, emerged the statue of the Virgin in its niche. The hanging foliage assumed an emerald sheen, the hundreds of crutches covering the vault resembled an inextricable network of dead wood on the point of reflowering. And the darkness was rendered more dense by so great a brightness, the surroundings became lost in a deep shadow in which nothing, neither walls nor trees, remained; whilst all alone ascended the angry and continuous murmur of the Gave, rolling along beneath the gloomy, boundless sky, now heavy with a gathering storm.

"Are you comfortable, Marie?" gently inquired Pierre. "Don't you feel chilly?"

She had just shivered. But it was only at a breath from the other world, which had seemed to her to come from the Grotto.

"No, no, I am so comfortable! Only place the shawl over my knees. And—thank you, Pierre—don't be anxious about me. I no longer require anyone now that I am with her."

Her voice died away, she was already falling into an ecstasy, her hands clasped, her eyes raised towards the white statue, in a beatific transfiguration of the whole of her poor suffering face.

Yet Pierre remained a few minutes longer beside her. He would have liked to wrap her in the shawl, for he perceived the trembling of her little wasted hands. But he feared to annoy her, so confined himself to tucking her in like a child; whilst she, slightly raised, with her elbows on the edges of her box, and her eyes fixed on the Grotto, no longer beheld him.

A bench stood near, and he had just seated himself upon it, intending to collect his thoughts, when his glance fell upon a woman kneeling in the gloom. Dressed in black, she was so slim, so discreet, so unobtrusive, so wrapt in darkness, that at first he had not noticed her. After a while, however, he recognised her as Madame Maze. The thought of the letter which she had received during the day then recurred to him. And the sight of her filled him with pity; he could feel for the forlornness of this solitary woman, who had no physical sore to heal, but only implored the Blessed Virgin to relieve her heart-pain by converting her inconstant husband. The letter had no doubt been some harsh reply, for, with bowed head, she seemed almost annihilated, filled with the humility of some poor beaten creature. It was only at night-time that she readily forgot herself there, happy at disappearing, at being able to weep, suffer martyrdom, and implore the return of the lost caresses, for hours together, without anyone suspecting her grievous secret. Her lips did not even move; it was her wounded heart which prayed, which desperately begged for its share of love and happiness.

Ah! that inextinguishable thirst for happiness which brought them all there, wounded either in body or in spirit; Pierre also felt it parching his throat, in an ardent desire to be quenched. He longed to cast himself upon his knees, to beg the divine aid with the same humble faith as that woman. But his limbs were as though tied; he could not find the words he wanted, and it was a relief when he at last felt someone touch him on the arm. "Come with me, Monsieur l'Abbe, if you do not know the Grotto," said a voice. "I will find you a place. It is so pleasant there at this time!"

He raised his head, and recognised Baron Suire, the director of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation. This benevolent and simple man no doubt felt some affection for him. He therefore accepted his offer, and followed him into the Grotto, which was quite empty. The Baron had a key, with which he locked the railing behind them.

"You see, Monsieur l'Abbe," said he, "this is the time when one can really be comfortable here. For my part, whenever I come to spend a few days at Lourdes, I seldom retire to rest before daybreak, as I have fallen into the habit of finishing my night here. The place is deserted, one is quite alone, and is it not pleasant? How well one feels oneself to be in the abode of the Blessed Virgin!"

He smiled with a kindly air, doing the honours of the Grotto like an old frequenter of the place, somewhat enfeebled by age, but full of genuine affection for this delightful nook. Moreover, in spite of his great piety, he was in no way ill at ease there, but talked on and explained matters with the familiarity of a man who felt himself to be the friend of Heaven.

"Ah! you are looking at the tapers," he said. "There are about two hundred of them which burn together night and day; and they end by making the place warm. It is even warm here in winter."

Indeed, Pierre was beginning to feel incommoded by the warm odour of the wax. Dazzled by the brilliant light into which he was penetrating, he gazed at the large, central, pyramidal holder, all bristling with little tapers, and resembling a luminous clipped yew glistening with stars. In the background, a straight holder, on a level with the ground, upheld the large tapers, which, like the pipes of an organ, formed a row of uneven height, some of them being as large as a man's thigh. And yet other holders, resembling massive candelabra, stood here and there on the jutting parts of the rock. The vault of the Grotto sank towards the left, where the stone seemed baked and blackened by the eternal flames which had been heating it for years. And the wax was perpetually dripping like fine snow; the trays of the holders were smothered with it, whitened by its ever-thickening dust. In fact, it coated the whole rock, which had become quite greasy to the touch; and to such a degree did it cover the ground that accidents had occurred, and it had been necessary to spread some mats about to prevent persons from slipping.

"You see those large ones there," obligingly continued Baron Suire. "They are the most expensive and cost sixty francs apiece; they will continue burning for a month. The smallest ones, which cost but five sous each, only last three hours. Oh! we don't husband them; we never run short. Look here! Here are two more hampers full, which there has not yet been time to remove to the storehouse."

Then he pointed to the furniture, which comprised a harmonium covered with a cloth, a substantial dresser with several large drawers in which the sacred vestments were kept, some benches and chairs reserved for the privileged few who were admitted during the ceremonies, and finally a very handsome movable altar, which was adorned with engraved silver plates, the gift of a great lady, and—for fear of injury from dampness—was only brought out on the occasions of remunerative pilgrimages.

Pierre was disturbed by all this well-meant chatter. His religious emotion lost some of its charm. In spite of his lack of faith, he had, on entering, experienced a feeling of agitation, a heaving of the soul, as though the mystery were about to be revealed to him. It was at the same time both an anxious and a delicious feeling. And he beheld things which deeply stirred him: bunches of flowers, lying in a heap at the Virgin's feet, with the votive offerings of children—little faded shoes, a tiny iron corselet, and a doll-like crutch which almost seemed to be a toy. Beneath the natural ogival cavity in which the apparition had appeared, at the spot where the pilgrims rubbed the chaplets and medals they wished to consecrate, the rock was quite worn away and polished. Millions of ardent lips had pressed kisses on the wall with such intensity of love that the stone was as though calcined, streaked with black veins, shining like marble.

However, he stopped short at last opposite a cavity in which lay a considerable pile of letters and papers of every description.

"Ah! I was forgetting," hastily resumed Baron Suire; "this is the most interesting part of it. These are the letters which the faithful throw into the Grotto through the railing every day. We gather them up and place them there; and in the winter I amuse myself by glancing through them. You see, we cannot burn them without opening them, for they often contain money—francs, half-francs, and especially postage-stamps."

He stirred up the letters, and, selecting a few at random, showed the addresses, and opened them to read. Nearly all of them were letters from illiterate persons, with the superscription, "To Our Lady of Lourdes," scrawled on the envelopes in big, irregular handwriting. Many of them contained requests or thanks, incorrectly worded and wondrously spelt; and nothing was more affecting than the nature of some of the petitions: a little brother to be saved, a lawsuit to be gained, a lover to be preserved, a marriage to be effected. Other letters, however, were angry ones, taking the Blessed Virgin to task for not having had the politeness to acknowledge a former communication by granting the writer's prayers. Then there were still others, written in a finer hand, with carefully worded phrases containing confessions and fervent entreaties; and these were from women who confided to the Queen of Heaven things which they dared not even say to a priest in the shadow of the confessional. Finally, one envelope, selected at random, merely contained a photograph; a young girl had sent her portrait to Our Lady of Lourdes, with this dedication: "To my good Mother." In short, they every day received the correspondence of a most powerful Queen, to whom both prayers and secrets were addressed, and who was expected to reply with favours and kindnesses of every kind. The franc and half-franc pieces were simple tokens of love to propitiate her; while, as for the postage-stamps, these could only be sent for convenience' sake, in lieu of coined money; unless, indeed, they were sent guilelessly, as in the case of a peasant woman who had added a postscript to her letter to say that she enclosed a stamp for the reply.

"I can assure you," concluded the Baron, "that there are some very nice ones among them, much less foolish than you might imagine. During a period of three years I constantly found some very interesting letters from a lady who did nothing without relating it to the Blessed Virgin. She was a married woman, and entertained a most dangerous passion for a friend of her husband's. Well, Monsieur l'Abbe, she overcame it; the Blessed Virgin answered her by sending her an armour for her chastity, an all-divine power to resist the promptings of her heart." Then he broke off to say: "But come and seat yourself here, Monsieur l'Abbe. You will see how comfortable you will be."

Pierre went and placed himself beside him on a bench on the left hand, at the spot where the rock sloped down. This was a deliciously reposeful corner, and neither the one nor the other spoke; a profound silence had ensued, when, behind him, Pierre heard an indistinct murmur, a light crystalline voice, which seemed to come from the Invisible. He gave a start, which Baron Suire understood.

"That is the spring which you hear," said he; "it is there, underground, below this grating. Would you like to see it?"

And without waiting for Pierre's reply, he at once bent down to open one of the iron plates protecting the spring, mentioning that it was thus closed up in order to prevent freethinkers from throwing poison into it. For a moment this extraordinary idea quite amazed the priest; but he ended by attributing it entirely to the Baron, who was, indeed, very childish. The latter, meantime, was vainly struggling with the padlock, which opened by a combination of letters, and refused to yield to his endeavours. "It is singular," he muttered; "the word is Rome, and I am positive that it hasn't been changed. The damp destroys everything. Every two years or so we are obliged to replace those crutches up there, otherwise they would all rot away. Be good enough to bring me a taper."

By the light of the candle which Pierre then took from one of the holders, he at last succeeded in unfastening the brass padlock, which was covered with vert-de-gris. Then, the plate having been raised, the spring appeared to view. Upon a bed of muddy gravel, in a fissure of the rock, there was a limpid stream, quite tranquil, but seemingly spreading over a rather large surface. The Baron explained that it had been necessary to conduct it to the fountains through pipes coated with cement; and he even admitted that, behind the piscinas, a large cistern had been dug in which the water was collected during the night, as otherwise the small output of the source would not suffice for the daily requirements.

"Will you taste it?" he suddenly asked. "It is much better here, fresh from the earth."

Pierre did not answer; he was gazing at that tranquil, innocent water, which assumed a moire-like golden sheen in the dancing light of the taper. The falling drops of wax now and again ruffled its surface. And, as he gazed at it, the young priest pondered upon all the mystery it brought with it from the distant mountain slopes.

"Come, drink some!" said the Baron, who had already dipped and filled a glass which was kept there handy. The priest had no choice but to empty it; it was good pure, water, fresh and transparent, like that which flows from all the lofty uplands of the Pyrenees.

After refastening the padlock, they both returned to the bench. Now and again Pierre could still hear the spring flowing behind him, with a music resembling the gentle warble of some unseen bird. And now the Baron again raised his voice, giving him the history of the Grotto at all times and seasons, in a pathetic babble, replete with puerile details.

The summer was the roughest season, for then came the great itinerant pilgrimage crowds, with the uproarious fervour of thousands of eager beings, all praying and vociferating together. But with the autumn came the rain, those diluvial rains which beat against the Grotto entrance for days together; and with them arrived the pilgrims from remote countries, small, silent, and ecstatic bands of Indians, Malays, and even Chinese, who fell upon their knees in the mud at the sign from the missionaries accompanying them. Of all the old provinces of France, it was Brittany that sent the most devout pilgrims, whole parishes arriving together, the men as numerous as the women, and all displaying a pious deportment, a simple and unostentatious faith, such as might edify the world. Then came the winter, December with its terrible cold, its dense snow-drifts blocking the mountain ways. But even then families put up at the hotels, and, despite everything, faithful worshippers—all those who, fleeing the noise of the world, wished to speak to the Virgin in the tender intimacy of solitude—still came every morning to the Grotto. Among them were some whom no one knew, who appeared directly they felt certain they would be alone there to kneel and love like jealous lovers; and who departed, frightened away by the first suspicion of a crowd. And how warm and pleasant the place was throughout the foul winter weather! In spite of rain and wind and snow, the Grotto still continued flaring. Even during nights of howling tempest, when not a soul was there, it lighted up the empty darkness, blazing like a brasier of love that nothing could extinguish. The Baron related that, at the time of the heavy snowfall of the previous winter, he had spent whole afternoons there, on the bench where they were then seated. A gentle warmth prevailed, although the spot faced the north and was never reached by a ray of sunshine. No doubt the circumstance of the burning tapers continually heating the rock explained this generous warmth; but might one not also believe in some charming kindness on the part of the Virgin, who endowed the spot with perpetual springtide? And the little birds were well aware of it; when the snow on the ground froze their feet, all the finches of the neighbourhood sought shelter there, fluttering about in the ivy around the holy statue. At length came the awakening of the real spring: the Gave, swollen with melted snow, and rolling on with a voice of thunder: the trees, under the action of their sap, arraying themselves in a mantle of greenery, whilst the crowds, once more returning, noisily invaded the sparkling Grotto, whence they drove the little birds of heaven.

"Yes, yes," repeated Baron Suire, in a declining voice, "I spent some most delightful winter days here all alone. I saw no one but a woman, who leant against the railing to avoid kneeling in the snow. She was quite young, twenty-five perhaps, and very pretty—dark, with magnificent blue eyes. She never spoke, and did not even seem to pray, but remained there for hours together, looking intensely sad. I do not know who she was, nor have I ever seen her since."

He ceased speaking; and when, a couple of minutes later, Pierre, surprised at his silence, looked at him, he perceived that he had fallen asleep. With his hands clasped upon his belly, his chin resting on his chest, he slept as peacefully as a child, a smile hovering the while about his mouth. Doubtless, when he said that he spent the night there, he meant that he came thither to indulge in the early nap of a happy old man, whose dreams are of the angels. And now Pierre tasted all the charms of the solitude. It was indeed true that a feeling of peacefulness and comfort permeated the soul in this rocky nook. It was occasioned by the somewhat stifling fumes of the burning wax, by the transplendent ecstasy into which one sank amidst the glare of the tapers. The young priest could no longer distinctly see the crutches on the roof, the votive offerings hanging from the sides, the altar of engraved silver, and the harmonium in its wrapper, for a slow intoxication seemed to be stealing over him, a gradual prostration of his whole being. And he particularly experienced the divine sensation of having left the living world, of having attained to the far realms of the marvellous and the superhuman, as though that simple iron railing yonder had become the very barrier of the Infinite.

However, a slight noise on his left again disturbed him. It was the spring flowing, ever flowing on, with its bird-like warble. Ah! how he would have liked to fall upon his knees and believe in the miracle, to acquire a certain conviction that that divine water had gushed from the rock solely for the healing of suffering humanity. Had he not come there to prostrate himself and implore the Virgin to restore the faith of his childhood? Why, then, did he not pray, why did he not beseech her to bring him back to grace? His feeling of suffocation increased, the burning tapers dazzled him almost to the point of giddiness. And, all at once, the recollection came to him that for two days past, amidst the great freedom which priests enjoyed at Lourdes, he had neglected to say his mass. He was in a state of sin, and perhaps it was the weight of this transgression which was oppressing his heart. He suffered so much that he was at last compelled to rise from his seat and walk away. He gently closed the gate behind him, leaving Baron Suire still asleep do the bench. Marie, he found, had not stirred, but was still raised on her elbows, with her ecstatic eyes uplifted towards the figure of the Virgin.

"How are you, Marie?" asked Pierre. "Don't you feel cold?"

She did not reply. He felt her hands and found them warm and soft, albeit slightly trembling. "It is not the cold which makes you tremble, is it, Marie?" he asked.

In a voice as gentle as a zephyr she replied: "No, no! let me be; I am so happy! I shall see her, I feel it. Ah! what joy!"

So, after slightly pulling up her shawl, he went forth into the night, a prey to indescribable agitation. Beyond the bright glow of the Grotto was a night as black as ink, a region of darkness, into which he plunged at random. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to this gloom, he found himself near the Gave, and skirted it, following a path shaded by tall trees, where he again came upon a refreshing obscurity. This shade and coolness, both so soothing, now brought him relief. And his only surprise was that he had not fallen on his knees in the Grotto, and prayed, even as Marie was praying, with all the power of his soul. What could be the obstacle within him? Whence came the irresistible revolt which prevented him from surrendering himself to faith even when his overtaxed, tortured being longed to yield? He understood well enough that it was his reason alone which protested, and the time had come when he would gladly have killed that voracious reason, which was devouring his life and preventing him from enjoying the happiness allowed to the ignorant and the simple. Perhaps, had he beheld a miracle, he might have acquired enough strength of will to believe. For instance, would he not have bowed himself down, vanquished at last, if Marie had suddenly risen up and walked before him. The scene which he conjured up of Marie saved, Marie cured, affected him so deeply that he stopped short, his trembling arms uplifted towards the star-spangled vault of heaven. What a lovely night it was!—so deep and mysterious, so airy and fragrant; and what joy rained down at the hope that eternal health might be restored, that eternal love might ever revive, even as spring returns! Then he continued his walk, following the path to the end. But his doubts were again coming back to him; when you need a miracle to gain belief, it means that you are incapable of believing. There is no need for the Almighty to prove His existence. Pierre also felt uneasy at the thought that, so long as he had not discharged his priestly duties by saying his mass, his prayers would not be answered. Why did he not go at once to the church of the Rosary, whose altars, from midnight till noon, are placed at the disposal of the priests who come from a distance? Thus thinking, he descended by another path, again finding himself beneath the trees, near the leafy spot whence he and Marie had watched the procession of tapers. Not a light now remained, there was but a boundless expanse of gloom.

Here Pierre experienced a fresh attack of faintness, and as though to gain time, he turned mechanically into the pilgrims' shelter-house. Its door had remained wide open; still this failed to sufficiently ventilate the spacious hall, which was now full of people. On the very threshold Pierre felt oppressed by the stifling heat emanating from the multitude of bodies, the dense pestilential smell of human breath and perspiration. The smoking lanterns gave out so bad a light that he had to pick his way with extreme care in order to avoid treading upon outstretched limbs; for the overcrowding was extraordinary, and many persons, unable to find room on the benches, had stretched themselves on the pavement, on the damp stone slabs fouled by all the refuse of the day. And on all sides indescribable promiscuousness prevailed: prostrated by overpowering weariness, men, women, and priests were lying there, pell-mell, at random, open-mouthed and utterly exhausted. A large number were snoring, seated on the slabs, with their backs against the walls and their heads drooping on their chests. Others had slipped down, with limbs intermingled, and one young girl lay prostrate across an old country priest, who in his calm, childlike slumber was smiling at the angels. It was like a cattle-shed sheltering poor wanderers of the roads, all those who were homeless on that beautiful holiday night, and who had dropped in there and fallen fraternally asleep. Still, there were some who found no repose in their feverish excitement, but turned and twisted, or rose up to finish eating the food which remained in their baskets. Others could be seen lying perfectly motionless, their eyes wide open and fixed upon the gloom. The cries of dreamers, the wailing of sufferers, arose amidst general snoring. And pity came to the heart, a pity full of anguish, at sight of this flock of wretches lying there in heaps in loathsome rags, whilst their poor spotless souls no doubt were far away in the blue realm of some mystical dream. Pierre was on the point of withdrawing, feeling sick at heart, when a low continuous moan attracted his attention. He looked, and recognised Madame Vincent, on the same spot and in the same position as before, still nursing little Rose upon her lap. "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," the poor woman murmured, "you hear her; she woke up nearly an hour ago, and has been sobbing ever since. Yet I assure you I have not moved even a finger, I felt so happy at seeing her sleep."

The priest bent down, examining the little one, who had not even the strength to raise her eyelids. A plaintive cry no stronger than a breath was coming from her lips; and she was so white that he shuddered, for he felt that death was hovering near.

"Dear me! what shall I do?" continued the poor mother, utterly worn out. "This cannot last; I can no longer bear to hear her cry. And if you knew all that I have been saying to her: 'My jewel, my treasure, my angel, I beseech you cry no more. Be good; the Blessed Virgin will cure you!' And yet she still cries on."

With these words the poor creature burst out sobbing, her big tears falling on the face of the child, whose rattle still continued. "Had it been daylight," she resumed, "I would long ago have left this hall, the more especially as she disturbs the others. There is an old lady yonder who has already complained. But I fear it may be chilly outside; and besides, where could I go in the middle of the night? Ah! Blessed Virgin, Blessed Virgin, take pity upon us!"

Overcome by emotion, Pierre kissed the child's fair head, and then hastened away to avoid bursting into tears like the sorrowing mother. And he went straight to the Rosary, as though he were determined to conquer death.

He had already beheld the Rosary in broad daylight, and had been displeased by the aspect of this church, which the architect, fettered by the rockbound site, had been obliged to make circular and low, so that it seemed crushed beneath its great cupola, which square pillars supported. The worst was that, despite its archaic Byzantine style, it altogether lacked any religious appearance, and suggested neither mystery nor meditation. Indeed, with the glaring light admitted by the cupola and the broad glazed doors it was more like some brand-new corn-market. And then, too, it was not yet completed: the decorations were lacking, the bare walls against which the altars stood had no other embellishment than some artificial roses of coloured paper and a few insignificant votive offerings; and this bareness heightened the resemblance to some vast public hall. Moreover, in time of rain the paved floor became as muddy as that of a general waiting-room at a railway station. The high altar was a temporary structure of painted wood. Innumerable rows of benches filled the central rotunda, benches free to the public, on which people could come and rest at all hours, for night and day alike the Rosary remained open to the swarming pilgrims. Like the shelter-house, it was a cow-shed in which the Almighty received the poor ones of the earth.

On entering, Pierre felt himself to be in some common hall trod by the footsteps of an ever-changing crowd. But the brilliant sunlight no longer streamed on the pallid walls, the tapers burning at every altar simply gleamed like stars amidst the uncertain gloom which filled the building. A solemn high mass had been celebrated at midnight with extraordinary pomp, amidst all the splendour of candles, chants, golden vestments, and swinging, steaming censers; but of all this glorious display there now remained only the regulation number of tapers necessary for the celebration of the masses at each of the fifteen altars ranged around the edifice. These masses began at midnight and did not cease till noon. Nearly four hundred were said during those twelve hours at the Rosary alone. Taking the whole of Lourdes, where there were altogether some fifty altars, more than two thousand masses were celebrated daily. And so great was the abundance of priests, that many had extreme difficulty in fulfilling their duties, having to wait for hours together before they could find an altar unoccupied. What particularly struck Pierre that evening, was the sight of all the altars besieged by rows of priests patiently awaiting their turn in the dim light at the foot of the steps; whilst the officiating minister galloped through the Latin phrases, hastily punctuating them with the prescribed signs of the cross. And the weariness of all the waiting ones was so great, that most of them were seated on the flagstones, some even dozing on the altar steps in heaps, quite overpowered, relying on the beadle to come and rouse them.

For a moment Pierre walked about undecided. Was he going to wait like the others? However, the scene determined him against doing so. At every altar, at every mass, a crowd of pilgrims was gathered, communicating in all haste with a sort of voracious fervour. Each pyx was filled and emptied incessantly; the priests' hands grew tired in thus distributing the bread of life; and Pierre's surprise increased at the sight. Never before had he beheld a corner of this earth so watered by the divine blood, whence faith took wing in such a flight of souls. It was like a return to the heroic days of the Church, when all nations prostrated themselves beneath the same blast of credulity in their terrified ignorance which led them to place their hope of eternal happiness in an Almighty God. He could fancy himself carried back some eight or nine centuries, to the time of great public piety, when people believed in the approaching end of the world; and this he could fancy the more readily as the crowd of simple folk, the whole host that had attended high mass, was still seated on the benches, as much at ease in God's house as at home. Many had no place of refuge. Was not the church their home, the asylum where consolation awaited them both by day and by night? Those who knew not where to sleep, who had not found room even at the shelter place, came to the Rosary, where sometimes they succeeded in finding a vacant seat on a bench, at others sufficient space to lie down on the flagstones. And others who had beds awaiting them lingered there for the joy of passing a whole night in that divine abode, so full of beautiful dreams. Until daylight the concourse and promiscuity were extraordinary; every row of benches was occupied, sleeping persons were scattered in every corner and behind every pillar; men, women, children were leaning against each other, their heads on one another's shoulders, their breath mingling in calm unconsciousness. It was the break-up of a religious gathering overwhelmed by sleep, a church transformed into a chance hospital, its doors wide open to the lovely August night, giving access to all who were wandering in the darkness, the good and the bad, the weary and the lost. And all over the place, from each of the fifteen altars, the bells announcing the elevation of the Host incessantly sounded, whilst from among the mob of sleepers bands of believers now and again arose, went and received the sacrament, and then returned to mingle once more with the nameless, shepherdless flock which the semi-obscurity enveloped like a veil.

With an air of restless indecision, Pierre was still wandering through the shadowy groups, when an old priest, seated on the step of an altar, beckoned to him. For two hours he had been waiting there, and now that his turn was at length arriving he felt so faint that he feared he might not have strength to say the whole of his mass, and preferred, therefore, to surrender his place to another. No doubt the sight of Pierre, wandering so distressfully in the gloom, had moved him. He pointed the vestry out to him, waited until he returned with chasuble and chalice, and then went off and fell into a sound sleep on one of the neighbouring benches. Pierre thereupon said his mass in the same way as he said it at Paris, like a worthy man fulfilling a professional duty. He outwardly maintained an air of sincere faith. But, contrary to what he had expected from the two feverish days through which he had just gone, from the extraordinary and agitating surroundings amidst which he had spent the last few hours, nothing moved him nor touched his heart. He had hoped that a great commotion would overpower him at the moment of the communion, when the divine mystery is accomplished; that he would find himself in view of Paradise, steeped in grace, in the very presence of the Almighty; but there was no manifestation, his chilled heart did not even throb, he went on to the end pronouncing the usual words, making the regulation gestures, with the mechanical accuracy of the profession. In spite of his effort to be fervent, one single idea kept obstinately returning to his mind—that the vestry was far too small, since such an enormous number of masses had to be said. How could the sacristans manage to distribute the holy vestments and the cloths? It puzzled him, and engaged his thoughts with absurd persistency.

At length, to his surprise, he once more found himself outside. Again he wandered through the night, a night which seemed to him utterly void, darker and stiller than before. The town was lifeless, not a light was gleaming. There only remained the growl of the Gave, which his accustomed ears no longer heard. And suddenly, similar to a miraculous apparition, the Grotto blazed before him, illumining the darkness with its everlasting brasier, which burnt with a flame of inextinguishable love. He had returned thither unconsciously, attracted no doubt by thoughts of Marie. Three o'clock was about to strike, the benches before the Grotto were emptying, and only some twenty persons remained there, dark, indistinct forms, kneeling in slumberous ecstasy, wrapped in divine torpor. It seemed as though the night in progressing had increased the gloom, and imparted a remote visionary aspect to the Grotto. All faded away amidst delicious lassitude, sleep reigned supreme over the dim, far-spreading country side; whilst the voice of the invisible waters seemed to be merely the breathing of this pure slumber, upon which the Blessed Virgin, all white with her aureola of tapers, was smiling. And among the few unconscious women was Madame Maze, still kneeling, with clasped hands and bowed head, but so indistinct that she seemed to have melted away amidst her ardent prayer.

Pierre, however, had immediately gone up to Marie. He was shivering, and fancied that she must be chilled by the early morning air. "I beseech you, Marie, cover yourself up," said he. "Do you want to suffer still more?" And thereupon he drew up the shawl which had slipped off her, and endeavoured to fasten it about her neck. "You are cold, Marie," he added; "your hands are like ice."

She did not answer, she was still in the same attitude as when he had left her a couple of hours previously. With her elbows resting on the edges of her box, she kept herself raised, her soul still lifted towards the Blessed Virgin and her face transfigured, beaming with a celestial joy. Her lips moved, though no sound came from them. Perhaps she was still carrying on some mysterious conversation in the world of enchantments, dreaming wide awake, as she had been doing ever since he had placed her there. He spoke to her again, but still she answered not. At last, however, of her own accord, she murmured in a far-away voice: "Oh! I am so happy, Pierre! I have seen her; I prayed to her for you, and she smiled at me, slightly nodding her head to let me know that she heard me and would grant my prayers. And though she did not speak to me, Pierre, I understood what she wished me to know. 'Tis to-day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, when the Blessed Sacrament passes by, that I shall be cured!"

He listened to her in deep agitation. Had she been sleeping with her eyes wide open? Was it in a dream that she had seen the marble figure of the Blessed Virgin bend its head and smile? A great tremor passed through him at the thought that this poor child had prayed for him. And he walked up to the railing, and dropped upon his knees, stammering: "O Marie! O Marie!" without knowing whether this heart-cry were intended for the Virgin or for the beloved friend of his childhood. And he remained there, utterly overwhelmed, waiting for grace to come to him.

Endless minutes went by. This was indeed the superhuman effort, the waiting for the miracle which he had come to seek for himself, the sudden revelation, the thunderclap which was to sweep away his unbelief and restore him, rejuvenated and triumphant, to the faith of the simple-minded. He surrendered himself, he wished that some mighty power might ravage his being and transform it. But, even as before whilst saying his mass, he heard naught within him but an endless silence, felt nothing but a boundless vacuum. There was no divine intervention, his despairing heart almost seemed to cease beating. And although he strove to pray, to fix his mind wholly upon that powerful Virgin, so compassionate to poor humanity, his thoughts none the less wandered, won back by the outside world, and again turning to puerile trifles. Within the Grotto, on the other side of the railing, he had once more caught sight of Baron Suire, still asleep, still continuing his pleasant nap with his hands clasped in front of him. Other things also attracted his attention: the flowers deposited at the feet of the Virgin, the letters cast there as though into a heavenly letter-box, the delicate lace-like work of wax which remained erect around the flames of the larger tapers, looking like some rich silver ornamentation. Then, without any apparent reason, his thoughts flew away to the days of his childhood, and his brother Guillaume's face rose before him with extreme distinctness. He had not seen him since their mother's death. He merely knew that he led a very secluded life, occupying himself with scientific matters, in a little house in which he had buried himself with a mistress and two big dogs; and he would have known nothing more about him, but for having recently read his name in a newspaper in connection with some revolutionary attempt. It was stated that he was passionately devoting himself to the study of explosives, and in constant intercourse with the leaders of the most advanced parties. Why, however, should Guillaume appear to him in this wise, in this ecstatic spot, amidst the mystical light of the tapers,—appear to him, moreover, such as he had formerly known him, so good, affectionate, and brotherly, overflowing with charity for every affliction! The thought haunted him for a moment, and filled him with painful regret for that brotherliness now dead and gone. Then, with hardly a moment's pause, his mind reverted to himself, and he realised that he might stubbornly remain there for hours without regaining faith. Nevertheless, he felt a sort of tremor pass through him, a final hope, a feeling that if the Blessed Virgin should perform the great miracle of curing Marie, he would at last believe. It was like a final delay which he allowed himself, an appointment with Faith for that very day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, when, according to what the girl had told him, the Blessed Sacrament would pass by. And at this thought his anguish at once ceased, he remained kneeling, worn out with fatigue and overcome by invincible drowsiness.

The hours passed by, the resplendent illumination of the Grotto was still projected into the night, its reflection stretching to the neighbouring hillsides and whitening the walls of the convents there. However, Pierre noticed it grow paler and paler, which surprised him, and he roused himself, feeling thoroughly chilled; it was the day breaking, beneath a leaden sky overcast with clouds. He perceived that one of those storms, so sudden in mountainous regions, was rapidly rising from the south. The thunder could already be heard rumbling in the distance, whilst gusts of wind swept along the roads. Perhaps he also had been sleeping, for he no longer beheld Baron Suire, whose departure he did not remember having witnessed. There were scarcely ten persons left before the Grotto, though among them he again recognised Madame Maze with her face hidden in her hands. However, when she noticed that it was daylight and that she could be seen, she rose up, and vanished at a turn of the narrow path leading to the convent of the Blue Sisters.

Feeling anxious, Pierre went up to Marie to tell her she must not remain there any longer, unless she wished to get wet through. "I will take you back to the hospital," said he.

She refused and then entreated: "No, no! I am waiting for mass; I promised to communicate here. Don't trouble about me, return to the hotel at once, and go to bed, I implore you. You know very well that covered vehicles are sent here for the sick whenever it rains."

And she persisted in refusing to leave, whilst on his side he kept on repeating that he did not wish to go to bed. A mass, it should be mentioned, was said at the Grotto early every morning, and it was a divine joy for the pilgrims to be able to communicate, amidst the glory of the rising sun, after a long night of ecstasy. And now, just as some large drops of rain were beginning to fall, there came the priest, wearing a chasuble and accompanied by two acolytes, one of whom, in order to protect the chalice, held a large white silk umbrella, embroidered with gold, over him.

Pierre, after pushing Marie's little conveyance close to the railing, so that the girl might be sheltered by the overhanging rock, under which the few other worshippers had also sought refuge, had just seen her receive the sacrament with ardent fervour, when his attention was attracted by a pitiful spectacle which quite wrung his heart.

Beneath a dense, heavy deluge of rain, he caught sight of Madame Vincent, still with that precious, woeful burden, her little Rose, whom with outstretched arms she was offering to the Blessed Virgin. Unable to stay any longer at the shelter-house owing to the complaints caused by the child's constant moaning, she had carried her off into the night, and during two hours had roamed about in the darkness, lost, distracted, bearing this poor flesh of her flesh, which she pressed to her bosom, unable to give it any relief. She knew not what road she had taken, beneath what trees she had strayed, so absorbed had she been in her revolt against the unjust sufferings which had so sorely stricken this poor little being, so feeble and so pure, and as yet quite incapable of sin. Was it not abominable that the grip of disease should for weeks have been incessantly torturing her child, whose cry she knew not how to quiet? She carried her about, rocking her in her arms as she went wildly along the paths, obstinately hoping that she would at last get her to sleep, and so hush that wail which was rending her heart. And suddenly, utterly worn-out, sharing each of her daughter's death pangs, she found herself opposite the Grotto, at the feet of the miracle-working Virgin, she who forgave and who healed.

"O Virgin, Mother most admirable, heal her! O Virgin, Mother of Divine Grace, heal her!"

She had fallen on her knees, and with quivering, outstretched arms was still offering her expiring daughter, in a paroxysm of hope and desire which seemed to raise her from the ground. And the rain, which she never noticed, beat down behind her with the fury of an escaped torrent, whilst violent claps of thunder shook the mountains. For one moment she thought her prayer was granted, for Rose had slightly shivered as though visited by the archangel, her face becoming quite white, her eyes and mouth opening wide; and with one last little gasp she ceased to cry.

"O Virgin, Mother of Our Redeemer, heal her! O Virgin, All-powerful Mother, heal her!"

But the poor woman felt her child become even lighter in her extended arms. And now she became afraid at no longer hearing her moan, at seeing her so white, with staring eyes and open mouth, without a sign of life. How was it that she did not smile if she were cured? Suddenly a loud heart-rending cry rang out, the cry of the mother, surpassing even the din of the thunder in the storm, whose violence was increasing. Her child was dead. And she rose up erect, turned her back on that deaf Virgin who let little children die, and started off like a madwoman beneath the lashing downpour, going straight before her without knowing whither, and still and ever carrying and nursing that poor little body which she had held in her arms during so many days and nights. A thunderbolt fell, shivering one of the neighbouring trees, as though with the stroke of a giant axe, amidst a great crash of twisted and broken branches.

Pierre had rushed after Madame Vincent, eager to guide and help her. But he was unable to follow her, for he at once lost sight of her behind the blurring curtain of rain. When he returned, the mass was drawing to an end, and, as soon as the rain fell less violently, the officiating priest went off under the white silk umbrella embroidered with gold. Meantime a kind of omnibus awaited the few patients to take them back to the hospital.

Marie pressed Pierre's hands. "Oh! how happy I am!" she said. "Do not come for me before three o'clock this afternoon."

On being left amidst the rain, which had now become an obstinate fine drizzle, Pierre re-entered the Grotto and seated himself on the bench near the spring. He would not go to bed, for in spite of his weariness he dreaded sleep in the state of nervous excitement in which he had been plunged ever since the day before. Little Rose's death had increased his fever; he could not banish from his mind the thought of that heart-broken mother, wandering along the muddy paths with the dead body of her child. What could be the reasons which influenced the Virgin? He was amazed that she could make a choice. Divine Mother as she was, he wondered how her heart could decide upon healing only ten out of a hundred sufferers—that ten per cent. of miracles which Doctor Bonamy had proved by statistics. He, Pierre, had already asked himself the day before which ones he would have chosen had he possessed the power of saving ten. A terrible power in all truth, a formidable selection, which he would never have had the courage to make. Why this one, and not that other? Where was the justice, where the compassion? To be all-powerful and heal every one of them, was not that the desire which rose from each heart? And the Virgin seemed to him to be cruel, badly informed, as harsh and indifferent as even impassible nature, distributing life and death at random, or in accordance with laws which mankind knew nothing of.

The rain was at last leaving off, and Pierre had been there a couple of hours when he felt that his feet were damp. He looked down, and was greatly surprised, for the spring was overflowing through the gratings. The soil of the Grotto was already covered; whilst outside a sheet of water was flowing under the benches, as far as the parapet against the Gave. The late storms had swollen the waters in the neighbourhood. Pierre thereupon reflected that this spring, in spite of its miraculous origin, was subject to the laws that governed other springs, for it certainly communicated with some natural reservoirs, wherein the rain penetrated and accumulated. And then, to keep his ankles dry, he left the place.

V. THE TWO VICTIMS

PIERRE walked along thirsting for fresh air, his head so heavy that he took off his hat to relieve his burning brow. Despite all the fatigue of that terrible night of vigil, he did not think of sleeping. He was kept erect by that rebellion of his whole being which he could not quiet. Eight o'clock was striking, and he walked at random under the glorious morning sun, now shining forth in a spotless sky, which the storm seemed to have cleansed of all the Sunday dust.

All at once, however, he raised his head, anxious to know where he was; and he was quite astonished, for he found that he had already covered a deal of ground, and was now below the station, near the municipal hospital. He was hesitating at a point where the road forked, not knowing which direction to take, when a friendly hand was laid on his shoulder, and a voice inquired: "Where are you going at this early hour?"

It was Doctor Chassaigne who addressed him, drawing up his lofty figure, clad in black from head to foot. "Have you lost yourself?" he added; "do you want to know your way?"

"No, thanks, no," replied Pierre, somewhat disturbed. "I spent the night at the Grotto with that young patient to whom I am so much attached, and my heart was so upset that I have been walking about in the hope it would do me good, before returning to the hotel to take a little sleep."

The doctor continued looking at him, clearly detecting the frightful struggle which was raging within him, the despair which he felt at being unable to sink asleep in faith, the suffering which the futility of all his efforts brought him. "Ah, my poor child!" murmured M. Chassaigne; and in a fatherly way he added: "Well, since you are walking, suppose we take a walk together? I was just going down yonder, to the bank of the Gave. Come along, and on our way back you will see what a lovely view we shall have."

For his part, the doctor took a walk of a couple of hours' duration each morning, ever alone, seeking, as it were, to tire and exhaust his grief. First of all, as soon as he had risen, he repaired to the cemetery, and knelt on the tomb of his wife and daughter, which, at all seasons, he decked with flowers. And afterwards he would roam along the roads, with tearful eyes, never returning home until fatigue compelled him.

With a wave of the hand, Pierre accepted his proposal, and in perfect silence they went, side by side, down the sloping road. They remained for a long time without speaking; the doctor seemed more overcome than was his wont that morning; it was as though his chat with his dear lost ones had made his heart bleed yet more copiously. He walked along with his head bowed; his face, round which his white hair streamed, was very pale, and tears still blurred his eyes. And yet it was so pleasant, so warm in the sunlight on that lovely morning. The road now followed the Gave on its right bank, on the other side of the new town; and you could see the gardens, the inclined ways, and the Basilica. And, all at once, the Grotto appeared, with the everlasting flare of its tapers, now paling in the broad light.

Doctor Chassaigne, who had turned his head, made the sign of the cross, which Pierre did not at first understand. And when, in his turn, he had perceived the Grotto, he glanced in surprise at his old friend, and once more relapsed into the astonishment which had come over him a couple of days previously on finding this man of science, this whilom atheist and materialist, so overwhelmed by grief that he was now a believer, longing for the one delight of meeting his dear ones in another life. His heart had swept his reason away; old and lonely as he was, it was only the illusion that he would live once more in Paradise, where loving souls meet again, that prolonged his life on earth. This thought increased the young priest's discomfort. Must he also wait until he had grown old and endured equal sufferings in order to find a refuge in faith?

Still walking beside the Gave, leaving the town farther and farther behind them, they were lulled as it were by the noise of those clear waters rolling over the pebbles between banks shaded by trees. And they still remained silent, walking on with an equal step, each, on his own side, absorbed in his sorrows.

"And Bernadette," Pierre suddenly inquired; "did you know her?"

The doctor raised his head. "Bernadette? Yes, yes," said he. "I saw her once—afterwards." He relapsed into silence for a moment, and then began chatting: "In 1858, you know, at the time of the apparitions, I was thirty years of age. I was in Paris, still young in my profession, and opposed to all supernatural notions, so that I had no idea of returning to my native mountains to see a girl suffering from hallucinations. Five or six years later, however, some time about 1864, I passed through Lourdes, and was inquisitive enough to pay Bernadette a visit. She was then still at the asylum with the Sisters of Nevers."

Pierre remembered that one of the reasons of his journey had been his desire to complete his inquiry respecting Bernadette. And who could tell if grace might not come to him from that humble, lovable girl, on the day when he should be convinced that she had indeed fulfilled a mission of divine love and forgiveness? For this consummation to ensue it would perhaps suffice that he should know her better and learn to feel that she was really the saint, the chosen one, as others believed her to have been.

"Tell me about her, I pray you," he said; "tell me all you know of her."

A faint smile curved the doctor's lips. He understood, and would have greatly liked to calm and comfort the young priest whose soul was so grievously tortured by doubt. "Oh! willingly, my poor child!" he answered. "I should be so happy to help you on the path to light. You do well to love Bernadette—that may save you; for since all those old-time things I have deeply reflected on her case, and I declare to you that I never met a more charming creature, or one with a better heart."

Then, to the slow rhythm of their footsteps along the well-kept, sunlit road, in the delightful freshness of morning, the doctor began to relate his visit to Bernadette in 1864. She had then just attained her twentieth birthday, the apparitions had taken place six years previously, and she had astonished him by her candid and sensible air, her perfect modesty. The Sisters of Nevers, who had taught her to read, kept her with them at the asylum in order to shield her from public inquisitiveness. She found an occupation there, helping them in sundry petty duties; but she was very often taken ill, and would spend weeks at a time in her bed. The doctor had been particularly struck by her beautiful eyes, pure, candid, and frank, like those of a child. The rest of her face, said he, had become somewhat spoilt; her complexion was losing its clearness, her features had grown less delicate, and her general appearance was that of an ordinary servant-girl, short, puny, and unobtrusive. Her piety was still keen, but she had not seemed to him to be the ecstatical, excitable creature that many might have supposed; indeed, she appeared to have a rather positive mind which did not indulge in flights of fancy; and she invariably had some little piece of needlework, some knitting, some embroidery in her hand. In a word, she appeared to have entered the common path, and in nowise resembled the intensely passionate female worshippers of the Christ. She had no further visions, and never of her own accord spoke of the eighteen apparitions which had decided her life. To learn anything it was necessary to interrogate her, to address precise questions to her. These she would briefly answer, and then seek to change the conversation, as though she did not like to talk of such mysterious things. If wishing to probe the matter further, you asked her the nature of the three secrets which the Virgin had confided to her, she would remain silent, simply averting her eyes. And it was impossible to make her contradict herself; the particulars she gave invariably agreed with her original narrative, and, indeed, she always seemed to repeat the same words, with the same inflections of the voice.

"I had her in hand during the whole of one afternoon," continued Doctor Chassaigne, "and there was not the variation of a syllable in her story. It was disconcerting. Still, I am prepared to swear that she was not lying, that she never lied, that she was altogether incapable of falsehood."

Pierre boldly ventured to discuss this point. "But won't you admit, doctor, the possibility of some disorder of the will?" he asked. "Has it not been proved, is it not admitted nowadays, that when certain degenerate creatures with childish minds fall into an hallucination, a fancy of some kind or other, they are often unable to free themselves from it, especially when they remain in the same environment in which the phenomenon occurred? Cloistered, living alone with her fixed idea, Bernadette, naturally enough, obstinately clung to it."

The doctor's faint smile returned to his lips, and vaguely waving his arm, he replied: "Ah! my child, you ask me too much. You know very well that I am now only a poor old man, who prides himself but little on his science, and no longer claims to be able to explain anything. However, I do of course know of that famous medical-school example of the young girl who allowed herself to waste away with hunger at home, because she imagined that she was suffering from a serious complaint of the digestive organs, but who nevertheless began to eat when she was taken elsewhere. However, that is but one circumstance, and there are so many contradictory cases."

For a moment they became silent, and only the rhythmical sound of their steps was heard along the road. Then the doctor resumed: "Moreover, it is quite true that Bernadette shunned the world, and was only happy in her solitary corner. She was never known to have a single intimate female friend, any particular human love for anybody. She was kind and gentle towards all, but it was only for children that she showed any lively affection. And as, after all, the medical man is not quite dead within me, I will confess to you that I have sometimes wondered if she remained as pure in mind, as, most undoubtedly, she did remain in body. However, I think it quite possible, given her sluggish, poor-blooded temperament, not to speak of the innocent sphere in which she grew up, first Bartres, and then the convent. Still, a doubt came to me when I heard of the tender interest which she took in the orphan asylum built by the Sisters of Nevers, farther along this very road. Poor little girls are received into it, and shielded from the perils of the highways. And if Bernadette wished it to be extremely large, so as to lodge all the little lambs in danger, was it not because she herself remembered having roamed the roads with bare feet, and still trembled at the idea of what might have become of her but for the help of the Blessed Virgin?"

Then, resuming his narrative, he went on telling Pierre of the crowds that flocked to see Bernadette and pay her reverence in her asylum at Lourdes. This had proved a source of considerable fatigue to her. Not a day went by without a stream of visitors appearing before her. They came from all parts of France, some even from abroad; and it soon proved necessary to refuse the applications of those who were actuated by mere inquisitiveness, and to grant admittance only to the genuine believers, the members of the clergy, and the people of mark on whom the doors could not well have been shut. A Sister was always present to protect Bernadette against the excessive indiscretion of some of her visitors, for questions literally rained upon her, and she often grew faint through having to repeat her story so many times. Ladies of high position fell on their knees, kissed her gown, and would have liked to carry a piece of it away as a relic. She also had to defend her chaplet, which in their excitement they all begged her to sell to them for a fabulous amount. One day a certain marchioness endeavoured to secure it by giving her another one which she had brought with her—a chaplet with a golden cross and beads of real pearls. Many hoped that she would consent to work a miracle in their presence; children were brought to her in order that she might lay her hands upon them; she was also consulted in cases of illness, and attempts were made to purchase her influence with the Virgin. Large sums were offered to her. At the slightest sign, the slightest expression of a desire to be a queen, decked with jewels and crowned with gold, she would have been overwhelmed with regal presents. And while the humble remained on their knees on her threshold, the great ones of the earth pressed round her, and would have counted it a glory to act as her escort. It was even related that one among them, the handsomest and wealthiest of princes, came one clear sunny April day to ask her hand in marriage.

"But what always struck and displeased me," said Pierre, "was her departure from Lourdes when she was two-and-twenty, her sudden disappearance and sequestration in the convent of Saint Gildard at Nevers, whence she never emerged. Didn't that give a semblance of truth to those spurious rumours of insanity which were circulated? Didn't it help people to suppose that she was being shut up, whisked away for fear of some indiscretion on her part, some naive remark or other which might have revealed the secret of a prolonged fraud? Indeed, to speak plainly, I will confess to you that for my own part I still believe that she was spirited away."

Doctor Chassaigne gently shook his head. "No, no," said he, "there was no story prepared in advance in this affair, no big melodrama secretly staged and afterwards performed by more or less unconscious actors. The developments came of themselves, by the sole force of circumstances; and they were always very intricate, very difficult to analyse. Moreover, it is certain that it was Bernadette herself who wished to leave Lourdes. Those incessant visits wearied her, she felt ill at ease amidst all that noisy worship. All that she desired was a dim nook where she might live in peace, and so fierce was she at times in her disinterestedness, that when money was handed to her, even with the pious intent of having a mass said or a taper burnt, she would fling it upon the floor. She never accepted anything for herself or for her family, which remained in poverty. And with such pride as she possessed, such natural simplicity, such a desire to remain in the background, one can very well understand that she should have wished to disappear and cloister herself in some lonely spot so as to prepare herself to make a good death. Her work was accomplished; she had initiated this great movement scarcely knowing how or why; and she could really be of no further utility. Others were about to conduct matters to an issue and insure the triumph of the Grotto."

"Let us admit, then, that she went off of her own accord," said Pierre; "still, what a relief it must have been for the people you speak of, who thenceforth became the real masters, whilst millions of money were raining down on Lourdes from the whole world."

"Oh! certainly; I don't pretend that any attempt was made to detain her here!" exclaimed the doctor. "Frankly, I even believe that she was in some degree urged into the course she took. She ended by becoming somewhat of an incumbrance. It was not that any annoying revelations were feared from her; but remember that with her extreme timidity and frequent illnesses she was scarcely ornamental. Besides, however small the room which she took up at Lourdes, however obedient she showed herself, she was none the less a power, and attracted the multitude, which made her, so to say, a competitor of the Grotto. For the Grotto to remain alone, resplendent in its glory, it was advisable that Bernadette should withdraw into the background, become as it were a simple legend. Such, indeed, must have been the reasons which induced Monseigneur Laurence, the Bishop of Tarbes, to hasten her departure. The only mistake that was made was in saying that it was a question of screening her from the enterprises of the world, as though it were feared that she might fall into the sin of pride, by growing vain of the saintly fame with which the whole of Christendom re-echoed. And this was doing her a grave injury, for she was as incapable of pride as she was of falsehood. Never, indeed, was there a more candid or more modest child."

The doctor was growing impassioned, excited. But all at once he became calm again, and a pale smile returned to his lips. "'Tis true," said he, "I love her; the more I have thought of her, the more have I learned to love her. But you must not think, Pierre, that I am completely brutified by belief. If I nowadays acknowledge the existence of an unseen power, if I feel a need of believing in another, better, and more just life, I nevertheless know right well that there are men remaining in this world of ours; and at times, even when they wear the cowl or the cassock, the work they do is vile."

There came another interval of silence. Each was continuing his dream apart from the other. Then the doctor resumed: "I will tell you of a fancy which has often haunted me. Suppose we admit that Bernadette was not the shy, simple child we knew her to be; let us endow her with a spirit of intrigue and domination, transform her into a conqueress, a leader of nations, and try to picture what, in that case, would have happened. It is evident that the Grotto would be hers, the Basilica also. We should see her lording it at all the ceremonies, under a dais, with a gold mitre on her head. She would distribute the miracles; with a sovereign gesture her little hand would lead the multitudes to heaven. All the lustre and glory would come from her, she being the saint, the chosen one, the only one that had been privileged to see the Divinity face to face. And indeed nothing would seem more just, for she would triumph after toiling, enjoy the fruit of her labour in all glory. But you see, as it happens, she is defrauded, robbed. The marvellous harvests sown by her are reaped by others. During the twelve years which she lived at Saint Gildard, kneeling in the gloom, Lourdes was full of victors, priests in golden vestments chanting thanksgivings, and blessing churches and monuments erected at a cost of millions. She alone did not behold the triumph of the new faith, whose author she had been. You say that she dreamt it all. Well, at all events, what a beautiful dream it was, a dream which has stirred the whole world, and from which she, dear girl, never awakened!"

They halted and sat down for a moment on a rock beside the road, before returning to the town. In front of them the Gave, deep at this point of its course, was rolling blue waters tinged with dark moire-like reflections, whilst, farther on, rushing hurriedly over a bed of large stones, the stream became so much foam, a white froth, light like snow. Amidst the gold raining from the sun, a fresh breeze came down from the mountains.

Whilst listening to that story of how Bernadette had been exploited and suppressed, Pierre had simply found in it all a fresh motive for revolt; and, with his eyes fixed on the ground, he began to think of the injustice of nature, of that law which wills that the strong should devour the weak. Then, all at once raising his head, he inquired: "And did you also know Abbe Peyramale?"

The doctor's eyes brightened once more, and he eagerly replied: "Certainly I did! He was an upright, energetic man, a saint, an apostle. He and Bernadette were the great makers of Our Lady of Lourdes. Like her, he endured frightful sufferings, and, like her, he died from them. Those who do not know his story can know nothing, understand nothing, of the drama enacted here."

Thereupon he related that story at length. Abbe Peyramale was the parish priest of Lourdes at the time of the apparitions. A native of the region, tall, broad-shouldered, with a powerful leonine head, he was extremely intelligent, very honest and goodhearted, though at times violent and domineering. He seemed built for combat. An enemy of all pious exaggerations, discharging the duties of his ministry in a broad, liberal spirit, he regarded the apparitions with distrust when he first heard of them, refused to believe in Bernadette's stories, questioned her, and demanded proofs. It was only at a later stage, when the blast of faith became irresistible, upsetting the most rebellious minds and mastering the multitude, that he ended, in his turn, by bowing his head; and when he was finally conquered, it was more particularly by his love for the humble and the oppressed which he could not restrain when he beheld Bernadette threatened with imprisonment. The civil authorities were persecuting one of his flock; at this his shepherd's heart awoke, and, in her defence, he gave full reign to his ardent passion for justice. Moreover, the charm which the child diffused had worked upon him; he felt her to be so candid, so truthful, that he began to place a blind faith in her and love her even as everybody else loved her. Moreover, why should he have curtly dismissed all questions of miracles, when miracles abound in the pages of Holy Writ? It was not for a minister of religion, whatever his prudence, to set himself up as a sceptic when entire populations were falling on their knees and the Church seemed to be on the eve of another great triumph. Then, too, he had the nature of one who leads men, who stirs up crowds, who builds, and in this affair he had really found his vocation, the vast field in which he might exercise his energy, the great cause to which he might wholly devote himself with all his passionate ardour and determination to succeed.

From that moment, then, Abbe Peyramale had but one thought, to execute the orders which the Virgin had commissioned Bernadette to transmit to him. He caused improvements to be carried out at the Grotto. A railing was placed in front of it; pipes were laid for the conveyance of the water from the source, and a variety of work was accomplished in order to clear the approaches. However, the Virgin had particularly requested that a chapel might be built; and he wished to have a church, quite a triumphal Basilica. He pictured everything on a grand scale, and, full of confidence in the enthusiastic help of Christendom, he worried the architects, requiring them to design real palaces worthy of the Queen of Heaven. As a matter of fact, offerings already abounded, gold poured from the most distant dioceses, a rain of gold destined to increase and never end. Then came his happy years: he was to be met among the workmen at all hours, instilling activity into them like the jovial, good-natured fellow he was, constantly on the point of taking a pick or trowel in hand himself, such was his eagerness to behold the realisation of his dream. But days of trial were in store for him: he fell ill, and lay in danger of death on the fourth of April, 1864, when the first procession started from his parish church to the Grotto, a procession of sixty thousand pilgrims, which wound along the streets amidst an immense concourse of spectators.

On the day when Abbe Peyramale rose from his bed, saved, a first time, from death, he found himself despoiled. To second him in his heavy task, Monseigneur Laurence, the Bishop, had already given him as assistant a former episcopal secretary, Father Sempe, whom he had appointed warden of the Missionaries of Geraison, a community founded by himself. Father Sempe was a sly, spare little man, to all appearance most disinterested and humble, but in reality consumed by all the thirst of ambition. At the outset he kept in his place, serving the parish priest of Lourdes like a faithful subordinate, attending to matters of all kinds in order to lighten the other's work, and acquiring information on every possible subject in his desire to render himself indispensable. He must soon have realised what a rich farm the Grotto was destined to become, and what a colossal revenue might be derived from it, if only a little skill were exercised. And thenceforth he no longer stirred from the episcopal residence, but ended by acquiring great influence over the calm, practical Bishop, who was in great need of money for the charities of his diocese. And thus it was that during Abbe Peyramale's illness Father Sempe succeeded in effecting a separation between the parish of Lourdes and the domain of the Grotto, which last he was commissioned to manage at the head of a few Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, over whom the Bishop placed him as Father Superior.

The struggle soon began, one of those covert, desperate, mortal struggles which are waged under the cloak of ecclesiastical discipline. There was a pretext for rupture all ready, a field of battle on which the longer purse would necessarily end by conquering. It was proposed to build a new parish church, larger and more worthy of Lourdes than the old one already in existence, which was admitted to have become too small since the faithful had been flocking into the town in larger and larger numbers. Moreover, it was an old idea of Abbe Peyramale, who desired to carry out the Virgin's orders with all possible precision. Speaking of the Grotto, she had said that people would go "thither in procession"; and the Abbe had always seen the pilgrims start in procession from the town, whither they were expected to return in the same fashion, as indeed had been the practice on the first occasions after the apparitions. A central point, a rallying spot, was therefore required, and the Abbe's dream was to erect a magnificent church, a cathedral of gigantic proportions, which would accommodate a vast multitude. Builder as he was by temperament, impassioned artisan working for the glory of Heaven, he already pictured this cathedral springing from the soil, and rearing its clanging belfry in the sunlight. And it was also his own house that he wished to build, the edifice which would be his act of faith and adoration, the temple where he would be the pontiff, and triumph in company with the sweet memory of Bernadette, in full view of the spot of which both he and she had been so cruelly dispossessed. Naturally enough, bitterly as he felt that act of spoliation, the building of this new parish church was in some degree his revenge, his share of all the glory, besides being a task which would enable him to utilise both his militant activity and the fever that had been consuming him ever since he had ceased going to the Grotto, by reason of his soreness of heart.

At the outset of the new enterprise there was again a flash of enthusiasm. At the prospect of seeing all the life and all the money flow into the new city which was springing from the ground around the Basilica, the old town, which felt itself thrust upon one side, espoused the cause of its priest. The municipal council voted a sum of one hundred thousand francs, which, unfortunately, was not to be paid until the new church should be roofed in. Abbe Peyramale had already accepted the plans of his architect—plans which, he had insisted, should be on a grand scale—and had also treated with a contractor of Chartres, who engaged to complete the church in three or four years if the promised supplies of funds should be regularly forthcoming. The Abbe believed that offerings would assuredly continue raining down from all parts, and so he launched into this big enterprise without any anxiety, overflowing with a careless bravery, and fully expecting that Heaven would not abandon him on the road. He even fancied that he could rely upon the support of Monseigneur Jourdan, who had now succeeded Monseigneur Laurence as Bishop of Tarbes, for this prelate, after blessing the foundation-stone of the new church, had delivered an address in which he admitted that the enterprise was necessary and meritorious. And it seemed, too, as though Father Sempe, with his customary humility, had bowed to the inevitable and accepted this vexatious competition, which would compel him to relinquish a share of the plunder; for he now pretended to devote himself entirely to the management of the Grotto, and even allowed a collection-box for contributions to the building of the new parish church to be placed inside the Basilica.

Then, however, the secret, rageful struggle began afresh. Abbe Peyramale, who was a wretched manager, exulted on seeing his new church so rapidly take shape. The work was being carried on at a fast pace, and he troubled about nothing else, being still under the delusion that the Blessed Virgin would find whatever money might be needed. Thus he was quite stupefied when he at last perceived that the offerings were falling off, that the money of the faithful no longer reached him, as though, indeed, someone had secretly diverted its flow. And eventually the day came when he was unable to make the stipulated payments. In all this there had been so much skilfully combined strangulation, of which he only became aware later on. Father Sempe, however, had once more prevailed on the Bishop to grant his favour exclusively to the Grotto. There was even a talk of some confidential circulars distributed through the various dioceses, so that the many sums of money offered by the faithful should no longer be sent to the parish. The voracious, insatiable Grotto was bent upon securing everything, and to such a point were things carried that five hundred franc notes slipped into the collection-box at the Basilica were kept back; the box was rifled and the parish robbed. Abbe Peyramale, however, in his passion for the rising church, his child, continued fighting most desperately, ready if need were to give his blood. He had at first treated with the contractor in the name of the vestry; then, when he was at a loss how to pay, he treated in his own name. His life was bound up in the enterprise, he wore himself out in the heroic efforts which he made. Of the four hundred thousand francs that he had promised, he had only been able to pay two hundred thousand; and the municipal council still obstinately refused to hand over the hundred thousand francs which it had voted, until the new church should be covered in. This was acting against the town's real interests. However, it was said that Father Sempe was trying to bring influence to bear on the contractor. And, all at once, the work was stopped.

From that moment the death agony began. Wounded in the heart, the Abbe Peyramale, the broad-shouldered mountaineer with the leonine face, staggered and fell like an oak struck down by a thunderbolt. He took to his bed, and never left it alive. Strange stories circulated: it was said that Father Sempe had sought to secure admission to the parsonage under some pious pretext, but in reality to see if his much-dreaded adversary were really mortally stricken; and it was added, that it had been necessary to drive him from the sick-room, where his presence was an outrageous scandal. Then, when the unhappy priest, vanquished and steeped in bitterness, was dead, Father Sempe was seen triumphing at the funeral, from which the others had not dared to keep him away. It was affirmed that he openly displayed his abominable delight, that his face was radiant that day with the joy of victory. He was at last rid of the only man who had been an obstacle to his designs, whose legitimate authority he had feared. He would no longer be forced to share anything with anybody now that both the founders of Our Lady of Lourdes had been suppressed—Bernadette placed in a convent, and Abbe Peyramale lowered into the ground. The Grotto was now his own property, the alms would come to him alone, and he could do what he pleased with the eight hundred thousand francs* or so which were at his disposal every year. He would complete the gigantic works destined to make the Basilica a self-supporting centre, and assist in embellishing the new town in order to increase the isolation of the old one and seclude it behind its rock, like an insignificant parish submerged beneath the splendour of its all-powerful neighbour. All the money, all the sovereignty, would be his; he henceforth would reign.

* About 145,000 dollars.

However, although the works had been stopped, and the new parish church was slumbering inside its wooden fence, it was none the less more than half built. The vaulted aisles were already erected. And the imperfect pile remained there like a threat, for the town might some day attempt to finish it. Like Abbe Peyramale, therefore, it must be killed for good, turned into an irreparable ruin. The secret labour therefore continued, a work of refined cruelty and slow destruction. To begin with, the new parish priest, a simple-minded creature, was cowed to such a point that he no longer opened the envelopes containing remittances for the parish; all the registered letters were at once taken to the Fathers. Then the site selected for the new parish church was criticised, and the diocesan architect was induced to draw up a report stating that the old church was still in good condition and of ample size for the requirements of the community. Moreover, influence was brought to bear on the Bishop, and representations were made to him respecting the annoying features of the pecuniary difficulties which had arisen with the contractor. With a little imagination poor Peyramale was transformed into a violent, obstinate madman, through whose undisciplined zeal the Church had almost been compromised. And, at last, the Bishop, forgetting that he himself had blessed the foundation-stone, issued a pastoral letter laying the unfinished church under interdict, and prohibiting all religious services in it. This was the supreme blow. Endless lawsuits had already begun; the contractor, who had only received two hundred thousand francs for the five hundred thousand francs' worth of work which had been executed, had taken proceedings against Abbe Peyramale's heir-at-law, the vestry, and the town, for the last still refused to pay over the amount which it had voted. At first the Prefect's Council declared itself incompetent to deal with the case, and when it was sent back to it by the Council of State, it rendered a judgment by which the town was condemned to pay the hundred thousand francs and the heir-at-law to finish the church. At the same time the vestry was put out of court. However, there was a fresh appeal to the Council of State, which quashed this judgment, and condemned the vestry, and, in default, the heir-at-law, to pay the contractor. Neither party being solvent, matters remained in this position. The lawsuits had lasted fifteen years. The town had now resignedly paid over the hundred thousand francs, and only two hundred thousand remained owing to the contractor. However, the costs and the accumulated interest had so increased the amount of indebtedness that it had risen to six hundred thousand francs; and as, on the other hand, it was estimated that four hundred thousand francs would be required to finish the church, a million was needed to save this young ruin from certain destruction. The Fathers of the Grotto were thenceforth able to sleep in peace; they had assassinated the poor church; it was as dead as Abbe Peyramale himself.

The bells of the Basilica rang out triumphantly, and Father Sempe reigned as a victor at the conclusion of that great struggle, that dagger warfare in which not only a man but stones also had been done to death in the shrouding gloom of intriguing sacristies. And old Lourdes, obstinate and unintelligent, paid a hard penalty for its mistake in not giving more support to its minister, who had died struggling, killed by his love for his parish, for now the new town did not cease to grow and prosper at the expense of the old one. All the wealth flowed to the former: the Fathers of the Grotto coined money, financed hotels and candle shops, and sold the water of the source, although a clause of their agreement with the municipality expressly prohibited them from carrying on any commercial pursuits.

The whole region began to rot and fester; the triumph of the Grotto had brought about such a passion for lucre, such a burning, feverish desire to possess and enjoy, that extraordinary perversion set in, growing worse and worse each day, and changing Bernadette's peaceful Bethlehem into a perfect Sodom or Gomorrah. Father Sempe had ensured the triumph of his Divinity by spreading human abominations all around and wrecking thousands of souls. Gigantic buildings rose from the ground, five or six millions of francs had already been expended, everything being sacrificed to the stern determination to leave the poor parish out in the cold and keep the entire plunder for self and friends. Those costly, colossal gradient ways had only been erected in order to avoid compliance with the Virgin's express desire that the faithful should come to the Grotto in procession. For to go down from the Basilica by the incline on the left, and climb up to it again by the incline on the right, could certainly not be called going to the Grotto in procession: it was simply so much revolving in a circle. However, the Fathers cared little about that; they had succeeded in compelling people to start from their premises and return to them, in order that they might be the sole proprietors of the affair, the opulent farmers who garnered the whole harvest. Abbe Peyramale lay buried in the crypt of his unfinished, ruined church, and Bernadette, who had long since dragged out her life of suffering in the depths of a convent far away, was now likewise sleeping the eternal sleep under a flagstone in a chapel.

Deep silence fell when Doctor Chassaigne had finished this long narrative. Then, with a painful effort, he rose to his feet again: "It will soon be ten o'clock, my dear child," said he, "and I want you to take a little rest. Let us go back."

Pierre followed him without speaking; and they retraced their steps toward the town at a more rapid pace.

"Ah! yes," resumed the doctor, "there were great iniquities and great sufferings in it all. But what else could you expect? Man spoils and corrupts the most beautiful things. And you cannot yet understand all the woeful sadness of the things of which I have been talking to you. You must see them, lay your hand on them. Would you like me to show you Bernadette's room and Abbe Peyramale's unfinished church this evening?"

"Yes, I should indeed," replied Pierre.

"Well, I will meet you in front of the Basilica after the four-o'clock procession, and you can come with me."

Then they spoke no further, each becoming absorbed in his reverie once more.

The Gave, now upon their right hand, was flowing through a deep gorge, a kind of cleft into which it plunged, vanishing from sight among the bushes. But at intervals a clear stretch of it, looking like unburnished silver, would appear to view; and, farther on, after a sudden turn in the road, they found it flowing in increased volume across a plain, where it spread at times into glassy sheets which must often have changed their beds, for the gravelly soil was ravined on all sides. The sun was now becoming very hot, and was already high in the heavens, whose limpid azure assumed a deeper tinge above the vast circle of mountains.

And it was at this turn of the road that Lourdes, still some distance away, reappeared to the eyes of Pierre and Doctor Chassaigne. In the splendid morning atmosphere, amid a flying dust of gold and purple rays, the town shone whitely on the horizon, its houses and monuments becoming more and more distinct at each step which brought them nearer. And the doctor, still silent, at last waved his arm with a broad, mournful gesture in order to call his companion's attention to this growing town, as though to a proof of all that he had been telling him. There, indeed, rising up in the dazzling daylight, was the evidence which confirmed his words.

The flare of the Grotto, fainter now that the sun was shining, could already be espied amidst the greenery. And soon afterwards the gigantic monumental works spread out: the quay with its freestone parapet skirting the Gave, whose course had been diverted; the new bridge connecting the new gardens with the recently opened boulevard; the colossal gradient ways, the massive church of the Rosary, and, finally, the slim, tapering Basilica, rising above all else with graceful pride. Of the new town spread all around the monuments, the wealthy city which had sprung, as though by enchantment, from the ancient impoverished soil, the great convents and the great hotels, you could, at this distance, merely distinguish a swarming of white facades and a scintillation of new slates; whilst, in confusion, far away, beyond the rocky mass on which the crumbling castle walls were profiled against the sky, appeared the humble roofs of the old town, a jumble of little time-worn roofs, pressing timorously against one another. And as a background to this vision of the life of yesterday and to-day, the little and the big Gers rose up beneath the splendour of the everlasting sun, and barred the horizon with their bare slopes, which the oblique rays were tingeing with streaks of pink and yellow.

Doctor Chassaigne insisted on accompanying Pierre to the Hotel of the Apparitions, and only parted from him at its door, after reminding him of their appointment for the afternoon. It was not yet eleven o'clock. Pierre, whom fatigue had suddenly mastered, forced himself to eat before going to bed, for he realised that want of food was one of the chief causes of the weakness which had come over him. He fortunately found a vacant seat at the table d'hote, and made some kind of a dejeuner, half asleep all the time, and scarcely knowing what was served to him. Then he went up-stairs and flung himself on his bed, after taking care to tell the servant to awake him at three o'clock.

However, on lying down, the fever that consumed him at first prevented him from closing his eyes. A pair of gloves, forgotten in the next room, had reminded him of M. de Guersaint, who had left for Gavarnie before daybreak, and would only return in the evening. What a delightful gift was thoughtlessness, thought Pierre. For his own part, with his limbs worn out by weariness and his mind distracted, he was sad unto death. Everything seemed to conspire against his willing desire to regain the faith of his childhood. The tale of Abbe Peyramale's tragic adventures had simply aggravated the feeling of revolt which the story of Bernadette, chosen and martyred, had implanted in his breast. And thus he asked himself whether his search after the truth, instead of restoring his faith, would not rather lead him to yet greater hatred of ignorance and credulity, and to the bitter conviction that man is indeed all alone in the world, with naught to guide him save his reason.

At last he fell asleep, but visions continued hovering around him in his painful slumber. He beheld Lourdes, contaminated by Mammon, turned into a spot of abomination and perdition, transformed into a huge bazaar, where everything was sold, masses and souls alike! He beheld also Abbe Peyramale, dead and slumbering under the ruins of his church, among the nettles which ingratitude had sown there. And he only grew calm again, only tasted the delights of forgetfulness when a last pale, woeful vision had faded from his gaze—a vision of Bernadette upon her knees in a gloomy corner at Nevers, dreaming of her far-away work, which she was never, never to behold.

THE FOURTH DAY

I. THE BITTERNESS OP DEATH

AT the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, that morning, Marie remained seated on her bed, propped up by pillows. Having spent the whole night at the Grotto, she had refused to let them take her back there. And, as Madame de Jonquiere approached her, to raise one of the pillows which was slipping from its place, she asked: "What day is it, madame?"

"Monday, my dear child."

"Ah! true. One so soon loses count of time. And, besides, I am so happy! It is to-day that the Blessed Virgin will cure me!"

She smiled divinely, with the air of a day-dreamer, her eyes gazing into vacancy, her thoughts so far away, so absorbed in her one fixed idea, that she beheld nothing save the certainty of her hope. Round about her, the Sainte-Honorine Ward was now quite deserted, all the patients, excepting Madame Vetu, who lay at the last extremity in the next bed, having already started for the Grotto. But Marie did not even notice her neighbour; she was delighted with the sudden stillness which had fallen. One of the windows overlooking the courtyard had been opened, and the glorious morning sunshine entered in one broad beam, whose golden dust was dancing over her bed and streaming upon her pale hands. It was indeed pleasant to find this room, so dismal at nighttime with its many beds of sickness, its unhealthy atmosphere, and its nightmare groans, thus suddenly filled with sunlight, purified by the morning air, and wrapped in such delicious silence! "Why don't you try to sleep a little?" maternally inquired Madame de Jonquiere. "You must be quite worn out by your vigil."

Marie, who felt so light and cheerful that she no longer experienced any pain, seemed surprised.

"But I am not at all tired, and I don't feel a bit sleepy. Go to sleep? Oh! no, that would be too sad. I should no longer know that I was going to be cured!"

At this the superintendent laughed. "Then why didn't you let them take you to the Grotto?" she asked. "You won't know what to do with yourself all alone here."

"I am not alone, madame, I am with her," replied Marie; and thereupon, her vision returning to her, she clasped her hands in ecstasy. "Last night, you know, I saw her bend her head towards me and smile. I quite understood her, I could hear her voice, although she never opened her lips. When the Blessed Sacrament passes at four o'clock I shall be cured."

Madame de Jonquiere tried to calm her, feeling rather anxious at the species of somnambulism in which she beheld her. However, the sick girl went on: "No, no, I am no worse, I am waiting. Only, you must surely see, madame, that there is no need for me to go to the Grotto this morning, since the appointment which she gave me is for four o'clock." And then the girl added in a lower tone: "Pierre will come for me at half-past three. At four o'clock I shall be cured."

The sunbeam slowly made its way up her bare arms, which were now almost transparent, so wasted had they become through illness; whilst her glorious fair hair, which had fallen over her shoulders, seemed like the very effulgence of the great luminary enveloping her. The trill of a bird came in from the courtyard, and quite enlivened the tremulous silence of the ward. Some child who could not be seen must also have been playing close by, for now and again a soft laugh could be heard ascending in the warm air which was so delightfully calm.

"Well," said Madame de Jonquiere by way of conclusion, "don't sleep then, as you don't wish to. But keep quite quiet, and it will rest you all the same."

Meantime Madame Vetu was expiring in the adjoining bed. They had not dared to take her to the Grotto, for fear they should see her die on the way. For some little time she had lain there with her eyes closed; and Sister Hyacinthe, who was watching, had beckoned to Madame Desagneaux in order to acquaint her with the bad opinion she had formed of the case. Both of them were now leaning over the dying woman, observing her with increasing anxiety. The mask upon her face had turned more yellow than ever, and now looked like a coating of mud; her eyes too had become more sunken, her lips seemed to have grown thinner, and the death rattle had begun, a slow, pestilential wheezing, polluted by the cancer which was finishing its destructive work. All at once she raised her eyelids, and was seized with fear on beholding those two faces bent over her own. Could her death be near, that they should thus be gazing at her? Immense sadness showed itself in her eyes, a despairing regret of life. It was not a vehement revolt, for she no longer had the strength to struggle; but what a frightful fate it was to have left her shop, her surroundings, and her husband, merely to come and die so far away; to have braved the abominable torture of such a journey, to have prayed both day and night, and then, instead of having her prayer granted, to die when others recovered!

However, she could do no more than murmur "Oh! how I suffer; oh! how I suffer. Do something, anything, to relieve this pain, I beseech you."

Little Madame Desagneaux, with her pretty milk-white face showing amidst her mass of fair, frizzy hair, was quite upset. She was not used to deathbed scenes, she would have given half her heart, as she expressed it, to see that poor woman recover. And she rose up and began to question Sister Hyacinthe, who was also in tears but already resigned, knowing as she did that salvation was assured when one died well. Could nothing really be done, however? Could not something be tried to ease the dying woman? Abbe Judaine had come and administered the last sacrament to her a couple of hours earlier that very morning. She now only had Heaven to look to; it was her only hope, for she had long since given up expecting aid from the skill of man.

"No, no! we must do something," exclaimed Madame Desagneaux. And thereupon she went and fetched Madame de Jonquiere from beside Marie's bed. "Look how this poor creature is suffering, madame!" she exclaimed. "Sister Hyacinthe says that she can only last a few hours longer. But we cannot leave her moaning like this. There are things which give relief. Why not call that young doctor who is here?"

"Of course we will," replied the superintendent. "We will send for him at once."

They seldom thought of the doctor in the wards. It only occurred to the ladies to send for him when a case was at its very worst, when one of their patients was howling with pain. Sister Hyacinthe, who herself felt surprised at not having thought of Ferrand, whom she believed to be in an adjoining room, inquired if she should fetch him.

"Certainly," was the reply. "Bring him as quickly as possible."

When the Sister had gone off, Madame de Jonquiere made Madame Desagneaux help her in slightly raising the dying woman's head, thinking that this might relieve her. The two ladies happened to be alone there that morning, all the other lady-hospitallers having gone to their devotions or their private affairs. However, from the end of the large deserted ward, where, amidst the warm quiver of the sunlight such sweet tranquillity prevailed, there still came at intervals the light laughter of the unseen child.

"Can it be Sophie who is making such a noise?" suddenly asked the lady-superintendent, whose nerves were somewhat upset by all the worry of the death which she foresaw. Then quickly walking to the end of the ward, she found that it was indeed Sophie Couteau—the young girl so miraculously healed the previous year—who, seated on the floor behind a bed, had been amusing herself, despite her fourteen years, in making a doll out of a few rags. She was now talking to it, so happy, so absorbed in her play, that she laughed quite heartily. "Hold yourself up, mademoiselle," said she. "Dance the polka, that I may see how you can do it! One! two! dance, turn, kiss the one you like best!"

Madame de Jonquiere, however, was now coming up. "Little girl," she said, "we have one of our patients here in great pain, and not expected to recover. You must not laugh so loud."

"Ah! madame, I didn't know," replied Sophie, rising up, and becoming quite serious, although still holding the doll in her hand. "Is she going to die, madame?"

"I fear so, my poor child."

Thereupon Sophie became quite silent. She followed the superintendent, and seated herself on an adjoining bed; whence, without the slightest sign of fear, but with her large eyes burning with curiosity, she began to watch Madame Vetu's death agony. In her nervous state, Madame Desagneaux was growing impatient at the delay in the doctor's arrival; whilst Marie, still enraptured, and resplendent in the sunlight, seemed unconscious of what was taking place about her, wrapt as she was in delightful expectancy of the miracle.

Not having found Ferrand in the small apartment near the linen-room which he usually occupied, Sister Hyacinthe was now searching for him all over the building. During the past two days the young doctor had become more bewildered than ever in that extraordinary hospital, where his assistance was only sought for the relief of death pangs. The small medicine-chest which he had brought with him proved quite useless; for there could be no thought of trying any course of treatment, as the sick were not there to be doctored, but simply to be cured by the lightning stroke of a miracle. And so he mainly confined himself to administering a few opium pills, in order to deaden the severer sufferings. He had been fairly amazed when accompanying Doctor Bonamy on a round through the wards. It had resolved itself into a mere stroll, the doctor, who had only come out of curiosity, taking no interest in the patients, whom he neither questioned nor examined. He solely concerned himself with the pretended cases of cure, stopping opposite those women whom he recognised from having seen them at his office where the miracles were verified. One of them had suffered from three complaints, only one of which the Blessed Virgin had so far deigned to cure; but great hopes were entertained respecting the other two. Sometimes, when a wretched woman, who the day before had claimed to be cured, was questioned with reference to her health, she would reply that her pains had returned to her. However, this never disturbed the doctor's serenity; ever conciliatory, the good man declared that Heaven would surely complete what Heaven had begun. Whenever there was an improvement in health, he would ask if it were not something to be thankful for. And, indeed, his constant saying was: "There's an improvement already; be patient!" What he most dreaded were the importunities of the lady-superintendents, who all wished to detain him to show him sundry extraordinary cases. Each prided herself on having the most serious illnesses, the most frightful, exceptional cases in her ward; so that she was eager to have them medically authenticated, in order that she might share in the triumph should cure supervene. One caught the doctor by the arm and assured him that she felt confident she had a leper in her charge; another entreated him to come and look at a young girl whose back, she said, was covered with fish's scales; whilst a third, whispering in his ear, gave him some terrible details about a married lady of the best society. He hastened away, however, refusing to see even one of them, or else simply promising to come back later on when he was not so busy. As he himself said, if he listened to all those ladies, the day would pass in useless consultations. However, he at last suddenly stopped opposite one of the miraculously cured inmates, and, beckoning Ferrand to his side, exclaimed: "Ah! now here is an interesting cure!" and Ferrand, utterly bewildered, had to listen to him whilst he described all the features of the illness, which had totally disappeared at the first immersion in the piscina.

At last Sister Hyacinthe, still wandering about, encountered Abbe Judaine, who informed her that the young doctor had just been summoned to the Family Ward. It was the fourth time he had gone thither to attend to Brother Isidore, whose sufferings were as acute as ever, and whom he could only fill with opium. In his agony, the Brother merely asked to be soothed a little, in order that he might gather together sufficient strength to return to the Grotto in the afternoon, as he had not been able to do so in the morning. However, his pains increased, and at last he swooned away.

When the Sister entered the ward she found the doctor seated at the missionary's bedside. "Monsieur Ferrand," she said, "come up-stairs with me to the Sainte-Honorine Ward at once. We have a patient there at the point of death."

He smiled at her; indeed, he never beheld her without feeling brighter and comforted. "I will come with you, Sister," he replied. "But you'll wait a minute, won't you? I must try to restore this poor man."

She waited patiently and made herself useful. The Family Ward, situated on the ground-floor, was also full of sunshine and fresh air which entered through three large windows opening on to a narrow strip of garden. In addition to Brother Isidore, only Monsieur Sabathier had remained in bed that morning, with the view of obtaining a little rest; whilst Madame Sabathier, taking advantage of the opportunity, had gone to purchase a few medals and pictures, which she intended for presents. Comfortably seated on his bed, his back supported by some pillows, the ex-professor was rolling the beads of a chaplet between his fingers. He was no longer praying, however, but merely continuing the operation in a mechanical manner, his eyes, meantime, fixed upon his neighbour, whose attack he was following with painful interest.

"Ah! Sister," said he to Sister Hyacinthe, who had drawn near, "that poor Brother fills me with admiration. Yesterday I doubted the Blessed Virgin for a moment, seeing that she did not deign to hear me, though I have been coming here for seven years past; but the example set me by that poor martyr, so resigned amidst his torments, has quite shamed me for my want of faith. You can have no idea how grievously he suffers, and you should see him at the Grotto, with his eyes glowing with divine hope! It is really sublime! I only know of one picture at the Louvre—a picture by some unknown Italian master—in which there is the head of a monk beatified by a similar faith."

The man of intellect, the ex-university-professor, reared on literature and art, was reappearing in this poor old fellow, whose life had been blasted, and who had desired to become a free patient, one of the poor of the earth, in order to move the pity of Heaven. He again began thinking of his own case, and with tenacious hopefulness, which the futility of seven journeys to Lourdes had failed to destroy, he added: "Well, I still have this afternoon, since we sha'n't leave till to-morrow. The water is certainly very cold, but I shall let them dip me a last time; and all the morning I have been praying and asking pardon for my revolt of yesterday. When the Blessed Virgin chooses to cure one of her children, it only takes her a second to do so; is that not so, Sister? May her will be done, and blessed be her name!"

Passing the beads of the chaplet more slowly between his fingers, he again began saying his "Aves" and "Paters," whilst his eyelids drooped on his flabby face, to which a childish expression had been returning during the many years that he had been virtually cut off from the world.

Meantime Ferrand had signalled to Brother Isidore's sister, Marthe, to come to him. She had been standing at the foot of the bed with her arms hanging down beside her, showing the tearless resignation of a poor, narrow-minded girl whilst she watched that dying man whom she worshipped. She was no more than a faithful dog; she had accompanied her brother and spent her scanty savings, without being of any use save to watch him suffer. Accordingly, when the doctor told her to take the invalid in her arms and raise him up a little, she felt quite happy at being of some service at last. Her heavy, freckled, mournful face actually grew bright.

"Hold him," said the doctor, "whilst I try to give him this."

When she had raised him, Ferrand, with the aid of a small spoon, succeeded in introducing a few drops of liquid between his set teeth. Almost immediately the sick man opened his eyes and heaved a deep sigh. He was calmer already; the opium was taking effect and dulling the pain which he felt burning his right side, as though a red-hot iron were being applied to it. However, he remained so weak that, when he wished to speak, it became necessary to place one's ear close to his mouth in order to catch what he said. With a slight sign he had begged Ferrand to bend over him. "You are the doctor, monsieur, are you not?" he faltered. "Give me sufficient strength that I may go once more to the Grotto, this afternoon. I am certain that, if I am able to go, the Blessed Virgin will cure me."

"Why, of course you shall go," replied the young man. "Don't you feel ever so much better?"

"Oh! ever so much better—no! I know very well what my condition is, because I saw many of our Brothers die, out there in Senegal. When the liver is attacked and the abscess has worked its way outside, it means the end. Sweating, fever, and delirium follow. But the Blessed Virgin will touch the sore with her little finger and it will be healed. Oh! I implore you all, take me to the Grotto, even if I should be unconscious!"

Sister Hyacinthe had also approached, and leant over him. "Be easy, dear Brother," said she. "You shall go to the Grotto after dejeuner, and we will all pray for you."

At length, in despair at these delays and extremely anxious about Madame Vetu, she was able to get Ferrand away. Still, the Brother's state filled her with pity; and, as they ascended the stairs, she questioned the doctor, asking him if there were really no more hope. The other made a gesture expressive of absolute hopelessness. It was madness to come to Lourdes when one was in such a condition. However, he hastened to add, with a smile: "I beg your pardon, Sister. You know that I am unfortunate enough not to be a believer."

But she smiled in her turn, like an indulgent friend who tolerates the shortcomings of those she loves. "Oh! that doesn't matter," she replied. "I know you; you're all the same a good fellow. Besides, we see so many people, we go amongst such pagans that it would be difficult to shock us."

Up above, in the Sainte-Honorine Ward, they found Madame Vetu still moaning, a prey to most intolerable suffering. Madame de Jonquiere and Madame Desagneaux had remained beside the bed, their faces turning pale, their hearts distracted by that death-cry, which never ceased. And when they consulted Ferrand in a whisper, he merely replied, with a slight shrug of the shoulders, that she was a lost woman, that it was only a question of hours, perhaps merely of minutes. All he could do was to stupefy her also, in order to ease the atrocious death agony which he foresaw. She was watching him, still conscious, and also very obedient, never refusing the medicine offered her. Like the others, she now had but one ardent desire—to go back to the Grotto—and she gave expression to it in the stammering accents of a child who fears that its prayer may not be granted: "To the Grotto—will you? To the Grotto!"

"You shall be taken there by-and-by, I promise you," said Sister Hyacinthe. "But you must be good. Try to sleep a little to gain some strength."

The sick woman appeared to sink into a doze, and Madame de Jonquiere then thought that she might take Madame Desagneaux with her to the other end of the ward to count the linen, a troublesome business, in which they became quite bewildered, as some of the articles were missing. Meantime Sophie, seated on the bed opposite Madame Vetu, had not stirred. She had laid her doll on her lap, and was waiting for the lady's death, since they had told her that she was about to die. Sister Hyacinthe, moreover, had remained beside the dying woman, and, unwilling to waste her time, had taken a needle and cotton to mend some patient's bodice which had a hole in the sleeve.

"You'll stay a little while with us, won't you?" she asked Ferrand.

The latter, who was still watching Madame Vetu, replied: "Yes, yes. She may go off at any moment. I fear hemorrhage." Then, catching sight of Marie on the neighbouring bed, he added in a lower voice: "How is she? Has she experienced any relief?"

"No, not yet. Ah, dear child! we all pray for her very sincerely. She is so young, so sweet, and so sorely afflicted. Just look at her now! Isn't she pretty? One might think her a saint amid all this sunshine, with her large, ecstatic eyes, and her golden hair shining like an aureola!"

Ferrand watched Marie for a moment with interest. Her absent air, her indifference to all about her, the ardent faith, the internal joy which so completely absorbed her, surprised him. "She will recover," he murmured, as though giving utterance to a prognostic. "She will recover."

Then he rejoined Sister Hyacinthe, who had seated herself in the embrasure of the lofty window, which stood wide open, admitting the warm air of the courtyard. The sun was now creeping round, and only a narrow golden ray fell upon her white coif and wimple. Ferrand stood opposite to her, leaning against the window bar and watching her while she sewed. "Do you know, Sister," said he, "this journey to Lourdes, which I undertook to oblige a friend, will be one of the few delights of my life."

She did not understand him, but innocently asked: "Why so?"

"Because I have found you again, because I am here with you, assisting you in your admirable work. And if you only knew how grateful I am to you, what sincere affection and reverence I feel for you!"

She raised her head to look him straight in the face, and began jesting without the least constraint. She was really delicious, with her pure lily-white complexion, her small laughing mouth, and adorable blue eyes which ever smiled. And you could realise that she had grown up in all innocence and devotion, slender and supple, with all the appearance of a girl hardly in her teens.

"What! You are so fond of me as all that!" she exclaimed. "Why?"

"Why I'm fond of you? Because you are the best, the most consoling, the most sisterly of beings. You are the sweetest memory in my life, the memory I evoke whenever I need to be encouraged and sustained. Do you no longer remember the month we spent together, in my poor room, when I was so ill and you so affectionately nursed me?"

"Of course, of course I remember it! Why, I never had so good a patient as you. You took all I offered you; and when I tucked you in, after changing your linen, you remained as still as a little child."

So speaking, she continued looking at him, smiling ingenuously the while. He was very handsome and robust, in the very prime of youth, with a rather pronounced nose, superb eyes, and red lips showing under his black moustache. But she seemed to be simply pleased at seeing him there before her moved almost to tears.

"Ah! Sister, I should have died if it hadn't been for you," he said. "It was through having you that I was cured."

Then, as they gazed at one another, with tender gaiety of heart, the memory of that adorable month recurred to them. They no longer heard Madame Vetu's death moans, nor beheld the ward littered with beds, and, with all its disorder, resembling some infirmary improvised after a public catastrophe. They once more found themselves in a small attic at the top of a dingy house in old Paris, where air and light only reached them through a tiny window opening on to a sea of roofs. And how charming it was to be alone there together—he who had been prostrated by fever, she who had appeared there like a good angel, who had quietly come from her convent like a comrade who fears nothing! It was thus that she nursed women, children, and men, as chance ordained, feeling perfectly happy so long as she had something to do, some sufferer to relieve. She never displayed any consciousness of her sex; and he, on his side, never seemed to have suspected that she might be a woman, except it were for the extreme softness of her hands, the caressing accents of her voice, the beneficent gentleness of her manner; and yet all the tender love of a mother, all the affection of a sister, radiated from her person. During three weeks, as she had said, she had nursed him like a child, helping him in and out of bed, and rendering him every necessary attention, without the slightest embarrassment or repugnance, the holy purity born of suffering and charity shielding them both the while. They were indeed far removed from the frailties of life. And when he became convalescent, what a happy existence began, how joyously they laughed, like two old friends! She still watched over him, scolding him and gently slapping his arms when he persisted in keeping them uncovered. He would watch her standing at the basin, washing him a shirt in order to save him the trifling expense of employing a laundress. No one ever came up there; they were quite alone, thousands of miles away from the world, delighted with this solitude, in which their youth displayed such fraternal gaiety.

"Do you remember, Sister, the morning when I was first able to walk about?" asked Ferrand. "You helped me to get up, and supported me whilst I awkwardly stumbled about, no longer knowing how to use my legs. We did laugh so."

"Yes, yes, you were saved, and I was very pleased."

"And the day when you brought me some cherries—I can see it all again: myself reclining on my pillows, and you seated at the edge of the bed, with the cherries lying between us in a large piece of white paper. I refused to touch them unless you ate some with me. And then we took them in turn, one at a time, until the paper was emptied; and they were very nice."

"Yes, yes, very nice. It was the same with the currant syrup: you would only drink it when I took some also."

Thereupon they laughed yet louder; these recollections quite delighted them. But a painful sigh from Madame Vetu brought them back to the present. Ferrand leant over and cast a glance at the sick woman, who had not stirred. The ward was still full of a quivering peacefulness, which was only broken by the clear voice of Madame Desagneaux counting the linen. Stifling with emotion, the young man resumed in a lower tone: "Ah! Sister, were I to live a hundred years, to know every joy, every pleasure, I should never love another woman as I love you!"

Then Sister Hyacinthe, without, however, showing any confusion, bowed her head and resumed her sewing. An almost imperceptible blush tinged her lily-white skin with pink.

"I also love you well, Monsieur Ferrand," she said, "but you must not make me vain. I only did for you what I do for so many others. It is my business, you see. And there was really only one pleasant thing about it all, that the Almighty cured you."

They were now again interrupted. La Grivotte and Elise Rouquet had returned from the Grotto before the others. La Grivotte at once squatted down on her mattress on the floor, at the foot of Madame Vetu's bed, and, taking a piece of bread from her pocket, proceeded to devour it. Ferrand, since the day before, had felt some interest in this consumptive patient, who was traversing such a curious phase of agitation, a prey to an inordinate appetite and a feverish need of motion. For the moment, however, Elise Rouquet's case interested him still more; for it had now become evident that the lupus, the sore which was eating away her face, was showing signs of cure. She had continued bathing her face at the miraculous fountain, and had just come from the Verification Office, where Doctor Bonamy had triumphed. Ferrand, quite surprised, went and examined the sore, which, although still far from healed, was already paler in colour and slightly desiccated, displaying all the symptoms of gradual cure. And the case seemed to him so curious, that he resolved to make some notes upon it for one of his old masters at the medical college, who was studying the nervous origin of certain skin diseases due to faulty nutrition.

"Have you felt any pricking sensation?" he asked.

"Not at all, monsieur," she replied. "I bathe my face and tell my beads with my whole soul, and that is all."

La Grivotte, who was vain and jealous, and ever since the day before had been going in triumph among the crowds, thereupon called to the doctor. "I say, monsieur, I am cured, cured, cured completely!"

He waved his hand to her in a friendly way, but refused to examine her. "I know, my girl. There is nothing more the matter with you."

Just then Sister Hyacinthe called to him. She had put her sewing down on seeing Madame Vetu raise herself in a frightful fit of nausea. In spite of her haste, however, she was too late with the basin; the sick woman had brought up another discharge of black matter, similar to soot; but, this time, some blood was mixed with it, little specks of violet-coloured blood. It was the hemorrhage coming, the near end which Ferrand had been dreading.

"Send for the superintendent," he said in a low voice, seating himself at the bedside.

Sister Hyacinthe ran for Madame de Jonquiere. The linen having been counted, she found her deep in conversation with her daughter Raymonde, at some distance from Madame Desagneaux, who was washing her hands.

Raymonde had just escaped for a few minutes from the refectory, where she was on duty. This was the roughest of her labours. The long narrow room, with its double row of greasy tables, its sickening smell of food and misery, quite disgusted her. And taking advantage of the half-hour still remaining before the return of the patients, she had hurried up-stairs, where, out of breath, with a rosy face and shining eyes, she had thrown her arms around her mother's neck.

"Ah! mamma," she cried, "what happiness! It's settled!"

Amazed, her head buzzing, busy with the superintendence of her ward, Madame de Jonquiere did not understand. "What's settled, my child?" she asked.

Then Raymonde lowered her voice, and, with a faint blush, replied: "My marriage!"

It was now the mother's turn to rejoice. Lively satisfaction appeared upon her face, the fat face of a ripe, handsome, and still agreeable woman. She at once beheld in her mind's eye their little lodging in the Rue Vaneau, where, since her husband's death, she had reared her daughter with great difficulty upon the few thousand francs he had left her. This marriage, however, meant a return to life, to society, the good old times come back once more.

"Ah! my child, how happy you make me!" she exclaimed.

But a feeling of uneasiness suddenly restrained her. God was her witness that for three years past she had been coming to Lourdes through pure motives of charity, for the one great joy of nursing His beloved invalids. Perhaps, had she closely examined her conscience, she might, behind her devotion, have found some trace of her fondness for authority, which rendered her present managerial duties extremely pleasant to her. However, the hope of finding a husband for her daughter among the suitable young men who swarmed at the Grotto was certainly her last thought. It was a thought which came to her, of course, but merely as something that was possible, though she never mentioned it. However, her happiness, wrung an avowal from her:

"Ah! my child, your success doesn't surprise me. I prayed to the Blessed Virgin for it this morning."

Then she wished to be quite sure, and asked for further information. Raymonde had not yet told her of her long walk leaning on Gerard's arm the day before, for she did not wish to speak of such things until she was triumphant, certain of having at last secured a husband. And now it was indeed settled, as she had exclaimed so gaily: that very morning she had again seen the young man at the Grotto, and he had formally become engaged to her. M. Berthaud would undoubtedly ask for her hand on his cousin's behalf before they took their departure from Lourdes.

"Well," declared Madame de Jonquiere, who was now convinced, smiling, and delighted at heart, "I hope you will be happy, since you are so sensible and do not need my aid to bring your affairs to a successful issue. Kiss me."

It was at this moment that Sister Hyacinthe arrived to announce Madame Vetu's imminent death. Raymonde at once ran off. And Madame Desagneaux, who was wiping her hands, began to complain of the lady-assistants, who had all disappeared precisely on the morning when they were most wanted. "For instance," said she, "there's Madame Volmar. I should like to know where she can have got to. She has not been seen, even for an hour, ever since our arrival."

"Pray leave Madame Volmar alone!" replied Madame de Jonquiere with some asperity. "I have already told you that she is ill."

They both hastened to Madame Vetu. Ferrand stood there waiting; and Sister Hyacinthe having asked him if there were indeed nothing to be done, he shook his head. The dying woman, relieved by her first emesis, now lay inert, with closed eyes. But, a second time, the frightful nausea returned to her, and she brought up another discharge of black matter mingled with violet-coloured blood. Then she had another short interval of calm, during which she noticed La Grivotte, who was greedily devouring her hunk of bread on the mattress on the floor.

"She is cured, isn't she?" the poor woman asked, feeling that she herself was dying.

La Grivotte heard her, and exclaimed triumphantly: "Oh, yes, madame, cured, cured, cured completely!"

For a moment Madame Vetu seemed overcome by a miserable feeling of grief, the revolt of one who will not succumb while others continue to live. But almost immediately she became resigned, and they heard her add very faintly, "It is the young ones who ought to remain."

Then her eyes, which remained wide open, looked round, as though bidding farewell to all those persons, whom she seemed surprised to see about her. She attempted to smile as she encountered the eager gaze of curiosity which little Sophie Couteau still fixed upon her: the charming child had come to kiss her that very morning, in her bed. Elise Rouquet, who troubled herself about nobody, was meantime holding her hand-glass, absorbed in the contemplation of her face, which seemed to her to be growing beautiful, now that the sore was healing. But what especially charmed the dying woman was the sight of Marie, so lovely in her ecstasy. She watched her for a long time, constantly attracted towards her, as towards a vision of light and joy. Perhaps she fancied that she already beheld one of the saints of Paradise amid the glory of the sun.

Suddenly, however, the fits of vomiting returned, and now she solely brought up blood, vitiated blood, the colour of claret. The rush was so great that it bespattered the sheet, and ran all over the bed. In vain did Madame de Jonquiere and Madame Desagneaux bring cloths; they were both very pale and scarce able to remain standing. Ferrand, knowing how powerless he was, had withdrawn to the window, to the very spot where he had so lately experienced such delicious emotion; and with an instinctive movement, of which she was surely unconscious, Sister Hyacinthe had likewise returned to that happy window, as though to be near him.

"Really, can you do nothing?" she inquired.

"No, nothing! She will go off like that, in the same way as a lamp that has burnt out."

Madame Vetu, who was now utterly exhausted, with a thin red stream still flowing from her mouth, looked fixedly at Madame de Jonquiere whilst faintly moving her lips. The lady-superintendent thereupon bent over her and heard these slowly uttered words:

"About my husband, madame—the shop is in the Rue Mouffetard—oh! it's quite a tiny one, not far from the Gobelins.—He's a clockmaker, he is; he couldn't come with me, of course, having to attend to the business; and he will be very much put out when he finds I don't come back.—Yes, I cleaned the jewelry and did the errands—" Then her voice grew fainter, her words disjointed by the death rattle, which began. "Therefore, madame, I beg you will write to him, because I haven't done so, and now here's the end.—Tell him my body had better remain here at Lourdes, on account of the expense.—And he must marry again; it's necessary for one in trade—his cousin—tell him his cousin—"

The rest became a confused murmur. Her weakness was too great, her breath was halting. Yet her eyes continued open and full of life, amid her pale, yellow, waxy mask. And those eyes seemed to fix themselves despairingly on the past, on all that which soon would be no more: the little clockmaker's shop hidden away in a populous neighbourhood; the gentle humdrum existence, with a toiling husband who was ever bending over his watches; the great pleasures of Sunday, such as watching children fly their kites upon the fortifications. And at last these staring eyes gazed vainly into the frightful night which was gathering.

A last time did Madame de Jonquiere lean over her, seeing that her lips were again moving. There came but a faint breath, a voice from far away, which distantly murmured in an accent of intense grief: "She did not cure me."

And then Madame Vetu expired, very gently.

As though this were all that she had been waiting for, little Sophie Couteau jumped from the bed quite satisfied, and went off to play with her doll again at the far end of the ward. Neither La Grivotte, who was finishing her bread, nor Elise Rouquet, busy with her mirror, noticed the catastrophe. However, amidst the cold breath which seemingly swept by, while Madame de Jonquiere and Madame Desagneaux—the latter of whom was unaccustomed to the sight of death—were whispering together in agitation, Marie emerged from the expectant rapture in which the continuous, unspoken prayer of her whole being had plunged her so long. And when she understood what had happened, a feeling of sisterly compassion—the compassion of a suffering companion, on her side certain of cure—brought tears to her eyes.

"Ah! the poor woman!" she murmured; "to think that she has died so far from home, in such loneliness, at the hour when others are being born anew!"

Ferrand, who, in spite of professional indifference, had also been stirred by the scene, stepped forward to verify the death; and it was on a sign from him that Sister Hyacinthe turned up the sheet, and threw it over the dead woman's face, for there could be no question of removing the corpse at that moment. The patients were now returning from the Grotto in bands, and the ward, hitherto so calm, so full of sunshine, was again filling with the tumult of wretchedness and pain—deep coughing and feeble shuffling, mingled with a noisome smell—a pitiful display, in fact, of well-nigh every human infirmity.

II. THE SERVICE AT THE GROTTO

ON that day, Monday, the crowd at the Grotto, was enormous. It was the last day that the national pilgrimage would spend at Lourdes, and Father Fourcade, in his morning address, had said that it would be necessary to make a supreme effort of fervour and faith to obtain from Heaven all that it might be willing to grant in the way of grace and prodigious cure. So, from two o'clock in the afternoon, twenty thousand pilgrims were assembled there, feverish, and agitated by the most ardent hopes. From minute to minute the throng continued increasing, to such a point, indeed, that Baron Suire became alarmed, and came out of the Grotto to say to Berthaud: "My friend, we shall be overwhelmed, that's certain. Double your squads, bring your men closer together."

The Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation was alone entrusted with the task of keeping order, for there were neither guardians nor policemen, of any sort present; and it was for this reason that the President of the Association was so alarmed. However, Berthaud, under grave circumstances, was a leader whose words commanded attention, and who was endowed with energy that could be relied on.

"Be easy," said he; "I will be answerable for everything. I shall not move from here until the four-o'clock procession has passed by."

Nevertheless, he signalled to Gerard to approach.

"Give your men the strictest instructions," he said to him. "Only those persons who have cards should be allowed to pass. And place your men nearer each other; tell them to hold the cord tight."

Yonder, beneath the ivy which draped the rock, the Grotto opened, with the eternal flaring of its candles. From a distance it looked rather squat and misshapen, a very narrow and modest aperture for the breath of the Infinite which issued from it, turning all faces pale and bowing every head. The statue of the Virgin had become a mere white spot, which seemed to move amid the quiver of the atmosphere, heated by the small yellow flames. To see everything it was necessary to raise oneself; for the silver altar, the harmonium divested of its housing, the heap of bouquets flung there, and the votive offerings streaking the smoky walls were scarcely distinguishable from behind the railing. And the day was lovely; never yet had a purer sky expanded above the immense crowd; the softness of the breeze in particular seemed delicious after the storm of the night, which had brought down the over-oppressive heat of the two first days.

Gerard had to fight his way with his elbows in order to repeat the orders to his men. The crowd had already begun pushing. "Two more men here!" he called. "Come, four together, if necessary, and hold the rope well!"

The general impulse was instinctive and invincible; the twenty thousand persons assembled there were drawn towards the Grotto by an irresistible attraction, in which burning curiosity mingled with the thirst for mystery. All eyes converged, every mouth, hand, and body was borne towards the pale glitter of the candles and the white moving speck of the marble Virgin. And, in order that the large space reserved to the sick, in front of the railings, might not be invaded by the swelling mob, it had been necessary to inclose it with a stout rope which the bearers at intervals of two or three yards grasped with both hands. Their orders were to let nobody pass excepting the sick provided with hospital cards and the few persons to whom special authorisations had been granted. They limited themselves, therefore, to raising the cords and then letting them fall behind the chosen ones, without heeding the supplications of the others. In fact they even showed themselves somewhat rough, taking a certain pleasure in exercising the authority with which they were invested for a day. In truth, however, they were very much pushed about, and had to support each other and resist with all the strength of their loins to avoid being swept away.

While the benches before the Grotto and the vast reserved space were filling with sick people, handcarts, and stretchers, the crowd, the immense crowd, swayed about on the outskirts. Starting from the Place du Rosaire, it extended to the bottom of the promenade along the Gave, where the pavement throughout its entire length was black with people, so dense a human sea that all circulation was prevented. On the parapet was an interminable line of women—most of them seated, but some few standing so as to see the better—and almost all carrying silk parasols, which, with holiday-like gaiety, shimmered in the sunlight. The managers had wished to keep a path open in order that the sick might be brought along; but it was ever being invaded and obstructed, so that the carts and stretchers remained on the road, submerged and lost until a bearer freed them. Nevertheless, the great tramping was that of a docile flock, an innocent, lamb-like crowd; and it was only the involuntary pushing, the blind rolling towards the light of the candles that had to be contended against. No accident had ever happened there, notwithstanding the excitement, which gradually increased and threw the people into the unruly delirium of faith.

However, Baron Suire again forced his way through the throng. "Berthaud! Berthaud!" he called, "see that the defile is conducted less rapidly. There are women and children stifling."

This time Berthaud gave a sign of impatience. "Ah! hang it, I can't be everywhere! Close the gate for a moment if it's necessary."

It was a question of the march through the Grotto which went on throughout the afternoon. The faithful were permitted to enter by the door on the left, and made their exit by that on the right.

"Close the gate!" exclaimed the Baron. "But that would be worse; they would all get crushed against it!"

As it happened Gerard was there, thoughtlessly talking for an instant with Raymonde, who was standing on the other side of the cord, holding a bowl of milk which she was about to carry to a paralysed old woman; and Berthaud ordered the young fellow to post two men at the entrance gate of the iron railing, with instructions only to allow the pilgrims to enter by tens. When Gerard had executed this order, and returned, he found Berthaud laughing and joking with Raymonde. She went off on her errand, however, and the two men stood watching her while she made the paralysed woman drink.

"She is charming, and it's settled, eh?" said Berthaud. "You are going to marry her, aren't you?"

"I shall ask her mother to-night. I rely upon you to accompany me."

"Why, certainly. You know what I told you. Nothing could be more sensible. The uncle will find you a berth before six months are over."

A push of the crowd separated them, and Berthaud went off to make sure whether the march through the Grotto was now being accomplished in a methodical manner, without any crushing. For hours the same unbroken tide rolled in—women, men, and children from all parts of the world, all who chose, all who passed that way. As a result, the crowd was singularly mixed: there were beggars in rags beside neat bourgeois, peasants of either sex, well dressed ladies, servants with bare hair, young girls with bare feet, and others with pomatumed hair and foreheads bound with ribbons. Admission was free; the mystery was open to all, to unbelievers as well as to the faithful, to those who were solely influenced by curiosity as well as to those who entered with their hearts faint with love. And it was a sight to see them, all almost equally affected by the tepid odour of the wax, half stifling in the heavy tabernacle air which gathered beneath the rocky vault, and lowering their eyes for fear of slipping on the gratings. Many stood there bewildered, not even bowing, examining the things around with the covert uneasiness of indifferent folks astray amidst the redoubtable mysteries of a sanctuary. But the devout crossed themselves, threw letters, deposited candles and bouquets, kissed the rock below the Virgin's statue, or else rubbed their chaplets, medals, and other small objects of piety against it, as the contact sufficed to bless them. And the defile continued, continued without end during days and months as it had done for years; and it seemed as if the whole world, all the miseries and sufferings of humanity, came in turn and passed in the same hypnotic, contagious kind of round, through that rocky nook, ever in search of happiness.

When Berthaud had satisfied himself that everything was working well, he walked about like a mere spectator, superintending his men. Only one matter remained to trouble him: the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, during which such frenzy burst forth that accidents were always to be feared.

This last day seemed likely to be a very fervent one, for he already felt a tremor of exalted faith rising among the crowd. The treatment needed for miraculous care was drawing to an end; there had been the fever of the journey, the besetting influence of the same endlessly repeated hymns, and the stubborn continuation of the same religious exercises; and ever and ever the conversation had been turned on miracles, and the mind fixed on the divine illumination of the Grotto. Many, not having slept for three nights, had reached a state of hallucination, and walked about in a rageful dream. No repose was granted them, the continual prayers were like whips lashing their souls. The appeals to the Blessed Virgin never ceased; priest followed priest in the pulpit, proclaiming the universal dolour and directing the despairing supplications of the throng, during the whole time that the sick remained with hands clasped and eyes raised to heaven before the pale, smiling, marble statue.

At that moment the white stone pulpit against the rock on the right of the Grotto was occupied by a priest from Toulouse, whom Berthaud knew, and to whom he listened for a moment with an air of approval. He was a stout man with an unctuous diction, famous for his rhetorical successes. However, all eloquence here consisted in displaying the strength of one's lungs in a violent delivery of the phrase or cry which the whole crowd had to repeat; for the addresses were nothing more than so much vociferation interspersed with "Ayes" and "Paters."

The priest, who had just finished the Rosary, strove to increase his stature by stretching his short legs, whilst shouting the first appeal of the litanies which he improvised, and led in his own way, according to the inspiration which possessed him.

"Mary, we love thee!" he called.

And thereupon the crowd repeated in a lower, confused, and broken tone: "Mary, we love thee!"

From that moment there was no stopping. The voice of the priest rang out at full swing, and the voices of the crowd responded in a dolorous murmur:

"Mary, thou art our only hope!"

"Mary, thou art our only hope!"

"Pure Virgin, make us purer, among the pure!"

"Pure Virgin, make us purer, among the pure!"

"Powerful Virgin, save our sick!"

"Powerful Virgin, save our sick!"

Often, when the priest's imagination failed him, or he wished to thrust a cry home with greater force, he would repeat it thrice; while the docile crowd would do the same, quivering under the enervating effect of the persistent lamentation, which increased the fever.

The litanies continued, and Berthaud went back towards the Grotto. Those who defiled through it beheld an extraordinary sight when they turned and faced the sick. The whole of the large space between the cords was occupied by the thousand or twelve hundred patients whom the national pilgrimage had brought with it; and beneath the vast, spotless sky on that radiant day there was the most heart-rending jumble of sufferers that one could behold. The three hospitals of Lourdes had emptied their chambers of horror. To begin with, those who were still able to remain seated had been piled upon the benches. Many of them, however, were propped up with cushions, whilst others kept shoulder to shoulder, the strong ones supporting the weak. Then, in front of the benches, before the Grotto itself, were the more grievously afflicted sufferers lying at full length; the flagstones disappearing from view beneath this woeful assemblage, which was like a large, stagnant pool of horror. There was an indescribable block of vehicles, stretchers, and mattresses. Some of the invalids in little boxes not unlike coffins had raised themselves up and showed above the others, but the majority lay almost on a level with the ground. There were some lying fully dressed on the check-patterned ticks of mattresses; whilst others had been brought with their bedding, so that only their heads and pale hands were seen outside the sheets. Few of these pallets were clean. Some pillows of dazzling whiteness, which by a last feeling of coquetry had been trimmed with embroidery, alone shone out among all the filthy wretchedness of all the rest—a fearful collection of rags, worn-out blankets, and linen splashed with stains. And all were pushed, squeezed, piled up by chance as they came, women, men, children, and priests, people in nightgowns beside people who were fully attired being jumbled together in the blinding light of day.

And all forms of disease were there, the whole frightful procession which, twice a day, left the hospitals to wend its way through horrified Lourdes. There were the heads eaten away by eczema, the foreheads crowned with roseola, and the noses and mouths which elephantiasis had transformed into shapeless snouts. Next, the dropsical ones, swollen out like leathern bottles; the rheumatic ones with twisted hands and swollen feet, like bags stuffed full of rags; and a sufferer from hydrocephalus, whose huge and weighty skull fell backwards. Then the consumptive ones, with livid skins, trembling with fever, exhausted by dysentery, wasted to skeletons. Then the deformities, the contractions, the twisted trunks, the twisted arms, the necks all awry; all the poor broken, pounded creatures, motionless in their tragic, marionette-like postures. Then the poor rachitic girls displaying their waxen complexions and slender necks eaten into by sores; the yellow-faced, besotted-looking women in the painful stupor which falls on unfortunate creatures devoured by cancer; and the others who turned pale, and dared not move, fearing as they did the shock of the tumours whose weighty pain was stifling them. On the benches sat bewildered deaf women, who heard nothing, but sang on all the same, and blind ones with heads erect, who remained for hours turned toward the statue of the Virgin which they could not see. And there was also the woman stricken with imbecility, whose nose was eaten away, and who laughed with a terrifying laugh, displaying the black, empty cavern of her mouth; and then the epileptic woman, whom a recent attack had left as pale as death, with froth still at the corners of her lips.

But sickness and suffering were no longer of consequence, since they were all there, seated or stretched with their eyes upon the Grotto. The poor, fleshless, earthy-looking faces became transfigured, and began to glow with hope. Anchylosed hands were joined, heavy eyelids found the strength to rise, exhausted voices revived as the priest shouted the appeals. At first there was nothing but indistinct stuttering, similar to slight puffs of air rising, here and there above the multitude. Then the cry ascended and spread through the crowd itself from one to the other end of the immense square.

"Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us!" cried the priest in his thundering voice.

And the sick and the pilgrims repeated louder and louder: "Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us!"

Then the flow of the litany set in, and continued with increasing speed:

"Most pure Mother, most chaste Mother, thy children are at thy feet!"

"Most pure Mother, most chaste Mother, thy children are at thy feet!"

"Queen of the Angels, say but a word, and our sick shall be healed!"

"Queen of the Angels, say but a word, and our sick shall be healed!"

In the second row of sufferers, near the pulpit, was M. Sabathier, who had asked to be brought there early, wishing to choose his place like an old habitue who knew the cosy corners. Moreover, it seemed to him that it was of paramount importance that he should be as near as possible, under the very eyes of the Virgin, as though she required to see her faithful in order not to forget them. However, for the seven years that he had been coming there he had nursed this one hope of being some day noticed by her, of touching her, and of obtaining his cure, if not by selection, at least by seniority. This merely needed patience on his part without the firmness of his faith being in the least shaken by his way of thinking. Only, like a poor, resigned man just a little weary of being always put off, he sometimes allowed himself diversions. For instance, he had obtained permission to keep his wife near him, seated on a camp-stool, and he liked to talk to her, and acquaint her with his reflections.

"Raise me a little, my dear," said he. "I am slipping. I am very uncomfortable."

Attired in trousers and a coarse woollen jacket, he was sitting upon his mattress, with his back leaning against a tilted chair.

"Are you better?" asked his wife, when she had raised him.

"Yes, yes," he answered; and then began to take an interest in Brother Isidore, whom they had succeeded in bringing in spite of everything, and who was lying upon a neighbouring mattress, with a sheet drawn up to his chin, and nothing protruding but his wasted hands, which lay clasped upon the blanket.

"Ah! the poor man," said M. Sabathier. "It's very imprudent, but the Blessed Virgin is so powerful when she chooses!"

He took up his chaplet again, but once more broke off from his devotions on perceiving Madame Maze, who had just glided into the reserved space—so slender and unobtrusive that she had doubtless slipped under the ropes without being noticed. She had seated herself at the end of a bench and, very quiet and motionless, did not occupy more room there than a child. And her long face, with its weary features, the face of a woman of two-and-thirty faded before her time, wore an expression of unlimited sadness, infinite abandonment.

"And so," resumed M. Sabathier in a low voice, again addressing his wife after attracting her attention by a slight movement of the chin, "it's for the conversion of her husband that this lady prays. You came across her this morning in a shop, didn't you?"

"Yes, yes," replied Madame Sabathier. "And, besides, I had some talk about her with another lady who knows her. Her husband is a commercial-traveller. He leaves her for six months at a time, and goes about with other people. Oh! he's a very gay fellow, it seems, very nice, and he doesn't let her want for money; only she adores him, she cannot accustom herself to his neglect, and comes to pray the Blessed Virgin to give him back to her. At this moment, it appears, he is close by, at Luchon, with two ladies—two sisters."

M. Sabathier signed to his wife to stop. He was now looking at the Grotto, again becoming a man of intellect, a professor whom questions of art had formerly impassioned. "You see, my dear," he said, "they have spoilt the Grotto by endeavouring to make it too beautiful. I am certain it looked much better in its original wildness. It has lost its characteristic features—and what a frightful shop they have stuck there, on the left!"

However, he now experienced sudden remorse for his thoughtlessness. Whilst he was chatting away, might not the Blessed Virgin be noticing one of his neighbours, more fervent, more sedate than himself? Feeling anxious on the point, he reverted to his customary modesty and patience, and with dull, expressionless eyes again began waiting for the good pleasure of Heaven.

Moreover, the sound of a fresh voice helped to bring him back to this annihilation, in which nothing was left of the cultured reasoner that he had formerly been. It was another preacher who had just entered the pulpit, a Capuchin this time, whose guttural call, persistently repeated, sent a tremor through the crowd.

"Holy Virgin of virgins, be blessed!"

"Holy Virgin of virgins, be blessed!"

"Holy Virgin of virgins, turn not thy face from thy children!"

"Holy Virgin of virgins, turn not thy face from thy children!"

"Holy Virgin of virgins, breathe upon our sores, and our sores shall heal!"

"Holy Virgin of virgins, breathe upon our sores, and our sores shall heal!"

At the end of the first bench, skirting the central path, which was becoming crowded, the Vigneron family had succeeded in finding room for themselves. They were all there: little Gustave, seated in a sinking posture, with his crutch between his legs; his mother, beside him, following the prayers like a punctilious bourgeoise; his aunt, Madame Chaise, on the other side, so inconvenienced by the crowd that she was stifling; and M. Vigneron, who remained silent and, for a moment, had been examining Madame Chaise attentively.

"What is the matter with you, my dear?" he inquired. "Do you feel unwell?"

She was breathing with difficulty. "Well, I don't know," she answered; "but I can't feel my limbs, and my breath fails me."

At that very moment the thought had occurred to him that all the agitation, fever, and scramble of a pilgrimage could not be very good for heart-disease. Of course he did not desire anybody's death, he had never asked the Blessed Virgin for any such thing. If his prayer for advancement had already been granted through the sudden death of his chief, it must certainly be because Heaven had already ordained the latter's death. And, in the same way, if Madame Chaise should die first, leaving her fortune to Gustave, he would only have to bow before the will of God, which generally requires that the aged should go off before the young. Nevertheless, his hope unconsciously became so keen that he could not help exchanging a glance with his wife, to whom had come the same involuntary thought.

"Gustave, draw back," he exclaimed; "you are inconveniencing your aunt." And then, as Raymonde passed, he asked; "Do you happen to have a glass of water, mademoiselle? One of our relatives here is losing consciousness."

But Madame Chaise refused the offer with a gesture. She was getting better, recovering her breath with an effort. "No, I want nothing, thank you," she gasped. "There, I'm better—still, I really thought this time that I should stifle!"

Her fright left her trembling, with haggard eyes in her pale face. She again joined her hands, and begged the Blessed Virgin to save her from other attacks and cure her; while the Vignerons, man and wife, honest folk both of them, reverted to the covert prayer for happiness that they had come to offer up at Lourdes: a pleasant old age, deservedly gained by twenty years of honesty, with a respectable fortune which in later years they would go and enjoy in the country, cultivating flowers. On the other hand, little Gustave, who had seen and noted everything with his bright eyes and intelligence sharpened by suffering, was not praying, but smiling at space, with his vague enigmatical smile. What could be the use of his praying? He knew that the Blessed Virgin would not cure him, and that he would die.

However, M. Vigneron could not remain long without busying himself about his neighbours. Madame Dieulafay, who had come late, had been deposited in the crowded central pathway; and he marvelled at the luxury about the young woman, that sort of coffin quilted with white silk, in which she was lying, attired in a pink dressing-gown trimmed with Valenciennes lace. The husband in a frock-coat, and the sister in a black gown of simple but marvellous elegance, were standing by; while Abbe Judaine, kneeling near the sufferer, finished offering up a fervent prayer.

When the priest had risen, M. Vigneron made him a little room on the bench beside him; and he then took the liberty of questioning him. "Well, Monsieur le Cure, does that poor young woman feel a little better?"

Abbe Judaine made a gesture of infinite sadness.

"Alas! no. I was full of so much hope! It was I who persuaded the family to come. Two years ago the Blessed Virgin showed me such extraordinary grace by curing my poor lost eyes, that I hoped to obtain another favour from her. However, I will not despair. We still have until to-morrow."

M. Vigneron again looked towards Madame Dieulafay and examined her face, still of a perfect oval and with admirable eyes; but it was expressionless, with ashen hue, similar to a mask of death, amidst the lace. "It's really very sad," he murmured.

"And if you had seen her last summer!" resumed the priest. "They have their country seat at Saligny, my parish, and I often dined with them. I cannot help feeling sad when I look at her elder sister, Madame Jousseur, that lady in black who stands there, for she bears a strong resemblance to her; and the poor sufferer was even prettier, one of the beauties of Paris. And now compare them together—observe that brilliancy, that sovereign grace, beside that poor, pitiful creature—it oppresses one's heart—ah! what a frightful lesson!"

He became silent for an instant. Saintly man that he was naturally, altogether devoid of passions, with no keen intelligence to disturb him in his faith, he displayed a naive admiration for beauty, wealth, and power, which he had never envied. Nevertheless, he ventured to express a doubt, a scruple, which troubled his usual serenity. "For my part, I should have liked her to come here with more simplicity, without all that surrounding of luxury, because the Blessed Virgin prefers the humble—But I understand very well that there are certain social exigencies. And, then, her husband and sister love her so! Remember that he has forsaken his business and she her pleasures in order to come here with her; and so overcome are they at the idea of losing her that their eyes are never dry, they always have that bewildered look which you can notice. So they must be excused for trying to procure her the comfort of looking beautiful until the last hour."

M. Vigneron nodded his head approvingly. Ah! it was certainly not the wealthy who had the most luck at the Grotto! Servants, country folk, poor beggars, were cured, while ladies returned home with their ailments unrelieved, notwithstanding their gifts and the big candles they had burnt. And, in spite of himself, Vigneron then looked at Madame Chaise, who, having recovered from her attack, was now reposing with a comfortable air.

But a tremor passed through the crowd and Abbe Judaine spoke again: "Here is Father Massias coming towards the pulpit. He is a saint; listen to him."

They knew him, and were aware that he could not make his appearance without every soul being stirred by sudden hope, for it was reported that the miracles were often brought to pass by his great fervour. His voice, full of tenderness and strength, was said to be appreciated by the Virgin.

All heads were therefore uplifted and the emotion yet further increased when Father Fourcade was seen coming to the foot of the pulpit, leaning on the shoulder of his well-beloved brother, the preferred of all; and he stayed there, so that he also might hear him. His gouty foot had been paining him more acutely since the morning, so that it required great courage on his part to remain thus standing and smiling. The increasing exaltation of the crowd made him happy, however; he foresaw prodigies and dazzling cures which would redound to the glory of Mary and Jesus.

Having ascended the pulpit, Father Massias did not at once speak. He seemed, very tall, thin, and pale, with an ascetic face, elongated the more by his discoloured beard. His eyes sparkled, and his large eloquent mouth protruded passionately.

"Lord, save us, for we perish!" he suddenly cried; and in a fever, which increased minute by minute, the transported crowd repeated: "Lord, save us, for we perish!"

Then he opened his arms and again launched forth his flaming cry, as if he had torn it from his glowing heart: "Lord, if it be Thy will, Thou canst heal me!"

"Lord, if it be Thy will, Thou canst heal me!"

"Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof, but only say the word, and I shall be healed!"

"Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof, but only say the word, and I shall be healed!"

Marthe, Brother Isidore's sister, had now begun to talk in a whisper to Madame Sabathier, near whom she had at last seated herself. They had formed an acquaintance at the hospital; and, drawn together by so much suffering, the servant had familiarly confided to the bourgeoise how anxious she felt about her brother; for she could plainly see that he had very little breath left in him. The Blessed Virgin must be quick indeed if she desired to save him. It was already a miracle that they had been able to bring him alive as far as the Grotto.

In her resignation, poor, simple creature that she was, she did not weep; but her heart was so swollen that her infrequent words came faintly from her lips. Then a flood of past memories suddenly returned to her; and with her utterance thickened by prolonged silence, she began to relieve her heart: "We were fourteen at home, at Saint Jacut, near Vannes. He, big as he was, has always been delicate, and that was why he remained with our priest, who ended by placing him among the Christian Brothers. The elder ones took over the property, and, for my part, I preferred going out to service. Yes, it was a lady who took me with her to Paris, five years ago already. Ah! what a lot of trouble there is in life! Everyone has so much trouble!"

"You are quite right, my girl," replied Madame Sabathier, looking the while at her husband, who was devoutly repeating each of Father Massias's appeals.

"And then," continued Marthe, "there I learned last month that Isidore, who had returned from a hot climate where he had been on a mission, had brought a bad sickness back with him. And, when I ran to see him, he told me he should die if he did not leave for Lourdes, but that he couldn't make the journey, because he had nobody to accompany him. Then, as I had eighty francs saved up, I gave up my place, and we set out together. You see, madame, if I am so fond of him, it's because he used to bring me gooseberries from the parsonage, whereas all the others beat me."

She relapsed into silence for a moment, her countenance swollen by grief, and her poor eyes so scorched by watching that no tears could come from them. Then she began to stutter disjointed words: "Look at him, madame. It fills one with pity. Ah! my God, his poor cheeks, his poor chin, his poor face—"

It was, in fact, a lamentable spectacle. Madame Sabathier's heart was quite upset when she observed Brother Isidore so yellow, cadaverous, steeped in a cold sweat of agony. Above the sheet he still only showed his clasped hands and his face encircled with long scanty hair; but if those wax-like hands seemed lifeless, if there was not a feature of that long-suffering face that stirred, its eyes were still alive, inextinguishable eyes of love, whose flame sufficed to illumine the whole of his expiring visage—the visage of a Christ upon the cross. And never had the contrast been so clearly marked between his low forehead and unintelligent, loutish, peasant air, and the divine splendour which came from his poor human mask, ravaged and sanctified by suffering, sublime at this last hour in the passionate radiance of his faith. His flesh had melted, as it were; he was no longer a breath, nothing but a look, a light.

Since he had been set down there his eyes had not strayed from the statue of the Virgin. Nothing else existed around him. He did not see the enormous multitude, he did not even hear the wild cries of the priests, the incessant cries which shook this quivering crowd. His eyes alone remained to him, his eyes burning with infinite tenderness, and they were fixed upon the Virgin, never more to turn from her. They drank her in, even unto death; they made a last effort of will to disappear, die out in her. For an instant, however, his mouth half opened and his drawn visage relaxed as an expression of celestial beatitude came over it. Then nothing more stirred, his eyes remained wide open, still obstinately fixed upon the white statue.

A few seconds elapsed. Marthe had felt a cold breath, chilling the roots of her hair. "I say, madame, look!" she stammered.

Madame Sabathier, who felt anxious, pretended that she did not understand. "What is it, my girl?"

"My brother! look! He no longer moves. He opened his mouth, and has not stirred since." Then they both shuddered, feeling certain he was dead. He had, indeed, just passed away, without a rattle, without a breath, as if life had escaped in his glance, through his large, loving eyes, ravenous with passion. He had expired gazing upon the Virgin, and nothing could have been so sweet; and he still continued to gaze upon her with his dead eyes, as though with ineffable delight.

"Try to close his eyes," murmured Madame Sabathier. "We shall soon know then."

Marthe had already risen, and, leaning forward, so as not to be observed, she endeavoured to close the eyes with a trembling finger. But each time they reopened, and again looked at the Virgin with invincible obstinacy. He was dead, and Marthe had to leave his eyes wide open, steeped in unbounded ecstasy.

"Ah! it's finished, it's quite finished, madame!" she stuttered.

Two tears then burst from her heavy eyelids and ran down her cheeks; while Madame Sabathier caught hold of her hand to keep her quiet. There had been whisperings, and uneasiness was already spreading. But what course could be adopted? It was impossible to carry off the corpse amidst such a mob, during the prayers, without incurring the risk of creating a disastrous effect. The best plan would be to leave it there, pending a favourable moment. The poor fellow scandalised no one, he did not seem any more dead now than he had seemed ten minutes previously, and everybody would think that his flaming eyes were still alive, ardently appealing to the divine compassion of the Blessed Virgin.

Only a few persons among those around knew the truth. M. Sabathier, quite scared, had made a questioning sign to his wife, and on being answered by a prolonged affirmative nod, he had returned to his prayers without any rebellion, though he could not help turning pale at the thought of the mysterious almighty power which sent death when life was asked for. The Vignerons, who were very much interested, leaned forward, and whispered as though in presence of some street accident, one of those petty incidents which in Paris the father sometimes related on returning home from the Ministry, and which sufficed to occupy them all, throughout the evening. Madame Jousseur, for her part, had simply turned round and whispered a word or two in M. Dieulafay's ear, and then they had both reverted to the heart-rending contemplation of their own dear invalid; whilst Abbe Judaine, informed by M. Vigneron, knelt down, and in a low, agitated voice recited the prayers for the dead. Was he not a Saint, that missionary who had returned from a deadly climate, with a mortal wound in his side, to die there, beneath the smiling gaze of the Blessed Virgin? And Madame Maze, who also knew what had happened, suddenly felt a taste for death, and resolved that she would implore Heaven to suppress her also, in unobtrusive fashion, if it would not listen to her prayer and give her back her husband.

But the cry of Father Massias rose into a still higher key, burst forth with a strength of terrible despair, with a rending like that of a sob: "Jesus, son of David, I am perishing, save me!"

And the crowd sobbed after him in unison "Jesus, son of David, I am perishing, save me!"

Then, in quick succession, and in higher and higher keys, the appeals went on proclaiming the intolerable misery of the world:

"Jesus, son of David, take pity on Thy sick children!"

"Jesus, son of David, take pity on Thy sick children!"

"Jesus, son of David, come, heal them, that they may live!"

"Jesus, son of David, come, heal them, that they may live!"

It was delirium. At the foot of the pulpit Father Fourcade, succumbing to the extraordinary passion which overflowed from all hearts, had likewise raised his arms, and was shouting the appeals in his thundering voice as though to compel the intervention of Heaven. And the exaltation was still increasing beneath this blast of desire, whose powerful breath bowed every head in turn, spreading even to the young women who, in a spirit of mere curiosity, sat watching the scene from the parapet of the Gave; for these also turned pale under their sunshades.

Miserable humanity was clamouring from the depths of its abyss of suffering, and the clamour swept along, sending a shudder down every spine, for one and all were plunged in agony, refusing to die, longing to compel God to grant them eternal life. Ah! life, life! that was what all those unfortunates, who had come so far, amid so many obstacles, wanted—that was the one boon they asked for in their wild desire to live it over again, to live it always! O Lord, whatever our misery, whatever the torment of our life may be, cure us, grant that we may begin to live again and suffer once more what we have suffered already. However unhappy we may be, to be is what we wish. It is not heaven that we ask Thee for, it is earth; and grant that we may leave it at the latest possible moment, never leave it, indeed, if such be Thy good pleasure. And even when we no longer implore a physical cure, but a moral favour, it is still happiness that we ask Thee for; happiness, the thirst for which alone consumes us. O Lord, grant that we may be happy and healthy; let us live, ay, let us live forever!

This wild cry, the cry of man's furious desire for life, came in broken accents, mingled with tears, from every breast.

"O Lord, son of David, heal our sick!"

"O Lord, son of David, heal our sick!"

Berthaud had twice been obliged to dash forward to prevent the cords from giving way under the unconscious pressure of the crowd. Baron Suire, in despair, kept on making signs, begging someone to come to his assistance; for the Grotto was now invaded, and the march past had become the mere trampling of a flock rushing to its passion. In vain did Gerard again leave Raymonde and post himself at the entrance gate of the iron railing, so as to carry out the orders, which were to admit the pilgrims by tens. He was hustled and swept aside, while with feverish excitement everybody rushed in, passing like a torrent between the flaring candles, throwing bouquets and letters to the Virgin, and kissing the rock, which the pressure of millions of inflamed lips had polished. It was faith run wild, the great power that nothing henceforth could stop.

And now, whilst Gerard stood there, hemmed in against the iron railing, he heard two countrywomen, whom the advance was bearing onward, raise loud exclamations at sight of the sufferers lying on the stretchers before them. One of them was so greatly impressed by the pallid face of Brother Isidore, whose large dilated eyes were still fixed on the statue of the Virgin, that she crossed herself, and, overcome by devout admiration, murmured: "Oh! look at that one; see how he is praying with his whole heart, and how he gazes on Our Lady of Lourdes!"

The other peasant woman thereupon replied "Oh! she will certainly cure him, he is so beautiful!"

Indeed, as the dead man lay there, his eyes still fixedly staring whilst he continued his prayer of love and faith, his appearance touched every heart. No one in that endless, streaming throng could behold him without feeling edified.

III. MARIE'S CURE

IT was good Abbe Judaine who was to carry the Blessed Sacrament in the four-o'clock procession. Since the Blessed Virgin had cured him of a disease of the eyes, a miracle with which the Catholic press still resounded, he had become one of the glories of Lourdes, was given the first place, and honoured with all sorts of attentions.

At half-past three he rose, wishing to leave the Grotto, but the extraordinary concourse of people quite frightened him, and he feared he would be late if he did not succeed in getting out of it. Fortunately help came to him in the person of Berthaud. "Monsieur le Cure," exclaimed the superintendent of the bearers, "don't attempt to pass out by way of the Rosary; you would never arrive in time. The best course is to ascend by the winding paths—and come! follow me; I will go before you."

By means of his elbows, he thereupon parted the dense throng and opened a path for the priest, who overwhelmed him with thanks. "You are too kind. It's my fault; I had forgotten myself. But, good heavens! how shall we manage to pass with the procession presently?"

This procession was Berthaud's remaining anxiety. Even on ordinary days it provoked wild excitement, which forced him to take special measures; and what would now happen, as it wended its way through this dense multitude of thirty thousand persons, consumed by such a fever of faith, already on the verge of divine frenzy? Accordingly, in a sensible way, he took advantage of this opportunity to give Abbe Judaine the best advice.

"Ah! Monsieur le Cure, pray impress upon your colleagues of the clergy that they must not leave any space between their ranks; they should come on slowly, one close behind the other. And, above all, the banners should be firmly grasped, so that they may not be overthrown. As for yourself, Monsieur le Cure, see that the canopy-bearers are strong, tighten the cloth around the monstrance, and don't be afraid to carry it in both hands with all your strength."

A little frightened by this advice, the priest went on expressing his thanks. "Of course, of course; you are very good," said he. "Ah! monsieur, how much I am indebted to you for having helped me to escape from all those people!"

Then, free at last, he hastened towards the Basilica by the narrow serpentine path which climbs the hill; while his companion again plunged into the mob, to return to his post of inspection.

At that same moment Pierre, who was bringing Marie to the Grotto in her little cart, encountered on the other side, that of the Place du Rosaire, the impenetrable wall formed by the crowd. The servant at the hotel had awakened him at three o'clock, so that he might go and fetch the young girl at the hospital. There seemed to be no hurry; they apparently had plenty of time to reach the Grotto before the procession. However, that immense throng, that resisting, living wall, through which he did not know how to break, began to cause him some uneasiness. He would never succeed in passing with the little car if the people did not evince some obligingness. "Come, ladies, come!" he appealed. "I beg of you! You see, it's for a patient!"

The ladies, hypnotised as they were by the spectacle of the Grotto sparkling in the distance, and standing on tiptoe so as to lose nothing of the sight, did not move, however. Besides, the clamour of the litanies was so loud at this moment that they did not even hear the young priest's entreaties.

Then Pierre began again: "Pray stand on one side, gentlemen; allow me to pass. A little room for a sick person. Come, please, listen to what I am saying!"

But the men, beside themselves, in a blind, deaf rapture, would stir no more than the women.

Marie, however, smiled serenely, as if ignorant of the impediments, and convinced that nothing in the world could prevent her from going to her cure. However, when Pierre had found an aperture, and begun to work his way through the moving mass, the situation became more serious. From all parts the swelling human waves beat against the frail chariot, and at times threatened to submerge it. At each step it became necessary to stop, wait, and again entreat the people. Pierre had never before felt such an anxious sensation in a crowd. True, it was not a threatening mob, it was as innocent as a flock of sheep; but he found a troubling thrill in its midst, a peculiar atmosphere that upset him. And, in spite of his affection for the humble, the ugliness of the features around him, the common, sweating faces, the evil breath, and the old clothes, smelling of poverty, made him suffer even to nausea.

"Now, ladies, now, gentlemen, it's for a patient," he repeated. "A little room, I beg of you!"

Buffeted about in this vast ocean, the little vehicle continued to advance by fits and starts, taking long minutes to get over a few yards of ground. At one moment you might have thought it swamped, for no sign of it could be detected. Then, however, it reappeared near the piscinas. Tender sympathy had at length been awakened for this sick girl, so wasted by suffering, but still so beautiful. When people had been compelled to give way before the priest's stubborn pushing, they turned round, but did not dare to get angry, for pity penetrated them at sight of that thin, suffering face, shining out amidst a halo of fair hair. Words of compassion and admiration were heard on all sides: "Ah, the poor child!"—"Was it not cruel to be infirm at her age?"—"Might the Blessed Virgin be merciful to her!" Others, however, expressed surprise, struck as they were by the ecstasy in which they saw her, with her clear eyes open to the spheres beyond, where she had placed her hope. She beheld Heaven, she would assuredly be cured. And thus the little car left, as it were, a feeling of wonder and fraternal charity behind it, as it made its way with so much difficulty through that human ocean.

Pierre, however, was in despair and at the end of his strength, when some of the stretcher-bearers came to his aid by forming a path for the passage of the procession—a path which Berthaud had ordered them to keep clear by means of cords, which they were to hold at intervals of a couple of yards. From that moment the young priest was able to drag Marie along in a fairly easy manner, and at last place her within the reserved space, where he halted, facing the Grotto on the left side. You could no longer move in this reserved space, where the crowd seemed to increase every minute. And, quite exhausted by the painful journey he had just accomplished, Pierre reflected what a prodigious concourse of people there was; it had seemed to him as if he were in the midst of an ocean, whose waves he had heard heaving around him without a pause.

Since leaving the hospital Marie had not opened her lips. He now realised, however, that she wished to speak to him, and accordingly bent over her. "And my father," she inquired, "is he here? Hasn't he returned from his excursion?"

Pierre had to answer that M. de Guersaint had not returned, and that he had doubtless been delayed against his will. And thereupon she merely added with a smile: "Ah I poor father, won't he be pleased when he finds me cured!"

Pierre looked at her with tender admiration. He did not remember having ever seen her looking so adorable since the slow wasting of sickness had begun. Her hair, which alone disease had respected, clothed her in gold. Her thin, delicate face had assumed a dreamy expression, her eyes wandering away to the haunting thought of her sufferings, her features motionless, as if she had fallen asleep in a fixed thought until the expected shock of happiness should waken her. She was absent from herself, ready, however, to return to consciousness whenever God might will it. And, indeed, this delicious infantile creature, this little girl of three-and-twenty, still a child as when an accident had struck her, delaying her growth, preventing her from becoming a woman, was at last ready to receive the visit of the angel, the miraculous shock which would draw her out of her torpor and set her upright once more. Her morning ecstasy continued; she had clasped her hands, and a leap of her whole being had ravished her from earth as soon as she had perceived the image of the Blessed Virgin yonder. And now she prayed and offered herself divinely.

It was an hour of great mental trouble for Pierre. He felt that the drama of his priestly life was about to be enacted, and that if he did not recover faith in this crisis, it would never return to him. And he was without bad thoughts, without resistance, hoping with fervour, he also, that they might both be healed! Oh! that he might be convinced by her cure, that he might believe like her, that they might be saved together! He wished to pray, ardently, as she herself did. But in spite of himself he was preoccupied by the crowd, that limitless crowd, among which he found it so difficult to drown himself, disappear, become nothing more than a leaf in the forest, lost amidst the rustle of all the leaves. He could not prevent himself from analysing and judging it. He knew that for four days past it had been undergoing all the training of suggestion; there had been the fever of the long journey, the excitement of the new landscapes, the days spent before the splendour of the Grotto, the sleepless nights, and all the exasperating suffering, ravenous for illusion. Then, again, there had been the all-besetting prayers, those hymns, those litanies, which agitated it without a pause. Another priest had followed Father Massias in the pulpit, a little thin, dark Abbe, whom Pierre heard hurling appeals to the Virgin and Jesus in a lashing voice which resounded like a whip. Father Massias and Father Fourcade had remained at the foot of the pulpit, and were now directing the cries of the crowd, whose lamentations rose in louder and louder tones beneath the limpid sunlight. The general exaltation had yet increased; it was the hour when the violence done to Heaven at last produced the miracles.

All at once a paralytic rose up and walked towards the Grotto, holding his crutch in the air; and this crutch, waving like a flag above the swaying heads, wrung loud applause from the faithful. They were all on the look-out for prodigies, they awaited them with the certainty that they would take place, innumerable and wonderful. Some eyes seemed to behold them, and feverish voices pointed them out. Another woman had been cured! Another! Yet another! A deaf person had heard, a mute had spoken, a consumptive had revived! What, a consumptive? Certainly, that was a daily occurrence! Surprise was no longer possible; you might have certified that an amputated leg was growing again without astonishing anyone. Miracle-working became the actual state of nature, the usual thing, quite commonplace, such was its abundance. The most incredible stories seemed quite simple to those overheated imaginations, given what they expected from the Blessed Virgin. And you should have heard the tales that went about, the quiet affirmations, the expressions of absolute certainty which were exchanged whenever a delirious patient cried out that she was cured. Another! Yet another! However, a piteous voice would at times exclaim: "Ah! she's cured; that one; she's lucky, she is!"

Already, at the Verification Office, Pierre had suffered from this credulity of the folk among whom he lived. But here it surpassed everything he could have imagined; and he was exasperated by the extravagant things he heard people say in such a placid fashion, with the open smiles of children. Accordingly he tried to absorb himself in his thoughts and listen to nothing. "O God!" he prayed, "grant that my reason may be annihilated, that I may no longer desire to understand, that I may accept the unreal and impossible." For a moment he thought the spirit of inquiry dead within him, and allowed the cry of supplication to carry him away: "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!" He repeated this appeal with all his charity, clasped his hands, and gazed fixedly at the statue of the Virgin, until he became quite giddy, and imagined that the figure moved. Why should he not return to a state of childhood like the others, since happiness lay in ignorance and falsehood? Contagion would surely end by acting; he would become nothing more than a grain of sand among innumerable other grains, one of the humblest among the humble ones under the millstone, who trouble not about the power that crushes them. But just at that second, when he hoped that he had killed the old man in him, that he had annihilated himself along with his will and intelligence, the stubborn work of thought, incessant and invincible, began afresh in the depths of his brain. Little by little, notwithstanding his efforts to the contrary, he returned to his inquiries, doubted, and sought the truth. What was the unknown force thrown off by this crowd, the vital fluid powerful enough to work the few cures that really occurred? There was here a phenomenon that no physiologist had yet studied. Ought one to believe that a multitude became a single being, as it were, able to increase the power of auto-suggestion tenfold upon itself? Might one admit that, under certain circumstances of extreme exaltation, a multitude became an agent of sovereign will compelling the obedience of matter? That would have explained how sudden cure fell at times upon the most sincerely excited of the throng. The breaths of all of them united in one breath, and the power that acted was a power of consolation, hope, and life.

This thought, the outcome of his human charity, filled Pierre with emotion. For another moment he was able to regain possession of himself, and prayed for the cure of all, deeply touched by the belief that he himself might in some degree contribute towards the cure of Marie. But all at once, without knowing what transition of ideas led to it, a recollection returned to him of the medical consultation which he had insisted upon prior to the young girl's departure for Lourdes. The scene rose before him with extraordinary clearness and precision; he saw the room with its grey, blue-flowered wall-paper, and he heard the three doctors discuss and decide. The two who had given certificates diagnosticating paralysis of the marrow spoke discreetly, slowly, like esteemed, well-known, perfectly honourable practitioners; but Pierre still heard the warm, vivacious voice of his cousin Beauclair, the third doctor, a young man of vast and daring intelligence, who was treated coldly by his colleagues as being of an adventurous turn of mind. And at this supreme moment Pierre was surprised to find in his memory things which he did not know were there; but it was only an instance of that singular phenomenon by which it sometimes happens that words scarce listened to, words but imperfectly heard, words stored away in the brain almost in spite of self, will awaken, burst forth, and impose themselves on the mind after they have long been forgotten. And thus it now seemed to him that the very approach of the miracle was bringing him a vision of the conditions under which—according to Beauclair's predictions—the miracle would be accomplished.

In vain did Pierre endeavour to drive away this recollection by praying with an increase of fervour. The scene again appeared to him, and the old words rang out, filling his ears like a trumpet-blast. He was now again in the dining-room, where Beauclair and he had shut themselves up after the departure of the two others, and Beauclair recapitulated the history of the malady: the fall from a horse at the age of fourteen; the dislocation and displacement of the organ, with doubtless a slight laceration of the ligaments, whence the weight which the sufferer had felt, and the weakness of the legs leading to paralysis. Then, a slow healing of the disorder, everything returning to its place of itself, but without the pain ceasing. In fact this big, nervous child, whose mind had been so grievously impressed by her accident, was unable to forget it; her attention remained fixed on the part where she suffered, and she could not divert it, so that, even after cure, her sufferings had continued—a neuropathic state, a consecutive nervous exhaustion, doubtless aggravated by accidents due to faulty nutrition as yet imperfectly understood. And further, Beauclair easily explained the contrary and erroneous diagnosis of the numerous doctors who had attended her, and who, as she would not submit to examination, had groped in the dark, some believing in a tumour, and the others, the more numerous, convinced of some lesion of the marrow. He alone, after inquiring into the girl's parentage, had just begun to suspect a simple state of auto-suggestion, in which she had obstinately remained ever since the first violent shock of pain; and among the reasons which he gave for this belief were the contraction of her visual field, the fixity of her eyes, the absorbed, inattentive expression of her face, and above all the nature of the pain she felt, which, leaving the organ, had borne to the left, where it continued in the form of a crushing, intolerable weight, which sometimes rose to the breast in frightful fits of stifling. A sudden determination to throw off the false notion she had formed of her complaint, the will to rise, breathe freely, and suffer no more, could alone place her on her feet again, cured, transfigured, beneath the lash of some intense emotion.

A last time did Pierre endeavour to see and hear no more, for he felt that the irreparable ruin of all belief in the miraculous was in him. And, in spite of his efforts, in spite of the ardour with which he began to cry, "Jesus, son of David, heal our sick!" he still saw, he still heard Beauclair telling him, in his calm, smiling manner how the miracle would take place, like a lightning flash, at the moment of extreme emotion, under the decisive circumstance which would complete the loosening of the muscles. The patient would rise and walk in a wild transport of joy, her legs would all at once be light again, relieved of the weight which had so long made them like lead, as though this weight had melted, fallen to the ground. But above all, the weight which bore upon the lower part of the trunk, which rose, ravaged the breast, and strangled the throat, would this time depart in a prodigious soaring flight, a tempest blast bearing all the evil away with it. And was it not thus that, in the Middle Ages, possessed women had by the mouth cast up the Devil, by whom their flesh had so long been tortured? And Beauclair had added that Marie would at last become a woman, that in that moment of supreme joy she would cease to be a child, that although seemingly worn out by her prolonged dream of suffering, she would all at once be restored to resplendent health, with beaming face, and eyes full of life.

Pierre looked at her, and his trouble increased still more on seeing her so wretched in her little cart, so distractedly imploring health, her whole being soaring towards Our Lady of Lourdes, who gave life. Ah! might she be saved, at the cost even of his own damnation! But she was too ill; science lied like faith; he could not believe that this child, whose limbs had been dead for so many years, would indeed return to life. And, in the bewildered doubt into which he again relapsed, his bleeding heart clamoured yet more loudly, ever and ever repeating with the delirious crowd: "Lord, son of David, heal our sick!—Lord, son of David, heal our sick!"

At that moment a tumult arose agitating one and all. People shuddered, faces were turned and raised. It was the cross of the four-o'clock procession, a little behind time that day, appearing from beneath one of the arches of the monumental gradient way. There was such applause and such violent, instinctive pushing that Berthaud, waving his arms, commanded the bearers to thrust the crowd back by pulling strongly on the cords. Overpowered for a moment, the bearers had to throw themselves backward with sore hands; however, they ended by somewhat enlarging the reserved path, along which the procession was then able to slowly wend its way. At the head came a superb beadle, all blue and gold, followed by the processional cross, a tall cross shining like a star. Then followed the delegations of the different pilgrimages with their banners, standards of velvet and satin, embroidered with metal and bright silk, adorned with painted figures, and bearing the names of towns: Versailles, Rheims, Orleans, Poitiers, and Toulouse. One, which was quite white, magnificently rich, displayed in red letters the inscription "Association of Catholic Working Men's Clubs." Then came the clergy, two or three hundred priests in simple cassocks, about a hundred in surplices, and some fifty clothed in golden chasubles, effulgent like stars. They all carried lighted candles, and sang the "Laudate Sion Salvatorem" in full voices. And then the canopy appeared in royal pomp, a canopy of purple silk, braided with gold, and upheld by four ecclesiastics, who, it could be seen, had been selected from among the most robust. Beneath it, between two other priests who assisted him, was Abbe Judaine, vigorously clasping the Blessed Sacrament with both hands, as Berthaud had recommended him to do; and the somewhat uneasy glances that he cast on the encroaching crowd right and left showed how anxious he was that no injury should befall the heavy divine monstrance, whose weight was already straining his wrists. When the slanting sun fell upon him in front, the monstrance itself looked like another sun. Choir-boys meantime were swinging censers in the blinding glow which gave splendour to the entire procession; and, finally, in the rear, there was a confused mass of pilgrims, a flock-like tramping of believers and sightseers all aflame, hurrying along, and blocking the track with their ever-rolling waves.

Father Massias had returned to the pulpit a moment previously; and this time he had devised another pious exercise. After the burning cries of faith, hope, and love that he threw forth, he all at once commanded absolute silence, in order that one and all might, with closed lips, speak to God in secret for a few minutes. These sudden spells of silence falling upon the vast crowd, these minutes of mute prayer, in which all souls unbosomed their secrets, were deeply, wonderfully impressive. Their solemnity became formidable; you heard desire, the immense desire for life, winging its flight on high. Then Father Massias invited the sick alone to speak, to implore God to grant them what they asked of His almighty power. And, in response, came a pitiful lamentation, hundreds of tremulous, broken voices rising amidst a concert of sobs. "Lord Jesus, if it please Thee, Thou canst cure me!"—"Lord Jesus take pity on Thy child, who is dying of love!"—"Lord Jesus, grant that I may see, grant that I may hear, grant that I may walk!" And, all at once, the shrill voice of a little girl, light and vivacious as the notes of a flute, rose above the universal sob, repeating in the distance: "Save the others, save the others, Lord Jesus!" Tears streamed from every eye; these supplications upset all hearts, threw the hardest into the frenzy of charity, into a sublime disorder which would have impelled them to open their breasts with both hands, if by doing so they could have given their neighbours their health and youth. And then Father Massias, not letting this enthusiasm abate, resumed his cries, and again lashed the delirious crowd with them; while Father Fourcade himself sobbed on one of the steps of the pulpit, raising his streaming face to heaven as though to command God to descend on earth.

But the procession had arrived; the delegations, the priests, had ranged themselves on the right and left; and, when the canopy entered the space reserved to the sick in front of the Grotto, when the sufferers perceived Jesus the Host, the Blessed Sacrament, shining like a sun, in the hands of Abbe Judaine, it became impossible to direct the prayers, all voices mingled together, and all will was borne away by vertigo. The cries, calls, entreaties broke, lapsing into groans. Human forms rose from pallets of suffering; trembling arms were stretched forth; clenched hands seemingly desired to clutch at the miracle on the way. "Lord Jesus, save us, for we perish!"—"Lord Jesus, we worship Thee; heal us!"—"Lord Jesus, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God; heal us!" Thrice did the despairing, exasperated voices give vent to the supreme lamentation in a clamour which rushed up to Heaven; and the tears redoubled, flooding all the burning faces which desire transformed. At one moment, the delirium became so great, the instinctive leap toward the Blessed Sacrament seemed so irresistible, that Berthaud placed the bearers who were there in a chain about it. This was the extreme protective manoeuvre, a hedge of bearers drawn up on either side of the canopy, each placing an arm firmly round his neighbour's neck, so as to establish a sort of living wall. Not the smallest aperture was left in it; nothing whatever could pass. Still, these human barriers staggered under the pressure of the unfortunate creatures who hungered for life, who wished to touch, to kiss Jesus; and, oscillating and recoiling, the bearers were at last thrust against the canopy they were defending, and the canopy itself began swaying among the crowd, ever in danger of being swept away like some holy bark in peril of being wrecked.

Then, at the very climax of this holy frenzy, the miracles began amidst supplications and sobs, as when the heavens open during a storm, and a thunderbolt falls on earth. A paralytic woman rose and cast aside her crutches. There was a piercing yell, and another woman appeared erect on her mattress, wrapped in a white blanket as in a winding sheet; and people said it was a half-dead consumptive who had thus been resuscitated. Then grace fell upon two others in quick succession: a blind woman suddenly perceived the Grotto in a flame; a dumb woman fell on both her knees, thanking the Blessed Virgin in a loud, clear voice. And all in a like way prostrated themselves at the feet of Our Lady of Lourdes, distracted with joy and gratitude.

But Pierre had not taken his eyes off Marie, and he was overcome with tender emotion at what he saw. The sufferer's eyes were still expressionless, but they had dilated, while her poor, pale face, with its heavy mask, was contracted as if she were suffering frightfully. She did not speak in her despair; she undoubtedly thought that she was again in the clutches of her ailment. But all at once, when the Blessed Sacrament passed by, and she saw the star-like monstrance sparkling in the sun, a sensation of dizziness came over her. She imagined herself struck by lightning. Her eyes caught fire from the glare which flashed upon her, and at last regained their flame of life, shining out like stars. And under the influence of a wave of blood her face became animated, suffused with colour, beaming with a smile of joy and health. And, suddenly, Pierre saw her rise, stand upright in her little car, staggering, stuttering, and finding in her mind only these caressing words: "Oh, my friend! Oh, my friend!"

He hurriedly drew near in order to support her. But she drove him back with a gesture. She was regaining strength, looking so touching, so beautiful, in the little black woollen gown and slippers which she always wore; tall and slender, too, and crowned as with a halo of gold by her beautiful flaxen hair, which was covered with a simple piece of lace. The whole of her virgin form was quivering as if some powerful fermentation had regenerated her. First of all, it was her legs that were relieved of the chains that bound them; and then, while she felt the spirit of life—the life of woman, wife, and mother—within her, there came a final agony, an enormous weight that rose to her very throat. Only, this time, it did not linger there, did not stifle her, but burst from her open mouth, and flew away in a cry of sublime joy.

"I am cured!—I am cured!"

Then there was an extraordinary sight. The blanket lay at her feet, she was triumphant, she had a superb, glowing face. And her cry of cure had resounded with such rapturous delight that the entire crowd was distracted by it. She had become the sole point of interest, the others saw none but her, erect, grown so radiant and so divine.

"I am cured!—I am cured!"

Pierre, at the violent shock his heart had received, had begun to weep. Indeed, tears glistened again in every eye. Amidst exclamations of gratitude and praise, frantic enthusiasm passed from one to another, throwing the thousands of pilgrims who pressed forward to see into a state of violent emotion. Applause broke out, a fury of applause, whose thunder rolled from one to the other end of the valley.

However, Father Fourcade began waving his arms, and Father Massias was at last able to make himself heard from the pulpit: "God has visited us, my dear brothers, my dear sisters!" said he. "Magnificat anima mea Dominum, My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour."

And then all the voices, the thousands of voices, began the chant of adoration and gratitude. The procession found itself at a stand-still. Abbe Judaine had been able to reach the Grotto with the monstrance, but he patiently remained there before giving the Benediction. The canopy was awaiting him outside the railings, surrounded by priests in surplices and chasubles, all a glitter of white and gold in the rays of the setting sun.

Marie, however, had knelt down, sobbing; and, whilst the canticle lasted, a burning prayer of faith and love ascended from her whole being. But the crowd wanted to see her walk, delighted women called to her, a group surrounded her, and swept her towards the Verification Office, so that the miracle might be proved true, as patent as the very light of the sun. Her box was forgotten, Pierre followed her, while she, stammering and hesitating, she who for seven years had not used her legs, advanced with adorable awkwardness, the uneasy, charming gait of a little child making its first steps; and it was so affecting, so delicious, that the young priest thought of nothing but the immense happiness of seeing her thus return to her childhood. Ah! the dear friend of infancy, the dear tenderness of long ago, so she would at last be the beautiful and charming woman that she had promised to be as a young girl when, in the little garden at Neuilly, she had looked so gay and pretty beneath the tall trees flecked with sunlight!

The crowd continued to applaud her furiously, a huge wave of people accompanied her; and all remained awaiting her egress, swarming in a fever before the door, when she had entered the office, whither Pierre only was admitted with her.

That particular afternoon there were few people at the Verification Office. The small square room, with its hot wooden walls and rudimentary furniture, its rush-bottomed chairs, and its two tables of unequal height, contained, apart from the usual staff only some five or six doctors, seated and silent. At the tables were the inspector of the piscinas and two young Abbes making entries in the registers, and consulting the sets of documents; while Father Dargeles, at one end, wrote a paragraph for his newspaper. And, as it happened, Doctor Bonamy was just then examining Elise Rouquet, who, for the third time, had come to have the increasing cicatrisation of her sore certified.

"Anyhow, gentlemen," exclaimed the doctor, "have you ever seen a lupus heal in this way so rapidly? I am aware that a new work has appeared on faith healing in which it is stated that certain sores may have a nervous origin. Only that is by no means proved in the case of lupus, and I defy a committee of doctors to assemble and explain mademoiselle's cure by ordinary means."

He paused, and turning towards Father Dargeles, inquired: "Have you noted, Father, that the suppuration has completely disappeared, and that the skin is resuming its natural colour?"

However, he did not wait for the reply, for just then Marie entered, followed by Pierre; and by her beaming radiance he immediately guessed what good-fortune was befalling him. She looked superb, admirably fitted to transport and convert the multitude. He therefore promptly dismissed Elise Rouquet, inquired the new arrival's name, and asked one of the young priests to look for her papers. Then, as she slightly staggered, he wished to seat her in the arm-chair.

"Oh no! oh no!" she exclaimed. "I am so happy to be able to use my legs!"

Pierre, with a glance, had sought for Doctor Chassaigne, whom he was sorry not to see there. He remained on one side, waiting while they rummaged in the untidy drawers without being able to place their hands on the required papers. "Let's see," repeated Dr. Bonamy; "Marie de Guersaint, Marie de Guersaint. I have certainly seen that name before."

At last Raboin discovered the documents classified under a wrong letter; and when the doctor had perused the two medical certificates he became quite enthusiastic. "Here is something very interesting, gentlemen," said he. "I beg you to listen attentively. This young lady, whom you see standing here, was afflicted with a very serious lesion of the marrow. And, if one had the least doubt of it, these two certificates would suffice to convince the most incredulous, for they are signed by two doctors of the Paris faculty, whose names are well known to us all."

Then he passed the certificates to the doctors present, who read them, wagging their heads the while. It was beyond dispute; the medical men who had drawn up these documents enjoyed the reputation of being honest and clever practitioners.

"Well, gentlemen, if the diagnosis is not disputed—and it cannot be when a patient brings us documents of this value—we will now see what change has taken place in the young lady's condition."

However, before questioning her he turned towards Pierre. "Monsieur l'Abbe," said he, "you came from Paris with Mademoiselle de Guersaint, I think. Did you converse with the doctors before your departure?"

The priest shuddered amidst all his great delight.

"I was present at the consultation, monsieur," he replied.

And again the scene rose up before him. He once more saw the two doctors, so serious and rational, and he once more saw Beauclair smiling, while his colleagues drew up their certificates, which were identical. And was he, Pierre, to reduce these certificates to nothing, reveal the other diagnosis, the one that allowed of the cure being explained scientifically? The miracle had been predicted, shattered beforehand.

"You will observe, gentlemen," now resumed Dr. Bonamy, "that the presence of the Abbe gives these proofs additional weight. However, mademoiselle will now tell us exactly what she felt."

He had leant over Father Dargeles's shoulder to impress upon him that he must not forget to make Pierre play the part of a witness in the narrative.

"Mon Dieu! gentlemen, how can I tell you?" exclaimed Marie in a halting voice, broken by her surging happiness. "Since yesterday I had felt certain that I should be cured. And yet, a little while ago, when the pins and needles seized me in the legs again, I was afraid it might only be another attack. For an instant I doubted. Then the feeling stopped. But it began again as soon as I recommenced praying. Oh! I prayed, I prayed with all my soul! I ended by surrendering myself like a child. 'Blessed Virgin, Our Lady of Lourdes, do with me as thou wilt,' I said. But the feeling did not cease, it seemed as if my blood were boiling; a voice cried to me: 'Rise! Rise!' And I felt the miracle fall on me in a cracking of all my bones, of all my flesh, as if I had been struck by lightning."

Pierre, very pale, listened to her. Beauclair had positively told him that the cure would come like a lightning flash, that under the influence of extreme excitement a sudden awakening of will so long somnolent would take place within her.

"It was my legs which the Holy Virgin first of all delivered," she continued. "I could well feel that the iron bands which bound them were gliding along my skin like broken chains. Then the weight which still suffocated me, there, in the left side, began to ascend; and I thought I was going to die, it hurt me so. But it passed my chest, it passed my throat, and I felt it there in my mouth, and spat it out violently. It was all over, I no longer had any pain, it had flown away!"

She had made a gesture expressive of the motion of a night bird beating its wings, and, lapsing into silence, stood smiling at Pierre, who was bewildered. Beauclair had told him all that beforehand, using almost the same words and the same imagery. Point by point, his prognostics were realised, there was nothing more in the case than natural phenomena, which had been foreseen.

Raboin, however, had followed Marie's narrative with dilated eyes and the passion of a pietist of limited intelligence, ever haunted by the idea of hell. "It was the devil," he cried; "it was the devil that she spat out!"

Doctor Bonamy, who was more wary, made him hold his tongue. And turning towards the doctors he said: "Gentlemen, you know that we always avoid pronouncing the big word of miracle here. Only here is a fact, and I am curious to know how any of you can explain it by natural means. Seven years ago this young lady was struck with serious paralysis, evidently due to a lesion of the marrow. And that cannot be denied; the certificates are there, irrefutable. She could no longer walk, she could no longer make a movement without a cry of pain, she had reached that extreme state of exhaustion which precedes but by little an unfortunate issue. All at once, however, here she rises, walks, laughs, and beams on us. The paralysis has completely disappeared, no pain remains, she is as well as you and I. Come, gentlemen, approach, examine her, and tell me what has happened."

He triumphed. Not one of the doctors spoke. Two, who were doubtless true Catholics, had shown their approval of his speech by their vigorous nods, while the others remained motionless, with a constrained air, not caring to mix themselves up in the business. However, a little thin man, whose eyes shone behind the glasses he was wearing, ended by rising to take a closer look at Marie. He caught hold of her hand, examined the pupils of her eyes, and merely seemed preoccupied by the air of transfiguration which she wore. Then, in a very courteous manner, without even showing a desire to discuss the matter, he came back and sat down again.

"The case is beyond science, that is all I can assume," concluded Doctor Bonamy, victoriously. "I will add that we have no convalescence here; health is at once restored, full, entire. Observe the young lady. Her eyes are bright, her colour is rosy, her physiognomy has recovered its lively gaiety. Without doubt, the healing of the tissues will proceed somewhat slowly, but one can already say that mademoiselle has been born again. Is it not so, Monsieur l'Abbe, you who have seen her so frequently; you no longer recognise her, eh?"

"That's true, that's true," stammered Pierre.

And, in fact, she already appeared strong to him, her cheeks full and fresh, gaily blooming. But Beauclair had also foreseen this sudden joyful change, this straightening and resplendency of her invalid frame, when life should re-enter it, with the will to be cured and be happy. Once again, however, had Doctor Bonamy leant over Father Dargeles, who was finishing his note, a brief but fairly complete account of the affair. They exchanged a few words in low tones, consulting together, and the doctor ended by saying: "You have witnessed these marvels, Monsieur l'Abbe, so you will not refuse to sign the careful report which the reverend Father has drawn up for publication in the 'Journal de la Grotte.'"

He—Pierre—sign that page of error and falsehood! A revolt roused him, and he was on the point of shouting out the truth. But he felt the weight of his cassock on his shoulders; and, above all, Marie's divine joy filled his heart. He was penetrated with deep happiness at seeing her saved. Since they had ceased questioning her she had come and leant on his arm, and remained smiling at him with eyes full of enthusiasm.

"Oh, my, friend, thank the Blessed Virgin!" she murmured in a low voice. "She has been so good to me; I am now so well, so beautiful, so young! And how pleased my father, my poor father, will be!"

Then Pierre signed. Everything was collapsing within him, but it was enough that she should be saved; he would have thought it sacrilegious to interfere with the faith of that child, the great pure faith which had healed her.

When Marie reappeared outside the office, the applause began afresh, the crowd clapped their hands. It now seemed that the miracle was official. However, certain charitable persons, fearing that she might again fatigue herself and again require her little car, which she had abandoned before the Grotto, had brought it to the office, and when she found it there she felt deeply moved. Ah! that box in which she had lived so many years, that rolling coffin in which she had sometimes imagined herself buried alive, how many tears, how much despair, how many bad days it had witnessed! And, all at once, the idea occurred to her that it had so long been linked with her sufferings, it ought also to share her triumph. It was a sudden inspiration, a kind of holy folly, that made her seize the handle.

At that moment the procession passed by, returning from the Grotto, where Abbe Judaine had pronounced the Benediction. And thereupon Marie, dragging the little car, placed herself behind the canopy. And, in her slippers, her head covered with a strip of lace, her bosom heaving, her face erect, glowing, and superb, she walked on behind the clergy, dragging after her that car of misery, that rolling coffin, in which she had endured so much agony. And the crowd which acclaimed her, the frantic crowd, followed in her wake.

IV. TRIUMPH—DESPAIR

PIERRE also had followed Marie, and like her was behind the canopy, carried along as it were by the blast of glory which made her drag her little car along in triumph. Every moment, however, there was so much tempestuous pushing that the young priest would assuredly have fallen if a rough hand had not upheld him.

"Don't be alarmed," said a voice; "give me your arm, otherwise you won't be able to remain on your feet."

Pierre turned round, and was surprised to recognise Father Massias, who had left Father Fourcade in the pulpit in order to accompany the procession. An extraordinary fever was sustaining him, throwing him forward, as solid as a rock, with eyes glowing like live coals, and an excited face covered with perspiration.

"Take care, then!" he again exclaimed; "give me your arm."

A fresh human wave had almost swept them away. And Pierre now yielded to the support of this terrible enthusiast, whom he remembered as a fellow-student at the seminary. What a singular meeting it was, and how greatly he would have liked to possess that violent faith, that mad faith, which was making Massias pant, with his throat full of sobs, whilst he continued giving vent to the ardent entreaty "Lord Jesus, heal our sick! Lord Jesus, heal our sick!"

There was no cessation of this cry behind the canopy, where there was always a crier whose duty it was to accord no respite to the slow clemency of Heaven. At times a thick voice full of anguish, and at others a shrill and piercing voice, would arise. The Father's, which was an imperious one, was now at last breaking through sheer emotion.

"Lord Jesus, heal our sick! Lord Jesus, heal our sick!"

The rumour of Marie's wondrous cure, of the miracle whose fame would speedily fill all Christendom, had already spread from one to the other end of Lourdes; and from this had come the increased vertigo of the multitude, the attack of contagious delirium which now caused it to whirl and rush toward the Blessed Sacrament like the resistless flux of a rising tide. One and all yielded to the desire of beholding the Sacrament and touching it, of being cured and becoming happy. The Divinity was passing; and now it was not merely a question of ailing beings glowing with a desire for life, but a longing for happiness which consumed all present and raised them up with bleeding, open hearts and eager hands.

Berthaud, who feared the excesses of this religious adoration, had decided to accompany his men. He commanded them, carefully watching over the double chain of bearers beside the canopy in order that it might not be broken.

"Close your ranks—closer—closer!" he called, "and keep your arms firmly linked!"

These young men, chosen from among the most vigorous of the bearers, had an extremely difficult duty to discharge. The wall which they formed, shoulder to shoulder, with arms linked at the waist and the neck, kept on giving way under the involuntary assaults of the throng. Nobody, certainly, fancied that he was pushing, but there was constant eddying, and deep waves of people rolled towards the procession from afar and threatened to submerge it.

When the canopy had reached the middle of the Place du Rosaire, Abbe Judaine really thought that he would be unable to go any farther. Numerous conflicting currents had set in over the vast expanse, and were whirling, assailing him from all sides, so that he had to halt under the swaying canopy, which shook like a sail in a sudden squall on the open sea. He held the Blessed Sacrament aloft with his numbed hands, each moment fearing that a final push would throw him over; for he fully realised that the golden monstrance, radiant like a sun, was the one passion of all that multitude, the Divinity they demanded to kiss, in order that they might lose themselves in it, even though they should annihilate it in doing so. Accordingly, while standing there, the priest anxiously turned his eyes on Berthaud.

"Let nobody pass!" called the latter to the bearers—"nobody! The orders are precise; you hear me?"

Voices, however, were rising in supplication on all sides, wretched beings were sobbing with arms outstretched and lips protruding, in the wild desire that they might be allowed to approach and kneel at the priest's feet. What divine grace it would be to be thrown upon the ground and trampled under foot by the whole procession!* An infirm old man displayed his withered hand in the conviction that it would be made sound again were he only allowed to touch the monstrance. A dumb woman wildly pushed her way through the throng with her broad shoulders, in order that she might loosen her tongue by a kiss. Others were shouting, imploring, and even clenching their fists in their rage with those cruel men who denied cure to their bodily sufferings and their mental wretchedness. The orders to keep them back were rigidly enforced, however, for the most serious accidents were feared.

* One is here irresistibly reminded of the car of Juggernaut, and
of the Hindoo fanatics throwing themselves beneath its wheels
in the belief that they would thus obtain an entrance into
Paradise.—Trans.

"Nobody, nobody!" repeated Berthaud; "let nobody whatever pass!"

There was a woman there, however, who touched every heart with compassion. Clad in wretched garments, bareheaded, her face wet with tears, she was holding in her arms a little boy of ten years or so, whose limp, paralysed legs hung down inertly. The lad's weight was too great for one so weak as herself, still she did not seem to feel it. She had brought the boy there, and was now entreating the bearers with an invincible obstinacy which neither words nor hustling could conquer.

At last, as Abbe Judaine, who felt deeply moved, beckoned to her to approach, two of the bearers, in deference to his compassion, drew apart, despite all the danger of opening a breach, and the woman then rushed forward with her burden, and fell in a heap before the priest. For a moment he rested the foot of the monstrance on the child's head, and the mother herself pressed her eager, longing lips to it; and, as they started off again, she wished to remain behind the canopy, and followed the procession, with streaming hair and panting breast, staggering the while under the heavy burden, which was fast exhausting her strength.

They managed, with great difficulty, to cross the remainder of the Place du Rosaire, and then the ascent began, the glorious ascent by way of the monumental incline; whilst upon high, on the fringe of heaven, the Basilica reared its slim spire, whence pealing bells were winging their flight, sounding the triumphs of Our Lady of Lourdes. And now it was towards an apotheosis that the canopy slowly climbed, towards the lofty portal of the high-perched sanctuary which stood open, face to face with the Infinite, high above the huge multitude whose waves continued soaring across the valley's squares and avenues. Preceding the processional cross, the magnificent beadle, all blue and silver, was already rearing the level of the Rosary cupola, the spacious esplanade formed by the roof of the lower church, across which the pilgrimage deputations began to wind, with their bright-coloured silk and velvet banners waving in the ruddy glow of the sunset. Then came the clergy, the priests in snowy surplices, and the priests in golden chasubles, likewise shining out like a procession of stars. And the censers swung, and the canopy continued climbing, without anything of its bearers being seen, so that it seemed as though a mysterious power, some troop of invisible angels, were carrying it off in this glorious ascension towards the open portal of heaven.

A sound of chanting had burst forth; the voices in the procession no longer called for the healing of the sick, now that the cortege had extricated itself from amidst the crowd. The miracle had been worked, and they were celebrating it with the full power of their lungs, amidst the pealing of the bells and the quivering gaiety of the atmosphere.

"Magnificat anima mea Dominum"—they began. "My soul doth magnify the Lord."

'Twas the song of gratitude, already chanted at the Grotto, and again springing from every heart: "Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo." "And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour."

Meantime it was with increasing, overflowing joy that Marie took part in that radiant ascent, by the colossal gradient way, towards the glowing Basilica. It seemed to her, as she continued climbing, that she was growing stronger and stronger, that her legs, so long lifeless, became firmer at each step. The little car which she victoriously dragged behind her was like the earthly tenement of her illness, the inferno whence the Blessed Virgin had extricated her, and although its handle was making her hands sore, she nevertheless wished to pull it up yonder with her, in order that she might cast it at last at the feet of the Almighty. No obstacle could stay her course, she laughed through the big tears which were falling on her cheeks, her bosom was swelling, her demeanour becoming warlike. One of her slippers had become unfastened, and the strip of lace had fallen from her head to her shoulders. Nevertheless, with her lovely fair hair crowning her like a helmet and her face beaming brightly, she still marched on and on with such an awakening of will and strength that, behind her, you could hear her car leap and rattle over the rough slope of the flagstones, as though it had been a mere toy.

Near Marie was Pierre, still leaning on the arm of Father Massias, who had not relinquished his hold. Lost amidst the far-spreading emotion, the young priest was unable to reflect. Moreover his companion's sonorous voice quite deafened him.

"Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles." "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble."

On Pierre's other side, the right, Berthaud, who no longer had any cause for anxiety, was now also following the canopy. He had given his bearers orders to break their chain, and was gazing with an expression of delight on the human sea through which the procession had lately passed. The higher they the incline, the more did the Place du Rosaire and the avenues and paths of the gardens expand below them, black with the swarming multitude. It was a bird's-eye view of a whole nation, an ant-hill which ever increased in size, spreading farther and farther away. "Look!" Berthaud at last exclaimed to Pierre. "How vast and how beautiful it is! Ah! well, the year won't have been a bad one after all."

Looking upon Lourdes as a centre of propaganda, where his political rancour found satisfaction, he always rejoiced when there was a numerous pilgrimage, as in his mind it was bound to prove unpleasant to the Government. Ah! thought he, if they had only been able to bring the working classes of the towns thither, and create a Catholic democracy. "Last year we scarcely reached the figure of two hundred thousand pilgrims," he continued, "but we shall exceed it this year, I hope." And then, with the gay air of the jolly fellow that he was, despite his sectarian passions, he added: "Well, 'pon my word, I was really pleased just now when there was such a crush. Things are looking up, I thought, things are looking up."

Pierre, however, was not listening to him; his mind had been struck by the grandeur of the spectacle. That multitude, which spread out more and more as the procession rose higher and higher above it, that magnificent valley which was hollowed out below and ever became more and more extensive, displaying afar off its gorgeous horizon of mountains, filled him with quivering admiration. His mental trouble was increased by it all, and seeking Marie's glance, he waved his arm to draw her attention to the vast circular expanse of country. And his gesture deceived her, for in the purely spiritual excitement that possessed her she did not behold the material spectacle he pointed at, but thought that he was calling earth to witness the prodigious favours which the Blessed Virgin had heaped upon them both; for she imagined that he had had his share of the miracle, and that in the stroke of grace which had set her erect with her flesh healed, he, so near to her that their hearts mingled, had felt himself enveloped and raised by the same divine power, his soul saved from doubt, conquered by faith once more. How could he have witnessed her wondrous cure, indeed, without being convinced? Moreover, she had prayed so fervently for him outside the Grotto on the previous night. And now, therefore, to her excessive delight, she espied him transfigured like herself, weeping and laughing, restored to God again. And this lent increased force to her blissful fever; she dragged her little car along with unwearying hands, and—as though it were their double cross, her own redemption and her friend's redemption which she was carrying up that incline with its resounding flagstones—she would have liked to drag it yet farther, for leagues and leagues, ever higher and higher, to the most inaccessible summits, to the transplendent threshold of Paradise itself.

"O Pierre, Pierre!" she stammered, "how sweet it is that this great happiness should have fallen on us together—yes, together! I prayed for it so fervently, and she granted my prayer, and saved you even in saving me. Yes, I felt your soul mingling with my own. Tell me that our mutual prayers have been granted, tell me that I have won your salvation even as you have won mine!"

He understood her mistake and shuddered.

"If you only knew," she continued, "how great would have been my grief had I thus ascended into light alone. Oh! to be chosen without you, to soar yonder without you! But with you, Pierre, it is rapturous delight! We have been saved together, we shall be happy forever! I feel all needful strength for happiness, yes, strength enough to raise the world!"

And in spite of everything, he was obliged to answer her and lie, revolting at the idea of spoiling, dimming that great and pure felicity. "Yes, yes, be happy, Marie," he said, "for I am very happy myself, and all our sufferings are redeemed."

But even while he spoke he felt a deep rending within him, as though a brutal hatchet-stroke were parting them forever. Amidst their common sufferings, she had hitherto remained the little friend of childhood's days, the first artlessly loved woman, whom he knew to be still his own, since she could belong to none. But now she was cured, and he remained alone in his hell, repeating to himself that she would never more be his! This sudden thought so upset him that he averted his eyes, in despair at reaping such suffering from the prodigious felicity with which she exulted.

However the chant went on, and Father Massias, hearing nothing and seeing nothing, absorbed as he was in his glowing gratitude to God, shouted the final verse in a thundering voice: "Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham, et semini ejus in saecula." "As He spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever!"

Yet another incline had to be climbed, yet another effort had to be made up that rough acclivity, with its large slippery flagstones. And the procession rose yet higher, and the ascent still went on in the full, bright light. There came a last turn, and the wheels of Marie's car grated against a granite curb. Then, still higher, still and ever higher, did it roll until it finally reached what seemed to be the very fringe of heaven.

And all at once the canopy appeared on the summit of the gigantic inclined ways, on the stone balcony overlooking the stretch of country outside the portal of the Basilica. Abbe Judaine stepped forward holding the Blessed Sacrament aloft with both hands. Marie, who had pulled her car up the balcony steps, was near him, her heart beating from her exertion, her face all aglow amidst the gold of her loosened hair. Then all the clergy, the snowy surplices, and the dazzling chasubles ranged themselves behind, whilst the banners waved like bunting decking the white balustrades. And a solemn minute followed.

From on high there could have been no grander spectacle. First, immediately below, there was the multitude, the human sea with its dark waves, its heaving billows, now for a moment stilled, amidst which you only distinguished the small pale specks of the faces uplifted towards the Basilica, in expectation of the Benediction; and as far as the eye could reach, from the place du Rosaire to the Gave, along the paths and avenues and across the open spaces, even to the old town in the distance; those little pale faces multiplied and multiplied, all with lips parted, and eyes fixed upon the august heaven was about to open to their gaze.

Then the vast amphitheatre of slopes and hills and mountains surged aloft, ascended upon all sides, crests following crests, until they faded away in the far blue atmosphere. The numerous convents among the trees on the first of the northern slopes, beyond the torrent—those of the Carmelites, the Dominicans, the Assumptionists, and the Sisters of Nevers—were coloured by a rosy reflection from the fire-like glow of the sunset. Then wooded masses rose one above the other, until they reached the heights of Le Buala, which were surmounted by the Serre de Julos, in its turn capped by the Miramont.

Deep valleys opened on the south, narrow gorges between piles of gigantic rocks whose bases were already steeped in lakes of bluish shadow, whilst the summits sparkled with the smiling farewell of the sun. The hills of Visens upon this side were empurpled, and shewed like a promontory of coral, in front of the stagnant lake of the ether, which was bright with a sapphire-like transparency. But, on the east, in front of you, the horizon again spread out to the very point of intersection of the seven valleys. The castle which had formerly guarded them still stood with its keep, its lofty walls, its black outlines—the outlines of a fierce fortress of feudal time,—upon the rock whose base was watered by the Gave; and upon this side of the stern old pile was the new town, looking quite gay amidst its gardens, with its swarm of white house-fronts, its large hotels, its lodging-houses, and its fine shops, whose windows were glowing like live embers; whilst, behind the castle, the discoloured roofs of old Lourdes spread out in confusion, in a ruddy light which hovered over them like a cloud of dust. At this late hour, when the declining luminary was sinking in royal splendour behind the little Gers and the big Gers, those two huge ridges of bare rock, spotted with patches of short herbage, formed nothing but a neutral, somewhat violet, background, as though, indeed, they were two curtains of sober hue drawn across the margin of the horizon.

And higher and still higher, in front of this immensity, did Abbe Judaine with both hands raise the Blessed Sacrament. He moved it slowly from one to the other horizon, causing it to describe a huge sign of the cross against the vault of heaven. He saluted the convents, the heights of Le Buala, the Serre de Julos, and the Miramont, upon his left; he saluted the huge fallen rocks of the dim valleys, and the empurpled hills of Visens, on his right; he saluted the new and the old town, the castle bathed by the Gave, the big and the little Gers, already drowsy, in front of him; and he saluted the woods, the torrents, the mountains, the faint chains linking the distant peaks, the whole earth, even beyond the visible horizon: Peace upon earth, hope and consolation to mankind! The multitude below had quivered beneath that great sign of the cross which enveloped it. It seemed as though a divine breath were passing, rolling those billows of little pale faces which were as numerous as the waves of an ocean. A loud murmur of adoration ascended; all those parted lips proclaimed the glory of God when, in the rays of the setting sun, the illumined monstrance again shone forth like another sun, a sun of pure gold, describing the sign of the cross in streaks of flame upon the threshold of the Infinite.

The banners, the clergy, with Abbe Judaine under the canopy, were already returning to the Basilica, when Marie, who was also entering it, still dragging her car by the handle, was stopped by two ladies, who kissed her, weeping. They were Madame de Jonquiere and her daughter Raymonde, who had come thither to witness the Benediction, and had been told of the miracle.

"Ah! my dear child, what happiness!" repeated the lady-hospitaller; "and how proud I am to have you in my ward! It is so precious a favour for all of us that the Blessed Virgin should have been pleased to select you."

Raymonde, meanwhile, had kept one of the young girl's hands in her own. "Will you allow me to call you my friend, mademoiselle?" said she. "I felt so much pity for you, and I am now so pleased to see you walking, so strong and beautiful already. Let me kiss you again. It will bring me happiness."

"Thank you, thank you with all my heart," Marie stammered amidst her rapture. "I am so happy, so very happy!"

"Oh! we will not leave you," resumed Madame de Jonquiere. "You hear me, Raymonde? We must follow her, and kneel beside her, and we will take her back after the ceremony."

Thereupon the two ladies joined the cortege, and, following the canopy, walked beside Pierre and Father Massias, between the rows of chairs which the deputations already occupied, to the very centre of the choir. The banners alone were allowed on either side of the high altar; but Marie advanced to its steps, still dragging her car, whose wheels resounded over the flagstones. She had at last brought it to the spot whither the sacred madness of her desire had longingly impelled her to drag it. She had brought it, indeed, woeful, wretched-looking as it was, into the splendour of God's house, so that it might there testify to the truth of the miracle. The threshold had scarcely been crossed when the organs burst into a hymn of triumph, the sonorous acclamation of a happy people, from amidst which there soon arose a celestial, angelic voice, of joyful shrillness and crystalline purity. Abbe Judaine had placed the Blessed Sacrament upon the altar, and the crowd was streaming into the nave, each taking a seat, installing him or herself in a corner, pending the commencement of the ceremony. Marie had at once fallen on her knees between Madame de Jonquiere and Raymonde, whose eyes were moist with tender emotion; whilst Father Massias, exhausted by the extraordinary tension of the nerves which had been sustaining him ever since his departure from the Grotto, had sunk upon the ground, sobbing, with his head between his hands. Behind him Pierre and Berthaud remained standing, the latter still busy with his superintendence, his eyes ever on the watch, seeing that good order was preserved even during the most violent outbursts of emotion.

Then, amidst all his mental confusion, increased by the deafening strains of the organ, Pierre raised his head and examined the interior of the Basilica. The nave was narrow and lofty, and streaked with bright colours, which numerous windows flooded with light. There were scarcely any aisles; they were reduced to the proportions of a mere passage running between the side-chapels and the clustering columns, and this circumstance seemed to increase the slim loftiness of the nave, the soaring of the stonework in perpendicular lines of infantile, graceful slenderness. A gilded railing, as transparent as lace, closed the choir, where the high altar, of white marble richly sculptured, arose in all its lavish chasteness. But the feature of the building which astonished you was the mass of extraordinary ornamentation which transformed the whole of it into an overflowing exhibition of embroidery and jewellery. What with all the banners and votive offerings, the perfect river of gifts which had flowed into it and remained clinging to its walls in a stream of gold and silver, velvet and silk, covering it from top to bottom, it was, so to say, the ever-glowing sanctuary of gratitude, whose thousand rich adornments seemed to be chanting a perpetual canticle of faith and thankfulness.

The banners, in particular, abounded, as innumerable as the leaves of trees. Some thirty hung from the vaulted roof, whilst others were suspended, like pictures, between the little columns around the triforium. And others, again, displayed themselves on the walls, waved in the depths of the side-chapels, and encompassed the choir with a heaven of silk, satin, and velvet. You could count them by hundreds, and your eyes grew weary of admiring them. Many of them were quite celebrated, so renowned for their skilful workmanship that talented embroideresses took the trouble to come to Lourdes on purpose to examine them. Among these were the banner of our Lady of Fourvieres, bearing the arms of the city of Lyons; the banner of Alsace, of black velvet embroidered with gold; the banner of Lorraine, on which you beheld the Virgin casting her cloak around two children; and the white and blue banner of Brittany, on which bled the sacred heart of Jesus in the midst of a halo. All empires and kingdoms of the earth were represented; the most distant lands—Canada, Brazil, Chili, Haiti—here had their flags, which, in all piety, were being offered as a tribute of homage to the Queen of Heaven.

Then, after the banners, there were other marvels, the thousands and thousands of gold and silver hearts which were hanging everywhere, glittering on the walls like stars in the heavens. Some were grouped together in the form of mystical roses, others described festoons and garlands, others, again, climbed up the pillars, surrounded the windows, and constellated the deep, dim chapels. Below the triforium somebody had had the ingenious idea of employing these hearts to trace in tall letters the various words which the Blessed Virgin had addressed to Bernadette; and thus, around the nave, there extended a long frieze of words, the delight of the infantile minds which busied themselves with spelling them. It was a swarming, a prodigious resplendency of hearts, whose infinite number deeply impressed you when you thought of all the hands, trembling with gratitude, which had offered them. Moreover, the adornments comprised many other votive offerings, and some of quite an unexpected description. There were bridal wreaths and crosses of honour, jewels and photographs, chaplets, and even spurs, in glass cases or frames. There were also the epaulets and swords of officers, together with a superb sabre, left there in memory of a miraculous conversion.

But all this was not sufficient; other riches, riches of every kind, shone out on all sides—marble statues, diadems enriched with brilliants, a marvellous carpet designed at Blois and embroidered by ladies of all parts of France, and a golden palm with ornaments of enamel, the gift of the sovereign pontiff. The lamps suspended from the vaulted roof, some of them of massive gold and the most delicate workmanship, were also gifts. They were too numerous to be counted, they studded the nave with stars of great price. Immediately in front of the tabernacle there was one, a masterpiece of chasing, offered by Ireland. Others—one from Lille, one from Valence, one from Macao in far-off China—were veritable jewels, sparkling with precious stones. And how great was the resplendency when the choir's score of chandeliers was illumined, when the hundreds of lamps and the hundreds of candles burned all together, at the great evening ceremonies! The whole church then became a conflagration, the thousands of gold and silver hearts reflecting all the little flames with thousands of fiery scintillations. It was like a huge and wondrous brasier; the walls streamed with live flakes of light; you seemed to be entering into the blinding glory of Paradise itself; whilst on all sides the innumerable banners spread out their silk, their satin, and their velvet, embroidered with sanguifluous sacred hearts, victorious saints, and Virgins whose kindly smiles engendered miracles.

Ah! how many ceremonies had already displayed their pomp in that Basilica! Worship, prayer, chanting, never ceased there. From one end of the year to the other incense smoked, organs roared, and kneeling multitudes prayed there with their whole souls. Masses, vespers, sermons, were continually following one upon another; day by day the religious exercises began afresh, and each festival of the Church was celebrated with unparalleled magnificence. The least noteworthy anniversary supplied a pretext for pompous solemnities. Each pilgrimage was granted its share of the dazzling resplendency. It was necessary that those suffering ones and those humble ones who had come from such long distances should be sent home consoled and enraptured, carrying with them a vision of Paradise espied through its opening portals. They beheld the luxurious surroundings of the Divinity, and would forever remain enraptured by the sight. In the depths of bare, wretched rooms, indeed, by the side of humble pallets of suffering throughout all Christendom, a vision of the Basilica with its blazing riches continually arose like a vision of fortune itself, like a vision of the wealth of that life to be, into which the poor would surely some day enter after their long, long misery in this terrestrial sphere.

Pierre, however, felt no delight; no consolation, no hope, came to him as he gazed upon all the splendour. His frightful feeling of discomfort was increasing, all was becoming black within him, with that blackness of the tempest which gathers when men's thoughts and feelings pant and shriek. He had felt immense desolation rising in his soul ever since Marie, crying that she was healed, had risen from her little car and walked along with such strength and fulness of life. Yet he loved her like a passionately attached brother, and had experienced unlimited happiness on seeing that she no longer suffered. Why, therefore, should her felicity bring him such agony? He could now no longer gaze at her, kneeling there, radiant amidst her tears, with beauty recovered and increased, without his poor heart bleeding as from some mortal wound. Still he wished to remain there, and so, averting his eyes, he tried to interest himself in Father Massias, who was still shaking with violent sobbing on the flagstones, and whose prostration and annihilation, amidst the consuming illusion of divine love, he sorely envied. For a moment, moreover, he questioned Berthaud, feigning to admire some banner and requesting information respecting it.

"Which one?" asked the superintendent of the bearers; "that lace banner over there?"

"Yes, that one on the left."

"Oh! it is a banner offered by Le Puy. The arms are those of Le Puy and Lourdes linked together by the Rosary. The lace is so fine that if you crumpled the banner up, you could hold it in the hollow of your hand."

However, Abbe Judaine was now stepping forward; the ceremony was about to begin. Again did the organs resound, and again was a canticle chanted, whilst, on the altar, the Blessed Sacrament looked like the sovereign planet amidst the scintillations of the gold and silver hearts, as innumerable as stars. And then Pierre lacked the strength to remain there any longer. Since Marie had Madame de Jonquiere and Raymonde with her, and they would accompany her back, he might surely go off by himself, vanish into some shadowy corner, and there, at last, vent his grief. In a few words he excused himself, giving his appointment with Doctor Chassaigne as a pretext for his departure. However, another fear suddenly came to him, that of being unable to leave the building, so densely did the serried throng of believers bar the open doorway. But immediately afterwards he had an inspiration, and, crossing the sacristy, descended into the crypt by the narrow interior stairway.

Deep silence and sepulchral gloom suddenly succeeded to the joyous chants and prodigious radiance of the Basilica above. Cut in the rock, the crypt formed two narrow passages, parted by a massive block of stone which upheld the nave, and conducting to a subterranean chapel under the apse, where some little lamps remained burning both day and night. A dim forest of pillars rose up there, a mystic terror reigned in that semi-obscurity where the mystery ever quivered. The chapel walls remained bare, like the very stones of the tomb, in which all men must some day sleep the last sleep. And along the passages, against their sides, covered from top to bottom with marble votive offerings, you only saw a double row of confessionals; for it was here, in the lifeless tranquillity of the bowels of the earth, that sins were confessed; and there were priests, speaking all languages, to absolve the sinners who came thither from the four corners of the world.

At that hour, however, when the multitude was thronging the Basilica above, the crypt had become quite deserted. Not a soul, save Pierre's, throbbed there ever so faintly; and he, amidst that deep silence, that darkness, that coolness of the grave, fell upon his knees. It was not, however, through any need of prayer and worship, but because his whole being was giving way beneath his crushing mental torment. He felt a torturing longing to be able to see clearly within himself. Ah! why could he not plunge even more deeply into the heart of things, reflect, understand, and at last calm himself.

And it was a fearful agony that he experienced. He tried to remember all the minutes that had gone by since Marie, suddenly springing from her pallet of wretchedness, had raised her cry of resurrection. Why had he even then, despite his fraternal joy in seeing her erect, felt such an awful sensation of discomfort, as though, indeed, the greatest of all possible misfortunes had fallen upon him? Was he jealous of the divine grace? Did he suffer because the Virgin, whilst healing her, had forgotten him, whose soul was so afflicted? He remembered how he had granted himself a last delay, fixed a supreme appointment with Faith for the moment when the Blessed Sacrament should pass by, were Marie only cured; and she was cured, and still he did not believe, and henceforth there was no hope, for never, never would he be able to believe. Therein lay the bare, bleeding sore. The truth burst upon him with blinding cruelty and certainty—she was saved, he was lost. That pretended miracle which had restored her to life had, in him, completed the ruin of all belief in the supernatural. That which he had, for a moment, dreamed of seeking, and perhaps finding, at Lourdes,—naive faith, the happy faith of a little child,—was no longer possible, would never bloom again after that collapse of the miraculous, that cure which Beauclair had foretold, and which had afterwards come to pass, exactly as had been predicted. Jealous! No—he was not jealous; but he was ravaged, full of mortal sadness at thus remaining all alone in the icy desert of his intelligence, regretting the illusion, the lie, the divine love of the simpleminded, for which henceforth there was no room in his heart.

A flood of bitterness stifled him, and tears started from his eyes. He had slipped on to the flagstones, prostrated by his anguish. And, by degrees, he remembered the whole delightful story, from the day when Marie, guessing how he was tortured by doubt, had become so passionately eager for his conversion, taking hold of his hand in the gloom, retaining it in her own, and stammering that she would pray for him—oh! pray for him with her whole soul. She forgot herself, she entreated the Blessed Virgin to save her friend rather than herself if there were but one grace that she could obtain from her Divine Son. Then came another memory, the memory of the delightful hours which they had spent together amid the dense darkness of the trees during the night procession. There, again, they had prayed for one another, mingled one in the other with so ardent a desire for mutual happiness that, for a moment, they had attained to the very depths of the love which gives and immolates itself. And now their long, tear-drenched tenderness, their pure idyl of suffering, was ending in this brutal separation; she on her side saved, radiant amidst the hosannas of the triumphant Basilica; and he lost, sobbing with wretchedness, bowed down in the depths of the dark crypt in an icy, grave-like solitude. It was as though he had just lost her again, and this time forever and forever.

All at once Pierre felt the sharp stab which this thought dealt his heart. He at last understood his pain—a sudden light illumined the terrible crisis of woe amidst which he was struggling. He had lost Marie for the first time on the day when he had become a priest, saying to himself that he might well renounce his manhood since she, stricken in her sex by incurable illness, would never be a woman. But behold! she was cured. Behold! she had become a woman. She had all at once appeared to him very strong, very beautiful, living, and desirable. He, who was dead, however, could not become a man again. Never more would he be able to raise the tombstone which crushed and imprisoned his flesh. She fled away alone, leaving him in the cold grave. The whole wide world was opening before her with smiling happiness, with the love which laughs in the sunlit paths, with the husband, with children, no doubt. Whereas he, buried, as it were to his shoulders, had naught of his body free, save his brain, and that remained free, no doubt, in order that he might suffer the more. She had still been his so long as she had not belonged to another; and if he had been enduring such agony during the past hour, it was only through this final rending which, this time, parted her from him forever and forever.

Then rage shook Pierre from head to foot. He was tempted to return to the Basilica, and cry the truth aloud to Marie. The miracle was a lie! The helpful beneficence of an all-powerful Divinity was but so much illusion! Nature alone had acted, life had conquered once again. And he would have given proofs: he would have shown how life, the only sovereign, worked for health amid all the sufferings of this terrestrial sphere. And then they would have gone off together; they would have fled far, far away, that they might be happy. But a sudden terror took possession of him. What! lay hands upon that little spotless soul, kill all belief in it, fill it with the ruins which worked such havoc in his own soul? It all at once occurred to him that this would be odious sacrilege. He would afterwards become horrified with himself, he would look upon himself as her murderer were he some day to realise that he was unable to give her a happiness equal to that which she would have lost. Perhaps, too, she would not believe him. And, moreover, would she ever consent to marry a priest who had broken his vows? She who would always retain the sweet and never-to be-forgotten memory of how she had been healed in ecstasy! His design then appeared to him insane, monstrous, polluting. And his revolt rapidly subsided, until he only retained a feeling of infinite weariness, a sensation of a burning, incurable wound—the wound of his poor, bruised, lacerated heart.

Then, however, amidst his abandonment, the void in which he was whirling, a supreme struggle began, filling him again with agony. What should he do? His sufferings made a coward of him, and he would have liked to flee, so that he might never see Marie again. For he understood very well that he would now have to lie to her, since she thought that he was saved like herself, converted, healed in soul, even as she had been healed in body. She had told him of her joy while dragging her car up the colossal gradient way. Oh! to have had that great happiness together, together; to have felt their hearts melt and mingle one in the other! And even then he had already lied, as he would always be obliged to lie in order that he might not spoil her pure and blissful illusion. He let the last throbbings of his veins subside, and vowed that he would find sufficient strength for the sublime charity of feigning peacefulness of soul, the rapture of one who is redeemed. For he wished her to be wholly happy—without a regret, without a doubt—in the full serenity of faith, convinced that the blessed Virgin had indeed given her consent to their purely mystical union. What did his torments matter? Later on, perhaps, he might recover possession of himself. Amidst his desolate solitude of mind would there not always be a little joy to sustain him, all that joy whose consoling falsity he would leave to her?

Several minutes again elapsed, and Pierre, still overwhelmed, remained on the flagstones, seeking to calm his fever. He no longer thought, he no longer lived; he was a prey to that prostration of the entire being which follows upon great crises. But, all at once, he fancied he could hear a sound of footsteps, and thereupon he painfully rose to his feet, and feigned to be reading the inscriptions graven in the marble votive slabs along the walls. He had been mistaken—nobody was there; nevertheless, seeking to divert his mind, he continued perusing the inscriptions, at first in a mechanical kind of way, and then, little by little, feeling a fresh emotion steal over him.

The sight was almost beyond imagination. Faith, love, and gratitude displayed themselves in a hundred, a thousand ways on these marble slabs with gilded lettering. Some of the inscriptions were so artless as to provoke a smile. A colonel had sent a sculptured representation of his foot with the words: "Thou hast preserved it; grant that it may serve Thee." Farther on you read the line: "May Her protection extend to the glass trade." And then, by the frankness of certain expressions of thanks, you realised of what a strange character the appeals had been. "To Mary the Immaculate," ran one inscription, "from a father of a family, in recognition of health restored, a lawsuit won, and advancement gained." However, the memory of these instances faded away amidst the chorus of soaring, fervent cries. There was the cry of the lovers: "Paul and Anna entreat Our Lady of Lourdes to bless their union." There was the cry of the mothers in various forms: "Gratitude to Mary, who has thrice healed my child."—"Gratitude to Mary for the birth of Antoinette, whom I dedicate, like myself and all my kin, to Her."—"P. D., three years old, has been preserved to the love of his parents." And then came the cry of the wives, the cry, too, of the sick restored to health, and of the souls restored to happiness: "Protect my husband; grant that my husband may enjoy good health."—"I was crippled in both legs, and now I am healed."—"We came, and now we hope."—"I prayed, I wept, and She heard me." And there were yet other cries, cries whose veiled glow conjured up thoughts of long romances: "Thou didst join us together; protect us, we pray Thee."—"To Mary, for the greatest of all blessings." And the same cries, the same words—gratitude, thankfulness, homage, acknowledgment,—occurred again and again, ever with the same passionate fervour. All! those hundreds, those thousands of cries which were forever graven on that marble, and from the depths of the crypt rose clamorously to the Virgin, proclaiming the everlasting devotion of the unhappy beings whom she had succoured.

Pierre did not weary of reading them, albeit his mouth was bitter and increasing desolation was filling him. So it was only he who had no succour to hope for! When so many sufferers were listened to, he alone had been unable to make himself heard! And he now began to think of the extraordinary number of prayers which must be said at Lourdes from one end of the year to the other. He tried to cast them up; those said during the days spent at the Grotto and during the nights spent at the Rosary, those said at the ceremonies at the Basilica, and those said at the sunlight and the starlight processions. But this continual entreaty of every second was beyond computation. It seemed as if the faithful were determined to weary the ears of the Divinity, determined to extort favours and forgiveness by the very multitude, the vast multitude of their prayers. The priests said that it was necessary to offer to God the acts of expiation which the sins of France required, and that when the number of these acts of expiation should be large enough, God would smite France no more. What a harsh belief in the necessity of chastisement! What a ferocious idea born of the gloomiest pessimism! How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to Heaven!

In the midst of all his sadness, Pierre felt deep compassion penetrate his heart. He was upset by the thought that mankind should be so wretched, reduced to such a state of woe, so bare, so weak, so utterly forsaken, that it renounced its own reason to place the one sole possibility of happiness in the hallucinatory intoxication of dreams. Tears once more filled his eyes; he wept for himself and for others, for all the poor tortured beings who feel a need of stupefying and numbing their pains in order to escape from the realities of the world. He again seemed to hear the swarming, kneeling crowd of the Grotto, raising the glowing entreaty of its prayer to Heaven, the multitude of twenty and thirty thousand souls from whose midst ascended such a fervour of desire that you seemed to see it smoking in the sunlight like incense. Then another form of the exaltation of faith glowed, beneath the crypt, in the Church of the Rosary, where nights were spent in a paradise of rapture, amidst the silent delights of the communion, the mute appeals in which the whole being pines, burns, and soars aloft. And as though the cries raised before the Grotto and the perpetual adoration of the Rosary were not sufficient, that clamour of ardent entreaty burst forth afresh on the walls of the crypt around him; and here it was eternised in marble, here it would continue shrieking the sufferings of humanity even into the far-away ages. It was the marble, it was the walls themselves praying, seized by that shudder of universal woe which penetrated even the world's stones. And, at last, the prayers ascended yet higher, still higher, soared aloft from the radiant Basilica, which was humming and buzzing above him, full as it now was of a frantic multitude, whose mighty voice, bursting into a canticle of hope, he fancied he could hear through the flagstones of the nave. And it finally seemed to him that he was being whirled away, transported, as though he were indeed amidst the very vibrations of that huge wave of prayer, which, starting from the dust of the earth, ascended the tier of superposed churches, spreading from tabernacle to tabernacle, and filling even the walls with such pity that they sobbed aloud, and that the supreme cry of wretchedness pierced its way into heaven with the white spire, the lofty golden cross, above the steeple. O Almighty God, O Divinity, Helpful Power, whoever, whatever Thou mayst be, take pity upon poor mankind and make human suffering cease!

All at once Pierre was dazzled. He had followed the left-hand passage, and was coming out into broad daylight, above the inclined ways, and two affectionate arms at once caught hold of him and clasped him. It was Doctor Chassaigne, whose appointment he had forgotten, and who had been waiting there to take him to visit Bernadette's room and Abbe Peyramale's church. "Oh! what joy must be yours, my child!" exclaimed the good old man. "I have just learnt the great news, the extraordinary favour which Our Lady of Lourdes has granted to your young friend. Recollect what I told you the day before yesterday. I am now at ease—you are saved!"

A last bitterness came to the young priest who was very pale. However, he was able to smile, and he gently answered: "Yes, we are saved, we are very happy."

It was the lie beginning; the divine illusion which in a spirit of charity he wished to give to others.

And then one more spectacle met Pierre's eyes. The principal door of the Basilica stood wide open, and a red sheet of light from the setting sun was enfilading the nave from one to the other end. Everything was flaring with the splendour of a conflagration—the gilt railings of the choir, the votive offerings of gold and silver, the lamps enriched with precious stones, the banners with their bright embroideries, and the swinging censers, which seemed like flying jewels. And yonder, in the depths of this burning splendour, amidst the snowy surplices and the golden chasubles, he recognised Marie, with hair unbound, hair of gold like all else, enveloping her in a golden mantle. And the organs burst into a hymn of triumph; and the delirious people acclaimed God; and Abbe Judaine, who had again just taken the Blessed Sacrament from off the altar, raised it aloft and presented it to their gaze for the last time; and radiantly magnificent it shone out like a glory amidst the streaming gold of the Basilica, whose prodigious triumph all the bells proclaimed in clanging, flying peals.

V. CRADLE AND GRAVE

IMMEDIATELY afterwards, as they descended the steps, Doctor Chassaigne said to Pierre: "You have just seen the triumph; I will now show you two great injustices."

And he conducted him into the Rue des Petits-Fosses to visit Bernadette's room, that low, dark chamber whence she set out on the day the Blessed Virgin appeared to her.

The Rue des Petits-Fosses starts from the former Rue des Bois, now the Rue de la Grotte, and crosses the Rue du Tribunal. It is a winding lane, slightly sloping and very gloomy. The passers-by are few; it is skirted by long walls, wretched-looking houses, with mournful facades in which never a window opens. All its gaiety consists in an occasional tree in a courtyard.

"Here we are," at last said the doctor.

At the part where he had halted, the street contracted, becoming very narrow, and the house faced the high, grey wall of a barn. Raising their heads, both men looked up at the little dwelling, which seemed quite lifeless, with its narrow casements and its coarse, violet pargeting, displaying the shameful ugliness of poverty. The entrance passage down below was quite black; an old light iron gate was all that closed it; and there was a step to mount, which in rainy weather was immersed in the water of the gutter.

"Go in, my friend, go in," said the doctor. "You have only to push the gate."

The passage was long, and Pierre kept on feeling the damp wall with his hand, for fear of making a false step. It seemed to him as if he were descending into a cellar, in deep obscurity, and he could feel a slippery soil impregnated with water beneath his feet. Then at the end, in obedience to the doctor's direction, he turned to the right.

"Stoop, or you may hurt yourself," said M. Chassaigne; "the door is very low. There, here we are."

The door of the room, like the gate in the street, stood wide open, as if the place had been carelessly abandoned; and Pierre, who had stopped in the middle of the chamber, hesitating, his eyes still full of the bright daylight outside, could distinguish absolutely nothing. He had fallen into complete darkness, and felt an icy chill about the shoulders similar to the sensation that might be caused by a wet towel.

But, little by little, his eyes became accustomed to the dimness. Two windows of unequal size opened on to a narrow, interior courtyard, where only a greenish light descended, as at the bottom of a well; and to read there, in the middle of the day, it would be necessary to have a candle. Measuring about fifteen feet by twelve, the room was flagged with large uneven stones; while the principal beam and the rafters of the roof, which were visible, had darkened with time and assumed a dirty, sooty hue. Opposite the door was the chimney, a miserable plaster chimney, with a mantelpiece formed of a rotten old plank. There was a sink between this chimney and one of the windows. The walls, with their decaying, damp-stained plaster falling off by bits, were full of cracks, and turning a dirty black like the ceiling. There was no longer any furniture there; the room seemed abandoned; you could only catch a glimpse of some confused, strange objects, unrecognisable in the heavy obscurity that hung about the corners.

After a spell of silence, the doctor exclaimed "Yes, this is the room; all came from here. Nothing has been changed, with the exception that the furniture has gone. I have tried to picture how it was placed: the beds certainly stood against this wall, opposite the windows; there must have been three of them at least, for the Soubirouses were seven—the father, mother, two boys, and three girls. Think of that! Three beds filling this room! Seven persons living in this small space! All of them buried alive, without air, without light, almost without bread! What frightful misery! What lowly, pity-awaking poverty!"

But he was interrupted. A shadowy form, which Pierre at first took for an old woman, entered. It was a priest, however, the curate of the parish, who now occupied the house. He was acquainted with the doctor.

"I heard your voice, Monsieur Chassaigne, and came down," said he. "So there you are, showing the room again?"

"Just so, Monsieur l' Abbe; I took the liberty. It does not inconvenience you?"

"Oh! not at all, not at all! Come as often as you please, and bring other people."

He laughed in an engaging manner, and bowed to Pierre, who, astonished by this quiet carelessness, observed: "The people who come, however, must sometimes plague you?"

The curate in his turn seemed surprised. "Indeed, no! Nobody comes. You see the place is scarcely known. Every one remains over there at the Grotto. I leave the door open so as not to be worried. But days and days often pass without my hearing even the sound of a mouse."

Pierre's eyes were becoming more and more accustomed to the obscurity; and among the vague, perplexing objects which filled the corners, he ended by distinguishing some old barrels, remnants of fowl cages, and broken tools, a lot of rubbish such as is swept away and thrown to the bottom of cellars. Hanging from the rafters, moreover, were some provisions, a salad basket full of eggs, and several bunches of big pink onions.

"And, from what I see," resumed Pierre, with a slight shudder, "you have thought that you might make use of the room?"

The curate was beginning to feel uncomfortable. "Of course, that's it," said he. "What can one do? The house is so small, I have so little space. And then you can't imagine how damp it is here; it is altogether impossible to occupy the room. And so, mon Dieu, little by little all this has accumulated here by itself, contrary to one's own desire."

"It has become a lumber-room," concluded Pierre.

"Oh no! hardly that. An unoccupied room, and yet in truth, if you insist on it, it is a lumber-room!"

His uneasiness was increasing, mingled with a little shame. Doctor Chassaigne remained silent and did not interfere; but he smiled, and was visibly delighted at his companion's revolt against human ingratitude. Pierre, unable to restrain himself, now continued: "You must excuse me, Monsieur l'Abbe, if I insist. But just reflect that you owe everything to Bernadette; but for her Lourdes would still be one of the least known towns of France. And really it seems to me that out of mere gratitude the parish ought to have transformed this wretched room into a chapel."

"Oh! a chapel!" interrupted the curate. "It is only a question of a human creature: the Church could not make her an object of worship."

"Well, we won't say a chapel, then; but at all events there ought to be some lights and flowers—bouquets of roses constantly renewed by the piety of the inhabitants and the pilgrims. In a word, I should like some little show of affection—a touching souvenir, a picture of Bernadette—something that would delicately indicate that she deserves to have a place in all hearts. This forgetfulness and desertion are shocking. It is monstrous that so much dirt should have been allowed to accumulate!"

The curate, a poor, thoughtless, nervous man, at once adopted Pierre's views: "In reality, you are a thousand times right," said he; "but I myself have no power, I can do nothing. Whenever they ask me for the room, to set it to rights, I will give it up and remove my barrels, although I really don't know where else to put them. Only, I repeat, it does not depend on me. I can do nothing, nothing at all!" Then, under the pretext that he had to go out, he hastened to take leave and run away again, saying to Doctor Chassaigne: "Remain, remain as long as you please; you are never in my way."

When the doctor once more found himself alone with Pierre he caught hold of both his hands with effusive delight. "Ah, my dear child," said he, "how pleased you have made me! How admirably you expressed to him all that has been boiling in my own heart so long! Like you, I thought of bringing some roses here every morning. I should have simply had the room cleaned, and would have contented myself with placing two large bunches of roses on the mantelpiece; for you know that I have long felt deep affection for Bernadette, and it seemed to me that those roses would be like the very flowering and perfume of her memory. Only—only—" and so saying he made a despairing gesture, "only courage failed me. Yes, I say courage, no one having yet dared to declare himself openly against the Fathers of the Grotto. One hesitates and recoils in the fear of stirring up a religious scandal. Fancy what a deplorable racket all this would create. And so those who are as indignant as I am are reduced to the necessity of holding their tongues—preferring a continuance of silence to anything else." Then, by way of conclusion, he added: "The ingratitude and rapacity of man, my dear child, are sad things to see. Each time I come into this dim wretchedness, my heart swells and I cannot restrain my tears."

He ceased speaking, and neither of them said another word, both being overcome by the extreme melancholy which the surroundings fostered. They were steeped in gloom. The dampness made them shudder as they stood there amidst the dilapidated walls and the dust of the old rubbish piled upon either side. And the idea returned to them that without Bernadette none of the prodigies which had made Lourdes a town unique in the world would have existed. It was at her voice that the miraculous spring had gushed forth, that the Grotto, bright with candles, had opened. Immense works were executed, new churches rose from the ground, giant-like causeways led up to God. An entire new city was built, as if by enchantment, with gardens, walks, quays, bridges, shops, and hotels. And people from the uttermost parts of the earth flocked thither in crowds, and the rain of millions fell with such force and so abundantly that the young city seemed likely to increase indefinitely—to fill the whole valley, from one to the other end of the mountains. If Bernadette had been suppressed none of those things would have existed, the extraordinary story would have relapsed into nothingness, old unknown Lourdes would still have been plunged in the sleep of ages at the foot of its castle. Bernadette was the sole labourer and creatress; and yet this room, whence she had set out on the day she beheld the Virgin, this cradle, indeed, of the miracle and of all the marvellous fortune of the town, was disdained, left a prey to vermin, good only for a lumber-room, where onions and empty barrels were put away.

Then the other side of the question vividly appeared in Pierre's mind, and he again seemed to see the triumph which he had just witnessed, the exaltation of the Grotto and Basilica, while Marie, dragging her little car, ascended behind the Blessed Sacrament, amidst the clamour of the multitude. But the Grotto especially shone out before him. It was no longer the wild, rocky cavity before which the child had formerly knelt on the deserted bank of the torrent; it was a chapel, transformed and enriched, a chapel illumined by a vast number of candles, where nations marched past in procession. All the noise, all the brightness, all the adoration, all the money, burst forth there in a splendour of constant victory. Here, at the cradle, in this dark, icy hole, there was not a soul, not a taper, not a hymn, not a flower. Of the infrequent visitors who came thither, none knelt or prayed. All that a few tender-hearted pilgrims had done in their desire to carry away a souvenir had been to reduce to dust, between their fingers, the half-rotten plank serving as a mantelshelf. The clergy ignored the existence of this spot of misery, which the processions ought to have visited as they might visit a station of glory. It was there that the poor child had begun her dream, one cold night, lying in bed between her two sisters, and seized with a fit of her ailment while the whole family was fast asleep. It was thence, too, that she had set out, unconsciously carrying along with her that dream, which was again to be born within her in the broad daylight and to flower so prettily in a vision such as those of the legends. And no one now followed in her footsteps. The manger was forgotten, and left in darkness—that manger where had germed the little humble seed which over yonder was now yielding such prodigious harvests, reaped by the workmen of the last hour amidst the sovereign pomp of ceremonies.

Pierre, whom the great human emotion of the story moved to tears, at last summed up his thoughts in three words, saying in a low voice, "It is Bethlehem."

"Yes," remarked Doctor Chassaigne, in his turn, "it is the wretched lodging, the chance refuge, where new religions are born of suffering and pity. And at times I ask myself if all is not better thus: if it is not better that this room should remain in its actual state of wretchedness and abandonment. It seems to me that Bernadette has nothing to lose by it, for I love her all the more when I come to spend an hour here."

He again became silent, and then made a gesture of revolt: "But no, no! I cannot forgive it—this ingratitude sets me beside myself. I told you I was convinced that Bernadette had freely gone to cloister herself at Nevers. But although no one smuggled her away, what a relief it was for those whom she had begun to inconvenience here! And they are the same men, so anxious to be the absolute masters, who at the present time endeavour by all possible means to wrap her memory in silence. Ah! my dear child, if I were to tell you all!"

Little by little he spoke out and relieved himself. Those Fathers of the Grotto, who showed such greed in trading on the work of Bernadette, dreaded her still more now that she was dead than they had done whilst she was alive. So long as she had lived, their great terror had assuredly been that she might return to Lourdes to claim a portion of the spoil; and her humility alone reassured them, for she was in nowise of a domineering disposition, and had herself chosen the dim abode of renunciation where she was destined to pass away. But at present their fears had increased at the idea that a will other than theirs might bring the relics of the visionary back to Lourdes; that, thought had, indeed, occurred to the municipal council immediately after her death; the town had wished to raise a tomb, and there had been talk of opening a subscription. The Sisters of Nevers, however, formally refused to give up the body, which they said belonged to them. Everyone felt that the Sisters were acting under the influence of the Fathers, who were very uneasy, and energetically bestirred themselves to prevent by all means in their power the return of those venerated ashes, in whose presence at Lourdes they foresaw a possible competition with the Grotto itself. Could they have imagined some such threatening occurrence as this—a monumental tomb in the cemetery, pilgrims proceeding thither in procession, the sick feverishly kissing the marble, and miracles being worked there amidst a holy fervour? This would have been disastrous rivalry, a certain displacement of all the present devotion and prodigies. And the great, the sole fear, still and ever returned to them, that of having to divide the spoils, of seeing the money go elsewhere should the town, now taught by experience, know how to turn the tomb to account.

The Fathers were even credited with a scheme of profound craftiness. They were supposed to have the secret idea of reserving Bernadette's remains for themselves; the Sisters of Nevers having simply undertaken to keep it for them within the peaceful precincts of their chapel. Only, they were waiting, and would not bring it back until the affluence of the pilgrims should decrease. What was the use of a solemn return at present, when crowds flocked to the place without interruption and in increasing numbers? Whereas, when the extraordinary success of Our Lady of Lourdes should decline, like everything else in this world, one could imagine what a reawakening of faith would attend the solemn, resounding ceremony at which Christendom would behold the relics of the chosen one take possession of the soil whence she had made so many marvels spring. And the miracles would then begin again on the marble of her tomb before the Grotto or in the choir of the Basilica.

"You may search," continued Doctor Chassaigne, "but you won't find a single official picture of Bernadette at Lourdes. Her portrait is sold, but it is hung no where, in no sanctuary. It is systematic forgetfulness, the same sentiment of covert uneasiness as that which has wrought silence and abandonment in this sad chamber where we are. In the same way as they are afraid of worship at her tomb, so are they afraid of crowds coming and kneeling here, should two candles burn or a couple of bouquets of roses bloom upon this chimney. And if a paralytic woman were to rise shouting that she was cured, what a scandal would arise, how disturbed would be those good traders of the Grotto on seeing their monopoly seriously threatened! They are the masters, and the masters they intend to remain; they will not part with any portion of the magnificent farm that they have acquired and are working. Nevertheless they tremble—yes, they tremble at the memory of the workers of the first hour, of that little girl who is still so great in death, and for whose huge inheritance they burn with such greed that after having sent her to live at Nevers, they dare not even bring back her corpse, but leave it imprisoned beneath the flagstones of a convent!"

Ah! how wretched was the fate of that poor creature, who had been cut off from among the living, and whose corpse in its turn was condemned to exile! And how Pierre pitied her, that daughter of misery, who seemed to have been chosen only that she might suffer in her life and in her death! Even admitting that an unique, persistent will had not compelled her to disappear, still guarding her even in her tomb, what a strange succession of circumstances there had been—how it seemed as if someone, uneasy at the idea of the immense power she might grasp, had jealously sought to keep her out of the way! In Pierre's eyes she remained the chosen one, the martyr; and if he could no longer believe, if the history of this unfortunate girl sufficed to complete within him the ruin of his faith, it none the less upset him in all his brotherly love for mankind by revealing a new religion to him, the only one which might still fill his heart, the religion of life, of human sorrow.

Just then, before leaving the room, Doctor Chassaigne exclaimed: "And it's here that one must believe, my dear child. Do you see this obscure hole, do you think of the resplendent Grotto, of the triumphant Basilica, of the town built, of the world created, the crowds that flock to Lourdes! And if Bernadette was only hallucinated, only an idiot, would not the outcome be more astonishing, more inexplicable still? What! An idiot's dream would have sufficed to stir up nations like this! No! no! The Divine breath which alone can explain prodigies passed here."

Pierre was on the point of hastily replying "Yes!" It was true, a breath had passed there, the sob of sorrow, the inextinguishable yearning towards the Infinite of hope. If the dream of a suffering child had sufficed to attract multitudes, to bring about a rain of millions and raise a new city from the soil, was it not because this dream in a measure appeased the hunger of poor mankind, its insatiable need of being deceived and consoled? She had once more opened the Unknown, doubtless at a favourable moment both socially and historically; and the crowds had rushed towards it. Oh! to take refuge in mystery, when reality is so hard, to abandon oneself to the miraculous, since cruel nature seems merely one long injustice! But although you may organise the Unknown, reduce it to dogmas, make revealed religions of it, there is never anything at the bottom of it beyond the appeal of suffering, the cry of life, demanding health, joy, and fraternal happiness, and ready to accept them in another world if they cannot be obtained on earth. What use is it to believe in dogmas? Does it not suffice to weep and love?

Pierre, however, did not discuss the question. He withheld the answer that was on his lips, convinced, moreover, that the eternal need of the supernatural would cause eternal faith to abide among sorrowing mankind. The miraculous, which could not be verified, must be a food necessary to human despair. Besides, had he not vowed in all charity that he would not wound anyone with his doubts?

"What a prodigy, isn't it?" repeated the doctor.

"Certainly," Pierre ended by answering. "The whole human drama has been played, all the unknown forces have acted in this poor room, so damp and dark."

They remained there a few minutes more in silence; they walked round the walls, raised their eyes toward the smoky ceiling, and cast a final glance at the narrow, greenish yard. Truly it was a heart-rending sight, this poverty of the cobweb level, with its dirty old barrels, its worn-out tools, its refuse of all kinds rotting in the corners in heaps. And without adding a word they at last slowly retired, feeling extremely sad.

It was only in the street that Doctor Chassaigne seemed to awaken. He gave a slight shudder and hastened his steps, saying: "It is not finished, my dear child; follow me. We are now going to look at the other great iniquity." He referred to Abbe Peyramale and his church.

They crossed the Place du Porche and turned into the Rue Saint Pierre; a few minutes would suffice them. But their conversation had again fallen on the Fathers of the Grotto, on the terrible, merciless war waged by Father Sempe against the former Cure of Lourdes. The latter had been vanquished, and had died in consequence, overcome by feelings of frightful bitterness; and, after thus killing him by grief, they had completed the destruction of his church, which he had left unfinished, without a roof, open to the wind and to the rain. With what a glorious dream had that monumental edifice filled the last year of the Cure's life! Since he had been dispossessed of the Grotto, driven from the work of Our Lady of Lourdes, of which he, with Bernadette, had been the first artisan, his church had become his revenge, his protestation, his own share of the glory, the House of the Lord where he would triumph in his sacred vestments, and whence he would conduct endless processions in compliance with the formal desire of the Blessed Virgin. Man of authority and domination as he was at bottom, a pastor of the multitude, a builder of temples, he experienced a restless delight in hurrying on the work, with the lack of foresight of an eager man who did not allow indebtedness to trouble him, but was perfectly contented so long as he always had a swarm of workmen busy on the scaffoldings. And thus he saw his church rise up, and pictured it finished, one bright summer morning, all new in the rising sun.

Ah! that vision constantly evoked gave him courage for the struggle, amidst the underhand, murderous designs by which he felt himself to be enveloped. His church, towering above the vast square, at last rose in all its colossal majesty. He had decided that it should be in the Romanesque style, very large, very simple, its nave nearly three hundred feet long, its steeple four hundred and sixty feet high. It shone out resplendently in the clear sunlight, freed on the previous day of the last scaffolding, and looking quite smart in its newness, with its broad courses of stone disposed with perfect regularity. And, in thought, he sauntered around it, charmed with its nudity, its stupendous candour, its chasteness recalling that of a virgin child, for there was not a piece of sculpture, not an ornament that would have uselessly loaded it. The roofs of the nave, transept, and apse were of equal height above the entablature, which was decorated with simple mouldings. In the same way the apertures in the aisles and nave had no other adornments than archivaults with mouldings, rising above the piers. He stopped in thought before the great coloured glass windows of the transept, whose roses were sparkling; and passing round the building he skirted the semicircular apse against which stood the vestry building with its two rows of little windows; and then he returned, never tiring of his contemplation of that regal ordonnance, those great lines standing out against the blue sky, those superposed roofs, that enormous mass of stone, whose solidity promised to defy centuries. But, when he closed his eyes he, above all else, conjured up, with rapturous pride, a vision of the facade and steeple; down below, the three portals, the roofs of the two lateral ones forming terraces, while from the central one, in the very middle of the facade, the steeple boldly sprang. Here again columns resting on piers supported archivaults with simple mouldings. Against the gable, at a point where there was a pinnacle, and between the two lofty windows lighting the nave, was a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes under a canopy. Up above, were other bays with freshly painted luffer-boards. Buttresses started from the ground at the four corners of the steeple-base, becoming less and less massive from storey to storey, till they reached the spire, a bold, tapering spire in stone, flanked by four turrets and adorned with pinnacles, and soaring upward till it vanished in the sky. And to the parish priest of Lourdes it seemed as if it were his own fervent soul which had grown and flown aloft with this spire, to testify to his faith throughout the ages, there on high, quite close to God.

At other times another vision delighted him still more. He thought he could see the inside of his church on the day of the first solemn mass he would perform there. The coloured windows threw flashes of fire brilliant like precious stones; the twelve chapels, the aisles, were beaming with lighted candles. And he was at the high altar of marble and gold; and the fourteen columns of the nave in single blocks of Pyrenean marble, magnificent marble purchased with money that had come from the four corners of Christendom, rose up supporting the vaulted roof, while the sonorous voices of the organs filled the whole building with a hymn of joy. A multitude of the faithful was gathered there, kneeling on the flags in front of the choir, which was screened by ironwork as delicate as lace, and covered with admirably carved wood. The pulpit, the regal present of a great lady, was a marvel of art cut in massive oak. The baptismal fonts had been hewn out of hard stone by an artist of great talent. Pictures by masters ornamented the walls. Crosses, pyxes, precious monstrances, sacred vestments, similar to suns, were piled up in the vestry cupboards. And what a dream it was to be the pontiff of such a temple, to reign there after having erected it with passion, to bless the crowds who hastened to it from the entire earth, while the flying peals from the steeple told the Grotto and Basilica that they had over there, in old Lourdes, a rival, a victorious sister, in whose great nave God triumphed also!

After following the Rue Saint Pierre for a moment, Doctor Chassaigne and his companion turned into the little Rue de Langelle.

"We are coming to it," said the doctor. But though Pierre looked around him he could see no church. There were merely some wretched hovels, a whole district of poverty, littered with foul buildings. At length, however, at the bottom of a blind alley, he perceived a remnant of the half-rotten palings which still surrounded the vast square site bordered by the Rue Saint Pierre, the Rue de Bagneres, the Rue de Langelle, and the Rue des Jardins.

"We must turn to the left," continued the doctor, who had entered a narrow passage among the rubbish. "Here we are!"

And the ruin suddenly appeared amidst the ugliness and wretchedness that masked it.

The whole great carcase of the nave and the aisles, the transept and the apse was standing. The walls rose on all sides to the point where the vaulting would have begun. You entered as into a real church, you could walk about at ease, identifying all the usual parts of an edifice of this description. Only when you raised your eyes you saw the sky; the roofs were wanting, the rain could fall and the wind blow there freely. Some fifteen years previously the works had been abandoned, and things had remained in the same state as the last workman had left them. What struck you first of all were the ten pillars of the nave and the four pillars of the choir, those magnificent columns of Pyrenean marble, each of a single block, which had been covered with a casing of planks in order to protect them from damage. The bases and capitals were still in the rough, awaiting the sculptors. And these isolated columns, thus cased in wood, had a mournful aspect indeed. Moreover, a dismal sensation filled you at sight of the whole gaping enclosure, where grass had sprung up all over the ravaged, bumpy soil of the aisles and the nave, a thick cemetery grass, through which the women of the neighbourhood had ended by making paths. They came in to spread out their washing there. And even now a collection of poor people's washing—thick sheets, shirts in shreds, and babies' swaddling clothes—was fast drying in the last rays of the sun, which glided in through the broad, empty bays.

Slowly, without speaking, Pierre and Doctor Chassaigne walked round the inside of the church. The ten chapels of the aisles formed a species of compartments full of rubbish and remnants. The ground of the choir had been cemented, doubtless to protect the crypt below against infiltrations; but unfortunately the vaults must be sinking; there was a hollow there which the storm of the previous night had transformed into a little lake. However, it was these portions of the transept and the apse which had the least suffered. Not a stone had moved; the great central rose windows above the triforium seemed to be awaiting their coloured glass, while some thick planks, forgotten atop of the walls of the apse, might have made anyone think that the workmen would begin covering it the next day. But, when Pierre and the doctor had retraced their steps, and went out to look at the facade, the lamentable woefulness of the young ruin was displayed to their gaze. On this side, indeed, the works had not been carried forward to anything like the same extent: the porch with its three portals alone was built, and fifteen years of abandonment had sufficed for the winter weather to eat into the sculptures, the small columns and the archivaults, with a really singular destructive effect, as though the stones, deeply penetrated, destroyed, had melted away beneath tears. The heart grieved at the sight of the decay which had attacked the work before it was even finished. Not yet to be, and nevertheless to crumble away in this fashion under the sky! To be arrested in one's colossal growth, and simply strew the weeds with ruins!

They returned to the nave, and were overcome by the frightful sadness which this assassination of a monument provoked. The spacious plot of waste ground inside was littered with the remains of scaffoldings, which had been pulled down when half rotten, in fear lest their fall might crush people; and everywhere amidst the tall grass were boards, put-logs, moulds for arches, mingled with bundles of old cord eaten away by damp. There was also the long narrow carcase of a crane rising up like a gibbet. Spade-handles, pieces of broken wheelbarrows, and heaps of greenish bricks, speckled with moss and wild convolvuli in bloom, were still lying among the forgotten materials. In the beds of nettles you here and there distinguished the rails of a little railway laid down for the trucks, one of which was lying overturned in a corner. But the saddest sight in all this death of things was certainly the portable engine which had remained in the shed that sheltered it. For fifteen years it had been standing there cold and lifeless. A part of the roof of the shed had ended by falling in upon it, and now the rain drenched it at every shower. A bit of the leather harness by which the crane was worked hung down, and seemed to bind the engine like a thread of some gigantic spider's web. And its metal-work, its steel and copper, was also decaying, as if rusted by lichens, covered with the vegetation of old age, whose yellowish patches made it look like a very ancient, grass-grown machine which the winters had preyed upon. This lifeless engine, this cold engine with its empty firebox and its silent boiler, was like the very soul of the departed labour vainly awaiting the advent of some great charitable heart, whose coming through the eglantine and the brambles would awaken this sleeping church in the wood from its heavy slumber of ruin.

At last Doctor Chassaigne spoke: "Ah!" he said, "when one thinks that fifty thousand francs would have sufficed to prevent such a disaster! With fifty thousand francs the roof could have been put on, the heavy work would have been saved, and one could have waited patiently. But they wanted to kill the work just as they had killed the man." With a gesture he designated the Fathers of the Grotto, whom he avoided naming. "And to think," he continued, "that their annual receipts are eight hundred thousand francs. However, they prefer to send presents to Rome to propitiate powerful friends there."

In spite of himself, he was again opening hostilities against the adversaries of Cure Peyramale. The whole story caused a holy anger of justice to haunt him. Face to face with those lamentable ruins, he returned to the facts—the enthusiastic Cure starting on the building of his beloved church, and getting deeper and deeper into debt, whilst Father Sempe, ever on the lookout, took advantage of each of his mistakes, discrediting him with the Bishop, arresting the flow of offerings, and finally stopping the works. Then, after the conquered man was dead, had come interminable lawsuits, lawsuits lasting fifteen years, which gave the winters time to devour the building. And now it was in such a woeful state, and the debt had risen to such an enormous figure, that all seemed over. The slow death, the death of the stones, was becoming irrevocable. The portable engine beneath its tumbling shed would fall to pieces, pounded by the rain and eaten away by the moss.

"I know very well that they chant victory," resumed the doctor; "that they alone remain. It is just what they wanted—to be the absolute masters, to have all the power, all the money for themselves alone. I may tell you that their terror of competition has even made them intrigue against the religious Orders that have attempted to come to Lourdes. Jesuits, Dominicans, Benedictines, Capuchins, and Carmelites have made applications at various times, and the Fathers of the Grotto have always succeeded in keeping them away. They only tolerate the female Orders, and will only have one flock. And the town belongs to them; they have opened shop there, and sell God there wholesale and retail!"

Walking slowly, he had while speaking returned to the middle of the nave, amidst the ruins, and with a sweeping wave of the arm he pointed to all the devastation surrounding him. "Look at this sadness, this frightful wretchedness! Over yonder the Rosary and Basilica cost them three millions of francs."*

* About 580,000 dollars.

Then, as in Bernadette's cold, dark room, Pierre saw the Basilica rise before him, radiant in its triumph. It was not here that you found the realisation of the dream of Cure Peyramale, officiating and blessing kneeling multitudes while the organs resounded joyfully. The Basilica, over yonder, appeared, vibrating with the pealing of its bells, clamorous with the superhuman joy of an accomplished miracle, all sparkling with its countless lights, its banners, its lamps, its hearts of silver and gold, its clergy attired in gold, and its monstrance akin to a golden star. It flamed in the setting sun, it touched the heavens with its spire, amidst the soaring of the milliards of prayers which caused its walls to quiver. Here, however, was the church that had died before being born, the church placed under interdict by a mandamus of the Bishop, the church falling into dust, and open to the four winds of heaven. Each storm carried away a little more of the stones, big flies buzzed all alone among the nettles which had invaded the nave; and there were no other devotees than the poor women of the neighbourhood, who came thither to turn their sorry linen, spread upon the grass.

It seemed amidst the mournful silence as though a low voice were sobbing, perhaps the voice of the marble columns weeping over their useless beauty under their wooden shirts. At times birds would fly across the deserted apse uttering a shrill cry. Bands of enormous rats which had taken refuge under bits of the lowered scaffoldings would fight, and bite, and bound out of their holes in a gallop of terror. And nothing could have been more heart-rending than the sight of this pre-determined ruin, face to face with its triumphant rival, the Basilica, which beamed with gold.

Again Doctor Chassaigne curtly said, "Come."

They left the church, and following the left aisle, reached a door, roughly fashioned out of a few planks nailed together; and, when they had passed down a half-demolished wooden staircase, the steps of which shook beneath their feet, they found themselves in the crypt.

It was a low vault, with squat arches, on exactly the same plan as the choir. The thick, stunted columns, left in the rough, also awaited their sculptors. Materials were lying about, pieces of wood were rotting on the beaten ground, the whole vast hall was white with plaster in the abandonment in which unfinished buildings are left. At the far end, three bays, formerly glazed, but in which not a pane of glass remained, threw a clear, cold light upon the desolate bareness of the walls.

And there, in the middle, lay Cure Peyramale's corpse. Some pious friends had conceived the touching idea of thus burying him in the crypt of his unfinished church. The tomb stood on a broad step and was all marble. The inscriptions, in letters of gold, expressed the feelings of the subscribers, the cry of truth and reparation that came from the monument itself. You read on the face: "This tomb has been erected by the aid of pious offerings from the entire universe to the blessed memory of the great servant of Our Lady of Lourdes." On the right side were these words from a Brief of Pope Pius IX.: "You have entirely devoted yourself to erecting a temple to the Mother of God." And on the left were these words from the New Testament: "Happy are they who suffer persecution for justice' sake." Did not these inscriptions embody the true plaint, the legitimate hope of the vanquished man who had fought so long in the sole desire of strictly executing the commands of the Virgin as transmitted to him by Bernadette? She, Our Lady of Lourdes, was there personified by a slender statuette, standing above the commemorative inscription, against the naked wall whose only decorations were a few bead wreaths hanging from nails. And before the tomb, as before the Grotto, were five or six benches in rows, for the faithful who desired to sit down.

But with another gesture of sorrowful compassion, Doctor Chassaigne had silently pointed out to Pierre a huge damp spot which was turning the wall at the far end quite green. Pierre remembered the little lake which he had noticed up above on the cracked cement flooring of the choir—quite a quantity of water left by the storm of the previous night. Infiltration had evidently commenced, a perfect stream ran down, invading the crypt, whenever there was heavy rain. And they both felt a pang at their hearts when they perceived that the water was trickling along the vaulted roof in narrow threads, and thence falling in large, regular rhythmical drops upon the tomb. The doctor could not restrain a groan. "Now it rains," he said; "it rains on him!"

Pierre remained motionless, in a kind of awe. In the presence of that falling water, at the thought of the blasts which must rush at winter time through the glassless windows, that corpse appeared to him both woeful and tragic. It acquired a fierce grandeur, lying there alone in its splendid marble tomb, amidst all the rubbish, at the bottom of the crumbling ruins of its own church. It was the solitary guardian, the dead sleeper and dreamer watching over the empty spaces, open to all the birds of night. It was the mute, obstinate, eternal protest, and it was expectation also. Cure Peyramale, stretched in his coffin, having all eternity before him to acquire patience, there, without weariness, awaited the workmen who would perhaps return thither some fine April morning. If they should take ten years to do so, he would be there, and if it should take them a century, he would be there still. He was waiting for the rotten scaffoldings up above, among the grass of the nave, to be resuscitated like the dead, and by the force of some miracle to stand upright once more, along the walls. He was waiting, too, for the moss-covered engine to become all at once burning hot, recover its breath, and raise the timbers for the roof. His beloved enterprise, his gigantic building, was crumbling about his head, and yet with joined hands and closed eyes he was watching over its ruins, watching and waiting too.

In a low voice, the doctor finished the cruel story, telling how, after persecuting Cure Peyramale and his work, they persecuted his tomb. There had formerly been a bust of the Cure there, and pious hands had kept a little lamp burning before it. But a woman had one day fallen with her face to the earth, saying that she had perceived the soul of the deceased, and thereupon the Fathers of the Grotto were in a flutter. Were miracles about to take place there? The sick already passed entire days there, seated on the benches before the tomb. Others knelt down, kissed the marble, and prayed to be cured. And at this a feeling of terror arose: supposing they should be cured, supposing the Grotto should find a competitor in this martyr, lying all alone, amidst the old tools left there by the masons! The Bishop of Tarbes, informed and influenced, thereupon published the mandamus which placed the church under interdict, forbidding all worship there and all pilgrimages and processions to the tomb of the former priest of Lourdes. As in the case of Bernadette, his memory was proscribed, his portrait could be found, officially, nowhere. In the same manner as they had shown themselves merciless against the living man, so did the Fathers prove merciless to his memory. They pursued him even in his tomb. They alone, again nowadays, prevented the works of the church from being proceeded with, by raising continual obstacles, and absolutely refusing to share their rich harvest of alms. And they seemed to be waiting for the winter rains to fall and complete the work of destruction, for the vaulted roof of the crypt, the walls, the whole gigantic pile to crumble down upon the tomb of the martyr, upon the body of the defeated man, so that he might be buried beneath them and at last pounded to dust!

"Ah!" murmured the doctor, "I, who knew him so valiant, so enthusiastic in all noble labour! Now, you see it, it rains, it rains on him!"

Painfully, he set himself on his knees and found relief in a long prayer.

Pierre, who could not pray, remained standing. Compassionate sorrow was overflowing from his heart. He listened to the heavy drops from the roof as one by one they broke on the tomb with a slow rhythmical pit-a-pat, which seemed to be numbering the seconds of eternity, amidst the profound silence. And he reflected on the eternal misery of this world, on the choice which suffering makes in always falling on the best. The two great makers of Our Lady of Lourdes, Bernadette and Cure Peyramale, rose up in the flesh again before him, like woeful victims, tortured during their lives and exiled after their deaths. That alone, indeed, would have completed within him the destruction of his faith; for the Bernadette, whom he had just found at the end of his researches, was but a human sister, loaded with every dolour. But none the less he preserved a tender brotherly veneration for her, and two tears slowly trickled down his cheeks.

THE FIFTH DAY

I. EGOTISM AND LOVE

AGAIN that night Pierre, at the Hotel of the Apparitions, was unable to obtain a wink of sleep. After calling at the hospital to inquire after Marie, who, since her return from the procession, had been soundly enjoying the delicious, restoring sleep of a child, he had gone to bed himself feeling anxious at the prolonged absence of M. de Guersaint. He had expected him at latest at dinner-time, but probably some mischance had detained him at Gavarnie; and he thought how disappointed Marie would be if her father were not there to embrace her the first thing in the morning. With a man like M. de Guersaint, so pleasantly heedless and so hare-brained, everything was possible, every fear might be realised.

Perhaps this anxiety had at first sufficed to keep Pierre awake in spite of his great fatigue; but afterwards the nocturnal noises of the hotel had really assumed unbearable proportions. The morrow, Tuesday, was the day of departure, the last day which the national pilgrimage would spend at Lourdes, and the pilgrims no doubt were making the most of their time, coming from the Grotto and returning thither in the middle of the night, endeavouring as it were to force the grace of Heaven by their commotion, and apparently never feeling the slightest need of repose. The doors slammed, the floors shook, the entire building vibrated beneath the disorderly gallop of a crowd. Never before had the walls reverberated with such obstinate coughs, such thick, husky voices. Thus Pierre, a prey to insomnia, tossed about on his bed and continually rose up, beset with the idea that the noise he heard must have been made by M. de Guersaint who had returned. For some minutes he would listen feverishly; but he could only hear the extraordinary sounds of the passage, amid which he could distinguish nothing precisely. Was it the priest, the mother and her three daughters, or the old married couple on his left, who were fighting with the furniture? or was it rather the larger family, or the single gentleman, or the young single woman on his right, whom some incomprehensible occurrences were leading into adventures? At one moment he jumped from his bed, wishing to explore his absent friend's empty room, as he felt certain that some deeds of violence were taking place in it. But although he listened very attentively when he got there, the only sound he could distinguish was the tender caressing murmur of two voices. Then a sudden recollection of Madame Volmar came to him, and he returned shuddering to bed.

At length, when it was broad daylight and Pierre had just fallen asleep, a loud knocking at his door awoke him with a start. This time there could be no mistake, a loud voice broken by sobs was calling "Monsieur l'Abbe! Monsieur l'Abbe! for Heaven's sake wake up!"

Surely it must be M. de Guersaint who had been brought back dead, at least. Quite scared, Pierre ran and opened the door, in his night-shirt, and found himself in the presence of his neighbour, M. Vigneron.

"Oh! for Heaven's sake, Monsieur l'Abbe, dress yourself at once!" exclaimed the assistant head-clerk. "Your holy ministry is required." And he began to relate that he had just got up to see the time by his watch on the mantelpiece, when he had heard some most frightful sighs issuing from the adjoining room, where Madame Chaise slept. She had left the communicating door open in order to be more with them, as she pleasantly expressed it. Accordingly he had hastened in, and flung the shutters open so as to admit both light and air. "And what a sight, Monsieur l'Abbe!" he continued. "Our poor aunt lying on her bed, nearly purple in the face already, her mouth wide open in a vain effort to breathe, and her hands fumbling with the sheet. It's her heart complaint, you know. Come, come at once, Monsieur l'Abbe, and help her, I implore you!"

Pierre, utterly bewildered, could find neither his breeches nor his cassock. "Of course, of course I'll come with you," said he. "But I have not what is necessary for administering the last sacraments."

M. Vigneron had assisted him to dress, and was now stooping down looking for his slippers. "Never mind," he said, "the mere sight of you will assist her in her last moments, if Heaven has this affliction in store for us. Here! put these on your feet, and follow me at once—oh! at once!"

He went off like a gust of wind and plunged into the adjoining room. All the doors remained wide open. The young priest, who followed him, noticed nothing in the first room, which was in an incredible state of disorder, beyond the half-naked figure of little Gustave, who sat on the sofa serving him as a bed, motionless, very pale, forgotten, and shivering amid this drama of inexorable death. Open bags littered the floor, the greasy remains of supper soiled the table, the parents' bed seemed devastated by the catastrophe, its coverlets torn off and lying on the floor. And almost immediately afterwards he caught sight of the mother, who had hastily enveloped herself in an old yellow dressing-gown, standing with a terrified look in the inner room.

"Well, my love, well, my love?" repeated M. Vigneron, in stammering accents.

With a wave of her hand and without uttering a word Madame Vigneron drew their attention to Madame Chaise, who lay motionless, with her head sunk in the pillow and her hands stiffened and twisted. She was blue in the face, and her mouth gaped, as though with the last great gasp that had come from her.

Pierre bent over her. Then in a low voice he said: "She is dead!"

Dead! The word rang through the room where a heavy silence reigned, and the husband and wife looked at each other in amazement, bewilderment. So it was over? The aunt had died before Gustave, and the youngster inherited her five hundred thousand francs. How many times had they dwelt on that dream; whose sudden realisation dumfounded them? How many times had despair overcome them when they feared that the poor child might depart before her? Dead! Good heavens! was it their fault? Had they really prayed to the Blessed Virgin for this? She had shown herself so good to them that they trembled at the thought that they had not been able to express a wish without its being granted. In the death of the chief clerk, so suddenly carried off so that they might have his place, they had already recognised the powerful hand of Our Lady of Lourdes. Had she again loaded them with favours, listening even to the unconscious dreams of their desire? Yet they had never desired anyone's death; they were worthy people incapable of any bad action, loving their relations, fulfilling their religious duties, going to confession, partaking of the communion like other people without any ostentation. Whenever they thought of those five hundred thousand francs, of their son who might be the first to go, and of the annoyance it would be to them to see another and far less worthy nephew inherit that fortune, it was merely in the innermost recesses of their hearts, in short, quite innocently and naturally. Certainly they had thought of it when they were at the Grotto, but was not the Blessed Virgin wisdom itself? Did she not know far better than ourselves what she ought to do for the happiness of both the living and the dead?

Then Madame Vigneron in all sincerity burst into tears and wept for the sister whom she loved so much. "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," she said, "I saw her expire; she passed away before my eyes. What a misfortune that you were not here sooner to receive her soul! She died without a priest; your presence would have consoled her so much."

A prey also to emotion, his eyes full of tears, Vigneron sought to console his wife. "Your sister was a saint," said he; "she communicated again yesterday morning, and you need have no anxiety concerning her; her soul has gone straight to heaven. No doubt, if Monsieur l'Abbe had been here in time she would have been glad to see him. But what would you? Death was quicker. I went at once, and really there is nothing for us to reproach ourselves with."

Then, turning towards the priest, he added "Monsieur l'Abbe, it was her excessive piety which certainly hastened her end. Yesterday, at the Grotto, she had a bad attack, which was a warning. And in spite of her fatigue she obstinately followed the procession afterwards. I thought then that she could not last long. Yet, out of delicacy, one did not like to say anything to her, for fear of frightening her."

Pierre gently knelt down and said the customary prayers, with that human emotion which was his nearest approach to faith in the presence of eternal life and eternal death, both so pitiful. Then, as he remained kneeling a little longer, he overheard snatches of the conversation around him.

Little Gustave, forgotten on his couch amid the disorder of the other room, must have lost patience, for he had begun to cry and call out, "Mamma! mamma! mamma!"

At length Madame Vigneron went to quiet him, and it occurred to her to carry him in her arms to kiss his poor aunt for the last time. But at first he struggled and refused, crying so much that M. Vigneron was obliged to interfere and try to make him ashamed of himself. What! he who was never frightened of anything! who bore suffering with the courage of a grown-up man! And to think it was a question of kissing his poor aunt, who had always been so kind, whose last thought must most certainly have been for him!

"Give him to me," said he to his wife; "he's going to be good."

Gustave ended by clinging to his father's neck. He came shivering in his night-shirt, displaying his wretched little body devoured by scrofula. It seemed indeed as though the miraculous water of the piscinas, far from curing him, had freshened the sore on his back; whilst his scraggy leg hung down inertly like a dry stick.

"Kiss her," resumed M. Vigneron.

The child leant forward and kissed his aunt on the forehead. It was not death which upset him and caused him to struggle. Since he had been in the room he had been looking at the dead woman with an air of quiet curiosity. He did not love her, he had suffered on her account so long. He had the ideas and feelings of a man, and the weight of them was stifling him as, like his complaint, they developed and became more acute. He felt full well that he was too little, that children ought not to understand what only concerns their elders.

However, his father, seating himself out of the way, kept him on his knee, whilst his mother closed the window and lit the two candles on the mantelpiece. "Ah! my poor dear," murmured M. Vigneron, feeling that he must say something, "it's a cruel loss for all of us. Our trip is now completely spoilt; this is our last day, for we start this afternoon. And the Blessed Virgin, too, was showing herself so kind to us."

However, seeing his son's surprised look, a look of infinite sadness and reproach, he hastened to add: "Yes, of course, I know that she hasn't yet quite cured you. But we must not despair of her kindness. She loves us so well, she shows us so many favours that she will certainly end by curing you, since that is now the only favour that remains for her to grant us."

Madame Vigneron, who was listening, drew near and said: "How happy we should have been to have returned to Paris all three hale and hearty! Nothing is ever perfect!"

"I say!" suddenly observed Monsieur Vigneron, "I sha'n't be able to leave with you this afternoon, on account of the formalities which have to be gone through. I hope that my return ticket will still be available to-morrow!"

They were both getting over the frightful shock, feeling a sense of relief in spite of their affection for Madame Chaise; and, in fact, they were already forgetting her, anxious above all things to leave Lourdes as soon as possible, as though the principal object of their journey had been attained. A decorous, unavowed delight was slowly penetrating them.

"When I get back to Paris there will be so much for me to do," continued M. Vigneron. "I, who now only long for repose! All the same I shall remain my three years at the Ministry, until I can retire, especially now that I am certain of the retiring pension of chief clerk. But afterwards—oh! afterwards I certainly hope to enjoy life a bit. Since this money has come to us I shall purchase the estate of Les Billottes, that superb property down at my native place which I have always been dreaming of. And I promise you that I sha'n't find time hanging heavy on my hands in the midst of my horses, my dogs, and my flowers!"

Little Gustave was still on his father's knee, his night-shirt tucked up, his whole wretched misshapen body shivering, and displaying the scragginess of a slowly dying child. When he perceived that his father, now full of his dream of an opulent life, no longer seemed to notice that he was there, he gave one of his enigmatical smiles, in which melancholy was tinged with malice. "But what about me, father?" he asked.

M. Vigneron started, like one aroused from sleep, and did not at first seem to understand. "You, little one? You'll be with us, of course!"

But Gustave gave him a long, straight look, without ceasing to smile with his artful, though woeful lips. "Oh! do you think so?" he asked.

"Of course I think so! You'll be with us, and it will be very nice to be with us."

Uneasy, stammering, unable to find the proper words, M. Vigneron felt a chill come over him when his son shrugged his skinny shoulders with an air of philosophical disdain and answered: "Oh, no! I shall be dead."

And then the terrified father was suddenly able to detect in the child's deep glance the glance of a man who was very aged, very knowing in all things, acquainted with all the abominations of life through having gone through them. What especially alarmed him was the abrupt conviction that this child had always seen into the innermost recesses of his heart, even farther than the things he dared to acknowledge to himself. He could recall that when the little sufferer had been but a baby in his cradle his eyes would frequently be fixed upon his own—and even then those eyes had been rendered so sharp by suffering, endowed, too, with such an extraordinary power of divination, that they had seemed able to dive into the unconscious thoughts buried in the depths of his brain. And by a singular counter-effect all the things that he had never owned to himself he now found in his child's eyes—he beheld them, read them there, against his will. The story of his cupidity lay unfolded before him, his anger at having such a sorry son, his anguish at the idea that Madame Chaise's fortune depended upon such a fragile existence, his eager desire that she might make haste and die whilst the youngster was still there, in order that he might finger the legacy. It was simply a question of days, this duel as to which should go off first. And then, at the end, it still meant death—the youngster must in his turn disappear, whilst he, the father, alone pocketed the cash, and lived joyfully to a good old age. And these frightful things shone forth so clearly from the keen, melancholy, smiling eyes of the poor condemned child, passed from son to father with such evident distinctness, that for a moment it seemed to them that they were shouting them aloud.

However, M. Vigneron struggled against it all, and, averting his head, began energetically protesting: "How! You'll be dead? What an idea! It's absurd to have such ideas as that!"

Meantime, Madame Vigneron was sobbing. "You wicked child," she gasped; "how can you make us so unhappy, when we already have such a cruel loss to deplore?"

Gustave had to kiss them, and to promise them that he would live for their sakes. Yet he did not cease smiling, conscious as he was that a lie is necessary when one does not wish to be too miserable, and quite prepared, moreover, to leave his parents happy behind him, since even the Blessed Virgin herself was powerless to grant him in this world the little happy lot to which each creature should be born.

His mother took him back to bed, and Pierre at length rose up, just as M. Vigneron had finished arranging the chamber of death in a suitable manner. "You'll excuse me, won't you, Monsieur l'Abbe?" said he, accompanying the young priest to the door. "I'm not quite myself. Well, it's an unpleasant time to go through. I must get over it somehow, however."

When Pierre got into the passage he stopped for a moment, listening to a sound of voices which was ascending the stairs. He had just been thinking of M. de Guersaint again, and imagined that he could recognise his voice. However, whilst he stood there waiting, an incident occurred which caused him intense discomfort. The door of the room next to M. de Guersaint's softly opened and a woman, clad in black, slipped into the passage. As she turned, she found herself face to face with Pierre, in such a fashion that it was impossible for them to pretend not to recognise each other.

The woman was Madame Volmar. Six o'clock had not yet struck, and she was going off, hoping that nobody would notice her, with the intention of showing herself at the hospital, and there spending this last morning, in order, in some measure, to justify her journey to Lourdes. When she perceived Pierre, she began to tremble, and, at first, could only stammer: "Oh, Monsieur l'Abbe, Monsieur l'Abbe!"

Then, noticing that the priest had left his door wide open, she seemed to give way to the fever consuming her, to a need of speaking out, explaining things and justifying herself. With her face suffused by a rush of blood she entered the young man's room, whither he had to follow her, greatly disturbed by this strange adventure. And, as he still left the door open, it was she who, in her desire to confide her sorrow and her sin to him, begged that he would close it.

"Oh! I pray you, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "do not judge me too harshly."

He made a gesture as though to reply that he did not allow himself the right to pass judgment upon her.

"But yes, but yes," she responded; "I know very well that you are acquainted with my misfortune. You saw me once in Paris behind the church of La Trinite, and the other day you recognised me on the balcony here! You were aware that I was there—in that room. But if you only knew—ah, if you only knew!"

Her lips were quivering, and tears were welling into her eyes. As he looked at her he was surprised by the extraordinary beauty transfiguring her face. This woman, invariably clad in black, extremely simple, with never a jewel, now appeared to him in all the brilliancy of her passion; no longer drawing back into the gloom, no longer seeking to bedim the lustre of her eyes, as was her wont. She, who at first sight did not seem pretty, but too dark and slender, with drawn features, a large mouth and long nose, assumed, as he now examined her, a troubling charm, a powerful, irresistible beauty. Her eyes especially—her large, magnificent eyes, whose brasiers she usually sought to cover with a veil of indifference—were flaring like torches; and he understood that she should be loved, adored, to madness.

"If you only knew, Monsieur l'Abbe," she continued. "If I were only to tell you all that I have suffered. Doubtless you have suspected something of it, since you are acquainted with my mother-in-law and my husband. On the few occasions when you have called on us you cannot but have understood some of the abominable things which go on in my home, though I have always striven to appear happy in my silent little corner. But to live like that for ten years, to have no existence—never to love, never to be loved—no, no, it was beyond my power!"

And then she related the whole painful story: her marriage with the diamond merchant, a disastrous, though it seemed an advantageous one; her mother-in-law, with the stern soul of a jailer or an executioner, and her husband, a monster of physical ugliness and mental villainy. They imprisoned her, they did not even allow her to look out of a window. They had beaten her, they had pitilessly assailed her in her tastes, her inclinations, in all her feminine weaknesses. She knew that her husband wandered in his affections, and yet if she smiled to a relative, if she had a flower in her corsage on some rare day of gaiety, he would tear it from her, enter into the most jealous rage, and seize and bruise her wrists whilst shouting the most fearful threats. For years and years she had lived in that hell, hoping, hoping still, having within her such a power of life, such an ardent need of affection, that she continued waiting for happiness, ever thinking, at the faintest breath, that it was about to enter.

"I swear to you, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "that I could not do otherwise than I have done. I was too unhappy: my whole being longed for someone who would care for me. And when my friend the first time told me that he loved me it was all over—I was his forever. Ah! to be loved, to be spoken to gently, to have someone near you who is always solicitous and amiable; to know that in absence he thinks of you, that there is a heart somewhere in which you live... Ah! if it be a crime, Monsieur l'Abbe, I cannot, cannot feel remorse for it. I will not even say that I was urged to it; I simply say that it came to me as naturally as my breath, because it was as necessary to my life!"

She had carried her hand to her lips as though to throw a kiss to the world, and Pierre felt deeply disturbed in presence of this lovely woman, who personified all the ardour of human passion, and at the same time a feeling of deep pity began to arise within him.

"Poor woman!" he murmured.

"It is not to the priest that I am confessing," she resumed; "it is to the man that I am speaking, to a man by whom I should greatly like to be understood. No, I am not a believer: religion has not sufficed me. It is said that some women find contentment in it, a firm protection even against all transgressions. But I have ever felt cold in church, weary unto death. Oh! I know very well that it is wrong to feign piety, to mingle religion with my heart affairs. But what would you? I am forced to it. If you saw me in Paris behind La Trinite it was because that church is the only place to which I am allowed to go alone; and if you find me here at Lourdes it is because, in the whole long year, I have but these three days of happiness and freedom."

Again she began to tremble. Hot tears were coursing down her cheeks. A vision of it all arose in Pierre's mind, and, distracted by the thought of the ardent earthly love which possessed this unhappy creature, he again murmured: "Poor woman!"

"And, Monsieur l'Abbe," she continued, "think of the hell to which I am about to return! For weeks and months I live my life of martyrdom without complaint. Another year, another year must go by without a day, an hour of happiness! Ah! I am indeed very unhappy, Monsieur l'Abbe, yet do you not think all the same that I am a good woman?"

He had been deeply moved by her sincere display of mingled grief and passion. He felt in her the breath of universal desire—a sovereign flame. And his compassion overflowed from his heart, and his words were words of pardon. "Madame," he said, "I pity you and respect you infinitely."

Then she spoke no further, but looked at him with her large tear-blurred eyes. And suddenly catching hold of both his hands, she grasped them tightly with her burning fingers. And then she went off, vanishing down the passage as light, as ethereal, as a shadow.

However, Pierre suffered from her presence in that room even more acutely after she had departed. He opened the window wide that the fresh air might carry off the breath of passion which she had left there. Already on the Sunday when he had seen her on the balcony he had been seized with terror at the thought that she personified the revenge of the world and the flesh amidst all the mystical exaltation of immaculate Lourdes. And now his terror was returning to him. Love seemed stronger than faith, and perhaps it was only love that was divine. To love, to belong to one another, to create and continue life—was not that the one sole object of nature outside of all social and religious policies? For a moment he was conscious of the abyss before him: his chastity was his last prop, the very dignity of his spoilt life; and he realised that, if after yielding to his reason he also yielded to his flesh, he would be utterly lost. All his pride of purity, all his strength which he had placed in professional rectitude, thereupon returned to him, and he again vowed that he would never be a man, since he had voluntarily cut himself off from among men.

Seven o'clock was striking, and Pierre did not go back to bed, but began to wash himself, thoroughly enjoying the cool water, which ended by calming his fever. As he finished dressing, the anxious thought of M. de Guersaint recurred to him on hearing a sound of footsteps in the passage. These steps stopped outside his room and someone knocked. With a feeling of relief he went to open the door, but on doing so exclaimed in great surprise "What, it's you! How is it that you're already up, running about to see people?"

Marie stood on the threshold smiling, whilst behind her was Sister Hyacinthe, who had come with her, and who also was smiling, with her lovely, candid eyes.

"Ah! my friend," said the girl, "I could not remain in bed. I sprang out directly I saw the sunshine. I had such a longing to walk, to run and jump about like a child, and I begged and implored so much that Sister was good enough to come with me. I think I should have got out through the window if the door had been closed against me."

Pierre ushered them in, and an indescribable emotion oppressed him as he heard her jest so gaily and saw her move about so freely with such grace and liveliness. She, good heavens! she whom he had seen for years with lifeless legs and colourless face! Since he had left her the day before at the Basilica she had blossomed into full youth and beauty. One night had sufficed for him to find again, developed it is true, the sweet creature whom he had loved so tenderly, the superb, radiant child whom he had embraced so wildly in the by-gone days behind the flowering hedge, beneath the sun-flecked trees.

"How tall and lovely you are, Marie!" said he, in spite of himself.

Then Sister Hyacinthe interposed: "Hasn't the Blessed Virgin done things well, Monsieur l'Abbe? When she takes us in hand, you see, she turns us out as fresh as roses and smelling quite as sweet."

"Ah!" resumed Marie, "I'm so happy; I feel quite strong and well and spotless, as though I had just been born!"

All this was very delicious to Pierre. It seemed to him that the atmosphere was now truly purified of Madame Volmar's presence. Marie filled the room with her candour, with the perfume and brightness of her innocent youth. And yet the joy he felt at the sight of pure beauty and life reflowering was not exempt from sadness. For, after all, the revolt which he had felt in the crypt, the wound of his wrecked life, must forever leave him a bleeding heart. As he gazed upon all that resuscitated grace, as the woman he loved thus reappeared before him in the flower of her youth, he could not but remember that she would never be his, that he belonged no longer to the world, but to the grave. However, he no longer lamented; he experienced a boundless melancholy—a sensation of utter nothingness as he told himself that he was dead, that this dawn of beauty was rising on the tomb in which his manhood slept. It was renunciation, accepted, resolved upon amidst all the desolate grandeur attaching to those lives which are led contrary to nature's law. Then, like the other woman, the impassioned one, Marie took hold of Pierre's hands. But hers were so soft, so fresh, so soothing! She looked at him with so little confusion and a great longing which she dared not express. After a while, however, she summoned up her courage and said: "Will you kiss me, Pierre? It would please me so much."

He shuddered, his heart crushed by this last torture. Ah! the kisses of other days—those kisses which had ever lingered on his lips! Never since had he kissed her, and to-day she was like a sister flinging her arms around his neck. She kissed him with a loud smack on both his cheeks, and offering her own, insisted on his doing likewise to her. So twice, in his turn, he embraced her.

"I, too, Marie," said he, "am pleased, very pleased, I assure you." And then, overcome by emotion, his courage exhausted, whilst at the same time filled with delight and bitterness, he burst into sobs, weeping with his face buried in his hands, like a child seeking to hide its tears.

"Come, come, we must not give way," said Sister Hyacinthe, gaily. "Monsieur l'Abbe would feel too proud if he fancied that we had merely come on his account. M. de Guersaint is about, isn't he?"

Marie raised a cry of deep affection. "Ah! my dear father! After all, it's he who'll be most pleased!"

Thereupon Pierre had to relate that M. de Guersaint had not returned from his excursion to Gavarnie. His increasing anxiety showed itself while he spoke, although he sought to explain his friend's absence, surmising all sorts of obstacles and unforeseen complications. Marie, however, did not seem afraid, but again laughed, saying that her father never could be punctual. Still she was extremely eager for him to see her walking, to find her on her legs again, resuscitated, in the fresh blossoming of her youth.

All at once Sister Hyacinthe, who had gone to lean over the balcony, returned to the room, saying "Here he comes! He's down below, just alighting from his carriage."

"Ah!" cried Marie, with the eager playfulness of a school-girl, "let's give him a surprise. Yes, we must hide, and when he's here we'll show ourselves all of a sudden."

With these words, she hastily dragged Sister Hyacinthe into the adjoining room.

Almost immediately afterwards, M. de Guersaint entered like a whirlwind from the passage, the door communicating with which had been quickly opened by Pierre, and, shaking the young priest's hand, the belated excursionist exclaimed: "Here I am at last! Ah! my friend, you can't have known what to think since four o'clock yesterday, when you expected me back, eh? But you have no idea of the adventures we have had. To begin with, one of the wheels of our landau came off just as we reached Gavarnie; then, yesterday evening—though we managed to start off again—a frightful storm detained us all night long at Saint-Sauveur. I wasn't able to sleep a wink." Then, breaking off, he inquired, "And you, are you all right?"

"I wasn't able to sleep either," said the priest; "they made such a noise in the hotel."

But M. de Guersaint had already started off again: "All the same, it was delightful. I must tell you; you can't imagine it. I was with three delightful churchmen. Abbe des Hermoises is certainly the most charming man I know. Oh! we did laugh—we did laugh!"

Then he again stopped, to inquire, "And how's my daughter?"

Thereupon a clear laugh behind him caused him to turn round, and he remained with his mouth wide open. Marie was there, and was walking, with a look of rapturous delight upon her face, which was beaming with health. He had never for a moment doubted the miracle, and was not in the least surprised that it had taken place, for he had returned with the conviction that everything would end well, and that he would surely find her cured. But what so utterly astounded him was the prodigious spectacle which he had not foreseen: his daughter, looking so beautiful, so divine, in her little black gown!—his daughter, who had not even brought a hat with her, and merely had a piece of lace tied over her lovely fair hair!—his daughter, full of life, blooming, triumphant, similar to all the daughters of all the fathers whom he had envied for so many years!

"O my child! O my child!" he exclaimed.

And, as she had flown into his arms, he pressed her to his heart, and then they fell upon their knees together. Everything disappeared from before them in a radiant effusion of faith and love. This heedless, hare-brained man, who fell asleep instead of accompanying his daughter to the Grotto, who went off to Gavarnie on the day the Blessed Virgin was to cure her, overflowed with such paternal affection, with such Christian faith so exalted by thankfulness, that for a moment he appeared sublime.

"O Jesus! O Mary! let me thank you for having restored my child to me! O my child, we shall never have breath enough, soul enough, to render thanks to Mary and Jesus for the great happiness they have vouchsafed us! O my child, whom they have resuscitated, O my child, whom they have made so beautiful again, take my heart to offer it to them with your own! I am yours, I am theirs eternally, O my beloved child, my adored child!"

Kneeling before the open window they both, with uplifted eyes, gazed ardently on heaven. The daughter had rested her head on her father's shoulder; whilst he had passed an arm round her waist. They had become one. Tears slowly trickled down their enraptured faces, which were smiling with superhuman felicity, whilst they stammered together disconnected expressions of gratitude.

"O Jesus, we give Thee thanks! O Holy Mother of Jesus, we give thee thanks! We love you, we adore you both. You have rejuvenated the best blood in our veins; it is yours, it circulates only for you. O All-powerful Mother, O Divine and Well-beloved Son, behold a daughter and a father who bless you, who prostrate themselves with joy at your feet."

So affecting was this mingling of two beings, happy at last after so many dark days, this happiness, which could but stammer as though still tinged with suffering, that Pierre was again moved to tears. But this time they were soothing tears which relieved his heart. Ah! poor pitiable humanity! how pleasant it was to see it somewhat consoled and enraptured! and what did it matter, after all, if its great joys of a few seconds' duration sprang from the eternal illusion! Was not the whole of humanity, pitiable humanity, saved by love, personified by that poor childish man who suddenly became sublime because he found his daughter resuscitated?

Standing a little aside, Sister Hyacinthe was also weeping, her heart very full, full of human emotion which she had never before experienced, she who had known no other parents than the Almighty and the Blessed Virgin. Silence had now fallen in this room full of so much tearful fraternity. And it was she who spoke the first, when the father and the daughter, overcome with emotion, at length rose up.

"Now, mademoiselle," she said, "we must be quick and get back to the hospital."

But they all protested. M. de Guersaint wished to keep his daughter with him, and Marie's eyes expressed an eager desire, a longing to enjoy life, to walk and ramble through the whole vast world.

"Oh! no, no!" said the father, "I won't give her back to you. We'll each have a cup of milk, for I'm dying of thirst; then we'll go out and walk about. Yes, yes, both of us! She shall take my arm, like a little woman!"

Sister Hyacinthe laughed again. "Very well!" said she, "I'll leave her with you, and tell the ladies that you've stolen her from me. But for my own part I must be off. You've no idea what an amount of work we have to get through at the hospital if we are to be ready in time to leave: there are all the patients and things to be seen to; and all is in the greatest confusion!"

"So to-day's really Tuesday, and we leave this afternoon?" asked Monsieur de Guersaint, already absent-minded again.

"Of course we do, and don't forget! The white train starts at 3.40. And if you're sensible you'll bring your daughter back early so that she may have a little rest."

Marie walked with the Sister to the door, saying "Be easy, I will be very good. Besides, I want to go back to the Grotto, to thank the Blessed Virgin once more."

When they found themselves all three alone in the little room full of sunshine, it was delicious. Pierre called the servant and told her to bring them some milk, some chocolate, and cakes, in fact the nicest things he could think of. And although Marie had already broken her fast, she ate again, so great an appetite had come upon her since the night before. They drew the table to the window and made quite a feast amidst the keen air from the mountains, whilst the hundred bells of Lourdes, proclaimed with flying peals the glory of that radiant day. They chattered and laughed, and the young woman told her father the story of the miracle, with all the oft-repeated details. She related, too, how she had left her box at the Basilica, and how she had slept twelve hours without stirring. Then M. de Guersaint on his side wished to relate his excursion, but got mixed and kept coming back to the miracle. Finally, it appeared that the Cirque de Gavarnie was something colossal. Only, when you looked at it from a distance it seemed small, for you lost all sense of proportion. The gigantic snow-covered tiers of cliffs, the topmost ridge standing out against the sky with the outlines of some cyclopean fortress with razed keep and jagged ramparts, the great cascade, whose ceaseless jet seemed so slow when in reality it must have rushed down with a noise like thunder, the whole immensity, the forests on right and left, the torrents and the landslips, looked as though they might have been held in the palm of one's hand, when one gazed upon them from the village market-place. And what had impressed him most, what he repeatedly alluded to, were the strange figures described by the snow, which had remained up there amongst the rocks. Amongst others was a huge crucifix, a white cross, several thousand yards in length, which you might have thought had been thrown across the amphitheatre from one end to the other.

However, all at once M. de Guersaint broke off to inquire: "By the way, what's happening at our neighbour's? As I came up-stairs a little while ago I met Monsieur Vigneron running about like a madman; and, through the open doorway of their room, I fancied I saw Madame Vigneron looking very red. Has their son Gustave had another attack?"

Pierre had quite forgotten Madame Chaise lying dead on the other side of the partition. He seemed to feel a cold breath pass over him. "No, no," he answered, "the child is all right." And he said no more, preferring to remain silent. Why spoil this happy hour of new life and reconquered youth by mingling with it the image of death? However, from that moment he himself could not cease thinking of the proximity of nothingness. And he thought, too, of that other room where Madame Volmar's friend was now alone, stifling his sobs with his lips pressed upon a pair of gloves which he had stolen from her. All the sounds of the hotel were now becoming audible again—the coughs, the sighs, the indistinct voices, the continual slamming of doors, the creaking of the floors beneath the great accumulation of travellers, and all the stir in the passages, along which flying skirts were sweeping, and families galloping distractedly amidst the hurry-scurry of departure.

"On my word! you'll do yourself an injury," all at once cried Monsieur de Guersaint, on seeing his daughter take up another cake.

Marie was quite merry too. But at a sudden thought tears came into her eyes, and she exclaimed: "Ah! how glad I am! but also how sorry when I think that everybody is not as pleased as myself."

II. PLEASANT HOURS

IT was eight o'clock, and Marie was so impatient that she could not keep still, but continued going to the window, as if she wished to inhale all the air of the vast, expanse and the immense sky. Ah! what a pleasure to be able to run about the streets, across the squares, to go everywhere as far as she might wish. And to show how strong she was, to have the pride of walking leagues in the presence of everyone, now that the Blessed Virgin had cured her! It was an irresistible impulsion, a flight of her entire being, her blood, and her heart.

However, just as she was setting out she made up her mind that her first visit with her father ought to be to the Grotto, where both of them had to thank Our Lady of Lourdes. Then they would be free; they would have two long hours before them, and might walk wherever they chose, before she returned to lunch and pack up her few things at the hospital.

"Well, is everyone ready?" repeated M. de Guersaint. "Shall we make a move?"

Pierre took his hat, and all three went down-stairs, talking very loud and laughing on the staircase, like boisterous school-boys going for their holidays. They had almost reached the street, when at the doorway Madame Majeste rushed forward. She had evidently been waiting for them to go out.

"Ah! mademoiselle; ah! gentlemen, allow me to congratulate you," she said. "We have heard of the extraordinary favour that has been granted you; we are so happy, so much flattered, when the Blessed Virgin is pleased to select one of our customers!"

Her dry, harsh face was melting with amiability, and she observed the miraculously healed girl with the fondest of eyes. Then she impulsively called her husband, who was passing: "Look, my dear! It's mademoiselle; it's mademoiselle."

Majeste's clean-shaven face, puffed out with yellow fat, assumed a happy and grateful expression. "Really, mademoiselle, I cannot tell you how honoured we feel," said he. "We shall never forget that your papa put up at our place. It has already excited the envy of many people."

While he spoke Madame Majeste stopped the other travellers who were going out, and with a sign summoned the families already seated in the dining-room; indeed, she would have called in the whole street if they had given her time, to show that she had in her house the miracle at which all Lourdes had been marvelling since the previous day. People ended by collecting there, a crowd gathered little by little, while she whispered in the ear of each "Look! that's she; the young party, you know, the young party who—"

But all at once she exclaimed: "I'll go and fetch Apolline from the shop; I must show mademoiselle to Apolline."

Thereupon, however, Majeste, in a very dignified way, restrained her. "No," he said, "leave Apolline; she has three ladies to serve already. Mademoiselle and these gentlemen will certainly not leave Lourdes without making a few purchases. The little souvenirs that one carries away with one are so pleasant to look at later on! And our customers make a point of never buying elsewhere than here, in the shop which we have annexed to the hotel."

"I have already offered my services," added Madame Majeste, "and I renew them. Apolline will be so happy to show mademoiselle all our prettiest articles, at prices, too, which are incredibly low! Oh! there are some delightful things, delightful!"

Marie was becoming impatient at being detained in this manner, and Pierre was suffering from the increasing curiosity which they were arousing. As for M. de Guersaint, he enjoyed this popularity and triumph of his daughter immensely, and promised to return.

"Certainly," said he, "we will purchase a few little knick-knacks. Some souvenirs for ourselves, and some presents that we shall have to make, but later on, when we come back."

At last they escaped and descended the Avenue de la Grotte. The weather was again superb after the storms of the two preceding nights. Cooled by the rain, the morning air was delicious amidst the gaiety which the bright sun shed around. A busy crowd, well pleased with life, was already hurrying along the pavements. And what pleasure it all was for Marie, to whom everything seemed new, charming, inappreciable! In the morning she had had to allow Raymonde to lend her a pair of boots, for she had taken good care not to put any in her portmanteau, superstitiously fearing that they might bring her bad luck. However, Raymonde's boots fitted her admirably, and she listened with childish delight to the little heels tapping merrily on the flagstones. And she did not remember having ever seen houses so white, trees so green, and passers-by so happy. All her senses seemed holiday-making, endowed with a marvellously delicate sensibility; she heard music, smelt distant perfumes, savoured the air greedily, as though it were some delicious fruit. But what she considered, above all, so nice, so charming, was to walk along in this wise on her father's arm. She had never done so before, although she had felt the desire for years, as for one of those impossible pleasures with which people occupy their minds when invalided. And now her dream was realised and her heart beat with joy. She pressed against her father, and strove to walk very upright and look very handsome, so as to do him honour. And he was quite proud, as happy as she was, showing, exhibiting her, overcome with joy at the thought that she belonged to him, that she was his blood, his flesh, his daughter, henceforth beaming with youth and health.

As they were all three crossing the Plateau de la Merlasse, already obstructed by a band of candle and bouquet sellers running after the pilgrims, M. de Guersaint exclaimed, "We are surely not going to the Grotto empty-handed!"

Pierre, who was walking on the other side of Marie, himself brightened by her merry humour, thereupon stopped, and they were at once surrounded by a crowd of female hawkers, who with eager fingers thrust their goods into their faces. "My beautiful young lady! My good gentleman! Buy of me, of me, of me!" Such was the onslaught that it became necessary to struggle in order to extricate oneself. M. de Guersaint ended by purchasing the largest nosegay he could see—a bouquet of white marguerites, as round and hard as a cabbage—from a handsome, fair-haired, well developed girl of twenty, who was extremely bold both in look and manner. It only cost twenty sons, and he insisted on paying for it out of his own little purse, somewhat abashed meantime by the girl's unblushing effrontery. Then Pierre in his turn settled for the three candles which Marie had taken from an old woman, candles at two francs each, a very reasonable price, as she repeatedly said. And on being paid, the old creature, who had an angular face, covetous eyes, and a nose like the beak of a bird of prey, returned profuse and mellifluous thanks: "May Our Lady of Lourdes bless you, my beautiful young lady! May she cure you of your complaints, you and yours!" This enlivened them again, and they set out once more, all three laughing, amused like children at the idea that the good woman's wish had already been accomplished.

At the Grotto Marie wished to file off at once, in order to offer the bouquet and candles herself before even kneeling down. There were not many people there as yet, and having gone to the end of the line their turn came after waiting some three or four minutes. And with what enraptured glances did she then examine everything—the altar of engraved silver, the harmonium-organ, the votive offerings, the candle-holders, streaming with wax blazing in broad daylight. She was now inside that Grotto which she had hitherto only seen from her box of misery; she breathed there as in Paradise itself, steeped rapturously in a pleasant warmth and odour, which slightly oppressed her. When she had placed the tapers at the bottom of the large basket, and had raised herself on tiptoe to fix the bouquet on one of the spears of the iron railing, she imprinted a long kiss upon the rock, below the statue of the Blessed Virgin, at the very spot, indeed, which millions of lips had already polished. And the stone received a kiss of love in which she put forth all the strength of her gratitude, a kiss with which her heart melted.

When she was once more outside, Marie prostrated and humbled herself in an almost endless act of thanksgiving. Her father also had knelt down near her, and mingled the fervour of his gratitude with hers. But he could not remain doing the same thing for long. Little by little he became uneasy, and ended by bending down to his daughter's ear to tell her that he had a call to make which he had previously forgotten. Assuredly the best course would be for her to remain where she was, praying, and waiting for him. While she completed her devotions he would hurry along and get his troublesome errand over; and then they might walk about at ease wheresoever they liked. She did not understand him, did not even hear him, but simply nodded her head, promising that she would not move, and then such tender faith again took possession of her that her eyes, fixed on the white statue of the Virgin, filled with tears.

When M. de Guersaint had joined Pierre, who had remained a short distance off, he gave him the following explanation. "My dear fellow," he said, "it's a matter of conscience; I formally promised the coachman who drove us to Gavarnie that I would see his master and tell him the real cause of our delay. You know whom I mean—the hairdresser on the Place du Marcadal. And, besides, I want to get shaved."

Pierre, who felt uneasy at this proposal, had to give way in face of the promise that they would be back within a quarter of an hour. Only, as the distance seemed long, he on his side insisted on taking a trap which was standing at the bottom of the Plateau de la Merlasse. It was a sort of greenish cabriolet, and its driver, a fat fellow of about thirty, with the usual Basque cap on his head, was smoking a cigarette whilst waiting to be hired. Perched sideways on the seat with his knees wide apart, he drove them on with the tranquil indifference of a well-fed man who considers himself the master of the street.

"We will keep you," said Pierre as he alighted, when they had reached the Place du Marcadal.

"Very well, very well, Monsieur l'Abbe! I'll wait for you!" And then, leaving his lean horse in the hot sun, the driver went to chat and laugh with a strong, dishevelled servant-girl who was washing a dog in the basin of the neighbouring fountain.

Cazaban, as it happened, was just then on the threshold of his shop, the lofty windows and pale green painting of which enlivened the dull Place, which was so deserted on week-days. When he was not pressed with work he delighted to parade in this manner, standing between his two windows, which pots of pomatum and bottles of perfumery decorated with bright shades of colour.

He at once recognised the gentlemen. "Very flattered, very much honoured. Pray walk in, I beg of you," he said.

Then, at the first words which M. de Guersaint said to him to excuse the man who had driven him to Gavarnie, he showed himself well disposed. Of course it was not the man's fault; he could not prevent wheels coming to pieces, or storms falling. So long as the travellers did not complain all was well.

"Oh!" thereupon exclaimed M. de Guersaint, "it's a magnificent country, never to be forgotten."

"Well, monsieur, as our neighbourhood pleases you, you must come and see us again; we don't ask anything better," said Cazaban; and, on the architect seating himself in one of the arm-chairs and asking to be shaved, he began to bustle about.

His assistant was still absent, running errands for the pilgrims whom he lodged, a whole family, who were taking a case of chaplets, plaster Virgins, and framed engravings away with them. You heard a confused tramping of feet and violent bursts of conversation coming from the first floor, all the helter-skelter of people whom the approaching departure and the packing of purchases lying hither and thither drove almost crazy. In the adjoining dining-room, the door of which had remained open, two children were draining the dregs of some cups of chocolate which stood about amidst the disorder of the breakfast service. The whole of the house had been let, entirely given over, and now had come the last hours of this invasion which compelled the hairdresser and his wife to seek refuge in the narrow cellar, where they slept on a small camp-bed.

While Cazaban was rubbing M. de Guersaint's cheeks with soap-suds, the architect questioned him. "Well, are you satisfied with the season?"

"Certainly, monsieur, I can't complain. As you hear, my travellers are leaving to-day, but I am expecting others to-morrow morning; barely sufficient time for a sweep out. It will be the same up to October."

Then, as Pierre remained standing, walking about the shop and looking at the walls with an air of impatience, he turned round politely and said: "Pray be seated, Monsieur l'Abbe; take a newspaper. It will not be long."

The priest having thanked him with a nod, and refusing to sit down, the hairdresser, whose tongue was ever itching to talk, continued: "Oh! as for myself, I am always busy, my house is renowned for the cleanliness of the beds and the excellence of the fare. Only the town is not satisfied. Ah, no! I may even say that I have never known so much discontent here."

He became silent for a moment, and shaved his customer's left cheek; then again pausing in his work he suddenly declared with a cry, wrung from him by conviction, "The Fathers of the Grotto are playing with fire, monsieur, that is all I have to say."

From that moment, however, the vent-plug was withdrawn, and he talked and talked and talked again. His big eyes rolled in his long face with prominent cheek-bones and sunburnt complexion sprinkled with red, while the whole of his nervous little body continued on the jump, agitated by his growing exuberance of speech and gesture. He returned to his former indictment, and enumerated all the many grievances that the old town had against the Fathers. The hotel-keepers complained; the dealers in religious fancy articles did not take half the amount they ought to have realised; and, finally, the new town monopolised both the pilgrims and the cash; there was now no possibility for anyone but the keepers of the lodging-houses, hotels, and shops open in the neighbourhood of the Grotto to make any money whatever. It was a merciless struggle, a deadly hostility increasing from day to day, the old city losing a little of its life each season, and assuredly destined to disappear,—to be choked, assassinated, by the young town. Ah! their dirty Grotto! He would rather have his feet cut off than tread there. Wasn't it heart-rending, that knick-knack shop which they had stuck beside it? A shameful thing, at which a bishop had shown himself so indignant that it was said he had written to the Pope! He, Cazaban, who flattered himself with being a freethinker and a Republican of the old days, who already under the Empire had voted for the Opposition candidates, assuredly had the right to declare that he did not believe in their dirty Grotto, and that he did not care a fig for it!

"Look here, monsieur," he continued; "I am going to tell you a fact. My brother belongs to the municipal council, and it's through him that I know it. I must tell you first of all that we now have a Republican municipal council, which is much worried by the demoralisation of the town. You can no longer go out at night without meeting girls in the streets—you know, those candle hawkers! They gad about with the drivers who come here when the season commences, and swell the suspicious floating population which comes no one knows whence. And I must also explain to you the position of the Fathers towards the town. When they purchased the land at the Grotto they signed an agreement by which they undertook not to engage in any business there. Well, they have opened a shop in spite of their signature. Is not that an unfair rivalry, unworthy of honest people? So the new council decided on sending them a deputation to insist on the agreement being respected, and enjoining them to close their shop at once. What do you think they answered, monsieur? Oh! what they have replied twenty times before, what they will always answer, when they are reminded of their engagements: 'Very well, we consent to keep them, but we are masters at our own place, and we'll close the Grotto!'"

He raised himself up, his razor in the air, and, repeating his words, his eyes dilated by the enormity of the thing, he said, "'We'll close the Grotto.'"

Pierre, who was continuing his slow walk, suddenly stopped and said in his face, "Well! the municipal council had only to answer, 'Close it.'"

At this Cazaban almost choked; the blood rushed to his face, he was beside himself, and stammered out "Close the Grotto?—Close the Grotto?"

"Certainly! As the Grotto irritates you and rends your heart; as it's a cause of continual warfare, injustice, and corruption. Everything would be over, we should hear no more about it. That would really be a capital solution, and if the council had the power it would render you a service by forcing the Fathers to carry out their threat."

As Pierre went on speaking, Cazaban's anger subsided. He became very calm and somewhat pale, and in the depths of his big eyes the priest detected an expression of increasing uneasiness. Had he not gone too far in his passion against the Fathers? Many ecclesiastics did not like them; perhaps this young priest was simply at Lourdes for the purpose of stirring-up an agitation against them. Then who knows?—it might possibly result in the Grotto being closed later on. But it was by the Grotto that they all lived. If the old city screeched with rage at only picking up the crumbs, it was well pleased to secure even that windfall; and the freethinkers themselves, who coined money with the pilgrims, like everyone else, held their tongues, ill at ease, and even frightened, when they found people too much of their opinion with regard to the objectionable features of new Lourdes. It was necessary to be prudent.

Cazaban thereupon returned to M. de Guersaint, whose other cheek he began shaving, murmuring the while in an off-hand manner: "Oh! what I say about the Grotto is not because it troubles me much in reality, and, besides, everyone must live."

In the dining-room, the children, amidst deafening shouts, had just broken one of the bowls, and Pierre, glancing through the open doorway, again noticed the engravings of religious subjects and the plaster Virgin with which the hairdresser had ornamented the apartment in order to please his lodgers. And just then, too, a voice shouted from the first floor that the trunk was ready, and that they would be much obliged if the assistant would cord it as soon as he returned.

However, Cazaban, in the presence of these two gentlemen whom, as a matter of fact, he did not know, remained suspicious and uneasy, his brain haunted by all sorts of disquieting suppositions. He was in despair at the idea of having to let them go away without learning anything about them, especially after having exposed himself. If he had only been able to withdraw the more rabid of his biting remarks about the Fathers. Accordingly, when M. de Guersaint rose to wash his chin, he yielded to a desire to renew the conversation.

"Have you heard talk of yesterday's miracle? The town is quite upside down with it; more than twenty people have already given me an account of what occurred. Yes, it seems they obtained an extraordinary miracle, a paralytic young lady got up and dragged her invalid carriage as far as the choir of the Basilica."

M. de Guersaint, who was about to sit down after wiping himself, gave a complacent laugh. "That young lady is my daughter," he said.

Thereupon, under this sudden and fortunate flash of enlightenment, Cazaban became all smiles. He felt reassured, and combed M. de Guersaint's hair with a masterly touch, amid a returning exuberance of speech and gesture. "Ah! monsieur, I congratulate you, I am flattered at having you in my hands. Since the young lady your daughter is cured, your father's heart is at ease. Am I not right?"

And he also found a few pleasant words for Pierre. Then, when he had decided to let them go, he looked at the priest with an air of conviction, and remarked, like a sensible man, desirous of coming to a conclusion on the subject of miracles: "There are some, Monsieur l'Abbe, which are good fortunes for everybody. From time to time we require one of that description."

Outside, M. de Guersaint had to go and fetch the coachman, who was still laughing with the servant-girl, while her dog, dripping with water, was shaking itself in the sun. In five minutes the trap brought them back to the bottom of the Plateau de la Merlasse. The trip had taken a good half-hour. Pierre wanted to keep the conveyance, with the idea of showing Marie the town without giving her too much fatigue. So, while the father ran to the Grotto to fetch his daughter, he waited there beneath the trees.

The coachman at once engaged in conversation with the priest. He had lit another cigarette and showed himself very familiar. He came from a village in the environs of Toulouse, and did not complain, for he earned good round sums each day at Lourdes. You fed well there, said he, you amused yourself, it was what you might call a good neighbourhood. He said these things with the abandon of a man who was not troubled with religious scruples, but yet did not forget the respect which he owed to an ecclesiastic.

At last, from the top of his box, where he remained half lying down, dangling one of his legs, he allowed this remark to fall slowly from his lips: "Ah! yes, Monsieur l'Abbe, Lourdes has caught on well, but the question is whether it will all last long!"

Pierre, who was very much struck by the remark, was pondering on its involuntary profundity, when M. de Guersaint reappeared, bringing Marie with him. He had found her kneeling on the same spot, in the same act of faith and thankfulness, at the feet of the Blessed Virgin; and it seemed as if she had brought all the brilliant light of the Grotto away in her eyes, so vividly did they sparkle with divine joy at her cure. She would not entertain a proposal to keep the trap. No, no! she preferred to go on foot; she did not care about seeing the town, so long as she might for another hour continue walking on her father's arm through the gardens, the streets, the squares, anywhere they pleased! And, when Pierre had paid the driver, it was she who turned into a path of the Esplanade garden, delighted at being able to saunter in this wise beside the turf and the flower beds, under the great trees. The grass, the leaves, the shady solitary walks where you heard the everlasting rippling of the Gave, were so sweet and fresh! But afterwards she wished to return by way of the streets, among the crowd, that she might find the agitation, noise, and life, the need of which possessed her whole being.

In the Rue St. Joseph, on perceiving the panorama, where the former Grotto was depicted, with Bernadette kneeling down before it on the day of the miracle of the candle, the idea occurred to Pierre to go in. Marie became as happy as a child; and even M. de Guersaint was full of innocent delight, especially when he noticed that among the batch of pilgrims who dived at the same time as themselves into the depths of the obscure corridor, several recognised in his daughter the girl so miraculously healed the day before, who was already famous, and whose name flew from mouth to mouth. Up above, on the circular platform, when they came out into the diffuse light, filtering through a vellum, there was a sort of ovation around Marie; soft whispers, beatifical glances, a rapture of delight in seeing, following, and touching her. Now glory had come, she would be loved in that way wherever she went, and it was not until the showman who gave the explanations had placed himself at the head of the little party of visitors, and begun to walk round, relating the incident depicted on the huge circular canvas, nearly five hundred feet in length, that she was in some measure forgotten. The painting represented the seventeenth apparition of the Blessed Virgin to Bernadette, on the day when, kneeling before the Grotto during her vision, she had heedlessly left her hand on the flame of the candle without burning it. The whole of the old primitive landscape of the Grotto was shown, the whole scene was set out with all its historical personages: the doctor verifying the miracle watch in hand, the Mayor, the Commissary of Police, and the Public Prosecutor, whose names the showman gave out, amidst the amazement of the public following him.

Then, by an unconscious transition of ideas, Pierre recalled the remark which the driver of the cabriolet had made a short time previously: "Lourdes has caught on well, but the question is whether it will all last long." That, in fact, was the question. How many venerated sanctuaries had thus been built already, at the bidding of innocent chosen children, to whom the Blessed Virgin had shown herself! It was always the same story beginning afresh: an apparition; a persecuted shepherdess, who was called a liar; next the covert propulsion of human misery hungering after illusion; then propaganda, and the triumph of the sanctuary shining like a star; and afterwards decline, and oblivion, when the ecstatic dream of another visionary gave birth to another sanctuary elsewhere. It seemed as if the power of illusion wore away; that it was necessary in the course of centuries to displace it, set it amidst new scenery, under fresh circumstances, in order to renew its force. La Salette had dethroned the old wooden and stone Virgins that had healed; Lourdes had just dethroned La Salette, pending the time when it would be dethroned itself by Our Lady of to-morrow, she who will show her sweet, consoling features to some pure child as yet unborn. Only, if Lourdes had met with such rapid, such prodigious fortune, it assuredly owed it to the little sincere soul, the delightful charm of Bernadette. Here there was no deceit, no falsehood, merely the blossoming of suffering, a delicate sick child who brought to the afflicted multitude her dream of justice and equality in the miraculous. She was merely eternal hope, eternal consolation. Besides, all historical and social circumstances seem to have combined to increase the need of this mystical flight at the close of a terrible century of positivist inquiry; and that was perhaps the reason why Lourdes would still long endure in its triumph, before becoming a mere legend, one of those dead religions whose powerful perfume has evaporated.

Ah! that ancient Lourdes, that city of peace and belief, the only possible cradle where the legend could come into being, how easily Pierre conjured it up before him, whilst walking round the vast canvas of the Panorama! That canvas said everything; it was the best lesson of things that could be seen. The monotonous explanations of the showman were not heard; the landscape spoke for itself. First of all there was the Grotto, the rocky hollow beside the Gave, a savage spot suitable for reverie—bushy slopes and heaps of fallen stone, without a path among them; and nothing yet in the way of ornamentation—no monumental quay, no garden paths winding among trimly cut shrubs; no Grotto set in order, deformed, enclosed with iron railings; above all, no shop for the sale of religious articles, that simony shop which was the scandal of all pious souls. The Virgin could not have selected a more solitary and charming nook wherein to show herself to the chosen one of her heart, the poor young girl who came thither still possessed by the dream of her painful nights, even whilst gathering dead wood. And on the opposite side of the Gave, behind the rock of the castle, was old Lourdes, confident and asleep. Another age was then conjured up; a small town, with narrow pebble-paved streets, black houses with marble dressings, and an antique, semi-Spanish church, full of old carvings, and peopled with visions of gold and painted flesh. Communication with other places was only kept up by the Bagneres and Cauterets diligences, which twice a day forded the Lapaca to climb the steep causeway of the Rue Basse. The spirit of the century had not breathed on those peaceful roofs sheltering a belated population which had remained childish, enclosed within the narrow limits of strict religious discipline. There was no debauchery; a slow antique commerce sufficed for daily life, a poor life whose hardships were the safeguards of morality. And Pierre had never better understood how Bernadette, born in that land of faith and honesty, had flowered like a natural rose, budding on the briars of the road.

"It's all the same very curious," observed M. de Guersaint when they found themselves in the street again. "I'm not at all sorry I saw it."

Marie was also laughing with pleasure. "One would almost think oneself there. Isn't it so, father? At times it seems as if the people were going to move. And how charming Bernadette looks on her knees, in ecstasy, while the candle flame licks her fingers without burning them."

"Let us see," said the architect; "we have only an hour left, so we must think of making our purchases, if we wish to buy anything. Shall we take a look at the shops? We certainly promised Majeste to give him the preference; but that does not prevent us from making a few inquiries. Eh! Pierre, what do you say?"

"Oh! certainly, as you like," answered the priest. "Besides, it will give us a walk."

And he thereupon followed the young girl and her father, who returned to the Plateau de la Merlasse. Since he had quitted the Panorama he felt as though he no longer knew where he was. It seemed to him as if he had all at once been transported from one to another town, parted by centuries. He had left the solitude, the slumbering peacefulness of old Lourdes, which the dead light of the vellum had increased, to fall at last into new Lourdes, sparkling with brightness and noisy with the crowd. Ten o'clock had just struck, and extraordinary animation reigned on the footways, where before breakfast an entire people was hastening to complete its purchases, so that it might have nothing but its departure to think of afterwards. The thousands of pilgrims of the national pilgrimage streamed along the thoroughfares and besieged the shops in a final scramble. You would have taken the cries, the jostling, and the sudden rushes for those at some fair just breaking up amidst a ceaseless roll of vehicles. Many, providing themselves with provisions for the journey, cleared the open-air stalls where bread and slices of sausages and ham were sold. Others purchased fruit and wine; baskets were filled with bottles and greasy parcels until they almost burst. A hawker who was wheeling some cheeses about on a small truck saw his goods carried off as if swept away by the wind. But what the crowd more particularly purchased were religious articles, and those hawkers whose barrows were loaded with statuettes and sacred engravings were reaping golden gains. The customers at the shops stood in strings on the pavement; the women were belted with immense chaplets, had Blessed Virgins tucked under their arms, and were provided with cans which they meant to fill at the miraculous spring. Carried in the hand or slung from the shoulder, some of them quite plain and others daubed over with a Lady of Lourdes in blue paint, these cans held from one to ten quarts apiece; and, shining with all the brightness of new tin, clashing, too, at times with the sharp jingle of stew-pans, they added a gay note to the aspect of the noisy multitude. And the fever of dealing, the pleasure of spending one's money, of returning home with one's pockets crammed with photographs and medals, lit up all faces with a holiday expression, transforming the radiant gathering into a fair-field crowd with appetites either beyond control or satisfied.

On the Plateau de la Merlasse, M. de Guersaint for a moment felt tempted to enter one of the finest and most patronised shops, on the board over which were these words in large letters: "Soubirous, Brother of Bernadette."

"Eh! what if we were to make our purchases there? It would be more appropriate, more interesting to remember."

However, he passed on, repeating that they must see everything first of all.

Pierre had looked at the shop kept by Bernadette's brother with a heavy heart. It grieved him to find the brother selling the Blessed Virgin whom the sister had beheld. However, it was necessary to live, and he had reason to believe that, beside the triumphant Basilica resplendent with gold, the visionary's relatives were not making a fortune, the competition being so terrible. If on the one hand the pilgrims left millions behind them at Lourdes, on the other there were more than two hundred dealers in religious articles, to say nothing of the hotel and lodging-house keepers, to whom the largest part of the spoils fell; and thus the gain, so eagerly disputed, ended by being moderate enough after all. Along the Plateau on the right and left of the repository kept by Bernadette's brother, other shops appeared, an uninterrupted row of them, pressing one against the other, each occupying a division of a long wooden structure, a sort of gallery erected by the town, which derived from it some sixty thousand francs a year. It formed a regular bazaar of open stalls, encroaching on the pavements so as to tempt people to stop as they passed along. For more than three hundred yards no other trade was plied: a river of chaplets, medals, and statuettes streamed without end behind the windows; and in enormous letters on the boards above appeared the venerated names of Saint Roch, Saint Joseph, Jerusalem, The Immaculate Virgin, The Sacred Heart of Mary, all the names in Paradise that were most likely to touch and attract customers.

"Really," said M. de Guersaint, "I think it's the same thing all over the place. Let us go anywhere." He himself had had enough of it, this interminable display was quite exhausting him.

"But as you promised to make the purchases at Majeste's," said Marie, who was not, in the least tired, "the best thing will be to go back."

"That's it; let's return to Majeste's place."

But the rows of shops began again in the Avenue de la Grotte. They swarmed on both sides; and among them here were jewellers, drapers, and umbrella-makers, who also dealt in religious articles. There was even a confectioner who sold boxes of pastilles a l'eau de Lourdes, with a figure of the Virgin on the cover. A photographer's windows were crammed with views of the Grotto and the Basilica, and portraits of Bishops and reverend Fathers of all Orders, mixed up with views of famous sites in the neighbouring mountains. A bookseller displayed the last Catholic publications, volumes bearing devout titles, and among them the innumerable works published on Lourdes during the last twenty years, some of which had had a wonderful success, which was still fresh in memory. In this broad, populous thoroughfare the crowd streamed along in more open order; their cans jingled, everyone was in high spirits, amid the bright sunrays which enfiladed the road from one end to the other. And it seemed as if there would never be a finish to the statuettes, the medals, and the chaplets; one display followed another; and, indeed, there were miles of them running through the streets of the entire town, which was ever the same bazaar selling the same articles.

In front of the Hotel of the Apparitions M. de Guersaint again hesitated. "Then it's decided, we are going to make our purchases there?" he asked.

"Certainly," said Marie. "See what a beautiful shop it is!"

And she was the first to enter the establishment, which was, in fact, one of the largest in the street, occupying the ground-floor of the hotel on the left hand. M. de Guersaint and Pierre followed her.

Apolline, the niece of the Majestes, who was in charge of the place, was standing on a stool, taking some holy-water vases from a top shelf to show them to a young man, an elegant bearer, wearing beautiful yellow gaiters. She was laughing with the cooing sound of a dove, and looked charming with her thick black hair and her superb eyes, set in a somewhat square face, which had a straight forehead, chubby cheeks, and full red lips. Jumping lightly to the ground, she exclaimed: "Then you don't think that this pattern would please madame, your aunt?"

"No, no," answered the bearer, as he went off. "Obtain the other pattern. I shall not leave until to-morrow, and will come back."

When Apolline learnt that Marie was the young person visited by the miracle of whom Madame Majeste had been talking ever since the previous day, she became extremely attentive. She looked at her with her merry smile, in which there was a dash of surprise and covert incredulity. However, like the clever saleswoman that she was, she was profuse in complimentary remarks. "Ah, mademoiselle, I shall be so happy to sell to you! Your miracle is so beautiful! Look, the whole shop is at your disposal. We have the largest choice."

Marie was ill at ease. "Thank you," she replied, "you are very good. But we have only come to buy a few small things."

"If you will allow us," said M. de Guersaint, "we will choose ourselves."

"Very well. That's it, monsieur. Afterwards we will see!"

And as some other customers now came in, Apolline forgot them, returned to her duties as a pretty saleswoman, with caressing words and seductive glances, especially for the gentlemen, whom she never allowed to leave until they had their pockets full of purchases.

M. de Guersaint had only two francs left of the louis which Blanche, his eldest daughter, had slipped into his hand when he was leaving, as pocket-money; and so he did not dare to make any large selection. But Pierre declared that they would cause him great pain if they did not allow him to offer them the few things which they would like to take away with them from Lourdes. It was therefore understood that they would first of all choose a present for Blanche, and then Marie and her father should select the souvenirs that pleased them best.

"Don't let us hurry," repeated M. de Guersaint, who had become very gay. "Come, Marie, have a good look. What would be most likely to please Blanche?"

All three looked, searched, and rummaged. But their indecision increased as they went from one object to another. With its counters, show-cases, and nests of drawers, furnishing it from top to bottom, the spacious shop was a sea of endless billows, overflowing with all the religious knick-knacks imaginable. There were the chaplets: skeins of chaplets hanging along the walls, and heaps of chaplets lying in the drawers, from humble ones costing twenty sons a dozen, to those of sweet-scented wood, agate, and lapis-lazuli, with chains of gold or silver; and some of them, of immense length, made to go twice round the neck or waist, had carved beads, as large as walnuts, separated by death's-heads. Then there were the medals: a shower of medals, boxes full of medals, of all sizes, of all metals, the cheapest and the most precious. They bore different inscriptions, they represented the Basilica, the Grotto, or the Immaculate Conception; they were engraved, repoussees, or enamelled, executed with care, or made by the gross, according to the price. And next there were the Blessed Virgins, great and small, in zinc, wood, ivory, and especially plaster; some entirely white, others tinted in bright colours, in accordance with the description given by Bernadette; the amiable and smiling face, the extremely long veil, the blue sash, and the golden roses on the feet, there being, however, some slight modification in each model so as to guarantee the copyright. And there was another flood of other religious objects: a hundred varieties of scapularies, a thousand different sorts of sacred pictures: fine engravings, large chromo-lithographs in glaring colours, submerged beneath a mass of smaller pictures, which were coloured, gilded, varnished, decorated with bouquets of flowers, and bordered with lace paper. And there was also jewellery: rings, brooches, and bracelets, loaded with stars and crosses, and ornamented with saintly figures. Finally, there was the Paris article, which rose above and submerged all the rest: pencil-holders, purses, cigar-holders, paperweights, paper-knives, even snuff-boxes; and innumerable other objects on which the Basilica, Grotto, and Blessed Virgin ever and ever appeared, reproduced in every way, by every process that is known. Heaped together pell-mell in one of the cases reserved to articles at fifty centimes apiece were napkin-rings, egg-cups, and wooden pipes, on which was carved the beaming apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes.

Little by little, M. de Guersaint, with the annoyance of a man who prides himself on being an artist, became disgusted and quite sad. "But all this is frightful, frightful!" he repeated at every new article he took up to look at.

Then he relieved himself by reminding Pierre of the ruinous attempt which he had made to improve the artistic quality of religious prints. The remains of his fortune had been lost in that attempt, and the thought made him all the more angry, in presence of the wretched productions with which the shop was crammed. Had anyone ever seen things of such idiotic, pretentious, and complicated ugliness! The vulgarity of the ideas and the silliness of the expressions portrayed rivalled the commonplace character of the composition. You were reminded of fashion-plates, the covers of boxes of sweets, and the wax dolls' heads that revolve in hairdressers' windows; it was an art abounding in false prettiness, painfully childish, with no really human touch in it, no tone, and no sincerity. And the architect, who was wound up, could not stop, but went on to express his disgust with the buildings of new Lourdes, the pitiable disfigurement of the Grotto, the colossal monstrosity of the inclined ways, the disastrous lack of symmetry in the church of the Rosary and the Basilica, the former looking too heavy, like a corn market, whilst the latter had an anaemical structural leanness with no kind of style but the mongrel.

"Ah! one must really be very fond of God," he at last concluded, "to have courage enough to come and adore Him amidst such horrors! They have failed in everything, spoilt everything, as though out of pleasure. Not one of them has experienced that moment of true feeling, of real naturalness and sincere faith, which gives birth to masterpieces. They are all clever people, but all plagiarists; not one has given his mind and being to the undertaking. And what must they not require to inspire them, since they have failed to produce anything grand even in this land of miracles?"

Pierre did not reply, but he was very much struck by these reflections, which at last gave him an explanation of a feeling of discomfort that he had experienced ever since his arrival at Lourdes. This discomfort arose from the difference between the modern surroundings and the faith of past ages which it sought to resuscitate. He thought of the old cathedrals where quivered that faith of nations; he pictured the former attributes of worship—the images, the goldsmith's work, the saints in wood and stone—all of admirable power and beauty of expression. The fact was that in those ancient times the workmen had been true believers, had given their whole souls and bodies and all the candour of their feelings to their productions, just as M. de Guersaint said. But nowadays architects built churches with the same practical tranquillity that they erected five-storey houses, just as the religious articles, the chaplets, the medals, and the statuettes were manufactured by the gross in the populous quarters of Paris by merrymaking workmen who did not even follow their religion. And thus what slopwork, what toymakers', ironmongers' stuff it all was! of a prettiness fit to make you cry, a silly sentimentality fit to make your heart turn with disgust! Lourdes was inundated, devastated, disfigured by it all to such a point as to quite upset persons with any delicacy of taste who happened to stray through its streets. It clashed jarringly with the attempted resuscitation of the legends, ceremonies, and processions of dead ages; and all at once it occurred to Pierre that the social and historical condemnation of Lourdes lay in this, that faith is forever dead among a people when it no longer introduces it into the churches it builds or the chaplets it manufactures.

However, Marie had continued examining the shelves with the impatience of a child, hesitating, and finding nothing which seemed to her worthy of the great dream of ecstasy which she would ever keep within her.

"Father," she said, "it is getting late; you must take me back to the hospital; and to make up my mind, look, I will give Blanche this medal with the silver chain. After all it's the most simple and prettiest thing here. She will wear it; it will make her a little piece of jewellery. As for myself, I will take this statuette of Our Lady of Lourdes, this small one, which is rather prettily painted. I shall place it in my room and surround it with fresh flowers. It will be very nice, will it not?"

M. de Guersaint approved of her idea, and then busied himself with his own choice. "O dear! oh dear! how embarrassed I am!" said he.

He was examining some ivory-handled penholders capped with pea-like balls, in which were microscopic photographs, and while bringing one of the little holes to his eye to look in it he raised an exclamation of mingled surprise and pleasure. "Hallo! here's the Cirque de Gavarnie! Ah! it's prodigious; everything is there; how can that colossal panorama have been got into so small a space? Come, I'll take this penholder; it's curious, and will remind me of my excursion."

Pierre had simply chosen a portrait of Bernadette, the large photograph which represents her on her knees in a black gown, with a handkerchief tied over her hair, and which is said to be the only one in existence taken from life. He hastened to pay, and they were all three on the point of leaving when Madame Majeste entered, protested, and positively insisted on making Marie a little present, saying that it would bring her establishment good-fortune. "I beg of you, mademoiselle, take a scapulary," said she. "Look among those there. The Blessed Virgin who chose you will repay me in good luck."

She raised her voice and made so much fuss that the purchasers filling the shop were interested, and began gazing at the girl with envious eyes. It was popularity bursting out again around her, a popularity which ended even by reaching the street when the landlady went to the threshold of the shop, making signs to the tradespeople opposite and putting all the neighbourhood in a flutter.

"Let us go," repeated Marie, feeling more and more uncomfortable.

But her father, on noticing a priest come in, detained her. "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe des Hermoises!"

It was in fact the handsome Abbe, clad in a cassock of fine cloth emitting a pleasant odour, and with an expression of soft gaiety on his fresh-coloured face. He had not noticed his companion of the previous day, but had gone straight to Apolline and taken her on one side. And Pierre overheard him saying in a subdued tone: "Why didn't you bring me my three-dozen chaplets this morning?"

Apolline again began laughing with the cooing notes of a dove, and looked at him sideways, roguishly, without answering.

"They are for my little penitents at Toulouse. I wanted to place them at the bottom of my trunk; and you offered to help me pack my linen."

She continued laughing, and her pretty eyes sparkled.

"However, I shall not leave before to-morrow. Bring them me to-night, will you not? When you are at liberty. It's at the end of the street, at Duchene's."

Thereupon, with a slight movement of her red lips, and in a somewhat bantering way, which left him in doubt as to whether she would keep her promise, she replied: "Certainly, Monsieur l'Abbe, I will go."

They were now interrupted by M. de Guersaint, who came forward to shake the priest's hand. And the two men at once began talking again of the Cirque de Gavarnie: they had had a delightful trip, a most pleasant time, which they would never forget. Then they enjoyed a laugh at the expense of their two companions, ecclesiastics of slender means, good-natured fellows, who had much amused them. And the architect ended by reminding his new friend that he had kindly promised to induce a personage at Toulouse, who was ten times a millionaire, to interest himself in his studies on navigable balloons. "A first advance of a hundred thousand francs would be sufficient," he said.

"You can rely on me," answered Abbe des Hermoises. "You will not have prayed to the Blessed Virgin in vain."

However, Pierre, who had kept Bernadette's portrait in his hand, had just then been struck by the extraordinary likeness between Apolline and the visionary. It was the same rather massive face, the same full thick mouth, and the same magnificent eyes; and he recollected that Madame Majeste had already pointed out to him this striking resemblance, which was all the more peculiar as Apolline had passed through a similar poverty-stricken childhood at Bartres before her aunt had taken her with her to assist in keeping the shop. Bernadette! Apolline! What a strange association, what an unexpected reincarnation at thirty years' distance! And, all at once, with this Apolline, who was so flightily merry and careless, and in regard to whom there were so many odd rumours, new Lourdes rose before his eyes: the coachmen, the candle-girls, the persons who let rooms and waylaid tenants at the railway station, the hundreds of furnished houses with discreet little lodgings, the crowd of free priests, the lady hospitallers, and the simple passers-by, who came there to satisfy their appetites. Then, too, there was the trading mania excited by the shower of millions, the entire town given up to lucre, the shops transforming the streets into bazaars which devoured one another, the hotels living gluttonously on the pilgrims, even to the Blue Sisters who kept a table d'hote, and the Fathers of the Grotto who coined money with their God! What a sad and frightful course of events, the vision of pure Bernadette inflaming multitudes, making them rush to the illusion of happiness, bringing a river of gold to the town, and from that moment rotting everything. The breath of superstition had sufficed to make humanity flock thither, to attract abundance of money, and to corrupt this honest corner of the earth forever. Where the candid lily had formerly bloomed there now grew the carnal rose, in the new loam of cupidity and enjoyment. Bethlehem had become Sodom since an innocent child had seen the Virgin.

"Eh? What did I tell you?" exclaimed Madame Majeste, perceiving that Pierre was comparing her niece with the portrait. "Apolline is Bernadette all over!"

The young girl approached with her amiable smile, flattered at first by the comparison.

"Let's see, let's see!" said Abbe des Hermoises, with an air of lively interest.

He took the photograph in his turn, compared it with the girl, and then exclaimed in amazement: "It's wonderful; the same features. I had not noticed it before. Really I'm delighted—"

"Still I fancy she had a larger nose," Apolline ended by remarking.

The Abbe then raised an exclamation of irresistible admiration: "Oh! you are prettier, much prettier, that's evident. But that does not matter, anyone would take you for two sisters."

Pierre could not refrain from laughing, he thought the remark so peculiar. Ah! poor Bernadette was absolutely dead, and she had no sister. She could not have been born again; it would have been impossible for her to exist in the region of crowded life and passion which she had made.

At length Marie went off leaning on her father's arm, and it was agreed that they would both call and fetch her at the hospital to go to the station together. More than fifty people were awaiting her in the street in a state of ecstasy. They bowed to her and followed her; and one woman even made her infirm child, whom she was bringing back from the Grotto, touch her gown.

III. DEPARTURE

At half-past two o'clock the white train, which was to leave Lourdes at three-forty, was already in the station, alongside the second platform. For three days it had been waiting on a siding, in the same state as when it had come from Paris, and since it had been run into the station again white flags had been waving from the foremost and hindmost of its carriages, by way of preventing any mistakes on the part of the pilgrims, whose entraining was usually a very long and troublesome affair. Moreover, all the fourteen trains of the pilgrimage were timed to leave that day. The green train had started off at ten o'clock, followed by the pink and the yellow trains, and the others—the orange, the grey, and the blue—would start in turn after the white train had taken its departure. It was, indeed, another terrible day's work for the station staff, amidst a tumult and a scramble which altogether distracted them.

However, the departure of the white train was always the event of the day which provoked most interest and emotion, for it took away with it all the more afflicted patients, amongst whom were naturally those loved by the Virgin and chosen by her for the miraculous cures. Accordingly, a large, serried crowd was collected under the roofing of the spacious platform, a hundred yards in length, where all the benches were already covered with waiting pilgrims and their parcels. In the refreshment-room, at one end of the buildings, men were drinking beer and women ordering lemonade at the little tables which had been taken by assault, whilst at the other end bearers stood on guard at the goods entrance so as to keep the way clear for the speedy passage of the patients, who would soon be arriving. And all along the broad platform there was incessant coming and going, poor people rushing hither and thither in bewilderment, priests trotting along to render assistance, gentlemen in frock-coats looking on with quiet inquisitiveness: indeed, all the jumbling and jostling of the most mixed, most variegated throng ever elbowed in a railway station.

At three o'clock, however, the sick had not yet reached the station, and Baron Suire was in despair, his anxiety arising from the dearth of horses, for a number of unexpected tourists had arrived at Lourdes that morning and hired conveyances for Bareges, Cauterets, and Gavarnie. At last, however, the Baron espied Berthaud and Gerard arriving in all haste, after scouring the town; and when he had rushed up to them they soon pacified him by announcing that things were going splendidly. They had been able to procure the needful animals, and the removal of the patients from the hospital was now being carried out under the most favorable circumstances. Squads of bearers with their stretchers and little carts were already in the station yard, watching for the arrival of the vans, breaks, and other vehicles which had been recruited. A reserve supply of mattresses and cushions was, moreover, heaped up beside a lamp-post. Nevertheless, just as the first patients arrived, Baron Suire again lost his head, whilst Berthaud and Gerard hastened to the platform from which the train would start. There they began to superintend matters, and gave orders amidst an increasing scramble.

Father Fourcade was on this platform, walking up and down alongside the train, on Father Massias's arm. Seeing Doctor Bonamy approach, he stopped short to speak to him: "Ah, doctor," said he, "I am pleased to see you. Father Massias, who is about to leave us, was again telling me just now of the extraordinary favor granted by the Blessed Virgin to that interesting young person, Mademoiselle Marie de Guersaint. There has not been such a brilliant miracle for years! It is signal good-fortune for us—a blessing which should render our labours fruitful. All Christendom will be illumined, comforted, enriched by it."

He was radiant with pleasure, and forthwith the doctor with his clean-shaven face, heavy, peaceful features, and usually tired eyes, also began to exult: "Yes, your reverence, it is prodigious, prodigious! I shall write a pamphlet about it. Never was cure produced by supernatural means in a more authentic manner. Ah! what a stir it will create!"

Then, as they had begun walking to and fro again, all three together, he noticed that Father Fourcade was dragging his leg with increased difficulty, leaning heavily the while on his companion's arm. "Is your attack of gout worse, your reverence?" he inquired. "You seem to be suffering a great deal."

"Oh! don't speak of it; I wasn't able to close my eyes all night! It is very annoying that this attack should have come on me the very day of my arrival here! It might as well have waited. But there is nothing to be done, so don't let us talk of it any more. I am, at all events, very pleased with this year's result."

"Ah! yes, yes indeed," in his turn said Father Massias, in a voice which quivered with fervour; "we may all feel proud, and go away with our hearts full of enthusiasm and gratitude. How many prodigies there have been, in addition to the healing of that young woman you spoke of! There is no counting all the miracles: deaf women and dumb women have recovered their faculties, faces disfigured by sores have become as smooth as the hand, moribund consumptives have come to life again and eaten and danced! It is not a train of sufferers, but a train of resurrection, a train of glory, that I am about to take back to Paris!"

He had ceased to see the ailing creatures around him, and in the blindness of his faith was soaring triumphantly.

Then, alongside the carriages, whose compartments were beginning to fill, they all three continued their slow saunter, smiling at the pilgrims who bowed to them, and at times again stopping to address a kind word to some mournful woman who, pale and shivering, passed by upon a stretcher. They boldly declared that she was looking much better, and would assuredly soon get well.

However, the station-master, who was incessantly bustling about, passed by, calling in a shrill voice: "Don't block up the platform, please; don't block up the platform!" And on Berthaud pointing out to him that it was, at all events, necessary to deposit the stretchers on the platform before hoisting the patients into the carriages, he became quite angry: "But, come, come; is it reasonable?" he asked. "Look at that little hand-cart which has been left on the rails over yonder. I expect the train to Toulouse in a few minutes. Do you want your people to be crushed to death?"

Then he went off at a run to instruct some porters to keep the bewildered flock of pilgrims away from the rails. Many of them, old and simple people, did not even recognise the colour of their train, and this was the reason why one and all wore cards of some particular hue hanging from their necks, so that they might be led and entrained like marked cattle. And what a constant state of excitement it was, with the starting of these fourteen special trains, in addition to all the ordinary traffic, in which no change had been made.

Pierre arrived, valise in hand, and found some difficulty in reaching the platform. He was alone, for Marie had expressed an ardent desire to kneel once more at the Grotto, so that her soul might burn with gratitude before the Blessed Virgin until the last moment; and so he had left M. de Guersaint to conduct her thither whilst he himself settled the hotel bill. Moreover, he had made them promise that they would take a fly to the station, and they would certainly arrive within a quarter of an hour. Meantime, his idea was to seek their carriage, and there rid himself of his valise. This, however, was not an easy task, and he only recognised the carriage eventually by the placard which had been swinging from it in the sunlight and the storms during the last three days—a square of pasteboard bearing the names of Madame de Jonquiere and Sisters Hyacinthe and Claire des Anges. There could be no mistake, and Pierre again pictured the compartments full of his travelling companions. Some cushions already marked M. Sabathier's corner, and on the seat where Marie had experienced such suffering he still found some scratches caused by the ironwork of her box. Then, having deposited his valise in his own place, he remained on the platform waiting and looking around him, with a slight feeling of surprise at not perceiving Doctor Chassaigne, who had promised to come and embrace him before the train started.

Now that Marie was well again, Pierre had laid his bearer straps aside, and merely wore the red cross of the pilgrimage on his cassock. The station, of which he had caught but a glimpse, in the livid dawn amidst the anguish of the terrible morning of their arrival, now surprised him by its spacious platforms, its broad exits, and its clear gaiety. He could not see the mountains, but some verdant slopes rose up on the other side, in front of the waiting-rooms; and that afternoon the weather was delightfully mild, the sky of a milky whiteness, with light fleecy clouds veiling the sun, whence there fell a broad diffuse light, like a nacreous, pearly dust: "maiden's weather," as country folk are wont to say.

The big clock had just struck three, and Pierre was looking at it when he saw Madame Desagneaux and Madame Volmar arrive, followed by Madame de Jonquiere and her daughter. These ladies, who had driven from the hospital in a landau, at once began looking for their carriage, and it was Raymonde who first recognised the first-class compartment in which she had travelled from Paris. "Mamma, mamma, here; here it is!" she called. "Stay a little while with us; you have plenty of time to install yourself among your patients, since they haven't yet arrived."

Pierre now again found himself face to face with Madame Volmar, and their glances met. However, he gave no sign of recognition, and on her side there was but a slight sudden drooping of the eyelids. She had again assumed the air of a languid, indolent, black-robed woman, who modestly shrinks back, well pleased to escape notice. Her brasier-like eyes no longer glowed; it was only at long intervals that they kindled into a spark beneath the veil of indifference, the moire-like shade, which dimmed them.

"Oh! it was a fearful sick headache!" she was repeating to Madame Desagneaux. "And, you can see, I've hardly recovered the use of my poor head yet. It's the journey which brings it on. It's the same thing every year."

However, Berthaud and Gerard, who had just perceived the ladies, were hurrying up to them. That morning they had presented themselves at the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, and Madame de Jonquiere had received them in a little office near the linen-room. Thereupon, apologising with smiling affability for making his request amidst such a hurly-burly, Berthaud had solicited the hand of Mademoiselle Raymonde for his cousin, Gerard. They at once felt themselves at ease, the mother, with some show of emotion, saying that Lourdes would bring the young couple good luck. And so the marriage was arranged in a few words, amidst general satisfaction. A meeting was even appointed for the fifteenth of September at the Chateau of Berneville, near Caen, an estate belonging to Raymonde's uncle, the diplomatist, whom Berthaud knew, and to whom he promised to introduce Gerard. Then Raymonde was summoned, and blushed with pleasure as she placed her little hand in those of her betrothed.

Binding her now upon the platform, the latter began paying her every attention, and asking, "Would you like some pillows for the night? Don't make any ceremony about it; I can give you plenty, both for yourself and for these ladies who are accompanying you."

However, Raymonde gaily refused the offer, "No, no," said she, "we are not so delicate. Keep them for the poor sufferers."

All the ladies were now talking together. Madame de Jonquiere declared that she was so tired, so tired that she no longer felt alive; and yet she displayed great happiness, her eyes smiling as she glanced at her daughter and the young man she was engaged to. But neither Berthaud nor Gerard could remain there; they had their duties to perform, and accordingly took their leave, after reminding Madame de Jonquiere and Raymonde of the appointed meeting. It was understood, was it not, on September 15th, at the Chateau of Berneville? Yes, yes, it was understood! And then came fresh smiles and handshakes, whilst the eyes of the newly engaged couple—caressing, delighted eyes—added all that they dared not say aloud in the midst of such a throng.

"What!" exclaimed little Madame Desagneaux, "you will go to Berneville on the 15th? But if we stay at Trouville till the 10th, as my husband wishes to do, we will go to see you!" And then, turning towards Madame Volmar, who stood there silent, she added, "You ought to come as well, my dear. It would be so nice to meet there all together."

But, with a slow wave of the hand and an air of weary indifference, Madame Volmar answered, "Oh! my holiday is all over; I am going home."

Just then her eyes again met those of Pierre, who had remained standing near the party, and he fancied that she became confused, whilst an expression of indescribable suffering passed over her lifeless face.

The Sisters of the Assumption were now arriving, and the ladies joined them in front of the cantine van. Ferrand, who had come with the Sisters from the hospital, got into the van, and then helped Sister Saint-Francois to mount upon the somewhat high footboard. Then he remained standing on the threshold of the van—transformed into a kitchen and containing all sorts of supplies for the journey, such as bread, broth, milk, and chocolate,—whilst Sister Hyacinthe and Sister Claire des Anges, who were still on the platform, passed him his little medicine-chest and some small articles of luggage.

"You are sure you have everything?" Sister Hyacinthe asked him. "All right. Well, now you only have to go and lie down in your corner and get to sleep, since you complain that your services are not utilised."

Ferrand began to laugh softly. "I shall help Sister Saint-Francois," said he. "I shall light the oil-stove, wash the crockery, carry the cups of broth and milk to the patients whenever we stop, according to the time-table hanging yonder; and if, all the same, you should require a doctor, you will please come to fetch me."

Sister Hyacinthe had also begun to laugh. "But we no longer require a doctor since all our patients are cured," she replied; and, fixing her eyes on his, with her calm, sisterly air, she added, "Good-bye, Monsieur Ferrand."

He smiled again, whilst a feeling of deep emotion brought moisture to his eyes. The tremulous accents of his voice expressed his conviction that he would never be able to forget this journey, his joy at having seen her again, and the souvenir of divine and eternal affection which he was taking away with him. "Good-bye, Sister," said he.

Then Madame de Jonquiere talked of going to her carriage with Sister Claire des Anges and Sister Hyacinthe; but the latter assured her that there was no hurry, since the sick pilgrims were as yet scarcely arriving. She left her, therefore, taking the other Sister with her, and promising to see to everything. Moreover, she even insisted on ridding the superintendent of her little bag, saying that she would find it on her seat when it was time for her to come. Thus the ladies continued walking and chatting gaily on the broad platform, where the atmosphere was so pleasant.

Pierre, however, his eyes fixed upon the big clock, watched the minutes hasten by on the dial, and began to feel surprised at not seeing Marie arrive with her father. It was to be hoped that M. de Guersaint would not lose himself on the road!

The young priest was still watching, when, to his surprise, he caught sight of M. Vigneron, in a state of perfect exasperation, pushing his wife and little Gustave furiously before him.

"Oh, Monsieur l'Abbe," he exclaimed, "tell me where our carriage is! Help me to put our luggage and this child in it. I am at my wit's end! They have made me altogether lose my temper."

Then, on reaching the second-class compartment, he caught hold of Pierre's hands, just as the young man was about to place little Gustave inside, and quite an outburst followed. "Could you believe it? They insist on my starting. They tell me that my return-ticket will not be available if I wait here till to-morrow. It was of no use my telling them about the accident. As it is, it's by no means pleasant to have to stay with that corpse, watch over it, see it put in a coffin, and remove it to-morrow within the regulation time. But they pretend that it doesn't concern them, that they already make large enough reductions on the pilgrimage tickets, and that they can't enter into any questions of people dying."

Madame Vigneron stood all of a tremble listening to him, whilst Gustave, forgotten, staggering on his crutch with fatigue, raised his poor, inquisitive, suffering face.

"But at all events," continued the irate father, "as I told them, it's a case of compulsion. What do they expect me to do with that corpse? I can't take it under my arm, and bring it them to-day, like an article of luggage! I am therefore absolutely obliged to remain behind. But no! ah! how many stupid and wicked people there are!"

"Have you spoken to the station-master?" asked Pierre.

"The station-master! Oh! he's somewhere about, in the midst of the scramble. They were never able to find him. How could you have anything done properly in such a bear-garden? Still, I mean to rout him out, and give him a bit of my mind!"

Then, perceiving his wife standing beside him motionless, glued as it were to the platform, he cried: "What are you doing there? Get in, so that we may pass you the youngster and the parcels!"

With these words he pushed her in, and threw the parcels after her, whilst the young priest took Gustave in his arms. The poor little fellow, who was as light as a bird, seemingly thinner than before, consumed by sores, and so full of pain, raised a faint cry. "Oh, my dear child, have I hurt you?" asked Pierre.

"No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe, but I've been moved about so much to-day, and I'm very tired this afternoon." As he spoke, he smiled with his usual intelligent and mournful expression, and then, sinking back into his corner, closed his eyes, exhausted, indeed done for, by this fearful trip to Lourdes.

"As you can very well understand," now resumed M. Vigneron, "it by no means amuses me to stay here, kicking my heels, while my wife and my son go back to Paris without me. They have to go, however, for life at the hotel is no longer bearable; and besides, if I kept them with me, and the railway people won't listen to reason, I should have to pay three extra fares. And to make matters worse, my wife hasn't got much brains. I'm afraid she won't be able to manage things properly."

Then, almost breathless, he overwhelmed Madame Vigneron with the most minute instructions—what she was to do during the journey, how she was to get back home on arriving in Paris, and what steps she was to take if Gustave was to have another attack. Somewhat scared, she responded, in all docility, to each recommendation: "Yes, yes, dear—of course, dear, of course."

But all at once her husband's rage came back to him. "After all," he shouted, "what I want to know is whether my return ticket be good or not! I must know for certain! They must find that station-master for me!"

He was already on the point of rushing away through the crowd, when he noticed Gustave's crutch lying on the platform. This was disastrous, and he raised his eyes to heaven as though to call Providence to witness that he would never be able to extricate himself from such awful complications. And, throwing the crutch to his wife, he hurried off, distracted and shouting, "There, take it! You forget everything!"

The sick pilgrims were now flocking into the station, and, as on the occasion of their arrival, there was plenty of disorderly carting along the platform and across the lines. All the abominable ailments, all the sores, all the deformities, went past once more, neither their gravity nor their number seeming to have decreased; for the few cures which had been effected were but a faint inappreciable gleam of light amidst the general mourning. They were taken back as they had come. The little carts, laden with helpless old women with their bags at their feet, grated over the rails. The stretchers on which you saw inflated bodies and pale faces with glittering eyes, swayed amidst the jostling of the throng. There was wild and senseless haste, indescribable confusion, questions, calls, sudden running, all the whirling of a flock which cannot find the entrance to the pen. And the bearers ended by losing their heads, no longer knowing which direction to take amidst the warning cries of the porters, who at each moment were frightening people, distracting them with anguish. "Take care, take care over there! Make haste! No, no, don't cross! The Toulouse train, the Toulouse train!"

Retracing his steps, Pierre again perceived the ladies, Madame de Jonquiere and the others, still gaily chatting together. Lingering near them, he listened to Berthaud, whom Father Fourcade had stopped, to congratulate him on the good order which had been maintained throughout the pilgrimage. The ex-public prosecutor was now bowing his thanks, feeling quite flattered by this praise. "Is it not a lesson for their Republic, your reverence?" he asked. "People get killed in Paris when such crowds as these celebrate some bloody anniversary of their hateful history. They ought to come and take a lesson here."

He was delighted with the thought of being disagreeable to the Government which had compelled him to resign. He was never so happy as when women were just saved from being knocked over amidst the great concourse of believers at Lourdes. However, he did not seem to be satisfied with the results of the political propaganda which he came to further there, during three days, every year. Fits of impatience came over him, things did not move fast enough. When did Our Lady of Lourdes mean to bring back the monarchy?

"You see, your reverence," said he, "the only means, the real triumph, would be to bring the working classes of the towns here en masse. I shall cease dreaming, I shall devote myself to that entirely. Ah! if one could only create a Catholic democracy!"

Father Fourcade had become very grave. His fine, intelligent eyes filled with a dreamy expression, and wandered far away. How many times already had he himself made the creation of that new people the object of his efforts! But was not the breath of a new Messiah needed for the accomplishment of such a task? "Yes, yes," he murmured, "a Catholic democracy; ah! the history of humanity would begin afresh!"

But Father Massias interrupted him in a passionate voice, saying that all the nations of the earth would end by coming; whilst Doctor Bonamy, who already detected a slight subsidence of fervour among the pilgrims, wagged his head and expressed the opinion that the faithful ones of the Grotto ought to increase their zeal. To his mind, success especially depended on the greatest possible measure of publicity being given to the miracles. And he assumed a radiant air and laughed complacently whilst pointing to the tumultuous defile of the sick. "Look at them!" said he. "Don't they go off looking better? There are a great many who, although they don't appear to be cured, are nevertheless carrying the germs of cure away with them; of that you may be certain! Ah! the good people; they do far more than we do all together for the glory of Our Lady of Lourdes!"

However, he had to check himself, for Madame Dieulafay was passing before them, in her box lined with quilted silk. She was deposited in front of the door of the first-class carriage, in which a maid was already placing the luggage. Pity came to all who beheld the unhappy woman, for she did not seem to have awakened from her prostration during her three days' sojourn at Lourdes. What she had been when they had removed her from the carriage on the morning of her arrival, that she also was now when the bearers were about to place her inside it again—clad in lace, covered with jewels, still with the lifeless, imbecile face of a mummy slowly liquefying; and, indeed, one might have thought that she had become yet more wasted, that she was being taken back diminished, shrunken more and more to the proportions of a child, by the march of that horrible disease which, after destroying her bones, was now dissolving the softened fibres of her muscles. Inconsolable, bowed down by the loss of their last hope, her husband and sister, their eyes red, were following her with Abbe Judaine, even as one follows a corpse to the grave.

"No, no! not yet!" said the old priest to the bearers, in order to prevent them from placing the box in the carriage. "She will have time enough to roll along in there. Let her have the warmth of that lovely sky above her till the last possible moment."

Then, seeing Pierre near him, he drew him a few steps aside, and, in a voice broken by grief, resumed: "Ah! I am indeed distressed. Again this morning I had a hope. I had her taken to the Grotto, I said my mass for her, and came back to pray till eleven o'clock. But nothing came of it; the Blessed Virgin did not listen to me. Although she cured me, a poor, useless old man like me, I could not obtain from her the cure of this beautiful, young, and wealthy woman, whose life ought to be a continual fete. Undoubtedly the Blessed Virgin knows what she ought to do better than ourselves, and I bow and bless her name. Nevertheless, my soul is full of frightful sadness."

He did not tell everything; he did not confess the thought which was upsetting him, simple, childish, worthy man that he was, whose life had never been troubled by either passion or doubt. But his thought was that those poor weeping people, the husband and the sister, had too many millions, that the presents they had brought were too costly, that they had given far too much money to the Basilica. A miracle is not to be bought. The wealth of the world is a hindrance rather than an advantage when you address yourself to God. Assuredly, if the Blessed Virgin had turned a deaf ear to their entreaties, had shown them but a stern, cold countenance, it was in order that she might the more attentively listen to the weak voices of the lowly ones who had come to her with empty hands, with no other wealth than their love, and these she had loaded with grace, flooded with the glowing affection of her Divine Motherhood. And those poor wealthy ones, who had not been heard, that sister and that husband, both so wretched beside the sorry body they were taking away with them, they themselves felt like pariahs among the throng of the humble who had been consoled or healed; they seemed embarrassed by their very luxury, and recoiled, awkward and ill at ease, covered with shame at the thought that Our Lady of Lourdes had relieved beggars whilst never casting a glance upon that beautiful and powerful lady agonising unto death amidst all her lace!

All at once it occurred to Pierre that he might have missed seeing M. de Guersaint and Marie arrive, and that they were perhaps already in the carriage. He returned thither, but there was still only his valise on the seat. Sister Hyacinthe and Sister Claire des Anges, however, had begun to install themselves, pending the arrival of their charges, and as Gerard just then brought up M. Sabathier in a little handcart, Pierre helped to place him in the carriage, a laborious task which put both the young priest and Gerard into a perspiration. The ex-professor, who looked disconsolate though very calm, at once settled himself in his corner.

"Thank you, gentlemen," said he. "That's over, thank goodness. And now they'll only have to take me out at Paris."

After wrapping a rug round his legs, Madame Sabathier, who was also there, got out of the carriage and remained standing near the open door. She was talking to Pierre when all at once she broke off to say: "Ah! here's Madame Maze coming to take her seat. She confided in me the other day, you know. She's a very unhappy little woman."

Then, in an obliging spirit, she called to her and offered to watch over her things. But Madame Maze shook her head, laughed, and gesticulated as though she were out of her senses.

"No, no, I am not going," said she.

"What! you are not going back?"

"No, no, I am not going—that is, I am, but not with you, not with you!"

She wore such an extraordinary air, she looked so bright, that Pierre and Madame Sabathier found it difficult to recognise her. Her fair, prematurely faded face was radiant, she seemed to be ten years younger, suddenly aroused from the infinite sadness into which desertion had plunged her. And, at last, her joy overflowing, she raised a cry: "I am going off with him! Yes, he has come to fetch me, he is taking me with him. Yes, yes, we are going to Luchon together, together!"

Then, with a rapturous glance, she pointed out a dark, sturdy-looking young man, with gay eyes and bright red lips, who was purchasing some newspapers. "There! that's my husband," said she, "that handsome man who's laughing over there with the newspaper-girl. He turned up here early this morning, and he's carrying me off. We shall take the Toulouse train in a couple of minutes. Ah! dear madame, I told you of all my worries, and you can understand my happiness, can't you?"

However, she could not remain silent, but again spoke of the frightful letter which she had received on Sunday, a letter in which he had declared to her that if she should take advantage of her sojourn at Lourdes to come to Luchon after him, he would not open the door to her. And, think of it, theirs had been a love match! But for ten years he had neglected her, profiting by his continual journeys as a commercial traveller to take friends about with him from one to the other end of France. Ah! that time she had thought it all over, she had asked the Blessed Virgin to let her die, for she knew that the faithless one was at that very moment at Luchon with two friends. What was it then that had happened? A thunderbolt must certainly have fallen from heaven. Those two friends must have received a warning from on high—perhaps they had dreamt that they were already condemned to everlasting punishment. At all events they had fled one evening without a word of explanation, and he, unable to live alone, had suddenly been seized with a desire to fetch his wife and keep her with him for a week. Grace must have certainly fallen on him, though he did not say it, for he was so kind and pleasant that she could not do otherwise than believe in a real beginning of conversion.

"Ah! how grateful I am to the Blessed Virgin," she continued; "she alone can have acted, and I well understood her last evening. It seemed to me that she made me a little sign just at the very moment when my husband was making up his mind to come here to fetch me. I asked him at what time it was that the idea occurred to him, and the hours fit in exactly. Ah! there has been no greater miracle. The others make me smile with their mended legs and their vanished sores. Blessed be Our Lady of Lourdes, who has healed my heart!"

Just then the sturdy young man turned round, and she darted away to join him, so full of delight that she forgot to bid the others good-bye. And it was at this moment, amidst the growing crowd of patients whom the bearers were bringing, that the Toulouse train at last came in. The tumult increased, the confusion became extraordinary. Bells rang and signals worked, whilst the station-master was seen rushing up, shouting with all the strength of his lungs: "Be careful there! Clear the line at once!"

A railway employe had to rush from the platform to push a little vehicle, which had been forgotten on the line, with an old woman in it, out of harm's way; however, yet another scared band of pilgrims ran across when the steaming, growling engine was only thirty yards distant. Others, losing their heads, would have been crushed by the wheels if porters had not roughly caught them by the shoulders. Then, without having pounded anybody, the train at last stopped alongside the mattresses, pillows, and cushions lying hither and thither, and the bewildered, whirling groups of people. The carriage doors opened and a torrent of travellers alighted, whilst another torrent climbed in, these two obstinately contending currents bringing the tumult to a climax. Faces, first wearing an inquisitive expression, and then overcome by stupefaction at the astonishing sight, showed themselves at the windows of the doors which remained closed; and, among them, one especially noticed the faces of two remarkably pretty girls, whose large candid eyes ended by expressing the most dolorous compassion.

Followed by her husband, however, Madame Maze had climbed into one of the carriages, feeling as happy and buoyant as if she were in her twentieth year again, as on the already distant evening of her honeymoon journey. And the doors having been slammed, the engine gave a loud whistle and began to move, going off slowly and heavily between the throng, which, in the rear of the train, flowed on to the lines again like an invading torrent whose flood-gates have been swept away.

"Bar the platform!" shouted the station-master to his men. "Keep watch when the engine comes up!"

The belated patients and pilgrims had arrived during this alert. La Grivotte passed by with her feverish eyes and excited, dancing gait, followed by Elise Rouquet and Sophie Couteau, who were very gay, and quite out of breath through running. All three hastened to their carriage, where Sister Hyacinthe scolded them. They had almost been left behind at the Grotto, where, at times, the pilgrims lingered forgetfully, unable to tear themselves away, still imploring and entreating the Blessed Virgin, when the train was waiting for them at the railway-station.

All at once Pierre, who likewise was anxious, no longer knowing what to think, perceived M. de Guersaint and Marie quietly talking with Abbe Judaine on the covered platform. He hastened to join them, and told them of his impatience. "What have you been doing?" he asked. "I was losing all hope."

"What have we been doing?" responded M. de Guersaint, with quiet astonishment. "We were at the Grotto, as you know very well. There was a priest there, preaching in a most remarkable manner, and we should still be there if I hadn't remembered that we had to leave. And we took a fly here, as we promised you we would do."

He broke off to look at the clock. "But hang it all!" he added, "there's no hurry. The train won't start for another quarter of an hour."

This was true. Then Marie, smiling with divine joy, exclaimed: "Oh! if you only knew, Pierre, what happiness I have brought away from that last visit to the Blessed Virgin. I saw her smile at me, I felt her giving me strength to live. Really, that farewell was delightful, and you must not scold us, Pierre."

He himself had begun to smile, somewhat ill at ease, however, as he thought of his nervous fidgeting. Had he, then, experienced so keen a desire to get far away from Lourdes? Had he feared that the Grotto might keep Marie, that she might never come away from it again? Now that she was there beside him, he was astonished at having indulged such thoughts, and felt himself to be very calm.

However, whilst he was advising them to go and take their seats in the carriage, he recognised Doctor Chassaigne hastily approaching. "Ah! my dear doctor," he said, "I was waiting for you. I should have been sorry indeed to have gone away without embracing you."

But the old doctor, who was trembling with emotion, interrupted him. "Yes, yes, I am late. But ten minutes ago, just as I arrived, I caught sight of that eccentric fellow, the Commander, and had a talk with him over yonder. He was sneering at the sight of your people taking the train again to go and die at home, when, said he, they ought to have done so before coming to Lourdes. Well, all at once, while he was talking like this, he fell on the ground before me. It was his third attack of paralysis; the one he had long been expecting."

"Oh! mon Dieu," murmured Abbe Judaine, who heard the doctor, "he was blaspheming. Heaven has punished him."

M. de Guersaint and Marie were listening, greatly interested and deeply moved.

"I had him carried yonder, into that shed," continued the doctor. "It is all over; I can do nothing. He will doubtless be dead before a quarter of an hour has gone by. But I thought of a priest, and hastened up to you."

Then, turning towards Abbe Judaine, M. Chassaigne added: "Come with me, Monsieur le Cure; you know him. We cannot let a Christian depart unsuccoured. Perhaps he will be moved, recognise his error, and become reconciled with God."

Abbe Judaine quickly followed the doctor, and in the rear went M. de Guersaint, leading Marie and Pierre, whom the thought of this tragedy impassioned. All five entered the goods shed, at twenty paces from the crowd which was still bustling and buzzing, without a soul in it expecting that there was a man dying so near by.

In a solitary corner of the shed, between two piles of sacks filled with oats, lay the Commander, on a mattress borrowed from the Hospitality reserve supply. He wore his everlasting frock-coat, with its buttonhole decked with a broad red riband, and somebody who had taken the precaution to pick up his silver-knobbed walking-stick had carefully placed it on the ground beside the mattress.

Abbe Judaine at once leant over him. "You recognise us, you can hear us, my poor friend, can't you?" asked the priest.

Only the Commander's eyes now appeared to be alive; but they were alive, still glittering brightly with a stubborn flame of energy. The attack had this time fallen on his right side, almost entirely depriving him of the power of speech. He could only stammer a few words, by which he succeeded in making them understand that he wished to die there, without being moved or worried any further. He had no relative at Lourdes, where nobody knew anything either of his former life or his family. For three years he had lived there happily on the salary attached to his little post at the station, and now he at last beheld his ardent, his only desire, approaching fulfilment—the desire that he might depart and fall into the eternal sleep. His eyes expressed the great joy he felt at being so near his end.

"Have you any wish to make known to us?" resumed Abbe Judaine. "Cannot we be useful to you in any way?"

No, no; his eyes replied that he was all right, well pleased. For three years past he had never got up in the morning without hoping that by night time he would be sleeping in the cemetery. Whenever he saw the sun shine he was wont to say in an envious tone: "What a beautiful day for departure!" And now that death was at last at hand, ready to deliver him from his hateful existence, it was indeed welcome.

"I can do nothing, science is powerless. He is condemned," said Doctor Chassaigne in a low, bitter tone to the old priest, who begged him to attempt some effort.

However, at that same moment it chanced that an aged woman, a pilgrim of fourscore years, who had lost her way and knew not whither she was going, entered the shed. Lame and humpbacked, reduced to the stature of childhood's days, afflicted with all the ailments of extreme old age, she was dragging herself along with the assistance of a stick, and at her side was slung a can full of Lourdes water, which she was taking away with her, in the hope of yet prolonging her old age, in spite of all its frightful decay. For a moment her senile, imbecile mind was quite scared. She stood looking at that outstretched, stiffened man, who was dying. Then a gleam of grandmotherly kindliness appeared in the depths of her dim, vague eyes; and with the sisterly feelings of one who was very aged and suffered very grievously she drew nearer, and, taking hold of her can with her hands, which never ceased shaking, she offered it to the man.

To Abbe Judaine this seemed like a sudden flash of light, an inspiration from on high. He, who had prayed so fervently and so often for the cure of Madame Dieulafay without being heard by the Blessed Virgin, now glowed with fresh faith in the conviction that if the Commander would only drink that water he would be cured.

The old priest fell upon his knees beside the mattress. "O brother!" he said, "it is God who has sent you this woman. Reconcile yourself with God, drink and pray, whilst we ourselves implore the divine mercy with our whole souls. God will prove His power to you; God will work the great miracle of setting you erect once more, so that you may yet spend many years upon this earth, loving Him and glorifying Him."

No, no! the Commander's sparkling eyes cried no! He, indeed, show himself as cowardly as those flocks of pilgrims who came from afar, through so many fatigues, in order to drag themselves on the ground and sob and beg Heaven to let them live a month, a year, ten years longer! It was so pleasant, so simple to die quietly in your bed. You turned your face to the wall and you died.

"Drink, O my brother, I implore you!" continued the old priest. "It is life that you will drink, it is strength and health, the very joy of living. Drink that you may become young again, that you may begin a new and pious life; drink that you may sing the praises of the Divine Mother, who will have saved both your body and your soul. She is speaking to me, your resurrection is certain."

But no! but no! The eyes refused, repelled the offer of life with growing obstinacy, and in their expression now appeared a covert fear of the miraculous. The Commander did not believe; for three years he had been shrugging his shoulders at the pretended cases of cure. But could one ever tell in this strange world of ours? Such extraordinary things did sometimes happen. And if by chance their water should really have a supernatural power, and if by force they should make him drink some of it, it would be terrible to have to live again—to endure once more the punishment of a galley-slave existence, that abomination which Lazarus—the pitiable object of the great miracle—had suffered twice. No, no, he would not drink; he would not incur the fearful risk of resurrection.

"Drink, drink, my brother," repeated Abbe Judaine, who was now in tears; "do not harden your heart to refuse the favours of Heaven."

And then a terrible thing was seen; this man, already half dead, raised himself, shaking off the stifling bonds of paralysis, loosening for a second his tied tongue, and stammering, growling in a hoarse voice: "No, no, NO!"

Pierre had to lead the stupefied old woman away and put her in the right direction again. She had failed to understand that refusal of the water which she herself was taking home with her like an inestimable treasure, the very gift of God's eternity to the poor who did not wish to die. Lame of one leg, humpbacked, dragging the sorry remnants of her fourscore years along by the assistance of her stick, she disappeared among the tramping crowd, consumed by the passion of being, eager for space, air, sunshine, and noise.

Marie and her father had shuddered in presence of that appetite for death, that greedy hungering for the end which the Commander showed. Ah! to sleep, to sleep without a dream, in the infinite darkness forever and ever—nothing in the world could have seemed so sweet to him. He did not hope in a better life; he had no desire to become happy, at last, in Paradise where equality and justice would reign. His sole longing was for black night and endless sleep, the joy of being no more, of never, never being again. And Doctor Chassaigne also had shuddered, for he also nourished but one thought, the thought of the happy moment when he would depart. But, in his case, on the other side of this earthly existence he would find his dear lost ones awaiting him, at the spot where eternal life began; and how icy cold all would have seemed had he but for a single moment thought that he might not meet them there.

Abbe Judaine painfully rose up. It had seemed to him that the Commander was now fixing his bright eyes upon Marie. Deeply grieved that his entreaties should have been of no avail, the priest wished to show the dying man an example of that goodness of God which he repulsed.

"You recognise her, do you not?" he asked. "Yes, it is the young lady who arrived here on Saturday so ill, with both legs paralysed. And you see her now, so full of health, so strong, so beautiful. Heaven has taken pity on her, and now she is reviving to youth, to the long life she was born to live. Do you feel no regret in seeing her? Would you also like her to be dead? would you have advised her not to drink the water?"

The Commander could not answer; but his eyes no longer strayed from Marie's young face, on which one read such great happiness at having resuscitated, such vast hopes in countless morrows; and tears appeared in those fixed eyes of his, gathered under their lids, and rolled down his cheeks, which were already cold. He was certainly weeping for her; he must have been thinking of that other miracle which he had wished her—that if she should be cured, she might be happy. It was the tenderness of an old man, who knows the miseries of this world, stirred to pity by the thought of all the sorrows which awaited this young creature. Ah! poor woman, how many times; perhaps, might she regret that she had not died in her twentieth year!

Then the Commander's eyes grew very dim, as though those last pitiful tears had dissolved them. It was the end; coma was coming; the mind was departing with the breath. He slightly turned, and died.

Doctor Chassaigne at once drew Marie aside. "The train's starting," he said; "make haste, make haste!"

Indeed, the loud ringing of a bell was clearly resounding above the growing tumult of the crowd. And the doctor, having requested two bearers to watch the body, which would be removed later on when the train had gone, desired to accompany his friends to their carriage.

They hastened their steps. Abbe Judaine, who was in despair, joined them after saying a short prayer for the repose of that rebellious soul. However, while Marie, followed by Pierre and M. de Guersaint, was running along the platform, she was stopped once more, and this time by Doctor Bonamy, who triumphantly presented her to Father Fourcade. "Here is Mademoiselle de Guersaint, your reverence, the young lady who was healed so marvellously yesterday."

The radiant smile of a general who is reminded of his most decisive victory appeared on Father Fourcade's face. "I know, I know; I was there," he replied. "God has blessed you among all women, my dear daughter; go, and cause His name to be worshipped."

Then he congratulated M. de Guersaint, whose paternal pride savoured divine enjoyment. It was the ovation beginning afresh—the concert of loving words and enraptured glances which had followed the girl through the streets of Lourdes that morning, and which again surrounded her at the moment of departure. The bell might go on ringing; a circle of delighted pilgrims still lingered around her; it seemed as if she were carrying away in her person all the glory of the pilgrimage, the triumph of religion, which would echo and echo to the four corners of the earth.

And Pierre was moved as he noticed the dolorous group which Madame Jousseur and M. Dieulafay formed near by. Their eyes were fixed upon Marie; like the others, they were astonished by the resurrection of this beautiful girl, whom they had seen lying inert, emaciated, with ashen face. Why should that child have been healed? Why not the young woman, the dear woman, whom they were taking home in a dying state? Their confusion, their sense of shame, seemed to increase; they drew back, uneasy, like pariahs burdened with too much wealth; and it was a great relief for them when, three bearers having with difficulty placed Madame Dieulafay in the first-class compartment, they themselves were able to vanish into it in company with Abbe Judaine.

The employes were already shouting, "Take your seats! take your seats," and Father Massias, the spiritual director of the train, had returned to his compartment, leaving Father Fourcade on the platform leaning on Doctor Bonamy's shoulder. In all haste Gerard and Berthaud again saluted the ladies, while Raymonde got in to join Madame Desagneaux and Madame Volmar in their corner; and Madame de Jonquiere at last ran off to her carriage, which she reached at the same time as the Guersaints. There was hustling, and shouting, and wild running from one to the other end of the long train, to which the engine, a copper engine, glittering like a star, had just been coupled.

Pierre was helping Marie into the carriage, when M. Vigneron, coming back at a gallop, shouted to him: "It'll be good to-morrow, it'll be good tomorrow!" Very red in the face, he showed and waved his ticket, and then galloped off again to the compartment where his wife and son had their seats, in order to announce the good news to them.

When Marie and her father were installed in their places, Pierre lingered for another moment on the platform with Doctor Chassaigne, who embraced him paternally. The young man wished to induce the doctor to return to Paris and take some little interest in life again. But M. Chassaigne shook his head. "No, no, my dear child," he replied. "I shall remain here. They are here, they keep me here." He was speaking of his dear lost ones. Then, very gently and lovingly, he said, "Farewell."

"Not farewell, my dear doctor; till we meet again."

"Yes, yes, farewell. The Commander was right, you know; nothing can be so sweet as to die, but to die in order to live again."

Baron Suire was now giving orders for the removal of the white flags on the foremost and hindmost carriages of the train; the shouts of the railway employes were ringing out in more and more imperious tones, "Take your seats! take your seats!" and now came the supreme scramble, the torrent of belated pilgrims rushing up distracted, breathless, and covered with perspiration. Madame de Jonquiere and Sister Hyacinthe were counting their party in the carriage. La Grivotte, Elise Rouquet, and Sophie Couteau were all three there. Madame Sabathier, too, had taken her seat in front of her husband, who, with his eyes half closed, was patiently awaiting the departure. However, a voice inquired, "And Madame Vincent, isn't she going back with us?"

Thereupon Sister Hyacinthe, who was leaning out of the window exchanging a last smile with Ferrand, who stood at the door of the cantine van, exclaimed: "Here she comes!"

Madame Vincent crossed the lines, rushed up, the last of all, breathless and haggard. And at once, by an involuntary impulse, Pierre glanced at her arms. They carried nothing now.

All the doors were being closed, slammed one after the other; the carriages were full, and only the signal for departure was awaited. Panting and smoking, the engine gave vent to a first loud whistle, shrill and joyous; and at that moment the sun, hitherto veiled from sight, dissipated the light cloudlets and made the whole train resplendent, gilding the engine, which seemed on the point of starting for the legendary Paradise. No bitterness, but a divine, infantile gaiety attended the departure. All the sick appeared to be healed. Though most of them were being taken away in the same condition as they had been brought, they went off relieved and happy, at all events, for an hour. And not the slightest jealousy tainted their brotherly and sisterly feelings; those who were not cured waxed quite gay, triumphant at the cure of the others. Their own turns would surely come; yesterday's miracle was the formal promise of to-morrow's. Even after those three days of burning entreaty their fever of desire remained within them; the faith of the forgotten ones continued as keen as ever in the conviction that the Blessed Virgin had simply deferred a cure for their souls' benefit. Inextinguishable love, invincible hope glowed within all those wretched ones thirsting for life. And so a last outburst of joy, a turbulent display of happiness, laughter and shouts, overflowed from all the crowded carriages. "Till next year! We'll come back, we'll come back again!" was the cry; and then the gay little Sisters of the Assumption clapped their hands, and the hymn of gratitude, the "Magnificat," began, sung by all the eight hundred pilgrims: "Magnificat anima mea Dominum." "My soul doth magnify the Lord."

Thereupon the station-master, his mind at last at ease, his arms hanging beside him, caused the signal to be given. The engine whistled once again and then set out, rolling along in the dazzling sunlight as amidst a glory. Although his leg was causing him great suffering, Father Fourcade had remained on the platform, leaning upon Doctor Bonamy's shoulder, and, in spite of everything, saluting the departure of his dear children with a smile. Berthaud, Gerard, and Baron Suire formed another group, and near them were Doctor Chassaigne and M. Vigneron waving their handkerchiefs. Heads were looking joyously out of the windows of the fleeing carriages, whence other handkerchiefs were streaming in the current of air produced by the motion of the train. Madame Vigneron compelled Gustave to show his pale little face, and for a long time Raymonde's small hand could be seen waving good wishes; but Marie remained the last, looking back on Lourdes as it grew smaller and smaller amidst the trees.

Across the bright countryside the train triumphantly disappeared, resplendent, growling, chanting at the full pitch of its eight hundred voices: "Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo." "And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour!"

IV. MARIE'S VOW

ONCE more was the white train rolling, rolling towards Paris on its way home; and the third-class carriage, where the shrill voices singing the "Magnificat" at full pitch rose above the growling of the wheels, had again become a common room, a travelling hospital ward, full of disorder, littered like an improvised ambulance. Basins and brooms and sponges lay about under the seats, which half concealed them. Articles of luggage, all the wretched mass of poor worn-out things, were heaped together, a little bit everywhere; and up above, the litter began again, what with the parcels, the baskets, and the bags hanging from the brass pegs and swinging to and fro without a moment's rest. The same Sisters of the Assumption and the same lady-hospitallers were there with their patients, amidst the contingent of healthy pilgrims, who were already suffering from the overpowering heat and unbearable odour. And at the far end there was again the compartment full of women, the ten close-packed female pilgrims, some young, some old, and all looking pitifully ugly as they violently chanted the canticle in cracked and woeful voices.

"At what time shall we reach Paris?" M. de Guersaint inquired of Pierre.

"To-morrow at about two in the afternoon, I think," the priest replied.

Since starting, Marie had been looking at the latter with an air of anxious preoccupation, as though haunted by a sudden sorrow which she could not reveal. However, she found her gay, healthful smile again to say: "Twenty-two hours' journey! Ah! it won't be so long and trying as it was coming."

"Besides," resumed her father, "we have left some of our people behind. We have plenty of room now."

In fact Madame Maze's absence left a corner free at the end of the seat which Marie, now sitting up like any other passenger, no longer encumbered with her box. Moreover, little Sophie had this time been placed in the next compartment, where there was neither Brother Isidore nor his sister Marthe. The latter, it was said, had remained at Lourdes in service with a pious lady. On the other side, Madame de Jonquiere and Sister Hyacinthe also had the benefit of a vacant seat, that of Madame Vetu; and it had further occurred to them to get rid of Elise Rouquet by placing her with Sophie, so that only La Grivotte and the Sabathier couple were with them in their compartment. Thanks to these new arrangements, they were better able to breathe, and perhaps they might manage to sleep a little.

The last verse of the "Magnificat" having been sung, the ladies finished installing themselves as comfortably as possible by setting their little household in order. One of the most important matters was to put the zinc water-can, which interfered with their legs, out of the way. All the blinds of the left-hand windows had been pulled down, for the oblique sunrays were falling on the train, and had poured into it in sheets of fire. The last storms, however, must have laid the dust, and the night would certainly be cool. Moreover, there was less suffering: death had carried off the most afflicted ones, and only stupefied ailments, numbed by fatigue and lapsing into a slow torpor, remained. The overpowering reaction which always follows great moral shocks was about to declare itself. The souls had made the efforts required of them, the miracles had been worked, and now the relaxing was beginning amidst a hebetude tinged with profound relief.

Until they got to Tarbes they were all very much occupied in setting things in order and making themselves comfortable. But as they left that station Sister Hyacinthe rose up and clapped her hands. "My children," said she, "we must not forget the Blessed Virgin who has been so kind to us. Let us begin the Rosary."

Then the whole carriage repeated the first chaplet—the five joyful mysteries, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Purification, and the Finding of Jesus in the Temple. And afterwards they intoned the canticle, "Let us contemplate the heavenly Archangel," in such loud voices that the peasants working in the fields raised their heads to look at this singing train as it rushed past them at full speed.

Marie was at the window, gazing with admiration at the vast landscape and the immense stretch of sky, which had gradually freed itself of its mist and was now of a dazzling blue. It was the delicious close of a fine day. However, she at last looked back into the carriage, and her eyes were fixing themselves on Pierre with that mute sadness which had previously dimmed them, when all at once a sound of furious sobbing burst forth in front of her. The canticle was finished, and it was Madame Vincent who was crying, stammering confused words, half-choked by her tears: "Ah, my poor little one!" she gasped. "Ah, my jewel, my treasure, my life!"

She had previously remained in her corner, shrinking back into it as though anxious to disappear. With a fierce face, her lips tightly set, and her eyes closed, as though to isolate herself in the depths of her cruel grief, she had hitherto not said a word. But, chancing to open her eyes, she had espied the leathern window-strap hanging down beside the door, and the sight of that strap, which her daughter had touched, almost played with at one moment during the previous journey, had overwhelmed her with a frantic despair which swept away her resolution to remain silent.

"Ah! my poor little Rose," she continued. "Her little hand touched that strap, she turned it, and looked at it—ah, it was her last plaything! And we were there both together then; she was still alive, I still had her on my lap, in my arms. It was still so nice, so nice! But now I no longer have her; I shall never, never have her again, my poor little Rose, my poor little Rose!"

Distracted, sobbing bitterly, she looked at her knees and her arms, on which nothing now rested, and which she was at a loss how to employ. She had so long rocked her daughter on her knees, so long carried her in her arms, that it now seemed to her as if some portion of her being had been amputated, as if her body had been deprived of one of its functions, leaving her diminished, unoccupied, distracted at being unable to fulfil that function any more. Those useless arms and knees of hers quite embarrassed her.

Pierre and Marie, who were deeply moved, had drawn near, uttering kind words and striving to console the unhappy mother. And, little by little, from the disconnected sentences which mingled with her sobs, they learned what a Calvary she had ascended since her daughter's death. On the morning of the previous day, when she had carried the body off in her arms amidst the storm, she must have long continued walking, blind and deaf to everything, whilst the torrential rain beat down upon her. She no longer remembered what squares she had crossed, what streets she had traversed, as she roamed through that infamous Lourdes, that Lourdes which killed little children, that Lourdes which she cursed.

"Ah! I can't remember, I can't remember," she faltered. "But some people took me in, had pity upon me, some people whom I don't know, but who live somewhere. Ah! I can't remember where, but it was somewhere high up, far away, at the other end of the town. And they were certainly very poor folk, for I can still see myself in a poor-looking room with my dear little one who was quite cold, and whom they laid upon their bed."

At this recollection a fresh attack of sobbing shook her, in fact almost stifled her.

"No, no," she at last resumed, "I would not part with her dear little body by leaving it in that abominable town. And I can't tell exactly how it happened, but it must have been those poor people who took me with them. We did a great deal of walking, oh! a great deal of walking; we saw all those gentlemen of the pilgrimage and the railway. 'What can it matter to you?' I repeated to them. 'Let me take her back to Paris in my arms. I brought her here like that when she was alive, I may surely take her back dead? Nobody will notice anything, people will think that she is asleep.'"

"And all of them, all those officials, began shouting and driving me away as though I were asking them to let me do something wicked. Then I ended by telling them my mind. When people make so much fuss, and bring so many agonising sick to a place like that, they surely ought to send the dead ones home again, ought they not? And do you know how much money they ended by asking of me at the station? Three hundred francs! Yes, it appears it is the price! Three hundred francs, good Lord! of me, who came here with thirty sous in my pocket and have only five left. Why, I don't earn that amount of money by six months' sewing. They ought to have asked me for my life; I would have given it so willingly. Three hundred francs! three hundred francs for that poor little bird-like body, which it would have consoled me so much to have brought away on my knees!"

Then she began stammering and complaining in a confused, husky voice: "Ah, if you only knew how sensibly those poor people talked to me to induce me to go back. A work-woman like myself, with work waiting, ought to return to Paris, they said; and, besides, I couldn't afford to sacrifice my return ticket; I must take the three-forty train. And they told me, too, that people are compelled to put up with things when they are not rich. Only the rich can keep their dead, do what they like with them, eh? And I can't remember—no, again I can't remember! I didn't even know the time; I should never have been able to find my way back to the station. After the funeral over there, at a place where there were two trees, it must have been those poor people who led me away, half out of my senses, and brought me to the station, and pushed me into the carriage just at the moment when the train was starting. But what a rending it was—as if my heart had remained there underground, and it is frightful, that it is, frightful, my God!"

"Poor woman!" murmured Marie. "Take courage, and pray to the Blessed Virgin for the succour which she never refuses to the afflicted."

But at this Madame Vincent shook with rage. "It isn't true!" she cried. "The Blessed Virgin doesn't care a rap about me. She doesn't tell the truth! Why did she deceive me? I should never have gone to Lourdes if I hadn't heard that voice in a church. My little girl would still be alive, and perhaps the doctors would have saved her. I, who would never set my foot among the priests formerly! Ah! I was right! I was right! There's no Blessed Virgin at all!"

And in this wise, without resignation, without illusion, without hope, she continued blaspheming with the coarse fury of a woman of the people, shrieking the sufferings of her heart aloud in such rough fashion that Sister Hyacinthe had to intervene: "Be quiet, you unhappy woman! It is God who is making you suffer, to punish you."

The scene had already lasted a long time, and as they passed Riscle at full speed the Sister again clapped her hands and gave the signal for the chanting of the "Laudate Mariam." "Come, come, my children," she exclaimed, "all together, and with all your hearts:

"In heav'n, on earth,
All voices raise,
In concert sing
My Mother's praise:
Laudate, laudate, laudate Mariam!"

Madame Vincent, whose voice was drowned by this canticle of love, now only sobbed, with her hands pressed to her face. Her revolt was over, she was again strengthless, weak like a suffering woman whom grief and weariness have stupefied.

After the canticle, fatigue fell more or less heavily upon all the occupants of the carriage. Only Sister Hyacinthe, so quick and active, and Sister Claire des Anges, so gentle, serious, and slight, retained, as on their departure from Paris and during their sojourn at Lourdes, the professional serenity of women accustomed to everything, amidst the bright gaiety of their white coifs and wimples. Madame de Jonquiere, who had scarcely slept for five days past, had to make an effort to keep her poor eyes open; and yet she was delighted with the journey, for her heart was full of joy at having arranged her daughter's marriage, and at bringing back with her the greatest of all the miracles, a miraculee whom everybody was talking of. She decided in her own mind that she would get to sleep that night, however bad the jolting might be; though on the other hand she could not shake off a covert fear with regard to La Grivotte, who looked very strange, excited, and haggard, with dull eyes, and cheeks glowing with patches of violet colour. Madame de Jonquiere had tried a dozen times to keep her from fidgeting, but had not been able to induce her to remain still, with joined hands and closed eyes. Fortunately, the other patients gave her no anxiety; most of them were either so relieved or so weary that they were already dozing off. Elise Rouquet, however, had bought herself a pocket mirror, a large round one, in which she did not weary of contemplating herself, finding herself quite pretty, and verifying from minute to minute the progress of her cure with a coquetry which, now that her monstrous face was becoming human again, made her purse her lips and try a variety of smiles. As for Sophie Couteau, she was playing very prettily; for finding that nobody now asked to examine her foot, she had taken off her shoe and stocking of her own accord, repeating that she must surely have a pebble in one or the other of them; and as her companions still paid no attention to that little foot which the Blessed Virgin had been pleased to visit, she kept it in her hands, caressing it, seemingly delighted to touch it and turn it into a plaything.

M. de Guersaint had meantime risen from his seat, and, leaning on the low partition between the compartments, he was glancing at M. Sabathier, when all of a sudden Marie called: "Oh! father, father, look at this notch in the seat; it was the ironwork of my box that made it!"

The discovery of this trace rendered her so happy that for a moment she forgot the secret sorrow which she seemed anxious to keep to herself. And in the same way as Madame Vincent had burst out sobbing on perceiving the leather strap which her little girl had touched, so she burst into joy at the sight of this scratch, which reminded her of her long martyrdom in this same carriage, all the abomination which had now disappeared, vanished like a nightmare. "To think that four days have scarcely gone by," she said; "I was lying there, I could not stir, and now, now I come and go, and feel so comfortable!"

Pierre and M. de Guersaint were smiling at her; and M. Sabathier, who had heard her, slowly said: "It is quite true. We leave a little of ourselves in things, a little of our sufferings and our hopes, and when we find them again they speak to us, and once more tell us the things which sadden us or make us gay."

He had remained in his corner silent, with an air of resignation, ever since their departure from Lourdes. Even his wife whilst wrapping up his legs had only been able to obtain sundry shakes of the head from him in response to her inquiries whether he was suffering. In point of fact he was not suffering, but extreme dejection was overcoming him.

"Thus for my own part," he continued, "during our long journey from Paris I tried to divert my thoughts by counting the bands in the roofing up there. There were thirteen from the lamp to the door. Well, I have just been counting them again, and naturally enough there are still thirteen. It's like that brass knob beside me. You can't imagine what dreams I had whilst I watched it shining at night-time when Monsieur l'Abbe was reading the story of Bernadette to us. Yes, I saw myself cured; I was making that journey to Rome which I have been talking of for twenty years past; I walked and travelled the world—briefly, I had all manner of wild and delightful dreams. And now here we are on our way back to Paris, and there are thirteen bands across the roofing there, and the knob is still shining—all of which tells me that I am again on the same seat, with my legs lifeless. Well, well, it's understood, I'm a poor, old, used-up animal, and such I shall remain."

Two big tears appeared in his eyes; he must have been passing through an hour of frightful bitterness. However, he raised his big square head, with its jaw typical of patient obstinacy, and added: "This is the seventh year that I have been to Lourdes, and the Blessed Virgin has not listened to me. No matter! It won't prevent me from going back next year. Perhaps she will at last deign to hear me."

For his part he did not revolt. And Pierre, whilst chatting with him, was stupefied to find persistent, tenacious credulity springing up once more, in spite of everything, in the cultivated brain of this man of intellect. What ardent desire of cure and life was it that had led to this refusal to accept evidence, this determination to remain blind? He stubbornly clung to the resolution to be saved when all human probabilities were against him, when the experiment of the miracle itself had failed so many times already; and he had reached such a point that he wished to explain his fresh rebuff, urging moments of inattention at the Grotto, a lack of sufficient contrition, and all sorts of little transgressions which must have displeased the Blessed Virgin. Moreover, he was already deciding in his mind that he would perform a novena somewhere next year, before again repairing to Lourdes.

"Ah! by the way," he resumed, "do you know of the good-luck which my substitute has had? Yes, you must remember my telling you about that poor fellow suffering from tuberculosis, for whom I paid fifty francs when I obtained hospitalisation for myself. Well, he has been thoroughly cured."

"Really! And he was suffering from tuberculosis!" exclaimed M. de Guersaint.

"Certainly, monsieur, perfectly cured I had seen him looking so low, so yellow, so emaciated, when we started; but when he came to pay me a visit at the hospital he was quite a new man; and, dear me, I gave him five francs."

Pierre had to restrain a smile, for be had heard the story from Doctor Chassaigne. This miraculously healed individual was a feigner, who had eventually been recognised at the Medical Verification Office. It was, apparently, the third year that he had presented himself there, the first time alleging paralysis and the second time a tumour, both of which had been as completely healed as his pretended tuberculosis. On each occasion he obtained an outing, lodging and food, and returned home loaded with alms. It appeared that he had formerly been a hospital nurse, and that he transformed himself, "made-up" a face suited to his pretended ailment, in such an extremely artistic manner that it was only by chance that Doctor Bonamy had detected the imposition. Moreover, the Fathers had immediately required that the incident should be kept secret. What was the use of stirring up a scandal which would only have led to jocular remarks in the newspapers? Whenever any fraudulent miracles of this kind were discovered, the Fathers contented themselves with forcing the guilty parties to go away. Moreover, these feigners were far from numerous, despite all that was related of them in the amusing stories concocted by Voltairean humourists. Apart from faith, human stupidity and ignorance, alas! were quite sufficient to account for the miracles.

M. Sabathier, however, was greatly stirred by the idea that Heaven had healed this man who had gone to Lourdes at his expense, whereas he himself was returning home still helpless, still in the same woeful state. He sighed, and, despite all his resignation, could not help saying, with a touch of envy: "What would you, however? The Blessed Virgin must know very well what she's about. Neither you nor I can call her to account to us for her actions. Whenever it may please her to cast her eyes on me she will find me at her feet."

After the "Angelus" when they got to Mont-de-Marsan, Sister Hyacinthe made them repeat the second chaplet, the five sorrowful mysteries, Jesus in the Garden of Olives, Jesus scourged, Jesus crowned with thorns, Jesus carrying the cross, and Jesus crucified. Then they took dinner in the carriage, for there would be no stopping until they reached Bordeaux, where they would only arrive at eleven o'clock at night. All the pilgrims' baskets were crammed with provisions, to say nothing of the milk, broth, chocolate, and fruit which Sister Saint-Francois had sent from the cantine. Then, too, there was fraternal sharing: they sat with their food on their laps and drew close together, every compartment becoming, as it were, the scene of a picnic, to which each contributed his share. And they had finished their meal and were packing up the remaining bread again when the train passed Morceux.

"My children," now said Sister Hyacinthe, rising up, "the evening prayer!"

Thereupon came a confused murmuring made up of "Paters" and "Aves," self-examinations, acts of contrition and vows of trustful reliance in God, the Blessed Virgin, and the Saints, with thanksgivings for that happy day, and, at last, a prayer for the living and for the faithful departed.

"I warn you," then resumed the Sister, "that when we get to Lamothe, at ten o'clock, I shall order silence. However, I think you will all be very good and won't require any rocking to get to sleep."

This made them laugh. It was now half-past eight o'clock, and the night had slowly covered the country-side. The hills alone retained a vague trace of the twilight's farewell, whilst a dense sheet of darkness blotted out all the low ground. Rushing on at full speed, the train entered an immense plain, and then there was nothing but a sea of darkness, through which they ever and ever rolled under a blackish sky, studded with stars.

For a moment or so Pierre had been astonished by the demeanour of La Grivotte. While the other pilgrims and patients were already dozing off, sinking down amidst the luggage, which the constant jolting shook, she had risen to her feet and was clinging to the partition in a sudden spasm of agony. And under the pale, yellow, dancing gleam of the lamp she once more looked emaciated, with a livid, tortured face.

"Take care, madame, she will fall!" the priest called to Madame de Jonquiere, who, with eyelids lowered, was at last giving way to sleep.

She made all haste to intervene, but Sister Hyacinthe had turned more quickly and caught La Grivotte in her arms. A frightful fit of coughing, however, prostrated the unhappy creature upon the seat, and for five minutes she continued stifling, shaken by such an attack that her poor body seemed to be actually cracking and rending. Then a red thread oozed from between her lips, and at last she spat up blood by the throatful.

"Good heavens! good heavens! it's coming on her again!" repeated Madame de Jonquiere in despair. "I had a fear of it; I was not at ease, seeing her looking so strange. Wait a moment; I will sit down beside her."

But the Sister would not consent: "No, no, madame, sleep a little. I'll watch over her. You are not accustomed to it: you would end by making yourself ill as well."

Then she settled herself beside La Grivotte, made her rest her head against her shoulder, and wiped the blood from her lips. The attack subsided, but weakness was coming back, so extreme that the wretched woman was scarcely able to stammer: "Oh, it is nothing, nothing at all; I am cured, I am cured, completely cured!"

Pierre was thoroughly upset: This sudden, overwhelming relapse had sent an icy chill through the whole carriage. Many of the passengers raised themselves up and looked at La Grivotte with terror in their eyes. Then they dived down into their corners again, and nobody spoke, nobody stirred any further. Pierre, for his part, reflected on the curious medical aspect of this girl's case. Her strength had come back to her over yonder. She had displayed a ravenous appetite, she had walked long distances with a dancing gait, her face quite radiant the while; and now she had spat blood, her cough had broken out afresh, she again had the heavy ashen face of one in the last agony. Her ailment had returned to her with brutal force, victorious over everything. Was this, then, some special case of phthisis complicated by neurosis? Or was it some other malady, some unknown disease, quietly continuing its work in the midst of contradictory diagnosis? The sea of error and ignorance, the darkness amidst which human science is still struggling, again appeared to Pierre. And he once more saw Doctor Chassaigne shrugging his shoulders with disdain, whilst Doctor Bonamy, full of serenity, quietly continued his verification work, absolutely convinced that nobody would be able to prove to him the impossibility of his miracles any more than he himself could have proved their possibility.

"Oh! I am not frightened," La Grivotte continued, stammering. "I am cured, completely cured; they all told me so, over yonder."

Meantime the carriage was rolling, rolling along, through the black night. Each of its occupants was making preparations, stretching himself out in order to sleep more comfortably. They compelled Madame Vincent to lie down on the seat, and gave her a pillow on which to rest her poor pain-racked head; and then, as docile as a child, quite stupefied, she fell asleep in a nightmare-like torpor, with big, silent tears still flowing from her closed eyes. Elise Rouquet, who had a whole seat to herself, was also getting ready to lie down, but first of all she made quite an elaborate toilet, tying the black wrap which had served to hide her sore about her head, and then again peering into her glass to see if this headgear became her, now that the swelling of her lip had subsided. And again did Pierre feel astonished at sight of that sore, which was certainly healing, if not already healed—that face, so lately a monster's face, which one could now look at without feeling horrified. The sea of incertitude stretched before him once more. Was it even a real lupus? Might it not rather be some unknown form of ulcer of hysterical origin? Or ought one to admit that certain forms of lupus, as yet but imperfectly studied and arising from faulty nutrition of the skin, might be benefited by a great moral shock? At all events there here seemed to be a miracle, unless, indeed, the sore should reappear again in three weeks', three months', or three years' time, like La Grivotte's phthisis.

It was ten o'clock, and the people in the carriage were falling asleep when they left Lamothe. Sister Hyacinthe, upon whose knees La Grivotte was now drowsily resting her head, was unable to rise, and, for form's sake, merely said, "Silence, silence, my children!" in a low voice, which died away amidst the growling rumble of the wheels.

However, something continued stirring in an adjoining compartment; she heard a noise which irritated her nerves, and the cause of which she at last fancied she could understand.

"Why do you keep on kicking the seat, Sophie?" she asked. "You must get to sleep, my child."

"I'm not kicking, Sister. It's a key that was rolling about under my foot."

"A key!—how is that? Pass it to me."

Then she examined it. A very old, poor-looking key it was—blackened, worn away, and polished by long use, its ring bearing the mark of where it had been broken and resoldered. However, they all searched their pockets, and none of them, it seemed, had lost a key.

"I found it in the corner," now resumed Sophie; "it must have belonged to the man."

"What man?" asked Sister Hyacinthe.

"The man who died there."

They had already forgotten him. But it had surely been his, for Sister Hyacinthe recollected that she had heard something fall while she was wiping his forehead. And she turned the key over and continued looking at it, as it lay in her hand, poor, ugly, wretched key that it was, no longer of any use, never again to open the lock it belonged to—some unknown lock, hidden far away in the depths of the world. For a moment she was minded to put it in her pocket, as though by a kind of compassion for this little bit of iron, so humble and so mysterious, since it was all that remained of that unknown man. But then the pious thought came to her that it is wrong to show attachment to any earthly thing; and, the window being half-lowered, she threw out the key, which fell into the black night.

"You must not play any more, Sophie," she resumed. "Come, come, my children, silence!"

It was only after the brief stay at Bordeaux, however, at about half-past eleven o'clock, that sleep came back again and overpowered all in the carriage. Madame de Jonquiere had been unable to contend against it any longer, and her head was now resting against the partition, her face wearing an expression of happiness amidst all her fatigue. The Sabathiers were, in a like fashion, calmly sleeping; and not a sound now came from the compartment which Sophie Couteau and Elise Rouquet occupied, stretched in front of each other, on the seats. From time to time a low plaint would rise, a strangled cry of grief or fright, escaping from the lips of Madame Vincent, who, amidst her prostration, was being tortured by evil dreams. Sister Hyacinthe was one of the very few who still had their eyes open, anxious as she was respecting La Grivotte, who now lay quite motionless, like a felled animal, breathing painfully, with a continuous wheezing sound. From one to the other end of this travelling dormitory, shaken by the rumbling of the train rolling on at full speed, the pilgrims and the sick surrendered themselves to sleep, and limbs dangled and heads swayed under the pale, dancing gleams from the lamps. At the far end, in the compartment occupied by the ten female pilgrims, there was a woeful jumbling of poor, ugly faces, old and young, and all open-mouthed, as though sleep had suddenly fallen upon them at the moment they were finishing some hymn. Great pity came to the heart at the sight of all those mournful, weary beings, prostrated by five days of wild hope and infinite ecstasy, and destined to awaken, on the very morrow, to the stern realities of life.

And now Pierre once more felt himself to be alone with Marie. She had not consented to stretch herself on the seat—she had been lying down too long, she said, for seven years, alas! And in order that M. de Guersaint, who on leaving Bordeaux had again fallen into his childlike slumber, might be more at ease, Pierre came and sat down beside the girl. As the light of the lamp annoyed her he drew the little screen, and they thus found themselves in the shade, a soft and transparent shade. The train must now have been crossing a plain, for it glided through the night as in an endless flight, with a sound like the regular flapping of huge wings. Through the window, which they had opened, a delicious coolness came from the black fields, the fathomless fields, where not even any lonely little village lights could be seen gleaming. For a moment Pierre had turned towards Marie and had noticed that her eyes were closed. But he could divine that she was not sleeping, that she was savouring the deep peacefulness which prevailed around them amidst the thundering roar of their rush through the darkness, and, like her, he closed his eyelids and began dreaming.

Yet once again did the past arise before him: the little house at Neuilly, the embrace which they had exchanged near the flowering hedge under the trees flecked with sunlight. How far away all that already was, and with what perfume had it not filled his life! Then bitter thoughts returned to him at the memory of the day when he had become a priest. Since she would never be a woman, he had consented to be a man no more; and that was to prove their eternal misfortune, for ironical Nature was to make her a wife and a mother after all. Had he only been able to retain his faith he might have found eternal consolation in it. But all his attempts to regain it had been in vain. He had gone to Lourdes, he had striven his utmost at the Grotto, he had hoped for a moment that he would end by believing should Marie be miraculously healed; but total and irremediable ruin had come when the predicted cure had taken place even as science had foretold. And their idyl, so pure and so painful, the long story of their affection bathed in tears, likewise spread out before him. She, having penetrated his sad secret, had come to Lourdes to pray to Heaven for the miracle of his conversion. When they had remained alone under the trees amidst the perfume of the invisible roses, during the night procession, they had prayed one for the other, mingling one in the other, with an ardent desire for their mutual happiness. Before the Grotto, too, she had entreated the Blessed Virgin to forget her and to save him, if she could obtain but one favour from her Divine Son. Then, healed, beside herself, transported with love and gratitude, whirled with her little car up the inclined ways to the Basilica, she had thought her prayers granted, and had cried aloud the joy she felt that they should have both been saved, together, together! Ah! that lie which he, prompted by affection and charity, had told, that error in which he had from that moment suffered her to remain, with what a weight did it oppress his heart! It was the heavy slab which walled him in his voluntarily chosen sepulchre. He remembered the frightful attack of grief which had almost killed him in the gloom of the crypt, his sobs, his brutal revolt, his longing to keep her for himself alone, to possess her since he knew her to be his own—all that rising passion of his awakened manhood, which little by little had fallen asleep again, drowned by the rushing river of his tears; and in order that he might not destroy the divine illusion which possessed her, yielding to brotherly compassion, he had taken that heroic vow to lie to her, that vow which now filled him with such anguish.

Pierre shuddered amidst his reverie. Would he have the strength to keep that vow forever? Had he not detected a feeling of impatience in his heart even whilst he was waiting for her at the railway station, a jealous longing to leave that Lourdes which she loved too well, in the vague hope that she might again become his own, somewhere far away? If he had not been a priest he would have married her. And what rapture, what felicity would then have been his! He would have given himself wholly unto her, she would have been wholly his own, and he and she would have lived again in the dear child that would doubtless have been born to them. Ah! surely that alone was divine, the life which is complete, the life which creates life! And then his reverie strayed: he pictured himself married, and the thought filled him with such delight that he asked why such a dream should be unrealisable? She knew no more than a child of ten; he would educate her, form her mind. She would then understand that this cure for which she thought herself indebted to the Blessed Virgin, had in reality come to her from the Only Mother, serene and impassive Nature. But even whilst he was thus settling things in his mind, a kind of terror, born of his religious education, arose within him. Could he tell if that human happiness with which he desired to endow her would ever be worth as much as the holy ignorance, the infantile candour in which she now lived? How bitterly he would reproach himself afterwards if she should not be happy. Then, too, what a drama it would all be; he to throw off the cassock, and marry this girl healed by an alleged miracle—ravage her faith sufficiently to induce her to consent to such sacrilege? Yet therein lay the brave course; there lay reason, life, real manhood, real womanhood. Why, then, did he not dare? Horrible sadness was breaking upon his reverie, he became conscious of nothing beyond the sufferings of his poor heart.

The train was still rolling along with its great noise of flapping wings. Beside Pierre and Marie, only Sister Hyacinthe was still awake amidst the weary slumber of the carriage; and just then, Marie leant towards Pierre, and softly said to him: "It's strange, my friend; I am so sleepy, and yet I can't sleep." Then, with alight laugh, she added: "I've got Paris in my head!"

"How is that—Paris?"

"Yes, yes. I'm thinking that it's waiting for me, that I am about to return to it—that Paris which I know nothing of, and where I shall have to live!"

These words brought fresh anguish to Pierre's heart. He had well foreseen it; she could no longer belong to him, she would belong to others. If Lourdes had restored her to him, Paris was about to take her from him again. And he pictured this ignorant little being fatally acquiring all the education of woman. That little spotless soul which had remained so candid in the frame of a big girl of three-and-twenty, that soul which illness had kept apart from others, far from life, far even from novels, would soon ripen, now that it could fly freely once more. He beheld her, a gay, healthy young girl, running everywhere, looking and learning, and, some day, meeting the husband who would finish her education.

"And so," said he, "you propose to amuse yourself in Paris?"

"Oh! what are you saying, my friend? Are we rich enough to amuse ourselves?" she replied. "No, I was thinking of my poor sister Blanche, and wondering what I should be able to do in Paris to help her a little. She is so good, she works so hard; I don't wish that she should have to continue earning all the money."

And, after a fresh pause, as he, deeply moved, remained silent, she added: "Formerly, before I suffered so dreadfully, I painted miniatures rather nicely. You remember, don't you, that I painted a portrait of papa which was very like him, and which everybody praised. You will help me, won't you? You will find me customers?"

Then she began talking of the new life which she was about to live. She wanted to arrange her room and hang it with cretonne, something pretty, with a pattern of little blue flowers. She would buy it out of the first money she could save. Blanche had spoken to her of the big shops where things could be bought so cheaply. To go out with Blanche and run about a little would be so amusing for her, who, confined to her bed since childhood, had never seen anything. Then Pierre, who for a moment had been calmer, again began to suffer, for he could divine all her glowing desire to live, her ardour to see everything, know everything, and taste everything. It was at last the awakening of the woman whom she was destined to be, whom he had divined in childhood's days—a dear creature of gaiety and passion, with blooming lips, starry eyes, a milky complexion, golden hair, all resplendent with the joy of being.

"Oh! I shall work, I shall work," she resumed; "but you are right, Pierre, I shall also amuse myself, because it cannot be a sin to be gay, can it?"

"No, surely not, Marie."

"On Sundays we will go into the country, oh very far away, into the woods where there are beautiful trees. And we will sometimes go to the theatre, too, if papa will take us. I have been told that there are many plays that one may see. But, after all, it's not all that. Provided I can go out and walk in the streets and see things, I shall be so happy; I shall come home so gay. It is so nice to live, is it not, Pierre?"

"Yes, yes, Marie, it is very nice."

A chill like that of death was coming over him; his regret that he was no longer a man was filling him with agony. But since she tempted him like this with her irritating candour, why should he not confess to her the truth which was ravaging his being? He would have won her, have conquered her. Never had a more frightful struggle arisen between his heart and his will. For a moment he was on the point of uttering irrevocable words.

But with the voice of a joyous child she was already resuming: "Oh! look at poor papa; how pleased he must be to sleep so soundly!"

On the seat in front of them M. de Guersaint was indeed slumbering with a comfortable expression on his face, as though he were in his bed, and had no consciousness of the continual jolting of the train. This monotonous rolling and heaving seemed, in fact, a lullaby rocking the whole carriage to sleep. All surrendered themselves to it, sinking powerless on to the piles of bags and parcels, many of which had also fallen; and the rhythmical growling of the wheels never ceased in the unknown darkness through which the train was still rolling. Now and again, as they passed through a station or under a bridge, there would be a loud rush of wind, a tempest would suddenly sweep by; and then the lulling, growling sound would begin again, ever the same for hours together.

Marie gently took hold of Pierre's hands; he and she were so lost, so completely alone among all those prostrated beings, in the deep, rumbling peacefulness of the train flying across the black night. And sadness, the sadness which she had hitherto hidden, had again come back to her, casting a shadow over her large blue eyes.

"You will often come with us, my good Pierre, won't you?" she asked.

He had started on feeling her little hand pressing his own. His heart was on his lips, he was making up his mind to speak. However, he once again restrained himself and stammered: "I am not always at liberty, Marie; a priest cannot go everywhere."

"A priest?" she repeated. "Yes, yes, a priest. I understand."

Then it was she who spoke, who confessed the mortal secret which had been oppressing her heart ever since they had started. She leant nearer, and in a lower voice resumed: "Listen, my good Pierre; I am fearfully sad. I may look pleased, but there is death in my soul. You did not tell me the truth yesterday."

He became quite scared, but did not at first understand her. "I did not tell you the truth—About what?" he asked.

A kind of shame restrained her, and she again hesitated at the moment of descending into the depths of another conscience than her own. Then, like a friend, a sister, she continued: "No, you let me believe that you had been saved with me, and it was not true, Pierre, you have not found your lost faith again."

Good Lord! she knew. For him this was desolation, such a catastrophe that he forgot his torments. And, at first, he obstinately clung to the falsehood born of his fraternal charity. "But I assure you, Marie. How can you have formed such a wicked idea?"

"Oh! be quiet, my friend, for pity's sake. It would grieve me too deeply if you were to speak to me falsely again. It was yonder, at the station, at the moment when we were starting, and that unhappy man had died. Good Abbe Judaine had knelt down to pray for the repose of that rebellious soul. And I divined everything, I understood everything when I saw that you did not kneel as well, that prayer did not rise to your lips as to his."

"But, really, I assure you, Marie—"

"No, no, you did not pray for the dead; you no longer believe. And besides, there is something else; something I can guess, something which comes to me from you, a despair which you can't hide from me, a melancholy look which comes into your poor eyes directly they meet mine. The Blessed Virgin did not grant my prayer, she did not restore your faith, and I am very, very wretched."

She was weeping, a hot tear fell upon the priest's hand, which she was still holding. It quite upset him, and he ceased struggling, confessing, in his turn letting his tears flow, whilst, in a very low voice, he stammered: "Ah! Marie, I am very wretched also. Oh! so very wretched."

For a moment they remained silent, in their cruel grief at feeling that the abyss which parts different beliefs was yawning between them. They would never belong to one another again, and they were in despair at being so utterly unable to bring themselves nearer to one another; but the severance was henceforth definitive, since Heaven itself had been unable to reconnect the bond. And thus, side by side, they wept over their separation.

"I who prayed so fervently for your conversion," she said in a dolorous voice, "I who was so happy. It had seemed to me that your soul was mingling with mine; and it was so delightful to have been saved together, together. I felt such strength for life; oh, strength enough to raise the world!"

He did not answer; his tears were still flowing, flowing without end.

"And to think," she resumed, "that I was saved all alone; that this great happiness fell upon me without you having any share in it. And to see you so forsaken, so desolate, when I am loaded with grace and joy, rends my heart. Ah! how severe the Blessed Virgin has been! Why did she not heal your soul at the same time that she healed my body?"

The last opportunity was presenting itself; he ought to have illumined this innocent creature's mind with the light of reason, have explained the miracle to her, in order that life, after accomplishing its healthful work in her body, might complete its triumph by throwing them into one another's arms. He also was healed, his mind was healthy now, and it was not for the loss of faith, but for the loss of herself, that he was weeping. However, invincible compassion was taking possession of him amidst all his grief. No, no, he would not trouble that dear soul; he would not rob her of her belief, which some day might prove her only stay amidst the sorrows of this world. One cannot yet require of children and women the bitter heroism of reason. He had not the strength to do it; he even thought that he had not the right. It would have seemed to him violation, abominable murder. And he did not speak out, but his tears flowed, hotter and hotter, in this immolation of his love, this despairing sacrifice of his own happiness in order that she might remain candid and ignorant and gay at heart.

"Oh, Marie, how wretched I am! Nowhere on the roads, nowhere at the galleys even, is there a man more wretched than myself! Oh, Marie, if you only knew; if you only knew how wretched I am!"

She was distracted, and caught him in her trembling arms, wishing to console him with a sisterly embrace. And at that moment the woman awaking within her understood everything, and she herself sobbed with sorrow that both human and divine will should thus part them. She had never yet reflected on such things, but suddenly she caught a glimpse of life, with its passions, its struggles, and its sufferings; and then, seeking for what she might say to soothe in some degree that broken heart, she stammered very faintly, distressed that she could find nothing sweet enough, "I know, I know—"

Then the words it was needful she should speak came to her; and as though that which she had to say ought only to be heard by the angels, she became anxious and looked around her. But the slumber which reigned in the carriage seemed more heavy even than before. Her father was still sleeping, with the innocent look of a big child. Not one of the pilgrims, not one of the ailing ones, had stirred amidst the rough rocking which bore them onward. Even Sister Hyacinthe, giving way to her overpowering weariness, had just closed her eyes, after drawing the lamp-screen in her own compartment. And now there were only vague shadows there, ill-defined bodies amidst nameless things, ghostly forms scarce visible, which a tempest blast, a furious rush, was carrying on and on through the darkness. And she likewise distrusted that black country-side whose unknown depths went by on either side of the train without one even being able to tell what forests, what rivers, what hills one was crossing. A short time back some bright sparks of light had appeared, possibly the lights of some distant forges, or the woeful lamps of workers or sufferers. Now, however, the night again streamed deeply all around, the obscure, infinite, nameless sea, farther and farther through which they ever went, not knowing where they were.

Then, with a chaste confusion, blushing amidst her tears, Marie placed her lips near Pierre's ear. "Listen, my friend; there is a great secret between the Blessed Virgin and myself. I had sworn that I would never tell it to anybody. But you are too unhappy, you are suffering too bitterly; she will forgive me; I will confide it to you."

And in a faint breath she went on: "During that night of love, you know, that night of burning ecstasy which I spent before the Grotto, I engaged myself by a vow: I promised the Blessed Virgin the gift of my chastity if she would but heal me.... She has healed me, and never—you hear me, Pierre, never will I marry anybody."

Ah! what unhoped-for sweetness! He thought that a balmy dew was falling on his poor wounded heart. It was a divine enchantment, a delicious relief. If she belonged to none other she would always be a little bit his own. And how well she had known his torment and what it was needful she should say in order that life might yet be possible for him.

In his turn he wished to find happy words and promise that he also would ever be hers, ever love her as he had loved her since childhood, like the dear creature she was, whose one kiss, long, long ago, had sufficed to perfume his entire life. But she made him stop, already anxious, fearing to spoil that pure moment. "No, no, my friend," she murmured, "let us say nothing more; it would be wrong, perhaps. I am very weary; I shall sleep quietly now."

And, with her head against his shoulder, she fell asleep at once, like a sister who is all confidence. He for a moment kept himself awake in that painful happiness of renunciation which they had just tasted together. It was all over, quite over now; the sacrifice was consummated. He would live a solitary life, apart from the life of other men. Never would he know woman, never would any child be born to him. And there remained to him only the consoling pride of that accepted and desired suicide, with the desolate grandeur that attaches to lives which are beyond the pale of nature.

But fatigue overpowered him also; his eyes closed, and in his turn he fell asleep. And afterwards his head slipped down, and his cheek touched the cheek of his dear friend, who was sleeping very gently with her brow against his shoulder. Then their hair mingled. She had her golden hair, her royal hair, half unbound, and it streamed over his face, and he dreamed amidst its perfume. Doubtless the same blissful dream fell upon them both, for their loving faces assumed the same expression of rapture; they both seemed to be smiling to the angels. It was chaste and passionate abandon, the innocence of chance slumber placing them in one another's arms, with warm, close lips so that their breath mingled, like the breath of two babes lying in the same cradle. And such was their bridal night, the consummation of the spiritual marriage in which they were to live, a delicious annihilation born of extreme fatigue, with scarcely a fleeting dream of mystical possession, amidst that carriage of wretchedness and suffering, which still and ever rolled along through the dense night. Hours and hours slipped by, the wheels growled, the bags and baskets swung from the brass hooks, whilst from the piled-up, crushed bodies there only arose a sense of terrible fatigue, the great physical exhaustion brought back from the land of miracles when the overworked souls returned home.

At last, at five o'clock, whilst the sun was rising, there was a sudden awakening, a resounding entry into a large station, with porters calling, doors opening, and people scrambling together. They were at Poitiers, and at once the whole carriage was on foot, amidst a chorus of laughter and exclamations. Little Sophie Couteau alighted here, and was bidding everybody farewell. She embraced all the ladies, even passing over the partition to take leave of Sister Claire des Anges, whom nobody had seen since the previous evening, for, silent and slight of build, with eyes full of mystery, she had vanished into her corner. Then the child came back again, took her little parcel, and showed herself particularly amiable towards Sister Hyacinthe and Madame de Jonquiere.

"Au revoir, Sister! Au revoir, madame! I thank you for all your kindness."

"You must come back again next year, my child."

"Oh, I sha'n't fail, Sister; it's my duty."

"And be good, my dear child, and take care of your health, so that the Blessed Virgin may be proud of you."

"To be sure, madame, she was so good to me, and it amuses me so much to go to see her."

When she was on the platform, all the pilgrims in the carriage leaned out, and with happy faces watched her go off.

"Till next year!" they called to her; "till next year!"

"Yes, yes, thank you kindly. Till next year."

The morning prayer was only to be said at Chatelherault. After the stoppage at Poitiers, when the train was once more rolling on in the fresh breeze of morning, M. de Guersaint gaily declared that he had slept delightfully, in spite of the hardness of the seat. Madame de Jonquiere also congratulated herself on the good rest which she had had, and of which she had been in so much need; though, at the same time, she was somewhat annoyed at having left Sister Hyacinthe all alone to watch over La Grivotte, who was now shivering with intense fever, again attacked by her horrible cough. Meanwhile the other female pilgrims were tidying themselves. The ten women at the far end were fastening their fichus and tying their cap strings, with a kind of modest nervousness displayed on their mournfully ugly faces. And Elise Rouquet, all attention, with her face close to her pocket glass, did not cease examining her nose, mouth, and cheeks, admiring herself with the thought that she was really and truly becoming nice-looking.

And it was then that Pierre and Marie again experienced a feeling of deep compassion on glancing at Madame Vincent, whom nothing had been able to rouse from a state of torpor, neither the tumultuous stoppage at Poitiers, nor the noise of voices which had continued ever since they had started off again. Prostrate on the seat, she had not opened her eyes, but still and ever slumbered, tortured by atrocious dreams. And, with big tears still streaming from her closed eyes, she had caught hold of the pillow which had been forced upon her, and was closely pressing it to her breast in some nightmare born of her suffering. Her poor arms, which had so long carried her dying daughter, her arms now unoccupied, forever empty, had found this cushion whilst she slept, and had coiled around them, as around a phantom, with a blind and frantic embrace.

On the other hand, M. Sabathier had woke up feeling quite joyous. Whilst his wife was pulling up his rug, carefully wrapping it round his lifeless legs; he began to chat with sparkling eyes, once more basking in illusion. He had dreamt of Lourdes, said he, and had seen the Blessed Virgin leaning towards him with a smile of kindly promise. And then, although he had before him both Madame Vincent, that mother whose daughter the Virgin had allowed to die, and La Grivotte, the wretched woman whom she had healed and who had so cruelly relapsed into her mortal disease, he nevertheless rejoiced and made merry, repeating to M. de Guersaint, with an air of perfect conviction: "Oh! I shall return home quite easy in mind, monsieur—I shall be cured next year. Yes, yes, as that dear little girl said just now: 'Till next year, till next year!'"

It was indestructible illusion, victorious even over certainty, eternal hope determined not to die, but shooting up with more life than ever, after each defeat, upon the ruins of everything.

At Chatelherault, Sister Hyacinthe made them say the morning prayer, the "Pater," the "Ave," the "Credo," and an appeal to God begging Him for the happiness of a glorious day: "O God, grant me sufficient strength that I may avoid all that is evil, do all that is good, and suffer without complaint every pain."

V. THE DEATH OP BERNADETTE—THE NEW RELIGION

AND the journey continued; the train rolled, still rolled along. At Sainte-Maure the prayers of the mass were said, and at Sainte-Pierre-des-Corps the "Credo" was chanted. However, the religious exercises no longer proved so welcome; the pilgrims' zeal was flagging somewhat in the increasing fatigue of their return journey, after such prolonged mental excitement. It occurred to Sister Hyacinthe that the happiest way of entertaining these poor worn-out folks would be for someone to read aloud; and she promised that she would allow Monsieur l'Abbe to read them the finish of Bernadette's life, some of the marvellous episodes of which he had already on two occasions related to them. However, they must wait until they arrived at Les Aubrais; there would be nearly two hours between Les Aubrais and Etampes, ample time to finish the story without being disturbed.

Then the various religious exercises followed one after the other, in a monotonous repetition of the order which had been observed whilst they crossed the same plains on their way to Lourdes. They again began the Rosary at Amboise, where they said the first chaplet, the five joyful mysteries; then, after singing the canticle, "O loving Mother, bless," at Blois, they recited the second chaplet, the five sorrowful mysteries, at Beaugency. Some little fleecy clouds had veiled the sun since morning, and the landscapes, very sweet and somewhat sad, flew by with a continuous fan-like motion. The trees and houses on either side of the line disappeared in the grey light with the fleetness of vague visions, whilst the distant hills, enveloped in mist, vanished more slowly, with the gentle rise and fall of a swelling sea. Between Beaugency and Les Aubrais the train seemed to slacken speed, though it still kept up its rhythmical, persistent rumbling, which the deafened pilgrims no longer even heard.

At length, when Les Aubrais had been left behind, they began to lunch in the carriage. It was then a quarter to twelve, and when they had said the "Angelus," and the three "Aves" had been thrice repeated, Pierre took from Marie's bag the little book whose blue cover was ornamented with an artless picture of Our Lady of Lourdes. Sister Hyacinthe clapped her hands as a signal for silence, and amidst general wakefulness and ardent curiosity like that of big children impassioned by the marvellous story, the priest was able to begin reading in his fine, penetrating voice. Now came the narrative of Bernadette's sojourn at Nevers, and then her death there. Pierre, however, as on the two previous occasions, soon ceased following the exact text of the little book, and added charming anecdotes of his own, both what he knew and what he could divine; and, for himself alone, he again evolved the true story, the human, pitiful story, that which none had ever told, but which he felt so deeply.

It was on the 8th July, 1866, that Bernadette left Lourdes. She went to take the veil at Nevers, in the convent of Saint-Gildard, the chief habitation of the Sisters on duty at the Asylum where she had learnt to read and had been living for eight years. She was then twenty-two years of age, and it was eight years since the Blessed Virgin had appeared to her. And her farewells to the Grotto, to the Basilica, to the whole town which she loved, were watered with tears. But she could no longer remain there, owing to the continuous persecution of public curiosity, the visits, the homage, and the adoration paid to her, from which, on account of her delicate health, she suffered cruelly. Her sincere humility, her timid love of shade and silence, had at last produced in her an ardent desire to disappear, to hide her resounding glory—the glory of one whom heaven had chosen and whom the world would not leave in peace—in the depth of some unknown darkness; and she longed only for simple-mindedness, for a quiet humdrum life devoted to prayer and petty daily occupations. Her departure was therefore a relief both to her and to the Grotto, which she was beginning to embarrass with her excessive innocence and burdensome complaints.

At Nevers, Saint-Gildard ought to have proved a paradise. She there found fresh air, sunshine, spacious apartments, and an extensive garden planted with fine trees. Yet she did not enjoy peace,—that utter forgetfulness of the world for which one flees to the far-away desert. Scarcely twenty days after her arrival, she donned the garb of the Order and assumed the name of Sister Marie-Bernard, for the time simply engaging herself by partial vows. However, the world still flocked around her, the persecution of the multitude began afresh. She was pursued even into the cloister through an irresistible desire to obtain favours from her saintly person. Ah! to see her, touch her, become lucky by gazing on her or surreptitiously rubbing some medal against her dress. It was the credulous passion of fetishism, a rush of believers pursuing this poor beatified being in the desire which each felt to secure a share of hope and divine illusion. She wept at it with very weariness, with impatient revolt, and often repeated: "Why do they torment me like this? What more is there in me than in others?" And at last she felt real grief at thus becoming "the raree-show," as she ended by calling herself with a sad, suffering smile. She defended herself as far as she could, refusing to see anyone. Her companions defended her also, and sometimes very sternly, showing her only to such visitors as were authorised by the Bishop. The doors of the Convent remained closed, and ecclesiastics almost alone succeeded in effecting an entrance. Still, even this was too much for her desire for solitude, and she often had to be obstinate, to request that the priests who had called might be sent away, weary as she was of always telling the same story, of ever answering the same questions. She was incensed, wounded, on behalf of the Blessed Virgin herself. Still, she sometimes had to yield, for the Bishop in person would bring great personages, dignitaries, and prelates; and she would then appear with her grave air, answering politely and as briefly as possible; only feeling at ease when she was allowed to return to her shadowy corner. Never, indeed, had distinction weighed more heavily on a mortal. One day, when she was asked if she was not proud of the continual visits paid her by the Bishop, she answered simply: "Monseigneur does not come to see me, he comes to show me." On another occasion some princes of the Church, great militant Catholics, who wished to see her, were overcome with emotion and sobbed before her; but, in her horror of being shown, in the vexation they caused her simple mind, she left them without comprehending, merely feeling very weary and very sad.

At length, however, she grew accustomed to Saint-Gildard, and spent a peaceful existence there, engaged in avocations of which she became very fond. She was so delicate, so frequently ill, that she was employed in the infirmary. In addition to the little assistance she rendered there, she worked with her needle, with which she became rather skilful, embroidering albs and altar-cloths in a delicate manner. But at times she, would lose all strength, and be unable to do even this light work. When she was not confined to her bed she spent long days in an easy-chair, her only diversion being to recite her rosary or to read some pious work. Now that she had learnt to read, books interested her, especially the beautiful stories of conversion, the delightful legends in which saints of both sexes appear, and the splendid and terrible dramas in which the devil is baffled and cast back into hell. But her great favourite, the book at which she continually marvelled, was the Bible, that wonderful New Testament of whose perpetual miracle she never wearied. She remembered the Bible at Bartres, that old book which had been in the family a hundred years, and whose pages had turned yellow; she could again see her foster-father slip a pin between the leaves to open the book at random, and then read aloud from the top of the right-hand page; and even at that time she had already known those beautiful stories so well that she could have continued repeating the narrative by heart, whatever might be the passage at which the perusal had ceased. And now that she read the book herself, she found in it a constant source of surprise, an ever-increasing delight. The story of the Passion particularly upset her, as though it were some extraordinary tragical event that had happened only the day before. She sobbed with pity; it made her poor suffering body quiver for hours. Mingled with her tears, perhaps, there was the unconscious dolour of her own passion, the desolate Calvary which she also had been ascending ever since her childhood.

When Bernadette was well and able to perform her duties in the infirmary, she bustled about, filling the building with childish liveliness. Until her death she remained an innocent, infantile being, fond of laughing, romping, and play. She was very little, the smallest Sister of the community, so that her companions always treated her somewhat like a child. Her face grew long and hollow, and lost its bloom of youth; but she retained the pure divine brightness of her eyes, the beautiful eyes of a visionary, in which, as in a limpid sky, you detected the flight of her dreams. As she grew older and her sufferings increased, she became somewhat sour-tempered and violent, cross-grained, anxious, and at times rough; little imperfections which after each attack filled her with remorse. She would humble herself, think herself damned, and beg pardon of everyone. But, more frequently, what a good little daughter of Providence she was! She became lively, alert, quick at repartee, full of mirth-provoking remarks, with a grace quite her own, which made her beloved. In spite of her great devotion, although she spent days in prayer, she was not at all bigoted or over-exacting with regard to others, but tolerant and compassionate. In fact, no nun was ever so much a woman, with distinct features, a decided personality, charming even in its puerility. And this gift of childishness which she had retained, the simple innocence of the child she still was, also made children love her, as though they recognised in her one of themselves. They all ran to her, jumped upon her lap, and passed their tiny arms round her neck, and the garden would then fill with the noise of joyous games, races, and cries; and it was not she who ran or cried the least, so happy was she at once more feeling herself a poor unknown little girl as in the far-away days of Bartres! Later on it was related that a mother had one day brought her paralysed child to the convent for the saint to touch and cure it. The woman sobbed so much that the Superior ended by consenting to make the attempt. However, as Bernadette indignantly protested whenever she was asked to perform a miracle, she was not forewarned, but simply called to take the sick child to the infirmary. And she did so, and when she stood the child on the ground it walked. It was cured.

Ah! how many times must Bartres and her free childhood spent watching her lambs—the years passed among the hills, in the long grass, in the leafy woods—have returned to her during the hours she gave to her dreams when weary of praying for sinners! No one then fathomed her soul, no one could say if involuntary regrets did not rend her wounded heart. One day she spoke some words, which her historians have preserved, with the view of making her passion more touching. Cloistered far away from her mountains, confined to a bed of sickness, she exclaimed: "It seems to me that I was made to live, to act, to be ever on the move, and yet the Lord will have me remain motionless." What a revelation, full of terrible testimony and immense sadness! Why should the Lord wish that dear being, all grace and gaiety, to remain motionless? Could she not have honoured Him equally well by living the free, healthy life that she had been born to live? And would she not have done more to increase the world's happiness and her own if, instead of praying for sinners, her constant occupation, she had given her love to the husband who might have been united to her and to the children who might have been born to her? She, so gay and so active, would, on certain evenings, become extremely depressed. She turned gloomy and remained wrapped in herself, as though overcome by excess of pain. No doubt the cup was becoming too bitter. The thought of her life's perpetual renunciation was killing her.

Did Bernadette often think of Lourdes whilst she was at Saint-Gildard? What knew she of the triumph of the Grotto, of the prodigies which were daily transforming the land of miracles? These questions were never thoroughly elucidated. Her companions were forbidden to talk to her of such matters, which remained enveloped in absolute, continual silence. She herself did not care to speak of them; she kept silent with regard to the mysterious past, and evinced no desire to know the present, however triumphant it might be. But all the same did not her heart, in imagination, fly away to the enchanted country of her childhood, where lived her kith and kin, where all her life-ties had been formed, where she had left the most extraordinary dream that ever human being dreamt? Surely she must have sometimes travelled the beautiful journey of memory, she must have known the main features of the great events that had taken place at Lourdes. What she most dreaded was to go there herself, and, she always refused to do so, knowing full well that she could not remain unrecognised, and fearful of meeting the crowds whose adoration awaited her. What glory would have been hers had she been headstrong, ambitious, domineering! She would have returned to the holy spot of her visions, have worked miracles there, have become a priestess, a female pope, with the infallibility and sovereignty of one of the elect, a friend of the Blessed Virgin. But the Fathers never really feared this, although express orders had been given to withdraw her from the world for her salvation's sake. In reality they were easy, for they knew her, so gentle and so humble in her fear of becoming divine, in her ignorance of the colossal machine which she had put in motion, and the working of which would have made her recoil with affright had she understood it. No, no! that was no longer her land, that place of crowds, of violence and trafficking. She would have suffered too much there, she would have been out of her element, bewildered, ashamed. And so, when pilgrims bound thither asked her with a smile, "Will you come with us?" she shivered slightly, and then hastily replied, "No, no! but how I should like to, were I a little bird!"

Her reverie alone was that little travelling bird, with rapid flight and noiseless wings, which continually went on pilgrimage to the Grotto. In her dreams, indeed, she must have continually lived at Lourdes, though in the flesh she had not even gone there for either her father's or her mother's funeral. Yet she loved her kin; she was anxious to procure work for her relations who had remained poor, and she had insisted on seeing her eldest brother, who, coming to Nevers to complain, had been refused admission to the convent. However, he found her weary and resigned, and she did not ask him a single question about New Lourdes, as though that rising town were no longer her own. The year of the crowning of the Virgin, a priest whom she had deputed to pray for her before the Grotto came back and told her of the never-to-be forgotten wonders of the ceremony, the hundred thousand pilgrims who had flocked to it, and the five-and-thirty bishops in golden vestments who had assembled in the resplendent Basilica. Whilst listening, she trembled with her customary little quiver of desire and anxiety. And when the priest exclaimed, "Ah! if you had only seen that pomp!" she answered: "Me! I was much better here in my little corner in the infirmary." They had robbed her of her glory; her work shone forth resplendently amidst a continuous hosanna, and she only tasted joy in forgetfulness, in the gloom of the cloister, where the opulent farmers of the Grotto forgot her. It was never the re-echoing solemnities that prompted her mysterious journeys; the little bird of her soul only winged its lonesome flight to Lourdes on days of solitude, in the peaceful hours when no one could there disturb its devotions. It was before the wild primitive Grotto that she returned to kneel, amongst the bushy eglantine, as in the days when the Gave was not walled in by a monumental quay. And it was the old town that she visited at twilight, when the cool, perfumed breezes came down from the mountains, the old painted and gilded semi-Spanish church where she had made her first communion, the old Asylum so full of suffering where during eight years she had grown accustomed to solitude—all that poor, innocent old town, whose every paving-stone awoke old affections in her memory's depths.

And did Bernadette ever extend the pilgrimage of her dreams as far as Bartres? Probably, at times when she sat in her invalid-chair and let some pious book slip from her tired hands, and closed her eyes, Bartres did appear to her, lighting up the darkness of her view. The little antique Romanesque church with sky-blue nave and blood-red altar screens stood there amidst the tombs of the narrow cemetery. Then she would find herself once more in the house of the Lagues, in the large room on the left, where the fire was burning, and where, in winter-time, such wonderful stories were told whilst the big clock gravely ticked the hours away. At times the whole countryside spread out before her, meadows without end, giant chestnut-trees beneath which you lost yourself, deserted table-lands whence you descried the distant mountains, the Pic du Midi and the Pic de Viscos soaring aloft as airy and as rose-coloured as dreams, in a paradise such as the legends have depicted. And afterwards, afterwards came her free childhood, when she scampered off whither she listed in the open air, her lonely, dreamy thirteenth year, when with all the joy of living she wandered through the immensity of nature. And now, too, perhaps, she again beheld herself roaming in the tall grass among the hawthorn bushes beside the streams on a warm sunny day in June. Did she not picture herself grown, with a lover of her own age, whom she would have loved with all the simplicity and affection of her heart? Ah! to be a child again, to be free, unknown, happy once more, to love afresh, and to love differently! The vision must have passed confusedly before her—a husband who worshipped her, children gaily growing up around her, the life that everybody led, the joys and sorrows that her own parents had known, and which her children would have had to know in their turn. But little by little all vanished, and she again found herself in her chair of suffering, imprisoned between four cold walls, with no other desire than a longing one for a speedy death, since she had been denied a share of the poor common happiness of this world.

Bernadette's ailments increased each year. It was, in fact, the commencement of her passion, the passion of this new child-Messiah, who had come to bring relief to the unhappy, to announce to mankind the religion of divine justice and equality in the face of miracles which flouted the laws of impassible nature. If she now rose it was only to drag herself from chair to chair for a few days at a time, and then she would have a relapse and be again forced to take to her bed. Her sufferings became terrible. Her hereditary nervousness, her asthma, aggravated by cloister life, had probably turned into phthisis. She coughed frightfully, each fit rending her burning chest and leaving her half dead. To complete her misery, caries of the right knee-cap supervened, a gnawing disease, the shooting pains of which caused her to cry aloud. Her poor body, to which dressings were continually being applied, became one great sore, which was irritated by the warmth of her bed, by her prolonged sojourn between sheets whose friction ended by breaking her skin. One and all pitied her; those who beheld her martyrdom said that it was impossible to suffer more, or with greater fortitude. She tried some of the Lourdes water, but it brought her no relief. Lord, Almighty King, why cure others and not cure her? To save her soul? Then dost Thou not save the souls of the others? What an inexplicable selection! How absurd that in the eternal evolution of worlds it should be necessary for this poor being to be tortured! She sobbed, and again and again said in order to keep up her courage: "Heaven is at the end, but how long the end is in coming!" There was ever the idea that suffering is the test, that it is necessary to suffer upon earth if one would triumph elsewhere, that suffering is indispensable, enviable, and blessed. But is this not blasphemous, O Lord? Hast Thou not created youth and joy? Is it Thy wish that Thy creatures should enjoy neither the sun, nor the smiling Nature which Thou hast created, nor the human affections with which Thou hast endowed their flesh? She dreaded the feeling of revolt which maddened her at times, and wished also to strengthen herself against the disease which made her groan, and she crucified herself in thought, extending her arms so as to form a cross and unite herself to Jesus, her limbs against His limbs, her mouth against His mouth, streaming the while with blood like Him, and steeped like Him in bitterness! Jesus died in three hours, but a longer agony fell to her, who again brought redemption by pain, who died to give others life. When her bones ached with agony she would sometimes utter complaints, but she reproached herself immediately. "Oh! how I suffer, oh! how I suffer! but what happiness it is to bear this pain!" There can be no more frightful words, words pregnant with a blacker pessimism. Happy to suffer, O Lord! but why, and to what unknown and senseless end? Where is the reason in this useless cruelty, in this revolting glorification of suffering, when from the whole of humanity there ascends but one desperate longing for health and happiness?

In the midst of her frightful sufferings, however, Sister Marie-Bernard took the final vows on September 22, 1878. Twenty years had gone by since the Blessed Virgin had appeared to her, visiting her as the Angel had visited the Virgin, choosing her as the Virgin had been chosen, amongst the most lowly and the most candid, that she might hide within her the secret of King Jesus. Such was the mystical explanation of that election of suffering, the raison d'etre of that being who was so harshly separated from her fellows, weighed down by disease, transformed into the pitiable field of every human affliction. She was the "garden inclosed"* that brings such pleasure to the gaze of the Spouse. He had chosen her, then buried her in the death of her hidden life. And even when the unhappy creature staggered beneath the weight of her cross, her companions would say to her: "Do you forget that the Blessed Virgin promised you that you should be happy, not in this world, but in the next?" And with renewed strength, and striking her forehead, she would answer: "Forget? no, no! it is here!" She only recovered temporary energy by means of this illusion of a paradise of glory, into which she would enter escorted by seraphims, to be forever and ever happy. The three personal secrets which the Blessed Virgin had confided to her, to arm her against evil, must have been promises of beauty, felicity, and immortality in heaven. What monstrous dupery if there were only the darkness of the earth beyond the grave, if the Blessed Virgin of her dream were not there to meet her with the prodigious guerdons she had promised! But Bernadette had not a doubt; she willingly undertook all the little commissions with which her companions naively entrusted her for Heaven: "Sister Marie-Bernard, you'll say this, you'll say that, to the Almighty." "Sister Marie-Bernard, you'll kiss my brother if you meet him in Paradise." "Sister Marie-Bernard, give me a little place beside you when I die." And she obligingly answered each one: "Have no fear, I will do it!" Ah! all-powerful illusion, delicious repose, power ever reviving and consolatory!

* Song of Solomon iv. 12.

And then came the last agony, then came death.

On Friday, March 28, 1879, it was thought that she would not last the night. She had a despairing longing for the tomb, in order that she might suffer no more, and live again in heaven. And thus she obstinately refused to receive extreme unction, saying that twice already it had cured her. She wished, in short, that God would let her die, for it was more than she could bear; it would have been unreasonable to require that she should suffer longer. Yet she ended by consenting to receive the sacraments, and her last agony was thereby prolonged for nearly three weeks. The priest who attended her frequently said: "My daughter, you must make the sacrifice of your life"; and one day, quite out of patience, she sharply answered him: "But, Father, it is no sacrifice." A terrible saying, that also, for it implied disgust at being, furious contempt for existence, and an immediate ending of her humanity, had she had the power to suppress herself by a gesture. It is true that the poor girl had nothing to regret, that she had been compelled to banish everything from her life, health, joy, and love, so that she might leave it as one casts off a soiled, worn, tattered garment. And she was right; she condemned her useless, cruel life when she said: "My passion will finish only at my death; it will not cease until I enter into eternity." And this idea of her passion pursued her, attaching her more closely to the cross with her Divine Master. She had induced them to give her a large crucifix; she pressed it vehemently against her poor maidenly breast, exclaiming that she would like to thrust it into her bosom and leave it there. Towards the end, her strength completely forsook her, and she could no longer grasp the crucifix with her trembling hands. "Let it be tightly tied to me," she prayed, "that I may feel it until my last breath!" The Redeemer upon that crucifix was the only spouse that she was destined to know; His bleeding kiss was to be the only one bestowed upon her womanhood, diverted from nature's course. The nuns took cords, passed them under her aching back, and fastened the crucifix so roughly to her bosom that it did indeed penetrate it.

At last death took pity upon her. On Easter Monday she was seized with a great fit of shivering. Hallucinations perturbed her, she trembled with fright, she beheld the devil jeering and prowling around her. "Be off, be off, Satan!" she gasped; "do not touch me, do not carry me away!" And amidst her delirium she related that the fiend had sought to throw himself upon her, that she had felt his mouth scorching her with all the flames of hell. The devil in a life so pure, in a soul without sin! what for, O Lord! and again I ask it, why this relentless suffering, intense to the very last, why this nightmare-like ending, this death troubled with such frightful fancies, after so beautiful a life of candour, purity, and innocence? Could she not fall asleep serenely in the peacefulness of her chaste soul? But doubtless so long as breath remained in her body it was necessary to leave her the hatred and dread of life, which is the devil. It was life which menaced her, and it was life which she cast out, in the same way that she denied life when she reserved to the Celestial Bridegroom her tortured, crucified womanhood. That dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which her dream had come to strengthen, was a blow dealt by the Church to woman, both wife and mother. To decree that woman is only worthy of worship on condition that she be a virgin, to imagine that virgin to be herself born without sin, is not this an insult to Nature, the condemnation of life, the denial of womanhood, whose true greatness consists in perpetuating life? "Be off, be off, Satan! let me die without fulfilling Nature's law." And she drove the sunshine from the room and the free air that entered by the window, the air that was sweet with the scent of flowers, laden with all the floating germs which transmit love throughout the whole vast world.

On the Wednesday after Easter (April 16th), the death agony commenced. It is related that on the morning of that day one of Bernadette's companions, a nun attacked with a mortal illness and lying in the infirmary in an adjoining bed, was suddenly healed upon drinking a glass of Lourdes water. But she, the privileged one, had drunk of it in vain. God at last granted her the signal favour which she desired by sending her into the good sound sleep of the earth, in which there is no more suffering. She asked pardon of everyone. Her passion was consummated; like the Saviour, she had the nails and the crown of thorns, the scourged limbs, the pierced side. Like Him she raised her eyes to heaven, extended her arms in the form of a cross, and uttered a loud cry: "My God!" And, like Him, she said, towards three o'clock: "I thirst." She moistened her lips in the glass, then bowed her head and expired.

Thus, very glorious and very holy, died the Visionary of Lourdes, Bernadette Soubirous, Sister Marie-Bernard, one of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers. During three days her body remained exposed to view, and vast crowds passed before it; a whole people hastened to the convent, an interminable procession of devotees hungering after hope, who rubbed medals, chaplets, pictures, and missals against the dead woman's dress, to obtain from her one more favour, a fetish bringing happiness. Even in death her dream of solitude was denied her: a mob of the wretched ones of this world rushed to the spot, drinking in illusion around her coffin. And it was noticed that her left eye, the eye which at the time of the apparitions had been nearest to the Blessed Virgin, remained obstinately open. Then a last miracle amazed the convent: the body underwent no change, but was interred on the third day, still supple, warm, with red lips, and a very white skin, rejuvenated as it were, and smelling sweet. And to-day Bernadette Soubirous, exiled from Lourdes, obscurely sleeps her last sleep at Saint Gildard, beneath a stone slab in a little chapel, amidst the shade and silence of the old trees of the garden, whilst yonder the Grotto shines resplendently in all its triumph.

Pierre ceased speaking; the beautiful, marvellous story was ended. And yet the whole carriage was still listening, deeply impressed by that death, at once so tragic and so touching. Compassionate tears fell from Marie's eyes, while the others, Elise Rouquet, La Grivotte herself, now calmer, clasped their hands and prayed to her who was in heaven to intercede with the Divinity to complete their cure. M. Sabathier made a big sign of the cross, and then ate a cake which his wife had bought him at Poitiers.

M. de Guersaint, whom sad things always upset, had fallen asleep again in the middle of the story. And there was only Madame Vincent, with her face buried in her pillow, who had not stirred, like a deaf and blind creature, determined to see and hear nothing more.

Meanwhile the train rolled, still rolled along. Madame de Jonquiere, after putting her head out of the window, informed them that they were approaching Etampes. And, when they had left that station behind them, Sister Hyacinthe gave the signal, and they recited the third chaplet of the Rosary, the five glorious mysteries—the Resurrection of Our Lord, the Ascension of Our Lord, the Mission of the Holy Ghost, the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin, and the Crowning of the Most Blessed Virgin. And afterwards they sang the canticle:

"O Virgin, in thy help I put my trust."

Then Pierre fell into a deep reverie. His glance had turned towards the now sunlit landscape, the continual flight of which seemed to lull his thoughts. The noise of the wheels was making him dizzy, and he ended by no longer recognising the familiar horizon of this vast suburban expanse with which he had once been acquainted. They still had to pass Bretigny and Juvisy, and then, in an hour and a half at the utmost, they would at last be at Paris. So the great journey was finished! the inquiry, which he had so much desired to make, the experiment which he had attempted with so much passion, were over! He had wished to acquire certainty, to study Bernadette's case on the spot, and see if grace would not come back to him in a lightning flash, restoring him his faith. And now he had settled the point—Bernadette had dreamed through the continual torments of her flesh, and he himself would never believe again. And this forced itself upon his mind like a brutal fact: the simple faith of the child who kneels and prays, the primitive faith of young people, bowed down by an awe born of their ignorance, was dead. Though thousands of pilgrims might each year go to Lourdes, the nations were no longer with them; this attempt to bring about the resurrection of absolute faith, the faith of dead-and-gone centuries, without revolt or examination, was fatally doomed to fail. History never retraces its steps, humanity cannot return to childhood, times have too much changed, too many new inspirations have sown new harvests for the men of to-day to become once more like the men of olden time. It was decisive; Lourdes was only an explainable accident, whose reactionary violence was even a proof of the extreme agony in which belief under the antique form of Catholicism was struggling. Never again, as in the cathedrals of the twelfth century, would the entire nation kneel like a docile flock in the hands of the Master. To blindly, obstinately cling to the attempt to bring that to pass would mean to dash oneself against the impossible, to rush, perhaps, towards great moral catastrophes.

And of his journey there already only remained to Pierre an immense feeling of compassion. Ah! his heart was overflowing with pity; his poor heart was returning wrung by all that he had seen. He recalled the words of worthy Abbe Judaine; and he had seen those thousands of unhappy beings praying, weeping, and imploring God to take pity on their suffering; and he had wept with them, and felt within himself, like an open wound, a sorrowful fraternal feeling for all their ailments. He could not think of those poor people without burning with a desire to relieve them. If it were true that the faith of the simple-minded no longer sufficed; if one ran the risk of going astray in wishing to turn back, would it become necessary to close the Grotto, to preach other efforts, other sufferings? However, his compassion revolted at that thought. No, no! it would be a crime to snatch their dream of Heaven from those poor creatures who suffered either in body or in mind, and who only found relief in kneeling yonder amidst the splendour of tapers and the soothing repetition of hymns. He had not taken the murderous course of undeceiving Marie, but had sacrificed himself in order to leave her the joy of her fancy, the divine consolation of having been healed by the Virgin. Where was the man hard enough, cruel enough, to prevent the lowly from believing, to rob them of the consolation of the supernatural, the hope that God troubled Himself about them, that He held a better life in His paradise in reserve for them? All humanity was weeping, desperate with anguish, like some despairing invalid, irrevocably condemned, and whom only a miracle could save. He felt mankind to be unhappy indeed, and he shuddered with fraternal affection in the presence of such pitiable humility, ignorance, poverty in its rags, disease with its sores and evil odour, all the lowly sufferers, in hospital, convent, and slums, amidst vermin and dirt, with ugliness and imbecility written on their faces, an immense protest against health, life, and Nature, in the triumphal name of justice, equality, and benevolence. No, no! it would never do to drive the wretched to despair. Lourdes must be tolerated, in the same way that you tolerate a falsehood which makes life possible. And, as he had already said in Bernadette's chamber, she remained the martyr, she it was who revealed to him the only religion which still filled his heart, the religion of human suffering. Ah! to be good and kindly, to alleviate all ills, to lull pain, to sleep in a dream, to lie even, so that no one might suffer any more!

The train passed at full speed through a village, and Pierre vaguely caught sight of a church nestling amidst some large apple trees. All the pilgrims in the carriage crossed themselves. But he was now becoming uneasy, scruples were tingeing his reverie with anxiety. This religion of human suffering, this redemption by pain, was not this yet another lure, a continual aggravation of pain and misery? It is cowardly and dangerous to allow superstition to live. To tolerate and accept it is to revive the dark evil ages afresh. It weakens and stupefies; the sanctimoniousness bequeathed by heredity produces humiliated, timorous generations, decadent and docile nations, who are an easy prey to the powerful of the earth. Whole nations are imposed upon, robbed, devoured, when they have devoted the whole effort of their will to the mere conquest of a future existence. Would it not, therefore, be better to cure humanity at once by boldly closing the miraculous Grottos whither it goes to weep, and thus restore to it the courage to live the real life, even in the midst of tears? And it was the same prayer, that incessant flood of prayer which ascended from Lourdes, the endless supplication in which he had been immersed and softened: was it not after all but puerile lullaby, a debasement of all one's energies? It benumbed the will, one's very being became dissolved in it and acquired disgust for life and action. Of what use could it be to will anything, do anything, when you totally resigned yourself to the caprices of an unknown almighty power? And, in another respect, what a strange thing was this mad desire for prodigies, this anxiety to drive the Divinity to transgress the laws of Nature established by Himself in His infinite wisdom! Therein evidently lay peril and unreasonableness; at the risk even of losing illusion, that divine comforter, only the habit of personal effort and the courage of truth should have been developed in man, and especially in the child.

Then a great brightness arose in Pierre's mind and dazzled him. It was Reason, protesting against the glorification of the absurd and the deposition of common-sense. Ah! reason, it was through her that he had suffered, through her alone that he was happy. As he had told Doctor Chassaigne, his one consuming longing was to satisfy reason ever more and more, although it might cost him happiness to do so. It was reason, he now well understood it, whose continual revolt at the Grotto, at the Basilica, throughout entire Lourdes, had prevented him from believing. Unlike his old friend—that stricken old man, who was afflicted with such dolorous senility, who had fallen into second childhood since the shipwreck of his affections,—he had been unable to kill reason and humiliate and annihilate himself. Reason remained his sovereign mistress, and she it was who buoyed him up even amidst the obscurities and failures of science. Whenever he met with a thing which he could not understand, it was she who whispered to him, "There is certainly a natural explanation which escapes me." He repeated that there could be no healthy ideal outside the march towards the discovery of the unknown, the slow victory of reason amidst all the wretchedness of body and mind. In the clashing of the twofold heredity which he had derived from his father, all brain, and his mother, all faith, he, a priest, found it possible to ravage his life in order that he might keep his vows. He had acquired strength enough to master his flesh, but he felt that his paternal heredity had now definitely gained the upper hand, for henceforth the sacrifice of his reason had become an impossibility; this he would not renounce and would not master. No, no, even human suffering, the hallowed suffering of the poor, ought not to prove an obstacle, enjoining the necessity of ignorance and folly. Reason before all; in her alone lay salvation. If at Lourdes, whilst bathed in tears, softened by the sight of so much affliction, he had said that it was sufficient to weep and love, he had made a dangerous mistake. Pity was but a convenient expedient. One must live, one must act; reason must combat suffering, unless it be desired that the latter should last forever.

However, as the train rolled on and the landscape flew by, a church once more appeared, this time on the fringe of heaven, some votive chapel perched upon a hill and surmounted by a lofty statue of the Virgin. And once more all the pilgrims made the sign of the cross, and once more Pierre's reverie strayed, a fresh stream of reflections bringing his anguish back to him. What was this imperious need of the things beyond, which tortured suffering humanity? Whence came it? Why should equality and justice be desired when they did not seem to exist in impassive nature? Man had set them in the unknown spheres of the Mysterious, in the supernatural realms of religious paradises, and there contented his ardent thirst for them. That unquenchable thirst for happiness had ever consumed, and would consume him always. If the Fathers of the Grotto drove such a glorious trade, it was simply because they made motley out of what was divine. That thirst for the Divine, which nothing had quenched through the long, long ages, seemed to have returned with increased violence at the close of our century of science. Lourdes was a resounding and undeniable proof that man could never live without the dream of a Sovereign Divinity, re-establishing equality and re-creating happiness by dint of miracles. When man has reached the depths of life's misfortunes, he returns to the divine illusion, and the origin of all religions lies there. Man, weak and bare, lacks the strength to live through his terrestrial misery without the everlasting lie of a paradise. To-day, thought Pierre, the experiment had been made; it seemed that science alone could not suffice, and that one would be obliged to leave a door open on the Mysterious.

All at once in the depths of his deeply absorbed mind the words rang out, A new religion! The door which must be left open on the Mysterious was indeed a new religion. To subject mankind to brutal amputation, lop off its dream, and forcibly deprive it of the Marvellous, which it needed to live as much as it needed bread, would possibly kill it. Would it ever have the philosophical courage to take life as it is, and live it for its own sake, without any idea of future rewards and penalties? It certainly seemed that centuries must elapse before the advent of a society wise enough to lead a life of rectitude without the moral control of some cultus and the consolation of superhuman equality and justice. Yes, a new religion! The call burst forth, resounded within Pierre's brain like the call of the nations, the eager, despairing desire of the modern soul. The consolation and hope which Catholicism had brought the world seemed exhausted after eighteen hundred years full of so many tears, so much blood, so much vain and barbarous agitation. It was an illusion departing, and it was at least necessary that the illusion should be changed. If mankind had long ago darted for refuge into the Christian paradise, it was because that paradise then opened before it like a fresh hope. But now a new religion, a new hope, a new paradise, yes, that was what the world thirsted for, in the discomfort in which it was struggling. And Father Fourcade, for his part, fully felt such to be the case; he had not meant to imply anything else when he had given rein to his anxiety, entreating that the people of the great towns, the dense mass of the humble which forms the nation, might be brought to Lourdes. One hundred thousand, two hundred thousand pilgrims at Lourdes each year, that was, after all, but a grain of sand. It was the people, the whole people, that was required. But the people has forever deserted the churches, it no longer puts any soul in the Blessed Virgins which it manufactures, and nothing nowadays could restore its lost faith. A Catholic democracy—yes, history would then begin afresh; only were it possible to create a new Christian people, would not the advent of a new Saviour, the mighty breath of a new Messiah, have been needed for such a task?

However, the words still sounded, still rang out in Pierre's mind with the growing clamour of pealing bells. A new religion; a new religion. Doubtless it must be a religion nearer to life, giving a larger place to the things of the world, and taking the acquired truths into due account. And, above all, it must be a religion which was not an appetite for death—Bernadette living solely in order that she might die, Doctor Chassaigne aspiring to the tomb as to the only happiness—for all that spiritualistic abandonment was so much continuous disorganisation of the will to live. At bottom of it was hatred to life, disgust with and cessation of action. Every religion, it is true, is but a promise of immortality, an embellishment of the spheres beyond, an enchanted garden to be entered on the morrow of death. Could a new religion ever place such a garden of eternal happiness on earth? Where was the formula, the dogma, that would satisfy the hopes of the mankind of to-day? What belief should be sown to blossom forth in a harvest of strength and peace? How could one fecundate the universal doubt so that it should give birth to a new faith? and what sort of illusion, what divine falsehood of any kind could be made to germinate in the contemporary world, ravaged as it had been upon all sides, broken up by a century of science?

At that moment, without any apparent transition, Pierre saw the face of his brother Guillaume arise in the troublous depths of his mind. Still, he was not surprised; some secret link must have brought that vision there. Ah! how fond they had been of one another long ago, and what a good brother that elder brother, so upright and gentle, had been! Henceforth, also, the rupture was complete; Pierre no longer saw Guillaume, since the latter had cloistered himself in his chemical studies, living like a savage in a little suburban house, with a mistress and two big dogs. Then Pierre's reverie again diverged, and he thought of that trial in which Guillaume had been mentioned, like one suspected of having compromising friendships amongst the most violent revolutionaries. It was related, too, that the young man had, after long researches, discovered the formula of a terrible explosive, one pound of which would suffice to blow up a cathedral. And Pierre then thought of those Anarchists who wished to renew and save the world by destroying it. They were but dreamers, horrible dreamers; yet dreamers in the same way as those innocent pilgrims whom he had seen kneeling at the Grotto in an enraptured flock. If the Anarchists, if the extreme Socialists, demanded with violence the equality of wealth, the sharing of all the enjoyments of the world, the pilgrims on their side demanded with tears equality of health and an equitable sharing of moral and physical peace. The latter relied on miracles, the former appealed to brute force. At bottom, however, it was but the same exasperated dream of fraternity and justice, the eternal desire for happiness—neither poor nor sick left, but bliss for one and all. And, in fact, had not the primitive Christians been terrible revolutionaries for the pagan world, which they threatened, and did, indeed, destroy? They who were persecuted, whom the others sought to exterminate, are to-day inoffensive, because they have become the Past. The frightful Future is ever the man who dreams of a future society; even as to-day it is the madman so wildly bent on social renovation that he harbours the great black dream of purifying everything by the flame of conflagrations. This seemed monstrous to Pierre. Yet, who could tell? Therein, perchance, lay the rejuvenated world of to-morrow.

Astray, full of doubts, he nevertheless, in his horror of violence, made common cause with old society now reduced to defend itself, unable though he was to say whence would come the new Messiah of Gentleness, in whose hands he would have liked to place poor ailing mankind. A new religion, yes, a new religion. But it is not easy to invent one, and he knew not to what conclusion to come between the ancient faith, which was dead, and the young faith of to-morrow, as yet unborn. For his part, in his desolation, he was only sure of keeping his vow, like an unbelieving priest watching over the belief of others, chastely and honestly discharging his duties, with the proud sadness that he had been unable to renounce his reason as he had renounced his flesh. And for the rest, he would wait.

However, the train rolled on between large parks, and the engine gave a prolonged whistle, a joyful flourish, which drew Pierre from his reflections. The others were stirring, displaying emotion around him. The train had just left Juvisy, and Paris was at last near at hand, within a short half-hour's journey. One and all were getting their things together: the Sabathiers were remaking their little parcels, Elise Rouquet was giving a last glance at her mirror. For a moment Madame de Jonquiere again became anxious concerning La Grivotte, and decided that as the girl was in such a pitiful condition she would have her taken straight to a hospital on arriving; whilst Marie endeavoured to rouse Madame Vincent from the torpor in which she seemed determined to remain. M. de Guersaint, who had been indulging in a little siesta, also had to be awakened. And at last, when Sister Hyacinthe had clapped her hands, the whole carriage intonated the "Te Deum," the hymn of praise and thanksgiving. "Te Deum, laudamus, te Dominum confitemur." The voices rose amidst a last burst of fervour. All those glowing souls returned thanks to God for the beautiful journey, the marvellous favours that He had already bestowed on them, and would bestow on them yet again.

At last came the fortifications. The two o'clock sun was slowly descending the vast, pure heavens, so serenely warm. Distant smoke, a ruddy smoke, was rising in light clouds above the immensity of Paris like the scattered, flying breath of that toiling colossus. It was Paris in her forge, Paris with her passions, her battles, her ever-growling thunder, her ardent life ever engendering the life of to-morrow. And the white train, the woeful train of every misery and every dolour, was returning into it all at full speed, sounding in higher and higher strains the piercing flourishes of its whistle-calls. The five hundred pilgrims, the three hundred patients, were about to disappear in the vast city, fall again upon the hard pavement of life after the prodigious dream in which they had just indulged, until the day should come when their need of the consolation of a fresh dream would irresistibly impel them to start once more on the everlasting pilgrimage to mystery and forgetfulness.

Ah! unhappy mankind, poor ailing humanity, hungering for illusion, and in the weariness of this waning century distracted and sore from having too greedily acquired science; it fancies itself abandoned by the physicians of both the mind and the body, and, in great danger of succumbing to incurable disease, retraces its steps and asks the miracle of its cure of the mystical Lourdes of a past forever dead! Yonder, however, Bernadette, the new Messiah of suffering, so touching in her human reality, constitutes the terrible lesson, the sacrifice cut off from the world, the victim condemned to abandonment, solitude, and death, smitten with the penalty of being neither woman, nor wife, nor mother, because she beheld the Blessed Virgin.

THE END

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rome, by Emile Zola

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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Rome
From the "Three Cities"

Author: Emile Zola

Translator: Ernest A. Vizetelly

Release Date: March 17, 2009 [EBook #8726]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROME ***

Produced by David Widger and Dagny

ROME

Of the Three Cities

By Emile Zola

Translated By Ernest A. Vizetelly

Contents

ROME

PREFACE

PART I.

I.

II.

III.

PART II.

IV.

V.

VI.

PART III.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

PART IV.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

PART V.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

ROME

FROM "THE THREE CITIES"

By Emile Zola

Translated By Ernest A. Vizetelly

PREFACE

IN submitting to the English-speaking public this second volume of M. Zola's trilogy "Lourdes, Rome, Paris," I have no prefatory remarks to offer on behalf of the author, whose views on Rome, its past, present, and future, will be found fully expounded in the following pages. That a book of this character will, like its forerunner "Lourdes," provoke considerable controversy is certain, but comment or rejoinder may well be postponed until that controversy has arisen. At present then I only desire to say, that in spite of the great labour which I have bestowed on this translation, I am sensible of its shortcomings, and in a work of such length, such intricacy, and such a wide range of subject, it will not be surprising if some slips are discovered. Any errors which may be pointed out to me, however, shall be rectified in subsequent editions. I have given, I think, the whole essence of M. Zola's text; but he himself has admitted to me that he has now and again allowed his pen to run away with him, and thus whilst sacrificing nothing of his sense I have at times abbreviated his phraseology so as slightly to condense the book. I may add that there are no chapter headings in the original, and that the circumstances under which the translation was made did not permit me to supply any whilst it was passing through the press; however, as some indication of the contents of the book—which treats of many more things than are usually found in novels—may be a convenience to the reader, I have prepared a table briefly epitomising the chief features of each successive chapter.

E. A. V.

MERTON, SURREY, ENGLAND,
April, 1896.

DETAILED CONTENTS

PART I. I
"NEW ROME"—Abbe Froment in the Eternal City—His First Impressions—His
Book and the Rejuvenation of Christianity

II
"BLACK MOUTH, RED SOUL"—The Boccaneras, their Mansion, Ancestors,
History, and Friends

III
ROMANS OF THE CHURCH—Cardinals Boccanera and Sanguinetti—Abbes
Paparelli and Santobono—Don Vigilio—Monsignor Nani

CONTENTS TO PART II. IV
ROMANS OF NEW ITALY—The Pradas and the Saccos—The Corso and the Pincio

V
THE BLOOD OF AUGUSTUS—The Palaces of the Caesars—The Capitol—The
Forum—The Appian Way—The Campagna—The Catacombs—St. Peter's.

VI
VENUS AND HERCULES—The Vatican—The Sixtine Chapel—Michael Angelo and
Raffaelle—Botticelli and Bernini—Gods and Goddesses—The Gardens—Leo
XIII—The Revolt of Passion

CONTENTS TO PART III. VII
PRINCE AND PONTIFF—The International Pilgrimage—The Papal Revenue—A
Function at St. Peter's—The Pope-King—The Temporal Power

VIII
THE POOR AND THE POPE—The Building Mania—The Financial Crash—The
Horrors of the Castle Fields—The Roman Workman—May Christ's Vicar
Gamble?—Hopes and Fears of the Papacy

IX
TITO's WARNING—Aspects of Rome—The Via Giulia—The Tiber by Day—The
Gardens—The Villa Medici—-The Squares—The Fountains—Poussin and the
Campagna—The Campo Verano—The Trastevere—The "Palaces"—Aristocracy,
Middle Class, Democracy—The Tiber by Night

CONTENTS TO PART IV. X
FROM PILLAR TO POST—The Propaganda—The Index—Dominicans, Jesuits,
Franciscans—The Secular Clergy—Roman Worship—Freemasonry—Cardinal
Vicar and Cardinal Secretary—The Inquisition.

XI
POISON!—Frascati—A Cardinal and his Creature—Albano, Castel Gandolfo,
Nemi—Across the Campagna—An Osteria—Destiny on the March

XII
THE AGONY OF PASSION—A Roman Gala—The Buongiovannis—The Grey
World—The Triumph of Benedetta—King Humbert and Queen Margherita—The
Fig-tree of Judas

XIII
DESTINY!—A Happy Morning—The Mid-day Meal—Dario and the Figs—Extreme
Unction—Benedetta's Curse—The Lovers' Death

CONTENTS TO PART V. XIV
SUBMISSION—The Vatican by Night—The Papal Anterooms—Some Great
Popes—His Holiness's Bed-room—Pierre's Reception—Papal Wrath—Pierre's
Appeal—The Pope's Policy—Dogma and Lourdes—Pierre Reprobates his Book

XV
A HOUSE OF MOURNING—Lying in State—Mother and Son—Princess and
Work-girl—Nani the Jesuit—Rival Cardinals—The Pontiff of Destruction

XVI
JUDGMENT—Pierre and Orlando—Italian Rome—Wanted, a Democracy—Italy
and France—The Rome of the Anarchists—The Agony of Guilt—A
Botticelli—The Papacy Condemned—The Coming Schism—The March of
Science—The Destruction of Rome—The Victory of Reason—Justice not
Charity—Departure—The March of Civilisation—One Fatherland for All
Mankind

ROME

PART I.

I.

THE train had been greatly delayed during the night between Pisa and Civita Vecchia, and it was close upon nine o'clock in the morning when, after a fatiguing journey of twenty-five hours' duration, Abbe Pierre Froment at last reached Rome. He had brought only a valise with him, and, springing hastily out of the railway carriage amidst the scramble of the arrival, he brushed the eager porters aside, intent on carrying his trifling luggage himself, so anxious was he to reach his destination, to be alone, and look around him. And almost immediately, on the Piazza dei Cinquecento, in front of the railway station, he climbed into one of the small open cabs ranged alongside the footwalk, and placed the valise near him after giving the driver this address:

"Via Giulia, Palazzo Boccanera."*

* Boccanera mansion, Julia Street.

It was a Monday, the 3rd of September, a beautifully bright and mild morning, with a clear sky overhead. The cabby, a plump little man with sparkling eyes and white teeth, smiled on realising by Pierre's accent that he had to deal with a French priest. Then he whipped up his lean horse, and the vehicle started off at the rapid pace customary to the clean and cheerful cabs of Rome. However, on reaching the Piazza delle Terme, after skirting the greenery of a little public garden, the man turned round, still smiling, and pointing to some ruins with his whip,

"The baths of Diocletian," said he in broken French, like an obliging driver who is anxious to court favour with foreigners in order to secure their custom.

Then, at a fast trot, the vehicle descended the rapid slope of the Via Nazionale, which dips down from the summit of the Viminalis,* where the railway station is situated. And from that moment the driver scarcely ceased turning round and pointing at the monuments with his whip. In this broad new thoroughfare there were only buildings of recent erection. Still, the wave of the cabman's whip became more pronounced and his voice rose to a higher key, with a somewhat ironical inflection, when he gave the name of a huge and still chalky pile on his left, a gigantic erection of stone, overladen with sculptured work-pediments and statues.

* One of the seven hills on which Rome is built. The other six
are the Capitoline, Aventine, Quirinal, Esquiline, Coelian,
and Palatine. These names will perforce frequently occur in
the present narrative.

"The National Bank!" he said.

Pierre, however, during the week which had followed his resolve to make the journey, had spent wellnigh every day in studying Roman topography in maps and books. Thus he could have directed his steps to any given spot without inquiring his way, and he anticipated most of the driver's explanations. At the same time he was disconcerted by the sudden slopes, the perpetually recurring hills, on which certain districts rose, house above house, in terrace fashion. On his right-hand clumps of greenery were now climbing a height, and above them stretched a long bare yellow building of barrack or convent-like aspect.

"The Quirinal, the King's palace," said the driver.

Lower down, as the cab turned across a triangular square, Pierre, on raising his eyes, was delighted to perceive a sort of aerial garden high above him—a garden which was upheld by a lofty smooth wall, and whence the elegant and vigorous silhouette of a parasol pine, many centuries old, rose aloft into the limpid heavens. At this sight he realised all the pride and grace of Rome.

"The Villa Aldobrandini," the cabman called.

Then, yet lower down, there came a fleeting vision which decisively impassioned Pierre. The street again made a sudden bend, and in one corner, beyond a short dim alley, there was a blazing gap of light. On a lower level appeared a white square, a well of sunshine, filled with a blinding golden dust; and amidst all that morning glory there arose a gigantic marble column, gilt from base to summit on the side which the sun in rising had laved with its beams for wellnigh eighteen hundred years. And Pierre was surprised when the cabman told him the name of the column, for in his mind he had never pictured it soaring aloft in such a dazzling cavity with shadows all around. It was the column of Trajan.

The Via Nazionale turned for the last time at the foot of the slope. And then other names fell hastily from the driver's lips as his horse went on at a fast trot. There was the Palazzo Colonna, with its garden edged by meagre cypresses; the Palazzo Torlonia, almost ripped open by recent "improvements"; the Palazzo di Venezia, bare and fearsome, with its crenelated walls, its stern and tragic appearance, that of some fortress of the middle ages, forgotten there amidst the commonplace life of nowadays. Pierre's surprise increased at the unexpected aspect which certain buildings and streets presented; and the keenest blow of all was dealt him when the cabman with his whip triumphantly called his attention to the Corso, a long narrow thoroughfare, about as broad as Fleet Street,* white with sunshine on the left, and black with shadows on the right, whilst at the far end the Piazza del Popolo (the Square of the People) showed like a bright star. Was this, then, the heart of the city, the vaunted promenade, the street brimful of life, whither flowed all the blood of Rome?

* M. Zola likens the Corso to the Rue St. Honore in Paris, but
I have thought that an English comparison would be preferable
in the present version.—Trans.

However, the cab was already entering the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, which follows the Via Nazionale, these being the two piercings effected right across the olden city from the railway station to the bridge of St. Angelo. On the left-hand the rounded apsis of the Gesu church looked quite golden in the morning brightness. Then, between the church and the heavy Altieri palace which the "improvers" had not dared to demolish, the street became narrower, and one entered into cold, damp shade. But a moment afterwards, before the facade of the Gesu, when the square was reached, the sun again appeared, dazzling, throwing golden sheets of light around; whilst afar off at the end of the Via di Ara Coeli, steeped in shadow, a glimpse could be caught of some sunlit palm-trees.

"That's the Capitol yonder," said the cabman.

The priest hastily leant to the left, but only espied the patch of greenery at the end of the dim corridor-like street. The sudden alternations of warm light and cold shade made him shiver. In front of the Palazzo di Venezia, and in front of the Gesu, it had seemed to him as if all the night of ancient times were falling icily upon his shoulders; but at each fresh square, each broadening of the new thoroughfares, there came a return to light, to the pleasant warmth and gaiety of life. The yellow sunflashes, in falling from the house fronts, sharply outlined the violescent shadows. Strips of sky, very blue and very benign, could be perceived between the roofs. And it seemed to Pierre that the air he breathed had a particular savour, which he could not yet quite define, but it was like that of fruit, and increased the feverishness which had possessed him ever since his arrival.

The Corso Vittorio Emanuele is, in spite of its irregularity, a very fine modern thoroughfare; and for a time Pierre might have fancied himself in any great city full of huge houses let out in flats. But when he passed before the Cancelleria,* Bramante's masterpiece, the typical monument of the Roman Renascence, his astonishment came back to him and his mind returned to the mansions which he had previously espied, those bare, huge, heavy edifices, those vast cubes of stone-work resembling hospitals or prisons. Never would he have imagined that the famous Roman "palaces" were like that, destitute of all grace and fancy and external magnificence. However, they were considered very fine and must be so; he would doubtless end by understanding things, but for that he would require reflection.**

* Formerly the residence of the Papal Vice-Chancellors.

** It is as well to point out at once that a palazzo is not a
palace as we understand the term, but rather a mansion.—Trans.

All at once the cab turned out of the populous Corso Vittorio Emanuele into a succession of winding alleys, through which it had difficulty in making its way. Quietude and solitude now came back again; the olden city, cold and somniferous, followed the new city with its bright sunshine and its crowds. Pierre remembered the maps which he had consulted, and realised that he was drawing near to the Via Giulia, and thereupon his curiosity, which had been steadily increasing, augmented to such a point that he suffered from it, full of despair at not seeing more and learning more at once. In the feverish state in which he had found himself ever since leaving the station, his astonishment at not finding things such as he had expected, the many shocks that his imagination had received, aggravated his passion beyond endurance, and brought him an acute desire to satisfy himself immediately. Nine o'clock had struck but a few minutes previously, he had the whole morning before him to repair to the Boccanera palace, so why should he not at once drive to the classic spot, the summit whence one perceives the whole of Rome spread out upon her seven hills? And when once this thought had entered into his mind it tortured him until he was at last compelled to yield to it.

The driver no longer turned his head, so that Pierre rose up to give him this new address: "To San Pietro in Montorio!"

On hearing him the man at first looked astonished, unable to understand. He indicated with his whip that San Pietro was yonder, far away. However, as the priest insisted, he again smiled complacently, with a friendly nod of his head. All right! For his own part he was quite willing.

The horse then went on at a more rapid pace through the maze of narrow streets. One of these was pent between high walls, and the daylight descended into it as into a deep trench. But at the end came a sudden return to light, and the Tiber was crossed by the antique bridge of Sixtus IV, right and left of which stretched the new quays, amidst the ravages and fresh plaster-work of recent erections. On the other side of the river the Trastevere district also was ripped open, and the vehicle ascended the slope of the Janiculum by a broad thoroughfare where large slabs bore the name of Garibaldi. For the last time the driver made a gesture of good-natured pride as he named this triumphal route.

"Via Garibaldi!"

The horse had been obliged to slacken its pace, and Pierre, mastered by childish impatience, turned round to look at the city as by degrees it spread out and revealed itself behind him. The ascent was a long one; fresh districts were ever rising up, even to the most distant hills. Then, in the increasing emotion which made his heart beat, the young priest felt that he was spoiling the contentment of his desire by thus gradually satisfying it, slowly and but partially effecting his conquest of the horizon. He wished to receive the shock full in the face, to behold all Rome at one glance, to gather the holy city together, and embrace the whole of it at one grasp. And thereupon he mustered sufficient strength of mind to refrain from turning round any more, in spite of the impulses of his whole being.

There is a spacious terrace on the summit of the incline. The church of San Pietro in Montorio stands there, on the spot where, as some say, St. Peter was crucified. The square is bare and brown, baked by the hot summer suns; but a little further away in the rear, the clear and noisy waters of the Acqua Paola fall bubbling from the three basins of a monumental fountain amidst sempiternal freshness. And alongside the terrace parapet, on the very crown of the Trastevere, there are always rows of tourists, slim Englishmen and square-built Germans, agape with traditional admiration, or consulting their guide-books in order to identify the monuments.

Pierre sprang lightly from the cab, leaving his valise on the seat, and making a sign to the driver, who went to join the row of waiting cabs, and remained philosophically seated on his box in the full sunlight, his head drooping like that of his horse, both resigning themselves to the customary long stoppage.

Meantime Pierre, erect against the parapet, in his tight black cassock, and with his bare feverish hands nervously clenched, was gazing before him with all his eyes, with all his soul. Rome! Rome! the city of the Caesars, the city of the Popes, the Eternal City which has twice conquered the world, the predestined city of the glowing dream in which he had indulged for months! At last it was before him, at last his eyes beheld it! During the previous days some rainstorms had abated the intense August heat, and on that lovely September morning the air had freshened under the pale blue of the spotless far-spreading heavens. And the Rome that Pierre beheld was a Rome steeped in mildness, a visionary Rome which seemed to evaporate in the clear sunshine. A fine bluey haze, scarcely perceptible, as delicate as gauze, hovered over the roofs of the low-lying districts; whilst the vast Campagna, the distant hills, died away in a pale pink flush. At first Pierre distinguished nothing, sought no particular edifice or spot, but gave sight and soul alike to the whole of Rome, to the living colossus spread out below him, on a soil compounded of the dust of generations. Each century had renewed the city's glory as with the sap of immortal youth. And that which struck Pierre, that which made his heart leap within him, was that he found Rome such as he had desired to find her, fresh and youthful, with a volatile, almost incorporeal, gaiety of aspect, smiling as at the hope of a new life in the pure dawn of a lovely day.

And standing motionless before the sublime vista, with his hands still clenched and burning, Pierre in a few minutes again lived the last three years of his life. Ah! what a terrible year had the first been, spent in his little house at Neuilly, with doors and windows ever closed, burrowing there like some wounded animal suffering unto death. He had come back from Lourdes with his soul desolate, his heart bleeding, with nought but ashes within him. Silence and darkness fell upon the ruins of his love and his faith. Days and days went by, without a pulsation of his veins, without the faintest gleam arising to brighten the gloom of his abandonment. His life was a mechanical one; he awaited the necessary courage to resume the tenor of existence in the name of sovereign reason, which had imposed upon him the sacrifice of everything. Why was he not stronger, more resistant, why did he not quietly adapt his life to his new opinions? As he was unwilling to cast off his cassock, through fidelity to the love of one and disgust of backsliding, why did he not seek occupation in some science suited to a priest, such as astronomy or archaeology? The truth was that something, doubtless his mother's spirit, wept within him, an infinite, distracted love which nothing had yet satisfied and which ever despaired of attaining contentment. Therein lay the perpetual suffering of his solitude: beneath the lofty dignity of reason regained, the wound still lingered, raw and bleeding.

One autumn evening, however, under a dismal rainy sky, chance brought him into relations with an old priest, Abbe Rose, who was curate at the church of Ste. Marguerite, in the Faubourg St. Antoine. He went to see Abbe Rose in the Rue de Charonne, where in the depths of a damp ground floor he had transformed three rooms into an asylum for abandoned children, whom he picked up in the neighbouring streets. And from that moment Pierre's life changed, a fresh and all-powerful source of interest had entered into it, and by degrees he became the old priest's passionate helper. It was a long way from Neuilly to the Rue de Charonne, and at first he only made the journey twice a week. But afterwards he bestirred himself every day, leaving home in the morning and not returning until night. As the three rooms no longer sufficed for the asylum, he rented the first floor of the house, reserving for himself a chamber in which ultimately he often slept. And all his modest income was expended there, in the prompt succouring of poor children; and the old priest, delighted, touched to tears by the young devoted help which had come to him from heaven, would often embrace Pierre, weeping, and call him a child of God.

It was then that Pierre knew want and wretchedness—wicked, abominable wretchedness; then that he lived amidst it for two long years. The acquaintance began with the poor little beings whom he picked up on the pavements, or whom kind-hearted neighbours brought to him now that the asylum was known in the district—little boys, little girls, tiny mites stranded on the streets whilst their fathers and mothers were toiling, drinking, or dying. The father had often disappeared, the mother had gone wrong, drunkenness and debauchery had followed slack times into the home; and then the brood was swept into the gutter, and the younger ones half perished of cold and hunger on the footways, whilst their elders betook themselves to courses of vice and crime. One evening Pierre rescued from the wheels of a stone-dray two little nippers, brothers, who could not even give him an address, tell him whence they had come. On another evening he returned to the asylum with a little girl in his arms, a fair-haired little angel, barely three years old, whom he had found on a bench, and who sobbed, saying that her mother had left her there. And by a logical chain of circumstances, after dealing with the fleshless, pitiful fledglings ousted from their nests, he came to deal with the parents, to enter their hovels, penetrating each day further and further into a hellish sphere, and ultimately acquiring knowledge of all its frightful horror, his heart meantime bleeding, rent by terrified anguish and impotent charity.

Oh! the grievous City of Misery, the bottomless abyss of human suffering and degradation—how frightful were his journeys through it during those two years which distracted his whole being! In that Ste. Marguerite district of Paris, in the very heart of that Faubourg St. Antoine, so active and so brave for work, however hard, he discovered no end of sordid dwellings, whole lanes and alleys of hovels without light or air, cellar-like in their dampness, and where a multitude of wretches wallowed and suffered as from poison. All the way up the shaky staircases one's feet slipped upon filth. On every story there was the same destitution, dirt, and promiscuity. Many windows were paneless, and in swept the wind howling, and the rain pouring torrentially. Many of the inmates slept on the bare tiled floors, never unclothing themselves. There was neither furniture nor linen, the life led there was essentially an animal life, a commingling of either sex and of every age—humanity lapsing into animality through lack of even indispensable things, through indigence of so complete a character that men, women, and children fought even with tooth and nail for the very crumbs swept from the tables of the rich. And the worst of it all was the degradation of the human being; this was no case of the free naked savage, hunting and devouring his prey in the primeval forests; here civilised man was found, sunk into brutishness, with all the stigmas of his fall, debased, disfigured, and enfeebled, amidst the luxury and refinement of that city of Paris which is one of the queens of the world.

In every household Pierre heard the same story. There had been youth and gaiety at the outset, brave acceptance of the law that one must work. Then weariness had come; what was the use of always toiling if one were never to get rich? And so, by way of snatching a share of happiness, the husband turned to drink; the wife neglected her home, also drinking at times, and letting the children grow up as they might. Sordid surroundings, ignorance, and overcrowding did the rest. In the great majority of cases, prolonged lack of work was mostly to blame; for this not only empties the drawers of the savings hidden away in them, but exhausts human courage, and tends to confirmed habits of idleness. During long weeks the workshops empty, and the arms of the toilers lose strength. In all Paris, so feverishly inclined to action, it is impossible to find the slightest thing to do. And then the husband comes home in the evening with tearful eyes, having vainly offered his arms everywhere, having failed even to get a job at street-sweeping, for that employment is much sought after, and to secure it one needs influence and protectors. Is it not monstrous to see a man seeking work that he may eat, and finding no work and therefore no food in this great city resplendent and resonant with wealth? The wife does not eat, the children do not eat. And then comes black famine, brutishness, and finally revolt and the snapping of all social ties under the frightful injustice meted out to poor beings who by their weakness are condemned to death. And the old workman, he whose limbs have been worn out by half a century of hard toil, without possibility of saving a copper, on what pallet of agony, in what dark hole must he not sink to die? Should he then be finished off with a mallet, like a crippled beast of burden, on the day when ceasing to work he also ceases to eat? Almost all pass away in the hospitals, others disappear, unknown, swept off by the muddy flow of the streets. One morning, on some rotten straw in a loathsome hovel, Pierre found a poor devil who had died of hunger and had been forgotten there for a week. The rats had devoured his face.

But it was particularly on an evening of the last winter that Pierre's heart had overflowed with pity. Awful in winter time are the sufferings of the poor in their fireless hovels, where the snow penetrates by every chink. The Seine rolls blocks of ice, the soil is frost-bound, in all sorts of callings there is an enforced cessation of work. Bands of urchins, barefooted, scarcely clad, hungry and racked by coughing, wander about the ragpickers' "rents" and are carried off by sudden hurricanes of consumption. Pierre found families, women with five and six children, who had not eaten for three days, and who huddled together in heaps to try to keep themselves warm. And on that terrible evening, before anybody else, he went down a dark passage and entered a room of terror, where he found that a mother had just committed suicide with her five little ones—driven to it by despair and hunger—a tragedy of misery which for a few hours would make all Paris shudder! There was not an article of furniture or linen left in the place; it had been necessary to sell everything bit by bit to a neighbouring dealer. There was nothing but the stove where the charcoal was still smoking and a half-emptied palliasse on which the mother had fallen, suckling her last-born, a babe but three months old. And a drop of blood had trickled from the nipple of her breast, towards which the dead infant still protruded its eager lips. Two little girls, three and five years old, two pretty little blondes, were also lying there, sleeping the eternal sleep side by side; whilst of the two boys, who were older, one had succumbed crouching against the wall with his head between his hands, and the other had passed through the last throes on the floor, struggling as though he had sought to crawl on his knees to the window in order to open it. Some neighbours, hurrying in, told Pierre the fearful commonplace story; slow ruin, the father unable to find work, perchance taking to drink, the landlord weary of waiting, threatening the family with expulsion, and the mother losing her head, thirsting for death, and prevailing on her little ones to die with her, while her husband, who had been out since the morning, was vainly scouring the streets. Just as the Commissary of Police arrived to verify what had happened, the poor devil returned, and when he had seen and understood things, he fell to the ground like a stunned ox, and raised a prolonged, plaintive howl, such a poignant cry of death that the whole terrified street wept at it.

Both in his ears and in his heart Pierre carried away with him that horrible cry, the plaint of a condemned race expiring amidst abandonment and hunger; and that night he could neither eat nor sleep. Was it possible that such abomination, such absolute destitution, such black misery leading straight to death should exist in the heart of that great city of Paris, brimful of wealth, intoxicated with enjoyment, flinging millions out of the windows for mere pleasure? What! there should on one side be such colossal fortunes, so many foolish fancies gratified, with lives endowed with every happiness, whilst on the other was found inveterate poverty, lack even of bread, absence of every hope, and mothers killing themselves with their babes, to whom they had nought to offer but the blood of their milkless breast! And a feeling of revolt stirred Pierre; he was for a moment conscious of the derisive futility of charity. What indeed was the use of doing that which he did—picking up the little ones, succouring the parents, prolonging the sufferings of the aged? The very foundations of the social edifice were rotten; all would soon collapse amid mire and blood. A great act of justice alone could sweep the old world away in order that the new world might be built. And at that moment he realised so keenly how irreparable was the breach, how irremediable the evil, how deathly the cancer of misery, that he understood the actions of the violent, and was himself ready to accept the devastating and purifying whirlwind, the regeneration of the world by flame and steel, even as when in the dim ages Jehovah in His wrath sent fire from heaven to cleanse the accursed cities of the plains.

However, on hearing him sob that evening, Abbe Rose came up to remonstrate in fatherly fashion. The old priest was a saint, endowed with infinite gentleness and infinite hope. Why despair indeed when one had the Gospel? Did not the divine commandment, "Love one another," suffice for the salvation of the world? He, Abbe Rose, held violence in horror and was wont to say that, however great the evil, it would soon be overcome if humanity would but turn backward to the age of humility, simplicity, and purity, when Christians lived together in innocent brotherhood. What a delightful picture he drew of evangelical society, of whose second coming he spoke with quiet gaiety as though it were to take place on the very morrow! And Pierre, anxious to escape from his frightful recollections, ended by smiling, by taking pleasure in Abbe Rose's bright consoling tale. They chatted until a late hour, and on the following days reverted to the same subject of conversation, one which the old priest was very fond of, ever supplying new particulars, and speaking of the approaching reign of love and justice with the touching confidence of a good if simple man, who is convinced that he will not die till he shall have seen the Deity descend upon earth.

And now a fresh evolution took place in Pierre's mind. The practice of benevolence in that poor district had developed infinite compassion in his breast, his heart failed him, distracted, rent by contemplation of the misery which he despaired of healing. And in this awakening of his feelings he often thought that his reason was giving way, he seemed to be retracing his steps towards childhood, to that need of universal love which his mother had implanted in him, and dreamt of chimerical solutions, awaiting help from the unknown powers. Then his fears, his hatred of the brutality of facts at last brought him an increasing desire to work salvation by love. No time should be lost in seeking to avert the frightful catastrophe which seemed inevitable, the fratricidal war of classes which would sweep the old world away beneath the accumulation of its crimes. Convinced that injustice had attained its apogee, that but little time remained before the vengeful hour when the poor would compel the rich to part with their possessions, he took pleasure in dreaming of a peaceful solution, a kiss of peace exchanged by all men, a return to the pure morals of the Gospel as it had been preached by Jesus.

Doubts tortured him at the outset. Could olden Catholicism be rejuvenated, brought back to the youth and candour of primitive Christianity? He set himself to study things, reading and questioning, and taking a more and more passionate interest in that great problem of Catholic socialism which had made no little noise for some years past. And quivering with pity for the wretched, ready as he was for the miracle of fraternisation, he gradually lost such scruples as intelligence might have prompted, and persuaded himself that once again Christ would work the redemption of suffering humanity. At last a precise idea took possession of him, a conviction that Catholicism purified, brought back to its original state, would prove the one pact, the supreme law that might save society by averting the sanguinary crisis which threatened it.

When he had quitted Lourdes two years previously, revolted by all its gross idolatry, his faith for ever dead, but his mind worried by the everlasting need of the divine which tortures human creatures, a cry had arisen within him from the deepest recesses of his being: "A new religion! a new religion!" And it was this new religion, or rather this revived religion which he now fancied he had discovered in his desire to work social salvation—ensuring human happiness by means of the only moral authority that was erect, the distant outcome of the most admirable implement ever devised for the government of nations.

During the period of slow development through which Pierre passed, two men, apart from Abbe Rose, exercised great influence on him. A benevolent action brought him into intercourse with Monseigneur Bergerot, a bishop whom the Pope had recently created a cardinal, in reward for a whole life of charity, and this in spite of the covert opposition of the papal curia which suspected the French prelate to be a man of open mind, governing his diocese in paternal fashion. Pierre became more impassioned by his intercourse with this apostle, this shepherd of souls, in whom he detected one of the good simple leaders that he desired for the future community. However, his apostolate was influenced even more decisively by meeting Viscount Philibert de la Choue at the gatherings of certain workingmen's Catholic associations. A handsome man, with military manners, and a long noble-looking face, spoilt by a small and broken nose which seemed to presage the ultimate defeat of a badly balanced mind, the Viscount was one of the most active agitators of Catholic socialism in France. He was the possessor of vast estates, a vast fortune, though it was said that some unsuccessful agricultural enterprises had already reduced his wealth by nearly one-half. In the department where his property was situated he had been at great pains to establish model farms, at which he had put his ideas on Christian socialism into practice, but success did not seem to follow him. However, it had all helped to secure his election as a deputy, and he spoke in the Chamber, unfolding the programme of his party in long and stirring speeches.

Unwearying in his ardour, he also led pilgrimages to Rome, presided over meetings, and delivered lectures, devoting himself particularly to the people, the conquest of whom, so he privately remarked, could alone ensure the triumph of the Church. And thus he exercised considerable influence over Pierre, who in him admired qualities which himself did not possess—an organising spirit and a militant if somewhat blundering will, entirely applied to the revival of Christian society in France. However, though the young priest learnt a good deal by associating with him, he nevertheless remained a sentimental dreamer, whose imagination, disdainful of political requirements, straightway winged its flight to the future abode of universal happiness; whereas the Viscount aspired to complete the downfall of the liberal ideas of 1789 by utilising the disillusion and anger of the democracy to work a return towards the past.

Pierre spent some delightful months. Never before had neophyte lived so entirely for the happiness of others. He was all love, consumed by the passion of his apostolate. The sight of the poor wretches whom he visited, the men without work, the women, the children without bread, filled him with a keener and keener conviction that a new religion must arise to put an end to all the injustice which otherwise would bring the rebellious world to a violent death. And he was resolved to employ all his strength in effecting and hastening the intervention of the divine, the resuscitation of primitive Christianity. His Catholic faith remained dead; he still had no belief in dogmas, mysteries, and miracles; but a hope sufficed him, the hope that the Church might still work good, by connecting itself with the irresistible modern democratic movement, so as to save the nations from the social catastrophe which impended. His soul had grown calm since he had taken on himself the mission of replanting the Gospel in the hearts of the hungry and growling people of the Faubourgs. He was now leading an active life, and suffered less from the frightful void which he had brought back from Lourdes; and as he no longer questioned himself, the anguish of uncertainty no longer tortured him. It was with the serenity which attends the simple accomplishment of duty that he continued to say his mass. He even finished by thinking that the mystery which he thus celebrated—indeed, that all the mysteries and all the dogmas were but symbols—rites requisite for humanity in its childhood, which would be got rid of later on, when enlarged, purified, and instructed humanity should be able to support the brightness of naked truth.

And in his zealous desire to be useful, his passion to proclaim his belief aloud, Pierre one morning found himself at his table writing a book. This had come about quite naturally; the book proceeded from him like a heart-cry, without any literary idea having crossed his mind. One night, whilst he lay awake, its title suddenly flashed before his eyes in the darkness: "NEW ROME." That expressed everything, for must not the new redemption of the nations originate in eternal and holy Rome? The only existing authority was found there; rejuvenescence could only spring from the sacred soil where the old Catholic oak had grown. He wrote his book in a couple of months, having unconsciously prepared himself for the work by his studies in contemporary socialism during a year past. There was a bubbling flow in his brain as in a poet's; it seemed to him sometimes as if he dreamt those pages, as if an internal distant voice dictated them to him.

When he read passages written on the previous day to Viscount Philibert de la Choue, the latter often expressed keen approval of them from a practical point of view, saying that one must touch the people in order to lead them, and that it would also be a good plan to compose pious and yet amusing songs for singing in the workshops. As for Monseigneur Bergerot, without examining the book from the dogmatic standpoint, he was deeply touched by the glowing breath of charity which every page exhaled, and was even guilty of the imprudence of writing an approving letter to the author, which letter he authorised him to insert in his work by way of preface. And yet now the Congregation of the Index Expurgatorius was about to place this book, issued in the previous June, under interdict; and it was to defend it that the young priest had hastened to Rome, inflamed by the desire to make his ideas prevail, and resolved to plead his cause in person before the Holy Father, having, he was convinced of it, simply given expression to the pontiff's views.

Pierre had not stirred whilst thus living his three last years afresh: he still stood erect before the parapet, before Rome, which he had so often dreamt of and had so keenly desired to see. There was a constant succession of arriving and departing vehicles behind him; the slim Englishmen and the heavy Germans passed away after bestowing on the classic view the five minutes prescribed by their guidebooks; whilst the driver and the horse of Pierre's cab remained waiting complacently, each with his head drooping under the bright sun, which was heating the valise on the seat of the vehicle. And Pierre, in his black cassock, seemed to have grown slimmer and elongated, very slight of build, as he stood there motionless, absorbed in the sublime spectacle. He had lost flesh after his journey to Lourdes, his features too had become less pronounced. Since his mother's part in his nature had regained ascendency, the broad, straight forehead, the intellectual air which he owed to his father seemed to have grown less conspicuous, while his kind and somewhat large mouth, and his delicate chin, bespeaking infinite affection, dominated, revealing his soul, which also glowed in the kindly sparkle of his eyes.

Ah! how tender and glowing were the eyes with which he gazed upon the Rome of his book, the new Rome that he had dreamt of! If, first of all, the ensemble had claimed his attention in the soft and somewhat veiled light of that lovely morning, at present he could distinguish details, and let his glance rest upon particular edifices. And it was with childish delight that he identified them, having long studied them in maps and collections of photographs. Beneath his feet, at the bottom of the Janiculum, stretched the Trastevere district with its chaos of old ruddy houses, whose sunburnt tiles hid the course of the Tiber. He was somewhat surprised by the flattish aspect of everything as seen from the terraced summit. It was as though a bird's-eye view levelled the city, the famous hills merely showing like bosses, swellings scarcely perceptible amidst the spreading sea of house-fronts. Yonder, on the right, distinct against the distant blue of the Alban mountains, was certainly the Aventine with its three churches half-hidden by foliage; there, too, was the discrowned Palatine, edged as with black fringe by a line of cypresses. In the rear, the Coelian hill faded away, showing only the trees of the Villa Mattei paling in the golden sunshine. The slender spire and two little domes of Sta. Maria Maggiore alone indicated the summit of the Esquiline, right in front and far away at the other end of the city; whilst on the heights of the neighbouring Viminal, Pierre only perceived a confused mass of whitish blocks, steeped in light and streaked with fine brown lines—recent erections, no doubt, which at that distance suggested an abandoned stone quarry. He long sought the Capitol without being able to discover it; he had to take his bearings, and ended by convincing himself that the square tower, modestly lost among surrounding house-roofs, which he saw in front of Sta. Maria Maggiore was its campanile. Next, on the left, came the Quirinal, recognisable by the long facade of the royal palace, a barrack or hospital-like facade, flat, crudely yellow in hue, and pierced by an infinite number of regularly disposed windows. However, as Pierre was completing the circuit, a sudden vision made him stop short. Without the city, above the trees of the Botanical Garden, the dome of St. Peter's appeared to him. It seemed to be poised upon the greenery, and rose up into the pure blue sky, sky-blue itself and so ethereal that it mingled with the azure of the infinite. The stone lantern which surmounts it, white and dazzling, looked as though it were suspended on high.

Pierre did not weary, and his glances incessantly travelled from one end of the horizon to the other. They lingered on the noble outlines, the proud gracefulness of the town-sprinkled Sabine and Alban mountains, whose girdle limited the expanse. The Roman Campagna spread out in far stretches, bare and majestic, like a desert of death, with the glaucous green of a stagnant sea; and he ended by distinguishing "the stern round tower" of the tomb of Cecilia Metella, behind which a thin pale line indicated the ancient Appian Way. Remnants of aqueducts strewed the short herbage amidst the dust of the fallen worlds. And, bringing his glance nearer in, the city again appeared with its jumble of edifices, on which his eyes lighted at random. Close at hand, by its loggia turned towards the river, he recognised the huge tawny cube of the Palazzo Farnese. The low cupola, farther away and scarcely visible, was probably that of the Pantheon. Then by sudden leaps came the freshly whitened walls of San Paolo-fuori-le-Mura,* similar to those of some huge barn, and the statues crowning San Giovanni in Laterano, delicate, scarcely as big as insects. Next the swarming of domes, that of the Gesu, that of San Carlo, that of St'. Andrea della Valle, that of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini; then a number of other sites and edifices, all quivering with memories, the castle of St'. Angelo with its glittering statue of the Destroying Angel, the Villa Medici dominating the entire city, the terrace of the Pincio with its marbles showing whitely among its scanty verdure; and the thick-foliaged trees of the Villa Borghese, whose green crests bounded the horizon. Vainly however did Pierre seek the Colosseum.

* St. Paul-beyond-the-walls.

The north wind, which was blowing very mildly, had now begun to dissipate the morning haze. Whole districts vigorously disentangled themselves, and showed against the vaporous distance like promontories in a sunlit sea. Here and there, in the indistinct swarming of houses, a strip of white wall glittered, a row of window panes flared, or a garden supplied a black splotch, of wondrous intensity of hue. And all the rest, the medley of streets and squares, the endless blocks of buildings, scattered about on either hand, mingled and grew indistinct in the living glory of the sun, whilst long coils of white smoke, which had ascended from the roofs, slowly traversed the pure sky.

Guided by a secret influence, however, Pierre soon ceased to take interest in all but three points of the mighty panorama. That line of slender cypresses which set a black fringe on the height of the Palatine yonder filled him with emotion: beyond it he saw only a void: the palaces of the Caesars had disappeared, had fallen, had been razed by time; and he evoked their memory, he fancied he could see them rise like vague, trembling phantoms of gold amidst the purple of that splendid morning. Then his glances reverted to St. Peter's, and there the dome yet soared aloft, screening the Vatican which he knew was beside the colossus, clinging to its flanks. And that dome, of the same colour as the heavens, appeared so triumphant, so full of strength, so vast, that it seemed to him like a giant king, dominating the whole city and seen from every spot throughout eternity. Then he fixed his eyes on the height in front of him, on the Quirinal, and there the King's palace no longer appeared aught but a flat low barracks bedaubed with yellow paint.

And for him all the secular history of Rome, with its constant convulsions and successive resurrections, found embodiment in that symbolical triangle, in those three summits gazing at one another across the Tiber. Ancient Rome blossoming forth in a piling up of palaces and temples, the monstrous florescence of imperial power and splendour; Papal Rome, victorious in the middle ages, mistress of the world, bringing that colossal church, symbolical of beauty regained, to weigh upon all Christendom; and the Rome of to-day, which he knew nothing of, which he had neglected, and whose royal palace, so bare and so cold, brought him disparaging ideas—the idea of some out-of-place, bureaucratic effort, some sacrilegious attempt at modernity in an exceptional city which should have been left entirely to the dreams of the future. However, he shook off the almost painful feelings which the importunate present brought to him, and would not let his eyes rest on a pale new district, quite a little town, in course of erection, no doubt, which he could distinctly see near St. Peter's on the margin of the river. He had dreamt of his own new Rome, and still dreamt of it, even in front of the Palatine whose edifices had crumbled in the dust of centuries, of the dome of St. Peter's whose huge shadow lulled the Vatican to sleep, of the Palace of the Quirinal repaired and repainted, reigning in homely fashion over the new districts which swarmed on every side, while with its ruddy roofs the olden city, ripped up by improvements, coruscated beneath the bright morning sun.

Again did the title of his book, "NEW ROME," flare before Pierre's eyes, and another reverie carried him off; he lived his book afresh even as he had just lived his life. He had written it amid a flow of enthusiasm, utilising the data which he had accumulated at random; and its division into three parts, past, present, and future, had at once forced itself upon him.

The PAST was the extraordinary story of primitive Christianity, of the slow evolution which had turned this Christianity into present-day Catholicism. He showed that an economical question is invariably hidden beneath each religious evolution, and that, upon the whole, the everlasting evil, the everlasting struggle, has never been aught but one between the rich and the poor. Among the Jews, when their nomadic life was over, and they had conquered the land of Canaan, and ownership and property came into being, a class warfare at once broke out. There were rich, and there were poor; thence arose the social question. The transition had been sudden, and the new state of things so rapidly went from bad to worse that the poor suffered keenly, and protested with the greater violence as they still remembered the golden age of the nomadic life. Until the time of Jesus the prophets are but rebels who surge from out the misery of the people, proclaim its sufferings, and vent their wrath upon the rich, to whom they prophesy every evil in punishment for their injustice and their harshness. Jesus Himself appears as the claimant of the rights of the poor. The prophets, whether socialists or anarchists, had preached social equality, and called for the destruction of the world if it were unjust. Jesus likewise brings to the wretched hatred of the rich. All His teaching threatens wealth and property; and if by the Kingdom of Heaven which He promised one were to understand peace and fraternity upon this earth, there would only be a question of returning to a life of pastoral simplicity, to the dream of the Christian community, such as after Him it would seem to have been realised by His disciples. During the first three centuries each Church was an experiment in communism, a real association whose members possessed all in common—wives excepted. This is shown to us by the apologists and early fathers of the Church. Christianity was then but the religion of the humble and the poor, a form of democracy, of socialism struggling against Roman society. And when the latter toppled over, rotted by money, it succumbed far more beneath the results of frantic speculation, swindling banks, and financial disasters, than beneath the onslaught of barbarian hordes and the stealthy, termite-like working of the Christians.

The money question will always be found at the bottom of everything. And a new proof of this was supplied when Christianity, at last triumphing by virtue of historical, social, and human causes, was proclaimed a State religion. To ensure itself complete victory it was forced to range itself on the side of the rich and the powerful; and one should see by means of what artfulness and sophistry the fathers of the Church succeeded in discovering a defence of property and wealth in the Gospel of Jesus. All this, however, was a vital political necessity for Christianity; it was only at this price that it became Catholicism, the universal religion. From that time forth the powerful machine, the weapon of conquest and rule, was reared aloft: up above were the powerful and the wealthy, those whose duty it was to share with the poor, but who did not do so; while down below were the poor, the toilers, who were taught resignation and obedience, and promised the kingdom of futurity, the divine and eternal reward—an admirable monument which has lasted for ages, and which is entirely based on the promise of life beyond life, on the inextinguishable thirst for immortality and justice that consumes mankind.

Pierre had completed this first part of his book, this history of the past, by a broad sketch of Catholicism until the present time. First appeared St. Peter, ignorant and anxious, coming to Rome by an inspiration of genius, there to fulfil the ancient oracles which had predicted the eternity of the Capitol. Then came the first popes, mere heads of burial associations, the slow rise of the all-powerful papacy ever struggling to conquer the world, unremittingly seeking to realise its dream of universal domination. At the time of the great popes of the middle ages it thought for a moment that it had attained its goal, that it was the sovereign master of the nations. Would not absolute truth and right consist in the pope being both pontiff and ruler of the world, reigning over both the souls and the bodies of all men, even like the Deity whose vicar he is? This, the highest and mightiest of all ambitions, one, too, that is perfectly logical, was attained by Augustus, emperor and pontiff, master of all the known world; and it is the glorious figure of Augustus, ever rising anew from among the ruins of ancient Rome, which has always haunted the popes; it is his blood which has pulsated in their veins.

But power had become divided into two parts amidst the crumbling of the Roman empire; it was necessary to content oneself with a share, and leave temporal government to the emperor, retaining over him, however, the right of coronation by divine grant. The people belonged to God, and in God's name the pope gave the people to the emperor, and could take it from him; an unlimited power whose most terrible weapon was excommunication, a superior sovereignty, which carried the papacy towards real and final possession of the empire. Looking at things broadly, the everlasting quarrel between the pope and the emperor was a quarrel for the people, the inert mass of humble and suffering ones, the great silent multitude whose irremediable wretchedness was only revealed by occasional covert growls. It was disposed of, for its good, as one might dispose of a child. Yet the Church really contributed to civilisation, rendered constant services to humanity, diffused abundant alms. In the convents, at any rate, the old dream of the Christian community was ever coming back: one-third of the wealth accumulated for the purposes of worship, the adornment and glorification of the shrine, one-third for the priests, and one-third for the poor. Was not this a simplification of life, a means of rendering existence possible to the faithful who had no earthly desires, pending the marvellous contentment of heavenly life? Give us, then, the whole earth, and we will divide terrestrial wealth into three such parts, and you shall see what a golden age will reign amidst the resignation and the obedience of all!

However, Pierre went on to show how the papacy was assailed by the greatest dangers on emerging from its all-powerfulness of the middle ages. It was almost swept away amidst the luxury and excesses of the Renascence, the bubbling of living sap which then gushed from eternal nature, downtrodden and regarded as dead for ages past. More threatening still were the stealthy awakenings of the people, of the great silent multitude whose tongue seemed to be loosening. The Reformation burst forth like the protest of reason and justice, like a recall to the disregarded truths of the Gospel; and to escape total annihilation Rome needed the stern defence of the Inquisition, the slow stubborn labour of the Council of Trent, which strengthened the dogmas and ensured the temporal power. And then the papacy entered into two centuries of peace and effacement, for the strong absolute monarchies which had divided Europe among themselves could do without it, and had ceased to tremble at the harmless thunderbolts of excommunication or to look on the pope as aught but a master of ceremonies, controlling certain rites. The possession of the people was no longer subject to the same rules. Allowing that the kings still held the people from God, it was the pope's duty to register the donation once for all, without ever intervening, whatever the circumstances, in the government of states. Never was Rome farther away from the realisation of its ancient dream of universal dominion. And when the French Revolution burst forth, it may well have been imagined that the proclamation of the rights of man would kill that papacy to which the exercise of divine right over the nations had been committed. And so how great at first was the anxiety, the anger, the desperate resistance with which the Vatican opposed the idea of freedom, the new credo of liberated reason, of humanity regaining self-possession and control. It was the apparent denouement of the long struggle between the pope and the emperor for possession of the people: the emperor vanished, and the people, henceforward free to dispose of itself, claimed to escape from the pope—an unforeseen solution, in which it seemed as though all the ancient scaffolding of the Catholic world must fall to the very ground.

At this point Pierre concluded the first part of his book by contrasting primitive Christianity with present-day Catholicism, which is the triumph of the rich and the powerful. That Roman society which Jesus had come to destroy in the name of the poor and humble, had not Catholic Rome steadily continued rebuilding it through all the centuries, by its policy of cupidity and pride? And what bitter irony it was to find, after eighteen hundred years of the Gospel, that the world was again collapsing through frantic speculation, rotten banks, financial disasters, and the frightful injustice of a few men gorged with wealth whilst thousands of their brothers were dying of hunger! The whole redemption of the wretched had to be worked afresh. However, Pierre gave expression to all these terrible things in words so softened by charity, so steeped in hope, that they lost their revolutionary danger. Moreover, he nowhere attacked the dogmas. His book, in its sentimental, somewhat poetic form, was but the cry of an apostle glowing with love for his fellow-men.

Then came the second part of the work, the PRESENT, a study of Catholic society as it now exists. Here Pierre had painted a frightful picture of the misery of the poor, the misery of a great city, which he knew so well and bled for, through having laid his hands upon its poisonous wounds. The present-day injustice could no longer be tolerated, charity was becoming powerless, and so frightful was the suffering that all hope was dying away from the hearts of the people. And was it not the monstrous spectacle presented by Christendom, whose abominations corrupted the people, and maddened it with hatred and vengeance, that had largely destroyed its faith? However, after this picture of rotting and crumbling society, Pierre returned to history, to the period of the French Revolution, to the mighty hope with which the idea of freedom had filled the world. The middle classes, the great Liberal party, on attaining power had undertaken to bring happiness to one and all. But after a century's experience it really seemed that liberty had failed to bring any happiness whatever to the outcasts. In the political sphere illusions were departing. At all events, if the reigning third estate declares itself satisfied, the fourth estate, that of the toilers,* still suffers and continues to demand its share of fortune. The working classes have been proclaimed free; political equality has been granted them, but the gift has been valueless, for economically they are still bound to servitude, and only enjoy, as they did formerly, the liberty of dying of hunger. All the socialist revendications have come from that; between labour and capital rests the terrifying problem, the solution of which threatens to sweep away society. When slavery disappeared from the olden world to be succeeded by salaried employment the revolution was immense, and certainly the Christian principle was one of the great factors in the destruction of slavery. Nowadays, therefore, when the question is to replace salaried employment by something else, possibly by the participation of the workman in the profits of his work, why should not Christianity again seek a new principle of action? The fatal and proximate accession of the democracy means the beginning of another phase in human history, the creation of the society of to-morrow. And Rome cannot keep away from the arena; the papacy must take part in the quarrel if it does not desire to disappear from the world like a piece of mechanism that has become altogether useless.

* In England we call the press the fourth estate, but in France
and elsewhere the term is applied to the working classes, and
in that sense must be taken here.—Trans.

Hence it followed that Catholic socialism was legitimate. On every side the socialist sects were battling with their various solutions for the privilege of ensuring the happiness of the people, and the Church also must offer her solution of the problem. Here it was that New Rome appeared, that the evolution spread into a renewal of boundless hope. Most certainly there was nothing contrary to democracy in the principles of the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed she had only to return to the evangelical traditions, to become once more the Church of the humble and the poor, to re-establish the universal Christian community. She is undoubtedly of democratic essence, and if she sided with the rich and the powerful when Christianity became Catholicism, she only did so perforce, that she might live by sacrificing some portion of her original purity; so that if to-day she should abandon the condemned governing classes in order to make common cause with the multitude of the wretched, she would simply be drawing nearer to Christ, thereby securing a new lease of youth and purifying herself of all the political compromises which she formerly was compelled to accept. Without renouncing aught of her absolutism the Church has at all times known how to bow to circumstances; but she reserves her perfect sovereignty, simply tolerating that which she cannot prevent, and patiently waiting, even through long centuries, for the time when she shall again become the mistress of the world.

Might not that time come in the crisis which was now at hand? Once more, all the powers are battling for possession of the people. Since the people, thanks to liberty and education, has become strong, since it has developed consciousness and will, and claimed its share of fortune, all rulers have been seeking to attach it to themselves, to reign by it, and even with it, should that be necessary. Socialism, therein lies the future, the new instrument of government; and the kings tottering on their thrones, the middle-class presidents of anxious republics, the ambitious plotters who dream of power, all dabble in socialism! They all agree that the capitalist organisation of the State is a return to pagan times, to the olden slave-market; and they all talk of breaking for ever the iron law by which the labour of human beings has become so much merchandise, subject to supply and demand, with wages calculated on an estimate of what is strictly necessary to keep a workman from dying of hunger. And, down in the sphere below, the evil increases, the workmen agonise with hunger and exasperation, while above them discussion still goes on, systems are bandied about, and well-meaning persons exhaust themselves in attempting to apply ridiculously inadequate remedies. There is much stir without any progress, all the wild bewilderment which precedes great catastrophes. And among the many, Catholic socialism, quite as ardent as Revolutionary socialism, enters the lists and strives to conquer.

After these explanations Pierre gave an account of the long efforts made by Catholic socialism throughout the Christian world. That which particularly struck one in this connection was that the warfare became keener and more victorious whenever it was waged in some land of propaganda, as yet not completely conquered by Roman Catholicism. For instance, in the countries where Protestantism confronted the latter, the priests fought with wondrous passion, as for dear life itself, contending with the schismatical clergy for possession of the people by dint of daring, by unfolding the most audacious democratic theories. In Germany, the classic land of socialism, Mgr. Ketteler was one of the first to speak of adequately taxing the rich; and later he fomented a wide-spread agitation which the clergy now directs by means of numerous associations and newspapers. In Switzerland Mgr. Mermillod pleaded the cause of the poor so loudly that the bishops there now almost make common cause with the democratic socialists, whom they doubtless hope to convert when the day for sharing arrives. In England, where socialism penetrates so very slowly, Cardinal Manning achieved considerable success, stood by the working classes on the occasion of a famous strike, and helped on a popular movement, which was signalised by numerous conversions. But it was particularly in the United States of America that Catholic socialism proved triumphant, in a sphere of democracy where the bishops, like Mgr. Ireland, were forced to set themselves at the head of the working-class agitation. And there across the Atlantic a new Church seems to be germinating, still in confusion but overflowing with sap, and upheld by intense hope, as at the aurora of the rejuvenated Christianity of to-morrow.

Passing thence to Austria and Belgium, both Catholic countries, one found Catholic socialism mingling in the first instance with anti-semitism, while in the second it had no precise sense. And all movement ceased and disappeared when one came to Spain and Italy, those old lands of faith. The former with its intractable bishops who contented themselves with hurling excommunication at unbelievers as in the days of the Inquisition, seemed to be abandoned to the violent theories of revolutionaries, whilst Italy, immobilised in the traditional courses, remained without possibility of initiative, reduced to silence and respect by the presence of the Holy See. In France, however, the struggle remained keen, but it was more particularly a struggle of ideas. On the whole, the war was there being waged against the revolution, and to some it seemed as though it would suffice to re-establish the old organisation of monarchical times in order to revert to the golden age. It was thus that the question of working-class corporations had become the one problem, the panacea for all the ills of the toilers. But people were far from agreeing; some, those Catholics who rejected State interference and favoured purely moral action, desired that the corporations should be free; whilst others, the young and impatient ones, bent on action, demanded that they should be obligatory, each with capital of its own, and recognised and protected by the State.

Viscount Philibert de la Choue had by pen and speech carried on a vigorous campaign in favour of the obligatory corporations; and his great grief was that he had so far failed to prevail on the Pope to say whether in his opinion these corporations should be closed or open. According to the Viscount, herein lay the fate of society, a peaceful solution of the social question or the frightful catastrophe which must sweep everything away. In reality, though he refused to own it, the Viscount had ended by adopting State socialism. And, despite the lack of agreement, the agitation remained very great; attempts, scarcely happy in their results, were made; co-operative associations, companies for erecting workmen's dwellings, popular savings' banks were started; many more or less disguised efforts to revert to the old Christian community organisation were tried; while day by day, amidst the prevailing confusion, in the mental perturbation and political difficulties through which the country passed, the militant Catholic party felt its hopes increasing, even to the blind conviction of soon resuming sway over the whole world.

The second part of Pierre's book concluded by a picture of the moral and intellectual uneasiness amidst which the end of the century is struggling. While the toiling multitude suffers from its hard lot and demands that in any fresh division of wealth it shall be ensured at least its daily bread, the elite is no better satisfied, but complains of the void induced by the freeing of its reason and the enlargement of its intelligence. It is the famous bankruptcy of rationalism, of positivism, of science itself which is in question. Minds consumed by need of the absolute grow weary of groping, weary of the delays of science which recognises only proven truths; doubt tortures them, they need a complete and immediate synthesis in order to sleep in peace; and they fall on their knees, overcome by the roadside, distracted by the thought that science will never tell them all, and preferring the Deity, the mystery revealed and affirmed by faith. Even to-day, it must be admitted, science calms neither our thirst for justice, our desire for safety, nor our everlasting idea of happiness after life in an eternity of enjoyment. To one and all it only brings the austere duty to live, to be a mere contributor in the universal toil; and how well one can understand that hearts should revolt and sigh for the Christian heaven, peopled with lovely angels, full of light and music and perfumes! Ah! to embrace one's dead, to tell oneself that one will meet them again, that one will live with them once more in glorious immortality! And to possess the certainty of sovereign equity to enable one to support the abominations of terrestrial life! And in this wise to trample on the frightful thought of annihilation, to escape the horror of the disappearance of the ego, and to tranquillise oneself with that unshakable faith which postpones until the portal of death be crossed the solution of all the problems of destiny! This dream will be dreamt by the nations for ages yet. And this it is which explains why, in these last days of the century, excessive mental labour and the deep unrest of humanity, pregnant with a new world, have awakened religious feeling, anxious, tormented by thoughts of the ideal and the infinite, demanding a moral law and an assurance of superior justice. Religions may disappear, but religious feelings will always create new ones, even with the help of science. A new religion! a new religion! Was it not the ancient Catholicism, which in the soil of the present day, where all seemed conducive to a miracle, was about to spring up afresh, throw out green branches and blossom in a young yet mighty florescence?

At last, in the third part of his book and in the glowing language of an apostle, Pierre depicted the FUTURE: Catholicism rejuvenated, and bringing health and peace, the forgotten golden age of primitive Christianity, back to expiring society. He began with an emotional and sparkling portrait of Leo XIII, the ideal Pope, the Man of Destiny entrusted with the salvation of the nations. He had conjured up a presentment of him and beheld him thus in his feverish longing for the advent of a pastor who should put an end to human misery. It was perhaps not a close likeness, but it was a portrait of the needed saviour, with open heart and mind, and inexhaustible benevolence, such as he had dreamed. At the same time he had certainly searched documents, studied encyclical letters, based his sketch upon facts: first Leo's religious education at Rome, then his brief nunciature at Brussels, and afterwards his long episcopate at Perugia. And as soon as Leo became pope in the difficult situation bequeathed by Pius IX, the duality of his nature appeared: on one hand was the firm guardian of dogmas, on the other the supple politician resolved to carry conciliation to its utmost limits. We see him flatly severing all connection with modern philosophy, stepping backward beyond the Renascence to the middle ages and reviving Christian philosophy, as expounded by "the angelic doctor," St. Thomas Aquinas, in Catholic schools. Then the dogmas being in this wise sheltered, he adroitly maintains himself in equilibrium by giving securities to every power, striving to utilise every opportunity. He displays extraordinary activity, reconciles the Holy See with Germany, draws nearer to Russia, contents Switzerland, asks the friendship of Great Britain, and writes to the Emperor of China begging him to protect the missionaries and Christians in his dominions. Later on, too, he intervenes in France and acknowledges the legitimacy of the Republic.

From the very outset an idea becomes apparent in all his actions, an idea which will place him among the great papal politicians. It is moreover the ancient idea of the papacy—the conquest of every soul, Rome capital and mistress of the world. Thus Leo XIII has but one desire, one object, that of unifying the Church, of drawing all the dissident communities to it in order that it may be invincible in the coming social struggle. He seeks to obtain recognition of the moral authority of the Vatican in Russia; he dreams of disarming the Anglican Church and of drawing it into a sort of fraternal truce; and he particularly seeks to come to an understanding with the Schismatical Churches of the East, which he regards as sisters, simply living apart, whose return his paternal heart entreats. Would not Rome indeed dispose of victorious strength if she exercised uncontested sway over all the Christians of the earth?

And here the social ideas of Leo XIII come in. Whilst yet Bishop of Perugia he wrote a pastoral letter in which a vague humanitarian socialism appeared. As soon, however, as he had assumed the triple crown his opinions changed and he anathematised the revolutionaries whose audacity was terrifying Italy. But almost at once he corrected himself, warned by events and realising the great danger of leaving socialism in the hands of the enemies of the Church. Then he listened to the bishops of the lands of propaganda, ceased to intervene in the Irish quarrel, withdrew the excommunications which he had launched against the American "knights of labour," and would not allow the bold works of Catholic socialist writers to be placed in the Index. This evolution towards democracy may be traced through his most famous encyclical letters: Immortale Dei, on the constitution of States; Libertas, on human liberty; Sapientoe, on the duties of Christian citizens; Rerum novarum, on the condition of the working classes; and it is particularly this last which would seem to have rejuvenated the Church. The Pope herein chronicles the undeserved misery of the toilers, the undue length of the hours of labour, the insufficiency of salaries. All men have the right to live, and all contracts extorted by threats of starvation are unjust. Elsewhere he declares that the workman must not be left defenceless in presence of a system which converts the misery of the majority into the wealth of a few. Compelled to deal vaguely with questions of organisation, he contents himself with encouraging the corporative movement, placing it under State patronage; and after thus contributing to restore the secular power, he reinstates the Deity on the throne of sovereignty, and discerns the path to salvation more particularly in moral measures, in the ancient respect due to family ties and ownership. Nevertheless, was not the helpful hand which the august Vicar of Christ thus publicly tendered to the poor and the humble, the certain token of a new alliance, the announcement of a new reign of Jesus upon earth? Thenceforward the people knew that it was not abandoned. And from that moment too how glorious became Leo XIII, whose sacerdotal jubilee and episcopal jubilee were celebrated by all Christendom amidst the coming of a vast multitude, of endless offerings, and of flattering letters from every sovereign!

Pierre next dealt with the question of the temporal power, and this he thought he might treat freely. Naturally, he was not ignorant of the fact that the Pope in his quarrel with Italy upheld the rights of the Church over Rome as stubbornly as his predecessor; but he imagined that this was merely a necessary conventional attitude, imposed by political considerations, and destined to be abandoned when the times were ripe. For his own part he was convinced that if the Pope had never appeared greater than he did now, it was to the loss of the temporal power that he owed it; for thence had come the great increase of his authority, the pure splendour of moral omnipotence which he diffused.

What a long history of blunders and conflicts had been that of the possession of the little kingdom of Rome during fifteen centuries! Constantine quits Rome in the fourth century, only a few forgotten functionaries remaining on the deserted Palatine, and the Pope naturally rises to power, and the life of the city passes to the Lateran. However, it is only four centuries later that Charlemagne recognises accomplished facts and formally bestows the States of the Church upon the papacy. From that time warfare between the spiritual power and the temporal powers has never ceased; though often latent it has at times become acute, breaking forth with blood and fire. And to-day, in the midst of Europe in arms, is it not unreasonable to dream of the papacy ruling a strip of territory where it would be exposed to every vexation, and where it could only maintain itself by the help of a foreign army? What would become of it in the general massacre which is apprehended? Is it not far more sheltered, far more dignified, far more lofty when disentangled from all terrestrial cares, reigning over the world of souls?

In the early times of the Church the papacy from being merely local, merely Roman, gradually became catholicised, universalised, slowly acquiring dominion over all Christendom. In the same way the Sacred College, at first a continuation of the Roman Senate, acquired an international character, and in our time has ended by becoming the most cosmopolitan of assemblies, in which representatives of all the nations have seats. And is it not evident that the Pope, thus leaning on the cardinals, has become the one great international power which exercises the greater authority since it is free from all monarchical interests, and can speak not merely in the name of country but in that of humanity itself? The solution so often sought amidst such long wars surely lies in this: Either give the Pope the temporal sovereignty of the world, or leave him only the spiritual sovereignty. Vicar of the Deity, absolute and infallible sovereign by divine delegation, he can but remain in the sanctuary if, ruler already of the human soul, he is not recognised by every nation as the one master of the body also—the king of kings.

But what a strange affair was this new incursion of the papacy into the field sown by the French Revolution, an incursion conducting it perhaps towards the domination, which it has striven for with a will that has upheld it for centuries! For now it stands alone before the people. The kings are down. And as the people is henceforth free to give itself to whomsoever it pleases, why should it not give itself to the Church? The depreciation which the idea of liberty has certainly undergone renders every hope permissible. The liberal party appears to be vanquished in the sphere of economics. The toilers, dissatisfied with 1789 complain of the aggravation of their misery, bestir themselves, seek happiness despairingly. On the other hand the new regimes have increased the international power of the Church; Catholic members are numerous in the parliaments of the republics and the constitutional monarchies. All circumstances seem therefore to favour this extraordinary return of fortune, Catholicism reverting to the vigour of youth in its old age. Even science, remember, is accused of bankruptcy, a charge which saves the Syllabus from ridicule, troubles the minds of men, and throws the limitless sphere of mystery and impossibility open once more. And then a prophecy is recalled, a prediction that the papacy shall be mistress of the world on the day when she marches at the head of the democracy after reuniting the Schismatical Churches of the East to the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church. And, in Pierre's opinion, assuredly the times had come since Pope Leo XIII, dismissing the great and the wealthy of the world, left the kings driven from their thrones in exile to place himself like Jesus on the side of the foodless toilers and the beggars of the high roads. Yet a few more years, perhaps, of frightful misery, alarming confusion, fearful social danger, and the people, the great silent multitude which others have so far disposed of, will return to the cradle, to the unified Church of Rome, in order to escape the destruction which threatens human society.

Pierre concluded his book with a passionate evocation of New Rome, the spiritual Rome which would soon reign over the nations, reconciled and fraternising as in another golden age. Herein he even saw the end of superstitions. Without making a direct attack on dogma, he allowed himself to dream of an enlargement of religious feeling, freed from rites, and absorbed in the one satisfaction of human charity. And still smarting from his journey to Lourdes, he felt the need of contenting his heart. Was not that gross superstition of Lourdes the hateful symptom of the excessive suffering of the times? On the day when the Gospel should be universally diffused and practised, suffering ones would cease seeking an illusory relief so far away, assured as they would be of finding assistance, consolation, and cure in their homes amidst their brothers. At Lourdes there was an iniquitous displacement of wealth, a spectacle so frightful as to make one doubt of God, a perpetual conflict which would disappear in the truly Christian society of to-morrow. Ah! that society, that Christian community, all Pierre's work ended in an ardent longing for its speedy advent: Christianity becoming once more the religion of truth and justice which it had been before it allowed itself to be conquered by the rich and the powerful! The little ones and the poor ones reigning, sharing the wealth of earth, and owing obedience to nought but the levelling law of work! The Pope alone erect at the head of the federation of nations, prince of peace, with the simple mission of supplying the moral rule, the link of charity and love which was to unite all men! And would not this be the speedy realisation of the promises of Christ? The times were near accomplishment, secular and religious society would mingle so closely that they would form but one; and it would be the age of triumph and happiness predicted by all the prophets, no more struggles possible, no more antagonism between the mind and the body, but a marvellous equilibrium which would kill evil and set the kingdom of heaven upon earth. New Rome, the centre of the world, bestowing on the world the new religion!

Pierre felt that tears were coming to his eyes, and with an unconscious movement, never noticing how much he astonished the slim Englishmen and thick-set Germans passing along the terrace, he opened his arms and extended them towards the real Rome, steeped in such lovely sunshine and stretched out at his feet. Would she prove responsive to his dream? Would he, as he had written, find within her the remedy for our impatience and our alarms? Could Catholicism be renewed, could it return to the spirit of primitive Christianity, become the religion of the democracy, the faith which the modern world, overturned and in danger of perishing, awaits in order to be pacified and to live?

Pierre was full of generous passion, full of faith. He again beheld good Abbe Rose weeping with emotion as he read his book. He heard Viscount Philibert de la Choue telling him that such a book was worth an army. And he particularly felt strong in the approval of Cardinal Bergerot, that apostle of inexhaustible charity. Why should the Congregation of the Index threaten his work with interdiction? Since he had been officiously advised to go to Rome if he desired to defend himself, he had been turning this question over in his mind without being able to discover which of his pages were attacked. To him indeed they all seemed to glow with the purest Christianity. However, he had arrived quivering with enthusiasm and courage: he was all eagerness to kneel before the Pope, and place himself under his august protection, assuring him that he had not written a line without taking inspiration from his ideas, without desiring the triumph of his policy. Was it possible that condemnation should be passed on a book in which he imagined in all sincerity that he had exalted Leo XIII by striving to help him in his work of Christian reunion and universal peace?

For a moment longer Pierre remained standing before the parapet. He had been there for nearly an hour, unable to drink in enough of the grandeur of Rome, which, given all the unknown things she hid from him, he would have liked to possess at once. Oh! to seize hold of her, know her, ascertain at once the true word which he had come to seek from her! This again, like Lourdes, was an experiment, but a graver one, a decisive one, whence he would emerge either strengthened or overcome for evermore. He no longer sought the simple, perfect faith of the little child, but the superior faith of the intellectual man, raising himself above rites and symbols, working for the greatest happiness of humanity as based on its need of certainty. His temples throbbed responsive to his heart. What would be the answer of Rome?

The sunlight had increased and the higher districts now stood out more vigorously against the fiery background. Far away the hills became gilded and empurpled, whilst the nearer house-fronts grew very distinct and bright with their thousands of windows sharply outlined. However, some morning haze still hovered around; light veils seemed to rise from the lower streets, blurring the summits for a moment, and then evaporating in the ardent heavens where all was blue. For a moment Pierre fancied that the Palatine had vanished, for he could scarcely see the dark fringe of cypresses; it was as though the dust of its ruins concealed the hill. But the Quirinal was even more obscured; the royal palace seemed to have faded away in a fog, so paltry did it look with its low flat front, so vague in the distance that he no longer distinguished it; whereas above the trees on his left the dome of St. Peter's had grown yet larger in the limpid gold of the sunshine, and appeared to occupy the whole sky and dominate the whole city!

Ah! the Rome of that first meeting, the Rome of early morning, whose new districts he had not even noticed in the burning fever of his arrival—with what boundless hopes did she not inspirit him, this Rome which he believed he should find alive, such indeed as he had dreamed! And whilst he stood there in his thin black cassock, thus gazing on her that lovely day, what a shout of coming redemption seemed to arise from her house-roofs, what a promise of universal peace seemed to issue from that sacred soil, twice already Queen of the world! It was the third Rome, it was New Rome whose maternal love was travelling across the frontiers to all the nations to console them and reunite them in a common embrace. In the passionate candour of his dream he beheld her, he heard her, rejuvenated, full of the gentleness of childhood, soaring, as it were, amidst the morning freshness into the vast pure heavens.

But at last Pierre tore himself away from the sublime spectacle. The driver and the horse, their heads drooping under the broad sunlight, had not stirred. On the seat the valise was almost burning, hot with rays of the sun which was already heavy. And once more Pierre got into the vehicle and gave this address:

"Via Giulia, Palazzo Boccanera."

II.

THE Via Giulia, which runs in a straight line over a distance of five hundred yards from the Farnese palace to the church of St. John of the Florentines, was at that hour steeped in bright sunlight, the glow streaming from end to end and whitening the small square paving stones. The street had no footways, and the cab rolled along it almost to the farther extremity, passing the old grey sleepy and deserted residences whose large windows were barred with iron, while their deep porches revealed sombre courts resembling wells. Laid out by Pope Julius II, who had dreamt of lining it with magnificent palaces, the street, then the most regular and handsome in Rome, had served as Corso* in the sixteenth century. One could tell that one was in a former luxurious district, which had lapsed into silence, solitude, and abandonment, instinct with a kind of religious gentleness and discretion. The old house-fronts followed one after another, their shutters closed and their gratings occasionally decked with climbing plants. At some doors cats were seated, and dim shops, appropriated to humble trades, were installed in certain dependencies. But little traffic was apparent. Pierre only noticed some bare-headed women dragging children behind them, a hay cart drawn by a mule, a superb monk draped in drugget, and a bicyclist speeding along noiselessly, his machine sparkling in the sun.

* The Corso was so called on account of the horse races held in
it at carnival time.—Trans.

At last the driver turned and pointed to a large square building at the corner of a lane running towards the Tiber.

"Palazzo Boccanera."

Pierre raised his head and was pained by the severe aspect of the structure, so bare and massive and blackened by age. Like its neighbours the Farnese and Sacchetti palaces, it had been built by Antonio da Sangallo in the early part of the sixteenth century, and, as with the former of those residences, the tradition ran that in raising the pile the architect had made use of stones pilfered from the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus. The vast, square-looking facade had three upper stories, each with seven windows, and the first one very lofty and noble. Down below, the only sign of decoration was that the high ground-floor windows, barred with huge projecting gratings as though from fear of siege, rested upon large consoles, and were crowned by attics which smaller consoles supported. Above the monumental entrance, with folding doors of bronze, there was a balcony in front of the central first-floor window. And at the summit of the facade against the sky appeared a sumptuous entablature, whose frieze displayed admirable grace and purity of ornamentation. The frieze, the consoles, the attics, and the door-case were of white marble, but marble whose surface had so crumbled and so darkened that it now had the rough yellowish grain of stone. Right and left of the entrance were two antique seats upheld by griffons also of marble; and incrusted in the wall at one corner, a lovely Renascence fountain, its source dried up, still lingered; and on it a cupid riding a dolphin could with difficulty be distinguished, to such a degree had the wear and tear of time eaten into the sculpture.

Pierre's eyes, however, had been more particularly attracted by an escutcheon carved above one of the ground-floor windows, the escutcheon of the Boccaneras, a winged dragon venting flames, and underneath it he could plainly read the motto which had remained intact: "Bocca nera, Alma rossa" (black mouth, red soul). Above another window, as a pendant to the escutcheon, there was one of those little shrines which are still common in Rome, a satin-robed statuette of the Blessed Virgin, before which a lantern burnt in the full daylight.

The cabman was about to drive through the dim and gaping porch, according to custom, when the young priest, overcome by timidity, stopped him. "No, no," he said; "don't go in, it's useless."

Then he alighted from the vehicle, paid the man, and, valise in hand, found himself first under the vaulted roof, and then in the central court without having met a living soul.

It was a square and fairly spacious court, surrounded by a porticus like a cloister. Some remnants of statuary, marbles discovered in excavating, an armless Apollo, and the trunk of a Venus, were ranged against the walls under the dismal arcades; and some fine grass had sprouted between the pebbles which paved the soil as with a black and white mosaic. It seemed as if the sun-rays could never reach that paving, mouldy with damp. A dimness and a silence instinct with departed grandeur and infinite mournfulness reigned there.

Surprised by the emptiness of this silent mansion, Pierre continued seeking somebody, a porter, a servant; and, fancying that he saw a shadow flit by, he decided to pass through another arch which led to a little garden fringing the Tiber. On this side the facade of the building was quite plain, displaying nothing beyond its three rows of symmetrically disposed windows. However, the abandonment reigning in the garden brought Pierre yet a keener pang. In the centre some large box-plants were growing in the basin of a fountain which had been filled up; while among the mass of weeds, some orange-trees with golden, ripening fruit alone indicated the tracery of the paths which they had once bordered. Between two huge laurel-bushes, against the right-hand wall, there was a sarcophagus of the second century—with fauns offering violence to nymphs, one of those wild baccanali, those scenes of eager passion which Rome in its decline was wont to depict on the tombs of its dead; and this marble sarcophagus, crumbling with age and green with moisture, served as a tank into which a streamlet of water fell from a large tragic mask incrusted in the wall. Facing the Tiber there had formerly been a sort of colonnaded loggia, a terrace whence a double flight of steps descended to the river. For the construction of the new quays, however, the river bank was being raised, and the terrace was already lower than the new ground level, and stood there crumbling and useless amidst piles of rubbish and blocks of stone, all the wretched chalky confusion of the improvements which were ripping up and overturning the district.

Pierre, however, was suddenly convinced that he could see somebody crossing the court. So he returned thither and found a woman somewhat short of stature, who must have been nearly fifty, though as yet she had not a white hair, but looked very bright and active. At sight of the priest, however, an expression of distrust passed over her round face and clear eyes.

Employing the few words of broken Italian which he knew, Pierre at once sought to explain matters: "I am Abbe Pierre Froment, madame—" he began.

However, she did not let him continue, but exclaimed in fluent French, with the somewhat thick and lingering accent of the province of the Ile-de-France: "Ah! yes, Monsieur l'Abbe, I know, I know—I was expecting you, I received orders about you." And then, as he gazed at her in amazement, she added: "Oh! I'm a Frenchwoman! I've been here for five and twenty years, but I haven't yet been able to get used to their horrible lingo!"

Pierre thereupon remembered that Viscount Philibert de la Choue had spoken to him of this servant, one Victorine Bosquet, a native of Auneau in La Beauce, who, when two and twenty, had gone to Rome with a consumptive mistress. The latter's sudden death had left her in as much terror and bewilderment as if she had been alone in some land of savages; and so she had gratefully devoted herself to the Countess Ernesta Brandini, a Boccanera by birth, who had, so to say, picked her up in the streets. The Countess had at first employed her as a nurse to her daughter Benedetta, hoping in this way to teach the child some French; and Victorine—remaining for some five and twenty years with the same family—had by degrees raised herself to the position of housekeeper, whilst still remaining virtually illiterate, so destitute indeed of any linguistic gift that she could only jabber a little broken Italian, just sufficient for her needs in her intercourse with the other servants.

"And is Monsieur le Vicomte quite well?" she resumed with frank familiarity. "He is so very pleasant, and we are always so pleased to see him. He stays here, you know, each time he comes to Rome. I know that the Princess and the Contessina received a letter from him yesterday announcing you."

It was indeed Viscount Philibert de la Choue who had made all the arrangements for Pierre's sojourn in Rome. Of the ancient and once vigorous race of the Boccaneras, there now only remained Cardinal Pio Boccanera, the Princess his sister, an old maid who from respect was called "Donna" Serafina, their niece Benedetta—whose mother Ernesta had followed her husband, Count Brandini, to the tomb—and finally their nephew, Prince Dario Boccanera, whose father, Prince Onofrio, was likewise dead, and whose mother, a Montefiori, had married again. It so chanced that the Viscount de la Choue was connected with the family, his younger brother having married a Brandini, sister to Benedetta's father; and thus, with the courtesy rank of uncle, he had, in Count Brandini's time, frequently sojourned at the mansion in the Via Giulia. He had also become attached to Benedetta, especially since the advent of a private family drama, consequent upon an unhappy marriage which the young woman had contracted, and which she had petitioned the Holy Father to annul. Since Benedetta had left her husband to live with her aunt Serafina and her uncle the Cardinal, M. de la Choue had often written to her and sent her parcels of French books. Among others he had forwarded her a copy of Pierre's book, and the whole affair had originated in that wise. Several letters on the subject had been exchanged when at last Benedetta sent word that the work had been denounced to the Congregation of the Index, and that it was advisable the author should at once repair to Rome, where she graciously offered him the hospitality of the Boccanera mansion.

The Viscount was quite as much astonished as the young priest at these tidings, and failed to understand why the book should be threatened at all; however, he prevailed on Pierre to make the journey as a matter of good policy, becoming himself impassioned for the achievement of a victory which he counted in anticipation as his own. And so it was easy to understand the bewildered condition of Pierre, on tumbling into this unknown mansion, launched into an heroic adventure, the reasons and circumstances of which were beyond him.

Victorine, however, suddenly resumed: "But I am leaving you here, Monsieur l'Abbe. Let me conduct you to your rooms. Where is your luggage?"

Then, when he had shown her his valise which he had placed on the ground beside him, and explained that having no more than a fortnight's stay in view he had contented himself with bringing a second cassock and some linen, she seemed very much surprised.

"A fortnight! You only expect to remain here a fortnight? Well, well, you'll see."

And then summoning a big devil of a lackey who had ended by making his appearance, she said: "Take that up into the red room, Giacomo. Will you kindly follow me, Monsieur l'Abbe?"

Pierre felt quite comforted and inspirited by thus unexpectedly meeting such a lively, good-natured compatriot in this gloomy Roman "palace." Whilst crossing the court he listened to her as she related that the Princess had gone out, and that the Contessina—as Benedetta from motives of affection was still called in the house, despite her marriage—had not yet shown herself that morning, being rather poorly. However, added Victorine, she had her orders.

The staircase was in one corner of the court, under the porticus. It was a monumental staircase with broad, low steps, the incline being so gentle that a horse might easily have climbed it. The stone walls, however, were quite bare, the landings empty and solemn, and a death-like mournfulness fell from the lofty vault above.

As they reached the first floor, noticing Pierre's emotion, Victorine smiled. The mansion seemed to be uninhabited; not a sound came from its closed chambers. Simply pointing to a large oaken door on the right-hand, the housekeeper remarked: "The wing overlooking the court and the river is occupied by his Eminence. But he doesn't use a quarter of the rooms. All the reception-rooms on the side of the street have been shut. How could one keep up such a big place, and what, too, would be the use of it? We should need somebody to lodge."

With her lithe step she continued ascending the stairs. She had remained essentially a foreigner, a Frenchwoman, too different from those among whom she lived to be influenced by her environment. On reaching the second floor she resumed: "There, on the left, are Donna Serafina's rooms; those of the Contessina are on the right. This is the only part of the house where there's a little warmth and life. Besides, it's Monday to-day, the Princess will be receiving visitors this evening. You'll see."

Then, opening a door, beyond which was a second and very narrow staircase, she went on: "We others have our rooms on the third floor. I must ask Monsieur l'Abbe to let me go up before him."

The grand staircase ceased at the second floor, and Victorine explained that the third story was reached exclusively by this servants' staircase, which led from the lane running down to the Tiber on one side of the mansion. There was a small private entrance in this lane, which was very convenient.

At last, reaching the third story, she hurried along a passage, again calling Pierre's attention to various doors. "These are the apartments of Don Vigilio, his Eminence's secretary. These are mine. And these will be yours. Monsieur le Vicomte will never have any other rooms when he comes to spend a few days in Rome. He says that he enjoys more liberty up here, as he can come in and go out as he pleases. I gave him a key to the door in the lane, and I'll give you one too. And, besides, you'll see what a nice view there is from here!"

Whilst speaking she had gone in. The apartments comprised two rooms: a somewhat spacious salon, with wall-paper of a large scroll pattern on a red ground, and a bed-chamber, where the paper was of a flax grey, studded with faded blue flowers. The sitting-room was in one corner of the mansion overlooking the lane and the Tiber, and Victorine at once went to the windows, one of which afforded a view over the distant lower part of the river, while the other faced the Trastevere and the Janiculum across the water.

"Ah! yes, it's very pleasant!" said Pierre, who had followed and stood beside her.

Giaccomo, who did not hurry, came in behind them with the valise. It was now past eleven o'clock; and seeing that the young priest looked tired, and realising that he must be hungry after such a journey, Victorine offered to have some breakfast served at once in the sitting-room. He would then have the afternoon to rest or go out, and would only meet the ladies in the evening at dinner. At the mere suggestion of resting, however, Pierre began to protest, declaring that he should certainly go out, not wishing to lose an entire afternoon. The breakfast he readily accepted, for he was indeed dying of hunger.

However, he had to wait another full half hour. Giaccomo, who served him under Victorine's orders, did everything in a most leisurely way. And Victorine, lacking confidence in the man, remained with the young priest to make sure that everything he might require was provided.

"Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "what people! What a country! You can't have an idea of it. I should never get accustomed to it even if I were to live here for a hundred years. Ah! if it were not for the Contessina, but she's so good and beautiful."

Then, whilst placing a dish of figs on the table, she astonished Pierre by adding that a city where nearly everybody was a priest could not possibly be a good city. Thereupon the presence of this gay, active, unbelieving servant in the queer old palace again scared him.

"What! you are not religious?" he exclaimed.

"No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe, the priests don't suit me," said Victorine; "I knew one in France when I was very little, and since I've been here I've seen too many of them. It's all over. Oh! I don't say that on account of his Eminence, who is a holy man worthy of all possible respect. And besides, everybody in the house knows that I've nothing to reproach myself with. So why not leave me alone, since I'm fond of my employers and attend properly to my duties?"

She burst into a frank laugh. "Ah!" she resumed, "when I was told that another priest was coming, just as if we hadn't enough already, I couldn't help growling to myself. But you look like a good young man, Monsieur l'Abbe, and I feel sure we shall get on well together.... I really don't know why I'm telling you all this—probably it's because you've come from yonder, and because the Contessina takes an interest in you. At all events, you'll excuse me, won't you, Monsieur l'Abbe? And take my advice, stay here and rest to-day; don't be so foolish as to go running about their tiring city. There's nothing very amusing to be seen in it, whatever they may say to the contrary."

When Pierre found himself alone, he suddenly felt overwhelmed by all the fatigue of his journey coupled with the fever of enthusiasm that had consumed him during the morning. And as though dazed, intoxicated by the hasty meal which he had just made—a couple of eggs and a cutlet—he flung himself upon the bed with the idea of taking half an hour's rest. He did not fall asleep immediately, but for a time thought of those Boccaneras, with whose history he was partly acquainted, and of whose life in that deserted and silent palace, instinct with such dilapidated and melancholy grandeur, he began to dream. But at last his ideas grew confused, and by degrees he sunk into sleep amidst a crowd of shadowy forms, some tragic and some sweet, with vague faces which gazed at him with enigmatical eyes as they whirled before him in the depths of dreamland.

The Boccaneras had supplied two popes to Rome, one in the thirteenth, the other in the fifteenth century, and from those two favoured ones, those all-powerful masters, the family had formerly derived its vast fortune—large estates in the vicinity of Viterbo, several palaces in Rome, enough works of art to fill numerous spacious galleries, and a pile of gold sufficient to cram a cellar. The family passed as being the most pious of the Roman patriziato, a family of burning faith whose sword had always been at the service of the Church; but if it were the most believing family it was also the most violent, the most disputatious, constantly at war, and so fiercely savage that the anger of the Boccaneras had become proverbial. And thence came their arms, the winged dragon spitting flames, and the fierce, glowing motto, with its play on the name "Bocca sera, Alma rossa" (black mouth, red soul), the mouth darkened by a roar, the soul flaming like a brazier of faith and love.

Legends of endless passion, of terrible deeds of justice and vengeance still circulated. There was the duel fought by Onfredo, the Boccanera by whom the present palazzo had been built in the sixteenth century on the site of the demolished antique residence of the family. Onfredo, learning that his wife had allowed herself to be kissed on the lips by young Count Costamagna, had caused the Count to be kidnapped one evening and brought to the palazzo bound with cords. And there in one of the large halls, before freeing him, he compelled him to confess himself to a monk. Then he severed the cords with a stiletto, threw the lamps over and extinguished them, calling to the Count to keep the stiletto and defend himself. During more than an hour, in complete obscurity, in this hall full of furniture, the two men sought one another, fled from one another, seized hold of one another, and pierced one another with their blades. And when the doors were broken down and the servants rushed in they found among the pools of blood, among the overturned tables and broken seats, Costamagna with his nose sliced off and his hips pierced with two and thirty wounds, whilst Onfredo had lost two fingers of his right hand, and had both shoulders riddled with holes! The wonder was that neither died of the encounter.

A century later, on that same bank of the Tiber, a daughter of the Boccaneras, a girl barely sixteen years of age, the lovely and passionate Cassia, filled all Rome with terror and admiration. She loved Flavio Corradini, the scion of a rival and hated house, whose alliance her father, Prince Boccanera, roughly rejected, and whom her elder brother, Ercole, swore to slay should he ever surprise him with her. Nevertheless the young man came to visit her in a boat, and she joined him by the little staircase descending to the river. But one evening Ercole, who was on the watch, sprang into the boat and planted his dagger full in Flavio's heart. Later on the subsequent incidents were unravelled; it was understood that Cassia, wrathful and frantic with despair, unwilling to survive her love and bent on wreaking justice, had thrown herself upon her brother, had seized both murderer and victim with the same grasp whilst overturning the boat; for when the three bodies were recovered Cassia still retained her hold upon the two men, pressing their faces one against the other with her bare arms, which had remained as white as snow.

But those were vanished times. Nowadays, if faith remained, blood violence seemed to be departing from the Boccaneras. Their huge fortune also had been lost in the slow decline which for a century past has been ruining the Roman patriziato. It had been necessary to sell the estates; the palace had emptied, gradually sinking to the mediocrity and bourgeois life of the new times. For their part the Boccaneras obstinately declined to contract any alien alliances, proud as they were of the purity of their Roman blood. And poverty was as nothing to them; they found contentment in their immense pride, and without a plaint sequestered themselves amidst the silence and gloom in which their race was dwindling away.

Prince Ascanio, dead since 1848, had left four children by his wife, a Corvisieri; first Pio, the Cardinal; then Serafina, who, in order to remain with her brother, had not married; and finally Ernesta and Onofrio, both of whom were deceased. As Ernesta had merely left a daughter, Benedetta, behind her, it followed that the only male heir, the only possible continuator of the family name was Onofrio's son, young Prince Dario, now some thirty years of age. Should he die without posterity, the Boccaneras, once so full of life and whose deeds had filled Roman history in papal times, must fatally disappear.

Dario and his cousin Benedetta had been drawn together by a deep, smiling, natural passion ever since childhood. They seemed born one for the other; they could not imagine that they had been brought into the world for any other purpose than that of becoming husband and wife as soon as they should be old enough to marry. When Prince Onofrio—an amiable man of forty, very popular in Rome, where he spent his modest fortune as his heart listed—espoused La Montefiori's daughter, the little Marchesa Flavia, whose superb beauty, suggestive of a youthful Juno, had maddened him, he went to reside at the Villa Montefiori, the only property, indeed the only belonging, that remained to the two ladies. It was in the direction of St'. Agnese-fuori-le-Mura,* and there were vast grounds, a perfect park in fact, planted with centenarian trees, among which the villa, a somewhat sorry building of the seventeenth century, was falling into ruins.

* St. Agnes-without-the-walls, N.E. of Rome.

Unfavourable reports were circulated about the ladies, the mother having almost lost caste since she had become a widow, and the girl having too bold a beauty, too conquering an air. Thus the marriage had not met with the approval of Serafina, who was very rigid, or of Onofrio's elder brother Pio, at that time merely a Cameriere segreto of the Holy Father and a Canon of the Vatican basilica. Only Ernesta kept up a regular intercourse with Onofrio, fond of him as she was by reason of his gaiety of disposition; and thus, later on, her favourite diversion was to go each week to the Villa Montefiori with her daughter Benedetta, there to spend the day. And what a delightful day it always proved to Benedetta and Dario, she ten years old and he fifteen, what a fraternal loving day in that vast and almost abandoned garden with its parasol pines, its giant box-plants, and its clumps of evergreen oaks, amidst which one lost oneself as in a virgin forest.

The poor stifled soul of Ernesta was a soul of pain and passion. Born with a mighty longing for life, she thirsted for the sun—for a free, happy, active existence in the full daylight. She was noted for her large limpid eyes and the charming oval of her gentle face. Extremely ignorant, like all the daughters of the Roman nobility, having learnt the little she knew in a convent of French nuns, she had grown up cloistered in the black Boccanera palace, having no knowledge of the world than by those daily drives to the Corso and the Pincio on which she accompanied her mother. Eventually, when she was five and twenty, and was already weary and desolate, she contracted the customary marriage of her caste, espousing Count Brandini, the last-born of a very noble, very numerous and poor family, who had to come and live in the Via Giulia mansion, where an entire wing of the second floor was got ready for the young couple. And nothing changed, Ernesta continued to live in the same cold gloom, in the midst of the same dead past, the weight of which, like that of a tombstone, she felt pressing more and more heavily upon her.

The marriage was, on either side, a very honourable one. Count Brandini soon passed as being the most foolish and haughty man in Rome. A strict, intolerant formalist in religious matters, he became quite triumphant when, after innumerable intrigues, secret plottings which lasted ten long years, he at last secured the appointment of grand equerry to the Holy Father. With this appointment it seemed as if all the dismal majesty of the Vatican entered his household. However, Ernesta found life still bearable in the time of Pius IX—that is until the latter part of 1870—for she might still venture to open the windows overlooking the street, receive a few lady friends otherwise than in secrecy, and accept invitations to festivities. But when the Italians had conquered Rome and the Pope declared himself a prisoner, the mansion in the Via Giulia became a sepulchre. The great doors were closed and bolted, even nailed together in token of mourning; and during ten years the inmates only went out and came in by the little staircase communicating with the lane. It was also forbidden to open the window shutters of the facade. This was the sulking, the protest of the black world, the mansion sinking into death-like immobility, complete seclusion; no more receptions, barely a few shadows, the intimates of Donna Serafina who on Monday evenings slipped in by the little door in the lane which was scarcely set ajar. And during those ten lugubrious years, overcome by secret despair, the young woman wept every night, suffered untold agony at thus being buried alive.

Ernesta had given birth to her daughter Benedetta rather late in life, when three and thirty years of age. At first the little one helped to divert her mind. But afterwards her wonted existence, like a grinding millstone, again seized hold of her, and she had to place the child in the charge of the French nuns, by whom she herself had been educated, at the convent of the Sacred Heart of La Trinita de' Monti. When Benedetta left the convent, grown up, nineteen years of age, she was able to speak and write French, knew a little arithmetic and her catechism, and possessed a few hazy notions of history. Then the life of the two women was resumed, the life of a gynoeceum, suggestive of the Orient; never an excursion with husband or father, but day after day spent in closed, secluded rooms, with nought to cheer one but the sole, everlasting, obligatory promenade, the daily drive to the Corso and the Pincio.

At home, absolute obedience was the rule; the tie of relationship possessed an authority, a strength, which made both women bow to the will of the Count, without possible thought of rebellion; and to the Count's will was added that of Donna Serafina and that of Cardinal Pio, both of whom were stern defenders of the old-time customs. Since the Pope had ceased to show himself in Rome, the post of grand equerry had left the Count considerable leisure, for the number of equipages in the pontifical stables had been very largely reduced; nevertheless, he was constant in his attendance at the Vatican, where his duties were now a mere matter of parade, and ever increased his devout zeal as a mark of protest against the usurping monarchy installed at the Quirinal. However, Benedetta had just attained her twentieth year, when one evening her father returned coughing and shivering from some ceremony at St. Peter's. A week later he died, carried off by inflammation of the lungs. And despite their mourning, the loss was secretly considered a deliverance by both women, who now felt that they were free.

Thenceforward Ernesta had but one thought, that of saving her daughter from that awful life of immurement and entombment. She herself had sorrowed too deeply: it was no longer possible for her to remount the current of existence; but she was unwilling that Benedetta should in her turn lead a life contrary to nature, in a voluntary grave. Moreover, similar lassitude and rebellion were showing themselves among other patrician families, which, after the sulking of the first years, were beginning to draw nearer to the Quirinal. Why indeed should the children, eager for action, liberty, and sunlight, perpetually keep up the quarrel of the fathers? And so, though no reconciliation could take place between the black world and the white world,* intermediate tints were already appearing, and some unexpected matrimonial alliances were contracted.

* The "blacks" are the supporters of the papacy, the "whites"
those of the King of Italy.—Trans.

Ernesta for her part was indifferent to the political question; she knew next to nothing about it; but that which she passionately desired was that her race might at last emerge from that hateful sepulchre, that black, silent Boccanera mansion, where her woman's joys had been frozen by so long a death. She had suffered very grievously in her heart, as girl, as lover, and as wife, and yielded to anger at the thought that her life should have been so spoiled, so lost through idiotic resignation. Then, too, her mind was greatly influenced by the choice of a new confessor at this period; for she had remained very religious, practising all the rites of the Church, and ever docile to the advice of her spiritual director. To free herself the more, however, she now quitted the Jesuit father whom her husband had chosen for her, and in his stead took Abbe Pisoni, the rector of the little church of Sta. Brigida, on the Piazza Farnese, close by. He was a man of fifty, very gentle, and very good-hearted, of a benevolence seldom found in the Roman world; and archaeology, a passion for the old stones of the past, had made him an ardent patriot. Humble though his position was, folks whispered that he had on several occasions served as an intermediary in delicate matters between the Vatican and the Quirinal. And, becoming confessor not only of Ernesta but of Benedetta also, he was fond of discoursing to them about the grandeur of Italian unity, the triumphant sway that Italy would exercise when the Pope and the King should agree together.

Meantime Benedetta and Dario loved as on the first day, patiently, with the strong tranquil love of those who know that they belong to one another. But it happened that Ernesta threw herself between them and stubbornly opposed their marriage. No, no! her daughter must not espouse that Dario, that cousin, the last of the name, who in his turn would immure his wife in the black sepulchre of the Boccanera palace! Their union would be a prolongation of entombment, an aggravation of ruin, a repetition of the haughty wretchedness of the past, of the everlasting peevish sulking which depressed and benumbed one! She was well acquainted with the young man's character; she knew that he was egotistical and weak, incapable of thinking and acting, predestined to bury his race with a smile on his lips, to let the last remnant of the house crumble about his head without attempting the slightest effort to found a new family. And that which she desired was fortune in another guise, a new birth for her daughter with wealth and the florescence of life amid the victors and powerful ones of to-morrow.

From that moment the mother did not cease her stubborn efforts to ensure her daughter's happiness despite herself. She told her of her tears, entreated her not to renew her own deplorable career. Yet she would have failed, such was the calm determination of the girl who had for ever given her heart, if certain circumstances had not brought her into connection with such a son-in-law as she dreamt of. At that very Villa Montefiori where Benedetta and Dario had plighted their troth, she met Count Prada, son of Orlando, one of the heroes of the reunion of Italy. Arriving in Rome from Milan, with his father, when eighteen years of age, at the time of the occupation of the city by the Italian Government, Prada had first entered the Ministry of Finances as a mere clerk, whilst the old warrior, his sire, created a senator, lived scantily on a petty income, the last remnant of a fortune spent in his country's service. The fine war-like madness of the former comrade of Garibaldi had, however, in the son turned into a fierce appetite for booty, so that the young man became one of the real conquerors of Rome, one of those birds of prey that dismembered and devoured the city. Engaged in vast speculations on land, already wealthy according to popular report, he had—at the time of meeting Ernesta—just become intimate with Prince Onofrio, whose head he had turned by suggesting to him the idea of selling the far-spreading grounds of the Villa Montefiori for the erection of a new suburban district on the site. Others averred that he was the lover of the princess, the beautiful Flavia, who, although nine years his senior, was still superb. And, truth to tell, he was certainly a man of violent desires, with an eagerness to rush on the spoils of conquest which rendered him utterly unscrupulous with regard either to the wealth or to the wives of others.

From the first day that he beheld Benedetta he desired her. But she, at any rate, could only become his by marriage. And he did not for a moment hesitate, but broke off all connection with Flavia, eager as he was for the pure virgin beauty, the patrician youth of the other. When he realised that Ernesta, the mother, favoured him, he asked her daughter's hand, feeling certain of success. And the surprise was great, for he was some fifteen years older than the girl. However, he was a count, he bore a name which was already historical, he was piling up millions, he was regarded with favour at the Quirinal, and none could tell to what heights he might not attain. All Rome became impassioned.

Never afterwards was Benedetta able to explain to herself how it happened that she had eventually consented. Six months sooner, six months later, such a marriage would certainly have been impossible, given the fearful scandal which it raised in the black world. A Boccanera, the last maiden of that antique papal race, given to a Prada, to one of the despoilers of the Church! Was it credible? In order that the wild project might prove successful it had been necessary that it should be formed at a particular brief moment—a moment when a supreme effort was being made to conciliate the Vatican and the Quirinal. A report circulated that an agreement was on the point of being arrived at, that the King consented to recognise the Pope's absolute sovereignty over the Leonine City,* and a narrow band of territory extending to the sea. And if such were the case would not the marriage of Benedetta and Prada become, so to say, a symbol of union, of national reconciliation? That lovely girl, the pure lily of the black world, was she not the acquiescent sacrifice, the pledge granted to the whites?

* The Vatican suburb of Rome, called the Civitas Leonina,
because Leo IV, to protect it from the Saracens and Arabs,
enclosed it with walls in the ninth century.—Trans.

For a fortnight nothing else was talked of; people discussed the question, allowed their emotion rein, indulged in all sorts of hopes. The girl, for her part, did not enter into the political reasons, but simply listened to her heart, which she could not bestow since it was hers no more. From morn till night, however, she had to encounter her mother's prayers entreating her not to refuse the fortune, the life which offered. And she was particularly exercised by the counsels of her confessor, good Abbe Pisoni, whose patriotic zeal now burst forth. He weighed upon her with all his faith in the Christian destinies of Italy, and returned heartfelt thanks to Providence for having chosen one of his penitents as the instrument for hastening the reconciliation which would work God's triumph throughout the world. And her confessor's influence was certainly one of the decisive factors in shaping Benedetta's decision, for she was very pious, very devout, especially with regard to a certain Madonna whose image she went to adore every Sunday at the little church on the Piazza Farnese. One circumstance in particular struck her: Abbe Pisoni related that the flame of the lamp before the image in question whitened each time that he himself knelt there to beg the Virgin to incline his penitent to the all-redeeming marriage. And thus superior forces intervened; and she yielded in obedience to her mother, whom the Cardinal and Donna Serafina had at first opposed, but whom they left free to act when the religious question arose.

Benedetta had grown up in such absolute purity and ignorance, knowing nothing of herself, so shut off from existence, that marriage with another than Dario was to her simply the rupture of a long-kept promise of life in common. It was not the violent wrenching of heart and flesh that it would have been in the case of a woman who knew the facts of life. She wept a good deal, and then in a day of self-surrender she married Prada, lacking the strength to continue resisting everybody, and yielding to a union which all Rome had conspired to bring about.

But the clap of thunder came on the very night of the nuptials. Was it that Prada, the Piedmontese, the Italian of the North, the man of conquest, displayed towards his bride the same brutality that he had shown towards the city he had sacked? Or was it that the revelation of married life filled Benedetta with repulsion since nothing in her own heart responded to the passion of this man? On that point she never clearly explained herself; but with violence she shut the door of her room, locked it and bolted it, and refused to admit her husband. For a month Prada was maddened by her scorn. He felt outraged; both his pride and his passion bled; and he swore to master her, even as one masters a colt, with the whip. But all his virile fury was impotent against the indomitable determination which had sprung up one evening behind Benedetta's small and lovely brow. The spirit of the Boccaneras had awoke within her; nothing in the world, not even the fear of death, would have induced her to become her husband's wife.* And then, love being at last revealed to her, there came a return of her heart to Dario, a conviction that she must reserve herself for him alone, since it was to him that she had promised herself.

* Many readers will doubtless remember that the situation as
here described is somewhat akin to that of the earlier part
of M. George Ohnet's Ironmaster, which, in its form as a
novel, I translated into English many years ago. However,
all resemblance between Rome and the Ironmaster is confined
to this one point.—Trans.

Ever since that marriage, which he had borne like a bereavement, the young man had been travelling in France. She did not hide the truth from him, but wrote to him, again vowing that she would never be another's. And meantime her piety increased, her resolve to reserve herself for the lover she had chosen mingled in her mind with constancy of religious faith. The ardent heart of a great amorosa had ignited within her, she was ready for martyrdom for faith's sake. And when her despairing mother with clasped hands entreated her to resign herself to her conjugal duties, she replied that she owed no duties, since she had known nothing when she married. Moreover, the times were changing; the attempts to reconcile the Quirinal and the Vatican had failed, so completely, indeed, that the newspapers of the rival parties had, with renewed violence, resumed their campaign of mutual insult and outrage; and thus that triumphal marriage, to which every one had contributed as to a pledge of peace, crumbled amid the general smash-up, became but a ruin the more added to so many others.

Ernesta died of it. She had made a mistake. Her spoilt life—the life of a joyless wife—had culminated in this supreme maternal error. And the worst was that she alone had to bear all the responsibility of the disaster, for both her brother, the Cardinal, and her sister, Donna Serafina, overwhelmed her with reproaches. For consolation she had but the despair of Abbe Pisoni, whose patriotic hopes had been destroyed, and who was consumed with grief at having contributed to such a catastrophe. And one morning Ernesta was found, icy white and cold, in her bed. Folks talked of the rupture of a blood-vessel, but grief had been sufficient, for she had suffered frightfully, secretly, without a plaint, as indeed she had suffered all her life long.

At this time Benedetta had been married about a twelvemonth: still strong in her resistance to her husband, but remaining under the conjugal roof in order to spare her mother the terrible blow of a public scandal. However, her aunt Serafina had brought influence to bear on her, by opening to her the hope of a possible nullification of her marriage, should she throw herself at the feet of the Holy Father and entreat his intervention. And Serafina ended by persuading her of this, when, deferring to certain advice, she removed her from the spiritual control of Abbe Pisoni, and gave her the same confessor as herself. This was a Jesuit father named Lorenza, a man scarce five and thirty, with bright eyes, grave and amiable manners, and great persuasive powers. However, it was only on the morrow of her mother's death that Benedetta made up her mind, and returned to the Palazzo Boccanera, to occupy the apartments where she had been born, and where her mother had just passed away.

Immediately afterwards proceedings for annulling the marriage were instituted, in the first instance, for inquiry, before the Cardinal Vicar charged with the diocese of Rome. It was related that the Contessina had only taken this step after a secret audience with his Holiness, who had shown her the most encouraging sympathy. Count Prada at first spoke of applying to the law courts to compel his wife to return to the conjugal domicile; but, yielding to the entreaties of his old father Orlando, whom the affair greatly grieved, he eventually consented to accept the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. He was infuriated, however, to find that the nullification of the marriage was solicited on the ground of its non-consummation through impotentia mariti; this being one of the most valid and decisive pleas on which the Church of Rome consents to part those whom she has joined. And far more unhappy marriages than might be imagined are severed on these grounds, though the world only gives attention to those cases in which people of title or renown are concerned, as it did, for instance, with the famous Martinez Campos suit.

In Benedetta's case, her counsel, Consistorial-Advocate Morano, one of the leading authorities of the Roman bar, simply neglected to mention, in his memoir, that if she was still merely a wife in name, this was entirely due to herself. In addition to the evidence of friends and servants, showing on what terms the husband and wife had lived since their marriage, the advocate produced a certificate of a medical character, showing that the non-consummation of the union was certain. And the Cardinal Vicar, acting as Bishop of Rome, had thereupon remitted the case to the Congregation of the Council. This was a first success for Benedetta, and matters remained in this position. She was waiting for the Congregation to deliver its final pronouncement, hoping that the ecclesiastical dissolution of the marriage would prove an irresistible argument in favour of the divorce which she meant to solicit of the civil courts. And meantime, in the icy rooms where her mother Ernesta, submissive and desolate, had lately died, the Contessina resumed her girlish life, showing herself calm, yet very firm in her passion, having vowed that she would belong to none but Dario, and that she would not belong to him until the day when a priest should have joined them together in God's holy name.

As it happened, some six months previously, Dario also had taken up his abode at the Boccanera palace in consequence of the death of his father and the catastrophe which had ruined him. Prince Onofrio, after adopting Prada's advice and selling the Villa Montefiori to a financial company for ten million lire,* had, instead of prudently keeping his money in his pockets, succumbed to the fever of speculation which was consuming Rome. He began to gamble, buying back his own land, and ending by losing everything in the formidable krach which was swallowing up the wealth of the entire city. Totally ruined, somewhat deeply in debt even, the Prince nevertheless continued to promenade the Corso, like the handsome, smiling, popular man he was, when he accidentally met his death through falling from his horse; and four months later his widow, the ever beautiful Flavia—who had managed to save a modern villa and a personal income of forty thousand lire* from the disaster—was remarried to a man of magnificent presence, her junior by some ten years. This was a Swiss named Jules Laporte, originally a sergeant in the Papal Swiss Guard, then a traveller for a shady business in "relics," and finally Marchese Montefiore, having secured that title in securing his wife, thanks to a special brief of the Holy Father. Thus the Princess Boccanera had again become the Marchioness Montefiori.

* 400,000 pounds.
** 1,800 pounds.

It was then that Cardinal Boccanera, feeling greatly hurt, insisted on his nephew Dario coming to live with him, in a small apartment on the first floor of the palazzo. In the heart of that holy man, who seemed dead to the world, there still lingered pride of name and lineage, with a feeling of affection for his young, slightly built nephew, the last of the race, the only one by whom the old stock might blossom anew. Moreover, he was not opposed to Dario's marriage with Benedetta, whom he also loved with a paternal affection; and so proud was he of the family honour, and so convinced of the young people's pious rectitude that, in taking them to live with him, he absolutely scorned the abominable rumours which Count Prada's friends in the white world had begun to circulate ever since the two cousins had resided under the same roof. Donna Serafina guarded Benedetta, as he, the Cardinal, guarded Dario, and in the silence and the gloom of the vast deserted mansion, ensanguined of olden time by so many tragic deeds of violence, there now only remained these four with their restrained, stilled passions, last survivors of a crumbling world upon the threshold of a new one.

When Abbe Pierre Froment all at once awoke from sleep, his head heavy with painful dreams, he was worried to find that the daylight was already waning. His watch, which he hastened to consult, pointed to six o'clock. Intending to rest for an hour at the utmost, he had slept on for nearly seven hours, overcome beyond power of resistance. And even on awaking he remained on the bed, helpless, as though he were conquered before he had fought. Why, he wondered, did he experience this prostration, this unreasonable discouragement, this quiver of doubt which had come he knew not whence during his sleep, and which was annihilating his youthful enthusiasm of the morning? Had the Boccaneras any connection with this sudden weakening of his powers? He had espied dim disquieting figures in the black night of his dreams; and the anguish which they had brought him continued, and he again evoked them, scared as he was at thus awaking in a strange room, full of uneasiness in presence of the unknown. Things no longer seemed natural to him. He could not understand why Benedetta should have written to Viscount Philibert de la Choue to tell him that his, Pierre's, book had been denounced to the Congregation of the Index. What interest too could she have had in his coming to Rome to defend himself; and with what object had she carried her amiability so far as to desire that he should take up his quarters in the mansion? Pierre's stupefaction indeed arose from his being there, on that bed in that strange room, in that palace whose deep, death-like silence encompassed him. As he lay there, his limbs still overpowered and his brain seemingly empty, a flash of light suddenly came to him, and he realised that there must be certain circumstances that he knew nothing of that, simple though things appeared, they must really hide some complicated intrigue. However, it was only a fugitive gleam of enlightenment; his suspicions faded; and he rose up shaking himself and accusing the gloomy twilight of being the sole cause of the shivering and the despondency of which he felt ashamed.

In order to bestir himself, Pierre began to examine the two rooms. They were furnished simply, almost meagrely, in mahogany, there being scarcely any two articles alike, though all dated from the beginning of the century. Neither the bed nor the windows nor the doors had any hangings. On the floor of bare tiles, coloured red and polished, there were merely some little foot-mats in front of the various seats. And at sight of this middle-class bareness and coldness Pierre ended by remembering a room where he had slept in childhood—a room at Versailles, at the abode of his grandmother, who had kept a little grocer's shop there in the days of Louis Philippe. However, he became interested in an old painting which hung in the bed-room, on the wall facing the bed, amidst some childish and valueless engravings. But partially discernible in the waning light, this painting represented a woman seated on some projecting stone-work, on the threshold of a great stern building, whence she seemed to have been driven forth. The folding doors of bronze had for ever closed behind her, yet she remained there in a mere drapery of white linen; whilst scattered articles of clothing, thrown forth chance-wise with a violent hand, lay upon the massive granite steps. Her feet were bare, her arms were bare, and her hands, distorted by bitter agony, were pressed to her face—a face which one saw not, veiled as it was by the tawny gold of her rippling, streaming hair. What nameless grief, what fearful shame, what hateful abandonment was thus being hidden by that rejected one, that lingering victim of love, of whose unknown story one might for ever dream with tortured heart? It could be divined that she was adorably young and beautiful in her wretchedness, in the shred of linen draped about her shoulders; but a mystery enveloped everything else—her passion, possibly her misfortune, perhaps even her transgression—unless, indeed, she were there merely as a symbol of all that shivers and that weeps visageless before the ever closed portals of the unknown. For a long time Pierre looked at her, and so intently that he at last imagined he could distinguish her profile, divine in its purity and expression of suffering. But this was only an illusion; the painting had greatly suffered, blackened by time and neglect; and he asked himself whose work it might be that it should move him so intensely. On the adjoining wall a picture of a Madonna, a bad copy of an eighteenth-century painting, irritated him by the banality of its smile.

Night was falling faster and faster, and, opening the sitting-room window, Pierre leant out. On the other bank of the Tiber facing him arose the Janiculum, the height whence he had gazed upon Rome that morning. But at this dim hour Rome was no longer the city of youth and dreamland soaring into the early sunshine. The night was raining down, grey and ashen; the horizon was becoming blurred, vague, and mournful. Yonder, to the left, beyond the sea of roofs, Pierre could still divine the presence of the Palatine; and yonder, to the right, there still arose the Dome of St. Peter's, now grey like slate against the leaden sky; whilst behind him the Quirinal, which he could not see, must also be fading away into the misty night. A few minutes went by, and everything became yet more blurred; he realised that Rome was fading, departing in its immensity of which he knew nothing. Then his causeless doubt and disquietude again came on him so painfully that he could no longer remain at the window. He closed it and sat down, letting the darkness submerge him with its flood of infinite sadness. And his despairing reverie only ceased when the door gently opened and the glow of a lamp enlivened the room.

It was Victorine who came in quietly, bringing the light. "Ah! so you are up, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she; "I came in at about four o'clock but I let you sleep on. You have done quite right to take all the rest you required."

Then, as he complained of pains and shivering, she became anxious. "Don't go catching their nasty fevers," she said. "It isn't at all healthy near their river, you know. Don Vigilio, his Eminence's secretary, is always having the fever, and I assure you that it isn't pleasant."

She accordingly advised him to remain upstairs and lie down again. She would excuse his absence to the Princess and the Contessina. And he ended by letting her do as she desired, for he was in no state to have any will of his own. By her advice he dined, partaking of some soup, a wing of a chicken, and some preserves, which Giaccomo, the big lackey, brought up to him. And the food did him a great deal of good; he felt so restored that he refused to go to bed, desiring, said he, to thank the ladies that very evening for their kindly hospitality. As Donna Serafina received on Mondays he would present himself before her.

"Very good," said Victorine approvingly. "As you are all right again it can do you no harm, it will even enliven you. The best thing will be for Don Vigilio to come for you at nine o'clock and accompany you. Wait for him here."

Pierre had just washed and put on the new cassock he had brought with him, when, at nine o'clock precisely, he heard a discreet knock at his door. A little priest came in, a man scarcely thirty years of age, but thin and debile of build, with a long, seared, saffron-coloured face. For two years past attacks of fever, coming on every day at the same hour, had been consuming him. Nevertheless, whenever he forgot to control the black eyes which lighted his yellow face, they shone out ardently with the glow of his fiery soul. He bowed, and then in fluent French introduced himself in this simple fashion: "Don Vigilio, Monsieur l'Abbe, who is entirely at your service. If you are willing, we will go down."

Pierre immediately followed him, expressing his thanks, and Don Vigilio, relapsing into silence, answered his remarks with a smile. Having descended the small staircase, they found themselves on the second floor, on the spacious landing of the grand staircase. And Pierre was surprised and saddened by the scanty illumination, which, as in some dingy lodging-house, was limited to a few gas-jets, placed far apart, their yellow splotches but faintly relieving the deep gloom of the lofty, endless corridors. All was gigantic and funereal. Even on the landing, where was the entrance to Donna Serafina's apartments, facing those occupied by her niece, nothing indicated that a reception was being held that evening. The door remained closed, not a sound came from the rooms, a death-like silence arose from the whole palace. And Don Vigilio did not even ring, but, after a fresh bow, discreetly turned the door-handle.

A single petroleum lamp, placed on a table, lighted the ante-room, a large apartment with bare fresco-painted walls, simulating hangings of red and gold, draped regularly all around in the antique fashion. A few men's overcoats and two ladies' mantles lay on the chairs, whilst a pier table was littered with hats, and a servant sat there dozing, with his back to the wall.

However, as Don Vigilio stepped aside to allow Pierre to enter a first reception-room, hung with red brocatelle, a room but dimly lighted and which he imagined to be empty, the young priest found himself face to face with an apparition in black, a woman whose features he could not at first distinguish. Fortunately he heard his companion say, with a low bow, "Contessina, I have the honour to present to you Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre Froment, who arrived from France this morning."

Then, for a moment, Pierre remained alone with Benedetta in that deserted salon, in the sleepy glimmer of two lace-veiled lamps. At present, however, a sound of voices came from a room beyond, a larger apartment whose doorway, with folding doors thrown wide open, described a parallelogram of brighter light.

The young woman at once showed herself very affable, with perfect simplicity of manner: "Ah! I am happy to see you, Monsieur l'Abbe. I was afraid that your indisposition might be serious. You are quite recovered now, are you not?"

Pierre listened to her, fascinated by her slow and rather thick voice, in which restrained passion seemed to mingle with much prudent good sense. And at last he saw her, with her hair so heavy and so dark, her skin so white, the whiteness of ivory. She had a round face, with somewhat full lips, a small refined nose, features as delicate as a child's. But it was especially her eyes that lived, immense eyes, whose infinite depths none could fathom. Was she slumbering? Was she dreaming? Did her motionless face conceal the ardent tension of a great saint and a great amorosa? So white, so young, and so calm, her every movement was harmonious, her appearance at once very staid, very noble, and very rhythmical. In her ears she wore two large pearls of matchless purity, pearls which had come from a famous necklace of her mother's, known throughout Rome.

Pierre apologised and thanked her. "You see me in confusion, madame," said he; "I should have liked to express to you this morning my gratitude for your great kindness."

He had hesitated to call her madame, remembering the plea brought forward in the suit for the dissolution of her marriage. But plainly enough everybody must call her madame. Moreover, her face had retained its calm and kindly expression.

"Consider yourself at home here, Monsieur l'Abbe," she responded, wishing to put him at his ease. "It is sufficient that our relative, Monsieur de la Choue, should be fond of you, and take interest in your work. I have, you know, much affection for him." Then her voice faltered slightly, for she realised that she ought to speak of the book, the one reason of Pierre's journey and her proffered hospitality. "Yes," she added, "the Viscount sent me your book. I read it and found it very beautiful. It disturbed me. But I am only an ignoramus, and certainly failed to understand everything in it. We must talk it over together; you will explain your ideas to me, won't you, Monsieur l'Abbe?"

In her large clear eyes, which did not know how to lie, Pierre then read the surprise and emotion of a child's soul when confronted by disquieting and undreamt-of problems. So it was not she who had become impassioned and had desired to have him near her that she might sustain him and assist his victory. Once again, and this time very keenly, he suspected a secret influence, a hidden hand which was directing everything towards some unknown goal. However, he was charmed by so much simplicity and frankness in so beautiful, young, and noble a creature; and he gave himself to her after the exchange of those few words, and was about to tell her that she might absolutely dispose of him, when he was interrupted by the advent of another woman, whose tall, slight figure, also clad in black, stood out strongly against the luminous background of the further reception-room as seen through the open doorway.

"Well, Benedetta, have you sent Giaccomo up to see?" asked the newcomer. "Don Vigilio has just come down and he is quite alone. It is improper."

"No, no, aunt. Monsieur l'Abbe is here," was the reply of Benedetta, hastening to introduce the young priest. "Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre Froment—The Princess Boccanera."

Ceremonious salutations were exchanged. The Princess must have been nearly sixty, but she laced herself so tightly that from behind one might have taken her for a young woman. This tight lacing, however, was her last coquetry. Her hair, though still plentiful, was quite white, her eyebrows alone remaining black in her long, wrinkled face, from which projected the large obstinate nose of the family. She had never been beautiful, and had remained a spinster, wounded to the heart by the selection of Count Brandini, who had preferred her younger sister, Ernesta. From that moment she had resolved to seek consolation and satisfaction in family pride alone, the hereditary pride of the great name which she bore. The Boccaneras had already supplied two Popes to the Church, and she hoped that before she died her brother would become the third. She had transformed herself into his housekeeper, as it were, remaining with him, watching over him, and advising him, managing all the household affairs herself, and accomplishing miracles in order to conceal the slow ruin which was bringing the ceilings about their heads. If every Monday for thirty years past she had continued receiving a few intimates, all of them folks of the Vatican, it was from high political considerations, so that her drawing-room might remain a meeting-place of the black world, a power and a threat.

And Pierre divined by her greeting that she deemed him of little account, petty foreign priest that he was, not even a prelate. This too again surprised him, again brought the puzzling question to the fore: Why had he been invited, what was expected of him in this society from which the humble were usually excluded? Knowing the Princess to be austerely devout, he at last fancied that she received him solely out of regard for her kinsman, the Viscount, for in her turn she only found these words of welcome: "We are so pleased to receive good news of Monsieur de la Choue! He brought us such a beautiful pilgrimage two years ago."

Passing the first through the doorway, she at last ushered the young priest into the adjoining reception-room. It was a spacious square apartment, hung with old yellow brocatelle of a flowery Louis XIV pattern. The lofty ceiling was adorned with a very fine panelling, carved and coloured, with gilded roses in each compartment. The furniture, however, was of all sorts. There were some high mirrors, a couple of superb gilded pier tables, and a few handsome seventeenth-century arm-chairs; but all the rest was wretched. A heavy round table of first-empire style, which had come nobody knew whence, caught the eye with a medley of anomalous articles picked up at some bazaar, and a quantity of cheap photographs littered the costly marble tops of the pier tables. No interesting article of virtu was to be seen. The old paintings on the walls were with two exceptions feebly executed. There was a delightful example of an unknown primitive master, a fourteenth-century Visitation, in which the Virgin had the stature and pure delicacy of a child of ten, whilst the Archangel, huge and superb, inundated her with a stream of dazzling, superhuman love; and in front of this hung an antique family portrait, depicting a very beautiful young girl in a turban, who was thought to be Cassia Boccanera, the amorosa and avengeress who had flung herself into the Tiber with her brother Ercole and the corpse of her lover, Flavio Corradini. Four lamps threw a broad, peaceful glow over the faded room, and, like a melancholy sunset, tinged it with yellow. It looked grave and bare, with not even a flower in a vase to brighten it.

In a few words Donna Serafina at once introduced Pierre to the company; and in the silence, the pause which ensued in the conversation, he felt that every eye was fixed upon him as upon a promised and expected curiosity. There were altogether some ten persons present, among them being Dario, who stood talking with little Princess Celia Buongiovanni, whilst the elderly relative who had brought the latter sat whispering to a prelate, Monsignor Nani, in a dim corner. Pierre, however, had been particularly struck by the name of Consistorial-Advocate Morano, of whose position in the house Viscount de la Choue had thought proper to inform him in order to avert any unpleasant blunder. For thirty years past Morano had been Donna Serafina's amico. Their connection, formerly a guilty one, for the advocate had wife and children of his own, had in course of time, since he had been left a widower, become one of those liaisons which tolerant people excuse and except. Both parties were extremely devout and had certainly assured themselves of all needful "indulgences." And thus Morano was there in the seat which he had always taken for a quarter of a century past, a seat beside the chimney-piece, though as yet the winter fire had not been lighted, and when Donna Serafina had discharged her duties as mistress of the house, she returned to her own place in front of him, on the other side of the chimney.

When Pierre in his turn had seated himself near Don Vigilio, who, silent and discreet, had already taken a chair, Dario resumed in a louder voice the story which he had been relating to Celia. Dario was a handsome man, of average height, slim and elegant. He wore a full beard, dark and carefully tended, and had the long face and pronounced nose of the Boccaneras, but the impoverishment of the family blood over a course of centuries had attenuated, softened as it were, any sharpness or undue prominence of feature.

"Oh! a beauty, an astounding beauty!" he repeated emphatically.

"Whose beauty?" asked Benedetta, approaching him.

Celia, who resembled the little Virgin of the primitive master hanging above her head, began to laugh. "Oh! Dario's speaking of a poor girl, a work-girl whom he met to-day," she explained.

Thereupon Dario had to begin his narrative again. It appeared that while passing along a narrow street near the Piazza Navona, he had perceived a tall, shapely girl of twenty, who was weeping and sobbing violently, prone upon a flight of steps. Touched particularly by her beauty, he had approached her and learnt that she had been working in the house outside which she was, a manufactory of wax beads, but that, slack times having come, the workshops had closed and she did not dare to return home, so fearful was the misery there. Amidst the downpour of her tears she raised such beautiful eyes to his that he ended by drawing some money from his pocket. But at this, crimson with confusion, she sprang to her feet, hiding her hands in the folds of her skirt, and refusing to take anything. She added, however, that he might follow her if it so pleased him, and give the money to her mother. And then she hurried off towards the Ponte St'. Angelo.*

* Bridge of St. Angelo.

"Yes, she was a beauty, a perfect beauty," repeated Dario with an air of ecstasy. "Taller than I, and slim though sturdy, with the bosom of a goddess. In fact, a real antique, a Venus of twenty, her chin rather bold, her mouth and nose of perfect form, and her eyes wonderfully pure and large! And she was bare-headed too, with nothing but a crown of heavy black hair, and a dazzling face, gilded, so to say, by the sun."

They had all begun to listen to him, enraptured, full of that passionate admiration for beauty which, in spite of every change, Rome still retains in her heart.

"Those beautiful girls of the people are becoming very rare," remarked Morano. "You might scour the Trastevere without finding any. However, this proves that there is at least one of them left."

"And what was your goddess's name?" asked Benedetta, smiling, amused and enraptured like the others.

"Pierina," replied Dario, also with a laugh.

"And what did you do with her?"

At this question the young man's excited face assumed an expression of discomfort and fear, like the face of a child on suddenly encountering some ugly creature amidst its play.

"Oh! don't talk of it," said he. "I felt very sorry afterwards. I saw such misery—enough to make one ill."

Yielding to his curiosity, it seemed, he had followed the girl across the Ponte St'. Angelo into the new district which was being built over the former castle meadows*; and there, on the first floor of an abandoned house which was already falling into ruins, though the plaster was scarcely dry, he had come upon a frightful spectacle which still stirred his heart: a whole family, father and mother, children, and an infirm old uncle, dying of hunger and rotting in filth! He selected the most dignified words he could think of to describe the scene, waving his hand the while with a gesture of fright, as if to ward off some horrible vision.

* The meadows around the Castle of St. Angelo. The district, now
covered with buildings, is quite flat and was formerly greatly
subject to floods. It is known as the Quartiere dei Prati.—Trans.

"At last," he concluded, "I ran away, and you may be sure that I shan't go back again."

A general wagging of heads ensued in the cold, irksome silence which fell upon the room. Then Morano summed up the matter in a few bitter words, in which he accused the despoilers, the men of the Quirinal, of being the sole cause of all the frightful misery of Rome. Were not people even talking of the approaching nomination of Deputy Sacco as Minister of Finances—Sacco, that intriguer who had engaged in all sorts of underhand practices? His appointment would be the climax of impudence; bankruptcy would speedily and infallibly ensue.

Meantime Benedetta, who had fixed her eyes on Pierre, with his book in her mind, alone murmured: "Poor people, how very sad! But why not go back to see them?"

Pierre, out of his element and absent-minded during the earlier moments, had been deeply stirred by the latter part of Dario's narrative. His thoughts reverted to his apostolate amidst the misery of Paris, and his heart was touched with compassion at being confronted by the story of such fearful sufferings on the very day of his arrival in Rome. Unwittingly, impulsively, he raised his voice, and said aloud: "Oh! we will go to see them together, madame; you will take me. These questions impassion me so much."

The attention of everybody was then again turned upon the young priest. The others questioned him, and he realised that they were all anxious about his first impressions, his opinion of their city and of themselves. He must not judge Rome by mere outward appearances, they said. What effect had the city produced on him? How had he found it, and what did he think of it? Thereupon he politely apologised for his inability to answer them. He had not yet gone out, said he, and had seen nothing. But this answer was of no avail; they pressed him all the more keenly, and he fully understood that their object was to gain him over to admiration and love. They advised him, adjured him not to yield to any fatal disillusion, but to persist and wait until Rome should have revealed to him her soul.

"How long do you expect to remain among us, Monsieur l'Abbe?" suddenly inquired a courteous voice, with a clear but gentle ring.

It was Monsignor Nani, who, seated in the gloom, thus raised his voice for the first time. On several occasions it had seemed to Pierre that the prelate's keen blue eyes were steadily fixed upon him, though all the while he pretended to be attentively listening to the drawling chatter of Celia's aunt. And before replying Pierre glanced at him. In his crimson-edged cassock, with a violet silk sash drawn tightly around his waist, Nani still looked young, although he was over fifty. His hair had remained blond, he had a straight refined nose, a mouth very firm yet very delicate of contour, and beautifully white teeth.

"Why, a fortnight or perhaps three weeks, Monsignor," replied Pierre.

The whole salon protested. What, three weeks! It was his pretension to know Rome in three weeks! Why, six weeks, twelve months, ten years were required! The first impression was always a disastrous one, and a long sojourn was needed for a visitor to recover from it.

"Three weeks!" repeated Donna Serafina with her disdainful air. "Is it possible for people to study one another and get fond of one another in three weeks? Those who come back to us are those who have learned to know us."

Instead of launching into exclamations like the others, Nani had at first contented himself with smiling, and gently waving his shapely hand, which bespoke his aristocratic origin. Then, as Pierre modestly explained himself, saying that he had come to Rome to attend to certain matters and would leave again as soon as those matters should have been concluded, the prelate, still smiling, summed up the argument with the remark: "Oh! Monsieur l'Abbe will stay with us for more than three weeks; we shall have the happiness of his presence here for a long time, I hope."

These words, though spoken with quiet cordiality, strangely disturbed the young priest. What was known, what was meant? He leant towards Don Vigilio, who had remained near him, still and ever silent, and in a whisper inquired: "Who is Monsignor Nani?"

The secretary, however, did not at once reply. His feverish face became yet more livid. Then his ardent eyes glanced round to make sure that nobody was watching him, and in a breath he responded: "He is the Assessor of the Holy Office."*

* Otherwise the Inquisition.

This information sufficed, for Pierre was not ignorant of the fact that the assessor, who was present in silence at the meetings of the Holy Office, waited upon his Holiness every Wednesday evening after the sitting, to render him an account of the matters dealt with in the afternoon. This weekly audience, this hour spent with the Pope in a privacy which allowed of every subject being broached, gave the assessor an exceptional position, one of considerable power. Moreover the office led to the cardinalate; the only "rise" that could be given to the assessor was his promotion to the Sacred College.

Monsignor Nani, who seemed so perfectly frank and amiable, continued to look at the young priest with such an encouraging air that the latter felt obliged to go and occupy the seat beside him, which Celia's old aunt at last vacated. After all, was there not an omen of victory in meeting, on the very day of his arrival, a powerful prelate whose influence would perhaps open every door to him? He therefore felt very touched when Monsignor Nani, immediately after the first words, inquired in a tone of deep interest, "And so, my dear child, you have published a book?"

After this, gradually mastered by his enthusiasm and forgetting where he was, Pierre unbosomed himself, and recounted the birth and progress of his burning love amidst the sick and the humble, gave voice to his dream of a return to the olden Christian community, and triumphed with the rejuvenescence of Catholicism, developing into the one religion of the universal democracy. Little by little he again raised his voice, and silence fell around him in the stern, antique reception-room, every one lending ear to his words with increasing surprise, with a growing coldness of which he remained unconscious.

At last Nani gently interrupted him, still wearing his perpetual smile, the faint irony of which, however, had departed. "No doubt, no doubt, my dear child," he said, "it is very beautiful, oh! very beautiful, well worthy of the pure and noble imagination of a Christian. But what do you count on doing now?"

"I shall go straight to the Holy Father to defend myself," answered Pierre.

A light, restrained laugh went round, and Donna Serafina expressed the general opinion by exclaiming: "The Holy Father isn't seen as easily as that."

Pierre, however, was quite impassioned. "Well, for my part," he rejoined, "I hope I shall see him. Have I not expressed his views? Have I not defended his policy? Can he let my book be condemned when I believe that I have taken inspiration from all that is best in him?"

"No doubt, no doubt," Nani again hastily replied, as if he feared that the others might be too brusque with the young enthusiast. "The Holy Father has such a lofty mind. And of course it would be necessary to see him. Only, my dear child, you must not excite yourself so much; reflect a little; take your time." And, turning to Benedetta, he added, "Of course his Eminence has not seen Abbe Froment yet. It would be well, however, that he should receive him to-morrow morning to guide him with his wise counsel."

Cardinal Boccanera never attended his sister's Monday-evening receptions. Still, he was always there in the spirit, like some absent sovereign master.

"To tell the truth," replied the Contessina, hesitating, "I fear that my uncle does not share Monsieur l'Abbe's views."

Nani again smiled. "Exactly; he will tell him things which it is good he should hear."

Thereupon it was at once settled with Don Vigilio that the latter would put down the young priest's name for an audience on the following morning at ten o'clock.

However, at that moment a cardinal came in, clad in town costume—his sash and his stockings red, but his simar black, with a red edging and red buttons. It was Cardinal Sarno, a very old intimate of the Boccaneras; and whilst he apologised for arriving so late, through press of work, the company became silent and deferentially clustered round him. This was the first cardinal Pierre had seen, and he felt greatly disappointed, for the newcomer had none of the majesty, none of the fine port and presence to which he had looked forward. On the contrary, he was short and somewhat deformed, with the left shoulder higher than the right, and a worn, ashen face with lifeless eyes. To Pierre he looked like some old clerk of seventy, half stupefied by fifty years of office work, dulled and bent by incessantly leaning over his writing desk ever since his youth. And indeed that was Sarno's story. The puny child of a petty middle-class family, he had been educated at the Seminario Romano. Then later he had for ten years professed Canon Law at that same seminary, afterwards becoming one of the secretaries of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Finally, five and twenty years ago, he had been created a cardinal, and the jubilee of his cardinalate had recently been celebrated. Born in Rome, he had always lived there; he was the perfect type of the prelate who, through growing up in the shade of the Vatican, has become one of the masters of the world. Although he had never occupied any diplomatic post, he had rendered such important services to the Propaganda, by his methodical habits of work, that he had become president of one of the two commissions which furthered the interests of the Church in those vast countries of the west which are not yet Catholic. And thus, in the depths of his dim eyes, behind his low, dull-looking brow, the huge map of Christendom was stored away.

Nani himself had risen, full of covert respect for the unobtrusive but terrible man whose hand was everywhere, even in the most distant corners of the earth, although he had never left his office. As Nani knew, despite his apparent nullity, Sarno, with his slow, methodical, ably organised work of conquest, possessed sufficient power to set empires in confusion.

"Has your Eminence recovered from that cold which distressed us so much?" asked Nani.

"No, no, I still cough. There is a most malignant passage at the offices. I feel as cold as ice as soon as I leave my room."

From that moment Pierre felt quite little, virtually lost. He was not even introduced to the Cardinal. And yet he had to remain in the room for nearly another hour, looking around and observing. That antiquated world then seemed to him puerile, as though it had lapsed into a mournful second childhood. Under all the apparent haughtiness and proud reserve he could divine real timidity, unacknowledged distrust, born of great ignorance. If the conversation did not become general, it was because nobody dared to speak out frankly; and what he heard in the corners was simply so much childish chatter, the petty gossip of the week, the trivial echoes of sacristies and drawing-rooms. People saw but little of one another, and the slightest incidents assumed huge proportions. At last Pierre ended by feeling as though he were transported into some salon of the time of Charles X, in one of the episcopal cities of the French provinces. No refreshments were served. Celia's old aunt secured possession of Cardinal Sarno; but, instead of replying to her, he simply wagged his head from time to time. Don Vigilio had not opened his mouth the whole evening. However, a conversation in a very low tone was started by Nani and Morano, to whom Donna Serafina listened, leaning forward and expressing her approval by slowly nodding her head. They were doubtless speaking of the dissolution of Benedetta's marriage, for they glanced at the young woman gravely from time to time. And in the centre of the spacious room, in the sleepy glow of the lamps, there was only the young people, Benedetta, Dario, and Celia who seemed to be at all alive, chattering in undertones and occasionally repressing a burst of laughter.

All at once Pierre was struck by the great resemblance between Benedetta and the portrait of Cassia hanging on the wall. Each displayed the same delicate youth, the same passionate mouth, the same large, unfathomable eyes, set in the same round, sensible, healthy-looking face. In each there was certainly the same upright soul, the same heart of flame. Then a recollection came to Pierre, that of a painting by Guido Reni, the adorable, candid head of Beatrice Cenci, which, at that moment and to his thinking, the portrait of Cassia closely resembled. This resemblance stirred him and he glanced at Benedetta with anxious sympathy, as if all the fierce fatality of race and country were about to fall on her. But no, it could not be; she looked so calm, so resolute, and so patient! Besides, ever since he had entered that room he had noticed none other than signs of gay fraternal tenderness between her and Dario, especially on her side, for her face ever retained the bright serenity of a love which may be openly confessed. At one moment, it is true, Dario in a joking way had caught hold of her hands and pressed them; but while he began to laugh rather nervously, with a brighter gleam darting from his eyes, she on her side, all composure, slowly freed her hands, as though theirs was but the play of old and affectionate friends. She loved him, though, it was visible, with her whole being and for her whole life.

At last when Dario, after stifling a slight yawn and glancing at his watch, had slipped off to join some friends who were playing cards at a lady's house, Benedetta and Celia sat down together on a sofa near Pierre; and the latter, without wishing to listen, overheard a few words of their confidential chat. The little Princess was the eldest daughter of Prince Matteo Buongiovanni, who was already the father of five children by an English wife, a Mortimer, to whom he was indebted for a dowry of two hundred thousand pounds. Indeed, the Buongiovannis were known as one of the few patrician families of Rome that were still rich, still erect among the ruins of the past, now crumbling on every side. They also numbered two popes among their forerunners, yet this had not prevented Prince Matteo from lending support to the Quirinal without quarrelling with the Vatican. Son of an American woman, no longer having the pure Roman blood in his veins, he was a more supple politician than other aristocrats, and was also, folks said, extremely grasping, struggling to be one of the last to retain the wealth and power of olden times, which he realised were condemned to death. Yet it was in his family, renowned for its superb pride and its continued magnificence, that a love romance had lately taken birth, a romance which was the subject of endless gossip: Celia had suddenly fallen in love with a young lieutenant to whom she had never spoken; her love was reciprocated, and the passionate attachment of the officer and the girl only found vent in the glances they exchanged on meeting each day during the usual drive through the Corso. Nevertheless Celia displayed a tenacious will, and after declaring to her father that she would never take any other husband, she was waiting, firm and resolute, in the certainty that she would ultimately secure the man of her choice. The worst of the affair was that the lieutenant, Attilio Sacco, happened to be the son of Deputy Sacco, a parvenu whom the black world looked down upon, as upon one sold to the Quirinal and ready to undertake the very dirtiest job.

"It was for me that Morano spoke just now," Celia murmured in Benedetta's ear. "Yes, yes, when he spoke so harshly of Attilio's father and that ministerial appointment which people are talking about. He wanted to give me a lesson."

The two girls had sworn eternal affection in their school-days, and Benedetta, the elder by five years, showed herself maternal. "And so," she said, "you've not become a whit more reasonable. You still think of that young man?"

"What! are you going to grieve me too, dear?" replied Celia. "I love Attilio and mean to have him. Yes, him and not another! I want him and I'll have him, because I love him and he loves me. It's simple enough."

Pierre glanced at her, thunderstruck. With her gentle virgin face she was like a candid, budding lily. A brow and a nose of blossom-like purity; a mouth all innocence with its lips closing over pearly teeth, and eyes like spring water, clear and fathomless. And not a quiver passed over her cheeks of satiny freshness, no sign, however faint, of anxiety or inquisitiveness appeared in her candid glance. Did she think? Did she know? Who could have answered? She was virginity personified with all its redoubtable mystery.

"Ah! my dear," resumed Benedetta, "don't begin my sad story over again. One doesn't succeed in marrying the Pope and the King."

All tranquillity, Celia responded: "But you didn't love Prada, whereas I love Attilio. Life lies in that: one must love."

These words, spoken so naturally by that ignorant child, disturbed Pierre to such a point that he felt tears rising to his eyes. Love! yes, therein lay the solution of every quarrel, the alliance between the nations, the reign of peace and joy throughout the world! However, Donna Serafina had now risen, shrewdly suspecting the nature of the conversation which was impassioning the two girls. And she gave Don Vigilio a glance, which the latter understood, for he came to tell Pierre in an undertone that it was time to retire. Eleven o'clock was striking, and Celia went off with her aunt. Advocate Morano, however, doubtless desired to retain Cardinal Sarno and Nani for a few moments in order that they might privately discuss some difficulty which had arisen in the divorce proceedings. On reaching the outer reception-room, Benedetta, after kissing Celia on both cheeks, took leave of Pierre with much good grace.

"In answering the Viscount to-morrow morning," said she, "I shall tell him how happy we are to have you with us, and for longer than you think. Don't forget to come down at ten o'clock to see my uncle, the Cardinal."

Having climbed to the third floor again, Pierre and Don Vigilio, each carrying a candlestick which the servant had handed to them, were about to part for the night, when the former could not refrain from asking the secretary a question which had been worrying him for hours: "Is Monsignor Nani a very influential personage?"

Don Vigilio again became quite scared, and simply replied by a gesture, opening his arms as if to embrace the world. Then his eyes flashed, and in his turn he seemed to yield to inquisitiveness. "You already knew him, didn't you?" he inquired.

"I? not at all!"

"Really! Well, he knows you very well. Last Monday I heard him speak of you in such precise terms that he seemed to be acquainted with the slightest particulars of your career and your character."

"Why, I never even heard his name before."

"Then he must have procured information."

Thereupon Don Vigilio bowed and entered his room; whilst Pierre, surprised to find his door open, saw Victorine come out with her calm active air.

"Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe, I wanted to make sure that you had everything you were likely to want. There are candles, water, sugar, and matches. And what do you take in the morning, please? Coffee? No, a cup of milk with a roll. Very good; at eight o'clock, eh? And now rest and sleep well. I was awfully afraid of ghosts during the first nights I spent in this old palace! But I never saw a trace of one. The fact is, when people are dead, they are too well pleased, and don't want to break their rest!"

Then off she went, and Pierre at last found himself alone, glad to be able to shake off the strain imposed on him, to free himself from the discomfort which he had felt in that reception-room, among those people who in his mind still mingled and vanished like shadows in the sleepy glow of the lamps. Ghosts, thought he, are the old dead ones of long ago whose distressed spirits return to love and suffer in the breasts of the living of to-day. And, despite his long afternoon rest, he had never felt so weary, so desirous of slumber, confused and foggy as was his mind, full of the fear that he had hitherto not understood things aright. When he began to undress, his astonishment at being in that room returned to him with such intensity that he almost fancied himself another person. What did all those people think of his book? Why had he been brought to this cold dwelling whose hostility he could divine? Was it for the purpose of helping him or conquering him? And again in the yellow glimmer, the dismal sunset of the drawing-room, he perceived Donna Serafina and Advocate Morano on either side of the chimney-piece, whilst behind the calm yet passionate visage of Benedetta appeared the smiling face of Monsignor Nani, with cunning eyes and lips bespeaking indomitable energy.

He went to bed, but soon got up again, stifling, feeling such a need of fresh, free air that he opened the window wide in order to lean out. But the night was black as ink, the darkness had submerged the horizon. A mist must have hidden the stars in the firmament; the vault above seemed opaque and heavy like lead; and yonder in front the houses of the Trastevere had long since been asleep. Not one of all their windows glittered; there was but a single gaslight shining, all alone and far away, like a lost spark. In vain did Pierre seek the Janiculum. In the depths of that ocean of nihility all sunk and vanished, Rome's four and twenty centuries, the ancient Palatine and the modern Quirinal, even the giant dome of St. Peter's, blotted out from the sky by the flood of gloom. And below him he could not see, he could not even hear the Tiber, the dead river flowing past the dead city.

III.

AT a quarter to ten o'clock on the following morning Pierre came down to the first floor of the mansion for his audience with Cardinal Boccanera. He had awoke free of all fatigue and again full of courage and candid enthusiasm; nothing remaining of his strange despondency of the previous night, the doubts and suspicions which had then come over him. The morning was so fine, the sky so pure and so bright, that his heart once more palpitated with hope.

On the landing he found the folding doors of the first ante-room wide open. While closing the gala saloons which overlooked the street, and which were rotting with old age and neglect, the Cardinal still used the reception-rooms of one of his grand-uncles, who in the eighteenth century had risen to the same ecclesiastical dignity as himself. There was a suite of four immense rooms, each sixteen feet high, with windows facing the lane which sloped down towards the Tiber; and the sun never entered them, shut off as it was by the black houses across the lane. Thus the installation, in point of space, was in keeping with the display and pomp of the old-time princely dignitaries of the Church. But no repairs were ever made, no care was taken of anything, the hangings were frayed and ragged, and dust preyed on the furniture, amidst an unconcern which seemed to betoken some proud resolve to stay the course of time.

Pierre experienced a slight shock as he entered the first room, the servants' ante-chamber. Formerly two pontifical gente d'armi in full uniform had always stood there amidst a stream of lackeys; and the single servant now on duty seemed by his phantom-like appearance to increase the melancholiness of the vast and gloomy hall. One was particularly struck by an altar facing the windows, an altar with red drapery surmounted by a baldacchino with red hangings, on which appeared the escutcheon of the Boccaneras, the winged dragon spitting flames with the device, Bocca nera, Alma rossa. And the grand-uncle's red hat, the old huge ceremonial hat, was also there, with the two cushions of red silk, and the two antique parasols which were taken in the coach each time his Eminence went out. And in the deep silence it seemed as if one could almost hear the faint noise of the moths preying for a century past upon all this dead splendour, which would have fallen into dust at the slightest touch of a feather broom.

The second ante-room, that was formerly occupied by the secretary, was also empty, and it was only in the third one, the anticamera nobile, that Pierre found Don Vigilio. With his retinue reduced to what was strictly necessary, the Cardinal had preferred to have his secretary near him—at the door, so to say, of the old throne-room, where he gave audience. And Don Vigilio, so thin and yellow, and quivering with fever, sat there like one lost, at a small, common, black table covered with papers. Raising his head from among a batch of documents, he recognised Pierre, and in a low voice, a faint murmur amidst the silence, he said, "His Eminence is engaged. Please wait."

Then he again turned to his reading, doubtless to escape all attempts at conversation.

Not daring to sit down, Pierre examined the apartment. It looked perhaps yet more dilapidated than the others, with its hangings of green damask worn by age and resembling the faded moss on ancient trees. The ceiling, however, had remained superb. Within a frieze of gilded and coloured ornaments was a fresco representing the Triumph of Amphitrite, the work of one of Raffaelle's pupils. And, according to antique usage, it was here that the berretta, the red cap, was placed, on a credence, below a large crucifix of ivory and ebony.

As Pierre grew used to the half-light, however, his attention was more particularly attracted by a recently painted full-length portrait of the Cardinal in ceremonial costume—cassock of red moire, rochet of lace, and cappa thrown like a royal mantle over his shoulders. In these vestments of the Church the tall old man of seventy retained the proud bearing of a prince, clean shaven, but still boasting an abundance of white hair which streamed in curls over his shoulders. He had the commanding visage of the Boccaneras, a large nose and a large thin-lipped mouth in a long face intersected by broad lines; and the eyes which lighted his pale countenance were indeed the eyes of his race, very dark, yet sparkling with ardent life under bushy brows which had remained quite black. With laurels about his head he would have resembled a Roman emperor, very handsome and master of the world, as though indeed the blood of Augustus pulsated in his veins.

Pierre knew his story which this portrait recalled. Educated at the College of the Nobles, Pio Boccanera had but once absented himself from Rome, and that when very young, hardly a deacon, but nevertheless appointed oblegate to convey a berretta to Paris. On his return his ecclesiastical career had continued in sovereign fashion. Honours had fallen on him naturally, as by right of birth. Ordained by Pius IX himself, afterwards becoming a Canon of the Vatican Basilica, and Cameriere segreto, he had risen to the post of Majordomo about the time of the Italian occupation, and in 1874 had been created a Cardinal. For the last four years, moreover, he had been Papal Chamberlain (Camerlingo), and folks whispered that Leo XIII had appointed him to that post, even as he himself had been appointed to it by Pius IX, in order to lessen his chance of succeeding to the pontifical throne; for although the conclave in choosing Leo had set aside the old tradition that the Camerlingo was ineligible for the papacy, it was not probable that it would again dare to infringe that rule. Moreover, people asserted that, even as had been the case in the reign of Pius, there was a secret warfare between the Pope and his Camerlingo, the latter remaining on one side, condemning the policy of the Holy See, holding radically different opinions on all things, and silently waiting for the death of Leo, which would place power in his hands with the duty of summoning the conclave, and provisionally watching over the affairs and interests of the Church until a new Pope should be elected. Behind Cardinal Pio's broad, stern brow, however, in the glow of his dark eyes, might there not also be the ambition of actually rising to the papacy, of repeating the career of Gioachino Pecci, Camerlingo and then Pope, all tradition notwithstanding? With the pride of a Roman prince Pio knew but Rome; he almost gloried in being totally ignorant of the modern world; and verily he showed himself very pious, austerely religious, with a full firm faith into which the faintest doubt could never enter.

But a whisper drew Pierre from his reflections. Don Vigilio, in his prudent way, invited him to sit down: "You may have to wait some time: take a stool."

Then he began to cover a large sheet of yellowish paper with fine writing, while Pierre seated himself on one of the stools ranged alongside the wall in front of the portrait. And again the young man fell into a reverie, picturing in his mind a renewal of all the princely pomp of the old-time cardinals in that antique room. To begin with, as soon as nominated, a cardinal gave public festivities, which were sometimes very splendid. During three days the reception-rooms remained wide open, all could enter, and from room to room ushers repeated the names of those who came—patricians, people of the middle class, poor folks, all Rome indeed, whom the new cardinal received with sovereign kindliness, as a king might receive his subjects. Then there was quite a princely retinue; some cardinals carried five hundred people about with them, had no fewer than sixteen distinct offices in their households, lived, in fact, amidst a perfect court. Even when life subsequently became simplified, a cardinal, if he were a prince, still had a right to a gala train of four coaches drawn by black horses. Four servants preceded him in liveries, emblazoned with his arms, and carried his hat, cushion, and parasols. He was also attended by a secretary in a mantle of violet silk, a train-bearer in a gown of violet woollen stuff, and a gentleman in waiting, wearing an Elizabethan style of costume, and bearing the berretta with gloved hands. Although the household had then become smaller, it still comprised an auditore specially charged with the congregational work, a secretary employed exclusively for correspondence, a chief usher who introduced visitors, a gentleman in attendance for the carrying of the berretta, a train-bearer, a chaplain, a majordomo and a valet-de-chambre, to say nothing of a flock of underlings, lackeys, cooks, coachmen, grooms, quite a population, which filled the vast mansions with bustle. And with these attendants Pierre mentally sought to fill the three spacious ante-rooms now so deserted; the stream of lackeys in blue liveries broidered with emblazonry, the world of abbes and prelates in silk mantles appeared before him, again setting magnificent and passionate life under the lofty ceilings, illumining all the semi-gloom with resuscitated splendour.

But nowadays—particularly since the Italian occupation of Rome—nearly all the great fortunes of the Roman princes have been exhausted, and the pomp of the great dignitaries of the Church has disappeared. The ruined patricians have kept aloof from badly remunerated ecclesiastical offices to which little renown attaches, and have left them to the ambition of the petty bourgeoisie. Cardinal Boccanera, the last prince of ancient nobility invested with the purple, received scarcely more than 30,000 lire* a year to enable him to sustain his rank, that is 22,000 lire,** the salary of his post as Camerlingo, and various small sums derived from other functions. And he would never have made both ends meet had not Donna Serafina helped him with the remnants of the former family fortune which he had long previously surrendered to his sisters and his brother. Donna Serafina and Benedetta lived apart, in their own rooms, having their own table, servants, and personal expenses. The Cardinal only had his nephew Dario with him, and he never gave a dinner or held a public reception. His greatest source of expense was his carriage, the heavy pair-horse coach, which ceremonial usage compelled him to retain, for a cardinal cannot go on foot through the streets of Rome. However, his coachman, an old family servant, spared him the necessity of keeping a groom by insisting on taking entire charge of the carriage and the two black horses, which, like himself, had grown old in the service of the Boccaneras. There were two footmen, father and son, the latter born in the house. And the cook's wife assisted in the kitchen. However, yet greater reductions had been made in the ante-rooms, where the staff, once so brilliant and numerous, was now simply composed of two petty priests, Don Vigilio, who was at once secretary, auditore, and majordomo, and Abbe Paparelli, who acted as train-bearer, chaplain, and chief usher. There, where a crowd of salaried people of all ranks had once moved to and fro, filling the vast halls with bustle and colour, one now only beheld two little black cassocks gliding noiselessly along, two unobtrusive shadows flitting about amidst the deep gloom of the lifeless rooms.

* 1,200 pounds.

** 880 pounds.

And Pierre now fully understood the haughty unconcern of the Cardinal, who suffered time to complete its work of destruction in that ancestral mansion, to which he was powerless to restore the glorious life of former times! Built for that shining life, for the sovereign display of a sixteenth-century prince, it was now deserted and empty, crumbling about the head of its last master, who had no servants left him to fill it, and would not have known how to pay for the materials which repairs would have necessitated. And so, since the modern world was hostile, since religion was no longer sovereign, since men had changed, and one was drifting into the unknown, amidst the hatred and indifference of new generations, why not allow the old world to collapse in the stubborn, motionless pride born of its ancient glory? Heroes alone died standing, without relinquishing aught of their past, preserving the same faith until their final gasp, beholding, with pain-fraught bravery and infinite sadness, the slow last agony of their divinity. And the Cardinal's tall figure, his pale, proud face, so full of sovereign despair and courage, expressed that stubborn determination to perish beneath the ruins of the old social edifice rather than change a single one of its stones.

Pierre was roused by a rustling of furtive steps, a little mouse-like trot, which made him raise his head. A door in the wall had just opened, and to his surprise there stood before him an abbe of some forty years, fat and short, looking like an old maid in a black skirt, a very old maid in fact, so numerous were the wrinkles on his flabby face. It was Abbe Paparelli, the train-bearer and usher, and on seeing Pierre he was about to question him, when Don Vigilio explained matters.

"Ah! very good, very good, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment. His Eminence will condescend to receive you, but you must wait, you must wait."

Then, with his silent rolling walk, he returned to the second ante-room, where he usually stationed himself.

Pierre did not like his face—the face of an old female devotee, whitened by celibacy, and ravaged by stern observance of the rites; and so, as Don Vigilio—his head weary and his hands burning with fever—had not resumed his work, the young man ventured to question him. Oh! Abbe Paparelli, he was a man of the liveliest faith, who from simple humility remained in a modest post in his Eminence's service. On the other hand, his Eminence was pleased to reward him for his devotion by occasionally condescending to listen to his advice.

As Don Vigilio spoke, a faint gleam of irony, a kind of veiled anger appeared in his ardent eyes. However, he continued to examine Pierre, and gradually seemed reassured, appreciating the evident frankness of this foreigner who could hardly belong to any clique. And so he ended by departing somewhat from his continual sickly distrust, and even engaged in a brief chat.

"Yes, yes," he said, "there is a deal of work sometimes, and rather hard work too. His Eminence belongs to several Congregations, the Consistorial, the Holy Office, the Index, the Rites. And all the documents concerning the business which falls to him come into my hands. I have to study each affair, prepare a report on it, clear the way, so to say. Besides which all the correspondence is carried on through me. Fortunately his Eminence is a holy man, and intrigues neither for himself nor for others, and this enables us to taste a little peace."

Pierre took a keen interest in these particulars of the life led by a prince of the Church. He learnt that the Cardinal rose at six o'clock, summer and winter alike. He said his mass in his chapel, a little room which simply contained an altar of painted wood, and which nobody but himself ever entered. His private apartments were limited to three rooms—a bed-room, dining-room, and study—all very modest and small, contrived indeed by partitioning off portions of one large hall. And he led a very retired life, exempt from all luxury, like one who is frugal and poor. At eight in the morning he drank a cup of cold milk for his breakfast. Then, when there were sittings of the Congregations to which he belonged, he attended them; otherwise he remained at home and gave audience. Dinner was served at one o'clock, and afterwards came the siesta, lasting until five in summer and until four at other seasons—a sacred moment when a servant would not have dared even to knock at the door. On awaking, if it were fine, his Eminence drove out towards the ancient Appian Way, returning at sunset when the Ave Maria began to ring. And finally, after again giving audience between seven and nine, he supped and retired into his room, where he worked all alone or went to bed. The cardinals wait upon the Pope on fixed days, two or three times each month, for purposes connected with their functions. For nearly a year, however, the Camerlingo had not been received in private audience by his Holiness, and this was a sign of disgrace, a proof of secret warfare, of which the entire black world spoke in prudent whispers.

"His Eminence is sometimes a little rough," continued Don Vigilio in a soft voice. "But you should see him smile when his niece the Contessina, of whom he is very fond, comes down to kiss him. If you have a good reception, you know, you will owe it to the Contessina."

At this moment the secretary was interrupted. A sound of voices came from the second ante-room, and forthwith he rose to his feet, and bent very low at sight of a stout man in a black cassock, red sash, and black hat, with twisted cord of red and gold, whom Abbe Paparelli was ushering in with a great display of deferential genuflections. Pierre also had risen at a sign from Don Vigilio, who found time to whisper to him, "Cardinal Sanguinetti, Prefect of the Congregation of the Index."

Meantime Abbe Paparelli was lavishing attentions on the prelate, repeating with an expression of blissful satisfaction: "Your most reverend Eminence was expected. I have orders to admit your most reverend Eminence at once. His Eminence the Grand Penitentiary is already here."

Sanguinetti, loud of voice and sonorous of tread, spoke out with sudden familiarity, "Yes, yes, I know. A number of importunate people detained me! One can never do as one desires. But I am here at last."

He was a man of sixty, squat and fat, with a round and highly coloured face distinguished by a huge nose, thick lips, and bright eyes which were always on the move. But he more particularly struck one by his active, almost turbulent, youthful vivacity, scarcely a white hair as yet showing among his brown and carefully tended locks, which fell in curls about his temples. Born at Viterbo, he had studied at the seminary there before completing his education at the Universita Gregoriana in Rome. His ecclesiastical appointments showed how rapidly he had made his way, how supple was his mind: first of all secretary to the nunciature at Lisbon; then created titular Bishop of Thebes, and entrusted with a delicate mission in Brazil; on his return appointed nuncio first at Brussels and next at Vienna; and finally raised to the cardinalate, to say nothing of the fact that he had lately secured the suburban episcopal see of Frascati.* Trained to business, having dealt with every nation in Europe, he had nothing against him but his ambition, of which he made too open a display, and his spirit of intrigue, which was ever restless. It was said that he was now one of the irreconcilables who demanded that Italy should surrender Rome, though formerly he had made advances to the Quirinal. In his wild passion to become the next Pope he rushed from one opinion to the other, giving himself no end of trouble to gain people from whom he afterwards parted. He had twice already fallen out with Leo XIII, but had deemed it politic to make his submission. In point of fact, given that he was an almost openly declared candidate to the papacy, he was wearing himself out by his perpetual efforts, dabbling in too many things, and setting too many people agog.

* Cardinals York and Howard were Bishops of Frascati.—Trans.

Pierre, however, had only seen in him the Prefect of the Congregation of the Index; and the one idea which struck him was that this man would decide the fate of his book. And so, when the Cardinal had disappeared and Abbe Paparelli had returned to the second ante-room, he could not refrain from asking Don Vigilio, "Are their Eminences Cardinal Sanguinetti and Cardinal Boccanera very intimate, then?"

An irrepressible smile contracted the secretary's lips, while his eyes gleamed with an irony which he could no longer subdue: "Very intimate—oh! no, no—they see one another when they can't do otherwise."

Then he explained that considerable deference was shown to Cardinal Boccanera's high birth, and that his colleagues often met at his residence, when, as happened to be the case that morning, any grave affair presented itself, requiring an interview apart from the usual official meetings. Cardinal Sanguinetti, he added, was the son of a petty medical man of Viterbo. "No, no," he concluded, "their Eminences are not at all intimate. It is difficult for men to agree when they have neither the same ideas nor the same character, especially too when they are in each other's way."

Don Vigilio spoke these last words in a lower tone, as if talking to himself and still retaining his sharp smile. But Pierre scarcely listened, absorbed as he was in his own worries. "Perhaps they have met to discuss some affair connected with the Index?" said he.

Don Vigilio must have known the object of the meeting. However, he merely replied that, if the Index had been in question, the meeting would have taken place at the residence of the Prefect of that Congregation. Thereupon Pierre, yielding to his impatience, was obliged to put a straight question. "You know of my affair—the affair of my book," he said. "Well, as his Eminence is a member of the Congregation, and all the documents pass through your hands, you might be able to give me some useful information. I know nothing as yet and am so anxious to know!"

At this Don Vigilio relapsed into scared disquietude. He stammered, saying that he had not seen any documents, which was true. "Nothing has yet reached us," he added; "I assure you I know nothing."

Then, as the other persisted, he signed to him to keep quiet, and again turned to his writing, glancing furtively towards the second ante-room as if he believed that Abbe Paparelli was listening. He had certainly said too much, he thought, and he made himself very small, crouching over the table, and melting, fading away in his dim corner.

Pierre again fell into a reverie, a prey to all the mystery which enveloped him—the sleepy, antique sadness of his surroundings. Long minutes went by; it was nearly eleven when the sound of a door opening and a buzz of voices roused him. Then he bowed respectfully to Cardinal Sanguinetti, who went off accompanied by another cardinal, a very thin and tall man, with a grey, bony, ascetic face. Neither of them, however, seemed even to see the petty foreign priest who bent low as they went by. They were chatting aloud in familiar fashion.

"Yes! the wind is falling; it is warmer than yesterday."

"We shall certainly have the sirocco to-morrow."

Then solemn silence again fell on the large, dim room. Don Vigilio was still writing, but his pen made no noise as it travelled over the stiff yellow paper. However, the faint tinkle of a cracked bell was suddenly heard, and Abbe Paparelli, after hastening into the throne-room for a moment, returned to summon Pierre, whom he announced in a restrained voice: "Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre Froment."

The spacious throne-room was like the other apartments, a virtual ruin. Under the fine ceiling of carved and gilded wood-work, the red wall-hangings of brocatelle, with a large palm pattern, were falling into tatters. A few holes had been patched, but long wear had streaked the dark purple of the silk—once of dazzling magnificence—with pale hues. The curiosity of the room was its old throne, an arm-chair upholstered in red silk, on which the Holy Father had sat when visiting Cardinal Pio's grand-uncle. This chair was surmounted by a canopy, likewise of red silk, under which hung the portrait of the reigning Pope. And, according to custom, the chair was turned towards the wall, to show that none might sit on it. The other furniture of the apartment was made up of sofas, arm-chairs, and chairs, with a marvellous Louis Quatorze table of gilded wood, having a top of mosaic-work representing the rape of Europa.

But at first Pierre only saw Cardinal Boccanera standing by the table which he used for writing. In his simple black cassock, with red edging and red buttons, the Cardinal seemed to him yet taller and prouder than in the portrait which showed him in ceremonial costume. There was the same curly white hair, the same long, strongly marked face, with large nose and thin lips, and the same ardent eyes, illumining the pale countenance from under bushy brows which had remained black. But the portrait did not express the lofty tranquil faith which shone in this handsome face, a complete certainty of what truth was, and an absolute determination to abide by it for ever.

Boccanera had not stirred, but with black, fixed glance remained watching his visitor's approach; and the young priest, acquainted with the usual ceremonial, knelt and kissed the large ruby which the prelate wore on his hand. However, the Cardinal immediately raised him.

"You are welcome here, my dear son. My niece spoke to me about you with so much sympathy that I am happy to receive you." With these words Pio seated himself near the table, as yet not telling Pierre to take a chair, but still examining him whilst speaking slowly and with studied politeness: "You arrived yesterday morning, did you not, and were very tired?"

"Your Eminence is too kind—yes, I was worn out, as much through emotion as fatigue. This journey is one of such gravity for me."

The Cardinal seemed indisposed to speak of serious matters so soon. "No doubt; it is a long way from Paris to Rome," he replied. "Nowadays the journey may be accomplished with fair rapidity, but formerly how interminable it was!" Then speaking yet more slowly: "I went to Paris once—oh! a long time ago, nearly fifty years ago—and then for barely a week. A large and handsome city; yes, yes, a great many people in the streets, extremely well-bred people, a nation which has accomplished great and admirable things. Even in these sad times one cannot forget that France was the eldest daughter of the Church. But since that one journey I have not left Rome—"

Then he made a gesture of quiet disdain, expressive of all he left unsaid. What was the use of journeying to a land of doubt and rebellion? Did not Rome suffice—Rome, which governed the world—the Eternal City which, when the times should be accomplished, would become the capital of the world once more?

Silently glancing at the Cardinal's lofty stature, the stature of one of the violent war-like princes of long ago, now reduced to wearing that simple cassock, Pierre deemed him superb with his proud conviction that Rome sufficed unto herself. But that stubborn resolve to remain in ignorance, that determination to take no account of other nations excepting to treat them as vassals, disquieted him when he reflected on the motives that had brought him there. And as silence had again fallen he thought it politic to approach the subject he had at heart by words of homage.

"Before taking any other steps," said he, "I desired to express my profound respect for your Eminence; for in your Eminence I place my only hope; and I beg your Eminence to be good enough to advise and guide me."

With a wave of the hand Boccanera thereupon invited Pierre to take a chair in front of him. "I certainly do not refuse you my counsel, my dear son," he replied. "I owe my counsel to every Christian who desires to do well. But it would be wrong for you to rely on my influence. I have none. I live entirely apart from others; I cannot and will not ask for anything. However, this will not prevent us from chatting." Then, approaching the question in all frankness, without the slightest artifice, like one of brave and absolute mind who fears no responsibility however great, he continued: "You have written a book, have you not?—'New Rome,' I believe—and you have come to defend this book which has been denounced to the Congregation of the Index. For my own part I have not yet read it. You will understand that I cannot read everything. I only see the works that are sent to me by the Congregation which I have belonged to since last year; and, besides, I often content myself with the reports which my secretary draws up for me. However, my niece Benedetta has read your book, and has told me that it is not lacking in interest. It first astonished her somewhat, and then greatly moved her. So I promise you that I will go through it and study the incriminated passages with the greatest care."

Pierre profited by the opportunity to begin pleading his cause. And it occurred to him that it would be best to give his references at once. "Your Eminence will realise how stupefied I was when I learnt that proceedings were being taken against my book," he said. "Monsieur le Vicomte Philibert de la Choue, who is good enough to show me some friendship, does not cease repeating that such a book is worth the best of armies to the Holy See."

"Oh! De la Choue, De la Choue!" repeated the Cardinal with a pout of good-natured disdain. "I know that De la Choue considers himself a good Catholic. He is in a slight degree our relative, as you know. And when he comes to Rome and stays here, I willingly see him, on condition however that no mention is made of certain subjects on which it would be impossible for us to agree. To tell the truth, the Catholicism preached by De la Choue—worthy, clever man though he is—his Catholicism, I say, with his corporations, his working-class clubs, his cleansed democracy and his vague socialism, is after all merely so much literature!"

This pronouncement struck Pierre, for he realised all the disdainful irony contained in it—an irony which touched himself. And so he hastened to name his other reference, whose authority he imagined to be above discussion: "His Eminence Cardinal Bergerot has been kind enough to signify his full approval of my book."

At this Boccanera's face suddenly changed. It no longer wore an expression of derisive blame, tinged with the pity that is prompted by a child's ill-considered action fated to certain failure. A flash of anger now lighted up the Cardinal's dark eyes, and a pugnacious impulse hardened his entire countenance. "In France," he slowly resumed, "Cardinal Bergerot no doubt has a reputation for great piety. We know little of him in Rome. Personally, I have only seen him once, when he came to receive his hat. And I would not therefore allow myself to judge him if his writings and actions had not recently saddened my believing soul. Unhappily, I am not the only one; you will find nobody here, of the Sacred College, who approves of his doings." Boccanera paused, then in a firm voice concluded: "Cardinal Bergerot is a Revolutionary!"

This time Pierre's surprise for a moment forced him to silence. A Revolutionary—good heavens! a Revolutionary—that gentle pastor of souls, whose charity was inexhaustible, whose one dream was that Jesus might return to earth to ensure at last the reign of peace and justice! So words did not have the same signification in all places; into what religion had he now tumbled that the faith of the poor and the humble should be looked upon as a mere insurrectional, condemnable passion? As yet unable to understand things aright, Pierre nevertheless realised that discussion would be both discourteous and futile, and his only remaining desire was to give an account of his book, explain and vindicate it. But at his first words the Cardinal interposed.

"No, no, my dear son. It would take us too long and I wish to read the passages. Besides, there is an absolute rule. All books which meddle with the faith are condemnable and pernicious. Does your book show perfect respect for dogma?"

"I believe so, and I assure your Eminence that I have had no intention of writing a work of negation."

"Good: I may be on your side if that is true. Only, in the contrary case, I have but one course to advise you, which is to withdraw your work, condemn it, and destroy it without waiting until a decision of the Index compels you to do so. Whosoever has given birth to scandal must stifle it and expiate it, even if he have to cut into his own flesh. The only duties of a priest are humility and obedience, the complete annihilation of self before the sovereign will of the Church. And, besides, why write at all? For there is already rebellion in expressing an opinion of one's own. It is always the temptation of the devil which puts a pen in an author's hand. Why, then, incur the risk of being for ever damned by yielding to the pride of intelligence and domination? Your book again, my dear son—your book is literature, literature!"

This expression again repeated was instinct with so much contempt that Pierre realised all the wretchedness that would fall upon the poor pages of his apostolate on meeting the eyes of this prince who had become a saintly man. With increasing fear and admiration he listened to him, and beheld him growing greater and greater.

"Ah! faith, my dear son, everything is in faith—perfect, disinterested faith—which believes for the sole happiness of believing! How restful it is to bow down before the mysteries without seeking to penetrate them, full of the tranquil conviction that, in accepting them, one possesses both the certain and the final! Is not the highest intellectual satisfaction that which is derived from the victory of the divine over the mind, which it disciplines, and contents so completely that it knows desire no more? And apart from that perfect equilibrium, that explanation of the unknown by the divine, no durable peace is possible for man. If one desires that truth and justice should reign upon earth, it is in God that one must place them. He that does not believe is like a battlefield, the scene of every disaster. Faith alone can tranquillise and deliver."

For an instant Pierre remained silent before the great figure rising up in front of him. At Lourdes he had only seen suffering humanity rushing thither for health of the body and consolation of the soul; but here was the intellectual believer, the mind that needs certainty, finding satisfaction, tasting the supreme enjoyment of doubting no more. He had never previously heard such a cry of joy at living in obedience without anxiety as to the morrow of death. He knew that Boccanera's youth had been somewhat stormy, traversed by acute attacks of sensuality, a flaring of the red blood of his ancestors; and he marvelled at the calm majesty which faith had at last implanted in this descendant of so violent a race, who had no passion remaining in him but that of pride.

"And yet," Pierre at last ventured to say in a timid, gentle voice, "if faith remains essential and immutable, forms change. From hour to hour evolution goes on in all things—the world changes."

"That is not true!" exclaimed the Cardinal, "the world does not change. It continually tramps over the same ground, loses itself, strays into the most abominable courses, and it continually has to be brought back into the right path. That is the truth. In order that the promises of Christ may be fulfilled, is it not necessary that the world should return to its starting point, its original innocence? Is not the end of time fixed for the day when men shall be in possession of the full truth of the Gospel? Yes, truth is in the past, and it is always to the past that one must cling if one would avoid the pitfalls which evil imaginations create. All those fine novelties, those mirages of that famous so-called progress, are simply traps and snares of the eternal tempter, causes of perdition and death. Why seek any further, why constantly incur the risk of error, when for eighteen hundred years the truth has been known? Truth! why it is in Apostolic and Roman Catholicism as created by a long succession of generations! What madness to desire to change it when so many lofty minds, so many pious souls have made of it the most admirable of monuments, the one instrument of order in this world, and of salvation in the next!"

Pierre, whose heart had contracted, refrained from further protest, for he could no longer doubt that he had before him an implacable adversary of his most cherished ideas. Chilled by a covert fear, as though he felt a faint breath, as of a distant wind from a land of ruins, pass over his face, bringing with it the mortal cold of a sepulchre, he bowed respectfully whilst the Cardinal, rising to his full height, continued in his obstinate voice, resonant with proud courage: "And if Catholicism, as its enemies pretend, be really stricken unto death, it must die standing and in all its glorious integrality. You hear me, Monsieur l'Abbe—not one concession, not one surrender, not a single act of cowardice! Catholicism is such as it is, and cannot be otherwise. No modification of the divine certainty, the entire truth, is possible. The removal of the smallest stone from the edifice could only prove a cause of instability. Is this not evident? You cannot save old houses by attacking them with the pickaxe under pretence of decorating them. You only enlarge the fissures. Even if it were true that Rome were on the eve of falling into dust, the only result of all the repairing and patching would be to hasten the catastrophe. And instead of a noble death, met unflinchingly, we should then behold the basest of agonies, the death throes of a coward who struggles and begs for mercy! For my part I wait. I am convinced that all that people say is but so much horrible falsehood, that Catholicism has never been firmer, that it imbibes eternity from the one and only source of life. But should the heavens indeed fall, on that day I should be here, amidst these old and crumbling walls, under these old ceilings whose beams are being devoured by the worms, and it is here, erect, among the ruins, that I should meet my end, repeating my credo for the last time."

His final words fell more slowly, full of haughty sadness, whilst with a sweeping gesture he waved his arms towards the old, silent, deserted palace around him, whence life was withdrawing day by day. Had an involuntary presentiment come to him, did the faint cold breath from the ruins also fan his own cheeks? All the neglect into which the vast rooms had fallen was explained by his words; and a superb, despondent grandeur enveloped this prince and cardinal, this uncompromising Catholic who, withdrawing into the dim half-light of the past, braved with a soldier's heart the inevitable downfall of the olden world.

Deeply impressed, Pierre was about to take his leave when, to his surprise, a little door opened in the hangings. "What is it? Can't I be left in peace for a moment?" exclaimed Boccanera with sudden impatience.

Nevertheless, Abbe Paparelli, fat and sleek, glided into the room without the faintest sign of emotion. And he whispered a few words in the ear of the Cardinal, who, on seeing him, had become calm again. "What curate?" asked Boccanera. "Oh! yes, Santobono, the curate of Frascati. I know—tell him I cannot see him just now."

Paparelli, however, again began whispering in his soft voice, though not in so low a key as previously, for some of his words could be overheard. The affair was urgent, the curate was compelled to return home, and had only a word or two to say. And then, without awaiting consent, the train-bearer ushered in the visitor, a protege of his, whom he had left just outside the little door. And for his own part he withdrew with the tranquillity of a retainer who, whatever the modesty of his office, knows himself to be all powerful.

Pierre, who was momentarily forgotten, looked at the visitor—a big fellow of a priest, the son of a peasant evidently, and still near to the soil. He had an ungainly, bony figure, huge feet and knotted hands, with a seamy tanned face lighted by extremely keen black eyes. Five and forty and still robust, his chin and cheeks bristling, and his cassock, overlarge, hanging loosely about his big projecting bones, he suggested a bandit in disguise. Still there was nothing base about him; the expression of his face was proud. And in one hand he carried a small wicker basket carefully covered over with fig-leaves.

Santobono at once bent his knees and kissed the Cardinal's ring, but with hasty unconcern, as though only some ordinary piece of civility were in question. Then, with that commingling of respect and familiarity which the little ones of the world often evince towards the great, he said, "I beg your most reverend Eminence's forgiveness for having insisted. But there were people waiting, and I should not have been received if my old friend Paparelli had not brought me by way of that door. Oh! I have a very great service to ask of your Eminence, a real service of the heart. But first of all may I be allowed to offer your Eminence a little present?"

The Cardinal listened with a grave expression. He had been well acquainted with Santobono in the years when he had spent the summer at Frascati, at a princely residence which the Boccaneras had possessed there—a villa rebuilt in the seventeenth century, surrounded by a wonderful park, whose famous terrace overlooked the Campagna, stretching far and bare like the sea. This villa, however, had since been sold, and on some vineyards, which had fallen to Benedetta's share, Count Prada, prior to the divorce proceedings, had begun to erect quite a district of little pleasure houses. In former times, when walking out, the Cardinal had condescended to enter and rest in the dwelling of Santobono, who officiated at an antique chapel dedicated to St. Mary of the Fields, without the town. The priest had his home in a half-ruined building adjoining this chapel, and the charm of the place was a walled garden which he cultivated himself with the passion of a true peasant.

"As is my rule every year," said he, placing his basket on the table, "I wished that your Eminence might taste my figs. They are the first of the season. I gathered them expressly this morning. You used to be so fond of them, your Eminence, when you condescended to gather them from the tree itself. You were good enough to tell me that there wasn't another tree in the world that produced such fine figs."

The Cardinal could not help smiling. He was indeed very fond of figs, and Santobono spoke truly: his fig-tree was renowned throughout the district. "Thank you, my dear Abbe," said Boccanera, "you remember my little failings. Well, and what can I do for you?"

Again he became grave, for, in former times, there had been unpleasant discussions between him and the curate, a lack of agreement which had angered him. Born at Nemi, in the core of a fierce district, Santobono belonged to a violent family, and his eldest brother had died of a stab. He himself had always professed ardently patriotic opinions. It was said that he had all but taken up arms for Garibaldi; and, on the day when the Italians had entered Rome, force had been needed to prevent him from raising the flag of Italian unity above his roof. His passionate dream was to behold Rome mistress of the world, when the Pope and the King should have embraced and made cause together. Thus the Cardinal looked on him as a dangerous revolutionary, a renegade who imperilled Catholicism.

"Oh! what your Eminence can do for me, what your Eminence can do if only condescending and willing!" repeated Santobono in an ardent voice, clasping his big knotty hands. And then, breaking off, he inquired, "Did not his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti explain my affair to your most reverend Eminence?"

"No, the Cardinal simply advised me of your visit, saying that you had something to ask of me."

Whilst speaking Boccanera's face had clouded over, and it was with increased sternness of manner that he again waited. He was aware that the priest had become Sanguinetti's "client" since the latter had been in the habit of spending weeks together at his suburban see of Frascati. Walking in the shadow of every cardinal who is a candidate to the papacy, there are familiars of low degree who stake the ambition of their life on the possibility of that cardinal's election. If he becomes Pope some day, if they themselves help him to the throne, they enter the great pontifical family in his train. It was related that Sanguinetti had once already extricated Santobono from a nasty difficulty: the priest having one day caught a marauding urchin in the act of climbing his wall, had beaten the little fellow with such severity that he had ultimately died of it. However, to Santobono's credit it must be added that his fanatical devotion to the Cardinal was largely based upon the hope that he would prove the Pope whom men awaited, the Pope who would make Italy the sovereign nation of the world.

"Well, this is my misfortune," he said. "Your Eminence knows my brother Agostino, who was gardener at the villa for two years in your Eminence's time. He is certainly a very pleasant and gentle young fellow, of whom nobody has ever complained. And so it is hard to understand how such an accident can have happened to him, but it seems that he has killed a man with a knife at Genzano, while walking in the street in the evening. I am dreadfully distressed about it, and would willingly give two fingers of my right hand to extricate him from prison. However, it occurred to me that your Eminence would not refuse me a certificate stating that Agostino was formerly in your Eminence's service, and that your Eminence was always well pleased with his quiet disposition."

But the Cardinal flatly protested: "I was not at all pleased with Agostino. He was wildly violent, and I had to dismiss him precisely because he was always quarrelling with the other servants."

"Oh! how grieved I am to hear your Eminence say that! So it is true, then, my poor little Agostino's disposition has really changed! Still there is always a way out of a difficulty, is there not? You can still give me a certificate, first arranging the wording of it. A certificate from your Eminence would have such a favourable effect upon the law officers."

"No doubt," replied Boccanera; "I can understand that, but I will give no certificate."

"What! does your most reverend Eminence refuse my prayer?"

"Absolutely! I know that you are a priest of perfect morality, that you discharge the duties of your ministry with strict punctuality, and that you would be deserving of high commendation were it not for your political fancies. Only your fraternal affection is now leading you astray. I cannot tell a lie to please you."

Santobono gazed at him in real stupefaction, unable to understand that a prince, an all-powerful cardinal, should be influenced by such petty scruples, when the entire question was a mere knife thrust, the most commonplace and frequent of incidents in the yet wild land of the old Roman castles.

"A lie! a lie!" he muttered; "but surely it isn't lying just to say what is good of a man, leaving out all the rest, especially when a man has good points as Agostino certainly has. In a certificate, too, everything depends on the words one uses."

He stubbornly clung to that idea; he could not conceive that a person should refuse to soften the rigour of justice by an ingenious presentation of the facts. However, on acquiring a certainty that he would obtain nothing, he made a gesture of despair, his livid face assuming an expression of violent rancour, whilst his black eyes flamed with restrained passion.

"Well, well! each looks on truth in his own way," he said. "I shall go back to tell his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti. And I beg your Eminence not to be displeased with me for having disturbed your Eminence to no purpose. By the way, perhaps the figs are not yet quite ripe; but I will take the liberty to bring another basketful towards the end of the season, when they will be quite nice and sweet. A thousand thanks and a thousand felicities to your most reverend Eminence."

Santobono went off backwards, his big bony figure bending double with repeated genuflections. Pierre, whom the scene had greatly interested, in him beheld a specimen of the petty clergy of Rome and its environs, of whom people had told him before his departure from Paris. This was not the scagnozzo, the wretched famished priest whom some nasty affair brings from the provinces, who seeks his daily bread on the pavements of Rome; one of the herd of begowned beggars searching for a livelihood among the crumbs of Church life, voraciously fighting for chance masses, and mingling with the lowest orders in taverns of the worst repute. Nor was this the country priest of distant parts, a man of crass ignorance and superstition, a peasant among the peasants, treated as an equal by his pious flock, which is careful not to mistake him for the Divinity, and which, whilst kneeling in all humility before the parish saint, does not bend before the man who from that saint derives his livelihood. At Frascati the officiating minister of a little church may receive a stipend of some nine hundred lire a year,* and he has only bread and meat to buy if his garden yields him wine and fruit and vegetables. This one, Santobono, was not without education; he knew a little theology and a little history, especially the history of the past grandeur of Rome, which had inflamed his patriotic heart with the mad dream that universal domination would soon fall to the portion of renascent Rome, the capital of united Italy. But what an insuperable distance still remained between this petty Roman clergy, often very worthy and intelligent, and the high clergy, the high dignitaries of the Vatican! Nobody that was not at least a prelate seemed to count.

* About 36 pounds. One is reminded of Goldsmith's line: "And
passing rich with forty pounds a year."—Trans.

"A thousand thanks to your most reverend Eminence, and may success attend all your Eminence's desires."

With these words Santobono finally disappeared, and the Cardinal returned to Pierre, who also bowed preparatory to taking his leave.

"To sum up the matter, Monsieur l'Abbe," said Boccanera, "the affair of your book presents certain difficulties. As I have told you, I have no precise information, I have seen no documents. But knowing that my niece took an interest in you, I said a few words on the subject to Cardinal Sanguinetti, the Prefect of the Index, who was here just now. And he knows little more than I do, for nothing has yet left the Secretary's hands. Still he told me that the denunciation emanated from personages of rank and influence, and applied to numerous pages of your work, in which it was said there were passages of the most deplorable character as regards both discipline and dogma."

Greatly moved by the idea that he had hidden foes, secret adversaries who pursued him in the dark, the young priest responded: "Oh! denounced, denounced! If your Eminence only knew how that word pains my heart! And denounced, too, for offences which were certainly involuntary, since my one ardent desire was the triumph of the Church! All I can do, then, is to fling myself at the feet of the Holy Father and entreat him to hear my defence."

Boccanera suddenly became very grave again. A stern look rested on his lofty brow as he drew his haughty figure to its full height. "His Holiness," said he, "can do everything, even receive you, if such be his good pleasure, and absolve you also. But listen to me. I again advise you to withdraw your book yourself, to destroy it, simply and courageously, before embarking in a struggle in which you will reap the shame of being overwhelmed. Reflect on that."

Pierre, however, had no sooner spoken of the Pope than he had regretted it, for he realised that an appeal to the sovereign authority was calculated to wound the Cardinal's feelings. Moreover, there was no further room for doubt. Boccanera would be against his book, and the utmost that he could hope for was to gain his neutrality by bringing pressure to bear on him through those about him. At the same time he had found the Cardinal very plain spoken, very frank, far removed from all the secret intriguing in which the affair of his book was involved, as he now began to realise; and so it was with deep respect and genuine admiration for the prelate's strong and lofty character that he took leave of him.

"I am infinitely obliged to your Eminence," he said, "and I promise that I will carefully reflect upon all that your Eminence has been kind enough to say to me."

On returning to the ante-room, Pierre there found five or six persons who had arrived during his audience, and were now waiting. There was a bishop, a domestic prelate, and two old ladies, and as he drew near to Don Vigilio before retiring, he was surprised to find him conversing with a tall, fair young fellow, a Frenchman, who, also in astonishment, exclaimed, "What! are you here in Rome, Monsieur l'Abbe?"

For a moment Pierre had hesitated. "Ah! I must ask your pardon, Monsieur Narcisse Habert," he replied, "I did not at first recognise you! It was the less excusable as I knew that you had been an attache at our embassy here ever since last year."

Tall, slim, and elegant of appearance, Narcisse Habert had a clear complexion, with eyes of a bluish, almost mauvish, hue, a fair frizzy beard, and long curling fair hair cut short over the forehead in the Florentine fashion. Of a wealthy family of militant Catholics, chiefly members of the bar or bench, he had an uncle in the diplomatic profession, and this had decided his own career. Moreover, a place at Rome was marked out for him, for he there had powerful connections. He was a nephew by marriage of Cardinal Sarno, whose sister had married another of his uncles, a Paris notary; and he was also cousin german of Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, a Cameriere segreto, and son of one of his aunts, who had married an Italian colonel. And in some measure for these reasons he had been attached to the embassy to the Holy See, his superiors tolerating his somewhat fantastic ways, his everlasting passion for art which sent him wandering hither and thither through Rome. He was moreover very amiable and extremely well-bred; and it occasionally happened, as was the case that morning, that with his weary and somewhat mysterious air he came to speak to one or another of the cardinals on some real matter of business in the ambassador's name.

So as to converse with Pierre at his ease, he drew him into the deep embrasure of one of the windows. "Ah! my dear Abbe, how pleased I am to see you!" said he. "You must remember what pleasant chats we had when we met at Cardinal Bergerot's! I told you about some paintings which you were to see for your book, some miniatures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. And now, you know, I mean to take possession of you. I'll show you Rome as nobody else could show it to you. I've seen and explored everything. Ah! there are treasures, such treasures! But in truth there is only one supreme work; one always comes back to one's particular passion. The Botticelli in the Sixtine Chapel—ah, the Botticelli!"

His voice died away, and he made a faint gesture as if overcome by admiration. Then Pierre had to promise that he would place himself in his hands and accompany him to the Sixtine Chapel. "You know why I am here," at last said the young priest. "Proceedings have been taken against my book; it has been denounced to the Congregation of the Index."

"Your book! is it possible?" exclaimed Narcisse: "a book like that with pages recalling the delightful St. Francis of Assisi!" And thereupon he obligingly placed himself at Pierre's disposal. "But our ambassador will be very useful to you," he said. "He is the best man in the world, of charming affability, and full of the old French spirit. I will present you to him this afternoon or to-morrow morning at the latest; and since you desire an immediate audience with the Pope, he will endeavour to obtain one for you. His position naturally designates him as your intermediary. Still, I must confess that things are not always easily managed. Although the Holy Father is very fond of him, there are times when his Excellency fails, for the approaches are so extremely intricate."

Pierre had not thought of employing the ambassador's good offices, for he had naively imagined that an accused priest who came to defend himself would find every door open. However, he was delighted with Narcisse's offer, and thanked him as warmly as if the audience were already obtained.

"Besides," the young man continued, "if we encounter any difficulties I have relatives at the Vatican, as you know. I don't mean my uncle the Cardinal, who would be of no use to us, for he never stirs out of his office at the Propaganda, and will never apply for anything. But my cousin, Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, is very obliging, and he lives in intimacy with the Pope, his duties requiring his constant attendance on him. So, if necessary, I will take you to see him, and he will no doubt find a means of procuring you an interview, though his extreme prudence keeps him perpetually afraid of compromising himself. However, it's understood, you may rely on me in every respect."

"Ah! my dear sir," exclaimed Pierre, relieved and happy, "I heartily accept your offer. You don't know what balm your words have brought me; for ever since my arrival everybody has been discouraging me, and you are the first to restore my strength by looking at things in the true French way."

Then, lowering his voice, he told the attache of his interview with Cardinal Boccanera, of his conviction that the latter would not help him, of the unfavourable information which had been given by Cardinal Sanguinetti, and of the rivalry which he had divined between the two prelates. Narcisse listened, smiling, and in his turn began to gossip confidentially. The rivalry which Pierre had mentioned, the premature contest for the tiara which Sanguinetti and Boccanera were waging, impelled to it by a furious desire to become the next Pope, had for a long time been revolutionising the black world. There was incredible intricacy in the depths of the affair; none could exactly tell who was pulling the strings, conducting the vast intrigue. As regards generalities it was simply known that Boccanera represented absolutism—the Church freed from all compromises with modern society, and waiting in immobility for the Deity to triumph over Satan, for Rome to be restored to the Holy Father, and for repentant Italy to perform penance for its sacrilege; whereas Sanguinetti, extremely politic and supple, was reported to harbour bold and novel ideas: permission to vote to be granted to all true Catholics,* a majority to be gained by this means in the Legislature; then, as a fatal corollary, the downfall of the House of Savoy, and the proclamation of a kind of republican federation of all the former petty States of Italy under the august protectorate of the Pope. On the whole, the struggle was between these two antagonistic elements—the first bent on upholding the Church by a rigorous maintenance of the old traditions, and the other predicting the fall of the Church if it did not follow the bent of the coming century. But all was steeped in so much mystery that people ended by thinking that, if the present Pope should live a few years longer, his successor would certainly be neither Boccanera nor Sanguinetti.

* Since the occupation of Rome by the Italian authorities, the
supporters of the Church, obedient to the prohibition of the
Vatican, have abstained from taking part in the political
elections, this being their protest against the new order of
things which they do not recognise. Various attempts have been
made, however, to induce the Pope to give them permission to
vote, many members of the Roman aristocracy considering the
present course impolitic and even harmful to the interests of
the Church.—Trans.

All at once Pierre interrupted Narcisse: "And Monsignor Nani, do you know him? I spoke with him yesterday evening. And there he is coming in now!"

Nani was indeed just entering the ante-room with his usual smile on his amiable pink face. His cassock of fine texture, and his sash of violet silk shone with discreet soft luxury. And he showed himself very amiable to Abbe Paparelli, who, accompanying him in all humility, begged him to be kind enough to wait until his Eminence should be able to receive him.

"Oh! Monsignor Nani," muttered Narcisse, becoming serious, "he is a man whom it is advisable to have for a friend."

Then, knowing Nani's history, he related it in an undertone. Born at Venice, of a noble but ruined family which had produced heroes, Nani, after first studying under the Jesuits, had come to Rome to perfect himself in philosophy and theology at the Collegio Romano, which was then also under Jesuit management. Ordained when three and twenty, he had at once followed a nuncio to Bavaria as private secretary; and then had gone as auditore to the nunciatures of Brussels and Paris, in which latter city he had lived for five years. Everything seemed to predestine him to diplomacy, his brilliant beginnings and his keen and encyclopaedical intelligence; but all at once he had been recalled to Rome, where he was soon afterwards appointed Assessor to the Holy Office. It was asserted at the time that this was done by the Pope himself, who, being well acquainted with Nani, and desirous of having a person he could depend upon at the Holy Office, had given instructions for his recall, saying that he could render far more services at Rome than abroad. Already a domestic prelate, Nani had also lately become a Canon of St. Peter's and an apostolic prothonotary, with the prospect of obtaining a cardinal's hat whenever the Pope should find some other favourite who would please him better as assessor.

"Oh, Monsignor Nani!" continued Narcisse. "He's a superior man, thoroughly well acquainted with modern Europe, and at the same time a very saintly priest, a sincere believer, absolutely devoted to the Church, with the substantial faith of an intelligent politician—a belief different, it is true, from the narrow gloomy theological faith which we know so well in France. And this is one of the reasons why you will hardly understand things here at first. The Roman prelates leave the Deity in the sanctuary and reign in His name, convinced that Catholicism is the human expression of the government of God, the only perfect and eternal government, beyond the pales of which nothing but falsehood and social danger can be found. While we in our country lag behind, furiously arguing whether there be a God or not, they do not admit that God's existence can be doubted, since they themselves are his delegated ministers; and they entirely devote themselves to playing their parts as ministers whom none can dispossess, exercising their power for the greatest good of humanity, and devoting all their intelligence, all their energy to maintaining themselves as the accepted masters of the nations. As for Monsignor Nani, after being mixed up in the politics of the whole world, he has for ten years been discharging the most delicate functions in Rome, taking part in the most varied and most important affairs. He sees all the foreigners who come to Rome, knows everything, has a hand in everything. Add to this that he is extremely discreet and amiable, with a modesty which seems perfect, though none can tell whether, with his light silent footstep, he is not really marching towards the highest ambition, the purple of sovereignty."

"Another candidate for the tiara," thought Pierre, who had listened passionately; for this man Nani interested him, caused him an instinctive disquietude, as though behind his pink and smiling face he could divine an infinity of obscure things. At the same time, however, the young priest but ill understood his friend, for he again felt bewildered by all this strange Roman world, so different from what he had expected.

Nani had perceived the two young men and came towards them with his hand cordially outstretched "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, I am happy to meet you again. I won't ask you if you have slept well, for people always sleep well at Rome. Good-day, Monsieur Habert; your health has kept good I hope, since I met you in front of Bernini's Santa Teresa, which you admire so much.* I see that you know one another. That is very nice. I must tell you, Monsieur l'Abbe, that Monsieur Habert is a passionate lover of our city; he will be able to show you all its finest sights."

* The allusion is to a statue representing St. Theresa in ecstasy,
with the Angel of Death descending to transfix her with his dart.
It stands in a transept of Sta. Maria della Vittoria.—Trans.

Then, in his affectionate way, he at once asked for information respecting Pierre's interview with the Cardinal. He listened attentively to the young man's narrative, nodding his head at certain passages, and occasionally restraining his sharp smile. The Cardinal's severity and Pierre's conviction that he would accord him no support did not at all astonish Nani. It seemed as if he had expected that result. However, on hearing that Cardinal Sanguinetti had been there that morning, and had pronounced the affair of the book to be very serious, he appeared to lose his self-control for a moment, for he spoke out with sudden vivacity:

"It can't be helped, my dear child, my intervention came too late. Directly I heard of the proceedings I went to his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti to tell him that the result would be an immense advertisement for your book. Was it sensible? What was the use of it? We know that you are inclined to be carried away by your ideas, that you are an enthusiast, and are prompt to do battle. So what advantage should we gain by embarrassing ourselves with the revolt of a young priest who might wage war against us with a book of which some thousands of copies have been sold already? For my part I desired that nothing should be done. And I must say that the Cardinal, who is a man of sense, was of the same mind. He raised his arms to heaven, went into a passion, and exclaimed that he was never consulted, that the blunder was already committed beyond recall, and that it was impossible to prevent process from taking its course since the matter had already been brought before the Congregation, in consequence of denunciations from authoritative sources, based on the gravest motives. Briefly, as he said, the blunder was committed, and I had to think of something else."

All at once Nani paused. He had just noticed that Pierre's ardent eyes were fixed upon his own, striving to penetrate his meaning. A faint flush then heightened the pinkiness of his complexion, whilst in an easy way he continued, unwilling to reveal how annoyed he was at having said too much: "Yes, I thought of helping you with all the little influence I possess, in order to extricate you from the worries in which this affair will certainly land you."

An impulse of revolt was stirring Pierre, who vaguely felt that he was perhaps being made game of. Why should he not be free to declare his faith, which was so pure, so free from personal considerations, so full of glowing Christian charity? "Never," said he, "will I withdraw; never will I myself suppress my book, as I am advised to do. It would be an act of cowardice and falsehood, for I regret nothing, I disown nothing. If I believe that my book brings a little truth to light I cannot destroy it without acting criminally both towards myself and towards others. No, never! You hear me—never!"

Silence fell. But almost immediately he resumed: "It is at the knees of the Holy Father that I desire to make that declaration. He will understand me, he will approve me."

Nani no longer smiled; henceforth his face remained as it were closed. He seemed to be studying the sudden violence of the young priest with curiosity; then sought to calm him with his own tranquil kindliness. "No doubt, no doubt," said he. "There is certainly great sweetness in obedience and humility. Still I can understand that, before anything else, you should desire to speak to his Holiness. And afterwards you will see—is that not so?—you will see—"

Then he evinced a lively interest in the suggested application for an audience. He expressed keen regret that Pierre had not forwarded that application from Paris, before even coming to Rome: in that course would have rested the best chance of a favourable reply. Bother of any kind was not liked at the Vatican, and if the news of the young priest's presence in Rome should only spread abroad, and the motives of his journey be discussed, all would be lost. Then, on learning that Narcisse had offered to present Pierre to the French ambassador, Nani seemed full of anxiety, and deprecated any such proceeding: "No, no! don't do that—it would be most imprudent. In the first place you would run the risk of embarrassing the ambassador, whose position is always delicate in affairs of this kind. And then, too, if he failed—and my fear is that he might fail—yes, if he failed it would be all over; you would no longer have the slightest chance of obtaining an audience by any other means. For the Vatican would not like to hurt the ambassador's feelings by yielding to other influence after resisting his."

Pierre anxiously glanced at Narcisse, who wagged his head, embarrassed and hesitating. "The fact is," the attache at last murmured, "we lately solicited an audience for a high French personage and it was refused, which was very unpleasant for us. Monsignor is right. We must keep our ambassador in reserve, and only utilise him when we have exhausted all other means." Then, noticing Pierre's disappointment, he added obligingly: "Our first visit therefore shall be for my cousin at the Vatican."

Nani, his attention again roused, looked at the young man in astonishment. "At the Vatican? You have a cousin there?"

"Why, yes—Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo."

"Gamba! Gamba! Yes, yes, excuse me, I remember now. Ah! so you thought of Gamba to bring influence to bear on his Holiness? That's an idea, no doubt; one must see—one must see."

He repeated these words again and again as if to secure time to see into the matter himself, to weigh the pros and cons of the suggestion. Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo was a worthy man who played no part at the Papal Court, whose nullity indeed had become a byword at the Vatican. His childish stories, however, amused the Pope, whom he greatly flattered, and who was fond of leaning on his arm while walking in the gardens. It was during these strolls that Gamba easily secured all sorts of little favours. However, he was a remarkable poltroon, and had such an intense fear of losing his influence that he never risked a request without having convinced himself by long meditation that no possible harm could come to him through it.

"Well, do you know, the idea is not a bad one," Nani at last declared. "Yes, yes, Gamba can secure the audience for you, if he is willing. I will see him myself and explain the matter."

At the same time Nani did not cease advising extreme caution. He even ventured to say that it was necessary to be on one's guard with the papal entourage, for, alas! it was a fact his Holiness was so good, and had such a blind faith in the goodness of others, that he had not always chosen his familiars with the critical care which he ought to have displayed. Thus one never knew to what sort of man one might be applying, or in what trap one might be setting one's foot. Nani even allowed it to be understood that on no account ought any direct application to be made to his Eminence the Secretary of State, for even his Eminence was not a free agent, but found himself encompassed by intrigues of such intricacy that his best intentions were paralysed. And as Nani went on discoursing in this fashion, in a very gentle, extremely unctuous manner, the Vatican appeared like some enchanted castle, guarded by jealous and treacherous dragons—a castle where one must not take a step, pass through a doorway, risk a limb, without having carefully assured oneself that one would not leave one's whole body there to be devoured.

Pierre continued listening, feeling colder and colder at heart, and again sinking into uncertainty. "Mon Dieu!" he exclaimed, "I shall never know how to act. You discourage me, Monsignor."

At this Nani's cordial smile reappeared. "I, my dear child? I should be sorry to do so. I only want to repeat to you that you must wait and do nothing. Avoid all feverishness especially. There is no hurry, I assure you, for it was only yesterday that a consultore was chosen to report upon your book, so you have a good full month before you. Avoid everybody, live in such a way that people shall be virtually ignorant of your existence, visit Rome in peace and quietness—that is the best course you can adopt to forward your interests." Then, taking one of the priest's hands between both his own, so aristocratic, soft, and plump, he added: "You will understand that I have my reasons for speaking to you like this. I should have offered my own services; I should have made it a point of honour to take you straight to his Holiness, had I thought it advisable. But I do not wish to mix myself up in the matter at this stage; I realise only too well that at the present moment we should simply make sad work of it. Later on—you hear me—later on, in the event of nobody else succeeding, I myself will obtain you an audience; I formally promise it. But meanwhile, I entreat you, refrain from using those words 'a new religion,' which, unfortunately, occur in your book, and which I heard you repeat again only last night. There can be no new religion, my dear child; there is but one eternal religion, which is beyond all surrender and compromise—the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion. And at the same time leave your Paris friends to themselves. Don't rely too much on Cardinal Bergerot, whose lofty piety is not sufficiently appreciated in Rome. I assure you that I am speaking to you as a friend."

Then, seeing how disabled Pierre appeared to be, half overcome already, no longer knowing in what direction to begin his campaign, he again strove to comfort him: "Come, come, things will right themselves; everything will end for the best, both for the welfare of the Church and your own. And now you must excuse me, I must leave you; I shall not be able to see his Eminence to-day, for it is impossible for me to wait any longer."

Abbe Paparelli, whom Pierre had noticed prowling around with his ears cocked, now hastened forward and declared to Monsignor Nani that there were only two persons to be received before him. But the prelate very graciously replied that he would come back again at another time, for the affair which he wished to lay before his Eminence was in no wise pressing. Then he withdrew, courteously bowing to everybody.

Narcisse Habert's turn came almost immediately afterwards. However, before entering the throne-room he pressed Pierre's hand, repeating, "So it is understood. I will go to see my cousin at the Vatican to-morrow, and directly I get a reply I will let you know. We shall meet again soon I hope."

It was now past twelve o'clock, and the only remaining visitor was one of the two old ladies who seemed to have fallen asleep. At his little secretarial table Don Vigilio still sat covering huge sheets of yellow paper with fine handwriting, from which he only lifted his eyes at intervals to glance about him distrustfully, and make sure that nothing threatened him.

In the mournful silence which fell around, Pierre lingered for yet another moment in the deep embrasure of the window. Ah! what anxiety consumed his poor, tender, enthusiastic heart! On leaving Paris things had seemed so simple, so natural to him! He was unjustly accused, and he started off to defend himself, arrived and flung himself at the feet of the Holy Father, who listened to him indulgently. Did not the Pope personify living religion, intelligence to understand, justice based upon truth? And was he not, before aught else, the Father, the delegate of divine forgiveness and mercy, with arms outstretched towards all the children of the Church, even the guilty ones? Was it not meet, then, that he should leave his door wide open so that the humblest of his sons might freely enter to relate their troubles, confess their transgressions, explain their conduct, imbibe comfort from the source of eternal loving kindness? And yet on the very first day of his, Pierre's, arrival, the doors closed upon him with a bang; he felt himself sinking into a hostile sphere, full of traps and pitfalls. One and all cried out to him "Beware!" as if he were incurring the greatest dangers in setting one foot before the other. His desire to see the Pope became an extraordinary pretension, so difficult of achievement that it set the interests and passions and influences of the whole Vatican agog. And there was endless conflicting advice, long-discussed manoeuvring, all the strategy of generals leading an army to victory, and fresh complications ever arising in the midst of a dim stealthy swarming of intrigues. Ah! good Lord! how different all this was from the charitable reception that Pierre had anticipated: the pastor's house standing open beside the high road for the admission of all the sheep of the flock, both those that were docile and those that had gone astray.

That which began to frighten Pierre, however, was the evil, the wickedness, which he could divine vaguely stirring in the gloom: Cardinal Bergerot suspected, dubbed a Revolutionary, deemed so compromising that he, Pierre, was advised not to mention his name again! The young priest once more saw Cardinal Boccanera's pout of disdain while speaking of his colleague. And then Monsignor Nani had warned him not to repeat those words "a new religion," as if it were not clear to everybody that they simply signified the return of Catholicism to the primitive purity of Christianity! Was that one of the crimes denounced to the Congregation of the Index? He had begun to suspect who his accusers were, and felt alarmed, for he was now conscious of secret subterranean plotting, a great stealthy effort to strike him down and suppress his work. All that surrounded him became suspicious. If he listened to advice and temporised, it was solely to follow the same politic course as his adversaries, to learn to know them before acting. He would spend a few days in meditation, in surveying and studying that black world of Rome which to him had proved so unexpected. But, at the same time, in the revolt of his apostle-like faith, he swore, even as he had said to Nani, that he would never yield, never change either a page or a line of his book, but maintain it in its integrity in the broad daylight as the unshakable testimony of his belief. Even were the book condemned by the Index, he would not tender submission, withdraw aught of it. And should it become necessary he would quit the Church, he would go even as far as schism, continuing to preach the new religion and writing a new book, Real Rome, such as he now vaguely began to espy.

However, Don Vigilio had ceased writing, and gazed so fixedly at Pierre that the latter at last stepped up to him politely in order to take leave. And then the secretary, yielding, despite his fears, to a desire to confide in him, murmured, "He came simply on your account, you know; he wanted to ascertain the result of your interview with his Eminence."

It was not necessary for Don Vigilio to mention Nani by name; Pierre understood. "Really, do you think so?" he asked.

"Oh! there is no doubt of it. And if you take my advice you will do what he desires with a good grace, for it is absolutely certain that you will do it later on."

These words brought Pierre's disquietude and exasperation to a climax. He went off with a gesture of defiance. They would see if he would ever yield.

The three ante-rooms which he again crossed appeared to him blacker, emptier, more lifeless than ever. In the second one Abbe Paparelli saluted him with a little silent bow; in the first the sleepy lackey did not even seem to see him. A spider was weaving its web between the tassels of the great red hat under the baldacchino. Would not the better course have been to set the pick at work amongst all that rotting past, now crumbling into dust, so that the sunlight might stream in freely and restore to the purified soil the fruitfulness of youth?

PART II.

IV.

ON the afternoon of that same day Pierre, having leisure before him, at once thought of beginning his peregrinations through Rome by a visit on which he had set his heart. Almost immediately after the publication of "New Rome" he had been deeply moved and interested by a letter addressed to him from the Eternal City by old Count Orlando Prada, the hero of Italian independence and reunion, who, although unacquainted with him, had written spontaneously after a first hasty perusal of his book. And the letter had been a flaming protest, a cry of the patriotic faith still young in the heart of that aged man, who accused him of having forgotten Italy and claimed Rome, the new Rome, for the country which was at last free and united. Correspondence had ensued, and the priest, while clinging to his dream of Neo-Catholicism saving the world, had from afar grown attached to the man who wrote to him with such glowing love of country and freedom. He had eventually informed him of his journey, and promised to call upon him. But the hospitality which he had accepted at the Boccanera mansion now seemed to him somewhat of an impediment; for after Benedetta's kindly, almost affectionate, greeting, he felt that he could not, on the very first day and with out warning her, sally forth to visit the father of the man from whom she had fled and from whom she now asked the Church to part her for ever. Moreover, old Orlando was actually living with his son in a little palazzo which the latter had erected at the farther end of the Via Venti Settembre.

Before venturing on any step Pierre resolved to confide in the Contessina herself; and this seemed the easier as Viscount Philibert de la Choue had told him that the young woman still retained a filial feeling, mingled with admiration, for the old hero. And indeed, at the very first words which he uttered after lunch, Benedetta promptly retorted: "But go, Monsieur l'Abbe, go at once! Old Orlando, you know, is one of our national glories—you must not be surprised to hear me call him by his Christian name. All Italy does so, from pure affection and gratitude. For my part I grew up among people who hated him, who likened him to Satan. It was only later that I learned to know him, and then I loved him, for he is certainly the most just and gentle man in the world."

She had begun to smile, but timid tears were moistening her eyes at the recollection, no doubt, of the year of suffering she had spent in her husband's house, where her only peaceful hours had been those passed with the old man. And in a lower and somewhat tremulous voice she added: "As you are going to see him, tell him from me that I still love him, and, whatever happens, shall never forget his goodness."

So Pierre set out, and whilst he was driving in a cab towards the Via Venti Settembre, he recalled to mind the heroic story of old Orlando's life which had been told him in Paris. It was like an epic poem, full of faith, bravery, and the disinterestedness of another age.

Born of a noble house of Milan, Count Orlando Prada had learnt to hate the foreigner at such an early age that, when scarcely fifteen, he already formed part of a secret society, one of the ramifications of the antique Carbonarism. This hatred of Austrian domination had been transmitted from father to son through long years, from the olden days of revolt against servitude, when the conspirators met by stealth in abandoned huts, deep in the recesses of the forests; and it was rendered the keener by the eternal dream of Italy delivered, restored to herself, transformed once more into a great sovereign nation, the worthy daughter of those who had conquered and ruled the world. Ah! that land of whilom glory, that unhappy, dismembered, parcelled Italy, the prey of a crowd of petty tyrants, constantly invaded and appropriated by neighbouring nations—how superb and ardent was that dream to free her from such long opprobrium! To defeat the foreigner, drive out the despots, awaken the people from the base misery of slavery, to proclaim Italy free and Italy united—such was the passion which then inflamed the young with inextinguishable ardour, which made the youthful Orlando's heart leap with enthusiasm. He spent his early years consumed by holy indignation, proudly and impatiently longing for an opportunity to give his blood for his country, and to die for her if he could not deliver her.

Quivering under the yoke, wasting his time in sterile conspiracies, he was living in retirement in the old family residence at Milan, when, shortly after his marriage and his twenty-fifth birthday, tidings came to him of the flight of Pius IX and the Revolution of Rome.* And at once he quitted everything, wife and hearth, and hastened to Rome as if summoned thither by the call of destiny. This was the first time that he set out scouring the roads for the attainment of independence; and how frequently, yet again and again, was he to start upon fresh campaigns, never wearying, never disheartened! And now it was that he became acquainted with Mazzini, and for a moment was inflamed with enthusiasm for that mystical unitarian Republican. He himself indulged in an ardent dream of a Universal Republic, adopted the Mazzinian device, "Dio e popolo" (God and the people), and followed the procession which wended its way with great pomp through insurrectionary Rome. The time was one of vast hopes, one when people already felt a need of renovated religion, and looked to the coming of a humanitarian Christ who would redeem the world yet once again. But before long a man, a captain of the ancient days, Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose epic glory was dawning, made Orlando entirely his own, transformed him into a soldier whose sole cause was freedom and union. Orlando loved Garibaldi as though the latter were a demi-god, fought beside him in defence of Republican Rome, took part in the victory of Rieti over the Neapolitans, and followed the stubborn patriot in his retreat when he sought to succour Venice, compelled as he was to relinquish the Eternal City to the French army of General Oudinot, who came thither to reinstate Pius IX. And what an extraordinary and madly heroic adventure was that of Garibaldi and Venice! Venice, which Manin, another great patriot, a martyr, had again transformed into a republican city, and which for long months had been resisting the Austrians! And Garibaldi starts with a handful of men to deliver the city, charters thirteen fishing barks, loses eight in a naval engagement, is compelled to return to the Roman shores, and there in all wretchedness is bereft of his wife, Anita, whose eyes he closes before returning to America, where, once before, he had awaited the hour of insurrection. Ah! that land of Italy, which in those days rumbled from end to end with the internal fire of patriotism, where men of faith and courage arose in every city, where riots and insurrections burst forth on all sides like eruptions—it continued, in spite of every check, its invincible march to freedom!

* It was on November 24, 1848, that the Pope fled to Gaeta,
consequent upon the insurrection which had broken out nine
days previously.—Trans.

Orlando returned to his young wife at Milan, and for two years lived there, almost in concealment, devoured by impatience for the glorious morrow which was so long in coming. Amidst his fever a gleam of happiness softened his heart; a son, Luigi, was born to him, but the birth killed the mother, and joy was turned into mourning. Then, unable to remain any longer at Milan, where he was spied upon, tracked by the police, suffering also too grievously from the foreign occupation, Orlando decided to realise the little fortune remaining to him, and to withdraw to Turin, where an aunt of his wife took charge of the child. Count di Cavour, like a great statesman, was then already seeking to bring about independence, preparing Piedmont for the decisive role which it was destined to play. It was the time when King Victor Emmanuel evinced flattering cordiality towards all the refugees who came to him from every part of Italy, even those whom he knew to be Republicans, compromised and flying the consequences of popular insurrection. The rough, shrewd House of Savoy had long been dreaming of bringing about Italian unity to the profit of the Piedmontese monarchy, and Orlando well knew under what master he was taking service; but in him the Republican already went behind the patriot, and indeed he had begun to question the possibility of a united Republican Italy, placed under the protectorate of a liberal Pope, as Mazzini had at one time dreamed. Was that not indeed a chimera beyond realisation which would devour generation after generation if one obstinately continued to pursue it? For his part, he did not wish to die without having slept in Rome as one of the conquerors. Even if liberty was to be lost, he desired to see his country united and erect, returning once more to life in the full sunlight. And so it was with feverish happiness that he enlisted at the outset of the war of 1859; and his heart palpitated with such force as almost to rend his breast, when, after Magenta, he entered Milan with the French army—Milan which he had quitted eight years previously, like an exile, in despair. The treaty of Villafranca which followed Solferino proved a bitter deception: Venetia was not secured, Venice remained enthralled. Nevertheless the Milanese was conquered from the foe, and then Tuscany and the duchies of Parma and Modena voted for annexation. So, at all events, the nucleus of the Italian star was formed; the country had begun to build itself up afresh around victorious Piedmont.

Then, in the following year, Orlando plunged into epopoeia once more. Garibaldi had returned from his two sojourns in America, with the halo of a legend round him—paladin-like feats in the pampas of Uruguay, an extraordinary passage from Canton to Lima—and he had returned to take part in the war of 1859, forestalling the French army, overthrowing an Austrian marshal, and entering Como, Bergamo, and Brescia. And now, all at once, folks heard that he had landed at Marsala with only a thousand men—the Thousand of Marsala, the ever illustrious handful of braves! Orlando fought in the first rank, and Palermo after three days' resistance was carried. Becoming the dictator's favourite lieutenant, he helped him to organise a government, then crossed the straits with him, and was beside him on the triumphal entry into Naples, whose king had fled. There was mad audacity and valour at that time, an explosion of the inevitable; and all sorts of supernatural stories were current—Garibaldi invulnerable, protected better by his red shirt than by the strongest armour, Garibaldi routing opposing armies like an archangel, by merely brandishing his flaming sword! The Piedmontese on their side had defeated General Lamoriciere at Castelfidardo, and were invading the States of the Church. And Orlando was there when the dictator, abdicating power, signed the decree which annexed the Two Sicilies to the Crown of Italy; even as subsequently he took part in that forlorn attempt on Rome, when the rageful cry was "Rome or Death!"—an attempt which came to a tragic issue at Aspromonte, when the little army was dispersed by the Italian troops, and Garibaldi, wounded, was taken prisoner, and sent back to the solitude of his island of Caprera, where he became but a fisherman and a tiller of the rocky soil.*

* M. Zola's brief but glowing account of Garibaldi's glorious
achievements has stirred many memories in my mind. My uncle,
Frank Vizetelly, the war artist of the Illustrated London
News, whose bones lie bleaching somewhere in the Soudan, was
one of Garibaldi's constant companions throughout the memorable
campaign of the Two Sicilies, and afterwards he went with him
to Caprera. Later, in 1870, my brother, Edward Vizetelly, acted
as orderly-officer to the general when he offered the help of
his sword to France.—Trans.

Six years of waiting again went by, and Orlando still dwelt at Turin, even after Florence had been chosen as the new capital. The Senate had acclaimed Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy; and Italy was indeed almost built, it lacked only Rome and Venice. But the great battles seemed all over, the epic era was closed; Venice was to be won by defeat. Orlando took part in the unlucky battle of Custozza, where he received two wounds, full of furious grief at the thought that Austria should be triumphant. But at that same moment the latter, defeated at Sadowa, relinquished Venetia, and five months later Orlando satisfied his desire to be in Venice participating in the joy of triumph, when Victor Emmanuel made his entry amidst the frantic acclamations of the people. Rome alone remained to be won, and wild impatience urged all Italy towards the city; but friendly France had sworn to maintain the Pope, and this acted as a check. Then, for the third time, Garibaldi dreamt of renewing the feats of the old-world legends, and threw himself upon Rome like a soldier of fortune illumined by patriotism and free from every tie. And for the third time Orlando shared in that fine heroic madness destined to be vanquished at Mentana by the Pontifical Zouaves supported by a small French corps. Again wounded, he came back to Turin in almost a dying condition. But, though his spirit quivered, he had to resign himself; the situation seemed to have no outlet; only an upheaval of the nations could give Rome to Italy.

All at once the thunderclap of Sedan, of the downfall of France, resounded through the world; and then the road to Rome lay open, and Orlando, having returned to service in the regular army, was with the troops who took up position in the Campagna to ensure the safety of the Holy See, as was said in the letter which Victor Emmanuel wrote to Pius IX. There was, however, but the shadow of an engagement: General Kanzler's Pontifical Zouaves were compelled to fall back, and Orlando was one of the first to enter the city by the breach of the Porta Pia. Ah! that twentieth of September—that day when he experienced the greatest happiness of his life—a day of delirium, of complete triumph, which realised the dream of so many years of terrible contest, the dream for which he had sacrificed rest and fortune, and given both body and mind!

Then came more than ten happy years in conquered Rome—in Rome adored, flattered, treated with all tenderness, like a woman in whom one has placed one's entire hope. From her he awaited so much national vigour, such a marvellous resurrection of strength and glory for the endowment of the young nation. Old Republican, old insurrectional soldier that he was, he had been obliged to adhere to the monarchy, and accept a senatorship. But then did not Garibaldi himself—Garibaldi his divinity—likewise call upon the King and sit in parliament? Mazzini alone, rejecting all compromises, was unwilling to rest content with a united and independent Italy that was not Republican. Moreover, another consideration influenced Orlando, the future of his son Luigi, who had attained his eighteenth birthday shortly after the occupation of Rome. Though he, Orlando, could manage with the crumbs which remained of the fortune he had expended in his country's service, he dreamt of a splendid destiny for the child of his heart. Realising that the heroic age was over, he desired to make a great politician of him, a great administrator, a man who should be useful to the mighty nation of the morrow; and it was on this account that he had not rejected royal favour, the reward of long devotion, desiring, as he did, to be in a position to help, watch, and guide Luigi. Besides, was he himself so old, so used-up, as to be unable to assist in organisation, even as he had assisted in conquest? Struck by his son's quick intelligence in business matters, perhaps also instinctively divining that the battle would now continue on financial and economic grounds, he obtained him employment at the Ministry of Finances. And again he himself lived on, dreaming, still enthusiastically believing in a splendid future, overflowing with boundless hope, seeing Rome double her population, grow and spread with a wild vegetation of new districts, and once more, in his loving enraptured eyes, become the queen of the world.

But all at once came a thunderbolt. One morning, as he was going downstairs, Orlando was stricken with paralysis. Both his legs suddenly became lifeless, as heavy as lead. It was necessary to carry him up again, and never since had he set foot on the street pavement. At that time he had just completed his fifty-sixth year, and for fourteen years since he had remained in his arm-chair, as motionless as stone, he who had so impetuously trod every battlefield of Italy. It was a pitiful business, the collapse of a hero. And worst of all, from that room where he was for ever imprisoned, the old soldier beheld the slow crumbling of all his hopes, and fell into dismal melancholy, full of unacknowledged fear for the future. Now that the intoxication of action no longer dimmed his eyes, now that he spent his long and empty days in thought, his vision became clear. Italy, which he had desired to see so powerful, so triumphant in her unity, was acting madly, rushing to ruin, possibly to bankruptcy. Rome, which to him had ever been the one necessary capital, the city of unparalleled glory, requisite for the sovereign people of to-morrow, seemed unwilling to take upon herself the part of a great modern metropolis; heavy as a corpse she weighed with all her centuries on the bosom of the young nation. Moreover, his son Luigi distressed him. Rebellious to all guidance, the young man had become one of the devouring offsprings of conquest, eager to despoil that Italy, that Rome, which his father seemed to have desired solely in order that he might pillage them and batten on them. Orlando had vainly opposed Luigi's departure from the ministry, his participation in the frantic speculations on land and house property to which the mad building of the new districts had given rise. But at the same time he loved his son, and was reduced to silence, especially now when everything had succeeded with Luigi, even his most risky financial ventures, such as the transformation of the Villa Montefiori into a perfect town—a colossal enterprise in which many of great wealth had been ruined, but whence he himself had emerged with millions. And it was in part for this reason that Orlando, sad and silent, had obstinately restricted himself to one small room on the third floor of the little palazzo erected by Luigi in the Via Venti Settembre—a room where he lived cloistered with a single servant, subsisting on his own scanty income, and accepting nothing but that modest hospitality from his son.

As Pierre reached that new Via Venti Settembre* which climbs the side and summit of the Viminal hill, he was struck by the heavy sumptuousness of the new "palaces," which betokened among the moderns the same taste for the huge that marked the ancient Romans. In the warm afternoon glow, blent of purple and old gold, the broad, triumphant thoroughfare, with its endless rows of white house-fronts, bore witness to new Rome's proud hope of futurity and sovereign power. And Pierre fairly gasped when he beheld the Palazzo delle Finanze, or Treasury, a gigantic erection, a cyclopean cube with a profusion of columns, balconies, pediments, and sculptured work, to which the building mania had given birth in a day of immoderate pride. And on the other side of the street, a little higher up, before reaching the Villa Bonaparte, stood Count Prada's little palazzo.

* The name—Twentieth September Street—was given to the
thoroughfare to commemorate the date of the occupation
of Rome by Victor Emmanuel's army.—Trans.

After discharging his driver, Pierre for a moment remained somewhat embarrassed. The door was open, and he entered the vestibule; but, as at the mansion in the Via Giulia, no door porter or servant was to be seen. So he had to make up his mind to ascend the monumental stairs, which with their marble balustrades seemed to be copied, on a smaller scale, from those of the Palazzo Boccanera. And there was much the same cold bareness, tempered, however, by a carpet and red door-hangings, which contrasted vividly with the white stucco of the walls. The reception-rooms, sixteen feet high, were on the first floor, and as a door chanced to be ajar he caught a glimpse of two salons, one following the other, and both displaying quite modern richness, with a profusion of silk and velvet hangings, gilt furniture, and lofty mirrors reflecting a pompous assemblage of stands and tables. And still there was nobody, not a soul, in that seemingly forsaken abode, which exhaled nought of woman's presence. Indeed Pierre was on the point of going down again to ring, when a footman at last presented himself.

"Count Prada, if you please."

The servant silently surveyed the little priest, and seemed to understand. "The father or the son?" he asked.

"The father, Count Orlando Prada."

"Oh! that's on the third floor." And he condescended to add: "The little door on the right-hand side of the landing. Knock loudly if you wish to be admitted."

Pierre indeed had to knock twice, and then a little withered old man of military appearance, a former soldier who had remained in the Count's service, opened the door and apologised for the delay by saying that he had been attending to his master's legs. Immediately afterwards he announced the visitor, and the latter, after passing through a dim and narrow ante-room, was lost in amazement on finding himself in a relatively small chamber, extremely bare and bright, with wall-paper of a light hue studded with tiny blue flowers. Behind a screen was an iron bedstead, the soldier's pallet, and there was no other furniture than the arm-chair in which the cripple spent his days, with a table of black wood placed near him, and covered with books and papers, and two old straw-seated chairs which served for the accommodation of the infrequent visitors. A few planks, fixed to one of the walls, did duty as book-shelves. However, the broad, clear, curtainless window overlooked the most admirable panorama of Rome that could be desired.

Then the room disappeared from before Pierre's eyes, and with a sudden shock of deep emotion he only beheld old Orlando, the old blanched lion, still superb, broad, and tall. A forest of white hair crowned his powerful head, with its thick mouth, fleshy broken nose, and large, sparkling, black eyes. A long white beard streamed down with the vigour of youth, curling like that of an ancient god. By that leonine muzzle one divined what great passions had growled within; but all, carnal and intellectual alike, had erupted in patriotism, in wild bravery, and riotous love of independence. And the old stricken hero, his torso still erect, was fixed there on his straw-seated arm-chair, with lifeless legs buried beneath a black wrapper. Alone did his arms and hands live, and his face beam with strength and intelligence.

Orlando turned towards his servant, and gently said to him: "You can go away, Batista. Come back in a couple of hours." Then, looking Pierre full in the face, he exclaimed in a voice which was still sonorous despite his seventy years: "So it's you at last, my dear Monsieur Froment, and we shall be able to chat at our ease. There, take that chair, and sit down in front of me."

He had noticed the glance of surprise which the young priest had cast upon the bareness of the room, and he gaily added: "You will excuse me for receiving you in my cell. Yes, I live here like a monk, like an old invalided soldier, henceforth withdrawn from active life. My son long begged me to take one of the fine rooms downstairs. But what would have been the use of it? I have no needs, and I scarcely care for feather beds, for my old bones are accustomed to the hard ground. And then too I have such a fine view up here, all Rome presenting herself to me, now that I can no longer go to her."

With a wave of the hand towards the window he sought to hide the embarrassment, the slight flush which came to him each time that he thus excused his son; unwilling as he was to tell the true reason, the scruple of probity which had made him obstinately cling to his bare pauper's lodging.

"But it is very nice, the view is superb!" declared Pierre, in order to please him. "I am for my own part very glad to see you, very glad to be able to grasp your valiant hands, which accomplished so many great things."

Orlando made a fresh gesture, as though to sweep the past away. "Pooh! pooh! all that is dead and buried. Let us talk about you, my dear Monsieur Froment, you who are young and represent the present; and especially about your book, which represents the future! Ah! if you only knew how angry your book, your 'New Rome,' made me first of all."

He began to laugh, and took the book from off the table near him; then, tapping on its cover with his big, broad hand, he continued: "No, you cannot imagine with what starts of protest I read your book. The Pope, and again the Pope, and always the Pope! New Rome to be created by the Pope and for the Pope, to triumph thanks to the Pope, to be given to the Pope, and to fuse its glory in the glory of the Pope! But what about us? What about Italy? What about all the millions which we have spent in order to make Rome a great capital? Ah! only a Frenchman, and a Frenchman of Paris, could have written such a book! But let me tell you, my dear sir, if you are ignorant of it, that Rome has become the capital of the kingdom of Italy, that we here have King Humbert, and the Italian people, a whole nation which must be taken into account, and which means to keep Rome—glorious, resuscitated Rome—for itself!"

This juvenile ardour made Pierre laugh in turn. "Yes, yes," said he, "you wrote me that. Only what does it matter from my point of view? Italy is but one nation, a part of humanity, and I desire concord and fraternity among all the nations, mankind reconciled, believing, and happy. Of what consequence, then, is any particular form of government, monarchy or republic, of what consequence is any question of a united and independent country, if all mankind forms but one free people subsisting on truth and justice?"

To only one word of this enthusiastic outburst did Orlando pay attention. In a lower tone, and with a dreamy air, he resumed: "Ah! a republic. In my youth I ardently desired one. I fought for one; I conspired with Mazzini, a saintly man, a believer, who was shattered by collision with the absolute. And then, too, one had to bow to practical necessities; the most obstinate ended by submitting. And nowadays would a republic save us? In any case it would differ but little from our parliamentary monarchy. Just think of what goes on in France! And so why risk a revolution which would place power in the hands of the extreme revolutionists, the anarchists? We fear all that, and this explains our resignation. I know very well that a few think they can detect salvation in a republican federation, a reconstitution of all the former little states in so many republics, over which Rome would preside. The Vatican would gain largely by any such transformation; still one cannot say that it endeavours to bring it about; it simply regards the eventuality without disfavour. But it is a dream, a dream!"

At this Orlando's gaiety came back to him, with even a little gentle irony: "You don't know, I suppose, what it was that took my fancy in your book—for, in spite of all my protests, I have read it twice. Well, what pleased me was that Mazzini himself might almost have written it at one time. Yes! I found all my youth again in your pages, all the wild hope of my twenty-fifth year, the new religion of a humanitarian Christ, the pacification of the world effected by the Gospel! Are you aware that, long before your time, Mazzini desired the renovation of Christianity? He set dogma and discipline on one side and only retained morals. And it was new Rome, the Rome of the people, which he would have given as see to the universal Church, in which all the churches of the past were to be fused—Rome, the eternal and predestined city, the mother and queen, whose domination was to arise anew to ensure the definitive happiness of mankind! Is it not curious that all the present-day Neo-Catholicism, the vague, spiritualistic awakening, the evolution towards communion and Christian charity, with which some are making so much stir, should be simply a return of the mystical and humanitarian ideas of 1848? Alas! I saw all that, I believed and burned, and I know in what a fine mess those flights into the azure of mystery landed us! So it cannot be helped, I lack confidence."

Then, as Pierre on his side was growing impassioned and sought to reply, he stopped him: "No, let me finish. I only want to convince you how absolutely necessary it was that we should take Rome and make her the capital of Italy. Without Rome new Italy could not have existed; Rome represented the glory of ancient time; in her dust lay the sovereign power which we wished to re-establish; she brought strength, beauty, eternity to those who possessed her. Standing in the middle of our country, she was its heart, and must assuredly become its life as soon as she should be awakened from the long sleep of ruin. Ah! how we desired her, amidst victory and amidst defeat, through years and years of frightful impatience! For my part I loved her, and longed for her, far more than for any woman, with my blood burning, and in despair that I should be growing old. And when we possessed her, our folly was a desire to behold her huge, magnificent, and commanding all at once, the equal of the other great capitals of Europe—Berlin, Paris, and London. Look at her! she is still my only love, my only consolation now that I am virtually dead, with nothing alive in me but my eyes."

With the same gesture as before, he directed Pierre's attention to the window. Under the glowing sky Rome stretched out in its immensity, empurpled and gilded by the slanting sunrays. Across the horizon, far, far away, the trees of the Janiculum stretched a green girdle, of a limpid emerald hue, whilst the dome of St. Peter's, more to the left, showed palely blue, like a sapphire bedimmed by too bright a light. Then came the low town, the old ruddy city, baked as it were by centuries of burning summers, soft to the eye and beautiful with the deep life of the past, an unbounded chaos of roofs, gables, towers, campanili, and cupolas. But, in the foreground under the window, there was the new city—that which had been building for the last five and twenty years—huge blocks of masonry piled up side by side, still white with plaster, neither the sun nor history having as yet robed them in purple. And in particular the roofs of the colossal Palazzo delle Finanze had a disastrous effect, spreading out like far, bare steppes of cruel hideousness. And it was upon the desolation and abomination of all the newly erected piles that the eyes of the old soldier of conquest at last rested.

Silence ensued. Pierre felt the faint chill of hidden, unacknowledged sadness pass by, and courteously waited.

"I must beg your pardon for having interrupted you just now," resumed Orlando; "but it seems to me that we cannot talk about your book to any good purpose until you have seen and studied Rome closely. You only arrived yesterday, did you not? Well, stroll about the city, look at things, question people, and I think that many of your ideas will change. I shall particularly like to know your impression of the Vatican since you have cone here solely to see the Pope and defend your book against the Index. Why should we discuss things to-day, if facts themselves are calculated to bring you to other views, far more readily than the finest speeches which I might make? It is understood, you will come to see me again, and we shall then know what we are talking about, and, maybe, agree together."

"Why certainly, you are too kind," replied Pierre. "I only came to-day to express my gratitude to you for having read my book so attentively, and to pay homage to one of the glories of Italy."

Orlando was not listening, but remained for a moment absorbed in thought, with his eyes still resting upon Rome. And overcome, despite himself, by secret disquietude, he resumed in a low voice as though making an involuntary confession: "We have gone too fast, no doubt. There were expenses of undeniable utility—the roads, ports, and railways. And it was necessary to arm the country also; I did not at first disapprove of the heavy military burden. But since then how crushing has been the war budget—a war which has never come, and the long wait for which has ruined us. Ah! I have always been the friend of France. I only reproach her with one thing, that she has failed to understand the position in which we were placed, the vital reasons which compelled us to ally ourselves with Germany. And then there are the thousand millions of lire* swallowed up in Rome! That was the real madness; pride and enthusiasm led us astray. Old and solitary as I've been for many years now, given to deep reflection, I was one of the first to divine the pitfall, the frightful financial crisis, the deficit which would bring about the collapse of the nation. I shouted it from the housetops, to my son, to all who came near me; but what was the use? They didn't listen; they were mad, still buying and selling and building, with no thought but for gambling booms and bubbles. But you'll see, you'll see. And the worst is that we are not situated as you are; we haven't a reserve of men and money in a dense peasant population, whose thrifty savings are always at hand to fill up the gaps caused by big catastrophes. There is no social rise among our people as yet; fresh men don't spring up out of the lower classes to reinvigorate the national blood, as they constantly do in your country. And, besides, the people are poor; they have no stockings to empty. The misery is frightful, I must admit it. Those who have any money prefer to spend it in the towns in a petty way rather than to risk it in agricultural or manufacturing enterprise. Factories are but slowly built, and the land is almost everywhere tilled in the same primitive manner as it was two thousand years ago. And then, too, take Rome—Rome, which didn't make Italy, but which Italy made its capital to satisfy an ardent, overpowering desire—Rome, which is still but a splendid bit of scenery, picturing the glory of the centuries, and which, apart from its historical splendour, has only given us its degenerate papal population, swollen with ignorance and pride! Ah! I loved Rome too well, and I still love it too well to regret being now within its walls. But, good heavens! what insanity its acquisition brought us, what piles of money it has cost us, and how heavily and triumphantly it weighs us down! Look! look!"

* 40,000,000 pounds.

He waved his hand as he spoke towards the livid roofs of the Palazzo delle Finanze, that vast and desolate steppe, as though he could see the harvest of glory all stripped off and bankruptcy appear with its fearful, threatening bareness. Restrained tears were dimming his eyes, and he looked superbly pitiful with his expression of baffled hope and grievous disquietude, with his huge white head, the muzzle of an old blanched lion henceforth powerless and caged in that bare, bright room, whose poverty-stricken aspect was instinct with so much pride that it seemed, as it were, a protest against the monumental splendour of the whole surrounding district! So those were the purposes to which the conquest had been put! And to think that he was impotent, henceforth unable to give his blood and his soul as he had done in the days gone by.

"Yes, yes," he exclaimed in a final outburst; "one gave everything, heart and brain, one's whole life indeed, so long as it was a question of making the country one and independent. But, now that the country is ours, just try to stir up enthusiasm for the reorganisation of its finances! There's no ideality in that! And this explains why, whilst the old ones are dying off, not a new man comes to the front among the young ones—"

All at once he stopped, looking somewhat embarrassed, yet smiling at his feverishness. "Excuse me," he said, "I'm off again, I'm incorrigible. But it's understood, we'll leave that subject alone, and you'll come back here, and we'll chat together when you've seen everything."

From that moment he showed himself extremely pleasant, and it was apparent to Pierre that he regretted having said so much, by the seductive affability and growing affection which he now displayed. He begged the young priest to prolong his sojourn, to abstain from all hasty judgments on Rome, and to rest convinced that, at bottom, Italy still loved France. And he was also very desirous that France should love Italy, and displayed genuine anxiety at the thought that perhaps she loved her no more. As at the Boccanera mansion, on the previous evening, Pierre realised that an attempt was being made to persuade him to admiration and affection. Like a susceptible woman with secret misgivings respecting the attractive power of her beauty, Italy was all anxiety with regard to the opinion of her visitors, and strove to win and retain their love.

However, Orlando again became impassioned when he learnt that Pierre was staying at the Boccanera mansion, and he made a gesture of extreme annoyance on hearing, at that very moment, a knock at the outer door. "Come in!" he called; but at the same time he detained Pierre, saying, "No, no, don't go yet; I wish to know—"

But a lady came in—a woman of over forty, short and extremely plump, and still attractive with her small features and pretty smile swamped in fat. She was a blonde, with green, limpid eyes; and, fairly well dressed in a sober, nicely fitting mignonette gown, she looked at once pleasant, modest, and shrewd.

"Ah! it's you, Stefana," said the old man, letting her kiss him.

"Yes, uncle, I was passing by and came up to see how you were getting on."

The visitor was the Signora Sacco, niece of Prada and a Neapolitan by birth, her mother having quitted Milan to marry a certain Pagani, a Neapolitan banker, who had afterwards failed. Subsequent to that disaster Stefana had married Sacco, then merely a petty post-office clerk. He, later on, wishing to revive his father-in-law's business, had launched into all sorts of terrible, complicated, suspicious affairs, which by unforeseen luck had ended in his election as a deputy. Since he had arrived in Rome, to conquer the city in his turn, his wife had been compelled to assist his devouring ambition by dressing well and opening a salon; and, although she was still a little awkward, she rendered him many real services, being very economical and prudent, a thorough good housewife, with all the sterling, substantial qualities of Northern Italy which she had inherited from her mother, and which showed conspicuously beside the turbulence and carelessness of her husband, in whom flared Southern Italy with its perpetual, rageful appetite.

Despite his contempt for Sacco, old Orlando had retained some affection for his niece, in whose veins flowed blood similar to his own. He thanked her for her kind inquiries, and then at once spoke of an announcement which he had read in the morning papers, for he suspected that the deputy had sent his wife to ascertain his opinion.

"Well, and that ministry?" he asked.

The Signora had seated herself and made no haste to reply, but glanced at the newspapers strewn over the table. "Oh! nothing is settled yet," she at last responded; "the newspapers spoke out too soon. The Prime Minister sent for Sacco, and they had a talk together. But Sacco hesitates a good deal; he fears that he has no aptitude for the Department of Agriculture. Ah! if it were only the Finances—However, in any case, he would not have come to a decision without consulting you. What do you think of it, uncle?"

He interrupted her with a violent wave of the hand: "No, no, I won't mix myself up in such matters!"

To him the rapid success of that adventurer Sacco, that schemer and gambler who had always fished in troubled waters, was an abomination, the beginning of the end. His son Luigi certainly distressed him; but it was even worse to think that—whilst Luigi, with his great intelligence and many remaining fine qualities, was nothing at all—Sacco, on the other hand, Sacco, blunderhead and ever-famished battener that he was, had not merely slipped into parliament, but was now, it seemed, on the point of securing office! A little, swarthy, dry man he was, with big, round eyes, projecting cheekbones, and prominent chin. Ever dancing and chattering, he was gifted with a showy eloquence, all the force of which lay in his voice—a voice which at will became admirably powerful or gentle! And withal an insinuating man, profiting by every opportunity, wheedling and commanding by turn.

"You hear, Stefana," said Orlando; "tell your husband that the only advice I have to give him is to return to his clerkship at the post-office, where perhaps he may be of use."

What particularly filled the old soldier with indignation and despair was that such a man, a Sacco, should have fallen like a bandit on Rome—on that Rome whose conquest had cost so many noble efforts. And in his turn Sacco was conquering the city, was carrying it off from those who had won it by such hard toil, and was simply using it to satisfy his wild passion for power and its attendant enjoyments. Beneath his wheedling air there was the determination to devour everything. After the victory, while the spoil lay there, still warm, the wolves had come. It was the North that had made Italy, whereas the South, eager for the quarry, simply rushed upon the country, preyed upon it. And beneath the anger of the old stricken hero of Italian unity there was indeed all the growing antagonism of the North towards the South—the North industrious, economical, shrewd in politics, enlightened, full of all the great modern ideas, and the South ignorant and idle, bent on enjoying life immediately, amidst childish disorder in action, and an empty show of fine sonorous words.

Stefana had begun to smile in a placid way while glancing at Pierre, who had approached the window. "Oh, you say that, uncle," she responded; "but you love us well all the same, and more than once you have given me myself some good advice, for which I'm very thankful to you. For instance, there's that affair of Attilio's—"

She was alluding to her son, the lieutenant, and his love affair with Celia, the little Princess Buongiovanni, of which all the drawing-rooms, white and black alike, were talking.

"Attilio—that's another matter!" exclaimed Orlando. "He and you are both of the same blood as myself, and it's wonderful how I see myself again in that fine fellow. Yes, he is just the same as I was at his age, good-looking and brave and enthusiastic! I'm paying myself compliments, you see. But, really now, Attilio warms my heart, for he is the future, and brings me back some hope. Well, and what about his affair?"

"Oh! it gives us a lot of worry, uncle. I spoke to you about it before, but you shrugged your shoulders, saying that in matters of that kind all that the parents had to do was to let the lovers settle their affairs between them. Still, we don't want everybody to repeat that we are urging our son to get the little princess to elope with him, so that he may afterwards marry her money and title."

At this Orlando indulged in a frank outburst of gaiety: "That's a fine scruple! Was it your husband who instructed you to tell me of it? I know, however, that he affects some delicacy in this matter. For my own part, I believe myself to be as honest as he is, and I can only repeat that, if I had a son like yours, so straightforward and good, and candidly loving, I should let him marry whomsoever he pleased in his own way. The Buongiovannis—good heavens! the Buongiovannis—why, despite all their rank and lineage and the money they still possess, it will be a great honour for them to have a handsome young man with a noble heart as their son-in-law!"

Again did Stefana assume an expression of placid satisfaction. She had certainly only come there for approval. "Very well, uncle," she replied, "I'll repeat that to my husband, and he will pay great attention to it; for if you are severe towards him he holds you in perfect veneration. And as for that ministry—well, perhaps nothing will be done, Sacco will decide according to circumstances."

She rose and took her leave, kissing the old soldier very affectionately as on her arrival. And she complimented him on his good looks, declaring that she found him as handsome as ever, and making him smile by speaking of a lady who was still madly in love with him. Then, after acknowledging the young priest's silent salutation by a slight bow, she went off, once more wearing her modest and sensible air.

For a moment Orlando, with his eyes turned towards the door, remained silent, again sad, reflecting no doubt on all the difficult, equivocal present, so different from the glorious past. But all at once he turned to Pierre, who was still waiting. "And so, my friend," said he, "you are staying at the Palazzo Boccanera? Ah! what a grievous misfortune there has been on that side too!"

However, when the priest had told him of his conversation with Benedetta, and of her message that she still loved him and would never forget his goodness to her, no matter whatever happened, he appeared moved and his voice trembled: "Yes, she has a good heart, she has no spite. But what would you have? She did not love Luigi, and he was possibly violent. There is no mystery about the matter now, and I can speak to you freely, since to my great grief everybody knows what has happened."

Then Orlando abandoned himself to his recollections, and related how keen had been his delight on the eve of the marriage at the thought that so lovely a creature would become his daughter, and set some youth and charm around his invalid's arm-chair. He had always worshipped beauty, and would have had no other love than woman, if his country had not seized upon the best part of him. And Benedetta on her side loved him, revered him, constantly coming up to spend long hours with him, sharing his poor little room, which at those times became resplendent with all the divine grace that she brought with her. With her fresh breath near him, the pure scent she diffused, the caressing womanly tenderness with which she surrounded him, he lived anew. But, immediately afterwards, what a frightful drama and how his heart had bled at his inability to reconcile the husband and the wife! He could not possibly say that his son was in the wrong in desiring to be the loved and accepted spouse. At first indeed he had hoped to soften Benedetta, and throw her into Luigi's arms. But when she had confessed herself to him in tears, owning her old love for Dario, and her horror of belonging to another, he realised that she would never yield. And a whole year had then gone by; he had lived for a whole year imprisoned in his arm-chair, with that poignant drama progressing beneath him in those luxurious rooms whence no sound even reached his ears. How many times had he not listened, striving to hear, fearing atrocious quarrels, in despair at his inability to prove still useful by creating happiness. He knew nothing by his son, who kept his own counsel; he only learnt a few particulars from Benedetta at intervals when emotion left her defenceless; and that marriage in which he had for a moment espied the much-needed alliance between old and new Rome, that unconsummated marriage filled him with despair, as if it were indeed the defeat of every hope, the final collapse of the dream which had filled his life. And he himself had ended by desiring the divorce, so unbearable had become the suffering caused by such a situation.

"Ah! my friend!" he said to Pierre; "never before did I so well understand the fatality of certain antagonism, the possibility of working one's own misfortune and that of others, even when one has the most loving heart and upright mind!"

But at that moment the door again opened, and this time, without knocking, Count Luigi Prada came in. And after rapidly bowing to the visitor, who had risen, he gently took hold of his father's hands and felt them, as if fearing that they might be too warm or too cold.

"I've just arrived from Frascati, where I had to sleep," said he; "for the interruption of all that building gives me a lot of worry. And I'm told that you spent a bad night!"

"No, I assure you."

"Oh! I knew you wouldn't own it. But why will you persist in living up here without any comfort? All this isn't suited to your age. I should be so pleased if you would accept a more comfortable room where you might sleep better."

"No, no—I know that you love me well, my dear Luigi. But let me do as my old head tells me. That's the only way to make me happy."

Pierre was much struck by the ardent affection which sparkled in the eyes of the two men as they gazed at one another, face to face. This seemed to him very touching and beautiful, knowing as he did how many contrary ideas and actions, how many moral divergencies separated them. And he next took an interest in comparing them physically. Count Luigi Prada, shorter, more thick-set than his father, had, however, much the same strong energetic head, crowned with coarse black hair, and the same frank but somewhat stern eyes set in a face of clear complexion, barred by thick moustaches. But his mouth differed—a sensual, voracious mouth it was, with wolfish teeth—a mouth of prey made for nights of rapine, when the only question is to bite, and tear, and devour others. And for this reason, when some praised the frankness in his eyes, another would retort: "Yes, but I don't like his mouth." His feet were large, his hands plump and over-broad, but admirably cared for.

And Pierre marvelled at finding him such as he had anticipated. He knew enough of his story to picture in him a hero's son spoilt by conquest, eagerly devouring the harvest garnered by his father's glorious sword. And he particularly studied how the father's virtues had deflected and become transformed into vices in the son—the most noble qualities being perverted, heroic and disinterested energy lapsing into a ferocious appetite for possession, the man of battle leading to the man of booty, since the great gusts of enthusiasm no longer swept by, since men no longer fought, since they remained there resting, pillaging, and devouring amidst the heaped-up spoils. And the pity of it was that the old hero, the paralytic, motionless father beheld it all—beheld the degeneration of his son, the speculator and company promoter gorged with millions!

However, Orlando introduced Pierre. "This is Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre Froment, whom I spoke to you about," he said, "the author of the book which I gave you to read."

Luigi Prada showed himself very amiable, at once talking of home with an intelligent passion like one who wished to make the city a great modern capital. He had seen Paris transformed by the Second Empire; he had seen Berlin enlarged and embellished after the German victories; and, according to him, if Rome did not follow the movement, if it did not become the inhabitable capital of a great people, it was threatened with prompt death: either a crumbling museum or a renovated, resuscitated city—those were the alternatives.*

* Personally I should have thought the example of Berlin a great
deterrent. The enlargement and embellishment of the Prussian
capital, after the war of 1870, was attended by far greater
roguery and wholesale swindling than even the previous
transformation of Paris. Thousands of people too were ruined,
and instead of an increase of prosperity the result was the
very reverse.—Trans.

Greatly struck, almost gained over already, Pierre listened to this clever man, charmed with his firm, clear mind. He knew how skilfully Prada had manoeuvred in the affair of the Villa Montefiori, enriching himself when every one else was ruined, having doubtless foreseen the fatal catastrophe even while the gambling passion was maddening the entire nation. However, the young priest could already detect marks of weariness, precocious wrinkles and a fall of the lips, on that determined, energetic face, as though its possessor were growing tired of the continual struggle that he had to carry on amidst surrounding downfalls, the shock of which threatened to bring the most firmly established fortunes to the ground. It was said that Prada had recently had grave cause for anxiety; and indeed there was no longer any solidity to be found; everything might be swept away by the financial crisis which day by day was becoming more and more serious. In the case of Luigi, sturdy son though he was of Northern Italy, a sort of degeneration had set in, a slow rot, caused by the softening, perversive influence of Rome. He had there rushed upon the satisfaction of every appetite, and prolonged enjoyment was exhausting him. This, indeed, was one of the causes of the deep silent sadness of Orlando, who was compelled to witness the swift deterioration of his conquering race, whilst Sacco, the Italian of the South—served as it were by the climate, accustomed to the voluptuous atmosphere, the life of those sun-baked cities compounded of the dust of antiquity—bloomed there like the natural vegetation of a soil saturated with the crimes of history, and gradually grasped everything, both wealth and power.

As Orlando spoke of Stefana's visit to his son, Sacco's name was mentioned. Then, without another word, the two men exchanged a smile. A rumour was current that the Minister of Agriculture, lately deceased, would perhaps not be replaced immediately, and that another minister would take charge of the department pending the next session of the Chamber.

Next the Palazzo Boccanera was mentioned, and Pierre, his interest awakened, became more attentive. "Ah!" exclaimed Count Luigi, turning to him, "so you are staying in the Via Giulia? All the Rome of olden time sleeps there in the silence of forgetfulness."

With perfect ease he went on to speak of the Cardinal and even of Benedetta—"the Countess," as he called her. But, although he was careful to let no sign of anger escape him, the young priest could divine that he was secretly quivering, full of suffering and spite. In him the enthusiastic energy of his father appeared in a baser, degenerate form. Quitting the yet handsome Princess Flavia in his passion for Benedetta, her divinely beautiful niece, he had resolved to make the latter his own at any cost, determined to marry her, to struggle with her and overcome her, although he knew that she loved him not, and that he would almost certainly wreck his entire life. Rather than relinquish her, however, he would have set Rome on fire. And thus his hopeless suffering was now great indeed: this woman was but his wife in name, and so torturing was the thought of her disdain, that at times, however calm his outward demeanour, he was consumed by a jealous vindictive sensual madness that did not even recoil from the idea of crime.

"Monsieur l'Abbe is acquainted with the situation," sadly murmured old Orlando.

His son responded by a wave of the hand, as though to say that everybody was acquainted with it. "Ah! father," he added, "but for you I should never have consented to take part in those proceedings for annulling the marriage! The Countess would have found herself compelled to return here, and would not nowadays be deriding us with her lover, that cousin of hers, Dario!"

At this Orlando also waved his hand, as if in protest.

"Oh! it's a fact, father," continued Luigi. "Why did she flee from here if it wasn't to go and live with her lover? And indeed, in my opinion, it's scandalous that a Cardinal's palace should shelter such goings-on!"

This was the report which he spread abroad, the accusation which he everywhere levelled against his wife, of publicly carrying on a shameless liaison. In reality, however, he did not believe a word of it, being too well acquainted with Benedetta's firm rectitude, and her determination to belong to none but the man she loved, and to him only in marriage. However, in Prada's eyes such accusations were not only fair play but also very efficacious.

And now, although he turned pale with covert exasperation, and laughed a hard, vindictive, cruel laugh, he went on to speak in a bantering tone of the proceedings for annulling the marriage, and in particular of the plea put forward by Benedetta's advocate Morano. And at last his language became so free that Orlando, with a glance towards the priest, gently interposed: "Luigi! Luigi!"

"Yes, you are right, father, I'll say no more," thereupon added the young Count. "But it's really abominable and ridiculous. Lisbeth, you know, is highly amused at it."

Orlando again looked displeased, for when visitors were present he did not like his son to refer to the person whom he had just named. Lisbeth Kauffmann, very blonde and pink and merry, was barely thirty years of age, and belonged to the Roman foreign colony. For two years past she had been a widow, her husband having died at Rome whither he had come to nurse a complaint of the lungs. Thenceforward free, and sufficiently well off, she had remained in the city by taste, having a marked predilection for art, and painting a little, herself. In the Via Principe Amadeo, in the new Viminal district, she had purchased a little palazzo, and transformed a large apartment on its second floor into a studio hung with old stuffs, and balmy in every season with the scent of flowers. The place was well known to tolerant and intellectual society. Lisbeth was there found in perpetual jubilation, clad in a long blouse, somewhat of a gamine in her ways, trenchant too and often bold of speech, but nevertheless capital company, and as yet compromised with nobody but Prada. Their liaison had begun some four months after his wife had left him, and now Lisbeth was near the time of becoming a mother. This she in no wise concealed, but displayed such candid tranquillity and happiness that her numerous acquaintances continued to visit her as if there were nothing in question, so facile and free indeed is the life of the great cosmopolitan continental cities. Under the circumstances which his wife's suit had created, Prada himself was not displeased at the turn which events had taken with regard to Lisbeth, but none the less his incurable wound still bled.

There could be no compensation for the bitterness of Benedetta's disdain, it was she for whom his heart burned, and he dreamt of one day wreaking on her a tragic punishment.

Pierre, knowing nothing of Lisbeth, failed to understand the allusions of Orlando and his son. But realising that there was some embarrassment between them, he sought to take countenance by picking from off the littered table a thick book which, to his surprise, he found to be a French educational work, one of those manuals for the baccalaureat,* containing a digest of the knowledge which the official programmes require. It was but a humble, practical, elementary work, yet it necessarily dealt with all the mathematical, physical, chemical, and natural sciences, thus broadly outlining the intellectual conquests of the century, the present phase of human knowledge.

* The examination for the degree of bachelor, which degree is
the necessary passport to all the liberal professions in France.
M. Zola, by the way, failed to secure it, being ploughed for
"insufficiency in literature"!—Trans.

"Ah!" exclaimed Orlando, well pleased with the diversion, "you are looking at the book of my old friend Theophile Morin. He was one of the thousand of Marsala, you know, and helped us to conquer Sicily and Naples. A hero! But for more than thirty years now he has been living in France again, absorbed in the duties of his petty professorship, which hasn't made him at all rich. And so he lately published that book, which sells very well in France it seems; and it occurred to him that he might increase his modest profits on it by issuing translations, an Italian one among others. He and I have remained brothers, and thinking that my influence would prove decisive, he wishes to utilise it. But he is mistaken; I fear, alas! that I shall be unable to get anybody to take up his book."

At this Luigi Prada, who had again become very composed and amiable, shrugged his shoulders slightly, full as he was of the scepticism of his generation which desired to maintain things in their actual state so as to derive the greatest profit from them. "What would be the good of it?" he murmured; "there are too many books already!"

"No, no!" the old man passionately retorted, "there can never be too many books! We still and ever require fresh ones! It's by literature, not by the sword, that mankind will overcome falsehood and injustice and attain to the final peace of fraternity among the nations—Oh! you may smile; I know that you call these ideas my fancies of '48, the fancies of a greybeard, as people say in France. But it is none the less true that Italy is doomed, if the problem be not attacked from down below, if the people be not properly fashioned. And there is only one way to make a nation, to create men, and that is to educate them, to develop by educational means the immense lost force which now stagnates in ignorance and idleness. Yes, yes, Italy is made, but let us make an Italian nation. And give us more and more books, and let us ever go more and more forward into science and into light, if we wish to live and to be healthy, good, and strong!"

With his torso erect, with his powerful leonine muzzle flaming with the white brightness of his beard and hair, old Orlando looked superb. And in that simple, candid chamber, so touching with its intentional poverty, he raised his cry of hope with such intensity of feverish faith, that before the young priest's eyes there arose another figure—that of Cardinal Boccanera, erect and black save for his snow-white hair, and likewise glowing with heroic beauty in his crumbling palace whose gilded ceilings threatened to fall about his head! Ah! the magnificent stubborn men of the past, the believers, the old men who still show themselves more virile, more ardent than the young! Those two represented the opposite poles of belief; they had not an idea, an affection in common, and in that ancient city of Rome, where all was being blown away in dust, they alone seemed to protest, indestructible, face to face like two parted brothers, standing motionless on either horizon. And to have seen them thus, one after the other, so great and grand, so lonely, so detached from ordinary life, was to fill one's day with a dream of eternity.

Luigi, however, had taken hold of the old man's hands to calm him by an affectionate filial clasp. "Yes, yes, you are right, father, always right, and I'm a fool to contradict you. Now, pray don't move about like that, for you are uncovering yourself, and your legs will get cold again."

So saying, he knelt down and very carefully arranged the wrapper; and then remaining on the floor like a child, albeit he was two and forty, he raised his moist eyes, full of mute, entreating worship towards the old man who, calmed and deeply moved, caressed his hair with a trembling touch.

Pierre had been there for nearly two hours, when he at last took leave, greatly struck and affected by all that he had seen and heard. And again he had to promise that he would return and have a long chat with Orlando. Once out of doors he walked along at random. It was barely four o'clock, and it was his idea to ramble in this wise, without any predetermined programme, through Rome at that delightful hour when the sun sinks in the refreshed and far blue atmosphere. Almost immediately, however, he found himself in the Via Nazionale, along which he had driven on arriving the previous day. And he recognised the huge livid Banca d'Italia, the green gardens climbing to the Quirinal, and the heaven-soaring pines of the Villa Aldobrandini. Then, at the turn of the street, as he stopped short in order that he might again contemplate the column of Trajan which now rose up darkly from its low piazza, already full of twilight, he was surprised to see a victoria suddenly pull up, and a young man courteously beckon to him.

"Monsieur l'Abbe Froment! Monsieur l'Abbe Froment!"

It was young Prince Dario Boccanera, on his way to his daily drive along the Corso. He now virtually subsisted on the liberality of his uncle the Cardinal, and was almost always short of money. But, like all the Romans, he would, if necessary, have rather lived on bread and water than have forgone his carriage, horse, and coachman. An equipage, indeed, is the one indispensable luxury of Rome.

"If you will come with me, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment," said the young Prince, "I will show you the most interesting part of our city."

He doubtless desired to please Benedetta, by behaving amiably towards her protege. Idle as he was, too, it seemed to him a pleasant occupation to initiate that young priest, who was said to be so intelligent, into what he deemed the inimitable side, the true florescence of Roman life.

Pierre was compelled to accept, although he would have preferred a solitary stroll. Yet he was interested in this young man, the last born of an exhausted race, who, while seemingly incapable of either thought or action, was none the less very seductive with his high-born pride and indolence. Far more a Roman than a patriot, Dario had never had the faintest inclination to rally to the new order of things, being well content to live apart and do nothing; and passionate though he was, he indulged in no follies, being very practical and sensible at heart, as are all his fellow-citizens, despite their apparent impetuosity. As soon as his carriage, after crossing the Piazza di Venezia, entered the Corso, he gave rein to his childish vanity, his desire to shine, his passion for gay, happy life in the open under the lovely sky. All this, indeed, was clearly expressed in the simple gesture which he made whilst exclaiming: "The Corso!"

As on the previous day, Pierre was filled with astonishment. The long narrow street again stretched before him as far as the white dazzling Piazza del Popolo, the only difference being that the right-hand houses were now steeped in sunshine, whilst those on the left were black with shadow. What! was that the Corso then, that semi-obscure trench, close pressed by high and heavy house-fronts, that mean roadway where three vehicles could scarcely pass abreast, and which serried shops lined with gaudy displays? There was neither space, nor far horizon, nor refreshing greenery such as the fashionable drives of Paris could boast! Nothing but jostling, crowding, and stifling on the little footways under the narrow strip of sky. And although Dario named the pompous and historical palaces, Bonaparte, Doria, Odescalchi, Sciarra, and Chigi; although he pointed out the column of Marcus Aurelius on the Piazza Colonna, the most lively square of the whole city with its everlasting throng of lounging, gazing, chattering people; although, all the way to the Piazza del Popolo, he never ceased calling attention to churches, houses, and side-streets, notably the Via dei Condotti, at the far end of which the Trinity de' Monti, all golden in the glory of the sinking sun, appeared above that famous flight of steps, the triumphal Scala di Spagna—Pierre still and ever retained the impression of disillusion which the narrow, airless thoroughfare had conveyed to him: the "palaces" looked to him like mournful hospitals or barracks, the Piazza Colonna suffered terribly from a lack of trees, and the Trinity de' Monti alone took his fancy by its distant radiance of fairyland.

But it was necessary to come back from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza di Venezia, then return to the former square, and come back yet again, following the entire Corso three and four times without wearying. The delighted Dario showed himself and looked about him, exchanging salutations. On either footway was a compact crowd of promenaders whose eyes roamed over the equipages and whose hands could have shaken those of the carriage folks. So great at last became the number of vehicles that both lines were absolutely unbroken, crowded to such a point that the coachmen could do no more than walk their horses. Perpetually going up and coming down the Corso, people scrutinised and jostled one another. It was open-air promiscuity, all Rome gathered together in the smallest possible space, the folks who knew one another and who met here as in a friendly drawing-room, and the folks belonging to adverse parties who did not speak together but who elbowed each other, and whose glances penetrated to each other's soul. Then a revelation came to Pierre, and he suddenly understood the Corso, the ancient custom, the passion and glory of the city. Its pleasure lay precisely in the very narrowness of the street, in that forced elbowing which facilitated not only desired meetings but the satisfaction of curiosity, the display of vanity, and the garnering of endless tittle-tattle. All Roman society met here each day, displayed itself, spied on itself, offering itself in spectacle to its own eyes, with such an indispensable need of thus beholding itself that the man of birth who missed the Corso was like one out of his element, destitute of newspapers, living like a savage. And withal the atmosphere was delightfully balmy, and the narrow strip of sky between the heavy, rusty mansions displayed an infinite azure purity.

Dario never ceased smiling, and slightly inclining his head while he repeated to Pierre the names of princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses—high-sounding names whose flourish had filled history, whose sonorous syllables conjured up the shock of armour on the battlefield and the splendour of papal pomp with robes of purple, tiaras of gold, and sacred vestments sparkling with precious stones. And as Pierre listened and looked he was pained to see merely some corpulent ladies or undersized gentlemen, bloated or shrunken beings, whose ill-looks seemed to be increased by their modern attire. However, a few pretty women went by, particularly some young, silent girls with large, clear eyes. And just as Dario had pointed out the Palazzo Buongiovanni, a huge seventeenth-century facade, with windows encompassed by foliaged ornamentation deplorably heavy in style, he added gaily:

"Ah! look—that's Attilio there on the footway. Young Lieutenant Sacco—you know, don't you?"

Pierre signed that he understood. Standing there in uniform, Attilio, so young, so energetic and brave of appearance, with a frank countenance softly illumined by blue eyes like his mother's, at once pleased the priest. He seemed indeed the very personification of youth and love, with all their enthusiastic, disinterested hope in the future.

"You'll see by and by, when we pass the palace again," said Dario. "He'll still be there and I'll show you something."

Then he began to talk gaily of the girls of Rome, the little princesses, the little duchesses, so discreetly educated at the convent of the Sacred Heart, quitting it for the most part so ignorant and then completing their education beside their mothers, never going out but to accompany the latter on the obligatory drive to the Corso, and living through endless days, cloistered, imprisoned in the depths of sombre mansions. Nevertheless what tempests raged in those mute souls to which none had ever penetrated! what stealthy growth of will suddenly appeared from under passive obedience, apparent unconsciousness of surroundings! How many there were who stubbornly set their minds on carving out their lives for themselves, on choosing the man who might please them, and securing him despite the opposition of the entire world! And the lover was chosen there from among the stream of young men promenading the Corso, the lover hooked with a glance during the daily drive, those candid eyes speaking aloud and sufficing for confession and the gift of all, whilst not a breath was wafted from the lips so chastely closed. And afterwards there came love letters, furtively exchanged in church, and the winning-over of maids to facilitate stolen meetings, at first so innocent. In the end, a marriage often resulted.

Celia, for her part, had determined to win Attilio on the very first day when their eyes had met. And it was from a window of the Palazzo Buongiovanni that she had perceived him one afternoon of mortal weariness. He had just raised his head, and she had taken him for ever and given herself to him with those large, pure eyes of hers as they rested on his own. She was but an amorosa—nothing more; he pleased her; she had set her heart on him—him and none other. She would have waited twenty years for him, but she relied on winning him at once by quiet stubbornness of will. People declared that the terrible fury of the Prince, her father, had proved impotent against her respectful, obstinate silence. He, man of mixed blood as he was, son of an American woman, and husband of an English woman, laboured but to retain his own name and fortune intact amidst the downfall of others; and it was rumoured that as the result of a quarrel which he had picked with his wife, whom he accused of not sufficiently watching over their daughter, the Princess had revolted, full not only of the pride of a foreigner who had brought a huge dowry in marriage, but also of such plain, frank egotism that she had declared she no longer found time enough to attend to herself, let alone another. Had she not already done enough in bearing him five children? She thought so; and now she spent her time in worshipping herself, letting Celia do as she listed, and taking no further interest in the household through which swept stormy gusts.

However, the carriage was again about to pass the Buongiovanni mansion, and Dario forewarned Pierre. "You see," said he, "Attilio has come back. And now look up at the third window on the first floor."

It was at once rapid and charming. Pierre saw the curtain slightly drawn aside and Celia's gentle face appear. Closed, candid lily, she did not smile, she did not move. Nothing could be read on those pure lips, or in those clear but fathomless eyes of hers. Yet she was taking Attilio to herself, and giving herself to him without reserve. And soon the curtain fell once more.

"Ah, the little mask!" muttered Dario. "Can one ever tell what there is behind so much innocence?"

As Pierre turned round he perceived Attilio, whose head was still raised, and whose face was also motionless and pale, with closed mouth, and widely opened eyes. And the young priest was deeply touched, for this was love, absolute love in its sudden omnipotence, true love, eternal and juvenescent, in which ambition and calculation played no part.

Then Dario ordered the coachman to drive up to the Pincio; for, before or after the Corso, the round of the Pincio is obligatory on fine, clear afternoons. First came the Piazza del Popolo, the most airy and regular square of Rome, with its conjunction of thoroughfares, its churches and fountains, its central obelisk, and its two clumps of trees facing one another at either end of the small white paving-stones, betwixt the severe and sun-gilt buildings. Then, turning to the right, the carriage began to climb the inclined way to the Pincio—a magnificent winding ascent, decorated with bas-reliefs, statues, and fountains—a kind of apotheosis of marble, a commemoration of ancient Rome, rising amidst greenery. Up above, however, Pierre found the garden small, little better than a large square, with just the four necessary roadways to enable the carriages to drive round and round as long as they pleased. An uninterrupted line of busts of the great men of ancient and modern Italy fringed these roadways. But what Pierre most admired was the trees—trees of the most rare and varied kinds, chosen and tended with infinite care, and nearly always evergreens, so that in winter and summer alike the spot was adorned with lovely foliage of every imaginable shade of verdure. And beside these trees, along the fine, breezy roadways, Dario's victoria began to turn, following the continuous, unwearying stream of the other carriages.

Pierre remarked one young woman of modest demeanour and attractive simplicity who sat alone in a dark-blue victoria, drawn by a well-groomed, elegantly harnessed horse. She was very pretty, short, with chestnut hair, a creamy complexion, and large gentle eyes. Quietly robed in dead-leaf silk, she wore a large hat, which alone looked somewhat extravagant. And seeing that Dario was staring at her, the priest inquired her name, whereat the young Prince smiled. Oh! she was nobody, La Tonietta was the name that people gave her; she was one of the few demi-mondaines that Roman society talked of. Then, with the freeness and frankness which his race displays in such matters, Dario added some particulars. La Tonietta's origin was obscure; some said that she was the daughter of an innkeeper of Tivoli, and others that of a Neapolitan banker. At all events, she was very intelligent, had educated herself, and knew thoroughly well how to receive and entertain people at the little palazzo in the Via dei Mille, which had been given to her by old Marquis Manfredi now deceased. She made no scandalous show, had but one protector at a time, and the princesses and duchesses who paid attention to her at the Corso every afternoon, considered her nice-looking. One peculiarity had made her somewhat notorious. There was some one whom she loved and from whom she never accepted aught but a bouquet of white roses; and folks would smile indulgently when at times for weeks together she was seen driving round the Pincio with those pure, white bridal flowers on the carriage seat.

Dario, however, suddenly paused in his explanations to address a ceremonious bow to a lady who, accompanied by a gentleman, drove by in a large landau. Then he simply said to the priest: "My mother."

Pierre already knew of her. Viscount de la Choue had told him her story, how, after Prince Onofrio Boccanera's death, she had married again, although she was already fifty; how at the Corso, just like some young girl, she had hooked with her eyes a handsome man to her liking—one, too, who was fifteen years her junior. And Pierre also knew who that man was, a certain Jules Laporte, an ex-sergeant of the papal Swiss Guard, an ex-traveller in relics, compromised in an extraordinary "false relic" fraud; and he was further aware that Laporte's wife had made a fine-looking Marquis Montefiori of him, the last of the fortunate adventurers of romance, triumphing as in the legendary lands where shepherds are wedded to queens.

At the next turn, as the large landau again went by, Pierre looked at the couple. The Marchioness was really wonderful, blooming with all the classical Roman beauty, tall, opulent, and very dark, with the head of a goddess and regular if somewhat massive features, nothing as yet betraying her age except the down upon her upper lip. And the Marquis, the Romanised Swiss of Geneva, really had a proud bearing, with his solid soldierly figure and long wavy moustaches. People said that he was in no wise a fool but, on the contrary, very gay and very supple, just the man to please women. His wife so gloried in him that she dragged him about and displayed him everywhere, having begun life afresh with him as if she were still but twenty, spending on him the little fortune which she had saved from the Villa Montefiori disaster, and so completely forgetting her son that she only saw the latter now and again at the promenade and acknowledged his bow like that of some chance acquaintance.

"Let us go to see the sun set behind St. Peter's," all at once said Dario, conscientiously playing his part as a showman of curiosities.

The victoria thereupon returned to the terrace, where a military band was now playing with a terrific blare of brass instruments. In order that their occupants might hear the music, a large number of carriages had already drawn up, and a growing crowd of loungers on foot had assembled there. And from that beautiful terrace, so broad and lofty, one of the most wonderful views of Rome was offered to the gaze. Beyond the Tiber, beyond the pale chaos of the new district of the castle meadows,* and between the greenery of Monte Mario and the Janiculum arose St. Peter's. Then on the left came all the olden city, an endless stretch of roofs, a rolling sea of edifices as far as the eye could reach. But one's glances always came back to St. Peter's, towering into the azure with pure and sovereign grandeur. And, seen from the terrace, the slow sunsets in the depths of the vast sky behind the colossus were sublime.

* See ante note on castle meadows.

Sometimes there are topplings of sanguineous clouds, battles of giants hurling mountains at one another and succumbing beneath the monstrous ruins of flaming cities. Sometimes only red streaks or fissures appear on the surface of a sombre lake, as if a net of light has been flung to fish the submerged orb from amidst the seaweed. Sometimes, too, there is a rosy mist, a kind of delicate dust which falls, streaked with pearls by a distant shower, whose curtain is drawn across the mystery of the horizon. And sometimes there is a triumph, a cortege of gold and purple chariots of cloud rolling along a highway of fire, galleys floating upon an azure sea, fantastic and extravagant pomps slowly sinking into the less and less fathomable abyss of the twilight.

But that night the sublime spectacle presented itself to Pierre with a calm, blinding, desperate grandeur. At first, just above the dome of St. Peter's, the sun, descending in a spotless, deeply limpid sky, proved yet so resplendent that one's eyes could not face its brightness. And in this resplendency the dome seemed to be incandescent, you would have said a dome of liquid silver; whilst the surrounding districts, the house-roofs of the Borgo, were as though changed into a lake of live embers. Then, as the sun was by degrees inclined, it lost some of its blaze, and one could look; and soon afterwards sinking with majestic slowness it disappeared behind the dome, which showed forth darkly blue, while the orb, now entirely hidden, set an aureola around it, a glory like a crown of flaming rays. And then began the dream, the dazzling symbol, the singular illumination of the row of windows beneath the cupola which were transpierced by the light and looked like the ruddy mouths of furnaces, in such wise that one might have imagined the dome to be poised upon a brazier, isolated, in the air, as though raised and upheld by the violence of the fire. It all lasted barely three minutes. Down below the jumbled roofs of the Borgo became steeped in violet vapour, sank into increasing gloom, whilst from the Janiculum to Monte Mario the horizon showed its firm black line. And it was the sky then which became all purple and gold, displaying the infinite placidity of a supernatural radiance above the earth which faded into nihility. Finally the last window reflections were extinguished, the glow of the heavens departed, and nothing remained but the vague, fading roundness of the dome of St. Peter's amidst the all-invading night.

And, by some subtle connection of ideas, Pierre at that moment once again saw rising before him the lofty, sad, declining figures of Cardinal Boccanera and old Orlando. On the evening of that day when he had learnt to know them, one after the other, both so great in the obstinacy of their hope, they seemed to be there, erect on the horizon above their annihilated city, on the fringe of the heavens which death apparently was about to seize. Was everything then to crumble with them? was everything to fade away and disappear in the falling night following upon accomplished Time?

V.

ON the following day Narcisse Habert came in great worry to tell Pierre that Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo complained of being unwell, and asked for a delay of two or three days before receiving the young priest and considering the matter of his audience. Pierre was thus reduced to inaction, for he dared not make any attempt elsewhere in view of seeing the Pope. He had been so frightened by Nani and others that he feared he might jeopardise everything by inconsiderate endeavours. And so he began to visit Rome in order to occupy his leisure.

His first visit was for the ruins of the Palatine. Going out alone one clear morning at eight o'clock, he presented himself at the entrance in the Via San Teodoro, an iron gateway flanked by the lodges of the keepers. One of the latter at once offered his services, and though Pierre would have preferred to roam at will, following the bent of his dream, he somehow did not like to refuse the offer of this man, who spoke French very distinctly, and smiled in a very good-natured way. He was a squatly built little man, a former soldier, some sixty years of age, and his square-cut, ruddy face was barred by thick white moustaches.

"Then will you please follow me, Monsieur l'Abbe," said he. "I can see that you are French, Monsieur l'Abbe. I'm a Piedmontese myself, but I know the French well enough; I was with them at Solferino. Yes, yes, whatever people may say, one can't forget old friendships. Here, this way, please, to the right."

Raising his eyes, Pierre had just perceived the line of cypresses edging the plateau of the Palatine on the side of the Tiber; and in the delicate blue atmosphere the intense greenery of these trees showed like a black fringe. They alone attracted the eye; the slope, of a dusty, dirty grey, stretched out bare and devastated, dotted by a few bushes, among which peeped fragments of ancient walls. All was instinct with the ravaged, leprous sadness of a spot handed over to excavation, and where only men of learning could wax enthusiastic.

"The palaces of Tiberius, Caligula, and the Flavians are up above," resumed the guide. "We must keep then for the end and go round." Nevertheless he took a few steps to the left, and pausing before an excavation, a sort of grotto in the hillside, exclaimed: "This is the Lupercal den where the wolf suckled Romulus and Remus. Just here at the entry used to stand the Ruminal fig-tree which sheltered the twins."

Pierre could not restrain a smile, so convinced was the tone in which the old soldier gave these explanations, proud as he was of all the ancient glory, and wont to regard the wildest legends as indisputable facts. However, when the worthy man pointed out some vestiges of Roma Quadrata—remnants of walls which really seemed to date from the foundation of the city—Pierre began to feel interested, and a first touch of emotion made his heart beat. This emotion was certainly not due to any beauty of scene, for he merely beheld a few courses of tufa blocks, placed one upon the other and uncemented. But a past which had been dead for seven and twenty centuries seemed to rise up before him, and those crumbling, blackened blocks, the foundation of such a mighty eclipse of power and splendour, acquired extraordinary majesty.

Continuing their inspection, they went on, skirting the hillside. The outbuildings of the palaces must have descended to this point; fragments of porticoes, fallen beams, columns and friezes set up afresh, edged the rugged path which wound through wild weeds, suggesting a neglected cemetery; and the guide repeated the words which he had used day by day for ten years past, continuing to enunciate suppositions as facts, and giving a name, a destination, a history, to every one of the fragments.

"The house of Augustus," he said at last, pointing towards some masses of earth and rubbish.

Thereupon Pierre, unable to distinguish anything, ventured to inquire: "Where do you mean?"

"Oh!" said the man, "it seems that the walls were still to be seen at the end of the last century. But it was entered from the other side, from the Sacred Way. On this side there was a huge balcony which overlooked the Circus Maximus so that one could view the sports. However, as you can see, the greater part of the palace is still buried under that big garden up above, the garden of the Villa Mills. When there's money for fresh excavations it will be found again, together with the temple of Apollo and the shrine of Vesta which accompanied it."

Turning to the left, he next entered the Stadium, the arena erected for foot-racing, which stretched beside the palace of Augustus; and the priest's interest was now once more awakened. It was not that he found himself in presence of well-preserved and monumental remains, for not a column had remained erect, and only the right-hand walls were still standing. But the entire plan of the building had been traced, with the goals at either end, the porticus round the course, and the colossal imperial tribune which, after being on the left, annexed to the house of Augustus, had afterwards opened on the right, fitting into the palace of Septimius Severus. And while Pierre looked on all the scattered remnants, his guide went on chattering, furnishing the most copious and precise information, and declaring that the gentlemen who directed the excavations had mentally reconstructed the Stadium in each and every particular, and were even preparing a most exact plan of it, showing all the columns in their proper order and the statues in their niches, and even specifying the divers sorts of marble which had covered the walls.

"Oh! the directors are quite at ease," the old soldier eventually added with an air of infinite satisfaction. "There will be nothing for the Germans to pounce on here. They won't be allowed to set things topsy-turvy as they did at the Forum, where everybody's at sea since they came along with their wonderful science!"

Pierre—a Frenchman—smiled, and his interest increased when, by broken steps and wooden bridges thrown over gaps, he followed the guide into the great ruins of the palace of Severus. Rising on the southern point of the Palatine, this palace had overlooked the Appian Way and the Campagna as far as the eye could reach. Nowadays, almost the only remains are the substructures, the subterranean halls contrived under the arches of the terraces, by which the plateau of the hill was enlarged; and yet these dismantled substructures suffice to give some idea of the triumphant palace which they once upheld, so huge and powerful have they remained in their indestructible massiveness. Near by arose the famous Septizonium, the tower with the seven tiers of arcades, which only finally disappeared in the sixteenth century. One of the palace terraces yet juts out upon cyclopean arches and from it the view is splendid. But all the rest is a commingling of massive yet crumbling walls, gaping depths whose ceilings have fallen, endless corridors and vast halls of doubtful destination. Well cared for by the new administration, swept and cleansed of weeds, the ruins have lost their romantic wildness and assumed an aspect of bare and mournful grandeur. However, flashes of living sunlight often gild the ancient walls, penetrate by their breaches into the black halls, and animate with their dazzlement the mute melancholy of all this dead splendour now exhumed from the earth in which it slumbered for centuries. Over the old ruddy masonry, stripped of its pompous marble covering, is the purple mantle of the sunlight, draping the whole with imperial glory once more.

For more than two hours already Pierre had been walking on, and yet he still had to visit all the earlier palaces on the north and east of the plateau. "We must go back," said the guide, "the gardens of the Villa Mills and the convent of San Bonaventura stop the way. We shall only be able to pass on this side when the excavations have made a clearance. Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe, if you had walked over the Palatine merely some fifty years ago! I've seen some plans of that time. There were only some vineyards and little gardens with hedges then, a real campagna, where not a soul was to be met. And to think that all these palaces were sleeping underneath!"

Pierre followed him, and after again passing the house of Augustus, they ascended the slope and reached the vast Flavian palace,* still half buried by the neighbouring villa, and composed of a great number of halls large and small, on the nature of which scholars are still arguing. The aula regia, or throne-room, the basilica, or hall of justice, the triclinium, or dining-room, and the peristylium seem certainties; but for all the rest, and especially the small chambers of the private part of the structure, only more or less fanciful conjectures can be offered. Moreover, not a wall is entire; merely foundations peep out of the ground, mutilated bases describing the plan of the edifice. The only ruin preserved, as if by miracle, is the house on a lower level which some assert to have been that of Livia,* a house which seems very small beside all the huge palaces, and where are three halls comparatively intact, with mural paintings of mythological scenes, flowers, and fruits, still wonderfully fresh. As for the palace of Tiberius, not one of its stones can be seen; its remains lie buried beneath a lovely public garden; whilst of the neighbouring palace of Caligula, overhanging the Forum, there are only some huge substructures, akin to those of the house of Severus—buttresses, lofty arcades, which upheld the palace, vast basements, so to say, where the praetorians were posted and gorged themselves with continual junketings. And thus this lofty plateau dominating the city merely offered some scarcely recognisable vestiges to the view, stretches of grey, bare soil turned up by the pick, and dotted with fragments of old walls; and it needed a real effort of scholarly imagination to conjure up the ancient imperial splendour which once had triumphed there.

* Begun by Vespasian and finished by Domitian.—Trans.

** Others assert it to have been the house of Germanicus,
father of Caligula.—Trans.

Nevertheless Pierre's guide, with quiet conviction, persisted in his explanations, pointing to empty space as though the edifices still rose before him. "Here," said he, "we are in the Area Palatina. Yonder, you see, is the facade of Domitian's palace, and there you have that of Caligula's palace, while on turning round the temple of Jupiter Stator is in front of you. The Sacred Way came up as far as here, and passed under the Porta Mugonia, one of the three gates of primitive Rome."

He paused and pointed to the northwest portion of the height. "You will have noticed," he resumed, "that the Caesars didn't build yonder. And that was evidently because they had to respect some very ancient monuments dating from before the foundation of the city and greatly venerated by the people. There stood the temple of Victory built by Evander and his Arcadians, the Lupercal grotto which I showed you, and the humble hut of Romulus constructed of reeds and clay. Oh! everything has been found again, Monsieur l'Abbe; and, in spite of all that the Germans say there isn't the slightest doubt of it."

Then, quite abruptly, like a man suddenly remembering the most interesting thing of all, he exclaimed: "Ah! to wind up we'll just go to see the subterranean gallery where Caligula was murdered."

Thereupon they descended into a long crypto-porticus, through the breaches of which the sun now casts bright rays. Some ornaments of stucco and fragments of mosaic-work are yet to be seen. Still the spot remains mournful and desolate, well fitted for tragic horror. The old soldier's voice had become graver as he related how Caligula, on returning from the Palatine games, had been minded to descend all alone into this gallery to witness certain sacred dances which some youths from Asia were practising there. And then it was that the gloom gave Cassius Chaereas, the chief of the conspirators, an opportunity to deal him the first thrust in the abdomen. Howling with pain, the emperor sought to flee; but the assassins, his creatures, his dearest friends, rushed upon him, threw him down, and dealt him blow after blow, whilst he, mad with rage and fright, filled the dim, deaf gallery with the howling of a slaughtered beast. When he had expired, silence fell once more, and the frightened murderers fled.

The classical visit to the Palatine was now over, and when Pierre came up into the light again, he wished to rid himself of his guide and remain alone in the pleasant, dreamy garden on the summit of the height. For three hours he had been tramping about with the guide's voice buzzing in his ears. The worthy man was now talking of his friendship for France and relating the battle of Magenta in great detail. He smiled as he took the piece of silver which Pierre offered him, and then started on the battle of Solferino. Indeed, it seemed impossible to stop him, when fortunately a lady came up to ask for some information. And, thereupon, he went off with her. "Good-evening, Monsieur l'Abbe," he said; "you can go down by way of Caligula's palace."

Delightful was Pierre's relief when he was at last able to rest for a moment on one of the marble seats in the garden. There were but few clumps of trees, cypresses, box-trees, palms, and some fine evergreen oaks; but the latter, sheltering the seat, cast a dark shade of exquisite freshness around. The charm of the spot was also largely due to its dreamy solitude, to the low rustle which seemed to come from that ancient soil saturated with resounding history. Here formerly had been the pleasure grounds of the Villa Farnese which still exists though greatly damaged, and the grace of the Renascence seems to linger here, its breath passing caressingly through the shiny foliage of the old evergreen oaks. You are, as it were, enveloped by the soul of the past, an ethereal conglomeration of visions, and overhead is wafted the straying breath of innumerable generations buried beneath the sod.

After a time, however, Pierre could no longer remain seated, so powerful was the attraction of Rome, scattered all around that august summit. So he rose and approached the balustrade of a terrace; and beneath him appeared the Forum, and beyond it the Capitoline hill. To the eye the latter now only presented a commingling of grey buildings, lacking both grandeur and beauty. On the summit one saw the rear of the Palace of the Senator, flat, with little windows, and surmounted by a high, square campanile. The large, bare, rusty-looking walls hid the church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli and the spot where the temple of Capitoline Jove had formerly stood, radiant in all its royalty. On the left, some ugly houses rose terrace-wise upon the slope of Monte Caprino, where goats were pastured in the middle ages; while the few fine trees in the grounds of the Caffarelli palace, the present German embassy, set some greenery above the ancient Tarpeian rock now scarcely to be found, lost, hidden as it is, by buttress walls. Yet this was the Mount of the Capitol, the most glorious of the seven hills, with its citadel and its temple, the temple to which universal dominion was promised, the St. Peter's of pagan Rome; this indeed was the hill—steep on the side of the Forum, and a precipice on that of the Campus Martius—where the thunder of Jupiter fell, where in the dimmest of the far-off ages the Asylum of Romulus rose with its sacred oaks, a spot of infinite savage mystery. Here, later, were preserved the public documents of Roman grandeur inscribed on tablets of brass; hither climbed the heroes of the triumphs; and here the emperors became gods, erect in statues of marble. And nowadays the eye inquires wonderingly how so much history and so much glory can have had for their scene so small a space, such a rugged, jumbled pile of paltry buildings, a mole-hill, looking no bigger, no loftier than a hamlet perched between two valleys.

Then another surprise for Pierre was the Forum, starting from the Capitol and stretching out below the Palatine: a narrow square, close pressed by the neighbouring hills, a hollow where Rome in growing had been compelled to rear edifice close to edifice till all stifled for lack of breathing space. It was necessary to dig very deep—some fifty feet—to find the venerable republican soil, and now all you see is a long, clean, livid trench, cleared of ivy and bramble, where the fragments of paving, the bases of columns, and the piles of foundations appear like bits of bone. Level with the ground the Basilica Julia, entirely mapped out, looks like an architect's ground plan. On that side the arch of Septimius Severus alone rears itself aloft, virtually intact, whilst of the temple of Vespasian only a few isolated columns remain still standing, as if by miracle, amidst the general downfall, soaring with a proud elegance, with sovereign audacity of equilibrium, so slender and so gilded, into the blue heavens. The column of Phocas is also erect; and you see some portions of the Rostra fitted together out of fragments discovered near by. But if the eye seeks a sensation of extraordinary vastness, it must travel beyond the three columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux, beyond the vestiges of the house of the Vestals, beyond the temple of Faustina, in which the Christian Church of San Lorenzo has so composedly installed itself, and even beyond the round temple of Romulus, to light upon the Basilica of Constantine with its three colossal, gaping archways. From the Palatine they look like porches built for a nation of giants, so massive that a fallen fragment resembles some huge rock hurled by a whirlwind from a mountain summit. And there, in that illustrious, narrow, overflowing Forum the history of the greatest of nations held for centuries, from the legendary time of the Sabine women, reconciling their relatives and their ravishers, to that of the proclamation of public liberty, so slowly wrung from the patricians by the plebeians. Was not the Forum at once the market, the exchange, the tribunal, the open-air hall of public meeting? The Gracchi there defended the cause of the humble; Sylla there set up the lists of those whom he proscribed; Cicero there spoke, and there, against the rostra, his bleeding head was hung. Then, under the emperors, the old renown was dimmed, the centuries buried the monuments and temples with such piles of dust that all that the middle ages could do was to turn the spot into a cattle market! Respect has come back once more, a respect which violates tombs, which is full of feverish curiosity and science, which is dissatisfied with mere hypotheses, which loses itself amidst this historical soil where generations rise one above the other, and hesitates between the fifteen or twenty restorations of the Forum that have been planned on paper, each of them as plausible as the other. But to the mere passer-by, who is not a professional scholar and has not recently re-perused the history of Rome, the details have no significance. All he sees on this searched and scoured spot is a city's cemetery where old exhumed stones are whitening, and whence rises the intense sadness that envelops dead nations. Pierre, however, noting here and there fragments of the Sacred Way, now turning, now running down, and now ascending with their pavement of silex indented by the chariot-wheels, thought of the triumphs, of the ascent of the triumpher, so sorely shaken as his chariot jolted over that rough pavement of glory.

But the horizon expanded towards the southeast, and beyond the arches of Titus and Constantine he perceived the Colosseum. Ah! that colossus, only one-half or so of which has been destroyed by time as with the stroke of a mighty scythe, it rises in its enormity and majesty like a stone lace-work with hundreds of empty bays agape against the blue of heaven! There is a world of halls, stairs, landings, and passages, a world where one loses oneself amidst death-like silence and solitude. The furrowed tiers of seats, eaten into by the atmosphere, are like shapeless steps leading down into some old extinct crater, some natural circus excavated by the force of the elements in indestructible rock. The hot suns of eighteen hundred years have baked and scorched this ruin, which has reverted to a state of nature, bare and golden-brown like a mountain-side, since it has been stripped of its vegetation, the flora which once made it like a virgin forest. And what an evocation when the mind sets flesh and blood and life again on all that dead osseous framework, fills the circus with the 90,000 spectators which it could hold, marshals the games and the combats of the arena, gathers a whole civilisation together, from the emperor and the dignitaries to the surging plebeian sea, all aglow with the agitation and brilliancy of an impassioned people, assembled under the ruddy reflection of the giant purple velum. And then, yet further, on the horizon, were other cyclopean ruins, the baths of Caracalla, standing there like relics of a race of giants long since vanished from the world: halls extravagantly and inexplicably spacious and lofty; vestibules large enough for an entire population; a frigidarium where five hundred people could swim together; a tepidarium and a calidarium* on the same proportions, born of a wild craving for the huge; and then the terrific massiveness of the structures, the thickness of the piles of brick-work, such as no feudal castle ever knew; and, in addition, the general immensity which makes passing visitors look like lost ants; such an extraordinary riot of the great and the mighty that one wonders for what men, for what multitudes, this monstrous edifice was reared. To-day, you would say a mass of rocks in the rough, thrown from some height for building the abode of Titans.

* Tepidarium, warm bath; calidarium, vapour bath.—Trans.

And as Pierre gazed, he became more and more immersed in the limitless past which encompassed him. On all sides history rose up like a surging sea. Those bluey plains on the north and west were ancient Etruria; those jagged crests on the east were the Sabine Mountains; while southward, the Alban Mountains and Latium spread out in the streaming gold of the sunshine. Alba Longa was there, and so was Monte Cavo, with its crown of old trees, and the convent which has taken the place of the ancient temple of Jupiter. Then beyond the Forum, beyond the Capitol, the greater part of Rome stretched out, whilst behind Pierre, on the margin of the Tiber, was the Janiculum. And a voice seemed to come from the whole city, a voice which told him of Rome's eternal life, resplendent with past greatness. He remembered just enough of what he had been taught at school to realise where he was; he knew just what every one knows of Rome with no pretension to scholarship, and it was more particularly his artistic temperament which awoke within him and gathered warmth from the flame of memory. The present had disappeared, and the ocean of the past was still rising, buoying him up, carrying him away.

And then his mind involuntarily pictured a resurrection instinct with life. The grey, dismal Palatine, razed like some accursed city, suddenly became animated, peopled, crowned with palaces and temples. There had been the cradle of the Eternal City, founded by Romulus on that summit overlooking the Tiber. There assuredly the seven kings of its two and a half centuries of monarchical rule had dwelt, enclosed within high, strong walls, which had but three gateways. Then the five centuries of republican sway spread out, the greatest, the most glorious of all the centuries, those which brought the Italic peninsula and finally the known world under Roman dominion. During those victorious years of social and war-like struggle, Rome grew and peopled the seven hills, and the Palatine became but a venerable cradle with legendary temples, and was even gradually invaded by private residences. But at last Caesar, the incarnation of the power of his race, after Gaul and after Pharsalia triumphed in the name of the whole Roman people, having completed the colossal task by which the five following centuries of imperialism were to profit, with a pompous splendour and a rush of every appetite. And then Augustus could ascend to power; glory had reached its climax; millions of gold were waiting to be filched from the depths of the provinces; and the imperial gala was to begin in the world's capital, before the eyes of the dazzled and subjected nations. Augustus had been born on the Palatine, and after Actium had given him the empire, he set his pride in reigning from the summit of that sacred mount, venerated by the people. He bought up private houses and there built his palace with luxurious splendour: an atrium upheld by four pilasters and eight columns; a peristylium encompassed by fifty-six Ionic columns; private apartments all around, and all in marble; a profusion of marble, brought at great cost from foreign lands, and of the brightest hues, resplendent like gems. And he lodged himself with the gods, building near his own abode a large temple of Apollo and a shrine of Vesta in order to ensure himself divine and eternal sovereignty. And then the seed of the imperial palaces was sown; they were to spring up, grow and swarm, and cover the entire mount.

Ah! the all-powerfulness of Augustus, his four and forty years of total, absolute, superhuman power, such as no despot has known even in his dreams! He had taken to himself every title, united every magistracy in his person. Imperator and consul, he commanded the armies and exercised executive power; pro-consul, he was supreme in the provinces; perpetual censor and princeps, he reigned over the senate; tribune, he was the master of the people. And, formerly called Octavius, he had caused himself to be declared Augustus, sacred, god among men, having his temples and his priests, worshipped in his lifetime like a divinity deigning to visit the earth. And finally he had resolved to be supreme pontiff, annexing religious to civil power, and thus by a stroke of genius attaining to the most complete dominion to which man can climb. As the supreme pontiff could not reside in a private house, he declared his abode to be State property. As the supreme pontiff could not leave the vicinity of the temple of Vesta, he built a temple to that goddess near his own dwelling, leaving the guardianship of the ancient altar below the Palatine to the Vestal virgins. He spared no effort, for he well realised that human omnipotence, the mastery of mankind and the world, lay in that reunion of sovereignty, in being both king and priest, emperor and pope. All the sap of a mighty race, all the victories achieved, and all the favours of fortune yet to be garnered, blossomed forth in Augustus, in a unique splendour which was never again to shed such brilliant radiance. He was really the master of the world, amidst the conquered and pacified nations, encompassed by immortal glory in literature and in art. In him would seem to have been satisfied the old intense ambition of his people, the ambition which it had pursued through centuries of patient conquest, to become the people-king. The blood of Rome, the blood of Augustus, at last coruscated in the sunlight, in the purple of empire. And the blood of Augustus, of the divine, triumphant, absolute sovereign of bodies and souls, of the man in whom seven centuries of national pride had culminated, was to descend through the ages, through an innumerable posterity with a heritage of boundless pride and ambition. For it was fatal: the blood of Augustus was bound to spring into life once more and pulsate in the veins of all the successive masters of Rome, ever haunting them with the dream of ruling the whole world. And later on, after the decline and fall, when power had once more become divided between the king and the priest, the popes—their hearts burning with the red, devouring blood of their great forerunner—had no other passion, no other policy, through the centuries, than that of attaining to civil dominion, to the totality of human power.

But Augustus being dead, his palace having been closed and consecrated, Pierre saw that of Tiberius spring up from the soil. It had stood where his feet now rested, where the beautiful evergreen oaks sheltered him. He pictured it with courts, porticoes, and halls, both substantial and grand, despite the gloomy bent of the emperor who betook himself far from Rome to live amongst informers and debauchees, with his heart and brain poisoned by power to the point of crime and most extraordinary insanity. Then the palace of Caligula followed, an enlargement of that of Tiberius, with arcades set up to increase its extent, and a bridge thrown over the Forum to the Capitol, in order that the prince might go thither at his ease to converse with Jove, whose son he claimed to be. And sovereignty also rendered this one ferocious—a madman with omnipotence to do as he listed! Then, after Claudius, Nero, not finding the Palatine large enough, seized upon the delightful gardens climbing the Esquiline in order to set up his Golden House, a dream of sumptuous immensity which he could not complete and the ruins of which disappeared in the troubles following the death of this monster whom pride demented. Next, in eighteen months, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius fell one upon the other, in mire and in blood, the purple converting them also into imbeciles and monsters, gorged like unclean beasts at the trough of imperial enjoyment. And afterwards came the Flavians, at first a respite, with commonsense and human kindness: Vespasian; next Titus, who built but little on the Palatine; but then Domitian, in whom the sombre madness of omnipotence burst forth anew amidst a regime of fear and spying, idiotic atrocities and crimes, debauchery contrary to nature, and building enterprises born of insane vanity instinct with a desire to outvie the temples of the gods. The palace of Domitian, parted by a lane from that of Tiberius, arose colossal-like—a palace of fairyland. There was the hall of audience, with its throne of gold, its sixteen columns of Phrygian and Numidian marble and its eight niches containing colossal statues; there were the hall of justice, the vast dining-room, the peristylium, the sleeping apartments, where granite, porphyry, and alabaster overflowed, carved and decorated by the most famous artists, and lavished on all sides in order to dazzle the world. And finally, many years later, a last palace was added to all the others—that of Septimius Severus: again a building of pride, with arches supporting lofty halls, terraced storeys, towers o'er-topping the roofs, a perfect Babylonian pile, rising up at the extreme point of the mount in view of the Appian Way, so that the emperor's compatriots—those from the province of Africa, where he was born—might, on reaching the horizon, marvel at his fortune and worship him in his glory.

And now Pierre beheld all those palaces which he had conjured up around him, resuscitated, resplendent in the full sunlight. They were as if linked together, parted merely by the narrowest of passages. In order that not an inch of that precious summit might be lost, they had sprouted thickly like the monstrous florescence of strength, power, and unbridled pride which satisfied itself at the cost of millions, bleeding the whole world for the enjoyment of one man. And in truth there was but one palace altogether, a palace enlarged as soon as one emperor died and was placed among the deities, and another, shunning the consecrated pile where possibly the shadow of death frightened him, experienced an imperious need to build a house of his own and perpetuate in everlasting stone the memory of his reign. All the emperors were seized with this building craze; it was like a disease which the very throne seemed to carry from one occupant to another with growing intensity, a consuming desire to excel all predecessors by thicker and higher walls, by a more and more wonderful profusion of marbles, columns, and statues. And among all these princes there was the idea of a glorious survival, of leaving a testimony of their greatness to dazzled and stupefied generations, of perpetuating themselves by marvels which would not perish but for ever weigh heavily upon the earth, when their own light ashes should long since have been swept away by the winds. And thus the Palatine became but the venerable base of a monstrous edifice, a thick vegetation of adjoining buildings, each new pile being like a fresh eruption of feverish pride; while the whole, now showing the snowy brightness of white marble and now the glowing hues of coloured marble, ended by crowning Rome and the world with the most extraordinary and most insolent abode of sovereignty—whether palace, temple, basilica, or cathedral—that omnipotence and dominion have ever reared under the heavens.

But death lurked beneath this excess of strength and glory. Seven hundred and thirty years of monarchy and republic had sufficed to make Rome great; and in five centuries of imperial sway the people-king was to be devoured down to its last muscles. There was the immensity of the territory, the more distant provinces gradually pillaged and exhausted; there was the fisc consuming everything, digging the pit of fatal bankruptcy; and there was the degeneration of the people, poisoned by the scenes of the circus and the arena, fallen to the sloth and debauchery of their masters, the Caesars, while mercenaries fought the foe and tilled the soil. Already at the time of Constantine, Rome had a rival, Byzantium; disruption followed with Honorius; and then some ten emperors sufficed for decomposition to be complete, for the bones of the dying prey to be picked clean, the end coming with Romulus Augustulus, the sorry creature whose name is, so to say, a mockery of the whole glorious history, a buffet for both the founder of Rome and the founder of the empire.

The palaces, the colossal assemblage of walls, storeys, terraces, and gaping roofs, still remained on the deserted Palatine; many ornaments and statues, however, had already been removed to Byzantium. And the empire, having become Christian, had afterwards closed the temples and extinguished the fire of Vesta, whilst yet respecting the ancient Palladium. But in the fifth century the barbarians rush upon Rome, sack and burn it, and carry the spoils spared by the flames away in their chariots. As long as the city was dependent on Byzantium a custodian of the imperial palaces remained there watching over the Palatine. Then all fades and crumbles in the night of the middle ages. It would really seem that the popes then slowly took the place of the Caesars, succeeding them both in their abandoned marble halls and their ever-subsisting passion for domination. Some of them assuredly dwelt in the palace of Septimius Severus; a council of the Church was held in the Septizonium; and, later on, Gelasius II was elected in a neighbouring monastery on the sacred mount. It was as if Augustus were again rising from the tomb, once more master of the world, with a Sacred College of Cardinals resuscitating the Roman Senate. In the twelfth century the Septizonium belonged to some Benedictine monks, and was sold by them to the powerful Frangipani family, who fortified it as they had already fortified the Colosseum and the arches of Constantine and Titus, thus forming a vast fortress round about the venerable cradle of the city. And the violent deeds of civil war and the ravages of invasion swept by like whirlwinds, throwing down the walls, razing the palaces and towers. And afterwards successive generations invaded the ruins, installed themselves in them by right of trover and conquest, turned them into cellars, store-places for forage, and stables for mules. Kitchen gardens were formed, vines were planted on the spots where fallen soil had covered the mosaics of the imperial halls. All around nettles and brambles grew up, and ivy preyed on the overturned porticoes, till there came a day when the colossal assemblage of palaces and temples, which marble was to have rendered eternal, seemed to dive beneath the dust, to disappear under the surging soil and vegetation which impassive Nature threw over it. And then, in the hot sunlight, among the wild flowerets, only big, buzzing flies remained, whilst herds of goats strayed in freedom through the throne-room of Domitian and the fallen sanctuary of Apollo.

A great shudder passed through Pierre. To think of so much strength, pride, and grandeur, and such rapid ruin—a world for ever swept away! He wondered how entire palaces, yet peopled by admirable statuary, could thus have been gradually buried without any one thinking of protecting them. It was no sudden catastrophe which had swallowed up those masterpieces, subsequently to be disinterred with exclamations of admiring wonder; they had been drowned, as it were—caught progressively by the legs, the waist, and the neck, till at last the head had sunk beneath the rising tide. And how could one explain that generations had heedlessly witnessed such things without thought of putting forth a helping hand? It would seem as if, at a given moment, a black curtain were suddenly drawn across the world, as if mankind began afresh, with a new and empty brain which needed moulding and furnishing. Rome had become depopulated; men ceased to repair the ruins left by fire and sword; the edifices which by their very immensity had become useless were utterly neglected, allowed to crumble and fall. And then, too, the new religion everywhere hunted down the old one, stole its temples, overturned its gods. Earthly deposits probably completed the disaster—there were, it is said, both earthquakes and inundations—and the soil was ever rising, the alluvia of the young Christian world buried the ancient pagan society. And after the pillaging of the temples, the theft of the bronze roofs and marble columns, the climax came with the filching of the stones torn from the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus, with the pounding of the statuary and sculpture-work, thrown into kilns to procure the lime needed for the new monuments of Catholic Rome.

It was nearly one o'clock, and Pierre awoke as from a dream. The sun-rays were streaming in a golden rain between the shiny leaves of the ever-green oaks above him, and down below Rome lay dozing, overcome by the great heat. Then he made up his mind to leave the garden, and went stumbling over the rough pavement of the Clivus Victoriae, his mind still haunted by blinding visions. To complete his day, he had resolved to visit the old Appian Way during the afternoon, and, unwilling to return to the Via Giulia, he lunched at a suburban tavern, in a large, dim room, where, alone with the buzzing flies, he lingered for more than two hours, awaiting the sinking of the sun.

Ah! that Appian Way, that ancient queen of the high roads, crossing the Campagna in a long straight line with rows of proud tombs on either hand—to Pierre it seemed like a triumphant prolongation of the Palatine. He there found the same passion for splendour and domination, the same craving to eternise the memory of Roman greatness in marble and daylight. Oblivion was vanquished; the dead refused to rest, and remained for ever erect among the living, on either side of that road which was traversed by multitudes from the entire world. The deified images of those who were now but dust still gazed on the passers-by with empty eyes; the inscriptions still spoke, proclaiming names and titles. In former times the rows of sepulchres must have extended without interruption along all the straight, level miles between the tomb of Caecilia Metella and that of Casale Rotondo, forming an elongated cemetery where the powerful and wealthy competed as to who should leave the most colossal and lavishly decorated mausoleum: such, indeed, was the craving for survival, the passion for pompous immortality, the desire to deify death by lodging it in temples; whereof the present-day monumental splendour of the Genoese Campo Santo and the Roman Campo Verano is, so to say, a remote inheritance. And what a vision it was to picture all the tremendous tombs on the right and left of the glorious pavement which the legions trod on their return from the conquest of the world! That tomb of Caecilia Metella, with its bond-stones so huge, its walls so thick that the middle ages transformed it into the battlemented keep of a fortress! And then all the tombs which follow, the modern structures erected in order that the marble fragments discovered might be set in place, the old blocks of brick and concrete, despoiled of their sculptured-work and rising up like seared rocks, yet still suggesting their original shapes as shrines, cippi, and sarcophagi. There is a wondrous succession of high reliefs figuring the dead in groups of three and five; statues in which the dead live deified, erect; seats contrived in niches in order that wayfarers may rest and bless the hospitality of the dead; laudatory epitaphs celebrating the dead, both the known and the unknown, the children of Sextius Pompeius Justus, the departed Marcus Servilius Quartus, Hilarius Fuscus, Rabirius Hermodorus; without counting the sepulchres venturously ascribed to Seneca and the Horatii and Curiatii. And finally there is the most extraordinary and gigantic of all the tombs, that known as Casale Rotondo, which is so large that it has been possible to establish a farmhouse and an olive garden on its substructures, which formerly upheld a double rotunda, adorned with Corinthian pilasters, large candelabra, and scenic masks.*

* Some believe this tomb to have been that of Messalla Corvinus,
the historian and poet, a friend of Augustus and Horace; others
ascribe it to his son, Aurelius Messallinus Cotta.—Trans.

Pierre, having driven in a cab as far as the tomb of Caecilia Metella, continued his excursion on foot, going slowly towards Casale Rotondo. In many places the old pavement appears—large blocks of basaltic lava, worn into deep ruts that jolt the best-hung vehicles. Among the ruined tombs on either hand run bands of grass, the neglected grass of cemeteries, scorched by the summer suns and sprinkled with big violet thistles and tall sulphur-wort. Parapets of dry stones, breast high, enclose the russet roadsides, which resound with the crepitation of grasshoppers; and, beyond, the Campagna stretches, vast and bare, as far as the eye can see. A parasol pine, a eucalyptus, some olive or fig trees, white with dust, alone rise up near the road at infrequent intervals. On the left the ruddy arches of the Acqua Claudia show vigorously in the meadows, and stretches of poorly cultivated land, vineyards, and little farms, extend to the blue and lilac Sabine and Alban hills, where Frascati, Rocca di Papa, and Albano set bright spots, which grow and whiten as one gets nearer to them. Then, on the right, towards the sea, the houseless, treeless plain grows and spreads with vast, broad ripples, extraordinary ocean-like simplicity and grandeur, a long, straight line alone parting it from the sky. At the height of summer all burns and flares on this limitless prairie, then of a ruddy gold; but in September a green tinge begins to suffuse the ocean of herbage, which dies away in the pink and mauve and vivid blue of the fine sunsets.

As Pierre, quite alone and in a dreary mood, slowly paced the endless, flat highway, that resurrection of the past which he had beheld on the Palatine again confronted his mind's eye. On either hand the tombs once more rose up intact, with marble of dazzling whiteness. Had not the head of a colossal statue been found, mingled with fragments of huge sphinxes, at the foot of yonder vase-shaped mass of bricks? He seemed to see the entire colossal statue standing again between the huge, crouching beasts. Farther on a beautiful headless statue of a woman had been discovered in the cella of a sepulchre, and he beheld it, again whole, with features expressive of grace and strength smiling upon life. The inscriptions also became perfect; he could read and understand them at a glance, as if living among those dead ones of two thousand years ago. And the road, too, became peopled: the chariots thundered, the armies tramped along, the people of Rome jostled him with the feverish agitation of great communities. It was a return of the times of the Flavians or the Antonines, the palmy years of the empire, when the pomp of the Appian Way, with its grand sepulchres, carved and adorned like temples, attained its apogee. What a monumental Street of Death, what an approach to Rome, that highway, straight as an arrow, where with the extraordinary pomp of their pride, which had survived their dust, the great dead greeted the traveller, ushered him into the presence of the living! He may well have wondered among what sovereign people, what masters of the world, he was about to find himself—a nation which had committed to its dead the duty of telling strangers that it allowed nothing whatever to perish—that its dead, like its city, remained eternal and glorious in monuments of extraordinary vastness! To think of it—the foundations of a fortress, and a tower sixty feet in diameter, that one woman might be laid to rest! And then, far away, at the end of the superb, dazzling highway, bordered with the marble of its funereal palaces, Pierre, turning round, distinctly beheld the Palatine, with the marble of its imperial palaces—the huge assemblage of palaces whose omnipotence had dominated the world!

But suddenly he started: two carabiniers had just appeared among the ruins. The spot was not safe; the authorities watched over tourists even in broad daylight. And later on came another meeting which caused him some emotion. He perceived an ecclesiastic, a tall old man, in a black cassock, edged and girt with red; and was surprised to recognise Cardinal Boccanera, who had quitted the roadway, and was slowly strolling along the band of grass, among the tall thistles and sulphur-wort. With his head lowered and his feet brushing against the fragments of the tombs, the Cardinal did not even see Pierre. The young priest courteously turned aside, surprised to find him so far from home and alone. Then, on perceiving a heavy coach, drawn by two black horses, behind a building, he understood matters. A footman in black livery was waiting motionless beside the carriage, and the coachman had not quitted his box. And Pierre remembered that the Cardinals were not expected to walk in Rome, so that they were compelled to drive into the country when they desired to take exercise. But what haughty sadness, what solitary and, so to say, ostracised grandeur there was about that tall, thoughtful old man, thus forced to seek the desert, and wander among the tombs, in order to breathe a little of the evening air!

Pierre had lingered there for long hours; the twilight was coming on, and once again he witnessed a lovely sunset. On his left the Campagna became blurred, and assumed a slaty hue, against which the yellowish arcades of the aqueduct showed very plainly, while the Alban hills, far away, faded into pink. Then, on the right, towards the sea, the planet sank among a number of cloudlets, figuring an archipelago of gold in an ocean of dying embers. And excepting the sapphire sky, studded with rubies, above the endless line of the Campagna, which was likewise changed into a sparkling lake, the dull green of the herbage turning to a liquid emerald tint, there was nothing to be seen, neither a hillock nor a flock—nothing, indeed, but Cardinal Boccanera's black figure, erect among the tombs, and looking, as it were, enlarged as it stood out against the last purple flush of the sunset.

Early on the following morning Pierre, eager to see everything, returned to the Appian Way in order to visit the catacomb of St. Calixtus, the most extensive and remarkable of the old Christian cemeteries, and one, too, where several of the early popes were buried. You ascend through a scorched garden, past olives and cypresses, reach a shanty of boards and plaster in which a little trade in "articles of piety" is carried on, and there a modern and fairly easy flight of steps enables you to descend. Pierre fortunately found there some French Trappists, who guard these catacombs and show them to strangers. One brother was on the point of going down with two French ladies, the mother and daughter, the former still comely and the other radiant with youth. They stood there smiling, though already slightly frightened, while the monk lighted some long, slim candles. He was a man with a bossy brow, the large, massive jaw of an obstinate believer and pale eyes bespeaking an ingenuous soul.

"Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," he said to Pierre, "you've come just in time. If the ladies are willing, you had better come with us; for three Brothers are already below with people, and you would have a long time to wait. This is the great season for visitors."

The ladies politely nodded, and the Trappist handed a candle to the priest. In all probability neither mother nor daughter was devout, for both glanced askance at their new companion's cassock, and suddenly became serious. Then they all went down and found themselves in a narrow subterranean corridor. "Take care, mesdames," repeated the Trappist, lighting the ground with his candle. "Walk slowly, for there are projections and slopes."

Then, in a shrill voice full of extraordinary conviction, he began his explanations. Pierre had descended in silence, his heart beating with emotion. Ah! how many times, indeed, in his innocent seminary days, had he not dreamt of those catacombs of the early Christians, those asylums of the primitive faith! Even recently, while writing his book, he had often thought of them as of the most ancient and venerable remains of that community of the lowly and simple, for the return of which he called. But his brain was full of pages written by poets and great prose writers. He had beheld the catacombs through the magnifying glass of those imaginative authors, and had believed them to be vast, similar to subterranean cities, with broad highways and spacious halls, fit for the accommodation of vast crowds. And now how poor and humble the reality!

"Well, yes," said the Trappist in reply to the ladies' questions, "the corridor is scarcely more than a yard in width; two persons could not pass along side by side. How they dug it? Oh! it was simple enough. A family or a burial association needed a place of sepulchre. Well, a first gallery was excavated with pickaxes in soil of this description—granular tufa, as it is called—a reddish substance, as you can see, both soft and yet resistant, easy to work and at the same time waterproof. In a word, just the substance that was needed, and one, too, that has preserved the remains of the buried in a wonderful way." He paused and brought the flamelet of his candle near to the compartments excavated on either hand of the passage. "Look," he continued, "these are the loculi. Well, a subterranean gallery was dug, and on both sides these compartments were hollowed out, one above the other. The bodies of the dead were laid in them, for the most part simply wrapped in shrouds. Then the aperture was closed with tiles or marble slabs, carefully cemented. So, as you can see, everything explains itself. If other families joined the first one, or the burial association became more numerous, fresh galleries were added to those already filled. Passages were excavated on either hand, in every sense; and, indeed, a second and lower storey, at times even a third, was dug out. And here, you see, we are in a gallery which is certainly thirteen feet high. Now, you may wonder how they raised the bodies to place them in the compartments of the top tier. Well, they did not raise them to any such height; in all their work they kept on going lower and lower, removing more and more of the soil as the compartments became filled. And in this wise, in these catacombs of St. Calixtus, in less than four centuries, the Christians excavated more than ten miles of galleries, in which more than a million of their dead must have been laid to rest. Now, there are dozens of catacombs; the environs of Rome are honeycombed with them. Think of that, and perhaps you will be able to form some idea of the vast number of people who were buried in this manner."

Pierre listened, feeling greatly impressed. He had once visited a coal pit in Belgium, and he here found the same narrow passages, the same heavy, stifling atmosphere, the same nihility of darkness and silence. The flamelets of the candles showed merely like stars in the deep gloom; they shed no radiance around. And he at last understood the character of this funereal, termite-like labour—these chance burrowings continued according to requirements, without art, method, or symmetry. The rugged soil was ever ascending and descending, the sides of the gallery snaked: neither plumb-line nor square had been used. All this, indeed, had simply been a work of charity and necessity, wrought by simple, willing grave-diggers, illiterate craftsmen, with the clumsy handiwork of the decline and fall. Proof thereof was furnished by the inscriptions and emblems on the marble slabs. They reminded one of the childish drawings which street urchins scrawl upon blank walls.

"You see," the Trappist continued, "most frequently there is merely a name; and sometimes there is no name, but simply the words In Pace. At other times there is an emblem, the dove of purity, the palm of martyrdom, or else the fish whose name in Greek is composed of five letters which, as initials, signify: 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.'"

He again brought his candle near to the marble slabs, and the palm could be distinguished: a central stroke, whence started a few oblique lines; and then came the dove or the fish, roughly outlined, a zigzag indicating a tail, two bars representing the bird's feet, while a round point simulated an eye. And the letters of the short inscriptions were all askew, of various sizes, often quite misshapen, as in the coarse handwriting of the ignorant and simple.

However, they reached a crypt, a sort of little hall, where the graves of several popes had been found; among others that of Sixtus II, a holy martyr, in whose honour there was a superbly engraved metrical inscription set up by Pope Damasus. Then, in another hall, a family vault of much the same size, decorated at a later stage, with naive mural paintings, the spot where St. Cecilia's body had been discovered was shown. And the explanations continued. The Trappist dilated on the paintings, drawing from them a confirmation of every dogma and belief, baptism, the Eucharist, the resurrection, Lazarus arising from the tomb, Jonas cast up by the whale, Daniel in the lions' den, Moses drawing water from the rock, and Christ—shown beardless, as was the practice in the early ages—accomplishing His various miracles.

"You see," repeated the Trappist, "all those things are shown there; and remember that none of the paintings was specially prepared: they are absolutely authentic."

At a question from Pierre, whose astonishment was increasing, he admitted that the catacombs had been mere cemeteries at the outset, when no religious ceremonies had been celebrated in them. It was only later, in the fourth century, when the martyrs were honoured, that the crypts were utilised for worship. And in the same way they only became places of refuge during the persecutions, when the Christians had to conceal the entrances to them. Previously they had remained freely and legally open. This was indeed their true history: cemeteries four centuries old becoming places of asylum, ravaged at times during the persecutions; afterwards held in veneration till the eighth century; then despoiled of their holy relics, and subsequently blocked up and forgotten, so that they remained buried during more than seven hundred years, people thinking of them so little that at the time of the first searches in the fifteenth century they were considered an extraordinary discovery—an intricate historical problem—one, moreover, which only our own age has solved.

"Please stoop, mesdames," resumed the Trappist. "In this compartment here is a skeleton which has not been touched. It has been lying here for sixteen or seventeen hundred years, and will show you how the bodies were laid out. Savants say that it is the skeleton of a female, probably a young girl. It was still quite perfect last spring; but the skull, as you can see, is now split open. An American broke it with his walking stick to make sure that it was genuine."

The ladies leaned forward, and the flickering light illumined their pale faces, expressive of mingled fright and compassion. Especially noticeable was the pitiful, pain-fraught look which appeared on the countenance of the daughter, so full of life with her red lips and large black eyes. Then all relapsed into gloom, and the little candles were borne aloft and went their way through the heavy darkness of the galleries. The visit lasted another hour, for the Trappist did not spare a detail, fond as he was of certain nooks and corners, and as zealous as if he desired to work the redemption of his visitors.

While Pierre followed the others, a complete evolution took place within him. As he looked about him, and formed a more and more complete idea of his surroundings, his first stupefaction at finding the reality so different from the embellished accounts of story-tellers and poets, his disillusion at being plunged into such rudely excavated mole-burrows, gave way to fraternal emotion. It was not that he thought of the fifteen hundred martyrs whose sacred bones had rested there. But how humble, resigned, yet full of hope had been those who had chosen such a place of sepulchre! Those low, darksome galleries were but temporary sleeping-places for the Christians. If they did not burn the bodies of their dead, as the Pagans did, it was because, like the Jews, they believed in the resurrection of the body; and it was that lovely idea of sleep, of tranquil rest after a just life, whilst awaiting the celestial reward, which imparted such intense peacefulness, such infinite charm, to the black, subterranean city. Everything there spoke of calm and silent night; everything there slumbered in rapturous quiescence, patient until the far-off awakening. What could be more touching than those terra-cotta tiles, those marble slabs, which bore not even a name—nothing but the words In Pace—at peace. Ah! to be at peace—life's work at last accomplished; to sleep in peace, to hope in peace for the advent of heaven! And the peacefulness seemed the more delightful as it was enjoyed in such deep humility. Doubtless the diggers worked chance-wise and clumsily; the craftsmen no longer knew how to engrave a name or carve a palm or a dove. Art had vanished; but all the feebleness and ignorance were instinct with the youth of a new humanity. Poor and lowly and meek ones swarmed there, reposing beneath the soil, whilst up above the sun continued its everlasting task. You found there charity and fraternity and death; husband and wife often lying together with their offspring at their feet; the great mass of the unknown submerging the personage, the bishop, or the martyr; the most touching equality—that springing from modesty—prevailing amidst all that dust, with compartments ever similar and slabs destitute of ornament, so that rows and rows of the sleepers mingled without distinctive sign. The inscriptions seldom ventured on a word of praise, and then how prudent, how delicate it was: the men were very worthy, very pious: the women very gentle, very beautiful, very chaste. A perfume of infancy arose, unlimited human affection spread: this was death as understood by the primitive Christians—death which hid itself to await the resurrection, and dreamt no more of the empire of the world!

And all at once before Pierre's eyes arose a vision of the sumptuous tombs of the Appian Way, displaying the domineering pride of a whole civilisation in the sunlight—tombs of vast dimensions, with a profusion of marbles, grandiloquent inscriptions, and masterpieces of sculptured-work. Ah! what an extraordinary contrast between that pompous avenue of death, conducting, like a highway of triumph, to the regal Eternal City, when compared with the subterranean necropolis of the Christians, that city of hidden death, so gentle, so beautiful, and so chaste! Here only quiet slumber, desired and accepted night, resignation and patience were to be found. Millions of human beings had here laid themselves to rest in all humility, had slept for centuries, and would still be sleeping here, lulled by the silence and the gloom, if the living had not intruded on their desire to remain in oblivion so long as the trumpets of the Judgment Day did not awaken them. Death had then spoken of Life: nowhere had there been more intimate and touching life than in these buried cities of the unknown, lowly dead. And a mighty breath had formerly come from them—the breath of a new humanity destined to renew the world. With the advent of meekness, contempt for the flesh, terror and hatred of nature, relinquishment of terrestrial joys, and a passion for death, which delivers and opens the portals of Paradise, another world had begun. And the blood of Augustus, so proud of purpling in the sunlight, so fired by the passion for sovereign dominion, seemed for a moment to disappear, as if, indeed, the new world had sucked it up in the depths of its gloomy sepulchres.

However, the Trappist insisted on showing the ladies the steps of Diocletian, and began to tell them the legend. "Yes," said he, "it was a miracle. One day, under that emperor, some soldiers were pursuing several Christians, who took refuge in these catacombs; and when the soldiers followed them inside the steps suddenly gave way, and all the persecutors were hurled to the bottom. The steps remain broken to this day. Come and see them; they are close by."

But the ladies were quite overcome, so affected by their prolonged sojourn in the gloom and by the tales of death which the Trappist had poured into their ears that they insisted on going up again. Moreover, the candles were coming to an end. They were all dazzled when they found themselves once more in the sunlight, outside the little hut where articles of piety and souvenirs were sold. The girl bought a paper weight, a piece of marble on which was engraved the fish symbolical of "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour of Mankind."

On the afternoon of that same day Pierre decided to visit St. Peter's. He had as yet only driven across the superb piazza with its obelisk and twin fountains, encircled by Bernini's colonnades, those four rows of columns and pilasters which form a girdle of monumental majesty. At the far end rises the basilica, its facade making it look smaller and heavier than it really is, but its sovereign dome nevertheless filling the heavens.

Pebbled, deserted inclines stretched out, and steps followed steps, worn and white, under the burning sun; but at last Pierre reached the door and went in. It was three o'clock. Broad sheets of light streamed in through the high square windows, and some ceremony—the vesper service, no doubt—was beginning in the Capella Clementina on the left. Pierre, however, heard nothing; he was simply struck by the immensity of the edifice, as with raised eyes he slowly walked along. At the entrance came the giant basins for holy water with their boy-angels as chubby as Cupids; then the nave, vaulted and decorated with sunken coffers; then the four cyclopean buttress-piers upholding the dome, and then again the transepts and apsis, each as large as one of our churches. And the proud pomp, the dazzling, crushing splendour of everything, also astonished him: he marvelled at the cupola, looking like a planet, resplendent with the gold and bright colours of its mosaic-work, at the sumptuous baldacchino of bronze, crowning the high altar raised above the very tomb of St. Peter, and whence descend the double steps of the Confession, illumined by seven and eighty lamps, which are always kept burning. And finally he was lost in astonishment at the extraordinary profusion of marble, both white and coloured. Oh! those polychromatic marbles, Bernini's luxurious passion! The splendid pavement reflecting the entire edifice, the facings of the pilasters with their medallions of popes, the tiara and the keys borne aloft by chubby angels, the walls covered with emblems, particularly the dove of Innocent X, the niches with their colossal statues uncouth in taste, the loggie and their balconies, the balustrade and double steps of the Confession, the rich altars and yet richer tombs—all, nave, aisles, transepts, and apsis, were in marble, resplendent with the wealth of marble; not a nook small as the palm of one's hand appearing but it showed the insolent opulence of marble. And the basilica triumphed, beyond discussion, recognised and admired by every one as the largest and most splendid church in the whole world—the personification of hugeness and magnificence combined.

Pierre still wandered on, gazing, overcome, as yet not distinguishing details. He paused for a moment before the bronze statue of St. Peter, seated in a stiff, hierarchical attitude on a marble pedestal. A few of the faithful were there kissing the large toe of the Saint's right foot. Some of them carefully wiped it before applying their lips; others, with no thought of cleanliness, kissed it, pressed their foreheads to it, and then kissed it again. Next, Pierre turned into the transept on the left, where stand the confessionals. Priests are ever stationed there, ready to confess penitents in every language. Others wait, holding long staves, with which they lightly tap the heads of kneeling sinners, who thereby obtain thirty days' indulgence. However, there were few people present, and inside the small wooden boxes the priests occupied their leisure time in reading and writing, as if they were at home. Then Pierre again found himself before the Confession, and gazed with interest at the eighty lamps, scintillating like stars. The high altar, at which the Pope alone can officiate, seemed wrapped in the haughty melancholy of solitude under its gigantic, flowery baldacchino, the casting and gilding of which cost two and twenty thousand pounds. But suddenly Pierre remembered the ceremony in the Capella Clementina, and felt astonished, for he could hear nothing of it. As he drew near a faint breath, like the far-away piping of a flute, was wafted to him. Then the volume of sound slowly increased, but it was only on reaching the chapel that he recognised an organ peal. The sunlight here filtered through red curtains drawn before the windows, and thus the chapel glowed like a furnace whilst resounding with the grave music. But in that huge pile all became so slight, so weak, that at sixty paces neither voice nor organ could be distinguished.

On entering the basilica Pierre had fancied that it was quite empty and lifeless. There were, however, some people there, but so few and far between that their presence was not noticed. A few tourists wandered about wearily, guide-book in hand. In the grand nave a painter with his easel was taking a view, as in a public gallery. Then a French seminary went by, conducted by a prelate who named and explained the tombs. But in all that space these fifty or a hundred people looked merely like a few black ants who had lost themselves and were vainly seeking their way. And Pierre pictured himself in some gigantic gala hall or tremendous vestibule in an immeasurable palace of reception. The broad sheets of sunlight streaming through the lofty square windows of plain white glass illumined the church with blending radiance. There was not a single stool or chair: nothing but the superb, bare pavement, such as you might find in a museum, shining mirror-like under the dancing shower of sunrays. Nor was there a single corner for solitary reflection, a nook of gloom and mystery, where one might kneel and pray. In lieu thereof the sumptuous, sovereign dazzlement of broad daylight prevailed upon every side. And, on thus suddenly finding himself in this deserted opera-house, all aglow with flaring gold and purple, Pierre could but remember the quivering gloom of the Gothic cathedrals of France, where dim crowds sob and supplicate amidst a forest of pillars. In presence of all this ceremonial majesty—this huge, empty pomp, which was all Body—he recalled with a pang the emaciate architecture and statuary of the middle ages, which were all Soul. He vainly sought for some poor, kneeling woman, some creature swayed by faith or suffering, yielding in a modest half-light to thoughts of the unknown, and with closed lips holding communion with the invisible. These he found not: there was but the weary wandering of the tourists, and the bustle of the prelates conducting the young priests to the obligatory stations; while the vesper service continued in the left-hand chapel, nought of it reaching the ears of the visitors save, perhaps, a confused vibration, as of the peal of a bell penetrating from outside through the vaults above.

And Pierre then understood that this was the splendid skeleton of a colossus whence life was departing. To fill it, to animate it with a soul, all the gorgeous display of great religious ceremonies was needed; the eighty thousand worshippers which it could hold, the great pontifical pomps, the festivals of Christmas and Easter, the processions and corteges displaying all the luxury of the Church amidst operatic scenery and appointments. And he tried to conjure up a picture of the past magnificence—the basilica overflowing with an idolatrous multitude, and the superhuman cortege passing along whilst every head was lowered; the cross and the sword opening the march, the cardinals going two by two, like twin divinities, in their rochets of lace and their mantles and robes of red moire, which train-bearers held up behind them; and at last, with Jove-like pomp, the Pope, carried on a stage draped with red velvet, seated in an arm-chair of red velvet and gold, and dressed in white velvet, with cope of gold, stole of gold, and tiara of gold. The bearers of the Sedia gestatoria* shone bravely in red tunics broidered with gold. Above the one and only Sovereign Pontiff of the world the flabelli waved those huge fans of feathers which formerly were waved before the idols of pagan Rome. And around the seat of triumph what a dazzling, glorious court there was! The whole pontifical family, the stream of assistant prelates, the patriarchs, the archbishops, and the bishops, with vestments and mitres of gold, the Camerieri segreti partecipanti in violet silk, the Camerieri partecipanti of the cape and the sword in black velvet Renascence costumes, with ruffs and golden chains, the whole innumerable ecclesiastical and laical suite, which not even a hundred pages of the "Gerarchia" can completely enumerate, the prothonotaries, the chaplains, the prelates of every class and degree, without mentioning the military household, the gendarmes with their busbies, the Palatine Guards in blue trousers and black tunics, the Swiss Guards costumed in red, yellow, and black, with breastplates of silver, suggesting the men at arms of some drama of the Romantic school, and the Noble Guards, superb in their high boots, white pigskins, red tunics, gold lace, epaulets, and helmets! However, since Rome had become the capital of Italy the doors were no longer thrown wide open; on the rare occasions when the Pope yet came down to officiate, to show himself as the supreme representative of the Divinity on earth, the basilica was filled with chosen ones. To enter it you needed a card of invitation. You no longer saw the people—a throng of fifty, even eighty, thousand Christians—flocking to the Church and swarming within it promiscuously; there was but a select gathering, a congregation of friends convened as for a private function. Even when, by dint of effort, thousands were collected together there, they formed but a picked audience invited to the performance of a monster concert.

* The chair and stage are known by that name.—Trans.

And as Pierre strolled among the bright, crude marbles in that cold if gorgeous museum, the feeling grew upon him that he was in some pagan temple raised to the deity of Light and Pomp. The larger temples of ancient Rome were certainly similar piles, upheld by the same precious columns, with walls covered with the same polychromatic marbles and vaulted ceilings having the same gilded panels. And his feeling was destined to become yet more acute after his visits to the other basilicas, which could but reveal the truth to him. First one found the Christian Church quietly, audaciously quartering itself in a pagan church, as, for instance, San Lorenzo in Miranda installed in the temple of Antoninus and Faustina, and retaining the latter's rare porticus in cipollino marble and its handsome white marble entablature. Then there was the Christian Church springing from the ruins of the destroyed pagan edifice, as, for example, San Clemente, beneath which centuries of contrary beliefs are stratified: a very ancient edifice of the time of the kings or the republic, then another of the days of the empire identified as a temple of Mithras, and next a basilica of the primitive faith. Then, too, there was the Christian Church, typified by that of Saint Agnes-beyond-the-walls which had been built on exactly the same pattern as the Roman secular basilica—that Tribunal and Exchange which accompanied every Forum. And, in particular, there was the Christian Church erected with material stolen from the demolished pagan temples. To this testified the sixteen superb columns of that same Saint Agnes, columns of various marbles filched from various gods; the one and twenty columns of Santa Maria in Trastevere, columns of all sorts of orders torn from a temple of Isis and Serapis, who even now are represented on their capitals; also the six and thirty white marble Ionic columns of Santa Maria Maggiore derived from the temple of Juno Lucina; and the two and twenty columns of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, these varying in substance, size, and workmanship, and certain of them said to have been stolen from Jove himself, from the famous temple of Jupiter Capitolinus which rose upon the sacred summit. In addition, the temples of the opulent Imperial period seemed to resuscitate in our times at San Giovanni in Laterano and San Paolo-fuori-le-mura. Was not that Basilica of San Giovanni—"the Mother and Head of all the churches of the city and the earth"—like the abode of honour of some pagan divinity whose splendid kingdom was of this world? It boasted five naves, parted by four rows of columns; it was a profusion of bas-reliefs, friezes, and entablatures, and its twelve colossal statues of the Apostles looked like subordinate deities lining the approach to the master of the gods! And did not San Paolo, lately completed, its new marbles shimmering like mirrors, recall the abode of the Olympian immortals, typical temple as it was with its majestic colonnade, its flat, gilt-panelled ceiling, its marble pavement incomparably beautiful both in substance and workmanship, its violet columns with white bases and capitals, and its white entablature with violet frieze: everywhere, indeed, you found, the mingling of those two colours so divinely carnal in their harmony. And there, as at St. Peter's, not one patch of gloom, not one nook of mystery where one might peer into the invisible, could be found! And, withal, St. Peter's remained the monster, the colossus, larger than the largest of all others, an extravagant testimony of what the mad passion for the huge can achieve when human pride, by dint of spending millions, dreams of lodging the divinity in an over-vast, over-opulent palace of stone, where in truth that pride itself, and not the divinity, triumphs!

And to think that after long centuries that gala colossus had been the outcome of the fervour of primitive faith! You found there a blossoming of that ancient sap, peculiar to the soil of Rome, which in all ages has thrown up preposterous edifices, of exaggerated hugeness and dazzling and ruinous luxury. It would seem as if the absolute masters successively ruling the city brought that passion for cyclopean building with them, derived it from the soil in which they grew, for they transmitted it one to the other, without a pause, from civilisation to civilisation, however diverse and contrary their minds. It has all been, so to say, a continuous blossoming of human vanity, a passionate desire to set one's name on an imperishable wall, and, after being master of the world, to leave behind one an indestructible trace, a tangible proof of one's passing glory, an eternal edifice of bronze and marble fit to attest that glory until the end of time. At the bottom the spirit of conquest, the proud ambition to dominate the world, subsists; and when all has crumbled, and a new society has sprung up from the ruins of its predecessor, men have erred in imagining it to be cured of the sin of pride, steeped in humility once more, for it has had the old blood in its veins, and has yielded to the same insolent madness as its ancestors, a prey to all the violence of its heredity directly it has become great and strong. Among the illustrious popes there has not been one that did not seek to build, did not revert to the traditions of the Caesars, eternising their reigns in stone and raising temples for resting-places, so as to rank among the gods. Ever the same passion for terrestrial immortality has burst forth: it has been a battle as to who should leave the highest, most substantial, most gorgeous monument; and so acute has been the disease that those who, for lack of means and opportunity, have been unable to build, and have been forced to content themselves with repairing, have, nevertheless, desired to bequeath the memory of their modest achievements to subsequent generations by commemorative marble slabs engraved with pompous inscriptions! These slabs are to be seen on every side: not a wall has ever been strengthened but some pope has stamped it with his arms, not a ruin has been restored, not a palace repaired, not a fountain cleaned, but the reigning pope has signed the work with his Roman and pagan title of "Pontifex Maximus." It is a haunting passion, a form of involuntary debauchery, the fated florescence of that compost of ruins, that dust of edifices whence new edifices are ever arising. And given the perversion with which the old Roman soil almost immediately tarnished the doctrines of Jesus, that resolute passion for domination and that desire for terrestrial glory which wrought the triumph of Catholicism in scorn of the humble and pure, the fraternal and simple ones of the primitive Church, one may well ask whether Rome has ever been Christian at all!

And whilst Pierre was for the second time walking round the huge basilica, admiring the tombs of the popes, truth, like a sudden illumination, burst upon him and filled him with its glow. Ah! those tombs! Yonder in the full sunlight, in the rosy Campagna, on either side of the Appian Way—that triumphal approach to Rome, conducting the stranger to the august Palatine with its crown of circling palaces—there arose the gigantic tombs of the powerful and wealthy, tombs of unparalleled artistic splendour, perpetuating in marble the pride and pomp of a strong race that had mastered the world. Then, near at hand, beneath the sod, in the shrouding night of wretched mole-holes, other tombs were hidden—the tombs of the lowly, the poor, and the suffering—tombs destitute of art or display, but whose very humility proclaimed that a breath of affection and resignation had passed by, that One had come preaching love and fraternity, the relinquishment of the wealth of the earth for the everlasting joys of a future life, and committing to the soil the good seed of His Gospel, sowing the new humanity which was to transform the olden world. And, behold, from that seed, buried in the soil for centuries, behold, from those humble, unobtrusive tombs, where martyrs slept their last and gentle sleep whilst waiting for the glorious call, yet other tombs had sprung, tombs as gigantic and as pompous as the ancient, destroyed sepulchres of the idolaters, tombs uprearing their marbles among a pagan-temple-like splendour, proclaiming the same superhuman pride, the same mad passion for universal sovereignty. At the time of the Renascence Rome became pagan once more; the old imperial blood frothed up and swept Christianity away with the greatest onslaught ever directed against it. Ah! those tombs of the popes at St. Peter's, with their impudent, insolent glorification of the departed, their sumptuous, carnal hugeness, defying death and setting immortality upon this earth. There are giant popes of bronze, allegorical figures and angels of equivocal character wearing the beauty of lovely girls, of passion-compelling women with the thighs and the breasts of pagan goddesses! Paul III is seated on a high pedestal, Justice and Prudence are almost prostrate at his feet. Urban VIII is between Prudence and Religion, Innocent XI between Religion and Justice, Innocent XII between Justice and Charity, Gregory XIII between Religion and Strength. Attended by Prudence and Justice, Alexander VII appears kneeling, with Charity and Truth before him, and a skeleton rises up displaying an empty hour-glass. Clement XIII, also on his knees, triumphs above a monumental sarcophagus, against which leans Religion bearing the Cross; while the Genius of Death, his elbow resting on the right-hand corner, has two huge, superb lions, emblems of omnipotence, beneath him. Bronze bespeaks the eternity of the figures, white marble describes opulent flesh, and coloured marble winds around in rich draperies, deifying the monuments under the bright, golden glow of nave and aisles.

And Pierre passed from one tomb to the other on his way through the magnificent, deserted, sunlit basilica. Yes, these tombs, so imperial in their ostentation, were meet companions for those of the Appian Way. Assuredly it was Rome, the soil of Rome, that soil where pride and domination sprouted like the herbage of the fields that had transformed the humble Christianity of primitive times, the religion of fraternity, justice, and hope into what it now was: victorious Catholicism, allied to the rich and powerful, a huge implement of government, prepared for the conquest of every nation. The popes had awoke as Caesars. Remote heredity had acted, the blood of Augustus had bubbled forth afresh, flowing through their veins and firing their minds with immeasurable ambition. As yet none but Augustus had held the empire of the world, had been both emperor and pontiff, master of the body and the soul. And thence had come the eternal dream of the popes in despair at only holding the spiritual power, and obstinately refusing to yield in temporal matters, clinging for ever to the ancient hope that their dream might at last be realised, and the Vatican become another Palatine, whence they might reign with absolute despotism over all the conquered nations.

VI.

PIERRE had been in Rome for a fortnight, and yet the affair of his book was no nearer solution. He was still possessed by an ardent desire to see the Pope, but could in no wise tell how to satisfy it, so frequent were the delays and so greatly had he been frightened by Monsignor Nani's predictions of the dire consequences which might attend any imprudent action. And so, foreseeing a prolonged sojourn, he at last betook himself to the Vicariate in order that his "celebret" might be stamped, and afterwards said his mass each morning at the Church of Santa Brigida, where he received a kindly greeting from Abbe Pisoni, Benedetta's former confessor.

One Monday evening he resolved to repair early to Donna Serafina's customary reception in the hope of learning some news and expediting his affairs. Perhaps Monsignor Nani would look in; perhaps he might be lucky enough to come across some cardinal or domestic prelate willing to help him. It was in vain that he had tried to extract any positive information from Don Vigilio, for, after a short spell of affability and willingness, Cardinal Pio's secretary had relapsed into distrust and fear, and avoided Pierre as if he were resolved not to meddle in a business which, all considered, was decidedly suspicious and dangerous. Moreover, for a couple of days past a violent attack of fever had compelled him to keep his room.

Thus the only person to whom Pierre could turn for comfort was Victorine Bosquet, the old Beauceronne servant who had been promoted to the rank of housekeeper, and who still retained a French heart after thirty years' residence in Rome. She often spoke to the young priest of Auneau, her native place, as if she had left it only the previous day; but on that particular Monday even she had lost her wonted gay vivacity, and when she heard that he meant to go down in the evening to see the ladies she wagged her head significantly. "Ah! you won't find them very cheerful," said she. "My poor Benedetta is greatly worried. Her divorce suit is not progressing at all well."

All Rome, indeed, was again talking of this affair. An extraordinary revival of tittle-tattle had set both white and black worlds agog. And so there was no need for reticence on Victorine's part, especially in conversing with a compatriot. It appeared, then, that, in reply to Advocate Morano's memoir setting forth that the marriage had not been consummated, there had come another memoir, a terrible one, emanating from Monsignor Palma, a doctor in theology, whom the Congregation of the Council had selected to defend the marriage. As a first point, Monsignor Palma flatly disputed the alleged non-consummation, questioned the certificate put forward on Benedetta's behalf, and quoted instances recorded in scientific text-books which showed how deceptive appearances often were. He strongly insisted, moreover, on the narrative which Count Prada supplied in another memoir, a narrative well calculated to inspire doubt; and, further, he so turned and twisted the evidence of Benedetta's own maid as to make that evidence also serve against her. Finally he argued in a decisive way that, even supposing the marriage had not been consummated, this could only be ascribed to the resistance of the Countess, who had thus set at defiance one of the elementary laws of married life, which was that a wife owed obedience to her husband.

Next had come a fourth memoir, drawn up by the reporter of the Congregation, who analysed and discussed the three others, and subsequently the Congregation itself had dealt with the matter, opining in favour of the dissolution of the marriage by a majority of one vote—such a bare majority, indeed, that Monsignor Palma, exercising his rights, had hastened to demand further inquiry, a course which brought the whole procedure again into question, and rendered a fresh vote necessary.

"Ah! the poor Contessina!" exclaimed Victorine, "she'll surely die of grief, for, calm as she may seem, there's an inward fire consuming her. It seems that Monsignor Palma is the master of the situation, and can make the affair drag on as long as he likes. And then a deal of money had already been spent, and one will have to spend a lot more. Abbe Pisoni, whom you know, was very badly inspired when he helped on that marriage; and though I certainly don't want to soil the memory of my good mistress, Countess Ernesta, who was a real saint, it's none the less true that she wrecked her daughter's life when she gave her to Count Prada."

The housekeeper paused. Then, impelled by an instinctive sense of justice, she resumed. "It's only natural that Count Prada should be annoyed, for he's really being made a fool of. And, for my part, as there is no end to all the fuss, and this divorce is so hard to obtain, I really don't see why the Contessina shouldn't live with her Dario without troubling any further. Haven't they loved one another ever since they were children? Aren't they both young and handsome, and wouldn't they be happy together, whatever the world might say? Happiness, mon Dieu! one finds it so seldom that one can't afford to let it pass."

Then, seeing how greatly surprised Pierre was at hearing such language, she began to laugh with the quiet composure of one belonging to the humble classes of France, whose only desire is a quiet and happy life, irrespective of matrimonial ties. Next, in more discreet language, she proceeded to lament another worry which had fallen on the household, another result of the divorce affair. A rupture had come about between Donna Serafina and Advocate Morano, who was very displeased with the ill success of his memoir to the congregation, and accused Father Lorenza—the confessor of the Boccanera ladies—of having urged them into a deplorable lawsuit, whose only fruit could be a wretched scandal affecting everybody. And so great had been Morano's annoyance that he had not returned to the Boccanera mansion, but had severed a connection of thirty years' standing, to the stupefaction of all the Roman drawing-rooms, which altogether disapproved of his conduct. Donna Serafina was, for her part, the more grieved as she suspected the advocate of having purposely picked the quarrel in order to secure an excuse for leaving her; his real motive, in her estimation, being a sudden, disgraceful passion for a young and intriguing woman of the middle classes.

That Monday evening, when Pierre entered the drawing-room, hung with yellow brocatelle of a flowery Louis XIV pattern, he at once realised that melancholy reigned in the dim light radiating from the lace-veiled lamps. Benedetta and Celia, seated on a sofa, were chatting with Dario, whilst Cardinal Sarno, ensconced in an arm-chair, listened to the ceaseless chatter of the old relative who conducted the little Princess to each Monday gathering. And the only other person present was Donna Serafina, seated all alone in her wonted place on the right-hand side of the chimney-piece, and consumed with secret rage at seeing the chair on the left-hand side unoccupied—that chair which Morano had always taken during the thirty years that he had been faithful to her. Pierre noticed with what anxious and then despairing eyes she observed his entrance, her glance ever straying towards the door, as though she even yet hoped for the fickle one's return. Withal her bearing was erect and proud; she seemed to be more tightly laced than ever; and there was all the wonted haughtiness on her hard-featured face, with its jet-black eyebrows and snowy hair.

Pierre had no sooner paid his respects to her than he allowed his own worry to appear by inquiring whether they would not have the pleasure of seeing Monsignor Nani that evening. Thereupon Donna Serafina could not refrain from answering: "Oh! Monsignor Nani is forsaking us like the others. People always take themselves off when they can be of service."

She harboured a spite against the prelate for having done so little to further the divorce in spite of his many promises. Beneath his outward show of extreme willingness and caressing affability he doubtless concealed some scheme of his own which he was tenaciously pursuing. However, Donna Serafina promptly regretted the confession which anger had wrung from her, and resumed: "After all, he will perhaps come. He is so good-natured, and so fond of us."

In spite of the vivacity of her temperament she really wished to act diplomatically, so as to overcome the bad luck which had recently set in. Her brother the Cardinal had told her how irritated he was by the attitude of the Congregation of the Council; he had little doubt that the frigid reception accorded to his niece's suit had been due in part to the desire of some of his brother cardinals to be disagreeable to him. Personally, he desired the divorce, as it seemed to him the only means of ensuring the perpetuation of the family; for Dario obstinately refused to marry any other woman than his cousin. And thus there was an accumulation of disasters; the Cardinal was wounded in his pride, his sister shared his sufferings and on her own side was stricken in the heart, whilst both lovers were plunged in despair at finding their hopes yet again deferred.

As Pierre approached the sofa where the young folks were chatting he found that they were speaking of the catastrophe. "Why should you be so despondent?" asked Celia in an undertone. "After all, there was a majority of a vote in favour of annulling the marriage. Your suit hasn't been rejected; there is only a delay."

But Benedetta shook her head. "No, no! If Monsignor Palma proves obstinate his Holiness will never consent. It's all over."

"Ah! if one were only rich, very rich!" murmured Dario, with such an air of conviction that no one smiled. And, turning to his cousin, he added in a whisper: "I must really have a talk with you. We cannot go on living like this."

In a breath she responded: "Yes, you are right. Come down to-morrow evening at five. I will be here alone."

Then dreariness set in; the evening seemed to have no end. Pierre was greatly touched by the evident despair of Benedetta, who as a rule was so calm and sensible. The deep eyes which illumined her pure, delicate, infantile face were now blurred as by restrained tears. He had already formed a sincere affection for her, pleased as he was with her equable if somewhat indolent disposition, the semblance of discreet good sense with which she veiled her soul of fire. That Monday even she certainly tried to smile while listening to the pretty secrets confided to her by Celia, whose love affairs were prospering far more than her own. There was only one brief interval of general conversation, and that was brought about by the little Princess's aunt, who, suddenly raising her voice, began to speak of the infamous manner in which the Italian newspapers referred to the Holy Father. Never, indeed, had there been so much bad feeling between the Vatican and the Quirinal. Cardinal Sarno felt so strongly on the subject that he departed from his wonted silence to announce that on the occasion of the sacrilegious festivities of the Twentieth of September, celebrating the capture of Rome, the Pope intended to cast a fresh letter of protest in the face of all the Christian powers, whose indifference proved their complicity in the odious spoliation of the Church.

"Yes, indeed! what folly to try and marry the Pope and the King," bitterly exclaimed Donna Serafina, alluding to her niece's deplorable marriage.

The old maid now seemed quite beside herself; it was already so late that neither Monsignor Nani nor anybody else was expected. However, at the unhoped-for sound of footsteps her eyes again brightened and turned feverishly towards the door. But it was only to encounter a final disappointment. The visitor proved to be Narcisse Habert, who stepped up to her, apologising for making so late a call. It was Cardinal Sarno, his uncle by marriage, who had introduced him into this exclusive salon, where he had received a cordial reception on account of his religious views, which were said to be most uncompromising. If, however, despite the lateness of the hour, he had ventured to call there that evening, it was solely on account of Pierre, whom he at once drew on one side.

"I felt sure I should find you here," he said. "Just now I managed to see my cousin, Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, and I have some good news for you. He will see us to-morrow at about eleven in his rooms at the Vatican." Then, lowering his voice: "I think he will endeavour to conduct you to the Holy Father. Briefly, the audience seems to me assured."

Pierre was greatly delighted by this promised certainty, which came to him so suddenly in that dreary drawing-room, where for a couple of hours he had been gradually sinking into despair! So at last a solution was at hand!

Meantime Narcisse, after shaking hands with Dario and bowing to Benedetta and Celia, approached his uncle the Cardinal, who, having rid himself of the old relation, made up his mind to talk. But his conversation was confined to the state of his health, and the weather, and sundry insignificant anecdotes which he had lately heard. Not a word escaped him respecting the thousand complicated matters with which he dealt at the Propaganda. It was as though, once outside his office, he plunged into the commonplace and the unimportant by way of resting from the anxious task of governing the world. And after he had spoken for a time every one got up, and the visitors took leave.

"Don't forget," Narcisse repeated to Pierre, "you will find me at the Sixtine Chapel to-morrow at ten. And I will show you the Botticellis before we go to our appointment."

At half-past nine on the following morning Pierre, who had come on foot, was already on the spacious Piazza of St. Peter's; and before turning to the right, towards the bronze gate near one corner of Bernini's colonnade, he raised his eyes and lingered, gazing at the Vatican. Nothing to his mind could be less monumental than the jumble of buildings which, without semblance of architectural order or regularity of any kind, had grown up in the shadow cast by the dome of the basilica. Roofs rose one above the other and broad, flat walls stretched out chance-wise, just as wings and storeys had been added. The only symmetry observable above the colonnade was that of the three sides of the court of San Damaso, where the lofty glass-work which now encloses the old loggie sparkled in the sun between the ruddy columns and pilasters, suggesting, as it were, three huge conservatories.

And this was the most beautiful palace in the world, the largest of all palaces, comprising no fewer than eleven thousand apartments and containing the most admirable masterpieces of human genius! But Pierre, disillusioned as he was, had eyes only for the lofty facade on the right, overlooking the piazza, for he knew that the second-floor windows there were those of the Pope's private apartments. And he contemplated those windows for a long time, and remembered having been told that the fifth one on the right was that of the Pope's bed-room, and that a lamp could always be seen burning there far into the night.

What was there, too, behind that gate of bronze which he saw before him—that sacred portal by which all the kingdoms of the world communicated with the kingdom of heaven, whose august vicar had secluded himself behind those lofty, silent walls? From where he stood Pierre gazed on that gate with its metal panels studded with large square-headed nails, and wondered what it defended, what it concealed, what it shut off from the view, with its stern, forbidding air, recalling that of the gate of some ancient fortress. What kind of world would he find behind it, what treasures of human charity jealously preserved in yonder gloom, what revivifying hope for the new nations hungering for fraternity and justice? He took pleasure in fancying, in picturing the one holy pastor of humanity, ever watching in the depths of that closed palace, and, while the nations strayed into hatred, preparing all for the final reign of Jesus, and at last proclaiming the advent of that reign by transforming our democracies into the one great Christian community promised by the Saviour. Assuredly the world's future was being prepared behind that bronze portal; assuredly it was that future which would issue forth.

But all at once Pierre was amazed to find himself face to face with Monsignor Nani, who had just left the Vatican on his way to the neighbouring Palace of the Inquisition, where, as Assessor, he had his residence.

"Ah! Monsignor," said Pierre, "I am very pleased. My friend Monsieur Habert is going to present me to his cousin, Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, and I think I shall obtain the audience I so greatly desire."

Monsignor Nani smiled with his usual amiable yet keen expression. "Yes, yes, I know." But, correcting himself as it were, he added: "I share your satisfaction, my dear son. Only, you must be prudent." And then, as if fearing that the young priest might have understood by his first words that he had just seen Monsignor Gamba, the most easily terrified prelate of the whole prudent pontifical family, he related that he had been running about since an early hour on behalf of two French ladies, who likewise were dying of a desire to see the Pope. However, he greatly feared that the help he was giving them would not prove successful.

"I will confess to you, Monsignor," replied Pierre, "that I myself was getting very discouraged. Yes, it is high time I should find a little comfort, for my sojourn here is hardly calculated to brace my soul."

He went on in this strain, allowing it to be seen that the sights of Rome were finally destroying his faith. Such days as those which he had spent on the Palatine and along the Appian Way, in the Catacombs and at St. Peter's, grievously disturbed him, spoilt his dream of Christianity rejuvenated and triumphant. He emerged from them full of doubt and growing lassitude, having already lost much of his usually rebellious enthusiasm.

Still smiling, Monsignor Nani listened and nodded approvingly. Yes, no doubt that was the fatal result. He seemed to have foreseen it, and to be well satisfied thereat. "At all events, my dear son," said he, "everything is going on well, since you are now certain that you will see his Holiness."

"That is true, Monsignor; I have placed my only hope in the very just and perspicacious Leo XIII. He alone can judge me, since he alone can recognise in my book his own ideas, which I think I have very faithfully set forth. Ah! if he be willing he will, in Jesus' name and by democracy and science, save this old world of ours!"

Pierre's enthusiasm was returning again, and Nani, smiling more and more affably with his piercing eyes and thin lips, again expressed approval: "Certainly; quite so, my dear son. You will speak to him, you will see."

Then as they both raised their heads and looked towards the Vatican, Nani carried his amiability so far as to undeceive Pierre with respect to the Pope's bed-room. No, the window where a light was seen every evening was simply that of a landing where the gas was kept burning almost all night. The window of his Holiness's bed-chamber was the second one farther on. Then both relapsed into silence, equally grave as they continued to gaze at the facade.

"Well, till we meet again, my dear son," said Nani at last. "You will tell me of your interview, I hope."

As soon as Pierre was alone he went in by the bronze portal, his heart beating violently, as if he were entering some redoubtable sanctuary where the future happiness of mankind was elaborated. A sentry was on duty there, a Swiss guard, who walked slowly up and down in a grey-blue cloak, below which one only caught a glimpse of his baggy red, black, and yellow breeches; and it seemed as if this cloak of sober hue were purposely cast over a disguise in order to conceal its strangeness, which had become irksome. Then, on the right-hand, came the covered stairway conducting to the Court of San Damaso; but to reach the Sixtine Chapel it was necessary to follow a long gallery, with columns on either hand, and ascend the royal staircase, the Scala Regia. And in this realm of the gigantic, where every dimension is exaggerated and replete with overpowering majesty, Pierre's breath came short as he ascended the broad steps.

He was much surprised on entering the Sixtine Chapel, for it at first seemed to him small, a sort of rectangular and lofty hall, with a delicate screen of white marble separating the part where guests congregate on the occasion of great ceremonies from the choir where the cardinals sit on simple oaken benches, while the inferior prelates remain standing behind them. On a low platform to the right of the soberly adorned altar is the pontifical throne; while in the wall on the left opens the narrow singing gallery with its balcony of marble. And for everything suddenly to spread out and soar into the infinite one must raise one's head, allow one's eyes to ascend from the huge fresco of the Last Judgment, occupying the whole of the end wall, to the paintings which cover the vaulted ceiling down to the cornice extending between the twelve windows of white glass, six on either hand.

Fortunately there were only three or four quiet tourists there; and Pierre at once perceived Narcisse Habert occupying one of the cardinals' seats above the steps where the train-bearers crouch. Motionless, and with his head somewhat thrown back, the young man seemed to be in ecstasy. But it was not the work of Michael Angelo that he thus contemplated. His eyes never strayed from one of the earlier frescoes below the cornice; and on recognising the priest he contented himself with murmuring: "Ah! my friend, just look at the Botticelli." Then, with dreamy eyes, he relapsed into a state of rapture.

Pierre, for his part, had received a great shock both in heart and in mind, overpowered as he was by the superhuman genius of Michael Angelo. The rest vanished; there only remained, up yonder, as in a limitless heaven, the extraordinary creations of the master's art. That which at first surprised one was that the painter should have been the sole artisan of the mighty work. No marble cutters, no bronze workers, no gilders, no one of another calling had intervened. The painter with his brush had sufficed for all—for the pilasters, columns, and cornices of marble, for the statues and the ornaments of bronze, for the fleurons and roses of gold, for the whole of the wondrously rich decorative work which surrounded the frescoes. And Pierre imagined Michael Angelo on the day when the bare vault was handed over to him, covered with plaster, offering only a flat white surface, hundreds of square yards to be adorned. And he pictured him face to face with that huge white page, refusing all help, driving all inquisitive folks away, jealously, violently shutting himself up alone with his gigantic task, spending four and a half years in fierce solitude, and day by day adding to his colossal work of creation. Ah! that mighty work, a task to fill a whole lifetime, a task which he must have begun with quiet confidence in his own will and power, drawing, as it were, an entire world from his brain and flinging it there with the ceaseless flow of creative virility in the full heyday of its omnipotence.

And Pierre was yet more overcome when he began to examine these presentments of humanity, magnified as by the eyes of a visionary, overflowing in mighty sympathetic pages of cyclopean symbolisation. Royal grace and nobility, sovereign peacefulness and power—every beauty shone out like natural florescence. And there was perfect science, the most audacious foreshortening risked with the certainty of success—an everlasting triumph of technique over the difficulty which an arched surface presented. And, in particular, there was wonderful simplicity of medium; matter was reduced almost to nothingness; a few colours were used broadly without any studied search for effect or brilliancy. Yet that sufficed, the blood seethed freely, the muscles projected, the figures became animated and stood out of their frames with such energy and dash that it seemed as if a flame were flashing by aloft, endowing all those beings with superhuman and immortal life. Life, aye, it was life, which burst forth and triumphed—mighty, swarming life, miraculous life, the creation of one sole hand possessed of the supreme gift—simplicity blended with power.

That a philosophical system, a record of the whole of human destiny, should have been found therein, with the creation of the world, of man, and of woman, the fall, the chastisement, then the redemption, and finally God's judgment on the last day—this was a matter on which Pierre was unable to dwell, at this first visit, in the wondering stupor into which the paintings threw him. But he could not help noticing how the human body, its beauty, its power, and its grace were exalted! Ah! that regal Jehovah, at once terrible and paternal, carried off amid the whirlwind of his creation, his arms outstretched and giving birth to worlds! And that superb and nobly outlined Adam, with extended hand, whom Jehovah, though he touch him not, animates with his finger—a wondrous and admirable gesture, leaving a sacred space between the finger of the Creator and that of the created—a tiny space, in which, nevertheless, abides all the infinite of the invisible and the mysterious. And then that powerful yet adorable Eve, that Eve with the sturdy flanks fit for the bearing of humanity, that Eve with the proud, tender grace of a woman bent on being loved even to perdition, that Eve embodying the whole of woman with her fecundity, her seductiveness, her empire! Moreover, even the decorative figures of the pilasters at the corners of the frescoes celebrate the triumph of the flesh: there are the twenty young men radiant in their nakedness, with incomparable splendour of torso and of limb, and such intensity of life that a craze for motion seems to carry them off, bend them, throw them over in superb attitudes. And between the windows are the giants, the prophets and the sibyls—man and woman deified, with inordinate wealth of muscle and grandeur of intellectual expression. There is Jeremiah with his elbow resting on his knee and his chin on his hand, plunged as he is in reflection—in the very depths of his visions and his dreams; there is the Sibylla Erithraea, so pure of profile, so young despite the opulence of her form, and with one finger resting on the open book of destiny; there is Isaiah with the thick lips of truth, virile and haughty, his head half turned and his hand raised with a gesture of command; there is the Sibylla Cumaea, terrifying with her science and her old age, her wrinkled countenance, her vulture's nose, her square protruding chin; there is Jonah cast forth by the whale, and wondrously foreshortened, his torso twisted, his arms bent, his head thrown back, and his mouth agape and shouting: and there are the others, all of the same full-blown, majestic family, reigning with the sovereignty of eternal health and intelligence, and typifying the dream of a broader, loftier, and indestructible humanity. Moreover, in the lunettes and the arches over the windows other figures of grace, power, and beauty appear and throng, the ancestors of the Christ, thoughtful mothers with lovely nude infants, men with wondering eyes peering into the future, representatives of the punished weary race longing for the promised Redeemer; while in the pendentives of the four corners various biblical episodes, the victories of Israel over the Spirit of Evil, spring into life. And finally there is the gigantic fresco at the far end, the Last Judgment with its swarming multitude, so numerous that days and days are needed to see each figure aright, a distracted crowd, full of the hot breath of life, from the dead rising in response to the furious trumpeting of the angels, from the fearsome groups of the damned whom the demons fling into hell, even to Jesus the justiciar, surrounded by the saints and apostles, and to the radiant concourse of the blessed who ascend upheld by angels, whilst higher and still higher other angels, bearing the instruments of the Passion, triumph as in full glory. And yet, above this gigantic composition, painted thirty years subsequently, in the full ripeness of age, the ceiling retains its ethereality, its unquestionable superiority, for on it the artist bestowed all his virgin power, his whole youth, the first great flare of his genius.

And Pierre found but one word to express his feelings: Michael Angelo was the monster dominating and crushing all others. Beneath his immense achievement you had only to glance at the works of Perugino, Pinturicchio, Roselli, Signorelli, and Botticelli, those earlier frescoes, admirable in their way, which below the cornice spread out around the chapel.

Narcisse for his part had not raised his eyes to the overpowering splendour of the ceiling. Wrapt in ecstasy, he did not allow his gaze to stray from one of the three frescoes of Botticelli. "Ah! Botticelli," he at last murmured; "in him you have the elegance and the grace of the mysterious; a profound feeling of sadness even in the midst of voluptuousness, a divination of the whole modern soul, with the most troublous charm that ever attended artist's work."

Pierre glanced at him in amazement, and then ventured to inquire: "You come here to see the Botticellis?"

"Yes, certainly," the young man quietly replied; "I only come here for him, and five hours every week I only look at his work. There, just study that fresco, Moses and the daughters of Jethro. Isn't it the most penetrating work that human tenderness and melancholy have produced?"

Then, with a faint, devout quiver in his voice and the air of a priest initiating another into the delightful but perturbing atmosphere of a sanctuary, he went on repeating the praises of Botticelli's art; his women with long, sensual, yet candid faces, supple bearing, and rounded forms showing from under light drapery; his young men, his angels of doubtful sex, blending stateliness of muscle with infinite delicacy of outline; next the mouths he painted, fleshy, fruit-like mouths, at times suggesting irony, at others pain, and often so enigmatical with their sinuous curves that one knew not whether the words they left unuttered were words of purity or filth; then, too, the eyes which he bestowed on his figures, eyes of languor and passion, of carnal or mystical rapture, their joy at times so instinct with grief as they peer into the nihility of human things that no eyes in the world could be more impenetrable. And finally there were Botticelli's hands, so carefully and delicately painted, so full of life, wantoning so to say in a free atmosphere, now joining, caressing, and even, as it were, speaking, the whole evincing such intense solicitude for gracefulness that at times there seems to be undue mannerism, though every hand has its particular expression, each varying expression of the enjoyment or pain which the sense of touch can bring. And yet there was nothing effeminate or false about the painter's work: on all sides a sort of virile pride was apparent, an atmosphere of superb passionate motion, absolute concern for truth, direct study from life, conscientiousness, veritable realism, corrected and elevated by a genial strangeness of feeling and character that imparted a never-to-be-forgotten charm even to ugliness itself.

Pierre's stupefaction, however, increased as he listened to Narcisse, whose somewhat studied elegance, whose curly hair cut in the Florentine fashion, and whose blue, mauvish eyes paling with enthusiasm he now for the first time remarked. "Botticelli," he at last said, "was no doubt a marvellous artist, only it seems to me that here, at any rate, Michael Angelo—"

But Narcisse interrupted him almost with violence. "No! no! Don't talk of him! He spoilt everything, ruined everything! A man who harnessed himself to his work like an ox, who laboured at his task like a navvy, at the rate of so many square yards a day! And a man, too, with no sense of the mysterious and the unknown, who saw everything so huge as to disgust one with beauty, painting girls like the trunks of oak-trees, women like giant butchers, with heaps and heaps of stupid flesh, and never a gleam of a divine or infernal soul! He was a mason—a colossal mason, if you like—but he was nothing more."

Weary "modern" that Narcisse was, spoilt by the pursuit of the original and the rare, he thus unconsciously gave rein to his fated hate of health and power. That Michael Angelo who brought forth without an effort, who had left behind him the most prodigious of all artistic creations, was the enemy. And his crime precisely was that he had created life, produced life in such excess that all the petty creations of others, even the most delightful among them, vanished in presence of the overflowing torrent of human beings flung there all alive in the sunlight.

"Well, for my part," Pierre courageously declared, "I'm not of your opinion. I now realise that life is everything in art; that real immortality belongs only to those who create. The case of Michael Angelo seems to me decisive, for he is the superhuman master, the monster who overwhelms all others, precisely because he brought forth that magnificent living flesh which offends your sense of delicacy. Those who are inclined to the curious, those who have minds of a pretty turn, whose intellects are ever seeking to penetrate things, may try to improve on the equivocal and invisible, and set all the charm of art in some elaborate stroke or symbolisation; but, none the less, Michael Angelo remains the all-powerful, the maker of men, the master of clearness, simplicity, and health."

At this Narcisse smiled with indulgent and courteous disdain. And he anticipated further argument by remarking: "It's already eleven. My cousin was to have sent a servant here as soon as he could receive us. I am surprised to have seen nobody as yet. Shall we go up to see the stanze of Raffaelle while we wait?"

Once in the rooms above, he showed himself perfect, both lucid in his remarks and just in his appreciations, having recovered all his easy intelligence as soon as he was no longer upset by his hatred of colossal labour and cheerful decoration.

It was unfortunate that Pierre should have first visited the Sixtine Chapel; for it was necessary he should forget what he had just seen and accustom himself to what he now beheld in order to enjoy its pure beauty. It was as if some potent wine had confused him, and prevented any immediate relish of a lighter vintage of delicate fragrance. Admiration did not here fall upon one with lightning speed; it was slowly, irresistibly that one grew charmed. And the contrast was like that of Racine beside Corneille, Lamartine beside Hugo, the eternal pair, the masculine and feminine genius coupled through centuries of glory. With Raffaelle it is nobility, grace, exquisiteness, and correctness of line, and divineness of harmony that triumph. You do not find in him merely the materialist symbolism so superbly thrown off by Michael Angelo; he introduces psychological analysis of deep penetration into the painter's art. Man is shown more purified, idealised; one sees more of that which is within him. And though one may be in presence of an artist of sentimental bent, a feminine genius whose quiver of tenderness one can feel, it is also certain that admirable firmness of workmanship confronts one, that the whole is very strong and very great. Pierre gradually yielded to such sovereign masterliness, such virile elegance, such a vision of supreme beauty set in supreme perfection. But if the "Dispute on the Sacrament" and the so-called "School of Athens," both prior to the paintings of the Sixtine Chapel, seemed to him to be Raffaelle's masterpieces, he felt that in the "Burning of the Borgo," and particularly in the "Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple," and "Pope St. Leo staying Attila at the Gates of Rome," the artist had lost the flower of his divine grace, through the deep impression which the overwhelming grandeur of Michael Angelo had wrought upon him. How crushing indeed had been the blow when the Sixtine Chapel was thrown open and the rivals entered! The creations of the monster then appeared, and the greatest of the humanisers lost some of his soul at sight of them, thenceforward unable to rid himself of their influence.

From the stanze Narcisse took Pierre to the loggie, those glazed galleries which are so high and so delicately decorated. But here you only find work which pupils executed after designs left by Raffaelle at his death. The fall was sudden and complete, and never had Pierre better understood that genius is everything—that when it disappears the school collapses. The man of genius sums up his period; at a given hour he throws forth all the sap of the social soil, which afterwards remains exhausted often for centuries. So Pierre became more particularly interested in the fine view that the loggie afford, and all at once he noticed that the papal apartments were in front of him, just across the Court of San Damaso. This court, with its porticus, fountain, and white pavement, had an aspect of empty, airy, sunlit solemnity which surprised him. There was none of the gloom or pent-up religious mystery that he had dreamt of with his mind full of the surroundings of the old northern cathedrals. Right and left of the steps conducting to the rooms of the Pope and the Cardinal Secretary of State four or five carriages were ranged, the coachmen stiffly erect and the horses motionless in the brilliant light; and nothing else peopled that vast square desert of a court which, with its bareness gilded by the coruscations of its glass-work and the ruddiness of its stones, suggested a pagan temple dedicated to the sun. But what more particularly struck Pierre was the splendid panorama of Rome, for he had not hitherto imagined that the Pope from his windows could thus behold the entire city spread out before him as if he merely had to stretch forth his hand to make it his own once more.

While Pierre contemplated the scene a sound of voices caused him to turn; and he perceived a servant in black livery who, after repeating a message to Narcisse, was retiring with a deep bow. Looking much annoyed, the attache approached the young priest. "Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo," said he, "has sent word that he can't see us this morning. Some unexpected duties require his presence." However, Narcisse's embarrassment showed that he did not believe in the excuse, but rather suspected some one of having so terrified his cousin that the latter was afraid of compromising himself. Obliging and courageous as Habert himself was, this made him indignant. Still he smiled and resumed: "Listen, perhaps there's a means of forcing an entry. If your time is your own we can lunch together and then return to visit the Museum of Antiquities. I shall certainly end by coming across my cousin and we may, perhaps, be lucky enough to meet the Pope should he go down to the gardens."

At the news that his audience was yet again postponed Pierre had felt keenly disappointed. However, as the whole day was at his disposal, he willingly accepted the attache's offer. They lunched in front of St. Peter's, in a little restaurant of the Borgo, most of whose customers were pilgrims, and the fare, as it happened, was far from good. Then at about two o'clock they set off for the museum, skirting the basilica by way of the Piazza della Sagrestia. It was a bright, deserted, burning district; and again, but in a far greater degree, did the young priest experience that sensation of bare, tawny, sun-baked majesty which had come upon him while gazing into the Court of San Damaso. Then, as he passed the apse of St. Peter's, the enormity of the colossus was brought home to him more strongly than ever: it rose like a giant bouquet of architecture edged by empty expanses of pavement sprinkled with fine weeds. And in all the silent immensity there were only two children playing in the shadow of a wall. The old papal mint, the Zecca, now an Italian possession, and guarded by soldiers of the royal army, is on the left of the passage leading to the museums, while on the right, just in front, is one of the entrances of honour to the Vatican where the papal Swiss Guard keeps watch and ward; and this is the entrance by which, according to etiquette, the pair-horse carriages convey the Pope's visitors into the Court of San Damaso.

Following the long lane which ascends between a wing of the palace and its garden wall, Narcisse and Pierre at last reached the Museum of Antiquities. Ah! what a museum it is, with galleries innumerable, a museum compounded of three museums, the Pio-Clementino, Chiaramonti, and the Braccio-Nuovo, and containing a whole world found beneath the soil, then exhumed, and now glorified in full sunlight. For more than two hours Pierre went from one hall to another, dazzled by the masterpieces, bewildered by the accumulation of genius and beauty. It was not only the celebrated examples of statuary, the Laocoon and the Apollo of the cabinets of the Belvedere, the Meleager, or even the torso of Hercules—that astonished him. He was yet more impressed by the ensemble, by the innumerable quantities of Venuses, Bacchuses, and deified emperors and empresses, by the whole superb growth of beautiful or August flesh celebrating the immortality of life. Three days previously he had visited the Museum of the Capitol, where he had admired the Venus, the Dying Gaul,* the marvellous Centaurs of black marble, and the extraordinary collection of busts, but here his admiration became intensified into stupor by the inexhaustible wealth of the galleries. And, with more curiosity for life than for art, perhaps, he again lingered before the busts which so powerfully resuscitate the Rome of history—the Rome which, whilst incapable of realising the ideal beauty of Greece, was certainly well able to create life. The emperors, the philosophers, the learned men, the poets are all there, and live such as they really were, studied and portrayed in all scrupulousness with their deformities, their blemishes, the slightest peculiarities of their features. And from this extreme solicitude for truth springs a wonderful wealth of character and an incomparable vision of the past. Nothing, indeed, could be loftier: the very men live once more, and retrace the history of their city, that history which has been so falsified that the teaching of it has caused generations of school-boys to hold antiquity in horror. But on seeing the men, how well one understands, how fully one can sympathise! And indeed the smallest bits of marble, the maimed statues, the bas-reliefs in fragments, even the isolated limbs—whether the divine arm of a nymph or the sinewy, shaggy thigh of a satyr—evoke the splendour of a civilisation full of light, grandeur, and strength.

* Best known in England, through Byron's lines, as the
Dying Gladiator, though that appellation is certainly
erroneous.—Trans.

At last Narcisse brought Pierre back into the Gallery of the Candelabra, three hundred feet in length and full of fine examples of sculpture. "Listen, my dear Abbe," said he. "It is scarcely more than four o'clock, and we will sit down here for a while, as I am told that the Holy Father sometimes passes this way to go down to the gardens. It would be really lucky if you could see him, perhaps even speak to him—who can tell? At all events, it will rest you, for you must be tired out."

Narcisse was known to all the attendants, and his relationship to Monsignor Gamba gave him the run of almost the entire Vatican, where he was fond of spending his leisure time. Finding two chairs, they sat down, and the attache again began to talk of art.

How astonishing had been the destiny of Rome, what a singular, borrowed royalty had been hers! She seemed like a centre whither the whole world converged, but where nothing grew from the soil itself, which from the outset appeared to be stricken with sterility. The arts required to be acclimatised there; it was necessary to transplant the genius of neighbouring nations, which, once there, however, flourished magnificently. Under the emperors, when Rome was the queen of the earth, the beauty of her monuments and sculpture came to her from Greece. Later, when Christianity arose in Rome, it there remained impregnated with paganism; it was on another soil that it produced Gothic art, the Christian Art par excellence. Later still, at the Renascence, it was certainly at Rome that the age of Julius II and Leo X shone forth; but the artists of Tuscany and Umbria prepared the evolution, brought it to Rome that it might thence expand and soar. For the second time, indeed, art came to Rome from without, and gave her the royalty of the world by blossoming so triumphantly within her walls. Then occurred the extraordinary awakening of antiquity, Apollo and Venus resuscitated worshipped by the popes themselves, who from the time of Nicholas V dreamt of making papal Rome the equal of the imperial city. After the precursors, so sincere, tender, and strong in their art—Fra Angelico, Perugino, Botticelli, and so many others—came the two sovereigns, Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, the superhuman and the divine. Then the fall was sudden, years elapsed before the advent of Caravaggio with power of colour and modelling, all that the science of painting could achieve when bereft of genius. And afterwards the decline continued until Bernini was reached—Bernini, the real creator of the Rome of the present popes, the prodigal child who at twenty could already show a galaxy of colossal marble wenches, the universal architect who with fearful activity finished the facade, built the colonnade, decorated the interior of St. Peter's, and raised fountains, churches, and palaces innumerable. And that was the end of all, for since then Rome has little by little withdrawn from life, from the modern world, as though she, who always lived on what she derived from others, were dying of her inability to take anything more from them in order to convert it to her own glory.

"Ah! Bernini, that delightful Bernini!" continued Narcisse with his rapturous air. "He is both powerful and exquisite, his verve always ready, his ingenuity invariably awake, his fecundity full of grace and magnificence. As for their Bramante with his masterpiece, that cold, correct Cancelleria, we'll dub him the Michael Angelo and Raffaelle of architecture and say no more about it. But Bernini, that exquisite Bernini, why, there is more delicacy and refinement in his pretended bad taste than in all the hugeness and perfection of the others! Our own age ought to recognise itself in his art, at once so varied and so deep, so triumphant in its mannerisms, so full of a perturbing solicitude for the artificial and so free from the baseness of reality. Just go to the Villa Borghese to see the group of Apollo and Daphne which Bernini executed when he was eighteen,* and in particular see his statue of Santa Teresa in ecstasy at Santa Maria della Vittoria! Ah! that Santa Teresa! It is like heaven opening, with the quiver that only a purely divine enjoyment can set in woman's flesh, the rapture of faith carried to the point of spasm, the creature losing breath and dying of pleasure in the arms of the Divinity! I have spent hours and hours before that work without exhausting the infinite scope of its precious, burning symbolisation."

* There is also at the Villa Borghese Bernini's Anchises carried
by Aeneas, which he sculptured when only sixteen. No doubt his
faults were many; but it was his misfortune to belong to a
decadent period.—Trans.

Narcisse's voice died away, and Pierre, no longer astonished at his covert, unconscious hatred of health, simplicity, and strength, scarcely listened to him. The young priest himself was again becoming absorbed in the idea he had formed of pagan Rome resuscitating in Christian Rome and turning it into Catholic Rome, the new political, sacerdotal, domineering centre of earthly government. Apart from the primitive age of the Catacombs, had Rome ever been Christian? The thoughts that had come to him on the Palatine, in the Appian Way, and in St. Peter's were gathering confirmation. Genius that morning had brought him fresh proof. No doubt the paganism which reappeared in the art of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle was tempered, transformed by the Christian spirit. But did it not still remain the basis? Had not the former master peered across Olympus when snatching his great nudities from the terrible heavens of Jehovah? Did not the ideal figures of Raffaelle reveal the superb, fascinating flesh of Venus beneath the chaste veil of the Virgin? It seemed so to Pierre, and some embarrassment mingled with his despondency, for all those beautiful forms glorifying the ardent passions of life, were in opposition to his dream of rejuvenated Christianity giving peace to the world and reviving the simplicity and purity of the early ages.

All at once he was surprised to hear Narcisse, by what transition he could not tell, speaking to him of the daily life of Leo XIII. "Yes, my dear Abbe, at eighty-four* the Holy Father shows the activity of a young man and leads a life of determination and hard work such as neither you nor I would care for! At six o'clock he is already up, says his mass in his private chapel, and drinks a little milk for breakfast. Then, from eight o'clock till noon, there is a ceaseless procession of cardinals and prelates, all the affairs of the congregations passing under his eyes, and none could be more numerous or intricate. At noon the public and collective audiences usually begin. At two he dines. Then comes the siesta which he has well earned, or else a promenade in the gardens until six o'clock. The private audiences then sometimes keep him for an hour or two. He sups at nine and scarcely eats, lives on nothing, in fact, and is always alone at his little table. What do you think, eh, of the etiquette which compels him to such loneliness? There you have a man who for eighteen years has never had a guest at his table, who day by day sits all alone in his grandeur! And as soon as ten o'clock strikes, after saying the Rosary with his familiars, he shuts himself up in his room. But, although he may go to bed, he sleeps very little; he is frequently troubled by insomnia, and gets up and sends for a secretary to dictate memoranda or letters to him. When any interesting matter requires his attention he gives himself up to it heart and soul, never letting it escape his thoughts. And his life, his health, lies in all this. His mind is always busy; his will and strength must always be exerting themselves. You may know that he long cultivated Latin verse with affection; and I believe that in his days of struggle he had a passion for journalism, inspired the articles of the newspapers he subsidised, and even dictated some of them when his most cherished ideas were in question."

* The reader should remember that the period selected for this
narrative is the year 1894. Leo XIII was born in 1810.—Trans.

Silence fell. At every moment Narcisse craned his neck to see if the little papal cortege were not emerging from the Gallery of the Tapestries to pass them on its way to the gardens. "You are perhaps aware," he resumed, "that his Holiness is brought down on a low chair which is small enough to pass through every doorway. It's quite a journey, more than a mile, through the loggie, the stanze of Raffaelle, the painting and sculpture galleries, not to mention the numerous staircases, before he reaches the gardens, where a pair-horse carriage awaits him. It's quite fine this evening, so he will surely come. We must have a little patience."

Whilst Narcisse was giving these particulars Pierre again sank into a reverie and saw the whole extraordinary history pass before him. First came the worldly, ostentatious popes of the Renascence, those who resuscitated antiquity with so much passion and dreamt of draping the Holy See with the purple of empire once more. There was Paul II, the magnificent Venetian who built the Palazzo di Venezia; Sixtus IV, to whom one owes the Sixtine Chapel; and Julius II and Leo X, who made Rome a city of theatrical pomp, prodigious festivities, tournaments, ballets, hunts, masquerades, and banquets. At that time the papacy had just rediscovered Olympus amidst the dust of buried ruins, and as though intoxicated by the torrent of life which arose from the ancient soil, it founded the museums, thus reviving the superb temples of the pagan age, and restoring them to the cult of universal admiration. Never had the Church been in such peril of death, for if the Christ was still honoured at St. Peter's, Jupiter and all the other gods and goddesses, with their beauteous, triumphant flesh, were enthroned in the halls of the Vatican. Then, however, another vision passed before Pierre, one of the modern popes prior to the Italian occupation—notably Pius IX, who, whilst yet free, often went into his good city of Rome. His huge red and gold coach was drawn by six horses, surrounded by Swiss Guards and followed by Noble Guards; but now and again he would alight in the Corso, and continue his promenade on foot, and then the mounted men of the escort galloped forward to give warning and stop the traffic. The carriages drew up, the gentlemen had to alight and kneel on the pavement, whilst the ladies simply rose and devoutly inclined their heads, as the Holy Father, attended by his Court, slowly wended his way to the Piazza del Popolo, smiling and blessing at every step. And now had come Leo XIII, the voluntary prisoner, shut up in the Vatican for eighteen years, and he, behind the high, silent walls, in the unknown sphere where each of his days flowed by so quietly, had acquired a more exalted majesty, instinct with sacred and redoubtable mysteriousness.

Ah! that Pope whom you no longer meet or see, that Pope hidden from the common of mankind like some terrible divinity whom the priests alone dare to approach! It is in that sumptuous Vatican which his forerunners of the Renascence built and adorned for giant festivities that he has secluded himself; it is there he lives, far from the crowd, in prison with the handsome men and the lovely women of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, with the gods and goddesses of marble, with the whole of resplendent Olympus celebrating around him the religion of life and light. With him the entire Papacy is there steeped in paganism. What a spectacle when the slender, weak old man, all soul, so purely white, passes along the galleries of the Museum of Antiquities on his way to the gardens. Right and left the statues behold him pass with all their bare flesh. There is Jupiter, there is Apollo, there is Venus the dominatrix, there is Pan, the universal god in whose laugh the joys of earth ring out. Nereids bathe in transparent water. Bacchantes roll, unveiled, in the warm grass. Centaurs gallop by carrying lovely girls, faint with rapture, on their steaming haunches. Ariadne is surprised by Bacchus, Ganymede fondles the eagle, Adonis fires youth and maiden with his flame. And on and on passes the weak, white old man, swaying on his low chair, amidst that splendid triumph, that display and glorification of the flesh, which shouts aloud the omnipotence of Nature, of everlasting matter! Since they have found it again, exhumed it, and honoured it, that it is which once more reigns there imperishable; and in vain have they set vine leaves on the statues, even as they have swathed the huge figures of Michael Angelo; sex still flares on all sides, life overflows, its germs course in torrents through the veins of the world. Near by, in that Vatican library of incomparable wealth, where all human science lies slumbering, there lurks a yet more terrible danger—the danger of an explosion which would sweep away everything, Vatican and St. Peter's also, if one day the books in their turn were to awake and speak aloud as speak the beauty of Venus and the manliness of Apollo. But the white, diaphanous old man seems neither to see nor to hear, and the huge heads of Jupiter, the trunks of Hercules, the equivocal statues of Antinous continue to watch him as he passes on!

However, Narcisse had become impatient, and, going in search of an attendant, he learnt from him that his Holiness had already gone down. To shorten the distance, indeed, the cortege often passes along a kind of open gallery leading towards the Mint. "Well, let us go down as well," said Narcisse to Pierre; "I will try to show you the gardens."

Down below, in the vestibule, a door of which opened on to a broad path, he spoke to another attendant, a former pontifical soldier whom he personally knew. The man at once let him pass with Pierre, but was unable to tell him whether Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo had accompanied his Holiness that day.

"No matter," resumed Narcisse when he and his companion were alone in the path; "I don't despair of meeting him—and these, you see, are the famous gardens of the Vatican."

They are very extensive grounds, and the Pope can go quite two and a half miles by passing along the paths of the wood, the vineyard, and the kitchen garden. Occupying the plateau of the Vatican hill, which the medieval wall of Leo IV still girdles, the gardens are separated from the neighbouring valleys as by a fortified rampart. The wall formerly stretched to the castle of Sant' Angelo, thereby forming what was known as the Leonine City. No inquisitive eyes can peer into the grounds excepting from the dome of St. Peter's, which casts its huge shadow over them during the hot summer weather. They are, too, quite a little world, which each pope has taken pleasure in embellishing. There is a large parterre with lawns of geometrical patterns, planted with handsome palms and adorned with lemon and orange trees in pots; there is a less formal, a shadier garden, where, amidst deep plantations of yoke-elms, you find Giovanni Vesanzio's fountain, the Aquilone, and Pius IV's old Casino; then, too, there are the woods with their superb evergreen oaks, their thickets of plane-trees, acacias, and pines, intersected by broad avenues, which are delightfully pleasant for leisurely strolls; and finally, on turning to the left, beyond other clumps of trees, come the kitchen garden and the vineyard, the last well tended.

Whilst walking through the wood Narcisse told Pierre of the life led by the Holy Father in these gardens. He strolls in them every second day when the weather allows. Formerly the popes left the Vatican for the Quirinal, which is cooler and healthier, as soon as May arrived; and spent the dog days at Castle Gandolfo on the margins of the Lake of Albano. But nowadays the only summer residence possessed by his Holiness is a virtually intact tower of the old rampart of Leo IV. He here spends the hottest days, and has even erected a sort of pavilion beside it for the accommodation of his suite. Narcisse, like one at home, went in and secured permission for Pierre to glance at the one room occupied by the Pope, a spacious round chamber with semispherical ceiling, on which are painted the heavens with symbolical figures of the constellations; one of the latter, the lion, having two stars for eyes—stars which a system of lighting causes to sparkle during the night. The walls of the tower are so thick that after blocking up a window, a kind of room, for the accommodation of a couch, has been contrived in the embrasure. Beside this couch the only furniture is a large work-table, a dining-table with flaps, and a large regal arm-chair, a mass of gilding, one of the gifts of the Pope's episcopal jubilee. And you dream of the days of solitude and perfect silence, spent in that low donjon hall, where the coolness of a tomb prevails whilst the heavy suns of August are scorching overpowered Rome.

An astronomical observatory has been installed in another tower, surmounted by a little white cupola, which you espy amidst the greenery; and under the trees there is also a Swiss chalet, where Leo XIII is fond of resting. He sometimes goes on foot to the kitchen garden, and takes much interest in the vineyard, visiting it to see if the grapes are ripening and if the vintage will be a good one. What most astonished Pierre, however, was to learn that the Holy Father had been very fond of "sport" before age had weakened him. He was indeed passionately addicted to bird snaring. Broad-meshed nets were hung on either side of a path on the fringe of a plantation, and in the middle of the path were placed cages containing the decoys, whose songs soon attracted all the birds of the neighbourhood—red-breasts, white-throats, black-caps, nightingales, fig-peckers of all sorts. And when a numerous company of them was gathered together Leo XIII, seated out of sight and watching, would suddenly clap his hands and startle the birds, which flew up and were caught by the wings in the meshes of the nets. All that then remained to be done was to take them out of the nets and stifle them by a touch of the thumb. Roast fig-peckers are delicious.*

* Perhaps so; but what a delightful pastime for the Vicar of the
Divinity!—Trans.

As Pierre came back through the wood he had another surprise. He suddenly lighted on a "Grotto of Lourdes," a miniature imitation of the original, built of rocks and blocks of cement. And such was his emotion at the sight that he could not conceal it. "It's true, then!" said he. "I was told of it, but I thought that the Holy Father was of loftier mind—free from all such base superstitions!"

"Oh!" replied Narcisse, "I fancy that the grotto dates from Pius IX, who evinced especial gratitude to our Lady of Lourdes. At all events, it must be a gift, and Leo XIII simply keeps it in repair."

For a few moments Pierre remained motionless and silent before that imitation grotto, that childish plaything. Some zealously devout visitors had left their visiting cards in the cracks of the cement-work! For his part, he felt very sad, and followed his companion with bowed head, lamenting the wretched idiocy of the world. Then, on emerging from the wood, on again reaching the parterre, he raised his eyes.

Ah! how exquisite in spite of everything was that decline of a lovely day, and what a victorious charm ascended from the soil in that part of the gardens. There, in front of that bare, noble, burning parterre, far more than under the languishing foliage of the wood or among the fruitful vines, Pierre realised the strength of Nature. Above the grass growing meagrely over the compartments of geometrical pattern which the pathways traced there were barely a few low shrubs, dwarf roses, aloes, rare tufts of withering flowers. Some green bushes still described the escutcheon of Pius IX in accordance with the strange taste of former times. And amidst the warm silence one only heard the faint crystalline murmur of the water trickling from the basin of the central fountain. But all Rome, its ardent heavens, sovereign grace, and conquering voluptuousness, seemed with their own soul to animate this vast rectangular patch of decorative gardening, this mosaic of verdure, which in its semi-abandonment and scorched decay assumed an aspect of melancholy pride, instinct with the ever returning quiver of a passion of fire that could not die. Some antique vases and statues, whitely nude under the setting sun, skirted the parterres. And above the aroma of eucalyptus and of pine, stronger even than that of the ripening oranges, there rose the odour of the large, bitter box-shrubs, so laden with pungent life that it disturbed one as one passed as if indeed it were the very scent of the fecundity of that ancient soil saturated with the dust of generations.

"It's very strange that we have not met his Holiness," exclaimed Narcisse. "Perhaps his carriage took the other path through the wood while we were in the tower."

Then, reverting to Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, the attache explained that the functions of Copiere, or papal cup-bearer, which his cousin should have discharged as one of the four Camerieri segreti partecipanti had become purely honorary since the dinners offered to diplomatists or in honour of newly consecrated bishops had been given by the Cardinal Secretary of State. Monsignor Gamba, whose cowardice and nullity were legendary, seemed therefore to have no other role than that of enlivening Leo XIII, whose favour he had won by his incessant flattery and the anecdotes which he was ever relating about both the black and the white worlds. Indeed this fat, amiable man, who could even be obliging when his interests were not in question, was a perfect newspaper, brimful of tittle-tattle, disdaining no item of gossip whatever, even if it came from the kitchens. And thus he was quietly marching towards the cardinalate, certain of obtaining the hat without other exertion than that of bringing a budget of gossip to beguile the pleasant hours of the promenade. And Heaven knew that he was always able to garner an abundant harvest of news in that closed Vatican swarming with prelates of every kind, in that womanless pontifical family of old begowned bachelors, all secretly exercised by vast ambitions, covert and revolting rivalries, and ferocious hatreds, which, it is said, are still sometimes carried as far as the good old poison of ancient days.

All at once Narcisse stopped. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "I was certain of it. There's the Holy Father! But we are not in luck. He won't even see us; he is about to get into his carriage again."

As he spoke a carriage drew up at the verge of the wood, and a little cortege emerging from a narrow path, went towards it.

Pierre felt as if he had received a great blow in the heart. Motionless beside his companion, and half hidden by a lofty vase containing a lemon-tree, it was only from a distance that he was able to see the white old man, looking so frail and slender in the wavy folds of his white cassock, and walking so very slowly with short, gliding steps. The young priest could scarcely distinguish the emaciated face of old diaphanous ivory, emphasised by a large nose which jutted out above thin lips. However, the Pontiff's black eyes were glittering with an inquisitive smile, while his right ear was inclined towards Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, who was doubtless finishing some story at once rich and short, flowery and dignified. And on the left walked a Noble Guard; and two other prelates followed.

It was but a familiar apparition; Leo XIII was already climbing into the closed carriage. And Pierre, in the midst of that large, odoriferous, burning garden, again experienced the singular emotion which had come upon him in the Gallery of the Candelabra while he was picturing the Pope on his way between the Apollos and Venuses radiant in their triumphant nudity. There, however, it was only pagan art which had celebrated the eternity of life, the superb, almighty powers of Nature. But here he had beheld the Pontiff steeped in Nature itself, in Nature clad in the most lovely, most voluptuous, most passionate guise. Ah! that Pope, that old man strolling with his Divinity of grief, humility, and renunciation along the paths of those gardens of love, in the languid evenings of the hot summer days, beneath the caressing scents of pine and eucalyptus, ripe oranges, and tall, acrid box-shrubs! The whole atmosphere around him proclaimed the powers of the great god Pan. How pleasant was the thought of living there, amidst that magnificence of heaven and of earth, of loving the beauty of woman and of rejoicing in the fruitfulness of all! And suddenly the decisive truth burst forth that from a land of such joy and light it was only possible for a temporal religion of conquest and political domination to rise; not the mystical, pain-fraught religion of the North—the religion of the soul!

However, Narcisse led the young priest away, telling him other anecdotes as they went—anecdotes of the occasional bonhomie of Leo XIII, who would stop to chat with the gardeners, and question them about the health of the trees and the sale of the oranges. And he also mentioned the Pope's former passion for a pair of gazelles, sent him from Africa, two graceful creatures which he had been fond of caressing, and at whose death he had shed tears. But Pierre no longer listened. When they found themselves on the Piazza of St. Peter's, he turned round and gazed at the Vatican once more.

His eyes had fallen on the gate of bronze, and he remembered having wondered that morning what there might be behind these metal panels ornamented with big nails. And he did not yet dare to answer the question, and decide if the new nations thirsting for fraternity and justice would really find there the religion necessary for the democracies of to-morrow; for he had not been able to probe things, and only carried a first impression away with him. But how keen it was, and how ill it boded for his dreams! A gate of bronze! Yes, a hard, impregnable gate, so completely shutting the Vatican off from the rest of the world that nothing new had entered the palace for three hundred years. Behind that portal the old centuries, as far as the sixteenth, remained immutable. Time seemed to have stayed its course there for ever; nothing more stirred; the very costumes of the Swiss Guards, the Noble Guards, and the prelates themselves were unchanged; and you found yourself in the world of three hundred years ago, with its etiquette, its costumes, and its ideas. That the popes in a spirit of haughty protest should for five and twenty years have voluntarily shut themselves up in their palace was already regrettable; but this imprisonment of centuries within the past, within the grooves of tradition, was far more serious and dangerous. It was all Catholicism which was thus imprisoned, whose dogmas and sacerdotal organisation were obstinately immobilised. Perhaps, in spite of its apparent flexibility, Catholicism was really unable to yield in anything, under peril of being swept away, and therein lay both its weakness and its strength. And then what a terrible world was there, how great the pride and ambition, how numerous the hatreds and rivalries! And how strange the prison, how singular the company assembled behind the bars—the Crucified by the side of Jupiter Capitolinus, all pagan antiquity fraternising with the Apostles, all the splendours of the Renascence surrounding the pastor of the Gospel who reigns in the name of the humble and the poor!

The sun was sinking, the gentle, luscious sweetness of the Roman evenings was falling from the limpid heavens, and after that splendid day spent with Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, the ancients, and the Pope, in the finest palace of the world, the young priest lingered, distracted, on the Piazza of St. Peter's.

"Well, you must excuse me, my dear Abbe," concluded Narcisse. "But I will now confess to you that I suspect my worthy cousin of a fear that he might compromise himself by meddling in your affair. I shall certainly see him again, but you will do well not to put too much reliance on him."

It was nearly six o'clock when Pierre got back to the Boccanera mansion. As a rule, he passed in all modesty down the lane, and entered by the little side door, a key of which had been given him. But he had that morning received a letter from M. de la Choue, and desired to communicate it to Benedetta. So he ascended the grand staircase, and on reaching the anteroom was surprised to find nobody there. As a rule, whenever the man-servant went out Victorine installed herself in his place and busied herself with some needlework. Her chair was there, and Pierre even noticed some linen which she had left on a little table when probably summoned elsewhere. Then, as the door of the first reception-room was ajar, he at last ventured in. It was almost night there already, the twilight was softly dying away, and all at once the young priest stopped short, fearing to take another step, for, from the room beyond, the large yellow salon, there came a murmur of feverish, distracted words, ardent entreaties, fierce panting, a rustling and a shuffling of footsteps. And suddenly Pierre no longer hesitated, urged on despite himself by the conviction that the sounds he heard were those of a struggle, and that some one was hard pressed.

And when he darted into the further room he was stupefied, for Dario was there, no longer showing the degenerate elegance of the last scion of an exhausted race, but maddened by the hot, frantic blood of the Boccaneras which had bubbled up within him. He had clasped Benedetta by the shoulders in a frenzy of passion and was scorching her face with his hot, entreating words: "But since you say, my darling, that it is all over, that your marriage will never be dissolved—oh! why should we be wretched for ever! Love me as you do love me, and let me love you—let me love you!"

But the Contessina, with an indescribable expression of tenderness and suffering on her tearful face, repulsed him with her outstretched arms, she likewise evincing a fierce energy as she repeated: "No, no; I love you, but it must not, it must not be."

At that moment, amidst the roar of his despair, Dario became conscious that some one was entering the room. He turned and gazed at Pierre with an expression of stupefied insanity, scarce able even to recognise him. Then he carried his two hands to his face, to his bloodshot eyes and his cheeks wet with scalding tears, and fled, heaving a terrible, pain-fraught sigh in which baffled passion mingled with grief and repentance.

Benedetta seated herself, breathing hard, her strength and courage wellnigh exhausted. But as Pierre, too much embarrassed to speak, turned towards the door, she addressed him in a calmer voice: "No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe, do not go away—sit down, I pray you; I should like to speak to you for a moment."

He thereupon thought it his duty to account for his sudden entrance, and explained that he had found the door of the first salon ajar, and that Victorine was not in the ante-room, though he had seen her work lying on the table there.

"Yes," exclaimed the Contessina, "Victorine ought to have been there; I saw her there but a short time ago. And when my poor Dario lost his head I called her. Why did she not come?" Then, with sudden expansion, leaning towards Pierre, she continued: "Listen, Monsieur l'Abbe, I will tell you what happened, for I don't want you to form too bad an opinion of my poor Dario. It was all in some measure my fault. Last night he asked me for an appointment here in order that we might have a quiet chat, and as I knew that my aunt would be absent at this time to-day I told him to come. It was only natural—wasn't it?—that we should want to see one another and come to an agreement after the grievous news that my marriage will probably never be annulled. We suffer too much, and must form a decision. And so when he came this evening we began to weep and embrace, mingling our tears together. I kissed him again and again, telling him how I adored him, how bitterly grieved I was at being the cause of his sufferings, and how surely I should die of grief at seeing him so unhappy. Ah! no doubt I did wrong; I ought not to have caught him to my heart and embraced him as I did, for it maddened him, Monsieur l'Abbe; he lost his head, and would have made me break my vow to the Blessed Virgin."

She spoke these words in all tranquillity and simplicity, without sign of embarrassment, like a young and beautiful woman who is at once sensible and practical. Then she resumed: "Oh! I know my poor Dario well, but it does not prevent me from loving him; perhaps, indeed, it only makes me love him the more. He looks delicate, perhaps rather sickly, but in truth he is a man of passion. Yes, the old blood of my people bubbles up in him. I know something of it myself, for when I was a child I sometimes had fits of angry passion which left me exhausted on the floor, and even now, when the gusts arise within me, I have to fight against myself and torture myself in order that I may not act madly. But my poor Dario does not know how to suffer. He is like a child whose fancies must be gratified. And yet at bottom he has a good deal of common sense; he waits for me because he knows that the only real happiness lies with the woman who adores him."

As Pierre listened he was able to form a more precise idea of the young prince, of whose character he had hitherto had but a vague perception. Whilst dying of love for his cousin, Dario had ever been a man of pleasure. Though he was no doubt very amiable, the basis of his temperament was none the less egotism. And, in particular, he was unable to endure suffering; he loathed suffering, ugliness, and poverty, whether they affected himself or others. Both his flesh and his soul required gaiety, brilliancy, show, life in the full sunlight. And withal he was exhausted, with no strength left him but for the idle life he led, so incapable of thought and will that the idea of joining the new regime had not even occurred to him. Yet he had all the unbounded pride of a Roman; sagacity—a keen, practical perception of the real—was mingled with his indolence; while his inveterate love of woman, more frequently displayed in charm of manner, burst forth at times in attacks of frantic sensuality.

"After all he is a man," concluded Benedetta in a low voice, "and I must not ask impossibilities of him." Then, as Pierre gazed at her, his notions of Italian jealousy quite upset, she exclaimed, aglow with passionate adoration: "No, no. Situated as we are, I am not jealous. I know very well that he will always return to me, and that he will be mine alone whenever I please, whenever it may be possible."

Silence followed; shadows were filling the room, the gilding of the large pier tables faded away, and infinite melancholy fell from the lofty, dim ceiling and the old hangings, yellow like autumn leaves. But soon, by some chance play of the waning light, a painting stood out above the sofa on which the Contessina was seated. It was the portrait of the beautiful young girl with the turban—Cassia Boccanera the forerunner, the amorosa and avengeress. Again was Pierre struck by the portrait's resemblance to Benedetta, and, thinking aloud, he resumed: "Passion always proves the stronger; there invariably comes a moment when one succumbs—"

But Benedetta violently interrupted him: "I! I! Ah! you do not know me; I would rather die!" And with extraordinary exaltation, all aglow with love, as if her superstitious faith had fired her passion to ecstasy, she continued: "I have vowed to the Madonna that I will belong to none but the man I love, and to him only when he is my husband. And hitherto I have kept that vow, at the cost of my happiness, and I will keep it still, even if it cost me my life! Yes, we will die, my poor Dario and I, if it be necessary; but the holy Virgin has my vow, and the angels shall not weep in heaven!"

She was all in those words, her nature all simplicity, intricate, inexplicable though it might seem. She was doubtless swayed by that idea of human nobility which Christianity has set in renunciation and purity; a protest, as it were, against eternal matter, against the forces of Nature, the everlasting fruitfulness of life. But there was more than this; she reserved herself, like a divine and priceless gift, to be bestowed on the one being whom her heart had chosen, he who would be her lord and master when God should have united them in marriage. For her everything lay in the blessing of the priest, in the religious solemnisation of matrimony. And thus one understood her long resistance to Prada, whom she did not love, and her despairing, grievous resistance to Dario, whom she did love, but who was not her husband. And how torturing it was for that soul of fire to have to resist her love; how continual was the combat waged by duty in the Virgin's name against the wild, passionate blood of her race! Ignorant, indolent though she might be, she was capable of great fidelity of heart, and, moreover, she was not given to dreaming: love might have its immaterial charms, but she desired it complete.

As Pierre looked at her in the dying twilight he seemed to see and understand her for the first time. The duality of her nature appeared in her somewhat full, fleshy lips, in her big black eyes, which suggested a dark, tempestuous night illumined by flashes of lightning, and in the calm, sensible expression of the rest of her gentle, infantile face. And, withal, behind those eyes of flame, beneath that pure, candid skin, one divined the internal tension of a superstitious, proud, and self-willed woman, who was obstinately intent on reserving herself for her one love. And Pierre could well understand that she should be adored, that she should fill the life of the man she chose with passion, and that to his own eyes she should appear like the younger sister of that lovely, tragic Cassia who, unwilling to survive the blow that had rendered self-bestowal impossible, had flung herself into the Tiber, dragging her brother Ercole and the corpse of her lover Flavio with her.

However, with a gesture of kindly affection Benedetta caught hold of Pierre's hands. "You have been here a fortnight, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "and I have come to like you very much, for I feel you to be a friend. If at first you do not understand us, at least pray do not judge us too severely. Ignorant as I may be, I always strive to act for the best, I assure you."

Pierre was greatly touched by her affectionate graciousness, and thanked her whilst for a moment retaining her beautiful hands in his own, for he also was becoming much attached to her. A fresh dream was carrying him off, that of educating her, should he have the time, or, at all events, of not returning home before winning her soul over to his own ideas of future charity and fraternity. Did not that adorable, unoccupied, indolent, ignorant creature, who only knew how to defend her love, personify the Italy of yesterday? The Italy of yesterday, so lovely and so sleepy, instinct with a dying grace, charming one even in her drowsiness, and retaining so much mystery in the fathomless depths of her black, passionate eyes! And what a role would be that of awakening her, instructing her, winning her over to truth, making her the rejuvenated Italy of to-morrow such as he had dreamt of! Even in that disastrous marriage with Count Prada he tried to see merely a first attempt at revival which had failed, the modern Italy of the North being over-hasty, too brutal in its eagerness to love and transform that gentle, belated Rome which was yet so superb and indolent. But might he not take up the task? Had he not noticed that his book, after the astonishment of the first perusal, had remained a source of interest and reflection with Benedetta amidst the emptiness of her days given over to grief? What! was it really possible that she might find some appeasement for her own wretchedness by interesting herself in the humble, in the happiness of the poor? Emotion already thrilled her at the idea, and he, quivering at the thought of all the boundless love that was within her and that she might bestow, vowed to himself that he would draw tears of pity from her eyes.

But the night had now almost completely fallen, and Benedetta rose to ask for a lamp. Then, as Pierre was about to take leave, she detained him for another moment in the gloom. He could no longer see her; he only heard her grave voice: "You will not go away with too bad an opinion of us, will you, Monsieur l'Abbe? We love one another, Dario and I, and that is no sin when one behaves as one ought. Ah! yes, I love him, and have loved him for years. I was barely thirteen, he was eighteen, and we already loved one another wildly in those big gardens of the Villa Montefiori which are now all broken up. Ah! what days we spent there, whole afternoons among the trees, hours in secret hiding-places, where we kissed like little angels. When the oranges ripened their perfume intoxicated us. And the large box-plants, ah, Dio! how they enveloped us, how their strong, acrid scent made our hearts beat! I can never smell then nowadays without feeling faint!"

A man-servant brought in the lamp, and Pierre ascended to his room. But when half-way up the little staircase he perceived Victorine, who started slightly, as if she had posted herself there to watch his departure from the salon. And now, as she followed him up, talking and seeking for information, he suddenly realised what had happened. "Why did you not go to your mistress instead of running off," he asked, "when she called you, while you were sewing in the ante-room?"

At first she tried to feign astonishment and reply that she had heard nothing. But her good-natured, frank face did not know how to lie, and she ended by confessing, with a gay, courageous air. "Well," she said, "it surely wasn't for me to interfere between lovers! Besides, my poor little Benedetta is simply torturing herself to death with those ideas of hers. Why shouldn't they be happy, since they love one another? Life isn't so amusing as some may think. And how bitterly one regrets not having seized hold of happiness when the time for it has gone!"

Once alone in his room, Pierre suddenly staggered, quite overcome. The great box-plants, the great box-plants with their acrid, perturbing perfume! She, Benedetta, like himself, had quivered as she smelt them; and he saw them once more in a vision of the pontifical gardens, the voluptuous gardens of Rome, deserted, glowing under the August sun. And now his whole day crystallised, assumed clear and full significance. It spoke to him of the fruitful awakening, of the eternal protest of Nature and life, Venus and Hercules, whom one may bury for centuries beneath the soil, but who, nevertheless, one day arise from it, and though one may seek to wall them up within the domineering, stubborn, immutable Vatican, reign yet even there, and rule the whole, wide world with sovereign power!

PART III.

VII.

On the following day as Pierre, after a long ramble, once more found himself in front of the Vatican, whither a harassing attraction ever led him, he again encountered Monsignor Nani. It was a Wednesday evening, and the Assessor of the Holy Office had just come from his weekly audience with the Pope, whom he had acquainted with the proceedings of the Congregation at its meeting that morning. "What a fortunate chance, my dear sir," said he; "I was thinking of you. Would you like to see his Holiness in public while you are waiting for a private audience?"

Nani had put on his pleasant expression of smiling civility, beneath which one would barely detect the faint irony of a superior man who knew everything, prepared everything, and could do everything.

"Why, yes, Monsignor," Pierre replied, somewhat astonished by the abruptness of the offer. "Anything of a nature to divert one's mind is welcome when one loses one's time in waiting."

"No, no, you are not losing your time," replied the prelate. "You are looking round you, reflecting, and enlightening yourself. Well, this is the point. You are doubtless aware that the great international pilgrimage of the Peter's Pence Fund will arrive in Rome on Friday, and be received on Saturday by his Holiness. On Sunday, moreover, the Holy Father will celebrate mass at the Basilica. Well, I have a few cards left, and here are some very good places for both ceremonies." So saying he produced an elegant little pocketbook bearing a gilt monogram and handed Pierre two cards, one green and the other pink. "If you only knew how people fight for them," he resumed. "You remember that I told you of two French ladies who are consumed by a desire to see his Holiness. Well, I did not like to support their request for an audience in too pressing a way, and they have had to content themselves with cards like these. The fact is, the Holy Father is somewhat fatigued at the present time. I found him looking yellow and feverish just now. But he has so much courage; he nowadays only lives by force of soul." Then Nani's smile came back with its almost imperceptible touch of derision as he resumed: "Impatient ones ought to find a great example in him, my dear son. I heard that Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo had been unable to help you. But you must not be too much distressed on that account. This long delay is assuredly a grace of Providence in order that you may instruct yourself and come to understand certain things which you French priests do not, unfortunately, realise when you arrive in Rome. And perhaps it will prevent you from making certain mistakes. Come, calm yourself, and remember that the course of events is in the hands of God, who, in His sovereign wisdom, fixes the hour for all things."

Thereupon Nani offered Pierre his plump, supple, shapely hand, a hand soft like a woman's but with the grasp of a vice. And afterwards he climbed into his carriage, which was waiting for him.

It so happened that the letter which Pierre had received from Viscount Philibert de la Choue was a long cry of spite and despair in connection with the great international pilgrimage of the Peter's Pence Fund. The Viscount wrote from his bed, to which he was confined by a very severe attack of gout, and his grief at being unable to come to Rome was the greater as the President of the Committee, who would naturally present the pilgrims to the Pope, happened to be Baron de Fouras, one of his most bitter adversaries of the old conservative, Catholic party. M. de la Choue felt certain that the Baron would profit by his opportunity to win the Pope over to the theory of free corporations; whereas he, the Viscount, believed that the salvation of Catholicism and the world could only be worked by a system in which the corporations should be closed and obligatory. And so he urged Pierre to exert himself with such cardinals as were favourable, to secure an audience with the Holy Father whatever the obstacles, and to remain in Rome until he should have secured the Pontiff's approbation, which alone could decide the victory. The letter further mentioned that the pilgrimage would be made up of a number of groups headed by bishops and other ecclesiastical dignitaries, and would comprise three thousand people from France, Belgium, Spain, Austria, and even Germany. Two thousand of these would come from France alone. An international committee had assembled in Paris to organise everything and select the pilgrims, which last had proved a delicate task, as a representative gathering had been desired, a commingling of members of the aristocracy, sisterhood of middle-class ladies, and associations of the working classes, among whom all social differences would be forgotten in the union of a common faith. And the Viscount added that the pilgrimage would bring the Pope a large sum of money, and had settled the date of its arrival in the Eternal City in such wise that it would figure as a solemn protest of the Catholic world against the festivities of September 20, by which the Quirinal had just celebrated the anniversary of the occupation of Rome.

The reception of the pilgrimage being fixed for noon, Pierre in all simplicity thought that he would be sufficiently early if he reached St. Peter's at eleven. The function was to take place in the Hall of Beatifications, which is a large and handsome apartment over the portico, and has been arranged as a chapel since 1890. One of its windows opens on to the central balcony, whence the popes formerly blessed the people, the city, and the world. To reach the apartment you pass through two other halls of audience, the Sala Regia and Sala Ducale, and when Pierre wished to gain the place to which his green card entitled him he found both those rooms so extremely crowded that he could only elbow his way forward with the greatest difficulty. For an hour already the three or four thousand people assembled there had been stifling, full of growing emotion and feverishness. At last the young priest managed to reach the threshold of the third hall, but was so discouraged at sight of the extraordinary multitude of heads before him that he did not attempt to go any further.

The apartment, which he could survey at a glance by rising on tip-toe, appeared to him to be very rich of aspect, with walls gilded and painted under a severe and lofty ceiling. On a low platform, where the altar usually stood, facing the entry, the pontifical throne had now been set: a large arm-chair upholstered in red velvet with glittering golden back and arms; whilst the hangings of the baldacchino, also of red velvet, fell behind and spread out on either side like a pair of huge purple wings. However, what more particularly interested Pierre was the wildly passionate concourse of people whose hearts he could almost hear beating and whose eyes sought to beguile their feverish impatience by contemplating and adoring the empty throne. As if it had been some golden monstrance which the Divinity in person would soon deign to occupy, that throne dazzled them, disturbed them, filled them all with devout rapture. Among the throng were workmen rigged out in their Sunday best, with clear childish eyes and rough ecstatic faces; ladies of the upper classes wearing black, as the regulations required, and looking intensely pale from the sacred awe which mingled with their excessive desire; and gentlemen in evening dress, who appeared quite glorious, inflated with the conviction that they were saving both the Church and the nations. One cluster of dress-coats assembled near the throne, was particularly noticeable; it comprised the members of the International Committee, headed by Baron de Fouras, a very tall, stout, fair man of fifty, who bestirred and exerted himself and issued orders like some commander on the morning of a decisive victory. Then, amidst the general mass of grey, neutral hue, there gleamed the violet silk of some bishop's cassock, for each pastor had desired to remain with his flock; whilst members of various religious orders, superiors in brown, black, and white habits, rose up above all others with lofty bearded or shaven heads. Right and left drooped banners which associations and congregations had brought to present to the Pope. And the sea of pilgrims ever waved and surged with a growing clamour: so much impatient love being exhaled by those perspiring faces, burning eyes, and hungry mouths that the atmosphere, reeking with the odour of the throng, seemed thickened and darkened.

All at once, however, Pierre perceived Monsignor Nani standing near the throne and beckoning him to approach; and although the young priest replied by a modest gesture, implying that he preferred to remain where he was, the prelate insisted and even sent an usher to make way for him. Directly the usher had led him forward, Nani inquired: "Why did you not come to take your place? Your card entitled you to be here, on the left of the throne."

"The truth is," answered the priest, "I did not like to disturb so many people. Besides, this is an undue honour for me."

"No, no; I gave you that place in order that you should occupy it. I want you to be in the first rank, so that you may see everything of the ceremony."

Pierre could not do otherwise than thank him. Then, on looking round, he saw that several cardinals and many other prelates were likewise waiting on either side of the throne. But it was in vain that he sought Cardinal Boccanera, who only came to St. Peter's and the Vatican on the days when his functions required his presence there. However, he recognised Cardinal Sanguinetti, who, broad and sturdy and red of face, was talking in a loud voice to Baron de Fouras. And Nani, with his obliging air, stepped up again to point out two other Eminences who were high and mighty personages—the Cardinal Vicar, a short, fat man, with a feverish countenance scorched by ambition, and the Cardinal Secretary, who was robust and bony, fashioned as with a hatchet, suggesting a romantic type of Sicilian bandit, who, to other courses, had preferred the discreet, smiling diplomacy of the Church. A few steps further on, and quite alone, the Grand Penitentiary, silent and seemingly suffering, showed his grey, lean, ascetic profile.

Noon had struck. There was a false alert, a burst of emotion, which swept in like a wave from the other halls. But it was merely the ushers opening a passage for the cortege. Then, all at once, acclamations arose in the first hall, gathered volume, and drew nearer. This time it was the cortege itself. First came a detachment of the Swiss Guard in undress, headed by a sergeant; then a party of chair-bearers in red; and next the domestic prelates, including the four Camerieri segreti partecipanti. And finally, between two rows of Noble Guards, in semi-gala uniforms, walked the Holy Father, alone, smiling a pale smile, and slowly blessing the pilgrims on either hand. In his wake the clamour which had risen in the other apartments swept into the Hall of Beatifications with the violence of delirious love; and, under his slender, white, benedictive hand, all those distracted creatures fell upon both knees, nought remaining but the prostration of a devout multitude, overwhelmed, as it were, by the apparition of its god.

Quivering, carried away, Pierre had knelt like the others. Ah! that omnipotence, that irresistible contagion of faith, of the redoubtable current from the spheres beyond, increased tenfold by a scenario and a pomp of sovereign grandeur! Profound silence fell when Leo XIII was seated on the throne surrounded by the cardinals and his court; and then the ceremony proceeded according to rite and usage. First a bishop spoke, kneeling and laying the homage of the faithful of all Christendom at his Holiness's feet. The President of the Committee, Baron de Fouras, followed, remaining erect whilst he read a long address in which he introduced the pilgrimage and explained its motive, investing it with all the gravity of a political and religious protest. This stout man had a shrill and piercing voice, and his words jarred like the grating of a gimlet as he proclaimed the grief of the Catholic world at the spoliation which the Holy See had endured for a quarter of a century, and the desire of all the nations there represented by the pilgrims to console the supreme and venerated Head of the Church by bringing him the offerings of rich and poor, even to the mites of the humblest, in order that the Papacy might retain the pride of independence and be able to treat its enemies with contempt. And he also spoke of France, deplored her errors, predicted her return to healthy traditions, and gave it to be understood that she remained in spite of everything the most opulent and generous of the Christian nations, the donor whose gold and presents flowed into Rome in a never ending stream. At last Leo XIII arose to reply to the bishop and the baron. His voice was full, with a strong nasal twang, and surprised one coming from a man so slight of build. In a few sentences he expressed his gratitude, saying how touched he was by the devotion of the nations to the Holy See. Although the times might be bad, the final triumph could not be delayed much longer. There were evident signs that mankind was returning to faith, and that iniquity would soon cease under the universal dominion of the Christ. As for France, was she not the eldest daughter of the Church, and had she not given too many proofs of her affection for the Holy See for the latter ever to cease loving her? Then, raising his arm, he bestowed on all the pilgrims present, on the societies and enterprises they represented, on their families and friends, on France, on all the nations of the Catholic world, his apostolic benediction, in gratitude for the precious help which they sent him. And whilst he was again seating himself applause burst forth, frantic salvoes of applause lasting for ten minutes and mingling with vivats and inarticulate cries—a passionate, tempestuous outburst, which made the very building shake.

Amidst this blast of frantic adoration Pierre gazed at Leo XIII, now again motionless on his throne. With the papal cap on his head and the red cape edged with ermine about his shoulders, he retained in his long white cassock the rigid, sacerdotal attitude of an idol venerated by two hundred and fifty millions of Christians. Against the purple background of the hangings of the baldacchino, between the wing-like drapery on either side, enclosing, as it were, a brasier of glory, he assumed real majesty of aspect. He was no longer the feeble old man with the slow, jerky walk and the slender, scraggy neck of a poor ailing bird. The simious ugliness of his face, the largeness of his nose, the long slit of his mouth, the hugeness of his ears, the conflicting jumble of his withered features disappeared. In that waxen countenance you only distinguished the admirable, dark, deep eyes, beaming with eternal youth, with extraordinary intelligence and penetration. And then there was a resolute bracing of his entire person, a consciousness of the eternity which he represented, a regal nobility, born of the very circumstance that he was now but a mere breath, a soul set in so pellucid a body of ivory that it became visible as though it were already freed from the bonds of earth. And Pierre realised what such a man—the Sovereign Pontiff, the king obeyed by two hundred and fifty millions of subjects—must be for the devout and dolent creatures who came to adore him from so far, and who fell at his feet awestruck by the splendour of the powers incarnate in him. Behind him, amidst the purple of the hangings, what a gleam was suddenly afforded of the spheres beyond, what an Infinite of ideality and blinding glory! So many centuries of history from the Apostle Peter downward, so much strength and genius, so many struggles and triumphs to be summed up in one being, the Elect, the Unique, the Superhuman! And what a miracle, incessantly renewed, was that of Heaven deigning to descend into human flesh, of the Deity fixing His abode in His chosen servant, whom He consecrated above and beyond all others, endowing him with all power and all science! What sacred perturbation, what emotion fraught with distracted love might one not feel at the thought of the Deity being ever there in the depths of that man's eyes, speaking with his voice and emanating from his hand each time that he raised it to bless! Could one imagine the exorbitant absoluteness of that sovereign who was infallible, who disposed of the totality of authority in this world and of salvation in the next! At all events, how well one understood that souls consumed by a craving for faith should fly towards him, that those who at last found the certainty they had so ardently sought should seek annihilation in him, the consolation of self-bestowal and disappearance within the Deity Himself.

Meantime, the ceremony was drawing to an end; Baron de Fouras was now presenting the members of the committee and a few other persons of importance. There was a slow procession with trembling genuflections and much greedy kissing of the papal ring and slipper. Then the banners were offered, and Pierre felt a pang on seeing that the finest and richest of them was one of Lourdes, an offering no doubt from the Fathers of the Immaculate Conception. On one side of the white, gold-bordered silk Our Lady of Lourdes was painted, while on the other appeared a portrait of Leo XIII. Pierre saw the Pope smile at the presentment of himself, and was greatly grieved thereat, as though, indeed, his whole dream of an intellectual, evangelical Pope, disentangled from all low superstition, were crumbling away. And just then his eyes met those of Nani, who from the outset had been watching him with the inquisitive air of a man who is making an experiment.

"That banner is superb, isn't it?" said Nani, drawing near. "How it must please his Holiness to be so nicely painted in company with so pretty a virgin." And as the young priest, turning pale, did not reply, the prelate added, with an air of devout enjoyment: "We are very fond of Lourdes in Rome; that story of Bernadette is so delightful."

However, the scene which followed was so extraordinary that for a long time Pierre remained overcome by it. He had beheld never-to-be-forgotten idolatry at Lourdes, incidents of naive faith and frantic religious passion which yet made him quiver with alarm and grief. But the crowds rushing on the grotto, the sick dying of divine love before the Virgin's statue, the multitudes delirious with the contagion of the miraculous—nothing of all that gave an idea of the blast of madness which suddenly inflamed the pilgrims at the feet of the Pope. Some bishops, superiors of religious orders, and other delegates of various kinds had stepped forward to deposit near the throne the offerings which they brought from the whole Catholic world, the universal "collection" of St. Peter's Pence. It was the voluntary tribute of the nations to their sovereign: silver, gold, and bank notes in purses, bags, and cases. Ladies came and fell on their knees to offer silk and velvet alms-bags which they themselves had embroidered. Others had caused the note cases which they tendered to be adorned with the monogram of Leo XIII in diamonds. And at one moment the enthusiasm became so intense that several women stripped themselves of their adornments, flung their own purses on to the platform, and emptied their pockets even to the very coppers they had about them. One lady, tall and slender, very beautiful and very dark, wrenched her watch from about her neck, pulled off her rings, and threw everything upon the carpet. Had it been possible, they would have torn away their flesh to pluck out their love-burnt hearts and fling them likewise to the demi-god. They would even have flung themselves, have given themselves without reserve. It was a rain of presents, an explosion of the passion which impels one to strip oneself for the object of one's cult, happy at having nothing of one's own that shall not belong to him. And meantime the clamour grew, vivats and shrill cries of adoration arose amidst pushing and jostling of increased violence, one and all yielding to the irresistible desire to kiss the idol!

But a signal was given, and Leo XIII made haste to quit the throne and take his place in the cortege in order to return to his apartments. The Swiss Guards energetically thrust back the throng, seeking to open a way through the three halls. But at sight of his Holiness's departure a lamentation of despair arose and spread, as if heaven had suddenly closed again and shut out those who had not yet been able to approach. What a frightful disappointment—to have beheld the living manifestation of the Deity and to see it disappear before gaining salvation by just touching it! So terrible became the scramble, so extraordinary the confusion, that the Swiss Guards were swept away. And ladies were seen to dart after the Pope, to drag themselves on all fours over the marble slabs and kiss his footprints and lap up the dust of his steps! The tall dark lady suddenly fell at the edge of the platform, raised a loud shriek, and fainted; and two gentlemen of the committee had to hold her so that she might not do herself an injury in the convulsions of the hysterical fit which had come upon her. Another, a plump blonde, was wildly, desperately kissing one of the golden arms of the throne-chair, on which the old man's poor, bony elbow had just rested. And others, on seeing her, came to dispute possession, seized both arms, gilding and velvet, and pressed their mouths to wood-work or upholstery, their bodies meanwhile shaking with their sobs. Force had to be employed in order to drag them away.

When it was all over Pierre went off, emerging as it were from a painful dream, sick at heart, and with his mind revolting. And again he encountered Nani's glance, which never left him. "It was a superb ceremony, was it not?" said the prelate. "It consoles one for many iniquities."

"Yes, no doubt; but what idolatry!" the young priest murmured despite himself.

Nani, however, merely smiled, as if he had not heard the last word. At that same moment the two French ladies whom he had provided with tickets came up to thank him, and. Pierre was surprised to recognise the mother and daughter whom he had met at the Catacombs. Charming, bright, and healthy as they were, their enthusiasm was only for the spectacle: they declared that they were well pleased at having seen it—that it was really astonishing, unique.

As the crowd slowly withdrew Pierre all at once felt a tap on his shoulder, and, on turning his head, perceived Narcisse Habert, who also was very enthusiastic. "I made signs to you, my dear Abbe," said he, "but you didn't see me. Ah! how superb was the expression of that dark woman who fell rigid beside the platform with her arms outstretched. She reminded me of a masterpiece of one of the primitives, Cimabue, Giotto, or Fra Angelico. And the others, those who devoured the chair arms with their kisses, what suavity, beauty, and love! I never miss these ceremonies: there are always some fine scenes, perfect pictures, in which souls reveal themselves."

The long stream of pilgrims slowly descended the stairs, and Pierre, followed by Nani and Narcisse, who had begun to chat, tried to bring the ideas which were tumultuously throbbing in his brain into something like order. There was certainly grandeur and beauty in that Pope who had shut himself up in his Vatican, and who, the more he became a purely moral, spiritual authority, freed from all terrestrial cares, had grown in the adoration and awe of mankind. Such a flight into the ideal deeply stirred Pierre, whose dream of rejuvenated Christianity rested on the idea of the supreme Head of the Church exercising only a purified, spiritual authority. He had just seen what an increase of majesty and power was in that way gained by the Supreme Pontiff of the spheres beyond, at whose feet the women fainted, and behind whom they beheld a vision of the Deity. But at the same moment the pecuniary side of the question had risen before him and spoilt his joy. If the enforced relinquishment of the temporal power had exalted the Pope by freeing him from the worries of a petty sovereignty which was ever threatened, the need of money still remained like a chain about his feet tying him to earth. As he could not accept the proffered subvention of the Italian Government,* there was certainly in the Peter's Pence a means of placing the Holy See above all material cares, provided, however, that this Peter's Pence were really the Catholic sou, the mite of each believer, levied on his daily income and sent direct to Rome. Such a voluntary tribute paid by the flock to its pastor would, moreover, suffice for the wants of the Church if each of the 250,000,000 of Catholics gave his or her sou every week. In this wise the Pope, indebted to each and all of his children, would be indebted to none in particular. A sou was so little and so easy to give, and there was also something so touching about the idea. But, unhappily, things were not worked in that way; the great majority of Catholics gave nothing whatever, while the rich ones sent large sums from motives of political passion; and a particular objection was that the gifts were centralised in the hands of certain bishops and religious orders, so that these became ostensibly the benefactors of the papacy, the indispensable cashiers from whom it drew the sinews of life. The lowly and humble whose mites filled the collection boxes were, so to say, suppressed, and the Pope became dependent on the intermediaries, and was compelled to act cautiously with them, listen to their remonstrances, and even at times obey their passions, lest the stream of gifts should suddenly dry up. And so, although he was disburdened of the dead weight of the temporal power, he was not free; but remained the tributary of his clergy, with interests and appetites around him which he must needs satisfy. And Pierre remembered the "Grotto of Lourdes" in the Vatican gardens, and the banner which he had just seen, and he knew that the Lourdes fathers levied 200,000 francs a year on their receipts to send them as a present to the Holy Father. Was not that the chief reason of their great power? He quivered, and suddenly became conscious that, do what he might, he would be defeated, and his book would be condemned.

* 110,000 pounds per annum. It has never been accepted, and the
accumulations lapse to the Government every five years, and
cannot afterwards be recovered.—Trans.

At last, as he was coming out on to the Piazza of St. Peter's, he heard Narcisse asking Monsignor Nani: "Indeed! Do you really think that to-day's gifts exceeded that figure?"

"Yes, more than three millions,* I'm convinced of it," the prelate replied.

* All the amounts given on this and the following pages are
calculated in francs. The reader will bear in mind that a
million francs is equivalent to 40,000 pounds.—Trans.

For a moment the three men halted under the right-hand colonnade and gazed at the vast, sunlit piazza where the pilgrims were spreading out like little black specks hurrying hither and thither—an ant-hill, as it were, in revolution.

Three millions! The words had rung in Pierre's ears. And, raising his head, he gazed at the Vatican, all golden in the sunlight against the expanse of blue sky, as if he wished to penetrate its walls and follow the steps of Leo XIII returning to his apartments. He pictured him laden with those millions, with his weak, slender arms pressed to his breast, carrying the silver, the gold, the bank notes, and even the jewels which the women had flung him. And almost unconsciously the young priest spoke aloud: "What will he do with those millions? Where is he taking them?"

Narcisse and even Nani could not help being amused by this strangely expressed curiosity. It was the young attache who replied. "Why, his Holiness is taking them to his room; or, at least, is having them carried there before him. Didn't you see two persons of his suite picking up everything and filling their pockets? And now his Holiness has shut himself up quite alone; and if you could see him you would find him counting and recounting his treasure with cheerful care, ranging the rolls of gold in good order, slipping the bank notes into envelopes in equal quantities, and then putting everything away in hiding-places which are only known to himself."

While his companion was speaking Pierre again raised his eyes to the windows of the Pope's apartments, as if to follow the scene. Moreover, Narcisse gave further explanations, asserting that the money was put away in a certain article of furniture, standing against the right-hand wall in the Holy Father's bedroom. Some people, he added, also spoke of a writing table or secretaire with deep drawers; and others declared that the money slumbered in some big padlocked trunks stored away in the depths of the alcove, which was very roomy. Of course, on the left side of the passage leading to the Archives there was a large room occupied by a general cashier and a monumental safe; but the funds kept there were simply those of the Patrimony of St. Peter, the administrative receipts of Rome; whereas the Peter's Pence money, the voluntary donations of Christendom, remained in the hands of Leo XIII: he alone knew the exact amount of that fund, and lived alone with its millions, which he disposed of like an absolute master, rendering account to none. And such was his prudence that he never left his room when the servants cleaned and set it in order. At the utmost he would consent to remain on the threshold of the adjoining apartment in order to escape the dust. And whenever he meant to absent himself for a few hours, to go down into the gardens, for instance, he double-locked the doors and carried the keys away with him, never confiding them to another.

At this point Narcisse paused and, turning to Nani, inquired: "Is not that so, Monsignor? These are things known to all Rome."

The prelate, ever smiling and wagging his head without expressing either approval or disapproval, had begun to study on Pierre's face the effect of these curious stories. "No doubt, no doubt," he responded; "so many things are said! I know nothing myself, but you seem to be certain of it all, Monsieur Habert."

"Oh!" resumed the other, "I don't accuse his Holiness of sordid avarice, such as is rumoured. Some fabulous stories are current, stories of coffers full of gold in which the Holy Father is said to plunge his hands for hours at a time; treasures which he has heaped up in corners for the sole pleasure of counting them over and over again. Nevertheless, one may well admit that his Holiness is somewhat fond of money for its own sake, for the pleasure of handling it and setting it in order when he happens to be alone—and after all that is a very excusable mania in an old man who has no other pastime. But I must add that he is yet fonder of money for the social power which it brings, the decisive help which it will give to the Holy See in the future, if the latter desires to triumph."

These words evoked the lofty figure of a wise and prudent Pope, conscious of modern requirements, inclined to utilise the powers of the century in order to conquer it, and for this reason venturing on business and speculation. As it happened, the treasure bequeathed by Pius IX had nearly been lost in a financial disaster, but ever since that time Leo XIII had sought to repair the breach and make the treasure whole again, in order that he might leave it to his successor intact and even enlarged. Economical he certainly was, but he saved for the needs of the Church, which, as he knew, increased day by day; and money was absolutely necessary if Atheism was to be met and fought in the sphere of the schools, institutions, and associations of all sorts. Without money, indeed, the Church would become a vassal at the mercy of the civil powers, the Kingdom of Italy and other Catholic states; and so, although he liberally helped every enterprise which might contribute to the triumph of the Faith, Leo XIII had a contempt for all expenditure without an object, and treated himself and others with stern closeness. Personally, he had no needs. At the outset of his pontificate he had set his small private patrimony apart from the rich patrimony of St. Peter, refusing to take aught from the latter for the purpose of assisting his relatives. Never had pontiff displayed less nepotism: his three nephews and his two nieces had remained poor—in fact, in great pecuniary embarrassment. Still he listened neither to complaints nor accusations, but remained inflexible, proudly resolved to bequeath the sinews of life, the invincible weapon money, to the popes of future times, and therefore vigorously defending the millions of the Holy See against the desperate covetousness of one and all.

"But, after all, what are the receipts and expenses of the Holy See?" inquired Pierre.

In all haste Nani again made his amiable, evasive gesture. "Oh! I am altogether ignorant in such matters," he replied. "Ask Monsieur Habert, who is so well informed."

"For my part," responded the attache, "I simply know what is known to all the embassies here, the matters which are the subject of common report. With respect to the receipts there is, first of all, the treasure left by Pius IX, some twenty millions, invested in various ways and formerly yielding about a million a year in interest. But, as I said before, a disaster happened, and there must then have been a falling off in the income. Still, nowadays it is reported that nearly all deficiencies have been made good. Well, besides the regular income from the invested money, a few hundred thousand francs are derived every year from chancellery dues, patents of nobility, and all sorts of little fees paid to the Congregations. However, as the annual expenses exceed seven millions, it has been necessary to find quite six millions every year; and certainly it is the Peter's Pence Fund that has supplied, not the six millions, perhaps, but three or four of them, and with these the Holy See has speculated in the hope of doubling them and making both ends meet. It would take me too long just now to relate the whole story of these speculations, the first huge gains, then the catastrophe which almost swept everything away, and finally the stubborn perseverance which is gradually supplying all deficiencies. However, if you are anxious on the subject, I will one day tell you all about it."

Pierre had listened with deep interest. "Six millions—even four!" he exclaimed, "what does the Peter's Pence Fund bring in, then?"

"Oh! I can only repeat that nobody has ever known the exact figures. In former times the Catholic Press published lists giving the amounts of different offerings, and in this way one could frame an approximate estimate. But the practice must have been considered unadvisable, for no documents nowadays appear, and it is absolutely impossible for people to form any real idea of what the Pope receives. He alone knows the correct amount, keeps the money, and disposes of it with absolute authority. Still I believe that in good years the offerings have amounted to between four and five millions. Originally France contributed one-half of the sum; but nowadays it certainly gives much less. Then come Belgium and Austria, England and Germany. As for Spain and Italy—oh! Italy—"

Narcisse paused and smiled at Monsignor Nani, who was wagging his head with the air of a man delighted at learning some extremely curious things of which he had previously had no idea.

"Oh, you may proceed, you may proceed, my dear son," said he.

"Well, then, Italy scarcely distinguishes itself. If the Pope had to provide for his living out of the gifts of the Italian Catholics there would soon be a famine at the Vatican. Far from helping him, indeed, the Roman nobility has cost him dear; for one of the chief causes of his pecuniary losses was his folly in lending money to the princes who speculated. It is really only from France and England that rich people, noblemen and so forth, have sent royal gifts to the imprisoned and martyred Pontiff. Among others there was an English nobleman who came to Rome every year with a large offering, the outcome of a vow which he had made in the hope that Heaven would cure his unhappy idiot son. And, of course, I don't refer to the extraordinary harvest garnered during the sacerdotal and the episcopal jubilees—the forty millions which then fell at his Holiness's feet."

"And the expenses?" asked Pierre.

"Well, as I told you, they amount to about seven millions. We may reckon two of them for the pensions paid to former officials of the pontifical government who were unwilling to take service under Italy; but I must add that this source of expense is diminishing every year as people die off and their pensions become extinguished. Then, broadly speaking, we may put down one million for the Italian sees, another for the Secretariate and the Nunciatures, and another for the Vatican. In this last sum I include the expenses of the pontifical Court, the military establishment, the museums, and the repair of the palace and the Basilica. Well, we have reached five millions, and the two others may be set down for the various subsidised enterprises, the Propaganda, and particularly the schools, which Leo XIII, with great practical good sense, subsidises very handsomely, for he is well aware that the battle and the triumph be in that direction—among the children who will be men to-morrow, and who will then defend their mother the Church, provided that they have been inspired with horror for the abominable doctrines of the age."

A spell of silence ensued, and the three men slowly paced the majestic colonnade. The swarming crowd had gradually disappeared, leaving the piazza empty, so that only the obelisk and the twin fountains now arose from the burning desert of symmetrical paving; whilst on the entablature of the porticus across the square a noble line of motionless statues stood out in the bright sunlight. And Pierre, with his eyes still raised to the Pope's windows, again fancied that he could see Leo XIII amidst all the streaming gold that had been spoken of, his whole, white, pure figure, his poor, waxen, transparent form steeped amidst those millions which he hid and counted and expended for the glory of God alone. "And so," murmured the young priest, "he has no anxiety, he is not in any pecuniary embarrassment."

"Pecuniary embarrassment!" exclaimed Monsignor Nani, his patience so sorely tried by the remark that he could no longer retain his diplomatic reserve. "Oh! my dear son! Why, when Cardinal Mocenni, the treasurer, goes to his Holiness every month, his Holiness always gives him the sum he asks for; he would give it, and be able to give it, however large it might be! His Holiness has certainly had the wisdom to effect great economies; the Treasure of St. Peter is larger than ever. Pecuniary embarrassment, indeed! Why, if a misfortune should occur, and the Sovereign Pontiff were to make a direct appeal to all his children, the Catholics of the entire world, do you know that in that case a thousand millions would fall at his feet just like the gold and the jewels which you saw raining on the steps of his throne just now?" Then suddenly calming himself and recovering his pleasant smile, Nani added: "At least, that is what I sometimes hear said; for, personally, I know nothing, absolutely nothing; and it is fortunate that Monsieur Habert should have been here to give you information. Ah! Monsieur Habert, Monsieur Habert! Why, I fancied that you were always in the skies absorbed in your passion for art, and far removed from all base mundane interests! But you really understand these things like a banker or a notary. Nothing escapes you, nothing. It is wonderful."

Narcisse must have felt the sting of the prelate's delicate sarcasm. At bottom, beneath this make-believe Florentine all-angelicalness, with long curly hair and mauve eyes which grew dim with rapture at sight of a Botticelli, there was a thoroughly practical, business-like young man, who took admirable care of his fortune and was even somewhat miserly. However, he contented himself with lowering his eyelids and assuming a languorous air. "Oh!" said he, "I'm all reverie; my soul is elsewhere."

"At all events," resumed Nani, turning towards Pierre, "I am very glad that you were able to see such a beautiful spectacle. A few more such opportunities and you will understand things far better than you would from all the explanations in the world. Don't miss the grand ceremony at St. Peter's to-morrow. It will be magnificent, and will give you food for useful reflection; I'm sure of it. And now allow me to leave you, delighted at seeing you in such a fit frame of mind."

Darting a last glance at Pierre, Nani seemed to have observed with pleasure the weariness and uncertainty which were paling his face. And when the prelate had gone off, and Narcisse also had taken leave with a gentle hand-shake, the young priest felt the ire of protest rising within him. What fit frame of mind did Nani mean? Did that man hope to weary him and drive him to despair by throwing him into collision with obstacles, so that he might afterwards overcome him with perfect ease? For the second time Pierre became suddenly and briefly conscious of the stealthy efforts which were being made to invest and crush him. But, believing as he did in his own strength of resistance, pride filled him with disdain. Again he swore that he would never yield, never withdraw his book, no matter what might happen. And then, before crossing the piazza, he once more raised his eyes to the windows of the Vatican, all his impressions crystallising in the thought of that much-needed money which like a last bond still attached the Pope to earth. Its chief evil doubtless lay in the manner in which it was provided; and if indeed the only question were to devise an improved method of collection, his dream of a pope who should be all soul, the bond of love, the spiritual leader of the world, would not be seriously affected. At this thought, Pierre felt comforted and was unwilling to look on things otherwise than hopefully, moved as he was by the extraordinary scene which he had just beheld, that feeble old man shining forth like the symbol of human deliverance, obeyed and venerated by the multitudes, and alone among all men endowed with the moral omnipotence that might at last set the reign of charity and peace on earth.

For the ceremony on the following day, it was fortunate that Pierre held a private ticket which admitted him to a reserved gallery, for the scramble at the entrances to the Basilica proved terrible. The mass, which the Pope was to celebrate in person, was fixed for ten o'clock, but people began to pour into St. Peter's four hours earlier, as soon, indeed, as the gates had been thrown open. The three thousand members of the International Pilgrimage were increased tenfold by the arrival of all the tourists in Italy, who had hastened to Rome eager to witness one of those great pontifical functions which nowadays are so rare. Moreover, the devotees and partisans whom the Holy See numbered in Rome itself and in other great cities of the kingdom, helped to swell the throng, all alacrity at the prospect of a demonstration. Judging by the tickets distributed, there would be a concourse of 40,000 people. And, indeed, at nine o'clock, when Pierre crossed the piazza on his way to the Canons' Entrance in the Via Santa Marta, where the holders of pink tickets were admitted, he saw the portico of the facade still thronged with people who were but slowly gaining admittance, while several gentlemen in evening dress, members of some Catholic association, bestirred themselves to maintain order with the help of a detachment of Pontifical Guards. Nevertheless, violent quarrels broke out in the crowd, and blows were exchanged amidst the involuntary scramble. Some people were almost stifled, and two women were carried off half crushed to death.

A disagreeable surprise met Pierre on his entry into the Basilica. The huge edifice was draped; coverings of old red damask with bands of gold swathed the columns and pilasters, seventy-five feet high; even the aisles were hung with the same old and faded silk; and the shrouding of those pompous marbles, of all the superb dazzling ornamentation of the church bespoke a very singular taste, a tawdry affectation of pomposity, extremely wretched in its effect. However, he was yet more amazed on seeing that even the statue of St. Peter was clad, costumed like a living pope in sumptuous pontifical vestments, with a tiara on its metal head. He had never imagined that people could garment statues either for their glory or for the pleasure of the eyes, and the result seemed to him disastrous.

The Pope was to say mass at the papal altar of the Confession, the high altar which stands under the dome. On a platform at the entrance of the left-hand transept was the throne on which he would afterwards take his place. Then, on either side of the nave, tribunes had been erected for the choristers of the Sixtine Chapel, the Corps Diplomatique, the Knights of Malta, the Roman nobility, and other guests of various kinds. And, finally, in the centre, before the altar, there were three rows of benches covered with red rugs, the first for the cardinals and the other two for the bishops and the prelates of the pontifical court. All the rest of the congregation was to remain standing.

Ah! that huge concert-audience, those thirty, forty thousand believers from here, there, and everywhere, inflamed with curiosity, passion, or faith, bestirring themselves, jostling one another, rising on tip-toe to see the better! The clamour of a human sea arose, the crowd was as gay and familiar as if it had found itself in some heavenly theatre where it was allowable for one to chat aloud and recreate oneself with the spectacle of religious pomp! At first Pierre was thunderstruck, he who only knew of nervous, silent kneeling in the depths of dim cathedrals, who was not accustomed to that religion of light, whose brilliancy transformed a religious celebration into a morning festivity. Around him, in the same tribune as himself, were gentlemen in dress-coats and ladies gowned in black, carrying glasses as in an opera-house. There were German and English women, and numerous Americans, all more or less charming, displaying the grace of thoughtless, chirruping birds. In the tribune of the Roman nobility on the left he recognised Benedetta and Donna Serafina, and there the simplicity of the regulation attire for ladies was relieved by large lace veils rivalling one another in richness and elegance. Then on the right was the tribune of the Knights of Malta, where the Grand Master stood amidst a group of commanders: while across the nave rose the diplomatic tribune where Pierre perceived the ambassadors of all the Catholic nations, resplendent in gala uniforms covered with gold lace. However, the young priest's eyes were ever returning to the crowd, the great surging throng in which the three thousand pilgrims were lost amidst the multitude of other spectators. And yet as the Basilica was so vast that it could easily contain eighty thousand people, it did not seem to be more than half full. People came and went along the aisles and took up favourable positions without impediment. Some could be seen gesticulating, and calls rang out above the ceaseless rumble of voices. From the lofty windows of plain white glass fell broad sheets of sunlight, which set a gory glow upon the faded damask hangings, and these cast a reflection as of fire upon all the tumultuous, feverish, impatient faces. The multitude of candles, and the seven-and-eighty lamps of the Confession paled to such a degree that they seemed but glimmering night-lights in the blinding radiance; and everything proclaimed the worldly gala of the imperial Deity of Roman pomp.

All at once there came a premature shock of delight, a false alert. Cries burst forth and circulated through the crowd: "Eccolo! eccolo! Here he comes!" And then there was pushing and jostling, eddying which made the human sea whirl and surge, all craning their necks, raising themselves to their full height, darting forward in a frenzied desire to see the Holy Father and the cortege. But only a detachment of Noble Guards marched by and took up position right and left of the altar. A flattering murmur accompanied them, their fine impassive bearing with its exaggerated military stiffness, provoking the admiration of the throng. An American woman declared that they were superb-looking fellows; and a Roman lady gave an English friend some particulars about the select corps to which they belonged. Formerly, said she, young men of the aristocracy had greatly sought the honour of forming part of it, for the sake of wearing its rich uniform and caracoling in front of the ladies. But recruiting was now such a difficult matter that one had to content oneself with good-looking young men of doubtful or ruined nobility, whose only care was for the meagre "pay" which just enabled them to live.

When another quarter of an hour of chatting and scrutinising had elapsed, the papal cortege at last made its appearance, and no sooner was it seen than applause burst forth as in a theatre—furious applause it was which rose and rolled along under the vaulted ceilings, suggesting the acclamations which ring out when some popular, idolised actor makes his entry on the stage. As in a theatre, too, everything had been very skilfully contrived so as to produce all possible effect amidst the magnificent scenery of the Basilica. The cortege was formed in the wings, that is in the Cappella della Pieta, the first chapel of the right aisle, and in order to reach it, the Holy Father, coming from his apartments by the way of the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, had been stealthily carried behind the hangings of the aisle which served the purpose of a drop-scene. Awaiting him in all readiness in the Cappella della Pieta were the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, the whole pontifical prelacy, hierarchically classified and grouped. And then, as at a signal from a ballet master, the cortege made its entry, reaching the nave and ascending it in triumph from the closed Porta Santa to the altar of the Confession. On either hand were the rows of spectators whose applause at the sight of so much magnificence grew louder and louder as their delirious enthusiasm increased.

It was the cortege of the olden solemnities, the cross and sword, the Swiss Guard in full uniform, the valets in scarlet simars, the Knights of the Cape and the Sword in Renascence costumes, the Canons in rochets of lace, the superiors of the religious communities, the apostolic prothonotaries, the archbishops, and bishops, all the pontifical prelates in violet silk, the cardinals, each wearing the cappa magna and draped in purple, walking solemnly two by two with long intervals between each pair. Finally, around his Holiness were grouped the officers of the military household, the chamber prelates, Monsignor the Majordomo, Monsignor the Grand Chamberlain, and all the other high dignitaries of the Vatican, with the Roman prince assistant of the throne, the traditional, symbolical defender of the Church. And on the sedia gestatoria, screened by the flabelli with their lofty triumphal fans of feathers and carried on high by the bearers in red tunics broidered with silk, sat the Pope, clad in the sacred vestments which he had assumed in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, the amict, the alb, the stole, and the white chasuble and white mitre enriched with gold, two gifts of extraordinary sumptuousness that had come from France. And, as his Holiness drew near, all hands were raised and clapped yet more loudly amidst the waves of living sunlight which streamed from the lofty windows.

Then a new and different impression of Leo XIII came to Pierre. The Pope, as he now beheld him, was no longer the familiar, tired, inquisitive old man, leaning on the arm of a talkative prelate as he strolled through the loveliest gardens in the world. He no longer recalled the Holy Father, in red cape and papal cap, giving a paternal welcome to a pilgrimage which brought him a fortune. He was here the Sovereign Pontiff, the all-powerful Master whom Christendom adored. His slim waxen form seemed to have stiffened within his white vestments, heavy with golden broidery, as in a reliquary of precious metal; and he retained a rigid, haughty, hieratic attitude, like that of some idol, gilded, withered for centuries past by the smoke of sacrifices. Amidst the mournful stiffness of his face only his eyes lived—eyes like black sparkling diamonds gazing afar, beyond earth, into the infinite. He gave not a glance to the crowd, he lowered his eyes neither to right nor to left, but remained soaring in the heavens, ignoring all that took place at his feet.

And as that seemingly embalmed idol, deaf and blind, in spite of the brilliancy of his eyes, was carried through the frantic multitude which it appeared neither to hear nor to see, it assumed fearsome majesty, disquieting grandeur, all the rigidity of dogma, all the immobility of tradition exhumed with its fascioe which alone kept it erect. Still Pierre fancied he could detect that the Pope was ill and weary, suffering from the attack of fever which Nani had spoken of when glorifying the courage of that old man of eighty-four, whom strength of soul alone now kept alive.

The service began. Alighting from the sedia gestatoria before the altar of the Confession, his Holiness slowly celebrated a low mass, assisted by four prelates and the pro-prefect of the ceremonies. When the time came for washing his fingers, Monsignor the Majordomo and Monsignor the Grand Chamberlain, accompanied by two cardinals, poured the water on his august hands; and shortly before the elevation of the host all the prelates of the pontifical court, each holding a lighted taper, came and knelt around the altar. There was a solemn moment, the forty thousand believers there assembled shuddered as if they could feel the terrible yet delicious blast of the invisible sweeping over them when during the elevation the silver clarions sounded the famous chorus of angels which invariably makes some women swoon. Almost immediately an aerial chant descended from the cupola, from a lofty gallery where one hundred and twenty choristers were concealed, and the enraptured multitude marvelled as though the angels had indeed responded to the clarion call. The voices descended, taking their flight under the vaulted ceilings with the airy sweetness of celestial harps; then in suave harmony they died away, reascended to the heavens as with a faint flapping of wings. And, after the mass, his Holiness, still standing at the altar, in person started the Te Deum, which the singers of the Sixtine Chapel and the other choristers took up, each party chanting a verse alternately. But soon the whole congregation joined them, forty thousand voices were raised, and a hymn of joy and glory spread through the vast nave with incomparable splendour of effect. And then the scene became one of extraordinary magnificence: there was Bernini's triumphal, flowery, gilded baldacchino, surrounded by the whole pontifical court with the lighted tapers showing like starry constellations, there was the Sovereign Pontiff in the centre, radiant like a planet in his gold-broidered chasuble, there were the benches crowded with cardinals in purple and archbishops and bishops in violet silk, there were the tribunes glittering with official finery, the gold lace of the diplomatists, the variegated uniforms of foreign officers, and then there was the throng flowing and eddying on all sides, rolling billows after billows of heads from the most distant depths of the Basilica. And the hugeness of the temple increased one's amazement; and even the glorious hymn which the multitude repeated became colossal, ascended like a tempest blast amidst the great marble tombs, the superhuman statues and gigantic pillars, till it reached the vast vaulted heavens of stone, and penetrated into the firmament of the cupola where the Infinite seemed to open resplendent with the gold-work of the mosaics.

A long murmur of voices followed the Te Deum, whilst Leo XIII, after donning the tiara in lieu of the mitre, and exchanging the chasuble for the pontifical cope, went to occupy his throne on the platform at the entry of the left transept. He thence dominated the whole assembly, through which a quiver sped when after the prayers of the ritual, he once more rose erect. Beneath the symbolic, triple crown, in the golden sheathing of his cope, he seemed to have grown taller. Amidst sudden and profound silence, which only feverish heart-beats interrupted, he raised his arm with a very noble gesture and pronounced the papal benediction in a slow, loud, full voice, which seemed, as it were, the very voice of the Deity, so greatly did its power astonish one, coming from such waxen lips, from such a bloodless, lifeless frame. And the effect was prodigious: as soon as the cortege reformed to return whence it had come, applause again burst forth, a frenzy of enthusiasm which the clapping of hands could no longer content. Acclamations resounded and gradually gained upon the whole multitude. They began among a group of ardent partisans stationed near the statue of St. Peter: "Evviva il Papa-Re! evviva il Papa-Re! Long live the Pope-King!" as the cortege went by the shout rushed along like leaping fire, inflaming heart after heart, and at last springing from every mouth in a thunderous protest against the theft of the states of the Church. All the faith, all the love of those believers, overexcited by the regal spectacle they had just beheld, returned once more to the dream, to the rageful desire that the Pope should be both King and Pontiff, master of men's bodies as he was of their souls—in one word, the absolute sovereign of the earth. Therein lay the only truth, the only happiness, the only salvation! Let all be given to him, both mankind and the world! "Evviva il Papa-Re! evviva il Papa-Re! Long live the Pope-King!"

Ah! that cry, that cry of war which had caused so many errors and so much bloodshed, that cry of self-abandonment and blindness which, realised, would have brought back the old ages of suffering, it shocked Pierre, and impelled him in all haste to quit the tribune where he was in order that he might escape the contagion of idolatry. And while the cortege still went its way and the deafening clamour of the crowd continued, he for a moment followed the left aisle amidst the general scramble. This, however, made him despair of reaching the street, and anxious to escape the crush of the general departure, it occurred to him to profit by a door which he saw open and which led him into a vestibule, whence ascended the steps conducting to the dome. A sacristan standing in the doorway, both bewildered and delighted at the demonstration, looked at him for a moment, hesitating whether he should stop him or not. However, the sight of the young priest's cassock combined with his own emotion rendered the man tolerant. Pierre was allowed to pass, and at once began to climb the staircase as rapidly as he could, in order that he might flee farther and farther away, ascend higher and yet higher into peace and silence.

And the silence suddenly became profound, the walls stifled the cry of the multitude. The staircase was easy and light, with broad paved steps turning within a sort of tower. When Pierre came out upon the roofs of nave and aisles, he was delighted to find himself in the bright sunlight and the pure keen air which blew there as in the open country. And it was with astonishment that he gazed upon the huge expanse of lead, zinc, and stone-work, a perfect aerial city living a life of its own under the blue sky. He saw cupolas, spires, terraces, even houses and gardens, houses bright with flowers, the residences of the workmen who live atop of the Basilica, which is ever and ever requiring repair. A little population here bestirs itself, labours, loves, eats, and sleeps. However, Pierre desired to approach the balustrade so as to get a near view of the colossal statues of the Saviour and the Apostles which surmount the facade on the side of the piazza. These giants, some nineteen feet in height, are constantly being mended; their arms, legs, and heads, into which the atmosphere is ever eating, nowadays only hold together by the help of cement, bars, and hooks. And having examined them, Pierre was leaning forward to glance at the Vatican's jumble of ruddy roofs, when it seemed to him that the shout from which he had fled was rising from the piazza, and thereupon, in all haste, he resumed his ascent within the pillar conducting to the dome. There was first a staircase, and then came some narrow, oblique passages, inclines intersected by a few steps, between the inner and outer walls of the cupola. Yielding to curiosity, Pierre pushed a door open, and suddenly found himself inside the Basilica again, at nearly 200 feet from the ground. A narrow gallery there ran round the dome just above the frieze, on which, in letters five feet high, appeared the famous inscription: Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram oedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi dabo claves regni coelorum.* And then, as Pierre leant over to gaze into the fearful cavity beneath him and the wide openings of nave, and aisles, and transepts, the cry, the delirious cry of the multitude, yet clamorously swarming below, struck him full in the face. He fled once more; but, higher up, yet a second time he pushed another door open and found another gallery, one perched above the windows, just where the splendid mosaics begin, and whence the crowd seemed to him lost in the depths of a dizzy abyss, altar and baldacchino alike looking no larger than toys. And yet the cry of idolatry and warfare arose again, and smote him like the buffet of a tempest which gathers increase of strength the farther it rushes. So to escape it he had to climb higher still, even to the outer gallery which encircles the lantern, hovering in the very heavens.

* Thou art Peter (Petrus) and on that rock (Petram) will I build
my church, and to thee will I give the keys of the Kingdom of
Heaven.

How delightful was the relief which that bath of air and sunlight at first brought him! Above him now there only remained the ball of gilt copper into which emperors and queens have ascended, as is testified by the pompous inscriptions in the passages; a hollow ball it is, where the voice crashes like thunder, where all the sounds of space reverberate. As he emerged on the side of the apse, his eyes at first plunged into the papal gardens, whose clumps of trees seemed mere bushes almost level with the soil; and he could retrace his recent stroll among them, the broad parterre looking like a faded Smyrna rug, the large wood showing the deep glaucous greenery of a stagnant pool. Then there were the kitchen garden and the vineyard easily identified and tended with care. The fountains, the observatory, the casino, where the Pope spent the hot days of summer, showed merely like little white spots in those undulating grounds, walled in like any other estate, but with the fearsome rampart of the fourth Leo, which yet retained its fortress-like aspect. However, Pierre took his way round the narrow gallery and abruptly found himself in front of Rome, a sudden and immense expanse, with the distant sea on the west, the uninterrupted mountain chains on the east and the south, the Roman Campagna stretching to the horizon like a bare and greenish desert, while the city, the Eternal City, was spread out at his feet. Never before had space impressed him so majestically. Rome was there, as a bird might see it, within the glance, as distinct as some geographical plan executed in relief. To think of it, such a past, such a history, so much grandeur, and Rome so dwarfed and contracted by distance! Houses as lilliputian and as pretty as toys; and the whole a mere mouldy speck upon the earth's face! What impassioned Pierre was that he could at a glance understand the divisions of Rome: the antique city yonder with the Capitol, the Forum, and the Palatine; the papal city in that Borgo which he overlooked, with St. Peter's and the Vatican gazing across the city of the middle ages—which was huddled together in the right angle described by the yellow Tiber—towards the modern city, the Quirinal of the Italian monarchy. And particularly did he remark the chalky girdle with which the new districts encompassed the ancient, central, sun-tanned quarters, thus symbolising an effort at rejuvenescence, the old heart but slowly mended, whereas the outlying limbs were renewed as if by miracle.

In that ardent noontide glow, however, Pierre no longer beheld the pure ethereal Rome which had met his eyes on the morning of his arrival in the delightfully soft radiance of the rising sun. That smiling, unobtrusive city, half veiled by golden mist, immersed as it were in some dream of childhood, now appeared to him flooded with a crude light, motionless, hard of outline and silent like death. The distance was as if devoured by too keen a flame, steeped in a luminous dust in which it crumbled. And against that blurred background the whole city showed with violent distinctness in great patches of light and shade, their tracery harshly conspicuous. One might have fancied oneself above some very ancient, abandoned stone quarry, which a few clumps of trees spotted with dark green. Of the ancient city one could see the sunburnt tower of the Capitol, the black cypresses of the Palatine, and the ruins of the palace of Septimius Severus, suggesting the white osseous carcase of some fossil monster, left there by a flood. In front, was enthroned the modern city with the long, renovated buildings of the Quirinal, whose yellow walls stood forth with wondrous crudity amidst the vigorous crests of the garden trees. And to right and left on the Viminal, beyond the palace, the new districts appeared like a city of chalk and plaster mottled by innumerable windows as with a thousand touches of black ink. Then here and there were the Pincio showing like a stagnant mere, the Villa Medici uprearing its campanili, the castle of Sant' Angelo brown like rust, the spire of Santa Maria Maggiore aglow like a burning taper, the three churches of the Aventine drowsy amidst verdure, the Palazzo Farnese with its summer-baked tiles showing like old gold, the domes of the Gesu, of Sant' Andrea della Valle, of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, and yet other domes and other domes, all in fusion, incandescent in the brazier of the heavens. And Pierre again felt a heart-pang in presence of that harsh, stern Rome, so different from the Rome of his dream, the Rome of rejuvenescence and hope, which he had fancied he had found on his first morning, but which had now faded away to give place to the immutable city of pride and domination, stubborn under the sun even unto death.

And there on high, all alone with his thoughts, Pierre suddenly understood. It was as if a dart of flaming light fell on him in that free, unbounded expanse where he hovered. Had it come from the ceremony which he had just beheld, from the frantic cry of servitude still ringing in his ears? Had it come from the spectacle of that city beneath him, that city which suggested an embalmed queen still reigning amidst the dust of her tomb? He knew not; but doubtless both had acted as factors, and at all events the light which fell upon his mind was complete: he felt that Catholicism could not exist without the temporal power, that it must fatally disappear whenever it should no longer be king over this earth. A first reason of this lay in heredity, in the forces of history, the long line of the heirs of the Caesars, the popes, the great pontiffs, in whose veins the blood of Augustus, demanding the empire of the world, had never ceased to flow. Though they might reside in the Vatican they had come from the imperial abodes on the Palatine, from the palace of Septimius Severus, and throughout the centuries their policy had ever pursued the dream of Roman mastery, of all the nations vanquished, submissive, and obedient to Rome. If its sovereignty were not universal, extending alike over bodies and over souls, Catholicism would lose its raison d'etre; for the Church cannot recognise any empire or kingdom otherwise than politically—the emperors and the kings being purely and simply so many temporary delegates placed in charge of the nations pending the time when they shall be called upon to relinquish their trust. All the nations, all humanity, and the whole world belong to the Church to whom they have been given by God. And if real and effective possession is not hers to-day, this is only because she yields to force, compelled to face accomplished facts, but with the formal reserve that she is in presence of guilty usurpation, that her possessions are unjustly withheld from her, and that she awaits the realisation of the promises of the Christ, who, when the time shall be accomplished, will for ever restore to her both the earth and mankind. Such is the real future city which time is to bring: Catholic Rome, sovereign of the world once more. And Rome the city forms a substantial part of the dream, Rome whose eternity has been predicted, Rome whose soil has imparted to Catholicism the inextinguishable thirst of absolute power. And thus the destiny of the papacy is linked to that of Rome, to such a point indeed that a pope elsewhere than at Rome would no longer be a Catholic pope. The thought of all this frightened Pierre; a great shudder passed through him as he leant on the light iron balustrade, gazing down into the abyss where the stern mournful city was even now crumbling away under the fierce sun.

There was, however, evidence of the facts which had dawned on him. If Pius IX and Leo XIII had resolved to imprison themselves in the Vatican, it was because necessity bound them to Rome. A pope is not free to leave the city, to be the head of the Church elsewhere; and in the same way a pope, however well he may understand the modern world, has not the right to relinquish the temporal power. This is an inalienable inheritance which he must defend, and it is moreover a question of life, peremptory, above discussion. And thus Leo XIII has retained the title of Master of the temporal dominions of the Church, and this he has done the more readily since as a cardinal—like all the members of the Sacred College when elected—he swore that he would maintain those dominions intact. Italy may hold Rome as her capital for another century or more, but the coming popes will never cease to protest and claim their kingdom. If ever an understanding should be arrived at, it must be based on the gift of a strip of territory. Formerly, when rumours of reconciliation were current, was it not said that the papacy exacted, as a formal condition, the possession of at least the Leonine City with the neutralisation of a road leading to the sea? Nothing is not enough, one cannot start from nothing to attain to everything, whereas that Civitas Leonina, that bit of a city, would already be a little royal ground, and it would then only be necessary to conquer the rest, first Rome, next Italy, then the neighbouring states, and at last the whole world. Never has the Church despaired, even when, beaten and despoiled, she seemed to be at the last gasp. Never will she abdicate, never will she renounce the promises of the Christ, for she believes in a boundless future and declares herself to be both indestructible and eternal. Grant her but a pebble on which to rest her head, and she will hope to possess, first the field in which that pebble lies, and then the empire in which the field is situated. If one pope cannot achieve the recovery of the inheritance, another pope, ten, twenty other popes will continue the work. The centuries do not count. And this explains why an old man of eighty-four has undertaken colossal enterprises whose achievement requires several lives, certain as he is that his successors will take his place, and that the work will ever and ever be carried forward and completed.

As these thoughts coursed through his mind, Pierre, overlooking that ancient city of glory and domination, so stubbornly clinging to its purple, realised that he was an imbecile with his dream of a purely spiritual pope. The notion seemed to him so different from the reality, so out of place, that he experienced a sort of shame-fraught despair. The new pope, consonant to the teachings of the Gospel, such as a purely spiritual pope reigning over souls alone, would be, was virtually beyond the ken of a Roman prelate. At thought of that papal court congealed in ritual, pride, and authority, Pierre suddenly understood what horror and repugnance such a pastor would inspire. How great must be the astonishment and contempt of the papal prelates for that singular notion of the northern mind, a pope without dominions or subjects, military household or royal honours, a pope who would be, as it were, a spirit, exercising purely moral authority, dwelling in the depths of God's temple, and governing the world solely with gestures of benediction and deeds of kindliness and love! All that was but a misty Gothic invention for this Latin clergy, these priests of light and magnificence, who were certainly pious and even superstitious, but who left the Deity well sheltered within the tabernacle in order to govern in His name, according to what they considered the interests of Heaven. Thence it arose that they employed craft and artifice like mere politicians, and lived by dint of expedients amidst the great battle of human appetites, marching with the prudent, stealthy steps of diplomatists towards the final terrestrial victory of the Christ, who, in the person of the Pope, was one day to reign over all the nations. And how stupefied must a French prelate have been—a prelate like Monseigneur Bergerot, that apostle of renunciation and charity—when he lighted amidst that world of the Vatican! How difficult must it have been for him to understand and focus things, and afterwards how great his grief at finding himself unable to come to any agreement with those men without country, without fatherland, those "internationals," who were ever poring over the maps of both hemispheres, ever absorbed in schemes which were to bring them empire. Days and days were necessary, one needed to live in Rome, and he, Pierre himself, had only seen things clearly after a month's sojourn, whilst labouring under the violent shock of the royal pomp of St. Peter's, and standing face to face with the ancient city as it slumbered heavily in the sunlight and dreamt its dream of eternity.

But on lowering his eyes to the piazza in front of the Basilica he perceived the multitude, the 40,000 believers streaming over the pavement like insects. And then he thought that he could hear the cry again rising: "Evviva il Papa-Re! evviva il Papa-Re! Long live the Pope-King!" Whilst ascending those endless staircases a moment previously it had seemed to him as if the colossus of stone were quivering with the frantic shout raised beneath its ceilings. And now that he had climbed even into cloudland that shout apparently was traversing space. If the colossal pile beneath him still vibrated with it, was it not as with a last rise of sap within its ancient walls, a reinvigoration of that Catholic blood which formerly had demanded that the pile should be a stupendous one, the veritable king of temples, and which now was striving to reanimate it with the powerful breath of life, and this at the very hour when death was beginning to fall upon its over-vast, deserted nave and aisles? The crowd was still streaming forth, filling the piazza, and Pierre's heart was wrung by frightful anguish, for that throng with its shout had just swept his last hope away. On the previous afternoon, after the reception of the pilgrimage, he had yet been able to deceive himself by overlooking the necessity for money which bound the Pope to earth in order that he might see nought but the feeble old man, all spirituality, resplendent like the symbol of moral authority. But his faith in such a pastor of the Gospel, free from all considerations of earthly wealth, and king of none other than a heavenly kingdom, had fled. Not only did the Peter's Pence impose hard servitude upon Leo XIII but he was also the prisoner of papal tradition—the eternal King of Rome, riveted to the soil of Rome, unable either to quit the city or to renounce the temporal power. The fatal end would be collapse on the spot, the dome of St. Peter's falling even as the temple of Olympian Jupiter had fallen, Catholicism strewing the grass with its ruins whilst elsewhere schism burst forth: a new faith for the new nations. Of this Pierre had a grandiose and tragical vision: he beheld his dream destroyed, his book swept away amidst that cry which spread around him as if flying to the four corners of the Catholic world "Evviva il Papa-Re! evviva il Papa-Re! Long live the Pope-King!" But even in that hour of the papacy's passing triumph he already felt that the giant of gold and marble on which he stood was oscillating, even as totter all old and rotten societies.

At last he took his way down again, and a fresh shock of emotion came to him as he reached the roofs, that sunlit expanse of lead and zinc, large enough for the site of a town. Monsignor Nani was there, in company with the two French ladies, the mother and the daughter, both looking very happy and highly amused. No doubt the prelate had good-naturedly offered to conduct them to the dome. However, as soon as he recognised the young priest he went towards him: "Well, my dear son," he inquired, "are you pleased? Have you been impressed, edified?" As he spoke, his searching eyes dived into Pierre's soul, as if to ascertain the present result of his experiments. Then, satisfied with what he detected, he began to laugh softly: "Yes, yes, I see—come, you are a sensible fellow after all. I begin to think that the unfortunate affair which brought you here will have a happy ending."

VIII.

WHEN Pierre remained in the morning at the Boccanera mansion he often spent some hours in the little neglected garden which had formerly ended with a sort of colonnaded loggia, whence two flights of steps descended to the Tiber. This garden was a delightful, solitary nook, perfumed by the ripe fruit of the centenarian orange-trees, whose symmetrical lines were the only indication of the former pathways, now hidden beneath rank weeds. And Pierre also found there the acrid scent of the large box-shrubs growing in the old central fountain basin, which had been filled up with loose earth and rubbish.

On those luminous October mornings, full of such tender and penetrating charm, the spot was one where all the joy of living might well be savoured, but Pierre brought thither his northern dreaminess, his concern for suffering, his steadfast feeling of compassion, which rendered yet sweeter the caress of the sunlight pervading that atmosphere of love. He seated himself against the right-hand wall on a fragment of a fallen column over which a huge laurel cast a deep-black shadow, fresh and aromatic. In the antique greenish sarcophagus beside him, on which fauns offered violence to nymphs, the streamlet of water trickling from the mask incrusted in the wall, set the unchanging music of its crystal note, whilst he read the newspapers and the letters which he received, all the communications of good Abbe Rose, who kept him informed of his mission among the wretched ones of gloomy Paris, now already steeped in fog and mud.

One morning however, Pierre unexpectedly found Benedetta seated on the fallen column which he usually made his chair. She raised a light cry of surprise on seeing him, and for a moment remained embarrassed, for she had with her his book "New Rome," which she had read once already, but had then imperfectly understood. And overcoming her embarrassment she now hastened to detain him, making him sit down beside her, and frankly owning that she had come to the garden in order to be alone and apply herself to an attentive study of the book, in the same way as some ignorant school-girl. Then they began to chat like a pair of friends, and the young priest spent a delightful hour. Although Benedetta did not speak of herself, he realised that it was her grief alone which brought her nearer to him, as if indeed her own sufferings enlarged her heart and made her think of all who suffered in the world. Patrician as she was, regarding social hierarchy as a divine law, she had never previously thought of such things, and some pages of Pierre's book greatly astonished her. What! one ought to take interest in the lowly, realise that they had the same souls and the same griefs as oneself, and seek in brotherly or sisterly fashion to make them happy? She certainly sought to acquire such an interest, but with no great success, for she secretly feared that it might lead her into sin, as it could not be right to alter aught of the social system which had been established by God and consecrated by the Church. Charitable she undoubtedly was, wont to bestow small sums in alms, but she did not give her heart, she felt no true sympathy for the humble, belonging as she did to such a different race, which looked to a throne in heaven high above the seats of all the plebeian elect.

She and Pierre, however, found themselves on other mornings side by side in the shade of the laurels near the trickling, singing water; and he, lacking occupation, weary of waiting for a solution which seemed to recede day by day, fervently strove to animate this young and beautiful woman with some of his own fraternal feelings. He was impassioned by the idea that he was catechising Italy herself, the queen of beauty, who was still slumbering in ignorance, but who would recover all her past glory if she were to awake to the new times with soul enlarged, swelling with pity for men and things. Reading good Abbe Rose's letters to Benedetta, he made her shudder at the frightful wail of wretchedness which ascends from all great cities. With such deep tenderness in her eyes, with the happiness of love reciprocated emanating from her whole being, why should she not recognise, even as he did, that the law of love was the sole means of saving suffering humanity, which, through hatred, incurred the danger of death? And to please him she did try to believe in democracy, in the fraternal remodelling of society, but among other nations only—not at Rome, for an involuntary, gentle laugh came to her lips whenever his words evoked the idea of the poor still remaining in the Trastevere district fraternising with those who yet dwelt in the old princely palaces. No, no, things had been as they were so long; they could not, must not, be altered! And so, after all, Pierre's pupil made little progress: she was, in reality, simply touched by the wealth of ardent love which the young priest had chastely transferred from one alone to the whole of human kind. And between him and her, as those sunlit October mornings went by, a tie of exquisite sweetness was formed; they came to love one another with deep, pure, fraternal affection, amidst the great glowing passion which consumed them both.

Then, one day, Benedetta, her elbow resting on the sarcophagus, spoke of Dario, whose name she had hitherto refrained from mentioning. Ah! poor amico, how circumspect and repentant he had shown himself since that fit of brutal insanity! At first, to conceal his embarrassment, he had gone to spend three days at Naples, and it was said that La Tonietta, the sentimental demi-mondaine, had hastened to join him there, wildly in love with him. Since his return to the mansion he had avoided all private meetings with his cousin, and scarcely saw her except at the Monday receptions, when he wore a submissive air, and with his eyes silently entreated forgiveness.

"Yesterday, however," continued Benedetta, "I met him on the staircase and gave him my hand. He understood that I was no longer angry with him and was very happy. What else could I have done? One must not be severe for ever. Besides, I do not want things to go too far between him and that woman. I want him to remember that I still love him, and am still waiting for him. Oh! he is mine, mine alone. But alas! I cannot say the word: our affairs are in such sorry plight."

She paused, and two big tears welled into her eyes. The divorce proceedings to which she alluded had now come to a standstill, fresh obstacles ever arising to stay their course.

Pierre was much moved by her tears, for she seldom wept. She herself sometimes confessed, with her calm smile, that she did not know how to weep. But now her heart was melting, and for a moment she remained overcome, leaning on the mossy, crumbling sarcophagus, whilst the clear water falling from the gaping mouth of the tragic mask still sounded its flutelike note. And a sudden thought of death came to the priest as he saw her, so young and so radiant with beauty, half fainting beside that marble resting-place where fauns were rushing upon nymphs in a frantic bacchanal which proclaimed the omnipotence of love—that omnipotence which the ancients were fond of symbolising on their tombs as a token of life's eternity. And meantime a faint, warm breeze passed through the sunlit, silent garden, wafting hither and thither the penetrating scent of box and orange.

"One has so much strength when one loves," Pierre at last murmured.

"Yes, yes, you are right," she replied, already smiling again. "I am childish. But it is the fault of your book. It is only when I suffer that I properly understand it. But all the same I am making progress, am I not? Since you desire it, let all the poor, all those who suffer, as I do, be my brothers and sisters."

Then for a while they resumed their chat.

On these occasions Benedetta was usually the first to return to the house, and Pierre would linger alone under the laurels, vaguely dreaming of sweet, sad things. Often did he think how hard life proved for poor creatures whose only thirst was for happiness!

One Monday evening, at a quarter-past ten, only the young folks remained in Donna Serafina's reception-room. Monsignor Nani had merely put in an appearance that night, and Cardinal Sarno had just gone off.

Even Donna Serafina, in her usual seat by the fireplace, seemed to have withdrawn from the others, absorbed as she was in contemplation of the chair which the absent Morano still stubbornly left unoccupied. Chatting and laughing in front of the sofa on which sat Benedetta and Celia were Dario, Pierre, and Narcisse Habert, the last of whom had begun to twit the young Prince, having met him, so he asserted, a few days previously, in the company of a very pretty girl.

"Oh! don't deny it, my dear fellow," continued Narcisse, "for she was really superb. She was walking beside you, and you turned into a lane together—the Borgo Angelico, I think."

Dario listened smiling, quite at his ease and incapable of denying his passionate predilection for beauty. "No doubt, no doubt; it was I, I don't deny it," he responded. "Only the inferences you draw are not correct." And turning towards Benedetta, who, without a thought of jealous anxiety, wore as gay a look as himself, as though delighted that he should have enjoyed that passing pleasure of the eyes, he went on: "It was the girl, you know, whom I found in tears six weeks ago. Yes, that bead-worker who was sobbing because the workshop was shut up, and who rushed along, all blushing, to conduct me to her parents when I offered her a bit of silver. Pierina her name is, as you, perhaps, remember."

"Oh! yes, Pierina."

"Well, since then I've met her in the street on four or five occasions. And, to tell the truth, she is so very beautiful that I've stopped and spoken to her. The other day, for instance, I walked with her as far as a manufacturer's. But she hasn't yet found any work, and she began to cry, and so, to console her a little, I kissed her. She was quite taken aback at it, but she seemed very well pleased."

At this all the others began to laugh. But suddenly Celia desisted and said very gravely, "You know, Dario, she loves you; you must not be hard on her."

Dario, no doubt, was of Celia's opinion, for he again looked at Benedetta, but with a gay toss of the head, as if to say that, although the girl might love him, he did not love her. A bead-worker indeed, a girl of the lowest classes, pooh! She might be a Venus, but she could be nothing to him. And he himself made merry over his romantic adventure, which Narcisse sought to arrange in a kind of antique sonnet: A beautiful bead-worker falling madly in love with a young prince, as fair as sunlight, who, touched by her misfortune, hands her a silver crown; then the beautiful bead-worker, quite overcome at finding him as charitable as handsome, dreaming of him incessantly, and following him everywhere, chained to his steps by a link of flame; and finally the beautiful bead-worker, who has refused the silver crown, so entreating the handsome prince with her soft, submissive eyes, that he at last deigns to grant her the alms of his heart. This pastime greatly amused Benedetta; but Celia, with her angelic face and the air of a little girl who ought to have been ignorant of everything, remained very grave and repeated sadly, "Dario, Dario, she loves you; you must not make her suffer."

Then the Contessina, in her turn, was moved to pity. "And those poor folks are not happy!" said she.

"Oh!" exclaimed the Prince, "it's misery beyond belief. On the day she took me to the Quartiere dei Prati* I was quite overcome; it was awful, astonishingly awful!"

* The district of the castle meadows—see ante note.—Trans.

"But I remember that we promised to go to see the poor people," resumed Benedetta, "and we have done wrong in delaying our visit so long. For your studies, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, you greatly desired to accompany us and see the poor of Rome—was that not so?"

As she spoke she raised her eyes to Pierre, who for a moment had been silent. He was much moved by her charitable thought, for he realised, by the faint quiver of her voice, that she desired to appear a docile pupil, progressing in affection for the lowly and the wretched. Moreover, his passion for his apostolate had at once returned to him. "Oh!" said he, "I shall not quit Rome without having seen those who suffer, those who lack work and bread. Therein lies the malady which affects every nation; salvation can only be attained by the healing of misery. When the roots of the tree cannot find sustenance the tree dies."

"Well," resumed the Contessina, "we will fix an appointment at once; you shall come with us to the Quartiere dei Prati—Dario will take us there."

At this the Prince, who had listened to the priest with an air of stupefaction, unable to understand the simile of the tree and its roots, began to protest distressfully, "No, no, cousin, take Monsieur l'Abbe for a stroll there if it amuses you. But I've been, and don't want to go back. Why, when I got home the last time I was so upset that I almost took to my bed. No, no; such abominations are too awful—it isn't possible."

At this moment a voice, bitter with displeasure, arose from the chimney corner. Donna Serafina was emerging from her long silence. "Dario is quite right! Send your alms, my dear, and I will gladly add mine. There are other places where you might take Monsieur l'Abbe, and which it would be far more useful for him to see. With that idea of yours you would send him away with a nice recollection of our city."

Roman pride rang out amidst the old lady's bad temper. Why, indeed, show one's sores to foreigners, whose visit is possibly prompted by hostile curiosity? One always ought to look beautiful; Rome should not be shown otherwise than in the garb of glory.

Narcisse, however, had taken possession of Pierre. "It's true, my dear Abbe," said he; "I forgot to recommend that stroll to you. You really must visit the new district built over the castle meadows. It's typical, and sums up all the others. And you won't lose your time there, I'll warrant you, for nowhere can you learn more about the Rome of the present day. It's extraordinary, extraordinary!" Then, addressing Benedetta, he added, "Is it decided? Shall we say to-morrow morning? You'll find the Abbe and me over there, for I want to explain matters to him beforehand, in order that he may understand them. What do you say to ten o'clock?"

Before answering him the Contessina turned towards her aunt and respectfully opposed her views. "But Monsieur l'Abbe, aunt, has met enough beggars in our streets already, so he may well see everything. Besides, judging by his book, he won't see worse things than he has seen in Paris. As he says in one passage, hunger is the same all the world over." Then, with her sensible air, she gently laid siege to Dario. "You know, Dario," said she, "you would please me very much by taking me there. We can go in the carriage and join these gentlemen. It will be a very pleasant outing for us. It is such a long time since we went out together."

It was certainly that idea of going out with Dario, of having a pretext for a complete reconciliation with him, that enchanted her; he himself realised it, and, unable to escape, he tried to treat the matter as a joke. "Ah! cousin," he said, "it will be your fault; I shall have the nightmare for a week. An excursion like that spoils all the enjoyment of life for days and days."

The mere thought made him quiver with revolt. However, laughter again rang out around him, and, in spite of Donna Serafina's mute disapproval, the appointment was finally fixed for the following morning at ten o'clock. Celia as she went off expressed deep regret that she could not form one of the party; but, with the closed candour of a budding lily, she really took interest in Pierina alone. As she reached the ante-room she whispered in her friend's ear: "Take a good look at that beauty, my dear, so as to tell me whether she is so very beautiful—beautiful beyond compare."

When Pierre met Narcisse near the Castle of Sant' Angelo on the morrow, at nine o'clock, he was surprised to find him again languid and enraptured, plunged anew in artistic enthusiasm. At first not a word was said of the excursion. Narcisse related that he had risen at sunrise in order that he might spend an hour before Bernini's "Santa Teresa." It seemed that when he did not see that statue for a week he suffered as acutely as if he were parted from some cherished mistress. And his adoration varied with the time of day, according to the light in which he beheld the figure: in the morning, when the pale glow of dawn steeped it in whiteness, he worshipped it with quite a mystical transport of the soul, whilst in the afternoon, when the glow of the declining sun's oblique rays seemed to permeate the marble, his passion became as fiery red as the blood of martyrs. "Ah! my friend," said he with a weary air whilst his dreamy eyes faded to mauve, "you have no idea how delightful and perturbing her awakening was this morning—how languorously she opened her eyes, like a pure, candid virgin, emerging from the embrace of the Divinity. One could die of rapture at the sight!"

Then, growing calm again when he had taken a few steps, he resumed in the voice of a practical man who does not lose his balance in the affairs of life: "We'll walk slowly towards the castle-fields district—the buildings yonder; and on our way I'll tell you what I know of the things we shall see there. It was the maddest affair imaginable, one of those delirious frenzies of speculation which have a splendour of their own, just like the superb, monstrous masterpiece of a man of genius whose mind is unhinged. I was told of it all by some relatives of mine, who took part in the gambling, and, in point of fact, made a good deal of money by it."

Thereupon, with the clearness and precision of a financier, employing technical terms with perfect ease, he recounted the extraordinary adventure. That all Italy, on the morrow of the occupation of Rome, should have been delirious with enthusiasm at the thought of at last possessing the ancient and glorious city, the eternal capital to which the empire of the world had been promised, was but natural. It was, so to say, a legitimate explosion of the delight and the hopes of a young nation anxious to show its power. The question was to make Rome a modern capital worthy of a great kingdom, and before aught else there were sanitary requirements to be dealt with: the city needed to be cleansed of all the filth which disgraced it. One cannot nowadays imagine in what abominable putrescence the city of the popes, the Roma sporca which artists regret, was then steeped: the vast majority of the houses lacked even the most primitive arrangements, the public thoroughfares were used for all purposes, noble ruins served as store-places for sewage, the princely palaces were surrounded by filth, and the streets were perfect manure beds which fostered frequent epidemics. Thus vast municipal works were absolutely necessary, the question was one of health and life itself. And in much the same way it was only right to think of building houses for the newcomers, who would assuredly flock into the city. There had been a precedent at Berlin, whose population, after the establishment of the German empire, had suddenly increased by some hundreds of thousands. In the same way the population of Rome would certainly be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, for as the new centre of national life the city would necessarily attract all the vis viva of the provinces. And at this thought pride stepped in: the fallen government of the Vatican must be shown what Italy was capable of achieving, what splendour she would bestow on the new and third Rome, which, by the magnificence of its thoroughfares and the multitude of its people, would far excel either the imperial or the papal city.

True, during the early years some prudence was observed; wisely enough, houses were only built in proportion as they were required. The population had doubled at one bound, rising from two to four hundred thousand souls, thanks to the arrival of the little world of employees and officials of the public services—all those who live on the State or hope to live on it, without mentioning the idlers and enjoyers of life whom a Court always carries in its train. However, this influx of newcomers was a first cause of intoxication, for every one imagined that the increase would continue, and, in fact, become more and more rapid. And so the city of the day before no longer seemed large enough; it was necessary to make immediate preparations for the morrow's need by enlarging Rome on all sides. Folks talked, too, of the Paris of the second empire, which had been so extended and transformed into a city of light and health. But unfortunately on the banks of the Tiber there was neither any preconcerted general plan nor any clear-seeing man, master of the situation, supported by powerful financial organisations. And the work, begun by pride, prompted by the ambition of surpassing the Rome of the Caesars and the Popes, the determination to make the eternal, predestined city the queen and centre of the world once more, was completed by speculation, one of those extraordinary gambling frenzies, those tempests which arise, rage, destroy, and carry everything away without premonitory warning or possibility of arresting their course. All at once it was rumoured that land bought at five francs the metre had been sold again for a hundred francs the metre; and thereupon the fever arose—the fever of a nation which is passionately fond of gambling. A flight of speculators descending from North Italy swooped down upon Rome, the noblest and easiest of preys. Those needy, famished mountaineers found spoils for every appetite in that voluptuous South where life is so benign, and the very delights of the climate helped to corrupt and hasten moral gangrene. At first, too; it was merely necessary to stoop; money was to be found by the shovelful among the rubbish of the first districts which were opened up. People who were clever enough to scent the course which the new thoroughfares would take and purchase buildings threatened with demolition increased their capital tenfold in a couple of years. And after that the contagion spread, infecting all classes—the princes, burgesses, petty proprietors, even the shop-keepers, bakers, grocers, and boot-makers; the delirium rising to such a pitch that a mere baker subsequently failed for forty-five millions.* Nothing, indeed, was left but rageful gambling, in which the stakes were millions, whilst the lands and the houses became mere fictions, mere pretexts for stock-exchange operations. And thus the old hereditary pride, which had dreamt of transforming Rome into the capital of the world, was heated to madness by the high fever of speculation—folks buying, and building, and selling without limit, without a pause, even as one might throw shares upon the market as fast and as long as presses can be found to print them.

* 1,800,000 pounds. See ante note.—Trans.

No other city in course of evolution has ever furnished such a spectacle. Nowadays, when one strives to penetrate things one is confounded. The population had increased to five hundred thousand, and then seemingly remained stationary; nevertheless, new districts continued to sprout up more thickly than ever. Yet what folly it was not to wait for a further influx of inhabitants! Why continue piling up accommodation for thousands of families whose advent was uncertain? The only excuse lay in having beforehand propounded the proposition that the third Rome, the triumphant capital of Italy, could not count less than a million souls, and in regarding that proposition as indisputable fact. The people had not come, but they surely would come: no patriot could doubt it without being guilty of treason. And so houses were built and built without a pause, for the half-million citizens who were coming. There was no anxiety as to the date of their arrival; it was sufficient that they should be expected. Inside Rome the companies which had been formed in connection with the new thoroughfares passing through the old, demolished, pestiferous districts, certainly sold or let their house property, and thereby realised large profits. But, as the craze increased, other companies were established for the purpose of erecting yet more and more districts outside Rome—veritable little towns, of which there was no need whatever. Beyond the Porta San Giovanni and the Porta San Lorenzo, suburbs sprang up as by miracle. A town was sketched out over the vast estate of the Villa Ludovisi, from the Porta Pia to the Porta Salaria and even as far as Sant' Agnese. And then came an attempt to make quite a little city, with church, school, and market, arise all at once on the fields of the Castle of Sant' Angelo. And it was no question of small dwellings for labourers, modest flats for employees, and others of limited means; no, it was a question of colossal mansions three and four storeys high, displaying uniform and endless facades which made these new excentral quarters quite Babylonian, such districts, indeed, as only capitals endowed with intense life, like Paris and London, could contrive to populate. However, such were the monstrous products of pride and gambling; and what a page of history, what a bitter lesson now that Rome, financially ruined, is further disgraced by that hideous girdle of empty, and, for the most part, uncompleted carcases, whose ruins already strew the grassy streets!

The fatal collapse, the disaster proved a frightful one. Narcisse explained its causes and recounted its phases so clearly that Pierre fully understood. Naturally enough, numerous financial companies had sprouted up: the Immobiliere, the Society d'Edilizia e Construzione, the Fondaria, the Tiberiana, and the Esquilino. Nearly all of them built, erected huge houses, entire streets of them, for purposes of sale; but they also gambled in land, selling plots at large profit to petty speculators, who also dreamt of making large profits amidst the continuous, fictitious rise brought about by the growing fever of agiotage. And the worst was that the petty speculators, the middle-class people, the inexperienced shop-keepers without capital, were crazy enough to build in their turn by borrowing of the banks or applying to the companies which had sold them the land for sufficient cash to enable them to complete their structures. As a general rule, to avoid the loss of everything, the companies were one day compelled to take back both land and buildings, incomplete though the latter might be, and from the congestion which resulted they were bound to perish. If the expected million of people had arrived to occupy the dwellings prepared for them the gains would have been fabulous, and in ten years Rome might have become one of the most flourishing capitals of the world. But the people did not come, and the dwellings remained empty. Moreover, the buildings erected by the companies were too large and costly for the average investor inclined to put his money into house property. Heredity had acted, the builders had planned things on too huge a scale, raising a series of magnificent piles whose purpose was to dwarf those of all other ages; but, as it happened, they were fated to remain lifeless and deserted, testifying with wondrous eloquence to the impotence of pride.

So there was no private capital that dared or could take the place of that of the companies. Elsewhere, in Paris for instance, new districts have been erected and embellishments have been carried out with the capital of the country—the money saved by dint of thrift. But in Rome all was built on the credit system, either by means of bills of exchange at ninety days, or—and this was chiefly the case—by borrowing money abroad. The huge sum sunk in these enterprises is estimated at a milliard, four-fifths of which was French money. The bankers did everything; the French ones lent to the Italian bankers at 3 1-2 or 4 per cent.; and the Italian bankers accommodated the speculators, the Roman builders, at 6, 7, and even 8 per cent. And thus the disaster was great indeed when France, learning of Italy's alliance with Germany, withdrew her 800,000,000 francs in less than two years. The Italian banks were drained of their specie, and the land and building companies, being likewise compelled to reimburse their loans, were compelled to apply to the banks of issue, those privileged to issue notes. At the same time they intimidated the Government, threatening to stop all work and throw 40,000 artisans and labourers starving on the pavement of Rome if it did not compel the banks of issue to lend them the five or six millions of paper which they needed. And this the Government at last did, appalled by the possibility of universal bankruptcy. Naturally, however, the five or six millions could not be paid back at maturity, as the newly built houses found neither purchasers nor tenants; and so the great fall began, and continued with a rush, heaping ruin upon ruin. The petty speculators fell on the builders, the builders on the land companies, the land companies on the banks of issue, and the latter on the public credit, ruining the nation. And that was how a mere municipal crisis became a frightful disaster: a whole milliard sunk to no purpose, Rome disfigured, littered with the ruins of the gaping and empty dwellings which had been prepared for the five or six hundred thousand inhabitants for whom the city yet waits in vain!

Moreover, in the breeze of glory which swept by, the state itself took a colossal view of things. It was a question of at once making Italy triumphant and perfect, of accomplishing in five and twenty years what other nations have required centuries to effect. So there was feverish activity and a prodigious outlay on canals, ports, roads, railway lines, and improvements in all the great cities. Directly after the alliance with Germany, moreover, the military and naval estimates began to devour millions to no purpose. And the ever growing financial requirements were simply met by the issue of paper, by a fresh loan each succeeding year. In Rome alone, too, the building of the Ministry of War cost ten millions, that of the Ministry of Finances fifteen, whilst a hundred was spent on the yet unfinished quays, and two hundred and fifty were sunk on works of defence around the city. And all this was a flare of the old hereditary pride, springing from that soil whose sap can only blossom in extravagant projects; the determination to dazzle and conquer the world which comes as soon as one has climbed to the Capitol, even though one's feet rest amidst the accumulated dust of all the forms of human power which have there crumbled one above the other.

"And, my dear friend," continued Narcisse, "if I could go into all the stories that are current, that are whispered here and there, you would be stupefied at the insanity which overcame the whole city amidst the terrible fever to which the gambling passion gave rise. Folks of small account, and fools and ignorant people were not the only ones to be ruined; nearly all the Roman nobles lost their ancient fortunes, their gold and their palaces and their galleries of masterpieces, which they owed to the munificence of the popes. The colossal wealth which it had taken centuries of nepotism to pile up in the hands of a few melted away like wax, in less than ten years, in the levelling fire of modern speculation." Then, forgetting that he was speaking to a priest, he went on to relate one of the whispered stories to which he had alluded: "There's our good friend Dario, Prince Boccanera, the last of the name, reduced to live on the crumbs which fall to him from his uncle the Cardinal, who has little beyond his stipend left him. Well, Dario would be a rich man had it not been for that extraordinary affair of the Villa Montefiori. You have heard of it, no doubt; how Prince Onofrio, Dario's father, speculated, sold the villa grounds for ten millions, then bought them back and built on them, and how, at last, not only the ten millions were lost, but also all that remained of the once colossal fortune of the Boccaneras. What you haven't been told, however, is the secret part which Count Prada—our Contessina's husband—played in the affair. He was the lover of Princess Boccanera, the beautiful Flavia Montefiori, who had brought the villa as dowry to the old Prince. She was a very fine woman, much younger than her husband, and it is positively said that it was through her that Prada mastered the Prince—for she held her old doting husband at arm's length whenever he hesitated to give a signature or go farther into the affair of which he scented the danger. And in all this Prada gained the millions which he now spends, while as for the beautiful Flavia, you are aware, no doubt, that she saved a little fortune from the wreck and bought herself a second and much younger husband, whom she turned into a Marquis Montefiori. In the whole affair the only victim is our good friend Dario, who is absolutely ruined, and wishes to marry his cousin, who is as poor as himself. It's true that she's determined to have him, and that it's impossible for him not to reciprocate her love. But for that he would have already married some American girl with a dowry of millions, like so many of the ruined princes, on the verge of starvation, have done; that is, unless the Cardinal and Donna Serafina had opposed such a match, which would not have been surprising, proud and stubborn as they are, anxious to preserve the purity of their old Roman blood. However, let us hope that Dario and the exquisite Benedetta will some day be happy together."

Narcisse paused; but, after taking a few steps in silence, he added in a lower tone: "I've a relative who picked up nearly three millions in that Villa Montefiori affair. Ah! I regret that I wasn't here in those heroic days of speculation. It must have been very amusing; and what strokes there were for a man of self-possession to make!"

However, all at once, as he raised his head, he saw before him the Quartiere dei Prati—the new district of the castle fields; and his face thereupon changed: he again became an artist, indignant with the modern abominations with which old Rome had been disfigured. His eyes paled, and a curl of his lips expressed the bitter disdain of a dreamer whose passion for the vanished centuries was sorely hurt: "Look, look at it all!" he exclaimed. "To think of it, in the city of Augustus, the city of Leo X, the city of eternal power and eternal beauty!"

Pierre himself was thunderstruck. The meadows of the Castle of Sant' Angelo, dotted with a few poplar trees, had here formerly stretched alongside the Tiber as far as the first slopes of Monte Mario, thus supplying, to the satisfaction of artists, a foreground or greenery to the Borgo and the dome of St. Peter's. But now, amidst the white, leprous, overturned plain, there stood a town of huge, massive houses, cubes of stone-work, invariably the same, with broad streets intersecting one another at right angles. From end to end similar facades appeared, suggesting series of convents, barracks, or hospitals. Extraordinary and painful was the impression produced by this town so suddenly immobilised whilst in course of erection. It was as if on some accursed morning a wicked magician had with one touch of his wand stopped the works and emptied the noisy stone-yards, leaving the buildings in mournful abandonment. Here on one side the soil had been banked up; there deep pits dug for foundations had remained gaping, overrun with weeds. There were houses whose halls scarcely rose above the level of the soil; others which had been raised to a second or third floor; others, again, which had been carried as high as was intended, and even roofed in, suggesting skeletons or empty cages. Then there were houses finished excepting that their walls had not been plastered, others which had been left without window frames, shutters, or doors; others, again, which had their doors and shutters, but were nailed up like coffins with not a soul inside them; and yet others which were partly, and in a few cases fully, inhabited—animated by the most unexpected of populations. And no words could describe the fearful mournfulness of that City of the Sleeping Beauty, hushed into mortal slumber before it had even lived, lying annihilated beneath the heavy sun pending an awakening which, likely enough, would never come.

Following his companion, Pierre walked along the broad, deserted streets, where all was still as in a cemetery. Not a vehicle nor a pedestrian passed by. Some streets had no foot ways; weeds were covering the unpaved roads, turning them once more into fields; and yet there were temporary gas lamps, mere leaden pipes bound to poles, which had been there for years. To avoid payment of the door and window tax, the house owners had generally closed all apertures with planks; while some houses, of which little had been built, were surrounded by high palings for fear lest their cellars should become the dens of all the bandits of the district. But the most painful sight of all was that of the young ruins, the proud, lofty structures, which, although unfinished, were already cracking on all sides, and required the support of an intricate arrangement of timbers to prevent them from falling in dust upon the ground. A pang came to one's heart as though one was in a city which some scourge had depopulated—pestilence, war, or bombardment, of which these gaping carcases seem to retain the mark. Then at the thought that this was abortment, not death—that destruction would complete its work before the dreamt-of, vainly awaited denizens would bring life to the still-born houses, one's melancholy deepened to hopeless discouragement. And at each corner, moreover, there was the frightful irony of the magnificent marble slabs which bore the names of the streets, illustrious historical names, Gracchus, Scipio, Pliny, Pompey, Julius Caesar, blazing forth on those unfinished, crumbling walls like a buffet dealt by the Past to modern incompetency.

Then Pierre was once more struck by this truth—that whosoever possesses Rome is consumed by the building frenzy, the passion for marble, the boastful desire to build and leave his monument of glory to future generations. After the Caesars and the Popes had come the Italian Government, which was no sooner master of the city than it wished to reconstruct it, make it more splendid, more huge than it had ever been before. It was the fatal suggestion of the soil itself—the blood of Augustus rushing to the brain of these last-comers and urging them to a mad desire to make the third Rome the queen of the earth. Thence had come all the vast schemes such as the cyclopean quays and the mere ministries struggling to outvie the Colosseum; and thence had come all the new districts of gigantic houses which had sprouted like towns around the ancient city. It was not only on the castle fields, but at the Porta San Giovanni, the Porta San Lorenzo, the Villa Ludovisi, and on the heights of the Viminal and the Esquiline that unfinished, empty districts were already crumbling amidst the weeds of their deserted streets. After two thousand years of prodigious fertility the soil really seemed to be exhausted. Even as in very old fruit gardens newly planted plum and cherry trees wither and die, so the new walls, no doubt, found no life in that old dust of Rome, impoverished by the immemorial growth of so many temples, circuses, arches, basilicas, and churches. And thus the modern houses, which men had sought to render fruitful, the useless, over-huge houses, swollen with hereditary ambition, had been unable to attain maturity, and remained there sterile like dry bushes on a plot of land exhausted by over-cultivation. And the frightful sadness that one felt arose from the fact that so creative and great a past had culminated in such present-day impotency—Rome, who had covered the world with indestructible monuments, now so reduced that she could only generate ruins.

"Oh, they'll be finished some day!" said Pierre.

Narcisse gazed at him in astonishment: "For whom?"

That was the cruel question! Only by dint of patriotic enthusiasm on the morrow of the conquest had one been able to indulge in the hope of a mighty influx of population, and now singular blindness was needed for the belief that such an influx would ever take place. The past experiments seemed decisive; moreover, there was no reason why the population should double: Rome offered neither the attraction of pleasure nor that of gain to be amassed in commerce and industry for those she had not, nor of intensity of social and intellectual life, since of this she seemed no longer capable. In any case, years and years would be requisite. And, meantime, how could one people those houses which were finished; and for whom was one to finish those which had remained mere skeletons, falling to pieces under sun and rain? Must they all remain there indefinitely, some gaunt and open to every blast and others closed and silent like tombs, in the wretched hideousness of their inutility and abandonment? What a terrible proof of error they offered under the radiant sky! The new masters of Rome had made a bad start, and even if they now knew what they ought to have done would they have the courage to undo what they had done? Since the milliard sunk there seemed to be definitely lost and wasted, one actually hoped for the advent of a Nero, endowed with mighty, sovereign will, who would take torch and pick and burn and raze everything in the avenging name of reason and beauty.

"Ah!" resumed Narcisse, "here are the Contessina and the Prince."

Benedetta had told the coachman to pull up in one of the open spaces intersecting the deserted streets, and now along the broad, quiet, grassy road—well fitted for a lovers' stroll—she was approaching on Dario's arm, both of them delighted with their outing, and no longer thinking of the sad things which they had come to see. "What a nice day it is!" the Contessina gaily exclaimed as she reached Pierre and Narcisse. "How pleasant the sunshine is! It's quite a treat to be able to walk about a little as if one were in the country!"

Dario was the first to cease smiling at the blue sky, all the delight of his stroll with his cousin on his arm suddenly departing. "My dear," said he, "we must go to see those people, since you are bent on it, though it will certainly spoil our day. But first I must take my bearings. I'm not particularly clever, you know, in finding my way in places where I don't care to go. Besides, this district is idiotic with all its dead streets and dead houses, and never a face or a shop to serve as a reminder. Still I think the place is over yonder. Follow me; at all events, we shall see."

The four friends then wended their way towards the central part of the district, the part facing the Tiber, where a small nucleus of a population had collected. The landlords turned the few completed houses to the best advantage they could, letting the rooms at very low rentals, and waiting patiently enough for payment. Some needy employees, some poverty-stricken families—had thus installed themselves there, and in the long run contrived to pay a trifle for their accommodation. In consequence, however, of the demolition of the ancient Ghetto and the opening of the new streets by which air had been let into the Trastevere district, perfect hordes of tatterdemalions, famished and homeless, and almost without garments, had swooped upon the unfinished houses, filling them with wretchedness and vermin; and it had been necessary to tolerate this lawless occupation lest all the frightful misery should remain displayed in the public thoroughfares. And so it was to those frightful tenants that had fallen the huge four and five storeyed palaces, entered by monumental doorways flanked by lofty statues and having carved balconies upheld by caryatides all along their fronts. Each family had made its choice, often closing the frameless windows with boards and the gaping doorways with rags, and occupying now an entire princely flat and now a few small rooms, according to its taste. Horrid-looking linen hung drying from the carved balconies, foul stains already degraded the white walls, and from the magnificent porches, intended for sumptuous equipages, there poured a stream of filth which rotted in stagnant pools in the roads, where there was neither pavement nor footpath.

On two occasions already Dario had caused his companions to retrace their steps. He was losing his way and becoming more and more gloomy. "I ought to have taken to the left," said he, "but how is one to know amidst such a set as that!"

Parties of verminous children were now to be seen rolling in the dust;

they were wondrously dirty, almost naked, with black skins and tangled locks as coarse as horsehair. There were also women in sordid skirts and with their loose jackets unhooked. Many stood talking together in yelping voices, whilst others, seated on old chairs with their hands on their knees, remained like that idle for hours. Not many men were met; but a few lay on the scorched grass, sleeping heavily in the sunlight. However, the stench was becoming unbearable—a stench of misery as when the human animal eschews all cleanliness to wallow in filth. And matters were made worse by the smell from a small, improvised market—the emanations of the rotting fruit, cooked and sour vegetables, and stale fried fish which a few poor women had set out on the ground amidst a throng of famished, covetous children.

"Ah! well, my dear, I really don't know where it is," all at once exclaimed the Prince, addressing his cousin. "Be reasonable; we've surely seen enough; let's go back to the carriage."

He was really suffering, and, as Benedetta had said, he did not know how to suffer. It seemed to him monstrous that one should sadden one's life by such an excursion as this. Life ought to be buoyant and benign under the clear sky, brightened by pleasant sights, by dance and song. And he, with his naive egotism, had a positive horror of ugliness, poverty, and suffering, the sight of which caused him both mental and physical pain.

Benedetta shuddered even as he did, but in presence of Pierre she desired to be brave. Glancing at him, and seeing how deeply interested and compassionate he looked, she desired to persevere in her effort to sympathise with the humble and the wretched. "No, no, Dario, we must stay. These gentlemen wish to see everything—is it not so?"

"Oh, the Rome of to-day is here," exclaimed Pierre; "this tells one more about it than all the promenades among the ruins and the monuments."

"You exaggerate, my dear Abbe," declared Narcisse. "Still, I will admit that it is very interesting. Some of the old women are particularly expressive."

At this moment Benedetta, seeing a superbly beautiful girl in front of her, could not restrain a cry of enraptured admiration: "O che bellezza!"

And then Dario, having recognised the girl, exclaimed with the same delight: "Why, it's La Pierina; she'll show us the way."

The girl had been following the party for a moment already without daring to approach. Her eyes, glittering with the joy of a loving slave, had at first darted towards the Prince, and then had hastily scrutinised the Contessina—not, however, with any show of jealous anger, but with an expression of affectionate submission and resigned happiness at seeing that she also was very beautiful. And the girl fully answered to the Prince's description of her—tall, sturdy, with the bust of a goddess, a real antique, a Juno of twenty, her chin somewhat prominent, her mouth and nose perfect in contour, her eyes large and full like a heifer's, and her whole face quite dazzling—gilded, so to say, by a sunflash—beneath her casque of heavy jet-black hair.

"So you will show us the way?" said Benedetta, familiar and smiling, already consoled for all the surrounding ugliness by the thought that there should be such beautiful creatures in the world.

"Oh yes, signora, yes, at once!" And thereupon Pierina ran off before them, her feet in shoes which at any rate had no holes, whilst the old brown woollen dress which she wore appeared to have been recently washed and mended. One seemed to divine in her a certain coquettish care, a desire for cleanliness, which none of the others displayed; unless, indeed, it were simply that her great beauty lent radiance to her humble garments and made her appear a goddess.

"Che bellezza! the bellezza!" the Contessina repeated without wearying. "That girl, Dario mio, is a real feast for the eyes!"

"I knew she would please you," he quietly replied, flattered at having discovered such a beauty, and no longer talking of departure, since he could at last rest his eyes on something pleasant.

Behind them came Pierre, likewise full of admiration, whilst Narcisse spoke to him of the scrupulosity of his own tastes, which were for the rare and the subtle. "She's beautiful, no doubt," said he; "but at bottom nothing can be more gross than the Roman style of beauty; there's no soul, none of the infinite in it. These girls simply have blood under their skins without ever a glimpse of heaven."

Meantime Pierina had stopped, and with a wave of the hand directed attention to her mother, who sat on a broken box beside the lofty doorway of an unfinished mansion. She also must have once been very beautiful, but at forty she was already a wreck, with dim eyes, drawn mouth, black teeth, broadly wrinkled countenance, and huge fallen bosom. And she was also fearfully dirty, her grey wavy hair dishevelled and her skirt and jacket soiled and slit, revealing glimpses of grimy flesh. On her knees she held a sleeping infant, her last-born, at whom she gazed like one overwhelmed and courageless, like a beast of burden resigned to her fate.

"Bene, bene," said she, raising her head, "it's the gentleman who came to give me a crown because he saw you crying. And he's come back to see us with some friends. Well, well, there are some good hearts in the world after all."

Then she related their story, but in a spiritless way, without seeking to move her visitors. She was called Giacinta, it appeared, and had married a mason, one Tomaso Gozzo, by whom she had had seven children, Pierina, then Tito, a big fellow of eighteen, then four more girls, each at an interval of two years, and finally the infant, a boy, whom she now had on her lap. They had long lived in the Trastevere district, in an old house which had lately been pulled down; and their existence seemed to have then been shattered, for since they had taken refuge in the Quartiere dei Prati the crisis in the building trade had reduced Tomaso and Tito to absolute idleness, and the bead factory where Pierina had earned as much as tenpence a day—just enough to prevent them from dying of hunger—had closed its doors. At present not one of them had any work; they lived purely by chance.

"If you like to go up," the woman added, "you'll find Tomaso there with his brother Ambrogio, whom we've taken to live with us. They'll know better than I what to say to you. Tomaso is resting; but what else can he do? It's like Tito—he's dozing over there."

So saying she pointed towards the dry grass amidst which lay a tall young fellow with a pronounced nose, hard mouth, and eyes as admirable as Pierina's. He had raised his head to glance suspiciously at the visitors, a fierce frown gathering on his forehead when he remarked how rapturously his sister contemplated the Prince. Then he let his head fall again, but kept his eyes open, watching the pair stealthily.

"Take the lady and gentlemen upstairs, Pierina, since they would like to see the place," said the mother.

Other women had now drawn near, shuffling along with bare feet in old shoes; bands of children, too, were swarming around; little girls but half clad, amongst whom, no doubt, were Giacinta's four. However, with their black eyes under their tangled mops they were all so much alike that only their mothers could identify them. And the whole resembled a teeming camp of misery pitched on that spot of majestic disaster, that street of palaces, unfinished yet already in ruins.

With a soft, loving smile, Benedetta turned to her cousin. "Don't you come up," she gently said; "I don't desire your death, Dario mio. It was very good of you to come so far. Wait for me here in the pleasant sunshine: Monsieur l'Abbe and Monsieur Habert will go up with me."

Dario began to laugh, and willingly acquiesced. Then lighting a cigarette, he walked slowly up and down, well pleased with the mildness of the atmosphere.

La Pierina had already darted into the spacious porch whose lofty, vaulted ceiling was adorned with coffers displaying a rosaceous pattern. However, a veritable manure heap covered such marble slabs as had already been laid in the vestibule, whilst the steps of the monumental stone staircase with sculptured balustrade were already cracked and so grimy that they seemed almost black. On all sides appeared the greasy stains of hands; the walls, whilst awaiting the painter and gilder, had been smeared with repulsive filth.

On reaching the spacious first-floor landing Pierina paused, and contented herself with calling through a gaping portal which lacked both door and framework: "Father, here's a lady and two gentlemen to see you." Then to the Contessina she added: "It's the third room at the end." And forthwith she herself rapidly descended the stairs, hastening back to her passion.

Benedetta and her companions passed through two large rooms, bossy with plaster under foot and having frameless windows wide open upon space; and at last they reached a third room, where the whole Gozzo family had installed itself with the remnants it used as furniture. On the floor, where the bare iron girders showed, no boards having been laid down, were five or six leprous-looking palliasses. A long table, which was still strong, occupied the centre of the room, and here and there were a few old, damaged, straw-seated chairs mended with bits of rope. The great business had been to close two of the three windows with boards, whilst the third one and the door were screened with some old mattress ticking studded with stains and holes.

Tomaso's face expressed the surprise of a man who is unaccustomed to visits of charity. Seated at the table, with his elbows resting on it and his chin supported by his hands, he was taking repose, as his wife Giacinta had said. He was a sturdy fellow of five and forty, bearded and long-haired; and, in spite of all his misery and idleness, his large face had remained as serene as that of a Roman senator. However, the sight of the two foreigners—for such he at once judged Pierre and Narcisse to be, made him rise to his feet with sudden distrust. But he smiled on recognising Benedetta, and as she began to speak of Dario, and to explain the charitable purpose of their visit, he interrupted her: "Yes, yes, I know, Contessina. Oh! I well know who you are, for in my father's time I once walled up a window at the Palazzo Boccanera."

Then he complaisantly allowed himself to be questioned, telling Pierre, who was surprised, that although they were certainly not happy they would have found life tolerable had they been able to work two days a week. And one could divine that he was, at heart, fairly well content to go on short commons, provided that he could live as he listed without fatigue. His narrative and his manner suggested the familiar locksmith who, on being summoned by a traveller to open his trunk, the key of which was lost, sent word that he could not possibly disturb himself during the hour of the siesta. In short, there was no rent to pay, as there were plenty of empty mansions open to the poor, and a few coppers would have sufficed for food, easily contented and sober as one was.

"But oh, sir," Tomaso continued, "things were ever so much better under the Pope. My father, a mason like myself, worked at the Vatican all his life, and even now, when I myself get a job or two, it's always there. We were spoilt, you see, by those ten years of busy work, when we never left our ladders and earned as much as we pleased. Of course, we fed ourselves better, and bought ourselves clothes, and took such pleasure as we cared for; so that it's all the harder nowadays to have to stint ourselves. But if you'd only come to see us in the Pope's time! No taxes, everything to be had for nothing, so to say—why, one merely had to let oneself live."

At this moment a growl arose from one of the palliasses lying in the shade of the boarded windows, and the mason, in his slow, quiet way, resumed: "It's my brother Ambrogio, who isn't of my opinion.

"He was with the Republicans in '49, when he was fourteen. But it doesn't matter; we took him with us when we heard that he was dying of hunger and sickness in a cellar."

The visitors could not help quivering with pity. Ambrogio was the elder by some fifteen years; and now, though scarcely sixty, he was already a ruin, consumed by fever, his legs so wasted that he spent his days on his palliasse without ever going out. Shorter and slighter, but more turbulent than his brother, he had been a carpenter by trade. And, despite his physical decay, he retained an extraordinary head—the head of an apostle and martyr, at once noble and tragic in its expression, and encompassed by bristling snowy hair and beard.

"The Pope," he growled; "I've never spoken badly of the Pope. Yet it's his fault if tyranny continues. He alone in '49 could have given us the Republic, and then we shouldn't have been as we are now."

Ambrogio had known Mazzini, whose vague religiosity remained in him—the dream of a Republican pope at last establishing the reign of liberty and fraternity. But later on his passion for Garibaldi had disturbed these views, and led him to regard the papacy as worthless, incapable of achieving human freedom. And so, between the dream of his youth and the stern experience of his life, he now hardly knew in which direction the truth lay. Moreover, he had never acted save under the impulse of violent emotion, but contented himself with fine words—vague, indeterminate wishes.

"Brother Ambrogio," replied Tomaso, all tranquillity, "the Pope is the Pope, and wisdom lies in putting oneself on his side, because he will always be the Pope—that is to say, the stronger. For my part, if we had to vote to-morrow I'd vote for him."

Calmed by the shrewd prudence characteristic of his race, the old carpenter made no haste to reply. At last he said, "Well, as for me, brother Tomaso, I should vote against him—always against him. And you know very well that we should have the majority. The Pope-king indeed! That's all over. The very Borgo would revolt. Still, I won't say that we oughtn't to come to an understanding with him, so that everybody's religion may be respected."

Pierre listened, deeply interested, and at last ventured to ask: "Are there many socialists among the Roman working classes?"

This time the answer came after a yet longer pause. "Socialists? Yes, there are some, no doubt, but much fewer than in other places. All those things are novelties which impatient fellows go in for without understanding much about them. We old men, we were for liberty; we don't believe in fire and massacre."

Then, fearing to say too much in presence of that lady and those gentlemen, Ambrogio began to moan on his pallet, whilst the Contessina, somewhat upset by the smell of the place, took her departure, after telling the young priest that it would be best for them to leave their alms with the wife downstairs. Meantime Tomaso resumed his seat at the table, again letting his chin rest on his hands as he nodded to his visitors, no more impressed by their departure than he had been by their arrival: "To the pleasure of seeing you again, and am happy to have been able to oblige you."

On the threshold, however, Narcisse's enthusiasm burst forth; he turned to cast a final admiring glance at old Ambrogio's head, "a perfect masterpiece," which he continued praising whilst he descended the stairs.

Down below Giacinta was still sitting on the broken box with her infant across her lap, and a few steps away Pierina stood in front of Dario, watching him with an enchanted air whilst he finished his cigarette. Tito, lying low in the grass like an animal on the watch for prey, did not for a moment cease to gaze at them.

"Ah, signora!" resumed the woman, in her resigned, doleful voice, "the place is hardly inhabitable, as you must have seen. The only good thing is that one gets plenty of room. But there are draughts enough to kill me, and I'm always so afraid of the children falling down some of the holes."

Thereupon she related a story of a woman who had lost her life through mistaking a window for a door one evening and falling headlong into the street. Then, too, a little girl had broken both arms by tumbling from a staircase which had no banisters. And you could die there without anybody knowing how bad you were and coming to help you. Only the previous day the corpse of an old man had been found lying on the plaster in a lonely room. Starvation must have killed him quite a week previously, yet he would still have been stretched there if the odour of his remains had not attracted the attention of neighbours.

"If one only had something to eat things wouldn't be so bad!" continued Giacinta. "But it's dreadful when there's a baby to suckle and one gets no food, for after a while one has no milk. This little fellow wants his titty and gets angry with me because I can't give him any. But it isn't my fault. He has sucked me till the blood came, and all I can do is to cry."

As she spoke tears welled into her poor dim eyes. But all at once she flew into a tantrum with Tito, who was still wallowing in the grass like an animal instead of rising by way of civility towards those fine people, who would surely leave her some alms. "Eh! Tito, you lazy fellow, can't you get up when people come to see you?" she called.

After some pretence of not hearing, the young fellow at last rose with an air of great ill-humour; and Pierre, feeling interested in him, tried to draw him out as he had done with the father and uncle upstairs. But Tito only returned curt answers, as if both bored and suspicious. Since there was no work to be had, said he, the only thing was to sleep. It was of no use to get angry; that wouldn't alter matters. So the best was to live as one could without increasing one's worry. As for socialists—well, yes, perhaps there were a few, but he didn't know any. And his weary, indifferent manner made it quite clear that, if his father was for the Pope and his uncle for the Republic, he himself was for nothing at all. In this Pierre divined the end of a nation, or rather the slumber of a nation in which democracy has not yet awakened. However, as the priest continued, asking Tito his age, what school he had attended, and in what district he had been born, the young man suddenly cut the questions short by pointing with one finger to his breast and saying gravely, "Io son' Romano di Roma."

And, indeed, did not that answer everything? "I am a Roman of Rome." Pierre smiled sadly and spoke no further. Never had he more fully realised the pride of that race, the long-descending inheritance of glory which was so heavy to bear. The sovereign vanity of the Caesars lived anew in that degenerate young fellow who was scarcely able to read and write. Starveling though he was, he knew his city, and could instinctively have recounted the grand pages of its history. The names of the great emperors and great popes were familiar to him. And why should men toil and moil when they had been the masters of the world? Why not live nobly and idly in the most beautiful of cities, under the most beautiful of skies? "Io son' Romano di Roma!"

Benedetta had slipped her alms into the mother's hand, and Pierre and Narcisse were following her example when Dario, who had already done so, thought of Pierina. He did not like to offer her money, but a pretty, fanciful idea occurred to him. Lightly touching his lips with his finger-tips, he said, with a faint laugh, "For beauty!"

There was something really pretty and pleasing in the kiss thus wafted with a slightly mocking laugh by that familiar, good-natured young Prince who, as in some love story of the olden time, was touched by the beautiful bead-worker's mute adoration. Pierina flushed with pleasure, and, losing her head, darted upon Dario's hand and pressed her warm lips to it with unthinking impulsiveness, in which there was as much divine gratitude as tender passion. But Tito's eyes flashed with anger at the sight, and, brutally seizing his sister by the skirt, he threw her back, growling between his teeth, "None of that, you know, or I'll kill you, and him too!"

It was high time for the visitors to depart, for other women, scenting the presence of money, were now coming forward with outstretched hands, or despatching tearful children in their stead. The whole wretched, abandoned district was in a flutter, a distressful wail ascended from those lifeless streets with high resounding names. But what was to be done? One could not give to all. So the only course lay in flight—amidst deep sadness as one realised how powerless was charity in presence of such appalling want.

When Benedetta and Dario had reached their carriage they hastened to take their seats and nestle side by side, glad to escape from all such horrors. Still the Contessina was well pleased with her bravery in the presence of Pierre, whose hand she pressed with the emotion of a pupil touched by the master's lesson, after Narcisse had told her that he meant to take the young priest to lunch at the little restaurant on the Piazza of St. Peter's whence one obtained such an interesting view of the Vatican.

"Try some of the light white wine of Genzano," said Dario, who had become quite gay again. "There's nothing better to drive away the blues."

However, Pierre's curiosity was insatiable, and on the way he again questioned Narcisse about the people of modern Rome, their life, habits, and manners. There was little or no education, he learnt; no large manufactures and no export trade existed. The men carried on the few trades that were current, all consumption being virtually limited to the city itself. Among the women there were bead-workers and embroiderers; and the manufacture of religious articles, such as medals and chaplets, and of certain popular jewellery had always occupied a fair number of hands. But after marriage the women, invariably burdened with numerous offspring, attempted little beyond household work. Briefly, the population took life as it came, working just sufficiently to secure food, contenting itself with vegetables, pastes, and scraggy mutton, without thought of rebellion or ambition. The only vices were gambling and a partiality for the red and white wines of the Roman province—wines which excited to quarrel and murder, and on the evenings of feast days, when the taverns emptied, strewed the streets with groaning men, slashed and stabbed with knives. The girls, however, but seldom went wrong; one could count those who allowed themselves to be seduced; and this arose from the great union prevailing in each family, every member of which bowed submissively to the father's absolute authority. Moreover, the brothers watched over their sisters even as Tito did over Pierina, guarding them fiercely for the sake of the family honour. And amidst all this there was no real religion, but simply a childish idolatry, all hearts going forth to Madonna and the Saints, who alone were entreated and regarded as having being: for it never occurred to anybody to think of God.

Thus the stagnation of the lower orders could easily be understood. Behind them were the many centuries during which idleness had been encouraged, vanity flattered, and nerveless life willingly accepted. When they were neither masons, nor carpenters, nor bakers, they were servants serving the priests, and more or less directly in the pay of the Vatican. Thence sprang the two antagonistic parties, on the one hand the more numerous party composed of the old Carbonari, Mazzinians, and Garibaldians, the elite of the Trastevere; and on the other the "clients" of the Vatican, all who lived on or by the Church and regretted the Pope-King. But, after all, the antagonism was confined to opinions; there was no thought of making an effort or incurring a risk. For that, some sudden flare of passion, strong enough to overcome the sturdy calmness of the race, would have been needed. But what would have been the use of it? The wretchedness had lasted for so many centuries, the sky was so blue, the siesta preferable to aught else during the hot hours! And only one thing seemed positive—that the majority was certainly in favour of Rome remaining the capital of Italy. Indeed, rebellion had almost broken out in the Leonine City when the cession of the latter to the Holy See was rumoured. As for the increase of want and poverty, this was largely due to the circumstance that the Roman workman had really gained nothing by the many works carried on in his city during fifteen years. First of all, over 40,000 provincials, mostly from the North, more spirited and resistant than himself, and working at cheaper rates, had invaded Rome; and when he, the Roman, had secured his share of the labour, he had lived in better style, without thought of economy; so that after the crisis, when the 40,000 men from the provinces were sent home again, he had found himself once more in a dead city where trade was always slack. And thus he had relapsed into his antique indolence, at heart well pleased at no longer being hustled by press of work, and again accommodating himself as best he could to his old mistress, Want, empty in pocket yet always a grand seigneur.

However, Pierre was struck by the great difference between the want and wretchedness of Rome and Paris. In Rome the destitution was certainly more complete, the food more loathsome, the dirt more repulsive. Yet at the same time the Roman poor retained more ease of manner and more real gaiety. The young priest thought of the fireless, breadless poor of Paris, shivering in their hovels at winter time; and suddenly he understood. The destitution of Rome did not know cold. What a sweet and eternal consolation; a sun for ever bright, a sky for ever blue and benign out of charity to the wretched! And what mattered the vileness of the dwelling if one could sleep under the sky, fanned by the warm breeze! What mattered even hunger if the family could await the windfall of chance in sunlit streets or on the scorched grass! The climate induced sobriety; there was no need of alcohol or red meat to enable one to face treacherous fogs. Blissful idleness smiled on the golden evenings, poverty became like the enjoyment of liberty in that delightful atmosphere where the happiness of living seemed to be all sufficient. Narcisse told Pierre that at Naples, in the narrow odoriferous streets of the port and Santa Lucia districts, the people spent virtually their whole lives out-of-doors, gay, childish, and ignorant, seeking nothing beyond the few pence that were needed to buy food. And it was certainly the climate which fostered the prolonged infancy of the nation, which explained why such a democracy did not awaken to social ambition and consciousness of itself. No doubt the poor of Naples and Rome suffered from want; but they did not know the rancour which cruel winter implants in men's hearts, the dark rancour which one feels on shivering with cold while rich people are warming themselves before blazing fires. They did not know the infuriated reveries in snow-swept hovels, when the guttering dip burns low, the passionate need which then comes upon one to wreak justice, to revolt, as from a sense of duty, in order that one may save wife and children from consumption, in order that they also may have a warm nest where life shall be a possibility! Ah! the want that shivers with the bitter cold—therein lies the excess of social injustice, the most terrible of schools, where the poor learn to realise their sufferings, where they are roused to indignation, and swear to make those sufferings cease, even if in doing so they annihilate all olden society!

And in that same clemency of the southern heavens Pierre also found an explanation of the life of St. Francis,* that divine mendicant of love who roamed the high roads extolling the charms of poverty. Doubtless he was an unconscious revolutionary, protesting against the overflowing luxury of the Roman court by his return to the love of the humble, the simplicity of the primitive Church. But such a revival of innocence and sobriety would never have been possible in a northern land. The enchantment of Nature, the frugality of a people whom the sunlight nourished, the benignity of mendicancy on roads for ever warm, were needed to effect it. And yet how was it possible that a St. Francis, glowing with brotherly love, could have appeared in a land which nowadays so seldom practises charity, which treats the lowly so harshly and contemptuously, and cannot even bestow alms on its own Pope? Is it because ancient pride ends by hardening all hearts, or because the experience of very old races leads finally to egotism, that one now beholds Italy seemingly benumbed amidst dogmatic and pompous Catholicism, whilst the return to the ideals of the Gospel, the passionate interest in the poor and the suffering comes from the woeful plains of the North, from the nations whose sunlight is so limited? Yes, doubtless all that has much to do with the change, and the success of St. Francis was in particular due to the circumstance that, after so gaily espousing his lady, Poverty, he was able to lead her, bare-footed and scarcely clad, during endless and delightful spring-tides, among communities whom an ardent need of love and compassion then consumed.

* St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the famous order of
mendicant friars.—Trans.

While conversing, Pierre and Narcisse had reached the Piazza of St. Peter's, and they sat down at one of the little tables skirting the pavement outside the restaurant where they had lunched once before. The linen was none too clean, but the view was splendid. The Basilica rose up in front of them, and the Vatican on the right, above the majestic curve of the colonnade. Just as the waiter was bringing the hors-d'oeuvre, some finocchio* and anchovies, the young priest, who had fixed his eyes on the Vatican, raised an exclamation to attract Narcisse's attention: "Look, my friend, at that window, which I am told is the Holy Father's. Can't you distinguish a pale figure standing there, quite motionless?"

* Fennel-root, eaten raw, a favourite "appetiser" in Rome during
the spring and autumn.—Trans.

The young man began to laugh. "Oh! well," said he, "it must be the Holy Father in person. You are so anxious to see him that your very anxiety conjures him into your presence."

"But I assure you," repeated Pierre, "that he is over there behind the window-pane. There is a white figure looking this way."

Narcisse, who was very hungry, began to eat whilst still indulging in banter. All at once, however, he exclaimed: "Well, my dear Abbe, as the Pope is looking at us, this is the moment to speak of him. I promised to tell you how he sunk several millions of St. Peter's Patrimony in the frightful financial crisis of which you have just seen the ruins; and, indeed, your visit to the new district of the castle fields would not be complete without this story by way of appendix."

Thereupon, without losing a mouthful, Narcisse spoke at considerable length. At the death of Pius IX the Patrimony of St. Peter, it seemed, had exceeded twenty millions of francs. Cardinal Antonelli, who speculated, and whose ventures were usually successful, had for a long time left a part of this money with the Rothschilds and a part in the hands of different nuncios, who turned it to profit abroad. After Antonelli's death, however, his successor, Cardinal Simeoni, withdrew the money from the nuncios to invest it at Rome; and Leo XIII on his accession entrusted the administration of the Patrimony to a commission of cardinals, of which Monsignor Folchi was appointed secretary. This prelate, who for twelve years played such an important role, was the son of an employee of the Dataria, who, thanks to skilful financial operations, had left a fortune of a million francs. Monsignor Folchi inherited his father's cleverness, and revealed himself to be a financier of the first rank in such wise that the commission gradually relinquished its powers to him, letting him act exactly as he pleased and contenting itself with approving the reports which he laid before it at each meeting. The Patrimony, however, yielded scarcely more than a million francs per annum, and, as the expenditure amounted to seven millions, six had to be found. Accordingly, from that other source of income, the Peter's Pence, the Pope annually gave three million francs to Monsignor Folchi, who, by skilful speculations and investments, was able to double them every year, and thus provide for all disbursements without ever breaking into the capital of the Patrimony. In the earlier times he realised considerable profit by gambling in land in and about Rome. He took shares also in many new enterprises, speculated in mills, omnibuses, and water-services, without mentioning all the gambling in which he participated with the Banca di Roma, a Catholic institution. Wonderstruck by his skill, the Pope, who, on his own side, had hitherto speculated through the medium of a confidential employee named Sterbini, dismissed the latter, and entrusted Monsignor Folchi with the duty of turning his money to profit in the same way as he turned that of the Holy See. This was the climax of the prelate's favour, the apogee of his power. Bad days were dawning, things were tottering already, and the great collapse was soon to come, sudden and swift like lightning. One of Leo XIII's practices was to lend large sums to the Roman princes who, seized with the gambling frenzy, and mixed up in land and building speculations, were at a loss for money. To guarantee the Pope's advances they deposited shares with him, and thus, when the downfall came, he was left with heaps of worthless paper on his hands. Then another disastrous affair was an attempt to found a house of credit in Paris in view of working off the shares which could not be disposed of in Italy among the French aristocracy and religious people. To egg these on it was said that the Pope was interested in the venture; and the worst was that he dropped three millions of francs in it.* The situation then became the more critical as he had gradually risked all the money he disposed of in the terrible agiotage going on in Rome, tempted thereto by the prospect of huge profits and perhaps indulging in the hope that he might win back by money the city which had been torn from him by force. His own responsibility remained complete, for Monsignor Folchi never made an important venture without consulting him; and he must have been therefore the real artisan of the disaster, mastered by his passion for gain, his desire to endow the Church with a huge capital, that great source of power in modern times. As always happens, however, the prelate was the only victim. He had become imperious and difficult to deal with; and was no longer liked by the cardinals of the commission, who were merely called together to approve such transactions as he chose to entrust to them. So, when the crisis came, a plot was laid; the cardinals terrified the Pope by telling him of all the evil rumours which were current, and then forced Monsignor Folchi to render a full account of his speculations. The situation proved to be very bad; it was no longer possible to avoid heavy losses. And so Monsignor Folchi was disgraced, and since then has vainly solicited an audience of Leo XIII, who has always refused to receive him, as if determined to punish him for their common fault—that passion for lucre which blinded them both. Very pious and submissive, however, Monsignor Folchi has never complained, but has kept his secrets and bowed to fate. Nobody can say exactly how many millions the Patrimony of St. Peter lost when Rome was changed into a gambling-hell, but if some prelates only admit ten, others go as far as thirty. The probability is that the loss was about fifteen millions.**

* The allusion is evidently to the famous Union Generale, on
which the Pope bestowed his apostolic benediction, and with
which M. Zola deals at length in his novel Money. Certainly
a very brilliant idea was embodied in the Union Generale, that
of establishing a great international Catholic bank which
would destroy the Jewish financial autocracy throughout Europe,
and provide both the papacy and the Legitimist cause in several
countries with the sinews of war. But in the battle which
ensued the great Jew financial houses proved the stronger, and
the disaster which overtook the Catholic speculators was a
terrible one.—Trans.

** That is 600,000 pounds.

Whilst Narcisse was giving this account he and Pierre had despatched their cutlets and tomatoes, and the waiter was now serving them some fried chicken. "At the present time," said Narcisse by way of conclusion, "the gap has been filled up; I told you of the large sums yielded by the Peter's Pence Fund, the amount of which is only known by the Pope, who alone fixes its employment. And, by the way, he isn't cured of speculating: I know from a good source that he still gambles, though with more prudence. Moreover, his confidential assistant is still a prelate. And, when all is said, my dear Abbe, he's in the right: a man must belong to his times—dash it all!"

Pierre had listened with growing surprise, in which terror and sadness mingled. Doubtless such things were natural, even legitimate; yet he, in his dream of a pastor of souls free from all terrestrial cares, had never imagined that they existed. What! the Pope—the spiritual father of the lowly and the suffering—had speculated in land and in stocks and shares! He had gambled, placed funds in the hands of Jew bankers, practised usury, extracted hard interest from money—he, the successor of the Apostle, the Pontiff of Christ, the representative of Jesus, of the Gospel, that divine friend of the poor! And, besides, what a painful contrast: so many millions stored away in those rooms of the Vatican, and so many millions working and fructifying, constantly being diverted from one speculation to another in order that they might yield the more gain; and then down below, near at hand, so much want and misery in those abominable unfinished buildings of the new districts, so many poor folks dying of hunger amidst filth, mothers without milk for their babes, men reduced to idleness by lack of work, old ones at the last gasp like beasts of burden who are pole-axed when they are of no more use! Ah! God of Charity, God of Love, was it possible! The Church doubtless had material wants; she could not live without money; prudence and policy had dictated the thought of gaining for her such a treasure as would enable her to fight her adversaries victoriously. But how grievously this wounded one's feelings, how it soiled the Church, how she descended from her divine throne to become nothing but a party, a vast international association organised for the purpose of conquering and possessing the world!

And the more Pierre thought of the extraordinary adventure the greater was his astonishment. Could a more unexpected, startling drama be imagined? That Pope shutting himself up in his palace—a prison, no doubt, but one whose hundred windows overlooked immensity; that Pope who, at all hours of the day and night, in every season, could from his window see his capital, the city which had been stolen from him, and the restitution of which he never ceased to demand; that Pope who, day by day, beheld the changes effected in the city—the opening of new streets, the demolition of ancient districts, the sale of land, and the gradual erection of new buildings which ended by forming a white girdle around the old ruddy roofs; that Pope who, in presence of this daily spectacle, this building frenzy, which he could follow from morn till eve, was himself finally overcome by the gambling passion, and, secluded in his closed chamber, began to speculate on the embellishments of his old capital, seeking wealth in the spurt of work and trade brought about by that very Italian Government which he reproached with spoliation; and finally that Pope losing millions in a catastrophe which he ought to have desired, but had been unable to foresee! No, never had dethroned monarch yielded to a stranger idea, compromised himself in a more tragical venture, the result of which fell upon him like divine punishment. And it was no mere king who had done this, but the delegate of God, the man who, in the eyes of idolatrous Christendom, was the living manifestation of the Deity!

Dessert had now been served—a goat's cheese and some fruit—and Narcisse was just finishing some grapes when, on raising his eyes, he in turn exclaimed: "Well, you are quite right, my dear Abbe, I myself can see a pale figure at the window of the Holy Father's room."

Pierre, who scarcely took his eyes from the window, answered slowly: "Yes, yes, it went away, but has just come back, and stands there white and motionless."

"Well, after all, what would you have the Pope do?" resumed Narcisse with his languid air. "He's like everybody else; he looks out of the window when he wants a little distraction, and certainly there's plenty for him to look at."

The same idea had occurred to Pierre, and was filling him with emotion. People talked of the Vatican being closed, and pictured a dark, gloomy palace, encompassed by high walls, whereas this palace overlooked all Rome, and the Pope from his window could see the world. Pierre himself had viewed the panorama from the summit of the Janiculum, the loggie of Raffaelle, and the dome of St. Peter's, and so he well knew what it was that Leo XIII was able to behold. In the centre of the vast desert of the Campagna, bounded by the Sabine and Alban mountains, the seven illustrious hills appeared to him with their trees and edifices. His eyes ranged also over all the basilicas, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano, the cradle of the papacy, San Paolo-fuori-le-Mura, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Sant' Agnese, and the others; they beheld, too, the domes of the Gesu of Sant' Andrea della Valle, San Carlo and San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, and indeed all those four hundred churches of Rome which make the city like a campo santo studded with crosses. And Leo XIII could moreover see the famous monuments testifying to the pride of successive centuries—the Castle of Sant' Angelo, that imperial mausoleum which was transformed into a papal fortress, the distant white line of the tombs of the Appian Way, the scattered ruins of the baths of Caracalla and the abode of Septimius Severus; and then, after the innumerable columns, porticoes, and triumphal arches, there were the palaces and villas of the sumptuous cardinals of the Renascence, the Palazzo Farnese, the Palazzo Borghese, the Villa Medici, and others, amidst a swarming of facades and roofs. But, in particular, just under his window, on the left, the Pope was able to see the abominations of the unfinished district of the castle fields. In the afternoon, when he strolled through his gardens, bastioned by the wall of the fourth Leo like the plateau of a citadel, his view stretched over the ravaged valley at the foot of Monte Mario, where so many brick-works were established during the building frenzy. The green slopes are still ripped up, yellow trenches intersect them in all directions, and the closed works and factories have become wretched ruins with lofty, black, and smokeless chimneys. And at any other hour of the day Leo XIII could not approach his window without beholding the abandoned houses for which all those brick-fields had worked, those houses which had died before they even lived, and where there was now nought but the swarming misery of Rome, rotting there like some decomposition of olden society.

However, Pierre more particularly thought of Leo XIII, forgetting the rest of the city to let his thoughts dwell on the Palatine, now bereft of its crown of palaces and rearing only its black cypresses towards the blue heavens. Doubtless in his mind he rebuilt the palaces of the Caesars, whilst before him rose great shadowy forms arrayed in purple, visions of his real ancestors, those emperors and Supreme Pontiffs who alone could tell him how one might reign over every nation and be the absolute master of the world. Then, however, his glances strayed to the Quirinal, and there he could contemplate the new and neighbouring royalty. How strange the meeting of those two palaces, the Quirinal and the Vatican, which rise up and gaze at one another across the Rome of the middle ages and the Renascence, whose roofs, baked and gilded by the burning sun, are jumbled in confusion alongside the Tiber. When the Pope and the King go to their windows they can with a mere opera-glass see each other quite distinctly. True, they are but specks in the boundless immensity, and what a gulf there is between them—how many centuries of history, how many generations that battled and suffered, how much departed greatness, and how much new seed for the mysterious future! Still, they can see one another, and they are yet waging the eternal fight, the fight as to which of them—the pontiff and shepherd of the soul or the monarch and master of the body—shall possess the people whose stream rolls beneath them, and in the result remain the absolute sovereign. And Pierre wondered also what might be the thoughts and dreams of Leo XIII behind those window-panes where he still fancied he could distinguish his pale, ghostly figure. On surveying new Rome, the ravaged olden districts and the new ones laid waste by the blast of disaster, the Pope must certainly rejoice at the colossal failure of the Italian Government. His city had been stolen from him; the newcomers had virtually declared that they would show him how a great capital was created, and their boast had ended in that catastrophe—a multitude of hideous and useless buildings which they did not even know how to finish! He, the Pope, could moreover only be delighted with the terrible worries into which the usurping regime had fallen, the political crisis, and the financial crisis, the whole growing national unrest amidst which that regime seemed likely to sink some day; and yet did not he himself possess a patriotic soul? was he not a loving son of that Italy whose genius and ancient ambition coursed in the blood of his veins? Ah! no, nothing against Italy; rather everything that would enable her to become once more the mistress of the world. And so, even amidst the joy of hope, he must have been grieved to see her thus ruined, threatened with bankruptcy, displaying like a sore that overturned, unfinished Rome which was a confession of her impotency. But, on the other hand, if the House of Savoy were to be swept away, would he not be there to take its place, and at last resume possession of his capital, which, from his window, for fifteen years past, he had beheld in the grip of masons and demolishers? And then he would again be the master and reign over the world, enthroned in the predestined city to which prophecy has ensured eternity and universal dominion.

But the horizon spread out, and Pierre wondered what Leo XIII beheld beyond Rome, beyond the Campagna and the Sabine and Alban mountains. What had he seen for eighteen years past from that window whence he obtained his only view of the world? What echoes of modern society, its truths and certainties, had reached his ears? From the heights of the Viminal, where the railway terminus stands, the prolonged whistling of engines must have occasionally been carried towards him, suggesting our scientific civilisation, the nations brought nearer together, free humanity marching on towards the future. Did he himself ever dream of liberty when, on turning to the right, he pictured the sea over yonder, past the tombs of the Appian Way? Had he ever desired to go off, quit Rome and her traditions, and found the Papacy of the new democracies elsewhere? As he was said to possess so clear and penetrating a mind he ought to have understood and trembled at the far-away stir and noise that came from certain lands of battle, from those United States of America, for instance, where revolutionary bishops were conquering, winning over the people. Were they working for him or for themselves? If he could not follow them, if he remained stubborn within his Vatican, bound on every side by dogma and tradition, might not rupture some day become unavoidable? And, indeed, the fear of a blast of schism, coming from afar, must have filled him with growing anguish. It was assuredly on that account that he had practised the diplomacy of conciliation, seeking to unite in his hands all the scattered forces of the Church, overlooking the audacious proceedings of certain bishops as far as possible, and himself striving to gain the support of the people by putting himself on its side against the fallen monarchies. But would he ever go any farther? Shut up in that Vatican, behind that bronze portal, was he not bound to the strict formulas of Catholicism, chained to them by the force of centuries? There obstinacy was fated; it was impossible for him to resign himself to that which was his real and surpassing power, the purely spiritual power, the moral authority which brought mankind to his feet, made thousands of pilgrims kneel and women swoon. Departure from Rome and the renunciation of the temporal power would not displace the centre of the Catholic world, but would transform him, the head of the Catholic Church, into the head of something else. And how anxious must have been his thoughts if the evening breeze ever brought him a vague presentiment of that something else, a fear of the new religion which was yet dimly, confusedly dawning amidst the tramp of the nations on the march, and the sound of which must have reached him at one and the same time from every point of the compass.

At this precise moment, however, Pierre felt that the white and motionless shadow behind those windowpanes was held erect by pride, by the ever present conviction of victory. If man could not achieve it, a miracle would intervene. He, the Pope, was absolutely convinced that he or some successor would recover possession of Rome. Had not the Church all eternity before it? And, moreover, why should not the victor be himself? Could not God accomplish the impossible? Why, if it so pleased God, on the very morrow his city would be restored to him, in spite of all the objections of human reason, all the apparent logic of facts. Ah! how he would welcome the return of that prodigal daughter whose equivocal adventures he had ever watched with tears bedewing his paternal eyes! He would soon forget the excesses which he had beheld during eighteen years at all hours and in all seasons. Perhaps he dreamt of what he would do with those new districts with which the city had been soiled. Should they be razed, or left as evidence of the insanity of the usurpers? At all events, Rome would again become the august and lifeless city, disdainful of such vain matters as material cleanliness and comfort, and shining forth upon the world like a pure soul encompassed by the traditional glory of the centuries. And his dream continued, picturing the course which events would take on the very morrow, no doubt. Anything, even a republic was preferable to that House of Savoy. Why not a federal republic, reviving the old political divisions of Italy, restoring Rome to the Church, and choosing him, the Pope, as the natural protector of the country thus reorganised? But his eyes travelled beyond Rome and Italy, and his dream expanded, embracing republican France, Spain which might become republican again, Austria which would some day be won, and indeed all the Catholic nations welded into the United States of Europe, and fraternising in peace under his high presidency as Sovereign Pontiff. And then would follow the supreme triumph, all the other churches at last vanishing, and all the dissident communities coming to him as to the one and only pastor, who would reign in the name of Jesus over the universal democracy.

However, whilst Pierre was immersed in this dream which he attributed to Leo XIII, he was all at once interrupted by Narcisse, who exclaimed: "Oh! my dear Abbe, just look at those statues on the colonnade." The young fellow had ordered a cup of coffee and was languidly smoking a cigar, deep once more in the subtle aesthetics which were his only preoccupation. "They are rosy, are they not?" he continued; "rosy, with a touch of mauve, as if the blue blood of angels circulated in their stone veins. It is the sun of Rome which gives them that supra-terrestrial life; for they live, my friend; I have seen them smile and hold out their arms to me during certain fine sunsets. Ah! Rome, marvellous, delicious Rome! One could live here as poor as Job, content with the very atmosphere, and in everlasting delight at breathing it!"

This time Pierre could not help feeling surprised at Narcisse's language, for he remembered his incisive voice and clear, precise, financial acumen when speaking of money matters. And, at this recollection, the young priest's mind reverted to the castle fields, and intense sadness filled his heart as for the last time all the want and suffering rose before him. Again he beheld the horrible filth which was tainting so many human beings, that shocking proof of the abominable social injustice which condemns the greater number to lead the joyless, breadless lives of accursed beasts. And as his glance returned yet once more to the window of the Vatican, and he fancied he could see a pale hand uplifted behind the glass panes, he thought of that papal benediction which Leo XIII gave from that height, over Rome, and over the plain and the hills, to the faithful of all Christendom. And that papal benediction suddenly seemed to him a mockery, destitute of all power, since throughout such a multitude of centuries it had not once been able to stay a single one of the sufferings of mankind, and could not even bring a little justice for those poor wretches who were agonising yonder beneath the very window.

IX.

THAT evening at dusk, as Benedetta had sent Pierre word that she desired to see him, he went down to her little salon, and there found her chatting with Celia.

"I've seen your Pierina, you know," exclaimed the latter, just as the young priest came in. "And with Dario, too. Or rather, she must have been watching for him; he found her waiting in a path on the Pincio and smiled at her. I understood at once. What a beauty she is!"

Benedetta smiled at her friend's enthusiasm; but her lips twitched somewhat painfully, for, however sensible she might be, this passion, which she realised to be so naive and so strong, was beginning to make her suffer. She certainly made allowances for Dario, but the girl was too much in love with him, and she feared the consequences. Even in turning the conversation she allowed the secret of her heart to escape her. "Pray sit down, Monsieur l'Abbe," she said, "we are talking scandal, you see. My poor Dario is accused of making love to every pretty woman in Rome. People say that it's he who gives La Tonietta those white roses which she has been exhibiting at the Corso every afternoon for a fortnight past."

"That's certain, my dear," retorted Celia impetuously. "At first people were in doubt, and talked of little Pontecorvo and Lieutenant Moretta. But every one now knows that La Tonietta's caprice is Dario. Besides, he joined her in her box at the Costanzi the other evening."

Pierre remembered that the young Prince had pointed out La Tonietta at the Pincio one afternoon. She was one of the few demi-mondaines that the higher-class society of Rome took an interest in. For a month or so the rich Englishman to whom she owed her means had been absent, travelling.

"Ah!" resumed Benedetta, whose budding jealousy was entirely confined to La Pierina, "so my poor Dario is ruining himself in white roses! Well, I shall have to twit him about it. But one or another of these beauties will end by robbing me of him if our affairs are not soon settled. Fortunately, I have had some better news. Yes, my suit is to be taken in hand again, and my aunt has gone out to-day on that very account."

Then, as Victorine came in with a lamp, and Celia rose to depart, Benedetta turned towards Pierre, who also was rising from his chair: "Please stay," said she; "I wish to speak to you."

However, Celia still lingered, interested by the mention of the divorce suit, and eager to know if the cousins would soon be able to marry. And at last throwing her arms round Benedetta, she kissed her passionately. "So you are hopeful, my dear," she exclaimed. "You think that the Holy Father will give you back your liberty? Oh! I am so pleased; it will be so nice for you to marry Dario! And I'm well pleased on my own account, for my father and mother are beginning to yield. Only yesterday I said to them with that quiet little air of mine, 'I want Attilio, and you must give him me.' And then my father flew into a furious passion and upbraided me, and shook his fist at me, saying that if he'd made my head as hard as his own he would know how to break it. My mother was there quite silent and vexed, and all at once he turned to her and said: 'Here, give her that Attilio she wants, and then perhaps we shall have some peace!' Oh yes! I'm well pleased, very well pleased indeed!"

As she spoke her pure virginal face beamed with so much innocent, celestial joy that Pierre and Benedetta could not help laughing. And at last she went off attended by a maid who had waited for her in the first salon.

When they were alone Benedetta made the priest sit down again: "I have been asked to give you some important advice, my friend," she said. "It seems that the news of your presence in Rome is spreading, and that bad reports of you are circulated. Your book is said to be a fierce appeal to schism, and you are spoken of as a mere ambitious, turbulent schismatic. After publishing your book in Paris you have come to Rome, it is said, to raise a fearful scandal over it in order to make it sell. Now, if you still desire to see his Holiness, so as to plead your cause before him, you are advised to make people forget you, to disappear altogether for a fortnight or three weeks."

Pierre was stupefied. Why, they would end by maddening him with all the obstacles they raised to exhaust his patience; they would actually implant in him an idea of schism, of an avenging, liberating scandal! He wished to protest and refuse the advice, but all at once he made a gesture of weariness. What would be the good of it, especially with that young woman, who was certainly sincere and affectionate. "Who asked you to give me this advice?" he inquired. She did not answer, but smiled, and with sudden intuition he resumed: "It was Monsignor Nani, was it not?"

Thereupon, still unwilling to give a direct reply, she began to praise the prelate. He had at last consented to guide her in her divorce affair; and Donna Serafina had gone to the Palace of the Inquisition that very afternoon in order to acquaint him with the result of certain steps she had taken. Father Lorenza, the confessor of both the Boccanera ladies, was to be present at the interview, for the idea of the divorce was in reality his own. He had urged the two women to it in his eagerness to sever the bond which the patriotic priest Pisoni had tied full of such fine illusions. Benedetta became quite animated as she explained the reasons of her hopefulness. "Monsignor Nani can do everything," she said, "and I am very happy that my affair should be in his hands. You must be reasonable also, my friend; do as you are requested. I'm sure you will some day be well pleased at having taken this advice."

Pierre had bowed his head and remained thoughtful. There was nothing unpleasant in the idea of remaining for a few more weeks in Rome, where day by day his curiosity found so much fresh food. Of course, all these delays were calculated to discourage him and bend his will. Yet what did he fear, since he was still determined to relinquish nothing of his book, and to see the Holy Father for the sole purpose of proclaiming his new faith? Once more, in silence, he took that oath, then yielded to Benedetta's entreaties. And as he apologised for being a source of embarrassment in the house she exclaimed: "No, no, I am delighted to have you here. I fancy that your presence will bring us good fortune now that luck seems to be changing in our favour."

It was then agreed that he would no longer prowl around St. Peter's and the Vatican, where his constant presence must have attracted attention. He even promised that he would virtually spend a week indoors, desirous as he was of reperusing certain books, certain pages of Rome's history. Then he went on chatting for a moment, lulled by the peacefulness which reigned around him, since the lamp had illumined the salon with its sleepy radiance. Six o'clock had just struck, and outside all was dark.

"Wasn't his Eminence indisposed to-day?" the young man asked.

"Yes," replied the Contessina. "But we are not anxious: it is only a little fatigue. He sent Don Vigilio to tell me that he intended to shut himself up in his room and dictate some letters. So there can be nothing much the matter, you see."

Silence fell again. For a while not a sound came from the deserted street or the old empty mansion, mute and dreamy like a tomb. But all at once the soft somnolence, instinct with all the sweetness of a dream of hope, was disturbed by a tempestuous entry, a whirl of skirts, a gasp of terror. It was Victorine, who had gone off after bringing the lamp, but now returned, scared and breathless: "Contessina! Contessina!"

Benedetta had risen, suddenly quite white and cold, as at the advent of a blast of misfortune. "What, what is it? Why do you run and tremble?" she asked.

"Dario, Monsieur Dario—down below. I went down to see if the lantern in the porch were alight, as it is so often forgotten. And in the dark, in the porch, I stumbled against Monsieur Dario. He is on the ground; he has a knife-thrust somewhere."

A cry leapt from the amorosa's heart: "Dead!"

"No, no, wounded."

But Benedetta did not hear; in a louder and louder voice she cried: "Dead! dead!"

"No, no, I tell you, he spoke to me. And for Heaven's sake, be quiet. He silenced me because he did not want any one to know; he told me to come and fetch you—only you. However, as Monsieur l'Abbe is here, he had better help us. We shall be none too many."

Pierre listened, also quite aghast. And when Victorine wished to take the lamp her trembling hand, with which she had no doubt felt the prostrate body, was seen to be quite bloody. The sight filled Benedetta with so much horror that she again began to moan wildly.

"Be quiet, be quiet!" repeated Victorine. "We ought not to make any noise in going down. I shall take the lamp, because we must at all events be able to see. Now, quick, quick!"

Across the porch, just at the entrance of the vestibule, Dario lay prone upon the slabs, as if, after being stabbed in the street, he had only had sufficient strength to take a few steps before falling. And he had just fainted, and lay there with his face very pale, his lips compressed, and his eyes closed. Benedetta, recovering the energy of her race amidst her excessive grief, no longer lamented or cried out, but gazed at him with wild, tearless, dilated eyes, as though unable to understand. The horror of it all was the suddenness and mysteriousness of the catastrophe, the why and wherefore of this murderous attempt amidst the silence of the old deserted palace, black with the shades of night. The wound had as yet bled but little, for only the Prince's clothes were stained.

"Quick, quick!" repeated Victorine in an undertone after lowering the lamp and moving it around. "The porter isn't there—he's always at the carpenter's next door—and you see that he hasn't yet lighted the lantern. Still he may come back at any moment. So the Abbe and I will carry the Prince into his room at once." She alone retained her head, like a woman of well-balanced mind and quiet activity. The two others, whose stupor continued, listened to her and obeyed her with the docility of children. "Contessina," she continued, "you must light us. Here, take the lamp and lower it a little so that we may see the steps. You, Abbe, take the feet; I'll take hold of him under the armpits. And don't be alarmed, the poor dear fellow isn't heavy."

Ah! that ascent of the monumental staircase with its low steps and its landings as spacious as guardrooms. They facilitated the cruel journey, but how lugubrious looked the little cortege under the flickering glimmer of the lamp which Benedetta held with arm outstretched, stiffened by determination! And still not a sound came from the old lifeless dwelling, nothing but the silent crumbling of the walls, the slow decay which was making the ceilings crack. Victorine continued to whisper words of advice whilst Pierre, afraid of slipping on the shiny slabs, put forth an excess of strength which made his breath come short. Huge, wild shadows danced over the big expanse of bare wall up to the very vaults decorated with sunken panels. So endless seemed the ascent that at last a halt became necessary; but the slow march was soon resumed. Fortunately Dario's apartments—bed-chamber, dressing-room, and sitting-room—were on the first floor adjoining those of the Cardinal in the wing facing the Tiber; so, on reaching the landing, they only had to walk softly along the corridor, and at last, to their great relief, laid the wounded man upon his bed.

Victorine vented her satisfaction in a light laugh. "That's done," said she; "put the lamp on that table, Contessina. I'm sure nobody heard us. It's lucky that Donna Serafina should have gone out, and that his Eminence should have shut himself up with Don Vigilio. I wrapped my skirt round Monsieur Dario's shoulders, you know, so I don't think any blood fell on the stairs. By and by, too, I'll go down with a sponge and wipe the slabs in the porch—" She stopped short, looked at Dario, and then quickly added: "He's breathing—now I'll leave you both to watch over him while I go for good Doctor Giordano, who saw you come into the world, Contessina. He's a man to be trusted."

Alone with the unconscious sufferer in that dim chamber, which seemed to quiver with the frightful horror that filled their hearts, Benedetta and Pierre remained on either side of the bed, as yet unable to exchange a word. The young woman first opened her arms and wrung her hands whilst giving vent to a hollow moan, as if to relieve and exhale her grief; and then, leaning forward, she watched for some sign of life on that pale face whose eyes were closed. Dario was certainly breathing, but his respiration was slow and very faint, and some time went by before a touch of colour returned to his cheeks. At last, however, he opened his eyes, and then she at once took hold of his hand and pressed it, instilling into the pressure all the anguish of her heart. Great was her happiness on feeling that he feebly returned the clasp.

"Tell me," she said, "you can see me and hear me, can't you? What has happened, good God?"

He did not at first answer, being worried by the presence of Pierre. On recognising the young priest, however, he seemed content that he should be there, and then glanced apprehensively round the room to see if there were anybody else. And at last he murmured: "No one saw me, no one knows?"

"No, no; be easy. We carried you up with Victorine without meeting a soul. Aunt has just gone out, uncle is shut up in his rooms."

At this Dario seemed relieved, and he even smiled. "I don't want anybody to know, it is so stupid," he murmured.

"But in God's name what has happened?" she again asked him.

"Ah! I don't know, I don't know," was his response, as he lowered his eyelids with a weary air as if to escape the question. But he must have realised that it was best for him to confess some portion of the truth at once, for he resumed: "A man was hidden in the shadow of the porch—he must have been waiting for me. And so, when I came in, he dug his knife into my shoulder, there."

Forthwith she again leant over him, quivering, and gazing into the depths of his eyes: "But who was the man, who was he?" she asked. Then, as he, in a yet more weary way, began to stammer that he didn't know, that the man had fled into the darkness before he could recognise him, she raised a terrible cry: "It was Prada! it was Prada, confess it, I know it already!" And, quite delirious, she went on: "I tell you that I know it! Ah! I would not be his, and he is determined that we shall never belong to one another. Rather than have that he will kill you on the day when I am free to be your wife! Oh! I know him well; I shall never, never be happy. Yes, I know it well, it was Prada, Prada!"

But sudden energy upbuoyed the wounded man, and he loyally protested: "No, no, it was not Prada, nor was it any one working for him. That I swear to you. I did not recognise the man, but it wasn't Prada—no, no!"

There was such a ring of truth in Dario's words that Benedetta must have been convinced by them. But terror once more overpowered her, for the hand she held was suddenly growing soft, moist, and powerless. Exhausted by his effort, Dario had fallen back, again fainting, his face quite white and his eyes closed. And it seemed to her that he was dying. Distracted by her anguish, she felt him with trembling, groping hands: "Look, look, Monsieur l'Abbe!" she exclaimed. "But he is dying, he is dying; he is already quite cold. Ah! God of heaven, he is dying!"

Pierre, terribly upset by her cries, sought to reassure her, saying: "He spoke too much; he has lost consciousness, as he did before. But I assure you that I can feel his heart beating. Here, put your hand here, Contessina. For mercy's sake don't distress yourself like that; the doctor will soon be here, and everything will be all right."

But she did not listen to him, and all at once he was lost in amazement, for she flung herself upon the body of the man she adored, caught it in a frantic embrace, bathed it with tears and covered it with kisses whilst stammering words of fire: "Ah! if I were to lose you, if I were to lose you! And to think that I repulsed you, that I would not accept happiness when it was yet possible! Yes, that idea of mine, that vow I made to the Madonna! Yet how could she be offended by our happiness? And then, and then, if she has deceived me, if she takes you from me, ah! then I can have but one regret—that I did not damn myself with you—yes, yes, damnation rather than that we should never, never be each other's!"

Was this the woman who had shown herself so calm, so sensible, so patient the better to ensure her happiness? Pierre was terrified, and no longer recognised her. He had hitherto seen her so reserved, so modest, with a childish charm that seemed to come from her very nature! But under the threatening blow she feared, the terrible blood of the Boccaneras had awoke within her with a long heredity of violence, pride, frantic and exasperated longings. She wished for her share of life, her share of love! And she moaned and she clamoured, as if death, in taking her lover from her, were tearing away some of her own flesh.

"Calm yourself, I entreat you, madame," repeated the priest. "He is alive, his heart beats. You are doing yourself great harm."

But she wished to die with her lover: "O my darling! if you must go, take me, take me with you. I will lay myself on your heart, I will clasp you so tightly with my arms that they shall be joined to yours, and then we must needs be buried together. Yes, yes, we shall be dead, and we shall be wedded all the same—wedded in death! I promised that I would belong to none but you, and I will be yours in spite of everything, even in the grave. O my darling, open your eyes, open your mouth, kiss me if you don't want me to die as soon as you are dead!"

A blaze of wild passion, full of blood and fire, had passed through that mournful chamber with old, sleepy walls. But tears were now overcoming Benedetta, and big gasping sobs at last threw her, blinded and strengthless, on the edge of the bed. And fortunately an end was put to the terrible scene by the arrival of the doctor whom Victorine had fetched.

Doctor Giordano was a little old man of over sixty, with white curly hair, and fresh-looking, clean-shaven countenance. By long practice among Churchmen he had acquired the paternal appearance and manner of an amiable prelate. And he was said to be a very worthy man, tending the poor for nothing, and displaying ecclesiastical reserve and discretion in all delicate cases. For thirty years past the whole Boccanera family, children, women, and even the most eminent Cardinal himself, had in all cases of sickness been placed in the hands of this prudent practitioner. Lighted by Victorine and helped by Pierre, he undressed Dario, who was roused from his swoon by pain; and after examining the wound he declared with a smile that it was not at all dangerous. The young Prince would at the utmost have to spend three weeks in bed, and no complications were to be feared. Then, like all the doctors of Rome, enamoured of the fine thrusts and cuts which day by day they have to dress among chance patients of the lower classes, he complacently lingered over the wound, doubtless regarding it as a clever piece of work, for he ended by saying to the Prince in an undertone: "That's what we call a warning. The man didn't want to kill, the blow was dealt downwards so that the knife might slip through the flesh without touching the bone. Ah! a man really needs to be skilful to deal such a stab; it was very neatly done."

"Yes, yes," murmured Dario, "he spared me; had he chosen he could have pierced me through."

Benedetta did not hear. Since the doctor had declared the case to be free from danger, and had explained that the fainting fits were due to nervous shock, she had fallen in a chair, quite prostrated. Gradually, however, some gentle tears coursed from her eyes, bringing relief after her frightful despair, and then, rising to her feet, she came and kissed Dario with mute and passionate delight.

"I say, my dear doctor," resumed the Prince, "it's useless for people to know of this. It's so ridiculous. Nobody has seen anything, it seems, excepting Monsieur l'Abbe, whom I ask to keep the matter secret. And in particular I don't want anybody to alarm the Cardinal or my aunt, or indeed any of our friends."

Doctor Giordano indulged in one of his placid smiles. "Bene, bene," said he, "that's natural; don't worry yourself. We will say that you have had a fall on the stairs and have dislocated your shoulder. And now that the wound is dressed you must try to sleep, and don't get feverish. I will come back to-morrow morning."

That evening of excitement was followed by some very tranquil days, and a new life began for Pierre, who at first remained indoors, reading and writing, with no other recreation than that of spending his afternoons in Dario's room, where he was certain to find Benedetta. After a somewhat intense fever lasting for eight and forty hours, cure took its usual course, and the story of the dislocated shoulder was so generally believed, that the Cardinal insisted on Donna Serafina departing from her habits of strict economy, to have a second lantern lighted on the landing in order that no such accident might occur again. And then the monotonous peacefulness was only disturbed by a final incident, a threat of trouble, as it were, with which Pierre found himself mixed up one evening when he was lingering beside the convalescent patient.

Benedetta had absented herself for a few minutes, and as Victorine, who had brought up some broth, was leaning towards the Prince to take the empty cup from him, she said in a low voice: "There's a girl, Monsieur, La Pierina, who comes here every day, crying and asking for news of you. I can't get rid of her, she's always prowling about the place, so I thought it best to tell you of it."

Unintentionally, Pierre heard her and understood everything. Dario, who was looking at him, at once guessed his thoughts, and without answering Victorine exclaimed: "Yes, Abbe, it was that brute Tito! How idiotic, eh?" At the same time, although the young man protested that he had done nothing whatever for the girl's brother to give him such a "warning," he smiled in an embarrassed way, as if vexed and even somewhat ashamed of being mixed up in an affair of the kind. And he was evidently relieved when the priest promised that he would see the girl, should she come back, and make her understand that she ought to remain at home.

"It was such a stupid affair!" the Prince repeated, with an exaggerated show of anger. "Such things are not of our times."

But all at once he ceased speaking, for Benedetta entered the room. She sat down again beside her dear patient, and the sweet, peaceful evening then took its course in the old sleepy chamber, the old, lifeless palace, whence never a sound arose.

When Pierre began to go out again he at first merely took a brief airing in the district. The Via Giulia interested him, for he knew how splendid it had been in the time of Julius II, who had dreamt of lining it with sumptuous palaces. Horse and foot races then took place there during the carnival, the Palazzo Farnese being the starting-point, and the Piazza of St. Peter's the goal. Pierre had also lately read that a French ambassador, D'Estree, Marquis de Coure, had resided at the Palazzo Sacchetti, and in 1638 had given some magnificent entertainments in honour of the birth of the Dauphin,* when on three successive days there had been racing from the Ponte Sisto to San Giovanni dei Fiorentini amidst an extraordinary display of sumptuosity: the street being strewn with flowers, and rich hangings adorning every window. On the second evening there had been fireworks on the Tiber, with a machine representing the ship Argo carrying Jason and his companions to the recovery of the Golden Fleece; and, on another occasion, the Farnese fountain, the Mascherone, had flowed with wine. Nowadays, however, all was changed. The street, bright with sunshine or steeped in shadow according to the hour, was ever silent and deserted. The heavy, ancient palatial houses, their old doors studded with plates and nails, their windows barred with huge iron gratings, always seemed to be asleep, whole storeys showing nothing but closed shutters as if to keep out the daylight for evermore. Now and again, when a door was open, you espied deep vaults, damp, cold courts, green with mildew, and encompassed by colonnades like cloisters. Then, in the outbuildings of the mansions, the low structures which had collected more particularly on the side of the Tiber, various small silent shops had installed themselves. There was a baker's, a tailor's, and a bookbinder's, some fruiterers' shops with a few tomatoes and salad plants set out on boards, and some wine-shops which claimed to sell the vintages of Frascati and Genzano, but whose customers seemed to be dead. Midway along the street was a modern prison, whose horrid yellow wall in no wise enlivened the scene, whilst, overhead, a flight of telegraph wires stretched from the arcades of the Farnese palace to the distant vista of trees beyond the river. With its infrequent traffic the street, even in the daytime, was like some sepulchral corridor where the past was crumbling into dust, and when night fell its desolation quite appalled Pierre. You did not meet a soul, you did not see a light in any window, and the glimmering gas lamps, few and far between, seemed powerless to pierce the gloom. On either hand the doors were barred and bolted, and not a sound, not a breath came from within. Even when, after a long interval, you passed a lighted wine-shop, behind whose panes of frosted glass a lamp gleamed dim and motionless, not an exclamation, not a suspicion of a laugh ever reached your ear. There was nothing alive save the two sentries placed outside the prison, one before the entrance and the other at the corner of the right-hand lane, and they remained erect and still, coagulated, as it were, in that dead street.

* Afterwards Louis XIV.—Trans.

Pierre's interest, however, was not merely confined to the Via Giulia; it extended to the whole district, once so fine and fashionable, but now fallen into sad decay, far removed from modern life, and exhaling a faint musty odour of monasticism. Towards San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, where the new Corso Vittorio Emanuele has ripped up every olden district, the lofty five-storeyed houses with their dazzling sculptured fronts contrasted violently with the black sunken dwellings of the neighbouring lanes. In the evening the globes of the electric lamps on the Corso shone out with such dazzling whiteness that the gas lamps of the Via Giulia and other streets looked like smoky lanterns. There were several old and famous thoroughfares, the Via Banchi Vecchi, the Via del Pellegrino, the Via di Monserrato, and an infinity of cross-streets which intersected and connected the others, all going towards the Tiber, and for the most part so narrow that vehicles scarcely had room to pass. And each street had its church, a multitude of churches all more or less alike, highly decorated, gilded, and painted, and open only at service time when they were full of sunlight and incense. In the Via Giulia, in addition to San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, San Biagio della Pagnotta, San Eligio degli Orefici, and three or four others, there was the so-called Church of the Dead, Santa Maria dell' Orazione; and this church, which is at the lower end behind the Farnese palace, was often visited by Pierre, who liked to dream there of the wild life of Rome, and of the pious brothers of the Confraternita della Morte, who officiate there, and whose mission is to search for and bury such poor outcasts as die in the Campagna. One evening he was present at the funeral of two unknown men, whose bodies, after remaining unburied for quite a fortnight, had been discovered in a field near the Appian Way.

However, Pierre's favourite promenade soon became the new quay of the Tiber beyond the Palazzo Boccanera. He had merely to take the narrow lane skirting the mansion to reach a spot where he found much food for reflection. Although the quay was not yet finished, the work seemed to be quite abandoned. There were heaps of rubbish, blocks of stone, broken fences, and dilapidated tool-sheds all around. To such a height had it been necessary to carry the quay walls—designed to protect the city from floods, for the river bed has been rising for centuries past—that the old terrace of the Boccanera gardens, with its double flight of steps to which pleasure boats had once been moored, now lay in a hollow, threatened with annihilation whenever the works should be finished. But nothing had yet been levelled; the soil, brought thither for making up the bank, lay as it had fallen from the carts, and on all sides were pits and mounds interspersed with the abandoned building materials. Wretched urchins came to play there, workmen without work slept in the sunshine, and women after washing ragged linen spread it out to dry upon the stones. Nevertheless the spot proved a happy, peaceful refuge for Pierre, one fruitful in inexhaustible reveries when for hours at a time he lingered gazing at the river, the quays, and the city, stretching in front of him and on either hand.

At eight in the morning the sun already gilded the vast opening. On turning to the left he perceived the roofs of the Trastevere, of a misty, bluish grey against the dazzling sky. Then, just beyond the apse of San Giovanni, on the right, the river curved, and on its other bank the poplars of the Ospedale di Santo Spirito formed a green curtain, while the castle of Sant' Angelo showed brightly in the distance. But Pierre's eyes dwelt more particularly on the bank just in front of him, for there he found some lingering vestiges of old Rome. On that side indeed between the Ponte Sisto and the Ponte Sant' Angelo, the quays, which were to imprison the river within high, white, fortress-like walls, had not yet been raised, and the bank with its remnants of the old papal city conjured up an extraordinary vision of the middle ages. The houses, descending to the river brink, were cracked, scorched, rusted by innumerable burning summers, like so many antique bronzes. Down below there were black vaults into which the water flowed, piles upholding walls, and fragments of Roman stone-work plunging into the river bed; then, rising from the shore, came steep, broken stairways, green with moisture, tiers of terraces, storeys with tiny windows pierced here and their in hap-hazard fashion, houses perched atop of other houses, and the whole jumbled together with a fantastic commingling of balconies and wooden galleries, footbridges spanning courtyards, clumps of trees growing apparently on the very roofs, and attics rising from amidst pinky tiles. The contents of a drain fell noisily into the river from a worn and soiled gorge of stone; and wherever the houses stood back and the bank appeared, it was covered with wild vegetation, weeds, shrubs, and mantling ivy, which trailed like a kingly robe of state. And in the glory of the sun the wretchedness and dirt vanished, the crooked, jumbled houses seemed to be of gold, draped with the purple of the red petticoats and the dazzling white of the shifts which hung drying from their windows; while higher still, above the district, the Janiculum rose into all the luminary's dazzlement, uprearing the slender profile of Sant' Onofrio amidst cypresses and pines.

Leaning on the parapet of the quay wall, Pierre sadly gazed at the Tiber for hours at a time. Nothing could convey an idea of the weariness of those old waters, the mournful slowness of their flow along that Babylonian trench where they were confined within huge, bare, livid prison-like walls. In the sunlight their yellowness was gilded, and the faint quiver of the current brought ripples of green and blue; but as soon as the shade spread over it the stream became opaque like mud, so turbid in its venerable old age that it no longer even gave back a reflection of the houses lining it. And how desolate was its abandonment, what a stream of silence and solitude it was! After the winter rains it might roll furiously and threateningly, but during the long months of bright weather it traversed Rome without a sound, and Pierre could remain there all day long without seeing either a skiff or a sail. The two or three little steam-boats which arrived from the coast, the few tartanes which brought wine from Sicily, never came higher than the Aventine, beyond which there was only a watery desert in which here and there, at long intervals, a motionless angler let his line dangle. All that Pierre ever saw in the way of shipping was a sort of ancient, covered pinnace, a rotting Noah's ark, moored on the right beside the old bank, and he fancied that it might be used as a washhouse, though on no occasion did he see any one in it. And on a neck of mud there also lay a stranded boat with one side broken in, a lamentable symbol of the impossibility and the relinquishment of navigation. Ah! that decay of the river, that decay of father Tiber, as dead as the famous ruins whose dust he is weary of laving! And what an evocation! all the centuries of history, so many things, so many men, that those yellow waters have reflected till, full of lassitude and disgust, they have grown heavy, silent and deserted, longing only for annihilation.

One morning on the river bank Pierre found La Pierina standing behind an abandoned tool-shed. With her neck extended, she was looking fixedly at the window of Dario's room, at the corner of the quay and the lane. Doubtless she had been frightened by Victorine's severe reception, and had not dared to return to the mansion; but some servant, possibly, had told her which was the young Prince's window, and so she now came to this spot, where without wearying she waited for a glimpse of the man she loved, for some sign of life and salvation, the mere hope of which made her heart leap. Deeply touched by the way in which she hid herself, all humility and quivering with adoration, the priest approached her, and instead of scolding her and driving her away as he had been asked to do, spoke to her in a gentle, cheerful manner, asking her for news of her people as though nothing had happened, and at last contriving to mention Dario's name in order that she might understand that he would be up and about again within a fortnight. On perceiving Pierre, La Pierina had started with timidity and distrust as if anxious to flee; but when she understood him, tears of happiness gushed from her eyes, and with a bright smile she kissed her hand to him, calling: "Grazie, grazie, thanks, thanks!" And thereupon she darted away, and he never saw her again.

On another morning at an early hour, as Pierre was going to say mass at Santa Brigida on the Piazza Farnese, he was surprised to meet Benedetta coming out of the church and carrying a small phial of oil. She evinced no embarrassment, but frankly told him that every two or three days she went thither to obtain from the beadle a few drops of the oil used for the lamp that burnt before an antique wooden statue of the Madonna, in which she had perfect confidence. She even confessed that she had never had confidence in any other Madonna, having never obtained anything from any other, though she had prayed to several of high repute, Madonnas of marble and even of silver. And so her heart was full of ardent devotion for the holy image which refused her nothing. And she declared in all simplicity, as though the matter were quite natural and above discussion, that the few drops of oil which she applied, morning and evening, to Dario's wound, were alone working his cure, so speedy a cure as to be quite miraculous. Pierre, fairly aghast, distressed indeed to find such childish, superstitious notions in one so full of sense and grace and passion, did not even venture to smile.

In the evenings, when he came back from his strolls and spent an hour or so in Dario's room, he would for a time divert the patient by relating what he had done and seen and thought of during the day. And when he again ventured to stray beyond the district, and became enamoured of the lovely gardens of Rome, which he visited as soon as they opened in the morning in order that he might be virtually alone, he delighted the young prince and Benedetta with his enthusiasm, his rapturous passion for the splendid trees, the plashing water, and the spreading terraces whence the views were so sublime. It was not the most extensive of these gardens which the more deeply impressed his heart. In the grounds of the Villa Borghese, the little Roman Bois de Boulogne, there were certainly some majestic clumps of greenery, some regal avenues where carriages took a turn in the afternoon before the obligatory drive to the Pincio; but Pierre was more touched by the reserved garden of the villa—that villa dazzling with marble and now containing one of the finest museums in the world. There was a simple lawn of fine grass with a vast central basin surmounted by a figure of Venus, nude and white; and antique fragments, vases, statues, columns, and sarcophagi were ranged symmetrically all around the deserted, sunlit yet melancholy, sward. On returning on one occasion to the Pincio Pierre spent a delightful morning there, penetrated by the charm of this little nook with its scanty evergreens, and its admirable vista of all Rome and St. Peter's rising up afar off in the soft limpid radiance. At the Villa Albani and the Villa Pamphili he again came upon superb parasol pines, tall, stately, and graceful, and powerful elm-trees with twisted limbs and dusky foliage. In the Pamphili grounds, the elm-trees steeped the paths in a delicious half-light, the lake with its weeping willows and tufts of reeds had a dreamy aspect, while down below the parterre displayed a fantastic floral mosaic bright with the various hues of flowers and foliage. That which most particularly struck Pierre, however, in this, the noblest, most spacious, and most carefully tended garden of Rome, was the novel and unexpected view that he suddenly obtained of St. Peter's, whilst skirting a low wall: a view whose symbolism for ever clung to him. Rome had completely vanished, and between the slopes of Monte Mario and another wooded height which hid the city, there only appeared the colossal dome which seemed to be poised on an infinity of scattered blocks, now white, now red. These were the houses of the Borgo, the jumbled piles of the Vatican and the Basilica which the huge dome surmounted and annihilated, showing greyly blue in the light blue of the heavens, whilst far away stretched a delicate, boundless vista of the Campagna, likewise of a bluish tint.

It was, however, more particularly in the less sumptuous gardens, those of a more homely grace, that Pierre realised that even things have souls. Ah! that Villa Mattei on one side of the Coelius with its terraced grounds, its sloping alleys edged with laurel, aloe, and spindle tree, its box-plants forming arbours, its oranges, its roses, and its fountains! Pierre spent some delicious hours there, and only found a similar charm on visiting the Aventine, where three churches are embowered in verdure. The little garden of Santa Sabina, the birthplace of the Dominican order, is closed on all sides and affords no view: it slumbers in quiescence, warm and perfumed by its orange-trees, amongst which that planted by St. Dominic stands huge and gnarled but still laden with ripe fruit. At the adjoining Priorato, however, the garden, perched high above the Tiber, overlooks a vast expanse, with the river and the buildings on either bank as far as the summit of the Janiculum. And in these gardens of Rome Pierre ever found the same clipped box-shrubs, the same eucalypti with white trunks and pale leaves long like hair, the same ilex-trees squat and dusky, the same giant pines, the same black cypresses, the same marbles whitening amidst tufts of roses, and the same fountains gurgling under mantling ivy. Never did he enjoy more gentle, sorrow-tinged delight than at the Villa of Pope Julius, where all the life of a gay and sensual period is suggested by the semi-circular porticus opening on the gardens, a porticus decorated with paintings, golden trellis-work laden with flowers, amidst which flutter flights of smiling Cupids. Then, on the evening when he returned from the Farnesina, he declared that he had brought all the dead soul of ancient Rome away with him, and it was not the paintings executed after Raffaelle's designs that had touched him, it was rather the pretty hall on the river side decorated in soft blue and pink and lilac, with an art devoid of genius yet so charming and so Roman; and in particular it was the abandoned garden once stretching down to the Tiber, and now shut off from it by the new quay, and presenting an aspect of woeful desolation, ravaged, bossy and weedy like a cemetery, albeit the golden fruit of orange and citron tree still ripened there.

And for the last time a shock came to Pierre's heart on the lovely evening when he visited the Villa Medici. There he was on French soil.* And again what a marvellous garden he found with box-plants, and pines, and avenues full of magnificence and charm! What a refuge for antique reverie was that wood of ilex-trees, so old and so sombre, where the sun in declining cast fiery gleams of red gold amidst the sheeny bronze of the foliage. You ascend by endless steps, and from the crowning belvedere on high you embrace all Rome at a glance as though by opening your arms you could seize it in its entirety. From the villa's dining-room, decorated with portraits of all the artists who have successfully sojourned there, and from the spacious peaceful library one beholds the same splendid, broad, all-conquering panorama, a panorama of unlimited ambition, whose infinite ought to set in the hearts of the young men dwelling there a determination to subjugate the world. Pierre, who came thither opposed to the principle of the "Prix de Rome," that traditional, uniform education so dangerous for originality, was for a moment charmed by the warm peacefulness, the limpid solitude of the garden, and the sublime horizon where the wings of genius seemed to flutter. Ah! how delightful, to be only twenty and to live for three years amidst such infinite sweetness, encompassed by the finest works of man; to say to oneself that one is as yet too young to produce, and to reflect, and seek, and learn how to enjoy, suffer, and love! But Pierre afterwards reflected that this was not a fit task for youth, and that to appreciate the divine enjoyment of such a retreat, all art and blue sky, ripe age was needed, age with victories already gained and weariness following upon the accomplishment of work. He chatted with some of the young pensioners, and remarked that if those who were inclined to dreaminess and contemplation, like those who could merely claim mediocrity, accommodated themselves to this life cloistered in the art of the past, on the other hand artists of active bent and personal temperament pined with impatience, their eyes ever turned towards Paris, their souls eager to plunge into the furnace of battle and production.

* Here is the French Academy, where winners of the "Prix de
Rome" in painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving, and
music are maintained by the French Government for three
years. The creation dates from Louis XIV.—Trans.

All those gardens of which Pierre spoke to Dario and Benedetta with so much rapture, awoke within them the memory of the garden of the Villa Montefiori, now a waste, but once so green, planted with the finest orange-trees of Rome, a grove of centenarian orange-trees where they had learnt to love one another. And the memory of their early love brought thoughts of their present situation and their future prospects. To these the conversation always reverted, and evening after evening Pierre witnessed their delight, and heard them talk of coming happiness like lovers transported to the seventh heaven. The suit for the dissolution of Benedetta's marriage was now assuming a more and more favourable aspect. Guided by a powerful hand, Donna Serafina was apparently acting very vigorously, for almost every day she had some further good news to report. She was indeed anxious to finish the affair both for the continuity and for the honour of the name, for on the one hand Dario refused to marry any one but his cousin, and on the other this marriage would explain everything and put an end to an intolerable situation. The scandalous rumours which circulated both in the white and the black world quite incensed her, and a victory was the more necessary as Leo XIII, already so aged, might be snatched away at any moment, and in the Conclave which would follow she desired that her brother's name should shine forth with untarnished, sovereign radiance. Never had the secret ambition of her life, the hope that her race might give a third pope to the Church, filled her with so much passion. It was as if she therein sought a consolation for the harsh abandonment of Advocate Morano. Invariably clad in sombre garb, ever active and slim, so tightly laced that from behind one might have taken her for a young girl, she was so to say the black soul of that old palace; and Pierre, who met her everywhere, prowling and inspecting like a careful house-keeper, and jealously watching over her brother the Cardinal, bowed to her in silence, chilled to the heart by the stern look of her withered wrinkled face in which was set the large, opiniative nose of her family. However she barely returned his bows, for she still disdained that paltry foreign priest, and only tolerated him in order to please Monsignor Nani and Viscount Philibert de la Choue.

A witness every evening of the anxious delight and impatience of Benedetta and Dario, Pierre by degrees became almost as impassioned as themselves, as desirous for an early solution. Benedetta's suit was about to come before the Congregation of the Council once more. Monsignor Palma, the defender of the marriage, had demanded a supplementary inquiry after the favourable decision arrived at in the first instance by a bare majority of one vote—a majority which the Pope would certainly not have thought sufficient had he been asked for his ratification. So the question now was to gain votes among the ten cardinals who formed the Congregation, to persuade and convince them, and if possible ensure an almost unanimous pronouncement. The task was arduous, for, instead of facilitating matters, Benedetta's relationship to Cardinal Boccanera raised many difficulties, owing to the intriguing spirit rife at the Vatican, the spite of rivals who, by perpetuating the scandal, hoped to destroy Boccanera's chance of ever attaining to the papacy. Every afternoon, however, Donna Serafina devoted herself to the task of winning votes under the direction of her confessor, Father Lorenza, whom she saw daily at the Collegio Germanico, now the last refuge of the Jesuits in Rome, for they have ceased to be masters of the Gesu. The chief hope of success lay in Prada's formal declaration that he would not put in an appearance. The whole affair wearied and irritated him; the imputations levelled against him as a man, seemed to him supremely odious and ridiculous; and he no longer even took the trouble to reply to the assignations which were sent to him. He acted indeed as if he had never been married, though deep in his heart the wound dealt to his passion and his pride still lingered, bleeding afresh whenever one or another of the scandalous rumours in circulation reached his ears. However, as their adversary desisted from all action, one can understand that the hopes of Benedetta and Dario increased, the more so as hardly an evening passed without Donna Serafina telling them that she believed she had gained the support of another cardinal.

But the man who terrified them all was Monsignor Palma, whom the Congregation had appointed to defend the sacred ties of matrimony. His rights and privileges were almost unlimited, he could appeal yet again, and in any case would make the affair drag on as long as it pleased him. His first report, in reply to Morano's memoir, had been a terrible blow, and it was now said that a second one which he was preparing would prove yet more pitiless, establishing as a fundamental principle of the Church that it could not annul a marriage whose nonconsummation was purely and simply due to the action of the wife in refusing obedience to her husband. In presence of such energy and logic, it was unlikely that the cardinals, even if sympathetic, would dare to advise the Holy Father to dissolve the marriage. And so discouragement was once more overcoming Benedetta when Donna Serafina, on returning from a visit to Monsignor Nani, calmed her somewhat by telling her that a mutual friend had undertaken to deal with Monsignor Palma. However, said she, even if they succeeded, it would doubtless cost them a large sum.

Monsignor Palma, a theologist expert in all canonical affairs, and a perfectly honest man in pecuniary matters, had met with a great misfortune in his life. He had a niece, a poor and lovely girl, for whom, unhappily, in his declining years he conceived an insensate passion, with the result that to avoid a scandal he was compelled to marry her to a rascal who now preyed upon her and even beat her. And the prelate was now passing through a fearful crisis, weary of reducing himself to beggary, and indeed no longer having the money necessary to extricate his nephew by marriage from a very nasty predicament, the result of cheating at cards. So the idea was to save the young man by a considerable pecuniary payment, and then to procure him employment without asking aught of his uncle, who, as if offering complicity, came in tears one evening, when night had fallen, to thank Donna Serafina for her exceeding goodness.

Pierre was with Dario that evening when Benedetta entered the room, laughing and joyfully clapping her bands. "It's done, it's done!" she said, "he has just left aunt, and vowed eternal gratitude to her. He will now be obliged to show himself amiable."

However Dario distrustfully inquired: "But was he made to sign anything, did he enter into a formal engagement?"

"Oh! no; how could one do that? It's such a delicate matter," replied Benedetta. "But people say that he is a very honest man." Nevertheless, in spite of these words, she herself became uneasy. What if Monsignor Palma should remain incorruptible in spite of the great service which had been rendered him? Thenceforth this idea haunted them, and their suspense began once more.

Dario, eager to divert his mind, was imprudent enough to get up before he was perfectly cured, and, his wound reopening, he was obliged to take to his bed again for a few days. Every evening, as previously, Pierre strove to enliven him with an account of his strolls. The young priest was now getting bolder, rambling in turn through all the districts of Rome, and discovering the many "classical" curiosities catalogued in the guide-books. One evening he spoke with a kind of affection of the principal squares of the city which he had first thought commonplace, but which now seemed to him very varied, each with original features of its own. There was the noble Piazza del Popolo of such monumental symmetry and so full of sunlight; there was the Piazza di Spagna, the lively meeting-place of foreigners, with its double flight of a hundred and thirty steps gilded by the sun; there was the vast Piazza Colonna, always swarming with people, and the most Italian of all the Roman squares from the presence of the idle, careless crowd which ever lounged round the column of Marcus Aurelius as if waiting for fortune to fall from heaven; there was also the long and regular Piazza Navona, deserted since the market was no longer held there, and retaining a melancholy recollection of its former bustling life; and there was the Campo dei Fiori, which was invaded each morning by the tumultuous fruit and vegetable markets, quite a plantation of huge umbrellas sheltering heaps of tomatoes, pimentoes, and grapes amidst a noisy stream of dealers and housewives. Pierre's great surprise, however, was the Piazza del Campidoglio—the "Square of the Capitol"—which to him suggested a summit, an open spot overlooking the city and the world, but which he found to be small and square, and on three sides enclosed by palaces, whilst on the fourth side the view was of little extent.* There are no passers-by there; visitors usually come up by a flight of steps bordered by a few palm-trees, only foreigners making use of the winding carriage-ascent. The vehicles wait, and the tourists loiter for a while with their eyes raised to the admirable equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, in antique bronze, which occupies the centre of the piazza. Towards four o'clock, when the sun gilds the left-hand palace, and the slender statues of its entablature show vividly against the blue sky, you might think yourself in some warm cosy square of a little provincial town, what with the women of the neighbourhood who sit knitting under the arcade, and the bands of ragged urchins who disport themselves on all sides like school-boys in a playground.

* The Piazza del Campidoglio is really a depression between the
Capitolium proper and the northern height called the Arx. It is
supposed to have been the exact site of Romulus's traditional
Asylum.—Trans.

Then, on another evening Pierre told Benedetta and Dario of his admiration for the Roman fountains, for in no other city of the world does water flow so abundantly and magnificently in fountains of bronze and marble, from the boat-shaped Fontana della Barcaccia on the Piazza di Spagna, the Triton on the Piazza Barberini, and the Tortoises which give their name to the Piazza delle Tartarughe, to the three fountains of the Piazza Navona where Bernini's vast central composition of rock and river-gods rises so triumphantly, and to the colossal and pompous fountain of Trevi, where King Neptune stands on high attended by lofty figures of Health and Fruitfulness. And on yet another evening Pierre came home quite pleased, relating that he had at last discovered why it was that the old streets around the Capitol and along the Tiber seemed to him so strange: it was because they had no footways, and pedestrians, instead of skirting the walls, invariably took the middle of the road, leisurely wending their way among the vehicles. Pierre was very fond of those old districts with their winding lanes, their tiny squares so irregular in shape, and their huge square mansions swamped by a multitudinous jumble of little houses. He found a charm, too, in the district of the Esquiline, where, besides innumerable flights of ascending steps, each of grey pebbles edged with white stone, there were sudden sinuous slopes, tiers of terraces, seminaries and convents, lifeless, with their windows ever closed, and lofty, blank walls above which a superb palm-tree would now and again soar into the spotless blue of the sky. And on yet another evening, having strolled into the Campagna beside the Tiber and above the Ponte Molle, he came back full of enthusiasm for a form of classical art which hitherto he had scarcely appreciated. Along the river bank, however, he had found the very scenery that Poussin so faithfully depicted: the sluggish, yellow stream fringed with reeds; low riven cliffs, whose chalky whiteness showed against the ruddy background of a far-stretching, undulating plain, bounded by blue hills; a few spare trees with a ruined porticus opening on to space atop of the bank, and a line of pale-hued sheep descending to drink, whilst the shepherd, with an elbow resting on the trunk of an ilex-tree, stood looking on. It was a special kind of beauty, broad and ruddy, made up of nothing, sometimes simplified into a series of low, horizontal lines, but ever ennobled by the great memories it evoked: the Roman legions marching along the paved highways across the bare Campagna; the long slumber of the middle ages; and then the awakening of antique nature in the midst of Catholicism, whereby, for the second time, Rome became ruler of the world.

One day when Pierre came back from seeing the great modern cemetery, the Campo Verano, he found Celia, as well as Benedetta, by the side of Dario's bed. "What, Monsieur l'Abbe!" exclaimed the little Princess when she learnt where he had been; "it amuses you to visit the dead?"

"Oh those Frenchmen," remarked Dario, to whom the mere idea of a cemetery was repulsive; "those Frenchmen seem to take a pleasure in making their lives wretched with their partiality for gloomy scenes."

"But there is no escaping the reality of death," gently replied Pierre; "the best course is to look it in the face."

This made the Prince quite angry. "Reality, reality," said he, "when reality isn't pleasant I don't look at it; I try never to think of it even."

In spite of this rejoinder, Pierre, with his smiling, placid air, went on enumerating the things which had struck him: first, the admirable manner in which the cemetery was kept, then the festive appearance which it derived from the bright autumn sun, and the wonderful profusion in which marble was lavished in slabs, statues, and chapels. The ancient atavism had surely been at work, the sumptuous mausoleums of the Appian Way had here sprung up afresh, making death a pretext for the display of pomp and pride. In the upper part of the cemetery the Roman nobility had a district of its own, crowded with veritable temples, colossal statues, groups of several figures; and if at times the taste shown in these monuments was deplorable, it was none the less certain that millions had been expended on them. One charming feature of the place, said Pierre, was that the marbles, standing among yews and cypresses were remarkably well preserved, white and spotless; for, if the summer sun slowly gilded them, there were none of those stains of moss and rain which impart an aspect of melancholy decay to the statues of northern climes.

Touched by the discomfort of Dario, Benedetta, hitherto silent, ended by interrupting Pierre. "And was the hunt interesting?" she asked, turning to Celia.

The little Princess had been taken by her mother to see a fox-hunt, and had been speaking of it when the priest entered the room.

"Yes, it was very interesting, my dear," she replied; "the meet was at noon near the tomb of Caecilia Metella, where a buffet had been arranged under a tent. And there was such a number of people—the foreign colony, the young men of the embassies, and some officers, not to mention ourselves—all the men in scarlet and a great many ladies in habits. The 'throw-off' was at one o'clock, and the gallop lasted more than two hours and a half, so that the fox had a very long run. I wasn't able to follow, but all the same I saw some extraordinary things—a great wall which the whole hunt had to leap, and then ditches and hedges—a mad race indeed in the rear of the hounds. There were two accidents, but nothing serious; one gentleman, who was unseated, sprained his wrist badly, and another broke his leg."*

* The Roman Hunt, which counts about one hundred subscribers,
has flourished since 1840. There is a kennel of English
hounds, an English huntsman and whip, and a stable of
English hunters.—Trans.

Dario had listened to Celia with passionate interest, for fox-hunting is one of the great pleasures of Rome, and the Campagna, flat and yet bristling with obstacles, is certainly well adapted to the sport. "Ah!" said the young Prince in a despairing tone, "how idiotic it is to be riveted to this room! I shall end by dying of ennui!"

Benedetta contented herself with smiling; neither reproach nor expression of sadness came from her at this candid display of egotism. Her own happiness at having him all to herself in the room where she nursed him was great indeed; still her love, at once full of youth and good sense, included a maternal element, and she well understood that he hardly amused himself, deprived as he was of his customary pleasures and severed from his friends, few of whom he was willing to receive, for he feared that they might think the story of the dislocated shoulder suspicious. Of course there were no more fetes, no more evenings at the theatre, no more flirtations. But above everything else Dario missed the Corso, and suffered despairingly at no longer seeing or learning anything by watching the procession of Roman society from four to five each afternoon. Accordingly, as soon as an intimate called, there were endless questions: Had the visitor seen so and so? Had such a one reappeared? How had a certain friend's love affair ended? Was any new adventure setting the city agog? And so forth; all the petty frivolities, nine days' wonders, and puerile intrigues in which the young Prince had hitherto expended his manly energy.

After a pause Celia, who was fond of coming to him with innocent gossip, fixed her candid eyes on him—the fathomless eyes of an enigmatical virgin, and resumed: "How long it takes to set a shoulder right!"

Had she, child as she was, with love her only business, divined the truth? Dario in his embarrassment glanced at Benedetta, who still smiled. However, the little Princess was already darting to another subject: "Ah! you know, Dario, at the Corso yesterday I saw a lady—" Then she stopped short, surprised and embarrassed that these words should have escaped her. However, in all bravery she resumed like one who had been a friend since childhood, sharing many a little love secret: "Yes, a very pretty person whom you know. Well, she had a bouquet of white roses with her all the same."

At this Benedetta indulged in a burst of frank merriment, and Dario, still looking at her, also laughed. She had twitted him during the early days because no young woman ever sent to make inquiries about him. For his part, he was not displeased with the rupture, for the continuance of the connection might have proved embarrassing; and so, although his vanity may have been slightly hurt, the news that he was already replaced in La Tonietta's affections was welcome rather than otherwise. "Ah!" he contented himself with saying, "the absent are always in the wrong."

"The man one loves is never absent," declared Celia with her grave, candid air.

However, Benedetta had stepped up to the bed to raise the young man's pillows: "Never mind, Dario mio," said she, "all those things are over; I mean to keep you, and you will only have me to love."

He gave her a passionate glance and kissed her hair. She spoke the truth: he had never loved any one but her, and she was not mistaken in her anticipation of keeping him always to herself alone, as soon as they should be wedded. To her great delight, since she had been nursing him he had become quite childish again, such as he had been when she had learnt to love him under the orange-trees of the Villa Montefiori. He retained a sort of puerility, doubtless the outcome of impoverished blood, that return to childhood which one remarks amongst very ancient races; and he toyed on his bed with pictures, gazed for hours at photographs, which made him laugh. Moreover, his inability to endure suffering had yet increased; he wished Benedetta to be gay and sing, and amused her with his petty egotism which led him to dream of a life of continual joy with her. Ah! how pleasant it would be to live together and for ever in the sunlight, to do nothing and care for nothing, and even if the world should crumble somewhere to heed it not!

"One thing which greatly pleases me," suddenly said the young Prince, "is that Monsieur l'Abbe has ended by falling in love with Rome."

Pierre admitted it with a good grace.

"We told you so," remarked Benedetta. "A great deal of time is needed for one to understand and love Rome. If you had only stayed here for a fortnight you would have gone off with a deplorable idea of us, but now that you have been here for two full months we are quite at ease, for you will never think of us without affection."

She looked exceedingly charming as she spoke these words, and Pierre again bowed. However, he had already given thought to the phenomenon, and fancied he could explain it. When a stranger comes to Rome he brings with him a Rome of his own, a Rome such as he dreams of, so ennobled by imagination that the real Rome proves a terrible disenchantment. And so it is necessary to wait for habituation, for the mediocrity of the reality to soften, and for the imagination to have time to kindle again, and only behold things such as they are athwart the prodigious splendour of the past.

However, Celia had risen and was taking leave. "Good-bye, dear," she said; "I hope the wedding will soon take place. You know, Dario, that I mean to be betrothed before the end of the month. Oh yes, I intend to make my father give a grand entertainment. And how nice it would be if the two weddings could take place at the same time!"

Two days later, after a long ramble through the Trastevere district, followed by a visit to the Palazzo Farnese, Pierre felt that he could at last understand the terrible, melancholy truth about Rome. He had several times already strolled through the Trastevere, attracted towards its wretched denizens by his compassion for all who suffered. Ah! that quagmire of wretchedness and ignorance! He knew of abominable nooks in the faubourgs of Paris, frightful "rents" and "courts" where people rotted in heaps, but there was nothing in France to equal the listless, filthy stagnation of the Trastevere. On the brightest days a dank gloom chilled the sinuous, cellar-like lanes, and the smell of rotting vegetables, rank oil, and human animality brought on fits of nausea. Jumbled together in a confusion which artists of romantic turn would admire, the antique, irregular houses had black, gaping entrances diving below ground, outdoor stairways conducting to upper floors, and wooden balconies which only a miracle upheld. There were crumbling fronts, shored up with beams; sordid lodgings whose filth and bareness could be seen through shattered windows; and numerous petty shops, all the open-air cook-stalls of a lazy race which never lighted a fire at home: you saw frying-shops with heaps of polenta, and fish swimming in stinking oil, and dealers in cooked vegetables displaying huge turnips, celery, cauliflowers, and spinach, all cold and sticky. The butcher's meat was black and clumsily cut up; the necks of the animals bristled with bloody clots, as though the heads had simply been torn away. The baker's loaves, piled on planks, looked like little round paving stones; at the beggarly greengrocers' merely a few pimentoes and fir-apples were shown under the strings of dry tomatoes which festooned the doorways; and the only shops which were at all attractive were those of the pork butchers with their salted provisions and their cheese, whose pungent smell slightly attenuated the pestilential reek of the gutters. Lottery offices, displaying lists of winning numbers, alternated with wine-shops, of which latter there was a fresh one every thirty yards with large inscriptions setting forth that the best wines of Genzano, Marino, and Frascati were to be found within. And the whole district teemed with ragged, grimy denizens, children half naked and devoured by vermin, bare-headed, gesticulating and shouting women, whose skirts were stiff with grease, old men who remained motionless on benches amidst swarms of hungry flies; idleness and agitation appearing on all sides, whilst cobblers sat on the sidewalks quietly plying their trade, and little donkeys pulled carts hither and thither, and men drove turkeys along, whip in hand, and hands of beggars rushed upon the few anxious tourists who had timorously ventured into the district. At the door of a little tailor's shop an old house-pail dangled full of earth, in which a succulent plant was flowering. And from every window and balcony, as from the many cords which stretched across the street from house to house, all the household washing hung like bunting, nameless drooping rags, the symbolical banners of abominable misery.

Pierre's fraternal, soul filled with pity at the sight. Ah! yes, it was necessary to demolish all those pestilential districts where the populace had wallowed for centuries as in a poisonous gaol! He was for demolition and sanitary improvement, even if old Rome were killed and artists scandalised. Doubtless the Trastevere was already greatly changed, pierced with several new thoroughfares which let the sun stream in. And amidst the abattis of rubbish and the spacious clearings, where nothing new had yet been erected, the remaining portions of the old district seemed even blacker and more loathsome. Some day, no doubt, it would all be rebuilt, but how interesting was this phase of the city's evolution: old Rome expiring and new Rome just dawning amidst countless difficulties! To appreciate the change it was necessary to have known the filthy Rome of the past, swamped by sewage in every form. The recently levelled Ghetto had, over a course of centuries, so rotted the soil on which it stood that an awful pestilential odour yet arose from its bare site. It was only fitting that it should long remain waste, so that it might dry and become purified in the sun. In all the districts on either side of the Tiber where extensive improvements have been undertaken you find the same scenes. You follow some narrow, damp, evil-smelling street with black house-fronts and overhanging roofs, and suddenly come upon a clearing as in a forest of ancient leprous hovels. There are squares, broad footways; lofty white carved buildings yet in the rough, littered with rubbish and fenced off. On every side you find as it were a huge building yard, which the financial crisis perpetuates; the city of to-morrow arrested in its growth, stranded there in its monstrous, precocious, surprising infancy. Nevertheless, therein lies good and healthful work, such as was and is absolutely necessary if Rome is to become a great modern city, instead of being left to rot, to dwindle into a mere ancient curiosity, a museum show-piece.

That day, as Pierre went from the Trastevere to the Palazzo Farnese, where he was expected, he chose a roundabout route, following the Via di Pettinari and the Via dei Giubbonari, the former so dark and narrow with a great hospital wall on one side and a row of wretched houses on the other, and the latter animated by a constant stream of people and enlivened by the jewellers' windows, full of big gold chains, and the displays of the drapers' shops, where stuffs hung in bright red, blue, green, and yellow lengths. And the popular district through which he had roamed and the trading district which he was now crossing reminded him of the castle fields with their mass of workpeople reduced to mendicity by lack of employment and forced to camp in the superb, unfinished, abandoned mansions. Ah! the poor, sad people, who were yet so childish, kept in the ignorance and credulity of a savage race by centuries of theocracy, so habituated to mental night and bodily suffering that even to-day they remained apart from the social awakening, simply desirous of enjoying their pride, indolence, and sunlight in peace! They seemed both blind and deaf in their decadence, and whilst Rome was being overturned they continued to lead the stagnant life of former times, realising nought but the worries of the improvements, the demolition of the old favourite districts, the consequent change in habits, and the rise in the cost of food, as if indeed they would rather have gone without light, cleanliness, and health, since these could only be secured by a great financial and labour crisis. And yet, at bottom, it was solely for the people, the populace, that Rome was being cleansed and rebuilt with the idea of making it a great modern capital, for democracy lies at the end of these present day transformations; it is the people who will inherit the cities whence dirt and disease are being expelled, and where the law of labour will end by prevailing and killing want. And so, though one may curse the dusting and repairing of the ruins and the stripping of all the wild flora from the Colosseum, though one may wax indignant at sight of the hideous fortress like ramparts which imprison the Tiber, and bewail the old romantic banks with their greenery and their antique dwellings dipping into the stream, one must at the same time acknowledge that life springs from death, and that to-morrow must perforce blossom in the dust of the past.

While thinking of all these things Pierre had reached the deserted, stern-looking Piazza Farnese, and for a moment he looked up at the bare monumental facade of the heavy square Palazzo, its lofty entrance where hung the tricolour, its rows of windows and its famous cornice sculptured with such marvellous art. Then he went in. A friend of Narcisse Habert, one of the attaches of the embassy to the King of Italy, was waiting for him, having offered to show him over the huge pile, the finest palace in Rome, which France had leased as a lodging for her ambassador.* Ah! that colossal, sumptuous, deadly dwelling, with its vast court whose porticus is so dark and damp, its giant staircase with low steps, its endless corridors, its immense galleries and halls. All was sovereign pomp blended with death. An icy, penetrating chill fell from the walls. With a discreet smile the attache owned that the embassy was frozen in winter and baked in summer. The only part of the building which was at all lively and pleasant was the first storey, overlooking the Tiber, which the ambassador himself occupied. From the gallery there, containing the famous frescoes of Annibale Caracci, one can see the Janiculum, the Corsini gardens, and the Acqua Paola above San Pietro in Montorio. Then, after a vast drawing-room comes the study, peaceful and pleasant, and enlivened by sunshine. But the dining-room, the bed-chambers, and other apartments occupied by the personnel look out on to the mournful gloom of a side street. All these vast rooms, twenty and four-and-twenty feet high, have admirable carved or painted ceilings, bare walls, a few of them decorated with frescoes, and incongruous furniture, superb pier tables mingling with modern bric-a-brac. And things become abominable when you enter the gala reception-rooms overlooking the piazza, for there you no longer find an article of furniture, no longer a hanging, nothing but disaster, a series of magnificent deserted halls given over to rats and spiders. The embassy occupies but one of them, where it heaps up its dusty archives. Near by is a huge hall occupying the height of two floors, and thus sixty feet in elevation. Reserved by the owner of the palace, the ex-King of Naples, it has become a mere lumber-room where maquettes, unfinished statues, and a very fine sarcophagus are stowed away amidst all kinds of remnants. And this is but a part of the palace. The ground floor is altogether uninhabited; the French "Ecole de Rome" occupies a corner of the second floor; while the embassy huddles in chilly fashion in the most habitable corner of the first floor, compelled to abandon everything else and lock the doors to spare itself the useless trouble of sweeping. No doubt it is grand to live in the Palazzo Farnese, built by Pope Paul III and for more than a century inhabited by cardinals; but how cruel the discomfort and how frightful the melancholy of this huge ruin, three-fourths of whose rooms are dead, useless, impossible, cut off from life. And the evenings, oh! the evenings, when porch, court, stairs, and corridors are invaded by dense gloom, against which a few smoky gas lamps struggle in vain, when a long, long journey lies before one through the lugubrious desert of stone, before one reaches the ambassador's warm and cheerful drawing-room!

* The French have two embassies at Rome: one at the Palazzo
Farnese, to the Italian Court, and the other at the Palazzo
Rospigliosi, to the Vatican.—Trans.

Pierre came away quite aghast. And, as he walked along, the many other grand palaces which he had seen during his strolls rose before him, one and all of them stripped of their splendour, shorn of their princely establishments, let out in uncomfortable flats! What could be done with those grandiose galleries and halls now that no fortune could defray the cost of the pompous life for which they had been built, or even feed the retinue needed to keep them up? Few indeed were the nobles who, like Prince Aldobrandini, with his numerous progeny, still occupied their entire mansions. Almost all of them let the antique dwellings of their forefathers to companies or individual tenants, reserving only a storey, and at times a mere lodging in some dark corner, for themselves. The Palazzo Chigi was let: the ground floor to bankers and the first floor to the Austrian ambassador, while the Prince and his family divided the second floor with a cardinal. The Palazzo Sciarra was let: the first floor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the second to a senator, while the Prince and his mother merely occupied the ground floor. The Palazzo Barberini was let: its ground floor, first floor, and second floor to various families, whilst the Prince found a refuge on the third floor in the rooms which had been occupied by his ancestors' lackeys. The Palazzo Borghese was let: the ground floor to a dealer in antiquities, the first floor to a Lodge of Freemasons, and the rest to various households, whilst the Prince only retained the use of a small suite of apartments. And the Palazzo Odescalchi, the Palazzo Colonna, the Palazzo Doria were let: their Princes reduced to the position of needy landlords eager to derive as much profit as possible from their property in order to make both ends meet. A blast of ruin was sweeping over the Roman patriziato, the greatest fortunes had crumbled in the financial crisis, very few remained wealthy, and what a wealth it was, stagnant and dead, which neither commerce nor industry could renew. The numerous princes who had tried speculation were stripped of their fortunes. The others, terrified, called upon to pay enormous taxes, amounting to nearly one-third of their incomes, could henceforth only wait and behold their last stagnant millions dwindle away till they were exhausted or distributed according to the succession laws. Such wealth as remained to these nobles must perish, for, like everything else, wealth perishes when it lacks a soil in which it may fructify. In all this there was solely a question of time: eventual ruin was a foregone and irremediable conclusion, of absolute, historical certainty. Those who resigned themselves to the course of letting their deserted mansions still struggled for life, seeking to accommodate themselves to present-day exigencies; whilst death already dwelt among the others, those stubborn, proud ones who immured themselves in the tombs of their race, like that appalling Palazzo Boccanera, which was falling into dust amidst such chilly gloom and silence, the latter only broken at long intervals when the Cardinal's old coach rumbled over the grassy court.

The point which most struck Pierre, however, was that his visits to the Trastevere and the Palazzo Farnese shed light one on the other, and led him to a conclusion which had never previously seemed so manifest. As yet no "people," and soon no aristocracy. He had found the people so wretched, ignorant, and resigned in its long infancy induced by historic and climatic causes that many years of instruction and culture were necessary for it to become a strong, healthy, and laborious democracy, conscious of both its rights and its duties. As for the aristocracy, it was dwindling to death in its crumbling palaces, no longer aught than a finished, degenerate race, with such an admixture also of American, Austrian, Polish, and Spanish blood that pure Roman blood became a rare exception; and, moreover, it had ceased to belong either to sword or gown, unwilling to serve constitutional Italy and forsaking the Sacred College, where only parvenus now donned the purple. And between the lowly and the aristocracy there was as yet no firmly seated middle class, with the vigour of fresh sap and sufficient knowledge, and good sense to act as the transitional educator of the nation. The middle class was made up in part of the old servants and clients of the princes, the farmers who rented their lands, the stewards, notaries, and solicitors who managed their fortunes; in part, too, of all the employees, the functionaries of every rank and class, the deputies and senators, whom the new Government had brought from the provinces; and, in particular, of the voracious hawks who had swooped down upon Rome, the Pradas, the men of prey from all parts of the kingdom, who with beak and talon devoured both people and aristocracy. For whom, then, had one laboured? For whom had those gigantic works of new Rome been undertaken? A shudder of fear sped by, a crack as of doom was heard, arousing pitiful disquietude in every fraternal heart. Yes, a threat of doom and annihilation: as yet no people, soon no aristocracy, and only a ravenous middle class, quarrying, vulture-like, among the ruins.

On the evening of that day, when all was dark, Pierre went to spend an hour on the river quay beyond the Boccanera mansion. He was very fond of meditating on that deserted spot in spite of the warnings of Victorine, who asserted that it was not safe. And, indeed, on such inky nights as that one, no cutthroat place ever presented a more tragic aspect. Not a soul, not a passer-by; a dense gloom, a void in front and on either hand. At a corner of the mansion, now steeped in darkness, there was a gas lamp which stood in a hollow since the river margin had been banked up, and this lamp cast an uncertain glimmer upon the quay, level with the latter's bossy soil. Thus long vague shadows stretched from the various materials, piles of bricks and piles of stone, which were strewn around. On the right a few lights shone upon the bridge near San Giovanni and in the windows of the hospital of the Santo Spirito. On the left, amidst the dim recession of the river, the distant districts were blotted out. Then yonder, across the stream, was the Trastevere, the houses on the bank looking like vague, pale phantoms, with infrequent window-panes showing a blurred yellow glimmer, whilst on high only a dark band shadowed the Janiculum, near whose summit the lamps of some promenade scintillated like a triangle of stars. But it was the Tiber which impassioned Pierre; such was its melancholy majesty during those nocturnal hours. Leaning over the parapet, he watched it gliding between the new walls, which looked like those of some black and monstrous prison built for a giant. So long as lights gleamed in the windows of the houses opposite he saw the sluggish water flow by, showing slow, moire-like ripples there where the quivering reflections endowed it with a mysterious life. And he often mused on the river's famous past and evoked the legends which assert that fabulous wealth lies buried in its muddy bed. At each fresh invasion of the barbarians, and particularly when Rome was sacked, the treasures of palaces and temples are said to have been cast into the water to prevent them from falling into the hands of the conquerors. Might not those golden bars trembling yonder in the glaucous stream be the branches of the famous candelabrum which Titus brought from Jerusalem? Might not those pale patches whose shape remained uncertain amidst the frequent eddies indicate the white marble of statues and columns? And those deep moires glittering with little flamelets, were they not promiscuous heaps of precious metal, cups, vases, ornaments enriched with gems? What a dream was that of the swarming riches espied athwart the old river's bosom, of the hidden life of the treasures which were said to have slumbered there for centuries; and what a hope for the nation's pride and enrichment centred in the miraculous finds which might be made in the Tiber if one could some day dry it up and search its bed, as had already been suggested! Therein, perchance, lay Rome's new fortune.

However, on that black night, whilst Pierre leant over the parapet, it was stern reality alone which occupied his mind. He was still pursuing the train of thought suggested by his visits to the Trastevere and the Farnese palace, and in presence of that lifeless water was coming to the conclusion that the selection of Rome for transformation into a modern capital was the great misfortune to which the sufferings of young Italy were due. He knew right well that the selection had been inevitable: Rome being the queen of glory, the antique ruler of the world to whom eternity had been promised, and without whom the national unity had always seemed an impossibility. And so the problem was a terrible one, since without Rome Italy could not exist, and with Rome it seemed difficult for it to exist. Ah! that dead river, how it symbolised disaster! Not a boat upon its surface, not a quiver of the commercial and industrial activity of those waters which bear life to the very hearts of great modern cities! There had been fine schemes, no doubt—Rome a seaport, gigantic works, canalisation to enable vessels of heavy tonnage to come up to the Aventine; but these were mere delusions; the authorities would scarcely be able to clear the river mouth, which deposits were continually choking. And there was that other cause of mortal languishment, the Campagna—the desert of death which the dead river crossed and which girdled Rome with sterility. There was talk of draining and planting it; much futile discussion on the question whether it had been fertile in the days of the old Romans; and even a few experiments were made; but, all the same, Rome remained in the midst of a vast cemetery like a city of other times, for ever separated from the modern world by that lande or moor where the dust of centuries had accumulated. The geographical considerations which once gave the city the empire of the world no longer exist. The centre of civilisation has been displaced. The basin of the Mediterranean has been divided among powerful nations. In Italy all roads now lead to Milan, the city of industry and commerce, and Rome is but a town of passage. And so the most valiant efforts have failed to rouse it from its invincible slumber. The capital which the newcomers sought to improvise with such extreme haste has remained unfinished, and has almost ruined the nation. The Government, legislators, and functionaries only camp there, fleeing directly the warm weather sets in so as to escape the pernicious climate. The hotels and shops even put up their shutters, and the streets and promenades become deserts, the city having failed to acquire any life of its own, and relapsing into death as soon as the artificial life instilled into it is withdrawn. So all remains in suspense in this purely decorative capital, where only a fresh growth of men and money can finish and people the huge useless piles of the new districts. If it be true that to-morrow always blooms in the dust of the past, one ought to force oneself to hope; but Pierre asked himself if the soil were not exhausted, and since mere buildings could no longer grow on it, if it were not for ever drained of the sap which makes a race healthy, a nation powerful.

As the night advanced the lights in the houses of the Trastevere went out one by one: yet Pierre for a long time lingered on the quay, leaning over the blackened river and yielding to hopelessness. There was now no distance to the gloom; all had become dense; no longer did any reflections set a moire-like, golden quiver in the water, or reveal beneath its mystery-concealing current a fantastic, dancing vision of fabulous wealth. Gone was the legend, gone the seven-branched golden candelabrum, gone the golden vases, gone the golden jewellery, the whole dream of antique treasure that had vanished into night, even like the antique glory of Rome. Not a glimmer, nothing but slumber, disturbed solely by the heavy fall of sewage from the drain on the right-hand, which could not be seen. The very water had disappeared, and Pierre no longer espied its leaden flow through the darkness, no longer had any perception of the sluggish senility, the long-dating weariness, the intense sadness of that ancient and glorious Tiber, whose waters now rolled nought but death. Only the vast, opulent sky, the eternal, pompous sky displayed the dazzling life of its milliards of planets above that river of darkness, bearing away the ruins of wellnigh three thousand years.

Before returning to his own chamber that evening Pierre entered Dario's room, and found Victorine there preparing things for the night. And as soon as she heard where he had been she raised her voice in protest: "What! you have again been to the quay at this time of night, Monsieur l'Abbe? You want to get a good knife thrust yourself, it seems. Well, for my part, I certainly wouldn't take the air at such a late hour in this dangerous city." Then, with her wonted familiarity, she turned and spoke to the Prince, who was lying back in an arm-chair and smiling: "That girl, La Pierina," she said, "hasn't been back here, but all the same I've lately seen her prowling about among the building materials."

Dario raised his hand to silence her, and, addressing Pierre, exclaimed: "But you spoke to her, didn't you? It's becoming idiotic! Just fancy that brute Tito coming back to dig his knife into my other shoulder—"

All at once he paused, for he had just perceived Benedetta standing there and listening to him; she had slipped into the room a moment previously in order to wish him good-night. At sight of her his embarrassment was great indeed; he wished to speak, explain his words, and swear that he was wholly innocent in the affair. But she, with a smiling face, contented herself with saying, "I knew all about it, Dario mio. I am not so foolish as not to have thought it all over and understood the truth. If I ceased questioning you it was because I knew, and loved you all the same."

The young woman looked very happy as she spoke, and for this she had good cause, for that very evening she had learnt that Monsignor Palma had shown himself grateful for the service rendered to his nephew by laying a fresh and favourable memoir on the marriage affair before the Congregation of the Council. He had been unwilling to recall his previous opinions so far as to range himself completely on the Contessina's side, but the certificates of two doctors whom she had recently seen had enabled him to conclude that her own declarations were accurate. And gliding over the question of wifely obedience, on which he had previously laid stress, he had skilfully set forth the reasons which made a dissolution of the marriage desirable. No hope of reconciliation could be entertained, so it was certain that both parties were constantly exposed to temptation and sin. He discreetly alluded to the fact that the husband had already succumbed to this danger, and praised the wife's lofty morality and piety, all the virtues which she displayed, and which guaranteed her veracity. Then, without formulating any conclusion of his own, he left the decision to the wisdom of the Congregation. And as he virtually repeated Advocate Morano's arguments, and Prada stubbornly refused to enter an appearance, it now seemed certain that the Congregation would by a great majority pronounce itself in favour of dissolution, a result which would enable the Holy Father to act benevolently.

"Ah! Dario mio!" said Benedetta, "we are at the end of our worries. But what a lot of money, what a lot of money it all costs! Aunt says that they will scarcely leave us water to drink."

So speaking she laughed with the happy heedlessness of an impassioned amorosa. It was not that the jurisdiction of the Congregations was in itself ruinous; indeed, in principle, it was gratuitous. Still there were a multitude of petty expenses, payments to subaltern employees, payments for medical consultations and certificates, copies of documents, and the memoirs and addresses of counsel. And although the votes of the cardinals were certainly not bought direct, some of them ended by costing considerable sums, for it often became necessary to win over dependants, to induce quite a little world to bring influence to bear upon their Eminences; without mentioning that large pecuniary gifts, when made with tact, have a decisive effect in clearing away the greatest difficulties in that sphere of the Vatican. And, briefly, Monsignor Palma's nephew by marriage had cost the Boccaneras a large sum.

"But it doesn't matter, does it, Dario mio?" continued Benedetta. "Since you are now cured, they must make haste to give us permission to marry. That's all we ask of them. And if they want more, well, I'll give them my pearls, which will be all I shall have left me."

He also laughed, for money had never held any place in his life. He had never had it at his pleasure, and simply hoped that he would always live with his uncle the cardinal, who would certainly not leave him and his young wife in the streets. Ruined as the family was, one or two hundred thousand francs represented nothing to his mind, and he had heard that certain dissolutions of marriage had cost as much as half a million. So, by way of response, he could only find a jest: "Give them my ring as well," said he; "give them everything, my dear, and we shall still be happy in this old palace even if we have to sell the furniture!"

His words filled her with enthusiasm; she took his head between both hands and kissed him madly on the eyes in an extraordinary transport of passion. Then, suddenly turning to Pierre, she said: "Oh! excuse me, Monsieur l'Abbe. I was forgetting that I have a commission for you. Yes, Monsignor Nani, who brought us that good news, bade me tell you that you are making people forget you too much, and that you ought to set to work to defend your book."

The priest listened in astonishment; then replied: "But it was he who advised me to disappear."

"No doubt—only it seems that the time has now come for you to see people and plead your cause. And Monsignor Nani has been able to learn that the reporter appointed to examine your book is Monsignor Fornaro, who lives on the Piazza Navona."

Pierre's stupefaction was increasing, for a reporter's name is never divulged, but kept quite secret, in order to ensure a free exercise of judgment. Was a new phase of his sojourn in Rome about to begin then? His mind was all wonderment. However, he simply answered: "Very good, I will set to work and see everybody."

PART IV.

X.

IN his anxiety to bring things to a finish, Pierre wished to begin his campaign on the very next day. But on whom should he first call if he were to steer clear of blunders in that intricate and conceited ecclesiastical world? The question greatly perplexed him; however, on opening his door that morning he luckily perceived Don Vigilio in the passage, and with a sudden inspiration asked him to step inside. He realised that this thin little man with the saffron face, who always trembled with fever and displayed such exaggerated, timorous discretion, was in reality well informed, mixed up in everything. At one period it had seemed to Pierre that the secretary purposely avoided him, doubtless for fear of compromising himself; but recently Don Vigilio had proved less unsociable, as though he were not far from sharing the impatience which must be consuming the young Frenchman amidst his long enforced inactivity. And so, on this occasion, he did not seek to avoid the chat on which Pierre was bent.

"I must apologise," said the latter, "for asking you in here when things are in such disorder. But I have just received some more linen and some winter clothing from Paris. I came, you know, with just a little valise, meaning to stay for a fortnight, and yet I've now been here for nearly three months, and am no more advanced than I was on the morning of my arrival."

Don Vigilio nodded. "Yes, yes, I know," said he.

Thereupon Pierre explained to him that Monsignor Nani had informed him, through the Contessina, that he now ought to act and see everybody for the defence of his book. But he was much embarrassed, as he did not know in what order to make his visits so that they might benefit him. For instance, ought he to call in the first place on Monsignor Fornaro, the consultore selected to report on his book, and whose name had been given him?

"Ah!" exclaimed Don Vigilio, quivering; "has Monsignor Nani gone as far as that—given you the reporter's name? That's even more than I expected." Then, forgetting his prudence, yielding to his secret interest in the affair, he resumed: "No, no; don't begin with Monsignor Fornaro. Your first visit should be a very humble one to the Prefect of the Congregation of the Index—his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti; for he would never forgive you for having offered your first homage to another should he some day hear of it." And, after a pause, Don Vigilio added, in a low voice, amidst a faint, feverish shiver: "And he would hear of it; everything becomes known."

Again he hesitated, and then, as if yielding to sudden, sympathetic courage, he took hold of the young Frenchman's hands. "I swear to you, my dear Monsieur Froment," he said, "that I should be very happy to help you, for you are a man of simple soul, and I really begin to feel worried for you. But you must not ask me for impossibilities. Ah! if you only knew—if I could only tell you of all the perils which surround us! However, I think I can repeat to you that you must in no wise rely on my patron, his Eminence Cardinal Boccanera. He has expressed absolute disapproval of your book in my presence on several occasions. Only he is a saint, a most worthy, honourable man; and, though he won't defend you, he won't attack you—he will remain neutral out of regard for his niece, whom he loves so dearly, and who protects you. So, when you see him, don't plead your cause; it would be of no avail, and might even irritate him."

Pierre was not particularly distressed by this news, for at his first interview with the Cardinal, and on the few subsequent occasions when he had respectfully visited him, he had fully understood that his Eminence would never be other than an adversary. "Well," said he, "I will wait on him to thank him for his neutrality."

But at this all Don Vigilio's terrors returned. "No, no, don't do that; he would perhaps realise that I have spoken to you, and then what a disaster—my position would be compromised. I've said nothing, nothing! See the cardinals to begin with, see all the cardinals. Let it be understood between us that I've said nothing more." And, on that occasion at any rate, Don Vigilio would speak no further, but left the room shuddering and darting fiery, suspicious glances on either side of the corridor.

Pierre at once went out to call on Cardinal Sanguinetti. It was ten o'clock, and there was a chance that he might find him at home. This cardinal resided on the first floor of a little palazzo in a dark, narrow street near San Luigi dei Francesi.* There was here none of the giant ruin full of princely and melancholy grandeur amidst which Cardinal Boccanera so stubbornly remained. The old regulation gala suite of rooms had been cut down just like the number of servants. There was no throne-room, no red hat hanging under a baldacchino, no arm-chair turned to the wall pending a visit from the Pope. A couple of apartments served as ante-rooms, and then came a salon where the Cardinal received; and there was no luxury, indeed scarcely any comfort; the furniture was of mahogany, dating from the empire period, and the hangings and carpets were dusty and faded by long use. Moreover, Pierre had to wait a long time for admittance, and when a servant, leisurely putting on his jacket, at last set the door ajar, it was only to say that his Eminence had been away at Frascati since the previous day.

* This is the French church of Rome, and is under the protection
of the French Government.—Trans.

Pierre then remembered that Cardinal Sanguinetti was one of the suburban bishops. At his see of Frascati he had a villa where he occasionally spent a few days whenever a desire for rest or some political motive impelled him to do so.

"And will his Eminence soon return?" Pierre inquired.

"Ah! we don't know. His Eminence is poorly, and expressly desired us to send nobody to worry him."

When Pierre reached the street again he felt quite bewildered by this disappointment. At first he wondered whether he had not better call on Monsignor Fornaro without more ado, but he recollected Don Vigilio's advice to see the cardinals first of all, and, an inspiration coming to him, he resolved that his next visit should be for Cardinal Sarno, whose acquaintance he had eventually made at Donna Serafina's Mondays. In spite of Cardinal Sarno's voluntary self-effacement, people looked upon him as one of the most powerful and redoubtable members of the Sacred College, albeit his nephew Narcisse Habert declared that he knew no man who showed more obtuseness in matters which did not pertain to his habitual occupations. At all events, Pierre thought that the Cardinal, although not a member of the Congregation of the Index, might well give him some good advice, and possibly bring his great influence to bear on his colleagues.

The young man straightway betook himself to the Palace of the Propaganda, where he knew he would find the Cardinal. This palace, which is seen from the Piazza di Spagna, is a bare, massive corner pile between two streets. And Pierre, hampered by his faulty Italian, quite lost himself in it, climbing to floors whence he had to descend again, and finding himself in a perfect labyrinth of stairs, passages, and halls. At last he luckily came across the Cardinal's secretary, an amiable young priest, whom he had already seen at the Boccanera mansion. "Why, yes," said the secretary, "I think that his Eminence will receive you. You did well to come at this hour, for he is always here of a morning. Kindly follow me, if you please."

Then came a fresh journey. Cardinal Sarno, long a Secretary of the Propaganda, now presided over the commission which controlled the organisation of worship in those countries of Europe, Africa, America, and Oceanica where Catholicism had lately gained a footing; and he thus had a private room of his own with special officers and assistants, reigning there with the ultra-methodical habits of a functionary who had grown old in his arm-chair, closely surrounded by nests of drawers, and knowing nothing of the world save the usual sights of the street below his window.

The secretary left Pierre on a bench at the end of a dark passage, which was lighted by gas even in full daylight. And quite a quarter of an hour went by before he returned with his eager, affable air. "His Eminence is conferring with some missionaries who are about to leave Rome," he said; "but it will soon be over, and he told me to take you to his room, where you can wait for him."

As soon as Pierre was alone in the Cardinal's sanctum he examined it with curiosity. Fairly spacious, but in no wise luxurious, it had green paper on its walls, and its furniture was of black wood and green damask. From two windows overlooking a narrow side street a mournful light reached the dark wall-paper and faded carpets. There were a couple of pier tables and a plain black writing-table, which stood near one window, its worn mole-skin covering littered with all sorts of papers. Pierre drew near to it for a moment, and glanced at the arm-chair with damaged, sunken seat, the screen which sheltered it from draughts, and the old inkstand splotched with ink. And then, in the lifeless and oppressive atmosphere, the disquieting silence, which only the low rumbles from the street disturbed, he began to grow impatient.

However, whilst he was softly walking up and down he suddenly espied a map affixed to one wall, and the sight of it filled him with such absorbing thoughts that he soon forgot everything else. It was a coloured map of the world, the different tints indicating whether the territories belonged to victorious Catholicism or whether Catholicism was still warring there against unbelief; these last countries being classified as vicariates or prefectures, according to the general principles of organisation. And the whole was a graphic presentment of the long efforts of Catholicism in striving for the universal dominion which it has sought so unremittingly since its earliest hour. God has given the world to His Church, but it is needful that she should secure possession of it since error so stubbornly abides. From this has sprung the eternal battle, the fight which is carried on, even in our days, to win nations over from other religions, as it was in the days when the Apostles quitted Judaea to spread abroad the tidings of the Gospel. During the middle ages the great task was to organise conquered Europe, and this was too absorbing an enterprise to allow of any attempt at reconciliation with the dissident churches of the East. Then the Reformation burst forth, schism was added to schism, and the Protestant half of Europe had to be reconquered as well as all the orthodox East.

War-like ardour, however, awoke at the discovery of the New World. Rome was ambitious of securing that other side of the earth, and missions were organised for the subjection of races of which nobody had known anything the day before, but which God had, nevertheless, given to His Church, like all the others. And by degrees the two great divisions of Christianity were formed, on one hand the Catholic nations, those where the faith simply had to be kept up, and which the Secretariate of State installed at the Vatican guided with sovereign authority, and on the other the schismatical or pagan nations which were to be brought back to the fold or converted, and over which the Congregation of the Propaganda sought to reign. Then this Congregation had been obliged to divide itself into two branches in order to facilitate its work—the Oriental branch, which dealt with the dissident sects of the East, and the Latin branch, whose authority extended over all the other lands of mission: the two forming a vast organisation—a huge, strong, closely meshed net cast over the whole world in order that not a single soul might escape.

It was in presence of that map that Pierre for the first time became clearly conscious of the mechanism which for centuries had been working to bring about the absorption of humanity. The Propaganda, richly dowered by the popes, and disposing of a considerable revenue, appeared to him like a separate force, a papacy within the papacy, and he well understood that the Prefect of the Congregation should be called the "Red Pope," for how limitless were the powers of that man of conquest and domination, whose hands stretched from one to the other end of the earth. Allowing that the Cardinal Secretary held Europe, that diminutive portion of the globe, did not he, the Prefect, hold all the rest—the infinity of space, the distant countries as yet almost unknown? Besides, statistics showed that Rome's uncontested dominion was limited to 200 millions of Apostolic and Roman Catholics; whereas the schismatics of the East and the Reformation, if added together, already exceeded that number, and how small became the minority of the true believers when, besides the schismatics, one brought into line the 1000 millions of infidels who yet remained to be converted. The figures struck Pierre with a force which made him shudder. What! there were 5 million Jews, nearly 200 million Mahommedans, more than 700 million Brahmanists and Buddhists, without counting another 100 million pagans of divers creeds, the whole making 1000 millions, and against these the Christians could marshal barely more than 400 millions, who were divided among themselves, ever in conflict, one half with Rome and the other half against her?* Was it possible that in 1800 years Christianity had not proved victorious over even one-third of mankind, and that Rome, the eternal and all-powerful, only counted a sixth part of the nations among her subjects? Only one soul saved out of every six—how fearful was the disproportion! However, the map spoke with brutal eloquence: the red-tinted empire of Rome was but a speck when compared with the yellow-hued empire of the other gods—the endless countries which the Propaganda still had to conquer. And the question arose: How many centuries must elapse before the promises of the Christ were realised, before the whole world were gained to Christianity, before religious society spread over secular society, and there remained but one kingdom and one belief? And in presence of this question, in presence of the prodigious labour yet to be accomplished, how great was one's astonishment when one thought of Rome's tranquil serenity, her patient stubbornness, which has never known doubt or weariness, her bishops and ministers toiling without cessation in the conviction that she alone will some day be the mistress of the world!

* Some readers may question certain of the figures given by M.
Zola, but it must be remembered that all such calculations
(even those of the best "authorities") are largely guesswork.
I myself think that there are more than 5 million Jews, and
more than 200 millions of Mahommedans, but I regard the alleged
number of Brahmanists and Buddhists as exaggerated. On the
other hand, some statistical tables specify 80 millions of
Confucianists, of whom M. Zola makes no separate mention.
However, as regards the number of Christians in the world, the
figures given above are, within a few millions, probably
accurate.—Trans.

Narcisse had told Pierre how carefully the embassies at Rome watched the doings of the Propaganda, for the missions were often the instruments of one or another nation, and exercised decisive influence in far-away lands. And so there was a continual struggle, in which the Congregation did all it could to favour the missionaries of Italy and her allies. It had always been jealous of its French rival, "L'Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi," installed at Lyons, which is as wealthy in money as itself, and richer in men of energy and courage. However, not content with levelling tribute on this French association, the Propaganda thwarted it, sacrificed it on every occasion when it had reason to think it might achieve a victory. Not once or twice, but over and over again had the French missionaries, the French orders, been driven from the scenes of their labours to make way for Italians or Germans. And Pierre, standing in that mournful, dusty room, which the sunlight never brightened, pictured the secret hot-bed of political intrigue masked by the civilising ardour of faith. Again he shuddered as one shudders when monstrous, terrifying things are brought home to one. And might not the most sensible be overcome? Might not the bravest be dismayed by the thought of that universal engine of conquest and domination, which worked with the stubbornness of eternity, not merely content with the gain of souls, but ever seeking to ensure its future sovereignty over the whole of corporeal humanity, and—pending the time when it might rule the nations itself—disposing of them, handing them over to the charge of this or that temporary master, in accordance with its good pleasure. And then, too, what a prodigious dream! Rome smiling and tranquilly awaiting the day when she will have united Christians, Mahommedans, Brahmanists, and Buddhists into one sole nation, of whom she will be both the spiritual and the temporal queen!

However, a sound of coughing made Pierre turn, and he started on perceiving Cardinal Sarno, whom he had not heard enter. Standing in front of that map, he felt like one caught in the act of prying into a secret, and a deep flush overspread his face. The Cardinal, however, after looking at him fixedly with his dim eyes, went to his writing-table, and let himself drop into the arm-chair without saying a word. With a gesture he dispensed Pierre of the duty of kissing his ring.

"I desired to offer my homage to your Eminence," said the young man. "Is your Eminence unwell?"

"No, no, it's nothing but a dreadful cold which I can't get rid of. And then, too, I have so many things to attend to just now."

Pierre looked at the Cardinal as he appeared in the livid light from the window, puny, lopsided, with the left shoulder higher than the right, and not a sign of life on his worn and ashen countenance. The young priest was reminded of one of his uncles, who, after thirty years spent in the offices of a French public department, displayed the same lifeless glance, parchment-like skin, and weary hebetation. Was it possible that this withered old man, so lost in his black cassock with red edging, was really one of the masters of the world, with the map of Christendom so deeply stamped on his mind, albeit he had never left Rome, that the Prefect of the Propaganda did not take a decision without asking his opinion?

"Sit down, Monsieur l'Abbe," said the Cardinal. "So you have come to see me—you have something to ask of me!" And, whilst disposing himself to listen, he stretched out his thin bony hands to finger the documents heaped up before him, glancing at each of them like some general, some strategist, profoundly versed in the science of his profession, who, although his army is far away, nevertheless directs it to victory from his private room, never for a moment allowing it to escape his mind.

Pierre was somewhat embarrassed by such a plain enunciation of the interested object of his visit; still, he decided to go to the point. "Yes, indeed," he answered, "it is a liberty I have taken to come and appeal to your Eminence's wisdom for advice. Your Eminence is aware that I am in Rome for the purpose of defending a book of mine, and I should be grateful if your Eminence would help and guide me." Then he gave a brief account of the present position of the affair, and began to plead his cause; but as he continued speaking he noticed that the Cardinal gave him very little attention, as though indeed he were thinking of something else, and failed to understand.

"Ah! yes," the great man at last muttered, "you have written a book. There was some question of it at Donna Serafina's one evening. But a priest ought not to write; it is a mistake for him to do so. What is the good of it? And the Congregation of the Index must certainly be in the right if it is prosecuting your book. At all events, what can I do? I don't belong to the Congregation, and I know nothing, nothing about the matter."

Pierre, pained at finding him so listless and indifferent, went on trying to enlighten and move him. But he realised that this man's mind, so far-reaching and penetrating in the field in which it had worked for forty years, closed up as soon as one sought to divert it from its specialty. It was neither an inquisitive nor a supple mind. All trace of life faded from the Cardinal's eyes, and his entire countenance assumed an expression of mournful imbecility. "I know nothing, nothing," he repeated, "and I never recommend anybody." However, at last he made an effort: "But Nani is mixed up in this," said he. "What does Nani advise you to do?"

"Monsignor Nani has been kind enough to reveal to me that the reporter is Monsignor Fornaro, and advises me to see him."

At this Cardinal Sarno seemed surprised and somewhat roused. A little light returned to his eyes. "Ah! really," he rejoined, "ah! really—Well, if Nani has done that he must have some idea. Go and see Monsignor Fornaro." Then, after rising and dismissing his visitor, who was compelled to thank him, bowing deeply, he resumed his seat, and a moment later the only sound in the lifeless room was that of his bony fingers turning over the documents before him.

Pierre, in all docility, followed the advice given him, and immediately betook himself to the Piazza Navona, where, however, he learnt from one of Monsignor Fornaro's servants that the prelate had just gone out, and that to find him at home it was necessary to call in the morning at ten o'clock. Accordingly it was only on the following day that Pierre was able to obtain an interview. He had previously made inquiries and knew what was necessary concerning Monsignor Fornaro. Born at Naples, he had there begun his studies under the Barnabites, had finished them at the Seminario Romano, and had subsequently, for many years, been a professor at the University Gregoriana. Nowadays Consultor to several Congregations and a Canon of Santa Maria Maggiore, he placed his immediate ambition in a Canonry at St. Peter's, and harboured the dream of some day becoming Secretary of the Consistorial Congregation, a post conducting to the cardinalate. A theologian of remarkable ability, Monsignor Fornaro incurred no other reproach than that of occasionally sacrificing to literature by contributing articles, which he carefully abstained from signing, to certain religious reviews. He was also said to be very worldly.

Pierre was received as soon as he had sent in his card, and perhaps he would have fancied that his visit was expected had not an appearance of sincere surprise, blended with a little anxiety, marked his reception.

"Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment," repeated the prelate, looking at the card which he still held. "Kindly step in—I was about to forbid my door, for I have some urgent work to attend to. But no matter, sit down."

Pierre, however, remained standing, quite charmed by the blooming appearance of this tall, strong, handsome man who, although five and forty years of age, was quite fresh and rosy, with moist lips, caressing eyes, and scarcely a grey hair among his curly locks. Nobody more fascinating and decorative could be found among the whole Roman prelacy. Careful of his person undoubtedly, and aiming at a simple elegance, he looked really superb in his black cassock with violet collar. And around him the spacious room where he received his visitors, gaily lighted as it was by two large windows facing the Piazza Navona, and furnished with a taste nowadays seldom met with among the Roman clergy, diffused a pleasant odour and formed a setting instinct with kindly cheerfulness.

"Pray sit down, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment," he resumed, "and tell me to what I am indebted for the honour of your visit."

He had already recovered his self-possession and assumed a naif, purely obliging air; and Pierre, though the question was only natural, and he ought to have foreseen it, suddenly felt greatly embarrassed, more embarrassed indeed than in Cardinal Sarno's presence. Should he go to the point at once, confess the delicate motive of his visit? A moment's reflection showed him that this would be the best and worthier course. "Dear me, Monseigneur," he replied, "I know very well that the step I have taken in calling on you is not usually taken, but it has been advised me, and it has seemed to me that among honest folks there can never be any harm in seeking in all good faith to elucidate the truth."

"What is it, what is it, then?" asked the prelate with an expression of perfect candour, and still continuing to smile.

"Well, simply this. I have learnt that the Congregation of the Index has handed you my book 'New Rome,' and appointed you to examine it; and I have ventured to present myself before you in case you should have any explanations to ask of me."

But Monsignor Fornaro seemed unwilling to hear any more. He had carried both hands to his head and drawn back, albeit still courteous. "No, no," said he, "don't tell me that, don't continue, you would grieve me dreadfully. Let us say, if you like, that you have been deceived, for nothing ought to be known, in fact nothing is known, either by others or myself. I pray you, do not let us talk of such matters."

Pierre, however, had fortunately remarked what a decisive effect was produced when he had occasion to mention the name of the Assessor of the Holy Office. So it occurred to him to reply: "I most certainly do not desire to give you the slightest cause for embarrassment, Monseigneur, and I repeat to you that I would never have ventured to importune you if Monsignor Nani himself had not acquainted me with your name and address."

This time the effect was immediate, though Monsignor Fornaro, with that easy grace which he introduced into all things, made some ceremony about surrendering. He began by a demurrer, speaking archly with subtle shades of expression. "What! is Monsignor Nani the tattler! But I shall scold him, I shall get angry with him! And what does he know? He doesn't belong to the Congregation; he may have been led into error. You must tell him that he has made a mistake, and that I have nothing at all to do with your affair. That will teach him not to reveal needful secrets which everybody respects!" Then, in a pleasant way, with winning glance and flowery lips, he went on: "Come, since Monsignor Nani desires it, I am willing to chat with you for a moment, my dear Monsieur Froment, but on condition that you shall know nothing of my report or of what may have been said or done at the Congregation."

Pierre in his turn smiled, admiring how easy things became when forms were respected and appearances saved. And once again he began to explain his case, the profound astonishment into which the prosecution of his book had thrown him, and his ignorance of the objections which were taken to it, and for which he had vainly sought a cause.

"Really, really," repeated the prelate, quite amazed at so much innocence. "The Congregation is a tribunal, and can only act when a case is brought before it. Proceedings have been taken against your book simply because it has been denounced."

"Yes, I know, denounced."

"Of course. Complaint was laid by three French bishops, whose names you will allow me to keep secret, and it consequently became necessary for the Congregation to examine the incriminated work."

Pierre looked at him quite scared. Denounced by three bishops? Why? With what object? Then he thought of his protector. "But Cardinal Bergerot," said he, "wrote me a letter of approval, which I placed at the beginning of my work as a preface. Ought not a guarantee like that to have been sufficient for the French episcopacy?"

Monsignor Fornaro wagged his head in a knowing way before making up his mind to reply: "Ah! yes, no doubt, his Eminence's letter, a very beautiful letter. I think, however, that it would have been much better if he had not written it, both for himself and for you especially." Then as the priest, whose surprise was increasing, opened his mouth to urge him to explain himself, he went on: "No, no, I know nothing, I say nothing. His Eminence Cardinal Bergerot is a saintly man whom everybody venerates, and if it were possible for him to sin it would only be through pure goodness of heart."

Silence fell. Pierre could divine that an abyss was opening, and dared not insist. However, he at last resumed with some violence: "But, after all, why should my book be prosecuted, and the books of others be left untouched? I have no intention of acting as a denouncer myself, but how many books there are to which Rome closes her eyes, and which are far more dangerous than mine can be!"

This time Monsignor Fornaro seemed glad to be able to support Pierre's views. "You are right," said he, "we cannot deal with every bad book, and it greatly distresses us. But you must remember what an incalculable number of works we should be compelled to read. And so we have to content ourselves with condemning the worst en bloc."

Then he complacently entered into explanations. In principle, no printer ought to send any work to press without having previously submitted the manuscript to the approval of the bishop of the diocese. Nowadays, however, with the enormous output of the printing trade, one could understand how terribly embarrassed the bishops would be if the printers were suddenly to conform to the Church's regulation. There was neither the time nor the money, nor were there the men necessary for such colossal labour. And so the Congregation of the Index condemned en masse, without examination, all works of certain categories: first, books which were dangerous for morals, all erotic writings, and all novels; next the various bibles in the vulgar tongue, for the perusal of Holy Writ without discretion was not allowable; then the books on magic and sorcery, and all works on science, history, or philosophy that were in any way contrary to dogma, as well as the writings of heresiarchs or mere ecclesiastics discussing religion, which should never be discussed. All these were wise laws made by different popes, and were set forth in the preface to the catalogue of forbidden books which the Congregation published, and without them this catalogue, to have been complete, would in itself have formed a large library. On turning it over one found that the works singled out for interdiction were chiefly those of priests, the task being so vast and difficult that Rome's concern extended but little beyond the observance of good order within the Church. And Pierre and his book came within the limit.

"You will understand," continued Monsignor Fornaro, "that we have no desire to advertise a heap of unwholesome writings by honouring them with special condemnation. Their name is legion in every country, and we should have neither enough paper nor enough ink to deal with them all. So we content ourselves with condemning one from time to time, when it bears a famous name and makes too much noise, or contains disquieting attacks on the faith. This suffices to remind the world that we exist and defend ourselves without abandoning aught of our rights or duties."

"But my book, my book," exclaimed Pierre, "why these proceedings against my book?"

"I am explaining that to you as far as it is allowable for me to do, my dear Monsieur Froment. You are a priest, your book is a success, you have published a cheap edition of it which sells very readily; and I don't speak of its literary merit, which is remarkable, for it contains a breath of real poetry which transported me, and on which I must really compliment you. However, under the circumstances which I have enumerated, how could we close our eyes to such a work as yours, in which the conclusion arrived at is the annihilation of our holy religion and the destruction of Rome?"

Pierre remained open-mouthed, suffocating with surprise. "The destruction of Rome!" he at last exclaimed; "but I desire to see Rome rejuvenated, eternal, again the queen of the world." And, once more mastered by his glowing enthusiasm, he defended himself and confessed his faith: Catholicism reverting to the principles and practices of the primitive Church, drawing the blood of regeneration from the fraternal Christianity of Jesus; the Pope, freed from all terrestrial royalty, governing the whole of humanity with charity and love, and saving the world from the frightful social cataclysm that threatens it by leading it to the real Kingdom of God: the Christian communion of all nations united in one nation only. "And can the Holy Father disavow me?" he continued. "Are not these his secret ideas, which people are beginning to divine, and does not my only offence lie in having expressed them perhaps too soon and too freely? And if I were allowed to see him should I not at once obtain from him an order to stop these proceedings?"

Monsignor Fornaro no longer spoke, but wagged his head without appearing offended by the priest's juvenile ardour. On the contrary, he smiled with increasing amiability, as though highly amused by so much innocence and imagination. At last he gaily responded, "Oh! speak on, speak on; it isn't I who will stop you. I'm forbidden to say anything. But the temporal power, the temporal power."

"Well, what of the temporal power?" asked Pierre.

The prelate had again become silent, raising his amiable face to heaven and waving his white hands with a pretty gesture. And when he once more opened his mouth it was to say: "Then there's your new religion—for the expression occurs twice: the new religion, the new religion—ah, Dio!"

Again he became restless, going off into an ecstasy of wonderment, at sight of which Pierre impatiently exclaimed: "I do not know what your report will be, Monseigneur, but I declare to you that I have had no desire to attack dogma. And, candidly now, my whole book shows that I only sought to write a work of pity and salvation. It is only justice that some account should be taken of one's intentions."

Monsignor Fornaro had become very calm and paternal again. "Oh! intentions! intentions!" he said as he rose to dismiss his visitor. "You may be sure, my dear Monsieur Froment, that I feel much honoured by your visit. Naturally I cannot tell you what my report will be; as it is, we have talked too much about it, and, in fact, I ought to have refused to listen to your defence. At the same time, you will always find me ready to be of service to you in anything that does not go against my duty. But I greatly fear that your book will be condemned." And then, as Pierre again started, he added: "Well, yes. It is facts that are judged, you know, not intentions. So all defence is useless; the book is there, and we take it such as it is. However much you may try to explain it, you cannot alter it. And this is why the Congregation never calls the accused parties before it, and never accepts from them aught but retraction pure and simple. And, indeed, the wisest course would be for you to withdraw your book and make your submission. No? You won't? Ah! how young you are, my friend!"

He laughed yet more loudly at the gesture of revolt, of indomitable pride which had just escaped his young friend, as he called him. Then, on reaching the door, he again threw off some of his reserve, and said in a low voice, "Come, my dear Abbe, there is something I will do for you. I will give you some good advice. At bottom, I myself am nothing. I deliver my report, and it is printed, and the members of the Congregation read it, but are quite free to pay no attention to it. However, the Secretary of the Congregation, Father Dangelis, can accomplish everything, even impossibilities. Go to see him; you will find him at the Dominican convent behind the Piazza di Spagna. Don't name me. And for the present good-bye, my dear fellow, good-bye."

Pierre once more found himself on the Piazza Navona, quite dazed, no longer knowing what to believe or hope. A cowardly idea was coming over him; why should he continue this struggle, in which his adversaries remained unknown and indiscernible? Why carry obstinacy any further, why linger any longer in that impassionating but deceptive Rome? He would flee that very evening, return to Paris, disappear there, and forget his bitter disillusion in the practice of humble charity. He was traversing one of those hours of weakness when the long-dreamt-of task suddenly seems to be an impossibility. However, amidst his great confusion he was nevertheless walking on, going towards his destination. And when he found himself in the Corso, then in the Via dei Condotti, and finally in the Piazza di Spagna, he resolved that he would at any rate see Father Dangelis. The Dominican convent is there, just below the Trinity de' Monti.

Ah! those Dominicans! Pierre had never thought of them without a feeling of respect with which mingled a little fear. What vigorous pillars of the principle of authority and theocracy they had for centuries proved themselves to be! To them the Church had been indebted for its greatest measure of authority; they were the glorious soldiers of its triumph. Whilst St. Francis won the souls of the humble over to Rome, St. Dominic, on Rome's behalf, subjected all the superior souls—those of the intelligent and powerful. And this he did with passion, amidst a blaze of faith and determination, making use of all possible means, preachings, writings, and police and judicial pressure. Though he did not found the Inquisition, its principles were his, and it was with fire and sword that his fraternal, loving heart waged war on schism. Living like his monks, in poverty, chastity, and obedience—the great virtues of those times of pride and licentiousness—he went from city to city, exhorting the impious, striving to bring them back to the Church and arraigning them before the ecclesiastical courts when his preachings did not suffice. He also laid siege to science, sought to make it his own, dreamt of defending God with the weapons of reason and human knowledge like a true forerunner of the angelic St. Thomas, that light of the middle ages, who joined the Dominican order and set everything in his "Summa Theologiae," psychology, logic, policy, and morals. And thus it was that the Dominicans filled the world, upholding the doctrines of Rome in the most famous pulpits of every nation, and contending almost everywhere against the free sprit of the Universities, like the vigilant guardians of dogma that they were, the unwearying artisans of the fortunes of the popes, the most powerful amongst all the artistic, scientific, and literary workers who raised the huge edifice of Catholicism such as it exists to-day.

However, Pierre, who could feel that this edifice was even now tottering, though it had been built, people fancied, so substantially as to last through all eternity, asked himself what could be the present use of the Dominicans, those toilers of another age, whose police system and whose tribunals had perished beneath universal execration, whose voices were no longer listened to, whose books were but seldom read, and whose role as savants and civilisers had come to an end in presence of latter-day science, the truths of which were rending dogma on all sides. Certainly the Dominicans still form an influential and prosperous order; but how far one is from the times when their general reigned in Rome, Master of the Holy Palace, with convents and schools, and subjects throughout Europe! Of all their vast inheritance, so far as the Roman curia is concerned, only a few posts now remain to them, and among others the Secretaryship of the Congregation of the Index, a former dependency of the Holy Office where they once despotically ruled.

Pierre was immediately ushered into the presence of Father Dangelis. The convent parlour was vast, bare, and white, flooded with bright sunshine. The only furniture was a table and some stools; and a large brass crucifix hung from the wall. Near the table stood the Father, a very thin man of about fifty, severely draped in his ample white habit and black mantle. From his long ascetic face, with thin lips, thin nose, and pointed, obstinate chin, his grey eyes shone out with a fixity that embarrassed one. And, moreover, he showed himself very plain and simple of speech, and frigidly polite in manner.

"Monsieur l'Abbe Froment—the author of 'New Rome,' I suppose?" Then seating himself on one stool and pointing to another, he added: "Pray acquaint me with the object of your visit, Monsieur l'Abbe."

Thereupon Pierre had to begin his explanation, his defence, all over again; and the task soon became the more painful as his words fell from his lips amidst death-like silence and frigidity. Father Dangelis did not stir; with his hands crossed upon his knees he kept his sharp, penetrating eyes fixed upon those of the priest. And when the latter had at last ceased speaking, he slowly said: "I did not like to interrupt you, Monsieur l'Abbe, but it was not for me to hear all this. Process against your book has begun, and no power in the world can stay or impede its course. I do not therefore realise what it is that you apparently expect of me."

In a quivering voice Pierre was bold enough to answer: "I look for some kindness and justice."

A pale smile, instinct with proud humility, arose to the Dominican's lips. "Be without fear," he replied, "God has ever deigned to enlighten me in the discharge of my modest duties. Personally, be it said, I have no justice to render; I am but an employee whose duty is to classify matters and draw up documents concerning them. Their Eminences, the members of the Congregation, will alone pronounce judgment on your book. And assuredly they will do so with the help of the Holy Spirit. You will only have to bow to their sentence when it shall have been ratified by his Holiness."

Then he broke off the interview by rising, and Pierre was obliged to do the same. The Dominican's words were virtually identical with those that had fallen from Monsignor Fornaro, but they were spoken with cutting frankness, a sort of tranquil bravery. On all sides Pierre came into collision with the same anonymous force, the same powerful engine whose component parts sought to ignore one another. For a long time yet, no doubt, he would be sent from one to the other, without ever finding the volitional element which reasoned and acted. And the only thing that he could do was to bow to it all.

However, before going off, it occurred to him once more to mention the name of Monsignor Nani, the powerful effect of which he had begun to realise. "I ask your pardon," he said, "for having disturbed you to no purpose, but I simply deferred to the kind advice of Monsignor Nani, who has condescended to show me some interest."

The effect of these words was unexpected. Again did Father Dangelis's thin face brighten into a smile, but with a twist of the lips, sharp with ironical contempt. He had become yet paler, and his keen intelligent eyes were flaming. "Ah! it was Monsignor Nani who sent you!" he said. "Well, if you think you need a protector, it is useless for you to apply to any other than himself. He is all-powerful. Go to see him; go to see him!"

And that was the only encouragement Pierre derived from his visit: the advice to go back to the man who had sent him. At this he felt that he was losing ground, and he resolved to return home in order to reflect on things and try to understand them before taking any further steps. The idea of questioning Don Vigilio at once occurred to him, and that same evening after supper he luckily met the secretary in the corridor, just as, candle in hand, he was on his way to bed.

"I have so many things that I should like to say to you," Pierre said to him. "Can you kindly come to my rooms for a moment?"

But the other promptly silenced him with a gesture, and then whispered: "Didn't you see Abbe Paparelli on the first floor? He was following us, I'm sure."

Pierre often saw the train-bearer roaming about the house, and greatly disliked his stealthy, prying ways. However, he had hitherto attached no importance to him, and was therefore much surprised by Don Vigilio's question. The other, without awaiting his reply, had returned to the end of the corridor, where for a long while he remained listening. Then he came back on tip-toe, blew out his candle, and darted into Pierre's sitting-room. "There—that's done," he murmured directly the door was shut. "But if it is all the same to you, we won't stop in this sitting-room. Let us go into your bed-room. Two walls are better than one."

When the lamp had been placed on the table and they found themselves seated face to face in that bare, faded bed-chamber, Pierre noticed that the secretary was suffering from a more violent attack of fever than usual. His thin puny figure was shivering from head to foot, and his ardent eyes had never before blazed so blackly in his ravaged, yellow face. "Are you poorly?" asked Pierre. "I don't want to tire you."

"Poorly, yes, I am on fire—but I want to talk. I can't bear it any longer. One always has to relieve oneself some day or other."

Was it his complaint that he desired to relieve; or was he anxious to break his long silence in order that it might not stifle him? This at first remained uncertain. He immediately asked for an account of the steps that Pierre had lately taken, and became yet more restless when he heard how the other had been received by Cardinal Sarno, Monsignor Fornaro, and Father Dangelis. "Yes, that's quite it," he repeated, "nothing astonishes me nowadays, and yet I feel indignant on your account. Yes, it doesn't concern me, but all the same it makes me ill, for it reminds me of all my own troubles. You must not rely on Cardinal Sarno, remember, for he is always elsewhere, with his mind far away, and has never helped anybody. But that Fornaro, that Fornaro!"

"He seemed to me very amiable, even kindly disposed," replied Pierre; "and I really think that after our interview, he will considerably soften his report."

"He! Why, the gentler he was with you the more grievously he will saddle you! He will devour you, fatten himself with such easy prey. Ah! you don't know him, dilizioso that he is, ever on the watch to rear his own fortune on the troubles of poor devils whose defeat is bound to please the powerful. I prefer the other one, Father Dangelis, a terrible man, no doubt, but frank and brave and of superior mind. I must admit, however, that he would burn you like a handful of straw if he were the master. And ah! if I could tell you everything, if I could show you the frightful under-side of this world of ours, the monstrous, ravenous ambition, the abominable network of intrigues, venality, cowardice, treachery, and even crime!"

On seeing Don Vigilio so excited, in such a blaze of spite, Pierre thought of extracting from him some of the many items of information which he had hitherto sought in vain. "Well, tell me merely what is the position of my affair," he responded. "When I questioned you on my arrival here you said that nothing had yet reached Cardinal Boccanera. But all information must now have been collected, and you must know of it. And, by the way, Monsignor Fornaro told me that three French bishops had asked that my book should be prosecuted. Three bishops, is it possible?"

Don Vigilio shrugged his shoulders. "Ah!" said he, "yours is an innocent soul! I'm surprised that there were only three! Yes, several documents relating to your affair are in our hands; and, moreover, things have turned out much as I suspected. The three bishops are first the Bishop of Tarbes, who evidently carries out the vengeance of the Fathers of Lourdes; and then the Bishops of Poitiers and Evreux, who are both known as uncompromising Ultramontanists and passionate adversaries of Cardinal Bergerot. The Cardinal, you know, is regarded with disfavour at the Vatican, where his Gallican ideas and broad liberal mind provoke perfect anger. And don't seek for anything else. The whole affair lies in that: an execution which the powerful Fathers of Lourdes demand of his Holiness, and a desire to reach and strike Cardinal Bergerot through your book, by means of the letter of approval which he imprudently wrote to you and which you published by way of preface. For a long time past the condemnations of the Index have largely been secret knock-down blows levelled at Churchmen. Denunciation reigns supreme, and the law applied is that of good pleasure. I could tell you some almost incredible things, how perfectly innocent books have been selected among a hundred for the sole object of killing an idea or a man; for the blow is almost always levelled at some one behind the author, some one higher than he is. And there is such a hot-bed of intrigue, such a source of abuses in this institution of the Index, that it is tottering, and even among those who surround the Pope it is felt that it must soon be freshly regulated if it is not to fall into complete discredit. I well understand that the Church should endeavour to retain universal power, and govern by every fit weapon, but the weapons must be such as one can use without their injustice leading to revolt, or their antique childishness provoking merriment!"

Pierre listened with dolorous astonishment in his heart. Since he had been at Rome and had seen the Fathers of the Grotto saluted and feared there, holding an authoritative position, thanks to the large alms which they contributed to the Peter's Pence, he had felt that they were behind the proceedings instituted against him, and realised that he would have to pay for a certain page of his book in which he had called attention to an iniquitous displacement of fortune at Lourdes, a frightful spectacle which made one doubt the very existence of the Divinity, a continual cause of battle and conflict which would disappear in the truly Christian society of to-morrow. And he could also now understand that his delight at the loss of the temporal power must have caused a scandal, and especially that the unfortunate expression "a new religion" had alone been sufficient to arm delatores against him. But that which amazed and grieved him was to learn that Cardinal Bergerot's letter was looked upon as a crime, and that his (Pierre's) book was denounced and condemned in order that adversaries who dared not attack the venerable pastor face to face might, deal him a cowardly blow from behind. The thought of afflicting that saintly man, of serving as the implement to strike him in his ardent charity, cruelly grieved Pierre. And how bitter and disheartening it was to find the most hideous questions of pride and money, ambition and appetite, running riot with the most ferocious egotism, beneath the quarrels of those leaders of the Church who ought only to have contended together in love for the poor!

And then Pierre's mind revolted against that supremely odious and idiotic Index. He now understood how it worked, from the arrival of the denunciations to the public posting of the titles of the condemned works. He had just seen the Secretary of the Congregation, Father Dangelis, to whom the denunciations came, and who then investigated the affair, collecting all documents and information concerning it with the passion of a cultivated authoritarian monk, who dreamt of ruling minds and consciences as in the heroic days of the Inquisition. Then, too, Pierre had visited one of the consultive prelates, Monsignor Fornaro, who was so ambitious and affable, and so subtle a theologian that he would have discovered attacks against the faith in a treatise on algebra, had his interests required it. Next there were the infrequent meetings of the cardinals, who at long intervals voted for the interdiction of some hostile book, deeply regretting that they could not suppress them all; and finally came the Pope, approving and signing the decrees, which was a mere formality, for were not all books guilty? But what an extraordinary wretched Bastille of the past was that aged Index, that senile institution now sunk into second childhood. One realised that it must have been a formidable power when books were rare and the Church had tribunals of blood and fire to enforce her edicts. But books had so greatly multiplied, the written, printed thoughts of mankind had swollen into such a deep broad river, that they had swept all opposition away, and now the Index was swamped and reduced to powerlessness, compelled more and more to limit its field of action, to confine itself to the examination of the writings of ecclesiastics, and even in this respect it was becoming corrupt, fouled by the worst passions and changed into an instrument of intrigue, hatred, and vengeance. Ah! that confession of decay, of paralysis which grew more and more complete amidst the scornful indifference of the nations. To think that Catholicism, the once glorious agent of civilisation, had come to such a pass that it cast books into hell-fire by the heap; and what books they were, almost the entire literature, history, philosophy, and science of the past and the present! Few works, indeed, are published nowadays that would not fall under the ban of the Church. If she seems to close her eyes, it is in order to avoid the impossible task of hunting out and destroying everything. Yet she stubbornly insists on retaining a semblance of sovereign authority over human intelligence, just as some very aged queen, dispossessed of her states and henceforth without judges or executioners, might continue to deliver vain sentences to which only an infinitesimal minority would pay heed. But imagine the Church momentarily victorious, miraculously mastering the modern world, and ask yourself what she, with her tribunals to condemn and her gendarmes to enforce, would do with human thought. Imagine a strict application of the Index regulations: no printer able to put anything whatever to press without the approval of his bishop, and even then every book laid before the Congregation, the past expunged, the present throttled, subjected to an intellectual Reign of Terror! Would not the closing of every library perforce ensue, would not the long heritage of written thought be cast into prison, would not the future be barred, would not all progress, all conquest of knowledge, be totally arrested? Rome herself is nowadays a terrible example of such a disastrous experiment—Rome with her congealed soil, her dead sap, killed by centuries of papal government, Rome which has become so barren that not a man, not a work has sprung from her midst even after five and twenty years of awakening and liberty! And who would accept such a state of things, not among people of revolutionary mind, but among those of religious mind that might possess any culture and breadth of view? Plainly enough it was all mere childishness and absurdity.

Deep silence reigned, and Pierre, quite upset by his reflections, made a gesture of despair whilst glancing at Don Vigilio, who sat speechless in front of him. For a moment longer, amidst the death-like quiescence of that old sleeping mansion, both continued silent, seated face to face in the closed chamber which the lamp illumined with a peaceful glow. But at last Don Vigilio leant forward, his eyes sparkling, and with a feverish shiver murmured: "It is they, you know, always they, at the bottom of everything."

Pierre, who did not understand, felt astonished, indeed somewhat anxious at such a strange remark coming without any apparent transition. "Who are they?" he asked.

"The Jesuits!"

In this reply the little, withered, yellow priest had set all the concentrated rage of his exploding passion. Ah! so much the worse if he had perpetrated a fresh act of folly. The cat was out of the bag at last! Nevertheless, he cast a final suspicious glance around the walls. And then he relieved his mind at length, with a flow of words which gushed forth the more irresistibly since he had so long held them in check. "Ah! the Jesuits, the Jesuits! You fancy that you know them, but you haven't even an idea of their abominable actions and incalculable power. They it is whom one always comes upon, everywhere, in every circumstance. Remember that whenever you fail to understand anything, if you wish to understand it. Whenever grief or trouble comes upon you, whenever you suffer, whenever you weep, say to yourself at once: 'It is they; they are there!' Why, for all I know, there may be one of them under that bed, inside that cupboard. Ah! the Jesuits, the Jesuits! They have devoured me, they are devouring me still, they will leave nothing of me at last, neither flesh nor bone."

Then, in a halting voice, he related the story of his life, beginning with his youth, which had opened so hopefully. He belonged to the petty provincial nobility, and had been dowered with a fairly large income, besides a keen, supple intelligence, which looked smilingly towards the future. Nowadays, he would assuredly have been a prelate, on the road to high dignities, but he had been foolish enough to speak ill of the Jesuits and to thwart them in two or three circumstances. And from that moment, if he were to be believed, they had caused every imaginable misfortune to rain upon him: his father and mother had died, his banker had robbed him and fled, good positions had escaped him at the very moment when he was about to occupy them, the most awful misadventures had pursued him amidst the duties of his ministry to such a point indeed, that he had narrowly escaped interdiction. It was only since Cardinal Boccanera, compassionating his bad luck, had taken him into his house and attached him to his person, that he had enjoyed a little repose. "Here I have a refuge, an asylum," he continued. "They execrate his Eminence, who has never been on their side, but they haven't yet dared to attack him or his servants. Oh! I have no illusions, they will end by catching me again, all the same. Perhaps they will even hear of our conversation this evening, and make me pay dearly for it; for I do wrong to speak, I speak in spite of myself. They have stolen all my happiness, and brought all possible misfortune on me, everything that was possible, everything—you hear me!"

Increasing discomfort was taking possession of Pierre, who, seeking to relieve himself by a jest, exclaimed: "Come, come, at any rate it wasn't the Jesuits who gave you the fever."

"Yes, yes, it was!" Don Vigilio violently declared. "I caught it on the bank of the Tiber one evening, when I went to weep there in my grief at having been driven from the little church where I officiated."

Pierre, hitherto, had never believed in the terrible legend of the Jesuits. He belonged to a generation which laughed at the idea of wehr-wolves, and considered the bourgeois fear of the famous black men, who hid themselves in walls and terrorised families, to be a trifle ridiculous. To him all such things seemed to be nursery tales, exaggerated by religious and political passion. And so it was with amazement that he examined Don Vigilio, suddenly fearing that he might have to deal with a maniac.

Nevertheless he could not help recalling the extraordinary story of the Jesuits. If St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic are the very soul and spirit of the middle ages, its masters and teachers, the former a living expression of all the ardent, charitable faith of the humble, and the other defending dogma and fixing doctrines for the intelligent and the powerful, on the other hand Ignatius de Loyola appeared on the threshold of modern times to save the tottering heritage by accommodating religion to the new developments of society, thereby ensuring it the empire of the world which was about to appear.

At the advent of the modern era it seemed as if the Deity were to be vanquished in the uncompromising struggle with sin, for it was certain that the old determination to suppress Nature, to kill the man within man, with his appetites, passions, heart, and blood, could only result in a disastrous defeat, in which, indeed, the Church found herself on the very eve of sinking; and it was the Jesuits who came to extricate her from this peril and reinvigorate her by deciding that it was she who now ought to go to the world, since the world seemed unwilling to go any longer to her. All lay in that; you find the Jesuits declaring that one can enter into arrangements with heaven; they bend and adjust themselves to the customs, prejudices, and even vices of the times; they smile, all condescension, cast rigourism aside, and practice the diplomacy of amiability, ever ready to turn the most awful abominations "to the greater glory of God." That is their motto, their battle-cry, and thence springs the moral principle which many regard as their crime: that all means are good to attain one's end, especially when that end is the furtherance of the Deity's interests as represented by those of the Church. And what overwhelming success attends the efforts of the Jesuits! they swarm and before long cover the earth, on all sides becoming uncontested masters. They shrive kings, they acquire immense wealth, they display such victorious power of invasion that, however humbly they may set foot in any country, they soon wholly possess it: souls, bodies, power, and fortune alike falling to them. And they are particularly zealous in founding schools, they show themselves to be incomparable moulders of the human brain, well understanding that power always belongs to the morrow, to the generations which are growing up and whose master one must be if one desire to reign eternally. So great is their power, based on the necessity of compromise with sin, that, on the morrow of the Council of Trent, they transform the very spirit of Catholicism, penetrate it, identify it with themselves and become the indispensable soldiers of the papacy which lives by them and for them. And from that moment Rome is theirs, Rome where their general so long commands, whence so long go forth the directions for the obscure tactics which are blindly followed by their innumerable army, whose skilful organisation covers the globe as with an iron network hidden by the velvet of hands expert in dealing gently with poor suffering humanity. But, after all, the most prodigious feature is the stupefying vitality of the Jesuits who are incessantly tracked, condemned, executed, and yet still and ever erect. As soon as their power asserts itself, their unpopularity begins and gradually becomes universal. Hoots of execration arise around them, abominable accusations, scandalous law cases in which they appear as corruptors and felons. Pascal devotes them to public contempt, parliaments condemn their books to be burnt, universities denounce their system of morals and their teaching as poisonous. They foment such disturbances, such struggles in every kingdom, that organised persecution sets in, and they are soon driven from everywhere. During more than a century they become wanderers, expelled, then recalled, passing and repassing frontiers, leaving a country amidst cries of hatred to return to it as soon as quiet has been restored. Finally, for supreme disaster, they are suppressed by one pope, but another re-establishes them, and since then they have been virtually tolerated everywhere. And in the diplomatic self-effacement, the shade in which they have the prudence to sequester themselves, they are none the less triumphant, quietly confident of their victory like soldiers who have once and for ever subdued the earth.

Pierre was aware that, judging by mere appearances, the Jesuits were nowadays dispossessed of all influence in Rome. They no longer officiated at the Gesu, they no longer directed the Collegio Romano, where they formerly fashioned so many souls; and with no abode of their own, reduced to accept foreign hospitality, they had modestly sought a refuge at the Collegio Germanico, where there is a little chapel. There they taught and there they still confessed, but without the slightest bustle or display. Was one to believe, however, that this effacement was but masterly cunning, a feigned disappearance in order that they might really remain secret, all-powerful masters, the hidden hand which directs and guides everything? People certainly said that the proclamation of papal Infallibility had been their work, a weapon with which they had armed themselves whilst feigning to bestow it on the papacy, in readiness for the coming decisive task which their genius foresaw in the approaching social upheavals. And thus there might perhaps be some truth in what Don Vigilio, with a shiver of mystery, related about their occult sovereignty, a seizin, as it were, of the government of the Church, a royalty ignored but nevertheless complete.

As this idea occurred to Pierre, a dim connection between certain of his experiences arose in his mind and he all at once inquired: "Is Monsignor Nani a Jesuit, then?"

These words seemed to revive all Don Vigilio's anxious passion. He waved his trembling hand, and replied: "He? Oh, he's too clever, too skilful by far to have taken the robe. But he comes from that Collegio Romano where his generation grew up, and he there imbibed that Jesuit genius which adapted itself so well to his own. Whilst fully realising the danger of wearing an unpopular and embarrassing livery, and wishing to be free, he is none the less a Jesuit in his flesh, in his bones, in his very soul. He is evidently convinced that the Church can only triumph by utilising the passions of mankind, and withal he is very fond of the Church, very pious at bottom, a very good priest, serving God without weakness in gratitude for the absolute power which God gives to His ministers. And besides, he is so charming, incapable of any brutal action, full of the good breeding of his noble Venetian ancestors, and deeply versed in knowledge of the world, thanks to his experiences at the nunciatures of Paris, Vienna, and other places, without mentioning that he knows everything that goes on by reason of the delicate functions which he has discharged for ten years past as Assessor of the Holy Office. Yes, he is powerful, all-powerful, and in him you do not have the furtive Jesuit whose robe glides past amidst suspicion, but the head, the brain, the leader whom no uniform designates."

This reply made Pierre grave, for he was quite willing to admit that an opportunist code of morals, like that of the Jesuits, was inoculable and now predominated throughout the Church. Indeed, the Jesuits might disappear, but their doctrine would survive them, since it was the one weapon of combat, the one system of strategy which might again place the nations under the dominion of Rome. And in reality the struggle which continued lay precisely in the attempts to accommodate religion to the century, and the century to religion. Such being the case, Pierre realised that such men as Monsignor Nani might acquire vast and even decisive importance.

"Ah! if you knew, if you knew," continued Don Vigilio, "he's everywhere, he has his hand in everything. For instance, nothing has ever happened here, among the Boccaneras, but I've found him at the bottom of it, tangling or untangling the threads according to necessities with which he alone is acquainted."

Then, in the unquenchable fever for confiding things which was now consuming him, the secretary related how Monsignor Nani had most certainly brought on Benedetta's divorce case. The Jesuits, in spite of their conciliatory spirit, have always taken up a hostile position with regard to Italy, either because they do not despair of reconquering Rome, or because they wait to treat in due season with the ultimate and real victor, whether King or Pope. And so Nani, who had long been one of Donna Serafina's intimates, had helped to precipitate the rupture with Prada as soon as Benedetta's mother was dead. Again, it was he who, to prevent any interference on the part of the patriotic Abbe Pisoni, the young woman's confessor and the artisan of her marriage, had urged her to take the same spiritual director as her aunt, Father Lorenza, a handsome Jesuit with clear and kindly eyes, whose confessional in the chapel of the Collegio Germanico was incessantly besieged by penitents. And it seemed certain that this manoeuvre had brought about everything; what one cleric working for Italy had done, was to be undone by another working against Italy. Why was it, however, that Nani, after bringing about the rupture, had momentarily ceased to show all interest in the affair to the point even of jeopardising the suit for the dissolution of the marriage? And why was he now again busying himself with it, setting Donna Serafina in action, prompting her to buy Monsignor Palma's support, and bringing his own influence to bear on the cardinals of the Congregation? There was mystery in all this, as there was in everything he did, for his schemes were always complicated and distant in their effects. However, one might suppose that he now wished to hasten the marriage of Benedetta and Dario, in order to stop all the abominable rumours which were circulating in the white world; unless, indeed, this divorce secured by pecuniary payments and the pressure of notorious influences were an intentional scandal at first spun out and now hastened, in order to harm Cardinal Boccanera, whom the Jesuits might desire to brush aside in certain eventualities which were possibly near at hand.

"To tell the truth, I rather incline to the latter view," said Don Vigilio, "the more so indeed as I learnt this evening that the Pope is not well. With an old man of eighty-four the end may come at any moment, and so the Pope can never catch cold but what the Sacred College and the prelacies are all agog, stirred by sudden ambitious rivalries. Now, the Jesuits have always opposed Cardinal Boccanera's candidature. They ought to be on his side, on account of his rank, and his uncompromising attitude towards Italy, but the idea of giving themselves such a master disquiets them, for they consider him unseasonably rough and stern, too violent in his faith, which unbending as it is would prove dangerous in these diplomatic times through which the Church is passing. And so I should in no wise be astonished if there were an attempt to discredit him and render his candidature impossible, by employing the most underhand and shameful means."

A little quiver of fear was coming over Pierre. The contagion of the unknown, of the black intrigues plotted in the dark, was spreading amidst the silence of the night in the depths of that palace, near that Tiber, in that Rome so full of legendary tragedies. But all at once the young man's mind reverted to himself, to his own affair. "But what is my part in all this?" he asked: "why does Monsignor Nani seem to take an interest in me? Why is he mixed up in the proceedings against my book?"

"Oh! one never knows, one never knows exactly!" replied Don Vigilio, waving his arms. "One thing I can say, that he only knew of the affair when the denunciations of the three bishops were already in the hands of Father Dangelis; and I have also learnt that he then tried to stop the proceedings, which he no doubt thought both useless and impolitic. But when a matter is once before the Congregation it is almost impossible for it to be withdrawn, and Monsignor Nani must also have come into collision with Father Dangelis who, like a faithful Dominican, is the passionate adversary of the Jesuits. It was then that he caused the Contessina to write to Monsieur de la Choue, requesting him to tell you to hasten here in order to defend yourself, and to arrange for your acceptance of hospitality in this mansion, during your stay."

This revelation brought Pierre's emotion to a climax. "You are sure of that?" he asked.

"Oh! quite sure. I heard Nani speak of you one Monday, and some time ago I told you that he seemed to know all about you, as if he had made most minute inquiries. My belief is that he had already read your book, and was extremely preoccupied about it."

"Do you think that he shares my ideas, then? Is he sincere, is he defending himself while striving to defend me?"

"Oh! no, no, not at all. Your ideas, why he certainly hates them, and your book and yourself as well. You have no idea what contempt for the weak, what hatred of the poor, and love of authority and domination he conceals under his caressing amiability. Lourdes he might abandon to you, though it embodies a marvellous weapon of government; but he will never forgive you for being on the side of the little ones of the world, and for pronouncing against the temporal power. If you only heard with what gentle ferocity he derides Monsieur de la Choue, whom he calls the weeping willow of Neo-Catholicism!"

Pierre carried his hands to his temples and pressed his head despairingly. "Then why, why, tell me I beg of you, why has he brought me here and kept me here in this house at his disposal? Why has he promenaded me up and down Rome for three long months, throwing me against obstacles and wearying me, when it was so easy for him to let the Index condemn my book if it embarrassed him? It's true, of course, that things would not have gone quietly, for I was disposed to refuse submission and openly confess my new faith, even against the decisions of Rome."

Don Vigilio's black eyes flared in his yellow face: "Perhaps it was that which he wished to prevent. He knows you to be very intelligent and enthusiastic, and I have often heard him say that intelligence and enthusiasm should not be fought openly."

Pierre, however, had risen to his feet, and instead of listening, was striding up and down the room as though carried away by the whirlwind of his thoughts. "Come, come," he said at last, "it is necessary that I should know and understand things if I am to continue the struggle. You must be kind enough to give me some detailed particulars about each of the persons mixed up in my affair. Jesuits, Jesuits everywhere? Mon Dieu, it may be so, you are perhaps right! But all the same you must point out the different shades to me. Now, for instance, what of that Fornaro?"

"Monsignor Fornaro, oh! he's whatever you like. Still he also was brought up at the Collegio Romano, so you may be certain that he is a Jesuit, a Jesuit by education, position, and ambition. He is longing to become a cardinal, and if he some day becomes one, he'll long to be the next pope. Besides, you know, every one here is a candidate to the papacy as soon as he enters the seminary."

"And Cardinal Sanguinetti?"

"A Jesuit, a Jesuit! To speak plainly, he was one, then ceased to be one, and is now undoubtedly one again. Sanguinetti has flirted with every influence. It was long thought that he was in favour of conciliation between the Holy See and Italy; but things drifted into a bad way, and he violently took part against the usurpers. In the same style he has frequently fallen out with Leo XIII and then made his peace. To-day at the Vatican, he keeps on a footing of diplomatic reserve. Briefly he only has one object, the tiara, and even shows it too plainly, which is a mistake, for it uses up a candidate. Still, just at present the struggle seems to be between him and Cardinal Boccanera. And that's why he has gone over to the Jesuits again, utilising their hatred of his rival, and anticipating that they will be forced to support him in order to defeat the other. But I doubt it, they are too shrewd, they will hesitate to patronise a candidate who is already so compromised. He, blunder-head, passionate and proud as he is, doubts nothing, and since you say that he is now at Frascati, I'm certain that he made all haste to shut himself up there with some grand strategical object in view, as soon as he heard of the Pope's illness."

"Well, and the Pope himself, Leo XIII?" asked Pierre.

This time Don Vigilio slightly hesitated, his eyes blinking. Then he said: "Leo XIII? He is a Jesuit, a Jesuit! Oh! I know it is said that he sides with the Dominicans, and this is in a measure true, for he fancies that he is animated with their spirit and he has brought St. Thomas into favour again, and has restored all the ecclesiastical teaching of doctrine. But there is also the Jesuit, remember, who is one involuntarily and without knowing it, and of this category the present Pope will prove the most famous example. Study his acts, investigate his policy, and you will find that everything in it emanates from the Jesuit spirit. The fact is that he has unwittingly become impregnated with that spirit, and that all the influence, directly or indirectly brought to bear on him comes from a Jesuit centre. Ah! why don't you believe me? I repeat that the Jesuits have conquered and absorbed everything, that all Rome belongs to them from the most insignificant cleric to his Holiness in person."

Then he continued, replying to each fresh name that Pierre gave with the same obstinate, maniacal cry: "Jesuit, Jesuit!" It seemed as if a Churchman could be nothing else, as if each answer were a confirmation of the proposition that the clergy must compound with the modern world if it desired to preserve its Deity. The heroic age of Catholicism was accomplished, henceforth it could only live by dint of diplomacy and ruses, concessions and arrangements. "And that Paparelli, he's a Jesuit too, a Jesuit!" Don Vigilio went on, instinctively lowering his voice. "Yes, the humble but terrible Jesuit, the Jesuit in his most abominable role as a spy and a perverter! I could swear that he has merely been placed here in order to keep watch on his Eminence! And you should see with what supple talent and craft he has performed his task, to such a point indeed that it is now he alone who wills and orders things. He opens the door to whomsoever he pleases, uses his master like something belonging to him, weighs on each of his resolutions, and holds him in his power by dint of his stealthy unremitting efforts. Yes! it's the lion conquered by the insect; the infinitesimally small disposing of the infinitely great; the train-bearer—whose proper part is to sit at his cardinal's feet like a faithful hound—in reality reigning over him, and impelling him in whatsoever direction he chooses. Ah! the Jesuit! the Jesuit! Mistrust him when you see him gliding by in his shabby old cassock, with the flabby wrinkled face of a devout old maid. And make sure that he isn't behind the doors, or in the cupboards, or under the beds. Ah! I tell you that they'll devour you as they've devoured me; and they'll give you the fever too, perhaps even the plague if you are not careful!"

Pierre suddenly halted in front of his companion. He was losing all assurance, both fear and rage were penetrating him. And, after all, why not? These extraordinary stories must be true. "But in that case give me some advice," he exclaimed, "I asked you to come in here this evening precisely because I no longer know what to do, and need to be set in the right path—" Then he broke off and again paced to and fro, as if urged into motion by his exploding passion. "Or rather no, tell me nothing!" he abruptly resumed. "It's all over; I prefer to go away. The thought occurred to me before, but it was in a moment of cowardice and with the idea of disappearing and of returning to live in peace in my little nook: whereas now, if I go off, it will be as an avenger, a judge, to cry aloud to all the world from Paris, to proclaim what I have seen in Rome, what men have done there with the Christianity of Jesus, the Vatican falling into dust, the corpse-like odour which comes from it, the idiotic illusions of those who hope that they will one day see a renascence of the modern soul arise from a sepulchre where the remnants of dead centuries rot and slumber. Oh! I will not yield, I will not make my submission, I will defend my book by a fresh one. And that book, I promise you, will make some noise in the world, for it will sound the last agony of a dying religion, which one must make all haste to bury lest its remains should poison the nations!"

All this was beyond Don Vigilio's mind. The Italian priest, with narrow belief and ignorant terror of the new ideas, awoke within him. He clasped his hands, affrighted. "Be quiet, be quiet! You are blaspheming! And, besides, you cannot go off like that without again trying to see his Holiness. He alone is sovereign. And I know that I shall surprise you; but Father Dangelis has given you in jest the only good advice that can be given: Go back to see Monsignor Nani, for he alone will open the door of the Vatican for you."

Again did Pierre give a start of anger: "What! It was with Monsignor Nani that I began, from him that I set out; and I am to go back to him? What game is that? Can I consent to be a shuttlecock sent flying hither and thither by every battledore? People are having a game with me!"

Then, harassed and distracted, the young man fell on his chair in front of Don Vigilio, who with his face drawn by his prolonged vigil, and his hands still and ever faintly trembling, remained for some time silent. At last he explained that he had another idea. He was slightly acquainted with the Pope's confessor, a Franciscan father, a man of great simplicity, to whom he might recommend Pierre. This Franciscan, despite his self-effacement, would perhaps prove of service to him. At all events he might be tried. Then, once more, silence fell, and Pierre, whose dreamy eyes were turned towards the wall, ended by distinguishing the old picture which had touched him so deeply on the day of his arrival. In the pale glow of the lamp it gradually showed forth and lived, like an incarnation of his own case, his own futile despair before the sternly closed portal of truth and justice. Ah! that outcast woman, that stubborn victim of love, weeping amidst her streaming hair, her visage hidden whilst with pain and grief she sank upon the steps of that palace whose door was so pitilessly shut—how she resembled him! Draped with a mere strip of linen, she was shivering, and amidst the overpowering distress of her abandonment she did not reveal her secret, misfortune, or transgression, whichever it might be. But he, behind her close-pressed hands, endowed her with a face akin to his own: she became his sister, as were all the poor creatures without roof or certainty who weep because they are naked and alone, and wear out their strength in seeking to force the wicked thresholds of men. He could never gaze at her without pitying her, and it stirred him so much that evening to find her ever so unknown, nameless and visageless, yet steeped in the most bitter tears, that he suddenly began to question his companion.

"Tell me," said he, "do you know who painted that old picture? It stirs me to the soul like a masterpiece."

Stupefied by this unexpected question, the secretary raised his head and looked, feeling yet more astonished when he had examined the blackened, forsaken panel in its sorry frame.

"Where did it come from?" resumed Pierre; "why has it been stowed away in this room?"

"Oh!" replied Don Vigilio, with a gesture of indifference, "it's nothing. There are heaps of valueless old paintings everywhere. That one, no doubt, has always been here. But I don't know; I never noticed it before."

Whilst speaking he had at last risen to his feet, and this simple action had brought on such a fit of shivering that he could scarcely take leave, so violently did his teeth chatter with fever. "No, no, don't show me out," he stammered, "keep the lamp here. And to conclude: the best course is for you to leave yourself in the hands of Monsignor Nani, for he, at all events, is a superior man. I told you on your arrival that, whether you would or not, you would end by doing as he desired. And so what's the use of struggling? And mind, not a word of our conversation to-night; it would mean my death."

Then he noiselessly opened the doors, glanced distrustfully into the darkness of the passage, and at last ventured out and disappeared, regaining his own room with such soft steps that not the faintest footfall was heard amidst the tomb-like slumber of the old mansion.

On the morrow, Pierre, again mastered by a desire to fight on to the very end, got Don Vigilio to recommend him to the Pope's confessor, the Franciscan friar with whom the secretary was slightly acquainted. However, this friar proved to be an extremely timid if worthy man, selected precisely on account of his great modesty, simplicity, and absolute lack of influence in order that he might not abuse his position with respect to the Holy Father. And doubtless there was an affectation of humility on the latter's part in taking for confessor a member of the humblest of the regular orders, a friend of the poor, a holy beggar of the roads. At the same time the friar certainly enjoyed a reputation for oratory; and hidden by a veil the Pope at times listened to his sermons; for although as infallible Sovereign Pontiff Leo XIII could not receive lessons from any priest, it was admitted that as a man he might reap profit by listening to good discourse. Nevertheless apart from his natural eloquence, the worthy friar was really a mere washer of souls, a confessor who listens and absolves without even remembering the impurities which he removes in the waters of penitence. And Pierre, finding him really so poor and such a cipher, did not insist on an intervention which he realised would be futile.

All that day the young priest was haunted by the figure of that ingenuous lover of poverty, that delicious St. Francis, as Narcisse Habert was wont to say. Pierre had often wondered how such an apostle, so gentle towards both animate and inanimate creation, and so full of ardent charity for the wretched, could have arisen in a country of egotism and enjoyment like Italy, where the love of beauty alone has remained queen. Doubtless the times have changed; yet what a strong sap of love must have been needed in the old days, during the great sufferings of the middle ages, for such a consoler of the humble to spring from the popular soil and preach the gift of self to others, the renunciation of wealth, the horror of brutal force, the equality and obedience which would ensure the peace of the world. St. Francis trod the roads clad as one of the poorest, a rope girdling his grey gown and his bare feet shod with sandals, and he carried with him neither purse nor staff. And he and his brethren spoke aloud and freely, with sovereign florescence of poetry and boldness of truth, attacking the rich and the powerful, and daring even to denounce the priests of evil life, the debauched, simoniacal, and perjured bishops. A long cry of relief greeted the Franciscans, the people followed them in crowds—they were the friends, the liberators of all the humble ones who suffered. And thus, like revolutionaries, they at first so alarmed Rome, that the popes hesitated to authorise their Order. When they at last gave way it was assuredly with the hope of using this new force for their own profit, by conquering the whole vague mass of the lowly whose covert threats have ever growled through the ages, even in the most despotic times. And thenceforward in the sons of St. Francis the Church possessed an ever victorious army—a wandering army which spread over the roads, in the villages and through the towns, penetrating to the firesides of artisan and peasant, and gaining possession of all simple hearts. How great the democratic power of such an Order which had sprung from the very entrails of the people! And thence its rapid prosperity, its teeming growth in a few years, friaries arising upon all sides, and the third Order* so invading the secular population as to impregnate and absorb it. And that there was here a genuine growth of the soil, a vigorous vegetation of the plebeian stock was shown by an entire national art arising from it—the precursors of the Renascence in painting and even Dante himself, the soul of Italia's genius.

* The Franciscans, like the Dominicans and others, admit, in
addition to the two Orders of friars and nuns, a third Order
comprising devout persons of either sex who have neither the
vocation nor the opportunity for cloistered life, but live in
the world, privately observing the chief principles of the
fraternity with which they are connected. In central and
southern Europe members of these third Orders are still
numerous.—Trans.

For some days now, in the Rome of the present time, Pierre had been coming into contact with those great Orders of the past. The Franciscans and the Dominicans were there face to face in their vast convents of prosperous aspect. But it seemed as if the humility of the Franciscans had in the long run deprived them of influence. Perhaps, too, their role as friends and liberators of the people was ended since the people now undertook to liberate itself. And so the only real remaining battle was between the Dominicans and the Jesuits, both of whom still claimed to mould the world according to their particular views. Warfare between them was incessant, and Rome—the supreme power at the Vatican—was ever the prize for which they contended. But, although the Dominicans had St. Thomas on their side, they must have felt that their old dogmatic science was crumbling, compelled as they were each day to surrender a little ground to the Jesuits whose principles accorded better with the spirit of the century. And, in addition to these, there were the white-robed Carthusians, those very holy, pure, and silent meditators who fled from the world into quiet cells and cloisters, those despairing and consoled ones whose numbers may decrease but whose Order will live for ever, even as grief and desire for solitude will live. And then there were the Benedictines whose admirable rules have sanctified labour, passionate toilers in literature and science, once powerful instruments of civilisation, enlarging universal knowledge by their immense historical and critical works. These Pierre loved, and with them would have sought a refuge two centuries earlier, yet he was astonished to find them building on the Aventine a huge dwelling, for which Leo XIII has already given millions, as if the science of to-day and to-morrow were yet a field where they might garner harvests. But cui bono, when the workmen have changed, and dogmas are there to bar the road—dogmas which totter, no doubt, but which believers may not fling aside in order to pass onward? And finally came the swarm of less important Orders, hundreds in number; there were the Carmelites, the Trappists, the Minims, the Barnabites, the Lazzarists, the Eudists, the Mission Fathers, the Servites, the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine; there were the Bernadines, the Augustinians, the Theatines, the Observants, the Passionists, the Celestines, and the Capuchins, without counting the corresponding Orders of women or the Poor Clares, or the innumerable nuns like those of the Visitation and the Calvary. Each community had its modest or sumptuous dwelling, certain districts of Rome were entirely composed of convents, and behind the silent lifeless facades all those people buzzed, intrigued, and waged the everlasting warfare of rival interests and passions. The social evolution which produced them had long since ceased, still they obstinately sought to prolong their life, growing weaker and more useless day by day, destined to a slow agony until the time shall come when the new development of society will leave them neither foothold nor breathing space.

And it was not only with the regulars that Pierre came in contact during his peregrinations through Rome; indeed, he more particularly had to deal with the secular clergy, and learnt to know them well. A hierarchical system which was still vigorously enforced maintained them in various ranks and classes. Up above, around the Pope, reigned the pontifical family, the high and noble cardinals and prelates whose conceit was great in spite of their apparent familiarity. Below them the parish clergy formed a very worthy middle class of wise and moderate minds; and here patriot priests were not rare. Moreover, the Italian occupation of a quarter of a century, by installing in the city a world of functionaries who saw everything that went on, had, curiously enough, greatly purified the private life of the Roman priesthood, in which under the popes women, beyond all question, played a supreme part. And finally one came to the plebeian clergy whom Pierre studied with curiosity, a collection of wretched, grimy, half-naked priests who like famished animals prowled around in search of masses, and drifted into disreputable taverns in the company of beggars and thieves. However, he was more interested by the floating population of foreign priests from all parts of Christendom—the adventurers, the ambitious ones, the believers, the madmen whom Rome attracted just as a lamp at night time attracts the insects of the gloom. Among these were men of every nationality, position, and age, all lashed on by their appetites and scrambling from morn till eve around the Vatican, in order to snap at the prey which they hoped to secure. He found them everywhere, and told himself with some shame that he was one of them, that the unit of his own personality served to increase the incredible number of cassocks that one encountered in the streets. Ah! that ebb and flow, that ceaseless tide of black gowns and frocks of every hue! With their processions of students ever walking abroad, the seminaries of the different nations would alone have sufficed to drape and decorate the streets, for there were the French and the English all in black, the South Americans in black with blue sashes, the North Americans in black with red sashes, the Poles in black with green sashes, the Greeks in blue, the Germans in red, the Scots in violet, the Romans in black or violet or purple, the Bohemians with chocolate sashes, the Irish with red lappets, the Spaniards with blue cords, to say nothing of all the others with broidery and bindings and buttons in a hundred different styles. And in addition there were the confraternities, the penitents, white, black, blue, and grey, with sleeveless frocks and capes of different hue, grey, blue, black, or white. And thus even nowadays Papal Rome at times seemed to resuscitate, and one could realise how tenaciously and vivaciously she struggled on in order that she might not disappear in the cosmopolitan Rome of the new era. However, Pierre, whilst running about from one prelate to another, frequenting priests and crossing churches, could not accustom himself to the worship, the Roman piety which astonished him when it did not wound him. One rainy Sunday morning, on entering Santa Maria Maggiore, he fancied himself in some waiting-room, a very splendid one, no doubt, but where God seemed to have no habitation. There was not a bench, not a chair in the nave, across which people passed, as they might pass through a railway station, wetting and soiling the precious mosaic pavement with their muddy shoes; and tired women and children sat round the bases of the columns, even as in railway stations one sees people sitting and waiting for their trains during the great crushes of the holiday season. And for this tramping throng of folks of small degree, who had looked in en passant, a priest was saying a low mass in a side chapel, before which a narrow file of standing people had gathered, extending across the nave, and recalling the crowds which wait in front of theatres for the opening of the doors. At the elevation of the host one and all inclined themselves devoutly, but almost immediately afterwards the gathering dispersed. And indeed why linger? The mass was said. Pierre everywhere found the same form of attendance, peculiar to the countries of the sun; the worshippers were in a hurry and only favoured the Deity with short familiar visits, unless it were a question of some gala scene at San Paolo or San Giovanni in Laterano or some other of the old basilicas. It was only at the Gesu, on another Sunday morning, that the young priest came upon a high-mass congregation, which reminded him of the devout throngs of the North. Here there were benches and women seated, a worldly warmth and cosiness under the luxurious, gilded, carved, and painted roof, whose tawny splendour is very fine now that time has toned down the eccentricities of the decoration. But how many of the churches were empty, among them some of the most ancient and venerable, San Clemente, Sant' Agnese, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, where during the offices one saw but a few believers of the neighbourhood. Four hundred churches were a good many for even Rome to people; and, indeed, some were merely attended on fixed ceremonial occasions, and a good many merely opened their doors once every year—on the feast day, that is, of their patron saint. Some also subsisted on the lucky possession of a fetish, an idol compassionate to human sufferings. Santa Maria in Ara Coeli possessed the miraculous little Jesus, the "Bambino," who healed sick children, and Sant' Agostino had the "Madonna del Parto," who grants a happy delivery to mothers. Then others were renowned for the holy water of their fonts, the oil of their lamps, the power of some wooden saint or marble virgin. Others again seemed forsaken, given up to tourists and the perquisites of beadles, like mere museums peopled with dead gods: Finally others disturbed one's faith by the suggestiveness of their aspects, as, for instance, that Santa Maria Rotonda, which is located in the Pantheon, a circular hall recalling a circus, where the Virgin remains the evident tenant of the Olympian deities.

Pierre took no little interest in the churches of the poor districts, but did not find there the keen faith and the throngs he had hoped for. One afternoon, at Santa Maria in Trastevere, he heard the choir in full song, but the church was quite empty, and the chant had a most lugubrious sound in such a desert. Then, another day, on entering San Crisogono, he found it draped, probably in readiness for some festival on the morrow. The columns were cased with red damask, and between them were hangings and curtains alternately yellow and blue, white and red; and the young man fled from such a fearful decoration as gaudy as that of a fair booth. Ah! how far he was from the cathedrals where in childhood he had believed and prayed! On all sides he found the same type of church, the antique basilica accommodated to the taste of eighteenth-century Rome. Though the style of San Luigi dei Francesi is better, more soberly elegant, the only thing that touched him even there was the thought of the heroic or saintly Frenchmen, who sleep in foreign soil beneath the flags. And as he sought for something Gothic, he ended by going to see Santa Maria sopra Minerva,* which, he was told, was the only example of the Gothic style in Rome. Here his stupefaction attained a climax at sight of the clustering columns cased in stucco imitating marble, the ogives which dared not soar, the rounded vaults condemned to the heavy majesty of the dome style. No, no, thought he, the faith whose cooling cinders lingered there was no longer that whose brazier had invaded and set all Christendom aglow! However, Monsignor Fornaro whom he chanced to meet as he was leaving the church, inveighed against the Gothic style as rank heresy. The first Christian church, said the prelate, had been the basilica, which had sprung from the temple, and it was blasphemy to assert that the Gothic cathedral was the real Christian house of prayer, for Gothic embodied the hateful Anglo-Saxon spirit, the rebellious genius of Luther. At this a passionate reply rose to Pierre's lips, but he said nothing for fear that he might say too much. However, he asked himself whether in all this there was not a decisive proof that Catholicism was the very vegetation of Rome, Paganism modified by Christianity. Elsewhere Christianity has grown up in quite a different spirit, to such a point that it has risen in rebellion and schismatically turned against the mother-city. And the breach has ever gone on widening, the dissemblance has become more and more marked; and amidst the evolution of new societies, yet a fresh schism appears inevitable and proximate in spite of all the despairing efforts to maintain union.

* So called because it occupies the site of a temple to
Minerva.—Trans.

While Pierre thus visited the Roman churches, he also continued his efforts to gain support in the matter of his book, his irritation tending to such stubbornness, that if in the first instance he failed to obtain an interview, he went back again and again to secure one, steadfastly keeping his promise to call in turn upon each cardinal of the Congregation of the Index. And as a cardinal may belong to several Congregations, it resulted that he gradually found himself roaming through those former ministries of the old pontifical government which, if less numerous than formerly, are still very intricate institutions, each with its cardinal-prefect, its cardinal-members, its consultative prelates, and its numerous employees. Pierre repeatedly had to return to the Cancelleria, where the Congregation of the Index meets, and lost himself in its world of staircases, corridors, and halls. From the moment he passed under the porticus he was overcome by the icy shiver which fell from the old walls, and was quite unable to appreciate the bare, frigid beauty of the palace, Bramante's masterpiece though it be, so purely typical of the Roman Renascence. He also knew the Propaganda where he had seen Cardinal Sarno; and, sent as he was hither and thither, in his efforts to gain over influential prelates, chance made him acquainted with the other Congregations, that of the Bishops and Regulars, that of the Rites and that of the Council. He even obtained a glimpse of the Consistorial, the Dataria,* and the sacred Penitentiary. All these formed part of the administrative mechanism of the Church under its several aspects—the government of the Catholic world, the enlargement of the Church's conquests, the administration of its affairs in conquered countries, the decision of all questions touching faith, morals, and individuals, the investigation and punishment of offences, the grant of dispensations and the sale of favours. One can scarcely imagine what a fearful number of affairs are each morning submitted to the Vatican, questions of the greatest gravity, delicacy, and intricacy, the solution of which gives rise to endless study and research. It is necessary to reply to the innumerable visitors who flock to Rome from all parts, and to the letters, the petitions, and the batches of documents which are submitted and require to be distributed among the various offices. And Pierre was struck by the deep and discreet silence in which all this colossal labour was accomplished; not a sound reaching the streets from the tribunals, parliaments, and factories for the manufacture of saints and nobles, whose mechanism was so well greased, that in spite of the rust of centuries and the deep and irremediable wear and tear, the whole continued working without clank or creak to denote its presence behind the walls. And did not that silence embody the whole policy of the Church, which is to remain mute and await developments? Nevertheless what a prodigious mechanism it was, antiquated no doubt, but still so powerful! And amidst those Congregations how keenly Pierre felt himself to be in the grip of the most absolute power ever devised for the domination of mankind. However much he might notice signs of decay and coming ruin he was none the less seized, crushed, and carried off by that huge engine made up of vanity and venality, corruption and ambition, meanness and greatness. And how far, too, he now was from the Rome that he had dreamt of, and what anger at times filled him amidst his weariness, as he persevered in his resolve to defend himself!

* It is from the Dataria that bulls, rescripts, letters of
appointment to benefices, and dispensations of marriage,
are issued, after the affixture of the date and formula
Datum Romae, "Given at Rome."—Trans.

All at once certain things which he had never understood were explained to him. One day, when he returned to the Propaganda, Cardinal Sarno spoke to him of Freemasonry with such icy rage that he was abruptly enlightened. Freemasonry had hitherto made him smile; he had believed in it no more than he had believed in the Jesuits. Indeed, he had looked upon the ridiculous stories which were current—the stories of mysterious, shadowy men who governed the world with secret incalculable power—as mere childish legends. In particular he had been amazed by the blind hatred which maddened certain people as soon as Freemasonry was mentioned. However, a very distinguished and intelligent prelate had declared to him, with an air of profound conviction, that at least on one occasion every year each masonic Lodge was presided over by the Devil in person, incarnate in a visible shape! And now, by Cardinal Sarno's remarks, he understood the rivalry, the furious struggle of the Roman Catholic Church against that other Church, the Church of over the way.* Although the former counted on her own triumph, she none the less felt that the other, the Church of Freemasonry, was a competitor, a very ancient enemy, who indeed claimed to be more ancient than herself, and whose victory always remained a possibility. And the friction between them was largely due to the circumstance that they both aimed at universal sovereignty, and had a similar international organisation, a similar net thrown over the nations, and in a like way mysteries, dogmas, and rites. It was deity against deity, faith against faith, conquest against conquest: and so, like competing tradesmen in the same street, they were a source of mutual embarrassment, and one of them was bound to kill the other. But if Roman Catholicism seemed to Pierre to be worn out and threatened with ruin, he remained quite as sceptical with regard to the power of Freemasonry. He had made inquiries as to the reality of that power in Rome, where both Grand Master and Pope were enthroned, one in front of the other. He was certainly told that the last Roman princes had thought themselves compelled to become Freemasons in order to render their own difficult position somewhat easier and facilitate the future of their sons. But was this true? had they not simply yielded to the force of the present social evolution? And would not Freemasonry eventually be submerged by its own triumph—that of the ideas of justice, reason, and truth, which it had defended through the dark and violent ages of history? It is a thing which constantly happens; the victory of an idea kills the sect which has propagated it, and renders the apparatus with which the members of the sect surrounded themselves, in order to fire imaginations, both useless and somewhat ridiculous. Carbonarism did not survive the conquest of the political liberties which it demanded; and on the day when the Catholic Church crumbles, having accomplished its work of civilisation, the other Church, the Freemasons' Church of across the road, will in a like way disappear, its task of liberation ended. Nowadays the famous power of the Lodges, hampered by traditions, weakened by a ceremonial which provokes laughter, and reduced to a simple bond of brotherly agreement and mutual assistance, would be but a sorry weapon of conquest for humanity, were it not that the vigorous breath of science impels the nations onwards and helps to destroy the old religions.

* Some readers may think the above passages an exaggeration, but
such is not the case. The hatred with which the Catholic
priesthood, especially in Italy, Spain, and France, regards
Freemasonry is remarkable. At the moment of writing these lines
I have before me several French clerical newspapers, which
contain the most abusive articles levelled against President
Faure solely because he is a Freemason. One of these prints, a
leading journal of Lyons, tells the French President that he
cannot serve both God and the Devil; and that if he cannot give
up Freemasonry he would do well to cease desecrating the abode
of the Deity by his attendance at divine service.—Trans.

However, all Pierre's journeyings and applications brought him no certainty; and, while stubbornly clinging to Rome, intent on fighting to the very end, like a soldier who will not believe in the possibility of defeat, he remained as anxious as ever. He had seen all the cardinals whose influence could be of use to him. He had seen the Cardinal Vicar, entrusted with the diocese of Rome, who, like the man of letters he was, had spoken to him of Horace, and, like a somewhat blundering politician, had questioned him about France, the Republic, the Army, and the Navy Estimates, without dealing in the slightest degree with the incriminated book. He had also seen the Grand Penitentiary, that tall old man, with fleshless, ascetic face, of whom he had previously caught a glimpse at the Boccanera mansion, and from whom he now only drew a long and severe sermon on the wickedness of young priests, whom the century had perverted and who wrote most abominable books. Finally, at the Vatican, he had seen the Cardinal Secretary, in some wise his Holiness's Minister of Foreign Affairs, the great power of the Holy See, whom he had hitherto been prevented from approaching by terrifying warnings as to the possible result of an unfavourable reception. However, whilst apologising for calling at such a late stage, he had found himself in presence of a most amiable man, whose somewhat rough appearance was softened by diplomatic affability, and who, after making him sit down, questioned him with an air of interest, listened to him, and even spoke some words of comfort. Nevertheless, on again reaching the Piazza of St. Peter's, Pierre well understood that his affair had not made the slightest progress, and that if he ever managed to force the Pope's door, it would not be by way of the Secretariate of State. And that evening he returned home quite exhausted by so many visits, in such distraction at feeling that little by little he had been wholly caught in that huge mechanism with its hundred wheels, that he asked himself in terror what he should do on the morrow now that there remained nothing for him to do—unless, indeed, it were to go mad.

However, meeting Don Vigilio in a passage of the house, he again wished to ask him for some good advice. But the secretary, who had a gleam of terror in his eyes, silenced him, he knew not why, with an anxious gesture. And then in a whisper, in Pierre's ear, he said: "Have you seen Monsignor Nani? No! Well, go to see him, go to see him. I repeat that you have nothing else to do!"

Pierre yielded. And indeed why should he have resisted? Apart from the motives of ardent charity which had brought him to Rome to defend his book, was he not there for a self-educating, experimental purpose? It was necessary that he should carry his attempts to the very end.

On the morrow, when he reached the colonnade of St. Peter's, the hour was so early that he had to wait there awhile. He had never better realised the enormity of those four curving rows of columns, forming a forest of gigantic stone trunks among which nobody ever promenades. In fact, the spot is a grandiose and dreary desert, and one asks oneself the why and wherefore of such a majestic porticus. Doubtless, however, it was for its sole majesty, for the mere pomp of decoration, that this colonnade was reared; and therein, again, one finds the whole Roman spirit. However, Pierre at last turned into the Via di Sant' Offizio, and passing the sacristy of St. Peter's, found himself before the Palace of the Holy Office in a solitary silent district, which the footfall of pedestrians or the rumble of wheels but seldom disturbs. The sun alone lives there, in sheets of light which spread slowly over the small, white paving. You divine the vicinity of the Basilica, for there is a smell as of incense, a cloisteral quiescence as of the slumber of centuries. And at one corner the Palace of the Holy Office rises up with heavy, disquieting bareness, only a single row of windows piercing its lofty, yellow front. The wall which skirts a side street looks yet more suspicious with its row of even smaller casements, mere peep-holes with glaucous panes. In the bright sunlight this huge cube of mud-coloured masonry ever seems asleep, mysterious, and closed like a prison, with scarcely an aperture for communication with the outer world.

Pierre shivered, but then smiled as at an act of childishness, for he reflected that the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, nowadays the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, was no longer the institution it had been, the purveyor of heretics for the stake, the occult tribunal beyond appeal which had right of life and death over all mankind. True, it still laboured in secrecy, meeting every Wednesday, and judging and condemning without a sound issuing from within its walls. But on the other hand if it still continued to strike at the crime of heresy, if it smote men as well as their works, it no longer possessed either weapons or dungeons, steel or fire to do its bidding, but was reduced to a mere role of protest, unable to inflict aught but disciplinary penalties even upon the ecclesiastics of its own Church.

When Pierre on entering was ushered into the reception-room of Monsignor Nani who, as assessor, lived in the palace, he experienced an agreeable surprise. The apartment faced the south, and was spacious and flooded with sunshine. And stiff as was the furniture, dark as were the hangings, an exquisite sweetness pervaded the room, as though a woman had lived in it and accomplished the prodigy of imparting some of her own grace to all those stern-looking things. There were no flowers, yet there was a pleasant smell. A charm expanded and conquered every heart from the very threshold.

Monsignor Nani at once came forward, with a smile on his rosy face, his blue eyes keenly glittering, and his fine light hair powdered by age. With hands outstretched, he exclaimed: "Ah! how kind of you to have come to see me, my dear son! Come, sit down, let us have a friendly chat." Then with an extraordinary display of affection, he began to question Pierre: "How are you getting on? Tell me all about it, exactly what you have done."

Touched in spite of Don Vigilio's revelations, won over by the sympathy which he fancied he could detect, Pierre thereupon confessed himself, relating his visits to Cardinal Sarno, Monsignor Fornaro and Father Dangelis, his applications to all the influential cardinals, those of the Index, the Grand Penitentiary, the Cardinal Vicar, and the Cardinal Secretary; and dwelling on his endless journeys from door to door through all the Congregations and all the clergy, that huge, active, silent bee-hive amidst which he had wearied his feet, exhausted his limbs, and bewildered his poor brain. And at each successive Station of this Calvary of entreaty, Monsignor Nani, who seemed to listen with an air of rapture, exclaimed: "But that's very good, that's capital! Oh! your affair is progressing. Yes, yes, it's progressing marvellously well."

He was exultant, though he allowed no unseemly irony to appear, while his pleasant, penetrating eyes fathomed the young priest, to ascertain if he had been brought to the requisite degree of obedience. Had he been sufficiently wearied, disillusioned and instructed in the reality of things, for one to finish with him? Had three months' sojourn in Rome sufficed to turn the somewhat mad enthusiast of the first days into an unimpassioned or at least resigned being?

However, all at once Monsignor Nani remarked: "But, my dear son, you tell me nothing of his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti."

"The fact is, Monseigneur, that his Eminence is at Frascati, so I have been unable to see him."

Thereupon the prelate, as if once more postponing the denouement with the secret enjoyment of an artistic diplomate, began to protest, raising his little plump hands with the anxious air of a man who considers everything lost: "Oh! but you must see his Eminence; it is absolutely necessary! Think of it! The Prefect of the Index! We can only act after your visit to him, for as you have not seen him it is as if you had seen nobody. Go, go to Frascati, my dear son."

And thereupon Pierre could only bow and reply: "I will go, Monseigneur."

XI.

ALTHOUGH Pierre knew that he would be unable to see Cardinal Sanguinetti before eleven o'clock, he nevertheless availed himself of an early train, so that it was barely nine when he alighted at the little station of Frascati. He had already visited the place during his enforced idleness, when he had made the classical excursion to the Roman castles which extend from Frascati to Rocco di Papa, and from Rocco di Papa to Monte Cavo, and he was now delighted with the prospect of strolling for a couple of hours along those first slopes of the Alban hills, where, amidst rushes, olives, and vines, Frascati, like a promontory, overlooks the immense ruddy sea of the Campagna even as far as Rome, which, six full leagues away, wears the whitish aspect of a marble isle.

Ah! that charming Frascati, on its greeny knoll at the foot of the wooded Tusculan heights, with its famous terrace whence one enjoys the finest view in the world, its old patrician villas with proud and elegant Renascence facades and magnificent parks, which, planted with cypress, pine, and ilex, are for ever green! There was a sweetness, a delight, a fascination about the spot, of which Pierre would have never wearied. And for more than an hour he had wandered blissfully along roads edged with ancient, knotty olive-trees, along dingle ways shaded by the spreading foliage of neighbouring estates, and along perfumed paths, at each turn of which the Campagna was seen stretching far away, when all at once he was accosted by a person whom he was both surprised and annoyed to meet. He had strolled down to some low ground near the railway station, some old vineyards where a number of new houses had been built of recent years, and suddenly saw a stylish pair-horse victoria, coming from the direction of Rome, draw up close by, whilst its occupant called to him: "What! Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, are you taking a walk here, at this early hour?"

Thereupon Pierre recognised Count Luigi Prada, who alighted, shook hands with him and began to walk beside him, whilst the empty carriage went on in advance. And forthwith the Count explained his tastes: "I seldom take the train," he said, "I drive over. It gives my horses an outing. I have interests over here as you may know, a big building enterprise which is unfortunately not progressing very well. And so, although the season is advanced, I'm obliged to come rather more frequently than I care to do."

As Prada suggested, Pierre was acquainted with the story. The Boccaneras had been obliged to sell a sumptuous villa which a cardinal of their family had built at Frascati in accordance with the plans of Giacomo della Porta, during the latter part of the sixteenth century: a regal summer-residence it had been, finely wooded, with groves and basins and cascades, and in particular a famous terrace projecting like a cape above the Roman Campagna whose expanse stretches from the Sabine mountains to the Mediterranean sands. Through the division of the property, Benedetta had inherited from her mother some very extensive vineyards below Frascati, and these she had brought as dowry to Prada at the very moment when the building mania was extending from Rome into the provinces. And thereupon Prada had conceived the idea of erecting on the spot a number of middle-class villas like those which litter the suburbs of Paris. Few purchasers, however, had come forward, the financial crash had supervened, and he was now with difficulty liquidating this unlucky business, having indemnified his wife at the time of their separation.

"And then," he continued, addressing Pierre, "one can come and go as one likes with a carriage, whereas, on taking the train, one is at the mercy of the time table. This morning, for instance, I have appointments with contractors, experts, and lawyers, and I have no notion how long they will keep me. It's a wonderful country, isn't it? And we are quite right to be proud of it in Rome. Although I may have some worries just now, I can never set foot here without my heart beating with delight."

A circumstance which he did not mention, was that his amica, Lisbeth Kauffmann, had spent the summer in one of the newly erected villas, where she had installed her studio and had been visited by all the foreign colony, which tolerated her irregular position on account of her gay spirits and artistic talent. Indeed, people had even ended by accepting the outcome of her connection with Prada, and a fortnight previously she had returned to Rome, and there given birth to a son—an event which had again revived all the scandalous tittle-tattle respecting Benedetta's divorce suit. And Prada's attachment to Frascati doubtless sprang from the recollection of the happy hours he had spent there, and the joyful pride with which the birth of the boy inspired him.

Pierre, for his part, felt ill at ease in the young Count's presence, for he had an instinctive hatred of money-mongers and men of prey. Nevertheless, he desired to respond to his amiability, and so inquired after his father, old Orlando, the hero of the Liberation.

"Oh!" replied Prada, "excepting for his legs he's in wonderfully good health. He'll live a hundred years. Poor father! I should so much have liked to install him in one of these little houses, last summer. But I could not get him to consent; he's determined not to leave Rome; he's afraid, perhaps, that it might be taken away from him during his absence." Then the young Count burst into a laugh, quite merry at the thought of jeering at the heroic but no longer fashionable age of independence. And afterwards he said, "My father was speaking of you again only yesterday, Monsieur l'Abbe. He is astonished that he has not seen you lately."

This distressed Pierre, for he had begun to regard Orlando with respectful affection. Since his first visit, he had twice called on the old hero, but the latter had refused to broach the subject of Rome so long as his young friend should not have seen, felt, and understood everything. There would be time for a talk later on, said he, when they were both in a position to formulate their conclusions.

"Pray tell Count Orlando," responded Pierre, "that I have not forgotten him, and that, if I have deferred a fresh visit, it is because I desire to satisfy him. However, I certainly will not leave Rome without going to tell him how deeply his kind greeting has touched me."

Whilst talking, the two men slowly followed the ascending road past the newly erected villas, several of which were not yet finished. And when Prada learned that the priest had come to call on Cardinal Sanguinetti, he again laughed, with the laugh of a good-natured wolf, showing his white fangs. "True," he exclaimed, "the Cardinal has been here since the Pope has been laid up. Ah! you'll find him in a pretty fever."

"Why?"

"Why, because there's bad news about the Holy Father this morning. When I left Rome it was rumoured that he had spent a fearful night."

So speaking, Prada halted at a bend of the road, not far from an antique chapel, a little church of solitary, mournful grace of aspect, on the verge of an olive grove. Beside it stood a ruinous building, the old parsonage, no doubt, whence there suddenly emerged a tall, knotty priest with coarse and earthy face, who, after roughly locking the door, went off in the direction of the town.

"Ah!" resumed the Count in a tone of raillery, "that fellow's heart also must be beating violently; he's surely gone to your Cardinal in search of news."

Pierre had looked at the priest. "I know him," he replied; "I saw him, I remember, on the day after my arrival at Cardinal Boccanera's. He brought the Cardinal a basket of figs and asked him for a certificate in favour of his young brother, who had been sent to prison for some deed of violence—a knife thrust if I recollect rightly. However, the Cardinal absolutely refused him the certificate."

"It's the same man," said Prada, "you may depend on it. He was often at the Villa Boccanera formerly; for his young brother was gardener there. But he's now the client, the creature of Cardinal Sanguinetti. Santobono his name is, and he's a curious character, such as you wouldn't find in France, I fancy. He lives all alone in that falling hovel, and officiates at that old chapel of St. Mary in the Fields, where people don't go to hear mass three times in a year. Yes, it's a perfect sinecure, which with its stipend of a thousand francs enables him to live there like a peasant philosopher, cultivating the somewhat extensive garden whose big walls you see yonder."

The close to which he called attention stretched down the slope behind the parsonage, without an aperture, like some savage place of refuge into which not even the eye could penetrate. And all that could be seen above the left-hand wall was a superb, gigantic fig-tree, whose big leaves showed blackly against the clear sky. Prada had moved on again, and continued to speak of Santobono, who evidently interested him. Fancy, a patriot priest, a Garibaldian! Born at Nemi, in that yet savage nook among the Alban hills, he belonged to the people and was still near to the soil. However, he had studied, and knew sufficient history to realise the past greatness of Rome, and dream of the re-establishment of Roman dominion as represented by young Italy. And he had come to believe, with passionate fervour, that only a great pope could realise his dream by seizing upon power, and then conquering all the other nations. And what could be easier, since the Pope commanded millions of Catholics? Did not half Europe belong to him? France, Spain, and Austria would give way as soon as they should see him powerful, dictating laws to the world. Germany and Great Britain, indeed all the Protestant countries, would also inevitably be conquered, for the papacy was the only dike that could be opposed to error, which must some day fatally succumb in its efforts against such a barrier. Politically, however, Santobono had declared himself for Germany, for he considered that France needed to be crushed before she would throw herself into the arms of the Holy Father. And thus contradictions and fancies clashed in his foggy brain, whose burning ideas swiftly turned to violence under the influence of primitive, racial fierceness. Briefly, the priest was a barbarian upholder of the Gospel, a friend of the humble and woeful, a sectarian of that school which is capable alike of great virtues and great crimes.

"Yes," concluded Prada, "he is now devoted to Cardinal Sanguinetti because he believes that the latter will prove the great pope of to-morrow, who is to make Rome the one capital of the nations. At the same time he doubtless harbours a lower personal ambition, that of attaining to a canonry or of gaining assistance in the little worries of life, as when he wished to extricate his brother from trouble. Here, you know, people stake their luck on a cardinal just as they nurse a 'trey' in the lottery, and if their cardinal proves the winning number and becomes pope they gain a fortune. And that's why you now see Santobono striding along yonder, all anxiety to know if Leo XIII will die and Sanguinetti don the tiara."

"Do you think the Pope so very ill, then?" asked Pierre, both anxious and interested.

The Count smiled and raised both arms: "Ah!" said he, "can one ever tell? They all get ill when their interest lies that way. However, I believe that the Pope is this time really indisposed; a complaint of the bowels, it is said; and at his age, you know, the slightest indisposition may prove fatal."

The two men took a few steps in silence, then the priest again asked a question: "Would Cardinal Sanguinetti have a great chance if the Holy See were vacant?"

"A great chance! Ah! that's another of those things which one never knows. The truth is people class Sanguinetti among the acceptable candidates, and if personal desire sufficed he would certainly be the next pope, for ambition consumes him to the marrow, and he displays extraordinary passion and determination in his efforts to succeed. But therein lies his very weakness; he is using himself up, and he knows it. And so he must be resolved to every step during the last days of battle. You may be quite sure that if he has shut himself up here at this critical time, it is in order that he may the better direct his operations from a distance, whilst at the same time feigning a retreat, a disinterestedness which is bound to have a good effect."

Then Prada began to expatiate on Sanguinetti with no little complacency, for he liked the man's spirit of intrigue, his keen, conquering appetite, his excessive, and even somewhat blundering activity. He had become acquainted with him on his return from the nunciature at Vienna, when he had already resolved to win the tiara. That ambition explained everything, his quarrels and reconciliations with the reigning pope, his affection for Germany, followed by a sudden evolution in the direction of France, his varying attitude with regard to Italy, at first a desire for agreement, and then absolute rejection of all compromises, a refusal to grant any concession, so long as Rome should not be evacuated. This, indeed, seemed to be Sanguinetti's definite position; he made a show of disliking the wavering sway of Leo XIII, and of retaining a fervent admiration for Pius IX, the great, heroic pope of the days of resistance, whose goodness of heart had proved no impediment to unshakable firmness. And all this was equivalent to a promise that he, Sanguinetti, would again make kindliness exempt from weakness, the rule of the Church, and would steer clear of the dangerous compounding of politics. At bottom, however, politics were his only dream, and he had even formulated a complete programme of intentional vagueness, which his clients and creatures spread abroad with an air of rapturous mystery. However, since a previous indisposition of the Pope's, during the spring, he had been living in mortal disquietude, for it had then been rumoured that the Jesuits would resign themselves to support Cardinal Pio Boccanera, although the latter scarcely favoured them. He was rough and stern, no doubt, and his extreme bigotry might be a source of danger in this tolerant age; but, on the other hand, was he not a patrician, and would not his election imply that the papacy would never cease to claim the temporal power? From that moment Boccanera had been the one man whom Sanguinetti feared, for he beheld himself despoiled of his prize, and spent his time in devising plans to rid himself of such a powerful rival, repeating abominable stories of Cardinal Pio's alleged complaisance with regard to Benedetta and Dario, and incessantly representing him as Antichrist, the man of sin, whose reign would consummate the ruin of the papacy. Finally, to regain the support of the Jesuits, Sanguinetti's last idea was to repeat through his familiars that for his part he would not merely maintain the principle of the temporal power intact, but would even undertake to regain that power. And he had a full plan on the subject, which folks confided to one another in whispers, a plan which, in spite of its apparent concessions, would lead to the overwhelming victory of the Church. It was to raise the prohibition which prevented Catholics from voting or becoming candidates at the Italian elections; to send a hundred, then two hundred, and then three hundred deputies to the Chamber, and in that wise to overthrow the House of Savoy, and establish a Federation of the Italian provinces, whereof the Holy Father, once more placed in possession of Rome, would become the august and sovereign President.

As Prada finished he again laughed, showing his white teeth—teeth which would never readily relinquish the prey they held. "So you see," he added, "we need to defend ourselves, since it's a question of turning us out. Fortunately, there are some little obstacles in the way of that. Nevertheless, such dreams naturally have great influence on excited minds, such as that of Santobono, for instance. He's a man whom one word from Sanguinetti would lead far indeed. Ah! he has good legs. Look at him up yonder, he has already reached the Cardinal's little palace—that white villa with the sculptured balconies."

Pierre raised his eyes and perceived the episcopal residence, which was one of the first houses of Frascati. Of modern construction and Renascence style, it overlooked the immensity of the Roman Campagna.

It was now eleven o'clock, and as the young priest, before going up to pay his own visit, bade the Count good-bye, the latter for a moment kept hold of his hand. "Do you know," said he, "it would be very kind of you to lunch with me—will you? Come and join me at that restaurant yonder with the pink front as soon as you are at liberty. I shall have settled my own business in an hour's time, and I shall be delighted to have your company at table."

Pierre began by declining, but he could offer no possible excuse, and at last surrendered, won over, despite himself, by Prada's real charm of manner. When they had parted, the young priest only had to climb a street in order to reach the Cardinal's door. With his natural expansiveness and craving for popularity, Sanguinetti was easy of access, and at Frascati in particular his doors were flung open even to the most humble cassocks. So Pierre was at once ushered in, a circumstance which somewhat surprised him, for he remembered the bad humour of the servant whom he had seen on calling at the Cardinal's residence in Rome, when he had been advised to forego the journey, as his Eminence did not like to be disturbed when he was ill. However, nothing spoke of illness in that pleasant villa, flooded with sunshine. True, the waiting-room, where he was momentarily left alone, displayed neither luxury nor comfort; but it was brightened by the finest light in the world, and overlooked that extraordinary Campagna, so flat, so bare, and so unique in its beauty, for in front of it one ever dreams and sees the past arise. And so, whilst waiting, Pierre stationed himself at an open window, conducting on to a balcony, and his eyes roamed over the endless sea of herbage to the far-away whiteness of Rome, above which rose the dome of St. Peter's, at that distance a mere sparkling speck, barely as large as the nail of one's little finger.

However, the young man had scarcely taken up this position when he was surprised to hear some people talking, their words reaching him with great distinctness. And on leaning forward he realised that his Eminence in person was standing on another balcony close by, and conversing with a priest, only a portion of whose cassock could be seen. Still, this sufficed for Pierre to recognise Santobono. His first impulse, dictated by natural discretion, was to withdraw from the window, but the words he next heard riveted him to the spot.

"We shall know in a moment," his Eminence was saying in his full voice. "I sent Eufemio to Rome, for he is the only person in whom I've any confidence. And see, there is the train bringing him back."

A train, still as small as a plaything, could in fact be seen approaching over the vast plain, and doubtless it was to watch for its arrival that Sanguinetti had stationed himself on the balcony. And there he lingered, with his eyes fixed on distant Rome. Then Santobono, in a passionate voice, spoke some words which Pierre imperfectly understood, but the Cardinal with clear articulation rejoined, "Yes, yes, my dear fellow, a catastrophe would be a great misfortune. Ah! may his Holiness long be preserved to us." Then he paused, and as he was no hypocrite, gave full expression to the thoughts which were in his mind: "At least, I hope that he will be preserved just now, for the times are bad, and I am in frightful anguish. The partisans of Antichrist have lately gained much ground."

A cry escaped Santobono: "Oh! your Eminence will act and triumph."

"I, my dear fellow? What would you have me do? I am simply at the disposal of my friends, those who are willing to believe in me, with the sole object of ensuring the victory of the Holy See. It is they who ought to act, it is they—each according to the measure of his means—who ought to bar the road to the wicked in order that the righteous may succeed. Ah! if Antichrist should reign—"

The recurrence of this word Antichrist greatly disturbed Pierre; but he suddenly remembered what the Count had told him: Antichrist was Cardinal Boccanera.

"Think of that, my dear fellow," continued Sanguinetti. "Picture Antichrist at the Vatican, consummating the ruin of religion by his implacable pride, his iron will, his gloomy passion for nihility; for there can be no doubt of it, he is the Beast of Death announced by the prophecies, the Beast who will expose one and all to the danger of being swallowed up with him in his furious rush into abysmal darkness. I know him; he only dreams of obstinacy and destruction, he will seize the pillars of the temple and shake them in order that he may sink beneath the ruins, he and the whole Catholic world! In less than six months he will be driven from Rome, at strife with all the nations, execrated by Italy, and roaming the world like the phantom of the last pope!"

It was with a low growl, suggestive of a stifled oath, that Santobono responded to this frightful prediction. But the train had now reached the station, and among the few passengers who had alighted, Pierre could distinguish a little Abbe, who was walking so fast that his cassock flapped against his hips. It was Abbe Eufemio, the Cardinal's secretary, and when he had perceived his Eminence on the balcony he lost all self-respect, and broke into a run, in order that he might the sooner ascend the sloping street. "Ah! here's Eufemio," exclaimed the Cardinal, quivering with anxiety. "We shall know now, we shall know now."

The secretary had plunged into the doorway below, and he climbed the stairs with such rapidity that almost immediately afterwards Pierre saw him rush breathlessly across the waiting-room, and vanish into the Cardinal's sanctum. Sanguinetti had quitted the balcony to meet his messenger, but soon afterwards he returned to it asking questions, venting exclamations, raising, in fact, quite a tumult over the news which he had received. "And so it's really true, the night was a bad one. His Holiness scarcely slept! Colic, you were told? But nothing could be worse at his age; it might carry him off in a couple of hours. And the doctors, what do they say?"

The answer did not reach Pierre, but he understood its purport as the Cardinal in his naturally loud voice resumed: "Oh! the doctors never know. Besides, when they refuse to speak death is never far off. Dio! what a misfortune if the catastrophe cannot be deferred for a few days!"

Then he became silent, and Pierre realised that his eyes were once more travelling towards Rome, gazing with ambitious anguish at the dome of St. Peter's, that little, sparkling speck above the vast, ruddy plain. What a commotion, what agitation if the Pope were dead! And he wished that it had merely been necessary for him to stretch forth his arm in order to take and hold the Eternal City, the Holy City, which, yonder on the horizon, occupied no more space than a heap of gravel cast there by a child's spade. And he was already dreaming of the coming Conclave, when the canopy of each other cardinal would fall, and his own, motionless and sovereign, would crown him with purple.

"But you are right, my friend!" he suddenly exclaimed, addressing Santobono, "one must act, the salvation of the Church is at stake. And, besides, it is impossible that Heaven should not be with us, since our sole desire is its triumph. If necessary, at the supreme moment, Heaven will know how to crush Antichrist."

Then, for the first time, Pierre distinctly heard the voice of Santobono, who, gruffly, with a sort of savage decision, responded: "Oh! if Heaven is tardy it shall be helped."

That was all; the young man heard nothing further save a confused murmur of voices. The speakers quitted the balcony, and his spell of waiting began afresh in the sunlit salon so peaceful and delightful in its brightness. But all at once the door of his Eminence's private room was thrown wide open and a servant ushered him in; and he was surprised to find the Cardinal alone, for he had not witnessed the departure of the two priests, who had gone off by another door. The Cardinal, with his highly coloured face, big nose, thick lips, square-set, vigorous figure, which still looked young despite his sixty years, was standing near a window in the bright golden light. He had put on the paternal smile with which he greeted even the humblest from motives of good policy, and as soon as Pierre had knelt and kissed his ring, he motioned him to a chair. "Sit down, dear son, sit down. You have come of course about that unfortunate affair of your book. I am very pleased indeed to be able to speak with you about it."

He himself then took a chair in front of that window overlooking Rome whence he seemed unable to drag himself. And the young priest, whilst apologising for coming to disturb his rest, perceived that he scarcely listened, for his eyes again sought the prey which he so ardently coveted. Yet the semblance of good-natured attention was perfect, and Pierre marvelled at the force of will which this man must possess to appear so calm, so interested in the affairs of others, when such a tempest was raging in him.

"Your Eminence will, I hope, kindly forgive me," continued the young priest.

"But you have done right to come, since I am kept here by my failing health," said the Cardinal. "Besides, I am somewhat better, and it is only natural that you should wish to give me some explanations and defend your work and enlighten my judgment. In fact, I was astonished at not yet having seen you, for I know that your faith in your cause is great and that you spare no steps to convert your judges. So speak, my dear son, I am listening and shall be pleased indeed if I can absolve you."

Pierre was caught by these kind words, and a hope returned to him, that of winning the support of the all-powerful Prefect of the Index. He already regarded this ex-nuncio—who at Brussels and Vienna had acquired the worldly art of sending people away satisfied with indefinite promises though he meant to grant them nothing—as a man of rare intelligence and exquisite cordiality. And so once more he regained the fervour of his apostolate to express his views respecting the future Rome, the Rome he dreamt of, which was destined yet again to become the mistress of the world if she would return to the Christianity of Jesus, to an ardent love for the weak and the humble.

Sanguinetti smiled, wagged his head, and raised exclamations of rapture: "Very good, very good indeed, perfect! Oh! I agree with you, dear son. One cannot put things better. It is quite evident; all good minds must agree with you." And then, said he, the poetic side deeply touched him. Like Leo XIII—and doubtless in a spirit of rivalry—he courted the reputation of being a very distinguished Latinist, and professed a special and boundless affection for Virgil. "I know, I know," he exclaimed, "I remember your page on the return of spring, which consoles the poor whom winter has frozen. Oh! I read it three times over! And are you aware that your writing is full of Latin turns of style. I noticed more than fifty expressions which could be found in the 'Bucolics.' Your book is a charm, a perfect charm!"

As he was no fool, and realised that the little priest before him was a man of high intelligence, he ended by interesting himself, not in Pierre personally, but in the profit which he might possibly derive from him. Amidst his feverish intrigues, he unceasingly sought to utilise all the qualities possessed by those whom God sent to him that might in any way be conducive to his own triumph. So, for a moment, he turned away from Rome and looked his companion in the face, listening to him and asking himself in what way he might employ him—either at once in the crisis through which he was passing, or later on when he should be pope. But the young priest again made the mistake of attacking the temporal power, and of employing that unfortunate expression, "a new religion." Thereupon the Cardinal stopped him with a gesture, still smiling, still retaining all his amiability, although the resolution which he had long since formed became from that moment definitive. "You are certainly in the right on many points, my dear son," he said, "and I often share your views—share them completely. But come, you are doubtless not aware that I am the protector of Lourdes here at Rome. And so, after the page which you have written about the Grotto, how can I possibly pronounce in your favour and against the Fathers?"

Pierre was utterly overcome by this announcement, for he was indeed unaware of the Cardinal's position with respect to Lourdes, nobody having taken the precaution to warn him. However, each of the Catholic enterprises distributed throughout the world has a protector at Rome, a cardinal who is designated by the Pope to represent it and, if need be, to defend it.

"Those good Fathers!" Sanguinetti continued in a gentle voice, "you have caused them great grief, and really our hands are tied, we cannot add to their sorrow. If you only knew what a number of masses they send us! I know more than one of our poor priests who would die of hunger if it were not for them."

Pierre could only bow beneath the blow. Once more he found himself in presence of the pecuniary question, the necessity in which the Holy See is placed to secure the revenue it requires one year with another. And thus the Pope was ever in servitude, for if the loss of Rome had freed him of the cares of state, his enforced gratitude for the alms he received still riveted him to earth. So great, indeed, were the requirements, that money was the ruler, the sovereign power, before which all bowed at the Court of Rome.

And now Sanguinetti rose to dismiss his visitor. "You must not despair, dear son," he said effusively. "I have only my own vote, you know, and I promise you that I will take into account the excellent explanations which you have just given me. And who can tell? If God be with you, He will save you even in spite of all!" This speech formed part of the Cardinal's usual tactics; for one of his principles was never to drive people to extremes by sending them away hopeless. What good, indeed, would it do to tell this one that the condemnation of his book was a foregone conclusion, and that his only prudent course would be to disavow it? Only a savage like Boccanera breathed anger upon fiery souls and plunged them into rebellion. "You must hope, hope!" repeated Sanguinetti with a smile, as if implying a multitude of fortunate things which he could not plainly express.

Thereupon Pierre, who was deeply touched, felt born anew. He even forgot the conversation he had surprised, the Cardinal's keen ambition and covert rage with his redoubtable rival. Besides, might not intelligence take the place of heart among the powerful? If this man should some day become pope, and had understood him, might he not prove the pope who was awaited, the pope who would accept the task of reorganising the Church of the United States of Europe, and making it the spiritual sovereign of the world? So he thanked him with emotion, bowed, and left him to his dream, standing before that widely open window whence Rome appeared to him, glittering like a jewel, even indeed as the tiara of gold and gems, in the splendour of the autumn sun.

It was nearly one o'clock when Pierre and Count Prada were at last able to sit down to dejeuner in the little restaurant where they had agreed to meet. They had both been delayed by their affairs. However, the Count, having settled some worrying matters to his own advantage, was very lively, whilst the priest on his side was again hopeful, and yielded to the delightful charm of that last fine day. And so the meal proved a very pleasant one in the large, bright room, which, as usual at that season of the year, was quite deserted. Pink and blue predominated in the decoration, but Cupids fluttered on the ceiling, and landscapes, vaguely recalling the Roman castles, adorned the walls. The things they ate were fresh, and they drank the wine of Frascati, to which the soil imparts a kind of burnt flavour as if the old volcanoes of the region had left some little of their fire behind.

For a long while the conversation ranged over those wild and graceful Alban hills, which, fortunately for the pleasure of the eye, overlook the flat Roman Campagna. Pierre, who had made the customary carriage excursion from Frascati to Nemi, still felt its charm and spoke of it in glowing language. First came the lovely road from Frascati to Albano, ascending and descending hillsides planted with reeds, vines, and olive-trees, amongst which one obtained frequent glimpses of the Campagna's wavy immensity. On the right-hand the village of Rocca di Papa arose in amphitheatrical fashion, showing whitely on a knoll below Monte Cavo, which was crowned by lofty and ancient trees. And from this point of the road, on looking back towards Frascati, one saw high up, on the verge of a pine wood the ruins of Tusculum, large ruddy ruins, baked by centuries of sunshine, and whence the boundless panorama must have been superb. Next one passed through Marino, with its sloping streets, its large cathedral, and its black decaying palace belonging to the Colonnas. Then, beyond a wood of ilex-trees, the lake of Albano was skirted with scenery which has no parallel in the world. In front, beyond the clear mirror of motionless water, were the ruins of Alba Longa; on the left rose Monte Cavo with Rocca di Papa and Palazzuolo; whilst on the right Castel Gandolfo overlooked the lake as from the summit of a cliff. Down below in the extinct crater, as in the depths of a gigantic cup of verdure, the lake slept heavy and lifeless: a sheet of molten metal, which the sun on one side streaked with gold, whilst the other was black with shade. And the road then ascended all the way to Castel Gandolfo, which was perched on its rock, like a white bird betwixt the lake and the sea. Ever refreshed by breezes, even in the most burning hours of summer, the little place was once famous for its papal villa, where Pius IX loved to spend hours of indolence, and whither Leo XIII has never come. And next the road dipped down, and the ilex-trees appeared again, ilex-trees famous for their size, a double row of monsters with twisted limbs, two and three hundred years old. Then one at last reached Albano, a small town less modernised and less cleansed than Frascati, a patch of the old land which has retained some of its ancient wildness; and afterwards there was Ariccia with the Palazzo Chigi, and hills covered with forests and viaducts spanning ravines which overflowed with foliage; and there was yet Genzano, and yet Nemi, growing still wilder and more remote, lost in the midst of rocks and trees.

Ah! how ineffaceable was the recollection which Pierre had retained of Nemi, Nemi on the shore of its lake, Nemi so delicious and fascinating from afar, conjuring up all the ancient legends of fairy towns springing from amidst the greenery of mysterious waters, but so repulsively filthy when one at last reaches it, crumbling on all sides but yet dominated by the Orsini tower, as by the evil genius of the middle ages, which there seems to perpetuate the ferocious habits, the violent passions, the knife thrusts of the past! Thence came that Santobono whose brother had killed, and who himself, with his eyes of crime glittering like live embers, seemed to be consumed by a murderous flame. And the lake, that lake round like an extinguished moon fallen into the depths of a former crater, a deeper and less open cup than that of the lake of Albano, a cup rimmed with trees of wondrous vigour and density! Pines, elms, and willows descend to the very margin, with a green mass of tangled branches which weigh each other down. This formidable fecundity springs from the vapour which constantly arises from the water under the parching action of the sun, whose rays accumulate in this hollow till it becomes like a furnace. There is a warm, heavy dampness, the paths of the adjacent gardens grow green with moss, and in the morning dense mists often fill the large cup with white vapour, as with the steaming milk of some sorceress of malevolent craft. And Pierre well remembered how uncomfortable he had felt before that lake where ancient atrocities, a mysterious religion with abominable rites, seemed to slumber amidst the superb scenery. He had seen it at the approach of evening, looking, in the shade of its forest girdle, like a plate of dull metal, black and silver, motionless by reason of its weight. And that water, clear and yet so deep, that water deserted, without a bark upon its surface, that water august, lifeless, and sepulchral, had left him a feeling of inexpressible sadness, of mortal melancholy, the hopelessness of great solitary passion, earth and water alike swollen by the mute spasms of germs, troublous in their fecundity. Ah! those black and plunging banks, and that black mournful lake prone at the bottom!*

* Some literary interest attaches to M. Zola's account of Nemi,
whose praises have been sung by a hundred poets. It will be
observed that he makes no mention of Egeria. The religion
distinguished by abominable practices to which he alludes,
may perhaps be the worship of the Egyptian Diana, who had a
famous temple near Nemi, which was excavated by Lord Savile
some ten years ago, when all the smaller objects discovered
were presented to the town of Nottingham. At this temple,
according to some classical writers, the chief priest was
required to murder his predecessor, and there were other
abominable usages.—Trans.

Count Prada began to laugh when Pierre told him of these impressions. "Yes, yes," said he, "it's true, Nemi isn't always gay. In dull weather I have seen the lake looking like lead, and even the full sunshine scarcely animates it. For my part, I know I should die of ennui if I had to live face to face with that bare water. But it is admired by poets and romantic women, those who adore great tragedies of passion."

Then, as he and Pierre rose from the table to go and take coffee on the terrace of the restaurant, the conversation changed: "Do you mean to attend Prince Buongiovanni's reception this evening?" the Count inquired. "It will be a curious sight, especially for a foreigner, and I advise you not to miss it."

"Yes, I have an invitation," Pierre replied. "A friend of mine, Monsieur Narcisse Habert, an attache at our embassy, procured it for me, and I am going with him."

That evening, indeed, there was to be a fete at the Palazzo Buongiovanni on the Corso, one of the few galas that take place in Rome each winter. People said that this one would surpass all others in magnificence, for it was to be given in honour of the betrothal of little Princess Celia. The Prince, her father, after boxing her ears, it was rumoured, and narrowly escaping an attack of apoplexy as the result of a frightful fit of anger, had, all at once, yielded to her quiet, gentle stubbornness, and consented to her marriage with Lieutenant Attilio, the son of Minister Sacco. And all the drawing-rooms of Rome, those of the white world quite as much as those of the black, were thoroughly upset by the tidings.

Count Prada made merry over the affair. "Ah! you'll see a fine sight!" he exclaimed. "Personally, I'm delighted with it all for the sake of my good cousin Attilio, who is really a very nice and worthy fellow. And nothing in the world would keep me from going to see my dear uncle Sacco make his entry into the ancient salons of the Buongiovanni. It will be something extraordinary and superb. He has at last become Minister of Agriculture, you know. My father, who always takes things so seriously, told me this morning that the affair so worried him he hadn't closed his eyes all night."

The Count paused, but almost immediately added: "I say, it is half-past two and you won't have a train before five o'clock. Do you know what you ought to do? Why, drive back to Rome with me in my carriage."

"No, no," rejoined Pierre, "I'm deeply obliged to you but I'm to dine with my friend Narcisse this evening, and I mustn't be late."

"But you won't be late—on the contrary! We shall start at three and reach Rome before five o'clock. There can't be a more pleasant promenade when the light falls; and, come, I promise you a splendid sunset."

He was so pressing that the young priest had to accept, quite subjugated by so much amiability and good humour. They spent another half-hour very pleasantly in chatting about Rome, Italy, and France. Then, for a moment, they went up into Frascati where the Count wished to say a few words to a contractor, and just as three o'clock was striking they started off, seated side by side on the soft cushions and gently rocked by the motion of the victoria as the two horses broke into a light trot. As Prada had predicted, that return to Rome across the bare Campagna under the vast limpid heavens at the close of such a mild autumn day proved most delightful. First of all, however, the victoria had to descend the slopes of Frascati between vineyards and olive-trees. The paved road snaked, and was but little frequented; they merely saw a few peasants in old felt hats, a white mule, and a cart drawn by a donkey, for it is only upon Sundays that the osterie or wine-shops are filled and that artisans in easy circumstances come to eat a dish of kid at the surrounding bastides. However, at one turn of the road they passed a monumental fountain. Then a flock of sheep momentarily barred the way before defiling past. And beyond the gentle undulations of the ruddy Campagna Rome appeared amidst the violet vapours of evening, sinking by degrees as the carriage itself descended to a lower and lower level. There came a moment when the city was a mere thin grey streak, speckled whitely here and there by a few sunlit house-fronts. And then it seemed to plunge below the ground—to be submerged by the swell of the far-spreading fields.

The victoria was now rolling over the plain, leaving the Alban hills behind, whilst before it and on either hand came the expanse of meadows and stubbles. And then it was that the Count, after leaning forward, exclaimed: "Just look ahead, yonder, there's our man of this morning, Santobono in person—what a strapping fellow he is, and how fast he walks! My horses can scarcely overtake him."

Pierre in his turn leant forward and likewise perceived the priest of St. Mary in the Fields, looking tall and knotty, fashioned as it were with a bill-hook. Robed in a long black cassock, he showed like a vigorous splotch of ink amidst the bright sunshine streaming around him; and he was walking on at such a fast, stern, regular pace that he suggested Destiny on the march. Something, which could not be well distinguished, was hanging from his right arm.

When the carriage had at last overtaken him Prada told the coachman to slacken speed, and then entered into conversation.

"Good-day, Abbe; you are well, I hope?" he asked.

"Very well, Signor Conte, I thank you."

"And where are you going so bravely?"

"Signor Conte, I am going to Rome."

"What! to Rome, at this late hour?"

"Oh! I shall be there nearly as soon as yourself. The distance doesn't frighten me, and money's quickly earned by walking."

Scarcely turning his head to reply, stepping out beside the wheels, Santobono did not miss a stride. And Prada, diverted by the meeting, whispered to Pierre: "Wait a bit, he'll amuse us." Then he added aloud: "Since you are going to Rome, Abbe, you had better get in here; there's room for you."

Santobono required no pressing, but at once accepted the offer. "Willingly; a thousand thanks," he said. "It's still better to save one's shoe leather."

Then he got in and installed himself on the bracket-seat, declining with abrupt humility the place which Pierre politely offered him beside the Count. The young priest and the latter now saw that the object he was carrying was a little basket of fresh figs, nicely arranged and covered with leaves.

The horses set off again at a faster trot, and the carriage rolled on and on over the superb, flat plain. "So you are going to Rome?" the Count resumed in order to make Santobono talk.

"Yes," the other replied, "I am taking his Eminence Cardinal Boccanera these few figs, the last of the season: a little present which I had promised him." He had placed the basket on his knees and was holding it between his big knotty hands as if it were something rare and fragile.

"Ah! some of the famous figs of your garden," said Prada. "It's quite true, they are like honey. But why don't you rid yourself of them. You surely don't mean to keep them on your knees all the way to Rome. Give them to me, I'll put them in the hood."

However, Santobono became quite agitated, and vigorously declined the offer. "No, no, a thousand thanks! They don't embarrass me in the least; they are very well here; and in this way I shall be sure that no accident will befall them."

His passion for the fruit he grew quite amused Prada, who nudged Pierre, and then inquired: "Is the Cardinal fond of your figs?"

"Oh! his Eminence condescends to adore them. In former years, when he spent the summer at the villa, he would never touch the figs from other trees. And so, you see, knowing his tastes, it costs me very little to gratify him."

Whilst making this reply Santobono had shot such a keen glance in the direction of Pierre that the Count felt it necessary to introduce them to one another. This he did saying: "As it happens, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment is stopping at the Palazzo Boccanera; he has been there for three months or so."

"Yes, I'm aware of it," Santobono quietly replied; "I found Monsieur l'Abbe with his Eminence one day when I took some figs to the Palazzo. Those were less ripe, but these are perfect." So speaking he gave the little basket a complacent glance, and seemed to press it yet more closely between his huge and hairy fingers.

Then came a spell of silence, whilst on either hand the Campagna spread out as far as the eye could reach. All houses had long since disappeared; there was not a wall, not a tree, nothing but the undulating expanse whose sparse, short herbage was, with the approach of winter, beginning to turn green once more. A tower, a half-fallen ruin which came into sight on the left, rising in solitude into the limpid sky above the flat, boundless line of the horizon, suddenly assumed extraordinary importance. Then, on the right, the distant silhouettes of cattle and horses were seen in a large enclosure with wooden rails. Urged on by the goad, oxen, still yoked, were slowly coming back from ploughing; whilst a farmer, cantering beside the ploughed land on a little sorrel nag, gave a final look round for the night. Now and again the road became peopled. A biroccino, an extremely light vehicle with two huge wheels and a small seat perched upon the springs, whisked by like a gust of wind. From time to time also the victoria passed a carrotino, one of the low carts in which peasants, sheltered by a kind of bright-hued tent, bring the wine, vegetables, and fruit of the castle-lands to Rome. The shrill tinkling of horses' bells was heard afar off as the animals followed the well-known road of their own accord, their peasant drivers usually being sound asleep. Women with bare, black hair, scarlet neckerchiefs, and skirts caught up, were seen going home in groups of three and four. And then the road again emptied, and the solitude became more and more complete, without a wayfarer or an animal appearing for miles and miles, whilst yonder, at the far end of the lifeless sea, so grandiose and mournful in its monotony, the sun continued to descend from the infinite vault of heaven.

"And the Pope, Abbe, is he dead?" Prada suddenly inquired.

Santobono did not even start. "I trust," he replied in all simplicity, "that his Holiness still has many long years to live for the triumph of the Church."

"So you had good news this morning when you called on your bishop, Cardinal Sanguinetti?"

This time the priest was unable to restrain a slight start. Had he been seen, then? In his haste he had failed to notice the two men following the road behind him. However, he at once regained self-possession, and replied: "Oh! one can never tell exactly whether news is good or bad. It seems that his Holiness passed a somewhat painful night, but I devoutly hope that the next will be a better one." Then he seemed to meditate for a moment, and added: "Moreover, if God should have deemed it time to call his Holiness to Himself, He would not leave His flock without a shepherd. He would have already chosen and designated the Sovereign Pontiff of to-morrow."

This superb answer increased Prada's gaiety. "You are really extraordinary, Abbe," he said. "So you think that popes are solely created by the grace of the Divinity! The pope of to-morrow is chosen up in heaven, eh, and simply waits? Well, I fancied that men had something to do with the matter. But perhaps you already know which cardinal it is that the divine favour has thus elected in advance?"

Then, like the unbeliever he was, he went on with his facile jests, which left the priest unruffled. In fact, the latter also ended by laughing when the Count, after alluding to the gambling passion which at each fresh Conclave sets wellnigh the whole population of Rome betting for or against this or that candidate, told him that he might easily make his fortune if he were in the divine secret. Next the talk turned on the three white cassocks of different sizes which are always kept in readiness in a cupboard at the Vatican. Which of them would be required on this occasion?—the short one, the long one, or the one of medium size? Each time that the reigning pope falls somewhat seriously ill there is in this wise an extraordinary outburst of emotion, a keen awakening of all ambitions and intrigues, to such a point that not merely in the black world, but throughout the city, people have no other subject of curiosity, conversation, and occupation than that of discussing the relative claims of the cardinals and predicting which of them will be elected.

"Come, come," Prada resumed, "since you know the truth, I'm determined that you shall tell me. Will it be Cardinal Moretta?"

Santobono, in spite of his evident desire to remain dignified and disinterested, like a good, pious priest, was gradually growing impassioned, yielding to the hidden fire which consumed him. And this interrogatory finished him off; he could no longer restrain himself, but replied: "Moretta! What an idea! Why, he is sold to all Europe!"

"Well, will it be Cardinal Bartolini?"

"Oh! you can't think that. Bartolini has used himself up in striving for everything and getting nothing."

"Will it be Cardinal Dozio, then?"

"Dozio, Dozio! Why, if Dozio were to win one might altogether despair of our Holy Church, for no man can have a baser mind than he!"

Prada raised his hands, as if he had exhausted the serious candidates. In order to increase the priest's exasperation he maliciously refrained from naming Cardinal Sanguinetti, who was certainly Santobono's nominee. All at once, however, he pretended to make a good guess, and gaily exclaimed: "Ah! I have it; I know your man—Cardinal Boccanera!"

The blow struck Santobono full in the heart, wounding him both in his rancour and his patriotic faith. His terrible mouth was already opening, and he was about to shout "No! no!" with all his strength, but he managed to restrain the cry, compelled as he was to silence by the present on his knees—that little basket of figs which he pressed so convulsively with both hands; and the effort which he was obliged to make left him quivering to such a point that he had to wait some time before he could reply in a calm voice: "His most reverend Eminence Cardinal Boccanera is a saintly man, well worthy of the throne, and my only fear is that, with his hatred of new Italy, he might bring us warfare."

Prada, however, desired to enlarge the wound. "At all events," said he, "you accept him and love him too much not to rejoice over his chances of success. And I really think that we have arrived at the truth, for everybody is convinced that the Conclave's choice cannot fall elsewhere. Come, come; Boccanera is a very tall man, so it's the long white cassock which will be required."

"The long cassock, the long cassock," growled Santobono, despite himself; "that's all very well, but—"

Then he stopped short, and, again overcoming his passion, left his sentence unfinished. Pierre, listening in silence, marvelled at the man's self-restraint, for he remembered the conversation which he had overheard at Cardinal Sanguinetti's. Those figs were evidently a mere pretext for gaining admission to the Boccanera mansion, where some friend—Abbe Paparelli, no doubt—could alone supply certain positive information which was needed. But how great was the command which the hot-blooded priest exercised over himself amidst the riotous impulses of his soul!

On either side of the road the Campagna still and ever spread its expanse of verdure, and Prada, who had become grave and dreamy, gazed before him without seeing anything. At last, however, he gave expression to his thoughts. "You know, Abbe, what will be said if the Pope should die this time. That sudden illness, those colics, those refusals to make any information public, mean nothing good—Yes, yes, poison, just as for the others!"

Pierre gave a start of stupefaction. The Pope poisoned! "What! Poison? Again?" he exclaimed as he gazed at his companions with dilated eyes. Poison at the end of the nineteenth century, as in the days of the Borgias, as on the stage in a romanticist melodrama! To him the idea appeared both monstrous and ridiculous.

Santobono, whose features had become motionless and impenetrable, made no reply. But Prada nodded, and the conversation was henceforth confined to him and the young priest. "Why, yes, poison," he replied. "The fear of it has remained very great in Rome. Whenever a death seems inexplicable, either by reason of its suddenness or the tragic circumstances which attend it, the unanimous thought is poison. And remark this: in no city, I believe, are sudden deaths so frequent. The causes I don't exactly know, but some doctors put everything down to the fevers. Among the people, however, the one thought is poison, poison with all its legends, poison which kills like lightning and leaves no trace, the famous recipe bequeathed from age to age, through the emperors and the popes, down to these present times of middle-class democracy."

As he spoke he ended by smiling, for he was inclined to be somewhat sceptical on the point, despite the covert terror with which he was inspired by racial and educational causes. However, he quoted instances. The Roman matrons had rid themselves of their husbands and lovers by employing the venom of red toads. Locusta, in a more practical spirit, sought poison in plants, one of which, probably aconite, she was wont to boil. Then, long afterwards, came the age of the Borgias, and subsequently, at Naples, La Toffana sold a famous water, doubtless some preparation of arsenic, in phials decorated with a representation of St. Nicholas of Bari. There were also extraordinary stories of pins, a prick from which killed one like lightning, of cups of wine poisoned by the infusion of rose petals, of woodcocks cut in half with prepared knives, which poisoned but one-half of the bird, so that he who partook of that half was killed. "I myself, in my younger days," continued Prada, "had a friend whose bride fell dead in church during the marriage service through simply inhaling a bouquet of flowers. And so isn't it possible that the famous recipe may really have been handed down, and have remained known to a few adepts?"

"But chemistry has made too much progress," Pierre replied. "If mysterious poisons were believed in by the ancients and remained undetected in their time it was because there were no means of analysis. But the drug of the Borgias would now lead the simpleton who might employ it straight to the Assizes. Such stories are mere nonsense, and at the present day people scarcely tolerate them in newspaper serials and shockers."

"Perhaps so," resumed the Count with his uneasy smile. "You are right, no doubt—only go and tell that to your host, for instance, Cardinal Boccanera, who last summer held in his arms an old and deeply-loved friend, Monsignor Gallo, who died after a seizure of a couple of hours."

"But apoplexy may kill one in two hours, and aneurism only takes two minutes."

"True, but ask the Cardinal what he thought of his friend's prolonged shudders, the leaden hue which overcame his face, the sinking of his eyes, and the expression of terror which made him quite unrecognisable. The Cardinal is convinced that Monsignor Gallo was poisoned, because he was his dearest confidant, the counsellor to whom he always listened, and whose wise advice was a guarantee of success."

Pierre's bewilderment was increasing, and, irritated by the impassibility of Santobono, he addressed him direct. "It's idiotic, it's awful! Does your reverence also believe in these frightful stories?"

But the priest of Frascati gave no sign. His thick, passionate lips remained closed while his black glowing eyes never ceased to gaze at Prada. The latter, moreover, was quoting other instances. There was the case of Monsignor Nazzarelli, who had been found in bed, shrunken and calcined like carbon. And there was that of Monsignor Brando, struck down in his sacerdotal vestments at St. Peter's itself, in the very sacristy, during vespers!

"Ah! Mon Dieu!" sighed Pierre, "you will tell me so much that I myself shall end by trembling, and sha'n't dare to eat anything but boiled eggs as long as I stay in this terrible Rome of yours."

For a moment this whimsical reply enlivened both the Count and Pierre. But it was quite true that their conversation showed Rome under a terrible aspect, for it conjured up the Eternal City of Crime, the city of poison and the knife, where for more than two thousand years, ever since the raising of the first bit of wall, the lust of power, the frantic hunger for possession and enjoyment, had armed men's hands, ensanguined the pavements, and cast victims into the river and the ground. Assassinations and poisonings under the emperors, poisonings and assassinations under the popes, ever did the same torrent of abominations strew that tragic soil with death amidst the sovereign glory of the sun.

"All the same," said the Count, "those who take precautions are perhaps not ill advised. It is said that more than one cardinal shudders and mistrusts people. One whom I know will never eat anything that has not been bought and prepared by his own cook. And as for the Pope, if he is anxious—"

Pierre again raised a cry of stupefaction. "What, the Pope himself! The Pope afraid of being poisoned!"

"Well, my dear Abbe, people commonly assert it. There are certainly days when he considers himself more menaced than anybody else. And are you not aware of the old Roman view that a pope ought never to live till too great an age, and that when he is so obstinate as not to die at the right time he ought to be assisted? As soon as a pope begins to fall into second childhood, and by reason of his senility becomes a source of embarrassment, and possibly even danger, to the Church, his right place is heaven. Moreover, matters are managed in a discreet manner; a slight cold becomes a decent pretext to prevent him from tarrying any longer on the throne of St. Peter."

Prada then gave some curious details. One prelate, it was said, wishing to dispel his Holiness's fears, had devised an elaborate precautionary system which, among other things, was to comprise a little padlocked vehicle, in which the food destined for the frugal pontifical table was to be securely placed before leaving the kitchen, so that it might not be tampered with on its way to the Pope's apartments. However, this project had not yet been carried into effect.

"After all," the Count concluded with a laugh, "every pope has to die some day, especially when his death is needful for the welfare of the Church. Isn't that so, Abbe?"

Santobono, whom he addressed, had a moment previously lowered his eyes as if to contemplate the little basket of figs which he held on his lap with as much care as if it had been the Blessed Sacrament. On being questioned in such a direct, sharp fashion he could not do otherwise than look up. However, he did not depart from his prolonged silence, but limited his answer to a slow nod.

"And it is God alone, and not poison, who causes one to die. Is that not so, Abbe?" repeated Prada. "It is said that those were the last words of poor Monsignor Gallo before he expired in the arms of his friend Cardinal Boccanera."

For the second time Santobono nodded without speaking. And then silence fell, all three sinking into a dreamy mood.

Meantime, without a pause, the carriage rolled on across the immensity of the Campagna. The road, straight as an arrow, seemed to extend into the infinite. As the sun descended towards the horizon the play of light and shade became more marked on the broad undulations of the ground which stretched away, alternately of a pinky green and a violet grey, till they reached the distant fringe of the sky. At the roadside on either hand there were still and ever tall withered thistles and giant fennel with yellow umbels. Then, after a time, came a team of four oxen, that had been kept ploughing until late, and stood forth black and huge in the pale atmosphere and mournful solitude. Farther on some flocks of sheep, whence the breeze wafted a tallowy odour, set patches of brown amidst the herbage, which once more was becoming verdant; whilst at intervals a dog was heard to bark, his voice the only distinct sound amidst the low quivering of that silent desert where the sovereign peacefulness of death seemed to reign. But all at once a light melody arose and some larks flew up, one of them soaring into the limpid golden heavens. And ahead, at the far extremity of the pure sky, Rome, with her towers and domes, grew larger and larger, like a city of white marble springing from a mirage amidst the greenery of some enchanted garden.

"Matteo!" Prada called to his coachman, "pull up at the Osteria Romana." And to his companions he added: "Pray excuse me, but I want to see if I can get some new-laid eggs for my father. He is so fond of them."

A few minutes afterwards the carriage stopped. At the very edge of the road stood a primitive sort of inn, bearing the proud and sonorous name of "Antica Osteria Romana." It had now become a mere house of call for carters and chance sportsmen, who ventured to drink a flagon of white wine whilst eating an omelet and a slice of ham. Occasionally, on Sundays, some of the humble classes would walk over from Rome and make merry there; but the week days often went by without a soul entering the place, such was its isolation amidst the bare Campagna.

The Count was already springing from the carriage. "I shall only be a minute," said he as he turned away.

The osteria was a long, low pile with a ground floor and one upper storey, the last being reached by an outdoor stairway built of large blocks of stone which had been scorched by the hot suns. The entire place, indeed, was corroded, tinged with the hue of old gold. On the ground floor one found a common room, a cart-house, and a stable with adjoining sheds. At one side, near a cluster of parasol pines—the only trees that could grow in that ungrateful soil—there was an arbour of reeds where five or six rough wooden tables were set out. And, as a background to this sorry, mournful nook of life, there arose a fragment of an ancient aqueduct whose arches, half fallen and opening on to space, alone interrupted the flat line of the horizon.

All at once, however, the Count retraced his steps, and, addressing Santobono, exclaimed: "I say, Abbe, you'll surely accept a glass of white wine. I know that you are a bit of a vine grower, and they have a little white wine here which you ought to make acquaintance with."

Santobono again required no pressing, but quietly alighted. "Oh! I know it," said he; "it's a wine from Marino; it's grown in a lighter soil than ours at Frascati."

Then, as he would not relax his hold on his basket of figs, but even now carried it along with him, the Count lost patience. "Come, you don't want that basket," said he; "leave it in the carriage."

The priest gave no reply, but walked ahead, whilst Pierre also made up his mind to descend from the carriage in order to see what a suburban osteria was like. Prada was known at this place, and an old woman, tall, withered, but looking quite queenly in her wretched garments, had at once presented herself. On the last occasion when the Count had called she had managed to find half a dozen eggs. This time she said she would go to see, but could promise nothing, for the hens laid here and there all over the place, and she could never tell what eggs there might be.

"All right!" Prada answered, "go and look; and meantime we will have a caraffa of white wine."

The three men entered the common room, which was already quite dark. Although the hot weather was now over, one heard the buzzing of innumerable flies immediately one reached the threshold, and a pungent odour of acidulous wine and rancid oil caught one at the throat. As soon as their eyes became accustomed to the dimness they were able to distinguish the spacious, blackened, malodorous chamber, whose only furniture consisted of some roughly made tables and benches. It seemed to be quite empty, so complete was the silence, apart from the buzz of the flies. However, two men were seated there, two wayfarers who remained mute and motionless before their untouched, brimming glasses. Moreover, on a low chair near the door, in the little light which penetrated from without, a thin, sallow girl, the daughter of the house, sat idle, trembling with fever, her hands close pressed between her knees.

Realising that Pierre felt uncomfortable there, the Count proposed that they should drink their wine outside. "We shall be better out of doors," said he, "it's so very in mild this evening."

Accordingly, whilst the mother looked for the eggs, and the father mended a wheel in an adjacent shed, the daughter was obliged to get up shivering to carry the flagon of wine and the three glasses to the arbour, where she placed them on one of the tables. And, having pocketed the price of the wine—threepence—in silence, she went back to her seat with a sullen look, as if annoyed at having been compelled to make such a long journey. Meanwhile the three men had sat down, and Prada gaily filled each of the glasses, although Pierre declared that he was quite unable to drink wine between his meals. "Pooh, pooh," said the Count, "you can always clink glasses with us. And now, Abbe, isn't this little wine droll? Come, here's to the Pope's better health, since he's unwell!"

Santobono at one gulp emptied his glass and clacked his tongue. With gentle, paternal care he had deposited his basket on the ground beside him: and, taking off his hat, he drew a long breath. The evening was really delightful. A superb sky of a soft golden hue stretched over that endless sea of the Campagna which was soon to fall asleep with sovereign quiescence. And the light breeze which went by amidst the deep silence brought with it an exquisite odour of wild herbs and flowers.

"How pleasant it is!" muttered Pierre, affected by the surrounding charm. "And what a desert for eternal rest, forgetfulness of all the world!"

Prada, who had emptied the flagon by filling Santobono's glass a second time, made no reply; he was silently amusing himself with an occurrence which at first he was the only one to observe. However, with a merry expression of complicity, he gave the young priest a wink, and then they both watched the dramatic incidents of the affair. Some scraggy fowls were wandering round them searching the yellow turf for grasshoppers; and one of these birds, a little shiny black hen with an impudent manner, had caught sight of the basket of figs and was boldly approaching it. When she got near, however, she took fright, and retreated somewhat, with neck stiffened and head turned, so as to cast suspicious glances at the basket with her round sparkling eye. But at last covetousness gained the victory, for she could see one of the figs between the leaves, and so she slowly advanced, lifting her feet very high at each step; and, all at once, stretching out her neck, she gave the fig a formidable peck, which ripped it open and made the juice exude.

Prada, who felt as happy as a child, was then able to give vent to the laughter which he had scarcely been able to restrain: "Look out, Abbe," he called, "mind your figs!"

At that very moment Santobono was finishing his second glass of wine with his head thrown back and his eyes blissfully raised to heaven. He gave a start, looked round, and on seeing the hen at once understood the position. And then came a terrible outburst of anger, with sweeping gestures and terrible invectives. But the hen, who was again pecking, would not be denied; she dug her beak into the fig and carried it off, flapping her wings, so quick and so comical that Prada, and Pierre as well, laughed till tears came into their eyes, their merriment increasing at sight of the impotent fury of Santobono, who, for a moment, pursued the thief, threatening her with his fist.

"Ah!" said the Count, "that's what comes of not leaving the basket in the carriage. If I hadn't warned you the hen would have eaten all the figs."

The priest did not reply, but, growling out vague imprecations, placed the basket on the table, where he raised the leaves and artistically rearranged the fruit so as to fill up the void. Then, the harm having been repaired as far as was possible, he at last calmed down.

It was now time for them to resume their journey, for the sun was sinking towards the horizon, and night would soon fall. Thus the Count ended by getting impatient. "Well, and those eggs?" he called.

Then, as the woman did not return, he went to seek her. He entered the stable, and afterwards the cart-house, but she was neither here nor there. Next he went towards the rear of the osteria in order to look in the sheds. But all at once an unexpected spectacle made him stop short. The little black hen was lying on the ground, dead, killed as by lightning. She showed no sign of hurt; there was nothing but a little streamlet of violet blood still trickling from her beak. Prada was at first merely astonished. He stooped and touched the hen. She was still warm and soft like a rag. Doubtless some apoplectic stroke had killed her. But immediately afterwards he became fearfully pale; the truth appeared to him, and turned him as cold as ice. In a moment he conjured up everything: Leo XIII attacked by illness, Santobono hurrying to Cardinal Sanguinetti for tidings, and then starting for Rome to present a basket of figs to Cardinal Boccanera. And Prada also remembered the conversation in the carriage: the possibility of the Pope's demise, the candidates for the tiara, the legendary stories of poison which still fostered terror in and around the Vatican; and he once more saw the priest, with his little basket on his knees, lavishing paternal attention on it, and he saw the little black hen pecking at the fruit and fleeing with a fig on her beak. And now that little black hen lay there, suddenly struck down, dead!

His conviction was immediate and absolute. But he did not have time to decide what course he should take, for a voice behind him exclaimed: "Why, it's the little hen; what's the matter with her?"

The voice was that of Pierre, who, letting Santobono climb into the carriage alone, had in his turn come round to the rear of the house in order to obtain a better view of the ruined aqueduct among the parasol pines.

Prada, who shuddered as if he himself were the culprit, answered him with a lie, a lie which he did not premeditate, but to which he was impelled by a sort of instinct. "But she's dead," he said.... "Just fancy, there was a fight. At the moment when I got here that other hen, which you see yonder, sprang upon this one to get the fig, which she was still holding, and with a thrust of the beak split her head open.... The blood's flowing, as you can see yourself."

Why did he say these things? He himself was astonished at them whilst he went on inventing them. Was it then that he wished to remain master of the situation, keep the abominable secret entirely to himself, in order that he might afterwards act in accordance with his own desires? Certainly his feelings partook of shame and embarrassment in presence of that foreigner, whilst his personal inclination for violence set some admiration amidst the revolt of his conscience, and a covert desire arose within him to examine the matter from the standpoint of his interests before he came to a decision. But, on the other hand, he claimed to be a man of integrity, and would assuredly not allow people to be poisoned.

Pierre, who was compassionately inclined towards all creation, looked at the hen with the emotion which he always felt at the sudden severance of life. However, he at once accepted Prada's story. "Ah! those fowls!" said he. "They treat one another with an idiotic ferocity which even men can scarcely equal. I kept fowls at home at one time, and one of the hens no sooner hurt her leg than all the others, on seeing the blood oozing, would flock round and peck at the limb till they stripped it to the bone."

Prada, however, did not listen, but at once went off; and it so happened that the woman was, on her side, looking for him in order to hand him four eggs which, after a deal of searching, she had discovered in odd corners about the house. The Count made haste to pay for them, and called to Pierre, who was lingering behind: "We must look sharp! We sha'n't reach Rome now until it is quite dark."

They found Santobono quietly waiting in the carriage, where he had again installed himself on the bracket with his spine resting against the box-seat and his long legs drawn back under him, and he again had the little basket of figs on his knees, and clasped it with his big knotty hands as though it were something fragile and rare which the slightest jolting might damage. His cassock showed like a huge blot, and in his coarse ashen face, that of a peasant yet near to the wild soil and but slightly polished by a few years of theological studies, his eyes alone seemed to live, glowing with the dark flame of a devouring passion. On seeing him seated there in such composure Prada could not restrain a slight shudder. Then, as soon as the victoria was again rolling along the road, he exclaimed: "Well, Abbe, that glass of wine will guarantee us against the malaria. The Pope would soon be cured if he could imitate our example."

Santobono's only reply was a growl. He was in no mood for conversation, but wrapped himself in perfect silence, as in the night which was slowly falling. And Prada in his turn ceased to speak, and, with his eyes still fixed upon the other, reflected on the course that he should follow.

The road turned, and then the carriage rolled on and on over another interminable straight highway with white paving, whose brilliancy made the road look like a ribbon of snow stretching across the Campagna, where delicate shadows were slowly falling. Gloom gathered in the hollows of the broad undulations whence a tide of violet hue seemed to spread over the short herbage until all mingled and the expanse became an indistinct swell of neutral hue from one to the other horizon. And the solitude was now yet more complete; a last indolent cart had gone by and a last tinkling of horses' bells had subsided in the distance. There was no longer a passer-by, no longer a beast of the fields to be seen, colour and sound died away, all forms of life sank into slumber, into the serene stillness of nihility. Some fragments of an aqueduct were still to be seen at intervals on the right hand, where they looked like portions of gigantic millepeds severed by the scythe of time; next, on the left, came another tower, whose dark and ruined pile barred the sky as with a huge black stake; and then the remains of another aqueduct spanned the road, assuming yet greater dimensions against the sunset glow. Ah! that unique hour, the hour of twilight in the Campagna, when all is blotted out and simplified, the hour of bare immensity, of the infinite in its simplest expression! There is nothing, nothing all around you, but the flat line of the horizon with the one splotch of an isolated tower, and yet that nothing is instinct with sovereign majesty.

However, on the left, towards the sea, the sun was setting, descending in the limpid sky like a globe of fire of blinding redness. It slowly plunged beneath the horizon, and the only sign of cloud was some fiery vapour, as if indeed the distant sea had seethed at contact with that royal and flaming visit. And directly the sun had disappeared the heavens above it purpled and became a lake of blood, whilst the Campagna turned to grey. At the far end of the fading plain there remained only that purple lake whose brasier slowly died out behind the black arches of the aqueduct, while in the opposite direction the scattered arches remained bright and rosy against a pewter-like sky. Then the fiery vapour was dissipated, and the sunset ended by fading away. One by one the stars came out in the pacified vault, now of an ashen blue, while the lights of Rome, still far away on the verge of the horizon, scintillated like the lamps of light-houses.

And Prada, amidst the dreamy silence of his companions and the infinite melancholy of the evening and the inexpressible distress which even he experienced, continued to ask himself what course he should adopt. Again and again he mentally repeated that he could not allow people to be poisoned. The figs were certainly intended for Cardinal Boccanera, and on the whole it mattered little to him whether there were a cardinal the more or the fewer in the world. Moreover, it had always seemed to him best to let Destiny follow its course; and, infidel that he was, he saw no harm in one priest devouring another. Again, it might be dangerous for him to intervene in that abominable affair, to mix himself up in the base, fathomless intrigues of the black world. But on the other hand the Cardinal was not the only person who lived in the Boccanera mansion, and might not the figs go to others, might they not be eaten by people to whom no harm was intended? This idea of a treacherous chance haunted him, and in spite of every effort the figures of Benedetta and Dario rose up before him, returned and imposed themselves on him though he again and again sought to banish them from his mind. What if Benedetta, what if Dario should partake of that fruit? For Benedetta he felt no fear, for he knew that she and her aunt ate their meals by themselves, and that their cuisine and the Cardinal's had nothing in common. But Dario sat at his uncle's table every day, and for a moment Prada, pictured the young Prince suddenly seized with a spasm, then falling, like poor Monsignor Gallo, into the Cardinal's arms with livid face and receding eyes, and dying within two hours.

But no, no! That would be frightful, he could not suffer such an abomination. And thereupon he made up his mind. He would wait till the night had completely gathered round and would then simply take the basket from Santobono's lap and fling it into some dark hollow without saying a word. The priest would understand him. The other one, the young Frenchman, would perhaps not even notice the incident. Besides, that mattered little, for he would not even attempt to explain his action. And he felt quite calm again when the idea occurred to him to throw the basket away while the carriage passed through the Porta Furba, a couple of miles or so before reaching Rome. That would suit him exactly; in the darkness of the gateway nothing whatever would be seen.

"We stopped too long at that osteria," he suddenly exclaimed aloud, turning towards Pierre. "We sha'n't reach Rome much before six o'clock. Still you will have time to dress and join your friend." And then without awaiting the young man's reply he said to Santobono: "Your figs will arrive very late, Abbe."

"Oh!" answered the priest, "his Eminence receives until eight o'clock. And, besides, the figs are not for this evening. People don't eat figs in the evening. They will be for to-morrow morning." And thereupon he again relapsed into silence.

"For to-morrow morning—yes, yes, no doubt," repeated Prada. "And the Cardinal will be able to thoroughly regale himself if nobody helps him to eat the fruit."

Thereupon Pierre, without pausing to reflect, exclaimed: "He will no doubt eat it by himself, for his nephew, Prince Dario, must have started to-day for Naples on a little convalescence trip to rid himself of the effects of the accident which laid him up during the last month." Then, having got so far, the young priest remembered to whom he was speaking, and abruptly stopped short.

The Count noticed his embarrassment. "Oh! speak on, my dear Monsieur Froment," said he, "you don't offend me. It's an old affair now. So that young man has left, you say?"

"Yes, unless he has postponed his departure. However, I don't expect to find him at the palazzo when I get there."

For a moment the only sound was that of the continuous rumble of the wheels. Prada again felt worried, a prey to the discomfort of uncertainty. Why should he mix himself up in the affair if Dario were really absent? All the ideas which came to him tired his brain, and he ended by thinking aloud: "If he has gone away it must be for propriety's sake, so as to avoid attending the Buongiovanni reception, for the Congregation of the Council met this morning to give its decision in the suit which the Countess has brought against me. Yes, I shall know by and by whether our marriage is to be dissolved."

It was in a somewhat hoarse voice that he spoke these words, and one could realise that the old wound was again bleeding within him. Although Lisbeth had borne him a son, the charge levelled against him in his wife's petition for divorce still filled him with blind fury each time that he thought of it. And all at once he shuddered violently, as if an icy blast had darted through his frame. Then, turning the conversation, he added: "It's not at all warm this evening. This is the dangerous hour of the Roman climate, the twilight hour when it's easy to catch a terrible fever if one isn't prudent. Here, pull the rug over your legs, wrap it round you as carefully as you can."

Then, as they drew near the Porta Furba, silence again fell, more profound, like the slumber which was invincibly spreading over the Campagna, now steeped in night. And at last, in the bright starlight, appeared the gate, an arch of the Acqua Felice, under which the road passed. From a distance, this fragment seemed to bar the way with its mass of ancient half-fallen walls. But afterwards the gigantic arch where all was black opened like a gaping porch. And the carriage passed under it in darkness whilst the wheels rumbled with increased sonority.

When the victoria emerged on the other side, Santobono still had the little basket of figs upon his knees and Prada looked at it, quite overcome, asking himself what sudden paralysis of the hands had prevented him from seizing it and throwing it into the darkness. Such had still been his intention but a few seconds before they passed under the arch. He had even given the basket a final glance in order that he might the better realise what movements he should make. What had taken place within him then? At present he was yielding to increasing irresolution, henceforth incapable of decisive action, feeling a need of delay in order that he might, before everything else, fully satisfy himself as to what was likely to happen. And as Dario had doubtless gone away and the figs would certainly not be eaten until the following morning, what reason was there for him to hurry? He would know that evening if the Congregation of the Council had annulled his marriage, he would know how far the so-called "Justice of God" was venal and mendacious! Certainly he would suffer nobody to be poisoned, not even Cardinal Boccanera, though the latter's life was of little account to him personally. But had not that little basket, ever since leaving Frascati, been like Destiny on the march? And was it not enjoyment, the enjoyment of omnipotence, to be able to say to himself that he was the master who could stay that basket's course, or allow it to go onward and accomplish its deadly purpose? Moreover, he yielded to the dimmest of mental struggles, ceasing to reason, unable to raise his hand, and yet convinced that he would drop a warning note into the letter-box at the palazzo before he went to bed, though at the same time he felt happy in the thought that if his interest directed otherwise he would not do so.

And the remainder of the journey was accomplished in silent weariness, amidst the shiver of evening which seemed to have chilled all three men. In vain did the Count endeavour to escape from the battle of his thoughts, by reverting to the Buongiovanni reception, and giving particulars of the splendours which would be witnessed at it: his words fell sparsely in an embarrassed and absent-minded way. Then he sought to inspirit Pierre by speaking to him of Cardinal Sanguinetti's amiable manner and fair words, but although the young priest was returning home well pleased with his journey, in the idea that with a little help he might yet triumph, he scarcely answered the Count, so wrapt he was in his reverie. And Santobono, on his side, neither spoke nor moved. Black like the night itself, he seemed to have vanished. However, the lights of Rome were increasing in number, and houses again appeared on either hand, at first at long intervals, and then in close succession. They were suburban houses, and there were yet more fields of reeds, quickset hedges, olive-trees overtopping long walls, and big gateways with vase-surmounted pillars; but at last came the city with its rows of small grey houses, its petty shops and its dingy taverns, whence at times came shouts and rumours of battle.

Prada insisted on setting his companions down in the Via Giulia, at fifty paces from the palazzo. "It doesn't inconvenience me at all," said he to Pierre. "Besides, with the little time you have before you, it would never do for you to go on foot."

The Via Giulia was already steeped in slumber, and wore a melancholy aspect of abandonment in the dreary light of the gas lamps standing on either hand. And as soon as Santobono had alighted from the carriage, he took himself off without waiting for Pierre, who, moreover, always went in by the little door in the side lane.

"Good-bye, Abbe," exclaimed Prada.

"Good-bye, Count, a thousand thanks," was Santobono's response.

Then the two others stood watching him as he went towards the Boccanera mansion, whose old, monumental entrance, full of gloom, was still wide open. For a moment they saw his tall, rugged figure erect against that gloom. Then in he plunged, he and his little basket, bearing Destiny.

XII.

IT was ten o'clock when Pierre and Narcisse, after dining at the Caffe di Roma, where they had long lingered chatting, at last walked down the Corso towards the Palazzo Buongiovanni. They had the greatest difficulty to reach its entrance, for carriages were coming up in serried files, and the inquisitive crowd of on-lookers, who pressed even into the roadway, in spite of the injunctions of the police, was growing so compact that even the horses could no longer approach. The ten lofty windows on the first floor of the long monumental facade shone with an intense white radiance, the radiance of electric lamps, which illumined the street like sunshine, spreading over the equipages aground in that human sea, whose billows of eager, excited faces rolled to and fro amidst an extraordinary tumult.

And in all this there was not merely the usual curiosity to see uniforms go by and ladies in rich attire alight from their carriages, for Pierre soon gathered from what he heard that the crowd had come to witness the arrival of the King and Queen, who had promised to appear at the ball given by Prince Buongiovanni, in celebration of the betrothal of his daughter Celia to Lieutenant Attilio Sacco, the son of one of his Majesty's ministers. Moreover, people were enraptured with this marriage, the happy ending of a love story which had impassioned the whole city: to begin with, love at first sight, with the suddenness of a lightning-flash, and then stubborn fidelity triumphing over all obstacles, amidst romantic circumstances whose story sped from lip to lip, moistening every eye and stirring every heart.

It was this story that Narcisse had related at dessert to Pierre, who already knew some portion of it. People asserted that if the Prince had ended by yielding after a final terrible scene, it was only from fear of seeing Celia elope from the palace with her lover. She did not threaten to do so, but, amidst her virginal calmness, there was so much contempt for everything foreign to her love, that her father felt her to be capable of acting with the greatest folly in all ingenuousness. Only indifference was manifested by the Prince's wife, a phlegmatic and still beautiful Englishwoman, who considered that she had done quite enough for the household by bringing her husband a dowry of five millions, and bearing him five children. The Prince, anxious and weak despite his violence, in which one found a trace of the old Roman blood, already spoilt by mixture with that of a foreign race, was nowadays ever influenced in his actions by the fear that his house and fortune—which hitherto had remained intact amidst the accumulated ruins of the patriziato—might suddenly collapse. And in finally yielding to Celia, he must have been guided by the idea of rallying to the new regime through his daughter, so as to have one foot firmly set at the Quirinal, without withdrawing the other from the Vatican. It was galling, no doubt; his pride must have bled at the idea of allying his name with that of such low folks as the Saccos. But then Sacco was a minister, and had sped so quickly from success to success that it seemed likely he would rise yet higher, and, after the portfolio of Agriculture, secure that of Finances, which he had long coveted. And an alliance with Sacco meant the certain favour of the King, an assured retreat in that direction should the papacy some day collapse. Then, too, the Prince had made inquiries respecting the son, and was somewhat disarmed by the good looks, bravery, and rectitude of young Attilio, who represented the future, and possibly the glorious Italy of to-morrow. He was a soldier, and could be helped forward to the highest rank. And people spitefully added that the last reason which had influenced the Prince, who was very avaricious, and greatly worried by the thought that his fortune must be divided among his five children,* was that an opportunity presented itself for him to bestow a ridiculously small dowry on Celia. However, having consented to the marriage, he resolved to give a splendid fete, such as was now seldom witnessed in Rome, throwing his doors open to all the rival sections of society, inviting the sovereigns, and setting the palazzo ablaze as in the grand days of old. In doing this he would necessarily have to expend some of the money to which he clung, but a boastful spirit incited him to show the world that he at any rate had not been vanquished by the financial crisis, and that the Buongiovannis had nothing to hide and nothing to blush for. To tell the truth, some people asserted that this bravado had not originated with himself, but had been instilled into him without his knowledge by the quiet and innocent Celia, who wished to exhibit her happiness to all applauding Rome.

* The Italian succession law is similar to the French. Children
cannot be disinherited. All property is divided among them,
and thus the piling up of large hereditary fortunes is
prevented.—Trans.

"Dear me!" said Narcisse, whom the throng prevented from advancing. "We shall never get in. Why, they seem to have invited the whole city." And then, as Pierre seemed surprised to see a prelate drive up in his carriage, the attache added: "Oh! you will elbow more than one of them upstairs. The cardinals won't like to come on account of the presence of the King and Queen, but the prelates are sure to be here. This, you know, is a neutral drawing-room where the black and the white worlds can fraternise. And then too, there are so few fetes that people rush on them."

He went on to explain that there were two grand balls at Court every winter, but that it was only under exceptional circumstances that the patriziato gave similar galas. Two or three of the black salons were opened once in a way towards the close of the Carnival, but little dances among intimates replaced the pompous entertainments of former times. Some princesses moreover merely had their day. And as for the few white salons that existed, these likewise retained the same character of intimacy, more or less mixed, for no lady had yet become the undisputed queen of the new society.

"Well, here we are at last," resumed Narcisse as they eventually climbed the stairs.

"Let us keep together," Pierre somewhat anxiously replied. "My only acquaintance is with the fiancee, and I want you to introduce me."

However, a considerable effort was needed even to climb the monumental staircase, so great was the crush of arriving guests. Never, in the old days of wax candles and oil lamps, had this staircase offered such a blaze of light. Electric lamps, burning in clusters in superb bronze candelabra on the landings, steeped everything in a white radiance. The cold stucco of the walls was hidden by a series of lofty tapestries depicting the story of Cupid and Psyche, marvels which had remained in the family since the days of the Renascence. And a thick carpet covered the worn marble steps, whilst clumps of evergreens and tall spreading palms decorated every corner. An affluence of new blood warmed the antique mansion that evening; there was a resurrection of life, so to say, as the women surged up the staircase, smiling and perfumed, bare-shouldered, and sparkling with diamonds.

At the entrance of the first reception-room Pierre at once perceived Prince and Princess Buongiovanni, standing side by side and receiving their guests. The Prince, a tall, slim man with fair complexion and hair turning grey, had the pale northern eyes of his American mother in an energetic face such as became a former captain of the popes. The Princess, with small, delicate, and rounded features, looked barely thirty, though she had really passed her fortieth year. And still pretty, displaying a smiling serenity which nothing could disconcert, she purely and simply basked in self-adoration. Her gown was of pink satin, and a marvellous parure of large rubies set flamelets about her dainty neck and in her fine, fair hair. Of her five children, her son, the eldest, was travelling, and three of the girls, mere children, were still at school, so that only Celia was present, Celia in a modest gown of white muslin, fair like her mother, quite bewitching with her large innocent eyes and her candid lips, and retaining to the very end of her love story the semblance of a closed lily of impenetrable, virginal mysteriousness. The Saccos had but just arrived, and Attilio, in his simple lieutenant's uniform, had remained near his betrothed, so naively and openly delighted with his great happiness that his handsome face, with its caressing mouth and brave eyes, was quite resplendent with youth and strength. Standing there, near one another, in the triumph of their passion they appeared like life's very joy and health, like the personification of hope in the morrow's promises; and the entering guests who saw them could not refrain from smiling and feeling moved, momentarily forgetting their loquacious and malicious curiosity to give their hearts to those chosen ones of love who looked so handsome and so enraptured.

Narcisse stepped forward in order to present Pierre, but Celia anticipated him. Going to meet the young priest she led him to her father and mother, saying: "Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre Froment, a friend of my dear Benedetta." Ceremonious salutations followed. Then the young girl, whose graciousness greatly touched Pierre, said to him: "Benedetta is coming with her aunt and Dario. She must be very happy this evening! And you will also see how beautiful she will be."

Pierre and Narcisse next began to congratulate her, but they could not remain there, the throng was ever jostling them; and the Prince and Princess, quite lost in the crush, had barely time to answer the many salutations with amiable, continuous nods. And Celia, after conducting the two friends to Attilio, was obliged to return to her parents so as to take her place beside them as the little queen of the fete.

Narcisse was already slightly acquainted with Attilio, and so fresh congratulations ensued. Then the two friends manoeuvred to find a spot where they might momentarily tarry and contemplate the spectacle which this first salon presented. It was a vast hall, hung with green velvet broidered with golden flowers, and contained a very remarkable collection of weapons and armour, breast-plates, battle-axes, and swords, almost all of which had belonged to the Buongiovannis of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And amidst those stern implements of war there was a lovely sedan-chair of the last century, gilded and decorated with delicate paintings. It was in this chair that the Prince's great-grandmother, the celebrated Bettina, whose beauty was historical, had usually been carried to mass. On the walls, moreover, there were numerous historical paintings: battles, peace congresses, and royal receptions in which the Buongiovannis had taken part, without counting the many family portraits, tall and proud figures of sea-captains, commanders in the field, great dignitaries of the Church, prelates and cardinals, amongst whom, in the place of honour, appeared the family pope, the white-robed Buongiovanni whose accession to the pontifical throne had enriched a long line of descendants. And it was among those armours, near that coquettish sedan, and below those antique portraits, that the Saccos, husband and wife, had in their turn just halted, at a few steps from the master and mistress of the house, in order to secure their share of congratulations and bows.

"Look over there!" Narcisse whispered to Pierre, "those are the Saccos in front of us, that dark little fellow and the lady in mauve silk."

Pierre promptly recognised the bright face and pleasant smile of Stefana, whom he had already met at old Orlando's. But he was more interested in her husband, a dark dry man, with big eyes, sallow complexion, prominent chin, and vulturine nose. Like some gay Neapolitan "Pulcinello," he was dancing, shouting, and displaying such infectious good humour that it spread to all around him. He possessed a wonderful gift of speech, with a voice that was unrivalled as an instrument of fascination and conquest; and on seeing how easily he ingratiated himself with the people in that drawing-room, one could understand his lightning-like successes in the political world. He had manoeuvered with rare skill in the matter of his son's marriage, affecting such exaggerated delicacy of feeling as to set himself against the lovers, and declare that he would never consent to their union, as he had no desire to be accused of stealing a dowry and a title. As a matter of fact, he had only yielded after the Buongiovannis had given their consent, and even then he had desired to take the opinion of old Orlando, whose lofty integrity was proverbial. However, he knew right well that he would secure the old hero's approval in this particular affair, for Orlando made no secret of his opinion that the Buongiovannis ought to be glad to admit his grand-nephew into their family, as that handsome young fellow, with brave and healthy heart, would help to regenerate their impoverished blood. And throughout the whole affair, Sacco had shrewdly availed himself of Orlando's famous name, for ever talking of the relationship between them, and displaying filial veneration for this glorious founder of the country, as if indeed he had no suspicion that the latter despised and execrated him and mourned his accession to power in the conviction that he would lead Italy to shame and ruin.

"Ah!" resumed Narcisse addressing Pierre, "he's one of those supple, practical men who care nothing for a smack in the face. It seems that unscrupulous individuals like himself become necessary when states get into trouble and have to pass through political, financial, and moral crises. It is said that Sacco with his imperturbable assurance and ingenious and resourceful mind has quite won the King's favour. Just look at him! Why, with that crowd of courtiers round him, one might think him the master of this palace!"

And indeed the guests, after passing the Prince and Princess with a bow, at once congregated around Sacco, for he represented power, emoluments, pensions, and crosses; and if folks still smiled at seeing his dark, turbulent, and scraggy figure amidst that framework of family portraits which proclaimed the mighty ancestry of the Buongiovannis, they none the less worshipped him as the personification of the new power, the democratic force which was confusedly rising even from the old Roman soil where the patriziato lay in ruins.

"What a crowd!" muttered Pierre. "Who are all these people?"

"Oh!" replied Narcisse, "it is a regular mixture. These people belong neither to the black nor the white world; they form a grey world as it were. The evolution was certain; a man like Cardinal Boccanera may retain an uncompromising attitude, but a whole city, a nation can't. The Pope alone will always say no and remain immutable. But everything around him progresses and undergoes transformation, so that in spite of all resistance, Rome will become Italian in a few years' time. Even now, whenever a prince has two sons only one of them remains on the side of the Vatican, the other goes over to the Quirinal. People must live, you see; and the great families threatened with annihilation have not sufficient heroism to carry obstinacy to the point of suicide. And I have already told you that we are here on neutral ground, for Prince Buongiovanni was one of the first to realise the necessity of conciliation. He feels that his fortune is perishing, he does not care to risk it either in industry or in speculation, and already sees it portioned out among his five children, by whose descendants it will be yet further divided; and this is why he prudently makes advances to the King without, however, breaking with the Pope. In this salon, therefore, you see a perfect picture of the debacle, the confusion which reigns in the Prince's ideas and opinions." Narcisse paused, and then began to name some of the persons who were coming in. "There's a general," said he, "who has become very popular since his last campaign in Africa. There will be a great many military men here this evening, for all Attilio's superiors have been invited, so as to give the young man an entourage of glory. Ah! and there's the German ambassador. I fancy that nearly all the Corps Diplomatique will come on account of their Majesties' presence. But, by way of contrast, just look at that stout fellow yonder. He's a very influential deputy, a parvenu of the new middle class. Thirty years ago he was merely one of Prince Albertini's farmers, one of those mercanti di campagna who go about the environs of Rome in stout boots and a soft felt hat. And now look at that prelate coming in—"

"Oh! I know him," Pierre interrupted. "He's Monsignor Fornaro."

"Exactly, Monsignor Fornaro, a personage of some importance. You told me, I remember, that he is the reporter of the Congregation in that affair of your book. A most delightful man! Did you see how he bowed to the Princess? And what a noble and graceful bearing he has in his little mantle of violet silk!"

Then Narcisse went on enumerating the princes and princesses, the dukes and duchesses, the politicians and functionaries, the diplomatists and ministers, and the officers and well-to-do middle-class people, who of themselves made up a most wonderful medley of guests, to say nothing of the representatives of the various foreign colonies, English people, Americans, Germans, Spaniards, and Russians, in a word, all ancient Europe, and both Americas. And afterwards the young man reverted to the Saccos, to the little Signora Sacco in particular, in order to tell Pierre of the heroic efforts which she had made to open a salon for the purpose of assisting her husband's ambition. Gentle and modest as she seemed, she was also very shrewd, endowed with genuine qualities, Piedmontese patience and strength of resistance, orderly habits and thriftiness. And thus it was she who re-established the equilibrium in household affairs which her husband by his exuberance so often disturbed. He was indeed greatly indebted to her, though nobody suspected it. At the same time, however, she had so far failed in her attempts to establish a white salon which should take the lead in influencing opinion. Only the people of her own set visited her, not a single prince ever came, and her Monday dances were the same as in a score of other middle-class homes, having no brilliancy and no importance. In fact, the real white salon, which should guide men and things and sway all Rome was still in dreamland.

"Just notice her keen smile as she examines everything here," resumed Narcisse. "She's teaching herself and forming plans, I'm sure of it. Now that she is about to be connected with a princely family she probably hopes to receive some of the best society."

Large as was the room, the crowd in it had by this time grown so dense that the two friends were pressed back to a wall, and felt almost stifled. The attache therefore decided to lead the priest elsewhere, and as they walked along he gave him some particulars concerning the palace, which was one of the most sumptuous in Rome, and renowned for the magnificence of its reception-rooms. Dancing took place in the picture gallery, a superb apartment more than sixty feet long, with eight windows overlooking the Corso; while the buffet was installed in the Hall of the Antiques, a marble hall, which among other precious things contained a statue of Venus, rivalling the one at the Capitol. Then there was a suite of marvellous salons, still resplendent with ancient luxury, hung with the rarest stuffs, and retaining some unique specimens of old-time furniture, on which covetous antiquaries kept their eyes fixed, whilst waiting and hoping for the inevitable future ruin. And one of these apartments, the little Saloon of the Mirrors, was particularly famous. Of circular shape and Louis XV style, it was surrounded by mirrors in rococo frames, extremely rich, and most exquisitely carved.

"You will see all that by and by," continued Narcisse. "At present we had better go in here if we want to breathe a little. It is here that the arm-chairs from the adjacent gallery have been brought for the accommodation of the ladies who desire to sit down and be seen and admired."

The apartment they entered was a spacious one, draped with the most superb Genoese velvet, that antique jardiniere velvet with pale satin ground, and flowers once of dazzling brightness, whose greens and blues and reds had now become exquisitely soft, with the subdued, faded tones of old floral love-tokens. On the pier tables and in the cabinets all around were some of the most precious curios in the palace, ivory caskets, gilt and painted wood carvings, pieces of antique plate—briefly, a collection of marvels. And several ladies, fleeing the crush, had already taken refuge on the numerous seats, clustering in little groups, and laughing and chatting with the few gentlemen who had discovered this retreat of grace and galanterie. In the bright glow of the lamps nothing could be more delightful than the sight of all those bare, sheeny shoulders, and those supple necks, above whose napes were coiled tresses of fair or raven hair. Bare arms emerged like living flowers of flesh from amidst the mingling lace and silk of soft-hued bodices. The fans played slowly, as if to heighten the fires of the precious stones, and at each beat wafted around an odore di femina blended with a predominating perfume of violets.

"Hallo!" exclaimed Narcisse, "there's our good friend Monsignor Nani bowing to the Austrian ambassadress."

As soon as Nani perceived the young priest and his companion he came towards them, and the trio then withdrew into the embrasure of a window in order that they might chat for a moment at their ease. The prelate was smiling like one enchanted with the beauty of the fete, but at the same time he retained all the serenity of innocence, as if he had not even noticed the exhibition of bare shoulders by which he was surrounded. "Ah, my dear son!" he said to Pierre, "I am very pleased to see you! Well, and what do you think of our Rome when she makes up her mind to give fetes?"

"Why, it is superb, Monseigneur."

Then, in an emotional manner, Nani spoke of Celia's lofty piety; and, in order to give the Vatican the credit of this sumptuous gala, affected to regard the Prince and Princess as staunch adherents of the Church, as if he were altogether unaware that the King and Queen were presently coming. And afterwards he abruptly exclaimed: "I have been thinking of you all day, my dear son. Yes, I heard that you had gone to see his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti. Well, and how did he receive you?"

"Oh! in a most paternal manner," Pierre replied. "At first he made me understand the embarrassment in which he was placed by his position as protector of Lourdes; but just as I was going off he showed himself charming, and promised me his help with a delicacy which deeply touched me."

"Did he indeed, my dear son? But it doesn't surprise me, his Eminence is so good-hearted!"

"And I must add, Monseigneur, that I came back with a light and hopeful heart. It now seems to me as if my suit were half gained."

"Naturally, I understand it," replied Nani, who was still smiling with that keen, intelligent smile of his, sharpened by a touch of almost imperceptible irony. And after a short pause he added in a very simple way: "The misfortune is that on the day before yesterday your book was condemned by the Congregation of the Index, which was convoked by its Secretary expressly for that purpose. And the judgment will be laid before his Holiness, for him to sign it, on the day after to-morrow."

Pierre looked at the prelate in bewilderment. Had the old mansion fallen on his head he would not have felt more overcome. What! was it all over? His journey to Rome, the experiment he had come to attempt there, had resulted in that defeat, of which he was thus suddenly apprised amidst that betrothal fete. And he had not even been able to defend himself, he had sacrificed his time without finding any one to whom he might speak, before whom he might plead his cause! Anger was rising within him, and he could not prevent himself from muttering bitterly: "Ah! how I have been duped! And that Cardinal who said to me only this morning: 'If God be with you he will save you in spite of everything.' Yes, yes, I now understand him; he was juggling with words, he only desired a disaster in order that submission might lead me to Heaven! Submit, indeed, ah! I cannot, I cannot yet! My heart is too full of indignation and grief."

Nani examined and studied him with curiosity. "But my dear son," he said, "nothing is final so long as the Holy Father has not signed the judgment. You have all to-morrow and even the morning of the day after before you. A miracle is always possible." Then, lowering his voice and drawing Pierre on one side whilst Narcisse in an aesthetical spirit examined the ladies, he added: "Listen, I have a communication to make to you in great secrecy. Come and join me in the little Saloon of the Mirrors by and by, during the Cotillon. We shall be able to talk there at our ease."

Pierre nodded, and thereupon the prelate discreetly withdrew and disappeared in the crowd. However, the young man's ears were buzzing; he could no longer hope; what indeed could he accomplish in one day since he had lost three months without even being able to secure an audience with the Pope? And his bewilderment increased as he suddenly heard Narcisse speaking to him of art. "It's astonishing how the feminine figure has deteriorated in these dreadful democratic days. It's all fat and horribly common. Not one of those women yonder shows the Florentine contour, with small bosom and slender, elegant neck. Ah! that one yonder isn't so bad perhaps, the fair one with her hair coiled up, whom Monsignor Fornaro has just approached."

For a few minutes indeed Monsignor Fornaro had been fluttering from beauty to beauty, with an amiable air of conquest. He looked superb that evening with his lofty decorative figure, blooming cheeks, and victorious affability. No unpleasant scandal was associated with his name; he was simply regarded as a prelate of gallant ways who took pleasure in the society of ladies. And he paused and chatted, and leant over their bare shoulders with laughing eyes and humid lips as if experiencing a sort of devout rapture. However, on perceiving Narcisse whom he occasionally met, he at once came forward and the attache had to bow to him. "You have been in good health I hope, Monseigneur, since I had the honour of seeing you at the embassy."

"Oh! yes, I am very well, very well indeed. What a delightful fete, is it not?"

Pierre also had bowed. This was the man whose report had brought about the condemnation of his book; and it was with resentment that he recalled his caressing air and charming greeting, instinct with such lying promise. However, the prelate, who was very shrewd, must have guessed that the young priest was already acquainted with the decision of the Congregation, and have thought it more dignified to abstain from open recognition; for on his side he merely nodded and smiled at him. "What a number of people!" he went on, "and how many charming persons there are! It will soon be impossible for one to move in this room."

All the seats in fact were now occupied by ladies, and what with the strong perfume of violets and the exhalations of warm necks and shoulders the atmosphere was becoming most oppressive. The fans flapped more briskly, and clear laughter rang out amidst a growing hubbub of conversation in which the same words constantly recurred. Some news, doubtless, had just arrived, some rumour was being whispered from group to group, throwing them all into feverish excitement. As it happened, Monsignor Fornaro, who was always well informed, desired to be the proclaimer of this news, which nobody as yet had ventured to announce aloud.

"Do you know what is exciting them all?" he inquired.

"Is it the Holy Father's illness?" asked Pierre in his anxiety. "Is he worse this evening?"

The prelate looked at him in astonishment, and then somewhat impatiently replied: "Oh, no, no. His Holiness is much better, thank Heaven. A person belonging to the Vatican was telling me just now that he was able to get up this afternoon and receive his intimates as usual."

"All the same, people have been alarmed," interrupted Narcisse. "I must confess that we did not feel easy at the embassy, for a Conclave at the present time would be a great worry for France. She would exercise no influence at it. It is a great mistake on the part of our Republican Government to treat the Holy See as of no importance! However, can one ever tell whether the Pope is ill or not? I know for a certainty that he was nearly carried off last winter when nobody breathed a word about any illness, whereas on the last occasion when the newspapers killed him and talked about a dreadful attack of bronchitis, I myself saw him quite strong and in the best of spirits! His reported illnesses are mere matters of policy, I fancy."*

* There is much truth in this; but the reader must not imagine
that the Pope is never ill. At his great age, indispositions
are only natural.—Trans.

With a hasty gesture, however, Monsignor Fornaro brushed this importunate subject aside. "No, no," said he, "people are tranquillised and no longer talk of it. What excites all those ladies is that the Congregation of the Council to-day voted the dissolution of the Prada marriage by a great majority."

Again did Pierre feel moved. However, not having had time to see any members of the Boccanera family on his return from Frascati he feared that the news might be false and said so. Thereupon the prelate gave his word of honour that things were as he stated. "The news is certain," he declared. "I had it from a member of the Congregation." And then, all at once, he apologised and hurried off: "Excuse me but I see a lady whom I had not yet caught sight of, and desire to pay my respects to her."

He at once hastened to the lady in question, and, being unable to sit down, inclined his lofty figure as if to envelop her with his gallant courtesy; whilst she, young, fresh, and bare-shouldered, laughed with a pearly laugh as his cape of violet silk lightly brushed her sheeny skin.

"You know that person, don't you?" Narcisse inquired of Pierre. "No! Really? Why, that is Count Prada's inamorata, the charming Lisbeth Kauffmann, by whom he has just had a son. It's her first appearance in society since that event. She's a German, you know, and lost her husband here. She paints a little; in fact, rather nicely. A great deal is forgiven to the ladies of the foreign colony, and this one is particularly popular on account of the very affable manner in which she receives people at her little palazzo in the Via Principe Amedeo. As you may imagine, the news of the dissolution of that marriage must amuse her!"

She looked really exquisite, that Lisbeth, very fair, rosy, and gay, with satiny skin, soft blue eyes, and lips wreathed in an amiable smile, which was renowned for its grace. And that evening, in her gown of white silk spangled with gold, she showed herself so delighted with life, so securely happy in the thought that she was free, that she loved and was loved in return, that the whispered tidings, the malicious remarks exchanged behind the fans of those around her, seemed to turn to her personal triumph. For a moment all eyes had sought her, and people talked of the outcome of her connection with Prada, the man whose manhood the Church solemnly denied by its decision of that very day! And there came stifled laughter and whispered jests, whilst she, radiant in her insolent serenity, accepted with a rapturous air the gallantry of Monsignor Fornaro, who congratulated her on a painting of the Virgin with the lily, which she had lately sent to a fine-art show.

Ah! that matrimonial nullity suit, which for a year had supplied Rome with scandal, what a final hubbub it occasioned as the tidings of its termination burst forth amidst that ball! The black and white worlds had long chosen it as a battlefield for the exchange of incredible slander, endless gossip, the most nonsensical tittle-tattle. And now it was over; the Vatican with imperturbable impudence had pronounced the marriage null and void on the ground that the husband was no man, and all Rome would laugh over the affair, with that free scepticism which it displayed as soon as the pecuniary affairs of the Church came into question. The incidents of the struggle were already common property: Prada's feelings revolting to such a point that he had withdrawn from the contest, the Boccaneras moving heaven and earth in their feverish anxiety, the money which they had distributed among the creatures of the various cardinals in order to gain their influence, and the large sum which they had indirectly paid for the second and favourable report of Monsignor Palma. People said that, altogether, more than a hundred thousand francs had been expended, but this was not thought over-much, as a well-known French countess had been obliged to disburse nearly ten times that amount to secure the dissolution of her marriage. But then the Holy Father's need was so great! And, moreover, nobody was angered by this venality; it merely gave rise to malicious witticisms; and the fans continued waving in the increasing heat, and the ladies quivered with contentment as the whispered pleasantries took wing and fluttered over their bare shoulders.

"Oh! how pleased the Contessina must be!" Pierre resumed. "I did not understand what her little friend, Princess Celia, meant by saying when we came in that she would be so happy and beautiful this evening. It is doubtless on that account that she is coming here, after cloistering herself all the time the affair lasted, as if she were in mourning."

However, Lisbeth's eyes had chanced to meet those of Narcisse, and as she smiled at him he was, in his turn, obliged to pay his respects to her, for, like everybody else of the foreign colony, he knew her through having visited her studio. He was again returning to Pierre when a fresh outburst of emotion stirred the diamond aigrettes and the flowers adorning the ladies' hair. People turned to see what was the matter, and again did the hubbub increase. "Ah! it's Count Prada in person!" murmured Narcisse, with an admiring glance. "He has a fine bearing, whatever folks may say. Dress him up in velvet and gold, and what a splendid, unscrupulous, fifteenth-century adventurer he would make!"

Prada entered the room, looking quite gay, in fact, almost triumphant. And above his large, white shirtfront, edged by the black of his coat, he really had a commanding, predacious expression, with his frank, stern eyes, and his energetic features barred by a large black moustache. Never had a more rapturous smile of sensuality revealed the wolfish teeth of his voracious mouth. With rapid glances he took stock of the women, dived into their very souls. Then, on seeing Lisbeth, who looked so pink, and fair, and girlish, his expression softened, and he frankly went up to her, without troubling in the slightest degree about the ardent, inquisitive eyes which were turned upon him. As soon as Monsignor Fornaro had made room, he stooped and conversed with the young woman in a low tone. And she no doubt confirmed the news which was circulating, for as he again drew himself erect, he laughed a somewhat forced laugh, and made an involuntary gesture.

However, he then caught sight of Pierre, and joined him in the embrasure of the window; and when he had also shaken hands with Narcisse, he said to the young priest with all his wonted bravura: "You recollect what I told you as we were coming back from Frascati? Well, it's done, it seems, they've annulled my marriage. It's such an impudent, such an imbecile decision, that I still doubted it a moment ago!"

"Oh! the news is certain," Pierre made bold to reply. "It has just been confirmed to us by Monsignor Fornaro, who had it from a member of the Congregation. And it is said that the majority was very large."

Prada again shook with laughter. "No, no," said he, "such a farce is beyond belief! It's the finest smack given to justice and common-sense that I know of. Ah! if the marriage can also be annulled by the civil courts, and if my friend whom you see yonder be only willing, we shall amuse ourselves in Rome! Yes, indeed, I'd marry her at Santa Maria Maggiore with all possible pomp. And there's a dear little being in the world who would take part in the fete in his nurse's arms!"

He laughed too loud as he spoke, alluded in too brutal a fashion to his child, that living proof of his manhood. Was it suffering that made his lips curve upwards and reveal his white teeth? It could be divined that he was quivering, fighting against an awakening of covert, tumultuous passion, which he would not acknowledge even to himself.

"And you, my dear Abbe?" he hastily resumed. "Do you know the other report? Do you know that the Countess is coming here?" It was thus, by force of habit, that he designated Benedetta, forgetting that she was no longer his wife.

"Yes, I have just been told so," Pierre replied; and then he hesitated for a moment before adding, with a desire to prevent any disagreeable surprise: "And we shall no doubt see Prince Dario also, for he has not started for Naples as I told you. Something prevented his departure at the last moment, I believe. At least so I gathered from a servant."

Prada no longer laughed. His face suddenly became grave, and he contented himself with murmuring: "Ah! so the cousin is to be of the party. Well, we shall see them, we shall see them both!"

Then, whilst the two friends went on chatting, he became silent, as if serious considerations impelled him to reflect. And suddenly making a gesture of apology he withdrew yet farther into the embrasure in which he stood, pulled a note-book out of his pocket, and tore from it a leaf on which, without modifying his handwriting otherwise than by slightly enlarging it, he pencilled these four lines: "A legend avers that the fig tree of Judas now grows at Frascati, and that its fruit is deadly for him who may desire to become Pope. Eat not the poisoned figs, nor give them either to your servants or your fowls." Then he folded the paper, fastened it with a postage stamp, and wrote on it the address: "To his most Reverend and most Illustrious Eminence, Cardinal Boccanera." And when he had placed everything in his pocket again, he drew a long breath and once more called back his laugh.

A kind of invincible discomfort, a far-away terror had momentarily frozen him. Without being guided by any clear train of reasoning, he had felt the need of protecting himself against any cowardly temptation, any possible abomination. He could not have told what course of ideas had induced him to write those four lines without a moment's delay, on the very spot where he stood, under penalty of contributing to a great catastrophe. But one thought was firmly fixed in his brain, that on leaving the ball he would go to the Via Giulia and throw that note into the letter-box at the Palazzo Boccanera. And that decided, he was once more easy in mind.

"Why, what is the matter with you, my dear Abbe?" he inquired on again joining in the conversation of the two friends. "You are quite gloomy." And on Pierre telling him of the bad news which he had received, the condemnation of his book, and the single day which remained to him for action if he did not wish his journey to Rome to result in defeat, he began to protest as if he himself needed agitation and diversion in order to continue hopeful and bear the ills of life. "Never mind, never mind, don't worry yourself," said he, "one loses all one's strength by worrying. A day is a great deal, one can do ever so many things in a day. An hour, a minute suffices for Destiny to intervene and turn defeat into victory!" He grew feverish as he spoke, and all at once added, "Come, let's go to the ball-room. It seems that the scene there is something prodigious."

Then he exchanged a last loving glance with Lisbeth whilst Pierre and Narcisse followed him, the three of them extricating themselves from their corner with the greatest difficulty, and then wending their way towards the adjoining gallery through a sea of serried skirts, a billowy expanse of necks and shoulders whence ascended the passion which makes life, the odour alike of love and of death.

With its eight windows overlooking the Corso, their panes uncurtained and throwing a blaze of light upon the houses across the road, the picture gallery, sixty-five feet in length and more than thirty in breadth, spread out with incomparable splendour. The illumination was dazzling. Clusters of electric lamps had changed seven pairs of huge marble candelabra into gigantic torcheres, akin to constellations; and all along the cornice up above, other lamps set in bright-hued floral glasses formed a marvellous garland of flaming flowers: tulips, paeonies, and roses. The antique red velvet worked with gold, which draped the walls, glowed like a furnace fire. About the doors and windows there were hangings of old lace broidered with flowers in coloured silk whose hues had the very intensity of life. But the sight of sights beneath the sumptuous panelled ceiling adorned with golden roses, the unique spectacle of a richness not to be equalled, was the collection of masterpieces such as no museum could excel. There were works of Raffaelle and Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens, Velasquez and Ribera, famous works which in this unexpected illumination suddenly showed forth, triumphant with youth regained, as if awakened to the immortal life of genius. And, as their Majesties would not arrive before midnight, the ball had just been opened, and flights of soft-hued gowns were whirling in a waltz past all the pompous throng, the glittering jewels and decorations, the gold-broidered uniforms and the pearl-broidered robes, whilst silk and satin and velvet spread and overflowed upon every side.

"It is prodigious, really!" declared Prada with his excited air; "let us go this way and place ourselves in a window recess again. There is no better spot for getting a good view without being too much jostled."

They lost Narcisse somehow or other, and on reaching the desired recess found themselves but two, Pierre and the Count. The orchestra, installed on a little platform at the far end of the gallery, had just finished the waltz, and the dancers, with an air of giddy rapture, were slowly walking through the crowd when a fresh arrival caused every head to turn. Donna Serafina, arrayed in a robe of purple silk as if she had worn the colours of her brother the Cardinal, was making a royal entry on the arm of Consistorial-Advocate Morano. And never before had she laced herself so tightly, never had her waist looked so slim and girlish; and never had her stern, wrinkled face, which her white hair scarcely softened, expressed such stubborn and victorious domination. A discreet murmur of approval ran round, a murmur of public relief as it were, for all Roman society had condemned the unworthy conduct of Morano in severing a connection of thirty years to which the drawing-rooms had grown as accustomed as if it had been a legal marriage. The rupture had lasted for two months, to the great scandal of Rome where the cult of long and faithful affections still abides. And so the reconciliation touched every heart and was regarded as one of the happiest consequences of the victory which the Boccaneras had that day gained in the affair of Benedetta's marriage. Morano repentant and Donna Serafina reappearing on his arm, nothing could have been more satisfactory; love had conquered, decorum was preserved and good order re-established.

But there was a deeper sensation as soon as Benedetta and Dario were seen to enter, side by side, behind the others. This tranquil indifference for the ordinary forms of propriety, on the very day when the marriage with Prada had been annulled, this victory of love, confessed and celebrated before one and all, seemed so charming in its audacity, so full of the bravery of youth and hope, that the pair were at once forgiven amidst a murmur of universal admiration. And as in the case of Celia and Attilio, all hearts flew to them, to their radiant beauty, to the wondrous happiness that made their faces so resplendent. Dario, still pale after his long convalescence, somewhat slight and delicate of build, with the fine clear eyes of a big child, and the dark curly beard of a young god, bore himself with a light pride, in which all the old princely blood of the Boccaneras could be traced. And Benedetta, she so white under her casque of jetty hair, she so calm and so sensible, wore her lovely smile, that smile so seldom seen on her face but which was irresistibly fascinating, transfiguring her, imparting the charm of a flower to her somewhat full mouth, and filling the infinite of her dark and fathomless eyes with a radiance as of heaven. And in this gay return of youth and happiness, an exquisite instinct had prompted her to put on a white gown, a plain girlish gown which symbolised her maidenhood, which told that she had remained through all a pure untarnished lily for the husband of her choice. And nothing of her form was to be seen, not a glimpse of bosom or shoulder. It was as if the impenetrable, redoubtable mystery of love, the sovereign beauty of woman slumbered there, all powerful, but veiled with white. Again, not a jewel appeared on her fingers or in her ears. There was simply a necklace falling about her corsage, but a necklace fit for royalty, the famous pearl necklace of the Boccaneras, which she had inherited from her mother, and which was known to all Rome—pearls of fabulous size cast negligently about her neck, and sufficing, simply as she was gowned, to make her queen of all.

"Oh!" murmured Pierre in ecstasy, "how happy and how beautiful she is!"

But he at once regretted that he had expressed his thoughts aloud, for beside him he heard a low plaint, an involuntary growl which reminded him of the Count's presence. However, Prada promptly stifled this cry of returning anguish, and found strength enough to affect a brutish gaiety: "The devil!" said he, "they have plenty of impudence. I hope we shall see them married and bedded at once!" Then regretting this coarse jest which had been prompted by the revolt of passion, he sought to appear indifferent: "She looks very nice this evening," he said; "she has the finest shoulders in the world, you know, and its a real success for her to hide them and yet appear more beautiful than ever."

He went on speaking, contriving to assume an easy tone, and giving various little particulars about the Countess as he still obstinately called the young woman. However, he had drawn rather further into the recess, for fear, no doubt, that people might remark his pallor, and the painful twitch which contracted his mouth. He was in no state to fight, to show himself gay and insolent in presence of the joy which the lovers so openly and naively expressed. And he was glad of the respite which the arrival of the King and Queen at this moment offered him. "Ah! here are their Majesties!" he exclaimed, turning towards the window. "Look at the scramble in the street!"

Although the windows were closed, a tumult could be heard rising from the footways. And Pierre on looking down saw, by the light of the electric lamps, a sea of human heads pour over the road and encompass the carriages. He had several times already seen the King during the latter's daily drives to the grounds of the Villa Borghese, whither he came like any private gentleman—unguarded, unescorted, with merely an aide-de-camp accompanying him in his victoria. At other times he drove a light phaeton with only a footman in black livery to attend him. And on one occasion Pierre had seen him with the Queen, the pair of them seated side by side like worthy middle-class folks driving abroad for pleasure. And, as the royal couple went by, the busy people in the streets and the promenaders in the public gardens contented themselves with wafting them an affectionate wave of the hand, the most expansive simply approaching to smile at them, and no one importuning them with acclamations. Pierre, who harboured the traditional idea of kings closely guarded and passing processionally with all the accompaniment of military pomp, was therefore greatly surprised and touched by the amiable bonhomie of this royal pair, who went wherever they listed in full security amidst the smiling affection of their people. Everybody, moreover, had told him of the King's kindliness and simplicity, his desire for peace, and his passion for sport, solitude, and the open air, which, amidst the worries of power, must often have made him dream of a life of freedom far from the imperious duties of royalty for which he seemed unfitted.* But the Queen was yet more tenderly loved. So naturally and serenely virtuous that she alone remained ignorant of the scandals of Rome, she was also a woman of great culture and great refinement, conversant with every field of literature, and very happy in being so intelligent, so superior to those around her—a pre-eminence which she realised and which she was fond of showing, but in the most natural and most graceful of ways.

* King Humbert inherited these tastes from his father Victor
Emanuel, who was likewise a great sportsman and had a perfect
horror of court life, pageantry, and the exigencies of
politics.—Trans.

Like Pierre, Prada had remained with his face to the window, and suddenly pointing to the crowd he said: "Now that they have seen the Queen they will go to bed well pleased. And there isn't a single police agent there, I'm sure. Ah! to be loved, to be loved!" Plainly enough his distress of spirit was coming back, and so, turning towards the gallery again, he tried to play the jester. "Attention, my dear Abbe, we mustn't miss their Majesties' entry. That will be the finest part of the fete!"

A few minutes went by, and then, in the very midst of a polka, the orchestra suddenly ceased playing. But a moment afterwards, with all the blare of its brass instruments, it struck up the Royal March. The dancers fled in confusion, the centre of the gallery was cleared, and the King and Queen entered, escorted by the Prince and Princess Buongiovanni, who had received them at the foot of the staircase. The King was in ordinary evening dress, while the Queen wore a robe of straw-coloured satin, covered with superb white lace; and under the diadem of brilliants which encircled her beautiful fair hair, she looked still young, with a fresh and rounded face, whose expression was all amiability, gentleness, and wit. The music was still sounding with the enthusiastic violence of welcome. Behind her father and mother, Celia appeared amidst the press of people who were following to see the sight; and then came Attilio, the Saccos, and various relatives and official personages. And, pending the termination of the Royal March, only salutations, glances, and smiles were exchanged amidst the sonorous music and dazzling light; whilst all the guests crowded around on tip-toe, with outstretched necks and glittering eyes—a rising tide of heads and shoulders, flashing with the fires of precious stones.

At last the march ended and the presentations began. Their Majesties were already acquainted with Celia, and congratulated her with quite affectionate kindliness. However, Sacco, both as minister and father, was particularly desirous of presenting his son Attilio. He bent his supple spine, and summoned to his lips the fine words which were appropriate, in such wise that he contrived to make the young man bow to the King in the capacity of a lieutenant in his Majesty's army, whilst his homage as a handsome young man, so passionately loved by his betrothed was reserved for Queen Margherita. Again did their Majesties show themselves very gracious, even towards the Signora Sacco who, ever modest and prudent, had remained in the background. And then occurred an incident that was destined to give rise to endless gossip. Catching sight of Benedetta, whom Count Prada had presented to her after his marriage, the Queen, who greatly admired her beauty and charm of manner, addressed her a smile in such wise that the young woman was compelled to approach. A conversation of some minutes' duration ensued, and the Contessina was favoured with some extremely amiable expressions which were perfectly audible to all around. Most certainly the Queen was ignorant of the event of the day, the dissolution of Benedetta's marriage with Prada, and her coming union with Dario so publicly announced at this gala, which now seemed to have been given to celebrate a double betrothal. Nevertheless that conversation caused a deep impression; the guests talked of nothing but the compliments which Benedetta had received from the most virtuous and intelligent of queens, and her triumph was increased by it all, she became yet more beautiful and more victorious amidst the happiness she felt at being at last able to bestow herself on the spouse of her choice, that happiness which made her look so radiant.

But, on the other hand, the torture which Prada experienced now became intense. Whilst the sovereigns continued conversing, the Queen with the ladies who came to pay her their respects, the King with the officers, diplomatists, and other important personages who approached him, Prada saw none but Benedetta—Benedetta congratulated, caressed, exalted by affection and glory. Dario was near her, flushing with pleasure, radiant like herself. It was for them that this ball had been given, for them that the lamps shone out, for them that the music played, for them that the most beautiful women of Rome had bared their bosoms and adorned them with precious stones. It was for them that their Majesties had entered to the strains of the Royal March, for them that the fete was becoming like an apotheosis, for them that a fondly loved queen was smiling, appearing at that betrothal gala like the good fairy of the nursery tales, whose coming betokens life-long happiness. And for Prada, this wondrously brilliant hour when good fortune and joyfulness attained their apogee, was one of defeat. It was fraught with the victory of that woman who had refused to be his wife in aught but name, and of that man who now was about to take her from him: such a public, ostentatious, insulting victory that it struck him like a buffet in the face. And not merely did his pride and passion bleed for that: he felt that the triumph of the Saccos dealt a blow to his fortune. Was it true, then, that the rough conquerors of the North were bound to deteriorate in the delightful climate of Rome, was that the reason why he already experienced such a sensation of weariness and exhaustion? That very morning at Frascati in connection with that disastrous building enterprise he had realised that his millions were menaced, albeit he refused to admit that things were going badly with him, as some people rumoured. And now, that evening, amidst that fete he beheld the South victorious, Sacco winning the day like one who feeds at his ease on the warm prey so gluttonously pounced upon under the flaming sun.

And the thought of Sacco being a minister, an intimate of the King, allying himself by marriage to one of the noblest families of the Roman aristocracy, and already laying hands on the people and the national funds with the prospect of some day becoming the master of Rome and Italy—that thought again was a blow for the vanity of this man of prey, for the ever voracious appetite of this enjoyer, who felt as if he were being pushed away from table before the feast was over! All crumbled and escaped him, Sacco stole his millions, and Benedetta tortured his flesh, stirring up that awful wound of unsatisfied passion which never would be healed.

Again did Pierre hear that dull plaint, that involuntary despairing growl, which had upset him once before. And he looked at the Count, and asked him: "Are you suffering?" But on seeing how livid was the face of Prada, who only retained his calmness by a superhuman effort, he regretted his indiscreet question, which, moreover, remained unanswered. And then to put the other more at ease, the young priest went on speaking, venting the thoughts which the sight before him inspired: "Your father was right," said he, "we Frenchmen whose education is so full of the Catholic spirit, even in these days of universal doubt, we never think of Rome otherwise than as the old Rome of the popes. We scarcely know, we can scarcely understand the great changes which, year by year, have brought about the Italian Rome of the present day. Why, when I arrived here, the King and his government and the young nation working to make a great capital for itself, seemed to me of no account whatever! Yes, I dismissed all that, thought nothing of it, in my dream of resuscitating a Christian and evangelical Rome, which should assure the happiness of the world."

He laughed as he spoke, pitying his own artlessness, and then pointed towards the gallery where Prince Buongiovanni was bowing to the King whilst the Princess listened to the gallant remarks of Sacco: a scene full of symbolism, the old papal aristocracy struck down, the parvenus accepted, the black and white worlds so mixed together that one and all were little else than subjects, on the eve of forming but one united nation. That conciliation between the Quirinal and the Vatican which in principle was regarded as impossible, was it not in practice fatal, in face of the evolution which went on day by day? People must go on living, loving, and creating life throughout the ages. And the marriage of Attilio and Celia would be the symbol of the needful union: youth and love triumphing over ancient hatred, all quarrels forgotten as a handsome lad goes by, wins a lovely girl, and carries her off in his arms in order that the world may last.

"Look at them!" resumed Pierre, "how handsome and young and gay both the fiances are, all confidence in the future. Ah! I well understand that your King should have come here to please his minister and win one of the old Roman families over to his throne; it is good, brave, and fatherly policy. But I like to think that he has also realised the touching significance of that marriage—old Rome, in the person of that candid, loving child giving herself to young Italy, that upright, enthusiastic young man who wears his uniform so jauntily. And may their nuptials be definitive and fruitful; from them and from all the others may there arise the great nation which, now that I begin to know you, I trust you will soon become!"

Amidst the tottering of his former dream of an evangelical and universal Rome, Pierre expressed these good wishes for the Eternal City's future fortune with such keen and deep emotion that Prada could not help replying: "I thank you; that wish of yours is in the heart of every good Italian."

But his voice quavered, for even whilst he was looking at Celia and Attilio, who stood smiling and talking together, he saw Benedetta and Dario approach them, wearing the same joyful expression of perfect happiness. And when the two couples were united, so radiant and so triumphant, so full of superb and happy life, he no longer had strength to stay there, see them, and suffer.

"I am frightfully thirsty," he hoarsely exclaimed. "Let's go to the buffet to drink something." And, thereupon, in order to avoid notice, he so manoeuvred as to glide behind the throng, skirting the windows in the direction of the entrance to the Hall of the Antiques, which was beyond the gallery.

Whilst Pierre was following him they were parted by an eddy of the crowd, and the young priest found himself carried towards the two loving couples who still stood chatting together. And Celia, on recognising him, beckoned to him in a friendly way. With her passionate cult for beauty, she was enraptured with the appearance of Benedetta, before whom she joined her little lily hands as before the image of the Madonna. "Oh! Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "to please me now, do tell her how beautiful she is, more beautiful than anything on earth, more beautiful than even the sun, and the moon and stars. If you only knew, my dear, it makes me quiver to see you so beautiful as that, as beautiful as happiness, as beautiful as love itself!"

Benedetta began to laugh, while the two young men made merry. "But you are as beautiful as I am, darling," said the Contessina. "And if we are beautiful it is because we are happy."

"Yes, yes, happy," Celia gently responded. "Do you remember the evening when you told me that one didn't succeed in marrying the Pope and the King? But Attilio and I are marrying them, and yet we are very happy."

"But we don't marry them, Dario and I! On the contrary!" said Benedetta gaily. "No matter; as you answered me that same evening, it is sufficient that we should love one another, love saves the world."

When Pierre at last succeeded in reaching the door of the Hall of the Antiques, where the buffet was installed, he found Prada there, motionless, gazing despite himself on the galling spectacle which he desired to flee. A power stronger than his will had kept him there, forcing him to turn round and look, and look again. And thus, with a bleeding heart, he still lingered and witnessed the resumption of the dancing, the first figure of a quadrille which the orchestra began to play with a lively flourish of its brass instruments. Benedetta and Dario, Celia and Attilio were vis-à-vis. And so charming and delightful was the sight which the two couples presented dancing in the white blaze, all youth and joy, that the King and Queen drew near to them and became interested. And soon bravos of admiration rang out, while from every heart spread a feeling of infinite tenderness.

"I'm dying of thirst, let's go!" repeated Prada, at last managing to wrench himself away from the torturing sight.

He called for some iced lemonade and drank the glassful at one draught, gulping it down with the greedy eagerness of a man stricken with fever, who will never more be able to quench the burning fire within him.

The Hall of the Antiques was a spacious room with mosaic pavement, and decorations of stucco; and a famous collection of vases, bas-reliefs, and statues, was disposed along its walls. The marbles predominated, but there were a few bronzes, and among them a dying gladiator of extreme beauty. The marvel however was the famous statue of Venus, a companion to that of the Capitol, but with a more elegant and supple figure and with the left arm falling loosely in a gesture of voluptuous surrender. That evening a powerful electric reflector threw a dazzling light upon the statue, which, in its divine and pure nudity, seemed to be endowed with superhuman, immortal life. Against the end-wall was the buffet, a long table covered with an embroidered cloth and laden with fruit, pastry, and cold meats. Sheaves of flowers rose up amidst bottles of champagne, hot punch, and iced sorbetto, and here and there were marshalled armies of glasses, tea-cups, and broth-bowls, a perfect wealth of sparkling crystal, porcelain, and silver. And a happy innovation had been to fill half of the hall with rows of little tables, at which the guests, in lieu of being obliged to refresh themselves standing, were able to sit down and order what they desired as in a cafe.

At one of these little tables, Pierre perceived Narcisse seated near a young woman, whom Prada, on approaching, recognised to be Lisbeth. "You find me, you see, in delightful company," gallantly exclaimed the attache. "As we lost one another, I could think of nothing better than of offering madame my arm to bring her here."

"It was, in fact, a good idea," said Lisbeth with her pretty laugh, "for I was feeling very thirsty."

They had ordered some iced coffee, which they were slowly sipping out of little silver-gilt spoons.

"I have a terrible thirst, too," declared the Count, "and I can't quench it. You will allow us to join you, will you not, my dear sir? Some of that coffee will perhaps calm me." And then to Lisbeth he added, "Ah! my dear, allow me to introduce to you Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, a young French priest of great distinction."

Then for a long time they all four remained seated at that table, chatting and making merry over certain of the guests who went by. Prada, however, in spite of his usual gallantry towards Lisbeth, frequently became absent-minded; at times he quite forgot her, being again mastered by his anguish, and, in spite of all his efforts, his eyes ever turned towards the neighbouring gallery whence the sound of music and dancing reached him.

"Why, what are you thinking of, caro mio?" Lisbeth asked in her pretty way, on seeing him at one moment so pale and lost. "Are you indisposed?"

He did not reply, however, but suddenly exclaimed, "Ah! look there, that's the real pair, there's real love and happiness for you!"

With a jerk of the hand he designated Dario's mother, the Marchioness Montefiori and her second husband, Jules Laporte—that ex-sergeant of the papal Swiss Guard, her junior by fifteen years, whom she had one day hooked at the Corso with her eyes of fire, which yet had remained superb, and whom she had afterwards triumphantly transformed into a Marquis Montefiori in order to have him entirely to herself. Such was her passion that she never relaxed her hold on him whether at ball or reception, but, despite all usages, kept him beside her, and even made him escort her to the buffet, so much did she delight in being able to exhibit him and say that this handsome man was her own exclusive property. And standing there side by side, the pair of them began to drink champagne and eat sandwiches, she yet a marvel of massive beauty although she was over fifty, and he with long wavy moustaches, and proud bearing, like a fortunate adventurer whose jovial impudence pleased the ladies.

"You know that she had to extricate him from a nasty affair," resumed the Count in a lower tone. "Yes, he travelled in relics; he picked up a living by supplying relics on commission to convents in France and Switzerland; and he had launched quite a business in false relics with the help of some Jews here who concocted little ancient reliquaries out of mutton bones, with everything sealed and signed by the most genuine authorities. The affair was hushed up, as three prelates were also compromised in it! Ah! the happy man! Do you see how she devours him with her eyes? And he, doesn't he look quite a grand seigneur by the mere way in which he holds that plate for her whilst she eats the breast of a fowl out of it!"

Then, in a rough way and with biting irony, he went on to speak of the amours of Rome. The Roman women, said he, were ignorant, obstinate, and jealous. When a woman had managed to win a man, she kept him for ever, he became her property, and she disposed of him as she pleased. By way of proof, he cited many interminable liaisons, such as that of Donna Serafina and Morano which, in time became virtual marriages; and he sneered at such a lack of fancy, such an excess of fidelity whose only ending, when it did end, was some very disagreeable unpleasantness.

At this, Lisbeth interrupted him. "But what is the matter with you this evening, my dear?" she asked with a laugh. "What you speak of is on the contrary very nice and pretty! When a man and a woman love one another they ought to do so for ever!"

She looked delightful as she spoke, with her fine wavy blonde hair and delicate fair complexion; and Narcisse with a languorous expression in his half-closed eyes compared her to a Botticelli which he had seen at Florence. However, the night was now far advanced, and Pierre had once more sunk into gloomy thoughtfulness when he heard a passing lady remark that they had already begun to dance the Cotillon in the gallery; and thereupon he suddenly remembered that Monsignor Nani had given him an appointment in the little Saloon of the Mirrors.

"Are you leaving?" hastily inquired Prada on seeing him rise and bow to Lisbeth.

"No, no, not yet," Pierre answered.

"Oh! all right. Don't go away without me. I want to walk a little, and I'll see you home. It's agreed, eh? You will find me here."

The young priest had to cross two rooms, one hung with yellow and the other with blue, before he at last reached the mirrored salon. This was really an exquisite example of the rococo style, a rotunda as it were of pale mirrors framed with superb gilded carvings. Even the ceiling was covered with mirrors disposed slantwise so that on every side things multiplied, mingled, and appeared under all possible aspects. Discreetly enough no electric lights had been placed in the room, the only illumination being that of some pink tapers burning in a pair of candelabra. The hangings and upholstery were of soft blue silk, and the impression on entering was very sweet and charming, as if one had found oneself in the abode of some fairy queen of the rills, a palace of limpid water, illumined to its farthest depths by clusters of stars.

Pierre at once perceived Monsignor Nani, who was sitting on a low couch, and, as the prelate had hoped, he was quite alone, for the Cotillon had attracted almost everybody to the picture gallery. And the silence in the little salon was nearly perfect, for at that distance the blare of the orchestra subsided into a faint, flute-like murmur. The young priest at once apologised to the prelate for having kept him waiting.

"No, no, my dear son," said Nani, with his inexhaustible amiability. "I was very comfortable in this retreat—when the press of the crowd became over-threatening I took refuge here." He did not speak of the King and Queen, but he allowed it to be understood that he had politely avoided their company. If he had come to the fete it was on account of his sincere affection for Celia and also with a very delicate diplomatic object, for the Church wished to avoid any appearance of having entirely broken with the Buongiovanni family, that ancient house which was so famous in the annals of the papacy. Doubtless the Vatican was unable to subscribe to this marriage which seemed to unite old Rome with the young Kingdom of Italy, but on the other hand it did not desire people to think that it abandoned old and faithful supporters and took no interest in what befell them.

"But come, my dear son," the prelate resumed, "it is you who are now in question. I told you that although the Congregation of the Index had pronounced itself for the condemnation of your book, the sentence would only be submitted to the Holy Father and signed by him on the day after to-morrow. So you still have a whole day before you."

At this Pierre could not refrain from a dolorous and vivacious interruption.

"Alas! Monseigneur, what can I do?" said he; "I have thought it all over, and I see no means, no opportunity of defending myself. How could I even see his Holiness now that he is so ill?"

"Oh! ill, ill!" muttered Nani with his shrewd expression. "His Holiness is ever so much better, for this very day, like every other Wednesday, I had the honour to be received by him. When his Holiness is a little tired and people say that he is very ill, he often lets them do so, for it gives him a rest and enables him to judge certain ambitions and manifestations of impatience around him."

Pierre, however, was too upset to listen attentively. "No, it's all over," he continued, "I'm in despair. You spoke to me of the possibility of a miracle, but I am no great believer in miracles. Since I am defeated here at Rome, I shall go away, I shall return to Paris, and continue the struggle there. Oh! I cannot resign myself, my hope in salvation by the practice of love cannot die, and I shall answer my denouncers in a new book, in which I shall tell in what new soil the new religion will grow up!"

Silence fell. Nani looked at him with his clear eyes in which intelligence shone distinct and sharp like steel. And amidst the deep calm, the warm heavy atmosphere of the little salon, whose mirrors were starred with countless reflections of candles, a more sonorous burst of music was suddenly wafted from the gallery, a rhythmical waltz melody, which slowly expanded, then died away.

"My dear son," said Nani, "anger is always harmful. You remember that on your arrival here I promised that if your own efforts to obtain an interview with the Holy Father should prove unavailing, I would myself endeavour to secure an audience for you." Then, seeing how agitated the young priest was getting, he went on: "Listen to me and don't excite yourself. His Holiness, unfortunately, is not always prudently advised. Around him are persons whose devotion, however great, is at times deficient in intelligence. I told you that, and warned you against inconsiderate applications. And this is why, already three weeks ago, I myself handed your book to his Holiness in the hope that he would deign to glance at it. I rightly suspected that it had not been allowed to reach him. And this is what I am instructed to tell you: his Holiness, who has had the great kindness to read your book, expressly desires to see you."

A cry of joy and gratitude died away in Pierre's throat: "Ah! Monseigneur. Ah! Monseigneur!"

But Nani quickly silenced him and glanced around with an expression of keen anxiety as if he feared that some one might hear them. "Hush! Hush!" said he, "it is a secret. His Holiness wishes to see you privately, without taking anybody else into his confidence. Listen attentively. It is now two o'clock in the morning. Well, this very day, at nine in the evening precisely, you must present yourself at the Vatican and at every door ask for Signor Squadra. You will invariably be allowed to pass. Signor Squadra will be waiting for you upstairs, and will introduce you. And not a word, mind; not a soul must have the faintest suspicion of these things."

Pierre's happiness and gratitude at last flowed forth. He had caught hold of the prelate's soft, plump hands, and stammered, "Ah! Monseigneur, how can I express my gratitude to you? If you only knew how full my soul was of night and rebellion since I realised that I had been a mere plaything in the hands of those powerful cardinals. But you have saved me, and again I feel sure that I shall win the victory, for I shall at last be able to fling myself at the feet of his Holiness the father of all truth and all justice. He can but absolve me, I who love him, I who admire him, I who have never battled for aught but his own policy and most cherished ideas. No, no, it is impossible; he will not sign that judgment; he will not condemn my book!"

Releasing his hands, Nani sought to calm him with a fatherly gesture, whilst retaining a faint smile of contempt for such a useless expenditure of enthusiasm. At last he succeeded, and begged him to retire. The orchestra was again playing more loudly in the distance. And when the young priest at last withdrew, thanking him once more, he said very simply, "Remember, my dear son, that only obedience is great."

Pierre, whose one desire now was to take himself off, found Prada almost immediately afterwards in the first reception-room. Their Majesties had just left the ball in grand ceremony, escorted to the threshold by the Buongiovannis and the Saccos. And before departing the Queen had maternally kissed Celia, whilst the King shook hands with Attilio—honours instinct with a charming good nature which made the members of both families quite radiant. However, a good many of the guests were following the example of the sovereigns and disappearing in small batches. And the Count, who seemed strangely nervous, and showed more sternness and bitterness than ever, was, on his side, also eager to be gone. "Ah! it's you at last. I was waiting for you," he said to Pierre. "Well, let's get off at once, eh? Your compatriot Monsieur Narcisse Habert asked me to tell you not to look for him. The fact is, he has gone to see my friend Lisbeth to her carriage. I myself want a breath of fresh air, a stroll, and so I'll go with you as far as the Via Giulia."

Then, as they took their things from the cloak-room, he could not help sneering and saying in his brutal way: "I saw your good friends go off, all four together. It's lucky that you prefer to go home on foot, for there was no room for you in the carriage. What superb impudence it was on the part of that Donna Serafina to drag herself here, at her age, with that Morano of hers, so as to triumph over the return of the fickle one! And the two others, the two young ones—ah! I confess that I can hardly speak calmly of them, for in parading here together as they did this evening, they have shown an impudence and a cruelty such as is rarely seen!" Prada's hands trembled, and he murmured: "A good journey, a good journey to the young man, since he is going to Naples. Yes, I heard Celia say that he was starting for Naples this evening at six o'clock. Well, my wishes go with him; a good journey!"

The two men found the change delightful when they at last emerged from the stifling heat of the reception-rooms into the lovely, cool, and limpid night. It was a night illumined by a superb full moon, one of those matchless Roman nights when the city slumbers in Elysian radiance, steeped in a dream of the Infinite, under the vast vault of heaven. And they took the most agreeable route, going down the Corso proper and then turning into the Corso Vittorio Emanuele.

Prada had grown somewhat calmer, but remained full of irony. To divert his mind, no doubt, he talked on in the most voluble manner, reverting to the women of Rome and to that fete which he had at first found splendid, but at which he now began to rail.

"Oh! of course they have very fine gowns," said he, speaking of the women; "but gowns which don't fit them, gowns which are sent them from Paris, and which, of course, they can't try on. It's just the same with their jewels; they still have diamonds and pearls, in particular, which are very fine, but they are so wretchedly, so heavily mounted that they look frightful. And if you only knew how ignorant and frivolous these women are, despite all their conceit! Everything is on the surface with them, even religion: there's nothing beneath. I looked at them eating at the buffet. Oh! they at least have fine appetites. This evening some decorum was observed, there wasn't too much gorging. But at one of the Court balls you would see a general pillage, the buffets besieged, and everything swallowed up amidst a scramble of amazing voracity!"

To all this talk Pierre only returned monosyllabic responses. He was wrapped in overflowing delight at the thought of that audience with the Pope, which, unable as he was to confide in any one, he strove to arrange and picture in his own mind, even in its pettiest details. And meantime the footsteps of the two men rang out on the dry pavement of the clear, broad, deserted thoroughfare, whose black shadows were sharply outlined by the moonlight.

All at once Prada himself became silent. His loquacious bravura was exhausted, the frightful struggle going on in his mind wholly possessed and paralysed him. Twice already he had dipped his hand into his coat pocket and felt the pencilled note whose four lines he mentally repeated: "A legend avers that the fig-tree of Judas now grows at Frascati, and that its fruit is deadly for him who may desire to become pope. Eat not the poisoned figs, nor give them either to your servants or your fowls." The note was there; he could feel it; and if he had desired to accompany Pierre, it was in order that he might drop it into the letter-box at the Palazzo Boccanera. And he continued to step out briskly, so that within another ten minutes that note would surely be in the box, for no power in the world could prevent it, since such was his express determination. Never would he commit such a crime as to allow people to be poisoned.

But he was suffering such abominable torture. That Benedetta and that Dario had raised such a tempest of jealous hatred within him! For them he forgot Lisbeth whom he loved, and even that flesh of his flesh, the child of whom he was so proud. All sex as he was, eager to conquer and subdue, he had never cared for facile loves. His passion was to overcome. And now there was a woman in the world who defied him, a woman forsooth whom he had bought, whom he had married, who had been handed over to him, but who would never, never be his. Ah! in the old days, to subdue her, he would if needful have fired Rome like a Nero; but now he asked himself what he could possibly do to prevent her from belonging to another. That galling thought made the blood gush from his gaping wound. How that woman and her lover must deride him! And to think that they had sought to turn him to ridicule by a baseless charge, an arrant lie which still and ever made him smart, all proof of its falsity to the contrary. He, on his side, had accused them in the past without much belief in what he said, but now the charges he had imputed to them must come true, for they were free, freed at all events of the religious bond, and that no doubt was their only care. And then visions of their happiness passed before his eyes, infuriating him. Ah! no, ah! no, it was impossible, he would rather destroy the world!

Then, as he and Pierre turned out of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele to thread the old narrow tortuous streets leading to the Via Giulia, he pictured himself dropping the note into the letter-box at the palazzo. And next he conjured up what would follow. The note would lie in the letter-box till morning. At an early hour Don Vigilio, the secretary, who by the Cardinal's express orders kept the key of the box, would come down, find the note, and hand it to his Eminence, who never allowed another to open any communication addressed to him. And then the figs would be thrown away, there would be no further possibility of crime, the black world would in all prudence keep silent. But if the note should not be in the letter-box, what would happen then? And admitting that supposition he pictured the figs placed on the table at the one o'clock meal, in their pretty little leaf-covered basket. Dario would be there as usual, alone with his uncle, since he was not to leave for Naples till the evening. And would both the uncle and the nephew eat the figs, or would only one of them partake of the fruit, and which of them would that be? At this point Prada's clearness of vision failed him; again he conjured up Destiny on the march, that Destiny which he had met on the road from Frascati, going on towards its unknown goal, athwart all obstacles without possibility of stoppage. Aye, the little basket of figs went ever on and on to accomplish its fateful purpose, which no hand in the world had power enough to prevent.

And at last, on either hand of Pierre and Prada, the Via Giulia stretched away in a long line white with moonlight, and the priest emerged as if from a dream at sight of the Palazzo Boccanera rising blackly under the silver sky. Three o'clock struck at a neighbouring church. And he felt himself quivering slightly as once again he heard near him the dolorous moan of a lion wounded unto death, that low involuntary growl which the Count, amidst the frightful struggle of his feelings, had for the third time allowed to escape him. But immediately afterwards he burst into a sneering laugh, and pressing the priest's hands, exclaimed: "No, no, I am not going farther. If I were seen here at this hour, people would think that I had fallen in love with my wife again."

And thereupon he lighted a cigar, and retraced his steps in the clear night, without once looking round.

XIII.

WHEN Pierre awoke he was much surprised to hear eleven o'clock striking. Fatigued as he was by that ball where he had lingered so long, he had slept like a child in delightful peacefulness, and as soon as he opened his eyes the radiant sunshine filled him with hope. His first thought was that he would see the Pope that evening at nine o'clock. Ten more hours to wait! What would he be able to do with himself during that lovely day, whose radiant sky seemed to him of such happy augury? He rose and opened the windows to admit the warm air which, as he had noticed on the day of his arrival, had a savour of fruit and flowers, a blending, as it were, of the perfume of rose and orange. Could this possibly be December? What a delightful land, that the spring should seem to flower on the very threshold of winter! Then, having dressed, he was leaning out of the window to glance across the golden Tiber at the evergreen slopes of the Janiculum, when he espied Benedetta seated in the abandoned garden of the mansion. And thereupon, unable to keep still, full of a desire for life, gaiety, and beauty, he went down to join her.

With radiant visage and outstretched hands, she at once vented the cry he had expected: "Ah! my dear Abbe, how happy I am!"

They had often spent their mornings in that quiet, forsaken nook; but what sad mornings those had been, hopeless as they both were! To-day, however, the weed-grown paths, the box-plants growing in the old basin, the orange-trees which alone marked the outline of the beds—all seemed full of charm, instinct with a sweet and dreamy cosiness in which it was very pleasant to lull one's joy. And it was so warm, too, beside the big laurel-bush, in the corner where the streamlet of water ever fell with flute-like music from the gaping, tragic mask.

"Ah!" repeated Benedetta, "how happy I am! I was stifling upstairs, and my heart felt such a need of space, and air, and sunlight, that I came down here!"

She was seated on the fallen column beside the old marble sarcophagus, and desired the priest to place himself beside her. Never had he seen her looking so beautiful, with her black hair encompassing her pure face, which in the sunshine appeared pinky and delicate as a flower. Her large, fathomless eyes showed in the light like braziers rolling gold, and her childish mouth, all candour and good sense, laughed the laugh of one who was at last free to love as her heart listed, without offending either God or man. And, dreaming aloud, she built up plans for the future. "It's all simple enough," said she; "I have already obtained a separation, and shall easily get that changed into civil divorce now that the Church has annulled my marriage. And I shall marry Dario next spring, perhaps sooner, if the formalities can be hastened. He is going to Naples this evening about the sale of some property which we still possess there, but which must now be sold, for all this business has cost us a lot of money. Still, that doesn't matter since we now belong to one another. And when he comes back in a few days, what a happy time we shall have! I could not sleep when I got back from that splendid ball last night, for my head was so full of plans—oh! splendid plans, as you shall see, for I mean to keep you in Rome until our marriage."

Like herself, Pierre began to laugh, so gained upon by this explosion of youth and happiness that he had to make a great effort to refrain from speaking of his own delight, his hopefulness at the thought of his coming interview with the Pope. Of that, however, he had sworn to speak to nobody.

Every now and again, amidst the quivering silence of the sunlit garden, the cry of a bird persistently rang out; and Benedetta, raising her head and looking at a cage hanging beside one of the first-floor windows, jestingly exclaimed: "Yes, yes, Tata, make a good noise, show that you are pleased, my dear. Everybody in the house must be pleased now." Then, turning towards Pierre, she added gaily: "You know Tata, don't you? What! No? Why, Tata is my uncle's parrot. I gave her to him last spring; he's very fond of her, and lets her help herself out of his plate. And he himself attends to her, puts her out and takes her in, and keeps her in his dining-room, for fear lest she should take cold, as that is the only room of his which is at all warm."

Pierre in his turn looked up and saw the bird, one of those pretty little parrots with soft, silky, dull-green plumage. It was hanging by the beak from a bar of its cage, swinging itself and flapping its wings, all mirth in the bright sunshine.

"Does the bird talk?" he asked.

"No, she only screams," replied Benedetta, laughing. "Still my uncle pretends that he understands her." And then the young woman abruptly darted to another subject, as if this mention of her uncle the Cardinal had made her think of the uncle by marriage whom she had in Paris. "I suppose you have heard from Viscount de la Choue," said she. "I had a letter from him yesterday, in which he said how grieved he was that you were unable to see the Holy Father, as he had counted on you for the triumph of his ideas."

Pierre indeed frequently heard from the Viscount, who was greatly distressed by the importance which his adversary, Baron de Fouras, had acquired since his success with the International Pilgrimage of the Peter's Pence. The old, uncompromising Catholic party would awaken, said the Viscount, and all the conquests of Neo-Catholicism would be threatened, if one could not obtain the Holy Father's formal adhesion to the proposed system of free guilds, in order to overcome the demand for closed guilds which was brought forward by the Conservatives. And the Viscount overwhelmed Pierre with injunctions, and sent him all sorts of complicated plans in his eagerness to see him received at the Vatican. "Yes, yes," muttered the young priest in reply to Benedetta. "I had a letter on Sunday, and found another waiting for me on my return from Frascati yesterday. Ah! it would make me very happy to be able to send the Viscount some good news." Then again Pierre's joy overflowed at the thought that he would that evening see the Pope, and, on opening his loving heart to the Pontiff, receive the supreme encouragement which would strengthen him in his mission to work social salvation in the name of the lowly and the poor. And he could not restrain himself any longer, but let his secret escape him: "It's settled, you know," said he. "My audience is for this evening."

Benedetta did not understand at first. "What audience?" she asked.

"Oh! Monsignor Nani was good enough to tell me at the ball this morning, that the Holy Father has read my book and desires to see me. I shall be received this evening at nine o'clock."

At this the Contessina flushed with pleasure, participating in the delight of the young priest to whom she had grown much attached. And this success of his, coming in the midst of her own felicity, acquired extraordinary importance in her eyes as if it were an augury of complete success for one and all. Superstitious as she was, she raised a cry of rapture and excitement: "Ah! Dio, that will bring us good luck. How happy I am, my friend, to see happiness coming to you at the same time as to me! You cannot think how pleased I am! And all will go well now, it's certain, for a house where there is any one whom the Pope welcomes is blessed, the thunder of Heaven falls on it no more!"

She laughed yet more loudly as she spoke, and clapped her hands with such exuberant gaiety that Pierre became anxious. "Hush! hush!" said he, "it's a secret. Pray don't mention it to any one, either your aunt or even his Eminence. Monsignor Nani would be much annoyed."

She thereupon promised to say nothing, and in a kindly voice spoke of Nani as a benefactor, for was she not indebted to him for the dissolution of her marriage? Then, with a fresh explosion of gaiety, she went on: "But come, my friend, is not happiness the only good thing? You don't ask me to weep over the suffering poor to-day! Ah! the happiness of life, that's everything. People don't suffer or feel cold or hungry when they are happy."

He looked at her in stupefaction at the idea of that strange solution of the terrible question of human misery. And suddenly he realised that, with that daughter of the sun who had inherited so many centuries of sovereign aristocracy, all his endeavours at conversion were vain. He had wished to bring her to a Christian love for the lowly and the wretched, win her over to the new, enlightened, and compassionate Italy that he had dreamt of; but if she had been moved by the sufferings of the multitude at the time when she herself had suffered, when grievous wounds had made her own heart bleed, she was no sooner healed than she proclaimed the doctrine of universal felicity like a true daughter of a clime of burning summers, and winters as mild as spring. "But everybody is not happy!" said he.

"Yes, yes, they are!" she exclaimed. "You don't know the poor! Give a girl of the Trastevere the lad she loves, and she becomes as radiant as a queen, and finds her dry bread quite sweet. The mothers who save a child from sickness, the men who conquer in a battle, or who win at the lottery, one and all in fact are like that, people only ask for good fortune and pleasure. And despite all your striving to be just and to arrive at a more even distribution of fortune, the only satisfied ones will be those whose hearts sing—often without their knowing the cause—on a fine sunny day like this."

Pierre made a gesture of surrender, not wishing to sadden her by again pleading the cause of all the poor ones who at that very moment were somewhere agonising with physical or mental pain. But, all at once, through the luminous mild atmosphere a shadow seemed to fall, tingeing joy with sadness, the sunshine with despair. And the sight of the old sarcophagus, with its bacchanal of satyrs and nymphs, brought back the memory that death lurks even amidst the bliss of passion, the unsatiated kisses of love. For a moment the clear song of the water sounded in Pierre's ears like a long-drawn sob, and all seemed to crumble in the terrible shadow which had fallen from the invisible.

Benedetta, however, caught hold of his hands and roused him once more to the delight of being there beside her. "Your pupil is rebellious, is she not, my friend?" said she. "But what would you have? There are ideas which can't enter into our heads. No, you will never get those things into the head of a Roman girl. So be content with loving us as we are, beautiful with all our strength, as beautiful as we can be."

She herself, in her resplendent happiness, looked at that moment so beautiful that he trembled as in presence of a divinity whose all-powerfulness swayed the world. "Yes, yes," he stammered, "beauty, beauty, still and ever sovereign. Ah! why can it not suffice to satisfy the eternal longings of poor suffering men?"

"Never mind!" she gaily responded. "Do not distress yourself; it is pleasant to live. And now let us go upstairs, my aunt must be waiting."

The midday meal was served at one o'clock, and on the few occasions when Pierre did not eat at one or another restaurant a cover was laid for him at the ladies' table in the little dining-room of the second floor, overlooking the courtyard. At the same hour, in the sunlit dining-room of the first floor, whose windows faced the Tiber, the Cardinal likewise sat down to table, happy in the society of his nephew Dario, for his secretary, Don Vigilio, who also was usually present, never opened his mouth unless to reply to some question. And the two services were quite distinct, each having its own kitchen and servants, the only thing at all common to them both being a large room downstairs which served as a pantry and store-place.

Although the second-floor dining-room was so gloomy, saddened by the greeny half-light of the courtyard, the meal shared that day by the two ladies and the young priest proved a very gay one. Even Donna Serafina, usually so rigid, seemed to relax under the influence of great internal felicity. She was no doubt still enjoying her triumph of the previous evening, and it was she who first spoke of the ball and sung its praises, though the presence of the King and Queen had much embarrassed her, said she. According to her account, she had only avoided presentation by skilful strategy; however she hoped that her well-known affection for Celia, whose god-mother she was, would explain her presence in that neutral mansion where Vatican and Quirinal had met. At the same time she must have retained certain scruples, for she declared that directly after dinner she was going to the Vatican to see the Cardinal Secretary, to whom she desired to speak about an enterprise of which she was lady-patroness. This visit would compensate for her attendance at the Buongiovanni entertainment. And on the other hand never had Donna Serafina seemed so zealous and hopeful of her brother's speedy accession to the throne of St. Peter: therein lay a supreme triumph, an elevation of her race, which her pride deemed both needful and inevitable; and indeed during Leo XIII's last indisposition she had actually concerned herself about the trousseau which would be needed and which would require to be marked with the new Pontiff's arms.

On her side, Benedetta was all gaiety during the repast, laughing at everything, and speaking of Celia and Attilio with the passionate affection of a woman whose own happiness delights in that of her friends. Then, just as the dessert had been served, she turned to the servant with an air of surprise: "Well, and the figs, Giacomo?" she asked.

Giacomo, slow and sleepy of notion, looked at her without understanding. However, Victorine was crossing the room, and Benedetta's next question was for her: "Why are the figs not served, Victorine?" she inquired.

"What figs, Contessina?"

"Why the figs I saw in the pantry as I passed through it this morning on my way to the garden. They were in a little basket and looked superb. I was even astonished to see that there were still some fresh figs left at this season. I'm very fond of them, and felt quite pleased at the thought that I should eat some at dinner."

Victorine began to laugh: "Ah! yes, Contessina, I understand," she replied. "They were some figs which that priest of Frascati, whom you know very well, brought yesterday evening as a present for his Eminence. I was there, and I heard him repeat three or four times that they were a present, and were to be put on his Eminence's table without a leaf being touched. And so one did as he said."

"Well, that's nice," retorted Benedetta with comical indignation. "What gourmands my uncle and Dario are to regale themselves without us! They might have given us a share!"

Donna Serafina thereupon intervened, and asked Victorine: "You are speaking, are you not, of that priest who used to come to the villa at Frascati?"

"Yes, yes, Abbe Santobono his name is, he officiates at the little church of St. Mary in the Fields. He always asks for Abbe Paparelli when he calls; I think they were at the seminary together. And it was Abbe Paparelli who brought him to the pantry with his basket last night. To tell the truth, the basket was forgotten there in spite of all the injunctions, so that nobody would have eaten the figs to-day if Abbe Paparelli hadn't run down just now and carried them upstairs as piously as if they were the Blessed Sacrament. It's true though that his Eminence is so fond of them."

"My brother won't do them much honour to-day," remarked the Princess. "He is slightly indisposed. He passed a bad night." The repeated mention of Abbe Paparelli had made the old lady somewhat thoughtful. She had regarded the train-bearer with displeasure ever since she had noticed the extraordinary influence he was gaining over the Cardinal, despite all his apparent humility and self-effacement. He was but a servant and apparently a very insignificant one, yet he governed, and she could feel that he combated her own influence, often undoing things which she had done to further her brother's interests. Twice already, moreover, she had suspected him of having urged the Cardinal to courses which she looked upon as absolute blunders. But perhaps she was wrong; she did the train-bearer the justice to admit that he had great merits and displayed exemplary piety.

However, Benedetta went on laughing and jesting, and as Victorine had now withdrawn, she called the man-servant: "Listen, Giacomo, I have a commission for you." Then she broke off to say to her aunt and Pierre: "Pray let us assert our rights. I can see them at table almost underneath us. Uncle is taking the leaves off the basket and serving himself with a smile; then he passes the basket to Dario, who passes it on to Don Vigilio. And all three of them eat and enjoy the figs. You can see them, can't you?" She herself could see them well. And it was her desire to be near Dario, the constant flight of her thoughts to him that now made her picture him at table with the others. Her heart was down below, and there was nothing there that she could not see, and hear, and smell, with such keenness of the senses did her love endow her. "Giacomo," she resumed, "you are to go down and tell his Eminence that we are longing to taste his figs, and that it will be very kind of him if he will send us such as he can spare."

Again, however, did Donna Serafina intervene, recalling her wonted severity of voice: "Giacomo, you will please stay here." And to her niece she added: "That's enough childishness! I dislike such silly freaks."

"Oh! aunt," Benedetta murmured. "But I'm so happy, it's so long since I laughed so good-heartedly."

Pierre had hitherto remained listening, enlivened by the sight of her gaiety. But now, as a little chill fell, he raised his voice to say that on the previous day he himself had been astonished to see the famous fig-tree of Frascati still bearing fruit so late in the year. This was doubtless due, however, to the tree's position and the protection of a high wall.

"Ah! so you saw the tree?" said Benedetta.

"Yes, and I even travelled with those figs which you would so much like to taste."

"Why, how was that?"

The young man already regretted the reply which had escaped him. However, having gone so far, he preferred to say everything. "I met somebody at Frascati who had come there in a carriage and who insisted on driving me back to Rome," said he. "On the way we picked up Abbe Santobono, who was bravely making the journey on foot with his basket in his hand. And afterwards we stopped at an osteria—" Then he went on to describe the drive and relate his impressions whilst crossing the Campagna amidst the falling twilight. But Benedetta gazed at him fixedly, aware as she was of Prada's frequent visits to the land and houses which he owned at Frascati; and suddenly she murmured: "Somebody, somebody, it was the Count, was it not?"

"Yes, madame, the Count," Pierre answered. "I saw him again last night; he was overcome, and really deserves to be pitied."

The two women took no offence at this charitable remark which fell from the young priest with such deep and natural emotion, full as he was of overflowing love and compassion for one and all. Donna Serafina remained motionless as if she had not even heard him, and Benedetta made a gesture which seemed to imply that she had neither pity nor hatred to express for a man who had become a perfect stranger to her. However, she no longer laughed, but, thinking of the little basket which had travelled in Prada's carriage, she said: "Ah! I don't care for those figs at all now, I am even glad that I haven't eaten any of them."

Immediately after the coffee Donna Serafina withdrew, saying that she was at once going to the Vatican; and the others, being left to themselves, lingered at table, again full of gaiety, and chatting like friends. The priest, with his feverish impatience, once more referred to the audience which he was to have that evening. It was now barely two o'clock, and he had seven more hours to wait. How should he employ that endless afternoon? Thereupon Benedetta good-naturedly made him a proposal. "I'll tell you what," said she, "as we are all in such good spirits we mustn't leave one another. Dario has his victoria, you know. He must have finished lunch by now, and I'll ask him to take us for a long drive along the Tiber."

This fine project so delighted her that she began to clap her hands; but just then Don Vigilio appeared with a scared look on his face. "Isn't the Princess here?" he inquired.

"No, my aunt has gone out. What is the matter?"

"His Eminence sent me. The Prince has just felt unwell on rising from table. Oh! it's nothing—nothing serious, no doubt."

Benedetta raised a cry of surprise rather than anxiety: "What, Dario! Well, we'll all go down. Come with me, Monsieur l'Abbe. He mustn't get ill if he is to take us for a drive!" Then, meeting Victorine on the stairs, she bade her follow. "Dario isn't well," she said. "You may be wanted."

They all four entered the spacious, antiquated, and simply furnished bed-room where the young Prince had lately been laid up for a whole month. It was reached by way of a small salon, and from an adjoining dressing-room a passage conducted to the Cardinal's apartments, the relatively small dining-room, bed-room, and study, which had been devised by subdividing one of the huge galleries of former days. In addition, the passage gave access to his Eminence's private chapel, a bare, uncarpeted, chairless room, where there was nothing beyond the painted, wooden altar, and the hard, cold tiles on which to kneel and pray.

On entering, Benedetta hastened to the bed where Dario was lying, still fully dressed. Near him, in fatherly fashion, stood Cardinal Boccanera, who, amidst his dawning anxiety, retained his proud and lofty bearing—the calmness of a soul beyond reproach. "Why, what is the matter, Dario mio?" asked the young woman.

He smiled, eager to reassure her. One only noticed that he was very pale, with a look as of intoxication on his face.

"Oh! it's nothing, mere giddiness," he replied. "It's just as if I had drunk too much. All at once things swam before my eyes, and I thought I was going to fall. And then I only had time to come and fling myself on the bed."

Then he drew a long breath, as though talking exhausted him, and the Cardinal in his turn gave some details. "We had just finished our meal," said he, "I was giving Don Vigilio some orders for this afternoon, and was about to rise when I saw Dario get up and reel. He wouldn't sit down again, but came in here, staggering like a somnambulist, and fumbling at the doors to open them. We followed him without understanding. And I confess that I don't yet comprehend it."

So saying, the Cardinal punctuated his surprise by waving his arm towards the rooms, through which a gust of misfortune seemed to have suddenly swept. All the doors had remained wide open: the dressing-room could be seen, and then the passage, at the end of which appeared the dining-room, in a disorderly state, like an apartment suddenly vacated; the table still laid, the napkins flung here and there, and the chairs pushed back. As yet, however, there was no alarm.

Benedetta made the remark which is usually made in such cases: "I hope you haven't eaten anything which has disagreed with you."

The Cardinal, smiling, again waved his hand as if to attest the frugality of his table. "Oh!" said he, "there were only some eggs, some lamb cutlets, and a dish of sorrel—they couldn't have overloaded his stomach. I myself only drink water; he takes just a sip of white wine. No, no, the food has nothing to do with it."

"Besides, in that case his Eminence and I would also have felt indisposed," Don Vigilio made bold to remark.

Dario, after momentarily closing his eyes, opened them again, and once more drew a long breath, whilst endeavouring to laugh. "Oh, it will be nothing;" he said. "I feel more at ease already. I must get up and stir myself."

"In that case," said Benedetta, "this is what I had thought of. You will take Monsieur l'Abbe Froment and me for a long drive in the Campagna."

"Willingly. It's a nice idea. Victorine, help me."

Whilst speaking he had raised himself by means of one arm; but, before the servant could approach, a slight convulsion seized him, and he fell back again as if overcome by a fainting fit. It was the Cardinal, still standing by the bedside, who caught him in his arms, whilst the Contessina this time lost her head: "Dio, Dio! It has come on him again. Quick, quick, a doctor!"

"Shall I run for one?" asked Pierre, whom the scene was also beginning to upset.

"No, no, not you; stay with me. Victorine will go at once. She knows the address. Doctor Giordano, Victorine."

The servant hurried away, and a heavy silence fell on the room where the anxiety became more pronounced every moment. Benedetta, now quite pale, had again approached the bed, whilst the Cardinal looked down at Dario, whom he still held in his arms. And a terrible suspicion, vague, indeterminate as yet, had just awoke in the old man's mind: Dario's face seemed to him to be ashen, to wear that mask of terrified anguish which he had already remarked on the countenance of his dearest friend, Monsignor Gallo, when he had held him in his arms, in like manner, two hours before his death. There was also the same swoon and the same sensation of clasping a cold form whose heart ceases to beat. And above everything else there was in Boccanera's mind the same growing thought of poison, poison coming one knew not whence or how, but mysteriously striking down those around him with the suddenness of lightning. And for a long time he remained with his head bent over the face of his nephew, that last scion of his race, seeking, studying, and recognising the signs of the mysterious, implacable disorder which once already had rent his heart atwain.

But Benedetta addressed him in a low, entreating voice: "You will tire yourself, uncle. Let me take him a little, I beg you. Have no fear, I'll hold him very gently, he will feel that it is I, and perhaps that will rouse him."

At last the Cardinal raised his head and looked at her, and allowed her to take his place after kissing her with distracted passion, his eyes the while full of tears—a sudden burst of emotion in which his great love for the young woman melted the stern frigidity which he usually affected. "Ah! my poor child, my poor child!" he stammered, trembling from head to foot like an oak-tree about to fall. Immediately afterwards, however, he mastered himself, and whilst Pierre and Don Vigilio, mute and motionless, regretted that they could be of no help, he walked slowly to and fro. Soon, moreover, that bed-chamber became too small for all the thoughts revolving in his mind, and he strayed first into the dressing-room and then down the passage as far as the dining-room. And again and again he went to and fro, grave and impassible, his head low, ever lost in the same gloomy reverie. What were the multitudinous thoughts stirring in the brain of that believer, that haughty Prince who had given himself to God and could do naught to stay inevitable Destiny? From time to time he returned to the bedside, observed the progress of the disorder, and then started off again at the same slow regular pace, disappearing and reappearing, carried along as it were by the monotonous alternations of forces which man cannot control. Possibly he was mistaken, possibly this was some mere indisposition at which the doctor would smile. One must hope and wait. And again he went off and again he came back; and amidst the heavy silence nothing more clearly bespoke the torture of anxious fear than the rhythmical footsteps of that tall old man who was thus awaiting Destiny.

The door opened, and Victorine came in breathless. "I found the doctor, here he is," she gasped.

With his little pink face and white curls, his discreet paternal bearing which gave him the air of an amiable prelate, Doctor Giordano came in smiling; but on seeing that room and all the anxious people waiting in it, he turned very grave, at once assuming the expression of profound respect for all ecclesiastical secrets which he had acquired by long practice among the clergy. And when he had glanced at the sufferer he let but a low murmur escape him: "What, again! Is it beginning again!"

He was probably alluding to the knife thrust for which he had recently tended Dario. Who could be thus relentlessly pursuing that poor and inoffensive young prince? However no one heard the doctor unless it were Benedetta, and she was so full of feverish impatience, so eager to be tranquillised, that she did not listen but burst into fresh entreaties: "Oh! doctor, pray look at him, examine him, tell us that it is nothing. It can't be anything serious, since he was so well and gay but a little while ago. It's nothing serious, is it?"

"You are right no doubt, Contessina, it can be nothing dangerous. We will see."

However, on turning round, Doctor Giordano perceived the Cardinal, who with regular, thoughtful footsteps had come back from the dining-room to place himself at the foot of the bed. And while bowing, the doctor doubtless detected a gleam of mortal anxiety in the dark eyes fixed upon his own, for he added nothing but began to examine Dario like a man who realises that time is precious. And as his examination progressed the affable optimism which usually appeared upon his countenance gave place to ashen gravity, a covert terror which made his lips slightly tremble. It was he who had attended Monsignor Gallo when the latter had been carried off so mysteriously; it was he who for imperative reasons had then delivered a certificate stating the cause of death to be infectious fever; and doubtless he now found the same terrible symptoms as in that case, a leaden hue overspreading the sufferer's features, a stupor as of excessive intoxication; and, old Roman practitioner that he was, accustomed to sudden deaths, he realised that the malaria which kills was passing, that malaria which science does not yet fully understand, which may come from the putrescent exhalations of the Tiber unless it be but a name for the ancient poison of the legends.

As the doctor raised his head his glance again encountered the black eyes of the Cardinal, which never left him. "Signor Giordano," said his Eminence, "you are not over-anxious, I hope? It is only some case of indigestion, is it not?"

The doctor again bowed. By the slight quiver of the Cardinal's voice he understood how acute was the anxiety of that powerful man, who once more was stricken in his dearest affections.

"Your Eminence must be right," he said, "there's a bad digestion certainly. Such accidents sometimes become dangerous when fever supervenes. I need not tell your Eminence how thoroughly you may rely on my prudence and zeal." Then he broke off and added in a clear professional voice: "We must lose no time; the Prince must be undressed. I should prefer to remain alone with him for a moment."

Whilst speaking in this way, however, Doctor Giordano detained Victorine, who would be able to help him, said he; should he need any further assistance he would take Giacomo. His evident desire was to get rid of the members of the family in order that he might have more freedom of action. And the Cardinal, who understood him, gently led Benedetta into the dining-room, whither Pierre and Don Vigilio followed.

When the doors had been closed, the most mournful and oppressive silence reigned in that dining-room, which the bright sun of winter filled with such delightful warmth and radiance. The table was still laid, its cloth strewn here and there with bread-crumbs; and a coffee cup had remained half full. In the centre stood the basket of figs, whose covering of leaves had been removed. However, only two or three of the figs were missing. And in front of the window was Tata, the female parrot, who had flown out of her cage and perched herself on her stand, where she remained, dazzled and enraptured, amidst the dancing dust of a broad yellow sunray. In her astonishment however, at seeing so many people enter, she had ceased to scream and smooth her feathers, and had turned her head the better to examine the newcomers with her round and scrutinising eye.

The minutes went by slowly amidst all the feverish anxiety as to what might be occurring in the neighbouring room. Don Vigilio had taken a corner seat in silence, whilst Benedetta and Pierre, who had remained standing, preserved similar muteness, and immobility. But the Cardinal had reverted to that instinctive, lulling tramp by which he apparently hoped to quiet his impatience and arrive the sooner at the explanation for which he was groping through a tumultuous maze of ideas. And whilst his rhythmical footsteps resounded with mechanical regularity, dark fury was taking possession of his mind, exasperation at being unable to understand the why and wherefore of that sickness. As he passed the table he had twice glanced at the things lying on it in confusion, as if seeking some explanation from them. Perhaps the harm had been done by that unfinished coffee, or by that bread whose crumbs lay here and there, or by those cutlets, a bone of which remained? Then as for the third time he passed by, again glancing, his eyes fell upon the basket of figs, and at once he stopped, as if beneath the shock of a revelation. An idea seized upon him and mastered him, without any plan, however, occurring to him by which he might change his sudden suspicion into certainty. For a moment he remained puzzled with his eyes fixed upon the basket. Then he took a fig and examined it, but, noticing nothing strange, was about to put it back when Tata, the parrot, who was very fond of figs, raised a strident cry. And this was like a ray of light; the means of changing suspicion into certainty was found.

Slowly, with grave air and gloomy visage, the Cardinal carried the fig to the parrot and gave it to her without hesitation or regret. She was a very pretty bird, the only being of the lower order of creation to which he had ever really been attached. Stretching out her supple, delicate form, whose silken feathers of dull green here and there assumed a pinky tinge in the sunlight, she took hold of the fig with her claws, then ripped it open with her beak. But when she had raked it she ate but little, and let all the rest fall upon the floor. Still grave and impassible, the Cardinal looked at her and waited. Quite three minutes went by, and then feeling reassured, he began to scratch the bird's poll, whilst she, taking pleasure in the caress, turned her neck and fixed her bright ruby eye upon her master. But all at once she sank back without even a flap of the wings, and fell like a bullet. She was dead, killed as by a thunderbolt.

Boccanera made but a gesture, raising both hands to heaven as if in horror at what he now knew. Great God! such a terrible crime, and such a fearful mistake, such an abominable trick of Destiny! No cry of grief came from him, but the gloom upon his face grew black and fierce. Yet there was a cry, a piercing cry from Benedetta, who like Pierre and Don Vigilio had watched the Cardinal with an astonishment which had changed into terror: "Poison! poison! Ah! Dario, my heart, my soul!"

But the Cardinal violently caught his niece by the wrist, whilst darting a suspicious glance at the two petty priests, the secretary and the foreigner, who were present: "Be quiet, be quiet!" said he.

She shook herself free, rebelling, frantic with rage and hatred: "Why should I be quiet!" she cried. "It is Prada's work, I shall denounce him, he shall die as well! I tell you it is Prada, I know it, for yesterday Abbe Froment came back with him from Frascati in his carriage with that priest Santobono and that basket of figs! Yes, yes, I have witnesses, it is Prada, Prada!"

"No, no, you are mad, be quiet!" said the Cardinal, who had again taken hold of the young woman's hands and sought to master her with all his sovereign authority. He, who knew the influence which Cardinal Sanguinetti exercised over Santobono's excitable mind, had just understood the whole affair; no direct complicity but covert propulsion, the animal excited and then let loose upon the troublesome rival at the moment when the pontifical throne seemed likely to be vacant. The probability, the certainty of all this flashed upon Boccanera who, though some points remained obscure, did not seek to penetrate them. It was not necessary indeed that he should know every particular: the thing was as he said, since it was bound to be so. "No, no, it was not Prada," he exclaimed, addressing Benedetta. "That man can bear me no personal grudge, and I alone was aimed at, it was to me that those figs were given. Come, think it out! Only an unforeseen indisposition prevented me from eating the greater part of the fruit, for it is known that I am very fond of figs, and while my poor Dario was tasting them, I jested and told him to leave the finer ones for me to-morrow. Yes, the abominable blow was meant for me, and it is on him that it has fallen by the most atrocious of chances, the most monstrous of the follies of fate. Ah! Lord God, Lord God, have you then forsaken us!"

Tears came into the old man's eyes, whilst she still quivered and seemed unconvinced: "But you have no enemies, uncle," she said. "Why should that Santobono try to take your life?"

For a moment he found no fitting reply. With supreme grandeur he had already resolved to keep the truth secret. Then a recollection came to him, and he resigned himself to the telling of a lie: "Santobono's mind has always been somewhat unhinged," said he, "and I know that he has hated me ever since I refused to help him to get a brother of his, one of our former gardeners, out of prison. Deadly spite often has no more serious cause. He must have thought that he had reason to be revenged on me."

Thereupon Benedetta, exhausted, unable to argue any further, sank upon a chair with a despairing gesture: "Ah! God, God! I no longer know—and what matters it now that my Dario is in such danger? There's only one thing to be done, he must be saved. How long they are over what they are doing in that room—why does not Victorine come for us!"

The silence again fell, full of terror. Without speaking the Cardinal took the basket of figs from the table and carried it to a cupboard in which he locked it. Then he put the key in his pocket. No doubt, when night had fallen, he himself would throw the proofs of the crime into the Tiber. However, on coming back from the cupboard he noticed the two priests, who naturally had watched him; and with mingled grandeur and simplicity he said to them: "Gentlemen, I need not ask you to be discreet. There are scandals which we must spare the Church, which is not, cannot be guilty. To deliver one of ourselves, even when he is a criminal, to the civil tribunals, often means a blow for the whole Church, for men of evil mind may lay hold of the affair and seek to impute the responsibility of the crime even to the Church itself. We therefore have but to commit the murderer to the hands of God, who will know more surely how to punish him. Ah! for my part, whether I be struck in my own person or whether the blow be directed against my family, my dearest affections, I declare in the name of the Christ who died upon the cross, that I feel neither anger, nor desire for vengeance, that I efface the murderer's name from my memory and bury his abominable act in the eternal silence of the grave."

Tall as he was, he seemed of yet loftier stature whilst with hand upraised he took that oath to leave his enemies to the justice of God alone; for he did not refer merely to Santobono, but to Cardinal Sanguinetti, whose evil influence he had divined. And amidst all the heroism of his pride, he was rent by tragic dolour at thought of the dark battle which was waged around the tiara, all the evil hatred and voracious appetite which stirred in the depths of the gloom. Then, as Pierre and Don Vigilio bowed to him as a sign that they would preserve silence, he almost choked with invincible emotion, a sob of loving grief which he strove to keep down rising to his throat, whilst he stammered: "Ah! my poor child, my poor child, the only scion of our race, the only love and hope of my heart! Ah! to die, to die like this!"

But Benedetta, again all violence, sprang up: "Die! Who, Dario? I won't have it! We'll nurse him, we'll go back to him. We will take him in our arms and save him. Come, uncle, come at once! I won't, I won't, I won't have him die!"

She was going towards the door, and nothing would have prevented her from re-entering the bed-room, when, as it happened, Victorine appeared with a wild look on her face, for, despite her wonted serenity, all her courage was now exhausted. "The doctor begs madame and his Eminence to come at once, at once," said she.

Stupefied by all these things, Pierre did not follow the others, but lingered for a moment in the sunlit dining-room with Don Vigilio. What! poison? Poison as in the time of the Borgias, elegantly hidden away, served up with luscious fruit by a crafty traitor, whom one dared not even denounce! And he recalled the conversation on his way back from Frascati, and his Parisian scepticism with respect to those legendary drugs, which to his mind had no place save in the fifth acts of melodramas. Yet those abominable stories were true, those tales of poisoned knives and flowers, of prelates and even dilatory popes being suppressed by a drop or a grain of something administered to them in their morning chocolate. That passionate tragical Santobono was really a poisoner, Pierre could no longer doubt it, for a lurid light now illumined the whole of the previous day: there were the words of ambition and menace which had been spoken by Cardinal Sanguinetti, the eagerness to act in presence of the probable death of the reigning pope, the suggestion of a crime for the sake of the Church's salvation, then that priest with his little basket of figs encountered on the road, then that basket carried for hours so carefully, so devoutly, on the priest's knees, that basket which now haunted Pierre like a nightmare, and whose colour, and odour, and shape he would ever recall with a shudder. Aye, poison, poison, there was truth in it; it existed and still circulated in the depths of the black world, amidst all the ravenous, rival longings for conquest and sovereignty.

And all at once the figure of Prada likewise arose in Pierre's mind. A little while previously, when Benedetta had so violently accused the Count, he, Pierre, had stepped forward to defend him and cry aloud what he knew, whence the poison had come, and what hand had offered it. But a sudden thought had made him shiver: though Prada had not devised the crime, he had allowed it to be perpetrated. Another memory darted keen like steel through the young priest's mind—that of the little black hen lying lifeless beside the shed, amidst the dismal surroundings of the osteria, with a tiny streamlet of violet blood trickling from her beak. And here again, Tata, the parrot, lay still soft and warm at the foot of her stand, with her beak stained by oozing blood. Why had Prada told that lie about a battle between two fowls? All the dim intricacy of passion and contention bewildered Pierre, he could not thread his way through it; nor was he better able to follow the frightful combat which must have been waged in that man's mind during the night of the ball. At the same time he could not again picture him by his side during their nocturnal walk towards the Boccanera mansion without shuddering, dimly divining what a frightful decision had been taken before that mansion's door. Moreover, whatever the obscurities, whether Prada had expected that the Cardinal alone would be killed, or had hoped that some chance stroke of fate might avenge him on others, the terrible fact remained—he had known, he had been able to stay Destiny on the march, but had allowed it to go onward and blindly accomplish its work of death.

Turning his head Pierre perceived Don Vigilio still seated on the corner chair whence he had not stirred, and looking so pale and haggard that perhaps he also had swallowed some of the poison. "Do you feel unwell?" the young priest asked.

At first the secretary could not reply, for terror had gripped him at the throat. Then in a low voice he said: "No, no, I didn't eat any. Ah, Heaven, when I think that I so much wanted to taste them, and that merely deference kept me back on seeing that his Eminence did not take any!" Don Vigilio's whole body shivered at the thought that his humility alone had saved him; and on his face and his hands there remained the icy chill of death which had fallen so near and grazed him as it passed.

Then twice he heaved a sigh, and with a gesture of affright sought to brush the horrid thing away while murmuring: "Ah! Paparelli, Paparelli!"

Pierre, deeply stirred, and knowing what he thought of the train-bearer, tried to extract some information from him: "What do you mean?" he asked. "Do you accuse him too? Do you think they urged him on, and that it was they at bottom?"

The word Jesuits was not even spoken, but a big black shadow passed athwart the gay sunlight of the dining-room, and for a moment seemed to fill it with darkness. "They! ah yes!" exclaimed Don Vigilio, "they are everywhere; it is always they! As soon as one weeps, as soon as one dies, they are mixed up in it. And this is intended for me too; I am quite surprised that I haven't been carried off." Then again he raised a dull moan of fear, hatred, and anger: "Ah! Paparelli, Paparelli!" And he refused to reply any further, but darted scared glances at the walls as if from one or another of them he expected to see the train-bearer emerge, with his wrinkled flabby face like that of an old maid, his furtive mouse-like trot, and his mysterious, invading hands which had gone expressly to bring the forgotten figs from the pantry and deposit them on the table.

At last the two priests decided to return to the bedroom, where perhaps they might be required; and Pierre on entering was overcome by the heart-rending scene which the chamber now presented. Doctor Giordano, suspecting poison, had for half an hour been trying the usual remedies, an emetic and then magnesia. Just then, too, he had made Victorine whip some whites of eggs in water. But the disorder was progressing with such lightning-like rapidity that all succour was becoming futile. Undressed and lying on his back, his bust propped up by pillows and his arms lying outstretched over the sheets, Dario looked quite frightful in the sort of painful intoxication which characterised that redoubtable and mysterious disorder to which already Monsignor Gallo and others had succumbed. The young man seemed to be stricken with a sort of dizzy stupor, his eyes receded farther and farther into the depth of their dark sockets, whilst his whole face became withered, aged as it were, and covered with an earthy pallor. A moment previously he had closed his eyes, and the only sign that he still lived was the heaving of his chest induced by painful respiration. And leaning over his poor dying face stood Benedetta, sharing his sufferings, and mastered by such impotent grief that she also was unrecognisable, so white, so distracted by anguish, that it seemed as if death were gradually taking her at the same time as it was taking him.

In the recess by the window whither Cardinal Boccanera had led Doctor Giordano, a few words were exchanged in low tones. "He is lost, is he not?"

The doctor made the despairing gesture of one who is vanquished: "Alas! yes. I must warn your Eminence that in an hour all will be over."

A short interval of silence followed. "And the same malady as Gallo, is it not?" asked the Cardinal; and as the doctor trembling and averting his eyes did not answer he added: "At all events of an infectious fever!"

Giordano well understood what the Cardinal thus asked of him: silence, the crime for ever hidden away for the sake of the good renown of his mother, the Church. And there could be no loftier, no more tragical grandeur than that of this old man of seventy, still so erect and sovereign, who would neither suffer a slur to be cast upon his spiritual family, nor consent to his human family being dragged into the inevitable mire of a sensational murder trial. No, no, there must be none of that, there must be silence, the eternal silence in which all becomes forgotten.

At last the doctor bowed with his gentle air of discretion. "Evidently, of an infectious fever as your Eminence so well says," he replied.

Two big tears then again appeared in Boccanera's eyes. Now that he had screened the Deity from attack in the person of the Church, his heart as a man again bled. He begged the doctor to make a supreme effort, to attempt the impossible; but, pointing to the dying man with trembling hands, Giordano shook his head. For his own father, his own mother he could have done nothing. Death was there. So why weary, why torture a dying man, whose sufferings he would only have increased? And then, as the Cardinal, finding the end so near at hand, thought of his sister Serafina, and lamented that she would not be able to kiss her nephew for the last time if she lingered at the Vatican, the doctor offered to fetch her in his carriage which was waiting below. It would not take him more than twenty minutes, said he, and he would be back in time for the end, should he then be needed.

Left to himself in the window recess the Cardinal remained there motionless for another moment. With eyes blurred by tears, he gazed towards heaven. And his quivering arms were suddenly raised in a gesture of ardent entreaty. O God, since the science of man was so limited and vain, since that doctor had gone off happy to escape the embarrassment of his impotence, O God, why not a miracle which should proclaim the splendour of Thy Almighty Power! A miracle, a miracle! that was what the Cardinal asked from the depths of his believing soul, with the insistence, the imperious entreaty of a Prince of the Earth, who deemed that he had rendered considerable services to Heaven by dedicating his whole life to the Church. And he asked for that miracle in order that his race might be perpetuated, in order that its last male scion might not thus miserably perish, but be able to marry that fondly loved cousin, who now stood there all woe and tears. A miracle, a miracle for the sake of those two dear children! A miracle which would endow the family with fresh life: a miracle which would eternise the glorious name of Boccanera by enabling an innumerable posterity of valiant ones and faithful ones to spring from that young couple!

When the Cardinal returned to the centre of the room he seemed transfigured. Faith had dried his eyes, his soul had become strong and submissive, exempt from all human weakness. He had placed himself in the hands of God, and had resolved that he himself would administer extreme unction to Dario. With a gesture he summoned Don Vigilio and led him into the little room which served as a chapel, and the key of which he always carried. A cupboard had been contrived behind the altar of painted wood, and the Cardinal went to it to take both stole and surplice. The coffer containing the Holy Oils was likewise there, a very ancient silver coffer bearing the Boccanera arms. And on Don Vigilio following the Cardinal back into the bed-room they in turn pronounced the Latin words:

"Pax huic domui."

"Et omnibus habitantibus in ea."*

* "Peace unto this house and unto all who dwell in it."—Trans.

Death was coming so fast and threatening, that all the usual preparations were perforce dispensed with. Neither the two lighted tapers, nor the little table covered with white cloth had been provided. And, in the same way, Don Vigilio the assistant, having failed to bring the Holy Water basin and sprinkler, the Cardinal, as officiating priest, could merely make the gesture of blessing the room and the dying man, whilst pronouncing the words of the ritual: "Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor; lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor."*

* "Sprinkle me, Lord, with hyssop, and purify me; wash me, and
make me whiter than snow."—Trans.

Benedetta on seeing the Cardinal appear carrying the Holy Oils, had with a long quiver fallen on her knees at the foot of the bed, whilst, somewhat farther away, Pierre and Victorine likewise knelt, overcome by the dolorous grandeur of the scene. And the dilated eyes of the Contessina, whose face was pale as snow, never quitted her Dario, whom she no longer recognised, so earthy was his face, its skin tanned and wrinkled like that of an old man. And it was not for their marriage which he so much desired that their uncle, the all-powerful Prince of the Church, was bringing the Sacrament, but for the supreme rupture, the end of all pride, Death which finishes off the haughtiest races, and sweeps them away, even as the wind sweeps the dust of the roads.

It was needful that there should be no delay, so the Cardinal promptly repeated the Credo in an undertone, "Credo in unum Deum—"

"Amen," responded Don Vigilio, who, after the prayers of the ritual, stammered the Litanies in order that Heaven might take pity on the wretched man who was about to appear before God, if God by a prodigy did not spare him.

Then, without taking time to wash his fingers, the Cardinal opened the case containing the Holy Oils, and limiting himself to one anointment, as is permissible in pressing cases, he deposited a single drop of the oil on Dario's parched mouth which was already withered by death. And in doing so he repeated the words of the formula, his heart all aglow with faith as he asked that the divine mercy might efface each and every sin that the young man had committed by either of his five senses, those five portals by which everlasting temptation assails the soul. And the Cardinal's fervour was also instinct with the hope that if God had smitten the poor sufferer for his offences, perhaps He would make His indulgence entire and even restore him to life as soon as He should have forgiven his sins. Life, O Lord, life in order that the ancient line of the Boccaneras might yet multiply and continue to serve Thee in battle and at the altar until the end of time!

For a moment the Cardinal remained with quivering hands, gazing at the mute face, the closed eyes of the dying man, and waiting for the miracle. But no sign appeared, not the faintest glimmer brightened that haggard countenance, nor did a sigh of relief come from the withered lips as Don Vigilio wiped them with a little cotton wool. And the last prayer was said, and whilst the frightful silence fell once more the Cardinal, followed by his assistant, returned to the chapel. There they both knelt, the Cardinal plunging into ardent prayer upon the bare tiles. With his eyes raised to the brass crucifix upon the altar he saw nothing, heard nothing, but gave himself wholly to his entreaties, supplicating God to take him in place of his nephew, if a sacrifice were necessary, and yet clinging to the hope that so long as Dario retained a breath of life and he himself thus remained on his knees addressing the Deity, he might succeed in pacifying the wrath of Heaven. He was both so humble and so great. Would not accord surely be established between God and a Boccanera? The old palace might have fallen to the ground, he himself would not even have felt the toppling of its beams.

In the bed-room, however, nothing had yet stirred beneath the weight of tragic majesty which the ceremony had left there. It was only now that Dario raised his eyelids, and when on looking at his hands he saw them so aged and wasted the depths of his eyes kindled with an expression of immense regretfulness that life should be departing. Doubtless it was at this moment of lucidity amidst the kind of intoxication with which the poison overwhelmed him, that he for the first time realised his perilous condition. Ah! to die, amidst such pain, such physical degradation, what a revolting horror for that frivolous and egotistical man, that lover of beauty, joy, and light, who knew not how to suffer! In him ferocious fate chastised racial degeneracy with too heavy a hand. He became horrified with himself, seized with childish despair and terror, which lent him strength enough to sit up and gaze wildly about the room, in order to see if every one had not abandoned him. And when his eyes lighted on Benedetta still kneeling at the foot of the bed, a supreme impulse carried him towards her, he stretched forth both arms as passionately as his strength allowed and stammered her name: "O Benedetta, Benedetta!"

She, motionless in the stupor of her anxiety, had not taken her eyes from his face. The horrible disorder which was carrying off her lover, seemed also to possess and annihilate her more and more, even as he himself grew weaker and weaker. Her features were assuming an immaterial whiteness; and through the void of her clear eyeballs one began to espy her soul. However, when she perceived him thus resuscitating and calling her with arms outstretched, she in her turn arose and standing beside the bed made answer: "I am coming, my Dario, here I am."

And then Pierre and Victorine, still on their knees, beheld a sublime deed of such extraordinary grandeur that they remained rooted to the floor, spell-bound as in the presence of some supra-terrestrial spectacle in which human beings may not intervene. Benedetta herself spoke and acted like one freed from all social and conventional ties, already beyond life, only seeing and addressing beings and things from a great distance, from the depths of the unknown in which she was about to disappear.

"Ah! my Dario, so an attempt has been made to part us! It was in order that I might never belong to you—that we might never be happy, that your death was resolved upon, and it was known that with your life my own must cease! And it is that man who is killing you! Yes, he is your murderer, even if the actual blow has been dealt by another. He is the first cause—he who stole me from you when I was about to become yours, he who ravaged our lives, and who breathed around us the hateful poison which is killing us. Ah! how I hate him, how I hate him; how I should like to crush him with my hate before I die with you!"

She did not raise her voice, but spoke those terrible words in a deep murmur, simply and passionately. Prada was not even named, and she scarcely turned towards Pierre—who knelt, paralysed, behind her—to add with a commanding air: "You will see his father, I charge you to tell him that I cursed his son! That kind-hearted hero loved me well—I love him even now, and the words you will carry to him from me will rend his heart. But I desire that he should know—he must know, for the sake of truth and justice."

Distracted by terror, sobbing amidst a last convulsion, Dario again stretched forth his arms, feeling that she was no longer looking at him, that her clear eyes were no longer fixed upon his own: "Benedetta, Benedetta!"

"I am coming, I am coming, my Dario—I am here!" she responded, drawing yet nearer to the bedside and almost touching him. "Ah!" she went on, "that vow which I made to the Madonna to belong to none, not even you, until God should allow it by the blessing of one of his priests! Ah! I set a noble, a divine pride in remaining immaculate for him who should be the one master of my soul and body. And that chastity which I was so proud of, I defended it against the other as one defends oneself against a wolf, and I defended it against you with tears for fear of sacrilege. And if you only knew what terrible struggles I was forced to wage with myself, for I loved you and longed to be yours, like a woman who accepts the whole of love, the love that makes wife and mother! Ah! my vow to the Madonna—with what difficulty did I keep it when the old blood of our race arose in me like a tempest; and now what a disaster!" She drew yet nearer, and her low voice became more ardent: "You remember that evening when you came back with a knife-thrust in your shoulder. I thought you dead, and cried aloud with rage at the idea of losing you like that. I insulted the Madonna and regretted that I had not damned myself with you that we might die together, so tightly clasped that we must needs be buried together also. And to think that such a terrible warning was of no avail! I was blind and foolish; and now you are again stricken, again being taken from my love. Ah! my wretched pride, my idiotic dream!"

That which now rang out in her stifled voice was the anger of the practical woman that she had ever been, all superstition notwithstanding. Could the Madonna, who was so maternal, desire the woe of lovers? No, assuredly not. Nor did the angels make the mere absence of a priest a cause for weeping over the transports of true and mutual love. Was not such love holy in itself, and did not the angels rather smile upon it and burst into gladsome song! And ah! how one cheated oneself by not loving to heart's content under the sun, when the blood of life coursed through one's veins!

"Benedetta! Benedetta!" repeated the dying man, full of child-like terror at thus going off all alone into the depths of the black and everlasting night.

"Here I am, my Dario, I am coming!"

Then, as she fancied that the servant, albeit motionless, had stirred, as if to rise and interfere, she added: "Leave me, leave me, Victorine, nothing in the world can henceforth prevent it. A moment ago, when I was on my knees, something roused me and urged me on. I know whither I am going. And besides, did I not swear on the night of the knife thrust? Did I not promise to belong to him alone, even in the earth if it were necessary? I must embrace him, and he will carry me away! We shall be dead, and we shall be wedded in spite of all, and for ever and for ever!"

She stepped back to the dying man, and touched him: "Here I am, my Dario, here I am!"

Then came the apogee. Amidst growing exaltation, buoyed up by a blaze of love, careless of glances, candid like a lily, she divested herself of her garments and stood forth so white, that neither marble statue, nor dove, nor snow itself was ever whiter. "Here I am, my Dario, here I am!"

Recoiling almost to the ground as at sight of an apparition, the glorious flash of a holy vision, Pierre and Victorine gazed at her with dazzled eyes. The servant had not stirred to prevent this extraordinary action, seized as she was with that shrinking reverential terror which comes upon one in presence of the wild, mad deeds of faith and passion. And the priest, whose limbs were paralysed, felt that something so sublime was passing that he could only quiver in distraction. And no thought of impurity came to him on beholding that lily, snowy whiteness. All candour and all nobility as she was, that virgin shocked him no more than some sculptured masterpiece of genius.

"Here I am, my Dario, here I am."

She had lain herself down beside the spouse whom she had chosen, she had clasped the dying man whose arms only had enough strength left to fold themselves around her. Death was stealing him from her, but she would go with him; and again she murmured: "My Dario, here I am."

And at that moment, against the wall at the head of the bed, Pierre perceived the escutcheon of the Boccaneras, embroidered in gold and coloured silks on a groundwork of violet velvet. There was the winged dragon belching flames, there was the fierce and glowing motto "Bocca nera, Alma rossa" (black mouth, red soul), the mouth darkened by a roar, the soul flaming like a brazier of faith and love. And behold! all that old race of passion and violence with its tragic legends had reappeared, its blood bubbling up afresh to urge that last and adorable daughter of the line to those terrifying and prodigious nuptials in death. And to Pierre that escutcheon recalled another memory, that of the portrait of Cassia Boccanera the amorosa and avengeress who had flung herself into the Tiber with her brother Ercole and the corpse of her lover Flavio. Was there not here even with Benedetta the same despairing clasp seeking to vanquish death, the same savagery in hurling oneself into the abyss with the corpse of the one's only love? Benedetta and Cassia were as sisters, Cassia, who lived anew in the old painting in the salon overhead, Benedetta who was here dying of her lover's death, as though she were but the other's spirit. Both had the same delicate childish features, the same mouth of passion, the same large dreamy eyes set in the same round, practical, and stubborn head.

"My Dario, here I am!"

For a second, which seemed an eternity, they clasped one another, she neither repelled nor terrified by the disorder which made him so unrecognisable, but displaying a delirious passion, a holy frenzy as if to pass beyond life, to penetrate with him into the black Unknown. And beneath the shock of the felicity at last offered to him he expired, with his arms yet convulsively wound around her as though indeed to carry her off. Then, whether from grief or from bliss amidst that embrace of death, there came such a rush of blood to her heart that the organ burst: she died on her lover's neck, both tightly and for ever clasped in one another's arms.

There was a faint sigh. Victorine understood and drew near, while Pierre, also erect, remained quivering with the tearful admiration of one who has beheld the sublime.

"Look, look!" whispered the servant, "she no longer moves, she no longer breathes. Ah! my poor child, my poor child, she is dead!"

Then the priest murmured: "Oh! God, how beautiful they are."

It was true, never had loftier and more resplendent beauty appeared on the faces of the dead. Dario's countenance, so lately aged and earthen, had assumed the pallor and nobility of marble, its features lengthened and simplified as by a transport of ineffable joy. Benedetta remained very grave, her lips curved by ardent determination, whilst her whole face was expressive of dolorous yet infinite beatitude in a setting of infinite whiteness. Their hair mingled, and their eyes, which had remained open, continued gazing as into one another's souls with eternal, caressing sweetness. They were for ever linked, soaring into immortality amidst the enchantment of their union, vanquishers of death, radiant with the rapturous beauty of love, the conqueror, the immortal.

But Victorine's sobs at last burst forth, mingled with such lamentations that great confusion followed. Pierre, now quite beside himself, in some measure failed to understand how it was that the room suddenly became invaded by terrified people. The Cardinal and Don Vigilio, however, must have hastened in from the chapel; and at the same moment, no doubt, Doctor Giordano must have returned with Donna Serafina, for both were now there, she stupefied by the blows which had thus fallen on the house in her absence, whilst he, the doctor, displayed the perturbation and astonishment which comes upon the oldest practitioners when facts seem to give the lie to their experience. However, he sought an explanation of Benedetta's death, and hesitatingly ascribed it to aneurism, or possibly embolism.

Thereupon Victorine, like a servant whose grief makes her the equal of her employers, boldly interrupted him: "Ah! Sir," said she, "they loved each other too fondly; did not that suffice for them to die together?"

Meantime Donna Serafina, after kissing the poor children on the brow, desired to close their eyes; but she could not succeed in doing so, for the lids lifted directly she removed her finger and once more the eyes began to smile at one another, to exchange in all fixity their loving and eternal glance. And then as she spoke of parting the bodies, Victorine again protested: "Oh! madame, oh! madame," she said, "you would have to break their arms. Cannot you see that their fingers are almost dug into one another's shoulders? No, they can never be parted!"

Thereupon Cardinal Boccanera intervened. God had not granted the miracle; and he, His minister, was livid, tearless, and full of icy despair. But he waved his arm with a sovereign gesture of absolution and sanctification, as if, Prince of the Church that he was, disposing of the will of Heaven, he consented that the lovers should appear in that embrace before the supreme tribunal. In presence of such wondrous love, indeed, profoundly stirred by the sufferings of their lives and the beauty of their death, he showed a broad and lofty contempt for mundane proprieties. "Leave them, leave me, my sister," said he, "do not disturb their slumber. Let their eyes remain open since they desire to gaze on one another till the end of time without ever wearying. And let them sleep in one another's arms since in their lives they did not sin, and only locked themselves in that embrace in order that they might be laid together in the ground."

And then, again becoming a Roman Prince whose proud blood was yet hot with old-time deeds of battle and passion, he added: "Two Boccaneras may well sleep like that; all Rome will admire them and weep for them. Leave them, leave them together, my sister. God knows them and awaits them!"

All knelt, and the Cardinal himself repeated the prayers for the dead. Night was coming, increasing gloom stole into the chamber, where two burning tapers soon shone out like stars.

And then, without knowing how, Pierre again found himself in the little deserted garden on the bank of the Tiber. Suffocating with fatigue and grief, he must have come thither for fresh air. Darkness shrouded the charming nook where the streamlet of water falling from the tragic mask into the ancient sarcophagus ever sang its shrill and flute-like song; and the laurel-bush which shaded it, and the bitter box-plants and the orange-trees skirting the paths now formed but vague masses under the blue-black sky. Ah! how gay and sweet had that melancholy garden been in the morning, and what a desolate echo it retained of Benedetta's winsome laughter, all that fine delight in coming happiness which now lay prone upstairs, steeped in the nothingness of things and beings! So dolorous was the pang which came to Pierre's heart that he burst into sobs, seated on the same broken column where she had sat, and encompassed by the same atmosphere that she had breathed, in which still lingered the perfume of her presence.

But all at once a distant clock struck six, and the young priest started on remembering that he was to be received by the Pope that very evening at nine. Yet three more hours! He had not thought of that interview during the terrifying catastrophe, and it seemed to him now as if months and months had gone by, as if the appointment were some very old one which a man is only able to keep after years of absence, when he has grown aged and had his heart and brain modified by innumerable experiences. However, he made an effort and rose to his feet. In three hours' time he would go to the Vatican and at last he would see the Pope.

PART V.

XIV.

THAT evening, when Pierre emerged from the Borgo in front of the Vatican, a sonorous stroke rang out from the clock amidst the deep silence of the dark and sleepy district. It was only half-past eight, and being in advance the young priest resolved to wait some twenty minutes in order to reach the doors of the papal apartments precisely at nine, the hour fixed for his audience.

This respite brought him some relief amidst the infinite emotion and grief which gripped his heart. That tragic afternoon which he had spent in the chamber of death, where Dario and Benedetta now slept the eternal sleep in one another's arms, had left him very weary. He was haunted by a wild, dolorous vision of the two lovers, and involuntary sighs came from his lips whilst tears continually moistened his eyes. He had been altogether unable to eat that evening. Ah! how he would have liked to hide himself and weep at his ease! His heart melted at each fresh thought. The pitiful death of the lovers intensified the grievous feeling with which his book was instinct, and impelled him to yet greater compassion, a perfect anguish of charity for all who suffered in the world. And he was so distracted by the thought of the many physical and moral sores of Paris and of Rome, where he had beheld so much unjust and abominable suffering, that at each step he took he feared lest he should burst into sobs with arms upstretched towards the blackness of heaven.

In the hope of somewhat calming himself he began to walk slowly across the Piazza of St. Peter's, now all darkness and solitude. On arriving he had fancied that he was losing himself in a murky sea, but by degrees his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness. The vast expanse was only lighted by the four candelabra at the corners of the obelisk and by infrequent lamps skirting the buildings which run on either hand towards the Basilica. Under the colonnade, too, other lamps threw yellow gleams across the forest of pillars, showing up their stone trunks in fantastic fashion; while on the piazza only the pale, ghostly obelisk was at all distinctly visible. Pierre could scarcely perceive the dim, silent facade of St. Peter's; whilst of the dome he merely divined a gigantic, bluey roundness faintly shadowed against the sky. In the obscurity he at first heard the plashing of the fountains without being at all able to see them, but on approaching he at last distinguished the slender phantoms of the ever rising jets which fell again in spray. And above the vast square stretched the vast and moonless sky of a deep velvety blue, where the stars were large and radiant like carbuncles; Charles's Wain, with golden wheels and golden shaft tilted back as it were, over the roof of the Vatican, and Orion, bedizened with the three bright stars of his belt, showing magnificently above Rome, in the direction of the Via Giulia.

At last Pierre raised his eyes to the Vatican, but facing the piazza there was here merely a confused jumble of walls, amidst which only two gleams of light appeared on the floor of the papal apartments. The Court of San Damaso was, however, lighted, for the conservatory-like glass-work of two of its sides sparkled as with the reflection of gas lamps which could not be seen. For a time there was not a sound or sign of movement, but at last two persons crossed the expanse of the piazza, and then came a third who in his turn disappeared, nothing remaining but a rhythmical far-away echo of steps. The spot was indeed a perfect desert, there were neither promenaders nor passers-by, nor was there even the shadow of a prowler in the pillared forest of the colonnade, which was as empty as the wild primeval forests of the world's infancy. And what a solemn desert it was, full of the silence of haughty desolation. Never had so vast and black a presentment of slumber, so instinct with the sovereign nobility of death, appeared to Pierre.

At ten minutes to nine he at last made up his mind and went towards the bronze portal. Only one of the folding doors was now open at the end of the right-hand porticus, where the increasing density of the gloom steeped everything in night. Pierre remembered the instructions which Monsignor Nani had given him; at each door that he reached he was to ask for Signor Squadra without adding a word, and thereupon each door would open and he would have nothing to do but to let himself be guided on. No one but the prelate now knew that he was there, since Benedetta, the only being to whom he had confided the secret, was dead. When he had crossed the threshold of the bronze doors and found himself in presence of the motionless, sleeping Swiss Guard, who was on duty there, he simply spoke the words agreed upon: "Signor Squadra." And as the Guard did not stir, did not seek to bar his way, he passed on, turning into the vestibule of the Scala Pia, the stone stairway which ascends to the Court of San Damaso. And not a soul was to be seen: there was but the faint sound of his own light footsteps and the sleepy glow of the gas jets whose light was softly whitened by globes of frosted glass. Up above, on reaching the courtyard he found it a solitude, whose slumber seemed sepulchral amidst the mournful gleams of the gas lamps which cast a pallid reflection on the lofty glass-work of the facades. And feeling somewhat nervous, affected by the quiver which pervaded all that void and silence, Pierre hastened on, turning to the right, towards the low flight of steps which leads to the staircase of the Pope's private apartments.

Here stood a superb gendarme in full uniform. "Signor Squadra," said Pierre, and without a word the gendarme pointed to the stairs.

The young man went up. It was a broad stairway, with low steps, balustrade of white marble, and walls covered with yellowish stucco. The gas, burning in globes of round glass, seemed to have been already turned down in a spirit of prudent economy. And in the glimmering light nothing could have been more mournfully solemn than that cold and pallid staircase. On each landing there was a Swiss Guard, halbard in hand, and in the heavy slumber spreading through the palace one only heard the regular monotonous footsteps of these men, ever marching up and down, in order no doubt that they might not succumb to the benumbing influence of their surroundings.

Amidst the invading dimness and the quivering silence the ascent of the stairs seemed interminable to Pierre, who by the time he reached the second-floor landing imagined that he had been climbing for ages. There, outside the glass door of the Sala Clementina, only the right-hand half of which was open, a last Swiss Guard stood watching.

"Signor Squadra," Pierre said again, and the Guard drew back to let him pass.

The Sala Clementina, spacious enough by daylight, seemed immense at that nocturnal hour, in the twilight glimmer of its lamps. All the opulent decorative-work, sculpture, painting, and gilding became blended, the walls assuming a tawny vagueness amidst which appeared bright patches like the sparkle of precious stones. There was not an article of furniture, nothing but the endless pavement stretching away into the semi-darkness. At last, however, near a door at the far end Pierre espied some men dozing on a bench. They were three Swiss Guards. "Signor Squadra," he said to them.

One of the Guards thereupon slowly rose and left the hall, and Pierre understood that he was to wait. He did not dare to move, disturbed as he was by the sound of his own footsteps on the paved floor, so he contented himself with gazing around and picturing the crowds which at times peopled that vast apartment, the first of the many papal ante-chambers. But before long the Guard returned, and behind him, on the threshold of the adjoining room, appeared a man of forty or thereabouts, who was clad in black from head to foot and suggested a cross between a butler and a beadle. He had a good-looking, clean-shaven face, with somewhat pronounced nose and large, clear, fixed eyes. "Signor Squadra," said Pierre for the last time.

The man bowed as if to say that he was Signor Squadra, and then, with a fresh reverence, he invited the priest to follow him. Thereupon at a leisurely step, one behind the other, they began to thread the interminable suite of waiting-rooms. Pierre, who was acquainted with the ceremonial, of which he had often spoken with Narcisse, recognised the different apartments as he passed through them, recalling their names and purpose, and peopling them in imagination with the various officials of the papal retinue who have the right to occupy them. These according to their rank cannot go beyond certain doors, so that the persons who are to have audience of the Pope are passed on from the servants to the Noble Guards, from the Noble Guards to the honorary Camerieri, and from the latter to the Camerieri segreti, until they at last reach the presence of the Holy Father. At eight o'clock, however, the ante-rooms empty and become both deserted and dim, only a few lamps being left alight upon the pier tables standing here and there against the walls.

And first Pierre came to the ante-room of the bussolanti, mere ushers clad in red velvet broidered with the papal arms, who conduct visitors to the door of the ante-room of honour. At that late hour only one of them was left there, seated on a bench in such a dark corner that his purple tunic looked quite black. Then the Hall of the Gendarmes was crossed, where according to the regulations the secretaries of cardinals and other high personages await their masters' return; and this was now completely empty, void both of the handsome blue uniforms with white shoulder belts and the cassocks of fine black cloth which mingled in it during the brilliant reception hours. Empty also was the following room, a smaller one reserved to the Palatine Guards, who are recruited among the Roman middle class and wear black tunics with gold epaulets and shakoes surmounted by red plumes. Then Pierre and his guide turned into another series of apartments, and again was the first one empty. This was the Hall of the Arras, a superb waiting-room with lofty painted ceiling and admirable Gobelins tapestry designed by Audran and representing the miracles of Jesus. And empty also was the ante-chamber of the Noble Guards which followed, with its wooden stools, its pier table on the right-hand surmounted by a large crucifix standing between two lamps, and its large door opening at the far end into another but smaller room, a sort of alcove indeed, where there is an altar at which the Holy Father says mass by himself whilst those privileged to be present remain kneeling on the marble slabs of the outer apartment which is resplendent with the dazzling uniforms of the Guards. And empty likewise was the ensuing ante-room of honour, otherwise the grand throne-room, where the Pope receives two or three hundred people at a time in public audience. The throne, an arm-chair of elaborate pattern, gilded, and upholstered with red velvet, stands under a velvet canopy of the same hue, in front of the windows. Beside it is the cushion on which the Pope rests his foot in order that it may be kissed. Then facing one another, right and left of the room, there are two pier tables, on one of which is a clock and on the other a crucifix between lofty candelabra with feet of gilded wood. The wall hangings, of red silk damask with a Louis XIV palm pattern, are topped by a pompous frieze, framing a ceiling decorated with allegorical figures and attributes, and it is only just in front of the throne that a Smyrna carpet covers the magnificent marble pavement. On the days of private audience, when the Pope remains in the little throne-room or at times in his bed-chamber, the grand throne-room becomes simply the ante-room of honour, where high dignitaries of the Church, ambassadors, and great civilian personages, wait their turns. Two Camerieri, one in violet coat, the other of the Cape and the Sword, here do duty, receiving from the bussolanti the persons who are to be honoured with audiences and conducting them to the door of the next room, the secret or private ante-chamber, where they hand them over to the Camerieri segreti.

Signor Squadra who, walking on with slow and silent steps, had not yet once turned round, paused for a moment on reaching the door of the anticamera segreta so as to give Pierre time to breathe and recover himself somewhat before crossing the threshold of the sanctuary. The Camerieri segreti alone had the right to occupy that last ante-chamber, and none but the cardinals might wait there till the Pope should condescend to receive them. And so when Signor Squadra made up his mind to admit Pierre, the latter could not restrain a slight nervous shiver as if he were passing into some redoubtable mysterious sphere beyond the limits of the lower world. In the daytime a Noble Guard stood on sentry duty before the door, but the latter was now free of access, and the room within proved as empty as all the others. It was rather narrow, almost like a passage, with two windows overlooking the new district of the castle fields and a third one facing the Piazza of St. Peter's. Near the last was a door conducting to the little throne-room, and between this door and the window stood a small table at which a secretary, now absent, usually sat. And here again, as in all the other rooms, one found a gilded pier table surmounted by a crucifix flanked by a pair of lamps. In a corner too there was a large clock, loudly ticking in its ebony case incrusted with brass-work. Still there was nothing to awaken curiosity under the panelled and gilded ceiling unless it were the wall-hangings of red damask, on which yellow scutcheons displaying the Keys and the Tiara alternated with armorial lions, each with a paw resting on a globe.

Signor Squadra, however, now noticed that Pierre still carried his hat in his hand, whereas according to etiquette he should have left it in the hall of the bussolanti, only cardinals being privileged to carry their hats with them into the Pope's presence. Accordingly he discreetly took the young priest's from him, and deposited it on the pier table to indicate that it must at least remain there. Then, without a word, by a simple bow he gave Pierre to understand that he was about to announce him to his Holiness, and that he must be good enough to wait for a few minutes in that room.

On being left to himself Pierre drew a long breath. He was stifling; his heart was beating as though it would burst. Nevertheless his mind remained clear, and in spite of the semi-obscurity he had been able to form some idea of the famous and magnificent apartments of the Pope, a suite of splendid salons with tapestried or silken walls, gilded or painted friezes, and frescoed ceilings. By way of furniture, however, there were only pier table, stools,* and thrones. And the lamps and the clocks, and the crucifixes, even the thrones, were all presents brought from the four quarters of the world in the great fervent days of jubilee. There was no sign of comfort, everything was pompous, stiff, cold, and inconvenient. All olden Italy was there, with its perpetual display and lack of intimate, cosy life. It had been necessary to lay a few carpets over the superb marble slabs which froze one's feet; and some caloriferes had even lately been installed, but it was not thought prudent to light them lest the variations of temperature should give the Pope a cold. However, that which more particularly struck Pierre now that he stood there waiting was the extraordinary silence which prevailed all around, silence so deep that it seemed as if all the dark quiescence of that huge, somniferous Vatican were concentrated in that one suite of lifeless, sumptuous rooms, which the motionless flamelets of the lamps as dimly illumined.

* M. Zola seems to have fallen into error here. Many of the seats,
which are of peculiar antique design, do, in the lower part,
resemble stools, but they have backs, whereas a stool proper has
none. Briefly, these seats, which are entirely of wood, are not
unlike certain old-fashioned hall chairs.—Trans.

All at once the ebony clock struck nine and the young man felt astonished. What! had only ten minutes elapsed since he had crossed the threshold of the bronze doors below? He felt as if he had been walking on for days and days. Then, desiring to overcome the nervous feeling which oppressed him—for he ever feared lest his enforced calmness should collapse amidst a flood of tears—he began to walk up and down, passing in front of the clock, glancing at the crucifix on the pier table, and the globe of the lamp on which had remained the mark of a servant's greasy fingers. And the light was so faint and yellow that he felt inclined to turn the lamp up, but did not dare. Then he found himself with his brow resting against one of the panes of the window facing the Piazza of St. Peter's, and for a moment he was thunderstruck, for between the imperfectly closed shutters he could see all Rome, as he had seen it one day from the loggie of Raffaelle, and as he had pictured Leo XIII contemplating it from the window of his bed-room. However, it was now Rome by night, Rome spreading out into the depths of the gloom, as limitless as the starry sky. And in that sea of black waves one could only with certainty identify the larger thoroughfares which the white brightness of electric lights turned, as it were, into Milky Ways. All the rest showed but a swarming of little yellow sparks, the crumbs, as it were, of a half-extinguished heaven swept down upon the earth. Occasional constellations of bright stars, tracing mysterious figures, vainly endeavoured to show forth distinctly, but they were submerged, blotted out by the general chaos which suggested the dust of some old planet that had crumbled there, losing its splendour and reduced to mere phosphorescent sand. And how immense was the blackness thus sprinkled with light, how huge the mass of obscurity and mystery into which the Eternal City with its seven and twenty centuries, its ruins, its monuments, its people, its history seemed to have been merged. You could no longer tell where it began or where it ended, whether it spread to the farthest recesses of the gloom, or whether it were so reduced that the sun on rising would illumine but a little pile of ashes.

However, in spite of all Pierre's efforts, his nervous anguish increased each moment, even in presence of that ocean of darkness which displayed such sovereign quiescence. He drew away from the window and quivered from head to foot on hearing a faint footfall and thinking it was that of Signor Squadra approaching to fetch him. The sound came from an adjacent apartment, the little throne-room, whose door, he now perceived, had remained ajar. And at last, as he heard nothing further, he yielded to his feverish impatience and peeped into this room which he found to be fairly spacious, again hung with red damask, and containing a gilded arm-chair, covered with red velvet under a canopy of the same material. And again there was the inevitable pier table, with a tall ivory crucifix, a clock, a pair of lamps, a pair of candelabra, a pair of large vases on pedestals, and two smaller ones of Sevres manufacture decorated with the Holy Father's portrait. At the same time, however, the room displayed rather more comfort, for a Smyrna carpet covered the whole of the marble floor, while a few arm-chairs stood against the walls, and an imitation chimney-piece, draped with damask, served as counterpart to the pier table. As a rule the Pope, whose bed-chamber communicated with this little throne-room, received in the latter such persons as he desired to honour. And Pierre's shiver became more pronounced at the idea that in all likelihood he would merely have the throne-room to cross and that Leo XIII was yonder behind its farther door. Why was he kept waiting, he wondered? He had been told of mysterious audiences granted at a similar hour to personages who had been received in similar silent fashion, great personages whose names were only mentioned in the lowest whispers. With regard to himself no doubt, it was because he was considered compromising that there was a desire to receive him in this manner unknown to the personages of the Court, and so as to speak with him at ease. Then, all at once, he understood the cause of the noise he had recently heard, for beside the lamp on the pier table of the little throne-room he saw a kind of butler's tray containing some soiled plates, knives, forks, and spoons, with a bottle and a glass, which had evidently just been removed from a supper table. And he realised that Signor Squadra, having seen these things in the Pope's room, had brought them there, and had then gone in again, perhaps to tidy up. He knew also of the Pope's frugality, how he took his meals all alone at a little round table, everything being brought to him in that tray, a plate of meat, a plate of vegetables, a little Bordeaux claret as prescribed by his doctor, and a large allowance of beef broth of which he was very fond. In the same way as others might offer a cup of tea, he was wont to offer cups of broth to the old cardinals his friends and favourites, quite an invigorating little treat which these old bachelors much enjoyed. And, O ye orgies of Alexander VI, ye banquets and galas of Julius II and Leo X, only eight lire a day—six shillings and fourpence—were allowed to defray the cost of Leo XIII's table! However, just as that recollection occurred to Pierre, he again heard a slight noise, this time in his Holiness's bed-chamber, and thereupon, terrified by his indiscretion, he hastened to withdraw from the entrance of the throne-room which, lifeless and quiescent though it was, seemed in his agitation to flare as with sudden fire.

Then, quivering too violently to be able to remain still, he began to walk up and down the ante-chamber. He remembered that Narcisse had spoken to him of that Signor Squadra, his Holiness's cherished valet, whose importance and influence were so great. He alone, on reception days, was able to prevail on the Pope to don a clean cassock if the one he was wearing happened to be soiled by snuff. And though his Holiness stubbornly shut himself up alone in his bed-room every night from a spirit of independence, which some called the anxiety of a miser determined to sleep alone with his treasure, Signor Squadra at all events occupied an adjoining chamber, and was ever on the watch, ready to respond to the faintest call. Again, it was he who respectfully intervened whenever his Holiness sat up too late or worked too long. But on this point it was difficult to induce the Pope to listen to reason. During his hours of insomnia he would often rise and send Squadra to fetch a secretary in order that he might detail some memoranda or sketch out an encyclical letter. When the drafting of one of the latter impassioned him he would have spent days and nights over it, just as formerly, when claiming proficiency in Latin verse, he had often let the dawn surprise him whilst he was polishing a line. But, indeed, he slept very little, his brain ever being at work, ever scheming out the realisation of some former ideas. His memory alone seemed to have slightly weakened during recent times.

Pierre, as he slowly paced to and fro, gradually became absorbed in his thoughts of that lofty and sovereign personality. From the petty details of the Pope's daily existence, he passed to his intellectual life, to the role which he was certainly bent on playing as a great pontiff. And Pierre asked himself which of his two hundred and fifty-seven predecessors, the long line of saints and criminals, men of mediocrity and men of genius, he most desired to resemble. Was it one of the first humble popes, those who followed on during the first three centuries, mere heads of burial guilds, fraternal pastors of the Christian community? Was it Pope Damasus, the first great builder, the man of letters who took delight in intellectual matters, the ardent believer who is said to have opened the Catacombs to the piety of the faithful? Was it Leo III, who by crowning Charlemagne boldly consummated the rupture with the schismatic East and conveyed the Empire to the West by the all-powerful will of God and His Church, which thenceforth disposed of the crowns of monarchs? Was it the terrible Gregory VII, the purifier of the temple, the sovereign of kings; was it Innocent III or Boniface VIII, those masters of souls, nations, and thrones, who, armed with the fierce weapon of excommunication, reigned with such despotism over the terrified middle ages that Catholicism was never nearer the attainment of its dream of universal dominion? Was it Urban II or Gregory IX or another of those popes in whom flared the red Crusading passion which urged the nations on to the conquest of the unknown and the divine? Was it Alexander III, who defended the Holy See against the Empire, and at last conquered and set his foot on the neck of Frederick Barbarossa? Was it, long after the sorrows of Avignon, Julius II, who wore the cuirass and once more strengthened the political power of the papacy? Was it Leo X, the pompous, glorious patron of the Renascence, of a whole great century of art, whose mind, however, was possessed of so little penetration and foresight that he looked on Luther as a mere rebellious monk? Was it Pius V, who personified dark and avenging reaction, the fire of the stakes that punished the heretic world? Was it some other of the popes who reigned after the Council of Trent with faith absolute, belief re-established in its full integrity, the Church saved by pride and the stubborn upholding of every dogma? Or was it a pope of the decline, such as Benedict XIV, the man of vast intelligence, the learned theologian who, as his hands were tied, and he could not dispose of the kingdoms of the world, spent a worthy life in regulating the affairs of heaven?

In this wise, in Pierre's mind there spread out the whole history of the popes, the most prodigious of all histories, showing fortune in every guise, the lowest, the most wretched, as well as the loftiest and most dazzling; whilst an obstinate determination to live enabled the papacy to survive everything—conflagrations, massacres, and the downfall of many nations, for always did it remain militant and erect in the persons of its popes, that most extraordinary of all lines of absolute, conquering, and domineering sovereigns, every one of them—even the puny and humble—masters of the world, every one of them glorious with the imperishable glory of heaven when they were thus evoked in that ancient Vatican, where their spirits assuredly awoke at night and prowled about the endless galleries and spreading halls in that tomb-like silence whose quiver came no doubt from the light touch of their gliding steps over the marble slabs.

However, Pierre was now thinking that he indeed knew which of the great popes Leo XIII most desired to resemble. It was first Gregory the Great, the conqueror and organiser of the early days of Catholic power. He had come of ancient Roman stock, and in his heart there was a little of the blood of the emperors. He administered Rome after it had been saved from the Goths, cultivated the ecclesiastical domains, and divided earthly wealth into thirds, one for the poor, one for the clergy, and one for the Church. Then too he was the first to establish the Propaganda, sending his priests forth to civilise and pacify the nations, and carrying his conquests so far as to win Great Britain over to the divine law of Christ. And the second pope whom Leo XIII took as model was one who had arisen after a long lapse of centuries, Sixtus V, the pope financier and politician, the vine-dresser's son, who, when he had donned the tiara, revealed one of the most extensive and supple minds of a period fertile in great diplomatists. He heaped up treasure and displayed stern avarice, in order that he might ever have in his coffers all the money needful for war or for peace. He spent years and years in negotiations with kings, never despairing of his own triumph; and never did he display open hostility for his times, but took them as they were and then sought to modify them in accordance with the interests of the Holy See, showing himself conciliatory in all things and with every one, already dreaming of an European balance of power which he hoped to control. And withal a very saintly pope, a fervent mystic, yet a pope of the most absolute and domineering mind blended with a politician ready for whatever courses might most conduce to the rule of God's Church on earth.

And, after all, Pierre amidst his rising enthusiasm, which despite his efforts at calmness was sweeping away all prudence and doubt, Pierre asked himself why he need question the past. Was not Leo XIII the pope whom he had depicted in his book, the great pontiff, who was desired and expected? No doubt the portrait which he had sketched was not accurate in every detail, but surely its main lines must be correct if mankind were to retain a hope of salvation. Whole pages of that book of his arose before him, and he again beheld the Leo XIII that he had portrayed, the wise and conciliatory politician, labouring for the unity of the Church and so anxious to make it strong and invincible against the day of the inevitable great struggle. He again beheld him freed from the cares of the temporal power, elevated, radiant with moral splendour, the only authority left erect above the nations; he beheld him realising what mortal danger would be incurred if the solution of the social question were left to the enemies of Christianity, and therefore resolving to intervene in contemporary quarrels for the defence of the poor and the lowly, even as Jesus had intervened once before. And he again beheld him putting himself on the side of the democracies, accepting the Republic in France, leaving the dethroned kings in exile, and verifying the prediction which promised the empire of the world to Rome once more when the papacy should have unified belief and have placed itself at the head of the people. The times indeed were near accomplishment, Caesar was struck down, the Pope alone remained, and would not the people, the great silent multitude, for whom the two powers had so long contended, give itself to its Father now that it knew him to be both just and charitable, with heart aglow and hand outstretched to welcome all the penniless toilers and beggars of the roads! Given the catastrophe which threatened our rotten modern societies, the frightful misery which ravaged every city, there was surely no other solution possible: Leo XIII, the predestined, necessary redeemer, the pastor sent to save the flock from coming disaster by re-establishing the true Christian community, the forgotten golden age of primitive Christianity. The reign of justice would at last begin, all men would be reconciled, there would be but one nation living in peace and obeying the equalising law of work, under the high patronage of the Pope, sole bond of charity and love on earth!

And at this thought Pierre was upbuoyed by fiery enthusiasm. At last he was about to see the Holy Father, empty his heart and open his soul to him! He had so long and so passionately looked for the advent of that moment! To secure it he had fought with all his courage through ever recurring obstacles, and the length and difficulty of the struggle and the success now at last achieved, increased his feverishness, his desire for final victory. Yes, yes, he would conquer, he would confound his enemies. As he had said to Monsignor Fornaro, could the Pope disavow him? Had he not expressed the Holy Father's secret ideas? Perhaps he might have done so somewhat prematurely, but was not that a fault to be forgiven? And then too, he remembered his declaration to Monsignor Nani, that he himself would never withdraw and suppress his book, for he neither regretted nor disowned anything that was in it. At this very moment he again questioned himself, and felt that all his valour and determination to defend his book, all his desire to work the triumph of his belief, remained intact. Yet his mental perturbation was becoming great, he had to seek for ideas, wondering how he should enter the Pope's presence, what he should say, what precise terms he should employ. Something heavy and mysterious which he could hardly account for seemed to weigh him down. At bottom he was weary, already exhausted, only held up by his dream, his compassion for human misery. However, he would enter in all haste, he would fall upon his knees and speak as he best could, letting his heart flow forth. And assuredly the Holy Father would smile on him, and dismiss him with a promise that he would not sign the condemnation of a work in which he had found the expression of his own most cherished thoughts.

Then, again, such an acute sensation as of fainting came over Pierre that he went up to the window to press his burning brow against the cold glass. His ears were buzzing, his legs staggering, whilst his brain throbbed violently. And he was striving to forget his thoughts by gazing upon the black immensity of Rome, longing to be steeped in night himself, total, healing night, the night in which one sleeps on for ever, knowing neither pain nor wretchedness, when all at once he became conscious that somebody was standing behind him; and thereupon, with a start, he turned round.

And there, indeed, stood Signor Squadra in his black livery. Again he made one of his customary bows to invite the visitor to follow him, and again he walked on in front, crossing the little throne-room, and slowly opening the farther door. Then he drew aside, allowed Pierre to enter, and noiselessly closed the door behind him.

Pierre was in his Holiness's bed-room. He had feared one of those overwhelming attacks of emotion which madden or paralyse one. He had been told of women reaching the Pope's presence in a fainting condition, staggering as if intoxicated, while others came with a rush, as though upheld and borne along by invisible pinions. And suddenly the anguish of his own spell of waiting, his intense feverishness, ceased in a sort of astonishment, a reaction which rendered him very calm and so restored his clearness of vision, that he could see everything. As he entered he distinctly realised the decisive importance of such an audience, he, a mere petty priest in presence of the Supreme Pontiff, the Head of the Church. All his religious and moral life would depend on it; and possibly it was this sudden thought that thus chilled him on the threshold of the redoubtable sanctuary, which he had approached with such quivering steps, and which he would not have thought to enter otherwise than with distracted heart and loss of senses, unable to do more than stammer the simple prayers of childhood.

Later on, when he sought to classify his recollections he remembered that his eyes had first lighted on Leo XIII, not, however, to the exclusion of his surroundings, but in conjunction with them, that spacious room hung with yellow damask whose alcove, adorned with fluted marble columns, was so deep that the bed was quite hidden away in it, as well as other articles of furniture, a couch, a wardrobe, and some trunks, those famous trunks in which the treasure of the Peter's Pence was said to be securely locked. A sort of Louis XIV writing-desk with ornaments of engraved brass stood face to face with a large gilded and painted Louis XV pier table on which a lamp was burning beside a lofty crucifix. The room was virtually bare, only three arm-chairs and four or five other chairs, upholstered in light silk, being disposed here and there over the well-worn carpet. And on one of the arm-chairs sat Leo XIII, near a small table on which another lamp with a shade had been placed. Three newspapers, moreover, lay there, two of them French and one Italian, and the last was half unfolded as if the Pope had momentarily turned from it to stir a glass of syrup, standing beside him, with a long silver-gilt spoon.

In the same way as Pierre saw the Pope's room, he saw his costume, his cassock of white cloth with white buttons, his white skull-cap, his white cape and his white sash fringed with gold and broidered at either end with golden keys. His stockings were white, his slippers were of red velvet, and these again were broidered with golden keys. What surprised the young priest, however, was his Holiness's face and figure, which now seemed so shrunken that he scarcely recognised them. This was his fourth meeting with the Pope. He had seen him walking in the Vatican gardens, enthroned in the Hall of Beatifications, and pontifying at St. Peter's, and now he beheld him on that arm-chair, in privacy, and looking so slight and fragile that he could not restrain a feeling of affectionate anxiety. Leo's neck was particularly remarkable, slender beyond belief, suggesting the neck of some little, aged, white bird. And his face, of the pallor of alabaster, was characteristically transparent, to such a degree, indeed, that one could see the lamplight through his large commanding nose, as if the blood had entirely withdrawn from that organ. A mouth of great length, with white bloodless lips, streaked the lower part of the papal countenance, and the eyes alone had remained young and handsome. Superb eyes they were, brilliant like black diamonds, endowed with sufficient penetration and strength to lay souls open and force them to confess the truth aloud. Some scanty white curls emerged from under the white skull-cap, thus whitely crowning the thin white face, whose ugliness was softened by all this whiteness, this spiritual whiteness in which Leo XIII's flesh seemed as it were but pure lily-white florescence.

At the first glance, however, Pierre noticed that if Signor Squadra had kept him waiting, it had not been in order to compel the Holy Father to don a clean cassock, for the one he was wearing was badly soiled by snuff. A number of brown stains had trickled down the front of the garment beside the buttons, and just like any good bourgeois, his Holiness had a handkerchief on his knees to wipe himself. Apart from all this he seemed in good health, having recovered from his recent indisposition as easily as he usually recovered from such passing illnesses, sober, prudent old man that he was, quite free from organic disease, and simply declining by reason of progressive natural exhaustion.

Immediately on entering Pierre had felt that the Pope's sparkling eyes, those two black diamonds, were fixed upon him. The silence was profound, and the lamps burned with motionless, pallid flames. He had to approach, and after making the three genuflections prescribed by etiquette, he stooped over one of the Pope's feet resting on a cushion in order to kiss the red velvet slipper. And on the Pope's side there was not a word, not a gesture, not a movement. When the young man drew himself up again he found the two black diamonds, those two eyes which were all brightness and intelligence, still riveted on him.

But at last Leo XIII, who had been unwilling to spare the young priest the humble duty of kissing his foot and who now left him standing, began to speak, whilst still examining him, probing, as it were, his very soul. "My son," he said, "you greatly desired to see me, and I consented to afford you that satisfaction."

He spoke in French, somewhat uncertain French, pronounced after the Italian fashion, and so slowly did he articulate each sentence that one could have written it down like so much dictation. And his voice, as Pierre had previously noticed, was strong and nasal, one of those full voices which people are surprised to hear coming from debile and apparently bloodless and breathless frames.

In response to the Holy Father's remark Pierre contented himself with bowing, knowing that respect required him to wait for a direct answer before speaking. However, this question promptly came. "You live in Paris?" asked Leo XIII.

"Yes, Holy Father."

"Are you attached to one of the great parishes of the city?"

"No, Holy Father. I simply officiate at the little church of Neuilly."

"Ah, yes, Neuilly, that is in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne, is it not? And how old are you, my son?"

"Thirty-four, Holy Father."

A short interval followed. Leo XIII had at last lowered his eyes. With frail, ivory hand he took up the glass beside him, again stirred the syrup with the long spoon, and then drank a little of it. And all this he did gently and slowly, with a prudent, judicious air, as was his wont no doubt in everything. "I have read your book, my son," he resumed. "Yes, the greater part of it. As a rule only fragments are submitted to me. But a person who is interested in you handed me the volume, begging me to glance through it. And that is how I was able to look into it."

As he spoke he made a slight gesture in which Pierre fancied he could detect a protest against the isolation in which he was kept by those surrounding him, who, as Monsignor Nani had said, maintained a strict watch in order that nothing they objected to might reach him. And thereupon the young priest ventured to say: "I thank your Holiness for having done me so much honour. No greater or more desired happiness could have befallen me." He was indeed so happy! On seeing the Pope so calm, so free from all signs of anger, and on hearing him speak in that way of his book, like one well acquainted with it, he imagined that his cause was won.

"You are in relations with Monsieur le Vicomte Philibert de la Choue, are you not, my son?" continued Leo XIII. "I was struck by the resemblance between some of your ideas and those of that devoted servant of the Church, who has in other ways given us previous testimony of his good feelings."

"Yes, indeed, Holy Father, Monsieur de la Choue is kind enough to show me some affection. We have often talked together, so it is not surprising that I should have given expression to some of his most cherished ideas."

"No doubt, no doubt. For instance, there is that question of the working-class guilds with which he largely occupies himself—with which, in fact, he occupies himself rather too much. At the time of his last journey to Rome he spoke to me of it in the most pressing manner. And in the same way, quite recently, another of your compatriots, one of the best and worthiest of men, Monsieur le Baron de Fouras, who brought us that superb pilgrimage of the St. Peter's Pence Fund, never ceased his efforts until I consented to receive him, when he spoke to me on the same subject during nearly an hour. Only it must be said that they do not agree in the matter, for one begs me to do things which the other will not have me do on any account."

Pierre realised that the conversation was straying away from his book, but he remembered having promised the Viscount that if he should see the Pope he would make an attempt to obtain from him a decisive expression of opinion on the famous question as to whether the working-class guilds or corporations should be free or obligatory, open or closed. And the unhappy Viscount, kept in Paris by the gout, had written the young priest letter after letter on the subject, whilst his rival the Baron, availing himself of the opportunity offered by the international pilgrimage, endeavoured to wring from the Pope an approval of his own views, with which he would have returned in triumph to France. Pierre conscientiously desired to keep his promise, and so he answered: "Your Holiness knows better than any of us in which direction true wisdom lies. Monsieur de Fouras is of opinion that salvation, the solution of the labour question, lies simply in the re-establishment of the old free corporations, whilst Monsieur de la Choue desires the corporations to be obligatory, protected by the state and governed by new regulations. This last conception is certainly more in agreement with the social ideas now prevalent in France. Should your Holiness condescend to express a favourable opinion in that sense, the young French Catholic party would certainly know how to turn it to good result, by producing quite a movement of the working classes in favour of the Church."

In his quiet way Leo XIII responded: "But I cannot. Frenchmen always ask things of me which I cannot, will not do. What I will allow you to say on my behalf to Monsieur de la Choue is, that though I cannot content him I have not contented Monsieur de Fouras. He obtained from me nothing beyond the expression of my sincere good-will for the French working classes, who are so dear to me and who can do so much for the restoration of the faith. You must surely understand, however, that among you Frenchmen there are questions of detail, of mere organisation, so to say, into which I cannot possibly enter without imparting to them an importance which they do not have, and at the same time greatly discontenting some people should I please others."

As the Pope pronounced these last words he smiled a pale smile, in which the shrewd, conciliatory politician, who was determined not to allow his infallibility to be compromised in useless and risky ventures, was fully revealed. And then he drank a little more syrup and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, like a sovereign whose Court day is over and who takes his ease, having chosen this hour of solitude and silence to chat as long as he may be so inclined.

Pierre, however, sought to bring him back to the subject of his book. "Monsieur de la Choue," said he, "has shown me so much kindness and is so anxious to know the fate reserved to my book—as if, indeed, it were his own—that I should have been very happy to convey to him an expression of your Holiness's approval."

However, the Pope continued wiping his mouth and did not reply.

"I became acquainted with the Viscount," continued Pierre, "at the residence of his Eminence Cardinal Bergerot, another great heart whose ardent charity ought to suffice to restore the faith in France."

This time the effect was immediate. "Ah! yes, Monsieur le Cardinal Bergerot!" said Leo XIII. "I read that letter of his which is printed at the beginning of your book. He was very badly inspired in writing it to you; and you, my son, acted very culpably on the day you published it. I cannot yet believe that Monsieur le Cardinal Bergerot had read some of your pages when he sent you an expression of his complete and full approval. I prefer to charge him with ignorance and thoughtlessness. How could he approve of your attacks on dogma, your revolutionary theories which tend to the complete destruction of our holy religion? If it be a fact that he had read your book, the only excuse he can invoke is sudden and inexplicable aberration. It is true that a very bad spirit prevails among a small portion of the French clergy. What are called Gallican ideas are ever sprouting up like noxious weeds; there is a malcontent Liberalism rebellious to our authority which continually hungers for free examination and sentimental adventures."

The Pope grew animated as he spoke. Italian words mingled with his hesitating French, and every now and again his full nasal voice resounded with the sonority of a brass instrument. "Monsieur le Cardinal Bergerot," he continued, "must be given to understand that we shall crush him on the day when we see in him nothing but a rebellious son. He owes the example of obedience; we shall acquaint him with our displeasure, and we hope that he will submit. Humility and charity are great virtues doubtless, and we have always taken pleasure in recognising them in him. But they must not be the refuge of a rebellious heart, for they are as nothing unless accompanied by obedience—obedience, obedience, the finest adornment of the great saints!"

Pierre listened thunderstruck, overcome. He forgot himself to think of the apostle of kindliness and tolerance upon whose head he had drawn this all-powerful anger. So Don Vigilio had spoken the truth: over and above his—Pierre's—head the denunciations of the Bishops of Evreux and Poitiers were about to fall on the man who opposed their Ultramontane policy, that worthy and gentle Cardinal Bergerot, whose heart was open to all the woes of the lowly and the poor. This filled the young priest with despair; he could accept the denunciation of the Bishop of Tarbes acting on behalf of the Fathers of the Grotto, for that only fell on himself, as a reprisal for what he had written about Lourdes; but the underhand warfare of the others exasperated him, filled him with dolorous indignation. And from that puny old man before him with the slender, scraggy neck of an aged bird, he had suddenly seen such a wrathful, formidable Master arise that he trembled. How could he have allowed himself to be deceived by appearances on entering? How could he have imagined that he was simply in presence of a poor old man, worn out by age, desirous of peace, and ready for every concession? A blast had swept through that sleepy chamber, and all his doubts and his anguish awoke once more. Ah! that Pope, how thoroughly he answered to all the accounts that he, Pierre, had heard but had refused to believe; so many people had told him in Rome that he would find Leo XIII a man of intellect rather than of sentiment, a man of the most unbounded pride, who from his very youth had nourished the supreme ambition, to such a point indeed that he had promised eventual triumph to his relatives in order that they might make the necessary sacrifices for him, while since he had occupied the pontifical throne his one will and determination had been to reign, to reign in spite of all, to be the sole absolute and omnipotent master of the world! And now here was reality arising with irresistible force and confirming everything. And yet Pierre struggled, stubbornly clutching at his dream once more.

"Oh! Holy Father," said he, "I should be grieved indeed if his Eminence should have a moment's worry on account of my unfortunate book. If I be guilty I can answer for my error, but his Eminence only obeyed the dictates of his heart and can only have transgressed by excess of love for the disinherited of the world!"

Leo XIII made no reply. He had again raised his superb eyes, those eyes of ardent life, set, as it were, in the motionless countenance of an alabaster idol; and once more he was fixedly gazing at the young priest.

And Pierre, amidst his returning feverishness, seemed to behold him growing in power and splendour, whilst behind him arose a vision of the ages, a vision of that long line of popes whom the young priest had previously evoked, the saintly and the proud ones, the warriors and the ascetics, the theologians and the diplomatists, those who had worn armour, those who had conquered by the Cross, those who had disposed of empires as of mere provinces which God had committed to their charge. And in particular Pierre beheld the great Gregory, the conqueror and founder, and Sixtus V, the negotiator and politician, who had first foreseen the eventual victory of the papacy over all the vanquished monarchies. Ah! what a throng of magnificent princes, of sovereign masters with powerful brains and arms, there was behind that pale, motionless, old man! What an accumulation of inexhaustible determination, stubborn genius, and boundless domination! The whole history of human ambition, the whole effort of the ages to subject the nations to the pride of one man, the greatest force that has ever conquered, exploited, and fashioned mankind in the name of its happiness! And even now, when territorial sovereignty had come to an end, how great was the spiritual sovereignty of that pale and slender old man, in whose presence women fainted, as if overcome by the divine splendour radiating from his person. Not only did all the resounding glories, the masterful triumphs of history spread out behind him, but heaven opened, the very spheres beyond life shone out in their dazzling mystery. He—the Pope—stood at the portals of heaven, holding the keys and opening those portals to human souls; all the ancient symbolism was revived, freed at last from the stains of royalty here below.

"Oh! I beg you, Holy Father," resumed Pierre, "if an example be needed strike none other than myself. I have come, and am here; decide my fate, but do not aggravate my punishment by filling me with remorse at having brought condemnation on the innocent."

Leo XIII still refrained from replying, though he continued to look at the young priest with burning eyes. And he, Pierre, no longer beheld Leo XIII, the last of a long line of popes, the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the East, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Temporal Domains of the Holy Church; he saw the Leo XIII that he had dreamt of, the awaited saviour who would dispel the frightful cataclysm in which rotten society was sinking. He beheld him with his supple, lofty intelligence and fraternal, conciliatory tactics, avoiding friction and labouring to bring about unity whilst with his heart overflowing with love he went straight to the hearts of the multitude, again giving the best of his blood in sign of the new alliance. He raised him aloft as the sole remaining moral authority, the sole possible bond of charity and peace—as the Father, in fact, who alone could stamp out injustice among his children, destroy misery, and re-establish the liberating Law of Work by bringing the nations back to the faith of the primitive Church, the gentleness and the wisdom of the true Christian community. And in the deep silence of that room the great figure which he thus set up assumed invincible all-powerfulness, extraordinary majesty.

"Oh, I beseech you, Holy Father, listen to me," he said. "Do not even strike me, strike no one, neither a being nor a thing, anything that can suffer under the sun. Show kindness and indulgence to all, show all the kindness and indulgence which the sight of the world's sufferings must have set in you!"

And then, seeing that Leo XIII still remained silent and still left him standing there, he sank down upon his knees, as if felled by the growing emotion which rendered his heart so heavy. And within him there was a sort of debacle; all his doubts, all his anguish and sadness burst forth in an irresistible stream. There was the memory of the frightful day that he had just spent, the tragic death of Dario and Benedetta, which weighed on him like lead; there were all the sufferings that he had experienced since his arrival in Rome, the destruction of his illusions, the wounds dealt to his delicacy, the buffets with which men and things had responded to his young enthusiasm; and, lying yet more deeply within his heart, there was the sum total of human wretchedness, the thought of famished ones howling for food, of mothers whose breasts were drained and who sobbed whilst kissing their hungry babes, of fathers without work, who clenched their fists and revolted—indeed, the whole of that hateful misery which is as old as mankind itself, which has preyed upon mankind since its earliest hour, and which he now had everywhere found increasing in horror and havoc, without a gleam of hope that it would ever be healed. And withal, yet more immense and more incurable, he felt within him a nameless sorrow to which he could assign no precise cause or name—an universal, an illimitable sorrow with which he melted despairingly, and which was perhaps the very sorrow of life.

"O Holy Father!" he exclaimed, "I myself have no existence and my book has no existence. I desired, passionately desired to see your Holiness that I might explain and defend myself. But I no longer know, I can no longer recall a single one of the things that I wished to say, I can only weep, weep the tears which are stifling me. Yes, I am but a poor man, and the only need I feel is to speak to you of the poor. Oh! the poor ones, oh! the lowly ones, whom for two years past I have seen in our faubourgs of Paris, so wretched and so full of pain; the poor little children that I have picked out of the snow, the poor little angels who had eaten nothing for two days; the women too, consumed by consumption, without bread or fire, shivering in filthy hovels; and the men thrown on the street by slackness of trade, weary of begging for work as one begs for alms, sinking back into night, drunken with rage and harbouring the sole avenging thought of setting the whole city afire! And that night too, that terrible night, when in a room of horror I beheld a mother who had just killed herself with her five little ones, she lying on a palliasse suckling her last-born, and two little girls, two pretty little blondes, sleeping the last sleep beside her, while the two boys had succumbed farther away, one of them crouching against a wall, and the other lying upon the floor, distorted as though by a last effort to avoid death!... O Holy Father! I am but an ambassador, the messenger of those who suffer and who sob, the humble delegate of the humble ones who die of want beneath the hateful harshness, the frightful injustice of our present-day social system! And I bring your Holiness their tears, and I lay their tortures at your Holiness's feet, I raise their cry of woe, like a cry from the abyss, that cry which demands justice unless indeed the very heavens are to fall! Oh! show your loving kindness, Holy Father, show compassion!"

The young man had stretched out his arms and implored Leo XIII with a gesture as of supreme appeal to the divine compassion. Then he continued: "And here, Holy Father, in this splendid and eternal Rome, is not the want and misery as frightful! During the weeks that I have roamed hither and thither among the dust of famous ruins, I have never ceased to come in contact with evils which demand cure. Ah! to think of all that is crumbling, all that is expiring, the agony of so much glory, the fearful sadness of a world which is dying of exhaustion and hunger! Yonder, under your Holiness's windows, have I not seen a district of horrors, a district of unfinished palaces stricken like rickety children who cannot attain to full growth, palaces which are already in ruins and have become places of refuge for all the woeful misery of Rome? And here, as in Paris, what a suffering multitude, what a shameless exhibition too of the social sore, the devouring cancer openly tolerated and displayed in utter heedlessness! There are whole families leading idle and hungry lives in the splendid sunlight; fathers waiting for work to fall to them from heaven; sons listlessly spending their days asleep on the dry grass; mothers and daughters, withered before their time, shuffling about in loquacious idleness. O Holy Father, already to-morrow at dawn may your Holiness open that window yonder and with your benediction awaken that great childish people, which still slumbers in ignorance and poverty! May your Holiness give it the soul it lacks, a soul with the consciousness of human dignity, of the necessary law of work, of free and fraternal life regulated by justice only! Yes, may your Holiness make a people out of that heap of wretches, whose excuse lies in all their bodily suffering and mental night, who live like the beasts that go by and die, never knowing nor understanding, yet ever lashed onward with the whip!"

Pierre's sobs were gradually choking him, and it was only the impulse of his passion which still enabled him to speak. "And, Holy Father," he continued, "is it not to you that I ought to address myself in the name of all these wretched ones? Are you not the Father, and is it not before the Father that the messenger of the poor and the lowly should kneel as I am kneeling now? And is it not to the Father that he should bring the huge burden of their sorrows and ask for pity and help and justice? Yes, particularly for justice! And since you are the Father throw the doors wide open so that all may enter, even the humblest of your children, the faithful, the chance passers, even the rebellious ones and those who have gone astray but who will perhaps enter and whom you will save from the errors of abandonment! Be as the house of refuge on the dangerous road, the loving greeter of the wayfarer, the lamp of hospitality which ever burns, and is seen afar off and saves one in the storm! And since, O Father, you are power be salvation also! You can do all; you have centuries of domination behind you; you have nowadays risen to a moral authority which has rendered you the arbiter of the world; you are there before me like the very majesty of the sun which illumines and fructifies! Oh! be the star of kindness and charity, be the redeemer; take in hand once more the purpose of Jesus, which has been perverted by being left in the hands of the rich and the powerful who have ended by transforming the work of the Gospel into the most hateful of all monuments of pride and tyranny! And since the work has been spoilt, take it in hand, begin it afresh, place yourself on the side of the little ones, the lowly ones, the poor ones, and bring them back to the peace, the fraternity, and the justice of the original Christian communion. And say, O Father, that I have understood you, that I have sincerely expressed in this respect your most cherished ideas, the sole living desire of your reign! The rest, oh! the rest, my book, myself, what matter they! I do not defend myself, I only seek your glory and the happiness of mankind. Say that from the depths of this Vatican you have heard the rending of our corrupt modern societies! Say that you have quivered with loving pity, say that you desire to prevent the awful impending catastrophe by recalling the Gospel to the hearts of your children who are stricken with madness, and by bringing them back to the age of simplicity and purity when the first Christians lived together in innocent brotherhood! Yes, it is for that reason, is it not, that you have placed yourself, Father, on the side of the poor, and for that reason I am here and entreat you for pity and kindness and justice with my whole soul!"

Then the young man gave way beneath his emotion, and fell all of a heap upon the floor amidst a rush of sobs—loud, endless sobs, which flowed forth in billows, coming as it were not only from himself but from all the wretched, from the whole world in whose veins sorrow coursed mingled with the very blood of life. He was there as the ambassador of suffering, as he had said. And indeed, at the foot of that mute and motionless pope, he was like the personification of the whole of human woe.

Leo XIII, who was extremely fond of talking and could only listen to others with an effort, had twice raised one of his pallid hands to interrupt the young priest. Then, gradually overcome by astonishment, touched by emotion himself, he had allowed him to continue, to go on to the end of his outburst. A little blood even had suffused the snowy whiteness of the Pontiff's face whilst his eyes shone out yet more brilliantly. And as soon as he saw the young man speechless at his feet, shaken by those sobs which seemed to be wrenching away his heart, he became anxious and leant forward: "Calm yourself, my son, raise yourself," he said.

But the sobs still continued, still flowed forth, all reason and respect being swept away amidst that distracted plaint of a wounded soul, that moan of suffering, dying flesh.

"Raise yourself, my son, it is not proper," repeated Leo XIII. "There, take that chair." And with a gesture of authority he at last invited the young man to sit down.

Pierre rose with pain, and at once seated himself in order that he might not fall. He brushed his hair back from his forehead, and wiped his scalding tears away with his hands, unable to understand what had just happened, but striving to regain his self-possession.

"You appeal to the Holy Father," said Leo XIII. "Ah! rest assured that his heart is full of pity and affection for those who are unfortunate. But that is not the point, it is our holy religion which is in question. I have read your book, a bad book, I tell you so at once, the most dangerous and culpable of books, precisely on account of its qualities, the pages in which I myself felt interested. Yes, I was often fascinated, I should not have continued my perusal had I not felt carried away, transported by the ardent breath of your faith and enthusiasm. The subject 'New Rome' is such a beautiful one and impassions me so much! and certainly there is a book to be written under that title, but in a very different spirit to yours. You think that you have understood me, my son, that you have so penetrated yourself with my writings and actions that you simply express my most cherished ideas. But no, no, you have not understood me, and that is why I desired to see you, explain things to you, and convince you."

It was now Pierre who sat listening, mute and motionless. Yet he had only come thither to defend himself; for three months past he had been feverishly desiring this interview, preparing his arguments and feeling confident of victory; and now although he heard his book spoken of as dangerous and culpable he did not protest, did not reply with any one of those good reasons which he had deemed so irresistible. But the fact was that intense weariness had come upon him, the appeal that he had made, the tears that he had shed had left him utterly exhausted. By and by, however, he would be brave and would say what he had resolved to say.

"People do not understand me, do not understand me!" resumed Leo XIII with an air of impatient irritation. "It is incredible what trouble I have to make myself understood, in France especially! Take the temporal power for instance; how can you have fancied that the Holy See would ever enter into any compromise on that question? Such language is unworthy of a priest, it is the chimerical dream of one who is ignorant of the conditions in which the papacy has hitherto lived and in which it must still live if it does not desire to disappear. Cannot you see the sophistry of your argument that the Church becomes the loftier the more it frees itself from the cares of terrestrial sovereignty? A purely spiritual royalty, a sway of charity and love, indeed, 'tis a fine imaginative idea! But who will ensure us respect? Who will grant us the alms of a stone on which to rest our head if we are ever driven forth and forced to roam the highways? Who will guarantee our independence when we are at the mercy of every state?... No, no! this soil of Rome is ours, we have inherited it from the long line of our ancestors, and it is the indestructible, eternal soil on which the Church is built, so that any relinquishment would mean the downfall of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church. And, moreover, we could not relinquish it; we are bound by our oath to God and man."

He paused for a moment to allow Pierre to answer him. But the latter to his stupefaction could say nothing, for he perceived that this pope spoke as he was bound to speak. All the heavy mysterious things which had weighed the young priest down whilst he was waiting in the ante-room, now became more and more clearly defined. They were, indeed, the things which he had seen and learnt since his arrival in Rome, the disillusions, the rebuffs which he had experienced, all the many points of difference between existing reality and imagination, whereby his dream of a return to primitive Christianity was already half shattered. And in particular he remembered the hour which he had spent on the dome of St. Peter's, when, in presence of the old city of glory so stubbornly clinging to its purple, he had realised that he was an imbecile with his idea of a purely spiritual pope. He had that day fled from the furious shouts of the pilgrims acclaiming the Pope-King. He had only accepted the necessity for money, that last form of servitude still binding the Pope to earth. But all had crumbled afterwards, when he had beheld the real Rome, the ancient city of pride and domination where the papacy can never be complete without the temporal power. Too many bonds, dogma, tradition, environment, the very soil itself rendered the Church for ever immutable. It was only in appearances that she could make concessions, and a time would even arrive when her concessions would cease, in presence of the impossibility of going any further without committing suicide. If his, Pierre's, dream of a New Rome were ever to be realised, it would only be faraway from ancient Rome. Only in some distant region could the new Christianity arise, for Catholicism was bound to die on the spot when the last of the popes, riveted to that land of ruins, should disappear beneath the falling dome of St. Peter's, which would fall as surely as the temple of Jupiter had fallen! And, as for that pope of the present day, though he might have no kingdom, though age might have made him weak and fragile, though his bloodless pallor might be that of some ancient idol of wax, he none the less flared with the red passion for universal sovereignty, he was none the less the stubborn scion of his ancestry, the Pontifex Maximus, the Caesar Imperator in whose veins flowed the blood of Augustus, master of the world.

"You must be fully aware," resumed Leo XIII, "of the ardent desire for unity which has always possessed us. We were very happy on the day when we unified the rite, by imposing the Roman rite throughout the whole Catholic world. This is one of our most cherished victories, for it can do much to uphold our authority. And I hope that our efforts in the East will end by bringing our dear brethren of the dissident communions back to us, in the same way as I do not despair of convincing the Anglican sects, without speaking of the other so-called Protestant sects who will be compelled to return to the bosom of the only Church, the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, when the times predicted by the Christ shall be accomplished. But a thing which you did not say in your book is that the Church can relinquish nothing whatever of dogma. On the contrary, you seem to fancy that an agreement might be effected, concessions made on either side, and that, my son, is a culpable thought, such language as a priest cannot use without being guilty of a crime. No, the truth is absolute, not a stone of the edifice shall be changed. Oh! in matters of form, we will do whatever may be asked. We are ready to adopt the most conciliatory courses if it be only a question of turning certain difficulties and weighing expressions in order to facilitate agreement.. .. Again, there is the part we have taken in contemporary socialism, and here too it is necessary that we should be understood. Those whom you have so well called the disinherited of the world, are certainly the object of our solicitude. If socialism be simply a desire for justice, and a constant determination to come to the help of the weak and the suffering, who can claim to give more thought to the matter and work with more energy than ourselves? Has not the Church always been the mother of the afflicted, the helper and benefactress of the poor? We are for all reasonable progress, we admit all new social forms which will promote peace and fraternity.... Only we can but condemn that socialism which begins by driving away God as a means of ensuring the happiness of mankind. Therein lies simple savagery, an abominable relapse into the primitive state in which there can only be catastrophe, conflagration, and massacre. And that again is a point on which you have not laid sufficient stress, for you have not shown in your book that there can be no progress outside the pale of the Church, that she is really the only initiatory and guiding power to whom one may surrender oneself without fear. Indeed, and in this again you have sinned, it seemed to me as if you set God on one side, as if for you religion lay solely in a certain bent of the soul, a florescence of love and charity, which sufficed one to work one's salvation. But that is execrable heresy. God is ever present, master of souls and bodies; and religion remains the bond, the law, the very governing power of mankind, apart from which there can only be barbarism in this world and damnation in the next. And, once again, forms are of no importance; it is sufficient that dogma should remain. Thus our adhesion to the French Republic proves that we in no wise mean to link the fate of religion to that of any form of government, however august and ancient the latter may be. Dynasties may have done their time, but God is eternal. Kings may perish, but God lives! And, moreover, there is nothing anti-Christian in the republican form of government; indeed, on the contrary, it would seem like an awakening of that Christian commonwealth to which you have referred in some really charming pages. The worst is that liberty at once becomes license, and that our desire for conciliation is often very badly requited.... But ah! what a wicked book you have written, my son,—with the best intentions, I am willing to believe,—and how your silence shows that you are beginning to recognise the disastrous consequences of your error."

Pierre still remained silent, overcome, feeling as if his arguments would fall against some deaf, blind, and impenetrable rock, which it was useless to assail since nothing could enter it. And only one thing now preoccupied him; he wondered how it was that a man of such intelligence and such ambition had not formed a more distinct and exact idea of the modern world. He could divine that the Pope possessed much information and carried the map of Christendom with many of the needs, deeds, and hopes of the nations, in his mind amidst his complicated diplomatic enterprises; but at the same time what gaps there were in his knowledge! The truth, no doubt, was that his personal acquaintance with the world was confined to his brief nunciature at Brussels.*

* That too, was in 1843-44, and the world is now utterly unlike
what it was then!—Trans.

During his occupation of the see of Perugia, which had followed, he had only mingled with the dawning life of young Italy. And for eighteen years now he had been shut up in the Vatican, isolated from the rest of mankind and communicating with the nations solely through his entourage, which was often most unintelligent, most mendacious, and most treacherous. Moreover, he was an Italian priest, a superstitious and despotic High Pontiff, bound by tradition, subjected to the influences of race environment, pecuniary considerations, and political necessities, not to speak of his great pride, the conviction that he ought to be implicitly obeyed in all things as the one sole legitimate power upon earth. Therein lay fatal causes of mental deformity, of errors and gaps in his extraordinary brain, though the latter certainly possessed many admirable qualities, quickness of comprehension and patient stubbornness of will and strength to draw conclusions and act. Of all his powers, however, that of intuition was certainly the most wonderful, for was it not this alone which, owing to his voluntary imprisonment, enabled him to divine the vast evolution of humanity at the present day? He was thus keenly conscious of the dangers surrounding him, of the rising tide of democracy and the boundless ocean of science which threatened to submerge the little islet where the dome of St. Peter's yet triumphed. And the object of all his policy, of all his labour, was to conquer so that he might reign. If he desired the unity of the Church it was in order that the latter might become strong and inexpugnable in the contest which he foresaw. If he preached conciliation, granting concessions in matters of form, tolerating audacious actions on the part of American bishops, it was because he deeply and secretly feared the dislocation of the Church, some sudden schism which might hasten disaster. And this fear explained his returning affection for the people, the concern which he displayed respecting socialism, and the Christian solution which he offered to the woes of earthly life. As Caesar was stricken low, was not the long contest for possession of the people over, and would not the people, the great silent multitude, speak out, and give itself to him, the Pope? He had begun experiments with France, forsaking the lost cause of the monarchy and recognising the Republic which he hoped might prove strong and victorious, for in spite of everything France remained the eldest daughter of the Church, the only Catholic nation which yet possessed sufficient strength to restore the temporal power at some propitious moment. And briefly Leo's desire was to reign. To reign by the support of France since it seemed impossible to do so by the support of Germany! To reign by the support of the people, since the people was now becoming the master, the bestower of thrones! To reign by means even of an Italian Republic, if only that Republic could wrest Rome from the House of Savoy and restore her to him, a federal Republic which would make him President of the United States of Italy pending the time when he should be President of the United States of Europe! To reign in spite of everybody and everything, such was his ambition, to reign over the world, even as Augustus had reigned, Augustus whose devouring blood alone upheld this expiring old man, yet so stubbornly clinging to power!

"And another crime of yours, my son," resumed Leo XIII, "is that you have dared to ask for a new religion. That is impious, blasphemous, sacrilegious. There is but one religion in the world, our Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Religion, apart from which there can be but darkness and damnation. I quite understand that what you mean to imply is a return to early Christianity. But the error of so-called Protestantism, so culpable and so deplorable in its consequences, never had any other pretext. As soon as one departs from the strict observance of dogma and absolute respect for tradition one sinks into the most frightful precipices.... Ah! schism, schism, my son, is a crime beyond forgiveness, an assassination of the true God, a device of the loathsome Beast of Temptation which Hell sends into the world to work the ruin of the faithful! If your book contained nothing beyond those words 'a new religion,' it would be necessary to destroy and burn it like so much poison fatal in its effects upon the human soul."

He continued at length on this subject, while Pierre recalled what Don Vigilio had told him of those all-powerful Jesuits who at the Vatican as elsewhere remained in the background, secretly but none the less decisively governing the Church. Was it true then that this pope, whose opportunist tendencies were so freely displayed, was one of them, a mere docile instrument in their hands, though he fancied himself penetrated with the doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas? In any case, like them he compounded with the century, made approaches to the world, and was willing to flatter it in order that he might possess it. Never before had Pierre so cruelly realised that the Church was now so reduced that she could only live by dint of concessions and diplomacy. And he could at last distinctly picture that Roman clergy which at first is so difficult of comprehension to a French priest, that Government of the Church, represented by the pope, the cardinals, and the prelates, whom the Deity has appointed to govern and administer His mundane possessions—mankind and the earth. They begin by setting that very Deity on one side, in the depths of the tabernacle, and impose whatever dogmas they please as so many essential truths. That the Deity exists is evident, since they govern in His name which is sufficient for everything. And being by virtue of their charge the masters, if they consent to sign covenants, Concordats, it is only as matters of form; they do not observe them, and never yield to anything but force, always reserving the principle of their absolute sovereignty which must some day finally triumph. Pending that day's arrival, they act as diplomatists, slowly carrying on their work of conquest as the Deity's functionaries; and religion is but the public homage which they pay to the Deity, and which they organise with all the pomp and magnificence that is likely to influence the multitude. Their only object is to enrapture and conquer mankind in order that the latter may submit to the rule of the Deity, that is the rule of themselves, since they are the Deity's visible representatives, expressly delegated to govern the world. In a word, they straightway descend from Roman law, they are still but the offspring of the old pagan soul of Rome, and if they have lasted until now and if they rely on lasting for ever, until the awaited hour when the empire of the world shall be restored to them, it is because they are the direct heirs of the purple-robed Caesars, the uninterrupted and living progeny of the blood of Augustus.

And thereupon Pierre felt ashamed of his tears. Ah! those poor nerves of his, that outburst of sentiment and enthusiasm to which he had given way! His very modesty was appalled, for he felt as if he had exhibited his soul in utter nakedness. And so uselessly too, in that room where nothing similar had ever been said before, and in presence of that Pontiff-King who could not understand him. His plan of the popes reigning by means of the poor and lowly now horrified him. His idea of the papacy going to the people, at last rid of its former masters, seemed to him a suggestion worthy of a wolf, for if the papacy should go to the people it would only be to prey upon it as the others had done. And really he, Pierre, must have been mad when he had imagined that a Roman prelate, a cardinal, a pope, was capable of admitting a return to the Christian commonwealth, a fresh florescence of primitive Christianity to pacify the aged nations whom hatred consumed. Such a conception indeed was beyond the comprehension of men who for centuries had regarded themselves as masters of the world, so heedless and disdainful of the lowly and the suffering, that they had at last become altogether incapable of either love or charity.*

* The reader should bear in mind that these remarks apply to the
Italian cardinals and prelates, whose vanity and egotism are
remarkable.—Trans.

Leo XIII, however, was still holding forth in his full, unwearying voice. And the young priest heard him saying: "Why did you write that page on Lourdes which shows such a thoroughly bad spirit? Lourdes, my son, has rendered great services to religion. To the persons who have come and told me of the touching miracles which are witnessed at the Grotto almost daily, I have often expressed my desire to see those miracles confirmed, proved by the most rigorous scientific tests. And, indeed, according to what I have read, I do not think that the most evilly disposed minds can entertain any further doubt on the matter, for the miracles are proved scientifically in the most irrefutable manner. Science, my son, must be God's servant. It can do nothing against Him, it is only by His grace that it arrives at the truth. All the solutions which people nowadays pretend to discover and which seemingly destroy dogma will some day be recognised as false, for God's truth will remain victorious when the times shall be accomplished. That is a very simple certainty, known even to little children, and it would suffice for the peace and salvation of mankind, if mankind would content itself with it. And be convinced, my son, that faith and reason are not incompatible. Have we not got St. Thomas who foresaw everything, explained everything, regulated everything? Your faith has been shaken by the onslaught of the spirit of examination, you have known trouble and anguish which Heaven has been pleased to spare our priests in this land of ancient belief, this city of Rome which the blood of so many martyrs has sanctified. However, we have no fear of the spirit of examination, study St. Thomas, read him thoroughly and your faith will return, definitive and triumphant, firmer than ever."

These remarks caused Pierre as much dismay as if fragments of the celestial vault were raining on his head. O God of truth, miracles—the miracles of Lourdes!—proved scientifically, faith in the dogmas compatible with reason, and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas sufficient to instil certainty into the minds of this present generation! How could one answer that, and indeed why answer it at all?

"Yes, yours is a most culpable and dangerous book," concluded Leo XIII; "its very title 'New Rome' is mendacious and poisonous, and the work is the more to be condemned as it offers every fascination of style, every perversion of generous fancy. Briefly it is such a book that a priest, if he conceived it in an hour of error, can have no other duty than that of burning it in public with the very hand which traced the pages of error and scandal."

All at once Pierre rose up erect. He was about to exclaim: "'Tis true, I had lost my faith, but I thought I had found it again in the compassion which the woes of the world set in my heart. You were my last hope, the awaited saviour. But, behold, that again is a dream, you cannot take the work of Jesus in hand once more and pacify mankind so as to avert the frightful fratricidal war which is preparing. You cannot leave your throne and come along the roads with the poor and the humble to carry out the supreme work of fraternity. Well, it is all over with you, your Vatican and your St. Peter's. All is falling before the onslaught of the rising multitude and growing science. You no longer exist, there are only ruins and remnants left here."

However, he did not speak those words. He simply bowed and said: "Holy Father, I make my submission and reprobate my book." And as he thus replied his voice trembled with disgust, and his open hands made a gesture of surrender as though he were yielding up his soul. The words he had chosen were precisely those of the required formula: Auctor laudabiliter se subjecit et opus reprobavit. "The author has laudably made his submission and reprobated his work." No error could have been confessed, no hope could have accomplished self-destruction with loftier despair, more sovereign grandeur. But what frightful irony: that book which he had sworn never to withdraw, and for whose triumph he had fought so passionately, and which he himself now denied and suppressed, not because he deemed it guilty, but because he had just realised that it was as futile, as chimerical as a lover's desire, a poet's dream. Ah! yes, since he had been mistaken, since he had merely dreamed, since he had found there neither the Deity nor the priest that he had desired for the happiness of mankind, why should he obstinately cling to the illusion of an awakening which was impossible! 'Twere better to fling his book on the ground like a dead leaf, better to deny it, better to cut it away like a dead limb that could serve no purpose whatever!

Somewhat surprised by such a prompt victory Leo XIII raised a slight exclamation of content. "That is well said, my son, that is well said! You have spoken the only words that can become a priest."

And in his evident satisfaction, he who left nothing to chance, who carefully prepared each of his audiences, deciding beforehand what words he would say, what gestures even he would make, unbent somewhat and displayed real bonhomie. Unable to understand, mistaking the real motives of this rebellious priest's submission, he tasted positive delight in having so easily reduced him to silence, the more so as report had stated the young man to be a terrible revolutionary. And thus his Holiness felt quite proud of such a conversion. "Moreover, my son," he said, "I did not expect less of one of your distinguished mind. There can be no loftier enjoyment than that of owning one's error, doing penance, and submitting."

He had again taken the glass off the little table beside him and was stirring the last spoonful of syrup before drinking it. And Pierre was amazed at again finding him as he had found him at the outset, shrunken, bereft of sovereign majesty, and simply suggestive of some aged bourgeois drinking his glass of sugared water before getting into bed. It was as if after growing and radiating, like a planet ascending to the zenith, he had again sunk to the level of the soil in all human mediocrity. Again did Pierre find him puny and fragile, with the slender neck of a little sick bird, and all those marks of senile ugliness which rendered him so exacting with regard to his portraits, whether they were oil paintings or photographs, gold medals, or marble busts, for of one and the other he would say that the artist must not portray "Papa Pecci" but Leo XIII, the great Pope, of whom he desired to leave such a lofty image to posterity. And Pierre, after momentarily ceasing to see them, was again embarrassed by the handkerchief which lay on the Pope's lap, and the dirty cassock soiled by snuff. His only feelings now were affectionate pity for such white old age, deep admiration for the stubborn power of life which had found a refuge in those dark black eyes, and respectful deference, such as became a worker, for that large brain which harboured such vast projects and overflowed with such innumerable ideas and actions.

The audience was over, and the young man bowed low: "I thank your Holiness for having deigned to give me such a fatherly reception," he said.

However, Leo XIII detained him for a moment longer, speaking to him of France and expressing his sincere desire to see her prosperous, calm, and strong for the greater advantage of the Church. And Pierre, during that last moment, had a singular vision, a strange haunting fancy. As he gazed at the Holy Father's ivory brow and thought of his great age and of his liability to be carried off by the slightest chill, he involuntarily recalled the scene instinct with a fierce grandeur which is witnessed each time a pope dies. He recalled Pius IX, Giovanni Mastai, two hours after death, his face covered by a white linen cloth, while the pontifical family surrounded him in dismay; and then Cardinal Pecci, the Camerlingo, approaching the bed, drawing aside the veil and dealing three taps with his silver hammer on the forehead of the deceased, repeating at each tap the call, "Giovanni! Giovanni! Giovanni!" And as the corpse made no response, turning, after an interval of a few seconds, and saying: "The Pope is dead!" And at the same time, yonder in the Via Giulia Pierre pictured Cardinal Boccanera, the present Camerlingo, awaiting his turn with his silver hammer, and he imagined Leo XIII, otherwise Gioachino Pecci, dead, like his predecessor, his face covered by a white linen cloth and his corpse surrounded by his prelates in that very room. And he saw the Camerlingo approach, draw the veil aside and tap the ivory forehead, each time repeating the call: "Gioachino! Gioachino! Gioachino!" Then, as the corpse did not answer, he waited for a few seconds and turned and said "The Pope is dead!" Did Leo XIII remember how he had thrice tapped the forehead of Pius IX, and did he ever feel on the brow an icy dread of the silver hammer with which he had armed his own Camerlingo, the man whom he knew to be his implacable adversary, Cardinal Boccanera?

"Go in peace, my son," at last said his Holiness by way of parting benediction. "Your transgression will be forgiven you since you have confessed and testify your horror for it."

With distressful spirit, accepting humiliation as well-deserved chastisement for his chimerical fancies, Pierre retired, stepping backwards according to the customary ceremonial. He made three deep bows and crossed the threshold without turning, followed by the black eyes of Leo XIII, which never left him. Still he saw the Pope stretch his arm towards the table to take up the newspaper which he had been reading prior to the audience, for Leo retained a great fancy for newspapers, and was very inquisitive as to news, though in the isolation in which he lived he frequently made mistakes respecting the relative importance of articles. And once more the chamber sank into deep quietude, whilst the two lamps continued to diffuse a soft and steady light.

In the centre of the anticamera segreta Signor Squadra stood waiting black and motionless. And on noticing that Pierre in his flurry forgot to take his hat from the pier table, he himself discreetly fetched it and handed it to the young priest with a silent bow. Then without any appearance of haste, he walked ahead to conduct the visitor back to the Sala Clementina. The endless promenade through the interminable ante-rooms began once more, and there was still not a soul, not a sound, not a breath. In each empty room stood the one solitary lamp, burning low amidst a yet deeper silence than before. The wilderness seemed also to have grown larger as the night advanced, casting its gloom over the few articles of furniture scattered under the lofty gilded ceilings, the thrones, the stools, the pier tables, the crucifixes, and the candelabra which recurred in each succeeding room. And at last the Sala Clementina which the Swiss Guards had just quitted was reached again, and Signor Squadra, who hitherto had not turned his head, thereupon drew aside without word or gesture, and, saluting Pierre with a last bow, allowed him to pass on. Then he himself disappeared.

And Pierre descended the two flights of the monumental staircase where the gas jets in their globes of ground glass glimmered like night lights amidst a wondrously heavy silence now that the footsteps of the sentries no longer resounded on the landings. And he crossed the Court of St. Damasus, empty and lifeless in the pale light of the lamps above the steps, and descended the Scala Pia, that other great stairway as dim, deserted, and void of life as all the rest, and at last passed beyond the bronze door which a porter slowly shut behind him. And with what a rumble, what a fierce roar did the hard metal close upon all that was within; all the accumulated darkness and silence; the dead, motionless centuries perpetuated by tradition; the indestructible idols, the dogmas, bound round for preservation like mummies; every chain which may weigh on one or hamper one, the whole apparatus of bondage and sovereign domination, with whose formidable clang all the dark, deserted halls re-echoed.

Once more the young man found himself alone on the gloomy expanse of the Piazza of St. Peter's. Not a single belated pedestrian was to be seen. There was only the lofty, livid, ghost-like obelisk, emerging between its four candelabra, from the mosaic pavement of red and serpentine porphyry. The facade of the Basilica also showed vaguely, pale as a vision, whilst from it on either side like a pair of giant arms stretched the quadruple colonnade, a thicket of stone, steeped in obscurity. The dome was but a huge roundness scarcely discernible against the moonless sky; and only the jets of the fountains, which could at last be detected rising like slim phantoms ever on the move, lent a voice to the silence, the endless murmur of a plaint of sorrow coming one knew not whence. Ah! how great was the melancholy grandeur of that slumber, that famous square, the Vatican and St. Peter's, thus seen by night when wrapped in silence and darkness! But suddenly the clock struck ten with so slow and loud a chime that never, so it seemed, had more solemn and decisive an hour rung out amidst blacker and more unfathomable gloom. All Pierre's poor weary frame quivered at the sound as he stood motionless in the centre of the expanse. What! had he spent barely three-quarters of an hour, chatting up yonder with that white old man who had just wrenched all his soul away from him! Yes, it was the final wrench; his last belief had been torn from his bleeding heart and brain. The supreme experiment had been made, a world had collapsed within him. And all at once he thought of Monsignor Nani, and reflected that he alone had been right. He, Pierre, had been told that in any case he would end by doing what Monsignor Nani might desire, and he was now stupefied to find that he had done so.

But sudden despair seized upon him, such atrocious distress of spirit that, from the depths of the abyss of darkness where he stood, he raised his quivering arms into space and spoke aloud: "No, no, Thou art not here, O God of life and love, O God of Salvation! But come, appear since Thy children are perishing because they know neither who Thou art, nor where to find Thee amidst the Infinite of the worlds!"

Above the vast square spread the vast sky of dark-blue velvet, the silent disturbing Infinite, where the constellations palpitated. Over the roofs of the Vatican, Charles's Wain seemed yet more tilted, its golden wheels straying from the right path, its golden shaft upreared in the air; whilst yonder, over Rome towards the Via Giulia, Orion was about to disappear and already showed but one of the three golden stars which bedecked his belt.

XV.

IT was nearly daybreak when Pierre fell asleep, exhausted by emotion and hot with fever. And at nine o'clock, when he had risen and breakfasted, he at once wished to go down into Cardinal Boccanera's rooms where the bodies of Dario and Benedetta had been laid in state in order that the members of the family, its friends and clients, might bring them their tears and prayers.

Whilst he breakfasted, Victorine who, showing an active bravery amidst her despair, had not been to bed at all, told him of what had taken place in the house during the night and early morning. Donna Serafina, prude that she was, had again made an attempt to have the bodies separated; but this had proved an impossibility, as rigor mortis had set in, and to part the lovers it would have been necessary to break their limbs. Moreover, the Cardinal, who had interposed once before, almost quarrelled with his sister on the subject, unwilling as he was that any one should disturb the lovers' last slumber, their union of eternity. Beneath his priestly garb there coursed the blood of his race, a pride in the passions of former times; and he remarked that if the family counted two popes among its forerunners, it had also been rendered illustrious by great captains and ardent lovers. Never would he allow any one to touch those two children, whose dolorous lives had been so pure and whom the grave alone had united. He was the master in his house, and they should be sewn together in the same shroud, and nailed together in the same coffin. Then too the religious service should take place at the neighbouring church of San Carlo, of which he was Cardinal-priest and where again he was the master. And if needful he would address himself to the Pope. And such being his sovereign will, so authoritatively expressed, everybody in the house had to bow submissively.

Donna Serafina at once occupied herself with the laying-out. According to the Roman custom the servants were present, and Victorine as the oldest and most appreciated of them, assisted the relatives. All that could be done in the first instance was to envelop both corpses in Benedetta's unbound hair, thick and odorous hair, which spread out into a royal mantle; and they were then laid together in one shroud of white silk, fastened about their necks in such wise that they formed but one being in death. And again the Cardinal imperatively ordered that they should be brought into his apartments and placed on a state bed in the centre of the throne-room, so that a supreme homage might be rendered to them as to the last scions of the name, the two tragic lovers with whom the once resounding glory of the Boccaneras was about to return to earth. The story which had been arranged was already circulating through Rome; folks related how Dario had been carried off in a few hours by infectious fever, and how Benedetta, maddened by grief, had expired whilst clasping him in her arms to bid him a last farewell; and there was talk too of the royal honours which the bodies were to receive, the superb funeral nuptials which were to be accorded them as they lay clasped on their bed of eternal rest. All Rome, quite overcome by this tragic story of love and death, would talk of nothing else for several weeks.

Pierre would have started for France that same night, eager as he was to quit the city of disaster where he had lost the last shreds of his faith, but he desired to attend the obsequies, and therefore postponed his departure until the following evening. And thus he would spend one more day in that old crumbling palace, near the corpse of that unhappy young woman to whom he had been so much attached and for whom he would try to find some prayers in the depths of his empty and lacerated heart.

When he reached the threshold of the Cardinal's reception-rooms, he suddenly remembered his first visit to them. They still presented the same aspect of ancient princely pomp falling into decay and dust. The doors of the three large ante-rooms were wide open, and the rooms themselves were at that early hour still empty. In the first one, the servants' anteroom, there was nobody but Giacomo who stood motionless in his black livery in front of the old red hat hanging under the baldacchino where spiders spun their webs between the crumbling tassels. In the second room, which the secretary formerly had occupied, Abbe Paparelli, the train-bearer, was softly walking up and down whilst waiting for visitors; and with his conquering humility, his all-powerful obsequiousness, he had never before so closely resembled an old maid, whitened and wrinkled by excess of devout observances. Finally, in the third ante-room, the anticamera nobile, where the red cap lay on a credence facing the large imperious portrait of the Cardinal in ceremonial costume, there was Don Vigilio who had left his little work-table to station himself at the door of the throne-room and there bow to those who crossed the threshold. And on that gloomy winter morning the rooms appeared more mournful and dilapidated than ever, the hangings frayed and ragged, the few articles of furniture covered with dust, the old wood-work crumbling beneath the continuous onslaught of worms, and the ceilings alone retaining their pompous show of gilding and painting.

However, Pierre, to whom Abbe Paparelli addressed a profound bow, in which one divined the irony of a sort of dismissal given to one who was vanquished, felt more impressed by the mournful grandeur which those three dilapidated rooms presented that day, conducting as they did to the old throne-room, now a chamber of death, where the two last children of the house slept their last sleep. What a superb and sorrowful gala of death! Every door wide open and all the emptiness of those over-spacious rooms, void of the throngs of ancient days and leading to the supreme affliction—the end of a race! The Cardinal had shut himself up in his little work-room where he received the relatives and intimates who desired to present their condolences to him, whilst Donna Serafina had chosen an adjoining apartment to await her lady friends who would come in procession until evening. And Pierre, informed of the ceremonial by Victorine, had in the first place to enter the throne-room, greeted as he passed by a deep bow from Don Vigilio who, pale and silent, did not seem to recognise him.

A surprise awaited the young priest. He had expected such a lying-in-state as is seen in France and elsewhere, all windows closed so as to steep the room in night, and hundreds of candles burning round a catafalco, whilst from ceiling to floor the walls were hung with black drapery. He had been told that the bodies would lie in the throne-room because the antique chapel on the ground floor of the palazzo had been shut up for half a century and was in no condition to be used, whilst the Cardinal's little private chapel was altogether too small for any such ceremony. And thus it had been necessary to improvise an altar in the throne-room, an altar at which masses had been said ever since dawn. Masses and other religious services were moreover to be celebrated all day long in the private chapel; and two additional altars had even been set up, one in a small room adjoining the anticamera nobile and the other in a sort of alcove communicating with the second anteroom: and in this wise priests, Franciscans, and members of other Orders bound by the vow of poverty, would simultaneously and without intermission celebrate the divine sacrifice on those four altars. The Cardinal, indeed, had desired that the Divine Blood should flow without pause under his roof for the redemption of those two dear souls which had flown away together. And thus in that mourning mansion, through those funeral halls the bells scarcely stopped tinkling for the elevation of the host, whilst the quivering murmur of Latin words ever continued, and consecrated wafers were continually broken and chalices drained, in such wise that the Divine Presence could not for a moment quit the heavy atmosphere all redolent of death.

On the other hand, however, Pierre, to his great astonishment, found the throne-room much as it had been on the day of his first visit. The curtains of the four large windows had not even been drawn, and the grey, cold, subdued light of the gloomy winter morning freely entered. Under the ceiling of carved and gilded wood-work there were the customary red wall-hangings of brocatelle, worn away by long usage; and there was the old throne with the arm-chair turned to the wall, uselessly waiting for a visit from the Pope which would never more come. The principal changes in the aspect of the room were that its seats and tables had been removed, and that, in addition to the improvised altar arranged beside the throne, it now contained the state bed on which lay the bodies of Benedetta and Dario, amidst a profusion of flowers. The bed stood in the centre of the room on a low platform, and at its head were two lighted candles, one on either side. There was nothing else, nothing but that wealth of flowers, such a harvest of white roses that one wondered in what fairy garden they had been culled, sheaves of them on the bed, sheaves of them toppling from the bed, sheaves of them covering the step of the platform, and falling from that step on to the magnificent marble paving of the room.

Pierre drew near to the bed, his heart faint with emotion. Those tapers whose little yellow flamelets scarcely showed in the pale daylight, that continuous low murmur of the mass being said at the altar, that penetrating perfume of roses which rendered the atmosphere so heavy, filled the antiquated, dusty room with a spirit of infinite woe, a lamentation of boundless mourning. And there was not a gesture, not a word spoken, save by the priest officiating at the altar, nothing but an occasional faint sound of stifled sobbing among the few persons present. Servants of the house constantly relieved one another, four always standing erect and motionless at the head of the bed, like faithful, familiar guards. From time to time Consistorial-Advocate Morano who, since early morning had been attending to everything, crossed the room with a silent step and the air of a man in a hurry. And at the edge of the platform all who entered, knelt, prayed, and wept. Pierre perceived three ladies there, their faces hidden by their handkerchiefs; and there was also an old priest who trembled with grief and hung his head in such wise that his face could not be distinguished. However, the young man was most moved by the sight of a poorly clad girl, whom he took for a servant, and whom sorrow had utterly prostrated on the marble slabs.

Then in his turn he knelt down, and with the professional murmur of the lips sought to repeat the Latin prayers which, as a priest, he had so often said at the bedside of the departed. But his growing emotion confused his memory, and he became wrapt in contemplation of the lovers whom his eyes were unable to quit. Under the wealth of flowers which covered them the clasped bodies could scarcely be distinguished, but the two heads emerged from the silken shroud, and lying there on the same cushion, with their hair mingling, they were still beautiful, beautiful as with satisfied passion. Benedetta had kept her divinely gay, loving, and faithful face for eternity, transported with rapture at having rendered up her last breath in a kiss of love; whilst Dario retained a more dolorous expression amidst his final joy. And their eyes were still wide open, gazing at one another with a persistent and caressing sweetness which nothing would ever more disturb.

Oh! God, was it true that yonder lay that Benedetta whom he, Pierre, had loved with such pure, brotherly affection? He was stirred to the very depths of his soul by the recollection of the delightful hours which he had spent with her. She had been so beautiful, so sensible, yet so full of passion! And he had indulged in so beautiful a dream, that of animating with his own liberating fraternal feelings that admirable creature with soul of fire and indolent air, in whom he had pictured all ancient Rome, and whom he would have liked to awaken and win over to the Italy of to-morrow. He had dreamt of enlarging her brain and heart by filling her with love for the lowly and the poor, with all present-day compassion for things and beings. How he would now have smiled at such a dream had not his tears been flowing! Yet how charming she had shown herself in striving to content him despite the invincible obstacles of race, education, and environment. She had been a docile pupil, but was incapable of any real progress. One day she had certainly seemed to draw nearer to him, as though her own sufferings had opened her soul to every charity; but the illusion of happiness had come back, and then she had lost all understanding of the woes of others, and had gone off in the egotism of her own hope and joy. Did that mean then that this Roman race must finish in that fashion, beautiful as it still often is, and fondly adored but so closed to all love for others, to those laws of charity and justice which, by regulating labour, can henceforth alone save this world of ours?

Then there came another great sorrow to Pierre which left him stammering, unable to speak any precise prayer. He thought of the overwhelming reassertion of Nature's powers which had attended the death of those two poor children. Was it not awful? To have taken that vow to the Virgin, to have endured torment throughout life, and to end by plunging into death, on the loved one's neck, distracted by vain regret and eager for self-bestowal! The brutal fact of impending separation had sufficed for Benedetta to realise how she had duped herself, and to revert to the universal instinct of love. And therein, again once more, was the Church vanquished; therein again appeared the great god Pan, mating the sexes and scattering life around! If in the days of the Renascence the Church did not fall beneath the assault of the Venuses and Hercules then exhumed from the old soil of Rome, the struggle at all events continued as bitterly as ever; and at each and every hour new nations, overflowing with sap, hungering for life, and warring against a religion which was nothing more than an appetite for death, threatened to sweep away that old Holy Apostolic Roman and Catholic edifice whose walls were already tottering on all sides.

And at that moment Pierre felt that the death of that adorable Benedetta was for him the supreme disaster. He was still looking at her and tears were scorching his eyes. She was carrying off his chimera. This time 'twas really the end. Rome the Catholic and the Princely was dead, lying there like marble on that funeral bed. She had been unable to go to the humble, the suffering ones of the world, and had just expired amidst the impotent cry of her egotistical passion when it was too late either to love or to create. Never more would children be born of her, the old Roman house was henceforth empty, sterile, beyond possibility of awakening. Pierre whose soul mourned such a splendid dream, was so grieved at seeing her thus motionless and frigid, that he felt himself fainting. He feared lest he might fall upon the step beside the bed, and so struggled to his feet and drew aside.

Then, as he sought refuge in a window recess in order that he might try to recover self-possession, he was astonished to perceive Victorine seated there on a bench which the hangings half concealed. She had come thither by Donna Serafina's orders, and sat watching her two dear children as she called them, whilst keeping an eye upon all who came in and went out. And, on seeing the young priest so pale and nearly swooning, she at once made room for him to sit down beside her. "Ah!" he murmured after drawing a long breath, "may they at least have the joy of being together elsewhere, of living a new life in another world."

Victorine, however, shrugged her shoulders, and in an equally low voice responded, "Oh! live again, Monsieur l'Abbe, why? When one's dead the best is to remain so and to sleep. Those poor children had enough torments on earth, one mustn't wish that they should begin again elsewhere."

This naive yet deep remark on the part of an ignorant unbelieving woman sent a shudder through Pierre's very bones. To think that his own teeth had chattered with fear at night time at the sudden thought of annihilation. He deemed her heroic at remaining so undisturbed by any ideas of eternity and the infinite. And she, as she felt he was quivering, went on: "What can you suppose there should be after death? We've deserved a right to sleep, and nothing to my thinking can be more desirable and consoling."

"But those two did not live," murmured Pierre, "so why not allow oneself the joy of believing that they now live elsewhere, recompensed for all their torments?"

Victorine, however, again shook her head; "No, no," she replied. "Ah! I was quite right in saying that my poor Benedetta did wrong in torturing herself with all those superstitious ideas of hers when she was really so fond of her lover. Yes, happiness is rarely found, and how one regrets having missed it when it's too late to turn back! That's the whole story of those poor little ones. It's too late for them, they are dead." Then in her turn she broke down and began to sob. "Poor little ones! poor little ones! Look how white they are, and think what they will be when only the bones of their heads lie side by side on the cushion, and only the bones of their arms still clasp one another. Ah! may they sleep, may they sleep; at least they know nothing and feel nothing now."

A long interval of silence followed. Pierre, amidst the quiver of his own doubts, the anxious desire which in common with most men he felt for a new life beyond the grave, gazed at this woman who did not find priests to her fancy, and who retained all her Beauceronne frankness of speech, with the tranquil, contented air of one who has ever done her duty in her humble station as a servant, lost though she had been for five and twenty years in a land of wolves, whose language she had not even been able to learn. Ah! yes, tortured as the young man was by his doubts, he would have liked to be as she was, a well-balanced, healthy, ignorant creature who was quite content with what the world offered, and who, when she had accomplished her daily task, went fully satisfied to bed, careless as to whether she might never wake again!

However, as Pierre's eyes once more sought the state bed, he suddenly recognised the old priest, who was kneeling on the step of the platform, and whose features he had hitherto been unable to distinguish. "Isn't that Abbe Pisoni, the priest of Santa Brigida, where I sometimes said mass?" he inquired. "The poor old man, how he weeps!"

In her quiet yet desolate voice Victorine replied, "He has good reason to weep. He did a fine thing when he took it into his head to marry my poor Benedetta to Count Prada. All those abominations would never have happened if the poor child had been given her Dario at once. But in this idiotic city they are all mad with their politics; and that old priest, who is none the less a very worthy man, thought he had accomplished a real miracle and saved the world by marrying the Pope and the King as he said with a soft laugh, poor old savant that he is, who for his part has never been in love with anything but old stones—you know, all that antiquated rubbish of theirs of a hundred thousand years ago. And now, you see, he can't keep from weeping. The other one too came not twenty minutes ago, Father Lorenza, the Jesuit who became the Contessina's confessor after Abbe Pisoni, and who undid what the other had done. Yes, a handsome man he is, but a fine bungler all the same, a perfect killjoy with all the crafty hindrances which he brought into that divorce affair. I wish you had been here to see what a big sign of the cross he made after he had knelt down. He didn't cry, he didn't: he seemed to be saying that as things had ended so badly it was evident that God had withdrawn from all share in the business. So much the worse for the dead!"

Victorine spoke gently and without a pause, as it relieved her, to empty her heart after the terrible hours of bustle and suffocation which she had spent since the previous day. "And that one yonder," she resumed in a lower voice, "don't you recognise her?"

She glanced towards the poorly clad girl whom Pierre had taken for a servant, and whom intensity of grief had prostrated beside the bed. With a gesture of awful suffering this girl had just thrown back her head, a head of extraordinary beauty, enveloped by superb black hair.

"La Pierina!" said Pierre. "Ah! poor girl."

Victorine made a gesture of compassion and tolerance.

"What would you have?" said she, "I let her come up. I don't know how she heard of the trouble, but it's true that she is always prowling round the house. She sent and asked me to come down to her, and you should have heard her sob and entreat me to let her see her Prince once more! Well, she does no harm to anybody there on the floor, looking at them both with her beautiful loving eyes full of tears. She's been there for half an hour already, and I had made up my mind to turn her out if she didn't behave properly. But since she's so quiet and doesn't even move, she may well stop and fill her heart with the sight of them for her whole life long."

It was really sublime to see that ignorant, passionate, beautiful Pierina thus overwhelmed below the nuptial couch on which the lovers slept for all eternity. She had sunk down on her heels, her arms hanging heavily beside her, and her hands open. And with raised face, motionless as in an ecstasy of suffering, she did not take her eyes from that adorable and tragic pair. Never had human face displayed such beauty, such a dazzling splendour of suffering and love; never had there been such a portrayal of ancient Grief, not however cold like marble but quivering with life. What was she thinking of, what were her sufferings, as she thus fixedly gazed at her Prince now and for ever locked in her rival's arms? Was it some jealousy which could have no end that chilled the blood of her veins? Or was it mere suffering at having lost him, at realising that she was looking at him for the last time, without thought of hatred for that other woman who vainly sought to warm him with her arms as icy cold as his own? There was still a soft gleam in the poor girl's blurred eyes, and her lips were still lips of love though curved in bitterness by grief. She found the lovers so pure and beautiful as they lay there amidst that profusion of flowers! And beautiful herself, beautiful like a queen, ignorant of her own charms, she remained there breathless, a humble servant, a loving slave as it were, whose heart had been wrenched away and carried off by her dying master.

People were now constantly entering the room, slowly approaching with mournful faces, then kneeling and praying for a few minutes, and afterwards retiring with the same mute, desolate mien. A pang came to Pierre's heart when he saw Dario's mother, the ever beautiful Flavia, enter, accompanied by her husband, the handsome Jules Laporte, that ex-sergeant of the Swiss Guard whom she had turned into a Marquis Montefiori. Warned of the tragedy directly it had happened, she had already come to the mansion on the previous evening; but now she returned in grand ceremony and full mourning, looking superb in her black garments which were well suited to her massive, Juno-like style of beauty. When she had approached the bed with a queenly step, she remained for a moment standing with two tears at the edges of her eyelids, tears which did not fall. Then, at the moment of kneeling, she made sure that Jules was beside her, and glanced at him as if to order him to kneel as well. They both sank down beside the platform and remained in prayer for the proper interval, she very dignified in her grief and he even surpassing her, with the perfect sorrow-stricken bearing of a man who knew how to conduct himself in every circumstance of life, even the gravest. And afterwards they rose together, and slowly betook themselves to the entrance of the private apartments where the Cardinal and Donna Serafina were receiving their relatives and friends.

Five ladies then came in one after the other, while two Capuchins and the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See went off. And Victorine, who for a few minutes had remained silent, suddenly resumed. "Ah! there's the little Princess, she's much afflicted too, and, no wonder, she was so fond of our Benedetta."

Pierre himself had just noticed Celia coming in. She also had attired herself in full mourning for this abominable visit of farewell. Behind her was a maid, who carried on either arm a huge sheaf of white roses.

"The dear girl!" murmured Victorine, "she wanted her wedding with her Attilio to take place on the same day as that of the poor lovers who lie there. And they, alas! have forestalled her, their wedding's over; there they sleep in their bridal bed."

Celia had at once crossed herself and knelt down beside the bed, but it was evident that she was not praying. She was indeed looking at the lovers with desolate stupefaction at finding them so white and cold with a beauty as of marble. What! had a few hours sufficed, had life departed, would those lips never more exchange a kiss! She could again see them at the ball of that other night, so resplendent and triumphant with their living love. And a feeling of furious protest rose from her young heart, so open to life, so eager for joy and sunlight, so angry with the hateful idiocy of death. And her anger and affright and grief, as she thus found herself face to face with the annihilation which chills every passion, could be read on her ingenuous, candid, lily-like face. She herself stood on the threshold of a life of passion of which she yet knew nothing, and behold! on that very threshold she encountered the corpses of those dearly loved ones, the loss of whom racked her soul with grief.

She gently closed her eyes and tried to pray, whilst big tears fell from under her lowered eyelids. Some time went by amidst the quivering silence, which only the murmur of the mass near by disturbed. At last she rose and took the sheaves of flowers from her maid; and standing on the platform she hesitated for a moment, then placed the roses to the right and left of the cushion on which the lovers' heads were resting, as if she wished to crown them with those blossoms, perfume their young brows with that sweet and powerful aroma. Then, though her hands remained empty she did not retire, but remained there leaning over the dead ones, trembling and seeking what she might yet say to them, what she might leave them of herself for ever more. An inspiration came to her, and she stooped forward, and with her whole, deep, loving soul set a long, long kiss on the brow of either spouse.

"Ah! the dear girl!" said Victorine, whose tears were again flowing. "You saw that she kissed them, and nobody had yet thought of that, not even the poor young Prince's mother. Ah! the dear little heart, she surely thought of her Attilio."

However, as Celia turned to descend from the platform she perceived La Pierina, whose figure was still thrown back in an attitude of mute and dolorous adoration. And she recognised the girl and melted with pity on seeing such a fit of sobbing come over her that her whole body, her goddess-like hips and bosom, shook as with frightful anguish. That agony of love quite upset the little Princess, and she could be heard murmuring in a tone of infinite compassion, "Calm yourself, my dear, calm yourself. Be reasonable, my dear, I beg you."

Then as La Pierina, thunderstruck at thus being pitied and succoured, began to sob yet more loudly so as to create quite a stir in the room, Celia raised her and held her up with both arms, for fear lest she should fall again. And she led her away in a sisterly clasp, like a sister of affection and despair, lavishing the most gentle, consoling words upon her as they went.

"Follow them, go and see what becomes of them," Victorine said to Pierre. "I do not want to stir from here, it quiets me to watch over my two poor children."

A Capuchin was just beginning a fresh mass at the improvised altar, and the low Latin psalmody went on again, while in the adjoining ante-chamber, where another mass was being celebrated, a bell was heard tinkling for the elevation of the host. The perfume of the flowers was becoming more violent and oppressive amidst the motionless and mournful atmosphere of the spacious throne-room. The four servants standing at the head of the bed, as for a gala reception, did not stir, and the procession of visitors ever continued, men and women entering in silence, suffocating there for a moment, and then withdrawing, carrying away with them the never-to-be-forgotten vision of the two tragic lovers sleeping their eternal sleep.

Pierre joined Celia and La Pierina in the anticamera nobile, where stood Don Vigilio. The few seats belonging to the throne-room had there been placed in a corner, and the little Princess had just compelled the work-girl to sit down in an arm-chair, in order that she might recover self-possession. Celia was in ecstasy before her, enraptured at finding her so beautiful, more beautiful than any other, as she said. Then she spoke of the two dead ones, who also had seemed to her very beautiful, endowed with an extraordinary beauty, at once superb and sweet; and despite all her tears, she still remained in a transport of admiration. On speaking with La Pierina, Pierre learnt that her brother Tito was at the hospital in great danger from the effects of a terrible knife thrust dealt him in the side; and since the beginning of the winter, said the girl, the misery in the district of the castle fields had become frightful. It was a source of great suffering to every one, and those whom death carried off had reason to rejoice.

Celia, however, with a gesture of invincible hopefulness, brushed all idea of suffering, even of death, aside. "No, no, we must live," she said. "And beauty is sufficient for life. Come, my dear, do not remain here, do not weep any more; live for the delight of being beautiful."

Then she led La Pierina away, and Pierre remained seated in one of the arm-chairs, overcome by such sorrow and weariness that he would have liked to remain there for ever. Don Vigilio was still bowing to each fresh visitor that arrived. A severe attack of fever had come on him during the night, and he was shivering from it, with his face very yellow, and his eyes ablaze and haggard. He constantly glanced at Pierre, as if anxious to speak to him, but his dread lest he should be seen by Abbe Paparelli, who stood in the next ante-room, the door of which was wide open, doubtless restrained him, for he did not cease to watch the train-bearer. At last the latter was compelled to absent himself for a moment, and the secretary thereupon approached the young Frenchman.

"You saw his Holiness last night," he said; and as Pierre gazed at him in stupefaction he added: "Oh! everything gets known, I told you so before. Well, and you purely and simply withdrew your book, did you not?" The young priest's increasing stupor was sufficient answer, and without leaving him time to reply, Don Vigilio went on: "I suspected it, but I wished to make certain. Ah! that's just the way they work! Do you believe me now, have you realised that they stifle those whom they don't poison?"

He was no doubt referring to the Jesuits. However, after glancing into the adjoining room to make sure that Abbe Paparelli had not returned thither, he resumed: "And what has Monsignor Nani just told you?"

"But I have not yet seen Monsignor Nani," was Pierre's reply.

"Oh! I thought you had. He passed through before you arrived. If you did not see him in the throne-room he must have gone to pay his respects to Donna Serafina and his Eminence. However, he will certainly pass this way again; you will see him by and by." Then with the bitterness of one who was weak, ever terror-smitten and vanquished, Don Vigilio added: "I told you that you would end by doing what Monsignor Nani desired."

With these words, fancying that he heard the light footfall of Abbe Paparelli, he hastily returned to his place and bowed to two old ladies who just then walked in. And Pierre, still seated, overcome, his eyes wearily closing, at last saw the figure of Nani arise before him in all its reality so typical of sovereign intelligence and address. He remembered what Don Vigilio, on the famous night of his revelations, had told him of this man who was far too shrewd to have labelled himself, so to say, with an unpopular robe, and who, withal, was a charming prelate with thorough knowledge of the world, acquired by long experience at different nunciatures and at the Holy Office, mixed up in everything, informed with regard to everything, one of the heads, one of the chief minds in fact of that modern black army, which by dint of Opportunism hopes to bring this century back to the Church. And all at once, full enlightenment fell on Pierre, he realised by what supple, clever strategy that man had led him to the act which he desired of him, the pure and simple withdrawal of his book, accomplished with every appearance of free will. First there had been great annoyance on Nani's part on learning that the book was being prosecuted, for he feared lest its excitable author might be prompted to some dangerous revolt; then plans had at once been formed, information had been collected concerning this young priest who seemed so capable of schism, he had been urged to come to Rome, invited to stay in an ancient mansion whose very walls would chill and enlighten him. And afterwards had come the ever recurring obstacles, the system of prolonging his sojourn in Rome by preventing him from seeing the Pope, but promising him the much-desired interview when the proper time should come, that is after he had been sent hither and thither and brought into collision with one and all. And finally, when every one and everything had shaken, wearied, and disgusted him, and he was restored once more to his old doubts, there had come the audience for which he had undergone all this preparation, that visit to the Pope which was destined to shatter whatever remained to him of his dream. Pierre could picture Nani smiling at him and speaking to him, declaring that the repeated delays were a favour of Providence, which would enable him to visit Rome, study and understand things, reflect, and avoid blunders. How delicate and how profound had been the prelate's diplomacy in thus crushing his feelings beneath his reason, appealing to his intelligence to suppress his work without any scandalous struggle as soon as his knowledge of the real Rome should have shown him how supremely ridiculous it was to dream of a new one!

At that moment Pierre perceived Nani in person just coming from the throne-room, and did not feel the irritation and rancour which he had anticipated. On the contrary he was glad when the prelate, in his turn seeing him, drew near and held out his hand. Nani, however, did not wear his wonted smile, but looked very grave, quite grief-stricken. "Ah! my dear son," he said, "what a frightful catastrophe! I have just left his Eminence, he is in tears. It is horrible, horrible!"

He seated himself on one of the chairs, inviting the young priest, who had risen, to do the same; and for a moment he remained silent, weary with emotion no doubt, and needing a brief rest to free himself of the weight of thoughts which visibly darkened his usually bright face. Then, with a gesture, he strove to dismiss that gloom, and recover his amiable cordiality. "Well, my dear son," he began, "you saw his Holiness?"

"Yes, Monseigneur, yesterday evening; and I thank you for your great kindness in satisfying my desire."

Nani looked at him fixedly, and his invincible smile again returned to his lips. "You thank me.... I can well see that you behaved sensibly and laid your full submission at his Holiness's feet. I was certain of it, I did not expect less of your fine intelligence. But, all the same, you render me very happy, for I am delighted to find that I was not mistaken concerning you." And then, setting aside his reserve, the prelate went on: "I never discussed things with you. What would have been the good of it, since facts were there to convince you? And now that you have withdrawn your book a discussion would be still more futile. However, just reflect that if it were possible for you to bring the Church back to her early period, to that Christian community which you have sketched so delightfully, she could only again follow the same evolutions as those in which God the first time guided her; so that, at the end of a similar number of centuries, she would find herself exactly in the position which she occupies to-day. No, what God has done has been well done, the Church such as she is must govern the world, such as it is; it is for her alone to know how she will end by firmly establishing her reign here below. And this is why your attack upon the temporal power was an unpardonable fault, a crime even, for by dispossessing the papacy of her domains you hand her over to the mercy of the nations. Your new religion is but the final downfall of all religion, moral anarchy, the liberty of schism, in a word, the destruction of the divine edifice, that ancient Catholicism which has shown such prodigious wisdom and solidity, which has sufficed for the salvation of mankind till now, and will alone be able to save it to-morrow and always."

Pierre felt that Nani was sincere, pious even, and really unshakable in his faith, loving the Church like a grateful son, and convinced that she was the only social organisation which could render mankind happy. And if he were bent on governing the world, it was doubtless for the pleasure of governing, but also in the conviction that no one could do so better than himself.

"Oh! certainly," said he, "methods are open to discussion. I desire them to be as affable and humane as possible, as conciliatory as can be with this present century, which seems to be escaping us, precisely because there is a misunderstanding between us. But we shall bring it back, I am sure of it. And that is why, my dear son, I am so pleased to see you return to the fold, thinking as we think, and ready to battle on our side, is that not so?"

In Nani's words the young priest once more found the arguments of Leo XIII. Desiring to avoid a direct reply, for although he now felt no anger the wrenching away of his dream had left him a smarting wound, he bowed, and replied slowly in order to conceal the bitter tremble of his voice: "I repeat, Monseigneur, that I deeply thank you for having amputated my vain illusions with the skill of an accomplished surgeon. A little later, when I shall have ceased to suffer, I shall think of you with eternal gratitude."

Monsignor Nani still looked at him with a smile. He fully understood that this young priest would remain on one side, that as an element of strength he was lost to the Church. What would he do now? Something foolish no doubt. However, the prelate had to content himself with having helped him to repair his first folly; he could not foresee the future. And he gracefully waved his hand as if to say that sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.

"Will you allow me to conclude, my dear son?" he at last exclaimed. "Be sensible, your happiness as a priest and a man lies in humility. You will be terribly unhappy if you use the great intelligence which God has given you against Him."

Then with another gesture he dismissed this affair, which was all over, and with which he need busy himself no more. And thereupon the other affair came back to make him gloomy, that other affair which also was drawing to a close, but so tragically, with those two poor children slumbering in the adjoining room. "Ah!" he resumed, "that poor Princess and that poor Cardinal quite upset my heart! Never did catastrophe fall so cruelly on a house. No, no, it is indeed too much, misfortune goes too far—it revolts one's soul!"

Just as he finished a sound of voices came from the second ante-room, and Pierre was thunderstruck to see Cardinal Sanguinetti go by, escorted with the greatest obsequiousness by Abbe Paparelli.

"If your most Reverend Eminence will have the extreme kindness to follow me," the train-bearer was saying, "I will conduct your most Reverend Eminence myself."

"Yes," replied Sanguinetti, "I arrived yesterday evening from Frascati, and when I heard the sad news, I at once desired to express my sorrow and offer consolation."

"Your Eminence will perhaps condescend to remain for a moment near the bodies. I will afterwards escort your Eminence to the private apartments."

"Yes, by all means. I desire every one to know how greatly I participate in the sorrow which has fallen on this illustrious house."

Then Sanguinetti entered the throne-room, leaving Pierre quite aghast at his quiet audacity. The young priest certainly did not accuse him of direct complicity with Santobono, he did not even dare to measure how far his moral complicity might go. But on seeing him pass by like that, his brow so lofty, his speech so clear, he had suddenly felt convinced that he knew the truth. How or through whom, he could not have told; but doubtless crimes become known in those shady spheres by those whose interest it is to know of them. And Pierre remained quite chilled by the haughty fashion in which that man presented himself, perhaps to stifle suspicion and certainly to accomplish an act of good policy by giving his rival a public mark of esteem and affection.

"The Cardinal! Here!" Pierre murmured despite himself.

Nani, who followed the young man's thoughts in his childish eyes, in which all could be read, pretended to mistake the sense of his exclamation. "Yes," said he, "I learnt that the Cardinal returned to Rome yesterday evening. He did not wish to remain away any longer; the Holy Father being so much better that he might perhaps have need of him."

Although these words were spoken with an air of perfect innocence, Pierre was not for a moment deceived by them. And having in his turn glanced at the prelate, he was convinced that the latter also knew the truth. Then, all at once, the whole affair appeared to him in its intricacy, in the ferocity which fate had imparted to it. Nani, an old intimate of the Palazzo Boccanera, was not heartless, he had surely loved Benedetta with affection, charmed by so much grace and beauty. One could thus explain the victorious manner in which he had at last caused her marriage to be annulled. But if Don Vigilio were to be believed, that divorce, obtained by pecuniary outlay, and under pressure of the most notorious influences, was simply a scandal which he, Nani, had in the first instance spun out, and then precipitated towards a resounding finish with the sole object of discrediting the Cardinal and destroying his chances of the tiara on the eve of the Conclave which everybody thought imminent. It seemed certain, too, that the Cardinal, uncompromising as he was, could not be the candidate of Nani, who was so desirous of universal agreement, and so the latter's long labour in that house, whilst conducing to the happiness of the Contessina, had been designed to frustrate Donna Serafina and Cardinal Pio in their burning ambition, that third triumphant elevation to the papacy which they sought to secure for their ancient family. However, if Nani had always desired to baulk this ambition, and had even at one moment placed his hopes in Sanguinetti and fought for him, he had never imagined that Boccanera's foes would go to the point of crime, to such an abomination as poison which missed its mark and killed the innocent. No, no, as he himself said, that was too much, and made one's soul rebel. He employed more gentle weapons; such brutality filled him with indignation; and his face, so pinky and carefully tended, still wore the grave expression of his revolt in presence of the tearful Cardinal and those poor lovers stricken in his stead.

Believing that Sanguinetti was still the prelate's secret candidate, Pierre was worried to know how far their moral complicity in this baleful affair might go. So he resumed the conversation by saying: "It is asserted that his Holiness is on bad terms with his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti. Of course the reigning pope cannot look on the future pope with a very kindly eye."

At this, Nani for a moment became quite gay in all frankness. "Oh," said he, "the Cardinal has quarrelled and made things up with the Vatican three or four times already. And, in any event, the Holy Father has no motive for posthumous jealousy; he knows very well that he can give his Eminence a good greeting." Then, regretting that he had thus expressed a certainty, he added: "I am joking, his Eminence is altogether worthy of the high fortune which perhaps awaits him."

Pierre knew what to think however; Sanguinetti was certainly Nani's candidate no longer. It was doubtless considered that he had used himself up too much by his impatient ambition, and was too dangerous by reason of the equivocal alliances which in his feverishness he had concluded with every party, even that of patriotic young Italy. And thus the situation became clearer. Cardinals Sanguinetti and Boccanera devoured and suppressed one another; the first, ever intriguing, accepting every compromise, dreaming of winning Rome back by electoral methods; and the other, erect and motionless in his stern maintenance of the past, excommunicating the century, and awaiting from God alone the miracle which would save the Church. And, indeed, why not leave the two theories, thus placed face to face, to destroy one another, including all the extreme, disquieting views which they respectively embodied? If Boccanera had escaped the poison, he had none the less become an impossible candidate, killed by all the stories which had set Rome buzzing; while if Sanguinetti could say that he was rid of a rival, he had at the same time dealt a mortal blow to his own candidature, by displaying such passion for power, and such unscrupulousness with regard to the methods he employed, as to be a danger for every one. Monsignor Nani was visibly delighted with this result; neither candidate was left, it was like the legendary story of the two wolves who fought and devoured one another so completely that nothing of either of them was found left, not even their tails! And in the depths of the prelate's pale eyes, in the whole of his discreet person, there remained nothing but redoubtable mystery: the mystery of the yet unknown, but definitively selected candidate who would be patronised by the all-powerful army of which he was one of the most skilful leaders. A man like him always had a solution ready. Who, then, who would be the next pope?

However, he now rose and cordially took leave of the young priest. "I doubt if I shall see you again, my dear son," he said; "I wish you a good journey."

Still he did not go off, but continued to look at Pierre with his penetrating eyes, and finally made him sit down again and did the same himself. "I feel sure," he said, "that you will go to pay your respects to Cardinal Bergerot as soon as you have returned to France. Kindly tell him that I respectfully desired to be reminded to him. I knew him a little at the time when he came here for his hat. He is one of the great luminaries of the French clergy. Ah! a man of such intelligence would only work for a good understanding in our holy Church. Unfortunately I fear that race and environment have instilled prejudices into him, for he does not always help us."

Pierre, who was surprised to hear Nani speak of the Cardinal for the first time at this moment of farewell, listened with curiosity. Then in all frankness he replied: "Yes, his Eminence has very decided ideas about our old Church of France. For instance, he professes perfect horror of the Jesuits."

With a light exclamation Nani stopped the young man. And he wore the most sincerely, frankly astonished air that could be imagined. "What! horror of the Jesuits! In what way can the Jesuits disquiet him? The Jesuits, there are none, that's all over! Have you seen any in Rome? Have they troubled you in any way, those poor Jesuits who haven't even a stone of their own left here on which to lay their heads? No, no, that bogey mustn't be brought up again, it's childish."

Pierre in his turn looked at him, marvelling at his perfect ease, his quiet courage in dealing with this burning subject. He did not avert his eyes, but displayed an open face like a book of truth. "Ah!" he continued, "if by Jesuits you mean the sensible priests who, instead of entering into sterile and dangerous struggles with modern society, seek by human methods to bring it back to the Church, why, then of course we are all of us more or less Jesuits, for it would be madness not to take into account the times in which one lives. And besides, I won't haggle over words; they are of no consequence! Jesuits, well, yes, if you like, Jesuits!" He was again smiling with that shrewd smile of his in which there was so much raillery and so much intelligence. "Well, when you see Cardinal Bergerot tell him that it is unreasonable to track the Jesuits and treat them as enemies of the nation. The contrary is the truth. The Jesuits are for France, because they are for wealth, strength, and courage. France is the only great Catholic country which has yet remained erect and sovereign, the only one on which the papacy can some day lean. Thus the Holy Father, after momentarily dreaming of obtaining support from victorious Germany, has allied himself with France, the vanquished, because he has understood that apart from France there can be no salvation for the Church. And in this he has only followed the policy of the Jesuits, those frightful Jesuits, whom your Parisians execrate. And tell Cardinal Bergerot also that it would be grand of him to work for pacification by making people understand how wrong it is for your Republic to help the Holy Father so little in his conciliatory efforts. It pretends to regard him as an element in the world's affairs that may be neglected; and that is dangerous, for although he may seem to have no political means of action he remains an immense moral force, and can at any moment raise consciences in rebellion and provoke a religious agitation of the most far-reaching consequences. It is still he who disposes of the nations, since he disposes of their souls, and the Republic acts most inconsiderately, from the standpoint of its own interests, in showing that it no longer even suspects it. And tell the Cardinal too, that it is really pitiful to see in what a wretched way your Republic selects its bishops, as though it intentionally desired to weaken its episcopacy. Leaving out a few fortunate exceptions, your bishops are men of small brains, and as a result your cardinals, likewise mere mediocrities, have no influence, play no part here in Rome. Ah! what a sorry figure you Frenchmen will cut at the next Conclave! And so why do you show such blind and foolish hatred of those Jesuits, who, politically, are your friends? Why don't you employ their intelligent zeal, which is ready to serve you, so that you may assure yourselves the help of the next, the coming pope? It is necessary for you that he should be on your side, that he should continue the work of Leo XIII, which is so badly judged and so much opposed, but which cares little for the petty results of to-day, since its purpose lies in the future, in the union of all the nations under their holy mother the Church. Tell Cardinal Bergerot, tell him plainly that he ought to be with us, that he ought to work for his country by working for us. The coming pope, why the whole question lies in that, and woe to France if in him she does not find a continuator of Leo XIII!"

Nani had again risen, and this time he was going off. Never before had he unbosomed himself at such length. But most assuredly he had only said what he desired to say, for a purpose that he alone knew of, and in a firm, gentle, and deliberate voice by which one could tell that each word had been weighed and determined beforehand. "Farewell, my dear son," he said, "and once again think over all you have seen and heard in Rome. Be as sensible as you can, and do not spoil your life."

Pierre bowed, and pressed the small, plump, supple hand which the prelate offered him. "Monseigneur," he replied, "I again thank you for all your kindness; you may be sure that I shall forget nothing of my journey."

Then he watched Nani as he went off, with a light and conquering step as if marching to all the victories of the future. No, no, he, Pierre, would forget nothing of his journey! He well knew that union of all the nations under their holy mother the Church, that temporal bondage in which the law of Christ would become the dictatorship of Augustus, master of the world! And as for those Jesuits, he had no doubt that they did love France, the eldest daughter of the Church, and the only daughter that could yet help her mother to reconquer universal sovereignty, but they loved her even as the black swarms of locusts love the harvests which they swoop upon and devour. Infinite sadness had returned to the young man's heart as he dimly realised that in that sorely-stricken mansion, in all that mourning and downfall, it was they, they again, who must have been the artisans of grief and disaster.

As this thought came to him he turned round and perceived Don Vigilio leaning against the credence in front of the large portrait of the Cardinal. Holding his hands to his face as if he desired to annihilate himself, the secretary was shivering in every limb as much with fear as with fever. At a moment when no fresh visitors were arriving he had succumbed to an attack of terrified despair.

"Mon Dieu! What is the matter with you?" asked Pierre stepping forward, "are you ill, can I help you?"

But Don Vigilio, suffocating and still hiding his face, could only gasp between his close-pressed hands "Ah! Paparelli, Paparelli!"

"What is it? What has he done to you?" asked the other astonished.

Then the secretary disclosed his face, and again yielded to his quivering desire to confide in some one. "Eh? what he has done to me? Can't you feel anything, can't you see anything then? Didn't you notice the manner in which he took possession of Cardinal Sanguinetti so as to conduct him to his Eminence? To impose that suspected, hateful rival on his Eminence at such a moment as this, what insolent audacity! And a few minutes previously did you notice with what wicked cunning he bowed out an old lady, a very old family friend, who only desired to kiss his Eminence's hand and show a little real affection which would have made his Eminence so happy! Ah! I tell you that he's the master here, he opens or closes the door as he pleases, and holds us all between his fingers like a pinch of dust which one throws to the wind!"

Pierre became anxious, seeing how yellow and feverish Don Vigilio was: "Come, come, my dear fellow," he said, "you are exaggerating!"

"Exaggerating? Do you know what happened last night, what I myself unwillingly witnessed? No, you don't know it; well, I will tell you."

Thereupon he related that Donna Serafina, on returning home on the previous day to face the terrible catastrophe awaiting her, had already been overcome by the bad news which she had learnt when calling on the Cardinal Secretary and various prelates of her acquaintance. She had then acquired a certainty that her brother's position was becoming extremely bad, for he had made so many fresh enemies among his colleagues of the Sacred College, that his election to the pontifical throne, which a year previously had seemed probable, now appeared an impossibility. Thus, all at once, the dream of her life collapsed, the ambition which she had so long nourished lay in dust at her feet. On despairingly seeking the why and wherefore of this change, she had been told of all sorts of blunders committed by the Cardinal, acts of rough sternness, unseasonable manifestations of opinion, inconsiderate words or actions which had sufficed to wound people, in fact such provoking demeanour that one might have thought it adopted with the express intention of spoiling everything. And the worst was that in each of the blunders she had recognised errors of judgment which she herself had blamed, but which her brother had obstinately insisted on perpetrating under the unacknowledged influence of Abbe Paparelli, that humble and insignificant train-bearer, in whom she detected a baneful and powerful adviser who destroyed her own vigilant and devoted influence. And so, in spite of the mourning in which the house was plunged, she did not wish to delay the punishment of the traitor, particularly as his old friendship with that terrible Santobono, and the story of that basket of figs which had passed from the hands of the one to those of the other, chilled her blood with a suspicion which she even recoiled from elucidating. However, at the first words she spoke, directly she made a formal request that the traitor should be immediately turned out of the house, she was confronted by invincible resistance on her brother's part. He would not listen to her, but flew into one of those hurricane-like passions which swept everything away, reproaching her for laying blame on so modest, pious, and saintly a man, and accusing her of playing into the hands of his enemies, who, after killing Monsignor Gallo, were seeking to poison his sole remaining affection for that poor, insignificant priest. He treated all the stories he was told as abominable inventions, and swore that he would keep the train-bearer in his service if only to show his disdain for calumny. And she was thereupon obliged to hold her peace.

However, Don Vigilio's shuddering fit had again come back; he carried his hands to his face stammering: "Ah! Paparelli, Paparelli!" And muttered invectives followed: the train-bearer was an artful hypocrite who feigned modesty and humility, a vile spy appointed to pry into everything, listen to everything, and pervert everything that went on in the palace; he was a loathsome, destructive insect, feeding on the most noble prey, devouring the lion's mane, a Jesuit—the Jesuit who is at once lackey and tyrant, in all his base horror as he accomplishes the work of vermin.

"Calm yourself, calm yourself," repeated Pierre, who whilst allowing for foolish exaggeration on the secretary's part could not help shivering at thought of all the threatening things which he himself could divine astir in the gloom.

However, since Don Vigilio had so narrowly escaped eating those horrible figs, his fright was such that nothing could calm it. Even when he was alone at night, in bed, with his door locked and bolted, sudden terror fell on him and made him hide his head under the sheet and vent stifled cries as if he thought that men were coming through the wall to strangle him. In a faint, breathless voice, as if just emerging from a struggle, he now resumed: "I told you what would happen on the evening when we had a talk together in your room. Although all the doors were securely shut, I did wrong to speak of them to you, I did wrong to ease my heart by telling you all that they were capable of. I was sure they would learn it, and you see they did learn it, since they tried to kill me.... Why it's even wrong of me to tell you this, for it will reach their ears and they won't miss me the next time. Ah! it's all over, I'm as good as dead; this house which I thought so safe will be my tomb."

Pierre began to feel deep compassion for this ailing man, whose feverish brain was haunted by nightmares, and whose life was being finally wrecked by the anguish of persecution mania. "But you must run away in that case!" he said. "Don't stop here; come to France."

Don Vigilio looked at him, momentarily calmed by surprise. "Run away, why? Go to France? Why, they are there! No matter where I might go, they would be there. They are everywhere, I should always be surrounded by them! No, no, I prefer to stay here and would rather die at once if his Eminence can no longer defend me." With an expression of ardent entreaty in which a last gleam of hope tried to assert itself, he raised his eyes to the large painting in which the Cardinal stood forth resplendent in his cassock of red moire; but his attack came back again and overwhelmed him with increased intensity of fever. "Leave me, I beg you, leave me," he gasped. "Don't make me talk any more. Ah! Paparelli, Paparelli! If he should come back and see us and hear me speak.... Oh! I'll never say anything again. I'll tie up my tongue, I'll cut it off. Leave me, you are killing me, I tell you, he'll be coming back and that will mean my death. Go away, oh! for mercy's sake, go away!"

Thereupon Don Vigilio turned towards the wall as if to flatten his face against it, and immure his lips in tomb-like silence; and Pierre resolved to leave him to himself, fearing lest he should provoke a yet more serious attack if he went on endeavouring to succour him.

On returning to the throne-room the young priest again found himself amidst all the frightful mourning. Mass was following mass; without cessation murmured prayers entreated the divine mercy to receive the two dear departed souls with loving kindness. And amidst the dying perfume of the fading roses, in front of the pale stars of the lighted candles, Pierre thought of that supreme downfall of the Boccaneras. Dario was the last of the name, and one could well understand that the Cardinal, whose only sin was family pride, should have loved that one remaining scion by whom alone the old stock might yet blossom afresh. And indeed, if he and Donna Serafina had desired the divorce, and then the marriage of the cousins, it had been less with the view of putting an end to scandal than with the hope of seeing a new line of Boccaneras spring up. But the lovers were dead, and the last remains of a long series of dazzling princes of sword and of gown lay there on that bed, soon to rot in the grave. It was all over; that old maid and that aged Cardinal could leave no posterity. They remained face to face like two withered oaks, sole remnants of a vanished forest, and their fall would soon leave the plain quite clear. And how terrible the grief of surviving in impotence, what anguish to have to tell oneself that one is the end of everything, that with oneself all life, all hope for the morrow will depart! Amidst the murmur of the prayers, the dying perfume of the roses, the pale gleams of the two candies, Pierre realised what a downfall was that bereavement, how heavy was the gravestone which fell for ever on an extinct house, a vanished world.

He well understood that as one of the familiars of the mansion he must pay his respects to Donna Serafina and the Cardinal, and he at once sought admission to the neighbouring room where the Princess was receiving her friends. He found her robed in black, very slim and very erect in her arm-chair, whence she rose with slow dignity to respond to the bow of each person that entered. She listened to the condolences but answered never a word, overcoming her physical pain by rigidity of bearing. Pierre, who had learnt to know her, could divine, however, by the hollowness of her cheeks, the emptiness of her eyes, and the bitter twinge of her mouth, how frightful was the collapse within her. Not only was her race ended, but her brother would never be pope, never secure the elevation which she had so long fancied she was winning for him by dint of devotion, dint of feminine renunciation, giving brain and heart, care and money, foregoing even wifehood and motherhood, spoiling her whole life, in order to realise that dream. And amidst all the ruin of hope, it was perhaps the nonfulfilment of that ambition which most made her heart bleed. She rose for the young priest, her guest, as she rose for the other persons who presented themselves; but she contrived to introduce shades of meaning into the manner in which she quitted her chair, and Pierre fully realised that he had remained in her eyes a mere petty French priest, an insignificant domestic of the Divinity who had not known how to acquire even the title of prelate. When she had again seated herself after acknowledging his compliment with a slight inclination of the head, he remained for a moment standing, out of politeness. Not a word, not a sound disturbed the mournful quiescence of the room, for although there were four or five lady visitors seated there they remained motionless and silent as with grief. Pierre was most struck, however, by the sight of Cardinal Sarno, who was lying back in an arm-chair with his eyes closed. The poor puny lopsided old man had lingered there forgetfully after expressing his condolences, and, overcome by the heavy silence and close atmosphere, had just fallen asleep. And everybody respected his slumber. Was he dreaming as he dozed of that map of Christendom which he carried behind his low obtuse-looking brow? Was he continuing in dreamland his terrible work of conquest, that task of subjecting and governing the earth which he directed from his dark room at the Propaganda? The ladies glanced at him affectionately and deferentially; he was gently scolded at times for over-working himself, the sleepiness which nowadays frequently overtook him in all sorts of places being attributed to excess of genius and zeal. And of this all-powerful Eminence Pierre was destined to carry off only this last impression: an exhausted old man, resting amidst the emotion of a mourning-gathering, sleeping there like a candid child, without any one knowing whether this were due to the approach of senile imbecility, or to the fatigues of a night spent in organising the reign of God over some distant continent.

Two ladies went off and three more arrived. Donna Serafina rose, bowed, and then reseated herself, reverting to her rigid attitude, her bust erect, her face stern and full of despair. Cardinal Sarno was still asleep. Then Pierre felt as if he would stifle, a kind of vertigo came on him, and his heart beat violently. So he bowed and withdrew: and on passing through the dining-room on his way to the little study where Cardinal Boccanera received his visitors, he found himself in the presence of Paparelli who was jealously guarding the door. When the train-bearer had sniffed at the young man, he seemed to realise that he could not refuse him admittance. Moreover, as this intruder was going away the very next day, defeated and covered with shame, there was nothing to be feared from him.

"You wish to see his Eminence?" said Paparelli. "Good, good. By and by, wait." And opining that Pierre was too near the door, he pushed him back to the other end of the room, for fear no doubt lest he should overhear anything. "His Eminence is still engaged with his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti. Wait, wait there!"

Sanguinetti indeed had made a point of kneeling for a long time in front of the bodies in the throne-room, and had then spun out his visit to Donna Serafina in order to mark how largely he shared the family sorrow. And for more than ten minutes now he had been closeted with Cardinal Boccanera, nothing but an occasional murmur of their voices being heard through the closed door.

Pierre, however, on finding Paparelli there, was again haunted by all that Don Vigilio had told him. He looked at the train-bearer, so fat and short, puffed out with bad fat in his dirty cassock, his face flabby and wrinkled, and his whole person at forty years of age suggestive of that of a very old maid: and he felt astonished. How was it that Cardinal Boccanera, that superb prince who carried his head so high, and who was so supremely proud of his name, had allowed himself to be captured and swayed by such a frightful creature reeking of baseness and abomination? Was it not the man's very physical degradation and profound humility that had struck him, disturbed him, and finally fascinated him, as wondrous gifts conducing to salvation, which he himself lacked? Paparelli's person and disposition were like blows dealt to his own handsome presence and his own pride. He, who could not be so deformed, he who could not vanquish his passion for glory, must, by an effort of faith, have grown jealous of that man who was so extremely ugly and so extremely insignificant, he must have come to admire him as a superior force of penitence and human abasement which threw the portals of heaven wide open. Who can ever tell what ascendency is exercised by the monster over the hero; by the horrid-looking saint covered with vermin over the powerful of this world in their terror at having to endure everlasting flames in payment of their terrestrial joys? And 'twas indeed the lion devoured by the insect, vast strength and splendour destroyed by the invisible. Ah! to have that fine soul which was so certain of paradise, which for its welfare was enclosed in such a disgusting body, to possess the happy humility of that wide intelligence, that remarkable theologian, who scourged himself with rods each morning on rising, and was content to be the lowest of servants.

Standing there a heap of livid fat, Paparelli on his side watched Pierre with his little grey eyes blinking amidst the myriad wrinkles of his face. And the young priest began to feel uneasy, wondering what their Eminences could be saying to one another, shut up together like that for so long a time. And what an interview it must be if Boccanera suspected Sanguinetti of counting Santobono among his clients. What serene audacity it was on Sanguinetti's part to have dared to present himself in that house, and what strength of soul there must be on Boccanera's part, what empire over himself, to prevent all scandal by remaining silent and accepting the visit as a simple mark of esteem and affection! What could they be saying to one another, however? How interesting it would have been to have seen them face to face, and have heard them exchange the diplomatic phrases suited to such an interview, whilst their souls were raging with furious hatred!

All at once the door opened and Cardinal Sanguinetti appeared with calm face, no ruddier than usual, indeed a trifle paler, and retaining the fitting measure of sorrow which he had thought it right to assume. His restless eyes alone revealed his delight at being rid of a difficult task. And he was going off, all hope, in the conviction that he was the only eligible candidate to the papacy that remained.

Abbe Paparelli had darted forward: "If your Eminence will kindly follow me—I will escort your Eminence to the door." Then, turning towards Pierre, he added: "You may go in now."

Pierre watched them walk away, the one so humble behind the other, who was so triumphant. Then he entered the little work-room, furnished simply with a table and three chairs, and in the centre of it he at once perceived Cardinal Boccanera still standing in the lofty, noble attitude which he had assumed to take leave of Sanguinetti, his hated rival to the pontifical throne. And, visibly, Boccanera also believed himself the only possible pope, the one whom the coming Conclave would elect.

However, when the door had been closed, and the Cardinal beheld that young priest, his guest, who had witnessed the death of those two dear children lying in the adjoining room, he was again mastered by emotion, an unexpected attack of weakness in which all his energy collapsed. His human feelings were taking their revenge now that his rival was no longer there to see him. He staggered like an old tree smitten with the axe, and sank upon a chair, stifling with sobs.

And as Pierre, according to usage, was about to stoop and kiss his ring, he raised him and at once made him sit down, stammering in a halting voice: "No, no, my dear son! Seat yourself there, wait—Excuse me, leave me to myself for a moment, my heart is bursting."

He sobbed with his hands to his face, unable to master himself, unable to drive back his grief with those yet vigorous fingers which were pressed to his cheeks and temples.

Tears came into Pierre's eyes, for he also lived through all that woe afresh, and was much upset by the weeping of that tall old man, that saint and prince, usually so haughty, so fully master of himself, but now only a poor, suffering, agonising man, as weak and as lost as a child. However, although the young priest was likewise stifling with grief, he desired to present his condolences, and sought for kindly words by which he might soothe the other's despair. "I beg your Eminence to believe in my profound grief," he said. "I have been overwhelmed with kindness here, and desired at once to tell your Eminence how much that irreparable loss—"

But with a brave gesture the Cardinal silenced him. "No, no, say nothing, for mercy's sake say nothing!"

And silence reigned while he continued weeping, shaken by the struggle he was waging, his efforts to regain sufficient strength to overcome himself. At last he mastered his quiver and slowly uncovered his face, which had again become calm, like that of a believer strong in his faith, and submissive to the will of God. In refusing a miracle, in dealing so hard a blow to that house, God had doubtless had His reasons, and he, the Cardinal, one of God's ministers, one of the high dignitaries of His terrestrial court, was in duty bound to bow to it. The silence lasted for another moment, and then, in a voice which he managed to render natural and cordial, Boccanera said: "You are leaving us, you are going back to France to-morrow, are you not, my dear son?"

"Yes, I shall have the honour to take leave of your Eminence to-morrow, again thanking your Eminence for your inexhaustible kindness."

"And you have learnt that the Congregation of the Index has condemned your book, as was inevitable?"

"Yes, I obtained the signal favour of being received by his Holiness, and in his presence made my submission and reprobated my book."

The Cardinal's moist eyes again began to sparkle. "Ah! you did that, ah! you did well, my dear son," he said. "It was only your strict duty as a priest, but there are so many nowadays who do not even do their duty! As a member of the Congregation I kept the promise I gave you to read your book, particularly the incriminated pages. And if I afterwards remained neutral, to such a point even as to miss the sitting in which judgment was pronounced, it was only to please my poor, dear niece, who was so fond of you, and who pleaded your cause to me."

Tears were coming into his eyes again, and he paused, feeling that he would once more be overcome if he evoked the memory of that adored and lamented Benedetta. And so it was with a pugnacious bitterness that he resumed: "But what an execrable book it was, my dear son, allow me to tell you so. You told me that you had shown respect for dogma, and I still wonder what aberration can have come over you that you should have been so blind to all consciousness of your offences. Respect for dogma—good Lord! when the entire work is the negation of our holy religion! Did you not realise that by asking for a new religion you absolutely condemned the old one, the only true one, the only good one, the only one that can be eternal? And that sufficed to make your book the most deadly of poisons, one of those infamous books which in former times were burnt by the hangman, and which one is nowadays compelled to leave in circulation after interdicting them and thereby designating them to evil curiosity, which explains the contagious rottenness of the century. Ah! I well recognised there some of the ideas of our distinguished and poetical relative, that dear Viscount Philibert de la Choue. A man of letters, yes! a man of letters! Literature, mere literature! I beg God to forgive him, for he most surely does not know what he is doing, or whither he is going with his elegiac Christianity for talkative working men and young persons of either sex, to whom scientific notions have given vagueness of soul. And I only feel angry with his Eminence Cardinal Bergerot, for he at any rate knows what he does, and does as he pleases. No, say nothing, do not defend him. He personifies Revolution in the Church, and is against God."

Although Pierre had resolved that he would not reply or argue, he had allowed a gesture of protest to escape him on hearing this furious attack upon the man whom he most respected in the whole world. However, he yielded to Cardinal Boccanera's injunction and again bowed.

"I cannot sufficiently express my horror," the Cardinal roughly continued; "yes, my horror for all that hollow dream of a new religion! That appeal to the most hideous passions which stir up the poor against the rich, by promising them I know not what division of wealth, what community of possession which is nowadays impossible! That base flattery shown to the lower orders to whom equality and justice are promised but never given, for these can come from God alone, it is only He who can finally make them reign on the day appointed by His almighty power! And there is even that interested charity which people abuse of to rail against Heaven itself and accuse it of iniquity and indifference, that lackadaisical weakening charity and compassion, unworthy of strong firm hearts, for it is as if human suffering were not necessary for salvation, as if we did not become more pure, greater and nearer to the supreme happiness, the more and more we suffer!"

He was growing excited, full of anguish, and superb. It was his bereavement, his heart wound, which thus exasperated him, the great blow which had felled him for a moment, but against which he again rose erect, defying grief, and stubborn in his stoic belief in an omnipotent God, who was the master of mankind, and reserved felicity to those whom He selected. Again, however, he made an effort to calm himself, and resumed in a more gentle voice: "At all events the fold is always open, my dear son, and here you are back in it since you have repented. You cannot imagine how happy it makes me."

In his turn Pierre strove to show himself conciliatory in order that he might not further ulcerate that violent, grief-stricken soul: "Your Eminence," said he, "may be sure that I shall endeavour to remember every one of the kind words which your Eminence has spoken to me, in the same way as I shall remember the fatherly greeting of his Holiness Leo XIII."

This sentence seemed to throw Boccanera into agitation again. At first only murmured, restrained words came from him, as if he were struggling against a desire to question the young priest. "Ah yes! you saw his Holiness, you spoke to him, and he told you I suppose, as he tells all the foreigners who go to pay their respects to him, that he desires conciliation and peace. For my part I now only see him when it is absolutely necessary; for more than a year I have not been received in private audience."

This proof of disfavour, of the covert struggle which as in the days of Pius IX kept the Holy Father and the Camerlingo at variance, filled the latter with bitterness. He was unable to restrain himself and spoke out, reflecting no doubt that he had a familiar before him, one whose discretion was certain, and who moreover was leaving Rome on the morrow. "One may go a long way," said he, "with those fine words, peace and conciliation, which are so often void of real wisdom and courage. The terrible truth is that Leo XIII's eighteen years of concessions have shaken everything in the Church, and should he long continue to reign Catholicism would topple over and crumble into dust like a building whose pillars have been undermined."

Interested by this remark, Pierre in his desire for knowledge began to raise objections. "But hasn't his Holiness shown himself very prudent?" he asked; "has he not placed dogma on one side in an impregnable fortress? If he seems to have made concessions on many points, have they not always been concessions in mere matters of form?"

"Matters of form; ah, yes!" the Cardinal resumed with increasing passion. "He told you, no doubt, as he tells others, that whilst in substance he will make no surrender, he will readily yield in matters of form! It's a deplorable axiom, an equivocal form of diplomacy even when it isn't so much low hypocrisy! My soul revolts at the thought of that Opportunism, that Jesuitism which makes artifice its weapon, and only serves to cast doubt among true believers, the confusion of a sauve-qui-peut, which by and by must lead to inevitable defeat. It is cowardice, the worst form of cowardice, abandonment of one's weapons in order that one may retreat the more speedily, shame of oneself, assumption of a mask in the hope of deceiving the enemy, penetrating into his camp, and overcoming him by treachery! No, no, form is everything in a traditional and immutable religion, which for eighteen hundred years has been, is now, and till the end of time will be the very law of God!"

The Cardinal's feelings so stirred him that he was unable to remain seated, and began to walk about the little room. And it was the whole reign, the whole policy of Leo XIII which he discussed and condemned. "Unity too," he continued, "that famous unity of the Christian Church which his Holiness talks of bringing about, and his desire for which people turn to his great glory, why, it is only the blind ambition of a conqueror enlarging his empire without asking himself if the new nations that he subjects may not disorganise, adulterate, and impregnate his old and hitherto faithful people with every error. What if all the schismatical nations on returning to the Catholic Church should so transform it as to kill it and make it a new Church? There is only one wise course, which is to be what one is, and that firmly. Again, isn't there both shame and danger in that pretended alliance with the democracy which in itself gives the lie to the ancient spirit of the papacy? The right of kings is divine, and to abandon the monarchical principle is to set oneself against God, to compound with revolution, and harbour a monstrous scheme of utilising the madness of men the better to establish one's power over them. All republics are forms of anarchy, and there can be no more criminal act, one which must for ever shake the principle of authority, order, and religion itself, than that of recognising a republic as legitimate for the sole purpose of indulging a dream of impossible conciliation. And observe how this bears on the question of the temporal power. He continues to claim it, he makes a point of no surrender on that question of the restoration of Rome; but in reality, has he not made the loss irreparable, has he not definitively renounced Rome, by admitting that nations have the right to drive away their kings and live like wild beasts in the depths of the forest?"

All at once the Cardinal stopped short and raised his arms to Heaven in a burst of holy anger. "Ah! that man, ah! that man who by his vanity and craving for success will have proved the ruin of the Church, that man who has never ceased corrupting everything, dissolving everything, crumbling everything in order to reign over the world which he fancies he will reconquer by those means, why, Almighty God, why hast Thou not already called him to Thee?"

So sincere was the accent in which that appeal to Death was raised, to such a point was hatred magnified by a real desire to save the Deity imperilled here below, that a great shudder swept through Pierre also. He now understood that Cardinal Boccanera who religiously and passionately hated Leo XIII; he saw him in the depths of his black palace, waiting and watching for the Pope's death, that death which as Camerlingo he must officially certify. How feverishly he must wait, how impatiently he must desire the advent of the hour, when with his little silver hammer he would deal the three symbolic taps on the skull of Leo XIII, while the latter lay cold and rigid on his bed surrounded by his pontifical Court. Ah! to strike that wall of the brain, to make sure that nothing more would answer from within, that nothing beyond night and silence was left there. And the three calls would ring out: "Gioachino! Gioachino! Gioachino!" And, the corpse making no answer, the Camerlingo after waiting for a few seconds would turn and say: "The Pope is dead!"

"Conciliation, however, is the weapon of the times," remarked Pierre, wishing to bring the Cardinal back to the present, "and it is in order to make sure of conquering that the Holy Father yields in matters of form."

"He will not conquer, he will be conquered," cried Boccanera. "Never has the Church been victorious save in stubbornly clinging to its integrality, the immutable eternity of its divine essence. And it would for a certainty fall on the day when it should allow a single stone of its edifice to be touched. Remember the terrible period through which it passed at the time of the Council of Trent. The Reformation had just deeply shaken it, laxity of discipline and morals was everywhere increasing, there was a rising tide of novelties, ideas suggested by the spirit of evil, unhealthy projects born of the pride of man, running riot in full license. And at the Council itself many members were disturbed, poisoned, ready to vote for the wildest changes, a fresh schism added to all the others. Well, if Catholicism was saved at that critical period, under the threat of such great danger, it was because the majority, enlightened by God, maintained the old edifice intact, it was because with divinely inspired obstinacy it kept itself within the narrow limits of dogma, it was because it made no concession, none, whether in substance or in form! Nowadays the situation is certainly not worse than it was at the time of the Council of Trent. Let us suppose it to be much the same, and tell me if it is not nobler, braver, and safer for the Church to show the courage which she showed before and declare aloud what she is, what she has been, and what she will be. There is no salvation for her otherwise than in her complete, indisputable sovereignty; and since she has always conquered by non-surrender, all attempts to conciliate her with the century are tantamount to killing her!"

The Cardinal had again begun to walk to and fro with thoughtful step. "No, no," said he, "no compounding, no surrender, no weakness! Rather the wall of steel which bars the road, the block of granite which marks the limit of a world! As I told you, my dear son, on the day of your arrival, to try to accommodate Catholicism to the new times is to hasten its end, if really it be threatened, as atheists pretend. And in that way it would die basely and shamefully instead of dying erect, proud, and dignified in its old glorious royalty! Ah! to die standing, denying nought of the past, braving the future and confessing one's whole faith!"

That old man of seventy seemed to grow yet loftier as he spoke, free from all dread of final annihilation, and making the gesture of a hero who defies futurity. Faith had given him serenity of peace; he believed, he knew, he had neither doubt nor fear of the morrow of death. Still his voice was tinged with haughty sadness as he resumed, "God can do all, even destroy His own work should it seem evil in His eyes. But though all should crumble to-morrow, though the Holy Church should disappear among the ruins, though the most venerated sanctuaries should be crushed by the falling stars, it would still be necessary for us to bow and adore God, who after creating the world might thus annihilate it for His own glory. And I wait, submissive to His will, for nothing happens unless He wills it. If really the temples be shaken, if Catholicism be fated to fall to-morrow into dust, I shall be here to act as the minister of death, even as I have been the minister of life! It is certain, I confess it, that there are hours when terrible signs appear to me. Perhaps, indeed, the end of time is nigh, and we shall witness that fall of the old world with which others threaten us. The worthiest, the loftiest are struck down as if Heaven erred, and in them punished the crimes of the world. Have I not myself felt the blast from the abyss into which all must sink, since my house, for transgressions that I am ignorant of, has been stricken with that frightful bereavement which precipitates it into the gulf which casts it back into night everlasting!"

He again evoked those two dear dead ones who were always present in his mind. Sobs were once more rising in his throat, his hands trembled, his lofty figure quivered with the last revolt of grief. Yes, if God had stricken him so severely by suppressing his race, if the greatest and most faithful were thus punished, it must be that the world was definitively condemned. Did not the end of his house mean the approaching end of all? And in his sovereign pride as priest and as prince, he found a cry of supreme resignation, once more raising his hands on high: "Almighty God, Thy will be done! May all die, all fall, all return to the night of chaos! I shall remain standing in this ruined palace, waiting to be buried beneath its fragments. And if Thy will should summon me to bury Thy holy religion, be without fear, I shall do nothing unworthy to prolong its life for a few days! I will maintain it erect, like myself, as proud, as uncompromising as in the days of all its power. I will yield nothing, whether in discipline, or in rite, or in dogma. And when the day shall come I will bury it with myself, carrying it whole into the grave rather than yielding aught of it, encompassing it with my cold arms to restore it to Thee, even as Thou didst commit it to the keeping of Thy Church. O mighty God and sovereign Master, dispose of me, make me if such be Thy good pleasure the pontiff of destruction, the pontiff of the death of the world."

Pierre, who was thunderstruck, quivered with fear and admiration at the extraordinary vision this evoked: the last of the popes interring Catholicism. He understood that Boccanera must at times have made that dream; he could see him in the Vatican, in St. Peter's which the thunderbolts had riven asunder, he could see him erect and alone in the spacious halls whence his terrified, cowardly pontifical Court had fled. Clad in his white cassock, thus wearing white mourning for the Church, he once more descended to the sanctuary, there to wait for heaven to fall on the evening of Time's accomplishment and annihilate the earth. Thrice he raised the large crucifix, overthrown by the supreme convulsions of the soil. Then, when the final crack rent the steps apart, he caught it in his arms and was annihilated with it beneath the falling vaults. And nothing could be more instinct with fierce and kingly grandeur.

Voiceless, but without weakness, his lofty stature invincible and erect in spite of all, Cardinal Boccanera made a gesture dismissing Pierre, who yielding to his passion for truth and beauty found that he alone was great and right, and respectfully kissed his hand.

It was in the throne-room, with closed doors, at nightfall, after the visits had ceased, that the two bodies were laid in their coffin. The religious services had come to an end, and in the close silent atmosphere there only lingered the dying perfume of the roses and the warm odour of the candles. As the latter's pale stars scarcely lighted the spacious room, some lamps had been brought, and servants held them in their hands like torches. According to custom, all the servants of the house were present to bid a last farewell to the departed.

There was a little delay. Morano, who had been giving himself no end of trouble ever since morning, was forced to run off again as the triple coffin did not arrive. At last it came, some servants brought it up, and then they were able to begin. The Cardinal and Donna Serafina stood side by side near the bed. Pierre also was present, as well as Don Vigilio. It was Victorine who sewed the lovers up in the white silk shroud, which seemed like a bridal robe, the gay pure robe of their union. Then two servants came forward and helped Pierre and Don Vigilio to lay the bodies in the first coffin, of pine wood lined with pink satin. It was scarcely broader than an ordinary coffin, so young and slim were the lovers and so tightly were they clasped in their last embrace. When they were stretched inside they there continued their eternal slumber, their heads half hidden by their odorous, mingling hair. And when this first coffin had been placed in the second one, a leaden shell, and the second had been enclosed in the third, of stout oak, and when the three lids had been soldered and screwed down, the lovers' faces could still be seen through the circular opening, covered with thick glass, which in accordance with the Roman custom had been left in each of the coffins. And then, for ever parted from the living, alone together, they still gazed at one another with their eyes obstinately open, having all eternity before them wherein to exhaust their infinite love.

XVI.

ON the following day, on his return from the funeral Pierre lunched alone in his room, having decided to take leave of the Cardinal and Donna Serafina during the afternoon. He was quitting Rome that evening by the train which started at seventeen minutes past ten. There was nothing to detain him any longer; there was only one visit which he desired to make, a visit to old Orlando, with whom he had promised to have a long chat prior to his departure. And so a little before two o'clock he sent for a cab which took him to the Via Venti Settembre. A fine rain had fallen all night, its moisture steeping the city in grey vapour; and though this rain had now ceased the sky remained very dark, and the huge new mansions of the Via Venti Settembre were quite livid, interminably mournful with their balconies ever of the same pattern and their regular and endless rows of windows. The Ministry of Finances, that colossal pile of masonry and sculpture, looked in particular like a dead town, a huge bloodless body whence all life had withdrawn. On the other hand, although all was so gloomy the rain had made the atmosphere milder, in fact it was almost warm, damply and feverishly warm.

In the hall of Prada's little palazzo Pierre was surprised to find four or five gentlemen taking off their overcoats; however he learnt from a servant that Count Luigi had a meeting that day with some contractors. As he, Pierre, wished to see the Count's father he had only to ascend to the third floor, added the servant. He must knock at the little door on the right-hand side of the landing there.

On the very first landing, however, the priest found himself face to face with the young Count who was there receiving the contractors, and who on recognising him became frightfully pale. They had not met since the tragedy at the Boccanera mansion, and Pierre well realised how greatly his glance disturbed that man, what a troublesome recollection of moral complicity it evoked, and what mortal dread lest he should have guessed the truth.

"Have you come to see me, have you something to tell me?" the Count inquired.

"No, I am leaving Rome, I have come to wish your father good-bye."

Prada's pallor increased at this, and his whole face quivered: "Ah! it is to see my father. He is not very well, be gentle with him," he replied, and as he spoke, his look of anguish clearly proclaimed what he feared from Pierre, some imprudent word, perhaps even a final mission, the malediction of that man and woman whom he had killed. And surely if his father knew, he would die as well. "Ah! how annoying it is," he resumed, "I can't go up with you! There are gentlemen waiting for me. Yes, how annoyed I am. As soon as possible, however, I will join you, yes, as soon as possible."

He knew not how to stop the young priest, whom he must evidently allow to remain with his father, whilst he himself stayed down below, kept there by his pecuniary worries. But how distressful were the eyes with which he watched Pierre climb the stairs, how he seemed to supplicate him with his whole quivering form. His father, good Lord, the only true love, the one great, pure, faithful passion of his life!

"Don't make him talk too much, brighten him, won't you?" were his parting words.

Up above it was not Batista, the devoted ex-soldier, who opened the door, but a very young fellow to whom Pierre did not at first pay any attention. The little room was bare and light as on previous occasions, and from the broad curtainless window there was the superb view of Rome, Rome crushed that day beneath a leaden sky and steeped in shade of infinite mournfulness. Old Orlando, however, had in no wise changed, but still displayed the superb head of an old blanched lion, a powerful muzzle and youthful eyes, which yet sparkled with the passions which had growled in a soul of fire. Pierre found the stricken hero in the same arm-chair as previously, near the same table littered with newspapers, and with his legs buried in the same black wrapper, as if he were there immobilised in a sheath of stone, to such a point that after months and years one was sure to perceive him quite unchanged, with living bust, and face glowing with strength and intelligence.

That grey day, however, he seemed gloomy, low in spirits. "Ah! so here you are, my dear Monsieur Froment," he exclaimed, "I have been thinking of you these three days past, living the awful days which you must have lived in that tragic Palazzo Boccanera. Ah, God! What a frightful bereavement! My heart is quite overwhelmed, these newspapers have again just upset me with the fresh details they give!" He pointed as he spoke to the papers scattered over the table. Then with a gesture he strove to brush aside the gloomy story, and banish that vision of Benedetta dead, which had been haunting him. "Well, and yourself?" he inquired.

"I am leaving this evening," replied Pierre, "but I did not wish to quit Rome without pressing your brave hands."

"You are leaving? But your book?"

"My book—I have been received by the Holy Father, I have made my submission and reprobated my book."

Orlando looked fixedly at the priest. There was a short interval of silence, during which their eyes told one another all that they had to tell respecting the affair. Neither felt the necessity of any longer explanation. The old man merely spoke these concluding words: "You have done well, your book was a chimera."

"Yes, a chimera, a piece of childishness, and I have condemned it myself in the name of truth and reason."

A smile appeared on the dolorous lips of the impotent hero. "Then you have seen things, you understand and know them now?"

"Yes, I know them; and that is why I did not wish to go off without having that frank conversation with you which we agreed upon."

Orlando was delighted, but all at once he seemed to remember the young fellow who had opened the door to Pierre, and who had afterwards modestly resumed his seat on a chair near the window. This young fellow was a youth of twenty, still beardless, of a blonde handsomeness such as occasionally flowers at Naples, with long curly hair, a lily-like complexion, a rosy mouth, and soft eyes full of a dreamy languor. The old man presented him in fatherly fashion, Angiolo Mascara his name was, and he was the grandson of an old comrade in arms, the epic Mascara of the Thousand, who had died like a hero, his body pierced by a hundred wounds.

"I sent for him to scold him," continued Orlando with a smile. "Do you know that this fine fellow with his girlish airs goes in for the new ideas? He is an Anarchist, one of the three or four dozen Anarchists that we have in Italy. He's a good little lad at bottom, he has only his mother left him, and supports her, thanks to the little berth which he holds, but which he'll lose one of these fine days if he is not careful. Come, come, my child, you must promise me to be reasonable."

Thereupon Angiolo, whose clean but well-worn garments bespoke decent poverty, made answer in a grave and musical voice: "I am reasonable, it is the others, all the others who are not. When all men are reasonable and desire truth and justice, the world will be happy."

"Ah! if you fancy that he'll give way!" cried Orlando. "But, my poor child, just ask Monsieur l'Abbe if one ever knows where truth and justice are. Well, well, one must leave you the time to live, and see, and understand things."

Then, paying no more attention to the young man, he returned to Pierre, while Angiolo, remaining very quiet in his corner, kept his eyes ardently fixed on them, and with open, quivering ears lost not a word they said.

"I told you, my dear Monsieur Froment," resumed Orlando, "that your ideas would change, and that acquaintance with Rome would bring you to accurate views far more readily than any fine speeches I could make to you. So I never doubted but what you would of your own free will withdraw your book as soon as men and things should have enlightened you respecting the Vatican at the present day. But let us leave the Vatican on one side, there is nothing to be done but to let it continue falling slowly and inevitably into ruin. What interests me is our Italian Rome, which you treated as an element to be neglected, but which you have now seen and studied, so that we can both speak of it with the necessary knowledge!"

He thereupon at once granted a great many things, acknowledged that blunders had been committed, that the finances were in a deplorable state, and that there were serious difficulties of all kinds. They, the Italians, had sinned by excess of legitimate pride, they had proceeded too hastily with their attempt to improvise a great nation, to change ancient Rome into a great modern capital as by the mere touch of a wand. And thence had come that mania for erecting new districts, that mad speculation in land and shares, which had brought the country within a hair's breadth of bankruptcy.

At this Pierre gently interrupted him to tell him of the view which he himself had arrived at after his peregrinations and studies through Rome. "That fever of the first hour, that financial debacle," said he, "is after all nothing. All pecuniary sores can be healed. But the grave point is that your Italy still remains to be created. There is no aristocracy left, and as yet there is no people, nothing but a devouring middle class, dating from yesterday, which preys on the rich harvest of the future before it is ripe."

Silence fell. Orlando sadly wagged his old leonine head. The cutting harshness of Pierre's formula struck him in the heart. "Yes, yes," he said at last, "that is so, you have seen things plainly; and why say no when facts are there, patent to everybody? I myself had already spoken to you of that middle class which hungers so ravenously for place and office, distinctions and plumes, and which at the same time is so avaricious, so suspicious with regard to its money which it invests in banks, never risking it in agriculture or manufactures or commerce, having indeed the one desire to enjoy life without doing anything, and so unintelligent that it cannot see it is killing its country by its loathing for labour, its contempt for the poor, its one ambition to live in a petty way with the barren glory of belonging to some official administration. And, as you say, the aristocracy is dying, discrowned, ruined, sunk into the degeneracy which overtakes races towards their close, most of its members reduced to beggary, the others, the few who have clung to their money, crushed by heavy imposts, possessing nought but dead fortunes which constant sharing diminishes and which must soon disappear with the princes themselves. And then there is the people, which has suffered so much and suffers still, but is so used to suffering that it can seemingly conceive no idea of emerging from it, blind and deaf as it is, almost regretting its ancient bondage, and so ignorant, so abominably ignorant, which is the one cause of its hopeless, morrowless misery, for it has not even the consolation of understanding that if we have conquered and are trying to resuscitate Rome and Italy in their ancient glory, it is for itself, the people, alone. Yes, yes, no aristocracy left, no people as yet, and a middle class which really alarms one. How can one therefore help yielding at times to the terrors of the pessimists, who pretend that our misfortunes are as yet nothing, that we are going forward to yet more awful catastrophes, as though, indeed, what we now behold were but the first symptoms of our race's end, the premonitory signs of final annihilation!"

As he spoke he raised his long quivering arms towards the window, towards the light, and Pierre, deeply moved, remembered how Cardinal Boccanera on the previous day had made a similar gesture of supplicant distress when appealing to the divine power. And both men, Cardinal and patriot, so hostile in their beliefs, were instinct with the same fierce and despairing grandeur.

"As I told you, however, on the first day," continued Orlando, "we only sought to accomplish logical and inevitable things. As for Rome, with her past history of splendour and domination which weighs so heavily upon us, we could not do otherwise than take her for capital, for she alone was the bond, the living symbol of our unity at the same time as the promise of eternity, the renewal offered to our great dream of resurrection and glory."

He went on, recognising the disastrous conditions under which Rome laboured as a capital. She was a purely decorative city with exhausted soil, she had remained apart from modern life, she was unhealthy, she offered no possibility of commerce or industry, she was invincibly preyed upon by death, standing as she did amidst that sterile desert of the Campagna. Then he compared her with the other cities which are jealous of her; first Florence, which, however, has become so indifferent and so sceptical, impregnated with a happy heedlessness which seems inexplicable when one remembers the frantic passions, and the torrents of blood rolling through her history; next Naples, which yet remains content with her bright sun, and whose childish people enjoy their ignorance and wretchedness so indolently that one knows not whether one ought to pity them; next Venice, which has resigned herself to remaining a marvel of ancient art, which one ought to put under glass so as to preserve her intact, slumbering amid the sovereign pomp of her annals; next Genoa, which is absorbed in trade, still active and bustling, one of the last queens of that Mediterranean, that insignificant lake which was once the opulent central sea, whose waters carried the wealth of the world; and then particularly Turin and Milan, those industrial and commercial centres, which are so full of life and so modernised that tourists disdain them as not being "Italian" cities, both of them having saved themselves from ruin by entering into that Western evolution which is preparing the next century. Ah! that old land of Italy, ought one to leave it all as a dusty museum for the pleasure of artistic souls, leave it to crumble away, even as its little towns of Magna Graecia, Umbria, and Tuscany are already crumbling, like exquisite bibelots which one dares not repair for fear that one might spoil their character. At all events, there must either be death, death soon and inevitable, or else the pick of the demolisher, the tottering walls thrown to the ground, and cities of labour, science, and health created on all sides; in one word, a new Italy really rising from the ashes of the old one, and adapted to the new civilisation into which humanity is entering.

"However, why despair?" Orlando continued energetically. "Rome may weigh heavily on our shoulders, but she is none the less the summit we coveted. We are here, and we shall stay here awaiting events. Even if the population does not increase it at least remains stationary at a figure of some 400,000 souls, and the movement of increase may set in again when the causes which stopped it shall have ceased. Our blunder was to think that Rome would become a Paris or Berlin; but, so far, all sorts of social, historical, even ethnical considerations seem opposed to it; yet who can tell what may be the surprises of to-morrow? Are we forbidden to hope, to put faith in the blood which courses in our veins, the blood of the old conquerors of the world? I, who no longer stir from this room, impotent as I am, even I at times feel my madness come back, believe in the invincibility and immortality of Rome, and wait for the two millions of people who must come to populate those dolorous new districts which you have seen so empty and already falling into ruins! And certainly they will come! Why not? You will see, you will see, everything will be populated, and even more houses will have to be built. Moreover, can you call a nation poor, when it possesses Lombardy? Is there not also inexhaustible wealth in our southern provinces? Let peace settle down, let the South and the North mingle together, and a new generation of workers grow up. Since we have the soil, such a fertile soil, the great harvest which is awaited will surely some day sprout and ripen under the burning sun!"

Enthusiasm was upbuoying him, all the furia of youth inflamed his eyes. Pierre smiled, won over; and as soon as he was able to speak, he said: "The problem must be tackled down below, among the people. You must make men!"

"Exactly!" cried Orlando. "I don't cease repeating it, one must make Italy. It is as if a wind from the East had blown the seed of humanity, the seed which makes vigorous and powerful nations, elsewhere. Our people is not like yours in France, a reservoir of men and money from which one can draw as plentifully as one pleases. It is such another inexhaustible reservoir that I wish to see created among us. And one must begin at the bottom. There must be schools everywhere, ignorance must be stamped out, brutishness and idleness must be fought with books, intellectual and moral instruction must give us the industrious people which we need if we are not to disappear from among the great nations. And once again for whom, if not for the democracy of to-morrow, have we worked in taking possession of Rome? And how easily one can understand that all should collapse here, and nothing grow up vigorously since such a democracy is absolutely absent. Yes, yes, the solution of the problem does not lie elsewhere; we must make a people, make an Italian democracy."

Pierre had grown calm again, feeling somewhat anxious yet not daring to say that it is by no means easy to modify a nation, that Italy is such as soil, history, and race have made her, and that to seek to transform her so radically and all at once might be a dangerous enterprise. Do not nations like beings have an active youth, a resplendent prime, and a more or less prolonged old age ending in death? A modern democratic Rome, good heavens! The modern Romes are named Paris, London, Chicago. So he contented himself with saying: "But pending this great renovation of the people, don't you think that you ought to be prudent? Your finances are in such a bad condition, you are passing through such great social and economic difficulties, that you run the risk of the worst catastrophes before you secure either men or money. Ah! how prudent would that minister be who should say in your Chamber: 'Our pride has made a mistake, it was wrong of us to try to make ourselves a great nation in one day; more time, labour, and patience are needed; and we consent to remain for the present a young nation, which will quietly reflect and labour at self-formation, without, for a long time yet, seeking to play a dominant part. So we intend to disarm, to strike out the war and naval estimates, all the estimates intended for display abroad, in order to devote ourselves to our internal prosperity, and to build up by education, physically and morally, the great nation which we swear we will be fifty years hence!' Yes, yes, strike out all needless expenditure, your salvation lies in that!"

But Orlando, while listening, had become gloomy again, and with a vague, weary gesture he replied in an undertone: "No, no, the minister who should use such language would be hooted. It would be too hard a confession, such as one cannot ask a nation to make. Every heart would bound, leap forth at the idea. And, besides, would not the danger perhaps be even greater if all that has been done were allowed to crumble? How many wrecked hopes, how much discarded, useless material there would be! No, we can now only save ourselves by patience and courage—and forward, ever forward! We are a very young nation, and in fifty years we desired to effect the unity which others have required two hundred years to arrive at. Well, we must pay for our haste, we must wait for the harvest to ripen, and fill our barns." Then, with another and more sweeping wave of the arm, he stubbornly strengthened himself in his hopes. "You know," said he, "that I was always against the alliance with Germany. As I predicted, it has ruined us. We were not big enough to march side by side with such a wealthy and powerful person, and it is in view of a war, always near at hand and inevitable, that we now suffer so cruelly from having to support the budgets of a great nation. Ah! that war which has never come, it is that which has exhausted the best part of our blood and sap and money without the slightest profit. To-day we have nothing before us but the necessity of breaking with our ally, who speculated on our pride, who has never helped us in any way, who has never given us anything but bad advice, and treated us otherwise than with suspicion. But it was all inevitable, and that's what people won't admit in France. I can speak freely of it all, for I am a declared friend of France, and people even feel some spite against me on that account. However, explain to your compatriots, that on the morrow of our conquest of Rome, in our frantic desire to resume our ancient rank, it was absolutely necessary that we should play our part in Europe and show that we were a power with whom the others must henceforth count. And hesitation was not allowable, all our interests impelled us toward Germany, the evidence was so binding as to impose itself. The stern law of the struggle for life weighs as heavily on nations as on individuals, and this it is which explains and justifies the rupture between the two sisters, France and Italy, the forgetting of so many ties, race, commercial intercourse, and, if you like, services also. The two sisters, ah! they now pursue each other with so much hatred that all common sense even seems at an end. My poor old heart bleeds when I read the articles which your newspapers and ours exchange like poisoned darts. When will this fratricidal massacre cease, which of the two will first realise the necessity of peace, the necessity of the alliance of the Latin races, if they are to remain alive amidst those torrents of other races which more and more invade the world?" Then gaily, with the bonhomie of a hero disarmed by old age, and seeking a refuge in his dreams, Orlando added: "Come, you must promise to help me as soon as you are in Paris. However small your field of action may be, promise me you will do all you can to promote peace between France and Italy; there can be no more holy task. Relate all you have seen here, all you have heard, oh! as frankly as possible. If we have faults, you certainly have faults as well. And, come, family quarrels can't last for ever!"

"No doubt," Pierre answered in some embarrassment. "Unfortunately they are the most tenacious. In families, when blood becomes exasperated with blood, hate goes as far as poison and the knife. And pardon becomes impossible."

He dared not fully express his thoughts. Since he had been in Rome, listening, and considering things, the quarrel between Italy and France had resumed itself in his mind in a fine tragic story. Once upon a time there were two princesses, daughters of a powerful queen, the mistress of the world. The elder one, who had inherited her mother's kingdom, was secretly grieved to see her sister, who had established herself in a neighbouring land, gradually increase in wealth, strength, and brilliancy, whilst she herself declined as if weakened by age, dismembered, so exhausted, and so sore, that she already felt defeated on the day when she attempted a supreme effort to regain universal power. And so how bitter were her feelings, how hurt she always felt on seeing her sister recover from the most frightful shocks, resume her dazzling gala, and continue to reign over the world by dint of strength and grace and wit. Never would she forgive it, however well that envied and detested sister might act towards her. Therein lay an incurable wound, the life of one poisoned by that of the other, the hatred of old blood for young blood, which could only be quieted by death. And even if peace, as was possible, should soon be restored between them in presence of the younger sister's evident triumph, the other would always harbour deep within her heart an endless grief at being the elder yet the vassal.

"However, you may rely on me," Pierre affectionately resumed. "This quarrel between the two countries is certainly a great source of grief and a great peril. And assuredly I will only say what I think to be the truth about you. At the same time I fear that you hardly like the truth, for temperament and custom have hardly prepared you for it. The poets of every nation who at various times have written on Rome have intoxicated you with so much praise that you are scarcely fitted to hear the real truth about your Rome of to-day. No matter how superb a share of praise one may accord you, one must all the same look at the reality of things, and this reality is just what you won't admit, lovers of the beautiful as you ever are, susceptible too like women, whom the slightest hint of a wrinkle sends into despair."

Orlando began to laugh. "Well, certainly, one must always beautify things a little," said he. "Why speak of ugly faces at all? We in our theatres only care for pretty music, pretty dancing, pretty pieces which please one. As for the rest, whatever is disagreeable let us hide it, for mercy's sake!"

"On the other hand," the priest continued, "I will cheerfully confess the great error of my book. The Italian Rome which I neglected and sacrificed to papal Rome not only exists but is already so powerful and triumphant that it is surely the other one which is bound to disappear in course of time. However much the Pope may strive to remain immutable within his Vatican, a steady evolution goes on around him, and the black world, by mingling with the white, has already become a grey world. I never realised that more acutely than at the fete given by Prince Buongiovanni for the betrothal of his daughter to your grand-nephew. I came away quite enchanted, won over to the cause of your resurrection."

The old man's eyes sparkled. "Ah! you were present?" said he, "and you witnessed a never-to-be-forgotten scene, did you not, and you no longer doubt our vitality, our growth into a great people when the difficulties of to-day are overcome? What does a quarter of a century, what does even a century matter! Italy will again rise to her old glory, as soon as the great people of to-morrow shall have sprung from the soil. And if I detest that man Sacco it is because to my mind he is the incarnation of all the enjoyers and intriguers whose appetite for the spoils of our conquest has retarded everything. But I live again in my dear grand-nephew Attilio, who represents the future, the generation of brave and worthy men who will purify and educate the country. Ah! may some of the great ones of to-morrow spring from him and that adorable little Princess Celia, whom my niece Stefana, a sensible woman at bottom, brought to see me the other day. If you had seen that child fling her arms about me, call me endearing names, and tell me that I should be godfather to her first son, so that he might bear my name and once again save Italy! Yes, yes, may peace be concluded around that coming cradle; may the union of those dear children be the indissoluble marriage of Rome and the whole nation, and may all be repaired, and all blossom anew in their love!"

Tears came to his eyes, and Pierre, touched by his inextinguishable patriotism, sought to please him. "I myself," said he, "expressed to your son much the same wish on the evening of the betrothal fete, when I told him I trusted that their nuptials might be definitive and fruitful, and that from them and all the others there might arise the great nation which, now that I begin to know you, I hope you will soon become!"

"You said that!" exclaimed Orlando. "Well, I forgive your book, for you have understood at last; and new Rome, there she is, the Rome which is ours, which we wish to make worthy of her glorious past, and for the third time the queen of the world."

With one of those broad gestures into which he put all his remaining life, he pointed to the curtainless window where Rome spread out in solemn majesty from one horizon to the other. But, suddenly he turned his head and in a fit of paternal indignation began to apostrophise young Angiolo Mascara. "You young rascal!" said he, "it's our Rome which you dream of destroying with your bombs, which you talk of razing like a rotten, tottering house, so as to rid the world of it for ever!"

Angiolo had hitherto remained silent, passionately listening to the others. His pretty, girlish, beardless face reflected the slightest emotion in sudden flashes; and his big blue eyes also had glowed on hearing what had been said of the people, the new people which it was necessary to create. "Yes!" he slowly replied in his pure and musical voice, "we mean to raze it and not leave a stone of it, but raze it in order to build it up again."

Orlando interrupted him with a soft, bantering laugh: "Oh! you would build it up again; that's fortunate!" he said.

"I would build it up again," the young man replied, in the trembling voice of an inspired prophet. "I would build it up again oh, so vast, so beautiful, and so noble! Will not the universal democracy of to-morrow, humanity when it is at last freed, need an unique city, which shall be the ark of alliance, the very centre of the world? And is not Rome designated, Rome which the prophecies have marked as eternal and immortal, where the destinies of the nations are to be accomplished? But in order that it may become the final definitive sanctuary, the capital of the destroyed kingdoms, where the wise men of all countries shall meet once every year, one must first of all purify it by fire, leave nothing of its old stains remaining. Then, when the sun shall have absorbed all the pestilence of the old soil, we will rebuild the city ten times more beautiful and ten times larger than it has ever been. And what a city of truth and justice it will at last be, the Rome that has been announced and awaited for three thousand years, all in gold and all in marble, filling the Campagna from the sea to the Sabine and the Alban mountains, and so prosperous and so sensible that its twenty millions of inhabitants after regulating the law of labour will live with the unique joy of being. Yes, yes, Rome the Mother, Rome the Queen, alone on the face of the earth and for all eternity!"

Pierre listened to him, aghast. What! did the blood of Augustus go to such a point as this? The popes had not become masters of Rome without feeling impelled to rebuild it in their passion to rule over the world; young Italy, likewise yielding to the hereditary madness of universal domination, had in its turn sought to make the city larger than any other, erecting whole districts for people who had never come, and now even the Anarchists were possessed by the same stubborn dream of the race, a dream beyond all measure this time, a fourth and monstrous Rome, whose suburbs would invade continents in order that liberated humanity, united in one family, might find sufficient lodging! This was the climax. Never could more extravagant proof be given of the blood of pride and sovereignty which had scorched the veins of that race ever since Augustus had bequeathed it the inheritance of his absolute empire, with the furious instinct that the world legally belonged to it, and that its mission was to conquer it again. This idea had intoxicated all the children of that historic soil, impelling all of them to make their city The City, the one which had reigned and which would reign again in splendour when the days predicted by the oracles should arrive. And Pierre remembered the four fatidical letters, the S.P.Q.R. of old and glorious Rome, which like an order of final triumph given to Destiny he had everywhere found in present-day Rome, on all the walls, on all the insignia, even on the municipal dust-carts! And he understood the prodigious vanity of these people, haunted by the glory of their ancestors, spellbound by the past of their city, declaring that she contains everything, that they themselves cannot know her thoroughly, that she is the sphinx who will some day explain the riddle of the universe, that she is so great and noble that all within her acquires increase of greatness and nobility, in such wise that they demand for her the idolatrous respect of the entire world, so vivacious in their minds is the illusive legend which clings to her, so incapable are they of realising that what was once great may be so no longer.

"But I know your fourth Rome," resumed Orlando, again enlivened. "It's the Rome of the people, the capital of the Universal Republic, which Mazzini dreamt of. Only he left the pope in it. Do you know, my lad, that if we old Republicans rallied to the monarchy, it was because we feared that in the event of revolution the country might fall into the hands of dangerous madmen such as those who have upset your brain? Yes, that was why we resigned ourselves to our monarchy, which is not much different from a parliamentary republic. And now, goodbye and be sensible, remember that your poor mother would die of it if any misfortune should befall you. Come, let me embrace you all the same."

On receiving the hero's affectionate kiss Angiolo coloured like a girl. Then he went off with his gentle, dreamy air, never adding a word but politely inclining his head to the priest. Silence continued till Orlando's eyes encountered the newspapers scattered on the table, when he once more spoke of the terrible bereavement of the Boccaneras. He had loved Benedetta like a dear daughter during the sad days when she had dwelt near him; and finding the newspaper accounts of her death somewhat singular, worried in fact by the obscure points which he could divine in the tragedy, he was asking Pierre for particulars, when his son Luigi suddenly entered the room, breathless from having climbed the stairs so quickly and with his face full of anxious fear. He had just dismissed his contractors with impatient roughness, giving no thought to his serious financial position, the jeopardy in which his fortune was now placed, so anxious was he to be up above beside his father. And when he was there his first uneasy glance was for the old man, to make sure whether the priest by some imprudent word had not dealt him his death blow.

He shuddered on noticing how Orlando quivered, moved to tears by the terrible affair of which he was speaking; and for a moment he thought he had arrived too late, that the harm was done. "Good heavens, father!" he exclaimed, "what is the matter with you, why are you crying?" And as he spoke he knelt at the old man's feet, taking hold of his hands and giving him such a passionate, loving glance that he seemed to be offering all the blood of his heart to spare him the slightest grief.

"It is about the death of that poor woman," Orlando sadly answered. "I was telling Monsieur Froment how it grieved me, and I added that I could not yet understand it all. The papers talk of a sudden death which is always so extraordinary."

The young Count rose again looking very pale. The priest had not yet spoken. But what a frightful moment was this! What if he should reply, what if he should speak out?

"You were present, were you not?" continued the old man addressing Pierre. "You saw everything. Tell me then how the thing happened."

Luigi Prada looked at Pierre. Their eyes met fixedly, plunging into one another's souls. All began afresh in their minds, Destiny on the march, Santobono encountered with his little basket, the drive across the melancholy Campagna, the conversation about poison while the little basket was gently rocked on the priest's knees; then, in particular, the sleepy osteria, and the little black hen, so suddenly killed, lying on the ground with a tiny streamlet of violet blood trickling from her beak. And next there was that splendid ball at the Buongiovanni mansion, with all its odore di femina and its triumph of love: and finally, before the Palazzo Boccanera, so black under the silvery moon, there was the man who lighted a cigar and went off without once turning his head, allowing dim Destiny to accomplish its work of death. Both of them, Pierre and Prada, knew that story and lived it over again, having no need to recall it aloud in order to make certain that they had fully penetrated one another's soul.

Pierre did not immediately answer the old man. "Oh!" he murmured at last, "there were frightful things, yes, frightful things."

"No doubt—that is what I suspected," resumed Orlando. "You can tell us all. In presence of death my son has freely forgiven."

The young Count's gaze again sought that of Pierre with such weight, such ardent entreaty that the priest felt deeply stirred. He had just remembered that man's anguish during the ball, the atrocious torture of jealousy which he had undergone before allowing Destiny to avenge him. And he pictured also what must have been his feelings after the terrible outcome of it all: at first stupefaction at Destiny's harshness, at this full vengeance which he had never desired so ferocious; then icy calmness like that of the cool gambler who awaits events, reading the newspapers, and feeling no other remorse than that of the general whose victory has cost him too many men. He must have immediately realised that the Cardinal would stifle the affair for the sake of the Church's honour; and only retained one weight on his heart, regret possibly for that woman whom he had never won, with perhaps a last horrible jealousy which he did not confess to himself but from which he would always suffer, jealousy at knowing that she lay in another's arms in the grave, for all eternity. But behold, after that victorious effort to remain calm, after that cold and remorseless waiting, Punishment arose, the fear that Destiny, travelling on with its poisoned figs, might have not yet ceased its march, and might by a rebound strike down his own father. Yet another thunderbolt, yet another victim, the most unexpected, the being he most adored! At that thought all his strength of resistance had in one moment collapsed, and he was there, in terror of Destiny, more at a loss, more trembling than a child.

"The newspapers, however," slowly said Pierre as if he were seeking his words, "the newspapers must have told you that the Prince succumbed first, and that the Contessina died of grief whilst embracing him for the last time.... As for the cause of death, mon Dieu, you know that doctors themselves in sudden cases scarcely dare to pronounce an exact opinion—"

He stopped short, for within him he had suddenly heard the voice of Benedetta giving him just before she died that terrible order: "You, who will see his father, I charge you to tell him that I cursed his son. I wish that he should know, it is necessary that he should know, for the sake of truth and justice." And was he, oh! Lord, about to obey that order, was it one of those divine commands which must be executed even if the result be a torrent of blood and tears? For a few seconds Pierre suffered from a heart-rending combat within him, hesitating between the act of truth and justice which the dead woman had called for and his own personal desire for forgiveness, and the horror he would feel should he kill that poor old man by fulfilling his implacable mission which could benefit nobody. And certainly the other one, the son, must have understood what a supreme struggle was going on in the priest's mind, a struggle which would decide his own father's fate, for his glance became yet more suppliant than ever.

"One first thought that it was merely indigestion," continued Pierre, "but the Prince became so much worse, that one was alarmed, and the doctor was sent for—"

Ah! Prada's eyes, they had become so despairing, so full of the most touching and weightiest things, that the priest could read in them all the decisive reasons which were about to stay his tongue. No, no, he would not strike an innocent old man, he had promised nothing, and to obey the last expression of the dead woman's hatred would have seemed to him like charging her memory with a crime. The young Count, too, during those few minutes of anguish, had suffered a whole life of such abominable torture, that after all some little justice was done.

"And then," Pierre concluded, "when the doctor arrived he at once recognised that it was a case of infectious fever. There can be no doubt of it. This morning I attended the funeral, it was very splendid and very touching."

Orlando did not insist, but contented himself with saying that he also had felt much emotion all the morning on thinking of that funeral. Then, as he turned to set the papers on the table in order with his trembling hands, his son, icy cold with perspiration, staggering and clinging to the back of a chair in order that he might not fall, again gave Pierre a long glance, but a very soft one, full of distracted gratitude.

"I am leaving this evening," resumed Pierre, who felt exhausted and wished to break off the conversation, "and I must now bid you farewell. Have you any commission to give me for Paris?"

"No, none," replied Orlando; and then, with sudden recollection, he added, "Yes, I have, though! You remember that book written by my old comrade in arms, Theophile Morin, one of Garibaldi's Thousand, that manual for the bachelor's degree which he desired to see translated and adopted here. Well, I am pleased to say that I have a promise that it shall be used in our schools, but on condition that he makes some alterations in it. Luigi, give me the book, it is there on that shelf."

Then, when his son had handed him the volume, he showed Pierre some notes which he had pencilled on the margins, and explained to him the modifications which were desired in the general scheme of the work. "Will you be kind enough," he continued, "to take this copy to Morin himself? His address is written inside the cover. If you can do so you will spare me the trouble of writing him a very long letter; in ten minutes you can explain matters to him more clearly and completely than I could do in ten pages.... And you must embrace Morin for me, and tell him that I still love him, oh! with all my heart of the bygone days, when I could still use my legs and we two fought like devils side by side under a hail of bullets."

A short silence followed, that pause, that embarrassment tinged with emotion which precedes the moment of farewell. "Come, good-bye," said Orlando, "embrace me for him and for yourself, embrace me affectionately like that lad did just now. I am so old and so near my end, my dear Monsieur Froment, that you will allow me to call you my child and to kiss you like a grandfather, wishing you all courage and peace, and that faith in life which alone helps one to live."

Pierre was so touched that tears rose to his eyes, and when with all his soul he kissed the stricken hero on either cheek, he felt that he likewise was weeping. With a hand yet as vigorous as a vice, Orlando detained him for a moment beside his arm-chair, whilst with his other hand waving in a supreme gesture, he for the last time showed him Rome, so immense and mournful under the ashen sky. And his voice came low, quivering and suppliant. "For mercy's sake swear to me that you will love her all the same, in spite of all, for she is the cradle, the mother! Love her for all that she no longer is, love her for all that she desires to be! Do not say that her end has come, love her, love her so that she may live again, that she may live for ever!"

Pierre again embraced him, unable to find any other response, upset as he was by all the passion displayed by that old warrior, who spoke of his city as a man of thirty might speak of the woman he adores. And he found him so handsome and so lofty with his old blanched, leonine mane and his stubborn belief in approaching resurrection, that once more the other old Roman, Cardinal Boccanera, arose before him, equally stubborn in his faith and relinquishing nought of his dream, even though he might be crushed on the spot by the fall of the heavens. These twain ever stood face to face, at either end of their city, alone rearing their lofty figures above the horizon, whilst awaiting the future.

Then, when Pierre had bowed to Count Luigi, and found himself outside again in the Via Venti Settembre he was all eagerness to get back to the Boccanera mansion so as to pack up his things and depart. His farewell visits were made, and he now only had to take leave of Donna Serafina and the Cardinal, and to thank them for all their kind hospitality. For him alone did their doors open, for they had shut themselves up on returning from the funeral, resolved to see nobody. At twilight, therefore, Pierre had no one but Victorine to keep him company in the vast, black mansion, for when he expressed a desire to take supper with Don Vigilio she told him that the latter had also shut himself in his room. Desirous as he was of at least shaking hands with the secretary for the last time, Pierre went to knock at the door, which was so near his own, but could obtain no reply, and divined that the poor fellow, overcome by a fresh attack of fever and suspicion, desired not to see him again, in terror at the idea that he might compromise himself yet more than he had done already. Thereupon, it was settled that as the train only started at seventeen minutes past ten Victorine should serve Pierre his supper on the little table in his sitting-room at eight o'clock. She brought him a lamp and spoke of putting his linen in order, but he absolutely declined her help, and she had to leave him to pack up quietly by himself.

He had purchased a little box, since his valise could not possibly hold all the linen and winter clothing which had been sent to him from Paris as his stay in Rome became more and more protracted. However, the packing was soon accomplished; the wardrobe was emptied, the drawers were visited, the box and valise filled and securely locked by seven o'clock. An hour remained to him before supper and he sat there resting, when his eyes whilst travelling round the walls to make sure that he had forgotten nothing, encountered that old painting by some unknown master, which had so often filled him with emotion. The lamplight now shone full upon it; and this time again as he gazed at it he felt a blow in the heart, a blow which was all the deeper, as now, at his parting hour, he found a symbol of his defeat at Rome in that dolent, tragic, half-naked woman, draped in a shred of linen, and weeping between her clasped hands whilst seated on the threshold of the palace whence she had been driven. Did not that rejected one, that stubborn victim of love, who sobbed so bitterly, and of whom one knew nothing, neither what her face was like, nor whence she had come, nor what her fault had been—did she not personify all man's useless efforts to force the doors of truth, and all the frightful abandonment into which he falls as soon as he collides with the wall which shuts the unknown off from him? For a long while did Pierre look at her, again worried at being obliged to depart without having seen her face behind her streaming golden hair, that face of dolorous beauty which he pictured radiant with youth and delicious in its mystery. And as he gazed he was just fancying that he could see it, that it was becoming his at last, when there was a knock at the door and Narcisse Habert entered.

Pierre was surprised to see the young attache, for three days previously he had started for Florence, impelled thither by one of the sudden whims of his artistic fancy. However, he at once apologised for his unceremonious intrusion. "Ah! there is your luggage!" he said; "I heard that you were going away this evening, and I was unwilling to let you leave Rome without coming to shake hands with you. But what frightful things have happened since we met! I only returned this afternoon, so that I could not attend the funeral. However, you may well imagine how thunderstruck I was by the news of those frightful deaths."

Then, suspecting some unacknowledged tragedy, like a man well acquainted with the legendary dark side of Rome, he put some questions to Pierre but did not insist on them, being at bottom far too prudent to burden himself uselessly with redoubtable secrets. And after Pierre had given him such particulars as he thought fit, the conversation changed and they spoke at length of Italy, Rome, Naples, and Florence. "Ah! Florence, Florence!" Narcisse repeated languorously. He had lighted a cigarette and his words fell more slowly, as he glanced round the room. "You were very well lodged here," he said, "it is very quiet. I had never come up to this floor before."

His eyes continued wandering over the walls until they were at last arrested by the old painting which the lamp illumined, and thereupon he remained for a moment blinking as if surprised. And all at once he rose and approached the picture. "Dear me, dear me," said he, "but that's very good, that's very fine."

"Isn't it?" rejoined Pierre. "I know nothing about painting but I was stirred by that picture on the very day of my arrival, and over and over again it has kept me here with my heart beating and full of indescribable feelings."

Narcisse no longer spoke but examined the painting with the care of a connoisseur, an expert, whose keen glance decides the question of authenticity, and appraises commercial value. And the most extraordinary delight appeared upon the young man's fair, rapturous face, whilst his fingers began to quiver. "But it's a Botticelli, it's a Botticelli! There can be no doubt about it," he exclaimed. "Just look at the hands, and look at the folds of the drapery! And the colour of the hair, and the technique, the flow of the whole composition. A Botticelli, ah! mon Dieu, a Botticelli."

He became quite faint, overflowing with increasing admiration as he penetrated more and more deeply into the subject, at once so simple and so poignant. Was it not acutely modern? The artist had foreseen our pain-fraught century, our anxiety in presence of the invisible, our distress at being unable to cross the portal of mystery which was for ever closed. And what an eternal symbol of the world's wretchedness was that woman, whose face one could not see, and who sobbed so distractedly without it being possible for one to wipe away her tears. Yes, a Botticelli, unknown, uncatalogued, what a discovery! Then he paused to inquire of Pierre: "Did you know it was a Botticelli?"

"Oh no! I spoke to Don Vigilio about it one day, but he seemed to think it of no account. And Victorine, when I spoke to her, replied that all those old things only served to harbour dust."

Narcisse protested, quite stupefied: "What! they have a Botticelli here and don't know it! Ah! how well I recognise in that the Roman princes who, unless their masterpieces have been labelled, are for the most part utterly at sea among them! No doubt this one has suffered a little, but a simple cleaning would make a marvel, a famous picture of it, for which a museum would at least give—"

He abruptly stopped, completing his sentence with a wave of the hand and not mentioning the figure which was on his lips. And then, as Victorine came in followed by Giacomo to lay the little table for Pierre's supper, he turned his back upon the Botticelli and said no more about it. The young priest's attention was aroused, however, and he could well divine what was passing in the other's mind. Under that make-believe Florentine, all angelicalness, there was an experienced business man, who well knew how to look after his pecuniary interests and was even reported to be somewhat avaricious. Pierre, who was aware of it, could not help smiling therefore when he saw him take his stand before another picture—a frightful Virgin, badly copied from some eighteenth-century canvas—and exclaim: "Dear me! that's not at all bad! I've a friend, I remember, who asked me to buy him some old paintings. I say, Victorine, now that Donna Serafina and the Cardinal are left alone do you think they would like to rid themselves of a few valueless pictures?"

The servant raised her arms as if to say that if it depended on her, everything might be carried away. Then she replied: "Not to a dealer, sir, on account of the nasty rumours which would at once spread about, but I'm sure they would be happy to please a friend. The house costs a lot to keep up, and money would be welcome."

Pierre then vainly endeavoured to persuade Narcisse to stay and sup with him, but the young man gave his word of honour that he was expected elsewhere and was even late. And thereupon he ran off, after pressing the priest's hands and affectionately wishing him a good journey.

Eight o'clock was striking, and Pierre seated himself at the little table, Victorine remaining to serve him after dismissing Giacomo, who had brought the supper things upstairs in a basket. "The people here make me wild," said the worthy woman after the other had gone, "they are so slow. And besides, it's a pleasure for me to serve you your last meal, Monsieur l'Abbe. I've had a little French dinner cooked for you, a sole au gratin and a roast fowl."

Pierre was touched by this attention, and pleased to have the company of a compatriot whilst he partook of his final meal amidst the deep silence of the old, black, deserted mansion. The buxom figure of Victorine was still instinct with mourning, with grief for the loss of her dear Contessina, but her daily toil was already setting her erect again, restoring her quick activity; and she spoke almost cheerfully whilst passing plates and dishes to Pierre. "And to think Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "that you'll be in Paris on the morning of the day after to-morrow! As for me, you know, it seems as if I only left Auneau yesterday. Ah! what fine soil there is there; rich soil yellow like gold, not like their poor stuff here which smells of sulphur! And the pretty fresh willows beside our stream, too, and the little wood so full of moss! They've no moss here, their trees look like tin under that stupid sun of theirs which burns up the grass. Mon Dieu! in the early times I would have given I don't know what for a good fall of rain to soak me and wash away all the dust. Ah! I shall never get used to their awful Rome. What a country and what people!"

Pierre was quite enlivened by her stubborn fidelity to her own nook, which after five and twenty years of absence still left her horrified with that city of crude light and black vegetation, true daughter as she was of a smiling and temperate clime which of a morning was steeped in rosy mist. "But now that your young mistress is dead," said he, "what keeps you here? Why don't you take the train with me?"

She looked at him in surprise: "Go off with you, go back to Auneau! Oh! it's impossible, Monsieur l'Abbe. It would be too ungrateful to begin with, for Donna Serafina is accustomed to me, and it would be bad on my part to forsake her and his Eminence now that they are in trouble. And besides, what could I do elsewhere? No, my little hole is here now."

"So you will never see Auneau again?"

"No, never, that's certain."

"And you don't mind being buried here, in their ground which smells of sulphur?"

She burst into a frank laugh. "Oh!" she said, "I don't mind where I am when I'm dead. One sleeps well everywhere. And it's funny that you should be so anxious as to what there may be when one's dead. There's nothing, I'm sure. That's what tranquillises me, to feel that it will be all over and that I shall have a rest. The good God owes us that after we've worked so hard. You know that I'm not devout, oh! dear no. Still that doesn't prevent me from behaving properly, and, true as I stand here, I've never had a lover. It seems foolish to say such a thing at my age, still I say it because it's the sober truth."

She continued laughing like the worthy woman she was, having no belief in priests and yet without a sin upon her conscience. And Pierre once more marvelled at the simple courage and great practical common sense of this laborious and devoted creature, who for him personified the whole unbelieving lowly class of France, those who no longer believe and will believe never more. Ah! to be as she was, to do one's work and lie down for the eternal sleep without any revolt of pride, satisfied with the one joy of having accomplished one's share of toil!

When Pierre had finished his supper Victorine summoned Giacomo to clear the things away. And as it was only half-past eight she advised the priest to spend another quiet hour in his room. Why go and catch a chill by waiting at the station? She could send for a cab at half-past nine, and as soon as it arrived she would send word to him and have his luggage carried down. He might be easy as to that, and need trouble himself about nothing.

When she had gone off Pierre soon sank into a deep reverie. It seemed to him, indeed, as if he had already quitted Rome, as if the city were far away and he could look back on it, and his experiences within it. His book, "New Rome," arose in his mind; and he remembered his first morning on the Janiculum, his view of Rome from the terrace of San Pietro in Montorio, a Rome such as he had dreamt of, so young and ethereal under the pure sky. It was then that he had asked himself the decisive question: Could Catholicism be renewed? Could it revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity, become the religion of the democracy, the faith which the distracted modern world, in danger of death, awaits in order that it may be pacified and live? His heart had then beaten with hope and enthusiasm. After his disaster at Lourdes from which he had scarcely recovered, he had come to attempt another and supreme experiment by asking Rome what her reply to his question would be. And now the experiment had failed, he knew what answer Rome had returned him through her ruins, her monuments, her very soil, her people, her prelates, her cardinals, her pope! No, Catholicism could not be renewed: no, it could not revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity; no, it could not become the religion of the democracy, the new faith which might save the old toppling societies in danger of death. Though it seemed to be of democratic origin, it was henceforth riveted to that Roman soil, it remained kingly in spite of everything, forced to cling to the principle of temporal power under penalty of suicide, bound by tradition, enchained by dogma, its evolutions mere simulations whilst in reality it was reduced to such immobility that, behind the bronze doors of the Vatican, the papacy was the prisoner, the ghost of eighteen centuries of atavism, indulging the ceaseless dream of universal dominion. There, where with priestly faith exalted by love of the suffering and the poor, he had come to seek life and a resurrection of the Christian communion, he had found death, the dust of a destroyed world in which nothing more could germinate, an exhausted soil whence now there could never grow aught but that despotic papacy, the master of bodies as it was of souls. To his distracted cry asking for a new religion, Rome had been content to reply by condemning his book as a work tainted with heresy, and he himself had withdrawn it amidst the bitter grief of his disillusions. He had seen, he had understood, and all had collapsed. And it was himself, his soul and his brain, which lay among the ruins.

Pierre was stifling. He rose, threw the window overlooking the Tiber wide open, and leant out. The rain had begun to fall again at the approach of evening, but now it had once more ceased. The atmosphere was very mild, moist, even oppressive. The moon must have arisen in the ashen grey sky, for her presence could be divined behind the clouds which she illumined with a vague, yellow, mournful light. And under that slumberous glimmer the vast horizon showed blackly and phantom-like: the Janiculum in front with the close-packed houses of the Trastevere; the river flowing away yonder on the left towards the dim height of the Palatine; whilst on the right the dome of St. Peter's showed forth, round and domineering in the pale atmosphere. Pierre could not see the Quirinal but divined it to be behind him, and could picture its long facade shutting off part of the sky. And what a collapsing Rome, half-devoured by the gloom, was this, so different from the Rome all youth and dreamland which he had beheld and passionately loved on the day of his arrival! He remembered the three symbolic summits which had then summed up for him the whole long history of Rome, the ancient, the papal, and the Italian city. But if the Palatine had remained the same discrowned mount on which there only rose the phantom of the ancestor, Augustus, emperor and pontiff, master of the world, he now pictured St. Peter's and the Quirinal as strangely altered. To that royal palace which he had so neglected, and which had seemed to him like a flat, low barrack, to that new Government which had brought him the impression of some attempt at sacrilegious modernity, he now accorded the large, increasing space that they occupied in the panorama, the whole of which they would apparently soon fill; whilst, on the contrary, St. Peter's, that dome which he had found so triumphal, all azure, reigning over the city like a gigantic and unshakable monarch, at present seemed to him full of cracks and already shrinking, as if it were one of those huge old piles, which, through the secret, unsuspected decay of their timbers, at times fall to the ground in one mass.

A murmur, a growling plaint rose from the swollen Tiber, and Pierre shivered at the icy abysmal breath which swept past his face. And his thoughts of the three summits and their symbolic triangle aroused within him the memory of the sufferings of the great silent multitude of poor and lowly for whom pope and king had so long disputed. It all dated from long ago, from the day when, in dividing the inheritance of Augustus, the emperor had been obliged to content himself with men's bodies, leaving their souls to the pope, whose one idea had henceforth been to gain the temporal power of which God, in his person, was despoiled. All the middle ages had been disturbed and ensanguined by the quarrel, till at last the silent multitude weary of vexations and misery spoke out; threw off the papal yoke at the Reformation, and later on began to overthrow its kings. And then, as Pierre had written in his book, a new fortune had been offered to the pope, that of reverting to the ancient dream, by dissociating himself from the fallen thrones and placing himself on the side of the wretched in the hope that this time he would conquer the people, win it entirely for himself. Was it not prodigious to see that man, Leo XIII, despoiled of his kingdom and allowing himself to be called a socialist, assembling under his banner the great flock of the disinherited, and marching against the kings at the head of that fourth estate to whom the coming century will belong? The eternal struggle for possession of the people continued as bitterly as ever even in Rome itself, where pope and king, who could see each other from their windows, contended together like falcon and hawk for the little birds of the woods. And in this for Pierre lay the reason why Catholicism was fatally condemned; for it was of monarchical essence to such a point that the Apostolic and Roman papacy could not renounce the temporal power under penalty of becoming something else and disappearing. In vain did it feign a return to the people, in vain did it seek to appear all soul; there was no room in the midst of the world's democracies for any such total and universal sovereignty as that which it claimed to hold from God. Pierre ever beheld the Imperator sprouting up afresh in the Pontifex Maximus, and it was this in particular which had killed his dream, destroyed his book, heaped up all those ruins before which he remained distracted without either strength or courage.

The sight of that ashen Rome, whose edifices faded away into the night, at last brought him such a heart-pang that he came back into the room and fell on a chair near his luggage. Never before had he experienced such distress of spirit, it seemed like the death of his soul. After his disaster at Lourdes he had not come to Rome in search of the candid and complete faith of a little child, but the superior faith of an intellectual being, rising above rites and symbols, and seeking to ensure the greatest possible happiness of mankind based on its need of certainty. And if this collapsed, if Catholicism could not be rejuvenated and become the religion and moral law of the new generations, if the Pope at Rome and with Rome could not be the Father, the arch of alliance, the spiritual leader whom all hearkened to and obeyed, why then, in Pierre's eyes, the last hope was wrecked, the supreme rending which must plunge present-day society into the abyss was near at hand. That scaffolding of Catholic socialism which had seemed to him so happily devised for the consolidation of the old Church, now appeared to him lying on the ground; and he judged it severely as a mere passing expedient which might perhaps for some years prop up the ruined edifice, but which was simply based on an intentional misunderstanding, on a skilful lie, on politics and diplomacy. No, no, that the people should once again, as so many times before, be duped and gained over, caressed in order that it might be enthralled—this was repugnant to one's reason, and the whole system appeared degenerate, dangerous, temporary, calculated to end in the worst catastrophes. So this then was the finish, nothing remained erect and stable, the old world was about to disappear amidst the frightful sanguinary crisis whose approach was announced by such indisputable signs. And he, before that chaos near at hand, had no soul left him, having once more lost his faith in that decisive experiment which, he had felt beforehand, would either strengthen him or strike him down for ever. The thunderbolt had fallen, and now, O God, what should he do?

To shake off his anguish he began to walk across the room. Aye, what should he do now that he was all doubt again, all dolorous negation, and that his cassock weighed more heavily than it had ever weighed upon his shoulders? He remembered having told Monsignor Nani that he would never submit, would never be able to resign himself and kill his hope in salvation by love, but would rather reply by a fresh book, in which he would say in what new soil the new religion would spring up. Yes, a flaming book against Rome, in which he would set down all he had seen, a book which would depict the real Rome, the Rome which knows neither charity nor love, and is dying in the pride of its purple! He had spoken of returning to Paris, leaving the Church and going to the point of schism. Well, his luggage now lay there packed, he was going off and he would write that book, he would be the great schismatic who was awaited! Did not everything foretell approaching schism amidst that great movement of men's minds, weary of old mummified dogmas and yet hungering for the divine? Even Leo XIII must be conscious of it, for his whole policy, his whole effort towards Christian unity, his assumed affection for the democracy had no other object than that of grouping the whole family around the papacy, and consolidating it so as to render the Pope invincible in the approaching struggle. But the times had come, Catholicism would soon find that it could grant no more political concessions without perishing, that at Rome it was reduced to the immobility of an ancient hieratic idol, and that only in the lands of propaganda, where it was fighting against other religions, could further evolution take place. It was, indeed, for this reason that Rome was condemned, the more so as the abolition of the temporal power, by accustoming men's minds to the idea of a purely spiritual papacy, seemed likely to conduce to the rise of some anti-pope, far away, whilst the successor of St. Peter was compelled to cling stubbornly to his Apostolic and Roman fiction. A bishop, a priest would arise—where, who could tell? Perhaps yonder in that free America, where there are priests whom the struggle for life has turned into convinced socialists, into ardent democrats, who are ready to go forward with the coming century. And whilst Rome remains unable to relinquish aught of her past, aught of her mysteries and dogmas, that priest will relinquish all of those things which fall from one in dust. Ah! to be that priest, to be that great reformer, that saviour of modern society, what a vast dream, what a part, akin to that of a Messiah summoned by the nations in distress. For a moment Pierre was transported as by a breeze of hope and triumph. If that great change did not come in France, in Paris, it would come elsewhere, yonder across the ocean, or farther yet, wherever there might be a sufficiently fruitful soil for the new seed to spring from it in overflowing harvests. A new religion! a new religion! even as he had cried on returning from Lourdes, a religion which in particular should not be an appetite for death, a religion which should at last realise here below that Kingdom of God referred to in the Gospel, and which should equitably divide terrestrial wealth, and with the law of labour ensure the rule of truth and justice.

In the fever of this fresh dream Pierre already saw the pages of his new book flaring before him when his eyes fell on an object lying upon a chair, which at first surprised him. This also was a book, that work of Theophile Morin's which Orlando had commissioned him to hand to its author, and he felt annoyed with himself at having left it there, for he might have forgotten it altogether. Before putting it into his valise he retained it for a moment in his hand turning its pages over, his ideas changing as by a sudden mental revolution. The work was, however, a very modest one, one of those manuals for the bachelor's degree containing little beyond the first elements of the sciences; still all the sciences were represented in it, and it gave a fair summary of the present state of human knowledge. And it was indeed Science which thus burst upon Pierre's reverie with the energy of sovereign power. Not only was Catholicism swept away from his mind, but all his religious conceptions, every hypothesis of the divine tottered and fell. Only that little school book, nothing but the universal desire for knowledge, that education which ever extends and penetrates the whole people, and behold the mysteries became absurdities, the dogmas crumbled, and nothing of ancient faith was left. A nation nourished upon Science, no longer believing in mysteries and dogmas, in a compensatory system of reward and punishment, is a nation whose faith is for ever dead: and without faith Catholicism cannot be. Therein is the blade of the knife, the knife which falls and severs. If one century, if two centuries be needed, Science will take them. She alone is eternal. It is pure naivete to say that reason is not contrary to faith. The truth is, that now already in order to save mere fragments of the sacred writings, it has been necessary to accommodate them to the new certainties, by taking refuge in the assertion that they are simply symbolical! And what an extraordinary attitude is that of the Catholic Church, expressly forbidding all those who may discover a truth contrary to the sacred writings to pronounce upon it in definitive fashion, and ordering them to await events in the conviction that this truth will some day be proved an error! Only the Pope, says the Church, is infallible; Science is fallible, her constant groping is exploited against her, and divines remain on the watch striving to make it appear that her discoveries of to-day are in contradiction with her discoveries of yesterday. What do her sacrilegious assertions, what do her certainties rending dogma asunder, matter to a Catholic since it is certain that at the end of time, she, Science, will again join Faith, and become the latter's very humble slave! Voluntary blindness and impudent denial of things as evident as the sunlight, can no further go. But all the same the insignificant little book, the manual of truth travels on continuing its work, destroying error and building up the new world, even as the infinitesimal agents of life built up our present continents.

In the sudden great enlightenment which had come on him Pierre at last felt himself upon firm ground. Has Science ever retreated? It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat. Never does Science stop, step by step she wrests truth from error, and to say that she is bankrupt because she cannot explain the world in one word and at one effort, is pure and simple nonsense. If she leaves, and no doubt will always leave a smaller and smaller domain to mystery, and if supposition may always strive to explain that mystery, it is none the less certain that she ruins, and with each successive hour will add to the ruin of the ancient hypotheses, those which crumble away before the acquired truths. And Catholicism is in the position of those ancient hypotheses, and will be in it yet more thoroughly to-morrow. Like all religions it is, at the bottom, but an explanation of the world, a superior social and political code, intended to bring about the greatest possible sum of peace and happiness on earth. This code which embraces the universality of things thenceforth becomes human, and mortal like everything that is human. One cannot put it on one side and say that it exists on one side by itself, whilst Science does the same on the other. Science is total and has already shown Catholicism that such is the case, and will show it again and again by compelling it to repair the breaches incessantly effected in its ramparts till the day of victory shall come with the final assault of resplendent truth. Frankly, it makes one laugh to hear people assign a role to Science, forbid her to enter such and such a domain, predict to her that she shall go no further, and declare that at this end of the century she is already so weary that she abdicates! Oh! you little men of shallow or distorted brains, you politicians planning expedients, you dogmatics at bay, you authoritarians so obstinately clinging to the ancient dreams, Science will pass on, and sweep you all away like withered leaves!

Pierre continued glancing through the humble little book, listening to all it told him of sovereign Science. She cannot become bankrupt, for she does not promise the absolute, she is simply the progressive conquest of truth. Never has she pretended that she could give the whole truth at one effort, that sort of edifice being precisely the work of metaphysics, of revelation, of faith. The role of Science, on the contrary, is only to destroy error as she gradually advances and increases enlightenment. And thus, far from becoming bankrupt, in her march which nothing stops, she remains the only possible truth for well-balanced and healthy minds. As for those whom she does not satisfy, who crave for immediate and universal knowledge, they have the resource of seeking refuge in no matter what religious hypothesis, provided, if they wish to appear in the right, that they build their fancy upon acquired certainties. Everything which is raised on proven error falls. However, although religious feeling persists among mankind, although the need of religion may be eternal, it by no means follows that Catholicism is eternal, for it is, after all, but one form of religion, which other forms preceded and which others will follow. Religions may disappear, but religious feeling will create new ones even with the help of Science. Pierre thought of that alleged repulse of Science by the present-day awakening of mysticism, the causes of which he had indicated in his book: the discredit into which the idea of liberty has fallen among the people, duped in the last social reorganisation, and the uneasiness of the elite, in despair at the void in which their liberated minds and enlarged intelligences have left them. It is the anguish of the Unknown springing up again; but it is also only a natural and momentary reaction after so much labour, on finding that Science does not yet calm our thirst for justice, our desire for security, or our ancient idea of an eternal after-life of enjoyment. In order, however, that Catholicism might be born anew, as some seem to think it will be, the social soil would have to change, and it cannot change; it no longer possesses the sap needful for the renewal of a decaying formula which schools and laboratories destroy more and more each day. The ground is other than it once was, a different oak must spring from it. May Science therefore have her religion, for such a religion will soon be the only one possible for the coming democracies, for the nations, whose knowledge ever increases whilst their Catholic faith is already nought but dust.

And all at once, by way of conclusion, Pierre bethought himself of the idiocy of the Congregation of the Index. It had condemned his book, and would surely condemn the other one that he had thought of, should he ever write it. A fine piece of work truly! To fall tooth and nail on the poor books of an enthusiastic dreamer, in which chimera contended with chimera! Yet the Congregation was so foolish as not to interdict that little book which he held in his hands, that humble book which alone was to be feared, which was the ever triumphant enemy that would surely overthrow the Church. Modest it was in its cheap "get up" as a school manual, but that did not matter: danger began with the very alphabet, increased as knowledge was acquired, and burst forth with those resumes of the physical, chemical, and natural sciences which bring the very Creation, as described by Holy Writ, into question. However, the Index dared not attempt to suppress those humble volumes, those terrible soldiers of truth, those destroyers of faith. What was the use, then, of all the money which Leo XIII drew from his hidden treasure of the Peter's Pence to subvention Catholic schools, with the thought of forming the believing generations which the papacy needed to enable it to conquer? What was the use of that precious money if it was only to serve for the purchase of similar insignificant yet formidable volumes, which could never be sufficiently "cooked" and expurgated, but would always contain too much Science, that growing Science which one day would blow up both Vatican and St. Peter's? Ah! that idiotic and impotent Index, what wretchedness and what derision!

Then, when Pierre had placed Theophile Morin's book in his valise, he once more returned to the window, and while leaning out, beheld an extraordinary vision. Under the cloudy, coppery sky, in the mild and mournful night, patches of wavy mist had risen, hiding many of the house-roofs with trailing shreds which looked like shrouds. Entire edifices had disappeared, and he imagined that the times were at last accomplished, and that truth had at last destroyed St. Peter's dome. In a hundred or a thousand years, it would be like that, fallen, obliterated from the black sky. One day, already, he had felt it tottering and cracking beneath him, and had foreseen that this temple of Catholicism would fall even as Jove's temple had fallen on the Capitol. And it was over now, the dome had strewn the ground with fragments, and all that remained standing, in addition to a portion of the apse, where five columns of the central nave, still upholding a shred of entablature, and four cyclopean buttress-piers on which the dome had rested—piers which still arose, isolated and superb, looking indestructible among all the surrounding downfall. But a denser mist flowed past, another thousand years no doubt went by, and then nothing whatever remained. The apse, the last pillars, the giant piers themselves were felled! The wind had swept away their dust, and it would have been necessary to search the soil beneath the brambles and the nettles to find a few fragments of broken statues, marbles with mutilated inscriptions, on the sense of which learned men were unable to agree. And, as formerly, on the Capitol, among the buried remnants of Jupiter's temple, goats strayed and climbed through the solitude, browsing upon the bushes, amidst the deep silence of the oppressive summer sunlight, which only the buzzing flies disturbed.

Then, only then, did Pierre feel the supreme collapse within him. It was really all over, Science was victorious, nothing of the old world remained. What use would it be then to become the great schismatic, the reformer who was awaited? Would it not simply mean the building up of a new dream? Only the eternal struggle of Science against the Unknown, the searching, pursuing inquiry which incessantly moderated man's thirst for the divine, now seemed to him of import, leaving him waiting to know if she would ever triumph so completely as to suffice mankind, by satisfying all its wants. And in the disaster which had overcome his apostolic enthusiasm, in presence of all those ruins, having lost his faith, and even his hope of utilising old Catholicism for social and moral salvation, there only remained reason that held him up. She had at one moment given way. If he had dreamt that book, and had just passed through that terrible crisis, it was because sentiment had once again overcome reason within him. It was his mother, so to say, who had wept in his heart, who had filled him with an irresistible desire to relieve the wretched and prevent the massacres which seemed near at hand; and his passion for charity had thus swept aside the scruples of his intelligence. But it was his father's voice that he now heard, lofty and bitter reason which, though it had fled, at present came back in all sovereignty. As he had done already after Lourdes, he protested against the glorification of the absurd and the downfall of common sense. Reason alone enabled him to walk erect and firm among the remnants of the old beliefs, even amidst the obscurities and failures of Science. Ah! Reason, it was through her alone that he suffered, through her alone that he could content himself, and he swore that he would now always seek to satisfy her, even if in doing so he should lose his happiness.

At that moment it would have been vain for him to ask what he ought to do. Everything remained in suspense, the world stretched before him still littered with the ruins of the past, of which, to-morrow, it would perhaps be rid. Yonder, in that dolorous faubourg of Paris, he would find good Abbe Rose, who but a few days previously had written begging him to return and tend, love, and save his poor, since Rome, so dazzling from afar, was dead to charity. And around the good and peaceful old priest he would find the ever growing flock of wretched ones; the little fledglings who had fallen from their nests, and whom he found pale with hunger and shivering with cold; the households of abominable misery in which the father drank and the mother became a prostitute, while the sons and the daughters sank into vice and crime; the dwellings, too, through which famine swept, where all was filth and shameful promiscuity, where there was neither furniture nor linen, nothing but purely animal life. And then there would also come the cold blasts of winter, the disasters of slack times, the hurricanes of consumption carrying off the weak, whilst the strong clenched their fists and dreamt of vengeance. One evening, too, perhaps, he might again enter some room of horror and find that another mother had killed herself and her five little ones, her last-born in her arms clinging to her drained breast, and the others scattered over the bare tiles, at last contented, feeling hunger no more, now that they were dead! But no, no, such awful things were no longer possible: such black misery conducting to suicide in the heart of that great city of Paris, which is brimful of wealth, intoxicated with enjoyment, and flings millions out of window for mere pleasure! The very foundations of the social edifice were rotten; all would soon collapse amidst mire and blood. Never before had Pierre so acutely realised the derisive futility of Charity. And all at once he became conscious that the long-awaited word, the word which was at last springing from the great silent multitude, the crushed and gagged people was Justice! Aye, Justice not Charity! Charity had only served to perpetuate misery, Justice perhaps would cure it. It was for Justice that the wretched hungered; an act of Justice alone could sweep away the olden world so that the new one might be reared. After all, the great silent multitude would belong neither to Vatican nor to Quirinal, neither to pope nor to king. If it had covertly growled through the ages in its long, sometimes mysterious, and sometimes open contest; if it had struggled betwixt pontiff and emperor who each had wished to retain it for himself alone, it had only done so in order that it might free itself, proclaim its resolve to belong to none on the day when it should cry Justice! Would to-morrow then at last prove that day of Justice and Truth? For his part, Pierre amidst his anguish—having on one hand that need of the divine which tortures man, and on the other sovereignty of reason which enables man to remain erect—was only sure of one thing, that he would keep his vows, continue a priest, watching over the belief of others though he could not himself believe, and would thus chastely and honestly follow his profession, amidst haughty sadness at having been unable to renounce his intelligence in the same way as he had renounced his flesh and his dream of saving the nations. And again, as after Lourdes, he would wait.

So deeply was he plunged in reflection at that window, face to face with the mist which seemed to be destroying the dark edifices of Rome, that he did not hear himself called. At last, however, he felt a tap on the shoulder: "Monsieur l'Abbe!" And then as he turned he saw Victorine, who said to him: "It is half-past nine; the cab is there. Giacomo has already taken your luggage down. You must come away, Monsieur l'Abbe."

Then seeing him blink, still dazed as it were, she smiled and added: "You were bidding Rome goodbye. What a frightful sky there is."

"Yes, frightful," was his reply.

Then they descended the stairs. He had handed her a hundred-franc note to be shared between herself and the other servants. And she apologised for going down before him with the lamp, explaining that the old palace was so dark that evening one could scarcely see.

Ah! that departure, that last descent through the black and empty mansion, it quite upset Pierre's heart. He gave his room that glance of farewell which always saddened him, even when he was leaving a spot where he had suffered. Then, on passing Don Vigilio's chamber, whence there only came a quivering silence, he pictured the secretary with his head buried in his pillows, holding his breath for fear lest he should speak and attract vengeance. But it was in particular on the second and first floor landings, on passing the closed doors of Donna Serafina and the Cardinal, that Pierre quivered with apprehension at hearing nothing but the silence of the grave. And as he followed Victorine, who, lamp in hand, was still descending, he thought of the brother and sister who were left alone in the ruined palace, last relics of a world which had half passed away. All hope of life had departed with Benedetta and Dario, no resurrection could come from that old maid and that priest who was bound to chastity. Ah! those interminable and lugubrious passages, that frigid and gigantic staircase which seemed to descend into nihility, those huge halls with cracking walls where all was wretchedness and abandonment! And that inner court, looking like a cemetery with its weeds and its damp porticus, where remnants of Apollos and Venuses were rotting! And the little deserted garden, fragrant with ripe oranges, whither nobody now would ever stray, where none would ever meet that adorable Contessina under the laurels near the sarcophagus! All was now annihilated in abominable mourning, in a death-like silence, amidst which the two last Boccaneras must wait, in savage grandeur, till their palace should fall about their heads. Pierre could only just detect a faint sound, the gnawing of a mouse perhaps, unless it were caused by Abbe Paparelli attacking the walls of some out-of-the-way rooms, preying on the old edifice down below, so as to hasten its fall.

The cab stood at the door, already laden with the luggage, the box beside the driver, the valise on the seat; and the priest at once got in.

"Oh! You have plenty of time," said Victorine, who had remained on the foot-pavement. "Nothing has been forgotten. I'm glad to see you go off comfortably."

And indeed at that last moment Pierre was comforted by the presence of that worthy woman, his compatriot, who had greeted him on his arrival and now attended his departure. "I won't say 'till we meet again,' Monsieur l'Abbe," she exclaimed, "for I don't fancy that you'll soon be back in this horrid city. Good-bye, Monsieur l'Abbe."

"Good-bye, Victorine, and thank you with all my heart."

The cab was already going off at a fast trot, turning into the narrow sinuous street which leads to the Corso Vittoria Emanuele. It was not raining and so the hood had not been raised, but although the damp atmosphere was comparatively mild, Pierre at once felt a chill. However, he was unwilling to stop the driver, a silent fellow whose only desire seemingly was to get rid of his fare as soon as possible. When the cab came out into the Corso Vittoria Emanuele, the young man was astonished to find it already quite deserted, the houses shut, the footways bare, and the electric lamps burning all alone in melancholy solitude. In truth, however, the temperature was far from warm and the fog seemed to be increasing, hiding the house-fronts more and more. When Pierre passed the Cancelleria, that stern colossal pile seemed to him to be receding, fading away; and farther on, upon the right, at the end of the Via di Ara Coeli, starred by a few smoky gas lamps, the Capitol had quite vanished in the gloom. Then the thoroughfare narrowed, and the cab went on between the dark heavy masses of the Gesu and the Altieri palace; and there in that contracted passage, where even on fine sunny days one found all the dampness of old times, the quivering priest yielded to a fresh train of thought. It was an idea which had sometimes made him feel anxious, the idea that mankind, starting from over yonder in Asia, had always marched onward with the sun. An east wind had always carried the human seed for future harvest towards the west. And for a long while now the cradle of humanity had been stricken with destruction and death, as if indeed the nations could only advance by stages, leaving exhausted soil, ruined cities, and degenerate populations behind, as they marched from orient to occident, towards their unknown goal. Nineveh and Babylon on the banks of the Euphrates, Thebes and Memphis on the banks of the Nile, had been reduced to dust, sinking from old age and weariness into a deadly numbness beyond possibility of awakening. Then decrepitude had spread to the shores of the great Mediterranean lake, burying both Tyre and Sidon with dust, and afterwards striking Carthage with senility whilst it yet seemed in full splendour. In this wise as mankind marched on, carried by the hidden forces of civilisation from east to west, it marked each day's journey with ruins; and how frightful was the sterility nowadays displayed by the cradle of History, that Asia and that Egypt, which had once more lapsed into childhood, immobilised in ignorance and degeneracy amidst the ruins of ancient cities that once had been queens of the world!

It was thus Pierre reflected as the cab rolled on. Still he was not unconscious of his surroundings. As he passed the Palazzo di Venezia it seemed to him to be crumbling beneath some assault of the invisible, for the mist had already swept away its battlements, and the lofty, bare, fearsome walls looked as if they were staggering from the onslaught of the growing darkness. And after passing the deep gap of the Corso, which was also deserted amidst the pallid radiance of its electric lights, the Palazzo Torlonia appeared on the right-hand, with one wing ripped open by the picks of demolishers, whilst on the left, farther up, the Palazzo Colonna showed its long, mournful facade and closed windows, as if, now that it was deserted by its masters and void of its ancient pomp, it awaited the demolishers in its turn.

Then, as the cab at a slower pace began to climb the ascent of the Via Nazionale, Pierre's reverie continued. Was not Rome also stricken, had not the hour come for her to disappear amidst that destruction which the nations on the march invariably left behind them? Greece, Athens, and Sparta slumbered beneath their glorious memories, and were of no account in the world of to-day. Moreover, the growing paralysis had already invaded the lower portion of the Italic peninsula; and after Naples certainly came the turn of Rome. She was on the very margin of the death spot which ever extends over the old continent, that margin where agony begins, where the impoverished soil will no longer nourish and support cities, where men themselves seem stricken with old age as soon as they are born. For two centuries Rome had been declining, withdrawing little by little from modern life, having neither manufactures nor trade, and being incapable even of science, literature, or art. And in Pierre's thoughts it was no longer St. Peter's only that fell, but all Rome—basilicas, palaces, and entire districts—which collapsed amidst a supreme rending, and covered the seven hills with a chaos of ruins. Like Nineveh and Babylon, and like Thebes and Memphis, Rome became but a plain, bossy with remnants, amidst which one vainly sought to identify the sites of ancient edifices, whilst its sole denizens were coiling serpents and bands of rats.

The cab turned, and on the right, in a huge gap of darkness Pierre recognised Trajan's column, but it was no longer gilded by the sun as when he had first seen it; it now rose up blackly like the dead trunk of a giant tree whose branches have fallen from old age. And farther on, when he raised his eyes while crossing the little triangular piazza, and perceived a real tree against the leaden sky, that parasol pine of the Villa Aldobrandini which rises there like a symbol of Rome's grace and pride, it seemed to him but a smear, a little cloud of soot ascending from the downfall of the whole city.

With the anxious, fraternal turn of his feelings, fear was coming over him as he reached the end of his tragic dream. When the numbness which spreads across the aged world should have passed Rome, when Lombardy should have yielded to it, and Genoa, Turin, and Milan should have fallen asleep as Venice has fallen already, then would come the turn of France. The Alps would be crossed, Marseilles, like Tyre and Sidon, would see its port choked up by sand, Lyons would sink into desolation and slumber, and at last Paris, invaded by the invincible torpor, and transformed into a sterile waste of stones bristling with nettles, would join Rome and Nineveh and Babylon in death, whilst the nations continued their march from orient to occident following the sun. A great cry sped through the gloom, the death cry of the Latin races! History, which seemed to have been born in the basin of the Mediterranean, was being transported elsewhere, and the ocean had now become the centre of the world. How many hours of the human day had gone by? Had mankind, starting from its cradle over yonder at daybreak, strewing its road with ruins from stage to stage, now accomplished one-half of its day and reached the dazzling hour of noon? If so, then the other half of the day allotted to it was beginning, the new world was following the old one, the new world of those American cities where democracy was forming and the religion of to-morrow was sprouting, those sovereign queens of the coming century, with yonder, across another ocean, on the other side of the globe, that motionless Far East, mysterious China and Japan, and all the threatening swarm of the yellow races.

However, while the cab climbed higher and higher up the Via Nazionale, Pierre felt his nightmare dissipating. There was here a lighter atmosphere, and he came back into a renewal of hope and courage. Yet the Banca d'Italia, with its brand-new ugliness, its chalky hugeness, looked to him like a phantom in a shroud; whilst above a dim expanse of gardens the Quirinal formed but a black streak barring the heavens. However, the street ever ascended and broadened, and on the summit of the Viminal, on the Piazza delle Terme, when he passed the ruins of Diocletian's baths, he could breathe as his lungs listed. No, no, the human day could not finish, it was eternal, and the stages of civilisation would follow and follow without end! What mattered that eastern wind which carried the nations towards the west, as if borne on by the power of the sun! If necessary, they would return across the other side of the globe, they would again and again make the circuit of the earth, until the day should come when they could establish themselves in peace, truth, and justice. After the next civilisation on the shores of the Atlantic, which would become the world's centre, skirted by queenly cities, there would spring up yet another civilisation, having the Pacific for its centre, with seaport capitals that could not be yet foreseen, whose germs yet slumbered on unknown shores. And in like way there would be still other civilisations and still others! And at that last moment, the inspiriting thought came to Pierre that the great movement of the nations was the instinct, the need which impelled them to return to unity. Originating in one sole family, afterwards parted and dispersed in tribes, thrown into collision by fratricidal hatred, their tendency was none the less to become one sole family again. The provinces united in nations, the nations would unite in races, and the races would end by uniting in one immortal mankind—mankind at last without frontiers, or possibility of wars, mankind living by just labour amidst an universal commonwealth. Was not this indeed the evolution, the object of the labour progressing everywhere, the finish reserved to History? Might Italy then become a strong and healthy nation, might concord be established between her and France, and might that fraternity of the Latin races become the beginning of universal fraternity! Ah! that one fatherland, the whole earth pacified and happy, in how many centuries would that come—and what a dream!

Then, on reaching the station the scramble prevented Pierre from thinking any further. He had to take his ticket and register his luggage, and afterwards he at once climbed into the train. At dawn on the next day but one, he would be back in Paris.

END

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Paris, by Emile Zola

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Title: Paris
From the "Three Cities"

Author: Emile Zola

Translator: Ernest A. Vizetelly

Release Date: March 17, 2009 [EBook #9169]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PARIS ***

Produced by David Widger and Dagny

PARIS

The Three Cities

By Emile Zola

Translated By Ernest A. Vizetelly

Contents

PARIS

BOOK I.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

I. THE PRIEST AND THE POOR

II. WEALTH AND WORLDLINESS

III. RANTERS AND RULERS

IV. SOCIAL SIDELIGHTS

V. FROM RELIGION TO ANARCHY

BOOK II.

I. REVOLUTIONISTS

II. A HOME OF INDUSTRY

III. PENURY AND TOIL

IV. CULTURE AND HOPE

V. PROBLEMS

BOOK III.

I. THE RIVALS

II. SPIRIT AND FLESH

III. PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT

IV. THE MAN HUNT

V. THE GAME OF POLITICS

BOOK IV.

I. PIERRE AND MARIE

II. TOWARDS LIFE

III. THE DAWN OF LOVE

IV. TRIAL AND SENTENCE

V. SACRIFICE

BOOK V.

I. THE GUILLOTINE

II. IN VANITY FAIR

III. THE GOAL OF LABOUR

IV. THE CRISIS

V. LIFE'S WORK AND PROMISE

PARIS

FROM THE THREE CITIES

By Emile Zola

Translated By Ernest A. Vizetelly

BOOK I.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

WITH the present work M. Zola completes the "Trilogy of the Three Cities," which he began with "Lourdes" and continued with "Rome"; and thus the adventures and experiences of Abbe Pierre Froment, the doubting Catholic priest who failed to find faith at the miraculous grotto by the Cave, and hope amidst the crumbling theocracy of the Vatican, are here brought to what, from M. Zola's point of view, is their logical conclusion. From the first pages of "Lourdes," many readers will have divined that Abbe Froment was bound to finish as he does, for, frankly, no other finish was possible from a writer of M. Zola's opinions.

Taking the Trilogy as a whole, one will find that it is essentially symbolical. Abbe Froment is Man, and his struggles are the struggles between Religion, as personified by the Roman Catholic Church, on the one hand, and Reason and Life on the other. In the Abbe's case the victory ultimately rests with the latter; and we may take it as being M. Zola's opinion that the same will eventually be the case with the great bulk of mankind. English writers are often accused of treating subjects from an insular point of view, and certainly there may be good ground for such a charge. But they are not the only writers guilty of the practice. The purview of French authors is often quite as limited: they regard French opinion as the only good opinion, and judge the rest of the world by their own standard. In the present case, if we leave the world and mankind generally on one side, and apply M. Zola's facts and theories to France alone, it will be found, I think, that he has made out a remarkably good case for himself. For it is certain that Catholicism, I may say Christianity, is fast crumbling in France. There may be revivals in certain limited circles, efforts of the greatest energy to prop up the tottering edifice by a "rallying" of believers to the democratic cause, and by a kindling of the most bitter anti-Semitic warfare; but all these revivals and efforts, although they are extremely well-advertised and create no little stir, produce very little impression on the bulk of the population. So far as France is concerned, the policy of Leo XIII. seems to have come too late. The French masses regard Catholicism or Christianity, whichever one pleases, as a religion of death,—a religion which, taking its stand on the text "There shall always be poor among you," condemns them to toil and moil in poverty and distress their whole life long, with no other consolation than the promise of happiness in heaven. And, on the other hand, they see the ministers of the Deity, "whose kingdom is not of this world," supporting the wealthy and powerful, and striving to secure wealth and power for themselves. Charity exists, of course, but the masses declare that it is no remedy; they do not ask for doles, they ask for Justice. It is largely by reason of all this that Socialism and Anarchism have made such great strides in France of recent years. Robespierre, as will be remembered, once tried to suppress Christianity altogether, and for a time certainly there was a virtually general cessation of religious observances in France. But no such Reign of Terror prevails there to-day. Men are perfectly free to believe if they are inclined to do so; and yet never were there fewer religious marriages, fewer baptisms or smaller congregations in the French churches. I refer not merely to Paris and other large cities, but to the smaller towns, and even the little hamlets of many parts. Old village priests, men practising what they teach and possessed of the most loving, benevolent hearts, have told me with tears in their eyes of the growing infidelity of their parishioners.

I have been studying this matter for some years, and write without prejudice, merely setting down what I believe to be the truth. Of course we are all aware that the most stupendous efforts are being made by the Catholic clergy and zealous believers to bring about a revival of the faith, and certainly in some circles there has been a measure of success. But the reconversion of a nation is the most formidable of tasks; and, in my own opinion, as in M. Zola's, France as a whole is lost to the Christian religion. On this proposition, combined with a second one, namely, that even as France as a nation will be the first to discard Christianity, so she will be the first to promulgate a new faith based on reason, science and the teachings of life, is founded the whole argument of M. Zola's Trilogy.

Having thus dealt with the Trilogy's religious aspects, I would now speak of "Paris," its concluding volume. This is very different from "Lourdes" and "Rome." Whilst recounting the struggles and fate of Abbe Froment and his brother Guillaume, and entering largely into the problem of Capital and Labour, which problem has done so much to turn the masses away from Christianity, it contains many an interesting and valuable picture of the Parisian world at the close of the nineteenth century. It is no guide-book to Paris; but it paints the city's social life, its rich and poor, its scandals and crimes, its work and its pleasures. Among the households to which the reader is introduced are those of a banker, an aged Countess of the old noblesse, a cosmopolitan Princess, of a kind that Paris knows only too well, a scientist, a manufacturer, a working mechanician, a priest, an Anarchist, a petty clerk and an actress of a class that so often dishonours the French stage. Science and art and learning and religion, all have their representatives. Then, too, the political world is well to the front. There are honest and unscrupulous Ministers of State, upright and venal deputies, enthusiastic and cautious candidates for power, together with social theoreticians of various schools. And the blase, weak-minded man of fashion is here, as well as the young "symbolist" of perverted, degraded mind. The women are of all types, from the most loathsome to the most lovable. Then, too, the journalists are portrayed in such life-like fashion that I might give each of them his real name. And journalism, Parisian journalism, is flagellated, shown as it really is,—if just a few well-conducted organs be excepted,—that is, venal and impudent, mendacious and even petty.

The actual scenes depicted are quite as kaleidoscopic as are the characters in their variety. We enter the banker's gilded saloon and the hovel of the pauper, the busy factory, the priest's retired home and the laboratory of the scientist. We wait in the lobbies of the Chamber of Deputies, and afterwards witness "a great debate"; we penetrate into the private sanctum of a Minister of the Interior; we attend a fashionable wedding at the Madeleine and a first performance at the Comedie Francaise; we dine at the Cafe Anglais and listen to a notorious vocalist in a low music hall at Montmartre; we pursue an Anarchist through the Bois de Boulogne; we slip into the Assize Court and see that Anarchist tried there; we afterwards gaze upon his execution by the guillotine; we are also on the boulevards when the lamps are lighted for a long night of revelry, and we stroll along the quiet streets in the small hours of the morning, when crime and homeless want are prowling round.

And ever the scene changes; the whole world of Paris passes before one. Yet the book, to my thinking, is far less descriptive than analytical. The souls of the principal characters are probed to their lowest depths. Many of the scenes, too, are intensely dramatic, admirably adapted for the stage; as, for instance, Baroness Duvillard's interview with her daughter in the chapter which I have called "The Rivals." And side by side with baseness there is heroism, while beauty of the flesh finds its counterpart in beauty of the mind. M. Zola has often been reproached for showing us the vileness of human nature; and no doubt such vileness may be found in "Paris," but there are contrasting pictures. If some of M. Zola's characters horrify the reader, there are others that the latter can but admire. Life is compounded of good and evil, and unfortunately it is usually the evil that makes the most noise and attracts the most attention. Moreover, in M. Zola's case, it has always been his purpose to expose the evils from which society suffers in the hope of directing attention to them and thereby hastening a remedy, and thus, in the course of his works, he could not do otherwise than drag the whole frightful mass of human villany and degradation into the full light of day. But if there are, again, black pages in "Paris," others, bright and comforting, will be found near them. And the book ends in no pessimist strain. Whatever may be thought of the writer's views on religion, most readers will, I imagine, agree with his opinion that, despite much social injustice, much crime, vice, cupidity and baseness, we are ever marching on to better things.

In the making of the coming, though still far-away, era of truth and justice, Paris, he thinks, will play the leading part, for whatever the stains upon her, they are but surface-deep; her heart remains good and sound; she has genius and courage and energy and wit and fancy. She can be generous, too, when she chooses, and more than once her ideas have irradiated the world. Thus M. Zola hopes much from her, and who will gainsay him? Not I, who can apply to her the words which Byron addressed to the home of my own and M. Zola's forefathers:—

"I loved her from my boyhood; she to me
Was as a fairy city of the heart."

Thus I can but hope that Paris, where I learnt the little I know, where I struggled and found love and happiness, whose every woe and disaster and triumph I have shared for over thirty years, may, however dark the clouds that still pass over her, some day fully justify M. Zola's confidence, and bring to pass his splendid dream of perfect truth and perfect justice.

E. A. V.

MERTON, SURREY, ENGLAND,

Feb. 5, 1898.

I. THE PRIEST AND THE POOR

THAT morning, one towards the end of January, Abbe Pierre Froment, who had a mass to say at the Sacred Heart at Montmartre, was on the height, in front of the basilica, already at eight o'clock. And before going in he gazed for a moment upon the immensity of Paris spread out below him.

After two months of bitter cold, ice and snow, the city was steeped in a mournful, quivering thaw. From the far-spreading, leaden-hued heavens a thick mist fell like a mourning shroud. All the eastern portion of the city, the abodes of misery and toil, seemed submerged beneath ruddy steam, amid which the panting of workshops and factories could be divined; while westwards, towards the districts of wealth and enjoyment, the fog broke and lightened, becoming but a fine and motionless veil of vapour. The curved line of the horizon could scarcely be divined, the expanse of houses, which nothing bounded, appeared like a chaos of stone, studded with stagnant pools, which filled the hollows with pale steam; whilst against them the summits of the edifices, the housetops of the loftier streets, showed black like soot. It was a Paris of mystery, shrouded by clouds, buried as it were beneath the ashes of some disaster, already half-sunken in the suffering and the shame of that which its immensity concealed.

Thin and sombre in his flimsy cassock, Pierre was looking on when Abbe Rose, who seemed to have sheltered himself behind a pillar of the porch on purpose to watch for him, came forward: "Ah! it's you at last, my dear child," said he, "I have something to ask you."

He seemed embarrassed and anxious, and glanced round distrustfully to make sure that nobody was near. Then, as if the solitude thereabouts did not suffice to reassure him, he led Pierre some distance away, through the icy, biting wind, which he himself did not seem to feel. "This is the matter," he resumed, "I have been told that a poor fellow, a former house-painter, an old man of seventy, who naturally can work no more, is dying of hunger in a hovel in the Rue des Saules. So, my dear child, I thought of you. I thought you would consent to take him these three francs from me, so that he may at least have some bread to eat for a few days."

"But why don't you take him your alms yourself?"

At this Abbe Rose again grew anxious, and cast vague, frightened glances about him. "Oh, no, oh, no!" he said, "I can no longer do that after all the worries that have befallen me. You know that I am watched, and should get another scolding if I were caught giving alms like this, scarcely knowing to whom I give them. It is true that I had to sell something to get these three francs. But, my dear child, render me this service, I pray you."

Pierre, with heart oppressed, stood contemplating the old priest, whose locks were quite white, whose full lips spoke of infinite kindliness, and whose eyes shone clear and childlike in his round and smiling face. And he bitterly recalled the story of that lover of the poor, the semi-disgrace into which he had fallen through the sublime candour of his charitable goodness. His little ground-floor of the Rue de Charonne, which he had turned into a refuge where he offered shelter to all the wretchedness of the streets, had ended by giving cause for scandal. His naivete and innocence had been abused; and abominable things had gone on under his roof without his knowledge. Vice had turned the asylum into a meeting-place; and at last, one night, the police had descended upon it to arrest a young girl accused of infanticide. Greatly concerned by this scandal, the diocesan authorities had forced Abbe Rose to close his shelter, and had removed him from the church of Ste. Marguerite to that of St. Pierre of Montmartre, where he now again acted as curate. Truth to tell, it was not a disgrace but a removal to another spot. However, he had been scolded and was watched, as he said; and he was much ashamed of it, and very unhappy at being only able to give alms by stealth, much like some harebrained prodigal who blushes for his faults.

Pierre took the three francs. "I promise to execute your commission, my friend, oh! with all my heart," he said.

"You will go after your mass, won't you? His name is Laveuve, he lives in the Rue des Saules in a house with a courtyard, just before reaching the Rue Marcadet. You are sure to find it. And if you want to be very kind you will tell me of your visit this evening at five o'clock, at the Madeleine, where I am going to hear Monseigneur Martha's address. He has been so good to me! Won't you also come to hear him?"

Pierre made an evasive gesture. Monseigneur Martha, Bishop of Persepolis and all powerful at the archiepiscopal palace, since, like the genial propagandist he was, he had been devoting himself to increasing the subscriptions for the basilica of the Sacred Heart, had indeed supported Abbe Rose; in fact, it was by his influence that the abbe had been kept in Paris, and placed once more at St. Pierre de Montmartre.

"I don't know if I shall be able to hear the address," said Pierre, "but in any case I will go there to meet you."

The north wind was blowing, and the gloomy cold penetrated both of them on that deserted summit amidst the fog which changed the vast city into a misty ocean. However, some footsteps were heard, and Abbe Rose, again mistrustful, saw a man go by, a tall and sturdy man, who wore clogs and was bareheaded, showing his thick and closely-cut white hair. "Is not that your brother?" asked the old priest.

Pierre had not stirred. "Yes, it is my brother Guillaume," he quietly responded. "I have found him again since I have been coming occasionally to the Sacred Heart. He owns a house close by, where he has been living for more than twenty years, I think. When we meet we shake hands, but I have never even been to his house. Oh! all is quite dead between us, we have nothing more in common, we are parted by worlds."

Abbe Rose's tender smile again appeared, and he waved his hand as if to say that one must never despair of love. Guillaume Froment, a savant of lofty intelligence, a chemist who lived apart from others, like one who rebelled against the social system, was now a parishioner of the abbe's, and when the latter passed the house where Guillaume lived with his three sons—a house all alive with work—he must often have dreamt of leading him back to God.

"But, my dear child," he resumed, "I am keeping you here in this dark cold, and you are not warm. Go and say your mass. Till this evening, at the Madeleine." Then, in entreating fashion, after again making sure that none could hear them, he added, still with the air of a child at fault: "And not a word to anybody about my little commission—it would again be said that I don't know how to conduct myself."

Pierre watched the old priest as he went off towards the Rue Cartot, where he lived on a damp ground-floor, enlivened by a strip of garden. The veil of disaster, which was submerging Paris, now seemed to grow thicker under the gusts of the icy north wind. And at last Pierre entered the basilica, his heart upset, overflowing with the bitterness stirred up by the recollection of Abbe Rose's story—that bankruptcy of charity, the frightful irony of a holy man punished for bestowing alms, and hiding himself that he might still continue to bestow them. Nothing could calm the smart of the wound reopened in Pierre's heart—neither the warm peacefulness into which he entered, nor the silent solemnity of the broad, deep fabric, whose new stonework was quite bare, without a single painting or any kind of decoration; the nave being still half-barred by the scaffoldings which blocked up the unfinished dome. At that early hour the masses of entreaty had already been said at several altars, under the grey light falling from the high and narrow windows, and the tapers of entreaty were burning in the depths of the apse. So Pierre made haste to go to the sacristy, there to assume his vestments in order that he might say his mass in the chapel of St. Vincent de Paul.

But the floodgates of memory had been opened, and he had no thought but for his distress whilst, in mechanical fashion, he performed the rites and made the customary gestures. Since his return from Rome three years previously, he had been living in the very worst anguish that can fall on man. At the outset, in order to recover his lost faith, he had essayed a first experiment: he had gone to Lourdes, there to seek the innocent belief of the child who kneels and prays, the primitive faith of young nations bending beneath the terror born of ignorance; but he had rebelled yet more than ever in presence of what he had witnessed at Lourdes: that glorification of the absurd, that collapse of common sense; and was convinced that salvation, the peace of men and nations nowadays, could not lie in that puerile relinquishment of reason. And afterwards, again yielding to the need of loving whilst yet allowing reason, so hard to satisfy, her share in his intellect, he had staked his final peace on a second experiment, and had gone to Rome to see if Catholicism could there be renewed, could revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity and become the religion of the democracy, the faith which the modern world, upheaving and in danger of death, was awaiting in order to calm down and live. And he had found there naught but ruins, the rotted trunk of a tree that could never put forth another springtide; and he had heard there naught but the supreme rending of the old social edifice, near to its fall. Then it was, that, relapsing into boundless doubt, total negation, he had been recalled to Paris by Abbe Rose, in the name of their poor, and had returned thither that he might forget and immolate himself and believe in them—the poor—since they and their frightful sufferings alone remained certain. And then it was too, that for three years he came into contact with that collapse, that very bankruptcy of goodness itself: charity a derision, charity useless and flouted.

Those three years had been lived by Pierre amidst ever-growing torments, in which his whole being had ended by sinking. His faith was forever dead; dead, too, even his hope of utilising the faith of the multitudes for the general salvation. He denied everything, he anticipated nothing but the final, inevitable catastrophe: revolt, massacre and conflagration, which would sweep away a guilty and condemned world. Unbelieving priest that he was, yet watching over the faith of others, honestly, chastely discharging his duties, full of haughty sadness at the thought that he had been unable to renounce his mind as he had renounced his flesh and his dream of being a saviour of the nations, he withal remained erect, full of fierce yet solitary grandeur. And this despairing, denying priest, who had dived to the bottom of nothingness, retained such a lofty and grave demeanour, perfumed by such pure kindness, that in his parish of Neuilly he had acquired the reputation of being a young saint, one beloved by Providence, whose prayers wrought miracles. He was but a personification of the rules of the Church; of the priest he retained only the gestures; he was like an empty sepulchre in which not even the ashes of hope remained; yet grief-stricken weeping women worshipped him and kissed his cassock; and it was a tortured mother whose infant was in danger of death, who had implored him to come and ask that infant's cure of Jesus, certain as she felt that Jesus would grant her the boon in that sanctuary of Montmartre where blazed the prodigy of His heart, all burning with love.

Clad in his vestments, Pierre had reached the chapel of St. Vincent de Paul. He there ascended the altar-step and began the mass; and when he turned round with hands spread out to bless the worshippers he showed his hollow cheeks, his gentle mouth contracted by bitterness, his loving eyes darkened by suffering. He was no longer the young priest whose countenance had glowed with tender fever on the road to Lourdes, whose face had been illumined by apostolic fervour when he started for Rome. The two hereditary influences which were ever at strife within him—that of his father to whom he owed his impregnable, towering brow, that of his mother who had given him his love-thirsting lips, were still waging war, the whole human battle of sentiment and reason, in that now ravaged face of his, whither in moments of forgetfulness ascended all the chaos of internal suffering. The lips still confessed that unquenched thirst for love, self-bestowal and life, which he well thought he could nevermore content, whilst the solid brow, the citadel which made him suffer, obstinately refused to capitulate, whatever might be the assaults of error. But he stiffened himself, hid the horror of the void in which he struggled, and showed himself superb, making each gesture, repeating each word in sovereign fashion. And gazing at him through her tears, the mother who was there among the few kneeling women, the mother who awaited a supreme intercession from him, who thought him in communion with Jesus for the salvation of her child, beheld him radiant with angelic beauty like some messenger of the divine grace.

When, after the offertory, Pierre uncovered the chalice he felt contempt for himself. The shock had been too great, and he thought of those things in spite of all. What puerility there had been in his two experiments at Lourdes and Rome, the naivete of a poor distracted being, consumed by desire to love and believe. To have imagined that present-day science would in his person accommodate itself to the faith of the year One Thousand, and in particular to have foolishly believed that he, petty priest that he was, would be able to indoctrinate the Pope and prevail on him to become a saint and change the face of the world! It all filled him with shame; how people must have laughed at him! Then, too, his idea of a schism made him blush. He again beheld himself at Rome, dreaming of writing a book by which he would violently sever himself from Catholicism to preach the new religion of the democracies, the purified, human and living Gospel. But what ridiculous folly! A schism? He had known in Paris an abbe of great heart and mind who had attempted to bring about that famous, predicted, awaited schism. Ah! the poor man, the sad, the ludicrous labour in the midst of universal incredulity, the icy indifference of some, the mockery and the reviling of others! If Luther were to come to France in our days he would end, forgotten and dying of hunger, on a Batignolles fifth-floor. A schism cannot succeed among a people that no longer believes, that has ceased to take all interest in the Church, and sets its hope elsewhere. And it was all Catholicism, in fact all Christianity, that would be swept away, for, apart from certain moral maxims, the Gospel no longer supplied a possible code for society. And this conviction increased Pierre's torment on the days when his cassock weighed more heavily on his shoulders, when he ended by feeling contempt for himself at thus celebrating the divine mystery of the mass, which for him had become but the formula of a dead religion.

Having half filled the chalice with wine from the vase, Pierre washed his hands and again perceived the mother with her face of ardent entreaty. Then he thought it was for her that, with the charitable leanings of a vow-bound man, he had remained a priest, a priest without belief, feeding the belief of others with the bread of illusion. But this heroic conduct, the haughty spirit of duty in which he imprisoned himself, was not practised by him without growing anguish. Did not elementary probity require that he should cast aside the cassock and return into the midst of men? At certain times the falsity of his position filled him with disgust for his useless heroism; and he asked himself if it were not cowardly and dangerous to leave the masses in superstition. Certainly the theory of a just and vigilant Providence, of a future paradise where all these sufferings of the world would receive compensation, had long seemed necessary to the wretchedness of mankind; but what a trap lay in it, what a pretext for the tyrannical grinding down of nations; and how far more virile it would be to undeceive the nations, however brutally, and give them courage to live the real life, even if it were in tears. If they were already turning aside from Christianity was not this because they needed a more human ideal, a religion of health and joy which should not be a religion of death? On the day when the idea of charity should crumble, Christianity would crumble also, for it was built upon the idea of divine charity correcting the injustice of fate, and offering future rewards to those who might suffer in this life. And it was crumbling; for the poor no longer believed in it, but grew angry at the thought of that deceptive paradise, with the promise of which their patience had been beguiled so long, and demanded that their share of happiness should not always be put off until the morrow of death. A cry for justice arose from every lip, for justice upon this earth, justice for those who hunger and thirst, whom alms are weary of relieving after eighteen hundred years of Gospel teaching, and who still and ever lack bread to eat.

When Pierre, with his elbows on the altar, had emptied the chalice after breaking the sacred wafer, he felt himself sinking into yet greater distress. And so a third experiment was beginning for him, the supreme battle of justice against charity, in which his heart and his mind would struggle together in that great Paris, so full of terrible, unknown things. The need for the divine still battled within him against domineering intelligence. How among the masses would one ever be able to content the thirst for the mysterious? Leaving the elite on one side, would science suffice to pacify desire, lull suffering, and satisfy the dream? And what would become of himself in the bankruptcy of that same charity, which for three years had alone kept him erect by occupying his every hour, and giving him the illusion of self-devotion, of being useful to others? It seemed, all at once, as if the ground sank beneath him, and he heard nothing save the cry of the masses, silent so long, but now demanding justice, growling and threatening to take their share, which was withheld from them by force and ruse. Nothing more, it seemed, could delay the inevitable catastrophe, the fratricidal class warfare that would sweep away the olden world, which was condemned to disappear beneath the mountain of its crimes. Every hour with frightful sadness he expected the collapse, Paris steeped in blood, Paris in flames. And his horror of all violence froze him; he knew not where to seek the new belief which might dissipate the peril. Fully conscious, though he was, that the social and religious problems are but one, and are alone in question in the dreadful daily labour of Paris, he was too deeply troubled himself, too far removed from ordinary things by his position as a priest, and too sorely rent by doubt and powerlessness to tell as yet where might be truth, and health, and life. Ah! to be healthy and to live, to content at last both heart and reason in the peace, the certain, simply honest labour, which man has come to accomplish upon this earth!

The mass was finished, and Pierre descended from the altar, when the weeping mother, near whom he passed, caught hold of a corner of the chasuble with her trembling hands, and kissed it with wild fervour, as one may kiss some relic of a saint from whom one expects salvation. She thanked him for the miracle which he must have accomplished, certain as she felt that she would find her child cured. And he was deeply stirred by that love, that ardent faith of hers, in spite of the sudden and yet keener distress which he felt at being in no wise the sovereign minister that she thought him, the minister able to obtain a respite from Death. But he dismissed her consoled and strengthened, and it was with an ardent prayer that he entreated the unknown but conscious Power to succour the poor creature. Then, when he had divested himself in the sacristy, and found himself again out of doors before the basilica, lashed by the keen wintry wind, a mortal shiver came upon him, and froze him, while through the mist he looked to see if a whirlwind of anger and justice had not swept Paris away: that catastrophe which must some day destroy it, leaving under the leaden heavens only the pestilential quagmire of its ruins.

Pierre wished to fulfil Abbe Rose's commission immediately. He followed the Rue des Norvins, on the crest of Montmartre; and, reaching the Rue des Saules, descended by its steep slope, between mossy walls, to the other side of Paris. The three francs which he was holding in his cassock's pocket, filled him at once with gentle emotion and covert anger against the futility of charity. But as he gradually descended by the sharp declivities and interminable storeys of steps, the mournful nooks of misery which he espied took possession of him, and infinite pity wrung his heart. A whole new district was here being built alongside the broad thoroughfares opened since the great works of the Sacred Heart had begun. Lofty middle-class houses were already rising among ripped-up gardens and plots of vacant land, still edged with palings. And these houses with their substantial frontages, all new and white, lent a yet more sombre and leprous aspect to such of the old shaky buildings as remained, the low pot-houses with blood-coloured walls, the cites of workmen's dwellings, those abodes of suffering with black, soiled buildings in which human cattle were piled. Under the low-hanging sky that day, the pavement, dented by heavily-laden carts, was covered with mud; the thaw soaked the walls with an icy dampness, whilst all the filth and destitution brought terrible sadness to the heart.

After going as far as the Rue Marcadet, Pierre retraced his steps; and in the Rue des Saules, certain that he was not mistaken, he entered the courtyard of a kind of barracks or hospital, encompassed by three irregular buildings. This court was a quagmire, where filth must have accumulated during the two months of terrible frost; and now all was melting, and an abominable stench arose. The buildings were half falling, the gaping vestibules looked like cellar holes, strips of paper streaked the cracked and filthy window-panes, and vile rags hung about like flags of death. Inside a shanty which served as the door-keeper's abode Pierre only saw an infirm man rolled up in a tattered strip of what had once been a horse-cloth.

"You have an old workman named Laveuve here," said the priest. "Which staircase is it, which floor?"

The man did not answer, but opened his anxious eyes, like a scared idiot. The door-keeper, no doubt, was in the neighbourhood. For a moment the priest waited; then seeing a little girl on the other side of the courtyard, he risked himself, crossed the quagmire on tip-toe, and asked: "Do you know an old workman named Laveuve in the house, my child?"

The little girl, who only had a ragged gown of pink cotton stuff about her meagre figure, stood there shivering, her hands covered with chilblains. She raised her delicate face, which looked pretty though nipped by the cold: "Laveuve," said she, "no, don't know, don't know." And with the unconscious gesture of a beggar child she put out one of her poor, numbed and disfigured hands. Then, when the priest had given her a little bit of silver, she began to prance through the mud like a joyful goat, singing the while in a shrill voice: "Don't know, don't know."

Pierre decided to follow her. She vanished into one of the gaping vestibules, and, in her rear, he climbed a dark and fetid staircase, whose steps were half-broken and so slippery, on account of the vegetable parings strewn over them, that he had to avail himself of the greasy rope by which the inmates hoisted themselves upwards. But every door was closed; he vainly knocked at several of them, and only elicited, at the last, a stifled growl, as though some despairing animal were confined within. Returning to the yard, he hesitated, then made his way to another staircase, where he was deafened by piercing cries, as of a child who is being butchered. He climbed on hearing this noise and at last found himself in front of an open room where an infant, who had been left alone, tied in his little chair, in order that he might not fall, was howling and howling without drawing breath. Then Pierre went down again, upset, frozen by the sight of so much destitution and abandonment.

But a woman was coming in, carrying three potatoes in her apron, and on being questioned by him she gazed distrustfully at his cassock. "Laveuve, Laveuve? I can't say," she replied. "If the door-keeper were there, she might be able to tell you. There are five staircases, you see, and we don't all know each other. Besides, there are so many changes. Still try over there; at the far end."

The staircase at the back of the yard was yet more abominable than the others, its steps warped, its walls slimy, as if soaked with the sweat of anguish. At each successive floor the drain-sinks exhaled a pestilential stench, whilst from every lodging came moans, or a noise of quarrelling, or some frightful sign of misery. A door swung open, and a man appeared dragging a woman by the hair whilst three youngsters sobbed aloud. On the next floor, Pierre caught a glimpse of a room where a young girl in her teens, racked by coughing, was hastily carrying an infant to and fro to quiet it, in despair that all the milk of her breast should be exhausted. Then, in an adjoining lodging, came the poignant spectacle of three beings, half clad in shreds, apparently sexless and ageless, who, amidst the dire bareness of their room, were gluttonously eating from the same earthen pan some pottage which even dogs would have refused. They barely raised their heads to growl, and did not answer Pierre's questions.

He was about to go down again, when right atop of the stairs, at the entry of a passage, it occurred to him to make a last try by knocking at the door. It was opened by a woman whose uncombed hair was already getting grey, though she could not be more than forty; while her pale lips, and dim eyes set in a yellow countenance, expressed utter lassitude, the shrinking, the constant dread of one whom wretchedness has pitilessly assailed. The sight of Pierre's cassock disturbed her, and she stammered anxiously: "Come in, come in, Monsieur l'Abbe."

However, a man whom Pierre had not at first seen—a workman also of some forty years, tall, thin and bald, with scanty moustache and beard of a washed-out reddish hue—made an angry gesture—a threat as it were—to turn the priest out of doors. But he calmed himself, sat down near a rickety table and pretended to turn his back. And as there was also a child present—a fair-haired girl, eleven or twelve years old, with a long and gentle face and that intelligent and somewhat aged expression which great misery imparts to children—he called her to him, and held her between his knees, doubtless to keep her away from the man in the cassock.

Pierre—whose heart was oppressed by his reception, and who realised the utter destitution of this family by the sight of the bare, fireless room, and the distressed mournfulness of its three inmates—decided all the same to repeat his question: "Madame, do you know an old workman named Laveuve in the house?"

The woman—who now trembled at having admitted him, since it seemed to displease her man—timidly tried to arrange matters. "Laveuve, Laveuve? no, I don't. But Salvat, you hear? Do you know a Laveuve here?"

Salvat merely shrugged his shoulders; but the little girl could not keep her tongue still: "I say, mamma Theodore, it's p'raps the Philosopher."

"A former house-painter," continued Pierre, "an old man who is ill and past work."

Madame Theodore was at once enlightened. "In that case it's him, it's him. We call him the Philosopher, a nickname folks have given him in the neighbourhood. But there's nothing to prevent his real name from being Laveuve."

With one of his fists raised towards the ceiling, Salvat seemed to be protesting against the abomination of a world and a Providence that allowed old toilers to die of hunger just like broken-down beasts. However, he did not speak, but relapsed into the savage, heavy silence, the bitter meditation in which he had been plunged when the priest arrived. He was a journeyman engineer, and gazed obstinately at the table where lay his little leather tool-bag, bulging with something it contained—something, perhaps, which he had to take back to a work-shop. He might have been thinking of a long, enforced spell of idleness, of a vain search for any kind of work during the two previous months of that terrible winter. Or perhaps it was the coming bloody reprisals of the starvelings that occupied the fiery reverie which set his large, strange, vague blue eyes aglow. All at once he noticed that his daughter had taken up the tool-bag and was trying to open it to see what it might contain. At this he quivered and at last spoke, his voice kindly, yet bitter with sudden emotion, which made him turn pale. "Celine, you must leave that alone. I forbade you to touch my tools," said he; then taking the bag, he deposited it with great precaution against the wall behind him.

"And so, madame," asked Pierre, "this man Laveuve lives on this floor?"

Madame Theodore directed a timid, questioning glance at Salvat. She was not in favour of hustling priests when they took the trouble to call, for at times there was a little money to be got from them. And when she realised that Salvat, who had once more relapsed into his black reverie, left her free to act as she pleased, she at once tendered her services. "If Monsieur l'Abbe is agreeable, I will conduct him. It's just at the end of the passage. But one must know the way, for there are still some steps to climb."

Celine, finding a pastime in this visit, escaped from her father's knees and likewise accompanied the priest. And Salvat remained alone in that den of poverty and suffering, injustice and anger, without a fire, without bread, haunted by his burning dream, his eyes again fixed upon his bag, as if there, among his tools, he possessed the wherewithal to heal the ailing world.

It indeed proved necessary to climb a few more steps; and then, following Madame Theodore and Celine, Pierre found himself in a kind of narrow garret under the roof, a loft a few yards square, where one could not stand erect. There was no window, only a skylight, and as the snow still covered it one had to leave the door wide open in order that one might see. And the thaw was entering the place, the melting snow was falling drop by drop, and coming over the tiled floor. After long weeks of intense cold, dark dampness rained quivering over all. And there, lacking even a chair, even a plank, Laveuve lay in a corner on a little pile of filthy rags spread upon the bare tiles; he looked like some animal dying on a dung-heap.

"There!" said Celine in her sing-song voice, "there he is, that's the Philosopher!"

Madame Theodore had bent down to ascertain if he still lived. "Yes, he breathes; he's sleeping I think. Oh! if he only had something to eat every day, he would be well enough. But what would you have? He has nobody left him, and when one gets to seventy the best is to throw oneself into the river. In the house-painting line it often happens that a man has to give up working on ladders and scaffoldings at fifty. He at first found some work to do on the ground level. Then he was lucky enough to get a job as night watchman. But that's over, he's been turned away from everywhere, and, for two months now, he's been lying in this nook waiting to die. The landlord hasn't dared to fling him into the street as yet, though not for want of any inclination that way. We others sometimes bring him a little wine and a crust, of course; but when one has nothing oneself, how can one give to others?"

Pierre, terrified, gazed at that frightful remnant of humanity, that remnant into which fifty years of toil, misery and social injustice had turned a man. And he ended by distinguishing Laveuve's white, worn, sunken, deformed head. Here, on a human face, appeared all the ruin following upon hopeless labour. Laveuve's unkempt beard straggled over his features, suggesting an old horse that is no longer cropped; his toothless jaws were quite askew, his eyes were vitreous, and his nose seemed to plunge into his mouth. But above all else one noticed his resemblance to some beast of burden, deformed by hard toil, lamed, worn to death, and now only good for the knackers.

"Ah! the poor fellow," muttered the shuddering priest. "And he is left to die of hunger, all alone, without any succour? And not a hospital, not an asylum has given him shelter?"

"Well," resumed Madame Theodore in her sad yet resigned voice, "the hospitals are built for the sick, and he isn't sick, he's simply finishing off, with his strength at an end. Besides he isn't always easy to deal with. People came again only lately to put him in an asylum, but he won't be shut up. And he speaks coarsely to those who question him, not to mention that he has the reputation of liking drink and talking badly about the gentle-folks. But, thank Heaven, he will now soon be delivered."

Pierre had leant forward on seeing Laveuve's eyes open, and he spoke to him tenderly, telling him that he had come from a friend with a little money to enable him to buy what he might most pressingly require. At first, on seeing Pierre's cassock, the old man had growled some coarse words; but, despite his extreme feebleness, he still retained the pert chaffing spirit of the Parisian artisan: "Well, then, I'll willingly drink a drop," he said distinctly, "and have a bit of bread with it, if there's the needful; for I've lost taste of both for a couple of days past."

Celine offered her services, and Madame Theodore sent her to fetch a loaf and a quart of wine with Abbe Rose's money. And in the interval she told Pierre how Laveuve was at one moment to have entered the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour, a charitable enterprise whose lady patronesses were presided over by Baroness Duvillard. However, the usual regulation inquiries had doubtless led to such an unfavourable report that matters had gone no further.

"Baroness Duvillard! but I know her, and will go to see her to-day!" exclaimed Pierre, whose heart was bleeding. "It is impossible for a man to be left in such circumstances any longer."

Then, as Celine came back with the loaf and the wine, the three of them tried to make Laveuve more comfortable, raised him on his heap of rags, gave him to eat and to drink, and then left the remainder of the wine and the loaf—a large four-pound loaf—near him, recommending him to wait awhile before he finished the bread, as otherwise he might stifle.

"Monsieur l'Abbe ought to give me his address in case I should have any news to send him," said Madame Theodore when she again found herself at her door.

Pierre had no card with him, and so all three went into the room. But Salvat was no longer alone there. He stood talking in a low voice very quickly, and almost mouth to mouth, with a young fellow of twenty. The latter, who was slim and dark, with a sprouting beard and hair cut in brush fashion, had bright eyes, a straight nose and thin lips set in a pale and slightly freckled face, betokening great intelligence. With stern and stubborn brow, he stood shivering in his well-worn jacket.

"Monsieur l'Abbe wants to leave me his address for the Philosopher's affair," gently explained Madame Theodore, annoyed to find another there with Salvat.

The two men had glanced at the priest and then looked at one another, each with terrible mien. And they suddenly ceased speaking in the bitter cold which fell from the ceiling. Then, again with infinite precaution, Salvat went to take his tool-bag from alongside the wall.

"So you are going down, you are again going to look for work?" asked Madame Theodore.

He did not answer, but merely made an angry gesture, as if to say that he would no longer have anything to do with work since work for so long a time had not cared to have anything to do with him.

"All the same," resumed the woman, "try to bring something back with you, for you know there's nothing. At what time will you be back?"

With another gesture he seemed to answer that he would come back when he could, perhaps never. And tears rising, despite all his efforts, to his vague, blue, glowing eyes he caught hold of his daughter Celine, kissed her violently, distractedly, and then went off, with his bag under his arm, followed by his young companion.

"Celine," resumed Madame Theodore, "give Monsieur l'Abbe your pencil, and, see, monsieur, seat yourself here, it will be better for writing."

Then, when Pierre had installed himself at the table, on the chair previously occupied by Salvat, she went on talking, seeking to excuse her man for his scanty politeness: "He hasn't a bad heart, but he's had so many worries in life that he has become a bit cracked. It's like that young man whom you just saw here, Monsieur Victor Mathis. There's another for you, who isn't happy, a young man who was well brought up, who has a lot of learning, and whose mother, a widow, has only just got the wherewithal to buy bread. So one can understand it, can't one? It all upsets their heads, and they talk of blowing up everybody. For my part those are not my notions, but I forgive them, oh! willingly enough."

Perturbed, yet interested by all the mystery and vague horror which he could divine around him, Pierre made no haste to write his address, but lingered listening, as if inviting confidence.

"If you only knew, Monsieur l'Abbe, that poor Salvat was a forsaken child, without father or mother, and had to scour the roads and try every trade at first to get a living. Then afterwards he became a mechanician, and a very good workman, I assure you, very skilful and very painstaking. But he already had those ideas of his, and quarrelled with people, and tried to bring his mates over to his views; and so he was unable to stay anywhere. At last, when he was thirty, he was stupid enough to go to America with an inventor, who traded on him to such a point that after six years of it he came back ill and penniless. I must tell you that he had married my younger sister Leonie, and that she died before he went to America, leaving him little Celine, who was then only a year old. I was then living with my husband, Theodore Labitte, a mason; and it's not to brag that I say it, but however much I wore out my eyes with needlework he used to beat me till he left me half-dead on the floor. But he ended by deserting me and going off with a young woman of twenty, which, after all, caused me more pleasure than grief. And naturally when Salvat came back he sought me out and found me alone with his little Celine, whom he had left in my charge when he went away, and who called me mamma. And we've all three been living together since then—"

She became somewhat embarrassed, and then, as if to show that she did not altogether lack some respectable family connections, she went on to say: "For my part I've had no luck; but I've another sister, Hortense, who's married to a clerk, Monsieur Chretiennot, and lives in a pretty lodging on the Boulevard Rochechouart. There were three of us born of my father's second marriage,—Hortense, who's the youngest, Leonie, who's dead, and myself, Pauline, the eldest. And of my father's first marriage I've still a brother Eugene Toussaint, who is ten years older than me and is an engineer like Salvat, and has been working ever since the war in the same establishment, the Grandidier factory, only a hundred steps away in the Rue Marcadet. The misfortune is that he had a stroke lately. As for me, my eyes are done for; I ruined them by working ten hours a day at fine needlework. And now I can no longer even try to mend anything without my eyes filling with water till I can't see at all. I've tried to find charwoman's work, but I can't get any; bad luck always follows us. And so we are in need of everything; we've nothing but black misery, two or three days sometimes going by without a bite, so that it's like the chance life of a dog that feeds on what it can find. And with these last two months of bitter cold to freeze us, it's sometimes made us think that one morning we should never wake up again. But what would you have? I've never been happy, I was beaten to begin with, and now I'm done for, left in a corner, living on, I really don't know why."

Her voice had begun to tremble, her red eyes moistened, and Pierre could realise that she thus wept through life, a good enough woman but one who had no will, and was already blotted out, so to say, from existence.

"Oh! I don't complain of Salvat," she went on. "He's a good fellow; he only dreams of everybody's happiness, and he doesn't drink, and he works when he can. Only it's certain that he'd work more if he didn't busy himself with politics. One can't discuss things with comrades, and go to public meetings and be at the workshop at the same time. In that he's at fault, that's evident. But all the same he has good reason to complain, for one can't imagine such misfortunes as have pursued him. Everything has fallen on him, everything has beaten him down. Why, a saint even would have gone mad, so that one can understand that a poor beggar who has never had any luck should get quite wild. For the last two months he has only met one good heart, a learned gentleman who lives up yonder on the height, Monsieur Guillaume Froment, who has given him a little work, just something to enable us to have some soup now and then."

Much surprised by this mention of his brother, Pierre wished to ask certain questions; but a singular feeling of uneasiness, in which fear and discretion mingled, checked his tongue. He looked at Celine, who stood before him, listening in silence with her grave, delicate air; and Madame Theodore, seeing him smile at the child, indulged in a final remark: "It's just the idea of that child," said she, "that throws Salvat out of his wits. He adores her, and he'd kill everybody if he could, when he sees her go supperless to bed. She's such a good girl, she was learning so nicely at the Communal School! But now she hasn't even a shift to go there in."

Pierre, who had at last written his address, slipped a five-franc piece into the little girl's hand, and, desirous as he was of curtailing any thanks, he hastily said: "You will know now where to find me if you need me for Laveuve. But I'm going to busy myself about him this very afternoon, and I really hope that he will be fetched away this evening."

Madame Theodore did not listen, but poured forth all possible blessings; whilst Celine, thunderstruck at seeing five francs in her hand, murmured: "Oh! that poor papa, who has gone to hunt for money! Shall I run after him to tell him that we've got enough for to-day?"

Then the priest, who was already in the passage, heard the woman answer: "Oh! he's far away if he's still walking. He'll p'raps come back right enough."

However, as Pierre, with buzzing head and grief-stricken heart, hastily escaped out of that frightful house of suffering, he perceived to his astonishment Salvat and Victor Mathis standing erect in a corner of the filthy courtyard, where the stench was so pestilential. They had come downstairs, there to continue their interrupted colloquy. And again, they were talking in very low tones, and very quickly, mouth to mouth, absorbed in the violent thoughts which made their eyes flare. But they heard the priest's footsteps, recognised him, and suddenly becoming cold and calm, exchanged an energetic hand-shake without uttering another word. Victor went up towards Montmartre, whilst Salvat hesitated like a man who is consulting destiny. Then, as if trusting himself to stern chance, drawing up his thin figure, the figure of a weary, hungry toiler, he turned into the Rue Marcadet, and walked towards Paris, his tool-bag still under his arm.

For an instant Pierre felt a desire to run and call to him that his little girl wished him to go back again. But the same feeling of uneasiness as before came over the priest—a commingling of discretion and fear, a covert conviction that nothing could stay destiny. And he himself was no longer calm, no longer experienced the icy, despairing distress of the early morning. On finding himself again in the street, amidst the quivering fog, he felt the fever, the glow of charity which the sight of such frightful wretchedness had ignited, once more within him. No, no! such suffering was too much; he wished to struggle still, to save Laveuve and restore a little joy to all those poor folk. The new experiment presented itself with that city of Paris which he had seen shrouded as with ashes, so mysterious and so perturbing beneath the threat of inevitable justice. And he dreamed of a huge sun bringing health and fruitfulness, which would make of the huge city the fertile field where would sprout the better world of to-morrow.

II. WEALTH AND WORLDLINESS

THAT same morning, as was the case nearly every day, some intimates were expected to dejeuner at the Duvillards', a few friends who more or less invited themselves. And on that chilly day, all thaw and fog, the regal mansion in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy near the Boulevard de la Madeleine bloomed with the rarest flowers, for flowers were the greatest passion of the Baroness, who transformed the lofty, sumptuous rooms, littered with marvels, into warm and odoriferous conservatories, whither the gloomy, livid light of Paris penetrated caressingly with infinite softness.

The great reception rooms were on the ground-floor looking on to the spacious courtyard, and preceded by a little winter garden, which served as a vestibule where two footmen in liveries of dark green and gold were invariably on duty. A famous gallery of paintings, valued at millions of francs, occupied the whole of the northern side of the house. And the grand staircase, of a sumptuousness which also was famous, conducted to the apartments usually occupied by the family, a large red drawing-room, a small blue and silver drawing-room, a study whose walls were hung with old stamped leather, and a dining-room in pale green with English furniture, not to mention the various bedchambers and dressing-rooms. Built in the time of Louis XIV. the mansion retained an aspect of noble grandeur, subordinated to the epicurean tastes of the triumphant bourgeoisie, which for a century now had reigned by virtue of the omnipotence of money.

Noon had not yet struck, and Baron Duvillard, contrary to custom, found himself the first in the little blue and silver salon. He was a man of sixty, tall and sturdy, with a large nose, full cheeks, broad, fleshy lips, and wolfish teeth, which had remained very fine. He had, however, become bald at an early age, and dyed the little hair that was left him. Moreover, since his beard had turned white, he had kept his face clean-shaven. His grey eyes bespoke his audacity, and in his laugh there was a ring of conquest, while the whole of his face expressed the fact that this conquest was his own, that he wielded the sovereignty of an unscrupulous master, who used and abused the power stolen and retained by his caste.

He took a few steps, and then halted in front of a basket of wonderful orchids near the window. On the mantel-piece and table tufts of violets sent forth their perfume, and in the warm, deep silence which seemed to fall from the hangings, the Baron sat down and stretched himself in one of the large armchairs, upholstered in blue satin striped with silver. He had taken a newspaper from his pocket, and began to re-peruse an article it contained, whilst all around him the entire mansion proclaimed his immense fortune, his sovereign power, the whole history of the century which had made him the master. His grandfather, Jerome Duvillard, son of a petty advocate of Poitou, had come to Paris as a notary's clerk in 1788, when he was eighteen; and very keen, intelligent and hungry as he was, he had gained the family's first three millions—at first in trafficking with the emigres' estates when they were confiscated and sold as national property, and later, in contracting for supplies to the imperial army. His father, Gregoire Duvillard, born in 1805, and the real great man of the family—he who had first reigned in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, after King Louis Philippe had granted him the title of Baron—remained one of the recognized heroes of modern finance by reason of the scandalous profits which he had made in every famous thieving speculation of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, such as mines, railroads, and the Suez Canal. And he, the present Baron, Henri by name, and born in 1836, had only seriously gone into business on Baron Gregoire's death soon after the Franco-German War. However, he had done so with such a rageful appetite, that in a quarter of a century he had again doubled the family fortune. He rotted and devoured, corrupted, swallowed everything that he touched; and he was also the tempter personified—the man who bought all consciences that were for sale—having fully understood the new times and its tendencies in presence of the democracy, which in its turn had become hungry and impatient. Inferior though he was both to his father and his grandfather, being a man of enjoyment, caring less for the work of conquest than the division of the spoil, he nevertheless remained a terrible fellow, a sleek triumpher, whose operations were all certainties, who amassed millions at each stroke, and treated with governments on a footing of equality, able as he was to place, if not France, at least a ministry in his pocket. In one century and three generations, royalty had become embodied in him: a royalty already threatened, already shaken by the tempest close ahead. And at times his figure grew and expanded till it became, as it were, an incarnation of the whole bourgeoisie—that bourgeoisie which at the division of the spoils in 1789 appropriated everything, and has since fattened on everything at the expense of the masses, and refuses to restore anything whatever.

The article which the Baron was re-perusing in a halfpenny newspaper interested him. "La Voix du Peuple" was a noisy sheet which, under the pretence of defending outraged justice and morality, set a fresh scandal circulating every morning in the hope of thereby increasing its sales. And that morning, in big type on its front page, this sub-title was displayed: "The Affair of the African Railways. Five Millions spent in Bribes: Two Ministers Bought, Thirty Deputies and Senators Compromised." Then in an article of odious violence the paper's editor, the famous Sagnier, announced that he possessed and intended to publish the list of the thirty-two members of Parliament, whose support Baron Duvillard had purchased at the time when the Chambers had voted the bill for the African Railway Lines. Quite a romantic story was mingled with all this, the adventures of a certain Hunter, whom the Baron had employed as his go-between and who had now fled. The Baron, however, re-perused each sentence and weighed each word of the article very calmly; and although he was alone he shrugged his shoulders and spoke aloud with the tranquil assurance of a man whose responsibility is covered and who is, moreover, too powerful to be molested.

"The idiot," he said, "he knows even less than he pretends."

Just then, however, a first guest arrived, a man of barely four and thirty, elegantly dressed, dark and good looking, with a delicately shaped nose, and curly hair and beard. As a rule, too, he had laughing eyes, and something giddy, flighty, bird-like in his demeanour; but that morning he seemed nervous, anxious even, and smiled in a scared way.

"Ah! it's you, Duthil," said the Baron, rising. "Have you read this?" And he showed the new comer the "Voix du Peuple," which he was folding up to replace it in his pocket.

"Why yes, I've read it. It's amazing. How can Sagnier have got hold of the list of names? Has there been some traitor?"

The Baron looked at his companion quietly, amused by his secret anguish. Duthil, the son of a notary of Angouleme, almost poor and very honest, had been sent to Paris as deputy for that town whilst yet very young, thanks to the high reputation of his father; and he there led a life of pleasure and idleness, even as he had formerly done when a student. However, his pleasant bachelor's quarters in the Rue de Suresnes, and his success as a handsome man in the whirl of women among whom he lived, cost him no little money; and gaily enough, devoid as he was of any moral sense, he had already glided into all sorts of compromising and lowering actions, like a light-headed, superior man, a charming, thoughtless fellow, who attached no importance whatever to such trifles.

"Bah!" said the Baron at last. "Has Sagnier even got a list? I doubt it, for there was none; Hunter wasn't so foolish as to draw one up. And then, too, it was merely an ordinary affair; nothing more was done than is always done in such matters of business."

Duthil, who for the first time in his life had felt anxious, listened like one that needs to be reassured. "Quite so, eh?" he exclaimed. "That's what I thought. There isn't a cat to be whipped in the whole affair."

He tried to laugh as usual, and no longer exactly knew how it was that he had received some ten thousand francs in connection with the matter, whether it were in the shape of a vague loan, or else under some pretext of publicity, puffery, or advertising, for Hunter had acted with extreme adroitness so as to give no offence to the susceptibilities of even the least virginal consciences.

"No, there's not a cat to be whipped," repeated Duvillard, who decidedly seemed amused by the face which Duthil was pulling. "And besides, my dear fellow, it's well known that cats always fall on their feet. But have you seen Silviane?"

"I just left her. I found her in a great rage with you. She learnt this morning that her affair of the Comedie is off."

A rush of anger suddenly reddened the Baron's face. He, who could scoff so calmly at the threat of the African Railways scandal, lost his balance and felt his blood boiling directly there was any question of Silviane, the last, imperious passion of his sixtieth year. "What! off?" said he. "But at the Ministry of Fine Arts they gave me almost a positive promise only the day before yesterday."

He referred to a stubborn caprice of Silviane d'Aulnay, who, although she had hitherto only reaped a success of beauty on the stage, obstinately sought to enter the Comedie Francaise and make her debut there in the part of "Pauline" in Corneille's "Polyeucte," which part she had been studying desperately for several months past. Her idea seemed an insane one, and all Paris laughed at it; but the young woman, with superb assurance, kept herself well to the front, and imperiously demanded the role, feeling sure that she would conquer.

"It was the minister who wouldn't have it," explained Duthil.

The Baron was choking. "The minister, the minister! Ah! well, I will soon have that minister sent to the rightabout."

However, he had to cease speaking, for at that moment Baroness Duvillard came into the little drawing-room. At forty-six years of age she was still very beautiful. Very fair and tall, having hitherto put on but little superfluous fat, and retaining perfect arms and shoulders, with speckless silky skin, it was only her face that was spoiling, colouring slightly with reddish blotches. And these blemishes were her torment, her hourly thought and worry. Her Jewish origin was revealed by her somewhat long and strangely charming face, with blue and softly voluptuous eyes. As indolent as an Oriental slave, disliking to have to move, walk, or even speak, she seemed intended for a harem life, especially as she was for ever tending her person. That day she was all in white, gowned in a white silk toilette of delicious and lustrous simplicity.

Duthil complimented her, and kissed her hand with an enraptured air. "Ah! madame, you set a little springtide in my heart. Paris is so black and muddy this morning."

However, a second guest entered the room, a tall and handsome man of five or six and thirty; and the Baron, still disturbed by his passion, profited by this opportunity to make his escape. He carried Duthil away into his study, saying, "Come here an instant, my dear fellow. I have a few more words to say to you about the affair in question. Monsieur de Quinsac will keep my wife company for a moment."

The Baroness, as soon as she was alone with the new comer, who, like Duthil, had most respectfully kissed her hand, gave him a long, silent look, while her soft eyes filled with tears. Deep silence, tinged with some slight embarrassment, had fallen, but she ended by saying in a very low voice: "How happy I am, Gerard, to find myself alone with you for a moment. For a month past I have not had that happiness."

The circumstances in which Henri Duvillard had married the younger daughter of Justus Steinberger, the great Jew banker, formed quite a story which was often recalled. The Steinbergers—after the fashion of the Rothschilds—were originally four brothers—Justus, residing in Paris, and the three others at Berlin, Vienna, and London, a circumstance which gave their secret association most formidable power in the financial markets of Europe. Justus, however, was the least wealthy of the four, and in Baron Gregoire Duvillard he had a redoubtable adversary against whom he was compelled to struggle each time that any large prey was in question. And it was after a terrible encounter between the pair, after the eager sharing of the spoils, that the crafty idea had come to Justus of giving his younger daughter Eve in marriage, by way of douceur, to the Baron's son, Henri. So far the latter had only been known as an amiable fellow, fond of horses and club life; and no doubt Justus's idea was that, at the death of the redoubtable Baron, who was already condemned by his physicians, he would be able to lay his hands on the rival banking-house, particularly if he only had in front of him a son-in-law whom it was easy to conquer. As it happened, Henri had been mastered by a violent passion for Eve's blond beauty, which was then dazzling. He wished to marry her, and his father, who knew him, consented, in reality greatly amused to think that Justus was making an execrably bad stroke of business. The enterprise became indeed disastrous for Justus when Henri succeeded his father and the man of prey appeared from beneath the man of pleasure and carved himself his own huge share in exploiting the unbridled appetites of the middle-class democracy, which had at last secured possession of power. Not only did Eve fail to devour Henri, who in his turn had become Baron Duvillard, the all-powerful banker, more and more master of the market; but it was the Baron who devoured Eve, and this in less than four years' time. After she had borne him a daughter and a son in turn, he suddenly drew away from her, neglected her, as if she were a mere toy that he no longer cared for. She was at first both surprised and distressed by the change, especially on learning that he was resuming his bachelor's habits, and had set his fickle if ardent affections elsewhere. Then, however, without any kind of recrimination, any display of anger, or even any particular effort to regain her ascendency over him, she, on her side, imitated his example. She could not live without love, and assuredly she had only been born to be beautiful, to fascinate and reap adoration. To the lover whom she chose when she was five and twenty she remained faithful for more than fifteen years, as faithful as she might have been to a husband; and when he died her grief was intense, it was like real widowhood. Six months later, however, having met Count Gerard de Quinsac she had again been unable to resist her imperative need of adoration, and an intrigue had followed.

"Have you been ill, my dear Gerard?" she inquired, noticing the young man's embarrassment. "Are you hiding some worry from me?"

She was ten years older than he was; and she clung desperately to this last passion of hers, revolting at the thought of growing old, and resolved upon every effort to keep the young man beside her.

"No, I am hiding nothing, I assure you," replied the Count. "But my mother has had much need of me recently."

She continued looking at him, however, with anxious passion, finding him so tall and aristocratic of mien, with his regular features and dark hair and moustaches which were always most carefully tended. He belonged to one of the oldest families of France, and resided on a ground-floor in the Rue St. Dominique with his widowed mother, who had been ruined by her adventurously inclined husband, and had at most an income of some fifteen thousand francs* to live upon. Gerard for his part had never done anything; contenting himself with his one year of obligatory military service, he had renounced the profession of arms in the same way as he had renounced that of diplomacy, the only one that offered him an opening of any dignity. He spent his days in that busy idleness common to all young men who lead "Paris life." And his mother, haughtily severe though she was, seemed to excuse this, as if in her opinion a man of his birth was bound by way of protest to keep apart from official life under a Republic. However, she no doubt had more intimate, more disturbing reasons for indulgence. She had nearly lost him when he was only seven, through an attack of brain fever. At eighteen he had complained of his heart, and the doctors had recommended that he should be treated gently in all respects. She knew, therefore, what a lie lurked behind his proud demeanour, within his lofty figure, that haughty facade of his race. He was but dust, ever threatened with illness and collapse. In the depths of his seeming virility there was merely girlish abandon; and he was simply a weak, good-natured fellow, liable to every stumble. It was on the occasion of a visit which he had paid with his mother to the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour that he had first seen Eve, whom he continued to meet; his mother, closing her eyes to this culpable connection in a sphere of society which she treated with contempt, in the same way as she had closed them to so many other acts of folly which she had forgiven because she regarded them as the mere lapses of an ailing child. Moreover, Eve had made a conquest of Madame de Quinsac, who was very pious, by an action which had recently amazed society. It had been suddenly learnt that she had allowed Monseigneur Martha to convert her to the Roman Catholic faith. This thing, which she had refused to do when solicited by her lawful husband, she had now done in the hope of ensuring herself a lover's eternal affection. And all Paris was still stirred by the magnificence exhibited at the Madeleine, on the occasion of the baptism of this Jewess of five and forty, whose beauty and whose tears had upset every heart.

* About 3000 dollars.

Gerard, on his side, was still flattered by the deep and touching tenderness shown to him; but weariness was coming, and he had already sought to break off the connection by avoiding any further assignations. He well understood Eve's glances and her tears, and though he was moved at sight of them he tried to excuse himself. "I assure you," said he, "my mother has kept me so busy that I could not get away." But she, without a word, still turned her tearful glance on him, and weak, like herself, in despair that he should have been left alone with her in this fashion, he yielded, unable to continue refusing. "Well, then," said he, "this afternoon at four o'clock if you are free."

He had lowered his voice in speaking, but a slight rustle made him turn his head and start like one in fault. It was the Baroness's daughter Camille entering the room. She had heard nothing; but by the smile which the others had exchanged, by the very quiver of the air, she understood everything; an assignation for that very day and at the very spot which she suspected. Some slight embarrassment followed, an exchange of anxious and evil glances.

Camille, at three and twenty, was a very dark young woman, short of stature and somewhat deformed, with her left shoulder higher than the right. There seemed to be nothing of her father or mother in her. Her case was one of those unforeseen accidents in family heredity which make people wonder whence they can arise. Her only pride lay in her beautiful black eyes and superb black hair, which, short as she was, would, said she, have sufficed to clothe her. But her nose was long, her face deviated to the left, and her chin was pointed. Her thin, witty, and malicious lips bespoke all the rancour and perverse anger stored in the heart of this uncomely creature, whom the thought of her uncomeliness enraged. However, the one whom she most hated in the whole world was her own mother, that amorosa who was so little fitted to be a mother, who had never loved her, never paid attention to her, but had abandoned her to the care of servants from her very infancy. In this wise real hatred had grown up between the two women, mute and frigid on the one side, and active and passionate on the other. The daughter hated her mother because she found her beautiful, because she had not been created in the same image: beautiful with the beauty with which her mother crushed her. Day by day she suffered at being sought by none, at realising that the adoration of one and all still went to her mother. As she was amusing in her maliciousness, people listened to her and laughed; however, the glances of all the men—even and indeed especially the younger ones—soon reverted to her triumphant mother, who seemingly defied old age. In part for this reason Camille, with ferocious determination, had decided that she would dispossess her mother of her last lover Gerard, and marry him herself, conscious that such a loss would doubtless kill the Baroness. Thanks to her promised dowry of five millions of francs, the young woman did not lack suitors; but, little flattered by their advances, she was accustomed to say, with her malicious laugh: "Oh! of course; why for five millions they would take a wife from a mad-house." However, she, herself, had really begun to love Gerard, who, good-natured as he was, evinced much kindness towards this suffering young woman whom nature had treated so harshly. It worried him to see her forsaken by everyone, and little by little he yielded to the grateful tenderness which she displayed towards him, happy, handsome man that he was, at being regarded as a demi-god and having such a slave. Indeed, in his attempt to quit the mother there was certainly a thought of allowing the daughter to marry him, which would be an agreeable ending to it all, though he did not as yet acknowledge this, ashamed as he felt and embarrassed by his illustrious name and all the complications and tears which he foresaw.

The silence continued. Camille with her piercing glance, as sharp as any knife, had told her mother that she knew the truth; and then with another and pain-fraught glance she had complained to Gerard. He, in order to re-establish equilibrium, could only think of a compliment: "Good morning, Camille. Ah! that havana-brown gown of yours looks nice! It's astonishing how well rather sombre colours suit you."

Camille glanced at her mother's white robe, and then at her own dark gown, which scarcely allowed her neck and wrists to be seen. "Yes," she replied laughing, "I only look passable when I don't dress as a young girl."

Eve, ill at ease, worried by the growth of a rivalry in which she did not as yet wish to believe, changed the conversation. "Isn't your brother there?" she asked.

"Why yes, we came down together."

Hyacinthe, who came in at that moment, shook hands with Gerard in a weary way. He was twenty, and had inherited his mother's pale blond hair, and her long face full of Oriental languor; while from his father he had derived his grey eyes and thick lips, expressive of unscrupulous appetites. A wretched scholar, regarding every profession with the same contempt, he had decided to do nothing. Spoilt by his father, he took some little interest in poetry and music, and lived in an extraordinary circle of artists, low women, madmen and bandits; boasting himself of all sorts of crimes and vices, professing the very worst philosophical and social ideas, invariably going to extremes, becoming in turn a Collectivist, an Individualist, an Anarchist, a Pessimist, a Symbolist, and what not besides; without, however, ceasing to be a Catholic, as this conjunction of Catholicity with something else seemed to him the supreme bon ton. In reality he was simply empty and rather a fool. In four generations the vigorous hungry blood of the Duvillards, after producing three magnificent beasts of prey, had, as if exhausted by the contentment of every passion, ended in this sorry emasculated creature, who was incapable alike of great knavery or great debauchery.

Camille, who was too intelligent not to realise her brother's nothingness, was fond of teasing him; and looking at him as he stood there, tightly buttoned in his long frock coat with pleated skirt—a resurrection of the romantic period, which he carried to exaggeration, she resumed: "Mamma has been asking for you, Hyacinthe. Come and show her your gown. You are the one who would look nice dressed as a young girl."

However, he eluded her without replying. He was covertly afraid of her, though they lived together in great intimacy, frankly exchanging confidences respecting their perverse views of life. And he directed a glance of disdain at the wonderful basket of orchids which seemed to him past the fashion, far too common nowadays. For his part he had left the lilies of life behind him, and reached the ranunculus, the flower of blood.

The two last guests who were expected now arrived almost together. The first was the investigating magistrate Amadieu, a little man of five and forty, who was an intimate of the household and had been brought into notoriety by a recent anarchist affair. Between a pair of fair, bushy whiskers he displayed a flat, regular judicial face, to which he tried to impart an expression of keenness by wearing a single eyeglass behind which his glance sparkled. Very worldly, moreover, he belonged to the new judicial school, being a distinguished psychologist and having written a book in reply to the abuses of criminalist physiology. And he was also a man of great, tenacious ambition, fond of notoriety and ever on the lookout for those resounding legal affairs which bring glory. Behind him, at last appeared General de Bozonnet, Gerard's uncle on the maternal side, a tall, lean old man with a nose like an eagle's beak. Chronic rheumatism had recently compelled him to retire from the service. Raised to a colonelcy after the Franco-German War in reward for his gallant conduct at St. Privat, he had, in spite of his extremely monarchical connections, kept his sworn faith to Napoleon III. And he was excused in his own sphere of society for this species of military Bonapartism, on account of the bitterness with which he accused the Republic of having ruined the army. Worthy fellow that he was, extremely fond of his sister, Madame de Quinsac, it seemed as though he acted in accordance with some secret desire of hers in accepting the invitations of Baroness Duvillard by way of rendering Gerard's constant presence in her house more natural and excusable.

However, the Baron and Duthil now returned from the study, laughing loudly in an exaggerated way, doubtless to make the others believe that they were quite easy in mind. And one and all passed into the large dining-room where a big wood fire was burning, its gay flames shining like a ray of springtide amid the fine mahogany furniture of English make laden with silver and crystal. The room, of a soft mossy green, had an unassuming charm in the pale light, and the table which in the centre displayed the richness of its covers and the immaculate whiteness of its linen adorned with Venetian point, seemed to have flowered miraculously with a wealth of large tea roses, most admirable blooms for the season, and of delicious perfume.

The Baroness seated the General on her right, and Amadieu on her left. The Baron on his right placed Duthil, and on his left Gerard. Then the young people installed themselves at either end, Camille between Gerard and the General, and Hyacinthe between Duthil and Amadieu. And forthwith, from the moment of starting on the scrambled eggs and truffles, conversation began, the usual conversation of Parisian dejeuners, when every event, great or little, of the morning or the day before is passed in review: the truths and the falsehoods current in every social sphere, the financial scandal, and the political adventure of the hour, the novel that has just appeared, the play that has just been produced, the stories which should only be retailed in whispers, but which are repeated aloud. And beneath all the light wit which circulates, beneath all the laughter, which often has a false ring, each retains his or her particular worry, or distress of mind, at times so acute that it becomes perfect agony.

With his quiet and wonted impudence, the Baron, bravely enough, was the first to speak of the article in the "Voix du Peuple." "I say, have you read Sagnier's article this morning? It's a good one; he has verve you know, but what a dangerous lunatic he is!"

This set everybody at ease, for the article would certainly have weighed upon the dejeuner had no one mentioned it.

"It's the 'Panama' dodge over again!" cried Duthil. "But no, no, we've had quite enough of it!"

"Why," resumed the Baron, "the affair of the African Railway Lines is as clear as spring water! All those whom Sagnier threatens may sleep in peace. The truth is that it's a scheme to upset Barroux's ministry. Leave to interpellate will certainly be asked for this afternoon. You'll see what a fine uproar there'll be in the Chamber."

"That libellous, scandal-seeking press," said Amadieu gravely, "is a dissolving agent which will bring France to ruin. We ought to have laws against it."

The General made an angry gesture: "Laws, what's the use of them, since nobody has the courage to enforce them."

Silence fell. With a light, discreet step the house-steward presented some grilled mullet. So noiseless was the service amid the cheerful perfumed warmth that not even the faintest clatter of crockery was heard. Without anyone knowing how it had come about, however, the conversation had suddenly changed; and somebody inquired: "So the revival of the piece is postponed?"

"Yes," said Gerard, "I heard this morning that 'Polyeucte' wouldn't get its turn till April at the earliest."

At this Camille, who had hitherto remained silent, watching the young Count and seeking to win him back, turned her glittering eyes upon her father and mother. It was a question of that revival in which Silviane was so stubbornly determined to make her debut. However, the Baron and the Baroness evinced perfect serenity, having long been acquainted with all that concerned each other. Moreover Eve was too much occupied with her own passion to think of anything else; and the Baron too busy with the fresh application which he intended to make in tempestuous fashion at the Ministry of Fine Arts, so as to wrest Silviane's engagement from those in office. He contented himself with saying: "How would you have them revive pieces at the Comedie! They have no actresses left there."

"Oh, by the way," the Baroness on her side simply remarked, "yesterday, in that play at the Vaudeville, Delphine Vignot wore such an exquisite gown. She's the only one too who knows how to arrange her hair."

Thereupon Duthil, in somewhat veiled language, began to relate a story about Delphine and a well-known senator. And then came another scandal, the sudden and almost suspicious death of a lady friend of the Duvillards'; whereupon the General, without any transition, broke in to relieve his bitter feelings by denouncing the idiotic manner in which the army was nowadays organised. Meantime the old Bordeaux glittered like ruby blood in the delicate crystal glasses. A truffled fillet of venison had just cast its somewhat sharp scent amidst the dying perfume of the roses, when some asparagus made its appearance, a primeur which once had been so rare but which no longer caused any astonishment.

"Nowadays we get it all through the winter," said the Baron with a gesture of disenchantment.

"And so," asked Gerard at the same moment, "the Princess de Harn's matinee is for this afternoon?"

Camille quickly intervened. "Yes, this afternoon. Shall you go?"

"No, I don't think so, I shan't be able," replied the young man in embarrassment.

"Ah! that little Princess, she's really deranged you know," exclaimed Duthil. "You are aware that she calls herself a widow? But the truth, it seems, is that her husband, a real Prince, connected with a royal house and very handsome, is travelling about the world in the company of a singer. She with her vicious urchin-like face preferred to come and reign in Paris, in that mansion of the Avenue Hoche, which is certainly the most extraordinary Noah's ark imaginable, with its swarming of cosmopolitan society indulging in every extravagance!"

"Be quiet, you malicious fellow," the Baroness gently interrupted. "We, here, are very fond of Rosemonde, who is a charming woman."

"Oh! certainly," Camille again resumed. "She invited us; and we are going to her place by-and-by, are we not, mamma?"

To avoid replying, the Baroness pretended that she did not hear, whilst Duthil, who seemed to be well-informed concerning the Princess, continued to make merry over her intended matinee, at which she meant to produce some Spanish dancing girls, whose performance was so very indecorous that all Paris, forewarned of the circumstance, would certainly swarm to her house. And he added: "You've heard that she has given up painting. Yes, she busies herself with chemistry. Her salon is full of Anarchists now—and, by the way, it seemed to me that she had cast her eyes on you, my dear Hyacinthe."

Hyacinthe had hitherto held his tongue, as if he took no interest in anything. "Oh! she bores me to death," he now condescended to reply. "If I'm going to her matinee it's simply in the hope of meeting my friend young Lord George Eldrett, who wrote to me from London to give me an appointment at the Princess's. And I admit that hers is the only salon where I find somebody to talk to."

"And so," asked Amadieu in an ironical way, "you have now gone over to Anarchism?"

With his air of lofty elegance Hyacinthe imperturbably confessed his creed: "But it seems to me, monsieur, that in these times of universal baseness and ignominy, no man of any distinction can be other than an Anarchist."

A laugh ran round the table. Hyacinthe was very much spoilt, and considered very entertaining. His father in particular was immensely amused by the notion that he of all men should have an Anarchist for a son. However, the General, in his rancorous moments, talked anarchically enough of blowing up a society which was so stupid as to let itself be led by half a dozen disreputable characters. And, indeed, the investigating magistrate, who was gradually making a specialty of Anarchist affairs, proved the only one who opposed the young man, defending threatened civilisation and giving terrifying particulars concerning what he called the army of devastation and massacre. The others, while partaking of some delicious duck's-liver pate, which the house-steward handed around, continued smiling. There was so much misery, said they; one must take everything into account: things would surely end by righting themselves. And the Baron himself declared, in a conciliatory manner: "It's certain that one might do something, though nobody knows exactly what. As for all sensible and moderate claims, oh! I agree to them in advance. For instance, the lot of the working classes may be ameliorated, charitable enterprises may be undertaken, such, for instance, as our Asylum for the Invalids of Labour, which we have reason to be proud of. But we must not be asked for impossibilities."

With the dessert came a sudden spell of silence; it was as if, amidst the restless fluttering of the conversation, and the dizziness born of the copious meal, each one's worry or distress was again wringing the heart and setting an expression of perturbation on the countenance. The nervous unconscientiousness of Duthil, threatened with denunciation, was seen to revive; so, too, the anxious anger of the Baron, who was meditating how he might possibly manage to content Silviane. That woman was this sturdy, powerful man's taint, the secret sore which would perhaps end by eating him away and destroying him. But it was the frightful drama in which the Baroness, Camille and Gerard were concerned that flitted by most visibly across the faces of all three of them: that hateful rivalry of mother and daughter, contending for the man they loved. And, meantime, the silver-gilt blades of the dessert-knives were delicately peeling choice fruit. And there were bunches of golden grapes looking beautifully fresh, and a procession of sweetmeats, little cakes, an infinity of dainties, over which the most satiated appetites lingered complacently.

Then, just as the finger-glasses were being served, a footman came and bent over the Baroness, who answered in an undertone, "Well, show him into the salon, I will join him there." And aloud to the others she added: "It's Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, who has called and asks most particularly to see me. He won't be in our way; I think that almost all of you know him. Oh! he's a genuine saint, and I have much sympathy for him."

For a few minutes longer they loitered round the table, and then at last quitted the dining-room, which was full of the odours of viands, wines, fruits and roses; quite warm, too, with the heat thrown out by the big logs of firewood, which were falling into embers amidst the somewhat jumbled brightness of all the crystal and silver, and the pale, delicate light which fell upon the disorderly table.

Pierre had remained standing in the centre of the little blue and silver salon. Seeing a tray on which the coffee and the liqueurs were in readiness, he regretted that he had insisted upon being received. And his embarrassment increased when the company came in rather noisily, with bright eyes and rosy cheeks. However, his charitable fervour had revived so ardently within him that he overcame this embarrassment, and all that remained to him of it was a slight feeling of discomfort at bringing the whole frightful morning which he had just spent amid such scenes of wretchedness, so much darkness and cold, so much filth and hunger, into this bright, warm, perfumed affluence, where the useless and the superfluous overflowed around those folks who seemed so gay at having made a delightful meal.

However, the Baroness at once came forward with Gerard, for it was through the latter, whose mother he knew, that the priest had been presented to the Duvillards at the time of the famous conversion. And as he apologised for having called at such an inconvenient hour, the Baroness responded: "But you are always welcome, Monsieur l'Abbe. You will allow me just to attend to my guests, won't you? I will be with you in an instant."

She thereupon returned to the table on which the tray had been placed, in order to serve the coffee and the liqueurs, with her daughter's assistance. Gerard, however, remained with Pierre; and, it so chanced, began to speak to him of the Asylum for the Invalids of Labour, where they had met one another at the recent laying of the foundation-stone of a new pavilion which was being erected, thanks to a handsome donation of 100,000 francs made by Baron Duvillard. So far, the enterprise only comprised four pavilions out of the fourteen which it was proposed to erect on the vast site given by the City of Paris on the peninsula of Gennevilliers*; and so the subscription fund remained open, and, indeed, no little noise was made over this charitable enterprise, which was regarded as a complete and peremptory reply to the accusations of those evilly disposed persons who charged the satiated bourgeoisie with doing nothing for the workers. But the truth was that a magnificent chapel, erected in the centre of the site, had absorbed two-thirds of the funds hitherto collected. Numerous lady patronesses, chosen from all the "worlds" of Paris—the Baroness Duvillard, the Countess de Quinsac, the Princess Rosemonde de Harn, and a score of others—were entrusted with the task of keeping the enterprise alive by dint of collections and fancy bazaars. But success had been chiefly obtained, thanks to the happy idea of ridding the ladies of all the weighty cares of organisation, by choosing as managing director a certain Fonsegue, who, besides being a deputy and editor of the "Globe" newspaper, was a prodigious promoter of all sorts of enterprises. And the "Globe" never paused in its propaganda, but answered the attacks of the revolutionaries by extolling the inexhaustible charity of the governing classes in such wise that, at the last elections, the enterprise had served as a victorious electoral weapon.

* This so-called peninsula lies to the northwest of Paris, and
is formed by the windings of the Seine.—Trans.

However, Camille was walking about with a steaming cup of coffee in her hand: "Will you take some coffee, Monsieur l'Abbe?" she inquired.

"No, thank you, mademoiselle."

"A glass of Chartreuse then?"

"No, thank you."

Then everybody being served, the Baroness came back and said amiably: "Come, Monsieur l'Abbe, what do you desire of me?"

Pierre began to speak almost in an undertone, his throat contracting and his heart beating with emotion. "I have come, madame, to appeal to your great kindness of heart. This morning, in a frightful house, in the Rue des Saules, behind Montmartre, I beheld a sight which utterly upset me. You can have no idea what an abode of misery and suffering it was; its inmates without fire or bread, the men reduced to idleness because there is no work, the mothers having no more milk for their babes, the children barely clad, coughing and shivering. And among all these horrors I saw the worst, the most abominable of all, an old workman, laid on his back by age, dying of hunger, huddled on a heap of rags, in a nook which a dog would not even accept as kennel."

He tried to recount things as discreetly as possible, frightened by the very words he spoke, the horrors he had to relate in that sphere of superlative luxury and enjoyment, before those happy ones who possessed all the gifts of this world; for—to use a slang expression—he fully realised that he sang out of tune, and in most uncourteous fashion. What a strange idea of his to have called at the hour when one has just finished dejeuner, when the aroma of hot coffee flatters happy digestion. Nevertheless he went on, and even ended by raising his voice, yielding to the feeling of revolt which gradually stirred him, going to the end of his terrible narrative, naming Laveuve, insisting on the unjust abandonment in which the old man was left, and asking for succour in the name of human compassion. And the whole company approached to listen to him; he could see the Baron and the General, and Duthil and Amadieu, in front of him, sipping their coffee, in silence, without a gesture.

"Well, madame," he concluded, "it seemed to me that one could not leave that old man an hour longer in such a frightful position, and that this very evening you would have the extreme goodness to have him admitted into the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour, which is, I think, the proper and only place for him."

Tears had moistened Eve's beautiful eyes. She was in consternation at so sad a story coming to her to spoil her afternoon when she was looking forward to her assignation with Gerard. Weak and indolent as she was, lacking all initiative, too much occupied moreover with her own person, she had only accepted the presidency of the Committee on the condition that all administrative worries were to fall on Fonsegue. "Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," she murmured, "you rend my heart. But I can do nothing, nothing at all, I assure you. Moreover, I believe that we have already inquired into the affair of that man Laveuve. With us, you know, there must be the most serious guarantees with regard to every admission. A reporter is chosen who has to give us full information. Wasn't it you, Monsieur Duthil, who was charged with this man Laveuve's affair?"

The deputy was finishing a glass of Chartreuse. "Yes, it was I. That fine fellow played you a comedy, Monsieur l'Abbe. He isn't at all ill, and if you left him any money you may be sure he went down to drink it as soon as you were gone. For he is always drunk; and, besides that, he has the most hateful disposition imaginable, crying out from morning till evening against the bourgeois, and saying that if he had any strength left in his arms he would undertake to blow up the whole show. And, moreover, he won't go into the asylum; he says that it's a real prison where one's guarded by Beguins who force one to hear mass, a dirty convent where the gates are shut at nine in the evening! And there are so many of them like that, who rather than be succoured prefer their liberty, with cold and hunger and death. Well then, let the Laveuves die in the street, since they refuse to be with us, and be warm and eat in our asylums!"

The General and Amadieu nodded their heads approvingly. But Duvillard showed himself more generous. "No, no, indeed! A man's a man after all, and should be succoured in spite of himself."

Eve, however, in despair at the idea that she would be robbed of her afternoon, struggled and sought for reasons. "I assure you that my hands are altogether tied. Monsieur l'Abbe does not doubt my heart or my zeal. But how call I possibly assemble the Committee without a few days' delay? And I have particular reasons for coming to no decision, especially in an affair which has already been inquired into and pronounced upon, without the Committee's sanction." Then, all at once she found a solution: "What I advise you to do, Monsieur l'Abbe, is to go at once to see Monsieur Fonsegue, our managing director. He alone can act in an urgent case, for he knows that the ladies have unlimited confidence in him and approve everything he does."

"You will find Fonsegue at the Chamber," added Duthil smiling, "only the sitting will be a warm one, and I doubt whether you will be able to have a comfortable chat with him."

Pierre, whose heart had contracted yet more painfully, insisted on the subject no further; but at once made up his mind to see Fonsegue, and in any event obtain from him a promise that the wretched Laveuve should be admitted to the Asylum that very evening. Then he lingered in the saloon for a few minutes listening to Gerard, who obligingly pointed out to him how he might best convince the deputy, which was by alleging how bad an effect such a story could have, should it be brought to light by the revolutionary newspapers. However, the guests were beginning to take their leave. The General, as he went off, came to ask his nephew if he should see him that afternoon at his mother's, Madame de Quinsac, whose "day" it was: a question which the young man answered with an evasive gesture when he noticed that both Eve and Camille were looking at him. Then came the turn of Amadieu, who hurried off saying that a serious affair required his presence at the Palace of Justice. And Duthil soon followed him in order to repair to the Chamber.

"I'll see you between four and five at Silviane's, eh?" said the Baron as he conducted him to the door. "Come and tell me what occurs at the Chamber in consequence of that odious article of Sagnier's. I must at all events know. For my part I shall go to the Ministry of Fine Arts, to settle that affair of the Comedie; and besides I've some calls to make, some contractors to see, and a big launching and advertisement affair to settle."

"It's understood then, between four and five, at Silviane's," said the deputy, who went off again mastered by his vague uneasiness, his anxiety as to what turn that nasty affair of the African Railway Lines might take.

And all of them had forgotten Laveuve, the miserable wretch who lay at death's door; and all of them were hastening away to their business or their passions, caught in the toils, sinking under the grindstone and whisked away by that rush of all Paris, whose fever bore them along, throwing one against another in an ardent scramble, in which the sole question was who should pass over the others and crush them.

"And so, mamma," said Camille, who continued to scrutinise her mother and Gerard, "you are going to take us to the Princess's matinee?"

"By-and-by, yes. Only I shan't be able to stay there with you. I received a telegram from Salmon about my corsage this morning, and I must absolutely go to try it on at four o'clock."

By the slight trembling of her mother's voice, the girl felt certain that she was telling a falsehood. "Oh!" said she, "I thought you were only going to try it on to-morrow? In that case I suppose we are to go and call for you at Salmon's with the carriage on leaving the matinee?"

"Oh! no my dear! One never knows when one will be free; and besides, if I have a moment, I shall call at the modiste's."

Camille's secret rage brought almost a murderous glare to her dark eyes. The truth was evident. But however passionately she might desire to set some obstacle across her mother's path, she could not, dared not, carry matters any further. In vain had she attempted to implore Gerard with her eyes. He was standing to take his leave, and turned away his eyes. Pierre, who had become acquainted with many things since he had frequented the house, noticed how all three of them quivered, and divined thereby the mute and terrible drama.

At this moment, however, Hyacinthe, stretched in an armchair, and munching an ether capsule, the only liqueur in which he indulged, raised his voice: "For my part, you know, I'm going to the Exposition du Lis. All Paris is swarming there. There's one painting in particular, 'The Rape of a Soul,' which it's absolutely necessary for one to have seen."

"Well, but I don't refuse to drive you there," resumed the Baroness. "Before going to the Princess's we can look in at that exhibition."

"That's it, that's it," hastily exclaimed Camille, who, though she harshly derided the symbolist painters as a rule, now doubtless desired to delay her mother. Then, forcing herself to smile, she asked: "Won't you risk a look-in at the Exposition du Lis with us, Monsieur Gerard?"

"Well, no," replied the Count, "I want to walk. I shall go with Monsieur l'Abbe Froment to the Chamber."

Thereupon he took leave of mother and daughter, kissing the hand of each in turn. It had just occurred to him that to while away his time he also might call for a moment at Silviane's, where, like the others, he had his entrees. On reaching the cold and solemn courtyard he said to the priest, "Ah! it does one good to breathe a little cool air. They keep their rooms too hot, and all those flowers, too, give one the headache."

Pierre for his part was going off with his brain in a whirl, his hands feverish, his senses oppressed by all the luxury which he left behind him, like the dream of some glowing, perfumed paradise where only the elect had their abode. At the same time his reviving thirst for charity had become keener than ever, and without listening to the Count, who was speaking very affectionately of his mother, he reflected as to how he might obtain Laveuve's admission to the Asylum from Fonsegue. However, when the door of the mansion had closed behind them and they had taken a few steps along the street, it occurred to Pierre that a moment previously a sudden vision had met his gaze. Had he not seen a workman carrying a tool-bag, standing and waiting on the foot pavement across the road, gazing at that monumental door, closed upon so much fabulous wealth—a workman in whom he fancied he had recognised Salvat, that hungry fellow who had gone off that morning in search of work? At this thought Pierre hastily turned round. Such wretchedness in face of so much affluence and enjoyment made him feel anxious. But the workman, disturbed in his contemplation, and possibly fearing that he had been recognised, was going off with dragging step. And now, getting only a back view of him, Pierre hesitated, and ended by thinking that he must have been mistaken.

III. RANTERS AND RULERS

WHEN Abbe Froment was about to enter the Palais-Bourbon he remembered that he had no card, and he was making up his mind that he would simply ask for Fonsegue, though he was not known to him, when, on reaching the vestibule, he perceived Mege, the Collectivist deputy, with whom he had become acquainted in his days of militant charity in the poverty-stricken Charonne district.

"What, you here? You surely have not come to evangelise us?" said Mege.

"No, I've come to see Monsieur Fonsegue on an urgent matter, about a poor fellow who cannot wait."

"Fonsegue? I don't know if he has arrived. Wait a moment." And stopping a short, dark young fellow with a ferreting, mouse-like air, Mege said to him: "Massot, here's Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, who wants to speak to your governor at once."

"The governor? But he isn't here. I left him at the office of the paper, where he'll be detained for another quarter of an hour. However, if Monsieur l'Abbe likes to wait he will surely see him here."

Thereupon Mege ushered Pierre into the large waiting-hall, the Salle des Pas Perdus, which in other moments looked so vast and cold with its bronze Minerva and Laocoon, and its bare walls on which the pale mournful winter light fell from the glass doors communicating with the garden. Just then, however, it was crowded, and warmed, as it were, by the feverish agitation of the many groups of men that had gathered here and there, and the constant coming and going of those who hastened through the throng. Most of these were deputies, but there were also numerous journalists and inquisitive visitors. And a growing uproar prevailed: colloquies now in undertones, now in loud voices, exclamations and bursts of laughter, amidst a deal of passionate gesticulation, Mege's return into the tumult seemed to fan it. He was tall, apostolically thin, and somewhat neglectful of his person, looking already old and worn for his age, which was but five and forty, though his eyes still glowed with youth behind the glasses which never left his beak-like nose. And he had a warm but grating voice, and had always been known to cough, living on solely because he was bitterly intent on doing so in order to realise the dream of social re-organisation which haunted him. The son of an impoverished medical man of a northern town, he had come to Paris when very young, living there during the Empire on petty newspaper and other unknown work, and first making a reputation as an orator at the public meetings of the time. Then, after the war, having become the chief of the Collectivist party, thanks to his ardent faith and the extraordinary activity of his fighting nature, he had at last managed to enter the Chamber, where, brimful of information, he fought for his ideas with fierce determination and obstinacy, like a doctrinaire who has decided in his own mind what the world ought to be, and who regulates in advance, and bit by bit, the whole dogma of Collectivism. However, since he had taken pay as a deputy, the outside Socialists had looked upon him as a mere rhetorician, an aspiring dictator who only tried to cast society in a new mould for the purpose of subordinating it to his personal views and ruling it.

"You know what is going on?" he said to Pierre. "This is another nice affair, is it not? But what would you have? We are in mud to our very ears."

He had formerly conceived genuine sympathy for the priest, whom he had found so gentle with all who suffered, and so desirous of social regeneration. And the priest himself had ended by taking an interest in this authoritarian dreamer, who was resolved to make men happy in spite even of themselves. He knew that he was poor, and led a retired life with his wife and four children, to whom he was devoted.

"You can well understand that I am no ally of Sagnier's," Mege resumed. "But as he chose to speak out this morning and threaten to publish the names of all those who have taken bribes, we can't allow ourselves to pass as accomplices any further. It has long been said that there was some nasty jobbery in that suspicious affair of the African railways. And the worst is that two members of the present Cabinet are in question, for three years ago, when the Chambers dealt with Duvillard's emission, Barroux was at the Home Department, and Monferrand at that of Public Works. Now that they have come back again, Monferrand at the Home Department, and Barroux at that of Finance, with the Presidency of the Council, it isn't possible, is it, for us to do otherwise than compel them to enlighten us, in their own interest even, about their former goings-on? No, no, they can no longer keep silence, and I've announced that I intend to interpellate them this very day."

It was the announcement of Mege's interpellation, following the terrible article of the "Voix du Peuple," which thus set the lobbies in an uproar. And Pierre remained rather scared at this big political affair falling into the midst of his scheme to save a wretched pauper from hunger and death. Thus he listened without fully understanding the explanations which the Socialist deputy was passionately giving him, while all around them the uproar increased, and bursts of laughter rang out, testifying to the astonishment which the others felt at seeing Mege in conversation with a priest.

"How stupid they are!" said Mege disdainfully. "Do they think then that I eat a cassock for dejeuner every morning? But I beg your pardon, my dear Monsieur Froment. Come, take a place on that seat and wait for Fonsegue."

Then he himself plunged into all the turmoil, and Pierre realised that his best course was to sit down and wait quietly. His surroundings began to influence and interest him, and he gradually forgot Laveuve for the passion of the Parliamentary crisis amidst which he found himself cast. The frightful Panama adventure was scarcely over; he had followed the progress of that tragedy with the anguish of a man who every night expects to hear the tocsin sound the last hour of olden, agonising society. And now a little Panama was beginning, a fresh cracking of the social edifice, an affair such as had been frequent in all parliaments in connection with big financial questions, but one which acquired mortal gravity from the circumstances in which it came to the front. That story of the African Railway Lines, that little patch of mud, stirred up and exhaling a perturbing odour, and suddenly fomenting all that emotion, fear, and anger in the Chamber, was after all but an opportunity for political strife, a field on which the voracious appetites of the various "groups" would take exercise and sharpen; and, at bottom, the sole question was that of overthrowing the ministry and replacing it by another. Only, behind all that lust of power, that continuous onslaught of ambition, what a distressful prey was stirring—the whole people with all its poverty and its sufferings!

Pierre noticed that Massot, "little Massot," as he was generally called, had just seated himself on the bench beside him. With his lively eye and ready ear listening to everything and noting it, gliding everywhere with his ferret-like air, Massot was not there in the capacity of a gallery man, but had simply scented a stormy debate, and come to see if he could not pick up material for some occasional "copy." And this priest lost in the midst of the throng doubtless interested him.

"Have a little patience, Monsieur l'Abbe," said he, with the amiable gaiety of a young gentleman who makes fun of everything. "The governor will certainly come, for he knows well enough that they are going to heat the oven here. You are not one of his constituents from La Correze, are you?"

"No, no! I belong to Paris; I've come on account of a poor fellow whom I wish to get admitted into the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour."

"Oh! all right. Well, I'm a child of Paris, too."

Then Massot laughed. And indeed he was a child of Paris, son of a chemist of the St. Denis district, and an ex-dunce of the Lycee Charlemagne, where he had not even finished his studies. He had failed entirely, and at eighteen years of age had found himself cast into journalism with barely sufficient knowledge of orthography for that calling. And for twelve years now, as he often said, he had been a rolling stone wandering through all spheres of society, confessing some and guessing at others. He had seen everything, and become disgusted with everything, no longer believing in the existence of great men, or of truth, but living peacefully enough on universal malice and folly. He naturally had no literary ambition, in fact he professed a deliberate contempt for literature. Withal, he was not a fool, but wrote in accordance with no matter what views in no matter what newspaper, having neither conviction nor belief, but quietly claiming the right to say whatever he pleased to the public on condition that he either amused or impassioned it.

"And so," said he, "you know Mege, Monsieur l'Abbe? What a study in character, eh? A big child, a dreamer of dreams in the skin of a terrible sectarian! Oh! I have had a deal of intercourse with him, I know him thoroughly. You are no doubt aware that he lives on with the everlasting conviction that he will attain to power in six months' time, and that between evening and morning he will have established that famous Collectivist community which is to succeed capitalist society, just as day follows night. And, by the way, as regards his interpellation to-day, he is convinced that in overthrowing the Barroux ministry he'll be hastening his own turn. His system is to use up his adversaries. How many times haven't I heard him making his calculations: there's such a one to be used up, then such a one, and then such a one, so that he himself may at last reign. And it's always to come off in six months at the latest. The misfortune is, however, that others are always springing up, and so his turn never comes at all."

Little Massot openly made merry over it. Then, slightly lowering his voice, he asked: "And Sagnier, do you know him? No? Do you see that red-haired man with the bull's neck—the one who looks like a butcher? That one yonder who is talking in a little group of frayed frock-coats."

Pierre at last perceived the man in question. He had broad red ears, a hanging under-lip, a large nose, and big, projecting dull eyes.

"I know that one thoroughly, as well," continued Massot; "I was on the 'Voix du Peuple' under him before I went on the 'Globe.' The one thing that nobody is exactly aware of is whence Sagnier first came. He long dragged out his life in the lower depths of journalism, doing nothing at all brilliant, but wild with ambition and appetite. Perhaps you remember the first hubbub he made, that rather dirty affair of a new Louis XVII. which he tried to launch, and which made him the extraordinary Royalist that he still is. Then it occurred to him to espouse the cause of the masses, and he made a display of vengeful Catholic socialism, attacking the Republic and all the abominations of the times in the name of justice and morality, under the pretext of curing them. He began with a series of sketches of financiers, a mass of dirty, uncontrolled, unproved tittle-tattle, which ought to have led him to the dock, but which met, as you know, with such wonderful success when gathered together in a volume. And he goes on in the same style in the 'Voix du Peuple,' which he himself made a success at the time of the Panama affair by dint of denunciation and scandal, and which to-day is like a sewer-pipe pouring forth all the filth of the times. And whenever the stream slackens, why, he invents things just to satisfy his craving for that hubbub on which both his pride and his pocket subsist."

Little Massot spoke without bitterness; indeed, he had even begun to laugh again. Beneath his thoughtless ferocity he really felt some respect for Sagnier. "Oh! he's a bandit," he continued, "but a clever fellow all the same. You can't imagine how full of vanity he is. Lately it occurred to him to get himself acclaimed by the populace, for he pretends to be a kind of King of the Markets, you know. Perhaps he has ended by taking his fine judge-like airs in earnest, and really believes that he is saving the people and helping the cause of virtue. What astonishes me is his fertility in the arts of denunciation and scandalmongering. Never a morning comes but he discovers some fresh horror, and delivers fresh culprits over to the hatred of the masses. No! the stream of mud never ceases; there is an incessant, unexpected spurt of infamy, an increase of monstrous fancies each time that the disgusted public shows any sign of weariness. And, do you know, there's genius in that, Monsieur l'Abbe; for he is well aware that his circulation goes up as soon as he threatens to speak out and publish a list of traitors and bribe-takers. His sales are certain now for some days to come."

Listening to Massot's gay, bantering voice, Pierre began to understand certain things, the exact meaning of which had hitherto escaped him. He ended by questioning the young journalist, surprised as he was that so many deputies should be in the lobbies when the sitting was in progress. Oh! the sitting indeed. The gravest matters, some bill of national interest, might be under discussion, yet every member fled from it at the sudden threat of an interpellation which might overturn the ministry. And the passion stirring there was the restrained anger, the growing anxiety of the present ministry's clients, who feared that they might have to give place to others; and it was also the sudden hope, the eager hunger of all who were waiting—the clients of the various possible ministries of the morrow.

Massot pointed to Barroux, the head of the Cabinet, who, though he was out of his element in the Department of Finances, had taken it simply because his generally recognised integrity was calculated to reassure public opinion after the Panama crisis. Barroux was chatting in a corner with the Minister of Public Instruction, Senator Taboureau, an old university man with a shrinking, mournful air, who was extremely honest, but totally ignorant of Paris, coming as he did from some far-away provincial faculty. Barroux for his part was of decorative aspect, tall, and with a handsome, clean-shaven face, which would have looked quite noble had not his nose been rather too small. Although he was sixty, he still had a profusion of curly snow-white hair completing the somewhat theatrical majesty of his appearance, which he was wont to turn to account when in the tribune. Coming of an old Parisian family, well-to-do, an advocate by profession, then a Republican journalist under the Empire, he had reached office with Gambetta, showing himself at once honest and romantic, loud of speech, and somewhat stupid, but at the same time very brave and very upright, and still clinging with ardent faith to the principles of the great Revolution. However, his Jacobinism was getting out of fashion, he was becoming an "ancestor," as it were, one of the last props of the middle-class Republic, and the new comers, the young politicians with long teeth, were beginning to smile at him. Moreover, beneath the ostentation of his demeanour, and the pomp of his eloquence, there was a man of hesitating, sentimental nature, a good fellow who shed tears when re-perusing the verses of Lamartine.

However, Monferrand, the minister for the Home Department, passed by and drew Barroux aside to whisper a few words in his ear. He, Monferrand, was fifty, short and fat, with a smiling, fatherly air; nevertheless a look of keen intelligence appeared at times on his round and somewhat common face fringed by a beard which was still dark. In him one divined a man of government, with hands which were fitted for difficult tasks, and which never released a prey. Formerly mayor of the town of Tulle, he came from La Correze, where he owned a large estate. He was certainly a force in motion, one whose constant rise was anxiously watched by keen observers. He spoke in a simple quiet way, but with extraordinary power of conviction. Having apparently no ambition, affecting indeed the greatest disinterestedness, he nevertheless harboured the most ferocious appetites. Sagnier had written that he was a thief and a murderer, having strangled two of his aunts in order to inherit their property. But even if he were a murderer, he was certainly not a vulgar one.

Then, too, came another personage of the drama which was about to be performed—deputy Vignon, whose arrival agitated the various groups. The two ministers looked at him, whilst he, at once surrounded by his friends, smiled at them from a distance. He was not yet thirty-six. Slim, and of average height, very fair, with a fine blond beard of which he took great care, a Parisian by birth, having rapidly made his way in the government service, at one time Prefect at Bordeaux, he now represented youth and the future in the Chamber. He had realised that new men were needed in the direction of affairs in order to accomplish the more urgent, indispensable reforms; and very ambitious and intelligent as he was, knowing many things, he already had a programme, the application of which he was quite capable of attempting, in part at any rate. However, he evinced no haste, but was full of prudence and shrewdness, convinced that his day would dawn, strong in the fact that he was as yet compromised in nothing, but had all space before him. At bottom he was merely a first-class administrator, clear and precise in speech, and his programme only differed from Barroux's by the rejuvenation of its formulas, although the advent of a Vignon ministry in place of a Barroux ministry appeared an event of importance. And it was of Vignon that Sagnier had written that he aimed at the Presidency of the Republic, even should he have to march through blood to reach the Elysee Palace.

"Mon Dieu!" Massot was explaining, "it's quite possible that Sagnier isn't lying this time, and that he has really found a list of names in some pocket-book of Hunter's that has fallen into his hands. I myself have long known that Hunter was Duvillard's vote-recruiter in the affair of the African Railways. But to understand matters one must first realise what his mode of proceeding was, the skill and the kind of amiable delicacy which he showed, which were far from the brutal corruption and dirty trafficking that people imagine. One must be such a man as Sagnier to picture a parliament as an open market, where every conscience is for sale and is impudently knocked down to the highest bidder. Oh! things happened in a very different way indeed; and they are explainable, and at times even excusable. Thus the article is levelled in particular against Barroux and Monferrand, who are designated in the clearest possible manner although they are not named. You are no doubt aware that at the time of the vote Barroux was at the Home Department and Monferrand at that of Public Works, and so now they are accused of having betrayed their trusts, the blackest of all social crimes. I don't know into what political combinations Barroux may have entered, but I am ready to swear that he put nothing in his pocket, for he is the most honest of men. As for Monferrand, that's another matter; he's a man to carve himself his share, only I should be much surprised if he had put himself in a bad position. He's incapable of a blunder, particularly of a stupid blunder, like that of taking money and leaving a receipt for it lying about."

Massot paused, and with a jerk of his head called Pierre's attention to Duthil, who, feverish, but nevertheless smiling, stood in a group which had just collected around the two ministers. "There! do you see that young man yonder, that dark handsome fellow whose beard looks so triumphant?"

"I know him," said Pierre.

"Oh! you know Duthil. Well, he's one who most certainly took money. But he's a mere bird. He came to us from Angouleme to lead the pleasantest of lives here, and he has no more conscience, no more scruples, than the pretty finches of his native part, who are ever love-making. Ah! for Duthil, Hunter's money was like manna due to him, and he never even paused to think that he was dirtying his fingers. You may be quite sure he feels astonished that people should attach the slightest importance to the matter."

Then Massot designated another deputy in the same group, a man of fifty or thereabouts, of slovenly aspect and lachrymose mien, lanky, too, like a maypole, and somewhat bent by the weight of his head, which was long and suggestive of a horse's. His scanty, straight, yellowish hair, his drooping moustaches, in fact the whole of his distracted countenance, expressed everlasting distress.

"And Chaigneux, do you know him?" continued Massot, referring to the deputy in question. "No? Well, look at him and ask yourself if it isn't quite as natural that he, too, should have taken money. He came from Arras. He was a solicitor there. When his division elected him he let politics intoxicate him, and sold his practice to make his fortune in Paris, where he installed himself with his wife and his three daughters. And you can picture his bewilderment amidst those four women, terrible women ever busy with finery, receiving and paying visits, and running after marriageable men who flee away. It's ill-luck with a vengeance, the daily defeat of a poor devil of mediocre attainments, who imagined that his position as a deputy would facilitate money-making, and who is drowning himself in it all. And so how can Chaigneux have done otherwise than take money, he who is always hard up for a five-hundred-franc note! I admit that originally he wasn't a dishonest man. But he's become one, that's all."

Massot was now fairly launched, and went on with his portraits, the series which he had, at one moment, dreamt of writing under the title of "Deputies for Sale." There were the simpletons who fell into the furnace, the men whom ambition goaded to exasperation, the low minds that yielded to the temptation of an open drawer, the company-promoters who grew intoxicated and lost ground by dint of dealing with big figures. At the same time, however, Massot admitted that these men were relatively few in number, and that black sheep were to be found in every parliament of the world. Then Sagnier's name cropped up again, and Massot remarked that only Sagnier could regard the French Chambers as mere dens of thieves.

Pierre, meantime, felt most interested in the tempest which the threat of a ministerial crisis was stirring up before him. Not only the men like Duthil and Chaigneux, pale at feeling the ground tremble beneath them, and wondering whether they would not sleep at the Mazas prison that night, were gathered round Barroux and Monferrand; all the latters' clients were there, all who enjoyed influence or office through them, and who would collapse and disappear should they happen to fall. And it was something to see the anxious glances and the pale dread amidst all the whispered chatter, the bits of information and tittle-tattle which were carried hither and thither. Then, in a neighbouring group formed round Vignon, who looked very calm and smiled, were the other clients, those who awaited the moment to climb to the assault of power, in order that they, in their turn, might at last possess influence or office. Eyes glittered with covetousness, hopeful delight could be read in them, pleasant surprise at the sudden opportunity now offered. Vignon avoided replying to the over-direct questions of his friends, and simply announced that he did not intend to intervene. Evidently enough his plan was to let Mege interpellate and overthrow the ministry, for he did not fear him, and in his own estimation would afterwards simply have to stoop to pick up the fallen portfolios.

"Ah! Monferrand now," little Massot was saying, "there's a rascal who trims his sails! I knew him as an anti-clerical, a devourer of priests, Monsieur l'Abbe, if you will allow me so to express myself; however, I don't say this to be agreeable to you, but I think I may tell you for certain that he has become reconciled to religion. At least, I have been told that Monseigneur Martha, who is a great converter, now seldom leaves him. This is calculated to please one in these new times, when science has become bankrupt, and religion blooms afresh with delicious mysticism on all sides, whether in art, literature, or society itself."

Massot was jesting, according to his wont; but he spoke so amiably that the priest could not do otherwise than bow. However, a great stir had set in before them; it was announced that Mege was about to ascend the tribune, and thereupon all the deputies hastened into the assembly hall, leaving only the inquisitive visitors and a few journalists in the Salle des Pas Perdus.

"It's astonishing that Fonsegue hasn't yet arrived," resumed Massot; "he's interested in what's going on. However, he's so cunning, that when he doesn't behave as others do, one may be sure that he has his reasons for it. Do you know him?" And as Pierre gave a negative answer, Massot went on: "Oh! he's a man of brains and real power—I speak with all freedom, you know, for I don't possess the bump of veneration; and, as for my editors, well, they're the very puppets that I know the best and pick to pieces with the most enjoyment. Fonsegue, also, is clearly designated in Sagnier's article. Moreover, he's one of Duvillard's usual clients. There can be no doubt that he took money, for he takes money in everything. Only he always protects himself, and takes it for reasons which may be acknowledged—as payment or commission on account of advertising, and so forth. And if I left him just now, looking, as it seemed to me, rather disturbed, and if he delays his arrival here to establish, as it were, a moral alibi, the truth must be that he has committed the first imprudent action in his life."

Then Massot rattled on, telling all there was to tell about Fonsegue. He, too, came from the department of La Correze, and had quarrelled for life with Monferrand after some unknown underhand affairs. Formerly an advocate at Tulle, his ambition had been to conquer Paris; and he had really conquered it, thanks to his big morning newspaper, "Le Globe," of which he was both founder and director. He now resided in a luxurious mansion in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and no enterprise was launched but he carved himself a princely share in it. He had a genius for "business," and employed his newspaper as a weapon to enable him to reign over the market. But how very carefully he had behaved, what long and skilful patience he had shown, before attaining to the reputation of a really serious man, who guided authoritatively the most virtuous and respected of the organs of the press! Though in reality he believed neither in God nor in Devil, he had made this newspaper the supporter of order, property, and family ties; and though he had become a Conservative Republican, since it was to his interest to be such, he had remained outwardly religious, affecting a Spiritualism which reassured the bourgeoisie. And amidst all his accepted power, to which others bowed, he nevertheless had one hand deep in every available money-bag.

"Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," said Massot, "see to what journalism may lead a man. There you have Sagnier and Fonsegue: just compare them a bit. In reality they are birds of the same feather: each has a quill and uses it. But how different the systems and the results. Sagnier's print is really a sewer which rolls him along and carries him to the cesspool; while the other's paper is certainly an example of the best journalism one can have, most carefully written, with a real literary flavour, a treat for readers of delicate minds, and an honour to the man who directs it. But at the bottom, good heavens! in both cases the farce is precisely the same!"

Massot burst out laughing, well pleased with this final thrust. Then all at once: "Ah! here's Fonsegue at last!" said he.

Quite at his ease, and still laughing, he forthwith introduced the priest. "This is Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, my dear patron, who has been waiting more than twenty minutes for you—I'm just going to see what is happening inside. You know that Mege is interpellating the government."

The new comer started slightly: "An interpellation!" said he. "All right, all right, I'll go to it."

Pierre was looking at him. He was about fifty years of age, short of stature, thin and active, still looking young without a grey hair in his black beard. He had sparkling eyes, too, but his mouth, said to be a terrible one, was hidden by his moustaches. And withal he looked a pleasant companion, full of wit to the tip of his little pointed nose, the nose of a sporting dog that is ever scenting game. "What can I do for you, Monsieur l'Abbe?" he inquired.

Then Pierre briefly presented his request, recounting his visit to Laveuve that morning, giving every heart-rending particular, and asking for the poor wretch's immediate admittance to the Asylum.

"Laveuve!" said the other, "but hasn't his affair been examined? Why, Duthil drew up a report on it, and things appeared to us of such a nature that we could not vote for the man's admittance."

But the priest insisted: "I assure you, monsieur, that your heart would have burst with compassion had you been with me this morning. It is revolting that an old man should be left in such frightful abandonment even for another hour. He must sleep at the Asylum to-night."

Fonsegue began to protest. "To-night! But it's impossible, altogether impossible! There are all sorts of indispensable formalities to be observed. And besides I alone cannot take such responsibility. I haven't the power. I am only the manager; all that I do is to execute the orders of the committee of lady patronesses."

"But it was precisely Baroness Duvillard who sent me to you, monsieur, telling me that you alone had the necessary authority to grant immediate admittance in an exceptional case."

"Oh! it was the Baroness who sent you? Ah! that is just like her, incapable of coming to any decision herself, and far too desirous of her own quietude to accept any responsibility. Why is it that she wants me to have the worries? No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe, I certainly won't go against all our regulations; I won't give an order which would perhaps embroil me with all those ladies. You don't know them, but they become positively terrible directly they attend our meetings."

He was growing lively, defending himself with a jocular air, whilst in secret he was fully determined to do nothing. However, just then Duthil abruptly reappeared, darting along bareheaded, hastening from lobby to lobby to recruit absent members, particularly those who were interested in the grave debate at that moment beginning. "What, Fonsegue!" he cried, "are you still here? Go, go to your seat at once, it's serious!" And thereupon he disappeared.

His colleague evinced no haste, however. It was as if the suspicious affair which was impassioning the Chamber had no concern for him. And he still smiled, although a slight feverish quiver made him blink. "Excuse me, Monsieur l'Abbe," he said at last. "You see that my friends have need of me. I repeat to you that I can do absolutely nothing for your protege."

But Pierre would not accept this reply as a final one. "No, no, monsieur," he rejoined, "go to your affairs, I will wait for you here. Don't come to a decision without full reflection. You are wanted, and I feel that your mind is not sufficiently at liberty for you to listen to me properly. By-and-by, when you come back and give me your full attention, I am sure that you will grant me what I ask."

And, although Fonsegue, as he went off, repeated that he could not alter his decision, the priest stubbornly resolved to make him do so, and sat down on the bench again, prepared, if needful, to stay there till the evening. The Salle des Pas Perdus was now almost quite empty, and looked yet more frigid and mournful with its Laocoon and its Minerva, its bare commonplace walls like those of a railway-station waiting-room, between which all the scramble of the century passed, though apparently without even warming the lofty ceiling. Never had paler and more callous light entered by the large glazed doors, behind which one espied the little slumberous garden with its meagre, wintry lawns. And not an echo of the tempest of the sitting near at hand reached the spot; from the whole heavy pile there fell but death-like silence, and a covert quiver of distress that had come from far away, perhaps from the entire country.

It was that which now haunted Pierre's reverie. The whole ancient, envenomed sore spread out before his mind's eye, with its poison and virulence. Parliamentary rottenness had slowly increased till it had begun to attack society itself. Above all the low intrigues and the rush of personal ambition there certainly remained the loftier struggle of the contending principles, with history on the march, clearing the past away and seeking to bring more truth, justice, and happiness in the future. But in practice, if one only considered the horrid daily cuisine of the sphere, what an unbridling of egotistical appetite one beheld, what an absorbing passion to strangle one's neighbour and triumph oneself alone! Among the various groups one found but an incessant battle for power and the satisfactions that it gives. "Left," "Right," "Catholics," "Republicans," "Socialists," the names given to the parties of twenty different shades, were simply labels classifying forms of the one burning thirst to rule and dominate. All questions could be reduced to a single one, that of knowing whether this man, that man, or that other man should hold France in his grasp, to enjoy it, and distribute its favours among his creatures. And the worst was that the outcome of the great parliamentary battles, the days and the weeks lost in setting this man in the place of that man, and that other man in the place of this man, was simply stagnation, for not one of the three men was better than his fellows, and there were but vague points of difference between them; in such wise that the new master bungled the very same work as the previous one had bungled, forgetful, perforce, of programmes and promises as soon as ever he began to reign.

However, Pierre's thoughts invincibly reverted to Laveuve, whom he had momentarily forgotten, but who now seized hold of him again with a quiver as of anger and death. Ah! what could it matter to that poor old wretch, dying of hunger on his bed of rags, whether Mege should overthrow Barroux's ministry, and whether a Vignon ministry should ascend to power or not! At that rate, a century, two centuries, would be needed before there would be bread in the garrets where groan the lamed sons of labour, the old, broken-down beasts of burden. And behind Laveuve there appeared the whole army of misery, the whole multitude of the disinherited and the poor, who agonised and asked for justice whilst the Chamber, sitting in all pomp, grew furiously impassioned over the question as to whom the nation should belong to, as to who should devour it. Mire was flowing on in a broad stream, the hideous, bleeding, devouring sore displayed itself in all impudence, like some cancer which preys upon an organ and spreads to the heart. And what disgust, what nausea must such a spectacle inspire; and what a longing for the vengeful knife that would bring health and joy!

Pierre could not have told for how long he had been plunged in this reverie, when uproar again filled the hall. People were coming back, gesticulating and gathering in groups. And suddenly he heard little Massot exclaim near him: "Well, if it isn't down it's not much better off. I wouldn't give four sous for its chance of surviving."

He referred to the ministry, and began to recount the sitting to a fellow journalist who had just arrived. Mege had spoken very eloquently, with extraordinary fury of indignation against the rotten bourgeoisie, which rotted everything it touched; but, as usual, he had gone much too far, alarming the Chamber by his very violence. And so, when Barroux had ascended the tribune to ask for a month's adjournment of the interpellation, he had merely had occasion to wax indignant, in all sincerity be it said, full of lofty anger that such infamous campaigns should be carried on by a certain portion of the press. Were the shameful Panama scandals about to be renewed? Were the national representatives going to let themselves be intimidated by fresh threats of denunciation? It was the Republic itself which its adversaries were seeking to submerge beneath a flood of abominations. No, no, the hour had come for one to collect one's thoughts, and work in quietude without allowing those who hungered for scandal to disturb the public peace. And the Chamber, impressed by these words, fearing, too, lest the electorate should at last grow utterly weary of the continuous overflow of filth, had adjourned the interpellation to that day month. However, although Vignon had not personally intervened in the debate, the whole of his group had voted against the ministry, with the result that the latter had merely secured a majority of two votes—a mockery.

"But in that case they will resign," said somebody to Massot.

"Yes, so it's rumoured. But Barroux is very tenacious. At all events if they show any obstinacy they will be down before a week is over, particularly as Sagnier, who is quite furious, declares that he will publish the list of names to-morrow."

Just then, indeed, Barroux and Monferrand were seen to pass, hastening along with thoughtful, busy mien, and followed by their anxious clients. It was said that the whole Cabinet was about to assemble to consider the position and come to a decision. And then Vignon, in his turn, reappeared amidst a stream of friends. He, for his part, was radiant, with a joy which he sought to conceal, calming his friends in his desire not to cry victory too soon. However, the eyes of the band glittered, like those of a pack of hounds when the moment draws near for the offal of the quarry to be distributed. And even Mege also looked triumphant. He had all but overthrown the ministry. That made another one that was worn out, and by-and-by he would wear out Vignon's, and at last govern in his turn.

"The devil!" muttered little Massot, "Chaigneux and Duthil look like whipped dogs. And see, there's nobody who is worth the governor. Just look at him, how superb he is, that Fonsegue! But good-by, I must now be off!"

Then he shook hands with his brother journalist unwilling as he was to remain any longer, although the sitting still continued, some bill of public importance again being debated before the rows of empty seats.

Chaigneux, with his desolate mien, had gone to lean against the pedestal of the high figure of Minerva; and never before had he been more bowed down by his needy distress, the everlasting anguish of his ill-luck. On the other hand, Duthil, in spite of everything, was perorating in the centre of a group with an affectation of scoffing unconcern; nevertheless nervous twitches made his nose pucker and distorted his mouth, while the whole of his handsome face was becoming moist with fear. And even as Massot had said, there really was only Fonsegue who showed composure and bravery, ever the same with his restless little figure, and his eyes beaming with wit, though at times they were just faintly clouded by a shadow of uneasiness.

Pierre had risen to renew his request; but Fonsegue forestalled him, vivaciously exclaiming: "No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe, I repeat that I cannot take on myself such an infraction of our rules. There was an inquiry, and a decision was arrived at. How would you have me over-rule it?"

"Monsieur," said the priest, in a tone of deep grief, "it is a question of an old man who is hungry and cold, and in danger of death if he be not succoured."

With a despairing gesture, the director of "Le Globe" seemed to take the very walls as witnesses of his powerlessness. No doubt he feared some nasty affair for his newspaper, in which he had abused the Invalids of Labour enterprise as an electoral weapon. Perhaps, too, the secret terror into which the sitting of the Chamber had just thrown him was hardening his heart. "I can do nothing," he repeated. "But naturally I don't ask better than to have my hands forced by the ladies of the Committee. You already have the support of the Baroness Duvillard, secure that of some others."

Pierre, who was determined to fight on to the very end, saw in this suggestion a supreme chance. "I know the Countess de Quinsac," he said, "I can go to see her at once."

"Quite so! an excellent idea, the Countess de Quinsac! Take a cab and go to see the Princess de Harn as well. She bestirs herself a great deal, and is becoming very influential. Secure the approval of these ladies, go back to the Baroness's at seven, get a letter from her to cover me, and then call on me at the office of my paper. That done, your man shall sleep at the Asylum at nine o'clock!"

He evinced in speaking a kind of joyous good nature, as though he no longer doubted of success now that he ran no risk of compromising himself. And great hope again came back to the priest: "Ah! thank you, monsieur," he said; "it is a work of salvation that you will accomplish."

"But you surely know that I ask nothing better. Ah! if we could only cure misery, prevent hunger and thirst by a mere word. However, make haste, you have not a minute to lose."

They shook hands, and Pierre at once tried to get out of the throng. This, however, was no easy task, for the various groups had grown larger as all the anger and anguish, roused by the recent debate, ebbed back there amid a confused tumult. It was as when a stone, cast into a pool, stirs the ooze below, and causes hidden, rotting things to rise once more to the surface. And Pierre had to bring his elbows into play and force a passage athwart the throng, betwixt the shivering cowardice of some, the insolent audacity of others, and the smirchings which sullied the greater number, given the contagion which inevitably prevailed. However, he carried away a fresh hope, and it seemed to him that if he should save a life, make but one man happy that day, it would be like a first instalment of redemption, a sign that a little forgiveness would be extended to the many follies and errors of that egotistical and all-devouring political world.

On reaching the vestibule a final incident detained him for a moment longer. Some commotion prevailed there following upon a quarrel between a man and an usher, the latter of whom had prevented the former from entering on finding that the admission ticket which he tendered was an old one, with its original date scratched out. The man, very rough at the outset, had then refrained from insisting, as if indeed sudden timidity had come upon him. And in this ill-dressed fellow Pierre was astonished to recognise Salvat, the journeyman engineer, whom he had seen going off in search of work that same morning. This time it was certainly he, tall, thin and ravaged, with dreamy yet flaming eyes, which set his pale starveling's face aglow. He no longer carried his tool-bag; his ragged jacket was buttoned up and distended on the left side by something that he carried in a pocket, doubtless some hunk of bread. And on being repulsed by the ushers, he walked away, taking the Concorde bridge, slowly, as if chancewise, like a man who knows not whither he is going.

IV. SOCIAL SIDELIGHTS

IN her old faded drawing-room—a Louis Seize salon with grey woodwork—the Countess de Quinsac sat near the chimney-piece in her accustomed place. She was singularly like her son, with a long and noble face, her chin somewhat stern, but her eyes still beautiful beneath her fine snowy hair, which was arranged in the antiquated style of her youth. And whatever her haughty coldness, she knew how to be amiable, with perfect, kindly graciousness.

Slightly waving her hand after a long silence, she resumed, addressing herself to the Marquis de Morigny, who sat on the other side of the chimney, where for long years he had always taken the same armchair. "Ah! you are right, my friend, Providence has left us here forgotten, in a most abominable epoch."

"Yes, we passed by the side of happiness and missed it," the Marquis slowly replied, "and it was your fault, and doubtless mine as well."

Smiling sadly, she stopped him with another wave of her hand. And the silence fell once more; not a sound from the streets reached that gloomy ground floor at the rear of the courtyard of an old mansion in the Rue St. Dominique, almost at the corner of the Rue de Bourgogne.

The Marquis was an old man of seventy-five, nine years older than the Countess. Short and thin though he was, he none the less had a distinguished air, with his clean-shaven face, furrowed by deep, aristocratic wrinkles. He belonged to one of the most ancient families of France, and remained one of the last hopeless Legitimists, of very pure and lofty views, zealously keeping his faith to the dead monarchy amidst the downfall of everything. His fortune, still estimated at several millions of francs, remained, as it were, in a state of stagnation, through his refusal to invest it in any of the enterprises of the century. It was known that in all discretion he had loved the Countess, even when M. de Quinsac was alive, and had, moreover, offered marriage after the latter's death, at the time when the widow had sought a refuge on that damp ground floor with merely an income of some 15,000 francs, saved with great difficulty from the wreck of the family fortune. But she, who adored her son Gerard, then in his tenth year, and of delicate health, had sacrificed everything to the boy from a kind of maternal chasteness and a superstitious fear that she might lose him should she set another affection and another duty in her life. And the Marquis, while bowing to her decision, had continued to worship her with his whole soul, ever paying his court as on the first evening when he had seen her, still gallant and faithful after a quarter of a century had passed. There had never been anything between them, not even the exchange of a kiss.

Seeing how sad she looked, he feared that he might have displeased her, and so he asked: "I should have liked to render you happy, but I didn't know how, and the fault can certainly only rest with me. Is Gerard giving you any cause for anxiety?"

She shook her head, and then replied: "As long as things remain as they are we cannot complain of them, my friend, since we accepted them."

She referred to her son's culpable connection with Baroness Duvillard. She had ever shown much weakness with regard to that son whom she had had so much trouble to rear, for she alone knew what exhaustion, what racial collapse was hidden behind his proud bearing. She tolerated his idleness, the apathetic disgust which, man of pleasure that he was, had turned him from the profession of diplomacy as from that of arms. How many times had she not repaired his acts of folly and paid his petty debts, keeping silent concerning them, and refusing all pecuniary help from the Marquis, who no longer dared offer his millions, so stubbornly intent she was on living upon the remnants of her own fortune. And thus she had ended by closing her eyes to her son's scandalous love intrigue, divining in some measure how things had happened, through self-abandonment and lack of conscience—the man weak, unable to resume possession of himself, and the woman holding and retaining him. The Marquis, however, strangely enough, had only forgiven the intrigue on the day when Eve had allowed herself to be converted.

"You know, my friend, how good-natured Gerard is," the Countess resumed. "In that lie both his strength and weakness. How would you have me scold him when he weeps over it all with me? He will tire of that woman."

M. de Morigny wagged his head. "She is still very beautiful," said he. "And then there's the daughter. It would be graver still if he were to marry her—"

"But the daughter's infirm?"

"Yes, and you know what would be said: A Quinsac marrying a monster for the sake of her millions."

This was their mutual terror. They knew everything that went on at the Duvillards, the affectionate friendship of the uncomely Camille and the handsome Gerard, the seeming idyll beneath which lurked the most awful of dramas. And they protested with all their indignation. "Oh! that, no, no, never!" the Countess declared. "My son in that family, no, I will never consent to it."

Just at that moment General de Bozonnet entered. He was much attached to his sister and came to keep her company on the days when she received, for the old circle had gradually dwindled down till now only a few faithful ones ventured into that grey gloomy salon, where one might have fancied oneself at thousands of leagues from present-day Paris. And forthwith, in order to enliven the room, he related that he had been to dejeuner at the Duvillards, and named the guests, Gerard among them. He knew that he pleased his sister by going to the banker's house whence he brought her news, a house, too, which he cleansed in some degree by conferring on it the great honour of his presence. And he himself in no wise felt bored there, for he had long been gained over to the century and showed himself of a very accommodating disposition in everything that did not pertain to military art.

"That poor little Camille worships Gerard," said he; "she was devouring him with her eyes at table."

But M. de Morigny gravely intervened: "There lies the danger, a marriage would be absolutely monstrous from every point of view."

The General seemed astonished: "Why, pray? She isn't beautiful, but it's not only the beauties who marry! And there are her millions. However, our dear child would only have to put them to a good use. True, there is also the mother; but, mon Dieu! such things are so common nowadays in Paris society."

This revolted the Marquis, who made a gesture of utter disgust. What was the use of discussion when all collapsed? How could one answer a Bozonnet, the last surviving representative of such an illustrious family, when he reached such a point as to excuse the infamous morals that prevailed under the Republic; after denying his king, too, and serving the Empire, faithfully and passionately attaching himself to the fortunes and memory of Caesar? However, the Countess also became indignant: "Oh! what are you saying, brother? I will never authorize such a scandal, I swore so only just now."

"Don't swear, sister," exclaimed the General; "for my part I should like to see our Gerard happy. That's all. And one must admit that he's not good for much. I can understand that he didn't go into the Army, for that profession is done for. But I do not so well understand why he did not enter the diplomatic profession, or accept some other occupation. It is very fine, no doubt, to run down the present times and declare that a man of our sphere cannot possibly do any clean work in them. But, as a matter of fact, it is only idle fellows who still say that. And Gerard has but one excuse, his lack of aptitude, will and strength."

Tears had risen to the mother's eyes. She even trembled, well knowing how deceitful were appearances: a mere chill might carry her son off, however tall and strong he might look. And was he not indeed a symbol of that old-time aristocracy, still so lofty and proud in appearance, though at bottom it is but dust?

"Well," continued the General, "he's thirty-six now; he's constantly hanging on your hands, and he must make an end of it all."

However, the Countess silenced him and turned to the Marquis: "Let us put our confidence in God, my friend," said she. "He cannot but come to my help, for I have never willingly offended Him."

"Never!" replied the Marquis, who in that one word set an expression of all his grief, all his affection and worship for that woman whom he had adored for so many years.

But another faithful friend came in and the conversation changed. M. de Larombiere, Vice-President of the Appeal Court, was an old man of seventy-five, thin, bald and clean shaven but for a pair of little white whiskers. And his grey eyes, compressed mouth and square and obstinate chin lent an expression of great austerity to his long face. The grief of his life was that, being afflicted with a somewhat childish lisp, he had never been able to make his full merits known when a public prosecutor, for he esteemed himself to be a great orator. And this secret worry rendered him morose. In him appeared an incarnation of that old royalist France which sulked and only served the Republic against its heart, that old stern magistracy which closed itself to all evolution, to all new views of things and beings. Of petty "gown" nobility, originally a Legitimist but now supporting Orleanism, he believed himself to be the one man of wisdom and logic in that salon, where he was very proud to meet the Marquis.

They talked of the last events; but with them political conversation was soon exhausted, amounting as it did to a mere bitter condemnation of men and occurrences, for all three were of one mind as to the abominations of the Republican regime. They themselves, however, were only ruins, the remnants of the old parties now all but utterly powerless. The Marquis for his part soared on high, yielding in nothing, ever faithful to the dead past; he was one of the last representatives of that lofty obstinate noblesse which dies when it finds itself without an effort to escape its fate. The judge, who at least had a pretender living, relied on a miracle, and demonstrated the necessity for one if France were not to sink into the depths of misfortune and completely disappear. And as for the General, all that he regretted of the two Empires was their great wars; he left the faint hope of a Bonapartist restoration on one side to declare that by not contenting itself with the Imperial military system, and by substituting thereto obligatory service, the nation in arms, the Republic had killed both warfare and the country.

When the Countess's one man-servant came to ask her if she would consent to receive Abbe Froment she seemed somewhat surprised. "What can he want of me? Show him in," she said.

She was very pious, and having met Pierre in connection with various charitable enterprises, she had been touched by his zeal as well as by the saintly reputation which he owed to his Neuilly parishioners.

He, absorbed by his fever, felt intimidated directly he crossed the threshold. He could at first distinguish nothing, but fancied he was entering some place of mourning, a shadowy spot where human forms seemed to melt away, and voices were never raised above a whisper. Then, on perceiving the persons present, he felt yet more out of his element, for they seemed so sad, so far removed from the world whence he had just come, and whither he was about to return. And when the Countess had made him sit down beside her in front of the chimney-piece, it was in a low voice that he told her the lamentable story of Laveuve, and asked her support to secure the man's admittance to the Asylum for the Invalids of Labour.

"Ah! yes," said she, "that enterprise which my son wished me to belong to. But, Monsieur l'Abbe, I have never once attended the Committee meetings. So how could I intervene, having assuredly no influence whatever?"

Again had the figures of Eve and Gerard arisen before her, for it was at this asylum that the pair had first met. And influenced by her sorrowful maternal love she was already weakening, although it was regretfully that she had lent her name to one of those noisy charitable enterprises, which people abused to further their selfish interests in a manner she condemned.

"But, madame," Pierre insisted, "it is a question of a poor starving old man. I implore you to be compassionate."

Although the priest had spoken in a low voice the General drew near. "It's for your old revolutionary that you are running about, is it not," said he. "Didn't you succeed with the manager, then? The fact is that it's difficult to feel any pity for fellows who, if they were the masters, would, as they themselves say, sweep us all away."

M. de Larombiere jerked his chin approvingly. For some time past he had been haunted by the Anarchist peril. But Pierre, distressed and quivering, again began to plead his cause. He spoke of all the frightful misery, the homes where there was no food, the women and children shivering with cold, and the fathers scouring muddy, wintry Paris in search of a bit of bread. All that he asked for was a line on a visiting card, a kindly word from the Countess, which he would at once carry to Baroness Duvillard to prevail on her to set the regulations aside. And his words fell one by one, tremulous with stifled tears, in that mournful salon, like sounds from afar, dying away in a dead world where there was no echo left.

Madame de Quinsac turned towards M. de Morigny, but he seemed to take no interest in it all. He was gazing fixedly at the fire, with the haughty air of a stranger who was indifferent to the things and beings in whose midst an error of time compelled him to live. But feeling that the glance of the woman he worshipped was fixed upon him he raised his head; and then their eyes met for a moment with an expression of infinite gentleness, the mournful gentleness of their heroic love.

"Mon Dieu!" said she, "I know your merits, Monsieur l'Abbe, and I won't refuse my help to one of your good works."

Then she went off for a moment, and returned with a card on which she had written that she supported with all her heart Monsieur l'Abbe Froment in the steps he was taking. And he thanked her and went off delighted, as if he carried yet a fresh hope of salvation from that drawing-room where, as he retired, gloom and silence once more seemed to fall on that old lady and her last faithful friends gathered around the fire, last relics of a world that was soon to disappear.

Once outside, Pierre joyfully climbed into his cab again, after giving the Princess de Harn's address in the Avenue Kleber. If he could also obtain her approval he would no longer doubt of success. However, there was such a crush on the Concorde bridge, that the driver had to walk his horse. And, on the foot-pavement, Pierre again saw Duthil, who, with a cigar between his lips, was smiling at the crowd, with his amiable bird-like heedlessness, happy as he felt at finding the pavement dry and the sky blue on leaving that worrying sitting of the Chamber. Seeing how gay and triumphant he looked, a sudden inspiration came to the priest, who said to himself that he ought to win over this young man, whose report had had such a disastrous effect. As it happened, the cab having been compelled to stop altogether, the deputy had just recognized him and was smiling at him.

"Where are you going, Monsieur Duthil?" Pierre asked.

"Close by, in the Champs Elysees."

"I'm going that way, and, as I should much like to speak to you for a moment, it would be very kind of you to take a seat beside me. I will set you down wherever you like."

"Willingly, Monsieur l'Abbe. It won't inconvenience you if I finish my cigar?"

"Oh! not at all."

The cab found its way out of the crush, crossed the Place de la Concorde and began to ascend the Champs Elysees. And Pierre, reflecting that he had very few minutes before him, at once attacked Duthil, quite ready for any effort to convince him. He remembered what a sortie the young deputy had made against Laveuve at the Baron's; and thus he was astonished to hear him interrupt and say quite pleasantly, enlivened as he seemed by the bright sun which was again beginning to shine: "Ah, yes! your old drunkard! So you didn't settle his business with Fonsegue? And what is it you want? To have him admitted to-day? Well, you know I don't oppose it?"

"But there's your report."

"My report, oh, my report! But questions change according to the way one looks at them. And if you are so anxious about your Laveuve I won't refuse to help you."

Pierre looked at him in astonishment, at bottom extremely well pleased. And there was no further necessity even for him to speak.

"You didn't take the matter in hand properly," continued Duthil, leaning forward with a confidential air. "It's the Baron who's the master at home, for reasons which you may divine, which you may very likely know. The Baroness does all that he asks without even discussing the point; and this morning,—instead of starting on a lot of useless visits, you only had to gain his support, particularly as he seemed to be very well disposed. And she would then have given way immediately." Duthil began to laugh. "And so," he continued, "do you know what I'll do? Well, I'll gain the Baron over to your cause. Yes, I am this moment going to a house where he is, where one is certain to find him every day at this time." Then he laughed more loudly. "And perhaps you are not ignorant of it, Monsieur l'Abbe. When he is there you may be certain he never gives a refusal. I promise you I'll make him swear that he will compel his wife to grant your man admission this very evening. Only it will, perhaps, be rather late."

Then all at once, as if struck by a fresh idea, Duthil went on: "But why shouldn't you come with me? You secure a line from the Baron, and thereupon, without losing a minute, you go in search of the Baroness. Ah! yes, the house embarrasses you a little, I understand it. Would you like to see only the Baron there? You can wait for him in a little salon downstairs; I will bring him to you."

This proposal made Duthil altogether merry, but Pierre, quite scared, hesitated at the idea of thus going to Silviane d'Aulnay's. It was hardly a place for him. However, to achieve his purpose, he would have descended into the very dwelling of the fiend, and had already done so sometimes with Abbe Rose, when there was hope of assuaging wretchedness. So he turned to Duthil and consented to accompany him.

Silviane d'Aulnay's little mansion, a very luxurious one, displaying, too, so to say, the luxury of a temple, refined but suggestive of gallantry, stood in the Avenue d'Antin, near the Champs Elysees. The inmate of this sanctuary, where the orfrays of old dalmaticas glittered in the mauve reflections from the windows of stained-glass, had just completed her twenty-fifth year. Short and slim she was, of an adorable, dark beauty, and all Paris was acquainted with her delicious, virginal countenance of a gentle oval, her delicate nose, her little mouth, her candid cheeks and artless chin, above all which she wore her black hair in thick, heavy bands, which hid her low brow. Her notoriety was due precisely to her pretty air of astonishment, the infinite purity of her blue eyes, the whole expression of chaste innocence which she assumed when it so pleased her, an expression which contrasted powerfully with her true nature, shameless creature that she really was, of the most monstrous, confessed, and openly-displayed perversity; such as, in fact, often spring up from the rotting soil of great cities. Extraordinary things were related about Silviane's tastes and fancies. Some said that she was a door-keeper's, others a doctor's, daughter. In any case she had managed to acquire instruction and manners, for when occasion required she lacked neither wit, nor style, nor deportment. She had been rolling through the theatres for ten years or so, applauded for her beauty's sake, and she had even ended by obtaining some pretty little successes in such parts as those of very pure young girls or loving and persecuted young women. Since there had been a question, though, of her entering the Comedie Francaise to play the role of Pauline in "Polyeucte," some people had waxed indignant and others had roared with laughter, so ridiculous did the idea appear, so outrageous for the majesty of classic tragedy. She, however, quiet and stubborn, wished this thing to be, was resolved that it should be, certain as she was that she would secure it, insolent like a creature to whom men had never yet been able to refuse anything.

That day, at three o'clock, Gerard de Quinsac, not knowing how to kill the time pending the appointment he had given Eve in the Rue Matignon, had thought of calling at Silviane's, which was in the neighbourhood. She was an old caprice of his, and even nowadays he would sometimes linger at the little mansion if its pretty mistress felt bored. But he had this time found her in a fury; and, reclining in one of the deep armchairs of the salon where "old gold" formed the predominant colour, he was listening to her complaints. She, standing in a white gown, white indeed from head to foot like Eve herself at the dejeuner, was speaking passionately, and fast convincing the young man, who, won over by so much youth and beauty, unconsciously compared her to his other flame, weary already of his coming assignation, and so mastered by supineness, both moral and physical, that he would have preferred to remain all day in the depths of that armchair.

"You hear me, Gerard!" she at last exclaimed, "I'll have nothing whatever to do with him, unless he brings me my nomination."

Just then Baron Duvillard came in, and forthwith she changed to ice and received him like some sorely offended young queen who awaits an explanation; whilst he, who foresaw the storm and brought moreover disastrous tidings, forced a smile, though very ill at ease. She was the stain, the blemish attaching to that man who was yet so sturdy and so powerful amidst the general decline of his race. And she was also the beginning of justice and punishment, taking all his piled-up gold from him by the handful, and by her cruelty avenging those who shivered and who starved. And it was pitiful to see that feared and flattered man, beneath whom states and governments trembled, here turn pale with anxiety, bend low in all humility, and relapse into the senile, lisping infancy of acute passion.

"Ah! my dear friend," said he, "if you only knew how I have been rushing about. I had a lot of worrying business, some contractors to see, a big advertisement affair to settle, and I feared that I should never be able to come and kiss your hand."

He kissed it, but she let her arm fall, coldly, indifferently, contenting herself with looking at him, waiting for what he might have to say to her, and embarrassing him to such a point that he began to perspire and stammer, unable to express himself. "Of course," he began, "I also thought of you, and went to the Fine Arts Office, where I had received a positive promise. Oh! they are still very much in your favour at the Fine Arts Office! Only, just fancy, it's that idiot of a minister, that Taboureau,* an old professor from the provinces who knows nothing about our Paris, that has expressly opposed your nomination, saying that as long as he is in office you shall not appear at the Comedie."

* Taboureau is previously described as Minister of Public
Instruction. It should be pointed out, however, that
although under the present Republic the Ministries of
Public Instruction and Fine Arts have occasionally been
distinct departments, at other times they have been
united, one minister, as in Taboureau's case, having
charge of both.—Trans.

Erect and rigid, she spoke but two words: "And then?"

"And then—well, my dear, what would you have me do? One can't after all overthrow a ministry to enable you to play the part of Pauline."

"Why not?"

He pretended to laugh, but his blood rushed to his face, and the whole of his sturdy figure quivered with anguish. "Come, my little Silviane," said he, "don't be obstinate. You can be so nice when you choose. Give up the idea of that debut. You, yourself, would risk a great deal in it, for what would be your worries if you were to fail? You would weep all the tears in your body. And besides, you can ask me for so many other things which I should be so happy to give you. Come now, at once, make a wish and I will gratify it immediately."

In a frolicsome way he sought to take her hand again. But she drew back with an air of much dignity. "No, you hear me, my dear fellow, I will have nothing whatever to do with you—nothing, so long as I don't play Pauline."

He understood her fully, and he knew her well enough to realise how rigorously she would treat him. Only a kind of grunt came from his contracted throat, though he still tried to treat the matter in a jesting way. "Isn't she bad-tempered to-day!" he resumed at last, turning towards Gerard. "What have you done to her that I find her in such a state?"

But the young man, who kept very quiet for fear lest he himself might be bespattered in the course of the dispute, continued to stretch himself out in a languid way and gave no answer.

But Silviane's anger burst forth. "What has he done to me? He has pitied me for being at the mercy of such a man as you—so egotistical, so insensible to the insults heaped upon me. Ought you not to be the first to bound with indignation? Ought you not to have exacted my admittance to the Comedie as a reparation for the insult? For, after all, it is a defeat for you; if I'm considered unworthy, you are struck at the same time as I am. And so I'm a drab, eh? Say at once that I'm a creature to be driven away from all respectable houses."

She went on in this style, coming at last to vile words, the abominable words which, in moments of anger, always ended by returning to her innocent-looking lips. The Baron, who well knew that a syllable from him would only increase the foulness of the overflow, vainly turned an imploring glance on the Count to solicit his intervention. Gerard, with his keen desire for peace and quietness, often brought about a reconciliation, but this time he did not stir, feeling too lazy and sleepy to interfere. And Silviane all at once came to a finish, repeating her trenchant, severing words: "Well, manage as you can, secure my debut, or I'll have nothing more to do with you, nothing!"

"All right! all right!" Duvillard at last murmured, sneering, but in despair, "we'll arrange it all."

However, at that moment a servant came in to say that M. Duthil was downstairs and wished to speak to the Baron in the smoking-room. Duvillard was astonished at this, for Duthil usually came up as though the house were his own. Then he reflected that the deputy had doubtless brought him some serious news from the Chamber which he wished to impart to him confidentially at once. So he followed the servant, leaving Gerard and Silviane together.

In the smoking-room, an apartment communicating with the hall by a wide bay, the curtain of which was drawn up, Pierre stood with his companion, waiting and glancing curiously around him. What particularly struck him was the almost religious solemnness of the entrance, the heavy hangings, the mystic gleams of the stained-glass, the old furniture steeped in chapel-like gloom amidst scattered perfumes of myrrh and incense. Duthil, who was still very gay, tapped a low divan with his cane and said: "She has a nicely-furnished house, eh? Oh! she knows how to look after her interests."

Then the Baron came in, still quite upset and anxious. And without even perceiving the priest, desirous as he was of tidings, he began: "Well, what did they do? Is there some very bad news, then?"

"Mege interpellated and applied for a declaration of urgency so as to overthrow Barroux. You can imagine what his speech was."

"Yes, yes, against the bourgeois, against me, against you. It's always the same thing—And then?"

"Then—well, urgency wasn't voted, but, in spite of a very fine defence, Barroux only secured a majority of two votes."

"Two votes, the devil! Then he's down, and we shall have a Vignon ministry next week."

"That's what everybody said in the lobbies."

The Baron frowned, as if he were estimating what good or evil might result to the world from such a change. Then, with a gesture of displeasure, he said: "A Vignon ministry! The devil! that would hardly be any better. Those young democrats pretend to be virtuous, and a Vignon ministry wouldn't admit Silviane to the Comedie."

This, at first, was his only thought in presence of the crisis which made the political world tremble. And so the deputy could not refrain from referring to his own anxiety. "Well, and we others, what is our position in it all?"

This brought Duvillard back to the situation. With a fresh gesture, this time a superbly proud one, he expressed his full and impudent confidence. "We others, why we remain as we are; we've never been in peril, I imagine. Oh! I am quite at ease. Sagnier can publish his famous list if it amuses him to do so. If we haven't long since bought Sagnier and his list, it's because Barroux is a thoroughly honest man, and for my part I don't care to throw money out of the window—I repeat to you that we fear nothing."

Then, as he at last recognised Abbe Froment, who had remained in the shade, Duthil explained what service the priest desired of him. And Duvillard, in his state of emotion, his heart still rent by Silviane's sternness, must have felt a covert hope that a good action might bring him luck; so he at once consented to intervene in favour of Laveuve's admission. Taking a card and a pencil from his pocket-book he drew near to the window. "Oh! whatever you desire, Monsieur l'Abbe," he said, "I shall be very happy to participate in this good work. Here, this is what I have written: 'My dear, please do what M. l'Abbe Froment solicits in favour of this unfortunate man, since our friend Fonsegue only awaits a word from you to take proper steps.'"

At this moment through the open bay Pierre caught sight of Gerard, whom Silviane, calm once more, and inquisitive no doubt to know why Duthil had called, was escorting into the hall. And the sight of the young woman filled him with astonishment, so simple and gentle did she seem to him, full of the immaculate candour of a virgin. Never had he dreamt of a lily of more unobtrusive yet delicious bloom in the whole garden of innocence.

"Now," continued Duvillard, "if you wish to hand this card to my wife at once, you must go to the Princess de Harn's, where there is a matinee—"

"I was going there, Monsieur le Baron."

"Very good. You will certainly find my wife there; she is to take the children there." Then he paused, for he too had just seen Gerard; and he called him: "I say, Gerard, my wife said that she was going to that matinee, didn't she? You feel sure—don't you?—that Monsieur l'Abbe will find her there?"

Although the young man was then going to the Rue Matignon, there to wait for Eve, it was in the most natural manner possible that he replied: "If Monsieur l'Abbe makes haste, I think he will find her there, for she was certainly going there before trying on a corsage at Salmon's."

Then he kissed Silviane's hand, and went off with the air of a handsome, indolent man, who knows no malice, and is even weary of pleasure.

Pierre, feeling rather embarrassed, was obliged to let Duvillard introduce him to the mistress of the house. He bowed in silence, whilst she, likewise silent, returned his bow with modest reserve, the tact appropriate to the occasion, such as no ingenue, even at the Comedie, was then capable of. And while the Baron accompanied the priest to the door, she returned to the salon with Duthil, who was scarcely screened by the door-curtain before he passed his arm round her waist.

When Pierre, who at last felt confident of success, found himself, still in his cab, in front of the Princess de Harn's mansion in the Avenue Kleber, he suddenly relapsed into great embarrassment. The avenue was crowded with carriages brought thither by the musical matinee, and such a throng of arriving guests pressed round the entrance, decorated with a kind of tent with scallopings of red velvet, that he deemed the house unapproachable. How could he manage to get in? And how in his cassock could he reach the Princess, and ask for a minute's conversation with Baroness Duvillard? Amidst all his feverishness he had not thought of these difficulties. However, he was approaching the door on foot, asking himself how he might glide unperceived through the throng, when the sound of a merry voice made him turn: "What, Monsieur l'Abbe! Is it possible! So now I find you here!"

It was little Massot who spoke. He went everywhere, witnessed ten sights a day,—a parliamentary sitting, a funeral, a wedding, any festive or mourning scene,—when he wanted a good subject for an article. "What! Monsieur l'Abbe," he resumed, "and so you have come to our amiable Princess's to see the Mauritanians dance!"

He was jesting, for the so-called Mauritanians were simply six Spanish dancing-girls, who by the sensuality of their performance were then making all Paris rush to the Folies-Bergere. For drawing-room entertainments these girls reserved yet more indecorous dances—dances of such a character indeed that they would certainly not have been allowed in a theatre. And the beau monde rushed to see them at the houses of the bolder lady-entertainers, the eccentric and foreign ones like the Princess, who in order to draw society recoiled from no "attraction."

But when Pierre had explained to little Massot that he was still running about on the same business, the journalist obligingly offered to pilot him. He knew the house, obtained admittance by a back door, and brought Pierre along a passage into a corner of the hall, near the very entrance of the grand drawing-room. Lofty green plants decorated this hall, and in the spot selected Pierre was virtually hidden. "Don't stir, my dear Abbe," said Massot, "I will try to ferret out the Princess for you. And you shall know if Baroness Duvillard has already arrived."

What surprised Pierre was that every window-shutter of the mansion was closed, every chink stopped up so that daylight might not enter, and that every room flared with electric lamps, an illumination of supernatural intensity. The heat was already very great, the atmosphere heavy with a violent perfume of flowers and odore di femina. And to Pierre, who felt both blinded and stifled, it seemed as if he were entering one of those luxurious, unearthly Dens of the Flesh such as the pleasure-world of Paris conjures from dreamland. By rising on tiptoes, as the drawing-room entrance was wide open, he could distinguish the backs of the women who were already seated, rows of necks crowned with fair or dark hair. The Mauritanians were doubtless executing their first dance. He did not see them, but he could divine the lascivious passion of the dance from the quiver of all those women's necks, which swayed as beneath a great gust of wind. Then laughter arose and a tempest of bravos, quite a tumult of enjoyment.

"I can't put my hand on the Princess; you must wait a little," Massot returned to say. "I met Janzen and he promised to bring her to me. Don't you know Janzen?"

Then, in part because his profession willed it, and in part for pleasure's sake, he began to gossip. The Princess was a good friend of his. He had described her first soiree during the previous year, when she had made her debut at that mansion on her arrival in Paris. He knew the real truth about her so far as it could be known. Rich? yes, perhaps she was, for she spent enormous sums. Married she must have been, and to a real prince, too; no doubt she was still married to him, in spite of her story of widowhood. Indeed, it seemed certain that her husband, who was as handsome as an archangel, was travelling about with a vocalist. As for having a bee in her bonnet that was beyond discussion, as clear as noonday. Whilst showing much intelligence, she constantly and suddenly shifted. Incapable of any prolonged effort, she went from one thing that had awakened her curiosity to another, never attaching herself anywhere. After ardently busying herself with painting, she had lately become impassioned for chemistry, and was now letting poetry master her.

"And so you don't know Janzen," continued Massot. "It was he who threw her into chemistry, into the study of explosives especially, for, as you may imagine, the only interest in chemistry for her is its connection with Anarchism. She, I think, is really an Austrian, though one must always doubt anything she herself says. As for Janzen, he calls himself a Russian, but he's probably German. Oh! he's the most unobtrusive, enigmatical man in the world, without a home, perhaps without a name—a terrible fellow with an unknown past. I myself hold proofs which make me think that he took part in that frightful crime at Barcelona. At all events, for nearly a year now I've been meeting him in Paris, where the police no doubt are watching him. And nothing can rid me of the idea that he merely consented to become our lunatic Princess's lover in order to throw the detectives off the scent. He affects to live in the midst of fetes, and he has introduced to the house some extraordinary people, Anarchists of all nationalities and all colours—for instance, one Raphanel, that fat, jovial little man yonder, a Frenchman he is, and his companions would do well to mistrust him. Then there's a Bergaz, a Spaniard, I think, an obscure jobber at the Bourse, whose sensual, blobber-lipped mouth is so disquieting. And there are others and others, adventurers and bandits from the four corners of the earth!... Ah! the foreign colonies of our Parisian pleasure-world! There are a few spotless fine names, a few real great fortunes among them, but as for the rest, ah! what a herd!"

Rosemonde's own drawing-room was summed up in those words: resounding titles, real millionaires, then, down below, the most extravagant medley of international imposture and turpitude. And Pierre thought of that internationalism, that cosmopolitanism, that flight of foreigners which, ever denser and denser, swooped down upon Paris. Most certainly it came thither to enjoy it, as to a city of adventure and delight, and it helped to rot it a little more. Was it then a necessary thing, that decomposition of the great cities which have governed the world, that affluxion of every passion, every desire, every gratification, that accumulation of reeking soil from all parts of the world, there where, in beauty and intelligence, blooms the flower of civilisation?

However, Janzen appeared, a tall, thin fellow of about thirty, very fair with grey, pale, harsh eyes, and a pointed beard and flowing curly hair which elongated his livid, cloudy face. He spoke indifferent French in a low voice and without a gesture. And he declared that the Princess could not be found; he had looked for her everywhere. Possibly, if somebody had displeased her, she had shut herself up in her room and gone to bed, leaving her guests to amuse themselves in all freedom in whatever way they might choose.

"Why, but here she is!" suddenly said Massot.

Rosemonde was indeed there, in the vestibule, watching the door as if she expected somebody. Short, slight, and strange rather than pretty, with her delicate face, her sea-green eyes, her small quivering nose, her rather large and over-ruddy mouth, which was parted so that one could see her superb teeth, she that day wore a sky-blue gown spangled with silver; and she had silver bracelets on her arms and a silver circlet in her pale brown hair, which rained down in curls and frizzy, straggling locks as though waving in a perpetual breeze.

"Oh! whatever you desire, Monsieur l'Abbe," she said to Pierre as soon as she knew his business. "If they don't take your old man in at our asylum, send him to me, I'll take him, I will; I will sleep him somewhere here."

Still, she remained disturbed, and continually glanced towards the door. And on the priest asking if Baroness Duvillard had yet arrived, "Why no!" she cried, "and I am much surprised at it. She is to bring her son and daughter. Yesterday, Hyacinthe positively promised me that he would come."

There lay her new caprice. If her passion for chemistry was giving way to a budding taste for decadent, symbolical verse, it was because one evening, whilst discussing Occultism with Hyacinthe, she had discovered an extraordinary beauty in him: the astral beauty of Nero's wandering soul! At least, said she, the signs of it were certain.

And all at once she quitted Pierre: "Ah, at last!" she cried, feeling relieved and happy. Then she darted forward: Hyacinthe was coming in with his sister Camille.

On the very threshold, however, he had just met the friend on whose account he was there, young Lord George Eldrett, a pale and languid stripling with the hair of a girl; and he scarcely condescended to notice the tender greeting of Rosemonde, for he professed to regard woman as an impure and degrading creature. Distressed by such coldness, she followed the two young men, returning in their rear into the reeking, blinding furnace of the drawing-room.

Massot, however, had been obliging enough to stop Camille and bring her to Pierre, who at the first words they exchanged relapsed into despair. "What, mademoiselle, has not madame your mother accompanied you here?"

The girl, clad according to her wont in a dark gown, this time of peacock-blue, was nervous, with wicked eyes and sibilant voice. And as she ragefully drew up her little figure, her deformity, her left shoulder higher than the right one, became more apparent than ever. "No," she rejoined, "she was unable. She had something to try on at her dressmaker's. We stopped too long at the Exposition du Lis, and she requested us to set her down at Salmon's door on our way here."

It was Camille herself who had skilfully prolonged the visit to the art show, still hoping to prevent her mother from meeting Gerard. And her rage arose from the ease with which her mother had got rid of her, thanks to that falsehood of having something to try on.

"But," ingenuously said Pierre, "if I went at once to this person Salmon, I might perhaps be able to send up my card."

Camille gave a shrill laugh, so funny did the idea appear to her. Then she retorted: "Oh! who knows if you would still find her there? She had another pressing appointment, and is no doubt already keeping it!"

"Well, then, I will wait for her here. She will surely come to fetch you, will she not?"

"Fetch us? Oh no! since I tell you that she has other important affairs to attend to. The carriage will take us home alone, my brother and I."

Increasing bitterness was infecting the girl's pain-fraught irony. Did he not understand her then, that priest who asked such naive questions which were like dagger-thrusts in her heart? Yet he must know, since everybody knew the truth.

"Ah! how worried I am," Pierre resumed, so grieved indeed that tears almost came to his eyes. "It's still on account of that poor man about whom I have been busying myself since this morning. I have a line from your father, and Monsieur Gerard told me—" But at this point he paused in confusion, and amidst all his thoughtlessness of the world, absorbed as he was in the one passion of charity, he suddenly divined the truth. "Yes," he added mechanically, "I just now saw your father again with Monsieur de Quinsac."

"I know, I know," replied Camille, with the suffering yet scoffing air of a girl who is ignorant of nothing. "Well, Monsieur l'Abbe, if you have a line from papa for mamma, you must wait till mamma has finished her business. You might come to the house about six o'clock, but I doubt if you'll find her there, as she may well be detained."

While Camille thus spoke, her murderous eyes glistened, and each word she uttered, simple as it seemed, became instinct with ferocity, as if it were a knife, which she would have liked to plunge into her mother's breast. In all certainty she had never before hated her mother to such a point as this in her envy of her beauty and her happiness in being loved. And the irony which poured from the girl's virgin lips, before that simple priest, was like a flood of mire with which she sought to submerge her rival.

Just then, however, Rosemonde came back again, feverish and flurried as usual. And she led Camille away: "Ah, my dear, make haste. They are extraordinary, delightful, intoxicating!"

Janzen and little Massot also followed the Princess. All the men hastened from the adjoining rooms, scrambled and plunged into the salon at the news that the Mauritanians had again begun to dance. That time it must have been the frantic, lascivious gallop that Paris whispered about, for Pierre saw the rows of necks and heads, now fair, now dark, wave and quiver as beneath a violent wind. With every window-shutter closed, the conflagration of the electric lamps turned the place into a perfect brazier, reeking with human effluvia. And there came a spell of rapture, fresh laughter and bravos, all the delight of an overflowing orgy.

When Pierre again found himself on the footwalk, he remained for a moment bewildered, blinking, astonished to be in broad daylight once more. Half-past four would soon strike, but he had nearly two hours to wait before calling at the house in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy. What should he do? He paid his driver; preferring to descend the Champs Elysees on foot, since he had some time to lose. A walk, moreover, might calm the fever which was burning his hands, in the passion of charity which ever since the morning had been mastering him more and more, in proportion as he encountered fresh and fresh obstacles. He now had but one pressing desire, to complete his good work, since success henceforth seemed certain. And he tried to restrain his steps and walk leisurely down the magnificent avenue, which had now been dried by the bright sun, and was enlivened by a concourse of people, while overhead the sky was again blue, lightly blue, as in springtime.

Nearly two hours to lose while, yonder, the wretched Laveuve lay with life ebbing from him on his bed of rags, in his icy den. Sudden feelings of revolt, of well-nigh irresistible impatience ascended from Pierre's heart, making him quiver with desire to run off and at once find Baroness Duvillard so as to obtain from her the all-saving order. He felt sure that she was somewhere near, in one of those quiet neighbouring streets, and great was his perturbation, his grief-fraught anger at having to wait in this wise to save a human life until she should have attended to those affairs of hers, of which her daughter spoke with such murderous glances! He seemed to hear a formidable cracking, the family life of the bourgeoisie was collapsing: the father was at a hussy's house, the mother with a lover, the son and daughter knew everything; the former gliding to idiotic perversity, the latter enraged and dreaming of stealing her mother's lover to make a husband of him. And meantime the splendid equipages descended the triumphal avenue, and the crowd with its luxury flowed along the sidewalks, one and all joyous and superb, seemingly with no idea that somewhere at the far end there was a gaping abyss wherein everyone of them would fall and be annihilated!

When Pierre got as far as the Summer Circus he was much surprised at again seeing Salvat, the journeyman engineer, on one of the avenue seats. He must have sunk down there, overcome by weariness and hunger, after many a vain search. However, his jacket was still distended by something he carried in or under it, some bit of bread, no doubt, which he meant to take home with him. And leaning back, with his arms hanging listlessly, he was watching with dreamy eyes the play of some very little children, who, with the help of their wooden spades, were laboriously raising mounds of sand, and then destroying them by dint of kicks. As he looked at them his red eyelids moistened, and a very gentle smile appeared on his poor discoloured lips. This time Pierre, penetrated by disquietude, wished to approach and question him. But Salvat distrustfully rose and went off towards the Circus, where a concert was drawing to a close; and he prowled around the entrance of that festive edifice in which two thousand happy people were heaped up together listening to music.

V. FROM RELIGION TO ANARCHY

AS Pierre was reaching the Place de la Concorde he suddenly remembered the appointment which Abbe Rose had given him for five o'clock at the Madeleine, and which he was forgetting in the feverishness born of his repeated steps to save Laveuve. And at thought of it he hastened on, well pleased at having this appointment to occupy and keep him patient.

When he entered the church he was surprised to find it so dark. There were only a few candles burning, huge shadows were flooding the nave, and amidst the semi-obscurity a very loud, clear voice spoke on with a ceaseless streaming of words. All that one could at first distinguish of the numerous congregation was a pale, vague mass of heads, motionless with extreme attention. In the pulpit stood Monseigneur Martha, finishing his third address on the New Spirit. The two former ones had re-echoed far and wide, and so what is called "all Paris" was there—women of society, politicians, and writers, who were captivated by the speaker's artistic oratory, his warm, skilful language, and his broad, easy gestures, worthy of a great actor.

Pierre did not wish to disturb the solemn attention, the quivering silence above which the prelate's voice alone rang out. Accordingly he resolved to wait before seeking Abbe Rose, and remained standing near a pillar. A parting gleam of daylight fell obliquely on Monseigneur Martha, who looked tall and sturdy in his white surplice, and scarcely showed a grey hair, although he was more than fifty. He had handsome features: black, keen eyes, a commanding nose, a mouth and chin of the greatest firmness of contour. What more particularly struck one, however, what gained the heart of every listener, was the expression of extreme amiability and anxious sympathy which ever softened the imperious haughtiness of the prelate's face.

Pierre had formerly known him as Cure, or parish priest, of Ste. Clotilde. He was doubtless of Italian origin, but he had been born in Paris, and had quitted the seminary of St. Sulpice with the best possible record. Very intelligent and very ambitious, he had evinced an activity which even made his superiors anxious. Then, on being appointed Bishop of Persepolis, he had disappeared, gone to Rome, where he had spent five years engaged in work of which very little was known. However, since his return he had been astonishing Paris by his brilliant propaganda, busying himself with the most varied affairs, and becoming much appreciated and very powerful at the archiepiscopal residence. He devoted himself in particular, and with wonderful results, to the task of increasing the subscriptions for the completion of the basilica of the Sacred Heart. He recoiled from nothing, neither from journeys, nor lectures, nor collections, nor applications to Government, nor even endeavours among Israelites and Freemasons. And at last, again enlarging his sphere of action, he had undertaken to reconcile Science with Catholicism, and to bring all Christian France to the Republic, on all sides expounding the policy of Pope Leo XIII., in order that the Church might finally triumph.

However, in spite of the advances of this influential and amiable man, Pierre scarcely liked him. He only felt grateful to him for one thing, the appointment of good Abbe Rose as curate at St. Pierre de Montmartre, which appointment he had secured for him no doubt in order to prevent such a scandal as the punishment of an old priest for showing himself too charitable. On thus finding and hearing the prelate speak in that renowned pulpit of the Madeleine, still and ever pursuing his work of conquest, Pierre remembered how he had seen him at the Duvillards' during the previous spring, when, with his usual maestria, he had achieved his greatest triumph—the conversion of Eve to Catholicism. That church, too, had witnessed her baptism, a wonderfully pompous ceremony, a perfect gala offered to the public which figures in all the great events of Parisian life. Gerard had knelt down, moved to tears, whilst the Baron triumphed like a good-natured husband who was happy to find religion establishing perfect harmony in his household. It was related among the spectators that Eve's family, and particularly old Justus Steinberger, her father, was not in reality much displeased by the affair. The old man sneeringly remarked, indeed, that he knew his daughter well enough to wish her to belong to his worst enemy. In the banking business there is a class of security which one is pleased to see discounted by one's rivals. With the stubborn hope of triumph peculiar to his race, Justus, consoling himself for the failure of his first scheme, doubtless considered that Eve would prove a powerful dissolving agent in the Christian family which she had entered, and thus help to make all wealth and power fall into the hands of the Jews.

However, Pierre's vision faded. Monseigneur Martha's voice was rising with increase of volume, celebrating, amidst the quivering of the congregation, the benefits that would accrue from the New Spirit, which was at last about to pacify France and restore her to her due rank and power. Were there not certain signs of this resurrection on every hand? The New Spirit was the revival of the Ideal, the protest of the soul against degrading materialism, the triumph of spirituality over filthy literature; and it was also Science accepted, but set in its proper place, reconciled with Faith, since it no longer pretended to encroach on the latter's sacred domain; and it was further the Democracy welcomed in fatherly fashion, the Republic legitimated, recognised in her turn as Eldest Daughter of the Church. A breath of poetry passed by. The Church opened her heart to all her children, there would henceforth be but concord and delight if the masses, obedient to the New Spirit, would give themselves to the Master of love as they had given themselves to their kings, recognising that the Divinity was the one unique power, absolute sovereign of both body and soul.

Pierre was now listening attentively, wondering where it was that he had previously heard almost identical words. And suddenly he remembered; and could fancy that he was again at Rome, listening to the last words of Monsignor Nani, the Assessor of the Holy Office. Here, again, he found the dream of a democratic Pope, ceasing to support the compromised monarchies, and seeking to subdue the masses. Since Caesar was down, or nearly so, might not the Pope realise the ancient ambition of his forerunners and become both emperor and pontiff, the sovereign, universal divinity on earth? This, too, was the dream in which Pierre himself, with apostolic naivete, had indulged when writing his book, "New Rome": a dream from which the sight of the real Rome had so roughly roused him. At bottom it was merely a policy of hypocritical falsehood, the priestly policy which relies on time, and is ever tenacious, carrying on the work of conquest with extraordinary suppleness, resolved to profit by everything. And what an evolution it was, the Church of Rome making advances to Science, to the Democracy, to the Republican regimes, convinced that it would be able to devour them if only it were allowed the time! Ah! yes, the New Spirit was simply the Old Spirit of Domination, incessantly reviving and hungering to conquer and possess the world.

Pierre thought that he recognised among the congregation certain deputies whom he had seen at the Chamber. Wasn't that tall gentleman with the fair beard, who listened so devoutly, one of Monferrand's creatures? It was said that Monferrand, once a devourer of priests, was now smilingly coquetting with the clergy. Quite an underhand evolution was beginning in the sacristies, orders from Rome flitted hither and thither; it was a question of accepting the new form of government, and absorbing it by dint of invasion. France was still the Eldest Daughter of the Church, the only great nation which had sufficient health and strength to place the Pope in possession of his temporal power once more. So France must be won; it was well worth one's while to espouse her, even if she were Republican. In the eager struggle of ambition the bishop made use of the minister, who thought it to his interest to lean upon the bishop. But which of the two would end by devouring the other? And to what a role had religion sunk: an electoral weapon, an element in a parliamentary majority, a decisive, secret reason for obtaining or retaining a ministerial portfolio! Of divine charity, the basis of religion, there was no thought, and Pierre's heart filled with bitterness as he remembered the recent death of Cardinal Bergerot, the last of the great saints and pure minds of the French episcopacy, among which there now seemed to be merely a set of intriguers and fools.

However, the address was drawing to a close. In a glowing peroration, which evoked the basilica of the Sacred Heart dominating Paris with the saving symbol of the Cross from the sacred Mount of the Martyrs,* Monseigneur Martha showed that great city of Paris Christian once more and master of the world, thanks to the moral omnipotence conferred upon it by the divine breath of the New Spirit. Unable to applaud, the congregation gave utterance to a murmur of approving rapture, delighted as it was with this miraculous finish which reassured both pocket and conscience. Then Monseigneur Martha quitted the pulpit with a noble step, whilst a loud noise of chairs broke upon the dark peacefulness of the church, where the few lighted candles glittered like the first stars in the evening sky. A long stream of men, vague, whispering shadows, glided away. The women alone remained, praying on their knees.

* Montmartre.

Pierre, still in the same spot, was rising on tip-toes, looking for Abbe Rose, when a hand touched him. It was that of the old priest, who had seen him from a distance. "I was yonder near the pulpit," said he, "and I saw you plainly, my dear child. Only I preferred to wait so as to disturb nobody. What a beautiful address dear Monseigneur delivered!"

He seemed, indeed, much moved. But there was deep sadness about his kindly mouth and clear childlike eyes, whose smile as a rule illumined his good, round white face. "I was afraid you might go off without seeing me," he resumed, "for I have something to tell you. You know that poor old man to whom I sent you this morning and in whom I asked you to interest yourself? Well, on getting home I found a lady there, who sometimes brings me a little money for my poor. Then I thought to myself that the three francs I gave you were really too small a sum, and as the thought worried me like a kind of remorse, I couldn't resist the impulse, but went this afternoon to the Rue des Saules myself."

He lowered his voice from a feeling of respect, in order not to disturb the deep, sepulchral silence of the church. Covert shame, moreover, impeded his utterance, shame at having again relapsed into the sin of blind, imprudent charity, as his superiors reproachfully said. And, quivering, he concluded in a very low voice indeed: "And so, my child, picture my grief. I had five francs more to give the poor old man, and I found him dead."

Pierre suddenly shuddered. But he was unwilling to understand: "What, dead!" he cried. "That old man dead! Laveuve dead?"

"Yes, I found him dead—ah! amidst what frightful wretchedness, like an old animal that has laid itself down for the finish on a heap of rags in the depths of a hole. No neighbours had assisted him in his last moments; he had simply turned himself towards the wall. And ah! how bare and cold and deserted it was! And what a pang for a poor creature to go off like that without a word, a caress. Ah! my heart bounded within me and it is still bleeding!"

Pierre in his utter amazement at first made but a gesture of revolt against imbecile social cruelty. Had the bread left near the unfortunate wretch, and devoured too eagerly, perhaps, after long days of abstinence, been the cause of his death? Or was not this rather the fatal denouement of an ended life, worn away by labour and privation? However, what did the cause signify? Death had come and delivered the poor man. "It isn't he that I pity," Pierre muttered at last; "it is we—we who witness all that, we who are guilty of these abominations."

But good Abbe Rose was already becoming resigned, and would only think of forgiveness and hope. "No, no, my child, rebellion is evil. If we are all guilty we can only implore Providence to forget our faults. I had given you an appointment here hoping for good news; and it's I who come to tell you of that frightful thing. Let us be penitent and pray."

Then he knelt upon the flagstones near the pillar, in the rear of the praying women, who looked black and vague in the gloom. And he inclined his white head, and for a long time remained in a posture of humility.

But Pierre was unable to pray, so powerfully did revolt stir him. He did not even bend his knees, but remained erect and quivering. His heart seemed to have been crushed; not a tear came to his ardent eyes. So Laveuve had died yonder, stretched on his litter of rags, his hands clenched in his obstinate desire to cling to his life of torture, whilst he, Pierre, again glowing with the flame of charity, consumed by apostolic zeal, was scouring Paris to find him for the evening a clean bed on which he might be saved. Ah! the atrocious irony of it all! He must have been at the Duvillards' in the warm salon, all blue and silver, whilst the old man was expiring; and it was for a wretched corpse that he had then hastened to the Chamber of Deputies, to the Countess de Quinsac's, to that creature Silviane's, and to that creature Rosemonde's. And it was for that corpse, freed from life, escaped from misery as from prison, that he had worried people, broken in upon their egotism, disturbed the peace of some, threatened the pleasures of others! What was the use of hastening from the parliamentary den to the cold salon where the dust of the past was congealing; of going from the sphere of middle-class debauchery to that of cosmopolitan extravagance, since one always arrived too late, and saved people when they were already dead? How ridiculous to have allowed himself to be fired once more by that blaze of charity, that final conflagration, only the ashes of which he now felt within him? This time he thought he was dead himself; he was naught but an empty sepulchre.

And all the frightful void and chaos which he had felt that morning at the basilica of the Sacred Heart after his mass became yet deeper, henceforth unfathomable. If charity were illusory and useless the Gospel crumbled, the end of the Book was nigh. After centuries of stubborn efforts, Redemption through Christianity failed, and another means of salvation was needed by the world in presence of the exasperated thirst for justice which came from the duped and wretched nations. They would have no more of that deceptive paradise, the promise of which had so long served to prop up social iniquity; they demanded that the question of happiness should be decided upon this earth. But how? By means of what new religion, what combination between the sentiment of the Divine and the necessity for honouring life in its sovereignty and its fruitfulness? Therein lay the grievous, torturing problem, into the midst of which Pierre was sinking; he, a priest, severed by vows of chastity and superstition from the rest of mankind.

He had ceased to believe in the efficacy of alms; it was not sufficient that one should be charitable, henceforth one must be just. Given justice, indeed, horrid misery would disappear, and no such thing as charity would be needed. Most certainly there was no lack of compassionate hearts in that grievous city of Paris; charitable foundations sprouted forth there like green leaves at the first warmth of springtide. There were some for every age, every peril, every misfortune. Through the concern shown for mothers, children were succoured even before they were born; then came the infant and orphan asylums lavishly provided for all sorts of classes; and, afterwards, man was followed through his life, help was tendered on all sides, particularly as he grew old, by a multiplicity of asylums, almshouses, and refuges. And there were all the hands stretched out to the forsaken ones, the disinherited ones, even the criminals, all sorts of associations to protect the weak, societies for the prevention of crime, homes that offered hospitality to those who repented. Whether as regards the propagation of good deeds, the support of the young, the saving of life, the bestowal of pecuniary help, or the promotion of guilds, pages and pages would have been needed merely to particularise the extraordinary vegetation of charity that sprouted between the paving-stones of Paris with so fine a vigour, in which goodness of soul was mingled with social vanity. Still that could not matter, since charity redeemed and purified all. But how terrible the proposition that this charity was a useless mockery! What! after so many centuries of Christian charity not a sore had healed. Misery had only grown and spread, irritated even to rage. Incessantly aggravated, the evil was reaching the point when it would be impossible to tolerate it for another day, since social injustice was neither arrested nor even diminished thereby. And besides, if only one single old man died of cold and hunger, did not the social edifice, raised on the theory of charity, collapse? But one victim, and society was condemned, thought Pierre.

He now felt such bitterness of heart that he could remain no longer in that church where the shadows ever slowly fell, blurring the sanctuaries and the large pale images of Christ nailed upon the Cross. All was about to sink into darkness, and he could hear nothing beyond an expiring murmur of prayers, a plaint from the women who were praying on their knees, in the depths of the shrouding gloom.

At the same time he hardly liked to go off without saying a word to Abbe Rose, who in his entreaties born of simple faith left the happiness and peace of mankind to the good pleasure of the Invisible. However, fearing that he might disturb him, Pierre was making up his mind to retire, when the old priest of his own accord raised his head. "Ah, my child," said he, "how difficult it is to be good in a reasonable manner. Monseigneur Martha has scolded me again, and but for the forgiveness of God I should fear for my salvation."

For a moment Pierre paused under the porticus of the Madeleine, on the summit of the great flight of steps which, rising above the railings, dominates the Place. Before him was the Rue Royale dipping down to the expanse of the Place de la Concorde, where rose the obelisk and the pair of plashing fountains. And, farther yet, the paling colonnade of the Chamber of Deputies bounded the horizon. It was a vista of sovereign grandeur under that pale sky over which twilight was slowly stealing, and which seemed to broaden the thoroughfares, throw back the edifices, and lend them the quivering, soaring aspect of the palaces of dreamland. No other capital in the world could boast a scene of such aerial pomp, such grandiose magnificence, at that hour of vagueness, when falling night imparts to cities a dreamy semblance, the infinite of human immensity.

Motionless and hesitating in presence of the opening expanse, Pierre distressfully pondered as to whither he should go now that all which he had so passionately sought to achieve since the morning had suddenly crumbled away. Was he still bound for the Duvillard mansion in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy? He no longer knew. Then the exasperating remembrance, with its cruel irony, returned to him. Since Laveuve was dead, of what use was it for him to kill time and perambulate the pavements pending the arrival of six o'clock? The idea that he had a home, and that the most simple course would be to return to it, did not even occur to him. He felt as if there were something of importance left for him to do, though he could not possibly tell what it might be. It seemed to him to be everywhere and yet very far away, to be so vague and so difficult of accomplishment that he would certainly never be in time or have sufficient power to do it. However, with heavy feet and tumultuous brain he descended the steps and, yielding to some obstinate impulse, began to walk through the flower-market, a late winter market where the first azaleas were opening with a little shiver. Some women were purchasing Nice roses and violets; and Pierre looked at them as if he were interested in all that soft, delicate, perfumed luxury. But suddenly he felt a horror of it and went off, starting along the Boulevards.

He walked straight before him without knowing why or whither. The falling darkness surprised him as if it were an unexpected phenomenon. Raising his eyes to the sky he felt astonished at seeing its azure gently pale between the slender black streaks of the chimney funnels. And the huge golden letters by which names or trades were advertised on every balcony also seemed to him singular in the last gleams of the daylight. Never before had he paid attention to the motley tints seen on the house-fronts, the painted mirrors, the blinds, the coats of arms, the posters of violent hues, the magnificent shops, like drawing-rooms and boudoirs open to the full light. And then, both in the roadway and along the foot-pavements, between the blue, red or yellow columns and kiosks, what mighty traffic there was, what an extraordinary crowd! The vehicles rolled along in a thundering stream: on all sides billows of cabs were parted by the ponderous tacking of huge omnibuses, which suggested lofty, bright-hued battle-ships. And on either hand, and farther and farther, and even among the wheels, the flood of passengers rushed on incessantly, with the conquering haste of ants in a state of revolution. Whence came all those people, and whither were all those vehicles going? How stupefying and torturing it all was.

Pierre was still walking straight ahead, mechanically, carried on by his gloomy reverie. Night was coming, the first gas-burners were being lighted; it was the dusk of Paris, the hour when real darkness has not yet come, when the electric lights flame in the dying day. Lamps shone forth on all sides, the shop-fronts were being illumined. Soon, moreover, right along the Boulevards the vehicles would carry their vivid starry lights, like a milky way on the march betwixt the foot-pavements all glowing with lanterns and cordons and girandoles, a dazzling profusion of radiance akin to sunlight. And the shouts of the drivers and the jostling of the foot passengers re-echoed the parting haste of the Paris which is all business or passion, which is absorbed in the merciless struggle for love and for money. The hard day was over, and now the Paris of Pleasure was lighting up for its night of fete. The cafes, the wine shops, the restaurants, flared and displayed their bright metal bars, and their little white tables behind their clear and lofty windows, whilst near their doors, by way of temptation, were oysters and choice fruits. And the Paris which was thus awaking with the first flashes of the gas was already full of the gaiety of enjoyment, already yielding to an unbridled appetite for whatsoever may be purchased.

However, Pierre had a narrow escape from being knocked down. A flock of newspaper hawkers came out of a side street, and darted through the crowd shouting the titles of the evening journals. A fresh edition of the "Voix du Peuple" gave rise, in particular, to a deafening clamour, which rose above all the rumbling of wheels. At regular intervals hoarse voices raised and repeated the cry: "Ask for the 'Voix du Peuple'—the new scandal of the African Railway Lines, the repulse of the ministry, the thirty-two bribe-takers of the Chamber and the Senate!" And these announcements, set in huge type, could be read on the copies of the paper, which the hawkers flourished like banners. Accustomed as it was to such filth, saturated with infamy, the crowd continued on its way without paying much attention. Still a few men paused and bought the paper, while painted women, who had come down to the Boulevards in search of a dinner, trailed their skirts and waited for some chance lover, glancing interrogatively at the outside customers of the cafes. And meantime the dishonouring shout of the newspaper hawkers, that cry in which there was both smirch and buffet, seemed like the last knell of the day, ringing the nation's funeral at the outset of the night of pleasure which was beginning.

Then Pierre once more remembered his morning and that frightful house in the Rue des Saules, where so much want and suffering were heaped up. He again saw the yard filthy like a quagmire, the evil-smelling staircases, the sordid, bare, icy rooms, the families fighting for messes which even stray dogs would not have eaten; the mothers, with exhausted breasts, carrying screaming children to and fro; the old men who fell in corners like brute beasts, and died of hunger amidst filth. And then came his other hours with the magnificence or the quietude or the gaiety of the salons through which he had passed, the whole insolent display of financial Paris, and political Paris, and society Paris. And at last he came to the dusk, and to that Paris-Sodom and Paris-Gomorrah before him, which was lighting itself up for the night, for the abominations of that accomplice night which, like fine dust, was little by little submerging the expanse of roofs. And the hateful monstrosity of it all howled aloud under the pale sky where the first pure, twinkling stars were gleaming.

A great shudder came upon Pierre as he thought of all that mass of iniquity and suffering, of all that went on below amid want and crime, and all that went on above amid wealth and vice. The bourgeoisie, wielding power, would relinquish naught of the sovereignty which it had conquered, wholly stolen, while the people, the eternal dupe, silent so long, clenched its fists and growled, claiming its legitimate share. And it was that frightful injustice which filled the growing gloom with anger. From what dark-breasted cloud would the thunderbolt fall? For years he had been waiting for that thunderbolt which low rumbles announced on all points of the horizon. And if he had written a book full of candour and hope, if he had gone in all innocence to Rome, it was to avert that thunderbolt and its frightful consequences. But all hope of the kind was dead within him; he felt that the thunderbolt was inevitable, that nothing henceforth could stay the catastrophe. And never before had he felt it to be so near, amidst the happy impudence of some, and the exasperated distress of others. And it was gathering, and it would surely fall over that Paris, all lust and bravado, which, when evening came, thus stirred up its furnace.

Tired out and distracted, Pierre raised his eyes as he reached the Place de l'Opera. Where was he then? The heart of the great city seemed to beat on this spot, in that vast expanse where met so many thoroughfares, as if from every point the blood of distant districts flowed thither along triumphal avenues. Right away to the horizon stretched the great gaps of the Avenue de l'Opera, the Rue du Quatre-Septembre, and the Rue de la Paix, still showing clearly in a final glimpse of daylight, but already starred with swarming sparks. The torrent of the Boulevard traffic poured across the Place, where clashed, too, all that from the neighbouring streets, with a constant turning and eddying which made the spot the most dangerous of whirlpools. In vain did the police seek to impose some little prudence, the stream of pedestrians still overflowed, wheels became entangled and horses reared amidst all the uproar of the human tide, which was as loud, as incessant, as the tempest voice of an ocean. Then there was the detached mass of the opera-house, slowly steeped in gloom, and rising huge and mysterious like a symbol, its lyre-bearing figure of Apollo, right aloft, showing a last reflection of daylight amidst the livid sky. And all the windows of the house-fronts began to shine, gaiety sprang from those thousands of lamps which coruscated one by one, a universal longing for ease and free gratification of each desire spread with the increasing darkness; whilst, at long intervals, the large globes of the electric lights shone as brightly as the moons of the city's cloudless nights.

But why was he, Pierre, there, he asked himself, irritated and wondering. Since Laveuve was dead he had but to go home, bury himself in his nook, and close up door and windows, like one who was henceforth useless, who had neither belief nor hope, and awaited naught save annihilation. It was a long journey from the Place de l'Opera to his little house at Neuilly. Still, however great his weariness, he would not take a cab, but retraced his steps, turning towards the Madeleine again, and plunging into the scramble of the pavements, amidst the deafening uproar from the roadway, with a bitter desire to aggravate his wound and saturate himself with revolt and anger. Was it not yonder at the corner of that street, at the end of that Boulevard, that he would find the expected abyss into which that rotten world, whose old society he could hear rending at each step, must soon assuredly topple?

However, when Pierre wished to cross the Rue Scribe a block in the traffic made him halt. In front of a luxurious cafe two tall, shabbily-clad and very dirty fellows were alternately offering the "Voix du Peuple" with its account of the scandals and the bribe-takers of the Chamber and the Senate, in voices so suggestive of cracked brass that passers-by clustered around them. And here, in a hesitating, wandering man, who after listening drew near to the large cafe and peered through its windows, Pierre was once again amazed to recognise Salvat. This time the meeting struck him forcibly, filled him with suspicion to such a point that he also stopped and resolved to watch the journeyman engineer. He did not expect that one of such wretched aspect, with what seemed to be a hunk of bread distending his old ragged jacket, would enter and seat himself at one of the cafe's little tables amidst the warm gaiety of the lamps. However, he waited for a moment, and then saw him wander away with slow and broken steps as if the cafe, which was nearly empty, did not suit him. What could he have been seeking, whither had he been going, since the morning, ever on a wild, solitary chase through the Paris of wealth and enjoyment while hunger dogged his steps? It was only with difficulty that he now dragged himself along, his will and energy seemed to be exhausted. As if quite overcome, he drew near to a kiosk, and for a moment leant against it. Then, however, he drew himself up again, and walked on further, still as it were in search of something.

And now came an incident which brought Pierre's emotion to a climax. A tall sturdy man on turning out of the Rue Caumartin caught sight of Salvat, and approached him. And just as the new comer without false pride was shaking the workman's hand, Pierre recognised him as his brother Guillaume. Yes, it was indeed he, with his thick bushy hair already white like snow, though he was but seven and forty. However, his heavy moustaches had remained quite dark without one silver thread, thus lending an expression of vigorous life to his full face with its lofty towering brow. It was from his father that he had inherited that brow of impregnable logic and reason, similar to that which Pierre himself possessed. But the lower part of the elder brother's countenance was fuller than that of his junior; his nose was larger, his chin was square, and his mouth broad and firm of contour. A pale scar, the mark of an old wound, streaked his left temple. And his physiognomy, though it might at first seem very grave, rough, and unexpansive, beamed with masculine kindliness whenever a smile revealed his teeth, which had remained extremely white.

While looking at his brother, Pierre remembered what Madame Theodore had told him that morning. Guillaume, touched by Salvat's dire want, had arranged to give him a few days' employment. And this explained the air of interest with which he now seemed to be questioning him, while the engineer, whom the meeting disturbed, stamped about as if eager to resume his mournful ramble. For a moment Guillaume appeared to notice the other's perturbation, by the embarrassed answers which he obtained from him. Still, they at last parted as if each were going his way. Then, however, almost immediately, Guillaume turned round again and watched the other, as with harassed stubborn mien he went off through the crowd. And the thoughts which had come to Guillaume must have been very serious and very pressing, for he all at once began to retrace his steps and follow the workman from a distance, as if to ascertain for certain what direction he would take.

Pierre had watched the scene with growing disquietude. His nervous apprehension of some great unknown calamity, the suspicions born of his frequent and inexplicable meetings with Salvat, his surprise at now seeing his brother mingled with the affair, all helped to fill him with a pressing desire to know, witness, and perhaps prevent. So he did not hesitate, but began to follow the others in a prudent way.

Fresh perturbation came upon him when first Salvat and then Guillaume suddenly turned into the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy. What destiny was thus bringing him back to that street whither a little time previously he had wished to return in feverish haste, and whence only the death of Laveuve had kept him? And his consternation increased yet further when, after losing sight of Salvat for a moment, he saw him standing in front of the Duvillard mansion, on the same spot where he had fancied he recognised him that morning. As it happened the carriage entrance of the mansion was wide open. Some repairs had been made to the paving of the porch, and although the workmen had now gone off, the doorway remained gaping, full of the falling night. The narrow street, running from the glittering Boulevard, was steeped in bluish gloom, starred at long intervals by a few gas-lamps. Some women went by, compelling Salvat to step off the foot-pavement. But he returned to it again, lighted the stump of a cigar, some remnant which he had found under a table outside a cafe, and then resumed his watch, patient and motionless, in front of the mansion.

Disturbed by his dim conjectures, Pierre gradually grew frightened, and asked himself if he ought not to approach that man. The chief thing that detained him was the presence of his brother, whom he had seen disappear into a neighbouring doorway, whence he also was observing the engineer, ready to intervene. And so Pierre contented himself with not losing sight of Salvat, who was still waiting and watching, merely taking his eyes from the mansion in order to glance towards the Boulevard as though he expected someone or something which would come from that direction. And at last, indeed, the Duvillards' landau appeared, with coachman and footman in livery of green and gold—a closed landau to which a pair of tall horses of superb build were harnessed in stylish fashion.

Contrary to custom, however, the carriage, which at that hour usually brought the father and mother home, was only occupied that evening by the son and daughter, Hyacinthe and Camille. Returning from the Princess de Harn's matinee, they were chatting freely, with that calm immodesty by which they sought to astonish one another. Hyacinthe, influenced by his perverted ideas, was attacking women, whilst Camille openly counselled him to respond to the Princess's advances. However, she was visibly irritated and feverish that evening, and, suddenly changing the subject, she began to speak of their mother and Gerard de Quinsac.

"But what can it matter to you?" quietly retorted Hyacinthe; and, seeing that she almost bounded from the seat at this remark, he continued: "Are you still in love with him, then? Do you still want to marry him?"

"Yes, I do, and I will!" she cried with all the jealous rage of an uncomely girl, who suffered so acutely at seeing herself spurned whilst her yet beautiful mother stole from her the man she wanted.

"You will, you will!" resumed Hyacinthe, well pleased to have an opportunity of teasing his sister, whom he somewhat feared. "But you won't unless he is willing—And he doesn't care for you."

"He does!" retorted Camille in a fury. "He's kind and pleasant with me, and that's enough."

Her brother felt afraid as he noticed the blackness of her glance, and the clenching of her weak little hands, whose fingers bent like claws. And after a pause he asked: "And papa, what does he say about it?"

"Oh, papa! All that he cares about is the other one."

Then Hyacinthe began to laugh.

But the landau, with its tall horses trotting on sonorously, had turned into the street and was approaching the house, when a slim fair-haired girl of sixteen or seventeen, a modiste's errand girl with a large bandbox on her arm, hastily crossed the road in order to enter the arched doorway before the carriage. She was bringing a bonnet for the Baroness, and had come all along the Boulevard musing, with her soft blue eyes, her pinky nose, and her mouth which ever laughed in the most adorable little face that one could see. And it was at this same moment that Salvat, after another glance at the landau, sprang forward and entered the doorway. An instant afterwards he reappeared, flung his lighted cigar stump into the gutter; and without undue haste went off, slinking into the depths of the vague gloom of the street.

And then what happened? Pierre, later on, remembered that a dray of the Western Railway Company in coming up stopped and delayed the landau for a moment, whilst the young errand girl entered the doorway. And with a heart-pang beyond description he saw his brother Guillaume in his turn spring forward and rush into the mansion as though impelled to do so by some revelation, some sudden certainty. He, Pierre, though he understood nothing clearly, could divine the approach of some frightful horror. But when he would have run, when he would have shouted, he found himself as if nailed to the pavement, and felt his throat clutched as by a hand of lead. Then suddenly came a thunderous roar, a formidable explosion, as if the earth was opening, and the lightning-struck mansion was being annihilated. Every window-pane of the neighbouring houses was shivered, the glass raining down with the loud clatter of hail. For a moment a hellish flame fired the street, and the dust and the smoke were such that the few passers-by were blinded and howled with affright, aghast at toppling, as they thought, into that fiery furnace.

And that dazzling flare brought Pierre enlightenment. He once more saw the bomb distending the tool-bag, which lack of work had emptied and rendered useless. He once more saw it under the ragged jacket, a protuberance caused, he had fancied, by some hunk of bread, picked up in a corner and treasured that it might be carried home to wife and child. After wandering and threatening all happy Paris, it was there that it had flared, there that it had burst with a thunder-clap, there on the threshold of the sovereign bourgeoisie to whom all wealth belonged. He, however, at that moment thought only of his brother Guillaume, and flung himself into that porch where a volcanic crater seemed to have opened. And at first he distinguished nothing, the acrid smoke streamed over all. Then he perceived the walls split, the upper floor rent open, the paving broken up, strewn with fragments. Outside, the landau which had been on the point of entering, had escaped all injury; neither of the horses had been touched, nor was there even a scratch on any panel of the vehicle. But the young girl, the pretty, slim, fair-haired errand girl, lay there on her back, her stomach ripped open, whilst her delicate face remained intact, her eyes clear, her smile full of astonishment, so swiftly and lightning-like had come the catastrophe. And near her, from the fallen bandbox, whose lid had merely come unfastened, had rolled the bonnet, a very fragile pink bonnet, which still looked charming in its flowery freshness.

By a prodigy Guillaume was alive and already on his legs again. His left hand alone streamed with blood, a projectile seemed to have broken his wrist. His moustaches moreover had been burnt, and the explosion by throwing him to the ground had so shaken and bruised him that he shivered from head to feet as with intense cold. Nevertheless, he recognised his brother without even feeling astonished to see him there, as indeed often happens after great disasters, when the unexplained becomes providential. That brother, of whom he had so long lost sight, was there, naturally enough, because it was necessary that he should be there. And Guillaume, amidst the wild quivers by which he was shaken, at once cried to him "Take me away! take me away! To your house at Neuilly, oh! take me away!"

Then, for sole explanation, and referring to Salvat, he stammered: "I suspected that he had stolen a cartridge from me; only one, most fortunately, for otherwise the whole district would have been blown to pieces. Ah! the wretched fellow! I wasn't in time to set my foot upon the match."

With perfect lucidity of mind, such as danger sometimes imparts, Pierre, neither speaking nor losing a moment, remembered that the mansion had a back entrance fronting the Rue Vignon. He had just realised in what serious peril his brother would be if he were found mixed up in that affair. And with all speed, when he had led him into the gloom of the Rue Vignon, he tied his handkerchief round his wrist, which he bade him press to his chest, under his coat, as that would conceal it.

But Guillaume, still shivering and haunted by the horror he had witnessed, repeated: "Take me away—to your place at Neuilly—not to my home."

"Of course, of course, be easy. Come, wait here a second, I will stop a cab."

In his eagerness to procure a conveyance, Pierre had brought his brother down to the Boulevard again. But the terrible thunderclap of the explosion had upset the whole neighbourhood, horses were still rearing, and people were running demented, hither and thither. And numerous policemen had hastened up, and a rushing crowd was already blocking the lower part of the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, which was now as black as a pit, every light in it having been extinguished; whilst on the Boulevard a hawker of the "Voix du Peuple" still stubbornly vociferated: "The new scandal of the African Railway Lines! The thirty-two bribe-takers of the Chamber and the Senate! The approaching fall of the ministry!"

Pierre was at last managing to stop a cab when he heard a person who ran by say to another, "The ministry? Ah, well! that bomb will mend it right enough!"

Then the brothers seated themselves in the cab, which carried them away. And now, over the whole of rumbling Paris black night had gathered, an unforgiving night, in which the stars foundered amidst the mist of crime and anger that had risen from the house-roofs. The great cry of justice swept by amidst the same terrifying flapping of wings which Sodom and Gomorrah once heard bearing down upon them from all the black clouds of the horizon.

BOOK II.

I. REVOLUTIONISTS

IN that out-of-the-way street at Neuilly, along which nobody passed after dusk, Pierre's little house was now steeped in deep slumber under the black sky; each of its shutters closed, and not a ray of light stealing forth from within. And one could divine, too, the profound quietude of the little garden in the rear, a garden empty and lifeless, benumbed by the winter cold.

Pierre had several times feared that his brother would faint away in the cab in which they were journeying. Leaning back, and often sinking down, Guillaume spoke not a word. And terrible was the silence between them—a silence fraught with all the questions and answers which they felt it would be useless and painful to exchange at such a time. However, the priest was anxious about the wound, and wondered to what surgeon he might apply, desirous as he was of admitting only a sure, staunch man into the secret, for he had noticed with how keen a desire to disappear his brother had sought to hide himself.

Until they reached the Arc de Triomphe the silence remained unbroken. It was only there that Guillaume seemed to emerge from the prostration of his reverie. "Mind, Pierre," said he, "no doctor. We will attend to this together."

Pierre was on the point of protesting, but he realised that it would be useless to discuss the subject at such a moment, and so he merely waved his hand to signify that he should act in spite of the prohibition were it necessary. In point of fact, his anxiety had increased, and, when the cab at last drew up before the house, it was with real relief that he saw his brother alight without evincing any marked feebleness. He himself quickly paid the driver, well-pleased, too, at finding that nobody, not even a neighbour, was about. And having opened the door with his latch key, he helped the injured man to ascend the steps.

A little night lamp glimmered faintly in the vestibule. On hearing the door open, Pierre's servant, Sophie, had at once emerged from the kitchen. A short, thin, dark woman of sixty, she had formed part of the household for more than thirty years, having served the mother before serving the son. She knew Guillaume, having seen him when he was a young man, and doubtless she now recognised him, although well-nigh ten years had gone by since he had last crossed that threshold. Instead of evincing any surprise, she seemed to consider his extraordinary return quite natural, and remained as silent and discreet as usual. She led, indeed, the life of a recluse, never speaking unless her work absolutely required it. And thus she now contented herself with saying: "Monsieur l'Abbe, Monsieur Bertheroy is in the study, and has been waiting there for a quarter of an hour."

At this Guillaume intervened, as if the news revived him: "Does Bertheroy still come here, then? I'll see him willingly. His is one of the best, the broadest, minds of these days. He has still remained my master."

A former friend of their father,—the illustrious chemist, Michel Froment,—Bertheroy had now, in his turn, become one of the loftiest glories of France, one to whom chemistry owed much of the extraordinary progress that has made it the mother-science, by which the very face of the earth is being changed. A member of the Institute, laden with offices and honours, he had retained much affection for Pierre, and occasionally visited him in this wise before dinner, by way of relaxation, he would say.

"You showed him into the study? All right, then, we will go there," said the Abbe to the servant. "Light a lamp and take it into my room, and get my bed ready so that my brother may go to bed at once."

While Sophie, without a word or sign of surprise, was obeying these instructions, the brothers went into their father's former laboratory, of which the priest had now made a spacious study. And it was with a cry of joyous astonishment that the savant greeted them on seeing them enter the room side by side, the one supporting the other. "What, together!" he exclaimed. "Ah! my dear children, you could not have caused me greater pleasure! I who have so often deplored your painful misunderstanding."

Bertheroy was a tall and lean septuagenarian, with angular features. His yellow skin clung like parchment to the projecting bones of his cheeks and jaw. Moreover, there was nothing imposing about him; he looked like some old shop-keeping herbalist. At the same time he had a fine, broad, smooth brow, and his eyes still glittered brightly beneath his tangled hair.

"What, have you injured yourself, Guillaume?" he continued, as soon as he saw the bandaged hand.

Pierre remained silent, so as to let his brother tell the story as he chose. Guillaume had realised that he must confess the truth, but in simple fashion, without detailing the circumstances. "Yes, in an explosion," he answered, "and I really think that I have my wrist broken."

At this, Bertheroy, whose glance was fixed upon him, noticed that his moustaches were burnt, and that there was an expression of bewildered stupor, such as follows a catastrophe, in his eyes. Forthwith the savant became grave and circumspect; and, without seeking to compel confidence by any questions, he simply said: "Indeed! an explosion! Will you let me see the injury? You know that before letting chemistry ensnare me I studied medicine, and am still somewhat of a surgeon."

On hearing these words Pierre could not restrain a heart-cry: "Yes, yes, master! Look at the injury—I was very anxious, and to find you here is unhoped-for good fortune!"

The savant glanced at him, and divined that the hidden circumstances of the accident must be serious. And then, as Guillaume, smiling, though paling with weakness, consented to the suggestion, Bertheroy retorted that before anything else he must be put to bed. The servant just then returned to say the bed was ready, and so they all went into the adjoining room, where the injured man was soon undressed and helped between the sheets.

"Light me, Pierre," said Bertheroy, "take the lamp; and let Sophie give me a basin full of water and some cloths." Then, having gently washed the wound, he resumed: "The devil! The wrist isn't broken, but it's a nasty injury. I am afraid there must be a lesion of the bone. Some nails passed through the flesh, did they not?"

Receiving no reply, he relapsed into silence. But his surprise was increasing, and he closely examined the hand, which the flame of the explosion had scorched, and even sniffed the shirt cuff as if seeking to understand the affair better. He evidently recognised the effects of one of those new explosives which he himself had studied, almost created. In the present case, however, he must have been puzzled, for there were characteristic signs and traces the significance of which escaped him.

"And so," he at last made up his mind to ask, carried away by professional curiosity, "and so it was a laboratory explosion which put you in this nice condition? What devilish powder were you concocting then?"

Guillaume, ever since he had seen Bertheroy thus studying his injury, had, in spite of his sufferings, given marked signs of annoyance and agitation. And as if the real secret which he wished to keep lay precisely in the question now put to him, in that powder, the first experiment with which had thus injured him, he replied with an air of restrained ardour, and a straight frank glance: "Pray do not question me, master. I cannot answer you. You have, I know, sufficient nobility of nature to nurse me and care for me without exacting a confession."

"Oh! certainly, my friend," exclaimed Bertheroy; "keep your secret. Your discovery belongs to you if you have made one; and I know that you are capable of putting it to the most generous use. Besides, you must be aware that I have too great a passion for truth to judge the actions of others, whatever their nature, without knowing every circumstance and motive."

So saying, he waved his hand as if to indicate how broadly tolerant and free from error and superstition was that lofty sovereign mind of his, which in spite of all the orders that bedizened him, in spite of all the academical titles that he bore as an official savant, made him a man of the boldest and most independent views, one whose only passion was truth, as he himself said.

He lacked the necessary appliances to do more than dress the wound, after making sure that no fragment of any projectile had remained in the flesh. Then he at last went off, promising to return at an early hour on the morrow; and, as the priest escorted him to the street door, he spoke some comforting words: if the bone had not been deeply injured all would be well.

On returning to the bedside, Pierre found his brother still sitting up and seeking fresh energy in his desire to write home and tranquillise his loved ones. So the priest, after providing pen and paper, again had to take up the lamp and light him. Guillaume fortunately retained full use of his right hand, and was thus able to pen a few lines to say that he would not be home that night. He addressed the note to Madame Leroi, the mother of his deceased mistress, who, since the latter's death, had remained with him and had reared his three sons. Pierre was aware also that the household at Montmartre included a young woman of five or six and twenty, the daughter of an old friend, to whom Guillaume had given shelter on her father's death, and whom he was soon to marry, in spite of the great difference in their ages. For the priest, however, all these were vague, disturbing things, condemnable features of disorderly life, and he had invariably pretended to be ignorant of them.

"So you wish this note to be taken to Montmartre at once?" he said to his brother.

"Yes, at once. It is scarcely more than seven o'clock now, and it will be there by eight. And you will choose a reliable man, won't you?"

"The best course will be for Sophie to take a cab. We need have no fear with her. She won't chatter. Wait a moment, and I will settle everything."

Sophie, on being summoned, at once understood what was wanted of her, and promised to say, in reply to any questions, that M. Guillaume had come to spend the night at his brother's, for reasons which she did not know. And without indulging in any reflections herself, she left the house, saying simply: "Monsieur l'Abbe's dinner is ready; he will only have to take the broth and the stew off the stove."

However, when Pierre this time returned to the bedside to sit down there, he found that Guillaume had fallen back with his head resting on both pillows. And he looked very weary and pale, and showed signs of fever. The lamp, standing on a corner of a side table, cast a soft light around, and so deep was the quietude that the big clock in the adjoining dining-room could be heard ticking. For a moment the silence continued around the two brothers, who, after so many years of separation, were at last re-united and alone together. Then the injured man brought his right hand to the edge of the sheet, and the priest grasped it, pressed it tenderly in his own. And the clasp was a long one, those two brotherly hands remaining locked, one in the other.

"My poor little Pierre," Guillaume faintly murmured, "you must forgive me for falling on you in this fashion. I've invaded the house and taken your bed, and I'm preventing you from dining."

"Don't talk, don't tire yourself any more," interrupted Pierre. "Is not this the right place for you when you are in trouble?"

A warmer pressure came from Guillaume's feverish hand, and tears gathered in his eyes. "Thanks, my little Pierre. I've found you again, and you are as gentle and loving as you always were. Ah! you cannot know how delightful it seems to me."

Then the priest's eyes also were dimmed by tears. Amidst the deep quietude, the great sense of comfort which had followed their violent emotion, the brothers found an infinite charm in being together once more in the home of their childhood.* It was there that both their father and mother had died—the father tragically, struck down by an explosion in his laboratory; the mother piously, like a very saint. It was there, too, in that same bed, that Guillaume had nursed Pierre, when, after their mother's death, the latter had nearly died; and it was there now that Pierre in his turn was nursing Guillaume. All helped to bow them down and fill them with emotion: the strange circumstances of their meeting, the frightful catastrophe which had caused them such a shock, the mysteriousness of the things which remained unexplained between them. And now that after so long a separation they were tragically brought together again, they both felt their memory awaking. The old house spoke to them of their childhood, of their parents dead and gone, of the far-away days when they had loved and suffered there. Beneath the window lay the garden, now icy cold, which once, under the sunbeams, had re-echoed with their play. On the left was the laboratory, the spacious room where their father had taught them to read. On the right, in the dining-room, they could picture their mother cutting bread and butter for them, and looking so gentle with her big, despairing eyes—those of a believer mated to an infidel. And the feeling that they were now alone in that home, and the pale, sleepy gleam of the lamp, and the deep silence of the garden and the house, and the very past itself, all filled them with the softest of emotion blended with the keenest bitterness.

* See M. Zola's "Lourdes," Day I., Chapter II.

They would have liked to talk and unbosom themselves. But what could they say to one another? Although their hands remained so tightly clasped, did not the most impassable of chasms separate them? In any case, they thought so. Guillaume was convinced that Pierre was a saint, a priest of the most robust faith, without a doubt, without aught in common with himself, whether in the sphere of ideas or in that of practical life. A hatchet-stroke had parted them, and each lived in a different world. And in the same way Pierre pictured Guillaume as one who had lost caste, whose conduct was most suspicious, who had never even married the mother of his three children, but was on the point of marrying that girl who was far too young for him, and who had come nobody knew whence. In him, moreover, were blended the passionate ideas of a savant and a revolutionist, ideas in which one found negation of everything, acceptance and possibly provocation of the worst forms of violence, with a glimpse of the vague monster of Anarchism underlying all. And so, on what basis could there be any understanding between them, since each retained his prejudices against the other, and saw him on the opposite side of the chasm, without possibility of any plank being thrown across it to enable them to unite? Thus, all alone in that room, their poor hearts bled with distracted brotherly love.

Pierre knew that, on a previous occasion, Guillaume had narrowly escaped being compromised in an Anarchist affair. He asked him no questions, but he could not help reflecting that he would not have hidden himself in this fashion had he not feared arrest for complicity. Complicity with Salvat? Was he really an accomplice? Pierre shuddered, for the only materials on which he could found a contrary opinion were, on one hand, the words that had escaped his brother after the crime, the cry he had raised accusing Salvat of having stolen a cartridge from him; and, on the other hand, his heroic rush into the doorway of the Duvillard mansion in order to extinguish the match. A great deal still remained obscure; but if a cartridge of that frightful explosive had been stolen from Guillaume the fact must be that he manufactured such cartridges and had others at home. Of course, even if he were not an accomplice, the injury to his wrist had made it needful for him to disappear. Given his bleeding hand, and the previous suspicions levelled against him, he would never have convinced anybody of his innocence. And yet, even allowing for these surmises, the affair remained wrapt in darkness: a crime on Guillaume's part seemed a possibility, and to Pierre it was all dreadful to think of.

Guillaume, by the trembling of his brother's moist, yielding hand, must in some degree have realised the prostration of his poor mind, already shattered by doubt and finished off by this calamity. Indeed, the sepulchre was empty now, the very ashes had been swept out of it.

"My poor little Pierre," the elder brother slowly said. "Forgive me if I do not tell you anything. I cannot do so. And besides, what would be the use of it? We should certainly not understand one another.... So let us keep from saying anything, and let us simply enjoy the delight of being together and loving one another in spite of all."

Pierre raised his eyes, and for a long time their glances lingered, one fixed on the other. "Ah!" stammered the priest, "how frightful it all is!"

Guillaume, however, had well understood the mute inquiry of Pierre's eyes. His own did not waver but replied boldly, beaming with purity and loftiness: "I can tell you nothing. Yet, all the same, let us love each other, my little Pierre."

And then Pierre for a moment felt that his brother was above all base anxiety, above the guilty fear of the man who trembles for himself. In lieu thereof he seemed to be carried away by the passion of some great design, the noble thought of concealing some sovereign idea, some secret which it was imperative for him to save. But, alas! this was only the fleeting vision of a vague hope; for all vanished, and again came the doubt, the suspicion, of a mind dealing with one that it knew nothing of.

And all at once a souvenir, a frightful spectacle, arose before Pierre's eyes and distracted him: "Did you see, brother," he stammered, "did you see that fair-haired girl lying under the archway, ripped open, with a smile of astonishment on her face?"

Guillaume in his turn quivered, and in a low and dolorous voice replied: "Yes, I saw her! Ah, poor little thing! Ah! the atrocious necessities, the atrocious errors, of justice!"

Then, amidst the frightful shudder that seemed to sweep by, Pierre, with his horror of all violence, succumbed, and let his face sink upon the counterpane at the edge of the bed. And he sobbed distractedly: a sudden attack of weakness, overflowing in tears, cast him there exhausted, with no more strength than a child. It was as if all his sufferings since the morning, the deep grief with which universal injustice and woe inspired him, were bursting forth in that flood of tears which nothing now could stay. And Guillaume, who, to calm his little brother, had set his hand upon his head, in the same way as he had often caressingly stroked his hair in childhood's days, likewise felt upset and remained silent, unable to find a word of consolation, resigned, as he was, to the eruption which in life is always possible, the cataclysm by which the slow evolution of nature is always liable to be precipitated. But how hard a fate for the wretched ones whom the lava sweeps away in millions! And then his tears also began to flow amidst the profound silence.

"Pierre," he gently exclaimed at last, "you must have some dinner. Go, go and have some. And screen the lamp; leave me by myself, and let me close my eyes. It will do me good."

Pierre had to content him. Still, he left the dining-room door open; and, weak for want of food, though he had not hitherto noticed it, he ate standing, with his ears on the alert, listening lest his brother should complain or call him. And the silence seemed to have become yet more complete, the little house sank, as it were, into annihilation, instinct with all the melancholy charm of the past.

At about half-past eight, when Sophie returned from her errand to Montmartre, Guillaume heard her step, light though it was. And he at once became restless and wanted to know what news she brought. It was Pierre, however, who enlightened him. "Don't be anxious. Sophie was received by an old lady who, after reading your note, merely answered, 'Very well.' She did not even ask Sophie a question, but remained quite composed without sign of curiosity."

Guillaume, realising that this fine serenity perplexed his brother, thereupon replied with similar calmness: "Oh! it was only necessary that grandmother should be warned. She knows well enough that if I don't return home it is because I can't."

However, from that moment it was impossible for the injured man to rest. Although the lamp was hidden away in a corner, he constantly opened his eyes, glanced round him, and seemed to listen, as if for sounds from the direction of Paris. And it at last became necessary for the priest to summon the servant and ask her if she had noticed anything strange on her way to or from Montmartre. She seemed surprised by the question, and answered that she had noticed nothing. Besides, the cab had followed the outer boulevards, which were almost deserted. A slight fog had again begun to fall, and the streets were steeped in icy dampness.

By the time it was nine o'clock Pierre realised that his brother would never be able to sleep if he were thus left without news. Amidst his growing feverishness the injured man experienced keen anxiety, a haunting desire to know if Salvat were arrested and had spoken out. He did not confess this; indeed he sought to convey the impression that he had no personal disquietude, which was doubtless true. But his great secret was stifling him; he shuddered at the thought that his lofty scheme, all his labour and all his hope, should be at the mercy of that unhappy man whom want had filled with delusions and who had sought to set justice upon earth by the aid of a bomb. And in vain did the priest try to make Guillaume understand that nothing certain could yet be known. He perceived that his impatience increased every minute, and at last resolved to make some effort to satisfy him.

But where could he go, of whom could he inquire? Guillaume, while talking and trying to guess with whom Salvat might have sought refuge, had mentioned Janzen, the Princess de Harn's mysterious lover; and for a moment he had even thought of sending to this man for information. But he reflected that if Janzen had heard of the explosion he was not at all the individual to wait for the police at home.

Meantime Pierre repeated: "I will willingly go to buy the evening papers for you—but there will certainly be nothing in them. Although I know almost everyone in Neuilly I can think of nobody who is likely to have any information, unless perhaps it were Bache—"

"You know Bache, the municipal councillor?" interrupted Guillaume.

"Yes, we have both had to busy ourselves with charitable work in the neighbourhood."

"Well, Bache is an old friend of mine, and I know no safer man. Pray go to him and bring him back with you."

A quarter of an hour later Pierre returned with Bache, who resided in a neighbouring street. And it was not only Bache whom he brought with him, for, much to his surprise, he had found Janzen at Bache's house. As Guillaume had suspected, Janzen, while dining at the Princess de Harn's, had heard of the crime, and had consequently refrained from returning to his little lodging in the Rue des Martyrs, where the police might well have set a trap for him. His connections were known, and he was aware that he was watched and was liable at any moment to arrest or expulsion as a foreign Anarchist. And so he had thought it prudent to solicit a few days' hospitality of Bache, a very upright and obliging man, to whom he entrusted himself without fear. He would never have remained with Rosemonde, that adorable lunatic who for a month past had been exhibiting him as her lover, and whose useless and dangerous extravagance of conduct he fully realised.

Guillaume was so delighted on seeing Bache and Janzen that he wished to sit up in bed again. But Pierre bade him remain quiet, rest his head on the pillows, and speak as little as possible. Then, while Janzen stood near, erect and silent, Bache took a chair and sat down by the bedside with many expressions of friendly interest. He was a stout man of sixty, with a broad, full face, a large white beard and long white hair. His little, gentle eyes had a dim, dreamy expression, while a pleasant, hopeful smile played round his thick lips. His father, a fervent St. Simonian, had brought him up in the doctrines of that belief. While retaining due respect for it, however, his personal inclinations towards orderliness and religion had led him to espouse the ideas of Fourier, in such wise that one found in him a succession and an abridgment, so to say, of two doctrines. Moreover, when he was about thirty, he had busied himself with spiritualism. Possessed of a comfortable little fortune, his only adventure in life had been his connection with the Paris Commune of 1871. How or why he had become a member of it he could now scarcely tell. Condemned to death by default, although he had sat among the Moderates, he had resided in Belgium until the amnesty; and since then Neuilly had elected him as its representative on the Paris Municipal Council, less by way of glorifying in him a victim of reaction than as a reward for his worthiness, for he was really esteemed by the whole district.

Guillaume, with his desire for tidings, was obliged to confide in his two visitors, tell them of the explosion and Salvat's flight, and how he himself had been wounded while seeking to extinguish the match. Janzen, with curly beard and hair, and a thin, fair face such as painters often attribute to the Christ, listened coldly, as was his wont, and at last said slowly in a gentle voice: "Ah! so it was Salvat! I thought it might be little Mathis—I'm surprised that it should be Salvat—for he hadn't made up his mind." Then, as Guillaume anxiously inquired if he thought that Salvat would speak out, he began to protest: "Oh! no; oh! no."

However, he corrected himself with a gleam of disdain in his clear, harsh eyes: "After all, there's no telling. Salvat is a man of sentiment."

Then Bache, who was quite upset by the news of the explosion, tried to think how his friend Guillaume, to whom he was much attached, might be extricated from any charge of complicity should he be denounced. And Guillaume, at sight of Janzen's contemptuous coldness, must have suffered keenly, for the other evidently believed him to be trembling, tortured by the one desire to save his own skin. But what could he say, how could he reveal the deep concern which rendered him so feverish without betraying the secret which he had hidden even from his brother?

However, at this moment Sophie came to tell her master that M. Theophile Morin had called with another gentleman. Much astonished by this visit at so late an hour, Pierre hastened into the next room to receive the new comers. He had become acquainted with Morin since his return from Rome, and had helped him to introduce a translation of an excellent scientific manual, prepared according to the official programmes, into the Italian schools.* A Franc-Comtois by birth, a compatriot of Proudhon, with whose poor family he had been intimate at Besancon, Morin, himself the son of a journeyman clockmaker, had grown up with Proudhonian ideas, full of affection for the poor and an instinctive hatred of property and wealth. Later on, having come to Paris as a school teacher, impassioned by study, he had given his whole mind to Auguste Comte. Beneath the fervent Positivist, however, one might yet find the old Proudhonian, the pauper who rebelled and detested want. Moreover, it was scientific Positivism that he clung to; in his hatred of all mysticism he would have naught to do with the fantastic religious leanings of Comte in his last years. And in Morin's brave, consistent, somewhat mournful life, there had been but one page of romance: the sudden feverish impulse which had carried him off to fight in Sicily by Garibaldi's side. Afterwards he had again become a petty professor in Paris, obscurely earning a dismal livelihood.

* See M. Zola's "Rome," Chapters IV. and XVI.

When Pierre returned to the bedroom he said to his brother in a tone of emotion: "Morin has brought me Barthes, who fancies himself in danger and asks my hospitality."

At this Guillaume forgot himself and became excited: "Nicholas Barthes, a hero with a soul worthy of antiquity. Oh! I know him; I admire and love him. You must set your door open wide for him."

Bache and Janzen, however, had glanced at one another smiling. And the latter, with his cold ironical air, slowly remarked: "Why does Monsieur Barthes hide himself? A great many people think he is dead; he is simply a ghost who no longer frightens anybody."

Four and seventy years of age as he now was, Barthes had spent nearly half a century in prison. He was the eternal prisoner, the hero of liberty whom each successive Government had carried from citadel to fortress. Since his youth he had been marching on amidst his dream of fraternity, fighting for an ideal Republic based on truth and justice, and each and every endeavour had led him to a dungeon; he had invariably finished his humanitarian reverie under bolts and bars. Carbonaro, Republican, evangelical sectarian, he had conspired at all times and in all places, incessantly struggling against the Power of the day, whatever it might be. And when the Republic at last had come, that Republic which had cost him so many years of gaol, it had, in its own turn, imprisoned him, adding fresh years of gloom to those which already had lacked sunlight. And thus he remained the martyr of freedom: freedom which he still desired in spite of everything; freedom, which, strive as he might, never came, never existed.

"But you are mistaken," replied Guillaume, wounded by Janzen's raillery. "There is again a thought of getting rid of Barthes, whose uncompromising rectitude disturbs our politicians; and he does well to take his precautions!"

Nicholas Barthes came in, a tall, slim, withered old man, with a nose like an eagle's beak, and eyes that still burned in their deep sockets, under white and bushy brows. His mouth, toothless but still refined, was lost to sight between his moustaches and snowy beard; and his hair, crowning him whitely like an aureola, fell in curls over his shoulders. Behind him with all modesty came Theophile Morin, with grey whiskers, grey, brush-like hair, spectacles, and yellow, weary mien—that of an old professor exhausted by years of teaching. Neither of them seemed astonished or awaited an explanation on finding that man in bed with an injured wrist. And there were no introductions: those who were acquainted merely smiled at one another.

Barthes, for his part, stooped and kissed Guillaume on both cheeks. "Ah!" said the latter, almost gaily, "it gives me courage to see you."

However, the new comers had brought a little information. The boulevards were in an agitated state, the news of the crime had spread from cafe to cafe, and everybody was anxious to see the late edition which one paper had published giving a very incorrect account of the affair, full of the most extraordinary details. Briefly, nothing positive was as yet known.

On seeing Guillaume turn pale Pierre compelled him to lie down again, and even talked of taking the visitors into the next room. But the injured man gently replied: "No, no, I promise you that I won't stir again, that I won't open my mouth. But stay there and chat together. I assure you that it will do me good to have you near me and hear you."

Then, under the sleepy gleams of the lamp, the others began to talk in undertones. Old Barthes, who considered that bomb to be both idiotic and abominable, spoke of it with the stupefaction of one who, after fighting like a hero through all the legendary struggles for liberty, found himself belated, out of his element, in a new era, which he could not understand. Did not the conquest of freedom suffice for everything? he added. Was there any other problem beyond that of founding the real Republic? Then, referring to Mege and his speech in the Chamber that afternoon, he bitterly arraigned Collectivism, which he declared to be one of the democratic forms of tyranny. Theophile Morin, for his part, also spoke against the Collectivist enrolling of the social forces, but he professed yet greater hatred of the odious violence of the Anarchists; for it was only by evolution that he expected progress, and he felt somewhat indifferent as to what political means might bring about the scientific society of to-morrow. And in like way Bache did not seem particularly fond of the Anarchists, though he was touched by the idyllic dream, the humanitarian hope, whose germs lay beneath their passion for destruction. And, like Barthes, he also flew into a passion with Mege, who since entering the Chamber had become, said he, a mere rhetorician and theorist, dreaming of dictatorship. Meantime Janzen, still erect, his face frigid and his lips curling ironically, listened to all three of them, and vented a few trenchant words to express his own Anarchist faith; the uselessness of drawing distinctions, and the necessity of destroying everything in order that everything might be rebuilt on fresh lines.

Pierre, who had remained near the bed, also listened with passionate attention. Amidst the downfall of his own beliefs, the utter void which he felt within him, here were these four men, who represented the cardinal points of this century's ideas, debating the very same terrible problem which brought him so much suffering, that of the new belief which the democracy of the coming century awaits. And, ah! since the days of the immediate ancestors, since the days of Voltaire and Diderot and Rousseau how incessantly had billows of ideas followed and jostled one another, the older ones giving birth to new ones, and all breaking and bounding in a tempest in which it was becoming so difficult to distinguish anything clearly! Whence came the wind, and whither was the ship of salvation going, for what port ought one to embark? Pierre had already thought that the balance-sheet of the century ought to be drawn up, and that, after accepting the legacies of Rousseau and the other precursors, he ought to study the ideas of St. Simon, Fourier and even Cabet; of Auguste Comte, Proudhon and Karl Marx as well, in order, at any rate, to form some idea of the distance that had been travelled, and of the cross-ways which one had now reached. And was not this an opportunity, since chance had gathered those men together in his house, living exponents of the conflicting doctrines which he wished to examine?

On turning round, however, he perceived that Guillaume was now very pale and had closed his eyes. Had even he, with his faith in science, felt the doubt which is born of contradictory theories, and the despair which comes when one sees the fight for truth resulting in growth of error?

"Are you in pain?" the priest anxiously inquired.

"Yes, a little. But I will try to sleep."

At this they all went off with silent handshakes. Nicholas Barthes alone remained in the house and slept in a room on the first floor which Sophie had got ready for him. Pierre, unwilling to quit his brother, dozed off upon a sofa. And the little house relapsed into its deep quietude, the silence of solitude and winter, through which passed the melancholy quiver of the souvenirs of childhood.

In the morning, as soon as it was seven o'clock, Pierre had to go for the newspapers. Guillaume had passed a bad night and intense fever had set in. Nevertheless, his brother was obliged to read him the articles on the explosion. There was an amazing medley of truths and inventions, of precise information lost amidst the most unexpected extravagance. Sagnier's paper, the "Voix du Peuple," distinguished itself by its sub-titles in huge print and a whole page of particulars jumbled together chance-wise. It had at once decided to postpone the famous list of the thirty-two deputies and senators compromised in the African Railways affair; and there was no end to the details it gave of the aspect of the entrance to the Duvillard mansion after the explosion the pavement broken up, the upper floor rent open, the huge doors torn away from their hinges. Then came the story of the Baron's son and daughter preserved as by a miracle, the landau escaping the slightest injury, while the banker and his wife, it was alleged, owed their preservation to the circumstance that they had lingered at the Madeleine after Monseigneur Martha's remarkable address there. An entire column was given to the one victim, the poor, pretty, fair-haired errand girl, whose identity did not seem to be clearly established, although a flock of reporters had rushed first to the modiste employing her, in the Avenue de l'Opera, and next to the upper part of the Faubourg St. Denis, where it was thought her grandmother resided. Then, in a gravely worded article in "Le Globe," evidently inspired by Fonsegue, an appeal was made to the Chamber's patriotism to avoid giving cause for any ministerial crisis in the painful circumstances through which the country was passing. Thus the ministry might last, and live in comparative quietude, for a few weeks longer.

Guillaume, however, was struck by one point only: the culprit was not known; Salvat, it appeared certain, was neither arrested nor even suspected. It seemed, indeed, as if the police were starting on a false scent—that of a well-dressed gentleman wearing gloves, whom a neighbour swore he had seen entering the mansion at the moment of the explosion. Thus Guillaume became a little calmer. But his brother read to him from another paper some particulars concerning the engine of destruction that had been employed. It was a preserved-meat can, and the fragments of it showed that it had been comparatively small. And Guillaume relapsed into anxiety on learning that people were much astonished at the violent ravages of such a sorry appliance, and that the presence of some new explosive of incalculable power was already suspected.

At eight o'clock Bertheroy put in an appearance. Although he was sixty-eight, he showed as much briskness and sprightliness as any young sawbones calling in a friendly way to perform a little operation. He had brought an instrument case, some linen bands and some lint. However, he became angry on finding the injured man nervous, flushed and hot with fever.

"Ah! I see that you haven't been reasonable, my dear child," said he. "You must have talked too much, and have bestirred and excited yourself." Then, having carefully probed the wound, he added, while dressing it: "The bone is injured, you know, and I won't answer for anything unless you behave better. Any complications would make amputation necessary."

Pierre shuddered, but Guillaume shrugged his shoulders, as if to say that he might just as well be amputated since all was crumbling around him. Bertheroy, who had sat down, lingering there for another moment, scrutinised both brothers with his keen eyes. He now knew of the explosion, and must have thought it over. "My dear child," he resumed in his brusque way, "I certainly don't think that you committed that abominable act of folly in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy. But I fancy that you were in the neighbourhood—no, no, don't answer me, don't defend yourself. I know nothing and desire to know nothing, not even the formula of that devilish powder of which your shirt cuff bore traces, and which has wrought such terrible havoc."

And then as the brothers remained surprised, turning cold with anxiety, in spite of his assurances, he added with a sweeping gesture: "Ah! my friends, I regard such an action as even more useless than criminal! I only feel contempt for the vain agitation of politics, whether they be revolutionary or conservative. Does not science suffice? Why hasten the times when one single step of science brings humanity nearer to the goal of truth and justice than do a hundred years of politics and social revolt? Why, it is science alone which sweeps away dogmas, casts down gods, and creates light and happiness. And I, Member of the Institute as I am, decorated and possessed of means, I am the only true Revolutionist."

Then he began to laugh and Guillaume realised all the good-natured irony of his laugh. While admiring him as a great savant, he had hitherto suffered at seeing him lead such a bourgeois life, accepting whatever appointments and honours were offered him, a Republican under the Republic, but quite ready to serve science under no matter what master. But now, from beneath this opportunist, this hieratical savant, this toiler who accepted wealth and glory from all hands, there appeared a quiet yet terrible evolutionist, who certainly expected that his own work would help to ravage and renew the world!

However, Bertheroy rose and took his leave: "I'll come back; behave sensibly, and love one another as well as you can."

When the brothers again found themselves alone, Pierre seated at Guillaume's bedside, their hands once more sought each other and met in a burning clasp instinct with all their anguish. How much threatening mystery and distress there was both around and within them! The grey wintry daylight came into the room, and they could see the black trees in the garden, while the house remained full of quivering silence, save that overhead a faint sound of footsteps was audible. They were the steps of Nicholas Barthes, the heroic lover of freedom, who, rising at daybreak, had, like a caged lion, resumed his wonted promenade, the incessant coming and going of one who had ever been a prisoner. And as the brothers ceased listening to him their eyes fell on a newspaper which had remained open on the bed, a newspaper soiled by a sketch in outline which pretended to portray the poor dead errand girl, lying, ripped open, beside the bandbox and the bonnet it had contained. It was so frightful, so atrociously hideous a scene, that two big tears again fell upon Pierre's cheeks, whilst Guillaume's blurred, despairing eyes gazed wistfully far away, seeking for the Future.

II. A HOME OF INDUSTRY

THE little house in which Guillaume had dwelt for so many years, a home of quietude and hard work, stood in the pale light of winter up yonder at Montmartre, peacefully awaiting his return. He reflected, however, after dejeuner that it might not be prudent for him to go back thither for some three weeks, and so he thought of sending Pierre to explain the position of affairs. "Listen, brother," he said. "You must render me this service. Go and tell them the truth—that I am here, slightly injured, and do not wish them to come to see me, for fear lest somebody should follow them and discover my retreat. After the note I wrote them last evening they would end by getting anxious if I did not send them some news." Then, yielding to the one worry which, since the previous night, had disturbed his clear, frank glance, he added: "Just feel in the right-hand pocket of my waistcoat; you will find a little key there. Good! that's it. Now you must give it to Madame Leroi, my mother-in-law, and tell her that if any misfortune should happen to me, she is to do what is understood between us. That will suffice, she will understand you."

At the first moment Pierre had hesitated; but he saw how even the slight effort of speaking exhausted his brother, so he silenced him, saying: "Don't talk, but put your mind at ease. I will go and reassure your people, since you wish that this commission should be undertaken by me."

Truth to tell, the errand was so distasteful to Pierre that he had at first thought of sending Sophie in his place. All his old prejudices were reviving; it was as if he were going to some ogre's den. How many times had he not heard his mother say "that creature!" in referring to the woman with whom her elder son cohabited. Never had she been willing to kiss Guillaume's boys; the whole connection had shocked her, and she was particularly indignant that Madame Leroi, the woman's mother, should have joined the household for the purpose of bringing up the little ones. Pierre retained so strong a recollection of all this that even nowadays, when he went to the basilica of the Sacred Heart and passed the little house on his way, he glanced at it distrustfully, and kept as far from it as he could, as if it were some abode of vice and error. Undoubtedly, for ten years now, the boys' mother had been dead, but did not another scandal-inspiring creature dwell there, that young orphan girl to whom his brother had given shelter, and whom he was going to marry, although a difference of twenty years lay between them? To Pierre all this was contrary to propriety, abnormal and revolting, and he pictured a home given over to social rebellion, where lack of principle led to every kind of disorder.

However, he was leaving the room to start upon his journey, when Guillaume called him back. "Tell Madame Leroi," said he, "that if I should die you will let her know of it, so that she may immediately do what is necessary."

"Yes, yes," answered Pierre. "But calm yourself, and don't move about. I'll say everything. And in my absence Sophie will stop here with you in case you should need her."

Having given full instructions to the servant, Pierre set out to take a tramcar, intending to alight from it on the Boulevard de Rochechouart, and then climb the height on foot. And on the road, lulled by the gliding motion of the heavy vehicle, he began to think of his brother's past life and connections, with which he was but vaguely, imperfectly, acquainted. It was only at a later date that details of everything came to his knowledge. In 1850 a young professor named Leroi, who had come from Paris to the college of Montauban with the most ardent republican ideas, had there married Agathe Dagnan, the youngest of the five girls of an old Protestant family from the Cevennes. Young Madame Leroi was enceinte when her husband, threatened with arrest for contributing some violent articles to a local newspaper, immediately after the "Coup d'Etat," found himself obliged to seek refuge at Geneva. It was there that the young couple's daughter, Marguerite, a very delicate child, was born in 1852. For seven years, that is until the Amnesty of 1859, the household struggled with poverty, the husband giving but a few ill-paid lessons, and the wife absorbed in the constant care which the child required. Then, after their return to Paris, their ill-luck became even greater. For a long time the ex-professor vainly sought regular employment; it was denied him on account of his opinions, and he had to run about giving lessons in private houses. When he was at last on the point of being received back into the University a supreme blow, an attack of paralysis, fell upon him. He lost the use of both legs. And then came utter misery, every kind of sordid drudgery, the writing of articles for dictionaries, the copying of manuscripts, and even the addressing of newspaper wrappers, on the fruits of which the household barely contrived to live, in a little lodging in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince.

It was there that Marguerite grew up. Leroi, embittered by injustice and suffering, predicted the advent of a Republic which would avenge the follies of the Empire, and a reign of science which would sweep away the deceptive and cruel divinity of religious dogmas. On the other hand, Agathe's religious faith had collapsed at Geneva, at sight of the narrow and imbecile practices of Calvinism, and all that she retained of it was the old Protestant leaven of rebellion. She had become at once the head and the arm of the house; she went for her husband's work, took it back when completed, and even did much of it herself, whilst, at the same time, performing her house duties, and rearing and educating her daughter. The latter, who attended no school, was indebted for all she learnt to her father and mother, on whose part there was never any question of religious instruction. Through contact with her husband, Madame Leroi had lost all belief, and her Protestant heredity inclining her to free inquiry and examination, she had arranged for herself a kind of peaceful atheism, based on paramount principles of human duty and justice, which she applied courageously, irrespective of all social conventionalities. The long iniquity of her husband's fate, the undeserved misfortunes which struck her through him and her daughter, ended by endowing her with wonderful fortitude and devotion, which made her, whether as a judge, a manager, or a consoler, a woman of incomparable energy and nobleness of character.

It was in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince that Guillaume became acquainted with the Leroi family, after the war of 1870. On the same floor as their little lodging he occupied a large room, where he devoted himself passionately to his studies. At the outset there was only an occasional bow, for Guillaume's neighbours were very proud and very grave, leading their life of poverty in fierce silence and retirement. Then intercourse began with the rendering of little services, such as when the young man procured the ex-professor a commission to write a few articles for a new encyclopaedia. But all at once came the catastrophe: Leroi died in his armchair one evening while his daughter was wheeling him from his table to his bed. The two distracted women had not even the money to bury him. The whole secret of their bitter want flowed forth with their tears, and they were obliged to accept the help of Guillaume, who, from that moment, became the necessary confidant and friend. And the thing which was bound to happen did happen, in the most simple and loving manner, permitted by the mother herself, who, full of contempt for a social system which allowed those of good hearts to die of hunger, refused to admit the necessity of any social tie. Thus there was no question of a regular marriage. One day Guillaume, who was twenty-three years old, found himself mated to Marguerite, who was twenty; both of them handsome, healthy, and strong, adoring one another, loving work, and full of hope in the future.

From that moment a new life began. Since his father's death, Guillaume, who had broken off all intercourse with his mother, had been receiving an allowance of two hundred francs a month. This just represented daily bread; however, he was already doubling the amount by his work as a chemist,—his analyses and researches, which tended to the employment of certain chemical products in industry. So he and Marguerite installed themselves on the very summit of Montmartre, in a little house, at a rental of eight hundred francs a year, the great convenience of the place being a strip of garden, where one might, later on, erect a wooden workshop. In all tranquillity Madame Leroi took up her abode with the young people, helping them, and sparing them the necessity of keeping a second servant. And at successive intervals of two years, her three grandchildren were born, three sturdy boys: first Thomas, then Francois, and then Antoine. And in the same way as she had devoted herself to her husband and daughter, and then to Guillaume, so did she now devote herself to the three children. She became "Mere-Grand"—an emphatic and affectionate way of expressing the term "grandmother"—for all who lived in the house, the older as well as the younger ones. She there personified sense, and wisdom, and courage; it was she who was ever on the watch, who directed everything, who was consulted about everything, and whose opinion was always followed. Indeed, she reigned there like an all-powerful queen-mother.

For fifteen years this life went on, a life of hard work and peaceful affection, while the strictest economy was observed in contenting every need of the modest little household. Then Guillaume lost his mother, took his share of the family inheritance, and was able to satisfy his old desire, which was to buy the house he lived in, and build a spacious workshop in the garden. He was even able to build it of bricks, and add an upper story to it. But the work was scarcely finished, and life seemed to be on the point of expanding and smiling on them all, when misfortune returned, and typhoid fever, with brutal force, carried off Marguerite, after a week's illness. She was then five and thirty, and her eldest boy, Thomas, was fourteen. Thus Guillaume, distracted by his loss, found himself a widower at thirty-eight. The thought of introducing any unknown woman into that retired home, where all hearts beat in tender unison, was so unbearable to him that he determined to take no other mate. His work absorbed him, and he would know how to quiet both his heart and his flesh. Mere-Grand, fortunately, was still there, erect and courageous; the household retained its queen, and in her the children found a manageress and teacher, schooled in adversity and heroism.

Two years passed; and then came an addition to the family. A young woman, Marie Couturier, the daughter of one of Guillaume's friends, suddenly entered it. Couturier had been an inventor, a madman with some measure of genius, and had spent a fairly large fortune in attempting all sorts of fantastic schemes. His wife, a very pious woman, had died of grief at it all; and although on the rare occasions when he saw his daughter, he showed great fondness for her and loaded her with presents, he had first placed her in a boarding college, and afterwards left her in the charge of a poor female relative. Remembering her only on his death-bed, he had begged Guillaume to give her an asylum, and find her a husband. The poor relation, who dealt in ladies' and babies' linen, had just become a bankrupt. So, at nineteen, the girl, Marie, found herself a penniless outcast, possessed of nothing save a good education, health and courage. Guillaume would never allow her to run about giving lessons. He took her, in quite a natural way, to help Mere-Grand, who was no longer so active as formerly. And the latter approved the arrangement, well pleased at the advent of youth and gaiety, which would somewhat brighten the household, whose life had been one of much gravity ever since Marguerite's death. Marie would simply be an elder sister; she was too old for the boys, who were still at college, to be disturbed by her presence. And she would work in that house where everybody worked. She would help the little community pending the time when she might meet and love some worthy fellow who would marry her.

Five more years elapsed without Marie consenting to quit that happy home. The sterling education she had received was lodged in a vigorous brain, which contented itself with the acquirement of knowledge. Yet she had remained very pure and healthy, even very naive, maidenly by reason of her natural rectitude. And she was also very much a woman, beautifying and amusing herself with a mere nothing, and ever showing gaiety and contentment. Moreover, she was in no wise of a dreamy nature, but very practical, always intent on some work or other, and only asking of life such things as life could give, without anxiety as to what might lie beyond it. She lovingly remembered her pious mother, who had prepared her for her first Communion in tears, imagining that she was opening heaven's portals to her. But since she had been an orphan she had of her own accord ceased all practice of religion, her good sense revolting and scorning the need of any moral police regulations to make her do her duty. Indeed, she considered such regulations dangerous and destructive of true health. Thus, like Mere-Grand, she had come to a sort of quiet and almost unconscious atheism, not after the fashion of one who reasons, but simply like the brave, healthy girl she was, one who had long endured poverty without suffering from it, and believed in nothing save the necessity of effort. She had been kept erect, indeed, by her conviction that happiness was to be found in the normal joys of life, lived courageously. And her happy equilibrium of mind had ever guided and saved her, in such wise that she willingly listened to her natural instinct, saying, with her pleasant laugh, that this was, after all, her best adviser. She rejected two offers of marriage, and on the second occasion, as Guillaume pressed her to accept, she grew astonished, and inquired if he had had enough of her in the house. She found herself very comfortable, and she rendered service there. So why should she leave and run the risk of being less happy elsewhere, particularly as she was not in love with anybody?

Then, by degrees, the idea of a marriage between Marie and Guillaume presented itself; and indeed what could have been more reasonable and advantageous for all? If Guillaume had not mated again it was for his sons' sake, because he feared that by introducing a stranger to the house he might impair its quietude and gaiety. But now there was a woman among them who already showed herself maternal towards the boys, and whose bright youth had ended by disturbing his own heart. He was still in his prime, and had always held that it was not good for man to live alone, although, personally, thanks to his ardour for work, he had hitherto escaped excessive suffering in his bereavement. However, there was the great difference of ages to be considered; and he would have bravely remained in the background and have sought a younger husband for Marie, if his three big sons and Mere-Grand herself had not conspired to effect his happiness by doing all they could to bring about a marriage which would strengthen every home tie and impart, as it were, a fresh springtide to the house. As for Marie, touched and grateful to Guillaume for the manner in which he had treated her for five years past, she immediately consented with an impulse of sincere affection, in which, she fancied, she could detect love. And at all events, could she act in a more sensible, reasonable way, base her life on more certain prospects of happiness? So the marriage had been resolved upon; and about a month previously it had been decided that it should take place during the ensuing spring, towards the end of April.

When Pierre, after alighting from the tramcar, began to climb the interminable flights of steps leading to the Rue St. Eleuthere, a feeling of uneasiness again came over him at the thought that he was about to enter that suspicious ogre's den where everything would certainly wound and irritate him. Given the letter which Sophie had carried thither on the previous night, announcing that the master would not return, how anxious and upset must all its inmates be! However, as Pierre ascended the final flight and nervously raised his head, the little house appeared to him right atop of the hill, looking very serene and quiet under the bright wintry sun, which had peered forth as if to bestow upon the modest dwelling an affectionate caress.

There was a door in the old garden wall alongside the Rue St. Eleuthere, almost in front of the broad thoroughfare conducting to the basilica of the Sacred Heart; but to reach the house itself one had to skirt the wall and climb to the Place du Tertre, where one found the facade and the entrance. Some children were playing on the Place, which, planted as it was with a few scrubby trees, and edged with humble shops,—a fruiterer's, a grocer's and a baker's,—looked like some square in a small provincial town. In a corner, on the left, Guillaume's dwelling, which had been whitewashed during the previous spring, showed its bright frontage and five lifeless windows, for all its life was on the other, the garden, side, which overlooked Paris and the far horizon.

Pierre mustered his courage and, pulling a brass knob which glittered like gold, rang the bell. There came a gay, distant jingle; but for a moment nobody appeared, and he was about to ring again, when the door was thrown wide open, revealing a passage which ran right through the house, beyond which appeared the ocean of Paris, the endless sea of house roofs bathed in sunlight. And against this spacious, airy background, stood a young woman of twenty-six, clad in a simple gown of black woolen stuff, half covered by a large blue apron. She had her sleeves rolled up above her elbows, and her arms and hands were still moist with water which she had but imperfectly wiped away.

A moment's surprise and embarrassment ensued. The young woman, who had hastened to the door with laughing mien, became grave and covertly hostile at sight of the visitor's cassock. The priest thereupon realised that he must give his name: "I am Abbe Pierre Froment."

At this the young woman's smile of welcome came back to her. "Oh! I beg your pardon, monsieur—I ought to have recognised you, for I saw you wish Guillaume good day one morning as you passed."

She said Guillaume; she, therefore, must be Marie. And Pierre looked at her in astonishment, finding her very different from what he had imagined. She was only of average height, but she was vigorously, admirably built, broad of hip and broad of shoulder, with the small firm bosom of an amazon. By her erect and easy step, instinct with all the adorable grace of woman in her prime, one could divine that she was strong, muscular and healthy. A brunette, but very white of skin, she had a heavy helm of superb black hair, which she fastened in a negligent way, without any show of coquetry. And under her dark locks, her pure, intelligent brow, her delicate nose and gay eyes appeared full of intense life; whilst the somewhat heavier character of her lower features, her fleshy lips and full chin, bespoke her quiet kindliness. She had surely come on earth as a promise of every form of tenderness, every form of devotion. In a word, she was a true mate for man.

However, with her heavy, straying hair and superb arms, so ingenuous in their nudity, she only gave Pierre an impression of superfluous health and extreme self-assurance. She displeased him and even made him feel somewhat anxious, as if she were a creature different from all others.

"It is my brother Guillaume who has sent me," he said.

At this her face again changed; she became grave and hastened to admit him to the passage. And when the door was closed she answered: "You have brought us news of him, then! I must apologise for receiving you in this fashion. The servants have just finished some washing, and I was making sure if the work had been well done. Pray excuse me, and come in here for a moment; it is perhaps best that I should be the first to know the news."

So saying, she led him past the kitchen to a little room which served as scullery and wash-house. A tub full of soapy water stood there, and some dripping linen hung over some wooden bars. "And so, Guillaume?" she asked.

Pierre then told the truth in simple fashion: that his brother's wrist had been injured; that he himself had witnessed the accident, and that his brother had then sought an asylum with him at Neuilly, where he wished to remain and get cured of his injury in peace and quietness, without even receiving a visit from his sons. While speaking in this fashion, the priest watched the effect of his words on Marie's face: first fright and pity, and then an effort to calm herself and judge things reasonably.

"His letter quite froze me last night," she ended by replying. "I felt sure that some misfortune had happened. But one must be brave and hide one's fear from others. His wrist injured, you say; it is not a serious injury, is it?"

"No; but it is necessary that every precaution should be taken with it."

She looked him well in the face with her big frank eyes, which dived into his own as if to reach the very depths of his being, though at the same time she plainly sought to restrain the score of questions which rose to her lips. "And that is all: he was injured in an accident," she resumed; "he didn't ask you to tell us anything further about it?"

"No, he simply desires that you will not be anxious."

Thereupon she insisted no further, but showed herself obedient and respectful of the decision which Guillaume had arrived at. It sufficed that he should have sent a messenger to reassure the household—she did not seek to learn any more. And even as she had returned to her work in spite of the secret anxiety in which the letter of the previous evening had left her, so now, with her air of quiet strength, she recovered an appearance of serenity, a quiet smile and clear brave glance.

"Guillaume only gave me one other commission," resumed Pierre, "that of handing a little key to Madame Leroi."

"Very good," Marie answered, "Mere-Grand is here; and, besides, the children must see you. I will take you to them."

Once more quite tranquil, she examined Pierre without managing to conceal her curiosity, which seemed of rather a kindly nature blended with an element of vague pity. Her fresh white arms had remained bare. In all candour she slowly drew down her sleeves; then took off the large blue apron, and showed herself with her rounded figure, at once robust and elegant, in her modest black gown. He meanwhile looked at her, and most certainly he did not find her to his liking. On seeing her so natural, healthy, and courageous, quite a feeling of revolt arose within him, though he knew not why.

"Will you please follow me, Monsieur l'Abbe?" she said. "We must cross the garden."

On the ground-floor of the house, across the passage, and facing the kitchen and the scullery, there were two other rooms, a library overlooking the Place du Tertre, and a dining-room whose windows opened into the garden. The four rooms on the first floor served as bedchambers for the father and the sons. As for the garden, originally but a small one, it had now been reduced to a kind of gravelled yard by the erection of the large workshop at one end of it. Of the former greenery, however, there still remained two huge plum-trees with old knotted trunks, as well as a big clump of lilac-bushes, which every spring were covered with bloom. And in front of the latter Marie had arranged a broad flower-bed, in which she amused herself with growing a few roses, some wallflowers and some mignonette.

With a wave of her hand as she went past, she called Pierre's attention to the black plum-trees and the lilacs and roses, which showed but a few greenish spots, for winter still held the little nook in sleep. "Tell Guillaume," she said, "that he must make haste to get well and be back for the first shoots."

Then, as Pierre glanced at her, she all at once flushed purple. Much to her distress, sudden and involuntary blushes would in this wise occasionally come upon her, even at the most innocent remarks. She found it ridiculous to feel such childish emotion when she had so brave a heart. But her pure maidenly blood had retained exquisite delicacy, such natural and instinctive modesty that she yielded to it perforce. And doubtless she had merely blushed because she feared that the priest might think she had referred to her marriage in speaking of the spring.

"Please go in, Monsieur l'Abbe. The children are there, all three." And forthwith she ushered him into the workshop.

It was a very spacious place, over sixteen feet high, with a brick flooring and bare walls painted an iron grey. A sheet of light, a stream of sunshine, spread to every corner through a huge window facing the south, where lay the immensity of Paris. The Venetian shutters often had to be lowered in the summer to attenuate the great heat. From morn till night the whole family lived here, closely and affectionately united in work. Each was installed as fancy listed, having a particular chosen place. One half of the building was occupied by the father's chemical laboratory, with its stove, experiment tables, shelves for apparatus, glass cases and cupboards for phials and jars. Near all this Thomas, the eldest son, had installed a little forge, an anvil, a vice bench, in fact everything necessary to a working mechanician, such as he had become since taking his bachelor's degree, from his desire to remain with his father and help him with certain researches and inventions. Then, at the other end, the younger brothers, Francois and Antoine, got on very well together on either side of a broad table which stood amidst a medley of portfolios, nests of drawers and revolving book-stands. Francois, laden with academical laurels, first on the pass list for the Ecole Normale, had entered that college where young men are trained for university professorships, and was there preparing for his Licentiate degree, while Antoine, who on reaching the third class at the Lycee Condorcet had taken a dislike to classical studies, now devoted himself to his calling as a wood-engraver. And, in the full light under the window, Mere-Grand and Marie likewise had their particular table, where needlework, embroidery, all sorts of chiffons and delicate things lay about near the somewhat rough jumble of retorts, tools and big books.

Marie, however, on the very threshold called out in her calm voice, to which she strove to impart a gay and cheering accent: "Children! children! here is Monsieur l'Abbe with news of father!"

Children, indeed! Yet what motherliness she already set in the word as she applied it to those big fellows whose elder sister she had long considered herself to be! At three and twenty Thomas was quite a colossus, already bearded and extremely like his father. But although he had a lofty brow and energetic features, he was somewhat slow both in mind and body. And he was also taciturn, almost unsociable, absorbed in filial devotion, delighted with the manual toil which made him a mere workman at his master's orders. Francois, two years younger than Thomas, and nearly as tall, showed a more refined face, though he had the same large brow and firm mouth, a perfect blending of health and strength, in which the man of intellect, the scientific Normalian, could only be detected by the brighter and more subtle sparkle of the eyes. The youngest of the brothers, Antoine, who for his eighteen years was almost as strong as his elders, and promised to become as tall, differed from them by his lighter hair and soft, blue, dreamy eyes, which he had inherited from his mother. It had been difficult, however, to distinguish one from the other when all three were schoolboys at the Lycee Condorcet; and even nowadays people made mistakes unless they saw them side by side, so as to detect the points of difference which were becoming more marked as age progressed.

On Pierre's arrival the brothers were so absorbed in their work that they did not even hear the door open. And again, as in the case of Marie, the priest was surprised by the discipline and firmness of mind, which amidst the keenest anxiety gave the young fellows strength to take up their daily task. Thomas, who stood at his vice-bench in a blouse, was carefully filing a little piece of copper with rough but skilful hands. Francois, leaning forward, was writing in a bold, firm fashion, whilst on the other side of the table, Antoine, with a slender graver between his fingers, finished a block for an illustrated newspaper.

However, Marie's clear voice made them raise their heads: "Children, father has sent you some news!"

Then all three with the same impulse hurriedly quitted their work and came forward. One could divine that directly there was any question of their father they were drawn together, blended one with the other, so that but one and the same heart beat in their three broad chests. However, a door at the far end of the workroom opened at that moment, and Mere-Grand, coming from the upper floor where she and Marie had their bedrooms, made her appearance. She had just absented herself to fetch a skein of wool; and she gazed fixedly at the priest, unable to understand the reason of his presence.

Marie had to explain matters. "Mere-Grand," said she, "this is Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, Guillaume's brother; he has come from him."

Pierre on his side was examining the old lady, astonished to find her so erect and full of life at seventy. Her former beauty had left a stately charm on her rather long face; youthful fire still lingered in her brown eyes; and very firm was the contour of her pale lips, which in parting showed that she had retained all her teeth. A few white hairs alone silvered her black tresses, which were arranged in old-time fashion. Her cheeks had but slightly withered, and her deep, symmetrical wrinkles gave her countenance an expression of much nobility, a sovereign air as of a queen-mother, which, tall and slight of stature as she was, and invariably gowned in black woollen stuff, she always retained, no matter how humble her occupation.

"So Guillaume sent you, monsieur," she said; "he is injured, is he not?"

Surprised by this proof of intuition, Pierre repeated his story. "Yes, his wrist is injured—but oh! it's not a case of immediate gravity."

On the part of the three sons, he had divined a sudden quiver, an impulse of their whole beings to rush to the help and defence of their father. And for their sakes he sought words of comfort: "He is with me at Neuilly. And with due care it is certain that no serious complications will arise. He sent me to tell you to be in no wise uneasy about him."

Mere-Grand for her part evinced no fears, but preserved great calmness, as if the priest's tidings contained nothing beyond what she had known already. If anything, she seemed rather relieved, freed from anxiety which she had confided to none. "If he is with you, monsieur," she answered, "he is evidently as comfortable as he can be, and sheltered from all risks. We were surprised, however, by his letter last night, as it did not explain why he was detained, and we should have ended by feeling frightened. But now everything is satisfactory."

Mere-Grand and the three sons, following Marie's example, asked no explanations. On a table near at hand Pierre noticed several morning newspapers lying open and displaying column after column of particulars about the crime. The sons had certainly read these papers, and had feared lest their father should be compromised in that frightful affair. How far did their knowledge of the latter go? They must be ignorant of the part played by Salvat. It was surely impossible for them to piece together all the unforeseen circumstances which had brought about their father's meeting with the workman, and then the crime. Mere-Grand, no doubt, was in certain respects better informed than the others. But they, the sons and Marie, neither knew nor sought to know anything. And thus what a wealth of respect and affection there was in their unshakable confidence in the father, in the tranquillity they displayed directly he sent them word that they were not to be anxious about him!

"Madame," Pierre resumed, "Guillaume told me to give you this little key, and to remind you to do what he charged you to do, if any misfortune should befall him."

She started, but so slightly that it was scarcely perceptible; and taking the key she answered as if some ordinary wish on the part of a sick person were alone in question. "Very well. Tell him that his wishes shall be carried out." Then she added, "But pray take a seat, monsieur."

Pierre, indeed, had remained standing. However, he now felt it necessary to accept a chair, desirous as he was of hiding the embarrassment which he still felt in this house, although he was en famille there. Marie, who could not live without occupation for her fingers, had just returned to some embroidery, some of the fine needlework which she stubbornly executed for a large establishment dealing in baby-linen and bridal trousseaux; for she wished at any rate to earn her own pocket-money, she often said with a laugh. Mere-Grand, too, from habit, which she followed even when visitors were present, had once more started on her perpetual stocking-mending; while Francois and Antoine had again seated themselves at their table; and Thomas alone remained on his legs, leaning against his bench. All the charm of industrious intimacy pervaded the spacious, sun-lit room.

"But we'll all go to see father to-morrow," Thomas suddenly exclaimed.

Before Pierre could answer Marie raised her head. "No, no," said she, "he does not wish any of us to go to him; for if we should be watched and followed we should betray the secret of his retreat. Isn't that so, Monsieur l'Abbe?"

"It would indeed be prudent of you to deprive yourselves of the pleasure of embracing him until he himself can come back here. It will be a matter of some two or three weeks," answered Pierre.

Mere-Grand at once expressed approval of this. "No doubt," said she. "Nothing could be more sensible."

So the three sons did not insist, but bravely accepted the secret anxiety in which they must for a time live, renouncing the visit which would have caused them so much delight, because their father bade them do so and because his safety depended perhaps on their obedience.

However, Thomas resumed: "Then, Monsieur l'Abbe, will you please tell him that as work will be interrupted here, I shall return to the factory during his absence. I shall be more at ease there for the researches on which we are engaged."

"And please tell him from me," put in Francois, "that he mustn't worry about my examination. Things are going very well. I feel almost certain of success."

Pierre promised that he would forget nothing. However, Marie raised her head, smiling and glancing at Antoine, who had remained silent with a faraway look in his eyes. "And you, little one," said she, "don't you send him any message?"

Emerging from a dream, the young fellow also began to smile. "Yes, yes, a message that you love him dearly, and that he's to make haste back for you to make him happy."

At this they all became merry, even Marie, who in lieu of embarrassment showed a tranquil gaiety born of confidence in the future. Between her and the young men there was naught but happy affection. And a grave smile appeared even on the pale lips of Mere-Grand, who likewise approved of the happiness which life seemed to be promising.

Pierre wished to stay a few minutes longer. They all began to chat, and his astonishment increased. He had gone from surprise to surprise in this house where he had expected to find that equivocal, disorderly life, that rebellion against social laws, which destroy morality. But instead of this he had found loving serenity, and such strong discipline that life there partook of the gravity, almost the austerity, of convent life, tempered by youth and gaiety. The vast room was redolent of industry and quietude, warm with bright sunshine. However, what most particularly struck him was the Spartan training, the bravery of mind and heart among those sons who allowed nothing to be seen of their personal feelings, and did not presume to judge their father, but remained content with his message, ready to await events, stoical and silent, while carrying on their daily tasks. Nothing could be more simple, more dignified, more lofty. And there was also the smiling heroism of Mere-Grand and Marie, those two women who slept over that laboratory where terrible preparations were manipulated, and where an explosion was always possible.

However, such courage, orderliness and dignity merely surprised Pierre, without touching him. He had no cause for complaint, he had received a polite greeting if not an affectionate one; but then he was as yet only a stranger there, a priest. In spite of everything, however, he remained hostile, feeling that he was in a sphere where none of his own torments could be shared or even divined. How did these folks manage to be so calm and happy amidst their religious unbelief, their sole faith in science, and in presence of that terrifying Paris which spread before them the boundless sea, the growling abomination of its injustice and its want? As this thought came to him he turned his head and gazed at the city through the huge window, whence it stretched away, ever present, ever living its giant life. And at that hour, under the oblique sun-rays of the winter afternoon, all Paris was speckled with luminous dust, as if some invisible sower, hidden amidst the glory of the planet, were fast scattering seed which fell upon every side in a stream of gold. The whole field was covered with it; for the endless chaos of house roofs and edifices seemed to be land in tilth, furrowed by some gigantic plough. And Pierre in his uneasiness, stirred, despite everything, by an invincible need of hope, asked himself if this was not a good sowing, the furrows of Paris strewn with light by the divine sun for the great future harvest, that harvest of truth and justice of whose advent he had despaired.

At last he rose and took his leave, promising to return at once, if there should be any bad news. It was Marie who showed him to the front door. And there another of those childish blushes which worried her so much suddenly rose to her face, just as she, in her turn, also wished to send her loving message to the injured man. However, with her gay, candid eyes fixed on those of the priest, she bravely spoke the words: "Au revoir, Monsieur l'Abbe. Tell Guillaume that I love him and await him."

III. PENURY AND TOIL

THREE days went by, and every morning Guillaume, confined to his bed and consumed by fever and impatience, experienced fresh anxiety directly the newspapers arrived. Pierre had tried to keep them from him, but Guillaume then worried himself the more, and so the priest had to read him column by column all the extraordinary articles that were published respecting the crime.

Never before had so many rumours inundated the press. Even the "Globe," usually so grave and circumspect, yielded to the general furore, and printed whatever statements reached it. But the more unscrupulous papers were the ones to read. The "Voix du Peuple" in particular made use of the public feverishness to increase its sales. Each morning it employed some fresh device, and printed some frightful story of a nature to drive people mad with terror. It related that not a day passed without Baron Duvillard receiving threatening letters of the coarsest description, announcing that his wife, his son and his daughter would all be killed, that he himself would be butchered in turn, and that do what he might his house would none the less be blown up. And as a measure of precaution the house was guarded day and night alike by a perfect army of plain-clothes officers. Then another article contained an amazing piece of invention. Some anarchists, after carrying barrels of powder into a sewer near the Madeleine, were said to have undermined the whole district, planning a perfect volcano there, into which one half of Paris would sink. And at another time it was alleged that the police were on the track of a terrible plot which embraced all Europe, from the depths of Russia to the shores of Spain. The signal for putting it into execution was to be given in France, and there would be a three days' massacre, with grape shot sweeping everyone off the Boulevards, and the Seine running red, swollen by a torrent of blood. Thanks to these able and intelligent devices of the Press, terror now reigned in the city; frightened foreigners fled from the hotels en masse; and Paris had become a mere mad-house, where the most idiotic delusions at once found credit.

It was not all this, however, that worried Guillaume. He was only anxious about Salvat and the various new "scents" which the newspaper reporters attempted to follow up. The engineer was not yet arrested, and, so far indeed, there had been no statement in print to indicate that the police were on his track. At last, however, Pierre one morning read a paragraph which made the injured man turn pale.

"Dear me! It seems that a tool has been found among the rubbish at the entrance of the Duvillard mansion. It is a bradawl, and its handle bears the name of Grandidier, which is that of a man who keeps some well-known metal works. He is to appear before the investigating magistrate to-day."

Guillaume made a gesture of despair. "Ah!" said he, "they are on the right track at last. That tool must certainly have been dropped by Salvat. He worked at Grandidier's before he came to me for a few days. And from Grandidier they will learn all that they need to know in order to follow the scent."

Pierre then remembered that he had heard the Grandidier factory mentioned at Montmartre. Guillaume's eldest son, Thomas, had served his apprenticeship there, and even worked there occasionally nowadays.

"You told me," resumed Guillaume, "that during my absence Thomas intended to go back to the factory. It's in connection with a new motor which he's planning, and has almost hit upon. If there should be a perquisition there, he may be questioned, and may refuse to answer, in order to guard his secret. So he ought to be warned of this, warned at once!"

Without trying to extract any more precise statement from his brother, Pierre obligingly offered his services. "If you like," said he, "I will go to see Thomas this afternoon. Perhaps I may come across Monsieur Grandidier himself and learn how far the affair has gone, and what was said at the investigating magistrate's."

With a moist glance and an affectionate grasp of the hand, Guillaume at once thanked Pierre: "Yes, yes, brother, go there, it will be good and brave of you."

"Besides," continued the priest, "I really wanted to go to Montmartre to-day. I haven't told you so, but something has been worrying me. If Salvat has fled, he must have left the woman and the child all alone up yonder. On the morning of the day when the explosion took place I saw the poor creatures in such a state of destitution, such misery, that I can't think of them without a heart-pang. Women and children so often die of hunger when the man is no longer there."

At this, Guillaume, who had kept Pierre's hand in his own, pressed it more tightly, and in a trembling voice exclaimed: "Yes, yes, and that will be good and brave too. Go there, brother, go there."

That house of the Rue des Saules, that horrible home of want and agony, had lingered in Pierre's memory. To him it was like an embodiment of the whole filthy cloaca, in which the poor of Paris suffer unto death. And on returning thither that afternoon, he found the same slimy mud around it; its yard littered with the same filth, its dark, damp stairways redolent of the same stench of neglect and poverty, as before. In winter time, while the fine central districts of Paris are dried and cleansed, the far-away districts of the poor remain gloomy and miry, beneath the everlasting tramp of the wretched ones who dwell in them.

Remembering the staircase which conducted to Salvat's lodging, Pierre began to climb it amidst a loud screaming of little children, who suddenly became quiet, letting the house sink into death-like silence once more. Then the thought of Laveuve, who had perished up there like a stray dog, came back to Pierre. And he shuddered when, on the top landing, he knocked at Salvat's door, and profound silence alone answered him. Not a breath was to be heard.

However, he knocked again, and as nothing stirred he began to think that nobody could be there. Perhaps Salvat had returned to fetch the woman and the child, and perhaps they had followed him to some humble nook abroad. Still this would have astonished him; for the poor seldom quit their homes, but die where they have suffered. So he gave another gentle knock.

And at last a faint sound, the light tread of little feet, was heard amidst the silence. Then a weak, childish voice ventured to inquire: "Who is there?"

"Monsieur l'Abbe."

The silence fell again, nothing more stirred. There was evidently hesitation on the other side.

"Monsieur l'Abbe who came the other day," said Pierre again.

This evidently put an end to all uncertainty, for the door was set ajar and little Celine admitted the priest. "I beg your pardon, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she, "but Mamma Theodore has gone out, and she told me not to open the door to anyone."

Pierre had, for a moment, imagined that Salvat himself was hiding there. But with a glance he took in the whole of the small bare room, where man, woman and child dwelt together. At the same time, Madame Theodore doubtless feared a visit from the police. Had she seen Salvat since the crime? Did she know where he was hiding? Had he come back there to embrace and tranquillise them both?

"And your papa, my dear," said Pierre to Celine, "isn't he here either?"

"Oh! no, monsieur, he has gone away."

"What, gone away?"

"Yes, he hasn't been home to sleep, and we don't know where he is."

"Perhaps he's working."

"Oh, no! he'd send us some money if he was."

"Then he's gone on a journey, perhaps?"

"I don't know."

"He wrote to Mamma Theodore, no doubt?"

"I don't know."

Pierre asked no further questions. In fact, he felt somewhat ashamed of his attempt to extract information from this child of eleven, whom he thus found alone. It was quite possible that she knew nothing, that Salvat, in a spirit of prudence, had even refrained from sending any tidings of himself. Indeed, there was an expression of truthfulness on the child's fair, gentle and intelligent face, which was grave with the gravity that extreme misery imparts to the young.

"I am sorry that Mamma Theodore isn't here," said Pierre, "I wanted to speak to her."

"But perhaps you would like to wait for her, Monsieur l'Abbe. She has gone to my Uncle Toussaint's in the Rue Marcadet; and she can't stop much longer, for she's been away more than an hour."

Thereupon Celine cleared one of the chairs on which lay a handful of scraps of wood, picked up on some waste ground.

The bare and fireless room was assuredly also a breadless one. Pierre could divine the absence of the bread-winner, the disappearance of the man who represents will and strength in the home, and on whom one still relies even when weeks have gone by without work. He goes out and scours the city, and often ends by bringing back the indispensable crust which keeps death at bay. But with his disappearance comes complete abandonment, the wife and child in danger, destitute of all prop and help.

Pierre, who had sat down and was looking at that poor, little, blue-eyed girl, to whose lips a smile returned in spite of everything, could not keep from questioning her on another point. "So you don't go to school, my child?" said he.

She faintly blushed and answered: "I've no shoes to go in."

He glanced at her feet, and saw that she was wearing a pair of ragged old list-slippers, from which her little toes protruded, red with cold.

"Besides," she continued, "Mamma Theodore says that one doesn't go to school when one's got nothing to eat. Mamma Theodore wanted to work but she couldn't, because her eyes got burning hot and full of water. And so we don't know what to do, for we've had nothing left since yesterday, and if Uncle Toussaint can't lend us twenty sous it'll be all over."

She was still smiling in her unconscious way, but two big tears had gathered in her eyes. And the sight of the child shut up in that bare room, apart from all the happy ones of earth, so upset the priest that he again felt his anger with want and misery awakening. Then, another ten minutes having elapsed, he became impatient, for he had to go to the Grandidier works before returning home.

"I don't know why Mamma Theodore doesn't come back," repeated Celine. "Perhaps she's chatting." Then, an idea occurring to her she continued: "I'll take you to my Uncle Toussaint's, Monsieur l'Abbe, if you like. It's close by, just round the corner."

"But you have no shoes, my child."

"Oh! that don't matter, I walk all the same."

Thereupon he rose from the chair and said simply: "Well, yes, that will be better, take me there. And I'll buy you some shoes."

Celine turned quite pink, and then made haste to follow him after carefully locking the door of the room like a good little housewife, though, truth to tell, there was nothing worth stealing in the place.

In the meantime it had occurred to Madame Theodore that before calling on her brother Toussaint to try to borrow a franc from him, she might first essay her luck with her younger sister, Hortense, who had married little Chretiennot, the clerk, and occupied a flat of four rooms on the Boulevard de Rochechouart. This was quite an affair, however, and the poor woman only made the venture because Celine had been fasting since the previous day.

Eugene Toussaint, the mechanician, a man of fifty, was her stepbrother, by the first marriage contracted by her father. A young dressmaker whom the latter had subsequently wedded, had borne him three daughters, Pauline, Leonie and Hortense. And on his death, his son Eugene, who already had a wife and child of his own, had found himself for a short time with his stepmother and sisters on his hands. The stepmother, fortunately, was an active and intelligent woman, and knew how to get out of difficulties. She returned to her former workroom where her daughter Pauline was already apprenticed, and she next placed Leonie there; so that Hortense, the youngest girl, who was a spoilt child, prettier and more delicate than her sisters, was alone left at school. And, later on,—after Pauline had married Labitte the stonemason, and Leonie, Salvat the journeyman-engineer,—Hortense, while serving as assistant at a confectioner's in the Rue des Martyrs, there became acquainted with Chretiennot, a clerk, who married her. Leonie had died young, only a few weeks after her mother; Pauline, forsaken by her husband, lived with her brother-in-law Salvat, and Hortense alone wore a light silk gown on Sundays, resided in a new house, and ranked as a bourgeoise, at the price, however, of interminable worries and great privation.

Madame Theodore knew that her sister was generally short of money towards the month's end, and therefore felt rather ill at ease in thus venturing to apply for a loan. Chretiennot, moreover, embittered by his own mediocrity, had of late years accused his wife of being the cause of their spoilt life, and had ceased all intercourse with her relatives. Toussaint, no doubt, was a decent workman; but that Madame Theodore who lived in misery with her brother-in-law, and that Salvat who wandered from workshop to workshop like an incorrigible ranter whom no employer would keep; those two, with their want and dirt and rebellion, had ended by incensing the vain little clerk, who was not only a great stickler for the proprieties, but was soured by all the difficulties he encountered in his own life. And thus he had forbidden Hortense to receive her sister.

All the same, as Madame Theodore climbed the carpeted staircase of the house on the Boulevard Rochechouart, she experienced a certain feeling of pride at the thought that she had a relation living in such luxury. The Chretiennot's rooms were on the third floor, and overlooked the courtyard. Their femme-de-menage—a woman who goes out by the day or hour charring, cleaning and cooking—came back every afternoon about four o'clock to see to the dinner, and that day she was already there. She admitted the visitor, though she could not conceal her anxious surprise at her boldness in calling in such slatternly garb. However, on the very threshold of the little salon, Madame Theodore stopped short in wonderment herself, for her sister Hortense was sobbing and crouching on one of the armchairs, upholstered in blue repp, of which she was so proud.

"What is the matter? What has happened to you?" asked Madame Theodore.

Her sister, though scarcely two and thirty, was no longer "the beautiful Hortense" of former days. She retained a doll-like appearance, with a tall slim figure, pretty eyes and fine, fair hair. But she who had once taken so much care of herself, had now come down to dressing-gowns of doubtful cleanliness. Her eyelids, too, were reddening, and blotches were appearing on her skin. She had begun to fade after giving birth to two daughters, one of whom was now nine and the other seven years of age. Very proud and egotistical, she herself had begun to regret her marriage, for she had formerly considered herself a real beauty, worthy of the palaces and equipages of some Prince Charming. And at this moment she was plunged in such despair, that her sister's sudden appearance on the scene did not even astonish her: "Ah! it's you," she gasped. "Ah! if you only knew what a blow's fallen on me in the middle of all our worries!"

Madame Theodore at once thought of the children, Lucienne and Marcelle. "Are your daughters ill?" she asked.

"No, no, our neighbour has taken them for a walk on the Boulevard. But the fact is, my dear, I'm enceinte, and when I told Chretiennot of it after dejeuner, he flew into a most fearful passion, saying the most dreadful, the most cruel things!"

Then she again sobbed. Gentle and indolent by nature, desirous of peace and quietness before anything else, she was incapable of deceiving her husband, as he well knew. But the trouble was that an addition to the family would upset the whole economy of the household.

"Mon Dieu!" said Madame Theodore at last, "you brought up the others, and you'll bring up this one too."

At this an explosion of anger dried the other's eyes; and she rose, exclaiming: "You are good, you are! One can see that our purse isn't yours. How are we to bring up another child when we can scarcely make both ends meet as it is?"

And thereupon, forgetting the bourgeois pride which usually prompted her to silence or falsehood, she freely explained their embarrassment, the horrid pecuniary worries which made their life a perpetual misery. Their rent amounted to 700 francs,* so that out of the 3000 francs** which the husband earned at his office, barely a couple of hundred were left them every month. And how were they to manage with that little sum, provide food and clothes, keep up their rank and so forth? There was the indispensable black coat for monsieur, the new dress which madame must have at regular intervals, under penalty of losing caste, the new boots which the children required almost every month, in fact, all sorts of things that could not possibly be dispensed with. One might strike a dish or two out of the daily menu, and even go without wine; but evenings came when it was absolutely necessary to take a cab. And, apart from all this, one had to reckon with the wastefulness of the children, the disorder in which the discouraged wife left the house, and the despair of the husband, who was convinced that he would never extricate himself from his difficulties, even should his salary some day be raised to as high a figure as 4000 francs. Briefly, one here found the unbearable penury of the petty clerk, with consequences as disastrous as the black want of the artisan: the mock facade and lying luxury; all the disorder and suffering which lie behind intellectual pride at not earning one's living at a bench or on a scaffolding.

* $140.

** $600.

"Well, well," repeated Madame Theodore, "you can't kill the child."

"No, of course not; but it's the end of everything," answered Hortense, sinking into the armchair again. "What will become of us, mon Dieu! What will become of us!" Then she collapsed in her unbuttoned dressing gown, tears once more gushing from her red and swollen eyes.

Much vexed that circumstances should be so unpropitious, Madame Theodore nevertheless ventured to ask for the loan of twenty sons; and this brought her sister's despair and confusion to a climax. "I really haven't a centime in the house," said she, "just now I borrowed ten sous for the children from the servant. I had to get ten francs from the Mont de Piete on a little ring the other day. And it's always the same at the end of the month. However, Chretiennot will be paid to-day, and he's coming back early with the money for dinner. So if I can I will send you something to-morrow."

At this same moment the servant hastened in with a distracted air, being well aware that monsieur was in no wise partial to madame's relatives. "Oh madame, madame!" said she; "here's monsieur coming up the stairs."

"Quick then, quick, go away!" cried Hortense, "I should only have another scene if he met you here. To-morrow, if I can, I promise you."

To avoid Chretiennot who was coming in, Madame Theodore had to hide herself in the kitchen. As he passed, she just caught sight of him, well dressed as usual in a tight-fitting frock-coat. Short and lean, with a thin face and long and carefully tended beard, he had the bearing of one who is both vain and quarrelsome. Fourteen years of office life had withered him, and now the long evening hours which he spent at a neighbouring cafe were finishing him off.

When Madame Theodore had quitted the house she turned with dragging steps towards the Rue Marcadet where the Toussaints resided. Here, again, she had no great expectations, for she well knew what ill-luck and worry had fallen upon her brother's home. During the previous autumn Toussaint, though he was but fifty, had experienced an attack of paralysis which had laid him up for nearly five months. Prior to this mishap he had borne himself bravely, working steadily, abstaining from drink, and bringing up his three children in true fatherly fashion. One of them, a girl, was now married to a carpenter, with whom she had gone to Le Havre, while of the others, both boys—one a soldier, had been killed in Tonquin, and the other Charles, after serving his time in the army, had become a working mechanician. Still, Toussaint's long illness had exhausted the little money which he had in the Savings Bank, and now that he had been set on his legs again, he had to begin life once more without a copper before him.

Madame Theodore found her sister-in-law alone in the cleanly kept room which she and her husband occupied. Madame Toussaint was a portly woman, whose corpulence increased in spite of everything, whether it were worry or fasting. She had a round puffy face with bright little eyes; and was a very worthy woman, whose only faults were an inclination for gossiping and a fondness for good cheer. Before Madame Theodore even opened her mouth she understood the object of her visit. "You've come on us at a bad moment, my dear," she said, "we're stumped. Toussaint wasn't able to go back to the works till the day before yesterday, and he'll have to ask for an advance this evening."

As she spoke, she looked at the other with no great sympathy, hurt as she felt by her slovenly appearance. "And Salvat," she added, "is he still doing nothing?"

Madame Theodore doubtless foresaw the question, for she quietly lied: "He isn't in Paris, a friend has taken him off for some work over Belgium way, and I'm waiting for him to send us something."

Madame Toussaint still remained distrustful, however: "Ah!" she said, "it's just as well that he shouldn't be in Paris; for with all these bomb affairs we couldn't help thinking of him, and saying that he was quite mad enough to mix himself up in them."

The other did not even blink. If she knew anything she kept it to herself.

"But you, my dear, can't you find any work?" continued Madame Toussaint.

"Well, what would you have me do with my poor eyes? It's no longer possible for me to sew."

"That's true. A seamstress gets done for. When Toussaint was laid up here I myself wanted to go back to my old calling as a needlewoman. But there! I spoilt everything and did no good. Charring's about the only thing that one can always do. Why don't you get some jobs of that kind?"

"I'm trying, but I can't find any."

Little by little Madame Toussaint was softening at sight of the other's miserable appearance. She made her sit down, and told her that she would give her something if Toussaint should come home with money. Then, yielding to her partiality for gossiping, since there was somebody to listen to her, she started telling stories. The one affair, however, on which she invariably harped was the sorry business of her son Charles and the servant girl at a wine shop over the way. Before going into the army Charles had been a most hard-working and affectionate son, invariably bringing his pay home to his mother. And certainly he still worked and showed himself good-natured; but military service, while sharpening his wits, had taken away some of his liking for ordinary manual toil. It wasn't that he regretted army life, for he spoke of his barracks as a prison. Only his tools had seemed to him rather heavy when, on quitting the service, he had been obliged to take them in hand once more.

"And so, my dear," continued Madame Toussaint, "it's all very well for Charles to be kind-hearted, he can do no more for us. I knew that he wasn't in a hurry to get married, as it costs money to keep a wife. And he was always very prudent, too, with girls. But what would you have? There was that moment of folly with that Eugenie over the road, a regular baggage who's already gone off with another man, and left her baby behind. Charles has put it out to nurse, and pays for it every month. And a lot of expense it is too, perfect ruination. Yes, indeed, every possible misfortune has fallen on us."

In this wise Madame Toussaint rattled on for a full half hour. Then seeing that waiting and anxiety had made her sister-in-law turn quite pale, she suddenly stopped short. "You're losing patience, eh?" she exclaimed. "The fact is, that Toussaint won't be back for some time. Shall we go to the works together? I'll easily find out if he's likely to bring any money home."

They then decided to go down, but at the bottom of the stairs they lingered for another quarter of an hour chatting with a neighbour who had lately lost a child. And just as they were at last leaving the house they heard a call: "Mamma! mamma!"

It came from little Celine, whose face was beaming with delight. She was wearing a pair of new shoes and devouring a cake. "Mamma," she resumed, "Monsieur l'Abbe who came the other day wants to see you. Just look! he bought me all this!"

On seeing the shoes and the cake, Madame Theodore understood matters. And when Pierre, who was behind the child, accosted her she began to tremble and stammer thanks. Madame Toussaint on her side had quickly drawn near, not indeed to ask for anything herself, but because she was well pleased at such a God-send for her sister-in-law, whose circumstances were worse than her own. And when she saw the priest slip ten francs into Madame Theodore's hand she explained to him that she herself would willingly have lent something had she been able. Then she promptly started on the stories of Toussaint's attack and her son Charles's ill-luck.

But Celine broke in: "I say, mamma, the factory where papa used to work is here in this street, isn't it? Monsieur l'Abbe has some business there."*

* Although the children of the French peasantry almost
invariably address their parents as "father" and "mother,"
those of the working classes of Paris, and some other large
cities, usually employ the terms "papa" and "mamma."—Trans.

"The Grandidier factory," resumed Madame Toussaint; "well, we were just going there, and we can show Monsieur l'Abbe the way."

It was only a hundred steps off. Escorted by the two women and the child, Pierre slackened his steps and tried to extract some information about Salvat from Madame Theodore. But she at once became very prudent. She had not seen him again, she declared; he must have gone with a mate to Belgium, where there was a prospect of some work. From what she said, it appeared to the priest that Salvat had not dared to return to the Rue des Saules since his crime, in which all had collapsed, both his past life of toil and hope, and his recent existence with its duties towards the woman and the child.

"There's the factory, Monsieur l'Abbe," suddenly said Madame Toussaint, "my sister-in-law won't have to wait now, since you've been kind enough to help her. Thank you for her and for us."

Madame Theodore and Celine likewise poured forth their thanks, standing beside Madame Toussaint in the everlasting mud of that populous district, amidst the jostling of the passers-by. And lingering there as if to see Pierre enter, they again chatted together and repeated that, after all, some priests were very kind.

The Grandidier works covered an extensive plot of ground. Facing the street there was only a brick building with narrow windows and a great archway, through which one espied a long courtyard. But, in the rear, came a suite of habitations, workshops, and sheds, above whose never ending roofs arose the two lofty chimneys of the generators. From the very threshold one detected the rumbling and quivering of machinery, all the noise and bustle of work. Black water flowed by at one's feet, and up above white vapour spurted from a slender pipe with a regular strident puff, as if it were the very breath of that huge, toiling hive.

Bicycles were now the principal output of the works. When Grandidier had taken them on leaving the Dijon Arts and Trades School, they were declining under bad management, slowly building some little motive engines by the aid of antiquated machinery. Foreseeing the future, however, he had induced his elder brother, one of the managers of the Bon Marche, to finance him, on the promise that he would supply that great emporium with excellent bicycles at 150 francs apiece. And now quite a big venture was in progress, for the Bon Marche was already bringing out the new popular machine "La Lisette," the "Bicycle for the Multitude," as the advertisements asserted. Nevertheless, Grandidier was still in all the throes of a great struggle, for his new machinery had cast a heavy burden of debt on him. At the same time each month brought its effort, the perfecting or simplifying of some part of the manufacture, which meant a saving in the future. He was ever on the watch; and even now was thinking of reverting to the construction of little motors, for he thought he could divine in the near future the triumph of the motor-car.

On asking if M. Thomas Froment were there, Pierre was led by an old workman to a little shed, where he found the young fellow in the linen jacket of a mechanician, his hands black with filings. He was adjusting some piece of mechanism, and nobody would have suspected him to be a former pupil of the Lycee Condorcet, one of the three clever Froments who had there rendered the name famous. But his only desire had been to act as his father's faithful servant, the arm that forges, the embodiment of the manual toil by which conceptions are realised. And, a giant of three and twenty, ever attentive and courageous, he was likewise a man of patient, silent and sober nature.

On catching sight of Pierre he quivered with anxiety and sprang forward. "Father is no worse?" he asked.

"No, no. But he read in the papers that story of a bradawl found in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, and it made him anxious, because the police may make a perquisition here."

Thomas, his own anxiety allayed, began to smile. "Tell him he may sleep quietly," he responded. "To begin with, I've unfortunately not yet hit on our little motor such as I want it to be. In fact, I haven't yet put it together. I'm keeping the pieces at our house, and nobody here knows exactly what I come to do at the factory. So the police may search, it will find nothing. Our secret runs no risk."

Pierre promised to repeat these words to Guillaume, so as to dissipate his fears. However, when he tried to sound Thomas, and ascertain the position of affairs, what the factory people thought of the discovery of the bradawl, and whether there was as yet any suspicion of Salvat, he once more found the young man taciturn, and elicited merely a "yes" or a "no" in answer to his inquiries. The police had not been there as yet? No. But the men must surely have mentioned Salvat? Yes, of course, on account of his Anarchist opinions. But what had Grandidier, the master, said, on returning from the investigating magistrate's? As for that Thomas knew nothing. He had not seen Grandidier that day.

"But here he comes!" the young man added. "Ah! poor fellow, his wife, I fancy, had another attack this morning."

He alluded to a frightful story which Guillaume had already recounted to Pierre. Grandidier, falling in love with a very beautiful girl, had married her; but for five years now she had been insane: the result of puerperal fever and the death of an infant son. Her husband, with his ardent affection for her, had been unwilling to place her in an asylum, and had accordingly kept her with him in a little pavilion, whose windows, overlooking the courtyard of the factory, always remained closed. She was never seen; and never did he speak of her to anybody. It was said that she was usually like a child, very gentle and very sad, and still beautiful, with regal golden hair. At times, however, attacks of frantic madness came upon her, and he then had to struggle with her, and often hold her for hours in his arms to prevent her from splitting her head against the walls. Fearful shrieks would ring out for a time, and then deathlike silence would fall once more.

Grandidier came into the shed where Thomas was working. A handsome man of forty, with an energetic face, he had a dark and heavy moustache, brush-like hair and clear eyes. He was very partial to Thomas, and during the young fellow's apprenticeship there, had treated him like a son. And he now let him return thither whenever it pleased him, and placed his appliances at his disposal. He knew that he was trying to devise a new motor, a question in which he himself was extremely interested; still he evinced the greatest discretion, never questioning Thomas, but awaiting the result of his endeavours.

"This is my uncle, Abbe Froment, who looked in to wish me good day," said the young man, introducing Pierre.

An exchange of polite remarks ensued. Then Grandidier sought to cast off the sadness which made people think him stern and harsh, and in a bantering tone exclaimed: "I didn't tell you, Thomas, of my business with the investigating magistrate. If I hadn't enjoyed a good reputation we should have had all the spies of the Prefecture here. The magistrate wanted me to explain the presence of that bradawl in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, and I at once realised that, in his opinion, the culprit must have worked here. For my part I immediately thought of Salvat. But I don't denounce people. The magistrate has my hiring-book, and as for Salvat I simply answered that he worked here for nearly three months last autumn, and then disappeared. They can look for him themselves! Ah! that magistrate! you can picture him a little fellow with fair hair and cat-like eyes, very careful of his appearance, a society man evidently, but quite frisky at being mixed up in this affair."

"Isn't he Monsieur Amadieu?" asked Pierre.

"Yes, that's his name. Ah! he's certainly delighted with the present which those Anarchists have made him, with that crime of theirs."

The priest listened in deep anxiety. As his brother had feared, the true scent, the first conducting wire, had now been found. And he looked at Thomas to see if he also were disturbed. But the young man was either ignorant of the ties which linked Salvat to his father, or else he possessed great power of self-control, for he merely smiled at Grandidier's sketch of the magistrate.

Then, as Grandidier went to look at the piece of mechanism which Thomas was finishing, and they began to speak about it, Pierre drew near to an open doorway which communicated with a long workshop where engine lathes were rumbling, and the beams of press-drills falling quickly and rhythmically. Leather gearing spun along with a continuous gliding, and there was ceaseless bustle and activity amidst the odoriferous dampness of all the steam. Scores of perspiring workmen, grimy with dust and filings, were still toiling. Still this was the final effort of the day. And as three men approached a water-tap near Pierre to wash their hands, he listened to their talk, and became particularly interested in it when he heard one of them, a tall, ginger-haired fellow, call another Toussaint, and the third Charles.

Toussaint, a big, square-shouldered man with knotty arms, only showed his fifty years on his round, scorched face, which besides being roughened and wrinkled by labour, bristled with grey hairs, which nowadays he was content to shave off once a week. It was only his right arm that was affected by paralysis, and moved rather sluggishly. As for Charles, a living portrait of his father, he was now in all the strength of his six and twentieth year, with splendid muscles distending his white skin, and a full face barred by a heavy black moustache. The three men, like their employer, were speaking of the explosion at the Duvillard mansion, of the bradawl found there, and of Salvat, whom they all now suspected.

"Why, only a brigand would do such a thing!" said Toussaint. "That Anarchism disgusts me. I'll have none of it. But all the same it's for the bourgeois to settle matters. If the others want to blow them up, it's their concern. It's they who brought it about."

This indifference was undoubtedly the outcome of a life of want and social injustice; it was the indifference of an old toiler, who, weary of struggling and hoping for improvements, was now quite ready to tolerate the crumbling of a social system, which threatened him with hunger in his impotent old age.

"Well, you know," rejoined Charles, "I've heard the Anarchists talking, and they really say some very true and sensible things. And just take yourself, father; you've been working for thirty years, and isn't it abominable that you should have had to pass through all that you did pass through recently, liable to go off like some old horse that's slaughtered at the first sign of illness? And, of course, it makes me think of myself, and I can't help feeling that it won't be at all amusing to end like that. And may the thunder of God kill me if I'm wrong, but one feels half inclined to join in their great flare-up if it's really to make everybody happy!"

He certainly lacked the flame of enthusiasm, and if he had come to these views it was solely from impatience to lead a less toilsome life, for obligatory military service had given him ideas of equality among all men—a desire to struggle, raise himself and obtain his legitimate share of life's enjoyments. It was, in fact, the inevitable step which carries each generation a little more forward. There was the father, who, deceived in his hope of a fraternal republic, had grown sceptical and contemptuous; and there was the son advancing towards a new faith, and gradually yielding to ideas of violence, since political liberty had failed to keep its promises.

Nevertheless, as the big, ginger-haired fellow grew angry, and shouted that if Salvat were guilty, he ought to be caught and guillotined at once, without waiting for judges, Toussaint ended by endorsing his opinion. "Yes, yes, he may have married one of my sisters, but I renounce him.... And yet, you know, it would astonish me to find him guilty, for he isn't wicked at heart. I'm sure he wouldn't kill a fly."

"But what would you have?" put in Charles. "When a man's driven to extremities he goes mad."

They had now washed themselves; but Toussaint, on perceiving his employer, lingered there in order to ask him for an advance. As it happened, Grandidier, after cordially shaking hands with Pierre, approached the old workman of his own accord, for he held him in esteem. And, after listening to him, he gave him a line for the cashier on a card. As a rule, he was altogether against the practice of advancing money, and his men disliked him, and said he was over rigid, though in point of fact he had a good heart. But he had his position as an employer to defend, and to him concessions meant ruin. With such keen competition on all sides, with the capitalist system entailing a terrible and incessant struggle, how could one grant the demands of the workers, even when they were legitimate?

Sudden compassion came upon Pierre when, after quitting Thomas, he saw Grandidier, who had finished his round, crossing the courtyard in the direction of the closed pavilion, where all the grief of his heart-tragedy awaited him. Here was that man waging the battle of life, defending his fortune with the risk that his business might melt away amidst the furious warfare between capital and labour; and at the same time, in lieu of evening repose, finding naught but anguish it his hearth: a mad wife, an adored wife, who had sunk back into infancy, and was for ever dead to love! How incurable was his secret despair! Even on the days when he triumphed in his workshops, disaster awaited him at home. And could any more unhappy man, any man more deserving of pity, be found even among the poor who died of hunger, among those gloomy workers, those vanquished sons of labour who hated and who envied him?

When Pierre found himself in the street again he was astonished to see Madame Toussaint and Madame Theodore still there with little Celine. With their feet in the mud, like bits of wreckage against which beat the ceaseless flow of wayfarers, they had lingered there, still and ever chatting, loquacious and doleful, lulling their wretchedness to rest beneath a deluge of tittle-tattle. And when Toussaint, followed by his son, came out, delighted with the advance he had secured, he also found them on the same spot. Then he told Madame Theodore the story of the bradawl, and the idea which had occurred to him and all his mates that Salvat might well be the culprit. She, however, though turning very pale, began to protest, concealing both what she knew and what she really thought.

"I tell you I haven't seen him for several days," said she. "He must certainly be in Belgium. And as for a bomb, that's humbug. You say yourself that he's very gentle and wouldn't harm a fly!"

A little later as Pierre journeyed back to Neuilly in a tramcar he fell into a deep reverie. All the stir and bustle of that working-class district, the buzzing of the factory, the overflowing activity of that hive of labour, seemed to have lingered within him. And for the first time, amidst his worries, he realised the necessity of work. Yes, it was fatal, but it also gave health and strength. In effort which sustains and saves, he at last found a solid basis on which all might be reared. Was this, then, the first gleam of a new faith? But ah! what mockery! Work an uncertainty, work hopeless, work always ending in injustice! And then want ever on the watch for the toiler, strangling him as soon as slack times came round, and casting him into the streets like a dead dog immediately old age set in.

On reaching Neuilly, Pierre found Bertheroy at Guillaume's bedside. The old savant had just dressed the injured wrist, and was not yet certain that no complications would arise. "The fact is," he said to Guillaume, "you don't keep quiet. I always find you in a state of feverish emotion which is the worst possible thing for you. You must calm yourself, my dear fellow, and not allow anything to worry you."

A few minutes later, though, just as he was going away, he said with his pleasant smile: "Do you know that a newspaper writer came to interview me about that explosion? Those reporters imagine that scientific men know everything! I told the one who called on me that it would be very kind of him to enlighten me as to what powder was employed. And, by the way, I am giving a lesson on explosives at my laboratory to-morrow. There will be just a few persons present. You might come as well, Pierre, so as to give an account of it to Guillaume; it would interest him."

At a glance from his brother, Pierre accepted the invitation. Then, Bertheroy having gone, he recounted all he had learnt during the afternoon, how Salvat was suspected, and how the investigating magistrate had been put on the right scent. And at this news, intense fever again came over Guillaume, who, with his head buried in the pillow, and his eyes closed, stammered as if in a kind of nightmare: "Ah! then, this is the end! Salvat arrested, Salvat interrogated! Ah! that so much toil and so much hope should crumble!"

IV. CULTURE AND HOPE

ON the morrow, punctually at one o'clock, Pierre reached the Rue d'Ulm, where Bertheroy resided in a fairly large house, which the State had placed at his disposal, in order that he might install in it a laboratory for study and research. Thus the whole first floor had been transformed into one spacious apartment, where, from time to time, the illustrious chemist was fond of receiving a limited number of pupils and admirers, before whom he made experiments, and explained his new discoveries and theories.

For these occasions a few chairs were set out before the long and massive table, which was covered with jars and appliances. In the rear one saw the furnace, while all around were glass cases, full of vials and specimens. The persons present were, for the most part, fellow savants, with a few young men, and even a lady or two, and, of course, an occasional journalist. The whole made up a kind of family gathering, the visitors chatting with the master in all freedom.

Directly Bertheroy perceived Pierre he came forward, pressed his hand and seated him on a chair beside Guillaume's son Francois, who had been one of the first arrivals. The young man was completing his third year at the Ecole Normale, close by, so he only had a few steps to take to call upon his master Bertheroy, whom he regarded as one of the firmest minds of the age. Pierre was delighted to meet his nephew, for he had been greatly impressed in his favour on the occasion of his visit to Montmartre. Francois, on his side, greeted his uncle with all the cordial expansiveness of youth. He was, moreover, well pleased to obtain some news of his father.

However, Bertheroy began. He spoke in a familiar and sober fashion, but frequently employed some very happy expressions. At first he gave an account of his own extensive labours and investigations with regard to explosive substances, and related with a laugh that he sometimes manipulated powders which would have blown up the entire district. But, said he, in order to reassure his listeners, he was always extremely prudent. At last he turned to the subject of that explosion in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, which, for some days, had filled Paris with dismay. The remnants of the bomb had been carefully examined by experts, and one fragment had been brought to him, in order that he might give his opinion on it. The bomb appeared to have been prepared in a very rudimentary fashion; it had been charged with small pieces of iron, and fired by means of a match, such as a child might have devised. The extraordinary part of the affair was the formidable power of the central cartridge, which, although it must have been a small one, had wrought as much havoc as any thunderbolt. And the question was this: What incalculable power of destruction might one not arrive at if the charge were increased ten, twenty or a hundredfold. Embarrassment began, and divergencies of opinion clouded the issue directly one tried to specify what explosive had been employed. Of the three experts who had been consulted, one pronounced himself in favour of dynamite pure and simple; but the two others, although they did not agree together, believed in some combination of explosive matters. He, Bertheroy, had modestly declined to adjudicate, for the fragment submitted to him bore traces of so slight a character, that analysis became impossible. Thus he was unwilling to make any positive pronouncement. But his opinion was that one found oneself in presence of some unknown powder, some new explosive, whose power exceeded anything that had hitherto been dreamt of. He could picture some unknown savant, or some ignorant but lucky inventor, discovering the formula of this explosive under mysterious conditions. And this brought him to the point he wished to reach, the question of all the explosives which are so far unknown, and of the coming discoveries which he could foresee. In the course of his investigations he himself had found cause to suspect the existence of several such explosives, though he had lacked time and opportunity to prosecute his studies in that direction. However, he indicated the field which should be explored, and the best way of proceeding. In his opinion it was there that lay the future. And in a broad and eloquent peroration, he declared that explosives had hitherto been degraded by being employed in idiotic schemes of vengeance and destruction; whereas it was in them possibly that lay the liberating force which science was seeking, the lever which would change the face of the world, when they should have been so domesticated and subdued as to be only the obedient servants of man.

Throughout this familiar discourse Pierre could feel that Francois was growing impassioned, quivering at thought of the vast horizon which the master opened up. He himself had become extremely interested, for he could not do otherwise than notice certain allusions, and connect what he heard with what he had guessed of Guillaume's anxiety regarding that secret which he feared to see at the mercy of an investigating magistrate. And so as he, Pierre, before going off with Francois, approached Bertheroy to wish him good day, he pointedly remarked: "Guillaume will be very sorry that he was unable to hear you unfold those admirable ideas."

The old savant smiled. "Pooh!" said he; "just give him a summary of what I said. He will understand. He knows more about the matter than I do."

In presence of the illustrious chemist, Francois preserved the silent gravity of a respectful pupil, but when he and Pierre had taken a few steps down the street in silence, he remarked: "What a pity it is that a man of such broad intelligence, free from all superstition, and anxious for the sole triumph of truth, should have allowed himself to be classified, ticketed, bound round with titles and academical functions! How greatly our affection for him would increase if he took less State pay, and freed himself from all the grand cordons which tie his hands."

"What would you have!" rejoined Pierre, in a conciliatory spirit. "A man must live! At the same time I believe that he does not regard himself as tied by anything."

Then, as they had reached the entrance of the Ecole Normale, the priest stopped, thinking that his companion was going back to the college. But Francois, raising his eyes and glancing at the old place, remarked: "No, no, to-day's Thursday, and I'm at liberty! Oh! we have a deal of liberty, perhaps too much. But for my own part I'm well pleased at it, for it often enables me to go to Montmartre and work at my old little table. It's only there that I feel any real strength and clearness of mind."

His preliminary examinations had entitled him to admission at either the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale,* and he had chosen the latter, entering its scientific section with No. 1 against his name. His father had wished him to make sure of an avocation, that of professor, even if circumstances should allow him to remain independent and follow his own bent on leaving the college. Francois, who was very precocious, was now preparing for his last examination there, and the only rest he took was in walking to and from Montmartre, or in strolling through the Luxembourg gardens.

* The purposes of the Ecole Normale have been referred to on
p. 197. At the Ecole Polytechnique young men receive much
of the preliminary training which they require to become
either artillery officers, or military, naval or civil
engineers.—Trans.

From force of habit he now turned towards the latter, accompanied by Pierre and chatting with him. One found the mildness of springtime there that February afternoon; for pale sunshine streamed between the trees, which were still leafless. It was indeed one of those first fine days which draw little green gems from the branches of the lilac bushes.

The Ecole Normale was still the subject of conversation and Pierre remarked: "I must own that I hardly like the spirit that prevails there. Excellent work is done, no doubt, and the only way to form professors is to teach men the trade by cramming them with the necessary knowledge. But the worst is that although all the students are trained for the teaching profession, many of them don't remain in it, but go out into the world, take to journalism, or make it their business to control the arts, literature and society. And those who do this are for the most part unbearable. After swearing by Voltaire they have gone back to spirituality and mysticism, the last drawing-room craze. Now that a firm faith in science is regarded as brutish and inelegant, they fancy that they rid themselves of their caste by feigning amiable doubt, and ignorance, and innocence. What they most fear is that they may carry a scent of the schools about with them, so they put on extremely Parisian airs, venture on somersaults and slang, and assume all the grace of dancing bears in their eager desire to please. From that desire spring the sarcastic shafts which they aim at science, they who pretend that they know everything, but who go back to the belief of the humble, the naive idealism of Biblical legends, just because they think the latter to be more distinguished."

Francois began to laugh: "The portrait is perhaps a little overdrawn," said he, "still there's truth in it, a great deal of truth."

"I have known several of them," continued Pierre, who was growing animated. "And among them all I have noticed that a fear of being duped leads them to reaction against the entire effort, the whole work of the century. Disgust with liberty, distrust of science, denial of the future, that is what they now profess. And they have such a horror of the commonplace that they would rather believe in nothing or the incredible. It may of course be commonplace to say that two and two make four, yet it's true enough; and it is far less foolish for a man to say and repeat it than to believe, for instance, in the miracles of Lourdes."

Francois glanced at the priest in astonishment. The other noticed it and strove to restrain himself. Nevertheless, grief and anger carried him away whenever he spoke of the educated young people of the time, such as, in his despair, he imagined them to be. In the same way as he had pitied the toilers dying of hunger in the districts of misery and want, so here he overflowed with contempt for the young minds that lacked bravery in the presence of knowledge, and harked back to the consolation of deceptive spirituality, the promise of an eternity of happiness in death, which last was longed for and exalted as the very sum of life. Was not the cowardly thought of refusing to live for the sake of living so as to discharge one's simple duty in being and making one's effort, equivalent to absolute assassination of life? However, the Ego was always the mainspring; each one sought personal happiness. And Pierre was grieved to think that those young people, instead of discarding the past and marching on to the truths of the future, were relapsing into shadowy metaphysics through sheer weariness and idleness, due in part perhaps to the excessive exertion of the century, which had been overladen with human toil.

However, Francois had begun to smile again. "But you are mistaken," said he; "we are not all like that at the Ecole Normale. You only seem to know the Normalians of the Section of Letters, and your opinions would surely change if you knew those of the Section of Sciences. It is quite true that the reaction against Positivism is making itself felt among our literary fellow-students, and that they, like others, are haunted by the idea of that famous bankruptcy of science. This is perhaps due to their masters, the neo-spiritualists and dogmatical rhetoricians into whose hands they have fallen. And it is still more due to fashion, the whim of the times which, as you have very well put it, regards scientific truth as bad taste, something graceless and altogether too brutal for light and distinguished minds. Consequently, a young fellow of any shrewdness who desires to please is perforce won over to the new spirit."

"The new spirit!" interrupted Pierre, unable to restrain himself. "Oh! that is no mere innocent, passing fashion, it is a tactical device and a terrible one, an offensive return of the powers of darkness against those of light, of servitude against free thought, truth and justice."

Then, as the young man again looked at him with growing astonishment, he relapsed into silence. The figure of Monseigneur Martha had risen before his eyes, and he fancied he could again hear the prelate at the Madeleine, striving to win Paris over to the policy of Rome, to that spurious neo-Catholicism which, with the object of destroying democracy and science, accepted such portions of them as it could adapt to its own views. This was indeed the supreme struggle. Thence came all the poison poured forth to the young. Pierre knew what efforts were being made in religious circles to help on this revival of mysticism, in the mad hope of hastening the rout of science. Monseigneur Martha, who was all-powerful at the Catholic University, said to his intimates, however, that three generations of devout and docile pupils would be needed before the Church would again be absolute sovereign of France.

"Well, as for the Ecole Normale," continued Francois, "I assure you that you are mistaken. There are a few narrow bigots there, no doubt. But even in the Section of Letters the majority of the students are sceptics at bottom—sceptics of discreet and good-natured average views. Of course they are professors before everything else, though they are a trifle ashamed of it; and, as professors, they judge things with no little pedantic irony, devoured by a spirit of criticism, and quite incapable of creating anything themselves. I should certainly be astonished to see the man of genius whom we await come out of their ranks. To my thinking, indeed, it would be preferable that some barbarian genius, neither well read nor endowed with critical faculty, or power of weighing and shading things, should come and open the next century with a hatchet stroke, sending up a fine flare of truth and reality.... But, as for my comrades of the Scientific Section, I assure you that neo-Catholicism and Mysticism and Occultism, and every other branch of the fashionable phantasmagoria trouble them very little indeed. They are not making a religion of science, they remain open to doubt on many points; but they are mostly men of very clear and firm minds, whose passion is the acquirement of certainty, and who are ever absorbed in the investigations which continue throughout the whole vast field of human knowledge. They haven't flinched, they have remained Positivists, or Evolutionists, or Determinists, and have set their faith in observation and experiment to help on the final conquest of the world."

Francois himself was growing excited, as he thus confessed his faith while strolling along the quiet sunlit garden paths. "The young indeed!" he resumed. "Do people know them? It makes us laugh when we see all sorts of apostles fighting for us, trying to attract us, and saying that we are white or black or grey, according to the hue which they require for the triumph of their particular ideas! The young, the real ones, why, they're in the schools, the laboratories and the libraries. It's they who work and who'll bring to-morrow to the world. It's not the young fellows of dinner and supper clubs, manifestoes and all sorts of extravagances. The latter make a great deal of noise, no doubt; in fact, they alone are heard. But if you knew of the ceaseless efforts and passionate striving of the others, those who remain silent, absorbed in their tasks. And I know many of them: they are with their century, they have rejected none of its hopes, but are marching on to the coming century, resolved to pursue the work of their forerunners, ever going towards more light and more equity. And just speak to them of the bankruptcy of science. They'll shrug their shoulders at the mere idea, for they know well enough that science has never before inflamed so many hearts or achieved greater conquests! It is only if the schools, laboratories and libraries were closed, and the social soil radically changed, that one would have cause to fear a fresh growth of error such as weak hearts and narrow minds hold so dear!"

At this point Francois's fine flow of eloquence was interrupted. A tall young fellow stopped to shake hands with him; and Pierre was surprised to recognise Baron Duvillard's son Hyacinthe, who bowed to him in very correct style. "What! you here in our old quarter," exclaimed Francois.

"My dear fellow, I'm going to Jonas's, over yonder, behind the Observatory. Don't you know Jonas? Ah! my dear fellow, he's a delightful sculptor, who has succeeded in doing away with matter almost entirely. He has carved a figure of Woman, no bigger than the finger, and entirely soul, free from all baseness of form, and yet complete. All Woman, indeed, in her essential symbolism! Ah! it's grand, it's overpowering. A perfect scheme of aesthetics, a real religion!"

Francois smiled as he looked at Hyacinthe, buttoned up in his long pleated frock-coat, with his made-up face, and carefully cropped hair and beard. "And yourself?" said he, "I thought you were working, and were going to publish a little poem, shortly?"

"Oh! the task of creating is so distasteful to me, my dear fellow! A single line often takes me weeks.... Still, yes, I have a little poem on hand, 'The End of Woman.' And you see, I'm not so exclusive as some people pretend, since I admire Jonas, who still believes in Woman. His excuse is sculpture, which, after all, is at best such a gross materialistic art. But in poetry, good heavens, how we've been overwhelmed with Woman, always Woman! It's surely time to drive her out of the temple, and cleanse it a little. Ah! if we were all pure and lofty enough to do without Woman, and renounce all those horrid sexual questions, so that the last of the species might die childless, eh? The world would then at least finish in a clean and proper manner!"

Thereupon, Hyacinthe walked off with his languid air, well pleased with the effect which he had produced on the others.

"So you know him?" said Pierre to Francois.

"He was my school-fellow at Condorcet, we were in the same classes together. Such a funny fellow he was! A perfect dunce! And he was always making a parade of Father Duvillard's millions, while pretending to disdain them, and act the revolutionist, for ever saying that he'd use his cigarette to fire the cartridge which was to blow up the world! He was Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and Tolstoi, and Ibsen, rolled into one! And you can see what he has become with it all: a humbug with a diseased mind!"

"It's a terrible symptom," muttered Pierre, "when through ennui or lassitude, or the contagion of destructive fury, the sons of the happy and privileged ones start doing the work of the demolishers."

Francois had resumed his walk, going down towards the ornamental water, where some children were sailing their boats. "That fellow is simply grotesque," he replied; "but how would you have sane people give any heed to that mysticism, that awakening of spirituality which is alleged by the same doctrinaires who started the bankruptcy of science cry, when after so brief an evolution it produces such insanity, both in art and literature? A few years of influence have sufficed; and now Satanism, Occultism and other absurdities are flourishing; not to mention that, according to some accounts, the Cities of the Plains are reconciled with new Rome. Isn't the tree judged by its fruits? And isn't it evident that, instead of a renascence, a far-spreading social movement bringing back the past, we are simply witnessing a transitory reaction, which many things explain? The old world would rather not die, and is struggling in a final convulsion, reviving for a last hour before it is swept away by the overflowing river of human knowledge, whose waters ever increase. And yonder, in the future, is the new world, which the real young ones will bring into existence, those who work, those who are not known, who are not heard. And yet, just listen! Perhaps you will hear them, for we are among them, in their 'quarter.' This deep silence is that of the labour of all the young fellows who are leaning over their work-tables, and day by day carrying forward the conquest of truth."

So saying Francois waved his hand towards all the day-schools and colleges and high schools beyond the Luxembourg garden, towards the Faculties of Law and Medicine, the Institute and its five Academies, the innumerable libraries and museums which made up the broad domain of intellectual labour. And Pierre, moved by it all, shaken in his theories of negation, thought that he could indeed hear a low but far-spreading murmur of the work of thousands of active minds, rising from laboratories, studies and class, reading and lecture rooms. It was not like the jerky, breathless trepidation, the loud clamour of factories where manual labour toils and chafes. But here, too, there were sighs of weariness, efforts as killing, exertion as fruitful in its results. Was it indeed true that the cultured young were still and ever in their silent forge, renouncing no hope, relinquishing no conquest, but in full freedom of mind forging the truth and justice of to-morrow with the invincible hammers of observation and experiment?

Francois, however, had raised his eyes to the palace clock to ascertain the time. "I'm going to Montmartre," he said; "will you come part of the way with me?"

Pierre assented, particularly as the young man added that on his way he meant to call for his brother Antoine at the Museum of the Louvre. That bright afternoon the Louvre picture galleries were steeped in warm and dignified quietude, which one particularly noticed on coming from the tumult and scramble of the streets. The majority of the few people one found there were copyists working in deep silence, which only the wandering footsteps of an occasional tourist disturbed. Pierre and Francois found Antoine at the end of the gallery assigned to the Primitive masters. With scrupulous, almost devout care he was making a drawing of a figure by Mantegna. The Primitives did not impassion him by reason of any particular mysticism and ideality, such as fashion pretends to find in them, but on the contrary, and justifiably enough, by reason of the sincerity of their ingenuous realism, their respect and modesty in presence of nature, and the minute fidelity with which they sought to transcribe it. He spent days of hard work in copying and studying them, in order to learn strictness and probity of drawing from them—all that lofty distinction of style which they owe to their candour as honest artists.

Pierre was struck by the pure glow which a sitting of good hard work had set in Antoine's light blue eyes. It imparted warmth and even feverishness to his fair face, which was usually all dreaminess and gentleness. His lofty forehead now truly looked like a citadel armed for the conquest of truth and beauty. He was only eighteen, and his story was simply this: as he had grown disgusted with classical studies and been mastered by a passion for drawing, his father had let him leave the Lycee Condorcet when he was in the third class there. Some little time had then elapsed while he felt his way and the deep originality within him was being evolved. He had tried etching on copper, but had soon come to wood engraving, and had attached himself to it in spite of the discredit into which it had fallen, lowered as it had been to the level of a mere trade. Was there not here an entire art to restore and enlarge? For his own part he dreamt of engraving his own drawings, of being at once the brain which conceives and the hand which executes, in such wise as to obtain new effects of great intensity both as regards perception and touch. To comply with the wishes of his father, who desired each of his sons to have a trade, he earned his bread like other engravers by working for the illustrated newspapers. But, in addition to this current work, he had already engraved several blocks instinct with wonderful power and life. They were simply copies of real things, scenes of everyday existence, but they were accentuated, elevated so to say, by the essential line, with a maestria which on the part of so young a lad fairly astonished one.

"Do you want to engrave that?" Francois asked him, as he placed his copy of Mantegna's figure in his portfolio.

"Oh! no, that's merely a dip into innocence, a good lesson to teach one to be modest and sincere. Life is very different nowadays."

Then, while walking along the streets—for Pierre, who felt growing sympathy for the two young fellows, went with them in the direction of Montmartre, forgetful of all else,—Antoine, who was beside him, spoke expansively of his artistic dreams.

"Colour is certainly a power, a sovereign source of charm, and one may, indeed, say that without colour nothing can be completely represented. Yet, singularly enough, it isn't indispensable to me. It seems to me that I can picture life as intensely and definitely with mere black and white, and I even fancy that I shall be able to do so in a more essential manner, without any of the dupery which lies in colour. But what a task it is! I should like to depict the Paris of to-day in a few scenes, a few typical figures, which would serve as testimony for all time. And I should like to do it with great fidelity and candour, for an artist only lives by reason of his candour, his humility and steadfast belief in Nature, which is ever beautiful. I've already done a few figures, I will show them to you. But ah! if I only dared to tackle my blocks with the graver, at the outset, without drawing my subject beforehand. For that generally takes away one's fire. However, what I do with the pencil is a mere sketch; for with the graver I may come upon a find, some unexpected strength or delicacy of effect. And so I'm draughtsman and engraver all in one, in such a way that my blocks can only be turned out by myself. If the drawings on them were engraved by another, they would be quite lifeless.... Yes, life can spring from the fingers just as well as from the brain, when one really possesses creative power."

They walked on, and when they found themselves just below Montmartre, and Pierre spoke of taking a tramcar to return to Neuilly, Antoine, quite feverish with artistic passion, asked him if he knew Jahan, the sculptor, who was working for the Sacred Heart. And on receiving a negative reply, he added: "Well, come and see him for a moment. He has a great future before him. You'll see an angel of his which has been declined."

Then, as Francois began to praise the angel in question, Pierre agreed to accompany them. On the summit of the height, among all the sheds which the building of the basilica necessitated, Jahan had been able to set up a glazed workshop large enough for the huge angel ordered of him. His three visitors found him there in a blouse, watching a couple of assistants, who were rough-hewing the block of stone whence the angel was to emerge. Jahan was a sturdy man of thirty-six, with dark hair and beard, a large, ruddy mouth and fine bright eyes. Born in Paris, he had studied at the Fine Art School, but his impetuous temperament had constantly landed him in trouble there.

"Ah! yes," said he, "you've come to see my angel, the one which the Archbishop wouldn't take. Well, there it is."

The clay model of the figure, some three feet high, and already drying, looked superb in its soaring posture, with its large, outspread wings expanding as if with passionate desire for the infinite. The body, barely draped, was that of a slim yet robust youth, whose face beamed with the rapture of his heavenly flight.

"They found him too human," said Jahan. "And after all they were right. There's nothing so difficult to conceive as an angel. One even hesitates as to the sex; and when faith is lacking one has to take the first model one finds and copy it and spoil it. For my part, while I was modelling that one, I tried to imagine a beautiful youth suddenly endowed with wings, and carried by the intoxication of his flight into all the joy of the sunshine. But it upset them, they wanted something more religious, they said; and so then I concocted that wretched thing over there. After all, one has to earn one's living, you know."

So saying, he waved his hand towards another model, the one for which his assistants were preparing the stone. And this model represented an angel of the correct type, with symmetrical wings like those of a goose, a figure of neither sex, and commonplace features, expressing the silly ecstasy that tradition requires.

"What would you have?" continued Jahan. "Religious art has sunk to the most disgusting triteness. People no longer believe; churches are built like barracks, and decorated with saints and virgins fit to make one weep. The fact is that genius is only the fruit of the social soil; and a great artist can only send up a blaze of the faith of the time he lives in. For my part, I'm the grandson of a Beauceron peasant. My father came to Paris to set himself up in business as a marble worker for tombstones and so forth, just at the top of the Rue de la Roquette. It was there I grew up. I began as a workman, and all my childhood was spent among the masses, in the streets, without ever a thought coming to me of setting foot in a church. So few Parisians think of doing so nowadays. And so what's to become of art since there's no belief in the Divinity or even in beauty? We're forced to go forward to the new faith, which is the faith in life and work and fruitfulness, in all that labours and produces."

Then suddenly breaking off he exclaimed: "By the way, I've been doing some more work to my figure of Fecundity, and I'm fairly well pleased with it. Just come with me and I'll show it you."

Thereupon he insisted on taking them to his private studio, which was near by, just below Guillaume's little house. It was entered by way of the Rue du Calvaire, a street which is simply a succession of ladder-like flights of steps. The door opened on to one of the little landings, and one found oneself in a spacious, well-lighted apartment littered with models and casts, fragments and figures, quite an overflow of sturdy, powerful talent. On a stool was the unfinished model of Fecundity swathed in wet cloths. These Jahan removed, and then she stood forth with her rounded figure, her broad hips and her wifely, maternal bosom, full of the milk which nourishes and redeems.

"Well, what do you think of her?" asked Jahan. "Built as she is, I fancy that her children ought to be less puny than the pale, languid, aesthetic fellows of nowadays!"

While Antoine and Francois were admiring the figure, Pierre, for his part, took most interest in a young girl who had opened the door to them, and who had now wearily reseated herself at a little table to continue a book she was reading. This was Jahan's sister, Lise. A score of years younger than himself, she was but sixteen, and had been living alone with him since their father's death. Very slight and delicate looking, she had a most gentle face, with fine light hair which suggested pale gold-dust. She was almost a cripple, with legs so weak that she only walked with difficulty, and her mind also was belated, still full of childish naivete. At first this had much saddened her brother, but with time he had grown accustomed to her innocence and languor. Busy as he always was, ever in a transport, overflowing with new plans, he somewhat neglected her by force of circumstances, letting her live beside him much as she listed.

Pierre had noticed, however, the sisterly impulsiveness with which she had greeted Antoine. And the latter, after congratulating Jahan on his statue, came and sat down beside her, questioned her and wished to see the book which she was reading. During the last six months the most pure and affectionate intercourse had sprung up between them. He, from his father's garden, up yonder on the Place du Tertre, could see her through the huge window of that studio where she led so innocent a life. And noticing that she was always alone, as if forsaken, he had begun to take an interest in her. Then had come acquaintance; and, delighted to find her so simple and so charming, he had conceived the design of rousing her to intelligence and life, by loving her, by becoming at once the mind and the heart whose power fructifies. Weak plant that she was, in need of delicate care, sunshine and affection, he became for her all that her brother had, through circumstances, failed to be. He had already taught her to read, a task in which every mistress had previously failed. But him she listened to and understood. And by slow degrees a glow of happiness came to the beautiful clear eyes set in her irregular face. It was love's miracle, the creation of woman beneath the breath of a young lover who gave himself entirely. No doubt she still remained very delicate, with such poor health that one ever feared that she might expire in a faint sigh; and her legs, moreover, were still too weak to admit of her walking any distance. But all the same, she was no longer the little wilding, the little ailing flower of the previous spring.

Jahan, who marvelled at the incipient miracle, drew near to the young people. "Ah!" said he, "your pupil does you honour. She reads quite fluently, you know, and understands the fine books you send her. You read to me of an evening now, don't you, Lise?"

She raised her candid eyes, and gazed at Antoine with a smile of infinite gratitude. "Oh! whatever he'll teach me," she said, "I'll learn it, and do it."

The others laughed gently. Then, as the visitors were going off, Francois paused before a model which had cracked while drying. "Oh! that's a spoilt thing," said the sculptor. "I wanted to model a figure of Charity. It was ordered of me by a philanthropic institution. But try as I might, I could only devise something so commonplace that I let the clay spoil. Still, I must think it over and endeavour to take the matter in hand again."

When they were outside, it occurred to Pierre to go as far as the basilica of the Sacred Heart in the hope of finding Abbe Rose there. So the three of them went round by way of the Rue Gabrielle and climbed the steps of the Rue Chape. And just as they were reaching the summit where the basilica reared its forest of scaffoldings beneath the clear sky, they encountered Thomas, who, on leaving the factory, had gone to give an order to a founder in the Rue Lamarck.

He, who as a rule was so silent and discreet, now happened to be in an expansive mood, which made him look quite radiant. "Ah! I'm so pleased," he said, addressing Pierre; "I fancy that I've found what I want for our little motor. Tell father that things are going on all right, and that he must make haste to get well."

At these words his brothers, Francois and Antoine, drew close to him with a common impulse. And they stood there all three, a valiant little group, their hearts uniting and beating with one and the same delight at the idea that their father would be gladdened, that the good news they were sending him would help him towards recovery. As for Pierre, who, now that he knew them, was beginning to love them and judge them at their worth, he marvelled at the sight of these three young giants, each so strikingly like the other, and drawn together so closely and so promptly, directly their filial affection took fire.

"Tell him that we are waiting for him, and will come to him at the first sign if we are wanted."

Then each in turn shook the priest's hand vigorously. And while he remained watching them as they went off towards the little house, whose garden he perceived over the wall of the Rue Saint Eleuthere, he fancied he could there detect a delicate silhouette, a white, sunlit face under a help of dark hair. It was doubtless the face of Marie, examining the buds on her lilac bushes. At that evening hour, however, the diffuse light was so golden that the vision seemed to fade in it as in a halo. And Pierre, feeling dazzled, turned his head, and on the other side saw naught but the overwhelming, chalky mass of the basilica, whose hugeness shut out all view of the horizon.

For a moment he remained motionless on that spot, so agitated by conflicting thoughts and feelings that he could read neither heart nor mind clearly. Then, as he turned towards the city, all Paris spread itself out at his feet, a limpid, lightsome Paris, beneath the pink glow of that spring-like evening. The endless billows of house-roofs showed forth with wonderful distinctness, and one could have counted the chimney stacks and the little black streaks of the windows by the million. The edifices rising into the calm atmosphere seemed like the anchored vessels of some fleet arrested in its course, with lofty masting which glittered at the sun's farewell. And never before had Pierre so distinctly observed the divisions of that human ocean. Eastward and northward was the city of manual toil, with the rumbling and the smoke of its factories. Southward, beyond the river, was the city of study, of intellectual labour, so calm, so perfectly serene. And on all sides the passion of trade ascended from the central districts, where the crowds rolled and scrambled amidst an everlasting uproar of wheels; while westward, the city of the happy and powerful ones, those who fought for sovereignty and wealth, spread out its piles of palaces amidst the slowly reddening flare of the declining planet.

And then, from the depths of his negation, the chaos into which his loss of faith had plunged him, Pierre felt a delicious freshness pass like the vague advent of a new faith. So vague it was that he could not have expressed even his hope of it in words. But already among the rough factory workers, manual toil had appeared to him necessary and redemptive, in spite of all the misery and abominable injustice to which it led. And now the young men of intellect of whom he had despaired, that generation of the morrow which he had thought spoilt, relapsing into ancient error and rottenness, had appeared to him full of virile promise, resolved to prosecute the work of those who had gone before, and effect, by the aid of Science only, the conquest of absolute truth and absolute justice.

V. PROBLEMS

A FULL month had already gone by since Guillaume had taken refuge at his brother's little house at Neuilly. His wrist was now nearly healed. He had long ceased to keep his bed, and often strolled through the garden. In spite of his impatience to go back to Montmartre, join his loved ones and resume his work there, he was each morning prompted to defer his return by the news he found in the newspapers. The situation was ever the same. Salvat, whom the police now suspected, had been perceived one evening near the central markets, and then again lost sight of. Every day, however, his arrest was said to be imminent. And in that case what would happen? Would he speak out, and would fresh perquisitions be made?

For a whole week the press had been busy with the bradawl found under the entrance of the Duvillard mansion. Nearly every reporter in Paris had called at the Grandidier factory and interviewed both workmen and master. Some had even started on personal investigations, in the hope of capturing the culprit themselves. There was no end of jesting about the incompetence of the police, and the hunt for Salvat was followed all the more passionately by the general public, as the papers overflowed with the most ridiculous concoctions, predicting further explosions, and declaring even that all Paris would some morning be blown into the air. The "Voix du Peuple" set a fresh shudder circulating every day by its announcements of threatening letters, incendiary placards and mysterious, far-reaching plots. And never before had so base and foolish a spirit of contagion wafted insanity through a civilised city.

Guillaume, for his part, no sooner awoke of a morning than he was all impatience to see the newspapers, quivering at the idea that he would at last read of Salvat's arrest. In his state of nervous expectancy, the wild campaign which the press had started, the idiotic and the ferocious things which he found in one or another journal, almost drove him crazy. A number of "suspects" had already been arrested in a kind of chance razzia, which had swept up the usual Anarchist herd, together with sundry honest workmen and bandits, illumines and lazy devils, in fact, a most singular, motley crew, which investigating magistrate Amadieu was endeavouring to turn into a gigantic association of evil-doers. One morning, moreover, Guillaume found his own name mentioned in connection with a perquisition at the residence of a revolutionary journalist, who was a friend of his. At this his heart bounded with revolt, but he was forced to the conclusion that it would be prudent for him to remain patient a little longer, in his peaceful retreat at Neuilly, since the police might at any moment break into his home at Montmartre, to arrest him should it find him there.

Amidst all this anxiety the brothers led a most solitary and gentle life. Pierre himself now spent most of his time at home. The first days of March had come, and precocious springtide imparted delightful charm and warmth to the little garden. Guillaume, however, since quitting his bed, had more particularly installed himself in his father's old laboratory, now transformed into a spacious study. All the books and papers left by the illustrious chemist were still there, and among the latter Guillaume found a number of unfinished essays, the perusal of which greatly excited his interest, and often absorbed him from morning till night. It was this which largely enabled him to bear his voluntary seclusion patiently. Seated on the other side of the big table, Pierre also mostly occupied himself with reading; but at times his eyes would quit his book and wander away into gloomy reverie, into all the chaos into which he still and ever sank. For long hours the brothers would in this wise remain side by side, without speaking a word. Yet they knew they were together; and occasionally, when their eyes met, they would exchange a smile. The strong affection of former days was again springing up within them; their childhood, their home, their parents, all seemed to live once more in the quiet atmosphere they breathed. However, the bay window overlooked the garden in the direction of Paris, and often, when they emerged from their reading or their reverie, it was with a sudden feeling of anxiety, and in order to lend ear to the distant rumbling, the increased clamour of the great city.

On other occasions they paused as if in astonishment at hearing a continuous footfall overhead. It was that of Nicholas Barthes, who still lingered in the room above. He seldom came downstairs, and scarcely ever ventured into the garden, for fear, said he, that he might be perceived and recognised from a distant house whose windows were concealed by a clump of trees. One might laugh at the old conspirator's haunting thought of the police. Nevertheless, the caged-lion restlessness, the ceaseless promenade of that perpetual prisoner who had spent two thirds of his life in the dungeons of France in his desire to secure the liberty of others, imparted to the silence of the little house a touching melancholy, the very rhythm as it were of all the great good things which one hoped for, but which would never perhaps come.

Very few visits drew the brothers from their solitude. Bertheroy came less frequently now that Guillaume's wrist was healing. The most assiduous caller was certainly Theophile Morin, whose discreet ring was heard every other day at the same hour. Though he did not share the ideas of Barthes he worshipped him as a martyr; and would always go upstairs to spend an hour with him. However, they must have exchanged few words, for not a sound came from the room. Whenever Morin sat down for a moment in the laboratory with the brothers, Pierre was struck by his seeming weariness, his ashen grey hair and beard and dismal countenance, all the life of which appeared to have been effaced by long years spent in the teaching profession. Indeed, it was only when the priest mentioned Italy that he saw his companion's resigned eyes blaze up like live coals. One day when he spoke of the great patriot Orlando Prada, Morin's companion of victory in Garibaldi's days, he was amazed by the sudden flare of enthusiasm which lighted up the other's lifeless features. However, these were but transient flashes: the old professor soon reappeared, and all that one found in Morin was the friend of Proudhon and the subsequent disciple of Auguste Comte. Of his Proudhonian principles he had retained all a pauper's hatred of wealth, and a desire for a more equitable partition of fortune. But the new times dismayed him, and neither principle nor temperament allowed him to follow Revolutionism to its utmost limits. Comte had imparted unshakable convictions to him in the sphere of intellectual questions, and he contented himself with the clear and decisive logic of Positivism, rejecting all metaphysical hypotheses as useless, persuaded as he was that the whole human question, whether social or religious, would be solved by science alone. This faith, firm as it had remained, was, however, coupled with secret bitterness, for nothing seemed to advance in a sensible manner towards its goal. Comte himself had ended in the most cloudy mysticism; great savants recoiled from truth in terror; and now barbarians were threatening the world with fresh night; all of which made Morin almost a reactionist in politics, already resigned to the advent of a dictator, who would set things somewhat in order, so that humanity might be able to complete its education.

Other visitors who occasionally called to see Guillaume were Bache and Janzen, who invariably came together and at night-time. Every now and then they would linger chatting with Guillaume in the spacious study until two o'clock in the morning. Bache, who was fat and had a fatherly air, with his little eyes gently beaming amidst all the snowy whiteness of his hair and beard, would talk on slowly, unctuously and interminably, as soon as he had begun to explain his views. He would address merely a polite bow to Saint-Simon, the initiator, the first to lay down the law that work was a necessity for one and all according to their capacities; but on coming to Fourier his voice softened and he confessed his whole religion. To his thinking, Fourier had been the real messiah of modern times, the saviour of genius, who had sown the good seed of the future world, by regulating society such as it would certainly be organised to-morrow. The law of harmony had been promulgated; human passions, liberated and utilised in healthy fashion, would become the requisite machinery; and work, rendered pleasant and attractive, would prove the very function of life. Nothing could discourage Bache; if merely one parish began by transforming itself into a phalansterium, the whole department would soon follow, then the adjacent departments, and finally all France. Moreover, Bache even favoured the schemes of Cabet, whose Icaria, said he, had in no wise been such a foolish idea. Further, he recalled a motion he had made, when member of the Commune in 1871, to apply Fourier's ideas to the French Republic; and he was apparently convinced that the troops of Versailles had delayed the triumph of Communism for half a century. Whenever people nowadays talked of table-turning he pretended to laugh, but at bottom he had remained an impenitent "spiritist." Since he had been a municipal councillor he had been travelling from one socialist sect to another, according as their ideas offered points of resemblance to his old faith. And he was fairly consumed by his need of faith, his perplexity as to the Divine, which he was now occasionally inclined to find in the legs of some piece of furniture, after denying its presence in the churches.

Janzen, for his part, was as taciturn as his friend Bache was garrulous. Such remarks as he made were brief, but they were as galling as lashes, as cutting as sabre-strokes. At the same time his ideas and theories remained somewhat obscure, partly by reason of this brevity of his, and partly on account of the difficulty he experienced in expressing himself in French. He was from over yonder, from some far-away land—Russia, Poland, Austria or Germany, nobody exactly knew; and it mattered little, for he certainly acknowledged no country, but wandered far and wide with his dream of blood-shedding fraternity. Whenever, with his wonted frigidity, he gave utterance to one of those terrible remarks of his which, like a scythe in a meadow, cut away all before him, little less than the necessity of thus mowing down nations, in order to sow the earth afresh with a young and better community, became apparent. At each proposition unfolded by Bache, such as labour rendered agreeable by police regulations, phalansteria organised like barracks, religion transformed into pantheist or spiritist deism, he gently shrugged his shoulders. What could be the use of such childishness, such hypocritical repairing, when the house was falling and the only honest course was to throw it to the ground, and build up the substantial edifice of to-morrow with entirely new materials? On the subject of propaganda by deeds, bomb-throwing and so forth, he remained silent, though his gestures were expressive of infinite hope. He evidently approved that course. The legend which made him one of the perpetrators of the crime of Barcelona set a gleam of horrible glory in his mysterious past. One day when Bache, while speaking to him of his friend Bergaz, the shadowy Bourse jobber who had already been compromised in some piece of thieving, plainly declared that the aforesaid Bergaz was a bandit, Janzen contented himself with smiling, and replying quietly that theft was merely forced restitution. Briefly, in this man of culture and refinement, in whose own mysterious life one might perhaps have found various crimes but not a single act of base improbity, one could divine an implacable, obstinate theoretician, who was resolved to set the world ablaze for the triumph of his ideas.

On certain evenings when a visit from Theophile Morin coincided with one from Bache and Janzen, and they and Guillaume lingered chatting until far into the night, Pierre would listen to them in despair from the shadowy corner where he remained motionless, never once joining in the discussions. Distracted, by his own unbelief and thirst for truth, he had at the outset taken a passionate interest in these debates, desirous as he was of drawing up a balance-sheet of the century's ideas, so as to form some notion of the distance that had been travelled, and the profits that had accrued. But he recoiled from all this in fresh despair, on hearing the others argue, each from his own standpoint and without possibility of concession and agreement. After the repulses he had encountered at Lourdes and Rome, he well realised that in this fresh experiment which he was making with Paris, the whole brain of the century was in question, the new truths, the expected gospel which was to change the face of the world. And, burning with inconsiderate zeal, he went from one belief to another, which other he soon rejected in order to adopt a third. If he had first felt himself to be a Positivist with Morin, an Evolutionist and Determinist with Guillaume, he had afterwards been touched by the fraternal dream of a new golden age which he had found in Bache's humanitarian Communism. And indeed even Janzen had momentarily shaken him by his fierce confidence in the theory of liberative Individualism. But afterwards he had found himself out of his depth; and each and every theory had seemed to him but part of the chaotic contradictions and incoherences of humanity on its march. It was all a continuous piling up of dross, amidst which he lost himself. Although Fourier had sprung from Saint-Simon he denied him in part; and if Saint-Simon's doctrine ended in a kind of mystical sensuality, the other's conducted to an unacceptable regimenting of society. Proudhon, for his part, demolished without rebuilding anything. Comte, who created method and declared science to be the one and only sovereign, had not even suspected the advent of the social crisis which now threatened to sweep all away, and had finished personally as a mere worshipper of love, overpowered by woman. Nevertheless, these two, Comte and Proudhon, entered the lists and fought against the others, Fourier and Saint-Simon; the combat between them or their disciples becoming so bitter and so blind that the truths common to them all were obscured and disfigured beyond recognition. Thence came the extraordinary muddle of the present hour; Bache with Saint-Simon and Fourier, and Morin with Proudhon and Comte, utterly failing to understand Mege, the Collectivist deputy, whom they held up to execration, him and his State Collectivism, in the same way, moreover, as they thundered against all the other present-time Socialist sects, without realising that these also, whatever their nature, had more or less sprung from the same masters as themselves. And all this seemingly indicated that Janzen was right when he declared that the house was past repair, fast crumbling amidst rottenness and insanity, and that it ought to be levelled to the ground.

One night, after the three visitors had gone, Pierre, who had remained with Guillaume, saw him grow very gloomy as he slowly walked to and fro. He, in his turn, had doubtless felt that all was crumbling. And though his brother alone was there to hear him, he went on speaking. He expressed all his horror of the Collectivist State as imagined by Mege, a Dictator-State re-establishing ancient servitude on yet closer lines. The error of all the Socialist sects was their arbitrary organisation of Labour, which enslaved the individual for the profit of the community. And, forced to conciliate the two great currents, the rights of society and the rights of the individual, Guillaume had ended by placing his whole faith in free Communism, an anarchical state in which he dreamt of seeing the individual freed, moving and developing without restraint, for the benefit both of himself and of all others. Was not this, said he, the one truly scientific theory, unities creating worlds, atoms producing life by force of attraction, free and ardent love? All oppressive minorities would disappear; and the faculties and energies of one and all would by free play arrive at harmony amidst the equilibrium—which changed according to needs—of the active forces of advancing humanity. In this wise he pictured a nation, saved from State tutelage, without a master, almost without laws, a happy nation, each citizen of which, completely developed by the exercise of liberty, would, of his free will, come to an understanding with his neighbours with regard to the thousand necessities of life. And thence would spring society, free association, hundreds of associations which would regulate social life; though at the same time they would remain variable, in fact often opposed and hostile to one another. For progress is but the fruit of conflict and struggle; the world has only been created by the battle of opposing forces. And that was all; there would be no more oppressors, no more rich, no more poor; the domain of the earth with its natural treasures and its implements of labour would be restored to the people, its legitimate owners, who would know how to enjoy it with justice and logic, when nothing abnormal would impede their expansion. And then only would the law of love make its action felt; then would human solidarity, which, among mankind, is the living form of universal attraction, acquire all its power, bringing men closer and closer together, and uniting them in one sole family. A splendid dream it was—the noble and pure dream of absolute freedom—free man in free society. And thither a savant's superior mind was fated to come after passing on the road the many Socialist sects which one and all bore the stigma of tyranny. And, assuredly, as thus indulged, the Anarchist idea is the loftiest, the proudest, of all ideas. And how delightful to yield to the hope of harmony in life—life which restored to the full exercise of its natural powers would of itself create happiness!

When Guillaume ceased speaking, he seemed to be emerging from a dream; and he glanced at Pierre with some dismay, for he feared that he might have said too much and have hurt his feelings. Pierre—moved though he was, for a moment in fact almost won over—had just seen the terrible practical objection, which destroyed all hope, arise before his mind's eye. Why had not harmony asserted itself in the first days of the world's existence, at the time when societies were formed? How was it that tyranny had triumphed, delivering nations over to oppressors? And supposing that the apparently insolvable problem of destroying everything, and beginning everything afresh, should ever be solved, who could promise that mankind, obedient to the same laws, would not again follow the same paths as formerly? After all, mankind, nowadays, is simply what life has made it; and nothing proves that life would again make it other than it is. To begin afresh, ah, yes! but to attain another result! But could that other result really come from man? Was it not rather man himself who should be changed? To start afresh from where one was, to continue the evolution that had begun, undoubtedly meant slow travel and dismal waiting. But how great would be the danger and even the delay, if one went back without knowing by what road across the whole chaos of ruins one might regain all the lost time!

"Let us go to bed," at last said Guillaume, smiling. "It's silly of me to weary you with all these things which don't concern you."

Pierre, in his excitement, was about to reveal his own heart and mind, and the whole torturing battle within him. But a feeling of shame again restrained him. His brother only knew him as a believing priest, faithful to his faith. And so, without answering, he betook himself to his room.

On the following evening, about ten o'clock, while Guillaume and Pierre sat reading in the study, the old servant entered to announce M. Janzen and a friend. The friend was Salvat.

"He wished to see you," Janzen explained to Guillaume. "I met him, and when he heard of your injury and anxiety he implored me to bring him here. And I've done so, though it was perhaps hardly prudent of me."

Guillaume had risen, full of surprise and emotion at such a visit; Pierre, however, though equally upset by Salvat's appearance; did not stir from his chair, but kept his eyes upon the workman.

"Monsieur Froment," Salvat ended by saying, standing there in a timid, embarrassed way, "I was very sorry indeed when I heard of the worry I'd put you in; for I shall never forget that you were very kind to me when everybody else turned me away."

As he spoke he balanced himself alternately on either leg, and transferred his old felt hat from hand to hand.

"And so I wanted to come and tell you myself that if I took a cartridge of your powder one evening when you had your back turned, it's the only thing that I feel any remorse about in the whole business, since it may compromise you. And I also want to take my oath before you that you've nothing to fear from me, that I'll let my head be cut off twenty times if need be, rather than utter your name. That's all that I had in my heart."

He relapsed into silence and embarrassment, but his soft, dreamy eyes, the eyes of a faithful dog, remained fixed upon Guillaume with an expression of respectful worship. And Pierre was still gazing at him athwart the hateful vision which his arrival had conjured up, that of the poor, dead, errand girl, the fair pretty child lying ripped open under the entrance of the Duvillard mansion! Was it possible that he was there, he, that madman, that murderer, and that his eyes were actually moist!

Guillaume, touched by Salvat's words, had drawn near and pressed his hand. "I am well aware, Salvat," said he, "that you are not wicked at heart. But what a foolish and abominable thing you did!"

Salvat showed no sign of anger, but gently smiled. "Oh! if it had to be done again, Monsieur Froment, I'd do it. It's my idea, you know. And, apart from you, all is well; I am content."

He would not sit down, but for another moment continued talking with Guillaume, while Janzen, as if he washed his hands of the business, deeming this visit both useless and dangerous, sat down and turned over the leaves of a picture book. And Guillaume made Salvat tell him what he had done on the day of the crime; how like a stray dog he had wandered in distraction through Paris, carrying his bomb with him, originally in his tool-bag and then under his jacket; how he had gone a first time to the Duvillard mansion and found its carriage entrance closed; then how he had betaken himself first to the Chamber of Deputies which the ushers had prevented him from entering, and afterwards to the Circus, where the thought of making a great sacrifice of bourgeois had occurred to him too late. And finally, how he had at last come back to the Duvillard mansion, as if drawn thither by the very power of destiny. His tool-bag was lying in the depths of the Seine, he said; he had thrown it into the water with sudden hatred of work, since it had even failed to give him bread. And he next told the story of his flight; the explosion shaking the whole district behind him, while, with delight and astonishment, he found himself some distance off, in quiet streets where nothing was as yet known. And for a month past he had been living in chance fashion, how or where he could hardly tell, but he had often slept in the open, and gone for a day without food. One evening little Victor Mathis had given him five francs. And other comrades had helped him, taken him in for a night and sent him off at the first sign of peril. A far-spreading, tacit complicity had hitherto saved him from the police. As for going abroad, well, he had, at one moment, thought of doing so; but a description of his person must have been circulated, the gendarmes must be waiting for him at the frontiers, and so would not flight, instead of retarding, rather hasten his arrest? Paris, however, was an ocean; it was there that he incurred the least risk of capture. Moreover, he no longer had sufficient energy to flee. A fatalist as he was after his own fashion, he could not find strength to quit the pavements of Paris, but there awaited arrest, like a social waif carried chancewise through the multitude as in a dream.

"And your daughter, little Celine?" Guillaume inquired. "Have you ventured to go back to see her?"

Salvat waved his hand in a vague way. "No, but what would you have? She's with Mamma Theodore. Women always find some help. And then I'm done for, I can do nothing for anybody. It's as if I were already dead." However, in spite of these words, tears were rising to his eyes. "Ah! the poor little thing!" he added, "I kissed her with all my heart before I went away. If she and the woman hadn't been starving so long the idea of that business would perhaps never have come to me."

Then, in all simplicity, he declared that he was ready to die. If he had ended by depositing his bomb at the entrance of Duvillard's house, it was because he knew the banker well, and was aware that he was the wealthiest of those bourgeois whose fathers at the time of the Revolution had duped the people, by taking all power and wealth for themselves,—the power and wealth which the sons were nowadays so obstinately bent in retaining that they would not even bestow the veriest crumbs on others. As for the Revolution, he understood it in his own fashion, like an illiterate fellow who had learnt the little he knew from newspapers and speeches at public meetings. And he struck his chest with his fist as he spoke of his honesty, and was particularly desirous that none should doubt his courage because he had fled.

"I've never robbed anybody," said he, "and if I don't go and hand myself up to the police, it's because they may surely take the trouble to find and arrest me. I'm very well aware that my affair's clear enough as they've found that bradawl and know me. All the same, it would be silly of me to help them in their work. Still, they'd better make haste, for I've almost had enough of being tracked like a wild beast and no longer knowing how I live."

Janzen, yielding to curiosity, had ceased turning over the leaves of the picture book and was looking at Salvat. There was a smile of disdain in the Anarchist leader's cold eyes; and in his usual broken French he remarked: "A man fights and defends himself, kills others and tries to avoid being killed himself. That's warfare."

These words fell from his lips amidst deep silence. Salvat, however, did not seem to have heard them, but stammered forth his faith in a long sentence laden with fulsome expressions, such as the sacrifice of his life in order that want might cease, and the example of a great action, in the certainty that it would inspire other heroes to continue the struggle. And with this certainly sincere faith and illuminism of his there was blended a martyr's pride, delight at being one of the radiant, worshipped saints of the dawning Revolutionary Church.

As he had come so he went off. When Janzen had led him away, it seemed as if the night which had brought him had carried him back into its impenetrable depths. And then only did Pierre rise from his chair. He was stifling, and threw the large window of the room wide open. It was a very mild but moonless night, whose silence was only disturbed by the subsiding clamour of Paris, which stretched away, invisible, on the horizon.

Guillaume, according to his habit, had begun to walk up and down. And at last he spoke, again forgetting that his brother was a priest. "Ah! the poor fellow! How well one can understand that deed of violence and hope! His whole past life of fruitless labour and ever-growing want explains it. Then, too, there has been all the contagion of ideas; the frequentation of public meetings where men intoxicate themselves with words, and of secret meetings among comrades where faith acquires firmness and the mind soars wildly. Ah! I think I know that man well indeed! He's a good workman, sober and courageous. Injustice has always exasperated him. And little by little the desire for universal happiness has cast him out of the realities of life which he has ended by holding in horror. So how can he do otherwise than live in a dream—a dream of redemption, which, from circumstances, has turned to fire and murder as its fitting instruments. As I looked at him standing there, I fancied I could picture one of the first Christian slaves of ancient Rome. All the iniquity of olden pagan society, agonising beneath the rottenness born of debauchery and covetousness, was weighing on his shoulders, bearing him down. He had come from the dark Catacombs where he had whispered words of deliverance and redemption with his wretched brethren. And a thirst for martyrdom consumed him, he spat in the face of Caesar, he insulted the gods, he fired the pagan temples, in order that the reign of Jesus might come and abolish servitude. And he was ready to die, to be torn to pieces by the wild beasts!"

Pierre did not immediately reply. He had already been struck, however, by the fact that there were undoubted points of resemblance between the secret propaganda and militant faith of the Anarchists, and certain practices of the first Christians. Both sects abandon themselves to a new faith in the hope that the humble may thereby at last reap justice. Paganism disappears through weariness of the flesh and the need of a more lofty and pure faith. That dream of a Christian paradise opening up a future life with a system of compensations for the ills endured on earth, was the outcome of young hope dawning at its historic hour. But to-day, when eighteen centuries have exhausted that hope, when the long experiment is over and the toiler finds himself duped and still and ever a slave, he once more dreams of getting happiness upon this earth, particularly as each day Science tends more and more to show him that the happiness of the spheres beyond is a lie. And in all this there is but the eternal struggle of the poor and the rich, the eternal question of bringing more justice and less suffering to the world.

"But surely," Pierre at last replied, "you can't be on the side of those bandits, those murderers whose savage violence horrifies me. I let you talk on yesterday, when you dreamt of a great and happy people, of ideal anarchy in which each would be free amidst the freedom of all. But what abomination, what disgust both for mind and heart, when one passes from theory to propaganda and practice! If yours is the brain that thinks, whose is the hateful hand that acts, that kills children, throws down doors and empties drawers? Do you accept that responsibility? With your education, your culture, the whole social heredity behind you, does not your entire being revolt at the idea of stealing and murdering?"

Guillaume halted before his brother, quivering. "Steal and murder! no! no! I will not. But one must say everything and fully understand the history of the evil hour through which we are passing. It is madness sweeping by; and, to tell the truth, everything necessary to provoke it has been done. At the very dawn of the Anarchist theory, at the very first innocent actions of its partisans, there was such stern repression, the police so grossly ill-treating the poor devils that fell into its hands, that little by little came anger and rage leading to the most horrible reprisals. It is the Terror initiated by the bourgeois that has produced Anarchist savagery. And would you know whence Salvat and his crime have come? Why, from all our centuries of impudence and iniquity, from all that the nations have suffered, from all the sores which are now devouring us, the impatience for enjoyment, the contempt of the strong for the weak, the whole monstrous spectacle which is presented by our rotting society!"

Guillaume was again slowly walking to and fro; and as if he were reflecting aloud he continued: "Ah! to reach the point I have attained, through how much thought, through how many battles, have I not passed! I was merely a Positivist, a savant devoted to observation and experiment, accepting nothing apart from proven facts. Scientifically and socially, I admitted that simple evolution had slowly brought humanity into being. But both in the history of the globe and that of human society, I found it necessary to make allowance for the volcano, the sudden cataclysm, the sudden eruption, by which each geological phase, each historical period, has been marked. In this wise one ends by ascertaining that no forward step has ever been taken, no progress ever accomplished in the world's history, without the help of horrible catastrophes. Each advance has meant the sacrifice of millions and millions of human lives. This of course revolts us, given our narrow ideas of justice, and we regard nature as a most barbarous mother; but, if we cannot excuse the volcano, we ought to deal with it when it bursts forth, like savants forewarned of its possibility.... And then, ah, then! well, perhaps I'm a dreamer like others, but I have my own notions."

With a sweeping gesture he confessed what a social dreamer there was within him beside the methodical and scrupulous savant. His constant endeavour was to bring all back to science, and he was deeply grieved at finding in nature no scientific sign of equality or even justice, such as he craved for in the social sphere. His despair indeed came from this inability to reconcile scientific logic with apostolic love, the dream of universal happiness and brotherhood and the end of all iniquity.

Pierre, however, who had remained near the open window, gazing into the night towards Paris, whence ascended the last sounds of the evening of passionate pleasure, felt the whole flood of his own doubt and despair stifling him. It was all too much: that brother of his who had fallen upon him with his scientific and apostolic beliefs, those men who came to discuss contemporary thought from every standpoint, and finally that Salvat who had brought thither the exasperation of his mad deed. And Pierre, who had hitherto listened to them all without a word, without a gesture, who had hidden his secrets from his brother, seeking refuge in his supposed priestly views, suddenly felt such bitterness stirring his heart that he could lie no longer.

"Ah! brother, if you have your dream, I have my sore which has eaten into me and left me void! Your Anarchy, your dream of just happiness, for which Salvat works with bombs, why, it is the final burst of insanity which will sweep everything away! How is it that you can't realise it? The century is ending in ruins. I've been listening to you all for a month past. Fourier destroyed Saint-Simon, Proudhon and Comte demolished Fourier, each in turn piling up incoherences and contradictions, leaving mere chaos behind them, which nobody dares to sort out. And since then, Socialist sects have been swarming and multiplying, the more sensible of them leading simply to dictatorship, while the others indulge in most dangerous reveries. And after such a tempest of ideas there could indeed come nothing but your Anarchy, which undertakes to bring the old world to a finish by reducing it to dust.... Ah! I expected it, I was waiting for it—that final catastrophe, that fratricidal madness, the inevitable class warfare in which our civilisation was destined to collapse! Everything announced it: the want and misery below, the egotism up above, all the cracking of the old human habitation, borne down by too great a weight of crime and grief. When I went to Lourdes it was to see if the divinity of simple minds would work the awaited miracle, and restore the belief of the early ages to the people, which rebelled through excess of suffering. And when I went to Rome it was in the naive hope of there finding the new religion required by our democracies, the only one that could pacify the world by bringing back the fraternity of the golden age. But how foolish of me all that was! Both here and there, I simply lighted on nothingness. There where I so ardently dreamt of finding the salvation of others, I only sank myself, going down apeak like a ship not a timber of which is ever found again. One tie still linked me to my fellow-men, that of charity, the dressing, relieving, and perhaps, in the long run, healing, of wounds and sores; but that last cable has now been severed. Charity, to my mind, appears futile and derisive by the side of justice, to whom all supremacy belongs, and whose advent has become a necessity and can be stayed by none. And so it is all over, I am mere ashes, an empty grave as it were. I no longer believe in anything, anything, anything whatever!"

Pierre had risen to his full height, with arms outstretched as if to let all the nothingness within his heart and mind fall from them. And Guillaume, distracted by the sight of such a fierce denier, such a despairing Nihilist as was now revealed to him, drew near, quivering: "What are you saying, brother! I thought you so firm, so calm in your belief! A priest to be admired, a saint worshipped by the whole of this parish! I was unwilling even to discuss your faith, and now it is you who deny all, and believe in nothing whatever!"

Pierre again slowly stretched out his arms. "There is nothing, I tried to learn all, and only found the atrocious grief born of the nothingness that overwhelms me."

"Ah! how you must suffer, Pierre, my little brother! Can religion, then, be even more withering than science, since it has ravaged you like that, while I have yet remained an old madman, still full of fancies?"

Guillaume caught hold of Pierre's hands and pressed them, full of terrified compassion in presence of all the grandeur and horror embodied in that unbelieving priest who watched over the belief of others, and chastely, honestly discharged his duty amidst the haughty sadness born of his falsehood. And how heavily must that falsehood have weighed upon his conscience for him to confess himself in that fashion, amidst an utter collapse of his whole being! A month previously, in the unexpansiveness of his proud solitude, he would never have taken such a course. To speak out it was necessary that he should have been stirred by many things, his reconciliation with his brother, the conversations he had heard of an evening, the terrible drama in which he was mingled, as well as his reflections on labour struggling against want, and the vague hope with which the sight of intellectual youth had inspired him. And, indeed, amid the very excess of his negation was there not already the faint dawn of a new faith?

This Guillaume must have understood, on seeing how he quivered with unsatisfied tenderness as he emerged from the fierce silence which he had preserved so long. He made him sit down near the window, and placed himself beside him without releasing his hands. "But I won't have you suffer, my little brother!" he said; "I won't leave you, I'll nurse you. For I know you much better than you know yourself. You would never have suffered were it not for the battle between your heart and your mind, and you will cease to suffer on the day when they make peace, and you love what you understand." And in a lower voice, with infinite affection, he went on: "You see, it's our poor mother and our poor father continuing their painful struggle in you. You were too young at the time, you couldn't know what went on. But I knew them both very wretched: he, wretched through her, who treated him as if he were one of the damned; and she, suffering through him, tortured by his irreligion. When he died, struck down by an explosion in this very room, she took it to be the punishment of God. Yet, what an honest man he was, with a good, great heart, what a worker, seeking for truth alone, and desirous of the love and happiness of all! Since we have spent our evenings here, I have felt him coming back, reviving as it were both around and within us; and she, too, poor, saintly woman, is ever here, enveloping us with love, weeping, and yet stubbornly refusing to understand. It is they, perhaps, who have kept me here so long, and who at this very moment are present to place your hands in mine."

And, indeed, it seemed to Pierre as if he could feel the breath of vigilant affection which Guillaume evoked passing over them both. There was again a revival of all the past, all their youth, and nothing could have been more delightful.

"You hear me, brother," Guillaume resumed. "You must reconcile them, for it is only in you that they can be reconciled. You have his firm, lofty brow, and her mouth and eyes of unrealisable tenderness. So, try to bring them to agreement, by some day contenting, as your reason shall allow, the everlasting thirst for love, and self-bestowal, and life, which for lack of satisfaction is killing you. Your frightful wretchedness has no other cause. Come back to life, love, bestow yourself, be a man!"

Pierre raised a dolorous cry: "No, no, the death born of doubt has swept through me, withering and shattering everything, and nothing more can live in that cold dust!"

"But, come," resumed Guillaume, "you cannot have reached such absolute negation. No man reaches it. Even in the most disabused of minds there remains a nook of fancy and hope. To deny charity, devotion, the prodigies which love may work, ah! for my part I do not go so far as that. And now that you have shown me your sore, why should I not tell you my dream, the wild hope which keeps me alive! It is strange; but, are savants to be the last childish dreamers, and is faith only to spring up nowadays in chemical laboratories?"

Intense emotion was stirring Guillaume; there was battle waging in both his brain and his heart. And at last, yielding to the deep compassion which filled him, vanquished by his ardent affection for his unhappy brother, he spoke out. But he had drawn yet closer to Pierre, even passed one arm around him; and it was thus embracing him that he, in his turn, made his confession, lowering his voice as if he feared that someone might overhear his secret. "Why should you not know it?" he said. "My own sons are ignorant of it. But you are a man and my brother, and since there is nothing of the priest left in you, it is to the brother I will confide it. This will make me love you the more, and perhaps it may do you good."

Then he told him of his invention, a new explosive, a powder of such extraordinary force that its effects were incalculable. And he had found employment for this powder in an engine of warfare, a special cannon, hurling bombs which would assure the most overwhelming victory to the army using them. The enemy's forces would be destroyed in a few hours, and besieged cities would fall into dust at the slightest bombardment. He had long searched and doubted, calculated, recalculated and experimented; but everything was now ready: the precise formula of the powder, the drawings for the cannon and the bombs, a whole packet of precious papers stored in a safe spot. And after months of anxious reflection he had resolved to give his invention to France, so as to ensure her a certainty of victory in her coming, inevitable war with Germany!

At the same time, he was not a man of narrow patriotism; on the contrary he had a very broad, international conception of the future liberative civilisation. Only he believed in the initiatory mission of France, and particularly in that of Paris, which, even as it is to-day, was destined to be the world's brain to-morrow, whence all science and justice would proceed. The great idea of liberty and equality had already soared from it at the prodigious blast of the Revolution; and from its genius and valour the final emancipation of man would also take its flight. Thus it was necessary that Paris should be victorious in the struggle in order that the world might be saved.

Pierre understood his brother, thanks to the lecture on explosives which he had heard at Bertheroy's. And the grandeur of this scheme, this dream, particularly struck him when he thought of the extraordinary future which would open for Paris amidst the effulgent blaze of the bombs. Moreover, he was struck by all the nobility of soul which had lain behind his brother's anxiety for a month past. If Guillaume had trembled it was simply with fear that his invention might be divulged in consequence of Salvat's crime. The slightest indiscretion might compromise everything; and that little stolen cartridge, whose effects had so astonished savants, might reveal his secret. He felt it necessary to act in mystery, choosing his own time, awaiting the proper hour, until when the secret would slumber in its hiding-place, confided to the sole care of Mere-Grand, who had her orders and knew what she was to do should he, in any sudden accident, disappear.

"And, now," said Guillaume in conclusion, "you know my hopes and my anguish, and you can help me and even take my place if I am unable to reach the end of my task. Ah! to reach the end! Since I have been shut up here, reflecting, consumed by anxiety and impatience, there have been hours when I have ceased to see my way clearly! There is that Salvat, that wretched fellow for whose crime we are all of us responsible, and who is now being hunted down like a wild beast! There is also that insensate and insatiable bourgeoisie, which will let itself be crushed by the fall of the shaky old house, rather than allow the least repair to it! And there is further that avaricious, that abominable Parisian press, so harsh towards the weak and little, so fond of insulting those who have none to defend them, so eager to coin money out of public misfortune, and ready to spread insanity on all sides, simply to increase its sales! Where, therefore, shall one find truth and justice, the hand endowed with logic and health that ought to be armed with the thunderbolt? Would Paris the conqueror, Paris the master of the nations, prove the justiciar, the saviour that men await! Ah! the anguish of believing oneself to be the master of the world's destinies, and to have to choose and decide."

He had risen again quivering, full of anger and fear that human wretchedness and baseness might prevent the realisation of his dream. And amidst the heavy silence which fell in the room, the little house suddenly resounded with a regular, continuous footfall.

"Ah, yes! to save men and love them, and wish them all to be equal and free," murmured Pierre, bitterly. "But just listen! Barthes's footsteps are answering you, as if from the everlasting dungeon into which his love of liberty has thrown him!"

However, Guillaume had already regained possession of himself, and coming back in a transport of his faith, he once more took Pierre in his loving, saving arms, like an elder brother who gives himself without restraint. "No, no, I'm wrong, I'm blaspheming," he exclaimed; "I wish you to be with me, full of hope and full of certainty. You must work, you must love, you must revive to life. Life alone can give you back peace and health."

Tears returned to the eyes of Pierre, who was penetrated to the heart by this ardent affection. "Ah! how I should like to believe you," he faltered, "and try to cure myself. True, I have already felt, as it were, a vague revival within me. And yet to live again, no, I cannot; the priest that I am is dead—a lifeless, an empty tomb."

He was shaken by so frightful a sob, that Guillaume could not restrain his own tears. And clasped in one another's arms the brothers wept on, their hearts full of the softest emotion in that home of their youth, whither the dear shadows of their parents ever returned, hovering around until they should be reconciled and restored to the peace of the earth. And all the darkness and mildness of the garden streamed in through the open window, while yonder, on the horizon, Paris had fallen asleep in the mysterious gloom, beneath a very peaceful sky which was studded with stars.

BOOK III.

I. THE RIVALS

ON the Wednesday preceding the mid-Lent Thursday, a great charity bazaar was held at the Duvillard mansion, for the benefit of the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour. The ground-floor reception rooms, three spacious Louis Seize salons, whose windows overlooked the bare and solemn courtyard, were given up to the swarm of purchasers, five thousand admission cards having been distributed among all sections of Parisian society. And the opening of the bombarded mansion in this wise to thousands of visitors was regarded as quite an event, a real manifestation, although some people whispered that the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy and the adjacent streets were guarded by quite an army of police agents.

The idea of the bazaar had come from Duvillard himself, and at his bidding his wife had resigned herself to all this worry for the benefit of the enterprise over which she presided with such distinguished nonchalance. On the previous day the "Globe" newspaper, inspired by its director Fonsegue, who was also the general manager of the asylum, had published a very fine article, announcing the bazaar, and pointing out how noble, and touching, and generous was the initiative of the Baroness, who still gave her time, her money, and even her home to charity, in spite of the abominable crime which had almost reduced that home to ashes. Was not this the magnanimous answer of the spheres above to the hateful passions of the spheres below? And was it not also a peremptory answer to those who accused the capitalists of doing nothing for the wage-earners, the disabled and broken-down sons of toil?

The drawing-room doors were to be opened at two o'clock, and would only close at seven, so that there would be five full hours for the sales. And at noon, when nothing was as yet ready downstairs, when workmen and women were still decorating the stalls, and sorting the goods amidst a final scramble, there was, as usual, a little friendly dejeuner, to which a few guests had been invited, in the private rooms on the first floor. However, a scarcely expected incident had given a finishing touch to the general excitement of the house: that very morning Sagnier had resumed his campaign of denunciation in the matter of the African Railway Lines. In a virulent article in the "Voix du Peuple," he had inquired if it were the intention of the authorities to beguile the public much longer with the story of that bomb and that Anarchist whom the police did not arrest. And this time, while undertaking to publish the names of the thirty-two corrupt senators and deputies in a very early issue, he had boldly named Minister Barroux as one who had pocketed a sum of 200,000 francs. Mege would therefore certainly revive his interpellation, which might become dangerous, now that Paris had been thrown into such a distracted state by terror of the Anarchists. At the same time it was said that Vignon and his party had resolved to turn circumstances to account, with the object of overthrowing the ministry. Thus a redoubtable crisis was inevitably at hand. Fortunately, the Chamber did not meet that Wednesday; in fact, it had adjourned until the Friday, with the view of making mid-Lent a holiday. And so forty-eight hours were left one to prepare for the onslaught.

Eve, that morning, seemed more gentle and languid than ever, rather pale too, with an expression of sorrowful anxiety in the depths of her beautiful eyes. She set it all down to the very great fatigue which the preparations for the bazaar had entailed on her. But the truth was that Gerard de Quinsac, after shunning any further assignation, had for five days past avoided her in an embarrassed way. Still she was convinced that she would see him that morning, and so she had again ventured to wear the white silk gown which made her look so much younger than she really was. At the same time, beautiful as she had remained, with her delicate skin, superb figure and noble and charming countenance, her six and forty years were asserting themselves in her blotchy complexion and the little creases which were appearing about her lips, eyelids and temples.

Camille, for her part, though her position as daughter of the house made it certain that she would attract much custom as a saleswoman, had obstinately persisted in wearing one of her usual dresses, a dark "carmelite" gown, an old woman's frock, as she herself called it with a cutting laugh. However, her long and wicked-looking face beamed with some secret delight; such an expression of wit and intelligence wreathing her thin lips and shining in her big eyes that one lost sight of her deformity and thought her almost pretty.

Eve experienced a first deception in the little blue and silver sitting-room, where, accompanied by her daughter, she awaited the arrival of her guests. General de Bozonnet, whom Gerard was to have brought with him, came in alone, explaining that Madame de Quinsac had felt rather poorly that morning, and that Gerard, like a good and dutiful son, had wished to remain with her. Still he would come to the bazaar directly after dejeuner. While the Baroness listened to the General, striving to hide her disappointment and her fear that she would now be unable to obtain any explanation from Gerard that day, Camille looked at her with eager, devouring eyes. And a certain covert instinct of the misfortune threatening her must at that moment have come to Eve, for in her turn she glanced at her daughter and turned pale as if with anxiety.

Then Princess Rosemonde de Harn swept in like a whirlwind. She also was to be one of the saleswomen at the stall chosen by the Baroness, who liked her for her very turbulence, the sudden gaiety which she generally brought with her. Gowned in fire-hued satin (red shot with yellow), looking very eccentric with her curly hair and thin boyish figure, she laughed and talked of an accident by which her carriage had almost been cut in halves. Then, as Baron Duvillard and Hyacinthe came in from their rooms, late as usual, she took possession of the young man and scolded him, for on the previous evening she had vainly waited for him till ten o'clock in the expectation that he would keep his promise to escort her to a tavern at Montmartre, where some horrible things were said to occur. Hyacinthe, looking very bored, quietly replied that he had been detained at a seance given by some adepts in the New Magic, in the course of which the soul of St. Theresa had descended from heaven to recite a love sonnet.

However, Fonsegue was now coming in with his wife, a tall, thin, silent and generally insignificant woman, whom he seldom took about with him. On this occasion he had been obliged to bring her, as she was one of the lady-patronesses of the asylum, and he himself was coming to lunch with the Duvillards in his capacity as general manager. To the superficial observer he looked quite as gay as usual; but he blinked nervously, and his first glance was a questioning one in the direction of Duvillard, as if he wished to know how the latter bore the fresh thrust directed at him by Sagnier. And when he saw the banker looking perfectly composed, as superb, as rubicund as usual, and chatting in a bantering way with Rosemonde, he also put on an easy air, like a gamester who had never lost but had always known how to compel good luck, even in hours of treachery. And by way of showing his unconstraint of mind he at once addressed the Baroness on managerial matters: "Have you now succeeded in seeing M. l'Abbe Froment for the affair of that old man Laveuve, whom he so warmly recommended to us? All the formalities have been gone through, you know, and he can be brought to us at once, as we have had a bed vacant for three days past."

"Yes, I know," replied Eve; "but I can't imagine what has become of Abbe Froment, for he hasn't given us a sign of life for a month past. However, I made up my mind to write to him yesterday, and beg him to come to the bazaar to-day. In this manner I shall be able to acquaint him with the good news myself."

"It was to leave you the pleasure of doing so," said Fonsegue, "that I refrained from sending him any official communication. He's a charming priest, is he not?"

"Oh! charming, we are very fond of him."

However, Duvillard now intervened to say that they need not wait for Duthil, as he had received a telegram from him stating that he was detained by sudden business. At this Fonsegue's anxiety returned, and he once more questioned the Baron with his eyes. Duvillard smiled, however, and reassured him in an undertone: "It's nothing serious. Merely a commission for me, about which he'll only be able to bring me an answer by-and-by." Then, taking Fonsegue on one side, he added: "By the way, don't forget to insert the paragraph I told you of."

"What paragraph? Oh! yes, the one about that soiree at which Silviane recited a piece of verse. Well, I wanted to speak to you about it. It worries me a little, on account of the excessive praise it contains."

Duvillard, but a moment before so full of serenity, with his lofty, conquering, disdainful mien, now suddenly became pale and agitated. "But I absolutely want it to be inserted, my dear fellow! You would place me in the greatest embarrassment if it were not to appear, for I promised Silviane that it should."

As he spoke his lips trembled, and a scared look came into his eyes, plainly revealing his dismay.

"All right, all right," said Fonsegue, secretly amused, and well pleased at this complicity. "As it's so serious the paragraph shall go in, I promise you."

The whole company was now present, since neither Gerard nor Duthil was to be expected. So they went into the dining-room amidst a final noise of hammering in the sale-rooms below. The meal proved somewhat of a scramble, and was on three occasions disturbed by female attendants, who came to explain difficulties and ask for orders. Doors were constantly slamming, and the very walls seemed to shake with the unusual bustle which filled the house. And feverish as they all were in the dining-room, they talked in desultory, haphazard fashion on all sorts of subjects, passing from a ball given at the Ministry of the Interior on the previous night, to the popular mid-Lent festival which would take place on the morrow, and ever reverting to the bazaar, the prices that had been given for the goods which would be on sale, the prices at which they might be sold, and the probable figure of the full receipts, all this being interspersed with strange anecdotes, witticisms and bursts of laughter. On the General mentioning magistrate Amadieu, Eve declared that she no longer dared to invite him to dejeuner, knowing how busy he was at the Palace of Justice. Still, she certainly hoped that he would come to the bazaar and contribute something. Then Fonsegue amused himself with teasing Princess Rosemonde about her fire-hued gown, in which, said he, she must already feel roasted by the flames of hell; a suggestion which secretly delighted her, as Satanism had now become her momentary passion. Meantime, Duvillard lavished the most gallant politeness on that silent creature, Madame Fonsegue, while Hyacinthe, in order to astonish even the Princess, explained in a few words how the New Magic could transform a chaste young man into a real angel. And Camille, who seemed very happy and very excited, from time to time darted a hot glance at her mother, whose anxiety and sadness increased as she found the other more and more aggressive, and apparently resolved upon open and merciless warfare.

At last, just as the dessert was coming to an end, the Baroness heard her daughter exclaim in a piercing, defiant voice: "Oh! don't talk to me of the old ladies who still seem to be playing with dolls, and paint themselves, and dress as if they were about to be confirmed! All such ogresses ought to retire from the scene! I hold them in horror!"

At this, Eve nervously rose from her seat, and exclaimed apologetically: "You must forgive me for hurrying you like this. But I'm afraid that we shan't have time to drink our coffee in peace."

The coffee was served in the little blue and silver sitting-room, where bloomed some lovely yellow roses, testifying to the Baroness's keen passion for flowers, which made the house an abode of perpetual spring. Duvillard and Fonsegue, however, carrying their cups of steaming coffee with them, at once went into the former's private room to smoke a cigar there and chat in freedom. As the door remained wide open, one could hear their gruff voices more or less distinctly. Meantime, General de Bozonnet, delighted to find in Madame Fonsegue a serious, submissive person, who listened without interrupting, began to tell her a very long story of an officer's wife who had followed her husband through every battle of the war of 1870. Then Hyacinthe, who took no coffee—contemptuously declaring it to be a beverage only fit for door-keepers—managed to rid himself of Rosemonde, who was sipping some kummel, in order to come and whisper to his sister: "I say, it was very stupid of you to taunt mamma in the way you did just now. I don't care a rap about it myself. But it ends by being noticed, and, I warn you candidly, it shows ill breeding."

Camille gazed at him fixedly with her black eyes. "Pray don't you meddle with my affairs," said she.

At this he felt frightened, scented a storm, and decided to take Rosemonde into the adjoining red drawing-room in order to show her a picture which his father had just purchased. And the General, on being called by him, likewise conducted Madame Fonsegue thither.

The mother and daughter then suddenly found themselves alone and face to face. Eve was leaning on a pier-table, as if overcome; and indeed, the least sorrow bore her down, so weak at heart she was, ever ready to weep in her naive and perfect egotism. Why was it that her daughter thus hated her, and did her utmost to disturb that last happy spell of love in which her heart lingered? She looked at Camille, grieved rather than irritated; and the unfortunate idea came to her of making a remark about her dress at the very moment when the girl was on the point of following the others into the larger drawing-room.

"It's quite wrong of you, my dear," said she, "to persist in dressing like an old woman. It doesn't improve you a bit."

As Eve spoke, her soft eyes, those of a courted and worshipped handsome woman, clearly expressed the compassion she felt for that ugly, deformed girl, whom she had never been able to regard as a daughter. Was it possible that she, with her sovereign beauty, that beauty which she herself had ever adored and nursed, making it her one care, her one religion—was it possible that she had given birth to such a graceless creature, with a dark, goatish profile, one shoulder higher than the other, and a pair of endless arms such as hunchbacks often have? All her grief and all her shame at having had such a child became apparent in the quivering of her voice.

Camille, however, had stopped short, as if struck in the face with a whip. Then she came back to her mother and the horrible explanation began with these simple words spoken in an undertone: "You consider that I dress badly? Well, you ought to have paid some attention to me, have seen that my gowns suited your taste, and have taught me your secret of looking beautiful!"

Eve, with her dislike of all painful feeling, all quarrelling and bitter words, was already regretting her attack. So she sought to make a retreat, particularly as time was flying and they would soon be expected downstairs: "Come, be quiet, and don't show your bad temper when all those people can hear us. I have loved you—"

But with a quiet yet terrible laugh Camille interrupted her. "You've loved me! Oh! my poor mamma, what a comical thing to say! Have you ever loved anybody? You want others to love you, but that's another matter. As for your child, any child, do you even know how it ought to be loved? You have always neglected me, thrust me on one side, deeming me so ugly, so unworthy of you! And besides, you have not had days and nights enough to love yourself! Oh! don't deny it, my poor mamma; but even now you're looking at me as if I were some loathsome monster that's in your way."

From that moment the abominable scene was bound to continue to the end. With their teeth set, their faces close together, the two women went on speaking in feverish whispers.

"Be quiet, Camille, I tell you! I will not allow such language!"

"But I won't be quiet when you do all you can to wound me. If it's wrong of me to dress like an old woman, perhaps another is rather ridiculous in dressing like a girl, like a bride."

"Like a bride? I don't understand you."

"Oh! yes, you do. However, I would have you know that everybody doesn't find me so ugly as you try to make them believe."

"If you look amiss, it is because you don't dress properly; that is all I said."

"I dress as I please, and no doubt I do so well enough, since I'm loved as I am."

"What, really! Does someone love you? Well, let him inform us of it and marry you."

"Yes—certainly, certainly! It will be a good riddance, won't it? And you'll have the pleasure of seeing me as a bride!"

Their voices were rising in spite of their efforts to restrain them. However, Camille paused and drew breath before hissing out the words: "Gerard is coming here to ask for my hand in a day or two."

Eve, livid, with wildly staring eyes, did not seem to understand. "Gerard? why do you tell me that?"

"Why, because it's Gerard who loves me and who is going to marry me! You drive me to extremities; you're for ever repeating that I'm ugly; you treat me like a monster whom nobody will ever care for. So I'm forced to defend myself and tell you the truth in order to prove to you that everybody is not of your opinion."

Silence fell; the frightful thing which had risen between them seemed to have arrested the quarrel. But there was neither mother nor daughter left there. They were simply two suffering, defiant rivals. Eve in her turn drew a long breath and glanced anxiously towards the adjoining room to ascertain if anyone were coming in or listening to them. And then in a tone of resolution she made answer:

"You cannot marry Gerard."

"Pray, why not?"

"Because I won't have it; because it's impossible."

"That isn't a reason; give me a reason."

"The reason is that the marriage is impossible that is all."

"No, no, I'll tell you the reason since you force me to it. The reason is that Gerard is your lover! But what does that matter, since I know it and am willing to take him all the same?"

And to this retort Camille's flaming eyes added the words: "And it is particularly on that account that I want him." All the long torture born of her infirmities, all her rage at having always seen her mother beautiful, courted and adored, was now stirring her and seeking vengeance in cruel triumph. At last then she was snatching from her rival the lover of whom she had so long been jealous!

"You wretched girl!" stammered Eve, wounded in the heart and almost sinking to the floor. "You don't know what you say or what you make me suffer."

However, she again had to pause, draw herself erect and smile; for Rosemonde hastened in from the adjoining room with the news that she was wanted downstairs. The doors were about to be opened, and it was necessary she should be at her stall. Yes, Eve answered, she would be down in another moment. Still, even as she spoke she leant more heavily on the pier-table behind her in order that she might not fall.

Hyacinthe had drawn near to his sister: "You know," said he, "it's simply idiotic to quarrel like that. You would do much better to come downstairs."

But Camille harshly dismissed him: "Just you go off, and take the others with you. It's quite as well that they shouldn't be about our ears."

Hyacinthe glanced at his mother, like one who knew the truth and considered the whole affair ridiculous. And then, vexed at seeing her so deficient in energy in dealing with that little pest, his sister, he shrugged his shoulders, and leaving them to their folly, conducted the others away. One could hear Rosemonde laughing as she went off below, while the General began to tell Madame Fonsegue another story as they descended the stairs together. However, at the moment when the mother and daughter at last fancied themselves alone once more, other voices reached their ears, those of Duvillard and Fonsegue, who were still near at hand. The Baron from his room might well overhear the dispute.

Eve felt that she ought to have gone off. But she had lacked the strength to do so; it had been a sheer impossibility for her after those words which had smote her like a buffet amidst her distress at the thought of losing her lover.

"Gerard cannot marry you," she said; "he does not love you."

"He does."

"You fancy it because he has good-naturedly shown some kindness to you, on seeing others pay you such little attention. But he does not love you."

"He does. He loves me first because I'm not such a fool as many others are, and particularly because I'm young."

This was a fresh wound for the Baroness; one inflicted with mocking cruelty in which rang out all the daughter's triumphant delight at seeing her mother's beauty at last ripening and waning. "Ah! my poor mamma, you no longer know what it is to be young. If I'm not beautiful, at all events I'm young; my eyes are clear and my lips are fresh. And my hair's so long too, and I've so much of it that it would suffice to gown me if I chose. You see, one's never ugly when one's young. Whereas, my poor mamma, everything is ended when one gets old. It's all very well for a woman to have been beautiful, and to strive to keep so, but in reality there's only ruin left, and shame and disgust."

She spoke these words in such a sharp, ferocious voice that each of them entered her mother's heart like a knife. Tears rose to the eyes of the wretched woman, again stricken in her bleeding wound. Ah! it was true, she remained without weapons against youth. And all her anguish came from the consciousness that she was growing old, from the feeling that love was departing from her now, that like a fruit she had ripened and fallen from the tree.

"But Gerard's mother will never let him marry you," she said.

"He will prevail on her; that's his concern. I've a dowry of two millions, and two millions can settle many things."

"Do you now want to libel him, and say that he's marrying you for your money?"

"No, indeed! Gerard's a very nice and honest fellow. He loves me and he's marrying me for myself. But, after all, he isn't rich; he still has no assured position, although he's thirty-six; and there may well be some advantage in a wife who brings you wealth as well as happiness. For, you hear, mamma, it's happiness I'm bringing him, real happiness, love that's shared and is certain of the future."

Once again their faces drew close together. The hateful scene, interrupted by sounds around them, postponed, and then resumed, was dragging on, becoming a perfect drama full of murderous violence, although they never shouted, but still spoke on in low and gasping voices. Neither gave way to the other, though at every moment they were liable to some surprise; for not only were all the doors open, so that the servants might come in, but the Baron's voice still rang out gaily, close at hand.

"He loves you, he loves you"—continued Eve. "That's what you say. But he never told you so."

"He has told me so twenty times; he repeats it every time that we are alone together!"

"Yes, just as one says it to a little girl by way of amusing her. But he has never told you that he meant to marry you."

"He told it me the last time he came. And it's settled. I'm simply waiting for him to get his mother's consent and make his formal offer."

"You lie, you lie, you wretched girl! You simply want to make me suffer, and you lie, you lie!"

Eve's grief at last burst forth in that cry of protest. She no longer knew that she was a mother, and was speaking to her daughter. The woman, the amorosa, alone remained in her, outraged and exasperated by a rival. And with a sob she confessed the truth: "It is I he loves! Only the last time I spoke to him, he swore to me—you hear me?—he swore upon his honour that he did not love you, and that he would never marry you!"

A faint, sharp laugh came from Camille. Then, with an air of derisive compassion, she replied: "Ah! my poor mamma, you really make me sorry for you! What a child you are! Yes, really, you are the child, not I. What! you who ought to have so much experience, you still allow yourself to be duped by a man's protests! That one really has no malice; and, indeed, that's why he swears whatever you want him to swear, just to please and quiet you, for at heart he's a bit of a coward."

"You lie, you lie!"

"But just think matters over. If he no longer comes here, if he didn't come to dejeuner this morning, it is simply because he's had enough of you. He has left you for good; just have the courage to realise it. Of course he's still polite and amiable, because he's a well-bred man, and doesn't know how to break off. The fact is that he takes pity on you."

"You lie, you lie!"

"Well, question him then. Have a frank explanation with him. Ask him his intentions in a friendly way. And then show some good nature yourself, and realise that if you care for him you ought to give him me at once in his own interest. Give him back his liberty, and you will soon see that I'm the one he loves."

"You lie, you lie! You wretched child, you only want to torture and kill me!"

Then, in her fury and distress, Eve remembered that she was the mother, and that it was for her to chastise that unworthy daughter. There was no stick near her, but from a basket of the yellow roses, whose powerful scent intoxicated both of them, she plucked a handful of blooms, with long and spiny stalks, and smote Camille across the face. A drop of blood appeared on the girl's left temple, near her eyelid.

But she sprang forward, flushed and maddened by this correction, with her hand raised and ready to strike back. "Take care, mother! I swear I'd beat you like a gipsy! And now just put this into your head: I mean to marry Gerard, and I will; and I'll take him from you, even if I have to raise a scandal, should you refuse to give him to me with good grace."

Eve, after her one act of angry vigour, had sunk into an armchair, overcome, distracted. And all the horror of quarrels, which sprang from her egotistical desire to be happy, caressed, flattered and adored, was returning to her. But Camille, still threatening, still unsatiated, showed her heart as it really was, her stern, black, unforgiving heart, intoxicated with cruelty. There came a moment of supreme silence, while Duvillard's gay voice again rang out in the adjoining room.

The mother was gently weeping, when Hyacinthe, coming upstairs at a run, swept into the little salon. He looked at the two women, and made a gesture of indulgent contempt. "Ah! you're no doubt satisfied now! But what did I tell you? It would have been much better for you to have come downstairs at once! Everybody is asking for you. It's all idiotic. I've come to fetch you."

Eve and Camille would not yet have followed him, perhaps, if Duvillard and Fonsegue had not at that moment come out of the former's room. Having finished their cigars they also spoke of going downstairs. And Eve had to rise and smile and show dry eyes, while Camille, standing before a looking-glass, arranged her hair, and stanched the little drop of blood that had gathered on her temple.

There was already quite a number of people below, in the three huge saloons adorned with tapestry and plants. The stalls had been draped with red silk, which set a gay, bright glow around the goods. And no ordinary bazaar could have put forth such a show, for there was something of everything among the articles of a thousand different kinds, from sketches by recognised masters, and the autographs of famous writers, down to socks and slippers and combs. The haphazard way in which things were laid out was in itself an attraction; and, in addition, there was a buffet, where the whitest of beautiful hands poured out champagne, and two lotteries, one for an organ and another for a pony-drawn village cart, the tickets for which were sold by a bevy of charming girls, who had scattered through the throng. As Duvillard had expected, however, the great success of the bazaar lay in the delightful little shiver which the beautiful ladies experienced as they passed through the entrance where the bomb had exploded. The rougher repairing work was finished, the walls and ceilings had been doctored, in part re-constructed. However, the painters had not yet come, and here and there the whiter stone and plaster work showed like fresh scars left by all the terrible gashes. It was with mingled anxiety and rapture that pretty heads emerged from the carriages which, arriving in a continuous stream, made the flagstones of the court re-echo. And in the three saloons, beside the stalls, there was no end to the lively chatter: "Ah! my dear, did you see all those marks? How frightful, how frightful! The whole house was almost blown up. And to think it might begin again while we are here! One really needs some courage to come, but then, that asylum is such a deserving institution, and money is badly wanted to build a new wing. And besides, those monsters will see that we are not frightened, whatever they do."

When the Baroness at last came down to her stall with Camille she found the saleswomen feverishly at work already under the direction of Princess Rosemonde, who on occasions of this kind evinced the greatest cunning and rapacity, robbing the customers in the most impudent fashion. "Ah! here you are," she exclaimed. "Beware of a number of higglers who have come to secure bargains. I know them! They watch for their opportunities, turn everything topsy-turvy and wait for us to lose our heads and forget prices, so as to pay even less than they would in a real shop. But I'll get good prices from them, you shall see!"

At this, Eve, who for her own part was a most incapable saleswoman, had to laugh with the others. And in a gentle voice she made a pretence of addressing certain recommendations to Camille, who listened with a smiling and most submissive air. In point of fact the wretched mother was sinking with emotion, particularly at the thought that she would have to remain there till seven o'clock, and suffer in secret before all those people, without possibility of relief. And thus it was almost like a respite when she suddenly perceived Abbe Froment sitting and waiting for her on a settee, covered with red velvet, near her stall. Her legs were failing her, so she took a place beside him.

"You received my letter then, Monsieur l'Abbe. I am glad that you have come, for I have some good news to give you, and wished to leave you the pleasure of imparting it to your protege, that man Laveuve, whom you so warmly recommended to me. Every formality has now been fulfilled, and you can bring him to the asylum to-morrow."

Pierre gazed at her in stupefaction. "Laveuve? Why, he is dead!"

In her turn she became astonished. "What, dead! But you never informed me of it! If I told you of all the trouble that has been taken, of all that had to be undone and done again, and the discussions and the papers and the writing! Are you quite sure that he is dead?"

"Oh! yes, he is dead. He has been dead a month."

"Dead a month! Well, we could not know; you yourself gave us no sign of life. Ah! mon Dieu! what a worry that he should be dead. We shall now be obliged to undo everything again!"

"He is dead, madame. It is true that I ought to have informed you of it. But that doesn't alter the fact—he is dead."

Dead! that word which kept on returning, the thought too, that for a month past she had been busying herself for a corpse, quite froze her, brought her to the very depths of despair, like an omen of the cold death into which she herself must soon descend, in the shroud of her last passion. And, meantime, Pierre, despite himself, smiled bitterly at the atrocious irony of it all. Ah! that lame and halting Charity, which proffers help when men are dead!

The priest still lingered on the settee when the Baroness rose. She had seen magistrate Amadieu hurriedly enter like one who just wished to show himself, purchase some trifle, and then return to the Palace of Justice. However, he was also perceived by little Massot, the "Globe" reporter, who was prowling round the stalls, and who at once bore down upon him, eager for information. And he hemmed him in and forthwith interviewed him respecting the affair of that mechanician Salvat, who was accused of having deposited the bomb at the entrance of the house. Was this simply an invention of the police, as some newspapers pretended? Or was it really correct? And if so, would Salvat soon be arrested? In self-defence Amadieu answered correctly enough that the affair did not as yet concern him, and would only come within his attributions, if Salvat should be arrested and the investigation placed in his hands. At the same time, however, the magistrate's pompous and affectedly shrewd manner suggested that he already knew everything to the smallest details, and that, had he chosen, he could have promised some great events for the morrow. A circle of ladies had gathered round him as he spoke, quite a number of pretty women feverish with curiosity, who jostled one another in their eagerness to hear that brigand tale which sent a little shiver coursing under their skins. However, Amadieu managed to slip off after paying Rosemonde twenty francs for a cigarette case, which was perhaps worth thirty sous.

Massot, on recognising Pierre, came up to shake hands with him. "Don't you agree with me, Monsieur l'Abbe, that Salvat must be a long way off by now if he's got good legs? Ah! the police will always make me laugh!"

However, Rosemonde brought Hyacinthe up to the journalist. "Monsieur Massot," said she, "you who go everywhere, I want you to be judge. That Chamber of Horrors at Montmartre, that tavern where Legras sings the 'Flowers of the Streets'—"

"Oh! a delightful spot, madame," interrupted Massot, "I wouldn't take even a gendarme there."

"No, don't jest, Monsieur Massot, I'm talking seriously. Isn't it quite allowable for a respectable woman to go there when she's accompanied by a gentleman?" And, without allowing the journalist time to answer her, she turned towards Hyacinthe: "There! you see that Monsieur Massot doesn't say no! You've got to take me there this evening, it's sworn, it's sworn."

Then she darted away to sell a packet of pins to an old lady, while the young man contented himself with remarking, in the voice of one who has no illusions left: "She's quite idiotic with her Chamber of Horrors!"

Massot philosophically shrugged his shoulders. It was only natural that a woman should want to amuse herself. And when Hyacinthe had gone off, passing with perverse contempt beside the lovely girls who were selling lottery tickets, the journalist ventured to murmur: "All the same, it would do that youngster good if a woman were to take him in hand."

Then, again addressing Pierre, he resumed: "Why, here comes Duthil! What did Sagnier mean this morning by saying that Duthil would sleep at Mazas to-night?"

In a great hurry apparently, and all smiles, Duthil was cutting his way through the crowd in order to join Duvillard and Fonsegue, who still stood talking near the Baroness's stall. And he waved his hand to them in a victorious way, to imply that he had succeeded in the delicate mission entrusted to him. This was nothing less than a bold manoeuvre to hasten Silviane's admission to the Comedie Francaise. The idea had occurred to her of making the Baron give a dinner at the Cafe Anglais in order that she might meet at it an influential critic, who, according to her statements, would compel the authorities to throw the doors wide open for her as soon as he should know her. However, it did not seem easy to secure the critic's presence, as he was noted for his sternness and grumbling disposition. And, indeed, after a first repulse, Duthil had for three days past been obliged to exert all his powers of diplomacy, and bring even the remotest influence into play. But he was radiant now, for he had conquered.

"It's for this evening, my dear Baron, at half-past seven," he exclaimed. "Ah! dash it all, I've had more trouble than I should have had to secure a concession vote!" Then he laughed with the pretty impudence of a man of pleasure, whom political conscientiousness did not trouble. And, indeed, his allusion to the fresh denunciations of the "Voix du Peuple" hugely amused him.

"Don't jest," muttered Fonsegue, who for his part wished to amuse himself by frightening the young deputy. "Things are going very badly!"

Duthil turned pale, and a vision of the police and Mazas rose before his eyes. In this wise sheer funk came over him from time to time. However, with his lack of all moral sense, he soon felt reassured and began to laugh. "Bah!" he retorted gaily, winking towards Duvillard, "the governor's there to pilot the barque!"

The Baron, who was extremely pleased, had pressed his hands, thanked him, and called him an obliging fellow. And now turning towards Fonsegue, he exclaimed: "I say, you must make one of us this evening. Oh! it's necessary. I want something imposing round Silviane. Duthil will represent the Chamber, you journalism, and I finance—" But he suddenly paused on seeing Gerard, who, with a somewhat grave expression, was leisurely picking his way through the sea of skirts. "Gerard, my friend," said the Baron, after beckoning to him, "I want you to do me a service." And forthwith he told him what was in question; how the influential critic had been prevailed upon to attend a dinner which would decide Silviane's future; and how it was the duty of all her friends to rally round her.

"But I can't," the young man answered in embarrassment. "I have to dine at home with my mother, who was rather poorly this morning."

"Oh! a sensible woman like your mother will readily understand that there are matters of exceptional importance. Go home and excuse yourself. Tell her some story, tell her that a friend's happiness is in question." And as Gerard began to weaken, Duvillard added: "The fact is, that I really want you, my dear fellow; I must have a society man. Society, you know, is a great force in theatrical matters; and if Silviane has society with her, her triumph is certain."

Gerard promised, and then chatted for a moment with his uncle, General de Bozonnet, who was quite enlivened by that throng of women, among whom he had been carried hither and thither like an old rudderless ship. After acknowledging the amiability with which Madame Fonsegue had listened to his stories, by purchasing an autograph of Monseigneur Martha from her for a hundred francs, he had quite lost himself amid the bevy of girls who had passed him on, one to another. And now, on his return from them, he had his hands full of lottery tickets: "Ah! my fine fellow," said he, "I don't advise you to venture among all those young persons. You would have to part with your last copper. But, just look! there's Mademoiselle Camille beckoning to you!"

Camille, indeed, from the moment she had perceived Gerard, had been smiling at him and awaiting his approach. And when their glances met he was obliged to go to her, although, at the same moment, he felt that Eve's despairing and entreating eyes were fixed upon him. The girl, who fully realised that her mother was watching her, at once made a marked display of amiability, profiting by the license which charitable fervour authorised, to slip a variety of little articles into the young man's pockets, and then place others in his hands, which she pressed within her own, showing the while all the sparkle of youth, indulging in fresh, merry laughter, which fairly tortured her rival.

So extreme was Eve's suffering, that she wished to intervene and part them. But it so chanced that Pierre barred her way, for he wished to submit an idea to her before leaving the bazaar. "Madame," said he, "since that man Laveuve is dead, and you have taken so much trouble with regard to the bed which you now have vacant, will you be so good as to keep it vacant until I have seen our venerable friend, Abbe Rose? I am to see him this evening, and he knows so many cases of want, and would be so glad to relieve one of them, and bring you some poor protege of his."

"Yes, certainly," stammered the Baroness, "I shall be very happy,—I will wait a little, as you desire,—of course, of course, Monsieur l'Abbe."

She was trembling all over; she no longer knew what she was saying; and, unable to conquer her passion, she turned aside from the priest, unaware even that he was still there, when Gerard, yielding to the dolorous entreaty of her eyes, at last managed to escape from Camille and join her.

"What a stranger you are becoming, my friend!" she said aloud, with a forced smile. "One never sees you now."

"Why, I have been poorly," he replied, in his amiable way. "Yes, I assure you I have been ailing a little."

He, ailing! She looked at him with maternal anxiety, quite upset. And, indeed, however proud and lofty his figure, his handsome regular face did seem to her paler than usual. It was as if the nobility of the facade had, in some degree, ceased to hide the irreparable dilapidation within. And given his real good nature, it must be true that he suffered—suffered by reason of his useless, wasted life, by reason of all the money he cost his impoverished mother, and of the needs that were at last driving him to marry that wealthy deformed girl, whom at first he had simply pitied. And so weak did he seem to Eve, so like a piece of wreckage tossed hither and thither by a tempest, that, at the risk of being overheard by the throng, she let her heart flow forth in a low but ardent, entreating murmur: "If you suffer, ah! what sufferings are mine!—Gerard, we must see one another, I will have it so."

"No, I beg you, let us wait," he stammered in embarrassment.

"It must be, Gerard; Camille has told me your plans. You cannot refuse to see me. I insist on it."

He made yet another attempt to escape the cruel explanation. "But it's impossible at the usual place," he answered, quivering. "The address is known."

"Then to-morrow, at four o'clock, at that little restaurant in the Bois where we have met before."

He had to promise, and they parted. Camille had just turned her head and was looking at them. Moreover, quite a number of women had besieged the stall; and the Baroness began to attend to them with the air of a ripe and nonchalant goddess, while Gerard rejoined Duvillard, Fonsegue and Duthil, who were quite excited at the prospect of their dinner that evening.

Pierre had heard a part of the conversation between Gerard and the Baroness. He knew what skeletons the house concealed, what physiological and moral torture and wretchedness lay beneath all the dazzling wealth and power. There was here an envenomed, bleeding sore, ever spreading, a cancer eating into father, mother, daughter and son, who one and all had thrown social bonds aside. However, the priest made his way out of the salons, half stifling amidst the throng of lady-purchasers who were making quite a triumph of the bazaar. And yonder, in the depths of the gloom, he could picture Salvat still running and running on; while the corpse of Laveuve seemed to him like a buffet of atrocious irony dealt to noisy and delusive charity.

II. SPIRIT AND FLESH

How delightful was the quietude of the little ground-floor overlooking a strip of garden in the Rue Cortot, where good Abbe Rose resided! Hereabouts there was not even a rumble of wheels, or an echo of the panting breath of Paris, which one heard on the other side of the height of Montmartre. The deep silence and sleepy peacefulness were suggestive of some distant provincial town.

Seven o'clock had struck, the dusk had gathered slowly, and Pierre was in the humble dining-room, waiting for the femme-de-menage to place the soup upon the table. Abbe Rose, anxious at having seen so little of him for a month past, had written, asking him to come to dinner, in order that they might have a quiet chat concerning their affairs. From time to time Pierre still gave his friend money for charitable purposes; in fact, ever since the days of the asylum in the Rue de Charonne, they had had accounts together, which they periodically liquidated. So that evening after dinner they were to talk of it all, and see if they could not do even more than they had hitherto done. The good old priest was quite radiant at the thought of the peaceful evening which he was about to spend in attending to the affairs of his beloved poor; for therein lay his only amusement, the sole pleasure to which he persistently and passionately returned, in spite of all the worries that his inconsiderate charity had already so often brought him.

Glad to be able to procure his friend this pleasure, Pierre, on his side, grew calmer, and found relief and momentary repose in sharing the other's simple repast and yielding to all the kindliness around him, far from his usual worries. He remembered the vacant bed at the Asylum, which Baroness Duvillard had promised to keep in reserve until he should have asked Abbe Rose if he knew of any case of destitution particularly worthy of interest; and so before sitting down to table he spoke of the matter.

"Destitution worthy of interest!" replied Abbe Rose, "ah! my dear child, every case is worthy of interest. And when it's a question of old toilers without work the only trouble is that of selection, the anguish of choosing one and leaving so many others in distress." Nevertheless, painful though his scruples were, he strove to think and come to some decision. "I know the case which will suit you," he said at last. "It's certainly one of the greatest suffering and wretchedness; and, so humble a one, too—an old carpenter of seventy-five, who has been living on public charity during the eight or ten years that he has been unable to find work. I don't know his name, everybody calls him 'the big Old'un.' There are times when he does not come to my Saturday distributions for weeks together. We shall have to look for him at once. I think that he sleeps at the Night Refuge in the Rue d'Orsel when lack of room there doesn't force him to spend the night crouching behind some palings. Shall we go down the Rue d'Orsel this evening?"

Abbe Rose's eyes beamed brightly as he spoke, for this proposal of his signified a great debauch, the tasting of forbidden fruit. He had been reproached so often and so roughly with his visits to those who had fallen to the deepest want and misery, that in spite of his overflowing, apostolic compassion, he now scarcely dared to go near them. However, he continued: "Is it agreed, my child? Only this once? Besides, it is our only means of finding the big Old'un. You won't have to stop with me later than eleven. And I should so like to show you all that! You will see what terrible sufferings there are! And perhaps we may be fortunate enough to relieve some poor creature or other."

Pierre smiled at the juvenile ardour displayed by this old man with snowy hair. "It's agreed, my dear Abbe," he responded, "I shall be very pleased to spend my whole evening with you, for I feel it will do me good to follow you once more on one of those rambles which used to fill our hearts with grief and joy."

At this moment the servant brought in the soup; however, just as the two priests were taking their seats a discreet ring was heard, and when Abbe Rose learnt that the visitor was a neighbour, Madame Mathis, who had come for an answer, he gave orders that she should be shown in.

"This poor woman," he explained to Pierre, "needed an advance of ten francs to get a mattress out of pawn; and I didn't have the money by me at the time. But I've since procured it. She lives in the house, you know, in silent poverty, on so small an income that it hardly keeps her in bread."

"But hasn't she a big son of twenty?" asked Pierre, suddenly remembering the young man he had seen at Salvat's.

"Yes, yes. Her parents, I believe, were rich people in the provinces. I've been told that she married a music master, who gave her lessons, at Nantes; and who ran away with her and brought her to Paris, where he died. It was quite a doleful love-story. By selling the furniture and realising every little thing she possessed, she scraped together an income of about two thousand francs a year, with which she was able to send her son to college and live decently herself. But a fresh blow fell on her: she lost the greater part of her little fortune, which was invested in doubtful securities. So now her income amounts at the utmost to eight hundred francs; two hundred of which she has to expend in rent. For all her other wants she has to be content with fifty francs a month. About eighteen months ago her son left her so as not to be a burden on her, and he is trying to earn his living somewhere, but without success, I believe."

Madame Mathis, a short, dark woman, with a sad, gentle, retiring face, came in. Invariably clad in the same black gown, she showed all the anxious timidity of a poor creature whom the storms of life perpetually assailed. When Abbe Rose had handed her the ten francs discreetly wrapped in paper, she blushed and thanked him, promising to pay him back as soon as she received her month's money, for she was not a beggar and did not wish to encroach on the share of those who starved.

"And your son, Victor, has he found any employment?" asked the old priest.

She hesitated, ignorant as she was of what her son might be doing, for now she did not see him for weeks together. And finally, she contented herself with answering: "He has a good heart, he is very fond of me. It is a great misfortune that we should have been ruined before he could enter the Ecole Normale. It was impossible for him to prepare for the examination. But at the Lycee he was such a diligent and intelligent pupil!"

"You lost your husband when your son was ten years old, did you not?" said Abbe Rose.

At this she blushed again, thinking that her husband's story was known to the two priests. "Yes, my poor husband never had any luck," she said. "His difficulties embittered and excited his mind, and he died in prison. He was sent there through a disturbance at a public meeting, when he had the misfortune to wound a police officer. He had also fought at the time of the Commune. And yet he was a very gentle man and extremely fond of me."

Tears had risen to her eyes; and Abbe Rose, much touched, dismissed her: "Well, let us hope that your son will give you satisfaction, and be able to repay you for all you have done for him."

With a gesture of infinite sorrow, Madame Mathis discreetly withdrew. She was quite ignorant of her son's doings, but fate had pursued her so relentlessly that she ever trembled.

"I don't think that the poor woman has much to expect from her son," said Pierre, when she had gone. "I only saw him once, but the gleam in his eyes was as harsh and trenchant as that of a knife."

"Do you think so?" the old priest exclaimed, with his kindly naivete. "Well, he seemed to me very polite, perhaps a trifle eager to enjoy life; but then, all the young folks are impatient nowadays. Come, let us sit down to table, for the soup will be cold."

Almost at the same hour, on the other side of Paris, night had in like fashion slowly fallen in the drawing-room of the Countess de Quinsac, on the dismal, silent ground-floor of an old mansion in the Rue St. Dominique. The Countess was there, alone with her faithful friend, the Marquis de Morigny, she on one side, and he on the other side of the chimney-piece, where the last embers of the wood fire were dying out. The servant had not yet brought the lamp, and the Countess refrained from ringing, finding some relief from her anxiety in the falling darkness, which hid from view all the unconfessed thoughts that she was afraid of showing on her weary face. And it was only now, before that dim hearth, and in that black room, where never a sound of wheels disturbed the silence of the slumberous past, that she dared to speak.

"Yes, my friend," she said, "I am not satisfied with Gerard's health. You will see him yourself, for he promised to come home early and dine with me. Oh! I'm well aware that he looks big and strong; but to know him properly one must have nursed and watched him as I have done! What trouble I had to rear him! In reality he is at the mercy of any petty ailment. His slightest complaint becomes serious illness. And the life he leads does not conduce to good health."

She paused and sighed, hesitating to carry her confession further.

"He leads the life he can," slowly responded the Marquis de Morigny, of whose delicate profile, and lofty yet loving bearing, little could be seen in the gloom. "As he was unable to endure military life, and as even the fatigues of diplomacy frighten you, what would you have him do? He can only live apart pending the final collapse, while this abominable Republic is dragging France to the grave."

"No doubt, my friend. And yet it is just that idle life which frightens me. He is losing in it all that was good and healthy in him. I don't refer merely to the liaisons which we have had to tolerate. The last one, which I found so much difficulty in countenancing at the outset, so contrary did it seem to all my ideas and beliefs, has since seemed to me to exercise almost a good influence. Only he is now entering his thirty-sixth year, and can he continue living in this fashion without object or duties? If he is ailing it is perhaps precisely because he does nothing, holds no position, and serves no purpose." Her voice again quavered. "And then, my friend, since you force me to tell you everything, I must own that I am not in good health myself. I have had several fainting fits of late, and have consulted a doctor. The truth is, that I may go off at any moment."

With a quiver, Morigny leant forward in the still deepening gloom, and wished to take hold of her hands. "You! what, am I to lose you, my last affection!" he faltered, "I who have seen the old world I belong to crumble away, I who only live in the hope that you at all events will still be here to close my eyes!"

But she begged him not to increase her grief: "No, no, don't take my hands, don't kiss them! Remain there in the shade, where I can scarcely see you.... We have loved one another so long without aught to cause shame or regret; and that will prove our strength—our divine strength—till we reach the grave.... And if you were to touch me, if I were to feel you too near me I could not finish, for I have not done so yet."

As soon as he had relapsed into silence and immobility, she continued: "If I were to die to-morrow, Gerard would not even find here the little fortune which he still fancies is in my hands. The dear child has often cost me large sums of money without apparently being conscious of it. I ought to have been more severe, more prudent. But what would you have? Ruin is at hand. I have always been too weak a mother. And do you now understand in what anguish I live? I ever have the thought that if I die Gerard will not even possess enough to live on, for he is incapable of effecting the miracle which I renew each day, in order to keep the house up on a decent footing.... Ah! I know him, so supine, so sickly, in spite of his proud bearing, unable to do anything, even conduct himself. And so what will become of him; will he not fall into the most dire distress?"

Then her tears flowed freely, her heart opened and bled, for she foresaw what must happen after her death: the collapse of her race and of a whole world in the person of that big child. And the Marquis, still motionless but distracted, feeling that he had no title to offer his own fortune, suddenly understood her, foresaw in what disgrace this fresh disaster would culminate.

"Ah! my poor friend!" he said at last in a voice trembling with revolt and grief. "So you have agreed to that marriage—yes, that abominable marriage with that woman's daughter! Yet you swore it should never be! You would rather witness the collapse of everything, you said. And now you are consenting, I can feel it!"

She still wept on in that black, silent drawing-room before the chimney-piece where the fire had died out. Did not Gerard's marriage to Camille mean a happy ending for herself, a certainty of leaving her son wealthy, loved, and seated at the banquet of life? However, a last feeling of rebellion arose within her.

"No, no," she exclaimed, "I don't consent, I swear to you that I don't consent as yet. I am fighting with my whole strength, waging an incessant battle, the torture of which you cannot imagine."

Then, in all sincerity, she foresaw the likelihood of defeat. "If I should some day give way, my friend, at all events believe that I feel, as fully as you do, how abominable such a marriage must be. It will be the end of our race and our honour!"

This cry profoundly stirred the Marquis, and he was unable to add a word. Haughty and uncompromising Catholic and Royalist that he was, he, on his side also, expected nothing but the supreme collapse. Yet how heartrending was the thought that this noble woman, so dearly and so purely loved, would prove one of the most mournful victims of the catastrophe! And in the shrouding gloom he found courage to kneel before her, take her hand, and kiss it.

Just as the servant was at last bringing a lighted lamp Gerard made his appearance. The past-century charm of the old Louis XVI. drawing-room, with its pale woodwork, again became apparent in the soft light. In order that his mother might not be over-saddened by his failure to dine with her that evening the young man had put on an air of brisk gaiety; and when he had explained that some friends were waiting for him, she at once released him from his promise, happy as she felt at seeing him so merry.

"Go, go, my dear boy," said she, "but mind you do not tire yourself too much.... I am going to keep Morigny; and the General and Larombiere are coming at nine o'clock. So be easy, I shall have someone with me to keep me from fretting and feeling lonely."

In this wise Gerard after sitting down for a moment and chatting with the Marquis was able to slip away, dress, and betake himself to the Cafe Anglais.

When he reached it women in fur cloaks were already climbing the stairs, fashionable and merry parties were filling the private rooms, the electric lights shone brilliantly, and the walls were already vibrating with the stir of pleasure and debauchery. In the room which Baron Duvillard had engaged the young man found an extraordinary display, the most superb flowers, and a profusion of plate and crystal as for a royal gala. The pomp with which the six covers were laid called forth a smile; while the bill of fare and the wine list promised marvels, all the rarest and most expensive things that could be selected.

"It's stylish, isn't it?" exclaimed Silviane, who was already there with Duvillard, Fonsegue and Duthil. "I just wanted to make your influential critic open his eyes a little! When one treats a journalist to such a dinner as this, he has got to be amiable, hasn't he?"

In her desire to conquer, it had occurred to the young woman to array herself in the most amazing fashion. Her gown of yellow satin, covered with old Alencon lace, was cut low at the neck; and she had put on all her diamonds, a necklace, a diadem, shoulder-knots, bracelets and rings. With her candid, girlish face, she looked like some Virgin in a missal, a Queen-Virgin, laden with the offerings of all Christendom.

"Well, well, you look so pretty," said Gerard, who sometimes jested with her, "that I think it will do all the same."

"Ah!" she replied with equanimity. "You consider me a bourgeoise, I see. Your opinion is that a simple little dinner and a modest gown would have shown better taste. But ah! my dear fellow, you don't know the way to get round men!"

Duvillard signified his approval, for he was delighted to be able to show her in all her glory, adorned like an idol. Fonsegue, for his part, talked of diamonds, saying that they were now doubtful investments, as the day when they would become articles of current manufacture was fast approaching, thanks to the electrical furnace and other inventions. Meantime Duthil, with an air of ecstasy and the dainty gestures of a lady's maid, hovered around the young woman, either smoothing a rebellious bow or arranging some fold of her lace.

"But I say," resumed Silviane, "your critic seems to be an ill-bred man, for he's keeping us waiting."

Indeed, the critic arrived a quarter of an hour late, and while apologising, he expressed his regret that he should be obliged to leave at half-past nine, for he was absolutely compelled to put in an appearance at a little theatre in the Rue Pigalle. He was a big fellow of fifty with broad shoulders and a full, bearded face. His most disagreeable characteristic was the narrow dogmatic pedantry which he had acquired at the Ecole Normale, and had never since been able to shake off. All his herculean efforts to be sceptical and frivolous, and the twenty years he had spent in Paris mingling with every section of society, had failed to rid him of it. Magister he was, and magister he remained, even in his most strenuous flights of imagination and audacity. From the moment of his arrival he tried to show himself enraptured with Silviane. Naturally enough, he already knew her by sight, and had even criticised her on one occasion in five or six contemptuous lines. However, the sight of her there, in full beauty, clad like a queen, and presented by four influential protectors, filled him with emotion; and he was struck with the idea that nothing would be more Parisian and less pedantic than to assert she had some talent and give her his support.

They had seated themselves at table, and the repast proved a magnificent one, the service ever prompt and assiduous, an attendant being allotted to each diner. While the flowers scattered their perfumes through the room, and the plate and crystal glittered on the snowy cloth, an abundance of delicious and unexpected dishes were handed round—a sturgeon from Russia, prohibited game, truffles as big as eggs, and hothouse vegetables and fruit as full of flavour as if they had been naturally matured. It was money flung out of window, simply for the pleasure of wasting more than other people, and eating what they could not procure. The influential critic, though he displayed the ease of a man accustomed to every sort of festivity, really felt astonished at it all, and became servile, promising his support, and pledging himself far more than he really wished to. Moreover, he showed himself very gay, found some witty remarks to repeat, and even some rather ribald jests. But when the champagne appeared after the roast and the grand burgundies, his over-excitement brought him back perforce to his real nature. The conversation had now turned on Corneille's "Polyeucte" and the part of "Pauline," in which Silviane wished to make her debut at the Comedie Francaise. This extraordinary caprice, which had quite revolted the influential critic a week previously, now seemed to him simply a bold enterprise in which the young woman might even prove victorious if she consented to listen to his advice. And, once started, he delivered quite a lecture on the past, asserting that no actress had ever yet understood it properly, for at the outset Pauline was simply a well-meaning little creature of the middle classes, and the beauty of her conversion at the finish arose from the working of a miracle, a stroke of heavenly grace which endowed her with something divine. This was not the opinion of Silviane, who from the first lines regarded Pauline as the ideal heroine of some symbolical legend. However, as the critic talked on and on, she had to feign approval; and he was delighted at finding her so beautiful and docile beneath his ferule. At last, as ten o'clock was striking, he rose and tore out of the hot and reeking room in order to do his work.

"Ah! my dears," cried Silviane, "he's a nice bore is that critic of yours! What a fool he is with his idea of Pauline being a little bourgeoise! I would have given him a fine dressing if it weren't for the fact that I have some need of him. Ah! no, it's too idiotic! Pour me out a glass of champagne. I want something to set me right after all that!"

The fete then took quite an intimate turn between the four men who remained and that bare-armed, bare-breasted girl, covered with diamonds; while from the neighbouring passages and rooms came bursts of laughter and sounds of kissing, all the stir and mirth of the debauchery now filling the house. And beneath the windows torrents of vehicles and pedestrians streamed along the Boulevards where reigned the wild fever of pleasure and harlotry.

"No, don't open it, or I shall catch cold!" resumed Silviane, addressing Fonsegue as he stepped towards the window. "Are you so very warm, then? I'm just comfortable.... But, Duvillard, my good fellow, please order some more champagne. It's wonderful what a thirst your critic has given me!"

Amidst the blinding glare of the lamps and the perfume of the flowers and wines, one almost stifled in the room. And Silviane was seized with an irresistible desire for a spree, a desire to tipple and amuse herself in some vulgar fashion, as in her bygone days. A few glasses of champagne brought her to full pitch, and she showed the boldest and giddiest gaiety. The others, who had never before seen her so lively, began on their own side to feel amused. As Fonsegue was obliged to go to his office she embraced him "like a daughter," as she expressed it. However, on remaining alone with the others she indulged in great freedom of speech, which became more and more marked as her intoxication increased. And to the class of men with whom she consorted her great attraction, as she was well aware, lay in the circumstance that with her virginal countenance and her air of ideal purity was coupled the most monstrous perversity ever displayed by any shameless woman. Despite her innocent blue eyes and lily-like candour, she would give rein, particularly when she was drunk, to the most diabolical of fancies.

Duvillard let her drink on, but she guessed his thoughts, like she guessed those of the others, and simply smiled while concocting impossible stories and descanting fantastically in the language of the gutter. And seeing her there in her dazzling gown fit for a queenly virgin, and hearing her pour forth the vilest words, they thought her most wonderfully droll. However, when she had drunk as much champagne as she cared for and was half crazy, a novel idea suddenly occurred to her.

"I say, my children," she exclaimed, "we are surely not going to stop here. It's so precious slow! You shall take me to the Chamber of Horrors—eh? just to finish the evening. I want to hear Legras sing 'La Chemise,' that song which all Paris is running to hear him sing."

But Duvillard indignantly rebelled: "Oh! no," said he; "most certainly not. It's a vile song and I'll never take you to such an abominable place."

But she did not appear to hear him. She had already staggered to her feet and was arranging her hair before a looking-glass. "I used to live at Montmartre," she said, "and it'll amuse me to go back there. And, besides, I want to know if this Legras is a Legras that I knew, oh! ever so long ago! Come, up you get, and let us be off!"

"But, my dear girl," pleaded Duvillard, "we can't take you into that den dressed as you are! Just fancy your entering that place in a low-necked gown and covered with diamonds! Why everyone would jeer at us! Come, Gerard, just tell her to be a little reasonable."

Gerard, equally offended by the idea of such a freak, was quite willing to intervene. But she closed his mouth with her gloved hand and repeated with the gay obstinacy of intoxication: "Pooh, it will be all the more amusing if they do jeer at us! Come, let us be off, let us be off, quick!"

Thereupon Duthil, who had been listening with a smile and the air of a man of pleasure whom nothing astonishes or displeases, gallantly took her part. "But, my dear Baron, everybody goes to the Chamber of Horrors," said he. "Why, I myself have taken the noblest ladies there, and precisely to hear that song of Legras, which is no worse than anything else."

"Ah! you hear what Duthil says!" cried Silviane. "He's a deputy, he is, and he wouldn't go there if he thought it would compromise his honorability!"

Then, as Duvillard still struggled on in despair at the idea of exhibiting himself with her in such a scandalous place, she became all the merrier: "Well, my dear fellow, please yourself. I don't need you. You and Gerard can go home if you like. But I'm going to Montmartre with Duthil. You'll take charge of me, won't you, Duthil, eh?"

Still, the Baron was in no wise disposed to let the evening finish in that fashion. The mere idea of it gave him a shock, and he had to resign himself to the girl's stubborn caprice. The only consolation he could think of was to secure Gerard's presence, for the young man, with some lingering sense of decorum, still obstinately refused to make one of the party. So the Baron took his hands and detained him, repeating in urgent tones that he begged him to come as an essential mark of friendship. And at last the wife's lover and daughter's suitor had to give way to the man who was the former's husband and the latter's father.

Silviane was immensely amused by it all, and, indiscreetly thee-ing and thou-ing Gerard, suggested that he at least owed the Baron some little compliance with his wishes.

Duvillard pretended not to hear her. He was listening to Duthil, who told him that there was a sort of box in a corner of the Chamber of Horrors, in which one could in some measure conceal oneself. And then, as Silviane's carriage—a large closed landau, whose coachman, a sturdy, handsome fellow, sat waiting impassively on his box—was down below, they started off.

The Chamber of Horrors was installed in premises on the Boulevard de Rochechouart, formerly occupied by a cafe whose proprietor had become bankrupt.* It was a suffocating place, narrow, irregular, with all sorts of twists, turns, and secluded nooks, and a low and smoky ceiling. And nothing could have been more rudimentary than its decorations. The walls had simply been placarded with posters of violent hues, some of the crudest character, showing the barest of female figures. Behind a piano at one end there was a little platform reached by a curtained doorway. For the rest, one simply found a number of bare wooden forms set alongside the veriest pot-house tables, on which the glasses containing various beverages left round and sticky marks. There was no luxury, no artistic feature, no cleanliness even. Globeless gas burners flared freely, heating a dense mist compounded of tobacco smoke and human breath. Perspiring, apoplectical faces could be perceived through this veil, and an acrid odour increased the intoxication of the assembly, which excited itself with louder and louder shouts at each fresh song. It had been sufficient for an enterprising fellow to set up these boards, bring out Legras, accompanied by two or three girls, make him sing his frantic and abominable songs, and in two or three evenings overwhelming success had come, all Paris being enticed and flocking to the place, which for ten years or so had failed to pay as a mere cafe, where by way of amusement petty cits had been simply allowed their daily games at dominoes.

* Those who know Paris will identify the site selected by M. Zola
as that where 'Colonel' Lisbonne of the Commune installed his
den the 'Bagne' some years ago. Nevertheless, such places as the
'Chamber of Horrors' now abound in the neighbourhood of
Montmartre, and it must be admitted that whilst they are
frequented by certain classes of Frenchmen they owe much of
their success in a pecuniary sense to the patronage of
foreigners. Among the latter, Englishmen are particularly
conspicuous.—Trans.

And the change had been caused by the passion for filth, the irresistible attraction exercised by all that brought opprobrium and disgust. The Paris of enjoyment, the bourgeoisie which held all wealth and power, which would relinquish naught of either, though it was surfeited and gradually wearying of both, simply hastened to the place in order that obscenity and insult might be flung in its face. Hypnotised, as it were, while staggering to its fall, it felt a need of being spat upon. And what a frightful symptom there lay in it all: those condemned ones rushing upon dirt of their own accord, voluntarily hastening their own decomposition by that unquenchable thirst for the vile, which attracted men, reputed to be grave and upright, and lovely women of the most perfect grace and luxury, to all the beastliness of that low den!

At one of the tables nearest the stage sat little Princess Rosemonde de Harn, with wild eyes and quivering nostrils, delighted as she felt at now being able to satisfy her curiosity regarding the depths of Paris life. Young Hyacinthe had resigned himself to the task of bringing her, and, correctly buttoned up in his long frock-coat, he was indulgent enough to refrain from any marked expression of boredom. At a neighbouring table they had found a shadowy Spaniard of their acquaintance, a so-called Bourse jobber, Bergaz, who had been introduced to the Princess by Janzen, and usually attended her entertainments. They virtually knew nothing about him, not even if he really earned at the Bourse all the money which he sometimes spent so lavishly, and which enabled him to dress with affected elegance. His slim, lofty figure was not without a certain air of distinction, but his red lips spoke of strong passions and his bright eyes were those of a beast of prey. That evening he had two young fellows with him, one Rossi, a short, swarthy Italian, who had come to Paris as a painter's model, and had soon glided into the lazy life of certain disreputable callings, and the other, Sanfaute, a born Parisian blackguard, a pale, beardless, vicious and impudent stripling of La Chapelle, whose long curly hair fell down upon either side of his bony cheeks.

"Oh! pray now!" feverishly said Rosemonde to Bergaz; "as you seem to know all these horrid people, just show me some of the celebrities. Aren't there some thieves and murderers among them?"

He laughed shrilly, and in a bantering way replied: "But you know these people well enough, madame. That pretty, pink, delicate-looking woman over yonder is an American lady, the wife of a consul, whom, I believe, you receive at your house. That other on the right, that tall brunette who shows such queenly dignity, is a Countess, whose carriage passes yours every day in the Bois. And the thin one yonder, whose eyes glitter like those of a she-wolf, is the particular friend of a high official, who is well known for his reputation of austerity."

But she stopped him, in vexation: "I know, I know. But the others, those of the lower classes, those whom one comes to see."

Then she went on asking questions, and seeking for terrifying and mysterious countenances. At last, two men seated in a corner ended by attracting her attention; one of them a very young fellow with a pale, pinched face, and the other an ageless individual who, besides being buttoned up to his neck in an old coat, had pulled his cap so low over his eyes, that one saw little of his face beyond the beard which fringed it. Before these two stood a couple of mugs of beer, which they drank slowly and in silence.

"You are making a great mistake, my dear," said Hyacinthe with a frank laugh, "if you are looking for brigands in disguise. That poor fellow with the pale face, who surely doesn't have food to eat every day, was my schoolfellow at Condorcet!"

Bergaz expressed his amazement. "What! you knew Mathis at Condorcet! After all, though, you're right, he received a college education. Ah! and so you knew him. A very remarkable young man he is, though want is throttling him. But, I say, the other one, his companion, you don't know him?"

Hyacinthe, after looking at the man with the cap-hidden face, was already shaking his head, when Bergaz suddenly gave him a nudge as a signal to keep quiet, and by way of explanation he muttered: "Hush! Here's Raphanel. I've been distrusting him for some time past. Whenever he appears anywhere, the police is not far off."

Raphanel was another of the vague, mysterious Anarchists whom Janzen had presented to the Princess by way of satisfying her momentary passion for revolutionism. This one, though he was a fat, gay, little man, with a doll-like face and childish nose, which almost disappeared between his puffy cheeks, had the reputation of being a thorough desperado; and at public meetings he certainly shouted for fire and murder with all his lungs. Still, although he had already been compromised in various affairs, he had invariably managed to save his own bacon, whilst his companions were kept under lock and key; and this they were now beginning to think somewhat singular.

He at once shook hands with the Princess in a jovial way, took a seat near her without being invited, and forthwith denounced the dirty bourgeoisie which came to wallow in places of ill fame. Rosemonde was delighted, and encouraged him, but others near by began to get angry, and Bergaz examined him with his piercing eyes, like a man of energy who acts, and lets others talk. Now and then, too, he exchanged quick glances of intelligence with his silent lieutenants, Sanfaute and Rossi, who plainly belonged to him, both body and soul. They were the ones who found their profit in Anarchy, practising it to its logical conclusions, whether in crime or in vice.

Meantime, pending the arrival of Legras with his "Flowers of the Pavement," two female vocalists had followed one another on the stage, the first fat and the second thin, one chirruping some silly love songs with an under-current of dirt, and the other shouting the coarsest of refrains, in a most violent, fighting voice. She had just finished amidst a storm of bravos, when the assembly, stirred to merriment and eager for a laugh, suddenly exploded once more. Silviane was entering the little box at one end of the hall. When she appeared erect in the full light, with bare arms and shoulders, looking like a planet in her gown of yellow satin and her blazing diamonds, there arose a formidable uproar, shouts, jeers, hisses, laughing and growling, mingled with ferocious applause. And the scandal increased, and the vilest expressions flew about as soon as Duvillard, Gerard and Duthil also showed themselves, looking very serious and dignified with their white ties and spreading shirt fronts.

"We told you so!" muttered Duvillard, who was much annoyed with the affair, while Gerard tried to conceal himself in a dim corner.

She, however, smiling and enchanted, faced the public, accepting the storm with the candid bearing of a foolish virgin, much as one inhales the vivifying air of the open when it bears down upon one in a squall. And, indeed, she herself had sprung from the sphere before her, its atmosphere was her native air.

"Well, what of it?" she said replying to the Baron who wanted her to sit down. "They are merry. It's very nice. Oh! I'm really amusing myself!"

"Why, yes, it's very nice," declared Duthil, who in like fashion set himself at his ease. "Silviane is right, people naturally like a laugh now and then!"

Amidst the uproar, which did not cease, little Princess Rosemonde rose enthusiastically to get a better view. "Why, it's your father who's with that woman Silviane," she said to Hyacinthe. "Just look at them! Well, he certainly has plenty of bounce to show himself here with her!"

Hyacinthe, however, refused to look. It didn't interest him, his father was an idiot, only a child would lose his head over a girl in that fashion. And with his contempt for woman the young man became positively insulting.

"You try my nerves, my dear fellow," said Rosemonde as she sat down. "You are the child with your silly ideas about us. And as for your father, he does quite right to love that girl. I find her very pretty indeed, quite adorable!"

Then all at once the uproar ceased, those who had risen resumed their seats, and the only sound was that of the feverish throb which coursed through the assembly. Legras had just appeared on the platform. He was a pale sturdy fellow with a round and carefully shaven face, stern eyes, and the powerful jaws of a man who compels the adoration of women by terrorising them. He was not deficient in talent, he sang true, and his ringing voice was one of extraordinary penetration and pathetic power. And his repertoire, his "Flowers of the Pavement," completed the explanation of his success; for all the foulness and suffering of the lower spheres, the whole abominable sore of the social hell created by the rich, shrieked aloud in these songs in words of filth and fire and blood.

A prelude was played on the piano, and Legras standing there in his velvet jacket sang "La Chemise," the horrible song which brought all Paris to hear him. All the lust and vice that crowd the streets of the great city appeared with their filth and their poison; and amid the picture of Woman stripped, degraded, ill-treated, dragged through the mire and cast into a cesspool, there rang out the crime of the bourgeoisie. But the scorching insult of it all was less in the words themselves than in the manner in which Legras cast them in the faces of the rich, the happy, the beautiful ladies who came to listen to him. Under the low ceiling, amidst the smoke from the pipes, in the blinding glare of the gas, he sent his lines flying through the assembly like expectorations, projected by a whirlwind of furious contempt. And when he had finished there came delirium; the beautiful ladies did not even think of wiping away the many affronts they had received, but applauded frantically. The whole assembly stamped and shouted, and wallowed, distracted, in its ignominy.

"Bravo! bravo!" the little Princess repeated in her shrill voice. "It's astonishing, astonishing, prodigious!"

And Silviane, whose intoxication seemed to have increased since she had been there, in the depths of that fiery furnace, made herself particularly conspicuous by the manner in which she clapped her hands and shouted: "It's he, it's my Legras! I really must kiss him, he's pleased me so much!"

Duvillard, now fairly exasperated, wished to take her off by force. But she clung to the hand-rest of the box, and shouted yet more loudly, though without any show of temper. It became necessary to parley with her. Yes, she was willing to go off and let them drive her home; but, first of all, she must embrace Legras, who was an old friend of hers. "Go and wait for me in the carriage!" she said, "I will be with you in a moment."

Just as the assembly was at last becoming calmer, Rosemonde perceived that the box was emptying; and her own curiosity being satisfied, she thought of prevailing on Hyacinthe to see her home. He, who had listened to Legras in a languid way without even applauding, was now talking of Norway with Bergaz, who pretended that he had travelled in the North. Oh! the fiords! oh! the ice-bound lakes! oh! the pure lily-white, chaste coldness of the eternal winter! It was only amid such surroundings, said Hyacinthe, that he could understand woman and love, like a kiss of the very snow itself.

"Shall we go off there to-morrow?" exclaimed the Princess with her vivacious effrontery. "I'll shut up my house and slip the key under the door."

Then she added that she was jesting, of course. But Bergaz knew her to be quite capable of such a freak; and at the idea that she might shut up her little mansion and perhaps leave it unprotected he exchanged a quick glance with Sanfaute and Rossi, who still smiled in silence. Ah! what an opportunity for a fine stroke! What an opportunity to get back some of the wealth of the community appropriated by the blackguard bourgeoisie!

Meantime Raphanel, after applauding Legras, was looking all round the place with his little grey, sharp eyes. And at last young Mathis and his companion, the ill-clad individual, of whose face only a scrap of beard could be seen, attracted his attention. They had neither laughed nor applauded; they seemed to be simply a couple of tired fellows who were resting, and in whose opinion one is best hidden in the midst of a crowd.

All at once, though, Raphanel turned towards Bergaz: "That's surely little Mathis over yonder. But who's that with him?"

Bergaz made an evasive gesture; he did not know. Still, he no longer took his eyes from Raphanel. And he saw the other feign indifference at what followed, and finish his beer and take his leave, with the jesting remark that he had an appointment with a lady at a neighbouring omnibus office. No sooner had he gone than Bergaz rose, sprang over some of the forms and jostled people in order to reach little Mathis, into whose ear he whispered a few words. And the young man at once left his table, taking his companion and pushing him outside through an occasional exit. It was all so rapidly accomplished that none of the general public paid attention to the flight.

"What is it?" said the Princess to Bergaz, when he had quietly resumed his seat between Rossi and Sanfaute.

"Oh! nothing, I merely wished to shake hands with Mathis as he was going off."

Thereupon Rosemonde announced that she meant to do the same. Nevertheless, she lingered a moment longer and again spoke of Norway on perceiving that nothing could impassion Hyacinthe except the idea of the eternal snow, the intense, purifying cold of the polar regions. In his poem on the "End of Woman," a composition of some thirty lines, which he hoped he should never finish, he thought of introducing a forest of frozen pines by way of final scene. Now the Princess had risen and was gaily reverting to her jest, declaring that she meant to take him home to drink a cup of tea and arrange their trip to the Pole, when an involuntary exclamation fell from Bergaz, who, while listening, had kept his eyes on the doorway.

"Mondesir! I was sure of it!"

There had appeared at the entrance a short, sinewy, broad-backed little man, about whose round face, bumpy forehead, and snub nose there was considerable military roughness. One might have thought him a non-commissioned officer in civilian attire. He gazed over the whole room, and seemed at once dismayed and disappointed.

Bergaz, however, wishing to account for his exclamation, resumed in an easy way: "Ah! I said there was a smell of the police about the place! You see that fellow—he's a detective, a very clever one, named Mondesir, who had some trouble when he was in the army. Just look at him, sniffing like a dog that has lost scent! Well, well, my brave fellow, if you've been told of any game you may look and look for it, the bird's flown already!"

Once outside, when Rosemonde had prevailed on Hyacinthe to see her home, they hastened to get into the brougham, which was waiting for them, for near at hand they perceived Silviane's landau, with the majestic coachman motionless on his box, while Duvillard, Gerard, and Duthil still stood waiting on the curbstone. They had been there for nearly twenty minutes already, in the semi-darkness of that outer boulevard, where all the vices of the poor districts of Paris were on the prowl. They had been jostled by drunkards; and shadowy women brushed against them as they went by whispering beneath the oaths and blows of bullies. And there were couples seeking the darkness under the trees, and lingering on the benches there; while all around were low taverns and dirty lodging-houses and places of ill-fame. All the human degradation which till break of day swarms in the black mud of this part of Paris, enveloped the three men, giving them the horrors, and yet neither the Baron nor Gerard nor Duthil was willing to go off. Each hoped that he would tire out the others, and take Silviane home when she should at last appear.

But after a time the Baron grew impatient, and said to the coachman: "Jules, go and see why madame doesn't come."

"But the horses, Monsieur le Baron?"

"Oh! they will be all right, we are here."

A fine drizzle had begun to fall; and the wait went on again as if it would never finish. But an unexpected meeting gave them momentary occupation. A shadowy form, something which seemed to be a thin, black-skirted woman, brushed against them. And all of a sudden they were surprised to find it was a priest.

"What, is it you, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment?" exclaimed Gerard. "At this time of night? And in this part of Paris?"

Thereupon Pierre, without venturing either to express his own astonishment at finding them there themselves, or to ask them what they were doing, explained that he had been belated through accompanying Abbe Rose on a visit to a night refuge. Ah! to think of all the frightful want which at last drifted to those pestilential dormitories where the stench had almost made him faint! To think of all the weariness and despair which there sank into the slumber of utter prostration, like that of beasts falling to the ground to sleep off the abominations of life! No name could be given to the promiscuity; poverty and suffering were there in heaps, children and men, young and old, beggars in sordid rags, beside the shameful poor in threadbare frock-coats, all the waifs and strays of the daily shipwrecks of Paris life, all the laziness and vice, and ill-luck and injustice which the torrent rolls on, and throws off like scum. Some slept on, quite annihilated, with the faces of corpses. Others, lying on their backs with mouths agape, snored loudly as if still venting the plaint of their sorry life. And others tossed restlessly, still struggling in their slumber against fatigue and cold and hunger, which pursued them like nightmares of monstrous shape. And from all those human beings, stretched there like wounded after a battle, from all that ambulance of life reeking with a stench of rottenness and death, there ascended a nausea born of revolt, the vengeance-prompting thought of all the happy chambers where, at that same hour, the wealthy loved or rested in fine linen and costly lace.*

* Even the oldest Paris night refuges, which are the outcome
of private philanthropy—L'Oeuvre de l'Hospitalite de Nuit—
have only been in existence some fourteen or fifteen years.
Before that time, and from the period of the great Revolution
forward, there was absolutely no place, either refuge, asylum,
or workhouse, in the whole of that great city of wealth and
pleasure, where the houseless poor could crave a night's
shelter. The various royalist, imperialist and republican
governments and municipalities of modern France have often
been described as 'paternal,' but no governments and
municipalities in the whole civilised world have done less for
the very poor. The official Poor Relief Board—L'Assistance
Publique—has for fifty years been a by-word, a mockery and a
sham, in spite of its large revenue. And this neglect of the
very poor has been an important factor in every French
revolution. Each of these—even that of 1870—had its purely
economic side, though many superficial historians are content
to ascribe economic causes to the one Revolution of 1789, and
to pass them by in all other instances.—Trans.

In vain had Pierre and Abbe Rose passed all the poor wretches in review while seeking the big Old'un, the former carpenter, so as to rescue him from the cesspool of misery, and send him to the Asylum on the very morrow. He had presented himself at the refuge that evening, but there was no room left, for, horrible to say, even the shelter of that hell could only be granted to early comers. And so he must now be leaning against a wall, or lying behind some palings. This had greatly distressed poor Abbe Rose and Pierre, but it was impossible for them to search every dark, suspicious corner; and so the former had returned to the Rue Cortot, while the latter was seeking a cab to convey him back to Neuilly.

The fine drizzling rain was still falling and becoming almost icy, when Silviane's coachman, Jules, at last reappeared and interrupted the priest, who was telling the Baron and the others how his visit to the refuge still made him shudder.

"Well, Jules—and madame?" asked Duvillard, quite anxious at seeing the coachman return alone.

Impassive and respectful, with no other sign of irony than a slight involuntary twist of the lips, Jules answered: "Madame sends word that she is not going home; and she places her carriage at the gentlemen's disposal if they will allow me to drive them home."

This was the last straw, and the Baron flew into a passion. To have allowed her to drag him to that vile den, to have waited there hopefully so long, and to be treated in this fashion for the sake of a Legras! No, no, he, the Baron, had had enough of it, and she should pay dearly for her abominable conduct! Then he stopped a passing cab and pushed Gerard inside it saying, "You can set me down at my door."

"But she's left us the carriage!" shouted Duthil, who was already consoled, and inwardly laughed at the termination of it all. "Come here, there's plenty of room for three. No? you prefer the cab? Well, just as you like, you know."

For his part he gaily climbed into the landau and drove off lounging on the cushions, while the Baron, in the jolting old cab, vented his rage without a word of interruption from Gerard, whose face was hidden by the darkness. To think of it! that she, whom he had overwhelmed with gifts, who had already cost him two millions of francs, should in this fashion insult him, the master who could dispose both of fortunes and of men! Well, she had chosen to do it, and he was delivered! Then Duvillard drew a long breath like a man released from the galleys.

For a moment Pierre watched the two vehicles go off; and then took his own way under the trees, so as to shelter himself from the rain until a vacant cab should pass. Full of distress and battling thoughts he had begun to feel icy cold. The whole monstrous night of Paris, all the debauchery and woe that sobbed around him made him shiver. Phantom-like women who, when young, had led lives of infamy in wealth, and who now, old and faded, led lives of infamy in poverty, were still and ever wandering past him in search of bread, when suddenly a shadowy form grazed him, and a voice murmured in his ear: "Warn your brother, the police are on Salvat's track, he may be arrested at any moment."

The shadowy figure was already going its way, and as a gas ray fell upon it, Pierre thought that he recognised the pale, pinched face of Victor Mathis. And at the same time, yonder in Abbe Rose's peaceful dining-room, he fancied he could again see the gentle face of Madame Mathis, so sad and so resigned, living on solely by the force of the last trembling hope which she had unhappily set in her son.

III. PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT

ALREADY at eight o'clock on that holiday-making mid-Lent Thursday, when all the offices of the Home Department were empty, Monferrand, the Minister, sat alone in his private room. A single usher guarded his door, and in the first ante-chamber there were only a couple of messengers.

The Minister had experienced, on awaking, the most unpleasant of emotions. The "Voix du Peuple," which on the previous day had revived the African Railway scandal, by accusing Barroux of having pocketed 20,000 francs, had that morning published its long-promised list of the bribe-taking senators and deputies. And at the head of this list Monferrand had found his own name set down against a sum of 80,000 francs, while Fonsegue was credited with 50,000. Then a fifth of the latter amount was said to have been Duthil's share, and Chaigneux had contented himself with the beggarly sum of 3,000 francs—the lowest price paid for any one vote, the cost of each of the others ranging from 5 to 20,000.

It must be said that there was no anger in Monferrand's emotion. Only he had never thought that Sagnier would carry his passion for uproar and scandal so far as to publish this list—a page which was said to have been torn from a memorandum book belonging to Duvillard's agent, Hunter, and which was covered with incomprehensible hieroglyphics that ought to have been discussed and explained, if, indeed, the real truth was to be arrived at. Personally, Monferrand felt quite at ease, for he had written nothing, signed nothing, and knew that one could always extricate oneself from a mess by showing some audacity, and never confessing. Nevertheless, what a commotion it would all cause in the parliamentary duck-pond. He at once realised the inevitable consequences, the ministry overthrown and swept away by this fresh whirlwind of denunciation and tittle-tattle. Mege would renew his interpellation on the morrow, and Vignon and his friends would at once lay siege to the posts they coveted. And he, Monferrand, could picture himself driven out of that ministerial sanctum where, for eight months past, he had been taking his ease, not with any foolish vainglory, but with the pleasure of feeling that he was in his proper place as a born ruler, who believed he could tame and lead the multitude.

Having thrown the newspapers aside with a disdainful gesture, he rose and stretched himself, growling the while like a plagued lion. And then he began to walk up and down the spacious room, which showed all the faded official luxury of mahogany furniture and green damask hangings. Stepping to and fro, with his hands behind his back, he no longer wore his usual fatherly, good-natured air. He appeared as he really was, a born wrestler, short, but broad shouldered, with sensual mouth, fleshy nose and stern eyes, that all proclaimed him to be unscrupulous, of iron will and fit for the greatest tasks. Still, in this case, in what direction lay his best course? Must he let himself be dragged down with Barroux? Perhaps his personal position was not absolutely compromised? And yet how could he part company from the others, swim ashore, and save himself while they were being drowned? It was a grave problem, and with his frantic desire to retain power, he made desperate endeavours to devise some suitable manoeuvre.

But he could think of nothing, and began to swear at the virtuous fits of that silly Republic, which, in his opinion, rendered all government impossible. To think of such foolish fiddle-faddle stopping a man of his acumen and strength! How on earth can one govern men if one is denied the use of money, that sovereign means of sway? And he laughed bitterly; for the idea of an idyllic country where all great enterprises would be carried out in an absolutely honest manner seemed to him the height of absurdity.

At last, however, unable as he was to come to a determination, it occurred to him to confer with Baron Duvillard, whom he had long known, and whom he regretted not having seen sooner so as to urge him to purchase Sagnier's silence. At first he thought of sending the Baron a brief note by a messenger; but he disliked committing anything to paper, for the veriest scrap of writing may prove dangerous; so he preferred to employ the telephone which had been installed for his private use near his writing-table.

"It is Baron Duvillard who is speaking to me?... Quite so. It's I, the Minister, Monsieur Monferrand. I shall be much obliged if you will come to see me at once.... Quite so, quite so, I will wait for you."

Then again he walked to and fro and meditated. That fellow Duvillard was as clever a man as himself, and might be able to give him an idea. And he was still laboriously trying to devise some scheme, when the usher entered saying that Monsieur Gascogne, the Chief of the Detective Police, particularly wished to speak to him. Monferrand's first thought was that the Prefecture of Police desired to know his views respecting the steps which ought to be taken to ensure public order that day; for two mid-Lent processions—one of the Washerwomen and the other of the Students—were to march through Paris, whose streets would certainly be crowded.

"Show Monsieur Gascogne in," he said.

A tall, slim, dark man, looking like an artisan in his Sunday best, then stepped into the ministerial sanctum. Fully acquainted with the under-currents of Paris life, this Chief of the Detective Force had a cold dispassionate nature and a clear and methodical mind. Professionalism slightly spoilt him, however: he would have possessed more intelligence if he had not credited himself with so much.

He began by apologising for his superior the Prefect, who would certainly have called in person had he not been suffering from indisposition. However, it was perhaps best that he, Gascogne, should acquaint Monsieur le Ministre with the grave affair which brought him, for he knew every detail of it. Then he revealed what the grave affair was.

"I believe, Monsieur le Ministre, that we at last hold the perpetrator of the crime in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy."

At this, Monferrand, who had been listening impatiently, became quite impassioned. The fruitless searches of the police, the attacks and the jeers of the newspapers, were a source of daily worry to him. "Ah!—Well, so much the better for you Monsieur Gascogne," he replied with brutal frankness. "You would have ended by losing your post. The man is arrested?"

"Not yet, Monsieur le Ministre; but he cannot escape, and it is merely an affair of a few hours."

Then the Chief of the Detective Force told the whole story: how Detective Mondesir, on being warned by a secret agent that the Anarchist Salvat was in a tavern at Montmartre, had reached it just as the bird had flown; then how chance had again set him in presence of Salvat at a hundred paces or so from the tavern, the rascal having foolishly loitered there to watch the establishment; and afterwards how Salvat had been stealthily shadowed in the hope that they might catch him in his hiding-place with his accomplices. And, in this wise, he had been tracked to the Porte-Maillot, where, realising, no doubt, that he was pursued, he had suddenly bolted into the Bois de Boulogne. It was there that he had been hiding since two o'clock in the morning in the drizzle which had not ceased to fall. They had waited for daylight in order to organise a battue and hunt him down like some animal, whose weariness must necessarily ensure capture. And so, from one moment to another, he would be caught.

"I know the great interest you take in the arrest, Monsieur le Ministre," added Gascogne, "and it occurred to me to ask your orders. Detective Mondesir is over there, directing the hunt. He regrets that he did not apprehend the man on the Boulevard de Rochechouart; but, all the same, the idea of following him was a capital one, and one can only reproach Mondesir with having forgotten the Bois de Boulogne in his calculations."

Salvat arrested! That fellow Salvat whose name had filled the newspapers for three weeks past. This was a most fortunate stroke which would be talked of far and wide! In the depths of Monferrand's fixed eyes one could divine a world of thoughts and a sudden determination to turn this incident which chance had brought him to his own personal advantage. In his own mind a link was already forming between this arrest and that African Railways interpellation which was likely to overthrow the ministry on the morrow. The first outlines of a scheme already rose before him. Was it not his good star that had sent him what he had been seeking—a means of fishing himself out of the troubled waters of the approaching crisis?

"But tell me, Monsieur Gascogne," said he, "are you quite sure that this man Salvat committed the crime?"

"Oh! perfectly sure, Monsieur le Ministre. He'll confess everything in the cab before he reaches the Prefecture."

Monferrand again walked to and fro with a pensive air, and ideas came to him as he spoke on in a slow, meditative fashion. "My orders! well, my orders, they are, first, that you must act with the very greatest prudence. Yes, don't gather a mob of promenaders together. Try to arrange things so that the arrest may pass unperceived—and if you secure a confession keep it to yourself, don't communicate it to the newspapers. Yes, I particularly recommend that point to you, don't take the newspapers into your confidence at all—and finally, come and tell me everything, and observe secrecy, absolute secrecy, with everybody else."

Gascogne bowed and would have withdrawn, but Monferrand detained him to say that not a day passed without his friend Monsieur Lehmann, the Public Prosecutor, receiving letters from Anarchists who threatened to blow him up with his family; in such wise that, although he was by no means a coward, he wished his house to be guarded by plain-clothes officers. A similar watch was already kept upon the house where investigating magistrate Amadieu resided. And if the latter's life was precious, that of Public Prosecutor Lehmann was equally so, for he was one of those political magistrates, one of those shrewd talented Israelites, who make their way in very honest fashion by invariably taking the part of the Government in office.

Then Gascogne in his turn remarked: "There is also the Barthes affair, Monsieur le Ministre—we are still waiting. Are we to arrest Barthes at that little house at Neuilly?"

One of those chances which sometimes come to the help of detectives and make people think the latter to be men of genius had revealed to him the circumstance that Barthes had found a refuge with Abbe Pierre Froment. Ever since the Anarchist terror had thrown Paris into dismay a warrant had been out against the old man, not for any precise offence, but simply because he was a suspicious character and might, therefore, have had some intercourse with the Revolutionists. However, it had been repugnant to Gascogne to arrest him at the house of a priest whom the whole district venerated as a saint; and the Minister, whom he had consulted on the point, had warmly approved of his reserve, since a member of the clergy was in question, and had undertaken to settle the affair himself.

"No, Monsieur Gascogne," he now replied, "don't move in the matter. You know what my feelings are, that we ought to have the priests with us and not against us—I have had a letter written to Abbe Froment in order that he may call here this morning, as I shall have no other visitors. I will speak to him myself, and you may take it that the affair no longer concerns you."

Then he was about to dismiss him when the usher came back saying that the President of the Council was in the ante-room.*

* The title of President of the Council is given to the French
prime minister.—Trans.

"Barroux!—Ah! dash it, then, Monsieur Gascogne, you had better go out this way. It is as well that nobody should meet you, as I wish you to keep silent respecting Salvat's arrest. It's fully understood, is it not? I alone am to know everything; and you will communicate with me here direct, by the telephone, if any serious incident should arise."

The Chief of the Detective Police had scarcely gone off, by way of an adjoining salon, when the usher reopened the door communicating with the ante-room: "Monsieur le President du Conseil."

With a nicely adjusted show of deference and cordiality, Monferrand stepped forward, his hands outstretched: "Ah! my dear President, why did you put yourself out to come here? I would have called on you if I had known that you wished to see me."

But with an impatient gesture Barroux brushed aside all question of etiquette. "No, no! I was taking my usual stroll in the Champs Elysees, and the worries of the situation impressed me so keenly that I preferred to come here at once. You yourself must realise that we can't put up with what is taking place. And pending to-morrow morning's council, when we shall have to arrange a plan of defence, I felt that there was good reason for us to talk things over."

He took an armchair, and Monferrand on his side rolled another forward so as to seat himself with his back to the light. Whilst Barroux, the elder of the pair by ten years, blanched and solemn, with a handsome face, snowy whiskers, clean-shaven chin and upper-lip, retained all the dignity of power, the bearing of a Conventionnel of romantic views, who sought to magnify the simple loyalty of a rather foolish but good-hearted bourgeois nature into something great; the other, beneath his heavy common countenance and feigned frankness and simplicity, concealed unknown depths, the unfathomable soul of a shrewd enjoyer and despot who was alike pitiless and unscrupulous in attaining his ends.

For a moment Barroux drew breath, for in reality he was greatly moved, his blood rising to his head, and his heart beating with indignation and anger at the thought of all the vulgar insults which the "Voix du Peuple" had poured upon him again that morning. "Come, my dear colleague," said he, "one must stop that scandalous campaign. Moreover, you can realise what awaits us at the Chamber to-morrow. Now that the famous list has been published we shall have every malcontent up in arms. Vignon is bestirring himself already—"

"Ah! you have news of Vignon?" exclaimed Monferrand, becoming very attentive.

"Well, as I passed his door just now, I saw a string of cabs waiting there. All his creatures have been on the move since yesterday, and at least twenty persons have told me that the band is already dividing the spoils. For, as you must know, the fierce and ingenuous Mege is again going to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for others. Briefly, we are dead, and the others claim that they are going to bury us in mud before they fight over our leavings." With his arm outstretched Barroux made a theatrical gesture, and his voice resounded as if he were in the tribune. Nevertheless, his emotion was real, tears even were coming to his eyes. "To think that I who have given my whole life to the Republic, I who founded it, who saved it, should be covered with insults in this fashion, and obliged to defend myself against abominable charges! To say that I abused my trust! That I sold myself and took 200,000 francs from that man Hunter, simply to slip them into my pocket! Well, certainly there was a question of 200,000 francs between us. But how and under what circumstances? They were doubtless the same as in your case, with regard to the 80,000 francs that he is said to have handed you—"

But Monferrand interrupted his colleague in a clear trenchant voice: "He never handed me a centime."

The other looked at him in astonishment, but could only see his big, rough head, whose features were steeped in shadow: "Ah! But I thought you had business relations with him, and knew him particularly well."

"No, I simply knew Hunter as everyone knew him. I was not even aware that he was Baron Duvillard's agent in the African Railways matter; and there was never any question of that affair between us."

This was so improbable, so contrary to everything Barroux knew of the business, that for a moment he felt quite scared. Then he waved his hand as if to say that others might as well look after their own affairs, and reverted to himself. "Oh! as for me," he said, "Hunter called on me more than ten times, and made me quite sick with his talk of the African Railways. It was at the time when the Chamber was asked to authorise the issue of lottery stock.* And, by the way, my dear fellow, I was then here at the Home Department, while you had just taken that of Public Works. I can remember sitting at that very writing-table, while Hunter was in the same armchair that I now occupy. That day he wanted to consult me about the employment of the large sum which Duvillard's house proposed to spend in advertising; and on seeing what big amounts were set down against the Royalist journals, I became quite angry, for I realised with perfect accuracy that this money would simply be used to wage war against the Republic. And so, yielding to Hunter's entreaties, I also drew up a list allotting 200,000 francs among the friendly Republican newspapers, which were paid through me, I admit it. And that's the whole story."**

* This kind of stock is common enough in France. A part of it is
extinguished annually at a public "drawing," when all such
shares or bonds that are drawn become entitled to redemption
at "par," a percentage of them also securing prizes of various
amounts. City of Paris Bonds issued on this system are very
popular among French people with small savings; but, on the
other hand, many ventures, whose lottery stock has been
authorised by the Legislature, have come to grief and ruined
investors.—Trans.

** All who are acquainted with recent French history will be
aware that Barroux' narrative is simply a passage from the
life of the late M. Floquet, slightly modified to suit the
requirements of M. Zola's story.—Trans.

Then he sprang to his feet and struck his chest, whilst his voice again rose: "Well, I've had more than enough of all that calumny and falsehood! And I shall simply tell the Chamber my story to-morrow. It will be my only defence. An honest man does not fear the truth!"

But Monferrand, in his turn, had sprung up with a cry which was a complete confession of his principles: "It's ridiculous, one never confesses; you surely won't do such a thing!"

"I shall," retorted Barroux with superb obstinacy. "And we shall see if the Chamber won't absolve me by acclamation."

"No, you will fall beneath an explosion of hisses, and drag all of us down with you."

"What does it matter? We shall fall with dignity, like honest men!"

Monferrand made a gesture of furious anger, and then suddenly became calm. Amidst all the anxious confusion in which he had been struggling since daybreak, a gleam now dawned upon him. The vague ideas suggested by Salvat's approaching arrest took shape, and expanded into an audacious scheme. Why should he prevent the fall of that big ninny Barroux? The only thing of importance was that he, Monferrand, should not fall with him, or at any rate that he should rise again. So he protested no further, but merely mumbled a few words, in which his rebellious feeling seemingly died out. And at last, putting on his good-natured air once more, he said: "Well, after all you are perhaps right. One must be brave. Besides, you are our head, my dear President, and we will follow you."

They had now again sat down face to face, and their conversation continued till they came to a cordial agreement respecting the course which the Government should adopt in view of the inevitable interpellation on the morrow.

Meantime, Baron Duvillard was on his way to the ministry. He had scarcely slept that night. When on the return from Montmartre Gerard had set him down at his door in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, he had at once gone to bed, like a man who is determined to compel sleep, so that he may forget his worries and recover self-control. But slumber would not come; for hours and hours he vainly sought it. The manner in which he had been insulted by that creature Silviane was so monstrous! To think that she, whom he had enriched, whose every desire he had contented, should have cast such mud at him, the master, who flattered himself that he held Paris and the Republic in his hands, since he bought up and controlled consciences just as others might make corners in wool or leather for the purposes of Bourse speculation. And the dim consciousness that Silviane was the avenging sore, the cancer preying on him who preyed on others, completed his exasperation. In vain did he try to drive away his haunting thoughts, remember his business affairs, his appointments for the morrow, his millions which were working in every quarter of the world, the financial omnipotence which placed the fate of nations in his grasp. Ever, and in spite of all, Silviane rose up before him, splashing him with mud. In despair he tried to fix his mind on a great enterprise which he had been planning for months past, a Trans-Saharan railway, a colossal venture which would set millions of money at work, and revolutionise the trade of the world. And yet Silviane appeared once more, and smacked him on both cheeks with her dainty little hand, which she had dipped in the gutter. It was only towards daybreak that he at last dozed off, while vowing in a fury that he would never see her again, that he would spurn her, and order her away, even should she come and drag herself at his feet.

However, when he awoke at seven, still tired and aching, his first thought was for her, and he almost yielded to a fit of weakness. The idea came to him to ascertain if she had returned home, and if so make his peace. But he jumped out of bed, and after his ablutions he recovered all his bravery. She was a wretch, and he this time thought himself for ever cured of his passion. To tell the truth, he forgot it as soon as he opened the morning newspapers. The publication of the list of bribe-takers in the "Voix du Peuple" quite upset him, for he had hitherto thought it unlikely that Sagnier held any such list. However, he judged the document at a glance, at once separating the few truths it contained from a mass of foolishness and falsehood. And this time also he did not consider himself personally in danger. There was only one thing that he really feared: the arrest of his intermediary, Hunter, whose trial might have drawn him into the affair. As matters stood, and as he did not cease to repeat with a calm and smiling air, he had merely done what every banking-house does when it issues stock, that is, pay the press for advertisements and puffery, employ brokers, and reward services discreetly rendered to the enterprise. It was all a business matter, and for him that expression summed up everything. Moreover, he played the game of life bravely, and spoke with indignant contempt of a banker who, distracted and driven to extremities by blackmailing, had imagined that he would bring a recent scandal to an end by killing himself: a pitiful tragedy, from all the mire and blood of which the scandal had sprouted afresh with the most luxuriant and indestructible vegetation. No, no! suicide was not the course to follow: a man ought to remain erect, and struggle on to his very last copper, and the very end of his energy.

At about nine o'clock a ringing brought Duvillard to the telephone installed in his private room. And then his folly took possession of him once more: it must be Silviane who wished to speak to him. She often amused herself by thus disturbing him amidst his greatest cares. No doubt she had just returned home, realising that she had carried things too far on the previous evening and desiring to be forgiven. However, when he found that the call was from Monferrand, who wished him to go to the ministry, he shivered slightly, like a man saved from the abyss beside which he is travelling. And forthwith he called for his hat and stick, desirous as he was of walking and reflecting in the open air. And again he became absorbed in the intricacies of the scandalous business which was about to stir all Paris and the legislature. Kill himself! ah, no, that would be foolish and cowardly. A gust of terror might be sweeping past; nevertheless, for his part he felt quite firm, superior to events, and resolved to defend himself without relinquishing aught of his power.

As soon as he entered the ante-rooms of the ministry he realised that the gust of terror was becoming a tempest. The publication of the terrible list in the "Voix du Peuple" had chilled the guilty ones to the heart; and, pale and distracted, feeling the ground give way beneath them, they had come to take counsel of Monferrand, who, they hoped, might save them. The first whom Duvillard perceived was Duthil, looking extremely feverish, biting his moustaches, and constantly making grimaces in his efforts to force a smile. The banker scolded him for coming, saying that it was a great mistake to have done so, particularly with such a scared face. The deputy, however, his spirits already cheered by these rough words, began to defend himself, declaring that he had not even read Sagnier's article, and had simply come to recommend a lady friend to the Minister. Thereupon the Baron undertook this business for him and sent him away with the wish that he might spend a merry mid-Lent. However, the one who most roused Duvillard's pity was Chaigneux, whose figure swayed about as if bent by the weight of his long equine head, and who looked so shabby and untidy that one might have taken him for an old pauper. On recognising the banker he darted forward, and bowed to him with obsequious eagerness.

"Ah! Monsieur le Baron," said he, "how wicked some men must be! They are killing me, I shall die of it all; and what will become of my wife, what will become of my three daughters, who have none but me to help them?"

The whole of his woeful story lay in that lament. A victim of politics, he had been foolish enough to quit Arras and his business there as a solicitor, in order to seek triumph in Paris with his wife and daughters, whose menial he had then become—a menial dismayed by the constant rebuffs and failures which his mediocrity brought upon him. An honest deputy! ah, good heavens! yes, he would have liked to be one; but was he not perpetually "hard-up," ever in search of a hundred-franc note, and thus, perforce, a deputy for sale? And withal he led such a pitiable life, so badgered by the women folk about him, that to satisfy their demands he would have picked up money no matter where or how.

"Just fancy, Monsieur le Baron, I have at last found a husband for my eldest girl. It is the first bit of luck that I have ever had; there will only be three women left on my hands if it comes off. But you can imagine what a disastrous impression such an article as that of this morning must create in the young man's family. So I have come to see the Minister to beg him to give my future son-in-law a prefectoral secretaryship. I have already promised him the post, and if I can secure it things may yet be arranged."

He looked so terribly shabby and spoke in such a doleful voice that it occurred to Duvillard to do one of those good actions on which he ventured at times when they were likely to prove remunerative investments. It is, indeed, an excellent plan to give a crust of bread to some poor devil whom one can turn, if necessary, into a valet or an accomplice. So the banker dismissed Chaigneux, undertaking to do his business for him in the same way as he had undertaken to do Duthil's. And he added that he would be pleased to see him on the morrow, and have a chat with him, as he might be able to help him in the matter of his daughter's marriage.

At this Chaigneux, scenting a loan, collapsed into the most lavish thanks. "Ah! Monsieur le Baron, my life will not be long enough to enable me to repay such a debt of gratitude."

As Duvillard turned round he was surprised to see Abbe Froment waiting in a corner of the ante-room. Surely that one could not belong to the batch of suspects, although by the manner in which he was pretending to read a newspaper it seemed as if he were trying to hide some keen anxiety. At last the Baron stepped forward, shook hands, and spoke to him cordially. And Pierre thereupon related that he had received a letter requesting him to call on the Minister that day. Why, he could not tell; in fact, he was greatly surprised, he said, putting on a smile in order to conceal his disquietude. He had been waiting a long time already, and hoped that he would not be forgotten on that bench.

Just then the usher appeared, and hastened up to the banker. "The Minister," said he, "was at that moment engaged with the President of the Council; but he had orders to admit the Baron as soon as the President withdrew." Almost immediately afterwards Barroux came out, and as Duvillard was about to enter he recognised and detained him. And he spoke of the denunciations very bitterly, like one indignant with all the slander. Would not he, Duvillard, should occasion require it, testify that he, Barroux, had never taken a centime for himself? Then, forgetting that he was speaking to a banker, and that he was Minister of Finances, he proceeded to express all his disgust of money. Ah! what poisonous, murky, and defiling waters were those in which money-making went on! However, he repeated that he would chastise his insulters, and that a statement of the truth would suffice for the purpose.

Duvillard listened and looked at him. And all at once the thought of Silviane came back, and took possession of the Baron, without any attempt on his part to drive it away. He reflected that if Barroux had chosen to give him a helping hand when he had asked for it, Silviane would now have been at the Comedie Francaise, in which case the deplorable affair of the previous night would not have occurred; for he was beginning to regard himself as guilty in the matter; if he had only contented Silviane's whim she would never have dismissed him in so vile a fashion.

"You know, I owe you a grudge," he said, interrupting Barroux.

The other looked at him in astonishment. "And why, pray?" he asked.

"Why, because you never helped me in the matter of that friend of mine who wishes to make her debut in 'Polyeucte.'"

Barroux smiled, and with amiable condescension replied: "Ah! yes, Silviane d'Aulnay! But, my dear sir, it was Taboureau who put spokes in the wheel. The Fine Arts are his department, and the question was entirely one for him. And I could do nothing; for that very worthy and honest gentleman, who came to us from a provincial faculty, was full of scruples. For my own part I'm an old Parisian, I can understand anything, and I should have been delighted to please you."

At this fresh resistance offered to his passion Duvillard once more became excited, eager to obtain that which was denied him. "Taboureau, Taboureau!" said he, "he's a nice deadweight for you to load yourself with! Honest! isn't everybody honest? Come, my dear Minister, there's still time, get Silviane admitted, it will bring you good luck for to-morrow."

This time Barroux burst into a frank laugh: "No, no, I can't cast Taboureau adrift at this moment—people would make too much sport of it—a ministry wrecked or saved by a Silviane question!"

Then he offered his hand before going off. The Baron pressed it, and for a moment retained it in his own, whilst saying very gravely and with a somewhat pale face: "You do wrong to laugh, my dear Minister. Governments have fallen or set themselves erect again through smaller matters than that. And should you fall to-morrow I trust that you will never have occasion to regret it."

Wounded to the heart by the other's jesting air, exasperated by the idea that there was something he could not achieve, Duvillard watched Barroux as he withdrew. Most certainly the Baron did not desire a reconciliation with Silviane, but he vowed that he would overturn everything if necessary in order to send her a signed engagement for the Comedie, and this simply by way of vengeance, as a slap, so to say,—yes, a slap which would make her tingle! That moment spent with Barroux had been a decisive one.

However, whilst still following Barroux with his eyes, Duvillard was surprised to see Fonsegue arrive and manoeuvre in such a way as to escape the Prime Minister's notice. He succeeded in doing so, and then entered the ante-room with an appearance of dismay about the whole of his little figure, which was, as a rule, so sprightly. It was the gust of terror, still blowing, that had brought him thither.

"Didn't you see your friend Barroux?" the Baron asked him, somewhat puzzled.

"Barroux? No!"

This quiet lie was equivalent to a confession of everything. Fonsegue was so intimate with Barroux that he thee'd and thou'd him, and for ten years had been supporting him in his newspaper, having precisely the same views, the same political religion. But with a smash-up threatening, he doubtless realised, thanks to his wonderfully keen scent, that he must change his friendships if he did not wish to remain under the ruins himself. If he had, for long years, shown so much prudence and diplomatic virtue in order to firmly establish the most dignified and respected of Parisian newspapers, it was not for the purpose of letting that newspaper be compromised by some foolish blunder on the part of an honest man.

"I thought you were on bad terms with Monferrand," resumed Duvillard. "What have you come here for?"

"Oh! my dear Baron, the director of a leading newspaper is never on bad terms with anybody. He's at the country's service."

In spite of his emotion, Duvillard could not help smiling. "You are right," he responded. "Besides, Monferrand is really an able man, whom one can support without fear."

At this Fonsegue began to wonder whether his anguish of mind was visible. He, who usually played the game of life so well, with his own hand under thorough control, had been terrified by the article in the "Voix du Peuple." For the first time in his career he had perpetrated a blunder, and felt that he was at the mercy of some denunciation, for with unpardonable imprudence he had written a very brief but compromising note. He was not anxious concerning the 50,000 francs which Barroux had handed him out of the 200,000 destined for the Republican press. But he trembled lest another affair should be discovered, that of a sum of money which he had received as a present. It was only on feeling the Baron's keen glance upon him that he was able to recover some self-possession. How silly it was to lose the knack of lying and to confess things simply by one's demeanour!

But the usher drew near and repeated that the Minister was now waiting for the Baron; and Fonsegue went to sit down beside Abbe Froment, whom he also was astonished to find there. Pierre repeated that he had received a letter, but had no notion what the Minister might wish to say to him. And the quiver of his hands again revealed how feverishly impatient he was to know what it might be. However, he could only wait, since Monferrand was still busy discussing such grave affairs.

On seeing Duvillard enter, the Minister had stepped forward, offering his hand. However much the blast of terror might shake others, he had retained his calmness and good-natured smile. "What an affair, eh, my dear Baron!" he exclaimed.

"It's idiotic!" plainly declared the other, with a shrug of his shoulders. Then he sat down in the armchair vacated by Barroux, while the Minister installed himself in front of him. These two were made to understand one another, and they indulged in the same despairing gestures and furious complaints, declaring that government, like business, would no longer be possible if men were required to show such virtue as they did not possess. At all times, and under every regime, when a decision of the Chambers had been required in connection with some great enterprise, had not the natural and legitimate tactics been for one to do what might be needful to secure that decision? It was absolutely necessary that one should obtain influential and sympathetic support, in a word, make sure of votes. Well, everything had to be paid for, men like other things, some with fine words, others with favours or money, presents made in a more or less disguised manner. And even admitting that, in the present cases, one had gone rather far in the purchasing, that some of the bartering had been conducted in an imprudent way, was it wise to make such an uproar over it? Would not a strong government have begun by stifling the scandal, from motives of patriotism, a mere sense of cleanliness even?

"Why, of course! You are right, a thousand times right!" exclaimed Monferrand. "Ah! if I were the master you would see what a fine first-class funeral I would give it all!" Then, as Duvillard looked at him fixedly, struck by these last words, he added with his expressive smile: "Unfortunately I'm not the master, and it was to talk to you of the situation that I ventured to disturb you. Barroux, who was here just now, seemed to me in a regrettable frame of mind."

"Yes, I saw him, he has such singular ideas at times—" Then, breaking off, the Baron added: "Do you know that Fonsegue is in the ante-room? As he wishes to make his peace with you, why not send for him? He won't be in the way, in fact, he's a man of good counsel, and the support of his newspaper often suffices to give one the victory."

"What, is Fonsegue there!" cried Monferrand. "Why, I don't ask better than to shake hands with him. There were some old affairs between us that don't concern anybody! But, good heavens! if you only knew what little spite I harbour!"

When the usher had admitted Fonsegue the reconciliation took place in the simplest fashion. They had been great friends at college in their native Correze, but had not spoken together for ten years past in consequence of some abominable affair the particulars of which were not exactly known. However, it becomes necessary to clear away all corpses when one wishes to have the arena free for a fresh battle.

"It's very good of you to come back the first," said Monferrand. "So it's all over, you no longer bear me any grudge?"

"No, indeed!" replied Fonsegue. "Why should people devour one another when it would be to their interest to come to an understanding?"

Then, without further explanations, they passed to the great affair, and the conference began. And when Monferrand had announced Barroux' determination to confess and explain his conduct, the others loudly protested. That meant certain downfall, they would prevent him, he surely would not be guilty of such folly. Forthwith they discussed every imaginable plan by which the Ministry might be saved, for that must certainly be Monferrand's sole desire. He himself with all eagerness pretended to seek some means of extricating his colleagues and himself from the mess in which they were. However, a faint smile, still played around his lips, and at last as if vanquished he sought no further. "There's no help for it," said he, "the ministry's down."

The others exchanged glances, full of anxiety at the thought of another Cabinet dealing with the African Railways affair. A Vignon Cabinet would doubtless plume itself on behaving honestly.

"Well, then, what shall we do?"

But just then the telephone rang, and Monferrand rose to respond to the summons: "Allow me."

He listened for a moment and then spoke into the tube, nothing that he said giving the others any inkling of the information which had reached him. This had come from the Chief of the Detective Police, and was to the effect that Salvat's whereabouts in the Bois de Boulogne had been discovered, and that he would be hunted down with all speed. "Very good! And don't forget my orders," replied Monferrand.

Now that Salvat's arrest was certain, the Minister determined to follow the plan which had gradually taken shape in his mind; and returning to the middle of the room he slowly walked to and fro, while saying with his wonted familiarity: "But what would you have, my friends? It would be necessary for me to be the master. Ah! if I were the master! A Commission of Inquiry, yes! that's the proper form for a first-class funeral to take in a big affair like this, so full of nasty things. For my part, I should confess nothing, and I should have a Commission appointed. And then you would see the storm subside."

Duvillard and Fonsegue began to laugh. The latter, however, thanks to his intimate knowledge of Monferrand, almost guessed the truth. "Just listen!" said he; "even if the ministry falls it doesn't necessarily follow that you must be on the ground with it. Besides, a ministry can be mended when there are good pieces of it left."

Somewhat anxious at finding his thoughts guessed, Monferrand protested: "No, no, my dear fellow, I don't play that game. We are jointly responsible, we've got to keep together, dash it all!"

"Keep together! Pooh! Not when simpletons purposely drown themselves! And, besides, if we others have need of you, we have a right to save you in spite of yourself! Isn't that so, my dear Baron?"

Then, as Monferrand sat down, no longer protesting but waiting, Duvillard, who was again thinking of his passion, full of anger at the recollection of Barroux' refusal, rose in his turn, and exclaimed: "Why, certainly! If the ministry's condemned let it fall! What good can you get out of a ministry which includes such a man as Taboureau! There you have an old, worn-out professor without any prestige, who comes to Paris from Grenoble, and has never set foot in a theatre in his life! Yet the control of the theatres is handed over to him, and naturally he's ever doing the most stupid things!"

Monferrand, who was well informed on the Silviane question, remained grave, and for a moment amused himself by trying to excite the Baron. "Taboureau," said he, "is a somewhat dull and old-fashioned University man, but at the department of Public Instruction he's in his proper element."

"Oh! don't talk like that, my dear fellow! You are more intelligent than that, you are not going to defend Taboureau as Barroux did. It's quite true that I should very much like to see Silviane at the Comedie. She's a very good girl at heart, and she has an amazing lot of talent. Would you stand in her way if you were in Taboureau's place?"

"I? Good heavens, no! A pretty girl on the stage, why, it would please everybody, I'm sure. Only it would be necessary to have a man of the same views as were at the department of Instruction and Fine Arts."

His sly smile had returned to his face. The securing of that girl's debut was certainly not a high price to pay for all the influence of Duvillard's millions. Monferrand therefore turned towards Fonsegue as if to consult him. The other, who fully understood the importance of the affair, was meditating in all seriousness: "A senator is the proper man for Public Instruction," said he. "But I can think of none, none at all, such as would be wanted. A man of broad mind, a real Parisian, and yet one whose presence at the head of the University wouldn't cause too much astonishment—there's perhaps Dauvergne—"

"Dauvergne! Who's he?" exclaimed Monferrand in surprise. "Ah! yes, Dauvergne the senator for Dijon—but he's altogether ignorant of University matters, he hasn't the slightest qualification."

"Well, as for that," resumed Fonsegue, "I'm trying to think. Dauvergne is certainly a good-looking fellow, tall and fair and decorative. Besides, he's immensely rich, has a most charming young wife—which does no harm, on the contrary—and he gives real fetes at his place on the Boulevard St. Germain."

It was only with hesitation that Fonsegue himself had ventured to suggest Dauvergne. But by degrees his selection appeared to him a real "find." "Wait a bit! I recollect now that in his young days Dauvergne wrote a comedy, a one act comedy in verse, and had it performed at Dijon. And Dijon's a literary town, you know, so that piece of his sets a little perfume of 'Belles-Lettres' around him. And then, too, he left Dijon twenty years ago, and is a most determined Parisian, frequenting every sphere of society. Dauvergne will do whatever one desires. He's the man for us, I tell you."

Duvillard thereupon declared that he knew him, and considered him a very decent fellow. Besides, he or another, it mattered nothing!

"Dauvergne, Dauvergne," repeated Monferrand. "Mon Dieu, yes! After all, why not? He'll perhaps make a very good minister. Let us say Dauvergne." Then suddenly bursting into a hearty laugh: "And so we are reconstructing the Cabinet in order that that charming young woman may join the Comedie! The Silviane cabinet—well, and what about the other departments?"

He jested, well knowing that gaiety often hastens difficult solutions. And, indeed, they merrily continued settling what should be done if the ministry were defeated on the morrow. Although they had not plainly said so the plan was to let Barroux sink, even help him to do so, and then fish Monferrand out of the troubled waters. The latter engaged himself with the two others, because he had need of them, the Baron on account of his financial sovereignty, and the director of "Le Globe" on account of the press campaign which he could carry on in his favour. And in the same way the others, quite apart from the Silviane business, had need of Monferrand, the strong-handed man of government, who undertook to bury the African Railways scandal by bringing about a Commission of Inquiry, all the strings of which would be pulled by himself. There was soon a perfect understanding between the three men, for nothing draws people more closely together than common interest, fear and need. Accordingly, when Duvillard spoke of Duthil's business, the young lady whom he wished to recommend, the Minister declared that it was settled. A very nice fellow was Duthil, they needed a good many like him. And it was also agreed that Chaigneux' future son-in-law should have his secretaryship. Poor Chaigneux! He was so devoted, always ready to undertake any commission, and his four women folk led him such a hard life!

"Well, then, it's understood." And Monferrand, Duvillard and Fonsegue vigorously shook hands.

However, when the first accompanied the others to the door, he noticed a prelate, in a cassock of fine material, edged with violet, speaking to a priest in the ante-room. Thereupon he, the Minister, hastened forward, looking much distressed. "Ah! you were waiting, Monseigneur Martha! Come in, come in quick!"

But with perfect urbanity the Bishop refused. "No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment was here before me. Pray receive him first."

Monferrand had to give way; he admitted the priest, and speedily dealt with him. He who usually employed the most diplomatic reserve when he was in presence of a member of the clergy plumply unfolded the Barthes business. Pierre had experienced the keenest anguish during the two hours that he had been waiting there, for he could only explain the letter he had received by a surmise that the police had discovered his brother's presence in his house. And so when he heard the Minister simply speak of Barthes, and declare that the government would rather see him go into exile than be obliged to imprison him once more, he remained for a moment quite disconcerted. As the police had been able to discover the old conspirator in the little house at Neuilly, how was it that they seemed altogether ignorant of Guillaume's presence there? It was, however, the usual gap in the genius of great detectives.

"Pray what do you desire of me, Monsieur le Ministre?" said Pierre at last; "I don't quite understand."

"Why, Monsieur l'Abbe, I leave all this to your sense of prudence. If that man were still at your house in forty-eight hours from now, we should be obliged to arrest him there, which would be a source of grief to us, for we are aware that your residence is the abode of every virtue. So advise him to leave France. If he does that we shall not trouble him."

Then Monferrand hastily brought Pierre back to the ante-room; and, smiling and bending low, he said: "Monseigneur, I am entirely at your disposal. Come in, come in, I beg you."

The prelate, who was gaily chatting with Duvillard and Fonsegue, shook hands with them, and then with Pierre. In his desire to win all hearts, he that morning displayed the most perfect graciousness. His bright, black eyes were all smiles, the whole of his handsome face wore a caressing expression, and he entered the ministerial sanctum leisurely and gracefully, with an easy air of conquest.

And now only Monferrand and Monseigneur Martha were left, talking on and on in the deserted building. Some people had thought that the prelate wished to become a deputy. But he played a far more useful and lofty part in governing behind the scenes, in acting as the directing mind of the Vatican's policy in France. Was not France still the Eldest Daughter of the Church, the only great nation which might some day restore omnipotence to the Papacy? For that reason he had accepted the Republic, preached the duty of "rallying" to it, and inspired the new Catholic group in the Chamber. And Monferrand, on his side, struck by the progress of the New Spirit, that reaction of mysticism which flattered itself that it would bury science, showed the prelate much amiability, like a strong-handed man who, to ensure his own victory, utilised every force that was offered him.

IV. THE MAN HUNT

ON the afternoon of that same day such a keen desire for space and the open air came upon Guillaume, that Pierre consented to accompany him on a long walk in the Bois de Boulogne. The priest, upon returning from his interview with Monferrand, had informed his brother that the government once more wished to get rid of Nicholas Barthes. However, they were so perplexed as to how they should impart these tidings to the old man, that they resolved to postpone the matter until the evening. During their walk they might devise some means of breaking the news in a gentle way. As for the walk, this seemed to offer no danger; to all appearance Guillaume was in no wise threatened, so why should he continue hiding? Thus the brothers sallied forth and entered the Bois by the Sablons gate, which was the nearest to them.

The last days of March had now come, and the trees were beginning to show some greenery, so soft and light, however, that one might have thought it was pale moss or delicate lace hanging between the stems and boughs. Although the sky remained of an ashen grey, the rain, after falling throughout the night and morning, had ceased; and exquisite freshness pervaded that wood now awakening to life once more, with its foliage dripping in the mild and peaceful atmosphere. The mid-Lent rejoicings had apparently attracted the populace to the centre of Paris, for in the avenues one found only the fashionable folks of select days, the people of society who come thither when the multitude stops away. There were carriages and gentlemen on horseback; beautiful aristocratic ladies who had alighted from their broughams or landaus; and wet-nurses with streaming ribbons, who carried infants wearing the most costly lace. Of the middle-classes, however, one found only a few matrons living in the neighbourhood, who sat here and there on the benches busy with embroidery or watching their children play.

Pierre and Guillaume followed the Allee de Longchamp as far as the road going from Madrid to the lakes. Then they took their way under the trees, alongside the little Longchamp rivulet. They wished to reach the lakes, pass round them, and return home by way of the Maillot gate. But so charming and peaceful was the deserted plantation through which they passed, that they yielded to a desire to sit down and taste the delight of resting amidst all the budding springtide around them. A fallen tree served them as a bench, and it was possible for them to fancy themselves far away from Paris, in the depths of some real forest. It was, too, of a real forest that Guillaume began to think on thus emerging from his long, voluntary imprisonment. Ah! for the space; and for the health-bringing air which courses between that forest's branches, that forest of the world which by right should be man's inalienable domain! However, the name of Barthes, the perpetual prisoner, came back to Guillaume's lips, and he sighed mournfully. The thought that there should be even a single man whose liberty was thus ever assailed, sufficed to poison the pure atmosphere he breathed.

"What will you say to Barthes?" he asked his brother. "The poor fellow must necessarily be warned. Exile is at any rate preferable to imprisonment."

Pierre sadly waved his hand. "Yes, of course, I must warn him. But what a painful task it is!"

Guillaume made no rejoinder, for at that very moment, in that remote, deserted nook, where they could fancy themselves at the world's end, a most extraordinary spectacle was presented to their view. Something or rather someone leapt out of a thicket and bounded past them. It was assuredly a man, but one who was so unrecognisable, so miry, so woeful and so frightful, that he might have been taken for an animal, a boar that hounds had tracked and forced from his retreat. On seeing the rivulet, he hesitated for a moment, and then followed its course. But, all at once, as a sound of footsteps and panting breath drew nearer, he sprang into the water, which reached his thighs, bounded on to the further bank, and vanished from sight behind a clump of pines. A moment afterwards some keepers and policemen rushed by, skirting the rivulet, and in their turn disappearing. It was a man hunt that had gone past, a fierce, secret hunt with no display of scarlet or blast of horns athwart the soft, sprouting foliage.

"Some rascal or other," muttered Pierre. "Ah! the wretched fellow!"

Guillaume made a gesture of discouragement. "Gendarmes and prison!" said he. "They still constitute society's only schooling system!"

Meantime the man was still running on, farther and farther away.

When, on the previous night, Salvat had suddenly escaped from the detectives by bounding into the Bois de Boulogne, it had occurred to him to slip round to the Dauphine gate and there descend into the deep ditch* of the city ramparts. He remembered days of enforced idleness which he had spent there, in nooks where, for his own part, he had never met a living soul. Nowhere, indeed, could one find more secret places of retreat, hedged round by thicker bushes, or concealed from view by loftier herbage. Some corners of the ditch, at certain angles of the massive bastions, are favourite dens or nests for thieves and lovers. Salvat, as he made his way through the thickest of the brambles, nettles and ivy, was lucky enough to find a cavity full of dry leaves, in which he buried himself to the chin. The rain had already drenched him, and after slipping down the muddy slope, he had frequently been obliged to grope his way upon all fours. So those dry leaves proved a boon such as he had not dared to hope for. They dried him somewhat, serving as a blanket in which he coiled himself after his wild race through the dank darkness. The rain still fell, but he now only felt it on his head, and, weary as he was, he gradually sank into deep slumber beneath the continuous drizzle. When he opened his eyes again, the dawn was breaking, and it was probably about six o'clock. During his sleep the rain had ended by soaking the leaves, so that he was now immersed in a kind of chilly bath. Still he remained in it, feeling that he was there sheltered from the police, who must now surely be searching for him. None of those bloodhounds would guess his presence in that hole, for his body was quite buried, and briers almost completely hid his head. So he did not stir, but watched the rise of the dawn.

* This ditch or dry moat is about 30 feet deep and 50 feet wide.
The counterscarp by which one may descend into it has an angle
of 45 degrees.—Trans.

When at eight o'clock some policemen and keepers came by, searching the ditch, they did not perceive him. As he had anticipated, the hunt had begun at the first glimmer of light. For a time his heart beat violently; however, nobody else passed, nothing whatever stirred the grass. The only sounds that reached him were faint ones from the Bois de Boulogne, the ring of a bicyclist's bell, the thud of a horse's hoofs, the rumble of carriage wheels. And time went by, nine o'clock came, and then ten o'clock. Since the rain had ceased falling, Salvat had not suffered so much from the cold, for he was wearing a thick overcoat which little Mathis had given him. But, on the other hand, hunger was coming back; there was a burning sensation in his stomach, and leaden hoops seemed to be pressing against his ribs. He had eaten nothing for two days; he had been starving already on the previous evening, when he had accepted a glass of beer at that tavern at Montmartre. Nevertheless, his plan was to remain in the ditch until nightfall, and then slip away in the direction of the village of Boulogne, where he knew of a means of egress from the wood. He was not caught yet, he repeated, he might still manage to escape. Then he tried to get to sleep again, but failed, so painful had his sufferings become. By the time it was eleven, everything swam before his eyes. He once nearly fainted, and thought that he was going to die. Then rage gradually mastered him, and, all at once, he sprang out of his leafy hiding-place, desperately hungering for food, unable to remain there any longer, and determined to find something to eat, even should it cost him his liberty and life. It was then noon.

On leaving the ditch he found the spreading lawns of the chateau of La Muette before him. He crossed them at a run, like a madman, instinctively going towards Boulogne, with the one idea that his only means of escape lay in that direction. It seemed miraculous that nobody paid attention to his helter-skelter flight. However, when he had reached the cover of some trees he became conscious of his imprudence, and almost regretted the sudden madness which had borne him along, eager for escape. Trembling nervously, he bent low among some furze bushes, and waited for a few minutes to ascertain if the police were behind him. Then with watchful eye and ready ear, wonderful instinct and scent of danger, he slowly went his way again. He hoped to pass between the upper lake and the Auteuil race-course; but there were few trees in that part, and they formed a broad avenue. He therefore had to exert all his skill in order to avoid observation, availing himself of the slenderest stems, the smallest bushes, as screens, and only venturing onward after a lengthy inspection of his surroundings. Before long the sight of a guard in the distance revived his fears and detained him, stretched on the ground behind some brambles, for a full quarter of an hour. Then the approach first of a cab, whose driver had lost his way, and afterwards of a strolling pedestrian, in turn sufficed to stop him. He breathed once more, however, when, after passing the Mortemart hillock, he was able to enter the thickets lying between the two roads which lead to Boulogne and St. Cloud. The coppices thereabouts were dense, and he merely had to follow them, screened from view, in order to reach the outlet he knew of, which was now near at hand. So he was surely saved.

But all at once, at a distance of some five and thirty yards, he saw a keeper, erect and motionless, barring his way. He turned slightly to the left and there perceived another keeper, who also seemed to be awaiting him. And there were more and more of them; at every fifty paces or so stood a fresh one, the whole forming a cordon, the meshes as it were of a huge net. The worst was that he must have been perceived, for a light cry, like the clear call of an owl, rang out, and was repeated farther and farther off. The hunters were at last on the right scent, prudence had become superfluous, and it was only by flight that the quarry might now hope to escape. Salvat understood this so well that he suddenly began to run, leaping over all obstacles and darting between the trees, careless whether he were seen or heard. A few bounds carried him across the Avenue de St. Cloud into the plantations stretching to the Allee de la Reine Marguerite. There the undergrowth was very dense; in the whole Bois there are no more closely set thickets. In summer they become one vast entanglement of verdure, amidst which, had it been the leafy season, Salvat might well have managed to secrete himself. For a moment he did find himself alone, and thereupon he halted to listen. He could neither see nor hear the keepers now. Had they lost his track, then? Profound quietude reigned under the fresh young foliage. But the light, owlish cry arose once more, branches cracked, and he resumed his wild flight, hurrying straight before him. Unluckily he found the Allee de la Reine Marguerite guarded by policemen, so that he could not cross over, but had to skirt it without quitting the thickets. And now his back was turned towards Boulogne; he was retracing his steps towards Paris. However, a last idea came to his bewildered mind: it was to run on in this wise as far as the shady spots around Madrid, and then, by stealing from copse to copse, attempt to reach the Seine. To proceed thither across the bare expanse of the race-course and training ground was not for a moment to be thought of.

So Salvat still ran on and on. But on reaching the Allee de Longchamp he found it guarded like the other roads, and therefore had to relinquish his plan of escaping by way of Madrid and the river-bank. While he was perforce making a bend alongside the Pre Catelan, he became aware that the keepers, led by detectives, were drawing yet nearer to him, confining his movements to a smaller and smaller area. And his race soon acquired all the frenzy of despair. Haggard and breathless he leapt mounds, rushed past multitudinous obstacles. He forced a passage through brambles, broke down palings, thrice caught his feet in wire work which he had not seen, and fell among nettles, yet picked himself up went on again, spurred by the stinging of his hands and face. It was then Guillaume and Pierre saw him pass, unrecognisable and frightful, taking to the muddy water of the rivulet like a stag which seeks to set a last obstacle between itself and the hounds. There came to him a wild idea of getting to the lake, and swimming, unperceived, to the island in the centre of it. That, he madly thought, would be a safe retreat, where he might burrow and hide himself without possibility of discovery. And so he still ran on. But once again the sight of some guards made him retrace his steps, and he was compelled to go back and back in the direction of Paris, chased, forced towards the very fortifications whence he had started that morning. It was now nearly three in the afternoon. For more than two hours and a half he had been running.

At last he saw a soft, sandy ride for horsemen before him. He crossed it, splashing through the mire left by the rain, and reached a little pathway, a delightful lovers' lane, as shady in summer as any arbour. For some time he was able to follow it, concealed from observation, and with his hopes reviving. But it led him to one of those broad, straight avenues where carriages and bicycles, the whole afternoon pageant of society, swept past under the mild and cloudy sky. So he returned to the thickets, fell once more upon the keepers, lost all notion of the direction he took, and even all power of thought, becoming a mere thing carried along and thrown hither and thither by the chances of the pursuit which pressed more and more closely upon him. Star-like crossways followed one upon other, and at last he came to a broad lawn, where the full light dazzled him. And there he suddenly felt the hot, panting breath of his pursuers close in the rear. Eager, hungry breath it was, like that of hounds seeking to devour him. Shouts rang out, one hand almost caught hold of him, there was a rush of heavy feet, a scramble to seize him. But with a supreme effort he leapt upon a bank, crawled to its summit, rose again, and once more found himself alone, still running on amid the fresh and quiet greenery.

Nevertheless, this was the end. He almost fell flat upon the ground. His aching feet could no longer carry him; blood was oozing from his ears, and froth had come to his mouth. His heart beat with such violence that it seemed likely to break his ribs. Water and perspiration streamed from him, he was miry and haggard and tortured by hunger, conquered, in fact, more by hunger than by fatigue. And through the mist which seemed to have gathered before his wild eyes, he suddenly saw an open doorway, the doorway of a coach-house in the rear of a kind of chalet, sequestered among trees. Excepting a big white cat, which took to flight, there was not a living creature in the place. Salvat plunged into it and rolled over on a heap of straw, among some empty casks. He was scarcely hidden there when he heard the chase sweep by, the detectives and the keepers losing scent, passing the chalet and rushing in the direction of the Paris ramparts. The noise of their heavy boots died away, and deep silence fell, while the hunted man, who had carried both hands to his heart to stay its beating, sank into the most complete prostration, with big tears trickling from his closed eyes.

Whilst all this was going on, Pierre and Guillaume, after a brief rest, had resumed their walk, reaching the lake and proceeding towards the crossway of the Cascades, in order to return to Neuilly by the road beyond the water. However, a shower fell, compelling them to take shelter under the big leafless branches of a chestnut-tree. Then, as the rain came down more heavily and they could perceive a kind of chalet, a little cafe-restaurant amid a clump of trees, they hastened thither for better protection. In a side road, which they passed on their way, they saw a cab standing, its driver waiting there in philosophical fashion under the falling shower. Pierre, moreover, noticed a young man stepping out briskly in front of them, a young man resembling Gerard de Quinsac, who, whilst walking in the Bois, had no doubt been overtaken by the rain, and like themselves was seeking shelter in the chalet. However, on entering the latter's public room, the priest saw no sign of the gentleman, and concluded that he must have been mistaken. This public room, which had a kind of glazed verandah overlooking the Bois, contained a few chairs and tables, the latter with marble tops. On the first floor there were four or five private rooms reached by a narrow passage. Though the doors were open the place had as yet scarcely emerged from its winter's rest. There was nobody about, and on all sides one found the dampness common to establishments which, from lack of custom, are compelled to close from November until March. In the rear were some stables, a coach-house, and various mossy, picturesque outbuildings, which painters and gardeners would now soon embellish for the gay pleasure parties which the fine weather would bring.

"I really think that they haven't opened for the season yet," said Guillaume as he entered the silent house.

"At all events they will let us stay here till the rain stops," answered Pierre, seating himself at one of the little tables.

However, a waiter suddenly made his appearance seemingly in a great hurry. He had come down from the first floor, and eagerly rummaged a cupboard for a few dry biscuits, which he laid upon a plate. At last he condescended to serve the brothers two glasses of Chartreuse.

In one of the private rooms upstairs Baroness Duvillard, who had driven to the chalet in a cab, had been awaiting her lover Gerard for nearly half an hour. It was there that, during the charity bazaar, they had given each other an appointment. For them the chalet had precious memories: two years previously, on discovering that secluded nest, which was so deserted in the early, hesitating days of chilly spring, they had met there under circumstances which they could not forget. And the Baroness, in choosing the house for the supreme assignation of their dying passion, had certainly not been influenced merely by a fear that she might be spied upon elsewhere. She had, indeed, thought of the first kisses that had been showered on her there, and would fain have revived them even if they should now prove the last that Gerard would bestow on her.

But she would also have liked to see some sunlight playing over the youthful foliage. The ashen sky and threatening rain saddened her. And when she entered the private room she did not recognise it, so cold and dim it seemed with its faded furniture. Winter had tarried there, with all the dampness and mouldy smell peculiar to rooms which have long remained closed. Then, too, some of the wall paper which had come away from the plaster hung down in shreds, dead flies were scattered over the parquetry flooring; and in order to open the shutters the waiter had to engage in a perfect fight with their fastenings. However, when he had lighted a little gas-stove, which at once flamed up and diffused some warmth, the room became more cosy.

Eve had seated herself on a chair, without raising the thick veil which hid her face. Gowned, gloved, and bonneted in black, as if she were already in mourning for her last passion, she showed naught of her own person save her superb fair hair, which glittered like a helm of tawny gold. She had ordered tea for two, and when the waiter brought it with a little plateful of dry biscuits, left, no doubt, from the previous season, he found her in the same place, still veiled and motionless, absorbed, it seemed, in a gloomy reverie. If she had reached the cafe half an hour before the appointed time it was because she desired some leisure and opportunity to overcome her despair and compose herself. She resolved that of all things she would not weep, that she would remain dignified and speak calmly, like one who, whatever rights she might possess, preferred to appeal to reason only. And she was well pleased with the courage that she found within her. Whilst thinking of what she should say to dissuade Gerard from a marriage which to her mind would prove both a calamity and a blunder, she fancied herself very calm, indeed almost resigned to whatsoever might happen.

But all at once she started and began to tremble. Gerard was entering the room.

"What! are you here the first, my dear?" he exclaimed. "I thought that I myself was ten minutes before the time! And you've ordered some tea and are waiting for me!"

He forced a smile as he spoke, striving to display the same delight at seeing her as he had shown in the early golden days of their passion. But at heart he was much embarrassed, and he shuddered at the thought of the awful scene which he could foresee.

She had at last risen and raised her veil. And looking at him she stammered: "Yes, I found myself at liberty earlier than I expected.... I feared some impediment might arise... and so I came."

Then, seeing how handsome and how affectionate he still looked, she could not restrain her passion. All her skilful arguments, all her fine resolutions, were swept away. Her flesh irresistibly impelled her towards him; she loved him, she would keep him, she would never surrender him to another. And she wildly flung her arms around his neck.

"Oh! Gerard, Gerard! I suffer too cruelly; I cannot, I cannot bear it! Tell me at once that you will not marry her, that you will never marry her!"

Her voice died away in a sob, tears started from her eyes. Ah! those tears which she had sworn she would never shed! They gushed forth without cessation, they streamed from her lovely eyes like a flood of the bitterest grief.

"My daughter, O God! What! you would marry my daughter! She, here, on your neck where I am now! No, no, such torture is past endurance, it must not be, I will not have it!"

He shivered as he heard that cry of frantic jealousy raised by a mother who now was but a woman, maddened by the thought of her rival's youth, those five and twenty summers which she herself had left far behind. For his part, on his way to the assignation, he had come to what he thought the most sensible decision, resolving to break off the intercourse after the fashion of a well-bred man, with all sorts of fine consolatory speeches. But sternness was not in his nature. He was weak and soft-hearted, and had never been able to withstand a woman's tears. Nevertheless, he endeavoured to calm her, and in order to rid himself of her embrace, he made her sit down upon the sofa. And there, beside her, he replied: "Come, be reasonable, my dear. We came here to have a friendly chat, did we not? I assure you that you are greatly exaggerating matters."

But she was determined to obtain a more positive answer from him. "No, no!" she retorted, "I am suffering too dreadfully, I must know the truth at once. Swear to me that you will never, never marry her!"

He again endeavoured to avoid replying as she wished him to do. "Come, come," he said, "you will do yourself harm by giving way to such grief as this; you know that I love you dearly."

"Then swear to me that you will never, never marry her."

"But I tell you that I love you, that you are the only one I love."

Then she again threw her arms around him, and kissed him passionately upon the eyes. "Is it true?" she asked in a transport. "You love me, you love no one else? Oh! tell me so again, and kiss me, and promise me that you will never belong to her."

Weak as he was he could not resist her ardent caresses and pressing entreaties. There came a moment of supreme cowardice and passion; her arms were around him and he forgot all but her, again and again repeating that he loved none other, and would never, never marry her daughter. At last he even sank so low as to pretend that he simply regarded that poor, infirm creature with pity. His words of compassionate disdain for her rival were like nectar to Eve, for they filled her with the blissful idea that it was she herself who would ever remain beautiful in his eyes and whom he would ever love....

At last silence fell between them, like an inevitable reaction after such a tempest of despair and passion. It disturbed Gerard. "Won't you drink some tea?" he asked. "It is almost cold already."

She was not listening, however. To her the reaction had come in a different form; and as though the inevitable explanation were only now commencing, she began to speak in a sad and weary voice. "My dear Gerard, you really cannot marry my daughter. In the first place it would be so wrong, and then there is the question of your name, your position. Forgive my frankness, but the fact is that everybody would say that you had sold yourself—such a marriage would be a scandal for both your family and mine."

As she spoke she took hold of his hands, like a mother seeking to prevent her big son from committing some terrible blunder. And he listened to her, with bowed head and averted eyes. She now evinced no anger, no jealous rage; all such feelings seemed to have departed with the rapture of her passion.

"Just think of what people would say," she continued. "I don't deceive myself, I am fully aware that there is an abyss between your circle of society and ours. It is all very well for us to be rich, but money simply enlarges the gap. And it was all very fine for me to be converted, my daughter is none the less 'the daughter of the Jewess,' as folks so often say. Ah! my Gerard, I am so proud of you, that it would rend my heart to see you lowered, degraded almost, by a marriage for money with a girl who is deformed, who is unworthy of you and whom you could never love."

He raised his eyes and looked at her entreatingly, anxious as he was to be spared such painful talk. "But haven't I sworn to you, that you are the only one I love?" he said. "Haven't I sworn that I would never marry her! It's all over. Don't let us torture ourselves any longer."

Their glances met and lingered on one another, instinct with all the misery which they dared not express in words. Eve's face had suddenly aged; her eyelids were red and swollen, and blotches marbled her quivering cheeks, down which her tears again began to trickle. "My poor, poor Gerard," said she, "how heavily I weigh on you. Oh! do not deny it! I feel that I am an intolerable burden on your shoulders, an impediment in your life, and that I shall bring irreparable disaster on you by my obstinacy in wishing you to be mine alone."

He tried to speak, but she silenced him. "No, no, all is over between us. I am growing ugly, all is ended. And besides, I shut off the future from you. I can be of no help to you, whereas you bestow all on me. And yet the time has come for you to assure yourself a position. At your age you can't continue living without any certainty of the morrow, without a home and hearth of your own; and it would be cowardly and cruel of me to set myself up as an obstacle, and prevent you from ending your life happily, as I should do if I clung to you and dragged you down with me."

Gazing at him through her tears she continued speaking in this fashion. Like his mother she was well aware that he was weak and even sickly; and she therefore dreamt of arranging a quiet life for him, a life of tranquil happiness free from all fear of want. She loved him so fondly; and possessed so much genuine kindness of heart that perhaps it might be possible for her to rise even to renunciation and sacrifice. Moreover, the very egotism born of her beauty suggested that it might be well for her to think of retirement and not allow the autumn of her life to be spoilt by torturing dramas. All this she said to him, treating him like a child whose happiness she wished to ensure even at the price of her own; and he, his eyes again lowered, listened without further protest, pleased indeed to let her arrange a happy life for him.

Examining the situation from every aspect, she at last began to recapitulate the points in favour of that abominable marriage, the thought of which had so intensely distressed her. "It is certain," she said, "that Camille would bring you all that I should like you to have. With her, I need hardly say it, would come plenty, affluence. And as for the rest, well, I do not wish to excuse myself or you, but I could name twenty households in which there have been worse things. Besides, I was wrong when I said that money opened a gap between people. On the contrary, it draws them nearer together, it secures forgiveness for every fault; so nobody would dare to blame you, there would only be jealous ones around you, dazzled by your good fortune."

Gerard rose, apparently rebelling once more. "Surely," said he, "you don't insist on my marrying your daughter?"

"Ah! no indeed! But I am sensible, and I tell you what I ought to tell you. You must think it all over."

"I have done so already. It is you that I have loved, and that I love still. What you say is impossible."

She smiled divinely, rose, and again embraced him. "How good and kind you are, my Gerard. Ah! if you only knew how I love you, how I shall always love you, whatever happens."

Then she again began to weep, and even he shed tears. Their good faith was absolute; tender of heart as they were, they sought to delay the painful wrenching and tried to hope for further happiness. But they were conscious that the marriage was virtually an accomplished fact. Only tears and words were left them, while life and destiny were marching on. And if their emotion was so acute it was probably because they felt that this was the last time they would meet as lovers. Still they strove to retain the illusion that they were not exchanging their last farewell, that their lips would some day meet again in a kiss of rapture.

Eve removed her arms from the young man's neck, and they both gazed round the room, at the sofa, the table, the four chairs, and the little hissing gas-stove. The moist, hot atmosphere was becoming quite oppressive.

"And so," said Gerard, "you won't drink a cup of tea?"

"No, it's so horrid here," she answered, while arranging her hair in front of the looking-glass.

At that parting moment the mournfulness of this place, where she had hoped to find such delightful memories, filled her with distress, which was turning to positive anguish, when she suddenly heard an uproar of gruff voices and heavy feet. People were hastening along the passage and knocking at the doors. And, on darting to the window, she perceived a number of policemen surrounding the chalet. At this the wildest ideas assailed her. Had her daughter employed somebody to follow her? Did her husband wish to divorce her so as to marry Silviane? The scandal would be awful, and all her plans must crumble! She waited in dismay, white like a ghost; while Gerard, also paling and quivering, begged her to be calm. At last, when loud blows were dealt upon the door and a Commissary of Police enjoined them to open it, they were obliged to do so. Ah! what a moment, and what dismay and shame!

Meantime, for more than an hour, Pierre and Guillaume had been waiting for the rain to cease. Seated in a corner of the glazed verandah they talked in undertones of Barthes' painful affair, and ultimately decided to ask Theophile Morin to dine with them on the following evening, and inform his old friend that he must again go into exile.

"That is the best course," repeated Guillaume. "Morin is very fond of him and will know how to break the news. I have no doubt too that he will go with him as far as the frontier."

Pierre sadly looked at the falling rain. "Ah! what a choice," said he, "to be ever driven to a foreign land under penalty of being thrust into prison. Poor fellow! how awful it is to have never known a moment of happiness and gaiety in one's life, to have devoted one's whole existence to the idea of liberty, and to see it scoffed at and expire with oneself!"

Then the priest paused, for he saw several policemen and keepers approach the cafe and prowl round it. Having lost scent of the man they were hunting, they had retraced their steps with the conviction no doubt that he had sought refuge in the chalet. And in order that he might not again escape them, they now took every precaution, exerted all their skill in surrounding the place before venturing on a minute search. Covert fear came upon Pierre and Guillaume when they noticed these proceedings. It seemed to them that it must all be connected with the chase which they had caught a glimpse of some time previously. Still, as they happened to be in the chalet they might be called upon to give their names and addresses. At this thought they glanced at one another, and almost made up their minds to go off under the rain. But they realised that anything like flight might only compromise them the more. So they waited; and all at once there came a diversion, for two fresh customers entered the establishment.

A victoria with its hood and apron raised had just drawn up outside the door. The first to alight from it was a young, well-dressed man with a bored expression of face. He was followed by a young woman who was laughing merrily, as if much amused by the persistence of the downpour. By way of jesting, indeed, she expressed her regret that she had not come to the Bois on her bicycle, whereupon her companion retorted that to drive about in a deluge appeared to him the height of idiocy.

"But we were bound to go somewhere, my dear fellow," she gaily answered. "Why didn't you take me to see the maskers?"

"The maskers, indeed! No, no, my dear. I prefer the Bois, and even the bottom of the lake, to them."

Then, as the couple entered the chalet, Pierre saw that the young woman who made merry over the rain was little Princess Rosemonde, while her companion, who regarded the mid-Lent festivities as horrible, and bicycling as an utterly unaesthetic amusement, was handsome Hyacinthe Duvillard. On the previous evening, while they were taking a cup of tea together on their return from the Chamber of Horrors, the young man had responded to the Princess's blandishments by declaring that the only form of attachment he believed in was a mystic union of intellects and souls. And as such a union could only be fittingly arrived at amidst the cold, chaste snow, they had decided that they would start for Christiania on the following Monday. Their chief regret was that by the time they reached the fiords the worst part of the northern winter would be over.

They sat down in the cafe and ordered some kummel, but there was none, said the waiter, so they had to content themselves with common anisette. Then Hyacinthe, who had been a schoolfellow of Guillaume's sons, recognised both him and Pierre; and leaning towards Rosemonde told her in a whisper who the elder brother was.

Thereupon, with sudden enthusiasm, she sprang to her feet: "Guillaume Froment, indeed! the great chemist!" And stepping forward with arm outstretched, she continued: "Ah! monsieur, you must excuse me, but I really must shake hands with you. I have so much admiration for you! You have done such wonderful work in connection with explosives!" Then, noticing the chemist's astonishment, she again burst into a laugh: "I am the Princess de Harn, your brother Abbe Froment knows me, and I ought to have asked him to introduce me. However, we have mutual friends, you and I; for instance, Monsieur Janzen, a very distinguished man, as you are aware. He was to have taken me to see you, for I am a modest disciple of yours. Yes, I have given some attention to chemistry, oh! from pure zeal for truth and in the hope of helping good causes, not otherwise. So you will let me call on you—won't you?—directly I come back from Christiania, where I am going with my young friend here, just to acquire some experience of unknown emotions."

In this way she rattled on, never allowing the others an opportunity to say a word. And she mingled one thing with another; her cosmopolitan tastes, which had thrown her into Anarchism and the society of shady adventurers; her new passion for mysticism and symbolism; her belief that the ideal must triumph over base materialism; her taste for aesthetic verse; and her dream of some unimagined rapture when Hyacinthe should kiss her with his frigid lips in a realm of eternal snow.

All at once, however, she stopped short and again began to laugh. "Dear me!" she exclaimed. "What are those policemen looking for here? Have they come to arrest us? How amusing it would be!"

Police Commissary Dupot and detective Mondesir had just made up their minds to search the cafe, as their men had hitherto failed to find Salvat in any of the outbuildings. They were convinced that he was here. Dupot, a thin, bald, short-sighted, spectacled little man, wore his usual expression of boredom and weariness; but in reality he was very wide awake and extremely courageous. He himself carried no weapons; but, as he anticipated a most violent resistance, such as might be expected from a trapped wolf, he advised Mondesir to have his revolver ready. From considerations of hierarchical respect, however, the detective, who with his snub nose and massive figure had much the appearance of a bull-dog, was obliged to let his superior enter first.

From behind his spectacles the Commissary of Police quickly scrutinized the four customers whom he found in the cafe: the lady, the priest, and the two other men. And passing them in a disdainful way, he at once made for the stairs, intending to inspect the upper floor. Thereupon the waiter, frightened by the sudden intrusion of the police, lost his head and stammered: "But there's a lady and gentleman upstairs in one of the private rooms."

Dupot quietly pushed him aside. "A lady and gentleman, that's not what we are looking for.... Come, make haste, open all the doors, you mustn't leave a cupboard closed."

Then climbing to the upper floor, he and Mondesir explored in turn every apartment and corner till they at last reached the room where Eve and Gerard were together. Here the waiter was unable to admit them, as the door was bolted inside. "Open the door!" he called through the keyhole, "it isn't you that they want!"

At last the bolt was drawn back, and Dupot, without even venturing to smile, allowed the trembling lady and gentleman to go downstairs, while Mondesir, entering the room, looked under every article of furniture, and even peeped into a little cupboard in order that no neglect might be imputed to him.

Meantime, in the public room which they had to cross after descending the stairs, Eve and Gerard experienced fresh emotion; for people whom they knew were there, brought together by an extraordinary freak of chance. Although Eve's face was hidden by a thick veil, her eyes met her son's glance and she felt sure that he recognised her. What a fatality! He had so long a tongue and told his sister everything! Then, as the Count, in despair at such a scandal, hurried off with the Baroness to conduct her through the pouring rain to her cab, they both distinctly heard little Princess Rosemonde exclaim: "Why, that was Count de Quinsac! Who was the lady, do you know?" And as Hyacinthe, greatly put out, returned no answer, she insisted, saying: "Come, you must surely know her. Who was she, eh?"

"Oh! nobody. Some woman or other," he ended by replying.

Pierre, who had understood the truth, turned his eyes away to hide his embarrassment. But all at once the scene changed. At the very moment when Commissary Dupot and detective Mondesir came downstairs again, after vainly exploring the upper floor, a loud shout was raised outside, followed by a noise of running and scrambling. Then Gascogne, the Chief of the Detective Force, who had remained in the rear of the chalet, continuing the search through the outbuildings, made his appearance, pushing before him a bundle of rags and mud, which two policemen held on either side. And this bundle was the man, the hunted man, who had just been discovered in the coach-house, inside a staved cask, covered with hay.

Ah! what a whoop of victory there was after that run of two hours' duration, that frantic chase which had left them all breathless and footsore! It had been the most exciting, the most savage of all sports—a man hunt! They had caught the man at last, and they pushed him, they dragged him, they belaboured him with blows. And he, the man, what a sorry prey he looked! A wreck, wan and dirty from having spent the night in a hole full of leaves, still soaked to his waist from having rushed through a stream, drenched too by the rain, bespattered with mire, his coat and trousers in tatters, his cap a mere shred, his legs and hands bleeding from his terrible rush through thickets bristling with brambles and nettles. There no longer seemed anything human about his face; his hair stuck to his moist temples, his bloodshot eyes protruded from their sockets; fright, rage, and suffering were all blended on his wasted, contracted face. Still it was he, the man, the quarry, and they gave him another push, and he sank on one of the tables of the little cafe, still held and shaken, however, by the rough hands of the policemen.

Then Guillaume shuddered as if thunderstruck, and caught hold of Pierre's hand. At this the priest, who was looking on, suddenly understood the truth and also quivered. Salvat! the man was Salvat! It was Salvat whom they had seen rushing through the wood like a wild boar forced by the hounds. And it was Salvat who was there, now conquered and simply a filthy bundle. Then once more there came to Pierre, amidst his anguish, a vision of the errand girl lying yonder at the entrance of the Duvillard mansion, the pretty fair-haired girl whom the bomb had ripped and killed!

Dupot and Mondesir made haste to participate in Gascogne's triumph. To tell the truth, however, the man had offered no resistance; it was like a lamb that he had let the police lay hold of him. And since he had been in the cafe, still roughly handled, he had simply cast a weary and mournful glance around him.

At last he spoke, and the first words uttered by his hoarse, gasping voice were these: "I am hungry."

He was sinking with hunger and weariness. This was the third day that he had eaten nothing.

"Give him some bread," said Commissary Dupot to the waiter. "He can eat it while a cab is being fetched."

A policeman went off to find a vehicle. The rain had suddenly ceased falling, the clear ring of a bicyclist's bell was heard in the distance, some carriages drove by, and under the pale sunrays life again came back to the Bois.

Meantime, Salvat had fallen gluttonously upon the hunk of bread which had been given him, and whilst he was devouring it with rapturous animal satisfaction, he perceived the four customers seated around. He seemed irritated by the sight of Hyacinthe and Rosemonde, whose faces expressed the mingled anxiety and delight they felt at thus witnessing the arrest of some bandit or other. But all at once his mournful, bloodshot eyes wavered, for to his intense surprise he had recognised Pierre and Guillaume. When he again looked at the latter it was with the submissive affection of a grateful dog, and as if he were once more promising that he would divulge nothing, whatever might happen.

At last he again spoke, as if addressing himself like a man of courage, both to Guillaume, from whom he had averted his eyes, and to others also, his comrades who were not there: "It was silly of me to run," said he. "I don't know why I did so. It's best that it should be all ended. I'm ready."

V. THE GAME OF POLITICS

ON reading the newspapers on the following morning Pierre and Guillaume were greatly surprised at not finding in them the sensational accounts of Salvat's arrest which they had expected. All they could discover was a brief paragraph in a column of general news, setting forth that some policemen on duty in the Bois de Boulogne had there arrested an Anarchist, who was believed to have played a part in certain recent occurrences. On the other hand, the papers gave a deal of space to the questions raised by Sagnier's fresh denunciations. There were innumerable articles on the African Railways scandal, and the great debate which might be expected at the Chamber of Deputies, should Mege, the Socialist member, really renew his interpellation, as he had announced his intention of doing.

As Guillaume's wrist was now fast healing, and nothing seemed to threaten him, he had already, on the previous evening, decided that he would return to Montmartre. The police had passed him by without apparently suspecting any responsibility on his part; and he was convinced that Salvat would keep silent. Pierre, however, begged him to wait a little longer, at any rate until the prisoner should have been interrogated by the investigating magistrate, by which time they would be able to judge the situation more clearly. Pierre, moreover, during his long stay at the Home Department on the previous morning, had caught a glimpse of certain things and overheard certain words which made him suspect some dim connection between Salvat's crime and the parliamentary crisis; and he therefore desired a settlement of the latter before Guillaume returned to his wonted life.

"Just listen," he said to his brother. "I am going to Morin's to ask him to come and dine here this evening, for it is absolutely necessary that Barthes should be warned of the fresh blow which is falling on him. And then I think I shall go to the Chamber, as I want to know what takes place there. After that, since you desire it, I will let you go back to your own home."

It was not more than half-past one when Pierre reached the Palais-Bourbon. It had occurred to him that Fonsegue would be able to secure him admittance to the meeting-hall, but in the vestibule he met General de Bozonnet, who happened to possess a couple of tickets. A friend of his, who was to have accompanied him, had, at the last moment, been unable to come. So widespread was the curiosity concerning the debate now near at hand, and so general were the predictions that it would prove a most exciting one, that the demand for tickets had been extremely keen during the last twenty-four hours. In fact Pierre would never have been able to obtain admittance if the General had not good-naturedly offered to take him in. As a matter of fact the old warrior was well pleased to have somebody to chat with. He explained that he had simply come there to kill time, just as he might have killed it at a concert or a charity bazaar. However, like the ex-Legitimist and Bonapartist that he was, he had really come for the pleasure of feasting his eyes on the shameful spectacle of parliamentary ignominy.

When the General and Pierre had climbed the stairs, they were able to secure two front seats in one of the public galleries. Little Massot, who was already there, and who knew them both, placed one of them on his right and the other on his left. "I couldn't find a decent seat left in the press gallery," said he, "but I managed to get this place, from which I shall be able to see things properly. It will certainly be a big sitting. Just look at the number of people there are on every side!"

The narrow and badly arranged galleries were packed to overflowing. There were men of every age and a great many women too in the confused, serried mass of spectators, amidst which one only distinguished a multiplicity of pale white faces. The real scene, however, was down below in the meeting-hall, which was as yet empty, and with its rows of seats disposed in semi-circular fashion looked like the auditorium of a theatre. Under the cold light which fell from the glazed roofing appeared the solemn, shiny tribune, whence members address the Chamber, whilst behind it, on a higher level, and running right along the rear wall, was what is called the Bureau, with its various tables and seats, including the presidential armchair. The Bureau, like the tribune, was still unoccupied. The only persons one saw there were a couple of attendants who were laying out new pens and filling inkstands.

"The women," said Massot with a laugh, after another glance at the galleries, "come here just as they might come to a menagerie, that is, in the secret hope of seeing wild beasts devour one another. But, by the way, did you read the article in the 'Voix du Peuple' this morning? What a wonderful fellow that Sagnier is. When nobody else can find any filth left, he manages to discover some. He apparently thinks it necessary to add something new every day, in order to send his sales up. And of course it all disturbs the public, and it's thanks to him that so many people have come here in the hope of witnessing some horrid scene."

Then he laughed again, as he asked Pierre if he had read an unsigned article in the "Globe," which in very dignified but perfidious language had called upon Barroux to give the full and frank explanations which the country had a right to demand in that matter of the African Railways. This paper had hitherto vigorously supported the President of the Council, but in the article in question the coldness which precedes a rupture was very apparent. Pierre replied that the article had much surprised him, for he had imagined that Fonsegue and Barroux were linked together by identity of views and long-standing personal friendship.

Massot was still laughing. "Quite so," said he. "And you may be sure that the governor's heart bled when he wrote that article. It has been much noticed, and it will do the government a deal of harm. But the governor, you see, knows better than anybody else what line he ought to follow to save both his own position and the paper's."

Then he related what extraordinary confusion and emotion reigned among the deputies in the lobbies through which he had strolled before coming upstairs to secure a seat. After an adjournment of a couple of days the Chamber found itself confronted by this terrible scandal, which was like one of those conflagrations which, at the moment when they are supposed to be dying out, suddenly flare up again and devour everything. The various figures given in Sagnier's list, the two hundred thousand francs paid to Barroux, the eighty thousand handed to Monferrand, the fifty thousand allotted to Fonsegue, the ten thousand pocketed by Duthil, and the three thousand secured by Chaigneux, with all the other amounts distributed among So-and-so and So-and-so, formed the general subject of conversation. And at the same time some most extraordinary stories were current; there was no end of tittle-tattle in which fact and falsehood were so inextricably mingled that everybody was at sea as to the real truth. Whilst many deputies turned pale and trembled as beneath a blast of terror, others passed by purple with excitement, bursting with delight, laughing with exultation at the thought of coming victory. For, in point of fact, beneath all the assumed indignation, all the calls for parliamentary cleanliness and morality, there simply lay a question of persons—the question of ascertaining whether the government would be overthrown, and in that event of whom the new administration would consist. Barroux no doubt appeared to be in a bad way; but with things in such a muddle one was bound to allow a margin for the unexpected. From what was generally said it seemed certain that Mege would be extremely violent. Barroux would answer him, and the Minister's friends declared that he was determined to speak out in the most decisive manner. As for Monferrand he would probably address the Chamber after his colleague, but Vignon's intentions were somewhat doubtful, as, in spite of his delight, he made a pretence of remaining in the back, ground. He had been seen going from one to another of his partisans, advising them to keep calm, in order that they might retain the cold, keen coup d'oeil which in warfare generally decides the victory. Briefly, such was the plotting and intriguing that never had any witch's cauldron brimful of drugs and nameless abominations been set to boil on a more hellish fire than that of this parliamentary cook-shop.

"Heaven only knows what they will end by serving us," said little Massot by way of conclusion.

General de Bozonnet for his part anticipated nothing but disaster. If France had only possessed an army, said he, one might have swept away that handful of bribe-taking parliamentarians who preyed upon the country and rotted it. But there was no army left, there was merely an armed nation, a very different thing. And thereupon, like a man of a past age whom the present times distracted, he started on what had been his favourite subject of complaint ever since he had been retired from the service.

"Here's an idea for an article if you want one," he said to Massot. "Although France may have a million soldiers she hasn't got an army. I'll give you some notes of mine, and you will be able to tell people the truth."

Warfare, he continued, ought to be purely and simply a caste occupation, with commanders designated by divine right, leading mercenaries or volunteers into action. By democratising warfare people had simply killed it; a circumstance which he deeply regretted, like a born soldier who regarded fighting as the only really noble occupation that life offered. For, as soon as it became every man's duty to fight, none was willing to do so; and thus compulsory military service—what was called "the nation in arms"—would, at a more or less distant date, certainly bring about the end of warfare. If France had not engaged in a European war since 1870 this was precisely due to the fact that everybody in France was ready to fight. But rulers hesitated to throw a whole nation against another nation, for the loss both in life and treasure would be tremendous. And so the thought that all Europe was transformed into a vast camp filled the General with anger and disgust. He sighed for the old times when men fought for the pleasure of the thing, just as they hunted; whereas nowadays people were convinced that they would exterminate one another at the very first engagement.

"But surely it wouldn't be an evil if war should disappear," Pierre gently remarked.

This somewhat angered the General. "Well, you'll have pretty nations if people no longer fight," he answered, and then trying to show a practical spirit, he added: "Never has the art of war cost more money than since war itself has become an impossibility. The present-day defensive peace is purely and simply ruining every country in Europe. One may be spared defeat, but utter bankruptcy is certainly at the end of it all. And in any case the profession of arms is done for. All faith in it is dying out, and it will soon be forsaken, just as men have begun to forsake the priesthood."

Thereupon he made a gesture of mingled grief and anger, almost cursing that parliament, that Republican legislature before him, as if he considered it responsible for the future extinction of warfare. But little Massot was wagging his head dubiously, for he regarded the subject as rather too serious a one for him to write upon. And, all at once, in order to turn the conversation into another channel, he exclaimed: "Ah! there's Monseigneur Martha in the diplomatic gallery beside the Spanish Ambassador. It's denied, you know, that he intends to come forward as a candidate in Morbihan. He's far too shrewd to wish to be a deputy. He already pulls the strings which set most of the Catholic deputies who have 'rallied' to the Republican Government in motion."

Pierre himself had just noticed Monseigneur Martha's smiling face. And, somehow or other, however modest might be the prelate's demeanour, it seemed to him that he really played an important part in what was going on. He could hardly take his eyes from him. It was as if he expected that he would suddenly order men hither and thither, and direct the whole march of events.

"Ah!" said Massot again. "Here comes Mege. It won't be long now before the sitting begins."

The hall, down below, was gradually filling. Deputies entered and descended the narrow passages between the benches. Most of them remained standing and chatting in a more or less excited way; but some seated themselves and raised their grey, weary faces to the glazed roof. It was a cloudy afternoon, and rain was doubtless threatening, for the light became quite livid. If the hall was pompous it was also dismal with its heavy columns, its cold allegorical statues, and its stretches of bare marble and woodwork. The only brightness was that of the red velvet of the benches and the gallery hand-rests.

Every deputy of any consequence who entered was named by Massot to his companions. Mege, on being stopped by another member of the little Socialist group, began to fume and gesticulate. Then Vignon, detaching himself from a group of friends and putting on an air of smiling composure, descended the steps towards his seat. The occupants of the galleries, however, gave most attention to the accused members, those whose names figured in Sagnier's list. And these were interesting studies. Some showed themselves quite sprightly, as if they were entirely at their ease; but others had assumed a most grave and indignant demeanour. Chaigneux staggered and hesitated as if beneath the weight of some frightful act of injustice; whereas Duthil looked perfectly serene save for an occasional twitch of his lips. The most admired, however, was Fonsegue, who showed so candid a face, so open a glance, that his colleagues as well as the spectators might well have declared him innocent. Nobody indeed could have looked more like an honest man.

"Ah! there's none like the governor," muttered Massot with enthusiasm. "But be attentive, for here come the ministers. One mustn't miss Barroux' meeting with Fonsegue, after this morning's article."

Chance willed it that as Barroux came along with his head erect, his face pale, and his whole demeanour aggressive, he was obliged to pass Fonsegue in order to reach the ministerial bench. In doing so he did not speak to him, but he gazed at him fixedly like one who is conscious of defection, of a cowardly stab in the back on the part of a traitor. Fonsegue seemed quite at ease, and went on shaking hands with one and another of his colleagues as if he were altogether unconscious of Barroux' glance. Nor did he even appear to see Monferrand, who walked by in the rear of the Prime Minister, wearing a placid good-natured air, as if he knew nothing of what was impending, but was simply coming to some ordinary humdrum sitting. However, when he reached his seat, he raised his eyes and smiled at Monseigneur Martha, who gently nodded to him. Then well pleased to think that things were going as he wished them to go, he began to rub his hands, as he often did by way of expressing his satisfaction.

"Who is that grey-haired, mournful-looking gentleman on the ministerial bench?" Pierre inquired of Massot.

"Why, that's Taboureau, the Minister of Public Instruction, the excellent gentleman who is said to have no prestige. One's always hearing of him, and one never recognises him; he looks like an old, badly worn coin. Just like Barroux he can't feel very well pleased with the governor this afternoon, for to-day's 'Globe' contained an article pointing out his thorough incapacity in everything concerning the fine arts. It was an article in measured language, but all the more effective for that very reason. It would surprise me if Taboureau should recover from it."

Just then a low roll of drums announced the arrival of the President and other officials of the Chamber. A door opened, and a little procession passed by amidst an uproar of exclamations and hasty footsteps. Then, standing at his table, the President rang his bell and declared the sitting open. But few members remained silent, however, whilst one of the secretaries, a dark, lanky young man with a harsh voice, read the minutes of the previous sitting. When they had been adopted, various letters of apology for non-attendance were read, and a short, unimportant bill was passed without discussion. And then came the big affair, Mege's interpellation, and at once the whole Chamber was in a flutter, while the most passionate curiosity reigned in the galleries above. On the Government consenting to the interpellation, the Chamber decided that the debate should take place at once. And thereupon complete silence fell, save that now and again a brief quiver sped by, in which one could detect the various feelings, passions and appetites swaying the assembly.

Mege began to speak with assumed moderation, carefully setting forth the various points at issue. Tall and thin, gnarled and twisted like a vine-stock, he rested his hands on the tribune as if to support his bent figure, and his speech was often interrupted by the little dry cough which came from the tuberculosis that was burning him. But his eyes sparkled with passion behind his glasses, and little by little his voice rose in piercing accents and he drew his lank figure erect and began to gesticulate vehemently. He reminded the Chamber that some two months previously, at the time of the first denunciations published by the "Voix du Peuple," he had asked leave to interpellate the Government respecting that deplorable affair of the African Railways; and he remarked, truly enough, that if the Chamber had not yielded to certain considerations which he did not wish to discuss, and had not adjourned his proposed inquiries, full light would long since have been thrown on the whole affair, in such wise that there would have been no revival, no increase of the scandal, and no possible pretext for that abominable campaign of denunciation which tortured and disgusted the country. However, it had at last been understood that silence could be maintained no longer. It was necessary that the two ministers who were so loudly accused of having abused their trusts, should prove their innocence, throw full light upon all they had done; apart from which the Chamber itself could not possibly remain beneath the charge of wholesale venality.

Then he recounted the whole history of the affair, beginning with the grant of a concession for the African Lines to Baron Duvillard; and next passing to the proposals for the issue of lottery stock, which proposals, it was now said, had only been sanctioned by the Chamber after the most shameful bargaining and buying of votes. At this point Mege became extremely violent. Speaking of that mysterious individual Hunter, Baron Duvillard's recruiter and go-between, he declared that the police had allowed him to flee from France, much preferring to spend its time in shadowing Socialist deputies. Then, hammering the tribune with his fist, he summoned Barroux to give a categorical denial to the charges brought against him, and to make it absolutely clear that he had never received a single copper of the two hundred thousand francs specified in Hunter's list. Forthwith certain members shouted to Mege that he ought to read the whole list; but when he wished to do so others vociferated that it was abominable, that such a mendacious and slanderous document ought not to be accorded a place in the proceedings of the French legislature. Mege went on still in frantic fashion, figuratively casting Sagnier into the gutter, and protesting that there was nothing in common between himself and such a base insulter. But at the same time he demanded that justice and punishment should be meted out equally to one and all, and that if indeed there were any bribe-takers among his colleagues, they should be sent that very night to the prison of Mazas.

Meantime the President, erect at his table, rang and rang his bell without managing to quell the uproar. He was like a pilot who finds the tempest too strong for him. Among all the men with purple faces and barking mouths who were gathered in front of him, the ushers alone maintained imperturbable gravity. At intervals between the bursts of shouting, Mege's voice could still be heard. By some sudden transition he had come to the question of a Collectivist organisation of society such as he dreamt of, and he contrasted it with the criminal capitalist society of the present day, which alone, said he, could produce such scandals. And yielding more and more to his apostolic fervour, declaring that there could be no salvation apart from Collectivism, he shouted that the day of triumph would soon dawn. He awaited it with a smile of confidence. In his opinion, indeed, he merely had to overthrow that ministry and perhaps another one, and then he himself would at last take the reins of power in hand, like a reformer who would know how to pacify the nation. As outside Socialists often declared, it was evident that the blood of a dictator flowed in that sectarian's veins. His feverish, stubborn rhetoric ended by exhausting his interrupters, who were compelled to listen to him. When he at last decided to leave the tribune, loud applause arose from a few benches on the left.

"Do you know," said Massot to the General, "I met Mege taking a walk with his three little children in the Jardin des Plantes the other day. He looked after them as carefully as an old nurse. I believe he's a very worthy fellow at heart, and lives in a very modest way."

But a quiver had now sped through the assembly. Barroux had quitted his seat to ascend the tribune. He there drew himself erect, throwing his head back after his usual fashion. There was a haughty, majestic, slightly sorrowful expression on his handsome face, which would have been perfect had his nose only been a little larger. He began to express his sorrow and indignation in fine flowery language, which he punctuated with theatrical gestures. His eloquence was that of a tribune of the romantic school, and as one listened to him one could divine that in spite of all his pomposity he was really a worthy, tender-hearted and somewhat foolish man. That afternoon he was stirred by genuine emotion; his heart bled at the thought of his disastrous destiny, he felt that a whole world was crumbling with himself. Ah! what a cry of despair he stifled, the cry of the man who is buffeted and thrown aside by the course of events on the very day when he thinks that his civic devotion entitles him to triumph! To have given himself and all he possessed to the cause of the Republic, even in the dark days of the Second Empire; to have fought and struggled and suffered persecution for that Republic's sake; to have established that Republic amidst the battle of parties, after all the horrors of national and civil war; and then, when the Republic at last triumphed and became a living fact, secure from all attacks and intrigues, to suddenly feel like a survival of some other age, to hear new comers speak a new language, preach a new ideal, and behold the collapse of all he had loved, all he had reverenced, all that had given him strength to fight and conquer! The mighty artisans of the early hours were no more; it had been meet that Gambetta should die. How bitter it all was for the last lingering old ones to find themselves among the men of the new, intelligent and shrewd generation, who gently smiled at them, deeming their romanticism quite out of fashion! All crumbled since the ideal of liberty collapsed, since liberty was no longer the one desideratum, the very basis of the Republic whose existence had been so dearly purchased after so long an effort!

Erect and dignified Barroux made his confession. The Republic to him was like the sacred ark of life; the very worst deeds became saintly if they were employed to save her from peril. And in all simplicity he, told his story, how he had found the great bulk of Baron Duvillard's money going to the opposition newspapers as pretended payment for puffery and advertising, whilst on the other hand the Republican organs received but beggarly, trumpery amounts. He had been Minister of the Interior at the time, and had therefore had charge of the press; so what would have been said of him if he had not endeavoured to reestablish some equilibrium in this distribution of funds in order that the adversaries of the institutions of the country might not acquire a great increase of strength by appropriating all the sinews of war? Hands had been stretched out towards him on all sides, a score of newspapers, the most faithful, the most meritorious, had claimed their legitimate share. And he had ensured them that share by distributing among them the two hundred thousand francs set down in the list against his name. Not a centime of the money had gone into his own pocket, he would allow nobody to impugn his personal honesty, on that point his word must suffice. At that moment Barroux was really grand. All his emphatic pomposity disappeared; he showed himself, as he really was—an honest man, quivering, his heart bared, his conscience bleeding, in his bitter distress at having been among those who had laboured and at now being denied reward.

For, truth to tell, his words fell amidst icy silence. In his childish simplicity he had anticipated an outburst of enthusiasm; a Republican Chamber could but acclaim him for having saved the Republic; and now the frigidity of one and all quite froze him. He suddenly felt that he was all alone, done for, touched by the hand of death. Nevertheless, he continued speaking amidst that terrible silence with the courage of one who is committing suicide, and who, from his love of noble and eloquent attitudes, is determined to die standing. He ended with a final impressive gesture. However, as he came down from the tribune, the general coldness seemed to increase, not a single member applauded. With supreme clumsiness he had alluded to the secret scheming of Rome and the clergy, whose one object, in his opinion, was to recover the predominant position they had lost and restore monarchy in France at a more or less distant date.

"How silly of him! Ought a man ever to confess?" muttered Massot. "He's done for, and the ministry too!"

Then, amidst the general frigidity, Monferrand boldly ascended the tribune stairs. The prevailing uneasiness was compounded of all the secret fear which sincerity always causes, of all the distress of the bribe-taking deputies who felt that they were rolling into an abyss, and also of the embarrassment which the others felt at thought of the more or less justifiable compromises of politics. Something like relief, therefore, came when Monferrand started with the most emphatic denials, protesting in the name of his outraged honour, and dealing blow after blow on the tribune with one hand, while with the other he smote his chest. Short and thick-set, with his face thrust forward, hiding his shrewdness beneath an expression of indignant frankness, he was for a moment really superb. He denied everything. He was not only ignorant of what was meant by that sum of eighty thousand francs set down against his name, but he defied the whole world to prove that he had even touched a single copper of that money. He boiled over with indignation to such a point that he did not simply deny bribe-taking on his own part, he denied it on behalf of the whole assembly, of all present and past French legislatures, as if, indeed, bribe-taking on the part of a representative of the people was altogether too monstrous an idea, a crime that surpassed possibility to such an extent that the mere notion of it was absurd. And thereupon applause rang out; the Chamber, delivered from its fears, thrilled by his words, acclaimed him.

From the little Socialist group, however, some jeers arose, and voices summoned Monferrand to explain himself on the subject of the African Railways, reminding him that he had been at the head of the Public Works Department at the time of the vote, and requiring of him that he should state what he now meant to do, as Minister of the Interior, in order to reassure the country. He juggled with this question, declaring that if there were any guilty parties they would be punished, for he did not require anybody to remind him of his duty. And then, all at once, with incomparable maestria, he had recourse to the diversion which he had been preparing since the previous day. His duty, said he, was a thing which he never forgot; he discharged it like a faithful soldier of the nation hour by hour, and with as much vigilance as prudence. He had been accused of employing the police on he knew not what base spying work in such wise as to allow the man Hunter to escape. Well, as for that much-slandered police force, he would tell the Chamber on what work he had really employed it the day before, and how zealously it had laboured for the cause of law and order. In the Bois de Boulogne, on the previous afternoon, it had arrested that terrible scoundrel, the perpetrator of the crime in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, that Anarchist mechanician Salvat, who for six weeks past had so cunningly contrived to elude capture. The scoundrel had made a full confession during the evening, and the law would now take its course with all despatch. Public morality was at last avenged, Paris might now emerge in safety from its long spell of terror, Anarchism would be struck down, annihilated. And that was what he, Monferrand, had done as a Minister for the honour and safety of his country, whilst villains were vainly seeking to dishonour him by inscribing his name on a list of infamy, the outcome of the very basest political intrigues.

The Chamber listened agape and quivering. This story of Salvat's arrest, which none of the morning papers had reported; the present which Monferrand seemed to be making them of that terrible Anarchist whom many had already begun to regard as a myth; the whole mise-en-scene of the Minister's speech transported the deputies as if they were suddenly witnessing the finish of a long-interrupted drama. Stirred and flattered, they prolonged their applause, while Monferrand went on celebrating his act of energy, how he had saved society, how crime should be punished, and how he himself would ever prove that he had a strong arm and could answer for public order. He even won favour with the Conservatives and Clericals on the Right by separating himself from Barroux, addressing a few words of sympathy to those Catholics who had "rallied" to the Republic, and appealing for concord among men of different beliefs in order that they might fight the common enemy, that fierce, wild socialism which talked of overthrowing everything!

By the time Monferrand came down from the tribune, the trick was played, he had virtually saved himself. Both the Right and Left of the Chamber* applauded, drowning the protests of the few Socialists whose vociferations only added to the triumphal tumult. Members eagerly stretched out their hands to the Minister, who for a moment remained standing there and smiling. But there was some anxiety in that smile of his; his success was beginning to frighten him. Had he spoken too well, and saved the entire Cabinet instead of merely saving himself? That would mean the ruin of his plan. The Chamber ought not to vote under the effect of that speech which had thrilled it so powerfully. Thus Monferrand, though he still continued to smile, spent a few anxious moments in waiting to see if anybody would rise to answer him.

* Ever since the days of the Bourbon Restoration it has been
the practice in the French Chambers for the more conservative
members to seat themselves on the President's right, and for
the Radical ones to place themselves on his left. The central
seats of the semicircle in which the members' seats are
arranged in tiers are usually occupied by men of moderate views.
Generally speaking, such terms as Right Centre and Left Centre
are applied to groups of Moderates inclining in the first place
to Conservatism and in the latter to Radicalism. All this is of
course known to readers acquainted with French institutions, but
I give the explanation because others, after perusing French
news in some daily paper, have often asked me what was meant by
"a deputy of the Right," and so forth.—Trans.

His success had been as great among the occupants of the galleries as among the deputies themselves. Several ladies had been seen applauding, and Monseigneur Martha had given unmistakable signs of the liveliest satisfaction. "Ah, General!" said Massot to Bozonnet in a sneering way. "Those are our fighting men of the present time. And he's a bold and strong one, is Monferrand. Of course it is all what people style 'saving one's bacon,' but none the less it's very clever work."

Just then, however, Monferrand to his great satisfaction had seen Vignon rise from his seat in response to the urging of his friends. And thereupon all anxiety vanished from the Minister's smile, which became one of malicious placidity.

The very atmosphere of the Chamber seemed to change with Vignon in the tribune. He was slim, with a fair and carefully tended beard, blue eyes and all the suppleness of youth. He spoke, moreover, like a practical man, in simple, straightforward language, which made the emptiness of the other's declamatory style painfully conspicuous. His term of official service as a prefect in the provinces had endowed him with keen insight; and it was in an easy way that he propounded and unravelled the most intricate questions. Active and courageous, confident in his own star, too young and too shrewd to have compromised himself in anything so far, he was steadily marching towards the future. He had already drawn up a rather more advanced political programme than that of Barroux and Monferrand, so that when opportunity offered there might be good reasons for him to take their place. Moreover, he was quite capable of carrying out his programme by attempting some of the long-promised reforms for which the country was waiting. He had guessed that honesty, when it had prudence and shrewdness as its allies, must some day secure an innings. In a clear voice, and in a very quiet, deliberate way, he now said what it was right to say on the subject under discussion, the things that common sense dictated and that the Chamber itself secretly desired should be said. He was certainly the first to rejoice over an arrest which would reassure the country; but he failed to understand what connection there could be between that arrest and the sad business that had been brought before the Chamber. The two affairs were quite distinct and different, and he begged his colleagues not to vote in the state of excitement in which he saw them. Full light must be thrown on the African Railways question, and this, one could not expect from the two incriminated ministers. However, he was opposed to any suggestion of a committee of inquiry. In his opinion the guilty parties, if such there were, ought to be brought immediately before a court of law. And, like Barroux, he wound up with a discreet allusion to the growing influence of the clergy, declaring that he was against all unworthy compromises, and was equally opposed to any state dictatorship and any revival of the ancient theocratic spirit.

Although there was but little applause when Vignon returned to his seat, it was evident that the Chamber was again master of its emotions. And the situation seemed so clear, and the overthrow of the ministry so certain, that Mege, who had meant to reply to the others, wisely abstained from doing so. Meantime people noticed the placid demeanour of Monferrand, who had listened to Vignon with the utmost complacency, as if he were rendering homage to an adversary's talent; whereas Barroux, ever since the cold silence which had greeted his speech, had remained motionless in his seat, bowed down and pale as a corpse.

"Well, it's all over," resumed Massot, amidst the hubbub which arose as the deputies prepared to vote; "the ministry's done for. Little Vignon will go a long way, you know. People say that he dreams of the Elysee. At all events everything points to him as our next prime minister."

Then, as the journalist rose, intending to go off, the General detained him: "Wait a moment, Monsieur Massot," said he. "How disgusting all that parliamentary cooking is! You ought to point it out in an article, and show people how the country is gradually being weakened and rotted to the marrow by all such useless and degrading discussions. Why, a great battle resulting in the loss of 50,000 men would exhaust us less than ten years of this abominable parliamentary system. You must call on me some morning. I will show you a scheme of military reform, in which I point out the necessity of returning to the limited professional armies which we used to have, for this present-day national army, as folks call it, which is a semi-civilian affair and at best a mere herd of men, is like a dead weight on us, and is bound to pull us down!"

Pierre, for his part, had not spoken a word since the beginning of the debate. He had listened to everything, at first influenced by the thought of his brother's interests, and afterwards mastered by the feverishness which gradually took possession of everybody present. He had become convinced that there was nothing more for Guillaume to fear; but how curiously did one event fit into another, and how loudly had Salvat's arrest re-echoed in the Chamber! Looking down into the seething hall below him, he had detected all the clash of rival passions and interests. After watching the great struggle between Barroux, Monferrand and Vignon, he had gazed upon the childish delight of that terrible Socialist Mege, who was so pleased at having been able to stir up the depths of those troubled waters, in which he always unwittingly angled for the benefit of others. Then, too, Pierre had become interested in Fonsegue, who, knowing what had been arranged between Monferrand, Duvillard and himself, evinced perfect calmness and strove to reassure Duthil and Chaigneux, who, on their side, were quite dismayed by the ministry's impending fall. Yet, Pierre's eyes always came back to Monseigneur Martha. He had watched his serene smiling face throughout the sitting, striving to detect his impressions of the various incidents that had occurred, as if in his opinion that dramatic parliamentary comedy had only been played as a step towards the more or less distant triumph for which the prelate laboured. And now, while awaiting the result of the vote, as Pierre turned towards Massot and the General, he found that they were talking of nothing but recruiting and tactics and the necessity of a bath of blood for the whole of Europe. Ah! poor mankind, ever fighting and ever devouring one another in parliaments as well as on battle-fields, when, thought Pierre, would it decide to disarm once and for all, and live at peace according to the laws of justice and reason!

Then he again looked down into the hall, where the greatest confusion was prevailing among the deputies with regard to the coming vote. There was quite a rainfall of suggested "resolutions," from a very violent one proposed by Mege, to another, which was merely severe, emanating from Vignon. The ministry, however, would only accept the "Order of the day pure and simple," a mere decision, that is, to pass to the next business, as if Mege's interpellation had been unworthy of attention. And presently the Government was defeated, Vignon's resolution being adopted by a majority of twenty-five. Some portion of the Left had evidently joined hands with the Right and the Socialist group. A prolonged hubbub followed this result.

"Well, so we are to have a Vignon Cabinet," said Massot, as he went off with Pierre and the General. "All the same, though, Monferrand has saved himself, and if I were in Vignon's place I should distrust him."

That evening there was a very touching farewell scene at the little house at Neuilly. When Pierre returned thither from the Chamber, saddened but reassured with regard to the future, Guillaume at once made up his mind to go home on the morrow. And as Nicholas Barthes was compelled to leave, the little dwelling seemed on the point of relapsing into dreary quietude once more.

Theophile Morin, whom Pierre had informed of the painful alternative in which Barthes was placed, duly came to dinner; but he did not have time to speak to the old man before they all sat down to table at seven o'clock. As usual Barthes had spent his day in marching, like a caged lion, up and down the room in which he had accepted shelter after the fashion of a big fearless child, who never worried with regard either to his present circumstances or the troubles which the future might have in store for him. His life had ever been one of unlimited hope, which reality had ever shattered. Although all that he had loved, all that he had hoped to secure by fifty years of imprisonment or exile,—liberty, equality and a real brotherly republic,—had hitherto failed to come, such as he had dreamt of them, he nevertheless retained the candid faith of his youth, and was ever confident in the near future. He would smile indulgently when new comers, men of violent ideas, derided him and called him a poor old fellow. For his part, he could make neither head nor tail of the many new sects. He simply felt indignant with their lack of human feeling, and stubbornly adhered to his own idea of basing the world's regeneration on the simple proposition that men were naturally good and ought to be free and brotherly.

That evening at dinner, feeling that he was with friends who cared for him, Barthes proved extremely gay, and showed all his ingenuousness in talking of his ideal, which would soon be realised, said he, in spite of everything. He could tell a story well whenever he cared to chat, and on that occasion he related some delightful anecdotes about the prisons through which he had passed. He knew all the dungeons, Ste. Pelagie and Mont St. Michel, Belle-Ile-en-Mer and Clairvaux, to say nothing of temporary gaols and the evil-smelling hulks on board which political prisoners are often confined. And he still laughed at certain recollections, and related how in the direst circumstances he had always been able to seek refuge in his conscience. The others listened to him quite charmed by his conversation, but full of anguish at the thought that this perpetual prisoner or exile must again rise and take his staff to sally forth, driven from his native land once more.

Pierre did not speak out until they were partaking of dessert. Then he related how the Minister had written to him, and how in a brief interview he had stated that Barthes must cross the frontier within forty-eight hours if he did not wish to be arrested. Thereupon the old man gravely rose, with his white fleece, his eagle beak and his bright eyes still sparkling with the fire of youth. And he wished to go off at once. "What!" said he, "you have known all this since yesterday, and have still kept me here at the risk of my compromising you even more than I had done already! You must forgive me, I did not think of the worry I might cause you, I thought that everything would be satisfactorily arranged. I must thank you both—yourself and Guillaume—for the few days of quietude that you have procured to an old vagabond and madman like myself."

Then, as they tried to prevail on him to remain until the following morning, he would not listen to them. There would be a train for Brussels about midnight, and he had ample time to take it. He refused to let Morin accompany him. No, no, said he, Morin was not a rich man, and moreover he had work to attend to. Why should he take him away from his duties, when it was so easy, so simple, for him to go off alone? He was going back into exile as into misery and grief which he had long known, like some Wandering Jew of Liberty, ever driven onward through the world.

When he took leave of the others at ten o'clock, in the little sleepy street just outside the house, tears suddenly dimmed his eyes. "Ah! I'm no longer a young man," he said; "it's all over this time. I shall never come back again. My bones will rest in some corner over yonder." And yet, after he had affectionately embraced Pierre and Guillaume, he drew himself up like one who remained unconquered, and he raised a supreme cry of hope. "But after all, who knows? Triumph may perhaps come to-morrow. The future belongs to those who prepare it and wait for it!"

Then he walked away, and long after he had disappeared his firm, sonorous footsteps could be heard re-echoing in the quiet night.

BOOK IV.

I. PIERRE AND MARIE

ON the mild March morning when Pierre left his little house at Neuilly to accompany Guillaume to Montmartre, he was oppressed by the thought that on returning home he would once more find himself alone with nothing to prevent him from relapsing into negation and despair. The idea of this had kept him from sleeping, and he still found it difficult to hide his distress and force a smile.

The sky was so clear and the atmosphere so mild that the brothers had resolved to go to Montmartre on foot by way of the outer boulevards. Nine o'clock was striking when they set out. Guillaume for his part was very gay at the thought of the surprise he would give his family. It was as if he were suddenly coming back from a long journey. He had not warned them of his intentions; he had merely written to them now and again to tell them that he was recovering, and they certainly had no idea that his return was so near at hand.

When Guillaume and Pierre had climbed the sunlit slopes of Montmartre, and crossed the quiet countrified Place du Tertre, the former, by means of a latch-key, quietly opened the door of his house, which seemed to be asleep, so profound was the stillness both around and within it. Pierre found it the same as on the occasion of his previous and only visit. First came the narrow passage which ran through the ground-floor, affording a view of all Paris at the further end. Next there was the garden, reduced to a couple of plum-trees and a clump of lilac-bushes, the leaves of which had now sprouted. And this time the priest perceived three bicycles leaning against the trees. Beyond them stood the large work-shop, so gay, and yet so peaceful, with its huge window overlooking a sea of roofs.

Guillaume had reached the work-shop without meeting anybody. With an expression of much amusement he raised a finger to his lips. "Attention, Pierre," he whispered; "you'll just see!"

Then having noiselessly opened the door, they remained for a moment on the threshold.

The three sons alone were there. Near his forge stood Thomas working a boring machine, with which he was making some holes in a small brass plate. Then Francois and Antoine were seated on either side of their large table, the former reading, and the latter finishing a block. The bright sunshine streamed in, playing over all the seeming disorder of the room, where so many callings and so many implements found place. A large bunch of wallflowers bloomed on the women's work-table near the window; and absorbed as the young men were in their respective tasks the only sound was the slight hissing of the boring machine each time that the eldest of them drilled another hole.

However, although Guillaume did not stir, there suddenly came a quiver, an awakening. His sons seemed to guess his presence, for they raised their heads, each at the same moment. From each, too, came the same cry, and a common impulse brought them first to their feet and then to his arms.

"Father!"

Guillaume embraced them, feeling very happy. And that was all; there was no long spell of emotion, no useless talk. It was as if he had merely gone out the day before and, delayed by business, had now come back. Still, he looked at them with his kindly smile, and they likewise smiled with their eyes fixed on his. Those glances proclaimed everything, the closest affection and complete self-bestowal for ever.

"Come in, Pierre," called Guillaume; "shake hands with these young men."

The priest had remained near the door, overcome by a singular feeling of discomfort. When his nephews had vigorously shaken hands with him, he sat down near the window apart from them, as if he felt out of his element there.

"Well, youngsters," said Guillaume, "where's Mere-Grand, and where's Marie?"

Their grandmother was upstairs in her room, they said; and Marie had taken it into her head to go marketing. This, by the way, was one of her delights. She asserted that she was the only one who knew how to buy new-laid eggs and butter of a nutty odour. Moreover, she sometimes brought some dainty or some flowers home, in her delight at proving herself to be so good a housewife.

"And so things are going on well?" resumed Guillaume. "You are all satisfied, your work is progressing, eh?"

He addressed brief questions to each of them, like one who, on his return home, at once reverts to his usual habits. Thomas, with his rough face beaming, explained in a couple of sentences that he was now sure of perfecting his little motor; Francois, who was still preparing for his examination, jestingly declared that he yet had to lodge a heap of learning in his brain; and then Antoine produced the block which he was finishing, and which depicted his little friend Lise, Jahan's sister, reading in her garden amidst the sunshine. It was like a florescence of that dear belated creature whose mind had been awakened by his affection.

However, the three brothers speedily went back to their places, reverting to their work with a natural impulse, for discipline had made them regard work as life itself. Then Guillaume, who had glanced at what each was doing, exclaimed: "Ah! youngsters, I schemed and prepared a lot of things myself while I was laid up. I even made a good many notes. We walked here from Neuilly, but my papers and the clothes which Mere-Grand sent me will come in a cab by-and-by.... Ah! how pleased I am to find everything in order here, and to be able to take up my task with you again! Ah! I shall polish off some work now, and no mistake!"

He had already gone to his own corner, the space reserved for him between the window and the forge. He there had a chemical furnace, several glass cases and shelves crowded with appliances, and a long table, one end of which he used for writing purposes. And he once more took possession of that little world. After glancing around with delight at seeing everything in its place, he began to handle one object and another, eager to be at work like his sons.

All at once, however, Mere-Grand appeared, calm, grave and erect in her black gown, at the top of the little staircase which conducted to the bedrooms. "So it's you, Guillaume?" said she. "Will you come up for a moment?"

He immediately did so, understanding that she wished to speak to him alone and tranquillise him. It was a question of the great secret between them, that one thing of which his sons knew nothing, and which, after Salvat's crime, had brought him much anguish, through his fear that it might be divulged. When he reached Mere-Grand's room she at once took him to the hiding-place near her bed, and showed him the cartridges of the new explosive, and the plans of the terrible engine of warfare which he had invented. He found them all as he had left them. Before anyone could have reached them, she would have blown up the whole place at the risk of perishing herself in the explosion. With her wonted air of quiet heroism, she handed Guillaume the key which he had sent her by Pierre.

"You were not anxious, I hope?" she said.

He pressed her hands with a commingling of affection and respect. "My only anxiety," he replied, "was that the police might come here and treat you roughly.... You are the guardian of our secret, and it would be for you to finish my work should I disappear."

While Guillaume and Madame Leroi were thus engaged upstairs, Pierre, still seated near the window below, felt his discomfort increasing. The inmates of the house certainly regarded him with no other feeling than one of affectionate sympathy; and so how came it that he considered them hostile? The truth was that he asked himself what would become of him among those workers, who were upheld by a faith of their own, whereas he believed in nothing, and did not work. The sight of those young men, so gaily and zealously toiling, ended by quite irritating him; and the arrival of Marie brought his distress to a climax.

Joyous and full of life, she came in without seeing him, a basket on her arm. And she seemed to bring all the sunlight of the spring morning with her, so bright was the sparkle of her youth. The whole of her pink face, her delicate nose, her broad intelligent brow, her thick, kindly lips, beamed beneath the heavy coils of her black hair. And her brown eyes ever laughed with the joyousness which comes from health and strength.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, "I have brought such a lot of things, youngsters. Just come and see them; I wouldn't unpack the basket in the kitchen."

It became absolutely necessary for the brothers to draw round the basket which she had laid upon the table. "First there's the butter!" said she; "just smell if it hasn't a nice scent of nuts! It's churned especially for me, you know. Then here are the eggs. They were laid only yesterday, I'll answer for it. And, in fact, that one there is this morning's. And look at the cutlets! They're wonderful, aren't they? The butcher cuts them carefully when he sees me. And then here's a cream cheese, real cream, you know, it will be delicious! Ah! and here's the surprise, something dainty, some radishes, some pretty little pink radishes. Just fancy! radishes in March, what a luxury!"

She triumphed like the good little housewife she was, one who had followed a whole course of cookery and home duties at the Lycee Fenelon. The brothers, as merry as she herself, were obliged to compliment her.

All at once, however, she caught sight of Pierre. "What! you are there, Monsieur l'Abbe?" she exclaimed; "I beg your pardon, but I didn't see you. How is Guillaume? Have you brought us some news of him?"

"But father's come home," said Thomas; "he's upstairs with Mere-Grand."

Quite thunderstruck, she hastily placed her purchases in the basket. "Guillaume's come back, Guillaume's come back!" said she, "and you don't tell me of it, you let me unpack everything! Well, it's nice of me, I must say, to go on praising my butter and eggs when Guillaume's come back."

Guillaume, as it happened, was just coming down with Madame Leroi. Marie gaily hastened to him and offered him her cheeks, on which he planted two resounding kisses. Then she, resting her hands on his shoulders, gave him a long look, while saying in a somewhat tremulous voice: "I am pleased, very pleased to see you, Guillaume. I may confess it now, I thought I had lost you, I was very anxious and very unhappy."

Although she was still smiling, tears had gathered in her eyes, and he, likewise moved, again kissed her, murmuring: "Dear Marie! How happy it makes me to find you as beautiful and as affectionate as ever."

Pierre, who was looking at them, deemed them cold. He had doubtless expected more tears, and a more passionate embrace on the part of an affianced pair, whom so grievous an accident had separated almost on the eve of their wedding. Moreover, his feelings were hurt by the disproportion of their respective ages. No doubt his brother still seemed to him very sturdy and young, and his feeling of repulsion must have come from that young woman whom, most decidedly, he did not like. Ever since her arrival he had experienced increasing discomfort, a keener and keener desire to go off and never return.

So acute became his suffering at feeling like a stranger in his brother's home, that he at last rose and sought to take his leave, under the pretext that he had some urgent matters to attend to in town.

"What! you won't stay to dejeuner with us!" exclaimed Guillaume in perfect stupefaction. "Why, it was agreed! You surely won't distress me like that! This house is your own, remember!"

Then, as with genuine affection they all protested and pressed him to stay, he was obliged to do so. However, he soon relapsed into silence and embarrassment, seated on the same chair as before, and listening moodily to those people who, although they were his relatives, seemed to be far removed from him.

As it was barely eleven o'clock they resumed work, but every now and again there was some merry talk. On one of the servants coming for the provisions, Marie told the girl to call her as soon as it should be time to boil the eggs, for she prided herself on boiling them to a nicety, in such wise as to leave the whites like creamy milk. This gave an opportunity for a few jests from Francois, who occasionally teased her about all the fine things she had learnt at the Lycee Fenelon, where her father had placed her when she was twelve years old. However, she was not afraid of him, but gave him tit for tat by chaffing him about all the hours which he lost at the Ecole Normale over a mass of pedagogic trash.

"Ah! you big children!" she exclaimed, while still working at her embroidery. "You are all very intelligent, and you all claim to have broad minds, and yet—confess it now—it worries you a little that a girl like me should have studied at college in the same way as yourselves. It's a sexual quarrel, a question of rivalry and competition, isn't it?"

They protested the contrary, declaring that they were in favour of girls receiving as complete an education as possible. She was well aware of this; however, she liked to tease them in return for the manner in which they themselves plagued her.

"But do you know," said she, "you are a great deal behind the times? I am well aware of the reproaches which are levelled at girls' colleges by so-called right-minded people. To begin, there is no religious element whatever in the education one receives there, and this alarms many families which consider religious education to be absolutely necessary for girls, if only as a moral weapon of defence. Then, too, the education at our Lycees is being democratised—girls of all positions come to them. Thanks to the scholarships which are so liberally offered, the daughter of the lady who rents a first floor flat often finds the daughter of her door-keeper among her school-fellows, and some think this objectionable. It is said also that the pupils free themselves too much from home influence, and that too much opportunity is left for personal initiative. As a matter of fact the extensiveness of the many courses of study, all the learning that is required of pupils at the examinations, certainly does tend to their emancipation, to the coming of the future woman and future society, which you young men are all longing for, are you not?"

"Of course we are!" exclaimed Francois; "we all agree on that point."

She waved her hand in a pretty way, and then quietly continued: "I'm jesting. My views are simple enough, as you well know, and I don't ask for nearly as much as you do. As for woman's claims and rights, well, the question is clear enough; woman is man's equal so far as nature allows it. And the only point is to agree and love one another. At the same time I'm well pleased to know what I do—oh! not from any spirit of pedantry but simply because I think it has all done me good, and given me some moral as well as physical health."

It delighted her to recall the days she had spent at the Lycee Fenelon, which of the five State colleges for girls opened in Paris was the only one counting a large number of pupils. Most of these were the daughters of officials or professors, who purposed entering the teaching profession. In this case, they had to win their last diploma at the Ecole Normale of Sevres, after leaving the Lycee. Marie, for her part, though her studies had been brilliant, had felt no taste whatever for the calling of teacher. Moreover, when Guillaume had taken charge of her after her father's death, he had refused to let her run about giving lessons. To provide herself with a little money, for she would accept none as a gift, she worked at embroidery, an art in which she was most accomplished.

While she was talking to the young men Guillaume had listened to her without interfering. If he had fallen in love with her it was largely on account of her frankness and uprightness, the even balance of her nature, which gave her so forcible a charm. She knew all; but if she lacked the poetry of the shrinking, lamb-like girl who has been brought up in ignorance, she had gained absolute rectitude of heart and mind, exempt from all hypocrisy, all secret perversity such as is stimulated by what may seem mysterious in life. And whatever she might know, she had retained such child-like purity that in spite of her six-and-twenty summers all the blood in her veins would occasionally rush to her cheeks in fiery blushes, which drove her to despair.

"My dear Marie," Guillaume now exclaimed, "you know very well that the youngsters were simply joking. You are in the right, of course.... And your boiled eggs cannot be matched in the whole world."

He said this in so soft and affectionate a tone that the young woman flushed purple. Then, becoming conscious of it, she coloured yet more deeply, and as the three young men glanced at her maliciously she grew angry with herself. "Isn't it ridiculous, Monsieur l'Abbe," she said, turning towards Pierre, "for an old maid like myself to blush in that fashion? People might think that I had committed a crime. It's simply to make me blush, you know, that those children tease me. I do all I can to prevent it, but it's stronger than my will."

At this Mere-Grand raised her eyes from the shirt she was mending, and remarked: "Oh! it's natural enough, my dear. It is your heart rising to your cheeks in order that we may see it."

The dejeuner hour was now at hand; and they decided to lay the table in the work-shop, as was occasionally done when they had a guest. The simple, cordial meal proved very enjoyable in the bright sunlight. Marie's boiled eggs, which she herself brought from the kitchen covered with a napkin, were found delicious. Due honour was also done to the butter and the radishes. The only dessert that followed the cutlets was the cream cheese, but it was a cheese such as nobody else had ever partaken of. And, meantime, while they ate and chatted all Paris lay below them, stretching away to the horizon with its mighty rumbling.

Pierre had made an effort to become cheerful, but he soon relapsed into silence. Guillaume, however, was very talkative. Having noticed the three bicycles in the garden, he inquired of Marie how far she had gone that morning. She answered that Francois and Antoine had accompanied her in the direction of Orgemont. The worry of their excursions was that each time they returned to Montmartre they had to push their machines up the height. From the general point of view, however, the young woman was delighted with bicycling, which had many virtues, said she. Then, seeing Pierre glance at her in amazement, she promised that she would some day explain her opinions on the subject to him. After this bicycling became the one topic of conversation until the end of the meal. Thomas gave an account of the latest improvements introduced into Grandidier's machines; and the others talked of the excursions they had made or meant to make, with all the exuberant delight of school children eager for the open air.

In the midst of the chatter, Mere-Grand, who presided at table with the serene dignity of a queen-mother, leant towards Guillaume, who sat next to her, and spoke to him in an undertone. Pierre understood that she was referring to his marriage, which was to have taken place in April, but must now necessarily be deferred. This sensible marriage, which seemed likely to ensure the happiness of the entire household, was largely the work of Mere-Grand and the three young men, for Guillaume would never have yielded to his heart if she whom he proposed to make his wife had not already been a well-loved member of the family. At the present time the last week in June seemed, for all sorts of reasons, to be a favourable date for the wedding.

Marie, who heard the suggestion, turned gaily towards Mere-Grand.

"The end of June will suit very well, will it not, my dear?" said the latter.

Pierre expected to see a deep flush rise to the young woman's cheeks, but she remained very calm. She felt deep affection, blended with the most tender gratitude, for Guillaume, and was convinced that in marrying him she would be acting wisely and well both for herself and the others.

"Certainly, the end of June," she repeated, "that will suit very well indeed."

Then the sons, who likewise had heard the proposal, nodded their heads by way of assenting also.

When they rose from table Pierre was absolutely determined to go off. The cordial and simple meal, the sight of that family, which had been rendered so happy by Guillaume's return, and of that young woman who smiled so placidly at life, had brought him keen suffering, though why he could not tell. However, it all irritated him beyond endurance; and he therefore again pretended that he had a number of things to see to in Paris. He shook hands in turn with the young men, Mere-Grand and Marie; both of the women evincing great friendliness but also some surprise at his haste to leave the house. Guillaume, who seemed saddened and anxious, sought to detain him, and failing in this endeavour followed him into the little garden, where he stopped him in order to have an explanation.

"Come," said he, "what is the matter with you, Pierre? Why are you running off like this?"

"Oh! there's nothing the matter I assure you; but I have to attend to a few urgent affairs."

"Oh, Pierre, pray put all pretence aside. Nobody here has displeased you or hurt your feelings, I hope. They also will soon love you as I do."

"I have no doubt of it, and I complain of nobody excepting perhaps myself."

Guillaume's sorrow was increasing. "Ah! brother, little brother," he resumed, "you distress me, for I can detect that you are hiding something from me. Remember that new ties have linked us together and that we love one another as in the old days when you were in your cradle and I used to come to play with you. I know you well, remember. I know all your tortures, since you have confessed them to me; and I won't have you suffer, I want to cure you, I do!"

Pierre's heart was full, and as he heard those words he could not restrain his tears. "Oh! you must leave me to my sufferings," he responded. "They are incurable. You can do nothing for me, I am beyond the pale of nature, I am a monster."

"What do you say! Can you not return within nature's pale even if you have gone beyond it? One thing that I will not allow is that you should go and shut yourself up in that solitary little house of yours, where you madden yourself by brooding over the fall of your faith. Come and spend your time with us, so that we may again give you some taste for life."

Ah! the empty little house which awaited him! Pierre shivered at the thought of it, at the idea that he would now find himself all alone there, bereft of the brother with whom he had lately spent so many happy days. Into what solitude and torment must he not now relapse after that companionship to which he had become accustomed? However, the very thought of the latter increased his grief, and confession suddenly gushed from his lips: "To spend my time here, live with you, oh! no, that is an impossibility. Why do you compel me to speak out, and tell you things that I am ashamed of and do not even understand. Ever since this morning you must have seen that I have been suffering here. No doubt it is because you and your people work, whereas I do nothing, because you love one another and believe in your efforts, whereas I no longer know how to love or believe. I feel out of my element. I'm embarrassed here, and I embarrass you. In fact you all irritate me, and I might end by hating you. There remains nothing healthy in me, all natural feelings have been spoilt and destroyed, and only envy and hatred could sprout up from such ruins. So let me go back to my accursed hole, where death will some day come for me. Farewell, brother!"

But Guillaume, full of affection and compassion, caught hold of his arms and detained him. "You shall not go, I will not allow you to go, without a positive promise that you will come back. I don't wish to lose you again, especially now that I know all you are worth and how dreadfully you suffer. I will save you, if need be, in spite of yourself. I will cure you of your torturing doubts, oh! without catechising you, without imposing any particular faith on you, but simply by allowing life to do its work, for life alone can give you back health and hope. So I beg you, brother, in the name of our affection, come back here, come as often as you can to spend a day with us. You will then see that when folks have allotted themselves a task and work together in unison, they escape excessive unhappiness. A task of any kind—yes, that is what is wanted, together with some great passion and frank acceptance of life, so that it may be lived as it should be and loved."

"But what would be the use of my living here?" Pierre muttered bitterly. "I've no task left me, and I no longer know how to love."

"Well, I will give you a task, and as for love, that will soon be awakened by the breath of life. Come, brother, consent, consent!"

Then, seeing that Pierre still remained gloomy and sorrowful, and persisted in his determination to go away and bury himself, Guillaume added, "Ah! I don't say that the things of this world are such as one might wish them to be. I don't say that only joy and truth and justice exist. For instance, the affair of that unhappy fellow Salvat fills me with anger and revolt. Guilty he is, of course, and yet how many excuses he had, and how I shall pity him if the crimes of all of us are laid at his door, if the various political gangs bandy him from one to another, and use him as a weapon in their sordid fight for power. The thought of it all so exasperates me that at times I am as unreasonable as yourself. But now, brother, just to please me, promise that you will come and spend the day after to-morrow with us."

Then, as Pierre still kept silent, Guillaume went on: "I will have it so. It would grieve me too much to think that you were suffering from martyrdom in your solitary nook. I want to cure and save you."

Tears again rose to Pierre's eyes, and in a tone of infinite distress he answered: "Don't compel me to promise.... All I can say is that I will try to conquer myself."

The week he then spent in his little, dark, empty home proved a terrible one. Shutting himself up he brooded over his despair at having lost the companionship of that elder brother whom he once more loved with his whole soul. He had never before been so keenly conscious of his solitude; and he was a score of times on the point of hastening to Montmartre, for he vaguely felt that affection, truth and life were there. But on each occasion he was held back by a return of the discomfort which he had already experienced, discomfort compounded of shame and fear. Priest that he was, cut off from love and the avocations of other men, he would surely find nothing but hurt and suffering among creatures who were all nature, freedom and health. While he pondered thus, however, there rose before him the shades of his father and mother, those sad spirits that seemed to wander through the deserted rooms lamenting and entreating him to reconcile them in himself, as soon as he should find peace. What was he to do,—deny their prayer, and remain weeping with them, or go yonder in search of the cure which might at last lull them to sleep and bring them happiness in death by the force of his own happiness in life? At last a morning came when it seemed to him that his father enjoined him with a smile to betake himself yonder, while his mother consented with a glance of her big soft eyes, in which her sorrow at having made so bad a priest of him yielded to her desire to restore him to the life of our common humanity.

Pierre did not argue with himself that day: he took a cab and gave Guillaume's address to the driver for fear lest he should be overcome on the way and wish to turn back. And when he again found himself, as in a dream, in the large work-shop, where Guillaume and the young men welcomed him in a delicately affectionate way, he witnessed an unexpected scene which both impressed and relieved him.

Marie, who had scarcely nodded to him as he entered, sat there with a pale and frowning face. And Mere-Grand, who was also grave, said, after glancing at her: "You must excuse her, Monsieur l'Abbe; but she isn't reasonable. She is in a temper with all five of us."

Guillaume began to laugh. "Ah! she's so stubborn!" he exclaimed. "You can have no idea, Pierre, of what goes on in that little head of hers when anybody says or does anything contrary to her ideas of justice. Such absolute and lofty ideas they are, that they can descend to no compromise. For instance, we were talking of that recent affair of a father who was found guilty on his son's evidence; and she maintained that the son had only done what was right in giving evidence against his father, and that one ought invariably to tell the truth, no matter what might happen. What a terrible public prosecutor she would make, eh?"

Thereupon Marie, exasperated by Pierre's smile, which seemingly indicated that he also thought her in the wrong, flew into quite a passion: "You are cruel, Guillaume!" she cried; "I won't be laughed at like this."

"But you are losing your senses, my dear," exclaimed Francois, while Thomas and Antoine again grew merry. "We were only urging a question of humanity, father and I, for we respect and love justice as much as you do."

"There's no question of humanity, but simply one of justice. What is just and right is just and right, and you cannot alter it."

Then, as Guillaume made a further attempt to state his views and win her over to them, she rose trembling, in such a passion that she could scarcely stammer: "No, no, you are all too cruel, you only want to grieve me. I prefer to go up into my own room."

At this Mere-Grand vainly sought to restrain her. "My child, my child!" said she, "reflect a moment; this is very wrong, you will deeply regret it."

"No, no; you are not just, and I suffer too much."

Then she wildly rushed upstairs to her room overhead.

Consternation followed. Scenes of a similar character had occasionally occurred before, but there had never been so serious a one. Guillaume immediately admitted that he had done wrong in laughing at her, for she could not bear irony. Then he told Pierre that in her childhood and youth she had been subject to terrible attacks of passion whenever she witnessed or heard of any act of injustice. As she herself explained, these attacks would come upon her with irresistible force, transporting her to such a point that she would sometimes fall upon the floor and rave. Even nowadays she proved quarrelsome and obstinate whenever certain subjects were touched upon. And she afterwards blushed for it all, fully conscious that others must think her unbearable.

Indeed, a quarter of an hour later, she came downstairs again of her own accord, and bravely acknowledged her fault. "Wasn't it ridiculous of me?" she said. "To think I accuse others of being unkind when I behave like that! Monsieur l'Abbe must have a very bad opinion of me." Then, after kissing Mere-Grand, she added: "You'll forgive me, won't you? Oh! Francois may laugh now, and so may Thomas and Antoine. They are quite right, our differences are merely laughing matters."

"My poor Marie," replied Guillaume, in a tone of deep affection. "You see what it is to surrender oneself to the absolute. If you are so healthy and reasonable it's because you regard almost everything from the relative point of view, and only ask life for such gifts as it can bestow. But when your absolute ideas of justice come upon you, you lose both equilibrium and reason. At the same time, I must say that we are all liable to err in much the same manner."

Marie, who was still very flushed, thereupon answered in a jesting way: "Well, it at least proves that I'm not perfect."

"Oh, certainly! And so much the better," said Guillaume, "for it makes me love you the more."

This was a sentiment which Pierre himself would willingly have re-echoed. The scene had deeply stirred him. Had not his own frightful torments originated with his desire for the absolute both in things and beings? He had sought faith in its entirety, and despair had thrown him into complete negation. Again, was there not some evil desire for the absolute and some affectation of pride and voluntary blindness in the haughty bearing which he had retained amidst the downfall of his belief, the saintly reputation which he had accepted when he possessed no faith at all? On hearing his brother praise Marie, because she only asked life for such things as it could give, it had seemed to him that this was advice for himself. It was as if a refreshing breath of nature had passed before his face. At the same time his feelings in this respect were still vague, and the only well-defined pleasure that he experienced came from the young woman's fit of anger, that error of hers which brought her nearer to him, by lowering her in some degree from her pedestal of serene perfection. It was, perhaps, that seeming perfection which had made him suffer; however, he was as yet unable to analyse his feelings. That day, for the first time, he chatted with her for a little while, and when he went off he thought her very good-hearted and very human.

Two days later he again came to spend the afternoon in the large sunlit work-shop overlooking Paris. Ever since he had become conscious of the idle life he was leading, he had felt very bored when he was alone, and only found relief among that gay, hardworking family. His brother scolded him for not having come to dejeuner, and he promised to do so on the morrow. By the time a week had elapsed, none of the discomfort and covert hostility which had prevailed between him and Marie remained: they met and chatted on a footing of good fellowship. Although he was a priest, she was in no wise embarrassed by his presence. With her quiet atheism, indeed, she had never imagined that a priest could be different from other men. Thus her sisterly cordiality both astonished and delighted Pierre. It was as if he wore the same garments and held the same ideas as his big nephews, as if there were nothing whatever to distinguish him from other men. He was still more surprised, however, by Marie's silence on all religious questions. She seemed to live on quietly and happily, without a thought of what might be beyond life, that terrifying realm of mystery, which to him had brought such agony of mind.

Now that he came every two or three days to Montmartre she noticed that he was suffering. What could be the matter with him, she wondered. When she questioned him in a friendly manner and only elicited evasive replies, she guessed that he was ashamed of his sufferings, and that they were aggravated, rendered well-nigh incurable, by the very secrecy in which he buried them. Thereupon womanly compassion awoke within her, and she felt increasing affection for that tall, pale fellow with feverish eyes, who was consumed by grievous torments which he would confess to none. No doubt she questioned Guillaume respecting her brother's sadness, and he must have confided some of the truth to her in order that she might help him to extricate Pierre from his sufferings, and give him back some taste for life. The poor fellow always seemed so happy when she treated him like a friend, a brother!

At last, one evening, on seeing his eyes full of tears as he gazed upon the dismal twilight falling over Paris, she herself pressed him to confide his trouble to her. And thereupon he suddenly spoke out, confessing all his torture and the horrible void which the loss of faith had left within him. Ah! to be unable to believe, to be unable to love, to be nothing but ashes, to know of nothing certain by which he might replace the faith that had fled from him! She listened in stupefaction. Why, he must be mad! And she plainly told him so, such was her astonishment and revolt at hearing such a desperate cry of wretchedness. To despair, indeed, and believe in nothing and love nothing, simply because a religious hypothesis had crumbled! And this, too, when the whole, vast world was spread before one, life with the duty of living it, creatures and things to be loved and succoured, without counting the universal labour, the task which one and all came to accomplish! Assuredly he must be mad, mad with the gloomiest madness; still she vowed she would cure him.

From that time forward she felt the most compassionate affection for this extraordinary young man, who had first embarrassed and afterwards astonished her. She showed herself very gentle and gay with him; she looked after him with the greatest skill and delicacy of heart and mind. There had been certain similar features in their childhood; each had been reared in the strictest religious views by a pious mother. But afterwards how different had been their fates! Whilst he was struggling with his doubts, bound by his priestly vows, she had grown up at the Lycee Fenelon, where her father had placed her as soon as her mother died; and there, far removed from all practice of religion, she had gradually reached total forgetfulness of her early religious views. It was a constant source of surprise for him to find that she had thus escaped all distress of mind at the thought of what might come after death, whereas that same thought had so deeply tortured him. When they chatted together and he expressed his astonishment at it, she frankly laughed, saying that she had never felt any fear of hell, for she was certain that no hell existed. And she added that she lived in all quietude, without hope of going to any heaven, her one thought being to comply in a reasonable way with the requirements and necessities of earthly life. It was, perhaps, in some measure a matter of temperament with her; but it was also a matter of education. Yet, whatever that education had been, whatever knowledge she had acquired, she had remained very womanly and very loving. There was nothing stern or masculine about her.

"Ah, my friend," she said one day to Pierre, "if you only knew how easy it is for me to remain happy so long as I see those I love free from any excessive suffering. For my own part I can always adapt myself to life. I work and content myself no matter what may happen. Sorrow has only come to me from others, for I can't help wishing that everybody should be fairly happy, and there are some who won't.... I was for a long time very poor, but I remained gay. I wish for nothing, except for things that can't be purchased. Still, want is the great abomination which distresses me. I can understand that you should have felt everything crumbling when charity appeared to you so insufficient a remedy as to be contemptible. Yet it does bring relief; and, moreover, it is so sweet to be able to give. Some day, too, by dint of reason and toil, by the good and efficient working of life itself, the reign of justice will surely come. But now it's I that am preaching! Oh! I have little taste for it! It would be ridiculous for me to try to heal you with big phrases. All the same, I should like to cure you of your gloomy sufferings. To do so, all that I ask of you is to spend as much time as you can with us. You know that this is Guillaume's greatest desire. We will all love you so well, you will see us all so affectionately united, and so gay over our common work, that you will come back to truth by joining us in the school of our good mother nature. You must live and work, and love and hope."

Pierre smiled as he listened. He now came to Montmartre nearly every day. She was so nice and affectionate when she preached to him in that way with a pretty assumption of wisdom. As she had said too, life was so delightful in that big workroom; it was so pleasant to be all together, and to labour in common at the same work of health and truth. Ashamed as Pierre was of doing nothing, anxious as he was to occupy his mind and fingers, he had first taken an interest in Antoine's engraving, asking why he should not try something of the kind himself. However, he felt that he lacked the necessary gift for art. Then, too, he recoiled from Francois' purely intellectual labour, for he himself had scarcely emerged from the harrowing study of conflicting texts. Thus he was more inclined for manual toil like that of Thomas. In mechanics he found precision and clearness such as might help to quench his thirst for certainty. So he placed himself at the young man's orders, pulled his bellows and held pieces of mechanism for him. He also sometimes served as assistant to Guillaume, tying a large blue apron over his cassock in order to help in the experiments. From that time he formed part of the work-shop, which simply counted a worker the more.

One afternoon early in April, when they were all busily engaged there, Marie, who sat embroidering at the table in front of Mere-Grand, raised her eyes to the window and suddenly burst into a cry of admiration: "Oh! look at Paris under that rain of sunlight!"

Pierre drew near; the play of light was much the same as that which he had witnessed at his first visit. The sun, sinking behind some slight purple clouds, was throwing down a hail of rays and sparks which on all sides rebounded and leapt over the endless stretch of roofs. It might have been thought that some great sower, hidden amidst the glory of the planet, was scattering handfuls of golden grain from one horizon to the other.

Pierre, at sight of it, put his fancy into words: "It is the sun sowing Paris with grain for a future harvest," said he. "See how the expanse looks like ploughed land; the brownish houses are like soil turned up, and the streets are deep and straight like furrows."

"Yes, yes, that's true," exclaimed Marie gaily. "The sun is sowing Paris with grain. See how it casts the seed of light and health right away to the distant suburbs! And yet, how singular! The rich districts on the west seem steeped in a ruddy mist, whilst the good seed falls in golden dust over the left bank and the populous districts eastward. It is there, is it not, that the crop will spring up?"

They had all drawn near, and were smiling at the symbol. As Marie had said, it seemed indeed that while the sun slowly sank behind the lacework of clouds, the sower of eternal life scattered his flaming seed with a rhythmical swing of the arm, ever selecting the districts of toil and effort. One dazzling handful of grain fell over yonder on the district of the schools; and then yet another rained down to fertilise the district of the factories and work-shops.

"Ah! well," said Guillaume gaily. "May the crop soon sprout from the good ground of our great Paris, which has been turned up by so many revolutions, and enriched by the blood of so many workers! It is the only ground in the world where Ideas can germinate and bloom. Yes, yes, Pierre is quite right, it is the sun sowing Paris with the seed of the future world, which can sprout only up here!"

Then Thomas, Francois and Antoine, who stood behind their father in a row, nodded as if to say that this was also their own conviction; whilst Mere-Grand gazed afar with dreamy eyes as though she could already behold the splendid future.

"Ah! but it is only a dream; centuries must elapse. We shall never see it!" murmured Pierre with a quiver.

"But others will!" cried Marie. "And does not that suffice?"

Those lofty words stirred Pierre to the depths of his being. And all at once there came to him the memory of another Marie*—the adorable Marie of his youth, that Marie de Guersaint who had been cured at Lourdes, and the loss of whom had left such a void in his heart. Was that new Marie who stood there smiling at him, so tranquil and so charming in her strength, destined to heal that old-time wound? He felt that he was beginning to live again since she had become his friend.

* The heroine of M. Zola's "Lourdes."

Meantime, there before them, the glorious sun, with the sweep of its rays, was scattering living golden dust over Paris, still and ever sowing the great future harvest of justice and of truth.

II. TOWARDS LIFE

ONE evening, at the close of a good day's work, Pierre, who was helping Thomas, suddenly caught his foot in the skirt of his cassock and narrowly escaped falling. At this, Marie, after raising a faint cry of anxiety, exclaimed: "Why don't you take it off?"

There was no malice in her inquiry. She simply looked upon the priestly robe as something too heavy and cumbersome, particularly when one had certain work to perform. Nevertheless, her words deeply impressed Pierre, and he could not forget them. When he was at home in the evening and repeated them to himself they gradually threw him into feverish agitation. Why, indeed, had he not divested himself of that cassock, which weighed so heavily and painfully on his shoulders? Then a frightful struggle began within him, and he spent a terrible, sleepless night, again a prey to all his former torments.

At first sight it seemed a very simple matter that he should cast his priestly gown aside, for had he not ceased to discharge any priestly office? He had not said mass for some time past, and this surely meant renunciation of the priesthood. Nevertheless, so long as he retained his gown it was possible that he might some day say mass again, whereas if he cast it aside he would, as it were, strip himself, quit the priesthood entirely, without possibility of return. It was a terrible step to take, one that would prove irrevocable; and thus he paced his room for hours, in great anguish of mind.

He had formerly indulged in a superb dream. Whilst believing nothing himself he had resolved to watch, in all loyalty, over the belief of others. He would not so lower himself as to forswear his vows, he would be no base renegade, but however great the torments of the void he felt within him he would remain the minister of man's illusions respecting the Divinity. And it was by reason of his conduct in this respect that he had ended by being venerated as a saint—he who denied everything, who had become a mere empty sepulchre. For a long time his falsehood had never disturbed him, but it now brought him acute suffering. It seemed to him that he would be acting in the vilest manner if he delayed placing his life in accord with his opinions. The thought of it all quite rent his heart.

The question was a very clear one. By what right did he remain the minister of a religion in which he no longer believed? Did not elementary honesty require that he should quit a Church in which he denied the presence of the Divinity? He regarded the dogmas of that Church as puerile errors, and yet he persisted in teaching them as if they were eternal truths. Base work it was, that alarmed his conscience. He vainly sought the feverish glow of charity and martyrdom which had led him to offer himself as a sacrifice, willing to suffer all the torture of doubt and to find his own life lost and ravaged, provided that he might yet afford the relief of hope to the lowly. Truth and nature, no doubt, had already regained too much ascendancy over him for those feelings to return. The thought of such a lying apostolate now wounded him; he no longer had the hypocritical courage to call the Divinity down upon the believers kneeling before him, when he was convinced that the Divinity would not descend. Thus all the past was swept away; there remained nothing of the sublime pastoral part he would once have liked to play, that supreme gift of himself which lay in stubborn adherence to the rules of the Church, and such devotion to faith as to endure in silence the torture of having lost it.

What must Marie think of his prolonged falsehood, he wondered, and thereupon he seemed to hear her words again: "Why not take your cassock off?" His conscience bled as if those words were a stab. What contempt must she not feel for him, she who was so upright, so high-minded? Every scattered blame, every covert criticism directed against his conduct, seemed to find embodiment in her. It now sufficed that she should condemn him, and he at once felt guilty. At the same time she had never voiced her disapproval to him, in all probability because she did not think she had any right to intervene in a struggle of conscience. The superb calmness and healthiness which she displayed still astonished him. He himself was ever haunted and tortured by thoughts of the unknown, of what the morrow of death might have in store for one; but although he had studied and watched her for days together, he had never seen her give a sign of doubt or distress. This exemption from such sufferings as his own was due, said she, to the fact that she gave all her gaiety, all her energy, all her sense of duty, to the task of living, in such wise that life itself proved a sufficiency, and no time was left for mere fancies to terrify and stultify her. Well, then, since she with her air of quiet strength had asked him why he did not take off his cassock, he would take it off—yes, he would divest himself of that robe which seemed to burn and weigh him down.

He fancied himself calmed by this decision, and towards morning threw himself upon his bed; but all at once a stifling sensation, a renewal of his abominable anguish, brought him to his feet again. No, no, he could not divest himself of that gown which clung so tightly to his flesh. His skin would come away with his cloth, his whole being would be lacerated! Is not the mark of priesthood an indelible one, does it not brand the priest for ever, and differentiate him from the flock? Even should he tear off his gown with his skin, he would remain a priest, an object of scandal and shame, awkward and impotent, shut off from the life of other men. And so why tear it off, since he would still and ever remain in prison, and a fruitful life of work in the broad sunlight was no longer within his reach? He, indeed, fancied himself irremediably stricken with impotence. Thus he was unable to come to any decision, and when he returned to Montmartre two days later he had again relapsed into a state of torment.

Feverishness, moreover, had come upon the happy home. Guillaume was becoming more and more annoyed about Salvat's affair, not a day elapsing without the newspapers fanning his irritation. He had at first been deeply touched by the dignified and reticent bearing of Salvat, who had declared that he had no accomplices whatever. Of course the inquiry into the crime was what is called a secret one; but magistrate Amadieu, to whom it had been entrusted, conducted it in a very noisy way. The newspapers, which he in some degree took into his confidence, were full of articles and paragraphs about him and his interviews with the prisoner. Thanks to Salvat's quiet admissions, Amadieu had been able to retrace the history of the crime hour by hour, his only remaining doubts having reference to the nature of the powder which had been employed, and the making of the bomb itself. It might after all be true that Salvat had loaded the bomb at a friend's, as he indeed asserted was the case; but he must be lying when he added that the only explosive used was dynamite, derived from some stolen cartridges, for all the experts now declared that dynamite would never have produced such effects as those which had been witnessed. This, then, was the mysterious point which protracted the investigations. And day by day the newspapers profited by it to circulate the wildest stories under sensational headings, which were specially devised for the purpose of sending up their sales.

It was all the nonsense contained in these stories that fanned Guillaume's irritation. In spite of his contempt for Sagnier he could not keep from buying the "Voix du Peuple." Quivering with indignation, growing more and more exasperated, he was somehow attracted by the mire which he found in that scurrilous journal. Moreover, the other newspapers, including even the "Globe," which was usually so dignified, published all sorts of statements for which no proof could be supplied, and drew from them remarks and conclusions which, though couched in milder language than Sagnier's, were none the less abominably unjust. It seemed indeed as if the whole press had set itself the task of covering Salvat with mud, so as to be able to vilify Anarchism generally. According to the journalists the prisoner's life had simply been one long abomination. He had already earned his living by thievery in his childhood at the time when he had roamed the streets, an unhappy, forsaken vagrant; and later on he had proved a bad soldier and a bad worker. He had been punished for insubordination whilst he was in the army, and he had been dismissed from a dozen work-shops because he incessantly disturbed them by his Anarchical propaganda. Later still, he had fled his country and led a suspicious life of adventure in America, where, it was alleged, he must have committed all sorts of unknown crimes. Moreover there was his horrible immorality, his connection with his sister-in-law, that Madame Theodore who had taken charge of his forsaken child in his absence, and with whom he had cohabited since his return to France. In this wise Salvat's failings and transgressions were pitilessly denounced and magnified without any mention of the causes which had induced them, or of the excuses which lay in the unhappy man's degrading environment. And so Guillaume's feelings of humanity and justice revolted, for he knew the real Salvat,—a man of tender heart and dreamy mind, so liable to be impassioned by fancies,—a man cast into life when a child without weapon of defence, ever trodden down or thrust aside, then gradually exasperated by the perpetual onslaughts of want, and at last dreaming of reviving the golden age by destroying the old, corrupt world.

Unfortunately for Salvat, everything had gone against him since he had been shut up in strict confinement, at the mercy of the ambitious and worldly Amadieu. Guillaume had learnt from his son, Thomas, that the prisoner could count on no support whatever among his former mates at the Grandidier works. These works were becoming prosperous once more, thanks to their steady output of bicycles; and it was said that Grandidier was only waiting for Thomas to perfect his little motor, in order to start the manufacture of motor-cars on a large scale. However, the success which he was now for the first time achieving, and which scarcely repaid him for all his years of toil and battle, had in certain respects rendered him prudent and even severe. He did not wish any suspicion to be cast upon his business through the unpleasant affair of his former workman Salvat, and so he had dismissed such of his workmen as held Anarchist views. If he had kept the two Toussaints, one of whom was the prisoner's brother-in-law, while the other was suspected of sympathy with him, this was because they had belonged to the works for a score of years, and he did not like to cast them adrift. Moreover, Toussaint, the father, had declared that if he were called as a witness for the defence, he should simply give such particulars of Salvat's career as related to the prisoner's marriage with his sister.

One evening when Thomas came home from the works, to which he returned every now and then in order to try his little motor, he related that he had that day seen Madame Grandidier, the poor young woman who had become insane through an attack of puerperal fever following upon the death of a child. Although most frightful attacks of madness occasionally came over her, and although life beside her was extremely painful, even during the intervals when she remained downcast and gentle as a child, her husband had never been willing to send her to an asylum. He kept her with him in a pavilion near the works, and as a rule the shutters of the windows overlooking the yard remained closed. Thus Thomas had been greatly surprised to see one of these windows open, and the young woman appear at it amidst the bright sunshine of that early spring. True, she only remained there for a moment, vision-like, fair and pretty, with smiling face; for a servant who suddenly drew near closed the window, and the pavilion then again sank into lifeless silence. At the same time it was reported among the men employed at the works that the poor creature had not experienced an attack for well-nigh a month past, and that this was the reason why the "governor" looked so strong and pleased, and worked so vigorously to help on the increasing prosperity of his business.

"He isn't a bad fellow," added Thomas, "but with the terrible competition that he has to encounter, he is bent on keeping his men under control. Nowadays, says he, when so many capitalists and wage earners seem bent on exterminating one another, the latter—if they don't want to starve—ought to be well pleased when capital falls into the hands of an active, fair-minded man.... If he shows no pity for Salvat, it is because he really believes in the necessity of an example."

That same day Thomas, after leaving the works and while threading his way through the toilsome hive-like Marcadet district, had overtaken Madame Theodore and little Celine, who were wandering on in great distress. It appeared that they had just called upon Toussaint, who had been unable to lend them even such a trifle as ten sous. Since Salvat's arrest, the woman and the child had been forsaken and suspected by one and all. Driven forth from their wretched lodging, they were without food and wandered hither and thither dependent on chance alms. Never had greater want and misery fallen on defenceless creatures.

"I told them to come up here, father," said Thomas, "for I thought that one might pay their landlord a month's rent, so that they might go home again.... Ah! there's somebody coming now—it's they, no doubt."

Guillaume had felt angry with himself whilst listening to his son, for he had not thought of the poor creatures. It was the old story: the man disappears, and the woman and the child find themselves in the streets, starving. Whenever Justice strikes a man her blow travels beyond him, fells innocent beings and kills them.

Madame Theodore came in, humble and timid, scared like a luckless creature whom life never wearies of persecuting. She was becoming almost blind, and little Celine had to lead her. The girl's fair, thin face wore its wonted expression of shrewd intelligence, and even now, however woeful her rags, it was occasionally brightened by a childish smile.

Pierre and Marie, who were both there, felt extremely touched. Near them was Madame Mathis, young Victor's mother, who had come to help Mere-Grand with the mending of some house-linen. She went out by the day in this fashion among a few families, and was thus enabled to give her son an occasional franc or two. Guillaume alone questioned Madame Theodore.

"Ah! monsieur," she stammered, "who could ever have thought Salvat capable of such a thing, he who's so good and so humane? Still it's true, since he himself has admitted it to the magistrate.... For my part I told everybody that he was in Belgium. I wasn't quite sure of it, still I'm glad that he didn't come back to see us; for if he had been arrested at our place I should have lost my senses.... Well, now that they have him, they'll sentence him to death, that's certain."

At this Celine, who had been looking around her with an air of interest, piteously exclaimed: "Oh! no, oh! no, mamma, they won't hurt him!"

Big tears appeared in the child's eyes as she raised this cry. Guillaume kissed her, and then went on questioning Madame Theodore.

"Well, monsieur," she answered, "the child's not old or big enough to work as yet, and my eyes are done for, people won't even take me as a charwoman. And so it's simple enough, we starve.... Oh! of course I'm not without relations; I have a sister who married very well. Her husband is a clerk, Monsieur Chretiennot, perhaps you know him. Unfortunately he's rather proud, and as I don't want any scenes between him and my sister, I no longer go to see her. Besides, she's in despair just now, for she's expecting another baby, which is a terrible blow for a small household, when one already has two girls.... That's why the only person I can apply to is my brother Toussaint. His wife isn't a bad sort by any means, but she's no longer the same since she's been living in fear of her husband having another attack. The first one carried off all her savings, and what would become of her if Toussaint should remain on her hands, paralysed? Besides, she's threatened with another burden, for, as you may know, her son Charles got keeping company with a servant at a wine shop, who of course ran away after she had a baby, which she left him to see to. So one can understand that the Toussaints themselves are hard put. I don't complain of them. They've already lent me a little money, and of course they can't go on lending for ever."

She continued talking in this spiritless, resigned way, complaining only on account of Celine; for, said she, it was enough to make one's heart break to see such an intelligent child obliged to tramp the streets after getting on so well at the Communal School. She could feel too that everybody now kept aloof from them on account of Salvat. The Toussaints didn't want to be compromised in any such business. There was only Charles, who had said that he could well understand a man losing his head and trying to blow up the bourgeois, because they really treated the workers in a blackguard way.

"For my part, monsieur," added Madame Theodore, "I say nothing, for I'm only a woman. All the same, though, if you'd like to know what I think, well, I think that it would have been better if Salvat hadn't done what he did, for we two, the girl and I, are the real ones to suffer from it. Ah! I can't get the idea into my head, that the little one should be the daughter of a man condemned to death."

Once more Celine interrupted her, flinging her arms around her neck: "Oh! mamma, oh! mamma, don't say that, I beg you! It can't be true, it grieves me too much!"

At this Pierre and Marie exchanged compassionate glances, while Mere-Grand rose from her chair, in order to go upstairs and search her wardrobes for some articles of clothing which might be of use to the two poor creatures. Guillaume, who, for his part, had been moved to tears, and felt full of revolt against the social system which rendered such distress possible, slipped some alms into the child's little hand, and promised Madame Theodore that he would see her landlord so as to get her back her room.

"Ah! Monsieur Froment!" replied the unfortunate woman. "Salvat was quite right when he said you were a real good man! And as you employed him here for a few days you know too that he isn't a wicked one.... Now that he's been put in prison everybody calls him a brigand, and it breaks my heart to hear them." Then, turning towards Madame Mathis, who had continued sewing in discreet silence, like a respectable woman whom none of these things could concern, she went on: "I know you, madame, but I'm better acquainted with your son, Monsieur Victor, who has often come to chat at our place. Oh! you needn't be afraid, I shan't say it, I shall never compromise anybody; but if Monsieur Victor were free to speak, he'd be the man to explain Salvat's ideas properly."

Madame Mathis looked at her in stupefaction. Ignorant as she was of her son's real life and views, she experienced a vague dread at the idea of any connection between him and Salvat's family. Moreover, she refused to believe it possible. "Oh! you must be mistaken," she said. "Victor told me that he now seldom came to Montmartre, as he was always going about in search of work."

By the anxious quiver of the widow's voice, Madame Theodore understood that she ought not to have mixed her up in her troubles; and so in all humility she at once beat a retreat: "I beg your pardon, madame, I didn't think I should hurt your feelings. Perhaps, too, I'm mistaken, as you say."

Madame Mathis had again turned to her sewing as to the solitude in which she lived, that nook of decent misery where she dwelt without companionship and almost unknown, with scarcely sufficient bread to eat. Ah! that dear son of hers, whom she loved so well; however much he might neglect her, she had placed her only remaining hope in him: he was her last dream, and would some day lavish all kinds of happiness upon her!

At that moment Mere-Grand came downstairs again, laden with a bundle of linen and woollen clothing, and Madame Theodore and little Celine withdrew while pouring forth their thanks. For a long time after they had gone Guillaume, unable to resume work, continued walking to and fro in silence, with a frown upon his face.

When Pierre, still hesitating and still tortured by conflicting feelings, returned to Montmartre on the following day he witnessed with much surprise a visit of a very different kind. There was a sudden gust of wind, a whirl of skirts and a ring of laughter as little Princess Rosemonde swept in, followed by young Hyacinthe Duvillard, who, on his side, retained a very frigid bearing.

"It's I, my dear master," exclaimed the Princess. "I promised you a visit, you remember, for I am such a great admirer of your genius. And our young friend here has been kind enough to bring me. We have only just returned from Norway, and my very first visit is for you."

She turned as she spoke, and bowed in an easy and gracious way to Pierre and Marie, Francois and Antoine, who were also there. Then she resumed: "Oh! my dear master, you have no idea how beautifully virginal Norway is! We all ought to go and drink at that new source of the Ideal, and we should return purified, rejuvenated and capable of great renunciations!"

As a matter of fact she had been well-nigh bored to death there. To make one's honeymoon journey to the land of the ice and snow, instead of to Italy, the hot land of the sun, was doubtless a very refined idea, which showed that no base materialism formed part of one's affections. It was the soul alone that travelled, and naturally it was fit that only kisses of the soul should be exchanged on the journey. Unfortunately, however, Hyacinthe had carried his symbolism so far as to exasperate Rosemonde, and on one occasion they had come to blows over it, and then to tears when this lover's quarrel had ended as many such quarrels do. Briefly, they had no longer deemed themselves pure enough for the companionship of the swans and the lakes of dreamland, and had therefore taken the first steamer that was sailing for France.

As it was altogether unnecessary to confess to everybody what a failure their journey had proved, the Princess abruptly brought her rapturous references to Norway to an end, and then explained: "By the way, do you know what I found awaiting me on my return? Why, I found my house pillaged, oh! completely pillaged! And in such a filthy condition, too! We at once recognised the mark of the beast, and thought of Bergaz's young friends."

Already on the previous day Guillaume had read in the newspapers that a band of young Anarchists had entered the Princess's little house by breaking a basement window. She had left it quite deserted, unprotected even by a caretaker; and the robbers had not merely removed everything from the premises—including even the larger articles of furniture, but had lived there for a couple of days, bringing provisions in from outside, drinking all the wine in the cellars, and leaving every room in a most filthy and disgusting condition. On discovering all this, Rosemonde had immediately remembered the evening she had spent at the Chamber of Horrors in the company of Bergaz and his acolytes, Rossi and Sanfaute, who had heard her speak of her intended trip to Norway. The two young men had therefore been arrested, but Bergaz had so far escaped. The Princess was not greatly astonished by it all, for she had already been warned of the presence of dangerous characters among the mixed cosmopolitan set with which she associated. Janzen had told her in confidence of a number of villanous affairs which were attributed to Bergaz and his band. And now the Anarchist leader openly declared that Bergaz had sold himself to the police like Raphanel; and that the burglary at the Princess's residence had been planned by the police officials, who thereby hoped to cover the Anarchist cause with mire. If proof was wanted of this, added Janzen, it could be found in the fact that the police had allowed Bergaz to escape.

"I fancied that the newspapers might have exaggerated matters," said Guillaume, when the Princess had finished her story. "They are inventing such abominable things just now, in order to blacken the case of that poor devil Salvat."

"Oh! they've exaggerated nothing!" Rosemonde gaily rejoined. "As a matter of fact they have omitted a number of particulars which were too filthy for publication.... For my part, I've merely had to go to an hotel. I'm very comfortable there; I was beginning to feel bored in that house of mine.... All the same, however, Anarchism is hardly a clean business, and I no longer like to say that I have any connection with it."

She again laughed, and then passed to another subject, asking Guillaume to tell her of his most recent researches, in order, no doubt, that she might show she knew enough chemistry to understand him. He had been rendered thoughtful, however, by the story of Bergaz and the burglary, and would only answer her in a general way.

Meantime, Hyacinthe was renewing his acquaintance with his school-fellows, Francois and Antoine. He had accompanied the Princess to Montmartre against his own inclinations; but since she had taken to whipping him he had become afraid of her. The chemist's little home filled him with disdain, particularly as the chemist was a man of questionable reputation. Moreover, he thought it a duty to insist on his own superiority in the presence of those old school-fellows of his, whom he found toiling away in the common rut, like other people.

"Ah! yes," said he to Francois, who was taking notes from a book spread open before him, "you are at the Ecole Normale, I believe, and are preparing for your licentiate. Well, for my part, you know, the idea of being tied to anything horrifies me. I become quite stupid when there's any question of examination or competition. The only possible road for one to follow is that of the Infinite. And between ourselves what dupery there is in science, how it narrows our horizon! It's just as well to remain a child with eyes gazing into the invisible. A child knows more than all your learned men."

Francois, who occasionally indulged in irony, pretended to share his opinion. "No doubt, no doubt," said he, "but one must have a natural disposition to remain a child. For my part, unhappily, I'm consumed by a desire to learn and know. It's deplorable, as I'm well aware, but I pass my days racking my brain over books.... I shall never know very much, that's certain; and perhaps that's the reason why I'm ever striving to learn a little more. You must at all events grant that work, like idleness, is a means of passing life, though of course it is a less elegant and aesthetic one."

"Less aesthetic, precisely," rejoined Hyacinthe. "Beauty lies solely in the unexpressed, and life is simply degraded when one introduces anything material into it."

Simpleton though he was in spite of the enormity of his pretensions, he doubtless detected that Francois had been speaking ironically. So he turned to Antoine, who had remained seated in front of a block he was engraving. It was the one which represented Lise reading in her garden, for he was ever taking it in hand again and touching it up in his desire to emphasise his indication of the girl's awakening to intelligence and life.

"So you engrave, I see," said Hyacinthe. "Well, since I renounced versification—a little poem I had begun on the End of Woman—because words seemed to me so gross and cumbersome, mere paving-stones as it were, fit for labourers, I myself have had some idea of trying drawing, and perhaps engraving too. But what drawing can portray the mystery which lies beyond life, the only sphere that has any real existence and importance for us? With what pencil and on what kind of plate could one depict it? We should need something impalpable, something unheard of, which would merely suggest the essence of things and beings."

"But it's only by material means," Antoine somewhat roughly replied, "that art can render the essence of things and beings, that is, their full significance as we understand it. To transcribe life is my great passion; and briefly life is the only mystery that there is in things and beings. When it seems to me that an engraving of mine lives, I'm well pleased, for I feel that I have created."

Hyacinthe pouted by way of expressing his contempt of all fruitfulness. Any fool might beget offspring. It was the sexless idea, existing by itself, that was rare and exquisite. He tried to explain this, but became confused, and fell back on the conviction which he had brought back from Norway, that literature and art were done for in France, killed by baseness and excess of production.

"It's evident!" said Francois gaily by way of conclusion. "To do nothing already shows that one has some talent!"

Meantime, Pierre and Marie listened and gazed around them, somewhat embarrassed by this strange visit which had set the usually grave and peaceful workroom topsy-turvy. The little Princess, though, evinced much amiability, and on drawing near to Marie admired the wonderful delicacy of some embroidery she was finishing. Before leaving, moreover, Rosemonde insisted upon Guillaume inscribing his autograph in an album which Hyacinthe had to fetch from her carriage. The young man obeyed her with evident boredom. It could be seen that they were already weary of one another. Pending a fresh caprice, however, it amused Rosemonde to terrorize her sorry victim. When she at length led him away, after declaring to Guillaume that she should always regard that visit as a memorable incident in her life, she made the whole household smile by saying: "Oh! so your sons knew Hyacinthe at college. He's a good-natured little fellow, isn't he? and he would really be quite nice if he would only behave like other people."

That same day Janzen and Bache came to spend the evening with Guillaume. Once a week they now met at Montmartre, as they had formerly done at Neuilly. Pierre, on these occasions, went home very late, for as soon as Mere-Grand, Marie, and Guillaume's sons had retired for the night, there were endless chats in the workroom, whence Paris could be seen spangled with thousands of gas lights. Another visitor at these times was Theophile Morin, but he did not arrive before ten o'clock, as he was detained by the work of correcting his pupils' exercises or some other wearisome labour pertaining to his profession.

As soon as Guillaume had told the others of the Princess's visit that afternoon, Janzen hastily exclaimed: "But she's mad, you know. When I first met her I thought for a moment that I might perhaps utilise her for the cause. She seemed so thoroughly convinced and bold! But I soon found that she was the craziest of women, and simply hungered for new emotions!"

Janzen was at last emerging from his wonted frigidity and mysteriousness. His cheeks were quite flushed. In all probability he had suffered from his rupture with the woman whom he had once called 'the Queen of the Anarchists,' and whose fortune and extensive circle of acquaintance had seemed to him such powerful weapons of propaganda.

"You know," said he, when he had calmed down, "it was the police who had her house pillaged and turned into a pigstye. Yes, in view of Salvat's trial, which is now near at hand, the idea was to damn Anarchism beyond possibility of even the faintest sympathy on the part of the bourgeois."

"Yes, she told me so," replied Guillaume, who had become attentive. "But I scarcely credit the story. If Bergaz had merely acted under such influence as you suggest, he would have been arrested with the others, just as Raphanel was taken with those whom he betrayed. Besides, I know something of Bergaz; he's a freebooter." Guillaume made a sorrowful gesture, and then in a saddened voice continued: "Oh, I can understand all claims and all legitimate reprisals. But theft, cynical theft for the purpose of profit and enjoyment, is beyond me! It lowers my hope of a better and more equitable form of society. Yes, that burglary at the Princess's house has greatly distressed me."

An enigmatical smile, sharp like a knife, again played over Janzen's lips. "Oh! it's a matter of heredity with you!" said he. "The centuries of education and belief that lie behind you compel you to protest. All the same, however, when people won't make restoration, things must be taken from them. What worries me is that Bergaz should have sold himself just now. The public prosecutor will use that farcical burglary as a crushing argument when he asks the jury for Salvat's head."

Such was Janzen's hatred of the police that he stubbornly clung to his version of the affair. Perhaps, too, he had quarrelled with Bergaz, with whom he had at one time freely associated.

Guillaume, who understood that all discussion would be useless, contented himself with replying: "Ah! yes, Salvat! Everything is against that unhappy fellow, he is certain to be condemned. But you can't know, my friends, what a passion that affair of his puts me into. All my ideas of truth and justice revolt at the thought of it. He's a madman certainly; but there are so many excuses to be urged for him. At bottom he is simply a martyr who has followed the wrong track. And yet he has become the scapegoat, laden with the crimes of the whole nation, condemned to pay for one and all!"

Bache and Morin nodded without replying. They both professed horror of Anarchism; while Morin, forgetting that the word if not the thing dated from his first master Proudhon, clung to his Comtist doctrines, in the conviction that science alone would ensure the happiness and pacification of the nations. Bache, for his part, old mystical humanitarian that he was, claimed that the only solution would come from Fourier, who by decreeing an alliance of talent, labour and capital, had mapped out the future in a decisive manner. Nevertheless, both Bache and Morin were so discontented with the slow-paced bourgeoise Republic of the present day, and so hurt by the thought that everything was going from bad to worse through the flouting of their own particular ideas, that they were quite willing to wax indignant at the manner in which the conflicting parties of the time were striving to make use of Salvat in order to retain or acquire power.

"When one thinks," said Bache, "that this ministerial crisis of theirs has now been lasting for nearly three weeks! Every appetite is openly displayed, it's a most disgusting sight! Did you see in the papers this morning that the President has again been obliged to summon Vignon to the Elysee?"

"Oh! the papers," muttered Morin in his weary way, "I no longer read them! What's the use of doing so? They are so badly written, and they all lie!"

As Bache had said, the ministerial crisis was still dragging on. The President of the Republic, taking as his guide the debate in the Chamber of Deputies, by which the Barroux administration had been overthrown, had very properly sent for Vignon, the victor on that occasion, and entrusted him with the formation of a new ministry. It had seemed that this would be an easy task, susceptible of accomplishment in two or three days at the utmost, for the names of the friends whom the young leader of the Radical party would bring to power with him had been freely mentioned for months past. But all sorts of difficulties had suddenly arisen. For ten days or so Vignon had struggled on amidst inextricable obstacles. Then, disheartened and disgusted, fearing, too, that he might use himself up and shut off the future if he persisted in his endeavours, he had been obliged to tell the President that he renounced the task. Forthwith the President had summoned other deputies, and questioned them until he had found one brave enough to make an attempt on his own account; whereupon incidents similar to those which had marked Vignon's endeavours had once more occurred. At the outset a list was drawn up with every prospect of being ratified within a few hours, but all at once hesitation arose, some pulled one way, some another; every effort was slowly paralysed till absolute failure resulted. It seemed as though the mysterious manoeuvres which had hampered Vignon had begun again; it was as if some band of invisible plotters was, for some unknown purpose, doing its utmost to wreck every combination. A thousand hindrances arose with increasing force from every side—jealousy, dislike, and even betrayal were secretly prompted by expert agents, who employed every form of pressure, whether threats or promises, besides fanning and casting rival passions and interests into collision. Thus the President, greatly embarrassed by this posture of affairs, had again found it necessary to summon Vignon, who, after reflection and negotiation, now had an almost complete list in his pocket, and seemed likely to perfect a new administration within the next forty-eight hours.

"Still it isn't settled," resumed Bache. "Well-informed people assert that Vignon will fail again as he did the first time. For my part I can't get rid of the idea that Duvillard's gang is pulling the strings, though for whose benefit is a mystery. You may be quite sure, however, that its chief purpose is to stifle the African Railways affair. If Monferrand were not so badly compromised I should almost suspect some trick on his part. Have you noticed that the 'Globe,' after throwing Barroux overboard in all haste, now refers to Monferrand every day with the most respectful sympathy? That's a grave sign; for it isn't Fonsegue's habit to show any solicitude for the vanquished. But what can one expect from that wretched Chamber! The only point certain is that something dirty is being plotted there."

"And that big dunderhead Mege who works for every party except his own!" exclaimed Morin; "what a dupe he is with that idea that he need merely overthrow first one cabinet and then another, in order to become the leader of one himself!"

The mention of Mege brought them all to agreement, for they unanimously hated him. Bache, although his views coincided on many points with those of the apostle of State Collectivism, judged each of his speeches, each of his actions, with pitiless severity. Janzen, for his part, treated the Collectivist leader as a mere reactionary bourgeois, who ought to be swept away one of the first. This hatred of Mege was indeed the common passion of Guillaume's friends. They could occasionally show some justice for men who in no wise shared their ideas; but in their estimation it was an unpardonable crime for anybody to hold much the same views as themselves, without being absolutely in agreement with them on every possible point.

Their discussion continued, their various theories mingling or clashing till they passed from politics to the press, and grew excited over the denunciations which poured each morning from Sagnier's newspaper, like filth from the mouth of a sewer. Thereupon Guillaume, who had become absorbed in reverie while pacing to and fro according to his habit, suddenly exclaimed: "Ah! what dirty work it is that Sagnier does! Before long there won't be a single person, a single thing left on which he hasn't vomited! You think he's on your side, and suddenly he splashes you with mire!... By the way, he related yesterday that skeleton keys and stolen purses were found on Salvat when he was arrested in the Bois de Boulogne! It's always Salvat! He's the inexhaustible subject for articles. The mere mention of him suffices to send up a paper's sales! The bribe-takers of the African Railways shout 'Salvat!' to create a diversion. And the battles which wreck ministers are waged round his name. One and all set upon him and make use of him and beat him down!"

With that cry of revolt and compassion, the friends separated for the night. Pierre, who sat near the open window, overlooking the sparkling immensity of Paris, had listened to the others without speaking a word. He had once more been mastered by his doubts, the terrible struggle of his heart and mind; and no solution, no appeasement had come to him from all the contradictory views he had heard—the views of men who only united in predicting the disappearance of the old world, and could make no joint brotherly effort to rear the future world of truth and justice. In that vast city of Paris stretching below him, spangled with stars, glittering like the sky of a summer's night, Pierre also found a great enigma. It was like chaos, like a dim expanse of ashes dotted with sparks whence the coming aurora would arise. What future was being forged there, he wondered, what decisive word of salvation and happiness would come with the dawn, and wing its flight to every point of the horizon?

When Pierre, in his turn, was about to retire, Guillaume laid his hands upon his shoulders, and with much emotion gave him a long look. "Ah! my poor fellow," said he, "you've been suffering too for some days past, I have noticed it. But you are the master of your sufferings, for the struggle you have to overcome is simply in yourself, and you can subdue it; whereas one cannot subdue the world, when it is the world, its cruelty and injustice that make one suffer! Good night, be brave, act as your reason tells you, even if it makes you weep, and you will find peace surely enough."

Later on, when Pierre again found himself alone in his little house at Neuilly, where none now visited him save the shades of his father and mother, he was long kept awake by a supreme internal combat. He had never before felt so disgusted with the falsehood of his life, that cassock which he had persisted in wearing, though he was a priest in name only. Perhaps it was all that he had beheld and heard at his brother's, the want and wretchedness of some, the wild, futile agitation of others, the need of improvement among mankind which remained paramount amidst every contradiction and form of weakness, that had made him more deeply conscious of the necessity of living in loyal and normal fashion in the broad daylight. He could no longer think of his former dream of leading the solitary life of a saintly priest when he was nothing of the kind, without a shiver of shame at having lied so long. And now it was quite decided, he would lie no longer, not even from feelings of compassion in order that others might retain their religious illusions. And yet how painful it was to have to divest himself of that gown which seemed to cling to his skin, and how heartrending the thought that if he did remove it he would be skinless, lacerated, infirm, unable, do what he might, to become like other men!

It was this recurring thought which again tortured him throughout that terrible night. Would life yet allow him to enter its fold? Had he not been branded with a mark which for ever condemned him to dwell apart? He thought he could feel his priestly vows burning his very flesh like red-hot iron. What use would it be for him to dress as men dress, if in reality he was never to be a man? He had hitherto lived in such a quivering state, in a sphere of renunciation and dreams! To know manhood never, to be too late for it, that thought filled him with terror. And when at last he made up his mind to fling aside his cassock, he did so from a simple sense of rectitude, for all his anguish remained.

When he returned to Montmartre on the following day, he wore a jacket and trousers of a dark colour. Neither an exclamation nor a glance that might have embarrassed him came from Mere-Grand or the three young men. Was not the change a natural one? They greeted him therefore in the quiet way that was usual with them; perhaps, with some increase of affection, as if to set him the more at his ease. Guillaume, however, ventured to smile good-naturedly. In that change he detected his own work. Cure was coming, as he had hoped it would come, by him and in his own home, amid the full sunlight, the life which ever streamed in through yonder window.

Marie, who on her side raised her eyes and looked at Pierre, knew nothing of the sufferings which he had endured through her simple and logical inquiry: "Why not take your cassock off?" She merely felt that by removing it he would be more at ease for his work.

"Oh, Pierre, just come and look!" she suddenly exclaimed. "I have been amusing myself with watching all the smoke which the wind is laying yonder over Paris. One might take it to be a huge fleet of ships shining in the sunlight. Yes, yes, golden ships, thousands of golden ships, setting forth from the ocean of Paris to enlighten and pacify the world!"

III. THE DAWN OF LOVE

A COUPLE of days afterwards, when Pierre was already growing accustomed to his new attire, and no longer gave it a thought, it so happened that on reaching Montmartre he encountered Abbe Rose outside the basilica of the Sacred Heart. The old priest, who at first was quite thunderstruck and scarcely able to recognise him, ended by taking hold of his hands and giving him a long look. Then with his eyes full of tears he exclaimed: "Oh! my son, so you have fallen into the awful state I feared! I never mentioned it, but I felt that God had withdrawn from you. Ah! nothing could wound my heart so cruelly as this."

Then, still trembling, he began to lead Pierre away as if to hide such a scandal from the few people who passed by; and at last, his strength failing him, he sank upon a heap of bricks lying on the grass of one of the adjoining work-yards.

The sincere grief which his old and affectionate friend displayed upset Pierre far more than any angry reproaches or curses would have done. Tears had come to his own eyes, so acute was the suffering he experienced at this meeting, which he ought, however, to have foreseen. There was yet another wrenching, and one which made the best of their blood flow, in that rupture between Pierre and the saintly man whose charitable dreams and hopes of salvation he had so long shared. There had been so many divine illusions, so many struggles for the relief of the masses, so much renunciation and forgiveness practised in common between them in their desire to hasten the harvest of the future! And now they were parting; he, Pierre, still young in years, was returning to life, leaving his aged companion to his vain waiting and his dreams.

In his turn, taking hold of Abbe Rose's hands, he gave expression to his sorrow. "Ah, my friend, my father," said he, "it is you alone that I regret losing, now that I am leaving my frightful torments behind. I thought that I was cured of them, but it has been sufficient for me to meet you, and my heart is rent again.... Don't weep for me, I pray you, don't reproach me for what I have done. It was necessary that I should do it. If I had consulted you, you would yourself have told me that it was better to renounce the priesthood than to remain a priest without faith or honour."

"Yes, yes," Abbe Rose gently responded, "you no longer had any faith left. I suspected it. And your rigidity and saintliness of life, in which I detected such great despair, made me anxious for you. How many hours did I not spend at times in striving to calm you! And you must listen to me again, you must still let me save you. I am not a sufficiently learned theologian to lead you back by discussing texts and dogmas; but in the name of Charity, my child, yes, in the name of Charity alone, reflect and take up your task of consolation and hope once more."

Pierre had sat down beside Abbe Rose, in that deserted nook, at the very foot of the basilica. "Charity! charity!" he replied in passionate accents; "why, it is its nothingness and bankruptcy that have killed the priest there was in me. How can you believe that benevolence is sufficient, when you have spent your whole life in practising it without any other result than that of seeing want perpetuated and even increased, and without any possibility of naming the day when such abomination shall cease?... You think of the reward after death, do you not? The justice that is to reign in heaven? But that is not justice, it is dupery—dupery that has brought the world nothing but suffering for centuries past."

Then he reminded the old priest of their life in the Charonne district, when they had gone about together succouring children in the streets and parents in their hovels; the whole of those admirable efforts which, so far as Abbe Rose was concerned, had simply ended in blame from his superiors, and removal from proximity to his poor, under penalty of more severe punishment should he persist in compromising religion by the practice of blind benevolence without reason or object. And now, was he not, so to say, submerged beneath the ever-rising tide of want, aware that he would never, never be able to give enough even should he dispose of millions, and that he could only prolong the agony of the poor, who, even should they eat today, would starve again on the morrow? Thus he was powerless. The wound which he tried to dress and heal, immediately reopened and spread, in such wise that all society would at last be stricken and carried off by it.

Quivering as he listened, and slowly shaking his white head, the old priest ended by replying: "that does that matter, my child? what does that matter? One must give, always give, give in spite of everything! There is no other joy on earth.... If dogmas worry you, content yourself with the Gospel, and even of that retain merely the promise of salvation through charity."

But at this Pierre's feelings revolted. He forgot that he was speaking to one of simple mind, who was all love and nothing else, and could therefore not follow him. "The trial has been made," he answered, "human salvation cannot be effected by charity, nothing but justice can accomplish it. That is the gathering cry which is going up from every nation. For nearly two thousand years now the Gospel has proved a failure. There has been no redemption; the sufferings of mankind are every whit as great and unjust as they were when Jesus came. And thus the Gospel is now but an abolished code, from which society can only draw things that are troublous and hurtful. Men must free themselves from it."

This was his final conviction. How strange the idea, thought he, of choosing as the world's social legislator one who lived, as Jesus lived, amidst a social system absolutely different from that of nowadays. The age was different, the very world was different. And if it were merely a question of retaining only such of the moral teaching of Jesus as seemed human and eternal, was there not again a danger in applying immutable principles to the society of every age? No society could live under the strict law of the Gospel. Was not all order, all labour, all life destroyed by the teaching of Jesus? Did He not deny woman, the earth, eternal nature and the eternal fruitfulness of things and beings? Moreover, Catholicism had reared upon His primitive teaching such a frightful edifice of terror and oppression. The theory of original sin, that terrible heredity reviving with each creature born into the world, made no allowance as Science does for the corrective influences of education, circumstances and environment. There could be no more pessimist conception of man than this one which devotes him to the Devil from the instant of his birth, and pictures him as struggling against himself until the instant of his death. An impossible and absurd struggle, for it is a question of changing man in his entirety, killing the flesh, killing reason, destroying some guilty energy in each and every passion, and of pursuing the Devil to the very depths of the waters, mountains and forests, there to annihilate him with the very sap of the world. If this theory is accepted the world is but sin, a mere Hell of temptation and suffering, through which one must pass in order to merit Heaven. Ah! what an admirable instrument for absolute despotism is that religion of death, which the principle of charity alone has enabled men to tolerate, but which the need of justice will perforce sweep away. The poor man, who is the wretched dupe of it all, no longer believes in Paradise, but requires that each and all should be rewarded according to their deserts upon this earth; and thus eternal life becomes the good goddess, and desire and labour the very laws of the world, while the fruitfulness of woman is again honoured, and the idiotic nightmare of Hell is replaced by glorious Nature whose travail knows no end. Leaning upon modern Science, clear Latin reason sweeps away the ancient Semitic conception of the Gospel.

"For eighteen hundred years," concluded Pierre, "Christianity has been hampering the march of mankind towards truth and justice. And mankind will only resume its evolution on the day when it abolishes Christianity, and places the Gospel among the works of the wise, without taking it any longer as its absolute and final law."

But Abbe Rose raised his trembling hands: "Be quiet, be quiet, my child!" he cried; "you are blaspheming! I knew that doubt distracted you; but I thought you so patient, so able to bear suffering, that I relied on your spirit of renunciation and resignation. What can have happened to make you leave the Church in this abrupt and violent fashion? I no longer recognise you. Sudden passion has sprung up in you, an invincible force seems to carry you away. What is it? Who has changed you, tell me?"

Pierre listened in astonishment. "No," said he, "I assure you, I am such as you have known me, and in all this there is but an inevitable result and finish. Who could have influenced me, since nobody has entered my life? What new feeling could transform me, since I find none in me? I am the same as before, the same assuredly."

Still there was a touch of hesitation in his voice. Was it really true that there had been no change within him? He again questioned himself, and there came no clear answer; decidedly, he would find nothing. It was all but a delightful awakening, an overpowering desire for life, a longing to open his arms widely enough to embrace everyone and everything indeed, a breeze of joy seemed to raise him from the ground and carry him along.

Although Abbe Rose was too innocent of heart to understand things clearly, he again shook his head and thought of the snares which the Devil is ever setting for men. He was quite overwhelmed by Pierre's defection. Continuing his efforts to win him back, he made the mistake of advising him to consult Monseigneur Martha, for he hoped that a prelate of such high authority would find the words necessary to restore him to his faith. Pierre, however, boldly replied that if he was leaving the Church it was partly because it comprised such a man as Martha, such an artisan of deception and despotism, one who turned religion into corrupt diplomacy, and dreamt of winning men back to God by dint of ruses. Thereupon Abbe Rose, rising to his feet, could find no other argument in his despair than that of pointing to the basilica which stood beside them, square, huge and massive, and still waiting for its dome.

"That is God's abode, my child," said he, "the edifice of expiation and triumph, of penitence and forgiveness. You have said mass in it, and now you are leaving it sacrilegiously and forswearing yourself!"

But Pierre also had risen; and buoyed up by a sudden rush of health and strength he answered: "No, no! I am leaving it willingly, as one leaves a dark vault, to return into the open air and the broad sunlight. God does not dwell there; the only purpose of that huge edifice is to defy reason, truth and justice; it has been erected on the highest spot that could be found, like a citadel of error that dominates, insults and threatens Paris!"

Then seeing that the old priest's eyes were again filling with tears, and feeling on his own side so pained by their rupture that he began to sob, Pierre wished to go away. "Farewell! farewell!" he stammered.

But Abbe Rose caught him in his arms and kissed him, as if he were a rebellious son who yet had remained the dearest. "No, not farewell, not farewell, my child," he answered; "say rather till we meet again. Promise me that we shall see each other again, at least among those who starve and weep. It is all very well for you to think that charity has become bankrupt, but shall we not always love one another in loving our poor?"

Then they parted.

On becoming the companion of his three big nephews, Pierre had in a few lessons learnt from them how to ride a bicycle, in order that he might occasionally accompany them on their morning excursions. He went twice with them and Marie along the somewhat roughly paved roads in the direction of the Lake of Enghien. Then one morning when the young woman had promised to take him and Antoine as far as the forest of Saint-Germain, it was found at the last moment that Antoine could not come. Marie was already dressed in a chemisette of fawn-coloured silk, and a little jacket and "rationals" of black serge, and it was such a warm, bright April day that she was not inclined to renounce her trip.

"Well, so much the worse!" she gaily said to Pierre, "I shall take you with me, there will only be the pair of us. I really want you to see how delightful it is to bowl over a good road between the beautiful trees."

However, as Pierre was not yet a very expert rider, they decided that they would take the train as far as Maisons-Laffitte, whence they would proceed on their bicycles to the forest, cross it in the direction of Saint-Germain, and afterwards return to Paris by train.

"You will be here for dejeuner, won't you?" asked Guillaume, whom this freak amused, and who looked with a smile at his brother. The latter, like Marie, was in black: jacket, breeches and stockings all of the same hue.

"Oh, certainly!" replied Marie. "It's now barely eight o'clock, so we have plenty of time. Still you need not wait for us, you know, we shall always find our way back."

It was a delightful morning. When they started, Pierre could fancy himself with a friend of his own sex, so that this trip together through the warm sunlight seemed quite natural. Doubtless their costumes, which were so much alike, conduced to the gay brotherly feeling he experienced. But beyond all this there was the healthfulness of the open air, the delight which exercise brings, the pleasure of roaming in all freedom through the midst of nature.

On taking the train they found themselves alone in a compartment, and Marie once more began to talk of her college days. "Ah! you've no idea," said she, "what fine games at baseball we used to have at Fenelon! We used to tie up our skirts with string so as to run the better, for we were not allowed to wear rationals like I'm wearing now. And there were shrieks, and rushes, and pushes, till our hair waved about and we were quite red with exercise and excitement. Still that didn't prevent us from working in the class-rooms. On the contrary! Directly we were at study we fought again, each striving to learn the most and reach the top of the class!"

She laughed gaily as she thus recalled her school life, and Pierre glanced at her with candid admiration, so pink and healthy did she look under her little hat of black felt, which a long silver pin kept in position. Her fine dark hair was caught up behind, showing her neck, which looked as fresh and delicate as a child's. And never before had she seemed to him so supple and so strong.

"Ah," she continued in a jesting way, "there is nothing like rationals, you know! To think that some women are foolish and obstinate enough to wear skirts when they go out cycling!"

Then, as he declared—just by way of speaking the truth, and without the faintest idea of gallantry—that she looked very nice indeed in her costume, she responded: "Oh! I don't count. I'm not a beauty. I simply enjoy good health.... But can you understand it? To think that women have an unique opportunity of putting themselves at their ease, and releasing their limbs from prison, and yet they won't do so! If they think that they look the prettier in short skirts like schoolgirls they are vastly mistaken! And as for any question of modesty, well, it seems to me that it is infinitely less objectionable for women to wear rationals than to bare their bosoms at balls and theatres and dinners as society ladies do." Then, with a gesture of girlish impulsiveness, she added: "Besides, does one think of such things when one's rolling along? ... Yes, rationals are the only things, skirts are rank heresy!"

In her turn, she was now looking at him, and was struck by the extraordinary change which had come over him since the day when he had first appeared to her, so sombre in his long cassock, with his face emaciated, livid, almost distorted by anguish. It was like a resurrection, for now his countenance was bright, his lofty brow had all the serenity of hope, while his eyes and lips once more showed some of the confident tenderness which sprang from his everlasting thirst for love, self-bestowal and life. All mark of the priesthood had already left him, save that where he had been tonsured his hair still remained rather short.

"Why are you looking at me?" he asked.

"I was noticing how much good has been done you by work and the open air," she frankly answered; "I much prefer you as you are. You used to look so poorly. I thought you really ill."

"So I was," said he.

The train, however, was now stopping at Maisons-Laffitte. They alighted from it, and at once took the road to the forest. This road rises gently till it reaches the Maisons gate, and on market days it is often crowded with carts.

"I shall go first, eh?" said Marie gaily, "for vehicles still alarm you."

Thereupon she started ahead, but every now and again she turned with a smile to see if he were following her. And every time they overtook and passed a cart she spoke to him of the merits of their machines, which both came from the Grandidier works. They were "Lisettes," examples of those popular bicycles which Thomas had helped to perfect, and which the Bon Marche now sold in large numbers for 250 francs apiece. Perhaps they were rather heavy in appearance, but on the other hand their strength was beyond question. They were just the machines for a long journey, so Marie declared.

"Ah! here's the forest," she at last exclaimed. "We have now reached the end of the rise; and you will see what splendid avenues there are. One can bowl along them as on a velvet carpet."

Pierre had already joined her, and they rode on side by side along the broad straight avenue fringed with magnificent trees.

"I am all right now," said Pierre; "your pupil will end by doing you honour, I hope."

"Oh! I've no doubt of it. You already have a very good seat, and before long you'll leave me behind, for a woman is never a man's equal in a matter like this. At the same time, however, what a capital education cycling is for women!"

In what way?"

"Oh! I've certain ideas of my own on the subject; and if ever I have a daughter I shall put her on a bicycle as soon as she's ten years old, just to teach her how to conduct herself in life."

"Education by experience, eh?"

"Yes, why not? Look at the big girls who are brought up hanging to their mothers' apron strings. Their parents frighten them with everything, they are allowed no initiative, no exercise of judgment or decision, so that at times they hardly know how to cross a street, to such a degree does the traffic alarm them. Well, I say that a girl ought to be set on a bicycle in her childhood, and allowed to follow the roads. She will then learn to open her eyes, to look out for stones and avoid them, and to turn in the right direction at every bend or crossway. If a vehicle comes up at a gallop or any other danger presents itself, she'll have to make up her mind on the instant, and steer her course firmly and properly if she does not wish to lose a limb. Briefly, doesn't all this supply proper apprenticeship for one's will, and teach one how to conduct and defend oneself?"

Pierre had begun to laugh. "You will all be too healthy," he remarked.

"Oh, one must be healthy if one wants to be happy. But what I wish to convey is that those who learn to avoid stones and to turn properly along the highways will know how to overcome difficulties, and take the best decisions in after life. The whole of education lies in knowledge and energy."

"So women are to be emancipated by cycling?"

"Well, why not? It may seem a droll idea; but see what progress has been made already. By wearing rationals women free their limbs from prison; then the facilities which cycling affords people for going out together tend to greater intercourse and equality between the sexes; the wife and the children can follow the husband everywhere, and friends like ourselves are at liberty to roam hither and thither without astonishing anybody. In this lies the greatest advantage of all: one takes a bath of air and sunshine, one goes back to nature, to the earth, our common mother, from whom one derives fresh strength and gaiety of heart! Just look how delightful this forest is. And how healthful the breeze that inflates our lungs! Yes, it all purifies, calms and encourages one."

The forest, which was quite deserted on week days, stretched out in quietude on either hand, with sunlight filtering between its deep bands of trees. At that hour the rays only illumined one side of the avenue, there gilding the lofty drapery of verdure; on the other, the shady side, the greenery seemed almost black. It was truly delightful to skim, swallow-like, over that royal avenue in the fresh atmosphere, amidst the waving of grass and foliage, whose powerful scent swept against one's face. Pierre and Marie scarcely touched the soil: it was as if wings had come to them, and were carrying them on with a regular flight, through alternate patches of shade and sunshine, and all the scattered vitality of the far-reaching, quivering forest, with its mosses, its sources, its animal and its insect life.

Marie would not stop when they reached the crossway of the Croix de Noailles, a spot where people congregate on Sundays, for she was acquainted with secluded nooks which were far more charming resting-places. When they reached the slope going down towards Poissy, she roused Pierre, and they let their machines rush on. Then came all the joyous intoxication of speed, the rapturous feeling of darting along breathlessly while the grey road flees beneath one, and the trees on either hand turn like the opening folds of a fan. The breeze blows tempestuously, and one fancies that one is journeying yonder towards the horizon, the infinite, which ever and ever recedes. It is like boundless hope, delivery from every shackle, absolute freedom of motion through space. And nothing can inspirit one more gloriously—one's heart leaps as if one were in the very heavens.

"We are not going to Poissy, you know!" Marie suddenly cried; "we have to turn to the left."

They took the road from Acheres to the Loges, which ascends and contracts, thus bringing one closer together in the shade. Gradually slowing down, they began to exert themselves in order to make their way up the incline. This road was not so good as the others, it had been gullied by the recent heavy rains, and sand and gravel lay about. But then is there not even a pleasure in effort?

"You will get used to it," said Marie to Pierre; "it's amusing to overcome obstacles. For my part I don't like roads which are invariably smooth. A little ascent which does not try one's limbs too much rouses and inspirits one. And it is so agreeable to find oneself strong, and able to go on and on in spite of rain, or wind, or hills."

Her bright humour and courage quite charmed Pierre. "And so," said he, "we are off for a journey round France?"

"No, no, we've arrived. You won't dislike a little rest, eh? And now, tell me, wasn't it worth our while to come on here and rest in such a nice fresh, quiet spot."

She nimbly sprang off her machine and, bidding him follow her, turned into a path, along which she went some fifty paces. They placed their bicycles against some trees, and then found themselves in a little clearing, the most exquisite, leafy nest that one could dream of. The forest here assumed an aspect of secluded sovereign beauty. The springtide had endowed it with youth, the foliage was light and virginal, like delicate green lace flecked with gold by the sun-rays. And from the herbage and the surrounding thickets arose a breath of life, laden with all the powerful aroma of the earth.

"It's not too warm as yet, fortunately," exclaimed Marie, as she seated herself at the foot of a young oak-tree, against which she leant. "In July ladies get rather red by the time they reach this spot, and all the powder comes off their faces. However, one can't always be beautiful."

"Well, I'm not cold by any means," replied Pierre, as he sat at her feet wiping his forehead.

She laughed, and answered that she had never before seen him with such a colour. Then they began to talk like children, like two young friends, finding a source of gaiety in the most puerile things. She was somewhat anxious about his health, however, and would not allow him to remain in the cool shade, as he felt so very warm. In order to tranquillise her, he had to change his place and seat himself with his back to the sun. Then a little later he saved her from a large black spider, which had caught itself in the wavy hair on the nape of her neck. At this all her womanly nature reappeared, and she shrieked with terror. "How stupid it was to be afraid of a spider!" she exclaimed a moment afterwards; yet, in spite of her efforts to master herself, she remained pale and trembling.

Silence at last fell between them, and they looked at one another with a smile. In the midst of that delicate greenery they felt drawn together by frank affection—the affection of brother and sister, so it seemed to them. It made Marie very happy to think that she had taken an interest in Pierre, and that his return to health was largely her own work. However, their eyes never fell, their hands never met, even as they sat there toying with the grass, for they were as pure, as unconscious of all evil, as were the lofty oaks around them.

At last Marie noticed that time was flying. "You know that they expect us back to lunch," she exclaimed. "We ought to be off."

Thereupon they rose, wheeled their bicycles back to the highway, and starting off again at a good pace passed the Loges and reached Saint-Germain by the fine avenue which conducts to the chateau. It charmed them to take their course again side by side, like birds of equal flight. Their little bells jingled, their chains rustled lightly, and a fresh breeze swept past them as they resumed their talk, quite at ease, and so linked together by friendship that they seemed far removed from all the rest of the world.

They took the train from Saint-Germain to Paris, and on the journey Pierre suddenly noticed that Marie's cheeks were purpling. There were two ladies with them in the compartment.

"Ah!" said he, "so you feel warm in your turn now?"

But she protested the contrary, her face glowing more and more brightly as she spoke, as if some sudden feeling of shame quite upset her. "No, I'm not warm," said she; "just feel my hands.... But how ridiculous it is to blush like this without any reason for it!"

He understood her. This was one of those involuntary blushing fits which so distressed her, and which, as Mere-Grand had remarked, brought her heart to her very cheeks. There was no cause for it, as she herself said. After slumbering in all innocence in the solitude of the forest her heart had begun to beat, despite herself.

Meantime, over yonder at Montmartre, Guillaume had spent his morning in preparing some of that mysterious powder, the cartridges of which he concealed upstairs in Mere-Grand's bedroom. Great danger attended this manufacture. The slightest forgetfulness while he was manipulating the ingredients, any delay, too, in turning off a tap, might lead to a terrible explosion, which would annihilate the building and all who might be in it. For this reason he preferred to work when he was alone, so that on the one hand there might be no danger for others, and on the other less likelihood of his own attention being diverted from his task. That morning, as it happened, his three sons were working in the room, and Mere-Grand sat sewing near the furnace. Truth to tell, she did not count, for she scarcely ever left her place, feeling quite at ease there, however great might be the peril. Indeed, she had become so well acquainted with the various phases of Guillaume's delicate operations, and their terrible possibilities, that she would occasionally give him a helping hand.

That morning, as she sat there mending some house linen,—her eyesight still being so keen that in spite of her seventy years she wore no spectacles,—she now and again glanced at Guillaume as if to make sure that he forgot nothing. Then feeling satisfied, she would once more bend over her work. She remained very strong and active. Her hair was only just turning white, and she had kept all her teeth, while her face still looked refined, though it was slowly withering with age and had acquired an expression of some severity. As a rule she was a woman of few words; her life was one of activity and good management. When she opened her lips it was usually to give advice, to counsel reason, energy and courage. For some time past she had been growing more taciturn than ever, as if all her attention were claimed by the household matters which were in her sole charge; still, her fine eyes would rest thoughtfully on those about her, on the three young men, and on Guillaume, Marie and Pierre, who all obeyed her as if she were their acknowledged queen. If she looked at them in that pensive way, was it that she foresaw certain changes, and noticed certain incidents of which the others remained unconscious? Perhaps so. At all events she became even graver, and more attentive than in the past. It was as if she were waiting for some hour to strike when all her wisdom and authority would be required.

"Be careful, Guillaume," she at last remarked, as she once more looked up from her sewing. "You seem absent-minded this morning. Is anything worrying you?"

He glanced at her with a smile. "No, nothing, I assure you," he replied. "But I was thinking of our dear Marie, who was so glad to go off to the forest in this bright sunshine."

Antoine, who heard the remark, raised his head, while his brothers remained absorbed in their work. "What a pity it is that I had this block to finish," said he; "I would willingly have gone with her."

"Oh, no matter," his father quietly rejoined. "Pierre is with her, and he is very cautious."

For another moment Mere-Grand continued scrutinising Guillaume; then she once more reverted to her sewing.

If she exercised such sway over the home and all its inmates, it was by reason of her long devotion, her intelligence, and the kindliness with which she ruled. Uninfluenced by any religious faith, and disregarding all social conventionalities, her guiding principle in everything was the theory of human justice which she had arrived at after suffering so grievously from the injustice that had killed her husband. She put her views into practice with wonderful courage, knowing nothing of any prejudices, but accomplishing her duty, such as she understood it, to the very end. And in the same way as she had first devoted herself to her husband, and next to her daughter Marguerite, so at present she devoted herself to Guillaume and his sons. Pierre, whom she had first studied with some anxiety, had now, too, become a member of her family, a dweller in the little realm of happiness which she ruled. She had doubtless found him worthy of admission into it, though she did not reveal the reason why. After days and days of silence she had simply said, one evening, to Guillaume, that he had done well in bringing his brother to live among them.

Time flew by as she sat sewing and thinking. Towards noon Guillaume, who was still at work, suddenly remarked to her: "As Marie and Pierre haven't come back, we had better let the lunch wait a little while. Besides, I should like to finish what I'm about."

Another quarter of an hour then elapsed. Finally, the three young men rose from their work, and went to wash their hands at a tap in the garden.

"Marie is very late," now remarked Mere-Grand. "We must hope that nothing has happened to her."

"Oh! she rides so well," replied Guillaume. "I'm more anxious on account of Pierre."

At this the old lady again fixed her eyes on him, and said: "But Marie will have guided Pierre; they already ride very well together."

"No doubt; still I should be better pleased if they were back home."

Then all at once, fancying that he heard the ring of a bicycle bell, he called out: "There they are!" And forgetting everything else in his satisfaction, he quitted his furnace and hastened into the garden in order to meet them.

Mere-Grand, left to herself, quietly continued sewing, without a thought that the manufacture of Guillaume's powder was drawing to an end in an apparatus near her. A couple of minutes later, however, when Guillaume came back, saying that he had made a mistake, his eyes suddenly rested on his furnace, and he turned quite livid. Brief as had been his absence the exact moment when it was necessary to turn off a tap in order that no danger might attend the preparation of his powder had already gone by; and now, unless someone should dare to approach that terrible tap, and boldly turn it, a fearful explosion might take place. Doubtless it was too late already, and whoever might have the bravery to attempt the feat would be blown to pieces.

Guillaume himself had often run a similar risk of death with perfect composure. But on this occasion he remained as if rooted to the floor, unable to take a step, paralysed by the dread of annihilation. He shuddered and stammered in momentary expectation of a catastrophe which would hurl the work-shop to the heavens.

"Mere-Grand, Mere-Grand," he stammered. "The apparatus, the tap... it is all over, all over!"

The old woman had raised her head without as yet understanding him. "Eh, what?" said she; "what is the matter with you?" Then, on seeing how distorted were his features, how he recoiled as if mad with terror, she glanced at the furnace and realised the danger. "Well, but it's simple enough," said she; "it's only necessary to turn off the tap, eh?"

Thereupon, without any semblance of haste, in the most easy and natural manner possible, she deposited her needlework on a little table, rose from her chair, and turned off the tap with a light but firm hand. "There! it's done," said she. "But why didn't you do it yourself, my friend?"

He had watched her in bewilderment, chilled to the bones, as if touched by the hand of death. And when some colour at last returned to his cheeks, and he found himself still alive in front of the apparatus whence no harm could now come, he heaved a deep sigh and again shuddered. "Why did I not turn it off?" he repeated. "It was because I felt afraid."

At that very moment Marie and Pierre came into the work-shop all chatter and laughter, delighted with their excursion, and bringing with them the bright joyousness of the sunlight. The three brothers, Thomas, Francis and Antoine, were jesting with them, and trying to make them confess that Pierre had at least fought a battle with a cow on the high road, and ridden into a cornfield. All at once, however, they became quite anxious, for they noticed that their father looked terribly upset.

"My lads," said he, "I've just been a coward. Ah! it's a curious feeling, I had never experienced it before."

Thereupon he recounted his fears of an accident, and how quietly Mere-Grand had saved them all from certain death. She waved her hand, however, as if to say that there was nothing particularly heroic in turning off a tap. The young men's eyes nevertheless filled with tears, and one after the other they went to kiss her with a fervour instinct with all the gratitude and worship they felt for her. She had been devoting herself to them ever since their infancy, she had now just given them a new lease of life. Marie also threw herself into her arms, kissing her with gratitude and emotion. Mere-Grand herself was the only one who did not shed tears. She strove to calm them, begging them to exaggerate nothing and to remain sensible.

"Well, you must at all events let me kiss you as the others have done," Guillaume said to her, as he recovered his self-possession. "I at least owe you that. And Pierre, too, shall kiss you, for you are now as good for him as you have always been for us."

At table, when it was at last possible for them to lunch, he reverted to that attack of fear which had left him both surprised and ashamed. He who for years had never once thought of death had for some time past found ideas of caution in his mind. On two occasions recently he had shuddered at the possibility of a catastrophe. How was it that a longing for life had come to him in his decline? Why was it that he now wished to live? At last with a touch of tender affection in his gaiety, he remarked: "Do you know, Marie, I think it is my thoughts of you that make me a coward. If I've lost my bravery it's because I risk something precious when any danger arises. Happiness has been entrusted to my charge. Just now when I fancied that we were all going to die, I thought I could see you, and my fear of losing you froze and paralysed me."

Marie indulged in a pretty laugh. Allusions to her coming marriage were seldom made; however, she invariably greeted them with an air of happy affection.

"Another six weeks!" she simply said.

Thereupon Mere-Grand, who had been looking at them, turned her eyes towards Pierre. He, however, like the others was listening with a smile.

"That's true," said the old lady, "you are to be married in six weeks' time. So I did right to prevent the house from being blown up."

At this the young men made merry; and the repast came to an end in very joyous fashion.

During the afternoon, however, Pierre's heart gradually grew heavy. Marie's words constantly returned to him: "Another six weeks!" Yes, it was indeed true, she would then be married. But it seemed to him that he had never previously known it, never for a moment thought of it. And later on, in the evening, when he was alone in his room at Neuilly, his heart-pain became intolerable. Those words tortured him. Why was it that they had not caused him any suffering when they were spoken, why had he greeted them with a smile? And why had such cruel anguish slowly followed? All at once an idea sprang up in his mind, and became an overwhelming certainty. He loved Marie, he loved her as a lover, with a love so intense that he might die from it.

With this sudden consciousness of his passion everything became clear and plain. He had been going perforce towards that love ever since he had first met Marie. The emotion into which the young woman had originally thrown him had seemed to him a feeling of repulsion, but afterwards he had been slowly conquered, all his torments and struggles ending in this love for her. It was indeed through her that he had at last found quietude. And the delightful morning which he had spent with her that day, appeared to him like a betrothal morning, in the depths of the happy forest. Nature had resumed her sway over him, delivered him from his sufferings, made him strong and healthy once more, and given him to the woman he adored. The quiver he had experienced, the happiness he had felt, his communion with the trees, the heavens, and every living creature—all those things which he had been unable to explain, now acquired a clear meaning which transported him. In Marie alone lay his cure, his hope, his conviction that he would be born anew and at last find happiness. In her company he had already forgotten all those distressing problems which had formerly haunted him and bowed him down. For a week past he had not once thought of death, which had so long been the companion of his every hour. All the conflict of faith and doubt, the distress roused by the idea of nihility, the anger he had felt at the unjust sufferings of mankind, had been swept away by her fresh cool hands. She was so healthy herself, so glad to live, that she had imparted a taste for life even to him. Yes, it was simply that: she was making him a man, a worker, a lover once more.

Then he suddenly remembered Abbe Rose and his painful conversation with that saintly man. The old priest, whose heart was so ingenuous, and who knew nothing of love and passion, was nevertheless the only one who had understood the truth. He had told Pierre that he was changed, that there was another man in him. And he, Pierre, had foolishly and stubbornly declared that he was the same as he had always been; whereas Marie had already transformed him, bringing all nature back to his breast—all nature, with its sunlit countrysides, its fructifying breezes, and its vast heavens, whose glow ripens its crops. That indeed was why he had felt so exasperated with Catholicism, that religion of death; that was why he had shouted that the Gospel was useless, and that the world awaited another law—a law of terrestrial happiness, human justice and living love and fruitfulness!

Ah, but Guillaume? Then a vision of his brother rose before Pierre, that brother who loved him so fondly, and who had carried him to his home of toil, quietude and affection, in order to cure him of his sufferings. If he knew Marie it was simply because Guillaume had chosen that he should know her. And again Marie's words recurred to him: "Another six weeks!" Yes, in six weeks his brother would marry the young woman. This thought was like a stab in Pierre's heart. Still, he did not for one moment hesitate: if he must die of his love, he would die of it, but none should ever know it, he would conquer himself, he would flee to the ends of the earth should he ever feel the faintest cowardice. Rather than bring a moment's pain to that brother who had striven to resuscitate him, who was the artisan of the passion now consuming him, who had given him his whole heart and all he had—he would condemn himself to perpetual torture. And indeed, torture was coming back; for in losing Marie he could but sink into the distress born of the consciousness of his nothingness. As he lay in bed, unable to sleep, he already experienced a return of his abominable torments—the negation of everything, the feeling that everything was useless, that the world had no significance, and that life was only worthy of being cursed and denied. And then the shudder born of the thought of death returned to him. Ah! to die, to die without even having lived!

The struggle was a frightful one. Until daybreak he sobbed in martyrdom. Why had he taken off his cassock? He had done so at a word from Marie; and now another word from her gave him the despairing idea of donning it once more. One could not escape from so fast a prison. That black gown still clung to his skin. He fancied that he had divested himself of it, and yet it was still weighing on his shoulders, and his wisest course would be to bury himself in it for ever. By donning it again he would at least wear mourning for his manhood.

All at once, however, a fresh thought upset him. Why should he struggle in that fashion? Marie did not love him. There had been nothing between them to indicate that she cared for him otherwise than as a charming, tender-hearted sister. It was Guillaume that she loved, no doubt. Then he pressed his face to his pillow to stifle his sobs, and once more swore that he would conquer himself and turn a smiling face upon their happiness.

IV. TRIAL AND SENTENCE

HAVING returned to Montmartre on the morrow Pierre suffered so grievously that he did not show himself there on the two following days. He preferred to remain at home where there was nobody to notice his feverishness. On the third morning, however, whilst he was still in bed, strengthless and full of despair, he was both surprised and embarrassed by a visit from Guillaume.

"I must needs come to you," said the latter, "since you forsake us. I've come to fetch you to attend Salvat's trial, which takes place to-day. I had no end of trouble to secure two places. Come, get up, we'll have dejeuner in town, so as to reach the court early."

Then, while Pierre was hastily dressing, Guillaume, who on his side seemed thoughtful and worried that morning, began to question him: "Have you anything to reproach us with?" he asked.

"No, nothing. What an idea!" was Pierre's reply.

"Then why have you been staying away? We had got into the habit of seeing you every day, but all at once you disappear."

Pierre vainly sought a falsehood, and all his composure fled. "I had some work to do here," said he, "and then, too, my gloomy ideas cane back to me, and I didn't want to go and sadden you all."

At this Guillaume hastily waved his hand. "If you fancy that your absence enlivens us you're mistaken," he replied. "Marie, who is usually so well and happy, had such a bad headache on the day before yesterday that she was obliged to keep her room. And she was ill at ease and nervous and silent again yesterday. We spent a very unpleasant day."

As he spoke Guillaume looked Pierre well in the face, his frank loyal eyes clearly revealing the suspicions which had come to him, but which he would not express in words.

Pierre, quite dismayed by the news of Marie's indisposition, and frightened by the idea of betraying his secret, thereupon managed to tell a lie. "Yes, she wasn't very well on the day when we went cycling," he quietly responded. "But I assure you that I have had a lot to do here. When you came in just now I was about to get up and go to your house as usual."

Guillaume kept his eyes on him for a moment longer. Then, either believing him or deciding to postpone his search for the truth to some future time, he began speaking affectionately on other subjects. With his keen brotherly love, however, there was blended such a quiver of impending distress, of unconfessed sorrow, which possibly he did not yet realise, that Pierre in his turn began to question him. "And you," said he, "are you ill? You seem to me to have lost your usual serenity."

"I? Oh! I'm not ill. Only I can't very well retain my composure; Salvat's affair distresses me exceedingly, as you must know. They will all end by driving me mad with the monstrous injustice they show towards that unhappy fellow."

Thenceforward Guillaume went on talking of Salvat in a stubborn passionate way, as if he wished to find an explanation of all his pain and unrest in that affair. While he and Pierre were partaking of dejeuner at a little restaurant on the Boulevard du Palais he related how deeply touched he was by the silence which Salvat had preserved with regard both to the nature of the explosive employed in the bomb and the few days' work which he had once done at his house. It was, thanks to this silence, that he, Guillaume, had not been worried or even summoned as a witness. Then, in his emotion, he reverted to his invention, that formidable engine which would ensure omnipotence to France, as the great initiatory and liberative power of the world. The results of the researches which had occupied him for ten years past were now out of danger and in all readiness, so that if occasion required they might at once be delivered to the French government. And, apart from certain scruples which came to him at the thought of the unworthiness of French financial and political society; he was simply delaying any further steps in the matter until his marriage with Marie, in order that he might associate her with the gift of universal peace which he imagined he was about to bestow upon the world.

It was through Bertheroy and with great difficulty that Guillaume had managed to secure two seats in court for Salvat's trial. When he and Pierre presented themselves for admission at eleven o'clock, they fancied that they would never be able to enter. The large gates of the Palace of Justice were kept closed, several passages were fenced off, and terror seemed to reign in the deserted building, as if indeed the judges feared some sudden invasion of bomb-laden Anarchists. Each door and barrier, too, was guarded by soldiers, with whom the brothers had to parley. When they at last entered the Assize Court they found it already crowded with people, who were apparently quite willing to suffocate there for an hour before the arrival of the judges, and to remain motionless for some seven or eight hours afterwards, since it was reported that the authorities wished to get the case over in a single sitting. In the small space allotted to the standing public there was a serried mass of sightseers who had come up from the streets, a few companions and friends of Salvat having managed to slip in among them. In the other compartment, where witnesses are generally huddled together on oak benches, were those spectators who had been allowed admittance by favour, and these were so numerous and so closely packed that here and there they almost sat upon one another's knees. Then, in the well of the court and behind the bench, were rows of chairs set out as for some theatrical performance, and occupied by privileged members of society, politicians, leading journalists, and ladies. And meantime a number of gowned advocates sought refuge wherever chance offered, crowding into every vacant spot, every available corner.

Pierre had never before visited the Assize Court, and its appearance surprised him. He had expected much pomp and majesty, whereas this temple of human justice seemed to him small and dismal and of doubtful cleanliness. The bench was so low that he could scarcely see the armchairs of the presiding judge and his two assessors. Then he was struck by the profusion of old oak panels, balustrades and benches, which helped to darken the apartment, whose wall hangings were of olive green, while a further display of oak panelling appeared on the ceiling above. From the seven narrow and high-set windows with scanty little white curtains there fell a pale light which sharply divided the court. On one hand one saw the dock and the defending counsel's seat steeped in frigid light, while, on the other, was the little, isolated jury box in the shade. This contrast seemed symbolical of justice, impersonal and uncertain, face to face with the accused, whom the light stripped bare, probed as it were to his very soul. Then, through a kind of grey mist above the bench, in the depths of the stern and gloomy scene, one could vaguely distinguish the heavy painting of "Christ Crucified." A white bust of the Republic alone showed forth clearly against the dark wall above the dock where Salvat would presently appear. The only remaining seats that Guillaume and Pierre could find were on the last bench of the witnesses' compartment, against the partition which separated the latter from the space allotted to the standing public. Just as Guillaume was seating himself, he saw among the latter little Victor Mathis, who stood there with his elbows leaning on the partition, while his chin rested on his crossed hands. The young man's eyes were glowing in his pale face with thin, compressed lips. Although they recognised one another, Victor did not move, and Guillaume on his side understood that it was not safe to exchange greetings in such a place. From that moment, however, he remained conscious that Victor was there, just above him, never stirring, but waiting silently, fiercely and with flaming eyes, for what was going to happen.

Pierre, meantime, had recognised that most amiable deputy Duthil, and little Princess Rosemonde, seated just in front of him. Amidst the hubbub of the throng which chatted and laughed to while away the time, their voices were the gayest to be heard, and plainly showed how delighted they were to find themselves at a spectacle to which so many desired admittance. Duthil was explaining all the arrangements to Rosemonde, telling her to whom or to what purpose each bench and wooden box was allotted: there was the jury-box, the prisoner's dock, the seats assigned to counsel for the defence, the public prosecutor, and the clerk of the court, without forgetting the table on which material evidence was deposited and the bar to which witnesses were summoned. There was nobody as yet in any of these places; one merely saw an attendant giving a last look round, and advocates passing rapidly. One might indeed have thought oneself in a theatre, the stage of which remained deserted, while the spectators crowded the auditorium waiting for the play to begin. To fill up the interval the little Princess ended by looking about her for persons of her acquaintance among the close-pressed crowd of sight-seers whose eager faces were already reddening.

"Oh! isn't that Monsieur Fonsegue over there behind the bench, near that stout lady in yellow?" she exclaimed. "Our friend General de Bozonnet is on the other side, I see. But isn't Baron Duvillard here?"

"Oh! no," replied Duthil; "he could hardly come; it would look as if he were here to ask for vengeance." Then, in his turn questioning Rosemonde, the deputy went on: "Do you happen to have quarrelled with your handsome friend Hyacinthe? Is that the reason why you've given me the pleasure of acting as your escort to-day?"

With a slight shrug of her shoulders, the Princess replied that poets were beginning to bore her. A fresh caprice, indeed, was drawing her into politics. For a week past she had found amusement in the surroundings of the ministerial crisis, into which the young deputy for Angouleme had initiated her. "They are all a little bit crazy at the Duvillards', my dear fellow," said she. "It's decided, you know, that Gerard is to marry Camille. The Baroness has resigned herself to it, and I've heard from a most reliable quarter that Madame de Quinsac, the young man's mother, has given her consent."

At this Duthil became quite merry. He also seemed to be well informed on the subject. "Yes, yes, I know," said he. "The wedding is to take place shortly, at the Madeleine. It will be a magnificent affair, no doubt. And after all, what would you have? There couldn't be a better finish to the affair. The Baroness is really kindness personified, and I said all along that she would sacrifice herself in order to ensure the happiness of her daughter and Gerard. In point of fact that marriage will settle everything, put everything in proper order again."

"And what does the Baron say?" asked Rosemonde.

"The Baron? Why, he's delighted," replied Duthil in a bantering way. "You read no doubt this morning that Dauvergne is given the department of Public Instruction in the new Ministry. This means that Silviane's engagement at the Comedic is a certainty. Dauvergne was chosen simply on that account."

At this moment the conversation was interrupted by little Massot, who, after a dispute with one of the ushers some distance away, had perceived a vacant place by the side of the Princess. He thereupon made her a questioning sign, and she beckoned to him to approach.

"Ah!" said he, as he installed himself beside her, "I have not got here without trouble. One's crushed to death on the press bench, and I've an article to write. You are the kindest of women, Princess, to make a little room for your faithful admirer, myself." Then, after shaking hands with Duthil, he continued without any transition: "And so there's a new ministry at last, Monsieur le Depute. You have all taken your time about it, but it's really a very fine ministry, which everybody regards with surprise and admiration."

The decrees appointing the new ministers had appeared in the "Journal Officiel" that very morning. After a long deadlock, after Vignon had for the second time seen his plans fail through ever-recurring obstacles, Monferrand, as a last resource, had suddenly been summoned to the Elysee, and in four-and-twenty hours he had found the colleagues he wanted and secured the acceptance of his list, in such wise that he now triumphantly re-ascended to power after falling from it with Barroux in such wretched fashion. He had also chosen a new post for himself, relinquishing the department of the Interior for that of Finances, with the Presidency of the Council, which had long been his secret ambition. His stealthy labour, the masterly fashion in which he had saved himself while others sank, now appeared in its full beauty. First had come Salvat's arrest, and the use he had made of it, then the wonderful subterranean campaign which he had carried on against Vignon, the thousand obstacles which he had twice set across his path, and finally the sudden denouement with that list he held in readiness, that formation of a ministry in a single day as soon as his services were solicited.

"It is fine work, I must compliment you on it," added little Massot by way of a jest.

"But I've had nothing to do with it," Duthil modestly replied.

"Nothing to do with it! Oh! yes you have, my dear sir, everybody says so."

The deputy felt flattered and smiled, while the other rattled on with his insinuations, which were put in such a humorous way that nothing he said could be resented. He talked of Monferrand's followers who had so powerfully helped him on to victory. How heartily had Fonsegue finished off his old friend Barroux in the "Globe"! Every morning for a month past the paper had published an article belabouring Barroux, annihilating Vignon, and preparing the public for the return of a saviour of society who was not named. Then, too, Duvillard's millions had waged a secret warfare, all the Baron's numerous creatures had fought like an army for the good cause. Duthil himself had played the pipe and beaten the drum, while Chaigneux resigned himself to the baser duties which others would not undertake. And so the triumphant Monferrand would certainly begin by stifling that scandalous and embarrassing affair of the African Railways, and appointing a Committee of Inquiry to bury it.

By this time Duthil had assumed an important air. "Well, my dear fellow," said he, "at serious moments when society is in peril, certain strong-handed men, real men of government, become absolutely necessary. Monferrand had no need of our friendship, his presence in office was imperiously required by the situation. His hand is the only one that can save us!"

"I know," replied Massot scoffingly. "I've even been told that if everything was settled straight off so that the decrees might be published this morning, it was in order to instil confidence into the judges and jurymen here, in such wise that knowing Monferrand's fist to be behind them they would have the courage to pronounce sentence of death this evening."

"Well, public safety requires a sentence of death, and those who have to ensure that safety must not be left ignorant of the fact that the government is with them, and will know how to protect them, if need be."

At this moment a merry laugh from the Princess broke in upon the conversation. "Oh! just look over there!" said she; "isn't that Silviane who has just sat down beside Monsieur Fonsegue?"

"The Silviane ministry!" muttered Massot in a jesting way. "Well, there will be no boredom at Dauvergne's if he ingratiates himself with actresses."

Guillaume and Pierre heard this chatter, however little they cared to listen to it. Such a deluge of society tittle-tattle and political indiscretion brought the former a keen heart-pang. So Salvat was sentenced to death even before he had appeared in court. He was to pay for the transgressions of one and all, his crime was simply a favourable opportunity for the triumph of a band of ambitious people bent on power and enjoyment! Ah! what terrible social rottenness there was in it all; money corrupting one and another, families sinking to filth, politics turned into a mere treacherous struggle between individuals, and power becoming the prey of the crafty and the impudent! Must not everything surely crumble? Was not this solemn assize of human justice a derisive parody, since all that one found there was an assembly of happy and privileged people defending the shaky edifice which sheltered them, and making use of all the forces they yet retained, to crush a fly—that unhappy devil of uncertain sanity who had been led to that court by his violent and cloudy dream of another, superior and avenging justice?

Such were Guillaume's thoughts, when all at once everybody around him started. Noon was now striking, and the jurymen trooped into court in straggling fashion and took their seats in their box. Among them one saw fat fellows clad in their Sunday best and with the faces of simpletons, and thin fellows who had bright eyes and sly expressions. Some of them were bearded and some were bald. However, they all remained rather indistinct, as their side of the court was steeped in shade. After them came the judges, headed by M. de Larombiere, one of the Vice-Presidents of the Appeal Court, who in assuming the perilous honour of conducting the trial had sought to increase the majesty of his long, slender, white face, which looked the more austere as both his assessors, one dark and the other fair, had highly coloured countenances. The public prosecutor's seat was already occupied by one of the most skilful of the advocates-general, M. Lehmann, a broad-shouldered Alsatian Israelite, with cunning eyes, whose presence showed that the case was deemed exceptionally important. At last, amidst the heavy tread of gendarmes, Salvat was brought in, at once rousing such ardent curiosity that all the spectators rose to look at him. He still wore the cap and loose overcoat procured for him by Victor Mathis, and everybody was surprised to see his emaciated, sorrowful, gentle face, crowned by scanty reddish hair, which was turning grey. His soft, glowing, dreamy blue eyes glanced around, and he smiled at someone whom he recognised, probably Victor, but perhaps Guillaume. After that he remained quite motionless.

The presiding judge waited for silence to fall, and then came the formalities which attend the opening of a court of law, followed by the perusal of the lengthy indictment, which a subordinate official read in a shrill voice. The scene had now changed, and the spectators listened wearily and somewhat impatiently, as, for weeks past, the newspapers had related all that the indictment set forth. At present not a corner of the court remained unoccupied, there was scarcely space enough for the witnesses to stand in front of the bench. The closely packed throng was one of divers hues, the light gowns of ladies alternating with the black gowns of advocates, while the red robes of the judges disappeared from view, the bench being so low that the presiding judge's long face scarcely rose above the sea of heads. Many of those present became interested in the jurors, and strove to scrutinise their shadowy countenances. Others, who did not take their eyes off the prisoner, marvelled at his apparent weariness and indifference, which were so great that he scarcely answered the whispered questions of his counsel, a young advocate with a wide-awake look, who was nervously awaiting the opportunity to achieve fame. Most curiosity, however, centred in the table set apart for the material evidence. Here were to be seen all sorts of fragments, some of the woodwork torn away from the carriage-door of the Duvillard mansion, some plaster that had fallen from the ceiling, a paving-stone which the violence of the explosion had split in halves, and other blackened remnants. The more moving sights, however, were the milliner's bonnet-box, which had remained uninjured, and a glass jar in which something white and vague was preserved in spirits of wine. This was one of the poor errand girl's little hands, which had been severed at the wrist. The authorities had been unable to place her poor ripped body on the table, and so they had brought that hand!

At last Salvat rose, and the presiding judge began to interrogate him. The contrast in the aspect of the court then acquired tragic force: in the shrouding shade upon one hand were the jurors, their minds already made up beneath the pressure of public terror, while in the full, vivid light on the other side was the prisoner, alone and woeful, charged with all the crimes of his race. Four gendarmes watched over him. He was addressed by M. de Larombiere in a tone of contempt and disgust. The judge was not deficient in rectitude; he was indeed one of the last representatives of the old, scrupulous, upright French magistracy; but he understood nothing of the new times, and he treated prisoners with the severity of a Biblical Jehovah. Moreover, the infirmity which was the worry of his life, the childish lisp which, in his opinion, had alone prevented him from shining as a public prosecutor, made him ferociously ill-tempered, incapable of any intelligent indulgence. There were smiles, which he divined, as soon as he raised his sharp, shrill little voice, to ask his first questions. That droll voice of his took away whatever majesty might have remained attached to these proceedings, in which a man's life was being fought for in a hall full of inquisitive, stifling and perspiring folks, who fanned themselves and jested. Salvat answered the judge's earlier questions with his wonted weariness and politeness. While the judge did everything to vilify him, harshly reproaching him with his wretched childhood and youth, magnifying every stain and every transgression in his career, referring to the promiscuity of his life between Madame Theodore and little Celine as something bestial, he, the prisoner, quietly said yes or no, like a man who has nothing to hide and accepts the full responsibility of his actions. He had already made a complete confession of his crime, and he calmly repeated it without changing a word. He explained that if he had deposited his bomb at the entrance of the Duvillard mansion it was to give his deed its true significance, that of summoning the wealthy, the money-mongers who had so scandalously enriched themselves by dint of theft and falsehood, to restore that part of the common wealth which they had appropriated, to the poor, the working classes, their children and their wives, who perished of starvation. It was only at this moment that he grew excited; all the misery that he had endured or witnessed rose to his clouded, semi-educated brain, in which claims and theories and exasperated ideas of absolute justice and universal happiness had gathered confusedly. And from that moment he appeared such as he really was, a sentimentalist, a dreamer transported by suffering, proud and stubborn, and bent on changing the world in accordance with his sectarian logic.

"But you fled!" cried the judge in a voice such as would have befitted a grasshopper. "You must not say that you gave your life to your cause and were ready for martyrdom!"

Salvat's most poignant regret was that he had yielded in the Bois de Boulogne to the dismay and rage which come upon a tracked and hunted man and impel him to do all he can to escape capture. And on being thus taunted by the judge he became quite angry. "I don't fear death, you'll see that," he replied. "If all had the same courage as I have, your rotten society would be swept away to-morrow, and happiness would at last dawn."

Then the interrogatory dealt at great length with the composition and manufacture of the bomb. The judge, rightly enough, pointed out that this was the only obscure point of the affair. "And so," he remarked, "you persist in saying that dynamite was the explosive you employed? Well, you will presently hear the experts, who, it is true, differ on certain points, but are all of opinion that you employed some other explosive, though they cannot say precisely what it was. Why not speak out on the point, as you glory in saying everything?"

Salvat, however, had suddenly calmed down, giving only cautious monosyllabic replies. "Well, seek for whatever you like if you don't believe me," he now answered. "I made my bomb by myself, and under circumstances which I've already related a score of times. You surely don't expect me to reveal names and compromise comrades?"

From this declaration he would not depart. It was only towards the end of the interrogatory that irresistible emotion overcame him on the judge again referring to the unhappy victim of his crime, the little errand girl, so pretty and fair and gentle, whom ferocious destiny had brought to the spot to meet such an awful death. "It was one of your own class whom you struck," said M. de Larombiere; "your victim was a work girl, a poor child who, with the few pence she earned, helped to support her aged grandmother."

Salvat's voice became very husky as he answered: "That's really the only thing I regret.... My bomb certainly wasn't meant for her; and may all the workers, all the starvelings, remember that she gave her blood as I'm going to give mine!"

In this wise the interrogatory ended amidst profound agitation. Pierre had felt Guillaume shuddering beside him, whilst the prisoner quietly and obstinately refused to say a word respecting the explosive that had been employed, preferring as he did to assume full responsibility for the deed which was about to cost him his life. Moreover, Guillaume, on turning round, in compliance with an irresistible impulse, had perceived Victor Mathis still motionless behind him: his elbows ever leaning on the rail of the partition, and his chin still resting on his hands, whilst he listened with silent, concentrated passion. His face had become yet paler than before, and his eyes glowed as with an avenging fire, whose flames would never more be extinguished.

The interrogatory of the prisoner was followed by a brief commotion in court.

"That Salvat looks quite nice, he has such soft eyes," declared the Princess, whom the proceedings greatly amused. "Oh! don't speak ill of him, my dear deputy. You know that I have Anarchist ideas myself."

"I speak no ill of him," gaily replied Duthil. "Nor has our friend Amadieu any right to speak ill of him. For you know that this affair has set Amadieu on a pinnacle. He was never before talked about to such an extent as he is now; and he delights in being talked about, you know! He has become quite a social celebrity, the most illustrious of our investigating magistrates, and will soon be able to do or become whatever he pleases."

Then Massot, with his sarcastic impudence, summed up the situation. "When Anarchism flourishes, everything flourishes, eh? That bomb has helped on the affairs of a good many fine fellows that I know. Do you think that my governor Fonsegue, who's so attentive to Silviane yonder, complains of it? And doesn't Sagnier, who's spreading himself out behind the presiding judge, and whose proper place would be between the four gendarmes—doesn't he owe a debt to Salvat for all the abominable advertisements he has been able to give his paper by using the wretched fellow's back as a big drum? And I need not mention the politicians or the financiers or all those who fish in troubled waters."

"But I say," interrupted Duthil, "it seems to me that you yourself made good use of the affair. Your interview with the little girl Celine brought you in a pot of money."

Massot, as it happened, had been struck with the idea of ferreting out Madame Theodore and the child, and of relating his visit to them in the "Globe," with an abundance of curious and touching particulars. The article had met with prodigious success, Celine's pretty answers respecting her imprisoned father having such an effect on ladies with sensitive hearts that they had driven to Montmartre in their carriages in order to see the two poor creatures. Thus alms had come to them from all sides; and strangely enough the very people who demanded the father's head were the most eager to sympathise with the child.

"Well, I don't complain of my little profits," said the journalist in answer to Duthil. "We all earn what we can, you know."

At this moment Rosemonde, while glancing round her, recognised Guillaume and Pierre, but she was so amazed to see the latter in ordinary civilian garb that she did not dare to speak to him. Leaning forward she acquainted Duthil and Massot with her surprise, and they both turned round to look. From motives of discretion, however, they pretended that they did not recognise the Froments.

The heat in court was now becoming quite unbearable, and one lady had already fainted. At last the presiding judge again raised his lisping voice, and managed to restore silence. Salvat, who had remained standing, now held a few sheets of paper, and with some difficulty he made the judge understand that he desired to complete his interrogatory by reading a declaration, which he had drawn up in prison, and in which he explained his reasons for his crime. For a moment M. de Larombiere hesitated, all surprise and indignation at such a request; but he was aware that he could not legally impose silence on the prisoner, and so he signified his consent with a gesture of mingled irritation and disdain. Thereupon Salvat began his perusal much after the fashion of a schoolboy, hemming and hawing here and there, occasionally becoming confused, and then bringing out certain words with wonderful emphasis, which evidently pleased him. This declaration of his was the usual cry of suffering and revolt already raised by so many disinherited ones. It referred to all the frightful want of the lower spheres; the toiler unable to find a livelihood in his toil; a whole class, the most numerous and worthy of the classes, dying of starvation; whilst, on the other hand, were the privileged ones, gorged with wealth, and wallowing in satiety, yet refusing to part with even the crumbs from their tables, determined as they were to restore nothing whatever of the wealth which they had stolen. And so it became necessary to take everything away from them, to rouse them from their egotism by terrible warnings, and to proclaim to them even with the crash of bombs that the day of justice had come. The unhappy man spoke that word "justice" in a ringing voice which seemed to fill the whole court. But the emotion of those who heard him reached its highest pitch when, after declaring that he laid down his life for the cause, and expected nothing but a verdict of death from the jury, he added, as if prophetically, that his blood would assuredly give birth to other martyrs. They might send him to the scaffold, said he, but he knew that his example would bear fruit. After him would come another avenger, and yet another, and others still, until the old and rotten social system should have crumbled away so as to make room for the society of justice and happiness of which he was one of the apostles.

The presiding judge, in his impatience and agitation, twice endeavoured to interrupt Salvat. But the other read on and on with the imperturbable conscientiousness of one who fears that he may not give proper utterance to his most important words. He must have been thinking of that perusal ever since he had been in prison. It was the decisive act of his suicide, the act by which he proclaimed that he gave his life for the glory of dying in the cause of mankind. And when he had finished he sat down between the gendarmes with glowing eyes and flushed cheeks, as if he inwardly experienced some deep joy.

To destroy the effect which the declaration had produced—a commingling of fear and compassion—the judge at once wished to proceed with the hearing of the witnesses. Of these there was an interminable procession; though little interest attached to their evidence, for none of them had any revelations to make. Most attention perhaps was paid to the measured statements of Grandidier, who had been obliged to dismiss Salvat from his employ on account of the Anarchist propaganda he had carried on. Then the prisoner's brother-in-law, Toussaint, the mechanician, also seemed a very worthy fellow if one might judge him by the manner in which he strove to put things favourably for Salvat, without in any way departing from the truth. After Toussaint's evidence considerable time was taken up by the discussions between the experts, who disagreed in public as much as they had disagreed in their reports. Although they were all of opinion that dynamite could not have been the explosive employed in the bomb, they indulged in the most extraordinary and contradictory suppositions as to this explosive's real nature. Eventually a written opinion given by the illustrious savant Bertheroy was read; and this, after clearly setting forth the known facts, concluded that one found oneself in presence of a new explosive of prodigious power, the formula of which he himself was unable to specify.

Then detective Mondesir and commissary Dupot came in turn to relate the various phases of the man hunt in the Bois de Boulogne. In Mondesir centred all the gaiety of the proceedings, thanks to the guardroom sallies with which he enlivened his narrative. And in like way the greatest grief, a perfect shudder of revolt and compassion, was roused by the errand girl's grandmother, a poor, bent, withered old woman, whom the prosecution had cruelly constrained to attend the court, and who wept and looked quite dismayed, unable as she was to understand what was wanted of her. When she had withdrawn, the only remaining witnesses were those for the defence, a procession of foremen and comrades, who all declared that they had known Salvat as a very worthy fellow, an intelligent and zealous workman, who did not drink, but was extremely fond of his daughter, and incapable of an act of dishonesty or cruelty.

It was already four o'clock when the evidence of the witnesses came to an end. The atmosphere in court was now quite stifling, feverish fatigue flushed every face, and a kind of ruddy dust obscured the waning light which fell from the windows. Women were fanning themselves and men were mopping their foreheads. However, the passion roused by the scene still brought a glow of cruel delight to every eye. And no one stirred.

"Ah!" sighed Rosemonde all at once, "to think that I hoped to drink a cup of tea at a friend's at five o'clock. I shall die of thirst and starvation here."

"We shall certainly be kept till seven," replied Massot. "I can't offer to go and fetch you a roll, for I shouldn't be readmitted."

Then Duthil, who had not ceased shrugging his shoulders while Salvat read his declaration, exclaimed: "What childish things he said, didn't he? And to think that the fool is going to die for all that! Rich and poor, indeed! Why, there will always be rich and poor. And it's equally certain that when a man is poor his one great desire is to become rich. If that fellow is in the dock to-day it's simply because he failed to make money."

While the others were thus conversing, Pierre for his part was feeling extremely anxious about his brother, who sat beside him in silence, pale and utterly upset. Pierre sought his hand and covertly pressed it. Then in a low voice he inquired: "Do you feel ill? Shall we go away?"

Guillaume answered him by discreetly and affectionately returning his handshake. He was all right, he would remain till the end, however much he might be stirred by exasperation.

It was now Monsieur Lehmann, the public prosecutor, who rose to address the court. He had a large, stern mouth, and was squarely built, with a stubborn Jewish face. Nevertheless he was known to be a man of dexterous, supple nature, one who had a foot in every political camp, and invariably contrived to be on good terms with the powers that were. This explained his rapid rise in life, and the constant favour he enjoyed. In the very first words he spoke he alluded to the new ministry gazetted that morning, referring pointedly to the strong-handed man who had undertaken the task of reassuring peaceable citizens and making evil-doers tremble. Then he fell upon the wretched Salvat with extraordinary vehemence, recounting the whole of his life, and exhibiting him as a bandit expressly born for the perpetration of crime, a monster who was bound to end by committing some abominable and cowardly outrage. Next he flagellated Anarchism and its partisans. The Anarchists were a mere herd of vagabonds and thieves, said he. That had been shown by the recent robbery at the Princess de Harn's house. The ignoble gang that had been arrested for that affair had given the apostles of the Anarchist doctrine as their references! And that was what the application of Anarchist theories resulted in—burglary and filth, pending a favourable hour for wholesale pillage and murder! For nearly a couple of hours the public prosecutor continued in this fashion, throwing truth and logic to the winds, and exclusively striving to alarm his hearers. He made all possible use of the terror which had reigned in Paris, and figuratively brandished the corpse of the poor little victim, the pretty errand girl, as if it were a blood-red flag, before pointing to the pale hand, preserved in spirits of wine, with a gesture of compassionate horror which sent a shudder through his audience. And he ended, as he had begun, by inspiriting the jurors, and telling them that they might fearlessly do their duty now that those at the head of the State were firmly resolved to give no heed to threats.

Then the young advocate entrusted with the defence in his turn spoke. And he really said what there was to say with great clearness and precision. He was of a different school from that of the public prosecutor: his eloquence was very simple and smooth, his only passion seemed to be zeal for truth. Moreover, it was sufficient for him to show Salvat's career in its proper light, to depict him pursued by social fatalities since his childhood, and to explain the final action of his career by all that he had suffered and all that had sprung up in his dreamy brain. Was not his crime the crime of one and all? Who was there that did not feel, if only in a small degree, responsible for that bomb which a penniless, starving workman had deposited on the threshold of a wealthy man's abode—a wealthy man whose name bespoke the injustice of the social system: so much enjoyment on the one hand and so much privation on the other! If one of us happened to lose his head, and felt impelled to hasten the advent of happiness by violence in such troublous times, when so many burning problems claimed solution, ought he to be deprived of his life in the name of justice, when none could swear that they had not in some measure contributed to his madness? Following up this question, Salvat's counsel dwelt at length on the period that witnessed the crime, a period of so many scandals and collapses, when the old world was giving birth to a new one amidst the most terrible struggles and pangs. And he concluded by begging the jury to show themselves humane, to resist all passion and terror, and to pacify the rival classes by a wise verdict, instead of prolonging social warfare by giving the starvelings yet another martyr to avenge.

It was past six o'clock when M. de Larombiere began to sum up in a partial and flowery fashion, in which one detected how grieved and angry he was at having such a shrill little voice. Then the judges and the jurors withdrew, and the prisoner was led away, leaving the spectators waiting amidst an uproar of feverish impatience. Some more ladies had fainted, and it had even been necessary to carry out a gentleman who had been overcome by the cruel heat. However, the others stubbornly remained there, not one of them quitting his place.

"Ah! it won't take long now," said Massot. "The jurors brought their verdict all ready in their pockets. I was looking at them while that little advocate was telling them such sensible things. They all looked as if they were comfortably asleep in the gloom."

Then Duthil turned to the Princess and asked her, "Are you still hungry?"

"Oh! I'm starving," she replied. "I shall never be able to wait till I get home. You will have to take me to eat a biscuit somewhere.... All the same, however, it's very exciting to see a man's life staked on a yes or a no."

Meantime Pierre, finding Guillaume still more feverish and grieved, had once again taken hold of his hand. Neither of them spoke, so great was the distress that they experienced for many reasons which they themselves could not have precisely defined. It seemed to them, however, that all human misery—inclusive of their own, the affections, the hopes, the griefs which brought them suffering—was sobbing and quivering in that buzzing hall. Twilight had gradually fallen there, but as the end was now so near it had doubtless been thought unnecessary to light the chandeliers. And thus large vague shadows, dimming and shrouding the serried throng, now hovered about in the last gleams of the day. The ladies in light gowns yonder, behind the bench, looked like pale phantoms with all-devouring eyes, whilst the numerous groups of black-robed advocates formed large sombre patches which gradually spread everywhere. The greyish painting of the Christ had already vanished, and on the walls one only saw the glaring white bust of the Republic, which resembled some frigid death's head starting forth from the darkness.

"Ah!" Massot once more exclaimed, "I knew that it wouldn't take long!"

Indeed, the jurors were returning after less than a quarter of an hour's absence. Then the judges likewise came back and took their seats. Increased emotion stirred the throng, a great gust seemed to sweep through the court, a gust of anxiety, which made every head sway. Some people had risen to their feet, and others gave vent to involuntary exclamations. The foreman of the jury, a gentleman with a broad red face, had to wait a moment before speaking. At last in a sharp but somewhat sputtering voice he declared: "On my honour and my conscience, before God and before man, the verdict of the jury is: on the question of Murder, yes, by a majority of votes."*

* English readers may be reminded that in France the verdict of
a majority of the jury suffices for conviction or acquittal.
If the jury is evenly divided the prisoner is acquitted.—Trans.

The night had almost completely fallen when Salvat was once more brought in. In front of the jurors, who faded away in the gloom, he stood forth, erect, with a last ray from the windows lighting up his face. The judges themselves almost disappeared from view, their red robes seemed to have turned black. And how phantom-like looked the prisoner's emaciated face as he stood there listening, with dreamy eyes, while the clerk of the court read the verdict to him.

When silence fell and no mention was made of extenuating circumstances, he understood everything. His face, which had retained a childish expression, suddenly brightened. "That means death. Thank you, gentlemen," he said.

Then he turned towards the public, and amidst the growing darkness searched for the friendly faces which he knew were there; and this time Guillaume became fully conscious that he had recognised him, and was again expressing affectionate and grateful thanks for the crust he had received from him on a day of want. He must have also bidden farewell to Victor Mathis, for as Guillaume glanced at the young man, who had not moved, he saw that his eyes were staring wildly, and that a terrible expression rested on his lips.

As for the rest of the proceedings, the last questions addressed to the jury and the counsel, the deliberations of the judges and the delivery of sentence—these were all lost amidst the buzzing and surging of the crowd. A little compassion was unconsciously manifested; and some stupor was mingled with the satisfaction that greeted the sentence of death.

No sooner had Salvat been condemned, however, than he drew himself up to his full height, and as the guards led him away he shouted in a stentorian voice: "Long live Anarchy!"

Nobody seemed angered by the cry. The crowd went off quietly, as if weariness had lulled all its passions. The proceedings had really lasted too long and fatigued one too much. It was quite pleasant to inhale the fresh air on emerging from such a nightmare.

In the large waiting hall, Pierre and Guillaume passed Duthil and the Princess, whom General de Bozonnet had stopped while chatting with Fonsegue. All four of them were talking in very loud voices, complaining of the heat and their hunger, and agreeing that the affair had not been a particularly interesting one. Yet, all was well that ended well. As Fonsegue remarked, the condemnation of Salvat to death was a political and social necessity.

When Pierre and Guillaume reached the Pont Neuf, the latter for a moment rested his elbows on the parapet of the bridge. His brother, standing beside him, also gazed at the grey waters of the Seine, which here and there were fired by the reflections of the gas lamps. A fresh breeze ascended from the river; it was the delightful hour when night steals gently over resting Paris. Then, as the brothers stood there breathing that atmosphere which usually brings relief and comfort, Pierre on his side again became conscious of his heart-wound, and remembered his promise to return to Montmartre, a promise that he must keep in spite of the torture there awaiting him; whilst Guillaume on the other hand experienced a revival of the suspicion and disquietude that had come to him on seeing Marie so feverish, changed as it were by some new feeling, of which she herself was ignorant. Were further sufferings, struggles, and obstacles to happiness yet in store for those brothers who loved one another so dearly? At all events their hearts bled once more with all the sorrow into which they had been cast by the scene they had just witnessed: that assize of justice at which a wretched man had been condemned to pay with his head for the crimes of one and all.

Then, as they turned along the quay, Guillaume recognised young Victor going off alone in the gloom, just in front of them. The chemist stopped him and spoke to him of his mother. But the young man did not hear; his thin lips parted, and in a voice as trenchant as a knife-thrust he exclaimed: "Ah! so it's blood they want. Well, they may cut off his head, but he will be avenged!"

V. SACRIFICE

THE days which followed Salvat's trial seemed gloomy ones up yonder in Guillaume's workroom, which was usually so bright and gay. Sadness and silence filled the place. The three young men were no longer there. Thomas betook himself to the Grandidier works early every morning in order to perfect his little motor; Francois was so busy preparing for his examination that he scarcely left the Ecole Normale; while Antoine was doing some work at Jahan's, where he delighted to linger and watch his little friend Lise awakening to life. Thus Guillaume's sole companion was Mere-Grand, who sat near the window busy with her needlework; for Marie was ever going about the house, and only stayed in the workroom for any length of time when Pierre happened to be there.

Guillaume's gloom was generally attributed to the feelings of anger and revolt into which the condemnation of Salvat had thrown him. He had flown into a passion on his return from the Palace of Justice, declaring that the execution of the unhappy man would simply be social murder, deliberate provocation of class warfare. And the others had bowed on hearing that pain-fraught violent cry, without attempting to discuss the point. Guillaume's sons respectfully left him to the thoughts which kept him silent for hours, with his face pale and a dreamy expression in his eyes. His chemical furnace remained unlighted, and his only occupation from morn till night was to examine the plans and documents connected with his invention, that new explosive and that terrible engine of war, which he had so long dreamt of presenting to France in order that she might impose the reign of truth and justice upon all the nations. However, during the long hours which he spent before the papers scattered over his table, often without seeing them, for his eyes wandered far away, a multitude of vague thoughts came to him—doubts respecting the wisdom of his project, and fears lest his desire to pacify the nations should simply throw them into an endless war of extermination. Although he really believed that great city of Paris to be the world's brain, entrusted with the task of preparing the future, he could not disguise from himself that with all its folly and shame and injustice it still presented a shocking spectacle. Was it really ripe enough for the work of human salvation which he thought of entrusting to it? Then, on trying to re-peruse his notes and verify his formulas, he only recovered his former energetic determination on thinking of his marriage, whereupon the idea came to him that it was now too late for him to upset his life by changing such long-settled plans.

His marriage! Was it not the thought of this which haunted Guillaume and disturbed him far more powerfully than his scientific work or his humanitarian passion? Beneath all the worries that he acknowledged, there was another which he did not confess even to himself, and which filled him with anguish. He repeated day by day that he would reveal his invention to the Minister of War as soon as he should be married to Marie, whom he wished to associate with his glory. Married to Marie! Each time he thought of it, burning fever and secret disquietude came over him. If he now remained so silent and had lost his quiet cheerfulness, it was because he had felt new life, as it were, emanating from her. She was certainly no longer the same woman as formerly; she was becoming more and more changed and distant. He had watched her and Pierre when the latter happened to be there, which was now but seldom. He, too, appeared embarrassed, and different from what he had been. On the days when he came, however, Marie seemed transformed; it was as if new life animated the house. Certainly the intercourse between her and Pierre was quite innocent, sisterly on the one hand, brotherly on the other. They simply seemed to be a pair of good friends. And yet a radiance, a vibration, emanated from them, something more subtle even than a sun-ray or a perfume. After the lapse of a few days Guillaume found himself unable to doubt the truth any longer. And his heart bled, he was utterly upset by it. He had not found them in fault in any way, but he was convinced that these two children, as he so paternally called them, really adored one another.

One lovely morning when he happened to be alone with Mere-Grand, face to face with sunlit Paris, he fell into a yet more dolorous reverie than usual. He seemed to be gazing fixedly at the old lady, as, seated in her usual place, she continued sewing with an air of queenly serenity. Perhaps, however, he did not see her. For her part she occasionally raised her eyes and glanced at him, as if expecting a confession which did not come. At last, finding such silence unbearable, she made up her mind to address him: "What has been the matter with you, Guillaume, for some time past? Why don't you tell me what you have to tell me?"

He descended from the clouds, as it were, and answered in astonishment: "What I have to tell you?"

"Yes, I know it as well as you do, and I thought you would speak to me of it, since it pleases you to do nothing here without consulting me."

At this he turned very pale and shuddered. So he had not been mistaken in the matter, even Mere-Grand knew all about it. To talk of it, however, was to give shape to his suspicions, to transform what, hitherto, might merely have been a fancy on his part into something real and definite.

"It was inevitable, my dear son," said Mere-Grand. "I foresaw it from the outset. And if I did not warn you of it, it was because I believed in some deep design on your part. Since I have seen you suffering, however, I have realised that I was mistaken." Then, as he still looked at her quivering and distracted, she continued: "Yes, I fancied that you might have wished it, that in bringing your brother here you wished to know if Marie loved you otherwise than as a father. There was good reason for testing her—for instance, the great difference between your ages, for your life is drawing to a close, whilst hers is only beginning. And I need not mention the question of your work, the mission which I have always dreamt of for you."

Thereupon, with his hands raised in prayerful fashion, Guillaume drew near to the old lady and exclaimed: "Oh! speak out clearly, tell me what you think. I don't understand, my poor heart is so lacerated; and yet I should so much like to know everything, so as to be able to act and take a decision. To think that you whom I love, you whom I venerate as much as if you were my real mother, you whose profound good sense I know so well that I have always followed your advice—to think that you should have foreseen this frightful thing and have allowed it to happen at the risk of its killing me!... Why have you done so, tell me, why?"

Mere-Grand was not fond of talking. Absolute mistress of the house as she was, managing everything, accountable to nobody for her actions, she never gave expression to all that she thought or all that she desired. Indeed, there was no occasion for it, as Guillaume, like the children, relied upon her completely, with full confidence in her wisdom. And her somewhat enigmatical ways even helped to raise her in their estimation.

"What is the use of words, when things themselves speak?" she now gently answered, while still plying her needle. "It is quite true that I approved of the plan of a marriage between you and Marie, for I saw that it was necessary that she should be married if she was to stay here. And then, too, there were many other reasons which I needn't speak of. However, Pierre's arrival here has changed everything, and placed things in their natural order. Is not that preferable?"

He still lacked the courage to understand her. "Preferable! When I'm in agony? When my life is wrecked?"

Thereupon she rose and came to him, tall and rigid in her thin black gown, and with an expression of austerity and energy on her pale face. "My son," she said, "you know that I love you, and that I wish you to be very noble and lofty. Only the other morning, you had an attack of fright, the house narrowly escaped being blown up. Then, for some days now you have been sitting over those documents and plans in an absent-minded, distracted state, like a man who feels weak, and doubts, and no longer knows his way. Believe me, you are following a dangerous path; it is better that Pierre should marry Marie, both for their sakes and for your own."

"For my sake? No, no! What will become of me!"

"You will calm yourself and reflect, my son. You have such serious duties before you. You are on the eve of making your invention known. It seems to me that something has bedimmed your sight, and that you will perhaps act wrongly in this respect, through failing to take due account of the problem before you. Perhaps there is something better to be done.... At all events, suffer if it be necessary, but remain faithful to your ideal."

Then, quitting him with a maternal smile, she sought to soften her somewhat stern words by adding: "You have compelled me to speak unnecessarily, for I am quite at ease; with your superior mind, whatever be in question, you can but do the one right thing that none other would do."

On finding himself alone Guillaume fell into feverish uncertainty. What was the meaning of Mere-Grand's enigmatical words? He knew that she was on the side of whatever might be good, natural, and necessary. But she seemed to be urging him to some lofty heroism; and indeed what she had said threw a ray of light upon the unrest which had come to him in connection with his old plan of going to confide his secret to some Minister of War or other, whatever one might happen to be in office at the time. Growing hesitation and repugnance stirred him as he fancied he could again hear her saying that perhaps there might be some better course, that would require search and reflection. But all at once a vision of Marie rose before him, and his heart was rent by the thought that he was asked to renounce her. To lose her, to give her to another! No, no, that was beyond his strength. He would never have the frightful courage that was needed to pass by the last promised raptures of love with disdain!

For a couple of days Guillaume struggled on. He seemed to be again living the six years which the young woman had already spent beside him in that happy little house. She had been at first like an adopted daughter there; and later on, when the idea of their marriage had sprung up, he had viewed it with quiet delight in the hope that it would ensure the happiness of all around him. If he had previously abstained from marrying again it was from the fear of placing a strange mother over his children; and if he yielded to the charm of loving yet once more, and no longer leading a solitary life, it was because he had found at his very hearth one of such sensible views, who, in the flower of youth, was willing to become his wife despite the difference in their ages. Then months had gone by, and serious occurrences had compelled them to postpone the wedding, though without undue suffering on his part. Indeed, the certainty that she was waiting for him had sufficed him, for his life of hard work had rendered him patient. Now, however, all at once, at the threat of losing her, his hitherto tranquil heart ached and bled. He would never have thought the tie so close a one. But he was now almost fifty, and it was as if love and woman were being wrenched away from him, the last woman that he could love and desire, one too who was the more desirable, as she was the incarnation of youth from which he must ever be severed, should he indeed lose her. Passionate desire, mingled with rage, flared up within him at the thought that someone should have come to take her from him.

One night, alone in his room, he suffered perfect martyrdom. In order that he might not rouse the house he buried his face in his pillow so as to stifle his sobs. After all, it was a simple matter; Marie had given him her promise, and he would compel her to keep it. She would be his, and his alone, and none would be able to steal her from him. Then, however, there rose before him a vision of his brother, the long-forgotten one, whom, from feelings of affection, he had compelled to join his family. But his sufferings were now so acute that he would have driven that brother away had he been before him. He was enraged, maddened, by the thought of him. His brother—his little brother! So all their love was over; hatred and violence were about to poison their lives. For hours Guillaume continued complaining deliriously, and seeking how he might so rid himself of Pierre that what had happened should be blotted out. Now and again, when he recovered self-control, he marvelled at the tempest within him; for was he not a savant guided by lofty reason, a toiler to whom long experience had brought serenity? But the truth was that this tempest had not sprung up in his mind, it was raging in the child-like soul that he had retained, the nook of affection and dreaminess which remained within him side by side with his principles of pitiless logic and his belief in proven phenomena only. His very genius came from the duality of his nature: behind the chemist was a social dreamer, hungering for justice and capable of the greatest love. And now passion was transporting him, and he was weeping for the loss of Marie as he would have wept over the downfall of that dream of his, the destruction of war by war, that scheme for the salvation of mankind at which he had been working for ten years past.

At last, amidst his weariness, a sudden resolution calmed him. He began to feel ashamed of despairing in this wise when he had no certain grounds to go upon. He must know everything, he would question the young woman; she was loyal enough to answer him frankly. Was not this a solution worthy of them both? An explanation in all sincerity, after which they would be able to take a decision. Then he fell asleep; and, tired though he felt when he rose in the morning, he was calmer. It was as if some secret work had gone on in his heart during his few hours of repose after that terrible storm.

As it happened Marie was very gay that morning. On the previous day she had gone with Pierre and Antoine on a cycling excursion over frightful roads in the direction of Montmorency, whence they had returned in a state of mingled anger and delight. When Guillaume stopped her in the little garden, he found her humming a song while returning bare-armed from the scullery, where some washing was going on.

"Do you want to speak to me?" she asked.

"Yes, my dear child, it's necessary for us to talk of some serious matters."

She at once understood that their marriage was in question, and became grave. She had formerly consented to that marriage because she regarded it as the only sensible course she could take, and this with full knowledge of the duties which she would assume. No doubt her husband would be some twenty years older than herself, but this circumstance was one of somewhat frequent occurrence, and as a rule such marriages turned out well, rather than otherwise. Moreover, she was in love with nobody, and was free to consent. And she had consented with an impulse of gratitude and affection which seemed so sweet that she thought it the sweetness of love itself. Everybody around her, too, appeared so pleased at the prospect of this marriage, which would draw the family yet more closely together. And, on her side, she had been as it were intoxicated by the idea of making others happy.

"What is the matter?" she now asked Guillaume in a somewhat anxious voice. "No bad news, I hope?"

"No, no," he answered. "I've simply something to say to you."

Then he led her under the plum-trees to the only green nook left in the garden. An old worm-eaten bench still stood there against the lilac-bushes. And in front of them Paris spread out its sea of roofs, looking light and fresh in the morning sunlight.

They both sat down. But at the moment of speaking and questioning Marie, Guillaume experienced sudden embarrassment, while his heart beat violently at seeing her beside him, so young and adorable with her bare arms.

"Our wedding-day is drawing near," he ended by saying. And then as she turned somewhat pale, perhaps unconsciously, he himself suddenly felt cold. Had not her lips twitched as if with pain? Had not a shadow passed over her fresh, clear eyes?

"Oh! we still have some time before us," she replied.

Then, slowly and very affectionately, he resumed: "No doubt; still it is necessary to attend to the formalities. And it is as well, perhaps, that I should speak of those worries to-day, so that I may not have to bother you about them again."

Then he gently went on telling her all that would have to be done, keeping his eyes on her whilst he spoke, watching for such signs of emotion as the thought of her promise's early fulfilment might bring to her face. She sat there in silence, with her hands on her lap, and her features quite still, thus giving no certain sign of any regret or trouble. Still she seemed rather dejected, compliant, as it were, but in no wise joyous.

"You say nothing, my dear Marie," Guillaume at last exclaimed. "Does anything of all this displease you?"

"Displease me? Oh, no!"

"You must speak out frankly, if it does, you know. We will wait a little longer if you have any personal reasons for wishing to postpone the date again."

"But I've no reasons, my friend. What reasons could I have? I leave you quite free to settle everything as you yourself may desire."

Silence fell. While answering, she had looked him frankly in the face; but a little quiver stirred her lips, and gloom, for which she could not account, seemed to rise and darken her face, usually as bright and gay as spring water. In former times would she not have laughed and sung at the mere announcement of that coming wedding?

Then Guillaume, with an effort which made his voice tremble, dared to speak out: "You must forgive me for asking you a question, my dear Marie. There is still time for you to cancel your promise. Are you quite certain that you love me?"

At this she looked at him in genuine stupefaction, utterly failing to understand what he could be aiming at. And—as she seemed to be deferring her reply, he added: "Consult your heart. Is it really your old friend or is it another that you love?"

"I? I, Guillaume? Why do you say that to me? What can I have done to give you occasion to say such a thing!"

All her frank nature revolted as she spoke, and her beautiful eyes, glowing with sincerity, gazed fixedly on his.

"I love Pierre! I do, I?... Well, yes, I love him, as I love you all; I love him because he has become one of us, because he shares our life and our joys! I'm happy when he's here, certainly; and I should like him to be always here. I'm always pleased to see him and hear him and go out with him. I was very much grieved recently when he seemed to be relapsing into his gloomy ideas. But all that is natural, is it not? And I think that I have only done what you desired I should do, and I cannot understand how my affection for Pierre can in any way exercise an influence respecting our marriage."

These words, in her estimation, ought to have convinced Guillaume that she was not in love with his brother; but in lieu thereof they brought him painful enlightenment by the very ardour with which she denied the love imputed to her.

"But you unfortunate girl!" he cried. "You are betraying yourself without knowing it.... It is quite certain you do not love me, you love my brother!"

He had caught hold of her wrists and was pressing them with despairing affection as if to compel her to read her heart. And she continued struggling. A most loving and tragic contest went on between them, he seeking to convince her by the evidence of facts, and she resisting him, stubbornly refusing to open her eyes. In vain did he recount what had happened since the first day, explaining the feelings which had followed one upon another in her heart and mind: first covert hostility, next curiosity regarding that extraordinary young priest, and then sympathy and affection when she had found him so wretched and had gradually cured him of his sufferings. They were both young and mother Nature had done the rest. However, at each fresh proof and certainty which he put before her, Marie only experienced growing emotion, trembling at last from head to foot, but still unwilling to question herself.

"No, no," said she, "I do not love him. If I loved him I should know it and would acknowledge it to you; for you are well aware that I cannot tell an untruth."

Guillaume, however, had the cruelty to insist on the point, like some heroic surgeon cutting into his own flesh even more than into that of others, in order that the truth might appear and everyone be saved. "Marie," said he, "it is not I whom you love. All that you feel for me is respect and gratitude and daughterly affection. Remember what your feelings were at the time when our marriage was decided upon. You were then in love with nobody, and you accepted the offer like a sensible girl, feeling certain that I should render you happy, and that the union was a right and satisfactory one.... But since then my brother has come here; love has sprung up in your heart in quite a natural way; and it is Pierre, Pierre alone, whom you love as a lover and a husband should be loved."

Exhausted though she was, utterly distracted, too, by the light which, despite herself, was dawning within her, Marie still stubbornly and desperately protested.

"But why do you struggle like this against the truth, my child?" said Guillaume; "I do not reproach you. It was I who chose that this should happen, like the old madman I am. What was bound to come has come, and doubtless it is for the best. I only wanted to learn the truth from you in order that I might take a decision and act uprightly."

These words vanquished her, and her tears gushed forth. It seemed as though something had been rent asunder within her; and she felt quite overcome, as if by the weight of a new truth of which she had hitherto been ignorant. "Ah! it was cruel of you," she said, "to do me such violence so as to make me read my heart. I swear to you again that I did not know I loved Pierre in the way you say. But you have opened my heart, and roused what was quietly slumbering in it.... And it is true, I do love Pierre, I love him now as you have said. And so here we are, all three of us supremely wretched through your doing!"

She sobbed, and with a sudden feeling of modesty freed her wrists from his grasp. He noticed, however, that no blush rose to her face. Truth to tell, her virginal loyalty was not in question; she had no cause to reproach herself with any betrayal; it was he alone, perforce, who had awakened her to love. For a moment they looked at one another through their tears: she so strong and healthy, her bosom heaving at each heart-beat, and her white arms—arms that could both charm and sustain—bare almost to her shoulders; and he still vigorous, with his thick fleece of white hair and his black moustaches, which gave his countenance such an expression of energetic youth. But it was all over, the irreparable had swept by, and utterly changed their lives.

"Marie," he nobly said, "you do not love me, I give you back your promise."

But with equal nobility she refused to take it back. "Never will I do so," she replied. "I gave it to you frankly, freely and joyfully, and my affection and admiration for you have never changed."

Nevertheless, with more firmness in his hitherto broken voice, Guillaume retorted: "You love Pierre, and it is Pierre whom you ought to marry."

"No," she again insisted, "I belong to you. A tie which years have tightened cannot be undone in an hour. Once again, if I love Pierre I swear to you that I was ignorant of it this morning. And let us leave the matter as it is; do not torture me any more, it would be too cruel of you."

Then, quivering like a woman who suddenly perceives that she is bare, in a stranger's presence, she hastily pulled down her sleeves, and even drew them over her hands as if to leave naught of her person visible. And afterwards she rose and walked away without adding a single word.

Guillaume remained alone on the bench in that leafy corner, in front of Paris, to which the light morning sunshine lent the aspect of some quivering, soaring city of dreamland. A great weight oppressed him, and it seemed to him as if he would never be able to rise from the seat. That which brought him most suffering was Marie's assurance that she had till that morning been ignorant of the fact that she was in love with Pierre. She had been ignorant of it, and it was he, Guillaume, who had brought it to her knowledge, compelled her to confess it! He had now firmly planted it in her heart, and perhaps increased it by revealing it to her. Ah! how cruel the thought—to be the artisan of one's own torment! Of one thing he was now quite certain: there would be no more love in his life. At the idea of this, his poor, loving heart sank and bled. And yet amidst the disaster, amidst his grief at realising that he was an old man, and that renunciation was imperative, he experienced a bitter joy at having brought the truth to light. This was very harsh consolation, fit only for one of heroic soul, yet he found lofty satisfaction in it, and from that moment the thought of sacrifice imposed itself upon him with extraordinary force. He must marry his children; there lay the path of duty, the only wise and just course, the only certain means of ensuring the happiness of the household. And when his revolting heart yet leapt and shrieked with anguish, he carried his vigorous hands to his chest in order to still it.

On the morrow came the supreme explanation between Guillaume and Pierre, not in the little garden, however, but in the spacious workroom. And here again one beheld the vast panorama of Paris, a nation as it were at work, a huge vat in which the wine of the future was fermenting. Guillaume had arranged things so that he might be alone with his brother; and no sooner had the latter entered than he attacked him, going straight to the point without any of the precautions which he had previously taken with Marie.

"Haven't you something to say to me, Pierre?" he inquired. "Why won't you confide in me?"

The other immediately understood him, and began to tremble, unable to find a word, but confessing everything by the distracted, entreating expression of his face.

"You love Marie," continued Guillaume, "why did you not loyally come and tell me of your love?"

At this Pierre recovered self-possession and defended himself vehemently: "I love Marie, it's true, and I felt that I could not conceal it, that you yourself would notice it at last. But there was no occasion for me to tell you of it, for I was sure of myself, and would have fled rather than have allowed a single word to cross my lips. I suffered in silence and alone, and you cannot know how great my torture was! It is even cruel on your part to speak to me of it; for now I am absolutely compelled to leave you.... I have already, on several occasions, thought of doing so. If I have come back here, it was doubtless through weakness, but also on account of my affection for you all. And what mattered my presence here? Marie ran no risk. She does not love me."

"She does love you!" Guillaume answered. "I questioned her yesterday, and she had to confess that she loved you."

At this Pierre, utterly distracted, caught Guillaume by the shoulders and gazed into his eyes. "Oh! brother, brother! what is this you say? Why say a thing which would mean terrible misfortune for us all? Even if it were true, my grief would far exceed my joy, for I will not have you suffer. Marie belongs to you. To me she is as sacred as a sister. And if there be only my madness to part you, it will pass by, I shall know how to conquer it."

"Marie loves you," repeated Guillaume in his gentle, obstinate way. "I don't reproach you with anything. I well know that you have struggled, and have never betrayed yourself to her either by word or glance. Yesterday she herself was still ignorant that she loved you, and I had to open her eyes.... What would you have? I simply state a fact: she loves you."

This time Pierre, still quivering, made a gesture of mingled rapture and terror, as if some divine and long-desired blessing were falling upon him from heaven and crushing him beneath its weight.

"Well, then," he said, after a brief pause, "it is all over.... Let us kiss one another for the last time, and then I'll go."

"Go? Why? You must stay with us. Nothing could be more simple: you love Marie and she loves you. I give her to you."

A loud cry came from Pierre, who wildly raised his hands again with a gesture of fright and rapture. "You give me Marie?" he replied. "You, who adore her, who have been waiting for her for months? No, no, it would overcome me, it would terrify me, as if you gave me your very heart after tearing it from your breast. No, no! I will not accept your sacrifice!"

"But as it is only gratitude and affection that Marie feels for me," said Guillaume, "as it is you whom she really loves, am I to take a mean advantage of the engagements which she entered into unconsciously, and force her to a marriage when I know that she would never be wholly mine? Besides, I have made a mistake, it isn't I who give her to you, she has already given herself, and I do not consider that I have any right to prevent her from doing so."

"No, no! I will never accept, I will never bring such grief upon you... Kiss me, brother, and let me go."

Thereupon Guillaume caught hold of Pierre and compelled him to sit down by his side on an old sofa near the window. And he began to scold him almost angrily while still retaining a smile, in which suffering and kindliness were blended. "Come," said he, "we are surely not going to fight over it. You won't force me to tie you up so as to keep you here? I know what I'm about. I thought it all over before I spoke to you. No doubt, I can't tell you that it gladdens me. I thought at first that I was going to die; I should have liked to hide myself in the very depths of the earth. And then, well, it was necessary to be reasonable, and I understood that things had arranged themselves for the best, in their natural order."

Pierre, unable to resist any further, had begun to weep with both hands raised to his face.

"Don't grieve, brother, either for yourself or for me," said Guillaume. "Do you remember the happy days we lately spent together at Neuilly after we had found one another again? All our old affection revived within us, and we remained for hours, hand in hand, recalling the past and loving one another. And what a terrible confession you made to me one night, the confession of your loss of faith, your torture, the void in which you were rolling! When I heard of it my one great wish was to cure you. I advised you to work, love, and believe in life, convinced as I was that life alone could restore you to peace and health.... And for that reason I afterwards brought you here. You fought against it, and it was I who forced you to come. I was so happy when I found that you again took an interest in life, and had once more become a man and a worker! I would have given some of my blood if necessary to complete your cure.... Well, it's done now, I have given you all I had, since Marie herself has become necessary to you, and she alone can save you."

Then as Pierre again attempted to protest, he resumed: "Don't deny it. It is so true indeed, that if she does not complete the work I have begun, all my efforts will have been vain, you will fall back into your misery and negation, into all the torments of a spoilt life. She is necessary to you, I say. And do you think that I no longer know how to love you? Would you have me refuse you the very breath of life that will truly make you a man, after all my fervent wishes for your return to life? I have enough affection for you both to consent to your loving one another.... Besides, I repeat it, nature knows what she does. Instinct is a sure guide, it always tends to what is useful and trite. I should have been a sorry husband, and it is best that I should keep to my work as an old savant; whereas you are young and represent the future, all fruitful and happy life."

Pierre shuddered as he heard this, for his old fears returned to him. Had not the priesthood for ever cut him off from life, had not his long years of chaste celibacy robbed him of his manhood? "Fruitful and happy life!" he muttered, "ah! if you only knew how distressed I feel at the idea that I do not perhaps deserve the gift you so lovingly offer me! You are worth more than I am; you would have given her a larger heart, a firmer brain, and perhaps, too, you are really a younger man than myself.... There is still time, brother, keep her, if with you she is likely to be happier and more truly and completely loved. For my part I am full of doubts. Her happiness is the only thing of consequence. Let her belong to the one who will love her best!"

Indescribable emotion had now come over both men. As Guillaume heard his brother's broken words, the cry of a love that trembled at the thought of possible weakness, he did for a moment waver. With a dreadful heart-pang he stammered despairingly: "Ah! Marie, whom I love so much! Marie, whom I would have rendered so happy!"

At this Pierre could not restrain himself; he rose and cried: "Ah! you see that you love her still and cannot renounce her.... So let me go! let me go!"

But Guillaume had already caught him around the body, clasping him with an intensity of brotherly love which was increased by the renunciation he was resolved upon: "Stay!" said he. "It wasn't I that spoke, it was the other man that was in me, he who is about to die, who is already dead! By the memory of our mother and our father I swear to you that the sacrifice is consummated, and that if you two refuse to accept happiness from me you will but make me suffer."

For a moment the weeping men remained in one another's arms. They had often embraced before, but never had their hearts met and mingled as they did now. It was a delightful moment, which seemed an eternity. All the grief and misery of the world had disappeared from before them; there remained naught save their glowing love, whence sprang an eternity of love even as light comes from the sun. And that moment was compensation for all their past and future tears, whilst yonder, on the horizon before them, Paris still spread and rumbled, ever preparing the unknown future.

Just then Marie herself came in. And the rest proved very simple. Guillaume freed himself from his brother's clasp, led him forward and compelled him and Marie to take each other by the hand. At first she made yet another gesture of refusal in her stubborn resolve that she would not take her promise back. But what could she say face to face with those two tearful men, whom she had found in one another's arms, mingling together in such close brotherliness? Did not those tears and that embrace sweep away all ordinary reasons, all such arguments as she held in reserve? Even the embarrassment of the situation disappeared, it seemed as if she had already had a long explanation with Pierre, and that he and she were of one mind to accept that gift of love which Guillaume offered them with so much heroism. A gust of the sublime passed through the room, and nothing could have appeared more natural to them than this extraordinary scene. Nevertheless, Marie remained silent, she dared not give her answer, but looked at them both with her big soft eyes, which, like their own, were full of tears.

And it was Guillaume who, with sudden inspiration, ran to the little staircase conducting to the rooms overhead, and called: "Mere-Grand! Mere-Grand! Come down at once, you are wanted."

Then, as soon as she was there, looking slim and pale in her black gown, and showing the wise air of a queen-mother whom all obeyed, he said: "Tell these two children that they can do nothing better than marry one another. Tell them that we have talked it over, you and I, and that it is your desire, your will that they should do so."

She quietly nodded her assent, and then said: "That is true, it will be by far the most sensible course."

Thereupon Marie flung herself into her arms, consenting, yielding to the superior forces, the powers of life, that had thus changed the course of her existence. Guillaume immediately desired that the date of the wedding should be fixed, and accommodation provided for the young couple in the rooms overhead. And as Pierre glanced at him with some remaining anxiety and spoke of travelling, for he feared that his wound was not yet healed, and that their presence might bring him suffering, Guillaume responded: "No, no, I mean to keep you. If I'm marrying you, it is to have you both here. Don't worry about me. I have so much work to do, I shall work."

In the evening when Thomas and Francois came home and learnt the news, they did not seem particularly surprised by it. They had doubtless felt that things would end like this. And they bowed to the denouement, not venturing to say a word, since it was their father himself who announced the decision which had been taken, with his usual air of composure. As for Antoine, who on his own side quivered with love for Lise, he gazed with doubting, anxious eyes at his father, who had thus had the courage to pluck out his heart. Could he really survive such a sacrifice, must it not kill him? Then Antoine kissed his father passionately, and the elder brothers in their turn embraced him with all their hearts. Guillaume smiled and his eyes became moist. After his victory over his horrible torments nothing could have been sweeter to him than the embraces of his three big sons.

There was, however, further emotion in store for him that evening. Just as the daylight was departing, and he was sitting at his large table near the window, again checking and classifying the documents and plans connected with his invention, he was surprised to see his old master and friend Bertheroy enter the workroom. The illustrious chemist called on him in this fashion at long intervals, and Guillaume felt the honour thus conferred on him by this old man to whom eminence and fame had brought so many titles, offices and decorations. Moreover, Bertheroy, with his position as an official savant and member of the Institute, showed some courage in thus venturing to call on one whom so-called respectable folks regarded with contumely. And on this occasion, Guillaume at once understood that it was some feeling of curiosity that had brought him. And so he was greatly embarrassed, for he hardly dared to remove the papers and plans which were lying on the table.

"Oh, don't be frightened," gaily exclaimed Bertheroy, who, despite his careless and abrupt ways, was really very shrewd. "I haven't come to pry into your secrets.... Leave your papers there, I promise you that I won't read anything."

Then, in all frankness, he turned the conversation on the subject of explosives, which he was still studying, he said, with passionate interest. He had made some new discoveries which he did not conceal. Incidentally, too, he spoke of the opinion he had given in Salvat's affair. His dream was to discover some explosive of great power, which one might attempt to domesticate and reduce to complete obedience. And with a smile he pointedly concluded: "I don't know where that madman found the formula of his powder. But if you should ever discover it, remember that the future perhaps lies in the employment of explosives as motive power."

Then, all at once, he added: "By the way, that fellow Salvat will be executed on the day after to-morrow. A friend of mine at the Ministry of Justice has just told me so."

Guillaume had hitherto listened to him with an air of mingled distrust and amusement. But this announcement of Salvat's execution stirred him to anger and revolt, though for some days past he had known it to be inevitable, in spite of the sympathy which the condemned man was now rousing in many quarters.

"It will be a murder!" he cried vehemently.

Bertheroy waved his hand: "What would you have?" he answered: "there's a social system and it defends itself when it is attacked. Besides, those Anarchists are really too foolish in imagining that they will transform the world with their squibs and crackers! In my opinion, you know, science is the only revolutionist. Science will not only bring us truth but justice also, if indeed justice ever be possible on this earth. And that is why I lead so calm a life and am so tolerant."

Once again Bertheroy appeared to Guillaume as a revolutionist, one who was convinced that he helped on the ruin of the ancient abominable society of today, with its dogmas and laws, even whilst he was working in the depths of his laboratory. He was, however, too desirous of repose, and had too great a contempt for futilities to mingle with the events of the day, and he preferred to live in quietude, liberally paid and rewarded, and at peace with the government whatever it might be, whilst at the same time foreseeing and preparing for the formidable parturition of the future.

He waved his hand towards Paris, over which a sun of victory was setting, and then again spoke: "Do you hear the rumble? It is we who are the stokers, we who are ever flinging fresh fuel under the boiler. Science does not pause in her work for a single hour, and she is the artisan of Paris, which—let us hope it—will be the artisan of the future. All the rest is of no account."

But Guillaume was no longer listening to him. He was thinking of Salvat and the terrible engine of war he had invented, that engine which before long would shatter cities. And a new idea was dawning and growing in his mind. He had just freed himself of his last tie, he had created all the happiness he could create around him. Ah! to recover his courage, to be master of himself once more, and, at any rate, derive from the sacrifice of his heart the lofty delight of being free, of being able to lay down even his life, should he some day deem it necessary!

BOOK V.

I. THE GUILLOTINE

FOR some reason of his own Guillaume was bent upon witnessing the execution of Salvat. Pierre tried to dissuade him from doing so; and finding his efforts vain, became somewhat anxious. He accordingly resolved to spend the night at Montmartre, accompany his brother and watch over him. In former times, when engaged with Abbe Rose in charitable work in the Charonne district, he had learnt that the guillotine could be seen from the house where Mege, the Socialist deputy, resided at the corner of the Rue Merlin. He therefore offered himself as a guide. As the execution was to take place as soon as it should legally be daybreak, that is, about half-past four o'clock, the brothers did not go to bed but sat up in the workroom, feeling somewhat drowsy, and exchanging few words. Then as soon as two o'clock struck, they started off.

The night was beautifully serene and clear. The full moon, shining like a silver lamp in the cloudless, far-stretching heavens, threw a calm, dreamy light over the vague immensity of Paris, which was like some spell-bound city of sleep, so overcome by fatigue that not a murmur arose from it. It was as if beneath the soft radiance which spread over its roofs, its panting labour and its cries of suffering were lulled to repose until the dawn. Yet, in a far, out of the way district, dark work was even now progressing, a knife was being raised on high in order that a man might be killed.

Pierre and Guillaume paused in the Rue St. Eleuthere, and gazed at the vaporous, tremulous city spread out below then. And as they turned they perceived the basilica of the Sacred Heart, still domeless but already looking huge indeed in the moonbeams, whose clear white light accentuated its outlines and brought them into sharp relief against a mass of shadows. Under the pale nocturnal sky, the edifice showed like a colossal monster, symbolical of provocation and sovereign dominion. Never before had Guillaume found it so huge, never had it appeared to him to dominate Paris, even in the latter's hours of slumber, with such stubborn and overwhelming might.

This wounded him so keenly in the state of mind in which he found himself, that he could not help exclaiming: "Ah! they chose a good site for it, and how stupid it was to let them do so! I know of nothing more nonsensical; Paris crowned and dominated by that temple of idolatry! How impudent it is, what a buffet for the cause of reason after so many centuries of science, labour, and battle! And to think of it being reared over Paris, the one city in the world which ought never to have been soiled in this fashion! One can understand it at Lourdes and Rome; but not in Paris, in the very field of intelligence which has been so deeply ploughed, and whence the future is sprouting. It is a declaration of war, an insolent proclamation that they hope to conquer Paris also!"

Guillaume usually evinced all the tolerance of a savant, for whom religions are simply social phenomena. He even willingly admitted the grandeur or grace of certain Catholic legends. But Marie Alacoque's famous vision, which has given rise to the cult of the Sacred Heart, filled him with irritation and something like physical disgust. He suffered at the mere idea of Christ's open, bleeding breast, and the gigantic heart which the saint asserted she had seen beating in the depths of the wound—the huge heart in which Jesus placed the woman's little heart to restore it to her inflated and glowing with love. What base and loathsome materialism there was in all this! What a display of viscera, muscles and blood suggestive of a butcher's shop! And Guillaume was particularly disgusted with the engraving which depicted this horror, and which he found everywhere, crudely coloured with red and yellow and blue, like some badly executed anatomical plate.

Pierre on his side was also looking at the basilica as, white with moonlight, it rose out of the darkness like a gigantic fortress raised to crush and conquer the city slumbering beneath it. It had already brought him suffering during the last days when he had said mass in it and was struggling with his torments. "They call it the national votive offering," he now exclaimed. "But the nation's longing is for health and strength and restoration to its old position by work. That is a thing the Church does not understand. It argues that if France was stricken with defeat, it was because she deserved punishment. She was guilty, and so to-day she ought to repent. Repent of what? Of the Revolution, of a century of free examination and science, of the emancipation of her mind, of her initiatory and liberative labour in all parts of the world? That indeed is her real transgression; and it is as a punishment for all our labour, search for truth, increase of knowledge and march towards justice that they have reared that huge pile which Paris will see from all her streets, and will never be able to see without feeling derided and insulted in her labour and glory."

With a wave of his hand he pointed to the city, slumbering in the moonlight as beneath a sheet of silver, and then set off again with his brother, down the slopes, towards the black and deserted streets.

They did not meet a living soul until they reached the outer boulevard. Here, however, no matter what the hour may be, life continues with scarcely a pause. No sooner are the wine shops, music and dancing halls closed, than vice and want, cast into the street, there resume their nocturnal existence. Thus the brothers came upon all the homeless ones: low prostitutes seeking a pallet, vagabonds stretched on the benches under the trees, rogues who prowled hither and thither on the lookout for a good stroke. Encouraged by their accomplice—night, all the mire and woe of Paris had returned to the surface. The empty roadway now belonged to the breadless, homeless starvelings, those for whom there was no place in the sunlight, the vague, swarming, despairing herd which is only espied at night-time. Ah! what spectres of destitution, what apparitions of grief and fright there were! What a sob of agony passed by in Paris that morning, when as soon as the dawn should rise, a man—a pauper, a sufferer like the others—was to be guillotined!

As Guillaume and Pierre were about to descend the Rue des Martyrs, the former perceived an old man lying on a bench with his bare feet protruding from his gaping, filthy shoes. Guillaume pointed to him in silence. Then, a few steps farther on, Pierre in his turn pointed to a ragged girl, crouching, asleep with open month, in the corner of a doorway. There was no need for the brothers to express in words all the compassion and anger which stirred their hearts. At long intervals policemen, walking slowly two by two, shook the poor wretches and compelled them to rise and walk on and on. Occasionally, if they found them suspicious or refractory, they marched them off to the police-station. And then rancour and the contagion of imprisonment often transformed a mere vagabond into a thief or a murderer.

In the Rue des Martyrs and the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, the brothers found night-birds of another kind, women who slunk past them, close to the house-fronts, and men and hussies who belaboured one another with blows. Then, upon the grand boulevards, on the thresholds of lofty black houses, only one row of whose windows flared in the night, pale-faced individuals, who had just come down from their clubs, stood lighting cigars before going home. A lady with a ball wrap over her evening gown went by accompanied by a servant. A few cabs, moreover, still jogged up and down the roadway, while others, which had been waiting for hours, stood on their ranks in rows, with drivers and horses alike asleep. And as one boulevard after another was reached, the Boulevard Poissonniere, the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, the Boulevard St. Denis, and so forth, as far as the Place de la Republique, there came fresh want and misery, more forsaken and hungry ones, more and more of the human "waste" that is cast into the streets and the darkness. And on the other hand, an army of street-sweepers was now appearing to remove all the filth of the past four and twenty hours, in order that Paris, spruce already at sunrise, might not blush for having thrown up such a mass of dirt and loathsomeness in the course of a single day.

It was, however, more particularly after following the Boulevard Voltaire, and drawing near to the districts of La Roquette and Charonne, that the brothers felt they were returning to a sphere of labour where there was often lack of food, and where life was but so much pain. Pierre found himself at home here. In former days, accompanied by good Abbe Rose, visiting despairing ones, distributing alms, picking up children who had sunk to the gutter, he had a hundred times perambulated every one of those long, densely populated streets. And thus a frightful vision arose before his mind's eye; he recalled all the tragedies he had witnessed, all the shrieks he had heard, all the tears and bloodshed he had seen, all the fathers, mothers and children huddled together and dying of want, dirt and abandonment: that social hell in which he had ended by losing his last hopes, fleeing from it with a sob in the conviction that charity was a mere amusement for the rich, and absolutely futile as a remedy. It was this conviction which now returned to him as he again cast eyes upon that want and grief stricken district which seemed fated to everlasting destitution. That poor old man whom Abbe Rose had revived one night in yonder hovel, had he not since died of starvation? That little girl whom he had one morning brought in his arms to the refuge after her parents' death, was it not she whom he had just met, grown but fallen to the streets, and shrieking beneath the fist of a bully? Ah! how great was the number of the wretched! Their name was legion! There were those whom one could not save, those who were hourly born to a life of woe and want, even as one may be born infirm, and those, too, who from every side sank in the sea of human injustice, that ocean which has ever been the same for centuries past, and which though one may strive to drain it, still and for ever spreads. How heavy was the silence, how dense the darkness in those working-class streets where sleep seems to be the comrade of death! Yet hunger prowls, and misfortune sobs; vague spectral forms slink by, and then are lost to view in the depths of the night.

As Pierre and Guillaume went along they became mixed with dark groups of people, a whole flock of inquisitive folk, a promiscuous, passionate tramp, tramp towards the guillotine. It came from all Paris, urged on by brutish fever, a hankering for death and blood. In spite, however, of the dull noise which came from this dim crowd, the mean streets that were passed remained quite dark, not a light appeared at any of their windows; nor could one hear the breathing of the weary toilers stretched on their wretched pallets from which they would not rise before the morning twilight.

On seeing the jostling crowd which was already assembled on the Place Voltaire, Pierre understood that it would be impossible for him and his brother to ascend the Rue de la Roquette. Barriers, moreover, must certainly have been thrown across that street. In order therefore to reach the corner of the Rue Merlin, it occurred to him to take the Rue de la Folie Regnault, which winds round in the rear of the prison, farther on.

Here indeed they found solitude and darkness again.

The huge, massive prison with its great bare walls on which a moonray fell, looked like some pile of cold stones, dead for centuries past. At the end of the street they once more fell in with the crowd, a dim restless mass of beings, whose pale faces alone could be distinguished. The brothers had great difficulty in reaching the house in which Mege resided at the corner of the Rue Merlin. All the shutters of the fourth-floor flat occupied by the Socialist deputy were closed, though every other window was wide open and crowded with surging sightseers. Moreover, the wine shop down below and the first-floor room connected with it flared with gas, and were already crowded with noisy customers, waiting for the performance to begin.

"I hardly like to go and knock at Mege's door," said Pierre.

"No, no, you must not do so!" replied Guillaume.

"Let us go into the wine shop. We may perhaps be able to see something from the balcony."

The first-floor room was provided with a very large balcony, which women and gentlemen were already filling. The brothers nevertheless managed to reach it, and for a few minutes remained there, peering into the darkness before them. The sloping street grew broader between the two prisons, the "great" and the "little" Roquette, in such wise as to form a sort of square, which was shaded by four clumps of plane-trees, rising from the footways. The low buildings and scrubby trees, all poor and ugly of aspect, seemed almost to lie on a level with the ground, under a vast sky in which stars were appearing, as the moon gradually declined. And the square was quite empty save that on one spot yonder there seemed to be some little stir. Two rows of guards prevented the crowd from advancing, and even threw it back into the neighbouring streets. On the one hand, the only lofty houses were far away, at the point where the Rue St. Maur intersects the Rue de la Roquette; while, on the other, they stood at the corners of the Rue Merlin and the Rue de la Folie Regnault, so that it was almost impossible to distinguish anything of the execution even from the best placed windows. As for the inquisitive folk on the pavement they only saw the backs of the guards. Still this did not prevent a crush. The human tide flowed on from all sides with increasing clamour.

Guided by the remarks of some women who, leaning forward on the balcony, had been watching the square for a long time already, the brothers were at last able to perceive something. It was now half-past three, and the guillotine was nearly ready. The little stir which one vaguely espied yonder under the trees, was that of the headsman's assistants fixing the knife in position. A lantern slowly came and went, and five or six shadows danced over the ground. But nothing else could be distinguished, the square was like a large black pit, around which ever broke the waves of the noisy crowd which one could not see. And beyond the square one could only identify the flaring wine shops, which showed forth like lighthouses in the night. All the surrounding district of poverty and toil was still asleep, not a gleam as yet came from workrooms or yards, not a puff of smoke from the lofty factory chimneys.

"We shall see nothing," Guillaume remarked.

But Pierre silenced him, for he has just discovered that an elegantly attired gentleman leaning over the balcony near him was none other than the amiable deputy Duthil. He had at first fancied that a woman muffled in wraps who stood close beside the deputy was the little Princess de Harn, whom he had very likely brought to see the execution since he had taken her to see the trial. On closer inspection, however, he had found that this woman was Silviane, the perverse creature with the virginal face. Truth to tell, she made no concealment of her presence, but talked on in an extremely loud voice, as if intoxicated; and the brothers soon learnt how it was that she happened to be there. Duvillard, Duthil, and other friends had been supping with her at one o'clock in the morning, when on learning that Salvat was about to be guillotined, the fancy of seeing the execution had suddenly come upon her. Duvillard, after vainly entreating her to do nothing of the kind, had gone off in a fury, for he felt that it would be most unseemly on his part to attend the execution of a man who had endeavoured to blow up his house. And thereupon Silviane had turned to Duthil, whom her caprice greatly worried, for he held all such loathsome spectacles in horror, and had already refused to act as escort to the Princess. However, he was so infatuated with Silviane's beauty, and she made him so many promises, that he had at last consented to take her.

"He can't understand people caring for amusement," she said, speaking of the Baron. "And yet this is really a thing to see.... But no matter, you'll find him at my feet again to-morrow."

Duthil smiled and responded: "I suppose that peace has been signed and ratified now that you have secured your engagement at the Comedie."

"Peace? No!" she protested. "No, no. There will be no peace between us until I have made my debut. After that, we'll see."

They both laughed; and then Duthil, by way of paying his court, told her how good-naturedly Dauvergne, the new Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, had adjusted the difficulties which had hitherto kept the doors of the Comedie closed upon her. A really charming man was Dauvergne, the embodiment of graciousness, the very flower of the Monferrand ministry. His was the velvet hand in that administration whose leader had a hand of iron.

"He told me, my beauty," said Duthil, "that a pretty girl was in place everywhere." And then as Silviane, as if flattered, pressed closely beside him, the deputy added: "So that wonderful revival of 'Polyeucte,' in which you are going to have such a triumph, is to take place on the day after to-morrow. We shall all go to applaud you, remember."

"Yes, on the evening of the day after to-morrow," said Silviane, "the very same day when the wedding of the Baron's daughter will take place. There'll be plenty of emotion that day!"

"Ah! yes, of course!" retorted Duthil, "there'll be the wedding of our friend Gerard with Mademoiselle Camille to begin with. We shall have a crush at the Madeleine in the morning and another at the Comedie in the evening. You are quite right, too; there will be several hearts throbbing in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy."

Thereupon they again became merry, and jested about the Duvillard family—father, mother, lover and daughter—with the greatest possible ferocity and crudity of language. Then, all at once Silviane exclaimed: "Do you know, I'm feeling awfully bored here, my little Duthil. I can't distinguish anything, and I should like to be quite near so as to see it all plainly. You must take me over yonder, close to that machine of theirs."

This request threw Duthil into consternation, particularly as at that same moment Silviane perceived Massot outside the wine shop, and began calling and beckoning to him imperiously. A brief conversation then ensued between the young woman and the journalist: "I say, Massot!" she called, "hasn't a deputy the right to pass the guards and take a lady wherever he likes?"

"Not at all!" exclaimed Duthil. "Massot knows very well that a deputy ought to be the very first to bow to the laws."

This exclamation warned Massot that Duthil did not wish to leave the balcony. "You ought to have secured a card of invitation, madame," said he, in reply to Silviane. "They would then have found you room at one of the windows of La Petite Roquette. Women are not allowed elsewhere.... But you mustn't complain, you have a very good place up there."

"But I can see nothing at all, my dear Massot."

"Well, you will in any case see more than Princess de Harn will. Just now I came upon her carriage in the Rue du Chemin Vert. The police would not allow it to come any nearer."

This news made Silviane merry again, whilst Duthil shuddered at the idea of the danger he incurred, for Rosemonde would assuredly treat him to a terrible scene should she see him with another woman. Then, an idea occurring to him, he ordered a bottle of champagne and some little cakes for his "beautiful friend," as he called Silviane. She had been complaining of thirst, and was delighted with the opportunity of perfecting her intoxication. When a waiter had managed to place a little table near her, on the balcony itself, she found things very pleasant, and indeed considered it quite brave to tipple and sup afresh, while waiting for that man to be guillotined close by.

It was impossible for Pierre and Guillaume to remain up there any longer. All that they heard, all that they beheld filled them with disgust. The boredom of waiting had turned all the inquisitive folks of the balcony and the adjoining room into customers. The waiter could hardly manage to serve the many glasses of beer, bottles of expensive wine, biscuits, and plates of cold meat which were ordered of him. And yet the spectators here were all bourgeois, rich gentlemen, people of society! On the other hand, time has to be killed somehow when it hangs heavily on one's hands; and thus there were bursts of laughter and paltry and horrible jests, quite a feverish uproar arising amidst the clouds of smoke from the men's cigars. When Pierre and Guillaume passed through the wine shop on the ground-floor they there found a similar crush and similar tumult, aggravated by the disorderly behaviour of the big fellows in blouses who were drinking draught wine at the pewter bar which shone like silver. There were people, too, at all the little tables, besides an incessant coming and going of folks who entered the place for a "wet," by way of calming their impatience. And what folks they were! All the scum, all the vagabonds who had been dragging themselves about since daybreak on the lookout for whatever chance might offer them, provided it were not work!

On the pavement outside, Pierre and Guillaume felt yet a greater heart-pang. In the throng which the guards kept back, one simply found so much mire stirred up from the very depths of Paris life: prostitutes and criminals, the murderers of to-morrow, who came to see how a man ought to die. Loathsome, bareheaded harlots mingled with bands of prowlers or ran through the crowd, howling obscene refrains. Bandits stood in groups chatting and quarrelling about the more or less glorious manner in which certain famous guillotines had died. Among these was one with respect to whom they all agreed, and of whom they spoke as of a great captain, a hero whose marvellous courage was deserving of immortality. Then, as one passed along, one caught snatches of horrible phrases, particulars about the instrument of death, ignoble boasts, and filthy jests reeking with blood. And over and above all else there was bestial fever, a lust for death which made this multitude delirious, an eagerness to see life flow forth fresh and ruddy beneath the knife, so that as it coursed over the soil they might dip their feet in it. As this execution was not an ordinary one, however, there were yet spectators of another kind; silent men with glowing eyes who came and went all alone, and who were plainly thrilled by their faith, intoxicated with the contagious madness which incites one to vengeance or martyrdom.

Guillaume was just thinking of Victor Mathis, when he fancied that he saw him standing in the front row of sightseers whom the guards held in check. It was indeed he, with his thin, beardless, pale, drawn face. Short as he was, he had to raise himself on tiptoes in order to see anything. Near him was a big, red-haired girl who gesticulated; but for his part he never stirred or spoke. He was waiting motionless, gazing yonder with the round, ardent, fixed eyes of a night-bird, seeking to penetrate the darkness. At last a guard pushed him back in a somewhat brutal way; but he soon returned to his previous position, ever patient though full of hatred against the executioners, wishing indeed to see all he could in order to increase his hate.

Then Massot approached the brothers. This time, on seeing Pierre without his cassock, he did not even make a sign of astonishment, but gaily remarked: "So you felt curious to see this affair, Monsieur Froment?"

"Yes, I came with my brother," Pierre replied. "But I very much fear that we shan't see much."

"You certainly won't if you stay here," rejoined Massot. And thereupon in his usual good-natured way—glad, moreover, to show what power a well-known journalist could wield—he inquired: "Would you like me to pass you through? The inspector here happens to be a friend of mine."

Then, without waiting for an answer, he stopped the inspector and hastily whispered to him that he had brought a couple of colleagues, who wanted to report the proceedings. At first the inspector hesitated, and seemed inclined to refuse Massot's request; but after a moment, influenced by the covert fear which the police always has of the press, he made a weary gesture of consent.

"Come, quick, then," said Massot, turning to the brothers, and taking them along with him.

A moment later, to the intense surprise of Pierre and Guillaume, the guards opened their ranks to let them pass. They then found themselves in the large open space which was kept clear. And on thus emerging from the tumultuous throng they were quite impressed by the death-like silence and solitude which reigned under the little plane-trees. The night was now paling. A faint gleam of dawn was already falling from the sky.

After leading his companions slantwise across the square, Massot stopped them near the prison and resumed: "I'm going inside; I want to see the prisoner roused and got ready. In the meantime, walk about here; nobody will say anything to you. Besides, I'll come back to you in a moment."

A hundred people or so, journalists and other privileged spectators, were scattered about the dark square. Movable wooden barriers—such as are set up at the doors of theatres when there is a press of people waiting for admission—had been placed on either side of the pavement running from the prison gate to the guillotine; and some sightseers were already leaning over these barriers, in order to secure a close view of the condemned man as he passed by. Others were walking slowly to and fro, and conversing in undertones. The brothers, for their part, approached the guillotine.

It stood there under the branches of the trees, amidst the delicate greenery of the fresh leaves of spring. A neighbouring gas-lamp, whose light was turning yellow in the rising dawn, cast vague gleams upon it. The work of fixing it in position—work performed as quietly as could be, so that the only sound was the occasional thud of a mallet—had just been finished; and the headsman's "valets" or assistants, in frock-coats and tall silk hats, were waiting and strolling about in a patient way. But the instrument itself, how base and shameful it looked, squatting on the ground like some filthy beast, disgusted with the work it had to accomplish! What! those few beams lying on the ground, and those others barely nine feet high which rose from it, keeping the knife in position, constituted the machine which avenged Society, the instrument which gave a warning to evil-doers! Where was the big scaffold painted a bright red and reached by a stairway of ten steps, the scaffold which raised high bloody arms over the eager multitude, so that everybody might behold the punishment of the law in all its horror! The beast had now been felled to the ground, where it simply looked ignoble, crafty and cowardly. If on the one hand there was no majesty in the manner in which human justice condemned a man to death at its assizes: on the other, there was merely horrid butchery with the help of the most barbarous and repulsive of mechanical contrivances, on the terrible day when that man was executed.

As Pierre and Guillaume gazed at the guillotine, a feeling of nausea came over them. Daylight was now slowly breaking, and the surroundings were appearing to view: first the square itself with its two low, grey prisons, facing one another; then the distant houses, the taverns, the marble workers' establishments, and the shops selling flowers and wreaths, which are numerous hereabouts, as the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise is so near. Before long one could plainly distinguish the black lines of the spectators standing around in a circle, the heads leaning forward from windows and balconies, and the people who had climbed to the very house roofs. The prison of La Petite Roquette over the way had been turned into a kind of tribune for guests; and mounted Gardes de Paris went slowly to and fro across the intervening expanse. Then, as the sky brightened, labour awoke throughout the district beyond the crowd, a district of broad, endless streets lined with factories, work-shops and work-yards. Engines began to snort, machinery and appliances were got ready to start once more on their usual tasks, and smoke already curled away from the forest of lofty brick chimneys which, on all sides, sprang out of the gloom.

It then seemed to Guillaume that the guillotine was really in its right place in that district of want and toil. It stood in its own realm, like a terminus and a threat. Did not ignorance, poverty and woe lead to it? And each time that it was set up amidst those toilsome streets, was it not charged to overawe the disinherited ones, the starvelings, who, exasperated by everlasting injustice, were always ready for revolt? It was not seen in the districts where wealth and enjoyment reigned. It would there have seemed purposeless, degrading and truly monstrous. And it was a tragical and terrible coincidence that the bomb-thrower, driven mad by want, should be guillotined there, in the very centre of want's dominion.

But daylight had come at last, for it was nearly half-past four. The distant noisy crowd could feel that the expected moment was drawing nigh. A shudder suddenly sped through the atmosphere.

"He's coming," exclaimed little Massot, as he came back to Pierre and Guillaume. "Ah! that Salvat is a brave fellow after all."

Then he related how the prisoner had been awakened; how the governor of the prison, magistrate Amadieu, the chaplain, and a few other persons had entered the cell where Salvat lay fast asleep; and then how the condemned man had understood the truth immediately upon opening his eyes. He had risen, looking pale but quite composed. And he had dressed himself without assistance, and had declined the nip of brandy and the cigarette proffered by the good-hearted chaplain, in the same way as with a gentle but stubborn gesture he had brushed the crucifix aside. Then had come the "toilette" for death. With all rapidity and without a word being exchanged, Salvat's hands had been tied behind his back, his legs had been loosely secured with a cord, and the neckband of his shirt had been cut away. He had smiled when the others exhorted him to be brave. He only feared some nervous weakness, and had but one desire, to die like a hero, to remain the martyr of the ardent faith in truth and justice for which he was about to perish.

"They are now drawing up the death certificate in the register," continued Massot in his chattering way. "Come along, come along to the barriers if you wish a good view.... I turned paler, you know, and trembled far more than he did. I don't care a rap for anything as a rule; but, all the same, an execution isn't a pleasant business.... You can't imagine how many attempts were made to save Salvat's life. Even some of the papers asked that he might be reprieved. But nothing succeeded, the execution was regarded as inevitable, it seems, even by those who consider it a blunder. Still, they had such a touching opportunity to reprieve him, when his daughter, little Celine, wrote that fine letter to the President of the Republic, which I was the first to publish in the 'Globe.' Ah! that letter, it cost me a lot of running about!"

Pierre, who was already quite upset by this long wait for the horrible scene, felt moved to tears by Massot's reference to Celine. He could again see the child standing beside Madame Theodore in that bare, cold room whither her father would never more return. It was thence that he had set out on a day of desperation with his stomach empty and his brain on fire, and it was here that he would end, between yonder beams, beneath yonder knife.

Massot, however, was still giving particulars. The doctors, said he, were furious because they feared that the body would not be delivered to them immediately after the execution. To this Guillaume did not listen. He stood there with his elbows resting on the wooden barrier and his eyes fixed on the prison gate, which still remained shut. His hands were quivering, and there was an expression of anguish on his face as if it were he himself who was about to be executed. The headsman had again just left the prison. He was a little, insignificant-looking man, and seemed annoyed, anxious to have done with it all. Then, among a group of frock-coated gentlemen, some of the spectators pointed out Gascogne, the Chief of the Detective Police, who wore a cold, official air, and Amadieu, the investigating magistrate, who smiled and looked very spruce, early though the hour was. He had come partly because it was his duty, and partly because he wished to show himself now that the curtain was about to fall on a wonderful tragedy of which he considered himself the author. Guillaume glanced at him, and then as a growing uproar rose from the distant crowd, he looked up for an instant, and again beheld the two grey prisons, the plane-trees with their fresh young leaves, and the houses swarming with people beneath the pale blue sky, in which the triumphant sun was about to appear.

"Look out, here he comes!"

Who had spoken? A slight noise, that of the opening gate, made every heart throb. Necks were outstretched, eyes gazed fixedly, there was laboured breathing on all sides. Salvat stood on the threshold of the prison. The chaplain, stepping backwards, had come out in advance of him, in order to conceal the guillotine from his sight, but he had stopped short, for he wished to see that instrument of death, make acquaintance with it, as it were, before he walked towards it. And as he stood there, his long, aged sunken face, on which life's hardships had left their mark, seemed transformed by the wondrous brilliancy of his flaring, dreamy eyes. Enthusiasm bore him up—he was going to his death in all the splendour of his dream. When the executioner's assistants drew near to support him he once more refused their help, and again set himself in motion, advancing with short steps, but as quickly and as straightly as the rope hampering his legs permitted.

All at once Guillaume felt that Salvat's eyes were fixed upon him. Drawing nearer and nearer the condemned man had perceived and recognised his friend; and as he passed by, at a distance of no more than six or seven feet, he smiled faintly and darted such a deep penetrating glance at Guillaume, that ever afterwards the latter felt its smart. But what last thought, what supreme legacy had Salvat left him to meditate upon, perhaps to put into execution? It was all so poignant that Pierre feared some involuntary call on his brother's part; and so he laid his hand upon his arm to quiet him.

"Long live Anarchy!"

It was Salvat who had raised this cry. But in the deep silence his husky, altered voice seemed to break. The few who were near at hand had turned very pale; the distant crowd seemed bereft of life. The horse of one of the Gardes de Paris was alone heard snorting in the centre of the space which had been kept clear.

Then came a loathsome scramble, a scene of nameless brutality and ignominy. The headsman's helps rushed upon Salvat as he came up slowly with brow erect. Two of them seized him by the head, but finding little hair there, could only lower it by tugging at his neck. Next two others grasped him by the legs and flung him violently upon a plank which tilted over and rolled forward. Then, by dint of pushing and tugging, the head was got into the "lunette," the upper part of which fell in such wise that the neck was fixed as in a ship's port-hole—and all this was accomplished amidst such confusion and with such savagery that one might have thought that head some cumbrous thing which it was necessary to get rid of with the greatest speed. But the knife fell with a dull, heavy, forcible thud, and two long jets of blood spurted from the severed arteries, while the dead man's feet moved convulsively. Nothing else could be seen. The executioner rubbed his hands in a mechanical way, and an assistant took the severed blood-streaming head from the little basket into which it had fallen and placed it in the large basket into which the body had already been turned.

Ah! that dull, that heavy thud of the knife! It seemed to Guillaume that he had heard it echoing far away all over that district of want and toil, even in the squalid rooms where thousands of workmen were at that moment rising to perform their day's hard task! And there the echo of that thud acquired formidable significance; it spoke of man's exasperation with injustice, of zeal for martyrdom, and of the dolorous hope that the blood then spilt might hasten the victory of the disinherited.

Pierre, for his part, at the sight of that loathsome butchery, the abject cutthroat work of that killing machine, had suddenly felt his chilling shudder become more violent; for before him arose a vision of another corpse, that of the fair, pretty child ripped open by a bomb and stretched yonder, at the entrance of the Duvillard mansion. Blood streamed from her delicate flesh, just as it had streamed from that decapitated neck. It was blood paying for blood; it was like payment for mankind's debt of wretchedness, for which payment is everlastingly being made, without man ever being able to free himself from suffering.

Above the square and the crowd all was still silent in the clear sky. How long had the abomination lasted? An eternity, perhaps, compressed into two or three minutes. And now came an awakening: the spectators emerged from their nightmare with quivering hands, livid faces, and eyes expressive of compassion, disgust and fear.

"That makes another one. I've now seen four executions," said Massot, who felt ill at ease. "After all, I prefer to report weddings. Let us go off, I have all I want for my article."

Guillaume and Pierre followed him mechanically across the square, and again reached the corner of the Rue Merlin. And here they saw little Victor Mathis, with flaming eyes and white face, still standing in silence on the spot where they had left him. He could have seen nothing distinctly; but the thud of the knife was still echoing in his brain. A policeman at last gave him a push, and told him to move on. At this he looked the policeman in the face, stirred by sudden rage and ready to strangle him. Then, however, he quietly walked away, ascending the Rue de la Roquette, atop of which the lofty foliage of Pere-Lachaise could be seen, beneath the rising sun.

The brothers meantime fell upon a scene of explanations, which they heard without wishing to do so. Now that the sight was over, the Princess de Harn arrived, and she was the more furious as at the door of the wine shop she could see her new friend Duthil accompanying a woman.

"I say!" she exclaimed, "you are nice, you are, to have left me in the lurch like this! It was impossible for my carriage to get near, so I've had to come on foot through all those horrid people who have been jostling and insulting me."

Thereupon Duthil, with all promptitude, introduced Silviane to her, adding, in an aside, that he had taken a friend's place as the actress's escort. And then Rosemonde, who greatly wished to know Silviane, calmed down as if by enchantment, and put on her most engaging ways. "It would have delighted me, madame," said she, "to have seen this sight in the company of an artiste of your merit, one whom I admire so much, though I have never before had an opportunity of telling her so."

"Well, dear me, madame," replied Silviane, "you haven't lost much by arriving late. We were on that balcony there, and all that I could see were a few men pushing another one about.... It really isn't worth the trouble of coming."

"Well, now that we have become acquainted, madame," said the Princess, "I really hope that you will allow me to be your friend."

"Certainly, madame, my friend; and I shall be flattered and delighted to be yours."

Standing there, hand in hand, they smiled at one another. Silviane was very drunk, but her virginal expression had returned to her face; whilst Rosemonde seemed feverish with vicious curiosity. Duthil, whom the scene amused, now had but one thought, that of seeing Silviane home; so calling to Massot, who was approaching, he asked him where he should find a cab-rank. Rosemonde, however, at once offered her carriage, which was waiting in an adjacent street.

She would set the actress down at her door, said she, and the deputy at his; and such was her persistence in the matter that Duthil, greatly vexed, was obliged to accept her offer.

"Well, then, till to-morrow at the Madeleine," said Massot, again quite sprightly, as he shook hands with the Princess.

"Yes, till to-morrow, at the Madeleine and the Comedie."

"Ah! yes, of course!" he repeated, taking Silviane's hand, which he kissed. "The Madeleine in the morning and the Comedie in the evening... . We shall all be there to applaud you."

"Yes, I expect you to do so," said Silviane. "Till to-morrow, then!"

"Till to-morrow!"

The crowd was now wearily dispersing, to all appearance disappointed and ill at ease. A few enthusiasts alone lingered in order to witness the departure of the van in which Salvat's corpse would soon be removed; while bands of prowlers and harlots, looking very wan in the daylight, whistled or called to one another with some last filthy expression before returning to their dens. The headsman's assistants were hastily taking down the guillotine, and the square would soon be quite clear.

Pierre for his part wished to lead his brother away. Since the fall of the knife, Guillaume had remained as if stunned, without once opening his lips. In vain had Pierre tried to rouse him by pointing to the shutters of Mege's flat, which still remained closed, whereas every other window of the lofty house was wide open. Although the Socialist deputy hated the Anarchists, those shutters were doubtless closed as a protest against capital punishment. Whilst the multitude had been rushing to that frightful spectacle, Mege, still in bed, with his face turned to the wall, had probably been dreaming of how he would some day compel mankind to be happy beneath the rigid laws of Collectivism. Affectionate father as he was, the recent death of one of his children had quite upset his private life. His cough, too, had become a very bad one; but he ardently wished to live, for as soon as that new Monferrand ministry should have fallen beneath the interpellation which he already contemplated, his own turn would surely come: he would take the reins of power in hand, abolish the guillotine and decree justice and perfect felicity.

"Do you see, Guillaume?" Pierre gently repeated. "Mege hasn't opened his windows. He's a good fellow, after all; although our friends Bache and Morin dislike him." Then, as his brother still refrained from answering, Pierre added, "Come, let us go, we must get back home."

They both turned into the Rue de la Folie Regnault, and reached the outer Boulevards by way of the Rue du Chemin Vert. All the toilers of the district were now at work. In the long streets edged with low buildings, work-shops and factories, one heard engines snorting and machinery rumbling, while up above, the smoke from the lofty chimneys was assuming a rosy hue in the sunrise. Afterwards, when the brothers reached the Boulevard de Menilmontant and the Boulevard de Belleville, which they followed in turn at a leisurely pace, they witnessed the great rush of the working classes into central Paris. The stream poured forth from every side; from all the wretched streets of the faubourgs there was an endless exodus of toilers, who, having risen at dawn, were now hurrying, in the sharp morning air, to their daily labour. Some wore short jackets and others blouses; some were in velveteen trousers, others in linen overalls. Their thick shoes made their tramp a heavy one; their hanging hands were often deformed by work. And they seemed half asleep, not a smile was to be seen on any of those wan, weary faces turned yonder towards the everlasting task—the task which was begun afresh each day, and which—'twas their only chance—they hoped to be able to take up for ever and ever. There was no end to that drove of toilers, that army of various callings, that human flesh fated to manual labour, upon which Paris preys in order that she may live in luxury and enjoyment.

Then the procession continued across the Boulevard de la Villette, the Boulevard de la Chapelle, and the Boulevard de Rochechouart, where one reached the height of Montmartre. More and more workmen were ever coming down from their bare cold rooms and plunging into the huge city, whence, tired out, they would that evening merely bring back the bread of rancour. And now, too, came a stream of work-girls, some of them in bright skirts, some glancing at the passers-by; girls whose wages were so paltry, so insufficient, that now and again pretty ones among them never more turned their faces homewards, whilst the ugly ones wasted away, condemned to mere bread and water. A little later, moreover, came the employes, the clerks, the counter-jumpers, the whole world of frock-coated penury—"gentlemen" who devoured a roll as they hastened onward, worried the while by the dread of being unable to pay their rent, or by the problem of providing food for wife and children until the end of the month should come.* And now the sun was fast ascending on the horizon, the whole army of ants was out and about, and the toilsome day had begun with its ceaseless display of courage, energy and suffering.

* In Paris nearly all clerks and shop-assistants receive
monthly salaries, while most workmen are paid once a
fortnight.—Trans.

Never before had it been so plainly manifest to Pierre that work was a necessity, that it healed and saved. On the occasion of his visit to the Grandidier works, and later still, when he himself had felt the need of occupation, there had cone to him the thought that work was really the world's law. And after that hateful night, after that spilling of blood, after the slaughter of that toiler maddened by his dreams, there was consolation and hope in seeing the sun rise once more, and everlasting labour take up its wonted task. However hard it might prove, however unjustly it might be lotted out, was it not work which would some day bring both justice and happiness to the world?

All at once, as the brothers were climbing the steep hillside towards Guillaume's house, they perceived before and above them the basilica of the Sacred Heart rising majestically and triumphantly to the sky. This was no sublunar apparition, no dreamy vision of Domination standing face to face with nocturnal Paris. The sun now clothed the edifice with splendour, it looked golden and proud and victorious, flaring with immortal glory.

Then Guillaume, still silent, still feeling Salvat's last glance upon him, seemed to come to some sudden and final decision. He looked at the basilica with glowing eyes, and pronounced sentence upon it.

II. IN VANITY FAIR

THE wedding was to take place at noon, and for half an hour already guests had been pouring into the magnificently decorated church, which was leafy with evergreens and balmy with the scent of flowers. The high altar in the rear glowed with countless candles, and through the great doorway, which was wide open, one could see the peristyle decked with shrubs, the steps covered with a broad carpet, and the inquisitive crowd assembled on the square and even along the Rue Royale, under the bright sun.

After finding three more chairs for some ladies who had arrived rather late, Duthil remarked to Massot, who was jotting down names in his note-book: "Well, if any more come, they will have to remain standing."

"Who were those three?" the journalist inquired.

"The Duchess de Boisemont and her two daughters."

"Indeed! All the titled people of France, as well as all the financiers and politicians, are here! It's something more even than a swell Parisian wedding."

As a matter of fact all the spheres of "society" were gathered together there, and some at first seemed rather embarrassed at finding themselves beside others. Whilst Duvillard's name attracted all the princes of finance and politicians in power, Madame de Quinsac and her son were supported by the highest of the French aristocracy. The mere names of the witnesses sufficed to indicate what an extraordinary medley there was. On Gerard's side these witnesses were his uncle, General de Bozonnet, and the Marquis de Morigny; whilst on Camille's they were the great banker Louvard, and Monferrand, the President of the Council and Minister of Finances. The quiet bravado which the latter displayed in thus supporting the bride after being compromised in her father's financial intrigues imparted a piquant touch of impudence to his triumph. And public curiosity was further stimulated by the circumstance that the nuptial blessing was to be given by Monseigneur Martha, Bishop of Persepolis, the Pope's political agent in France, and the apostle of the endeavours to win the Republic over to the Church by pretending to "rally" to it.

"But, I was mistaken," now resumed Massot with a sneer. "I said a really Parisian wedding, did I not? But in point of fact this wedding is a symbol. It's the apotheosis of the bourgeoisie, my dear fellow—the old nobility sacrificing one of its sons on the altar of the golden calf in order that the Divinity and the gendarmes, being the masters of France once more, may rid us of those scoundrelly Socialists!"

Then, again correcting himself, he added: "But I was forgetting. There are no more Socialists. Their head was cut off the other morning."

Duthil found this very funny. Then in a confidential way he remarked: "You know that the marriage wasn't settled without a good deal of difficulty.... Have you read Sagnier's ignoble article this morning?"

"Yes, yes; but I knew it all before, everybody knew it."

Then in an undertone, understanding one another's slightest allusion, they went on chatting. It was only amidst a flood of tears and after a despairing struggle that Baroness Duvillard had consented to let her lover marry her daughter. And in doing so she had yielded to the sole desire of seeing Gerard rich and happy. She still regarded Camille with all the hatred of a defeated rival. Then, an equally painful contest had taken place at Madame de Quinsac's. The Countess had only overcome her revolt and consented to the marriage in order to save her son from the dangers which had threatened him since childhood; and the Marquis de Morigny had been so affected by her maternal abnegation, that in spite of all his anger he had resignedly agreed to be a witness, thus making a supreme sacrifice, that of his conscience, to the woman whom he had ever loved. And it was this frightful story that Sagnier—using transparent nicknames—had related in the "Voix du Peuple" that morning. He had even contrived to make it more horrid than it really was; for, as usual, he was badly informed, and he was naturally inclined to falsehood and invention, as by sending an ever thicker and more poisonous torrent from his sewer, he might, day by day, increase his paper's sales. Since Monferrand's victory had compelled him to leave the African Railways scandal on one side, he had fallen back on scandals in private life, stripping whole families bare and pelting them with mud.

All at once Duthil and Massot were approached by Chaigneux, who, with his shabby frock coat badly buttoned, wore both a melancholy and busy air. "Well, Monsieur Massot," said he, "what about your article on Silviane? Is it settled? Will it go in?"

As Chaigneux was always for sale, always ready to serve as a valet, it had occurred to Duvillard to make use of him to ensure Silviane's success at the Comedie. He had handed this sorry deputy over to the young woman, who entrusted him with all manner of dirty work, and sent him scouring Paris in search of applauders and advertisements. His eldest daughter was not yet married, and never had his four women folk weighed more heavily on his hands. His life had become a perfect hell; they had ended by beating him, if he did not bring a thousand-franc note home on the first day of every month.

"My article!" Massot replied; "no, it surely won't go in, my dear deputy. Fonsegue says that it's written in too laudatory a style for the 'Globe.' He asked me if I were having a joke with the paper."

Chaigneux became livid. The article in question was one written in advance, from the society point of view, on the success which Silviane would achieve in "Polyeucte," that evening, at the Comedie. The journalist, in the hope of pleasing her, had even shown her his "copy"; and she, quite delighted, now relied upon finding the article in print in the most sober and solemn organ of the Parisian press.

"Good heavens! what will become of us?" murmured the wretched Chaigneux. "It's absolutely necessary that the article should go in."

"Well, I'm quite agreeable. But speak to the governor yourself. He's standing yonder between Vignon and Dauvergne, the Minister of Public Instruction."

"Yes, I certainly will speak to him—but not here. By-and-by in the sacristy, during the procession. And I must also try to speak to Dauvergne, for our Silviane particularly wants him to be in the ministerial box this evening. Monferrand will be there; he promised Duvillard so."

Massot began to laugh, repeating the expression which had circulated through Paris directly after the actress's engagement: "The Silviane ministry.... Well, Dauvergne certainly owes that much to his godmother!" said he.

Just then the little Princess de Harn, coming up like a gust of wind, broke in upon the three men. "I've no seat, you know!" she cried.

Duthil fancied that it was a question of finding her a well-placed chair in the church. "You mustn't count on me," he answered. "I've just had no end of trouble in stowing the Duchess de Boisemont away with her two daughters."

"Oh, but I'm talking of this evening's performance. Come, my dear Duthil, you really must find me a little corner in somebody's box. I shall die, I know I shall, if I can't applaud our delicious, our incomparable friend!"

Ever since setting Silviane down at her door on the previous day, Rosemonde had been overflowing with admiration for her.

"Oh! you won't find a single remaining seat, madame," declared Chaigneux, putting on an air of importance. "We have distributed everything. I have just been offered three hundred francs for a stall."

"That's true, there has been a fight even for the bracket seats, however badly they might be placed," Duthil resumed. "I am very sorry, but you must not count on me.... Duvillard is the only person who might take you in his box. He told me that he would reserve me a seat there. And so far, I think, there are only three of us, including his son.... Ask Hyacinthe by-and-by to procure you an invitation."

Rosemonde, whom Hyacinthe had so greatly bored that she had given him his dismissal, felt the irony of Duthil's suggestion. Nevertheless, she exclaimed with an air of delight: "Ah, yes! Hyacinthe can't refuse me that. Thanks for your information, my dear Duthil. You are very nice, you are; for you settle things gaily even when they are rather sad.... And don't forget, mind, that you have promised to teach me politics. Ah! politics, my dear fellow, I feel that nothing will ever impassion me as politics do!"

Then she left them, hustled several people, and in spite of the crush ended by installing herself in the front row.

"Ah! what a crank she is!" muttered Massot with an air of amusement.

Then, as Chaigneux darted towards magistrate Amadieu to ask him in the most obsequious way if he had received his ticket, the journalist said to Duthil in a whisper: "By the way, my dear friend, is it true that Duvillard is going to launch his famous scheme for a Trans-Saharan railway? It would be a gigantic enterprise, a question of hundreds and hundreds of millions this time.... At the 'Globe' office yesterday evening, Fonsegue shrugged his shoulders and said it was madness, and would never come off!"

Duthil winked, and in a jesting way replied: "It's as good as done, my dear boy. Fonsegue will be kissing the governor's feet before another forty-eight hours are over."

Then he gaily gave the other to understand that golden manna would presently be raining down on the press and all faithful friends and willing helpers. Birds shake their feathers when the storm is over, and he, Duthil, was as spruce and lively, as joyous at the prospect of the presents he now expected, as if there had never been any African Railways scandal to upset him and make him turn pale with fright.

"The deuce!" muttered Massot, who had become serious. "So this affair here is more than a triumph: it's the promise of yet another harvest. Well, I'm no longer surprised at the crush of people."

At this moment the organs suddenly burst into a glorious hymn of greeting. The marriage procession was entering the church. A loud clamour had gone up from the crowd, which spread over the roadway of the Rue Royale and impeded the traffic there, while the cortege pompously ascended the steps in the bright sunshine. And it was now entering the edifice and advancing beneath the lofty, re-echoing vaults towards the high altar which flared with candles, whilst on either hand crowded the congregation, the men on the right and the women on the left. They had all risen and stood there smiling, with necks outstretched and eyes glowing with curiosity.

First, in the rear of the magnificent beadle, came Camille, leaning on the arm of her father, Baron Duvillard, who wore a proud expression befitting a day of victory. Veiled with superb point d'Alencon falling from her diadem of orange blossom, gowned in pleated silk muslin over an underskirt of white satin, the bride looked so extremely happy, so radiant at having conquered, that she seemed almost pretty. Moreover, she held herself so upright that one could scarcely detect that her left shoulder was higher than her right.

Next came Gerard, giving his arm to his mother, the Countess de Quinsac,—he looking very handsome and courtly, as was proper, and she displaying impassive dignity in her gown of peacock-blue silk embroidered with gold and steel beads. But it was particularly Eve whom people wished to see, and every neck was craned forward when she appeared on the arm of General Bozonnet, the bridegroom's first witness and nearest male relative. She was gowned in "old rose" taffetas trimmed with Valenciennes of priceless value, and never had she looked younger, more deliciously fair. Yet her eyes betrayed her emotion, though she strove to smile; and her languid grace bespoke her widowhood, her compassionate surrender of the man she loved. Monferrand, the Marquis de Morigny, and banker Louvard, the three other witnesses, followed the Baroness and General Bozonnet, each giving his arm to some lady of the family. A considerable sensation was caused by the appearance of Monferrand, who seemed on first-rate terms with himself, and jested familiarly with the lady he accompanied, a little brunette with a giddy air. Another who was noticed in the solemn, interminable procession was the bride's eccentric brother Hyacinthe, whose dress coat was of a cut never previously seen, with its tails broadly and symmetrically pleated.

When the affianced pair had taken their places before the prayer-stools awaiting them, and the members of both families and the witnesses had installed themselves in the rear in large armchairs, all gilding and red velvet, the ceremony was performed with extraordinary pomp. The cure of the Madeleine officiated in person; and vocalists from the Grand Opera reinforced the choir, which chanted the high mass to the accompaniment of the organs, whence came a continuous hymn of glory. All possible luxury and magnificence were displayed, as if to turn this wedding into some public festivity, a great victory, an event marking the apogee of a class. Even the impudent bravado attaching to the loathsome private drama which lay behind it all, and which was known to everybody, added a touch of abominable grandeur to the ceremony. But the truculent spirit of superiority and domination which characterised the proceedings became most manifest when Monseigneur Martha appeared in surplice and stole to pronounce the blessing. Tall of stature, fresh of face, and faintly smiling, he had his wonted air of amiable sovereignty, and it was with august unction that he pronounced the sacramental words, like some pontiff well pleased at reconciling the two great empires whose heirs he united. His address to the newly married couple was awaited with curiosity. It proved really marvellous, he himself triumphed in it. Was it not in that same church that he had baptised the bride's mother, that blond Eve, who was still so beautiful, that Jewess whom he himself had converted to the Catholic faith amidst the tears of emotion shed by all Paris society? Was it not there also that he had delivered his three famous addresses on the New Spirit, whence dated, to his thinking, the rout of science, the awakening of Christian spirituality, and that policy of rallying to the Republic which was to lead to its conquest?

So it was assuredly allowable for him to indulge in some delicate allusions, by way of congratulating himself on his work, now that he was marrying a poor scion of the old aristocracy to the five millions of that bourgeoise heiress, in whose person triumphed the class which had won the victory in 1789, and was now master of the land. The fourth estate, the duped, robbed people, alone had no place in those festivities. But by uniting the affianced pair before him in the bonds of wedlock, Monseigneur Martha sealed the new alliance, gave effect to the Pope's own policy, that stealthy effort of Jesuitical Opportunism which would take democracy, power and wealth to wife, in order to subdue and control them. When the prelate reached his peroration he turned towards Monferrand, who sat there smiling; and it was he, the Minister, whom he seemed to be addressing while he expressed the hope that the newly married pair would ever lead a truly Christian life of humility and obedience in all fear of God, of whose iron hand he spoke as if it were that of some gendarme charged with maintaining the peace of the world. Everybody was aware that there was some diplomatic understanding between the Bishop and the Minister, some secret pact or other whereby both satisfied their passion for authority, their craving to insinuate themselves into everything and reign supreme; and thus when the spectators saw Monferrand smiling in his somewhat sly, jovial way, they also exchanged smiles.

"Ah!" muttered Massot, who had remained near Duthil, "how amused old Justus Steinberger would be, if he were here to see his granddaughter marrying the last of the Quinsacs!"

"But these marriages are quite the thing, quite the fashion, my dear fellow," the deputy replied. "The Jews and the Christians, the bourgeois and the nobles, do quite right to come to an understanding, so as to found a new aristocracy. An aristocracy is needed, you know, for otherwise we should be swept away by the masses."

None the less Massot continued sneering at the idea of what a grimace Justus Steinberger would have made if he had heard Monseigneur Martha. It was rumoured in Paris that although the old Jew banker had ceased all intercourse with his daughter Eve since her conversion, he took a keen interest in everything she was reported to do or say, as if he were more than ever convinced that she would prove an avenging and dissolving agent among those Christians, whose destruction was asserted to be the dream of his race. If he had failed in his hope of overcoming Duvillard by giving her to him as a wife, he doubtless now consoled himself with thinking of the extraordinary fortune to which his blood had attained, by mingling with that of the harsh, old-time masters of his race, to whose corruption it gave a finishing touch. Therein perhaps lay that final Jewish conquest of the world of which people sometimes talked.

A last triumphal strain from the organ brought the ceremony to an end; whereupon the two families and the witnesses passed into the sacristy, where the acts were signed. And forthwith the great congratulatory procession commenced.

The bride and bridegroom at last stood side by side in the lofty but rather dim room, panelled with oak. How radiant with delight was Camille at the thought that it was all over, that she had triumphed and married that handsome man of high lineage, after wresting him with so much difficulty from one and all, her mother especially! She seemed to have grown taller. Deformed, swarthy, and ugly though she was, she drew herself up exultingly, whilst scores and scores of women, friends or acquaintances, scrambled and rushed upon her, pressing her hands or kissing her, and addressing her in words of ecstasy. Gerard, who rose both head and shoulders above his bride, and looked all the nobler and stronger beside one of such puny figure, shook hands and smiled like some Prince Charming, who good-naturedly allowed himself to be loved. Meanwhile, the relatives of the newly wedded pair, though they were drawn up in one line, formed two distinct groups past which the crowd pushed and surged with arms outstretched. Duvillard received the congratulations offered him as if he were some king well pleased with his people; whilst Eve, with a supreme effort, put on an enchanting mien, and answered one and all with scarcely a sign of the sobs which she was forcing back. Then, on the other side of the bridal pair, Madame de Quinsac stood between General de Bozonnet and the Marquis de Morigny. Very dignified, in fact almost haughty, she acknowledged most of the salutations addressed to her with a mere nod, giving her little withered hand only to those people with whom she was well acquainted. A sea of strange countenances encompassed her, and now and again when some particularly murky wave rolled by, a wave of men whose faces bespoke all the crimes of money-mongering, she and the Marquis exchanged glances of deep sadness. This tide continued sweeping by for nearly half an hour; and such was the number of those who wanted to shake hands with the bridal pair and their relatives, that the latter soon felt their arms ache.

Meantime, some folks lingered in the sacristy; little groups collected, and gay chatter rang out. Monferrand was immediately surrounded. Massot pointed out to Duthil how eagerly Public Prosecutor Lehmann rushed upon the Minister to pay him court. They were immediately joined by investigating magistrate Amadieu. And even M. de Larombiere, the judge, approached Monferrand, although he hated the Republic, and was an intimate friend of the Quinsacs. But then obedience and obsequiousness were necessary on the part of the magistracy, for it was dependent on those in power, who alone could give advancement, and appoint even as they dismissed. As for Lehmann, it was alleged that he had rendered assistance to Monferrand by spiriting away certain documents connected with the African Railways affair, whilst with regard to the smiling and extremely Parisian Amadieu, was it not to him that the government was indebted for Salvat's head?

"You know," muttered Massot, "they've all come to be thanked for guillotining that man yesterday. Monferrand owes that wretched fellow a fine taper; for in the first place his bomb prolonged the life of the Barroux ministry, and later on it made Monferrand prime minister, as a strong-handed man was particularly needed to strangle Anarchism. What a contest, eh? Monferrand on one side and Salvat on the other. It was all bound to end in a head being cut off; one was wanted.... Ah! just listen, they are talking of it."

This was true. As the three functionaries of the law drew near to pay their respects to the all-powerful Minister, they were questioned by lady friends whose curiosity had been roused by what they had read in the newspapers. Thereupon Amadieu, whom duty had taken to the execution, and who was proud of his own importance, and determined to destroy what he called "the legend of Salvat's heroic death," declared that the scoundrel had shown no true courage at all. His pride alone had kept him on his feet. Fright had so shaken and choked him that he had virtually been dead before the fall of the knife.

"Ah! that's true!" cried Duthil. "I was there myself."

Massot, however, pulled him by the arm, quite indignant at such an assertion, although as a rule he cared a rap for nothing. "You couldn't see anything, my dear fellow," said he; "Salvat died very bravely. It's really stupid to continue throwing mud at that poor devil even when he's dead."

However, the idea that Salvat had died like a coward was too pleasing a one to be rejected. It was, so to say, a last sacrifice deposited at Monferrand's feet with the object of propitiating him. He still smiled in his peaceful way, like a good-natured man who is stern only when necessity requires it. And he showed great amiability towards the three judicial functionaries, and thanked them for the bravery with which they had accomplished their painful duty to the very end. On the previous day, after the execution, he had obtained a formidable majority in the Chamber on a somewhat delicate matter of policy. Order reigned, said he, and all was for the very best in France. Then, on seeing Vignon—who like a cool gamester had made a point of attending the wedding in order to show people that he was superior to fortune—the Minister detained him, and made much of him, partly as a matter of tactics, for in spite of everything he could not help fearing that the future might belong to that young fellow, who showed himself so intelligent and cautious. When a mutual friend informed them that Barroux' health was now so bad that the doctors had given him up as lost, they both began to express their compassion. Poor Barroux! He had never recovered from that vote of the Chamber which had overthrown him. He had been sinking from day to day, stricken to the heart by his country's ingratitude, dying of that abominable charge of money-mongering and thieving; he who was so upright and so loyal, who had devoted his whole life to the Republic! But then, as Monferrand repeated, one should never confess. The public can't understand such a thing.

At this moment Duvillard, in some degree relinquishing his paternal duties, came to join the others, and the Minister then had to share the honours of triumph with him. For was not this banker the master? Was he not money personified—money, which is the only stable, everlasting force, far above all ephemeral tenure of power, such as attaches to those ministerial portfolios which pass so rapidly from hand to hand? Monferrand reigned, but he would pass away, and a like fate would some day fall on Vignon, who had already had a warning that one could not govern unless the millions of the financial world were on one's side. So was not the only real triumpher himself, the Baron—he who laid out five millions of francs on buying a scion of the aristocracy for his daughter, he who was the personification of the sovereign bourgeoisie, who controlled public fortune, and was determined to part with nothing, even were he attacked with bombs? All these festivities really centred in himself, he alone sat down to the banquet, leaving merely the crumbs from his table to the lowly, those wretched toilers who had been so cleverly duped at the time of the Revolution.

That African Railways affair was already but so much ancient history, buried, spirited away by a parliamentary commission. All who had been compromised in it, the Duthils, the Chaigneux, the Fonsegues and others, could now laugh merrily. They had been delivered from their nightmare by Monferrand's strong fist, and raised by Duvillard's triumph. Even Sagnier's ignoble article and miry revelations in the "Voix du Peuple" were of no real account, and could be treated with a shrug of the shoulders, for the public had been so saturated with denunciation and slander that it was now utterly weary of all noisy scandal. The only thing which aroused interest was the rumour that Duvillard's big affair of the Trans-Saharan Railway was soon to be launched, that millions of money would be handled, and that some of them would rain down upon faithful friends.

Whilst Duvillard was conversing in a friendly way with Monferrand and Dauvergne, the Minister of Public Instruction, who had joined them, Massot encountered Fonsegue, his editor, and said to him in an undertone: "Duthil has just assured me that the Trans-Saharan business is ready, and that they mean to chance it with the Chamber. They declare that they are certain of success."

Fonsegue, however, was sceptical on the point. "It's impossible," said he; "they won't dare to begin again so soon."

Although he spoke in this fashion, the news had made him grave. He had lately had such a terrible fright through his imprudence in the African Railways affair, that he had vowed he would take every precaution in future. Still, this did not mean that he would refuse to participate in matters of business. The best course was to wait and study them, and then secure a share in all that seemed profitable. In the present instance he felt somewhat worried. However, whilst he stood there watching the group around Duvillard and the two ministers, he suddenly perceived Chaigneux, who, flitting hither and thither, was still beating up applauders for that evening's performance. He sang Silviane's praises in every key, predicted a most tremendous success, and did his very best to stimulate curiosity. At last he approached Dauvergne, and with his long figure bent double exclaimed: "My dear Minister, I have a particular request to make to you on the part of a very charming person, whose victory will not be complete this evening if you do not condescend to favour her with your vote."

Dauvergne, a tall, fair, good-looking man, whose blue eyes smiled behind his glasses, listened to Chaigneux with an affable air. He was proving a great success at the Ministry of Public Instruction, although he knew nothing of University matters. However, like a real Parisian of Dijon, as people called him, he was possessed of some tact and skill, gave entertainments at which his young and charming wife outshone all others, and passed as being quite an enlightened friend of writers and artists. Silviane's engagement at the Comedie, which so far was his most notable achievement, and which would have shaken the position of any other minister, had by a curious chance rendered him popular. It was regarded as something original and amusing.

On understanding that Chaigneux simply wished to make sure of his presence at the Comedie that evening, he became yet more affable. "Why, certainly, I shall be there, my dear deputy," he replied. "When one has such a charming god-daughter one mustn't forsake her in a moment of danger."

At this Monferrand, who had been lending ear, turned round. "And tell her," said he, "that I shall be there, too. She may therefore rely on having two more friends in the house."

Thereupon Duvillard, quite enraptured, his eyes glistening with emotion and gratitude, bowed to the two ministers as if they had granted him some never-to-be-forgotten favour.

When Chaigneux, on his side also, had returned thanks with a low bow, he happened to perceive Fonsegue, and forthwith he darted towards him and led him aside. "Ah! my dear colleague," he declared, "it is absolutely necessary that this matter should be settled. I regard it as of supreme importance."

"What are you speaking of?" inquired Fonsegue, much surprised.

"Why, of Massot's article, which you won't insert."

Thereupon, the director of the "Globe" plumply declared that he could not insert the article. He talked of his paper's dignity and gravity; and declared that the lavishing of such fulsome praise upon a hussy—yes, a mere hussy, in a journal whose exemplary morality and austerity had cost him so much labour, would seem monstrous and degrading. Personally, he did not care a fig about it if Silviane chose to make an exhibition of herself, well, he would be there to see; but the "Globe" was sacred.

Disconcerted and almost tearful, Chaigneux nevertheless renewed his attempt. "Come, my dear colleague," said he, "pray make a little effort for my sake. If the article isn't inserted, Duvillard will think that it is my fault. And you know that I really need his help. My eldest daughter's marriage has again been postponed, and I hardly know where to turn." Then perceiving that his own misfortunes in no wise touched Fonsegue, he added: "And do it for your own sake, my dear colleague, your own sake. For when all is said Duvillard knows what is in the article, and it is precisely because it is so favourable a one that he wishes to see it in the 'Globe.' Think it over; if the article isn't published, he will certainly turn his back on you."

For a moment Fonsegue remained silent. Was he thinking of the colossal Trans-Saharan enterprise? Was he reflecting that it would be hard to quarrel at such a moment and miss his own share in the coming distribution of millions among faithful friends? Perhaps so; however, the idea that it would be more prudent to await developments gained the day with him. "No, no," he said, "I can't, it's a matter of conscience."

In the mean time congratulations were still being tendered to the newly wedded couple. It seemed as if all Paris were passing through the sacristy; there were ever the same smiles and the same hand shakes. Gerard, Camille and their relatives, however weary they might feel, were forced to retain an air of delight while they stood there against the wall, pent up by the crowd. The heat was now becoming unbearable, and a cloud of dust arose as when some big flock goes by.

All at once little Princess de Harn, who had hitherto lingered nobody knew where, sprang out of the throng, flung her arms around Camille, kissed even Eve, and then kept Gerard's hand in her own while paying him extraordinary compliments. Then, on perceiving Hyacinthe, she took possession of him and carried him off into a corner. "I say," she exclaimed, "I have a favour to ask you."

The young man was wonderfully silent that day. His sister's wedding seemed to him a contemptible ceremony, the most vulgar that one could imagine. So here, thought he, was another pair accepting the horrid sexual law by which the absurdity of the world was perpetuated! For his part, he had decided that he would witness the proceedings in rigid silence, with a haughty air of disapproval. When Rosemonde spoke to him, he looked at her rather nervously, for he was glad that she had forsaken him for Duthil, and feared some fresh caprice on her part. At last, opening his mouth for the first time that day, he replied: "Oh, as a friend, you know, I will grant you whatever favour you like."

Forthwith the Princess explained that she would surely die if she did not witness the debut of her dear friend Silviane, of whom she had become such a passionate admirer. So she begged the young man to prevail on his father to give her a seat in his box, as she knew that one was left there.

Hyacinthe smiled. "Oh, willingly, my dear," said he; "I'll warn papa, there will be a seat for you."

Then, as the procession of guests at last drew to an end and the vestry began to empty, the bridal pair and their relatives were able to go off through the chattering throng, which still lingered about to bow to them and scrutinise them once more.

Gerard and Camille were to leave for an estate which Duvillard possessed in Normandy, directly after lunch. This repast, served at the princely mansion of the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, provided an opportunity for fresh display. The dining-room on the first floor had been transformed into a buffet, where reigned the greatest abundance and the most wonderful sumptuousness. Quite a reception too was held in the drawing-rooms, the large red salon, the little blue and silver salon and all the others, whose doors stood wide open. Although it had been arranged that only family friends should be invited, there were quite three hundred people present. The ministers had excused themselves, alleging that the weighty cares of public business required their presence elsewhere. But the magistrates, the deputies and the leading journalists who had attended the wedding were again assembled together. And in that throng of hungry folks, longing for some of the spoils of Duvillard's new venture, the people who felt most out of their element were Madame de Quinsac's few guests, whom General de Bozonnet and the Marquis de Morigny had seated on a sofa in the large red salon, which they did not quit.

Eve, who for her part felt quite overcome, both her moral and physical strength being exhausted, had seated herself in the little blue and silver drawing-room, which, with her passion for flowers, she had transformed into an arbour of roses. She would have fallen had she remained standing, the very floor had seemed to sink beneath her feet. Nevertheless, whenever a guest approached her she managed to force a smile, and appear beautiful and charming. Unlooked-for help at last came to her in the person of Monseigneur Martha, who had graciously honoured the lunch with his presence. He took an armchair near her, and began to talk to her in his amiable, caressing way. He was doubtless well aware of the frightful anguish which wrung the poor woman's heart, for he showed himself quite fatherly, eager to comfort her. She, however, talked on like some inconsolable widow bent on renouncing the world for God, who alone could bring her peace. Then, as the conversation turned on the Asylum for the Invalids of Labour, she declared that she was resolved to take her presidency very seriously, and, in fact, would exclusively devote herself to it, in the future.

"And as we are speaking of this, Monseigneur," said she, "I would even ask you to give me some advice.... I shall need somebody to help me, and I thought of securing the services of a priest whom I much admire, Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre Froment."

At this the Bishop became grave and embarrassed; but Princess Rosemonde, who was passing by with Duthil, had overheard the Baroness, and drawing near with her wonted impetuosity, she exclaimed: "Abbe Pierre Froment! Oh! I forgot to tell you, my dear, that I met him going about in jacket and trousers! And I've been told too that he cycles in the Bois with some creature or other. Isn't it true, Duthil, that we met him?"

The deputy bowed and smiled, whilst Eve clasped her hands in amazement. "Is it possible! A priest who was all charitable fervour, who had the faith and passion of an apostle!"

Thereupon Monseigneur intervened: "Yes, yes, great sorrows occasionally fall upon the Church. I heard of the madness of the unhappy man you speak of. I even thought it my duty to write to him, but he left my letter unanswered. I should so much have liked to stifle such a scandal! But there are abominable forces which we cannot always overcome; and so a day or two ago the archbishop was obliged to put him under interdict.... You must choose somebody else, madame."

It was quite a disaster. Eve gazed at Rosemonde and Duthil, without daring to ask them for particulars, but wondering what creature could have been so audacious as to turn a priest from the path of duty. She must assuredly be some shameless demented woman! And it seemed to Eve as if this crime gave a finishing touch to her own misfortune. With a wave of the arm, which took in all the luxury around her, the roses steeping her in perfume, and the crush of guests around the buffet, she murmured: "Ah! decidedly there's nothing but corruption left; one can no longer rely on anybody!"

Whilst this was going on, Camille happened to be alone in her own room getting ready to leave the house with Gerard. And all at once her brother Hyacinthe joined her there. "Ah! it's you, youngster!" she exclaimed. "Well, make haste if you want to kiss me, for I'm off now, thank goodness!"

He kissed her as she suggested, and then in a doctoral way replied: "I thought you had more self-command. The delight you have been showing all this morning quite disgusts me."

A quiet glance of contempt was her only answer. However, he continued: "You know very well that she'll take your Gerard from you again, directly you come back to Paris."

At this Camille's cheeks turned white and her eyes flared. She stepped towards her brother with clenched fists: "She! you say that she will take him from me!"

The "she" they referred to was their own mother.

"Listen, my boy! I'll kill her first!" continued Camille. "Ah, no! she needn't hope for that. I shall know how to keep the man that belongs to me.... And as for you, keep your spite to yourself, for I know you, remember; you are a mere child and a fool!"

He recoiled as if a viper were rearing its sharp, slender black head before him; and having always feared her, he thought it best to beat a retreat.

While the last guests were rushing upon the buffet and finishing the pillage there, the bridal pair took their leave, before driving off to the railway station. General de Bozonnet had joined a group in order to vent his usual complaints about compulsory military service, and the Marquis de Morigny was obliged to fetch him at the moment when the Countess de Quinsac was kissing her son and daughter-in-law. The old lady trembled with so much emotion that the Marquis respectfully ventured to sustain her. Meantime, Hyacinthe had started in search of his father, and at last found him near a window with the tottering Chaigneux, whom he was violently upbraiding, for Fonsegue's conscientious scruples had put him in a fury. Indeed, if Massot's article should not be inserted in the "Globe," Silviane might lay all the blame upon him, the Baron, and wreak further punishment upon him. However, upon being summoned by his son he had to don his triumphal air once more, kiss his daughter on the forehead, shake hands with his son-in-law, jest and wish them both a pleasant journey. Then Eve, near whom Monseigneur Martha had remained, smiling, in her turn had to say farewell. In this she evinced touching bravery; her determination to remain beautiful and charming until the very end lent her sufficient strength to show herself both gay and motherly.

She took hold of the slightly quivering hand which Gerard proffered with some embarrassment, and ventured to retain it for a moment in her own, in a good-hearted, affectionate way, instinct with all the heroism of renunciation. "Good by, Gerard," she said, "keep in good health, be happy." Then turning to Camille she kissed her on both cheeks, while Monseigneur Martha sat looking at them with an air of indulgent sympathy. They wished each other "Au revoir," but their voices trembled, and their eyes in meeting gleamed like swords; in the same way as beneath the kisses they had exchanged they had felt each other's teeth. Ah! how it enraged Camille to see her mother still so beautiful and fascinating in spite of age and grief! And for Eve how great the torture of beholding her daughter's youth, that youth which had overcome her, and was for ever wresting love from within her reach! No forgiveness was possible between them; they would still hate one another even in the family tomb, where some day they would sleep side by side.

All the same, that evening Baroness Duvillard excused herself from attending the performance of "Polyeucte" at the Comedie Francaise. She felt very tired and wished to go to bed early, said she. As a matter of fact she wept on her pillow all night long. Thus the Baron's stage-box on the first balcony tier contained only himself, Hyacinthe, Duthil, and little Princess de Harn.

At nine o'clock there was a full house, one of the brilliant chattering houses peculiar to great dramatic solemnities. All the society people who had marched through the sacristy of the Madeleine that morning were now assembled at the theatre, again feverish with curiosity, and on the lookout for the unexpected. One recognised the same faces and the sane smiles; the women acknowledged one another's presence with little signs of intelligence, the men understood each other at a word, a gesture. One and all had kept the appointment, the ladies with bared shoulders, the gentlemen with flowers in their button-holes. Fonsegue occupied the "Globe's" box, with two friendly families. Little Massot had his customary seat in the stalls. Amadieu, who was a faithful patron of the Comedie, was also to be seen there, as well as General de Bozonnet and Public Prosecutor Lehmann. The man who was most looked at, however, on account of his scandalous article that morning, was Sagnier, the terrible Sagnier, looking bloated and apoplectical. Then there was Chaigneux, who had kept merely a modest bracket-seat for himself, and who scoured the passages, and climbed to every tier, for the last time preaching enthusiasm. Finally, the two ministers Monferrand and Dauvergne appeared in the box facing Duvillard's; whereupon many knowing smiles were exchanged, for everybody was aware that these personages had come to help on the success of the debutante.

On the latter point there had still been unfavourable rumours only the previous day. Sagnier had declared that the debut of such a notorious harlot as Silviane at the Comedie Francaise, in such a part too as that of "Pauline," which was one of so much moral loftiness, could only be regarded as an impudent insult to public decency. The whole press, moreover, had long been up in arms against the young woman's extraordinary caprice. But then the affair had been talked of for six months past, so that Paris had grown used to the idea of seeing Silviane at the Comedie. And now it flocked thither with the one idea of being entertained. Before the curtain rose one could tell by the very atmosphere of the house that the audience was a jovial, good-humoured one, bent on enjoying itself, and ready to applaud should it find itself at all pleased.

The performance really proved extraordinary. When Silviane, chastely robed, made her appearance in the first act, the house was quite astonished by her virginal face, her innocent-looking mouth, and her eyes beaming with immaculate candour. Then, although the manner in which she had understood her part at first amazed people, it ended by charming them. From the moment of confiding in "Stratonice," from the moment of relating her dream, she turned "Pauline" into a soaring mystical creature, some saint, as it were, such as one sees in stained-glass windows, carried along by a Wagnerian Brunhilda riding the clouds. It was a thoroughly ridiculous conception of the part, contrary to reason and truth alike. Still, it only seemed to interest people the more, partly on account of mysticism being the fashion, and partly on account of the contrast between Silviane's assumed candour and real depravity. Her success increased from act to act, and some slight hissing which was attributed to Sagnier only helped to make the victory more complete. Monferrand and Dauvergne, as the newspapers afterwards related, gave the signal for applause; and the whole house joined in it, partly from amusement and partly perhaps in a spirit of irony.

During the interval between the fourth and fifth acts there was quite a procession of visitors to Duvillard's box, where the greatest excitement prevailed. Duthil, however, after absenting himself for a moment, came back to say: "You remember our influential critic, the one whom I brought to dinner at the Cafe Anglais? Well, he's repeating to everybody that 'Pauline' is merely a little bourgeoise, and is not transformed by the heavenly grace until the very finish of the piece. To turn her into a holy virgin from the outset simply kills the part, says he."

"Pooh!" repeated Duvillard, "let him argue if he likes, it will be all the more advertisement.... The important point is to get Massot's article inserted in the 'Globe' to-morrow morning."

On this point, unfortunately, the news was by no means good. Chaigneux, who had gone in search of Fonsegue, declared that the latter still hesitated in the matter in spite of Silviane's success, which he declared to be ridiculous. Thereupon, the Baron became quite angry. "Go and tell Fonsegue," he exclaimed, "that I insist on it, and that I shall remember what he does."

Meantime Princess Rosemonde was becoming quite delirious with enthusiasm. "My dear Hyacinthe," she pleaded, "please take me to Silviane's dressing-room; I can't wait, I really must go and kiss her."

"But we'll all go!" cried Duvillard, who heard her entreaty.

The passages were crowded, and there were people even on the stage. Moreover, when the party reached the door of Silviane's dressing-room, they found it shut. When the Baron knocked at it, a dresser replied that madame begged the gentlemen to wait a moment.

"Oh! a woman may surely go in," replied Rosemonde, hastily slipping through the doorway. "And you may come, Hyacinthe," she added; "there can be no objection to you."

Silviane was very hot, and a dresser was wiping her perspiring shoulders when Rosemonde darted forward and kissed her. Then they chatted together amidst the heat and glare from the gas and the intoxicating perfumes of all the flowers which were heaped up in the little room. Finally, Hyacinthe heard them promise to see one another after the performance, Silviane even inviting Rosemonde to drink a cup of tea with her at her house. At this the young man smiled complacently, and said to the actress: "Your carriage is waiting for you at the corner of the Rue Montpensier, is it not? Well, I'll take the Princess to it. That will be the simpler plan, you can both go off together!"

"Oh! how good of you," cried Rosemonde; "it's agreed."

Just then the door was opened, and the men, being admitted, began to pour forth their congratulations. However, they had to regain their seats in all haste so as to witness the fifth act. This proved quite a triumph, the whole house bursting into applause when Silviane spoke the famous line, "I see, I know, I believe, I am undeceived," with the rapturous enthusiasm of a holy martyr ascending to heaven. Nothing could have been more soul-like, it was said. And so when the performers were called before the curtain, Paris bestowed an ovation on that virgin of the stage, who, as Sagnier put it, knew so well how to act depravity at home.

Accompanied by Duthil, Duvillard at once went behind the scenes in order to fetch Silviane, while Hyacinthe escorted Rosemonde to the brougham waiting at the corner of the Rue Montpensier. Having helped her into it, the young man stood by, waiting. And he seemed to grow quite merry when his father came up with Silviane, and was stopped by her, just as, in his turn, he wished to get into the carriage.

"There's no room for you, my dear fellow," said she. "I've a friend with me."

Rosemonde's little smiling face then peered forth from the depths of the brougham. And the Baron remained there open-mouthed while the vehicle swiftly carried the two women away!

"Well, what would you have, my dear fellow?" said Hyacinthe, by way of explanation to Duthil, who also seemed somewhat amazed by what had happened. "Rosemonde was worrying my life out, and so I got rid of her by packing her off with Silviane."

Duvillard was still standing on the pavement and still looking dazed when Chaigneux, who was going home quite tired out, recognised him, and came up to say that Fonsegue had thought the matter over, and that Massot's article would be duly inserted. In the passages, too, there had been a deal of talk about the famous Trans-Saharan project.

Then Hyacinthe led his father away, trying to comfort him like a sensible friend, who regarded woman as a base and impure creature. "Let's go home to bed," said he. "As that article is to appear, you can take it to her to-morrow. She will see you, sure enough."

Thereupon they lighted cigars, and now and again exchanging a few words, took their way up the Avenue de l'Opera, which at that hour was deserted and dismal. Meantime, above the slumbering houses of Paris the breeze wafted a prolonged sigh, the plaint, as it were, of an expiring world.

III. THE GOAL OF LABOUR

EVER since the execution of Salvat, Guillaume had become extremely taciturn. He seemed worried and absent-minded. He would work for hours at the manufacture of that dangerous powder of which he alone knew the formula, and the preparation of which was such a delicate matter that he would allow none to assist him. Then, at other times he would go off, and return tired out by some long solitary ramble. He remained very gentle at home, and strove to smile there. But whenever anybody spoke to him he started as if suddenly called back from dreamland.

Pierre imagined his brother had relied too much upon his powers of renunciation, and found the loss of Marie unbearable. Was it not some thought of her that haunted him now that the date fixed for the marriage drew nearer and nearer? One evening, therefore, Pierre ventured to speak out, again offering to leave the house and disappear.

But at the first words he uttered Guillaume stopped him, and affectionately replied: "Marie? Oh! I love her, I love her too well to regret what I have done. No, no! you only bring me happiness, I derive all my strength and courage from you now that I know you are both happy. ... And I assure you that you are mistaken, there is nothing at all the matter with me; my work absorbs me, perhaps, but that is all."

That same evening he managed to cast his gloom aside, and displayed delightful gaiety. During dinner he inquired if the upholsterer would soon call to arrange the two little rooms which Marie was to occupy with her husband over the workroom. The young woman, who since her marriage with Pierre had been decided had remained waiting with smiling patience, thereupon told Guillaume what it was she desired—first some hangings of red cotton stuff, then some polished pine furniture which would enable her to imagine she was in the country, and finally a carpet on the floor, because a carpet seemed to her the height of luxury. She laughed as she spoke, and Guillaume laughed with her in a gay and fatherly way. His good spirits brought much relief to Pierre, who concluded that he must have been mistaken in his surmises.

On the very morrow, however, Guillaume relapsed into a dreamy state. And so disquietude again came upon Pierre, particularly when he noticed that Mere-Grand also seemed to be unusually grave and silent. Not daring to address her, he tried to extract some information from his nephews, but neither Thomas nor Francois nor Antoine knew anything. Each of them quietly devoted his time to his work, respecting and worshipping his father, but never questioning him about his plans or enterprises. Whatever he might choose to do could only be right and good; and they, his sons, were ready to do the same and help him at the very first call, without pausing to inquire into his purpose. It was plain, however, that he kept them apart from anything at all perilous, that he retained all responsibility for himself, and that Mere-Grand alone was his confidante, the one whom he consulted and to whom he perhaps listened. Pierre therefore renounced his hope of learning anything from the sons, and directed his attention to the old lady, whose rigid gravity worried him the more as she and Guillaume frequently had private chats in the room she occupied upstairs. They shut themselves up there all alone, and remained together for hours without the faintest sound coming from the seemingly lifeless chamber.

One day, however, Pierre caught sight of Guillaume as he came out of it, carrying a little valise which appeared to be very heavy. And Pierre thereupon remembered both his brother's powder, one pound weight of which would have sufficed to destroy a cathedral, and the destructive engine which he had purposed bestowing upon France in order that she might be victorious over all other nations, and become the one great initiatory and liberative power. Pierre remembered too that the only person besides himself who knew his brother's secret was Mere-Grand, who, at the time when Guillaume was fearing some perquisition on the part of the police, had long slept upon the cartridges of the terrible explosive. But now why was Guillaume removing all the powder which he had been preparing for some time past? As this question occurred to Pierre, a sudden suspicion, a vague dread, came upon him, and gave him strength to ask his brother: "Have you reason to fear anything, since you won't keep things here? If they embarrass you, they can all be deposited at my house, nobody will make a search there."

Guillaume, whom these words astonished, gazed at Pierre fixedly, and then replied: "Yes, I have learnt that the arrests and perquisitions have begun afresh since that poor devil was guillotined; for they are in terror at the thought that some despairing fellow may avenge him. Moreover, it is hardly prudent to keep destructive agents of such great power here. I prefer to deposit them in a safe place. But not at Neuilly—oh! no indeed! they are not a present for you, brother." Guillaume spoke with outward calmness; and if he had started with surprise at the first moment, it had been scarcely perceptible.

"So everything is ready?" Pierre resumed. "You will soon be handing your engine of destruction over to the Minister of War, I presume?"

A gleam of hesitation appeared in the depths of Guillaume's eyes, and he was for a moment about to tell a falsehood. However, he ended by replying "No, I have renounced that intention. I have another idea."

He spoke these last words with so much energy and decision that Pierre did not dare to question him further, to ask him, for instance, what that other idea might be. From that moment, however, he quivered with anxious expectancy. From hour to hour Mere-Grand's lofty silence and Guillaume's rapt, energetic face seemed to tell him that some huge and terrifying scheme had come into being, and was growing and threatening the whole of Paris.

One afternoon, just as Thomas was about to repair to the Grandidier works, some one came to Guillaume's with the news that old Toussaint, the workman, had been stricken with a fresh attack of paralysis. Thomas thereupon decided that he would call upon the poor fellow on his way, for he held him in esteem and wished to ascertain if he could render him any help. Pierre expressed a desire to accompany his nephew, and they started off together about four o'clock.

On entering the one room which the Toussaints occupied, the room where they ate and slept, the visitors found the mechanician seated on a low chair near the table. He looked half dead, as if struck by lightning. It was a case of hemiplegia, which had paralysed the whole of his right side, his right leg and right arm, and had also spread to his face in such wise that he could no longer speak. The only sound he could raise was an incomprehensible guttural grunt. His mouth was drawn to the right, and his once round, good-natured-looking face, with tanned skin and bright eyes, had been twisted into a frightful mask of anguish. At fifty years of age, the unhappy man was utterly done for. His unkempt beard was as white as that of an octogenarian, and his knotty limbs, preyed upon by toil, were henceforth dead. Only his eyes remained alive, and they travelled around the room, going from one to another. By his side, eager to do what she could for him, was his wife, who remained stout even when she had little to eat, and still showed herself active and clear-headed, however great her misfortunes.

"It's a friendly visit, Toussaint," said she. "It's Monsieur Thomas who has come to see you with Monsieur l'Abbe." Then quietly correcting herself she added: "With Monsieur Pierre, his uncle. You see that you are not yet forsaken."

Toussaint wished to speak, but his fruitless efforts only brought two big tears to his eyes. Then he gazed at his visitors with an expression of indescribable woe, his jaws trembling convulsively.

"Don't put yourself out," repeated his wife. "The doctor told you that it would do you no good."

At the moment of entering the room, Pierre had already noticed two persons who had risen from their chairs and drawn somewhat on one side. And now to his great surprise he recognised that they were Madame Theodore and Celine, who were both decently clad, and looked as if they led a life of comfort. On hearing of Toussaint's misfortune they had come to see him, like good-hearted creatures, who, on their own side, had experienced the most cruel suffering. Pierre, on noticing that they now seemed to be beyond dire want, remembered what he had heard of the wonderful sympathy lavished on the child after her father's execution, the many presents and donations offered her, and the generous proposals that had been made to adopt her. These last had ended in her being adopted by a former friend of Salvat, who had sent her to school again, pending the time when she might be apprenticed to some trade, while, on the other hand, Madame Theodore had been placed as a nurse in a convalescent home. In such wise both had been saved.

When Pierre drew near to little Celine in order to kiss her, Madame Theodore told her to thank Monsieur l'Abbe—for so she still respectfully called him—for all that he had previously done for her. "It was you who brought us happiness, Monsieur l'Abbe," said she. "And that's a thing one can never forget. I'm always telling Celine to remember you in her prayers."

"And so, my child, you are now going to school again," said Pierre.

"Oh yes, Monsieur l'Abbe, and I'm well pleased at it. Besides, we no longer lack anything." Then, however, sudden emotion came over the girl, and she stammered with a sob: "Ah! if poor papa could only see us!"

Madame Theodore, meanwhile, had begun to take leave of Madame Toussaint. "Well, good by, we must go," said she. "What has happened to you is very sad, and we wanted to tell you how much it grieved us. The worry is that when misfortune falls on one, courage isn't enough to set things right.. .. Celine, come and kiss your uncle.... My poor brother, I hope you'll get back the use of your legs as soon as possible."

They kissed the paralysed man on the cheeks, and then went off. Toussaint had looked at them with his keen and still intelligent eyes, as if he longed to participate in the life and activity into which they were returning. And a jealous thought came to his wife, who usually was so placid and good-natured. "Ah! my poor old man!" said she, after propping him up with a pillow, "those two are luckier than we are. Everything succeeds with them since that madman, Salvat, had his head cut off. They're provided for. They've plenty of bread on the shelf."

Then, turning towards Pierre and Thomas, she continued: "We others are done for, you know, we're down in the mud, with no hope of getting out of it. But what would you have? My poor husband hasn't been guillotined, he's done nothing but work his whole life long; and now, you see, that's the end of him, he's like some old animal, no longer good for anything."

Having made her visitors sit down she next answered their compassionate questions. The doctor had called twice already, and had promised to restore the unhappy man's power of speech, and perhaps enable him to crawl round the room with the help of a stick. But as for ever being able to resume real work that must not be expected. And so what was the use of living on? Toussaint's eyes plainly declared that he would much rather die at once. When a workman can no longer work and no longer provide for his wife he is ripe for the grave.

"Savings indeed!" Madame Toussaint resumed. "There are folks who ask if we have any savings.... Well, we had nearly a thousand francs in the Savings Bank when Toussaint had his first attack. And some people don't know what a lot of prudence one needs to put by such a sum; for, after all, we're not savages, we have to allow ourselves a little enjoyment now and then, a good dish and a good bottle of wine.... Well, what with five months of enforced idleness, and the medicines, and the underdone meat that was ordered, we got to the end of our thousand francs; and now that it's all begun again we're not likely to taste any more bottled wine or roast mutton."

Fond of good cheer as she had always been, this cry, far more than the tears she was forcing back, revealed how much the future terrified her. She was there erect and brave in spite of everything; but what a downfall if she were no longer able to keep her room tidy, stew a piece of veal on Sundays, and gossip with the neighbours while awaiting her husband's return from work! Why, they might just as well be thrown into the gutter and carried off in the scavenger's cart.

However, Thomas intervened: "Isn't there an Asylum for the Invalids of Labour, and couldn't your husband get admitted to it?" he asked. "It seems to me that is just the place for him."

"Oh dear, no," the woman answered. "People spoke to me of that place before, and I got particulars of it. They don't take sick people there. When you call they tell you that there are hospitals for those who are ill."

With a wave of his hand Pierre confirmed her statement: it was useless to apply in that direction. He could again see himself scouring Paris, hurrying from the Lady President, Baroness Duvillard, to Fonsegue, the General Manager, and only securing a bed for Laveuve when the unhappy man was dead.

However, at that moment an infant was heard wailing, and to the amazement of both visitors Madame Toussaint entered the little closet where her son Charles had so long slept, and came out of it carrying a child, who looked scarcely twenty months old. "Well, yes," she explained, "this is Charles's boy. He was sleeping there in his father's old bed, and now you hear him, he's woke up.... You see, only last Wednesday, the day before Toussaint had his stroke, I went to fetch the little one at the nurse's at St. Denis, because she had threatened to cast him adrift since Charles had got into bad habits, and no longer paid her. I said to myself at the time that work was looking up, and that my husband and I would always be able to provide for a little mouth like that.... But just afterwards everything collapsed! At the same time, as the child's here now I can't go and leave him in the street."

While speaking in this fashion she walked to and fro, rocking the baby in her arms. And naturally enough she reverted to Charles's folly with the girl, who had run away, leaving that infant behind her. Things might not have been so very bad if Charles had still worked as steadily as he had done before he went soldiering. In those days he had never lost an hour, and had always brought all his pay home! But he had come back from the army with much less taste for work. He argued, and had ideas of his own. He certainly hadn't yet come to bomb-throwing like that madman Salvat, but he spent half his time with Socialists and Anarchists, who put his brain in a muddle. It was a real pity to see such a strong, good-hearted young fellow turning out badly like that. But it was said in the neighbourhood that many another was inclined the same way; that the best and most intelligent of the younger men felt tired of want and unremunerative labour, and would end by knocking everything to pieces rather than go on toiling with no certainty of food in their old age.

"Ah! yes," continued Madame Toussaint, "the sons are not like the fathers were. These fine fellows won't be as patient as my poor husband has been, letting hard work wear him away till he's become the sorry thing you see there.... Do you know what Charles said the other evening when he found his father on that chair, crippled like that, and unable to speak? Why, he shouted to him that he'd been a stupid jackass all his life, working himself to death for those bourgeois, who now wouldn't bring him so much as a glass of water. Then, as he none the less has a good heart, he began to cry his eyes out."

The baby was no longer wailing, still the good woman continued walking to and fro, rocking it in her arms and pressing it to her affectionate heart. Her son Charles could do no more for them, she said; perhaps he might be able to give them a five-franc piece now and again, but even that wasn't certain. It was of no use for her to go back to her old calling as a seamstress, she had lost all practice of it. And it would even be difficult for her to earn anything as charwoman, for she had that infant on her hands as well as her infirm husband—a big child, whom she would have to wash and feed. And so what would become of the three of them? She couldn't tell; but it made her shudder, however brave and motherly she tried to be.

For their part, Pierre and Thomas quivered with compassion, particularly when they saw big tears coursing down the cheeks of the wretched, stricken Toussaint, as he sat quite motionless in that little and still cleanly home of toil and want. The poor man had listened to his wife, and he looked at her and at the infant now sleeping in her arms. Voiceless, unable to cry his woe aloud, he experienced the most awful anguish. What dupery his long life of labour had been! how frightfully unjust it was that all his efforts should end in such sufferings! how exasperating it was to feel himself powerless, and to see those whom he loved and who were as innocent as himself suffer and die by reason of his own suffering and death! Ah! poor old man, cripple that he was, ending like some beast of burden that has foundered by the roadside—that goal of labour! And it was all so revolting and so monstrous that he tried to put it into words, and his desperate grief ended in a frightful, raucous grunt.

"Be quiet, don't do yourself harm!" concluded Madame Toussaint. "Things are like that, and there's no mending them."

Then she went to put the child to bed again, and on her return, just as Thomas and Pierre were about to speak to her of Toussaint's employer, M. Grandidier, a fresh visitor arrived. Thereupon the others decided to wait.

The new comer was Madame Chretiennot, Toussaint's other sister, eighteen years younger than himself. Her husband, the little clerk, had compelled her to break off almost all intercourse with her relatives, as he felt ashamed of them; nevertheless, having heard of her brother's misfortune, she had very properly come to condole with him. She wore a gown of cheap flimsy silk, and a hat trimmed with red poppies, which she had freshened up three times already; but in spite of this display her appearance bespoke penury, and she did her best to hide her feet on account of the shabbiness of her boots. Moreover, she was no longer the beautiful Hortense. Since a recent miscarriage, all trace of her good looks had disappeared.

The lamentable appearance of her brother and the bareness of that home of suffering chilled her directly she crossed the threshold. And as soon as she had kissed Toussaint, and said how sorry she was to find him in such a condition, she began to lament her own fate, and recount her troubles, for fear lest she should be asked for any help.

"Ah! my dear," she said to her sister-in-law, "you are certainly much to be pitied! But if you only knew! We all have our troubles. Thus in my case, obliged as I am to dress fairly well on account of my husband's position, I have more trouble than you can imagine in making both ends meet. One can't go far on a salary of three thousand francs a year, when one has to pay seven hundred francs' rent out of it. You will perhaps say that we might lodge ourselves in a more modest way; but we can't, my dear, I must have a salon on account of the visits I receive. So just count!... Then there are my two girls. I've had to send them to school; Lucienne has begun to learn the piano and Marcelle has some taste for drawing.... By the way, I would have brought them with me, but I feared it would upset them too much. You will excuse me, won't you?"

Then she spoke of all the worries which she had had with her husband on account of Salvat's ignominious death. Chretiennot, vain, quarrelsome little fellow that he was, felt exasperated at now having a guillotine in his wife's family. And he had lately begun to treat the unfortunate woman most harshly, charging her with having brought about all their troubles, and even rendering her responsible for his own mediocrity, embittered as he was more and more each day by a confined life of office work. On some evenings they had downright quarrels; she stood up for herself, and related that when she was at the confectionery shop in the Rue des Martyrs she could have married a doctor had she only chosen, for the doctor found her quite pretty enough. Now, however, she was becoming plainer and plainer, and her husband felt that he was condemned to everlasting penury; so that their life was becoming more and more dismal and quarrelsome, and as unbearable—despite the pride of being "gentleman" and "lady"—as was the destitution of the working classes.

"All the same, my dear," at last said Madame Toussaint, weary of her sister-in-law's endless narrative of worries, "you have had one piece of luck. You won't have the trouble of bringing up a third child, now."

"That's true," replied Hortense, with a sigh of relief. "How we should have managed, I don't know.... Still, I was very ill, and I'm far from being in good health now. The doctor says that I don't eat enough, and that I ought to have good food."

Then she rose for the purpose of giving her brother another kiss and taking her departure; for she feared a scene on her husband's part should he happen to come home and find her absent. Once on her feet, however, she lingered there a moment longer, saying that she also had just seen her sister, Madame Theodore, and little Celine, both of them comfortably clad and looking happy. And with a touch of jealousy she added: "Well, my husband contents himself with slaving away at his office every day. He'll never do anything to get his head cut off; and it's quite certain that nobody will think of leaving an income to Marcelle and Lucienne.... Well, good by, my dear, you must be brave, one must always hope that things will turn out for the best."

When she had gone off, Pierre and Thomas inquired if M. Grandidier had heard of Toussaint's misfortune and agreed to do anything for him. Madame Toussaint answered that he had so far made only a vague promise; and on learning this they resolved to speak to him as warmly as they could on behalf of the old mechanician, who had spent as many as five and twenty years at the works. The misfortune was that a scheme for establishing a friendly society, and even a pension fund, which had been launched before the crisis from which the works were now recovering, had collapsed through a number of obstacles and complications. Had things turned out otherwise, Thomas might have had a pittance assured him, even though he was unable to work. But under the circumstances the only hope for the poor stricken fellow lay in his employer's compassion, if not his sense of justice.

As the baby again began to cry, Madame Toussaint went to fetch it, and she was once more carrying it to and fro, when Thomas pressed her husband's sound hand between both his own. "We will come back," said the young man; "we won't forsake you, Toussaint. You know very well that people like you, for you've always been a good and steady workman. So rely on us, we will do all we can."

Then they left him tearful and overpowered, in that dismal room, while, up and down beside him, his wife rocked the squealing infant—that other luckless creature, who was now so heavy on the old folks' hands, and like them was fated to die of want and unjust toil.

Toil, manual toil, panting at every effort, this was what Pierre and Thomas once more found at the works. From the slender pipes above the roofs spurted rhythmical puffs of steam, which seemed like the very breath of all that labour. And in the work-shops one found a continuous rumbling, a whole army of men in motion, forging, filing, and piercing, amidst the spinning of leather gearing and the trembling of machinery. The day was ending with a final feverish effort to complete some task or other before the bell should ring for departure.

On inquiring for the master Thomas learnt that he had not been seen since dejeuner, which was such an unusual occurrence that the young man at once feared some terrible scene in the silent pavilion, whose shutters were ever closed upon Grandidier's unhappy wife—that mad but beautiful creature, whom he loved so passionately that he had never been willing to part from her. The pavilion could be seen from the little glazed work-shop which Thomas usually occupied, and as he and Pierre stood waiting there, it looked very peaceful and pleasant amidst the big lilac-bushes planted round about it. Surely, they thought, it ought to have been brightened by the gay gown of a young woman and the laughter of playful children. But all at once a loud, piercing shriek reached their ears, followed by howls and moans, like those of an animal that is being beaten or possibly slaughtered. Ah! those howls ringing out amidst all the stir of the toiling works, punctuated it seemed by the rhythmical puffing of the steam, accompanied too by the dull rumbling of the machinery! The receipts of the business had been doubling and doubling since the last stock-taking; there was increase of prosperity every month, the bad times were over, far behind. Grandidier was realising a large fortune with his famous bicycle for the million, the "Lisette"; and the approaching vogue of motor-cars also promised huge gains, should he again start making little motor-engines, as he meant to do, as soon as Thomas's long-projected motor should be perfected. But what was wealth when in that dismal pavilion, whose shutters were ever closed, those frightful shrieks continued, proclaiming some terrible drama, which all the stir and bustle of the prosperous works were unable to stifle?

Pierre and Thomas looked at one another, pale and quivering. And all at once, as the cries ceased and the pavilion sank into death-like silence once more, the latter said in an undertone: "She is usually very gentle, she will sometimes spend whole days sitting on a carpet like a little child. He is fond of her when she is like that; he lays her down and picks her up, caresses her and makes her laugh as if she were a baby. Ah! how dreadfully sad it is! When an attack comes upon her she gets frantic, tries to bite herself, and kill herself by throwing herself against the walls. And then he has to struggle with her, for no one else is allowed to touch her. He tries to restrain her, and holds her in his arms to calm her.... But how terrible it was just now! Did you hear? I do not think she has ever had such a frightful attack before."

For a quarter of an hour longer profound silence prevailed. Then Grandidier came out of the pavilion, bareheaded and still ghastly pale. Passing the little glazed work-shop on his way, he perceived Thomas and Pierre there, and at once came in. But he was obliged to lean against a bench like a man who is dazed, haunted by a nightmare. His good-natured, energetic face retained an expression of acute anguish; and his left ear was scratched and bleeding. However, he at once wished to talk, overcome his feelings, and return to his life of activity. "I am very pleased to see you, my dear Thomas," said he, "I have been thinking over what you told me about our little motor. We must go into the matter again."

Seeing how distracted he was, it occurred to the young man that some sudden diversion, such as the story of another's misfortunes, might perhaps draw him from his haunting thoughts. "Of course I am at your disposal," he replied; "but before talking of that matter I should like to tell you that we have just seen Toussaint, that poor old fellow who has been stricken with paralysis. His awful fate has quite distressed us. He is in the greatest destitution, forsaken as it were by the roadside, after all his years of labour."

Thomas dwelt upon the quarter of a century which the old workman had spent at the factory, and suggested that it would be only just to take some account of his long efforts, the years of his life which he had devoted to the establishment. And he asked that he might be assisted in the name both of equity and compassion.

"Ah! monsieur," Pierre in his turn ventured to say. "I should like to take you for an instant into that bare room, and show you that poor, aged, worn-out, stricken man, who no longer has even the power of speech left him to tell people his sufferings. There can be no greater wretchedness than to die in this fashion, despairing of all kindliness and justice."

Grandidier had listened to them in silence. But big tears had irresistibly filled his eyes, and when he spoke it was in a very low and tremulous voice: "The greatest wretchedness, who can tell what it is? Who can speak of it if he has not known the wretchedness of others? Yes, yes, it's sad undoubtedly that poor Toussaint should be reduced to that state at his age, not knowing even if he will have food to eat on the morrow. But I know sorrows that are just as crushing, abominations which poison one's life in a still greater degree.... Ah! yes, food indeed! To think that happiness will reign in the world when everybody has food to eat! What an idiotic hope!"

The whole grievous tragedy of his life was in the shudder which had come over him. To be the employer, the master, the man who is making money, who disposes of capital and is envied by his workmen, to own an establishment to which prosperity has returned, whose machinery coins gold, apparently leaving one no other trouble than that of pocketing one's profits; and yet at the same time to be the most wretched of men, to know no day exempt from anguish, to find each evening at one's hearth no other reward or prop than the most atrocious torture of the heart! Everything, even success, has to be paid for. And thus that triumpher, that money-maker, whose pile was growing larger at each successive inventory, was sobbing with bitter grief.

However, he showed himself kindly disposed towards Toussaint, and promised to assist him. As for a pension that was an idea which he could not entertain, as it was the negation of the wage-system such as it existed. He energetically defended his rights as an employer, repeating that the strain of competition would compel him to avail himself of them so long as the present system should endure. His part in it was to do good business in an honest way. However, he regretted that his men had never carried out the scheme of establishing a relief fund, and he said that he would do his best to induce them to take it in hand again.

Some colour had now come back to his checks; for on returning to the interests of his life of battle he felt his energy restored. He again reverted to the question of the little motor, and spoke of it for some time with Thomas, while Pierre waited, feeling quite upset. Ah! he thought, how universal was the thirst for happiness! Then, in spite of the many technical terms that were used he caught a little of what the others were saying. Small steam motors had been made at the works in former times; but they had not proved successes. In point of fact a new propelling force was needed. Electricity, though everyone foresaw its future triumph, was so far out of the question on account of the weight of the apparatus which its employment necessitated. So only petroleum remained, and the inconvenience attaching to its use was so great that victory and fortune would certainly rest with the manufacturer who should be able to replace it by some other hitherto unknown agent. In the discovery and adaptation of the latter lay the whole problem.

"Yes, I am eager about it now," at last exclaimed Grandidier in an animated way. "I allowed you to prosecute your experiments without troubling you with any inquisitive questions. But a solution is becoming imperative."

Thomas smiled: "Well, you must remain patient just a little longer," said he; "I believe that I am on the right road."

Then Grandidier shook hands with him and Pierre, and went off to make his usual round through his busy, bustling works, whilst near at hand, awaiting his return, stood the closed pavilion, where every evening he was fated to relapse into endless, incurable anguish.

The daylight was already waning when Pierre and Thomas, after re-ascending the height of Montmartre, walked towards the large work-shop which Jahan, the sculptor, had set up among the many sheds whose erection had been necessitated by the building of the Sacred Heart. There was here a stretch of ground littered with materials, an extraordinary chaos of building stone, beams and machinery; and pending the time when an army of navvies would come to set the whole place in order, one could see gaping trenches, rough flights of descending steps and fences, imperfectly closing doorways which conducted to the substructures of the basilica.

Halting in front of Jahan's work-shop, Thomas pointed to one of these doorways by which one could reach the foundation works. "Have you never had an idea of visiting the foundations?" he inquired of Pierre. "There's quite a city down there on which millions of money have been spent. They could only find firm soil at the very base of the height, and they had to excavate more than eighty shafts, fill them with concrete, and then rear their church on all those subterranean columns.... Yes, that is so. Of course the columns cannot be seen, but it is they who hold that insulting edifice aloft, right over Paris!"

Having drawn near to the fence, Pierre was looking at an open doorway beyond it, a sort of dark landing whence steps descended as if into the bowels of the earth. And he thought of those invisible columns of concrete, and of all the stubborn energy and desire for domination which had set and kept the edifice erect.

Thomas was at last obliged to call him. "Let us make haste," said he, "the twilight will soon be here. We shan't be able to see much."

They had arranged to meet Antoine at Jahan's, as the sculptor wished to show them a new model he had prepared. When they entered the work-shop they found the two assistants still working at the colossal angel which had been ordered for the basilica. Standing on a scaffolding they were rough-hewing its symmetrical wings, whilst Jahan, seated on a low chair, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his hands soiled with clay, was contemplating a figure some three feet high on which he had just been working.

"Ah! it's you," he exclaimed. "Antoine has been waiting more than half an hour for you. He's gone outside with Lise to see the sun set over Paris, I think. But they will soon be back."

Then he relapsed into silence, with his eyes fixed on his work.

This was a bare, erect, lofty female figure, of such august majesty, so simple were its lines, that it suggested something gigantic. The figure's abundant, outspread hair suggested rays around its face, which beamed with sovereign beauty like the sun. And its only gesture was one of offer and of greeting; its arms were thrown slightly forward, and its hands were open for the grasp of all mankind.

Still lingering in his dream Jahan began to speak slowly: "You remember that I wanted a pendant for my figure of Fecundity. I had modelled a Charity, but it pleased me so little and seemed so commonplace that I let the clay dry and spoil.... And then the idea of a figure of Justice came to me. But not a gowned figure with the sword and the scales! That wasn't the Justice that inspired me. What haunted my mind was the other Justice, the one that the lowly and the sufferers await, the one who alone can some day set a little order and happiness among us. And I pictured her like that, quite bare, quite simple, and very lofty. She is the sun as it were, a sun all beauty, harmony and strength; for justice is only to be found in the sun which shines in the heavens for one and all, and bestows on poor and rich alike its magnificence and light and warmth, which are the source of all life. And so my figure, you see, has her hands outstretched as if she were offering herself to all mankind, greeting it and granting it the gift of eternal life in eternal beauty. Ah! to be beautiful and strong and just, one's whole dream lies in that."

Jahan relighted his pipe and burst into a merry laugh. "Well, I think the good woman carries herself upright.... What do you fellows say?"

His visitors highly praised his work. Pierre for his part was much affected at finding in this artistic conception the very idea that he had so long been revolving in his mind—the idea of an era of Justice rising from the ruins of the world, which Charity after centuries of trial had failed to save.

Then the sculptor gaily explained that he had prepared his model there instead of at home, in order to console himself a little for his big dummy of an angel, the prescribed triteness of which disgusted him. Some fresh objections had been raised with respect to the folds of the robe, which gave some prominence to the thighs, and in the end he had been compelled to modify all of the drapery.

"Oh! it's just as they like!" he cried; "it's no work of mine, you know; it's simply an order which I'm executing just as a mason builds a wall. There's no religious art left, it has been killed by stupidity and disbelief. Ah! if social or human art could only revive, how glorious to be one of the first to bear the tidings!"

Then he paused. Where could the youngsters, Antoine and Lise, have got to, he wondered. He threw the door wide open, and, a little distance away, among the materials littering the waste ground, one could see Antoine's tall figure and Lise's short slender form standing out against the immensity of Paris, which was all golden amidst the sun's farewell. The young man's strong arm supported Lise, who with this help walked beside him without feeling any fatigue. Slender and graceful, like a girl blossoming into womanhood, she raised her eyes to his with a smile of infinite gratitude, which proclaimed that she belonged to him for evermore.

"Ah! they are coming back," said Jahan. "The miracle is now complete, you know. I'm delighted at it. I did not know what to do with her; I had even renounced all attempts to teach her to read; I left her for days together in a corner, infirm and tongue-tied like a lack-wit.... But your brother came and took her in hand somehow or other. She listened to him and understood him, and began to read and write with him, and grow intelligent and gay. Then, as her limbs still gained no suppleness, and she remained infirm, ailing and puny, he began by carrying her here, and then helped her to walk in such wise that she can now do so by herself. In a few weeks' time she has positively grown and become quite charming. Yes, I assure you, it is second birth, real creation. Just look at them!"

Antoine and Lise were still slowly approaching. The evening breeze which rose from the great city, where all was yet heat and sunshine, brought them a bath of life. If the young man had chosen that spot, with its splendid horizon, open to the full air which wafted all the germs of life, it was doubtless because he felt that nowhere else could he instil more vitality, more soul, more strength into her. And love had been created by love. He had found her asleep, benumbed, without power of motion or intellect, and he had awakened her, kindled life in her, loved her, that he might be loved by her in return. She was his work, she was part of himself.

"So you no longer feel tired, little one?" said Jahan.

She smiled divinely. "Oh! no, it's so pleasant, so beautiful, to walk straight on like this.... All I desire is to go on for ever and ever with Antoine."

The others laughed, and Jahan exclaimed in his good-natured way: "Let us hope that he won't take you so far. You've reached your destination now, and I shan't be the one to prevent you from being happy."

Antoine was already standing before the figure of Justice, to which the falling twilight seemed to impart a quiver of life. "Oh! how divinely simple, how divinely beautiful!" said he.

For his own part he had lately finished a new wood engraving, which depicted Lise holding a book in her hand, an engraving instinct with truth and emotion, showing her awakened to intelligence and love. And this time he had achieved his desire, making no preliminary drawing, but tackling the block with his graver, straight away, in presence of his model. And infinite hopefulness had come upon him, he was dreaming of great original works in which the whole period that he belonged to would live anew and for ever.

Thomas now wished to return home. So they shook hands with Jahan, who, as his day's work was over, put on his coat to take his sister back to the Rue du Calvaire.

"Till to-morrow, Lise," said Antoine, inclining his head to kiss her.

She raised herself on tip-toes, and offered him her eyes, which he had opened to life. "Till to-morrow, Antoine," said she.

Outside, the twilight was falling. Pierre was the first to cross the threshold, and as he did so, he saw so extraordinary a sight that for an instant he felt stupefied. But it was certain enough: he could plainly distinguish his brother Guillaume emerging from the gaping doorway which conducted to the foundations of the basilica. And he saw him hastily climb over the palings, and then pretend to be there by pure chance, as though he had come up from the Rue Lamarck. When he accosted his two sons, as if he were delighted to meet them, and began to say that he had just come from Paris, Pierre asked himself if he had been dreaming. However, an anxious glance which his brother cast at him convinced him that he had been right. And then he not only felt ill at ease in presence of that man whom he had never previously known to lie, but it seemed to him that he was at last on the track of all he had feared, the formidable mystery that he had for some time past felt brewing around him in the little peaceful house.

When Guillaume, his sons and his brother reached home and entered the large workroom overlooking Paris, it was so dark that they fancied nobody was there.

"What! nobody in?" said Guillaume.

But in a somewhat low, quiet voice Francois answered out of the gloom: "Why, yes, I'm here."

He had remained at his table, where he had worked the whole afternoon, and as he could no longer read, he now sat in a dreamy mood with his head resting on his hands, his eyes wandering over Paris, where night was gradually falling. As his examination was now near at hand, he was living in a state of severe mental strain.

"What, you are still working there!" said his father. "Why didn't you ask for a lamp?"

"No, I wasn't working, I was looking at Paris," Francois slowly answered. "It's singular how the night falls over it by degrees. The last district that remained visible was the Montague Ste. Genevieve, the plateau of the Pantheon, where all our knowledge and science have grown up. A sun-ray still gilds the schools and libraries and laboratories, when the low-lying districts of trade are already steeped in darkness. I won't say that the planet has a particular partiality for us at the Ecole Normale, but it's certain that its beams still linger on our roofs, when they are to be seen nowhere else."

He began to laugh at his jest. Still one could see how ardent was his faith in mental effort, how entirely he gave himself to mental labour, which, in his opinion, could alone bring truth, establish justice and create happiness.

Then came a short spell of silence. Paris sank more and more deeply into the night, growing black and mysterious, till all at once sparks of light began to appear.

"The lamps are being lighted," resumed Francois; "work is being resumed on all sides."

Then Guillaume, who likewise had been dreaming, immersed in his fixed idea, exclaimed: "Work, yes, no doubt! But for work to give a full harvest it must be fertilised by will. There is something which is superior to work."

Thomas and Antoine had drawn near. And Francois, as much for them as for himself, inquired: "What is that, father?"

"Action."

For a moment the three young men remained silent, impressed by the solemnity of the hour, quivering too beneath the great waves of darkness which rose from the vague ocean of the city. Then a young voice remarked, though whose it was one could not tell: "Action is but work."

And Pierre, who lacked the respectful quietude, the silent faith, of his nephews, now felt his nervousness increasing. That huge and terrifying mystery of which he was dimly conscious rose before him, while a great quiver sped by in the darkness, over that black city where the lamps were now being lighted for a whole passionate night of work.

IV. THE CRISIS

A GREAT ceremony was to take place that day at the basilica of the Sacred Heart. Ten thousand pilgrims were to be present there, at a solemn consecration of the Holy Sacrament; and pending the arrival of four o'clock, the hour fixed for the service, Montmartre would be invaded by people. Its slopes would be black with swarming devotees, the shops where religious emblems and pictures were sold would be besieged, the cafes and taverns would be crowded to overflowing. It would all be like some huge fair, and meantime the big bell of the basilica, "La Savoyarde," would be ringing peal on peal over the holiday-making multitude.

When Pierre entered the workroom in the morning he perceived Guillaume and Mere-Grand alone there; and a remark which he heard the former make caused him to stop short and listen from behind a tall-revolving bookstand. Mere-Grand sat sewing in her usual place near the big window, while Guillaume stood before her, speaking in a low voice.

"Mother," said he, "everything is ready, it is for to-day."

She let her work fall, and raised her eyes, looking very pale. "Ah!" she said, "so you have made up your mind."

"Yes, irrevocably. At four o'clock I shall be yonder, and it will all be over."

"'Tis well—you are the master."

Silence fell, terrible silence. Guillaume's voice seemed to come from far away, from somewhere beyond the world. It was evident that his resolution was unshakable, that his tragic dream, his fixed idea of martyrdom, wholly absorbed him. Mere-Grand looked at him with her pale eyes, like an heroic woman who had grown old in relieving the sufferings of others, and had ever shown all the abnegation and devotion of an intrepid heart, which nothing but the idea of duty could influence. She knew Guillaume's terrible scheme, and had helped him to regulate the pettiest details of it; but if on the one hand, after all the iniquity she had seen and endured, she admitted that fierce and exemplary punishment might seem necessary, and that even the idea of purifying the world by the fire of a volcano might be entertained, on the other hand, she believed too strongly in the necessity of living one's life bravely to the very end, to be able, under any circumstances, to regard death as either good or profitable.

"My son," she gently resumed, "I witnessed the growth of your scheme, and it neither surprised nor angered me. I accepted it as one accepts lightning, the very fire of the skies, something of sovereign purity and power. And I have helped you through it all, and have taken upon myself to act as the mouthpiece of your conscience.... But let me tell you once more, one ought never to desert the cause of life."

"It is useless to speak, mother," Guillaume replied: "I have resolved to give my life and cannot take it back.... Are you now unwilling to carry out my desires, remain here, and act as we have decided, when all is over?"

She did not answer this inquiry, but in her turn, speaking slowly and gravely, put a question to him: "So it is useless for me to speak to you of the children, myself and the house?" said she. "You have thought it all over, you are quite determined?" And as he simply answered "Yes," she added: "'Tis well, you are the master.... I will be the one who is to remain behind and act. And you may be without fear, your bequest is in good hands. All that we have decided together shall be done."

Once more they became silent. Then she again inquired: "At four o'clock, you say, at the moment of that consecration?"

"Yes, at four o'clock."

She was still looking at him with her pale eyes, and there seemed to be something superhuman in her simplicity and grandeur as she sat there in her thin black gown. Her glance, in which the greatest bravery and the deepest sadness mingled, filled Guillaume with acute emotion. His hands began to tremble, and he asked: "Will you let me kiss you, mother?"

"Oh! right willingly, my son," she responded. "Your path of duty may not be mine, but you see I respect your views and love you."

They kissed one another, and when Pierre, whom the scene had chilled to his heart, presented himself as if he were just arriving, Mere-Grand had quietly taken up her needlework once more, while Guillaume was going to and fro, setting one of his laboratory shelves in order with all his wonted activity.

At noon when lunch was ready, they found it necessary to wait for Thomas, who had not yet come home. His brothers Francois and Antoine complained in a jesting way, saying that they were dying of hunger, while for her part Marie, who had made a creme, and was very proud of it, declared that they would eat it all, and that those who came late would have to go without tasting it. When Thomas eventually put in an appearance he was greeted with jeers.

"But it wasn't my fault," said he; "I stupidly came up the hill by way of the Rue de la Barre, and you can have no notion what a crowd I fell upon. Quite ten thousand pilgrims must have camped there last night. I am told that as many as possible were huddled together in the St. Joseph Refuge. The others no doubt had to sleep in the open air. And now they are busy eating, here, there and everywhere, all over the patches of waste ground and even on the pavements. One can scarcely set one foot before the other without risk of treading on somebody."

The meal proved a very gay one, though Pierre found the gaiety forced and excessive. Yet the young people could surely know nothing of the frightful, invisible thing which to Pierre ever seemed to be hovering around in the bright sunlight of that splendid June day. Was it that the dim presentiment which comes to loving hearts when mourning threatens them, swept by during the short intervals of silence that followed the joyous outbursts? Although Guillaume looked somewhat pale, and spoke with unusual caressing softness, he retained his customary bright smile. But, on the other hand, never had Mere-Grand been more silent or more grave.

Marie's creme proved a great success, and the others congratulated her on it so fulsomely that they made her blush. Then, all at once, heavy silence fell once more, a deathly chill seemed to sweep by, making every face turn pale—even while they were still cleaning their plates with their little spoons.

"Ah! that bell," exclaimed Francois; "it is really intolerable. I can feel my head splitting."

He referred to "La Savoyarde," the big bell of the basilica, which had now begun to toll, sending forth deep sonorous volumes of sound, which ever and ever winged their flight over the immensity of Paris. In the workroom they were all listening to the clang.

"Will it keep on like that till four o'clock?" asked Marie.

"Oh! at four o'clock," replied Thomas, "at the moment of the consecration you will hear something much louder than that. The great peals of joy, the song of triumph will then ring out."

Guillaume was still smiling. "Yes, yes," said he, "those who don't want to be deafened for life had better keep their windows closed. The worst is, that Paris has to hear it whether it will or no, and even as far away as the Pantheon, so I'm told."

Meantime Mere-Grand remained silent and impassive. Antoine for his part expressed his disgust with the horrible religious pictures for which the pilgrims fought—pictures which in some respects suggested those on the lids of sweetmeat boxes, although they depicted the Christ with His breast ripped open and displaying His bleeding heart. There could be no more repulsive materialism, no grosser or baser art, said Antoine. Then they rose from table, talking at the top of their voices so as to make themselves heard above the incessant din which came from the big bell.

Immediately afterwards they all set to work again. Mere-Grand took her everlasting needlework in hand once more, while Marie, sitting near her, continued some embroidery. The young men also attended to their respective tasks, and now and again raised their heads and exchanged a few words. Guillaume, for his part, likewise seemed very busy; Pierre alone coming and going in a state of anguish, beholding them all as in a nightmare, and attributing some terrible meaning to the most innocent remarks. During dejeuner, in order to explain the frightful discomfort into which he was thrown by the gaiety of the meal, he had been obliged to say that he felt poorly. And now he was looking and listening and waiting with ever-growing anxiety.

Shortly before three o'clock, Guillaume glanced at his watch and then quietly took up his hat. "Well," said he, "I'm going out."

His sons, Mere-Grand and Marie raised their heads.

"I'm going out," he repeated, "au revoir."

Still he did not go off. Pierre could divine that he was struggling, stiffening himself against the frightful tempest which was raging within him, striving to prevent either shudder or pallor from betraying his awful secret. Ah! he must have suffered keenly; he dared not give his sons a last kiss, for fear lest he might rouse some suspicion in their minds, which would impel them to oppose him and prevent his death! At last with supreme heroism he managed to overcome himself.

"Au revoir, boys."

"Au revoir, father. Will you be home early?"

"Yes, yes.... Don't worry about me, do plenty of work."

Mere-Grand, still majestically silent, kept her eyes fixed upon him. Her he had ventured to kiss, and their glances met and mingled, instinct with all that he had decided and that she had promised: their common dream of truth and justice.

"I say, Guillaume," exclaimed Marie gaily, "will you undertake a commission for me if you are going down by way of the Rue des Martyrs?"

"Why, certainly," he replied.

"Well, then, please look in at my dressmaker's, and tell her that I shan't go to try my gown on till to-morrow morning."

It was a question of her wedding dress, a gown of light grey silk, the stylishness of which she considered very amusing. Whenever she spoke of it, both she and the others began to laugh.

"It's understood, my dear," said Guillaume, likewise making merry over it. "We know it's Cinderella's court robe, eh? The fairy brocade and lace that are to make you very beautiful and for ever happy."

However, the laughter ceased, and in the sudden silence which fell, it again seemed as if death were passing by with a great flapping of wings and an icy gust which chilled the hearts of everyone remaining there.

"It's understood; so now I'm really off," resumed Guillaume. "Au revoir, children."

Then he sallied forth, without even turning round, and for a moment they could hear the firm tread of his feet over the garden gravel.

Pierre having invented a pretext was able to follow him a couple of minutes afterwards. As a matter of fact there was no need for him to dog Guillaume's heels, for he knew where his brother was going. He was thoroughly convinced that he would find him at that doorway, conducting to the foundations of the basilica, whence he had seen him emerge two days before. And so he wasted no time in looking for him among the crowd of pilgrims going to the church. His only thought was to hurry on and reach Jahan's workshop. And in accordance with his expectation, just as he arrived there, he perceived Guillaume slipping between the broken palings. The crush and the confusion prevailing among the concourse of believers favored Pierre as it had his brother, in such wise that he was able to follow the latter and enter the doorway without being noticed. Once there he had to pause and draw breath for a moment, so greatly did the beating of his heart oppress him.

A precipitous flight of steps, where all was steeped in darkness, descended from the narrow entry. It was with infinite precaution that Pierre ventured into the gloom, which ever grew denser and denser. He lowered his feet gently so as to make no noise, and feeling the walls with his hands, turned round and round as he went lower and lower into a kind of well. However, the descent was not a very long one. As soon as he found beaten ground beneath his feet he paused, no longer daring to stir for fear of betraying his presence. The darkness was like ink, and there was not a sound, a breath; the silence was complete.

How should he find his way? he wondered. Which direction ought he to take? He was still hesitating when some twenty paces away he suddenly saw a bright spark, the gleam of a lucifer. Guillaume was lighting a candle. Pierre recognised his broad shoulders, and from that moment he simply had to follow the flickering light along a walled and vaulted subterranean gallery. It seemed to be interminable and to run in a northerly direction, towards the nave of the basilica.

All at once the little light at last stopped, while Pierre, anxious to see what would happen, continued to advance, treading as softly as he could and remaining in the gloom. He found that Guillaume had stood his candle upon the ground in the middle of a kind of low rotunda under the crypt, and that he had knelt down and moved aside a long flagstone which seemed to cover a cavity. They were here among the foundations of the basilica; and one of the columns or piles of concrete poured into shafts in order to support the building could be seen. The gap, which the stone slab removed by Guillaume had covered, was by the very side of the pillar; it was either some natural surface flaw, or a deep fissure caused by some subsidence or settling of the soil. The heads of other pillars could be descried around, and these the cleft seemed to be reaching, for little slits branched out in all directions. Then, on seeing his brother leaning forward, like one who is for the last time examining a mine he has laid before applying a match to the fuse, Pierre suddenly understood the whole terrifying business. Considerable quantities of the new explosive had been brought to that spot. Guillaume had made the journey a score of times at carefully selected hours, and all his powder had been poured into the gap beside the pillar, spreading to the slightest rifts below, saturating the soil at a great depth, and in this wise forming a natural mine of incalculable force. And now the powder was flush with the flagstone which Guillaume has just moved aside. It was only necessary to throw a match there, and everything would be blown into the air!

For a moment an acute chill of horror rooted Pierre to the spot. He could neither have taken a step nor raised a cry. He pictured the swarming throng above him, the ten thousand pilgrims crowding the lofty naves of the basilica to witness the solemn consecration of the Host. Peal upon peal flew from "La Savoyarde," incense smoked, and ten thousand voices raised a hymn of magnificence and praise. And all at once came thunder and earthquake, and a volcano opening and belching forth fire and smoke, and swallowing up the whole church and its multitude of worshippers. Breaking the concrete piles and rending the unsound soil, the explosion, which was certain to be one of extraordinary violence, would doubtless split the edifice atwain, and hurl one-half down the slopes descending towards Paris, whilst the other on the side of the apse would crumble and collapse upon the spot where it stood. And how fearful would be the avalanche; a broken forest of scaffoldings, a hail of stonework, rushing and bounding through the dust and smoke on to the roofs below; whilst the violence of the shock would threaten the whole of Montmartre, which, it seemed likely, must stagger and sink in one huge mass of ruins!

However, Guillaume had again risen. The candle standing on the ground, its flame shooting up, erect and slender, threw his huge shadow all over the subterranean vault. Amidst the dense blackness the light looked like some dismal stationary star. Guillaume drew near to it in order to see what time it was by his watch. It proved to be five minutes past three. So he had nearly another hour to wait. He was in no hurry, he wished to carry out his design punctually, at the precise moment he had selected; and he therefore sat down on a block of stone, and remained there without moving, quiet and patient. The candle now cast its light upon his pale face, upon his towering brow crowned with white hair, upon the whole of his energetic countenance, which still looked handsome and young, thanks to his bright eyes and dark moustaches. And not a muscle of his face stirred; he simply gazed into the void. What thoughts could be passing through his mind at that supreme moment? Who could tell? There was not a quiver; heavy night, the deep eternal silence of the earth reigned all around.

Then Pierre, having quieted his palpitating heart, drew near. At the sound of his footsteps Guillaume rose menacingly, but he immediately recognised his brother, and did not seem astonished to see him.

"Ah! it's you," he said, "you followed me.... I felt that you possessed my secret. And it grieves me that you should have abused your knowledge to join me here. You might have spared me this last sorrow."

Pierre clasped his trembling hands, and at once tried to entreat him. "Brother, brother," he began.

"No, don't speak yet," said Guillaume, "if you absolutely wish it I will listen to you by-and-by. We have nearly an hour before us, so we can chat. But I want you to understand the futility of all you may think needful to tell me. My resolution is unshakable; I was a long time coming to it, and in carrying it out I shall simply be acting in accordance with my reason and my conscience."

Then he quietly related that having decided upon a great deed he had long hesitated as to which edifice he should destroy. The opera-house had momentarily tempted him, but he had reflected that there would be no great significance in the whirlwind of anger and justice destroying a little set of enjoyers. In fact, such a deed might savour of jealousy and covetousness. Next he had thought of the Bourse, where he might strike a blow at money, the great agent of corruption, and the capitalist society in whose clutches the wage-earners groaned. Only, here again the blow would fall upon a restricted circle. Then an idea of destroying the Palace of Justice, particularly the assize court, had occurred to him. It was a very tempting thought—to wreak justice upon human justice, to sweep away the witnesses, the culprit, the public prosecutor who charges the latter, the counsel who defends him, the judges who sentence him, and the lounging public which comes to the spot as to the unfolding of some sensational serial. And then too what fierce irony there would be in the summary superior justice of the volcano swallowing up everything indiscriminately without pausing to enter into details. However, the plan over which he had most lingered was that of blowing up the Arc de Triomphe. This he regarded as an odious monument which perpetuated warfare, hatred among nations, and the false, dearly purchased, sanguineous glory of conquerors. That colossus raised to the memory of so much frightful slaughter which had uselessly put an end to so many human lives, ought, he considered, to be slaughtered in its turn. Could he so have arranged things that the earth should swallow it up, he might have achieved the glory of causing no other death than his own, of dying alone, struck down, crushed to pieces beneath that giant of stone. What a tomb, and what a memory might he thus have left to the world!

"But there was no means of approaching it," he continued, "no basement, no cellar, so I had to give up the idea.... And then, although I'm perfectly willing to die alone, I thought what a loftier and more terrible lesson there would be in the unjust death of an innocent multitude, of thousands of unknown people, of all those that might happen to be passing. In the same way as human society by dint of injustice, want and harsh regulations causes so many innocent victims, so must punishment fall as the lightning falls, indiscriminately killing and destroying whatever it may encounter in its course. When a man sets his foot on an ant-hill, he gives no heed to all the lives which he stamps out."

Pierre, whom this theory rendered quite indignant, raised a cry of protest: "Oh! brother, brother, is it you who are saying such things?"

Yet, Guillaume did not pause: "If I have ended by choosing this basilica of the Sacred Heart," he continued, "it is because I found it near at hand and easy to destroy. But it is also because it haunts and exasperates me, because I have long since condemned it.... As I have often said to you, one cannot imagine anything more preposterous than Paris, our great Paris, crowned and dominated by this temple raised to the glorification of the absurd. Is it not outrageous that common sense should receive such a smack after so many centuries of science, that Rome should claim the right of triumphing in this insolent fashion, on our loftiest height in the full sunlight? The priests want Paris to repent and do penitence for its liberative work of truth and justice. But its only right course is to sweep away all that hampers and insults it in its march towards deliverance. And so may the temple fall with its deity of falsehood and servitude! And may its ruins crush its worshippers, so that like one of the old geological revolutions of the world, the catastrophe may resound through the very entrails of mankind, and renew and change it!"

"Brother, brother!" again cried Pierre, quite beside himself, "is it you who are talking? What! you, a great scientist, a man of great heart, you have come to this! What madness is stirring you that you should think and say such abominable things? On the evening when we confessed our secrets one to the other, you told me of your proud and lofty dream of ideal Anarchy. There would be free harmony in life, which left to its natural forces would of itself create happiness. But you still rebelled against the idea of theft and murder. You would not accept them as right or necessary; you merely explained and excused them. What has happened then that you, all brain and thought, should now have become the hateful hand that acts?"

"Salvat has been guillotined," said Guillaume simply, "and I read his will and testament in his last glance. I am merely an executor.... And what has happened, you ask? Why, all that has made me suffer for four months past, the whole social evil which surrounds us, and which must be brought to an end."

Silence fell. The brothers looked at one another in the darkness. And Pierre now understood things. He saw that Guillaume was changed, that the terrible gust of revolutionary contagion sweeping over Paris had transformed him. It had all come from the duality of his nature, the presence of contradictory elements within him. On one side one found a scientist whose whole creed lay in observation and experiment, who, in dealing with nature, evinced the most cautious logic; while on the other side was a social dreamer, haunted by ideas of fraternity, equality and justice, and eager for universal happiness. Thence had first come the theoretical anarchist that he had been, one in whom science and chimeras were mingled, who dreamt of human society returning to the harmonious law of the spheres, each man free, in a free association, regulated by love alone. Neither Theophile Morin with the doctrines of Proudhon and Comte, nor Bache with those of St. Simon and Fourier, had been able to satisfy his desire for the absolute. All those systems had seemed to him imperfect and chaotic, destructive of one another, and tending to the same wretchedness of life. Janzen alone had occasionally satisfied him with some of his curt phrases which shot over the horizon, like arrows conquering the whole earth for the human family. And then in Guillaume's big heart, which the idea of want, the unjust sufferings of the lowly and the poor exasperated, Salvat's tragic adventure had suddenly found place, fomenting supreme rebellion. For long weeks he had lived on with trembling hands, with growing anguish clutching at his throat. First had come that bomb and the explosion which still made him quiver, then the vile cupidity of the newspapers howling for the poor wretch's head, then the search for him and the hunt through the Bois de Boulogne, till he fell into the hands of the police, covered with mud and dying of starvation. And afterwards there had been the assize court, the judges, the gendarmes, the witnesses, the whole of France arrayed against one man and bent on making him pay for the universal crime. And finally, there had come the guillotine, the monstrous, the filthy beast consummating irreparable injustice in human justice's name. One sole idea now remained to Guillaume, that idea of justice which maddened him, leaving naught in his mind save the thought of the just, avenging flare by which he would repair the evil and ensure that which was right for all time forward. Salvat had looked at him, and contagion had done its work; he glowed with a desire for death, a desire to give his own blood and set the blood of others flowing, in order that mankind, amidst its fright and horror, should decree the return of the golden age.

Pierre understood the stubborn blindness of such insanity; and he felt utterly upset by the fear that he should be unable to overcome it. "You are mad, brother!" he exclaimed, "they have driven you mad! It is a gust of violence passing; they were treated in a wrong way and too relentlessly at the outset, and now that they are avenging one another, it may be that blood will never cease to flow.... But, listen, brother, throw off that nightmare. You can't be a Salvat who murders or a Bergaz who steals! Remember the pillage of the Princess's house and remember the fair-haired, pretty child whom we saw lying yonder, ripped open.... You do not, you cannot belong to that set, brother—"

With a wave of his hand, Guillaume brushed these vain reasons aside. Of what consequence were a few lives, his own included? No change had ever taken place in the world without millions and millions of existences being stamped out.

"But you had a great scheme in hand," cried Pierre, hoping to save him by reviving his sense of duty. "It isn't allowable for you to go off like this."

Then he fervently strove to awaken his brother's scientific pride. He spoke to him of his secret, of that great engine of warfare, which could destroy armies and reduce cities to dust, and which he had intended to offer to France, so that on emerging victorious from the approaching war, she might afterwards become the deliverer of the world. And it was this grand scheme that he had abandoned, preferring to employ his explosive in killing innocent people and overthrowing a church, which would be built afresh, whatever the cost, and become a sanctuary of martyrs!

Guillaume smiled. "I have not relinquished my scheme," said he, "I have simply modified it. Did I not tell you of my doubts, my anxious perplexity? Ah! to believe that one holds the destiny of the world in one's grasp, and to tremble and hesitate and wonder if the intelligence and wisdom, that are needful for things to take the one wise course, will be forthcoming! At sight of all the stains upon our great Paris, all the errors and transgressions which we lately witnessed, I shuddered. I asked myself if Paris were sufficiently calm and pure for one to entrust her with omnipotence. How terrible would be the disaster if such an invention as mine should fall into the hands of a demented nation, possibly a dictator, some man of conquest, who would simply employ it to terrorize other nations and reduce them to slavery.... Ah! no, I do not wish to perpetuate warfare, I wish to kill it."

Then in a clear firm voice he explained his new plan, in which Pierre was surprised to find some of the ideas which General de Bozonnet had one day laid before him in a very different spirit. Warfare was on the road to extinction, threatened by its very excesses. In the old days of mercenaries, and afterwards with conscripts, the percentage of soldiers designated by chance, war had been a profession and a passion. But nowadays, when everybody is called upon to fight, none care to do so. By the logical force of things, the system of the whole nation in arms means the coming end of armies. How much longer will the nations remain on a footing of deadly peace, bowed down by ever increasing "estimates," spending millions and millions on holding one another in respect? Ah! how great the deliverance, what a cry of relief would go up on the day when some formidable engine, capable of destroying armies and sweeping cities away, should render war an impossibility and constrain every people to disarm! Warfare would be dead, killed in her own turn, she who has killed so many. This was Guillaume's dream, and he grew quite enthusiastic, so strong was his conviction that he would presently bring it to pass.

"Everything is settled," said he; "if I am about to die and disappear, it is in order that my idea may triumph.... You have lately seen me spend whole afternoons alone with Mere-Grand. Well, we were completing the classification of the documents and making our final arrangements. She has my orders, and will execute them even at the risk of her life, for none has a braver, loftier soul.... As soon as I am dead, buried beneath these stones, as soon as she has heard the explosion shake Paris and proclaim the advent of the new era, she will forward a set of all the documents I have confided to her—the formula of my explosive, the drawings of the bomb and gun—to each of the great powers of the world. In this wise I shall bestow on all the nations the terrible gift of destruction and omnipotence which, at first, I wished to bestow on France alone; and I do this in order that the nations, being one and all armed with the thunderbolt, may at once disarm, for fear of being annihilated, when seeking to annihilate others."

Pierre listened to him, gaping, amazed at this extraordinary idea, in which childishness was blended with genius. "Well," said he, "if you give your secret to all the nations, why should you blow up this church, and die yourself?"

"Why! In order that I may be believed!" cried Guillaume with extraordinary force of utterance. Then he added, "The edifice must lie on the ground, and I must be under it. If the experiment is not made, if universal horror does not attest and proclaim the amazing destructive power of my explosive, people will consider me a mere schemer, a visionary!... A lot of dead, a lot of blood, that is what is needed in order that blood may for ever cease to flow!" Then, with a broad sweep of his arm, he again declared that his action was necessary. "Besides," he said, "Salvat left me the legacy of carrying out this deed of justice. If I have given it greater scope and significance, utilising it as a means of hastening the end of war, this is because I happen to be a man of intellect. It would have been better possibly if my mind had been a simple one, and if I had merely acted like some volcano which changes the soil, leaving life the task of renewing humanity."

Much of the candle had now burnt away, and Guillaume at last rose from the block of stone. He had again consulted his watch, and found that he had ten minutes left him. The little current of air created by his gestures made the light flicker, while all around him the darkness seemed to grow denser. And near at hand ever lay the threatening open mine which a spark might at any moment fire.

"It is nearly time," said Guillaume. "Come, brother, kiss me and go away. You know how much I love you, what ardent affection for you has been awakened in my old heart. So love me in like fashion, and find love enough to let me die as I want to die, in carrying out my duty. Kiss me, kiss me, and go away without turning your head."

His deep affection for Pierre made his voice tremble, but he struggled on, forced back his tears, and ended by conquering himself. It was as if he were no longer of the world, no longer one of mankind.

"No, brother, you have not convinced me," said Pierre, who on his side did not seek to hide his tears, "and it is precisely because I love you as you love me, with my whole being, my whole soul, that I cannot go away. It is impossible! You cannot be the madman, the murderer you would try to be."

"Why not? Am I not free. I have rid my life of all responsibilities, all ties.... I have brought up my sons, they have no further need of me. But one heart-link remained—Marie, and I have given her to you."

At this a disturbing argument occurred to Pierre, and he passionately availed himself of it. "So you want to die because you have given me Marie," said he. "You still love her, confess it!"

"No!" cried Guillaume, "I no longer love her, I swear it. I gave her to you. I love her no more."

"So you fancied; but you can see now that you still love her, for here you are, quite upset; whereas none of the terrifying things of which we spoke just now could even move you.... Yes, if you wish to die it is because you have lost Marie!"

Guillaume quivered, shaken by what his brother said, and in low, broken words he tried to question himself. "No, no, that any love pain should have urged me to this terrible deed would be unworthy—unworthy of my great design. No, no, I decided on it in the free exercise of my reason, and I am accomplishing it from no personal motive, but in the name of justice and for the benefit of humanity, in order that war and want may cease."

Then, in sudden anguish, he went on: "Ah! it is cruel of you, brother, cruel of you to poison my delight at dying. I have created all the happiness I could, I was going off well pleased at leaving you all happy, and now you poison my death. No, no! question it how I may, my heart does not ache; if I love Marie, it is simply in the same way as I love you."

Nevertheless, he remained perturbed, as if fearing lest he might be lying to himself; and by degrees gloomy anger came over him: "Listen, that is enough, Pierre," he exclaimed, "time is flying.... For the last time, go away! I order you to do so; I will have it!"

"I will not obey you, Guillaume.... I will stay, and as all my reasoning cannot save you from your insanity, fire your mine, and I will die with you."

"You? Die? But you have no right to do so, you are not free!"

"Free, or not, I swear that I will die with you. And if it merely be a question of flinging this candle into that hole, tell me so, and I will take it and fling it there myself."

He made a gesture at which his brother thought that he was about to carry out his threat. So he caught him by the arm, crying: "Why should you die? It would be absurd. That others should die may be necessary, but you, no! Of what use could be this additional monstrosity? You are endeavouring to soften me, you are torturing my heart!" Then all at once, imagining that Pierre's offer had concealed another design, Guillaume thundered in a fury: "You don't want to take the candle in order to throw it there. What you want to do is to blow it out! And you think I shan't be able then—ah! you bad brother!"

In his turn Pierre exclaimed: "Oh! certainly, I'll use every means to prevent you from accomplishing such a frightful and foolish deed!"

"You'll prevent me!"

"Yes, I'll cling to you, I'll fasten my arms to your shoulders, I'll hold your hands if necessary."

"Ah! you'll prevent me, you bad brother! You think you'll prevent me!"

Choking and trembling with rage, Guillaume had already caught hold of Pierre, pressing his ribs with his powerful muscular arms. They were closely linked together, their eyes fixed upon one another, and their breath mingling in that kind of subterranean dungeon, where their big dancing shadows looked like ghosts. They seemed to be vanishing into the night, the candle now showed merely like a little yellow tear in the midst of the darkness; and at that moment, in those far depths, a quiver sped through the silence of the earth which weighed so heavily upon them. Distant but sonorous peals rang out, as if death itself were somewhere ringing its invisible bell.

"You hear," stammered Guillaume, "it's their bell up there. The time has come. I have vowed to act, and you want to prevent me!"

"Yes, I'll prevent you as long as I'm here alive."

"As long as you are alive, you'll prevent me!"

Guillaume could hear "La Savoyarde" pealing joyfully up yonder; he could see the triumphant basilica, overflowing with its ten thousand pilgrims, and blazing with the splendour of the Host amidst the smoke of incense; and blind frenzy came over him at finding himself unable to act, at finding an obstacle suddenly barring the road to his fixed idea.

"As long as you are alive, as long as you are alive!" he repeated, beside himself. "Well, then, die, you wretched brother!"

A fratricidal gleam had darted from his blurred eyes. He hastily stooped, picked up a large brick forgotten there, and raised it with both hands as if it were a club.

"Ah! I'm willing," cried Pierre. "Kill me, then; kill your own brother before you kill the others!"

The brick was already descending, but Guillaume's arms must have deviated, for the weapon only grazed one of Pierre's shoulders. Nevertheless, he sank upon his knees in the gloom. When Guillaume saw him there he fancied he had dealt him a mortal blow. What was it that had happened between them, what had he done? For a moment he remained standing, haggard, his mouth open, his eyes dilating with terror. He looked at his hands, fancying that blood was streaming from them. Then he pressed them to his brow, which seemed to be bursting with pain, as if his fixed idea had been torn from him, leaving his skull open. And he himself suddenly sank upon the ground with a great sob.

"Oh! brother, little brother, what have I done?" he called. "I am a monster!"

But Pierre had passionately caught him in his arms again. "It is nothing, nothing, brother, I assure you," he replied. "Ah! you are weeping now. How pleased I am! You are saved, I can feel it, since you are weeping. And what a good thing it is that you flew into such a passion, for your anger with me has dispelled your evil dream of violence."

"I am horrified with myself," gasped Guillaume, "to think that I wanted to kill you! Yes, I'm a brute beast that would kill his brother! And the others, too, all the others up yonder.... Oh! I'm cold, I feel so cold."

His teeth were chattering, and he shivered. It was as if he had awakened, half stupefied, from some evil dream. And in the new light which his fratricidal deed cast upon things, the scheme which had haunted him and goaded him to madness appeared like some act of criminal folly, projected by another.

"To kill you!" he repeated almost in a whisper. "I shall never forgive myself. My life is ended, I shall never find courage enough to live."

But Pierre clasped him yet more tightly. "What do you say?" he answered. "Will there not rather be a fresh and stronger tie of affection between us? Ah! yes, brother, let me save you as you saved me, and we shall be yet more closely united! Don't you remember that evening at Neuilly, when you consoled me and held me to your heart as I am holding you to mine? I had confessed my torments to you, and you told me that I must live and love!... And you did far more afterwards: you plucked your own love from your breast and gave it to me. You wished to ensure my happiness at the price of your own! And how delightful it is that, in my turn, I now have an opportunity to console you, save you, and bring you back to life!"

"No, no, the bloodstain is there and it is ineffaceable. I can hope no more!"

"Yes, yes, you can. Hope in life as you bade me do! Hope in love and hope in labour!"

Still weeping and clasping one another, the brothers continued speaking in low voices. The expiring candle suddenly went out unknown to them, and in the inky night and deep silence their tears of redeeming affection flowed freely. On the one hand, there was joy at being able to repay a debt of brotherliness, and on the other, acute emotion at having been led by a fanatical love of justice and mankind to the very verge of crime. And there were yet other things in the depths of those tears which cleansed and purified them; there were protests against suffering in every form, and ardent wishes that the world might some day be relieved of all its dreadful woe.

At last, after pushing the flagstone over the cavity near the pillar, Pierre groped his way out of the vault, leading Guillaume like a child.

Meantime Mere-Grand, still seated near the window of the workroom, had impassively continued sewing. Now and again, pending the arrival of four o'clock, she had looked up at the timepiece hanging on the wall on her left hand, or else had glanced out of the window towards the unfinished pile of the basilica, which a gigantic framework of scaffoldings encompassed. Slowly and steadily plying her needle, the old lady remained very pale and silent, but full of heroic serenity. On the other hand, Marie, who sat near her, embroidering, shifted her position a score of times, broke her thread, and grew impatient, feeling strangely nervous, a prey to unaccountable anxiety, which oppressed her heart. For their part, the three young men could not keep in place at all; it was as if some contagious fever disturbed them. Each had gone to his work: Thomas was filing something at his bench; Francois and Antoine were on either side of their table, the first trying to solve a mathematical problem, and the other copying a bunch of poppies in a vase before him. It was in vain, however, that they strove to be attentive. They quivered at the slightest sound, raised their heads, and darted questioning glances at one another. What could be the matter? What could possess them? What did they fear? Now and again one or the other would rise, stretch himself, and then, resume his place. However, they did not speak; it was as if they dared not say anything, and thus the heavy silence grew more and more terrible.

When it was a few minutes to four o'clock Mere-Grand felt weary, or else desired to collect her thoughts. After another glance at the timepiece, she let her needlework fall on her lap and turned towards the basilica. It seemed to her that she had only enough strength left to wait; and she remained with her eyes fixed on the huge walls and the forest of scaffolding which rose over yonder with such triumphant pride under the blue sky. Then all at once, however brave and firm she might be, she could not restrain a start, for "La Savoyarde" had raised a joyful clang. The consecration of the Host was now at hand, the ten thousand pilgrims filled the church, four o'clock was about to strike. And thereupon an irresistible impulse forced the old lady to her feet; she drew herself up, quivering, her hands clasped, her eyes ever turned yonder, waiting in mute dread.

"What is the matter?" cried Thomas, who noticed her. "Why are you trembling, Mere-Grand?"

Francois and Antoine raised their heads, and in turn sprang forward.

"Are you ill? Why are you turning so pale, you who are so courageous?"

But she did not answer. Ah! might the force of the explosion rend the earth asunder, reach the house and sweep it into the flaming crater of the volcano! Might she and the three young men, might they all die with the father, this was her one ardent wish in order that grief might be spared them. And she remained waiting and waiting, quivering despite herself, but with her brave, clear eyes ever gazing yonder.

"Mere-Grand, Mere-Grand!" cried Marie in dismay; "you frighten us by refusing to answer us, by looking over there as if some misfortune were coming up at a gallop!"

Then, prompted by the same anguish, the same cry suddenly came from Thomas, Francois and Antoine: "Father is in peril—father is going to die!"

What did they know? Nothing precise, certainly. Thomas no doubt had been astonished to see what a large quantity of the explosive his father had recently prepared, and both Francois and Antoine were aware of the ideas of revolt which he harboured in his mind. But, full of filial deference, they never sought to know anything beyond what he might choose to confide to them. They never questioned him; they bowed to whatever he might do. And yet now a foreboding came to them, a conviction that their father was going to die, that some most frightful catastrophe was impending. It must have been that which had already sent such a quiver through the atmosphere ever since the morning, making them shiver with fever, feel ill at ease, and unable to work.

"Father is going to die, father is going to die!"

The three big fellows had drawn close together, distracted by one and the same anguish, and furiously longing to know what the danger was, in order that they might rush upon it and die with their father if they could not save him. And amidst Mere-Grand's stubborn silence death once more flitted through the room: there came a cold gust such as they had already felt brushing past them during dejeuner.

At last four o'clock began to strike, and Mere-Grand raised her white hands with a gesture of supreme entreaty. It was then that she at last spoke: "Father is going to die. Nothing but the duty of living can save him."

At this the three young men again wished to rush yonder, whither they knew not; but they felt that they must throw down all obstacles and conquer. Their powerlessness rent their hearts, they were both so frantic and so woeful that their grandmother strove to calm them. "Father's own wish was to die," said she, "and he is resolved to die alone."

They shuddered as they heard her, and then, on their side, strove to be heroic. But the minutes crept by, and it seemed as if the cold gust had slowly passed away. Sometimes, at the twilight hour, a night-bird will come in by the window like some messenger of misfortune, flit round the darkened room, and then fly off again, carrying its sadness with it. And it was much like that; the gust passed, the basilica remained standing, the earth did not open to swallow it. Little by little the atrocious anguish which wrung their hearts gave place to hope. And when at last Guillaume appeared, followed by Pierre, a great cry of resurrection came from one and all: "Father!"

Their kisses, their tears, deprived him of his little remaining strength. He was obliged to sit down. He had glanced round him as if he were returning to life perforce. Mere-Grand, who understood what bitter feelings must have followed the subjugation of his will, approached him smiling, and took hold of both his hands as if to tell him that she was well pleased at seeing him again, and at finding that he accepted his task and was unwilling to desert the cause of life. For his part he suffered dreadfully, the shock had been so great. The others spared him any narrative of their feelings; and he, himself, related nothing. With a gesture, a loving word, he simply indicated that it was Pierre who had saved him.

Thereupon, in a corner of the room, Marie flung her arms round the young man's neck. "Ah! my good Pierre, I have never yet kissed you," said she; "I want it to be for something serious the first time.... I love you, my good Pierre, I love you with all my heart."

Later that same evening, after night had fallen, Guillaume and Pierre remained for a moment alone in the big workroom. The young men had gone out, and Mere-Grand and Marie were upstairs sorting some house linen, while Madame Mathis, who had brought some work back, sat patiently in a dim corner waiting for another bundle of things which might require mending. The brothers, steeped in the soft melancholy of the twilight hour, and chatting in low tones, had quite forgotten her.

But all at once the arrival of a visitor upset them. It was Janzen with the fair, Christ-like face. He called very seldom nowadays; and one never knew from what gloomy spot he had come or into what darkness he would return when he took his departure. He disappeared, indeed, for months together, and was then suddenly to be seen like some momentary passer-by whose past and present life were alike unknown.

"I am leaving to-night," he said in a voice sharp like a knife.

"Are you going back to your home in Russia?" asked Guillaume.

A faint, disdainful smile appeared on the Anarchist's lips. "Home!" said he, "I am at home everywhere. To begin with, I am not a Russian, and then I recognise no other country than the world."

With a sweeping gesture he gave them to understand what manner of man he was, one who had no fatherland of his own, but carried his gory dream of fraternity hither and thither regardless of frontiers. From some words he spoke the brothers fancied he was returning to Spain, where some fellow-Anarchists awaited him. There was a deal of work to be done there, it appeared. He had quietly seated himself, chatting on in his cold way, when all at once he serenely added: "By the by, a bomb had just been thrown into the Cafe de l'Univers on the Boulevard. Three bourgeois were killed."

Pierre and Guillaume shuddered, and asked for particulars. Thereupon Janzen related that he had happened to be there, had heard the explosion, and seen the windows of the cafe shivered to atoms. Three customers were lying on the floor blown to pieces. Two of them were gentlemen, who had entered the place by chance and whose names were not known, while the third was a regular customer, a petty cit of the neighbourhood, who came every day to play a game at dominoes. And the whole place was wrecked; the marble tables were broken, the chandeliers twisted out of shape, the mirrors studded with projectiles. And how great the terror and the indignation, and how frantic the rush of the crowd! The perpetrator of the deed had been arrested immediately—in fact, just as he was turning the corner of the Rue Caumartin.

"I thought I would come and tell you of it," concluded Janzen; "it is well you should know it."

Then as Pierre, shuddering and already suspecting the truth, asked him if he knew who the man was that had been arrested, he slowly replied: "The worry is that you happen to know him—it was little Victor Mathis."

Pierre tried to silence Janzen too late. He had suddenly remembered that Victor's mother had been sitting in a dark corner behind them a short time previously. Was she still there? Then he again pictured Victor, slight and almost beardless, with a straight, stubborn brow, grey eyes glittering with intelligence, a pointed nose and thin lips expressive of stern will and unforgiving hatred. He was no simple and lowly one from the ranks of the disinherited. He was an educated scion of the bourgeoisie, and but for circumstances would have entered the Ecole Normale. There was no excuse for his abominable deed, there was no political passion, no humanitarian insanity, in it. He was the destroyer pure and simple, the theoretician of destruction, the cold energetic man of intellect who gave his cultivated mind to arguing the cause of murder, in his desire to make murder an instrument of the social evolution. True, he was also a poet, a visionary, but the most frightful of all visionaries: a monster whose nature could only be explained by mad pride, and who craved for the most awful immortality, dreaming that the coming dawn would rise from the arms of the guillotine. Only one thing could surpass him: the scythe of death which blindly mows the world.

For a few seconds, amidst the growing darkness, cold horror reigned in the workroom. "Ah!" muttered Guillaume, "he had the daring to do it, he had."

Pierre, however, lovingly pressed his arm. And he felt that he was as distracted, as upset, as himself. Perhaps this last abomination had been needed to ravage and cure him.

Janzen no doubt had been an accomplice in the deed. He was relating that Victor's purpose had been to avenge Salvat, when all at once a great sigh of pain was heard in the darkness, followed by a heavy thud upon the floor. It was Madame Mathis falling like a bundle, overwhelmed by the news which chance had brought her. At that moment it so happened that Mere-Grand came down with a lamp, which lighted up the room, and thereupon they hurried to the help of the wretched woman, who lay there as pale as a corpse in her flimsy black gown.

And this again brought Pierre an indescribable heart-pang. Ah! the poor, sad, suffering creature! He remembered her at Abbe Rose's, so discreet, so shamefaced, in her poverty, scarce able to live upon the slender resources which persistent misfortunes had left her. Hers had indeed been a cruel lot: first, a home with wealthy parents in the provinces, a love story and elopement with the man of her choice; next, ill-luck steadily pursuing her, all sorts of home troubles, and at last her husband's death. Then, in the retirement of her widowhood, after losing the best part of the little income which had enabled her to bring up her son, naught but this son had been left to her. He had been her Victor, her sole affection, the only one in whom she had faith. She had ever striven to believe that he was very busy, absorbed in work, and on the eve of attaining to some superb position worthy of his merits. And now, all at once, she had learnt that this fondly loved son was simply the most odious of assassins, that he had flung a bomb into a cafe, and had there killed three men.

When Madame Mathis had recovered her senses, thanks to the careful tending of Mere-Grand, she sobbed on without cessation, raising such a continuous doleful wail, that Pierre's hand again sought Guillaume's, and grasped it, whilst their hearts, distracted but healed, mingled lovingly one with the other.

V. LIFE'S WORK AND PROMISE

FIFTEEN months later, one fine golden day in September, Bache and Theophile Morin were taking dejeuner at Guillaume's, in the big workroom overlooking the immensity of Paris.

Near the table was a cradle with its little curtains drawn. Behind them slept Jean, a fine boy four months old, the son of Pierre and Marie. The latter, simply in order to protect the child's social rights, had been married civilly at the town-hall of Montmartre. Then, by way of pleasing Guillaume, who wished to keep them with him, and thus enlarge the family circle, they had continued living in the little lodging over the work-shop, leaving the sleepy house at Neuilly in the charge of Sophie, Pierre's old servant. And life had been flowing on happily for the fourteen months or so that they had now belonged to one another.

There was simply peace, affection and work around the young couple. Francois, who had left the Ecole Normale provided with every degree, every diploma, was now about to start for a college in the west of France, so as to serve his term of probation as a professor, intending to resign his post afterwards and devote himself, if he pleased, to science pure and simple. Then Antoine had lately achieved great success with a series of engravings he had executed—some views and scenes of Paris life; and it was settled that he was to marry Lise Jahan in the ensuing spring, when she would have completed her seventeenth year. Of the three sons, however, Thomas was the most triumphant, for he had at last devised and constructed his little motor, thanks to a happy idea of his father's. One morning, after the downfall of all his huge chimerical schemes, Guillaume, remembering the terrible explosive which he had discovered and hitherto failed to utilise, had suddenly thought of employing it as a motive force, in the place of petroleum, in the motor which his eldest son had so long been trying to construct for the Grandidier works. So he had set to work with Thomas, devising a new mechanism, encountering endless difficulties, and labouring for a whole year before reaching success. But now the father and son had accomplished their task; the marvel was created, and stood there riveted to an oak stand, and ready to work as soon as its final toilet should have been performed.

Amidst all the changes which had occurred, Mere-Grand, in spite of her great age, continued exercising her active, silent sway over the household, which was now again so gay and peaceful. Though she seldom seemed to leave her chair in front of her work-table, she was really here, there and everywhere. Since the birth of Jean, she had talked of rearing the child in the same way as she had formerly reared Thomas, Francois and Antoine. She was indeed full of the bravery of devotion, and seemed to think that she was not at all likely to die so long as she might have others to guide, love and save. Marie marvelled at it all. She herself, though she was always gay and in good health, felt tired at times now that she was suckling her infant. Little Jean indeed had two vigilant mothers near his cradle; whilst his father, Pierre, who had become Thomas's assistant, pulled the bellows, roughened out pieces of metal, and generally completed his apprenticeship as a working mechanician.

On the particular day when Bache and Theophile Morin came to Montmartre, the dejeuner proved even gayer than usual, thanks perhaps to their presence. The meal was over, the table had been cleared, and the coffee was being served, when a little boy, the son of a doorkeeper in the Rue Cortot, came to ask for Monsieur Pierre Froment. When they inquired his business, he answered in a hesitating way that Monsieur l'Abbe Rose was very ill, indeed dying, and that he had sent him to fetch Monsieur Pierre Froment at once.

Pierre followed the lad, feeling much affected; and on reaching the Rue Cortot he there found Abbe Rose in a little damp ground-floor room overlooking a strip of garden. The old priest was in bed, dying as the boy had said, but he still retained the use of his faculties, and could speak in his wonted slow and gentle voice. A Sister of Charity was watching beside him, and she seemed so surprised and anxious at the arrival of a visitor whom she did not know, that Pierre understood she was there to guard the dying man and prevent him from having intercourse with others. The old priest must have employed some stratagem in order to send the doorkeeper's boy to fetch him. However, when Abbe Rose in his grave and kindly way begged the Sister to leave them alone for a moment, she dared not refuse this supreme request, but immediately left the room.

"Ah! my dear child," said the old man, "how much I wanted to speak to you! Sit down there, close to the bed, so that you may be able to hear me, for this is the end; I shall no longer be here to-night. And I have such a great service to ask of you."

Quite upset at finding his friend so wasted, with his face white like a sheet, and scarce a sign of life save the sparkle of his innocent, loving eyes, Pierre responded: "But I would have come sooner if I had known you were in need of me! Why did you not send for me before? Are people being kept away from you?"

A faint smile of shame and confession appeared on the old priest's embarrassed face. "Well, my dear child," said he, "you must know that I have again done some foolish things. Yes, I gave money to some people who, it seems, were not deserving of it. In fact, there was quite a scandal; they scolded me at the Archbishop's palace, and accused me of compromising the interests of religion. And when they heard that I was ill, they put that good Sister beside me, because they said that I should die on the floor, and give the very sheets off my bed if I were not prevented."

He paused to draw breath, and then continued: "So you understand, that good Sister—oh! she is a very saintly woman—is here to nurse me and prevent me from still doing foolish things. To overcome her vigilance I had to use a little deceit, for which God, I trust, will forgive me. As it happens, it's precisely my poor who are in question; it was to speak to you about them that I so particularly wished to see you."

Tears had come to Pierre's eyes. "Tell me what you want me to do," he answered; "I am yours, both heart and soul."

"Yes, yes, I know it, my dear child. It was for that reason that I thought of you—you alone. In spite of all that has happened, you are the only one in whom I have any confidence, who can understand me, and give me a promise which will enable me to die in peace."

This was the only allusion he would venture to make to the cruel rupture which had occurred after the young man had thrown off his cassock and rebelled against the Church. He had since heard of Pierre's marriage, and was aware that he had for ever severed all religious ties. But at that supreme moment nothing of this seemed of any account to the old priest. His knowledge of Pierre's loving heart sufficed him, for all that he now desired was simply the help of that heart which he had seen glowing with such passionate charity.

"Well," he resumed, again finding sufficient strength to smile, "it is a very simple matter. I want to make you my heir. Oh! it isn't a fine legacy I am leaving you; it is the legacy of my poor, for I have nothing else to bestow on you; I shall leave nothing behind me but my poor."

Of these unhappy creatures, three in particular quite upset his heart. He recoiled from the prospect of leaving them without chance of succour, without even the crumbs which he had hitherto distributed among them, and which had enabled them to live. One was the big Old'un, the aged carpenter whom he and Pierre had vainly sought one night with the object of sending him to the Asylum for the Invalids of Labour. He had been sent there a little later, but he had fled three days afterwards, unwilling as he was to submit to the regulations. Wild and violent, he had the most detestable disposition. Nevertheless, he could not be left to starve. He came to Abbe Rose's every Saturday, it seemed, and received a franc, which sufficed him for the whole week. Then, too, there was a bedridden old woman in a hovel in the Rue du Mont-Cenis. The baker, who every morning took her the bread she needed, must be paid. And in particular there was a poor young woman residing on the Place du Tertre, one who was unmarried but a mother. She was dying of consumption, unable to work, and tortured by the idea that when she should have gone, her daughter must sink to the pavement like herself. And in this instance the legacy was twofold: there was the mother to relieve until her death, which was near at hand, and then the daughter to provide for until she could be placed in some good household.

"You must forgive me, my dear child, for leaving you all these worries," added Abbe Rose. "I tried to get the good Sister, who is nursing me, to take an interest in these poor people, but when I spoke to her of the big Old'un, she was so alarmed that she made the sign of the cross. And it's the same with my worthy friend Abbe Tavernier. I know nobody of more upright mind. Still I shouldn't be at ease with him, he has ideas of his own.... And so, my dear child, there is only you whom I can rely upon, and you must accept my legacy if you wish me to depart in peace."

Pierre was weeping. "Ah! certainly, with my whole soul," he answered. "I shall regard your desires as sacred."

"Good! I knew you would accept.... So it is agreed: a franc for the big Old'un every Saturday, the bread for the bedridden woman, some help for the poor young mother, and then a home for her little girl. Ah! if you only knew what a weight it is off my heart! The end may come now, it will be welcome to me."

His kind white face had brightened as if with supreme joy. Holding Pierre's hand within his own he detained him beside the bed, exchanging a farewell full of serene affection. And his voice weakening, he expressed his whole mind in faint, impressive accents: "Yes, I shall be pleased to go off. I could do no more, I could do no more! Though I gave and gave, I felt that it was ever necessary to give more and more. And how sad to find charity powerless, to give without hope of ever being able to stamp out want and suffering! I rebelled against that idea of yours, as you will remember. I told you that we should always love one another in our poor, and that was true, since you are here, so good and affectionate to me and those whom I am leaving behind. But, all the same, I can do no more, I can do no more; and I would rather go off, since the woes of others rise higher and higher around me, and I have ended by doing the most foolish things, scandalising the faithful and making my superiors indignant with me, without even saving one single poor person from the ever-growing torrent of want. Farewell, my dear child. My poor old heart goes off aching, my old hands are weary and conquered."

Pierre embraced him with his whole soul, and then departed. His eyes were full of tears and indescribable emotion wrung his heart. Never had he heard a more woeful cry than that confession of the impotence of charity, on the part of that old candid child, whose heart was all simplicity and sublime benevolence. Ah! what a disaster, that human kindness should be futile, that the world should always display so much distress and suffering in spite of all the compassionate tears that had been shed, in spite of all the alms that had fallen from millions and millions of hands for centuries and centuries! No wonder that it should bring desire for death, no wonder that a Christian should feel pleased at escaping from the abominations of this earth!

When Pierre again reached the workroom he found that the table had long since been cleared, and that Bache and Morin were chatting with Guillaume, whilst the latter's sons had returned to their customary occupations. Marie, also, had resumed her usual place at the work-table in front of Mere-Grand; but from time to time she rose and went to look at Jean, so as to make sure that he was sleeping peacefully, with his little clenched fists pressed to his heart. And when Pierre, who kept his emotion to himself, had likewise leant over the cradle beside the young woman, whose hair he discreetly kissed, he went to put on an apron in order that he might assist Thomas, who was now, for the last time, regulating his motor.

Then, as Pierre stood there awaiting an opportunity to help, the room vanished from before his eyes; he ceased to see or hear the persons who were there. The scent of Marie's hair alone lingered on his lips amidst the acute emotion into which he had been thrown by his visit to Abbe Rose. A recollection had come to him, that of the bitterly cold morning when the old priest had stopped him outside the basilica of the Sacred Heart, and had timidly asked him to take some alms to that old man Laveuve, who soon afterwards had died of want, like a dog by the wayside. How sad a morning it had been; what battle and torture had Pierre not felt within him, and what a resurrection had come afterwards! He had that day said one of his last masses, and he recalled with a shudder his abominable anguish, his despairing doubts at the thought of nothingness. Two experiments which he had previously made had failed most miserably. First had come one at Lourdes, where the glorification of the absurd had simply filled him with pity for any such attempt to revert to the primitive faith of young nations, who bend beneath the terror born of ignorance; and, secondly, there had been an experiment at Rome, which he had found incapable of any renewal, and which he had seen staggering to its death amidst its ruins, a mere great shadow, which would soon be of no account, fast sinking, as it was, to the dust of dead religions. And, in his own mind, Charity itself had become bankrupt; he no longer believed that alms could cure the sufferings of mankind, he awaited naught but a frightful catastrophe, fire and massacre, which would sweep away the guilty, condemned world. His cassock, too, stifled him, a lie alone kept it on his shoulders, the idea, unbelieving priest though he was, that he could honestly and chastely watch over the belief of others. The problem of a new religion, a new hope, such as was needful to ensure the peace of the coming democracies tortured him, but between the certainties of science and the need of the Divine, which seemed to consume humanity, he could find no solution. If Christianity crumbled with the principle of Charity, there could remain nothing else but Justice, that cry which came from every breast, that battle of Justice against Charity in which his heart must contend in that great city of Paris. It was there that began his third and decisive experiment, the experiment which was to make truth as plain to him as the sun itself, and give him back health and strength and delight in life.

At this point of his reverie Pierre was roused by Thomas, who asked him to fetch a tool. As he did so he heard Bache remarking: "The ministry resigned this morning. Vignon has had enough of it, he wants to reserve his remaining strength."

"Well, he has lasted more than a twelvemonth," replied Morin. "That's already an achievement."

After the crime of Victor Mathis, who had been tried and executed within three weeks, Monferrand had suddenly fallen from power. What was the use of having a strong-handed man at the head of the Government if bombs still continued to terrify the country? Moreover, he had displeased the Chamber by his voracious appetite, which had prevented him from allowing others more than an infinitesimal share of all the good things. And this time he had been succeeded by Vignon, although the latter's programme of reforms had long made people tremble. He, Vignon, was honest certainly, but of all these reforms he had only been able to carry out a few insignificant ones, for he had found himself hampered by a thousand obstacles. And thus he had resigned himself to ruling the country as others had done; and people had discovered that after all there were but faint shades of difference between him and Monferrand.

"You know that Monferrand is being spoken of again?" said Guillaume.

"Yes, and he has some chance of success. His creatures are bestirring themselves tremendously," replied Bache, adding, in a bitter, jesting way, that Mege, the Collectivist leader, played the part of a dupe in overthrowing ministry after ministry. He simply gratified the ambition of each coterie in turn, without any possible chance of attaining to power himself.

Thereupon Guillaume pronounced judgment. "Oh! well, let them devour one another," said he. "Eager as they all are to reign and dispose of power and wealth, they only fight over questions of persons. And nothing they do can prevent the evolution from continuing. Ideas expand, and events occur, and, over and above everything else, mankind is marching on."

Pierre was greatly struck by these words, and he again recalled the past. His dolorous Parisian experiment had begun, and he was once more roaming through the city. Paris seemed to him to be a huge vat, in which a world fermented, something of the best and something of the worst, a frightful mixture such as sorceresses might have used; precious powders mingled with filth, from all of which was to come the philter of love and eternal youth. And in that vat Pierre first marked the scum of the political world: Monferrand who strangled Barroux, who purchased the support of hungry ones such as Fonsegue, Duthil and Chaigneux, who made use of those who attained to mediocrity, such as Taboureau and Dauvergne; and who employed even the sectarian passions of Mege and the intelligent ambition of Vignon as his weapons. Next came money the poisoner, with that affair of the African Railways, which had rotted the Parliament and turned Duvillard, the triumphant bourgeois, into a public perverter, the very cancer as it were of the financial world. Then as a just consequence of all this there was Duvillard's own home infected by himself, that frightful drama of Eve contending with her daughter Camille for the possession of Gerard, then Camille stealing him from her mother, and Hyacinthe, the son, passing his crazy mistress Rosemonde on to that notorious harlot Silviane, with whom his father publicly exhibited himself. Then there was the old expiring aristocracy, with the pale, sad faces of Madame de Quinsac and the Marquis de Morigny; the old military spirit whose funeral was conducted by General de Bozonnet; the magistracy which slavishly served the powers of the day, Amadieu thrusting himself into notoriety by means of sensational cases, Lehmann, the public prosecutor, preparing his speeches in the private room of the Minister whose policy he defended; and, finally, the mendacious and cupid Press which lived upon scandal, the everlasting flood of denunciation and filth which poured from Sagnier, and the gay impudence shown by the unscrupulous and conscienceless Massot, who attacked all and defended all, by profession and to order! And in the same way as insects, on discovering one of their own kind dying, will often finish it off and fatten upon it, so the whole swarm of appetites, interests and passions had fallen upon a wretched madman, that unhappy Salvat, whose idiotic crime had brought them all scrambling together, gluttonously eager to derive some benefit from that starveling's emaciated carcass. And all boiled in the huge vat of Paris; the desires, the deeds of violence, the strivings of one and another man's will, the whole nameless medley of the bitterest ferments, whence, in all purity, the wine of the future would at last flow.

Then Pierre became conscious of the prodigious work which went on in the depths of the vat, beneath all the impurity and waste. As his brother had just said, what mattered the stains, the egotism and greed of politicians, if humanity were still on the march, ever slowly and stubbornly stepping forward! What mattered, too, that corrupt and emasculate bourgeoisie, nowadays as moribund as the aristocracy, whose place it took, if behind it there ever came the inexhaustible reserve of men who surged up from the masses of the country-sides and the towns! What mattered the debauchery, the perversion arising from excess of wealth and power, the luxuriousness and dissoluteness of life, since it seemed a proven fact that the capitals that had been queens of the world had never reigned without extreme civilisation, a cult of beauty and of pleasure! And what mattered even the venality, the transgressions and the folly of the press, if at the same time it remained an admirable instrument for the diffusion of knowledge, the open conscience, so to say, of the nation, a river which, though there might be horrors on its surface, none the less flowed on, carrying all nations to the brotherly ocean of the future centuries! The human lees ended by sinking to the bottom of the vat, and it was not possible to expect that what was right would triumph visibly every day; for it was often necessary that years should elapse before the realisation of some hope could emerge from the fermentation. Eternal matter is ever being cast afresh into the crucible and ever coming from it improved. And if in the depths of pestilential workshops and factories the slavery of ancient times subsists in the wage-earning system, if such men as Toussaint still die of want on their pallets like broken-down beasts of burden, it is nevertheless a fact that once already, on a memorable day of tempest, Liberty sprang forth from the vat to wing her flight throughout the world. And why in her turn should not Justice spring from it, proceeding from those troubled elements, freeing herself from all dross, flowing forth with dazzling limpidity and regenerating the nations?

However, the voices of Bache and Morin, rising in the course of their chat with Guillaume, once more drew Pierre from his reverie. They were now speaking of Janzen, who after being compromised in a fresh outrage at Barcelona had fled from Spain. Bache fancied that he had recognised him in the street only the previous day. To think that a man with so clear a mind and such keen energy should waste his natural gifts in such a hateful cause!

"When I remember," said Morin slowly, "that Barthes lives in exile in a shabby little room at Brussels, ever quivering with the hope that the reign of liberty is at hand—he who has never had a drop of blood on his hands and who has spent two-thirds of his life in prison in order that the nations may be freed!"

Bache gently shrugged his shoulders: "Liberty, liberty, of course," said he; "only it is worth nothing if it is not organised."

Thereupon their everlasting discussion began afresh, with Saint-Simon and Fourier on one side and Proudhon and Auguste Comte on the other. Bache gave a long account of the last commemoration which had taken place in honour of Fourier's memory, how faithful disciples had brought wreaths and made speeches, forming quite a meeting of apostles, who all stubbornly clung to their faith, as confident in the future as if they were the messengers of some new gospel. Afterwards Morin emptied his pockets, which were always full of Positivist tracts and pamphlets, manifestos, answers and so forth, in which Comte's doctrines were extolled as furnishing the only possible basis for the new, awaited religion. Pierre, who listened, thereupon remembered the disputes in his little house at Neuilly when he himself, searching for certainty, had endeavoured to draw up the century's balance-sheet. He had lost his depth, in the end, amidst the contradictions and incoherency of the various precursors. Although Fourier had sprung from Saint-Simon, he denied him in part, and if Saint-Simon's doctrine ended in a kind of mystical sensuality, the other's conducted to an inacceptable regimenting of society. Proudhon, for his part, demolished without rebuilding anything. Comte, who created method and declared science to be the one and only sovereign, had not even suspected the advent of the social crisis which now threatened to sweep all away, and had finished personally as a mere worshipper of love, overpowered by woman. Nevertheless, these two, Comte and Proudhon, entered the lists and fought against the others, Fourier and Saint-Simon; the combat between them or their disciples becoming so bitter and so blind that the truths common to them all at first seemed obscured and disfigured beyond recognition. Now, however, that evolution had slowly transformed Pierre, those common truths seemed to him as irrefutable, as clear as the sunlight itself. Amidst the chaos of conflicting assertions which was to be found in the gospels of those social messiahs, there were certain similar phrases and principles which recurred again and again, the defence of the poor, the idea of a new and just division of the riches of the world in accordance with individual labour and merit, and particularly the search for a new law of labour which would enable this fresh distribution to be made equitably. Since all the precursory men of genius agreed so closely upon those points, must they not be the very foundations of to-morrow's new religion, the necessary faith which this century must bequeath to the coming century, in order that the latter may make of it a human religion of peace, solidarity and love?

Then, all at once, there came a leap in Pierre's thoughts. He fancied himself at the Madeleine once more, listening to the address on the New Spirit delivered by Monseigneur Martha, who had predicted that Paris, now reconverted to Christianity, would, thanks to the Sacred Heart, become the ruler of the world. But no, but no! If Paris reigned, it was because it was able to exercise its intelligence freely. To set the cross and the mystic and repulsive symbolism of a bleeding heart above it was simply so much falsehood. Although they might rear edifices of pride and domination as if to crush Paris with their very weight, although they might try to stop science in the name of a dead ideal and in the hope of setting their clutches upon the coming century, these attempts would be of no avail. Science will end by sweeping away all remnants of their ancient sovereignty, their basilica will crumble beneath the breeze of Truth without any necessity of raising a finger against it. The trial has been made, the Gospel as a social code has fallen to pieces, and human wisdom can only retain account of its moral maxims. Ancient Catholicism is on all sides crumbling into dust, Catholic Rome is a mere field of ruins from which the nations turn aside, anxious as they are for a religion that shall not be a religion of death. In olden times the overburdened slave, glowing with a new hope and seeking to escape from his gaol, dreamt of a heaven where in return for his earthly misery he would be rewarded with eternal enjoyment. But now that science has destroyed that false idea of a heaven, and shown what dupery lies in reliance on the morrow of death, the slave, the workman, weary of dying for happiness' sake, demands that justice and happiness shall find place upon this earth. Therein lies the new hope—Justice, after eighteen hundred years of impotent Charity. Ah! in a thousand years from now, when Catholicism will be naught but a very ancient superstition of the past, how amazed men will be to think that their ancestors were able to endure that religion of torture and nihility! How astonished they will feel on finding that God was regarded as an executioner, that manhood was threatened, maimed and chastised, that nature was accounted an enemy, that life was looked upon as something accursed, and that death alone was pronounced sweet and liberating! For well-nigh two thousand years the onward march of mankind has been hampered by the odious idea of tearing all that is human away from man: his desires, his passions, his free intelligence, his will and right of action, his whole strength. And how glorious will be the awakening when such virginity as is now honoured by the Church is held in derision, when fruitfulness is again recognised as a virtue, amidst the hosanna of all the freed forces of nature—man's desires which will be honoured, his passions which will be utilised, his labour which will be exalted, whilst life is loved and ever and ever creates love afresh!

A new religion! a new religion! Pierre remembered the cry which had escaped him at Lourdes, and which he had repeated at Rome in presence of the collapse of old Catholicism. But he no longer displayed the same feverish eagerness as then—a puerile, sickly desire that a new Divinity should at once reveal himself, an ideal come into being, complete in all respects, with dogmas and form of worship. The Divine certainly seemed to be as necessary to man as were bread and water; he had ever fallen back upon it, hungering for the mysterious, seemingly having no other means of consolation than that of annihilating himself in the unknown. But who can say that science will not some day quench the thirst for what lies beyond us? If the domain of science embraces the acquired truths, it also embraces, and will ever do so, the truths that remain to be acquired. And in front of it will there not ever remain a margin for the thirst of knowledge, for the hypotheses which are but so much ideality? Besides, is not the yearning for the divine simply a desire to behold the Divinity? And if science should more and more content the yearning to know all and be able to do all, will not that yearning be quieted and end by mingling with the love of acquired truth? A religion grafted on science is the indicated, certain, inevitable finish of man's long march towards knowledge. He will come to it at last as to a natural haven, as to peace in the midst of certainty, after passing every form of ignorance and terror on his road. And is there not already some indication of such a religion? Has not the idea of the duality of God and the Universe been brushed aside, and is not the principle of unity, monisme, becoming more and more evident—unity leading to solidarity, and the sole law of life proceeding by evolution from the first point of the ether that condensed to create the world? But if precursors, scientists and philosophers—Darwin, Fourier and all the others—have sown the seed of to-morrow's religion by casting the good word to the passing breeze, how many centuries will doubtless be required to raise the crop! People always forget that before Catholicism grew up and reigned in the sunlight, it spent four centuries in germinating and sprouting from the soil. Well, then, grant some centuries to this religion of science of whose sprouting there are signs upon all sides, and by-and-by the admirable ideas of some Fourier will be seen expanding and forming a new gospel, with desire serving as the lever to raise the world, work accepted by one and all, honoured and regulated as the very mechanism of natural and social life, and the passions of man excited, contented and utilised for human happiness! The universal cry of Justice, which rises louder and louder, in a growing clamour from the once silent multitude, the people that have so long been duped and preyed upon, is but a cry for this happiness towards which human beings are tending, the happiness that embodies the complete satisfaction of man's needs, and the principle of life loved for its own sake, in the midst of peace and the expansion of every force and every joy. The time will come when this Kingdom of God will be set upon the earth; so why not close that other deceptive paradise, even if the weak-minded must momentarily suffer from the destruction of their illusions; for it is necessary to operate even with cruelty on the blind if they are to be extricated from their misery, from their long and frightful night of ignorance!

All at once a feeling of deep joy came over Pierre. A child's faint cry, the wakening cry of his son Jean had drawn him from his reverie. And he had suddenly remembered that he himself was now saved, freed from falsehood and fright, restored to good and healthy nature. How he quivered as he recalled that he had once fancied himself lost, blotted out of life, and that a prodigy of love had extricated him from his nothingness, still strong and sound, since that dear child of his was there, sturdy and smiling. Life had brought forth life; and truth had burst forth, as dazzling as the sun. He had made his third experiment with Paris, and this had been conclusive; it had been no wretched miscarriage with increase of darkness and grief, like his other experiments at Lourdes and Rome. In the first place, the law of labour had been revealed to him, and he had imposed upon himself a task, as humble a one as it was, that manual calling which he was learning so late in life, but which was, nevertheless, a form of labour, and one in which he would never fail, one too that would lend him the serenity which comes from the accomplishment of duty, for life itself was but labour: it was only by effort that the world existed. And then, moreover, he had loved; and salvation had come to him from woman and from his child. Ah! what a long and circuitous journey he had made to reach this finish at once so natural and so simple! How he had suffered, how much error and anger he had known before doing what all men ought to do! That eager, glowing love which had contended against his reason, which had bled at sight of the arrant absurdities of the miraculous grotto of Lourdes, which had bled again too in presence of the haughty decline of the Vatican, had at last found contentment now that he was husband and father, now that he had confidence in work and believed in the just laws of life. And thence had come the indisputable truth, the one solution—happiness in certainty.

Whilst Pierre was thus plunged in thought, Bache and Morin had already gone off with their customary handshakes and promises to come and chat again some evening. And as Jean was now crying more loudly, Marie took him in her arms and unhooked her dress-body to give him her breast.

"Oh! the darling, it's his time, you know, and he doesn't forget it!" she said. "Just look, Pierre, I believe he has got bigger since yesterday."

She laughed; and Pierre, likewise laughing, drew near to kiss the child. And afterwards he kissed his wife, mastered as he was by emotion at the sight of that pink, gluttonous little creature imbibing life from that lovely breast so full of milk.

"Why! he'll eat you," he gaily said to Marie. "How he's pulling!"

"Oh! he does bite me a little," she replied; "but I like that the better, it shows that he profits by it."

Then Mere-Grand, she who as a rule was so serious and silent, began to talk with a smile lighting up her face: "I weighed him this morning," said she, "he weighs nearly a quarter of a pound more than he did the last time. And if you had only seen how good he was, the darling! He will be a very intelligent and well-behaved little gentleman, such as I like. When he's five years old, I shall teach him his alphabet, and when he's fifteen, if he likes, I'll tell him how to be a man.... Don't you agree with me, Thomas? And you, Antoine, and you, too, Francois?"

Raising their heads, the three sons gaily nodded their approval, grateful as they felt for the lessons in heroism which she had given them, and apparently finding no reason why she might not live another twenty years in order to give similar lessons to Jean.

Pierre still remained in front of Marie, basking in all the rapture of love, when he felt Guillaume lay his hands upon his shoulders from behind. And on turning round he saw that his brother was also radiant, like one who felt well pleased at seeing them so happy. "Ah! brother," said Guillaume softly, "do you remember my telling you that you suffered solely from the battle between your mind and your heart, and that you would find quietude again when you loved what you could understand? It was necessary that our father and mother, whose painful quarrel had continued beyond the grave, should be reconciled in you. And now it's done, they sleep in peace within you, since you yourself are pacified."

These words filled Pierre with emotion. Joy beamed upon his face, which was now so open and energetic. He still had the towering brow, that impregnable fortress of reason, which he had derived from his father, and he still had the gentle chin and affectionate eyes and mouth which his mother had given him, but all was now blended together, instinct with happy harmony and serene strength. Those two experiments of his which had miscarried, were like crises of his maternal heredity, the tearful tenderness which had come to him from his mother, and which for lack of satisfaction had made him desperate; and his third experiment had only ended in happiness because he had contented his ardent thirst for love in accordance with sovereign reason, that paternal heredity which pleaded so loudly within him. Reason remained the queen. And if his sufferings had thus always come from the warfare which his reason had waged against his heart, it was because he was man personified, ever struggling between his intelligence and his passions. And how peaceful all seemed, now that he had reconciled and satisfied them both, now that he felt healthy, perfect and strong, like some lofty oak, which grows in all freedom, and whose branches spread far away over the forest.

"You have done good work in that respect," Guillaume affectionately continued, "for yourself and for all of us, and even for our dear parents whose shades, pacified and reconciled, now abide so peacefully in the little home of our childhood. I often think of our dear house at Neuilly, which old Sophie is taking care of for us; and although, out of egotism, a desire to set happiness around me, I wished to keep you here, your Jean must some day go and live there, so as to bring it fresh youth."

Pierre had taken hold of his brother's hands, and looking into his eyes he asked: "And you—are you happy?"

"Yes, very happy, happier than I have ever been; happy at loving you as I do, and happy at being loved by you as no one else will ever love me."

Their hearts mingled in ardent brotherly affection, the most perfect and heroic affection that can blend men together. And they embraced one another whilst, with her babe on her breast, Marie, so gay, healthful and loyal, looked at them and smiled, with big tears gathering in her eyes.

Thomas, however, having finished his motor's last toilet, had just set it in motion. It was a prodigy of lightness and strength, of no weight whatever in comparison with the power it displayed. And it worked with perfect smoothness, without noise or smell. The whole family was gathered round it in delight, when there came a timely visit, one from the learned and friendly Bertheroy, whom indeed Guillaume had asked to call, in order that he might see the motor working.

The great chemist at once expressed his admiration; and when he had examined the mechanism and understood how the explosive was employed as motive power—an idea which he had long recommended,—he tendered enthusiastic congratulations to Guillaume and Thomas. "You have created a little marvel," said he, "one which may have far-reaching effects both socially and humanly. Yes, yes, pending the invention of the electrical motor which we have not yet arrived at, here is an ideal one, a system of mechanical traction for all sorts of vehicles. Even aerial navigation may now become a possibility, and the problem of force at home is finally solved. And what a grand step! What sudden progress! Distance again diminished, all roads thrown open, and men able to fraternise! This is a great boon, a splendid gift, my good friends, that you are bestowing on the world."

Then he began to jest about the new explosive, whose prodigious power he had divined, and which he now found put to such a beneficent purpose. "And to think, Guillaume," he said, "that I fancied you acted with so much mysteriousness and hid the formula of your powder from me because you had an idea of blowing up Paris!"

At this Guillaume became grave and somewhat pale. And he confessed the truth. "Well, I did for a moment think of it."

However, Bertheroy went on laughing, as if he regarded this answer as mere repartee, though truth to tell he had felt a slight chill sweep through his hair. "Well, my friend," he said, "you have done far better in offering the world this marvel, which by the way must have been both a difficult and dangerous matter. So here is a powder which was intended to exterminate people, and which in lieu thereof will now increase their comfort and welfare. In the long run things always end well, as I'm quite tired of saying."

On beholding such lofty and tolerant good nature, Guillaume felt moved. Bertheroy's words were true. What had been intended for purposes of destruction served the cause of progress; the subjugated, domesticated volcano became labour, peace and civilisation. Guillaume had even relinquished all idea of his engine of battle and victory; he had found sufficient satisfaction in this last invention of his, which would relieve men of some measure of weariness, and help to reduce their labour to just so much effort as there must always be. In this he detected some little advance towards Justice; at all events it was all that he himself could contribute to the cause. And when on turning towards the window he caught sight of the basilica of the Sacred Heart, he could not explain what insanity had at one moment cone over him, and set him dreaming of idiotic and useless destruction. Some miasmal gust must have swept by, something born of want that scattered germs of anger and vengeance. But how blind it was to think that destruction and murder could ever bear good fruit, ever sow the soil with plenty and happiness! Violence cannot last, and all it does is to rouse man's feeling of solidarity even among those on whose behalf one kills. The people, the great multitude, rebel against the isolated individual who seeks to wreak justice. No one man can take upon himself the part of the volcano; this is the whole terrestrial crust, the whole multitude which internal fire impels to rise and throw up either an Alpine chain or a better and freer society. And whatever heroism there may be in their madness, however great and contagious may be their thirst for martyrdom, murderers are never anything but murderers, whose deeds simply sow the seeds of horror. And if on the one hand Victor Mathis had avenged Salvat, he had also slain him, so universal had been the cry of reprobation roused by the second crime, which was yet more monstrous and more useless than the first.

Guillaume, laughing in his turn, replied to Bertheroy in words which showed how completely he was cured: "You are right," he said, "all ends well since all contributes to truth and justice. Unfortunately, thousands of years are sometimes needed for any progress to be accomplished.... However, for my part, I am simply going to put my new explosive on the market, so that those who secure the necessary authorisation may manufacture it and grow rich. Henceforth it belongs to one and all.... And I've renounced all idea of revolutionising the world."

But Bertheroy protested. This great official scientist, this member of the Institute laden with offices and honours, pointed to the little motor, and replied with all the vigour of his seventy years: "But that is revolution, the true, the only revolution. It is with things like that and not with stupid bombs that one revolutionises the world! It is not by destroying, but by creating, that you have just done the work of a revolutionist. And how many times already have I not told you that science alone is the world's revolutionary force, the only force which, far above all paltry political incidents, the vain agitation of despots, priests, sectarians and ambitious people of all kinds, works for the benefit of those who will come after us, and prepares the triumph of truth, justice and peace.... Ah, my dear child, if you wish to overturn the world by striving to set a little more happiness in it, you have only to remain in your laboratory here, for human happiness can spring only from the furnace of the scientist."

He spoke perhaps in a somewhat jesting way, but one could feel that he was convinced of it all, that he held everything excepting science in utter contempt. He had not even shown any surprise when Pierre had cast his cassock aside; and on finding him there with his wife and child he had not scrupled to show him as much affection as in the past.

Meantime, however, the motor was travelling hither and thither, making no more noise than a bluebottle buzzing in the sunshine. The whole happy family was gathered about it, still laughing with delight at such a victorious achievement. And all at once little Jean, Monsieur Jean, having finished sucking, turned round, displaying his milk-smeared lips, and perceived the machine, the pretty plaything which walked about by itself. At sight of it, his eyes sparkled, dimples appeared on his plump cheeks, and, stretching out his quivering chubby hands, he raised a crow of delight.

Marie, who was quietly fastening her dress, smiled at his glee and brought him nearer, in order that he might have a better view of the toy. "Ah! my darling, it's pretty, isn't it? It moves and it turns, and it's strong; it's quite alive, you see."

The others, standing around, were much amused by the amazed, enraptured expression of the child, who would have liked to touch the machine, perhaps in the hope of understanding it.

"Yes," resumed Bertheroy, "it's alive and it's powerful like the sun, like that great sun shining yonder over Paris, and ripening men and things. And Paris too is a motor, a boiler in which the future is boiling, while we scientists keep the eternal flame burning underneath. Guillaume, my good fellow, you are one of the stokers, one of the artisans of the future, with that little marvel of yours, which will still further extend the influence of our great Paris over the whole world."

These words impressed Pierre, and he again thought of a gigantic vat stretching yonder from one horizon to the other, a vat in which the coming century would emerge from an extraordinary mixture of the excellent and the vile. But now, over and above all passions, ambitions, stains and waste, he was conscious of the colossal expenditure of labour which marked the life of Paris, of the heroic manual efforts in work-shops and factories, and the splendid striving of the young men of intellect whom he knew to be hard at work, studying in silence, relinquishing none of the conquests of their elders, but glowing with desire to enlarge their domain. And in all this Paris was exalted, together with the future that was being prepared within it, and which would wing its flight over the world bright like the dawn of day. If Rome, now so near its death, had ruled the ancient world, it was Paris that reigned with sovereign sway over the modern era, and had for the time become the great centre of the nations as they were carried on from civilisation to civilisation, in a sunward course from east to west. Paris was the world's brain. Its past so full of grandeur had prepared it for the part of initiator, civiliser and liberator. Only yesterday it had cast the cry of Liberty among the nations, and to-morrow it would bring them the religion of Science, the new faith awaited by the democracies. And Paris was also gaiety, kindness and gentleness, passion for knowledge and generosity without limit. Among the workmen of its faubourgs and the peasants of its country-sides there were endless reserves of men on whom the future might freely draw. And the century ended with Paris, and the new century would begin and spread with it. All the clamour of its prodigious labour, all the light that came from it as from a beacon overlooking the earth, all the thunder and tempest and triumphant brightness that sprang from its entrails, were pregnant with that final splendour, of which human happiness would be compounded.

Marie raised a light cry of admiration as she pointed towards the city. "Look! just look!" she exclaimed; "Paris is all golden, covered with a harvest of gold!"

They all re-echoed her admiration, for the effect was really one of extraordinary magnificence. The declining sun was once more veiling the immensity of Paris with golden dust. But this was no longer the city of the sower, a chaos of roofs and edifices suggesting brown land turned up by some huge plough, whilst the sun-rays streamed over it like golden seed, falling upon every side. Nor was it the city whose divisions had one day seemed so plain to Pierre: eastward, the districts of toil, misty with the grey smoke of factories; southward, the districts of study, serene and quiet; westward, the districts of wealth, bright and open; and in the centre the districts of trade, with dark and busy streets. It now seemed as if one and the same crop had sprung up on every side, imparting harmony to everything, and making the entire expanse one sole, boundless field, rich with the same fruitfulness. There was corn, corn everywhere, an infinity of corn, whose golden wave rolled from one end of the horizon to the other. Yes, the declining sun steeped all Paris in equal splendour, and it was truly the crop, the harvest, after the sowing!

"Look! just look," repeated Marie, "there is not a nook without its sheaf; the humblest roofs are fruitful, and every blade is full-eared wherever one may look. It is as if there were now but one and the same soil, reconciled and fraternal. Ah! Jean, my little Jean, look! see how beautiful it is!"

Pierre, who was quivering, had drawn close beside her. And Mere-Grand and Bertheroy smiled upon that promise of a future which they would not see, whilst beside Guillaume, whom the sight filled with emotion, were his three big sons, the three young giants, looking quite grave, they who ever laboured and were ever hopeful. Then Marie, with a fine gesture of enthusiasm, stretched out her arms and raised her child aloft, as if offering it in gift to the huge city.

"See, Jean! see, little one," she cried, "it's you who'll reap it all, who'll store the whole crop in the barn!"

And Paris flared—Paris, which the divine sun had sown with light, and where in glory waved the great future harvest of Truth and of Justice.

THE END

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Fruitfulness, by Emile Zola

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Title: Fruitfulness
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Author: Emile Zola

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FRUITFULNESS

(FECONDITE)

By Emile Zola

Translated and edited by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Contents

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

FRUITFULNESS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

"FRUITFULNESS" is the first of a series of four works in which M. Zola proposes to embody what he considers to be the four cardinal principles of human life. These works spring from the previous series of The Three Cities: "Lourdes," "Rome," and "Paris," which dealt with the principles of Faith, Hope, and Charity. The last scene in "Paris," when Marie, Pierre Froment's wife, takes her boy in her arms and consecrates him, so to say, to the city of labor and thought, furnishes the necessary transition from one series to the other. "Fruitfulness," says M. Zola, "creates the home. Thence springs the city. From the idea of citizenship comes that of the fatherland; and love of country, in minds fed by science, leads to the conception of a wider and vaster fatherland, comprising all the peoples of the earth. Of these three stages in the progress of mankind, the fourth still remains to be attained. I have thought then of writing, as it were, a poem in four volumes, in four chants, in which I shall endeavor to sum up the philosophy of all my work. The first of these volumes is 'Fruitfulness'; the second will be called 'Work'; the third, 'Truth'; the last, 'Justice.' In 'Fruitfulness' the hero's name is Matthew. In the next work it will be Luke; in 'Truth,' Mark; and in 'justice,' John. The children of my brain will, like the four Evangelists preaching the gospel, diffuse the religion of future society, which will be founded on Fruitfulness, Work, Truth, and Justice."

This, then, is M. Zola's reply to the cry repeatedly raised by his hero, Abbe Pierre Froment, in the pages of "Lourdes," "Paris," and "Rome": "A new religion, a new religion!" Critics of those works were careful to point out that no real answer was ever returned to the Abbe's despairing call; and it must be confessed that one must yet wait for the greater part of that answer, since "Fruitfulness," though complete as a narrative, forms but a portion of the whole. It is only after the publication of the succeeding volumes that one will be able to judge how far M. Zola's doctrines and theories in their ensemble may appeal to the requirements of the world.

While "Fruitfulness," as I have said, constitutes a first instalment of M. Zola's conception of a social religion, it embodies a good deal else. The idea of writing some such work first occurred to him many years ago. In 1896 he contributed an article to the Paris Figaro, in which he said: "For some ten years now I have been haunted by the idea of a novel, of which I shall, doubtless, never write the first page.... That novel would have been called 'Wastage'... and I should have pleaded in it in favor of all the rights of life, with all the passion which I may have in my heart."* M. Zola's article then proceeds to discuss the various social problems, theories, and speculations which are set forth here and there in the present work. Briefly, the genesis of "Fruitfulness" lies in the article I have quoted.

* See Nouvelle Campagne (1896), par Emile Zola.
Paris, 1897, pp. 217-228.

"Fruitfulness" is a book to be judged from several standpoints. It would be unjust and absurd to judge it from one alone, such, for instance, as that of the new social religion to which I have referred. It must be looked at notably as a tract for the times in relation to certain grievous evils from which France and other countries—though more particularly France—are undoubtedly suffering. And it may be said that some such denunciation of those evils was undoubtedly necessary, and that nobody was better placed to pen that denunciation than M. Zola, who, alone of all French writers nowadays, commands universal attention. Whatever opinion may be held of his writings, they have to be reckoned with. Thus, in preparing "Fruitfulness," he was before all else discharging a patriotic duty, and that duty he took in hand in an hour of cruel adversity, when to assist a great cause he withdrew from France and sought for a time a residence in England, where for eleven months I was privileged to help him in maintaining his incognito. "Fruitfulness" was entirely written in England, begun in a Surrey country house, and finished at the Queen's Hotel, Norwood.

It would be superfluous for me to enter here into all the questions which M. Zola raises in his pages. The evils from which France suffers in relation to the stagnancy of its population, are well known, and that their continuance—if continuance there be—will mean the downfall of the country from its position as one of the world's great powers before the close of the twentieth century, is a mathematical certainty. That M. Zola, in order to combat those evils, and to do his duty as a good citizen anxious to prevent the decline of his country, should have dealt with his subject with the greatest frankness and outspokenness, was only natural. Moreover, absolute freedom of speech exists in France, which is not the case elsewhere. Thus, when I first perused the original proofs of M. Zola's work, I came to the conclusion that any version of it in the English language would be well-nigh impossible. For some time I remained of that opinion, and I made a statement to that effect in a leading literary journal. Subsequently, however, my views became modified. "The man who is ridiculous," wrote a French poet, Barthelemy, "is he whose opinions never change," and thus I at last reverted to a task from which I had turned aside almost in despair.

Various considerations influenced me, and among them was the thought that if "Fruitfulness" were not presented to the public in an English dress, M. Zola's new series would remain incomplete, decapitated so far as British and American readers were concerned. After all, the criticisms dealing with the French original were solely directed against matters of form, the mould in which some part of the work was cast. Its high moral purpose was distinctly recognized by several even of its most bitter detractors. For me the problem was how to retain the whole ensemble of the narrative and the essence of the lessons which the work inculcates, while recasting some portion of it and sacrificing those matters of form to which exception was taken. It is not for me to say whether I have succeeded in the task; but I think that nothing in any degree offensive to delicate susceptibilities will be found in this present version of M. Zola's book.

The English reviews of the French original showed that if certain portions of it were deemed indiscreet, it none the less teemed with admirable and even delightful pages. Among the English reviewers were two well-known lady writers, Madame Darmesteter (formerly Miss Mary Robinson), and Miss Hannah Lynch. And the former remarked in one part of her critique: "Even this short review reveals how honest, how moral, how human and comely is the fable of Fecondite,"* while the latter expressed the view that the work was "eminently, pugnaciously virtuous in M. Zola's strictly material conception of virtue." And again: "The pages that tell the story of Mathieu and Marianne, it must be admitted, are as charming as possible. They have a bloom, a beauty, a fragrance we never expected to find in M. Zola's work. The tale is a simple one: the cheerful conquest of fortune and the continual birth of offspring."**

* Manchester Guardian, October 27, 1899.

** Fortnightly Review, January 1900.

Of course, these lady critics did not favor certain features of the original, and one of them, indeed, referred to the evil denounced by M. Zola as a mere evil of the hour, whereas it has been growing and spreading for half a century, gradually sapping all the vitality of France. But beside that evil, beside the downfall of the families it attacks, M. Zola portrays the triumph of rectitude, the triumph which follows faith in the powers of life, and observance of the law of universal labor. "Fruitfulness" contains charming pictures of homely married life, delightful glimpses of childhood and youth: the first smile, the first step, the first word, followed by the playfulness and the flirtations of boyhood, and the happiness which waits on the espousals of those who truly love. And the punishment of the guilty is awful, and the triumph of the righteous is the greatest that can be conceived. All those features have been retained, so far as my abilities have allowed, in the present version, which will at the same time, I think, give the reader unacquainted with the French language a general idea of M. Zola's views on one of the great questions of the age, as well as all the essential portions of a strongly conceived narrative.

E. A. V.

MERTON, SURREY, ENGLAND: April, 1900.

FRUITFULNESS

I

THAT morning, in the little pavilion of Chantebled, on the verge of the woods, where they had now been installed for nearly a month, Mathieu was making all haste in order that he might catch the seven-o'clock train which every day conveyed him from Janville to Paris. It was already half-past six, and there were fully two thousand paces from the pavilion to Janville. Afterwards came a railway journey of three-quarters of an hour, and another journey of at least equal duration through Paris, from the Northern Railway terminus to the Boulevard de Grenelle. He seldom reached his office at the factory before half-past eight o'clock.

He had just kissed the children. Fortunately they were asleep; otherwise they would have linked their arms about his neck, laughed and kissed him, being ever unwilling to let him go. And as he hastily returned to the principal bedroom, he found his wife, Marianne, in bed there, but awake and sitting up. She had risen a moment before in order to pull back a curtain, and all the glow of that radiant May morning swept in, throwing a flood of gay sunshine over the fresh and healthy beauty of her four-and-twenty years. He, who was three years the elder, positively adored her.

"You know, my darling," said he, "I must make haste, for I fear I may miss the train—and so manage as well as you can. You still have thirty sous left, haven't you?"

She began to laugh, looking charming with her bare arms and her loose-flowing dark hair. The ever-recurring pecuniary worries of the household left her brave and joyous. Yet she had been married at seventeen, her husband at twenty, and they already had to provide for four children.

"Oh! we shall be all right," said she. "It's the end of the month to-day, and you'll receive your money to-night. I'll settle our little debts at Janville to-morrow. There are only the Lepailleurs, who worry me with their bill for milk and eggs, for they always look as if they fancied one meant to rob them. But with thirty sous, my dear! why, we shall have quite a high time of it!"

She was still laughing as she held out her firm white arms for the customary morning good-by.

"Run off, since you are in a hurry. I will go to meet you at the little bridge to-night."

"No, no, I insist on your going to bed! You know very well that even if I catch the quarter-to-eleven-o'clock train, I cannot reach Janville before half-past eleven. Ah! what a day I have before me! I had to promise the Moranges that I would take dejeuner with them; and this evening Beauchene is entertaining a customer—a business dinner, which I'm obliged to attend. So go to bed, and have a good sleep while you are waiting for me."

She gently nodded, but would give no positive promise. "Don't forget to call on the landlord," she added, "to tell him that the rain comes into the children's bedroom. It's not right that we should be soaked here as if we were on the high-way, even if those millionaires, the Seguins du Hordel, do let us have this place for merely six hundred francs a year."

"Ah, yes! I should have forgotten that. I will call on them, I promise you."

Then Mathieu took her in his arms, and there was no ending to their leave-taking. He still lingered. She had begun to laugh again, while giving him many a kiss in return for his own. There was all the love of bounding health between them, the joy that springs from the most perfect union, as when man and wife are but one both in flesh and in soul.

"Run off, run off, darling! Remember to tell Constance that, before she goes into the country, she ought to run down here some Sunday with Maurice."

"Yes, yes, I will tell her—till to-night, darling."

But he came back once more, caught her in a tight embrace, and pressed to her lips a long, loving kiss, which she returned with her whole heart. And then he hurried away.

He usually took an omnibus on his arrival at the Northern Railway terminus. But on the days when only thirty sous remained at home he bravely went through Paris on foot. It was, too, a very fine walk by way of the Rue la Fayette, the Opera-house, the Boulevards, the Rue Royale, and then, after the Place de la Concorde, the Cours la Reine, the Alma bridge, and the Quai d'Orsay.

Beauchene's works were at the very end of the Quai d'Orsay, between the Rue de la Federation and the Boulevard de Grenelle. There was hereabouts a large square plot, at one end of which, facing the quay, stood a handsome private house of brickwork with white stone dressings, that had been erected by Leon Beauchene, father of Alexandre, the present master of the works. From the balconies one could perceive the houses which were perched aloft in the midst of greenery on the height of Passy, beyond the Seine; whilst on the right arose the campanile of the Trocadero palace. On one side, skirting the Rue de la Federation, one could still see a garden and a little house, which had been the modest dwelling of Leon Beauchene in the heroic days of desperate toil when he had laid the foundations of his fortune. Then the factory buildings and sheds, quite a mass of grayish structures, overtopped by two huge chimneys, occupied both the back part of the ground and that which fringed the Boulevard de Grenelle, the latter being shut off by long windowless walls. This important and well-known establishment manufactured chiefly agricultural appliances, from the most powerful machines to those ingenious and delicate implements on which particular care must be bestowed if perfection is to be attained. In addition to the hundreds of men who worked there daily, there were some fifty women, burnishers and polishers.

The entry to the workshops and offices was in the Rue de la Federation, through a large carriage way, whence one perceived the far-spreading yard, with its paving stones invariably black and often streaked by rivulets of steaming water. Dense smoke arose from the high chimneys, strident jets of steam emerged from the roof, whilst a low rumbling and a shaking of the ground betokened the activity within, the ceaseless bustle of labor.

It was thirty-five minutes past eight by the big clock of the central building when Mathieu crossed the yard towards the office which he occupied as chief designer. For eight years he had been employed at the works where, after a brilliant and special course of study, he had made his beginning as assistant draughtsman when but nineteen years old, receiving at that time a salary of one hundred francs a month. His father, Pierre Froment,* had four sons by Marie his wife—Jean the eldest, then Mathieu, Marc, and Luc—and while leaving them free to choose a particular career he had striven to give each of them some manual calling. Leon Beauchene, the founder of the works, had been dead a year, and his son Alexandre had succeeded him and married Constance Meunier, daughter of a very wealthy wall-paper manufacturer of the Marais, at the time when Mathieu entered the establishment, the master of which was scarcely five years older than himself. It was there that Mathieu had become acquainted with a poor cousin of Alexandre's, Marianne, then sixteen years old, whom he had married during the following year.

* Of Lourdes, Rome, and Paris.

Marianne, when only twelve, had become dependent upon her uncle, Leon Beauchene. After all sorts of mishaps a brother of the latter, one Felix Beauchene, a man of adventurous mind but a blunderhead, had gone to Algeria with his wife and daughter, there to woo fortune afresh; and the farm he had established was indeed prospering when, during a sudden revival of Arab brigandage, both he and his wife were murdered and their home was destroyed. Thus the only place of refuge for the little girl, who had escaped miraculously, was the home of her uncle, who showed her great kindness during the two years of life that remained to him. With her, however, were Alexandre, whose companionship was rather dull, and his younger sister, Seraphine, a big, vicious, and flighty girl of eighteen, who, as it happened, soon left the house amid a frightful scandal—an elopement with a certain Baron Lowicz, a genuine baron, but a swindler and forger, to whom it became necessary to marry her. She then received a dowry of 300,000 francs. Alexandre, after his father's death, made a money match with Constance, who brought him half a million francs, and Marianne then found herself still more a stranger, still more isolated beside her new cousin, a thin, dry, authoritative woman, who ruled the home with absolute sway. Mathieu was there, however, and a few months sufficed: fine, powerful, and healthy love sprang up between the young people; there was no lightning flash such as throws the passion-swayed into each other's arms, but esteem, tenderness, faith, and that mutual conviction of happiness in reciprocal bestowal which tends to indissoluble marriage. And they were delighted at marrying penniless, at bringing one another but their full hearts forever and forever. The only change in Mathieu's circumstances was an increase of salary to two hundred francs a month. True, his new cousin by marriage just vaguely hinted at a possible partnership, but that would not be till some very much later date.

As it happened Mathieu Froment gradually became indispensable at the works. The young master, Alexandre Beauchene, passed through an anxious crisis. The dowry which his father had been forced to draw from his coffers in order to get Seraphine married, and other large expenses which had been occasioned by the girl's rebellious and perverse conduct, had left but little working capital in the business. Then, too, on the morrow of Leon Beauchene's death it was found that, with the carelessness often evinced in such matters, he had neglected to leave a will; so that Seraphine eagerly opposed her brother's interests, demanding her personal share of the inheritance, and even suggesting the sale of the works. The property had narrowly escaped being cut up, annihilated. And Alexandre Beauchene still shivered with terror and anger at the recollection of that time, amidst all his delight at having at last rid himself of his sister by paying her in money the liberally estimated value of her share. It was in order to fill up the void thus created in his finances that he had espoused the half-million represented by Constance—an ugly creature, as he himself bitterly acknowledged, coarse male as he was. Truth to tell, she was so thin, so scraggy, that before consenting to make her his wife he had often called her "that bag of bones." But, on the other hand, thanks to his marriage with her, all his losses were made good in five or six years' time; the business of the works even doubled, and great prosperity set in. And Mathieu, having become a most active and necessary coadjutor, ended by taking the post of chief designer, at a salary of four thousand two hundred francs per annum.

Morange, the chief accountant, whose office was near Mathieu's, thrust his head through the doorway as soon as he heard the young man installing himself at his drawing-table. "I say, my dear Froment," he exclaimed, "don't forget that you are to take dejeuner with us."

"Yes, yes, my good Morange, it's understood. I will look in for you at twelve o'clock."

Then Mathieu very carefully scrutinized a wash drawing of a very simple but powerful steam thresher, an invention of his own, on which he had been working for some time past, and which a big landowner of Beauce, M. Firon-Badinier, was to examine during the afternoon.

The door of the master's private room was suddenly thrown wide open and Beauchene appeared—tall, with a ruddy face, a narrow brow, and big brown, protruding eyes. He had a rather large nose, thick lips, and a full black beard, on which he bestowed great care, as he likewise did on his hair, which was carefully combed over his head in order to conceal the serious baldness that was already coming upon him, although he was scarcely two-and-thirty. Frock-coated the first thing in the morning, he was already smoking a big cigar; and his loud voice, his peals of gayety, his bustling ways, all betokened an egotist and good liver still in his prime, a man for whom money—capital increased and increased by the labor of others—was the one only sovereign power.

"Ah! ah! it's ready, is it not?" said he; "Monsieur Firon-Badinier has again written me that he will be here at three o'clock. And you know that I'm going to take you to the restaurant with him this evening; for one can never induce those fellows to give orders unless one plies them with good wine. It annoys Constance to have it done here; and, besides, I prefer to entertain those people in town. You warned Marianne, eh?"

"Certainly. She knows that I shall return by the quarter-to-eleven-o'clock train."

Beauchene had sunk upon a chair: "Ah! my dear fellow, I'm worn out," he continued; "I dined in town last night; I got to bed only at one o'clock. And there was a terrible lot of work waiting for me this morning. One positively needs to be made of iron."

Until a short time before he had shown himself a prodigious worker, endowed with really marvellous energy and strength. Moreover, he had given proof of unfailing business instinct with regard to many profitable undertakings. Invariably the first to appear at the works, he looked after everything, foresaw everything, filling the place with his bustling zeal, and doubling his output year by year. Recently, however, fatigue had been gaining ground on him. He had always sought plenty of amusement, even amid the hard-working life he led. But nowadays certain "sprees," as he called them, left him fairly exhausted.

He gazed at Mathieu: "You seem fit enough, you do!" he said. "How is it that you manage never to look tired?"

As a matter of fact, the young man who stood there erect before his drawing-table seemed possessed of the sturdy health of a young oak tree. Tall and slender, he had the broad, lofty, tower-like brow of the Froments. He wore his thick hair cut quite short, and his beard, which curled slightly, in a point. But the chief expression of his face rested in his eyes, which were at once deep and bright, keen and thoughtful, and almost invariably illumined by a smile. They showed him to be at once a man of thought and of action, very simple, very gay, and of a kindly disposition.

"Oh! I," he answered with a laugh, "I behave reasonably."

But Beauchene protested: "No, you don't! The man who already has four children when he is only twenty-seven can't claim to be reasonable. And twins too—your Blaise and your Denis to begin with! And then your boy Ambroise and your little girl Rose. Without counting the other little girl that you lost at her birth. Including her, you would now have had five youngsters, you wretched fellow! No, no, I'm the one who behaves reasonably—I, who have but one child, and, like a prudent, sensible man, desire no others!"

He often made such jesting remarks as these, through which filtered his genuine indignation; for he deemed the young couple to be over-careless of their interests, and declared that the prolificness of his cousin Marianne was quite scandalous.

Accustomed as Mathieu was to these attacks, which left him perfectly serene, he went on laughing, without even giving a reply, when a workman abruptly entered the room—one who was currently called "old Moineaud," though he was scarcely three-and-forty years of age. Short and thick-set, he had a bullet head, a bull's neck, and face and hands scarred and dented by more than a quarter of a century of toil. By calling he was a fitter, and he had come to submit a difficulty which had just arisen in the piecing together of a reaping machine. But, his employer, who was still angrily thinking of over-numerous families, did not give him time to explain his purpose.

"And you, old Moineaud, how many children have you?" he inquired.

"Seven, Monsieur Beauchene," the workman replied, somewhat taken aback. "I've lost three."

"So, including them, you would now have ten? Well, that's a nice state of things! How can you do otherwise than starve?"

Moineaud began to laugh like the gay thriftless Paris workman that he was. The little ones? Well, they grew up without his even noticing it, and, indeed, he was really fond of them, so long as they remained at home. And, besides, they worked as they grew older, and brought a little money in. However, he preferred to answer his employer with a jest which set them all laughing.

After he had explained the difficulty with the reaper, the others followed him to examine the work for themselves. They were already turning into a passage, when Beauchene, seeing the door of the women's workshop open, determined to pass that way, so that he might give his customary look around. It was a long, spacious place, where the polishers, in smocks of black serge, sat in double rows polishing and grinding their pieces at little work-boards. Nearly all of them were young, a few were pretty, but most had low and common faces. An animal odor and a stench of rancid oil pervaded the place.

The regulations required perfect silence there during work. Yet all the girls were gossiping. As soon, however, as the master's approach was signalled the chatter abruptly ceased. There was but one girl who, having her head turned, and thus seeing nothing of Beauchene, went on furiously abusing a companion, with whom she had previously started a dispute. She and the other were sisters, and, as it happened, daughters of old Moineaud. Euphrasie, the younger one, she who was shouting, was a skinny creature of seventeen, light-haired, with a long, lean, pointed face, uncomely and malignant; whereas the elder, Norine, barely nineteen, was a pretty girl, a blonde like her sister, but having a milky skin, and withal plump and sturdy, showing real shoulders, arms, and hips, and one of those bright sunshiny faces, with wild hair and black eyes, all the freshness of the Parisian hussy, aglow with the fleeting charm of youth.

Norine was ever quarrelling with Euphrasie, and was pleased to have her caught in a misdeed; so she allowed her to rattle on. And it thereupon became necessary for Beauchene to intervene. He habitually evinced great severity in the women's workshop, for he had hitherto held the view that an employer who jested with his workgirls was a lost man. Thus, in spite of the low character of which he was said to give proof in his walks abroad, there had as yet never been the faintest suggestion of scandal in connection with him and the women in his employ.

"Well, now, Mademoiselle Euphrasie!" he exclaimed; "do you intend to be quiet? This is quite improper. You are fined twenty sous, and if I hear you again you will be locked out for a week."

The girl had turned round in consternation. Then, stifling her rage, she cast a terrible glance at her sister, thinking that she might at least have warned her. But the other, with the discreet air of a pretty wench conscious of her attractiveness, continued smiling, looking her employer full in the face, as if certain that she had nothing to fear from him. Their eyes met, and for a couple of seconds their glances mingled. Then he, with flushed cheeks and an angry air, resumed, addressing one and all: "As soon as the superintendent turns her back you chatter away like so many magpies. Just be careful, or you will have to deal with me!"

Moineaud, the father, had witnessed the scene unmoved, as if the two girls—she whom the master had scolded, and she who slyly gazed at him—were not his own daughters. And now the round was resumed and the three men quitted the women's workshop amidst profound silence, which only the whir of the little grinders disturbed.

When the fitting difficulty had been overcome downstairs and Moineaud had received his orders, Beauchene returned to his residence accompanied by Mathieu, who wished to convey Marianne's invitation to Constance. A gallery connected the black factory buildings with the luxurious private house on the quay. And they found Constance in a little drawing-room hung with yellow satin, a room to which she was very partial. She was seated near a sofa, on which lay little Maurice, her fondly prized and only child, who had just completed his seventh year.

"Is he ill?" inquired Mathieu.

The child seemed sturdily built, and he greatly resembled his father, though he had a more massive jaw. But he was pale and there was a faint ring round his heavy eyelids. His mother, that "bag of bones," a little dark woman, yellow and withered at six-and-twenty, looked at him with an expression of egotistical pride.

"Oh, no! he's never ill," she answered. "Only he has been complaining of his legs. And so I made him lie down, and I wrote last night to ask Dr. Boutan to call this morning."

"Pooh!" exclaimed Beauchene with a hearty laugh, "women are all the same! A child who is as strong as a Turk! I should just like anybody to tell me that he isn't strong."

Precisely at that moment in walked Dr. Boutan, a short, stout man of forty, with very keen eyes set in a clean-shaven, heavy, but extremely good-natured face. He at once examined the child, felt and sounded him; then with his kindly yet serious air he said: "No, no, there's nothing. It is the mere effect of growth. The lad has become rather pale through spending the winter in Paris, but a few months in the open air, in the country, will set him right again."

"I told you so!" cried Beauchene.

Constance had kept her son's little hand in her own. He had again stretched himself out and closed his eyes in a weary way, whilst she, in her happiness, continued smiling. Whenever she chose she could appear quite pleasant-looking, however unprepossessing might be her features. The doctor had seated himself, for he was fond of lingering and chatting in the houses of friends. A general practitioner, and one who more particularly tended the ailments of women and children, he was naturally a confessor, knew all sorts of secrets, and was quite at home in family circles. It was he who had attended Constance at the birth of that much-spoiled only son, and Marianne at the advent of the four children she already had.

Mathieu had remained standing, awaiting an opportunity to deliver his invitation. "Well," said he, "if you are soon leaving for the country, you must come one Sunday to Janville. My wife would be so delighted to see you there, to show you our encampment."

Then he jested respecting the bareness of the lonely pavilion which they occupied, recounting that as yet they possessed only a dozen plates and five egg-cups. But Beauchene knew the pavilion, for he went shooting in the neighborhood every winter, having a share in the tenancy of some extensive woods, the shooting-rights over which had been parcelled out by the owner.

"Seguin," said he, "is a friend of mine. I have lunched at your pavilion. It's a perfect hovel!"

Then Constance, contemptuous at the idea of such poverty, recalled what Madame Seguin—to whom she referred as Valentine—had told her of the dilapidated condition of the old shooting-box. But the doctor, after listening with a smile, broke in:

"Mme. Seguin is a patient of mine. At the time when her last child was born I advised her to stay at that pavilion. The atmosphere is wholesome, and children ought to spring up there like couch-grass."

Thereupon, with a sonorous laugh, Beauchene began to jest in his habitual way, remarking that if the doctor were correct there would probably be no end to Mathieu's progeny, numerous as it already was. But this elicited an angry protest from Constance, who on the subject of children held the same views as her husband himself professed in his more serious moments.

Mathieu thoroughly understood what they both meant. They regarded him and his wife with derisive pity, tinged with anger.

The advent of the young couple's last child, little Rose, had already increased their expenses to such a point that they had been obliged to seek refuge in the country, in a mere pauper's hovel. And yet, in spite of Beauchene's sneers and Constance's angry remarks, Mathieu outwardly remained very calm. Constance and Marianne had never been able to agree; they differed too much in all respects; and for his part he laughed off every attack, unwilling as he was to let anger master him, lest a rupture should ensue.

But Beauchene waxed passionate on the subject. That question of the birth-rate and the present-day falling off in population was one which he thought he had completely mastered, and on which he held forth at length authoritatively. He began by challenging the impartiality of Boutan, whom he knew to be a fervent partisan of large families. He made merry with him, declaring that no medical man could possibly have a disinterested opinion on the subject. Then he brought out all that he vaguely knew of Malthusianism, the geometrical increase of births, and the arithmetical increase of food-substances, the earth becoming so populous as to be reduced to a state of famine within two centuries. It was the poor's own fault, said he, if they led a life of starvation; they had only to limit themselves to as many children as they could provide for. The rich were falsely accused of social wrong-doing; they were by no means responsible for poverty. Indeed, they were the only reasonable people; they alone, by limiting their families, acted as good citizens should act. And he became quite triumphant, repeating that he knew of no cause for self-reproach, and that his ever-growing fortune left him with an easy conscience. It was so much the worse for the poor, if they were bent on remaining poor. In vain did the doctor urge that the Malthusian theories were shattered, that the calculations had been based on a possible, not a real, increase of population; in vain too did he prove that the present-day economic crisis, the evil distribution of wealth under the capitalist system, was the one hateful cause of poverty, and that whenever labor should be justly apportioned among one and all the fruitful earth would easily provide sustenance for happy men ten times more numerous than they are now. The other refused to listen to anything, took refuge in his egotism, declared that all those matters were no concern of his, that he felt no remorse at being rich, and that those who wished to become rich had, in the main, simply to do as he had done.

"Then, logically, this is the end of France, eh?" Boutan remarked maliciously. "The number of births ever increases in Germany, Russia, and elsewhere, while it decreases in a terrible way among us. Numerically the rank we occupy in Europe is already very inferior to what it formerly was; and yet number means power more than ever nowadays. It has been calculated that an average of four children per family is necessary in order that population may increase and the strength of a nation be maintained. You have but one child; you are a bad patriot."

At this Beauchene flew into a tantrum, quite beside himself, and gasped: "I a bad patriot! I, who kill myself with hard work! I, who even export French machinery!... Yes, certainly I see families, acquaintances around me who may well allow themselves four children; and I grant that they deserve censure when they have no families. But as for me, my dear doctor, it is impossible. You know very well that in my position I absolutely can't."

Then, for the hundredth time, he gave his reasons, relating how the works had narrowly escaped being cut into pieces, annihilated, simply because he had unfortunately been burdened with a sister. Seraphine had behaved abominably. There had been first her dowry; next her demands for the division of the property on their father's death; and the works had been saved only by means of a large pecuniary sacrifice which had long crippled their prosperity. And people imagined that he would be as imprudent as his father! Why, if Maurice should have a brother or a sister, he might hereafter find himself in the same dire embarrassment, in which the family property might already have been destroyed. No, no! He would not expose the boy to the necessity of dividing the inheritance in accordance with badly framed laws. He was resolved that Maurice should be the sole master of the fortune which he himself had derived from his father, and which he would transmit to his heir increased tenfold. For his son he dreamt of supreme wealth, a colossal fortune, such as nowadays alone ensures power.

Mathieu, refraining from any intervention, listened and remained grave; for this question of the birth-rate seemed to him a frightful one, the foremost of all questions, deciding the destiny of mankind and the world. There has never been any progress but such as has been determined by increase of births. If nations have accomplished evolutions, if civilization has advanced, it is because the nations have multiplied and subsequently spread through all the countries of the earth. And will not to-morrow's evolution, the advent of truth and justice, be brought about by the constant onslaught of the greater number, the revolutionary fruitfulness of the toilers and the poor?

It is quite true that Mathieu did not plainly say all these things to himself; indeed, he felt slightly ashamed of the four children that he already had, and was disturbed by the counsels of prudence addressed to him by the Beauchenes. But within him there struggled his faith in life, his belief that the greatest possible sum of life must bring about the greatest sum of happiness.

At last, wishing to change the subject, he bethought himself of Marianne's commission, and at the first favorable opportunity exclaimed: "Well, we shall rely on you, Marianne and I, for Sunday after next, at Janville."

But there was still no answer, for just then a servant came to say that a woman with an infant in her arms desired to see Madame. And Beauchene, having recognized the wife of Moineaud, the fitter, bade her come in. Boutan, who had now risen, was prompted by curiosity to remain a little longer.

La Moineaude, short and fat like her husband, was a woman of about forty, worn out before her time, with ashen face, pale eyes, thin faded hair, and a weak mouth which already lacked many teeth. A large family had been too much for her; and, moreover, she took no care of herself.

"Well, my good woman," Constance inquired, "what do you wish with me?"

But La Moineaude remained quite scared by the sight of all those people whom she had not expected to find there. She said nothing. She had hoped to speak to the lady privately.

"Is this your last-born?" Beauchene asked her as he looked at the pale, puny child on her arm.

"Yes, monsieur, it's my little Alfred; he's ten months old and I've had to wean him, for I couldn't feed him any longer. I had nine others before this one, but three are dead. My eldest son, Eugene, is a soldier in Tonquin. You have my two big girls, Euphrasie and Norine, at the works. And I have three left at home—Victor, who is now fifteen, then Cecile and Irma, who are ten and seven. After Irma I thought I had done with children for good, and I was well pleased. But, you see, this urchin came! And I, forty too—it's not just! The good Lord must surely have abandoned us."

Then Dr. Boutan began to question her. He avoided looking at the Beauchenes, but there was a malicious twinkle in his little eyes, and it was evident that he took pleasure in recapitulating the employer's arguments against excessive prolificness. He pretended to get angry and to reproach the Moineauds for their ten wretched children—the boys fated to become food for powder, the girls always liable to misfortune. And he gave the woman to understand that it was her own fault if she was in distress; for people with a tribe of children about them could never become rich. And the poor creature sadly answered that he was quite right, but that no idea of becoming rich could ever have entered their heads. Moineaud knew well enough that he would never be a cabinet minister, and so it was all the same to them how many children they might have on their hands. Indeed, a number proved a help when the youngsters grew old enough to go out to work.

Beauchene had become silent and slowly paced the room. A slight chill, a feeling of uneasiness was springing up, and so Constance made haste to inquire: "Well, my good woman, what is it I can do for you?"

"Mon Dieu, madame, it worries me; it's something which Moineaud didn't dare to ask of Monsieur Beauchene. For my part I hoped to find you alone and beg you to intercede for us. The fact is we should be very, very grateful if our little Victor could only be taken on at the works."

"But he is only fifteen," exclaimed Beauchene. "You must wait till he's sixteen. The law is strict."

"No doubt. Only one might perhaps just tell a little fib. It would be rendering us such a service—"

"No, it is impossible."

Big tears welled into La Moineaude's eyes. And Mathieu, who had listened with passionate interest, felt quite upset. Ah! that wretched toil-doomed flesh that hastened to offer itself without waiting until it was even ripe for work! Ah! the laborer who is prepared to lie, whom hunger sets against the very law designed for his own protection!

When La Moineaude had gone off in despair the doctor continued speaking of juvenile and female labor. As soon as a woman first finds herself a mother she can no longer continue toiling at a factory. Her lying-in and the nursing of her babe force her to remain at home, or else grievous infirmities may ensue for her and her offspring. As for the child, it becomes anemic, sometimes crippled; besides, it helps to keep wages down by being taken to work at a low scale of remuneration. Then the doctor went on to speak of the prolificness of wretchedness, the swarming of the lower classes. Was not the most hateful natality of all that which meant the endless increase of starvelings and social rebels?

"I perfectly understand you," Beauchene ended by saying, without any show of anger, as he abruptly brought his perambulations to an end. "You want to place me in contradiction with myself, and make me confess that I accept Moineaud's seven children and need them, whereas I, with my fixed determination to rest content with an only son, suppress, as it were, a family in order that I may not have to subdivide my estate. France, 'the country of only sons,' as folks say nowadays—that's it, eh? But, my dear fellow, the question is so intricate, and at bottom I am altogether in the right!"

Then he wished to explain things, and clapped his hand to his breast, exclaiming that he was a liberal, a democrat, ready to demand all really progressive measures. He willingly recognized that children were necessary, that the army required soldiers, and the factories workmen. Only he also invoked the prudential duties of the higher classes, and reasoned after the fashion of a man of wealth, a conservative clinging to the fortune he has acquired.

Mathieu meanwhile ended by understanding the brutal truth: Capital is compelled to favor the multiplication of lives foredoomed to wretchedness; in spite of everything it must stimulate the prolificness of the wage-earning classes, in order that its profits may continue. The law is that there must always be an excess of children in order that there may be enough cheap workers. Then also speculation on the wages' ratio wrests all nobility from labor, which is regarded as the worst misfortune a man can be condemned to, when in reality it is the most precious of boons. Such, then, is the cancer preying upon mankind. In countries of political equality and economical inequality the capitalist regime, the faulty distribution of wealth, at once restrains and precipitates the birth-rate by perpetually increasing the wrongful apportionment of means. On one side are the rich folk with "only" sons, who continually increase their fortunes; on the other, the poor folk, who, by reason of their unrestrained prolificness, see the little they possess crumble yet more and more. If labor be honored to-morrow, if a just apportionment of wealth be arrived at, equilibrium will be restored. Otherwise social revolution lies at the end of the road.

But Beauchene, in his triumphant manner, tried to show that he possessed great breadth of mind; he admitted the disquieting strides of a decrease of population, and denounced the causes of it—alcoholism, militarism, excessive mortality among infants, and other numerous matters. Then he indicated remedies; first, reductions in taxation, fiscal means in which he had little faith; then freedom to will one's estate as one pleased, which seemed to him more efficacious; a change, too, in the marriage laws, without forgetting the granting of affiliation rights.

However, Boutan ended by interrupting him. "All the legislative measures in the world will do nothing," said the doctor. "Manners and customs, our notions of what is moral and what is not, our very conceptions of the beautiful in life—all must be changed. If France is becoming depopulated, it is because she so chooses. It is simply necessary then for her to choose so no longer. But what a task—a whole world to create anew!"

At this Mathieu raised a superb cry: "Well! we'll create it. I've begun well enough, surely!"

But Constance, after laughing in a constrained way, in her turn thought it as well to change the subject. And so she at last replied to his invitation, saying that she would do her best to go to Janville, though she feared she might not be able to dispose of a Sunday to do so.

Dr. Boutan then took his leave, and was escorted to the door by Beauchene, who still went on jesting, like a man well pleased with life, one who was satisfied with himself and others, and who felt certain of being able to arrange things as might best suit his pleasure and his interests.

An hour later, a few minutes after midday, as Mathieu, who had been delayed in the works, went up to the offices to fetch Morange as he had promised to do, it occurred to him to take a short cut through the women's workshop. And there, in that spacious gallery, already deserted and silent, he came upon an unexpected scene which utterly amazed him. On some pretext or other Norine had lingered there the last, and Beauchene was with her, clasping her around the waist whilst he eagerly pressed his lips to hers. But all at once they caught sight of Mathieu and remained thunderstruck. And he, for his part, fled precipitately, deeply annoyed at having been a surprised witness to such a secret.

II

MORANGE, the chief accountant at Beauchene's works, was a man of thirty-eight, bald and already gray-headed, but with a superb dark, fan-shaped beard, of which he was very proud. His full limpid eyes, straight nose, and well-shaped if somewhat large mouth had in his younger days given him the reputation of being a handsome fellow. He still took great care of himself, invariably wore a tall silk hat, and preserved the correct appearance of a very painstaking and well-bred clerk.

"You don't know our new flat yet, do you?" he asked Mathieu as he led him away. "Oh! it's perfect, as you will see. A bedroom for us and another for Reine. And it is so close to the works too. I get there in four minutes, watch in hand."

He, Morange, was the son of a petty commercial clerk who had died on his stool after forty years of cloistral office-life. And he had married a clerk's daughter, one Valerie Duchemin, the eldest of four girls whose parents' home had been turned into a perfect hell, full of shameful wretchedness and unacknowledgable poverty, through this abominable incumbrance. Valerie, who was good-looking and ambitious, was lucky enough, however, to marry that handsome, honest, and hard-working fellow, Morange, although she was quite without a dowry; and, this accomplished, she indulged in the dream of climbing a little higher up the social ladder, and freeing herself from the loathsome world of petty clerkdom by making the son whom she hoped to have either an advocate or a doctor. Unfortunately the much-desired child proved to be a girl; and Valerie trembled, fearful of finding herself at last with four daughters on her hands, just as her mother had. Her dream thereupon changed, and she resolved to incite her husband onward to the highest posts, so that she might ultimately give her daughter a large dowry, and by this means gain that admittance to superior spheres which she so eagerly desired. Her husband, who was weak and extremely fond of her, ended by sharing her ambition, ever revolving schemes of pride and conquest for her benefit. But he had now been eight years at the Beauchene works, and he still earned but five thousand francs a year. This drove him and his wife to despair. Assuredly it was not at Beauchene's that he would ever make his fortune.

"You see!" he exclaimed, after going a couple of hundred yards with Mathieu along the Boulevard de Grenelle, "it is that new house yonder at the street corner. It has a stylish appearance, eh?"

Mathieu then perceived a lofty modern pile, ornamented with balconies and sculpture work, which looked quite out of place among the poor little houses predominating in the district.

"Why, it is a palace!" he exclaimed, in order to please Morange, who thereupon drew himself up quite proudly.

"You will see the staircase, my dear fellow! Our place, you know, is on the fifth floor. But that is of no consequence with such a staircase, so easy, so soft, that one climbs it almost without knowing."

Thereupon Morange showed his guest into the vestibule as if he were ushering him into a temple. The stucco walls gleamed brightly; there was a carpet on the stairs, and colored glass in the windows. And when, on reaching the fifth story, the cashier opened the door with his latchkey, he repeated, with an air of delight: "You will see, you will see!"

Valerie and Reine must have been on the watch, for they hastened forward. At thirty-two Valerie was still young and charming. She was a pleasant-looking brunette, with a round smiling face in a setting of superb hair. She had a full, round bust, and admirable shoulders, of which her husband felt quite proud whenever she showed herself in a low-necked dress. Reine, at this time twelve years old, was the very portrait of her mother, showing much the same smiling, if rather longer, face under similar black tresses.

"Ah! it is very kind of you to accept our invitation," said Valerie gayly as she pressed both Mathieu's hands. "What a pity that Madame Froment could not come with you! Reine, why don't you relieve the gentleman of his hat?"

Then she immediately continued: "We have a nice light anteroom, you see. Would you like to glance over our flat while the eggs are being boiled? That will always be one thing done, and you will then at least know where you are lunching."

All this was said in such an agreeable way, and Morange on his side smiled so good-naturedly, that Mathieu willingly lent himself to this innocent display of vanity. First came the parlor, the corner room, the walls of which were covered with pearl-gray paper with a design of golden flowers, while the furniture consisted of some of those white lacquered Louis XVI. pieces which makers turn out by the gross. The rosewood piano showed like a big black blot amidst all the rest. Then, overlooking the Boulevard de Grenelle, came Reine's bedroom, pale blue, with furniture of polished pine. Her parents' room, a very small apartment, was at the other end of the flat, separated from the parlor by the dining-room. The hangings adorning it were yellow; and a bedstead, a washstand, and a wardrobe, all of thuya, had been crowded into it. Finally the classic "old carved oak" triumphed in the dining-room, where a heavily gilded hanging lamp flashed like fire above the table, dazzling in its whiteness.

"Why, it's delightful," Mathieu, repeated, by way of politeness; "why, it's a real gem of a place."

In their excitement, father, mother, and daughter never ceased leading him hither and thither, explaining matters to him and making him feel the things. He was most struck, by the circumstance that the place recalled something he had seen before; he seemed to be familiar with the arrangement of the drawing-room, and with the way in which the nicknacks in the bedchamber were set out. And all at once he remembered. Influenced by envy and covert admiration, the Moranges, despite themselves, no doubt, had tried to copy the Beauchenes. Always short of money as they were, they could only and by dint of great sacrifices indulge in a species of make-believe luxury. Nevertheless they were proud of it, and, by imitating the envied higher class from afar, they imagined that they drew nearer to it.

"And then," Morange exclaimed, as he opened the dining-room window, "there is also this."

Outside, a balcony ran along the house-front, and at that height the view was really a very fine one, similar to that obtained from the Beauchene mansion but more extensive, the Seine showing in the distance, and the heights of Passy rising above the nearer and lower house-roofs.

Valerie also called attention to the prospect. "It is magnificent, is it not?" said she; "far better than the few trees that one can see from the quay."

The servant was now bringing the boiled eggs and they took their seats at table, while Morange victoriously explained that the place altogether cost him sixteen hundred francs a year. It was cheap indeed, though the amount was a heavy charge on Morange's slender income. Mathieu now began to understand that he had been invited more particularly to admire the new flat, and these worthy people seemed so delighted to triumph over it before him that he took the matter gayly and without thought of spite. There was no calculating ambition in his nature; he envied nothing of the luxury he brushed against in other people's homes, and he was quite satisfied with the snug modest life he led with Marianne and his children. Thus he simply felt surprised at finding the Moranges so desirous of cutting a figure and making money, and looked at them with a somewhat sad smile.

Valerie was wearing a pretty gown of foulard with a pattern of little yellow flowers, while her daughter, Reine, whom she liked to deck out coquettishly, had a frock of blue linen stuff. There was rather too much luxury about the meal also. Soles followed the eggs, and then came cutlets, and afterwards asparagus.

The conversation began with some mention of Janville.

"And so your children are in good health? Oh! they are very fine children indeed. And you really like the country? How funny! I think I should feel dreadfully bored there, for there is too great a lack of amusements. Why, yes, we shall be delighted to go to see you there, since Madame Froment is kind enough to invite us."

Then, as was bound to happen, the talk turned on the Beauchenes. This was a subject which haunted the Moranges, who lived in perpetual admiration of the Beauchenes, though at times they covertly criticised them. Valerie was very proud of being privileged to attend Constance's Saturday "at-homes," and of having been twice invited to dinner by her during the previous winter. She on her side now had a day of her own, Tuesday, and she even gave little private parties, and half ruined herself in providing refreshments at them. As for her acquaintances, she spoke with profound respect of Mme. Seguin du Hordel and that lady's magnificent mansion in the Avenue d'Antin, for Constance had obligingly obtained her an invitation to a ball there. But she was particularly vain of the friendship of Beauchene's sister, Seraphine, whom she invariably called "Madame la Baronne de Lowicz."

"The Baroness came to my at-home one afternoon," she said. "She is so very good-natured and so gay! You knew her formerly, did you not? After her marriage, eh? when she became reconciled to her brother and their wretched disputes about money matters were over. By the way, she has no great liking for Madame Beauchene, as you must know."

Then she again reverted to the manufacturer's wife, declared that little Maurice, however sturdy he might look, was simply puffed out with bad flesh; and she remarked that it would be a terrible blow for the parents if they should lose that only son. The subject of children was thus started, and when Mathieu, laughing, observed that they, the Moranges, had but one child, the cashier protested that it was unfair to compare him with M. Beauchene, who was such a wealthy man. Valerie, for her part, pictured the position of her parents, afflicted with four daughters, who had been obliged to wait months and months for boots and frocks and hats, and had grown up anyhow, in perpetual terror lest they should never find husbands. A family was all very well, but when it happened to consist of daughters the situation became terrible for people of limited means; for if daughters were to be launched properly into life they must have dowries.

"Besides," said she, "I am very ambitious for my husband, and I am convinced that he may rise to a very high position if he will only listen to me. But he must not be saddled with a lot of incumbrances. As things stand, I trust that we may be able to get rich and give Reine a suitable dowry."

Morange, quite moved by this little speech, caught hold of his wife's hand and kissed it. Weak and good-natured as he was, Valerie was really the one with will. It was she who had instilled some ambition into him, and he esteemed her the more for it.

"My wife is a thoroughly good woman, you know, my dear Froment," said he. "She has a good head as well as a good heart."

Then, while Valerie recapitulated her dream of wealth, the splendid flat she would have, the receptions she would hold, and the two months which, like the Beauchenes, she would spend at the seaside every summer, Mathieu looked at her and her husband and pondered their position. Their case was very different from that of old Moineaud, who knew that he would never be a cabinet minister. Morange possibly dreamt that his wife would indeed make him a minister some day. Every petty bourgeois in a democratic community has a chance of rising and wishes to do so. Indeed, there is a universal, ferocious rush, each seeking to push the others aside so that he may the more speedily climb a rung of the social ladder. This general ascent, this phenomenon akin to capillarity, is possible only in a country where political equality and economic inequality prevail; for each has the same right to fortune and has but to conquer it. There is, however, a struggle of the vilest egotism, if one wishes to taste the pleasures of the highly placed, pleasures which are displayed to the gaze of all and are eagerly coveted by nearly everybody in the lower spheres. Under a democratic constitution a nation cannot live happily if its manners and customs are not simple, and if the conditions of life are not virtually equal for one and all. Under other circumstances than these the liberal professions prove all-devouring: there is a rush for public functions; manual toil is regarded with contempt; luxury increases and becomes necessary; and wealth and power are furiously appropriated by assault in order that one may greedily taste the voluptuousness of enjoyment. And in such a state of affairs, children, as Valerie put it, were incumbrances, whereas one needed to be free, absolutely unburdened, if one wished to climb over all one's competitors.

Mathieu also thought of that law of imitation which impels even the least fortunate to impoverish themselves by striving to copy the happy ones of the world. How great the distress which really lurks beneath that envied luxury that is copied at such great cost! All sorts of useless needs are created, and production is turned aside from the strictly necessary. One can no longer express hardship by saying that people lack bread; what they lack in the majority of cases is the superfluous, which they are unable to renounce without imagining that they have gone to the dogs and are in danger of starvation.

At dessert, when the servant was no longer present, Morange, excited by his good meal, became expansive. Glancing at his wife he winked towards their guest, saying:

"Come, he's a safe friend; one may tell him everything."

And when Valerie had consented with a smile and a nod, he went on: "Well, this is the matter, my dear fellow: it is possible that I may soon leave the works. Oh! it's not decided, but I'm thinking of it. Yes, I've been thinking of it for some months past; for, when all is said, to earn five thousand francs a year, after eight years' zeal, and to think that one will never earn much more, is enough to make one despair of life."

"It's monstrous," the young woman interrupted: "it is like breaking one's head intentionally against a wall."

"Well, in such circumstances, my dear friend, the best course is to look out for something elsewhere, is it not? Do you remember Michaud, whom I had under my orders at the works some six years ago? A very intelligent fellow he was. Well, scarcely six years have elapsed since he left us to go to the Credit National, and what do you think he is now earning there? Twelve thousand francs—you hear me—twelve thousand francs!"

The last words rang out like a trumpet-call. The Moranges' eyes dilated with ecstasy. Even the little girl became very red.

"Last March," continued Morange, "I happened to meet Michaud, who told me all that, and showed himself very amiable. He offered to take me with him and help me on in my turn. Only there's some risk to run. He explained to me that I must at first accept three thousand six hundred, so as to rise gradually to a very big figure. But three thousand six hundred! How can one live on that in the meantime, especially now that this flat has increased our expenses?"

At this Valerie broke in impetuously: "'Nothing venture, nothing have!' That's what I keep on repeating to him. Of course I am in favor of prudence; I would never let him do anything rash which might compromise his future. But, at the same time, he can't moulder away in a situation unworthy of him."

"And so you have made up your minds?" asked Mathieu.

"Well, my wife has calculated everything," Morange replied; "and, yes, we have made up our minds, provided, of course, that nothing unforeseen occurs. Besides, it is only in October that any situation will be open at the Credit National. But, I say, my dear friend, keep the matter entirely to yourself, for we don't want to quarrel with the Beauchenes just now."

Then he looked at his watch, for, like a good clerk, he was very punctual, and did not wish to be late at the office. The servant was hurried, the coffee was served, and they were drinking it, boiling hot as it was, when the arrival of a visitor upset the little household and caused everything to be forgotten.

"Oh!" exclaimed Valerie, as she hastily rose, flushed with pride, "Madame la Baronne de Lowicz!"

Seraphine, at this time nine-and-twenty, was red-haired, tall and elegant, with magnificent shoulders which were known to all Paris. Her red lips were wreathed in a triumphant smile, and a voluptuous flame ever shone in her large brown eyes flecked with gold.

"Pray don't disturb yourselves, my friends," said she. "Your servant wanted to show me into the drawing-room, but I insisted on coming in here, because it is rather a pressing matter. I have come to fetch your charming little Reine to take her to a matinee at the Circus."

A fresh explosion of delight ensued. The child remained speechless with joy, whilst the mother exulted and rattled on: "Oh! Madame la Baronne, you are really too kind! You are spoiling the child. But the fact is that she isn't dressed, and you will have to wait a moment. Come, child, make haste, I will help you—ten minutes, you understand—I won't keep you waiting a moment longer."

Seraphine remained alone with the two men. She had made a gesture of surprise on perceiving Mathieu, whose hand, like an old friend, she now shook.

"And you, are you quite well?" she asked.

"Quite well," he answered; and as she sat down near him he instinctively pushed his chair back. He did not seem at all pleased at having met her.

He had been on familiar terms with her during his earlier days at the Beauchene works. She was a frantic pleasure-lover, and destitute of both conscience and moral principles. Her conduct had given rise to scandal even before her extraordinary elopement with Baron de Lowicz, that needy adventurer with a face like an archangel's and the soul of a swindler. The result of the union was a stillborn child. Then Seraphine, who was extremely egotistical and avaricious, quarrelled with her husband and drove him away. He repaired to Berlin, and was killed there in a brawl at a gambling den. Delighted at being rid of him, Seraphine made every use of her liberty as a young widow. She figured at every fete, took part in every kind of amusement, and many scandalous stories were told of her; but she contrived to keep up appearances and was thus still received everywhere.

"You are living in the country, are you not?" she asked again, turning towards Mathieu.

"Yes, we have been there for three weeks past."

"Constance told me of it. I met her the other day at Madame Seguin's. We are on the best terms possible, you know, now that I give my brother good advice."

In point of fact her sister-in-law, Constance, hated her, but with her usual boldness she treated the matter as a joke.

"We talked about Dr. Gaude," she resumed; "I fancied that she wanted to ask for his address; but she did not dare."

"Dr. Gaude!" interrupted Morange. "Ah! yes, a friend of my wife's spoke to her about him. He's a wonderfully clever man, it appears. Some of his operations are like miracles."

Then he went on talking of Dr. Gaude's clinic at the Hopital Marbeuf, a clinic whither society folks hastened to see operations performed, just as they might go to a theatre. The doctor, who was fond of money, and who bled his wealthy lady patients in more senses than one, was likewise partial to glory and proud of accomplishing the most dangerous experiments on the unhappy creatures who fell into his hands. The newspapers were always talking about him, his cures were constantly puffed and advertised by way of inducing fine ladies to trust themselves to his skill. And he certainly accomplished wonders, cutting and carving his patients in the quietest, most unconcerned way possible, with never a scruple, never a doubt as to whether what he did was strictly right or not.

Seraphine had begun to laugh, showing her white wolfish teeth between her blood-red lips, when she noticed the horrified expression which had appeared on Mathieu's face since Gaude had been spoken of. "Ah!" said she; "there's a man, now, who in nowise resembles your squeamish Dr. Boutan, who is always prattling about the birth-rate. I can't understand why Constance keeps to that old-fashioned booby, holding the views she does. She is quite right, you know, in her opinions. I fully share them."

Morange laughed complaisantly. He wished to show her that his opinions were the same. However, as Valerie did not return with Reine, he grew impatient, and asked permission to go and see what they were about. Perhaps he himself might be able to help in getting the child ready.

As soon as Seraphine was alone with Mathieu she turned her big, ardent, gold-flecked eyes upon him. She no longer laughed with the same laugh as a moment previously; an expression of voluptuous irony appeared on her bold bad face. After a spell of silence she inquired, "And is my good cousin Marianne quite well?"

"Quite well," replied Mathieu.

"And the children are still growing?"

"Yes, still growing."

"So you are happy, like a good paterfamilias, in your little nook?"

"Perfectly happy."

Again she lapsed into silence, but she did not cease to look at him, more provoking, more radiant than ever, with the charm of a young sorceress whose eyes burn and poison men's hearts. And at last she slowly resumed: "And so it is all over between us?"

He made a gesture in token of assent. There had long since been a passing fancy between them. He had been nineteen at the time, and she two-and-twenty. He had then but just entered life, and she was already married. But a few months later he had fallen in love with Marianne, and had then entirely freed himself from her.

"All over—really?" she again inquired, smiling but aggressive.

She was looking very beautiful and bold, seeking to tempt him and carry him off from that silly little cousin of hers, whose tears would simply have made her laugh. And as Mathieu did not this time give her any answer, even by a wave of the hand, she went on: "I prefer that: don't reply: don't say that it is all over. You might make a mistake, you know."

For a moment Mathieu's eyes flashed, then he closed them in order that he might no longer see Seraphine, who was leaning towards him. It seemed as if all the past were coming back. She almost pressed her lips to his as she whispered that she still loved him; and when he drew back, full of mingled emotion and annoyance, she raised her little hand to his mouth as if she feared that he was again going to say no.

"Be quiet," said she; "they are coming."

The Moranges were now indeed returning with Reine, whose hair had been curled. The child looked quite delicious in her frock of rose silk decked with white lace, and her large hat trimmed with some of the dress material. Her gay round face showed with flowery delicacy under the rose silk.

"Oh, what a love!" exclaimed Seraphine by way of pleasing the parents. "Somebody will be stealing her from me, you know."

Then it occurred to her to kiss the child in passionate fashion, feigning the emotion of a woman who regrets that she is childless. "Yes; indeed one regrets it very much when one sees such a treasure as this sweet girl of yours. Ah! if one could only be sure that God would give one such a charming child—well, at all events, I shall steal her from you; you need not expect me to bring her back again."

The enraptured Moranges laughed delightedly. And Mathieu, who knew her well, listened in stupefaction. How many times during their short and passionate attachment had she not inveighed against children! In her estimation maternity poisoned love, aged woman, and made a horror of her in the eyes of man.

The Moranges accompanied her and Reine to the landing. And they could not find words warm enough to express their happiness at seeing such coveted wealth and luxury come to seek their daughter. When the door of the flat was closed Valerie darted on to the balcony, exclaiming, "Let us see them drive off."

Morange, who no longer gave a thought to the office, took up a position near her, and called Mathieu and compelled him likewise to lean over and look down. A well-appointed victoria was waiting below with a superb-looking coachman motionless on the box-seat. This sight put a finishing touch to the excitement of the Moranges. When Seraphine had installed the little girl beside her, they laughed aloud.

"How pretty she looks! How happy she must feel!"

Reine must have been conscious that they were looking at her, for she raised her head, smiled and bowed. And Seraphine did the same, while the horse broke into a trot and turned the corner of the avenue. Then came a final explosion—

"Look at her!" repeated Valerie; "she is so candid! At twelve years old she is still as innocent as a child in her cradle. You know that I trust her to nobody. Wouldn't one think her a little duchess who has always had a carriage of her own?"

Then Morange reverted to his dream of fortune. "Well," said he, "I hope that she will have a carriage when we marry her off. Just let me get into the Credit National and you will see all your desires fulfilled."

And turning towards Mathieu he added, "There are three of us, and, as I have said before, that is quite enough for a man to provide for, especially as money is so hard to earn."

III

AT the works during the afternoon Mathieu, who wished to be free earlier than usual in order that, before dining in town, he might call upon his landlord, in accordance with his promise to Marianne, found himself so busy that he scarcely caught sight of Beauchene. This was a relief, for the secret which he had discovered by chance annoyed him, and he feared lest he might cause his employer embarrassment. But the latter, when they exchanged a few passing words, did not seem to remember even that there was any cause for shame on his part. He had never before shown himself more active, more devoted to business. The fatigue he had felt in the morning had passed away, and he talked and laughed like one who finds life very pleasant, and has no fear whatever of hard work.

As a rule Mathieu left at six o'clock; but that day he went into Morange's office at half-past five to receive his month's salary. This rightly amounted to three hundred and fifty francs; but as five hundred had been advanced to him in January, which he paid back by instalments of fifty, he now received only fifteen louis, and these he pocketed with such an air of satisfaction that the accountant commented on it.

"Well," said the young fellow, "the money's welcome, for I left my wife with just thirty sous this morning."

It was already more than six o'clock when he found himself outside the superb house which the Seguin du Hordel family occupied in the Avenue d'Antin. Seguin's grandfather had been a mere tiller of the soil at Janville. Later on, his father, as a contractor for the army, had made a considerable fortune. And he, son of a parvenu, led the life of a rich, elegant idler. He was a member of the leading clubs, and, while passionately fond of horses, affected also a taste for art and literature, going for fashion's sake to extreme opinions. He had proudly married an almost portionless girl of a very ancient aristocratic race, the last of the Vaugelades, whose blood was poor and whose mind was narrow. Her mother, an ardent Catholic, had only succeeded in making of her one who, while following religious practices, was eager for the joys of the world. Seguin, since his marriage, had likewise practised religion, because it was fashionable to do so. His peasant grandfather had had ten children; his father, the army contractor, had been content with six; and he himself had two, a boy and a girl, and deemed even that number more than was right.

One part of Seguin's fortune consisted of an estate of some twelve hundred acres—woods and heaths—above Janville, which his father had purchased with some of his large gains after retiring from business. The old man's long-caressed dream had been to return in triumph to his native village, whence he had started quite poor, and he was on the point of there building himself a princely residence in the midst of a vast park when death snatched him away. Almost the whole of this estate had come to Seguin in his share of the paternal inheritance, and he had turned the shooting rights to some account by dividing them into shares of five hundred francs value, which his friends eagerly purchased. The income derived from this source was, however, but a meagre one. Apart from the woods there was only uncultivated land on the estate, marshes, patches of sand, and fields of stones; and for centuries past the opinion of the district had been that no agriculturist could ever turn the expanse to good account. The defunct army contractor alone had been able to picture there a romantic park, such as he had dreamt of creating around his regal abode. It was he, by the way, who had obtained an authorization to add to the name of Seguin that of Du Hordel—taken from a ruined tower called the Hordel which stood on the estate.

It was through Beauchene, one of the shareholders of the shooting rights, that Mathieu had made Seguin's acquaintance, and had discovered the old hunting-box, the lonely, quiet pavilion, which had pleased him so much that he had rented it. Valentine, who good-naturedly treated Marianne as a poor friend, had even been amiable enough to visit her there, and had declared the situation of the place to be quite poetical, laughing the while over her previous ignorance of it like one who had known nothing of her property. In reality she herself would not have lived there for an hour. Her husband had launched her into the feverish life of literary, artistic, and social Paris, hurrying her to gatherings, studios, exhibitions, theatres, and other pleasure resorts—all those brasier-like places where weak heads and wavering hearts are lost. He himself, amid all his passion for show, felt bored to death everywhere, and was at ease only among his horses; and this despite his pretensions with respect to advanced literature and philosophy, his collections of curios, such as the bourgeois of to-day does not yet understand, his furniture, his pottery, his pewter-work, and particularly his bookbindings, of which he was very proud. And he was turning his wife into a copy of himself, perverting her by his extravagant opinions and his promiscuous friendships, so that the little devotee who had been confided to his keeping was now on the high road to every kind of folly. She still went to mass and partook of the holy communion; but she was each day growing more and more familiar with wrong-doing. A disaster must surely be at the end of it all, particularly as he foolishly behaved to her in a rough, jeering way, which greatly hurt her feelings, and led her to dream of being loved with gentleness.

When Mathieu entered the house, which displayed eight lofty windows on each of the stories of its ornate Renaissance facade, he laughed lightly as he thought: "These folks don't have to wait for a monthly pittance of three hundred francs, with just thirty sous in hand."

The hall was extremely rich, all bronze and marble. On the right hand were the dining-room and two drawing-rooms; on the left a billiard-room, a smoking-room, and a winter garden. On the first floor, in front of the broad staircase, was Seguin's so-called "cabinet," a vast apartment, sixteen feet high, forty feet long, and six-and-twenty feet wide, which occupied all the central part of the house; while the husband's bed and dressing rooms were on the right, and those of the wife and children on the left hand. Up above, on the second floor, two complete suites of rooms were kept in reserve for the time when the children should have grown up.

A footman, who knew Mathieu, at once took him upstairs to the cabinet and begged him to wait there, while Monsieur finished dressing. For a moment the visitor fancied himself alone and glanced round the spacious room, feeling interested in its adornments, the lofty windows of old stained glass, the hangings of old Genoese velvet and brocaded silk, the oak bookcases showing the highly ornamented backs of the volumes they contained; the tables laden with bibelots, bronzes, marbles, goldsmith's work, glass work, and the famous collection of modern pewter-work. Then Eastern carpets were spread out upon all sides; there were low seats and couches for every mood of idleness, and cosy nooks in which one could hide oneself behind fringes of lofty plants.

"Oh! so it's you, Monsieur Froment," suddenly exclaimed somebody in the direction of the table allotted to the pewter curios. And thereupon a tall young man of thirty, whom a screen had hitherto hidden from Mathieu's view, came forward with outstretched hand.

"Ah!" said Mathieu, after a moment's hesitation, "Monsieur Charles Santerre."

This was but their second meeting. They had found themselves together once before in that same room. Charles Santerre, already famous as a novelist, a young master popular in Parisian drawing-rooms, had a fine brow, caressing brown eyes, and a large red mouth which his moustache and beard, cut in the Assyrian style and carefully curled, helped to conceal. He had made his way, thanks to women, whose society he sought under pretext of studying them, but whom he was resolved to use as instruments of fortune. As a matter of calculation and principle he had remained a bachelor and generally installed himself in the nests of others. In literature feminine frailty was his stock subject he had made it his specialty to depict scenes of guilty love amid elegant, refined surroundings. At first he had no illusions as to the literary value of his works; he had simply chosen, in a deliberate way, what he deemed to be a pleasant and lucrative trade. But, duped by his successes, he had allowed pride to persuade him that he was really a writer. And nowadays he posed as the painter of an expiring society, professing the greatest pessimism, and basing a new religion on the annihilation of human passion, which annihilation would insure the final happiness of the world.

"Seguin will be here in a moment," he resumed in an amiable way. "It occurred to me to take him and his wife to dine at a restaurant this evening, before going to a certain first performance where there will probably be some fisticuffs and a rumpus to-night."

Mathieu then for the first time noticed that Santerre was in evening dress. They continued chatting for a moment, and the novelist called attention to a new pewter treasure among Seguin's collection. It represented a long, thin woman, stretched full-length, with her hair streaming around her. She seemed to be sobbing as she lay there, and Santerre declared the conception to be a masterpiece. The figure symbolized the end of woman, reduced to despair and solitude when man should finally have made up his mind to have nothing further to do with her. It was the novelist who, in literary and artistic matters, helped on the insanity which was gradually springing up in the Seguins' home.

However, Seguin himself now made his appearance. He was of the same age as Santerre, but was taller and slimmer, with fair hair, an aquiline nose, gray eyes, and thin lips shaded by a slight moustache. He also was in evening dress.

"Ah! well, my dear fellow," said he with the slight lisp which he affected, "Valentine is determined to put on a new gown. So we must be patient; we shall have an hour to wait."

Then, on catching sight of Mathieu, he began to apologize, evincing much politeness and striving to accentuate his air of frigid distinction. When the young man, whom he called his amiable tenant, had acquainted him with the motive of his visit—the leak in the zinc roof of the little pavilion at Janville—he at once consented to let the local plumber do any necessary soldering. But when, after fresh explanations, he understood that the roofing was so worn and damaged that it required to be changed entirely, he suddenly departed from his lofty affability and began to protest, declaring that he could not possibly expend in such repairs a sum which would exceed the whole annual rental of six hundred francs.

"Some soldering," he repeated; "some soldering; it's understood. I will write to the plumber." And wishing to change the subject he added: "Oh! wait a moment, Monsieur Froment. You are a man of taste, I know, and I want to show you a marvel."

He really had some esteem for Mathieu, for he knew that the young fellow possessed a quick appreciative mind. Mathieu began to smile, outwardly yielding to this attempt to create a diversion, but determined at heart that he would not leave the place until he had obtained the promise of a new roof. He took hold of a book, clad in a marvellous binding, which Seguin had fetched from a bookcase and tendered with religious care. On the cover of soft snow-white leather was incrusted a long silver lily, intersected by a tuft of big violet thistles. The title of the work, "Beauty Imperishable," was engraved up above, as in a corner of the sky.

"Ah! what a delightful conception, what delightful coloring!" declared Mathieu, who was really charmed. "Some bindings nowadays are perfect gems." Then he noticed the title: "Why, it's Monsieur Santerre's last novel!" said he.

Seguin smiled and glanced at the writer, who had drawn near. And when he saw him examining the book and looking quite moved by the compliment paid to it, he exclaimed: "My dear fellow, the binder brought it here this morning, and I was awaiting an opportunity to surprise you with it. It is the pearl of my collection! What do you think of the idea—that lily which symbolizes triumphant purity, and those thistles, the plants which spring up among ruins, and which symbolize the sterility of the world, at last deserted, again won over to the only perfect felicity? All your work lies in those symbols, you know."

"Yes, yes. But you spoil me; you will end by making me proud."

Mathieu had read Santerre's novel, having borrowed a copy of it from Mme. Beauchene, in order that his wife might see it, since it was a book that everybody was talking of. And the perusal of it had exasperated him. Forsaking the customary bachelor's flat where in previous works he had been so fond of laying scenes of debauchery, Santerre had this time tried to rise to the level of pure art and lyrical symbolism. The story he told was one of a certain Countess Anne-Marie, who, to escape a rough-mannered husband of extreme masculinity, had sought a refuge in Brittany in the company of a young painter endowed with divine inspiration, one Norbert, who had undertaken to decorate a convent chapel with paintings that depicted his various visions. And for thirty years he went on painting there, ever in colloquy with the angels, and ever having Anne-Marie beside him. And during those thirty years of love the Countess's beauty remained unimpaired; she was as young and as fresh at the finish as at the outset; whereas certain secondary personages, introduced into the story, wives and mothers of a neighboring little town, sank into physical and mental decay, and monstrous decrepitude. Mathieu considered the author's theory that all physical beauty and moral nobility belonged to virgins only, to be thoroughly imbecile, and he could not restrain himself from hinting his disapproval of it.

Both Santerre and Seguin, however, hotly opposed him, and quite a discussion ensued. First Santerre took up the matter from a religious standpoint. Said he, the words of the Old Testament, "Increase and multiply," were not to be found in the New Testament, which was the true basis of the Christian religion. The first Christians, he declared, had held marriage in horror, and with them the Holy Virgin had become the ideal of womanhood. Seguin thereupon nodded approval and proceeded to give his opinions on feminine beauty. But these were hardly to the taste of Mathieu, who promptly pointed out that the conception of beauty had often varied.

"To-day," said he, "you conceive beauty to consist in a long, slim, attenuated, almost angular figure; but at the time of the Renaissance the type of the beautiful was very different. Take Rubens, take Titian, take even Raffaelle, and you will see that their women were of robust build. Even their Virgin Marys have a motherly air. To my thinking, moreover, if we reverted to some such natural type of beauty, if women were not encouraged by fashion to compress and attenuate their figures so that their very nature, their very organism is changed, there would perhaps be some hope of coping with the evil of depopulation which is talked about so much nowadays."

The others looked at him and smiled with an air of compassionate superiority. "Depopulation an evil!" exclaimed Seguin; "can you, my dear sir, intelligent as you are, still believe in that hackneyed old story? Come, reflect and reason a little."

Then Santerre chimed in, and they went on talking one after the other and at times both together. Schopenhauer and Hartmann and Nietzsche were passed in review, and they claimed Malthus as one of themselves. But all this literary pessimism did not trouble Mathieu. He, with his belief in fruitfulness, remained convinced that the nation which no longer had faith in life must be dangerously ill. True, there were hours when he doubted the expediency of numerous families and asked himself if ten thousand happy people were not preferable to a hundred thousand unhappy ones; in which connection political and economic conditions had to be taken into account. But when all was said, he remained almost convinced that the Malthusian hypotheses would prove as false in the future as they had proved false in the past.

"Moreover," said he, "even if the world should become densely populated, even if food supplies, such as we know them, should fall short, chemistry would extract other means of subsistence from inorganic matter. And, besides, all such eventualities are so far away that it is impossible to make any calculation on a basis of scientific certainty. In France, too, instead of contributing to any such danger, we are going backward, we are marching towards annihilation. The population of France was once a fourth of the population of Europe, but now it is only one-eighth. In a century or two Paris will be dead, like ancient Athens and ancient Rome, and we shall have fallen to the rank that Greece now occupies. Paris seems determined to die."

But Santerre protested: "No, no; Paris simply wishes to remain stationary, and it wishes this precisely because it is the most intelligent, most highly civilized city in the world. The more nations advance in civilization the smaller becomes their birth-rate. We are simply giving the world an example of high culture, superior intelligence, and other nations will certainly follow that example when in turn they also attain to our state of perfection. There are signs of this already on every side."

"Quite so!" exclaimed Seguin, backing up his friend. "The phenomenon is general; all the nations show the same symptoms, and are decreasing in numbers, or will decrease as soon as they become civilized. Japan is affected already, and the same will be the case with China as soon as Europe forces open the door there."

Mathieu had become grave and attentive since the two society men, seated before him in evening dress, had begun to talk more rationally. The pale, slim, flat virgin, their ideal of feminine beauty, was no longer in question. The history of mankind was passing by. And almost as if communing with himself, he said: "So you do not fear the Yellow Peril, that terrible swarming of Asiatic barbarians who, it was said, would at some fatal moment sweep down on our Europe, ravage it, and people it afresh? In past ages, history always began anew in that fashion, by the sudden shifting of oceans, the invasion of fierce rough races coming to endow weakened nations with new blood. And after each such occurrence civilization flowered afresh, more broadly and freely than ever. How was it that Babylon, Nineveh, and Memphis fell into dust with their populations, who seem to have died on the spot? How is it that Athens and Rome still agonize to-day, unable to spring afresh from their ashes and renew the splendor of their ancient glory? How is it that death has already laid its hand upon Paris, which, whatever her splendor, is but the capital of a France whose virility is weakened? You may argue as you please and say that, like the ancient capitals of the world, Paris is dying of an excess of culture, intelligence, and civilization; it is none the less a fact that she is approaching death, the turn of the tide which will carry splendor and power to some new nation. Your theory of equilibrium is wrong. Nothing can remain stationary; whatever ceases to grow, decreases and disappears. And if Paris is bent on dying, she will die, and the country with her."

"Well, for my part," declared Santerre, resuming the pose of an elegant pessimist, "if she wishes to die, I shan't oppose her. In fact, I'm fully determined to help her."

"It is evident that the really honest, sensible course is to check any increase of population," added Seguin.

But Mathieu, as if he had not heard them, went on: "I know Herbert Spencer's law, and I believe it to be theoretically correct. It is certain that civilization is a check to fruitfulness, so that one may picture a series of social evolutions conducing now to decrease and now to increase of population, the whole ending in final equilibrium, by the very effect of culture's victory when the world shall be entirely populated and civilized. But who can foretell what road will be followed, through what disasters and sufferings one may have to go? More and more nations may disappear, and others may replace them; and how many thousands of years may not be needed before the final adjustment, compounded of truth, justice, and peace, is arrived at? At the thought of this the mind trembles and hesitates, and the heart contracts with a pang."

Deep silence fell while he thus remained disturbed, shaken in his faith in the good powers of life, and at a loss as to who was right—he or those two men so languidly stretched out before him.

But Valentine, Seguin's wife, came in, laughing and making an exhibition of masculine ways, which it had cost her much trouble to acquire.

"Ah! you people; you must not bear me any malice, you know. That girl Celeste takes such a time over everything!"

At five-and-twenty Valentine was short, slight, and still girlish. Fair, with a delicate face, laughing blue eyes, and a pert little nose, she could not claim to be pretty. Still she was charming and droll, and very free and easy in her ways; for not only did her husband take her about with him to all sorts of objectionable places, but she had become quite familiar with the artists and writers who frequented the house. Thus it was only in the presence of something extremely insulting that she again showed herself the last of the Vaugelades, and would all at once draw herself up and display haughty contempt and frigidity.

"Ah! it's you, Monsieur Froment," she said amiably, stepping towards Mathieu and shaking his hand in cavalier fashion. "Is Madame Froment in good health? Are the children flourishing as usual?"

Seguin was examining her dress, a gown of white silk trimmed with unbleached lace, and he suddenly gave way to one of those horribly rude fits which burst forth at times amid all his great affectation of politeness. "What! have you kept us waiting all this time to put that rag on? Well, you never looked a greater fright in your life!"

And she had entered the room convinced that she looked charming! She made an effort to control herself, but her girlish face darkened and assumed an expression of haughty, vindictive revolt. Then she slowly turned her eyes towards the friend who was present, and who was gazing at her with ecstasy, striving to accentuate the slavish submissiveness of his attitude.

"You look delicious!" he murmured; "that gown is a marvel."

Seguin laughed and twitted Santerre on his obsequiousness towards women. Valentine, mollified by the compliment, soon recovered her birdlike gayety, and such free and easy conversation ensued between the trio that Mathieu felt both stupefied and embarrassed. In fact, he would have gone off at once had it not been for his desire to obtain from his landlord a promise to repair the pavilion properly.

"Wait another moment," Valentine at last said to her husband; "I told Celeste to bring the children, so that we might kiss them before starting."

Mathieu wished to profit by this fresh delay, and sought to renew his request; but Valentine was already rattling on again, talking of dining at the most disreputable restaurant possible, and asking if at the first performance which they were to attend they would see all the horrors which had been hissed at the dress rehearsal the night before. She appeared like a pupil of the two men between whom she stood. She even went further in her opinions than they did, displaying the wildest pessimism, and such extreme views on literature and art that they themselves could not forbear laughing. Wagner was greatly over-estimated, in her opinion; she asked for invertebrate music, the free harmony of the passing wind. As for her moral views, they were enough to make one shudder. She had got past the argumentative amours of Ibsen's idiotic, rebellious heroines, and had now reached the theory of pure intangible beauty. She deemed Santerre's last creation, Anne-Marie, to be far too material and degraded, because in one deplorable passage the author remarked that Norbert's kisses had left their trace on the Countess's brow. Santerre disputed the quotation, whereupon she rushed upon the volume and sought the page to which she had referred.

"But I never degraded her," exclaimed the novelist in despair. "She never has a child."

"Pooh! What of that?" exclaimed Valentine. "If Anne-Marie is to raise our hearts she ought to be like spotless marble, and Norbert's kisses should leave no mark upon her."

But she was interrupted, for Celeste, the maid, a tall dark girl with an equine head, big features, and a pleasant air, now came in with the two children. Gaston was at this time five years old, and Lucie was three. Both were slight and delicate, pale like roses blooming in the shade. Like their mother, they were fair. The lad's hair was inclined to be carroty, while that of the girl suggested the color of oats. And they also had their mother's blue eyes, but their faces were elongated like that of their father. Dressed in white, with their locks curled, arrayed indeed in the most coquettish style, they looked like big fragile dolls. The parents were touched in their worldly pride at sight of them, and insisted on their playing their parts with due propriety.

"Well, don't you wish anybody good evening?"

The children were not timid; they were already used to society and looked visitors full in the face. If they made little haste, it was because they were naturally indolent and did not care to obey. They at last made up their minds and allowed themselves to be kissed.

"Good evening, good friend Santerre."

Then they hesitated before Mathieu, and their father had to remind them of the gentleman's name, though they had already seen him on two or three occasions.

"Good evening, Monsieur Froment."

Valentine took hold of them, sat them on her lap, and half stifled them with caresses. She seemed to adore them, but as soon as she had sat them down again she forgot all about them.

"So you are going out again, mamma?" asked the little boy.

"Why, yes, my darling. Papas and mammas, you know, have their affairs to see to."

"So we shall have dinner all alone, mamma?"

Valentine did not answer, but turned towards the maid, who was waiting for orders;—

"You are not to leave them for a moment, Celeste—you hear? And, above all things, they are not to go into the kitchen. I can never come home without finding them in the kitchen. It is exasperating. Let them have their dinner at seven, and put them to bed at nine. And see that they go to sleep."

The big girl with the equine head listened with an air of respectful obedience, while her faint smile expressed the cunning of a Norman peasant who had been five years in Paris already and was hardened to service, and well knew what was done with children when the master and mistress were absent.

"Madame," she said in a simple way, "Mademoiselle Lucie is poorly. She has been sick again."

"What? sick again!" cried the father in a fury. "I am always hearing of that! They are always being sick! And it always happens when we are going out! It is very disagreeable, my dear; you might see to it; you ought not to let our children have papier-mache stomachs!"

The mother made an angry gesture, as if to say that she could not help it. As a matter of fact, the children were often poorly. They had experienced every childish ailment, they were always catching cold or getting feverish. And they preserved the mute, moody, and somewhat anxious demeanor of children who are abandoned to the care of servants.

"Is it true you were poorly, my little Lucie?" asked Valentine, stooping down to the child. "You aren't poorly now, are you? No, no, it's nothing, nothing at all. Kiss me, my pet; bid papa good night very prettily, so that he may not feel worried in leaving you."

She rose up, already tranquillized and gay again; and, noticing that Mathieu was looking at her, she exclaimed:

"Ah! these little folks give one a deal of worry. But one loves them dearly all the same, though, so far as there is happiness in life, it would perhaps be better for them never to have been born. However, my duty to the country is done. Each wife ought to have a boy and a girl as I have."

Thereupon Mathieu, seeing that she was jesting, ventured to say with a laugh:

"Well, that isn't the opinion of your medical man, Dr. Boutan. He declares that to make the country prosperous every married couple ought to have four children."

"Four children! He's mad!" cried Seguin. And again with the greatest freedom of language he brought forward his pet theories. There was a world of meaning in his wife's laughter while Celeste stood there unmoved and the children listened without understanding. But at last Santerre led the Seguins away. It was only in the hall that Mathieu obtained from his landlord a promise that he would write to the plumber at Janville and that the roof of the pavilion should be entirely renovated, since the rain came into the bedrooms.

The Seguins' landau was waiting at the door. When they had got into it with their friend, it occurred to Mathieu to raise his eyes; and at one of the windows he perceived Celeste standing between the two children, intent, no doubt, on assuring herself that Monsieur and Madame were really going. The young man recalled Reine's departure from her parents; but here both Lucie and Gaston remained motionless, gravely mournful, and neither their father nor their mother once thought of looking up at them.

IV

AT half-past seven o'clock, when Mathieu arrived at the restaurant on the Place de la Madeleine where he was to meet his employer, he found him already there, drinking a glass of madeira with his customer, M. Firon-Badinier. The dinner was a remarkable one; choice viands and the best wines were served in abundance. But Mathieu was struck less by the appetite which the others displayed than by Beauchene's activity and skill. Glass in hand, never losing a bite, he had already persuaded his customer, by the time the roast arrived, to order not only the new thresher but also a mowing machine. M. Firon-Badinier was to take the train for Evreux at nine-twenty, and when nine o'clock struck, the other, now eager to be rid of him, contrived to pack him off in a cab to the St.-Lazare railway station.

For a moment Beauchene remained standing on the pavement with Mathieu, and took off his hat in order that the mild breezes of that delightful May evening might cool his burning head.

"Well, that's settled," he said with a laugh. "But it wasn't so easily managed. It was the Pommard which induced the beggar to make up his mind. All the same, I was dreadfully afraid he would make me miss my appointment."

These remarks, which escaped him amid his semi-intoxication, led him to more confidential talk. He put on his hat again, lighted a fresh cigar, and took Mathieu's arm. Then they walked on slowly through the passion-stirred throng and the nightly blaze of the Boulevards.

"There's plenty of time," said Beauchene. "I'm not expected till half-past nine, and it's close by. Will you have a cigar? No? You never smoke?"

"Never."

"Well, my dear fellow, it would be ridiculous to feign with you, since you happened to see me this morning. Oh, it's a stupid affair! I'm quite of that opinion; but, then, what would you have?"

Thereupon he launched out into long explanations concerning his marital life and the intrigue which had suddenly sprung up between him and that girl Norine, old Moineaud's daughter. He professed the greatest respect for his wife, but he was nevertheless a loose liver; and Constance was now beginning to resign herself to the inevitable. She closed her eyes when it would have been unpleasant for her to keep them open. She knew very well that it was essential that the business should be kept together and pass intact into the hands of their son Maurice. A tribe of children would have meant the ruin of all their plans.

Mathieu listened at first in great astonishment, and then began to ask questions and raise objections, at most of which Beauchene laughed gayly, like the gross egotist he was. He talked at length with extreme volubility, going into all sorts of details, at times assuming a semi-apologetic manner, but more frequently justifying himself with an air of triumph. And, finally, when they reached the corner of the Rue Caumartin he halted to bid Mathieu good-by. He there had a little bachelor's lodging, which was kept in order by the concierge of the house, who, being very well paid, proved an extremely discreet domestic.

As he hurried off, Mathieu, still standing at the corner of the street, could not help thinking of the scenes which he had witnessed at the Beauchene works that day. He thought of old Moineaud, the fitter, whom he again saw standing silent and unmoved in the women's workroom while his daughter Euphrasie was being soundly rated by Beauchene, and while Norine, the other girl, looked on with a sly laugh. When the toiler's children have grown up and gone to join, the lads the army of slaughter, and the girls the army of vice, the father, degraded by the ills of life, pays little heed to it all. To him it is seemingly a matter of indifference to what disaster the wind may carry the fledgelings who fall from the nest.

It was now half-past nine o'clock, and Mathieu had more than an hour before him to reach the Northern railway station. So he did not hurry, but strolled very leisurely up the Boulevards. He had eaten and drunk far more than usual, and Beauchene's insidious confidential talk, still buzzing in his ears, helped on his intoxication. His hands were hot, and now and again a sudden glow passed over his face. And what a warm evening it was, too, on those Boulevards, blazing with electric lights, fevered by a swarming, jostling throng, amid a ceaseless rumble of cabs and omnibuses! It was all like a stream of ardent life flowing away into the night, and Mathieu allowed himself to be carried on by the torrent, whose hot breath, whose glow of passion, he ever felt sweeping over him.

Then, in a reverie, he pictured the day he had just spent. First he was at the Beauchenes' in the morning, and saw the father and mother standing, like accomplices who fully shared one another's views, beside the sofa on which Maurice, their only son, lay dozing with a pale and waxen face. The works must never be exposed to the danger of being subdivided. Maurice alone must inherit all the millions which the business might yield, so that he might become one of the princes of industry. And therefore the husband hurried off to sin while the wife closed her eyes. In this sense, in defiance of morality and health, did the capitalist bourgeoisie, which had replaced the old nobility, virtually re-establish the law of primogeniture. That law had been abolished at the Revolution for the bourgeoisie's benefit; but now, also for its own purposes, it revived it. Each family must have but one son.

Mathieu had reached this stage in his reflections when his thoughts were diverted by several street hawkers who, in selling the last edition of an evening print, announced a "drawing" of the lottery stock of some enterprise launched by the Credit National. And then he suddenly recalled the Moranges in their dining-room, and heard them recapitulate their dream of making a big fortune as soon as the accountant should have secured a post in one of the big banking establishments, where the principals raise men of value to the highest posts. Those Moranges lived in everlasting dread of seeing their daughter marry a needy petty clerk; succumbing to that irresistible fever which, in a democracy ravaged by political equality and economic inequality, impels every one to climb higher up the social ladder. Envy consumed them at the thought of the luxury of others; they plunged into debt in order that they might imitate from afar the elegance of the upper class, and all their natural honesty and good nature was poisoned by the insanity born of ambitious pride. And here again but one child was permissible, lest they should be embarrassed, delayed, forever impeded in the attainment of the future they coveted.

A crowd of people now barred Mathieu's way, and he perceived that he was near the theatre, where a first performance was taking place that evening. It was a theatre where free farcical pieces were produced, and on its walls were posted huge portraits of its "star," a carroty wench with a long flat figure, destitute of all womanliness, and seemingly symbolical of perversity. Passers-by stopped to gaze at the bills, the vilest remarks were heard, and Mathieu remembered that the Seguins and Santerre were inside the house, laughing at the piece, which was of so filthy a nature that the spectators at the dress rehearsal, though they were by no means over-nice in such matters, had expressed their disgust by almost wrecking the auditorium. And while the Seguins were gloating over this horror, yonder, at their house in the Avenue d'Antin, Celeste had just put the children, Gaston and Lucie, to bed, and had then hastily returned to the kitchen, where a friend, Madame Menoux, who kept a little haberdasher's shop in the neighborhood, awaited her. Gaston, having been given some wine to drink, was already asleep; but Lucie, who again felt sick, lay shivering in her bed, not daring to call Celeste, lest the servant, who did not like to be disturbed, should ill-treat her. And, at two o'clock in the morning, after offering Santerre an oyster supper at a night restaurant, the Seguins would come home, their minds unhinged by the imbecile literature and art to which they had taken for fashion's sake, vitiated yet more by the ignoble performance they had witnessed, and the base society they had elbowed at supper. They seemed to typify vice for vice's sake, elegant vice and pessimism as a principle.

Indeed, when Mathieu tried to sum up his day, he found vice on every side, in each of the spheres with which he had come in contact. And now the examples he had witnessed filled him no longer with mere surprise; they disturbed him, they shook his beliefs, they made him doubt whether his notions of life, duty, and happiness might not after all be inaccurate.

He stopped short and drew a long breath, seeking to drive away his growing intoxication. He had passed the Grand Opera and was reaching the crossway of the Rue Drouot. Perhaps his increase of fever was due to those glowing Boulevards. The private rooms of the restaurants were still ablaze, the cafes threw bright radiance across the road, the pavement was blocked by their tables and chairs and customers. All Paris seemed to have come down thither to enjoy that delightful evening. There was endless elbowing, endless mingling of breath as the swelling crowd sauntered along. Couples lingered before the sparkling displays of jewellers' shops. Middle-class families swept under dazzling arches of electric lamps into cafes concerts, whose huge posters promised the grossest amusements. Hundreds and hundreds of women went by with trailing skirts, and whispered and jested and laughed; while men darted in pursuit, now of a fair chignon, now of a dark one. In the open cabs men and women sat side by side, now husbands and wives long since married, now chance couples who had met but an hour ago. But Mathieu went on again, yielding to the force of the current, carried along like all the others, a prey to the same fever which sprang from the surroundings, from the excitement of the day, from the customs of the age. And he no longer took the Beauchenes, the Moranges, the Seguins as isolated types; it was all Paris that symbolized vice, all Paris that yielded to debauchery and sank into degradation. There were the folks of high culture, the folks suffering from literary neurosis; there were the merchant princes; there were the men of liberal professions, the lawyers, the doctors, the engineers; there were the people of the lower middle-class, the petty tradesmen, the petty clerks; there were even the manual workers, poisoned by the example of the upper spheres—all practising the doctrines of egotism as vanity and the passion for money grew more and more intense.. .. No more children! Paris was bent on dying. And Mathieu recalled how Napoleon I., one evening after battle, on beholding a plain strewn with the corpses of his soldiers, had put his trust in Paris to repair the carnage of that day. But times had changed. Paris would no longer supply life, whether it were for slaughter or for toil.

And as Mathieu thought of it all a sudden weakness came upon him. Again he asked himself whether the Beauchenes, the Moranges, the Seguins, and all those thousands and thousands around him were not right, and whether he were not the fool, the dupe, the criminal, with his belief in life ever renascent, ever growing and spreading throughout the world. And before him arose, too, the image of Seraphine, the temptress, opening her perfumed arms to him and carrying him off to the same existence of pleasure and baseness which the others led.

Then he remembered the three hundred francs which he carried in his pocket. Three hundred francs, which must last for a whole month, though out of them he had to pay various little sums that he already owed. The remainder would barely suffice to buy a ribbon for Marianne and jam for the youngsters' bread. And if he set the Moranges on one side, the others, the Beauchenes and the Seguins, were rich. He bitterly recalled their wealth. He pictured the rumbling factory with its black buildings covering a great stretch of ground; he pictured hundreds of workmen ever increasing the fortune of their master, who dwelt in a handsomely appointed pavilion and whose only son was growing up for future sovereignty, under his mother's vigilant eyes. He pictured, too, the Seguins' luxurious mansion in the Avenue d'Antin, the great hall, the magnificent staircase, the vast room above, crowded with marvels; he pictured all the refinement, all the train of wealth, all the tokens of lavish life, the big dowry which would be given to the little girl, the high position which would be purchased for the son. And he, bare and empty-handed, who now possessed nothing, not even a stone at the edge of a field, would doubtless always possess nothing, neither factory buzzing with workmen, nor mansion rearing its proud front aloft. And he was the imprudent one, and the others were the sensible, the wise. What would ever become of himself and his troop of children? Would he not die in some garret? would they not lead lives of abject wretchedness? Ah! it was evident the others were right, the others were sensible. And he felt unhinged, he regarded himself with contempt, like a fool who has allowed himself to be duped.

Then once more the image of Seraphine arose before his eyes, more tempting than ever. A slight quiver came upon him as he beheld the blaze of the Northern railway station and all the feverish traffic around it. Wild fancies surged through his brain. He thought of Beauchene. Why should he not do likewise? He recalled past times, and, yielding to sudden madness, turned his back upon the station and retraced his steps towards the Boulevards. Seraphine, he said to himself, was doubtless waiting for him; she had told him that he would always be welcome. As for his wife, he would tell her he had missed his train.

At last a block in the traffic made him pause, and on raising his eyes he saw that he had reached the Boulevards once more. The crowd still streamed along, but with increased feverishness. Mathieu's temples were beating, and wild words escaped his lips. Why should he not live the same life as the others? He was ready, even eager, to plunge into it. But the block in the traffic continued, he could not cross the road; and while he stood there hesitation and doubt came upon him. He saw in that increasing obstruction a deliberate obstacle to his wild design. And all at once the image of Seraphine faded from before his mind's eye and he beheld another, his wife, his dear wife Marianne, awaiting him, all smiles and trustfulness, in the fresh quietude of the country. Could he deceive her? ... Then all at once he again rushed off towards the railway station, in fear lest he should lose his train. He was determined that he would listen to no further promptings, that he would cast no further glance upon glowing, dissolute Paris, and he reached the station just in time to climb into a car. The train started and he journeyed on, leaning out of his compartment and offering his face to the cool night breeze in order that it might calm and carry off the evil fever that had possessed him.

The night was moonless, but studded with such pure and such glowing stars that the country could be seen spreading far away beneath a soft bluish radiance. Already at twenty minutes past eleven Marianne found herself on the little bridge crossing the Yeuse, midway between Chantebled, the pavilion where she and her husband lived, and the station of Janville. The children were fast asleep; she had left them in the charge of Zoe, the servant, who sat knitting beside a lamp, the light of which could be seen from afar, showing like a bright spark amid the black line of the woods.

Whenever Mathieu returned home by the seven o'clock train, as was his wont, Marianne came to meet him at the bridge. Occasionally she brought her two eldest boys, the twins, with her, though their little legs moved but slowly on the return journey when, in retracing their steps, a thousand yards or more, they had to climb a rather steep hillside. And that evening, late though the hour was, Marianne had yielded to that pleasant habit of hers, enjoying the delight of thus going forward through the lovely night to meet the man she worshipped. She never went further than the bridge which arched over the narrow river. She seated herself on its broad, low parapet, as on some rustic bench, and thence she overlooked the whole plain as far as the houses of Janville, before which passed the railway line. And from afar she could see her husband approaching along the road which wound between the cornfields.

That evening she took her usual seat under the broad velvety sky spangled with gold. And with a movement which bespoke her solicitude she turned towards the bright little light shining on the verge of the sombre woods, a light telling of the quietude of the room in which it burnt, the servant's tranquil vigil, and the happy slumber of the children in the adjoining chamber. Then Marianne let her gaze wander all around her, over the great estate of Chantebled, belonging to the Seguins. The dilapidated pavilion stood at the extreme edge of the woods whose copses, intersected by patches of heath, spread over a lofty plateau to the distant farms of Mareuil and Lillebonne. But that was not all, for to the west of the plateau lay more than two hundred and fifty acres of land, a marshy expanse where pools stagnated amid brushwood, vast uncultivated tracts, where one went duck-shooting in winter. And there was yet a third part of the estate, acres upon acres of equally sterile soil, all sand and gravel, descending in a gentle slope to the embankment of the railway line. It was indeed a stretch of country lost to culture, where the few good patches of loam remained unproductive, inclosed within the waste land. But the spot had all the beauty and exquisite wildness of solitude, and was one that appealed to healthy minds fond of seeing nature in freedom. And on that lovely night one could nowhere have found more perfect and more balmy quiet.

Marianne, who since coming to the district had already threaded the woodland paths, explored the stretches of brushwood around the meres, and descended the pebbly slopes, let her eyes travel slowly over the expanse, divining spots she had visited and was fond of, though the darkness now prevented her from seeing them. In the depths of the woods an owl raised its soft, regular cry, while from a pond on the right ascended a faint croaking of frogs, so far away that it sounded like the vibration of crystal. And from the other side, the side of Paris, there came a growing rumble which, little by little, rose above all the other sounds of the night. She heard it, and at last lent ear to nothing else. It was the train, for whose familiar roar she waited every evening. As soon as it left Monval station on its way to Janville, it gave token of its coming, but so faintly that only a practised ear could distinguish its rumble amid the other sounds rising from the country side. For her part, she heard it immediately, and thereupon followed it in fancy through every phase of its journey. And never had she been better able to do so than on that splendid night, amid the profound quietude of the earth's slumber. It had left Monval, it was turning beside the brickworks, it was skirting St. George's fields. In another two minutes it would be at Janville. Then all at once its white light shone out beyond the poplar trees of Le Mesnil Rouge, and the panting of the engine grew louder, like that of some giant racer drawing near. On that side the plain spread far away into a dark, unknown region, beneath the star-spangled sky, which on the very horizon showed a ruddy reflection like that of some brasier, the reflection of nocturnal Paris, blazing and smoking in the darkness like a volcano.

Marianne sprang to her feet. The train stopped at Janville, and then its rumble rose again, grew fainter, and died away in the direction of Vieux-Bourg. But she no longer paid attention to it. She now had eyes and ears only for the road which wound like a pale ribbon between the dark patches of corn. Her husband did not take ten minutes to cover the thousand yards and more which separated the station from the little bridge. And, as a rule, she perceived and recognized him far off; but on that particular night, such was the deep silence that she could distinguish his footfall on the echoing road long before his dark, slim figure showed against the pale ground. And he found her there, erect under the stars, smiling and healthy, a picture of all that is good. The milky whiteness of her skin was accentuated by her beautiful black hair, caught up in a huge coil, and her big black eyes, which beamed with all the gentleness of spouse and mother. Her straight brow, her nose, her mouth, her chin so boldly, purely rounded, her cheeks which glowed like savory fruit, her delightful little ears—the whole of her face, full of love and tenderness, bespoke beauty in full health, the gayety which comes from the accomplishment of duty, and the serene conviction that by loving life she would live as she ought to live.

"What! so you've come then!" Mathieu exclaimed, as soon as he was near her. "But I begged you not to come out so late. Are you not afraid at being alone on the roads at this time of night?"

She began to laugh. "Afraid," said she, "when the night is so mild and healthful? Besides, wouldn't you rather have me here to kiss you ten minutes sooner?"

Those simple words brought tears to Mathieu's eyes. All the murkiness, all the shame through which he had passed in Paris horrified him. He tenderly took his wife in his arms, and they exchanged the closest, the most human of kisses amid the quiet of the slumbering fields. After the scorching pavement of Paris, after the eager struggling of the day and the degrading spectacles of the night, how reposeful was that far-spreading silence, that faint bluish radiance, that endless unrolling of plains, steeped in refreshing gloom and dreaming of fructification by the morrow's sun! And what suggestions of health, and rectitude, and felicity rose from productive Nature, who fell asleep beneath the dew of night solely that she might reawaken in triumph, ever and ever rejuvenated by life's torrent, which streams even through the dust of her paths.

Mathieu slowly seated Marianne on the low broad parapet once more. He kept her near his heart; it was a halt full of affection, which neither could forego, in presence of the universal peace that came to them from the stars, and the waters, and the woods, and the endless fields.

"What a splendid night!" murmured Mathieu. "How beautiful and how pleasant to live in it!"

Then, after a moment's rapture, during which they both heard their hearts beating, he began to tell her of his day. She questioned him with loving interest, and he answered, happy at having to tell her no lie.

"No, the Beauchenes cannot come here on Sunday. Constance never cared much for us, as you well know. Their boy Maurice is suffering in the legs; Dr. Boutan was there, and the question of children was discussed again. I will tell you all about that. On the other hand, the Moranges have promised to come. You can't have an idea of the delight and vanity they displayed in showing me their new flat. What with their eagerness to make a big fortune I'm much afraid that those worthy folks will do something very foolish. Oh! I was forgetting. I called on the landlord, and though I had a good deal of difficulty over it, he ended by consenting to have the roof entirely relaid. Ah! what a home, too, those Seguins have! I came away feeling quite scared. But I will tell you all about it by and by with the rest."

Marianne evinced no loquacious curiosity; she quietly awaited his confidences, and showed anxiety only respecting themselves and the children.

"You received your salary, didn't you?" she asked.

"Yes, yes, you need not be afraid about that."

"Oh! I'm not afraid, it's only our little debts which worry me."

Then she asked again: "And did your business dinner go off all right? I was afraid that Beauchene might detain you and make you miss your train."

He replied that everything had gone off properly, but as he spoke he flushed and felt a pang at his heart. To rid himself of his emotion he affected sudden gayety.

"Well, and you, my dear," he asked, "how did you manage with your thirty sous?"

"My thirty sous!" she gayly responded, "why, I was much too rich; we fared like princes, all five of us, and I have six sous left."

Then, in her turn, she gave an account of her day, her daily life, pure as crystal. She recapitulated what she had done, what she had said; she related how the children had behaved, and she entered into the minutest details respecting them and the house. With her, moreover, one day was like another; each morning she set herself to live the same life afresh, with never-failing happiness.

"To-day, though, we had a visit," said she; "Madame Lepailleur, the woman from the mill over yonder, came to tell me that she had some fine chickens for sale. As we owe her twelve francs for eggs and milk, I believe that she simply called to see if I meant to pay her. I told her that I would go to her place to-morrow."

While speaking Marianne had pointed through the gloom towards a big black pile, a little way down the Yeuse. It was an old water-mill which was still worked, and the Lepailleurs had now been installed in it for three generations. The last of them, Francois Lepailleur, who considered himself to be no fool, had come back from his military service with little inclination to work, and an idea that the mill would never enrich him, any more than it had enriched his father and grandfather. It then occurred to him to marry a peasant farmer's daughter, Victoire Cornu, whose dowry consisted of some neighboring fields skirting the Yeuse. And the young couple then lived fairly at their ease, on the produce of those fields and such small quantities of corn as the peasants of the district still brought to be ground at the old mill. If the antiquated and badly repaired mechanism of the mill had been replaced by modern appliances, and if the land, instead of being impoverished by adherence to old-fashioned practices, had fallen into the hands of an intelligent man who believed in progress, there would no doubt have been a fortune in it all. But Lepailleur was not only disgusted with work, he treated the soil with contempt. He indeed typified the peasant who has grown weary of his eternal mistress, the mistress whom his forefathers loved too much. Remembering that, in spite of all their efforts to fertilize the soil, it had never made them rich or happy, he had ended by hating it. All his faith in its powers had departed; he accused it of having lost its fertility, of being used up and decrepit, like some old cow which one sends to the slaughter-house. And, according to him, everything went wrong: the soil simply devoured the seed sown in it, the weather was never such as it should be, the seasons no longer came in their proper order. Briefly, it was all a premeditated disaster brought about by some evil power which had a spite against the peasantry, who were foolish to give their sweat and their blood to such a thankless creature.

"Madame Lepailleur brought her boy with her, a little fellow three years old, called Antonin," resumed Marianne, "and we fell to talking of children together. She quite surprised me. Peasant folks, you know, used to have such large families. But she declared that one child was quite enough. Yet she's only twenty-four, and her husband not yet twenty-seven."

These remarks revived the thoughts which had filled Mathieu's mind all day. For a moment he remained silent. Then he said, "She gave you her reasons, no doubt?"

"Give reasons—she, with her head like a horse's, her long freckled face, pale eyes, and tight, miserly mouth—I think she's simply a fool, ever in admiration before her husband because he fought in Africa and reads the newspapers. All that I could get out of her was that children cost one a good deal more than they bring in. But the husband, no doubt, has ideas of his own. You have seen him, haven't you? A tall, slim fellow, as carroty and as scraggy as his wife, with an angular face, green eyes, and prominent cheekbones. He looks as though he had never felt in a good humor in his life. And I understand that he is always complaining of his father-in-law, because the other had three daughters and a son. Of course that cut down his wife's dowry; she inherited only a part of her father's property. And, besides, as the trade of a miller never enriched his father, Lepailleur curses his mill from morning till night, and declares that he won't prevent his boy Antonin from going to eat white bread in Paris, if he can find a good berth there when he grows up."

Thus, even among the country folks, Mathieu found a small family the rule. Among the causes were the fear of having to split up an inheritance, the desire to rise in the social system, the disgust of manual toil, and the thirst for the luxuries of town life. Since the soil was becoming bankrupt, why indeed continue tilling it, when one knew that one would never grow rich by doing so? Mathieu was on the point of explaining these things to his wife, but he hesitated, and then simply said: "Lepailleur does wrong to complain; he has two cows and a horse, and when there is urgent work he can take an assistant. We, this morning, had just thirty sous belonging to us, and we own no mill, no scrap of land. For my part I think his mill superb; I envy him every time I cross this bridge. Just fancy! we two being the millers—why, we should be very rich and very happy!"

This made them both laugh, and for another moment they remained seated there, watching the dark massive mill beside the Yeuse. Between the willows and poplars on both banks the little river flowed on peacefully, scarce murmuring as it coursed among the water plants which made it ripple. Then, amid a clump of oaks, appeared the big shed sheltering the wheel, and the other buildings garlanded with ivy, honeysuckle, and creepers, the whole forming a spot of romantic prettiness. And at night, especially when the mill slept, without a light at any of its windows, there was nothing of more dreamy, more gentle charm.

"Why!" remarked Mathieu, lowering his voice, "there is somebody under the willows, beside the water. I heard a slight noise."

"Yes, I know," replied Marianne with tender gayety. "It must be the young couple who settled themselves in the little house yonder a fortnight ago. You know whom I mean—Madame Angelin, that schoolmate of Constance's."

The Angelins, who had become their neighbors, interested the Froments. The wife was of the same age as Marianne, tall, dark, with fine hair and fine eyes, radiant with continual joy, and fond of pleasure. And the husband was of the same age as Mathieu, a handsome fellow, very much in love, with moustaches waving in the wind, and the joyous spirits of a musketeer. They had married with sudden passion for one another, having between them an income of some ten thousand francs a year, which the husband, a fan painter with a pretty talent, might have doubled had it not been for the spirit of amorous idleness into which his marriage had thrown him. And that spring-time they had sought a refuge in that desert of Janville, that they might love freely, passionately, in the midst of nature. They were always to be met, holding each other by the waist, on the secluded paths in the woods; and at night they loved to stroll across the fields, beside the hedges, along the shady banks of the Yeuse, delighted when they could linger till very late near the murmuring water, in the thick shade of the willows.

But there was quite another side to their idyl, and Marianne mentioned it to her husband. She had chatted with Madame Angelin, and it appeared that the latter wished to enjoy life, at all events for the present, and did not desire to be burdened with children. Then Mathieu's worrying thoughts once more came back to him, and again at this fresh example he wondered who was right—he who stood alone in his belief, or all the others.

"Well," he muttered at last, "we all live according to our fancy. But come, my dear, let us go in; we disturb them."

They slowly climbed the narrow road leading to Chantebled, where the lamp shone out like a beacon. When Mathieu had bolted the front door they groped their way upstairs. The ground floor of their little house comprised a dining-room and a drawing-room on the right hand of the hall, and a kitchen and a store place on the left. Upstairs there were four bedrooms. Their scanty furniture seemed quite lost in those big rooms; but, exempt from vanity as they were, they merely laughed at this. By way of luxury they had simply hung some little curtains of red stuff at the windows, and the ruddy reflection from these hangings seemed to them to impart wonderfully rich cheerfulness to their home.

They found Zoe, their peasant servant, asleep over her knitting beside the lamp in their own bedroom, and they had to wake her and send her as quietly as possible to bed. Then Mathieu took up the lamp and entered the children's room to kiss them and make sure that they were comfortable. It was seldom they awoke on these occasions. Having placed the lamp on the mantelshelf, he still stood there looking at the three little beds when Marianne joined him. In the bed against the wall at one end of the room lay Blaise and Denis, the twins, sturdy little fellows six years of age; while in the second bed against the opposite wall was Ambroise, now nearly four and quite a little cherub. And the third bed, a cradle, was occupied by Mademoiselle Rose, fifteen months of age and weaned for three weeks past. She lay there half naked, showing her white flowerlike skin, and her mother had to cover her up with the bedclothes, which she had thrust aside with her self-willed little fists. Meantime the father busied himself with Ambroise's pillow, which had slipped aside. Both husband and wife came and went very gently, and bent again and again over the children's faces to make sure that they were sleeping peacefully. They kissed them and lingered yet a little longer, fancying that they had heard Blaise and Denis stirring. At last the mother took up the lamp and they went off, one after the other, on tiptoe.

When they were in their room again Marianne exclaimed: "I didn't want to worry you while we were out, but Rose made me feel anxious to-day; I did not find her well, and it was only this evening that I felt more at ease about her." Then, seeing that Mathieu started and turned pale, she went on: "Oh! it was nothing. I should not have gone out if I had felt the least fear for her. But with those little folks one is never free from anxiety."

She then began to make her preparations for the night; but Mathieu, instead of imitating her, sat down at the table where the lamp stood, and drew the money paid to him by Morange from his pocket. When he had counted those three hundred francs, those fifteen louis, he said in a bitter, jesting way, "The money hasn't grown on the road. Here it is; you can pay our debts to-morrow."

This remark gave him a fresh idea. Taking his pencil he began to jot down the various amounts they owed on a blank page of his pocket diary. "We say twelve francs to the Lepailleurs for eggs and milk. How much do you owe the butcher?" he asked.

"The butcher," replied Marianne, who had sat down to take off her shoes; "well, say twenty francs."

"And the grocer and the baker?"

"I don't know exactly, but about thirty francs altogether. There is nobody else."

Then Mathieu added up the items: "That makes sixty-two francs," said he. "Take them away from three hundred, and we shall have two hundred and thirty-eight left. Eight francs a day at the utmost. Well, we have a nice month before us, with our four children to feed, particularly if little Rose should fall ill."

The remark surprised his wife, who laughed gayly and confidently, saying: "Why, what is the matter with you to-night, my dear? You seem to be almost in despair, when as a rule you look forward to the morrow as full of promise. You have often said that it was sufficient to love life if one wished to live happily. As for me, you know, with you and the little ones I feel the happiest, richest woman in the world!"

At this Mathieu could restrain himself no longer. He shook his head and mournfully began to recapitulate the day he had just spent. At great length he relieved his long-pent-up feelings. He spoke of their poverty and the prosperity of others. He spoke of the Beauchenes, the Moranges, the Seguins, the Lepailleurs, of all he had seen of them, of all they had said, of all their scarcely disguised contempt for an improvident starveling like himself. He, Mathieu, and she, Marianne, would never have factory, nor mansion, nor mill, nor an income of twelve thousand francs a year; and their increasing penury, as the others said, had been their own work. They had certainly shown themselves imprudent, improvident. And he went on with his recollections, telling Marianne that he feared nothing for himself, but that he did not wish to condemn her and the little ones to want and poverty. She was surprised at first, and by degrees became colder, more constrained, as he told her all that he had upon his mind. Tears slowly welled into her eyes; and at last, however lovingly he spoke, she could no longer restrain herself, but burst into sobs. She did not question what he said, she spoke no words of revolt, but it was evident that her whole being rebelled, and that her heart was sorely grieved.

He started, greatly troubled when he saw her tears. Something akin to her own feelings came upon him. He was terribly distressed, angry with himself. "Do not weep, my darling!" he exclaimed as he pressed her to him: "it was stupid, brutal, and wrong of me to speak to you in that way. Don't distress yourself, I beg you; we'll think it all over and talk about it some other time."

She ceased to weep, but she continued silent, clinging to him, with her head resting on his shoulder. And Mathieu, by the side of that loving, trustful woman, all health and rectitude and purity, felt more and more confused, more and more ashamed of himself, ashamed of having given heed to the base, sordid, calculating principles which others made the basis of their lives. He thought with loathing of the sudden frenzy which had possessed him during the evening in Paris. Some poison must have been instilled into his veins; he could not recognize himself. But honor and rectitude, clear-sightedness and trustfulness in life were fast returning. Through the window, which had remained open, all the sounds of the lovely spring night poured into the room. It was spring, the season of love, and beneath the palpitating stars in the broad heavens, from fields and forests and waters came the murmur of germinating life. And never had Mathieu more fully realized that, whatever loss may result, whatever difficulty may arise, whatever fate may be in store, all the creative powers of the world, whether of the animal order, whether of the order of the plants, for ever and ever wage life's great incessant battle against death. Man alone, dissolute and diseased among all the other denizens of the world, all the healthful forces of nature, seeks death for death's sake, the annihilation of his species. Then Mathieu again caught his wife in a close embrace, printing on her lips a long, ardent kiss.

"Ah! dear heart, forgive me; I doubted both of us. It would be impossible for either of us to sleep unless you forgive me. Well, let the others hold us in derision and contempt if they choose. Let us love and live as nature tells us, for you are right: therein lies true wisdom and true courage."

V

MATHIEU rose noiselessly from his little folding iron bedstead beside the large one of mahogany, on which Marianne lay alone. He looked at her, and saw that she was awake and smiling.

"What! you are not asleep?" said he. "I hardly dared to stir for fear of waking you. It is nearly nine o'clock, you know."

It was Sunday morning. January had come round, and they were in Paris. During the first fortnight in December the weather had proved frightful at Chantebled, icy rains being followed by snow and terrible cold. This rigorous temperature, coupled with the circumstance that Marianne was again expecting to become a mother, had finally induced Mathieu to accept Beauchene's amiable offer to place at his disposal the little pavilion in the Rue de la Federation, where the founder of the works had lived before building the superb house on the quay. An old foreman who had occupied this pavilion, which still contained the simple furniture of former days, had lately died. And the young folks, desiring to be near their friend, worthy Dr. Boutan, had lived there for a month now, and did not intend to return to Chantebled until the first fine days in April.

"Wait a moment," resumed Mathieu; "I will let the light in."

He thereupon drew back one of the curtains, and a broad ray of yellow, wintry sunshine illumined the dim room. "Ah! there's the sun! And it's splendid weather—and Sunday too! I shall be able to take you out for a little while with the children this afternoon."

Then Marianne called him to her, and, when he had seated himself on the bed, took hold of his hand and said gayly: "Well, I hadn't been sleeping either for the last twenty minutes; and I didn't move because I wanted you to lie in bed a little late, as it's Sunday. How amusing to think that we were afraid of waking one another when we both had our eyes wide open!"

"Oh!" said he, "I was so happy to think you were sleeping. My one delight on Sundays now is to remain in this room all the morning, and spend the whole day with you and the children." Then he uttered a cry of surprise and remorse: "Why! I haven't kissed you yet."

She had raised herself on her pillows, and he gave her an eager clasp. In the stream of bright sunshine which gilded the bed she herself looked radiant with health and strength and hope. Never had her heavy brown tresses flowed down more abundantly, never had her big eyes smiled with gayer courage. And sturdy and healthful as she was, with her face all kindliness and love, she looked like the very personification of Fruitfulness, the good goddess with dazzling skin and perfect flesh, of sovereign dignity.

They remained for a moment clasped together in the golden sunshine which enveloped them with radiance. Then Mathieu pulled up Marianne's pillows, set the counterpane in order, and forbade her to stir until he had tidied the room. Forthwith he stripped his little bedstead, folded up the sheets, the mattress, and the bedstead itself, over which he slipped a cover. She vainly begged him not to trouble, saying that Zoe, the servant whom they had brought from the country, could very well do all those things. But he persisted, replying that the servant plagued him, and that he preferred to be alone to attend her and do all that there was to do. Then, as he suddenly began to shiver, he remarked that the room was cold, and blamed himself for not having already lighted the fire. Some logs and some small wood were piled in a corner, near the chimney-piece.

"How stupid of me!" he exclaimed; "here am I leaving you to freeze."

Then he knelt down before the fireplace, while she protested: "What an idea! Leave all that, and call Zoe."

"No, no, she doesn't know how to light the fire properly, and besides, it amuses me."

He laughed triumphantly when a bright clear fire began to crackle, filling the room with additional cheerfulness. The place was now a little paradise, said he; but he had scarcely finished washing and dressing when the partition behind the bed was shaken by a vigorous thumping.

"Ah! the rascals," he gayly exclaimed. "They are awake, you see! Oh! well, we may let them come, since to-day is Sunday."

For a few moments there had been a noise as of an aviary in commotion in the adjoining room. Prattling, shrill chirping, and ringing bursts of laughter could be heard. Then came a noise as of pillows and bolsters flying about, while two little fists continued pummelling the partition as if it were a drum.

"Yes, yes," said the mother, smiling and anxious, "answer them; tell them to come. They will be breaking everything if you don't."

Thereupon the father himself struck the wall, at which a victorious outburst, cries of triumphal delight, arose on the other side. And Mathieu scarcely had time to open the door before tramping and scuffling could be heard in the passage. A triumphal entry followed. All four of them wore long nightdresses falling to their little bare feet, and they trotted along and laughed, with their brown hair streaming about, their faces quite pink, and their eyes radiant with candid delight. Ambroise, though he was younger than his brothers, marched first, for he was the boldest and most enterprising. Behind him came the twins, Blaise and Denis, who were less turbulent—the latter especially. He taught the others to read, while Blaise, who was rather shy and timid, remained the dreamer of them all. And each gave a hand to little Mademoiselle Rose, who looked like an angel, pulled now to the right and now to the left amid bursts of laughter, while she contrived to keep herself steadily erect.

"Ah! mamma," cried Ambroise, "it's dreadfully cold, you know; do make me a little room."

Forthwith he bounded into the bed, slipped under the coverlet, and nestled close to his mother, so that only his laughing face and fine curly hair could be seen. But at this the two others raised a shout of war, and rushed forward in their turn upon the besieged citadel.

"Make a little room for us, mamma, make a little room! By your back, mamma! Near your shoulder, mamma!"

Only little Rose remained on the floor, feeling quite vexed and indignant. She had vainly attempted the assault, but had fallen back. "And me, mamma, and me," she pleaded.

It was necessary to help her in her endeavors to hoist herself up with her little hands. Then her mother took her in her arms in order that she might have the best place of all. Mathieu had at first felt somewhat anxious at seeing Marianne thus disturbed, but she laughed and told him not to trouble. And then the picture they all presented as they nestled there was so charming, so full of gayety, that he also smiled.

"It's very nice, it's so warm," said Ambroise, who was fond of taking his ease.

But Denis, the reasonable member of the band, began to explain why it was they had made so much noise "Blaise said that he had seen a spider. And then he felt frightened."

This accusation of cowardice vexed his brother, who replied: "It isn't true. I did see a spider, but I threw my pillow at it to kill it."

"So did I! so did I!" stammered Rose, again laughing wildly. "I threw my pillow like that—houp! houp!"

They all roared and wriggled again, so amusing did it seem to them. The truth was that they had engaged in a pillow fight under pretence of killing a spider, which Blaise alone said that he had seen. This unsupported testimony left the matter rather doubtful. But the whole brood looked so healthful and fresh in the bright sunshine that their father could not resist taking them in his arms, and kissing them here and there, wherever his lips lighted, a final game which sent them into perfect rapture amid a fresh explosion of laughter and shouts.

"Oh! what fun! what fun!"

"All the same," Marianne exclaimed, as she succeeded in freeing herself somewhat from the embraces of the children, "all the same, you know, I want to get up. I mustn't idle, for it does me no good. And besides, you little ones need to be washed and dressed."

They dressed in front of the big blazing fire; and it was nearly ten o'clock when they at last went down into the dining-room, where the earthenware stove was roaring, while the warm breakfast milk steamed upon the table. The ground floor of the pavilion comprised a dining-room and a drawing-room on the right of the hall, and a kitchen and a study on the left. The dining-room, like the principal bedchamber, overlooked the Rue de la Federation, and was filled every morning with cheerfulness by the rising sun.

The children were already at table, with their noses in their cups, when a ring at the street door was heard. And it was Dr. Boutan who came in. His arrival brought a renewal of noisy mirth, for the youngsters were fond of his round, good-natured face. He had attended them all at their births, and treated them like an old friend, with whom familiarity is allowable. And so they were already thrusting back their chairs to dart towards the doctor, when a remark from their mother restrained them.

"Now, please just leave the doctor quiet," said she, adding gayly, "Good morning, doctor. I'm much obliged to you for this bright sunshine, for I'm sure you ordered it so that I might go for a walk this afternoon."

"Why, yes, of course I ordered it—I was passing this way, and thought I would look in to see how you were getting on."

Boutan took a chair and seated himself near the table, while Mathieu explained to him that they had remained late in bed.

"Yes, that is all right, let her rest: but she must also take as much exercise as possible. However, there is no cause to worry. I see that she has a good appetite. When I find my patients at table, I cease to be a doctor, you know, I am simply a friend making a call."

Then he put a few questions, which the children, who were busy breakfasting, did not hear. And afterwards there came a pause in the conversation, which the doctor himself resumed, following, no doubt, some train of thought which he did not explain: "I hear that you are to lunch with the Seguins next Thursday," said he. "Ah! poor little woman! That is a terrible affair of hers."

With a gesture he expressed his feelings concerning the drama that had just upset the Seguins' household. Valentine, like Marianne, was to become a mother. For her part she was in despair at it, and her husband had given way to jealous fury. For a time, amid all their quarrels, they had continued leading their usual life of pleasure, but she now spent her days on a couch, while he neglected her and reverted to a bachelor's life. It was a very painful story, but the doctor was in hopes that Marianne, on the occasion of her visit to the Seguins, might bring some good influence to bear on them.

He rose from his chair and was about to retire, when the attack which had all along threatened him burst forth. The children, unsuspectedly rising from their chairs, had concerted together with a glance, and now they opened their campaign. The worthy doctor all at once found the twins upon his shoulders, while the younger boy clasped him round the waist and the little girl clung to his legs.

"Puff! puff! do the railway train, do the railway train, please do."

They pushed and shook him, amid peal after peal of flute-like laughter, while their father and mother rushed to his assistance, scolding and angry. But he calmed the parents by saying: "Let them be! they are simply wishing me good day. And besides, I must bear with them, you know, since, as our friend Beauchene says, it is a little bit my fault if they are in the world. What charms me with your children is that they enjoy such good health, just like their mother. For the present, at all events, one can ask nothing more of them."

When he had set them down on the floor, and given each a smacking kiss, he took hold of Marianne's hands and said to her that everything was going on beautifully, and that he was very pleased. Then he went off, escorted to the front door by Mathieu, the pair of them jesting and laughing gayly.

Directly after the midday meal Mathieu wished to go out, in order that Marianne might profit by the bright sunshine. The children had been dressed in readiness before sitting down to table, and it was scarcely more than one o'clock when the family turned the corner of the Rue de la Federation and found itself upon the quays.

This portion of Grenelle, lying between the Champ de Mars and the densely populated streets of the centre of the district, has an aspect all its own, characterized by vast bare expanses, and long and almost deserted streets running at right angles and fringed by factories with lofty, interminable gray walls. During work-hours nobody passes along these streets, and on raising one's head one sees only lofty chimneys belching forth thick coal smoke above the roofs of big buildings with dusty window panes. And if any large cart entrance happens to be open one may espy deep yards crowded with drays and full of acrid vapor. The only sounds are the strident puffs of jets of steam, the dull rumbling of machinery, and the sudden rattle of ironwork lowered from the carts to the pavement. But on Sundays the factories do not work, and the district then falls into death-like silence. In summer time there is but bright sunshine heating the pavement, in winter some icy snow-laden wind rushing down the lonely streets. The population of Grenelle is said to be the worst of Paris, both the most vicious and the most wretched. The neighborhood of the Ecole Militaire attracts thither a swarm of worthless women, who bring in their train all the scum of the populace. In contrast to all this the gay bourgeois district of Passy rises up across the Seine; while the rich aristocratic quarters of the Invalides and the Faubourg St. Germain spread out close by. Thus the Beauchene works on the quay, as their owner laughingly said, turned their back upon misery and looked towards all the prosperity and gayety of this world.

Mathieu was very partial to the avenues, planted with fine trees, which radiate from the Champ de Mars and the Esplanade des Invalides, supplying great gaps for air and sunlight. But he was particularly fond of that long diversified Quai d'Orsay, which starts from the Rue du Bac in the very centre of the city, passes before the Palais Bourbon, crosses first the Esplanade des Invalides, and then the Champ de Mars, to end at the Boulevard de Grenelle, in the black factory region. How majestically it spread out, what fine old leafy trees there were round that bend of the Seine from the State Tobacco Works to the garden of the Eiffel Tower! The river winds along with sovereign gracefulness; the avenue stretches out under superb foliage. You can really saunter there amid delicious quietude, instinct as it were with all the charm and power of Paris.

It was thither that Mathieu wished to take his wife and the little ones that Sunday. But the distance was considerable, and some anxiety was felt respecting Rose's little legs. She was intrusted to Ambroise, who, although the youngest of the boys, was already energetic and determined. These two opened the march; then came Blaise and Denis, the twins, the parents bringing up the rear. Everything at first went remarkably well: they strolled on slowly in the gay sunshine. That beautiful winter afternoon was exquisitely pure and clear, and though it was very cold in the shade, all seemed golden and velvety in the stretches of bright light. There were a great many people out of doors—all the idle folks, clad in their Sunday best, whom the faintest sunshine draws in crowds to the promenades of Paris. Little Rose, feeling warm and gay, drew herself up as if to show the people that she was a big girl. She crossed the whole extent of the Champ de Mars without asking to be carried. And her three brothers strode along making the frozen pavement resound beneath their steps. Promenaders were ever turning round to watch them. In other cities of Europe the sight of a young married couple preceded by four children would have excited no comment, but here in Paris the spectacle was so unusual that remarks of astonishment, sarcasm, and even compassion were exchanged. Mathieu and Marianne divined, even if they did not actually hear, these comments, but they cared nothing for them. They bravely went their way, smiling at one another, and feeling convinced that the course they had taken in life was the right one, whatever other folks might think or say.

It was three o'clock when they turned their steps homeward; and Marianne, feeling rather tired, then took a little rest on a sofa in the drawing-room, where Zoe had previously lighted a good fire. The children, quieted by fatigue, were sitting round a little table, listening to a tale which Denis read from a story-book, when a visitor was announced. This proved to be Constance, who, after driving out with Maurice, had thought of calling to inquire after Marianne, whom she saw only once or twice a week, although the little pavilion was merely separated by a garden from the large house on the quay.

"Oh! are you poorly, my dear?" she inquired as she entered the room and perceived Marianne on the sofa.

"Oh! dear, no," replied the other, "but I have been out walking for the last two hours and am now taking some rest."

Mathieu had brought an armchair forward for his wife's rich, vain cousin, who, whatever her real feelings, certainly strove to appear amiable. She apologized for not being able to call more frequently, and explained what a number of duties she had to discharge as mistress of her home. Meantime Maurice, clad in black velvet, hung round her petticoats, gazing from a distance at the other children, who one and all returned his scrutiny.

"Well, Maurice," exclaimed his mother, "don't you wish your little cousins good-day?"

He had to do as he was bidden and step towards them. But all five remained embarrassed. They seldom met, and had as yet had no opportunity to quarrel. The four little savages of Chantebled felt indeed almost out of their element in the presence of this young Parisian with bourgeois manners.

"And are all your little folks quite well?" resumed Constance, who, with her sharp eyes, was comparing her son with the other lads. "Ambroise has grown; his elder brothers also look very strong."

Her examination did not apparently result to Maurice's advantage. The latter was tall and looked sturdy, but he had quite a waxen complexion. Nevertheless, the glance that Constance gave the others was full of irony, disdain, and condemnation. When she had first heard that Marianne was likely to become a mother once more she had made no secret of her disapproval. She held to her old opinions more vigorously than ever.

Marianne, knowing full well that they would fall out if they discussed the subject of children, sought another topic of conversation. She inquired after Beauchene. "And Alexandre," said she, "why did you not bring him with you? I haven't seen him for a week!"

"Why," broke in Mathieu, "I told you he had gone shooting yesterday evening. He slept, no doubt, at Puymoreau, the other side of Chantebled, so as to be in the woods at daybreak this morning, and he probably won't be home till to-morrow."

"Ah! yes, I remember now. Well, it's nice weather to be in the woods."

This, however, was another perilous subject, and Marianne regretted having broached it, for, truth to tell, one never knew where Beauchene might really be when he claimed to have gone shooting. He availed himself so often of this pretext to absent himself from home that Constance was doubtless aware of the truth. But in the presence of that household, whose union was so perfect, she was determined to show a brave front.

"Well, you know," said she, "it is I who compel him to go about and take as much exercise as possible. He has a temperament that needs the open air. Shooting is very good for him."

At this same moment there came another ring at the door, announcing another visitor. And this time it was Madame Morange who entered the room, with her daughter Reine. She colored when she caught sight of Madame Beauchene, so keenly was she impressed by that perfect model of wealth and distinction, whom she ever strove to imitate. Constance, however, profited by the diversion of Valerie's arrival to declare that she unfortunately could not remain any longer, as a friend must now be waiting for her at home.

"Well, at all events, leave us Maurice," suggested Mathieu. "Here's Reine here now, and all six children can play a little while together. I will bring you the boy by and by, when he has had a little snack."

But Maurice had already once more sought refuge among his mother's skirts. And she refused the invitation. "Oh! no, no!" said she. "He has to keep to a certain diet, you know, and he must not eat anything away from home. Good-by; I must be off. I called only to inquire after you all in passing. Keep well; good-by."

Then she led her boy away, never speaking to Valerie, but simply shaking hands with her in a familiar, protecting fashion, which the other considered to be extremely distinguished. Reine, on her side, had smiled at Maurice, whom she already slightly knew. She looked delightful that day in her gown of thick blue cloth, her face smiling under her heavy black tresses, and showing such a likeness to her mother that she seemed to be the latter's younger sister.

Marianne, quite charmed, called the girl to her: "Come and kiss me, my dear! Oh! what a pretty young lady! Why, she is getting quite beautiful and tall. How old is she?"

"Nearly thirteen," Valerie replied.

She had seated herself in the armchair vacated by Constance, and Mathieu noticed what a keen expression of anxiety there was in her soft eyes. After mentioning that she also had called in passing to make inquiries, and declaring that both mother and children looked remarkably well, she relapsed into gloomy silence, scarcely listening to Marianne, who thanked her for having come. Thereupon it occurred to Mathieu to leave her with his wife. To him it seemed that she must have something on her mind, and perhaps she wished to make a confidante of Marianne.

"My dear Reine," said he, "come with these little ones into the dining-room. We will see what afternoon snack there is, and lay the cloth."

This proposal was greeted with shouts of delight, and all the children trooped into the dining-room with Mathieu. A quarter of an hour later, when everything was ready there, and Valerie came in, the latter's eyes looked very red, as if she had been weeping. And that evening, when Mathieu was alone with his wife, he learnt what the trouble was. Morange's scheme of leaving the Beauchene works and entering the service of the Credit National, where he would speedily rise to a high and lucrative position, his hope too of giving Reine a big dowry and marrying her off to advantage—all the ambitious dreams of rank and wealth in which his wife and he had indulged, now showed no likelihood of fulfilment, since it seemed probable that Valerie might again have a child. Both she and her husband were in despair over it, and though Marianne had done her utmost to pacify her friend and reconcile her to circumstances, there were reasons to fear that in her distracted condition she might do something desperate.

Four days later, when the Froments lunched with the Seguins du Hordel at the luxurious mansion in the Avenue d'Antin, they came upon similar trouble there. Seguin, who was positively enraged, did not scruple to accuse his wife of infidelity, and, on his side, he took to quite a bachelor life. He had been a gambler in his younger days, and had never fully cured himself of that passion, which now broke out afresh, like a fire which has only slumbered for a time. He spent night after night at his club, playing at baccarat, and could be met in the betting ring at every race meeting. Then, too, he glided into equivocal society and appeared at home only at intervals to vent his irritation and spite and jealousy upon his ailing wife.

She, poor woman, was absolutely guiltless of the charges preferred against her. But knowing her husband, and unwilling for her own part to give up her life of pleasure, she had practised concealment as long as possible. And now she was really very ill, haunted too by an unreasoning, irremovable fear that it would all end in her death. Mathieu, who had seen her but a few months previously looking so fair and fresh, was amazed to find her such a wreck. And on her side Valentine gazed, all astonishment, at Marianne, noticing with surprise how calm and strong the young woman seemed, and how limpid her clear and smiling eyes remained.

On the day of the Froments' visit Seguin had gone out early in the morning, and when they arrived he had not yet returned. Thus the lunch was for a short time kept waiting, and during the interval Celeste, the maid, entered the room where the visitors sat near her mistress, who was stretched upon a sofa, looking a perfect picture of distress. Valentine turned a questioning glance on the servant, who forthwith replied:

"No, madame, Monsieur has not come back yet. But that woman of my village is here. You know, madame, the woman I spoke to you about, Sophie Couteau, La Couteau as we call her at Rougemont, who brings nurses to Paris?"

"Well, what of it?" exclaimed Valentine, on the point of ordering Celeste to leave the room, for it seemed to her quite outrageous to be disturbed in this manner.

"Well, madame, she's here; and as I told you before, if you would intrust her with the matter now she would find a very good wet nurse for you in the country, and bring her here whenever she's wanted."

La Couteau had been standing behind the door, which had remained ajar, and scarcely had Celeste finished than, without waiting for an invitation, she boldly entered the room. She was a quick little wizened woman, with certain peasant ways, but considerably polished by her frequent journeys to Paris. So far as her small keen eyes and pointed nose went her long face was not unpleasant, but its expression of good nature was marred by her hard mouth, her thin lips, suggestive of artfulness and cupidity. Her gown of dark woollen stuff, her black cape, black mittens, and black cap with yellow ribbons, gave her the appearance of a respectable countrywoman going to mass in her Sunday best.

"Have you been a nurse?" Valentine inquired, as she scrutinized her.

"Yes, madame," replied La Couteau, "but that was ten years ago, when I was only twenty. It seemed to me that I wasn't likely to make much money by remaining a nurse, and so I preferred to set up as an agent to bring others to Paris."

As she spoke she smiled, like an intelligent woman who feels that those who give their services as wet nurses to bourgeois families are simply fools and dupes. However, she feared that she might have said too much on the point, and so she added: "But one does what one can, eh, madame? The doctor told me that I should never do for a nurse again, and so I thought that I might perhaps help the poor little dears in another manner."

"And you bring wet nurses to the Paris offices?"

"Yes, madame, twice a month. I supply several offices, but more particularly Madame Broquette's office in the Rue Roquepine. It's a very respectable place, where one runs no risk of being deceived—And so, if you like, madame, I will choose the very best I can find for you—the pick of the bunch, so to say. I know the business thoroughly, and you can rely on me."

As her mistress did not immediately reply, Celeste ventured to intervene, and began by explaining how it happened that La Couteau had called that day.

"When she goes back into the country, madame, she almost always takes a baby with her, sometimes a nurse's child, and sometimes the child of people who are not well enough off to keep a nurse in the house. And she takes these children to some of the rearers in the country. She just now came to see me before going round to my friend Madame Menoux, whose baby she is to take away with her."

Valentine became interested. This Madame Menoux was a haberdasher in the neighborhood and a great friend of Celeste's. She had married a former soldier, a tall handsome fellow, who now earned a hundred and fifty francs a month as an attendant at a museum. She was very fond of him, and had bravely set up a little shop, the profits from which doubled their income, in such wise that they lived very happily and almost at their ease. Celeste, who frequently absented herself from her duties to spend hours gossiping in Madame Menoux's little shop, was forever being scolded for this practice; but in the present instance Valentine, full of anxiety and curiosity, did not chide her. The maid was quite proud at being questioned, and informed her mistress that Madame Menoux's baby was a fine little boy, and that the mother had been attended by a certain Madame Rouche, who lived at the lower end of the Rue du Rocher.

"It was I who recommended her," continued the servant, "for a friend of mine whom she had attended had spoken to me very highly of her. No doubt she has not such a good position as Madame Bourdieu, who has so handsome a place in the Rue de Miromesnil, but she is less expensive, and so very kind and obliging."

Then Celeste suddenly ceased speaking, for she noticed that Mathieu's eyes were fixed upon her, and this, for reasons best known to herself, made her feel uncomfortable. He on his side certainly placed no confidence in this big dark girl with a head like that of a horse, who, it seemed to him, knew far too much.

Marianne joined in the conversation. "But why," asked she, "why does not this Madame Menoux, whom you speak about, keep her baby with her?"

Thereupon La Couteau turned a dark harsh glance upon this lady visitor, who, whatever course she might take herself, had certainly no right to prevent others from doing business.

"Oh! it's impossible," exclaimed Celeste, well pleased with the diversion. "Madame Menoux's shop is no bigger than my pocket-handkerchief, and at the back of it there is only one little room where she and her husband take their meals and sleep. And that room, too, overlooks a tiny courtyard where one can neither see nor breathe. The baby would not live a week in such a place. And, besides, Madame Menoux would not have time to attend to the child. She has never had a servant, and what with waiting on customers and having to cook meals in time for her husband's return from the museum, she never has a moment to spare. Oh! if she could, she would be very happy to keep the little fellow with her."

"It is true," said Marianne sadly; "there are some poor mothers whom I pity with all my heart. This person you speak of is not in poverty, and yet is reduced to this cruel separation. For my part, I should not be able to exist if a child of mine were taken away from me to some unknown spot and given to another woman."

La Couteau doubtless interpreted this as an attack upon herself. Assuming the kindly demeanor of one who dotes on children, the air which she always put on to prevail over hesitating mothers, she replied: "Oh, Rougemont is such a very pretty place. And then it's not far from Bayeux, so that folks are by no means savages there. The air is so pure, too, that people come there to recruit their health. And, besides, the little ones who are confided to us are well cared for, I assure you. One would have to be heartless to do otherwise than love such little angels."

However, like Celeste, she relapsed into silence on seeing how significantly Mathieu was looking at her. Perhaps, in spite of her rustic ways, she understood that there was a false ring in her voice. Besides, of what use was her usual patter about the salubrity of the region, since that lady, Madame Seguin, wished to have a nurse at her house? So she resumed: "Then it's understood, madame, I will bring you the best we have, a real treasure."

Valentine, now a little tranquillized as to her fears for herself, found strength to speak out. "No, no, I won't pledge myself in advance. I will send to see the nurses you bring to the office, and we shall see if there is one to suit me."

Then, without occupying herself further about the woman, she turned to Marianne, and asked: "Shall you nurse your baby yourself?"

"Certainly, as I did with the others. We have very decided opinions on that point, my husband and I."

"No doubt. I understand you: I should much like to do the same myself; but it is impossible."

La Couteau had remained there motionless, vexed at having come on a fruitless errand, and regretting the loss of the present which she would have earned by her obligingness in providing a nurse. She put all her spite into a glance which she shot at Marianne, who, thought she, was evidently some poor creature unable even to afford a nurse. However, at a sign which Celeste made her, she courtesied humbly and withdrew in the company of the maid.

A few minutes afterwards, Seguin arrived, and, repairing to the dining-room, they all sat down to lunch there. It was a very luxurious meal, comprising eggs, red mullet, game, and crawfish, with red and white Bordeaux wines and iced champagne. Such diet for Valentine and Marianne would never have met with Dr. Boutan's approval; but Seguin declared the doctor to be an unbearable individual whom nobody could ever please.

He, Seguin, while showing all politeness to his guests, seemed that day to be in an execrable temper. Again and again he levelled annoying and even galling remarks at his wife, carrying things to such a point at times that tears came to the unfortunate woman's eyes. Now that he scarcely set foot in the house he complained that everything was going wrong there. If he spent his time elsewhere it was, according to him, entirely his wife's fault. The place was becoming a perfect hell upon earth. And in everything, the slightest incident, the most common-place remark, he found an opportunity for jeers and gibes. These made Mathieu and Marianne extremely uncomfortable; but at last he let fall such a harsh expression that Valentine indignantly rebelled, and he had to apologize. At heart he feared her, especially when the blood of the Vaugelades arose within her, and she gave him to understand, in her haughty disdainful way, that she would some day revenge herself on him for his treatment.

However, seeking another outlet for his spite and rancor, he at last turned to Mathieu, and spoke of Chantebled, saying bitterly that the game in the covers there was fast becoming scarcer and scarcer, in such wise that he now had difficulty in selling his shooting shares, so that his income from the property was dwindling every year. He made no secret of the fact that he would much like to sell the estate, but where could he possibly find a purchaser for those unproductive woods, those sterile plains, those marshes and those tracts of gravel?

Mathieu listened to all this attentively, for during his long walks in the summer he had begun to take an interest in the estate. "Are you really of opinion that it cannot be cultivated?" he asked. "It's pitiful to see all that land lying waste and idle."

"Cultivate it!" cried Seguin. "Ah! I should like to see such a miracle! The only crops that one will ever raise on it are stones and frogs."

They had by this time eaten their dessert, and before rising from table Marianne was telling Valentine that she would much like to see and kiss her children, who had not been allowed to lunch with their elders on account of their supposed unruly ways, when a couple of visitors arrived in turn, and everything else was forgotten. One was Santerre the novelist, who of late had seldom called on the Seguins, and the other, much to Mathieu's dislike, proved to be Beauchene's sister, Seraphine, the Baroness de Lowicz. She looked at the young man in a bold, provoking, significant manner, and then, like Santerre, cast a sly glance of mocking contempt at Marianne and Valentine. She and the novelist between them soon turned the conversation on to subjects that appealed to their vicious tastes. And Santerre related that he had lately seen Doctor Gaude perform several operations at the Marbeuf Hospital. He had found there the usual set of society men who attend first performances at the theatres, and indeed there were also some women present.

And then he enlarged upon the subject, giving the crudest and most precise particulars, much to the delight of Seguin, who every now and again interpolated remarks of approval, while both Mathieu and Marianne grew more and more ill at ease. The young woman sat looking with amazement at Santerre as he calmly recapitulated horror after horror, to the evident enjoyment of the others. She remembered having read his last book, that love story which had seemed to her so supremely absurd, with its theories of the annihilation of the human species. And she at last glanced at Mathieu to tell him how weary she felt of all the semi-society and semi-medical chatter around her, and how much she would like to go off home, leaning on his arm, and walking slowly along the sunlit quays. He, for his part, felt a pang at seeing so much insanity rife amid those wealthy surroundings. He made his wife a sign that it was indeed time to take leave.

"What! are you going already!" Valentine then exclaimed. "Well, I dare not detain you if you feel tired." However, when Marianne begged her to kiss the children for her, she added: "Why, yes, it's true you have not seen them. Wait a moment, pray; I want you to kiss them yourself."

But when Celeste appeared in answer to the bell, she announced that Monsieur Gaston and Mademoiselle Lucie had gone out with their governess. And this made Seguin explode once more. All his rancor against his wife revived. The house was going to rack and ruin. She spent her days lying on a sofa. Since when had the governess taken leave to go out with the children without saying anything? One could not even see the children now in order to kiss them. It was a nice state of things. They were left to the servants; in fact, it was the servants now who controlled the house.

Thereupon Valentine began to cry.

"Mon Dieu!" said Marianne to her husband, when she found herself out of doors, able to breathe, and happy once more now that she was leaning on his arm; "why, they are quite mad, the people in that house."

"Yes," Mathieu responded, "they are mad, no doubt; but we must pity them, for they know not what happiness is."

VI

ABOUT nine o'clock one fine cold morning, a few days afterwards, as Mathieu, bound for his office, a little late through having lingered near his wife, was striding hastily across the garden which separated the pavilion from the factory yard, he met Constance and Maurice, who, clad in furs, were going out for a walk in the sharp air. Beauchene, who was accompanying them as far as the gate, bareheaded and ever sturdy and victorious, gayly exclaimed to his wife:

"Give the youngster a good spin on his legs! Let him take in all the fresh air he can. There's nothing like that and good food to make a man."

Mathieu, on hearing this, stopped short. "Has Maurice been poorly again?" he inquired.

"Oh, no!" hastily replied the boy's mother, with an appearance of great gayety, assumed perhaps from an unconscious desire to hide certain covert fears. "Only the doctor wants him to take exercise, and it is so fine this morning that we are going off on quite an expedition."

"Don't go along the quays," said Beauchene again. "Go up towards the Invalides. He'll have much stiffer marching to do when he's a soldier."

Then, the mother and the child having taken themselves off, he went back into the works with Mathieu, adding in his triumphant way: "That youngster, you know, is as strong as an oak. But women are always so nervous. For my part, I'm quite easy in mind about him, as you can see." And with a laugh he concluded: "When one has but one son, he keeps him."

That same day, about an hour later, a terrible dispute which broke out between old Moineaud's daughters, Norine and Euphrasie, threw the factory into a state of commotion. Norine's intrigue with Beauchene had ended in the usual way. He had soon tired of the girl and betaken himself to some other passing fancy, leaving her to her tears, her shame, and all the consequences of her fault; for although it had hitherto been possible for her to conceal her condition from her parents, she was unable to deceive her sister, who was her constant companion. The two girls were always bickering, and Norine had for some time lived in dread of scandal and exposure. And that day the trouble came to a climax, beginning with a trivial dispute about a bit of glass-paper in the workroom, then developing into a furious exchange of coarse, insulting language, and culminating in a frantic outburst from Euphrasie, who shrieked to the assembled work-girls all that she knew about her sister.

There was an outrageous scene: the sisters fought, clawing and scratching one another desperately, and could not be separated until Beauchene, Mathieu, and Morange, attracted by the extraordinary uproar, rushed into the workroom and restored a little order. Fortunately for Beauchene, Euphrasie did not know the whole truth, and Norine, after giving her employer a humble, supplicating glance, kept silence; but old Moineaud was present, and the public revelation of his daughter's shame sent him into a fury. He ordered Norine out of the works forthwith, and threatened to throw her out of window should he find her at home when he returned there in the evening. And Beauchene, both annoyed at the scandal and ashamed at being the primary cause of it, did not venture to interfere. It was only after the unhappy Norine had rushed off sobbing that he found strength of mind to attempt to pacify the father, and assert his authority in the workroom by threatening to dismiss one and all of the girls if the slightest scandal, the slightest noise, should ever occur there again.

Mathieu was deeply pained by the scene, but kept his own counsel. What most astonished him was the promptness with which Beauchene regained his self-possession as soon as Norine had fled, and the majesty with which he withdrew to his office after threatening the others and restoring order. Another whom the scene had painfully affected was Morange, whom Mathieu, to his surprise, found ghastly pale, with trembling hands, as if indeed he had had some share of responsibility in this unhappy business. But Morange, as he confided to Mathieu, was distressed for other reasons. The scene in the workroom, the revelation of Norine's condition, the fate awaiting the girl driven away into the bleak, icy streets, had revived all his own poignant worries with respect to Valerie. Mathieu had already heard of the latter's trouble from his wife, and he speedily grasped the accountant's meaning. It vaguely seemed to him also that Morange was yielding to the same unreasoning despair as Valerie, and was almost willing that she should take the desperate course which she had hinted to Marianne. But it was a very serious matter, and Mathieu did not wish to be in any way mixed up in it. Having tried his best to pacify the cashier, he sought forgetfulness of these painful incidents in his work.

That afternoon, however, a little girl, Cecile Moineaud, the old fitter's youngest daughter, slipped into his office, with a message from her mother, beseeching him to speak with her. He readily understood that the woman wished to see him respecting Norine, and in his usual compassionate way he consented to go. The interview took place in one of the adjacent streets, down which the cold winter wind was blowing. La Moineaude was there with Norine and another little girl of hers, Irma, a child eight years of age. Both Norine and her mother wept abundantly while begging Mathieu to help them. He alone knew the whole truth, and was in a position to approach Beauchene on the subject. La Moineaude was firmly determined to say nothing to her husband. She trembled for his future and that of her son Alfred, who was now employed at the works; for there was no telling what might happen if Beauchene's name should be mentioned. Life was indeed hard enough already, and what would become of them all should the family bread-winners be turned away from the factory? Norine certainly had no legal claim on Beauchene, the law being peremptory on that point; but, now that she had lost her employment, and was driven from home by her father, could he leave her to die of want in the streets? The girl tried to enforce her moral claim by asserting that she had always been virtuous before meeting Beauchene. In any case, her lot remained a very hard one. That Beauchene was the father of her child there could be no doubt; and at last Mathieu, without promising success, told the mother that he would do all he could in the matter.

He kept his word that same afternoon, and after a great deal of difficulty he succeeded. At first Beauchene fumed, stormed, denied, equivocated, almost blamed Mathieu for interfering, talked too of blackmail, and put on all sorts of high and mighty airs. But at heart the matter greatly worried him. What if Norine or her mother should go to his wife? Constance might close her eyes as long as she simply suspected things, but if complaints were formally, openly made to her, there would be a terrible scandal. On the other hand, however, should he do anything for the girl, it would become known, and everybody would regard him as responsible. And then there would be no end to what he called the blackmailing.

However, when Beauchene reached this stage Mathieu felt that the battle was gained. He smiled and answered: "Of course, one can never tell—the girl is certainly not malicious. But when women are driven beyond endurance, they become capable of the worst follies. I must say that she made no demands of me; she did not even explain what she wanted; she simply said that she could not remain in the streets in this bleak weather, since her father had turned her away from home. If you want my opinion, it is this: I think that one might at once put her to board at a proper place. Let us say that four or five months will elapse before she is able to work again; that would mean a round sum of five hundred francs in expenses. At that cost she might be properly looked after."

Beauchene walked nervously up and down, and then replied: "Well, I haven't a bad heart, as you know. Five hundred francs more or less will not inconvenience me. If I flew into a temper just now it was because the mere idea of being robbed and imposed upon puts me beside myself. But if it's a question of charity, why, then, do as you suggest. It must be understood, however, that I won't mix myself up in anything; I wish even to remain ignorant of what you do. Choose a nurse, place the girl where you please, and I will simply pay the bill. Neither more nor less."

Then he heaved a sigh of relief at the prospect of being extricated from this equivocal position, the worry of which he refused to acknowledge. And once more he put on the mien of a superior, victorious man, one who is certain that he will win all the battles of life. In fact, he even jested about the girl, and at last went off repeating his instructions: "See that my conditions are fully understood. I don't want to know anything about any child. Do whatever you please, but never let me hear another word of the matter."

That day was certainly one fertile in incidents, for in the evening there was quite an alarm at the Beauchenes. At the moment when they were about to sit down to dinner little Maurice fainted away and fell upon the floor. Nearly a quarter of an hour elapsed before the child could be revived, and meantime the distracted parents quarrelled and shouted, accusing one another of having compelled the lad to go out walking that morning in such cold, frosty weather. It was evidently that foolish outing which had chilled him. At least, this was what they said to one another by way of quieting their anxiety. Constance, while she held her boy in her arms, pictured him as dead. It occurred to her for the first time that she might possibly lose him. At this idea she experienced a terrible heart-pang, and a feeling of motherliness came upon her, so acute that it was like a revelation. The ambitious woman that was in her, she who dreamt of royalty for that only son, the future princely owner of the ever-growing family fortune, likewise suffered horribly. If she was to lose that son she would have no child left. Why had she none other? Was it not she who had willed it thus? At this thought a feeling of desperate regret shot through her like a red-hot blade, burning her cruelly to the very depths of her being. Maurice, however, at last recovered consciousness, and even sat down to the table and ate with a fair appetite. Then Beauchene immediately shrugged his shoulders, and began to jest about the unreasoning fears of women. And as time went by Constance herself ceased to think of the incident.

On the morrow, when Mathieu had to attend to the delicate mission which he had undertaken, he remembered the two women of whom Celeste, the maid, had spoken on the day of his visit to the Seguins. He at first dismissed all idea of that Madame Rouche, of whom the girl had spoken so strangely, but he thought of making some inquiries respecting Madame Bourdieu, who accommodated boarders at the little house where she resided in the Rue de Miromesnil. And he seemed to remember that this woman had attended Madame Morange at the time of Reine's birth, a circumstance which induced him to question the cashier.

At the very first words the latter seemed greatly disturbed. "Yes, a lady friend recommended Madame Bourdieu to my wife," said he; "but why do you ask me?"

And as he spoke he looked at Mathieu with an expression of anguish, as if that sudden mention of Madame Bourdieu's name signified that the young fellow had guessed his secret preoccupations. It was as though he had been abruptly surprised in wrong-doing. Perhaps, too, certain dim, haunting thoughts, which he had long been painfully revolving in his mind, without as yet being able to come to a decision, took shape at that moment. At all events, he turned pale and his lips trembled.

Then, as Mathieu gave him to understand that it was a question of placing Norine somewhere, he involuntarily let an avowal escape him.

"My wife was speaking to me of Madame Bourdieu only this morning," he began. "Oh! I don't know how it happened, but, as you are aware, Reine was born so many years ago that I can't give you any precise information. It seems that the woman has done well, and is now at the head of a first-class establishment. Inquire there yourself; I have no doubt you will find what you want there."

Mathieu followed this advice; but at the same time, as he had been warned that Madame Bourdieu's terms were rather high, he stifled his prejudices and began by repairing to the Rue du Rocher in order to reconnoitre Madame Rouche's establishment and make some inquiries of her. The mere aspect of the place chilled him. It was one of the black houses of old Paris, with a dark, evil-smelling passage, leading into a small yard which the nurse's few squalid rooms overlooked. Above the passage entrance was a yellow signboard which simply bore the name of Madame Rouche in big letters. She herself proved to be a person of five- or six-and-thirty, gowned in black and spare of figure, with a leaden complexion, scanty hair of no precise color, and a big nose of unusual prominence. With her low, drawling speech, her prudent, cat-like gestures, and her sour smile, he divined her to be a dangerous, unscrupulous woman. She told him that, as the accommodation at her disposal was so small, she only took boarders for a limited time, and this of course enabled him to curtail his inquiries. Glad to have done with her, he hurried off, oppressed by nausea and vaguely frightened by what he had seen of the place.

On the other hand, Madame Bourdieu's establishment, a little three-storied house in the Rue de Miromesnil, between the Rue La Boetie and the Rue de Penthievre, offered an engaging aspect, with its bright facade and muslin-curtained windows. And Madame Bourdieu, then two-and-thirty, rather short and stout, had a broad, pleasant white face, which had greatly helped her on the road to success. She expatiated to Mathieu on the preliminary training that was required by one of her profession, the cost of it, the efforts needed to make a position, the responsibilities, the inspections, the worries of all sorts that she had to face; and she plainly told the young man that her charge for a boarder would be two hundred francs a month. This was far more than he was empowered to give; however, after some further conversation, when Madame Bourdieu learnt that it was a question of four months' board, she became more accommodating, and agreed to accept a round sum of six hundred francs for the entire period, provided that the person for whom Mathieu was acting would consent to occupy a three-bedded room with two other boarders.

Altogether there were about a dozen boarders' rooms in the house, some of these having three, and even four, beds; while others, the terms for which were naturally higher, contained but one. Madame Bourdieu could accommodate as many as thirty boarders, and as a rule, she had some five-and-twenty staying on her premises. Provided they complied with the regulations, no questions were asked them. They were not required to say who they were or whence they came, and in most cases they were merely known by some Christian name which they chose to give.

Mathieu ended by agreeing to Madame Bourdieu's terms, and that same evening Norine was taken to her establishment. Some little trouble ensued with Beauchene, who protested when he learnt that five hundred francs would not suffice to defray the expenses. However, Mathieu managed affairs so diplomatically that at last the other not only became reconciled to the terms, but provided the money to purchase a little linen, and even agreed to supply pocket-money to the extent of ten francs a month. Thus, five days after Norine had entered Madame Bourdieu's establishment, Mathieu decided to return thither to hand the girl her first ten francs and tell her that he had settled everything.

He found her there in the boarders' refectory with some of her companions in the house—a tall, thin, severe-looking Englishwoman, with lifeless eyes and bloodless lips, who called herself Amy, and a pale red-haired girl with a tip-tilted nose and a big mouth, who was known as Victoire. Then, too, there was a young person of great beauty answering to the name of Rosine, a jeweller's daughter, so Norine told Mathieu, whose story was at once pathetic and horrible. The young man, while waiting to see Madame Bourdieu, who was engaged, sat for a time answering Norine's questions, and listening to the others, who conversed before him in a free and open way. His heart was wrung by much that he heard, and as soon as he could rid himself of Norine he returned to the waiting-room, eager to complete his business. There, however, two women who wished to consult Madame Bourdieu, and who sat chatting side by side on a sofa, told him that she was still engaged, so that he was compelled to tarry a little longer. He ensconced himself in a large armchair, and taking a newspaper from his pocket, began to read it. But he had not been thus occupied for many minutes before the door opened and a servant entered, ushering in a lady dressed in black and thickly veiled, whom she asked to be good enough to wait her turn. Mathieu was on the point of rising, for, though his back was turned to the door, he could see, in a looking-glass, that the new arrival was none other than Morange's wife, Valerie. After a moment's hesitation, however, the sight of her black gown and thick veil, which seemed to indicate that she desired to escape recognition, induced him to dive back into his armchair and feign extreme attention to his newspaper. She, on her side, had certainly not noticed him, but by glancing slantwise towards the looking-glass he could observe all her movements.

Meantime the conversation between the other women on the sofa continued, and to Mathieu's surprise it suddenly turned on Madame Rouche, concerning whom one of them began telling the most horrible stories, which fully confirmed the young man's previous suspicions. These stories seemed to have a powerful fascination for Valerie, who sat in a corner, never stirring, but listening intently. She did not even turn her head towards the other women, but, beneath her veil, Mathieu could detect her big eyes glittering feverishly. She started but once. It was when one of the others inquired of her friend where that horrid creature La Rouche resided, and the other replied, "At the lower end of the Rue du Rocher."

Then their chatter abruptly ceased, for Madame Bourdieu made her appearance on the threshold of her private room. The gossips exchanged only a few words with her, and then, as Mathieu remained in his armchair, the high back of which concealed him from view, Valerie rose from her seat and followed Madame Bourdieu into the private room.

As soon as he was alone the young man let his newspaper fall upon his knees, and lapsed into a reverie, haunted by all the chatter he had heard, both there and in Norine's company, and shuddering at the thought of the dreadful secrets that had been revealed to him. How long an interval elapsed he could not tell, but at last he was suddenly roused by a sound of voices.

Madame Bourdieu was now escorting Valerie to the door. She had the same plump fresh face as usual, and even smiled in a motherly way; but the other was quivering, as with distress and grief. "You are not sensible, my dear child," said Madame Bourdieu to her. "It is simply foolish of you. Come, go home and be good."

Then, Valerie having withdrawn without uttering a word, Madame Bourdieu was greatly surprised to see Mathieu, who had risen from his chair. And she suddenly became serious, displeased with herself at having spoken in his presence. Fortunately, a diversion was created by the arrival of Norine, who came in from the refectory; and Mathieu then promptly settled his business and went off, after promising Norine that he would return some day to see her.

To make up for lost time he was walking hastily towards the Rue La Boetie, when, all at once, he came to a halt, for at the very corner of that street he again perceived Valerie, now talking to a man, none other than her husband. So Morange had come with her, and had waited for her in the street while she interviewed Madame Bourdieu. And now they both stood there consulting together, hesitating and evidently in distress. It was plain to Mathieu that a terrible combat was going on within them. They stamped about, moved hither and thither in a feverish way, then halted once more to resume their conversation in a whisper. At one moment the young man felt intensely relieved, for, turning into the Rue La Boetie, they walked on slowly, as if downcast and resigned, in the direction of Grenelle. But all at once they halted once more and exchanged a few words; and then Mathieu's heart contracted as he saw them retrace their steps along the Rue La Boetie and follow the Rue de la Pepiniere as far as the Rue du Rocher. He readily divined whither they were going, but some irresistible force impelled him to follow them; and before long, from an open doorway, in which he prudently concealed himself, he saw them look round to ascertain whether they were observed, and then slink, first the wife and afterwards the husband, into the dark passage of La Rouche's house. For a moment Mathieu lingered in his hiding-place, quivering, full of dread and horror; and when at last he turned his steps homeward it was with a heavy heart indeed.

The weeks went by, the winter ran its course, and March had come round, when the memory of all that the young fellow had heard and seen that day—things which he had vainly striven to forget—was revived in the most startling fashion. One morning at eight o'clock Morange abruptly called at the little pavilion in the Rue de la Federation, accompanied by his daughter Reine. The cashier was livid, haggard, distracted, and as soon as Reine had joined Mathieu's children, and could not hear what he said, he implored the young man to come with him. In a gasp he told the dreadful truth—Valerie was dying. Her daughter believed her to be in the country, but that was a mere fib devised to quiet the girl. Valerie was elsewhere, in Paris, and he, Morange, had a cab waiting below, but lacked the strength to go back to her alone, so poignant was his grief, so great his dread.

Mathieu was expecting a happy event that very day, and he at first told the cashier that he could not possibly go with him; but when he had informed Marianne that he believed that something dreadful had happened to the Moranges, she bravely bade him render all assistance. And then the two men drove, as Mathieu had anticipated, to the Rue du Rocher, and there found the hapless Valerie, not dying, but dead, and white, and icy cold. Ah! the desperate, tearless grief of the husband, who fell upon his knees at the bedside, benumbed, annihilated, as if he also felt death's heavy hand upon him.

For a moment, indeed, the young man anticipated exposure and scandal. But when he hinted this to La Rouche she faintly smiled. She had friends on many sides, it seemed. She had already reported Valerie's death at the municipal office, and the doctor, who would be sent to certify the demise, would simply ascribe it to natural causes. Such was the usual practice!

Then Mathieu bethought himself of leading Morange away; but the other, still plunged in painful stupor, did not heed him.

"No, no, my friend, I pray you, say nothing," he at last replied, in a very faint, distant voice, as though he feared to awaken the unfortunate woman who had fallen asleep forever. "I know what I have done; I shall never forgive myself. If she lies there, it is because I consented. Yet I adored her, and never wished her aught but happiness. I loved her too much, and I was weak. Still, I was the husband, and when her madness came upon her I ought to have acted sensibly, and have warned and dissuaded her. I can understand and excuse her, poor creature; but as for me, it is all over; I am a wretch; I feel horrified with myself."

All his mediocrity and tenderness of heart sobbed forth in this confession of his weakness. And his voice never gave sign of animation, never rose in a louder tone from the depths of his annihilated being, which would evermore be void. "She wished to be gay, and rich, and happy," he continued. "It was so legitimate a wish on her part, she was so intelligent and beautiful! There was only one delight for me, to content her tastes and satisfy her ambition. You know our new flat. We spent far too much money on it. Then came that story of the Credit National and the hope of speedily rising to fortune. And thus, when the trouble came, and I saw her distracted at the idea of having to renounce all her dreams, I became as mad as she was, and suffered her to do her will. We thought that our only means of escaping from everlasting penury and drudgery was to evade Nature, and now, alas! she lies there."

Morange's lugubrious voice, never broken by a sob, never rising to violence, but sounding like a distant, monotonous, mournful knell, rent Mathieu's heart. He sought words of consolation, and spoke of Reine.

"Ah, yes!" said the other, "I am very fond of Reine. She is so like her mother. You will keep her at your house till to-morrow, won't you? Tell her nothing; let her play; I will acquaint her with this dreadful misfortune. And don't worry me, I beg you, don't take me away. I promise you that I will keep very quiet: I will simply stay here, watching her. Nobody will even hear me; I shan't disturb any one."

Then his voice faltered and he stammered a few more incoherent phrases as he sank into a dream of his wrecked life.

Mathieu, seeing him so quiet, so overcome, at last decided to leave him there, and, entering the waiting cab, drove back to Grenelle. Ah! it was indeed relief for him to see the crowded, sunlit streets again, and to breathe the keen air which came in at both windows of the vehicle. Emerging from that horrid gloom, he breathed gladly beneath the vast sky, all radiant with healthy joy. And the image of Marianne arose before him like a consolatory promise of life's coming victory, an atonement for every shame and iniquity. His dear wife, whom everlasting hope kept full of health and courage, and through whom, even amid her pangs, love would triumph, while they both held themselves in readiness for to-morrow's allotted effort! The cab rolled on so slowly that Mathieu almost despaired, eager as he was to reach his bright little house, that he might once more take part in life's poem, that august festival instinct with so much suffering and so much joy, humanity's everlasting hymn, the coming of a new being into the world.

That very day, soon after his return, Denis and Blaise, Ambroise, Rose, and Reine were sent round to the Beauchenes', where they filled the house with their romping mirth. Maurice, however, was again ailing, and had to lie upon a sofa, disconsolate at being unable to take part in the play of the others. "He has pains in his legs," said his father to Mathieu, when he came round to inquire after Marianne; "he's growing so fast, and getting such a big fellow, you know."

Lightly as Beauchene spoke, his eyes even then wavered, and his face remained for a moment clouded. Perhaps, in his turn, he also had felt the passing of that icy breath from the unknown which one evening had made Constance shudder with dread whilst she clasped her swooning boy in her arms.

But at that moment Mathieu, who had left Marianne's room to answer Beauchene's inquiries, was summoned back again. And there he now found the sunlight streaming brilliantly, like a glorious greeting to new life. While he yet stood there, dazzled by the glow, the doctor said to him: "It is a boy."

Then Mathieu leant over his wife and kissed her lovingly. Her beautiful eyes were still moist with the tears of anguish, but she was already smiling with happiness.

"Dear, dear wife," said Mathieu, "how good and brave you are, and how I love you!"

"Yes, yes, I am very happy," she faltered, "and I must try to give you back all the love that you give me."

Ah! that room of battle and victory, it seemed radiant with triumphant glory. Elsewhere was death, darkness, shame, and crime, but here holy suffering had led to joy and pride, hope and trustfulness in the coming future. One single being born, a poor bare wee creature, raising the faint cry of a chilly fledgeling, and life's immense treasure was increased and eternity insured. Mathieu remembered one warm balmy spring night when, yonder at Chantebled, all the perfumes of fruitful nature had streamed into their room in the little hunting-box, and now around him amid equal rapture he beheld the ardent sunlight flaring, chanting the poem of eternal life that sprang from love the eternal.

VII

"I TELL you that I don't need Zoe to give the child a bath," exclaimed Mathieu half in anger. "Stay in bed, and rest yourself!"

"But the servant must get the bath ready," replied Marianne, "and bring you some warm water."

She laughed as if amused by the dispute, and he ended by laughing also.

Two days previously they had re-installed themselves in the little pavilion on the verge of the woods near Janville which they rented from the Seguins. So impatient, indeed, were they to find themselves once more among the fields that in spite of the doctor's advice Marianne had made the journey but fifteen days after giving birth to her little boy. However, a precocious springtide brought with it that March such balmy warmth and sunshine that the only ill-effect she experienced was a little fatigue. And so, on the day after their arrival—Sunday—Mathieu, glad at being able to remain with her, insisted that she should rest in bed, and only rise about noon, in time for dejeuner.

"Why," he repeated, "I can very well attend to the child while you rest. You have him in your arms from morning till night. And, besides, if you only knew how pleased I am to be here again with you and the dear little fellow."

He approached her to kiss her gently, and with a fresh laugh she returned his kiss. It was quite true: they were both delighted to be back at Chantebled, which recalled to them such loving memories. That room, looking towards the far expanse of sky and all the countryside, renascent, quivering with sap, was gilded with gayety by the early springtide.

Marianne leant over the cradle which was near her, beside the bed. "The fact is," said she, "Master Gervais is sound asleep. Just look at him. You will never have the heart to wake him."

Then both father and mother remained for a moment gazing at their sleeping child. Marianne had passed her arm round her husband's neck and was clinging to him, as they laughed delightedly over the cradle in which the little one slumbered. He was a fine child, pink and white already; but only a father and mother could thus contemplate their offspring. As the baby opened his eyes, which were still full of all the mystery whence he had come, they raised exclamations full of emotion.

"You know, he saw me!"

"Certainly, and me too. He looked at me: he turned his head."

"Oh, the cherub!"

It was but an illusion, but that dear little face, still so soft and silent, told them so many things which none other would have heard! They found themselves repeated in the child, mingled as it were together; and detected extraordinary likenesses, which for hours and for days kept them discussing the question as to which of them he most resembled. Moreover, each proved very obstinate, declaring that he was the living portrait of the other.

As a matter of course, Master Gervais had no sooner opened his eyes than he began to shriek. But Marianne was pitiless: her rule was the bath first and milk afterwards. Zoe brought up a big jug of hot water, and then set out the little bath near the window in the sunlight. And Mathieu, all obstinacy, bathed the child, washing him with a soft sponge for some three minutes, while Marianne, from her bed, watched over the operation, jesting about the delicacy of touch that he displayed, as if the child were some fragile new-born divinity whom he feared to bruise with his big hands. At the same time they continued marvelling at the delightful scene. How pretty he looked in the water, his pink skin shining in the sunlight! And how well-behaved he was, for it was wonderful to see how quickly he ceased wailing and gave signs of satisfaction when he felt the all-enveloping caress of the warm water. Never had father and mother possessed such a little treasure.

"And now," said Mathieu, when Zoe had helped him to wipe the boy with a fine cloth, "and now we will weigh Master Gervais."

This was a complicated operation, which was rendered the more difficult by the extreme repugnance that the child displayed. He struggled and wriggled on the platform of the weighing scales to such a degree that it was impossible to arrive at his correct weight, in order to ascertain how much this had increased since the previous occasion. As a rule, the increase varied from six to seven ounces a week. The father generally lost patience over the operation, and the mother had to intervene.

"Here! put the scales on the table near my bed, and give me the little one in his napkin. We will see what the napkin weighs afterwards."

At this moment, however, the customary morning invasion took place. The other four children, who were beginning to know how to dress themselves, the elder ones helping the younger, and Zoe lending a hand at times, darted in at a gallop, like frolicsome escaped colts. Having thrown themselves on papa's neck and rushed upon mamma's bed to say good-morning, the boys stopped short, full of admiration and interest at the sight of Gervais in the scales. Rose, however, still rather uncertain on her legs, caught hold of the scales in her impatient efforts to climb upon the bed, and almost toppled everything over. "I want to see! I want to see!" she cried in her shrill voice.

At this the others likewise wished to meddle, and already stretched out their little hands, so that it became necessary to turn them out of doors.

"Now kindly oblige me by going to play outside," said Mathieu. "Take your hats and remain under the window, so that we may hear you."

Then, in spite of the complaints and leaps of Master Gervais, Marianne was at last able to obtain his correct weight. And what delight there was, for he had gained more than seven ounces during the week. After losing weight during the first three days, like all new-born children, he was now growing and filling out like a strong, healthy human plant. They could already picture him walking, sturdy and handsome. His mother, sitting up in bed, wrapped his swaddling clothes around him with her deft, nimble hands, jesting the while and answering each of his plaintive wails.

"Yes, yes, I know, we are very, very hungry. But it is all right; the soup is on the fire, and will be served to Monsieur smoking hot."

On awakening that morning she had made a real Sunday toilette: her superb hair was caught up in a huge chignon which disclosed the whiteness of her neck, and she wore a white flannel lace-trimmed dressing-jacket, which allowed but a little of her bare arms to be seen. Propped up by two pillows, she laughingly offered her breast to the child, who was already protruding his lips and groping with his hands. And when he found what he wanted he eagerly began to suck.

Mathieu, seeing that both mother and babe were steeped in sunshine, then went to draw one of the curtains, but Marianne exclaimed: "No, no, leave us the sun; it doesn't inconvenience us at all, it fills our veins with springtide."

He came back and lingered near the bed. The sun's rays poured over it, and life blazed there in a florescence of health and beauty. There is no more glorious blossoming, no more sacred symbol of living eternity than an infant at its mother's breast. It is like a prolongation of maternity's travail, when the mother continues giving herself to her babe, offering him the fountain of life that shall make him a man.

Scarce is he born to the world than she takes him back and clasps him to her bosom, that he may there again have warmth and nourishment. And nothing could be more simple or more necessary. Marianne, both for her own sake and that of her boy, in order that beauty and health might remain their portion, was naturally his nurse.

Little Gervais was still sucking when Zoe, after tidying the room, came up again with a big bunch of lilac, and announced that Monsieur and Madame Angelin had called, on their way back from an early walk, to inquire after Madame.

"Show them up," said Marianne gayly; "I can well receive them."

The Angelins were the young couple who, having installed themselves in a little house at Janville, ever roamed the lonely paths, absorbed in their mutual passion. She was delicious—dark, tall, admirably formed, always joyous and fond of pleasure. He, a handsome fellow, fair and square shouldered, had the gallant mien of a musketeer with his streaming moustache. In addition to their ten thousand francs a year, which enabled them to live as they liked, he earned a little money by painting pretty fans, flowery with roses and little women deftly postured. And so their life had hitherto been a game of love, an everlasting billing and cooing. Towards the close of the previous summer they had become quite intimate with the Froments, through meeting them well-nigh every day.

"Can we come in? Are we not intruding?" called Angelin, in his sonorous voice, from the landing.

Then Claire, his wife, as soon as she had kissed Marianne, apologized for having called so early.

"We only learnt last night, my dear," said she, "that you had arrived the day before. We didn't expect you for another eight or ten days. And so, as we passed the house just now, we couldn't resist calling. You will forgive us, won't you?" Then, never waiting for an answer, she added with the petulant vivacity of a tom-tit whom the open air had intoxicated: "Oh! so there is the new little gentleman—a boy, am I not right? And your health is good? But really I need not ask it. Mon Dieu, what a pretty little fellow he is! Look at him, Robert; how pretty he is! A real little doll! Isn't he funny now, isn't he funny! He is quite amusing."

Her husband, observing her gayety, drew near and began to admire the child by way of following her example. "Ah yes, he is really a pretty baby. But I have seen so many frightful ones—thin, puny, bluish little things, looking like little plucked chickens. When they are white and plump they are quite nice."

Mathieu began to laugh, and twitted the Angelins on having no child of their own. But on this point they held very decided opinions. They wished to enjoy life, unburdened by offspring, while they were young. As for what might happen in five or six years' time, that, of course, was another matter. Nevertheless, Madame Angelin could not help being struck by the delightful picture which Marianne, so fresh and gay, presented with her plump little babe at her breast in that white bed amid the bright sunshine.

At last she remarked: "There's one thing. I certainly could not feed a child. I should have to engage a nurse for any baby of mine."

"Of course!" her husband replied. "I would never allow you to feed it. It would be idiotic."

These words had scarcely passed his lips when he regretted them and apologized to Marianne, explaining that no mother possessed of means was nowadays willing to face the trouble and worry of nursing.

"Oh! for my part," Marianne responded, with her quiet smile, "if I had a hundred thousand francs a year I should nurse all my children, even were there a dozen of them. To begin with, it is so healthful, you know, both for mother and child: and if I didn't do my duty to the little one I should look on myself as a criminal, as a mother who grudged her offspring health and life."

Lowering her beautiful soft eyes towards her boy, she watched him with a look of infinite love, while he continued nursing gluttonously. And in a dreamy voice she continued: "To give a child of mine to another—oh no, never! I should feel too jealous. I want my children to be entirely my own. And it isn't merely a question of a child's physical health. I speak of his whole being, of the intelligence and heart that will come to him, and which he ought to derive from me alone. If I should find him foolish or malicious later on, I should think that his nurse had poisoned him. Dear little fellow! when he pulls like that it is as if he were drinking me up entirely."

Then Mathieu, deeply moved, turned towards the others, saying: "Ah! she is quite right. I only wish that every mother could hear her, and make it the fashion in France once more to suckle their infants. It would be sufficient if it became an ideal of beauty. And, indeed, is it not of the loftiest and brightest beauty?"

The Angelins complaisantly began to laugh, but they did not seem convinced. Just as they rose to take their leave an extraordinary uproar burst forth beneath the window, the piercing clamor of little wildings, freely romping in the fields. And it was all caused by Ambroise throwing a ball, which had lodged itself on a tree. Blaise and Denis were flinging stones at it to bring it down, and Rose called and jumped and stretched out her arms as if she hoped to be able to reach the ball. The Angelins stopped short, surprised and almost nervous.

"Good heavens!" murmured Claire, "what will it be when you have a dozen?"

"But the house would seem quite dead if they did not romp and shout," said Marianne, much amused. "Good-by, my dear. I will go to see you when I can get about."

The months of March and April proved superb, and all went well with Marianne. Thus the lonely little house, nestling amid foliage, was ever joyous. Each Sunday in particular proved a joy, for the father did not then have to go to his office. On the other days he started off early in the morning, and returned about seven o'clock, ever busily laden with work in the interval. And if his constant perambulations did not affect his good-humor, he was nevertheless often haunted by thoughts of the future. Formerly he had never been alarmed by the penury of his little home. Never had he indulged in any dream of ambition or wealth. Besides, he knew that his wife's only idea of happiness, like his own, was to live there in very simple fashion, leading a brave life of health, peacefulness, and love. But while he did not desire the power procured by a high position and the enjoyment offered by a large fortune, he could not help asking himself how he was to provide, were it ever so modestly, for his increasing family. What would he be able to do, should he have other children; how would he procure the necessaries of life each time that a fresh birth might impose fresh requirements upon him? One situated as he was must create resources, draw food from the earth step by step, each time a little mouth opened and cried its hunger aloud. Otherwise he would be guilty of criminal improvidence. And such reflections as these came upon him the more strongly as his penury had increased since the birth of Gervais—to such a point, indeed, that Marianne, despite prodigies of economy, no longer knew how to make her money last her till the end of the month. The slightest expenditure had to be debated; the very butter had to be spread thinly on the children's bread; and they had to continue wearing their blouses till they were well-nigh threadbare. To increase the embarrassment they grew every year, and cost more money. It had been necessary to send the three boys to a little school at Janville, which was as yet but a small expense. But would it not be necessary to send them the following year to a college, and where was the money for this to come from? A grave problem, a worry which grew from hour to hour, and which for Mathieu somewhat spoilt that charming spring whose advent was flowering the countryside.

The worst was that Mathieu deemed himself immured, as it were, in his position as designer at the Beauchene works. Even admitting that his salary should some day be doubled, it was not seven or eight thousand francs a year which would enable him to realize his dream of a numerous family freely and proudly growing and spreading like some happy forest, indebted solely for strength, health, and beauty to the good common mother of all, the earth, which gave to all its sap. And this was why, since his return to Janville, the earth, the soil had attracted him, detained him during his frequent walks, while he revolved vague but ever-expanding thoughts in his mind. He would pause for long minutes, now before a field of wheat, now on the verge of a leafy wood, now on the margin of a river whose waters glistened in the sunshine, and now amid the nettles of some stony moorland. All sorts of vague plans then rose within him, uncertain reveries of such vast scope, such singularity, that he had as yet spoken of them to nobody, not even his wife. Others would doubtless have mocked at him, for he had as yet but reached that dim, quivering hour when inventors feel the gust of their discovery sweep over them, before the idea that they are revolving presents itself with full precision to their minds. Yet why did he not address himself to the soil, man's everlasting provider and nurse? Why did he not clear and fertilize those far-spreading lands, those woods, those heaths, those stretches of stony ground which were left sterile around him? Since it was just that each man should bring his contribution to the common weal, create subsistence for himself and his offspring, why should not he, at the advent of each new child, supply a new field of fertile earth which would give that child food, without cost to the community? That was his sole idea; it took no more precise shape; at the thought of realizing it he was carried off into splendid dreams.

The Froments had been in the country fully a month when one evening Marianne, wheeling Gervais's little carriage in front of her, came as far as the bridge over the Yeuse to await Mathieu, who had promised to return early. Indeed, he got there before six o'clock. And as the evening was fine, it occurred to Marianne to go as far as the Lepailleurs' mill down the river, and buy some new-laid eggs there.

"I'm willing," said Mathieu. "I'm very fond of their romantic old mill, you know; though if it were mine I should pull it down and build another one with proper appliances."

In the yard of the picturesque old building, half covered with ivy, with its mossy wheel slumbering amid water-lilies, they found the Lepailleurs, the man tall, dry, and carroty, the woman as carroty and as dry as himself, but both of them young and hardy. Their child Antonin was sitting on the ground, digging a hole with his little hands.

"Eggs?" La Lepailleur exclaimed; "yes, certainly, madame, there must be some."

She made no haste to fetch them, however, but stood looking at Gervais, who was asleep in his little vehicle.

"Ah! so that's your last. He's plump and pretty enough, I must say," she remarked.

But Lepailleur raised a derisive laugh, and with the familiarity which the peasant displays towards the bourgeois whom he knows to be hard up, he said: "And so that makes you five, monsieur. Ah, well! that would be a deal too many for poor folks like us."

"Why?" Mathieu quietly inquired. "Haven't you got this mill, and don't you own fields, to give labor to the arms that would come and whose labor would double and treble your produce?"

These simple words were like a whipstroke that made Lepailleur rear. And once again he poured forth all his spite. Ah! surely now, it wasn't his tumble-down old mill that would ever enrich him, since it had enriched neither his father nor his grandfather. And as for his fields, well, that was a pretty dowry that his wife had brought him, land in which nothing more would grow, and which, however much one might water it with one's sweat, did not even pay for manuring and sowing.

"But in the first place," resumed Mathieu, "your mill ought to be repaired and its old mechanism replaced, or, better still, you should buy a good steam-engine."

"Repair the mill! Buy an engine! Why, that's madness," the other replied. "What would be the use of it? As it is, people hereabouts have almost renounced growing corn, and I remain idle every other month."

"And then," continued Mathieu, "if your fields yield less, it is because you cultivate them badly, following the old routine, without proper care or appliances or artificial manure."

"Appliances! Artificial manure! All that humbug which has only sent poor folks to rack and ruin! Ah! I should just like to see you trying to cultivate the land better, and make it yield what it'll never yield any more."

Thereupon he quite lost his temper, became violent and brutal, launching against the ungrateful earth all the charges which his love of idleness and his obstinacy suggested. He had travelled, he had fought in Africa as a soldier, folks could not say that he had always lived in his hole like an ignorant beast. But, none the less, on leaving his regiment he had lost all taste for work and come to the conclusion that agriculture was doomed, and would never give him aught but dry bread to eat. The land would soon be bankrupt, and the peasantry no longer believed in it, so old and empty and worn out had it become. And even the sun got out of order nowadays; they had snow in July and thunderstorms in December, a perfect upsetting of seasons, which wrecked the crops almost before they were out of the ground.

"No, monsieur," said Lepailleur, "what you say is impossible; it's all past. The soil and work, there's nothing left of either. It's barefaced robbery, and though the peasant may kill himself with labor, he will soon be left without even water to drink. Children indeed! No, no! There's Antonin, of course, and for him we may just be able to provide. But I assure you that I won't even make Antonin a peasant against his will! If he takes to schooling and wishes to go to Paris, I shall tell him that he's quite right, for Paris is nowadays the only chance for sturdy chaps who want to make a fortune. So he will be at liberty to sell everything, if he chooses, and try his luck there. The only thing that I regret is that I didn't make the venture myself when there was still time."

Mathieu began to laugh. Was it not singular that he, a bourgeois with a bachelor's degree and scientific attainments, should dream of coming back to the soil, to the common mother of all labor and wealth, when this peasant, sprung from peasants, cursed and insulted the earth, and hoped that his son would altogether renounce it? Never had anything struck him as more significant. It symbolized that disastrous exodus from the rural districts towards the towns, an exodus which year by year increased, unhinging the nation and reducing it to anaemia.

"You are wrong," he said in a jovial way so as to drive all bitterness from the discussion. "Don't be unfaithful to the earth; she's an old mistress who would revenge herself. In your place I would lay myself out to obtain from her, by increase of care, all that I might want. As in the world's early days, she is still the great fruitful spouse, and she yields abundantly when she is loved in proper fashion."

But Lepailleur, raising his fists, retorted: "No, no; I've had enough of her!"

"And, by the way," continued Mathieu, "one thing which astonishes me is that no courageous, intelligent man has ever yet come forward to do something with all that vast abandoned estate yonder—that Chantebled—which old Seguin, formerly, dreamt of turning into a princely domain. There are great stretches of waste land, woods which one might partly fell, heaths and moorland which might easily be restored to cultivation. What a splendid task! What a work of creation for a bold man to undertake!"

This so amazed Lepailleur that he stood there openmouthed. Then his jeering spirit asserted itself: "But, my dear sir—excuse my saying it—you must be mad! Cultivate Chantebled, clear those stony tracts, wade about in those marshes! Why, one might bury millions there without reaping a single bushel of oats! It's a cursed spot, which my grandfather's father saw such as it is now, and which my grandson's son will see just the same. Ah! well, I'm not inquisitive, but it would really amuse me to meet the fool who might attempt such madness."

"Mon Dieu, who knows?" Mathieu quietly concluded. "When one only loves strongly one may work miracles."

La Lepailleur, after going to fetch a dozen eggs, now stood erect before her husband in admiration at hearing him talk so eloquently to a bourgeois. They agreed very well together in their avaricious rage at being unable to amass money by the handful without any great exertion, and in their ambition to make their son a gentleman, since only a gentleman could become wealthy. And thus, as Marianne was going off after placing the eggs under a cushion in Gervais' little carriage, the other complacently called her attention to Antonin, who, having made a hole in the ground, was now spitting into it.

"Oh! he's smart," said she; "he knows his alphabet already, and we are going to put him to school. If he takes after his father he will be no fool, I assure you."

It was on a Sunday, some ten days later, that the supreme revelation, the great flash of light which was to decide his life and that of those he loved, fell suddenly upon Mathieu during a walk he took with his wife and the children. They had gone out for the whole afternoon, taking a little snack with them in order that they might share it amid the long grass in the fields. And after scouring the paths, crossing the copses, rambling over the moorland, they came back to the verge of the woods and sat down under an oak. Thence the whole expanse spread out before them, from the little pavilion where they dwelt to the distant village of Janville. On their right was the great marshy plateau, from which broad, dry, sterile slopes descended; while lower ground stretched away on their left. Then, behind them, spread the woods with deep thickets parted by clearings, full of herbage which no scythe had ever touched. And not a soul was to be seen around them; there was naught save wild Nature, grandly quiescent under the bright sun of that splendid April day. The earth seemed to be dilating with all the sap amassed within it, and a flood of life could be felt rising and quivering in the vigorous trees, the spreading plants, and the impetuous growth of brambles and nettles which stretched invadingly over the soil. And on all sides a powerful, pungent odor was diffused.

"Don't go too far," Marianne called to the children; "we shall stay under this oak. We will have something to eat by and by."

Blaise and Denis were already bounding along, followed by Ambroise, to see who could run the fastest; but Rose pettishly called them back, for she preferred to play at gathering wild flowers. The open air fairly intoxicated the youngsters; the herbage rose, here and there, to their very shoulders. But they came back and gathered flowers; and after a time they set off at a wild run once more, one of the big brothers carrying the little sister on his back.

Mathieu, however, had remained absent-minded, with his eyes wandering hither and thither, throughout their walk. At times he did not hear Marianne when she spoke to him; he lapsed into reverie before some uncultivated tract, some copse overrun with brushwood, some spring which suddenly bubbled up and was then lost in mire. Nevertheless, she felt that there was no sadness nor feeling of indifference in his heart; for as soon as he returned to her he laughed once more with his soft, loving laugh. It was she who often sent him roaming about the country, even alone, for she felt that it would do him good; and although she had guessed that something very serious was passing through his mind, she retained full confidence, waiting till it should please him to speak to her.

Now, however, just as he had sunk once more into his reverie, his glance wandering afar, studying the great varied expanse of land, she raised a light cry: "Oh! look, look!"

Under the big oak tree she had placed Master Gervais in his little carriage, among wild weeds which hid its wheels. And while she handed a little silver mug, from which it was intended they should drink while taking their snack, she had noticed that the child raised his head and followed the movement of her hand, in which the silver sparkled beneath the sun-rays. Forthwith she repeated the experiment, and again the child's eyes followed the starry gleam.

"Ah! it can't be said that I'm mistaken, and am simply fancying it!" she exclaimed. "It is certain that he can see quite plainly now. My pretty pet, my little darling!"

She darted to the child to kiss him in celebration of that first clear glance. And then, too, came the delight of the first smile.

"Why, look!" in his turn said Mathieu, who was leaning over the child beside her, yielding to the same feeling of rapture, "there he is smiling at you now. But of course, as soon as these little fellows see clearly they begin to laugh."

She herself burst into a laugh. "You are right, he is laughing! Ah! how funny he looks, and how happy I am!"

Both father and mother laughed together with content at the sight of that infantile smile, vague and fleeting, like a faint ripple on the pure water of some spring.

Amid this joy Marianne called the four others, who were bounding under the young foliage around them: "Come, Rose! come, Ambroise! come, Blaise and Denis! It's time now; come at once to have something to eat."

They hastened up and the snack was set out on a patch of soft grass. Mathieu unhooked the basket which hung in front of the baby's little vehicle; and Marianne, having drawn some slices of bread-and-butter from it, proceeded to distribute them. Perfect silence ensued while all four children began biting with hearty appetite, which it was a pleasure to see. But all at once a scream arose. It came from Master Gervais, who was vexed at not having been served first.

"Ah! yes, it's true I was forgetting you," said Marianne gayly; "you shall have your share. There, open your mouth, you darling;" and, with an easy, simple gesture, she unfastened her dress-body; and then, under the sunlight which steeped her in golden radiance, in full view of the far-spreading countryside, where all likewise was bare—the soil, the trees, the plants, streaming with sap—having seated herself in the long grass, where she almost disappeared amid the swarming growth of April's germs, the babe on her breast eagerly sucked in her warm milk, even as all the encompassing verdure was sucking life from the soil.

"How hungry you are!" she exclaimed. "Don't pinch me so hard, you little glutton!"

Meantime Mathieu had remained standing amid the enchantment of the child's first smile and the gayety born of the hearty hunger around him. Then his dream of creation came back to him, and he at last gave voice to those plans for the future which haunted him, and of which he had so far spoken to nobody: "Ah, well, it is high time that I should set to work and found a kingdom, if these children are to have enough soup to make them grow. Shall I tell you what I've thought—shall I tell you?"

Marianne raised her eyes, smiling and all attention. "Yes, tell me your secret if the time has come. Oh! I could guess that you had some great hope in you. But I did not ask you anything; I preferred to wait."

He did not give a direct reply, for at a sudden recollection his feelings rebelled. "That Lepailleur," said he, "is simply a lazy fellow and a fool in spite of all his cunning airs. Can there be any more sacrilegious folly than to imagine that the earth has lost her fruitfulness and is becoming bankrupt—she, the eternal mother, eternal life? She only shows herself a bad mother to her bad sons, the malicious, the obstinate, and the dull-witted, who do not know how to love and cultivate her. But if an intelligent son comes and devotes himself to her, and works her with the help of experience and all the new systems of science, you will soon see her quicken and yield tremendous harvests unceasingly. Ah! folks say in the district that this estate of Chantebled has never yielded and never will yield anything but nettles. Well, nevertheless, a man will come who will transform it and make it a new land of joy and abundance."

Then, suddenly turning round, with outstretched arm, and pointing to the spots to which he referred in turn, he went on: "Yonder in the rear there are nearly five hundred acres of little woods, stretching as far as the farms of Mareuil and Lillebonne. They are separated by clearings of excellent soil which broad gaps unite, and which could easily be turned into good pastures, for there are numerous springs. And, indeed, the springs become so abundant on the right, that they have changed that big plateau into a kind of marshland, dotted with ponds, and planted with reeds and rushes. But picture a man of bold mind, a clearer, a conqueror, who should drain those lands and rid them of superfluous water by means of a few canals which might easily be dug! Why, then a huge stretch of land would be reclaimed, handed over to cultivation, and wheat would grow there with extraordinary vigor. But that is not all. There is the expanse before us, those gentle slopes from Janville to Vieux-Bourg, that is another five hundred acres, which are left almost uncultivated on account of their dryness, the stony poverty of their soil. So it is all very simple. One would merely have to take the sources up yonder, the waters, now stagnant, and carry them across those sterile slopes, which, when irrigated, would gradually develop extraordinary fertility. I have seen everything, I have studied everything. I feel that there are at least twelve hundred acres of land which a bold creator might turn into a most productive estate. Yonder lies a whole kingdom of corn, a whole new world to be created by labor, with the help of the beneficent waters and our father the sun, the source of eternal life."

Marianne gazed at him and admired him as he stood there quivering, pondering over all that he evoked from his dream. But she was frightened by the vastness of such hopes, and could not restrain a cry of disquietude and prudence.

"No, no, that is too much; you desire the impossible. How can you think that we shall ever possess so much—that our fortune will spread over the entire region? Think of the capital, the arms that would be needed for such a conquest!"

For a moment Mathieu remained silent on thus suddenly being brought back to reality. Then with his affectionate, sensible air, he began to laugh. "You are right; I have been dreaming and talking wildly," he replied. "I am not yet so ambitious as to wish to be King of Chantebled. But there is truth in what I have said to you; and, besides, what harm can there be in dreaming of great plans to give oneself faith and courage? Meantime I intend to try cultivating just a few acres, which Seguin will no doubt sell me cheaply enough, together with the little pavilion in which we live. I know that the unproductiveness of the estate weighs on him. And, later on, we shall see if the earth is disposed to love us and come to us as we go to her. Ah well, my dear, give that little glutton plenty of life, and you, my darlings, eat and drink and grow in strength, for the earth belongs to those who are healthy and numerous."

Blaise and Denis made answer by taking some fresh slices of bread-and-butter, while Rose drained the mug of wine and water which Ambroise handed her. And Marianne sat there like the symbol of blossoming Fruitfulness, the source of vigor and conquest, while Gervais heartily nursed on. He pulled so hard, indeed, that one could hear the sound of his lips. It was like the faint noise which attends the rise of a spring—a slender rill of milk that is to swell and become a river. Around her the mother heard that source springing up and spreading on all sides. She was not nourishing alone: the sap of April was dilating the land, sending a quiver through the woods, raising the long herbage which embowered her. And beneath her, from the bosom of the earth, which was ever in travail, she felt that flood of sap reaching and ever pervading her. And it was like a stream of milk flowing through the world, a stream of eternal life for humanity's eternal crop. And on that gay day of spring the dazzling, singing, fragrant countryside was steeped in it all, triumphal with that beauty of the mother, who, in the full light of the sun, in view of the vast horizon, sat there nursing her child.

VIII

ON the morrow, after a morning's hard toil at his office at the works, Mathieu, having things well advanced, bethought himself of going to see Norine at Madame Bourdieu's. He knew that she had given birth to a child a fortnight previously, and he wished to ascertain the exact state of affairs, in order to carry to an end the mission with which Beauchene had intrusted him. As the other, however, had never again spoken to him on the subject, he simply told him that he was going out in the afternoon, without indicating the motive of his absence. At the same time he knew what secret relief Beauchene would experience when he at last learnt that the whole business was at an end—the child cast adrift and the mother following her own course.

On reaching the Rue de Miromesnil, Mathieu had to go up to Norine's room, for though she was to leave the house on the following Thursday, she still kept her bed. And at the foot of the bedstead, asleep in a cradle, he was surprised to see the infant, of which, he thought, she had already rid herself.

"Oh! is it you?" she joyously exclaimed. "I was about to write to you, for I wanted to see you before going away. My little sister here would have taken you the letter."

Cecile Moineaud was indeed there, together with the younger girl, Irma. The mother, unable to absent herself from her household duties, had sent them to make inquiries, and give Norine three big oranges, which glistened on the table beside the bed. The little girls had made the journey on foot, greatly interested by all the sights of the streets and the displays in the shop-windows. And now they were enraptured with the fine house in which they found their big sister sojourning, and full of curiosity with respect to the baby which slept under the cradle's muslin curtains.

Mathieu made the usual inquiries of Norine, who answered him gayly, but pouted somewhat at the prospect of having so soon to leave the house, where she had found herself so comfortable.

"We shan't easily find such soft mattresses and such good food, eh, Victoire?" she asked. Whereupon Mathieu perceived that another girl was present, a pale little creature with wavy red hair, tip-tilted nose, and long mouth, whom he had already seen there on the occasion of a previous visit. She slept in one of the two other beds which the room contained, and now sat beside it mending some linen. She was to leave the house on the morrow, having already sent her child to the Foundling Hospital; and in the meantime she was mending some things for Rosine, the well-to-do young person of great beauty whom Mathieu had previously espied, and whose story, according to Norine, was so sadly pathetic.

Victoire ceased sewing and raised her head. She was a servant girl by calling, one of those unlucky creatures who are overtaken by trouble when they have scarce arrived in the great city from their native village. "Well," said she, "it's quite certain that one won't be able to dawdle in bed, and that one won't have warm milk given one to drink before getting up. But, all the same, it isn't lively to see nothing but that big gray wall yonder from the window. And, besides, one can't go on forever doing nothing."

Norine laughed and jerked her head, as if she were not of this opinion. Then, as her little sisters embarrassed her, she wished to get rid of them.

"And so, my pussies," said she, "you say that papa's still angry with me, and that I'm not to go back home."

"Oh!" cried Cecile, "it's not so much that he's angry, but he says that all the neighbors would point their fingers at him if he let you come home. Besides, Euphrasie keeps his anger up, particularly since she's arranged to get married."

"What! Euphrasie going to be married? You didn't tell me that."

Norine looked very vexed, particularly when her sisters, speaking both together, told her that the future husband was Auguste Benard, a jovial young mason who lived on the floor above them. He had taken a fancy to Euphrasie, though she had no good looks, and was as thin, at eighteen, as a grasshopper. Doubtless, however, he considered her strong and hard-working.

"Much good may it do them!" said Norine spitefully. "Why, with her evil temper, she'll be beating him before six months are over. You can just tell mamma that I don't care a rap for any of you, and that I need nobody. I'll go and look for work, and I'll find somebody to help me. So, you hear, don't you come back here. I don't want to be bothered by you any more."

At this, Irma, but eight years old and tender-hearted, began to cry. "Why do you scold us? We didn't come to worry you. I wanted to ask you, too, if that baby's yours, and if we may kiss it before we go away."

Norine immediately regretted her spiteful outburst. She once more called the girls her "little pussies," kissed them tenderly, and told them that although they must run away now they might come back another day to see her if it amused them. "Thank mamma from me for her oranges. And as for the baby, well, you may look at it, but you mustn't touch it, for if it woke up we shouldn't be able to hear ourselves."

Then, as the two children leant inquisitively over the cradle, Mathieu also glanced at it, and saw a healthy, sturdy-looking child, with a square face and strong features. And it seemed to him that the infant was singularly like Beauchene.

At that moment, however, Madame Bourdieu came in, accompanied by a woman, whom he recognized as Sophie Couteau, "La Couteau," that nurse-agent whom he had seen at the Seguins' one day when she had gone thither to offer to procure them a nurse. She also certainly recognized this gentleman, whose wife, proud of being able to suckle her own children, had evinced such little inclination to help others to do business. She pretended, however, that she saw him for the first time; for she was discreet by profession and not even inquisitive, since so many matters were ever coming to her knowledge without the asking.

Little Cecile and little Irma went off at once; and then Madame Bourdieu, addressing Norine, inquired: "Well, my child, have you thought it over; have you quite made up your mind about that poor little darling, who is sleeping there so prettily? Here is the person I spoke to you about. She comes from Normandy every fortnight, bringing nurses to Paris; and each time she takes babies away with her to put them out to nurse in the country. Though you say you won't feed it, you surely need not cast off your child altogether; you might confide it to this person until you are in a position to take it back. Or else, if you have made up your mind to abandon it altogether, she will kindly take it to the Foundling Hospital at once."

Great perturbation had come over Norine, who let her head fall back on her pillow, over which streamed her thick fair hair, whilst her face darkened and she stammered: "Mon Dieu, mon Dieu! you are going to worry me again!"

Then she pressed her hands to her eyes as if anxious to see nothing more.

"This is what the regulations require of me, monsieur," said Madame Bourdieu to Mathieu in an undertone, while leaving the young mother for a moment to her reflections. "We are recommended to do all we can to persuade our boarders, especially when they are situated like this one, to nurse their infants. You are aware that this often saves not only the child, but the mother herself, from the sad future which threatens her. And so, however much she may wish to abandon the child, we leave it near her as long as possible, and feed it with the bottle, in the hope that the sight of the poor little creature may touch her heart and awaken feelings of motherliness in her. Nine times out of ten, as soon as she gives the child the breast, she is vanquished, and she keeps it. That is why you still see this baby here."

Mathieu, feeling greatly moved, drew near to Norine, who still lay back amid her streaming hair, with her hands pressed to her face. "Come," said he, "you are a goodhearted girl, there is no malice in you. Why not yourself keep that dear little fellow?"

Then she uncovered her burning, tearless face: "Did the father even come to see me?" she asked bitterly. "I can't love the child of a man who has behaved as he has! The mere thought that it's there, in that cradle, puts me in a rage."

"But that dear little innocent isn't guilty. It's he whom you condemn, yourself whom you punish, for now you will be quite alone, and he might prove a great consolation."

"No, I tell you no, I won't. I can't keep a child like that with nobody to help me. We all know what we can do, don't we? Well, it is of no use my questioning myself. I'm not brave enough, I'm not stupid enough to do such a thing. No, no, and no."

He said no more, for he realized that nothing would prevail over that thirst for liberty which she felt in the depths of her being. With a gesture he expressed his sadness, but he was neither indignant nor angry with her, for others had made her what she was.

"Well, it's understood, you won't be forced to feed it," resumed Madame Bourdieu, attempting a final effort. "But it isn't praiseworthy to abandon the child. Why not trust it to Madame here, who would put it out to nurse, so that you would be able to take it back some day, when you have found work? It wouldn't cost much, and no doubt the father would pay."

This time Norine flew into a passion. "He! pay? Ah! you don't know him. It's not that the money would inconvenience him, for he's a millionnaire. But all he wants is to see the little one disappear. If he had dared he would have told me to kill it! Just ask that gentleman if I speak the truth. You see that he keeps silent! And how am I to pay when I haven't a copper, when to-morrow I shall be cast out-of-doors, perhaps, without work and without bread. No, no, a thousand times no, I can't!"

Then, overcome by an hysterical fit of despair, she burst into sobs. "I beg you, leave me in peace. For the last fortnight you have been torturing me with that child, by keeping him near me, with the idea that I should end by nursing him. You bring him to me, and set him on my knees, so that I may look at him and kiss him. You are always worrying me with him, and making him cry with the hope that I shall pity him and take him to my breast. But, mon Dieu! can't you understand that if I turn my head away, if I don't want to kiss him or even to see him, it is because I'm afraid of being caught and loving him like a big fool, which would be a great misfortune both for him and for me? He'll be far happier by himself! So, I beg you, let him be taken away at once, and don't torture me any more."

Sobbing violently, she again sank back in bed, and buried her dishevelled head in the pillows.

La Couteau had remained waiting, mute and motionless, at the foot of the bedstead. In her gown of dark woollen stuff and her black cap trimmed with yellow ribbons she retained the air of a peasant woman in her Sunday best. And she strove to impart an expression of compassionate good-nature to her long, avaricious, false face. Although it seemed to her unlikely that business would ensue, she risked a repetition of her customary speech.

"At Rougemont, you know, madame, your little one would be just the same as at home. There's no better air in the Department; people come there from Bayeux to recruit their health. And if you only knew how well the little ones are cared for! It's the only occupation of the district, to have little Parisians to coddle and love! And, besides, I wouldn't charge you dear. I've a friend of mine who already has three nurslings, and, as she naturally brings them up with the bottle, it wouldn't put her out to take a fourth for almost next to nothing. Come, doesn't that suit you—doesn't that tempt you?"

When, however, she saw that tears were Norine's only answer, she made an impatient gesture like an active woman who cannot afford to lose her time. At each of her fortnightly journeys, as soon as she had rid herself of her batch of nurses at the different offices, she hastened round the nurses' establishments to pick up infants, so as to take the train homewards the same evening together with two or three women who, as she put it, helped her "to cart the little ones about." On this occasion she was in a greater hurry, as Madame Bourdieu, who employed her in a variety of ways, had asked her to take Norine's child to the Foundling Hospital if she did not take it to Rougemont.

"And so," said La Couteau, turning to Madame Bourdieu, "I shall have only the other lady's child to take back with me. Well, I had better see her at once to make final arrangements. Then I'll take this one and carry it yonder as fast as possible, for my train starts at six o'clock."

When La Couteau and Madame Bourdieu had gone off to speak to Rosine, who was the "other lady" referred to, the room sank into silence save for the wailing and sobbing of Norine. Mathieu had seated himself near the cradle, gazing compassionately at the poor little babe, who was still peacefully sleeping. Soon, however, Victoire, the little servant girl, who had hitherto remained silent, as if absorbed in her sewing, broke the heavy silence and talked on slowly and interminably without raising her eyes from her needle.

"You were quite right in not trusting your child to that horrid woman!" she began. "Whatever may be done with him at the hospital, he will be better off there than in her hands. At least he will have a chance to live. And that's why I insisted, like you, on having mine taken there at once. You know I belong in that woman's region—yes, I come from Berville, which is barely four miles from Rougemont, and I can't help knowing La Couteau, for folks talk enough about her in our village. She's a nice creature and no mistake! And it's a fine trade that she plies, selling other people's milk. She was no better than she should be at one time, but at last she was lucky enough to marry a big, coarse, brutal fellow, whom at this time of day she leads by the nose. And he helps her. Yes, he also brings nurses to Paris and takes babies back with him, at busy times. But between them they have more murders on their consciences than all the assassins that have ever been guillotined. The mayor of Berville, a bourgeois who's retired from business and a worthy man, said that Rougemont was the curse of the Department. I know well enough that there's always been some rivalry between Rougemont and Berville; but, the folks of Rougemont ply a wicked trade with the babies they get from Paris. All the inhabitants have ended by taking to it, there's nothing else doing in the whole village, and you should just see how things are arranged so that there may be as many funerals as possible. Ah! yes, people don't keep their stock-in-trade on their hands. The more that die, the more they earn. And so one can understand that La Couteau always wants to take back as many babies as possible at each journey she makes."

Victoire recounted these dreadful things in her simple way, as one whom Paris has not yet turned into a liar, and who says all she knows, careless what it may be.

"And it seems things were far worse years ago," she continued. "I have heard my father say that, in his time, the agents would bring back four or five children at one journey—perfect parcels of babies, which they tied together and carried under their arms. They set them out in rows on the seats in the waiting-rooms at the station; and one day, indeed, a Rougemont agent forgot one child in a waiting-room, and there was quite a row about it, because when the child was found again it was dead. And then you should have seen in the trains what a heap of poor little things there was, all crying with hunger. It became pitiable in winter time, when there was snow and frost, for they were all shivering and blue with cold in their scanty, ragged swaddling-clothes. One or another often died on the way, and then it was removed at the next station and buried in the nearest cemetery. And you can picture what a state those who didn't die were in. At our place we care better for our pigs, for we certainly wouldn't send them travelling in that fashion. My father used to say that it was enough to make the very stones weep. Nowadays, however, there's more supervision; the regulations allow the agents to take only one nursling back at a time. But they know all sorts of tricks, and often take a couple. And then, too, they make arrangements; they have women who help them, and they avail themselves of those who may be going back into the country alone. Yes, La Couteau has all sorts of tricks to evade the law. And, besides, all the folks of Rougemont close their eyes—they are too much interested in keeping business brisk; and all they fear is that the police may poke their noses into their affairs. Ah! it is all very well for the Government to send inspectors every month, and insist on registers, and the Mayor's signature and the stamp of the Commune; why, it's just as if it did nothing. It doesn't prevent these women from quietly plying their trade and sending as many little ones as they can to kingdom-come. We've got a cousin at Rougemont who said to us one day: 'La Malivoire's precious lucky, she got rid of four more during last month.'"

Victoire paused for a moment to thread her needle. Norine was still weeping, while Mathieu listened, mute with horror, and with his eyes fixed upon the sleeping child.

"No doubt folks say less about Rougemont nowadays than they used to," the girl resumed; "but there's still enough to disgust one. We know three or four baby-farmers who are not worth their salt. The rule is to bring the little ones up with the bottle, you know; and you'd be horrified if you saw what bottles they are—never cleaned, always filthy, with the milk inside them icy cold in the winter and sour in the summer. La Vimeux, for her part, thinks that the bottle system costs too much, and so she feeds her children on soup. That clears them off all the quicker. At La Loiseau's you have to hold your nose when you go near the corner where the little ones sleep—their rags are so filthy. As for La Gavette, she's always working in the fields with her man, so that the three or four nurslings that she generally has are left in charge of the grandfather, an old cripple of seventy, who can't even prevent the fowls from coming to peck at the little ones.* And things are worse even at La Cauchois', for, as she has nobody at all to mind the children when she goes out working, she leaves them tied in their cradles, for fear lest they should tumble out and crack their skulls. You might visit all the houses in the village, and you would find the same thing everywhere. There isn't a house where the trade isn't carried on. Round our part there are places where folks make lace, or make cheese, or make cider; but at Rougemont they only make dead bodies."

* There is no exaggeration in what M. Zola writes on this subject.
I have even read in French Government reports of instances in
which nurslings have been devoured by pigs! And it is a well-known
saying in France that certain Norman and Touraine villages are
virtually "paved with little Parisians."—Trans.

All at once she ceased sewing, and looked at Mathieu with her timid, clear eyes.

"But the worst of all," she continued, "is La Couillard, an old thief who once did six months in prison, and who now lives a little way out of the village on the verge of the wood. No live child has ever left La Couillard's. That's her specialty. When you see an agent, like La Couteau, for instance, taking her a child, you know at once what's in the wind. La Couteau has simply bargained that the little one shall die. It's settled in a very easy fashion: the parents give a sum of three or four hundred francs on condition that the little one shall be kept till his first communion, and you may be quite certain that he dies within a week. It's only necessary to leave a window open near him, as a nurse used to do whom my father knew. At winter time, when she had half a dozen babies in her house, she would set the door wide open and then go out for a stroll. And, by the way, that little boy in the next room, whom La Couteau has just gone to see, she'll take him to La Couillard's, I'm sure; for I heard the mother, Mademoiselle Rosine, agree with her the other day to give her a sum of four hundred francs down on the understanding that she should have nothing more to do in the matter."

At this point Victoire ceased speaking, for La Couteau came in to fetch Norine's child. Norine, who had emerged from her distress during the servant girl's stories, had ended by listening to them with great interest. But directly she perceived the agent she once more hid her face in her pillows, as though she feared to see what was about to happen. Mathieu, on his side, had risen from his chair and stood there quivering.

"So it's understood, I'm going to take the child," said La Couteau. "Madame Bourdieu has given me a slip of paper bearing the date of the birth and the address. Only I ought to have some Christian names. What do you wish the child to be called?"

Norine did not at first answer. Then, in a faint distressful voice, she said: "Alexandre."

"Alexandre, very well. But you would do better to give the boy a second Christian name, so as to identify him the more readily, if some day you take it into your head to run after him."

It was again necessary to tear a reply from Norine. "Honore," she said.

"Alexandre Honore—all right. That last name is yours, is it not?* And the first is the father's? That is settled; and now I've everything I need. Only it's four o'clock already, and I shall never get back in time for the six o'clock train if I don't take a cab. It's such a long way off—the other side of the Luxembourg. And a cab costs money. How shall we manage?"

* Norine is, of course, a diminutive of Honorine, which is the
feminine form of Honore.—Trans.

While she continued whining, to see if she could not extract a few francs from the distressed girl, it suddenly occurred to Mathieu to carry out his mission to the very end by driving with her himself to the Foundling Hospital, so that he might be in a position to inform Beauchene that the child had really been deposited there, in his presence. So he told La Couteau that he would go down with her, take a cab, and bring her back.

"All right; that will suit me. Let us be off! It's a pity to wake the little one, since he's so sound asleep; but all the same, we must pack him off, since it's decided."

With her dry hands, which were used to handling goods of this description, she caught up the child, perhaps, however, a little roughly, forgetting her assumed wheedling good nature now that she was simply charged with conveying it to hospital. And the child awoke and began to scream loudly.

"Ah! dear me, it won't be amusing if he keeps up this music in the cab. Quick, let us be off."

But Mathieu stopped her. "Won't you kiss him, Norine?" he asked.

At the very first squeal that sorry mother had dipped yet lower under her sheets, carrying her hands to her ears, distracted as she was by the sound of those cries. "No, no," she gasped, "take him away; take him away at once. Don't begin torturing me again!"

Then she closed her eyes, and with one arm repulsed the child who seemed to be pursuing her. But when she felt that the agent was laying him on the bed, she suddenly shuddered, sat up, and gave a wild hasty kiss, which lighted on the little fellow's cap. She had scarcely opened her tear-dimmed eyes, and could have seen but a vague phantom of that poor feeble creature, wailing and struggling at the decisive moment when he was being cast into the unknown.

"You are killing me! Take him away; take him away!"

Once in the cab the child suddenly became silent. Either the jolting of the vehicle calmed him, or the creaking of the wheels filled him with emotion. La Couteau, who kept him on her knees, at first remained silent, as if interested in the people on the footwalks, where the bright sun was shining. Then, all of a sudden, she began to talk, venting her thoughts aloud.

"That little woman made a great mistake in not trusting the child to me. I should have put him out to nurse properly, and he would have grown up finely at Rougemont. But there! they all imagine that we simply worry them because we want to do business. But I just ask you, if she had given me five francs for myself and paid my return journey, would that have ruined her? A pretty girl like her oughtn't to be hard up for money. I know very well that in our calling there are some people who are hardly honest, who speculate and ask for commissions, and then put out nurslings at cheap rates and rob both the parents and the nurse. It's really not right to treat these dear little things as if they were goods—poultry or vegetables. When folks do that I can understand that their hearts get hardened, and that they pass the little ones on from hand to hand without any more care than if they were stock-in-trade. But then, monsieur, I'm an honest woman; I'm authorized by the mayor of our village; I hold a certificate of morality, which I can show to anybody. If ever you should come to Rougemont, just ask after Sophie Couteau there. Folks will tell you that I'm a hard-working woman, and don't owe a copper to a soul!"

Mathieu could not help looking at her to see how unblushingly she thus praised herself. And her speech struck him as if it were a premeditated reply to all that Victoire had related of her, for, with the keen scent of a shrewd peasant woman, she must have guessed that charges had been brought against her. When she felt that his piercing glance was diving to her very soul, she doubtless feared that she had not lied with sufficient assurance, and had somehow negligently betrayed herself; for she did not insist, but put on more gentleness of manner, and contented herself with praising Rougemont in a general way, saying what a perfect paradise it was, where the little ones were received, fed, cared for, and coddled as if they were all sons of princes. Then, seeing that the gentleman uttered never a word, she became silent once more. It was evidently useless to try to win him over. And meantime the cab rolled and rolled along; streets followed streets, ever noisy and crowded; and they crossed the Seine and at last drew near to the Luxembourg. It was only after passing the palace gardens that La Couteau again began:

"Well, it's that young person's own affair if she imagines that her child will be better off for passing through the Foundling. I don't attack the Administration, but you know, monsieur, there's a good deal to be said on the matter. At Rougemont we have a number of nurslings that it sends us, and they don't grow any better or die less frequently than the others. Well, well, people are free to act as they fancy; but all the same I should like you to know, as I do, all that goes on in there."

The cab had stopped at the top of the Rue Denfert-Rochereau, at a short distance from the former outer Boulevard. A big gray wall stretched out, the frigid facade of a State establishment, and it was through a quiet, simple, unobtrusive little doorway at the end of this wall that La Couteau went in with the child. Mathieu followed her, but he did not enter the office where a woman received the children. He felt too much emotion, and feared lest he should be questioned; it was, indeed, as if he considered himself an accomplice in a crime. Though La Couteau told him that the woman would ask him nothing, and the strictest secrecy was always observed, he preferred to wait in an anteroom, which led to several closed compartments, where the persons who came to deposit children were placed to wait their turn. And he watched the woman go off, carrying the little one, who still remained extremely well behaved, with a vacant stare in his big eyes.

Though the interval of waiting could not have lasted more than twenty minutes, it seemed terribly long to Mathieu. Lifeless quietude reigned in that stern, sad-looking anteroom, wainscoted with oak, and pervaded with the smell peculiar to hospitals. All he heard was the occasional faint wail of some infant, above which now and then rose a heavy, restrained sob, coming perhaps from some mother who was waiting in one of the adjoining compartments. And he recalled the "slide" of other days, the box which turned within the wall. The mother crept up, concealing herself much as possible from view, thrust her baby into the cavity as into an oven, gave a tug at the bell-chain, and then precipitately fled. Mathieu was too young to have seen the real thing; he had only seen it represented in a melodrama at the Port St. Martin Theatre.* But how many stories it recalled—hampers of poor little creatures brought up from the provinces and deposited at the hospital by carriers; the stolen babes of Duchesses, here cast into oblivion by suspicious-looking men; the hundreds of wretched work-girls too who had here rid themselves of their unfortunate children. Now, however, the children had to be deposited openly, and there was a staff which took down names and dates, while giving a pledge of inviolable secrecy. Mathieu was aware that some few people imputed to the suppression of the slide system the great increase in criminal offences. But each day public opinion condemns more and more the attitude of society in former times, and discards the idea that one must accept evil, dam it in, and hide it as if it were some necessary sewer; for the only course for a free community to pursue is to foresee evil and grapple with it, and destroy it in the bud. To diminish the number of cast-off children one must seek out the mothers, encourage them, succor them, and give them the means to be mothers in fact as well as in name. At that moment, however, Mathieu did not reason; it was his heart that was affected, filled with growing pity and anguish at the thought of all the crime, all the shame, all the grief and distress that had passed through that anteroom in which he stood. What terrible confessions must have been heard, what a procession of suffering, ignominy, and wretchedness must have been witnessed by that woman who received the children in her mysterious little office! To her all the wreckage of the slums, all the woe lying beneath gilded life, all the abominations, all the tortures that remain unknown, were carried. There in her office was the port for the shipwrecked, there the black hole that swallowed up the offspring of frailty and shame. And while Mathieu's spell of waiting continued he saw three poor creatures arrive at the hospital. One was surely a work-girl, delicate and pretty though she looked, so thin, so pale too, and with so wild an air that he remembered a paragraph he had lately read in a newspaper, recounting how another such girl, after forsaking her child, had thrown herself into the river. The second seemed to him to be a married woman, some workman's wife, no doubt, overburdened with children and unable to provide food for another mouth; while the third was tall, strong, and insolent,—one of those who bring three or four children to the hospital one after the other. And all three women plunged in, and he heard them being penned in separate compartments by an attendant, while he, with stricken heart, realizing how heavily fate fell on some, still stood there waiting.

* The "slide" system, which enabled a mother to deposit her child
at the hospital without being seen by those within, ceased to be
employed officially as far back as 1847; but the apparatus was
long preserved intact, and I recollect seeing it in the latter
years of the Second Empire, cir. 1867-70, when I was often at
the artists' studios in the neighborhood. The aperture through
which children were deposited in the sliding-box was close to
the little door of which M. Zola speaks.—Trans.

When La Couteau at last reappeared with empty arms she said never a word, and Mathieu put no question to her. Still in silence, they took their seats in the cab; and only some ten minutes afterwards, when the vehicle was already rolling through bustling, populous streets, did the woman begin to laugh. Then, as her companion, still silent and distant, did not condescend to ask her the cause of her sudden gayety, she ended by saying aloud:

"Do you know why I am laughing? If I kept you waiting a bit longer, it was because I met a friend of mine, an attendant in the house, just as I left the office. She's one of those who put the babies out to nurse in the provinces.* Well, my friend told me that she was going to Rougemont to-morrow with two other attendants, and that among others they would certainly have with them the little fellow I had just left at the hospital."

* There are only about 600 beds at the Hopital des Enfants
Assistes, and the majority of the children deposited there
are perforce placed out to purse in the country.—Trans.

Again did she give vent to a dry laugh which distorted her wheedling face. And she continued: "How comical, eh? The mother wouldn't let me take the child to Rougemont, and now it's going there just the same. Ah! some things are bound to happen in spite of everything."

Mathieu did not answer, but an icy chill had sped through his heart. It was true, fate pitilessly took its own course. What would become of that poor little fellow? To what early death, what life of suffering or wretchedness, or even crime, had he been thus brutally cast?

But the cab continued rolling on, and for a long while neither Mathieu nor La Couteau spoke again. It was only when the latter alighted in the Rue de Miromesnil that she began to lament, on seeing that it was already half-past five o'clock, for she felt certain that she would miss her train, particularly as she still had some accounts to settle and that other child upstairs to fetch. Mathieu, who had intended to keep the cab and drive to the Northern terminus, then experienced a feeling of curiosity, and thought of witnessing the departure of the nurse-agents. So he calmed La Couteau by telling her that if she would make haste he would wait for her. And as she asked for a quarter of an hour, it occurred to him to speak to Norine again, and so he also went upstairs.

When he entered Norine's room he found her sitting up in bed, eating one of the oranges which her little sisters had brought her. She had all the greedy instincts of a plump, pretty girl; she carefully detached each section of the orange, and, her eyes half closed the while, her flesh quivering under her streaming outspread hair, she sucked one after another with her fresh red lips, like a pet cat lapping a cup of milk. Mathieu's sudden entry made her start, however, and when she recognized him she smiled faintly in an embarrassed way.

"It's done," he simply said.

She did not immediately reply, but wiped her fingers on her handkerchief. However, it was necessary that she should say something, and so she began: "You did not tell me you would come back—I was not expecting you. Well, it's done, and it's all for the best. I assure you there was no means of doing otherwise."

Then she spoke of her departure, asked the young man if he thought she might regain admittance to the works, and declared that in any case she should go there to see if the master would have the audacity to turn her away. Thus she continued while the minutes went slowly by. The conversation had dropped, Mathieu scarcely replying to her, when La Couteau, carrying the other child in her arms, at last darted in like a gust of wind. "Let's make haste, let's make haste!" she cried. "They never end with their figures; they try all they can to leave me without a copper for myself!"

But Norine detained her, asking: "Oh! is that Rosine's baby? Pray do show it me." Then she uncovered the infant's face, and exclaimed: "Oh! how plump and pretty he is!" And she began another sentence: "What a pity! Can one have the heart—" But then she remembered, paused, and changed her words: "Yes, how heartrending it is when one has to forsake such little angels."

"Good-by! Take care of yourself!" cried La Couteau; "you will make me miss my train. And I've got the return tickets, too; the five others are waiting for me at the station! Ah! what a fuss they would make if I got there too late!"

Then, followed by Mathieu, she hurried away, bounding down the stairs, where she almost fell with her little burden. But soon she threw herself back in the cab, which rolled off.

"Ah! that's a good job! And what do you say of that young person, monsieur? She wouldn't lay out fifteen francs a month on her own account, and yet she reproaches that good Mademoiselle Rosine, who has just given me four hundred francs to have her little one taken care of till his first communion. Just look at him—a superb child, isn't he? What a pity it is that the finest are often those who die the first."

Mathieu looked at the infant on the woman's knees. His garments were very white, of fine texture, trimmed with lace, as if he were some little condemned prince being taken in all luxury to execution. And the young man remembered that Norine had told him that the child was the offspring of crime. Born amid secrecy, he was now, for a fixed sum, to be handed over to a woman who would quietly suppress him by simply leaving some door or window wide open. Young though the boy was, he already had a finely-formed face, that suggested the beauty of a cherub. And he was very well behaved; he did not raise the faintest wail. But a shudder swept through Mathieu. How abominable!

La Couteau quickly sprang from the cab as soon as they reached the courtyard of the St. Lazare Station. "Thank you, monsieur, you have been very kind," said she. "And if you will kindly recommend me to any ladies you may know, I shall be quite at their disposal."

Then Mathieu, having alighted on the pavement in his turn, saw a scene which detained him there a few moments longer. Amid all the scramble of passengers and luggage, five women of peasant aspect, each carrying an infant, were darting in a scared, uneasy way hither and thither, like crows in trouble, with big yellow beaks quivering and black wings flapping with anxiety. Then, on perceiving La Couteau, there was one general caw, and all five swooped down upon her with angry, voracious mien. And, after a furious exchange of cries and explanations, the six banded themselves together, and, with cap-strings waving and skirts flying, rushed towards the train, carrying the little ones, like birds of prey who feared delay in returning to the charnel-house.

And Mathieu remained alone in the great crowd. Thus every year did these crows of ill omen carry off from Paris no fewer than 20,000 children, who were never, never seen again! Ah! that great question of the depopulation of France! Not merely were there those who were resolved to have no children, not only were infanticide and crime of other kinds rife upon all sides, but one-half of the babes saved from those dangers were killed. Thieves and murderesses, eager for lucre, flocked to the great city from the four points of the compass, and bore away all the budding Life that their arms could carry in order that they might turn it to Death! They beat down the game, they watched in the doorways, they sniffed from afar the innocent flesh on which they preyed. And the babes were carted to the railway stations; the cradles, the wards of hospitals and refuges, the wretched garrets of poor mothers, without fires and without bread—all, all were emptied! And the packages were heaped up, moved carelessly hither and thither, sent off, distributed to be murdered either by foul deed or by neglect. The raids swept on like tempest blasts; Death's scythe never knew dead season, at every hour it mowed down budding life. Children who might well have lived were taken from their mothers, the only nurses whose milk would have nourished them, to be carted away and to die for lack of proper nutriment.

A rush of blood warmed Mathieu's heart when, all at once, he thought of Marianne, so strong and healthy, who would be waiting for him on the bridge over the Yeuse, in the open country, with their little Gervais at her breast. Figures that he had seen in print came back to his mind. In certain regions which devoted themselves to baby-farming the mortality among the nurslings was fifty per cent; in the best of them it was forty, and seventy in the worst. It was calculated that in one century seventeen millions of nurslings had died. Over a long period the mortality had remained at from one hundred to one hundred and twenty thousand per annum. The most deadly reigns, the greatest butcheries of the most terrible conquerors, had never resulted in such massacre. It was a giant battle that France lost every year, the abyss into which her whole strength sank, the charnel-place into which every hope was cast. At the end of it is the imbecile death of the nation. And Mathieu, seized with terror at the thought, rushed away, eager to seek consolation by the side of Marianne, amid the peacefulness, the wisdom, and the health which were their happy lot.

IX

ONE Thursday morning Mathieu went to lunch with Dr. Boutan in the rooms where the latter had resided for more than ten years, in the Rue de l'Universite, behind the Palais-Bourbon. By a contradiction, at which he himself often laughed, this impassioned apostle of fruitfulness had remained a bachelor. His extensive practice kept him in a perpetual hurry, and he had little time free beyond his dejeuner hour. Accordingly, whenever a friend wished to have any serious conversation with him, he preferred to invite him to his modest table, to partake more or less hastily of an egg, a cutlet, and a cup of coffee.

Mathieu wished to ask the doctor's advice on a grave subject. After a couple of weeks' reflection, his idea of experimenting in agriculture, of extricating that unappreciated estate of Chantebled from chaos, preoccupied him to such a degree that he positively suffered at not daring to come to a decision. The imperious desire to create, to produce life, health, strength, and wealth grew within him day by day. Yet what fine courage and what a fund of hope he needed to venture upon an enterprise which outwardly seemed so wild and rash, and the wisdom of which was apparent to himself alone. With whom could he discuss such a matter, to whom could he confide his doubts and hesitation? When the idea of consulting Boutan occurred to him, he at once asked the doctor for an appointment. Here was such a confidant as he desired, a man of broad, brave mind, one who worshipped life, who was endowed with far-seeing intelligence, and who would therefore at once look beyond the first difficulties of execution.

As soon as they were face to face on either side of the table, Mathieu began to pour forth his confession, recounting his dream—his poem, as he called it. And the doctor listened without interrupting, evidently won over by the young man's growing, creative emotion. When at last Boutan had to express an opinion he replied: "Mon Dieu, my friend, I can tell you nothing from a practical point of view, for I have never even planted a lettuce. I will even add that your project seems to me so hazardous that any one versed in these matters whom you might consult would assuredly bring forward substantial and convincing arguments to dissuade you. But you speak of this affair with such superb confidence and ardor and affection, that I feel convinced you would succeed. Moreover, you flatter my own views, for I have long endeavored to show that, if numerous families are ever to flourish again in France, people must again love and worship the soil, and desert the towns, and lead a fruitful fortifying country life. So how can I disapprove your plans? Moreover, I suspect that, like all people who ask advice, you simply came here in the hope that you would find in me a brother ready, in principle at all events, to wage the same battle."

At this they both laughed heartily. Then, on Boutan inquiring with what capital he would start operations, Mathieu quietly explained that he did not mean to borrow money and thus run into debt; he would begin, if necessary, with very few acres indeed, convinced as he was of the conquering power of labor. His would be the head, and he would assuredly find the necessary arms. His only worry was whether he would be able to induce Seguin to sell him the old hunting-box and the few acres round it on a system of yearly payments, without preliminary disbursement. When he spoke to the doctor on this subject, the other replied:

"Oh! I think he is very favorably disposed. I know that he would be delighted to sell that huge, unprofitable estate, for with his increasing pecuniary wants he is very much embarrassed by it. You are aware, no doubt, that things are going from bad to worse in his household."

Then the doctor broke off to inquire: "And our friend Beauchene, have you warned him of your intention to leave the works?"

"Why, no, not yet," said Mathieu; "and I would ask you to keep the matter private, for I wish to have everything settled before informing him."

Lunching quickly, they had now got to their coffee, and the doctor offered to drive Mathieu back to the works, as he was going there himself, for Madame Beauchene had requested him to call once a week, in order that he might keep an eye on Maurice's health. Not only did the lad still suffer from his legs, but he had so weak and delicate a stomach that he had to be dieted severely.

"It's the kind of stomach one finds among children who have not been brought up by their own mothers," continued Boutan. "Your plucky wife doesn't know that trouble; she can let her children eat whatever they fancy. But with that poor little Maurice, the merest trifle, such as four cherries instead of three, provokes indigestion. Well, so it is settled, I will drive you back to the works. Only I must first make a call in the Rue Roquepine to choose a nurse. It won't take me long, I hope. Quick! let us be off."

When they were together in the brougham, Boutan told Mathieu that it was precisely for the Seguins that he was going to the nurse-agency. There was a terrible time at the house in the Avenue d'Antin. A few months previously Valentine had given birth to a daughter, and her husband had obstinately resolved to select a fit nurse for the child himself, pretending that he knew all about such matters. And he had chosen a big, sturdy young woman of monumental appearance. Nevertheless, for two months past Andree, the baby, had been pining away, and the doctor had discovered, by analyzing the nurse's milk, that it was deficient in nutriment. Thus the child was simply perishing of starvation. To change a nurse is a terrible thing, and the Seguins' house was in a tempestuous state. The husband rushed hither and thither, banging the doors and declaring that he would never more occupy himself about anything.

"And so," added Boutan, "I have now been instructed to choose a fresh nurse. And it is a pressing matter, for I am really feeling anxious about that poor little Andree."

"But why did not the mother nurse her child?" asked Mathieu.

The doctor made a gesture of despair. "Ah! my dear fellow, you ask me too much. But how would you have a Parisienne of the wealthy bourgeoisie undertake the duty, the long brave task of nursing a child, when she leads the life she does, what with receptions and dinners and soirees, and absences and social obligations of all sorts? That little Madame Seguin is simply trifling when she puts on an air of deep distress and says that she would so much have liked to nurse her infant, but that it was impossible since she had no milk. She never even tried! When her first child was born she could doubtless have nursed it. But to-day, with the imbecile, spoilt life she leads, it is quite certain that she is incapable of making such an effort. The worst is, my dear fellow, as any doctor will tell you, that after three or four generations of mothers who do not feed their children there comes a generation that cannot do so. And so, my friend, we are fast coming, not only in France, but in other countries where the odious wet-nurse system is in vogue, to a race of wretched, degenerate women, who will be absolutely powerless to nourish their offspring."

Mathieu then remembered what he had witnessed at Madame Bourdieu's and the Foundling Hospital. And he imparted his impressions to Boutan, who again made a despairing gesture. There was a great work of social salvation to be accomplished, said he. No doubt a number of philanthropists were trying their best to improve things, but private effort could not cope with such widespread need. There must be general measures; laws must be passed to save the nation. The mother must be protected and helped, even in secrecy, if she asked for it; she must be cared for, succored, from the earliest period, and right through all the long months during which she fed her babe. All sorts of establishments would have to be founded—refuges, convalescent homes, and so forth; and there must be protective enactments, and large sums of money voted to enable help to be extended to all mothers, whatever they might be. It was only by such preventive steps that one could put a stop to the frightful hecatomb of newly-born infants, that incessant loss of life which exhausted the nation and brought it nearer and nearer to death every day.

"And," continued the doctor, "it may all be summed up in this verity: 'It is a mother's duty to nurse her child.' And, besides, a mother, is she not the symbol of all grandeur, all strength, all beauty? She represents the eternity of life. She deserves a social culture, she should be religiously venerated. When we know how to worship motherhood, our country will be saved. And this is why, my friend, I should like a mother feeding her babe to be adopted as the highest expression of human beauty. Ah! how can one persuade our Parisiennes, all our French women, indeed, that woman's beauty lies in being a mother with an infant on her knees? Whenever that fashion prevails, we shall be the sovereign nation, the masters of the world!"

He ended by laughing in a distressed way, in his despair at being unable to change manners and customs, aware as he was that the nation could be revolutionized only by a change in its ideal of true beauty.

"To sum up, then, I believe in a child being nursed only by its own mother. Every mother who neglects that duty when she can perform it is a criminal. Of course, there are instances when she is physically incapable of accomplishing her duty, and in that case there is the feeding-bottle, which, if employed with care and extreme cleanliness, only sterilized milk being used, will yield a sufficiently good result. But to send a child away to be nursed means almost certain death; and as for the nurse in the house, that is a shameful transaction, a source of incalculable evil, for both the employer's child and the nurse's child frequently die from it."

Just then the doctor's brougham drew up outside the nurse-agency in the Rue Roquepine.

"I dare say you have never been in such a place, although you are the father of five children," said Boutan to Mathieu, gayly.

"No, I haven't."

"Well, then, come with me. One ought to know everything."

The office in the Rue Roquepine was the most important and the one with the best reputation in the district. It was kept by Madame Broquette, a woman of forty, with a dignified if somewhat blotched face, who was always very tightly laced in a faded silk gown of dead-leaf hue. But if she represented the dignity and fair fame of the establishment in its intercourse with clients, the soul of the place, the ever-busy manipulator, was her husband, Monsieur Broquette, a little man with a pointed nose, quick eyes, and the agility of a ferret. Charged with the police duties of the office, the supervision and training of the nurses, he received them, made them clean themselves, taught them to smile and put on pleasant ways, besides penning them in their various rooms and preventing them from eating too much. From morn till night he was ever prowling about, scolding and terrorizing those dirty, ill-behaved, and often lying and thieving women. The building, a dilapidated private house, with a damp ground floor, to which alone clients were admitted, had two upper stories, each comprising six rooms arranged as dormitories, in which the nurses and their infants slept. There was no end to the arrivals and departures there: the peasant women were ever galloping through the place, dragging trunks about, carrying babes in swaddling clothes, and filling the rooms and the passages with wild cries and vile odors. And amid all this the house had another inmate, Mademoiselle Broquette, Herminie as she was called, a long, pale, bloodless girl of fifteen, who mooned about languidly among that swarm of sturdy young women.

Boutan, who knew the house well, went in, followed by Mathieu. The central passage, which was fairly broad, ended in a glass door, which admitted one to a kind of courtyard, where a sickly conifer stood on a round patch of grass, which the dampness rotted. On the right of the passage was the office, whither Madame Broquette, at the request of her customers, summoned the nurses, who waited in a neighboring room, which was simply furnished with a greasy deal table in the centre. The furniture of the office was some old Empire stuff, upholstered in red velvet. There was a little mahogany centre table, and a gilt clock. Then, on the left of the passage, near the kitchen, was the general refectory, with two long tables, covered with oilcloth, and surrounded by straggling chairs, whose straw seats were badly damaged. Just a make-believe sweep with a broom was given there every day: one could divine long-amassed, tenacious dirt in every dim corner; and the place reeked with an odor of bad cookery mingled with that of sour milk.

When Boutan thrust open the office door he saw that Madame Broquette was busy with an old gentleman, who sat there inspecting a party of nurses. She recognized the doctor, and made a gesture of regret. "No matter, no matter," he exclaimed; "I am not in a hurry: I will wait."

Through the open door Mathieu had caught sight of Mademoiselle Herminie, the daughter of the house, ensconced in one of the red velvet armchairs near the window, and dreamily perusing a novel there, while her mother, standing up, extolled her goods in her most dignified way to the old gentleman, who gravely contemplated the procession of nurses and seemed unable to make up his mind.

"Let us have a look at the garden," said the doctor, with a laugh.

One of the boasts of the establishment, indeed, as set forth in its prospectus, was a garden and a tree in it, as if there were plenty of good air there, as in the country. They opened the glass door, and on a bench near the tree they saw a plump girl, who doubtless had just arrived, pretending to clean a squealing infant. She herself looked sordid, and had evidently not washed since her journey. In one corner there was an overflow of kitchen utensils, a pile of cracked pots and greasy and rusty saucepans. Then, at the other end, a French window gave access to the nurses' waiting-room, and here again there was a nauseous spectacle of dirt and untidiness.

All at once Monsieur Broquette darted forward, though whence he had come it was hard to say. At all events, he had seen Boutan, who was a client that needed attention. "Is my wife busy, then?" said he. "I cannot allow you to remain waiting here, doctor. Come, come, I pray you."

With his little ferreting eyes he had caught sight of the dirty girl cleaning the child, and he was anxious that his visitors should see nothing further of a character to give them a bad impression of the establishment. "Pray, doctor, follow me," he repeated, and understanding that an example was necessary, he turned to the girl, exclaiming, "What business have you to be here? Why haven't you gone upstairs to wash and dress? I shall fling a pailful of water in your face if you don't hurry off and tidy yourself."

Then he forced her to rise and drove her off, all scared and terrified, in front of him. When she had gone upstairs he led the two gentlemen to the office entrance and began to complain: "Ah! doctor, if you only knew what trouble I have even to get those girls to wash their hands! We who are so clean! who put all our pride in keeping the house clean. If ever a speck of dust is seen anywhere it is certainly not my fault."

Since the girl had gone upstairs a fearful tumult had arisen on the upper floors, whence also a vile smell descended. Some dispute, some battle, seemed to be in progress. There were shouts and howls, followed by a furious exchange of vituperation.

"Pray excuse me," at last exclaimed Monsieur Broquette; "my wife will receive you in a minute."

Thereupon he slipped off and flew up the stairs with noiseless agility. And directly afterwards there was an explosion. Then the house suddenly sank into death-like silence. All that could be heard was the voice of Madame in the office, as, in a very dignified manner, she kept on praising her goods.

"Well, my friend," said Boutan to Mathieu, while they walked up and down the passage, "all this, the material side of things, is nothing. What you should see and know is what goes on in the minds of all these people. And note that this is a fair average place. There are others which are real dens, and which the police sometimes have to close. No doubt there is a certain amount of supervision, and there are severe regulations which compel the nurses to bring certificates of morality, books setting forth their names, ages, parentage, the situations they have held, and so on, with other documents on which they have immediately to secure a signature from the Prefecture, where the final authorization is granted them. But these precautions don't prevent fraud and deceit of various kinds. The women assert that they have only recently begun nursing, when they have been doing it for months; they show you superb children which they have borrowed and which they assert to be their own. And there are many other tricks to which they resort in their eagerness to make money."

As the doctor and Mathieu chatted on, they paused for a moment near the door of the refectory, which chanced to be open, and there, among other young peasant women, they espied La Couteau hastily partaking of cold meat. Doubtless she had just arrived from Rougemont, and, after disposing of the batch of nurses she had brought with her, was seeking sustenance for the various visits which she would have to make before returning home. The refectory, with its wine-stained tables and greasy walls, cast a smell like that of a badly-kept sink.

"Ah! so you know La Couteau!" exclaimed Boutan, when Mathieu had told him of his meetings with the woman. "Then you know the depths of crime. La Couteau is an ogress! And yet, think of it, with our fine social organization, she is more or less useful, and perhaps I myself shall be happy to choose one of the nurses that she has brought with her."

At this moment Madame Broquette very amiably asked the visitors into her office. After long reflection, the old gentleman had gone off without selecting any nurse, but saying that he would return some other time.

"There are folks who don't know their own minds," said Madame Broquette sententiously. "It isn't my fault, and I sincerely beg you to excuse me, doctor. If you want a good nurse you will be satisfied, for I have just received some excellent ones from the provinces. I will show you."

Herminie, meanwhile, had not condescended to raise her nose from her novel. She remained ensconced in her armchair, still reading, with a weary, bored expression on her anaemic countenance. Mathieu, after sitting down a little on one side, contented himself with looking on, while Boutan stood erect, attentive to every detail, like a commander reviewing his troops. And the procession began.

Having opened a door which communicated with the common room, Madame Broquette, assuming the most noble airs, leisurely introduced the pick of her nurses, in groups of three, each with her infant in her arms. About a dozen were thus inspected: short ones with big heavy limbs, tall ones suggesting maypoles, dark ones with coarse stiff hair, fair ones with the whitest of skins, quick ones and slow ones, ugly ones and others who were pleasant-looking. All, however, wore the same nervous, silly smile, all swayed themselves with embarrassed timidity, the anxious mien of the bondswoman at the slave market, who fears that she may not find a purchaser. They clumsily tried to put on graceful ways, radiant with internal joy directly a customer seemed to nibble, but clouding over and casting black glances at their companions when the latter seemed to have the better chance. Out of the dozen the doctor began by setting three aside, and finally he detained but one, in order that he might study her more fully.

"One can see that Monsieur le Docteur knows his business," Madame Broquette allowed herself to say, with a flattering smile. "I don't often have such pearls. But she has only just arrived, otherwise she would probably have been engaged already. I can answer for her as I could for myself, for I have put her out before."

The nurse was a dark woman of about twenty-six, of average height, built strongly enough, but having a heavy, common face with a hard-looking jaw. Having already been in service, however, she held herself fairly well.

"So that child is not your first one?" asked the doctor.

"No, monsieur, he's my third."

Then Boutan inquired into her circumstances, studied her papers, took her into Madame Broquette's private room for examination, and on his return make a minute inspection of her child, a strong plump boy, some three months old, who in the interval had remained very quiet on an armchair. The doctor seemed satisfied, but he suddenly raised his head to ask, "And that child is really your own?"

"Oh! monsieur, where could I have got him otherwise?"

"Oh! my girl, children are borrowed, you know."

Then he paused for a moment, still hesitating and looking at the young woman, embarrassed by some feeling of doubt, although she seemed to embody all requirements. "And are you all quite well in your family?" he asked; "have none of your relatives ever died of chest complaints?"

"Never, monsieur."

"Well, of course you would not tell me if they had. Your books ought to contain a page for information of that kind. And you, are you of sober habits? You don't drink?"

"Oh! monsieur."

This time the young woman bristled up, and Boutan had to calm her. Then her face brightened with pleasure as soon as the doctor—with the gesture of a man who is taking his chance, for however careful one may be there is always an element of chance in such matters—said to her: "Well, it is understood, I engage you. If you can send your child away at once, you can go this evening to the address I will give you. Let me see, what is your name?"

"Marie Lebleu."

Madame Broquette, who, without presuming to interfere with a doctor, had retained her majestic air which so fully proclaimed the high respectability of her establishment, now turned towards her daughter: "Herminie, go to see if Madame Couteau is still there."

Then, as the girl slowly raised her pale dreamy eyes without stirring from her chair, her mother came to the conclusion that she had better execute the commission herself. A moment later she came back with La Couteau.

The doctor was now settling money matters. Eighty francs a month for the nurse; and forty-five francs for her board and lodging at the agency and Madame Broquette's charges. Then there was the question of her child's return to the country, which meant another thirty francs, without counting a gratuity to La Couteau.

"I'm going back this evening," said the latter; "I'm quite willing to take the little one with me. In the Avenue d'Antin, did you say? Oh! I know, there's a lady's maid from my district in that house. Marie can go there at once. When I've settled my business, in a couple of hours, I will go and rid her of her baby."

On entering the office, La Couteau had glanced askance at Mathieu, without, however, appearing to recognize him. He had remained on his chair silently watching the scene—first an inspection as of cattle at a market, and then a bargaining, the sale of a mother's milk. And by degrees pity and revolt had filled his heart. But a shudder passed through him when La Couteau turned towards the quiet, fine-looking child, of which she promised to rid the nurse. And once more he pictured her with her five companions at the St.-Lazare railway station, each, like some voracious crow, with a new-born babe in her clutches. It was the pillaging beginning afresh; life and hope were again being stolen from Paris. And this time, as the doctor said, a double murder was threatened; for, however careful one may be, the employer's child often dies from another's milk, and the nurse's child, carried back into the country like a parcel, is killed with neglect and indigestible pap.

But everything was now settled, and so the doctor and his companion drove away to Grenelle. And there, at the very entrance of the Beauchene works, came a meeting which again filled Mathieu with emotion. Morange, the accountant, was returning to his work after dejeuner, accompanied by his daughter Reine, both of them dressed in deep mourning. On the morrow of Valerie's funeral, Morange had returned to his work in a state of prostration which almost resembled forgetfulness. It was clear that he had abandoned all ambitious plans of quitting the works to seek a big fortune elsewhere. Still he could not make up his mind to leave his flat, though it was now too large for him, besides being too expensive. But then his wife had lived in those rooms, and he wished to remain in them. And, moreover, he desired to provide his daughter with all comfort. All the affection of his weak heart was now given to that child, whose resemblance to her mother distracted him. He would gaze at her for hours with tears in his eyes. A great passion was springing up within him; his one dream now was to dower her richly and seek happiness through her, if indeed he could ever be happy again. Thus feelings of avarice had come to him; he economized with respect to everything that was not connected with her, and secretly sought supplementary work in order that he might give her more luxury and increase her dower. Without her he would have died of weariness and self-abandonment. She was indeed fast becoming his very life.

"Why, yes," said she with a pretty smile, in answer to a question which Boutan put to her, "it is I who have brought poor papa back. I wanted to be sure that he would take a stroll before setting to work again. Other wise he shuts himself up in his room and doesn't stir."

Morange made a vague apologetic gesture. At home, indeed, overcome as he was by grief and remorse, he lived in his bedroom in the company of a collection of his wife's portraits, some fifteen photographs, showing her at all ages, which he had hung on the walls.

"It is very fine to-day, Monsieur Morange," said Boutan, "you do right in taking a stroll."

The unhappy man raised his eyes in astonishment, and glanced at the sun as if he had not previously noticed it. "That is true, it is fine weather—and besides it is very good for Reine to go out a little."

Then he tenderly gazed at her, so charming, so pink and white in her black mourning gown. He was always fearing that she must feel bored during the long hours when he left her at home, alone with the servant. To him solitude was so distressful, so full of the wife whom he mourned, and whom he accused himself of having killed.

"Papa won't believe that one never feels ennui at my age," said the girl gayly. "Since my poor mamma is no longer there, I must needs be a little woman. And, besides, the Baroness sometimes calls to take me out."

Then she gave a shrill cry on seeing a brougham draw up close to the curb. A woman was leaning out of the window, and she recognized her.

"Why, papa, there is the Baroness! She must have gone to our house, and Clara must have told her that I had accompanied you here."

This, indeed, was what had happened. Morange hastily led Reine to the carriage, from which Seraphine did not alight. And when his daughter had sprung in joyously, he remained there another moment, effusively thanking the Baroness, and delighted to think that his dear child was going to amuse herself. Then, after watching the brougham till it disappeared, he entered the factory, looking suddenly aged and shrunken, as if his grief had fallen on his shoulders once more, so overwhelming him that he quite forgot the others, and did not even take leave of them.

"Poor fellow!" muttered Mathieu, who had turned icy cold on seeing Seraphine's bright mocking face and red hair at the carriage window.

Then he was going to his office when Beauchene beckoned to him from one of the windows of the house to come in with the doctor. The pair of them found Constance and Maurice in the little drawing-room, whither the father had repaired to finish his coffee and smoke a cigar. Boutan immediately attended to the child, who was much better with respect to his legs, but who still suffered from stomachic disturbance, the slightest departure from the prescribed diet leading to troublesome complications.

Constance, though she did not confess it, had become really anxious about the boy, and questioned the doctor, and listened to him with all eagerness. While she was thus engaged Beauchene drew Mathieu on one side.

"I say," he began, laughing, "why did you not tell me that everything was finished over yonder? I met the pretty blonde in the street yesterday."

Mathieu quietly replied that he had waited to be questioned in order to render an account of his mission, for he had not cared to be the first to raise such a painful subject. The money handed to him for expenses had proved sufficient, and whenever the other desired it, he could produce receipts for his various disbursements. He was already entering into particulars when Beauchene jovially interrupted him.

"You know what happened here? She had the audacity to come and ask for work, not of me of course, but of the foreman of the women's work-room. Fortunately I had foreseen this and had given strict orders; so the foreman told her that considerations of order and discipline prevented him from taking her back. Her sister Euphrasie, who is to be married next week, is still working here. Just fancy them having another set-to! Besides, her place is not here."

Then he went to take a little glass of cognac which stood on the mantelpiece.

Mathieu had learnt only the day before that Norine, on leaving Madame Bourdieu's, had sought a temporary refuge with a female friend, not caring to resume a life of quarrelling at her parents' home. Besides her attempt to regain admittance at Beauchene's, she had applied at two other establishments; but, as a matter of fact, she did not evince any particular ardor in seeking to obtain work. Four months' idleness and coddling had altogether disgusted her with a factory hand's life, and the inevitable was bound to happen. Indeed Beauchene, as he came back sipping his cognac, resumed: "Yes, I met her in the street. She was quite smartly dressed, and leaning on the arm of a big, bearded young fellow, who did nothing but make eyes at her. It was certain to come to that, you know. I always thought so."

Then he was stepping towards his wife and the doctor, when he remembered something else, came back, and asked Mathieu in a yet lower tone, "What was it you were telling me about the child?" And as soon as Mathieu had related that he had taken the infant to the Foundling Hospital so as to be certain that it was deposited there, he warmly pressed his hand. "That's perfect. Thank you, my dear fellow; I shall be at peace now."

He felt, indeed, intensely relieved, hummed a lively air, and then took his stand before Constance, who was still consulting the doctor. She was holding little Maurice against her knees, and gazing at him with the jealous love of a good bourgeoise, who carefully watched over the health of her only son, that son whom she wished to make a prince of industry and wealth. All at once, however, in reply to a remark from Boutan, she exclaimed: "Why then, doctor, you think me culpable? You really say that a child, nursed by his mother, always has a stronger constitution than others, and can the better resist the ailments of childhood?"

"Oh! there is no doubt of it, madame."

Beauchene, ceasing to chew his cigar, shrugged his shoulders, and burst into a sonorous laugh: "Oh! don't you worry, that youngster will live to be a hundred! Why, the Burgundian who nursed him was as strong as a rock! But, I say, doctor, you intend then to make the Chambers pass a law for obligatory nursing by mothers?"

At this sally Boutan also began to laugh. "Well, why not?" said he.

This at once supplied Beauchene with material for innumerable jests. Why, such a law would completely upset manners and customs, social life would be suspended, and drawing-rooms would become deserted! Posters would be placarded everywhere bearing the inscription: "Closed on account of nursing."

"Briefly," said Beauchene, in conclusion, "you want to have a revolution."

"A revolution, yes," the doctor gently replied, "and we will effect it."

X

MATHIEU finished studying his great scheme, the clearing and cultivation of Chantebled, and at last, contrary to all prudence but with all the audacity of fervent faith and hope, it was resolved upon. He warned Beauchene one morning that he should leave the works at the end of the month, for on the previous day he had spoken to Seguin, and had found him quite willing to sell the little pavilion and some fifty acres around it on very easy terms. As Mathieu had imagined, Seguin's affairs were in a very muddled state, for he had lost large sums at the gaming table and spent money recklessly on women, leading indeed a most disastrous life since trouble had arisen in his home. And so he welcomed the transaction which Mathieu proposed to him, in the hope that the young man would end by ridding him of the whole of that unprofitable estate should his first experiment prove successful. Then came other interviews between them, and Seguin finally consented to sell on a system of annual payments, spread over a term of years, the first to be made in two years' time from that date. As things stood, the property seemed likely to remain unremunerative forever, and so there was nothing risked in allowing the purchaser a couple of years' credit. However, they agreed to meet once more and settle the final details before a formal deed of sale was drawn up. And one Monday morning, therefore, about ten o'clock, Mathieu set out for the house in the Avenue d'Antin in order to complete the business.

That morning, as it happened, Celeste the maid received in the linen room, where she usually remained, a visit from her friend Madame Menoux, the little haberdasher of the neighborhood, in whose tiny shop she was so fond of gossiping. They had become more intimate than ever since La Couteau, at Celeste's instigation, had taken Madame Menoux's child, Pierre, to Rougemont, to be put out to nurse there in the best possible way for the sum of thirty francs a month. La Couteau had also very complaisantly promised to call each month at one or another of her journeys in order to receive the thirty francs, thereby saving the mother the trouble of sending the money by post, and also enabling her to obtain fresh news of her child. Thus, each time a payment became due, if La Couteau's journey happened to be delayed a single day, Madame Menoux grew terribly frightened, and hastened off to Celeste to make inquiries of her. And, moreover, she was glad to have an opportunity of conversing with this girl, who came from the very part where her little Pierre was being reared.

"You will excuse, me, won't you, mademoiselle, for calling so early," said she, "but you told me that your lady never required you before nine o'clock. And I've come, you know, because I've had no news from over yonder, and it occurred to me that you perhaps might have received a letter."

Blonde, short and thin, Madame Menoux, who was the daughter of a poor clerk, had a slender pale face, and a pleasant, but somewhat sad, expression. From her own slightness of build probably sprang her passionate admiration for her big, handsome husband, who could have crushed her between his fingers. If she was slight, however, she was endowed with unconquerable tenacity and courage, and she would have killed herself with hard work to provide him with the coffee and cognac which he liked to sip after each repast.

"Ah! it's hard," she continued, "to have had to send our Pierre so far away. As it is, I don't see my husband all day, and now I've a child whom I never see at all. But the misfortune is that one has to live, and how could I have kept the little fellow in that tiny shop of mine, where from morning till night I never have a moment to spare! Yet, I can't help crying at the thought that I wasn't able to keep and nurse him. When my husband comes home from the museum every evening, we do nothing but talk about him, like a pair of fools. And so, according to you, mademoiselle, that place Rougemont is very healthy, and there are never any nasty illnesses about there?"

But at this moment she was interrupted by the arrival of another early visitor, whose advent she hailed with a cry of delight.

"Oh! how happy I am to see you, Madame Couteau! What a good idea it was of mine to call here!"

Amid exclamations of joyous surprise, the nurse-agent explained that she had arrived by the night train with a batch of nurses, and had started on her round of visits as soon as she had deposited them in the Rue Roquepine.

"After bidding Celeste good-day in passing," said she, "I intended to call on you, my dear lady. But since you are here, we can settle our accounts here, if you are agreeable."

Madame Menoux, however, was looking at her very anxiously. "And how is my little Pierre?" she asked.

"Why, not so bad, not so bad. He is not, you know, one of the strongest; one can't say that he's a big child. Only he's so pretty and nice-looking with his rather pale face. And it's quite certain that if there are bigger babies than he is, there are smaller ones too."

She spoke more slowly as she proceeded, and carefully sought words which might render the mother anxious, without driving her to despair. These were her usual tactics in order to disturb her customers' hearts, and then extract as much money from them as possible. On this occasion she must have guessed that she might carry things so far as to ascribe a slight illness to the child.

"However, I must really tell you, because I don't know how to lie; and besides, after all, it's my duty—Well, the poor little darling has been ill, and he's not quite well again yet."

Madame Menoux turned very pale and clasped her puny little hands: "Mon Dieu! he will die of it."

"No, no, since I tell you that he's already a little better. And certainly he doesn't lack good care. You should just see how La Loiseau coddles him! When children are well behaved they soon get themselves loved. And the whole house is at his service, and no expense is spared The doctor came twice, and there was even some medicine. And that costs money."

The last words fell from La Couteau's lips with the weight of a club. Then, without leaving the scared, trembling mother time to recover, the nurse-agent continued: "Shall we go into our accounts, my dear lady?"

Madame Menoux, who had intended to make a payment before returning to her shop, was delighted to have some money with her. They looked for a slip of paper on which to set down the figures; first the month's nursing, thirty francs; then the doctor, six francs; and indeed, with the medicine, that would make ten francs.

"Ah! and besides, I meant to tell you," added La Couteau, "that so much linen was dirtied during his illness that you really ought to add three francs for the soap. That would only be just; and besides, there were other little expenses, sugar, and eggs, so that in your place, to act like a good mother, I should put down five francs. Forty-five francs altogether, will that suit you?"

In spite of her emotion Madame Menoux felt that she was being robbed, that the other was speculating on her distress. She made a gesture of surprise and revolt at the idea of having to give so much money—that money which she found so hard to earn. No end of cotton and needles had to be sold to get such a sum together! And her distress, between the necessity of economy on the one hand and her maternal anxiety on the other, would have touched the hardest heart.

"But that will make another half-month's money," said she.

At this La Couteau put on her most frigid air: "Well, what would you have? It isn't my fault. One can't let your child die, so one must incur the necessary expenses. And then, if you haven't confidence in me, say so; send the money and settle things direct. Indeed, that will greatly relieve me, for in all this I lose my time and trouble; but then, I'm always stupid enough to be too obliging."

When Madame Menoux, again quivering and anxious, had given way, another difficulty arose. She had only some gold with her, two twenty-franc pieces and one ten-franc piece. The three coins lay glittering on the table. La Couteau looked at them with her yellow fixed eyes.

"Well, I can't give you your five francs change," she said, "I haven't any change with me. And you, Celeste, have you any change for this lady?"

She risked asking this question, but put it in such a tone and with such a glance that the other immediately understood her. "I have not a copper in my pocket," she replied.

Deep silence fell. Then, with bleeding heart and a gesture of cruel resignation, Madame Menoux did what was expected of her.

"Keep those five francs for yourself, Madame Couteau, since you have to take so much trouble. And, mon Dieu! may all this money bring me good luck, and at least enable my poor little fellow to grow up a fine handsome man like his father."

"Oh! as for that I'll warrant it," cried the other, with enthusiasm. "Those little ailments don't mean anything—on the contrary. I see plenty of little folks, I do; and so just remember what I tell you, yours will become an extraordinarily fine child. There won't be better."

When Madame Menoux went off, La Couteau had lavished such flattery and such promises upon her that she felt quite light and gay; no longer regretting her money, but dreaming of the day when little Pierre would come back to her with plump cheeks and all the vigor of a young oak.

As soon as the door had closed behind the haberdasher, Celeste began to laugh in her impudent way: "What a lot of fibs you told her! I don't believe that her child so much as caught a cold," she exclaimed.

La Couteau began by assuming a dignified air: "Say that I'm a liar at once. The child isn't well, I assure you."

The maid's gayety only increased at this. "Well now, you are really comical, putting on such airs with me. I know you, remember, and I know what is meant when the tip of your nose begins to wriggle."

"The child is quite puny," repeated her friend, more gently.

"Oh! I can believe that. All the same I should like to see the doctor's prescriptions, and the soap and the sugar. But, you know, I don't care a button about the matter. As for that little Madame Menoux, it's here to-day and gone to-morrow. She has her business, and I have mine. And you, too, have yours, and so much the better if you get as much out of it as you can."

But La Couteau changed the conversation by asking the maid if she could not give her a drop of something to drink, for night travelling did upset her stomach so. Thereupon Celeste, with a laugh, took a bottle half-full of malaga and a box of biscuits from the bottom of a cupboard. This was her little secret store, stolen from the still-room. Then, as the other expressed a fear that her mistress might surprise them, she made a gesture of insolent contempt. Her mistress! Why, she had her nose in her basins and perfumery pots, and wasn't at all likely to call till she had fixed herself up so as to look pretty.

"There are only the children to fear," added Celeste; "that Gaston and that Lucie, a couple of brats who are always after one because their parents never trouble about them, but let them come and play here or in the kitchen from morning till night. And I don't dare lock this door, for fear they should come rapping and kicking at it."

When, by way of precaution, she had glanced down the passage and they had both seated themselves at table, they warmed and spoke out their minds, soon reaching a stage of easy impudence and saying everything as if quite unconscious how abominable it was. While sipping her wine Celeste asked for news of the village, and La Couteau spoke the brutal truth, between two biscuits. It was at the Vimeux' house that the servant's last child, born in La Rouche's den, had died a fortnight after arriving at Rougemont, and the Vimeux, who were more or less her cousins, had sent her their friendly remembrances and the news that they were about to marry off their daughter. Then, at La Gavette's, the old grandfather, who looked after the nurslings while the family was at work in the fields, had fallen into the fire with a baby in his arms. Fortunately they had been pulled out of it, and only the little one had been roasted. La Cauchois, though at heart she wasn't downcast, now had some fears that she might be worried, because four little ones had gone off from her house all in a body, a window being forgetfully left open at night-time. They were all four little Parisians, it seemed—two foundlings and two that had come from Madame Bourdieu's. Since the beginning of the year as many had died at Rougemont as had arrived there, and the mayor had declared that far too many were dying, and that the village would end by getting a bad reputation. One thing was certain, La Couillard would be the very first to receive a visit from the gendarmes if she didn't so arrange matters as to keep at least one nursling alive every now and then.

"Ah? that Couillard!" added the nurse-agent. "Just fancy, my dear, I took her a child, a perfect little angel—the boy of a very pretty young person who was stopping at Madame Bourdieu's. She paid four hundred francs to have him brought up until his first communion, and he lived just five days! Really now, that wasn't long enough! La Couillard need not have been so hasty. It put me in such a temper! I asked her if she wanted to dishonor me. What will ruin me is my good heart. I don't know how to refuse when folks ask me to do them a service. And God in Heaven knows how fond I am of children! I've always lived among them, and in future, if anybody who's a friend of mine gives me a child to put out to nurse, I shall say: 'We won't take the little one to La Couillard, for it would be tempting Providence. But after all, I'm an honest woman, and I wash my hands of it, for if I do take the cherubs over yonder I don't nurse them. And when one's conscience is at ease one can sleep quietly.'"

"Of course," chimed in Celeste, with an air of conviction.

While they thus waxed maudlin over their malaga, there arose a horrible red vision—a vision of that terrible Rougemont, paved with little Parisians, the filthy, bloody village, the charnel-place of cowardly murder, whose steeple pointed so peacefully to the skies in the midst of the far-spreading plain.

But all at once a rush was heard in the passage, and the servant hastened to the door to rid herself of Gaston and Lucie, who were approaching. "Be off! I don't want you here. Your mamma has told you that you mustn't come here."

Then she came back into the room quite furious. "That's true!" said she; "I can do nothing but they must come to bother me. Why don't they stay a little with the nurse?"

"Oh! by the way," interrupted La Couteau, "did you hear that Marie Lebleu's little one is dead? She must have had a letter about it. Such a fine child it was! But what can one expect? it's a nasty wind passing. And then you know the saying, 'A nurse's child is the child of sacrifice!'"

"Yes, she told me she had heard of it," replied Celeste, "but she begged me not to mention it to madame, as such things always have a bad effect. The worst is that if her child's dead madame's little one isn't much better off."

At this La Couteau pricked up her ears. "Ah! so things are not satisfactory?"

"No, indeed. It isn't on account of her milk; that's good enough, and she has plenty of it. Only you never saw such a creature—such a temper! always brutal and insolent, banging the doors and talking of smashing everything at the slightest word. And besides, she drinks like a pig—as no woman ought to drink."

La Couteau's pale eyes sparkled with gayety, and she briskly nodded her head as if to say that she knew all this and had been expecting it. In that part of Normandy, in and around Rougemont, all the women drank more or less, and the girls even carried little bottles of brandy to school with them in their baskets. Marie Lebleu, however, was a woman of the kind that one picks up under the table, and, indeed, it might be said that since the birth of her last child she had never been quite sober.

"I know her, my dear," exclaimed La Couteau; "she is impossible. But then, that doctor who chose her didn't ask my opinion. And, besides, it isn't a matter that concerns me. I simply bring her to Paris and take her child back to the country. I know nothing about anything else. Let the gentlefolks get out of their trouble by themselves."

This sentiment tickled Celeste, who burst out laughing. "You haven't an idea," said she, "of the infernal life that Marie leads here! She fights people, she threw a water-bottle at the coachman, she broke a big vase in madame's apartments, she makes them all tremble with constant dread that something awful may happen. And, then, if you knew what tricks she plays to get something to drink! For it was found out that she drank, and all the liqueurs were put under lock and key. So you don't know what she devised? Well, last week she drained a whole bottle of Eau de Melisse, and was ill, quite ill, from it. Another time she was caught sipping some Eau de Cologne from one of the bottles in madame's dressing-room. I now really believe that she treats herself to some of the spirits of wine that are given her for the warmer!—it's enough to make one die of laughing. I'm always splitting my sides over it, in my little corner."

Then she laughed till the tears came into her eyes; and La Couteau, on her side highly amused, began to wriggle with a savage delight. All at once, however, she calmed down and exclaimed, "But, I say, they will turn her out of doors?"

"Oh! that won't be long. They would have done so already if they had dared."

But at this moment the ringing of a bell was heard, and an oath escaped Celeste. "Good! there's madame ringing for me now! One can never be at peace for a moment."

La Couteau, however, was already standing up, quite serious, intent on business and ready to depart.

"Come, little one, don't be foolish, you must do your work. For my part I have an idea. I'll run to fetch one of the nurses whom I brought this morning, a girl I can answer for as for myself. In an hour's time I'll be back here with her, and there will be a little present for you if you help me to get her the situation."

She disappeared while the maid, before answering a second ring, leisurely replaced the malaga and the biscuits at the bottom of the cupboard.

At ten o'clock that day Seguin was to take his wife and their friend Santerre to Mantes, to lunch there, by way of trying an electric motor-car, which he had just had built at considerable expense. He had become fond of this new "sport," less from personal taste, however, than from his desire to be one of the foremost in taking up a new fashion. And a quarter of an hour before the time fixed for starting he was already in his spacious "cabinet," arrayed in what he deemed an appropriate costume: a jacket and breeches of greenish ribbed velvet, yellow shoes, and a little leather hat. And he poked fun at Santerre when the latter presented himself in town attire, a light gray suit of delicate effect.

Soon after Valentine had given birth to her daughter Andree, the novelist had again become a constant frequenter of the house in the Avenue d'Antin. He was intent on resuming the little intrigue that he had begun there and felt confident of victory. Valentine, on her side, after a period of terror followed by great relief, had set about making up for lost time, throwing herself more wildly than ever into the vortex of fashionable life. She had recovered her good looks and youthfulness, and had never before experienced such a desire to divert herself, leaving her children more and more to the care of servants, and going about, hither and thither, as her fancy listed, particularly since her husband did the same in his sudden fits of jealousy and brutality, which broke out every now and again in the most imbecile fashion without the slightest cause. It was the collapse of all family life, with the threat of a great disaster in the future; and Santerre lived there in the midst of it, helping on the work of destruction.

He gave a cry of rapture when Valentine at last made her appearance gowned in a delicious travelling dress, with a cavalier toque on her head. But she was not quite ready, for she darted off again, saying that she would be at their service as soon as she had seen her little Andree, and given her last orders to the nurse.

"Well, make haste," cried her husband. "You are quite unbearable, you are never ready."

It was at this moment that Mathieu called, and Seguin received him in order to express his regret that he could not that day go into business matters with him. Nevertheless, before fixing another appointment, he was willing to take note of certain conditions which the other wished to stipulate for the purpose of reserving to himself the exclusive right of purchasing the remainder of the Chantebled estate in portions and at fixed dates. Seguin was promising that he would carefully study this proposal when he was cut short by a sudden tumult—distant shouts, wild hurrying to and fro, and a violent banging of doors.

"Why! what is it? what is it?" he muttered, turning towards the shaking walls.

The door suddenly opened and Valentine reappeared, distracted, red with fear and anger, and carrying her little Andree, who wailed and struggled in her arms.

"There, there, my pet," gasped the mother, "don't cry, she shan't hurt you any more. There, it's nothing, darling; be quiet, do."

Then she deposited the little girl in a large armchair, where she at once became quiet again. She was a very pretty child, but still so puny, although nearly four months old, that there seemed to be nothing but her beautiful big eyes in her pale little face.

"Well, what is the matter?" asked Seguin, in astonishment.

"The matter, is, my friend, that I have just found Marie lying across the cradle as drunk as a market porter, and half stifling the child. If I had been a few moments later it would have been all over. Drunk at ten o'clock in the morning! Can one understand such a thing? I had noticed that she drank, and so I hid the liqueurs, for I hoped to be able to keep her, since her milk is so good. But do you know what she had drunk? Why, the methylated spirits for the warmer! The empty bottle had remained beside her."

"But what did she say to you?"

"She simply wanted to beat me. When I shook her, she flew at me in a drunken fury, shouting abominable words. And I had time only to escape with the little one, while she began barricading herself in the room, where she is now smashing the furniture! There! just listen!"

Indeed, a distant uproar of destruction reached them. They looked one at the other, and deep silence fell, full of embarrassment and alarm.

"And then?" Seguin ended by asking in his curt dry voice.

"Well, what can I say? That woman is a brute beast, and I can't leave Andree in her charge to be killed by her. I have brought the child here, and I certainly shall not take her back. I will even own that I won't run the risk of going back to the room. You will have to turn the girl out of doors, after paying her wages."

"I! I!" cried Seguin. Then, walking up and down as if spurring on the anger which was rising within him, he burst forth: "I've had enough, you know, of all these idiotic stories! This house has become a perfect hell upon earth all through that child! There will soon be nothing but fighting here from morning till night. First of all it was pretended that the nurse whom I took the trouble to choose wasn't healthy. Well, then a second nurse is engaged, and she gets drunk and stifles the child. And now, I suppose, we are to have a third, some other vile creature who will prey on us and drive us mad. No, no, it's too exasperating, I won't have it."

Valentine, her fears now calmed, became aggressive. "What won't you have? There is no sense in what you say. As we have a child we must have a nurse. If I had spoken of nursing the little one myself you would have told me I was a fool. You would have found the house more uninhabitable than ever, if you had seen me with the child always in my arms. But I won't nurse—I can't. As you say, we will take a third nurse; it's simple enough, and we'll do so at once and risk it."

Seguin had abruptly halted in front of Andree, who, alarmed by the sight of his stern dark figure began to cry. Blinded as he was by anger, he perhaps failed to see her, even as he failed to see Gaston and Lucie, who had hastened in at the noise of the dispute and stood near the door, full of curiosity and fear. As nobody thought of sending them away they remained there, and saw and heard everything.

"The carriage is waiting," resumed Seguin, in a voice which he strove to render calm. "Let us make haste, let us go."

Valentine looked at him in stupefaction. "Come, be reasonable," said she. "How can I leave this child when I have nobody to whom I can trust her?"

"The carriage is waiting for us," he repeated, quivering; "let us go at once."

And as his wife this time contented herself with shrugging her shoulders, he was seized with one of those sudden fits of madness which impelled him to the greatest violence, even when people were present, and made him openly display his rankling poisonous sore, that absurd jealousy which had upset his life. As for that poor little puny, wailing child, he would have crushed her, for he held her to be guilty of everything, and indeed it was she who was now the obstacle to that excursion he had planned, that pleasure trip which he had promised himself, and which now seemed to him of such supreme importance. And 'twas so much the better if friends were there to hear him. So in the vilest language he began to upbraid his wife, not only reproaching her for the birth of that child, but even denying that the child was his. "You will only be content when you have driven me from the house!" he finished in a fury. "You won't come? Well then, I'll go by myself!"

And thereupon he rushed off like a whirlwind, without a word to Santerre, who had remained silent, and without even remembering that Mathieu still stood there awaiting an answer. The latter, in consternation at hearing all these things, had not dared to withdraw lest by doing so he should seem to be passing judgment on the scene. Standing there motionless, he turned his head aside, looked at little Andree who was still crying, and at Gaston and Lucie, who, silent with fright, pressed one against the other behind the armchair in which their sister was wailing.

Valentine had sunk upon a chair, stifling with sobs, her limbs trembling. "The wretch! Ah, how he treats me! To accuse me thus, when he knows how false it is! Ah! never more; no, never more! I would rather kill myself; yes, kill myself!"

Then Santerre, who had hitherto stood on one side, gently drew near to her and ventured to take her hand with a gesture of affectionate compassion, while saying in an undertone: "Come, calm yourself. You know very well that you are not alone, that you are not forsaken. There are some things which cannot touch you. Calm yourself, cease weeping, I beg you. You distress me dreadfully."

He made himself the more gentle since the husband had been the more brutal; and he leant over her yet the more closely, and again lowered his voice till it became but a murmur. Only a few words could be heard: "It is wrong of you to worry yourself like this. Forget all that folly. I told you before that he doesn't know how to behave towards a woman."

Twice was that last remark repeated with a sort of mocking pity; and she smiled vaguely amid her drying tears, in her turn murmuring: "You are kind, you are. Thank you. And you are quite right.... Ah! if I could only be a little happy!"

Then Mathieu distinctly saw her press Santerre's hand as if in acceptance of his consolation. It was the logical, fatal outcome of the situation—given a wife whom her husband had perverted, a mother who refused to nurse her babe. And yet a cry from Andree suddenly set Valentine erect, awaking to the reality of her position. If that poor creature were so puny, dying for lack of her mother's milk, the mother also was in danger from her refusal to nurse her and clasp her to her breast like a buckler of invincible defence. Life and salvation one through the other, or disaster for both, such was the law. And doubtless Valentine became clearly conscious of her peril, for she hastened to take up the child and cover her with caresses, as if to make of her a protecting rampart against the supreme madness to which she had felt prompted. And great was the distress that came over her. Her other children were there, looking and listening, and Mathieu also was still waiting. When she perceived him her tears gushed forth again, and she strove to explain things, and even attempted to defend her husband.

"Excuse him, there are moments when he quite loses his head. Mon Dieu! What will become of me with this child? Yet I can't nurse her now, it is too late. It is frightful to be in such a position without knowing what to do. Ah! what will become of me, good Lord?"

Santerre again attempted to console her, but she no longer listened to him, and he was about to defer all further efforts till another time when unexpected intervention helped on his designs.

Celeste, who had entered noiselessly, stood there waiting for her mistress to allow her to speak. "It is my friend who has come to see me, madame," said she; "you know, the person from my village, Sophie Couteau, and as she happens to have a nurse with her—"

"There is a nurse here?"

"Oh! yes, madame, a very fine one, an excellent one."

Then, on perceiving her mistress's radiant surprise, her joy at this relief, she showed herself zealous: "Madame must not tire herself by holding the little one. Madame hasn't the habit. If madame will allow me, I will bring the nurse to her."

Heaving a sigh of happy deliverance, Valentine had allowed the servant to take the child from her. So Heaven had not abandoned her! However, she began to discuss the matter, and was not inclined to have the nurse brought there. She somehow feared that if the other one, who was drunk in her room, should come out and meet the new arrival, she would set about beating them all and breaking everything. At last she insisted on taking Santerre and Mathieu into the linen-room, saying that the latter must certainly have some knowledge of these matters, although he declared the contrary. Only Gaston and Lucie were formally forbidden to follow.

"You are not wanted," said their mother, "so stay here and play. But we others will all go, and as softly as possible, please, so that that drunken creature may not suspect anything."

Once in the linen-room, Valentine ordered all the doors to be carefully secured. La Couteau was standing there with a sturdy young person of five-and-twenty, who carried a superb-looking infant in her arms. She had dark hair, a low forehead, and a broad face, and was very respectably dressed. And she made a little courtesy like a well-trained nurse, who has already served with gentlefolks and knows how to behave. But Valentine's embarrassment remained extreme; she looked at the nurse and at the babe like an ignorant woman who, though her elder children had been brought up in a room adjoining her own, had never troubled or concerned herself about anything. In her despair, seeing that Santerre kept to himself, she again appealed to Mathieu, who once more excused himself. And it was only then that La Couteau, after glancing askance at the gentleman who, somehow or other, always turned up whenever she had business to transact, ventured to intervene:

"Will madame rely on me? If madame will kindly remember, I once before ventured to offer her my services, and if she had accepted them she would have saved herself no end of worry. That Marie Lebleu is impossible, and I certainly could have warned madame of it at the time when I came to fetch Marie's child. But since madame's doctor had chosen her, it was not for me to speak. Oh! she has good milk, that's quite sure; only she also has a good tongue, which is always dry. So if madame will now place confidence in me—"

Then she rattled on interminably, expatiating on the respectability of her calling, and praising the value of the goods she offered.

"Well, madame, I tell you that you can take La Catiche with your eyes shut. She's exactly what you want, there's no better in Paris. Just look how she's built, how sturdy and how healthy she is! And her child, just look at it! She's married, she even has a little girl of four at the village with her husband. She's a respectable woman, which is more than can be said for a good many nurses. In a word, madame, I know her and can answer for her. If you are not pleased with her I myself will give you your money back."

In her haste to get it all over Valentine made a great gesture of surrender. She even consented to pay one hundred francs a month, since La Catiche was a married woman. Moreover, La Couteau explained that she would not have to pay the office charges, which would mean a saving of forty-five francs, though, perhaps, madame would not forget all the trouble which she, La Couteau, had taken. On the other hand, there would, of course, be the expense of taking La Catiche's child back to the village, a matter of thirty francs. Valentine liberally promised to double that sum; and all seemed to be settled, and she felt delivered, when she suddenly bethought herself of the other nurse, who had barricaded herself in her room. How could they get her out in order to install La Catiche in her place?

"What!" exclaimed La Couteau, "does Marie Lebleu frighten you? She had better not give me any of her nonsense if she wants me ever to find her another situation. I'll speak to her, never fear."

Celeste thereupon placed Andree on a blanket, which was lying there, side by side with the infant of which the new nurse had rid herself a moment previously, and undertook to conduct La Couteau to Marie Lebleu's room. Deathlike silence now reigned there, but the nurse-agent only had to give her name to secure admittance. She went in, and for a few moments one only heard her dry curt voice. Then, on coming out, she tranquillized Valentine, who had gone to listen, trembling.

"I've sobered her, I can tell you," said she. "Pay her her month's wages. She's packing her box and going off."

Then, as they went back into the linen-room, Valentine settled pecuniary matters and added five francs for this new service. But a final difficulty arose. La Couteau could not come back to fetch La Catiche's child in the evening, and what was she to do with it during the rest of the day? "Well, no matter," she said at last, "I'll take it; I'll deposit it at the office, before I go my round. They'll give it a bottle there, and it'll have to grow accustomed to the bottle now, won't it?"

"Of course," the mother quietly replied.

Then, as La Couteau, on the point of leaving, after all sorts of bows and thanks, turned round to take the little one, she made a gesture of hesitation on seeing the two children lying side by side on the blanket.

"The devil!" she murmured; "I mustn't make a mistake."

This seemed amusing, and enlivened the others. Celeste fairly exploded, and even La Catiche grinned broadly; while La Couteau caught up the child with her long claw-like hands and carried it away. Yet another gone, to be carted away yonder in one of those ever-recurring razzias which consigned the little babes to massacre!

Mathieu alone had not laughed. He had suddenly recalled his conversation with Boutan respecting the demoralizing effects of that nurse trade, the shameful bargaining, the common crime of two mothers, who each risked the death of her child—the idle mother who bought another's services, the venal mother who sold her milk. He felt cold at heart as he saw one child carried off still full of life, and the other remain there already so puny. And what would be fate's course? Would not one or the other, perhaps both of them be sacrificed?

Valentine, however, was already leading both him and Santerre to the spacious salon again; and she was so delighted, so fully relieved, that she had recovered all her cavalier carelessness, her passion for noise and pleasure. And as Mathieu was about to take his leave, he heard the triumphant Santerre saying to her, while for a moment he retained her hand in his clasp: "Till to-morrow, then." And she, who had cast her buckler of defence aside, made answer: "Yes—yes, to-morrow."

A week later La Catiche was the acknowledged queen of the house. Andree had recovered a little color, and was increasing in weight daily. And in presence of this result the others bowed low indeed. There was every disposition to overlook all possible faults on the nurse's part. She was the third, and a fourth would mean the child's death; so that she was an indispensable, a providential helper, one whose services must be retained at all costs. Moreover, she seemed to have no defects, for she was a calm, cunning, peasant woman, one who knew how to rule her employers and extract from them all that was to be extracted. Her conquest of the Seguins was effected with extraordinary skill. At first some unpleasantness seemed likely, because Celeste was, on her own side, pursuing a similar course; but they were both too intelligent to do otherwise than come to an understanding. As their departments were distinct, they agreed that they could prosecute parallel invasions. And from that moment they even helped one another, divided the empire, and preyed upon the house in company.

La Catiche sat upon a throne, served by the other domestics, with her employers at her feet. The finest dishes were for her; she had her special wine, her special bread, she had everything most delicate and most nourishing that could be found. Gluttonous, slothful, and proud, she strutted about, bending one and all to her fancies. The others gave way to her in everything to avoid sending her into a temper which might have spoilt her milk. At her slightest indisposition everybody was distracted. One night she had an attack of indigestion, and all the doctors in the neighborhood were rung up to attend on her. Her only real defect, perhaps, was a slight inclination for pilfering; she appropriated some linen that was lying about, but madame would not hear of the matter being mentioned.

There was also the chapter of the presents which were heaped on her in order to keep her in good temper. Apart from the regulation present when the child cut its first tooth, advantage was taken of various other occasions, and a ring, a brooch, and a pair of earrings were given her. Naturally she was the most adorned nurse in the Champs-Elysees, with superb cloaks and the richest of caps, trimmed with long ribbons which flared in the sunlight. Never did lady lead a life of more sumptuous idleness. There were also the presents which she extracted for her husband and her little girl at the village. Parcels were sent them by express train every week. And on the morning when news came that her own baby, carried back by La Couteau, had died from the effects of a bad cold, she was presented with fifty francs as if in payment for the loss of her child. Little Andree, meanwhile, grew ever stronger, and thus La Catiche rose higher and higher, with the whole house bending low beneath her tyrannical sway.

On the day when Mathieu called to sign the deed which was to insure him the possession of the little pavilion of Chantebled with some fifty acres around it, and the privilege of acquiring other parts of the estate on certain conditions, he found Seguin on the point of starting for Le Havre, where a friend, a wealthy Englishman, was waiting for him with his yacht, in order that they might have a month's trip round the coast of Spain.

"Yes," said Seguin feverishly, alluding to some recent heavy losses at the gaming table, "I'm leaving Paris for a time—I have no luck here just now. But I wish you plenty of courage and all success, my dear sir. You know how much I am interested in the attempt you are about to make."

A little later that same day Mathieu was crossing the Champs-Elysees, eager to join Marianne at Chantebled, moved as he was by the decisive step he had taken, yet quivering also with faith and hope, when in a deserted avenue he espied a cab waiting, and recognized Santerre inside it. Then, as a veiled lady furtively sprang into the vehicle, he turned round wondering: Was that not Valentine? And as the cab drove off he felt convinced it was.

There came other meetings when he reached the main avenue; first Gaston and Lucie, already tired of play, and dragging about their puny limbs under the careless supervision of Celeste, who was busy laughing with a grocer's man; while farther off La Catiche, superb and royal, decked out like the idol of venal motherhood, was giving little Andree an outing, with her long purple ribbons streaming victoriously in the sunshine.

XI

ON the day when the first blow with the pick was dealt, Marianne, with Gervais in her arms, came and sat down close by, full of happy emotion at this work of faith and hope which Mathieu was so boldly undertaking. It was a clear, warm day in the middle of June, with a pure, broad sky that encouraged confidence. And as the children had been given a holiday, they played about in the surrounding grass, and one could hear the shrill cries of little Rose while she amused herself with running after the three boys.

"Will you deal the first blow?" Mathieu gayly asked his wife.

But she pointed to her baby. "No, no, I have my work. Deal it yourself, you are the father."

He stood there with two men under his orders, but ready himself to undertake part of the hard manual toil in order to help on the realization of his long thought of, ripening scheme. With great prudence and wisdom he had assured himself a modest livelihood for a year of effort, by an intelligent scheme of association and advances repayable out of profits, which would enable him to wait for his first harvest. And it was his life that he risked on that future crop, should the earth refuse his worship and his labor. But he was a faithful believer, one who felt certain of conquering, since love and determination were his.

"Well then, here goes!" he gallantly cried. "May the earth prove a good mother to us!"

Then he dealt the first blow with his pick.

The work was begun to the left of the old pavilion, in a corner of that extensive marshy tableland, where little streams coursed on all sides through the reeds which sprang up everywhere. It was at first simply a question of draining a few acres by capturing these streams and turning them into canals, in order to direct them afterwards over the dry sandy slopes which descended towards the railway line. After an attentive examination Mathieu had discovered that the work might easily be executed, and that water-furrows would suffice, such was the disposition and nature of the ground. This, indeed, was his real discovery, not to mention the layer of humus which he felt certain would be found amassed on the plateau, and the wondrous fertility which it would display as soon as a ploughshare had passed through it. And so with his pick he now began to open the trench which was to drain the damp soil above, and fertilize the dry, sterile, thirsty ground below.

The open air, however, had doubtless given Gervais an appetite, for he began to cry. He was now a strong little fellow, three months and a half old, and never neglected mealtime. He was growing like one of the young trees in the neighboring wood, with hands which did not easily release what they grasped, with eyes too full of light, now all laughter and now all tears, and with the ever open beak of a greedy bird, that raised a tempest whenever his mother kept him waiting.

"Yes, yes, I know you are there," said she; "come, don't deafen us any longer."

Then she gave him the breast and he became quiet, simply purring like a happy little kitten. The beneficent source had begun to flow once more, as if it were inexhaustible. The trickling milk murmured unceasingly. One might have said that it could be heard descending and spreading, while Mathieu on his side continued opening his trench, assisted by the two men whose apprenticeship was long since past.

He rose up at last, wiped his brow, and with his air of quiet certainty exclaimed: "It's only a trade to learn. In a few months' time I shall be nothing but a peasant. Look at that stagnant pond there, green with water-plants. The spring which feeds it is yonder in that big tuft of herbage. And when this trench has been opened to the edge of the slope, you will see the pond dry up, and the spring gush forth and take its course, carrying the beneficent water away."

"Ah!" said Marianne, "may it fertilize all that stony expanse, for nothing can be sadder than dead land. How happy it will be to quench its thirst and live again!"

Then she broke off to scold Gervais: "Come, young gentleman, don't pull so hard," said she. "Wait till it comes; you know very well that it's all for you."

Meantime the blows of the pickaxes rang out, the trench rapidly made its way through the fat, moist soil, and soon the water would flow into the parched veins of the neighboring sandy tracts to endow them with fruitfulness. And the light trickling of the mother's milk also continued with the faint murmur of an inexhaustible source, flowing from her breast into the mouth of her babe, like a fountain of eternal life. It ever and ever flowed, it created flesh, intelligence, and labor, and strength. And soon its whispering would mingle with the babble of the delivered spring as it descended along the trenches to the dry hot lands. And at last there would be but one and the same stream, one and the same river, gradually overflowing and carrying life to all the earth, a mighty river of nourishing milk flowing through the world's veins, creating without a pause, and producing yet more youth and more health at each return of springtide.

Four months later, when Mathieu and his men had finished the autumn ploughing, there came the sowing on the same spot. Marianne was there again, and it was such a very mild gray day that she was still able to sit down, and once more gayly give the breast to little Gervais. He was already eight months old and had become quite a personage. He grew a little more every day, always in his mother's arms, on that warm breast whence he sucked life. He was like the seed which clings to the seed-pod so long as it is not ripe. And at that first quiver of November, that approach of winter through which the germs would slumber in the furrows, he pressed his chilly little face close to his mother's warm bosom, and nursed on in silence as if the river of life were lost, buried deep beneath the soil.

"Ah!" said Marianne, laughing, "you are not warm, young gentleman, are you? It is time for you to take up your winter quarters."

Just then Mathieu, with his sower's bag at his waist, was returning towards them, scattering the seed with broad rhythmical gestures. He had heard his wife, and he paused to say to her: "Let him nurse and sleep till the sun comes back. He will be a man by harvest time." And, pointing to the great field which he was sowing with his assistants, he added: "All this will grow and ripen when our Gervais has begun to walk and talk—just look, see our conquest!"

He was proud of it. From ten to fifteen acres of the plateau were now rid of the stagnant pools, cleared and levelled; and they spread out in a brown expanse, rich with humus, while the water-furrows which intersected them carried the streams to the neighboring slopes. Before cultivating those dry lands one must yet wait until the moisture should have penetrated and fertilized them. That would be the work of the future, and thus, by degrees, life would be diffused through the whole estate.

"Evening is coming on," resumed Mathieu, "I must make haste."

Then he set off again, throwing the seed with his broad rhythmical gesture. And while Marianne, gravely smiling, watched him go, it occurred to little Rose to follow in his track, and take up handfuls of earth, which she scattered to the wind. The three boys perceived her, and Blaise and Denis then hastened up, followed by Ambroise, all gleefully imitating their father's gesture, and darting hither and thither around him. And for a moment it was almost as if Mathieu with the sweep of his arm not only cast the seed of expected corn into the furrows, but also sowed those dear children, casting them here and there without cessation, so that a whole nation of little sowers should spring up and finish populating the world.

Two months more went by, and January had arrived with a hard frost, when one day the Froments unexpectedly received a visit from Seguin and Beauchene, who had come to try their luck at wild-duck shooting, among such of the ponds on the plateau as had not yet been drained. It was a Sunday, and the whole family was gathered in the roomy kitchen, cheered by a big fire. Through the clear windows one could see the far-spreading countryside, white with rime, and stiffly slumbering under that crystal casing, like some venerated saint awaiting April's resurrection. And, that day, when the visitors presented themselves, Gervais also was slumbering in his white cradle, rendered somnolent by the season, but plump even as larks are in the cold weather, and waiting, he also, simply for life's revival, in order to reappear in all the triumph of his acquired strength.

The family had gayly partaken of dejeuner, and now, before nightfall, the four children had gathered round a table by the window, absorbed in a playful occupation which delighted them. Helped by Ambroise, the twins, Blaise and Denis, were building a whole village out of pieces of cardboard, fixed together with paste. There were houses, a town hall, a church, a school. And Rose, who had been forbidden to touch the scissors, presided over the paste, with which she smeared herself even to her hair. In the deep quietude, through which their laughter rang at intervals, their father and mother had remained seated side by side in front of the blazing fire, enjoying that delightful Sunday peace after the week's hard work.

They lived there very simply, like genuine peasants, without any luxury, any amusement, save that of being together. Their gay, bright kitchen was redolent of that easy primitive life, lived so near the earth, which frees one from fictitious wants, ambition, and the longing for pleasure. And no fortune, no power could have brought such quiet delight as that afternoon of happy intimacy, while the last-born slept so soundly and quietly that one could not even hear him breathe.

Beauchene and Seguin broke in upon the quiet like unlucky sportsmen, with their limbs weary and their faces and hands icy cold. Amid the exclamations of surprise which greeted them, they complained of the folly that had possessed them to venture out of Paris in such bleak weather.

"Just fancy, my dear fellow," said Beauchene, "we haven't seen a single duck! It's no doubt too cold. And you can't imagine what a bitter wind blows on the plateau, amid those ponds and bushes bristling with icicles. So we gave up the idea of any shooting. You must give us each a glass of hot wine, and then we'll get back to Paris."

Seguin, who was in even a worse humor, stood before the fire trying to thaw himself; and while Marianne made haste to warm some wine, he began to speak of the cleared fields which he had skirted. Under the icy covering, however, beneath which they stiffly slumbered, hiding the seed within them, he had guessed nothing of the truth, and already felt anxious about this business of Mathieu's, which looked anything but encouraging. Indeed, he already feared that he would not be paid his purchase money, and so made bold to speak ironically.

"I say, my dear fellow, I am afraid you have lost your time," he began; "I noticed it all as I went by, and it did not seem promising. But how can you hope to reap anything from rotten soil in which only reeds have been growing for centuries?"

"One must wait," Mathieu quietly answered. "You must come back and see it all next June."

But Beauchene interrupted them. "There is a train at four o'clock, I think," said he; "let us make haste, for it would annoy us tremendously to miss it, would it not, Seguin?"

So saying, he gave him a gay, meaning glance. They had doubtless planned some little spree together, like husbands bent on availing themselves to the utmost of the convenient pretext of a day's shooting. Then, having drunk some wine and feeling warmed and livelier, they began to express astonishment at their surroundings.

"It stupefies me, my dear fellow," declared Beauchene, "that you can live in this awful solitude in the depth of winter. It is enough to kill anybody. I am all in favor of work, you know; but, dash it! one must have some amusement too."

"But we do amuse ourselves," said Mathieu, waving his hand round that rustic kitchen in which centred all their pleasant family life.

The two visitors followed his gesture, and gazed in amazement at the walls covered with utensils, at the rough furniture, and at the table on which the children were still building their village after offering their cheeks to be kissed. No doubt they were unable to understand what pleasure there could possibly be there, for, suppressing a jeering laugh, they shook their heads. To them it was really an extraordinary life, a life of most singular taste.

"Come and see my little Gervais," said Marianne softly. "He is asleep; mind, you must not wake him."

For politeness' sake they both bent over the cradle, and expressed surprise at finding a child but ten months old so big. He was very good, too. Only, as soon as he should wake, he would no doubt deafen everybody. And then, too, if a fine child like that sufficed to make life happy, how many people must be guilty of spoiling their lives! The visitors came back to the fireside, anxious only to be gone now that they felt enlivened.

"So it's understood," said Mathieu, "you won't stay to dinner with us?"

"Oh, no, indeed!" they exclaimed in one breath.

Then, to attenuate the discourtesy of such a cry, Beauchene began to jest, and accepted the invitation for a later date when the warm weather should have arrived.

"On my word of honor, we have business in Paris," he declared. "But I promise you that when it's fine we will all come and spend a day here—yes, with our wives and children. And you will then show us your work, and we shall see if you have succeeded. So good-by! All my good wishes, my dear fellow! Au revoir, cousin! Au revoir, children; be good!"

Then came more kisses and hand-shakes, and the two men disappeared. And when the gentle silence had fallen once more Mathieu and Marianne again found themselves in front of the bright fire, while the children completed the building of their village with a great consumption of paste, and Gervais continued sleeping soundly. Had they been dreaming? Mathieu wondered. What sudden blast from all the shame and suffering of Paris had blown into their far-away quiet? Outside, the country retained its icy rigidity. The fire alone sang the song of hope in life's future revival. And, all at once, after a few minutes' reverie the young man began to speak aloud, as if he had at last just found the answer to all sorts of grave questions which he had long since put to himself.

"But those folks don't love; they are incapable of loving! Money, power, ambition, pleasure—yes, all those things may be theirs, but not love! Even the husbands who deceive their wives do not really love their mistresses. They have never glowed with the supreme desire, the divine desire which is the world's very soul, the brazier of eternal life. And that explains everything. Without desire there is no love, no courage, and no hope. By love alone can one create. And if love be restricted in its mission there is but failure. Yes, they lie and deceive, because they do not love. Then they suffer and lapse into moral and physical degradation. And at the end lies the collapse of our rotten society, which breaks up more and more each day before our eyes. That, then, is the truth I was seeking. It is desire and love that save. Whoever loves and creates is the revolutionary saviour, the maker of men for the new world which will shortly dawn."

Never before had Mathieu so plainly understood that he and his wife were different from others. This now struck him with extraordinary force. Comparisons ensued, and he realized that their simple life, free from the lust of wealth, their contempt for luxury and worldly vanities, all their common participation in toil which made them accept and glorify life and its duties, all that mode of existence of theirs which was at once their joy and their strength, sprang solely from the source of eternal energy: the love with which they glowed. If, later on, victory should remain with them, if they should some day leave behind them work of value and health and happiness, it would be solely because they had possessed the power of love and the courage to love freely, harvesting, in an ever-increasing family, both the means of support and the means of conquest. And this sudden conviction filled Mathieu with such a glow that he leant towards his wife, who sat there deeply moved by what he said, and kissed her ardently upon the lips. It was divine love passing like a flaming blast. But she, though her own eyes were sparkling, laughingly scolded him, saying: "Hush, hush, you will wake Gervais."

Then they remained there hand in hand, pressing each other's fingers amid the silence. Evening was coming on, and at last the children, their village finished, raised cries of rapture at seeing it standing there among bits of wood, which figured trees. And then the softened glances of the parents strayed now through the window towards the crops sleeping beneath the crystalline rime, and now towards their last-born's cradle, where hope was likewise slumbering.

Again did two long months go by. Gervais had just completed his first year, and fine weather, setting in early, was hastening the awaking of the earth. One morning, when Marianne and the children went to join Mathieu on the plateau, they raised shouts of wonder, so completely had the sun transformed the expanse in a single week. It was now all green velvet, a thick endless carpet of sprouting corn, of tender, delicate emerald hue. Never had such a marvellous crop been seen. And thus, as the family walked on through the mild, radiant April morning, amid the country now roused from winter's sleep, and quivering with fresh youth, they all waxed merry at the sight of that healthfulness, that progressing fruitfulness, which promised the fulfilment of all their hopes. And their rapture yet increased when, all at once, they noticed that little Gervais also was awaking to life, acquiring decisive strength. As he struggled in his little carriage and his mother removed him from it, behold! he took his flight, and, staggering, made four steps; then hung to his father's legs with his little fists. A cry of extraordinary delight burst forth.

"Why! he walks, he walks!"

Ah! those first lispings of life, those successive flights of the dear little ones; the first glance, the first smile, the first step—what joy do they not bring to parents' hearts! They are the rapturous etapes of infancy, for which father and mother watch, which they await impatiently, which they hail with exclamations of victory, as if each were a conquest, a fresh triumphal entry into life. The child grows, the child becomes a man. And there is yet the first tooth, forcing its way like a needle-point through rosy gums; and there is also the first stammered word, the "pa-pa," the "mam-ma," which one is quite ready to detect amid the vaguest babble, though it be but the purring of a kitten, the chirping of a bird. Life does its work, and the father and the mother are ever wonderstruck with admiration and emotion at the sight of that efflorescence alike of their flesh and their souls.

"Wait a moment," said Marianne, "he will come back to me. Gervais! Gervais!"

And after a little hesitation, a false start, the child did indeed return, taking the four steps afresh, with arms extended and beating the air as if they were balancing-poles.

"Gervais! Gervais!" called Mathieu in his turn. And the child went back to him; and again and again did they want him to repeat the journey, amid their mirthful cries, so pretty and so funny did they find him.

Then, seeing that the four other children began playing rather roughly with him in their enthusiasm, Marianne carried him away. And once more, on the same spot, on the young grass, did she give him the breast. And again did the stream of milk trickle forth.

Close by that spot, skirting the new field, there passed a crossroad, in rather bad condition, leading to a neighboring village. And on this road a cart suddenly came into sight, jolting amid the ruts, and driven by a peasant—who was so absorbed in his contemplation of the land which Mathieu had cleared, that he would have let his horse climb upon a heap of stones had not a woman who accompanied him abruptly pulled the reins. The horse then stopped, and the man in a jeering voice called out: "So this, then, is your work, Monsieur Froment?"

Mathieu and Marianne thereupon recognized the Lepailleurs, the people of the mill. They were well aware that folks laughed at Janville over the folly of their attempt—that mad idea of growing wheat among the marshes of the plateau. Lepailleur, in particular, distinguished himself by the violent raillery he levelled at this Parisian, a gentleman born, with a good berth, who was so stupid as to make himself a peasant, and fling what money he had to that rascally earth, which would assuredly swallow him and his children and his money all together, without yielding even enough wheat to keep them in bread. And thus the sight of the field had stupefied him. It was a long while since he had passed that way, and he had never thought that the seed would sprout so thickly, for he had repeated a hundred times that nothing would germinate, so rotten was all the land. Although he almost choked with covert anger at seeing his predictions thus falsified, he was unwilling to admit his error, and put on an air of ironical doubt.

"So you think it will grow, eh? Well, one can't say that it hasn't come up. Only one must see if it can stand and ripen." And as Mathieu quietly smiled with hope and confidence, he added, striving to poison his joy: "Ah! when you know the earth you'll find what a hussy she is. I've seen plenty of crops coming on magnificently, and then a storm, a gust of wind, a mere trifle, has reduced them to nothing! But you are young at the trade as yet; you'll get your experience in misfortune."

His wife, who nodded approval on hearing him talk so finely, then addressed herself to Marianne: "Oh! my man doesn't say that to discourage you, madame. But the land you know, is just like children. There are some who live and some who die; some who give one pleasure, and others who kill one with grief. But, all considered, one always bestows more on them than one gets back, and in the end one finds oneself duped. You'll see, you'll see."

Without replying, Marianne, moved by these malicious predictions, gently raised her trustful eyes to Mathieu. And he, though for a moment irritated by all the ignorance, envy, and imbecile ambition which he felt were before him, contented himself with jesting. "That's it, we'll see. When your son Antoine becomes a prefect, and I have twelve peasant daughters ready, I'll invite you to their weddings, for it's your mill that ought to be rebuilt, you know, and provided with a fine engine, so as to grind all the corn of my property yonder, left and right, everywhere!"

The sweep of his arm embraced such a far expanse of ground that the miller, who did not like to be derided, almost lost his temper. He lashed his horse with his whip, and the cart jolted on again through the ruts.

"Wheat in the ear is not wheat in the mill," said he. "Au revoir, and good luck to you, all the same."

"Thanks, au revoir."

Then, while the children still ran about, seeking early primroses among the mosses, Mathieu came and sat down beside Marianne, who, he saw, was quivering. He said nothing to her, for he knew that she possessed sufficient strength and confidence to surmount, unaided, such fears for the future as threats might kindle in her womanly heart. But he simply set himself there, so near her that he touched her, looking and smiling at her the while. And she immediately became calm again and likewise smiled, while little Gervais, whom the words of the malicious could not as yet disturb, nursed more eagerly than ever, with a purr of rapturous satisfaction. The milk was ever trickling, bringing flesh to little limbs which grew stronger day by day, spreading through the earth, filling the whole world, nourishing the life which increased hour by hour. And was not this the answer which faith and hope returned to all threats of death?—the certainty of life's victory, with fine children ever growing in the sunlight, and fine crops ever rising from the soil at each returning spring! To-morrow, yet once again, on the glorious day of harvest, the corn will have ripened, the children will be men!

And it was thus, indeed, three months later, when the Beauchenes and the Seguins, keeping their promise, came—husbands, wives, and children—to spend a Sunday afternoon at Chantebled. The Froments had even prevailed on Morange to be of the party with Reine, in their desire to draw him for a day, at any rate, from the dolorous prostration in which he lived. As soon as all these fine folks had alighted from the train it was decided to go up to the plateau to see the famous fields, for everybody was curious about them, so extravagant and inexplicable did the idea of Mathieu's return to the soil, and transformation into a peasant, seem to them. He laughed gayly, and at least he succeeded in surprising them when he waved his hand towards the great expanse under the broad blue sky, that sea of tall green stalks whose ears were already heavy and undulated at the faintest breeze. That warm splendid afternoon, the far-spreading fields looked like the very triumph of fruitfulness, a growth of germs which the humus amassed through centuries had nourished with prodigious sap, thus producing this first formidable crop, as if to glorify the eternal source of life which sleeps in the earth's flanks. The milk had streamed, and the corn now grew on all sides with overflowing energy, creating health and strength, bespeaking man's labor and the kindliness, the solidarity of the world. It was like a beneficent, nourishing ocean, in which all hunger would be appeased, and in which to-morrow might arise, amid that tide of wheat whose waves were ever carrying good news to the horizon.

True, neither Constance nor Valentine was greatly touched by the sight of the waving wheat, for other ambitions filled their minds: and Morange, though he stared with his vague dim eyes, did not even seem to see it. But Beauchene and Seguin marvelled, for they remembered their visit in the month of January, when the frozen ground had been wrapt in sleep and mystery. They had then guessed nothing, and now they were amazed at this miraculous awakening, this conquering fertility, which had changed a part of the marshy tableland into a field of living wealth. And Seguin, in particular, did not cease praising and admiring, certain as he now felt that he would be paid, and already hoping that Mathieu would soon take a further portion of the estate off his hands.

Then, as soon as they had walked to the old pavilion, now transformed into a little farm, and had seated themselves in the garden, pending dinner-time, the conversation fell upon children. Marianne, as it happened, had weaned Gervais the day before, and he was there among the ladies, still somewhat unsteady on his legs, and yet boldly going from one to the other, careless of his frequent falls on his back or his nose. He was a gay-spirited child who seldom lost his temper, doubtless because his health was so good. His big clear eyes were ever laughing; he offered his little hands in a friendly way, and was very white, very pink, and very sturdy—quite a little man indeed, though but fifteen and a half months old. Constance and Valentine admired him, while Marianne jested and turned him away each time that he greedily put out his little hands towards her.

"No, no, monsieur, it's over now. You will have nothing but soup in future."

"Weaning is such a terrible business," then remarked Constance. "Did he let you sleep last night?"

"Oh! yes, he had good habits, you know; he never troubled me at night. But this morning he was stupefied and began to cry. Still, you see, he is fairly well behaved already. Besides, I never had more trouble than this with the other ones."

Beauchene was standing there, listening, and, as usual, smoking a cigar. Constance appealed to him:

"You are lucky. But you, dear, remember—don't you?—what a life Maurice led us when his nurse went away. For three whole nights we were unable to sleep."

"But just look how your Maurice is playing!" exclaimed Beauchene. "Yet you'll be telling me again that he is ill."

"Oh! I no longer say that, my friend; he is quite well now. Besides, I was never anxious; I know that he is very strong."

A great game of hide-and-seek was going on in the garden, along the paths and even over the flower-beds, among the eight children who were assembled there. Besides the four of the house—Blaise, Denis, Ambroise, and Rose—there were Gaston and Lucie, the two elder children of the Seguins, who had abstained, however, from bringing their other daughter—little Andree. Then, too, both Reine and Maurice were present. And the latter now, indeed, seemed to be all right upon his legs, though his square face with its heavy jaw still remained somewhat pale. His mother watched him running about, and felt so happy and so vain at the realization of her dream that she became quite amiable even towards these poor relatives the Froments, whose retirement into the country seemed to her like an incomprehensible downfall, which forever thrust them out of her social sphere.

"Ah! well," resumed Beauchene, "I've only one boy, but he's a sturdy fellow, I warrant it; isn't he, Mathieu?"

These words had scarcely passed his lips when he must have regretted them. His eyelids quivered and a little chill came over him as his glance met that of his former designer. For in the latter's clear eyes he beheld, as it were, a vision of that other son, Norine's ill-fated child, who had been cast into the unknown. Then there came a pause, and amid the shrill cries of the boys and girls playing at hide-and-seek a number of little shadows flitted through the sunlight: they were the shadows of the poor doomed babes who scarce saw the light before they were carried off from homes and hospitals to be abandoned in corners, and die of cold, and perhaps even of starvation!

Mathieu had been unable to answer a word. And his emotion increased when he noticed Morange huddled up on a chair, and gazing with blurred, tearful eyes at little Gervais, who was laughingly toddling hither and thither. Had a vision come to him also? Had the phantom of his dead wife, shrinking from the duties of motherhood and murdered in a hateful den, risen before him in that sunlit garden, amid all the turbulent mirth of happy, playful children?

"What a pretty girl your daughter Reine is!" said Mathieu, in the hope of drawing the accountant from his haunting remorse. "Just look at her running about!—so girlish still, as if she were not almost old enough to be married."

Morange slowly raised his head and looked at his daughter. And a smile returned to his eyes, still moist with tears. Day by day his adoration increased. As Reine grew up he found her more and more like her mother, and all his thoughts became centred in her. His one yearning was that she might be very beautiful, very happy, very rich. That would be a sign that he was forgiven—that would be the only joy for which he could yet hope. And amid it all there was a vague feeling of jealousy at the thought that a husband would some day take her from him, and that he would remain alone in utter solitude, alone with the phantom of his dead wife.

"Married?" he murmured; "oh! not yet. She is only fourteen."

At this the others expressed surprise: they would have taken her to be quite eighteen, so womanly was her precocious beauty already.

"As a matter of fact," resumed her father, feeling flattered, "she has already been asked in marriage. You know that the Baroness de Lowicz is kind enough to take her out now and then. Well, she told me that an arch-millionnaire had fallen in love with Reine—but he'll have to wait! I shall still be able to keep her to myself for another five or six years at least!"

He no longer wept, but gave a little laugh of egotistical satisfaction, without noticing the chill occasioned by the mention of Seraphine's name; for even Beauchene felt that his sister was hardly a fit companion for a young girl.

Then Marianne, anxious at seeing the conversation drop, began, questioning Valentine, while Gervais at last slyly crept to her knees.

"Why did you not bring your little Andree?" she inquired. "I should have been so pleased to kiss her. And she would have been able to play with this little gentleman, who, you see, does not leave me a moment's peace."

But Seguin did not give his wife time to reply. "Ah! no, indeed!" he exclaimed; "in that case I should not have come. It is quite enough to have to drag the two others about. That fearful child has not ceased deafening us ever since her nurse went away."

Valentine then explained that Andree was not really well behaved. She had been weaned at the beginning of the previous week, and La Catiche, after terrorizing the household for more than a year, had plunged it by her departure into anarchy. Ah! that Catiche, she might compliment herself on all the money she had cost! Sent away almost by force, like a queen who is bound to abdicate at last, she had been loaded with presents for herself and her husband, and her little girl at the village! And now it had been of little use to take a dry-nurse in her place, for Andree did not cease shrieking from morning till night. They had discovered, too, that La Catiche had not only carried off with her a large quantity of linen, but had left the other servants quite spoilt, disorganized, so that a general clearance seemed necessary.

"Oh!" resumed Marianne, as if to smooth things, "when the children are well one can overlook other worries."

"Why, do you imagine that Andree is well?" cried Seguin, giving way to one of his brutal fits. "That Catiche certainly set her right at first, but I don't know what happened afterwards, for now she is simply skin and bones." Then, as his wife wished to protest, he lost his temper. "Do you mean to say that I don't speak the truth? Why, look at our two others yonder: they have papier-mache faces, too! It is evident that you don't look after them enough. You know what a poor opinion Santerre has of them!"

For him Santerre's opinion remained authoritative. However, Valentine contented herself with shrugging her shoulders; while the others, feeling slightly embarrassed, looked at Gaston and Lucie, who amid the romping of their companions, soon lost breath and lagged behind, sulky and distrustful.

"But, my dear friend," said Constance to Valentine, "didn't our good Doctor Boutan tell you that all the trouble came from your not nursing your children yourself? At all events, that was the compliment that he paid me."

At the mention of Boutan a friendly shout arose. Oh! Boutan, Boutan! he was like all other specialists. Seguin sneered; Beauchene jested about the legislature decreeing compulsory nursing by mothers; and only Mathieu and Marianne remained silent.

"Of course, my dear friend, we are not jesting about you," said Constance, turning towards the latter. "Your children are superb, and nobody says the contrary."

Marianne gayly waved her hand, as if to reply that they were free to make fun of her if they pleased. But at this moment she perceived that Gervais, profiting by her inattention, was busy seeking his "paradise lost." And thereupon she set him on the ground: "Ah, no, no, monsieur!" she exclaimed. "I have told you that it is all over. Can't you see that people would laugh at us?"

Then for her and her husband came a delightful moment. He was looking at her with deep emotion. Her duty accomplished, she was now returning to him, for she was spouse as well as mother. Never had he thought her so beautiful, possessed of so strong and so calm a beauty, radiant with the triumph of happy motherhood, as though indeed a spark of something divine had been imparted to her by that river of milk that had streamed from her bosom. A song of glory seemed to sound, glory to the source of life, glory to the true mother, to the one who nourishes, her travail o'er. For there is none other; the rest are imperfect and cowardly, responsible for incalculable disasters. And on seeing her thus, in that glory, amid her vigorous children, like the good goddess of Fruitfulness, Mathieu felt that he adored her. Divine passion swept by—the glow which makes the fields palpitate, which rolls on through the waters, and floats in the wind, begetting millions and millions of existences. And 'twas delightful the ecstasy into which they both sank, forgetfulness of all else, of all those others who were there. They saw them no longer; they felt but one desire, to say that they loved each other, and that the season had come when love blossoms afresh. His lips protruded, she offered hers, and then they kissed.

"Oh! don't disturb yourselves!" cried Beauchene merrily. "Why, what is the matter with you?"

"Would you like us to move away?" added Seguin.

But while Valentine laughed wildly, and Constance put on a prudish air, Morange, in whose voice tears were again rising, spoke these words, fraught with supreme regret: "Ah! you are right!"

Astonished at what they had done, without intention of doing it, Mathieu and Marianne remained for a moment speechless, looking at one another in consternation. And then they burst into a hearty laugh, gayly excusing themselves. To love! to love! to be able to love! Therein lies all health, all will, and all power.

XII

FOUR years went by. And during those four years Mathieu and Marianne had two more children, a daughter at the end of the first year and a son at the expiration of the third. And each time that the family thus increased, the estate at Chantebled was increased also—on the first occasion by fifty more acres of rich soil reclaimed among the marshes of the plateau, and the second time by an extensive expanse of wood and moorland which the springs were beginning to fertilize. It was the resistless conquest of life, it was fruitfulness spreading in the sunlight, it was labor ever incessantly pursuing its work of creation amid obstacles and suffering, making good all losses, and at each succeeding hour setting more energy, more health, and more joy in the veins of the world.

On the day when Mathieu called on Seguin to purchase the wood and moorland, he lunched with Dr. Boutan, whom he found in an execrable humor. The doctor had just heard that three of his former patients had lately passed through the hands of his colleague Gaude, the notorious surgeon to whose clinic at the Marbeuf Hospital society Paris flocked as to a theatre. One of these patients was none other than Euphrasie, old Moineaud's eldest daughter, now married to Auguste Benard, a mason, and already the mother of three children. She had doubtless resumed her usual avocations too soon after the birth of her last child, as often happens in working-class families where the mother is unable to remain idle. At all events, she had for some time been ailing, and had finally been removed to the hospital. Mathieu had for a while employed her young sister Cecile, now seventeen, as a servant in the house at Chantebled, but she was of poor health and had returned to Paris, where, curiously enough, she also entered Doctor Gaude's clinic. And Boutan waxed indignant at the methods which Gaude employed. The two sisters, the married woman and the girl, had been discharged as cured, and so far, this might seem to be the case; but time, in Boutan's opinion, would bring round some terrible revenges.

One curious point of the affair was that Beauchene's dissolute sister, Seraphine, having heard of these so-called cures, which the newspapers had widely extolled, had actually sought out the Benards and the Moineauds to interview Euphrasie and Cecile on the subject. And in the result she likewise had placed herself in Gaude's hands. She certainly was of little account, and, whatever might become of her, the world would be none the poorer by her death. But Boutan pointed out that during the fifteen years that Gaude's theories and practices had prevailed in France, no fewer than half a million women had been treated accordingly, and, in the vast majority of cases, without any such treatment being really necessary. Moreover, Boutan spoke feelingly of the after results of such treatment—comparative health for a few brief years, followed in some cases by a total loss of muscular energy, and in others by insanity of a most violent form; so that the padded cells of the madhouses were filling year by year with the unhappy women who had passed through the hands of Gaude and his colleagues. From a social point of view also the effects were disastrous. They ran counter to all Boutan's own theories, and blasted all his hopes of living to see France again holding a foremost place among the nations of the earth.

"Ah!" said he to Mathieu, "if people were only like you and your good wife!"

During those four years at Chantebled the Froments had been ever founding, creating, increasing, and multiplying, again and again proving victorious in the eternal battle which life wages against death, thanks to that continual increase both of offspring and of fertile land which was like their very existence, their joy and their strength. Desire passed like a gust of flame—desire divine and fruitful, since they possessed the power of love, kindliness, and health. And their energy did the rest—that will of action, that quiet bravery in the presence of the labor that is necessary, the labor that has made and that regulates the earth. But during the first two years they had to struggle incessantly. There were two disastrous winters with snow and ice, and March brought hail-storms and hurricanes which left the crops lying low. Even as Lepailleur had threateningly predicted with a laugh of impotent envy, it seemed as if the earth meant to prove a bad mother, ungrateful to them for their toil, indifferent to their losses. During those two years they only extricated themselves from trouble thanks to the second fifty acres that they purchased from Seguin, to the west of the plateau, a fresh expanse of rich soil which they reclaimed amid the marshes, and which, in spite of frost and hail, yielded a prodigious first harvest. As the estate gradually expanded, it also grew stronger, better able to bear ill-luck.

But Mathieu and Marianne also had great family worries. Their five elder children gave them much anxiety, much fatigue. As with the soil, here again there was a daily battle, endless cares and endless fears. Little Gervais was stricken with fever and narrowly escaped death. Rose, too, one day filled them with the direst alarm, for she fell from a tree in their presence, but fortunately with no worse injury than a sprain. And, on the other hand, they were happy in the three others, Blaise, Denis, and Ambroise, who proved as healthy as young oak-trees. And when Marianne gave birth to her sixth child, on whom they bestowed the gay name of Claire, Mathieu celebrated the new pledge of their affection by further acquisitions.

Then, during the two ensuing years, their battles and sadness and joy all resulted in victory once more. Marianne gave birth, and Mathieu conquered new lands. There was ever much labor, much life expended, and much life realized and harvested. This time it was a question of enlarging the estate on the side of the moorlands, the sandy, gravelly slopes where nothing had grown for centuries. The captured sources of the tableland, directed towards those uncultivated tracts, gradually fertilized them, covered them with increasing vegetation. There were partial failures at first, and defeat even seemed possible, so great was the patient determination which the creative effort demanded. But here, too, the crops at last overflowed, while the intelligent felling of a part of the purchased woods resulted in a large profit, and gave Mathieu an idea of cultivating some of the spacious clearings hitherto overgrown with brambles.

And while the estate spread the children grew. It had been necessary to send the three elder ones—Blaise, Denis, and Ambroise—to a school in Paris, whither they gallantly repaired each day by the first train, returning only in the evening. But the three others, little Gervais and the girls Rose and Claire, were still allowed all freedom in the midst of Nature. Marianne, however, gave birth to a seventh child, amid circumstances which caused Mathieu keen anxiety. For a moment, indeed, he feared that he might lose her. But her healthful temperament triumphed over all, and the child—a boy, named Gregoire—soon drank life and strength from her breast, as from the very source of existence. When Mathieu saw his wife smiling again with that dear little one in her arms, he embraced her passionately, and triumphed once again over every sorrow and every pang. Yet another child, yet more wealth and power, yet an additional force born into the world, another field ready for to-morrow's harvest.

And 'twas ever the great work, the good work, the work of fruitfulness spreading, thanks to the earth and to woman, both victorious over destruction, offering fresh means of subsistence each time a fresh child was born, and loving, willing, battling, toiling even amid suffering, and ever tending to increase of life and increase of hope.

* * * * * *

Then two more years rolled on. And during those two years Mathieu and Marianne had yet another child, a girl. And again, at the same time as the family increased, the estate of Chantebled was increased also—on one side by five-and-seventy acres of woodland stretching over the plateau as far as the fields of Mareuil, and on the other by five-and-seventy acres of sloping moorland, extending to the village of Monval, alongside the railway line. But the principal change was that, as the old hunting-box, the little dilapidated pavilion, no longer offered sufficient accommodation, a whole farmstead had to be erected—stone buildings, and barns, and sheds, and stables, and cowhouses—for farm hands and crops and animals, whose number increased at each enlargement of the estate.

It was the resistless conquest of life; it was fruitfulness spreading in the sunlight; it was labor ever incessantly pursuing its work of creation amid obstacles and suffering, ever making good all losses, and at each succeeding hour setting more energy, more health, and more joy in the veins of the world.

But during those two years, while Chantebled grew, while labor and worry and victory alternated, Mathieu suddenly found himself mixed up in a terribly tragedy. He was obliged to come to Paris at times—more often indeed than he cared—now through his business relations with Seguin, now to sell, now to buy, now to order one thing or another. He often purchased implements and appliances at the Beauchene works, and had thus kept up intercourse with Morange, who once more seemed a changed man. Time had largely healed the wound left by his wife's death, particularly as she seemed to live again in Reine, to whom he was more attached than ever. Reine was no longer a child; she had become a woman. Still her father hoped to keep her with him some years yet, while working with all diligence, saving and saving every penny that he could spare, in order to increase her dowry.

But the inevitable was on the march, for the girl had become the constant companion of Seraphine. The latter, however depraved she might be, had certainly in the first instance entertained no idea of corrupting the child whom she patronized. She had at first taken her solely to such places of amusement as were fit for her years and understanding. But little by little the descent had come. Reine, too, as she grew into a woman, amid the hours of idleness when she was left alone by her father—who, perforce, had to spend his days at the Beauchene works—developed an ardent temperament and a thirst for every frivolous pleasure. And by degrees the once simply petted child became a participator in Seraphine's own reckless and dissolute life.

When the end came, and Reine found herself in dire trouble because of a high State functionary, a married man, a friend of Seraphine's—both women quite lost their heads. Such a blow might kill Morange. Everything must be hidden from him; but how? Thereupon Seraphine devised a plan. She obtained permission for Reine to accompany her on a visit into the country; but while the fond father imagined that his daughter was enjoying herself among society folk at a chateau in the Loiret, she was really hiding in Paris. It was indeed a repetition of her mother's tragic story, with this difference—that Seraphine addressed herself to no vulgar Madame Rouche, but to an assistant of her own surgeon, Gaude, a certain Sarraille, who had a dingy den of a clinic in the Passage Tivoli.

It was a bright day in August, and Mathieu, who had come to Paris to make some purchases at the Beauchene works, was lunching alone with Morange at the latter's flat, when Seraphine arrived there breathless and in consternation. Reine, she said, had been taken ill in the country, and she had brought her back to Paris to her own flat. But it was not thither; it was to Sarraille's den that she drove Morange and Mathieu. And there the frightful scene which had been enacted at La Rouche's at the time of Valerie's death was repeated. Reine, too, was dead—dead like her mother! And Morange, in a first outburst of fury threatened both Seraphine and Sarraille with the scaffold. For half an hour there was no mastering him, but all at once he broke down. To lose his daughter as he had lost his wife, it was too appalling; the blow was too great; he had strength left only to weep. Sarraille, moreover, defended himself; he swore that he had known nothing of the truth, that the deceased had simply come to him for legitimate treatment, and that both she and the Baroness had deceived him. Then Seraphine on her side took hold of Morange's hands, protesting her devotion, her frightful grief, her fear, too, lest the reputation of the poor dear girl should be dragged through the mire, if he (the father) did not keep the terrible secret. She accepted her share of responsibility and blame, admitted that she had been very culpable, and spoke of eternal remorse. But might the terrible truth be buried in the dead girl's grave, might there be none but pure flowers strewn upon that grave, might she who lay therein be regretted by all who had known her, as one snatched away in all innocence of youth and beauty!

And Morange yielded to his weakness of heart, stifling the while with sobs, and scarce repeating that word "Murderers!" which had sprung from his lips so impulsively a little while before. He thought, too, of the scandal, an autopsy, a court of law, the newspapers recounting the crime, his daughter's memory covered with mire, and—No! no! he could have none of that. Whatever Seraphine might be, she had spoken rightly.

Then his powerlessness to avenge his daughter completed his prostration. It was as if he had been beaten almost to the point of death; every one of his limbs was bruised, his head seemed empty, his heart cold and scarce able to beat. And he sank into a sort of second childhood, clasping his hands and stammering plaintively, terrified, and beseeching compassion, like one whose sufferings are too hard to bear.

And when Mathieu sought to console him he muttered: "Oh, it is all over. They have both gone, one after the other, and I alone am guilty. The first time it was I who lied to Reine, telling her that her mother was travelling; and then she in her turn lied to me the other day with that story of an invitation to a chateau in the country. Ah! if eight years ago I had only opposed my poor Valerie's madness, my poor Reine would still be alive to-day.... Yes, it is all my fault; I alone killed them by my weakness. I am their murderer."

Shivering, deathly cold, he went on amid his sobs: "And, wretched fool that I have been, I have killed them through loving them too much. They were so beautiful, and it was so excusable for them to be rich and gay and happy. One after the other they took my heart from me, and I lived only in them and by them and for them. When one had left me, the other became my all in all, and for her, my daughter, I again indulged in the dream of ambition which had originated with her mother. And yet I killed them both, and my mad desire to rise and conquer fortune led me to that twofold crime. Ah! when I think that even this morning I still dared to esteem myself happy at having but that one child, that daughter to cherish! What foolish blasphemy against love and life! She is dead now, dead like her mother, and I am alone, with nobody to love and nobody to love me—neither wife nor daughter, neither desire nor will, but alone—ah! all alone, forever!"

It was the cry of supreme abandonment that he raised, while sinking to the floor strengthless, with a great void within him; and all he could do was to press Mathieu's hands and stammer: "Leave me—tell me nothing. You alone were right. I refused the offers of life, and life has now taken everything from me."

Mathieu, in tears himself, kissed him and lingered yet a few moments longer in that tragic den, feeling more moved than he had ever felt before. And when he went off he left the unhappy Morange in the charge of Seraphine, who now treated him like a little ailing child whose will-power was entirely gone.

And at Chantebled, as time went on, Mathieu and Marianne founded, created, increased, and multiplied. During the two years which elapsed, they again proved victorious in the eternal battle which life wages against death, thanks to that continual increase both of offspring and of fertile land which was like their very existence, their joy, and their strength. Desire passed like a gust of flame—desire divine and fruitful, since they possessed the power of love, kindliness, and health. And their energy did the rest—that will of action, that quiet bravery in the presence of the labor that is necessary, the labor that has made and that regulates the world. They were, however, still in the hard, trying, earlier stage of their work of conquest, and they often wept with grief and anxiety. Many were their cares, too, in transforming the old pavilion into a farm. The outlay was considerable, and at times it seemed as if the crops would never pay the building accounts. Moreover, as the enterprise grew in magnitude, and there came more and more cattle, more and more horses, a larger staff of both men and girls became necessary, to say nothing of additional implements and appliances, and the increase of supervision which left the Froments little rest. Mathieu controlled the agricultural part of the enterprise, ever seeking improved methods for drawing from the earth all the life that slumbered within it. And Marianne watched over the farmyard, the dairy, the poultry, and showed herself a first-class accountant, keeping the books, and receiving and paying money. And thus, in spite of recurring worries, strokes of bad luck and inevitable mistakes, fortune smiled on them athwart all worries and losses, so brave and sensible did they prove in their incessant daily struggle.

Apart, too, from the new buildings, the estate was increased by five-and-seventy acres of woodland, and five-and-seventy acres of sandy sloping soil. Mathieu's battle with those sandy slopes became yet keener, more and more heroic as his field of action expanded; but he ended by conquering, by fertilizing them yet more each season, thanks to the fructifying springs which he directed through them upon every side. And in the same way he cut broad roads through the new woods which he purchased on the plateau, in order to increase the means of communication and carry into effect his idea of using the clearings as pasture for his cattle, pending the time when he might largely devote himself to stock-raising. In this wise, then, the battle went on, and spread incessantly in all directions; and the chances of decisive victory likewise increased, compensation for possible loss on one side being found on another where the harvest proved prodigious.

And, like the estate, the children also grew. Blaise and Denis, the twins, now already fourteen years of age, reaped prize after prize at school, putting their younger brother, Ambroise, slightly to shame, for his quick and ingenious mind was often busy with other matters than his lessons. Gervais, the girls Rose and Claire, as well as the last-born boy, little Gregoire, were yet too young to be trusted alone in Paris, and so they continued growing in the open air of the country, without any great mishap befalling them. And at the end of those two years Marianne gave birth to her eighth child, this time a girl, named Louise; and when Mathieu saw her smiling with the dear little babe in her arms, he embraced her passionately, and triumphed once again over every sorrow and every pang. Yet another child, yet more wealth and power, yet an additional force born into the world, another field ready for to-morrow's harvest.

And 'twas ever the great work, the good work, the work of fruitfulness spreading, thanks to the earth and thanks to woman, both victorious over destruction, offering fresh means of subsistence each time a fresh child was born, and loving, willing, battling, toiling, even amid suffering, and ever tending to increase of life and increase of hope.

* * * * * *

Then two more years rolled on, and during those two years Mathieu and Marianne had yet another child, another daughter, whom they called Madeleine. And once again the estate of Chantebled was increased; this time by all the marshland whose ponds and whose springs remained to be drained and captured on the west of the plateau. The whole of this part of the property was now acquired by the Froments—two hundred acres of land where, hitherto, only water plants had grown, but which now was given over to cultivation, and yielded abundant crops. And the new springs, turned into canals on every side, again carried beneficent life to the sandy slopes, and fertilized them. It was life's resistless conquest; it was fruitfulness spreading in the sunlight; it was labor ever incessantly pursuing its work of creation amid obstacles and suffering, making good all losses, and at each succeeding hour setting more energy, more health, and more joy in the veins of the world.

This time it was Seguin himself who asked Mathieu to purchase a fresh part of the estate, pressing him even to take all that was left of it, woods and moorland—extending over some five hundred acres. Nowadays Seguin was often in need of money, and in order to do business he offered Mathieu lower terms and all sorts of advantages; but the other prudently declined the proposals, keeping steadfastly to his original intentions, which were that he would proceed with his work of creation step by step, in accordance with his exact means and requirements. Moreover, a certain difficulty arose with regard to the purchase of the remaining moors, for enclosed by this land, eastward, near the railway line, were a few acres belonging to Lepailleur, the miller, who had never done anything with them. And so Mathieu preferred to select what remained of the marshy plateau, adding, however, that he would enter into negotiations respecting the moorland later on, when the miller should have consented to sell his enclosure. He knew that, ever since his property had been increasing, Lepailleur had regarded him with the greatest jealousy and hatred, and he did not think it advisable to apply to him personally, certain as he felt that he would fail in his endeavor. Seguin, however, pretended that if he took up the matter he would know how to bring the miller to reason, and even secure the enclosure for next to nothing. And indeed, thinking that he might yet induce Mathieu to purchase all the remaining property, he determined to see Lepailleur and negotiate with him before even signing the deed which was to convey to Mathieu the selected marshland on the plateau.

But the outcome proved as Mathieu had foreseen. Lepailleur asked such a monstrous price for his few acres enclosed within the estate that nothing could be done. When he was approached on the subject by Seguin, he made little secret of the rage he felt at Mathieu's triumph. He had told the young man that he would never succeed in reaping an ear of wheat from that uncultivated expanse, given over to brambles for centuries past; and yet now it was covered with abundant crops! And this had increased the miller's rancor against the soil; he hated it yet more than ever for its harshness to him, a peasant's son, and its kindliness towards that bourgeois, who seemed to have fallen from heaven expressly to revolutionize the region. Thus, in answer to Seguin, he declared with a sneer that since sorcerers had sprung up who were able to make wheat sprout from stones, his patch of ground was now worth its weight in gold. Several years previously, no doubt, he had offered Seguin the enclosure for a trifle; but times had changed, and he now crowed loudly over the other's folly in not entertaining his previous offer.

On the other hand, there seemed little likelihood of his turning the enclosure to account himself, for he was more disgusted than ever with the tilling of the soil. His disposition had been further embittered by the birth of a daughter, whom he would willingly have dispensed with, anxious as he was with respect to his son Antonin, now a lad of twelve, who proved so sharp and quick at school that he was regarded by the folks of Janville as a little prodigy. Mathieu had mortally offended the father and mother by suggesting that Antonin should be sent to an agricultural college—a very sensible suggestion, but one which exasperated them, determined as they were to make him a gentleman.

As Lepailleur would not part with his enclosure on any reasonable terms, Seguin had to content himself for the time with selling Mathieu the selected marshland on the plateau. A deed of conveyance having been prepared, they exchanged signatures. And then, on Seguin's hands, there still remained nearly two hundred and fifty acres of woods in the direction of Lillebonne, together with the moorlands stretching to Vieux-Bourg, in which Lepailleur's few acres were enclosed.

It was on the occasion of the visits which he paid Seguin in reference to these matters that Mathieu became acquainted with the terrible break-up of the other's home. The very rooms of the house in the Avenue d'Antin, particularly the once sumptuous "cabinet," spoke of neglect and abandonment. The desire to cut a figure in society, and to carry the "fad" of the moment to extremes, ever possessed Seguin; and thus he had for a while renounced his pretended artistic tastes for certain new forms of sport—the motor-car craze, and so forth. But his only real passion was horseflesh, and to this he at last returned. A racing stable which he set up quickly helped on his ruin. Women and gaming had been responsible for the loss of part of his large fortune, and now horses were devouring the remainder. It was said, too, that he gambled at the bourse, in the hope of recouping himself for his losses on the turf, and by way, too, of affecting an air of power and influence, for he allowed it to be supposed that he obtained information direct from members of the Government. And as his losses increased and downfall threatened him, all that remained of the bel esprit and moralist, once so prone to discuss literature and social philosophy with Santerre, was an embittered, impotent individual—one who had proclaimed himself a pessimist for fashion's sake, and was now caught in his own trap; having so spoilt his existence that he was now but an artisan of corruption and death.

All was disaster in his home. Celeste the maid had long since been dismissed, and the children were now in the charge of a certain German governess called Nora, who virtually ruled the house. Her position with respect to Seguin was evident to one and all; but then, what of Seguin's wife and Santerre? The worst was, that this horrible life, which seemed to be accepted on either side, was known to the children, or, at all events, to the elder daughter Lucie, yet scarcely in her teens. There had been terrible scenes with this child, who evinced a mystical disposition, and was ever talking of becoming a nun when she grew up. Gaston, her brother, resembled his father; he was brutal in his ways, narrow-minded, supremely egotistical. Very different was the little girl Andree, whom La Catiche had suckled. She had become a pretty child—so affectionate, docile, and gay, that she scarcely complained even of her brother's teasing, almost bullying ways. "What a pity," thought Mathieu, "that so lovable a child should have to grow up amid such surroundings!"

And then his thoughts turned to his own home—to Chantebled. The debts contracted at the outset of his enterprise had at last been paid, and he alone was now the master there, resolved to have no other partners than his wife and children. It was for each of his children that he conquered a fresh expanse of land. That estate would remain their home, their source of nourishment, the tie linking them together, even if they became dispersed through the world in a variety of social positions. And thus how decisive was that growth of the property, the acquisition of that last lot of marshland which allowed the whole plateau to be cultivated! There might now come yet another child, for there would be food for him; wheat would grow to provide him with daily bread. And when the work was finished, when the last springs were captured, and the land had been drained and cleared, how prodigious was the scene at springtide!—with the whole expanse, as far as eye could see, one mass of greenery, full of the promise of harvest. Therein was compensation for every tear, every worry and anxiety of the earlier days of labor.

Meantime Mathieu, amid his creative work, received Marianne's gay and courageous assistance. And she was not merely a skilful helpmate, taking a share in the general management, keeping the accounts, and watching over the home. She remained both a loving and well-loved spouse, and a mother who nursed, reared, and educated her little ones in order to give them some of her own sense and heart. As Boutan remarked, it is not enough for a woman to have a child; she should also possess healthy moral gifts in order that she may bring it up in creditable fashion. Marianne, for her part, made it her pride to obtain everything from her children by dint of gentleness and grace. She was listened to, obeyed, and worshipped by them, because she was so beautiful, so kind, and so greatly beloved. Her task was scarcely easy, since she had eight children already; but in all things she proceeded in a very orderly fashion, utilizing the elder to watch over the younger ones, giving each a little share of loving authority, and extricating herself from every embarrassment by setting truth and justice above one and all. Blaise and Denis, the twins, who were now sixteen, and Ambroise, who was nearly fourteen, did in a measure escape her authority, being largely in their father's hands. But around her she had the five others—from Rose, who was eleven, to Louise, who was two years old; between them, at intervals of a couple of years, coming Gervais, Claire, and Gregoire. And each time that one flew away, as it were, feeling his wings strong enough for flight, there appeared another to nestle beside her. And it was again a daughter, Madeleine, who came at the expiration of those two years. And when Mathieu saw his wife erect and smiling again, with the dear little girl at her breast, he embraced her passionately and triumphed once again over every sorrow and every pang. Yet another child, yet more wealth and power, yet an additional force born into the world, another field ready for to-morrow's harvest.

And 'twas ever the great work, the good work, the work of fruitfulness spreading, thanks to the earth and thanks to woman, both victorious over destruction, offering fresh means of subsistence each time a fresh child was born, and loving, willing, battling, toiling even amid suffering, and ever tending to increase of life and increase of hope.

XIII

TWO more years went by, and during those two years Mathieu and Marianne had yet another daughter; and this time, as the family increased, Chantebled also was increased by all the woodland extending eastward of the plateau to the distant farms of Mareuil and Lillebonne. All the northern part of the property was thus acquired: more than five hundred acres of woods, intersected by clearings which roads soon connected together. And those clearings, transformed into pasture-land, watered by the neighboring springs, enabled Mathieu to treble his live-stock and attempt cattle-raising on a large scale. It was the resistless conquest of life, it was fruitfulness spreading in the sunlight, it was labor ever incessantly pursuing its work of creation amid obstacles and suffering, making good all losses, and at each succeeding hour setting more energy, more health, and more joy in the veins of the world.

Since the Froments had become conquerors, busily founding a little kingdom and building up a substantial fortune in land, the Beauchenes no longer derided them respecting what they had once deemed their extravagant idea in establishing themselves in the country. Astonished and anticipating now the fullest success, they treated them as well-to-do relatives, and occasionally visited them, delighted with the aspect of that big, bustling farm, so full of life and prosperity. It was in the course of these visits that Constance renewed her intercourse with her former schoolfellow, Madame Angelin, the Froments' neighbor. A great change had come over the Angelins; they had ended by purchasing a little house at the end of the village, where they invariably spent the summer, but their buoyant happiness seemed to have departed. They had long desired to remain unburdened by children, and now they eagerly longed to have a child, and none came, though Claire, the wife, was as yet but six-and-thirty. Her husband, the once gay, handsome musketeer, was already turning gray and losing his eyesight—to such a degree, indeed, that he could scarcely see well enough to continue his profession as a fan-painter.

When Madame Angelin went to Paris she often called on Constance, to whom, before long, she confided all her worries. She had been in a doctor's hands for three years, but all to no avail, and now during the last six months she had been consulting a person in the Rue de Miromesnil, a certain Madame Bourdieu, said she.

Constance at first made light of her friend's statements, and in part declined to believe her. But when she found herself alone she felt disquieted by what she had heard. Perhaps she would have treated the matter as mere idle tittle-tattle, if she had not already regretted that she herself had no second child. On the day when the unhappy Morange had lost his only daughter, and had remained stricken down, utterly alone in life, she had experienced a vague feeling of anguish. Since that supreme loss the wretched accountant had been living on in a state of imbecile stupefaction, simply discharging his duties in a mechanical sort of way from force of habit. Scarcely speaking, but showing great gentleness of manner, he lived as one who was stranded, fated to remain forever at Beauchene's works, where his salary had now risen to eight thousand francs a year. It was not known what he did with this amount, which was considerable for a man who led such a narrow regular life, free from expenses and fancies outside his home—that flat which was much too big for him, but which he had, nevertheless, obstinately retained, shutting himself up therein, and leading a most misanthropic life in fierce solitude.

It was his grievous prostration which had at one moment quite upset and affected Constance, so that she had even sobbed with the desolate man—she whose tears flowed so seldom! No doubt a thought that she might have had other children than Maurice came back to her in certain bitter hours of unconscious self-examination, when from the depths of her being, in which feelings of motherliness awakened, there rose vague fear, sudden dread, such as she had never known before.

Yet Maurice, her son, after a delicate youth which had necessitated great care, was now a handsome fellow of nineteen, still somewhat pale, but vigorous in appearance. He had completed his studies in a fairly satisfactory manner, and was already helping his father in the management of the works. And his adoring mother had never set higher hopes upon his head. She already pictured him as the master of that great establishment, whose prosperity he would yet increase, thereby rising to royal wealth and power.

Constance's worship for that only son, to-morrow's hero; increased the more since his father day by day declined in her estimation, till she regarded him in fact with naught but contempt and disgust. It was a logical downfall, which she could not stop, and the successive phases of which she herself fatally precipitated. At the outset she had overlooked his infidelity; then from a spirit of duty and to save him from irreparable folly she had sought to retain him near her; and finally, failing in her endeavor, she had begun to feel loathing and disgust. He was now two-and-forty, he drank too much, he ate too much, he smoked too much. He was growing corpulent and scant of breath, with hanging lips and heavy eyelids; he no longer took care of his person as formerly, but went about slipshod, and indulged in the coarsest pleasantries. But it was more particularly away from his home that he sank into degradation, indulging in the low debauchery which had ever attracted him. Every now and again he disappeared from the house and slept elsewhere; then he concocted such ridiculous falsehoods that he could not be believed, or else did not take the trouble to lie at all. Constance, who felt powerless to influence him, ended by allowing him complete freedom.

The worst was, that the dissolute life he led grievously affected the business. He who had been such a great and energetic worker had lost both mental and bodily vigor; he could no longer plan remunerative strokes of business; he no longer had the strength to undertake important contracts. He lingered in bed in the morning, and remained for three or four days without once going round the works, letting disorder and waste accumulate there, so that his once triumphal stock-takings now year by year showed a falling-off. And what an end it was for that egotist, that enjoyer, so gayly and noisily active, who had always professed that money—capital increased tenfold by the labor of others—was the only desirable source of power, and whom excess of money and excess of enjoyment now cast with appropriate irony to slow ruin, the final paralysis of the impotent.

But a supreme blow was to fall on Constance and fill her with horror of her husband. Some anonymous letters, the low, treacherous revenge of a dismissed servant, apprised her of Beauchene's former intrigue with Norine, that work-girl who had given birth to a boy, spirited away none knew whither. Though ten years had elapsed since that occurrence, Constance could not think of it without a feeling of revolt. Whither had that child been sent? Was he still alive? What ignominious existence was he leading? She was vaguely jealous of the boy. The thought that her husband had two sons and she but one was painful to her, now that all her motherly nature was aroused. But she devoted herself yet more ardently to her fondly loved Maurice; she made a demi-god of him, and for his sake even sacrificed her just rancor. She indeed came to the conclusion that he must not suffer from his father's indignity, and so it was for him that, with extraordinary strength of will, she ever preserved a proud demeanor, feigning that she was ignorant of everything, never addressing a reproach to her husband, but remaining, in the presence of others, the same respectful wife as formerly. And even when they were alone together she kept silence and avoided explanations and quarrels. Never even thinking of the possibility of revenge, she seemed, in the presence of her husband's profligacy, to attach herself more firmly to her home, clinging to her son, and protected by him from thought of evil as much as by her own sternness of heart and principles. And thus sorely wounded, full of repugnance but hiding her contempt, she awaited the triumph of that son who would purify and save the house, feeling the greatest faith in his strength, and quite surprised and anxious whenever, all at once, without reasonable cause, a little quiver from the unknown brought her a chill, affecting her heart as with remorse for some long-past fault which she no longer remembered.

That little quiver came back while she listened to all that Madame Angelin confided to her. And at last she became quite interested in her friend's case, and offered to accompany her some day when she might be calling on Madame Bourdieu. In the end they arranged to meet one Thursday afternoon for the purpose of going together to the Rue de Miromesnil.

As it happened, that same Thursday, about two o'clock, Mathieu, who had come to Paris to see about a threshing-machine at Beauchene's works, was quietly walking along the Rue La Boetie when he met Cecile Moineaud, who was carrying a little parcel carefully tied round with string. She was now nearly twenty-one, but had remained slim, pale, and weak, since passing through the hands of Dr. Gaude. Mathieu had taken a great liking to her during the few months she had spent as a servant at Chantebled; and later, knowing what had befallen her at the hospital, he had regarded her with deep compassion. He had busied himself to find her easy work, and a friend of his had given her some cardboard boxes to paste together, the only employment that did not tire her thin weak hands. So childish had she remained that one would have taken her for a young girl suddenly arrested in her growth. Yet her slender fingers were skilful, and she contrived to earn some two francs a day in making the little boxes. And as she suffered greatly at her parents' home, tortured by her brutal surroundings there, and robbed of her earnings week by week, her dream was to secure a home of her own, to find a little money that would enable her to install herself in a room where she might live in peace and quietness. It had occurred to Mathieu to give her a pleasant surprise some day by supplying her with the small sum she needed.

"Where are you running so fast?" he gayly asked her.

The meeting seemed to take her aback, and she answered in an evasive, embarrassed way: "I am going to the Rue de Miromesnil for a call I have to make."

Noticing his kindly air, however, she soon told him the truth. Her sister, that poor creature Norine, had just given birth to another child, her third, at Madame Bourdieu's establishment. A gentleman who had been protecting her had cast her adrift, and she had been obliged to sell her few sticks of furniture in order to get together a couple of hundred francs, and thus secure admittance to Madame Bourdieu's house, for the mere idea of having to go to a hospital terrified her. Whenever she might be able to get about again, however, she would find herself in the streets, with the task of beginning life anew at one-and-thirty years of age.

"She never behaved unkindly to me," resumed Cecile. "I pity her with all my heart, and I have been to see her. I am taking her a little chocolate now. Ah! if you only saw her little boy! he is a perfect love!"

The poor girl's eyes shone, and her thin, pale face became radiant with a smile. The instinct of maternity remained keen within her, though she could never be a mother.

"What a pity it is," she continued, "that Norine is so obstinately determined on getting rid of the baby, just as she got rid of the others. This little fellow, it's true, cries so much that she has had to give him the breast. But it's only for the time being; she says that she can't see him starve while he remains near her. But it quite upsets me to think that one can get rid of one's children; I had an idea of arranging things very differently. You know that I want to leave my parents, don't you? Well, I thought of renting a room and of taking my sister and her little boy with me. I would show Norine how to cut out and paste up those little boxes, and we might live, all three, happily together."

"And won't she consent?" asked Mathieu.

"Oh! she told me that I was mad; and there's some truth in that, for I have no money even to rent a room. Ah! if you only knew how it distresses me."

Mathieu concealed his emotion, and resumed in his quiet way: "Well, there are rooms to be rented. And you would find a friend to help you. Only I am much afraid that you will never persuade your sister to keep her child, for I fancy that I know her ideas on that subject. A miracle would be needed to change them."

Quick-witted as she was, Cecile darted a glance at him. The friend he spoke of was himself. Good heavens would her dream come true? She ended by bravely saying: "Listen, monsieur; you are so kind that you really ought to do me a last favor. It would be to come with me and see Norine at once. You alone can talk to her and prevail on her perhaps. But let us walk slowly, for I am stifling, I feel so happy."

Mathieu, deeply touched, walked on beside her. They turned the corner of the Rue de Miromesnil, and his own heart began to beat as they climbed the stairs of Madame Bourdieu's establishment. Ten years ago! Was it possible? He recalled everything that he had seen and heard in that house. And it all seemed to date from yesterday, for the building had not changed; indeed, he fancied that he could recognize the very grease-spots on the doors on the various landings.

Following Cecile to Norine's room, he found Norine up and dressed, but seated at the side of her bed and nursing her babe.

"What! is it you, monsieur?" she exclaimed, as soon as she recognized her visitor. "It is very kind of Cecile to have brought you. Ah! mon Dieu what a lot of things have happened since I last saw you! We are none of us any the younger."

He scrutinized her, and she did indeed seem to him much aged. She was one of those blondes who fade rapidly after their thirtieth year. Still, if her face had become pasty and wore a weary expression, she remained pleasant-looking, and seemed as heedless, as careless as ever.

Cecile wished to bring matters to the point at once. "Here is your chocolate," she began. "I met Monsieur Froment in the street, and he is so kind and takes so much interest in me that he is willing to help me in carrying out my idea of renting a room where you might live and work with me. So I begged him to come up here and talk with you, and prevail on you to keep that poor little fellow of yours. You see, I don't want to take you unawares; I warn you in advance."

Norine started with emotion, and began to protest. "What is all this again?" said she. "No, no, I don't want to be worried. I'm too unhappy as it is."

But Mathieu immediately intervened, and made her understand that if she reverted to the life she had been leading she would simply sink lower and lower. She herself had no illusions on that point; she spoke bitterly enough of her experiences. Her youth had flown, her good-looks were departing, and the prospect seemed hopeless enough. But then what could she do? When one had fallen into the mire one had to stay there.

"Ah! yes, ah! yes," said she; "I've had enough of that infernal life which some folks think so amusing. But it's like a stone round my neck; I can't get rid of it. I shall have to keep to it till I'm picked up in some corner and carried off to die at a hospital."

She spoke these words with the fierce energy of one who all at once clearly perceives the fate which she cannot escape. Then she glanced at her infant, who was still nursing. "He had better go his way and I'll go mine," she added. "Then we shan't inconvenience one another."

This time her voice softened, and an expression of infinite tenderness passed over her desolate face. And Mathieu, in astonishment, divining the new emotion that possessed her, though she did not express it, made haste to rejoin: "To let him go his way would be the shortest way to kill him, now that you have begun to give him the breast."

"Is it my fault?" she angrily exclaimed. "I didn't want to give it to him; you know what my ideas were. And I flew into a passion and almost fought Madame Bourdieu when she put him in my arms. But then how could I hold out? He cried so dreadfully with hunger, poor little mite, and seemed to suffer so much, that I was weak enough to let him nurse just a little. I didn't intend to repeat it, but the next day he cried again, and so I had to continue, worse luck for me! There was no pity shown me; I've been made a hundred times more unhappy than I should have been, for, of course, I shall soon have to get rid of him as I got rid of the others."

Tears appeared in her eyes. It was the oft-recurring story of the girl-mother who is prevailed upon to nurse her child for a few days, in the hope that she will grow attached to the babe and be unable to part from it. The chief object in view is to save the child, because its best nurse is its natural nurse, the mother. And Norine, instinctively divining the trap set for her, had struggled to escape it, and repeated, sensibly enough, that one ought not to begin such a task when one meant to throw it up in a few days' time. As soon as she yielded she was certain to be caught; her egotism was bound to be vanquished by the wave of pity, love, and hope that would sweep through her heart. The poor, pale, puny infant had weighed but little the first time he took the breast. But every morning afterwards he had been weighed afresh, and on the wall at the foot of the bed had been hung the diagram indicating the daily difference of weight. At first Norine had taken little interest in the matter, but as the line gradually ascended, plainly indicating how much the child was profiting, she gave it more and more attention. All at once, as the result of an indisposition, the line had dipped down; and since then she had always feverishly awaited the weighing, eager to see if the line would once more ascend. Then, a continuous rise having set in, she laughed with delight. That little line, which ever ascended, told her that her child was saved, and that all the weight and strength he acquired was derived from her—from her milk, her blood, her flesh. She was completing the appointed work; and motherliness, at last awakened within her, was blossoming in a florescence of love.

"If you want to kill him," continued Mathieu, "you need only take him from your breast. See how eagerly the poor little fellow is nursing!"

This was indeed true. And Norine burst into big sobs: "Mon Dieu! you are beginning to torture me again. Do you think that I shall take any pleasure in getting rid of him now? You force me to say things which make me weep at night when I think of them. I shall feel as if my very vitals were being torn out when this child is taken from me! There, are you both pleased that you have made me say it? But what good does it do to put me in such a state, since nobody can remedy things, and he must needs go to the foundlings, while I return to the gutter, to wait for the broom that's to sweep me away?"

But Cecile, who likewise was weeping, kissed and kissed the child, and again reverted to her dream, explaining how happy they would be, all three of them, in a nice room, which she pictured full of endless joys, like some Paradise. It was by no means difficult to cut out and paste up the little boxes. As soon as Norine should know the work, she, who was strong, might perhaps earn three francs a day at it. And five francs a day between them, would not that mean fortune, the rearing of the child, and all evil things forgotten, at an end? Norine, more weary than ever, gave way at last, and ceased refusing.

"You daze me," she said. "I don't know. Do as you like—but certainly it will be great happiness to keep this dear little fellow with me."

Cecile, enraptured, clapped her hands; while Mathieu, who was greatly moved, gave utterance to these deeply significant words: "You have saved him, and now he saves you."

Then Norine at last smiled. She felt happy now; a great weight had been lifted from her heart. And carrying her child in her arms she insisted on accompanying her sister and their friend to the first floor.

During the last half-hour Constance and Madame Angelin had been deep in consultation with Madame Bourdieu. The former had not given her name, but had simply played the part of an obliging friend accompanying another on an occasion of some delicacy. Madame Bourdieu, with the keen scent characteristic of her profession, divined a possible customer in that inquisitive lady who put such strange questions to her. However, a rather painful scene took place, for realizing that she could not forever deceive Madame Angelin with false hopes, Madame Bourdieu decided to tell the truth—her case was hopeless. Constance, however, at last made a sign to entreat her to continue deceiving her friend, if only for charity's sake. The other, therefore, while conducting her visitors to the landing, spoke a few hopeful words to Madame Angelin: "After all, dear madame," said she, "one must never despair. I did wrong to speak as I did just now. I may yet be mistaken. Come back to see me again."

At this moment Mathieu and Cecile were still on the landing in conversation with Norine, whose infant had fallen asleep in her arms. Constance and Madame Angelin were so surprised at finding the farmer of Chantebled in the company of the two young women that they pretended they did not see him. All at once, however, Constance, with the help of memory, recognized Norine, the more readily perhaps as she was now aware that Mathieu had, ten years previously, acted as her husband's intermediary. And a feeling of revolt and the wildest fancies instantly arose within her. What was Mathieu doing in that house? whose child was it that the young woman carried in her arms? At that moment the other child seemed to peer forth from the past; she saw it in swaddling clothes, like the infant there; indeed, she almost confounded one with the other, and imagined that it was indeed her husband's illegitimate son that was sleeping in his mother's arms before her. Then all the satisfaction she had derived from what she had heard Madame Bourdieu say departed, and she went off furious and ashamed, as if soiled and threatened by all the vague abominations which she had for some time felt around her, without knowing, however, whence came the little chill which made her shudder as with dread.

As for Mathieu, he saw that neither Norine nor Cecile had recognized Madame Beauchene under her veil, and so he quietly continued explaining to the former that he would take steps to secure for her from the Assistance Publique—the official organization for the relief of the poor—a cradle and a supply of baby linen, as well as immediate pecuniary succor, since she undertook to keep and nurse her child. Afterwards he would obtain for her an allowance of thirty francs a month for at least one year. This would greatly help the sisters, particularly in the earlier stages of their life together in the room which they had settled to rent. When Mathieu added that he would take upon himself the preliminary outlay of a little furniture and so forth, Norine insisted upon kissing him.

"Oh! it is with a good heart," said she. "It does one good to meet a man like you. And come, kiss my poor little fellow, too; it will bring him good luck."

On reaching the Rue La Boetie it occurred to Mathieu, who was bound for the Beauchene works, to take a cab and let Cecile alight near her parents' home, since it was in the neighborhood of the factory. But she explained to him that she wished, first of all, to call upon her sister Euphrasie in the Rue Caroline. This street was in the same direction, and so Mathieu made her get into the cab, telling her that he would set her down at her sister's door.

She was so amazed, so happy at seeing her dream at last on the point of realization, that as she sat in the cab by the side of Mathieu she did not know how to thank him. Her eyes were quite moist, all smiles and tears.

"You must not think me a bad daughter, monsieur," said she, "because I'm so pleased to leave home. Papa still works as much as he is able, though he does not get much reward for it at the factory. And mamma does all she can at home, though she hasn't much strength left her nowadays. Since Victor came back from the army, he has married and has children of his own, and I'm even afraid that he'll have more than he can provide for, as, while he was in the army, he seems to have lost all taste for work. But the sharpest of the family is that lazy-bones Irma, my younger sister, who's so pretty and so delicate-looking, perhaps because she's always ill. As you may remember, mamma used to fear that Irma might turn out badly like Norine. Well, not at all! Indeed, she's the only one of us who is likely to do well, for she's going to marry a clerk in the post-office. And so the only ones left at home are myself and Alfred. Oh! he is a perfect bandit! That is the plain truth. He committed a theft the other day, and one had no end of trouble to get him out of the hands of the police commissary. But all the same, mamma has a weakness for him, and lets him take all my earnings. Yes, indeed, I've had quite enough of him, especially as he is always terrifying me out of my wits, threatening to beat and even kill me, though he well knows that ever since my illness the slightest noise throws me into a faint. And as, all considered, neither papa nor mamma needs me, it's quite excusable, isn't it, that I should prefer living quietly alone. It is my right, is it not, monsieur?"

She went on to speak of her sister Euphrasie, who had fallen into a most wretched condition, said she, ever since passing through Dr. Gaude's hands. Her home had virtually been broken up, she had become decrepit, a mere bundle of rags, unable even to handle a broom. It made one tremble to see her. Then, after a pause, just as the cab was reaching the Rue Caroline, the girl continued: "Will you come up to see her? You might say a few kind words to her. It would please me, for I'm going on a rather unpleasant errand. I thought that she would have strength enough to make some little boxes like me, and thus earn a few pence for herself; but she has kept the work I gave her more than a month now, and if she really cannot do it I must take it back."

Mathieu consented, and in the room upstairs he beheld one of the most frightful, poignant spectacles that he had ever witnessed. In the centre of that one room where the family slept and ate, Euphrasie sat on a straw-bottomed chair; and although she was barely thirty years of age, one might have taken her for a little old woman of fifty; so thin and so withered did she look that she resembled one of those fruits, suddenly deprived of sap, that dry up on the tree. Her teeth had fallen, and of her hair she only retained a few white locks. But the more characteristic mark of this mature senility was a wonderful loss of muscular strength, an almost complete disappearance of will, energy, and power of action, so that she now spent whole days, idle, stupefied, without courage even to raise a finger.

When Cecile told her that her visitor was M. Froment, the former chief designer at the Beauchene works, she did not even seem to recognize him; she no longer took interest in anything. And when her sister spoke of the object of her visit, asking for the work with which she had entrusted her, she answered with a gesture of utter weariness: "Oh! what can you expect! It takes me too long to stick all those little bits of cardboard together. I can't do it; it throws me into a perspiration."

Then a stout woman, who was cutting some bread and butter for the three children, intervened with an air of quiet authority: "You ought to take those materials away, Mademoiselle Cecile. She's incapable of doing anything with them. They will end by getting dirty, and then your people won't take them back."

This stout woman was a certain Madame Joseph, a widow of forty and a charwoman by calling, whom Benard, the husband, had at first engaged to come two hours every morning to attend to the housework, his wife not having strength enough to put on a child's shoes or to set a pot on the fire. At first Euphrasie had offered furious resistance to this intrusion of a stranger, but, her physical decline progressing, she had been obliged to yield. And then things had gone from bad to worse, till Madame Joseph became supreme in the household. Between times there had been terrible scenes over it all; but the wretched Euphrasie, stammering and shivering, had at last resigned herself to the position, like some little old woman sunk into second childhood and already cut off from the world. That Benard and Madame Joseph were not bad-hearted in reality was shown by the fact that although Euphrasie was now but an useless encumbrance, they kept her with them, instead of flinging her into the streets as others would have done.

"Why, there you are again in the middle of the room!" suddenly exclaimed the fat woman, who each time that she went hither and thither found it necessary to avoid the other's chair. "How funny it is that you can never put yourself in a corner! Auguste will be coming in for his four o'clock snack in a moment, and he won't be at all pleased if he doesn't find his cheese and his glass of wine on the table."

Without replying, Euphrasie nervously staggered to her feet, and with the greatest trouble dragged her chair towards the table. Then she sat down again limp and very weary.

Just as Madame Joseph was bringing the cheese, Benard, whose workshop was near by, made his appearance. He was still a full-bodied, jovial fellow, and began to jest with his sister-in-law while showing great politeness towards Mathieu, whom he thanked for taking interest in his unhappy wife's condition. "Mon Dieu, monsieur," said he, "it isn't her fault; it is all due to those rascally doctors at the hospital. For a year or so one might have thought her cured, but you see what has now become of her. Ah! it ought not to be allowed! You are no doubt aware that they treated Cecile just the same. And there was another, too, a baroness, whom you must know. She called here the other day to see Euphrasie, and, upon my word, I didn't recognize her. She used to be such a fine woman, and now she looks a hundred years old. Yes, yes, I say that the doctors ought to be sent to prison."

He was about to sit down to table when he stumbled against Euphrasie's chair. She sat watching him with an anxious, semi-stupefied expression. "There you are, in my way as usual!" said he; "one is always tumbling up against you. Come, make a little room, do."

He did not seem to be a very terrible customer, but at the sound of his voice she began to tremble, full of childish fear, as if she were threatened with a thrashing. And this time she found strength enough to drag her chair as far as a dark closet, the door of which was open. She there sought refuge, ensconcing herself in the gloom, amid which one could vaguely espy her shrunken, wrinkled face, which suggested that of some very old great-grandmother, who was taking years and years to die.

Mathieu's heart contracted as he observed that senile terror, that shivering obedience on the part of a woman whose harsh, dry, aggressively quarrelsome disposition he so well remembered. Industrious, self-willed, full of life as she had once been, she was now but a limp human rag. And yet her case was recorded in medical annals as one of the renowned Gaude's great miracles of cure. Ah! how truly had Boutan spoken in saying that people ought to wait to see the real results of those victorious operations which were sapping the vitality of France.

Cecile, however, with eager affection, kissed the three children, who somehow continued to grow up in that wrecked household. Tears came to her eyes, and directly Madame Joseph had given her back the work-materials entrusted to Euphrasie she hurried Mathieu away. And, as they reached the street, she said: "Thank you, Monsieur Froment; I can go home on foot now—. How frightful, eh? Ah! as I told you, we shall be in Paradise, Norine and I, in the quiet room which you have so kindly promised to rent for us."

On reaching Beauchene's establishment Mathieu immediately repaired to the workshops, but he could obtain no precise information respecting his threshing-machine, though he had ordered it several months previously. He was told that the master's son, Monsieur Maurice, had gone out on business, and that nobody could give him an answer, particularly as the master himself had not put in an appearance at the works that week. He learnt, however, that Beauchene had returned from a journey that very day, and must be indoors with his wife. Accordingly, he resolved to call at the house, less on account of the threshing-machine than to decide a matter of great interest to him, that of the entry of one of his twin sons, Blaise, into the establishment.

This big fellow had lately left college, and although he had only completed his nineteenth year, he was on the point of marrying a portionless young girl, Charlotte Desvignes, for whom he had conceived a romantic attachment ever since childhood. His parents, seeing in this match a renewal of their own former loving improvidence, had felt moved, and unwilling to drive the lad to despair. But, if he was to marry, some employment must first be found for him. Fortunately this could be managed. While Denis, the other of the twins, entered a technical school, Beauchene, by way of showing his esteem for the increasing fortune of his good cousins, as he now called the Froments, cordially offered to give Blaise a situation at his establishment.

On being ushered into Constance's little yellow salon, Mathieu found her taking a cup of tea with Madame Angelin, who had come back with her from the Rue de Miromesnil. Beauchene's unexpected arrival on the scene had disagreeably interrupted their private converse. He had returned from one of the debauches in which he so frequently indulged under the pretext of making a short business journey, and, still slightly intoxicated, with feverish, sunken eyes and clammy tongue, he was wearying the two women with his impudent, noisy falsehoods.

"Ah! my dear fellow!" he exclaimed on seeing Mathieu, "I was just telling the ladies of my return from Amiens—. What wonderful duck pates they have there!"

Then, on Mathieu speaking to him of Blaise, he launched out into protestations of friendship. It was understood, the young fellow need only present himself at the works, and in the first instance he should be put with Morange, in order that he might learn something of the business mechanism of the establishment. Thus talking, Beauchene puffed and coughed and spat, exhaling meantime the odor of tobacco, alcohol, and musk, which he always brought back from his "sprees," while his wife smiled affectionately before the others as was her wont, but directed at him glances full of despair and disgust whenever Madame Angelin turned her head.

As Beauchene continued talking too much, owning for instance that he did not know how far the thresher might be from completion, Mathieu noticed Constance listening anxiously. The idea of Blaise entering the establishment had already rendered her grave, and now her husband's apparent ignorance of important business matters distressed her. Besides, the thought of Norine was reviving in her mind; she remembered the girl's child, and almost feared some fresh understanding between Beauchene and Mathieu. All at once, however, she gave a cry of great relief: "Ah! here is Maurice."

Her son was entering the room—her son, the one and only god on whom she now set her affection and pride, the crown-prince who to-morrow would become king, who would save the kingdom from perdition, and who would exalt her on his right hand in a blaze of glory. She deemed him handsome, tall, strong, and as invincible in his nineteenth year as all the knights of the old legends. When he explained that he had just profitably compromised a worrying transaction in which his father had rashly embarked, she pictured him repairing disasters and achieving victories. And she triumphed more than ever on hearing him promise that the threshing-machine should be ready before the end of that same week.

"You must take a cup of tea, my dear," she exclaimed. "It would do you good; you worry your mind too much."

Maurice accepted the offer, and gayly replied: "Oh! do you know, an omnibus almost crushed me just now in the Rue de Rivoli!"

At this his mother turned livid, and the cup which she held escaped from her hand. Ah! God, was her happiness at the mercy of an accident? Then once again the fearful threat sped by, that icy gust which came she knew not whence, but which ever chilled her to her bones.

"Why, you stupid," said Beauchene, laughing, "it was he who crushed the omnibus, since here he is, telling you the tale. Ah! my poor Maurice, your mother is really ridiculous. I know how strong you are, and I'm quite at ease about you."

That day Madame Angelin returned to Janville with Mathieu. They found themselves alone in the railway carriage, and all at once, without any apparent cause, tears started from the young woman's eyes. At this she apologized, and murmured as if in a dream: "To have a child, to rear him, and then lose him—ah! certainly one's grief must then be poignant. Yet one has had him with one; he has grown up, and one has known for years all the joy of having him at one's side. But when one never has a child—never, never—ah! come rather suffering and mourning than such a void as that!"

And meantime, at Chantebled, Mathieu and Marianne founded, created, increased, and multiplied, again proving victorious in the eternal battle which life wages against death, thanks to that continual increase both of offspring and of fertile land, which was like their very existence, their joy and their strength. Desire passed like a gust of flame, desire divine and fruitful, since they possessed the power of love, of kindliness, and health. And their energy did the rest—that will of action, that quiet bravery in the presence of the labor that is necessary, the labor that has made and that regulates the world. Yet even during those two years it was not without constant struggling that they achieved victory. True, victory was becoming more and more certain as the estate expanded. The petty worries of earlier days had disappeared, and the chief question was now one of ruling sensibly and equitably. All the land had been purchased northward on the plateau, from the farm of Mareuil to the farm of Lillebonne; there was not a copse that did not belong to the Froments, and thus beside the surging sea of corn there rose a royal park of centenarian trees. Apart from the question of felling portions of the wood for timber, Mathieu was not disposed to retain the remainder for mere beauty's sake; and accordingly avenues were devised connecting the broad clearings, and cattle were then turned into this part of the property. The ark of life, increased by hundreds of animals, expanded, burst through the great trees. There was a fresh growth of fruitfulness: more and more cattle-sheds had to be built, sheepcotes had to be created, and manure came in loads and loads to endow the land with wondrous fertility. And now yet other children might come, for floods of milk poured forth, and there were herds and flocks to clothe and nourish them. Beside the ripening crops the woods waved their greenery, quivering with the eternal seeds that germinated in their shade, under the dazzling sun. And only one more stretch of land, the sandy slopes on the east, remained to be conquered in order that the kingdom might be complete. Assuredly this compensated one for all former tears, for all the bitter anxiety of the first years of toil.

Then, while Mathieu completed his conquest, there came to Marianne during those two years the joy of marrying one of her children even while she was again enceinte, for, like our good mother the earth, she also remained fruitful. 'Twas a delightful fete, full of infinite hope, that wedding of Blaise and Charlotte; he a strong young fellow of nineteen, she an adorable girl of eighteen summers, each loving the other with a love of nosegay freshness that had budded, even in childhood's hour, along the flowery paths of Chantebled. The eight other children were all there: first the big brothers, Denis, Ambroise, and Gervais, who were now finishing their studies; next Rose, the eldest girl, now fourteen, who promised to become a woman of healthy beauty and happy gayety of disposition; then Claire, who was still a child, and Gregoire, who was only just going to college; without counting the very little ones, Louise and Madeleine.

Folks came out of curiosity from the surrounding villages to see the gay troop conduct their big brother to the municipal offices. It was a marvellous cortege, flowery like springtide, full of felicity, which moved every heart. Often, moreover, on ordinary holidays, when for the sake of an outing the family repaired in a band to some village market, there was such a gallop in traps, on horseback, and on bicycles, while the girls' hair streamed in the wind and loud laughter rang out from one and all, that people would stop to watch the charming cavalcade. "Here are the troops passing!" folks would jestingly exclaim, implying that nothing could resist those Froments, that the whole countryside was theirs by right of conquest, since every two years their number increased. And this time, at the expiration of those last two years it was again to a daughter, Marguerite, that Marianne gave birth. For a while she remained in a feverish condition, and there were fears, too, that she might be unable to nurse her infant as she had done all the others. Thus, when Mathieu saw her erect once more and smiling, with her dear little Marguerite at her breast, he embraced her passionately, and triumphed once again over every sorrow and every pang. Yet another child, yet more wealth and power, yet an additional force born into the world, another field ready for to-morrow's harvest!

And 'twas ever the great work, the good work, the work of fruitfulness spreading, thanks to the earth and thanks to woman, both victorious over destruction, offering fresh means of subsistence each time a fresh child was born, and loving, willing, battling, toiling, even amid suffering, and ever tending to increase of life and increase of hope.

XIV

TWO more years went by, and during those two years yet another child, this time a boy, was born to Mathieu and Marianne. And on this occasion, at the same time as the family increased, the estate of Chantebled was increased also by all the heatherland extending to the east as far as the village of Vieux-Bourg. And this time the last lot was purchased, the conquest of the estate was complete. The 1250 acres of uncultivated soil which Seguin's father, the old army contractor, had formerly purchased in view of erecting a palatial residence there were now, thanks to unremitting effort, becoming fruitful from end to end. The enclosure belonging to the Lepailleurs, who stubbornly refused to sell it, alone set a strip of dry, stony, desolate land amid the broad green plain. And it was all life's resistless conquest; it was fruitfulness spreading in the sunlight; it was labor ever incessantly pursuing its work of creation amid obstacles and suffering, making good all losses, and at each succeeding hour setting more energy, more health, and more joy in the veins of the world.

Blaise, now the father of a little girl some ten months old, had been residing at the Beauchene works since the previous winter. He occupied the little pavilion where his mother had long previously given birth to his brother Gervais. His wife Charlotte had conquered the Beauchenes by her fair grace, her charming, bouquet-like freshness, to such a point, indeed, that even Constance had desired to have her near her. The truth was that Madame Desvignes had made adorable creatures of her two daughters, Charlotte and Marthe. At the death of her husband, a stockbroker's confidential clerk, who had died, leaving her at thirty years of age in very indifferent circumstances, she had gathered her scanty means together and withdrawn to Janville, her native place, where she had entirely devoted herself to her daughters' education. Knowing that they would be almost portionless, she had brought them up extremely well, in the hope that this might help to find them husbands, and it so chanced that she proved successful.

Affectionate intercourse sprang up between her and the Froments; the children played together; and it was, indeed, from those first games that came the love-romance which was to end in the marriage of Blaise and Charlotte. By the time the latter reached her eighteenth birthday and married, Marthe her sister, then fourteen years old, had become the inseparable companion of Rose Froment, who was of the same age and as pretty as herself, though dark instead of fair. Charlotte, who had a more delicate, and perhaps a weaker, nature than her gay, sensible sister, had become passionately fond of drawing and painting, which she had learnt at first simply by way of accomplishment. She had ended, however, by painting miniatures very prettily, and, as her mother remarked, her proficiency might prove a resource to her in the event of misfortune. Certainly there was some of the bourgeois respect and esteem for a good education in the fairly cordial greeting which Constance extended to Charlotte, who had painted a miniature portrait of her, a good though a flattering likeness.

On the other hand, Blaise, who was endowed with the creative fire of the Froments, ever striving, ever hard at work, became a valuable assistant to Maurice as soon as a brief stay in Morange's office had made him familiar with the business of the firm. Indeed it was Maurice who, finding that his father seconded him less and less, had insisted on Blaise and Charlotte installing themselves in the little pavilion, in order that the former's services might at all times be available. And Constance, ever on her knees before her son, could in this matter only obey respectfully. She evinced boundless faith in the vastness of Maurice's intellect. His studies had proved fairly satisfactory; if he was somewhat slow and heavy, and had frequently been delayed by youthful illnesses, he had, nevertheless, diligently plodded on. As he was far from talkative, his mother gave out that he was a reflective, concentrated genius, who would astonish the world by actions, not by speech. Before he was even fifteen she said of him, in her adoring way: "Oh! he has a great mind." And, naturally enough, she only acknowledged Blaise to be a necessary lieutenant, a humble assistant, one whose hand would execute the sapient young master's orders. The latter, to her thinking, was now so strong and so handsome, and he was so quickly reviving the business compromised by the father's slow collapse, that surely he must be on the high-road to prodigious wealth, to that final great triumph, indeed, of which she had been dreaming so proudly, so egotistically, for so many years.

But all at once the thunderbolt fell. It was not without some hesitation that Blaise had agreed to make the little pavilion his home, for he knew that there was an idea of reducing him to the status of a mere piece of machinery. But at the birth of his little girl he bravely decided to accept the proposal, and to engage in the battle of life even as his father had engaged in it, mindful of the fact that he also might in time have a large family. But it so happened that one morning, when he went up to the house to ask Maurice for some instructions, he heard from Constance herself that the young man had spent a very bad night, and that she had therefore prevailed on him to remain in bed. She did not evince any great anxiety on the subject; the indisposition could only be due to a little fatigue. Indeed, for a week past the two cousins had been tiring themselves out over the delivery of a very important order, which had set the entire works in motion. Besides, on the previous day Maurice, bareheaded and in perspiration, had imprudently lingered in a draught in one of the sheds while a machine was being tested.

That evening he was seized with intense fever, and Boutan was hastily summoned. On the morrow, alarmed, though he scarcely dared to say it, by the lightning-like progress of the illness, the doctor insisted on a consultation, and two of his colleagues being summoned, they soon agreed together. The malady was an extremely infectious form of galloping consumption, the more violent since it had found in the patient a field where there was little to resist its onslaught. Beauchene was away from home, travelling as usual. Constance, for her part, in spite of the grave mien of the doctors, who could not bring themselves to tell her the brutal truth, remained, in spite of growing anxiety, full of a stubborn hope that her son, the hero, the demi-god necessary for her own life, could not be seriously ill and likely to die. But only three days elapsed, and during the very night that Beauchene returned home, summoned by a telegram, the young fellow expired in her arms.

In reality his death was simply the final decomposition of impoverished, tainted, bourgeois blood, the sudden disappearance of a poor, mediocre being who, despite a facade of seeming health, had been ailing since childhood. But what an overwhelming blow it was both for the mother and for the father, all whose dreams and calculations it swept away! The only son, the one and only heir, the prince of industry, whom they had desired with such obstinate, scheming egotism, had passed away like a shadow; their arms clasped but a void, and the frightful reality arose before them; a moment had sufficed, and they were childless.

Blaise was with the parents at the bedside at the moment when Maurice expired. It was then about two in the morning, and as soon as possible he telegraphed the news of the death to Chantebled. Nine o'clock was striking when Marianne, very pale, quite upset, came into the yard to call Mathieu.

"Maurice is dead!... Mon Dieu! an only son; poor people!"

They stood there thunderstruck, chilled and trembling. They had simply heard that the young man was poorly; they had not imagined him to be seriously ill.

"Let me go to dress," said Mathieu; "I shall take the quarter-past ten o'clock train. I must go to kiss them."

Although Marianne was expecting her eleventh child before long, she decided to accompany her husband. It would have pained her to be unable to give this proof of affection to her cousins, who, all things considered, had treated Blaise and his young wife very kindly. Moreover, she was really grieved by the terrible catastrophe. So she and her husband, after distributing the day's work among the servants, set out for Janville station, which they reached just in time to catch the quarter-past ten o'clock train. It was already rolling on again when they recognized the Lepailleurs and their son Antonin in the very compartment where they were seated.

Seeing the Froments thus together in full dress, the miller imagined that they were going to a wedding, and when he learnt that they had a visit of condolence to make, he exclaimed: "Oh! so it's just the contrary. But no matter, it's an outing, a little diversion nevertheless."

Since Mathieu's victory, since the whole of the estate of Chantebled had been conquered and fertilized, Lepailleur had shown some respect for his bourgeois rival. Nevertheless, although he could not deny the results hitherto obtained, he did not altogether surrender, but continued sneering, as if he expected that some rending of heaven or earth would take place to prove him in the right. He would not confess that he had made a mistake; he repeated that he knew the truth, and that folks would some day see plainly enough that a peasant's calling was the very worst calling there could be, since the dirty land had gone bankrupt and would yield nothing more. Besides, he held his revenge—that enclosure which he left barren, uncultivated, by way of protest against the adjoining estate which it intersected. The thought of this made him ironical.

"Well," he resumed in his ridiculously vain, scoffing way, "we are going to Paris too. Yes, we are going to install this young gentleman there."

He pointed as he spoke to his son Antonin, now a tall, carroty fellow of eighteen, with an elongated head. A few light-colored bristles were already sprouting on his chin and cheeks, and he wore town attire, with a silk hat and gloves, and a bright blue necktie. After astonishing Janville by his success at school, he had displayed so much repugnance to manual work that his father had decided to make "a Parisian" of him.

"So it is decided; you have quite made up your mind?" asked Mathieu in a friendly way.

"Why, yes; why should I force him to toil and moil without the least hope of ever enriching himself? Neither my father nor I ever managed to put a copper by with that wretched old mill of ours. Why, the mill-stones wear away with rot more than with grinding corn. And the wretched fields, too, yield far more pebbles than crowns. And so, as he's now a scholar, he may as well try his fortune in Paris. There's nothing like city life to sharpen a man's wits."

Madame Lepailleur, who never took her eyes from her son, but remained in admiration before him as formerly before her husband, now exclaimed with an air of rapture: "Yes, yes, he has a place as a clerk with Maitre Rousselet, the attorney. We have rented a little room for him; I have seen about the furniture and the linen, and to-day's the great day; he will sleep there to-night, after we have dined, all three, at a good restaurant. Ah! yes, I'm very pleased; he's making a start now."

"And he will perhaps end by being a minister of state," said Mathieu, with a smile; "who knows? Everything is possible nowadays."

It all typified the exodus from the country districts towards the towns, the feverish impatience to make a fortune, which was becoming general. Even the parents nowadays celebrated their child's departure, and accompanied the adventurer on his way, anxious and proud to climb the social ladder with him. And that which brought a smile to the lips of the farmer of Chantebled, the bourgeois who had become a peasant, was the thought of the double change: the miller's son going to Paris, whereas he had gone to the earth, the mother of all strength and regeneration.

Antonin, however, had also begun to laugh with the air of an artful idler who was more particularly attracted by the free dissipation of Paris life. "Oh! minister?" said he, "I haven't much taste for that. I would much sooner win a million at once so as to rest afterwards."

Delighted with this display of wit, the Lepailleurs burst into noisy merriment. Oh! their boy would do great things, that was quite certain!

Marianne, her heart oppressed by thought of the mourning which awaited her, had hitherto kept silent. She now asked, however, why little Therese did not form one of the party. Lepailleur dryly replied that he did not choose to embarrass himself with a child but six years old, who did not know how to behave. Her arrival had upset everything in the house; things would have been much better if she had never been born. Then, as Marianne began to protest, saying that she had seldom seen a more intelligent and prettier little girl, Madame Lepailleur answered more gently: "Oh! she's sharp; that's true enough; but one can't send girls to Paris. She'll have to be put somewhere, and it will mean a lot of trouble, a lot of money. However, we mustn't talk about all that this morning, since we want to enjoy ourselves."

At last the train reached Paris, and the Lepailleurs, leaving the Northern terminus, were caught and carried off by the impetuously streaming crowd.

When Mathieu and Marianne alighted from their cab on the Quai d'Orsay, in front of the Beauchenes' residence, they recognized the Seguins' brougham drawn up beside the foot pavement. And within it they perceived the two girls, Lucie and Andree, waiting mute and motionless in their light-colored dresses. Then, as they approached the door, they saw Valentine come out, in a very great hurry as usual. On recognizing them, however, she assumed an expression of deep pity, and spoke the words required by the situation:

"What a frightful misfortune, is it not? an only son!"

Then she burst out into a flood of words: "You have hastened here, I see, as I did; it is only natural. I heard of the catastrophe only by chance less than an hour ago. And you see my luck! My daughters were dressed, and I myself was dressing to take them to a wedding—a cousin of our friend Santerre is marrying a diplomatist. And, in addition, I am engaged for the whole afternoon. Well, although the wedding is fixed for a quarter-past eleven, I did not hesitate, but drove here before going to the church. And naturally I went upstairs alone. My daughters have been waiting in the carriage. We shall no doubt be a little late for the wedding. But no matter! You will see the poor parents in their empty house, near the body, which, I must say, they have laid out very nicely on the bed. Oh! it is heartrending."

Mathieu was looking at her, surprised to see that she did not age. The fiery flame of her wild life seemed to scorch and preserve her. He knew that her home was now completely wrecked. Seguin openly lived with Nora, the governess, for whom he had furnished a little house. It was there even that he had given Mathieu an appointment to sign the final transfer of the Chantebled property. And since Gaston had entered the military college of St. Cyr, Valentine had only her two daughters with her in the spacious, luxurious mansion of the Avenue d'Antin, which ruin was slowly destroying.

"I think," resumed Madame Seguin, "that I shall tell Gaston to obtain permission to attend the funeral. For I am not sure whether his father is in Paris. It's just the same with our friend Santerre; he's starting on a tour to-morrow. Ah! not only do the dead leave us, but it is astonishing what a number of the living go off and disappear! Life is very sad, is it not, dear madame?"

As she spoke a little quiver passed over her face; the dread of the coming rupture, which she had felt approaching for several months past, amid all the skilful preparations of Santerre, who had been long maturing some secret plan, which she did not as yet divine. However, she made a devout ecstatic gesture, and added: "Well, we are in the hands of God."

Marianne, who was still smiling at the ever-motionless girls in the closed brougham, changed the subject. "How tall they have grown, how pretty they have become! Your Andree looks adorable. How old is your Lucie now? She will soon be of an age to marry."

"Oh! don't let her hear you," retorted Valentine; "you would make her burst into tears! She is seventeen, but for sense she isn't twelve. Would you believe it, she began sobbing this morning and refusing to go to the wedding, under the pretence that it would make her ill? She is always talking of convents; we shall have to come to a decision about her. Andree, though she is only thirteen, is already much more womanly. But she is a little stupid, just like a sheep. Her gentleness quite upsets me at times; it jars on my nerves."

Then Valentine, on the point of getting into her carriage, turned to shake hands with Marianne, and thought of inquiring after her health. "Really," said she, "I lose my head at times. I was quite forgetting. And the baby you're expecting will be your eleventh child, will it now? How terrible! Still it succeeds with you. And, ah! those poor people whom you are going to see, their house will be quite empty now."

When the brougham had rolled away it occurred to Mathieu and Marianne that before seeing the Beauchenes it might be advisable for them to call at the little pavilion, where their son or their daughter-in-law might be able to give them some useful information. But neither Blaise nor Charlotte was there. They found only a servant who was watching over the little girl, Berthe. This servant declared that she had not seen Monsieur Blaise since the previous day, for he had remained at the Beauchenes' near the body. And as for Madame, she also had gone there early that morning, and had left instructions that Berthe was to be brought to her at noon, in order that she might not have to come back to give her the breast. Then, as Marianne in surprise began to put some questions, the girl explained matters: "Madame took a box of drawing materials with her. I fancy that she is painting a portrait of the poor young man who is dead."

As Mathieu and Marianne crossed the courtyard of the works, they felt oppressed by the grave-like silence which reigned in that great city of labor, usually so full of noise and bustle. Death had suddenly passed by, and all the ardent life had at once ceased, the machinery had become cold and mute, the workshops silent and deserted. There was not a sound, not a soul, not a puff of that vapor which was like the very breath of the place. Its master dead, it had died also. And the distress of the Froments increased when they passed from the works into the house, amid absolute solitude; the connecting gallery was wrapt in slumber, the staircase quivered amid the heavy silence, all the doors were open, as in some uninhabited house, long since deserted. They found no servant in the antechamber, and even the dim drawing-room, where the blinds of embroidered muslin were lowered, while the armchairs were arranged in a circle, as on reception days, when numerous visitors were expected, at first seemed to them to be empty. But at last they detected a shadowy form moving slowly to and fro in the middle of the room. It was Morange, bareheaded and frock-coated; he had hastened thither at the first news with the same air as if he had been repairing to his office. He seemed to be at home; it was he who received the visitors in a scared way, overcome as he was by this sudden demise, which recalled to him his daughter's abominable death. His heart-wound had reopened; he was livid, all in disorder, with his long gray beard streaming down, while he stepped hither and thither without a pause, making all the surrounding grief his own.

As soon as he recognized the Froments he also spoke the words which came from every tongue: "What a frightful misfortune, an only son!"

Then he pressed their hands, and whispered and explained that Madame Beauchene, feeling quite exhausted, had withdrawn for a few moments, and that Beauchene and Blaise were making necessary arrangements downstairs. And then, resuming his maniacal perambulations, he pointed towards an adjoining room, the folding doors of which were wide open.

"He is there, on the bed where he died. There are flowers; it looks very nice. You may go in."

This room was Maurice's bedchamber. The large curtains had been closely drawn, and tapers were burning near the bed, casting a soft light on the deceased's face, which appeared very calm, very white, the eyes closed as if in sleep. Between the clasped hands rested a crucifix, and with the roses scattered over the sheet the bed was like a couch of springtide. The odor of the flowers, mingling with that of the burning wax, seemed rather oppressive amid the deep and tragic stillness. Not a breath stirred the tall, erect flames of the tapers, burning in the semi-obscurity, amid which the bed alone showed forth.

When Mathieu and Marianne had gone in, they perceived their daughter-in-law, Charlotte, behind a screen near the door. Lighted by a little lamp, she sat there with a sketching-block on her knees, making a drawing of Maurice's head as it rested among the roses. Hard and anguish-bringing as was such work for one with so young a heart, she had nevertheless yielded to the mother's ardent entreaties. And for three hours past, pale, looking wondrously beautiful, her face showing all the flower of youth, her blue eyes opening widely under her fine golden hair, she had been there diligently working, striving to do her best. When Mathieu and Marianne approached her she would not speak, but simply nodded. Still a little color came to her cheeks, and her eyes smiled. And when the others, after lingering there for a moment in sorrowful contemplation, had quietly returned to the drawing-room, she resumed her work alone, in the presence of the dead, among the roses and the tapers.

Morange was still walking the drawing-room like a lost, wandering phantom. Mathieu remained standing there, while Marianne sat down near the folding doors. Not another word was exchanged; the spell of waiting continued amid the oppressive silence of the dim, closed room. When some ten minutes had elapsed, two other visitors arrived, a lady and a gentleman, whom the Froments could not at first recognize. Morange bowed and received them in his dazed way. Then, as the lady did not release her hold of the gentleman's hand, but led him along, as if he were blind, between the articles of furniture, so that he might not knock against them, Marianne and Mathieu realized that the new comers were the Angelins.

Since the previous winter they had sold their little house at Janville to fix themselves in Paris, for a last misfortune had befallen them—the failure of a great banking house had carried away almost the whole of their modest fortune. The wife had fortunately secured a post as one of the delegates of the Poor Relief Board, an inspectorship with various duties, such as watching over the mothers and children assisted by the board, and reporting thereon. And she was wont to say, with a sad smile, that this work of looking after the little ones was something of a consolation for her, since it was now certain that she would never have a child of her own. As for her husband, whose eyesight was failing more and more, he had been obliged to relinquish painting altogether, and he dragged out his days in morose desolation, his life wrecked, annihilated.

With short steps, as if she were leading a child, Madame Angelin brought him to an armchair near Marianne and seated him in it. He had retained the lofty mien of a musketeer, but his features had been ravaged by anxiety, and his hair was white, though he was only forty-four years of age. And what memories arose at the sight of that sorrowful lady leading that infirm, aged man, for those who had known the young couple, all tenderness and good looks, rambling along the secluded paths of Janville, amid the careless delights of their love.

As soon as Madame Angelin had clasped Marianne's hands with her own trembling fingers, she also uttered in low, stammering accents, those despairing words: "Ah! what a frightful misfortune, an only son!"

Her eyes filled with tears, and she would not sit down before going for a moment to see the body in the adjoining room. When she came back, sobbing in her handkerchief, she sank into an armchair between Marianne and her husband. He remained there motionless, staring fixedly with his dim eyes. And silence fell again throughout the lifeless house, whither the rumble of the works, now deserted, fireless and frozen, ascended no longer.

But Beauchene, followed by Blaise, at last made his appearance. The heavy blow he had received seemed to have made him ten years older. It was as if the heavens had suddenly fallen upon him. Never amid his conquering egotism, his pride of strength and his pleasures, had he imagined such a downfall to be possible. Never had he been willing to admit that Maurice might be ill—such an idea was like casting a doubt upon his own strength; he thought himself beyond the reach of thunderbolts; misfortune would never dare to fall on him. And at the first overwhelming moment he had found himself weak as a woman, weary and limp, his strength undermined by his dissolute life, the slow disorganization of his faculties. He had sobbed like a child before his dead son, all his vanity crushed, all his calculations destroyed. The thunderbolt had sped by, and nothing remained. In a minute his life had been swept away; the world was now all black and void. And he remained livid, in consternation at it all, his bloated face swollen with grief, his heavy eyelids red with tears.

When he perceived the Froments, weakness again came upon him, and he staggered towards them with open arms, once more stifling with sobs.

"Ah! my dear friends, what a terrible blow! And I wasn't here! When I got here he had lost consciousness; he did not recognize me—. Is it possible? A lad who was in such good health! I cannot believe it. It seems to me that I must be dreaming, and that he will get up presently and come down with me into the workshops!"

They kissed him, they pitied him, struck down like this upon his return from some carouse or other, still intoxicated, perhaps, and tumbling into the midst of such an awful disaster, his prostration increased by the stupor following upon debauchery. His beard, moist with his tears, still stank of tobacco and musk.

Although he scarcely knew the Angelins, he pressed them also in his arms. "Ah! my poor friends, what a terrible blow! What a terrible blow!"

Then Blaise in his turn came to kiss his parents. In spite of his grief, and the horrible night he had spent, his face retained its youthful freshness. Yet tears coursed down his cheeks, for, working with Maurice day by day, he had conceived real friendship for him.

The silence fell again. Morange, as if unconscious of what went on around him, as if he were quite alone there, continued walking softly hither and thither like a somnambulist. Beauchene, with haggard mien, went off, and then came back carrying some little address-books. He turned about for another moment, and finally sat down at a writing-table which had been brought out of Maurice's room. Little accustomed as he was to grief, he instinctively sought to divert his mind, and began searching in the little address-books for the purpose of drawing up a list of the persons who must be invited to the funeral. But his eyes became blurred, and with a gesture he summoned Blaise, who, after going into the bedchamber to glance at his wife's sketch, was now returning to the drawing-room. Thereupon the young man, standing erect beside the writing-table, began to dictate the names in a low voice; and then, amid the deep silence sounded a low and monotonous murmur.

The minutes slowly went by. The visitors were still waiting for Constance. At last a little door of the death-chamber slowly opened, and she entered that chamber noiselessly, without anybody knowing that she was there. She looked like a spectre emerging out of the darkness into the pale light of the tapers. She had not yet wept; her face was livid, contracted, hardened by cold rage. Her little figure, instead of bending, seemed to have grown taller beneath the injustice of destiny, as if borne up by furious rebellion. Yet her loss did not surprise her. She had immediately felt that she had expected it, although but a minute before the death she had stubbornly refused to believe it possible. But the thought of it had remained latent within her for long months, and frightful evidence thereof now burst forth. She suddenly heard the whispers of the unknown once more, and understood them; she knew the meaning of those shivers which had chilled her, those vague, terror-fraught regrets at having no other child! And that which had been threatening her had come; irreparable destiny had willed it that her only son, the salvation of the imperilled home, the prince of to-morrow, who was to share his empire with her, should be swept away like a withered leaf. It was utter downfall; she sank into an abyss. And she remained tearless; fury dried her tears within her. Yet, good mother that she had always been, she suffered all the torment of motherliness exasperated, poisoned by the loss of her child.

She drew near to Charlotte and paused behind her, looking at the profile of her dead son resting among the flowers. And still she did not weep. She slowly gazed over the bed, filled her eyes with the dolorous scene, then carried them again to the paper, as if to see what would be left her of that adored son—those few pencil strokes—when the earth should have taken him forever. Charlotte, divining that somebody was behind her, started and raised her head. She did not speak; she had felt frightened. But both women exchanged a glance. And what a heart pang came to Constance, amid that display of death, in the presence of the void, the nothingness that was hers, as she gazed on the other's face, all love and health and beauty, suggesting some youthful star, whence promise of the future radiated through the fine gold of wavy hair.

But yet another pang came to Constance at that moment: words which were being whispered in the drawing-room, near the door of the bedchamber, reached her distinctly. She did not move, but remained erect behind Charlotte, who had resumed her work. And eagerly lending ear, she listened, not showing herself as yet, although she had already seen Marianne and Madame Angelin seated near the doorway, almost among the folds of the hangings.

"Ah!" Madame Angelin was saying, "the poor mother had a presentiment of it, as it were. I saw that she felt very anxious when I told her my own sad story. There is no hope for me; and now death has passed by, and no hope remains for her."

Silence ensued once more; then, prompted by some connecting train of thought, she went on: "And your next child will be your eleventh, will it not? Eleven is not a number; you will surely end by having twelve!"

As Constance heard those words she shuddered in another fit of that fury which dried up her tears. By glancing sideways she could see that mother of ten children, who was now expecting yet an eleventh child. She found her still young, still fresh, overflowing with joy and health and hope. And she was there, like the goddess of fruitfulness, nigh to the funeral bier at that hour of the supreme rending, when she, Constance, was bowed down by the irretrievable loss of her only child.

But Marianne was answering Madame Angelin: "Oh I don't think that at all likely. Why, I'm becoming an old woman. You forget that I am already a grandmother. Here, look at that!"

So saying, she waved her hand towards the servant of her daughter-in-law, Charlotte, who, in accordance with the instructions she had received, was now bringing the little Berthe in order that her mother might give her the breast. The servant had remained at the drawing-room door, hesitating, disliking to intrude on all that mourning; but the child good-humoredly waved her fat little fists, and laughed lightly. And Charlotte, hearing her, immediately rose and tripped across the salon to take the little one into a neighboring room.

"What a pretty child!" murmured Madame Angelin. "Those little ones are like nosegays; they bring brightness and freshness wherever they come."

Constance for her part had been dazzled. All at once, amid the semi-obscurity, starred by the flames of the tapers, amid the deathly atmosphere, which the odor of the roses rendered the more oppressive, that laughing child had set a semblance of budding springtime, the fresh, bright atmosphere of a long promise of life. And it typified the victory of fruitfulness; it was the child's child, it was Marianne reviving in her son's daughter. A grandmother already, and she was only forty-one years old! Marianne had smiled at that thought. But the hatchet-stroke rang out yet more frightfully in Constance's heart. In her case the tree was cut down to its very root, the sole scion had been lopped off, and none would ever sprout again.

For yet another moment she remained alone amid that nothingness, in that room where lay her son's remains. Then she made up her mind and passed into the drawing-room, with the air of a frozen spectre. They all rose, kissed her, and shivered as their lips touched her cold cheeks, which her blood was unable to warm. Profound compassion wrung them, so frightful was her calmness. And they sought kind words to say to her, but she curtly stopped them.

"It is all over," said she; "there is nothing to be said. Everything is ended, quite ended."

Madame Angelin sobbed, Angelin himself wiped his poor fixed, blurred eyes. Marianne and Mathieu shed tears while retaining Constance's hands in theirs. And she, rigid and still unable to weep, refused consolation, repeating in monotonous accents: "It is finished; nothing can give him back to me. Is it not so? And thus there remains nothing; all is ended, quite ended."

She needed to be brave, for visitors would soon be arriving in a stream. But a last stab in the heart was reserved for her. Beauchene, who since her arrival had begun to cry again, could no longer see to write. Moreover, his hand trembled, and he had to leave the writing-table and fling himself into an armchair, saying to Blaise: "There sit down there, and continue to write for me."

Then Constance saw Blaise seat himself at her son's writing-table, in his place, dip his pen in the inkstand and begin to write with the very same gesture that she had so often seen Maurice make. That Blaise, that son of the Froments! What! her dear boy was not yet buried, and a Froment already replaced him, even as vivacious, fast-growing plants overrun neighboring barren fields. That stream of life flowing around her, intent on universal conquest, seemed yet more threatening; grandmothers still bore children, daughters suckled already, sons laid hands upon vacant kingdoms. And she remained alone; she had but her unworthy, broken-down, worn-out husband beside her; while Morange, the maniac, incessantly walking to and fro, was like the symbolical spectre of human distress, one whose heart and strength and reason had been carried away in the frightful death of his only daughter. And not a sound came from the cold and empty works; the works themselves were dead.

The funeral ceremony two days later was an imposing one. The five hundred workmen of the establishment followed the hearse, notabilities of all sorts made up an immense cortege. It was much noticed that an old workman, father Moineaud, the oldest hand of the works, was one of the pall-bearers. Indeed, people thought it touching, although the worthy old man dragged his legs somewhat, and looked quite out of his element in a frock coat, stiffened as he was by thirty years' hard toil. In the cemetery, near the grave, Mathieu felt surprised on being approached by an old lady who alighted from one of the mourning-coaches.

"I see, my friend," said she, "that you do not recognize me."

He made a gesture of apology. It was Seraphine, still tall and slim, but so fleshless, so withered that one might have thought she was a hundred years old. Cecile had warned Mathieu of it, yet if he had not seen her himself he would never have believed that her proud insolent beauty, which had seemed to defy time and excesses, could have faded so swiftly. What frightful, withering blast could have swept over her?

"Ah! my friend," she continued, "I am more dead than the poor fellow whom they are about to lower into that grave. Come and have a chat with me some day. You are the only person to whom I can tell everything."

The coffin was lowered, the ropes gave out a creaking sound, and there came a little thud—the last. Beauchene, supported by a relative, looked on with dim, vacant eyes. Constance, who had had the bitter courage to come, and had now wept all the tears in her body, almost fainted. She was carried away, driven back to her home, which would now forever be empty, like one of those stricken fields that remain barren, fated to perpetual sterility. Mother earth had taken back her all.

And at Chantebled Mathieu and Marianne founded, created, increased, and multiplied, again proving victorious in the eternal battle which life wages against death, thanks to that continual increase, both of offspring and of fertile land, which was like their very existence, their joy and their strength. Desire passed like a gust of flame, desire divine and fruitful, since they possessed the power of love, kindliness, and health. And their energy did the rest—that will of action, that quiet bravery in the presence of the labor that is requisite, the labor that has made and that regulates the world.

Still, during those two years it was not without constant battling that victory remained to them. At last it was complete. Piece by piece Seguin had sold the entire estate, of which Mathieu was now king, thanks to his prudent system of conquest, that of increasing his empire by degrees as he gradually felt himself stronger. The fortune which the idler had disdained and dissipated had passed into the hands of the toiler, the creator. There were 1250 acres, spreading from horizon to horizon; there were woods intersected by broad meadows, where flocks and herds pastured; there was fat land overflowing with harvests, in the place of marshes that had been drained; there was other land, each year of increasing fertility, in the place of the moors which the captured springs now irrigated. The Lepailleurs' uncultivated enclosure alone remained, as if to bear witness to the prodigy, the great human effort which had quickened that desert of sand and mud, whose crops would henceforth nourish so many happy people. Mathieu devoured no other man's share; he had brought his share into being, increasing the common wealth, subjugating yet another small portion of this vast world, which is still so scantily peopled and so badly utilized for human happiness. The farm, the homestead, had sprung up and grown in the centre of the estate like a prosperous township, with inhabitants, servants, and live stock, a perfect focus of ardent triumphal life. And what sovereign power was that of the happy fruitfulness which had never wearied of creating, which had yielded all these beings and things that had been increasing and multiplying for twelve years past, that invading town which was but a family's expansion, those trees, those plants, those grain crops, those fruits whose nourishing stream ever rose under the dazzling sun! All pain and all tears were forgotten in that joy of creation, the accomplishment of due labor, the conquest of the future conducting to the infinite of Action.

Then, while Mathieu completed his work of conquest, Marianne during those two years had the happiness of seeing a daughter born to her son Blaise, even while she herself was expecting another child. The branches of the huge tree had begun to fork, pending the time when they would ramify endlessly, like the branches of some great royal oak spreading afar over the soil. There would be her children's children, her grandchildren's children, the whole posterity increasing from generation to generation. And yet how carefully and lovingly she still assembled around her her own first brood, from Blaise and Denis the twins, now one-and-twenty, to the last born, the wee creature who sucked in life from her bosom with greedy lips. There were some of all ages in the brood—a big fellow, who was already a father; others who went to school; others who still had to be dressed in the morning; there were boys, Ambroise, Gervais, Gregoire, and another; there were girls, Rose, nearly old enough to marry; Claire, Louise, Madeleine, and Marguerite, the last of whom could scarcely toddle. And it was a sight to see them roam over the estate like a troop of colts, following one another at varied pace, according to their growth. She knew that she could not keep them all tied to her apron-strings; it would be sufficient happiness if the farm kept two or three beside her; she resigned herself to seeing the younger ones go off some day to conquer other lands. Such was the law of expansion; the earth was the heritage of the most numerous race. Since they had number on their side, they would have strength also; the world would belong to them. The parents themselves had felt stronger, more united at the advent of each fresh child. If in spite of terrible cares they had always conquered, it was because their love, their toil, the ceaseless travail of their heart and will, gave them the victory. Fruitfulness is the great conqueress; from her come the pacific heroes who subjugate the world by peopling it. And this time especially, when at the lapse of those two years Marianne gave birth to a boy, Nicolas, her eleventh child, Mathieu embraced her passionately, triumphing over every sorrow and every pang. Yet another child; yet more wealth and power; yet an additional force born into the world; another field ready for to-morrow's harvest.

And 'twas ever the great work, the good work, the work of fruitfulness spreading, thanks to the earth and thanks to woman, both victorious over destruction, offering fresh means of subsistence each time a fresh child was born, and loving, willing, battling, toiling even amid suffering, and ever tending to increase of life and increase of hope.

XV

AMID the deep mourning life slowly resumed its course at the Beauchene works. One effect of the terrible blow which had fallen on Beauchene was that for some weeks he remained quietly at home. Indeed, he seemed to have profited by the terrible lesson, for he no longer coined lies, no longer invented pressing business journeys as a pretext for dissipation. He even set to work once more, and busied himself about the factory, coming down every morning as in his younger days. And in Blaise he found an active and devoted lieutenant, on whom he each day cast more and more of the heavier work. Intimates were most struck, however, by the manner in which Beauchene and his wife drew together again. Constance was most attentive to her husband; Beauchene no longer left her, and they seemed to agree well together, leading a very retired life in their quiet house, where only relatives were now received.

Constance, on the morrow of Maurice's sudden death, was like one who has just lost a limb. It seemed to her that she was no longer whole; she felt ashamed of being, as it were, disfigured. Mingled, too, with her loving sorrow for Maurice there was humiliation at the thought that she was no longer a mother, that she no longer had any heir-apparent to her kingdom beside her. To think that she had been so stubbornly determined to have but one son, one child, in order that he might become the sole master of the family fortune, the all-powerful monarch of the future. Death had stolen him from her, and the establishment now seemed to be less her own, particularly since that fellow Blaise and his wife and his child, representing those fruitful and all-invading Froments, were installed there. She could no longer console herself for having welcomed and lodged them, and her one passionate, all-absorbing desire was to have another son, and thereby reconquer her empire.

This it was which led to her reconciliation with her husband, and for six months they lived together on the best of terms. Then, however, came another six months, and it was evident that they no longer agreed so well together, for Beauchene took himself off at times under the pretext of seeking fresh air, and Constance remained at home, feverish, her eyes red with weeping.

One day Mathieu, who had come to Grenelle to see his daughter-in-law, Charlotte, was lingering in the garden playing with little Berthe, who had climbed upon his knees, when he was surprised by the sudden approach of Constance, who must have seen him from her windows. She invented a pretext to draw him into the house, and kept him there nearly a quarter of an hour before she could make up her mind to speak her thoughts. Then, all at once, she began: "My dear Mathieu, you must forgive me for mentioning a painful matter, but there are reasons why I should do so. Nearly fifteen years ago, I know it for a fact, my husband had a child by a girl who was employed at the works. And I also know that you acted as his intermediary on that occasion, and made certain arrangements with respect to that girl and her child—a boy, was it not?"

She paused for a reply. But Mathieu, stupefied at finding her so well informed, and at a loss to understand why she spoke to him of that sorry affair after the lapse of so many years, could only make a gesture by which he betrayed both his surprise and his anxiety.

"Oh!" said she, "I do not address any reproach to you; I am convinced that your motives were quite friendly, even affectionate, and that you wished to hush up a scandal which might have been very unpleasant for me. Moreover, I do not desire to indulge in recriminations after so long a time. My desire is simply for information. For a long time I did not care to investigate the statements whereby I was informed of the affair. But the recollection of it comes back to me and haunts me persistently, and it is natural that I should apply to you. I have never spoken a word on the subject to my husband, and indeed it is best for our tranquillity that I should not attempt to extort a detailed confession from him. One circumstance which has induced me to speak to you is that on an occasion when I accompanied Madame Angelin to a house in the Rue de Miromesnil, I perceived you there with that girl, who had another child in her arms. So you have not lost sight of her, and you must know what she is doing, and whether her first child is alive, and in that case where he is, and how he is situated."

Mathieu still refrained from replying, for Constance's increasing feverishness put him on his guard, and impelled him to seek the motive of such a strange application on the part of one who was as a rule so proud and so discreet. What could be happening? Why did she strive to provoke confidential revelations which might have far-reaching effects? Then, as she closely scanned him with her keen eyes, he sought to answer her with kind, evasive words.

"You greatly embarrass me. And, besides, I know nothing likely to interest you. What good would it do yourself or your husband to stir up all the dead past? Take my advice, forget what people may have told you—you are so sensible and prudent—"

But she interrupted him, caught hold of his hands, and held them in her warm, quivering grasp. Never before had she so behaved, forgetting and surrendering herself so passionately. "I repeat," said she, "that nobody has anything to fear from me—neither my husband, nor that girl, nor the child. Cannot you understand me? I am simply tormented; I suffer at knowing nothing. Yes, it seems to me that I shall feel more at ease when I know the truth. It is for myself that I question you, for my own peace of mind.... Ah! if I could only tell you, if I could tell you!"

He began to divine many things; it was unnecessary for her to be more explicit. He knew that during the past year she and her husband had been hoping for the advent of a second child, and that none had come. As a woman, Constance felt no jealousy of Norine, but as a mother she was jealous of her son. She could not drive the thought of that child from her mind; it ever and ever returned thither like a mocking insult now that her hopes of replacing Maurice were fading fast. Day by day did she dream more and more passionately of the other woman's son, wondering where he was, what had become of him, whether he were healthy, and whether he resembled his father.

"I assure you, my dear Mathieu," she resumed, "that you will really bring me relief by answering me. Is he alive? Tell me simply whether he is alive. But do not tell me a lie. If he is dead I think that I shall feel calmer. And yet, good heavens! I certainly wish him no evil."

Then Mathieu, who felt deeply touched, told her the simple truth.

"Since you insist on it, for the benefit of your peace of mind, and since it is to remain entirely between us and to have no effect on your home, I see no reason why I should not confide to you what I know. But that is very little. The child was left at the Foundling Hospital in my presence. Since then the mother, having never asked for news, has received none. I need not add that your husband is equally ignorant, for he always refused to have anything to do with the child. Is the lad still alive? Where is he? Those are things which I cannot tell you. A long inquiry would be necessary. If, however, you wish for my opinion, I think it probable that he is dead, for the mortality among these poor cast-off children is very great."

Constance looked at him fixedly. "You are telling me the real truth? You are hiding nothing?" she asked. And as he began to protest, she went on: "Yes, yes, I have confidence in you. And so you believe that he is dead! Ah! to think of all those children who die, when so many women would be happy to save one, to have one for themselves. Well, if you haven't been able to tell me anything positive, you have at least done your best. Thank you."

During the ensuing months Mathieu often found himself alone with Constance, but she never reverted to the subject. She seemed to set her energy on forgetting all about it, though he divined that it still haunted her. Meantime things went from bad to worse in the Beauchene household. The husband gradually went back to his former life of debauchery, in spite of all the efforts of Constance to keep him near her. She, for her part, clung to her fixed idea, and before long she consulted Boutan. There was a terrible scene that day between husband and wife in the doctor's presence. Constance raked up the story of Norine and cast it in Beauchene's teeth, while he upbraided her in a variety of ways. However, Boutan's advice, though followed for a time, proved unavailing, and she at last lost confidence in him. Then she spent months and months in consulting one and another. She placed herself in the hands of Madame Bourdieu, she even went to see La Rouche, she applied to all sorts of charlatans, exasperated to fury at finding that there was no real succor for her. She might long ago have had a family had she so chosen. But she had elected otherwise, setting all her egotism and pride on that only son whom death had snatched away; and now the motherhood she longed for was denied her.

For nearly two years did Constance battle, and at last in despair she was seized with the idea of consulting Dr. Gaude. He told her the brutal truth; it was useless for her to address herself to charlatans; she would simply be robbed by them; there was absolutely no hope for her. And Gaude uttered those decisive words in a light, jesting way, as though surprised and amused by her profound grief. She almost fainted on the stairs as she left his flat, and for a moment indeed death seemed welcome. But by a great effort of will she recovered self-possession, the courage to face the life of loneliness that now lay before her. Moreover, another idea vaguely dawned upon her, and the first time she found herself alone with Mathieu she again spoke to him of Norine's boy.

"Forgive me," said she, "for reverting to a painful subject, but I am suffering too much now that I know there is no hope for me. I am haunted by the thought of that illegitimate child of my husband's. Will you do me a great service? Make the inquiry you once spoke to me about, try to find out if he is alive or dead. I feel that when I know the facts peace may perhaps return to me."

Mathieu was almost on the point of answering her that, even if this child were found again, it could hardly cure her of her grief at having no child of her own. He had divined her agony at seeing Blaise take Maurice's place at the works now that Beauchene had resumed his dissolute life, and daily intrusted the young man with more and more authority. Blaise's home was prospering too; Charlotte had now given birth to a second child, a boy, and thus fruitfulness was invading the place and usurpation becoming more and more likely, since Constance could never more have an heir to bar the road of conquest. Without penetrating her singular feelings, Mathieu fancied that she perhaps wished to sound him to ascertain if he were not behind Blaise, urging on the work of spoliation. She possibly imagined that her request would make him anxious, and that he would refuse to make the necessary researches. At this idea he decided to do as she desired, if only to show her that he was above all the base calculations of ambition.

"I am at your disposal, cousin," said he. "It is enough for me that this inquiry may give you a little relief. But if the lad is alive, am I to bring him to you?"

"Oh! no, no, I do not ask that!" And then, gesticulating almost wildly, she stammered: "I don't know what I want, but I suffer so dreadfully that I am scarce able to live!"

In point of fact a tempest raged within her, but she really had no settled plan. One could hardly say that she really thought of that boy as a possible heir. In spite of her hatred of all conquerors from without, was it likely that she would accept him as a conqueror, in the face of her outraged womanly feelings and her bourgeois horror of illegitimacy? And yet if he were not her son, he was at least her husband's. And perhaps an idea of saving her empire by placing the works in the hands of that heir was dimly rising within her, above all her prejudices and her rancor. But however that might be, her feelings for the time remained confused, and the only clear thing was her desperate torment at being now and forever childless, a torment which goaded her on to seek another's child with the wild idea of making that child in some slight degree her own.

Mathieu, however, asked her, "Am I to inform Beauchene of the steps I take?"

"Do you as you please," she answered. "Still, that would be the best."

That same evening there came a complete rupture between herself and her husband. She threw in Beauchene's face all the contempt and loathing that she had felt for him for years. Hopeless as she was, she revenged herself by telling him everything that she had on her heart and mind. And her slim dark figure, upborne by bitter rage, assumed such redoubtable proportions in his eyes that he felt frightened by her and fled. Henceforth they were husband and wife in name only. It was logic on the march, it was the inevitable disorganization of a household reaching its climax, it was rebellion against nature's law and indulgence in vice leading to the gradual decline of a man of intelligence, it was a hard worker sinking into the sloth of so-called pleasure; and then, death having snatched away the only son, the home broke to pieces—the wife—fated to childlessness, and the husband driven away by her, rolling through debauchery towards final ruin.

But Mathieu, keeping his promise to Constance, discreetly began his researches. And before he even consulted Beauchene it occurred to him to apply at the Foundling Hospital. If, as he anticipated, the child were dead, the affair would go no further. Fortunately enough he remembered all the particulars: the two names, Alexandre-Honore, given to the child, the exact date of the deposit at the hospital, indeed all the little incidents of the day when he had driven thither with La Couteau. And when he was received by the director of the establishment, and had explained to him the real motives of his inquiries, at the same time giving his name, he was surprised by the promptness and precision of the answer: Alexandre-Honore, put out to nurse with the woman Loiseau at Rougemont, had first kept cows, and had then tried the calling of a locksmith; but for three months past he had been in apprenticeship with a wheelwright, a certain Montoir, residing at Saint-Pierre, a hamlet in the vicinity of Rougemont. Thus the lad lived; he was fifteen years old, and that was all. Mathieu could obtain no further information respecting either his physical health or his morality.

When Mathieu found himself in the street again, slightly dazed, he remembered that La Couteau had told him that the child would be sent to Rougemont. He had always pictured it dying there, carried off by the hurricane which killed so many babes, and lying in the silent village cemetery paved with little Parisians. To find the boy alive, saved from the massacre, came like a surprise of destiny, and brought vague anguish, a fear of some terrible catastrophe to Mathieu's heart. At the same time, since the boy was living, and he now knew where to seek him, he felt that he must warn Beauchene. The matter was becoming serious, and it seemed to him that he ought not to carry the inquiry any further without the father's authorization.

That same day, then, before returning to Chantebled, he repaired to the factory, where he was lucky enough to find Beauchene, whom Blaise's absence on business had detained there by force. Thus he was in a very bad humor, puffing and yawning and half asleep. It was nearly three o'clock, and he declared that he could never digest his lunch properly unless he went out afterwards. The truth was that since his rupture with his wife he had been devoting his afternoons to paying attentions to a girl serving at a beer-house.

"Ah! my good fellow," he muttered as he stretched himself. "My blood is evidently thickening. I must bestir myself, or else I shall be in a bad way."

However, he woke up when Mathieu had explained the motive of his visit. At first he could scarcely understand it, for the affair seemed to him so extraordinary, so idiotic.

"Eh? What do you say? It was my wife who spoke to you about that child? It is she who has taken it into her head to collect information and start a search?"

His fat apoplectical face became distorted, his anger was so violent that he could scarcely stutter. When he heard, however, of the mission with which his wife had intrusted Mathieu, he at last exploded: "She is mad! I tell you that she is raving mad! Were such fancies ever seen? Every morning she invents something fresh to distract me!"

Without heeding this interruption, Mathieu quietly finished his narrative: "And so I have just come back from the Foundling Hospital, where I learnt that the boy is alive. I have his address—and now what am I to do?"

This was the final blow. Beauchene clenched his fists and raised his arms in exasperation. "Ah! well, here's a nice state of things! But why on earth does she want to trouble me about that boy? He isn't hers! Why can't she leave us alone, the boy and me? It's my affair. And I ask you if it is at all proper for my wife to send you running about after him? Besides, I hope that you are not going to bring him to her. What on earth could we do with that little peasant, who may have every vice? Just picture him coming between us. I tell you that she is mad, mad, mad!"

He had begun to walk angrily to and fro. All at once he stopped: "My dear fellow, you will just oblige me by telling her that he is dead."

But he turned pale and recoiled. Constance stood on the threshold and had heard him. For some time past she had been in the habit of stealthily prowling around the offices, like one on the watch for something. For a moment, at the sight of the embarrassment which both men displayed, she remained silent. Then, without even addressing her husband, she asked: "He is alive, is he not?"

Mathieu could but tell her the truth. He answered with a nod. Then Beauchene, in despair, made a final effort: "Come, be reasonable, my dear. As I was saying only just now, we don't even know what this youngster's character is. You surely don't want to upset our life for the mere pleasure of doing so?"

Standing there, lean and frigid, she gave him a harsh glance; then, turning her back on him, she demanded the child's name, and the names of the wheelwright and the locality. "Good, you say Alexandre-Honore, with Montoir the wheelwright, at Saint-Pierre, near Rougemont, in Calvados. Well, my friend, oblige me by continuing your researches; endeavor to procure me some precise information about this boy's habits and disposition. Be prudent, too; don't give anybody's name. And thanks for what you have done already; thanks for all you are doing for me."

Thereupon she took herself off without giving any further explanation, without even telling her husband of the vague plans she was forming. Beneath her crushing contempt he had grown calm again. Why should he spoil his life of egotistical pleasure by resisting that mad creature? All that he need do was to put on his hat and betake himself to his usual diversions. And so he ended by shrugging his shoulders.

"After all, let her pick him up if she chooses, it won't be my doing. Act as she asks you, my dear fellow; continue your researches and try to content her. Perhaps she will then leave me in peace. But I've had quite enough of it for to-day; good-by, I'm going out."

With the view of obtaining some information of Rougemont, Mathieu at first thought of applying to La Couteau, if he could find her again; for which purpose it occurred to him that he might call on Madame Bourdieu in the Rue de Miromesnil. But another and more certain means suggested itself. He had been led to renew his intercourse with the Seguins, of whom he had for a time lost sight; and, much to his surprise, he had found Valentine's former maid, Celeste, in the Avenue d'Antin once more. Through this woman, he thought, he might reach La Couteau direct.

The renewal of the intercourse between the Froments and the Seguins was due to a very happy chance. Mathieu's son Ambroise, on leaving college, had entered the employment of an uncle of Seguin's, Thomas du Hordel, one of the wealthiest commission merchants in Paris; and this old man, who, despite his years, remained very sturdy, and still directed his business with all the fire of youth, had conceived a growing fondness for Ambroise, who had great mental endowments and a real genius for commerce. Du Hordel's own children had consisted of two daughters, one of whom had died young, while the other had married a madman, who had lodged a bullet in his head and had left her childless and crazy like himself. This partially explained the deep grandfatherly interest which Du Hordel took in young Ambroise, who was the handsomest of all the Froments, with a clear complexion, large black eyes, brown hair that curled naturally, and manners of much refinement and elegance. But the old man was further captivated by the young fellow's spirit of enterprise, the four modern languages which he spoke so readily, and the evident mastery which he would some day show in the management of a business which extended over the five parts of the world. In his childhood, among his brothers and sisters, Ambroise had always been the boldest, most captivating and self-assertive. The others might be better than he, but he reigned over them like a handsome, ambitious, greedy boy, a future man of gayety and conquest. And this indeed he proved to be; by the charm of his victorious intellect he conquered old Du Hordel in a few months, even as later on he was destined to vanquish everybody and everything much as he pleased. His strength lay in his power of pleasing and his power of action, a blending of grace with the most assiduous industry.

About this time Seguin and his uncle, who had never set foot in the house of the Avenue d'Antin since insanity had reigned there, drew together again. Their apparent reconciliation was the outcome of a drama shrouded in secrecy. Seguin, hard up and in debt, cast off by Nora, who divined his approaching ruin, and preyed upon by other voracious creatures, had ended by committing, on the turf, one of those indelicate actions which honest people call thefts. Du Hordel, on being apprised of the matter, had hastened forward and had paid what was due in order to avoid a frightful scandal. And he was so upset by the extraordinary muddle in which he found his nephew's home, once all prosperity, that remorse came upon him as if he were in some degree responsible for what had happened, since he had egotistically kept away from his relatives for his own peace's sake. But he was more particularly won over by his grandniece Andree, now a delicious young girl well-nigh eighteen years of age, and therefore marriageable. She alone sufficed to attract him to the house, and he was greatly distressed by the dangerous state of abandonment in which he found her.

Her father continued dragging out his worthless life away from home. Her mother, Valentine, had just emerged from a frightful crisis, her final rupture with Santerre, who had made up his mind to marry a very wealthy old lady, which, after all, was the logical destiny of such a crafty exploiter of women, one who behind his affectation of cultured pessimism had the vilest and greediest of natures. Valentine, distracted by this rupture, had now thrown herself into religion, and, like her husband, disappeared from the house for whole days. She was said to be an active helpmate of old Count de Navarede, the president of a society of Catholic propaganda. Gaston, her son, having left Saint-Cyr three months previously, was now at the Cavalry School of Saumur, so fired with passion for a military career that he already spoke of remaining a bachelor, since a soldier's sword should be his only love, his only spouse. Then Lucie, now nineteen years old, and full of mystical exaltation, had already entered an Ursuline convent for her novitiate. And in the big empty home, whence father, mother, brother and sister fled, there remained but the gentle and adorable Andree, exposed to all the blasts of insanity which even now swept through the household, and so distressed by loneliness, that her uncle, Du Hordel, full of compassionate affection, conceived the idea of giving her a husband in the person of young Ambroise, the future conqueror.

This plan was helped on by the renewed presence of Celeste the maid. Eight years had elapsed since Valentine had been obliged to dismiss this woman for immorality; and during those eight years Celeste, weary of service, had tried a number of equivocal callings of which she did not speak. She had ended by turning up at Rougemont, her native place, in bad health and such a state of wretchedness, that for the sake of a living she went out as a charwoman there. Then she gradually recovered her health, and accumulated a little stock of clothes, thanks to the protection of the village priest, whom she won over by an affectation of extreme piety. It was at Rougemont, no doubt, that she planned her return to the Seguins, of whose vicissitudes she was informed by La Couteau, the latter having kept up her intercourse with Madame Menoux, the little haberdasher of the neighborhood.

Valentine, shortly after her rupture with Santerre, one day of furious despair, when she had again dismissed all her servants, was surprised by the arrival of Celeste, who showed herself so repentant, so devoted, and so serious-minded, that her former mistress felt touched. She made her weep on reminding her of her faults, and asking her to swear before God that she would never repeat them; for Celeste now went to confession and partook of the holy communion, and carried with her a certificate from the Cure of Rougemont vouching for her deep piety and high morality. This certificate acted decisively on Valentine, who, unwilling to remain at home, and weary of the troubles of housekeeping, understood what precious help she might derive from this woman. On her side Celeste certainly relied upon power being surrendered to her. Two months later, by favoring Lucie's excessive partiality to religious practices, she had helped her into a convent. Gaston showed himself only when he secured a few days' leave. And so Andree alone remained at home, impeding by her presence the great general pillage that Celeste dreamt of. The maid therefore became a most active worker on behalf of her young mistress's marriage.

Andree, it should be said, was comprised in Ambroise's universal conquest. She had met him at her uncle Du Hordel's house for a year before it occurred to the latter to marry them. She was a very gentle girl, a little golden-haired sheep, as her mother sometimes said. And that handsome, smiling young man, who evinced so much kindness towards her, became the subject of her thoughts and hopes whenever she suffered from loneliness and abandonment. Thus, when her uncle prudently questioned her, she flung herself into his arms, weeping big tears of gratitude and confession. Valentine, on being approached, at first manifested some surprise. What, a son of the Froments! Those Froments had already taken Chantebled from them, and did they now want to take one of their daughters? Then, amid the collapse of fortune and household, she could find no reasonable objection to urge. She had never been attached to Andree. She accused La Catiche, the nurse, of having made the child her own. That gentle, docile, emotional little sheep was not a Seguin, she often remarked. Then, while feigning to defend the girl, Celeste embittered her mother against her, and inspired her with a desire to see the marriage promptly concluded, in order that she might free herself from her last cares and live as she wished. Thus, after a long chat with Mathieu, who promised his consent, it remained only for Du Hordel to assure himself of Seguin's approval before an application in due form was made. It was difficult, however, to find Seguin in a suitable frame of mind. So weeks were lost, and it became necessary to pacify Ambroise, who was very much in love, and was doubtless warned by his all-invading genius that this loving and simple girl would bring him a kingdom in her apron.

One day when Mathieu was passing along the Avenue d'Antin, it occurred to him to call at the house to ascertain if Seguin had re-appeared there, for he had suddenly taken himself off without warning, and had gone, so it was believed, to Italy. Then, as Mathieu found himself alone with Celeste, the opportunity seemed to him an excellent one to discover La Couteau's whereabouts. He asked for news of her, saying that a friend of his was in need of a good nurse.

"Well, monsieur, you are in luck's way," the maid replied; "La Couteau is to bring a child home to our neighbor, Madame Menoux, this very day. It is nearly four o'clock now, and that is the time when she promised to come. You know Madame Menoux's place, do you not? It is the third shop in the first street on the left." Then she apologized for being unable to conduct him thither: "I am alone," she said; "we still have no news of the master. On Wednesdays Madame presides at the meeting of her society, and Mademoiselle Andree has just gone out walking with her uncle."

Mathieu hastily repaired to Madame Menoux's shop. From a distance he saw her standing on the threshold; age had made her thinner than ever; at forty she was as slim as a young girl, with a long and pointed face. Silent labor consumed her; for twenty years she had been desperately selling bits of cotton and packages of needles without ever making a fortune, but pleased, nevertheless, at being able to add her modest gains to her husband's monthly salary in order to provide him with sundry little comforts. His rheumatism would no doubt soon compel him to relinquish his post as a museum attendant, and how would they be able to manage with his pension of a few hundred francs per annum if she did not keep up her business? Moreover, they had met with no luck. Their first child had died, and some years had elapsed before the birth of a second boy, whom they had greeted with delight, no doubt, though he would prove a heavy burden to them, especially as they had now decided to take him back from the country. Thus Mathieu found the worthy woman in a state of great emotion, waiting for the child on the threshold of her shop, and watching the corner of the avenue.

"Oh! it was Celeste who sent you, monsieur! No, La Couteau hasn't come yet. I'm quite astonished at it; I expect her every moment. Will you kindly step inside, monsieur, and sit down?"

He refused the only chair which blocked up the narrow passage where scarcely three customers could have stood in a row. Behind a glass partition one perceived the dim back shop, which served as kitchen and dining-room and bedchamber, and which received only a little air from a damp inner yard which suggested a sewer shaft.

"As you see, monsieur, we have scarcely any room," continued Madame Menoux; "but then we pay only eight hundred francs rent, and where else could we find a shop at that price? And besides, I have been here for nearly twenty years, and have worked up a little regular custom in the neighborhood. Oh! I don't complain of the place myself, I'm not big, there is always sufficient room for me. And as my husband comes home only in the evening, and then sits down in his armchair to smoke his pipe, he isn't so much inconvenienced. I do all I can for him, and he is reasonable enough not to ask me to do more. But with a child I fear that it will be impossible to get on here."

The recollection of her first boy, her little Pierre, returned to her, and her eyes filled with tears. "Ah! monsieur, that was ten years ago, and I can still see La Couteau bringing him back to me, just as she'll be bringing the other by and by. I was told so many tales; there was such good air at Rougemont, and the children led such healthy lives, and my boy had such rosy cheeks, that I ended by leaving him there till he was five years old, regretting that I had no room for him here. And no, you can't have an idea of all the presents that the nurse wheedled out of me, of all the money that I paid! It was ruination! And then, all at once, I had just time to send for the boy, and he was brought back to me as thin and pale and weak, as if he had never tasted good bread in his life. Two months later he died in my arms. His father fell ill over it, and if we hadn't been attached to one another, I think we should both have gone and drowned ourselves."

Scarce wiping her eyes she feverishly returned to the threshold, and again cast a passionate expectant glance towards the avenue. And when she came back, having seen nothing, she resumed: "So you will understand our emotion when, two years ago, though I was thirty-seven, I again had a little boy. We were wild with delight, like a young married couple. But what a lot of trouble and worry! We had to put the little fellow out to nurse as we let the other one, since we could not possibly keep him here. And even after swearing that he should not go to Rougemont we ended by saying that we at least knew the place, and that he would not be worse off there than elsewhere. Only we sent him to La Vimeux, for we wouldn't hear any more of La Loiseau since she sent Pierre back in such a fearful state. And this time, as the little fellow is now two years old, I was determined to have him home again, though I don't even know where I shall put him. I've been waiting for an hour now, and I can't help trembling, for I always fear some catastrophe."

She could not remain in the shop, but remained standing by the doorway, with her neck outstretched and her eyes fixed on the street corner. All at once a deep cry came from her: "Ah! here they are!"

Leisurely, and with a sour, harassed air, La Couteau came in and placed the sleeping child in Madame Menoux's arms, saying as she did so: "Well, your George is a tidy weight, I can tell you. You won't say that I've brought you this one back like a skeleton."

Quivering, her legs sinking beneath her for very joy, the mother had been obliged to sit down, keeping her child on her knees, kissing him, examining him, all haste to see if he were in good health and likely to live. He had a fat and rather pale face, and seemed big, though puffy. When she had unfastened his wraps, her hands trembling the while with nervousness, she found that he was pot-bellied, with small legs and arms.

"He is very big about the body," she murmured, ceasing to smile, and turning gloomy with renewed fears.

"Ah, yes! complain away!" said La Couteau. "The other was too thin; this one will be too fat. Mothers are never satisfied!"

At the first glance Mathieu had detected that the child was one of those who are fed on pap, stuffed for economy's sake with bread and water, and fated to all the stomachic complaints of early childhood. And at the sight of the poor little fellow, Rougemont, the frightful slaughter-place, with its daily massacre of the innocents, arose in his memory, such as it had been described to him in years long past. There was La Loiseau, whose habits were so abominably filthy that her nurslings rotted as on a manure heap; there was La Vimeux, who never purchased a drop of milk, but picked up all the village crusts and made bran porridge for her charges as if they had been pigs; there was La Gavette too, who, being always in the fields, left her nurslings in the charge of a paralytic old man, who sometimes let them fall into the fire; and there was La Cauchois, who, having nobody to watch the babes, contented herself with tying them in their cradles, leaving them in the company of fowls which came in bands to peck at their eyes. And the scythe of death swept by; there was wholesale assassination; doors were left wide open before rows of cradles, in order to make room for fresh bundles despatched from Paris. Yet all did not die; here, for instance, was one brought home again. But even when they came back alive they carried with them the germs of death, and another hecatomb ensued, another sacrifice to the monstrous god of social egotism.

"I'm tired out; I must sit down," resumed La Couteau, seating herself on the narrow bench behind the counter. "Ah! what a trade! And to think that we are always received as if we were heartless criminals and thieves!"

She also had become withered, her sunburnt, tanned face suggesting more than ever the beak of a bird of prey. But her eyes remained very keen, sharpened as it were by ferocity. She no doubt failed to get rich fast enough, for she continued wailing, complaining of her calling, of the increasing avarice of parents, of the demands of the authorities, of the warfare which was being declared against nurse-agents on all sides. Yes, it was a lost calling, said she, and really God must have abandoned her that she should still be compelled to carry it on at forty-five years of age. "It will end by killing me," she added; "I shall always get more kicks than money at it. How unjust it is! Here have I brought you back a superb child, and yet you look anything but pleased—it's enough to disgust one of doing one's best!"

In thus complaining her object perhaps was to extract from the haberdasher as large a present as possible. Madame Menoux was certainly disturbed by it all. Her boy woke up and began to wail loudly, and it became necessary to give him a little lukewarm milk. At last, when the accounts were settled, the nurse-agent, seeing that she would have ten francs for herself, grew calmer. She was about to take her leave when Madame Menoux, pointing to Mathieu, exclaimed: "This gentleman wished to speak to you on business."

Although La Couteau had not seen the gentleman for several years past, she had recognized him perfectly well. Still she had not even turned towards him, for she knew him to be mixed up in so many matters that his discretion was a certainty. And so she contented herself with saying: "If monsieur will kindly explain to me what it is I shall be quite at his service."

"I will accompany you," replied Mathieu; "we can speak together as we walk along."

"Very good, that will suit me well, for I am rather in a hurry."

Once outside, Mathieu resolved that he would try no ruses with her. The best course was to tell her plainly what he wanted, and then to buy her silence. At the first words he spoke she understood him. She well remembered Norine's child, although in her time she had carried dozens of children to the Foundling Hospital. The particular circumstances of that case, however, the conversation which had taken place, her drive with Mathieu in a cab, had all remained engraved on her memory. Moreover, she had found that child again, at Rougemont, five days later; and she even remembered that her friend the hospital-attendant had left it with La Loiseau. But she had occupied herself no more about it afterwards; and she believed that it was now dead, like so many others. When she heard Mathieu speak of the hamlet of Saint-Pierre, of Montoir the wheelwright, and of Alexandre-Honore, now fifteen, who must be in apprenticeship there, she evinced great surprise.

"Oh, you must be mistaken, monsieur," she said; "I know Montoir at Saint-Pierre very well. And he certainly has a lad from the Foundling, of the age you mention, at his place. But that lad came from La Cauchois; he is a big carroty fellow named Richard, who arrived at our village some days before the other. I know who his mother was; she was an English woman called Amy, who stopped more than once at Madame Bourdieu's. That ginger-haired lad is certainly not your Norine's boy. Alexandre-Honore was dark."

"Well, then," replied Mathieu, "there must be another apprentice at the wheelwright's. My information is precise, it was given me officially."

After a moment's perplexity La Couteau made a gesture of ignorance, and admitted that Mathieu might be right. "It's possible," said she; "perhaps Montoir has two apprentices. He does a good business, and as I haven't been to Saint-Pierre for some months now I can say nothing certain. Well, and what do you desire of me, monsieur?"

He then gave her very clear instructions. She was to obtain the most precise information possible about the lad's health, disposition, and conduct, whether the schoolmaster had always been pleased with him, whether his employer was equally satisfied, and so forth. Briefly, the inquiry was to be complete. But, above all things, she was to carry it on in such a way that nobody should suspect anything, neither the boy himself nor the folks of the district. There must be absolute secrecy.

"All that is easy," replied La Couteau, "I understand perfectly, and you can rely on me. I shall need a little time, however, and the best plan will be for me to tell you of the result of my researches when I next come to Paris. And if it suits you you will find me to-day fortnight, at two o'clock, at Broquette's office in the Rue Roquepine. I am quite at home there, and the place is like a tomb."

Some days later, as Mathieu was again at the Beauchene works with his son Blaise, he was observed by Constance, who called him to her and questioned him in such direct fashion that he had to tell her what steps he had taken. When she heard of his appointment with La Couteau for the Wednesday of the ensuing week, she said to him in her resolute way: "Come and fetch me. I wish to question that woman myself. I want to be quite certain on the matter."

In spite of the lapse of fifteen years Broquette's nurse-office in the Rue Roquepine had remained the same as formerly, except that Madame Broquette was dead and had been succeeded by her daughter Herminie. The sudden loss of that fair, dignified lady, who had possessed such a decorative presence and so ably represented the high morality and respectability of the establishment, had at first seemed a severe one. But it so happened that Herminie, a tall, slim, languid creature that she was, gorged with novel-reading, also proved in her way a distinguished figurehead for the office. She was already thirty and was still unmarried, feeling indeed nothing but loathing for all the mothers laden with whining children by whom she was surrounded. Moreover, M. Broquette, her father, though now more than five-and-seventy, secretly remained the all-powerful, energetic director of the place, discharging all needful police duties, drilling new nurses like recruits, remaining ever on the watch and incessantly perambulating the three floors of his suspicious, dingy lodging-house.

La Couteau was waiting for Mathieu in the doorway. On perceiving Constance, whom she did not know, for she had never previously met her, she seemed surprised. Who could that lady be? what had she to do with the affair? However, she promptly extinguished the bright gleam of curiosity which for a moment lighted up her eyes; and as Herminie, with distinguished nonchalance, was at that moment exhibiting a party of nurses to two gentlemen in the office, she took her visitors into the empty refectory, where the atmosphere was as usual tainted by a horrible stench of cookery.

"You must excuse me, monsieur and madame," she exclaimed, "but there is no other room free just now. The place is full."

Then she carried her keen glances from Mathieu to Constance, preferring to wait until she was questioned, since another person was now in the secret.

"You can speak out," said Mathieu. "Did you make the inquiries I spoke to you about?"

"Certainly, monsieur. They were made, and properly made, I think."

"Then tell us the result: I repeat that you can speak freely before this lady."

"Oh! monsieur, it won't take me long. You were quite right: there were two apprentices at the wheelwright's at Saint-Pierre, and one of them was Alexandre-Honore, the pretty blonde's child, the same that we took together over yonder. He had been there, I found, barely two months, after trying three or four other callings, and that explains my ignorance of the circumstance. Only he's a lad who can stay nowhere, and so three weeks ago he took himself off."

Constance could not restrain an exclamation of anxiety: "What! took himself off?"

"Yes, madame, I mean that he ran away, and this time it is quite certain that he has left the district, for he disappeared with three hundred francs belonging to Montoir, his master."

La Couteau's dry voice rang as if it were an axe dealing a deadly blow. Although she could not understand the lady's sudden pallor and despairing emotion, she certainly seemed to derive cruel enjoyment from it.

"Are you quite sure of your information?" resumed Constance, struggling against the facts. "That is perhaps mere village tittle-tattle."

"Tittle-tattle, madame? Oh! when I undertake to do anything I do it properly. I spoke to the gendarmes. They have scoured the whole district, and it is certain that Alexandre-Honore left no address behind him when he went off with those three hundred francs. He is still on the run. As for that I'll stake my name on it."

This was indeed a hard blow for Constance. That lad, whom she fancied she had found again, of whom she dreamt incessantly, and on whom she had based so many unacknowledgable plans of vengeance, escaped her, vanished once more into the unknown! She was distracted by it as by some pitiless stroke of fate, some fresh and irreparable defeat. However, she continued the interrogatory.

"Surely you did not merely see the gendarmes? you were instructed to question everybody."

"That is precisely what I did, madame. I saw the schoolmaster, and I spoke to the other persons who had employed the lad. They all told me that he was a good-for-nothing. The schoolmaster remembered that he had been a liar and a bully. Now he's a thief; that makes him perfect. I can't say otherwise than I have said, since you wanted to know the plain truth."

La Couteau thus emphasized her statements on seeing that the lady's suffering increased. And what strange suffering it was; a heart-pang at each fresh accusation, as if her husband's illegitimate child had become in some degree her own! She ended indeed by silencing the nurse-agent.

"Thank you. The boy is no longer at Rougemont, that is all we wished to know."

La Couteau thereupon turned to Mathieu, continuing her narrative, in order to give him his money's worth.

"I also made the other apprentice talk a bit," said she; "you know, that big carroty fellow, Richard, whom I spoke to you about. He's another whom I wouldn't willingly trust. But it's certain that he doesn't know where his companion has gone. The gendarmes think that Alexandre is in Paris."

Thereupon Mathieu in his turn thanked the woman, and handed her a bank-note for fifty francs—a gift which brought a smile to her face and rendered her obsequious, and, as she herself put it, "as discreetly silent as the grave." Then, as three nurses came into the refectory, and Monsieur Broquette could be heard scrubbing another's hands in the kitchen, by way of teaching her how to cleanse herself of her native dirt, Constance felt nausea arise within her, and made haste to follow her companion away. Once in the street, instead of entering the cab which was waiting, she paused pensively, haunted by La Couteau's final words.

"Did you hear?" she exclaimed. "That wretched lad may be in Paris."

"That is probable enough; they all end by stranding here."

Constance again hesitated, reflected, and finally made up her mind to say in a somewhat tremulous voice: "And the mother, my friend; you know where she lives, don't you? Did you not tell me that you had concerned yourself about her?"

"Yes, I did."

"Then listen—and above all, don't be astonished; pity me, for I am really suffering. An idea has just taken possession of me; it seems to me that if the boy is in Paris, he may have found his mother. Perhaps he is with her, or she may at least know where he lodges. Oh! don't tell me that it is impossible. On the contrary, everything is possible."

Surprised and moved at seeing one who usually evinced so much calmness now giving way to such fancies as these, Mathieu promised that he would make inquiries. Nevertheless, Constance did not get into the cab, but continued gazing at the pavement. And when she once more raised her eyes, she spoke to him entreatingly, in an embarrassed, humble manner: "Do you know what we ought to do? Excuse me, but it is a service I shall never forget. If I could only know the truth at once it might calm me a little. Well, let us drive to that woman's now. Oh! I won't go up; you can go alone, while I wait in the cab at the street corner. And perhaps you will obtain some news."

It was an insane idea, and he was at first minded to prove this to her. Then, on looking at her, she seemed to him so wretched, so painfully tortured, that without a word, making indeed but a kindly gesture of compassion, he consented. And the cab carried them away.

The large room in which Norine and Cecile lived together was at Grenelle, near the Champ de Mars, in a street at the end of the Rue de la Federation. They had been there for nearly six years now, and in the earlier days had experienced much worry and wretchedness. But the child whom they had to feed and save had on his side saved them also. The motherly feelings slumbering in Norine's heart had awakened with passionate intensity for that poor little one as soon as she had given him the breast and learnt to watch over him and kiss him. And it was also wondrous to see how that unfortunate creature Cecile regarded the child as in some degree her own. He had indeed two mothers, whose thoughts were for him alone. If Norine, during the first few months, had often wearied of spending her days in pasting little boxes together, if even thoughts of flight had at times come to her, she had always been restrained by the puny arms that were clasped around her neck. And now she had grown calm, sensible, diligent, and very expert at the light work which Cecile had taught her. It was a sight to see them both, gay and closely united in their little home, which was like a convent cell, spending their days at their little table; while between them was their child, their one source of life, of hard-working courage and happiness.

Since they had been living thus they had made but one good friend, and this was Madame Angelin. As a delegate of the Poor Relief Service, intrusted with one of the Grenelle districts, Madame Angelin had found Norine among the pensioners over whom she was appointed to watch. A feeling of affection for the two mothers, as she called the sisters, had sprung up within her, and she had succeeded in inducing the authorities to prolong the child's allowance of thirty francs a month for a period of three years. Then she had obtained scholastic assistance for him, not to mention frequent presents which she brought—clothes, linen, and even money—for apart from official matters, charitable people often intrusted her with fairly large sums, which she distributed among the most meritorious of the poor mothers whom she visited. And even nowadays she occasionally called on the sisters, well pleased to spend an hour in that nook of quiet toil, which the laughter and the play of the child enlivened. She there felt herself to be far away from the world, and suffered less from her own misfortunes. And Norine kissed her hands, declaring that without her the little household of the two mothers would never have managed to exist.

When Mathieu appeared there, cries of delight arose. He also was a friend, a saviour—the one who, by first taking and furnishing the large room, had founded the household. It was a very clean room, almost coquettish with its white curtains, and rendered very cheerful by its two large windows, which admitted the golden radiance of the afternoon sun. Norine and Cecile were working at the table, cutting out cardboard and pasting it together, while the little one, who had come home from school, sat between them on a high chair, gravely handling a pair of scissors and fully persuaded that he was helping them.

"Oh! is it you? How kind of you to come to see us! Nobody has called for five days past. Oh! we don't complain of it. We are so happy alone together! Since Irma married a clerk she has treated us with disdain. Euphrasie can no longer come down her stairs. Victor and his wife live so far away. And as for that rascal Alfred, he only comes up here to see if he can find something to steal. Mamma called five days ago to tell us that papa had narrowly escaped being killed at the works on the previous day. Poor mamma! she is so worn out that before long she won't be able to take a step."

While the sisters thus rattled on both together, one beginning a sentence and the other finishing it, Mathieu looked at Norine, who, thanks to that peaceful and regular life, had regained in her thirty-sixth year a freshness of complexion that suggested a superb, mature fruit gilded by the sun. And even the slender Cecile had acquired strength, the strength which love's energy can impart even to a childish form.

All at once, however, she raised a loud exclamation of horror: "Oh! he has hurt himself, the poor little fellow." And at once she snatched the scissors from the child, who sat there laughing with a drop of blood at the tip of one of his fingers.

"Oh! good Heavens," murmured Norine, who had turned quite pale, "I feared that he had slit his hand."

For a moment Mathieu wondered if he would serve any useful purpose by fulfilling the strange mission he had undertaken. Then it seemed to him that it might be as well to say at least a word of warning to the young woman who had grown so calm and quiet, thanks to the life of work which she had at last embraced. And he proceeded very prudently, only revealing the truth by slow degrees. Nevertheless, there came a moment when, after reminding Norine of the birth of Alexandre-Honore, it became necessary for him to add that the boy was living.

The mother looked at Mathieu in evident consternation. "He is living, living! Why do you tell me that? I was so pleased at knowing nothing."

"No doubt; but it is best that you should know. I have even been assured that he must now be in Paris, and I wondered whether he might have found you, and have come to see you."

At this she lost all self-possession. "What! Have come to see me! Nobody has been to see me. Do you think, then, that he might come? But I don't want him to do so! I should go mad! A big fellow of fifteen falling on me like that—a lad I don't know and don't care for! Oh! no, no; prevent it, I beg of you; I couldn't—I couldn't bear it!"

With a gesture of utter distraction she had burst into tears, and had caught hold of the little one near her, pressing him to her breast as if to shield him from the other, the unknown son, the stranger, who by his resurrection threatened to thrust himself in some degree in the younger lad's place.

"No, no!" she cried. "I have but one child; there is only one I love; I don't want any other."

Cecile had risen, greatly moved, and desirous of bringing her sister to reason. Supposing that the other son should come, how could she turn him out of doors? At the same time, though her pity was aroused for the abandoned one, she also began to bewail the loss of their happiness. It became necessary for Mathieu to reassure them both by saying that he regarded such a visit as most improbable. Without telling them the exact truth, he spoke of the elder lad's disappearance, adding, however, that he must be ignorant even of his mother's name. Thus, when he left the sisters, they already felt relieved and had again turned to their little boxes while smiling at their son, to whom they had once more intrusted the scissors in order that he might cut out some paper men.

Down below, at the street corner, Constance, in great impatience, was looking out of the cab window, watching the house-door.

"Well?" she asked, quivering, as soon as Mathieu was near her.

"Well, the mother knows nothing and has seen nobody. It was a foregone conclusion."

She sank down as if from some supreme collapse, and her ashen face became quite distorted. "You are right, it was certain," said she; "still one always hopes." And with a gesture of despair she added: "It is all ended now. Everything fails me, my last dream is dead."

Mathieu pressed her hand and remained waiting for her to give an address in order that he might transmit it to the driver. But she seemed to have lost her head and to have forgotten where she wished to go. Then, as she asked him if he would like her to set him down anywhere, he replied that he wished to call on the Seguins. The fear of finding herself alone again so soon after the blow which had fallen on her thereupon gave her the idea of paying a visit to Valentine, whom she had not seen for some time past.

"Get in," she said to Mathieu; "we will go to the Avenue d'Antin together."

The vehicle rolled off and heavy silence fell between them; they had not a word to say to one another. However, as they were reaching their destination, Constance exclaimed in a bitter voice: "You must give my husband the good news, and tell him that the boy has disappeared. Ah! what a relief for him!"

Mathieu, on calling in the Avenue d'Antin, had hoped to find the Seguins assembled there. Seguin himself had returned to Paris, nobody knew whence, a week previously, when Andree's hand had been formally asked of him; and after an interview with his uncle Du Hordel he had evinced great willingness and cordiality. Indeed, the wedding had immediately been fixed for the month of May, when the Froments also hoped to marry off their daughter Rose. The two weddings, it was thought, might take place at Chantebled on the same day, which would be delightful. This being arranged, Ambroise was accepted as fiance, and to his great delight was able to call at the Seguins' every day, about five o'clock, to pay his court according to established usage. It was on account of this that Mathieu fully expected to find the whole family at home.

When Constance asked for Valentine, however, a footman informed her that Madame had gone out. And when Mathieu in his turn asked for Seguin, the man replied that Monsieur was also absent. Only Mademoiselle was at home with her betrothed. On learning this the visitors went upstairs.

"What! are you left all alone?" exclaimed Mathieu on perceiving the young couple seated side by side on a little couch in the big room on the first floor, which Seguin had once called his "cabinet."

"Why, yes, we are alone in the house," Andree answered with a charming laugh. "We are very pleased at it."

They looked adorable, thus seated side by side—she so gentle, of such tender beauty—he with all the fascinating charm that was blended with his strength.

"Isn't Celeste there at any rate?" again inquired Mathieu.

"No, she has disappeared we don't know where." And again they laughed like free frolicsome birds ensconced in the depths of some lonely forest.

"Well, you cannot be very lively all alone like this."

"Oh! we don't feel at all bored, we have so many things to talk about. And then we look at one another. And there is never an end to it all."

Though her heart bled, Constance could not help admiring them. Ah, to think of it! Such grace, such health, such hope! While in her home all was blighted, withered, destroyed, that race of Froments seemed destined to increase forever! For this again was a conquest—those two children left free to love one another, henceforth alone in that sumptuous mansion which to-morrow would belong to them. Then, at another thought, Constance turned towards Mathieu: "Are you not also marrying your eldest daughter?" she asked.

"Yes, Rose," Mathieu gayly responded. "We shall have a grand fete at Chantebled next May! You must all of you come there."

'Twas indeed as she had thought: numbers prevailed, life proved victorious. Chantebled had been conquered from the Seguins, and now their very house would soon be invaded by Ambroise, while the Beauchene works themselves had already half fallen into the hands of Blaise.

"We will go," she answered, quivering. "And may your good luck continue—that is what I wish you."

XVI

AMID the general delight attending the double wedding which was to prove, so to say, a supreme celebration of the glory of Chantebled, it had occurred to Mathieu's daughter Rose to gather the whole family together one Sunday, ten days before the date appointed for the ceremony. She and her betrothed, followed by the whole family, were to repair to Janville station in the morning to meet the other affianced pair, Ambroise and Andree, who were to be conducted in triumph to the farm where they would all lunch together. It would be a kind of wedding rehearsal, she exclaimed with her hearty laugh; they would be able to arrange the programme for the great day. And her idea enraptured her to such a point, she seemed to anticipate so much delight from this preliminary festival, that Mathieu and Marianne consented to it.

Rose's marriage was like the supreme blossoming of years of prosperity, and brought a finishing touch to the happiness of the home. She was the prettiest of Mathieu's daughters, with dark brown hair, round gilded cheeks, merry eyes, and charming mouth. And she had the most equable of dispositions, her laughter ever rang out so heartily! She seemed indeed to be the very soul, the good fairy, of that farm teeming with busy life. But beneath the invariable good humor which kept her singing from morning till night there was much common sense and energy of affection, as her choice of a husband showed. Eight years previously Mathieu had engaged the services of one Frederic Berthaud, the son of a petty farmer of the neighborhood. This sturdy young fellow had taken a passionate interest in the creative work of Chantebled, learning and working there with rare activity and intelligence. He had no means of his own at all. Rose, who had grown up near him, knew however that he was her father's preferred assistant, and when he returned to the farm at the expiration of his military service she, divining that he loved her, forced him to acknowledge it. Thus she settled her own future life; she wished to remain near her parents, on that farm which had hitherto held all her happiness. Neither Mathieu nor Marianne was surprised at this. Deeply touched, they signified their approval of a choice in which affection for themselves had so large a part. The family ties seemed to be drawn yet closer, and increase of joy came to the home.

So everything was settled, and it was agreed that on the appointed Sunday Ambroise should bring his betrothed Andree and her mother, Madame Seguin, to Janville by the ten o'clock train. A couple of hours previously Rose had already begun a battle with the object of prevailing upon the whole family to repair to the railway station to meet the affianced pair.

"But come, my children, it is unreasonable," Marianne gently exclaimed. "It is necessary that somebody should stay at home. I shall keep Nicolas here, for there is no need to send children of five years old scouring the roads. I shall also keep Gervais and Claire. But you may take all the others if you like, and your father shall lead the way."

Rose, however, still merrily laughing, clung to her plan. "No, no, mamma, you must come as well; everybody must come; it was promised. Ambroise and Andree, you see, are like a royal couple from a neighboring kingdom. My brother Ambroise, having won the hand of a foreign princess, is going to present her to us. And so, to do them the honors of our own empire, we, Frederic and I, must go to meet them, attended by the whole Court. You form the Court and you cannot do otherwise than come. Ah what a fine sight it will be when we spread out through the country on our way home again!"

Marianne, amused by her daughter's overflowing gayety, ended by laughing and giving way.

"This will be the order of the march," resumed Rose. "Oh! I've planned everything, as you will see! As for Frederic and myself, we shall go on our bicycles—that is the most modern style. We will also take my maids of honor, my little sisters Louise, Madeleine, and Marguerite, eleven, nine, and seven years old, on their bicycles. They will look very well behind me. Then Gregoire can follow on his wheel; he is thirteen, and will do as a page, bringing up the rear of my personal escort. All the rest of the Court will have to pack itself into the chariot—I mean the big family wagon, in which there is room for eight. You, as Queen Mother, may keep your last little prince, Nicolas, on your knees. Papa will only have to carry himself proudly, as befits the head of a dynasty. And my brother Gervais, that young Hercules of seventeen, shall drive, with Claire, who at fifteen is so remarkable for common sense, beside him on the box-seat. As for the illustrious twins, those high and mighty lords, Denis and Blaise, we will call for them at Janville, since they are waiting for us there, at Madame Desvignes'."

Thus did Rose rattle on, exulting over the scheme she had devised. She danced, sang, clapped her hands, and finally exclaimed: "Ah! for a pretty cortege this will be fine indeed."

She was animated by such joyous haste that she made the party start much sooner than was necessary, and they reached Janville at half-past nine. It was true, however, that they had to call for the others there. The house in which Madame Desvignes had taken refuge after her husband's death, and which she had now occupied for some twelve years, living there in a very quiet retired way on the scanty income she had managed to save, was the first in the village, on the high road. For a week past her elder daughter Charlotte, Blaise's wife, had come to stay there with her children, Berthe and Christophe, who needed change of air; and on the previous evening they had been joined by Blaise, who was well pleased to spend Sunday with them.

Madame Desvignes' younger daughter, Marthe, was delighted whenever her sister thus came to spend a few weeks in the old home, bringing her little ones with her, and once more occupying the room which had belonged to her in her girlish days. All the laughter and playfulness of the past came back again, and the one dream of worthy Madame Desvignes, amid her pride at being a grandmamma, was of completing her life-work, hitherto so prudently carried on, by marrying off Marthe in her turn. As a matter of fact it had seemed likely that there might be three instead of two weddings at Chantebled that spring. Denis, who, since leaving a scientific school had embarked in fresh technical studies, often slept at the farm and nearly every Sunday he saw Marthe, who was of the same age as Rose and her constant companion. The young girl, a pretty blonde like her sister Charlotte, but of a less impulsive and more practical nature, had indeed attracted Denis, and, dowerless though she was, he had made up his mind to marry her, since he had discovered that she possessed the sterling qualities that help one on to fortune. But in their chats together both evinced good sense and serene confidence, without sign of undue haste. Particularly was this the case with Denis, who was very methodical in his ways and unwilling to place a woman's happiness in question until he could offer her an assured position. Thus, of their own accord, they had postponed their marriage, quietly and smilingly resisting the passionate assaults of Rose, whom the idea of three weddings on the same day had greatly excited. At the same time, Denis continued visiting Madame Desvignes, who, on her side, equally prudent and confident, received him much as if he were her son. That morning he had even quitted the farm at seven o'clock, saying that he meant to surprise Blaise in bed; and thus he also was to be met at Janville.

As it happened, the fete of Janville fell on Sunday, the second in May. Encompassing the square in front of the railway station were roundabouts, booths, shooting galleries, and refreshment stalls. Stormy showers during the night had cleansed the sky, which was of a pure blue, with a flaming sun, whose heat in fact was excessive for the season. A good many people were already assembled on the square—all the idlers of the district, bands of children, and peasants of the surrounding country, eager to see the sights; and into the midst of this crowd fell the Froments—first the bicyclists, next the wagon, and then the others who had been met at the entry of the village.

"We are producing our little effect!" exclaimed Rose as she sprang from her wheel.

This was incontestable. During the earlier years the whole of Janville had looked harshly on those Froments, those bourgeois who had come nobody knew whence, and who, with overweening conceit, had talked of making corn grow in land where there had been nothing but crops of stones for centuries past. Then the miracle, Mathieu's extraordinary victory, had long hurt people's vanity and thereby increased their anger. But everything passes away; one cannot regard success with rancor, and folks who grow rich always end by being in the right. Thus, nowadays, Janville smiled complacently on that swarming family which had grown up beside it, forgetting that in former times each fresh birth at Chantebled had been regarded as quite scandalous by the gossips. Besides, how could one resist such a happy display of strength and power, such a merry invasion, when, as on that festive Sunday, the whole family came up at a gallop, conquering the roads, the streets, and the squares? What with the father and mother, the eleven children—six boys and five girls—and two grandchildren already, there were fifteen of them. The eldest boys, the twins, were now four-and twenty, and still so much alike that people occasionally mistook one for the other as in their cradle days, when Marianne had been obliged to open their eyes to identify them, those of Blaise being gray, and those of Denis black. Nicolas, the youngest boy, at the other end of the family scale, was as yet but five years old; a delightful little urchin was he, a precocious little man whose energy and courage were quite amusing. And between the twins and that youngster came the eight other children: Ambroise, the future husband, who was already on the road to every conquest; Rose, so brimful of life; who likewise was on the eve of marrying; Gervais, with his square brow and wrestler's limbs, who would soon be fighting the good fight of agriculture; Claire, who was silent and hardworking, and lacked beauty, but possessed a strong heart and a housewife's sensible head. Next Gregoire, the undisciplined, self-willed schoolboy, who was ever beating the hedges in search of adventures; and then the three last girls: Louise, plump and good natured; Madeleine, delicate and of dreamy mind; Marguerite, the least pretty but the most loving of the trio. And when, behind their father and their mother, the eleven came along one after the other, followed too by Berthe and Christophe, representing yet another generation, it was a real procession that one saw, as, for instance, on that fine Sunday on the Grand Place of Janville, already crowded with holiday-making folks. And the effect was irresistible; even those who were scarcely pleased with the prodigious success of Chantebled felt enlivened and amused at seeing the Froments galloping about and invading the place. So much health and mirth and strength accompanied them, as if earth with her overflowing gifts of life had thus profusely created them for to-morrow's everlasting hopes.

"Let those who think themselves more numerous come forward!" Rose resumed gayly. "And then we will count one another."

"Come, be quiet!" said her mother, who, after alighting from the wagon, had set Nicolas on the ground. "You will end by making people hoot us."

"Hoot us! Why, they admire us: just look at them! How funny it is, mamma, that you are not prouder of yourself and of us!"

"Why, I am so very proud that I fear to humiliate others."

They all began to laugh. And Mathieu, standing near Marianne, likewise felt proud at finding himself, as he put it, among "the sacred battalion" of his sons and daughters. To that battalion worthy Madame Desvignes herself belonged, since her daughter Charlotte was adding soldiers to it and helping it to become an army. Such as it was indeed, this was only the beginning; later on the battalion would be seen ever increasing and multiplying, becoming a swarming victorious race, great-grandchildren following grandchildren, till there were fifty of them, and a hundred, and two hundred, all tending to increase the happiness and beauty of the world. And in the mingled amazement and amusement of Janville gathered around that fruitful family there was certainly some of the instinctive admiration which is felt for the strength and the healthfulness which create great nations.

"Besides, we have only friends now," remarked Mathieu. "Everybody is cordial with us!"

"Oh, everybody!" muttered Rose. "Just look at the Lepailleurs yonder, in front of that booth."

The Lepailleurs were indeed there—the father, the mother, Antonin, and Therese. In order to avoid the Froments they were pretending to take great interest in a booth, where a number of crudely-colored china ornaments were displayed as prizes for the winners at a "lucky-wheel." They no longer even exchanged courtesies with the Chantebled folks; for in their impotent rage at such ceaseless prosperity they had availed themselves of a petty business dispute to break off all relations. Lepailleur regarded the creation of Chantebled as a personal insult, for he had not forgotten his jeers and challenges with respect to those moorlands, from which, in his opinion, one would never reap anything but stones. And thus, when he had well examined the china ornaments, it occurred to him to be insolent, with which object he turned round and stared at the Froments, who, as the train they were expecting would not arrive for another quarter of an hour, were gayly promenading through the fair.

The miller's bad temper had for the last two months been increased by the return of his son Antonin to Janville under very deplorable circumstances. This young fellow, who had set off one morning to conquer Paris, sent there by his parents, who had a blind confidence in his fine handwriting, had remained with Maitre Rousselet the attorney for four years as a petty clerk, dull-witted and extremely idle. He had not made the slightest progress in his profession, but had gradually sunk into debauchery, cafe-life, drunkenness, gambling, and facile amours. To him the conquest of Paris meant greedy indulgence in the coarsest pleasures such as he had dreamt of in his village. It consumed all his money, all the supplies which he extracted from his mother by continual promises of victory, in which she implicitly believed, so great was her faith in him. But he ended by grievously suffering in health, turned thin and yellow, and actually began to lose his hair at three-and-twenty, so that his mother, full of alarm, brought him home one day, declaring that he worked too hard, and that she would not allow him to kill himself in that fashion. It leaked out, however, later on, that Maitre Rousselet had summarily dismissed him. Even before this was known his return home did not fail to make his father growl. The miller partially guessed the truth, and if he did not openly vent his anger, it was solely from pride, in order that he might not have to confess his mistake with respect to the brilliant career which he had predicted for Antonin. At home, when the doors were closed, Lepailleur revenged himself on his wife, picking the most frightful quarrels with her since he had discovered her frequent remittances of money to their son. But she held her own against him, for even as she had formerly admired him, so at present she admired her boy. She sacrificed, as it were, the father to the son, now that the latter's greater learning brought her increased surprise. And so the household was all disagreement as a result of that foolish attempt, born of vanity, to make their heir a Monsieur, a Parisian. Antonin for his part sneered and shrugged his shoulders at it all, idling away his time pending the day when he might be able to resume a life of profligacy.

When the Froments passed by, it was a fine sight to see the Lepailleurs standing there stiffly and devouring them with their eyes. The father puckered his lips in an attempt to sneer, and the mother jerked her head with an air of bravado. The son, standing there with his hands in his pockets, presented a sorry sight with his bent back, his bald head, and pale face. All three were seeking to devise something disagreeable when an opportunity presented itself.

"Why, where is Therese?" exclaimed La Lepailleur. "She was here just now: what has become of her? I won't have her leave me when there are all these people about!"

It was quite true, for the last moment Therese had disappeared. She was now ten years old and very pretty, quite a plump little blonde, with wild hair and black eyes which shone brightly. But she had a terribly impulsive and wilful nature, and would run off and disappear for hours at a time, beating the hedges and scouring the countryside in search of birds'-nests and flowers and wild fruit. If her mother, however, made such a display of alarm, darting hither and thither to find her, just as the Froments passed by, it was because she had become aware of some scandalous proceedings during the previous week. Therese's ardent dream was to possess a bicycle, and she desired one the more since her parents stubbornly refused to content her, declaring in fact that those machines might do for bourgeois but were certainly not fit for well-behaved girls. Well, one afternoon, when she had gone as usual into the fields, her mother, returning from market, had perceived her on a deserted strip of road, in company with little Gregoire Froment, another young wanderer whom she often met in this wise, in spots known only to themselves. The two made a very suitable pair, and were ever larking and rambling along the paths, under the leaves, beside the ditches. But the abominable thing was that, on this occasion, Gregoire, having seated Therese on his own bicycle, was supporting her at the waist and running alongside, helping her to direct the machine. Briefly it was a real bicycle lesson which the little rascal was giving, and which the little hussy took with all the pleasure in the world. When Therese returned home that evening she had her ears soundly boxed for her pains.

"Where can that little gadabout have got to?" La Lepailleur continued shouting. "One can no sooner take one's eyes off her than she runs away."

Antonin, however, having peeped behind the booth containing the china ornaments, lurched back again, still with his hands in his pockets, and said with his vicious sneer: "Just look there, you'll see something."

And indeed, behind the booth, his mother again found Therese and Gregoire together. The lad was holding his bicycle with one hand and explaining some of the mechanism of it, while the girl, full of admiration and covetousness, looked on with glowing eyes. Indeed she could not resist her inclination, but laughingly let Gregoire raise her in order to seat her for a moment on the saddle, when all at once her mother's terrible voice burst forth: "You wicked hussy! what are you up to there again? Just come back at once, or I'll settle your business for you."

Then Mathieu also, catching sight of the scene, sternly summoned Gregoire: "Please to place your wheel with the others. You know what I have already said to you, so don't begin again."

It was war. Lepailleur impudently growled ignoble threats, which fortunately were lost amid the strains of a barrel organ. And the two families separated, going off in different directions through the growing holiday-making crowd.

"Won't that train ever come, then?" resumed Rose, who with joyous impatience was at every moment turning to glance at the clock of the little railway station on the other side of the square. "We have still ten minutes to wait: whatever shall we do?"

As it happened she had stopped in front of a hawker who stood on the footway with a basketful of crawfish, crawling, pell-mell, at his feet. They had certainly come from the sources of the Yeuse, three leagues away. They were not large, but they were very tasty, for Rose herself had occasionally caught some in the stream. And thus a greedy but also playful fancy came to her.

"Oh, mamma!" she cried, "let us buy the whole basketful. It will be for the feast of welcome, you see; it will be our present to the royal couple we are awaiting. People won't say that Our Majesties neglect to do things properly when they are expecting other Majesties. And I will cook them when we get back, and you'll see how well I shall succeed."

At this the others began to poke fun at her, but her parents ended by doing as she asked, big child as she was, who in the fulness of her happiness hardly knew what amusement to seek. However, as by way of pastime she obstinately sought to count the crawfish, quite an affair ensued: some of them pinched her, and she dropped them with a little shriek; and, amid it all, the basket fell over and then the crawfish hurriedly crawled away. The boys and girls darted in pursuit of them, there was quite a hunt, in which even the serious members of the family at last took part. And what with the laughter and eagerness of one and all, the big as well as the little, the whole happy brood, the sight was so droll and gay that the folks of Janville again drew near and good-naturedly took their share of the amusement.

All at once, however, arose a distant rumble of wheels and an engine whistled.

"Ah, good Heavens! here they are!" cried Rose, quite scared; "quick, quick, or the reception will be missed."

A scramble ensued, the owner of the crawfish was paid, and there was just time to shut the basket and carry it to the wagon. The whole family was already running off, invading the little station, and ranging itself in good order along the arrival platform.

"No, no, not like that," Rose repeated. "You don't observe the right order of precedence. The queen mother must be with the king her husband, and then the princes according to their height. Frederic must place himself on my right. And it's for me, you know, to make the speech of welcome."

The train stopped. When Ambroise and Andree alighted they were at first much surprised to find that everybody had come to meet them, drawn up in a row with solemn mien. When Rose, however began to deliver a pompous little speech, treating her brother's betrothed like some foreign princess, whom she had orders to welcome in the name of the king, her father, the young couple began to laugh, and even prolonged the joke by responding in the same style. The railway men looked on and listened, gaping. It was a fine farce, and the Froments were delighted at showing themselves so playful on that warm May morning.

But Marianne suddenly raised an exclamation of surprise: "What! has not Madame Seguin come with you? She gave me so many promises that she would."

In the rear of Ambroise and Andree Celeste the maid had alone alighted from the train. And she undertook to explain things: "Madame charged me," said she, "to say that she was really most grieved. Yesterday she still hoped that she would be able to keep her promise. Only in the evening she received a visit from Monsieur de Navarede, who is presiding to-day, Sunday, at a meeting of his Society, and of course Madame could not do otherwise than attend it. So she requested me to accompany the young people, and everything is satisfactory, for here they are, you see."

As a matter of fact nobody regretted the absence of Valentine, who always moped when she came into the country. And Mathieu expressed the general opinion in a few words of polite regret: "Well, you must tell her how much we shall miss her. And now let us be off."

Celeste, however, intervened once more. "Excuse me, monsieur, but I cannot remain with you. No. Madame particularly told me to go back to her at once, as she will need me to dress her. And, besides, she is always bored when she is alone. There is a train for Paris at a quarter past ten, is there not? I will go back by it. Then I will be here at eight o'clock this evening to take Mademoiselle home. We settled all that in looking through a time-table. Till this evening, monsieur."

"Till this evening, then, it's understood."

Thereupon, leaving the maid in the deserted little station, all the others returned to the village square, where the wagon and the bicycles were waiting.

"Now we are all assembled," exclaimed Rose, "and the real fete is about to begin. Let me organize the procession for our triumphal return to the castle of our ancestors."

"I am very much afraid that your procession will be soaked," said Marianne. "Just look at the rain approaching!"

During the last few moments there had appeared in the hitherto spotless sky a huge, livid cloud, rising from the west and urged along by a sudden squall. It presaged a return of the violent stormy showers of the previous night.

"Rain! Oh, we don't care about that," the girl responded with an air of superb defiance. "It will never dare to come down before we get home."

Then, with a comical semblance of authority, she disposed her people in the order which she had planned in her mind a week previously. And the procession set off through the admiring village, amid the smiles of all the good women hastening to their doorsteps, and then spread out along the white road between the fertile fields, where bands of startled larks took wing, carrying their clear song to the heavens. It was really magnificent.

At the head of the party were Rose and Frederic, side by side on their bicycles, opening the nuptial march with majestic amplitude. Behind them followed the three maids of honor, the younger sisters, Louise, Madeleine, and Marguerite, the tallest first, the shortest last, and each on a wheel proportioned to her growth. And with berets* on their heads, and their hair down their backs, waving in the breeze, they looked adorable, suggesting a flight of messenger swallows skimming over the ground and bearing good tidings onward. As for Gregoire the page, restive and always ready to bolt, he did not behave very well; for he actually tried to pass the royal couple at the head of the procession, a proceeding which brought him various severe admonitions until he fell back, as duty demanded, to his deferential and modest post. On the other hand, as the three maids of honor began to sing the ballad of Cinderella on her way to the palace of Prince Charming, the royal couple condescendingly declared that the song was appropriate and of pleasing effect, whatever might be the requirements of etiquette. Indeed, Rose, Frederic, and Gregoire also ended by singing the ballad, which rang out amid the serene, far-spreading countryside like the finest music in the world.

* The beret is the Pyreneean tam-o'-shanter.

Then, at a short distance in the rear, came the chariot, the good old family wagon, which was now crowded. According to the prearranged programme it was Gervais who held the ribbons, with Claire beside him. The two strong horses trotted on in their usual leisurely fashion, in spite of all the gay whip-cracking of their driver, who also wished to contribute to the music. Inside there were now seven people for six places, for if the three children were small, they were at the same time so restless that they fully took up their share of room. First, face to face, there were Ambroise and Andree, the betrothed couple who were being honored by this glorious welcome. Then, also face to face, there were the high and mighty rulers of the region, Mathieu and Marianne, the latter of whom kept little Nicolas, the last prince of the line, on her knees, he braying the while like a little donkey, because he felt so pleased. Then the last places were occupied by the rulers' granddaughter and grandson, Mademoiselle Berthe and Monsieur Christophe, who were as yet unable to walk long distances. And the chariot rolled on with much majesty, albeit that for fear of the rain the curtains of stout white linen had already been half-drawn, thus giving the vehicle, at a distance, somewhat of the aspect of a miller's van.

Further back yet, as a sort of rear-guard, was a group on foot, composed of Blaise, Denis, Madame Desvignes, and her daughters Charlotte and Marthe. They had absolutely refused to take a fly, finding it more pleasant to walk the mile and a half which separated Chantebled from Janville. If the rain should fall, they would manage to find shelter somewhere. Besides, Rose had declared that a suite on foot was absolutely necessary to give the procession its full significance. Those five last comers would represent the multitude, the great concourse of people which follows sovereigns and acclaims them. Or else they might be the necessary guard, the men-at-arms, who watched for the purpose of foiling a possible attack from some felon neighbor. At the same time it unfortunately happened that worthy Madame Desvignes could not walk very fast, so that the rear-guard was soon distanced, to such a degree indeed that it became merely a little lost group, far away.

Still this did not disconcert Rose, but rather made her laugh the more. At the first bend of the road she turned her head, and when she saw her rear-guard more than three hundred yards away she raised cries of admiration. "Oh! just look, Frederic! What an interminable procession! What a deal of room we take up! The cortege is becoming longer and longer, and the road won't be long enough for it very soon."

Then, as the three maids of honor and the page began to jeer impertinently, "just try to be respectful," she said. "Count a little. There are six of us forming the vanguard. In the chariot there are nine, and six and nine make fifteen. Add to them the five of the rear-guard, and we have twenty. Wherever else is such a family seen? Why, the rabbits who watch us pass are mute with stupor and humiliation."

Then came another laugh, and once more they all took up the song of Cinderella on her way to the palace of Prince Charming.

It was at the bridge over the Yeuse that the first drops of rain, big drops they were, began to fall. The big livid cloud, urged on by a terrible wind, was galloping across the sky, filling it with the clamor of a tempest. And almost immediately afterwards the rain-drops increased in volume and in number, lashed by so violent a squall that the water poured down as if by the bucketful, or as if some huge sluice-gate had suddenly burst asunder overhead. One could no longer see twenty yards before one. In two minutes the road was running with water like the bed of a torrent.

Then there was a sauve-qui-peut among the procession. It was learnt later on that the people of the rear-guard had luckily been surprised near a peasant's cottage, in which they had quietly sought refuge. Then the folks in the wagon simply drew their curtains, and halted beneath the shelter of a wayside tree for fear lest the horses should take fright under such a downpour. They called to the bicyclists ahead of them to stop also, instead of obstinately remaining in such a deluge. But their words were lost amid the rush of water. However, the little girls and the page took a proper course in crouching beside a thick hedge, though the betrothed couple wildly continued on their way.

Frederic, the more reasonable of the two, certainly had sense enough to say: "This isn't prudent on our part. Let us stop like the others, I beg you."

But from Rose, all excitement, transported by her blissful fever, and insensible, so it seemed, to the pelting of the rain, he only drew this answer: "Pooh! what does it matter, now that we are soaking? It is by stopping that we might do ourselves harm. Let us make haste, all haste. In three minutes we shall be at home and able to make fine sport of those laggards when they arrive in another quarter of an hour."

They had just crossed the Yeuse bridge, and they swept on side by side, although the road was far from easy, being a continual ascent for a thousand yards or so between rows of lofty poplars.

"I assure you that we are doing wrong," the young man repeated. "They will blame me, and they will be right."

"Oh! well," cried she, "I'm amusing myself. This bicycle bath is quite funny. Leave me, then, if you don't love me enough to follow me."

He followed her, however, pressed close beside her, and sought to shelter her a little from the slanting rain. And it was a wild, mad race on the part of that young couple, almost linked together, their elbows touching as they sped on and on, as if lifted from the ground, carried off by all that rushing, howling water which poured down so ragefully. It was as though a thunder-blast bore them along. But at the very moment when they sprang from their bicycles in the yard of the farm the rain ceased, and the sky became blue once more.

Rose was laughing like a lunatic, and looked very flushed, but she was soaked to such a point that water streamed from her clothes, her hair, her hands. You might have taken her for some fairy of the springs who had overturned her urn on herself.

"Well, the fete is complete," she exclaimed breathlessly. "All the same, we are the first home."

She then darted upstairs to comb her hair and change her gown. But to gain just a few minutes, eager as she was to cook the crawfish, she did not take the trouble to put on dry linen. She wished the pot to be on the fire with the water, the white wine, the carrots and spices, before the family arrived. And she came and went, attending to the fire and filling the whole kitchen with her gay activity, like a good housewife who was glad to display her accomplishments, while her betrothed, who had also come downstairs again after changing his clothes, watched her with a kind of religious admiration.

At last, when the whole family had arrived, the folks of the brake and the pedestrians also, there came a rather sharp explanation. Mathieu and Marianne were angry, so greatly had they been alarmed by that rush through the storm.

"There was no sense in it, my girl," Marianne repeated. "Did you at least change your linen?"

"Why yes, why yes!" replied Rose. "Where are the crawfish?"

Mathieu meantime was lecturing Frederic. "You might have broken your necks," said he; "and, besides, it is by no means good to get soaked with cold water when one is hot. You ought to have stopped her."

"Well, she insisted on going on, and whenever she insists on anything, you know, I haven't the strength to prevent her."

At last Rose, in her pretty way, put an end to the reproaches. "Come, that's enough scolding; I did wrong, no doubt. But won't anybody compliment me on my court-bouillon? Have you ever known crawfish to smell as nice as that?"

The lunch was wonderfully gay. As they were twenty, and wished to have a real rehearsal of the wedding feast, the table had been set in a large gallery adjoining the ordinary dining-room. This gallery was still bare, but throughout the meal they talked incessantly of how they would embellish it with shrubs, garlands of foliage, and clumps of flowers. During the dessert they even sent for a ladder with the view of indicating on the walls the main lines of the decorations.

For a moment or so Rose, previously so talkative, had lapsed into silence. She had eaten heartily, but all the color had left her face, which had assumed a waxy pallor under her heavy hair, which was still damp. And when she wished to ascend the ladder herself to indicate how some ornament should be placed, her legs suddenly failed her, she staggered, and then fainted away.

Everybody was in consternation, but she was promptly placed in a chair, where for a few minutes longer she remained unconscious. Then, on coming to her senses, she remained for a moment silent, oppressed as by a feeling of pain, and apparently failing to understand what had taken place. Mathieu and Marianne, terribly upset, pressed her with questions, anxious as they were to know if she felt better. She had evidently caught cold, and this was the fine result of her foolish ride.

By degrees the girl recovered her composure, and again smiled. She then explained that she now felt no pain, but that it had suddenly seemed to her as if a heavy paving-stone were lying on her chest; then this weight had melted away, leaving her better able to breathe. And, indeed, she was soon on her feet once more, and finished giving her views respecting the decoration of the gallery, in such wise that the others ended by feeling reassured, and the afternoon passed away joyously in the making of all sorts of splendid plans. Little was eaten at dinner, for they had done too much honor to the crawfish at noon. And at nine o'clock, as soon as Celeste arrived for Andree, the gathering broke up. Ambroise was returning to Paris that same evening. Blaise and Denis were to take the seven o'clock train the following morning. And Rose, after accompanying Madame Desvignes and her daughters to the road, called to them through the darkness: "Au revoir, come back soon." She was again full of gayety at the thought of the general rendezvous which the family had arranged for the approaching weddings.

Neither Mathieu nor Marianne went to bed at once, however. Though they did not even speak of it together, they thought that Rose looked very strange, as if, indeed, she were intoxicated. She had again staggered on returning to the house, and though she only complained of some slight oppression, they prevailed on her to go to bed. After she had retired to her room, which adjoined their own, Marianne went several times to see if she were well wrapped up and were sleeping peacefully, while Mathieu remained anxiously thoughtful beside the lamp. At last the girl fell asleep, and the parents, leaving the door of communication open, then exchanged a few words in an undertone, in their desire to tranquillize each other. It would surely be nothing; a good night's rest would suffice to restore Rose to her wonted health. Then in their turn they went to bed, the whole farm lapsed into silence, surrendering itself to slumber until the first cockcrow. But all at once, about four o'clock, shortly before daybreak, a stifled call, "Mamma! mamma!" awoke both Mathieu and Marianne, and they sprang out of bed, barefooted, shivering, and groping for the candle. Rose was again stifling, struggling against another attack of extreme violence. For the second time, however, she soon regained consciousness and appeared relieved, and thus the parents, great as was their distress, preferred to summon nobody but to wait till daylight. Their alarm was caused particularly by the great change they noticed in their daughter's appearance; her face was swollen and distorted, as if some evil power had transformed her in the night. But she fell asleep again, in a state of great prostration; and they no longer stirred for fear of disturbing her slumber. They remained there watching and waiting, listening to the revival of life in the farm around them as the daylight gradually increased. Time went by; five and then six o'clock struck. And at about twenty minutes to seven Mathieu, on looking into the yard, and there catching sight of Denis, who was to return to Paris by the seven o'clock train, hastened down to tell him to call upon Boutan and beg the doctor to come at once. Then, as soon as his son had started, he rejoined Marianne upstairs, still unwilling to call or warn anybody. But a third attack followed, and this time it was the thunderbolt.

Rose had half risen in bed, her arms thrown out, her mouth distended as she gasped "Mamma! mamma!"

Then in a sudden fit of revolt, a last flash of life, she sprang from her bed and stepped towards the window, whose panes were all aglow with the rising sun. And for a moment she leant there, her legs bare, her shoulders bare, and her heavy hair falling over her like a royal mantle. Never had she looked more beautiful, more dazzling, full of strength and love.

But she murmured: "Oh! how I suffer! It is all over, I am going to die."

Her father darted towards her; her mother sustained her, throwing her arms around her like invincible armor which would shield her from all harm.

"Don't talk like that, you unhappy girl! It is nothing; it is only another attack which will pass away. Get into bed again, for mercy's sake. Your old friend Boutan is on his way here. You will be up and well again to-morrow."

"No, no, I am going to die; it is all over."

She fell back in their arms; they only had time to lay her on her bed. And the thunderbolt fell: without a word, without a glance, in a few minutes she died of congestion of the lungs.

Ah! the imbecile thunderbolt! Ah! the scythe, which with a single stroke blindly cuts down a whole springtide! It was all so brutally sudden, so utterly unexpected, that at first the stupefaction of Marianne and Mathieu was greater than their despair. In response to their cries the whole farm hastened up, the fearful news filled the place, and then all sank into the deep silence of death—all work, all life ceasing. And the other children were there, scared and overcome: little Nicolas, who did not yet understand things; Gregoire, the page of the previous day; Louise, Madeleine, and Marguerite, the three maids of honor, and their elders, Claire and Gervais, who felt the blow more deeply. And there were yet the others journeying away, Blaise, Denis, and Ambroise, travelling to Paris at that very moment, in ignorance of the unforeseen, frightful hatchet-stroke which had fallen on the family. Where would the terrible tidings reach them? In what cruel distress would they return! And the doctor who would soon arrive too! But all at once, amid the terror and confusion, there rang out the cries of Frederic, the poor dead girl's affianced lover. He shrieked his despair aloud, he was half mad, he wished to kill himself, saying that he was the murderer and that he ought to have prevented Rose from so rashly riding home through the storm! He had to be led away and watched for fear of some fresh misfortune. His sudden frenzy had gone to every heart; sobs burst forth and lamentations arose from the woful parents, from the brothers, the sisters, from the whole of stricken Chantebled, which death thus visited for the first time.

Ah, God! Rose on that bed of mourning, white, cold, and dead! She, the fairest, the gayest, the most loved! She, before whom all the others were ever in admiration—she of whom they were so proud, so fond! And to think that this blow should fall in the midst of hope, bright hope in long life and sterling happiness, but ten days before her wedding, and on the morrow of that day of wild gayety, all jests and laughter! They could again see her, full of life and so adorable with her happy youthful fancies—that princely reception and that royal procession. It had seemed as if those two coming weddings, celebrated the same day, would be like the supreme florescence of the family's long happiness and prosperity. Doubtless they had often experienced trouble and had even wept at times, but they had drawn closer together and consoled one another on such occasions; none had ever been cut off from the good-night embraces which healed every sore. And now the best was gone, death had come to say that absolute joy existed for none, that the most valiant, the happiest; never reaped the fulness of their hopes. There was no life without death. And they paid their share of the debt of human wretchedness, paid it the more dearly since they had made for themselves a larger sum of life. When everything germinates and grows around one, when one has determined on unreserved fruitfulness; on continuous creation and increase, how awful is the recall to the ever-present dim abyss in which the world is fashioned, on the day when misfortune falls, digs its first pit, and carries off a loved one! It is like a sudden snapping, a rending of the hopes which seemed to be endless, and a feeling of stupefaction comes at the discovery that one cannot live and love forever!

Ah! how terrible were the two days that followed: the farm itself lifeless, without sound save that of the breathing of the cattle, the whole family gathered together, overcome by the cruel spell of waiting, ever in tears while the poor corpse remained there under a harvest of flowers. And there was this cruel aggravation, that on the eve of the funeral, when the body had been laid in the coffin, it was brought down into that gallery where they had lunched so merrily while discussing how magnificently they might decorate it for the two weddings. It was there that the last funeral watch, the last wake, took place, and there were no evergreen shrubs, no garlands of foliage, merely four tapers which burnt there amid a wealth of white roses gathered in the morning, but already fading. Neither the mother nor the father was willing to go to bed that night. They remained, side by side, near the child whom mother-earth was taking back from them. They could see her quite little again, but sixteen months old, at the time of their first sojourn at Chantebled in the old tumbledown shooting-box, when she had just been weaned and they were wont to go and cover her up at nighttime. They saw her also, later on, in Paris, hastening to them in the morning, climbing up and pulling their bed to pieces with triumphant laughter. And they saw her yet more clearly, growing and becoming more beautiful even as Chantebled did, as if, indeed, she herself bloomed with all the health and beauty of that now fruitful land. Yet she was no more, and whenever the thought returned to them that they would never see her again, their hands sought one another, met in a woful clasp, while from their crushed and mingling hearts it seemed as if all life, all future, were flowing away to nihility. Now that a breach had been made, would not every other happiness be carried off in turn? And though the ten other children were there, from the little one five years old to the twins who were four-and-twenty, all clad in black, all gathered in tears around their sleeping sister, like a sorrow-stricken battalion rendering funeral honors, neither the father nor the mother saw or counted them: their hearts were rent by the loss of the daughter who had departed, carrying away with her some of their own flesh. And in that long bare gallery which the four candles scarcely lighted, the dawn at last arose upon that death watch, that last leave-taking.

Then grief again came with the funeral procession, which spread out along the white road between the lofty poplars and the green corn, that road over which Rose had galloped so madly through the storm. All the relations of the Froments, all their friends, all the district, had come to pay a tribute of emotion at so sudden and swift a death. Thus, this time, the cortege did stretch far away behind the hearse, draped with white and blooming with white roses in the bright sunshine. The whole family was present; the mother and the sisters had declared that they would only quit their loved one when she had been lowered into her last resting-place. And after the family came the friends, the Beauchenes, the Seguins, and others. But Mathieu and Marianne, worn out, overcome by suffering, no longer recognized people amid their tears. They only remembered on the morrow that they must have seen Morange, if indeed it were really Morange—that silent, unobtrusive, almost shadowy gentleman, who had wept while pressing their hands. And in like fashion Mathieu fancied that, in some horrible dream, he had seen Constance's spare figure and bony profile drawing near to him in the cemetery after the coffin had been lowered into the grave, and addressing vague words of consolation to him, though he fancied that her eyes flashed the while as if with abominable exultation.

What was it that she had said? He no longer knew. Of course her words must have been appropriate, even as her demeanor was that of a mourning relative. But a memory returned to him, that of other words which she had spoken when promising to attend the two weddings. She had then in bitter fashion expressed a wish that the good fortune of Chantebled might continue. But they, the Froments, so fruitful and so prosperous, were now stricken in their turn, and their good fortune had perhaps departed forever! Mathieu shuddered; his faith in the future was shaken; he was haunted by a fear of seeing prosperity and fruitfulness vanish, now that there was that open breach.

XVII

A YEAR later the first child born to Ambroise and Andree, a boy, little Leonce, was christened. The young people had been married very quietly six weeks after the death of Rose. And that christening was to be the first outing for Mathieu and Marianne, who had not yet fully recovered from the terrible shock of their eldest daughter's death. Moreover, it was arranged that after the ceremony there should simply be a lunch at the parents' home, and that one and all should afterwards be free to return to his or her avocations. It was impossible for the whole family to come, and, indeed, apart from the grandfather and grandmother, only the twins, Denis and Blaise, and the latter's wife Charlotte, were expected, together with the godparents. Beauchene, the godfather, had selected Madame Seguin as his commere, for, since the death of Maurice, Constance shuddered at the bare thought of touching a child. At the same time she had promised to be present at the lunch, and thus there would be ten of them, sufficient to fill the little dining-room of the modest flat in the Rue de La Boetie, where the young couple resided pending fortune's arrival.

It was a very pleasant morning. Although Mathieu and Marianne had been unwilling to set aside their black garments even for this rejoicing, they ended by evincing some gentle gayety before the cradle of that little grandson, whose advent brought them a renewal of hope. Early in the winter a fresh bereavement had fallen on the family; Blaise had lost his little Christophe, then two and a half years old, through an attack of croup. Charlotte, however, was already at that time again enceinte, and thus the grief of the first days had turned to expectancy fraught with emotion.

The little flat in the Rue de La Boetie seemed very bright and fragrant; it was perfumed by the fair grace of Andree and illumined by the victorious charm of Ambroise, that handsome loving couple who, arm in arm, had set out so bravely to conquer the world. During the lunch, too, there was the formidable appetite and jovial laughter of Beauchene, who gave the greatest attention to his commere Valentine, jesting and paying her the most extravagant court, which afforded her much amusement, prone as she still was to play a girlish part, though she was already forty-five and a grandmother like Marianne. Constance alone remained grave, scarce condescending to bend her thin lips into a faint smile, while a shadow of deep pain passed over her withered face every time that she glanced round that gay table, whence new strength, based on the invincible future, arose in spite of all the recent mourning.

At about three o'clock Blaise rose from the table, refusing to allow Beauchene to take any more Chartreuse.

"It's true, he is right, my children," Beauchene ended by exclaiming in a docile way. "We are very comfortable here, but it is absolutely necessary that we should return to the works. And we must deprive you of Denis, for we need his help over a big building affair. That's how we are, we others, we don't shirk duty."

Constance had also risen. "The carriage must be waiting," said she; "will you take it?"

"No, no, we will go on foot. A walk will clear our heads."

The sky was overcast, and as it grew darker and darker Ambroise, going to the window, exclaimed: "You will get wet."

"Oh! the rain has been threatening ever since this morning, but we shall have time to get to the works."

It was then understood that Constance should take Charlotte with her in the brougham and set her down at the door of the little pavilion adjoining the factory. As for Valentine, she was in no hurry and could quietly return to the Avenue d'Antin, which was close by, as soon as the sky might clear. And with regard to Marianne and Mathieu, they had just yielded to Andree's affectionate entreaties, and had arranged to spend the whole day and dine there, returning to Chantebled by the last train. Thus the fete would be complete, and the young couple were enraptured at the prospect.

The departure of the others was enlivened by a curious incident, a mistake which Constance made, and which seemed very comical amid all the mirth promoted by the copious lunch. She had turned towards Denis, and, looking at him with her pale eyes, she quietly asked him "Blaise, my friend, will you give me my boa? I must have left it in the ante-room."

Everybody began to laugh, but she failed to understand the reason. And it was in the same tranquil way as before that she thanked Denis when he brought her the boa: "I am obliged to you, Blaise; you are very amiable."

Thereupon came an explosion; the others almost choked with laughter, so droll did her quiet assurance seem to them. What was the matter, then? Why did they all laugh at her in that fashion? She ended by suspecting that she had made a mistake, and looked more attentively at the twins.

"Ah, yes, it isn't Blaise, but Denis! But it can't be helped. I am always mistaking them since they have worn their beards trimmed in the same fashion."

Thereupon Marianne, in her obliging way, in order to take any sting away from the laughter, repeated the well-known family story of how she herself, when the twins were children and slept together, had been wont to awake them in order to identify them by the different color of their eyes. The others, Beauchene and Valentine, then intervened and recalled circumstances under which they also had mistaken the twins one for the other, so perfect was their resemblance on certain occasions, in certain lights. And it was amid all this gay animation that the company separated after exchanging all sorts of embraces and handshakes.

Once in the brougham, Constance spoke but seldom to Charlotte, taking as a pretext a violent headache which the prolonged lunch had increased. With a weary air and her eyes half closed she began to reflect. After Rose's death, and when little Christophe likewise had been carried off, a revival of hope had come to her, for all at once she had felt quite young again. But when she consulted Boutan on the matter he dealt her a final blow by informing her that her hopes were quite illusive. Thus, for two months now, her rage and despair had been increasing. That very morning at that christening, and now in that carriage beside that young woman who was again expecting to become a mother, it was this which poisoned her mind, filled her with jealousy and spite, and rendered her capable of any evil deed. The loss of her son, the childlessness to which she was condemned, all threw her into a state of morbid perversity, fraught with dreams of some monstrous vengeance which she dared not even confess to herself. She accused the whole world of being in league to crush her. Her husband was the most cowardly and idiotic of traitors, for he betrayed her by letting some fresh part of the works pass day by day into the hands of that fellow Blaise, whose wife no sooner lost a child than she had another. She, Constance, was enraged also at seeing her husband so gay and happy, since she had left him to his own base courses. He still retained his air of victorious superiority, declaring that he had remained unchanged, and there was truth in this; for though, instead of being an active master as formerly, he now too often showed himself a senile prowler, on the high road to paralysis, he yet continued to be a practical egotist, one who drew from life the greatest sum of enjoyment possible. He was following his destined road, and if he took to Blaise it was simply because he was delighted to have found an intelligent, hard-working young man who spared him all the cares and worries that were too heavy for his weary shoulders, while still earning for him the money which he needed for his pleasures. Constance knew that something in the way of a partnership arrangement was about to be concluded. Indeed, her husband must have already received a large sum to enable him to make good certain losses and expenses which he had hidden from her. And closing her eyes as the brougham rolled along, she poisoned her mind by ruminating all these things, scarce able to refrain from venting her fury by throwing herself upon that young woman Charlotte, well-loved and fruitful spouse, who sat beside her.

Then the thought of Denis occurred to her. Why was he being taken to the works? Did he also mean to rob her? Yet she knew that he had refused to join his brother, as in his opinion there was not room for two at the establishment of the Boulevard de Grenelle. Indeed, Denis's ambition was to direct some huge works by himself; he possessed an extensive knowledge of mechanics, and this it was that rendered him a valuable adviser whenever a new model of some important agricultural machine had to be prepared at the Beauchene factory. Constance promptly dismissed him from her thoughts; in her estimation there was no reason to fear him; he was a mere passer-by, who on the morrow, perhaps, would establish himself at the other end of France. Then once more the thought of Blaise came back to her, imperative, all-absorbing; and it suddenly occurred to her that if she made haste home she would be able to see Morange alone in his office and ascertain many things from him before the others arrived. It was evident that the accountant must know something of the partnership scheme, even if it were as yet only in a preliminary stage. Thereupon she became impassioned, eager to arrive, certain as she felt of obtaining confidential information from Morange, whom she deemed to be devoted to her.

As the carriage rolled over the Jena bridge she opened her eyes and looked out. "Mon Dieu!" said she, "what a time this brougham takes! If the rain would only fall it would, perhaps, relieve my head a little."

She was thinking, however, that a sharp shower would give her more time, as it would compel the three men, Beauchene, Denis, and Blaise, to seek shelter in some doorway. And when the carriage reached the works she hastily stopped the coachman, without even conducting her companion to the little pavilion.

"You will excuse me, won't you, my dear?" said she; "you only have to turn the street corner."

When they had both alighted, Charlotte, smiling and affectionate, took hold of Constance's hand and retained it for a few moments in her own.

"Of course," she replied, "and many thanks. You are too kind. When you see my husband, pray tell him that you left me safe, for he grows anxious at the slightest thing."

Thereupon Constance in her turn had to smile and promise with many professions of friendship that she would duly execute the commission. Then they parted. "Au revoir, till to-morrow "—"Yes, yes, till to-morrow, au revoir."

Eighteen years had now already elapsed since Morange had lost his wife Valerie; and nine had gone by since the death of his daughter Reine. Yet it always seemed as if he were on the morrow of those disasters, for he had retained his black garb, and still led a cloister-like, retired life, giving utterance only to such words as were indispensable. On the other hand, he had again become a good model clerk, a correct painstaking accountant, very punctual in his habits, and rooted as it were to the office chair in which he had taken his seat every morning for thirty years past. The truth was that his wife and his daughter had carried off with them all his will-power, all his ambitious thoughts, all that he had momentarily dreamt of winning for their sakes—a large fortune and a luxurious triumphant life. He, who was now so much alone, who had relapsed into childish timidity and weakness, sought nothing beyond his humble daily task, and was content to die in the shady corner to which he was accustomed. It was suspected, however, that he led a mysterious maniacal life, tinged with anxious jealousy, at home, in that flat of the Boulevard de Grenelle which he had so obstinately refused to quit. His servant had orders to admit nobody, and she herself knew nothing. If he gave her free admittance to the dining- and drawing-rooms, he did not allow her to set foot in his own bedroom, formerly shared by Valerie, nor in that which Reine had occupied. He himself alone entered these chambers, which he regarded as sanctuaries, of which he was the sole priest. Under pretence of sweeping or dusting, he would shut himself up in one or the other of them for hours at a time. It was in vain that the servant tried to glance inside, in vain that she listened at the doors when he spent his holidays at home; she saw nothing and heard nothing. Nobody could have told what relics those chapels contained, nor with what religious cult he honored them. Another cause of surprise was his niggardly, avaricious life, which, as time went on, had become more and more pronounced, in such wise that his only expenses were his rental of sixteen hundred francs, the wages he paid to his servant, and the few pence per day which she with difficulty extracted from him to defray the cost of food and housekeeping. His salary had now risen to eight thousand francs a year, and he certainly did not spend half of it. What became, then, of his big savings, the money which he refused to devote to enjoyment? In what secret hole, and for what purpose, what secret passion, did he conceal it? Nobody could tell. But amid it all he remained very gentle, and, unlike most misers, continued very cleanly in his habits, keeping his beard, which was now white as snow, very carefully tended. And he came to his office every morning with a little smile on his face, in such wise that nothing in this man of regular methodical life revealed the collapse within him, all the ashes and smoldering fire which disaster had left in his heart.

By degrees a link of some intimacy had been formed between Constance and Morange. When, after his daughter's death, she had seen him return to the works quite a wreck, she had been stirred by deep pity, with which some covert personal anxiety confusedly mingled. Maurice was destined to live five years longer, but she was already haunted by apprehensions, and could never meet Morange without experiencing a chilling shudder, for he, as she repeated to herself, had lost his only child. "Ah, God! so such a catastrophe was possible." Then, on being stricken herself, on experiencing the horrible distress, on smarting from the sudden, gaping, incurable wound of her bereavement, she had drawn nearer to that brother in misfortune, treating him with a kindness which she showed to none other. At times she would invite him to spend an evening with her, and the pair of them would chat together, or more often remain silent, face to face, sharing each other's woe. Later on she had profited by this intimacy to obtain information from Morange respecting affairs at the factory, of which her husband avoided speaking. It was more particularly since she had suspected the latter of bad management, blunders and debts, that she endeavored to turn the accountant into a confidant, even a spy, who might aid her to secure as much control of the business as possible. And this was why she was so anxious to return to the factory that day, and profit by the opportunity to see Morange privately, persuaded as she was that she would induce him to speak out in the absence of his superiors.

She scarcely tarried to take off her gloves and her bonnet. She found the accountant in his little office, seated in his wonted place, and leaning over the everlasting ledger which was open before him.

"Why, is the christening finished?" he exclaimed in astonishment.

Forthwith she explained her presence in such a way as to enable her to speak of what she had at heart. "Why, yes. That is to say, I came away because I had such a dreadful headache. The others have remained yonder. And as we are alone here together it occurred to me that it might do me good to have a chat with you. You know how highly I esteem you. Ah! I am not happy, not happy at all."

She had sunk upon a chair overcome by the tears which she had been restraining so long in the presence of the happiness of others. Quite upset at seeing her in this condition, having little strength himself, Morange wished to summon her maid. He almost feared that she might have a fainting fit. But she prevented him.

"I have only you left me, my friend," said she. "Everybody else forsakes me, everybody is against me. I can feel it; I am being ruined; folks are bent on annihilating me, as if I had not already lost everything when I lost my child. And since you alone remain to me, you who know my torments, you who have no daughter left you, pray for heaven's sake help me and tell me the truth! In that wise I shall at least be able to defend myself."

On hearing her speak of his daughter Morange also had begun to weep. And now, therefore, she might question him, it was certain that he would answer and tell her everything, overpowered as he was by the common grief which she had evoked. Thus he informed her that an agreement was indeed on the point of being signed by Blaise and Beauchene, only it was not precisely a deed of partnership. Beauchene having drawn large sums from the strong-box of the establishment for expenses which he could not confess—a horrible story of blackmailing, so it was rumored—had been obliged to make a confidant of Blaise, the trusty and active lieutenant who managed the establishment. And he had even asked him to find somebody willing to lend him some money. Thereupon the young man had offered it himself; but doubtless it was his father, Mathieu Froment, who advanced the cash, well pleased to invest it in the works in his son's name. And now, with the view of putting everything in order, it had been resolved that the property should be divided into six parts, and that one of these parts or shares should be attributed to Blaise as reimbursement for the loan. Thus the young fellow would possess an interest of one sixth in the establishment, unless indeed Beauchene should buy him out again within a stipulated period. The danger was that, instead of freeing himself in this fashion, Beauchene might yield to the temptation of selling the other parts one by one, now that he was gliding down a path of folly and extravagance.

Constance listened to Morange, quivering and quite pale. "Is this signed?" she asked.

"No, not yet. But the papers are ready and will be signed shortly. Moreover, it is a reasonable and necessary solution of the difficulty."

She was evidently of another opinion. A feeling of revolt possessed her, and she strove to think of some decisive means of preventing the ruin and shame which in her opinion threatened her. "My God, what am I to do? How can I act?" she gasped; and then, in her rage at finding no device, at being powerless, this cry escaped her: "Ah! that scoundrel Blaise!"

Worthy Morange was quite moved by it. Still he had not fully understood. And so, in his quiet way, he endeavored to calm Constance, explaining that Blaise had a very good heart, and that in the circumstances in question he had behaved in the best way possible, doing all that he could to stifle scandal, and even displaying great disinterestedness. And as Constance had risen, satisfied with knowing the truth, and anxious that the three men might not find her there on their arrival, the accountant likewise quitted his chair, and accompanied her along the gallery which she had to follow in order to return to her house.

"I give you my word of honor, madame," said Morange, "that the young man has made no base calculations in the matter. All the papers pass through my hands, and nobody could know more than I know myself. Besides, if I had entertained the slightest doubt of any machination, I should have endeavored to requite your kindness by warning you."

She no longer listened to him, however; in fact, she was anxious to get rid of him, for all at once the long-threatening rain had begun to fall violently, lashing the glass roof. So dark a mass of clouds had overspread the sky that it was almost night in the gallery, though four o'clock had scarcely struck. And it occurred to Constance that in presence of such a deluge the three men would certainly take a cab. So she hastened her steps, still followed, however, by the accountant.

"For instance," he continued, "when it was a question of drawing up the agreement—"

But he suddenly paused, gave vent to a hoarse exclamation, and stopped her, pulling her back as if in terror.

"Take care!" he gasped.

There was a great cavity before them. Here, at the end of the gallery, before reaching the corridor which communicated with the private house, there was a steam lift of great power, which was principally used for lowering heavy articles to the packing room. It only worked as a rule on certain days; on all others the huge trap remained closed. When the appliance was working a watchman was always stationed there to superintend the operations.

"Take care! take care!" Morange repeated, shuddering with terror.

The trap was open, and the huge cavity gaped before them; there was no barrier, nothing to warn them and prevent them from making a fearful plunge. The rain still pelted on the glass roof, and the darkness had become so complete in the gallery that they had walked on without seeing anything before them. Another step would have hurled them to destruction. It was little short of miraculous that the accountant should have become anxious in presence of the increasing gloom in that corner, where he had divined rather than perceived the abyss.

Constance, however, still failing to understand her companion, sought to free herself from his wild grasp.

"But look!" he cried.

And he bent forward and compelled her also to stoop over the cavity. It descended through three floors to the very lowest basement, like a well of darkness. A damp odor arose: one could scarce distinguish the vague outlines of thick ironwork; alone, right at the bottom, burnt a lantern, a distant speck of light, as if the better to indicate the depth and horror of the gulf. Morange and Constance drew back again blanching.

And now Morange burst into a temper. "It is idiotic!" he exclaimed. "Why don't they obey the regulations! As a rule there is a man here, a man expressly told off for this duty, who ought not to stir from his post so long as the trap has not come up again. Where is he? What on earth can the rascal be up to?"

The accountant again approached the hole, and shouted down it in a fury: "Bonnard!"

No reply came: the pit remained bottomless, black and void.

"Bonnard! Bonnard!"

And still nothing was heard, not a sound; the damp breath of the darkness alone ascended as from the deep silence of the tomb.

Thereupon Morange resorted to action. "I must go down; I must find Bonnard. Can you picture us falling through that hole to the very bottom? No, no, this cannot be allowed. Either he must close this trap or return to his post. What can he be doing? Where can he be?"

Morange had already betaken himself to a little winding staircase, by which one reached every floor beside the lift, when in a voice which gradually grew more indistinct, he again called: "I beg you, madame, pray wait for me; remain there to warn anybody who might pass."

Constance was alone. The dull rattle of the rain on the glass above her continued, but a little livid light was appearing as a gust of wind carried off the clouds. And in that pale light Blaise suddenly appeared at the end of the gallery. He had just returned to the factory with Denis and Beauchene, and had left his companions together for a moment, in order to go to the workshops to procure some information they required. Preoccupied, absorbed once more in his work, he came along with an easy step, his head somewhat bent. And when Constance saw him thus appear, all that she felt in her heart was the smart of rancor, a renewal of her anger at what she had learnt of that agreement which was to be signed on the morrow and which would despoil her. That enemy who was in her home and worked against her, a revolt of her whole being urged her to exterminate him, and thrust him out like some usurper, all craft and falsehood.

He drew nearer. She was in the dense shadow near the wall, so that he could not see her. But on her side, as he softly approached steeped in a grayish light, she could see him with singular distinctness. Never before had she so plainly divined the power of his lofty brow, the intelligence of his eyes, the firm will of his mouth. And all at once she was struck with fulgural certainty; he was coming towards the cavity without seeing it and he would assuredly plunge into the depths unless she should stop him as he passed. But a little while before, she, like himself, had come from yonder, and would have fallen unless a friendly hand had restrained her; and the frightful shudder of that moment yet palpitated in her veins; she could still and ever see the damp black pit with the little lantern far below. The whole horror of it flashed before her eyes—the ground failing one, the sudden drop with a great shriek, and the smash a moment afterwards.

Blaise drew yet nearer. But certainly such a thing was impossible; she would prevent it, since a little motion of her hand would suffice. Would she not always have time to stretch out her arms when he was there before her? And yet from the recesses of her being a very clear and frigid voice seemed to ascend, articulating brief words which rang in her ears as if repeated by a trumpet blast. If he should die it would be all over, the factory would never belong to him. She who had bitterly lamented that she could devise no obstacle had merely to let this helpful chance take its own course. And this, indeed, was what the voice said, what it repeated with keen insistence, never adding another syllable. After that there would be nothing. After that there would merely remain the shattered remnants of a suppressed man, and a pit of darkness splashed with blood, in which she discerned, foresaw nothing more. What would happen on the morrow? She did not wish to know; indeed there would be no morrow. It was solely the brutal immediate fact which the imperious voice demanded. He dead, it would be all over, he would never possess the works.

He drew nearer still. And within her now there raged a frightful battle. How long did it last—days? years? Doubtless but a few seconds. She was still resolved that she would stop him as he passed, certain as she felt that she would conquer her horrible thoughts when the moment came for the decisive gesture. And yet those thoughts invaded her, became materialized within her, like some physical craving, thirst or hunger. She hungered for that finish, hungered to the point of suffering, seized by one of those sudden desperate longings which beget crime; such as when a passer-by is despoiled and throttled at the corner of a street. It seemed to her that if she could not satisfy her craving she herself must lose her life. A consuming passion, a mad desire for that man's annihilation filled her as she saw him approach. She could now see him still more plainly and the sight of him exasperated her. His forehead, his eyes, his lips tortured her like some hateful spectacle. Another step, yet one more, then another, and he would be before her. Yes, yet another step, and she was already stretching out her hand in readiness to stop him as soon as he should brush past.

He came along. What was it that happened? O God! When he was there, so absorbed in his thoughts that he brushed against her without feeling her, she turned to stone. Her hand became icy cold, she could not lift it, it hung too heavily from her arm. And amid her scorching fever a great cold shudder came upon her, immobilizing and stupefying her, while she was deafened by the clamorous voice rising from the depths of her being. All demur was swept away; the craving for that death remained intense, invincible, beneath the imperious stubborn call of the inner voice which robbed her of the power of will and action. He would be dead and he would never possess the works. And therefore, standing stiff and breathless against the wall, she did not stop him. She could hear his light breathing, she could discern his profile, then the nape of his neck. He had passed. Another step, another step! And yet if she had raised a call she might still have changed the course of destiny even at that last moment. She fancied that she had some such intention, but she was clenching her teeth tightly enough to break them. And he, Blaise, took yet a further step, still advancing quietly and confidently over that friendly ground, without even a glance before him, absorbed as he was in thoughts of his work. And the ground failed him, and there was a loud, terrible cry, a sudden gust following the fall, and a dull crash down below in the depths of the black darkness.

Constance did not stir. For a moment she remained as if petrified, still listening, still waiting. But only deep silence arose from the abyss. She could merely hear the rain pelting on the glass roof with renewed rage. And thereupon she fled, turned into the passage, re-entered her drawing-room. There she collected and questioned herself. Had she desired that abominable thing? No, her will had had nought to do with it. Most certainly it had been paralyzed, prevented from acting. If it had been possible for the thing to occur, it had occurred quite apart from her, for assuredly she had been absent. Absent, that word reassured her. Yes, indeed, that was the case, she had been absent. All her past life spread out behind her, faultless, pure of any evil action. Never had she sinned, never until that day had any consciousness of guilt weighed upon her conscience. An honest and virtuous woman, she had remained upright amidst all the excesses of her husband. An impassioned mother, she had been ascending her calvary ever since her son's death. And this recollection of Maurice alone drew her for a moment from her callousness, choked her with a rising sob, as if in that direction lay her madness, the vainly sought explanation of the crime. Vertigo again fell upon her, the thought of her dead son and of the other being master in his place, all her perverted passion for that only son of hers, the despoiled prince, all her poisoned, fermenting rage which had unhinged and maddened her, even to the point of murder. Had that monstrous vegetation growing within her reached her brain then? A rush of blood suffices at times to bedim a conscience. But she obstinately clung to the view that she had been absent; she forced back her tears and remained frigid. No remorse came to her. It was done, and 'twas good that it should be done. It was necessary. She had not pushed him, he himself had fallen. Had she not been there he would have fallen just the same. And so since she had not been there, since both her brain and her heart had been absent, it did not concern her. And ever and ever resounded the words which absolved her and chanted her victory; he was dead, and would never possess the works.

Erect in the middle of the drawing-room, Constance listened, straining her ears. Why was it that she heard nothing? How long they were in going down to pick him up! Anxiously waiting for the tumult which she expected, the clamor of horror which would assuredly rise from the works, the heavy footsteps, the loud calls, she held her breath, quivering at the slightest, faintest sound. Several minutes still elapsed, and the cosey quietude of her drawing-room pleased her. That room was like an asylum of bourgeois rectitude, luxurious dignity, in which she felt protected, saved. Some little objects on which her eyes lighted, a pocket scent-bottle ornamented with an opal, a paper-knife of burnished silver left inside a book, fully reassured her. She was moved, almost surprised at the sight of them, as if they had acquired some new and particular meaning. Then she shivered slightly and perceived that her hands were icy cold. She rubbed them together gently, wishing to warm them a little. Why was it, too, that she now felt so tired? It seemed to her as if she had just returned from some long walk, from some accident, from some affray in which she had been bruised. She felt within her also a tendency to somnolence, the somnolence of satiety, as if she had feasted too copiously off some spicy dish, after too great a hunger. Amid the fatigue which benumbed her limbs she desired nothing more; apart from her sleepiness all that she felt was a kind of astonishment that things should be as they were. However, she had again begun to listen, repeating that if that frightful silence continued, she would certainly sink upon a chair, close her eyes, and sleep. And at last it seemed to her that she detected a faint sound, scarcely a breath, far away.

What was it? No, there was nothing yet. Perhaps she had dreamt that horrible scene, perhaps it had all been a nightmare; that man marching on, that black pit, that loud cry of terror! Since she heard nothing, perhaps nothing had really happened. Were it true a clamor would have ascended from below in a growing wave of sound, and a distracted rush up the staircase and along the passages would have brought her the news. Then again she detected the faint distant sound, which seemed to draw a little nearer. It was not the tramping of a crowd; it seemed to be a mere footfall, perhaps that of some pedestrian on the quay. Yet no; it came from the works, and now it was quite distinct; it ascended steps and then sped along a passage. And the steps became quicker, and a panting could be heard, so tragical that she at last divined that the horror was at hand. All at once the door was violently flung open. Morange entered. He was alone, beside himself, with livid face and scarce able to stammer.

"He still breathes, but his head is smashed; it is all over."

"What ails you?" she asked. "What is the matter?"

He looked at her, agape. He had hastened upstairs at a run to ask her for an explanation, for he had quite lost his poor head over that unaccountable catastrophe. And the apparent ignorance and tranquillity in which he found Constance completed his dismay.

"But I left you near the trap," said he.

"Near the trap, yes. You went down, and I immediately came up here."

"But before I went down," he resumed with despairing violence, "I begged you to wait for me and keep a watch on the hole, so that nobody might fall through it."

"Oh! dear no. You said nothing to me, or, at all events, I heard nothing, understood nothing of that kind."

In his terror he peered into her eyes. Assuredly she was lying. Calm as she might appear, he could detect her voice trembling. Besides, it was evident she must still have been there, since he had not even had time to get below before it happened. And all at once he recalled their conversation, the questions she had asked him and her cry of hatred against the unfortunate young fellow who had now been picked up, covered with blood, in the depths of that abyss. Beneath the gust of horror which chilled him, Morange could only find these words: "Well, madame, poor Blaise came just behind you and broke his skull."

Her demeanor was perfect; her hands quivered as she raised them, and it was in a halting voice that she exclaimed: "Good Lord! good Lord, what a frightful misfortune."

But at that moment an uproar arose through the house. The drawing-room door had remained open, and the voices and footsteps of a number of people drew nearer, became each moment more distinct. Orders were being given on the stairs, men were straining and drawing breath, there were all the signs of the approach of some cumbrous burden, carried as gently as possible.

"What! is he being brought up here to me?" exclaimed Constance turning pale, and her involuntary cry would have sufficed to enlighten the accountant had he needed it. "He is being brought to me here!"

It was not Morange who answered; he was stupefied by the blow. But Beauchene abruptly appeared preceding the body, and he likewise was livid and beside himself, to such a degree did this sudden visit of death thrill him with fear, in his need of happy life.

"Morange will have told you of the frightful catastrophe, my dear," said he. "Fortunately Denis was there, for the question of responsibility towards his family. And it was Denis, too, who, just as we were about to carry the poor fellow home to the pavilion, opposed it, saying that, given his wife's condition, we should kill her if we carried him to her in this dying state. And so the only course was to bring him here, was it not?"

Then he quitted his wife with a gesture of bewilderment, and returned to the landing, where one could hear him repeating in a quivering voice: "Gently, gently, take care of the balusters."

The lugubrious train entered the drawing-room. Blaise had been laid on a stretcher provided with a mattress. Denis, as pale as linen, followed, supporting the pillow on which rested his brother's head. A little streamlet of blood coursed over the dying man's brow, his eyes were closed. And four factory hands held the shafts of the stretcher. Their heavy shoes crushed down the carpet, and fragile articles of furniture were thrust aside anyhow to open a passage for this invasion of horror and of fright.

Amid his bewilderment, an idea occurred to Beauchene, who continued to direct the operation.

"No, no, don't leave him there. There is a bed in the next room. We will take him up very gently with the mattress, and lay him with it on the bed."

It was Maurice's room; it was the bed in which Maurice had died, and which Constance with maternal piety had kept unchanged, consecrating the room to her son's memory. But what could she say? How could she prevent Blaise from dying there in his turn, killed by her?

The abomination of it all, the vengeance of destiny which exacted this sacrilege, filled her with such a feeling of revolt that at the moment when vertigo was about to seize her and the flooring began to flee from beneath her feet, she was lashed by it and kept erect. And then she displayed extraordinary strength, will, and insolent courage. When the stricken man passed before her, her puny little frame stiffened and grew. She looked at him, and her yellow face remained motionless, save for a flutter of her eyelids and an involuntary nervous twinge on the left side of her mouth, which forced a slight grimace. But that was all, and again she became perfect both in words and gesture, doing and saying what was necessary without lavishness, but like one simply thunderstruck by the suddenness of the catastrophe.

However, the orders had been carried out in the bedroom, and the bearers withdrew greatly upset. Down below, directly the accident had been discovered, old Moineaud had been told to take a cab and hasten to Dr. Boutan's to bring him back with a surgeon, if one could be found on the way.

"All the same, I prefer to have him here rather than in the basement," Beauchene repeated mechanically as he stood before the bed. "He still breathes. There! see, it is quite apparent. Who knows? Perhaps Boutan may be able to pull him through, after all."

Denis, however, entertained no illusions. He had taken one of his brother's cold yielding hands in his own and he could feel that it was again becoming a mere thing, as if broken, wrenched away from life in that great fall. For a moment he remained motionless beside the death-bed, with the mad hope they he might, perhaps, by his clasp infuse a little of the blood in his own heart into the veins of the dying man. Was not that blood common to them both? Had not their twin brotherhood drunk life from the same source? It was the other half of himself that was about to die. Down below, after raising a loud cry of heartrending distress, he had said nothing. Now all at once he spoke.

"One must go to Ambroise's to warn my mother and father. Since he still breathes, perhaps they will arrive soon enough to embrace him."

"Shall I go to fetch them?" Beauchene good-naturedly inquired.

"No, no! thanks. I did at first think of asking that service of you, but I have reflected. Nobody but myself can break this horrible news to mamma. And nothing must be done as yet with regard to Charlotte. We will see about that by and by, when I come back. I only hope that death will have a little patience, so that I may find my poor brother still alive."

He leant forward and kissed Blaise, who with his eyes closed remained motionless, still breathing faintly. Then distractedly Denis printed another kiss upon his hand and hurried off.

Constance meantime was busying herself, calling the maid, and requesting her to bring some warm water in order that they might wash the sufferer's blood-stained brow. It was impossible to think of taking off his jacket; they had to content themselves with doing the little they could to improve his appearance pending the arrival of the doctor. And during these preparations, Beauchene, haunted, worried by the accident, again began to speak of it.

"It is incomprehensible. One can hardly believe such a stupid mischance to be possible. Down below the transmission gearing gets out of order, and this prevents the mechanician from sending the trap up again. Then, up above, Bonnard gets angry, calls, and at last decides to go down in a fury when he finds that nobody answers him. Then Morange arrives, flies into a temper, and goes down in his turn, exasperated at receiving no answer to his calls for Bonnard. Poor Bonnard! he's sobbing; he wanted to kill himself when he saw the fine result of his absence."

At this point Beauchene abruptly broke off and turned to Constance. "But what about you?" he asked. "Morange told me that he had left you up above near the trap."

She was standing in front of her husband, in the full light which came through the window. And again did her eyelids beat while a little nervous twinge slightly twisted her mouth on the left side. That was all.

"I? Why I had gone down the passage. I came back here at once, as Morange knows very well."

A moment previously, Morange, annihilated, his legs failing him, had sunk upon a chair. Incapable of rendering any help, he sat there silent, awaiting the end. When he heard Constance lie in that quiet fashion, he looked at her. The assassin was herself, he no longer doubted it. And at that moment he felt a craving to proclaim it, to cry it aloud.

"Why, he thought that he had begged you to remain there on the watch," Beauchene resumed, addressing his wife.

"At all events his words never reached me," Constance duly answered. "Should I have moved if he had asked me to do that?" And turning towards the accountant she, in her turn, had the courage to fix her pale eyes upon him. "Just remember, Morange, you rushed down like a madman, you said nothing to me, and I went on my way."

Beneath those pale eyes, keen as steel, which dived into his own, Morange was seized with abject fear. All his weakness, his cowardice of heart returned. Could he accuse her of such an atrocious crime? He pictured the consequences. And then, too, he no longer knew if he were right or not; his poor maniacal mind was lost.

"It is possible," he stammered, "I may simply have thought I spoke. And it must be so since it can't be otherwise."

Then he relapsed into silence with a gesture of utter lassitude. The complicity demanded was accepted. For a moment he thought of rising to see if Blaise still breathed; but he did not dare. Deep peacefulness fell upon the room.

Ah! how great was the anguish, the torture in the cab, when Blaise brought Mathieu and Marianne back with him. He had at first spoken to them simply of an accident, a rather serious fall. But as the vehicle rolled along he had lost his self-possession, weeping and confessing the truth in response to their despairing questions. Thus, when they at last reached the factory, they doubted no longer, their child was dead. Work had just been stopped, and they recalled their visit to the place on the morrow of Maurice's death. They were returning to the same stillness, the same grave-like silence. All the rumbling life had suddenly ceased, the machines were cold and mute, the workshops darkened and deserted. Not a sound remained, not a soul, not a puff of that steam which was like the very breath of the place. He who had watched over its work was dead, and it was dead like him. Then their affright increased when they passed from the factory to the house amid that absolute solitude, the gallery steeped in slumber, the staircase quivering, all the doors upstairs open, as in some uninhabited place long since deserted. In the ante-room they found no servant. And it was indeed in the same tragedy of sudden death that they again participated, only this time it was their own son whom they were to find in the same room, on the same bed, frigid, pale, and lifeless.

Blaise had just expired. Boutan was there at the head of the bed, holding the inanimate hand in which the final pulsation of blood was dying away. And when he saw Mathieu and Marianne, who had instinctively crossed the disorderly drawing-room, rushing into that bedchamber whose odor of nihility they recognized, he could but murmur in a voice full of sobs:

"My poor friends, embrace him; you will yet have a little of his last breath."

That breath had scarce ceased, and the unhappy mother, the unhappy father, had already sprung forward, kissing those lips that exhaled the final quiver of life, and sobbing and crying their distress aloud. Their Blaise was dead. Like Rose, he had died suddenly, a year later, on a day of festivity. Their heart wound, scarce closed as yet, opened afresh with a tragic rending. Amid their long felicity this was the second time that they were thus terribly recalled to human wretchedness; this was the second hatchet stroke which fell on the flourishing, healthy, happy family. And their fright increased. Had they not yet finished paying their accumulated debt to misfortune? Was slow destruction now arriving with blow following blow? Already since Rose had quitted them, her bier strewn with flowers, they had feared to see their prosperity and fruitfulness checked and interrupted now that there was an open breach. And to-day, through that bloody breach, their Blaise departed in the most frightful of fashions, crushed as it were by the jealous anger of destiny. And now what other of their children would be torn away from them on the morrow to pay in turn the ransom of their happiness?

Mathieu and Marianne long remained sobbing on their knees beside the bed. Constance stood a few paces away, silent, with an air of quivering desolation. Beauchene, as if to combat that fear of death which made him shiver, had a moment previously seated himself at the little writing-table formerly used by Maurice, which had been left in the drawing-room like a souvenir. And he then strove to draw up a notice to his workpeople, to inform them that the factory would remain closed until the day after the funeral. He was vainly seeking words when he perceived Denis coming out of the bedroom, where he had wept all his tears and set his whole heart in the last kiss which he had bestowed on his departed brother. Beauchene called him, as if desirous of diverting him from his gloomy thoughts. "There, sit down here and continue this," said he.

Constance, in her turn entering the drawing-room, heard those words. They were virtually the same as the words which her husband had pronounced when making Blaise seat himself at that same table of Maurice's, on the day when he had given him the place of that poor boy, whose body almost seemed to be still lying on the bed in the adjoining room. And she recoiled with fright on seeing Denis seated there and writing. Had not Blaise resuscitated? Even as she had mistaken the twins one for the other that very afternoon on rising from the gay baptismal lunch, so now again she saw Blaise in Denis, the pair of them so similar physically that in former times their parents had only been able to distinguish them by the different color of their eyes. And thus it was as if Blaise returned and resumed his place; Blaise, who would possess the works although she had killed him. She had made a mistake; dead as he was, he would nevertheless have the works. She had killed one of those Froments, but behold another was born. When one died his brother filled up the breach. And her crime then appeared to her such a useless one, such a stupid one, that she was aghast at it, the hair on the nape of her neck standing up, while she burst into a cold sweat of fear, and recoiled as from a spectre.

"It is a notice for the workpeople," Beauchene repeated. "We will have it posted at the entrance."

She wished to be brave, and, approaching her husband, she said to him: "Draw it up yourself. Why give Blaise the trouble at such a moment as this?"

She had said "Blaise"; and once more an icy sensation of horror came over her. Unconsciously she had heard herself saying yonder, in the ante-room: "Blaise, where did I put my boa?" And it was Denis who had brought it to her. Of what use had it been for her to kill Blaise, since Denis was there? When death mows down a soldier of life, another is always ready to take the vacant post of combat.

But a last defeat awaited her. Mathieu and Marianne reappeared, while Morange, seized with a need of motion, came and went with an air of stupefaction, quite losing his wits amid his dreadful sufferings, those awful things which could but unhinge his narrow mind.

"I am going down," stammered Marianne, trying to wipe away her tears and to remain erect. "I wish to see Charlotte, and prepare and tell her of the misfortune. I alone can find the words to say, so that she may not die of the shock, circumstanced as she is."

But Mathieu, full of anxiety, sought to detain his wife, and spare her this fresh trial. "No, I beg you," he said; "Denis will go, or I will go myself."

With gentle obstinacy, however, she still went towards the stairs. "I am the only one who can tell her of it, I assure you—I shall have strength—"

But all at once she staggered and fainted. It became necessary to lay her on a sofa in the drawing-room. And when she recovered consciousness, her face remained quite white and distorted, and an attack of nausea came upon her. Then, as Constance, with an air of anxious solicitude, rang for her maid and sent for her little medicine-chest, Mathieu confessed the truth, which hitherto had been kept secret; Marianne, like Charlotte, was enceinte. It confused her a little, he said, since she was now three-and-forty years old; and so they had not mentioned it. "Ah! poor brave wife!" he added. "She wished to spare our daughter-in-law too great a shock; I trust that she herself will not be struck down by it."

Enceinte, good heavens! As Constance heard this, it seemed as if a bludgeon were falling on her to make her defeat complete. And so, even if she should now let Denis, in his turn, kill himself, another Froment was coming who would replace him. There was ever another and another of that race—a swarming of strength, an endless fountain of life, against which it became impossible to battle. Amid her stupefaction at finding the breach repaired when scarce opened, Constance realized her powerlessness and nothingness, childless as she was fated to remain. And she felt vanquished, overcome with awe, swept away as it were herself; thrust aside by the victorious flow of everlasting Fruitfulness.

XVIII

FOURTEEN months later there was a festival at Chantebled. Denis, who had taken Blaise's place at the factory, was married to Marthe Desvignes. And after all the grievous mourning this was the first smile, the bright warm sun of springtime, so to say, following severe winter. Mathieu and Marianne, hitherto grief-stricken and clad in black, displayed a gayety tinged with soft emotion in presence of the sempiternal renewal of life. The mother had been willing to don less gloomy a gown, and the father had agreed to defer no longer a marriage that had long since been resolved upon, and was necessitated by all sorts of considerations. For more than two years now Rose had been sleeping in the little cemetery of Janville, and for more than a year Blaise had joined her there, beneath flowers which were ever fresh. And the souvenir of the dear dead ones, whom they all visited, and who had remained alive in all their hearts, was to participate in the coming festival. It was as if they themselves had decided with their parents that the hour for the espousals had struck, and that regret for their loss ought no longer to bar the joy of growth and increase.

Denis's installation at the Beauchene works in his brother's place had come about quite naturally. If he had not gone thither on leaving the science school where he had spent three years, it was simply because the position was at that time already held by Blaise. All his technical studies marked him out for the post. In a single day he had fitted himself for it, and he simply had to take up his quarters in the little pavilion, Charlotte having fled to Chantebled with her little Berthe directly after the horrible catastrophe. It should be added that Denis' entry into the establishment offered a convenient solution with regard to the large sum of money lent to Beauchene, which, it had been arranged, should be reimbursed by a sixth share in the factory. That money came from the family, and one brother simply took the place of the other, signing the agreement which the deceased would have signed. With a delicate rectitude, however, Denis insisted that out of his share of the profits an annuity should be assigned to Charlotte, his brother's widow.

Thus matters were settled in a week, in the manner that circumstances logically demanded, and without possibility of discussion. Constance, bewildered and overwhelmed, was not even able to struggle. Her husband reduced her to silence by repeating: "What would you have me do? I must have somebody to help me, and it is just as well to take Denis as a stranger. Besides, if he worries me I will buy him out within a year and give him his dismissal!"

At this Constance remained silent to avoid casting his ignominy in his face, amid her despair at feeling the walls of the house crumble and fall, bit by bit, upon her.

Once installed at the works, Denis considered that the time had come to carry out the matrimonial plans which he had long since arranged with Marthe Desvignes. The latter, Charlotte's younger sister and at one time the inseparable friend of Rose, had been waiting for him for nearly three years now, with her bright smile and air of affectionate good sense. They had known one another since childhood, and had exchanged many a vow along the lonely paths of Janville. But they had said to one another that they would do nothing prematurely, that for the happiness of a whole lifetime one might well wait until one was old enough and strong enough to undertake family duties. Some people were greatly astonished that a young man whose future was so promising, and whose position at twenty-six years of age was already a superb one, should thus obstinately espouse a penniless girl. Mathieu and Marianne smiled, however, and consented, knowing their son's good reasons. He had no desire to marry a rich girl who would cost him more than she brought, and he was delighted at having discovered a pretty, healthy, and very sensible and skilful young woman, who would be at all times his companion, helpmate, and consoler. He feared no surprises with her, for he had studied her; she united charm and good sense with kindliness, all that was requisite for the happiness of a household. And he himself was very good-natured, prudent, and sensible, and she knew it and willingly took his arm to tread life's path with him, certain as she felt that they would thus walk on together until life's end should be reached, ever advancing with the same tranquil step under the divine and limpid sun of reason merged in love.

Great preparations were made at Chantebled on the day before the wedding. Nevertheless, the ceremony was to remain of an intimate character, on account of the recent mourning. The only guests, apart from members of the family, were the Seguins and the Beauchenes, and even the latter were cousins. So there would scarcely be more than a score of them altogether, and only a lunch was to be given. One matter which gave them some brief concern was to decide where to set the table, and how to decorate it. Those early days of July were so bright and warm that they resolved to place it out of doors under the trees. There was a fitting and delightful spot in front of the old shooting-box, the primitive pavilion, which had been their first residence on their arrival in the Janville district. That pavilion was indeed like the family nest, the hearth whence it had radiated over the surrounding region. As the pavilion had threatened ruin, Mathieu had repaired and enlarged it with the idea of retiring thither with Marianne, and Charlotte and her children, as soon as he should cede the farm to his son Gervais, that being his intention. He was, indeed, pleased with the idea of living in retirement like a patriarch, like a king who had willingly abdicated, but whose wise counsel was still sought and accepted. In place of the former wild garden a large lawn now stretched before the pavilion, surrounded by some beautiful trees, elms and hornbeams. These Mathieu had planted, and he had watched them grow; thus they seemed to him to be almost part of his flesh. But his real favorite was an oak tree, nearly twenty years of age and already sturdy, which stood in the centre of the lawn, where he had planted it with Marianne, who had held the slender sapling in position while he plied his spade on the day when they had founded their domain of Chantebled. And near this oak, which thus belonged to their robust family, there was a basin of living water, fed by the captured springs of the plateau—water whose crystalline song made the spot one of continual joy.

It was here then that a council was held on the day before the wedding. Mathieu and Marianne repaired thither to see what preparations would be necessary, and they found Charlotte with a sketch-book on her knees, rapidly finishing an impression of the oak tree.

"What is that—a surprise?" they asked.

She smiled with some confusion. "Yes, yes, a surprise; you will see."

Then she confessed that for a fortnight past she had been designing in water colors a series of menu cards for the wedding feast. And, prettily and lovingly enough, her idea had been to depict children's games and children's heads; indeed, all the members of the family in their childish days. She had taken their likenesses from old photographs, and her sketch of the oak tree was to serve as a background for the portraits of the two youngest scions of the house—little Benjamin and little Guillaume.

Mathieu and Marianne were delighted with that fleet procession of little faces all white and pink which they perfectly recognized as they saw them pass before their eyes. There were the twins nestling in their cradle, locked in one another's arms; there was Rose, the dear lost one, in her little shift; there were Ambroise and Gervais, bare, and wrestling on a patch of grass; there were Gregoire and Nicolas birdnesting; there were Claire and the three other girls, Louise, Madeleine, and Marguerite, romping about the farm, quarrelling with the fowls, springing upon the horses' backs. But what particularly touched Marianne was the sketch of her last-born, little Benjamin, now nine months old, whom Charlotte had depicted reclining under the oak tree in the same little carriage as her own son Guillaume, who was virtually of the same age, having been born but eight days later.

"The uncle and the nephew," said Mathieu jestingly. "All the same, the uncle is the elder by a week."

As Marianne stood there smiling, soft tears came into her eyes, and the sketch shook in her happy hands.

"The dears!" said she; "my son and grandson. With those dear little ones I am once again a mother and a grandmother. Ah, yes! those two are the supreme consolation; they have helped to heal the wound; it is they who have brought us back hope and courage."

This was true. How overwhelming had been the mourning and sadness of the early days when Charlotte, fleeing the factory, had sought refuge at the farm! The tragedy by which Blaise had been carried off had nearly killed her. Her first solace was to see that her daughter Berthe, who had been rather sickly in Paris, regained bright rosy cheeks amid the open air of Chantebled. Moreover, she had settled her life: she would spend her remaining years, in that hospitable house, devoting herself to her two children, and happy in having so affectionate a grandmother and grandfather to help and sustain her. She had always shown herself to be somewhat apart from life, possessed of a dreamy nature, only asking to love and to be loved in return.

So by degrees she settled down once more, installed beside her grandparents in the old pavilion, which Mathieu fitted up for the three of them. And wishing to occupy herself, irrespective of her income from the factory, she even set to work again and painted miniatures, which a dealer in Paris readily purchased. But her grief was mostly healed by her little Guillaume, that child bequeathed to her by her dead husband, in whom he resuscitated. And it was much the same with Marianne since the birth of Benjamin. A new son had replaced the one she had lost, and helped to fill the void in her heart. The two women, the two mothers, found infinite solace in nursing those babes. For them they forgot themselves; they reared them together, watching them grow side by side; they gave them the breast at the same hours, and it was their desire to see them both become very strong, very handsome, and very good. Although one mother was almost twice as old as the other, they became, as it were, sisters. The same nourishing milk flowed from both their fruitful bosoms. And gleams of light penetrated their mourning: they began to laugh when they saw those little cherubs laugh, and nothing could have been gayer than the sight of that mother-in-law and that daughter-in-law side by side, almost mingling, having but one cradle between them, amid an unceasing florescence of maternity.

"Be careful," Mathieu suddenly said to Charlotte; "hide your drawings, here are Gervais and Claire coming about the table."

Gervais at nineteen years of age was quite a colossus, the tallest and the strongest of the family, with short, curly black hair, large bright eyes, and a full broad-featured face. He had remained his father's favorite son, the son of the fertile earth, the one in whom Mathieu fostered a love for the estate, a passion for skilful agriculture, in order that later on the young man might continue the good work which had been begun. Mathieu already disburdened himself on Gervais of a part of his duties, and was only waiting to see him married to give him the control of the whole farm. And he often thought of adjoining to him Claire when she found a husband in some worthy, sturdy fellow who would assume part of the labor. Two men agreeing well would be none too many for an enterprise which was increasing in importance every day. Since Marianne had again been nursing, Claire had been attending to her work. Though she had no beauty, she was of vigorous health and quite strong for her seventeen years. She busied herself more particularly with cookery and household affairs, but she also kept the accounts, being shrewd-witted and very economically inclined, on which account the prodigals of the family often made fun of her.

"And so it's here that the table is to be set," said Gervais; "I shall have to see that the lawn is mowed then."

On her side Claire inquired what number of people there would be at table and how she had better place them. Then, Gervais having called to Frederic to bring a scythe, the three of them went on discussing the arrangements. After Rose's death, Frederic, her betrothed, had continued working beside Gervais, becoming his most active and intelligent comrade and helper. For some months, too, Marianne and Mathieu had noticed that he was revolving around Claire, as though, since he had lost the elder girl, he were willing to content himself with the younger one, who was far less beautiful no doubt, but withal a good and sturdy housewife. This had at first saddened the parents. Was it possible to forget their dear daughter? Then, however, they felt moved, for the thought came to them that the family ties would be drawn yet closer, that the young fellow's heart would not roam in search of love elsewhere, but would remain with them. So closing their eyes to what went on, they smiled, for in Frederic, when Claire should be old enough to marry, Gervais would find the brother-in-law and partner that he needed.

The question of the table had just been settled when a sudden invasion burst through the tall grass around the oak tree; skirts flew about, and loose hair waved in the sunshine.

"Oh!" cried Louise, "there are no roses."

"No," repeated Madeleine, "not a single white rose."

"And," added Marguerite, "we have inspected all the bushes. There are no white roses, only red ones."

Thirteen, eleven, and nine, such were their respective ages. Louise, plump and gay, already looked a little woman; Madeleine, slim and pretty, spent hours at her piano, her eyes full of dreaminess; Marguerite, whose nose was rather too large and whose lips were thick, had beautiful golden hair. She would pick up little birds at winter time and warm them with her hands. And the three of, them, after scouring the back garden, where flowers mingled with vegetables, had now rushed up in despair at their vain search. No white roses for a wedding! That was the end of everything! What could they offer to the bride? And what could they set upon the table?

Behind the three girls, however, appeared Gregoire, with jeering mien, and his hands in his pockets. At fifteen he was very malicious, the most turbulent, worrying member of the family, a lad inclined to the most diabolical devices. His pointed nose and his thin lips denoted also his adventurous spirit, his will power, and his skill in effecting his object. And, apparently much amused by his sisters' disappointment, he forgot himself and exclaimed, by way of teasing them: "Why, I know where there are some white roses, and fine ones, too."

"Where is that?" asked Mathieu.

"Why, at the mill, near the wheel, in the little enclosure. There are three big bushes which are quite white, with roses as big as cabbages."

Then he flushed and became confused, for his father was eyeing him severely.

"What! do you still prowl round the mill?" said Mathieu. "I had forbidden you to do so. As you know that there are white roses in the enclosure you must have gone in, eh?"

"No; I looked over the wall."

"You climbed up the wall, that's the finishing touch! So you want to land me in trouble with those Lepailleurs, who are decidedly very foolish and very malicious people. There is really a devil in you, my boy."

That which Gregoire left unsaid was that he repaired to the enclosure in order that he might there join Therese, the miller's fair-haired daughter with the droll, laughing face, who was also a terribly adventurous damsel for her thirteen years. True, their meetings were but childish play, but at the end of the enclosure, under the apple trees, there was a delightful nook where one could laugh and chat and amuse oneself at one's ease.

"Well, just listen to me," Mathieu resumed. "I won't have you going to play with Therese again. She is a pretty little girl, no doubt. But that house is not a place for you to go to. It seems that they fight one another there now."

This was a fact. When that young scamp Antonin had recovered his health, he had been tormented by a longing to return to Paris, and had done all he could with that object, in view of resuming a life of idleness and dissipation. Lepailleur, greatly irritated at having been duped by his son, had at first violently opposed his plans. But what could he do in the country with that idle fellow, whom he himself had taught to hate the earth and to sneer at the old rotting mill. Besides, he now had his wife against him. She was ever admiring her son's learning, and so stubborn was her faith in him that she was convinced that he would this time secure a good position in the capital. Thus the father had been obliged to give way, and Antonin was now finally wrecking his life while filling some petty employment at a merchant's in the Rue du Mail. But, on the other hand, the quarrelling increased in the home, particularly whenever Lepailleur suspected his wife of robbing him in order to send money to that big lazybones, their son. From the bridge over the Yeuse on certain days one could hear oaths and blows flying about. And here again was family life destroyed, strength wasted, and happiness spoilt.

Carried off by perfect anger, Mathieu continued: "To think of it; people who had everything needful to be happy! How can one be so stupid? How can one seek wretchedness for oneself with such obstinacy? As for that idea of theirs of an only son, and their vanity in wanting to make a gentleman of him, ah! well, they have succeeded finely! They must be extremely pleased to-day! It is just like Lepailleur's hatred of the earth, his old-fashioned system of cultivation, his obstinacy in leaving his bit of moorland barren and refusing to sell it to me, no doubt by way of protesting against our success! Can you imagine anything so stupid? And it's just like his mill; all folly and idleness he stands still, looking at it fall into ruins. He at least had a reason for that in former times; he used to say that as the region had almost renounced corn-growing, the peasants did not bring him enough grain to set his mill-stones working. But nowadays when, thanks to us, corn overflows on all sides, surely he ought to have pulled down his old wheel and have replaced it by a good engine. Ah! if I were in his place I would already have a new and bigger mill there, making all use of the water of the Yeuse, and connecting it with Janville railway station by a line of rails, which would not cost so much to lay down."

Gregoire stood listening, well pleased that the storm should fall on another than himself. And Marianne, seeing that her three daughters were still greatly grieved at having no white roses, consoled them, saying: "Well, for the table to-morrow morning you must gather those which are the lightest in color—the pale pink ones; they will do very well."

Thereupon Mathieu, calming down, made the children laugh, by adding gayly: "Gather the red ones too, the reddest you find. They will symbolize the blood of life!"

Marianne and Charlotte were still lingering there talking of all the preparations, when other little feet came tripping through the grass. Nicolas, quite proud of his seven years, was leading his niece Berthe, a big girl of six. They agreed very well together. That day they had remained indoors playing at "fathers and mothers" near the cradle occupied by Benjamin and Guillaume, whom they called their babies. But all at once the infants had awoke, clamoring for nourishment. And Nicolas and Berthe, quite alarmed, had thereupon run off to fetch the two mothers.

"Mamma!" called Nicolas, "Benjamin's asking for you. He's thirsty."

"Mamma, mamma!" repeated Berthe, "Guillaume's thirsty. Come quick, he's in a hurry."

Marianne and Charlotte laughed. True enough, the morrow's wedding had made them forget their pets; and so they hastily returned to the house.

On the following day those happy nuptials were celebrated in affectionate intimacy. There were but one-and-twenty at table under the oak tree in the middle of the lawn, which, girt with elms and hornbeams, seemed like a hall of verdure. The whole family was present: first those of the farm, then Denis the bridegroom, next Ambroise and his wife Andree, who had brought their little Leonce with them. And apart from the family proper, there were only the few invited relatives, Beauchene and Constance, Seguin and Valentine, with, of course, Madame Desvignes, the bride's mother. There were twenty-one at table, as has been said; but besides those one-and-twenty there were three very little ones present: Leonce, who at fifteen months had just been weaned, and Benjamin and Guillaume, who still took the breast. Their little carriages had been drawn up near, so that they also belonged to the party, which was thus a round two dozen. And the table, flowery with roses, sent forth a delightful perfume under the rain of summer sunbeams which flecked it with gold athwart the cool shady foliage. From one horizon to the other stretched the wondrous tent of azure of the triumphant July sky. And Marthe's white bridal gown, and the bright dresses of the girls, big and little; all those gay frocks, and all that fine youthful health, seemed like the very florescence of that green nook of happiness. They lunched joyously, and ended by clinking glasses in country fashion, while wishing all sorts of prosperity to the bridal pair and to everybody present.

Then, while the servants were removing the cloth, Seguin, who affected an interest in horse-breeding and cattle-raising, wished Mathieu to show him his stables. He had talked nothing but horseflesh during the meal, and was particularly desirous of seeing some big farm-horses, whose great strength had been praised by his host. He persuaded Beauchene to join him in the inspection, and the three men were starting, when Constance and Valentine, somewhat inquisitive with respect to that farm, the great growth of which still filled them with stupefaction, decided to follow, leaving the rest of the family installed under the trees, amid the smiling peacefulness of that fine afternoon.

The cow-houses and stables were on the right hand. But in order to reach them one had to cross the great yard, whence the entire estate could be seen. And here there was a halt, a sudden stopping inspired by admiration, so grandly did the work accomplished show forth under the sun. They had known that land dry and sterile, covered with mere scrub; they beheld it now one sea of waving corn, of crops whose growth increased at each successive season. Up yonder, on the old marshy plateau, the fertility was such, thanks to the humus amassed during long centuries, that Mathieu did not even manure the ground as yet. Then, to right and to left, the former sandy slopes spread out all greenery, fertilized by the springs which ever brought them increase of fruitfulness. And the very woods afar off, skilfully arranged, aired by broad clearings, seemed to possess more sap, as if all the surrounding growth of life had instilled additional vigor into them. With this vigor, this power, indeed, the whole domain was instinct; it was creation, man's labor fertilizing sterile soil, and drawing from it a wealth of nourishment for expanding humanity, the conqueror of the world.

There was a long spell of silence. At last Seguin, in his dry shrill voice, with a tinge of bitterness born of his own ruin, remarked: "You have done a good stroke of business. I should never have believed it possible."

Then they walked on again. But in the sheds, the cow-houses, the sheep-cotes, and all round, the sensation of strength and power yet increased. Creation was there continuing; the cattle, the sheep, the fowls, the rabbits, all that dwelt and swarmed there were incessantly increasing and multiplying. Each year the ark became too small, and fresh pens and fresh buildings were required. Life increased life; on all sides there were fresh broods, fresh flocks, fresh herds; all the conquering wealth of inexhaustible fruitfulness.

When they reached the stables Seguin greatly admired the big draught horses, and praised them with the expressions of a connoisseur. Then he returned to the subject of breeding, and cited some extraordinary results that one of his friends obtained by certain crosses. So far as the animal kingdom was concerned his ideas were sound enough, but when he came to the consideration of human kind he was as erratic as ever. As they walked back from the stables he began to descant on the population question, denouncing the century, and repeating all his old theories. Perhaps it was jealous rancor that impelled him to protest against the victory of life which the whole farm around him proclaimed so loudly. Depopulation! why, it did not extend fast enough. Paris, which wished to die, so people said, was really taking its time about it. All the same, he noticed some good symptoms, for bankruptcy was increasing on all sides—in science, politics, literature, and even art. Liberty was already dead. Democracy, by exasperating ambitious instincts and setting classes in conflict for power, was rapidly leading to a social collapse. Only the poor still had large families; the elite, the people of wealth and intelligence, had fewer and fewer children, so that, before final annihilation came, there might still be a last period of acceptable civilization, in which there would remain only a few men and women of supreme refinement, content with perfumes for sustenance and mere breath for enjoyment. He, however, was disgusted, for he now felt certain that he would not see that period since it was so slow in coming.

"If only Christianity would return to the primitive faith," he continued, "and condemn woman as an impure, diabolical, and harmful creature, we might go and lead holy lives in the desert, and in that way bring the world to an end much sooner. But the political Catholicism of nowadays, anxious to keep alive itself, allows and regulates marriage, with the view of maintaining things as they are. Oh! you will say, of course, that I myself married and that I have children, which is true; but I am pleased to think that they will redeem my fault. Gaston says that a soldier's only wife ought to be his sword, and so he intends to remain single; and as Lucie, on her side, has taken the veil at the Ursulines, I feel quite at ease. My race is, so to say, already extinct, and that delights me."

Mathieu listened with a smile. He was acquainted with that more or less literary form of pessimism. In former days all such views, as, for instance, the struggle of civilization against the birth-rate, and the relative childlessness of the most intelligent and able members of the community, had disturbed him. But since he had fought the cause of love he had found another faith. Thus he contented himself with saying rather maliciously: "But you forget your daughter Andree and her little boy Leonce."

"Oh! Andree!" replied Seguin, waving his hand as if she did not belong to him.

Valentine, however, had stopped short, gazing at him fixedly. Since their household had been wrecked and they had been leading lives apart, she no longer tolerated his sudden attacks of insane brutality and jealousy. By reason also of the squandering of their fortune she had a hold on him, for he feared that she might ask for certain accounts to be rendered her.

"Yes," he granted, "there is Andree; but then girls don't count."

They were walking on again when Beauchene, who had hitherto contented himself with puffing and chewing his cigar, for reserve was imposed upon him by the frightful drama of his own family life, was unable to remain silent any longer. Forgetful, relapsing into the extraordinary unconsciousness which always set him erect, like a victorious superior man, he spoke out loudly and boldly:

"I don't belong to Seguin's school, but, all the same, he says some true things. That population question greatly interests me even now, and I can flatter myself that I know it fully. Well, it is evident that Malthus was right. It is not allowable for people to have families without knowing how they will be able to nourish them. If the poor die of starvation it is their fault, and not ours."

Then he reverted to his usual lecture on the subject. The governing classes alone were reasonable in keeping to small families. A country could only produce a certain supply of food, and was therefore restricted to a certain population. People talked of the faulty division of wealth; but it was madness to dream of an Utopia, where there would be no more masters but only so many brothers, equal workers and sharers, who would apportion happiness among themselves like a birthday-cake. All the evil then came from the lack of foresight among the poor, though with brutal frankness he admitted that employers readily availed themselves of the circumstance that there was a surplus of children to hire labor at reduced rates.

Then, losing all recollection of the past, infatuated, intoxicated with his own ideas, he went on talking of himself. "People pretend that we are not patriots because we don't leave troops of children behind us. But that is simply ridiculous; each serves the country in his own way. If the poor folks give it soldiers, we give it our capital—all the proceeds of our commerce and industry. A fine lot of good would it do the country if we were to ruin ourselves with big families, which would hamper us, prevent us from getting rich, and afterwards destroy whatever we create by subdividing it. With our laws and customs there can be no substantial fortune unless a family is limited to one son. And yes, that is necessary; but one son—an only son—that is the only wise course; therein lies the only possible happiness."

It became so painful to hear him, in his position, speaking in that fashion, that the others remained silent, full of embarrassment. And he, thinking that he was convincing them, went on triumphantly: "Thus, I myself—"

But at this moment Constance interrupted him. She had hitherto walked on with bowed head amid that flow of chatter which brought her so much torture and shame, an aggravation, as it were, of her defeat. But now she raised her face, down which two big tears were trickling.

"Alexandre!" she said.

"What is it, my dear?"

He did not yet understand. But on seeing her tears, he ended by feeling disturbed, in spite of all his fine assurance. He looked at the others, and wishing to have the last word, he added: "Ah, yes! our poor child. But particular cases have nothing to do with general theories; ideas are still ideas."

Silence fell between them. They were now near the lawn where the family had remained. And for the last moment Mathieu had been thinking of Morange, whom he had also invited to the wedding, but who had excused himself from attending, as if he were terrified at the idea of gazing on the joy of others, and dreaded, too, lest some sacrilegious attempt should be made in his absence on the mysterious sanctuary where he worshipped. Would he, Morange—so Mathieu wondered—have clung like Beauchene to his former ideas? Would he still have defended the theory of the only child; that hateful, calculating theory which had cost him both his wife and his daughter? Mathieu could picture him flitting past, pale and distracted, with the step of a maniac hastening to some mysterious end, in which insanity would doubtless have its place. But the lugubrious vision vanished, and then again before Mathieu's eyes the lawn spread out under the joyous sun, offering between its belt of foliage such a picture of happy health and triumphant beauty, that he felt impelled to break the mournful silence and exclaim:

"Look there! look there! Isn't that gay; isn't that a delightful scene—all those dear women and dear children in that setting of verdure? It ought to be painted to show people how healthy and beautiful life is!"

Time had not been lost on the lawn since the Beauchenes and Seguins had gone off to visit the stables. First of all there had been a distribution of the menu cards, which Charlotte had adorned with such delicate water-color sketches. This surprise of hers had enraptured them all at lunch, and they still laughed at the sight of those pretty children's heads. Then, while the servants cleared the table, Gregoire achieved a great success by offering the bride a bouquet of splendid white roses, which he drew out of a bush where he had hitherto kept it hidden. He had doubtless been waiting for some absence of his father's. They were the roses of the mill; with Therese's assistance he must have pillaged the bushes in the enclosure. Marianne, recognizing how serious was the transgression, wished to scold him. But what superb white roses they were, as big as cabbages, as he himself had said! And he was entitled to triumph over them, for they were the only white roses there, and had been secured by himself, like the wandering urchin he was with a spice of knight-errantry in his composition, quite ready to jump over walls and cajole damsels in order to deck a bride with snowy blooms.

"Oh! papa won't say anything," he declared, with no little self-assurance; "they are far too beautiful."

This made the others laugh; but fresh emotion ensued, for Benjamin and Guillaume awoke and screamed their hunger aloud. It was gayly remarked, however, that they were quite entitled to their turn of feasting. And as it was simply a family gathering there was no embarrassment on the part of the mothers. Marianne took Benjamin on her knees in the shade of the oak tree, and Charlotte placed herself with Guillaume on her right hand; while, on her left, Andree seated herself with little Leonce, who had been weaned a week previously, but was still very fond of caresses.

It was at this moment that the Beauchenes and the Seguins reappeared with Mathieu, and stopped short, struck by the charm of the spectacle before them. Between a framework of tall trees, under the patriarchal oak, on the thick grass of the lawn the whole vigorous family was gathered in a group, instinct with gayety, beauty, and strength. Gervais and Claire, ever active, were, with Frederic, hurrying on the servants, who made no end of serving the coffee on the table which had just been cleared. For this table the three younger girls, half buried in a heap of flowers, tea and blush and crimson roses, were now, with the help of knight Gregoire, devising new decorations. Then, a few paces away, the bridal pair, Denis and Marthe, were conversing in undertones; while the bride's mother, Madame Desvignes, sat listening to them with a discreet and infinitely gentle smile upon her lips. And it was in the midst of all this that Marianne, radiant, white of skin, still fresh, ever beautiful, with serene strength, was giving the breast to her twelfth child, her Benjamin, and smiling at him as he sucked away; while surrendering her other knee to little Nicolas, who was jealous of his younger brother. And her two daughters-in-law seemed like a continuation of herself. There was Andree on the left with Ambroise, who had stepped up to tease his little Leonce; and Charlotte on the right with her two children, Guillaume, who hung on her breast, and Berthe, who had sought a place among her skirts. And here, faith in life had yielded prosperity, ever-increasing, overflowing wealth, all the sovereign florescence of happy fruitfulness.

Seguin, addressing himself to Marianne, asked her jestingly: "And so that little gentleman is the fourteenth you have nursed?"

She likewise laughed. "No; I mustn't tell fibs! I have nursed twelve, including this one; that is the exact number."

Beauchene, who had recovered his self-possession, could not refrain from intervening once more: "A full dozen, eh! It is madness!"

"I share your opinion," said Mathieu, laughing in his turn. "At all events, if it is not madness it is extravagance, as we admit, my wife and I, when we are alone. And we certainly don't think that all people ought to have such large families as ours. But, given the situation in France nowadays, with our population dwindling and that of nearly every other country increasing, it is hardly possible to complain of even the largest family. Thus, even if our example be exaggerated, it remains an example, I think, for others to think over."

Marianne listened, still smiling, but with tears standing in her eyes. A feeling of gentle sadness was penetrating her; her heart-wound had reopened even amid all her joy at seeing her children assembled around her. "Yes," said she in a trembling voice, "there have been twelve, but I have only ten left. Two are already sleeping yonder, waiting for us underground."

There was no sign of dread, however, in that evocation of the peaceful little cemetery of Janville and the family grave in which all the children hoped some day to be laid, one after the other, side by side. Rather did that evocation, coming amid that gay wedding assembly, seem like a promise of future blessed peace. The memory of the dear departed ones remained alive, and lent to one and all a kind of loving gravity even amid their mirth. Was it not impossible to accept life without accepting death. Each came here to perform his task, and then, his work ended, went to join his elders in that slumber of eternity where the great fraternity of humankind was fulfilled.

But in presence of those jesters, Beauchene and Seguin, quite a flood of words rose to Mathieu's lips. He would have liked to answer them; he would have liked to triumph over the mendacious theories which they still dared to assert even in their hour of defeat. To fear that the earth might become over-populated, that excess of life might produce famine, was this not idiotic? Others only had to do as he had done: create the necessary subsistence each time that a child was born to them. And he would have pointed to Chantebled, his work, and to all the corn growing up under the sun, even as his children grew. They could not be charged with having come to consume the share of others, since each was born with his bread before him. And millions of new beings might follow, for the earth was vast: more than two-thirds of it still remained to be placed under cultivation, and therein lay endless fertility for unlimited humanity. Besides, had not every civilization, every progress, been due to the impulse of numbers? The improvidence of the poor had alone urged revolutionary multitudes to the conquest of truth, justice, and happiness. And with each succeeding day the human torrent would require more kindliness, more equity, the logical division of wealth by just laws regulating universal labor. If it were true, too, that civilization was a check to excessive natality, this phenomenon itself might make one hope in final equilibrium in the far-off ages, when the earth should be entirely populated and wise enough to live in a sort of divine immobility. But all this was pure speculation beside the needs of the hour, the nations which must be built up afresh and incessantly enlarged, pending the eventual definitive federation of mankind. And it was really an example, a brave and a necessary one, that Marianne and he were giving, in order that manners and customs, and the idea of morality and the idea of beauty might be changed.

Full of these thoughts Mathieu was already opening his mouth to speak. But all at once he felt how futile discussion would be in presence of that admirable scene; that mother surrounded by such a florescence of vigorous children; that mother nursing yet another child, under the big oak which she had planted. She was bravely accomplishing her task—that of perpetuating the world. And hers was the sovereign beauty.

Mathieu could think of only one thing that would express everything, and that was to kiss her with all his heart before the whole assembly.

"There, dear wife! You are the most beautiful and the best! May all the others do as you have done."

Then, when Marianne had gloriously returned his kiss, there arose an acclamation, a tempest of merry laughter. They were both of heroic mould; it was with a great dash of heroism that they had steered their bark onward, thanks to their full faith in life, their will of action, and the force of their love. And Constance was at last conscious of it: she could realize the conquering power of fruitfulness; she could already see the Froments masters of the factory through their son Denis; masters of Seguin's mansion through their son Ambroise; masters, too, of all the countryside through their other children. Numbers spelt victory. And shrinking, consumed with a love which she could never more satisfy, full of the bitterness of her defeat, though she yet hoped for some abominable revenge of destiny, she—who never wept!—turned aside to hide the big hot tears which now burnt her withered cheeks.

Meantime Benjamin and Guillaume were enjoying themselves like greedy little men whom nothing could disturb. Had there been less laughter one might have heard the trickling of their mothers' milk: that little stream flowing forth amid the torrent of sap which upraised the earth and made the big trees quiver in the powerful July blaze. On every side fruitful life was conveying germs, creating and nourishing. And for its eternal work an eternal river of milk flowed through the world.

XIX

ONE Sunday morning Norine and Cecile—who, though it was rightly a day of rest, were, nevertheless, working on either side of their little table, pressed as they were to deliver boxes for the approaching New Year season—received a visit which left them pale with stupor and fright.

Their unknown hidden life had hitherto followed a peaceful course, the only battle being to make both ends meet every week, and to put by the rent money for payment every quarter. During the eight years that the sisters had been living together in the Rue de la Federation near the Champ de Mars, occupying the same big room with cheerful windows, a room whose coquettish cleanliness made them feel quite proud, Norine's child had grown up steadily between his two affectionate mothers. For he had ended by confounding them together: there was Mamma Norine and there was Mamma Cecile; and he did not exactly know whether one of the two was more his mother than the other. It was for him alone that they both lived and toiled, the one still a fine, good-looking woman at forty years of age, the other yet girlish at thirty.

Now, at about ten o'clock that Sunday, there came in succession two loud knocks at the door. When the latter was opened a short, thick-set fellow, about eighteen, stepped in. He was dark-haired, with a square face, a hard prominent jaw, and eyes of a pale gray. And he wore a ragged old jacket and a gray cloth cap, discolored by long usage.

"Excuse me," said he; "but isn't it here that live Mesdames Moineaud, who make cardboard boxes?"

Norine stood there looking at him with sudden uneasiness. Her heart had contracted as if she were menaced. She had certainly seen that face somewhere before; but she could only recall one old-time danger, which suddenly seemed to revive, more formidable than ever, as if threatening to spoil her quiet life.

"Yes, it is here," she answered.

Without any haste the young man glanced around the room. He must have expected more signs of means than he found, for he pouted slightly. Then his eyes rested on the child, who, like a well-behaved little boy, had been amusing himself with reading, and had now raised his face to examine the newcomer. And the latter concluded his examination by directing a brief glance at the other woman who was present, a slight, sickly creature who likewise felt anxious in presence of that sudden apparition of the unknown.

"I was told the left-hand door on the fourth floor," the young man resumed. "But, all the same, I was afraid of making a mistake, for the things I have to say can't be said to everybody. It isn't an easy matter, and, of course, I thought it well over before I came here."

He spoke slowly in a drawling way, and after again making sure that the other woman was too young to be the one he sought, he kept his pale eyes steadily fixed on Norine. The growing anguish with which he saw her quivering, the appeal that she was evidently making to her memory, induced him to prolong things for another moment. Then he spoke out: "I am the child who was put to nurse at Rougemont; my name is Alexandre-Honore."

There was no need for him to say anything more. The unhappy Norine began to tremble from head to foot, clasped and wrung her hands, while an ashen hue came over her distorted features. Good heavens—Beauchene! Yes, it was Beauchene whom he resembled, and in so striking a manner, with his eyes of prey, his big jaw which proclaimed an enjoyer consumed by base voracity, that she was now astonished that she had not been able to name him at her first glance. Her legs failed her, and she had to sit down.

"So it's you," said Alexandre.

As she continued shivering, confessing the truth by her manner, but unable to articulate a word, to such a point did despair and fright clutch her at the throat, he felt the need of reassuring her a little, particularly if he was to keep that door open to him.

"You must not upset yourself like that," said he; "you have nothing to fear from me; it isn't my intention to give you any trouble. Only when I learnt at last where you were I wished to know you, and that was natural, wasn't it? I even fancied that perhaps you might be pleased to see me.. .. Then, too, the truth is that I'm precious badly off. Three years ago I was silly enough to come back to Paris, where I do little more than starve. And on the days when one hasn't breakfasted, one feels inclined to look up one's parents, even though they may have turned one into the street, for, all the same, they can hardly be so hard-hearted as to refuse one a plateful of soup."

Tears rose to Norine's eyes. This was the finishing stroke, the return of that wretched cast-off son, that big suspicious-looking fellow who accused her and complained of starving. Annoyed at being unable to elicit from her any response but shivers and sobs, Alexandre turned to Cecile: "You are her sister, I know," said he; "tell her that it's stupid of her to go on like that. I haven't come to murder her. It's funny how pleased she is to see me! Yet I don't make any noise, and I said nothing whatever to the door-porter downstairs, I assure you."

Then as Cecile, without answering him, rose to go and comfort Norine, he again became interested in the child, who likewise felt frightened and turned pale on seeing the grief of his two mammas.

"So that lad is my brother?"

Thereupon Norine suddenly sprang to her feet and set herself between the child and him. A mad fear had come to her of some catastrophe, some great collapse which would crush them all. Yet she did not wish to be harsh, she even sought kind words, but amid it all she lost her head, carried away by feelings of revolt, rancor, instinctive hostility.

"You came, I can understand it. But it is so cruel. What can I do? After so many years one doesn't know one another, one has nothing to say. And, besides, as you can see for yourself, I'm not rich."

Alexandre glanced round the room for the second time. "Yes, I see," he answered; "and my father, can't you tell me his name?"

She remained thunderstruck by this question and turned yet paler, while he continued: "Because if my father should have any money I should know very well how to make him give me some. People have no right to fling children into the gutter like that."

All at once Norine had seen the past rise up before her: Beauchene, the works, and her father, who now had just quitted them owing to his infirmities, leaving his son Victor behind him.

And a sort of instinctive prudence came to her at the thought that if she were to give up Beauchene's name she might compromise all her happy life, since terrible complications might ensue. The dread she felt of that suspicious-looking lad, who reeked of idleness and vice, inspired her with an idea: "Your father? He has long been dead," said she.

He could have known nothing, have learnt nothing on that point, for, in presence of the energy of her answer, he expressed no doubt whatever of her veracity, but contented himself with making a rough gesture which indicated how angry he felt at seeing his hungry hopes thus destroyed.

"So I've got to starve!" he growled.

Norine, utterly distracted, was possessed by one painful desire—a desire that he might take himself away, and cease torturing her by his presence, to such a degree did remorse, and pity, and fright, and horror now wring her bleeding heart. She opened a drawer and took from it a ten-franc piece, her savings for the last three months, with which she had intended to buy a New Year's present for her little boy. And giving those ten francs to Alexandre, she said: "Listen, I can do nothing for you. We live all three in this one room, and we scarcely earn our bread. It grieves me very much to know that you are so unfortunately circumstanced. But you mustn't rely on me. Do as we do—work."

He pocketed the ten francs, and remained there for another moment swaying about, and saying that he had not come for money, and that he could very well understand things. For his part he always behaved properly with people when people behaved properly with him. And he repeated that since she showed herself good-natured he had no idea of creating any scandal. A mother who did what she could performed her duty, even though she might only give a ten-sous piece. Then, as he was at last going off, he inquired: "Won't you kiss me?"

She kissed him, but with cold lips and lifeless heart, and the two smacking kisses which, with noisy affectation, he gave her in return, left her cheeks quivering.

"And au revoir, eh?" said he. "Although one may be poor and unable to keep together, each knows now that the other's in the land of the living. And there is no reason why I shouldn't come up just now and again to wish you good day when I'm passing."

When he had at last disappeared long silence fell amid the infinite distress which his short stay had brought there. Norine had again sunk upon a chair, as if overwhelmed by this catastrophe. Cecile had been obliged to sit down in front of her, for she also was overcome. And it was she who, amid the mournfulness of that room, which but a little while ago had held all their happiness, spoke out the first to complain and express her astonishment.

"But you did not ask him anything; we know nothing about him," said she. "Where has he come from? What is he doing? What does he want? And, in particular, how did he manage to discover you? These were the interesting things to learn."

"Oh! what would you have!" replied Norine. "When he told me his name he knocked all the strength out of me; I felt as cold as ice! Oh! it's he, there's no doubt of it. You recognized his likeness to his father, didn't you? But you are right; we know nothing, and now we shall always be living with that threat over our heads, in fear that everything will crumble down upon us."

All her strength, all her courage was gone, and she began to sob, stammering indistinctly: "To think of it! a big fellow of eighteen falling on one like that without a word of warning! And it's quite true that I don't love him, since I don't even know him. When he kissed me I felt nothing. I was icy cold, as if my heart were frozen. O God! O God! what trouble to be sure, and how horrid and cruel it all is!"

Then, as her little boy, on seeing her weep, ran up and flung himself; frightened and tearful, against her bosom, she wildly caught him in her arms. "My poor little one! my poor little one! if only you don't suffer by it; if only my sin doesn't fall on you! Ah! that would be a terrible punishment. Really the best course is for folks to behave properly in life if they don't want to have a lot of trouble afterwards!"

In the evening the sisters, having grown somewhat calmer, decided that their best course would be to write to Mathieu. Norine remembered that he had called on her a few years previously to ask if Alexandre had not been to see her. He alone knew all the particulars of the business, and where to obtain information. And, indeed, as soon as the sisters' letter reached him Mathieu made haste to call on them in the Rue de la Federation, for he was anxious with respect to the effect which any scandal might have at the works, where Beauchene's position was becoming worse every day. After questioning Norine at length, he guessed that Alexandre must have learnt her address through La Couteau, though he could not say precisely how this had come about. At last, after a long month of discreet researches, conversations with Madame Menoux, Celeste, and La Couteau herself, he was able in some measure to explain things. The alert had certainly come from the inquiry intrusted to the nurse-agent at Rougemont, that visit which she had made to the hamlet of Saint-Pierre in quest of information respecting the lad who was supposed to be in apprenticeship with Montoir the wheelwright. She had talked too much, said too much, particularly to the other apprentice, that Richard, another foundling, and one of such bad instincts, too, that seven months later he had taken flight, like Alexandre, after purloining some money from his master. Then years elapsed, and all trace of them was lost. But later on, most assuredly they had met one another on the Paris pavement, in such wise that the big carroty lad had told the little dark fellow the whole story how his relatives had caused a search to be made for him, and perhaps, too, who his mother was, the whole interspersed with tittle-tattle and ridiculous inventions. Still this did not explain everything, and to understand how Alexandre had procured his mother's actual address, Mathieu had to presume that he had secured it from La Couteau, whom Celeste had acquainted with so many things. Indeed, he learnt at Broquette's nurse-agency that a short, thickset young man with pronounced jaw-bones had come there twice to speak to La Couteau. Nevertheless, many points remained unexplained; the whole affair had taken place amid the tragic, murky gloom of Parisian low life, whose mire it is not healthy to stir. Mathieu ended by resting content with a general notion of the business, for he himself felt frightened at the charges already hanging over those two young bandits, who lived so precariously, dragging their idleness and their vices over the pavement of the great city. And thus all his researches had resulted in but one consoling certainty, which was that even if Norine the mother was known, the father's name and position were certainly not suspected by anybody.

When Mathieu saw Norine again on the subject he terrified her by the few particulars which he was obliged to give her.

"Oh! I beg you, I beg you, do not let him come again," she pleaded. "Find some means; prevent him from coming here. It upsets me too dreadfully to see him."

Mathieu, of course, could do nothing in this respect. After mature reflection he realized that the great object of his efforts must be to prevent Alexandre from discovering Beauchene. What he had learnt of the young man was so bad, so dreadful, that he wished to spare Constance the pain and scandal of being blackmailed. He could see her blanching at the thought of the ignominy of that lad whom she had so passionately desired to find, and he felt ashamed for her sake, and deemed it more compassionate and even necessary to bury the secret in the silence of the grave. Still, it was only after a long fight with himself that he came to this decision, for he felt that it was hard to have to abandon the unhappy youth in the streets. Was it still possible to save him? He doubted it. And besides, who would undertake the task, who would know how to instil honest principles into that waif by teaching him to work? It all meant yet another man cast overboard, forsaken amid the tempest, and Mathieu's heart bled at the thought of condemning him, though he could think of no reasonable means of salvation.

"My opinion," he said to Norine, "is that you should keep his father's name from him for the present. Later on we will see. But just now I should fear worry for everybody."

She eagerly acquiesced. "Oh! you need not be anxious," she responded. "I have already told him that his father is dead. If I were to speak out everything would fall on my shoulders, and my great desire is to be left in peace in my corner with my little one."

With sorrowful mien Mathieu continued reflecting, unable to make up his mind to utterly abandon the young man. "If he would only work, I would find him some employment. And I would even take him on at the farm later, when I should no longer have cause to fear that he might contaminate my people. However, I will see what can be done; I know a wheelwright who would doubtless employ him, and I will write to you in order that you may tell him where to apply, when he comes back to see you."

"What? When he comes back!" she cried in despair. "So you think that he will come back. O God! O God! I shall never be happy again."

He did, indeed, come back. But when she gave him the wheelwright's address he sneered and shrugged his shoulders. He knew all about the Paris wheelwrights! A set of sweaters, a parcel of lazy rogues, who made poor people toil and moil for them. Besides, he had never finished his apprenticeship; he was only fit for running errands, in which capacity he was willing to accept a post in a large shop. When Mathieu had procured him such a situation, he did not remain in it a fortnight. One fine evening he disappeared with the parcels of goods which he had been told to deliver. In turn he tried to learn a baker's calling, became a mason's hodman, secured work at the markets, but without ever fixing himself anywhere. He simply discouraged his protector, and left all sorts of roguery behind him for others to liquidate. It became necessary to renounce the hope of saving him. When he turned up, as he did periodically, emaciated, hungry, and in rags, they had to limit themselves to providing him with the means to buy a jacket and some bread.

Thus Norine lived on in a state of mortal disquietude. For long weeks Alexandre seemed to be dead, but she, nevertheless, started at the slightest sound that she heard on the landing. She always felt him to be there, and whenever he suddenly rapped on the door she recognized his heavy knock and began to tremble as if he had come to beat her. He had noticed how his presence reduced the unhappy woman to a state of abject terror, and he profited by this to extract from her whatever little sums she hid away. When she had handed him the five-franc piece which Mathieu, as a rule, left with her for this purpose, the young rascal was not content, but began searching for more. At times he made his appearance in a wild, haggard state, declaring that he should certainly be sent to prison that evening if he did not secure ten francs, and talking the while of smashing everything in the room or else of carrying off the little clock in order to sell it. And it was then necessary for Cecile to intervene and turn him out of the place; for, however puny she might be, she had a brave heart. But if he went off it was only to return a few days later with fresh demands, threatening that he would shout his story to everybody on the stairs if the ten francs were not given to him. One day, when his mother had no money in the place and began to weep, he talked of ripping up the mattress, where, said he, she probably kept her hoard. Briefly, the sisters' little home was becoming a perfect hell.

The greatest misfortune of all, however, was that in the Rue de la Federation Alexandre made the acquaintance of Alfred, Norine's youngest brother, the last born of the Moineaud family. He was then twenty, and thus two years the senior of his nephew. No worse prowler than he existed. He was the genuine rough, with pale, beardless face, blinking eyes, and twisted mouth, the real gutter-weed that sprouts up amid the Parisian manure-heaps. At seven years of age he robbed his sisters, beating Cecile every Saturday in order to tear her earnings from her. Mother Moineaud, worn out with hard work and unable to exercise a constant watch over him, had never managed to make him attend school regularly, or to keep him in apprenticeship. He exasperated her to such a degree that she herself ended by turning him into the streets in order to secure a little peace and quietness at home. His big brothers kicked him about, his father was at work from morning till evening, and the child, thus morally a waif, grew up out of doors for a career of vice and crime among the swarms of lads and girls of his age, who all rotted there together like apples fallen on the ground. And as Alfred grew he became yet more corrupt; he was like the sacrificed surplus of a poor man's family, the surplus poured into the gutter, the spoilt fruit which spoils all that comes into contact with it.

Like Alexandre, too, he nowadays only lived chancewise, and it was not even known where he had been sleeping, since Mother Moineaud had died at a hospital exhausted by her long life of wretchedness and family cares which had proved far too heavy for her. She was only sixty at the time of her death, but was as bent and as worn out as a centenarian. Moineaud, two years older, bent like herself, his legs twisted by paralysis, a lamentable wreck after fifty years of unjust toil, had been obliged to quit the factory, and thus the home was empty, and its few poor sticks had been cast to the four winds of heaven.

Moineaud fortunately received a little pension, for which he was indebted to Denis's compassionate initiative. But he was sinking into second childhood, worn out by his long and constant efforts, and not only did he squander his few coppers in drink, but he could not be left alone, for his feet were lifeless, and his hands shook to such a degree that he ran the risk of setting all about him on fire whenever he tried to light his pipe. At last he found himself stranded in the home of his daughters, Norine and Cecile, the only two who had heart enough to take him in. They rented a little closet for him, on the fifth floor of the house, over their own room, and they nursed him and bought him food and clothes with his pension-money, to which they added a good deal of their own. As they remarked in their gay, courageous way, they now had two children, a little one and a very old one, which was a heavy burden for two women who earned but five francs a day, although they were ever making boxes from morn till night, There was a touch of soft irony in the circumstance that old Moineaud should have been unable to find any other refuge than the home of his daughter Norine—that daughter whom he had formerly turned away and cursed for her misconduct, that hussy who had dishonored him, but whose very hands he now kissed when, for fear lest he should set the tip of his nose ablaze, she helped him to light his pipe.

All the same, the shaky old nest of the Moineauds was destroyed, and the whole family had flown off, dispersed chancewise. Irma alone, thanks to her fine marriage with a clerk, lived happily, playing the part of a lady, and so full of vanity that she no longer condescended to see her brothers and sisters. Victor, meantime, was leading at the factory much the same life as his father had led, working at the same mill as the other, and in the same blind, stubborn way. He had married, and though he was under six-and-thirty, he already had six children, three boys and three girls, so that his wife seemed fated to much the same existence as his mother La Moineaude. Both of them would finish broken down, and their children in their turn would unconsciously perpetuate the swarming and accursed starveling race.

At Euphrasie's, destiny the inevitable showed itself more tragic still. The wretched woman had not been lucky enough to die. She had gradually become bedridden, quite unable to move, though she lived on and could hear and see and understand things. From that open grave, her bed, she had beheld the final break-up of what remained of her sorry home. She was nothing more than a thing, insulted by her husband and tortured by Madame Joseph, who would leave her for days together without water, and fling her occasional crusts much as they might be flung to a sick animal whose litter is not even changed. Terror-stricken, and full of humility amid her downfall, Euphrasie resigned herself to everything; but the worst was that her three children, her twin daughters and her son, being abandoned to themselves, sank into vice, the all-corrupting life of the streets. Benard, tired out, distracted by the wreck of his home, had taken to drinking with Madame Joseph; and afterwards they would fight together, break the furniture, and drive off the children, who came home muddy, in rags, and with their pockets full of stolen things. On two occasions Benard disappeared for a week at a time. On the third he did not come back at all. When the rent fell due, Madame Joseph in her turn took herself off. And then came the end. Euphrasie had to be removed to the hospital of La Salpetriere, the last refuge of the aged and the infirm; while the children, henceforth without a home in name, were driven into the gutter. The boy never turned up again; it was as if he had been swallowed by some sewer. One of the twin girls, found in the streets, died in a hospital during the ensuing year; and the other, Toinette, a fair-haired scraggy hussy, who, however puny she might look, was a terrible little creature with the eyes and the teeth of a wolf, lived under the bridges, in the depths of the stone quarries, in the dingy garrets of haunts of vice, so that at sixteen she was already an expert thief. Her fate was similar to Alfred's; here was a girl morally abandoned, then contaminated by the life of the streets, and carried off to a criminal career. And, indeed, the uncle and the niece having met by chance, ended by consorting together, their favorite refuge, it was thought, being the limekilns in the direction of Les Moulineaux.

One day then it happened that Alexandre upon calling at Norine's there encountered Alfred, who came at times to try to extract a half-franc from old Moineaud, his father. The two young bandits went off together, chatted, and met again. And from that chance encounter there sprang a band. Alexandre was living with Richard, and Alfred brought Toinette to them. Thus they were four in number, and the customary developments followed: begging at first, the girl putting out her hand at the instigation of the three prowlers, who remained on the watch and drew alms by force at nighttime from belated bourgeois encountered in dark corners; next came vulgar vice and its wonted attendant, blackmail; and then theft, petty larceny to begin with, the pilfering of things displayed for sale by shopkeepers, and afterwards more serious affairs, premeditated expeditions, mapped out like real war plans.

The band slept wherever it could; now in suspicious dingy doss-houses, now on waste ground. In summer time there were endless saunters through the woods of the environs, pending the arrival of night, which handed Paris over to their predatory designs. They found themselves at the Central Markets, among the crowds on the boulevards, in the low taverns, along the deserted avenues—indeed, wherever they sniffed the possibility of a stroke of luck, the chance of snatching the bread of idleness, or the pleasures of vice. They were like a little clan of savages on the war-path athwart civilization, living outside the pale of the laws. They suggested young wild beasts beating the ancestral forest; they typified the human animal relapsing into barbarism, forsaken since birth, and evincing the ancient instincts of pillage and carnage. And like noxious weeds they grew up sturdily, becoming bolder and bolder each day, exacting a bigger and bigger ransom from the fools who toiled and moiled, ever extending their thefts and marching along the road to murder.

Never should it be forgotten that the child, born chancewise, and then cast upon the pavement, without supervision, without prop or help, rots there and becomes a terrible ferment of social decomposition. All those little ones thrown to the gutter, like superfluous kittens are flung into some sewer, all those forsaken ones, those wanderers of the pavement who beg, and thieve, and indulge in vice, form the dung-heap in which the worst crimes germinate. Childhood left to wretchedness breeds a fearful nucleus of infection in the tragic gloom of the depths of Paris. Those who are thus imprudently cast into the streets yield a harvest of brigandage—that frightful harvest of evil which makes all society totter.

When Norine, through the boasting of Alexandre and Alfred, who took pleasure in astonishing her, began to suspect the exploits of the band, she felt so frightened that she had a strong bolt placed upon her door. And when night had fallen she no longer admitted any visitor until she knew his name. Her torture had been lasting for nearly two years; she was ever quivering with alarm at the thought of Alexandre rushing in upon her some dark night. He was twenty now; he spoke authoritatively, and threatened her with atrocious revenge whenever he had to retire with empty hands. One day, in spite of Cecile, he threw himself upon the wardrobe and carried off a bundle of linen, handkerchiefs, towels, napkins, and sheets, intending to sell them. And the sisters did not dare to pursue him down the stairs. Despairing, weeping, overwhelmed by it all, they had sunk down upon their chairs.

That winter proved a very severe one; and the two poor workwomen, pillaged in this fashion, would have perished in their sorry home of cold and starvation, together with the dear child for whom they still did their best, had it not been for the help which their old friend, Madame Angelin, regularly brought them. She was still a lady-delegate of the Poor Relief Service, and continued to watch over the children of unhappy mothers in that terrible district of Grenelle, whose poverty is so great. But for a long time past she had been unable to do anything officially for Norine. If she still brought her a twenty-franc piece every month, it was because charitable people intrusted her with fairly large amounts, knowing that she could distribute them to advantage in the dreadful inferno which her functions compelled her to frequent. She set her last joy and found the great consolation of her desolate, childless life in thus remitting alms to poor mothers whose little ones laughed at her joyously as soon as they saw her arrive with her hands full of good things.

One day when the weather was frightful, all rain and wind, Madame Angelin lingered for a little while in Norine's room. It was barely two o'clock in the afternoon, and she was just beginning her round. On her lap lay her little bag, bulging out with the gold and the silver which she had to distribute. Old Moineaud was there, installed on a chair and smoking his pipe, in front of her. And she felt concerned about his needs, and explained that she would have greatly liked to obtain a monthly relief allowance for him.

"But if you only knew," she added, "what suffering there is among the poor during these winter months. We are quite swamped, we cannot give to everybody, there are too many. And after all you are among the fortunate ones. I find some lying like dogs on the tiled floors of their rooms, without a scrap of coal to make a fire or even a potato to eat. And the poor children, too, good Heavens! Children in heaps among vermin, without shoes, without clothes, all growing up as if destined for prison or the scaffold, unless consumption should carry them off."

Madame Angelin quivered and closed her eyes as if to escape the spectacle of all the terrifying things that she evoked, the wretchedness, the shame, the crimes that she elbowed during her continual perambulations through that hell of poverty, vice, and hunger. She often returned home pale and silent, having reached the uttermost depths of human abomination, and never daring to say all. At times she trembled and raised her eyes to Heaven, wondering what vengeful cataclysm would swallow up that accursed city of Paris.

"Ah!" she murmured once more; "their sufferings are so great, may their sins be forgiven them."

Moineaud listened to her in a state of stupor, as if he were unable to understand. At last with difficulty he succeeded in taking his pipe from his mouth. It was, indeed, quite an effort now for him to do such a thing, and yet for fifty years he had wrestled with iron—iron in the vice or on the anvil.

"There is nothing like good conduct," he stammered huskily. "When a man works he's rewarded."

Then he wished to set his pipe between his lips once more, but was unable to do so. His hand, deformed by the constant use of tools, trembled too violently. So it became necessary for Norine to rise from her chair and help him.

"Poor father!" exclaimed Cecile, who had not ceased working, cutting out the cardboard for the little boxes she made: "What would have become of him if we had not given him shelter? It isn't Irma, with her stylish hats and her silk dresses who would have cared to have him at her place."

Meantime Norine's little boy had taken his stand in front of Madame Angelin, for he knew very well that, on the days when the good lady called, there was some dessert at supper in the evening. He smiled at her with the bright eyes which lit up his pretty fair face, crowned with tumbled sunshiny hair. And when she noticed with what a merry glance he was waiting for her to open her little bag, she felt quite moved.

"Come and kiss me, my little friend," said she.

She knew no sweeter reward for all that she did than the kisses of the children in the poor homes whither she brought a little joy. When the youngster had boldly thrown his arms round her neck, her eyes filled with tears; and, addressing herself to his mother, she repeated: "No, no, you must not complain; there are others who are more unhappy than you. I know one who if this pretty little fellow could only be her own would willingly accept your poverty, and paste boxes together from morning till night and lead a recluse's life in this one room, which he suffices to fill with sunshine. Ah! good Heavens, if you were only willing, if we could only change."

For a moment she became silent, afraid that she might burst into sobs. The wound dealt her by her childlessness had always remained open. She and her husband were now growing old in bitter solitude in three little rooms overlooking a courtyard in the Rue de Lille. In this retirement they subsisted on the salary which she, the wife, received as a lady-delegate, joined to what they had been able to save of their original fortune. The former fan-painter of triumphant mien was now completely blind, a mere thing, a poor suffering thing, whom his wife seated every morning in an armchair where she still found him in the evening when she returned home from her incessant peregrinations through the frightful misery of guilty mothers and martyred children. He could no longer eat, he could no longer go to bed without her help, he had only her left him, he was her child as he would say at times with a despairing irony which made them both weep.

A child? Ah, yes! she had ended by having one, and it was he! An old child, born of disaster; one who appeared to be eighty though he was less than fifty years old, and who amid his black and ceaseless night ever dreamt of sunshine during the long hours which he was compelled to spend alone. And Madame Angelin did not only envy that poor workwoman her little boy, she also envied her that old man smoking his pipe yonder, that infirm relic of labor who at all events saw clearly and still lived.

"Don't worry the lady," said Norine to her son; for she felt anxious, quite moved indeed, at seeing the other so disturbed, with her heart so full. "Run away and play."

She had learnt a little of Madame Angelin's sad story from Mathieu. And with the deep gratitude which she felt towards her benefactress was blended a sort of impassioned respect, which rendered her timid and deferent each time that she saw her arrive, tall and distinguished, ever clad in black, and showing the remnants of her former beauty which sorrow had wrecked already, though she was barely six-and-forty years of age. For Norine, the lady-delegate was like some queen who had fallen from her throne amid frightful and undeserved sufferings.

"Run away, go and play, my darling," Norine repeated to her boy: "you are tiring madame."

"Tiring me, oh no!" exclaimed Madame Angelin, conquering her emotion. "On the contrary, he does me good. Kiss me, kiss me again, my pretty fellow."

Then she began to bestir and collect herself.

"Well, it is getting late, and I have so many places to go to between now and this evening! This is what I can do for you."

She was at last taking a gold coin from her little bag, but at that very moment a heavy blow, as if dealt by a fist, resounded on the door. And Norine turned ghastly pale, for she had recognized Alexandre's brutal knock. What could she do? If she did not open the door, the bandit would go on knocking, and raise a scandal. She was obliged to open it, but things did not take the violent tragical turn which she had feared. Surprised at seeing a lady there, Alexandre did not even open his mouth. He simply slipped inside, and stationed himself bolt upright against the wall. The lady-delegate had raised her eyes and then carried them elsewhere, understanding that this young fellow must be some friend, probably some relative. And without thought of concealment, she went on:

"Here are twenty francs, I can't do more. Only I promise you that I will try to double the amount next month. It will be the rent month, and I've already applied for help on all sides, and people have promised to give me the utmost they can. But shall I ever have enough? So many applications are made to me."

Her little bag had remained open on her knees, and Alexandre, with his glittering eyes, was searching it, weighing in fancy all the treasure of the poor that it contained, all the gold and silver and even the copper money that distended its sides. Still in silence, he watched Madame Angelin as she closed it, slipped its little chain round her wrist, and then finally rose from her chair.

"Well, au revoir, till next month then," she resumed. "I shall certainly call on the 5th; and in all probability I shall begin my round with you. But it's possible that it may be rather late in the afternoon, for it happens to be my poor husband's name-day. And so be brave and work well."

Norine and Cecile had likewise risen, in order to escort her to the door. Here again there was an outpouring of gratitude, and the child once more kissed the good lady on both cheeks with all his little heart. The sisters, so terrified by Alexandre's arrival, at last began to breathe again.

In point of fact the incident terminated fairly well, for the young man showed himself accommodating. When Cecile returned from obtaining change for the gold, he contented himself with taking one of the four five-franc pieces which she brought up with her. And he did not tarry to torture them as was his wont, but immediately went off with the money he had levied, whistling the while the air of a hunting-song.

The 5th of the ensuing month, a Saturday, was one of the gloomiest, most rainy days of that wretched, mournful winter. Darkness fell rapidly already at three o'clock in the afternoon, and it became almost night. At the deserted end of Rue de la Federation there was an expanse of waste ground, a building site, for long years enclosed by a fence, which dampness had ended by rotting. Some of the boards were missing, and at one part there was quite a breach. All through that afternoon, in spite of the constantly recurring downpours, a scraggy girl remained stationed near that breach, wrapped to her eyes in the ragged remnants of an old shawl, doubtless for protection against the cold. She seemed to be waiting for some chance meeting, the advent it might be of some charitably disposed wayfarer. And her impatience was manifest, for while keeping close to the fence like some animal lying in wait, she continually peered through the breach, thrusting out her tapering weasel's head and watching yonder, in the direction of the Champ de Mars.

Hours went by, three o'clock struck, and then such dark clouds rolled over the livid sky, that the girl herself became blurred, obscured, as if she were some mere piece of wreckage cast into the darkness. At times she raised her head and watched the sky darken, with eyes that glittered as if to thank it for throwing so dense a gloom over that deserted corner, that spot so fit for an ambuscade. And just as the rain had once more begun to fall, a lady could be seen approaching, a lady clad in black, quite black, under an open umbrella. While seeking to avoid the puddles in her path, she walked on quickly, like one in a hurry, who goes about her business on foot in order to save herself the expense of a cab.

From some precise description which she had obtained, Toinette, the girl, appeared to recognize this lady from afar off. She was indeed none other than Madame Angelin, coming quickly from the Rue de Lille, on her way to the homes of her poor, with the little chain of her little bag encircling her wrist. And when the girl espied the gleaming steel of that little chain, she no longer had any doubts, but whistled softly. And forthwith cries and moans arose from a dim corner of the vacant ground, while she herself began to wail and call distressfully.

Astonished, disturbed by it all, Madame Angelin stopped short.

"What is the matter, my girl?" she asked.

"Oh! madame, my brother has fallen yonder and broken his leg."

"What, fallen? What has he fallen from?"

"Oh! madame, there's a shed yonder where we sleep, because we haven't any home, and he was using an old ladder to try to prevent the rain from pouring in on us, and he fell and broke his leg."

Thereupon the girl burst into sobs, asking what was to become of them, stammering that she had been standing there in despair for the last ten minutes, but could see nobody to help them, which was not surprising with that terrible rain falling and the cold so bitter. And while she stammered all this, the calls for help and the cries of pain became louder in the depths of the waste ground.

Though Madame Angelin was terribly upset, she nevertheless hesitated, as if distrustful.

"You must run to get a doctor, my poor child," said she, "I can do nothing."

"Oh! but you can, madame; come with me, I pray you. I don't know where there's a doctor to be found. Come with me, and we will pick him up, for I can't manage it by myself; and at all events we can lay him in the shed, so that the rain sha'n't pour down on him."

This time the good woman consented, so truthful did the girl's accents seem to be. Constant visits to the vilest dens, where crime sprouted from the dunghill of poverty, had made Madame Angelin brave. She was obliged to close her umbrella when she glided through the breach in the fence in the wake of the girl, who, slim and supple like a cat, glided on in front, bareheaded, in her ragged shawl.

"Give me your hand, madame," said she. "Take care, for there are some trenches.... It's over yonder at the end. Can you hear how he's moaning, poor brother?... Ah! here we are!"

Then came swift and overwhelming savagery. The three bandits, Alexandre, Richard, and Alfred, who had been crouching low, sprang forward and threw themselves upon Madame Angelin with such hungry, wolfish violence that she was thrown to the ground. Alfred, however, being a coward, then left her to the two others, and hastened with Toinette to the breach in order to keep watch. Alexandre, who had a handkerchief rolled up, all ready, thrust it into the poor lady's mouth to stifle her cries. Their intention was to stun her only and then make off with her little bag.

But the handkerchief must have slipped out, for she suddenly raised a shriek, a loud and terrible shriek. And at that moment the others near the breach gave the alarm whistle: some people were, doubtless, drawing near. It was necessary to finish. Alexandre knotted the handkerchief round the unhappy woman's neck, while Richard with his fist forced her shriek back into her throat. Red madness fell upon them, they both began to twist and tighten the handkerchief, and dragged the poor creature over the muddy ground until she stirred no more. Then, as the whistle sounded again, they took the bag, left the body there with the handkerchief around the neck, and galloped, all four of them, as far as the Grenelle bridge, whence they flung the bag into the Seine, after greedily thrusting the coppers, and the white silver, and the yellow gold into their pockets.

When Mathieu read the particulars of the crime in the newspapers, he was seized with fright and hastened to the Rue de la Federation. The murdered woman had been promptly identified, and the circumstance that the crime had been committed on that plot of vacant ground but a hundred yards or so from the house where Norine and Cecile lived upset him, filled him with a terrible presentiment. And he immediately realized that his fears were justified when he had to knock three times at Norine's door before Cecile, having recognized his voice, removed the articles with which it had been barricaded, and admitted him inside. Norine was in bed, quite ill, and as white as her sheets. She began to sob and shuddered repeatedly as she told him the story: Madame Angelin's visit the previous month, and the sudden arrival of Alexandre, who had seen the bag and had heard the promise of further help, at a certain hour on a certain date. Besides, Norine could have no doubts, for the handkerchief found round the victim's neck was one of hers which Alexandre had stolen: a handkerchief embroidered with the initial letters of her Christian name, one of those cheap fancy things which are sold by thousands at the big linendrapery establishments. That handkerchief, too, was the only clew to the murderers, and it was such a very vague one that the police were still vainly seeking the culprits, quite lost amid a variety of scents and despairing of success.

Mathieu sat near the bed listening to Norine and feeling icy cold. Good God! that poor, unfortunate Madame Angelin! He could picture her in her younger days, so gay and bright over yonder at Janville, roaming the woods there in the company of her husband, the pair of them losing themselves among the deserted paths, and lingering in the discreet shade of the pollard willows beside the Yeuse, where their love kisses sounded beneath the branches like the twittering of song birds. And he could picture her at a later date, already too severely punished for her lack of foresight, in despair at remaining childless, and bowed down with grief as by slow degrees her husband became blind, and night fell upon the little happiness yet left to them. And all at once Mathieu also pictured that wretched blind man, on the evening when he vainly awaited the return of his wife, in order that she might feed him and put him to bed, old child that he was, now motherless, forsaken, forever alone in his dark night, in which he could only see the bloody spectre of his murdered helpmate. Ah! to think of it, so bright a promise of radiant life, followed by such destiny, such death!

"We did right," muttered Mathieu, as his thoughts turned to Constance, "we did right to keep that ruffian in ignorance of his father's name. What a terrible thing! We must bury the secret as deeply as possible within us."

Norine shuddered once more.

"Oh! have no fear," she answered, "I would die rather than speak."

Months, years, flowed by; and never did the police discover the murderers of the lady with the little bag. For years, too, Norine shuddered every time that anybody knocked too roughly at her door. But Alexandre did not reappear there. He doubtless feared that corner of the Rue de la Federation, and remained as it were submerged in the dim unsoundable depths of the ocean of Paris.

XX

DURING the ten years which followed, the vigorous sprouting of the Froments, suggestive of some healthy vegetation of joy and strength, continued in and around the ever and ever richer domain of Chantebled. As the sons and the daughters grew up there came fresh marriages, and more and more children, all the promised crop, all the promised swarming of a race of conquerors.

First it was Gervais who married Caroline Boucher, daughter of a big farmer of the region, a fair, fine-featured, gay, strong girl, one of those superior women born to rule over a little army of servants. On leaving a Parisian boarding-school she had been sensible enough to feel no shame of her family's connection with the soil. Indeed she loved the earth and had set herself to win from it all the sterling happiness of her life. By way of dowry she brought an expanse of meadow-land in the direction of Lillebonne, which enlarged the estate by some seventy acres. But she more particularly brought her good humor, her health, her courage in rising early, in watching over the farmyard, the dairy, the whole home, like an energetic active housewife, who was ever bustling about, and always the last to bed.

Then came the turn of Claire, whose marriage with Frederic Berthaud, long since foreseen, ended by taking place. There were tears of soft emotion, for the memory of her whom Berthaud had loved and whom he was to have married disturbed several hearts on the wedding day when the family skirted the little cemetery of Janville as it returned to the farm from the municipal offices. But, after all, did not that love of former days, that faithful fellow's long affection, which in time had become transferred to the younger sister, constitute as it were another link in the ties which bound him to the Froments? He had no fortune, he brought with him only his constant faithfulness, and the fraternity which had sprung up between himself and Gervais during the many seasons when they had ploughed the estate like a span of tireless oxen drawing the same plough. His heart was one that could never be doubted, he was the helper who had become indispensable, the husband whose advent would mean the best of all understandings and absolute certainty of happiness.

From the day of that wedding the government of the farm was finally settled. Though Mathieu was barely five-and-fifty he abdicated, and transferred his authority to Gervais, that son of the earth as with a laugh he often called him, the first of his children born at Chantebled, the one who had never left the farm, and who had at all times given him the support of his arm and his brain and his heart. And now Frederic in turn would think and strive as Gervais's devoted lieutenant, in the great common task. Between them henceforth they would continue the father's work, and perfect the system of culture, procuring appliances of new design from the Beauchene works, now ruled by Denis, and ever drawing from the soil the largest crops that it could be induced to yield. Their wives had likewise divided their share of authority; Claire surrendered the duties of supervision to Caroline, who was stronger and more active than herself, and was content to attend to the accounts, the turnover of considerable sums of money, all that was paid away and all that was received. The two couples seemed to have been expressly and cleverly selected to complete one another and to accomplish the greatest sum of work without ever the slightest fear of conflict. And, indeed, they lived in perfect union, with only one will among them, one purpose which was ever more and more skilfully effected—the continual increase of the happiness and wealth of Chantebled under the beneficent sun.

At the same time, if Mathieu had renounced the actual exercise of authority, he none the less remained the creator, the oracle who was consulted, listened to, and obeyed. He dwelt with Marianne in the old shooting-box which had been transformed and enlarged into a very comfortable house. Here they lived like the founders of a dynasty who had retired in full glory, setting their only delight in beholding around them the development and expansion of their race, the birth and growth of their children's children. Leaving Claire and Gervais on one side, there were as yet only Denis and Ambroise—the first to wing their flight abroad—engaged in building up their fortunes in Paris. The three girls, Louise, Madeleine, and Marguerite, who would soon be old enough to marry, still dwelt in the happy home beside their parents, as well as the three youngest boys, Gregoire, the free lance, Nicolas, the most stubborn and determined of the brood, and Benjamin, who was of a dreamy nature. All these finished growing up at the edge of the nest, so to say, with the window of life open before them, ready for the day when they likewise would take wing.

With them dwelt Charlotte, Blaise's widow, and her two children, Berthe and Guillaume, the three of them occupying an upper floor of the house where the mother had installed her studio. She was becoming rich since her little share in the factory profits, stipulated by Denis, had been increasing year by year; but nevertheless, she continued working for her dealer in miniatures. This work brought her pocket-money, she gayly said, and would enable her to make her children a present whenever they might marry. There was, indeed, already some thought of Berthe marrying; and assuredly she would be the first of Mathieu and Marianne's grandchildren to enter into the state of matrimony. They smiled softly at the idea of becoming great-grandparents before very long perhaps.

After the lapse of four years, Gregoire, first of the younger children, flew away. There was a great deal of trouble, quite a little drama in connection with the affair, which Mathieu and Marianne had for some time been anticipating. Gregoire was anything but reasonable. Short, but robust, with a pert face in which glittered the brightest of eyes, he had always been the turbulent member of the family, the one who caused the most anxiety. His childhood had been spent in playing truant in the woods of Janville, and he had afterwards made a mere pretence of studying in Paris, returning home full of health and spirits, but unable or unwilling to make up his mind with respect to any particular trade or profession. Already four-and-twenty, he knew little more than how to shoot and fish, and trot about the country on horseback. He was certainly not more stupid or less active than another, but he seemed bent on living and amusing himself according to his fancy. The worst was that for some months past all the gossips of Janville had been relating that he had renewed his former boyish friendship with Therese Lepailleur, the miller's daughter, and that they were to be met of an evening in shady nooks under the pollard-willows by the Yeuse.

One morning Mathieu, wishing to ascertain if the young coveys of partridges were plentiful in the direction of Mareuil, took Gregoire with him; and when they found themselves alone among the plantations of the plateau, he began to talk to him seriously.

"You know I'm not pleased with you, my lad," said he. "I really cannot understand the idle life which you lead here, while all the rest of us are hard at work. I shall wait till October since you have positively promised me that you will then come to a decision and choose the calling which you most fancy. But what is all this tittle-tattle which I hear about appointments which you keep with the daughter of the Lepailleurs? Do you wish to cause us serious worry?"

Gregoire quietly began to laugh.

"Oh, father! You are surely not going to scold a son of yours because he happens to be on friendly terms with a pretty girl! Why, as you may remember, it was I who gave her her first bicycle lesson nearly ten years ago. And you will recollect the fine white roses which she helped me to secure in the enclosure by the mill for Denis' wedding."

Gregoire still laughed at the memory of that incident, and lived afresh through all his old time sweethearting—the escapades with Therese along the river banks, and the banquets of blackberries in undiscoverable hiding-places, deep in the woods. And it seemed, too, that the love of childhood had revived, and was now bursting into consuming fire, so vividly did his cheeks glow, and so hotly did his eyes blaze as he thus recalled those distant times.

"Poor Therese! We had been at daggers drawn for years, and all because one evening, on coming back from the fair at Vieux-Bourg, I pushed her into a pool of water where she dirtied her frock. It's true that last spring we made it up again on finding ourselves face to face in the little wood at Monval over yonder. But come, father, do you mean to say that it's a crime if we take a little pleasure in speaking to one another when we meet?"

Rendered the more anxious by the fire with which Gregoire sought to defend the girl, Mathieu spoke out plainly.

"A crime? No, if you just wish one another good day and good evening. Only folks relate that you are to be seen at dusk with your arms round each other's waist, and that you go stargazing through the grass alongside the Yeuse."

Then, as Gregoire this time without replying laughed yet more loudly, with the merry laugh of youth, his father gravely resumed:

"Listen, my lad, it is not at all to my taste to play the gendarme behind my sons. But I won't have you drawing some unpleasant business with the Lepailleurs on us all. You know the position, they would be delighted to give us trouble. So don't give them occasion for complaining, leave their daughter alone."

"Oh! I take plenty of care," cried the young man, thus suddenly confessing the truth. "Poor girl! She has already had her ears boxed because somebody told her father that I had been met with her. He answered that rather than give her to me he would throw her into the river."

"Ah! you see," concluded Mathieu. "It is understood, is it not? I shall rely on your good behavior."

Thereupon they went their way, scouring the fields as far as the road to Mareuil. Coveys of young partridges, still weak on the wing, started up both to the right and to the left. The shooting would be good. Then as the father and the son turned homeward, slackening their pace, a long spell of silence fell between them. They were both reflecting.

"I don't wish that there should be any misunderstanding between us," Mathieu suddenly resumed; "you must not imagine that I shall prevent you from marrying according to your tastes and that I shall require you to take an heiress. Our poor Blaise married a portionless girl. And it was the same with Denis; besides which I gave your sister, Claire, in marriage to Frederic, who was simply one of our farm hands. So I don't look down on Therese. On the contrary, I think her charming. She's one of the prettiest girls of the district—not tall, certainly, but so alert and determined, with her little pink face shining under such a wild crop of fair hair, that one might think her powdered with all the flour in the mill."

"Yes, isn't that so, father?" interrupted Gregoire enthusiastically. "And if you only knew how affectionate and courageous she is! She's worth a man any day. It's wrong of them to smack her, for she will never put up with it. Whenever she sets her mind on anything she's bound to do it, and it isn't I who can prevent her."

Absorbed in some reflections of his own, Mathieu scarcely heard his son.

"No, no," he resumed; "I certainly don't look down on their mill. If it were not for Lepailleur's stupid obstinacy he would be drawing a fortune from that mill nowadays. Since corn-growing has again been taken up all over the district, thanks to our victory, he might have got a good pile of crowns together if he had simply changed the old mechanism of his wheel which he leaves rotting under the moss. And better still, I should like to see a good engine there, and a bit of a light railway line connecting the mill with Janville station."

In this fashion he continued explaining his ideas while Gregoire listened, again quite lively and taking things in a jesting way.

"Well, father," the young man ended by saying, "as you wish that I should have a calling, it's settled. If I marry Therese, I'll be a miller."

Mathieu protested in surprise: "No, no, I was merely talking. And besides, you have promised me, my lad, that you will be reasonable. So once again, for the sake of the peace and quietness of all of us, leave Therese alone, for we can only expect to reap worry with the Lepailleurs."

The conversation ceased and they returned to the farm. That evening, however, the father told the mother of the young man's confession, and she, who already entertained various misgivings, felt more anxious than ever. Still a month went by without anything serious happening.

Then, one morning Marianne was astounded at finding Gregoire's bedroom empty. As a rule he came to kiss her. Perhaps he had risen early, and had gone on some excursion in the environs. But she trembled slightly when she remembered how lovingly he had twice caught her in his arms on the previous night when they were all retiring to bed. And as she looked inquisitively round the room she noticed on the mantelshelf a letter addressed to her—a prettily worded letter in which the young fellow begged her to forgive him for causing her grief, and asked her to excuse him with his father, for it was necessary that he should leave them for a time. Of his reasons for doing so and his purpose, however, no particulars were given.

This family rending, this bad conduct on the part of the son who had been the most spoilt of all, and who, in a fit of sudden folly was the first to break the ties which united the household together, was a very painful blow for Marianne and Mathieu. They were the more terrified since they divined that Gregoire had not gone off alone. They pieced together the incidents of the deplorable affair. Charlotte remembered that she had heard Gregoire go downstairs again, almost immediately after entering his bedroom, and before the servants had even bolted the house-doors for the night. He had certainly rushed off to join Therese in some coppice, whence they must have hurried away to Vieux-Bourg station which the last train to Paris quitted at five-and-twenty minutes past midnight. And it was indeed this which had taken place. At noon the Froments already learnt that Lepailleur was creating a terrible scandal about the flight of Therese. He had immediately gone to the gendarmes to shout the story to them, and demand that they should bring the guilty hussy back, chained to her accomplice, and both of them with gyves about their wrists.

He on his side had found a letter in his daughter's bedroom, a plucky letter in which she plainly said that as she had been struck again the previous day, she had had enough of it, and was going off of her own free will. Indeed, she added that she was taking Gregoire with her, and was quite big and old enough, now that she was two-and-twenty, to know what she was about. Lepailleur's fury was largely due to this letter which he did not dare to show abroad; besides which, his wife, ever at war with him respecting their son Antonin, not only roundly abused Therese, but sneeringly declared that it might all have been expected, and that he, the father, was the cause of the gad-about's misconduct. After that, they engaged in fisticuffs; and for a whole week the district did nothing but talk about the flight of one of the Chantebled lads with the girl of the mill, to the despair of Mathieu and Marianne, the latter of whom in particular grieved over the sorry business.

Five days later, a Sunday, matters became even worse. As the search for the runaways remained fruitless Lepailleur, boiling over with rancor, went up to the farm, and from the middle of the road—for he did not venture inside—poured forth a flood of ignoble insults. It so happened that Mathieu was absent; and Marianne had great trouble to restrain Gervais as well as Frederic, both of whom wished to thrust the miller's scurrilous language back into his throat. When Mathieu came home in the evening he was extremely vexed to hear of what had happened.

"It is impossible for this state of things to continue," he said to his wife, as they were retiring to rest. "It looks as if we were hiding, as if we were guilty in the matter. I will go to see that man in the morning. There is only one thing, and a very simple one, to be done, those unhappy children must be married. For our part we consent, is it not so? And it is to that man's advantage to consent also. To-morrow the matter must be settled."

On the following day, Monday, at two o'clock in the afternoon, Mathieu set out for the mill. But certain complications, a tragic drama, which he could not possibly foresee, awaited him there. For years now a stubborn struggle had been going on between Lepailleur and his wife with respect to Antonin. While the farmer had grown more and more exasperated with his son's idleness and life of low debauchery in Paris, the latter had supported her boy with all the obstinacy of an illiterate woman, who was possessed of a blind faith in his fine handwriting, and felt convinced that if he did not succeed in life it was simply because he was refused the money necessary for that purpose. In spite of her sordid avarice in some matters, the old woman continued bleeding herself for her son, and even robbed the house, promptly thrusting out her claws and setting her teeth ready to bite whenever she was caught in the act, and had to defend some twenty-franc piece or other, which she had been on the point of sending away. And each time the battle began afresh, to such a point indeed that it seemed as if the shaky old mill would some day end by falling on their heads.

Then, all at once, Antonin, a perfect wreck at thirty-six years of age, fell seriously ill. Lepailleur forthwith declared that if the scamp had the audacity to come home he would pitch him over the wheel into the water. Antonin, however, had no desire to return home; he held the country in horror and feared, too, that his father might chain him up like a dog. So his mother placed him with some people of Batignolles, paying for his board and for the attendance of a doctor of the district. This had been going on for three months or so, and every fortnight La Lepailleur went to see her son. She had done so the previous Thursday, and on the Sunday evening she received a telegram summoning her to Batignolles again. Thus, on the morning of the day when Mathieu repaired to the mill, she had once more gone to Paris after a frightful quarrel with her husband, who asked if their good-for-nothing son ever meant to cease fooling them and spending their money, when he had not the courage even to turn a spit of earth.

Alone in the mill that morning Lepailleur did not cease storming. At the slightest provocation he would have hammered his plough to pieces, or have rushed, axe in hand, and mad with hatred, on the old wheel by way of avenging his misfortunes. When he saw Mathieu come in he believed in some act of bravado, and almost choked.

"Come, neighbor," said the master of Chantebled cordially, "let us both try to be reasonable. I've come to return your visit, since you called upon me yesterday. Only, bad words never did good work, and the best course, since this misfortune has happened, is to repair it as speedily as possible. When would you have us marry off those bad children?"

Thunderstruck by the quiet good nature of this frontal attack, Lepailleur did not immediately reply. He had shouted over the house roofs that he would have no marriage at all, but rather a good lawsuit by way of sending all the Froments to prison. Nevertheless, when it came to reflection, a son of the big farmer of Chantebled was not to be disdained as a son-in-law.

"Marry them, marry them," he stammered at the first moment. "Yes, by fastening a big stone to both their necks and throwing them together into the river. Ah! the wretches! I'll skin them, I will, her as well as him."

At last, however, the miller grew calmer and was even showing a disposition to discuss matters, when all at once an urchin of Janville came running across the yard.

"What do you want, eh?" called the master of the premises.

"Please, Monsieur Lepailleur, it's a telegram."

"All right, give it here."

The lad, well pleased with the copper he received as a gratuity, had already gone off, and still the miller, instead of opening the telegram, stood examining the address on it with the distrustful air of a man who does not often receive such communications. However, he at last had to tear it open. It contained but three words: "Your son dead"; and in that brutal brevity, that prompt, hasty bludgeon-blow, one could detect the mother's cold rage and eager craving to crush without delay the man, the father yonder, whom she accused of having caused her son's death, even as she had accused him of being responsible for her daughter's flight. He felt this full well, and staggered beneath the shock, stunned by the words that appeared on that strip of blue paper, reading them again and again till he ended by understanding them. Then his hands began to tremble and he burst into oaths.

"Thunder and blazes! What again is this? Here's the boy dying now! Everything's going to the devil!"

But his heart dilated and tears appeared in his eyes. Unable to remain standing, he sank upon a chair and again obstinately read the telegram; "Your son dead—Your son dead," as if seeking something else, the particulars, indeed, which the message did not contain. Perhaps the boy had died before his mother's arrival. Or perhaps she had arrived just before he died. Such were his stammered comments. And he repeated a score of times that she had taken the train at ten minutes past eleven and must have reached Batignolles about half-past twelve. As she had handed in the telegram at twenty minutes past one it seemed more likely that she had found the lad already dead.

"Curse it! curse it!" he shouted; "a cursed telegram, it tells you nothing, and it murders you! She might, at all events, have sent somebody. I shall have to go there. Ah the whole thing's complete, it's more than a man can bear!"

Lepailleur shouted those words in such accents of rageful despair that Mathieu, full of compassion, made bold to intervene. The sudden shock of the tragedy had staggered him, and he had hitherto waited in silence. But now he offered his services and spoke of accompanying the other to Paris. He had to retreat, however, for the miller rose to his feet, seized with wild exasperation at perceiving him still there in his house.

"Ah! yes, you came; and what was it you were saying to me? That we ought to marry off those wretched children? Well, you can see that I'm in proper trim for a wedding! My boy's dead! You've chosen your day well. Be off with you, be off with you, I say, if you don't want me to do something dreadful!"

He raised his fists, quite maddened as he was by the presence of Mathieu at that moment when his whole life was wrecked. It was terrible indeed that this bourgeois who had made a fortune by turning himself into a peasant should be there at the moment when he so suddenly learnt the death of Antonin, that son whom he had dreamt of turning into a Monsieur by filling his mind with disgust of the soil and sending him to rot of idleness and vice in Paris! It enraged him to find that he had erred, that the earth whom he had slandered, whom he had taxed with decrepitude and barrenness was really a living, youthful, and fruitful spouse to the man who knew how to love her! And nought but ruin remained around him, thanks to his imbecile resolve to limit his family: a foul life had killed his only son, and his only daughter had gone off with a scion of the triumphant farm, while he was now utterly alone, weeping and howling in his deserted mill, that mill which he had likewise disdained and which was crumbling around him with old age.

"You hear me!" he shouted. "Therese may drag herself at my feet; but I will never, never give her to your thief of a son! You'd like it, wouldn't you? so that folks might mock me all over the district, and so that you might eat me up as you have eaten up all the others!"

This finish to it all had doubtless appeared to him, confusedly, in a sudden threatening vision: Antonin being dead, it was Gregoire who would possess the mill, if he should marry Therese. And he would possess the moorland also, that enclosure, hitherto left barren with such savage delight, and so passionately coveted by the farm. And doubtless he would cede it to the farm as soon as he should be the master. The thought that Chantebled might yet be increased by the fields which he, Lepailleur, had withheld from it brought the miller's delirious rage to a climax.

"Your son, I'll send him to the galleys! And you, if you don't go, I'll throw you out! Be off with you, be off!"

Mathieu, who was very pale, slowly retired before this furious madman. But as he went off he calmly said: "You are an unhappy man. I forgive you, for you are in great grief. Besides, I am quite easy, sensible things always end by taking place."

Again, a month went by. Then, one rainy morning in October, Madame Lepailleur was found hanging in the mill stable. There were folks at Janville who related that Lepailleur had hung her there. The truth was that she had given signs of melancholia ever since the death of Antonin. Moreover, the life led at the mill was no longer bearable; day by day the husband and wife reproached one another for their son's death and their daughter's flight, battling ragefully together like two abandoned beasts shut up in the same cage. Folks were merely astonished that such a harsh, avaricious woman should have been willing to quit this life without taking her goods and chattels with her.

As soon as Therese heard of her mother's death she hastened home, repentant, and took her place beside her father again, unwilling as she was that he should remain alone in his two-fold bereavement. At first it proved a terrible time for her in the company of that brutal old man who was exasperated by what he termed his bad luck. But she was a girl of sterling courage and prompt decision; and thus, after a few weeks, she had made her father consent to her marriage with Gregoire, which, as Mathieu had said, was the only sensible course. The news gave great relief at the farm whither the prodigal son had not yet dared to return. It was believed that the young couple, after eloping together, had lived in some out of the way district of Paris, and it was even suspected that Ambroise, who was liberally minded, had, in a brotherly way, helped them with his purse. And if, on the one hand, Lepailleur consented to the marriage in a churlish, distrustful manner—like one who deemed himself robbed, and was simply influenced by the egotistical dread of some day finding himself quite alone again in his gloomy house—Mathieu and Marianne, on the other side, were delighted with an arrangement which put an end to an equivocal situation that had caused them the greatest suffering, grieved as they were by the rebellion of one of their children.

Curiously enough, it came to pass that Gregoire, once married and installed at the mill in accordance with his wife's desire, agreed with his father-in-law far better than had been anticipated. This resulted in particular from a certain discussion during which Lepailleur had wished to make Gregoire swear, that, after his death, he would never dispose of the moorland enclosure, hitherto kept uncultivated with peasant stubbornness, to any of his brothers or sisters of the farm. Gregoire took no oath on the subject, but gayly declared that he was not such a fool as to despoil his wife of the best part of her inheritance, particularly as he proposed to cultivate those moors and, within two or three years' time, make them the most fertile land in the district. That which belonged to him did not belong to others, and people would soon see that he was well able to defend the property which had fallen to his lot. Things took a similar course with respect to the mill, where Gregoire at first contented himself with repairing the old mechanism, for he was unwilling to upset the miller's habits all at once, and therefore postponed until some future time the installation of an engine, and the laying down of a line of rails to Janville station—all those ideas formerly propounded by Mathieu which henceforth fermented in his audacious young mind.

In this wise, then, people found themselves in presence of a new Gregoire. The madcap had become wise, only retaining of his youthful follies the audacity which is needful for successful enterprise. And it must be said that he was admirably seconded by the fair and energetic Therese. They were both enraptured at now being free to love each other in the romantic old mill, garlanded with ivy, pending the time when they would resolutely fling it to the ground to install in its place the great white meal stores and huge new mill-stones, which, with their conquering ambition, they often dreamt of.

During the years that followed, Mathieu and Marianne witnessed other departures. The three daughters, Louise, Madeleine, and Marguerite, in turn took their flight from the family nest. All three found husbands in the district. Louise, a plump brunette, all gayety and health, with abundant hair and large laughing eyes, married notary Mazaud of Janville, a quiet, pensive little man, whose occasional silent smiles alone denoted the perfect satisfaction which he felt at having found a wife of such joyous disposition. Then Madeleine, whose chestnut tresses were tinged with gleaming gold, and who was slimmer than her sister, and of a more dreamy style of beauty, her character and disposition refined by her musical tastes, made a love match which was quite a romance. Herbette, the architect, who became her husband, was a handsome, elegant man, already celebrated; he owned near Monvel a park-like estate, where he came to rest at times from the fatigue of his labors in Paris.

At last, Marguerite, the least pretty of the girls—indeed, she was quite plain, but derived a charm from her infinite goodness of heart—was chosen in marriage by Dr. Chambouvet, a big, genial, kindly fellow, who had inherited his father's practice at Vieux-Bourg, where he lived in a large white house, which had become the resort of the poor. And thus the three girls being married, the only ones who remained with Mathieu and Marianne in the slowly emptying nest were their two last boys, Nicolas and Benjamin.

At the same time, however, as the youngsters flew away and installed themselves elsewhere, there came other little ones, a constant swarming due to the many family marriages. In eight years, Denis, who reigned at the factory in Paris, had been presented by his wife with three children, two boys, Lucien and Paul, and a girl, Hortense. Then Leonce, the son of Ambroise, who was conquering such a high position in the commercial world, now had a brother, Charles, and two little sisters, Pauline and Sophie. At the farm, moreover, Gervais was already the father of two boys, Leon and Henri, while Claire, his sister, could count three children, a boy, Joseph, and two daughters, Lucile and Angele. There was also Gregoire, at the mill, with a big boy who had received the name of Robert; and there were also the three last married daughters—Louise, with a girl two years old; Madeleine, with a boy six months of age; and Marguerite, who in anticipation of a happy event, had decided to call her child Stanislas, if it were a boy, and Christine, if it should be a girl.

Thus upon every side the family oak spread out its branches, its trunk forking and multiplying, and boughs sprouting from boughs at each successive season. And withal Mathieu was not yet sixty, and Marianne not yet fifty-seven. Both still possessed flourishing health, and strength, and gayety, and were ever in delight at seeing the family, which had sprung from them, thus growing and spreading, invading all the country around, even like a forest born from a single tree.

But the great and glorious festival of Chantebled at that period was the birth of Mathieu and Marianne's first great-grandchild—a girl, called Angeline, daughter of their granddaughter, Berthe. In this little girl, all pink and white, the ever-regretted Blaise seemed to live again. So closely did she resemble him that Charlotte, his widow, already a grandmother in her forty-second year, wept with emotion at the sight of her. Madame Desvignes had died six months previously, passing away, even as she had lived, gently and discreetly, at the termination of her task, which had chiefly consisted in rearing her two daughters on the scanty means at her disposal. Still it was she, who, before quitting the scene, had found a husband for her granddaughter, Berthe, in the person of Philippe Havard, a young engineer who had recently been appointed assistant-manager at a State factory near Mareuil. It was at Chantebled, however, that Berthe's little Angeline was born; and on the day of the churching, the whole family assembled together there once more to glorify the great-grandfather and great-grandmother.

"Ah! well," said Marianne gayly, as she stood beside the babe's cradle, "if the young ones fly away there are others born, and so the nest will never be empty."

"Never, never!" repeated Mathieu with emotion, proud as he felt of that continual victory over solitude and death. "We shall never be left alone!"

Yet there came another departure which brought them many tears. Nicolas, the youngest but one of their boys, who was approaching his twentieth birthday, and thus nigh the cross-roads of life, had not yet decided which one he would follow. He was a dark, sturdy young man, with an open, laughing face. As a child, he had adored tales of travel and far-away adventure, and had always evinced great courage and endurance, returning home enraptured from interminable rambles, and never uttering complaints, however badly his feet might be blistered. And withal he possessed a most orderly mind, ever carefully arranging and classifying his little belongings in his drawers, and looking down with contempt on the haphazard way in which his sisters kept their things.

Later on, as he grew up, he became thoughtful, as if he were vainly seeking around him some means of realizing his two-fold craving, that of discovering some new land and organizing it properly. One of the last-born of a numerous family, he no longer found space enough for the amplitude and force of his desires. His brothers and sisters had already taken all the surrounding lands, and he stifled, threatened also, as it were, with famine, and ever sought the broad expanse that he dreamt of, where he might grow and reap his bread. No more room, no more food! At first he knew not in which direction to turn, but groped and hesitated for some months. Nevertheless, his hearty laughter continued to gladden the house; he wearied neither his father nor his mother with the care of his destiny, for he knew that he was already strong enough to fix it himself.

There was no corner left for him at the farm where Gervais and Claire took up all the room. At the Beauchene works Denis was all sufficient, reigning there like a conscientious toiler, and nothing justified a younger brother in claiming a share beside him. At the mill, too, Gregoire was as yet barely established, and his kingdom was so small that he could not possibly cede half of it. Thus an opening was only possible with Ambroise, and Nicolas ended by accepting an obliging offer which the latter made to take him on trial for a few months, by way of initiating him into the higher branches of commerce. Ambroise's fortune was becoming prodigious since old uncle Du Hordel had died, leaving him his commission business. Year by year the new master increased his trade with all the countries of the world. Thanks to his lucky audacity and broad international views, he was enriching himself with the spoils of the earth. And though Nicolas again began to stifle in Ambroise's huge store-houses, where the riches of distant countries, the most varied climes, were collected together, it was there that his real vocation came to him; for a voice suddenly arose, calling him away yonder to dim, unknown regions, vast stretches of country yet sterile, which needed to be populated, and cleared and sowed with the crops of the future.

For two months Nicolas kept silent respecting the designs which he was now maturing. He was extremely discreet, as are all men of great energy, who reflect before they act. He must go, that was certain, since neither space nor sufficiency of sunlight remained for him in the cradle of his birth; but if he went off alone, would that not be going in an imperfect state, deficient in the means needed for the heroic task of populating and clearing a new land? He knew a girl of Janville, one Lisbeth Moreau, who was tall and strong, and whose robust health, seriousness, and activity had charmed him. She was nineteen years of age, and, like Nicolas, she stifled in the little nook to which destiny had confined her; for she craved for the free and open air, yonder, afar off. An orphan, and long dependent on an aunt, who was simply a little village haberdasher, she had hitherto, from feelings of affection, remained cloistered in a small and gloomy shop. But her aunt had lately died, leaving her some ten thousand francs, and her dream was to sell the little business, and go away and really live at last. One October evening, when Nicolas and Lisbeth told one another things that they had never previously told anybody, they came to an understanding. They resolutely took each other's hand and plighted their troth for life, for the hard battle of creating a new world, a new family, somewhere on the earth's broad surface, in those mysterious, far away climes of which they knew so little. 'Twas a delightful betrothal, full of courage and faith.

Only then, everything having been settled, did Nicolas speak out, announcing his departure to his father and mother. It was an autumn evening, still mild, but fraught with winter's first shiver, and the twilight was falling. Intense grief wrung the parents' hearts as soon as they understood their son. This time it was not simply a young one flying from the family nest to build his own on some neighboring tree of the common forest; it was flight across the seas forever, severance without hope of return. They would see their other children again, but this one was breathing an eternal farewell. Their consent would be the share of cruel sacrifice, that life demands, their supreme gift to life, the tithe levied by life on their affection and their blood. To pursue its victory, life, the perpetual conqueror, demanded this portion of their flesh, this overplus of the numerous family, which was overflowing, spreading, peopling the world. And what could they answer, how could they refuse? The son who was unprovided for took himself off; nothing could be more logical or more sensible. Far beyond the fatherland there were vast continents yet uninhabited, and the seed which is scattered by the breezes of heaven knows no frontiers. Beyond the race there is mankind with that endless spreading of humanity that is leading us to the one fraternal people of the accomplished times, when the whole earth shall be but one sole city of truth and justice.

Moreover, quite apart from the great dream of those seers, the poets, Nicolas, like a practical man, whatever his enthusiasm, gayly gave his reasons for departing. He did not wish to be a parasite; he was setting off to the conquest of another land, where he would grow the bread he needed, since his own country had no field left for him. Besides, he took his country with him in his blood; she it was that he wished to enlarge afar off with unlimited increase of wealth and strength. It was ancient Africa, the mysterious, now explored, traversed from end to end, that attracted him. In the first instance he intended to repair to Senegal, whence he would doubtless push on to the Soudan, to the very heart of the virgin lands where he dreamt of a new France, an immense colonial empire, which would rejuvenate the old Gallic race by endowing it with its due share of the earth. And it was there that he had the ambition of carving out a kingdom for himself, and of founding with Lisbeth another dynasty of Froments, and a new Chantebled, covering under the hot sun a tract ten times as extensive as the old one, and peopled with the people of his own children. And he spoke of all this with such joyous courage that Mathieu and Marianne ended by smiling amid their tears, despite the rending of their poor hearts.

"Go, my lad, we cannot keep you back. Go wherever life calls you, wherever you may live with more health and joy and strength. All that may spring from you yonder will still be health and joy and strength derived from us, of which we shall be proud. You are right, one must not weep, your departure must be a fete, for the family does not separate, it simply extends, invades, and conquers the world."

Nevertheless, on the day of farewell, after the marriage of Nicolas and Lisbeth there was an hour of painful emotion at Chantebled. The family had met to share a last meal all together, and when the time came for the young and adventurous couple to tear themselves from the maternal soil there were those who sobbed although they had vowed to be very brave. Nicolas and Lisbeth were going off with little means, but rich in hopes. Apart from the ten thousand francs of the wife's dowry they had only been willing to take another ten thousand, just enough to provide for the first difficulties. Might courage and labor therefore prove sturdy artisans of conquest.

Young Benjamin, the last born of the brothers Froment, was particularly upset by this departure. He was a delicate, good-looking child not yet twelve years old, whom his parents greatly spoiled, thinking that he was weak. And they were quite determined that they would at all events keep him with them, so handsome did they find him with his soft limpid eyes and beautiful curly hair. He was growing up in a languid way, dreamy, petted, idle among his mother's skirts, like the one charming weakling of that strong, hardworking family.

"Let me kiss you again, my good Nicolas," said he to his departing brother. "When will you come back?"

"Never, my little Benjamin."

The boy shuddered.

"Never, never!" he repeated. "Oh! that's too long. Come back, come back some day, so that I may kiss you again."

"Never," repeated Nicolas, turning pale himself. "Never, never."

He had lifted up the lad, whose tears were raining fast; and then for all came the supreme grief, the frightful moment of the hatchet-stroke, of the separation which was to be eternal.

"Good-by, little brother! Good-by, good-by, all of you!"

While Mathieu accompanied the future conqueror to the door for the last time wishing him victory, Benjamin in wild grief sought a refuge beside his mother who was blinded by her tears. And she caught him up with a passionate clasp, as if seized with fear that he also might leave her. He was the only one now left to them in the family nest.

XXI

AT the factory, in her luxurious house on the quay, where she had long reigned as sovereign mistress, Constance for twelve years already had been waiting for destiny, remaining rigid and stubborn amid the continual crumbling of her life and hopes.

During those twelve years Beauchene had pursued a downward course, the descent of which was fatal. He was right at the bottom now, in the last state of degradation. After beginning simply as a roving husband, festively inclined, he had ended by living entirely away from his home, principally in the company of two women, aunt and niece. He was now but a pitiful human rag, fast approaching some shameful death. And large as his fortune had been, it had not sufficed him; as he grew older he had squandered money yet more and more lavishly, immense sums being swallowed up in disreputable adventures, the scandal of which it had been necessary to stifle. Thus he at last found himself poor, receiving but a small portion of the ever-increasing profits of the works, which were in full prosperity.

This was the disaster which brought so much suffering to Constance in her incurable pride. Beauchene, since the death of his son, had quite abandoned himself to a dissolute life, thinking of nothing but his pleasures, and taking no further interest in his establishment. What was the use of defending it, since there was no longer an heir to whom it might be transmitted, enlarged and enriched? And thus he had surrendered it, bit by bit, to Denis, his partner, whom, by degrees, he allowed to become the sole master. On arriving at the works, Denis had possessed but one of the six shares which represented the totality of the property according to the agreement. And Beauchene had even reserved to himself the right of repurchasing that share within a certain period. But far from being in a position to do so before the appointed date was passed, he had been obliged to cede yet another share to the young man, in order to free himself of debts which he could not confess.

From that time forward it became a habit with Beauchene to cede Denis a fresh share every two years. A third followed the second, then came the turn of the fourth and the fifth, in such wise, indeed, that after a final arrangement, he had not even kept a whole share for himself; but simply some portion of the sixth. And even that was really fictitious, for Denis had only acknowledged it in order to have a pretext for providing him with a certain income, which, by the way, he subdivided, handing half of it to Constance every month.

She, therefore, was ignorant of nothing. She knew that, as a matter of fact, the works would belong to that son of the hated Froments, whenever he might choose to close the doors on their old master, who, as it happened, was never seen now in the workshops. True, there was a clause in the covenant which admitted, so long as that covenant should not be broken, the possibility of repurchasing all the shares at one and the same time. Was it, then, some mad hope of doing this, a fervent belief in a miracle, in the possibility of some saviour descending from Heaven, that kept Constance thus rigid and stubborn, awaiting destiny? Those twelve years of vain waiting—and increasing decline did not seem to have diminished her conviction that in spite of everything she would some day triumph. No doubt her tears had gushed forth at Chantebled in presence of the victory of Mathieu and Marianne; but she soon recovered her self-possession, and lived on in the hope that some unexpected occurrence would at last prove that she, the childless woman, was in the right.

She could not have said precisely what it was she wished; she was simply bent on remaining alive until misfortune should fall upon the over-numerous family, to exculpate her for what had happened in her own home, the loss of her son who was in the grave, and the downfall of her husband who was in the gutter—all the abomination, indeed, which had been so largely wrought by herself, but which filled her with agony. However much her heart might bleed over her losses, her vanity as an honest bourgeoise filled her with rebellious thoughts, for she could not admit that she had been in the wrong. And thus she awaited the revenge of destiny in that luxurious house, which was far too large now that she alone inhabited it. She only occupied the rooms on the first floor, where she shut herself up for days together with an old serving woman, the sole domestic that she had retained. Gowned in black, as if bent on wearing eternal mourning for Maurice, always erect, stiff, and haughtily silent, she never complained, although her covert exasperation had greatly affected her heart, in such wise that she experienced at times most terrible attacks of stifling. These she kept as secret as possible, and one day when the old servant ventured to go for Doctor Boutan she threatened her with dismissal. She would not even answer the doctor, and she refused to take any remedies, certain as she felt that she would last as long as the hope which buoyed her up.

Yet what anguish it was when she suddenly began to stifle, all alone in the empty house, without son or husband near her! She called nobody since she knew that nobody would come. And the attack over, with what unconquerable obstinacy did she rise erect again, repeating that her presence sufficed to prevent Denis from being the master, from reigning alone in full sovereignty, and that in any case he would not have the house and install himself in it like a conqueror, so long as she had not sunk to death under the final collapse of the ceilings.

Amid this retired life, Constance, haunted as she was by her fixed idea, had no other occupation than that of watching the factory, and ascertaining what went on there day by day. Morange, whom she had made her confidant, gave her information in all simplicity almost every evening, when he came to speak to her for a moment after leaving his office. She learnt everything from his lips—the successive sales of the shares into which the property had been divided, their gradual acquisition by Denis, and the fact that Beauchene and herself were henceforth living on the new master's liberality. Moreover, she so organized her system of espionage as to make the old accountant tell her unwittingly all that he knew of the private life led by Denis, his wife Marthe, and their children, Lucien, Paul, and Hortense all, indeed, that was done and said in the modest little pavilion where the young people, in spite of their increasing fortune, were still residing, evincing no ambitious haste to occupy the large house on the quay. They did not even seem to notice what scanty accommodation they had in that pavilion, while she alone dwelt in the gloomy mansion, which was so spacious that she seemed quite lost in it. And she was enraged, too, by their deference, by the tranquil way in which they waited for her to be no more; for she had been unable to make them quarrel with her, and was obliged to show herself grateful for the means they gave her, and to kiss their children, whom she hated, when they brought her flowers.

Thus, months and years went by, and almost every evening when Morange for a moment called on Constance, he found her in the same little silent salon, gowned in the same black dress, and stiffened into a posture of obstinate expectancy. Though no sign was given of destiny's revenge, of the patiently hoped-for fall of misfortune upon others, she never seemed to doubt of her ultimate victory. On the contrary, when things fell more and more heavily upon her, she drew herself yet more erect, defying fate, buoyed up by the conviction that it would at last be forced to prove that she was right. Thus, she remained immutable, superior to fatigue, and ever relying on a prodigy.

Each evening, when Morange called during those twelve years, the conversation invariably began in the same way.

"Nothing fresh since yesterday, dear madame?"

"No, my friend, nothing."

"Well, the chief thing is to enjoy good health. One can wait for better days."

"Oh! nobody enjoys good health; still one waits all the same."

And now one evening, at the end of the twelve years, as Morange went in to see her, he detected that the atmosphere of the little drawing-room was changed, quivering as it were with restrained delight amid the eternal silence.

"Nothing fresh since yesterday, dear madame?"

"Yes, my friend, there's something fresh."

"Something favorable I hope, then; something pleasant that you have been waiting for?"

"Something that I have been waiting for—yes! What one knows how to wait for always comes."

He looked at her in surprise, feeling almost anxious when he saw how altered she was, with glittering eyes and quick gestures. What fulfilment of her desires, after so many years of immutable mourning, could have resuscitated her like that? She smiled, she breathed vigorously, as if she were relieved of the enormous weight which had so long crushed and immured her. But when he asked the cause of her great happiness she said:

"I will not tell you yet, my friend. Perhaps I do wrong to rejoice; for everything is still very vague and doubtful. Only somebody told me this morning certain things, which I must make sure of, and think over. When I have done so I shall confide in you, you may rely on it, for I tell you everything; besides which, I shall no doubt need your help. So have a little patience, some evening you shall come to dinner with me here, and we shall have the whole evening before us to chat at our ease. But ah! mon Dieu! if it were only true, if it were only the miracle at last!"

More than three weeks elapsed before Morange heard anything further. He saw that Constance was very thoughtful and very feverish, but he did not even question her, absorbed as he himself was in the solitary, not to say automatic, life which he had made for himself. He had lately completed his sixty-ninth year; thirty years had gone by since the death of his wife Valerie, more than twenty since his daughter Reine had joined her, and he still ever lived on in his methodical, punctual manner, amid the downfall of his existence. Never had man suffered more than he, passed through greater tragedies, experienced keener remorse, and withal he came and went in a careful, correct way, ever and ever prolonging his career of mediocrity, like one whom many may have forgotten, but whom keenness of grief has preserved.

Nevertheless Morange had evidently sustained some internal damage of a nature to cause anxiety. He was lapsing into the most singular manias. While obstinately retaining possession of the over-large flat which he had formerly occupied with his wife and daughter, he now lived there absolutely alone; for he had dismissed his servant, and did his own marketing, cooking, and cleaning. For ten years nobody but himself had been inside his rooms, and the most filthy neglect was suspected there. But in vain did the landlord speak of repairs, he was not allowed even to cross the threshold. Moreover, although the old accountant, who was now white as snow, with a long, streaming beard, remained scrupulously clean of person, he wore a most wretched threadbare coat, which he must have spent his evenings in repairing. Such, too, was his maniacal, sordid avarice that he no longer spent a farthing on himself apart from the money which he paid for his bread—bread of the commonest kind, which he purchased every four days and ate when it was stale, in order that he might make it last the longer. This greatly puzzled the people who were acquainted with him, and never a week went by without the house-porter propounding the question: "When a gentleman of such quiet habits earns eight thousand francs a year at his office and never spends a cent, what can he do with his money?" Some folks even tried to reckon up the amount which Morange must be piling in some corner, and thought that it might perhaps run to some hundreds of thousands of francs.

But more serious trouble declared itself. He was twice snatched away from certain death. One day, when Denis was returning homewards across the Grenelle bridge he perceived Morange leaning far over the parapet, watching the flow of the water, and all ready to make a plunge if he had not been grasped by his coat-tails. The poor man, on recovering his self-possession, began to laugh in his gentle way, and talked of having felt giddy. Then, on another occasion, at the works, Victor Moineaud pushed him away from some machinery in motion at the very moment when, as if hypnotized, he was about to surrender himself to its devouring clutches. Then he again smiled, and acknowledged that he had done wrong in passing so near to the wheels. After this he was watched, for people came to the conclusion that he occasionally lost his head. If Denis retained him as chief accountant, this was, firstly, from a feeling of gratitude for his long services; but, apart from that matter, the extraordinary thing was that Morange had never discharged his duties more ably, obstinately tracing every doubtful centime in his books, and displaying the greatest accuracy over the longest additions. Always showing a calm and restful face, as though no tempest had ever assailed his heart, he clung tightly to his mechanical life, like a discreet maniac, who, though people might not know it, ought, perhaps, to have been placed under restraint.

At the same time, it should be mentioned that for some few years already there had been quite a big affair in Morange's life. Although he was Constance's confidant, although she had made him her creature by the force of her despotic will, he had gradually conceived the greatest affection for Denis's daughter, Hortense. As this child grew up, he fancied that he found in her his own long-mourned daughter, Reine. She had recently completed her ninth year, and each time that Morange met her he was thrown into a state of emotion and adoration, the more touching since it was all a divine illusion on his part, for the two girls in no wise resembled each other, the one having been extremely dark, and the other being nearly fair. In spite of his terrible avarice, the accountant loaded Hortense with dolls and sweetmeats on every possible occasion; and at last his affection for the child absorbed him to such a degree that Constance felt offended by it. She thereupon gave him to understand that whosoever was not entirely on her side was, in reality, against her.

To all appearance, he made his submission; in reality, he only loved the child the more for the thwarting of his passion, and he watched for her in order to kiss her in secret. In his daily intercourse with Constance, in showing apparent fidelity to the former mistress of the works, he now simply yielded to fear, like the poor weak being he was, one whom Constance had ever bent beneath her stern hand. The pact between them was an old one, it dated from that monstrous thing which they alone knew, that complicity of which they never spoke, but which bound them so closely together.

He, with his weak, good nature, seemed from that day to have remained annihilated, tamed, cowed like a frightened animal. Since that day, too, he had learnt many other things, and now no secret of the house remained unknown to him. This was not surprising. He had been living there so many years. He had so often walked to and fro with his short, discreet, maniacal step, hearing, seeing, and surprising everything! However, this madman, who knew the truth and who remained silent—this madman, left free amid the mysterious drama enacted in the Beauchenes' home, was gradually coming to a rebellious mood, particularly since he was compelled to hide himself to kiss his little friend Hortense. His heart growled at the thought of it, and he felt ready to explode should his passion be interfered with.

All at once, one evening, Constance kept him to dinner. And he suspected that the hour of her revelations had come, on seeing how she quivered and how erectly she carried her little figure, like a fighter henceforth certain of victory. Nevertheless, although the servant left them alone after bringing in at one journey the whole of the frugal repast, she did not broach the great affair at table. She spoke of the factory and then of Denis and his wife Marthe, whom she criticised, and she was even so foolish as to declare that Hortense was badly behaved, ugly, and destitute of grace. The accountant, like the coward he was, listened to her, never daring to protest in spite of the irritation and rebellion of his whole being.

"Well, we shall see," she said at last, "when one and all are put back into their proper places."

Then she waited until they returned to the little drawing-room, and the doors were shut behind them; and it was only then, near the fire, amid the deep silence of the winter evening, that she spoke out on the subject which she had at heart:

"As I think I have already told you, my friend, I have need of you. You must obtain employment at the works for a young man in whom I am interested. And if you desire to please me, you will even take him into your own office."

Morange, who was seated in front of her on the other side of the chimney-piece, gave her a look of surprise.

"But I am not the master," he replied; "apply to the master, he will certainly do whatever you ask."

"No, I do not wish to be indebted to Denis in any way. Besides, that would not suit my plans. You yourself must recommend the young man, and take him as an assistant, coaching him and giving him a post under you. Come, you surely have the power to choose a clerk. Besides, I insist on it."

She spoke like a sovereign, and he bowed his back, for he had obeyed people all his life; first his wife, then his daughter, and now that dethroned old queen who terrified him in spite of the dim feeling of rebellion which had been growing within him for some time past.

"No doubt, I might take the young man on," he said, "but who is he?"

Constance did not immediately reply. She had turned towards the fire, apparently for the purpose of raising a log of wood with the tongs, but in reality to give herself time for further reflection. What good would it do to tell him everything at once? She would some day be forced to tell it him, if she wished to have him entirely on her side; but there was no hurry, and she fancied that it would be skilful policy if at present she merely prepared the ground.

"He is a young man whose position has touched me, on account of certain recollections," she replied. "Perhaps you remember a girl who worked here—oh! a very long time ago, some thirty years at the least—a certain Norine Moineaud, one of old Moineaud's daughters."

Morange had hastily raised his head, and as sudden light flashed on his memory he looked at Constance with dilated eyes. Before he could even weigh his words he let everything escape him in a cry of surprise: "Alexandre-Honore, Norine's son, the child of Rougemont!"

Quite thunderstruck by those words, Constance dropped the tongs she was holding, and gazed into the old man's eyes, diving to the very depths of his soul.

"Ah! you know, then!" she said. "What is it you know? You must tell me; hide nothing. Speak! I insist on it!"

What he knew? Why, he knew everything. He spoke slowly and at length, as from the depths of a dream. He had witnessed everything, learnt everything—Norine's trouble, the money given by Beauchene to provide for her at Madame Bourdieu's, the child carried to the Foundling Hospital and then put out to nurse at Rougemont, whence he had fled after stealing three hundred francs. And the old accountant was even aware that the young scamp, after stranding on the pavement of Paris, had led the vilest of lives there.

"But who told you all that? How do you know all that?" cried Constance, who felt full of anxiety.

He waved his arm with a vague, sweeping gesture, as if to take in all the surrounding atmosphere, the whole house. He knew those things because they were things pertaining to the place, which people had told him of, or which he had guessed. He could no longer remember exactly how they had reached him. But he knew them well.

"You understand," said he, "when one has been in a place for more than thirty years, things end by coming to one naturally. I know everything, everything."

Constance started and deep silence fell. He, with his eyes fixed on the embers, had sunk back into the dolorous past. She reflected that it was, after all, preferable that the position should be perfectly plain. Since he was acquainted with everything, it was only needful that she, with all determination and bravery, should utilize him as her docile instrument.

"Alexandre-Honore, the child of Rougemont," she said. "Yes! that is the young man whom I have at last found again. But are you also aware of the steps which I took twelve years ago, when I despaired of finding him, and actually thought him dead?"

Morange nodded affirmatively, and she again went on speaking, relating that she had long since renounced her old plans, when all at once destiny had revealed itself to her.

"Imagine a flash of lightning!" she exclaimed. "It was on the morning of the day when you found me so moved! My sister-in-law, Seraphine, who does not call on me four times a year, came here, to my great surprise, at ten o'clock. She has become very strange, as you are aware, and I did not at first pay any attention to the story which she began to relate to me—the story of a young man whom she had become acquainted with through some lady—an unfortunate young man who had been spoilt by bad company, and whom one might save by a little help. Then what a blow it was, my friend, when she all at once spoke out plainly, and told me of the discovery which she had made by chance. I tell you, it is destiny awaking and striking!"

The story was indeed curious. Prematurely aged though she was, Seraphine, amid her growing insanity, continued to lead a wild, rackety life, and the strangest stories were related of her. A singular caprice of hers, given her own viciousness, was to join, as a lady patroness, a society whose purpose was to succor and moralize young offenders on their release from prison. And it was in this wise that she had become acquainted with Alexandre-Honore, now a big fellow of two-and-thirty, who had just completed a term of six years' imprisonment. He had ended by telling her his true story, speaking of Rougemont, naming Norine his mother, and relating the fruitless efforts that he had made in former years to discover his father, who was some immensely wealthy man. In the midst of it, Seraphine suddenly understood everything, and in particular why it was that his face had seemed so familiar to her. His striking resemblance to Beauchene sufficed to throw a vivid light upon the question of his parentage. For fear of worry, she herself told him nothing, but as she remembered how passionately Constance had at one time striven to find him, she went to her and acquainted her with her discovery.

"He knows nothing as yet," Constance explained to Morange. "My sister-in-law will simply send him here as if to a lady friend who will find him a good situation. It appears that he now asks nothing better than to work. If he has misconducted himself, the unhappy fellow, there have been many excuses for it! And, besides, I will answer for him as soon as he is in my hands; he will then only do as I tell him."

All that Constance knew respecting Alexandre's recent years was a story which he had concocted and retailed to Seraphine—a story to the effect that he owed his long term of imprisonment to a woman, the real culprit, who had been his mistress and whom he had refused to denounce. Of course that imprisonment, whatever its cause, only accounted for six out of the twelve years which had elapsed since his disappearance, and the six others, of which he said nothing, might conceal many an act of ignominy and crime. On the other hand, imprisonment at least seemed to have had a restful effect on him; he had emerged from his long confinement, calmer and keener-witted, with the intention of spoiling his life no longer. And cleansed, clad, and schooled by Seraphine, he had almost become a presentable young man.

Morange at last looked up from the glowing embers, at which he had been staring so fixedly.

"Well, what do you want to do with him?" he inquired. "Does he write a decent hand?"

"Yes, his handwriting is good. No doubt, however, he knows very little. It is for that reason that I wish to intrust him to you. You will polish him up for me and make him conversant with everything. My desire is that in a year or two he should know everything about the factory, like a master."

At that last word which enlightened him, the accountant's good sense suddenly awoke. Amid the manias which were wrecking his mind, he had remained a man of figures with a passion for arithmetical accuracy, and he protested.

"Well, madame, since you wish me to assist you, pray tell me everything; tell me in what work we can employ this young man here. Really now, you surely cannot hope through him to regain possession of the factory, re-purchase the shares, and become sole owner of the place?"

Then, with the greatest logic and clearness, he showed how foolish such a dream would be, enumerating figures and fully setting forth how large a sum of money would be needed to indemnify Denis, who was installed in the place like a conqueror.

"Besides, dear madame, I don't understand why you should take that young man rather than another. He has no legal rights, as you must be aware. He could never be anything but a stranger here, and I should prefer an intelligent, honest man, acquainted with our line of business."

Constance had set to work poking the fire logs with the tongs. When she at last looked up she thrust her face towards the other's, and said in a low voice, but violently: "Alexandre is my husband's son, he is the heir. He is not the stranger. The stranger is that Denis, that son of the Froments, who has robbed us of our property! You rend my heart; you make it bleed, my friend, by forcing me to tell you this."

The answer she thus gave was the answer of a conservative bourgeoise, who held that it would be more just if the inheritance should go to an illegitimate scion of the house rather than to a stranger. Doubtless the woman, the wife, the mother within her, bled even as she herself acknowledged, but she sacrificed everything to her rancor; she would drive the stranger away even if in doing so her own flesh should be lacerated. Then, too, it vaguely seemed to her that her husband's son must be in some degree her own, since his father was likewise the father of the son to whom she had given birth, and who was dead. Besides, she would make that young fellow her son; she would direct him, she would compel him to be hers, to work through her and for her.

"You wish to know how I shall employ him in the place," she resumed. "I myself don't know. It is evident that I shall not easily find the hundreds of thousands of francs which may be required. Your figures are accurate, and it is possible that we may never have the money to buy back the property. But, all the same, why not fight, why not try? And, besides—I will admit it—suppose we are vanquished, well then, so much the worse for the other. For I assure you that if this young man will only listen to me, he will then become the agent of destruction, the avenger and punisher, implanted in the factory to wreck it!"

With a gesture which summoned ruin athwart the walls, she finished expressing her abominable hopes. Among her vague plans, reared upon hate, was that of employing the wretched Alexandre as a destructive weapon, whose ravages would bring her some relief. Should she lose all other battles, that would assuredly be the final one. And she had attained to this pitch of madness through the boundless despair in which the loss of her only son had plunged her, withered, consumed by a love which she could not content, then demented, perverted to the point of crime.

Morange shuddered when, with her stubborn fierceness, she concluded: "For twelve years past I have been waiting for a stroke of destiny, and here it is! I would rather perish than not draw from it the last chance of good fortune which it brings me!"

This meant that Denis's ruin was decided on, and would be effected if destiny were willing. And the old accountant could picture the disaster: innocent children struck down in the person of their father, a great and most unjust catastrophe, which made his kindly heart rise in rebellion. Would he allow that fresh crime to be committed without shouting aloud all that he knew? Doubtless the memory of the other crime, the first one, the monstrous buried crime about which they both kept silence, returned at that horrible moment and shone out disturbingly in his eyes, for she herself shuddered as if she could see it there, while with the view of mastering him she gazed at him fixedly. For a moment, as they peered into one another's eyes, they lived once more beside the murderous trap, and shivered in the cold gust which rose from the abyss. And this time again Morange, like a poor weak man overpowered by a woman's will, was vanquished, and did not speak.

"So it is agreed, my friend," she softly resumed. "I rely on you to take Alexandre, in the first place, as a clerk. You can see him here one evening at five o'clock, after dusk, for I do not wish him to know at first what interest I take in him. Shall we say the day after to-morrow?"

"Yes, the evening of the day after to-morrow, if it pleases you, dear madame."

On the morrow Morange displayed so much agitation that the wife of the door-porter of the house where he resided, a woman who was ever watching him, imparted her fears to her husband. The old gentleman was certainly going to have an attack, for he had forgotten to put on his slippers when he came downstairs to fetch some water in the morning; and, besides, he went on talking to himself, and looked dreadfully upset. The most extraordinary incident of the day, however, was that after lunch Morange quite forgot himself, and was an hour late in returning to his office, a lack of punctuality which had no precedent, which, in the memory of everybody at the works, had never occurred before.

As a matter of fact, Morange had been carried away as by a storm, and, walking straight before him, had once more found himself on the Grenelle bridge, where Denis had one day saved him from the fascination of the water. And some force, some impulse had carried him again to the very same spot, and made him lean over the same parapet, gazing, in the same way as previously, at the flowing river. Ever since the previous evening he had been repeating the same words, words which he stammered in an undertone, and which haunted and tortured him. "Would he allow that fresh crime to be committed without shouting aloud what he knew?" No doubt it was those words, of which he could not rid himself, that had made him forget to put on his slippers in the morning, and that had just now again dazed him to the point of preventing him from returning to the factory, as if he no longer recognized the entrance as he passed it. And if he were at present leaning over that water, had he not been impelled thither by an unconscious desire to have done with all his troubles, an instinctive hope of drowning the torment into which he was thrown by those stubbornly recurring words? Down below, at the bottom of the river, those words would at last cease; he would no longer repeat them; he would no longer hear them urging him to an act of energy for which he could not find sufficient strength. And the call of the water was very gentle, and it would be so pleasant to have to struggle no longer, to yield to destiny, like a poor soft-hearted weakling who has lived too long.

Morange leant forward more and more, and in fancy could already feel the sonorous river seizing him, when a gay young voice in the rear recalled him to reality.

"What are you looking at, Monsieur Morange? Are there any big fishes there?"

It was Hortense, looking extremely pretty, and tall already for her ten years, whom a maid was conducting on a visit to some little friends at Auteuil. And when the distracted accountant turned round, he remained for a moment with trembling hands, and eyes moist with tears, at the sight of that apparition, that dear angel, who had recalled him from so far.

"What! is it you, my pet!" he exclaimed. "No, no, there are no big fishes. I think that they hide at the bottom because the water is so cold in winter. Are you going on a visit? You look quite beautiful in that fur-trimmed cloak!"

The little girl began to laugh, well pleased at being flattered and loved, for her old friend's voice quivered with adoration.

"Yes, yes, I am very happy; there are to be some private theatricals where I'm going. Oh! it is amusing to feel happy!"

She spoke those words like his own Reine might formerly have spoken them, and he could have gone down on his knees to kiss her little hands like an idol's.

"But it is necessary that you should always be happy," he replied. "You look so beautiful, I must really kiss you."

"Oh! you may, Monsieur Morange, I'm quite willing. Ah! you know the doll you gave me; her name's Margot, and you have no idea how good she is. Come to see her some day."

He had kissed her; and with glowing heart, ready for martyrdom, he watched her as she went off in the pale light of winter. What he had thought of would be too cowardly: besides, that child must be happy!

He slowly quitted the bridge, while within him the haunting words rang out with decisive distinctness, demanding a reply: "Would he allow that fresh crime to be committed without shouting aloud what he knew?" No, no! It was impossible: he would speak, he would act. Nevertheless, his mind remained clouded, befogged. How could he speak, how could he act?

Then, to crown his extravagant conduct, utterly breaking away from the habits of forty years, he no sooner returned to the office than, instead of immediately plunging into his everlasting additions, he began to write a long letter. This letter, which was addressed to Mathieu, recounted the whole affair—Alexandre's resurrection, Constance's plans, and the service which he himself had promised to render her. These things were set down simply as his impulse dictated, like a kind of confession by which he relieved his feelings. He had not yet come to any positive decision as to how he should play the part of a justiciar, which seemed so heavy to his shoulders. His one purpose was to warn Mathieu in order that there might be two of them to decide and act. And he simply finished by asking the other to come to see him on the following evening, though not before six o'clock, as he desired to see Alexandre and learn how the interview passed off, and what Constance might require of the young man.

The ensuing night, the ensuing day, must have been full of abominable torment for Morange. The doorkeeper's wife recounted, later on, that the fourth-floor tenant had heard the old gentleman walking about overhead all through the night. Doors were slammed, and furniture was dragged about as if for a removal. It was even thought that one could detect cries, sobs, and the monologues of a madman addressing phantoms, some mysterious rendering of worship to the dead who haunted him. And at the works during the day which followed Morange gave alarming signs of distress, of the final sinking of his mind into a flood of gloom. Ever darting troubled glances around him, he was tortured by internal combats, which, without the slightest motive, made him descend the stairs a dozen times, linger before the machinery in motion, and then return to his additions up above, with the bewildered, distracted air of one who could not find what he sought so painfully. When the darkness fell, about four o'clock on that gloomy winter day, the two clerks whom he had with him in his office noticed that he altogether ceased working. From that moment, indeed, he waited with his eyes fixed upon the clock. And when five o'clock struck he once more made sure that a certain total was correct, then rose and went out, leaving the ledger open, as if he meant to return to check the next addition.

He followed the gallery which led to the passage connecting the workshops with the private house. The whole factory was at that hour lighted up, electric lamps cast the brightness of daylight over it, while the stir of work ascended and the walls shook amid the rumbling of machinery. And all at once, before reaching the passage, Morange perceived the lift, the terrible cavity, the abyss of murder in which Blaise had met his death fourteen years previously. Subsequent to that catastrophe, and in order to prevent the like of it from ever occurring again, the trap had been surrounded by a balustrade with a gate, in such wise that a fall became impossible unless one should open the gate expressly to take a plunge. At that moment the trap was lowered and the gate was closed, and Morange, yielding to some superior force, bent over the cavity, shuddering. The whole scene of long ago rose up before him; he was again in the depths of that frightful void; he could see the crushed corpse; and he could feel the gust of terror chilling him in the presence of murder, accepted and concealed. Since he suffered so dreadfully, since he could no longer sleep, since he had promised his dear dead ones that he would join them, why should he not make an end of himself? Two days previously, while leaning over the parapet of the Grenelle bridge, a desire to do so had taken possession of him. He merely had to lose his equilibrium and he would be liberated, laid to rest in the peaceful earth between his wife and his daughter. And, all at once, as if the abyss itself suggested to him the frightful solution for which he had been vainly groping, in his growing madness, for two days past, he thought that he could hear a voice calling him from below, the voice of Blaise, which cried: "Come with the other one! Come with the other one!"

He started violently and drew himself erect; decision had fallen on him in a lightning flash. Insane as he was, that appeared to him to be the one sole logical, mathematical, sensible solution, which would settle everything. It seemed to him so simple, too, that he was astonished that he had sought it so long. And from that moment this poor soft-hearted weakling, whose wretched brain was unhinged, gave proof of iron will and sovereign heroism, assisted by the clearest reasoning, the most subtle craft.

In the first place he prepared everything, set the catch to prevent the trap from being sent up again in his absence, and also assured himself that the balustrade door opened and closed easily. He came and went with a light, aerial step, as if carried off his feet, with his eyes ever on the alert, anxious as he was to be neither seen nor heard. At last he extinguished the three electric lamps and plunged the gallery into darkness. From below, through the gaping cavity the stir of the working factory, the rumbling of the machinery ever ascended. And it was only then, everything being ready, that Morange turned into the passage to betake himself to the little drawing room of the mansion.

Constance was there waiting for him with Alexandre. She had given instructions for the latter to call half-an-hour earlier, for she wished to confess him while as yet telling him nothing of the real position which she meant him to take in the house. She was not disposed to place herself all at once at his mercy, and had therefore simply expressed her willingness to give him employment in accordance with the recommendation of her relative, the Baroness de Lowicz. Nevertheless, she studied him with restrained ardor, and was well pleased to find that he was strong, sturdy, and resolute, with a hard face lighted by terrible eyes, which promised her an avenger. She would finish polishing him up, and then he would suit her perfectly. For his part, without plainly understanding the truth, he scented something, divined that his fortune was at hand, and was quite ready to wait awhile for the certain feast, like a young wolf who consents to be domesticated in order that he may, later on, devour the whole flock at his ease.

When Morange went in only one thing struck him, Alexandre's resemblance to Beauchene, that extraordinary resemblance which had already upset Constance, and which now sent an icy chill through the old accountant as if in purposing to carry out his idea he had condemned his old master.

"I was waiting for you, my friend; you are late, you who are so punctual as a rule," said Constance.

"Yes, there was a little work which I wished to finish."

But she had merely been jesting, she felt so happy. And she immediately settled everything: "Well, here is the gentleman whom I spoke about," she said. "You will begin by taking him with you and making him acquainted with the business, even if in the first instance you can merely send him about on commissions for you. It is understood, is it not?"

"Quite so, dear madame, I will take him with me; you may rely on me."

Then, as she gave Alexandre his dismissal, saying that he might come on the morrow, Morange offered to show him out by way of his office and the workshops, which were still open.

"In that way he will form an acquaintance with the works, and can come straight to me to-morrow."

Constance laughed again, so fully did the accountant's obligingness reassure her.

"That is a good idea, my friend," she said. "Thank you. And au revoir, monsieur; we will take charge of your future if you behave sensibly."

At this moment, however, she was thunderstruck by an extravagant and seemingly senseless incident. Morange, having shown Alexandre out of the little salon, in advance of himself, turned round towards her with the sudden grimace of a madman, revealing his insanity by the distortion of his countenance. And in a low, familiar, sneering voice, he stammered in her face: "Ha! ha! Blaise at the bottom of the hole! He speaks, he has spoken to me! Ha! ha! the somersault! you would have the somersault! And you shall have it again, the somersault, the somersault!"

Then he disappeared, following Alexandre.

She had listened to him agape with wonder. It was all so unforeseen, so idiotic, that at first she did not understand it. But afterwards what a flash of light came to her! That which Morange had referred to was the murder yonder—the thing to which they had never referred, the monstrous thing which they had kept buried for fourteen years past, which their glances only had confessed, but which, all of a sudden, he had cast in her teeth with the grimace of a madman. What was the meaning of the poor fool's diabolical rebellion, the dim threat which she had felt passing like a gust from an abyss? She turned frightfully pale, she intuitively foresaw some frightful revenge of destiny, that destiny which, only a moment previously, she had believed to be her minion. Yes, it was surely that. And she felt herself carried fourteen years backward, and she remained standing, quivering, icy cold, listening to the sounds which arose from the works, waiting for the awful thud of the fall, even as on the distant day when she had listened and waited for the other to be crushed and killed.

Meantime Morange, with his discreet, short step, was leading Alexandre away, and speaking to him in a quiet, good-natured voice.

"I must ask your pardon for going first, but I have to show you the way. Oh! this is a very intricate place, with stairs and passages whose turns and twists never end. The passage now turns to the left, you see."

Then, on reaching the gallery where the darkness was complete, he affected anger in the most natural manner possible.

"Ah! well, that is just their way. They haven't yet lighted up this part. The switch is at the other end. Fortunately I know where to step, for I have been going backwards and forwards here for the last forty years. Mind follow me carefully."

Thereupon, at each successive step, he warned the other what he ought to do, guiding him along in his obliging way without the faintest tremor in his voice.

"Don't let go of me, turn to the left.—Now we merely have to go straight ahead.—Only, wait a moment, a barrier intersects the gallery, and there is a gate.—There we are! I'm opening the gate, you hear?—Follow me, I'll go first."

Morange quietly stepped into the void, amid the darkness. And, without a cry, he fell. Alexandre who was close in the rear, almost touching him so as not to lose him, certainly detected the void and the gust which followed the fall, as with sudden horror the flooring failed beneath them; but force of motion carried him on, he stepped forward in his turn, howled and likewise fell, head over heels. Both were smashed below, both killed at once. True, Morange still breathed for a few seconds. Alexandre, for his part, lay with his skull broken to pieces and his brains scattered on the very spot where Blaise had been picked up.

Horrible was the stupefaction when those bodies were found there. Nobody could explain the catastrophe. Morange carried off his secret, the reason for that savage act of justice which he had accomplished according to the chance suggestions of his dementia. Perhaps he had wished to punish Constance, perhaps he had desired to repair the old wrong: Denis long since stricken in the person of his brother, and now saved for the sake of his daughter Hortense, who would live happily with Margot, the pretty doll who was so good. By suppressing the criminal instrument the old accountant had indeed averted the possibility of a fresh crime. Swayed by his fixed idea, however, he had doubtless never reasoned that cataclysmic deed of justice, which was above reason, and which passed by with the impassive savagery of a death-dealing hurricane.

At the works there was but one opinion, Morange had assuredly been mad; and he alone could have caused the accident, particularly as it was impossible to account, otherwise than by an act of madness, for the extinguishing of the lights, the opening of the balustrade-door, and the plunge into the cavity which he knew to be there, and into which had followed him the unfortunate young man his companion. Moreover, the accountant's madness was no longer doubted by anybody a few days later, when the doorkeeper of his house related his final eccentricities, and a commissary of police went to search his rooms. He had been mad, mad enough to be placed in confinement.

To begin, nobody had ever seen a flat in such an extraordinary condition, the kitchen a perfect stable, the drawing-room in a state of utter abandonment with its Louis XIV. furniture gray with dust, and the dining-room all topsy-turvy, the old oak tables and chairs being piled up against the window as if to shut out every ray of light, though nobody could tell why. The only properly kept room was that in which Reine had formerly slept, which was as clean as a sanctuary, with its pitch-pine furniture as bright as if it had been polished every day. But the apartment in which Morange's madness became unmistakably manifest was his own bedchamber, which he had turned into a museum of souvenirs, covering its walls with photographs of his wife and daughter. Above a table there, the wall facing the window quite disappeared from view, for a sort of little chapel had been set up, decked with a multitude of portraits. In the centre were photographs of Valerie and Reine, both of them at twenty years of age, so that they looked like twin sisters; while symmetrically disposed all around was an extraordinary number of other portraits, again showing Valerie and Reine, now as children, now as girls, and now as women, in every sort of position, too, and every kind of toilet. And below them on the table, like an offering on an altar, was found more than one hundred thousand francs, in gold, and silver, and even copper; indeed, the whole fortune which Morange had been saving up for several years by eating only dry bread, like a pauper.

At last, then, one knew what he had done with his savings; he had given them to his dead wife and daughter, who had remained his will, passion, and ambition. Haunted by remorse at having killed them while dreaming of making them rich, he reserved for them that money which they had so keenly desired, and which they would have spent with so much ardor. It was still and ever for them that he earned it, and he took it to them, lavished it upon them, never devoting even a tithe of it to any egotistical pleasure, absorbed as he was in his vision-fraught worship and eager to pacify and cheer their spirits. And the whole neighborhood gossiped endlessly about the old mad gentleman who had let himself die of wretchedness by the side of a perfect treasure, piled coin by coin upon a table, and for twenty years past tendered to the portraits of his wife and daughter, even as flowers might have been offered to their memory.

About six o'clock, when Mathieu reached the works, he found the place terrified by the catastrophe. Ever since the morning he had been rendered anxious by Morange's letter, which had greatly surprised and worried him with that extraordinary story of Alexandre turning up once more, being welcomed by Constance, and introduced by her into the establishment. Plain as was the greater part of the letter, it contained some singularly incoherent passages, and darted from one point to another with incomprehensible suddenness. Mathieu had read it three times, indulging on each occasion in fresh hypotheses of a gloomier and gloomier nature; for the more he reflected, the more did the affair seem to him to be fraught with menace. Then, on reaching the rendezvous appointed by Morange, he found himself in presence of those bleeding bodies which Victor Moineaud had just picked up and laid out side by side! Silent, chilled to his bones, Mathieu listened to his son, Denis, who had hastened up to tell him of the unexplainable misfortune, the two men falling one atop of the other, first the old mad accountant, and then the young fellow whom nobody knew and who seemed to have dropped from heaven.

Mathieu, for his part, had immediately recognized Alexandre, and if, pale and terrified, he kept silent on the subject, it was because he desired to take nobody, not even his son, into his confidence, given the fresh suppositions, the frightful suppositions, which now arose in his mind from out of all the darkness. He listened with growing anxiety to the enumeration of the few points which were certain: the extinguishing of the electric lights in the gallery and the opening of the balustrade door, which was always kept closed and could only have been opened by some habitue, since, to turn the handle, one had to press a secret spring which kept it from moving. And, all at once, as Victor Moineaud pointed out that the old man had certainly been the first to fall, since one of the young man's legs had been stretched across his stomach, Mathieu was carried fourteen years backward. He remembered old Moineaud picking up Blaise on the very spot where Victor, the son, had just picked up Morange and Alexandre. Blaise! At the thought of his dead boy fresh light came to Mathieu, a frightful suspicion blazed up amid the terrible obscurity in which he had been groping and doubting. And, thereupon, leaving Denis to settle everything down below, he decided to see Constance.

Up above, however, when Mathieu was on the point of turning into the communicating passage, he paused once more, this time near the lift. It was there, fourteen years previously, that Morange, finding the trap open, had gone down to warn and chide the workmen, while Constance, according to her own account, had quietly returned into the house, at the very moment when Blaise, coming from the other end of the dim gallery, plunged into the gulf. Everybody had eventually accepted that narrative as being accurate, but Mathieu now felt that it was mendacious. He could recall various glances, various words, various spells of silence; and sudden certainty came upon him, a certainty based on all the petty things which he had not then understood, but which now assumed the most frightful significance. Yes, it was certain, even though round it there hovered the monstrous vagueness of silent crimes, cowardly crimes, over which a shadow of horrible mystery always lurks. Moreover, it explained the sequel, those two bodies lying below, as far, that is, as logical reasoning can explain a madman's action with all its gaps and mysteriousness. Nevertheless, Mathieu still strove to doubt; before anything else he wished to see Constance.

Showing a waxy pallor, she had remained erect, motionless, in the middle of her little drawing-room. The waiting of fourteen years previously had begun once more, lasting on and on, and filling her with such anxiety that she held her breath the better to listen. Nothing, no stir, no sound of footsteps, had yet ascended from the works. What could be happening then? Was the hateful thing, the dreaded thing, merely a nightmare after all? Yet Morange had really sneered in her face, she had fully understood him. Had not a howl, the thud of a fall, just reached her ears? And now, had not the rumbling of the machinery ceased? It was death, the factory silent, chilled and lost for her. All at once her heart ceased beating as she detected a sound of footsteps drawing nearer and nearer with increased rapidity. The door opened, and it was Mathieu who came in.

She recoiled, livid, as at the sight of a ghost. He, O God! Why he? How was it he was there? Of all the messengers of misfortune he was the one whom she had least expected. Had the dead son risen before her she would not have shuddered more dreadfully than she did at this apparition of the father.

She did not speak. He simply said: "They made the plunge, they are both dead—like Blaise."

Then, though she still said nothing, she looked at him. For a moment their eyes met. And in her glance he read everything: the murder was begun afresh, effected, consummated. Over yonder lay the bodies, dead, one atop of the other.

"Wretched woman, to what monstrous perversity have you fallen! And how much blood there is upon you!"

By an effort of supreme pride Constance was able to draw herself up and even increase her stature, still wishing to conquer, and cry aloud that she was indeed the murderess, that she had always thwarted him, and would ever do so. But Mathieu was already overwhelming her with a final revelation.

"You don't know, then, that that ruffian, Alexandre, was one of the murderers of your friend, Madame Angelin, the poor woman who was robbed and strangled one winter afternoon. I compassionately hid that from you. But he would now be at the galleys had I spoken out! And if I were to speak to-day you would be there too!"

That was the hatchet-stroke. She did not speak, but dropped, all of a lump, upon the carpet, like a tree which has been felled. This time her defeat was complete; destiny, which she awaited, had turned against her and thrown her to the ground. A mother the less, perverted by the love which she had set on her one child, a mother duped, robbed, and maddened, who had glided into murder amid the dementia born of inconsolable motherliness! And now she lay there, stretched out, scraggy and withered, poisoned by the affection which she had been unable to bestow.

Mathieu became anxious, and summoned the old servant, who, after procuring assistance, carried her mistress to her bed and then undressed her. Meantime, as Constance gave no sign of life, seized as she was by one of those fainting fits which often left her quite breathless, Mathieu himself went for Boutan, and meeting him just as he was returning home for dinner, was luckily able to bring him back at once.

Boutan, who was now nearly seventy-two, and was quietly spending his last years in serene cheerfulness, born of his hope in life, had virtually ceased practising, only attending a very few old patients, his friends. However, he did not refuse Mathieu's request. When he had examined Constance he made a gesture of hopelessness, the meaning of which was so plain that Mathieu, his anxiety increasing, bethought himself of trying to find Beauchene in order that the latter might, at least, be present if his wife should die. But the old servant, on being questioned, began by raising her arms to heaven. She did not know where Monsieur might be, Monsieur never left any address. At last, feeling frightened herself, she made up her mind to hasten to the abode of the two women, aunt and niece, with whom Beauchene spent the greater part of his time. She knew their address perfectly well, as her mistress had even sent her thither in pressing emergencies. But she learnt that the ladies had gone with Monsieur to Nice for a holiday; whereupon, not desiring to return without some member of the family, she was seized on her way back with the fine idea of calling on Monsieur's sister, the Baroness de Lowicz, whom she brought, almost by force, in her cab.

It was in vain that Boutan attempted treatment. When Constance opened her eyes again, she looked at him fixedly, recognized him, no doubt, and then lowered her eyelids. And from that moment she obstinately refused to reply to any question that was put to her. She must have heard and have known that people were there, trying to succor her. But she would have none of their succor, she was stubbornly intent on dying, on giving no further sign of life. Neither did she raise her eyelids, nor did her lips part again. It was as if she had already quitted the world amid the mute agony of her defeat.

That evening Seraphine's manner was extremely strange. She reeked of ether, for she drank ether now. When she heard of the two-fold "accident," the death of Morange and that of Alexandre, which had brought on Constance's cardiacal attack, she simply gave an insane grin, a kind of involuntary snigger, and stammered: "Ah! that's funny."

Though she removed neither her hat nor her gloves, she installed herself in an armchair, where she sat waiting, with her eyes wide open and staring straight before her—those brown eyes flecked with gold, whose living light was all that she had retained of her massacred beauty. At sixty-two she looked like a centenarian; her bold, insolent face was ravined, as it were, by her stormy life, and the glow of her sun-like hair had been extinguished by a shower of ashes. And time went on, midnight approached, and she was still there, near that death-bed of which she seemed to be ignorant, in that quivering chamber where she forgot herself, similar to a mere thing, apparently no longer even knowing why she had been brought thither.

Mathieu and Boutan had been unwilling to retire. Since Monsieur was at Nice in the company of those ladies, the aunt and the niece, they decided to spend the night there in order that Constance might not be left alone with the old servant. And towards midnight, while they were chatting together in undertones, they were suddenly stupefied at hearing Seraphine raise her voice, after preserving silence for three hours.

"He is dead, you know," said she.

Who was dead? At last they understood that she referred to Dr. Gaude. The celebrated surgeon, had, indeed, been found in his consulting-room struck down by sudden death, the cause of which was not clearly known. In fact, the strangest, the most horrible and tragical stories were current on the subject. According to one of them a patient had wreaked vengeance on the doctor; and Mathieu, full of emotion, recalled that one day, long ago, Seraphine herself had suggested that all Gaude's unhappy patients ought to band themselves together and put an end to him.

When Seraphine perceived that Mathieu was gazing at her, as in a nightmare, moved by the shuddering silence of that death-watch, she once more grinned like a lunatic, and said: "He is dead, we were all there!"

It was insane, improbable, impossible; and yet was it true or was it false? A cold, terrifying quiver swept by, the icy quiver of mystery, of that which one knows not, which one will never know.

Boutan leant towards Mathieu and whispered in his ear: "She will be raving mad and shut up in a padded cell before a week is over." And, indeed, a week later the Baroness de Lowicz was wearing a straight waistcoat. In her case Dr. Gaude's treatment had led to absolute insanity.

Mathieu and Boutan watched beside Constance until daybreak. She never opened her lips, nor raised her eyelids. As the sun rose up, she turned towards the wall, and then she died.

XXII

STILL more years passed, and Mathieu was already sixty-eight and Marianne sixty-five, when amid the increasing good fortune which they owed to their faith in life, and their long courageous hopefulness, a last battle, the most dolorous of their existence, almost struck them down and sent them to the grave, despairing and inconsolable.

One evening Marianne went to bed, quivering, utterly distracted. Quite a rending was taking place in the family. A disastrous and hateful quarrel had set the mill, where Gregoire reigned supreme, against the farm which was managed by Gervais and Claire. And Ambroise, on being selected as arbiter, had fanned the flames by judging the affair in a purely business way from his Paris counting-house, without taking into account the various passions which were kindled.

It was on returning from a secret application to Ambroise, prompted by a maternal longing for peace, that Marianne had taken to her bed, wounded to the heart, and terrified by the thought of the future. Ambroise had received her roughly, almost brutally, and she had gone back home in a state of intense anguish, feeling as if her own flesh were lacerated by the quarrelling of her ungrateful sons. And she had kept her bed, begging Mathieu to say nothing, and explaining that a doctor's services would be useless, since she did not suffer from any malady. She was fading away, however, as he could well detect; she was day by day taking leave of him, carried off by her bitter grief. Was it possible that all those loving and well-loved children, who had grown up under their care and their caresses, who had become the joy and pride of their victory, all those children born of their love, united in their fidelity, a sacred brotherly, sisterly battalion gathered close around them, was it possible that they should now disband and desperately seek to destroy one another? If so, it was true, then, that the more a family increases, the greater is the harvest of ingratitude. And still more accurate became the saying, that to judge of any human being's happiness or unhappiness in life, one must wait until he be dead.

"Ah!" said Mathieu, as he sat near Marianne's bed, holding her feverish hand, "to think of it! To have struggled so much, and to have triumphed so much, and then to encounter this supreme grief, which will bring us more pain than all the others. Decidedly it is true that one must continue battling until one's last breath, and that happiness is only to be won by suffering and tears. We must still hope, still triumph, and conquer and live."

Marianne, however, had lost all courage, and seemed to be overwhelmed.

"No," said she, "I have no energy left me, I am vanquished. I was always able to heal the wounds which came from without, but this wound comes from my own blood; my blood pours forth within me and stifles me. All our work is destroyed. Our joy, our health, our strength, have at the last day become mere lies."

Then Mathieu, whom her grievous fears of a disaster gained, went off to weep in the adjoining room, already picturing his wife dead and himself in utter solitude.

It was with reference to Lepailleur's moorland, the plots intersecting the Chantebled estate, that the wretched quarrel had broken out between the mill and the farm. For many years already, the romantic, ivy-covered old mill, with its ancient mossy wheel, had ceased to exist. Gregoire, at last putting his father's ideas into execution, had thrown it down to replace it by a large steam mill, with spacious meal-stores which a light railway-line connected with Janville station. And he himself, since he had been making a big fortune—for all the wheat of the district was now sent to him—had greatly changed, with nothing of his youthful turbulence left save a quick temper, which his wife Therese with her brave, loving heart alone could somewhat calm. On a score of occasions he had almost broken off all relations with his father-in-law, Lepailleur, who certainly abused his seventy years. Though the old miller, in spite of all his prophecies of ruin, had been unable to prevent the building of the new establishment, he none the less sneered and jeered at it, exasperated as he was at having been in the wrong. He had, in fact, been beaten for the second time. Not only did the prodigious crops of Chantebled disprove his theory of the bankruptcy of the earth, that villainous earth in which, like an obstinate peasant weary of toil and eager for speedy fortune, he asserted nothing more would grow; but now that mill of his, which he had so disdained, was born as it were afresh, growing to a gigantic size, and becoming in his son-in-law's hands an instrument of great wealth.

The worst was that Lepailleur so stubbornly lived on, experiencing continual defeats, but never willing to acknowledge that he was beaten. One sole delight remained to him, the promise given and kept by Gregoire that he would not sell the moorland enclosure to the farm. The old man had even prevailed on him to leave it uncultivated, and the sight of that sterile tract intersecting the wavy greenery of the beautiful estate of Chantebled, like a spot of desolation, well pleased his spiteful nature. He was often to be seen strolling there, like an old king of the stones and the brambles, drawing up his tall, scraggy figure as if he were quite proud of the poverty of that soil. In going thither one of his objects doubtless was to find a pretext for a quarrel; for it was he who in the course of one of these promenades, when he displayed such provoking insolence, discovered an encroachment on the part of the farm—an encroachment which his comments magnified to such a degree that disastrous consequences seemed probable. As it was, all the happiness of the Froments was for a time destroyed.

In business matters Gregoire invariably showed the rough impulsiveness of a man of sanguine temperament, obstinately determined to part with no fraction of his rights. When his father-in-law told him that the farm had impudently cleared some seven acres of his moorland, with the intention no doubt of carrying this fine robbery even further, if it were not promptly stopped, Gregoire at once decided to inquire into the matter, declaring that he would not tolerate any invasion of that sort. The misfortune then was that no boundary stones could be found. Thus, the people of the farm might assert that they had made a mistake in all good faith, or even that they had remained within their limits. But Lepailleur ragefully maintained the contrary, entered into particulars, and traced what he declared to be the proper frontier line with his stick, swearing that within a few inches it was absolutely correct. However, matters went altogether from bad to worse after an interview between the brothers, Gervais and Gregoire, in the course of which the latter lost his temper and indulged in unpardonable language. On the morrow, too, he began an action-at-law, to which Gervais replied by threatening that he would not send another grain of corn to be ground at the mill. And this rupture of business relations meant serious consequences for the mill, which really owed its prosperity to the custom of Chantebled.

From that moment matters grew worse each day, and conciliation soon seemed to be out of the question; for Ambroise, on being solicited to find a basis of agreement, became in his turn impassioned, and even ended by enraging both parties. Thus the hateful ravages of that fratricidal war were increased: there were now three brothers up in arms against one another. And did not this forebode the end of everything; might not this destructive fury gain the whole family, overwhelming it as with a blast of folly and hatred after so many years of sterling good sense and strong and healthy affection?

Mathieu naturally tried to intervene. But at the very outset he felt that if he should fail, if his paternal authority should be disregarded, the disaster would become irreparable. Without renouncing the struggle, he therefore waited for some opportunity which he might turn to good account. At the same time, each successive day of discord increased his anxiety. It was really all his own life-work, the little people which had sprung from him, the little kingdom which he had founded under the benevolent sun, that was threatened with sudden ruin. A work such as this can only live by force of love. The love which created it can alone perpetuate it; it crumbles as soon as the bond of fraternal solidarity is broken. Thus it seemed to Mathieu that instead of leaving his work behind him in full florescence of kindliness, joy, and vigor, he would see it cast to the ground in fragments, soiled, and dead even before he were dead himself. Yet what a fruitful and prosperous work had hitherto been that estate of Chantebled, whose overflowing fertility increased at each successive harvest; and that mill too, so enlarged and so flourishing, which was the outcome of his own inspiring suggestions, to say nothing of the prodigious fortunes which his conquering sons had acquired in Paris! Yet it was all this admirable work, which faith in life had created, that a fratricidal onslaught upon life was about to destroy!

One evening, in the mournful gloaming of one of the last days of September, the couch on which Marianne lay dying of silent grief was, by her desire, rolled to the window. Charlotte alone nursed her, and of all her sons she had but the last one, Benjamin, beside her in the now over-spacious house which had replaced the old shooting-box. Since the family had been at war she had kept the doors closed, intent on opening them only to her children when they became reconciled, if they should then seek to make her happy by coming to embrace one another beneath her roof. But she virtually despaired of that sole cure for her grief, the only joy that would make her live again.

That evening, as Mathieu came to sit beside her, and they lingered there hand in hand according to their wont, they did not at first speak, but gazed straight before them at the spreading plain; at the estate, whose interminable fields blended with the mist far away; at the mill yonder on the banks of the Yeuse, with its tall, smoking chimney; and at Paris itself on the horizon, where a tawny cloud was rising as from the huge furnace of some forge.

The minutes slowly passed away. During the afternoon Mathieu had taken a long walk in the direction of the farms of Mareuil and Lillebonne, in the hope of quieting his torment by physical fatigue. And in a low voice, as if speaking to himself, he at last said:

"The ploughing could not take place under better conditions. Yonder on the plateau the quality of the soil has been much improved by the recent methods of cultivation; and here, too, on the slopes, the sandy soil has been greatly enriched by the new distribution of the springs which Gervais devised. The estate has almost doubled in value since it has been in his hands and Claire's. There is no break in the prosperity; labor yields unlimited victory."

"What is the good of it if there is no more love?" murmured Marianne.

"Then, too," continued Mathieu, after a pause, "I went down to the Yeuse, and from a distance I saw that Gregoire had received the new machine which Denis has just built for him. It was being unloaded in the yard. It seems that it imparts a certain movement to the mill-stones, which saves a good third of the power needed. With such appliances the earth may produce seas of corn for innumerable nations, they will all have bread. And that mill-engine, with its regular breath and motion, will produce fresh wealth also."

"What use is it if people hate one another?" Marianne exclaimed.

At this Mathieu dropped the subject. But, in accordance with a resolution which he had formed during his walk, he told his wife that he meant to go to Paris on the morrow. And on noticing her surprise, he pretended that he wished to see to a certain business matter, the settlement of an old account. But the truth was, that he could no longer endure the spectacle of his wife's lingering agony, which brought him so much suffering. He wished to act, to make a supreme effort at reconciliation.

At ten o'clock on the following morning, when Mathieu alighted from the train at the Paris terminus, he drove direct to the factory at Grenelle. Before everything else he wished to see Denis, who had hitherto taken no part in the quarrel. For a long time now, indeed ever since Constance's death, Denis had been installed in the house on the quay with his wife Marthe and their three children. This occupation of the luxurious dwelling set apart for the master had been like a final entry into possession, with respect to the whole works. True, Beauchene had lived several years longer, but his name no longer figured in that of the firm. He had surrendered his last shred of interest in the business for an annuity; and at last one evening it was learnt that he had died that day, struck down by an attack of apoplexy after an over-copious lunch, at the residence of his lady-friends, the aunt and the niece. He had previously been sinking into a state of second childhood, the outcome of his life of fast and furious pleasure. And this, then, was the end of the egotistical debauchee, ever going from bad to worse, and finally swept into the gutter.

"Why! what good wind has blown you here?" cried Denis gayly, when he perceived his father. "Have you come to lunch? I'm still a bachelor, you know; for it is only next Monday that I shall go to fetch Marthe and the children from Dieppe, where they have spent a delightful September."

Then, on hearing that his mother was ailing, even in danger, he become serious and anxious.

"Mamma ill, and in danger! You amaze me. I thought she was simply troubled with some little indisposition. But come, father, what is really the matter? Are you hiding something? Is something worrying you?"

Thereupon he listened to the plain and detailed statement which Mathieu felt obliged to make to him. And he was deeply moved by it, as if the dread of the catastrophe which it foreshadowed would henceforth upset his life. "What!" he angrily exclaimed, "my brothers are up to these fine pranks with their idiotic quarrel! I knew that they did not get on well together. I had heard of things which saddened me, but I never imagined that matters had gone so far, and that you and mamma were so affected that you had shut yourselves up and were dying of it all! But things must be set to rights! One must see Ambroise at once. Let us go and lunch with him, and finish the whole business."

Before starting he had a few orders to give, so Mathieu went down to wait for him in the factory yard. And there, during the ten minutes which he spent walking about dreamily, all the distant past arose before his eyes. He could see himself a mere clerk, crossing that courtyard every morning on his arrival from Janville, with thirty sous for his lunch in his pocket. The spot had remained much the same; there was the central building, with its big clock, the workshops and the sheds, quite a little town of gray structures, surmounted by two lofty chimneys, which were ever smoking. True, his son had enlarged this city of toil; the stretch of ground bordered by the Rue de la Federation and the Boulevard de Grenelle had been utilized for the erection of other buildings. And facing the quay there still stood the large brick house with dressings of white stone, of which Constance had been so proud, and where, with the mien of some queen of industry, she had received her friends in her little salon hung with yellow silk. Eight hundred men now worked in the place; the ground quivered with the ceaseless trepidation of machinery; the establishment had grown to be the most important of its kind in Paris, the one whence came the finest agricultural appliances, the most powerful mechanical workers of the soil. And it was his, Mathieu's, son whom fortune had made prince of that branch of industry, and it was his daughter-in-law who, with her three strong, healthy children near her, received her friends in the little salon hung with yellow silk.

As Mathieu, moved by his recollections, glanced towards the right, towards the pavilion where he had dwelt with Marianne, and where Gervais had been born, an old workman who passed, lifted his cap to him, saying, "Good day, Monsieur Froment."

Mathieu thereupon recognized Victor Moineaud, now five-and-fifty years old, and aged, and wrecked by labor to even a greater degree than his father had been at the time when mother Moineaud had come to offer the Monster her children's immature flesh. Entering the works at sixteen years of age, Victor, like his father, had spent forty years between the forge and the anvil. It was iniquitous destiny beginning afresh: the most crushing toil falling upon a beast of burden, the son hebetated after the father, ground to death under the millstones of wretchedness and injustice.

"Good day, Victor," said Mathieu, "are you well?"

"Oh, I'm no longer young, Monsieur Froment," the other replied. "I shall soon have to look somewhere for a hole to lie in. Still, I hope it won't be under an omnibus."

He alluded to the death of his father, who had finally been picked up under an omnibus in the Rue de Grenelle, with his skull split and both legs broken.

"But after all," resumed Victor, "one may as well die that way as any other! It's even quicker. The old man was lucky in having Norine and Cecile to look after him. If it hadn't been for them, it's starvation that would have killed him, not an omnibus."

Mathieu interrupted. "Are Norine and Cecile well?" he asked.

"Yes, Monsieur Froment. Leastways, as far as I know, for, as you can understand, we don't often see one another. Them and me, that's about all that's left out of our lot; for Irma won't have anything more to do with us since she's become one of the toffs. Euphrasie was lucky enough to die, and that brigand Alfred disappeared, which was real relief, I assure you; for I feared that I should be seeing him at the galleys. And I was really pleased when I had some news of Norine and Cecile lately. Norine is older than I am, you know; she will soon be sixty. But she was always strong, and her boy, it seems, looks after her. Both she and Cecile still work; yes, Cecile still lives on, though one used to think that a fillip would have killed her. It's a pretty home, that one of theirs; two mothers for a big lad of whom they've made a decent fellow."

Mathieu nodded approvingly, and then remarked: "But you yourself, Victor, had boys and girls who must now in their turn be fathers and mothers."

The old workman waved his hand vaguely.

"Yes," said he, "I had eight, one more than my father. They've all gone off, and they are fathers and mothers in their turn, as you say, Monsieur Froment. It's all chance, you know; one has to live. There are some of them who certainly don't eat white bread, ah! that they don't. And the question is whether, when my arms fail me, I shall find one to take me in, as Norine and Cecile took my father. But when everything's said, what can you expect? It's all seed of poverty, it can't grow well, or yield anything good."

For a moment he remained silent; then resuming his walk towards the works, with bent, weary back and hanging hands, dented by toil, he said: "Au revoir, Monsieur Froment."

"Au revoir, Victor," Mathieu answered in a kindly tone.

Having given his orders, Denis now came to join his father, and proposed to him that they should go on foot to the Avenue d'Antin. On the way he warned him that they would certainly find Ambroise alone, for his wife and four children were still at Dieppe, where, indeed, the two sisters-in-law, Andree and Marthe, had spent the season together.

In a period of ten years, Ambroise's fortune had increased tenfold. Though he was barely five-and-forty, he reigned over the Paris market. With his spirit of enterprise, he had greatly enlarged the business left him by old Du Hordel, transforming it into a really universal comptoir, through which passed merchandise from all parts of the world. Frontiers did not exist for Ambroise, he enriched himself with the spoils of the earth, particularly striving to extract from the colonies all the wealth they were able to yield, and carrying on his operations with such triumphant audacity, such keen perception, that the most hazardous of his campaigns ended victoriously.

A man of this stamp, whose fruitful activity was ever winning battles, was certain to devour the idle, impotent Seguins. In the downfall of their fortune, the dispersal of the home and family, he had carved a share for himself by securing possession of the house in the Avenue d'Antin. Seguin himself had not resided there for years, he had thought it original to live at his club, where he secured accommodation after he and his wife had separated by consent. Two of the children had also gone off; Gaston, now a major in the army, was on duty in a distant garrison town, and Lucie was cloistered in an Ursuline convent. Thus, Valentine, left to herself and feeling very dreary, no longer able, moreover, to keep up the establishment on a proper footing, in her turn quitted the mansion for a cheerful and elegant little flat on the Boulevard Malesherbes, where she finished her life as a very devout old lady, presiding over a society for providing poor mothers with baby-linen, and thus devoting herself to the children of others—she who had not known how to bring up her own. And, in this wise, Ambroise had simply had to take possession of the empty mansion, which was heavily mortgaged, to such an extent, indeed, that when the Seguins died their heirs would certainly be owing him money.

Many were the recollections which awoke when Mathieu, accompanied by Denis, entered that princely mansion of the Avenue d'Antin! There, as at the factory, he could see himself arriving in poverty, as a needy tenant begging his landlord to repair a roof, in order that the rain might no longer pour down on the four children, whom, with culpable improvidence, he already had to provide for. There, facing the avenue, was the sumptuous Renaissance facade with eight lofty windows on each of its upper floors; there, inside, was the hall, all bronze and marble, conducting to the spacious ground-floor reception-rooms which a winter garden prolonged; and there, up above, occupying all the central part of the first floor, was Seguin's former "cabinet," the vast apartment with lofty windows of old stained glass. Mathieu could well remember that room with its profuse and amusing display of "antiquities," old brocades, old goldsmith's ware and old pottery, and its richly bound books, and its famous modern pewters. And he remembered it also at a later date, in the abandonment to which it had fallen, the aspect of ruin which it had assumed, covered, as it was, with gray dust which bespoke the slow crumbling of the home. And now he found it once more superb and cheerful, renovated with healthier and more substantial luxury by Ambroise, who had put masons and joiners and upholsterers into it for a period of three months. The whole mansion now lived afresh, more luxurious than ever, filled at winter-time with sounds of festivity, enlivened by the laughter of four happy children, and the blaze of a living fortune which effort and conquest ever renewed. And it was no longer Seguin, the idler, the artisan of nothingness, whom Mathieu came to see there, it was his own son Ambroise, a man of creative energy, whose victory had been sought by the very forces of life, which had made him triumph there, installed him as the master in the home of the vanquished.

When Mathieu and Denis arrived Ambroise was absent, but was expected home for lunch. They waited for him, and as the former again crossed the ante-room the better to judge of some new arrangements that had been made, he was surprised at being stopped by a lady who was sitting there patiently, and whom he had not previously noticed.

"I see that Monsieur Froment does not recognize me," she said.

Mathieu made a vague gesture. The woman had a tall, plump figure, and was certainly more than sixty years of age; but she evidently took care of her person, and had a smiling mien, with a long, full face and almost venerable white hair. One might have taken her for some worthy, well-to-do provincial bourgeoise in full dress.

"Celeste," said she. "Celeste, Madame Seguin's former maid."

Thereupon he fully recognized her, but hid his stupefaction at finding her so fortunately circumstanced at the close of her career. He had imagined that she was buried in some sewer.

In a gay, placid way she proceeded to recount her happiness: "Oh! I am very pleased," she said; "I had retired to Rougemont, my birth-place, and I ended by there marrying a retired naval officer, who has a very comfortable pension, not to speak of a little fortune which his first wife left him. As he has two big sons, I ventured to recommend the younger one to Monsieur Ambroise, who was kind enough to take him into his counting-house. And so I have profited by my first journey to Paris since then, to come and give Monsieur Ambroise my best thanks."

She did not say how she had managed to marry the retired naval officer; how she had originally been a servant in his household, and how she had hastened his first wife's death in order to marry him. All things considered, however, she rendered him very happy, and even rid him of his sons, who were in his way, thanks to the relations she had kept up in Paris.

She continued smiling like a worthy woman, whose feelings softened at the recollection of the past. "You can have no idea how pleased I felt when I saw you pass just now, Monsieur Froment," she resumed. "Ah! it was a long time ago that I first had the honor of seeing you here! You remember La Couteau, don't you? She was always complaining, was she not? But she is very well pleased now; she and her husband have retired to a pretty little house of their own, with some little savings which they live on very quietly. She is no longer young, but she has buried a good many in her time, and she'll bury more before she has finished! For instance, Madame Menoux—you must surely remember Madame Menoux, the little haberdasher close by—well, there was a woman now who never had any luck! She lost her second child, and she lost that big fellow, her husband, whom she was so fond of, and she herself died of grief six months afterwards. I did at one time think of taking her to Rougemont, where the air is so good for one's health. There are old folks of ninety living there. Take La Couteau, for instance, she will live as long as she likes! Oh! yes, it is a very pleasant part indeed, a perfect paradise."

At these words the abominable Rougemont, the bloody Rougemont, arose before Mathieu's eyes, rearing its peaceful steeple above the low plain, with its cemetery paved with little Parisians, where wild flowers bloomed and hid the victims of so many murders.

But Celeste was rattling on again, saying: "You remember Madame Bourdieu whom you used to know in the Rue de Miromesnil; she died very near our village on some property where she went to live when she gave up business, a good many years ago. She was luckier than her colleague La Rouche, who was far too good-natured with people. You must have read about her case in the newspapers, she was sent to prison with a medical man named Sarraille."

"La Rouche! Sarraille!" Yes, Mathieu had certainly read the trial of those two social pests, who were fated to meet at last in their work of iniquity. And what an echo did those names awaken in the past: Valerie Morange! Reine Morange! Already in the factory yard Mathieu had fancied that he could see the shadow of Morange gliding past him—the punctual, timid, soft-hearted accountant, whom misfortune and insanity had carried off into the darkness. And suddenly the unhappy man here again appeared to Mathieu, like a wandering phantom, the restless victim of all the imbecile ambition, all the desperate craving for pleasure which animated the period; a poor, weak, mediocre being, so cruelly punished for the crimes of others, that he was doubtless unable to sleep in the tomb into which he had flung himself, bleeding, with broken limbs. And before Mathieu's eyes there likewise passed the spectre of Seraphine, with the fierce and pain-fraught face of one who is racked and killed by insatiate desire.

"Well, excuse me for having ventured to stop you, Monsieur Froment," Celeste concluded; "but I am very, very pleased at having met you again."

He was still looking at her; and as he quitted her he said, with the indulgence born of his optimism: "May you keep happy since you are happy. Happiness must know what it does."

Nevertheless, Mathieu remained disturbed, as he thought of the apparent injustice of impassive nature. The memory of his Marianne, struck down by such deep grief, pining away through the impious quarrels of her sons, returned to him. And as Ambroise at last came in and gayly embraced him, after receiving Celeste's thanks, he felt a thrill of anguish, for the decisive moment which would save or wreck the family was now at hand.

Indeed, Denis, after inviting himself and Mathieu to lunch, promptly plunged into the subject.

"We are not here for the mere pleasure of lunching with you," said he; "mamma is ill, did you know it?"

"Ill?" said Ambroise. "Not seriously ill?"

"Yes, very ill, in danger. And are you aware that she has been ill like this ever since she came to speak to you about the quarrel between Gregoire and Gervais, when it seems that you treated her very roughly."

"I treated her roughly? We simply talked business, and perhaps I spoke to her like a business man, a little bluntly."

Then Ambroise turned towards Mathieu, who was waiting, pale and silent: "Is it true, father, that mamma is ill and causes you anxiety?"

And as his father replied with a long affirmative nod, he gave vent to his emotion, even as Denis had done at the works immediately on learning the truth.

"But dash it all," he said; "this affair is becoming quite idiotic! In my opinion Gregoire is right and Gervais wrong. Only I don't care a fig about that; they must make it up at once, so that poor mamma may not have another moment's suffering. But then, why did you shut yourselves up? Why did you not let us know how grieved you were? Every one would have reflected and understood things."

Then, all at once, Ambroise embraced his father with that promptness of decision which he displayed to such happy effect in business as soon as ever a ray of light illumined his mind.

"After all, father," said he; "you are the cleverest; you understand things and foresee them. Even if Gregoire were within his rights in bringing an action against Gervais, it would be idiotic for him to do so, because far above any petty private interest, there is the interest of all of us, the interest of the family, which is to remain, united, compact, and unattackable, if it desires to continue invincible. Our sovereign strength lies in our union—And so it's simple enough. We will lunch as quickly as possible and take the first train. We shall go, Denis and I, to Chantebled with you. Peace must be concluded this evening. I will see to it."

Laughing, and well pleased to find his own feelings shared by his two sons, Mathieu returned Ambroise's embrace. And while waiting for lunch to be served, they went down to see the winter garden, which was being enlarged for some fetes which Ambroise wished to give. He took pleasure in adding to the magnificence of the mansion, and in reigning there with princely pomp. At lunch he apologized for only offering his father and brother a bachelor's pot-luck, though, truth to tell, the fare was excellent. Indeed, whenever Andree and the children absented themselves, Ambroise still kept a good cook to minister to his needs, for he held the cuisine of restaurants in horror.

"Well, for my part," said Denis, "I go to a restaurant for my meals; for since Marthe and all the others have been at Dieppe, I have virtually shut up the house."

"You are a wise man, you see," Ambroise answered, with quiet frankness. "For my part, as you are aware, I am an enjoyer. Now, make haste and drink your coffee, and we will start."

They reached Janville by the two o'clock train. Their plan was to repair to Chantebled in the first instance, in order that Ambroise and Denis might begin by talking to Gervais, who was of a gentler nature than Gregoire, and with whom they thought they might devise some means of conciliation. Then they intended to betake themselves to the mill, lecture Gregoire, and impose on him such peace conditions as they might have agreed upon. As they drew nearer and nearer to the farm, however, the difficulties of their undertaking appeared to them, and seemed to increase in magnitude. An arrangement would not be arrived at so easily as they had at first imagined. So they girded their loins in readiness for a hard battle.

"Suppose we begin by going to see mamma," Denis suggested. "We should see and embrace her, and that would give us some courage."

Ambroise deemed the idea an excellent one. "Yes, let us go by all means, particularly as mamma has always been a good counsellor. She must have some idea."

They climbed to the first floor of the house, to the spacious room where Marianne spent her days on a couch beside the window. And to their stupefaction they found her seated on that couch with Gregoire standing by her and holding both her hands, while on the other side were Gervais and Claire, laughing softly.

"Why! what is this?" exclaimed Ambroise in amazement. "The work is done!"

"And we who despaired of being able to accomplish it!" declared Denis, with a gesture of bewilderment.

Mathieu was equally stupefied and delighted, and on noticing the surprise occasioned by the arrival of the two big brothers from Paris, he proceeded to explain the position.

"I went to Paris this morning to fetch them," he said, "and I've brought them here to reconcile us all!"

A joyous peal of laughter resounded. The big brothers were too late! Neither their wisdom nor their diplomacy had been needed. They themselves made merry over it, feeling the while greatly relieved that the victory should have been won without any battle.

Marianne, whose eyes were moist, and who felt divinely happy, so happy that she seemed already well again, simply replied to Mathieu: "You see, my friend, it's done. But as yet I know nothing further. Gregoire came here and kissed me, and wished me to send for Gervais and Claire at once. Then, of his own accord, he told them that they were all three mad in causing me such grief, and that they ought to come to an understanding together. Thereupon they kissed one another. And now it's done; it's all over."

But Gregoire gayly intervened. "Wait a moment; just listen; I cut too fine a figure in the story as mamma relates it, and I must tell you the truth. I wasn't the first to desire the reconciliation; the first was my wife, Therese. She has a good sterling heart and the very brains of a mule, in such wise that whenever she is determined on anything I always have to do it in the end. Well, yesterday evening we had a bit of a quarrel, for she had heard, I don't know how, that mamma was ill with grief. And this pained her, and she tried to prove to me how stupid the quarrel was, for we should all of us lose by it. This morning she began again, and of course she convinced me, more particularly as, with the thought of poor mamma lying ill through our fault, I had hardly slept all night. But father Lepailleur still had to be convinced, and Therese undertook to do that also. She even hit upon something extraordinary, so that the old man might imagine that he was the conqueror of conquerors. She persuaded him at last to sell you that terrible enclosure at such an insane price that he will be able to shout 'victory!' over all the house-tops."

Then turning to his brother and sister, Gregoire added, in a jocular tone; "My dear Gervais, my dear Claire, let yourselves be robbed, I beg of you. The peace of my home is at stake. Give my father-in-law the last joy of believing that he alone has always been in the right, and that we have never been anything but fools."

"Oh! as much money as he likes," replied Gervais, laughing. "Besides, that enclosure has always been a dishonor for the estate, streaking it with stones and brambles, like a nasty sore. We have long dreamt of seeing the property spotless, with its crops waving without a break under the sun. And Chantebled is rich enough to pay for its glory."

Thus the affair was settled. The wheat of the farm would return to the mill to be ground, and the mother would get well again. It was the force of life, the need of love, the union necessary for the whole family if it were to continue victorious, that had imposed true brotherliness on the sons, who for a moment had been foolish enough to destroy their power by assailing one another.

The delight of finding themselves once more together there, Denis, Ambroise, Gervais, Gregoire, the four big brothers, and Claire, the big sister, all reconciled and again invincible, increased when Charlotte arrived, bringing with her the other three daughters, Louise, Madeleine, and Marthe, who had married and settled in the district. Louise, having heard that her mother was ill, had gone to fetch her sisters, in order that they might repair to Chantebled together. And what a hearty laugh there was when the procession entered!

"Let them all come!" cried Ambroise, in a jocular way. "Let's have the family complete, a real meeting of the great privy council. You see, mamma, you must get well at once; the whole of your court is at your knees, and unanimously decides that it can no longer allow you to have even a headache."

Then, as Benjamin put in an appearance the very last, behind the three sisters, the laughter broke out afresh.

"And to think that we were forgetting Benjamin!" Mathieu exclaimed.

"Come, little one, come and kiss me in your turn," said Marianne affectionately, in a low voice. "The others jest because you are the last of the brood. But if I spoil you that only concerns ourselves, does it not? Tell them that you spent the morning with me, and that if you went out for a walk it was because I wished you to do so."

Benjamin smiled with a gentle and rather sad expression. "But I was downstairs, mamma; I saw them go up one after the other. I waited for them all to kiss, before coming up in my turn."

He was already one-and-twenty and extremely handsome, with a bright face, large brown eyes, long curly hair, and a frizzy, downy beard. Though he had never been ill, his mother would have it that he was weak, and insisted on coddling him. All of them, moreover, were very fond of him, both for his grace of person and the gentle charm of his disposition. He had grown up in a kind of dream, full of a desire which he could not put into words, ever seeking the unknown, something which he knew not, did not possess. And when his parents saw that he had no taste for any profession, and that even the idea of marrying did not appeal to him, they evinced no anger, but, on the contrary, they secretly plotted to keep this son, their last-born, life's final gift, to themselves. Had they not surrendered all the others? Would they not be forgiven for yielding to the egotism of love by reserving one for themselves, one who would be theirs entirely, who would never marry, or toil and moil, but would merely live beside them and love them, and be loved in return? This was the dream of their old age, the share which, in return for long fruitfulness, they would have liked to snatch from devouring life, which, though it gives one everything, yet takes everything away.

"Oh! just listen, Benjamin," Ambroise suddenly resumed, "you are interested in our brave Nicolas, I know. Would you like to have some news of him? I heard from him only the day before yesterday. And it's right that I should speak of him, since he's the only one of the brood, as mamma puts it, who cannot be here."

Benjamin at once became quite excited, asking, "Is it true? Has he written to you? What does he say? What is he doing?"

He could never think without emotion of Nicolas's departure for Senegal. He was twelve years old at that time, and nearly nine years had gone by since then, yet the scene, with that eternal farewell, that flight, as it were, into the infinite of time and hope, was ever present in his mind.

"You know that I have business relations with Nicolas," resumed Ambroise. "Oh! if we had but a few fellows as intelligent and courageous as he is in our colonies, we should soon rake in all the scattered wealth of those virgin lands. Well, Nicolas, as you are aware, went to Senegal with Lisbeth, who was the very companion and helpmate he needed. Thanks to the few thousand francs which they possessed between them, they soon established a prosperous business; but I divined that the field was still too small for them, and that they dreamt of clearing and conquering a larger expanse. And now, all at once, Nicolas writes to me that he is starting for the Soudan, the valley of the Niger, which has only lately been opened. He is taking his wife and his four children with him, and they are all going off to conquer as fortune may will it, like valiant pioneers beset by the idea of founding a new world. I confess that it amazes me, for it is a very hazardous enterprise. But all the same one must admit that our Nicolas is a very plucky fellow, and one can't help admiring his great energy and faith in thus setting out for an almost unknown region, fully convinced that he will subject and populate it."

Silence fell. A great gust seemed to have swept by, the gust of the infinite coming from the far away mysterious virgin plains. And the family could picture that young fellow, one of themselves, going off through the deserts, carrying the good seed of humanity under the spreading sky into unknown climes.

"Ah!" said Benjamin softly, his eyes dilating and gazing far, far away as if to the world's end; "ah! he's happy, for he sees other rivers, and other forests, and other suns than ours!"

But Marianne shuddered. "No, no, my boy," said she; "there are no other rivers than the Yeuse, no other forests but our woods of Lillebonne, no other sun but that of Chantebled. Come and kiss me again—let us all kiss once more, and I shall get well, and we shall never be parted again."

The laughter began afresh with the embraces. It was a great day, a day of victory, the most decisive victory which the family had ever won by refusing to let discord destroy it. Henceforth it would be invincible.

At twilight, on the evening of that day, Mathieu and Marianne again found themselves, as on the previous evening, hand in hand near the window whence they could see the estate stretching to the horizon; that horizon behind which arose the breath of Paris, the tawny cloud of its gigantic forge. But how little did that serene evening resemble the other, and how great was their present felicity, their trust in the goodness of their work.

"Do you feel better?" Mathieu asked his wife; "do you feel your strength returning; does your heart beat more freely?"

"Oh! my friend, I feel cured; I was only pining with grief. To-morrow I shall be strong."

Then Mathieu sank into a deep reverie, as he sat there face to face with his conquest—that estate which spread out under the setting sun. And again, as in the morning, did recollections crowd upon him; he remembered a morning more than forty years previously when he had left Marianne, with thirty sous in her purse, in the little tumbledown shooting-box on the verge of the woods. They lived there on next to nothing; they owed money, they typified gay improvidence with the four little mouths which they already had to feed, those children who had sprung from their love, their faith in life.

Then he recalled his return home at night time, the three hundred francs, a month's salary, which he had carried in his pocket, the calculations which he had made, the cowardly anxiety which he had felt, disturbed as he was by the poisonous egotism which he had encountered in Paris. There were the Beauchenes, with their factory, and their only son, Maurice, whom they were bringing up to be a future prince, the Beauchenes, who had prophesied to him that he and his wife and their troop of children could only expect a life of black misery, and death in a garret. There were also the Seguins, then his landlords, who had shown him their millions, and their magnificent mansion, full of treasures, crushing him the while, treating him with derisive pity because he did not behave sensibly like themselves, who were content with having but two children, a boy and a girl. And even those poor Moranges had talked to him of giving a royal dowry to their one daughter Reine, dreaming at that time of an appointment that would bring in twelve thousand francs a year, and full of contempt for the misery which a numerous family entails. And then the very Lepailleurs, the people of the mill, had evinced distrust because there were twelve francs owing to them for milk and eggs; for it had seemed to them doubtful whether a bourgeois, insane enough to have so many children, could possibly pay his debts. Ah! the views of the others had then appeared to be correct; he had repeated to himself that he would never have a factory, nor a mansion, nor even a mill, and that in all probability he would never earn twelve thousand francs a year. The others had everything and he nothing. The others, the rich, behaved sensibly, and did not burden themselves with offspring; whereas, he, the poor man, already had more children than he could provide for. What madness it had seemed to be!

But forty years had rolled away, and behold his madness was wisdom! He had conquered by his divine improvidence; the poor man had vanquished the wealthy. He had placed his trust in the future, and now the whole harvest was garnered. The Beauchene factory was his through his son Denis; the Seguins' mansion was his through his son Ambroise; the Lepailleurs' mill was his through his son Gregoire. Tragical, even excessive punishment, had blown those sorry Moranges away in a tempest of blood and insanity. And other social wastage had swept by and rolled into the gutter; Seraphine, the useless creature, had succumbed to her passions; the Moineauds had been dispersed, annihilated by their poisonous environment. And he, Mathieu, and Marianne alone remained erect, face to face with that estate of Chantebled, which they had conquered from the Seguins, and where their children, Gervais and Claire, at present reigned, prolonging the dynasty of their race. This was their kingdom; as far as the eye could see the fields spread out with wondrous fertility under the sun's farewell, proclaiming the battles, the heroic creative labor of their lives. There was their work, there was what they had produced, whether in the realm of animate or inanimate nature, thanks to the power of love within them, and their energy of will. By love, and resolution, and action, they had created a world.

"Look, look!" murmured Mathieu, waving his arm, "all that has sprung from us, and we must continue to love, we must continue to be happy, in order that it may all live."

"Ah!" Marianne gayly replied, "it will live forever now, since we have all become reconciled and united amid our victory."

Victory! yes, it was the natural, necessary victory that is reaped by the numerous family! Thanks to numbers they had ended by invading every sphere and possessing everything. Fruitfulness was the invincible, sovereign conqueress. Yet their conquest had not been meditated and planned; ever serenely loyal in their dealings with others, they owed it simply to the fulfilment of duty throughout their long years of toil. And they now stood before it hand in hand, like heroic figures, glorious because they had ever been good and strong, because they had created abundantly, because they had given abundance of joy, and health, and hope to the world amid all the everlasting struggles and the everlasting tears.

XXIII

AND Mathieu and Marianne lived more than a score of years longer, and Mathieu was ninety years old and Marianne eighty-seven, when their three eldest sons, Denis, Ambroise, and Gervais, ever erect beside them, planned that they would celebrate their diamond wedding, the seventieth anniversary of their marriage, by a fete at which they would assemble all the members of the family at Chantebled.

It was no little affair. When they had drawn up a complete list, they found that one hundred and fifty-eight children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren had sprung from Mathieu and Marianne, without counting a few little ones of a fourth generation. By adding to the above those who had married into the family as husbands and wives they would be three hundred in number. And where at the farm could they find a room large enough for the huge table of the patriarchal feast that they dreamt of? The anniversary fell on June 2, and the spring that year was one of incomparable mildness and beauty. So they decided that they would lunch out of doors, and place the tables in front of the old pavilion, on the large lawn, enclosed by curtains of superb elms and hornbeams, which gave the spot the aspect of a huge hall of verdure. There they would be at home, on the very breast of the beneficent earth, under the central and now gigantic oak, planted by the two ancestors, whose blessed fruitfulness the whole swarming progeny was about to celebrate.

Thus the festival was settled and organized amid a great impulse of love and joy. All were eager to take part in it, all hastened to the triumphal gathering, from the white-haired old men to the urchins who still sucked their thumbs. And the broad blue sky and the flaming sun were bent on participating in it also, as well as the whole estate, the streaming springs and the fields in flower, giving promise of bounteous harvests. Magnificent looked the huge horseshoe table set out amid the grass, with handsome china and snowy cloths which the sunbeams flecked athwart the foliage. The august pair, the father and mother, were to sit side by side, in the centre, under the oak tree. It was decided also that the other couples should not be separated, that it would be charming to place them side by side according to the generation they belonged to. But as for the young folks, the youths and maidens, the urchins and the little girls, they, it was thought, might well be left to seat themselves as their fancy listed.

Early in the morning those bidden to the feast began to arrive in bands; the dispersed family returned to the common nest, swooping down upon it from the four points of the compass. But alas! death's scythe had been at work, and there were many who could not come. Departed ones slept, each year more numerous, in the peaceful, flowery, Janville cemetery. Near Rose and Blaise, who had been the first to depart, others had gone thither to sleep the eternal sleep, each time carrying away a little more of the family's heart, and making of that sacred spot a place of worship and eternal souvenir. First Charlotte, after long illness, had joined Blaise, happy in leaving Berthe to replace her beside Mathieu and Marianne, who were heart-stricken by her death, as if indeed they were for the second time losing their dear son. Afterwards their daughter Claire had likewise departed from them, leaving the farm to her husband Frederic and her brother Gervais, who likewise had become a widower during the ensuing year. Then, too, Mathieu and Marianne had lost their son Gregoire, the master of the mill, whose widow Therese still ruled there amid a numerous progeny. And again they had to mourn another of their daughters, the kind-hearted Marguerite, Dr. Chambouvet's wife, who sickened and died, through having sheltered a poor workman's little children, who were affected with croup. And the other losses could no longer be counted among them were some who had married into the family, wives and husbands, and there were in particular many children, the tithe that death always exacts, those who are struck down by the storms which sweep over the human crop, all the dear little ones for whom the living weep, and who sanctify the ground in which they rest.

But if the dear departed yonder slept in deepest silence, how gay was the uproar and how great the victory of life that morning along the roads which led to Chantebled! The number of those who were born surpassed that of those who died. From each that departed, a whole florescence of living beings seemed to blossom forth. They sprang up in dozens from the ground where their forerunners had laid themselves to sleep when weary of their work. And they flocked to Chantebled from every side, even as swallows return at spring to revivify their old nests, filling the blue sky with the joy of their return. Outside the farm, vehicles were ever setting down fresh families with troops of children, whose sea of fair heads was always expanding. Great-grandfathers with snowy hair came leading little ones who could scarcely toddle. There were very nice-looking old ladies whom young girls of dazzling freshness assisted to alight. There were mothers expecting the arrival of other babes, and fathers to whom the charming idea had occurred of inviting their daughters' affianced lovers. And they were all related, they had all sprung from a common ancestry, they were all mingled in an inextricable tangle, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers-in-law, mothers-in-law, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, and cousins, of every possible degree, down to the fourth generation. And they were all one family; one sole little nation, assembling in joy and pride to celebrate that diamond wedding, the rare prodigious nuptials of two heroic creatures whom life had glorified and from whom all had sprung! And what an epic, what a Biblical numbering of that people suggested itself! How even name all those who entered the farm, how simply set forth their names, their ages, their degree of relationship, the health, the strength, and the hope that they had brought into the world!

Before everybody else there were those of the farm itself, all those who had been born and who had grown up there. Gervais, now sixty-two, was helped by his two eldest sons, Leon and Henri, who between them had ten children; while his three daughters, Mathilde, Leontine, and Julienne, who were married in the district, in like way numbered between them twelve. Then Frederic, Claire's husband, who was five years older than Gervais, had surrendered his post as a faithful lieutenant to his son Joseph, while his daughters Angele and Lucille, as well as a second son Jules, also helped on the farm, the four supplying a troop of fifteen children, some of them boys and some girls.

Then, of all those who came from without, the mill claimed the first place. Therese, Gregoire's widow, arrived with her offspring, her son Robert, who now managed the mill under her control, and her three daughters, Genevieve, Aline, and Natalie, followed by quite a train of children, ten belonging to the daughters and four to Robert. Next came Louise, notary Mazaud's wife, and Madeleine, architect Herbette's wife, followed by Dr. Chambouvet, who had lost his wife, the good Marguerite. And here again were three valiant companies; in the first, four daughters, of whom Colette was the eldest; in the second, five sons with Hilary at the head of them; and in the third, a son and daughter only, Sebastien and Christine; the whole, however, forming quite an army, for there were twenty of Mathieu's great-grandchildren in the rear.

But Paris arrived on the scene with Denis and his wife Marthe, who headed a grand cortege. Denis, now nearly seventy, and a great-grandfather through his daughters Hortense and Marcelle, had enjoyed the happy rest which follows accomplished labor ever since he had handed his works over to his eldest sons Lucien and Paul, who were both men of more than forty, and whose own sons were already on the road to every sort of fortune. And what with the mother and father, the four children, the fifteen grandchildren, and the three great-grandchildren, two of whom were yet in swaddling clothes, this was really an invading tribe packed into five vehicles.

Then the final entry was that of the little nation which had sprung from Ambroise, who to his great grief had early lost his wife Andree. His was such a green old age that at sixty-seven he still directed his business, in which his sons Leonce and Charles remained simple employes like his sons-in-law—the husbands of his daughters, Pauline and Sophie—who trembled before him, uncontested king that he remained, obeyed by one and all, grandfather of seven big bearded young men and nine strong young women, through four of whom he had become a great-grandfather even before his elder, the wise Denis. For this troop six carriages were required. And the defile lasted two hours, and the farm was soon full of a happy, laughing throng, holiday-making in the bright June sunlight.

Mathieu and Marianne had not yet put in an appearance. Ambroise, who was the grand master of the ceremonies that day, had made them promise to remain in their room, like sovereigns hidden from their people, until he should go to fetch them. He desired that they should appear in all solemnity. And when he made up his mind to summon them, the whole nation being assembled together, he found his brother Benjamin on the threshold of the house defending the door like a bodyguard.

He, Benjamin, had remained the one idler, the one unfruitful scion of that swarming tribe, which had toiled and multiplied so prodigiously. Now three-and-forty years of age, without a wife and without children, he lived, it seemed, solely for the joy of the old home, as a companion to his father and a passionate worshipper of his mother, who with the egotism of love had set themselves upon keeping him for themselves alone. At first they had not been opposed to his marrying, but when they had seen him refuse one match after another, they had secretly felt great delight. Nevertheless, as years rolled by, some unacknowledged remorse had come to them amid their happiness at having him beside them like some hoarded treasure, the delight of an avaricious old age, following a life of prodigality. Did not their Benjamin suffer at having been thus monopolized, shut up for their sole pleasure within the four walls of their house? He had at all times displayed an anxious dreaminess, his eyes had ever sought far-away things, the unknown land where perfect satisfaction dwelt, yonder, behind the horizon. And now that age was stealing upon him his torment seemed to increase, as if he were in despair at finding himself unable to try the possibilities of the unknown, before he ended a useless life devoid of happiness.

However, Benjamin moved away from the door, Ambroise gave his orders, and Mathieu and Marianne appeared upon the verdant lawn in the sunlight. An acclamation, merry laughter, affectionate clapping of hands greeted them. The gay excited throng, the whole swarming family cried aloud: "Long live the Father! Long live the Mother! Long life, long life to the Father and the Mother!"

At ninety years of age Mathieu was still very upright and slim, closely buttoned in a black frock-coat like a young bridegroom. Over his bare head fell a snowy fleece, for after long wearing his hair cut short he had now in a final impulse of coquetry allowed it to grow, so that it seemed liked the renouveau of an old but vigorous tree. Age might have withered and worn and wrinkled his face, but he still retained the eyes of his young days, large lustrous eyes, at once smiling and pensive, which still bespoke a man of thought and action, one who was very simple, very gay, and very good-hearted. And Marianne at eighty-seven years of age also held herself very upright in her light bridal gown, still strong and still showing some of the healthy beauty of other days. With hair white like Mathieu's, and softened face, illumined as by a last glow under her silky tresses, she resembled one of those sacred marbles whose features time has ravined, without, however, being able to efface from them the tranquil splendor of life. She seemed, indeed, like some fruitful Cybele, retaining all firmness of contour, and living anew in the broad daylight with gentle good humor sparkling in her large black eyes.

Arm-in-arm close to one another, like a worthy couple who had come from afar, who had walked on side by side without ever parting for seventy long years, Mathieu and Marianne smiled with tears of joy in their eyes at the whole swarming family which had sprung from their love, and which still acclaimed them:

"Long live the Father! Long live the Mother! Long life, long life to the Father and the Mother!"

Then came the ceremony of reciting a compliment and offering a bouquet. A fair-haired little girl named Rose, five years of age, had been intrusted with this duty. She had been chosen because she was the eldest child of the fourth generation. She was the daughter of Angeline, who was the daughter of Berthe, who was the daughter of Charlotte, wife of Blaise. And when the two ancestors saw her approach them with her big bouquet, their emotion increased, happy tears again gathered in their eyes, and recollections faltered on their lips: "Oh! our little Rose! Our Blaise, our Charlotte!"

All the past revived before them. The name of Rose had been given to the child in memory of the other long-mourned Rose, who had been the first to leave them, and who slept yonder in the little cemetery. There in his turn had Blaise been laid, and thither Charlotte had followed them. Then Berthe, Blaise's daughter, who had married Philippe Havard, had given birth to Angeline. And, later, Angeline, having married Georges Delmas, had given birth to Rose. Berthe and Philippe Havard, Angeline and Georges Delmas stood behind the child. And she represented one and all, the dead, the living, the whole flourishing line, its many griefs, its many joys, all the valiant toil of creation, all the river of life that it typified, for everything ended in her, dear, frail, fair-haired angel, with eyes bright like the dawn, in whose depths the future sparkled.

"Oh! our Rose! our Rose!"

With a big bouquet between her little hands Rose had stepped forward. She had been learning a very fine compliment for a fortnight past, and that very morning she had recited it to her mother without making a single mistake. But when she found herself there among all these people she could not recollect a word of it. Still that did not trouble her, she was already a very bold little damsel, and she frankly dropped her bouquet and sprang at the necks of Mathieu and Marianne, exclaiming in her shrill, flute-like voice: "Grandpapa, grandmamma, it's your fete, and I kiss you with all my heart!"

And that suited everybody remarkably well. They even found it far better than any compliment. Laughter and clapping of hands and acclamations again arose. Then they forthwith began to take their seats at table.

This, however, was quite an affair, so large was the horse-shoe table spread out under the oak on the short, freshly cut grass. First Mathieu and Marianne, still arm in arm, went ceremoniously to seat themselves in the centre with their backs towards the trunk of the great tree. On Mathieu's left, Marthe and Denis, Louise and her husband, notary Mazaud, took their places, since it had been fittingly decided that the husbands and wives should not be separated. On the right of Marianne came Ambroise, Therese, Gervais, Dr. Chambouvet, three widowers and a widow, then another married couple, Madeleine and her husband, architect Herbette, and then Benjamin alone. The other married folks afterwards installed themselves according to the generation they belonged to; and then, as had been decided, youth and childhood, the whole troop of young people and little ones took seats as they pleased amid no little turbulence.

What a moment of sovereign glory it was for Mathieu and Marianne! They found themselves there in a triumph of which they would never have dared to dream. Life, as if to reward them for having shown faith in her, for having increased her sway with all bravery, seemed to have taken pleasure in prolonging their existences beyond the usual limits so that their eyes might behold the marvellous blossoming of their work. The whole of their dear Chantebled, everything good and beautiful that they had there begotten and established, participated in the festival. From the cultivated fields that they had set in the place of marshes came the broad quiver of great coming harvests; from the pasture lands amid the distant woods came the warm breath of cattle and innumerable flocks which ever increased the ark of life; and they heard, too, the loud babble of the captured springs with which they had fertilized the now fruitful moorlands, the flow of that water which is like the very blood of our mother earth. The social task was accomplished, bread was won, subsistence had been created, drawn from the nothingness of barren soil.

And on what a lovely and well-loved spot did their happy, grateful race offer them that festival! Those elms and hornbeams, which made the lawn a great hall of greenery, had been planted by themselves; they had seen them growing day by day like the most peaceable and most sturdy of their children. And in particular that oak, now so gigantic, thanks to the clear waters of the adjoining basin through which one of the sources ever streamed, was their own big son, one that dated from the day when they had founded Chantebled, he, Mathieu, digging the hole and she, Marianne, holding the sapling erect. And now, as that tree stood there, shading them with its expanse of verdure, was it not like some royal symbol of the whole family? Like that oak the family had grown and multiplied, ever throwing out fresh branches which spread far over the ground; and like that oak it now formed by itself a perfect forest sprung from a single trunk, vivified by the same sap, strong in the same health, and full of song, and breeziness, and sunlight.

Leaning against that giant tree Mathieu and Marianne became merged in its sovereign glory and majesty, and was not their royalty akin to its own? Had they not begotten as many beings as the tree had begotten branches? Did they not reign there over a nation of their children, who lived by them, even as the leaves above lived by the tree? The three hundred big and little ones seated around them were but a prolongation of themselves; they belonged to the same tree of life, they had sprung from their love and still clung to them by every fibre. Mathieu and Marianne divined how joyous they all were at glorifying themselves in making much of them; how moved the elder ones, how turbulently merry the younger felt. They could hear their own hearts beating in the breasts of the fair-haired urchins who already laughed with ecstasy at the sight of the cakes and pastry on the table. And their work of human creation was assembled in front of them and within them, in the same way as the oak's huge dome spread out above it; and all around they were likewise encompassed by the fruitfulness of their other work, the fertility and growth of nature which had increased even as they themselves multiplied.

Then was the true beauty which had its abode in Mathieu and Marianne made manifest, that beauty of having loved one another for seventy years and of still worshipping one another now even as on the first day. For seventy years had they trod life's pathway side by side and arm in arm, without a quarrel, without ever a deed of unfaithfulness. They could certainly recall great sorrows, but these had always come from without. And if they had sometimes sobbed they had consoled one another by mingling their tears. Under their white locks they had retained the faith of their early days, their hearts remained blended, merged one into the other, even as on the morrow of their marriage, each having then been freely given and never taken back. In them the power of love, the will of action, the divine desire whose flame creates worlds, had happily met and united. He, adoring his wife, had known no other joy than the passion of creation, looking on the work that had to be performed and the work that was accomplished as the sole why and wherefore of his being, his duty and his reward. She, adoring her husband, had simply striven to be a true companion, spouse, mother, and good counsellor, one who was endowed with delicacy of judgment and helped to overcome all difficulties. Between them they were reason, and health, and strength. If, too, they had always triumphed athwart obstacles and tears, it was only by reason of their long agreement, their common fealty amid an eternal renewal of their love, whose armor rendered them invincible. They could not be conquered, they had conquered by the very power of their union without designing it. And they ended heroically, as conquerors of happiness, hand in hand, pure as crystal is, very great, very handsome, the more so from their extreme age, their long, long life, which one love had entirely filled. And the sole strength of their innumerable offspring now gathered there, the conquering tribe that had sprung from their loins, was the strength of union inherited from them: the loyal love transmitted from ancestors to children, the mutual affection which impelled them to help one another and ever fight for a better life in all brotherliness.

But mirthful sounds arose, the banquet was at last being served. All the servants of the farm had gathered to discharge this duty—they would not allow a single person from without to help them. Nearly all had grown up on the estate, and belonged, as it were, to the family. By and by they would have a table for themselves, and in their turn celebrate the diamond wedding. And it was amid exclamations and merry laughter that they brought the first dishes.

All at once, however, the serving ceased, silence fell, an unexpected incident attracted all attention. A young man, whom none apparently could recognize, was stepping across the lawn, between the arms of the horse-shoe table. He smiled gayly as he walked on, only stopping when he was face to face with Mathieu and Marianne. Then in a loud voice he said: "Good day, grandfather! good day, grandmother! You must have another cover laid, for I have come to celebrate the day with you."

The onlookers remained silent, in great astonishment. Who was this young man whom none had ever seen before? Assuredly he could not belong to the family, for they would have known his name, have recognized his face? Why, then, did he address the ancestors by the venerated names of grandfather and grandmother? And the stupefaction was the greater by reason of his extraordinary resemblance to Mathieu. Assuredly, he was a Froment, he had the bright eyes and the lofty tower-like forehead of the race. Mathieu lived again in him, such as he appeared in a piously-preserved portrait representing him at the age of seven-and-twenty when he had begun the conquest of Chantebled.

Mathieu, for his part, rose, trembling, while Marianne smiled divinely, for she understood the truth before all the others.

"Who are you, my child?" asked Mathieu, "you, who call me grandfather, and who resemble me as if you were my brother?"

"I am Dominique, the eldest son of your son Nicolas, who lives with my mother, Lisbeth, in the vast free country yonder, the other France!"

"And how old are you?"

"I shall be seven-and-twenty next August, when, yonder, the waters of the Niger, the good giant, come back to fertilize our spreading fields."

"And tell us, are you married, have you any children?"

"I have taken for my wife a French woman, born in Senegal, and in the brick house which I have built, four children are already growing up under the flaming sun of the Soudan."

"And tell us also, have you any brothers, any sisters?"

"My father, Nicolas, and Lisbeth, my mother, have had eighteen children, two of whom are dead. We are sixteen, nine boys and seven girls."

At this Mathieu laughed gayly, as if to say that his son Nicolas at fifty years of age had already proved a more valiant artisan of life than himself.

"Well then, my boy," he said, "since you are the son of my son Nicolas, come and embrace us to celebrate our wedding. And a cover shall be placed for you; you are at home here."

In four strides Dominique made the round of the tables, then cast his strong arms about the old people and embraced them—they the while feeling faint with happy emotion, so delightful was that surprise, yet another child falling among them, and on that day, as from some distant sky, and telling them of the other family, the other nation which had sprung from them, and which was swarming yonder with increase of fruitfulness amid the fiery glow of the tropics.

That surprise was due to the sly craft of Ambroise, who merrily explained how he had prepared it like a masterly coup de theatre. For a week past he had been lodging and hiding Dominique in his house in Paris; the young man having been sent from the Soudan by his father to negotiate certain business matters, and in particular to order of Denis a quantity of special agricultural machinery adapted to the soil of that far-away region. Thus Denis alone had been taken into the other's confidence.

When all those seated at the table saw Dominique in the old people's arms, and learnt the whole story, there came an extraordinary outburst of delight; deafening acclamations arose once more; and what with their enthusiastic greetings and embraces they almost stifled the messenger from the sister family, that prince of the second dynasty of the Froments which ruled in the land of the future France.

Mathieu gayly gave his orders: "There, place his cover in front of us! He alone will be in front of us like the ambassador of some powerful empire. Remember that, apart from his father and mother, he represents nine brothers and seven sisters, without counting the four children that he already has himself. There, my boy, sit down; and now let the service continue."

The feast proved a mirthful one under the big oak tree whose shade was spangled by the sunbeams. Delicious freshness arose from the grass, friendly nature seemed to contribute its share of caresses. The laughter never ceased, old folks became playful children once more in presence of the ninety and the eighty-seven years of the bridegroom and the bride. Faces beamed softly under white and dark and sunny hair; the whole assembly was joyful, beautiful with a healthy rapturous beauty; the children radiant, the youths superb, the maidens adorable, the married folk united, side by side. And what good appetites there were! What a gay tumult greeted the advent of each fresh dish! And how the good wine was honored to celebrate the goodness of life which had granted the two patriarchs the supreme grace of assembling them all at their table on such a glorious occasion! At dessert came toasts and health-drinking and fresh acclamations. But, amid all the chatter which flew from one to the other end of the table, the conversation invariably reverted to the surprise at the outset: that triumphal entry of the brotherly ambassador. It was he, his unexpected presence, all that he had not yet said, all the adventurous romance which he surely personated, that fanned the growing fever, the excitement of the family, intoxicated by that open-air gala. And as soon as the coffee was served no end of questions arose on every side, and he had to speak out.

"Well, what can I say?" he replied, laughing, to a question put to him by Ambroise, who wished to know what he thought of Chantebled, where he had taken him for a stroll during the morning. "I'm afraid that if I speak in all frankness, you won't think me very complimentary. Cultivation, no doubt, is quite an art here, a splendid effort of will and science and organization, as is needed to draw from this old soil such crops as it can still produce. You toil a great deal, and you effect prodigies. But, good heavens! how small your kingdom is! How can you live here without hurting yourselves by ever rubbing against other people's elbows? You are all heaped up to such a degree that you no longer have the amount of air needful for a man's lungs. Your largest stretches of land, what you call your big estates, are mere clods of soil where the few cattle that one sees look to me like lost ants. But ah! the immensity of our Niger; the immensity of the plains it waters; the immensity of our fields, whose only limit is the distant horizon!"

Benjamin had listened, quivering. Ever since that son of the great river had arrived, he had continued gazing at him, with passion rising in his dreamy eyes. And on hearing him speak in this fashion he could no longer restrain himself, but rose, went round the table, and sat down beside him.

"The Niger—the immense plains—tell us all about them," he said.

"The Niger, the good giant, the father of us all over yonder!" responded Dominique. "I was barely eight years old when my parents quitted Senegal, yielding to an impulse of reckless bravery and wild hope, possessed by a craving to plunge into the Soudan and conquer as chance might will it. There are many days' march among rocks and scrub and rivers from St. Louis to our present farm, far beyond Djenny. And I no longer remember the first journey. It seems to me as if I sprang from good father Niger himself, from the wondrous fertility of his waters. He is gentle but immense, rolling countless waves like the sea, and so broad, so vast, that no bridge can span him as he flows from horizon to horizon. He carries archipelagoes on his breast, and stretches out arms covered with herbage like pasture land. And there are the depths where flotillas of huge fishes roam at their ease. Father Niger has his tempests, too, and his days of fire, when his waters beget life in the burning clasp of the sun. And he has his delightful nights, his soft and rosy nights, when peace descends on earth from the stars.... He is the ancestor, the founder, the fertilizer of the Western Soudan, which he has dowered with incalculable wealth, wresting it from the invasion of neighboring Saharas, building it up of his own fertile ooze. It is he who every year at regular seasons floods the valley like an ocean and leaves it rich, pregnant, as it were, with amazing vegetation. Even like the Nile, he has vanquished the sands; he is the father of untold generations, the creative deity of a world as yet unknown, which in later times will enrich old Europe.... And the valley of the Niger, the good giant's colossal daughter. Ah! what pure immensity is hers; what a flight, so to say, into the infinite! The plain opens and expands, unbroken and limitless. Ever and ever comes the plain, fields are succeeded by other fields stretching out of sight, whose end a plough would only reach in months and months. All the food needed for a great nation will be reaped there when cultivation is practised with a little courage and a little science, for it is still a virgin kingdom such as the good river created it, thousands of years ago. To-morrow this kingdom will belong to the workers who are bold enough to take it, each carving for himself a domain as large as his strength of toil can dream of; not an estate of acres, but leagues and leagues of ploughland wavy with eternal crops.... And what breadth of atmosphere there is in that immensity! What delight it is to inhale all the air of that space at one breath, and how healthy and strong the life, for one is no longer piled one upon the other, but one feels free and powerful, master of that part of the earth which one has desired under the sun which shines for all."

Benjamin listened and questioned, never satisfied. "How are you installed there?" he asked. "How do you live? What are your habits? What is your work?"

Dominique began to laugh again, conscious as he was that he was astonishing, upsetting all these unknown relatives who pressed so close to him, aglow with increasing curiosity. Women and old men had in turn left their places to draw near to him; even children had gathered around, as if to listen to a fine story.

"Oh! we live in republican fashion," said he; "every member of our community has to help in the common fraternal task. The family counts more or less expert artisans of all kinds for the rough work. My father in particular has revealed himself to be a very skilful mason, for he had to build a place for us when we arrived. He even made his own bricks, thanks to some deposits of clayey soil which exist near Djenny. So our farm is now a little village: each married couple will have its own house. Then, too, we are not only agriculturists, we are fishermen and hunters also. We have our boats; the Niger abounds in fish to an extraordinary degree, and there are wonderful hauls at times. And even the shooting and hunting would suffice to feed us; game is plentiful, there are partridges and wild guinea-fowl, not to mention the flamingoes, the pelicans, the egrets, the thousands of creatures who do not prey on one another. Black lions visit us at times: eagles fly slowly over our heads; at dusk hippopotami come in parties of three and four to gambol in the river with the clumsy grace of negro children bathing. But, after all, we are more particularly cultivators, kings of the plain, especially when the waters of the Niger withdraw after fertilizing our fields. Our estate has no limits; it stretches as far as we can labor. And ah! if you could only see the natives, who do not even plough, but have few if any appliances beyond sticks, with which they just scratch the soil before confiding the seed to it! There is no trouble, no worry; the earth is rich, the sun ardent, and thus the crop will always be a fine one. When we ourselves employ the plough, when we bestow a little care on the soil which teems with life, what prodigious crops there are, an abundance of grain such as your barns could never hold! As soon as we possess the agricultural machinery, which I have come to order here in France, we shall need flotillas of boats in order to send you the overplus of our granaries.... When the river subsides, when its waters fall, the crop we more particularly grow is rice; there are, indeed, plains of rice, which occasionally yield two crops. Then come millet and ground-beans, and by and by will come corn, when we can grow it on a large scale. Vast cotton fields follow one after the other, and we also grow manioc and indigo, while in our kitchen gardens we have onions and pimentoes, and gourds and cucumbers. And I don't mention the natural vegetation, the precious gum-trees, of which we possess quite a forest; the butter-trees, the flour-trees, the silk-trees, which grow on our ground like briers alongside your roads.... Finally, we are shepherds; we own ever-increasing flocks, whose numbers we don't even know. Our goats, our bearded sheep may be counted by the thousand; our horses scamper freely through paddocks as large as cities, and when our hunch-backed cattle come down to the Niger to drink at that hour of serene splendor the sunset, they cover a league of the river banks.... And, above everything else, we are free men and joyous men, working for the delight of living without restraint, and our reward is the thought that our work is very great and good and beautiful, since it is the creation of another France, the sovereign France of to-morrow."

From that moment Dominique paused no more. There was no longer any need to question him, he poured forth all the beauty and grandeur in his mind. He spoke of Djenny, the ancient queen city, whose people and whose monuments came from Egypt, the city which even yet reigns over the valley. He spoke of four other centres, Bamakoo, Niamina, Segu, and Sansandig, big villages which would some day be great towns. And he spoke particularly of Timbuctoo the glorious, so long unknown, with a veil of legends cast over it as if it were some forbidden paradise, with its gold, its ivory, its beautiful women, all rising like a mirage of inaccessible delight beyond the devouring sands. He spoke of Timbuctoo, the gate of the Sahara and the Western Soudan, the frontier town where life ended and met and mingled, whither the camel of the desert brought the weapons and merchandise of Europe as well as salt, that indispensable commodity, and where the pirogues of the Niger landed the precious ivory, the surface gold, the ostrich feathers, the gum, the crops, all the wealth of the fruitful valley. He spoke of Timbuctoo the store-place, the metropolis and market of Central Africa, with its piles of ivory, its piles of virgin gold, its sacks of rice, millet, and ground-nuts, its cakes of indigo, its tufts of ostrich plumes, its metals, its dates, its stuffs, its iron-ware, and particularly its slabs of rock salt, brought on the backs of beasts of burden from Taudeni, the frightful Saharian city of salt, whose soil is salt for leagues around, an infernal mine of that salt which is so precious in the Soudan that it serves as a medium of exchange, as money more precious even than gold. And finally, he spoke of Timbuctoo impoverished, fallen from its high estate, the opulent and resplendent city of former times now almost in ruins, hiding remnants of its treasures behind cracked walls in fear of the robbers of the desert; but withal apt to become once more a city of glory and fortune, royally seated as it is between the Soudan, that granary of abundance, and the Sahara, the road to Europe, as soon as France shall have opened that road, have connected the provinces of her new empire, and have founded that huge new France of which the ancient fatherland will be but the directing mind.

"That is the dream!" cried Dominique, "that is the gigantic work which the future will achieve! Algeria, connected with Timbuctoo by the Sahara railway line, over which electric engines will carry the whole of old Europe through the far expanse of sand! Timbuctoo connected with Senegal by flotillas of steam vessels and yet other railways, all intersecting the vast empire on every side! New France connected with mother France, the old land, by a wondrous development of the means of communication, and founded, and got ready for the hundred millions of inhabitants who will some day spring up there!... Doubtless these things cannot be done in a night. The trans-Saharian railway is not yet laid down; there are two thousand five hundred kilometres* of bare desert to be crossed which can hardly tempt railway companies; and a certain amount of prosperity must be developed by starting cultivation, seeking and working mines, and increasing exportations before a pecuniary effort can be possible on the part of the motherland. Moreover, there is the question of the natives, mostly of gentle race, though some are ferocious bandits, whose savagery is increased by religious fanaticism, thus rendering the difficulties of our conquest all the greater. Until the terrible problem of Islamism is solved we shall always be coming in conflict with it. And only life, long years of life, can create a new nation, adapt it to the new land, blend diverse elements together, and yield normal existence, homogeneous strength, and genius proper to the clime. But no matter! From this day a new France is born yonder, a huge empire; and it needs our blood—and some must be given it, in order that it may be peopled and be able to draw its incalculable wealth from the soil, and become the greatest, the strongest, and the mightiest in the world!"

* About 1,553 English miles.

Transported with enthusiasm, quivering at the thought of the distant ideal at last revealed to him, Benjamin sat there with tears in his eyes. Ah! the healthy life! the noble life! the other life! the whole mission and work of which he had as yet but confusedly dreamt! Again he asked a question: "And are there many French families there, colonizing like yours?"

Dominique burst into a loud laugh. "Oh, no," said he, "there are certainly a few colonists in our old possessions of Senegal, but yonder in the Niger valley, beyond Djenny, there are, I think, only ourselves. We are the pioneers, the vanguard, the riskers full of faith and hope. And there is some merit in it, for to sensible stay-at-home folks it all seems like defying common sense. Can you picture it? A French family installed among savages, and unprotected, save for the vicinity of a little fort, where a French officer commands a dozen native soldiers—a French family, which is sometimes called upon to fight in person, and which establishes a farm in a land where the fanaticism of some head tribesman may any day stir up trouble. It seems so insane that folks get angry at the mere thought of it, yet it enraptures us and gives us gayety and health, and the courage to achieve victory. We are opening the road, we are giving the example, we are carrying our dear old France yonder, taking to ourselves a huge expanse of virgin land, which will become a province. We have already founded a village which in a hundred years will be a great town. In the colonies no race is more fruitful than the French, though it seems to become barren on its own ancient soil. Thus we shall swarm and swarm, and fill the world! So come then, come then, all of you; since here you are set too closely, since you lack air in your little fields and your overheated, pestilence-breeding towns. There is room for everybody yonder; there are new lands, there is open air that none has breathed, and there is a task to be accomplished which will make all of you heroes, strong, sturdy men, well pleased to live! Come with me. I will take the men, I will take all the women who are willing, and you will carve for yourselves other provinces and found other cities for the future glory and power of the great new France."

He laughed so gayly, he was so handsome, so spirited, so robust, that once again the whole table acclaimed him. They would certainly not follow him yonder, for all those married couples already had their own nests; and all those young folks were already too strongly rooted to the old land by the ties of their race—a race which after displaying such adventurous instincts has now fallen asleep, as it were, at its own fireside. But what a marvellous story it all was—a story to which big and little alike, had listened in rapture, and which to-morrow would, doubtless, arouse within them a passion for glorious enterprise far away! The seed of the unknown was sown, and would grow into a crop of fabulous magnitude.

For the moment Benjamin was the only one who cried amid the enthusiasm which drowned his words: "Yes, yes, I want to live. Take me, take me with you!"

But Dominique resumed, by way of conclusion: "And there is one thing, grandfather, which I have not yet told you. My father has given the name of Chantebled to our farm yonder. He often tells us how you founded your estate here, in an impulse of far-seeing audacity, although everybody jeered and shrugged their shoulders and declared that you must be mad. And, yonder, my father has to put up with the same derision, the same contemptuous pity, for people declare that the good Niger will some day sweep away our village, even if a band of prowling natives does not kill and eat us! But I'm easy in mind about all that, we shall conquer as you conquered, for what seems to be the folly of action is really divine wisdom. There will be another kingdom of the Froments yonder, another huge Chantebled, of which you and my grandmother will be the ancestors, the distant patriarchs, worshipped like deities.... And I drink to your health, grandfather, and I drink to yours, grandmother, on behalf of your other future people, who will grow up full of spirit under the burning sun of the tropics!"

Then with great emotion Mathieu, who had risen, replied in a powerful voice: "To your health! my boy. To the health of my son Nicolas, his wife, Lisbeth, and all who have been born from them! And to the health of all who will follow, from generation to generation!"

And Marianne, who had likewise risen, in her turn said: "To the health of your wives, and your daughters, your spouses and your mothers! To the health of those who will love and produce the greatest sum of life, in order that the greatest possible sum of happiness may follow!"

Then, the banquet ended, they quitted the table and spread freely over the lawn. There was a last ovation around Mathieu and Marianne, who were encompassed by their eager offspring. At one and the same time a score of arms were outstretched, carrying children, whose fair or dark heads they were asked to kiss. Aged as they were, returning to a divine state of childhood, they did not always recognize those little lads and lasses. They made mistakes, used wrong names, fancied that one child was another. Laughter thereupon arose, the mistakes were rectified, and appeals were made to the old people's memory. They likewise laughed, the errors were amusing, but it mattered little if they no longer remembered a name, the child at any rate belonged to the harvest that had sprung from them.

Then there were certain granddaughters and great-granddaughters whom they themselves summoned and kissed by way of bringing good luck to the babes that were expected, the children of their children's children, the race which would ever spread and perpetuate them through the far-off ages. And there were mothers, also, who were nursing, mothers whose little ones, after sleeping quietly during the feast, had now awakened, shrieking their hunger aloud. These had to be fed, and the mothers merrily seated themselves together under the trees and gave them the breast in all serenity. Therein lay the royal beauty of woman, wife and mother; fruitful maternity triumphed over virginity by which life is slain. Ah! might manners and customs change, might the idea of morality and the idea of beauty be altered, and the world recast, based on the triumphant beauty of the mother suckling her babe in all the majesty of her symbolism! From fresh sowings there ever came fresh harvests, the sun ever rose anew above the horizon, and milk streamed forth endlessly like the eternal sap of living humanity. And that river of milk carried life through the veins of the world, and expanded and overflowed for the centuries of the future.

The greatest possible sum of life in order that the greatest possible happiness might result: that was the act of faith in life, the act of hope in the justice and goodness of life's work. Victorious fruitfulness remained the one true force, the sovereign power which alone moulded the future. She was the great revolutionary, the incessant artisan of progress, the mother of every civilization, ever re-creating her army of innumerable fighters, throwing through the centuries millions after millions of poor and hungry and rebellious beings into the fight for truth and justice. Not a single forward step in history has ever been taken without numerousness having urged humanity forward. To-morrow, like yesterday, will be won by the swarming of the multitude whose quest is happiness. And to-morrow will give the benefits which our age has awaited; economic equality obtained even as political equality has been obtained; a just apportionment of wealth rendered easy; and compulsory work re-established as the one glorious and essential need.

It is not true that labor has been imposed on mankind as punishment for sin, it is on the contrary an honor, a mark of nobility, the most precious of boons, the joy, the health, the strength, the very soul of the world, which itself labors incessantly, ever creating the future. And misery, the great, abominable social crime, will disappear amid the glorification of labor, the distribution of the universal task among one and all, each accepting his legitimate share of duties and rights. And may children come, they will simply be instruments of wealth, they will but increase the human capital, the free happiness of a life in which the children of some will no longer be beasts of burden, or food for slaughter or for vice, to serve the egotism of the children of others. And life will then again prove the conqueror; there will come the renascence of life, honored and worshipped, the religion of life so long crushed beneath the hateful nightmare of Roman Catholicism, from which on divers occasions the nations have sought to free themselves by violence, and which they will drive away at last on the now near day when cult and power, and sovereign beauty shall be vested in the fruitful earth and the fruitful spouse.

In that last resplendent hour of eventide, Mathieu and Marianne reigned by virtue of their numerous race. They ended as heroes of life, because of the great creative work which they had accomplished amid battle and toil and grief. Often had they sobbed, but with extreme old age had come peace, deep smiling peace, made up of the good labor performed and the certainty of approaching rest while their children and their children's children resumed the fight, labored and suffered, lived in their own turn. And a part of Mathieu and Marianne's heroic grandeur sprang from the divine desire with which they had glowed, the desire which moulds and regulates the world. They were like a sacred temple in which the god had fixed his abode, they were animated by the inextinguishable fire with which the universe ever burns for the work of continual creation. Their radiant beauty under their white hair came from the light which yet filled their eyes, the light of love's power, which age had been unable to extinguish. Doubtless, as they themselves jestingly remarked at times, they had been prodigals, their family had been such a large one. But, after all, had they not been right? Their children had diminished no other's share, each had come with his or her own means of subsistence. And, besides, 'tis good to garner in excess when the granaries of a country are empty. Many such improvidents are needed to combat the egotism of others at times of great dearth. Amid all the frightful loss and wastage, the race is strengthened, the country is made afresh, a good civic example is given by such healthy prodigality as Mathieu and Marianne had shown.

But a last act of heroism was required of them. A month after the festival, when Dominique was on the point of returning to the Soudan, Benjamin one evening told them of his passion, of the irresistible summons from the unknown distant plains, which he could but obey.

"Dear father, darling mother, let me go with Dominique! I have struggled, I feel horrified with myself at quitting you thus, at your great age. But I suffer too dreadfully; my soul is full of yearnings, and seems ready to burst; and I shall die of shameful sloth, if I do not go."

They listened with breaking hearts. Their son's words did not surprise them; they had heard them coming ever since their diamond wedding. And they trembled, and felt that they could not refuse; for they knew that they were guilty in having kept their last-born in the family nest after surrendering to life all the others. Ah! how insatiable life was—it would not so much as suffer that tardy avarice of theirs; it demanded even the precious, discreetly hidden treasure from which, with jealous egotism, they had dreamt of parting only when they might find themselves upon the threshold of the grave.

Deep silence reigned; but at last Mathieu slowly answered: "I cannot keep you back, my son; go whither life calls you.... If I knew, however, that I should die to-night, I would ask you to wait till to-morrow."

In her turn Marianne gently said: "Why cannot we die at once? We should then escape this last great pang, and you would only carry our memory away with you."

Once again did the cemetery of Janville appear, the field of peace, where dear ones already slept, and where they would soon join them. No sadness tinged that thought, however; they hoped that they would lie down there together on the same day, for they could not imagine life, one without the other. And, besides, would they not forever live in their children; forever be united, immortal, in their race?

"Dear father, darling mother," Benjamin repeated; "it is I who will be dead to-morrow if I do not go. To wait for your death—good God! would not that be to desire it? You must still live long years, and I wish to live like you."

There came another pause, then Mathieu and Marianne replied together: "Go then, my boy. You are right, one must live."

But on the day of farewell, what a wrench, what a final pang there was when they had to tear themselves from that flesh of their flesh, all that remained to them, in order to hand over to life the supreme gift it demanded! The departure of Nicolas seemed to begin afresh; again came the "never more" of the migratory child taking wing, given to the passing wind for the sowing of unknown distant lands, far beyond the frontiers.

"Never more!" cried Mathieu in tears.

And Marianne repeated in a great sob which rose from the very depths of her being: "Never more! Never more!"

There was now no longer any mere question of increasing a family, of building up the country afresh, of re-peopling France for the struggles of the future, the question was one of the expansion of humanity, of the reclaiming of deserts, of the peopling of the entire earth. After one's country came the earth; after one's family, one's nation, and then mankind. And what an invading flight, what a sudden outlook upon the world's immensity! All the freshness of the oceans, all the perfumes of virgin continents, blended in a mighty gust like a breeze from the offing. Scarcely fifteen hundred million souls are to-day scattered through the few cultivated patches of the globe, and is that not indeed paltry, when the globe, ploughed from end to end, might nourish ten times that number? What narrowness of mind there is in seeking to limit mankind to its present figure, in admitting simply the continuance of exchanges among nations, and of capitals dying where they stand—as Babylon, Nineveh, and Memphis died—while other queens of the earth arise, inherit, and flourish amid fresh forms of civilization, and this without population ever more increasing! Such a theory is deadly, for nothing remains stationary: whatever ceases to increase decreases and disappears. Life is the rising tide whose waves daily continue the work of creation, and perfect the work of awaited happiness, which shall come when the times are accomplished. The flux and reflux of nations are but periods of the forward march: the great centuries of light, which dark ages at times replace, simply mark the phases of that march. Another step forward is ever taken, a little more of the earth is conquered, a little more life is brought into play. The law seems to lie in a double phenomenon; fruitfulness creating civilization, and civilization restraining fruitfulness. And equilibrium will come from it all on the day when the earth, being entirely inhabited, cleared, and utilized, shall at last have accomplished its destiny. And the divine dream, the generous utopian thought soars into the heavens; families blended into nations, nations blended into mankind, one sole brotherly people making of the world one sole city of peace and truth and justice! Ah! may eternal fruitfulness ever expand, may the seed of humanity be carried over the frontiers, peopling the untilled deserts afar, and increasing mankind through the coming centuries until dawns the reign of sovereign life, mistress at last both of time and of space!

And after the departure of Benjamin, whom Dominique took with him, Mathieu and Marianne recovered the joyful serenity and peace born of the work which they had so prodigally accomplished. Nothing more was theirs; nothing save the happiness of having given all to life. The "Never more" of separation became the "Still more" of life—life incessantly increasing, expanding beyond the limitless horizon. Candid and smiling, those all but centenarian heroes triumphed in the overflowing florescence of their race. The milk had streamed even athwart the seas—from the old land of France to the immensity of virgin Africa, the young and giant France of to-morrow. After the foundation of Chantebled, on a disdained, neglected spot of the national patrimony, another Chantebled was rising and becoming a kingdom in the vast deserted tracts which life yet had to fertilize. And this was the exodus, human expansion throughout the world, mankind upon the march towards the Infinite.

England.—August 1898-May 1899.

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Zola Dictionary, by J. G. Patterson

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: A Zola Dictionary

Author: J. G. Patterson

Release Date: April 22, 2006 [EBook #5103]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A ZOLA DICTIONARY ***

Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; David Widger

A ZOLA DICTIONARY

The Characters Of The Rougon-Macquart Novels Of Emile Zola

By J. G. Patterson

With a Biographical and Critical Introduction,
Synopses of the Plots, Bibliographical Note,
Map,
Genealogy, etc.

Contents

PREFATORY NOTE

INTRODUCTION

THE ROUGON-MACQUART GENEALOGICAL TREE.

SYNOPSES OF THE PLOTS OF THE ROUGON-MACQUART NOVELS

THE ZOLA DICTIONARY

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

V

W

Z

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PRINCIPAL SCENES

PREFATORY NOTE

In the preparation of my Introduction I have, of course, relied for information on the recognized Biographies of Zola, namely Notes d'un Ami, by Paul Alexis (Paris, Charpentier); Emile Zola, A biographical and Critical Study, by R. H. Sherrard (London, Chatto & Windus, 1893); Emile Zola, Novelist and Reformer: An account of his Life and Work, by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (London, John Lane, 1904). Reference has also been made to Mr. Arthur Symons' Studies in Prose and Verse, and to articles in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. Andrew Lang, in the Atlantic Monthly by Mr. Henry James, and in the Contemporary Review by M. Edouard Rod, as well as to articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and in the Dictionnaire Universel des Contemporains.

By kind permission of Messrs. Chatto & Windus it has been possible to include the diagram of the Rougon-Macquart Genealogical Tree, which appears in the Preface to their edition of Doctor Pascal, and to make use of their translations in the preparation of the Dictionary. In compiling the latter, Zola's own words have been adopted so far as possible, though usually they have required such condensation as to make direct quotation difficult. This difficulty was increased by the fact that occasional use was made of different translations of the same book, and that frequent references to the original were found necessary.

The Synopses of the Plots of the novels are arranged in the order in which the books should be read, as indicated by their Author in Le Docteur Pascal, and confirmed by his biographer, Mr. E. A. Vizetelly.

EDINBURGH, May, 1912. J. G. P.

INTRODUCTION

Emile Zola was born at Paris on 2nd April, 1840. His father, Francois Zola, was a man whose career up to that time had not been a success, though this was not due to any lack of energy or ability. Zola pere was of mixed nationality, his father being an Italian and his mother a Greek, and it is not unlikely that his unrest and want of concentration were due to the accident of his parentage. When quite a young man, Francois fought under the great Napoleon, after whose fall he became a civil engineer. He spent some time in Germany, where he was engaged in the construction of the first tramway line in Europe, afterwards visiting Holland and possibly England. Failure seems to have accompanied him, for in 1831 he applied for and obtained an appointment, as lieutenant in the Foreign Legion in Algeria. His career in Africa was, however, of short duration; some irregularities were discovered, and he disappeared for a time, though ultimately he came forward and made up his accounts, paying the balance that was due. No prosecution took place, and resignation of his commission was accepted. Nothing more was heard of the matter till 1898, when his son Emile identified himself with the cause of Dreyfus, and in the campaign of calumny that followed had to submit to the vilest charges against the memory of his father. The old dossier was produced by the French Ministry of War, the officials of which did not hesitate to strengthen their case by the forgery of some documents and the suppression of others. In view of these proved facts, and of the circumstance that Francois Zola, immediately after his resignation from the Foreign Legion, established himself as a civil engineer at Marseilles and prepared a scheme for new maritime docks there, and that in connection with this scheme he visited Paris repeatedly, obtaining private audiences with the King and interviewing statesmen, it must be held that the charges against him were of a venial nature, in no way warranting the accusations brought forward by the War Office nearly seventy years later to cast discredit on his son. Nothing came of the Marseilles harbour scheme, and the same fate attended subsequent plans for the fortification of Paris. Zola pere, who by this time had married, then turned his attention to a proposal to supply water to the town of Aix, in Provence, by means of a reservoir and canal. He removed thither with his wife and child, and after many delays and disappointments ultimately signed an agreement for the construction of the works. Even then further delays took place, and it was not till three years later that the work could be commenced. But the engineer's ill fortune still attended him, for one morning while he was superintending his workmen the treacherous mistral began to blow, and he took a chill, from the effects of which he died a few days afterwards.

The young widow, with her son Emile, then a child of seven, was left in poor circumstances, her only fortune being a claim against the municipality of Aix. Fortunately her parents had some means, and came to her assistance during the years of fruitless struggle to establish the rights of her dead husband. Emile had up to this time been allowed to run wild, and he had spent most of his time out of doors, where he acquired a love of the country which he retained in later years. Even when he was sent to school he was backward, only learning his letters with difficulty and showing little inclination for study. It was not till 1852, when he was twelve years sold, that his education really began. By this time he was able to realize his mother's financial position, and to see the sacrifices which were being made to send him as a boarder to the lycee at Aix. His progress then became rapid, and during the next five years he gained many prizes. Throughout all these years the struggle between Madame Zola and the municipality had gone on, each year diminishing her chance of success. In the end her position became desperate, and finding it impossible to continue to reside at Aix, the little family removed to Paris in 1858. Fortunately Emile was enabled by the intervention of certain friends of his late father to continue his studies, and became a day pupil at the Lycee St. Louis, on the Boulevard St. Michael. For some reason he made little progress there, and when he presented himself for his baccalaureat degree he failed to pass the examination. A later attempt at the University of Marseilles had the same result. As this examination is in France the passport to all the learned professions, Zola's failure to pass it placed him in a serious position. His mother's resources were by this time entirely exhausted, and some means of support had to be sought without delay. After many attempts, he got a place as clerk in a business house at a salary of twenty-six pounds a year, but the work proved so distasteful that after two months of drudgery he threw it up. Then followed a period of deep misery, but a period which must have greatly influenced the work of the future novelist. Wandering the streets by day and, when he could find money to buy a candle, writing poems and short stories by night, he was gaining that experience in the school of life of which he was later to make such splendid use. Meantime his wretchedness was deep. A miserable lodging in a garret, insufficient food, inadequate clothing, and complete absence of fire may be an incentive to high endeavour, but do not render easy the pathway of fame. The position had become all but untenable when Zola received an appointment in the publishing house of M. Hachette, of Paris, at a salary beginning at a pound a week, but soon afterwards increased. During the next two years he wrote a number of short stories which were published later under the title Contes a Ninon. The book did not prove a great success, though its undoubted ability attracted attention to the writer and opened the way to some journalistic work. About this time he appears to have been studying Balzac, and the recently published Madame Bovary of Flaubert, which was opening up a new world not only in French fiction, but in the literature of Europe. He had also read the Germinie Lacerteux of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, on which he wrote an appreciative article, and this remarkable book cannot have been without its influence on his work. The effect was indeed immediate, for in 1865 he published his next book, La Confession de Claud, which showed strong traces of that departure from conventional fiction which he was afterwards to make more pronounced. The book was not a financial success, though it attracted attention, and produced many reviews, some favourable, others merciless. Influenced by the latter, the Public Prosecutor caused inquiries regarding the author to be made at Hachette's, but nothing more was done, and it is indeed doubtful if any successful prosecution could have been raised, even at a period when it was thought necessary to indict the author of Madame Bovary.

Zola's employers had, however, begun to look askance at his literary work; they may have considered that it was occupying too much of the time for which they paid, or, more probably, they were becoming alarmed at their clerk's advanced views both on politics and literary art. As Zola afterwards explained the matter, one of the partners said to him, "You are earning two hundred francs a month here, which is ridiculous. You have plenty of talent, and would do better to take up literature altogether. You would find glory and profit there." The hint was a direct one, and it was taken. The young author was again thrown upon his own resources, but was no longer entirely unknown, for the not unfavourable reception of his first book and the violent attacks on his second had given him a certain position, even though it may to some extent have partaken of the nature of a succes de scandale. As he wrote at the time, he did not mean to pander to the likes or the dislikes of the crowd; he intended to force the public to caress or insult him.

Journalism was the avenue which now appeared most open, and Zola got an appointment on the staff of a newspaper called L'Evenement, in which he wrote articles on literary and artistic subjects. His views were not tempered by moderation, and when he depreciated the members of the Salon in order to exalt Manet, afterwards an artist of distinction, but then regarded as a dangerous revolutionary, the public outcry was such that he was forced to discontinue publication of the articles. He then began a second story called Le Vaeu d'une Morte in the same newspaper. It was intended to please the readers of L'Evenement, but from the first failed to do so, and its publication was stopped before it was half completed. Soon afterwards L'Evenement was incorporated with the Figaro, and Zola's connection with it terminated. A time of hardship again began, and during the year 1867 the wolf was only kept from the door by unremitting toil of the least agreeable kind. In the midst of his difficulties Zola wrote two books simultaneously, one supremely good and the other unquestionably bad. The one was Therese Raquin, and the other Les Mysteres de Marseille. The latter, which was pure hack-work, was written to the order of the publisher of a Marseillaise newspaper, who supplied historical material from researches made by himself at the Marseilles and Aix law courts, about the various causes celebres which during the previous fifty years had attracted the most public attention. These were to be strung together, and by an effort of legerdemain combined into a coherent whole in the form of a novel. Zola, desiring bread, undertook the task, with results that might have been anticipated.

Therese Raquin is a work of another kind, for into it Zola put the best that was in him, and elaborated the story with the greatest care. It is a tale of Divine Justice, wherein a husband is murdered by his wife and her lover, who, though safe from earthly consequence, are yet separated by the horror of their deed, and come to hate each other for the thing they have done. The book is one of remarkable power, and it is interesting to note that in the preface to it Zola first made use of the word naturalisme as describing that form of fiction which he was afterwards to uphold in and out of season. A violent attack in the Figaro gave opportunity for a vigorous reply, and the advertisement so obtained assisted the sales of the book, which from the first was a success. It was followed by Madeleine Ferat, which, however, was less fortunate. The subject is unpleasant, and its treatment lacks the force which made Therese Raquin convincing.

Up to this time Zola's life had been a steady struggle against poverty. He was terribly in earnest, and was determined to create for himself a place in literature; to accomplish this end he counted no labour too arduous, no sacrifice too great. His habits were Spartan in their simplicity; he was a slave to work and method, good equipment for the vast task he was next to undertake. He had long been an earnest student of Balzac, and there is no doubt that it was the example of the great Comedie Humaine which inspired his scheme for a series of novels dealing with the life history of a family during a particular period; as he described it himself, "the history natural and social of a family under the Second Empire." It is possible that he was also influenced by the financial success of the series of historical novels written by Erckmann-Chatrian, known as the Romans Nationaux. It was not, however, the past about which he proposed to write; no period was more suitable for his purpose than that in which he lived, that Second Empire whose regime began in blood and continued in corruption. He had there, under his own eyes and within his personal knowledge, a suitable mise-en-scene wherein to further develop those theories of hereditary influence which had already attracted his attention while he was writing Madeleine Ferat. The scheme was further attractive in as much as it lent itself readily to the system of treatment to which he had applied the term naturalisme, to distinguish it from the crudities of the realistic school. The scientific tendency of the period was to rely not on previously accepted propositions, but on observation and experience, or on facts and documents. To Zola the voice of science conveyed the word of ultimate truth, and with desperate earnestness he set out to apply its methods to literary production. His position was that the novelist is, like the scientist, an observer and an experimentalist combined. The observer, he says, gives the facts as he has observed them, fixes the starting-point, lays the solid ground on which his characters are to walk and his phenomena to develop. Then the experimentalist appears and starts the experiment, that is to say, he makes the personages in a particular story move, in order to show that the succession of events will be just what the determinism of phenomena together with study demand that they should be. The author must abstain from comment, never show his own personality, and never turn to the reader for sympathy; he must, as Mr. Andrew Lang has observed, be as cold as a vivisectionist at a lecture. Zola thought the application of this method would raise the position of the novel to the level of a science, and that it would become a medium for the expression of established truths. The fallacy of the argument has been exposed by more than one critic. It is self-evident that the "experiments" by the novelist cannot be made on subjects apart from himself, but are made by him and in him; so that they prove more regarding his own temperament than about what he professes to regard as the inevitable actions of his characters. The conclusion drawn by a writer from such actions must always be open to the retort that he invented the whole himself and that fiction is only fiction. But to Zola in the late sixties the theory seemed unassailable and it was upon it that he founded the whole edifice of Les Rougon-Macquart. The considerations then that influenced Zola in beginning a series of novels connected by subject into one gigantic whole were somewhat various. There was the example of Balzac's great Comedie Humaine; there was the desire of working out the theories of heredity in which he had become interested; there was the opportunity of putting into operation the system which he had termed naturalisme; and there was also the consideration that if he could get a publisher to agree to his proposals he would secure a certain income for a number of years. His original scheme was a series of twelve novels to be written at the rate of two a year, and he entered into a contract with a publisher named Lacroix, who was to pay him five hundred francs a month as an advance. M. Lacroix would, however, only bind himself to publish four out of the twelve novels. The arrangement could not be carried out, and at the end of three years only two volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series had been published, while Zola found that he had become indebted to the publisher for a very considerable sum.

The first novel of the series was begun in 1869, but was not published till the winter of 1871, delay having occurred on account of the war with Germany. Zola was never a rapid writer, and seems to have regulated his literary production with machinelike uniformity. As his friend and biographer Paul Alexis writes: "Only four pages, but four pages every day, every day without exception, the action of the drop of water always falling on the same place, and in the end wearing out the hardest stone. It seems nothing, but in course of time chapters follow chapters, volumes follow upon volumes, and a whole life's work sprouts, multiplies its branches, extends its foliage like a lofty oak, destined to rise high into the air and to remain standing in the forest of human productions."

His literary creed at the time he began the Rougon-Macquart series may be conveniently summed up in a few words from an article which he had only a month before written in the Gaulois: "If I kept a school of morals," he says, "I would hasten to place in the hands of my pupils Madame Bovary or Germinie Lacerteux, persuaded that truth alone can instruct and fortify generous souls."

In La Fortune des Rougon, then, Zola set out to plant the roots of the great family tree which was to occupy his attention during the next twenty years of his life. His object was to describe the origin of the family which he had selected for dissection in his series, and to outline the various principal characters, members of that family. Mr. Andrew Lang, writing on this subject in the Fortnightly Review, points out that certain Arab tribes trace their descent from a female Dog, and suggests that the Rougon-Macquart family might have claimed the same ancestry. Adelaide Fouque came of a race of peasants who had long lived at Plassans, a name invented by Zola to conceal the identity of Aix, the town in Provence where his youth had been spent. She was highly neurotic, with a tendency to epilepsy, but from the point of view of the naturalistic novelist she offered many advantages. When a mere girl she married a man named Rougon, who died soon afterwards, leaving her with a son named Pierre, from whom descended the legitimate branch of the family. Then followed a liaison with a drunken smuggler named Macquart, as a result of which two children were born, the Macquarts. Adelaide's original neurosis had by this time become more pronounced, and she ultimately became insane. Pierre married and had five children, but his financial affairs had not prospered, though by underhand methods he had contrived to get possession of his mother's property, to the exclusion of her other children. Then came the Coup d'Etat of 1851, and Pierre, quick to seize his opportunity, rendered such services to the Bonapartist party as to lay the foundation of the family fortune, a foundation which was, however, cemented with treachery and blood. It was with these two families, then, both descended from a common ancestress, and sometimes subsequently united by intermarriage, that the whole series of novels was to deal. They do not form an edifying group, these Rougon-Macquarts, but Zola, who had based his whole theory of the experimental novel upon the analogy of medical research, was not on the outlook for healthy subjects; he wanted social sores to probe. This is a fact much too often overlooked by readers of detached parts of the series, for it should always be kept in mind that the whole was written with the express purpose of laying bare all the social evils of one of the most corrupt periods in recent history, in the belief that through publicity might come regeneration. Zola was all along a reformer as well as a novelist, and his zeal was shown in many a bitter newspaper controversy. It has been urged against him that there were plenty of virtuous people about whom he could have written, but these critics appear to forget that he was in a sense a propagandist, and that it was not his metier to convert persons already in the odour of sanctity.

La Fortune des Rougon was not particularly successful on its publication, but in view of the fact that the war with Germany was barely concluded no surprise need be experienced. Zola's financial position was, however, by the arrangement with his publisher now more secure, and he felt justified in marrying. This he did, and settled down into the quiet bourgeois existence in which his life was spent.

The next book was La Curee, a study of the mushroom society of the Second Empire. The subject—the story of Phaedra adapted to modern environment—is unpleasant and the treatment is daring; but despite a slight succes de scandale, its reception by the public was no more favorable than that of La Fortune des Rougon.

La Curee was followed by Le Ventre de Paris, which reached a second edition. It contained some excellent descriptive writing, but was severely attacked by certain critics, who denounced it as the apotheosis of gluttony, while they resented the transference of a pork butcher's shop to literature and took particular exceptions to a certain "symphony of cheeses."

Next came La Conquete de Plassans, an excellent story, to be followed by La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret, one of Zola's most romantic books, and the first to attain any considerable success. He next wrote Son Excellence Eugene Rougon, in which he dealt with the political side of the Second Empire and sketched the life of the Imperial Court at Compiegne. For this task he was not particularly well equipped, and the book was only moderately successful. Then came L'Assommoir, and with it fame and fortune for the writer. It is a terrible story of working-class life in Paris, a study of the ravages wrought by drink. Again to quote Mr. Andrew Lang, "It is a dreadful but not an immoral book. It is the most powerful temperance tract that ever was written. As M. Zola saw much of the life of the poor in his early years, as he once lived, when a boy, in one of the huge lodging-houses he describes, one may fear that L'Assommoir is a not untruthful picture of the lives of many men and women in Paris."

In order to heighten the effect, Zola deliberately wrote the whole of L'Assommoir in the argot of the streets, sparing nothing of its coarseness and nothing of its force. For this alone he was attacked by many critics, and from its publication onwards an unexampled controversy arose regarding the author and his methods. Looking backwards it is difficult to see why such an outcry should have arisen about such a masterpiece of literature, but water has flowed beneath many bridges since 1877, and, largely by the influence of Zola's own work, the limits of convention have been widely extended. At the time, however, the work was savagely attacked, and to the author the basest motives were assigned, while libels on his own personal character were freely circulated. Zola replied to these attacks in a manner so calm and so convincing that quotation may be permitted. "It would be well," he said, "to read my novels, to understand them, to see them clearly in their entirety, before bringing forward the ready-made opinions, ridiculous and odious, which are circulated concerning myself and my works. Ah! if people only knew how my friends laugh at the appalling legend which amuses the crowd! If they only knew how the blood-thirsty wretch, the formidable novelist, is simply a respectable bourgeois, a man devoted to study and to art, living quietly in his corner, whose sole ambition is to leave as large and living a work as he can. I contradict no reports, I work on, and I rely on time, and on the good faith of the public, to discover me at last under the accumulation of nonsense that has been heaped upon me." This statement is absolutely in accordance with fact, and when it is realized that the writer of the Rougon-Macquart novels was merely a hard-working, earnest man, filled with a determination to complete the vast task which he had planned, and not to be turned from his ideas by praise or blame, it will go far to promote a better understanding of his aims and methods. It is necessary too, as has already been said, that the various novels forming the Rougon-Macquart series be considered not as separate entities, but as chapters of one vast whole.

L'Assommoir was an immediate success with the public, and the sales were unusually large for the time, while now (1912) they amount to one hundred and sixty-two thousand copies in the original French alone.

In 1878 Zola published Une Page d'Amour, the next volume of the series, a simple love story containing some very beautiful and romantic descriptions of Paris. Then followed Nana, to which L'Assommoir was the prelude. Nana dealt with the vast demimonde of Paris, and while it was his greatest popular success, was in every sense his worst book. Of no subject on which he wrote was Zola more ignorant than of this, and the result is a laboured collection of scandals acquired at second-hand. Mr. Arthur Symons, in his Studies in Prose and Verse, recounts how an English paper once reported an interview in which the author of Nana, indiscreetly questioned as to the amount of personal observation he had put into the book, replied that he had once lunched with an actress of the Varietes. "The reply was generally taken for a joke," says Mr. Symons, "but the lunch was a reality, and it was assuredly a rare experience in the life of a solitary diligence to which we owe so many impersonal studies in life." The sales of the book were, however, enormous, and Zola's financial position was now assured.

Publication of the Rougon-Macquart series went steadily on. Pot-Bouille a story of middle-class life, was followed by its sequel Au Bonheur des Dames, a study of life in one of the great emporiums which were beginning to crush out the small shopkeepers of Paris. La Joie de Vivre, that drab story of hypochondria and self-sacrifice, was succeeded by Germinal, the greatest, if not the only really great, novel of labour that has ever been written in any language. After Germinal came L'Oeuvre, which deals with art life in Paris, and is in part an autobiography of the author. We now come to La Terre around which the greatest controversy has raged. In parts the book is Shakespearian in its strength and insight, but it has to be admitted at once that the artistic quality of the work has been destroyed in large measure by the gratuitous coarseness which the author has thought necessary to put into it. Even allowing for the fact that the subject is the brutishness and animality of French peasant life, and admitting that the picture drawn may be a true one, the effect had been lessened by the fact that nothing has been left to the imagination. On the other hand there has, since Shakespeare, been nothing so fine as the treatment of Pere Fouan, that peasant King Lear, by his ungrateful family. It has been urged that Zola overdid the horrors of the situation and that no parent would have been so treated by his children. By a singular chance a complete answer to this objection may be found in a paragraph which appeared in the Daily Mail of 18th April, 1911. A few days before, a peasant woman in France had entered her father's bedroom and struck him nine times on the head with an axe, afterwards going home to bed. The reason for the crime was that the old man two years previously had divided his property between his two daughters on condition that they paid him a monthly allowance. His elder daughter was always in arrear with her share of the pension, and, after constant altercations between father and daughter, the latter extinguished her liability in the manner indicated. Now this tragedy in real life is the actual plot of La Terre, which was written twenty-four years before it occurred.

In accordance with the author's usual plan, whereby a heavy book was followed by a light one, La Terre was succeeded by Le Reve, a work at the other extreme of the literary gamut. As La Terre is of the earth, earthy, so is Le Reve spiritual and idyllic, the work of a man enamoured of the refined and the beautiful. It has indeed been described as the most beautiful work written in France during the whole of the nineteenth century.

La Bete Humaine, the next of the series, is a work of a different class, and is to the English reader the most fascinating of all Zola's novels. It deals with human passions in their elemental forms, with a background of constant interest in the railway life of Western France. The motives are always obvious and strong, a criticism which can by no means be invariably applied to French fiction.

Next appeared L'Argent, which is the sequel to La Curee and deals with financial scandals. It was inspired by the failure of the Union Generale Bank a few years before, and is a powerful indictment of the law affecting joint-stock companies. To L'Argent there succeeded La Debacle, that prose epic of modern war, more complete and coherent than even the best of Tolstoi. And to end all came Le Docteur Pascal, winding up the series on a note of pure romance.

Regarded as a literary tour de force the work is only comparable to the Comedie Humaine. It occupied nearly twenty-five years in writing, consists of twenty volumes containing over twelve hundred characters, and a number of words estimated by Mr. E. A. Vizetelly at two million five hundred thousand.

There can be little doubt that Zola's best work was expended on the Rougon-Macquart series. With its conclusion his zeal as a reformer began to outrun his judgment as an artist, and his later books partake more of the nature of active propaganda than of works of fiction. They comprise two series: Les Trois Villes (Lourdes, Paris, Rome) and Les Quatre Evangiles, of which only three (Fecondite, Travail, and Verite) were written before the author's death. Politics had begun to occupy his attention, and from 1896 onwards he increasingly interested himself in the Jewish question which culminated in the Dreyfus case. His sense of justice, always keen, was outraged by the action of the authorities and on 13th January, 1898, he published his famous letter, beginning with the words J'accuse, a letter which altered the whole course of events in France. It is difficult now to realize the effect of Zola's action in this matter; he was attacked with a virulence almost unexampled, a virulence which followed him beyond the grave. Four years later, on the day after his death, the Paris correspondent of The Times wrote: "It is evident the passions of two or three years ago are still alive. Many persons expressed their joy with such boisterous gestures as men indulge in on learning of a victory, and some exclaimed savagely, 'It is none too soon.' The unseemliness of this extraordinary spectacle evoked no retort from the passers-by." The feeling of resentment is still alive in France, and it is necessary to take it into account in the consideration of any estimates of his literary work by his own countrymen. It is a mistake to attribute Zola's campaign for the rehabilitation of Dreyfus to mere lust of fame, as has been freely done. He certainly was ambitious, but had he wished to gain the plaudits of the crowd he would not have adopted a cause which was opposed by the majority of the nation. As a result of the agitation, he was obliged to leave France and take refuge in England, till such time as a change of circumstances enabled him to return.

On 29th September, 1902, the world was startled to learn that Emile Zola had been found dead in his bedroom, suffocated by the fumes of a stove, and that his wife had narrowly escaped dying with him. A life of incessant literary labour had been quenched.

The reputation of Zola has suffered, it is to be feared, in no small degree from the indiscretions of his friends. In England he was introduced to the notice of the reading public by Mr. Henry Vizetelly, who between 1884 and 1889 published a number of translations of his novels. The last of these was The Soil, a translation of La Terre, which aroused such an outcry that a prosecution followed, and Mr. Vizetelly was sentenced to three months' imprisonment. Without raising any question as to the propriety of this prosecution, it is difficult to avoid pointing out that Mr. Vizetelly was singularly ill advised not to have taken into account the essential differences between English and French literature, and not have seen that the publication of this particular book in its entirety was an impossibility under existing conditions. It is regrettable also that Mr. Vizetelly, who though a gentleman of the highest character, was no doubt anxious to make the most possible out of his venture, did not duly appreciate that the word "Realistic," which was blazoned on the covers of the various books issued by him, was in the early eighties invariably interpreted as meaning pornographic. Presumably nothing was further from Mr. Vizetelly's wish—his defence at the trial was that the books were literature of the highest kind—but it is unquestionable that the format was such as to give the impression indicated, an impression deepened by the extremely Gallic freedom of the illustrations. There can be little doubt that had the works been issued in an unobtrusive form, without illustrations, they would have attracted less attention of the undesirable kind which they afterwards received. The use of the term "Realistic" was the more remarkable as Zola had previously invented the word Naturalisme to distinguish his work from that of the Realistic school. But if Zola's reputation in England suffered in this way, it is right to refer here to the debt of gratitude to Mr. E. A. Vizetelly under which the English public now lies. Some time after the prosecution of his father, Mr. Vizetelly began to publish, through Messrs. Chatto & Windus, a series of versions of Zola's works. The translations were admirably done, and while it was found necessary to make certain omissions, the task was so skilfully accomplished that in many cases actual improvement has resulted. These versions are at present the chief translations of Zola's works in circulation in this country; but while their number has been added to from time to time, it has not been found possible to include the whole of the Rougon-Macquart series. In 1894-5, however, the Lutetian Society issued to its members a literal and unabridged translation of six of the novels, made by writers of such eminence as Havelock Ellis, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. These are the only translations of these works which are of any value to the student, but they are unfortunately almost unobtainable, as the entire edition was restricted to three hundred copies on hand-made paper and ten on Japanese vellum.

A charge not unfrequently brought against Zola is that he was a somewhat ignorant person, who required to get up from textbooks every subject upon which he wrote. Now there seems to be little doubt that it was in the first instance due to the indiscretion of his biographer, M. Paul Alexis, that this charge has arisen. Impressed by the vast industry of his friend, M. Alexis said so much about "research" and "documents" that less friendly critics seized the opportunity of exaggerating the importance of these. Every novelist of any consequence has found it necessary to "cram" his subjects, but says little about the fact. James Payn, for instance, could not have written his admirable descriptions of China in By Proxy without much reading of many books, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling has not been blamed for studying the technicalities of engineering before he wrote The Ship that found Herself. It is open to question even whether Mr. Robert Hichens acquired his intimate knowledge of the conditions of life in Southern Europe and Northern Africa entirely without the assistance of Herr Baedeker. Zola undoubtedly studied his subjects, but far too much has been made of the necessity for his doing so. His equipment for the task he undertook was not less complete than that of many another novelist, and, like Dickens, he studied life in that school of a "stony-hearted stepmother," the streets of a great city.

Zola's literary method may be described as a piling up of detail upon detail till there is attained an effect portentous, overwhelming. He lacked, however, a sense of proportion; he became so carried away by his visions of human depravity, that his characters developed powers of wickedness beyond mortal strength; he lay under an obsession regarding the iniquities of mankind. In dealing with this it was unfortunately his method to leave nothing to the imagination, and herein lies the most serious blemish on his work. There is undoubtedly much coarseness in some of his books, and the regrettable feature is that it is not only unnecessary, but in some cases actually lessens the effect at which he aimed. It is doubtful whether he was possessed of any sense of humour. Mr. Andrew Lang says that his lack of it was absolute, a darkness that can be felt; Mr. R. H. Sherrard, on the other hand, indicates that his work "teems with quiet fun." On the whole, truth seems to lie with Mr. Lang. M. and Madame Charles Badeuil, in La Terre may seem Dickensian to an English reader, but there is always the Gallic point of view to be reckoned with, and it is doubtful if Zola did not regard these persons merely as types of a virtuous bourgeoisie.

It was in the treatment of crowds in motion that Zola chiefly excelled; there is nothing finer in literature than the march of the strikers in Germinal or the charges of the troops in La Debacle. Contrast him with such a master of prose as George Meredith, and we see how immensely strong the battle scenes in La Debacle are when compared with those in Vittoria; it is here that his method of piling detail on detail and horror on horror is most effectual. "To make his characters swarm," said Mr. Henry James in a critical article in the Atlantic Monthly (August, 1903), "was the task he set himself very nearly from the first, that was the secret he triumphantly mastered."

"Naturalism" as a school had a comparatively brief existence—Zola himself departed largely from its principles after the conclusion of the Rougon-Macquart series—but its effects have been far-reaching on the literature of many countries. In England the limits of literary convention have been extended, and pathways have been opened up along which later writers have not hesitated to travel, even while denying the influence of the craftsman who had cleared the way. It is safe to say that had L'Assommoir never been written there would have been no Jude the Obscure, and the same remark applies to much of the best modern fiction. In America, Frank Norris, an able writer who unfortunately died before the full fruition of his genius had obviously accepted Zola as his master, and the same influence is also apparent in the work of George Douglas, a brilliant young Scotsman whose premature death left only one book, The House with the Green Shutters, as an indication of what might have sprung from the methods of modified naturalism. M. Edouard Rod, an able critic, writing in the Contemporary Review (1902), pointed out that the influence of Zola has transformed novel writing in Italy, and that its effect in Germany has been not less pronounced. The virtue of this influence on German letters was undoubtedly great. It made an end of sentimentality, it shook literature out of the sleepy rut into which it had fallen and forced it to face universal problems.

One must regret for his own sake that Zola was unable to avoid offending those prejudices which were so powerful in his time. The novelist who adopts the method of the surgeon finds it necessary to expose many painful sores, and is open to the taunt that he finds pleasure in the task. On no one did this personal obloquy fall more hardly than on Zola, and never with less reason. It may be that he accumulated unseemly details and risky situations too readily; but he was an earnest man with a definite aim in view, and had formulated for himself a system which he allowed to work itself out with relentless fatality. The unredeemed baseness and profligacy of the period with which he had to deal must also be borne in mind. As to his personal character, it has been fitly described by M. Anatole France, himself a distinguished novelist. Zola, said he, "had the candour and sincerity of great souls. He was profoundly moral. He has depicted vice with a rough and vigorous hand. His apparent pessimism ill conceals a real optimism, a persistent faith in the progress of intelligence and justice. In his romances, which are social studies, he attacks with vigorous hatred an idle, frivolous society, a base and noxious aristocracy. He combated social evil wherever he encountered it. His work is comparable only in greatness with that of Tolstoi. At the two extremities of European thought the lyre has raised two vast cities. Both are generous and pacific; but whereas Tolstoi's is the city of resignation, Zola's is the city of work."

It is still too soon to form an opinion as to the permanent value of Zola's writings, for posterity has set aside many well-considered judgments; but their influence has been, and will continue to be, far reaching. They have opened up new avenues in literature, and have made possible to others much that was formerly unattainable.

THE ROUGON-MACQUART GENEALOGICAL TREE.

First Generation:

1. ADELAIDE FOUQUE, called AUNT DIDE, born in 1768, married in 1786 to Rougon, a placid, lubberly gardener; bears him a son in 1787; loses her husband in 1788; takes in 1789 a lover, Macquart, a smuggler, addicted to drink and half crazed; bears him a son in 1789, and a daughter in 1791; goes mad, and is sent to the Asylum of Les Tulettes in 1851; dies there of cerebral congestion in 1873 at 105 years of age. Supplies the original neurosis.

Second Generation:

2. PIERRE ROUGON, born in 1787, married in 1810 to Felicite Puech, an intelligent, active and healthy woman; has five children by her; dies in 1870, on the morrow of Sedan, from cerebral congestion due to overfeeding. An equilibrious blending of characteristics, the moral average of his father and mother, resembles them physically. An oil merchant, afterwards receiver of taxes.

3. ANTOINE MACQUART, born in 1789; a soldier in 1809; married in 1829 to a market dealer, Josephine Gavaudan, a vigorous, industrious, but intemperate woman; has three children by her; loses her in 1851; dies himself in 1873 from spontaneous combustion, brought about by alcoholism. A fusion of characteristics. Moral prepotency of and physical likeness to his father. A soldier, then a basket-maker, afterwards lives idle on his income.

4. URSULE MACQUART, born in 1791; married in 1810 to a journeyman-hatter, Mouret, a healthy man with a well-balanced mind. Bears him three children, dies of consumption in 1840. An adjunction of characteristics, her mother predominating morally and physically.

Third Generation:

5. EUGENE ROUGON, born in 1811, married in 1857 to Veronique Beulin d'Orcheres, by whom he has no children. A fusion of characteristics. Prepotency and ambition of his mother. Physical likeness to his father. A politician, at one time Cabinet Minister. Still alive in Paris, a deputy.

6. PASCAL ROUGON, born in 1813, never marries, has a posthumous child by Clotilde Rougon in 1874; dies of heart disease on November 7, 1873. Innateness, a combination in which the physical and moral characteristics of the parents are so blended that nothing of them appears manifest in the offspring. A doctor.

7. ARISTIDE ROUGON, alias SACCARD, born in 1815, married in 1836 to Angele Sicardot, the calm, dreamy-minded daughter of an officer; has by her a son in 1840, a daughter in 1847; loses his wife in 1854; has a natural son in 1853 by a work-girl, Rosalie Chavaille, counting consumptives and epileptics among her forerunners; remarried in 1855 to Renee Beraud Du Chatel, who dies childless in 1864. An adjunction of characteristics, moral prepotency of his father, physical likeness to his mother. Her ambition, modified by his father's appetites. A clerk, then a speculator. Still alive in Paris, directing a newspaper.

8. SIDONIE ROUGON, born in 1818, married at Plassans in 1838 to a solicitor's clerk, who dies in Paris in 1850. Has, by a stranger, in 1851, a daughter Angelique, whom she places in the foundling asylum. Prepotency of her father, physical likeness to her mother. A commission agent and procuress, dabbling in every shady calling; but eventually becomes very austere. Still alive in Paris, treasurer to the OEuvre du Sacrement.

9. MARTHE ROUGON, born in 1820, married in 1840 to her cousin Francois Mouret, bears him three children, dies in 1864 from a nervous disease. Reverting heredity, skipping one generation. Hysteria. Moral and physical likeness to Adelaide Fouque. Resembles her husband.

10. FRANCOIS MOURET, born in 1817, married in 1840 to Marthe Rougon, who bears him three children; dies mad in 1864 in a conflagration kindled by himself. Prepotency of his father. Physical likeness to his mother. Resembles his wife. At first a wine-merchant, then lives on his income.

11. HELENE MOURET, born in 1824, married in 1841 to Grandjean, a puny man, inclined to phthisis, who dies in 1853; has a daughter by him in 1842; remarried in 1857 to M. Rambaud, by whom she has no children. Innateness as in Pascal Rougon's case. Still living, at Marseilles, in retirement with her second husband.

12. SILVERE MOURET, born in 1834; shot dead by a gendarme in 1851. Prepotency of his mother. Innateness with regard to physical resemblance.

13. LISA MACQUART, born in 1827, married in 1852 to Quenu, a healthy man with a well-balanced mind. Bears him a daughter, dies in 1863 from decomposition of the blood. Prepotency of and physical likeness to her mother. Keeps a large pork-butcher's shop at the Paris markets.

14. GERVAISE MACQUART, born in 1828, has three sons by her lover Lantier, who counts paralytics among his ancestors; is taken to Paris, and there deserted by him; is married in 1852 to a workman, Coupeau, who comes of an alcoholic stock; has a daughter by him; dies of misery and drink in 1869. Prepotency of her father. Conceived in drunkenness. Is lame. A washerwoman.

15. JEAN MACQUART, born in 1831, married in 1867 to Francoise Mouche, who dies childless in 1870; remarried in 1871 to Melanie Vial, a sturdy, healthy peasant-girl, by whom he has a son, and who is again enceinte. Innateness, as with Pascal and Helene. First a peasant, then a soldier, then peasant again. Still alive at Valqueyras.

Fourth Generation:

16. MAXIME ROUGON, alias SACCARD, born in 1840, has a son in 1857 by a servant, Justine Megot, the chlorotic daughter of drunken parents; married in 1863 to Louise de Mareuil, who dies childless the same year; succumbs to ataxia in 1873. A dissemination of characteristics. Moral prepotency of his father, physical likeness to his mother. Idle, inclined to spending unearned money.

17. CLOTILDE ROUGON, alias SACCARD, born in 1847, has a son by Pascal Rougon in 1874. Prepotency of her mother. Reverting heredity, the moral and physical characteristics of her maternal grandfather preponderant. Still alive at Plassans.

18. VICTOR ROUGON, alias SACCARD, born in 1853. Adjunction of characteristics. Physical resemblance to his father. Has disappeared.

19. ANGELIQUE ROUGON, born in 1851, married in 1869 to Felicien de Hautecoeur, and dies the same day of a complaint never determined. Innateness: no resemblance to her mother or forerunners on the maternal side. No information as to her father.

20. OCTAVE MOURET, born in 1840, married in 1865 to Madame Hedouin, who dies the same year; remarried in 1869 to Denise Baudu, a healthy girl with a well-balanced mind, by whom he has a boy and a girl, still too young to be classified. Prepotency of his father. Physical resemblance to his uncle, Eugene Rougon. Indirect heredity. Establishes and directs "The Ladies' Paradise." Still alive in Paris.

21. SERGE MOURET, born in 1841. A dissemination of characteristics; moral and physical resemblance to his mother. Has his father's brain, influenced by the diseased condition of his mother. Heredity of a form of neurosis developing into mysticism. A priest, still alive at St. Eutrope.

22. DESIREE MOURET, born in 1844. Prepotency of and physical likeness to her mother. Heredity of a form of neurosis developing into idiocy. Still alive at St. Eutrope with her brother Serge.

23. JEANNE GRANDJEAN, born in 1842, dies of a nervous complaint in 1855. Reverting heredity, skipping two generations. Physical and moral resemblance to Adelaide Fouque.

24. Pauline Quenu, born in 1852, never marries. An equilibrious blending of characteristics. Moral and physical resemblance to her father and mother. An example of honesty. Still alive at Bonneville.

25. CLAUDE LANTIER, born in 1842, married in 1865 to Caroline Hallegrain, whose father succumbed to paraplegia; has by her, prior to marriage, a son, Jacques, who dies in 1869; hangs himself in 1870. A fusion of characteristics. Moral prepotency of and physical resemblance to his mother. Heredity of a form of neurosis developing into genius. A painter.

26. JACQUES LANTIER, born in 1844, killed in an accident in 1870. Prepotency of his mother. Physical likeness to his father. Heredity of alcoholism, developing into homicidal mania. An example of crime. An engine-driver.

27. ETIENNE LANTIER, born in 1846. A dissemination of characteristics. Physical resemblance, first to his mother, afterwards to his father. A miner. Still alive, transported to Noumea, there married, with children, it is said, who cannot, however, be classified.

28. ANNA COUPEAU, alias NANA, born in 1852, gives birth to a child, Louis, in 1867, loses him in 1870, dies herself of small-pox a few days later. A blending of characteristics. Moral prepotency of her father. Physical resemblance to her mother's first lover, Lantier. Heredity of alcoholism developing into mental and physical perversion. An example of vice.

Fifth Generation:

29. CHARLES ROUGON, alias SACCARD, born in 1857, dies of hemorrhage in 1873. Reverting heredity skipping three generations. Physical and moral resemblance to Adelaide Fouque. The last outcome of an exhausted stock.

30. JACQUES LOUIS LANTIER, born in 1860, a case of hydrocephalus, dies in 1869. Prepotency of his mother, whom he physically resembles.

31. LOUIS COUPEAU, called LOUISET, born in 1867, dies of small-pox in 1870. Prepotency of his mother, whom he physically resembles.

32. THE UNKNOWN CHILD will be born in 1874. What will it be?

SYNOPSES OF THE PLOTS OF THE ROUGON-MACQUART NOVELS

La Fortune des Rougon.

In the preface to this novel Zola explains his theories of heredity, and the work itself forms the introductory chapter to that great series which deals with the life history of a family and its descendants during the second empire.

The common ancestress of the Rougons and the Macquarts was Adelaide Fouque, a girl who from youth had been subject to nervous seizures. From her father she inherited a small farm, and at the age of eighteen married one of her own labourers, a man named Rougon, who died fifteen months afterwards, leaving her with one son, named Pierre. Shortly after her husband's death she fell completely under the influence of Macquart, a drunken smuggler and poacher, by whom in course of time she had a son named Antoine and a daughter named Ursule. She became more and more subject to cataleptic attacks, until eventually her mind was completely unhinged. Pierre Rougon, her legitimate son, was a man of strong will inherited from his father, and he early saw that his mother's property was being squandered by the Macquarts. By means approximating to fraud he induced his mother, who was then facile, to sell her property and hand over the proceeds to him. Soon after he married Felicite Peuch, a woman of great shrewdness and keen intelligence, by whom he had three sons (Eugene, Aristide, and Pascal) and two daughters (Marthe and Sidonie). Pierre Rougon was not particularly prosperous, but his eldest son, Eugene, went to Paris and became mixed up in the Bonapartist plots which led to the Coup d'Etat of 1851. He was consequently able to give his parents early information as to the probable course of events, and the result of their action was to lay the foundations of the family fortune.

The scene of the book is the Provencal town of Plassans, and the tragic events attending the rising of the populace against the Coup d'Etat are told with accuracy and knowledge. There is a charming love idyll between Silvere Mouret, a son of Ursule Macquart, and a young girl named Miette, both of whom fall as victims in the rising which followed the Coup d'Etat.

Mr. E. A. Vizetelly, in his introduction to the English translation of The Conquest of Plassans (London: Chatto & Windus), points out that almost every incident in The Fortune of the Rougons is based upon historical fact. "For instance," he says, "Miette had a counterpart in Madame Ferrier, that being the real name of the young woman who, carrying the insurgents' blood-red banner, was hailed by them as the Goddess of Liberty on their dramatic march. And in like way the tragic death of Silvere, linked to another hapless prisoner, was founded by M. Zola on an incident that followed the rising, as recorded by an eye-witness."

Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

An account of the career of Eugene Rougon, the eldest son of Pierre Rougon (La Fortune des Rougon), who went to Paris from Plassans, becoming involved in the plots which resulted in the Coup d'Etat of 1851 and the return of a Bonaparte to Imperial power. The future career of Rougon was assured; his services had been too important to be overlooked, and he ultimately became Minister of State and practically Vice-Emperor. He fell for a time under the influence of Clorinde Balbi, the daughter of an Italian adventuress, but realizing the risk of compromising himself, he shook himself free, and married a lady whose position in society tended to make his own still more secure. The novel gives an excellent account of the political and social life of the Second Empire, and of the cynical corruption which characterized the period.

In a preface to the English translation (His Excellency. London: Chatto & Windus), Mr. E. A. Vizetelly states that in his opinion, "with all due allowance for its somewhat limited range of subject, Son Excellence Eugene Rougon is the one existing French novel which gives the reader a fair general idea of what occurred in political spheres at an important period of the Empire. But His Excellency Eugene Rougon is not, as many critics and others have supposed, a mere portrait or caricature of His Excellency Eugene Rouher, the famous Vice-Emperor of history. Symbolism is to be found in every one of Zola's novels, and Rougon, in his main lines, is but the symbol of a principle, or, to be accurate, the symbol of a certain form of the principle of authority. His face is Rouher's, like his build and his favorite gesture; but with Rouher's words, actions, opinions, and experiences are blended those of half a dozen other personages. He is the incarnation of that craving, that lust for power which impelled so many men of ability to throw all principle to the winds and become the instruments of an abominable system of government. And his transformation at the close of the story is in strict accordance with historical facts."

La Curee.

In this novel Aristide Saccard, who followed his brother Eugene to Paris in the hope of sharing the spoils of the Second Empire (La Fortune des Rougon), was successful in amassing a vast fortune by speculation in building-sites. His first wife having died, he married Renee Beraud du Chatel, a lady of good family, whose dowry first enabled him to throw himself into the struggle of financial life. In a magnificent mansion which he built in the Parc Monceau a life of inconceivable extravagance began. The mushroom society of Paris was at this period the most corrupt in Europe, and the Saccards soon came to be regarded as leaders in every form of pleasure. Vast though their fortune was, their expenses were greater, and a catastrophe was frequently imminent. Renee, satisfied with prodigality of every kind, entered on an infamous liaison with her husband's son, a liaison which Aristide condoned in order to extract money from his wife. Rene ultimately died, leaving her husband immersed in his feverish speculations.

The novel gives a powerful though unpleasant picture of Parisian society in the period which followed the restoration of the Empire in 1851.

L'Argent.

After a disastrous speculation, Aristide Saccard (La Fortune des Rougon and La Curee) was forced to sell his mansion in the Parc Monceau and to cast about for means of creating a fresh fortune. Chance made him acquainted with Hamelin, an engineer whose residence in the East had suggested to him financial schemes which at once attracted the attention of Saccard. With a view to financing these schemes the Universal Bank was formed, and by force of advertising became immediately successful. Emboldened by success, Saccard launched into wild speculation, involving the bank, which ultimately became insolvent, and so caused the ruin of thousands of depositors. The scandal was so serious that Saccard was forced to disappear from France and to take refuge in Belgium.

The book was intended to show the terrible effects of speculation and fraudulent company promotion, the culpable negligence of directors, and the impotency of the existing laws. It deals with the shady underwoods of the financial world.

Mr. E. A. Vizetelly, in his preface to the English translation (Money. London: Chatto & Windus), suggests that Zola in sketching Saccard, that daring and unscrupulous financier, "must have bethought himself of Mires, whose name is so closely linked to the history of Second Empire finance. Mires, however, was a Jew, whereas Saccard was a Jew-hater, and outwardly, at all events, a zealous Roman Catholic. In this respect he reminds one of Bontoux, of Union General notoriety, just as Hamelin the engineer reminds one of Feder, Bontoux's associate. Indeed, the history of M. Zola's Universal Bank is much the history of the Union General. The latter was solemnly blessed by the Pope, and in a like way Zola shows us the Universal receiving the Papal benediction. Moreover, the second object of the Union General was to undermine the financial power of the Jews, and in the novel we find a similar purpose ascribed to Saccard's Bank. The union, we know, was eventually crushed by the great Israelite financiers, and this again is the fate which overtakes the institution whose meteor-like career is traced in the pages of L'Argent."

La Reve.

Written as a "passport to the Academy," this novel stands alone among the Rougon-Macquart series for its pure, idyllic grace. Angelique, a daughter of Sidonie Rougon (Le Curee), had been deserted by her mother, and was adopted by a maker of ecclesiastical embroideries, who with his wife lived and worked under the shadow of an ancient cathedral. In this atmosphere the child grew to womanhood, and as she fashioned the rich embroideries of the sacred vestments she had a vision of love and happiness which was ultimately realized, though the realization proved too much for her frail strength, and she died in its supreme moment. The vast cathedral with its solemn ritual dominates the book and colours the lives of its characters.

La Conquete de Plassans.

The heroine of this book is Marthe Rougon, the youngest daughter of Pierre and Felicite Rougon (La Fortune des Rougon), who had inherited much of the neurasthenic nature of her grandmother Adelaide Fouque. She married her cousin, Francois Mouret. Plassans, where the Mourets lived, was becoming a stronghold of the clerical party, when Abbe Faujas, a wily and arrogant priest, was sent to win it back for the Government. This powerful and unscrupulous ecclesiastic ruthlessly set aside every obstacle to his purpose, and in the course of his operations wrecked the home of the Mourets. Marthe having become infatuated with the priest, ruined her family for him and died neglected. Francois Mouret, her husband, who by the machinations of Faujas was confined in an asylum as a lunatic, became insane in fact, and having escaped, brought about a conflagration in which he perished along with the disturber of his domestic peace.

The book contains a vivid picture of the petty jealousies and intrigues of a country town, and of the political movements which followed the Coup d'Etat of 1851.

Pot-Bouille.

A study of middle-class life in Paris. Octave, the elder son of Francois Mouret, has come to the city, where he has got a situation in "The Ladies' Paradise," a draper's shop carried on by Madame Hedouin, a lady whom he ultimately marries. The interest of the book centres in a house in Rue de Choiseul which is let in flats to various tenants, the Vabres, Duvreyiers, and Josserands among others. The inner lives of these people, their struggles, their jealousies and their sins, are shown with an unsparing hand. Under the thin skin of an intense respectability there is a seething mass of depravity, and with ruthless art Zola has laid his subjects upon the dissecting-table. Of plot there is little, but as a terrible study in realism the book is a masterpiece.

An Bonheur des Dames.

Octave Mouret, after his marriage with Madame Hedouin, greatly increased the business of "The Ladies' Paradise," which he hoped would ultimately rival the Bon Marche and other great drapery establishments in Paris. While an addition to the shop was in progress Madame Mouret met with an accident which resulted in her death, and her husband remained a widower for a number of years. During this time his business grew to such an extent that his employees numbered many hundreds, among whom was Denise Baudu, a young girl who had come from the provinces. Mouret fell in love with her, and she, after resisting his advances for some time, ultimately married him. The book deals chiefly with life among the assistants in a great drapery establishment, their petty rivalries and their struggles; it contains some pathetic studies of the small shopkeepers of the district, crushed out of existence under the wheels of Mouret's moneymaking machine.

La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

Serge Mouret, the younger son of Francois Mouret (see La Conquete de Plassans), was ordained to the priesthood and appointed cure of Les Artaud, a squalid village in Provence, to whose degenerate inhabitants he ministered with small encouragement. He had inherited the family taint of the Rougon-Macquarts, which in him took the same form as in the case of his mother—a morbid religious enthusiasm bordering on hysteria. Brain fever followed, and bodily recovery left the priest without a mental past. Dr. Pascal Rougon, his uncle, hoping to save his reason, removed him from his accustomed surroundings and left him at the Paradou, the neglected demesne of a ruined mansion-house near Les Artaud, where he was nursed by Albine, niece of the caretaker. The Abbe fell in love with Albine, and, oblivious of his vows, broke them. A meeting with Archangias, a Christian Brother with whom he had been associated, and a chance glimpse of the world beyond the Paradou, served to restore his memory, and, filled with horror at himself, he fled from that enchanted garden. A long mental struggle followed, but in the end the Church was victorious, and the Abbe returned to her service with even more feverish devotion than before. Albine, broken-hearted, died among her loved flowers in the Paradou.

The tale is to some extend an indictment of the celibacy of the priesthood, though it has to be admitted that the issue is not put quite fairly, inasmuch as the Abbe was, at the time of his lapse, in entire forgetfulness of his sacred office. As a whole, the book contains some of Zola's best work, and is both poetical and convincing.

Une Page d'Amour.

A tale of Parisian life, in which the principal character is Helene Mouret, daughter of Mouret the hatter, and sister of Silvere Mouret (La Fortune des Rougon) and Francois Mouret (La Conquete de Plassans). Helene married M. Grandjean, son of a wealthy sugar-refiner of Marseilles, whose family opposed the marriage on the ground of her poverty. The marriage was a secret one, and some years of hardship had followed, when an uncle of M. Grandjean died, leaving his nephew a substantial income. The couple then moved to Paris with their young daughter Jeanne, but the day after their arrival Grandjean was seized with illness from which he died. Helene remained in Paris, though she had at first no friends there except Abbe Jouve and his half-brother M. Rambaud. Jeanne had inherited much of the family neurosis, along with a consumptive tendency derived from her father, and one of her sudden illnesses caused her mother to make the acquaintance of Doctor Deberle. An intimacy between the two families followed, which ripened into love between the doctor and Helene. Events were precipitated by an attempt on the part of Helene to save Madame Deberle from the consequences of an indiscretion in arranging an assignation with M. Malignon, with the result that she was herself seriously compromised in the eyes of Doctor Deberle and for the first and only time fell from virtue. Jeanne, whose jealous affection for her mother amounted to mania, was so affected by the belief that she was not longer the sole object of her mother's love that she became dangerously ill and died soon afterwards. This bitter punishment for her brief lapse killed Helene's love for Doctor Deberle, and two years later she married M. Rambaud. As Mr. Andrew Lang has observed, Helene was a good and pure woman, upon whom the fate of her family fell.

In writing the book Zola announced that his intention was to make all Paris weep, and there is no doubt that, though a study in realism, it contains much that is truly pathetic. The descriptions of Paris under varying atmospheric aspects, with which each section of the book closes, are wholly admirable.

Le Ventre de Paris.

A study of the teeming life which surrounds the great central markets of Paris. The heroine is Lisa Quenu, a daughter of Antoine Macquart (La Fortune des Rougon). She has become prosperous, and with prosperity her selfishness has increased. Her brother-in-law Florent had escaped from penal servitude in Cayenne and lived for a short time in her house, but she became tired of his presence and ultimately denounced him to the police. The book contains vivid pictures of the markets, bursting with the food of a great city, and of the vast population which lives by handling and distributing it. "But it also embraces a powerful allegory," writes Mr. E. A. Vizetelly in his preface to the English translation (The Fat and the Thin. London: Chatto & Windus), "the prose song of the eternal battle between the lean of this world and the fat—a battle in which, as the author shows, the latter always come off successful. M. Zola had a distinct social aim in writing this book."

La Joie de Vivre.

Pauline Quenu (Le Ventre de Paris), having been left an orphan, was sent to live with relatives in a village on the Normandy coast. It was a bleak, inhospitable shore, and its inhabitants lived their drab, hopeless lives under the morbid fear of inevitable death. The Chanteaus, Pauline's guardians, took advantage of her in every way, and Lazare Chanteau, her cousin, with whom she fell in love, got from her large sums of money to carry out wild schemes which he devised. The character of Pauline is a fine conception; basely wronged and treated with heartless ingratitude, her hopes blighted and her heart broken, she found consolation in the complete renunciation of herself for the sake of those who had so greatly injured her.

"The title selected by M. Zola for this book," says Mr. E. A. Vizetelly in his preface to the English translation (The Joy of Life. London: Chatto & Windus), "is to be taken in an ironical or sarcastic sense. There is no joy at all in the lives of the characters whom he portrays in it. The story of the hero is one of mental weakness, poisoned by a constantly recurring fear of death; whilst that of his father is one of intense physical suffering, blended with an eager desire to continue living, even at the cost of yet greater torture. Again, the story of the heroine is one of blighted affections, the wrecking of all which might have made her life worth living."

L'Assommoir.

A terrible study of the effects of drink on the moral and social condition of the working-class in Paris. There is probably no other work of fiction in which the effects of intemperance are shown with such grimness of realism and uncompromising force.

Gervaise Macquart, daughter of Antoine Macquart (La Fortune des Rougon), having accompanied her lover Lantier to Paris, taking with her their two children, was deserted by him a few weeks after their arrival in the city. She got employment in the laundry of Madame Fauconnier, and a few months later married Coupeau, a zinc-worker, who, though the son of drunken parents, was himself steady and industrious. For a while everything prospered with the Coupeaus; by hard work they were able to save a little money, and in time a daughter (Nana) was born to them. Then an accident to Coupeau, who fell from the roof of a house, brought about a change. His recovery was slow, and left him with an unwillingness to work and an inclination to pass his time in neighbouring dram-shops. Meantime Gervaise, with money borrowed from Goujet, a man who loved her with almost idyllic affection, had started a laundry of her own. She was successful for a time, in spite of her husband's growing intemperance and an increasing desire in herself for ease and good living; but deterioration had begun, and with the reappearance of Lantier, her old lover, it became rapid. Coupeau was by this time a confirmed loafer and drunkard, while Gervaise was growing careless and ease-loving. Lantier, having become a lodger with the Coupeaus, ceased doing any work, and as he never paid anything for his board, his presence not unnaturally hastened the downfall of his hosts. Circumstances conspired to renew the old relations between Gervaise and Lantier, and by easy stages she descended that somewhat slippery stair which leads to ruin. The shop was given up, and she again got employment in the laundry of Madame Fauconnier, though she was no longer the capable workwoman of former times. Nana, her daughter, vicious from childhood, had taken to evil courses; her husband had at least one attack of delirium tremens; and she herself was fast giving way to intemperance. The end was rapid. Coupeau died in the asylum of Sainte-Anne after an illness the description of which is for pure horror unparalleled in fiction; while Gervaise, after sinking to the lowest depths of degradation and poverty, died miserably in a garret. The tragedy of it all is that Gervaise, despite her early lapse with Lantier, was a good and naturally virtuous woman, whose ruin was wrought by circumstances and by the operation of the relentless laws of heredity.

It may be useful to note here that though Zola states in L'Assommoir that Gervaise and Lantier had two sons (Claude, born 1842, and Etienne, born 1846), he makes a third son (Jacques, born 1844), not elsewhere mentioned, the hero of La Bete Humaine, a subsequent work in the Rougon-Macquart series.

L'Oeuvre.

A novel dealing with artistic life in Paris towards the close of the Second Empire.

Claude Lantier, the eldest son of Auguste Lantier and Gervaise Macquart (La Fortune des Rougon and L'Assommoir), had been educated at Plassans by an old gentleman who was interested in his childish skill in drawing. His benefactor died, leaving him a sum which yielded an annual income of a thousand francs, and he came to Paris to follow an artistic career. There he met Dubuche, Pierre Sandoz, and others of his former schoolboy friends, and the little band formed a coterie of revolutionary spirits, whose aim was to introduce new ideas and drastic changes into the accepted canons of art. Claude attempted to embody his theories in a picture which he called Plein Air ("Open Air") in which he went direct to nature for inspiration, and threw aside all recognized conventions. The picture was refused by the committee of the Salon, and when subsequently shown at a minor exhibition was greeted with derision by the public. The artist was in despair, and left Paris with Christine Hallegrain, a young girl between whom and himself a chance acquaintanceship had ripened into love. They lived happily in a little cottage in the country for several years, a son being born to them, but Claude became restless, and they returned to Paris. Here he gradually became obsessed by an idea for a great picture, which would show the truth of his theories and cover his detractors with confusion. By this time there is no doubt that his mind was becoming affected by repeated disappointments, and that the family virus was beginning to manifest itself in him. Everything was now sacrificed to this picture; his little fortune was gradually encroached on, and his wife and child (he had married Christine some time after their return to Paris) were frequently without the necessaries of life. Christine was, however, devoted to her husband, and did all she could to induce him to leave the picture, which she saw was increasing his mental disturbance. This was becoming more serious, and in the death of his child he saw only the subject of a picture, L'Enfant Mort, which was exhibited at the Salon and was received with even more contempt than Plein Air. Despite all the efforts of Christine, Claude returned to his intended masterpiece, and one morning, in despair of achieving his aims, hanged himself in front of the fatal picture.

As a study of artistic life the novel is full of interest. There is little doubt that the character of Claude Lantier was suggested by that of Edouard Manet, the founder of the French Impressionist school, with whom Zola was on terms of friendship. It is also certain that Pierre Sandoz, the journalist with an idea for a vast series of novels dealing with the life history of a family, was the prototype of Zola himself.

La Bete Humaine.

A novel dealing with railway life in France towards the close of the Second Empire. The hero is Jacques Lantier, the second son of Gervaise Macquart and August Lantier (La Fortune des Rougon and L'Assommoir). When his parents went to Paris with his two brothers, he remained at Plassans with his godmother, "Aunt Phasie," who afterwards married Misard, a railway signalman, by whom she was slowly poisoned to secure a small legacy which she had concealed. After Jacques had passed through the School of Arts and Crafts at Plassans he became a railway engine-driver, and entered the service of the Western Railway Company, regularly driving the express train between Paris and Havre. He was a steady man and a competent engineer, but from his early youth he had been affected by a curious form of insanity, the desire to murder any woman of whom he became fond. "It seemed like a sudden outburst of blind rage, an ever-recurring thirst to avenge some very ancient offences, the exact recollection of which escaped him." There was also in the employment of the railway company, as assistant station-master at Havre, a compatriot of Lantier named Roubaud, who had married Severine Aubry, the godchild of President Grandmorin, a director of the company. A chance word of Severine's roused the suspicions of Roubaud regarding her former relations with the President, and, driven to frenzy by jealousy, he compelled her to become his accomplice in the murder of Grandmorin in an express train between Paris and Havre.

Though slight suspicion fell upon the Roubauds, they were able to prove an alibi, and as, for political reasons, it was not desired that Grandmorin's character should be publicly discussed, the inquiry into the murder was dropped. By a singular chance, however, Jacques Lantier had been a momentary witness of the crime, and the Roubauds became aware of his suspicions. To secure his silence they invited him constantly to their house, and a liaison with Severine followed. For the first time Lantier's blood lust was not aroused; the knowledge that this woman had killed seemed to constitute her a being apart and sacred. After the murder of Grandmorin a gradual disintegration of Roubaud's character set in, and he became in time a confirmed gambler. His relations with his wife were ultimately so strained that she induced Lantier to promise to murder him, in order that they might fly together to America with the proceeds of a small legacy she had received from Grandmorin. The arrangements were made, but at the last moment Lantier's frenzy overtook him, and it was Severine who was struck down by the knife destined for her husband. Lantier escaped without suspicion; but Roubaud, who was found on the scene of the crime under circumstances considered compromising, was tried, and along with a companion equally innocent, was sentenced to penal servitude for life. But Nemesis was not distant; Jacques had aroused the jealous fury of his fireman, Pecqueux, who, one night in 1870, attacked him as they were driving a train loaded with soldiers bound for the war. A fierce struggle followed, and in the end the two men fell from the engine and were cut in pieces beneath the wheels of the train, which, no longer under control, rushed on into the darkness with its living freight.

Germinal.

A novel dealing with the labour question in its special relation to coal-mining. The scene of the book is laid in the north of France at a time preceding and during a great strike; the hero is Etienne Lantier (La Fortune des Rougon and L'Assommoir). In a moment of passion Lantier had struck one of his superiors, and having been dismissed from his employment as an engineer, found it difficult to get work, till, after drifting from place to place, he eventually became a coal-miner. The hardships of the life and its miserable remuneration impressed him deeply, and he began to indoctrinate his comrades with a spirit of revolt. His influence grew, and he became the acknowledged leader of the strike which followed. The result was disastrous. After weeks of misery from cold and hunger the infuriated workmen attempted to destroy one of the pits, and were fired upon by soldiers sent to guard it. Many were killed, and the survivors, with their spirits crushed, returned to work. But worse was yet to come. Souvarine, an Anarchist, disgusted with the ineffectual struggle, brought about an inundation of the pit, whereby many of his comrades were entombed. Among them was Lantier, who was, however, eventually rescued.

As a study of the ever-lasting struggle between capital and labour the work has no rival in fiction; the miseries and degradation of the mining class, their tardy revolt against their employers, and their sufferings from hunger during its futile course, these are the theme, and the result is a picture of gloom, horrible and without relief.

Nana.

A novel dealing largely with theatrical life in Paris. Nana, the daughter of Coupeau and Gervaise Macquart his wife (L'Assommoir), has been given a part in a play produced at the Theatre des Varietes, and though she can neither sing nor act, achieves by the sheer force of her beauty an overwhelming success. All Paris is at her feet, and she selects her lovers from among the wealthiest and best born. But her extravagance knows no bounds, and ruin invariably overtakes those who yield to her fascination. After squandering vast sums she goes to the East, and stories spread that she had captivated a viceroy and gained a great fortune in Russia. Her return to Paris is speedily followed by her death from small-pox. In this novel the life of the courtesan class is dealt with by Zola with unhesitating frankness; there are many vivid studies of theatrical manners; and the racecourse also comes within its scope. The work was intended to lay bare the canker which was eating into the social life of the Second Empire and ultimately led to the debacle of 1870.

La Terre.

This is a novel which treats of the conditions of agricultural life in France before the war with Prussia, and the subsequent downfall of the Second Empire. It is, in some respects, the most powerful of all Zola's novels, but in dealing with the subject he unfortunately thought it necessary to introduce incidents and expressions which, from their nature, must always render it impossible to submit the book in its entirety to the general English reader.

Its connection with the Rougon-Macquart series is somewhat slight. Jean Macquart, son of Antoine Macquart and brother of Gervaise (La Fortune des Rougon), having served his time in the Army, came to the plain of La Beauce, and became an agricultural labourer on the farm of La Borderie, which belonged to Alexandre Hourdequin. He fell in love with Lise Mouche, who, however, married Buteau, and Macquart subsequently married her sister Francoise. Constant quarrels now arose between the two sisters as to the division of their father's property, and in the end Francoise was murdered by her sister. Macquart, tired of the struggle, decided to rejoin the army, which he did immediately after the outbreak of war.

The interest of the book is, however, largely connected with the history of the Fouans, a family of peasants, the senior member of which, having grown old, divided his land among his three children. The intense and brutish rapacity of these peasants, their utter lack of any feeling of morality or duty, their perfect selfishness, not stopping short of parricide, form a picture of horror unequalled in fiction. It is only to be regretted that the author, in leaving nothing to the imagination, has produced a work suitable only for the serious student of sociology.

La Debacle.

In the earlier volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series Zola had dealt with every phase of life under the Second Empire, and in this novel he tells the story of that terrific land-slide which overwhelmed the regime. It is a story of war, grim and terrible; of a struggle to the death between two great nations. In it the author has put much of his finest work, and the result is one of the masterpieces of literature. The hero is Jean Macquart, son of Antoine Macquart and brother of Gervaise (La Fortune des Rougon). After the terrible death of his wife, as told in La Terre, Jean enlisted for the second time in the army, and went through the campaign up to the battle of Sedan. After the capitulation he was made prisoner, and in escaping was wounded. When he returned to active service he took part in crushing the excesses of the Commune in Paris, and by a strange chance it was his hand that killed his dearest friend, Maurice Levasseur, who had joined the Communist ranks. La Debacle has been described as "a prose epic of modern war," and vast though the subject be, it is treated in a manner that is powerful, painful, and pathetic.

In the preface to the English translation (The Downfall. London: Chatto & Windus) Mr. E. A. Vizetelly quotes from an interview with Zola regarding his aim in writing the work. A novel, he says, "contains, or may be made to contain, everything; and it is because that is my creed that I am a novelist. I have, to my thinking, certain contributions to make to the thought of the world on certain subjects, and I have chosen the novel as the best way of communicating these contributions to the world. Thus La Debacle, in the form of a very precise and accurate relation of a series of historical facts—in other words, in the form of a realistic historical novel—is a document on the psychology of France in 1870. This will explain the enormous number of characters which figure in the book. Each character represents one etat d'ame psychologique of the France of the day. If my work be well done, the reader will be able to understand what was in men's minds and what was the bent of men's minds—what they thought and how they thought at that period."

Le Docteur Pascal.

In this, the concluding novel of the Rougon-Macquart series, Zola gathers together the threads of the preceding volumes and makes a vigorous defence of his theories of heredity. The story in the book is both simple and sad. Doctor Pascal Rougon, a medical man at Plassans and a distinguished student of heredity, had brought up his niece Clotilde (daughter of Aristide Rougon alias Saccard) from childhood. Years afterwards they found that they passionately loved one another, but they did not marry, as Pascal, who had lost money, thought that by doing so she would sacrifice her interests. (In this connection it is right to mention that marriage between an uncle and a niece is legal in France, and is not uncommon.) With fine self-sacrifice Pascal persuaded Clotilde to go to Paris to live with her brother who was wealthy and wanted her to nurse him. Soon after her departure Pascal showed symptoms of a fatal affection of the heart, and after some weeks of great suffering telegraphed for Clotilde to come back. One hour before her return he died. His mother, Madame Felicite Rougon, who feared that his researches on heredity might bring scandal on the family, burned all his papers, and in one hour destroyed the work of a lifetime. A child was born to Clotilde seven months after the death of Doctor Pascal; a child which he intensely desired, in the hope that through it might come the regeneration and rejuvenation of his race.

Zola, in an interview quoted by Mr. E. A. Vizetelly in the preface to his translation of Le Docteur Pascal (London: Chatto & Windus), states that in this book he has been able to defend himself against all the accusations which have been brought against him. "Pascal's works on the members of his family," says Zola, "is, in small, what I have attempted to do on humanity, to show all so that all may be cured. It is not a book which, like La Debacle, will stir the passions of the mob. It is a scientific work, the logical deduction and conclusion of all my preceding novels, and at the same time it is my speech in defence of all that I have done before the court of public opinion."

THE ZOLA DICTIONARY

A

ADELE, the girl for whom Auguste Lantier deserted Gervaise Macquart. They lived together for seven years, a life of constant bickerings and quarrels, accompanied, not infrequently, by blows, until the connection was ended by Adele running away. Her sister was Virginie, with whom Gervaise fought in the public washing-house on the day of her desertion by Lantier. L'Assommoir.

ADELE, maid-servant to the Josserands, and one of Hector Trublot's friends. Pot-Bouille.

ADELE, an assistant in the shop of Quenu, the pork-butcher. It was she who took charge of the shop on the sudden death of her master. And subsequently sent Pauline Quenu to Madame Chanteau. La Joie de Vivre.

ADOLPHE, an artillery driver in the same battery as Honore Fouchard. In accordance with a rule of the French artillery, under which a driver and a gunner are coupled, he messed with Louis, the gunner, whom, however, he was inclined to treat as a servant. At the battle of Sedan, before the Calvary d'Illy, where the French were almost exterminated by the Prussian artillery, Adolphe fell, killed by a wound in the chest; in a last convulsion he clasped in his arms Louis, who had fallen at the same moment, killed by the same shot. La Debacle.

ALBINE, niece of Jeanbernat, keeper of the Paradou, a neglected demesne in Provence. Her father had ruined himself and committed suicide when she was nine years old, and she then came to live with her uncle. She grew up in that vast garden of flowers, herself its fairest, almost in ignorance of the world outside, and when Abbe Mouret came to the Paradou forgetful of his past, she loved him unconsciously from the first. As she nursed him towards health, and his mind began again to grow from that fresh starting-point to which it had been thrown back, there developed an idyll as beautiful and as innocent as that which had its place in another and an earlier garden. The awakening of Abbe Mouret to the recollections of his priesthood ended the romance, for the call of his training was too strong for his love. One effort Albine made to bring him back, and it was successful in so much that one day he returned to the Paradou. Again there followed the struggle between the flesh and the Church, and again the Church prevailed. Broken-hearted, Albine passed for the last time through her loved garden, gathering as she went vast heaps of flowers. More and more she gathered, till her room was nearly full; then, closing the door and windows, she lay down amongst the flowers, and allowed herself to be suffocated by their overpowering perfume. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

ALEXANDRE, a porter at the Halles Centrales, where he became a friend of Claude Lantier. He was involved along with Florent and Gavard in the revolutionary meetings at Lebigre's wine-shop, and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Le Ventre de Paris.

ALEXANDRE, one of the warders at the asylum of Les Tulettes. He was a friend of Antoine Macquart, and at his request allowed Francois Mouret to escape from the asylum, with disastrous results to Abbe Faujas and his relations. La Conquete de Plassans.

ALEXANDRE, a boy employed in the shop known as Au Bonheur des Dames. Pot-Bouille.

AMADIEU, a speculator on the Paris Bourse who made a fortune by a rash purchase of mining stock. He went into the affair without calculation or knowledge, but his success made him revered by the entire Bourse. He placed no more orders, however, but seemed to be satisfied with his single victory. L'Argent.

AMANDA, one of the singers at a cafe concert in Boulevard Rochechouart. L'Assommoir.

AMELIE, a demi-mondaine who lodged at the Hotel Vanneau, which was kept by Madame Correur. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

AMELIE, wife of a journeyman carpenter who occupied a little room at the top of Vabre's tenement-house in Rue Choiseul. Pot-Bouille.

ANDRE (LE PERE), an old countryman at Chavanoz, the village where Miette spent her childhood. La Fortune des Rougon.

ANGELE (SISTER), a nun attached to the infirmary of the college of Plassans. Her Madonna-like face turned the heads of all the older pupils, and one morning she disappeared with Hermeline, a student of rhetoric. L'Oeuvre.

ANGELIQUE MARIE, born 1851, was the daughter of Sidonie Rougon, by an unknown father. Soon after her birth she was taken to the Foundling Hospital by a nurse, Madame Foucart, and no further inquiries were ever made about her. She was at first boarded with Francoise Hamelin, by whom she was not unkindly treated, and subsequently went to Paris with Louis Franchomme and his wife, who wished to teach her the trade of artificial-flower making. Franchomme having died three months later, his widow went to reside at Beaumont with her brother, Rabier, taking Angelique with her. Unfortunately, Madame Franchomme died a few months afterwards, leaving Angelique to the care of the Rabiers, who used her badly, not even giving her enough to eat. In consequence of their treatment, she ran away on Christmas Day, 1860, and the following morning was found in a fainting condition by Hubert, the chasuble-maker, who noticed her lying in the snow within the porch of the cathedral of Beaumont. Hubert and his wife took the child into their home, and, becoming attached to her, ultimately adopted her as their daughter, teaching her the art of embroidering vestments, in which she became very skilful. Angelique, though an amiable girl, was at first liable to violent attacks of temper, and it was only by the exercise of much patience and tact on the part of Madame Hubert that this tendency was overcome. The girl was always a dreamer, and her cloistered life with the Huberts, along with constant reading of the lives of the saints, brought out all that was mystic in her nature. A chance meeting between Angelique and a young man named Felicien led to their falling in love, she being in entire ignorance of the fact that he was the son of Monseigneur d'Hautecoeur, and a member of one of the oldest and proudest families in France. Felicien's father having refused his consent to a marriage, and a personal appeal to him by Angelique having failed, the lovers were separated for a time. The girl gradually fell into ill-health, and seemed at the point of death when Monseigneur himself came to administer the last rites of the Church. Having been miraculously restored to a measure of health, Angelique was married to Felicien d'Hautecoeur in the great cathedral of Beaumont. She was very feeble, and as she was leaving the church on the arm of her husband she sank to the ground. In the midst of her happiness she died; quietly and gently as she had lived. Le Reve.

ANGLARS (IRMA D'), a demi-mondaine of former times who had been celebrated under the First Empire. In her later years she retired to a house which she owned at Chamont, where she lived a simple yet stately life, treated with the greatest respect by all the neighbourhood. Nana.

ANNOUCHKA, mistress of Souvarine, and implicated with him in a political plot. Disguised as a countryman, she assisted in the undermining of a railway over which an imperial train was to pass, and it was she who eventually lit the fuse. She was captured along with others, and Souvarine, who had escaped, was present at her trial during six long days. When she came to be executed, she looked in vain among the crowd for her lover, till Souvarine mounted on a stone, and, their eyes having met, remained fixed in one long gaze till the end. Germinal.

ANTONIA, waiting-maid to Clorinde Balbi, with whom she was on familiar terms. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

ARCHANGLAS (BROTHER), a Christian Brother, who lived at Les Artaud, and taught children there. He was a coarse-minded man of violent temper, whose hatred of women led him to make the gravest charges against them. He constituted himself a spy on the actions of Abbe Mouret, and was partly the means of calling back the priest's memory of his sacred calling. He insulted Jeanbernat and Albine so grossly, that after the girl's death the old man attacked him and cut off his right ear with a pocket-knife. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

AUBERTOT (MADAME ELIZABETH), sister of M. Beraud du Chatel, and aunt of Renee and Christine. She gave a large sum of money to Saccard on his marriage to Renee. La Curee.

AUBRY (SEVERINE), youngest daughter of a gardener in the employment of Grandmorin. Her mother died when she was in infancy, and she was only thirteen when she lost her father also. President Grandmorin, who was her godfather, took charge of her, and brought her up with his daughter Berthe. The two girls were sent to the same school at Rouen, and spent their holidays together at Doinville. Ignorant and facile, Severine yielded to the designs of the old President, who subsequently arranged a marriage for her with Roubaud, an employee of the Western Railway Company. For three years the couple lived happily, but a moment of forgetfulness, a trifling lie which she neglected to sustain, revealed everything to Roubaud. In an accession of jealous fury he forced his wife to become his accomplice in the murder of Grandmorin, and it was she who threw herself across the limbs of the President while her husband struck the fatal blow. Suspicions fell upon the Roubauds, and indeed the truth was known to M. Camy-Lamotte, but political considerations made it desirable that the character of President Grandmorin should not be publicly discussed, and the inquiry into the murder was dropped. The domestic relations between the Roubauds were becoming more and more strained, and Severine became entirely enamoured of Jacques Lantier. In order to free herself from her husband, she persuaded Lantier to murder Roubaud and fly with her to America. The arrangements were completed when Lantier was seized with one of the homicidal frenzies to which he was subject, and it was Severine herself who fell under his knife instead of their intended victim. La Bete Humaine.

AUGUSTE, keeper of an eating-house known as Le Moulin d'Argent on Boulevard de la Chapelle. The wedding party of Coupeau and Gervaise was given there. L'Assommoir.

AUGUSTE, a waiter at the Cafe des Varietes. Nana.

AUGUSTE, a young swine-herd at La Borderie. He assisted Soulas, the old shepherd, to look after the sheep. La Terre.

AUGUSTINE, a young girl who assisted Gervaise Coupeau in her laundry. She was squint-eyed and mischievous, and was always making trouble with the other employees. As she was the least qualified and therefore the worst-paid assistant in the laundry, she was kept on after decreasing business caused the others to leave. L'Assommoir.

AUGUSTINE, an artificial-flower maker who was employed by Madame Titreville. L'Assommoir.

AURELIE (MADEMOISELLE), an elderly friend of Madame Deberle, at whose house she was a frequent visitor. She was in straitened circumstances. Une Page d'Amour.

AURELIE (MADAME). See Madame Aurelie Lhomme. Au Bonheur des Dames.

AURIGNY (LAURE D'), a celebrated demi-mondaine of the Second Empire. At a sale of her effects, Aristide Saccard bought a diamond necklace and aigrette for his second wife. La Curee.

B

BABET, one of the peasant girls of Les Artaud, who came to decorate the church for the festival of the Virgin. She was a hunchback. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

BACHELARD (PERE), brother of Narcisse Bachelard and uncle of Madame Josserand. He conducted for forty years a boarding-school known as the Institution-Bachelard. Pot-Bouille.

BACHELARD (ELEONORE). See Madame Josserand. Pot-Bouille.

BACHELARD (NARCISSE), a commission agent, whose keen business instincts were not blunted by his intemperate habits. He was a brother of Madame Josserand, and had at one time promised to give a dowry to her daughter Berthe; this promise he was unwilling to implement, and when spoken to on the subject usually feigned intoxication; eventually he suggested the somewhat dishonest plan by which Berthe's intended husband was hoodwinked into the belief that the dowry would be duly forthcoming. His protegee, Fifi, having compromised herself with Gueulin, his nephew, he insisted on their marriage, and presented the girl with a dowry. Pot-Bouille.

BADEUIL (CHARLES), married Laure Fouan, and went to live at Chartres. He tried commerce without much success, and, haunted by a desire for rapid fortune, acquired a maison publique which had fallen into bad repute through mismanagement. Thanks to the firm control of Badeuil, and the extraordinary activity of his wife, the establishment prospered, and in less than twenty-five years the couple had saved three hundred thousand francs. They were then able to realize the dream of their life, and to retire to the country, where they purchased a property named Roseblanche, near Madame Badeuil's native place. M. Badeuil was a handsome man, sixty-five years of age, with a solemn face, and the air of a retired magistrate. He was respected by his neighbours, and held the strictest views on morality. The old couple lived in complete happiness, their only worry being that Vaucogne, who had married their daughter Estelle and taken over the property in Chartres, was not managing it properly. La Terre.

BADEUIL (MADAME LAURE), wife of the preceding, was the youngest daughter of Joseph Casimir Fouan. She was the sister of La Grande, of Pere Fouan, and of Michel Fouan, known as Mouche. When her father's estate was divided, she got no land, but received an indemnity in money instead. After she and her husband acquired the establishment in Chartres, she assisted ably in its management. At the time of their retirement to the country, she was a woman of sixty-two years of age, of respectable appearance and an air of religious seclusion. She set a good example by going regularly to Mass, and paid great attention to the education of her granddaughter, Elodie, whom she endeavoured to bring up in entire ignorance of life. She had, however, still a passion for active life, and in busy seasons frequently returned to Chartres to assist her daughter, who had taken over the establishment there. Madame Badeuil received the greatest surprise of her life when she found that her granddaughter whom she had brought up in the innocence of ignorance, was quite aware of the source of the family fortune, and was ready to take up the work begun by her grandparents. La Terre.

BADEUIL (ESTELLE), daughter of the preceding, was educated by the Sisters of the Visitation at Chateaudun, and at eighteen was married to Hector Vaucogne, by whom she had one daughter, Elodie. She was thirty years of age before she had any suspicion of the calling of her parents, and at that time she took over the management of their establishment. She proved a capable manager, and in spite of the laziness of her husband, was able to keep up the reputation of the house, though in a few years she killed herself with hard work. La Terre.

BADINGUET, a popular nickname for Napoleon III. It was the name of the workman whose clothes he wore when he escaped from the fortress of Ham. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BAILLEHACHE, a notary at Cloyes, was born in 1805, and succeeded to several generations of lawyers. He had a large business amongst the peasantry, in whose quarrels he mediated with professional calmness. He arranged the division of Fouan's property between the various members of the old man's family. La Terre.

BAILLEHACHE (MADEMOISELLE), eldest sister of the preceding, was born in 1799. She was plain-looking, but good-natured, and at thirty-two married Alexandre Hourdequin, to whom she brought a considerable dowry. She had two children, a son and a daughter, and died in 1855. La Terre.

BALBI (CLORINDE), daughter of Comtesse Balbi, was a lady of great beauty, but of eccentric habits. Her position in society being precarious, she determined to establish it by a good marriage, and used every endeavour to induce Eugene Rougon to make her his wife. Having become fascinated by her beauty and charm, he made overtures which she resisted in the belief that he would be the more certain to marry her. He practically decided to do so, but reflection convinced him that marriage with Clorinde Balbi would only injure his prospects of political success. He suggested to her that she should marry his friend Delestang, who was a man of wealth and position, and had expressed admiration for her. Though naturally piqued at such a suggestion coming from Rougon, she consented, and soon after was married. She remained on outwardly friendly terms with Rougon, who was still infatuated by her, but was determined to make him regret the slight he had put upon her. After Rougon's return to office, Delestang, her husband, was, at her request, appointed Minister of Commerce and Agriculture. She had not, however, forgiven Rougon, and privately took a leading part in the agitation against his administration. Having become on somewhat equivocal terms with the Emperor, she was able to secure the acceptance of Rougon's second resignation, and the office of Minister of the Interior for her husband. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BALBI (COMTESSE LENORA), an Italian lady who lived in Paris with her daughter Clorinde. Little was known of her past, and it was generally believed that she was in the employment of the Sardinian Government. After her daughter's marriage to Delestang, she left Paris for some time, the eccentricity of her habits having begun to excite remark. M. De Plouguern, who had originally met her in Italy, remained her lover for thirty years. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BALTHAZER, the old horse driven by Madame Francois between Nanterre and Paris. Le Ventre de Paris.

BAMBOUSSE, mayor of the commune of Les Artaud, was more prosperous than the others of his class, as he owned several fields of corn, olives, and vines. His daughter Rosalie having become compromised with Fortune Brichet, Abbe Mouret strongly urged him to consent to a marriage between them, but this he at first refused, as he would lose the services of his daughter, and Fortune was too poor to make him any return. He ultimately consented, and the marriage was solemnized by Abbe Mouret. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

BAMBOUSSE (CATHERINE), younger daughter of the preceding, was always in disgrace with Brother Archangias on account of her idle habits and her friendship for Vincent Brichet. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

BAMBOUSSE (ROSALIE), elder daughter of the preceding. As she had become compromised by Fortune Brichet, Abbe Mouret urged her father to consent to their marriage, but this he refused to do, though he ultimately consented and the wedding took place. Her child died, and was buried on the same day as Albine. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

BAPTISTE, Aristide Saccard's footman. La Curee.

BAPTISTIN, a clerk in the employment of Larsonneau, who made him play the part of principal in a scheme whereby he intended to blackmail Aristide Saccard. La Curee.

BAQUET (LA MERE), a wine dealer who sold the wines of Orleans at a cheap rate. L'Assommoir.

BARILLOT, "call-boy" at the Theatre des Varietes, where he had been for thirty years. He was a little, sallow man, with a shrill voice. Nana.

BASTIAN, a drummer in the 106th regiment of the line, commanded by Colonel de Vineuil. During the retreat on Sedan, after the battle was over, he had the misfortune to be struck by a stray bullet. He was removed to an ambulance at the house of M. Delaherche, where he died during the division of treasure of the Seventh Army Corps. The gold coins which the sergeant put into his dying hands rolled on to the ground, and were picked up by a wounded companion. La Debacle.

BATAILLE, an old white horse, which had been for six years in the coal-pit at Voreux. It was killed by the flooding of the mine. Germinal.

BAUDEQUIN, a draughtsman who lived on the first floor of the house in which lived the Coupeaus and the Lorilleux. He was a confirmed sponger who was in debt all round, but spent his time in smoking and talking with his friends. L'Assommoir.

BAUDEQUIN, the proprietor of a cafe in the Boulevard des Batignolles, which was the resort on Sunday evenings during many years of Claude Lantier, Pierre Sandoz, Dubuche, Mahoudeau, and their friends, a band of youths devoted to art and determined to conquer Paris. Gradually, however, the little company became submerged by a flood of newcomers, and in time the meetings ceased. The cafe changed hands three times, and when, after some years, Claude and Sandoz chanced to return, they found everything completely altered. L'Oeuvre.

BAUDU (M.), proprietor of a drapery shop opposite "The Ladies' Paradise." The business had been in existence for many years and M. Baudu conducted it on such old-fashioned lines that in competition with Mouret's great establishment it was rapidly disappearing. He had acquired it from his father-in-law, and in turn he proposed to hand it to Colomban, his shopman, who was engaged to be married to Genevieve, his only daughter. Baudu postponed the marriage, however, from time to time, as he did not wish to hand over the business in a worse state than that in which he himself got it. Meanwhile Colomban had become infatuated with Clara Prunaire, who ultimately induced him to run off. Genevieve, who was in bad health, died soon afterwards, and before long her mother died also. The business had gone from bad to worse, and, in the end, Baudu lost everything, only avoiding bankruptcy by a complete surrender. Like many of his neighbours, he was crushed out of existence by Octave Mouret's triumphant success. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BAUDU (MADAME ELIZABETH), wife of the preceding, was the daughter of a draper whose business she brought to her husband. Her health was broken down by worry, and by anxiety regarding her daughter Genevieve, whose death she did not long survive. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BAUDU (CAPTAIN), son of Baudu, the draper. He went to Mexico. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BAUDU (DENISE) was the daughter of a dyer at Valognes. The death of her father left her with two young brothers dependent on her, and, the elder having got a situation in Paris, she determined to accompany him. M. Baudu, her uncle, had formerly promised assistance, but when Denise arrived she found that his business was rapidly being ruined by the steady extension of "The Ladies' Paradise," an enormous drapery establishment belonging to Octave Mouret. In these circumstances she could not be dependent on her uncle, and, to his annoyance, she applied for and got a situation in this rival business. On account of petty jealousies, her life there was not happy, and, having incurred the enmity of Jouve, one of the inspectors, she was dismissed on a false accusation. A time of great hardship followed, only lightened by the kindness of old Bourras, in whose house she had rented a room for herself and her young brother Pepe. She next got a situation with Robineau, who had bought a silk merchant's business and she remained there for some time. While Denise was at "The Ladies' Paradise" she had attracted the attention of Octave Mouret, and, chancing to meet her one day, he asked her to return. As she found that Robineau's business was not prospering, she consented, and from that time her position in "The Ladies' Paradise" was assured. Mouret had fallen in love with her, and she with him, but she had sufficient strength of mind to refuse his proposals. Ultimately he asked her to marry him, and to this she agreed. Au Bonheur des Dames.

Madame Denise Mouret had two children, the elder being a girl and the younger a boy. These resembled their mother, and grew magnificently. Le Docteur Pascal.

BAUDU (GENEVIEVE), daughter of Baudu, the draper. She was engaged for a number of years to Colomban, her father's shopman, but in consequence of the state of trade the marriage was put off from time to time. Genevieve ultimately learned that her fiance had become infatuated with Clara Prunaire, one of the shop-girls in "The Ladies' Paradise." Her health, never good, suffered greatly, and soon after Colomban's disappearance she died. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BAUDU (JACQUELINE). See Blanche de Sivry.

BAUDU (JEAN), the elder brother of Denise. He worked for a time with a cabinet-maker in Valognes, but earned nothing, though he learned to carve so well that a gentleman promised to find a place for him with an ivory-carver in Paris. He accepted the offer, and came to the city with his sister and young brother. At first he earned only his board and lodging, and, as he was good-looking and a favourite with women, he made heavy inroads on his sister's small purse. Ultimately, when he did get a wage, he took the earliest opportunity of getting married, inducing his sister, as usual, to give him what little money she had been able to save. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BAUDU (PEPE), the youngest brother of Denise. He was a mere child when the family came to Paris, and it was only by the greatest self-sacrifice that Denise was able to support him. When she went to "The Ladies' Paradise" he was boarded with Madame Gras, and after his sister's dismissal he went with her to Bourras, who showed great kindness to both of them. After Denise returned to "The Ladies' Paradise," Pepe again went to live with Madame Gras for a time. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BAUDU (THERESE), wife of Jean Baudu. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BAUGE, who was the younger son of a grocer at Dunkerque, came to Paris and got a situation in the linen department of the "Bon Marche," where he was able to make a fairly good income. He became the lover of Pauline Cugnot, whom he afterwards married, and, in order to be near her, left the "Bon Marche" and took an appointment in "The Ladies' Paradise." Au Bonheur des Dames.

BAUGE (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Pauline Cugnot. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BAVOUX, a salesman in Octave Mouret's shop. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BAZOUGE, an undertaker's assistant who lived in an attic of the same tenement-house as the Coupeaus and the Lorilleux. He was generally drunk and made ribald jests about his dismal calling. It was he who buried Gervaise Coupeau after she was found dead in an attic adjoining his own. L'Assommoir.

BEAUCHAMP (FLORE), an artist's model, who lived in Rue de Laval. She was fresh in colouring, but too thin. L'Oeuvre.

BEAUDOIN, a friend of the Hamelins whom they had known at Beyrout, where he lived. He promised to marry Caroline Hamelin after the death of her husband, but instead of waiting for that event he obtained the hand of a young and rich girl, the daughter of an English Consul. L'Argent.

BEAUDOIN, Captain of the 106th regiment of the line, commanded by Colonel de Vineuil. He was educated at Saint-Cyr, and having a fine tenor voice and good manners, along with Bonapartist principles, he was early marked for advancement. With his men he was unpopular, and, not caring for his profession, he did not readily adapt himself to the necessities of war. In the march to the Meuse he lost his baggage, and arrived at Sedan in a pitiable condition, his uniform soiled, his face and hands dirty. In former days at Charleville he had been on intimate terms with Gilberte Maginot, whom he now found at Sedan, married to Jules Delaherche. Their former relations were renewed for the moment, and next day Beaudoin rejoined his company, astonishing every one by the neatness of his attire. At the attack on the Calvary d'Illy he was severely wounded, and having been removed to the ambulance at Delaherche's house, his arm was amputated; but the hemorrhage had been too great, and he did not survive. La Debacle.

BEAU-FRANCOIS (LE), chief of a band of brigands, whose terrible exploits were still recounted at La Beauce. La Terre.

BEAURIVAGE (DUC DE), a character in La Petite Duchesse, a piece staged by Fauchery at the Theatre des Varietes. The part was taken by Bosc. Nana.

BEAUVILLIERS (COMTE CHARLES DE), a man of dissipated habits, who succeeded to the immense fortune of the Beauvilliers, which he completely squandered in a few years. He was killed in an accident of the chase, some said by the vengeance of a keeper. They found later a document signed by him in 1854 undertaking to pay ten thousand francs to a girl named Leonie Cron. L'Argent.

BEAUVILLIERS (COMTESSE DE), an old lady who lived with her daughter Alice in a house in the Rue Saint-Lazare, adjoining the Orviedo mansion. The family had at one time possessed large estates, but these had all gone, and the Comtesse and her daughter had barely sufficient to live upon, though they endeavoured to keep up before their neighbours as much as possible of their ancient state. Having made the acquaintance of Saccard, the Comtesse invested a small sum in the Universal Bank, increasing it from time to time until her whole means were involved. By the failure of the bank she was entirely ruined, and, to complete the catastrophe, Busch, who had become possessor of some papers compromising the honour of her dead husband, took the opportunity of blackmailing her. When she had handed over her jewels to him, she was left penniless. L'Argent.

BEAUVILLIERS (ALICE), daughter of Comtesse de Beauvilliers. The extravagance of her father had dissipated the family estates, and she and her mother were left with barely sufficient to keep up appearances. She was plain-looking, and had reached the age of twenty-five years without any offers of marriage. It was, however, in the hope of providing a suitable dowry for her, that the Comtesse invested her money in the Universal Bank, with disastrous results. Alice, who had few amusements, interested herself in charities, and frequently visited the institutions founded by Princess d'Orviedo. On a visit to L'Oeuvre du Travail she was attacked and robbed of a small sum by Victor Saccard, who was at that time an inmate. Her injuries were severe, and a serious illness followed. The failure of the Universal Bank left her and her mother in poverty. L'Argent.

BEAUVILLIERS (FERDINANDE DE), son of Comte Beauvilliers. He was for a time the cause of anxiety to his mother on account of some youthful extravagances, but early settled down, and having received a commission in the Papal troops, served with distinction. He was delicate, however, and died of fever in Rome. L'Argent.

BECKER, a jeweller in Paris. He supplied a set of sapphires for the mistress of Comte de Muffat. Nana.

BECOT, a grocer in Rue Montorgueil. Having become a widower, he took to dissolute courses, and his shop was gradually swallowed up, with its dried vegetables, jars, and drawers of sweetstuff. Eventually the place was sold up and Becot died of apoplexy soon afterwards. L'Oeuvre.

BECOT (IRMA), daughter of the preceding. After her father's death she went to live with an aunt, but soon afterwards ran off with a young fellow who lived across the street. She did not remain long with him, but, having a passion for artists, experienced in turn a caprice for Fagerolles, Gagniere, and many others. A young and foolish Marquis furnished a flat for her, and later she occupied a house in Rue de Moscou, the rent of which was twenty thousand francs. In the end she realized her dream of a princely house in the Avenue de Villiers; the site was bought by one lover, the house built by another, and the furniture provided by a third. But fortune did not alter her tastes; behind the backs of her serious lovers she still retained her fancy for Art, in the person of Henri Fagerolles, one of her early admirers. L'Oeuvre.

BEC-SALE, alias BOIT-SANS-SOIF, a rivet-maker employed in the same factory as Goujet. He drank enormous quantities of brandy, and was a boon companion of Coupeau. On the occasion of Gervaise Coupeau's first visit to the factory to see her son Etienne, Bec-Sale entered into a contest of strength with Goujet in which he was beaten. L'Assommoir.

BECU, gamekeeper and bell-ringer at Rognes, was a man of fifty years of age who had at one time been in the army. He was an intense Bonapartist, and pretended that he had met the Emperor. Himself a confirmed drunkard, he was on friendly terms with Hyacinthe Fouan, whose poaching expeditions he overlooked. La Terre.

BECU (LA), wife of the preceding, was on intimate terms with Hyacinthe Fouan. Her chief amusement was to throw Celine Macqueron and Flore Lengaigne against one another under the pretext of reconciling them. Though she was not devout, she made ardent intercessions to Heaven to reserve for her son a lucky number in the drawing for the conscription, but, after the event, turned her anger against the Deity because her prayers had not been answered. La Terre.

BECU (DELPHIN), son of the preceding, was a strong lad who, on leaving school, went to work as a farm labourer. He was much averse to leaving home, and, having drawn an unlucky number for the conscription, he chopped off with a cleaver the first finger of his right hand, in order that he might be unfit for service. La Terre.

BECU (MICHEL), uncle of Delphin. He died at Orleans. La Terre.

BEDORE, a hosier in Rue Gaillon, whose business was ruined by the extension of "The Ladies' Paradise." Au Bonheur des Dames.

BEJUIN (LEON), a Member of the Corps Legislatif, and a supporter of Eugene Rougon. He was proprietor of the Saint-Florent Cut-Glass Works. "A very worthy fellow, votes straight, never speaks, is very patient and waits contentedly till you think of him, but he is always on the spot to take care that you don't forget him." He received the Cross of the Legion of Honour after Rougon's return to office, and an appointment as Inspector. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BEJUIN (MADAME), wife of the preceding. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BELLOMBRE, a neighbour of Doctor Pascal at La Souleiade. He was a retired Professor, sixty-six years of age, who lived in his little house with no other company than his gardener, a man as old and crabbed as himself. His interests were solely centred in himself, and his egotism was a constant subject of irritation with Doctor Pascal. Le Docteur Pascal.

BELLOQUE (LE PERE), the first art-master of Claude Lantier. A retired infantry captain, with one arm, he had for a quarter of a century taught drawing to the youths of Plassans, in one of the galleries of the museum. L'Oeuvre.

BENARD, one of the tenants of the house in which Madame Coupeau carried on her laundry business. Benard and his wife were of intemperate habits, and few days passed without their fighting with one another. L'Assommoir.

BERAUD DU CHATEL (M.) was the last representative of an old middle-class family. A staunch Republican, he had grown old in the Magistracy, which he resigned at the time of the Coup d'Etat. Since then he lived in retirement in his house on the Ile Saint-Louis with his sister Madame Aubertot and his young daughter Christine. His elder daughter Renee, who was educated at a convent, was married to Aristide Saccard, and the circumstances which led to her marriage came as a severe blow to the stern old man. Though on nominally friendly terms with his daughter after her marriage, he never visited her, but when she died he paid her debts. La Curee.

BERAUD DU CHATEL (CHRISTINE), the second daughter of M. Beraud du Chatel, and sister of Madame Renee Saccard. La Curee.

BERAUD DU CHATEL (RENEE). See Madame Renee Rougon, alias Saccard.

BERGASSE, a second-hand dealer in Plassans. He supplied the old furniture bought by Madame Faujas. La Conquete de Plassans.

BERGERET (MADAME), concierge of the house at Plassy occupied by Helene Grandjean. Une Page d'Amour.

BERLINGOT, a horse which belonged to M. Mechain and gained the Prix d'Ispahan. Nana.

BERLOQUE, alias CHICOT, a miner who was killed by a landslip in the pit at Voreux. Germinal.

BERNHEIM (LES FRERES), proprietors of the glass-works of Saint-Joseph where Josserand was employed as cashier. Pot-Bouille.

BERTHIER (MADAME), was a friend of Madame Deberle, and took part in the amateur theatricals arranged by that lady. Une Page d'Amour.

BERTHIER, authorized clerk to Mazaud, the stockbroker. L'Argent.

BERTHOU, the celebrated painter of Nero in the Arena. Claude Lantier took lessons from him for six months, but their ideas were not in sympathy, and repeatedly the master told Claude that he would never do anything good. L'Oeuvre.

BERTRAND, a large dog which belonged to Sandoz. It barked furiously at visitors, until it recognized a friend of its master, whom it would greet with joyous welcome. L'Oeuvre.

BESNUS (CLARISSE), an actress at the Theatre des Varietes, where she played the part of Iris in the Blonde Venus, and Geraldine in the Petite Duchesse. She was mistress of Hector de la Faloise for a time. Nana.

BESSIERE, station-master at Barentin. He saw the Roubauds in the Havre express on the evening of the murder of President Grandmorin, and his evidence confirmed their alibi. La Bete Humaine.

BEULIN-D'ORCHERE (M.) was a member of a legal family. After being public prosecutor at Orleans and advocate-general at Rouen, he came to Paris as counsellor at the Appeal Court, of which he afterwards became president. His sister Veronique married Eugene Rougon. He was appointed first president of the Court of Paris after Rougon's return to office. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BEULIN-D'ORCHERE (VERONIQUE), a quiet, subdued woman about thirty-six years of age, who lived with her brother and seldom went out except to attend Low Mass at Saint-Sulpice. She married Eugene Rougon, to whom she brought a considerable fortune. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BIBI-LA-GRILLADE, the sobriquet of one of Coupeau's fellow-workmen, with whom he was on intimate terms. He was one of the party at Coupeau's wedding with Gervaise Macquart. L'Assommoir.

BIJARD, a drunken locksmith, who killed his wife by systematic ill-usage. On the rare occasions when he worked, he always had a bottle of alcohol beside him, from which he took large draughts every half-hour. After the death of his wife, he transferred his cruelty to his little daughter Lalie, who did not long survive. L'Assommoir.

BIJARD (MADAME) lived with her husband and their children in the same tenement as the Coupeaus and Lorilleux. She was a hard-working woman who did washing for Gervaise Coupeau's laundry, but her husband, a drunken brute, abused her to such an extent that she ultimately died of injuries received at his hands, or, more accurately, feet. The poor woman, in order to save her husband from the scaffold, said before she died that she had hurt herself by falling on the edge of a tub. L'Assommoir.

BIJARD (LALIE), daughter of the preceding, a child of eight when her mother died, had acted as the little mother of the family. "Without a word said, quite of her own accord, she took the dead woman's place, to such an extent that her foolish brute of a father, to make the likeness complete, battered about the daughter now as he had battered the mother before. When he came in drunk, he felt the need of a woman to attack. He did not even notice what a tiny little thing Lalie was; he hit her as he would have hit a grown woman. He beat her shamelessly, he kicked her for a yes or no; and she took it all with a resigned look in her beautiful eyes, without a murmur. Then when her father was tired of kicking her from corner to corner of the room, she waited until she had the strength to pick herself up, and then went back to her work. It was part of her daily task to be beaten." As the result of this infamous treatment the child died, but again the man unfortunately escaped punishment. L'Assommoir.

BIJARD (HENRIETTE), second daughter of Bijard. She was five years old at the time of her mother's death. L'Assommoir.

BIJARD (JULES), third child of Bijard. When his mother died he was three years old. L'Assommoir.

BIJOU, the pet dog of Nana. He excited the jealousy of Comte de Muffat. Nana.

BILLECOQ (HERMINIE), a protegee of Madame Correur, who induced Eugene Rougon to provide a dowry, in order that she might marry an officer who had compromised her. The officer did not, however, fulfill his promise, but went off with the dowry, of which he had obtained possession. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BLACHET, a deputy. He desired leave of absence. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BLAISOT, a banker at Paris. L'Argent.

BLANCHETTE, a cow which belonged to Lise and Francoise Fouan. La Terre.

BLERIOT (M. DE), prefect of the department in which Plassans is situated. He accompanied Colonel Masson and the troops which crushed the Republican rising in 1851. La Fortune des Rougon.

BLEUZE, a rope-walk at Montsou which was ruined by the miners' strike. Germinal.

BLOND (MARIA), a young girl of fifteen who had grown up on the pavements of Paris. She frequented the restaurant kept by Laure Piedefer. Nana.

BOCHE (M.) the concierge of the large tenement-house in which resided the Coupeaus, Lorilleux, and others. He and his wife were friendly with the various tenants in turn, sometimes siding with one and sometimes with another in the quarrels which so frequently arose. In the presence of the landlord, of whom they were afraid, they assumed an air of great importance, and affected not to know the tenants. They were present at Gervaise Coupeau's birthday party. L'Assommoir.

BOCHE (MADAME), wife of the preceding. L'Assommoir.

Nana informed Satin that Madame Boche is dead. Nana.

BOCHE (PAULINE), daughter of the preceding, was a girl of about the same age as Nana Coupeau, whose companion she was in all kinds of mischief. L'Assommoir.

BOCQUET (MADAME), mother of Clarisse. Pot-Bouille.

BOCQUET (CLARISSE), a woman on whom Duveyrier squandered large sums of money. She ultimately gained such complete influence over him, and made him so unhappy, that he attempted to commit suicide. Pot-Bouille.

BODIN (DOCTOR) was the regular medical attendant of Madame Helene Grandjean and her daughter Jeanne. A sudden illness of Jeanne made it necessary to call in Doctor Deberle, who subsequently met the older man in consultation from time to time. Une Page d'Amour.

BOHAIN (MARQUIS DE), an elderly nobleman whose presence and manners were of a kind to adorn a board of directors, and whose illustrious name was of value on a prospectus. He was in consequence always in demand by new companies. Since he began living by speculation, he and his wife had been legally separated, so far as estate went, and he lived with her only as a lodger, with nothing of his own except his clothes. "On two occasions already he had refused to pay up what he owed; he pocketed as long as he won, but as soon as he lost he did not pay." At the request of Saccard, the Marquis became a director of the Universal Bank. When the great gamble in the shares of the bank began, the Marquis followed his usual plan; having played through Mazaud for a rise, he refused to pay his losses, though he had gained two million francs through Jacoby, through whom he had played for a fall. L'Argent.

BONGRAND, a great artist, painter of the Village Wedding. He was a stout man, forty-five years old, with an expressive face and long grey hair; recently he had become a member of the Institute and an officer of the Legion of Honour. The grandson of a farmer in the Beauce country, the son of a man risen to the middle classes, with peasant blood in his veins, owing his culture to a mother of very artistic tastes, he was rich, had no need to sell his pictures, and retained many tastes and opinions of Bohemian life. His masterpiece, the Village Wedding, had brought about a revolution in art only parallel with Courbet, and he was acknowledged as Master by all the artists of the young school. The picture remained, however, his greatest work, though he objected to have it so designated, in the fear that it might be thought his powers were failing. A later picture called the Village Funeral was intended to surpass it, but failed to arrest attention, and was indeed only an echo of the earlier work. He was one of the few mourners at the funeral of Claude Lantier. L'Oeuvre.

BONHOMME, the horse which for a quarter of a century had carried Doctor Pascal on his visits to his patients. Latterly the old Bonhomme became blind, and was no longer being driven, but being much loved by his master, was tenderly cared for until his death. Le Docteur Pascal.

BONNAUD, formerly head of the counting-house of a railway company. Pot-Bouille.

BONNEHON (MADAME), sister of President Grandmorin. She was married to a wealthy manufacturer, who left her a widow at the age of thirty. In the mansion-house of Doinville, which belonged to her, she led a pleasant life, not without occasional affairs of the heart, but so correct in every way that she remained a leader of society in Rouen. She was a handsome woman, and in spite of her fifty years still retained much of her former charm. Among her friends she included Chaumette and Desbazeilles, both officials of the court at Rouen. Madame Bonnehon had a good opinion of the Roubauds, and did not approve of the position taken up by her niece Berthe regarding the legacy left to them by President Grandmorin. For the honour of her family she desired that the inquiry as to the murder of the President should not be continued. La Bete Humaine.

BONNEMORT, the sobriquet of Vincent Maheu. His family had been miners for generations, and he himself had worked in the pit since he was eight years old. After forty-five years of work underground he was given a post as fireman, and for five years worked each night at the Voreux pit for a wage of forty sous. He suffered greatly from rheumatism, which eventually turned into a form of dropsy, while his mind became affected to some extent by the sufferings occasioned by the great strike which took place at Voreux and other neighbouring pits. After the terrible scenes at Montsou, he could only sit in his chair before the fireless grate, with fixed and unseeing eyes, but in a sudden accession of madness he found strength to strangle Cecile Gregoire, who chanced to be left alone with him for a few moments. Germinal.

BONNET. See De Mareuil.

BORDENAVE, manager of the Theatre des Varietes. He was a coarse man, with cynical views as to the stage, and cared nothing as to the means by which a popular success might be secured. Though he was well aware that Nana could neither sing nor act, he saw that her beauty was of a type likely to attract the Parisian public, and accordingly gave her the chief part in the Blonde Venus. It was he who showed H.R.H. The Prince of Scots the honours of "behind the scenes." Nana.

BORGNE-DE-JOUY, one of the band of brigands which was led by Beau-Francois. He betrayed his companions. La Terre.

BOSC, an old actor at the Theatre des Varietes, where he played the part of Jupiter in the Blonde Venus, and the Duc de Beaurivage in the Petite Duchesse. He had a good-natured but somewhat drunken appearance. He treated women with disdain, and the idea that any man should trouble himself about them raised in him the only indignation of which he was capable. Nana.

BOUCHARD (M.), head-clerk in the office of the Minister of Interior. His house was the first thrown open to Eugene Rougon on his arrival in Paris. Later on, Bouchard inherited his father's property, and at fifty-four years of age married Adele Desvignes. He was appointed head of a department after Rougon's return to office. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BOUCHARD (MADAME), wife of the preceding, was the daughter of a respectable family at Rambouillet. M. Bouchard "had been anxious to marry a young lady from the provinces, because he made a point of having a steady wife. However, the fair and adorable little Adele, with her innocent blue eyes, had in less than four years proved to be a great deal more than a mere flirt." Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BOULAND(MADAME), the nurse who attended Madame Lazare Chanteau. La Joie de Vivre.

BOUM, a horse which belonged to M. Gasc and ran in the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

BOURDELAIS, an upper clerk in the office of the Minister of Finance. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BOURDELAIS (MADAME) was a short, fair woman of thirty, with a delicate nose and sparkling eyes, who had married a chief clerk in the Treasury. She was an old schoolfellow of Madame Desforges. Belonging to a good middle-class family, she managed her household and three children with an excellent knowledge of practical life. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BOURDEU (M.), formerly Prefect of the Drome, but turned out of office by the Revolution of 1848. Politically he was a Legitimist, and he was a friend of M. Rastoil, at whose house his party was in the habit of meeting. At one time he was suggested as a likely candidate for the representation of Plassans, but he retired after Delangre had been brought forward through the machinations of Abbe Faujas. Madame de Condamin promised him, however, that through her influence he would be rewarded with a prefecture. La Conquete de Plassans.

BOURDONCLE, the son of a poor farmer near Limoges, started at "The Ladies' Paradise" at the same time as Octave Mouret. He was very active and intelligent, but he lacked that touch of genius possessed by his companion, before whom he had bowed from the first. Acting on Mouret's advice, he put all his savings into the business, and, after passing through the various grades, he became in time one of the six persons who assisted Mouret to govern "The Ladies' Paradise," exercising a general control of the whole staff. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BOURGAIN-DESFEUILLES (GENERAL). During the war of 1870 he was at the head of a brigade of infantry, of which the 106th regiment of the line, commanded by Colonel de Vineuil, formed part. Like so many other officers he proved himself incompetent, and after the capitulation he, alone among the generals, took advantage of the pretext of illness to sign an undertaking to the Germans not to take any further part in the war. La Debacle.

BOURGUIGNON, a master zinc-worker from whom Coupeau got employment. L'Assommoir.

BOUROCHE (SURGEON-MAJOR), of the 106th regiment of the line, commanded by Colonel Vineuil. During the battle of Sedan he installed an ambulance in a factory belonging to Jules Delaherche, where he was soon overwhelmed with work. With untiring energy he performed one operation after another until the place became like a slaughter-house. Behind a clump of trees were thrown the bodies of the dead, and the limbs amputated from the living. Depressed for a moment by the vastness of his task, Bouroche nearly lost heart, exclaiming, "What is the use?" but his instincts of discipline recalled him to work, and he continued to operate even after the supply of chloroform was exhausted. During the insurrection at Paris he served with the army of Versailles, but consented to treat one of his old soldiers, Maurice Levasseur, who had been mortally wounded in the ranks of the Commune. La Debacle.

BOURRAS, an old man who sold umbrellas and walking-sticks in a tumble-down house which adjoined "The Ladies' Paradise." His business was ruined by the growth of that concern, and he expressed bitter hatred towards Octave Mouret, its proprietor. Denise Baudu rented a room from him after her dismissal from "The Ladies' Paradise," and he showed much kindness to her and Pepe, her young brother. He refused several offers by Mouret, who wished to purchase his lease in order to extend his own shop, and ultimately, having become bankrupt, was forced to leave without a penny. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BOURRETTE (ABBE), one of the clergy of the church of Saint-Saturnin at Plassans. He did duty as vicar during the illness of Abbe Compan, and had been led to expect the reversion of the appointment. Pressure brought to bear on Bishop Rousselot led to the selection of Abbe Faujas, and Bourrette was put off with vague promises for the future. He was a simple-minded, amiable man, who accepted his disappointment without murmuring, and continued on friendly terms with Faujas. La Conquete de Plassans.

BOUTAREL, a doctor who attended Nana. He was a handsome man, still young, who had a large practice in the demi-monde. Always gay and laughing, he was popular with his patients, but took care not to compromise himself with any of them. Nana.

BOUTAREL (MADAME), a lady who lived in the country and economized for months at a time, only coming to Paris occasionally. When she came, she made straight for "The Ladies' Paradise" and spent all her savings in an afternoon. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BOUTELOUP (LOUIS), a workman at the Voreux pit. He lodged with Madame Levaque, whose lover he became. Germinal.

BOUTEROUE (HILARION), second child of Vincent Bouteroue, and grandson of Marianne Fouan (La Grande). The latter had never forgiven the marriage of her daughter, and would do nothing to assist the two children after the death of their parents. Hilarion, who was of weak intellect, was looked after from childhood by his sister Palmyre, who wore herself out in his service. After Palmyre's death his grandmother gave him shelter, but took advantage of his great strength by employing him at work of the hardest kind. Ultimately Hilarion committed a serious assault on the old woman, and in defending herself she struck him on the head with a bill-hook, inflicting a wound from which he died. La Terre.

BOUTEROUE (PALMYRE), sister of the preceding, worked like a slave to support her brother, and died completely worn out by toil and hardship at the age of thirty-five. La Terre.

BOUTEROUE (VINCENT), a poor peasant, whom the daughter of the Pechards insisted on marrying despite the opposition of her mother. They both died of want, leaving two children, Palmyre and Hilarion. La Terre.

BOUTEROUE (MADAME VINCENT), see Mademoiselle Pechard.

BOUTHEMENT PERE, a shopkeeper at Montpellier, who sent his son to Paris to learn business. He was disgusted to find that the simple salesman in Paris could earn three times as much as he himself could make, and he was stupefied on seeing the vast emporium in which his son served. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BOUTHEMONT, manager of the silk department at "The Ladies' Paradise." Noisy and too fond of company, he was not much good for sales, but for buying he had not his equal. Nearly every month he went to Lyons, living at the best hotels, with authority to treat the manufacturers with open purse. He had, moreover, liberty to buy what he liked, provided he increased the sales of his department in a certain proportion settled beforehand; and it was on this proportion that his commission was based. Eventually, however, his position was undermined, and Madame Desforges, having become jealous of Mouret, and wishing to injure him, introduced Bouthemont to Baron Hartmann, who lent him money to start an opposition establishment called "The Four Seasons." This was burned down three weeks after its opening, but the enormous loss was covered by insurance. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BOUTIGNY, Lazare Chanteau's partner in the chemical business, into which he put thirty thousand francs. After the failure of the venture, he took over the whole concern, and began to manufacture potash from seaweed by the old methods. He was very successful in this, and by degrees began to employ on a small scale the scientific systems which had before proved disastrous. In a few years he amassed a considerable fortune. La Joie de Vivre.

BOUTIN, a retired artist's-model who kept a studio in Rue de la Huchette, which was frequented by Claude Lantier, who went there for purposes of study. A subscription of twenty francs enabled young artists to have the free use of models. L'Oeuvre.

BOUTIN, an old epileptic attended by Doctor Pascal at Plassans. He died in one of his fits. Le Docteur Pascal.

BOVES (COMTE DE), Inspector-General of the Imperial Stud, a tall, handsome man who had married his wife for her great beauty. Notwithstanding this, he carried on a liaison with Madame Guibal, whose demands upon his purse were so heavy that he was obliged to economize in his own establishment. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BOVES (COMTESSE DE), wife of the preceding, was a beautiful woman of about forty years of age. She was a constant customer at "The Ladies' Paradise," but as her husband kept her very short of money, was seldom able to buy anything. Eventually temptation proved too strong for her, and she was caught in the act of stealing some valuable lace. The matter was, however, kept quiet, and a scandal avoided. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BOVES (BLANCHE DE), daughter of the preceding. She usually accompanied her mother on her shopping expeditions to "The Ladies' Paradise," and, it is to be feared, was not unaware of the theft of lace by her. She married Paul de Vallagnosc. Au Bonheur des Dames.

BRAMAH, an English horse which won the Grand Prix de Paris. It belonged to Lord Reading. Nana.

BRAMBILLA (SIGNOR), a Venetian political refugee, and a friend of Comtesse Balbi. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BRETIGNY (COMTESSE DE). Auguste Lantier, reading the news from a journal to his friends Coupeau and Mes-Bottes, announced that the eldest daughter of the Comtesse de Bretigny was to be married to Baron de Valencay, aide-de-camp to His Majesty the Emperor. L'Assommoir.

BRETON-LE-CUL-SEC, one of the band of brigands led by Beau-Francois. La Terre.

BRICHET, the father of Fortune, Rosalie Bambousse's lover. He was a little man, withered by age, and with a cringing manner. He tilled a small piece of stony land near Les Artaud, and was very poor. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

BRICHET (MADAME), wife of the preceding, a tall, lachrymose woman, was the one solitary devotee of the village of Les Artaud. Whenever she had been to communion, she hung about the parsonage, knowing that the priest's servant always kept a couple of loaves for her from the last baking. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

BRICHET (FORTUNE), son of the preceding, was a largely built, bold-looking young fellow of about twenty-five years of age, who had been the lover of Rosalie Bambousse for some time before Abbe Mouret was able to induce the girl's parents to consent to her marriage. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

BRICHET (VINCENT), brother of Fortune, was the boy who assisted Abbe Mouret in serving Mass. He was an idle young scamp, and constantly incurred the chastisement of Brother Archangias, who predicted a bad end for him on account of his friendship for Catherine Bambousse. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

BRIQUET, a peasant of Rognes. His son drew the number 13 for the conscription. La Terre.

BRON (MADAME), concierge at the Theatre des Varietes. She sold liquor to the employees at the theatre. Nana.

BRU, an old house-painter who lived in a garret in the same tenement-house as the Coupeaus, where he starved with cold and hunger. He had lost three sons in the Crimea, and he lived on what he could pick up, now that for two years past he could hold a brush no longer. Gervaise Coupeau showed him some kindness and asked him to her famous birthday party. Things having gone from bad to worse with him, he was found one morning lying dead in his garret. L'Assommoir.

BRULE (LA), mother of La Pierronne. She was the widow of a miner who had been killed in the pit, and lived with her daughter at the settlement known as the Deux-Cent-Quarante. A terrible old woman, frantic to revenge on the masters the death of her husband, she was the leader in the outrages perpetrated by the strikers in the Montsou district. It was she who gave the signal for the attack on the troops, but at the first volley fired by the soldiers she fell back stiff and crackling like a bundle of dry faggots, stammering one last oath in the gurgling of blood. Germinal.

BRUNET (LES), a bourgeois family in the new quarter of Plassans, of whom Madame Felicite Rougon was jealous. La Fortune des Rougon.

BUDIN (LES), peasants of Rognes, whose daughter was said to have been cured of a fever by Sourdeau, who cut a live pigeon in two, and applied the halves to her head. La Terre.

BUQUIN-LECOMTE, a deputy at the Corps Legislatif. He desired leave of absence. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

BURGAT, a blacksmith, one of the band of insurgents which entered Plassans in December, 1851. La Fortune des Rougon.

BURNE, an English jockey who rode a horse called Spirit in the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

BUSCH, a man of German origin who came to Paris, and engaged in business of a shady character on the fringe of the Bourse. "In addition to usury and a secret traffic in jewels and precious stones, he particularly occupied himself with the purchase of 'bad debts.'" In pursuit of creditors he was unsparing, and his methods were not infrequently of the nature of blackmail. Jordon, Madame de Beauvilliers, and Saccard himself fell into his power, though Saccard refused to submit to extortion. Another of Busch's lines of business was the purchase of depreciated shares and debentures, thousands of which he collected together, selling them to bankrupts who found difficulty in accounting for real or imaginary losses. His one redeeming feature was his extraordinary love for his brother Sigismond, whom he nursed with the greatest care until his death. L'Argent.

BUSCH (SIGISMOND), brother of Busch, the money-lender, was an able man, educated at a German University, and speaking several languages. He had met Carl Marx at Cologne in 1849, and became a contributor to the New Rhenish Gazette. "From that time he professed Socialism with an ardent faith, giving his entire being to the idea of an approaching social renovation, which would assure the happiness of the poor and humble." After his master was banished from Germany, Sigismond, engrossed in his dreams, was so careless of his material affairs that he would have perished of hunger had his brother not taken him to live with him. From this time the elder Busch, ferocious as a wolf towards a debtor, looked after his brother with almost maternal care, and was heart-broken when Sigismond died of consumption a few years later. L'Argent.

BUTEAU, second son of Pere Fouan; brother of Hyacinthe and of Fanny Delhomme; cousin and husband of Lise Mouche; father of Jules and Laure. From early youth he was of violent temper, and having drawn a lucky number in the conscription, he went away from home, and got work, first at the farm of La Borderie and later at La Chamade. He was a true son of the soil, knowing nothing of the world beyond the narrow district in which he was born, and possessing that fierce passion for the land which is the characteristic of so many peasants. When Pere Fouan made a division of his property among his family, Buteau was dissatisfied with the lot which he drew, and refused to take possession of it. In this attitude he persisted for two years, until the formation of a new road gave a greatly increased value to his share. In the same way he refused to marry his cousin Lise Mouche, by whom he already had a son, until, after her father's death, she had inherited a share of his property. Buteau's chief anxiety then became to prevent a division of this land between his wife and her sister Francoise, and when, after the girl's marriage to Jean Macquart, this became imminent, he and his wife eventually murdered her. His father had been a witness of the crime, and as his silence was essential, he too was cruelly done to death. After these terrible events Buteau was able to sleep calmly, for the land, his overwhelming passion in life, was his beyond possibility of dispute. La Terre.

BUTEAU (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Lise Mouche. La Terre.

BUTEAU (JULES), the eldest child of the preceding, who were not married till three years after his birth. At nine years old he was the sole friend of old Fouan, but he soon came to neglect the old man. La Terre.

BUTEAU (LAURE), the second child of the Buteaus. At four years old she had already the hard eyes of her family, and was hostile to her grandfather, old Fouan. By jealousy she detached from him her brother Jules. La Terre.

C

CABASSE, a franc-tireur of the woods of Dieulet. He was the favourite companion of Ducat, and along with Guillaume Sambuc formed part of the band which so greatly embarrassed the Prussians in the neighbourhood of Sedan. He took part in the execution of Goliath Steinberg, the German spy. La Debacle.

CABIN (MADAME), the woman who looked after the bedrooms occupied by the saleswomen in "The Ladies' Paradise." In consideration of small bribes, she allowed numerous breaches of the strict rules of the establishment. Au Bonheur des Dames.

CABIROCHE (SIMONNE), an actress at the Theatre des Varietes. She was the daughter of a furniture dealer in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and had been educated at a boarding-school in order that she might become a governess. She played the part of Isabelle in the Petite Duchesse. Nana.

CABUCHE, a quarryman at Becourt, who lived alone in a hut in the middle of the forest. He was condemned to five years' imprisonment for having killed a man in a tavern brawl, but on account of his good conduct was liberated at the end of four years. From that time he was avoided by every one, and lived like a savage in the woods. Louisette, the younger daughter of Madame Misard, who was then fourteen years old, met him one day in the forest, and a strange friendship was formed between them, the rough man almost adoring this child, who alone was not afraid to speak to him. The girl afterwards went as a servant to Madame Bonnehon, but one evening Cabuche found her at his door, half mad with fright and on the verge of brain fever. He nursed her tenderly, but she died a few days later. The conduct of President Grandmorin was believed to be the cause of Louisette's flight from Doinville, and Cabuche was overheard to say in ungovernable rage that he would "bleed the pig." This remark led Denizet, the examining magistrate, to attribute to him the murder of the President, which was committed soon afterwards by the Roubauds, and still later he had the misfortune to be found beside the body of Severine Roubaud, who had been murdered by Jacques Lantier. He was found guilty of the two crimes, neither of which he committed, and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. It was Cabuche's wagon, loaded with huge blocks of stone, that Flore stopped in front of an express train in order to cause an accident. La Bete Humaine.

CADET-CASSIS, the sobriquet of Coupeau. L'Assommoir.

CADINE, a young girl who when only two years old was found by Madame Chantemesse and adopted by her. She was brought up along with Marjolin, and the two became inseparable companions and lovers. When she was eleven years old she set up as a dealer in birds' food, but in a year or two became a flower-seller. After the accident to Marjolin by which his intellect was affected, Cadine looked after him, and the two were seldom found apart. Le Ventre de Paris.

CAFFIN (ABBE), the predecessor of Abbe Mouret as cure at Les Artaud. He was originally from Normandy, and had a large face which always seemed laughing. His history was bad, and he had been sent in disgrace to this hot and dusty corner of Provence. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

CAMPARDON (ACHILLE), an architect, in whose house Octave Mouret boarded when he first came to Paris. His views on religion were somewhat free, but having been appointed diocesan architect he gradually became orthodox, though this did not prevent him from carrying on an intrigue with Gasparine, his wife's cousin, who ultimately came to live with the family. Pot-Bouille.

CAMPARDON (MADAME), wife of the preceding, nee Rose Domergue. Born at Plassans, she was an old friend of Madame Mouret, and when Octave Mouret came to Paris he boarded with the Campardons. After the birth of her child, Madame Campardon was an invalid, and was obliged to spend much of her time in bed, amusing herself by reading the works of Dickens. She tacitly accepted the liaison between her husband and Gasparine, her cousin, whom she ultimately asked to live with the family and manage the household affairs. Pot-Bouille.

CAMPARDON (ANGELE), daughter of the preceding. She was brought up at home by her parents, in order that she might remain ignorant of the realities of life, but intercourse with the servants in a large tenement-house early developed her unnatural precocity. Pot-Bouille.

CAMPENON, an incapable person to whom M. de Marsy gave a post as prefect, which Eugene Rougon had promised to Du Poizat. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

CAMY-LAMOTTE, secretary to the Minister of Justice, an office of great influence. It was his duty to prepare the list of promotions, and he was in constant communication with the Tuileries. He was a handsome man, who started his career as a substitute; but through his connections and his wife he had been elected deputy and made grand officer of the Legion of Honour. In examining the papers of President Grandmorin, he discovered the identity of the murderers, but knowing the probability of serious scandal arising in the event of public inquiry, he said nothing, and later, struck by the courage and charm of Severine Roubaud, who threw herself on his protection, he gave instructions that all proceedings were to be stopped. He rewarded Denizet, the examining magistrate, with a decoration and the promise of early promotion. La Bete Humaine.

CANIVET, an old peasant, of whom Zephyrin Lacour announced the death to Rosalie Pichon. Une Page d'Amour.

CARNAVANT (MARQUIS DE), a nobleman of Plassans. Said to have been intimate with the mother of Felicite Puech during the early period of her married life. He visited Pierre Rougon and his wife occasionally, and after their retirement from business he interested them in politics. La Fortune des Rougon.

CAROLINE, an artificial-flower maker employed by Madame Titreville. She was very unhappy at home. L'Assommoir.

CAROLINE (MADAME). See Caroline Hamelin.

CAROUBLE, a baker at Montsou. His business was threatened by the competition of Maigrat. Germinal.

CASIMIR, a liquor-dealer on the road to Montsou. Germinal.

CASSOUTE, an inhabitant of Plassans, who formed one of the group of insurgents which accompanied Antoine Macquart to the Rougons' house. He was left there to signal the return of Pierre Rougon, but not being very intelligent, allowed himself to be sent by Rougon to the Town Hall, where he was arrested. La Fortune des Rougon.

CATHERINE, servant to Granoux. She talked for a long time before letting in Pierre Rougon and Roudier, who came to seek her master to save Plassans. La Fortune des Rougon.

CAUCHE, the commissary of police attached to the railway station at Havre. He was a former officer who considered his present occupation as practically a sinecure, spending much of his time at the cafe. He was a confirmed gambler, who could lose or win without change of expression. A room on the first floor of the Cafe du Commerce was his usual haunt, and there Roubaud frequently spent half the night playing cards with him. Later, it fell to him to arrest Roubaud on the charge of murdering President Grandmorin. La Bete Humaine.

CAZENOVE (DOCTOR), a man of fifty-four years of age, of a vigorous and lean habit, who after thirty years' service in the navy settled down at Arromanches, where an uncle of his had left him a house. He affected scepticism of the power of medicine, but was unremitting in the care of his patients. Among the earliest of these was Madame Chanteau, and he became on intimate terms with the family, for some time acting as trustee to Pauline Quenu. La Joie de Vivre.

CECILE (MADEMOISELLE), daughter of a butcher in the neighbourhood of the Halles Centrales. Le Ventre de Paris.

CELESTE, lady's maid and confidante of Madame Renee Saccard. La Curee.

CELESTINE, a friend of Clemence. She was neurotic, and had a horror of the hair of cats, seeing it everywhere, and even turning her tongue in the belief that some of it had got into her mouth. L'Assommoir.

CESAR, a bull at the farm of La Borderie. La Terre.

CHADEUIL (MADAME), a milliner in the Rue Sainte-Anne. Octave Mouret's shop, "The Ladies' Paradise," ruined her within two years. Au Bonheur des Dames.

CHAINE, the companion of Mahoudeau, the sculptor. He was born at Saint-Firmin, a village about six miles from Plassans, where he served as a cowboy until he was drawn in the conscription. Unfortunately for him, a gentleman of the district who admired the walking-stick handles which he carved out of roots with his knife, persuaded Chaine that he was a rustic genius, and with extreme foolishness persuaded him to go in for painting. Having forty pounds, he went to Paris, where his small fortune lasted him for a year. Then, as he had only twenty francs left, he took up his quarters with his friend Mahoudeau. He had no talent, but had a certain skill in copying pictures with extreme exactness. The relations of Chaine and Mahoudeau with Mathilde Jabouille led to a coldness between the two friends, and ultimately they ceased to be on speaking terms, though they continued to live together, and even to sleep in the same bed. Some time afterwards Chaine gave up art, and started a booth at country fairs, in which he ran a wheel-of-fortune for trifling prizes. The booth was decorated with some of his alleged masterpieces. L'Oeuvre.

CHAMBOUVARD, a celebrated sculptor. He was said to be the son of a veterinary surgeon of Amiens, and at forty-five had already produced twenty masterpieces. He had, however, a complete lack of critical acumen, and was unable to distinguish between the most glorious offspring of his hands and the detestably grotesque figures which he happened to put together now and then. At one Salon he exhibited a Sower, admirable in every way, while at another he showed an execrable Reaping Woman, so bad that it seemed like a hoax; but he was no less pleased with the later work, feeling sure that he had turned out yet another masterpiece. L'Oeuvre.

CHAMPION, a master hatter at Montrouge. Auguste Lantier pretended to have left his employment because they had not the same political views. L'Assommoir.

CHAMPION, a retired sergeant, who was afterwards delivery manager at "The Ladies' Paradise." Au Bonheur des Dames.

CHANTEAU PERE, came originally from the south of France, beginning his life as a journeyman carpenter. He created a considerable timber business at Caen, but being somewhat daring in his speculation, he left it rather embarrassed at the time of his death. La Joie de Vivre.

CHANTEAU (M.), a cousin of M. Quenu, by whom he was nominated guardian of his daughter Pauline Quenu. On the death of his father, he succeeded to the timber business at Caen. Being an inactive man, unaspiring and careful, he contented himself with putting his affairs on a safe basis, and living on a moderate but sure profit. He married Eugenie de la Vigniere, who was an ambitious woman and hoped to rouse his indolent nature. Her schemes were, however, frustrated by the ill-health of her husband, who suffered from gout to such a degree that he ultimately sold his business to Devoine, and retired to Bonneville, where he had a house. His sufferings from gout gradually became more and more severe until he was a complete invalid. His ward Pauline Quenu showed him much kindness, and the Abbe Horteur played draughts with him regularly. La Joie de Vivre.

Until the end of his life he was taken care of by Pauline. Le Docteur Pascal.

CHANTEAU (MADAME), wife of the preceding, nee Eugenie de la Vigniere, was the orphan of one of the ruined squireens of the Cotentin. An ambitious woman, she hoped to induce her husband to overcome his indolent nature, but her plans were upset by the ill-health into which he fell, and she transferred to her son her hopes for the family's rise in life. From this source she had nothing but disappointment, as one after another of Lazare's schemes failed. To enable him to get money to start his chemical works, she encouraged the idea of marriage between him and Pauline Quenu, her husband's ward, who thereupon lent him thirty thousand francs. Little by little, Madame Chanteau got possession for the family use of nearly all Pauline's fortunes, but with each fresh loan her feelings towards the girl became more embittered until her affection for her had turned to hate. From this time, she discouraged her son's marriage with Pauline, and endeavoured to turn his thoughts towards Louise Thibaudier, who had a considerable fortune. She died of dropsy after a short illness. La Joie de Vivre.

CHANTEAU (LAZARE), born 1844, son of M. Chanteau, was educated at the college of Caen, where he took his bachelor's degree. He was undecided as to what profession he would adopt, and for some time his inclination turned towards music. Under the influence of Pauline Quenu he decided on medicine, and went to Paris, where at first he made good progress in his studies. Unfortunately he tired of this, and led a life of extravagance and dissipation, failing to pass his examinations. Having chanced to make the acquaintance of Herbelin, a celebrated chemist, Lazare entered his laboratory as an assistant. From him he got the idea of turning seaweed to profitable account by the extraction of chemicals by a new method. With a view to the commercial employment of this process he borrowed thirty thousand francs from Pauline Quenu, and entered into partnership with an old college friend named Boutigny who invested a similar sum in the business. Lazare was quite carried away by his enthusiasm, and the works were built on much too large a scale, the cost greatly exceeding the original estimates. More money was required, and a marriage having already been arranged between Lazare and Pauline Quenu, she at once lent him another ten thousand francs. Some slight success was at first attained, but this only led to fresh extravagances in the way of apparatus, and before long a hundred thousand francs of Pauline's money had been expended. By this time it was evident that the process could not be worked on a commercial scale, and Lazare, utterly discouraged, handed over his share to Boutigny for a trifling sum. A scheme for the protection of Bonneville against the inroads of the sea was the next subject to attract him, and he entered into it with his usual enthusiasm. More money was, of course, required, and, as before, this was found by Pauline. Failure again met his efforts; the barricade was washed away by the first high sea. All along Lazare had been subject to fits of morbid depression, accompanied by a frenzied fear of death, and after the death of his mother this mental disturbance became even more acute. The marriage with Pauline had been put off on one excuse or another, and ultimately she saw that his affections had been transferred to Louise Thibaudier. With noble self-sacrifice, she released him from his engagement, and his marriage to Louise followed. He went to Paris as manager of an insurance company, but soon tiring of business, he returned to Bonneville, where he lived so tormented by the fear of death that life itself had little charm for him. La Joie de Vivre.

Having become a widower, he left his son with Pauline Quenu, and went to America to seek his fortune. Le Docteur Pascal.

CHANTEAU (MADAME LAZARE), wife of the preceding. See Louise Thibaudier. La Joie de Vivre.

CHANTEAU (PAUL), the infant son of Lazare Chanteau. La Joie de Vivre.

CHANTECAILLE (i.e. SINGSMALL), an usher at the college of Plassans. He was so good-natured that he allowed the pupils to smoke when out walking. L'Oeuvre.

CHANTEGREIL, a poacher, who was sent to the galleys for shooting a gendarme. He was the father of Miette. La Fortune des Rougon.

CHANTEGREIL (MARIE), known as Miette, born 1838, daughter of Chantegreil, the poacher, who was sentenced to the galleys for murder. She went to live with her aunt, the wife of Rebufat, farmer at Plassans. Here she met Silvere Mouret, and an idyllic love affair followed. When Silvere joined the Republican Insurrection in 1861, Miette, fired by his enthusiasm, accompanied him, and carried the banner of revolt. In the attack by the regular troops, which soon followed, she fell mortally wounded. La Fortune des Rougon.

CHANTEGREIL (EULALIE). See Madame Eulalie Rebufat.

CHANTEMESSE (MADAME), a customer of Madame Francois, the market-gardener. It was she who brought up the two foundling children, Marjolin and Cadine. Le Ventre de Paris.

CHANTEREAU (MADAME), wife of an ironmaster. She was a cousin of the Fougerays, and a friend of the Muffats. With Madame du Joncquoy and Madame Hugon she gave an air of severe respectability to the drawing-room of Comtesse Sabine de Muffat. Her husband owned a foundry in Alsace, where war with Germany was feared, and she caused much amusement to her friends by expressing the opinion that Bismarck would make war with France and would conquer. Nana.

CHARBONNEL (M.), a retired oil-merchant of Plassans. His cousin Chevassu, a lawyer, died leaving his fortune of five hundred thousand francs to the Sisters of the Holy Family. Charbonnel, being next heir, contested the will on the ground of undue influence; and the Sisterhood having petitioned the Council of State to authorize the payment of the bequest to them, he went to Paris, accompanied by his wife, in order to secure the influence of Eugene Rougon. The matter dragged on for some months, and was then indefinitely delayed by Rougon's resignation of the Presidency of the Council of State. After Rougon's appointment as Minister of the Interior, he induced the Council of State to refuse the petition of the Sisterhood, and M. Charbonnel accordingly succeeded to the estate. Subsequently the Charbonnels accused the Sisters of having removed some of Chevassu's silver plate, and Rougon ordered the police to make a search in the convent. This caused a scandal in the town, and brought the Charbonnels, as well as Rougon, into popular disfavour. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

CHARBONNEL (MADAME), wife of the preceding. She accompanied her husband to Paris to assist him in looking after their interests in the estate of his cousin Chevassu. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

CHARDON (ABBE), the candidate favoured by Abbe Fenil for the vacancy in the church of Saint-Saturnin at Plassans. La Conquete de Plassans.

CHARDON (MADAME), a protegee of Madame Melanie Correur. The State having refused to accept some furnishings supplied by her, Eugene Rougon, the Minister, arranged the matter. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

CHARLES, a waiter at the Cafe Riche. It was he who served supper to Maxime Saccard and Renee in the White Salon. La Curee.

CHARLES, the attendant at the public washing-house where Gervaise Macquart had her great fight with Virginie. L'Assommoir.

CHARLES, a butcher whose shop was in Rue Polonceau. The Coupeaus dealt with him. L'Assommoir.

CHARLES, coachman in the service of Nana. He left her after a violent scene, in the course of which he called her a slut. Nana.

CHARLES, a cousin of the little soldier Jules from Plogof. Germinal.

CHARLES, coachman to Aristide Saccard. He was discovered stealing oats, and was dismissed. In revenge, he disclosed to Madame Caroline the relations between his master and the Baroness Sandorff. L'Argent.

CHARLES, (MONSIEUR AND MADAME), see Badeuil.

CHARPIER, a grain merchant at Vendome. He became bankrupt, and his papers having been purchased by Fayeux on behalf of Busch, the latter found among them a document signed by Comte de Beauvilliers, undertaking payment of a large sum to Leonie Cron. L'Argent.

CHARRIER, a bricklayer who amassed a fortune by speculations in building-sites during the early days of the Second Empire. Along with Mignon, his partner, he had many business dealings with Aristide Saccard. La Curee.

CHARVET, one of the party which met at Lebigre's wine-shop to discuss revolutionary subjects. He was the best educated of the coterie, and his flood of bitter words generally crushed his adversaries. Le Ventre de Paris.

CHASSAGNE (DOCTEUR), director of the asylum at Moulineaux, where Saturnin Josserand was confined for a time. Pot-Bouille.

CHAUMETTE, counsellor at the court of Rouen. At the trial of Roubaud he acted as assessor to the assizes. La Bete Humaine.

CHAUMETTE FILS, son of the preceding, was a substitute at Rouen. He was the latest fancy of Madame Bonnehon, who did all she could to secure his advancement. La Bete Humaine.

CHAVAILLE (ROSALIE), cousin of La Mechain, and mother of Victor Saccard. She fell into a life of vice and poverty, and died at the age of twenty-six. L'Argent.

CHAVAL, a miner employed at the Voreux pit. From the first he had an instinctive hatred towards Etienne Lantier, caused partly by jealousy regarding Catherine Maheu, whose lover he became. He treated the girl very badly, and she ultimately left him. During the strike he took up a position antagonistic to Lantier, who was one of the leaders, and even undertook the direction of a party of Belgians brought in by the mine-owners to work the pits. By a strange chance, Chaval met Lantier and Catherine in a gallery of the pit after a terrible accident, which resulted in its being flooded; a struggle followed, and Chaval was killed, his body being thrown into the water. But the rise of the flood brought him back time after time to the feet of the others, as if his jealousy continued even after death. Germinal.

CHAVE (CAPTAIN), brother of Madame Maugendre, and uncle of Madame Jordan. He was a petty gambler of a class who frequent the Bourse daily, in order to make an almost certain profit of fifteen or twenty francs, which must be realized before the day's operations are over. He said he was forced to speculate, as the pension which he received from the Government was not sufficient to keep him from starvation. L'Argent.

CHAVIGNAT, an employee at the Ministry of Public Education. Pot-Bouille.

CHEDEVILLE (DE), deputy for Eure-et-Loire under the Empire. He was an old beau who had flourished in the reign of Louis Philippe, and was still supposed to have Orleanist sympathies, though his reputed friendship with the Emperor was sufficient to secure his success at the polls. He had gone through all his money, and had now only the farm of La Chamade left. His political career was cut short by a scandal which gave offence at the Tuileries, and he was defeated by Rochefontaine, who was nominated by Government as the official candidate. La Terre.

CHERMETTE (MADAME DE), a friend of Madame Deberle. Une Page d'Amour.

CHEVASSU, a lawyer at Faverolles, who died leaving his fortune to the Sisters of the Holy Family. His cousin, M. Charbonnel, got the will reduced on the ground of undue influence. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

CHEZELLES (MADAME LEONIDE DE), a school friend of Comtesse Muffat, who was five years her senior. She was the wife of a magistrate. "It was rumoured that she deceived him quite openly, but people pardoned her offence, and received her just the same, because, said they, 'She's not answerable for her actions.'" Nana.

CHIBRAY (COMTE DE), aide-de-camp to the Emperor. He was for a time the lover of Renee Saccard. La Curee.

CHOUARD (MARQUIS DE), father of Comtesse Sabine Muffat de Beuville. He was a Councillor of State and Chamberlain to the Empress, but, notwithstanding this, had kept up his relations with the Legitimist party; he was known for his piety, and expressed the belief that his class should show an example in morals to the lower orders. In secret, however, his life was vicious, and many damaging stories were known of him. He was one of Nana's admirers, and after a visit to her he was struck by sudden imbecility and semi-paralysis, the result of sixty years of debauchery. Nana.

CHOUARD (SABINE DE), daughter of the preceding and wife of Comte Muffat de Beuville. She was married at seventeen, and ever since had led a cloistered existence with a pious husband and a dictatorial stepmother. The death of her stepmother made little difference, and the family continued to live in an atmosphere of frigid respectability. At thirty-four Sabine looked little older than her own daughter, and would not have been taken for more than twenty-eight. About this time Comte Muffat fell entirely under the influence of Nana, and a change came over the household. Sabine accepted the attentions of Fauchery, whose mistress she became, and soon after launched into a course of extravagance which in the end went far to complete the ruin to which her husband was himself contributing. Other lovers followed Fauchery, and in the end she ran off with the manager of a large drapery store. Ultimately she returned, and was pardoned by her husband, who had lost his own self-respect as a result of his intrigue with Nana. Nana.

CHOUTEAU, an old man of over ninety years of age, who with his wife lived in a little hut in Beaumont, furnished for them by Angelique with articles taken from the attic of her adopted parents. She, as well as Felicien d'Hautecoeur, showed them much kindness. Le Reve.

CHOUTEAU, a soldier in the 106th regiment of the line, commanded by Colonel de Vineuil. He belonged to the squad of Corporal Jean Macquart. Originally a housepainter of Montmartre, his time was almost expired when the outbreak of war prevented his leaving the army. A revolutionary in his ideas, he was the leader in every breach of discipline among his companions, suggesting to them that they should throw away their knapsacks and guns; on the plateau of Floing, in front of the enemy, he declared that as he had not eaten he would not fight. Sergeant Sapin having been severely wounded, Chouteau offered, along with Loubet, to remove him to the ambulance, and the two men disappeared from the battlefield. After the defeat of the French Army he was made prisoner at Iges, where he continued to advise his companions in committing all kinds of excesses, going the length of handing a knife to Lapoulle in order that he might kill Pache, who had hidden some provisions from him. Along with Loubet he made an attempt to escape from the Germans, and in this he attained success by treacherously sacrificing his comrade. During the Commune he took an active part in the excesses which were then committed; but during the sanguinary repression which followed he was seen in the blouse of an honest workman applauding the massacre which ensued. La Debacle.

CHRISTINE. See Christine Hallegrain.

CHUCHU (MADEMOISELLE), an actress at the Varietes. A liaison between her and Flory led to the ruin of the latter on the Stock Exchange. L'Argent.

CLARISSE, waiting-maid in the service of Baroness Sandorff. She betrayed to Delcambre the confidences of her mistress. L'Argent.

CLEMENCE, a clerk at the fish auction. She attended the meetings in Lebigre's wine-shop along with Charvet, with whom she lived. Le Ventre de Paris.

CLEMENCE (MADEMOISELLE), occupied a room in the same tenement-house as the Coupeaus and Lorilleux, where she took in ironing, as well as added to her income by less reputable means. When Gervaise Coupeau's laundry was at the height of its success Clemence got regular employment there, but when business began to go she had to leave. L'Assommoir.

CLEMENCE, lady's maid to Madame Duveyrier. Pot-Bouille.

CLORINDE. See Clorinde Balbi.

CLOU, Municipal Councillor at Rognes. He played the trombone at choral services in church. La Terre.

COEUR (GERMAINE), a demi-mondaine who was on intimate terms with many members of the Paris Bourse. L'Argent.

COGNET, a roadman at Rognes. He was an old drunkard, who beat his daughter unmercifully. La Terre.

COGNET (JACQUELINE), alias LA COGNETTE, daughter of the preceding. She went to La Borderie at the age of twelve years, and before long had several lovers. She made her fortune, however, by resisting her master, Alexandre Hourdequin, for six months, and when she ultimately became his mistress she had made her position so secure that he was afterwards unable to part with her. Notwithstanding her relations with Hourdequin, she had other lovers, and the old shepherd Soulas, from motives of revenge, informed Hourdequin of her intimacy with one of them, a man named Tron. The latter, having been dismissed, killed Hourdequin and burned down the farm, so that Jacqueline was compelled to leave La Borderie no richer than she had come. La Terre.

COLICHE (LA), a fine cow which belonged to the Mouche family and was a great favourite with them. La Terre.

COLIN, a notary at Havre. It was in his presence that the Roubauds made a mutual will, leaving everything to the last survivor. La Bete Humaine.

COLOMBAN PERE, a veterinary surgeon known to all in the district of Seine-et-Oise. He was of dissolute habits. Au Bonheur des Dames.

COLOMBAN, a shopman who had been for many years in the employment of M. Baudu. He was engaged to his master's daughter Genevieve, but the marriage was put off from time to time as Baudu's business was not prosperous. Meantime, Colomban had become infatuated by Clara Prunaire, a girl employed in "The Ladies' Paradise," and his affection for Genevieve rapidly cooled. Ultimately he went off with Clara, thereby hastening the death of Genevieve, who had been in bad health for some time. Au Bonheur des Dames.

COLOMBE. See Pere Colombe.

COMBELOT (M. DE), an Imperial Chamberlain whom the Department of the Landes had chosen as deputy upon the formally expressed desire of the Emperor. He was a tall, handsome man, with a very white skin, and an inky black beard, which had been the means of winning him great favour among the ladies. He was married to a sister of Delestang. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

COMBELOT (MADAME DE), see Henriette Delestang.

COMBETTE, a chemist at Chene-Populeux. He was assessor to the mayor, and the information which he received on the night of 27th August, 1870, satisfied him of the unhappy state of the Army of Chalons, which was then on its way to the front. La Debacle.

COMBETTE (MADAME), wife of the preceding. It was she who on the evening of 27th August, 1870, offered hospitality to the soldier Maurice Levasseur, who was worn out with fatigue and with the pain of his foot, which had been injured by the long march. La Debacle.

COMBEVILLE (DUCHESSE DE), mother of Princess d'Orviedo. L'Argent.

COMBOREL ET CIE, a firm of ship-owners who entered into the great transport syndicate founded by Aristide Saccard. L'Argent.

COMPAN (ABBE), vicar of the church of Saint-Saturnin at Plassans. He was on bad terms with Abbe Fenil, and consequently the other priests were afraid to have any intercourse with him, Abbe Bourrette alone visiting him during his last illness. La Conquete de Plassans.

CONDAMIN (M. DE), commissioner of woods and rivers for the district of Plassans. He was an elderly man, whose morality was looked upon with some suspicion by the respectable inhabitants of Plassans. He married a young wife, whom he brought from no one knew where, but who had evidently influential friends at Paris, as it was she who got her husband and Dr. Porquier decorated. La Conquete de Plassans.

CONDAMIN (MADAME DE), wife of the preceding. She was at first received with some suspicion at Plassans, nothing being known of her past history, but by the charm of her manner she soon overcame prejudice. Madame Mouret having asked her assistance in connection with the Home for Girls proposed by Abbe Faujas, she entered heartily into the scheme and used her influence on its behalf. Acting on advice from her influential friends at Paris, she assisted Faujas in the schemes which resulted in the election of M. Delangre as deputy for Plassans. La Conquete de Plassans.

CONIN, a stationer at the corner of Rue Feydeau, who supplied note-books to most members of the Bourse. He was assisted in the business by his wife, and seldom came out of the back shop. L'Argent.

CONIN (MADAME), wife of the preceding. She was on too friendly terms with many of her customers, but was so discreet that no scandal arose. L'Argent.

COQUART (LES), proprietors of the farm of Saint-Juste, which, however, they were forced by bad times to sell. The family consisted of the father, mother, three sons and two daughters. La Terre.

COQUETS, neighbours of the Lorilleux in Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. They took a fancy to light their cooking-stove on the stair-landing, and, as they also owed their term's rent, they were given notice to quit. L'Assommoir.

CORBIERE (COMTE DE), proprietor of the Paradou, an estate near Artaud. When he died, the care of the property was confided to Jeanbernat, a foster-brother of the Comte. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

CORBREUSE (DUC DE), proprietor of a racing-stable. Nana.

CORNAILLE, the principal draper in Valognes. Denise Baudu served her apprenticeship to him. Au Bonheur des Dames.

CORNEMUSE, a racehorse which was the prize of the City of Paris. Nana.

CORNILLE, a member of the firm of Cornille and Jenard, who held in the eighteenth century the mineral concession of Joiselle, which was joined in 1760 to two neighbouring concessions, those of Comte de Cougny and of Baron Desrumaux, in order to form the Company of the Mines of Montsou. Germinal.

CORNILLE (ABBE), one of the clergy of the cathedral of Beaumont. He accompanied Monseigneur d'Hautecoeur when the latter came to administer the last rites of the Church to Angelique. Le Reve.

CORREUR (MADAME MELANIE), was the daughter of a notary of Coulonges, a town in the district of Niort. When she was twenty-four years old she eloped with a journeyman butcher, and thereafter lived in Paris, ignored by her family. For some time she kept a boarding-house at the Hotel Vanneau in the Rue Vanneau, where among her lodgers were Eugene Rougon, Du Poizet, and Theodore Gilquin. She established a claim on Rougon's gratitude, and he assisted a number of her friends in obtaining pensions and appointments. Having ascertained that her brother, M. Martineau, had made a will by which she would benefit, she, knowing him to be in bad health, denounced him to Rougon as a dangerous Republican. His arrest and sudden death followed. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

COSINUS, a racehorse which ran in the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

COSSARD (LE PERE), prompter at the Theatre des Varietes. He was a little hunchback.

COUDELOUP (MADAME), a baker in Rue des Poissonniers. She supplied the Coupeaus until Lantier decided that they must have finer bread from a Viennese bakery. L'Assommoir.

COUGNY (COMTE DE), owner in the eighteenth century of the mining concession of Cougny, which in 1760 was joined to two neighbouring concessions to form the Company of the Mines of Montsou. Germinal.

COUILLOT (LES), peasants at Rognes. Their son got the number 206 in the drawing for the conscription. La Terre.

COUPEAU, a zinc-worker, who married Gervaise Macquart after her desertion by Lantier. He was the son of a drunken father, but was himself steady and industrious until a serious accident caused by a fall from a roof brought about a change. After that he became unwilling to work and began to spend his time in public-houses; his days of work became fewer and fewer, until, a confirmed drunkard, he lived entirely on his wife's earnings. Attacks of delirium tremens followed, and in the end he died in the Asylum of Sainte-Anne after an attack of more than usual violence. L'Assommoir.

COUPEAU (MADAME GERVAISE), wife of the preceding. See Gervaise Macquart. L'Assommoir.

COUPEAU (ANNA, known as NANA), born 1852, was the only child of Coupeau and Gervaise Macquart, his wife. Almost from infancy she was allowed to run wild in the gutters of Paris, and even in childhood her instincts were vicious. At thirteen years of age she was sent to learn artificial-flower making in the establishment of Madame Titreville, whose forewoman was Madame Lerat, Nana's aunt. She had been there some time when she began to receive attentions from an elderly gentleman who had noticed her going to work. Meantime her father and mother had taken to drink so seriously that home life had become intolerable, and, after one of innumerable quarrels, Nana ran away to her venerable admirer. After a few months she tired of him and left, to spend her time amongst the low-class dancing-halls, in one of which she was found by her father, who brought her home, where she remained for a fortnight, and then ran off again. From time to time she returned, but her visits gradually became less frequent till they ceased. L'Assommoir.

At sixteen years of age she had a child by an unknown father, and two years later was installed in a flat in Boulevard Haussmann by a rich merchant of Moscow, who had come to pass the winter in Paris. Bordenave, the director of the Theatre des Varietes, gave her a part in a play called La Blonde Venus, and though her voice was poor and she was ignorant of acting, she was by the sheer force of her beauty an immediate and overwhelming success. All Paris was at her feet; Comte Muffat, Steiner, the Prince of Scots himself, came in turn to offer homage. It seemed as if this girl, born of four or five generations of drunkards and brought up on the pavements of Paris, was to revenge her race upon the idle rich by the wild extravagances into which she dragged them. Muffat and Steiner were her lovers, and ruined themselves by the vast sums which she squandered; Georges Hugon killed himself from jealousy of his brother Philippe, who embezzled for her sake, and brought himself to imprisonment and disgrace; Vandeuvres too, after courting dishonour, met death at his own hand; and Foucarmont, stripped bare and cast off, went to perish in the China seas. The procession was unending; more money was always required. After a successful appearance in a play called Melusine, Nana suddenly left Paris and went to the East. Strange stories were told of her—the conquest of a viceroy, a colossal fortune acquired in Russia—but nothing definite was known. When she returned to Paris in 1870 she found that her son Louiset had been attacked by small-pox, and she herself contracted the disease from him. A few days later she died in a room in the Grand Hotel, nursed only by Rose Mignon, who had come to her in her trouble. The war with Germany had just broken out, and as she lay dying the passing crowds were shouting ceaselessly, "A Berlin, A Berlin." Nana.

COUPEAU (LOUIS). See Louiset.

COUPEAU (MADAME), mother of Coupeau the zinc-worker. She was an old woman, and, her sight having given way, was unable to support herself. Her daughter, Madame Lorilleux, refused anything but the most trifling assistance, and ultimately Gervaise Coupeau took the old woman into her own home and supported her till her death, which occurred some years later. L'Assommoir.

COURAJOD, a great landscape painter, whose masterpiece, the Pool at Gagny, is in the Luxembourg. Long before his death he disappeared from the world of art, and lived in a little house at Montmartre surrounded by his hens, ducks, rabbits, and dogs. He refused to speak of his former fame, and when Claude Lantier called on him the old man seemed to be entering into a second childhood, forgetful of his past. L'Oeuvre.

COUTARD, a soldier of infantry who belonged to the Second Division of the First Army Corps, which was defeated at Wissembourg on 4th August, 1870. He and his companion Picot were slightly wounded, and were left behind, not being able to rejoin their regiments for three weeks, most of which they spent tramping the country through wet and mud, endeavouring to overtake the vanquished army of France. La Debacle.

CRASSE (LA), i.e. "The Dirty." Sobriquet of a professor at the college of Plassans, so called by the pupils as he marked by the constant rubbing of his head the back of every chair he occupied. L'Oeuvre.

CREVECOEUR, a lace merchant in Rue Mail. Henri Deloche left his employment, and entered Octave Mouret's shop on the same day as Denise Baudu. Au Bonheur des Dames.

CRON, a carter at Vendome. He was the father of Leonie Cron. L'Argent.

CRON (LEONIE), the girl to whom the Comte de Beauvilliers gave the document which afterwards came into the hands of Busch, and was used by him as a means of blackmailing the widow of the Comte. L'Argent.

CUCHE, a family of fisher people who resided at Bonneville. They were ruined by their house being washed away by the sea. The father and mother lived extremely dissolute lives, and their son grew up little better than a savage. Pauline Quenu made great efforts to reform him, but he refused all attempts to make him settle down. La Joie de Vivre.

CUDORGE (MADAME), a seller of umbrellas in the Rue Neuve de la Goutte d'Or, where she was a neighbour of Gervaise Lantier. L'Assommoir.

CUGNOT (PAULINE), daughter of a miller at Chartres who was ruined by a lawsuit. She came to Paris, and eventually got a situation at "The Ladies' Paradise," where she showed much kindness to Denise Baudu, who was at first badly treated by the other employees there. Later on she married Bauge, her lover, but was allowed to retain her situation. Au Bonheur des Dames.

D

DABADIE, chief station-master at Havre. He was a handsome man, with the bearing of a commercial magnate engrossed in business. Indeed, he willingly left the passenger department of the station to his assistants, in order that he might give particular attention to the enormous transit of merchandise at the docks. It is said that he was on friendly terms with Mademoiselle Guichon, the office-keeper at the station. La Bete Humaine.

DAGUENET (PAUL), the favoured lover of Nana. His father who was highly esteemed by Louis Philippe, occupied a prefecture up to the time of his death. As for himself, he had gone through three hundred thousand francs in eighteen months in the pursuit of pleasure, and was only able to keep going by small speculations on the Stock Exchange. Attracted by the fortune of Estelle Muffat, he decided to marry her, and with the assistance of Nana obtained the consent of Count Muffat. Become serious after marriage, Daguenet came under the influence of Theophile Venot, and was ruled with a rod of iron by his wife, who now exhibited a character entirely unsuspected before. He now went to Mass, and was furious with his father-in-law, who was ruining the family on account of Nana. Nana.

DAGUENET (MADAME). See Estelle Muffat de Beuville.

DAIGREMONT, a Paris financier who was possessed of an enormous fortune. It was said that his fidelity was not quite reliable, and that on one occasion at least he played his allies false and swept away the profits. He was approached by Saccard before the foundation of the Universal Bank, and being assured that Eugene Rougon was to back up his brother, he agreed to become one of the directors. He supported Saccard during the great gamble in the shares of the bank, and even on the day of the collapse had promised to come on the market and buy so heavily as to put up the price of the shares. Having received information through Jacoby that Gundermann was determined at any cost to break the market, Daigremont deserted Saccard, and instead of buying, sold all the shares he had, thereby bringing about the final collapse. L'Argent.

DAIGREMONT (MADAME), wife of the preceding. She was celebrated for her beauty and for her fine singing. L'Argent.

DALICHAMP, a doctor at Raucourt, six kilometres from Remilly. He was a man of brusque manner, but of excellent heart, who showed much kindness to his patients. In the middle of August, 1870, he established an ambulance at Raucourt, and after Jean Macquart, severely wounded, had arrived at the house of Pere Fouchard, Dalichamp attended him secretly till his recovery. It was through him that Henriette Weiss and Jean gained their knowledge of the disasters which were everywhere overtaking the French army. La Debacle.

DAMBREVILLE, a Government official who married in order to secure promotion through the influence of his wife. Pot-Bouille.

DAMBREVILLE (MADAME), wife of the preceding. An elderly woman with a passion for Leon Josserand, whose appointment as Maitre des Requetes she procured by her influence. She promised to secure a wealthy wife for him, but delayed to do so until he insisted on a match being arranged between him and her niece Raymonde. Her friendly relations with him continued to subsist even after his marriage. Pot-Bouille.

DAMBREVILLE (RAYMONDE), niece of Dambreville. See Madame Leon Josserand.

DANSAERT, a head captain in the Voreux pit. He was brutal and overbearing with the workmen, but humble in the presence of his superiors. Though it was well known that he was the lover of La Pierronne, he was friendly with her husband, and got information from him regarding the progress of the strike. On the day of the accident in the pit he became mad with fear, and leaped into one of the cages, leaving his men at the bottom. This action, together with the scandals regarding him, caused the company to decide on his dismissal. Germinal.

DASTE (MADAME), a friend of the Saccards and of Madame de Lauwerens. La Curee.

DAUVERGNE, deputy station-master for the main lines at the Gare Saint-Lazare. He occupied with his family, Claire, Henri, and Sophie, a house belonging to the railway company in the Impasse d'Amsterdam. La Bete Humaine.

DAUVERGNE (CLAIRE), daughter of the preceding and sister of Sophie. The two sisters were both charming blondes, one eighteen and the other twenty, who, amidst a constant stream of gaiety, looked after the housekeeping with the six thousand francs earned by the two men. The elder one would be heard laughing, while the younger sang, and a cage full of exotic birds rivalled one another in roulades. La Bete Humaine.

DAUVERGNE (HENRI), a chief guard in the service of the Western Railway Company. He was in love with Severine Roubaud, but was aware of her liaison with Jacques Lantier. He was injured in the railway accident at Croix-de-Maufras, and having been removed to a house which belonged to Severine, he was nursed by her there. In a hallucination of illness, he believed that he heard, outside his window, Roubaud arranging with Cabuche for the murder of Severine: his mistaken evidence was greatly instrumental in leading to the conviction of the two men. La Bete Humaine.

DAUVERGNE (SOPHIE), the elder of the two sisters. La Bete Humaine.

DAVOINE, the purchaser of Chanteau's timber business at Caen. When Chanteau became incapacitated by gout, he sold his business to Davoine for a hundred thousand francs, of which one-half was to be paid in cash and the balance to remain in the business. Davoine was, however, constantly launching into speculations, and the consequence was that the profits were drained away, and the balance sheet generally showed a loss. He ultimately became bankrupt, and Chanteau lost all the money he had left in the business. La Joie de Vivre.

DEBERLE (DOCTOR HENRI), a medical man of Passy who inherited from his father a large fortune and an excellent practice. A chance call to attend Jeanne Grandjean led to an intimacy with her mother, which resulted in the fleeting love episode which forms the subject of the novel. Deberle, deceived by the circumstances under which Helene Grandjean prevented an assignation between his wife and M. Malignon, believed that Helene had arranged an assignation with himself, and she found it impossible to enlighten him without compromising his wife. The brief liaison was terminated by the illness and death of Jeanne. Une Page d'Amour.

DEBERLE (MADAME JULIETTE), wife of the preceding, was the elder daughter of M. Letellier, a wealthy silk merchant of Paris. Empty-headed and fond of gaiety, she was carried away by the attentions of M. Malignon, an idle young man who went everywhere in Paris society, and to whom she was foolish enough on one occasion to grant an assignation. Madame Helene Grandjean, who was on intimate terms with the family, warned Madame Deberle that her husband's suspicions had been aroused, and that lady, seeing in time the folly of her action, broke off the intrigue. Une Page d'Amour.

DEBERLE (LUCIEN), the young son of Doctor Deberle. He was a playmate of Jeanne Grandjean. Une Page d'Amour.

DECKER (BARONNE), a friend of the Marquis de Chouard, who occasionally visited her at Viroflay. Nana.

DEJOIE, a man who was appointed by Saccard to be attendant at the offices of the newspaper purchased in the interest of the Universal Bank. He had a small sum of money, intended for the dowry of his daughter, and to increase this he invested it in shares of the bank. On the rise of the shares he gained a large sum, but, refusing to sell, he lost everything in the final catastrophe. L'Argent.

DEJOIE (JOSEPHINE), wife of Dejoie, who first knew her when she was cook with Madame Leveque, sister-in-law of Durieu, the brewer. She was afterwards with Dr. Renaudin, and then in a shop in Rue Rambuteau. The husband and wife were never fortunate enough to get employment in one place. Josephine died when her daughter was fourteen years old. L'Argent.

DEJOIE (NATHALIE), daughter of the preceding. In order to provide a dowry for her, her father invested all his savings in shares of the Universal Bank, losing everything after its failure. She was a pretty girl, but absolutely heartless, and after the downfall of the bank she ran away from home, leaving her old father in his poverty. L'Argent.

DELAHERCHE (MADAME), mother of Jules Delaherche. Her husband's gay life rendered her unhappy, and after she became a widow she trembled lest her son should take to the same courses as his father; so, after marrying him to a woman who was devout and of simple tastes, she sought to keep him in a dependent state as though he were a mere youth. At fifty years of age, his wife having died, Delaherche determined to marry a young widow about whom there had been much gossip, and did so in spite of all the remonstrances of his mother. After that she only lived on in silent remonstrance, spending most of her time shut up in her own room. The miseries of war told severely on the old woman, and to these were added domestic troubles, for she became aware of her daughter-in-law's relations with Captain Baudoin and Edmond Lagarde. After the occupation of Sedan by the Prussians she devoted herself to nursing her old friend Colonel Vineuil, who had been brought to the house severely wounded. She remained with him till his death, shut up from the world, and refusing to hear of the defeats daily accumulating against their unhappy country. La Debacle.

DELAHERCHE (JULES), one of the principal cloth manufacturers of Sedan. He owned a large factory in Rue Maqua, which had been the property of the family for a hundred and sixty years; in the rear of the building was a palatial courtyard shaded with old trees, gigantic elms dating from the foundation of the establishment. Jules, married to a woman dull and plain-looking, had been kept by his mother in the dependent position of a mere boy, but at fifty years of age, his wife being dead, he became enamoured of Gilberte Maginot, a pretty young widow of Charleville, and married her in spite of the determined opposition of his mother. An ardent Bonapartist, he was much excited by a chance meeting with Napoleon III, but after the repeated defeats of the army in the war with Prussia his loyalty cooled, and he ultimately charged the Emperor with all the miseries which ensued. After the battle of Sedan an ambulance was established in the courtyard of his factory, and the wounded Colonel Vineuil was removed to his house. La Debacle.

DELAHERCHE (MADAME JULES). See Gilberte Vineuil. La Debacle.

DELANGRE (M.), mayor of Plassans. He was the son of a bricklayer, and when he passed as a lawyer had to be content with petty suits that no one else would take up. It was said that he became the lover of Madame Rastoil, and it was certainly through her influence that he won his first cases. He was shrewd enough to show no particular political proclivities; so after the Coup d'Etat of 1851, when they were looking out for a mayor, his name was at once thought of. He was elected, and from that time everything prospered with him. As a result of much scheming by Abbe Faujas, Delangre was adopted as candidate for the representation of Plassans, and was elected by a triumphant majority over Maurin, the Republican candidate. After his election, he voted steadily with the Government, thus accomplishing the object for which Faujas was sent to the town. La Conquete de Plassans.

DELANGRE (MADAME), wife of the preceding. "She was a tame little woman of a servant-like meekness, whose dissoluteness had remained a matter of legend in Plassans." She was consulted by Madame Mouret regarding the Home for Girls proposed by Abbe Faujas, and agreed to act on the Committee. La Conquete de Plassans.

DELANGRE (LUCIEN), son of M. Delangre, mayor of Plassans. He was a young barrister of four-and-twenty, short and sharp-eyed, with a crafty brain, and pleaded with all the coolness of an old practitioner. On the suggestion of Abbe Faujas he took a leading part in starting the Club for Young Men at Plassans. La Conquete de Plassans.

DELAROCQUE, a stockbroker who was married to the sister of Jacoby. L'Argent.

DELCAMBRE, Public Prosecutor, afterwards Minister of Justice. Having been for some time the lover of Baroness Sandorff, he was much annoyed at her subsequent intimacy with Saccard, and after the failure of the Universal Bank he instigated the proceedings which led to the conviction of its officials. L'Argent.

DELESTANG (M.), son of a wine merchant at Bercy, was himself a retired attorney and owner of a model farm. He was a man of great wealth, but of foolish and shallow character. Having got into political trouble at the time of the Coup d'Etat of 1851, he was helped out of an awkward position by Eugene Rougon. Acting on the suggestion of Rougon, he married Clorinde Balbi, and soon after was appointed Minister of Commerce and Agriculture. After Rougon's second retirement from office Delestang was appointed to succeed him as Minister of the Interior. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

DELESTANG (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Clorinde Balbi.

DELESTANG (HENRIETTE), sister of Delestang, the Minister, and wife of M. de Combelot, Chamberlain to Napoleon III. She had a passion for the Emperor, who, however, would not look at her. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

DELEUZE founded, along with his brother, in 1822, the drapers' shop in Paris known as Au Bonheur des Dames. When he died, his daughter Caroline, who was married to Hedouin, succeeded to his share in the business. Pot-Bouille.

The beginning of the business was exceedingly modest; there was only one window in the shop, and the stock was a small one. At that time the principal shop in the neighbourhood was the Vieil Elbeuf, of which Baudu afterwards became proprietor. Au Bonheur des Dames.

DELEUZE (UNCLE), one of the founders of the shop known as Au Bonheur des Dames. After the death of his elder brother he continued the business along with his niece Madame Hedouin. He became much affected by rheumatism, and left the management in the hands of Hedouin. Pot-Bouille.

DELEUZE (CAROLINE). See Caroline Hedouin.

DELHOMME was the son-in-law of Pere Fouan, whose daughter Fanny he married. He was the owner of a small farm, which he managed so well that he became one of the richest of the peasant proprietors at Rognes. He was a man of calm, upright nature, and was frequently selected as arbiter in petty disputes. In his own affairs, however, he allowed himself to be much influenced by his wife. He was a municipal councillor, and ultimately became mayor. La Terre.

DELHOMME (MADAME), nee Fanny Fouan, wife of the preceding. At first a not unamiable woman, she became hardened, and eventually the cleanliness of her house became a mania with her. She was unkind to her father, with whose little weaknesses she had no patience, and her persecution of him was carried to such an extent that he ceased to live with her and her husband. She was so annoyed at this that she refused to speak to him again, and her ill-will was not even terminated by his death. When her husband became mayor her conceit knew no bounds. La Terre.

DELHOMME (ERNEST), known as Nenesse, son of the preceding. From childhood he had a fancy for dressing himself up and aping the city lads, and as he had always a horror of the land he went to Chartres to assist in a restaurant, with which was connected a public dancing-hall. His parents effected an insurance against him being drawn in the conscription; but he drew a lucky number, and the loss of the money caused his mother considerable annoyance. He proposed to take over the maison de tolerance at Chartres which belonged to his grand-aunt Madame Badeuil and her husband, and he eventually did so by marrying their granddaughter Elodie Vaucogne. La Terre.

DELOCHE, a bailiff in needy circumstances who resided at Briquebec. He treated his son Henri very badly. Au Bonheur des Dames.

DELOCHE (HENRI), a young man who got employment at "The Ladies' Paradise" at the same time as Denise Baudu. He fell in love with Denise, but though she refused to marry him, they remained on friendly terms, and on one occasion he threw a glass of wine at Favier, a fellow-shopman, who repeated a slander about her. Au Bonheur des Dames.

DELORME, a relation of the Quenus. On the suggestion of Madame Chanteau he was nominated a member of the family council of Pauline Quenu. He consented to her emancipation. La Joie de Vivre.

DENEULIN, a cousin of the Gregoires. Like his cousin, he inherited a denier in the Montsou mines, but being an enterprising engineer, tormented by the desire for a royal fortune, he had hastened to sell out when the value of the denier reached a million francs. His wife possessed through an uncle the little concession of Vandame, on which were two abandoned pits—Jean-Bart and Gaston-Marie—and he invested all his money in the reopening of these pits. He was a bad manager, however, and after his wife's death he was pillaged by every one. The great strike at Montsou completed his ruin, and he was ultimately compelled to sell his pits to the great company which had already acquired all the neighbouring mines, himself receiving a situation as divisional engineer. Germinal.

DENEULIN (JEANNE), second daughter of the preceding. Having lost their mother when very young, she and her sister were brought up alone, somewhat badly, being spoiled by their father. Jeanne was fond of painting, and had already had three landscapes refused by the Salon. Her sister and she remained cheerful in the midst of their father's loss of fortune, and proved themselves excellent managers. Germinal.

DENEULIN (LUCIE), elder daughter of Deneulin. She was fond of music, and at one time talked of going on the stage. Like her sister, she showed an admirable spirit at the time of her father's downfall. Germinal.

DENIZET, examining magistrate (juge d'instruction) at Rouen. The son of a cattle-breeder, he studied law at Caen, but had entered the judicial department of the Government late in life; and his peasant origin, aggravated by his father's bankruptcy, made his promotion slow. After being substitute in various places he was sent to Rouen, where he acted as examining magistrate. He was fond of his profession, and at the beginning of the inquiry into the murder of President Grandmorin allowed himself to be carried away by his desire to elicit the facts of the case. He received, however, a hint from Camy-Lamotte, the secretary to the Minister of Justice, that caution must be exercised, and his desire to be decorated and removed to Paris was so great that he sacrificed the interests of justice, and caused the case to be hushed up. Later, the murder of Severine Roubaud reopened the Grandmorin inquiry, and Denizet was allowed a free hand in dealing with the affair. By a masterpiece of logical deduction he set out to prove the complicity of Cabuche and Roubaud, a complicity, however, which had no existence in fact, and the demonstration of which by Denizet produced a gross error of justice. La Bete Humaine.

DEQUERSONNIERE, an architect with whom Louis Dubuche served his apprenticeship. He was a former winner of the Grand Prize, and was architect of the Civil Branch of Public Works, an officer of the Legion of Honour, and a member of the Institute. His principal production was the church of Saint-Mathieu, a building which shared the characteristics of a pastry-cook's mould and a clock in the style of the First Empire. L'Oeuvre.

DESBAZEILLES, President of the Assize Court at Rouen on the occasion of the trial of Roubaud. He was a bachelor, and an old friend of Madame Bonnehon; a friendship which still continued, notwithstanding his sixty years. He was the literary glory of the Court, and his cleverly turned sonnets were well known. La Bete Humaine.

DESFORGES, a stock-broker. The friendship of his wife with Hartmann, the great financier, had been very useful to him. He died leaving a fortune, the amount of which was minimized by some and exaggerated by others. Au Bonheur des Dames.

DESFORGES (MADAME HENRIETTE), daughter of a Councillor of State and widow of a stock-broker, who left her a small fortune. "Even during her husband's lifetime, people said she had shown herself grateful towards Baron Hartmann, whose financial tips had proved very useful to them; and later on, after her husband's death, the acquaintance had probably continued, but always discreetly." Octave Mouret, having met her at the house of a mutual friend, made love to her, chiefly with a view to gaining Baron Hartmann's assistance through her influence. Madame Desforges was extremely jealous when she learned of Mouret's affection for Denise Baudu and the probability of his marrying her. In order to injure him, she introduced Bouthemont to Baron Hartmann, who lent him money to start an opposition establishment called "The Four Seasons." Au Bonheur des Dames.

DESIR (VEUVE), an elderly woman who kept a ball-room known as Bon-Joyeux. She called all the miners her children, and grew tender at the thought of the flood of beer which she had poured out for them during the last thirty years. She gave her ball-room to the miners to hold a meeting during the strike, and when the police arrived to break it up she held the door long enough to allow those present to escape. Germinal.

DESLIGNIERES, a toy-seller in Rue Saint-Roch. Au Bonheur des Dames.

DESMARQUAY, a money-changer in Rue Saint-Lazare. Trublot was employed in his office. Pot-Bouille.

DESROCHES, a notary at Chene-Populeux. His house there was requisitioned for the Emperor on 27th August, 1870, during the march of the army of MacMahon. La Debacle.

DESROCHES (MADAME), mother of the preceding. Their house adjoined the early home of Maurice Levasseur, and she had been good to him when he was a child. When the house was requisitioned for the Emperor, she had to give up her room to him and take refuge in the garret. La Debacle.

DESRUMAUX (BARON), one of the founders of the coal industry in the north of France. For forty years he struggled without yielding, in the midst of continual obstacles, and when at last his pits began to yield a small profit, two neighbouring concessions, that of Cougny, belonging to the Comte de Cougny, and that of Joiselle, belonging to the Cornille and Jenard Company, nearly overwhelmed him with their competition. Happily, on 25th August, 1760, a treaty was made between the three concessions, uniting them into a single one known as the Montsou Mining Company. Germinal.

DESVIGNES (ADELE), see Madame Bouchard.

DIDE (AUNT). See Adelaide Fouque.

DIEUDONNE (MADAME), wife of a small farmer at Seguiranne. She brought up her niece Sophie, who was cured of phthisis by Doctor Pascal. Le Docteur Pascal.

DOMERGUE was formerly Director of Roads and Bridges at Plassans. He was the father of Madame Campardon. Pot-Bouille.

DOMERGUE (MADAME), wife of the preceding, lived a retired life at Plassans with her husband. She introduced Octave Mouret to her daughter, Madame Campardon, when he came to Paris. Pot-Bouille.

DOMERGUE (ROSE). See Madame Achille Campardon.

DROUARD (MADAME), an old actress at the Theatre des Varietes. She played the part of Juno in the Blonde Venus. Nana.

DUBREUIL, a cousin of the Levasseurs. He was sub-manager of the sugar refinery at Chene-Populeux at the time Weiss was employed there; then, in 1868, he retired to a little property near Sedan which had come to his wife as a legacy. On the evening before the battle, foreseeing the disaster, he removed his wife and children to Bouillon, and next day the house was completely destroyed during the struggle. La Debacle.

DUBRUEL, a pork-butcher at Plassans who took part in the attack on the Town Hall. Three days later he was killed in the ambush arranged by Pierre Rougon against the Republicans. La Fortune des Rougon.

DUBUCHE (ALICE), daughter of Louis Dubuche and of Regine Margaillan, his wife. She was so delicate that at six years old she was still unable to walk. Her father endeavoured to strengthen her muscles by occasionally making her hold on to the bar of a trapeze for a few moments, but the exercise only seemed to produce extreme terror in the unfortunate child. L'Oeuvre.

DUBUCHE (GASTON), the elder child of Louis Dubuche and of Regine Margaillan, his wife. At the age of ten he had the feeble limbs of a little child, and though he regularly exercised on a trapeze, he was unable to raise himself on his wrists, the least exertion producing profuse perspiration. L'Oeuvre.

DUBUCHE (LOUIS), eldest son of a baker of Plassans, and companion from childhood of Claude Lantier and Pierre Sandoz. His mother, who was very ambitious, sent him to Paris, where he studied architecture at the School of Art. His reverence for established formulas caused him to be out of sympathy with the advanced school of painting advocated by Claude Lantier and his friends, though he expressed large ideals regarding his own profession. In time he became a first-class pupil at the school, and with infinite trouble gained the regulation "honourable mention." But his parents no longer sent him any money; it became necessary for him to gain his living, and he was already tired of earning a few francs by assisting an architect incapable of drawing his own plans. By the aid of his master, Dequersonniere, he gained a medal for a plan of a villa, and this brought him prominently under the notice of Margaillan, a wealthy building contractor, whose daughter Regine he married soon afterwards. The marriage was not a success; his wife was always ailing, and the two children which were born to them were so delicate as to cause constant anxiety. His business relations with his father-in-law were a failure, some of his ventures resulting in heavy loss, and Margaillan soon thrust him aside. His only satisfaction was that he had been able to repay to his parents the money they advanced for his education in Paris. L'Oeuvre.

DUBUCHE (MADAME LOUIS), wife of the preceding. See Regine Margaillan. L'Oeuvre.

DUCAT, a franc-tireur of the woods at Dieulet. He was formerly a bailiff at Blainville, but had to leave on account of a criminal charge against him. He was a friend of Cabasse and of Guillaume Sambuc, and took part in the murder of Goliath Steinberg. La Debacle.

DUCHESNE (GEORGES), a lover of Madame Bouchard, for whom she asked the patronage of Eugene Rougon, which he refused on the ground of his respect for her husband. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

DUCLOUX (LA), an old woman who lived in the neighbourhood of Croix de Maufras, having formerly been servant in an inn. Misard was authorized to employ her as gatekeeper on the railway after the death of Flore. She was anxious to marry Misard, and seeing him constantly searching for the little hoard of money which had been hidden by his deceased wife, La Ducloux cleverly led him to believe that she knew where the money was hidden. After she became the second Madame Misard she became infected with the feverish anxiety of her husband, and joined with him in his untiring search. La Bete Humaine.

DUMONTEIL, a rich silk manufacturer at Lyons. He supplied to Octave Mouret a special make of silk with which he achieved great success. Au Bonheur des Dames.

DU POIZAT PERE, an old bailiff at Coulonges. He was an old miser who refused any money to his son Leopold, and even threatened him with a pistol when he tried to borrow from him. He lived alone in an old ruinous house with a loaded gun behind the door. His son, having become a prefect, and wishing to dazzle the old man with his fine position, attempted to force the door; then followed a drama mysterious and without witness, at the end of which the old man was found lying at the foot of his staircase, with his head split open. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

DU POIZAT (LEOPOLD), son of a process-server at Coulonges, a little town in the district of Niort. His father, who had amassed a considerable fortune by usury, sent him to study law in Paris, giving him an allowance of only a hundred francs a month. Some months before the revolution of February, 1848, he became acquainted with Eugene Rougon, who, like himself, was boarding at that time with Madame Correur at the Hotel Vanneau. During the Bonapartist intrigues he assisted Rougon in some risky undertakings, and later on worked energetically to secure his election to the Legislative Assembly as member for Deux-Sevres. After the Coup d'Etat Rougon used his influence on behalf of Du Poizat, and got him appointed sub-prefect at Bressuire. He resigned this appointment on the advice of Rougon after the resignation of the latter as President of the State Council. After Rougon's return to office he was appointed prefect at Niort. His extreme harshness and overbearing conduct produced a public scandal, and the sudden death of his father, under peculiar circumstances, still further increased his unpopularity. He was at his own request transferred to another prefecture by Delestang, who succeeded Rougon as Minister of the Interior. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

DURIEU, a wealthy brewer who, carried away by the charm of Caroline Hamelin, married her. He became an alcoholic maniac, and on one occasion pursued his wife with a knife. A separation was arranged, and Durieu ultimately died in an asylum. L'Argent.

DURIEU (MADAME). See Caroline Hamelin.

DURIEU (LE PERE), a messenger at Plassans. He was a taciturn old Provencal. Le Docteur Pascal.

DUTILLEUL. A flour-miller at Montsou whose mills were stopped by the strike. Germinal.

DUVEYRIER (ALPHONSE), a counsellor at the Court of Appeal; married Clotilde, daughter of M. Vabre. He was a man of dissolute habits, to whom his wife's cold nature and love of music were repugnant, and he spent much of his time away from home. He squandered large sums of money on a woman named Clarisse Bocquet, who afterwards left him. Having found her again, he fell under her influence so completely as to allow her to treat him abominably. So unhappy did he become, that he attempted to commit suicide by shooting himself; the wound was, however, not a serious one, and he recovered. Pot-Bouille.

DUVEYRIER (MADAME CLOTILDE), wife of the preceding, was the only daughter of M. Vabre, a notary of Versailles. She did not get on well with her husband, who found her cold nature irksome, and, perhaps even more so, her love of piano-playing. Her musical evenings were attended by Octave Mouret, the Josserands, and others of the same circle. Pot-Bouille.

DUVEYRIER (GUSTAVE), son of the preceding, a thin, precocious boy of sixteen, who was being educated at the Lycee Bonaparte. Pot-Bouille.

DUVILLARD, the owner of a large house bought by Octave Mouret for the enlargement of his shop. Au Bonheur des Dames.

E

ECOSSE (S.A.R. LE PRINCE D'), the son of a queen and heir to a throne. He was tall and strong, with a fair beard and a fresh complexion. He was an habitue of the Theatre des Varietes, and an admirer of Nana, whom he wished to bring to London as a singer. Later, Nana spoke of him with little respect. Nana.

ECREVISSE (L'), a celebrated demi-mondaine of the Second Empire. La Curee.

EMPEREUR, one of the dogs of the shepherd Soulas. He was a fierce animal, and, like his master, hated Jacqueline Cognet. La Terre.

ERNESTINE, a woman who once occupied a room in Bourras's house, and had written her name in candle-smoke on the ceiling. Au Bonheur des Dames.

ESCORAILLES (MARQUIS D'), father of Jules d'Escorailles. "The Escorailles family was one of the oldest in Plassans, where it was treated with the utmost respect; and Rougon, who in former days had often dragged his worn-down boots past the old Marquis's house, took a pride in protecting and assisting the young man. The family retained an enthusiastic devotion for Henri V, though it allowed its heir to serve the Empire." The Marquis and his wife visited Paris specially to ask the assistance of Rougon in furthering the interests of their son. After Rougon's proceedings against the Sisters of the Holy Family, in the interest of the Charbonnels, they again visited Paris to insist on their son retiring from the administration, as they said they could not allow him to be mixed up in any persecution of the Church. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

ESCORAILLES (MARQUISE D'), wife of the preceding. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

ESCORAILLES (JULES D'), son of the Marquis d'Escorailles, a nobleman of Plassans, at whose request Rougon got Jules an appointment as auditor at the Council of State. After Rougon's return to office he appointed M. Escorailles his private secretary. He carried on an intrigue with Madame Bouchard. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

ESPANET (MARQUIS D'), husband of the Marquise Adeline. He was made aide-de-camp to the Emperor, but by his riotous conduct scandalized the older nobility. He never appeared in society with his wife. La Curee.

ESPANET (MARQUISE D'), one of the most prominent leaders of society of the Second Empire, was the inseparable companion of Madame Haffner, whose name was always associated with hers by the public. They were both schoolfellows and friends of Madame Renee Saccard. La Curee.

EUGENIE, cook for a short time to Madame Theophile Vabre. Pot-Bouille.

EUGENIE, a child buried in the cemetery of Cayenne at Saint-Ouen, where Bongard and Sandoz read the inscription on a poor cross, without railing, set up slantingly across a path, "Eugenie, three days." L'Oeuvre.

EUGENIE (EMPRESS), referred to in Son Excellence Eugene Rougon, and La Debacle.

EULALIE, a laundress who lived in Rue Montmartre. Gilquin, when visiting her, chanced to overhear in an adjoining room a conversation between some Italians who had come to Paris to assassinate the Emperor. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

EULALIE, a fish-seller, mistress of Bec-Sale, alias Boit-sans-soif. L'Assommoir.

EULALIE (LA MERE), a vegetable seller at Montmartre. She lodged with Madame Mechain. L'Argent.

EUSEBE, a choir-boy in the church of Saint-Saturnin at Plassans. He accompanied Abbe Bourrette to the deathbed of Abbe Compan. La Conquete de Plassans.

F

FAGEROLLES PERE, a manufacturer of zinc objects of art who lived in a gloomy old house in Rue Vieille-du-Temple. His workshop was on the ground floor, above it was a warehouse, and still higher, facing a courtyard, were the rooms in which he lived with his son Henri. He intended to bring up Henri as a designer of ornaments for his own trade, and when the boy showed higher ambitions, taking to painting proper and talking about the School of Art, there were quarrels, blows, a series of falling-outs and reconciliations. Even when the young man had achieved some success, the manufacturer of artistic zincwork, while resigned to letting him have his will, treated him harshly, like a lad who was spoiling his career. Later, in the desire of a decoration for himself, the merchant forgot his former opposition; he held out his son, who had now arrived at notoriety, as an additional claim for his own distinction. L'Oeuvre.

FAGEROLLES (HENRI), son of the preceding. In the gloomy house of his father he grew up like a true child of the Paris pavements. Though his father desired him to become a designer of ornaments for use in his trade, the lad had higher ambitions, and desiring to study painting, became a student at the School of Art. Notwithstanding this orthodox training, he was a disciple of Claude Lantier and his somewhat revolutionary band, whom he delighted by sly attacks upon his professors and praise of themselves. He paid particular court to Claude, under whose artistic influence he had come, and though he continued to paint with tricky skill, he no longer talked in anything but the jargon of the new open-air school. This did not prevent him, however, from elsewhere making fun of the adepts of that school, whom he accused of doing their work with a kitchen ladle. He made a success with a picture of an actress before her glass, which caught the popular taste, and afterwards appeared as an engraving. Taken up by Naudet, the picture-dealer, he began to receive large prices for his work, and by doing everything in his power to make his way in society his position soon became secure. He was elected a member of the Hanging Committee of the Salon, and secured the admission of Claude Lantier's picture L'Enfant Mort. He made large sums of money, in the spending of which he was assisted by Irma Becot. L'Oeuvre.

FANNY (MADEMOISELLE), a work-girl in the neighbourhood of Octave Mouret's shop, who was sent there by her employer to match some merinos. Au Bonheur des Dames.

FAUCHERY (LEON), a journalist and dramatic author, who wrote a piece for the Theatre des Varietes called La Petite Duchesse. After numerous liaisons he became for a time the lover of Comtesse Sabine Muffat, and under the pressure of Comte Muffat was forced to give to Nana a leading part in La Petite Duchesse. Fauchery's liaison with the Comtesse Muffat merely interrupted for a time one of older standing with Rose Mignon, whose husband appeared to be content with the position of major-domo in a menage a trois. Nana.

FAUCHEUR (LE PERE) kept at Bennecourt a small country inn much frequented by artists. In connection with the tavern he carried on a small business in groceries. After the death of the Faucheurs the inn was carried on by their niece Melie. L'Oeuvre.

FAUCHEUR (LA MERE), wife of the preceding. She was a daughter of old Poirette. L'Oeuvre.

FAUCONNIER (MADAME), carried on a laundry business in Paris, and gave employment to Gervaise Macquart after her desertion by Lantier. She continued on friendly terms with Gervaise after the latter's marriage to Coupeau, at which she was present. When drink had brought about the Coupeaus' ruin, Madame Fauconnier again took Gervaise into her employment, giving her work until her increasing carelessness and intemperance made her dismissal necessary. L'Assommoir.

FAUCONNIER (VICTOR), the young son of Madame Fauconnier. He was an idle scamp about four years older than Nana Coupeau, and was her constant playfellow and companion in all kinds of mischief. L'Assommoir.

Nana, in talking over with Satin the events of her childhood, referred to Victor as a youth who had always shown vicious tendencies. Nana.

FAUJAS (ABBE), a priest of Besancon who, having got into some trouble there, was sent to Plassans by the Government with the view of undermining the political influence of the clergy, who were strongly Legitimist in their views. At Plassans he took up his residence, along with his mother, in the house of Francois Mouret. At first he kept entirely in the background, but assisted by Madame Mouret, who had fallen in love with him, and by Madame Felicite Rougon, acting under instructions from her son Eugene, the Minister of State, Faujas soon began to make himself felt in Plassans. He appeared to take no interest in politics, but little by little he gained power, until "the conquest of Plassans" was accomplished and a supporter of the Government was elected as deputy. Meantime his influence over Madame Mouret had become complete, and he had practically taken possession of the Mourets' house, his sister and her husband, as well as his mother, living there with him. Thrust aside and neglected, Francois Mouret was wrongfully removed to the asylum at Les Tulettes, where confinement soon unhinged his not over-strong intellect. The Abbe now became even more arrogant, and Madame Mouret was barely tolerated in her own house. Ultimately Francois Mouret escaped from the asylum, and returning by night to his home, set fire to it; along with him, the Abbe Faujas and all his relations perished in the flames. La Conquete de Plassans.

FAUJAS (MADAME), mother of the preceding. She accompanied the Abbe to Plassans and took up house with him there. Absolutely devoted to her son, she made herself his slave, and sacrificed everything and every one to his interests. It was largely through her that the gradual ousting of the Mourets from their own home became possible; and to accomplish her ends she stopped short at nothing; seldom speaking, but always watching, she was ready to grasp each opportunity as it arose. Retribution came with the escape of Francois Mouret from the asylum, and Madame Faujas perished along with the other members of her family in the conflagration raised by him. La Conquete de Plassans.

FAUJAS (OLYMPE). See Madame Olympe Trouche.

FAUQUENOIX, an associate of Baron Desrumaux in the department of the mines of Montsou. Germinal.

FAUVELLE, a sugar-refinery at Montsou, which suffered on account of the strike of miners. Germinal.

FAVIER, a salesman in the silk department of "The Ladies' Paradise." He had for some reason an ill-will towards Denise Baudu and spread scandalous stories about her. Henri Deloche, her friend, hearing him do so on one occasion, threw a glass of wine in his face. Au Bonheur des Dames.

FAYEUX, a collector of rents at Vendome. He did business in connection with Busch, and also with La Mechain, whose cousin he was said to be. He speculated on the bourse through Mazaud, and after the downfall of the Universal Bank it was found that he had embezzled large sums from persons employing him. L'Argent.

FENIL (ABBE), head of the theological seminary at Plassans. He was a keen ecclesiastic, with strong Legitimist principles, and from the first took up a position antagonistic to Abbe Faujas. Having great influence with the Bishop of Plassans, he was for some time able to prevent Faujas from receiving preferment; a hint from Government, however, caused the Bishop to change his views, and Abbe Fenil was for the time routed. It was suspected that he ultimately induced Antoine Macquart to plan the escape of Francois Mouret from the asylum at Les Tulettes; an escape which led to the death of Abbe Faujas. La Conquete de Plassans.

FERAUD-GIRAUD FRERES, a firm of ship-owners who joined the great transport syndicate formed by Aristide Saccard. L'Argent.

FERNAND, a student of chemistry with Combette at Chene Populeux. He was a cowardly lad, whom fear of the Prussians drove into a fever. La Debacle.

FERNANDE, a chorus-girl at the Theatre des Varietes. Nana.

FETU (MERE), an old woman whom Helene Grandjean visited at the request of Abbe Jouve. At her house Helen frequently met Dr. Deberle, who was attending her professionally at the same time. Below this house was the flat taken by M. Malignon, who had appointed Mere Fetu caretaker, and it was through her that Helene came to know of the assignation between Malignon and Madame Deberle. Une Page d'Amour.

FIFI, the sobriquet of Fanny Menu, q.v. Pot-Bouille.

FINE, the sobriquet of Josephine Gavaudan. La Fortune des Rougon.

FINET (ARISTIDE), the founder of the drapery business known as the Vieil Elbeuf, in Paris. He was the father-in-law and predecessor of Hauchecorne. Au Bonheur des Dames.

FINET (DESIREE), daughter of the preceding. She married Hauchecorne, her father's principal salesman, who carried on the business. Au Bonheur des Dames.

FINET, a doctor of medicine who resided at Cloyes. He was disgusted by the brutality of his patients, whom he accused of always sending for him when it was too late. His indifference became such that he did not make any inquiries about the death of Rose Fouan, whose end was hastened by her son Buteau, or that of Pere Fouan, who was burned alive. La Terre.

FIRMIN, chief huntsman to Napoleon III at Compiegne. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

FLAMINIO, the Comtesse Balbi's man-servant, "with a face like a brigand's, and a long black beard." Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

FLEUR D'EPINE, a celebrated chief of brigands who preceded Beau-Francois. La Terre.

FLEURANCE, a putter in the Voreux pit who worked along with the Maheus. She was found dead in her bed, and the vacancy created in the pit was filled by Etienne Lantier. Germinal.

FLORE, the elder daughter of Madame Misard (Aunt Phasie). After illness rendered her mother unfit for work, Flore replaced her as gatekeeper at the railway crossing at Croix-de-Maufras. She was a tall and strong girl of eighteen, with a magnificent head of fair hair; disdainful of the male, she had thrashed at least one would-be lover. When she was quite little she had loved Jacques Lantier, and now it was to him alone she would have given herself. Jacques did not care for her, however, and she came to know that he had a mistress, Severine Roubaud. Convinced of her own right to be loved, for she was stronger and handsomer than the other, the girl was tortured by jealousy; and each Friday, as she saw the express rush past, bearing the two lovers to Paris, was seized with an imperious desire to end everything, and by causing their death prevent them from passing any more. She accordingly brought about a terrible railway accident, in which a large number of persons were killed; but the crime was useless, for Severine and Jacques escaped with trifling injuries. The thought that Jacques knew her guilt, and must in future regard her as a monster, rendered life hateful to Flore, and to meet death she set out on a walk of heroic determination through the tunnel of Malaunay, allowing herself to be cut in pieces by an express train. La Bete Humaine.

FLORENCE, an actress at the variety theatres. Marsy offered her a valuable house. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

Pauline Letellier met her one day on the boulevards accompanied by Malignon. Juliette Deberle, who was a little jealous, assured her that Florence was at least forty and very plain-looking. Une Page d'Amour.

FLORENT, elder son of a widow who took as her second husband M. Quenu, who, however, died three years later, leaving a son. Florent was a gentle, studious youth, and his mother lavished all her affection on him, dying in the end from hardships endured in her struggle to keep him at college in Paris. After her death Florent took young Quenu, his half-brother, to live with him in Paris, giving up all thought of continuing to attend the Law School, and taking pupils in order to find means of sustenance. Years of hardship followed, and Florent became imbued with Republican ideas. Two days after the Coup d'Etat of 1851, while the military were firing on the mob in the Boulevard Montmartre, he was knocked down and stunned. When he recovered, he found that he was lying beside the body of a young woman, whose blood had oozed from her wounds on to his hands. He was horrified at the sight, and rushed away to join a party of men who were throwing up barricades in an adjoining street. Worn out with fatigue, he fell asleep, and on awakening found himself in the hands of the police. His hands were still stained with the blood of the young woman, and the authorities assumed that he was a dangerous character. The semblance of a trial followed; he was condemned and transported to Cayenne. After incredible hardships and sufferings, he escaped and returned to France. Famished and exhausted, he tramped towards Paris, and had fallen in a faint on the road when he was overtaken by Madame Francois, who took him the rest of the journey on her cart. During his long absence his brother Quenu had at first been taken in by Gradelle, a brother of his mother, to whose business of pork-butcher he ultimately succeeded. Florent on his return from exile was warmly received by his brother and Madame Quenu, who told him that Gradelle, his uncle, had died, leaving a considerable sum, and that as there was no will he was entitled to a half-share. He refused to accept this, but agreed to live with the Quenus. This arrangement answered well at first, but Madame Quenu got tired of seeing him always about the house, and let him see that he must secure employment. After some time he got an appointment as deputy inspector at the Fish Market. He was introduced by Gavard to a small revolutionary circle which met nightly in a cafe kept by M. Lebigre, and of which he soon became the leader. Meantime, Mlle. Saget, who from a chance word of Pauline, the little daughter of Quenu, had learned Florent's past history, spread the story in the markets, and a strong feeling was awakened against him. His sister-in-law, Lisa, alarmed lest her husband should be compromised by the revolutionary conspiracy, thought it her duty to inform the police. She learned, however, that Florent's history had all along been known, Lebigre being a police spy, and that only a favourable opportunity was being awaited to arrest the whole gang of conspirators. The blow fell soon afterwards, and Florent was again sentenced to transportation to Cayenne. Le Ventre de Paris.

FLORY was born at Saintes, his father being employed in the local registry office. He came to Paris and entered the office of Mazaud, the stockbroker. At first he did his duties well, but was soon led astray and got into debt. Having started speculation on his own account, he became deeply involved in the Universal bank, and on the failure of that concern was left with a liability of a hundred thousand francs, to meet which he had not a single sou. Subsequently he was arrested and imprisoned for embezzling a large sum from Mazaud, his employer. L'Argent.

FONTAN (ACHILLE), an actor at the Theatre des Varietes who played parts in La Blonde Venus and La Petite Duchesse. He became for a time the lover of Nana, but treated her so abominably that she left him. Nana.

FONTENAILLES (MLLE. DE), was descended from an aristocratic family, but was in great poverty when a situation was found for her in "The Ladies' Paradise" through the influence of Madame Desforges. She proved incapable of anything but the most menial work, and ultimately married Joseph, one of the porters in the establishment. Au Bonheur des Dames.

FOUAN, alias BUTEAU. See Buteau.

FOUAN (FANNY). See Madame Delhomme.

FOUAN (HYACINTHE), the elder son of Pere Fouan and Rose Maliverne, his wife. He was an idler and drunkard, who, when he had left the army, after having seen service in Africa, had taken to tramp the fields, refusing to do any regular work, but living by theft and poaching, as though he were still looting a trembling nation of Bedouins. Withal there looked out of his fine, sunken eyes a merriment that was not altogether evil, the open heart of good-humoured drunkenness. He lived with his daughter in a ruined hut amongst some rocks near Rognes. After the division of land by his father, Hyacinthe soon mortgaged his share and drank the proceeds, never paying to his parents any part of the rent which had been agreed upon. For a time he sheltered his father, but frightened the old man by searching for some bonds which he had concealed. He had, however, neither the cold rapacity of his sister Fanny nor the murderous instincts of his brother Buteau. La Terre.

FOUAN (JOSEPH CASIMIR), the father of Marianne, Louis, Michel, and Laure. Born in 1766, he belonged to a family of peasant proprietors which for centuries had owned land, in varying quantities, in the neighbourhood of Rognes. They were originally serfs of the Roques-Bouqueval family. Bit by bit they acquired their land, until, when the Revolution of 1789 arrived, the Fouan of that day, Joseph Casimir, was the owner of twenty-one acres—the conquest of four centuries from the seigneurial territory. When, in 1793, the rest of the estate was declared national property and sold in lots by auction, he was too timid to purchase any, and had the mortification to see La Borderie sold to Isidore Hourdequin, a citizen of Chateaudun, for a fifth of its value. When he became old he divided his twenty-one acres between three of his family, Marianne, Louis, and Michel, and gave a corresponding sum of money to his younger daughter Laure, who had been brought up as a sempstress and was in service at Chateaudun. La Terre.

FOUAN (LAURE), younger daughter of the preceding. See Madame Charles Badeuil.

FOUAN (LOUIS), known as Pere Fouan. He was the son of Joseph Casimir Fouan, and married Rose Maliverne, by whom he had three children, Hyacinthe, Buteau, and Fanny. He received seven acres of land from his father, and his wife brought him twelve acres more. This land he cultivated well, and with a passion for the soil, as such, which amounted to frenzy. It alone had his love, and his wife and children trembled before him under a rude despotism. At seventy years of age he was still healthy, but his limbs were failing, and he reluctantly decided to divide his land between his children. He retained his house and garden, which had come to him with his wife, and his family undertook to pay him a rent for the land handed over to them. Upon this, along with a nest-egg of three hundred francs per annum, known to no one, the old people would be able to live comfortably. The division made, the family soon became rapacious; Hyacinthe never paid anything, Buteau only a part, and Delhomme, Fanny's husband, alone fulfilled his obligation. Mere Fouan died, and the old man lived alone for a year; after that he went to his daughter Fanny Delhomme, but her unkindness made his life miserable, and he accepted in turn the hospitality of his two sons, Buteau and Hyacinthe, both of whom had come to suspect the existence of his nest-egg and were anxious to secure it. In this sordid aim Buteau was eventually successful, and his subsequent treatment of the old man was even more infamous than it had been before. From this time Pere Fouan lived in isolation; he spoke to none and looked at none; as far as appearances went, he might have been blind and dumb. But even worse was to follow. He had seen the assault on Francoise Mouche which resulted in her death, and to ensure his silence he was murdered by Buteau and Lise, his son and daughter-in-law, who attempted to suffocate him, and subsequently burned him alive in his bed. La Terre.

FOUAN (MADAME ROSE), wife of the preceding, nee Maliverne. She worked on the farm like a man, rising first and going to bed last, her only reward being that she had lived. Stupid, and reduced by labour to the level of an animal, she had always trembled before the despotic authority of her husband. She brought up her family without love, and as if she resented their requiring even the simple necessaries of life. She did not long survive the division of land by her husband. Her favouritism for Hyacinthe, her elder son, excited the jealousy of Buteau, who in the course of a quarrel threw her to the ground, when she received such injuries that she died a few hours afterwards. La Terre.

FOUAN (MARIANNE). See La Grande.

FOUAN (MICHEL). See Pere Mouche.

FOUAN (OLYMPE), daughter of Hyacinthe. Her mother, who was a tramp, ran off when the child was three years old, leaving her to grow up as best she could. She was passionately fond of geese, of which she had a large flock. When little more than a child, she had as her lovers Delphin Becu and Nenesse Delhomme. La Terre.

FOUCARMONT, a naval officer who in ten years saved some money which he proposed to invest in the United States. He fell into the hands of Nana, however, and was soon completely ruined. When she turned him out of doors penniless, she merely advised him to go back to his ship. He was drowned later in the China seas. Nana.

FOUCART, the owner of a cheap restaurant frequented by Jory, Mahoudeau, and their band. L'Oeuvre.

FOUCART (MADAME), the nurse who attended Sidonie Rougon at the birth of Angelique and left the child at the foundling hospital. She assisted Sidonie both by taking her into her house and lending her money, but when Madame Foucart herself fell into difficulties Sidonie did nothing for her, not even paying back what she owed. It was from Madame Foucart that Hubert subsequently got information regarding the parentage of Angelique. Le Reve.

FOUCHARD, father of Honore Fouchard, and uncle, on the mother's side, of Henriette and Maurice Levasseur. He was a small farmer at Remilly, who to make money more quickly took up the trade of butcher also. Avaricious to the last degree, and with a nature of unpitying hardness, he opposed the marriage of Honore with his servant Silvine Morange. At the end of two years of waiting Honore went off, after a terrible scene with his father, though the old man still kept the girl, with whom he was well pleased. When the French troops were marching to Sedan, Fouchard concealed all the animals on his farm, burying even his supply of bread and wine, in the hope of being able to sell to better advantage later on. The death of his son, who was killed in the battle, cost him a few tears, but he was quickly consoled by some good purchases of horses stolen from the battlefield. He took Prosper Sambuc as farm-worker, because the soldier, being liable to imprisonment by the Prussians, could not ask him for any wages. He began to do a considerable trade in butcher-meat with the conquering army, selling them all the diseased animals that he could secure. A suspicion of being concerned in the death of Goliath Steinberg led to his arrest, but he was released soon afterwards, thanks to the intervention of Captain von Gartlauben, a friend of the Delaherches. La Debacle.

FOUCHARD (HONORE), only son of the preceding. At twenty years of age, in 1867, he drew a good number for the conscription, but on account of the opposition of his father to his marriage with Silvine Morange, he enlisted, and was sent to Africa, in the artillery. When he heard that Silvine had become the mistress of Goliath Steinberg he became so ill that he had to remain in hospital for three months. He afterwards received a letter from Silvine saying that she had never loved any one but him, and when passing through Remilly on his way to the front, he saw her and forgave everything. His battery was among those which on 1st September, 1870, defended the Calvary d'Illy, but was cut to pieces by the terrible fire of the Prussians. Honore was killed, and fell across his gun, firmly grasping the letter from Silvine, which in his death-struggle he had drawn from his bosom. La Debacle.

FOUGERAY (MADEMOISELLE DE), eldest daughter of the Baronne de Fougeray. She entered a convent, because it was said, a young man with whom she was in love had died. The event created much talk in all classes of society in Paris. Nana.

FOUQUE (ADELAIDE), generally known as Aunt Dide, the common ancestress of the Rougon-Macquarts, born at Plassans in 1768, was the last representative of a family who had owned a market-garden there for several generations. "This girl, whose father died insane, was a long, lank, pale creature, with a scared look and strange gait." In 1786, six months after the death of her father, she married one of her own workmen, named Rougon, "a rough-hewn peasant from the Basses Alpes." Rougon died fifteen months after his marriage, leaving a son named Pierre. Scarcely a year had elapsed before the widow took as her lover a man named Macquart, who lived in a hovel adjoining her own property, and two children were born. The legitimate son, Pierre Rougon, was brought up along with his half brother and sister, Antoine and Ursule, with whom, however, he was not on good terms. From her eighteenth year Adelaide was subject to nervous fits, which brought on convulsions, and though she was not yet insane, these repeated shocks produced cerebral disorders. "She lived from day to day like a child; like a fawning animal yielding to its instincts." These conditions continued for about twenty years, till the death of Macquart, and the children grew up as best they could. By this time Pierre realized the situation, and playing upon his mother's mental weakness, he brought her completely under his sway. On the death of Macquart, Adelaide went to live in the hovel bequeathed to her by him, and Pierre sold the family property, appropriating the price. Living at first entirely alone, her intellect became more and more affected by the recurring convulsive fits. Subsequently her grandson Silvere Mouret lived with her, but after his execution, of which she was a witness, she became quite insane. La Fortune des Rougon.

She was always under restraint, and remained a living sore to the family. The little property which belonged to her son Antoine Macquart was close to the asylum where she was confined, and Pierre Rougon seemed to have placed him there to look after her. Adelaide seldom spoke, and for twelve years had never moved from her chair. La Conquete de Plassans.

At 104 years old she was still living in the asylum at Les Tulettes. She was little better than a skeleton, and in her long, thin face it was only in the eyes that there was any sign of life. Immovable in her chair, she remained from year to year like a spectre, calling up the horrors of her family history. A sudden accident, the death of little Charles Saccard from nasal hemorrhage, wakened in her sleeping brain recollections of years before; she saw again the murder of Silvere, killed by a pistol-shot, and she saw also her lover Macquart, the smuggler, killed like a dog by the gendarmes. The shock proved too much for her feeble strength, and she died the following day (in 1873), aged 105 years, three months, and seven days. Le Docteur Pascal.

FOUSSET (LE PERE), tenant of the farm of Millouard, in the Canton of Orgeres. He was a victim of the band of brigands commanded by Beau-Francois. La Terre.

FRANCHOMME (LOUIS), a cousin of Francoise Hamelin and her brother, with whom he went to reside for a time when recovering from a fever. His wife having become fond of Angelique Marie, who lived at that time with Francoise Hamelin, he obtained permission to take her to Paris, where she could be taught the trade of making flowers. Unfortunately, however, he died three months later. Le Reve.

FRANCHOMME (THERESE), wife of the preceding. After the death of her husband, she, being in delicate health, was obliged to leave the city and go to live with her brother Rabier, a tanner, who was settled at Beaumont. She died a few months afterwards, leaving to the care of the Rabiers the child Angelique, whom she had brought with her from Paris. Le Reve.

FRANCIS, the hairdresser of Nana. He was in the habit of lending money to his customers, and on one occasion he found, with the assistance of Labordette, a hundred thousand francs for Comte Muffat, who required the money for Nana. Nana.

FRANCIS, coachman to the Gregoires. He also did the heavy work of the household. Germinal.

FRANCOIS, a wine-merchant whose shop was situated at the corner of Rue des Poissonniers and of Rue de la Goutte d'Or. Coupeau frequently spent whole days there. L'Assommoir.

FRANCOIS, concierge and footman in Nana's establishment. He was the husband of Victorine, the cook. He received visitors in the hall, wearing a gorgeous livery. Nana.

FRANCOIS (MADAME), a market-gardener of Nanterre. She drove regularly to Paris in the early morning with her vegetables, and on one occasion found Florent lying on the road from want and exhaustion. She took him to town in her cart, and subsequently showed kindness to him and Claude Lantier. Le Ventre de Paris.

FRANCOISE, housemaid to Madame Theophile Vabre. Pot-Bouille.

FRANCOISE, the servant of M. and Madame Sandoz in their little house in Rue Nollet. L'Oeuvre.

FRANGIPANE, a horse which belonged to Baron Verdier and ran in the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

FREDERICK (MADAME), a widow who held the position of "second hand" in the dress department of "The Ladies' Paradise." Au Bonheur des Dames.

FIRMAT, an old peasant of Rognes who was a neighbour of Mouche. He became paralysed. La Terre.

FIRMAT (LA), wife of the preceding. She was well known in the village for her knowledge of animals, and was frequently consulted when it would otherwise have been necessary to call in a veterinary surgeon. She worked hard to support her invalid husband, to whom she was devoted, and wept at the thought that he was soon to die. La Terre.

G

GABET (MERE), an old woman who assisted the Huberts with their washing. She became ill, and being in great poverty, was assisted by Angelique, and later by Felicien. Le Reve.

GAGA, an elderly demi-mondaine who had flourished in the reign of Louis Philippe, and was still notorious in the Second Empire. She had a daughter named Lili, who became the mistress of the Marquis Chouard. Nana.

GAGEBOIS, glass-works at Montsou. The strike of miners led to the fires being extinguished. Germinal.

GAGNIERE, an artist, one of the band of Claude Lantier. He belonged to Melun, where his well-to-do parents, who were both dead, had left him two houses; and he had learned painting, unassisted, in the forest of Fontainebleau. His landscapes were conscientious and excellent in intent, but his real passion was music. Becoming more and more engrossed in this, he took lessons in playing the piano from a middle-aged lady whom he married soon afterwards. He established himself at Melun in one of his two houses, going to Paris two or three times a month to attend a concert, and he continued to exhibit each year at the Salon one of his little studies of the banks of the Seine. L'Oeuvre.

GALISSARD, a haberdasher of Plassans, whose daughter married Professor Lalubie. She was a pretty girl to whom Claude Lantier and Sandoz used to sing serenades.

GARCONNET, a Legitimist who was Mayor of Plassans at the time of the Coup d'Etat. He was taken prisoner by the insurgents. La Fortune des Rougon.

GARTLAUBEN (VON), captain in the Prussian Army. During the occupation of Sedan he was billeted on Delaherche. He was a person of some importance, as his uncle had been made Governor-General at Rheims, and exercised sovereign power over the district. Fascinated by Gilberte Delaherche, his chief wish was to be taken for a man of refinement, and not for a barbarous soldier. He was able to render some services to the Delaherches, and to make the Prussian occupation easier for them. La Debacle.

GASC, proprietor of a racing-stable. One of his horses, named Boum, ran in the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

GASPARINE, a tall, handsome girl of Plassans, with whom Achille Campardon fell in love. She had no money, however, and he married her cousin Rose Domergue, who had a dowry of thirty thousand francs. Tears and recriminations followed, and Gasparine went to Paris, where for some time she had a situation in the shop of Madame Hedouin. Madame Campardon having fallen into ill-health, her husband returned to his first love, and a liaison existed between him and Gasparine for a considerable time. Ultimately she went to live with the Campardons, and managed their household affairs. Pot-Bouille.

GASTON was the son of a general, and was the same age as the Prince Imperial, though much stronger than he. The Emperor frequently made inquiries regarding the child. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

GAUDE, bugler in the 106th regiment of the line. "He was a big, skinny, sorrowful, taciturn man, without a hair on his chin, and blew his instrument with the lungs of a whirlwind." On the 1st September, during the defence of the Hermitage, he became seized with the madness of heroism, and continued to blow after his comrades had been slain and until he himself was shot down. La Debacle.

GAUDIBERT (ISIDORE), Mayor of Barbeville since 1850, wrote some poetry on political subjects, and was decorated by the Minister of State, Eugene Rougon. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

GAUDRON, husband of Madame Gaudron. He was described as having the sluggishness of a beast. L'Assommoir.

GAUDRON (MADAME), a wool-carder who lived with her husband and their large family in the same tenement-house as the Coupeaus and the Lorilleux. She was one of the guests at the Coupeaus' wedding. L'Assommoir.

GAUDRON FILS, the eldest child of the Gaudrons, was a journeyman carpenter. L'Assommoir.

GAUJEAN (M.), a silk manufacturer of Lyons who was dissatisfied with the monopoly created by the large establishments, such as that of Octave Mouret, and thought it could be broken by the creation of special shops in the neighbourhood, where the public could find a large and varied choice of articles. With this object he assisted Robineau to purchase Vincard's business by giving him credit to a large amount; the scheme was not successful, and he lost heavily. Au Bonheur des Dames.

GAUTIER, a wine-grower at Saint-Eutrope, with whom Francois Mouret had dealings at one time. La Conquete de Plassans.

GAVARD, originally kept a rotisserie or poultry-roasting establishment in the Rue Saint-Jacques, at which time he became acquainted with Florent and Quenu. In 1856 he retired from this business, and to amuse himself took a stall in the poultry-market. "Thenceforth he lived amidst ceaseless tittle-tattle, acquainted with every little scandal in the neighbourhood." Gavard was a leading spirit in the revolutionary circle which met in Lebigre's wine-shop, and was the means of bringing Florent to attend the meetings there. He was arrested at the same time as Florent and was transported. Le Ventre de Paris.

GAVAUDAN (JOSEPHINE), a market-woman of Plassans who married Antoine Macquart in 1826. She was much addicted to drink, but worked in order to keep her husband in idleness. She died in 1850. La Fortune des Rougon.

GEDEON, an ass which belonged to Mouche. It was very mischievous, and on one occasion got access to a vat of new wine, with the result that it became extremely drunk. La Terre.

GEORGES, a young man whose acquaintance Renee Saccard made by chance while walking one day on the Quai Saint-Paul. Her fancy for him passed without her ever having asked his family name. La Curee.

GERALDINE, a character in La Petite Duchesse, played by Clarisse Besnus at the Theatre des Varietes. It was originally intended that the part should be played by Nana. Nana.

GILQUIN (THEODORE), a lodger at Madame Correur's hotel at the same time as Eugene Rougon and Du Poizat. A man of shady character, he was frequently employed by Rougon, and by a fortunate accident was able to give him warning of the Orsini plot against the life of the Emperor. He was rewarded with the appointment of Commissary of Police at Niort. On the order of Rougon, he arrested Martineau, Madame Correur's brother. He was removed from his position on account of having compromised himself by taking a bribe to procure a conscript exemption from service. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

GIRAUD (TATA) kept at Plassans a boarding-school for children, where the sculptor Mahoudeau had known Pierre Sandoz and other comrades who met later in Paris. L'Oeuvre.

GODARD (ABBE), cure of Bazoches-le-Doyen. The authorities of Rognes, which was in his parish, refused to provide for a priest of their own, and Abbe Godard, in order to perform Mass, had to walk each Sunday the three kilometres which separated the two communes. He was a short, stout man of hasty temper, who was disgusted with the indifference and irreligion of his parishioners, and his services were the shortest and baldest possible. In spite of his temper, he had, however, a passion for the miserable, and to these he gave everything—his money, his linen, almost the clothes off his back. La Terre.

GODEBOEUF, a seller of herbs who occupied the shop in Rue Pirouette which formerly belonged to Gradelle, the pork-butcher. Le Ventre de Paris.

GODEMARD, a pupil of Dequersonniere, the architect. See Gorju. L'Oeuvre.

GOMARD, the keeper of a working-man's cafe in Rue de la Femme-sans-Tete, under the sign Au Chien de Montargis. Claude Lantier occasionally took his meals there. L'Oeuvre.

GONIN, a family of fisher-folks who lived at Bonneville. It consisted of Gonin, his wife, and one little girl. A cousin of the wife, named Cuche, came to live with them after his house had been washed away by the sea. Gonin soon after fell into bad health, and his wife and Cuche treated him so badly that the police talked of an inquiry. Pauline Quenu tried to reform the little girl, who had been allowed to grow up wild. La Joie de Vivre.

GORJU, a pupil of Dequersonniere, and himself a future architect. On one of the walls of the studio one could read this brief statement: "The 7th June, Gorju has said that he cared nothing for Rome. Signed, Godemard." L'Oeuvre.

GOUJET, a blacksmith from the Departement du Nord, who came to Paris and got employment in a manufactory of bolts. "Behind the silent quietude of his life lay buried a great sorrow: his father in a moment of drunken madness had killed a fellow-workman with a crowbar, and after arrest had hanged himself in his cell with a pocket-handkerchief." Goujet and his mother, who lived with him, always seemed to feel this horror weighing upon them, and did their best to redeem it by strict uprightness. "He was a giant of twenty-three, with rosy cheeks and blue eyes, and the strength of a Hercules. In the workshop he was known as Gueule d'Or, on account of his yellow beard. With his square head, his heavy frame, torpid after the hard work at the anvil, he was like a great animal, dull of intellect and good of heart." For a time the Coupeaus were his neighbours, and he came to love Gervaise with a perfectly innocent affection, which survived all disillusionments, and subsisted up to the time of her death. It was he who lent her money to start a laundry, and afterwards repeatedly assisted her when in difficulties. L'Assommoir.

GOUJET (MADAME), mother of the preceding, was a lace-mender, and lived with her son in part of the house first occupied by the Coupeaus. She showed much kindness to them, though she was distressed by her son's infatuation for Gervaise, and did not altogether approve of his lending her money to start a laundry. Notwithstanding this, she continued to assist Gervaise until neglect of work entrusted made it impossible to do so longer. She died in October, 1868, of acute rheumatism. L'Assommoir.

GOURAUD (BARON), was made a Baron by Napoleon I, and was a Senator under Napoleon III. "With his vast bulk, his bovine face, his elephantine movements, he boasted a delightful rascality; he sold himself majestically, and committed the greatest infamies in the name of duty and conscience." La Curee.

GOURD (M.), at one time valet to the Duc de Vaugelade, and afterwards doorkeeper in the tenement-house in Rue de Choiseul which belonged to M. Vabre, and was occupied by the Campardons, the Josserands, and others. He spent much of his time spying on the tenants, and posed as guardian of the morals of the establishment. Pot-Bouille.

GOURD (MADAME), wife of the preceding. She was the widow of a bailiff at Mort-la-Ville, and she and her present husband owned a house there. She was exceedingly stout, and suffered from an affection of the legs which prevented her from walking. Pot-Bouille.

GRADELLE, brother of Madame Quenu, senr., and uncle of Florent and Quenu. He was a prosperous pork-butcher in Paris, and after Florent's arrest he took young Quenu into his business. He died suddenly, without leaving a will, and Quenu succeeded to the business, and to a considerable sum of money which was found hidden at the bottom of a salting-tub. Le Ventre de Paris.

GRAND-DRAGON (LE), one of the band of brigands led by Beau-Francois. La Terre.

GRANDE (LA), elder daughter of Joseph Casimir Fouan, and sister of Pere Fouan, Michel Mouche, and Laure Badeuil. Married to a neighbour, Antoine Pechard, she brought to him seven acres of land against eighteen which he had of his own. Early left a widow, she turned out her only daughter, who, against her mother's will, wished to marry a poor lad named Vincent Bouteroue. The girl and her husband died of want, leaving two children, Palmyre and Hilarion, whom their grandmother refused to assist. At eighty years of age, respected and feared by the Fouan family, not for her age but for her fortune, she exacted the obedience of all, and still directed the management of her land. She bitterly reproached her brother Louis for dividing his property between his children, and warned him that he need not come to her when they had turned him into the street, a threat which she carried into effect. She took delight in the squabbles of the Fouan family, exciting their cupidity by promising them a share of her property at her death. Meantime she made a will which was so complicated that she hoped it would lead to endless lawsuits amongst her heirs. La Terre.

GRANDGUILLOT, a notary at Plassans. He embezzled large sums belonging to his clients, among whom was Dr. Pascal Rougon, and thereafter fled to Switzerland. Le Docteur Pascal.

GRANDJEAN (M.), son of a sugar-refiner of Marseilles. He fell in love with Helene Mouret, a young girl of great beauty, but without fortune; his friends bitterly opposed the match, and a secret marriage followed, the young couple finding it difficult to make ends meet, till the death of an uncle brought them ten thousand francs a year. By this time Grandjean had taken an intense dislike for Marseilles, and decided to remove to Paris. The day after his arrival there he was seized with illness, and eight days later he died, leaving his wife with one daughter, a young girl of ten. Une Page d'Amour.

GRANDJEAN (MADAME HELENE), wife of the preceding. See Helene Mouret.

GRANDJEAN (JEANNE), born 1842, was the daughter of M. Grandjean and Helene Mouret, his wife. She inherited much of the neurosis of her mother's family along with a consumptive tendency derived from her father, and from an early age had been subject to fits and other nervous attacks. One of these illnesses, more sudden and severe than usual, caused her mother to summon Doctor Deberle, and thus led to an intimacy which had disastrous results. Jeanne's jealous affection for her mother amounted almost to a mania, and when she came to suspect that Dr. Deberle had become in a sense her rival, she worked herself into such a nervous state that she exposed herself to a chill, and having become seriously ill, died in a few days, at the age of thirteen. Une Page d'Amour.

GRANDMORIN (LE PRESIDENT), one of the directors of the Western Railway Company. "Born in 1804, substitute at Digne on the morrow of the events in 1830, then at Fontainebleau, then at Paris, he had afterwards filled the posts of procurator at Troyes, advocate-general at Rennes, and finally first president at Rouen. A multi-millionaire, he had been member of the County Council since 1855, and on the day he retired he had been made Commander of the Legion of Honour." He owned a mansion at Paris in Rue du Rocher, and often resided with his sister, Madame Bonnehon, at Doinville. His private life was not unattended by scandal, and his relations with Louisette, the younger daughter of Madame Misard, led to her death. A somewhat similar connection with Severine Aubry, a ward of his own, had less immediately serious consequences, as he arranged for her marriage to Roubaud, an employee of the railway company, whom he took under his protection. Three years later Roubaud learned the truth by chance, and murdered Grandmorin in the Havre express between Malaunay and Barentin. The President left a fortune of over three and a half million francs, among other legacies being one to Severine Roubaud of the mansion-house of Croix-de-Maufras. La Bete Humaine.

GRANDMORIN (BERTHE), daughter of the preceding, was the wife of a magistrate, M. de Lachesnaye. She was a narrow-minded and avaricious woman, who affected ignorance of her father's real character, and the influence of her husband tended to increase her meanness. After the murder of President Grandmorin, when vague suspicions fell on Roubaud, Berthe took up a position antagonistic to her old play-fellow Severine Roubaud, in the hope that a legacy left by Grandmorin to her would be cut down. La Bete Humaine.

GRANDSIRE (M.), the justice of peace who assisted the Huberts in making the necessary arrangements for their adoption of Angelique. Le Reve.

GRANOUX (ISIDORE), one of the group of conservatives who met in Pierre Rougon's yellow room to declaim against the Republic. La Fortune des Rougon.

GRAS (MADAME), an old lady living in the Rue des Orties, who boarded and lodged young children for a small sum. When Denise Baudu got a situation in "The Ladies' Paradise," she put her young brother Pepe under the charge of Madame Gras for a time. Au Bonheur des Dames.

GREGOIRE (CECILE), daughter of Leon Gregoire. Her parents were devoted to her, and brought her up in happy ignorance, allowing her to do much as she liked. They taught her to be charitable, and made her dispense their little gifts to the poor; these were always in kind, as they held that money was likely to be misused. When the great strike broke out at Montsou, Cecile could comprehend nothing of the revolt of the poor, or the fury with which they regarded those better off than themselves, and when she fell into the hands of a fierce crowd was almost paralysed under the attack of La Brule and of Pere Bonnemort, from which she escaped with difficulty. A little later she chanced to call on a charitable errand at Maheu's house, and unfortunately was left alone for a few moments with Bonnemort, who was now supposed to be helpless. The sight of her seemed, however, to waken memories in the old man, for in an accession of madness he found strength to throw himself upon the poor girl and strangle her. Germinal.

GREGOIRE (EUGENE), grandfather of Leon Gregoire. He inherited the share in the Montsou mine bought by his father, but the dividends at that time were small, and as he had foolishly invested the remainder of the paternal fortune in a company that came to grief, he lived meanly enough. The share passed to his son Felicien. Germinal.

GREGOIRE (FELICIEN), son of the preceding and father of Leon Gregoire. The family fortune began with him, for the value of the share in the Montsou mine had greatly increased, and he was able to buy the dismembered estate of Piolaine, which he acquired as national property for a ludicrous sum. However, bad years followed; it was necessary to await the conclusion of the revolutionary catastrophes, and afterwards Napoleon's bloody fall. The little fortune of Felicien Gregoire passed to his son Leon. Germinal.

GREGOIRE (HONORE), great-grandfather of Leon Gregoire. He was in 1760 steward on the estate of Piolaine, a property which belonged to Baron Desrumaux. When the Montsou treaty was made, Honore, who had laid up savings to the amount of some fifty thousand francs, yielded tremblingly to his master's unshakable faith. He gave up ten thousand francs, and took a share in the Montsou Company, though with the fear of robbing his children of that sum. When he died his share passed to his son Eugene. Germinal.

GREGOIRE (LEON), great-grandson of Honore Gregoire. It was he who profited at a stupefying rate of progress by the timid investment of his ancestor. Those poor ten thousand francs grew and multiplied with the company's prosperity. Since 1820 they had brought in cent for cent ten thousand francs. In 1844 they had produced twenty thousand; in 1850, forty. During two years the dividend had reached the prodigious figure of fifty thousand francs; the value of the share, quoted at the Lille Bourse at a million, had centrupled in a century. Six months later an industrial crisis broke out; the share fell to six hundred thousand francs. But Leon refused to be alarmed, for he maintained an obstinate faith in the mine. When the great strike broke out he would not be persuaded of its seriousness, and refused to admit any danger, until he saw his daughter struck by a stone and savagely assaulted by the crowd. Afterwards he desired to show the largeness of his views, and spoke of forgetting and forgiving everything. With his wife and daughter Cecile he went to carry assistance to the Maheus, a family who had suffered sadly in the strike. Cecile was unfortunately left alone with old Bonnemort, Maheu's father, who in a sudden frenzy attacked the girl and strangled her. This terrible blow entirely shadowed the lives of Gregoire and his wife. Germinal.

GREGOIRE (MADAME LEON), wife of the preceding, was the daughter of a druggist at Marchiennes. She was a plain, penniless girl, whom he adored, and who repaid him with happiness. She shut herself up in her household, having no other will but her husband's. No difference of tastes separated them, their desires were mingled in one idea of comfort; and they had thus lived for forty years, in affection and little mutual services. Germinal.

GRESHAM, a jockey who, it was said, had always bad luck. He rode Lusignan in the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

GROGNET, a perfumer in Rue de Grammont, whose business was ruined by the growth of Octave Mouret's great establishment. Au Bonheur des Dames.

GROSBOIS, a Government surveyor who had also a small farm at Magnolles, a little village near Rognes. Liable to be summoned from Orgeres to Beaugency for purposes of survey, he left the management of his own land to his wife, and in the course of these constant excursions he acquired such a habit of drinking that he was never seen sober. That mattered little, however; the more drunk he was the better he seemed to see; he never made a wrong measurement or an error in calculation. People listened to him with respect, for he had the reputation of being a sly, acute man. La Terre.

GUENDE (MADAME DE), a friend of the Saccards. She was a woman well known in the society of the Second Empire. La Curee.

GUEULE-D'OR, the sobriquet of Goujet. L'Assommoir.

GUEULIN, nephew of Narcisse Bachelard, was a clerk in an insurance office. Directly after office hours he used to meet his uncle, and never left him, going the round of all the cafes in his wake. "Behind the huge, ungainly figure of the one you were sure to see the pale, wizened features of the other." He said that he avoided all love affairs, as they invariably led to trouble and complications, but he was ultimately caught by his uncle in compromising circumstances with Mademoiselle Fifi, who was a protegee of the old man. Bachelard insisted on their marriage, and gave the girl a handsome dowry. Pot-Bouille.

GUIBAL (MADAME), wife of a barrister well known at the Palais de Justice, who led, it was said, a somewhat free life. The husband and wife were never seen together, and Madame Guibal consoled herself with M. De Boves, from whom she derived such large sums of money that he found difficulty in carrying on his own establishment. She was a tall, thin woman, with red hair, and a somewhat cold, selfish expression. Au Bonheur des Dames.

GUICHON (MADEMOISELLE), the office-keeper at the railway station at Havre. She was a slim, fair woman about thirty years of age, who owed her post to M. Dabadie, the chief station-master, with whom it was generally believed she was on intimate terms. Nevertheless Madame Lebleu, who lived on the same corridor and kept perpetual watch, had never been able to discover anything. La Bete Humaine.

GUIGNARD, a peasant who belonged to the same village as Zephyrin Lacour. He desired to sell his house, and Zephyrin and Rosalie, his sweetheart, looked forward to buying it. Une Page d'Amour.

GUILLAUME, a peasant of Rognes. He owned a piece of land beside the hovel of Hyacinthe Fouan. La Terre.

GUILLAUME, a young swineherd at La Borderie. He afterwards became a soldier. La Terre.

GUIRAUD (M. DE), a magistrate of Paris, who was a friend of Doctor Deberle and visited at his house. Une Page d'Amour.

GUIRAUD (MADAME DE), wife of the preceding. She was on intimate terms with Madame Deberle, and took part in the amateur theatricals arranged by that lady. Une Page d'Amour.

GUIRAUDE (MADAME), mother of Sophie and Valentin, patients of Dr. Pascal. Her husband died of phthisis, and she herself suffered from a slow decomposition of the blood. She died soon after her son Valentin. Le Docteur Pascal.

GUNDERMANN, the great Jew banker, master of the Bourse and of the financial world. He was a man of over sixty years of age, who had long suffered from ill-health. Constantly engaged in business of the greatest magnitude, he never went to the Bourse himself; indeed, he even pretended that he sent no official representatives there. He was not on friendly terms with Saccard, and when the Universal Bank was started he placed himself in antagonism towards it. The wild speculation in the shares of the bank gave him his chance; his principle was that when a share rose above its true value a reaction was bound to follow. Accordingly, when the bank shares rose to two thousand francs he began to sell, and though Saccard by steady buying forced them to over three thousand francs, he continued to sell. His losses meantime were, of course, enormous, but having got information through Baroness Sandorff that Saccard's resources were at an end, he made a final effort, with the result that a panic ensued, the price of the shares broke, and Saccard, along with the bank, was ruined. L'Argent.

GUNTHER (OTTO), captain in the Prussian Guard. He was a cousin of Weiss on the mother's side. His feelings were strongly anti-French, and he refused to give any assistance to Henriette Weiss after the death of her husband, when she was searching for his body. La Debacle.

GUSTAVE, Maxime Saccard's hairdresser. La Curee.

GUTMANN, a soldier in the Prussian Army, who took part in the attack on Bazeilles. It was he who tore Henriette Weiss from the arms of her husband, who, being a civilian, was about to be executed for firing upon the Prussian troops. Henriette found him later in the ambulance at Remilly. He was unable to speak, a ball having carried away half his tongue, and they could only guess from the sounds he made that his name was Gutmann. Henriette, moved by pity, remained with him to the end, and she alone followed him to the place of burial. La Debacle.

GUYOT (ABBE), a priest of Saint-Eutrope. He took duty temporarily at Artaud while Abbe Mouret was ill. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

GUYOT-LAPLANCHE, a man of considerable importance in the Second Empire, whom Clorinde Balbi gained to the cause of Eugene Rougon. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

H

HAFFNER, a well-known manufacturer, at Colmar. He was a multi-millionaire, and became a politician during the time of the Second Empire. He was the husband of Suzanne Haffner. La Curee.

HAFFNER (MADAME SUZANNE), wife of a celebrated manufacturer of Colmar, a millionaire twenty times over, whom the Empire was transforming into a politician. She was the inseparable companion of the Marquise d'Espanet, and had been a schoolfellow of Madame Renee Saccard. La Curee.

HALLEGRAIN (CAPTAIN JACQUES), the father of Christine. He was a Gascon from Montauban. A stroke of paralysis in the legs caused his retirement from the army, and he settled at Clermont with his wife and daughter. One day, when they were at church, he died of a second attack of paralysis. L'Oeuvre.

HALLEGRAIN (MADAME), wife of the preceding. She survived him for five years, remaining at Clermont, managing as well as she could on her scanty pension, which she eked out by painting fans, in order to bring up her daughter as a lady. During these five years Madame Hallegrain became each day paler and thinner, until she was only a shadow; one morning she could not rise, and she died, looking sadly at Christine, with her eyes full of great tears. L'Oeuvre.

HALLEGRAIN (CHRISTINE), daughter of the preceding, was born at Strasburg. Her father died when she was twelve years old, and her mother, who had a severe struggle to make a living for herself and her child, only survived him five years. Christine was left penniless and unprotected, without a friend, save La Mere des Saints-Anges, the Superior of the Sisters of the Visitation, who kept her in the convent until she got a situation as reader and companion to Madame Vanzade, an old lady who lived in Paris. Chance led to a meeting between Christine and Claude Lantier on the evening of her arrival in the city, and the acquaintanceship ripened into love. Ultimately she ran off with him, and they took up house at Bennecourt, where they lived happily for several years, a son being born to them in 1860. She was devoted to Claude, who was engrossed in his art, and when she saw that he was becoming discontented in the country she urged his return to Paris. There he became obsessed by the idea of a masterpiece, by means of which he was to revolutionize the world of art, and Christine allowed him to sacrifice their child and herself to his hopes of fame. They began to encroach on the principal of their small fortune, and while this lasted were not unhappy, though Claude's increasing mental disturbance already gave cause for anxiety. Their marriage had taken place some time previously, and this had tended to make her position more comfortable. The exhaustion of their means was followed by great hardships, but Christine continued to sacrifice everything to her husband. The death of their child drew him away from his task for a time, but he again took it up, his mind becoming more and more unhinged. Christine made a last effort to detach him, but the call of his masterpiece was too strong, and one morning she found him hanging in front of the picture, dead. She fell on the floor in a faint, and lay there to all appearance as dead as her husband, both of them crushed by the sovereignty of art. L'Oeuvre.

HAMELIN (CAROLINE), sister of Georges Hamelin, accompanied him to Paris after the death of their father. She took a situation as governess, and soon after married a millionaire brewer in whose house she was employed. After a few years of married life, she was obliged to apply for a separation in order to avoid being killed by her husband, a drunkard who pursued her with a knife in fits of insane jealousy. Living with her brother, in the flat of the Orviedo mansion above that occupied by Saccard, she made the acquaintance of the latter, becoming after a time his housekeeper and subsequently his mistress. During the absence of her brother in the East, after the foundation of the Universal Bank, she did everything she could to protect his interests, and tried to persuade Saccard to discontinue the gambling in the shares of the bank which ultimately led to its ruin. Like her brother, she sold all her shares in the bank, and after the final crash divested herself of all her means in the assistance of ruined shareholders. She followed her brother in his flight to Rome. L'Argent.

HAMELIN (GEORGES), son of a Montpellier physician, a remarkable savant, an enthusiastic Catholic, who had died poor. After his father's death he came to Paris, along with his sister Caroline, and entered the Polytechnic school. He became an engineer, and having received an appointment in connection with the Suez Canal, went to Egypt. Subsequently he went to Syria, where he remained some years, laying out a carriage road from Beyrout to Damascus. He was an enthusiast, and his portfolio was full of schemes of far-reaching magnitude. Having met Saccard in Paris, he joined with him in the formation of the Universal Bank, which was intended to furnish the means of carrying out some at least of his schemes. Against his wish, Hamelin was made chairman of the bank, and he thus became liable for the actions of the other directors, though he was himself absent in the East forming the companies in which the bank was interested. He was a man of high honour, and when the gamble in the shares of the bank reached an excessive point, he did all he could to restrain it, even selling his own shares. The money received for these was subsequently used in relieving other shareholders who lost their all. When the crash came, Hamelin was arrested along with Saccard, and, after trial, was sentenced to five years' imprisonment and a fine of three thousand francs. By a technicality of law they were allowed a month to appeal, during which they were at liberty. With the connivance of Eugene Rougon, they fled the country, Hamelin going to Rome, where he secured a situation as an engineer. L'Argent.

HAMELIN (FRANCOISE), sister of M. Hamelin, a farmer, who lived at Soulanges. She brought up Angelique Marie, who was handed over to her by the Foundling Hospital when only a few days old. Angelique remained with her until she went to Paris with Madame Franchomme, some years later. Le Reve.

HARDY, tax-collector at Cloyes. La Terre.

HARTMANN (BARON), Director of the Credit Immobilier, a concern which had large interests in property immediately adjoining "The Ladies' Paradise." The Baron had been a lover of Madame Desforges, and through her influence he agreed to give financial support to Octave Mouret, thereby enabling him to carry out the large schemes of extension to which he had long looked forward. Au Bonheur des Dames.

HAUCHECORNE, principal assistant in the draper's shop known as Vieil Elbeuf. He married Desiree, the daughter of his employer, and succeeded to the business, which he ultimately handed over to Baudu, his own son-in-law. Au Bonheur des Dames.

HAUCHECORNE (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Desiree Finet.

HAUCHECORNE (ELIZABETH), daughter of the preceding. See Madame Baudu.

HAUTECOEUR (MONSEIGNEUR JEAN D') was a member of one of the oldest and proudest families in France. He was for some time in the army, and until he was forty years of age he led an adventurous life, travelling everywhere and having many strange experiences. At last he chanced to meet Mademoiselle Pauline, daughter of the Comte de Valencay, very wealthy, marvellously beautiful, and scarcely nineteen years of age. They were married, but at the end of a year Pauline had a son and died. A fortnight later M. d'Hautecoeur entered into Holy Orders, and soon became a priest; twenty years afterwards he was made a bishop. During all that time he refused to see Felicien, his son, who had been brought up by an old abbot, a relation of his wife. He intended to have his son brought up as a priest, but the lad having no vocation, he gave up the idea and brought him to live at Beaumont. There Felicien met and fell in love with Angelique, but the Bishop sternly forbade any thought of marriage between them, and even went the length of arranging a marriage between his son and Claire de Voincourt. A touching personal appeal by Angelique had no effect in gaining the Bishop's consent, but he was secretly much moved, and when she fell into ill-health he himself came to administer the last rites of the Church. Her semi-miraculous recovery led to the Bishop consenting to his son's marriage, which was celebrated a few months later in the cathedral of Beaumont. Le Reve.

HAUTECOEUR (MARQUISE JEAN XII DE). See Paule de Valencay.

HAUTECOEUR (ANGELIQUE DE). See Angelique Marie.

HAUTECOEUR (FELICIEN D'), only child of Jean d'Hautecoeur, who was afterwards Bishop of Beaumont. Felicien's mother having died at his birth, his father took Holy Orders, and refused to see him for over twenty years. Having ultimately come to live with his father at Beaumont, Felicien met and fell in love with Angelique, the adopted daughter of Hubert, the chasuble-maker. The Bishop having absolutely refused to consent to the marriage, the Huberts endeavoured to separate the lovers by persuading Angelique that Felicien no longer cared for her. They were aided in this by a rumour that Felicien was to marry Claire de Voincourt. A meeting between Angelique and Felicien cleared away the mists, but by this time the girl had fallen into ill-health and appeared to be dying. The Bishop, who had formerly been secretly moved by an appeal made to him by Angelique, came to administer to her the last rites of the Church. A semi-miraculous recovery followed, and, the Bishop having consented, Felicien was married to Angelique in the cathedral of Beaumont. The recovery had, however, been a mere spark of an expiring fire, for as Felicien led his new-made wife to the cathedral porch, she slipped from his arm, and in a few moments was dead. Le Reve.

HAZARD, a horse in the Mechain stable. It ran in the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

HEDOUIN (CHARLES), originally a salesman in the draper's shop known as Au Bonheur des Dames, he became a partner by marrying Caroline Deleuze, a daughter of one of the proprietors. He fell into ill-health, but when he died the business was left in a flourishing condition. Pot-Bouille.

HEDOUIN (MADAME CAROLINE), wife of M. Hedouin, the proprietor of a draper's shop in Paris known as "The Ladies' Paradise." She was a handsome woman with strong commercial capabilities, and during the frequent absences of her husband she undertook the management of the business. When Octave Mouret came to Paris, he first got employment at "The Ladies' Paradise," and with a view to establishing his position he conceived the idea of becoming Madame Hedouin's lover. She discouraged his advances, however, and he gave up his situation. M. Hedouin died soon afterwards, and his widow, finding the responsibilities of business too heavy, invited Octave Mouret to return; a few months afterwards they were married. Pot-Bouille.

After her marriage with Octave Mouret the business extended rapidly, and an enlargement of the shop soon became necessary. While the work was in progress she met with an accident which resulted in her death three days later. Au Bonheur des Dames.

HELENE (DUCHESSE), the principal character in La Petite Duchesse, a piece by Fauchery played at the Theatre des Varietes. The part was originally given to Rose Mignon, but was played by Nana, who was a complete failure in it. Nana.

HELOISE, an actress at the Folies. She was plain-looking, but very amusing. Au Bonheur des Dames.

HENNEBEAU, general manager of the Montsou Mining Company, was born in the Ardennes. In his early life he had undergone the hardships of a poor boy thrown as an orphan on the Paris streets. After having followed the courses of the Ecole des Mines, at the age of twenty-four he became engineer to the Sainte-Barbe mine, and three years later he became divisional engineer in the Pas-de-Calais, at the Marles mines. When there he married the daughter of the rich owner of a spinning factory at Arras. For fifteen years they lived in the same small provincial town, and no event broke the monotony of existence, not even the birth of a child. An increasing irritation detached Madame Hennebeau, who was disdainful of this husband who gained a small salary with such difficulty. The misunderstandings between them became more pronounced, but with the view of pleasing his wife Hennebeau accepted a situation in an office in Paris. But Paris only completed their separation, for she immediately threw herself into all the luxurious follies of the period. During the ten years spent there she carried on an open intrigue with a man whose desertion nearly killed her. It was then that her husband accepted the management of the Montsou mines, still hoping that his wife might be changed down there in that desolate black country. When the great strike of miners broke out he at first minimized its seriousness, thinking that it would not last a week. By his lack of decided action he forfeited to some extent the confidence of his directors, but he regained this by the subsequent measures taken by him for bringing the strike to an end, and ultimately received the decoration of an officer of the Legion of Honour. His domestic life was, however, once more embittered by the discovery of a liaison between his wife and his nephew, Paul Negrel. Germinal.

HENNEBEAU (MADAME), wife of the preceding, was the daughter of a rich spinner at Arras. She did not get on well with her husband, whom she despised for his small success, and after she accompanied him to Paris she entered into a notorious liaison with a man whose subsequent desertion nearly killed her. For a time after their removal to Montsou she seemed more contented, but this did not last long, and she ultimately consoled herself with her husband's nephew, Paul Negrel. She was angry at the strikers, as they interfered with the arrival of provisions for a dinner-party which she was giving; but she was incapable of understanding the sufferings of the miners and their families in the hardships they were forced to undergo. Germinal.

HEQUET (CAROLINE), a well-known demi-mondaine in Paris. Her father, who was a clerk in Bordeaux, was long since dead, and her mother, accepting the situation, looked after Caroline's financial affairs with the strictest regularity. She bought the estate known as La Mignotte after Nana tired of it. Nana.

HEQUET (MADAME), mother of the preceding. She was a model of orderliness, who kept her daughter's accounts with severe precision. She managed the whole household from some small lodgings two stories above her daughter's, where, moreover, she had established a work-room for dressmaking and plain sewing. Nana.

HERBELIN, a great chemist whose discoveries revolutionized that science. Lazare Chanteau, who was for some time in his laboratory as an assistant, got from him the idea of extracting chemicals from seaweed by a new process. La Joie de Vivre.

HERMELINE, a student of rhetoric at the college of Plassans. He was in love with Sister Angele, and once went the length of cutting his hands with his penknife to get an opportunity of seeing and speaking to her while she dressed his self-inflicted hurts. In the end the student and the Sister ran off together. L'Oeuvre.

HIPPOLYTE, valet to Duveyrier. Pot-Bouille.

HIPPOLYTE, valet to Hennebeau, the manager of the Montsou Mining Company. Germinal.

HOMME NOIR (L'), an apparition said to haunt the Voreux pit. It was said to take the form of an old miner who twisted the necks of bad girls. Germinal.

HONORINE, a maid-servant with the Gregoires. She was a girl of some twenty years, who had been taken in as a child and brought up in the house. Germinal.

HONORINE, a servant in the employment of the Badeuils. When dismissed for misconduct she became insolent.

HORN (LEA DE), a Parisian demi-mondaine whose drawing-room was frequented by some of the old ministers of Louis Philippe. Nana.

HORTEUR (ABBE), parish priest of Bonneville, was a thick-set man of peasant-like build whose red hair was still unsilvered by his fifty years. Much of his time was spent in cultivating a small plot of ground in the churchyard, which he had enclosed as a vegetable garden. With regard to religion, he had come to be contented with the observance of outward ceremonies, and his tolerance had degenerated into a state of indifference as to the spiritual condition of his flock. He was on good terms with Chanteau, with whom it was his custom to play draughts every Saturday. La Joie de Vivre.

HOTON, a sugar-refinery at Montsou. Its prosperity was greatly affected by the strike of miners. Germinal.

HOURDEQUIN (ALEXANDRE), born 1804, was the only son of Isidore Hourdequin. He studied at the college of Chateaudun, but made little progress, as his only interest was in farming, for which he had an absolute passion. On the death of his father he became master of La Borderie, which he cultivated on the latest principles of agriculture, spending large sums upon it. He married a sister of Baillehache, the notary, who brought him a considerable sum, which also went into the land. His wife died in a few years, leaving him with two children, a son named Leon, who to his great disappointment became a soldier, and a daughter who died young. In spite of these misfortunes he retained all his passion for the land, and in it he gradually sunk all his fortune, getting little from it in return. A liaison with Jacqueline Cognet, followed, and she gradually acquired complete influence over him. He died as the result of an accident brought about by Tron, one of his own servants, who was also a lover of Jacqueline. La Terre.

HOURDEQUIN (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Mademoiselle Baillehache. La Terre.

HOURDEQUIN (ISIDORE), born 1767, was the descendant of an old peasant family of Cloyes, which had educated and elevated itself into a middle-class position in the sixteenth century. They had all been employed in the administration of the salt monopoly, and Isidore, who had been left an orphan, was worth sixty thousand francs, when at twenty-six, the Revolution cost him his post. As a speculation he bought the farm of La Borderie for a fifth of its value, but the depreciation of real estate continued, and he was unable to resell it at the profit of which he had dreamed. He therefore determined to farm it himself, and about this time he married the daughter of a neighbour, who brought him an additional hundred and twenty acres of land. He had one son, Alexandre, and died in 1831. La Terre.

HOURDEQUIN (LEON), son of Alexandre Hourdequin. He had an intense hatred of the soil and became a soldier, being promoted Captain after Solferino. He did not visit his home more than once a year, and was much annoyed to discover the liaison between his father and Jacqueline Cognet. He endeavoured to get the latter into disgrace, but the only effect was to make a complete breach between his father and himself. La Terre.

HOURDEQUIN (MADEMOISELLE), the second child of Alexandre Hourdequin. She was a delicate and charming girl, tenderly loved by her father. She died young, a short time after her mother. La Terre.

HOUTELARD, a fisherman of Bonneville, whose house was washed away after the destruction by the sea of the barricade erected by Lazare Chanteau. La Joie de Vivre.

HUBERT, a chasuble-maker who lived in a house immediately adjoining the cathedral of Beaumont. "For four hundred years the line of Huberts, embroiderers from father to son, had lived in this house." At twenty years of age he fell in love with a young girl of sixteen, Hubertine, and as her mother refused to give her consent to their union they ran away and were married. On the morning after Christmas, 1860, he found the child Angelique lying in a fainting condition in the snow outside the cathedral door. Having taken her into his house, he and his wife soon became attached to her, and as they had no children, ultimately adopted her as their daughter. Le Reve.

HUBERTINE, wife of the preceding. At the age of sixteen she fell in love with Hubert, the chasuble-maker, and as her mother, widow of a magistrate, would not give her consent, they ran away and were married. A year later she went to the deathbed of her mother, who, however, disinherited her and gave her her curse. "So affected was she by the terrible scene that her infant, born soon after, died." The Huberts had no other children, and after twenty-four years they still mourned the little one they had lost. She warmly approved of the adoption by her husband and herself of the foundling child Angelique, whom she treated with the greatest kindness. From the bitterness of her own experience she had a horror of disobedience to parents, and when she found that the consent of Monseigneur d'Hautecoeur could not be obtained to a marriage between his son Felicien and Angelique, she did all she could to sever the lovers. In this she was successful for a time, until the illness of Angelique, and her miraculous recovery, induced the Bishop to give his consent. Le Reve.

HUE (M.) a retired Government official, who was a sincere lover of art. He was unfortunately not rich enough to be always buying pictures, and could only bewail the blindness of the public which allowed a genius to die of starvation; for he himself, convinced, had selected Claude Lantier's crudest works, which he hung by the side of his Delacroix, predicting an equal fortune for them. L'Oeuvre.

HUGON (MADAME), mother of Philippe and Georges Hugon. She was the widow of a notary, and lived quietly at Fondettes, an old family property near Orleans, but had retained a house in Paris in Rue de Richelieu. She had been an old friend of the Marquise de Chouard, and was on intimate terms with her daughter, the Comtesse Sabine. A woman of high principles, she believed that one should overlook much in others in order that something might be pardoned in oneself. In this she contrasted strongly with her old friend the Marquis de Chouard, who professed the most rigorous virtue while he secretly lived a shameful life. She was, however, unable to bear with equanimity the eccentricities of Nana, her neighbour in the country, who led Philippe Hugon into dishonour, and his brother Georges to suicide. Nana.

HUGON (GEORGES), the younger son of Madame Hugon. At seventeen years of age he became infatuated with Nana, and a liaison with her followed. His mother, having discovered the state of affairs, interfered, and kept him at Fondettes for some months after Nana had returned to Paris, but he ultimately followed her there. Though he was not affected by the knowledge that Nana had other lovers, he was driven to frenzy when he learned that his brother Philippe had become one of the number. He implored Nana to marry him, and when she refused to take his offer seriously he plunged a pair of her scissors into his breast. The injury was not immediately fatal, but he died a few months afterwards; some said as the result of the wound reopening, while others spoke of a second and successful attempt at suicide. Nana.

HUGON (PHILIPPE), the elder son of Madame Hugon. A tall, handsome youth, he quickly attained the rank of lieutenant in the army, and was stationed first in the garrison at Bourges, and afterwards at Vincennes. His mother imprudently sent him to endeavour to release Georges from the toils of Nana, with the result that he was himself ensnared. He had little money of his own, and, as the demands of Nana were unceasing, he began to take small sums from the regimental funds, of which he was treasurer. The thefts went on for a considerable time, and when discovery was made they amounted to twelve thousand francs. Philippe was arrested, and when he was released from prison some months afterwards, dishonoured for ever, he was only in time to join his mother at the death-bed of her other son, who was also a victim to Nana's unhappy influence. Nana.

HUGUENIN, held a sinecure worth six thousand francs at the Ministry of the Interior. When he died Eugene Rougon, the Minister, gave the post to Leon Bejuin. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

HUPEL DE LA NOUE (M.), prefet of the district for which M. Mareuil was member. He arranged the tableaux vivants at the great party given by Aristide Saccard. La Curee.

HURET, a member of the Chamber of Deputies who obtained his election through the influence of Eugene Rougon. His very existence depended on the favour of the Minister of State, towards whom he conducted himself as a sort of general servant. "By following this calling for a couple of years he had, thanks to bribes and pickings, prudently realized, been able to increase his estates." Having ascertained that Rougon would not oppose the foundation of the Universal Bank, Huret became a director; later on, when the shares had risen to their highest point, he sold out in the knowledge that Rougon had decided to abandon his brother and that a catastrophe would be inevitable. L'Argent.

HUTIN, a salesman in the silk department of "The Ladies' Paradise." "He had managed after eighteen months' service to become one of the principal salesmen, thanks to a natural flexibility of character, a continual flow of caressing flattery under which was concealed a furious rage for business." Having conspired against Robineau, the "second hand" in his department, he succeeded him, only to be conspired against in turn by his own subordinates. When Denise Baudu first came to "The Ladies' Paradise" Hutin showed her some kindness, for which she was grateful, but ultimately he made statements about her which were entirely without foundation. Au Bonheur des Dames.

HUTIN (MADAME), a woman who lived in the vicinity of the Halles Centrales, and was spied on by Mademoiselle Saget, whose penetrating eyes allowed none of her neighbours to escape notice. Le Ventre de Paris.

I

ISABELLE, a character in La Petite Duchesse a piece by Fauchery, played at the Theatre des Varietes. The part was taken by Simonne Cabiroche. Nana.

J

JABOUILLE, an herbalist, whose shop was situated in Rue de Cherche-Midi. He was a widower, and married for the second time a woman named Mathilde. His shop was at one time prosperous, but business fell away until what was left was only that of an equivocal character. He died of syncope induced by phthisis. L'Oeuvre.

JABOUILLE (MADAME MATHILDE), wife of the preceding. She was a woman of about thirty, plain-looking, and exceedingly thin. From the time of her marriage to Jabouille, his business began to decrease, and this, it would appear, was due to her reputation, which alarmed the more respectable customers. Her liaisons were numerous, and included Mahoudeau, Chaine, and Jory, but after the death of her husband she married the last named, settling down into respectability and ruling him with a rod of iron. L'Oeuvre.

JACOBY, a Jew from Bordeaux, between whom and Mazaud there was keen rivalry. "Though of great experience and shrewdness, he was sorely handicapped by his passion for speculation, and in spite of considerable profits always seemed on the eve of a catastrophe. His money melted away on settling days." He acted as broker for Daigremont, and also for Gundermann. The great gamble in the shares of the Universal Bank resolved itself into a duel between Jacoby and Mazaud, the one selling on behalf of Gundermann, and the other buying on behalf of Saccard; and the final catastrophe was hastened by Jacoby warning Daigremont of Gundermann's determination to crush out the bank. L'Argent.

JALAGUIER (MADAME), a protegee of Madame Correur, who induced Eugene Rougon, the Minister, to increase the old lady's pension considerably. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

JALAGUIER FILS, son of the preceding. Madame Correur took an interest in him, and asked Eugene Rougon to secure a scholarship for him. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

JANTROU, an ex-professor of the University of Bordeaux, who in consequence of some misconduct was obliged to leave for Paris, without caste or position. At the age of twenty-eight, he landed at the Bourse, where for ten years he dragged out existence as a remisier or broker's tout. At the time of the foundation of the Universal Bank he suggested to Saccard the purchase of a newspaper to be employed in the interest of the company. The purchase was carried out, and Jantrou was appointed editor. Subsequently other papers were acquired, which he manipulated so as to keep the bank continually before the public. He gave information to Baroness Sandorff which she repeated to Gundermann, who was induced thereby to continue his attack on the bank. L'Argent.

JEANBERNAT, the caretaker of the deserted estate of Paradou in Provence. He lived by himself with his niece Albine in an old house on the border of the demesne. In an attic he had found a large number of books which had been saved from a fire in the old mansion, and these he studied for twenty years, imbibing from them the rationalistic theories of the eighteenth century. He had no respect for religion, and particularly disliked Brother Archangias, who insulted both him and his niece. After the death of Albine he attacked Archangias, and cut off his right ear with a pocket-knife. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

JENARD, a partner in the firm of Cornille and Jenard, which developed in the eighteenth century the mineral concession of Joiselle. Germinal.

JESUS CHRIST, the sobriquet of Hyacinthe Fouan. La Terre.

JEUMONT (M. AND MADAME), were well known in society during the Second Empire. The Emperor admired Madame Jeumont, and her husband was decorated by him. L'Argent.

JOBELIN (AUGUSTE), son of Colonel Jobelin. Contrary to regulations, Eugene Rougon took him into the office of the Minister of the Interior without the necessary bachelor's degree. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

JOBELIN (COLONEL), a friend of Eugene Rougon, through whose aid he hoped to secure a nomination as commander of the Legion of Honour, and an appointment for his son. He was a cousin of M. Bouchard. After Rougon's return to office he received the appointment as commander. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

JOIRE (ABBE), Cure of Montsou. He pretended not to interest himself in anything, so as not to vex either the workers or the masters. During the strike he took his walks at night, to prevent himself from being compromised by the miners. He obtained promotion, and was replaced by Abbe Ranvier. Germinal.

JONCQUIER, a lover of Rose Mignon, who deserted her for a time in favour of Laure. Nana.

JONCQUOY (MADAME DU), an old friend of the Muffats. Years ago she had met Bismarck, who struck her as stupid; she was unable to understand his later success. Nana.

JORDAN (PAUL), a journalist, whose father, a Marseilles banker, had committed suicide in consequence of some disastrous speculations. He married a daughter of M. Maugendre, to whom he had been betrothed in more prosperous days. His wife brought him no dowry, as her parents were against the marriage on the ground of Jordan's occupation and want of means. Having made the acquaintance of Saccard, he received an appointment on the staff of the newspaper purchased to support the policy of the Universal Bank. He did not speculate, however, and remained in comparative poverty, until the success of a novel which he had written put him in more comfortable circumstances, and even enabled him to give assistance to his wife's parents after they were ruined by the failure of the bank. L'Argent.

JORDAN (MADAME MARCELLE), wife of the preceding. She was the only child of M. Maugendre, who was ruined by the failure of the Universal Bank. L'Argent.

JORY (EDOUARD), was the son of a magistrate of Plassans, whom he drove crazy by his profligate conduct. In the end he ran off with a music-hall singer under the pretext of going to Paris to follow the literary profession. Notwithstanding the fact that his profligacy went to even greater lengths in the city, he was successful in journalism, and soon earned between seven and eight thousand francs a year as a leader-writer and art critic. His first success was gained in a series of articles in a little newspaper called Le Tambour, in which he fell foul of the accepted canons of art, and hailed Claude Lantier and his companions as the founders of a new school. Later he claimed to have made Fagerolles by his articles, in the same manner as he formerly took credit for making Lantier. He gradually dropped his old friends, however, finding that the public only laughed at their productions, and in excuse pleaded that he had not a journal in which he could support their cause; but when, still later, he became director of a great Art review, he preserved the same silence. After innumerable love affairs, he ended by marrying Mathilde Jabouille. L'Oeuvre.

JORY (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Mathilde Jabouille.

JOSEPH, a butler in the employment of Nana at La Mignotte. Nana.

JOSEPH, an old soldier who secured a situation in "The Ladies' Paradise" through the influence of Lhomme, whose foster brother he was. He married Mlle. de Fontenailles, a shop-girl in the establishment. Au Bonheur des Dames.

JOSEPH (MADAME), the concierge of the house on Quay Bourbon where Claude Lantier lived. L'Oeuvre.

JOSSE (MADEMOISELLE) kept a little school for young children in Rue Polonceau. Anna Coupeau was her pupil, and made herself such a nuisance that twice Mademoiselle Josse sent her away, taking her back each time in order not to lose the small fees. L'Assommoir.

Nana in later years exchanged reminiscences with Satin, who, like herself, had been a pupil at Mademoiselle Josse's school. Nana.

JOSSERAND PERE, the father of Josserand, the cashier at the Saint-Joseph glass-works. He was originally a solicitor at Clermont. Pot-Bouille.

JOSSERAND, cashier at the St. Joseph glass-works. His salary was not a large one, and in consequence of the determination of his wife to keep up a greater style than they could afford, he was engaged in a continual struggle to make ends meet; to gain a few extra francs he frequently spent much of the night addressing circulars for a firm of publishers. Worn out by hard work and by the continual bickerings of his wife and daughters, he was not in a condition to stand the disgrace of his daughter Berthe's liaison with Octave Mouret, and he was struck down by paralysis, which soon after resulted in his death. Pot-Bouille.

JOSSERAND (MADAME ELEANORE), wife of the preceding. Her two objects in life were to appear better off than she really was, and to secure husbands for her daughters. In the latter quest she had many disappointments, and her temper, never good, correspondingly suffered, her unfortunate husband bearing the brunt. A marriage having ultimately been arranged between Berthe Josserand and Auguste Vabre, Madame Josserand made a strong effort to induce her brother, Narcisse Bachelard, to pay the dowry which he had long ago promised to his niece. As he refused to do so, Madame Josserand overcame the difficulty by a subterfuge of doubtful honesty. Pot-Bouille.

JOSSERAND (BERTHE), second daughter of M. Josserand. After several ineffectual efforts to secure a husband she became engaged to Auguste Vabre, the elder son of her father's landlord. Difficulties as to a dowry followed, but these were surmounted by somewhat shady means, and the marriage took place. Vabre's health was not good, and Berthe soon became discontented, a state of mind largely induced by the bad advice of her mother. About this time Octave Mouret came to be assistant in Vabre's shop, and Berthe, carried away by his attentions, entered upon an unfortunate liaison with him. Discovery by Vabre led to Berthe's return to her parents' home, and it was only after a considerable time that a reconciliation was brought about by the efforts of Abbe Mauduit. Pot-Bouille.

JOSSERAND (HORTENSE), elder daughter of M. Josserand. Her mother endeavoured to secure a husband for her, but she made her own choice, selecting one Verdier, a lawyer. The marriage was put off from time to time as Verdier had got entangled with a woman from whom he found separation difficult. Pot-Bouille.

JOSSERAND (LEON), elder son of M. Josserand. He was a young man of ambition, who hoped to rise through the influence of Madame Dambreville, whose lover he became. Ultimately she arranged a marriage between him and her niece Raymonde, who brought him a large dowry. Soon afterwards by the same means he was appointed Maitre des Requetes. Pot-Bouille.

JOSSERAND (MADAME LEON), wife of the preceding. See Raymonde. Pot-Bouille.

JOSSERAND (SATURNIN), younger son of M. Josserand. He was a powerful young man of twenty-five, whose mind had been seriously affected by an attack of brain fever; though not actually insane, he was subject to fits of blind fury whenever anybody annoyed him. When his sister Berthe was a little girl, he nursed her through a long illness, and since he saved her life he adored her with a deep, passionate devotion. The preparations for her marriage to Auguste Vabre affected him so seriously that his removal to an asylum became necessary, and he remained there for some time. On his release he went to live with his sister and her husband, but domestic trouble having arisen, his mind again became so unhinged that he made an attempt on the life of his brother-in-law and had again to be taken to an asylum. Pot-Bouille.

JOUVE (ABBE), an officiating priest at Notre Dame de Grace, the parish church of Passy. He had known M. Grandjean at Marseilles, and showed much kindness to Helene after the death of her husband, assisting her in settling up her affairs. Along with M. Rambaud, his half-brother, he was a regular visitor at Helene's house, and later endeavoured to arrange a marriage between her and his brother. He was devoted to Jeanne Grandjean, and helped to nurse her during her fatal illness. An amiable, kind-hearted man, he was greatly beloved by his parishioners. Une Page d'Amour.

JOUVE, a retired captain in the army, and afterwards one of the four inspectors at "The Ladies' Paradise." In addition to acting as spy on the staff he watched the customers, and it was he who detected Madame de Boves in the act of stealing some fine lace. He made certain advances to Denis Baudu which she resented, and in consequence he afterwards showed considerable ill-will towards her. Au Bonheur des Dames.

JUILLERAT (DOCTOR), an old physician who attended most of the inhabitants of the Rue de Choiseul. He was a man of only average abilities who had built up a large practice by hard work. His views were somewhat advanced, and he had many arguments with Abbe Mauduit, with whom he frequently came in contact at the bedsides of his patients. Pot-Bouille.

JULES, the lover of La Sarriette. He lived on her earnings as a fruit-dealer. Le Ventre de Paris.

JULES, one of the soldiers sent to Montsou during the strike. He was born at Plogof, where his mother and sister still resided. One night while he was on guard at the Voreux mine he was murdered by Jeanlin Maheu, who with the assistance of Etienne Lantier carried the body to a gallery of the mine, where they buried it under a fall of rock. Germinal.

JULES (MADAME), Nana's dresser at the Theatre des Varietes. Nana.

JULIE, cook in the employment of the Duveyriers. Pot-Bouille.

JULIEN, butler in the employment of Nana in the Avenue de Villiers. He left the house with a large sum, as Comte Muffat, being jealous, wished to be freed from his presence. Nana.

JUSSELIN (PIERRE-FRANCOIS), a protege of M. de Marsy. Eugene Rougon refused to nominate him as an officer of the Legion of Honour, and gave the decoration which had been intended for him to Bejuin. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

JEZEUR (MADAME), a neighbour of the Josserands in the Rue de Choiseul. Her husband had left her after ten days of married life, and thenceforth she lived alone in quiet lodgings. Very little was known of her circumstances or mode of life. Pot-Bouille.

K

KAHN (M.), son of a Jewish banker at Bordeaux; a deputy who was engaged in a scheme for the construction of a railway from Niort to Angers. He was chiefly anxious for this, as the proposed line would pass through Bressure, where he had some blast-furnaces, the value of which it would considerably increase. Rougon supported him energetically, and had almost secured the grant when his retirement from office delayed the scheme for some years. Soon after Rougon's appointment as Minister of the Interior the grant was obtained, and he accompanied Kahn to Niort to attend the inauguration of the scheme. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

KAHN (MADAME), wife of the preceding. She lived a very retired life at Paris. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

KELLER (LES), well-known leaders of society in Paris. It was at their house that Baroness Sandorff first met Gundermann. L'Argent.

KOLB (M.), a banker whose business consisted to a large extent in gold arbitrage, buying foreign coins, and melting them into gold bars. He was a man of Jewish origin, and having heard that Daigremont was to be connected with the Universal Bank, he readily agreed to become a director. Being a cautious man, however, he sold all his shares before the final collapse. L'Argent.

L

LABORDETTE, a young man who was well known in racing circles, and was specially popular with women, as he was always ready to render them little services. Through his relations with the world of trainers and jockeys he had always the latest information as to races. He made himself very useful to Nana when she was setting up a stable of her own, and assisted her in the selection of servants. Nana.

LACAILLE, a customer of Madame Francois, the market gardener. He attended the Revolutionary meetings in Lebrigre's cafe. Le Ventre de Paris.

LACAMP. See Puech and Lacamp.

LACASSAGNE, a dealer in feathers and artificial flowers, whose business was ruined by the competition of Octave Mouret's establishment. Au Bonheur des Dames.

LACHESNAYE (DE), judge at the Rouen Court of appeal, was the husband of Berthe Grandmorin, whom he somewhat resembled in character. He was a little man, dry and yellow, who had been a judge at the Court of Appeal from the age of thirty-six; he had been decorated, thanks to the influence of his father-in-law, and to the services which his father had rendered on the High Commissions at the time of the Coup d'Etat. He was disliked by Denizet, the examining magistrate, in whose eyes he represented the class of judicial functionary who attained position by wealth and influence. Lachesnaye was incensed at the will of his father-in-law, Grandmorin, who left fully half of his fortune to women of all classes, most of them unknown to his family. La Bete Humaine.

LACHESNAYE (MADAME DE), wife of the preceding. See Berthe Grandmorin. La Bete Humaine.

LACOUR (ZEPHYRIN), a young lad from the same village as Rosalie, whose sweetheart he was. He was drawn in the conscription and sent to Paris, where, by permission of Madame Grandjean, he came to see Rosalie, her maid, every Sunday. He was a good-hearted lad, whose ambition was to get out of the army, marry Rosalie, and return to his native village. Une Page d'Amour.

LADICOURT (BARONNE DE), a lady who lived at Vouziers. Captain Beaudoin lunched at her house on 26th August, 1870, at the hour when the Seventh Army Corps was taking up its position for battle. La Debacle.

LADRICOURT (COMTE DE), father of the Baroness Sandorff. He was a confirmed gambler, and a man of brutal manners. He died of apoplexy, completely ruined, after a series of disgraceful failures. L'Argent.

LA FALOISE (HECTOR DE), a youth who came from the country to Paris in order to complete his education. Thanks to the death of an uncle, he was very rich, and his chief ambition was to be in everything ultra Parisian. He posed as a man who had experienced everything, and who no longer thought anything worthy of being taken seriously. Introduced behind the scenes of the Theatre des Varietes by his cousin Fauchery, he met Nana, who did him the honour of ruining him without much loss of time. When his money was done, he returned to the country in the hope of marrying a distant relation who was both ugly and pious. Nana.

LAFOUASSE, a tavern-keeper in the neighbourhood of Plassans, between the old demesne of Paradou and the village of Artaud. He was treated by Dr. Pascal Rougon for ataxy, but died after a hypodermic injection of a serum with which the doctor was experimenting. Le Docteur Pascal.

LAGARDE (EDMOND), a sergeant in the 6th Regiment of the line. At the most his age was twenty-three, but he did not appear more than eighteen. He took part in the battle of Sedan, and was wounded in the left arm, which was broken by a bullet. His father, who was a shopkeeper in Paris, was a customer of Delaherche, and he was removed to the house of the manufacturer, where he was treated as one of the family. A handsome lad, he aroused the pity of Gilberte Delaherche, whose lover he became. La Debacle.

LAGRIFOUL (MARQUIS DE), the Legitimist Deputy for Plassans. His election came as a severe blow to the Government, and to M. Pequeur des Saulaies, the sub-prefect of Plassans, who was held responsible for it. In reality, the election had been largely influenced by the clergy, combined with the old nobility. It was to counteract this influence that the Government sent Abbe Faujas to Plassans. The Marquis being a man of poor abilities, whose public appearances were disappointing, his overthrow was rendered easier and more complete. La Conquete de Plassans.

LA JOLIE DAME, a customer at Octave Mouret's shop, Au Bonheur des Dames. She was a favourite with all the salesmen, and as no one knew her name she was always referred to as "The Pretty Lady." Au Bonheur des Dames.

LALUBIE, teacher of the sixth form at the college of Plassans. He found one day his room transformed into a chapelle ardente, thanks to his pupils led by Pouillard. After he recovered from his fright he set a heavy punishment for the whole class. He married the daughter of Galissard, the haberdasher at Plassans. L'Oeuvre.

LAMBERTHIER, an assistant at the Halles Centrales. Josephine Dejoie was at one time cook in his house. L'Argent.

LAMBERTHON (M. DE), a Deputy who discussed with M. La Rouquette the wisdom of the Emperor conceding the privilege of presenting an address to the Crown. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

LAMBOURDIEU, a shopkeeper at Cloyes, who sold Parisian novelties in all the villages within a radius of five or six miles. La Terre.

LANDOIS (AUGUSTE), assistant in Quenu's business. He came to Paris from Troyes to perfect himself in his trade, and having little money, intended to set up for himself as a pork-butcher. He was engaged to his cousin Augustine Landois, who was also employed by Quenu. He took a dislike to Florent, and wrote an anonymous letter denouncing him to the Prefect of Police. Le Ventre de Paris.

LANDOIS (AUGUSTINE) came to Quenu's establishment to learn shop management. She was engaged to her cousin Auguste Landois. Le Ventre de Paris.

LANGLADE (DE), Prefect of Deux-Sevres. He was accused of dissolute conduct, and was superseded in his office by Du Poizat. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

LANTIER (AUGUSTE), the lover of Gervaise Macquart; he accompanied her to Paris, when she left home with their two children. La Fortune des Rougon.

Soon after their arrival in Paris, he deserted Gervaise for a girl named Adele, with whom he lived for several years, during which he appears to have done little work. After Adele left him he renewed friendship with Gervaise and Coupeau, her husband, and induced them to take him into their home as a lodger. Once established there, he paid nothing for his support, and soon Gervaise was supporting him as well as her husband, who by this time was doing nothing. Gervaise, having become disgusted with her husband's intemperance, resumed her old relations with Lantier, and these continued till she was financially ruined, and her shop was taken over by Virginie Poisson. Lantier, having transferred his affections to Virginie, was allowed to retain his old position as lodger, and soon resumed his former tactics of paying no rent and living off his landlord. In course of time he succeeded in eating the Poissons' stock of sweetmeats and bringing them to ruin, and then began to look out for some one else to support him. L'Assommoir.

LANTIER (CLAUDE), son of Gervaise Macquart and Auguste Lantier, was born at Plassans in 1842. He was brought up by his paternal grandmother, but when she died, in 1850, he was taken to Paris by his parents. La Fortune des Rougon.

After Lantier's desertion of Gervaise, and her subsequent marriage to Coupeau, Claude continued to reside with his mother, but a few years later an old gentleman of Plassans, a lover of pictures, who had been greatly struck by some daubs done by the child, offered to pay for his education. The offer was accepted, and Claude returned to Plassans. L'Assommoir.

Some years later his benefactor died, leaving him an income of a thousand francs a year, enough to prevent him dying of hunger in the artistic career which he had decided to follow. Having come to Paris with an intense hatred of romanticism, he was struck by the artistic possibilities of the Halles Centrales, the great provision markets of Paris, which he haunted in search of subjects for his brush. He was induced by Florent to attend one of the republican meetings in Lebigre's cafe, but was not in sympathy with the movement, and declined to take part in it. He occasionally visited his aunt, Madame Lisa Quenu, but revolted against her complete indifference to art, and her middle-class selfishness. Le Ventre de Paris.

He was appointed a member of the family council which nominally had charge of Pauline Quenu's fortune. La Joie de Vivre.

He established himself in a studio near the roof of an old house close to the river, and there lived the life of a Bohemian, with an absolute disdain for everything not related to art. He revolted against the canons of the schools, and tried to achieve truth in painting by adopting an exaggerated realism. His hopes became centred in a large painting, which he called Plein Air, intended for exhibition in the Salon. The picture was rejected, and when shown at a minor exhibition was greeted with derision by the public. About this period began his connection with Christine Hallegrain, with whom he lived for several years, and ultimately married. They took up house at Bennecourt in an old cottage, and there some years passed happily enough, a son named Jacques Louis being born in 1860. But Claude gradually became discontented, and the family returned to Paris, where there began a long struggle against poverty, a struggle beginning in high anticipation and ending in despair. After a long search for a subject for a picture which was to be his masterpiece, Claude selected a stretch of the river near Notre Dame, and into this he intended to put all those new theories of art with which he hoped to revolutionize the world. Everything was sacrificed to this picture; the small fortune left him by his early benefactor was gradually realized to provide food, and when it was exhausted there was little but starvation for the artist and his dependants. The work was begun in a frenzy of genius, but was constantly interrupted by doubts and indecision; it became a monomania, and under its influence Claude's mind gradually became unhinged; the family virus was at last showing itself. Christine was wholly taken up with her husband, and their child died of an illness due greatly to neglect. By this time Claude was incapable of any real feeling save for art, and the death of his child only served to give him a subject for a picture. Having torn himself away from his intended masterpiece for a time, he painted L'Enfant Mort, which was exhibited in the Salon, and met with an even more contemptuous reception from the public than his Plein Air. Christine used all her influence to prevent her husband from returning to his task, but his brain had become obsessed by the great idea, which his hand proved powerless to execute as his mind became increasingly deranged. At length, in a moment of delirium, he hanged himself in front of the picture which had proved the means of his undoing. His genius was incomplete, and he was unable to carry out his own theories, but they were adopted by other and less able successors with better results. He was buried in the cemetery of Cayenne at Saint-Ouen. L'Oeuvre.

LANTIER (MADAME CHRISTINE), wife of the preceding. See Christine Hallegrain. L'Oeuvre.

LANTIER (ETIENNE), the youngest son of Auguste Lantier and Gervaise Macquart, was born in 1846, and accompanied his parents to Paris in 1850. La Fortune des Rougon.

After his mother had been married to Coupeau for some time, and had started her laundry, Etienne was found somewhat in the way, and on the suggestion of Goujet was sent to work in the rivet-making factory where he himself was employed. Later the boy was sent to Lille, where he was apprenticed to an old master of Goujet, an engineer in that town. When Gervaise had fallen into poverty, Etienne, who was by that time a stoker on an engine, was able to send his mother a five-franc piece occasionally. L'Assommoir.

In a moment of passion Etienne struck his chief, and was at once dismissed from his employment. An industrial crisis existed at the time, and, finding it impossible to get work, he tramped from place to place till eventually he arrived at Montsou, worn out with fatigue and want. At the Voreux pit he chanced to get work in a gang led by Maheu, and went underground for the first time. The work was hard and distasteful to him, but he was unwilling to give it up, and was perhaps influenced by the bright eyes of Catherine Maheu, who toiled alongside him. He became more and more impressed with the sense of the hardships of the miners' lives, and his mind was also influenced by Souvarine, a confessed anarchist, beside whom he lodged. Gradually Etienne began to indoctrinate his companions with a spirit of revolt, and when the great strike broke out he became the leader. He did not, however, accept the extreme doctrines of Souvarine, and endeavoured to dissuade the strikers from doing damage to property. In this he was not altogether successful, and his influence became considerably lessened, until he was blamed by his comrades for the hardships they had to endure during the strike, and for its ultimate collapse. He returned to work, and in the terrible catastrophe brought about by Souvarine he was cut off at the bottom of the pit with Chaval and Catherine Maheu. He had always loved Catherine, and notwithstanding their peril, an old jealousy revived, and in a struggle with Chaval, Etienne killed him. Days elapsed before rescue came, and by that time Catherine was dead. After six weeks in hospital, Etienne left for Paris. Germinal.

At Paris, later on, he took part in the Communist rising, and was condemned to death. He was respited, and transported to Noumea, where he married, and became father of a little girl. Le Docteur Pascal.

LANTIER (JACQUES), the second son of Gervaise Macquart and Auguste Lantier, was born at Plassans in 1844. He was six years old when his parents went to Paris with his brothers, Claude and Etienne, leaving him with his godmother, Aunt Phasie, who sent him to the School of Arts and Crafts. After two years passed on the Orleans Railway, he became an engineer of the first-class on the Western Railway. At twenty-six he was a tall, handsome man, with dark hair and a clear complexion. From childhood he had suffered from a complaint which the doctors did not understand, a pain in the head, behind the ears, accompanied by fever and an intense melancholy, which tempted him to hide like a suffering animal. When about sixteen years of age he became affected by a curious form of insanity, the desire to murder any woman of whom he became fond. "On each occasion it seemed like a sudden outburst of blind rage, an ever-recurring thirst to avenge some very ancient offence, the exact recollection of which escaped him. Did it date from so far back, from the harm women had done to his race, from the rancour laid up from male to male since the first deceptions in the depths of the caverns?" Even with his cousin Flore, who loved him from childhood, the same terrible instinct arose, and could only be stilled by flight.

By chance, Jacques was a momentary witness of the murder of President Grandmorin, and when suspicion fell upon the Roubauds he came to be of opinion that it was well-founded, a belief which was confirmed by a subsequent confession to him by Severine. This avowal by Severine placed her in his mind in a different category from all other woman; she had killed, and was a person sacred and apart, a woman he could love without his lust for blood being evoked. At the request of Severine, Jacques promised to kill Roubaud, her husband, whom she had come to hate; but, though all the preparations were made, it was Severine herself whom he killed, in an accession of that homicidal rage which he imagined he had conquered. He escaped all suspicion, and calmly allowed Roubaud and Cabuche to be punished for the crime. In order to see whether the murder of Severine had cured him of his blood lust, he made love to Philomene Sauvagnat, thereby arousing the jealousy of her lover, Pecqueux, who was stoker on the engine driven by Lantier. A quarrel between the two men on the footplate of the engine resulted in both of them falling off, and being cut in pieces beneath the wheels. La Bete Humaine.

LANTIER (JACQUES LOUIS), born 1860, was the son of Claude Lantier and Christine Hallegrain. He was allowed to grow up wild at Bennecourt until he was two and a half years old, when his parents removed to Paris, taking him with them. Life in the city did not agree with the child, who to make matters worse was much neglected, his mother being wholly taken up with her lover, and his father with art. He grew up puny, serious like a little man; at five years his head had grown quite out of proportion to his height, but as his skull increased in size his intelligence diminished. His head alone continued to grow, verging on cretinism, until, in 1869, the unfortunate child died of some obscure form of malnutrition. L'Oeuvre.

LAPOULLE, a soldier in the 106th Regiment of the line, in the squad of Corporal Jean Macquart. He came from the Marshes of Sologne, and was so ignorant that when he joined the regiment he asked to be shown the King. He had great strength, and consequently all the heavy work of his company was assigned to him. After the battle of Sedan, he was one of the prisoners on the Isle d'Iges, where driven frantic by famine, and instigated by Chouteau, he killed Pache, who had hidden some bread from his companions. The following night he attempted to escape by swimming the Meuse, but was killed by a bullet fired by a Prussian sentinel. La Debacle.

LAQUERRIERE (FLORENT), an unfortunate man who died of yellow fever in Dutch Guiana in the arms of Florent. It was by the aid of his papers that Florent, who had escaped from Cayenne, was able to return to France, and to evade the notice of the police. Le Ventre de Paris.

LA ROUQUETTE (M.), a member of the Chamber of Deputies. His sister, Madame de Llorentz, was one of the ladies-in-waiting of the Empress Eugenie. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

LA ROUQUETTE (MADEMOISELLE DE). See Madame de Llorentz.

LARSONNEAU, formerly a clerk at the Hotel de Ville along with Aristide Saccard; he was dismissed for prying into the prefet's private drawers. He acted for Saccard in many of the shady transactions in which he could not himself appear, and being entirely unscrupulous ultimately amassed such a sum of money that he was able to start a small banking establishment. La Curee.

He became immensely rich. It was through him that Busch came to know the past life of Aristide Saccard. L'Argent.

LAURE, an actress for whom Joncquier had an infatuation. Nana.

LAURE, a performer in a singing-hall at Montmartre. Hutin, one of Octave Mouret's salesmen, and his friend Lienard applauded her performance so noisily that the police threatened to intervene. Au Bonheur des Dames.

LAURENT, a peasant in easy circumstances who lived near Artaud. Pere Bambousse was anxious to have him as son-in-law. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

LAURENT, the recorder at the court of Rouen who assisted Denizet at the inquiry into the murder of Grandmorin. He was skilful in selecting the essential parts of evidence, so as not to put down anything useless. La Bete Humaine.

LAURENT, a gardener at Bazeilles. He was a man of thirty years of age who had recently lost his mother and his wife, who had both died of the same fever. During the battle of 1st September, 1870, he took part in the defence of Weiss's house, and having only his own body to care for, he determined to sell it dearly, and at each shot to bring down one of the enemy. He continued firing till his ammunition was exhausted, when he was taken prisoner by the Prussians, who finding that he was a civilian removed him, along with Weiss, for instant execution. In the face of the firing party he retained all his calmness, standing with his hands in his pockets till the fatal shots were fired. La Debacle.

LAUWERENS (DE), a well-known financier who was both wealthy and avaricious. He went the length of refusing to pay his wife's milliner's bill. La Curee.

LAUWERENS (MADAME DE), wife of the preceding. Notwithstanding certain well-authenticated scandals, she managed to keep her high position in society. She was a friend of Renee Saccard. La Curee.

LAVIGNIERE, was one of the auditors at the Universal Bank, Rousseau being the other. Their duties were delicate, and in the circumstances useless. Lavigniere was disposed to approve of everything, being consumed with a desire to become a member of the board later on. L'Argent.

LA VIGNIERE (CHEVALIER DE), grandfather of Madame Chanteau. La Joie de Vivre.

LA VIGNIERE (EUGENIE DE). See Madame Chanteau.

LA VILLARDIERE (DE), deputy for the department of the Cote d'Or. He was a friend of La Rouquette. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

LEA, a customer at the Cafe Anglais. Nana.

LEBEAU, a man of considerable influence in the Second Empire, whom Clorinde Balbi was able to gain over to the cause of Eugene Rougon. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

LEBLEU, the cashier at Havre railway station. La Bete Humaine.

LEBLEU (MADAME), wife of the preceding, was a woman of forty-five, so stout that she was in constant danger of choking. Between her and Severine Roubaud there was ill-feeling of long standing, arising from a question of their houses in the Station, the Lebleus occupying that which should by rights have belonged to the Roubauds, who on account of the generosity of their predecessor were relegated to rooms little more cheerful than a prison. She had a mania for spying upon her neighbours, and in the end caused so much irritation, that she was ordered to exchange houses with the Roubauds, thus letting them have the one to which they were entitled. The annoyance, and the change to a dismal house, proved fatal to Madame Lebleu, and she died four months afterwards. La Bete Humaine.

LEBIGRE, proprietor of the wine shop where Florent and his friends held their meetings. He was a police spy. Ultimately he married Louise Mehudin. Le Ventre de Paris.

LEBIGRE (MADAME). See Louise Mehudin.

LEBOUCQ, Counsellor at the Court of Rouen. He was assessor at the trial of Roubaud and Cabuche. La Bete Humaine.

LEBOUCQ (MADAME), wife of the preceding. She was a handsome woman, for whose receptions the barristers of Rouen were beginning to desert those of Madame Bonnehon, her rival. It was said that to the influence of Madame Leboucq was largely due the result of the trial of Roubaud, a result not favourable to the family of President Grandmorin. La Bete Humaine.

LECOEUR (MADAME), a butter and cheese merchant at the Halles Centrales. She was sister-in-law to Gavard, and had an idea of marrying him after the death of his wife. He made no advances, however, and she subsequently regarded him with bitter ill-will. Along with Mlle. Saget, she took an active share in the gossip which partly led to the arrest of Florent and Gavard, and wrote an anonymous letter denouncing them to the police. Accompanied by La Sarriette, her niece, she went to Gavard's house after his arrest, and took possession of his money, which they divided between them. Le Ventre de Paris.

LECOMTE (MADAME), an acquaintance of the Deberles. Une Page d'Amour.

LEFEVRE (MADAME), wife of a manufacturer at Raucourt, whose house was pillaged by the Prussians after the battle of Beaumont. La Debacle.

LEGOUGEUX, a miner at Joiselle. He was an associate of Pluchart. Germinal.

LEGRAIN (GENERAL), a deputy at the Corps Legislatif. He was devoted to the Emperor, and notwithstanding a severe attack of gout, attended at the Chamber in order to vote the funds for the baptism of the Prince Imperial. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

LEHONGRE (LES), grocers in Rue Neuve de la Goutte-d'Or. L'Assommoir.

LEHUDIER, a child to whom Charvet gave lessons. Le Ventre de Paris.

LELORRAIN, a notary in Rue Sainte Anne. In his office was executed the deed which established the joint-stock company of the Universal Bank. L'Argent.

LEMBALLEUSE, a family who lived in a ruined mill near the cathedral of Beaumont. It consisted of a grandmother, her daughter, and three granddaughters, all of whom lived by begging. Angelique did all she could for them, giving them food and even clothes. Le Reve.

LENFANT, the keeper of a dram-shop at Montsou. Germinal.

LENGAIGNE, a dealer in tobacco and tavern-keeper at Rogues. He cultivated a small piece of land, while his wife weighed tobacco and looked after the cellar. He also shaved and cut the hair of the village, a trade learned by him when he was in the army. He professed strong Republican principles, though he was afraid to express his opinions too strongly, in case of losing his licence. An old rivalry subsisted between him and Macqueron, a neighbouring tavern-keeper with whom he was always on the point of blows. La Terre.

LENGAIGNE (MADAME FLORE), wife of the preceding. She was always quarrelling with Coelina Macqueron. La Terre.

LENGAIGNE (SUZANNE), daughter of the two preceding. She was apprenticed to a dressmaker at Chateaudun, but after six months ran off to Paris where she led a gay life. Her return to her native village clad in silks caused quite a sensation, of which her parents were very proud. La Terre.

LENGAIGNE (VICTOR), brother of Suzanne. Before he was drawn in the conscription he was an awkward youth, but he returned a swaggering braggart, who could hardly be recognized with his moustache and beard. La Terre.

LENORE, a racehorse; mother of Frangipane. Nana.

LEON, a lad of about fifteen years of age, apprentice to Quenu. He was a gentle-looking lad, given to stealing stray bits of ham and sausage, which he concealed under his pillow and ate during the night. Le Ventre de Paris.

LEONCE (MADAME), the door-keeper of the house where Gavard lived in the Rue de la Cossonnerie. She acted also as Gavard's housekeeper. Le Ventre de Paris.

LEONIE, an artificial-flower maker employed by Madame Titreville. She left her trade in order to be married. L'Assommoir.

LEONIE, aunt of Louise Thibaudier. Louise went to her house after leaving Bonneville, driven away by Pauline Quenu. La Joie de Vivre.

LEPALMEC, a peasant at Plogof, in Brittany. Germinal.

LEQUEU, the schoolmaster at Rogues. His parents were peasants, and he had an intense hatred of the class from which he had sprung, looking upon them as little better than barbarians. In politics he had advanced views, but in consequence of his position he concealed them to a great extent. Disappointed in the hope which he had long nourished of marrying Berthe Macqueron, he ended by preaching the doctrines of anarchy. La Terre.

LERAT (MADAME), nee Coupeau, was a sister of Coupeau and Madame Lorilleux. She was a widow of thirty-six years of age, and was forewoman in the manufactory of artificial flowers carried on by Madame Titreville. The eldest of the Coupeau family, she was "a tall, skinny, mannish-looking woman, who talked through her nose"; she lived a hard-working, cloisteral existence, but she had a perfect mania for making improper allusions, so very obscure that only she herself could understand them. L'Assommoir.

For a long time she lost sight of her niece Nana, but later she found her in a position of apparent wealth. Madame Lerat had abandoned her trade of artificial-flower-maker and lived upon her savings, scraped together sou by sou. Nana rented a small house for her aunt, and gave her an allowance of a hundred francs per month to look after her little son Louiset. Nana.

LERENARD, the keeper of a cafe in the neighbourhood of Montsou. Germinal.

LEROI, alias CANON, a journeyman carpenter, who deserted Paris on account of some trouble, and preferred to live in the country, tramping from village to village, doing a week here and a week there, and offering his services from one farm to another when his employer did not want him. When there was a scarcity of work he begged on the high-roads, living partly on the vegetables he stole. He professed strong revolutionary principles, which he was fond of airing in village ale-shops. He was a friend of Hyacinthe Fouan. La Terre.

LETELLIER, father of Madame Deberle and her sister Pauline. He owned an extensive silk warehouse on the Boulevard des Capucines. "Since his wife's death he had been taking his younger daughter about everywhere, in search of a rich husband for her." Une Page d'Amour.

LETELLIER (JULIETTE). See Madame Deberle.

LETELLIER (PAULINE), the younger daughter of M. Letellier, a wealthy silk merchant, and sister of Madame Deberle. She was a giddy young girl who went about everywhere with her father in the hope of securing a rich husband, and was a constant visitor at the house of her sister. Une Page d'Amour.

LETURC (MADAME), widow of a captain, was a protegee of Madame Correur, who obtained a tobacco licence for her. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

LEVAQUE, a neighbour of the Maheus. He was of intemperate habits, and beat his wife on little provocation. During the strike he was among the most reckless, and at the assault on the Voreux pit he was taken prisoner by the troops. His arrest made him a sort of hero, and by the Paris newspapers he was credited with a reply of antique sublimity to the examining magistrate. Germinal.

LEVAQUE (ACHILLE), the eldest child of Zacharie Maheu and of Philomene Levaque. He was three years old when his parents were married. Germinal.

LEVAQUE (BEBERT), son of the Levaques, was a little boy of twelve, who already worked in the pit. Along with Lydie Pierron, he was a companion of Jeanlin Maheu in many escapades. As Jeanlin became more daring and unscrupulous, Bebert and Lydie were drawn together in an affection born of their common fear of him. The three children were present at the attack on the Voreux pit, and Bebert and Lydie, killed by the volley fired by the troops, fell dead in one another's arms. Germinal.

LEVAQUE (DESIREE), the youngest child of Philomene, aged nine months. Germinal.

LEVAQUE (PHILOMENE), daughter of the Levaques, had two children to Zacharie Maheu before her marriage to him. She had a delicacy of the chest and was unable to work underground. After the death of her husband she left Montsou with her two children, in the company of a miner from the Pas-de-Calais. Germinal.

LEVAQUE (LA), wife of Levaque the miner, and mother of Philomene and Bebert. She was a bad housekeeper, and was roughly treated by her husband, who, however, did not take exception to her relations with Bouteloup, their lodger. Germinal.

LEVASSEUR (MADAME), an acquaintance of Madame Deberle. Une Page d'Amour.

LEVASSEUR, chief clerk at "The Ladies' Paradise." Au Bonheur des Dames.

LEVASSEUR, a tax-collector at Chene Populeux. His father was one of the heroes of the army of the first Napoleon. He married a peasant woman named Fouchard, who died in bringing Maurice and his twin sister Henriette into the world. He sacrificed everything to make his son a gentleman, and the bad conduct of the lad hastened his end. La Debacle.

LEVASSEUR (HENRIETTE), daughter of the preceding, and twin sister of Maurice. After the death of her father she gave up the whole of her share of his property in order to retrieve to some extent the foolish conduct of her brother. Fortunately she had the chance soon after to marry Weiss, with whom she lived happily. On the morning of the battle of Sedan, Henriette, fearing that her husband was in danger at Bazeilles, where he had gone to look after a house he had recently bought, decided to follow him there. By this time the fighting was going on fiercely, and when, after the greatest difficulties and dangers, she arrived at Bazeilles, she was only in time to see her husband shot before her eyes. She took refuge at Remilly, at the house of her uncle Fouchard, and devoted herself to the care of the wounded in the battle. Among these was Jean Macquart, who along with Maurice had escaped from captivity. After the war with Prussia was over, Maurice unfortunately threw in his lot with the Communists, and when Henriette followed him to Paris it was to find that he had been fatally wounded in the fighting there. By an extraordinary chance, the wound was inflicted by his former comrade, Jean Macquart, who had remained in the regular army when Maurice joined the Communist ranks. The death of Maurice in this way put an end to the possibility of a dawning love idyll between Henriette and Jean Macquart. La Debacle.

LEVASSEUR (MAURICE), twin brother of the preceding. Everything was sacrificed by his father and sister in order that he might become an advocate, but when he went to Paris to complete his education he took part in every kind of foolishness and dissipation. In July, 1870, he had just been admitted to the Bar, when the outbreak of war found him full of enthusiasm, and he at once enlisted in the 106th Regiment of the line, commanded by Colonel de Vineuil. He was put into the squad of Jean Macquart, against whom he had at first an aversion. Later, the kindness of Jean when he was worn out with fatigue practically saved his life, and they became close comrades, Maurice in turn saving Jean by carrying him, severely wounded, from the battlefield of Sedan. Maurice was of a highly strung, nervous temperament, and the repeated disasters of the campaign drove him to madness. He threw himself into the Communist struggle, and sought for death when defeat became certain. It was Jean Macquart, his old comrade, who, by an extraordinary chance, was fated to deliver the fatal blow. La Debacle.

LEVEQUE (MADAME), sister-in-law of Durieu, the brewer. L'Argent.

LEVEQUE, a solicitor at Plassans. He interested himself in the affairs of Dr. Pascal Rougon after Grandguillot absconded and was able to recover a considerable sum which Pascal had believed to be entirely lost. Le Docteur Pascal.

LEVEQUE (MADEMOISELLE), daughter of the preceding, was an old friend of Clotilde Rougon, who was three years older than her. She married Dr. Ramond. Le Docteur Pascal.

LHOMME (M.), chief cashier at "The Ladies' Paradise." "Son of a tax-collector at Chablis, he came to Paris as a clerk in the office of a merchant of the Port-aux-Vins. Then, while lodging in Rue Cuvier, he married the daughter of his concierge, and from that day he bowed submissively before his wife, whose commercial ability filled him with respect. She earned more than twenty thousand francs a year in the dress department of 'The Ladies' Paradise,' whilst he only drew a fixed salary of five thousand francs." The loss of his right arm in an omnibus accident did not interfere with his work, and did not prevent him from playing upon a specially constructed French horn, an instrument of which he was passionately fond. Au Bonheur des Dames.

LHOMME (MADAME AURELIE), wife of the preceding. The daughter of a small tailor, she had keen business instincts, and, as head of the dress department at "The Ladies' Paradise," was able to make a large income. She was far from friendly to Denise Baudu, but seeing ultimately that Mouret was in love with the girl, she changed her methods in the hope of rendering her own position more secure. Au Bonheur des Dames.

LHOMME (ALBERT), son of the preceding. He was an idle and vicious youth, who could keep no position, and only got a post in the pay-desk of "The Ladies' Paradise" through the influence of his mother. He was careless in his work, and was repeatedly reprimanded, causing his parents much anxiety; ultimately it was discovered that he had conspired with some of the salesmen in a long series of frauds, and his dismissal followed. Au Bonheur des Dames.

LIARDIN, a relation of the Quenus. He was a member of Pauline's family council, and consented to her emancipation. La Joie de Vivre.

LIENARD, son of a rich Angers draper, came to Paris and got a situation in "The Ladies' Paradise." His spare time was spent in idleness and debauchery, and when his father recalled him to Angers he refused to leave Paris. Au Bonheur des Dames.

LIEUTAUD (M.), the diocesan architect at Plassans. He was consulted by Madame Mouret and Abbe Faujas regarding the Home for Girls which they founded, and he subsequently prepared the plans for the building. La Conquete de Plassans.

LIEVIN, a townsman of Plassans, who was amongst those enrolled and armed by Pierre Rougon to rescue the Town Hall, which had been occupied by the Republicans. He was so excited that he fired in the air without intending to do so. La Fortune des Rougon.

LILI, pet name of Amelie, the daughter of Gaga. Nana.

LINGUERLOT (LES), neighbours of the Lorilleux in Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. L'Assommoir.

LIOTARD (VEUVE HENRI), a firm of shipowners who joined the transport syndicate formed by Aristide Saccard. L'Argent.

LISA, a peasant girl of Les Artaud. Like the others of her class, she was void of any religious feeling, and when she came to decorate the church for the festival of the Virgin, she engaged in all sorts of irreverent pranks. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

LISA, a workwoman employed by Madame Titreville, the artificial-flower maker. L'Assommoir.

LISA, Madame Campardon's housemaid. She was active and intelligent, and her conduct was regarded as irreproachable. This was, however, a somewhat too favourable estimate, and her companionship was by no means beneficial to the Campardons' young daughter, Angele. Pot-Bouille.

LISON (LA), the name of the express engine driven by Jacques Lantier up to the time of the terrible railway accident caused by Flore. La Bete Humaine.

LLORENTZ (MADAME DE), one of the ladies-in-waiting of the Empress Eugenie and sister of M. La Rouquette, was the widow of General de Llorentz. She carried on an intrigue with De Massy, and was said to hold three compromising letters from him regarding certain august personages. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

LOGRE, a fish auctioneer at the Halles Centrales. He attended the revolutionary meetings at Lebigre's wine shop, and made violent speeches there, but was really an agent of the Police. Le Ventre de Paris.

LOISEAU, a municipal councillor of Rognes. He was devoted to the Mayor, Alexandre Hourdequin, on whose farm his son worked. He was an uncle of Macqueron. La Terre.

LONJUMEAU, a member of the band of brigands led by Beau-Francois. La Terre.

LORET (MADAME), a woman who lived in the neighbourhood of the Halles Centrales. Mademoiselle Saget made ill-natured remarks regarding her. Le Ventre de Paris.

LORILLEUX, a maker of gold chains, who was married to Coupeau's sister. He was a little man who looked much older than his age, and suffered from a constant cough. Miserly and spiteful, he was jealous of the Coupeaus in their success, and rejoiced at their downfall. L'Assommoir.

LORILLEUX (MADAME), wife of the preceding, was a sister of Coupeau, who married Gervaise Macquart. Along with her husband, she worked at the trade of gold chain-making; like him, she was so avaricious that her custom was to examine the soles of her visitors' boots lest they should depart with any adhering gold dust. From the first she resented her brother's marriage, and took every opportunity of being disagreeable to Gervaise. Though she was willing to accept the Coupeaus' hospitality in their prosperous days, she refused to do anything to assist them after their downfall. L'Assommoir.

LORILLON (LES), peasants at Rognes, who were said to have been cured of illness by the bone-setter Sourdeau. La Terre.

LOUBET, a soldier in the 106th Regiment of the line; in the squad of Corporal Jean Macquart. He was unwilling to fight, and during the battle of 1st September, 1870, he assisted his comrade Chouteau to carry Sapin to the ambulance, spending the rest of the day in a tavern. After the capitulation of the French army, Loubet was made a prisoner. Along with Chouteau he made a determined effort to escape, and would have done so had not his companion treacherously tripped him up in order to increase his own chance. La Debacle.

LOUHETTE, an elderly draper in Rue Neuve Saint-Augustin. He was the father of Madame Theophile Vabre. Pot-Bouille.

LOUHETTE (MADAME), wife of the preceding, and mother of Madame Theophile Vabre. Pot-Bouille.

LOUHETTE (VALERIE). See Theophile Vabre.

LOUIS, Irma Becot's butler at her house in the Avenue de Villiers. L'Oeuvre.

LOUIS, cousin of Cabuche, and, like him, a quarryman. He drove Cabuche's wagon on the evening of the murder of President Grandmorin. La Bete Humaine.

LOUIS, an artillery gunner, in the same battery as Honore Fouchard and Adolphe. He was mated with Adolphe, who was inclined to treat him as an inferior. In the attack by the Prussians on the Calvary d'Illy Louis fell, killed by the same shot as his comrade, and the two died entwined in one another's arms. La Debacle.

LOUIS (LA MERE), a wine-seller, who was famous for her "hen feet." L'Assommoir.

LOUISE, an actress at the Palais-Royal. Nana.

LOUISE, a young girl who was brought up in an Orphanage. At fifteen she went as maid-servant to Madame Jazeur, but not proving satisfactory, was sent back to the Orphanage. Pot-Bouille.

LOUISET, the pet name of Louis Coupeau, son of Nana, born 1867. Left at first with a nurse in the country, he was afterwards taken charge of by his aunt, Madame Lerat, who removed him to Batignolles. He was a delicate child, pale and scrofulous, bearing a legacy of ill-health derived from an unknown father. He died in July, 1870, of small-pox, which he communicated to his mother, who had just returned from Russia. Nana.

LOUISETTE, the younger daughter of Madame Misard (Aunt Phasie). She was a fair and sweet child who had a strong affection for Cabuche, a man who was regarded by nearly everyone as an outcast. As a maid-servant in the house of Madame Bonnehon, she attracted the notice of President Grandmorin, and fleeing from him, half-mad with fear, she came to the hut of Cabuche, who tenderly nursed her till she died of brain fever a few days later. La Bete Humaine.

LOULOU, a dog which belonged to Nana. Nana.

LULU, a dog which belonged to Nana. Nana.

LUSIGNAN, a racehorse in the stable of Vandeuvres. Mounted by Gresham, it was the favourite in the race for the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

M

MACQUART, a poacher and smuggler who lived at Plassans in a hovel adjoining the Fouque property. His reputation was of the worst, and "although no crimes had actually been brought home to him, the first suspicions always fell upon him whenever a theft or murder had been perpetrated in the country." He frequently disappeared for long periods, but during his short sojourns in the town he drank to great excess. He became the lover of Adelaide Fouque in 1789, less than a year after the death of her husband, and had two children by her, Antoine and Ursule Macquart. A man of violent and unrestrained passions, and of incorrigibly lazy habits, he retained complete influence over Adelaide, and they lived in the same relationship for over twenty years. About 1810, Macquart was killed on the frontier by a custom-house officer while he was endeavouring to smuggle a cargo of Geneva watches into France. Adelaide was sole legatee, the estate consisting of the hovel at Plassans and the carbine of the deceased, which a smuggler loyally brought back to her. La Fortune des Rougon.

MACQUART (ANTOINE), born 1789, son of Macquart the smuggler and Adelaide Fouque; was drawn in the conscription in 1809. On his return to Plassans, he found that his half-brother Pierre had sold the family property and had appropriated the proceeds. Being a confirmed drunkard, he was averse from work of any kind, but in order to support himself he learned the trade of basket-making. In 1826 he married Josephine Gavaudan, a market-woman, whom he afterwards allowed to support him. They had three children, Lisa, Gervaise, and Jean. His wife died in 1850, and soon after his daughter Gervaise and his son Jean, who had assisted to keep him in idleness, ran off. He had a bitter ill-will towards his brother Pierre Rougon, and, chiefly with a view to his annoyance, expressed strong Republican principles. For the same reason he took every opportunity of teaching these principles to his young nephew Silvere Mouret. After the Coup d'Etat he took an active share in the agitation which resulted in a Republican rising. When the Insurgents left Plassans, he remained with a few men to overawe the inhabitants. He and his whole band were, however, taken prisoners by the citizens under the leadership of Pierre Rougon. He was assisted to escape by Madame Felicite Rougon, who promised him a sum of money on condition that he would bring about an attack on the Town Hall by the Republicans. He did so the same night, and an ambush having been prepared by the Rougons, a number of lives were sacrificed. He thereafter left the country. La Fortune des Rougon.

Some time afterwards he returned to France, and bought a small house at Les Tulettes, about three leagues from Plassans. He fitted up his establishment by degrees, and even became possessed of a horse and trap. Where the money came from no one knew, but it was believed that his brother Pierre Rougon was keeping him. Notwithstanding this, he had great ill-will towards the Rougons, and lost no opportunity of annoying them. Partly with this object, and partly at the instigation of Abbe Fenil, who wished to be revenged on Abbe Faujas, he contrived the escape of Francois Mouret from the asylum at Les Tulettes; as result, Mouret returned to Plassans, and setting fire to his house, caused the death of Abbe Faujas, himself perishing in the flames. La Conquete de Plassans.

Macquart lived to an old age at Les Tulettes, though he increasingly gave way to drunkenness. His relations with the Rougons were friendly, but he was hated by Felicite on account of his knowledge of the origin of the family fortune. At eighty-four years of age he was still healthy, but his flesh was so saturated with alcohol that it seemed to be preserved by it. One day, as he was sitting helpless with drink and smoking his pipe, he set fire to his clothes, and his body, soaked as it was with ardent spirits, was burned to the last bone. Felicite Rougon chanced to enter the house just as the conflagration began, but she did nothing to stop it, and went silently away. The combustion was so complete that there was nothing left to bury, and the family had to content itself with having masses said for the repose of the dead. When Macquart's will was opened, it was found that he had left all his money for the erection of a magnificent tomb for himself, with weeping angels at the head and foot. Le Docteur Pascal.

MACQUART (MADAME ANTOINE), wife of the preceding. See Josephine Gavaudan.

MACQUART (GERVAISE), born 1828, was a daughter of Antoine Macquart, and was slightly lame from birth. She was apprenticed to a laundress, but at an early age had two children to a journeyman tanner named Lantier.[*]

Soon after the death of her mother, in 1850, she ran off to Paris with Lantier and her children, Claude, a boy of eight, and Etienne, aged four. La Fortune des Rougon.

The party had only been in the city a few weeks when Lantier ran off with a girl named Adele, leaving Gervaise and the children unprovided for. She got work in the laundry of Madame Fauconnier, and not long after received an offer of marriage from Coupeau, a respectable zinc-worker, which after some hesitation she accepted. The marriage took place, and for a considerable time things prospered, one child, a daughter named Nana being born. An accident to Coupeau, who fell from a roof and was seriously injured, led to a gradual change; formerly temperate and industrious, he became unwilling to work, and began to spend his time in public-houses. Gervaise had meantime taken a shop with money borrowed from the Goujets, and had started a laundry in it. She was at first successful, but in time grew lazy and fond of good living, while Coupeau continued idle and became increasingly intemperate. Business began to go, and Gervaise became more careless, even taking more drink occasionally than she had been wont to do. About this time Lantier, her former lover, appeared again, and made friends with Coupeau, who agreed to take him into the house as a lodger. After that, the descent of Gervaise was rapid. Lantier never paid anything for his support, Coupeau drank more heavily than ever, and Gervaise, who was gradually drifting into intemperance, resumed her old connection with her lover. All the time work was being neglected, and debts were accumulating with alarming rapidity. Eventually Madame Virginie Poisson took over the shop, and with it Lantier, who transferred his affections along with the lease, and the Coupeaus removed into a small house high up in the same building. Coupeau suffered from repeated attacks of delirium tremens, and eventually died in an asylum. Gervaise continued to sink still lower, until no work was too menial or too repulsive for her to undertake for the price of drink, and one day in the winter of 1869 she was found dead in a garret of that great tenement house where she had passed so much of her life. L'Assommoir.

Her sister, Lisa Quenu, the pork-butcher, did not come to her assistance. Lisa did not like people who were unfortunate, and she was ashamed that Gervaise should have married a workman. Le Ventre de Paris.

Her son Etienne sent her small sums of money from time to time while he was in a situation at Lille. Germinal.

[*] These two are the only children of Gervaise and Lantier
mentioned by M. Zola in La Fortune des Rougon,
L'Assommoir, L'Oeuvre, and Germinal. In La Bete
Humaine, however, the hero, Jacques Lantier, is stated to
have been a child of these parents.

MACQUART (JEAN), born 1811, son of Antoine Macquart, was apprenticed to a carpenter. A quiet, industrious lad, Jean's father took advantage of his simple nature and made him give up his whole earnings to assist in keeping him in idleness. Like his sister Gervaise, he ran off soon after the death of his mother. La Fortune des Rougon.

He entered the army, and, after seven years of soldiering was discharged in 1859. When he had left the ranks he turned up at Bazoches-le-Doyen with a comrade, a joiner like himself; and he resumed his occupation with the latter's father, a master carpenter in the village. But his heart was no longer in his work, and having been sent to La Borderie to make some repairs, he stayed on to assist at the harvest, and eventually became a regular farm servant. He was not popular, however, with the peasants, who resented his having had a trade before he came back to the soil. He became acquainted at Rognes with Mouche and his daughters, Lise and Francoise, and eventually married the latter, in spite of the determined opposition of her brother-in-law, Buteau. Notwithstanding his marriage, he remained a stranger, and, after the death of his wife, went away, leaving everything in the hands of her relatives. The war with Germany had just broken out, and Jean, disgusted with his life, again enlisted in the service of his country. La Terre.

He was made corporal in the 106th Regiment of the line, commanded by Colonel Vineuil. An excellent soldier, and invaluable by reason of his former experience, his want of education prevented him being promoted to higher rank. Maurice Levasseur was in his company, and between the two men there was at first deep antagonism, caused by difference of class and education, but little by little Jean was able to gain over the other, till the two men became close friends. In the fierce fighting at Sedan, each in turn saved the other's life. After the battle, they were made prisoners, but escaped, Jean receiving a severe wound during their flight. They took refuge at Remilly in the house of Fouchard, and Jean was nursed by Henriette Weiss, Levasseur's sister. Under her care, the wounded man came to dream of the possibility of a life of happiness with this woman, so tender, so sweet, and so active, whose fate had been so sad. But the chances of war were too hard; Maxime returned to Paris, and after the conclusion of the war took part in the Communist rising, which Jean assisted to quell. By an extraordinary chance, the two men, loving one another as brothers, came to be fighting on opposite sides, and it was the hand of Jean that was fated to inflict the fatal wound upon his friend. He had killed the brother of the woman he loved, and henceforth there could be nothing between them, so he passed from her life, returning to assist in that cultivation of the soil which was needed to rejuvenate his country. La Debacle.

He settled at Valqueyras, near Plassans, where he married Melanie Vial, the only daughter of a peasant farmer in easy circumstances, whose land he cultivated. Calm and sensible, always at his plough, his wife simple and strong, he raised a large and healthy family to assist in replenishing the soil exhausted by the horrors of war. Le Docteur Pascal.

MACQUART (MADAME JEAN), first wife of the preceding. See Francoise Mouche. La Terre.

MACQUART (MADAME JEAN), second wife of Jean Macquart. See Melanie Vial. Le Docteur Pascal.

MACQUART (LISA), born 1827, daughter of Antoine Macquart. When a child of seven she was taken as maid-servant by the wife of the postmaster at Plassans, whom she accompanied to Paris on her removal there in 1839. La Fortune des Rougon.

The old lady became very much attached to the girl, and when she died left her all her savings, amounting to ten thousand francs. Gradelle, a pork-butcher, who had become acquainted with Lisa by seeing her in the shop with her mistress, offered her a situation. She accepted, and soon the whole place seemed to belong to her; she enslaved Gradelle, his nephew Quenu, and even the smallest kitchen-boy. She became a beautiful woman, with a love of ease and the determination to secure it by steady application to duty. After the sudden death of Gradelle, she married Quenu, who had succeeded to the business, and they had one daughter, Pauline. Soon their affairs became so prosperous that Lisa induced her husband to remove to a larger shop. On Florent's return from exile, she received him kindly, and at once proposed to hand over to him his share of the money and property left by Gradelle, his uncle, which, however, he refused to accept. After a time she became tired of always seeing her brother-in-law about the house doing nothing, and was the means of making him accept the situation as Inspector at the Fish Market. When she heard of the Revolutionary meetings in Lebigre's wine-shop and of the leading part taken by Florent, she became greatly alarmed, more especially as Quenu had begun to accompany his brother occasionally. She succeeded in frightening her husband into giving up the meetings, and made it clear to Florent that he was no longer welcome in her house. Alarmed by the gossip of Mlle. Saget and others as to the progress of the conspiracy, she determined, after consultation with Abbe Roustan, to secure the safety of her husband and herself by informing the police of the plot. On going to the prefect, however, she learned that he had all along known of Florent's presence in Paris, and of the meetings, and was only waiting a favourable opportunity of arresting the plotters. She concealed the impending arrest from her husband and from Florent. Notwithstanding her action in this matter, Lisa was not an ill-natured or callous woman. She was only determined that nothing should come between her and a life of ease. In her there was much of her father's nature, though she did not know it. She was merely a steady, sensible Macquart with a logical desire for comfort, and to procuring this she gave all her time and thought. Le Ventre de Paris.

She died in 1863 from decomposition of the blood. La Joie de Vivre.

MACQUART (URSULE), born 1791, daughter of Macquart and Adelaide Fouque; married in 1810 a hatter named Mouret and went to live at Marseilles. She died of consumption in 1840, leaving three children. La Fortune des Rougon.

MACQUERON, a grocer and tavern-keeper at Rognes. He was a municipal councillor, and deputy Mayor. He made some money by speculating in wines, and had since become incorrigibly lazy, spending his time in fishing and shooting. Had his wife listened to him, they would have shut up the shop, but she was so fiercely set on money-making that she would not do so. There was a rivalry of long standing between the Macquerons and the Lengaignes, which frequently broke out in open quarrels. Having succeeded in undermining Hourdequin's position as Mayor, Macqueron succeeded him, but his triumph was of short duration, for some official scandal having arisen, he was obliged to resign. La Terre.

MACQUERON (MADAME COELINA), wife of the preceding, had a true passion for money-making. She was continually quarrelling with her neighbour, Madame Lengaigne. La Terre.

MACQUERON (BERTHE), daughter of the preceding, was educated at a boarding-school at Cloyes, and had learned to play the piano. She tolerated the attentions of Lequeu, the schoolmaster, whom she heartily disliked, as she felt flattered by the notice of the only man of education whom she knew. She had a fancy for the son of a neighbouring wheelwright, whom her parents would not allow her to see, and she ultimately compromised herself so seriously with him that they had to consent to her marriage. La Terre.

MADELEINE, a little girl of ten years of age who was an inmate of the institute founded by Princess d'Orviedo. Her mother was unable to look after her properly, and placed her there in the hope that she would be well cared for. L'Argent.

MADELINE (ABBE), was sent to Rognes, when that commune decided to have a cure to itself. He came from a mountainous district, and disheartened by the flatness of the vast plain of La Beauce, and especially by the religious indifference of his parishioners, he soon fell into ill-health, on one occasion fainting while he was saying Mass. At the end of two years and a half he left Rognes in a dying state, and returned to his native mountains. La Terre.

MADINIER (M.) carried on business as a cardboard manufacturer in part of the tenement occupied by the Coupeaus and the Lorilleux. The business was not prosperous, as he spent all his earnings on drink. He was one of Coupeau's witnesses on the occasion of his marriage to Gervaise Macquart, and was present at the wedding dinner. L'Assommoir.

MAFFRE (M.), a magistrate of Plassans and honorary Canon of Saint-Saturnin's church. Politically he was a Legitimist, and he was a friend of M. Rastoil, at whose house the party was in the habit of meeting. La Conquete de Plassans.

MAFFRE (ALPHONSE), second son of the magistrate at Plassans, aged eighteen years. Restrained too much by their father, the two brothers Maffre were especially intimate with Guillaume Porquier, who frequently led them into mischief. La Conquete de Plassans.

MAFFRE (AMBROISE), elder son of the magistrate at Plassans, aged twenty. La Conquete de Plassans.

MAGINOT, inspector of woods at Mezieres. He married Gilberte de Vineuil, but died a few years afterwards. La Debacle.

MAGINOT (MADAME), see Gilberte de Vineuil.

MAHEU (ALZIRE), the fourth child of Toussaint Maheu, aged nine years. She was deformed and delicate, but of precocious intelligence, and was able to assist her mother in many ways, sacrificing herself always for others. She died of cold and hunger during the strike at Montsou. Germinal.

MAHEU (CATHERINE), second child of Toussaint Maheu, worked as a putter in the Voreux pit along with the other members of her family. She liked Etienne Lantier, but became the mistress of Chaval, who treated her so abominably that she eventually returned home. As a result of the terrible catastrophe brought about by Souvarine, she was imprisoned at the bottom of the pit along with Chaval and Etienne. A struggle between the two men ensued, and Chaval was killed. Days elapsed before rescue arrived, but before then Catherine had died in the arms of Etienne, whom she had really loved all along. Germinal.

MAHEU (ESTELLE), seventh child of Toussaint Maheu, aged three months. Her constant crying disturbed the household. Germinal.

MAHEU (GUILLAUME), great-grandfather of Toussaint Maheu. When a boy of fifteen, he found rich coal at Requillart, the Montsou Company's first pit, and the seam he discovered was named after him. He died of old age at sixty. Germinal.

MAHEU (HENRI), sixth child of Toussaint Maheu, aged four years. Germinal.

MAHEU (JEANLIN), third child of Toussaint Maheu, aged eleven years. He was employed at the Voreux pit, and earned twenty sous a day. His nature was vicious, and he forced his companions Bebert Levaque and Lydie Pierron to commit petty thefts, with the proceeds of which he concealed himself in a disused mine. His criminal tendencies increased until he was unable to resist the inclination to kill one of the soldiers who guarded the Voreux pit during the strike. He accordingly waited till night, and leaping on the shoulders of Jules, a little soldier from Brittany, thrust a knife into his throat and killed him. Germinal.

MAHEU (LENORE), fifth child of Toussaint Maheu, aged six years. She was always fighting with her brother Henri, who was very like her in appearance, both having large heads with light yellow hair. Germinal.

MAHEU (NICOLAS), grandfather of Toussaint Maheu. He was killed by a landslip in the pit, when he was barely forty years old. Germinal.

MAHEU (TOUSSAINT), son of old Bonnemort, and husband of La Maheude. He was considered one of the best workmen in the Voreux pit, did not drink, and was liked and respected by all his companions. He had been for a considerable time under the influence of the doctrines taught by Etienne Lantier when he was selected by his comrades to place their views before the officials of the company. In the great strike which followed he took part, and in the attack on the troops sent to guard the pit he was driven on by his wife to join the aggressors. He fell, shot through the heart, after the fatal volley fired by the soldiers. Germinal.

MAHEU (VINCENT). See Bonnemort.

MAHEU (ZACHARIE), eldest child of Toussaint Maheu. He worked in the Voreux pit along with his father, but was lazy and seized any opportunity of pleasure. He was married to Philomene Levaque, by whom he already had two children. The strike interested him very little, and he spent most of his time playing crosse with Mouquet. But when his sister Catherine was entombed in the pit he was one of the first to come forward to the rescue, and he worked day and night with frantic energy. The ninth day, in his haste, he was imprudent enough to open his lamp, and a sudden explosion of gas reduced him to a calcined, unrecognizable mass. Germinal.

MAHEUDE (LA), wife of Toussaint Maheu. She was at first against the miners' strike, but moved by the hardship of her lot and the poverty in which she was forced to bring up her family, she ultimately urged her husband to take an active part. Even after she had seen him killed by the bullets of the soldiers, she was furious with those who talked of submitting. But further tragedies broke her spirit; her son Zacharie was killed in an attempt to rescue his sister, entombed at the bottom of the Voreux pit. Out of charity the company allowed the afflicted woman to go underground again, though she was past the usual age, and found employment for her in the manipulation of a small ventilator. Germinal.

MAHOUDEAU, a sculptor. The son of a stonemason at Plassans, he attained great success at the local art competitions, and came to Paris as the laureat of his town, with an allowance of eight hundred francs per annum for four years. In the capital, however, he found his level, failing in his competitions at the School of Arts, and merely spending his allowance to no purpose; so that in order to live he was obliged at the end of his term to enter the employment of a manufacturer of church statues. Later, however, he met with Claude Lantier and other companions from Plassans, and under their influence his ambitions revived. He installed himself in a studio in Rue du Cherche-Midi, and there set about the production of a colossal work entitled La Vendangeuse (the Vintage Girl), for which Madame Mathilde Jabouille served as model. For a time Chaine, who also came from Plassans, lived with Mahoudeau, but they quarrelled over Mathilde, and ultimately separated. After this Mahoudeau lived alone, in considerable poverty, until he got employment from a manufacturer of artistic bronzes. He then began to produce work which suited the popular taste, and his productions began to be seen on middle-class chimney-pieces. L'Oeuvre.

MAIGRAT, the principal shop-keeper in Montsou. He was originally an overseer at the Voreux pit, but, assisted by the company, started a business which grew to such proportions that he ultimately crushed out most of the other retail traders. He was a greedy, rapacious man, and during the strike made the women furious by refusing credit. For other reasons also they hated him, and his shop was one of the first places attacked by the maddened strikers. In terror Maigrat took refuge on the roof, but his foot slipped, and he was dashed to the ground, being killed on the spot. Even this did not satisfy his assailants, for the frenzied women, led by La Brule, rushed forward and mutilated the still quivering body. Germinal.

MAIGRAT (MADAME), wife of the preceding. She was a pitiful creature who passed all her days over a ledger without even daring to lift her head. On the day of the attack by the strikers she was a witness of the death of her husband and of the terrible events which followed. Up at the window she stood motionless; but beneath the last gleams of the setting sun the confused faults of the window-panes deformed her white face, which looked as though it were laughing. Germinal.

MALGRAS (LE PERE), a picture-dealer with whom Claude Lantier had frequent dealings. He was a thick-set old man, with close-cropped white hair, and wore a dirty old coat that made him look like an untidy cabman. Beneath this disguise was concealed a keen knowledge of art, combined with a ferocious skill in bargaining. As a superb liar, moreover, he was without an equal. He was satisfied with a small profit, but never purchased in the morning without knowing where to dispose of his purchase at night. He viewed with disdain the modern methods of picture-dealing introduced by Naudet, and like a cautious man he retired with a modest fortune to a little house at Bois-Colombes. L'Oeuvre.

MALIGNON (M.), a young stockbroker who was supposed to have a large fortune and accordingly was received everywhere in society. He posed as a critic of art, literature, and the drama, and pretended to be bored with everything. Madame Deberle, being carried away by his attentions, was foolish enough to promise to meet him at a flat which he had taken, but Madame Helene Grandjean having warned her that Dr. Deberle had got wind of the affair, the intended liaison came to nothing. Une Page d'Amour.

MALIVERNE (ROSE). See Madame Rose Fouan.

MALIVOIRE, a coach-hirer at Arromanches. He was the owner of the omnibus which ran between Arromanches and Bayeux. La Joie de Vivre.

MALOIR (MADAME), a respectable-looking elderly woman, was Nana's friend, chaperone, and companion, writing for her such letters as she required. She was always ready to receive the secrets of others, but never told anything about herself. It was said that she lived upon a mysterious pension, but she never appeared to carry any money with her. She had a mania for doing up all her hats afresh. Nana.

MAMAN NINI, the pet name given by Angelique to Francois Hamelin. Le Reve.

MANGUELIN (MADAME), a young, retiring woman, who was to some extent dependent on the bounty of Madame Deberle. Une Page d'Amour.

MANOURY, a salesman at the Central Markets in Paris. He was the employer of Logre and Clemence. Le Ventre de Paris.

MARCEL, a vegetable-dealer at the Paris Halles Centrales. Le Ventre de Paris.

MARDIENNE FRERES, manufacturers of church ornaments in Rue Saint-Sulpice. Mademoiselle Menu worked in their establishment. Pot-Bouille.

MARECHAL, a bookmaker who had formerly been coachman to Comte de Vandeuvres. As the result of a racing swindle by Vandeuvres, Marechal lost a large sum over a filly named Nana, and, his suspicions having been aroused, he caused such a scandal that the Comte was disqualified by the racing committee. Nana.

MARESCOT (M.), a cutler in the Rue de la Paix, who had once turned a grindstone in the streets and was now said to be worth several millions. He was a man of fifty-five, large, bony, with the huge hands of an old workman; one of his delights was to carry off the knives and scissors of his tenants, which he sharpened himself for his own amusement. He owned the large tenement-house on the Rue Goutte d'Or, in which resided the Coupeaus, Lorilleux, and others, and though a fair landlord, would brook no delay in payment of rent, turning out defaulters without mercy. L'Assommoir.

MAREUIL (M. DE), a retired sugar-refiner of Havre whose real name was Bonnet. After amassing a large fortune, he married a young girl of good birth, whose name he assumed. He was ambitious and hoped to become a member of the Corps Legislatif through the influence of his friend Saccard, whose brother Eugene Rougon was a Minister of State. To secure this he agreed to a marriage between his daughter and Maxime Saccard. He was a man of solemn and imposing appearance, but was absolutely without brains. La Curee.

MAREUIL (MADAME HELENE DE), wife of the preceding. She came of a noble and wealthy family, but lived such a fast life that she died young, worn out by pleasure. La Curee.

MAREUIL (LOUISE DE), daughter of a retired sugar-refiner of Havre. Slightly deformed and plain-looking, but with fascinating manners, she married Maxime Saccard, to whom she brought a large dowry. Six months afterwards she died of consumption in Italy. La Curee.

MAREUIL (COMTESSE), employed Clara Prunaire in her house to attend to the mending of linen. Au Bonheur des Dames.

MARGAILLAN, a great building contractor, many times a millionaire, who made his fortune out of the great public works of Paris, running up whole boulevards on his own account. He was a man of remarkable activity, with a great gift of administration, and an instinctive knowledge of the streets to construct and the buildings to buy. Moved by the success of Dubuche at the School of Art, and by the recommendations of his masters there, Margaillan took the young architect into partnership, and agreed to his marriage with his daughter Regine. Unfortunately, Dubuche showed deplorable incapacity in carrying into practice the theories which he had learned at the School of Art, and Margaillan, after losing considerable sums, returned to his original methods of construction, thrusting his son-in-law to one side. He possessed a magnificent estate named La Richaudiere, near Bennecourt. L'Oeuvre.

MARGAILLAN (MADAME), wife of the preceding. She was a girl of the middle-classes, whose family history was a bad one, and after suffering for years from anemia, she ultimately died of phthisis. L'Oeuvre.

MARGAILLAN (REGINE), daughter of the preceding, and wife of Louis Dubuche. She was very delicate, and suffered from a phthisical tendency derived from her mother, which in turn she handed to her two children, Gaston and Alice. It was frequently necessary for her to leave home for the benefit of her health, and during her absences the children were left at La Richaudiere in charge of their father. L'Oeuvre.

MARIA, an actress at the Theatre des Varietes. Nana.

MARJOLIN, a boy who was found in a heap of cabbages at the Paris market. It was never known who his parents were, and he became the adopted child of the place, always finding a lodging with one or other of the market-women. Later on he lived with Madame Chantemesse, who had adopted Cadine, another foundling, and the two children grew up together, becoming inseparable. Marjolin was always of slow intellect, and as the result of an injury to his head he became practically an idiot. Gavard gave him employment in the poultry market. Le Ventre de Paris.

MARSOULLIER, proprietor of the Hotel Boncoeur, where Gervaise Macquart and Lantier put up when they came to Paris. L'Assommoir.

MARTIN, coachman to Dr. Cazenove. He was an old man who formerly served in the navy, and had his leg amputated by Cazenove. La Joie de Vivre.

MARTINE, the old servant of Dr. Pascal, with whom she had been for thirty years. She brought up Clotilde Rougon, whose affection for the doctor excited her jealousy later on. Martine, who was devoted to her master, desired to force him to be reconciled with the Church, but Clotilde, at first her accomplice, escaped from religious influences and gave herself entirely to Pascal, leaving Martine with no other resource but prayer. She was extremely avaricious, but when the doctor was ruined, her devotion was such that she used some of her own money to purchase the necessaries of life for him. Distracted at the sudden death of her master, and in the hope of saving him from damnation, she assisted Madame Felicite Rougon to destroy his great work on heredity, which in her narrow-minded bigotry she believed was intended to subvert true religion. The work of destruction completed, she went away to live by herself at Sainte-Marthe, as she refused to serve any other master than the one she had been with so many years. Le Docteur Pascal.

MARTINEAU (M.), a notary of Coulonges, and brother of Madame Correur. He ignored his sister for many years, but his principles would not allow him to disinherit her, and he made a will under which his property would be divided between her and his wife. Soon thereafter, Madame Correur, knowing him to be in bad health, denounced him as a dangerous Republican to Rougon, then Minister of the Interior, and his arrest followed. The shock, together with the unnecessary harshnesses displayed by Gilquin, the commissary of police, caused Martineau's death, and the subsequent popular outcry had much to do with Rougon's second resignation of office. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

MARTINEAU (MADAME), wife of the preceding. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

MARSY (COMTE DE), Minister of the Interior before Eugene Rougon, who succeeded him on his appointment as President of the Corps Legislatif. Marsy, who was said to be the son of a queen, was brilliant, immoral, and unscrupulous. He was the chief political opponent of Eugene Rougon and had great influence at the Court of Napoleon III. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

MARTY (M.), a master at the Lycee Bonaparte, who was being ruined by the extravagance of his wife, and was obliged to double his salary by giving private lessons, in order to meet the constantly growing household expenses. Au Bonheur des Dames.

MARTY (MADAME), wife of the preceding, was a woman of about thirty-five years of age, whose face, never beautiful, was now much marked by small-pox. She had a perfect mania for spending money on clothes, and never visited "The Ladies' Paradise" without buying innumerable articles for which she had no need. As a result of her extravagance, her husband was nearly ruined, and was forced to increase his earnings by giving private lessons. Au Bonheur des Dames.

MARTY (VALENTINE), daughter of the preceding, a young girl of fourteen years of age, who was used by her mother as an excuse for some of her extravagance, as she dressed her like herself, with all the fashionable novelties of which she submitted to the irresistible seduction. Au Bonheur des Dames.

MASCART (PERE), a blind paralytic to whom Angelique showed much kindness. Le Reve.

MASSACRE, one of the dogs of old Soulas, the shepherd. It shared the hatred of its master of La Cognette. La Terre.

MASSIAS, a frequenter of the Paris Bourse, where he gained a living by bringing business to stockbrokers, from whom he received a commission on each transaction. He was employed by Saccard after the foundation of the Universal Bank, and by speculating in the shares he made a considerable fortune. With the downfall of the institution, he lost everything, and found himself in debt for a large sum. By borrowing from friends, and pledging his entire life, he paid his debts and started afresh. L'Argent.

MASSICOT, a tradesman of Plassans who was enrolled and armed by Pierre Rougon to deliver the Town Hall from the Republicans who had occupied it. He was so excited that when he got into the building he fired in the air without knowing he had done so. La Fortune des Rougon.

MASSON (COLONEL), commander of the troops which crushed the Republican rising in 1851. La Fortune des Rougon.

MATHIAS, an old hunchback who worked on the farm of La Borderie. La Terre.

MATHIEU, a large dog which belonged to the Chanteaus at Bonneville and was a great favourite of the family. The death of this animal greatly accelerated the unreasoning fear of inevitable mortality with which the mind of Lazare Chanteau was becoming obsessed. La Joie de Vivre.

MATHILDE, an actress at the Theatre des Varietes. Nana.

MATIGNON, a draper in Paris, whose shop was near that of Baudu. Au Bonheur des Dames.

MAUDIT (ABBE), Vicar of Saint-Roch, Paris, he counted among his parishioners the Josserands and the Duveyriers. Though well aware of the immorality that went on in his parish, he recognized the impossibility of stopping it, and did what he could to hide it under the cloak of religion. When the scandal arose about Madame Auguste Vabre, he was approached by her relations, and at their request acted as intermediary between the husband and wife. Pot-Bouille.

MAUGENDRE (M.), father of Madame Jordan; was a retired awning manufacturer who had made a considerable fortune from his business. He disapproved of his daughter's marriage, and refused to give her any dowry, on the pretext that she would have his fortune intact when he was dead and gone. He was a careful man, averse from speculation, but having on one occasion made a small venture, he gradually became imbued with the craze. The phenomenal success of the Universal Bank induced him to purchase its shares more and more wildly, until, when the crash came, he was so deeply committed as to be ruined. Jordan, who by this time had met with some success in literature, came to his assistance. L'Argent.

MAUGENDRE (MADAME), wife of the preceding, was at first bitterly opposed to the small speculations entered into by her husband. She soon got infected with the craze, and became even more reckless than he, urging him to involve himself more and more deeply in the fortunes of the Universal Bank. L'Argent.

MAUGENDRE (MARCELLE). See Madame Marcelle Jordan.

MAURIAC (BARON DE), starter at the racecourse of Longchamp. Nana.

MAURIN, a hatter of Plassans, who was selected by the Republicans of that town as their candidate. At the election he only received about fifteen hundred votes against the rival candidate. M. Delangre. La Conquete de Plassans.

MAURIN, a notary at Tulettes, who was also Mayor of the Commune. It was he who drew up the certificate of death of Antoine Macquart from spontaneous combustion.

MAZAUD, a broker on the Paris Bourse, who succeeded on the death of his uncle to one of the largest businesses in the city. He was young and pleasant-looking, with such remarkable activity and intuition that he soon came into the first rank. He was also assisted by the fact that he did business with all the great bankers, and was reputed to have a second cousin employed at the Havas News Agency. After the foundation of the Universal Bank, he became the official broker of that institution, and the great gamble in its shares resolved itself into a duel between him and Jacoby, the one buying for Saccard and the other selling for Gundermann. Mazaud did not speculate on his own account, but the failure of the bank led to so many of his clients being unable to meet their differences that he was ruined. After putting his affairs in order so far as possible, he committed suicide. L'Argent.

MAZAUD (MADAME), wife of the preceding. She married for love, and brought to her husband a considerable fortune. She had two children, a girl and a boy. The suicide of her husband completely overwhelmed her with grief. L'Argent.

MAZEL, a famous master at the School of Arts, and the last rampart of elegant conventionality. The first year that the Hanging Committee of the Salon was elected by the artists themselves, Mazel was chosen president. In the selection of pictures he was susceptible to influence, and was guided more by the name of the artist than by the quality of the work. L'Oeuvre.

MECHAIN, proprietor of a racing-stable. Hazard, one of his horses, ran in the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

MECHAIN (MADAME), a woman in the employment of Busch, the money-lender and debt collector. She assisted him in tracing debtors, and in the purchase of securities of bankrupt companies. She was a cousin of Rosalie Chavaille, mother of Victor Saccard, on whose death she was left with the boy to bring up. On discovering the paternity of Victor some years later, she and Busch attempted to blackmail Saccard, but without success, though they had previously got a considerable sum from Caroline Hamelin, who wished to save Saccard from annoyance. L'Argent.

MEGOT (JUSTINE), a young maid-servant of Renee Saccard. She had a son to Maxime Rougon in 1857, and was sent to live in the country with the child on a small annuity. La Curee.

Three years later she married Anselme Thomas, a harness-maker at Plassans. They had two children, and would have lived happily but for the husband's dislike to her eldest child, Charles Rougon. Her conduct after marriage was exemplary in every way. Le Docteur Pascal.

MEHUDIN (MADAME), originally came from Rouen to Paris, where she ever afterwards remained in the fish trade. As her two daughters, Louise and Claire, got on badly together, she ultimately divided her business between them, Louise going to the general fish-market, while Claire installed herself among the fresh-water fish. "From that time the old mother, although she pretended to have retired from business altogether, would flit from one stall to the other, still interfering in the selling of the fish, and causing her daughters continual annoyance by the foul insolence with which she at times spoke to customers." Le Ventre de Paris.

MEHUDIN (CLAIRE), the second daughter of Madame Mehudin, was an idle, fair-complexioned girl, with a gentle manner. She had, however, a strong will, and was invariably at loggerheads with others. When Florent became Inspector at the Fish Market, Claire took his part against her mother and sister, but afterwards went to the opposite extreme when his relations with Louise had become friendly. It appeared that she had a real affection for him, however, as after his arrest she assaulted her sister in the belief that she had given information to the police. Le Ventre de Paris.

MEHUDIN (LOUISE), commonly called La Normande. She was a beautiful woman who had at one time been engaged to be married to a clerk in the corn-market. He was, however, accidentally killed, leaving Louise with a son, who was known in the market by the nickname of Muche. When Florent was first appointed Inspector in the Fish Market, Louise, who had quarrelled with his sister-in-law, Lisa, did everything she could to annoy him. Afterwards, partly gratified by his kindness to her son, and partly to annoy Madame Lisa Quenu, she became reconciled to him. Le Ventre de Paris.

MEINHOLD (MADAME DE), a lady well-known in the Society of the Second Empire. She was a friend of Madame de Lauwerens and of the Saccards. La Curee.

MELANIE, cook in the employment of the Gregoires, with whom she had been for thirty years. Germinal.

MELANIE, the servant of Denizet, the examining magistrate at Rouen. The latter was anxious for promotion, in order that his old servant might be better fed and consequently better tempered. La Bete Humane.

MELIE, niece of the Fancheurs. She was a girl from the village of Bennecourt, who waited on Claude Lantier and Christine in their cottage there, and greatly amused them by her stupidity. After the death of the Fancheurs, the inn came into the possession of Melie, but soon lost favour on account of its dirt and disorder. L'Oeuvre.

MENU (MADEMOISELLE), aunt of Fanny Menu, who lived with her. She had been an embroideress for thirty years, but her sight failed and she was obliged to give up work. Fortunately she received a small legacy from a relative, and on this, added to the earnings of her niece, she was able to live. Pot-Bouille.

MENU (FANNY), a young girl who was protected by Narcisse Bachelard. As he on one occasion found her with Gueulin, his nephew, under compromising circumstances, he insisted on their marriage, and gave her a handsome dowry. Pot-Bouille.

MERLE, usher at the Council of State. He was appointed by Eugene Rougon, through the influence of Madame Correur. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

MES BOTTES, the sobriquet of one of Coupeau's companions. He was a heavy drinker and an enormous eater, and on account of the latter gift he was occasionally asked by his friends to join such parties of pleasure as paid by contract for their entertainment, in order that they might watch the landlord's face lengthen at the rapid disappearance of food. Chiefly for this reason, he was asked to the Coupeaus' wedding party. L'Assommoir.

MEYER, owner of a Viennese bakery in Faubourg Poissonniere. The Coupeaus bought their bread from him in order to please Lantier. L'Assommoir.

MICHELIN (M.), a surveyor of the Municipal Council. "His wife, a pretty woman, occasionally called to apologize to her husband's chiefs for his absence, when he stayed away through ill-health. He was often ill, but he obtained promotion at each illness." In order to secure Saccard's influence, Michelin assisted him in getting exorbitant prices for land sold to the city. La Curee.

MICHELIN (MADAME), wife of the preceding. By means of her good looks and a determination to get on at any cost, she secured the influence of her husband's superiors, and got rapid promotion for him in the office of the Municipal Council. La Curee.

MIETTE, the pet name of Marie Chantegreil. (q.v.).

MIETTE, one of the peasant girls of Les Artaud who assisted to decorate the church for the festival of the Virgin. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

MIGNON, a man who, beginning life as a bricklayer, had amassed a fortune by speculations in building land during the early days of the Second Empire. Along with Charrier, his partner, he had many business dealings with Aristide Saccard. La Curee.

MIGNON, husband of an actress at the Theatre des Varietes. When Rose married him he was leader of the orchestra at a cafe concert where she sang. They were the best of friends, and lived together on the earnings of the wife, who exploited her beauty not less than her talents. Mignon was always on the best of terms with his wife's lovers, even assisting them occasionally to deceive her, with the view of bringing them back in penitence later on. Nana.

MIGNON (CHARLES), younger son of the preceding. Nana.

MIGNON (HENRI), elder son of Mignon. Along with his brother Charles he was educated at a boarding-school. Nana.

MIGNON (ROSE), wife of Mignon, was a star actress at the Theatre des Varietes, being a fine comedienne and an admirable singer. She was dark and thin with that charming ugliness which is peculiar to the gamins of Paris. It was she who, annoyed by the rivalry of Nana, one day made Comte de Muffat aware of the liaison between his wife and Fauchery. She was, however, a good-hearted woman, and when she learned that Nana had contracted small-pox she arranged for her removal to the Grand Hotel, and nursed her there till she died. Nana.

MIGNOT, one of the salesmen in the glove department at "The Ladies' Paradise." He entered into a conspiracy with Albert Lhomme to defraud his employer, and this was successful to a considerable extent before its discovery; his dismissal followed, but there was no prosecution, as the firm preferred not to bring its internal affairs before the public eye. He afterwards got a situation as a traveller, and had even the boldness to call at "The Ladies' Paradise." Au Bonheur des Dames.

MIMI-LA-MORT, a pupil at the College of Plassans, who was also nicknamed Le Squelette-Externe (The Skeleton Day-Boarder) on account of his extreme thinness. Against the regulations of the College, he used to bring in snuff to the other scholars. L'Oeuvre.

MINOUCHE, a white cat which belonged to the Chanteaus. La Joie de Vivre.

MISARD, signalman on the railway at Croix-de-Maufras, between Malaunay and Barentin. He was a little puny man, with thin, discoloured hair and beard, and a lean, hollow-cheeked face. His work was mechanical, and he seemed to carry it through without thought or intelligence. His wife, a cousin of Jacques Lantier, looked after the level-crossing which adjoined their house until failing health prevented her from leaving the house. For this little man, silently and without anger, was slowly poisoning his wife with a powder which he placed in the salt which she ate. This crime, patient and cunning, had for its cause a legacy of a thousand francs left to Aunt Phasie by her father, a legacy which she had hidden, and refused to hand over to Misard. But the old woman triumphed in the end, for though Misard searched day and night for the treasure, he was never able to find it; she died taking her secret with her. An old woman of the neighbourhood, La Ducloux, whom he had employed to attend to the level-crossing after the death of his wife, induced him to marry her by pretending that she had discovered the secret hoard. La Bete Humaine.

MISARD (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Phasie (Aunt).

MORANGE (CHARLOT), son of Silvine Morange and of Goliath Steinberg. Physically he resembled his father's race, whom, however, he was brought up to hate. Hidden behind his mother, he was at three years old a witness of the murder of his father by the francs-tireurs. La Debacle.

MORANGE (SILVINE), servant with Fouchard at Remilly. Her mother, who was a worker in a factory at Raucourt, died when she was quite young, and her godfather, Dr. Dalichamp, got her a situation with Fouchard. Honore Fouchard fell in love with her, and they became engaged, but the opposition of the old man was so great that Honore went away from home and enlisted in the army. During his absence Silvine fell a victim to the wiles of Goliath Steinberg, and a child, Charlot, was born, Steinberg having previously disappeared. She had all along loved Honore, and when he passed through Remilly on his way to fight the Prussians he forgave her, and promised to marry her on his return. When she heard that he had been killed in the battle of Sedan, she became nearly mad, and with Prosper Sambuc made a wild search of the battlefield for her lover's body. They found it eventually, and brought it back in a cart for burial. Goliath Steinberg, who was a German spy, again made advances to her, and, to save herself and her friends, she betrayed him to the francs-tireurs, who killed him in her presence. La Debacle.

MORIZOT, a friend of Malignon, who took him to the children's party at Deberle's house. Une Page d'Amour.

MOSER, a speculator on the Paris Bourse. He was a short, yellow-skinned man, who suffered from liver complaint and was continually lamenting, in constant dread of some imminent catastrophe. In consequence of his views, he was known on the Bourse as "bear" Moser. Speculating heavily against the rise in the shares of the Universal Bank, he was at one time on the verge of ruin, but the collapse of that institution left him with an enormous fortune. L'Argent.

MOUCHE (LE PERE), the sobriquet of Michel Fouan, the third son of Joseph Casimir Fouan, and brother of La Grande, Pere Fouan, and Laure Badeuil. When his father's estate was divided, he received the family dwelling-house and some land, but was dissatisfied with his share and continued to accuse his brother and sister, though forty years had elapsed, of having robbed him when the lots were drawn. He had been long a widower, and, a soured unlucky man, he lived alone with his two daughters, Lise and Francoise. At sixty years of age he died of an attack of apoplexy. La Terre.

MOUCHE (FRANCOISE), younger daughter of Michel Fouan, alias Mouche. Her mother died early, and she was brought up by her sister Lise, to whom she was devotedly attached. She had a passion for justice, and when she had said "that is mine and that is yours," she would have been prepared to go to the stake in support of her rights. This execration of injustice gradually led to a change of feeling between the two sisters, for after the marriage of Lise to Buteau a division of the land should have been made. Buteau and his wife on various pretexts put off this division, and it was only on the marriage of Francoise to Jean Macquart that it was carried out. An entire estrangement between the two families followed, and constant quarrels took place. After a shameful assault by Buteau upon Francoise, his wife threw her upon a scythe which lay upon the ground near by, and the unfortunate girl received injuries from which she died a few hours later. A sense of loyalty to her family induced her to conceal the cause of these injuries, which were attributed to accident. La Terre.

MOUCHE (LISE), elder daughter of Pere Mouche, and sister of the preceding. She had a son to her cousin Buteau, who, however, did not marry her for three years afterwards, when the death of her father made her heiress to some land. She was at first an amiable woman, but grew hardened under the influence of her husband, and ultimately her whole desire was to avoid the necessity of a division of her father's estate between her sister and herself. Moved by these feelings, her love for Francoise became transformed into a hatred so intense that she did not hesitate to assist her husband in attempting to bring about the girl's ruin. In the end, having assisted Buteau in a shameful assault on Francoise, she afterwards threw her upon a scythe which was lying on the ground near by, inflicting injuries which proved fatal. Pere Fouan, having been a witness of the assault, was subsequently murdered by Lise and her husband, to ensure his silence and their own safety. La Terre.

MOULIN, an assistant station-master at Havre along with Roubaud. La Bete Humaine.

MOULIN (MADAME), wife of the preceding. She was a little woman, timid and weak, who was seldom seen. She had a large family of young children. La Bete Humaine.

MOUNIER, a tenor singer at the Opera, who gave the cue to Madame Daigremont at a performance in her house. L'Argent.

MOUQUE, father of Mouquet and of Mouquette. He had charge of the horses in the Voreux pit, and also acted as caretaker at a ruined mine known as the Requillart, where the company had given him two rooms to live in. Almost every evening he received a visit from his old comrade Bonnemort. Germinal.

MOUQUET, son of the preceding, was an inseparable companion of Zacharie Maheu, along with whom he worked at the Voreux pit. During the strike he went out of curiosity to see the attack by the strikers on the soldiers who were guarding the mines, and was killed by a stray ball which struck him in the mouth.

MOUQUETTE, daughter of Mouque. She was a putter in the Voreux pit, and lived with her father at the ruined mine of Requillart, where he was caretaker. She was present at the attack by the strikers on the soldiers guarding the Voreux, and when the fatal volley was fired she was killed, in an instinctive attempt to save Catherine Maheu, before whom she placed herself. Germinal.

MOURET, a hatter of Plassans who married Ursule Macquart in 1810 and went to live at Marseilles. He was devoted to his wife, and a year after her death in 1839, he hanged himself in a cupboard where her dresses were still suspended. He left three children, Helene, Francois, and Silvere. La Fortune des Rougon.

MOURET (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Ursule Macquart. La Fortune des Rougon.

MOURET (DESIREE), born 1844, daughter of Francois Mouret, and sister of Octave and Serge. La Fortune des Rougon.

She was of feeble intellect, and when a girl of sixteen was still mentally like a child of eight. When her mother fell under the influence of Abbe Faujas, and began entirely to neglect her family, Francois Mouret removed Desiree to the home of her old nurse, in whose custody she remained. La Conquete de Plassans.

When her brother Serge was appointed priest of Les Artaud, she accompanied him there. By that time she had grown to be a tall, handsome girl, but her mind had never developed, and she was still like a young child. Her love of animals had become a passion, and at her brother's home she was able to indulge it to the fullest extent, and to her complete happiness. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

She accompanied her brother to Saint Eutrope, where he became cure, and she continued innocent and healthy, like a happy young animal. Le Docteur Pascal.

MOURET (FRANCOIS), born in 1817, son of Mouret and Ursule Macquart, his wife. He got a situation in the business of his uncle, Pierre Rougon, whose daughter Marthe he married in 1840. They had three children, Octave, Serge, and Desiree. On the retirement of his uncle, Mouret returned to Marseilles and established himself in business there. La Fortune de Rougon.

During fifteen years of close application on the part of Mouret and his wife, he made a fortune out of wines, oil, and almonds, and then retired to Plassans, where he lived on his means, making an occasional deal in wine or oil when a chance occurred. He was not on good terms with his wife's relations, and placed himself politically in opposition to them by supporting the Legitimist candidate, the Marquis de Lagrifoul. In 1858, having two vacant rooms in his house, he was induced by the Abbe Bourrette to let them to Abbe Faujas, a priest who had been sent to Plassans by the Government to undermine the existing clerical influence there, which had been exercised in support of the Marquis de Lagrifoul. Mouret was a man of narrow and restricted intellect, and his peculiarities became more and more marked as the Abbe Faujas gradually came to dominate the household and induce Madame Mouret to neglect her husband and family for the service of the Church. By degrees Mouret came to be regarded as insane, and his wife having had several epileptic attacks, he was accused of having caused the injuries she had really inflicted on herself. His wrongful removal to the asylum at Les Tulettes followed, and confinement soon confirmed the insanity which before had only threatened. In 1864, his uncle, Antoine Macquart, in order to annoy the Rougons contrived his escape from the asylum, and he returned by night to his home at Plassans. Finding it in the occupancy of Abbe Faujas and his relatives, he was overcome by the fury of madness, and set fire to the house in several places. So thoroughly did he do his work that all the inmates, including himself, perished in the flames. La Conquete de Plassans.

MOURET (MADAME MARTHE), wife of the preceding. See Marthe Rougon.

MOURET (HELENE), born 1824, daughter of Mouret and Ursule Macquart, his wife. La Fortune des Rougon.

When seventeen years old she married M. Grandjean, the son of a sugar-refiner of Marseilles, whose family were bitterly opposed to the match on account of her poverty. The wedding was a secret one, and the young couple had difficulty making ends meet until an uncle died, leaving them ten thousand francs a year. "It was then that Grandjean, within whom an intense hatred of Marseilles was growing, had decided on coming to Paris, to live there for good." The day after their arrival Grandjean was seized with illness, and after eight days he died, leaving his wife with one daughter, a young girl of ten. Helene, who was a woman of singular beauty, had no friends in Paris except Abbe Jouve and his half-brother M. Rambaud, but from them she received much kindness. Her daughter Jeanne was far from strong, having inherited much of the hereditary neurosis of her mother's family, along with a consumptive tendency from that of her father. A sudden illness of the girl led to an acquaintance with Doctor Deberle, and this ripened into love between him and Helene, though considerations of duty kept them apart. Meantime, Helene had discovered the beginnings of an intrigue between Madame Deberle and M. Malignon, and in order to break it off was herself placed in such a compromising position towards Doctor Deberle that he became her lover. The discovery of the fact by Jeanne, whose jealous love of her mother amounted to a mania, led to the child's illness and death, and to her mother's bitter repentance. Two years later Helene married M. Rambaud, and went to live at Marseilles. Une Page d'Amour.

She lived for many years, very happy, and idolized by her husband, in a house which he owned near Marseilles, close to the seashore. She had no children by her second marriage. Le Docteur Pascal.

MOURET (OCTAVE), born 1840, son of Francois Mouret. La Fortune des Rougon.

A young man of high spirits and somewhat idle habits, he made little progress at college, and failed to pass the examinations for a degree. His father was much annoyed at this, and sent him off to Marseilles to enter a commercial business. The reports regarding him were, however, unsatisfactory, as it appeared that he showed no inclination to settle to hard work and was living a dissolute life.[*] La Conquete de Plassans.

After the death of his parents, Serge Mouret, who was about to take Holy Orders, renounced his share of his father's fortune in favour of his brother Octave. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

He was appointed a member of the family council which nominally had charge of Pauline Quenu's fortune. La Joie de Vivre.

After three years at Marseilles he came to Paris, where he secured an appointment as assistant at "The Ladies' Paradise" through the influence of the Campardons, who were old friends of his mother. He formed the project of advancing his prospects by making love to Madame Hedouin, wife of his employer, but she gave him no encouragement. He resigned his situation, and went as salesman to Auguste Vabre, a neighbouring silk merchant. Vabre's wife (nee Berthe Josserand) was not on good terms with her husband, and a liaison was formed between her and Octave Mouret, which subsisted for some time before it was discovered by Vabre, who received information from Rachael, his maid-servant. Mouret returned to his former employment at "The Ladies' Paradise," and M. Hedouin having died in the interval, he married the widow a few months afterwards. He had developed keen business ability, with large ideas, and under his management the shop became one of the most important in the district. Pot-Bouille.

In Mouret's hands the business of "The Ladies' Paradise" continued to grow, and repeated extensions of the building became necessary. While one of these was in progress, Madame Mouret, who was inspecting the work, fell into a hole, and as a result of her injuries died three days afterwards. Mouret remained a widower, and devoted himself to the extension of his business, though it was believed that a liaison with Madame Desforges was not the only entanglement of its kind. On the introduction of Madame Desforges he came to know Baron Hartmann, director of the Credit Immobilier, who became interested in him, and eventually found the money necessary to carry out the vast schemes of extension which he had long had in mind. By this time Denise Baudu had come to "The Ladies' Paradise" as a saleswoman, and from the first Mouret had taken an interest in her. This was probably increased by the fact that she resisted all his advances, and refused all his offers. Ultimately he became so infatuated by her that he asked her to marry him, which she agreed to do. By this time the success of "The Ladies' Paradise" had become triumphant, and the smaller traders of the district were being crushed out of existence, and driven one by one into bankruptcy. Au Bonheur des Dames.

He assisted at the burial of his cousin, Claude Lantier the artist. By this time he had become very rich, was decorated with the Legion of Honour, and was desirous of giving the impression of an enlightened taste for art. L'Oeuvre.

Octave Mouret, whose immense fortune continued to increase, had towards the end of 1872 a second child by his wife Denise Baudu, whom he adored, though he again began to lead a somewhat irregular life. Their little girl was puny, but the younger child, a boy, took after his mother, and grew magnificently. Le Docteur Pascal.

[*] It is interesting to note that by a curious oversight M.
Zola in Pot-Bouille refers to Octave Mouret as having
passed the examination for his bachelor's degree before
leaving Plassans, and states that at Marseilles the lad
showed a passion for business life, being able during his
three years' stay there to make a sum of five thousand
francs (two hundred pounds), which he took with him to
Paris.

MOURET (MADAME CAROLINE), first wife of the preceding. See Madame Caroline Hedouin.

MOURET (MADAME DENISE), second wife of Octave Mouret. See Denise Baudu.

MOURET (SERGE), born 1841, son of Francois Mouret. La Fortune des Rougon.

He was a young man of nervous temperament and of somewhat delicate health. Educated at Plassans, he took his degree at the college there, and it was intended that he should go to Paris to study for the bar. The state of his health caused his departure to be delayed, and meantime he, like his mother, fell under the influence of Abbe Faujas. Ultimately he decided to abandon the study of the law in order to become a priest, and against the wishes of his father he entered the Seminary at Plassans. La Conquete de Plassans.

After being ordained to the priesthood he was appointed cure of Les Artaud, a small village in Provence, to whose degenerate inhabitants he ministered with small success. From his parents he had inherited the family taint of the Rougon-Macquarts, which in him took the form of morbid religious enthusiasm bordering on hysteria. Brain fever resulted, and bodily recovery left the priest without a mental past. Dr. Pascal Rougon, his uncle, in the hope of saving his reason, removed him to Paradou, the neglected demesne of a ruined mansion, where he left him in the care of Albine, the keeper's niece. Here Serge slowly recovered his health, though the memory of his past was gone, and his mental development was that of a boy. In that enchanted garden, lush with foliage and with the scent of flowers, the drama of life unfolded, and Serge, loving Albine, and oblivious of his vows unwittingly broke them. A chance meeting with Brother Archangais, and a glimpse of the world outside the Paradou, recalled to Serge the recollection of his priesthood, and, filled with horror, he tore himself from Albine and returned to his cure of souls. A fierce struggle between love and duty followed, but in the end the Church conquered, and Albine was left to die, while Serge threw himself even more feverishly than before into the observances of his faith. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

Sent later to Saint-Eutrope, at the bottom of a marshy gorge, he was cloistered there with his sister Desiree. He showed a fine humility, refusing all preferment from his bishop, waiting for death like a holy man, averse to remedies, although he was already in the early stage of phthisis. Le Docteur Pascal.

MOURET (SILVERE), born 1834, son of Mouret, the hatter, and Ursule Macquart, his wife. After the death of his father, Silvere went to live with his grandmother Adelaide Fouque. Though poorly educated, he was fond of reading, and his lonely life with this old half-imbecile woman increased his own tendency to visionary dreamings. "He was predisposed to Utopian ideas by certain hereditary influences; his grandmother's nervous disorders became in him a chronic enthusiasm, striving after everything that was grandiose and impossible." His Uncle Antoine Macquart, who hoped through him to annoy the Rougons, encouraged him in his Republican views, and after the Coup d'Etat he joined the insurrection which then arose. Miette Chantegreil, a young girl to whom he was tenderly devoted, accompanied him, but was shot in the attack by regular troops. He was taken prisoner, and having been brought back to Plassans, was executed there. La Fortune des Rougon.

MOUSSEAU (ABBE), a priest at Plassans. La Conquete de Plassans.

MOURGUE, a peasant of Poujols, who, armed with a fork, had taken part in the insurrectionary rising against the Coup d'Etat. He was made prisoner, and was led to Plassans, tied by the arm to Silvere Mouret, who had also been arrested. He was shot at the same time as Silvere by Rengade, the gendarme. La Fortune des Rougon.

MOUTON, a cat which belonged to the Quenus, and was a favourite of little Pauline. Le Ventre de Paris.

MUCHE, the name by which Louise Mehudin's son was known in the market. He was befriended by Florent, who taught him to read and write. Le Ventre de Paris.

MUFFAT (MAMAN), wife of General Muffat de Beuville, who was created Comte by Napoleon I. She was an insufferable old woman, who was always hand-in-glove with the priests, and had an authoritative manner, which bent every one to her will. Her daughter-in-law, Comtesse Sabine, was entirely under her dominion, and was forced by her to lead an almost cloistered existence. Nana.

MUFFAT DE BEUVILLE (COMTE), son of the preceding and of General Muffat de Beuville. Brought up in the strictest manner by his mother, his life was one of cold and severe propriety, and being regarded with favour at the Court, he was appointed Chamberlain to the Empress. He married Sabine de Chouard, by whom he had one daughter, Estelle. For seventeen years of married life his career was a pattern of all the virtues, until a chance meeting with Nana led to an infatuation amounting to mania. Everything was sacrificed to her, and no degradation to his self-respect seemed too high a price to pay for her favour. Disgusted for a time by her liaison with Fontan, he left her, and turned for amusement to Rose Mignon, but the infatuation for Nana reasserted itself, and he recovered her good graces by inducing Bordenave to give her a part which she greatly desired in La Petite Duchesse, a play by Fauchery. He spent vast sums upon Nana, giving her a magnificent house in the Avenue de Villiers. Her influence over him became complete, and he even accepted Daguenet, her former lover, as his son-in-law. He overlooked too his wife's numerous liaisons, as he required her signature to enable him to raise still more money for Nana. Muffat's means were coming to an end, however, and the scandal reached such a height that he was forced to resign his position at the Tuileries. It was only when he learned that Nana was carrying on a liaison with his own father-in-law, the aged Marquis de Chouard, that he finally broke with her, and coming once more under the influence of Venot, he sought forgetfulness of the past in an exaggerated devotion to the service of the Church. Nana.

MUFFAT DE BEUVILLE (COMTESSE), wife of the preceding. See Sabine de Chouard. Nana.

MUFFAT DE BEUVILLE (ESTELLE), daughter of the preceding. At sixteen she was thin and insignificant, seldom speaking, but after her marriage to Daguenet, she exhibited a will of iron, and completely dominated her husband. Nana.

MULLER (BLANCHE), a favourite actress at the Theatre des Varietes. La Curee.

MUSSY (M. DE) was an admirer of Renee Saccard, and aspired to be her lover. He received an appointment on the staff of the London embassy. La Curee.

N

NANA. See Anna Coupeau.

NANA, name of a filly in the racing stable of Vandeuvres. She had been beaten in several races, and when run for the Grand Prix de Paris was looked on as an outsider. The success of the filly by fraudulent means led to the disqualification of the owner. Nana.

NAPOLEON III, Emperor of the French. Referred to in Son Excellence Eugene Rougon and in La Debacle.

NATHANSOHN, a stockbroker. He came from Besancon, where his father was a watchmaker. He was very fortunate in his speculations, and soon became a man of consequence. His Jewish caution prevented him from becoming involved with Saccard in the affairs of the Universal Bank, and when that institution collapsed he was in a position to snatch a fortune from its ruin. L'Argent.

NAUD, a shoemaker in Rue d'Antin who felt severely the competition of Octave Mouret's great shop. Au Bonheur des Dames.

NAUDET, a cousin of the Quenus. He was a member of Pauline's family council, and consented to her emancipation. La Joie de Vivre.

NAUDET, a picture-dealer who for some years had been revolutionizing the trade. He put aside the old cautious methods, the watching for pictures by beginners, bought for ten francs and sold for fifteen. To judge by his appearance he might have been a nobleman, and his habits were in keeping; he was, in fact, a pure speculator in pictures, caring nothing for art. But he unfailingly scented success; he guessed what artists ought to be taken up, not the ones likely to develop the genius of a great painter, but the one whose deceptive talent, set off by a pretended display of audacity, would command a premium in the market. He speculated, in fact, on the ignorance and vanity of amateurs. It was he who invented Fagerolles as a fashion, and made large sums out of his works. His success in forcing up the prices of pictures turned his head to some extent, and he even talked of crushing out all the other dealers. The exaggerated rise in the price of pictures came, as was inevitable, to an end, and in the fall which followed Naudet was practically ruined. L'Oeuvre.

NEGREL (MADAME), sister of M. Hennebeau, the manager of the Montsou mines. She was married to a captain, and after she became a widow lived at Avignon on a small income, contenting herself with little in order that she might properly educate her son Paul. Germinal.

NEGREL (PAUL), son of the preceding. He was an engineer at the Voreux pit, an appointment which he received from his uncle, M. Hennebeau, with whom he lived, being treated as one of the family. Madame Hennebeau, notwithstanding a liaison which subsisted between her and Negrel, planned for him a marriage with Cecile Gregoire, an arrangement which was only prevented by the murder of the girl by old Bonnemort. Negrel posed as taking no interest in the affairs of practical life, but in the terrible disaster at the Voreux pit he threw himself into the work of rescue with an ardour beyond praise. Germinal.

NOEMI, an actress at the Vaudeville. Madame Deberle admired the realistic manner in which she died in a piece she played. Une Page d'Amour.

NORINE, a vendor of salted provisions, who went around the neighbourhood of Cloyes. La Terre.

NORMANDE (LA), the sobriquet of Louise Mehudin. Le Ventre de Paris.

NOUGAREDE, an old senator who was on the point of asking the hand of Clorinde Balbi after having seen her at a ball in the character of Diana the huntress. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

O

OCTAVE, the favourite lover of Blanche de Sivry. Nana.

ORVIEDO (PRINCE D'), came to Paris from Spain with an immense fortune made on the Stock Exchange. There were strange stories told regarding the sources of his wealth; stories not more creditable than those told of the armed bandits of former days, for his robberies, though less open, were more dangerous. For twenty years he took his share of booty in all the great financial swindles. He ultimately died of apoplexy. L'Argent.

ORVIEDO (PRINCESS D'), was for a time one of the most curious notabilities of the Second Empire. At the command of her mother, the Duchesse de Combeville, she married the Prince in ignorance of the source of his regal fortune, estimated at three hundred millions of francs (twelve millions sterling). It was said that for twenty years the Prince had appropriated the lion's share of every great piece of financial rascality on the Bourses of France and Spain. After his sudden death from a stroke of apoplexy, the Princess shut up the great house in the Rue Saint-Lazare and retired with a maid to three rooms on the second floor, where she lived the life of a recluse. From thenceforth she lived solely for deeds of charity on a colossal scale. During five years she founded the St. Mary's Infant Asylum, the St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum, an Asylum for the aged at Chatillon, a hospital in the suburbs of Paris, and an institution known as L'Oeuvre du Travail, in which were boarded three hundred waifs and strays from the streets of Paris. On these foundations, and on other charities, she spent in five years over a hundred millions of francs. For some time Saccard assisted her in a disinterested way in carrying out her schemes, and later he rented from her the premises in which he started the Universal Bank. As time went on, the Princess seemed to be swayed more and more by the desire of restitution to the poor of the uttermost remnants of her husband's fortune. In the end, when she had divided it all, she retired to a convent of Carmelites, walled off from the world. L'Argent.

OZIL, a pointsman at the junction for Dieppe, between the tunnel and the station of Malaunay. He was in love with Flore, who for a time seemed to encourage him. He was dismissed from his post on account of grave negligence caused by Flore, who distracted his attention in order that he might allow the Havre express to dash into a train loaded with ballast. The accident was only averted by a new automatic signalling apparatus. La Bete Humaine.

P

PACHE, a soldier in the 106th regiment of the line, in the squad of Corporal Jean Macquart. He brought from his native village strong religious principles, and was in the regular habit of saying his prayers outside his tent. The example of his companions, however, made him a bad soldier, and during the battle of 1st September, 1870, he left the ranks, and took refuge in a tavern. After the capitulation of Sedan, he was imprisoned along with his regiment on the promontory of Iges. Moved by famine, he concealed some bread from his companions; but having been denounced by Chouteau, he refused to share the spoil, and was murdered by Lapoulle, who stabbed him with a knife. La Debacle.

PAILLOT, a farmer in the neighbourhood of Montsou. Germinal.

PALETTE (LA MERE), a poultry-seller at the Central Markets in Paris. Le Ventre de Paris.

PALOQUE, a judge. He and his wife were said to be the ugliest couple in Plassans, and in addition were far from popular. Madame Mouret having asked the assistance of Madame Paloque in connection with the Home for Girls proposed by Abbe Faujas, she agreed to act on the Committee, and became Treasurer. At the opening ceremony, however, the Bishop omitted to make reference to her services, and she took great offence, becoming afterwards very irregular in her work, and declining to perform any duties that she did not fancy. This ultimately led to the appointment of a paid Secretary for the institution, Honore Trouche, the brother-in-law of Abbe Faujas being selected. The Paloques were antagonistic to Faujas, but on getting a hint from Madame de Condamin that he had the backing of the Government and would see that they were rewarded, they came over to his side, and assisted him in "the conquest of Plassans" by the Bonapartist candidate. La Conquete de Plassans.

PARABOULOMENOS, a name given by the pupils of the college of Plassans to the youth who served in the kitchen. L'Oeuvre.

PARALLELUCA, the sobriquet given by the pupils of the College of Plassans to a scullery-maid employed there. It was alleged that there was a love-idyll between her and Paraboulomenos, both of whom were extremely ugly. L'Oeuvre.

PASCAL (LE DOCTEUR). See Pascal Rougon.

PATOIR, a veterinary surgeon at Cloyes. La Terre.

PAUVRE ENFANT, a young trooper of the 5th regiment of the line, who was fatally wounded at the battle of Sedan, and died in the ambulance at Remilly. He received the name because he continually repeated the words regarding himself, saying that his mother had always called him so. He died in the arms of Henriette Weiss, whom in his delirium he named "Mother." La Debacle.

PAYAN, a stone-cutter from the South, whose friends had views of making him an artist. He was a lover of Clarisse Bocquet, and pilfered from her a large quantity of furniture given her by Duveyrier. Pot-Bouille.

PECHARD (ANTOINE), a neighbour of the Fouans. He owned eighteen acres of land when he married La Grande, who brought him seven acres more. He died young, leaving one daughter. La Terre.

PECHARD (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See La Grand. La Terre.

PECHARD (MADEMOISELLE), daughter of Antoine Pechard and Marianne Fouan, his wife. As she insisted on marrying a poor youth named Vincent Bouteroue, her mother cast her out. Misfortunes pursued the young couple, both of whom died within a few years, leaving two children in profound misery. La Terre.

PECQUEUX, a stoker in the employment of the Western Railway Company. He was married to Mere Victoire, the old nurse of Severine Aubry. His original intention was to qualify as an engine-driver, but time passed without advancement, and later there was an insuperable barrier in his own conduct, for he was given to drinking bouts which converted him for the time into a savage animal, capable of any violence. His wife lived at Paris, while Philomene Sauvagnat helped him to pass the hours he was compelled to spend at Havre, an arrangement which had the concurrence of Victoire. Pecqueux had the devotion of a dog for his comrade Jacques Lantier, who concealed his vices and shared with him a love for their engine, "La Lison." Philomene, however, excited his jealousy by her attentions to Lantier, and the former friendship of the two comrades became changed to fierce enmity. At length it happened that one night, as their engine was drawing eighteen trucks of soldiers towards the seat of war in Prussia, Pecqueux in a sudden access of madness attacked Lantier, and, after a fierce struggle on the narrow foot-plate, the two fell off, and were cut in pieces beneath the wheels. La Bete Humaine.

PEIROTTE, receiver of taxes at Plassans. He was taken as a hostage by the Republican insurgents and was inadvertently shot by the troops which crushed the rising. La Fortune des Rougon.

PEQUEUR DES SAULAIES (M.), sub-prefect of Plassans. He fell into disfavour with the Government on account of the election of a Legitimist Deputy. For some time he was afraid to compromise himself with Abbe Faujas, but having received a hint from Madame de Condamin, who had influential friends in Paris, he allied himself with the Abbe. The result was the election of Delangre, who though nominally independent, was actually the Government candidate. La Conquete de Plassans.

PEQUIGNOT, a friend of the Lorilleux. He was a furniture dealer. L'Assommoir.

PERDIGUET, a singer known to Malignon, who promised to take him to the children's party at Deberle's house. Une Page d'Amour.

PERE COLOMBE, owner of the Assommoir, a public-house which was largely the scene of the downfall of Coupeau and Gervaise Macquart, his wife. L'Assommoir.

PEROU (LA MERE), an old woman employed by Gourd, the concierge, to do cleaning work. Terrorized by his brutality she agreed to accept less wages. Pot-Bouille.

PHASIE (AUNT), was the wife of Misard, and the mother of Flore and Louisette. She was a cousin of the Lantiers and was godmother to Jacques, who was left in her charge when his parents went to Paris. Her first husband died, leaving her with two daughters, and she married for a second time Misard, a little man, cunning and avaricious, who was five years her senior. Jacques found them later, living in Normandy at Croix-de-Maufras on the line to Havre, where Misard was signalman, and his wife had charge of the level crossing. It was a miserable existence, without neighbours or any one to speak to, without even anything to look at, except the trains constantly rushing past. Aunt Phasie, as she had always been called by Jacques Lantier, was a tall, handsome woman, but since her second marriage she had aged so rapidly that at forty-five she looked over sixty. The truth was that between her and Misard there was going on a duel to the death; Aunt Phasie had received a legacy of a thousand francs from her father, and this she obstinately refused to allow her husband to share, having indeed hidden the money to prevent him from taking it. Misard, overcome by avarice, slowly killed his wife with poison placed in the salt, but, though she had the strongest suspicions, she would nether take action against him nor tell him the hiding-place of her little hoard. And so she died, carrying the secret with her; but in the end she triumphed, for search as he might, Misard never discovered the hidden treasure. La Bete Humaine.

PICHINETTE, a horse entered for the Grand Prix de Paris. It was withdrawn before the race. Nana.

PICHON (JULES), a clerk who lived in the house in Rue de Choiseul occupied also by Octave Mouret. His means were small, and he was obliged to work hard, frequently till late at night, his wife being necessarily left much alone. Pot-Bouille.

PICHON (MARIE), wife of the preceding. She was a daughter of M. and Madame Vuillaume, by whom she was strictly brought up. A dreamy unpractical woman, she fell under the influence of Octave Mouret, her next-door neighbour, and a liaison existed between them for a considerable time, with results which caused much annoyance to her parents. Pot-Bouille.

PICHON (LILITTE), infant daughter of the preceding. Pot-Bouille.

PICHON (ROSALIE), Madame Helene Grandjean's maid-servant. She was an honest country girl who had been brought to Paris by Abbe Jouve on the recommendation of a village priest, in whose house she had been brought up. She served her mistress faithfully, and ruled Zephyrin Lacour, her sweetheart, with a hand of iron. Une Page d'Amour.

PICOT, a soldier of infantry who belonged to the first division of the seventh Army Corps. After the defeats of Wissenbourg and Froeschwiller, Picot, half dead with fatigue and slightly wounded, was left behind in a ditch with his comrade Coutard of the first corps. They were only able to rejoin the army at Rheims on 22nd August, 1870, arriving with their clothes worn out and covered with mud, and having more the appearance of bandits than of soldiers. La Debacle.

PICOU (M.), a townsman of Plassans who expressed disbelief in the success of the Coup d'Etat. La Fortune des Rougon.

PIED-DE-CELERI, a friend of Coupeau. He had a wooden leg, from which he received his nickname. L'Assommoir.

PIEDEFER (LAURE), kept a cheap restaurant in Rue des Martyrs, which was much frequented by a certain class of demi-mondaines. Laure appeared to be on intimate terms with her customers, as they usually kissed her when they entered. Nana.

PIEDEFER (ZOE), an artist's model who lived in Rue Campagne-Premiere. She was a tall brunette. L'Oeuvre.

PIERRE, Dr. Deberle's butler. Une Page d'Amour.

PIERRE, an employee at Au Bonheur des Dames. He was waiter in the dining-room of the shop assistants. Au Bonheur des Dames.

PIERRON, a miner employed at the Voreux pit. He was a widower with a little girl aged eight, Lydie, when he married for the second time, the daughter of La Brule. Though he took part in the strike he betrayed his companions, giving information to the company through Dansaert, his wife's lover. After the attack on the pit Pierron was arrested by mistake, and was taken off with handcuffs at his wrists as far as Marchiennes, to the great amusement of his mates. He was subsequently promoted to be captain of a gang, but his excessive zeal made him disliked by his men. Germinal.

PIERRON (LYDIE), daughter of the preceding, was a fragile child, who when ten years old was already working in the pit. Her constant companions were Jeanlin Maheu and Bebert Levaque, with whom she made many raids in search of food during the strike. She was killed by the volley fired by the troops at the strikers attacking the Voreux pit. Germinal.

PIERRONNE (LA), the second wife of Pierron, was a daughter of La Brule. She was allowed by the Company to sell sweetmeats and biscuits, which were a considerable source of revenue. Dansaert, the head captain of the Voreux pit, was her lover, and through him she obtained various favours, giving him in exchange information as to the intentions of the strikers. After the strike she was enabled to acquire the little Estaminet du Progres. Germinal.

PIFARD, an usher at the college of Plassans, whose wonderful nose kept betraying his presence behind doors when its owner went eavesdropping. L'Oeuvre.

PILLERAULT, a speculator on the Bourse, whose guiding principle was recklessness; he declared that he plunged into catastrophes whenever he paused to reflect. He was ruined by the failure of the Universal Bank. L'Argent.

PIOT AND RIVOIRE, a firm of furniture-dealers, whose business was seriously affected when Octave Mouret added a furniture department to "The Ladies' Paradise." Au Bonheur des Dames.

PIQUETTE kept an estaminet at Montsou, where Chaval lodged. Germinal.

PLOUGUERN (M. DE) was a member of the Chamber of Deputies during the reign of Louis Philippe. After the Revolution of February, 1848, he manifested a sudden affection for the Republic, and later, when the Emperor granted him the refuge of the Senate, he was a Bonapartist. He was a man of high birth and breeding, and though a sceptic, defended religion and family life. During a journey in Italy he met Comtesse Balbi, whose lover he remained for thirty years. According to some, Clorinde Balbi was his daughter. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

PLUCHART, a former workman who was now secretary of a branch of the International Association of workers. He had been Etienne Lantier's foreman at Lille, and at his request came to Montsou to address the miners there. As a result of his visit ten thousand miners joined the International Association. Germinal.

POIRETTE (LE PERE), a countryman of Bennecourt, with small eyes and the face of a wolf. He was the owner of an old cottage, which Claude Lantier and Christine rented from him for two hundred and fifty francs a year. L'Oeuvre.

POISSON (M.), who was originally a cabinet-maker, served his time as a soldier, and ultimately got a place as a policeman, which he considered more certain and respectable. He married Virginie, who afterwards went into business as a dealer in groceries and sweetmeats in the shop previously occupied by Gervaise Coupeau. Auguste Lantier, who had for some time lodged with the Coupeaus, remained with the Poissons, and lived at their expense. M. Poisson affected not to observe the resulting liaison between his wife and Lantier. L'Assommoir.

POISSON (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Virginie. L'Assommoir.

POLAND, a pet rabbit which belonged to Rasseneur, and was a favourite of Souvarine. Germinal.

POMARE (LA REINE), a rag-picker, who had formerly been one of the handsomest women in Paris. Now, for the sake of a laugh, the women of the district made her drink absinthe, after which the street boys would chase her and throw stones. Nana.

PORQUIER (DR.) the fashionable medical man of Plassans. He had considerable influence, and this was secured by Abbe Faujas on behalf of the Government's candidate for the representation of Plassans by the promise of an appointment for his son, Guillaume, a young man who had hitherto given him much trouble. La Conquete de Plassans.

PORQUIER (GUILLAUME), son of Dr. Porquier, had been sent to Paris to study, but did nothing there but get into debt. He caused his father much distress, and was supposed to afford the worst possible example to the youth of Plassans, whom he was believed to lead into all kinds of mischief. Ultimately, as a reward to his father, who had supported Delangre as representative of Plassans, Porquier was appointed chief clerk at the post office. La Conquete de Plassans.

POUILLAUD, a fellow-pupil of Claude Lantier and Pierre Sandoz at the college of Plassans. While there he was an inveterate practical joker, one of his escapades being the transformation of Professor Lalubie's room into a chapelle ardente. L'Oeuvre.

POWELL (MISS), second assistant in the corset department at Au Bonheur des Dames. She was able to play the piano, a talent of which the other assistants were jealous. Au Bonheur des Dames.

POZZO (LUIGI), Secretary to the Sardinian Minister at Paris. "Diplomatist, painter, musician, and lover." A friend of Clorinde Balbi. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

PRICE, an English jockey who mounted the filly Nana in the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

PRINCE IMPERIAL. Referred to in Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

PROUANE, a retired non-commissioned officer in the navy, who acted as beadle to Abbe Harteur, as well as fulfilling the duties of Mayor's clerk. He eked out a livelihood by gathering shell-fish, but when he had any money he was usually in a state of intoxication. La Joie de Vivre.

PRULLIERE, an actor at the Theatre des Varietes, where he played in La Blonde Venus and La Petite Duchesse. Nana.

PRUNAIRE (LE PERE), a maker of sabots, who lived at Vivet. Furious at the conduct of his daughter Clara, he threatened to go to Paris and break her bones with kicks of his sabots. Au Bonheur des Dames.

PRUNAIRE (CLARA), daughter of a clog-maker in the forest of Vilet, came to Paris and got a situation in "The Ladies' Paradise." She lived a fast life, and, after alluring Colomban away from Genevieve Baudu, his intended wife, she ultimately disappeared. Au Bonheur des Dames.

PUECH, senior partner of the firm of Puech and Lacamp, oil-dealers in Plassans; was father of Felicite Puech. La Fortune des Rougon.

PUECH AND LACAMP, a firm of oil-dealers in Plassans, who were in financial difficulties when Pierre Rougon married Felicite, the daughter of the senior partner. The money put into the business by Rougon retrieved the position of the firm, and, the two partners having retired soon afterwards, he acquired the sole interest in it. La Fortune des Rougon.

PUECH (FELICITE). See Madame Felicite Rougon.

PUTOIS (MADAME), one of the workwomen employed by Gervaise Coupeau in her laundry. She was a little, lean woman of forty-five, "who worked at her ironing table without even taking off her bonnet, a black bonnet trimmed with green ribbons turning yellow." In character she was severely respectable. L'Assommoir.

Q

QUANDIEU, the oldest captain of the Montsou mines. During the strike, the energetic position taken up by him saved the Mirou pit from destruction by the infuriated strikers. Germinal.

QUENU (MADAME) was a widow with one son when she married her second husband, M. Quenu, a clerk in the sub-prefecture at Le Vigan. Three years after, M. Quenu died, leaving a son. Madame Quenu lavished all her affection on Florent, her elder son, and stinted herself to the verge of starvation in order that he might continue his legal studies. Before these were completed she succumbed to the hardship of her life. Le Ventre de Paris.

QUENU, the half-brother of Florent. After the death of his mother, he was taken to Paris by Florent, who supported him by teaching. He was at first idle and unsettled, but after Florent's arrest he was taken in by his uncle Gradelle, to whose business of pork-butcher, as well as to a considerable sum of money, he ultimately succeeded. After his uncle's death he married Lisa Macquart, who had previously assisted in the shop, and they had a daughter, Pauline. Business prospered, and the Quenus were soon in a position to remove to larger premises. Florent on his return from exile was kindly received by Quenu, who later on took no part in the efforts made by his wife to induce his brother to leave voluntarily. He was ignorant of his wife's action with reference to the subsequent arrest of Florent. Le Ventre de Paris.

He died of apoplexy in 1863, six months after the death of his wife, leaving a will under which M. Chanteau, his cousin became the guardian of his daughter Pauline. La Joie de Vivre.

QUENU (MADAME LISA), wife of the preceding. See Lisa Macquart.

QUENU (PAULINE), born 1852, daughter of Quenu, the pork-butcher, and Lisa Macquart, his wife. A quiet, amiable child, she unwittingly gave Mlle. Saget, who bullied her, information regarding her uncle Florent's history, which led to the clamour against him in the Market, and ultimately to his arrest. Le Ventre de Paris.

After the death of her father, who left her a fortune of a hundred and fifty thousand francs, Pauline went in 1863 to live at Bonneville with M. Chanteau, her guardian. She soon endeared herself to her relatives, and became much attached to her cousin Lazare. As she grew up and her nature developed, it became more and more her pleasure to sacrifice herself to her friends. She allowed her fortune to be squandered by the Chanteaus, and though engaged to be married to Lazare, she released him in order that he might marry another girl with whom he had become infatuated. After his mania became acute, it was she who endeavoured to comfort him, and to dispel his unreasoning fear of death. She never married. La Joie de Vivre.

After the death of Chanteau, she remained at Bonneville, resolved never to marry, in order that she might devote herself entirely to Lazare's little son, Paul. Le Docteur Pascal.

QUINETTE, a glover in Rue Neuve Saint-Augustine, whose business was seriously affected by the competition of "The Ladies' Paradise." Au Bonheur des Dames.

QUITTARD (AUGUSTE), son of Francoise Quittard. He was a child of six years of age, who was so ill of typhoid fever that he could not be removed from Bazeilles when the place was attacked by the Prussians. Early in the day, his mother was killed by a cannon ball, and the poor child lay for hours tossing with fever and calling for her. He was burned to death in his bed, as the Prussians, infuriated by the length of the struggle, wantonly set fire to the village. La debacle.

QUITTARD (FRANCOISE), widow of a mason, and now caretaker of the dye-works at Bazeilles, which belonged to Delaherche. Before the battle all the workers made their escape into Belgium, but Francoise was unable to leave on account of the illness of her little son. Early in the attack by the Prussians, the unfortunate woman was killed by a cannon ball. La Debacle.

R

RABIER, a tanner of Beaumont. He was a brother of Madame Franchomme, and after her death she left the child Angelique in the care of him and his wife. They treated the girl with such cruelty that she ultimately ran away, finding shelter with the Huberts. Le Reve.

RACHAEL, the maid-servant in Auguste Vabre's household. As Octave Mouret and Madame Vabre did not bribe her sufficiently, she revealed their intrigue to Vabre. She acted as his housekeeper for some time, but had to leave after the reconciliation between him and his wife. Pot-Bouille.

RAMBAUD (M.), half-brother of Abbe Jouve, had a large business in the Rue de Rambuteau, where he sold oil and other southern produce. Along with Abbe Jouve he showed much kindness to Helene Grandjean after the death of her husband, and was a constant visitor at her house. Later on, the Abbe tried to arrange a marriage between Rambaud and Helene, but at her request the decision was delayed. Meantime the love episode with Doctor Deberle intervened, followed by the death of Jeanne. Two years afterwards the marriage took place, Rambaud having previously sold his Paris business and removed to Marseilles. Une Page d'Amour.

He retired from business and went to live at Marseilles. Having by his marriage become a cousin of Madame Lisa Quenu, he was appointed a member of the family council which nominally had charge of her daughter's fortune. La Joie de Vivre.

Rambaud led a happy life with his wife, whom he adored. Le Docteur Pascal.

RAMBAUD (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Helene Mouret.

RAMOND (DR.), a pupil and fellow-practitioner of Dr. Pascal. He wished to marry Clotilde Rougon, but she refused him, and he subsequently married Mademoiselle Leveque. When Doctor Pascal was seized with an affection of the heart, Ramond diagnosed the nature of the illness, and subsequently attended him with unremitting care until his death. Le Docteur Pascal.

RAMOND (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Mademoiselle Leveque. Le Docteur Pascal.

RANVIER (ABBE), succeeded Abbe Jouve as cure at Montsou. He was of socialistic tendencies, and blamed the middle classes, who he said robbed the Church, for all the horrors produced by the strike at Montsou. Upon the troops who had been called on to fire upon the strikers, he called down the anger of God, predicting an hour of justice in which fire would descend from heaven to exterminate the bourgeoisie. He was finally removed by the Bishop as too compromising. Germinal.

RASSENEUR kept a tavern with the sign A l'Avantage between the settlement of the Deux-Cent-Quarante and the Voreux pit. He was formerly a good workman, but as he was an excellent speaker, and placed himself at the head of every strike, he was dismissed by the Mining Company. His wife already held a licence, and when he was thrown out of work he became an innkeeper himself. It was in his house that Etienne Lantier found lodgings when he first came to Montsou, and Souvarine also lodged there. Rasseneur's readiness of speech gave him great influence with the miners, but a rivalry arose between him and Lantier, whose new theories caught the popular ear. This jealousy caused him to take a side against the strike, solely because it had been proposed by Lantier, and this attitude made him very unpopular. But after the failure of the strike, which he had all along predicted, the inconstancy of the crowd turned in his favour and he soon regained his old popularity. Germinal.

RASSENEUR (MADAME), wife of the preceding. At the time her husband was dismissed from the pit, she already held a licence, and they subsequently worked together to extend the business, in which they had considerable success. She was much more radical in politics than her husband, but during the strike trouble was careful to show extreme politeness to everyone. Germinal.

RASTOIL, a neighbour of Francois Mouret. He was a rich man about sixty years of age, who had been president of the civil tribunal of Plassans for over twenty years. He was a Legitimist, and his house was used as a convenient meeting-place for the party. For some time he refused to compromise his political position with Abbe Faujas, who had all along concealed his opinions. Ultimately, however, he supported the candidate for the representation of Plassans proposed by Faujas, for which he was rewarded by an appointment for his son. La Conquete de Plassans.

RASTOIL (MADAME), wife of the preceding, was a listless and somewhat prudish woman whose old entanglement with M. Delangre was still remembered with amusement in the cafes. She was consulted by Madame Mouret regarding the Home for Girls proposed by Abbe Faujas, and ultimately agreed to act on the committee. La Conquete de Plassans.

RASTOIL (ANGELINE), elder daughter of M. Rastoil, the president of the civil tribunal of Plassans. Though twenty-six years old, and now very yellow and shrewish-looking, she still adopted the role of a young girl, and had hopes of securing a husband. La Conquete de Plassans.

RASTOIL (AURELIE), second daughter of M. Rastoil. Like her sister Angeline, she was plain-looking, and posed as a girl fresh from school, in the uncertain hope of gaining a husband. La Conquete de Plassans.

RASTOIL (SEVERIN), son of M. Rastoil, the president of the civil tribunal of Plassans. "He was a tall young man of five and twenty, with a badly shaped skull and a dull brain, who had been just called to the Bar, thanks to the position which his father held. The latter was anxiously dreaming of making him a substitute, despairing of his ever succeeding in winning any practice for himself." On the suggestion of Abbe Faujas he took a share in starting the Club for Young Men at Plassans. After the election of M. Delangre as representative of Plassans, Rastoil received the appointment of assistant public procurator at Faverolles. La Conquete de Plassans.

RAVAUD, a captain of the 106th Regiment of the line, commanded by Colonel de Vineuil. A young soldier in his company was the first of the wounded to be taken to the ambulance in Delaherche's house on 1st September, 1870. In March, 1871, captain Ravaud was at Paris, in a regiment of recent formation, the 124th of the line. Jean Macquart was corporal in his company in this regiment. La Debacle.

READING (LORD), proprietor of a racing stable. Bramah, one of his horses, once gained the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

REBUFAT, a farmer whose land adjoined that inherited by Adelaide Fouque. He purchased the Fouque property when it was sold by Pierre Rougon. After the death of his wife Rebufat and his son Justin treated her niece Miette Chantegreil very harshly. La Fortune des Rougon.

REBUFAT (MADAME EULALIE), wife of the preceding; "a big, dark, stubborn shrew." She was a sister of Chantegreil, and was therefore the aunt of Miette, who lived with her after her father's conviction. La Fortune des Rougon.

REBUFAT (JUSTIN), son of Rebufat. "A youth about twenty years old, a sickly, squint-eyed creature, who cherished an implacable hatred against his cousin Miette." La Fortune des Rougon.

REMANJOU (MADEMOISELLE), an old lady who lived in the same tenement house in Rue de la Goutte d'Or as the Coupeaus and the Lorilleux, where she made a scanty livelihood by dressing dolls. She was one of the guests at the Coupeaus' wedding party. L'Assommoir.

RENAUDIN, a notary at Paris, who adjusted the Contract of Marriage between Auguste Vabre and Berthe Josserand. He acted in concert with Duveyrier in selling some heritable property to the loss of other members of the family. Pot-Bouille.

RENAUDIN, a medical man at Grenelle. Josephine Dejoie was at one time cook in his house. L'Argent.

RENGADE, a gendarme whose eye was accidentally destroyed by Silvere Mouret during a struggle for possession of a carbine after the entry of the insurgents into Plassans. La Fortune des Rougon.

REUTHLINGUER (BARON DE), a banker, and possessor of one of the largest fortunes in Europe. He was a friend of Clorinde Balbi, and from her received valuable information on political subjects. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

RHADAMANTE, the sobriquet of a professor at the college of Plassans. He was supposed never to have laughed. L'Oeuvre.

RICHOMME, one of the captains of the Voreux pit. He tried in vain to prevent a collision between the strikers and the troops, and even when bricks were being thrown he went between two parties, imploring one and advising the other, careless of danger. He was one of the first to fall when the troops ultimately fired. Germinal.

RIVOIRE, a member of the firm of Piot and Rivoire. Au Bonheur des Dames.

ROBERT (MADAME), a regular customer at the restaurant Laure Piedefer. She was jealous of Nana's relations with Satin, and revenged herself by writing anonymous letters to Muffat and to other lovers of her enemy. Nana.

ROBIN-CHAGOT (VISCOUNT DE), vice-chairman of the board of directors of the Universal Bank. He was selected for the position in the belief that he would sign anything put before him without making too many inquiries. L'Argent.

ROBINEAU, "second hand" in the silk department at "The Ladies' Paradise." As the result of a conspiracy among his subordinates, he was dismissed, and soon afterwards bought the business of M. Vincard, a silk merchant, with money belonging to his wife. His capital was inadequate, but M. Gaujean, a silk manufacturer who had quarrelled with Octave Mouret, promised to give him unlimited credit. Robineau's intention was to break up the monopoly of the cheaper class of silks which Mouret had secured, but he soon found that each reduction in price which he made was met by a still larger one. As he had no other departments out of which to average his profits, ruin inevitably followed, and he attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself under an omnibus; his injuries were not serious, however, and he ultimately recovered. Au Bonheur des Dames.

ROBINEAU (MADAME), wife of the preceding. "Daughter of an overseer in the Department of Highways, entirely ignorant of business matters, she still retained the charming awkwardness of a girl educated in a Blois convent." Her small fortune enabled her husband to buy the silk business of M. Vincard, and she assisted him in carrying it on. Their subsequent ruin affected her less than the attempted suicide of her husband, to whom she was devoted. Au Bonheur des Dames.

ROBINE, a regular attender at the revolutionary meetings in Lebigre's wine-shop. He sat for hours listening to arguments but never made any remarks. He escaped arrest. Le Ventre de Paris.

ROBINE (MADAME), wife of the preceding, lived with her husband in Rue Saint-Denis. No one ever entered their house, and even her personal appearance was unknown to her husband's friends. Le Ventre de Paris.

ROBINOT (MADAME), an acquaintance of the Deberles. Une Page d'Amour.

ROBIQUET, farmer of La Chamade. Being near the end of his lease, he ceased to manure the land, allowing it to go to ruin. He was eventually turned out as he did not pay his rent. La Terre.

ROCHART (MONSEIGNEUR), Bishop of Faverolles. He upheld the Sisters of the Holy Family in the matter of the succession to Chevassu's estate, but was beaten by Eugene Rougon, the Minister of State, who supported the claim of the Charbonnels. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

ROCHAS, lieutenant in the 106th Regiment of the line, commanded by Colonel de Vineuil. The son of a journeyman mason from Limousin, he was born in Paris, and not caring for his father's calling, enlisted when he was only eighteen. He gained a corporal's stripes in Algeria, rose to the rank of sergeant at Sebastopol, and was promoted to a lieutenancy after Solferino. Fifteen years of hardship and heroic bravery was the price he had paid to be an officer, but his education was so defective that he could never be made a captain. He held the old traditions that a defeat of the French army was impossible, and all through the campaign against Germany in 1870 he refused to believe in the repeated catastrophes. In the fierce attack by the Prussians on the Hermitage, he fought desperately against an overwhelming force, and up to the end encouraged his men by shouting that the victory was theirs. In the end he fell, mowed down by a hail of bullets. La Debacle.

ROCHEFONTAINE, proprietor of a large factory at Chateaudun. He was desirous of serving as a Deputy, but did not secure the support of the Government, and, standing as an independent candidate, was defeated. Later, in consequence of the disgrace of M. de Chedeville, he became the official candidate, and in spite of a brusqueness of manner which made him unpopular, he was elected. La Terre.

RODRIGUEZ, a distant relative of the Empress, who made a claim upon the State for a large sum, which he said had been due since 1808. Eugene Rougon, the Minister of State, gave great offence to the Empress by opposing the claim. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

ROGNES-BOUQUEVAL (LES), an ancient and noble family whose estate, already much reduced by enforced sales, was declared national property in 1793, and was purchased piece by piece by Isidore Hourdequin. La Terre.

ROIVILLE (LES), members of Parisian society at whose house Baroness Sandorff occasionally met Gundermann. L'Argent.

ROSALIE, an old chair-mender at Rognes. The poor woman lived all alone, sick and without a copper. Abbe Godard came to her assistance. La Terre.

ROSE, a waitress in Lebigre's wine-shop. Le Ventre de Paris.

ROSE, servant in the household of Francois Mouret, was an old woman of crabbed nature and uncertain temper. She fell under the influence of Abbe Faujas, and encouraged her mistress in the religious observances which led to the neglect of her family. Later, when Madame Mouret's health became impaired, and she became subject to fits, it was chiefly Rose who threw suspicion on her master, encouraging the belief that he was insane and had inflicted injuries on his wife. La Conquete de Plassans.

ROSE, a peasant girl at Artaud; sister of Lisa. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

ROSE, maid-servant to Madame Hennebeau. She was not alarmed by the violence of the strikers, as, belonging to that district, she knew the miners, and believed them not to be wicked. Germinal.

ROSE, daughter of the concierge at the sub-prefecture at Sedan. She was a worker in Delaherche's factory, and he applied to her for information regarding the course of the battle, as she was in a position to hear the gossip of the officers and officials. When Napoleon III decided to request an armistice from the Prussians, it was Rose who furnished a tablecloth to be used as a white flag. La Debacle.

ROSE, niece of Aristide Saccard's hairdresser. She was a pretty girl of about eighteen, whom Saccard sent to his son Maxime under the pretext of nursing him, but in reality with a view to hastening the course of a nervous disease from which the young man suffered. Aristide agreed to pay her a percentage on the fortune which he hoped to acquire at his son's death. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUBAUD, assistant station-master at Havre. Born in the south of France, at Plassans, he had a carter for father. He had quitted the army with the stripes of a sergeant-major, and for a long time had been general porter at the station at Nantes. He had been promoted head porter at Barentin, and it was there that he first saw Severine Aubry, the god-daughter of President Grandmorin, whom he married. This was the sole romance of his existence, and it was coupled with fortune, for apart from Severine and her marriage portion of ten thousand francs, the President, now a director of the Western Railway Company, got him appointed assistant station-master at Havre. He proved an excellent official, and the only thing against him was a suspicion that he was affected by republican principles. For three years Roubaud's married life was a happy one, until a chance lie of his wife's gave him a clue to her former relations with Grandmorin. Driven frantic by jealousy, he forced her to reveal the truth, afterwards compelling her to become his accomplice in the murder of the President in the Havre express. The Roubauds established an alibi, though slight suspicion attached to them, and Denizet, the examining magistrate, endeavoured to fasten the crime on Cabuche. For political reasons it was not considered desirable that Grandmorin's character should be publicly discussed, and the inquiry regarding the murder was dropped. Roubaud was aware, however, that Jacques Lantier had strong suspicions, and tried to secure his silence by making him a friend; a friendship which soon developed into a liaison between Lantier and Severine. With the murder of Grandmorin, the disintegration of Roubaud's character began; he gradually became a confirmed gambler, and having lost all his own money began to use that which he had taken from the body of his victim in order to establish a false motive for the crime. The relations between him and his wife became more and more strained, until they reached such a pitch that Lantier and she planned his murder. The homicidal frenzy of Lantier, to which Severine fell a victim, ended the plot, but Roubaud and Cabuche, who arrived on the scene immediately after the murder, were arrested under what appeared to be suspicious circumstances, and, after trial, were sentenced to penal servitude for a crime which they did not commit. La Bete Humaine.

ROUBAUD (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Severine Aubry. La Bete Humaine.

ROUDIER, a regular attender at the political meetings held in the Rougons' yellow drawing-room. La Fortune des Rougon.

ROUGE D'AUNEAU (LE), lieutenant of Beau-Francois, leader of the band of brigands. He wrote a complaint while in prison. La Terre.

ROUGETTE, a cow bought by the sisters Mouche at the market of Cloyes. La Terre.

ROUGON, a young gardener who worked for the Fouque family, and afterwards married Adelaide. Fifteen months afterwards he died from sunstroke, leaving a son named Pierre. La Fortune des Rougon.

ROUGON, alias SACCARD (ARISTIDE), born 1815, youngest son of Pierre Rougon, was educated, like his brothers, at Plassans and Paris, but failed to pass his examinations. His character was a combination of covetousness and slyness: his greatest desire was the acquisition of rapid fortune, gained without work. In 1836 he married Angele Sicardot, who brought him a dowry of ten thousand francs. As Aristide did no work, and lived extravagantly, the money was soon consumed, and he and his wife were in such poverty that he was at last compelled to seek a situation. He procured a place at the Sub-Prefecture, where he remained nearly ten years, and only reached a salary of eighteen hundred francs. During that time "he longed, with ever-increasing malevolence and rancour, for those enjoyments of which he was deprived" by his lowly position. In 1848, when his brother Eugene left for Paris, he had a faint idea of following him, but remained in the hope of something turning up. In opposition to his father, he expressed Republican principles, and edited a newspaper called the Independant. At the time of the Coup d'Etat, he became alarmed at the course of events, and pretended that an accident to his hand prevented him from writing. His mother having given him private information as to the success of the Bonapartist cause, he changed the politics of his paper, and became reconciled to his parents. La Fortune des Rougon.

Early in 1852 he went to Paris, taking with him his wife and daughter Clotilde, then a child of four; his son Maxime he left at Plassans. Through the influence of his brother Eugene, he got an appointment as assistant surveying clerk at the Hotel de Ville, with a salary of two thousand four hundred francs. Before entering on his duties, however, he changed his name to Saccard on the suggestion of his brother, who feared that he might be compromised by him. In 1853, Aristide was appointed a surveying commissioner of roads, with an increased salary. At this period great schemes of city improvement were under discussion, and Aristide by spying and other shady means got early information as to the position of the proposed new streets. Great chances of fortune were arising, but he had no capital. The death of his wife enabled him to enter into a plan proposed by his sister Sidonie, who had heard of a family willing to make a considerable sacrifice to find a not too inquisitive husband for their daughter. He accordingly married Renee Beraud du Chatel, and gained control of a considerable sum of ready money, in addition to the fortune settled on his wife. By means of a cleverly contrived swindle, in which he was assisted by his friend Larsonneau, he got a fabulous price for some property acquired by him, and the foundation of his fortune was laid. From this time, he lived a life of the wildest extravagance, and, though his gains were frequently enormous, his expenses were so great that it was only with difficulty that he was able to prevent a catastrophe. La Curee.

He as appointed by Pauline Quenu's family council to be her "surrogate guardian." La Joie de Vivre.

After a last and disastrous land speculation, Saccard was obliged to leave his great house in the Parc Monceau, which he abandoned to his creditors. At first undecided as to his movements, he took a flat in the mansion in Rue Saint-Lazare, which belonged to Princess d'Orviedo. There he met Hamelin, the engineer, and his sister Caroline, with whom he soon became on intimate terms. Hamelin having spent much time in the East, had formed many schemes for great financial ventures, and Saccard was so impressed with these that he formed a syndicate for the purpose of carrying some of them out. With this view the Universal Bank was formed, and was at first very successful. By persistent advertising, and other means, the shares of the Bank were forced to an undue price, and then Saccard began to speculate in them on behalf of the Bank itself. The great financier Gundermann, with whom Saccard had quarrelled, then began a persistent attack on the Bank, selling its shares steadily day after day. Saccard continued to buy as long as he was able; but the end came, the price broke, and he, as well as the Bank, which was now one of its own largest shareholders, was ruined. Since his previous failure, Saccard had not been on friendly terms with his brother Eugene Rougon, and, some time before the collapse of the Bank, had made violent attacks upon him in his newspaper. Consequently Rougon did nothing to assist him in the criminal proceedings which followed the final catastrophe; he did not, however, wish to have a brother in jail, and arranged matters so that an appeal was allowed. Next day Saccard escaped to Belgium. L'Argent.

After the fall of the Second Empire, he returned to Paris, despite the sentence he had incurred. Some complicated intrigue must have been at work, for not only did he obtain a pardon, but once more took part in promoting large undertakings, with a finger in every pie and a share of every bribe. In 1872 he was actively engaged in journalism, having been appointed Director of the Epoque, a Republican journal which made a great success by publishing the papers found in the Tuileries. Covetous of his son's fortune, he hastened a disease from which Maxime suffered, by encouraging him in vicious courses, and in the end got possession of the whole estate. By a singular irony, Aristide, now returned to his original Republicanism, was in a position to protect his brother Eugene, whom in earlier days he had so often compromised. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (MADAME ANGELE), first wife of the preceding, was a daughter of commander Sicardot. She brought her husband a dowry of ten thousand francs. La Fortune des Rougon.

Along with her daughter Clotilde, she accompanied her husband to Paris in 1852, and being an amiable woman without ambition she was quite satisfied with the modest position he at first secured. She died in 1854 of inflammation of the lungs. La Curee.

ROUGON, alias SACCARD (MADAME RENEE), the second wife of Aristide Rougon, alias Saccard, was the elder daughter of M. Beraud du Chatel, the last representative of an old middle-class family. Having become seriously compromised, she was hurriedly married to Saccard through the agency of his sister Madame Sidonie, and a considerable sum of money as well as land was settled upon her. Wholly given over to pleasure and extravagance, she soon got deeply into debt, and her husband took advantage of this from time to time by inducing her to make over to him her property, in order that he might speculate with it. She engaged in a shameful liaison with her husband's son Maxime, which ultimately brought her great unhappiness, and she died of acute meningitis at an early age. La Curee.

ROUGON (CHARLES), born 1857, son of Maxime Rougon, alias Saccard, and of Justine Megot, a maid-servant of Madame Renee Saccard. The child and his mother were sent to the country with a little annuity of twelve hundred francs. La Curee.

At fifteen years of age he lived at Plassans with his mother, who had married a saddler named Anselme Thomas. Charles was a degenerate who reproduced at a distance of three generations his great-great-grandmother, Adelaide Fouque. He did not look more than twelve years old, and his intelligence was that of a child of five. There was in him a relaxation of tissues, due to degeneracy, and the slightest exertion produced hemorrhage. Charles was not kindly treated by his stepfather, and generally lived with his great-grandmother Felicite Rougon. He was frequently taken to visit the aged Adelaide Fouque in the asylum at Les Tulettes, and on one occasion, in 1873, when he chanced to be left alone with her he was seized with bleeding at the nose, and, under the fixed eyes of his ancestress, he slowly bled to death. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (CLOTILDE), born 1847, daughter of Aristide Rougon, accompanied her father and mother to Paris in 1852. After the death of her mother in 1854, she was sent to live with Dr. Pascal Rougon, her uncle, who had frequently offered to take her to enliven his silent scientific home. La Curee.

At Plassans Clotilde lived a quiet healthy life, much of it spent in the open air. She was not highly educated, but having considerable artistic talent was able to assist Doctor Pascal by making illustrations for his great work on heredity. At one period she developed strong religious tendencies under the influence of Martine, the doctor's old servant, who took her to church, and imbued the girl with her own bigoted ideas regarding the salvation of Pascal. Her grandmother, Felicite Rougon, who wished, for family reasons, to destroy Pascal's manuscripts on the subject of heredity, played on Clotilde's feelings, and induced her to assist in a search for the hated work. Rougon surprised them in the act, and subsequently laid bare to Clotilde the whole facts of the terrible family history. In time the mysticism of the Church gave place to passionate love between Clotilde and Pascal. The doctor felt, however, that she was sacrificing her youth for him, and sent her to Paris to live with her brother Maxime. Soon afterwards, Pascal became ill, and died before she was able to return. A child was born some months later. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (EUGENE), born 1811, eldest son of Pierre Rougon, was educated at Plassans and Paris, and was called to the Bar. He practised in the local Court for a number of years, but with little success. Though of lethargic appearance, he was a man of ability, who "cherished lofty ambitions, possessed domineering instincts, and showed a singular contempt for trifling expedients and small fortunes." With the Revolution of February, 1848, Eugene felt that his opportunity had come, and he left for Paris with scarcely five hundred francs in his pocket. He was able to give his parents early information of the designs of the Bonapartes, and so prepared the way for the events of the Coup d'Etat of 1851, when the family fortunes were made. La Fortune des Rougon.

During his early days in Paris Rougon resided at the Hotel Vanneau, kept by Madame Correur, and while there he made the acquaintance of Gilquin and Du Poizet, both of whom assisted him in spreading the Bonapartist propaganda. By his exertions in this cause he established a claim for reward, and he was appointed a member of the State Council, ultimately becoming its President. He fell into disfavour, however, with the Court on account of his opposition to a claim for two million francs by a distant relative of the Empress Eugenie. Finding that his position was insecure, he tendered his resignation to the Emperor, who accepted it. About this time he met Clorinde Balbi, an Italian adventuress, who endeavoured to induce him to marry her. Carried away for the time being, Rougon made overtures to her which she resented, and he was on the point of offering her marriage. Reflection on her somewhat equivocal position in society induced him to think better of this, and he offered to arrange a marriage between her and his friend Delestang. The offer was accepted, and the marriage took place. Soon after, Rougon married Veronique Beulin-d'Orchere. During his retirement Rougon was surrounded by a band of followers, the Charbonnels, Du Poizet, Kahn, and others, who in the hope of profiting by his return to office lost no chance of establishing a claim upon him. After the Orsini plot against the life of the Emperor, of which Rougon had prior information through Gilquin, the need for a strong man arose, and he was again called to office, being appointed Minister of the Interior. His harshness in carrying out reprisals against the Republican party, and even more, his recklessness in finding appointments for his friends, led to a public outcry, and his position again became undermined. Clorinde, who had never forgiven him for not marrying her, did much to foment the disaffection, and even his own band of followers turned against him. Always quick to act, Rougon again placed his resignation in the hands of the Emperor, who to his surprise accepted it. Three years later he was once more a member of the Corps Legislatif, and having brought his principles into accordance with the more liberal views then professed by the Emperor, he gave his strong support to the measures giving effect to them. In consequence, he was appointed by the Emperor as a Minister without department, and commissioned to defend the new Policy. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

When his brother Aristide came to Paris, Eugene found a situation for him, but, fearing to be compromised by him, suggested that he should change his name to Saccard which he did. There was no intimacy between the brothers, but Eugene occasionally visited Aristide at the great house built by him in the Parc Monceau. La Curee.

After Saccard's bankruptcy, Eugene refused to have any further connection with him, though he tacitly approved of the foundation of the Universal Bank. The Bank having failed, however, he did nothing to stay legal proceedings against his brother; but, after a sentence of imprisonment had been passed, he connived at his escape from the country while the sentence was under appeal. L'Argent.

He continued to take a lively interest in Plassans, and it was by him that Abbe Faujas was sent there to counteract the clerical influence, which at that time was strongly Legitimist. He kept up a correspondence with his mother, whom he advised as to each step she should take in political matters. La Conquete de Plassans.

After the fall of the Empire, Eugene became a simple Deputy, and in the Assembly remained to defend the old order of things which the downfall had swept away. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (MADAME EUGENE), wife of the preceding. See Veronique Beulin-d'Orchere. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

ROUGON (MARTHE), born 1820, daughter of Pierre Rougon; married in 1840 her cousin Francois Rougon; had three children. La Fortune des Rougon.

She accompanied her husband to Marseilles, where by close attention to business they accumulated a fortune in fifteen years, returning to Plassans at the end of that period and settling down there. Her life at Plassans was a happy one until the household fell under the influence of Abbe Faujas. From the first she was in love with the priest, and as he gave her no encouragement in this, she devoted herself to church services to the entire neglect of her household and family. As time went on, her passion for the Abbe grew more extreme, and her health became undermined to a serious extent. She became subject to fits of an epileptic nature, and having injured herself in some of these, she allowed the injuries to be attributed to her husband, whom she had now grown to regard as an encumbrance. Though she was aware that he was not insane, she allowed him to be removed to an asylum, where confinement soon completed the work begun by her own conduct. The Abbe Faujas having resolutely resisted her advances, her health became still worse, and she died in her mother's house on the same night that her husband escaped from the asylum and burned down their old home. La Conquete de Plassans.

ROUGON (MAXIME), born 1840, son of Aristide Rougon. La Fortune des Rougon.

When his father went to Paris in 1852, Maxime remained at school at Plassans, not going to Paris till after his father's second marriage. From early youth he was of vicious character, and the idleness and extravagance of the life in his father's house only completed the training begun at Plassans. After carrying on a disgraceful liaison with his father's second wife, he married Louise de Mareuil, through whom he got a considerable dowry. La Curee.

After the death of his wife, six months after their marriage, he returned to Paris, where he lived quietly upon the dowry brought to him by her. He refused to join in any of his father's schemes, or to assist him in any way, and was consequently not affected by the failure of the Universal Bank. L'Argent.

After the war he re-established himself in his mansion in Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne, where he lived on the fortune left by his wife. "He had become prudent, however, with the enforced restraint of a man whose marrow is diseased, and who seeks by artifice to ward off the paralysis which threatened him." In the fear of this impending illness, he induced his sister Clotilde to leave Doctor Pascal, and go to live with him in Paris, but in his constant fear of being taken advantage of he soon began to be suspicious of her, as he did of every one who served him. His father, who wished to hasten his own inheritance, encouraged him in a renewal of his vicious courses, and he died of locomotor ataxy at the age of thirty-three. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (MADAME MAXIME). See Louise de Mareuil.

ROUGON (PASCAL), born 1813, second son of Pierre Rougon, "had an uprightness of spirit, a love of study, a retiring modesty which contrasted strangely with the feverish ambitions and unscrupulous intrigues of his family." Having acquitted himself admirably in his medical studies at Paris, he returned to Plassans, where he lived a life of quiet study and work. He had few patients, but devoted himself to research, particularly on the subject of heredity, with special reference to its results on his own family. In the hope of alleviating suffering, he followed the Republican insurgents in their march from Plassans in December, 1851. La Fortune des Rougon.

In 1854 his niece Clotilde, daughter of his brother Aristide, went to live with him. He had frequently offered to take her, but nothing was arranged till after the death of her mother, at which time she was about seven years old. La Curee.

His practice as a medical man extended to Les Artaud, and he attended his nephew Abbe Serge Mouret during an attack of brain fever. On the priest's partial recovery, he removed him to the Paradou, and left him in the care of Albine, niece of old Jeanbernat, the caretaker of that neglected demesne. Dr. Pascal was much attached to Albine, and deeply regretted the sad love affair which resulted from Mouret's forgetfulness of his past. He had no religious beliefs himself, and he urged Mouret to return to Albine, but the voice of the Church proved too strong in the end. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

At sixty years of age Pascal was so fresh and vigorous that, though his hair and beard were white, he might have been mistaken for a young man with powdered locks. He had lived for seventeen years at La Souleiade, near Plassans, with his niece Clotilde and his old servant Martine, having amassed a little fortune, which was sufficient for his needs. He had devoted his life to the study of heredity, finding typical examples in his own family. He brought up Clotilde without imposing on her his own philosophic creed, even allowing Martine to take her to church regularly. But this tolerance brought about a serious misunderstanding between them, for the girl fell under the influence of religious mysticism, and came to look with horror on the savant's scientific pursuits. Discovered by him in an attempt to destroy his documents, he explained to Clotilde fully and frankly the bearing of their terrible family history on his theory of heredity, with the result that her outlook on life was entirely changed; he had opposed the force of human truth against the shadows of mysticism. The struggle between Pascal and Clotilde brought them to a knowledge of mutual love, and an illicit relationship was established between them. He would have married her (this being legal in France), but having lost most of his money he was unwilling to sacrifice what he believed to be her interests, and persuaded her to go to Paris to live with her brother Maxime. Soon after her departure he was seized with an affection of the heart, and, after some weeks of suffering, died only an hour before her return. Immediately after his death his mother, Madame Felicite Rougon, took possession of his papers, and in an immense auto-da-fe destroyed in an hour the records of a lifetime of work. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (PIERRE), born 1787, legitimate son of Adelaide Fouque, was a thrifty, selfish lad who saw that his mother by her improvident conduct was squandering the estate to which he considered himself sole heir. His aim was to induce his mother and her two illegitimate children to remove from the house and land, and in this he was ultimately successful. Having sold the property for fifty thousand francs, he induced his mother, who by this time was of weak intellect, to sign a receipt for that sum, and was so able to defraud his half-brother and sister of the shares to which they would have been entitled. Soon thereafter he married Felicite Puech, the daughter of an oil dealer in Plassans. The firm of Puech and Lacamp was not prosperous, but the money brought by Pierre Rougon retrieved the situation, and after a few years the two original partners retired. Fortune, however, soon changed, and for thirty years there was a continual struggle to make ends meet. Three sons and two daughters were born, and their education was a heavy drain upon their parents' means. In 1845 Pierre and his wife retired from business with forty thousand francs at the most. Instigated by the Marquis de Carnavant, they went in for politics, and soon regular meetings of the reactionary party came to be held in their "yellow drawing-room." Advised, however, by their son Eugene, they resolved to support the cause of the Bonapartes, and at the time of the Coup d'Etat of 1851 Pierre was the leader of that party in Plassans. Having concealed himself when the Republican insurgents entered Plassans, he avoided capture, and after they retired he led the band of citizens which recaptured the town hall. This bloodless victory having been somewhat minimized by the townspeople, Pierre and his wife, with a view to establishing a strong claim for subsequent reward, bribed Antoine Macquart to lead the Republicans left in Plassans to an attack on the town hall. To meet this he prepared a strong ambuscade, and the Republicans were repulsed with considerable loss. As a result of this treachery, Pierre was regarded by his fellow-citizens as the saviour of the town, and the Government subsequently appointed him Receiver of Taxes, decorating him with the Cross of the Legion of Honour. La Fortune des Rougon.

He settled down quietly and took little part in public affairs, though his wife continued to hold weekly receptions at which members of the different political parties were represented. La Conquete de Plassans.

He became so corpulent that he was unable to move, and was carried off by an attack of indigestion on the night of 3rd September, 1870, a few hours after hearing of the catastrophe of Sedan. The downfall of the regime which he prided himself on having helped to establish seemed to have crushed him like a thunderbolt. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (MADAME FELICITE), wife of the preceding, and daughter of Puech, the oil-dealer. She was married in 1810, and had three sons and two daughters. A woman of strong ambitions, she hoped to better her social position by the aid of her sons, on whose education she spent large sums. Disappointed in this hope for many years, she and her husband retired from business with barely sufficient means to keep themselves in comfort. She, instigated by the Marquis de Carnavant (her putative father), urged her husband to take part in politics, and meetings of the reactionary party were regularly held in her "yellow drawing-room." While the success of the Coup d'Etat was in some doubt, she encouraged her husband in maintaining the position he had taken up; and, having ascertained that the success of the Bonapartists was assured she arranged with Antoine Macquart for the attack on the town hall, the repulse of which led to the rise of the family fortunes. La Fortune des Rougon.

After her husband's appointment as Receiver of Taxes, she continued her weekly receptions, but endeavoured to give them a non-political character by inviting representatives of all parties. Her son Eugene, now a Minister of State, kept her advised as to the course she should pursue, and on his instructions she gave some assistance to Abbe Faujas in his political "conquest of Plassans." La Conquete de Plassans.

In 1856 she interested herself in a lawsuit raised by M. Charbonnel, a retired oil-merchant of Plassans, and requested her son Eugene, the President of the Council of State, to use his influence on behalf of her friend. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

After the disasters of the war, Plassans escaped from her dominion, and she had to content herself with the role of dethroned queen of the old regime. Her ruling passion was the defence of the glory of the Rougons, and the obliteration of everything tending to reflect on the family name. In this connection she welcomed the death of Adelaide Fouque, the common ancestress of the Rougons and the Macquarts, and she did nothing to save her old accomplice Antoine Macquart from the terrible fate which overtook him. After these events, her only remaining trouble was the work on family heredity which had for years occupied her son Pascal. Assisted by his servant Martine, she eventually succeeded in burning the whole manuscript to which Pascal had devoted his life. Her triumph was then secure, and in order to raise a monument to the glory of the family she devoted a large part of her fortune to the erection of an asylum for the aged, to be known as the Rougon Asylum. At eighty-two years of age, she laid the foundation stone of the building, and in doing so conquered Plassans for the third time. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (SIDONIE), born 1818, daughter of Pierre Rougon. La Fortune des Rougon.

She married at Plassans an attorney's clerk, named Touche, and together they went to Paris, setting up business in the Rue Saint-Honore, as dealers in fruit from the south of France. The venture was unsuccessful, and the husband soon disappeared. At the rise of the Second Empire, Sidonie was thirty-five; but she dressed herself with so little care and had so little of the woman in her manner that she looked much older. She carried on business in lace and pianos, but did not confine herself to these trades; when she had sold ten francs worth of lace she would insinuate herself into her customer's good graces and become her man of business, attending attorneys, advocates, and judges on her behalf. The confidences she everywhere received put her on the track of good strokes of business, often of a nature more than equivocal, and it was she who arranged the second marriage of her brother Aristide. She was a true Rougon, who had inherited the hunger for money, the longing for intrigue, which was the characteristic of the family. La Curee.

In 1851 she had a daughter by an unknown father. The child, who was named Angelique Marie, was at once sent to the Foundling Hospital by her mother, who never made any inquiry about her afterwards. Le Reve.

She attended the funeral of her cousin, Claude Lantier, the artist. Arrived at his house, "she went upstairs, turned round the studio, sniffed at all its bare wretchedness, and then walked down again with a hard mouth, irritated at having taken the trouble to come." L'Oeuvre.

"After a long disappearance from the scene, Sidonie, weary of the shady callings she had plied, and now of a nunlike austerity, retired to the gloomy shelter of a conventual kind of establishment, holding the purse-strings of the Oeuvre du Sacrament, an institution founded with the object of assisting seduced girls, who had become mothers, to secure husbands." Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (VICTOR), son of Aristide Saccard and Rosaline Chavaille. Brought up in the gutter, he was from the first incorrigibly lazy and vicious. La Mechain, his mother's cousin, after discovering his paternity, told the facts to Caroline Hamelin, who, to save Saccard annoyance, paid over a considerable sum and removed the boy to L'Oeuvre du Travail, one of the institutions founded by the Princess d'Orviedo. Here every effort was made to reclaim him, but without success; vice and cunning had become his nature. In the end he made a murderous attack upon Alice du Beauvilliers, who was visiting the hospital, and having stolen her purse, made his escape. Subsequent search proved fruitless; he had disappeared in the under-world of crime. L'Argent.

"In 1873, Victor had altogether vanished, living, no doubt, in the shady haunts of crime—since he was in no penitentiary—let loose upon the world like some brute foaming with the hereditary virus, whose every bite would enlarge that existing evil—free to work out his own future, his unknown destiny, which was perchance the scaffold." Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (——-), the child of Doctor Pascal Rougon and of Clotilde Rougon, born some months after his father's death. Pascal a few minutes before he died, drew towards him the genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquart family, over which he had spent so many years, and in a vacant space wrote the words: "The unknown child, to be born in 1874. What will it be?" Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUSSE (LA), a peasant girl of Les Artaud, who assisted to decorate the church for the festival of the Virgin. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

ROUSSEAU, one of the auditors of the Universal Bank, an office which he shared with Lavigniere, under whose influence he was to a great extent. L'Argent.

ROUSSELOT (MONSEIGNEUR), Bishop of Plassans, an amiable but weak man, who was entirely under the influence of Abbe Fenil. Having got into disfavour with the Government over the election of a Legitimist as Deputy, he was anxious to retrieve his position, and with this object agreed to appoint Abbe Faujas vicar of Saint-Saturnin's church. This led to a quarrel with Abbe Fenil, who, of course, resented the appointment. The Bishop being still in some doubt as to the standing of Abbe Faujas with the Government, went to Paris, where he interviewed Eugene Rougon, the Minister of State. Satisfied with the information which he received, he threw himself heartily into the political struggle then proceeding at Plassans, giving Faujas every assistance in carrying out his schemes on behalf of the Bonapartist candidate. La Conquete de Plassans.

ROUSSIE (LA), a woman who had formerly worked as a putter in the Voreux pit. Germinal.

ROUSTAN (ABBE), one of the clergy of Sainte-Eustache church. Madame Lisa Quenu consulted him as to her proposed course of action regarding Florent. Le Ventre de Paris.

ROUVET, an old peasant who lived in the same village as Zephyrin Lacour and Rosalie Pichon. One of her pleasures consisted in calling to mind the sayings of the old man. Une Page d'Amour.

ROZAN (DUC DE), was a young man of dissolute life, who, after getting the control of his fortune, soon went through the greater part of it. He was the lover of Renee Saccard for a time. La Curee.

ROZAN (DUCHESSE DE), mother of the preceding. She kept her son so short of money that, till he was thirty-five, he seldom had more than a dozen louis at a time. Her death was largely occasioned by the knowledge of the enormous amount of debts her son had incurred. La Curee.

RUSCONI (CHEVALIER), the Sardinian Minister at Paris, a friend of Comtesse Balbi, and her daughter. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

S

SABATANI, a native of the Levant, who appeared in Paris after defaulting on some foreign Stock Exchange. He was a handsome man, and little by little gained the confidence of the Bourse "by scrupulous correctness of behaviour and an unremitting graciousness even towards the most disreputable." He began doing business with Mazard by depositing a small sum as "cover" in the belief that the insignificance of the amount would in time be forgotten; and "he evinced great prudence, increasing the orders in a stealthy gradual fashion, pending the day when, with a heavy settlement to meet, it would be necessary for him to disappear." When Saccard founded the Universal Bank, he selected Sabatani as the "man of straw" in whose name the shares held by the Bank itself were to be taken up. Sabatani soon increased his speculations to an enormous extent, gaining large sums, but after the collapse of the Universal Bank he disappeared without paying his "differences," thereby contributing largely to the ruin of Mazard. L'Argent.

SABOT, a vine-grower of Brinqueville. He was a renowned joker, who entered into a competition with Hyacinthe Fouan, but was beaten by him. La Terre.

SACCARD, the name assumed by Aristide Rougon, on the suggestion of his brother Eugene. See Rougon (Aristide). La Curee.

SACCARD (VICTOR). See Victor Rougon.

SAFFRE (DE), secretary to Eugene Rougon, the Minister of State. La Curee.

SAGET (MADEMOISELLE), an old lady who had lived in the Rue Pirouette for forty years. She never spoke about herself, but she spent her life in getting information about her neighbours, carrying her prying curiosity so far as to listen behind their doors and open their letters. She went about all day pretending she was marketing, but in reality merely spreading scandal and getting information. By bullying little Pauline Quenu, she got a hint of Florent's past history, which she promptly spread through the markets, even going the length of writing an anonymous letter to the Prefect of Police. Le Ventre de Paris.

SAINT-FIRMIN (OSCAR DE), a character in La Petite Duchesse, a play by Fauchery. The part was played by Prulliere. Nana.

SAINT-GERMAIN (MADEMOISELLE DE), was the owner of a princely house in Rue Saint-Lazare, which after her death became the property of Princess d'Orviedo. L'Argent.

SAINTS-ANGES (LA MERE DES), superior of the Convent of the Visitation at Clermont. She saved from the cloister Christine Hallegrain, who had not a religious vocation, and obtained for her a situation to Madame de Vanzade. L'Oeuvre.

SALMON, a speculator on the Paris Bourse who passed for a man of extraordinary acumen by listening to everyone and saying nothing. He answered only by smiles, and one could never tell in what he was speculating or whether he was speculating at all. L'Argent.

SALNEUVE (DE), a man of considerable importance in the Second Empire, whose influence was secured for Eugene Rougon by Clorinde Balbi. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

SAMBUC (GUILLAUME), one of the francs-tireurs who carried on a guerilla warfare against the Germans in 1870. He was the worthy son of a family of scoundrels, and lived by theft and rapine. He furnished most valuable information to the French generals regarding the movement of the Prussians to surprise Beaumont, but his information was disregarded till too late. The francs-tireurs had a particular hatred against Goliath Steinberg, the German spy, and, instigated by Silvine Morange, Sambuc arranged for his capture, afterwards killing him by cutting his throat. La Debacle.

SAMBUC (PROSPER), brother of the preceding. Of a nature docile and hard-working, he hated the life of the woods, and would have liked to be a farm labourer. He entered the army and became one of the Chasseurs d'Afrique. Sent to France to take part in the war against Germany, he shared in many weary marches, but saw no fighting, till the battle of Sedan, when his horse, Zephir, which he loved like a brother, was killed under him. He made his escape after the battle, and having been able to change his uniform for the clothes of a countryman, he returned to Remilly and got employment on the farm of Fouchard. La Debacle.

SANDORFF, a member of the Austrian Embassy at Paris. He married Mlle. de Ladricourt, who was much younger than he. He was very niggardly. L'Argent.

SANDORFF (BARONESS), wife of the Councillor to the Austrian Embassy, who was thirty-five years older than herself. She was an inveterate speculator, and, as her husband refused to assist her, she found it necessary to have recourse to her lovers when her losses were greater than usual. She stopped at nothing to gain information, and at one time was on intimate terms with Saccard. Having quarrelled with him, she hastened the downfall of the Universal Bank, by giving information to Gundermann which caused him to continue his attack on the Bank. L'Argent.

SANDOZ (PERE), a Spaniard who took refuge in France in consequence of a political disturbance in which he was involved. He started near Plassans a paper mill with new machinery of his own invention. When he died, almost heart-broken by the petty local jealousy that had sought to hamper him in every way, his widow found herself in a position so involved, and burdened with so many tangled lawsuits, that the whole of her remaining means were swallowed up. L'Oeuvre.

SANDOZ MERE (MADAME), wife of the preceding, was a native of Burgundy. Yielding to her hatred of the Provencals, whom she blamed for the death of her husband, and even for the slow paralysis from which she herself was suffering, she migrated to Paris, with her son Pierre, who then supported her out of a clerk's small salary. In Rue d'Enfer she occupied a single room on the same flat as her son, and there, disabled by paralysis, lived in morose and voluntary solitude, surrounded by his tender care. Later, Pierre, who was now married, and was making a considerable income, took a house in Rue Nollet, and there Madame Sandoz passed her remaining years. L'Oeuvre.

SANDOZ (PIERRE), a famous novelist whose youth was spent at Plassans, where at school he was the inseparable companion of Claude Lantier and Dubuche. The favourite amusement of the boys was walking, and together they took long excursions, spending whole days in the country. After the death of his father Sandoz went to Paris, where he got employment at a small salary at the Mairie of the fifth arrondissement, in the office for registration of births; he was chained there by the thought of his mother, whom he had to support, and to whom he was tenderly attached. Presently he published his first book: a series of mild sketches, brought with him from Plassans, among which only a few rougher notes indicated the mutineer, the lover of truth and power. He lived at this time with his mother in a little house in Rue d'Enfer, and there he received each Thursday evening his old friends from Plassans, Claude Lantier and Dubuche, and with them Fagerolles, Mahoudeau, Jory, Gagniere, now reunited at Paris, and all animated by the same passion for art. He was still obsessed by a desire for literary glory, and had thoughts of writing a poem on some vast subject, but at last he hit on a scheme which soon took form in his mind. With reference to it he said, "I am going to take a family, and I shall study its members, one by one, whence they come, whither they go, how they react upon one another—in short, humanity in a small compass, the way in which humanity grows and behaves. On the other hand, I shall set my men and women in a determined period of history, which will provide me with the necessary surroundings and circumstances, a slice of history—you understand, eh? A series of fifteen or twenty books, episodes that will cling together although having each a separate framework, a suite of novels with which I shall be able to build myself a house for my old age if they don't crush me." The first of the novels met with some success, and Sandoz having resigned his appointment, and put his trust entirely in literature, married a young girl named Henriette, the daughter of middle-class parents, and removed his house to Rue Nollet. In course of time his circumstances became still more comfortable, and he again removed to a large house in Rue de Londres. When Claude Lantier fell into misery and despair, a gradual separation came about between him and his friends, but Sandoz remained true to the old companionship. He was one of the few mourners who attended the funeral of the unfortunate artist. L'Oeuvre.

SANDOZ (MADAME HENRIETTE), wife of the preceding. She was an orphan, the daughter of a small shop-keeper, without a penny, but pretty and intelligent. She occupied herself much with the affairs of the kitchen, being specially proud of some of her dishes. Even later, when the family was more prosperous and had removed to a large flat in Rue de Londres, Henriette continued to take personal charge, out of affection for her husband, whose only fault was a tendency to gluttony. L'Oeuvre.

SANQUIRINO (DUCHESSE), a lady of the Italian aristocracy, who resided at Paris. She gave Eugene Rougon very unsatisfactory information regarding Comtesse Balbi and her daughter Clorinde. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

SANS-POUCE, one of the brigands of the band of Beau-Francois. La Terre.

SAPIN, sergeant in Captain Beaudoin's company of the 106th Regiment of the line. "The son of a Lyons grocer in a small way of business, spoilt by his mother, who was dead, and unable to get on with his father, he had remained in the regiment disgusted with everything, but unwilling to be bought out." Later he became engaged to one of his cousins, who had a small dowry, and began to take an interest in life. During the march to Sedan, however, he became impressed with the idea that he would be killed, and this belief was realized during the fighting on 1st September, 1870. La Debacle.

SAPIN (LA), a disreputable old woman at Magnolles who performed illegal operations and pretended to work magic.

SARRIET (MADAME), sister of Madame Lecoeur and of Madame Gavard; mother of La Sarriette. Le Ventre de Paris.

SARRIET, usually called La Sarriette, was the niece of Madame Lecoeur. She grew up in the markets and her sympathies were with the lower ranks of the people. At twenty she set up in business as a fruit-dealer, and took as her lover a young man named Jules, who was employed by her aunt as a porter. After the arrest of Gavard, her uncle by marriage, La Sarriette and her aunt divided his money between them. Le Ventre de Paris.

SARTEUR, a journeyman hatter at Plassans. He was afflicted with homicidal mania, and was confined for a time in the asylum at Tulettes. While there he was treated by Doctor Pascal Rougon, who affected a cure by hypodermic injections of a substance with which he had long experimented. Sarteur was released from the asylum, but the cure was not permanent, for a few months afterwards the unfortunate man became conscious of a return of his homicidal mania, and, to prevent its operation, hanged himself. Le Docteur Pascal.

SATIN, a friend of Nana from childhood, having, like her, attended the school of Mademoiselle Josse. She was a regular customer at Laure Piedefer's restaurant, where she met Madame Robert. She lived for a time with Nana, of whom she was intensely jealous, and in time gained control of the whole household. She died in the hospital of Lariboisiere. Nana.

SAUCISSE (LA PERE), an old peasant of Rognes, who owned an acre of land which he sold to Pere Fouan for an annuity of fifteen sous a day. In order to dupe the old man, he pretended to be in bad health. Later, terrorized by Buteau, he cancelled the agreement, and repaid half the sums he had received. La Terre.

SAUVAGNAT, a friend of Pluchart. He lived at Marchiennes. Germinal.

SAUVAGNAT, chief of the depot at Havre, lived in a cottage near the engine depot, which his sister Philomene kept for him, but greatly neglected. He was an obstinate man and a strict disciplinarian, greatly esteemed by his superiors, but had met with the utmost vexation on account of his sister, even to the point of being threatened with dismissal. If the Company bore with her now on his account, he only kept her with him because of the family tie; but this did not prevent him belabouring her so severely with blows whenever he caught her at fault that he frequently left her half dead on the floor. La Bete Humaine.

SAUVAGNAT (PHILOMENE), sister of the preceding, was a tall, thin woman of thirty-two, who after numerous love-affairs had settled down with Pecqueux, whose mistress she became. She had the reputation of drinking. A subsequent intrigue between her and Jacques Lantier excited the jealousy of Pecqueux to the point of murder. La Bete Humaine.

SAUVEUR (MADAME), a dress-maker, who numbered Madame Desforges among her customers. She frequented Mouret's shop, Au Bonheur des Dames, on the occasions of great sales, purchasing large quantities of stuff which she afterwards sold to her own customers at higher prices. Au Bonheur des Dames.

SAUVIGNY (DE), judge of the race for the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

SCHLOSSER, a speculator on the Paris Bourse. He was secretly associated with Sabatani, with whom he carried out many schemes to their mutual advantage. L'Argent.

SCOTS (H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF). See Ecosse.

SEDILLE, a native of Lyons, who established himself in Paris, and after thirty years' toil succeeded in making his silk business one of the best known in the city. Unfortunately he acquired a passion for gambling, and a couple of successful ventures made him altogether lose his head. From that time he neglected his business, and ruin lay inevitably at the end. On the invitation of Saccard he became a Director of the Universal Bank. Like the other Directors, he speculated largely in the shares of the Bank; but, unlike most of them, he did not sell in time, with the result that he was completely ruined, and his bankruptcy followed. L'Argent.

SEDILLE (GUSTAVE), son of M. Sedille, the silk merchant. To the disappointment of his father, he despised commercial pursuits, and cared only for pleasure. In the hope that he might take an interest in finance, he was given a situation in the office of Mazard, the stockbroker, where, however, he did little work, and soon engaged in speculations on his own account. The failure of the Universal Bank left him penniless, and deep in debt. L'Argent.

SICARDOT (COMMANDER), the father-in-law of Aristide Rougon. He had the strongest intellect of the politicians who met in Pierre Rougon's yellow drawing-room. He was taken prisoner by the insurgents at the time of the Coup d'Etat. La Fortune des Rougon.

SICARDOT, the name of Aristide Rougon's wife's family. He adopted this name when he went to Paris in 1851, using it for considerable time before he again changed it to Saccard. L'Argent.

SICARDOT (ANGELE). See Madame Aristide Rougon.

SIDONIE (MADAME), the name by which Sidonie Rougon (q.v.) was generally known. La Curee.

SIMON (LA MERE), an old woman who assisted Severine Roubaud in her housework. La Bete Humaine.

SIMONNOT, a grocer at Raucourt. His premises were raided by the Bavarians after the Battle of Beaumont. La Debacle.

SIMPSON, an American who was attache at his country's Embassy at Paris. He was a frequent visitor at the house of Renee Saccard. La Curee.

SIVRY (BLANCHE DE), the name assumed by Jacqueline Baudu, a girl who came to Paris from a village near Amiens. Magnificent in person, stupid and untruthful in character, she gave herself out as the granddaughter of a general, and never owned to her thirty-two summers. She was much annoyed at the outbreak of war with Germany, because her lover, a young Prussian, was expelled from the country. Nana.

SMELTEN, a baker at Montsou. He gave credit for some time during the strike, in the hope of recovering some of his business taken away by Maigrat. Germinal.

SMITHSON (MISS), Lucien Deberle's English governess. Une Page d'Amour.

SONNEVILLE, a manufacturer at Marchiennes. His business was seriously affected by the strike of miners at Montsou. Germinal.

SOPHIE, a workwoman employed at Madame Titreville's artificial flower-making establishment. L'Assommoir.

SOPHIE, an old waiting-maid in the service of the Duchesse de Combeville, whose daughter, Princess d'Orviedo, she brought up. When the Princess shut herself up from the world, Sophie remained with her. L'Argent.

SOPHIE, daughter of Guiraude. Predestined to phthisis by heredity, she was saved, thanks to Dr. Pascal Rougon, who sent her to live with an aunt in the country, where she was brought up in the open air. When she was seventeen years old she married a young miller in the neighbourhood. Le Docteur Pascal.

SOULAS, an old shepherd at La Borderie, where he had been for half a century. At sixty-five he had saved nothing, having been eaten up by a drunken wife, "whom at last he had the pleasure of burying." He had few friends, except his two dogs, Emperor and Massacre, and he especially hated Jacqueline Cognet with the jealous disgust of an old servant at her rapid advancement. He was aware of her numerous liaisons, but said nothing until she brought about his dismissal, when he told everything to his master, Alexandre Hourdequin. La Terre.

SOURDEAU, a bone-setter at Bazoches-le-Doyen, who was supposed to be equally good for wounds. La Terre.

SOUVARINE, an engine-man at the Voreux pit, who lodged with the Rasteneurs. He was a Russian of noble family, who had at first studied medicine, until, carried away by social enthusiasm, he learned a trade in order that he might mix with the people. It was by this trade that he now lived, after having fled in consequence of an unsuccessful attempt against the Czar's life, an attempt which resulted in his mistress, Annouchka, and many of his friends, being hanged. His principles were those of the most violent anarchy, and he would have nothing to do with the strike at Montsou, which he considered a merely childish affair. Disgusted at the return of the miners to their work, he resolved to bring about the destruction of the Voreux pit, by weakening the timbers which kept out a vast accumulation of water. He accomplished that work of madness in a fury of destruction in which he twenty times risked his life. And when the torrent had invaded the mine, imprisoning the unfortunate workers, Souvarine went calmly away into the unknown without a glance behind. Germinal.

SPIRIT, an English horse which ran in the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

SPONTINI, a master at the College of Plassans. He came originally from Corsica, and used to show his knife, rusty with the blood of three cousins. L'Oeuvre.

SQUELETTE-EXTERNE (LE). See Mimi-la-Mort. L'Oeuvre.

STADERINO (SIGNOR), a Venetian political refugee, and a friend of Comtesse Balbi. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

STEINBERG (GOLIATH), a Prussian spy who was engaged in 1867 as a farm servant by Fouchard at Remilly. He became the lover of Silvine Morange, promising her marriage, but disappearing before the ceremony. It was said that he served also on other farms in the neighbourhood of Beaumont and Raucourt. During the war he was able to give important information to the German forces. In trying to regain his former influence over Silvine, he threatened to remove their child to Germany, and, to prevent his doing so, she betrayed him to Guillaume Sambuc and the francs-tireurs of his band, who killed him in the house of Fouchard, in the presence of Silvine, by cutting his throat, and bleeding him in the same manner as a pig. La Debacle.

STEINER, a banker in Paris. He was a German Jew, through whose hands had passed millions. He spent vast sums upon Rose Mignon and Nana. Nana.

STERNICH (DUCHESSE DE), a celebrated leader of society in the Second Empire. She dominated all her friends on the ground of a former intimacy with the Emperor. La Curee.

STEWARD (LUCY), was the daughter of an engine-cleaner of English origin who was employed at the Gare du Nord. She was not beautiful, but had such a charm of manner that she was considered the smartest of the demi-mondaines in Paris. Among her lovers had been a prince of the royal blood. She had a son, Ollivier, before whom she posed as an actress. Nana.

STEWART (OLLIVIER), son of the preceding. He was a pupil at the naval college, and had no suspicion of the calling of his mother. Nana.

SURIN (ABBE), secretary to the Bishop of Plassans, of whom he was a great favourite. He was a constant visitor at the home of M. Rastoil, with whose daughters he played battledore. La Conquete de Plassans.

SYLVIA, an actress who was admired by Maxime Saccard. La Curee.

T

TABOUREAU (MADAME), a baker in the Rue Turbigo. She was a recognized authority on all subjects relating to her neighbours. Le Ventre de Paris.

TATIN (MADEMOISELLE), kept an under-linen warehouse in the Passage Choiseul, and was so seriously affected by the competition of Octave Mouret's great store that she became bankrupt. Au Bonheur des Dames.

TARDIVEAU (BARON DE), a character in La Petite Duchesse, a play by Fauchery. The part was played by Fontan.

TATAN NENE, a young girl of great beauty who had herded cows in Champagne before coming to Paris. She was one of Nana's friends. Nana.

TAVERNIER, an old doctor of Orleans, who had ceased to practise. Georges Hugon made a pretext of visiting him, in order to be able to join Nana at La Mignotte. Nana.

TEISSIERE (MADAME), a mondaine of the Second Empire. She was a friend of Madame de Lauwerens and of the Saccards. La Curee.

TESTANIERE (MADAME), a protegee of Madame Correur, who recommended her to Eugene Rougon, the Minister of State. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

TEUSE (LA), an elderly woman who acted as servant to Abbe Mouret. In addition, she cleaned the church and kept the vestments in order; on occasion, it was said, she had even served the Mass for the Abbe's predecessor. She was garrulous and ill-tempered, but was devoted to Mouret, of whom she took the greatest care, and she was also kind to his weak-minded sister, Desiree. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

THEODORE, a Belgian who gave lessons on the piano to Clarisse Bocquet, and afterwards became her lover. Pot-Bouille.

THEODORE, son of a paste-board maker. He was to have married Nathalie Dejoie, but wishing to establish himself in business, demanded a considerable dowry. He afterwards married the daughter of a workman, who brought him nearly eight thousand francs. L'Argent.

THERESE, a former neighbour of the Lorilleux in Rue de la Goutte d'Or. She died of consumption, and the Lorilleux thought they saw a resemblance between Gervaise and her. L'Assommoir.

THIBAUDIER (M.), a banker at Caen. He had a daughter, Louise, but having married again soon after the death of his first wife, he troubled little about her, and was quite willing to consent to her marriage with Lazare Chanteau. La Joie de Vivre.

THIBAUDIER (LOUISE), daughter of M. Thibaudier, a banker at Caen. She was a slight, delicate girl, with an attractive manner, and Lazare Chanteau fell in love with her, though he was at the time engaged to Pauline Quenu. Pauline having magnanimously released him, they were married. Lazare's morbid mania having become more acute, and Louise being herself in poor health, their relations became strained, and the marriage was not a happy one. They had a son who was named Paul. La Joie de Vivre.

Louise died young. Le Docteur Pascal.

THOMAS, keeper of an eating-house at Montmartre. L'Assommoir.

THOMAS (ANSELME), a journeyman saddler at Plassans. He married Justine Megot, tempted by the annuity of twelve hundred francs which she received from Saccard. He disliked her child, the little Charles Rougon, who was degenerate and weak-minded. Le Docteur Pascal.

THOMAS (MADAME ANSELME), wife of the preceding. See Justine Megot. Le Docteur Pascal.

TISON, keeper of a dram-shop at Montsou. Germinal.

TISSOT (MADAME), a friend of Madame Deberle. Une Page d'Amour.

TITREVILLE (MADAME) carried on the business of an artificial-flower maker, of which Madame Lerat was forewoman, and where Nana Coupeau was a pupil. She was a tall woman who never unbent, and the girls were all afraid of her, pretending to be engrossed in work whenever she appeared. L'Assommoir.

TOUCHE (M.), a townsman of Plassans who expressed disbelief in the success of the Coup d'Etat. La Fortune des Rougon.

TOUCHE, an Attorney's clerk at Plassans. He married Sidonie Rougon in 1838, and went with her to Paris, where he started business as a dealer in the products of the South. He was not very successful, and died in 1850. La Curee.

TOURMAL (LES), a family who resided at Bonneville and lived chiefly by smuggling and stealing. The father and grandfather were sent to prison, and the daughter, when shown kindness by Pauline Quenu, rewarded her by attempting to steal such small articles of value as she could conceal. La Joie de Vivre.

TOUTIN-LAROCHE (M.), a retired candle-manufacturer; now a municipal councillor, and a director of the Credit Viticole, the Societe Generale of the Ports of Morocco, and other companies of doubtful standing. His ambition was to enter the Senate, and he clung to Baron Gauraud and Saccard in the belief that they could assist him. La Curee.

TRICON (LA), a well-known procuress, who numbered Nana among her clients. She had a passion for racing, and at the Grand Prix seemed to dominate the crowd.

TROMPETTE, one of the horses in the Voreux pit. It only lived a few months after being taken underground. Germinal.

TRON, a labourer in the farm of La Borderie. He was one of Jacqueline Cognet's lovers, and exhibited jealousy amounting to insanity regarding her. Having been dismissed by his master, he opened a trap-door through which Hourdequin fell and was killed. When he found that Jacqueline would not forgive him for this stupid murder, which ruined her prospects, he set fire to the farm buildings. La Terre.

TROUCHE (HONORE), brother-in-law of Abbe Faujas. Having been unsuccessful in business at Besancon, he followed Faujas to Plassans, where he went with his wife to live in rooms rented by the Abbe from Francois Mouret. He was of bad character and quite unscrupulous, but by the influence of Faujas he was appointed Secretary to the Girls' Home started by Madame Mouret and other ladies of Plassans. Having got a footing in the Mourets' house, he soon began to take advantage of his position, and little by little got possession of the whole premises. He did all he could to encourage the idea of Francois Mouret's madness, and after the unfortunate man's removal to the asylum was able with greater ease to carry out his schemes. Mouret having ultimately escaped from the asylum, returned to his home and set it on fire; Trouche perished in the flames. La Conquete de Plassans.

TROUCHE (MADAME OLYMPE), wife of the preceding, and sister of Abbe Faujas. She accompanied her husband to Plassans, and contributed largely to the ruin of the Mouret family. Utterly heartless, she stopped at nothing, robbing Madame Mouret of money, clothing, everything that came within her power. Nemesis came with the return of Francois Mouret, who set fire to his house, causing the death of Madame Trouche as well as that of her husband. La Conquete de Plassans.

TROUILLE (LA), the nickname of Olympe Fouan. La Terre.

TRUBLOT (HECTOR), a young man whom Madame Josserand hoped at one time to secure as a husband for her daughter. He had, however, no thoughts of marriage, and as he was averse to any risk of complications, his habit was to select his female friends from among the maid-servants of his acquaintances. He was employed as correspondent in the office of Monsieur Desmarquay, a money-changer. Pot-Bouille.

V

VABRE, a notary of Versailles who retired to Paris with a fortune, part of which he invested in the house in Rue de Choiseul occupied by the Duveyriers, the Josserands, and others. He had unfortunately a hidden passion for gambling in stocks and shares, and when he died it was found that his whole fortune had been dissipated, even his house being heavily mortgaged. Pot-Bouille.

VABRE (AUGUSTE), eldest son of M. Vabre, carried on a silk merchant's business in part of the premises which belonged to his father. He married Berthe Josserand, but as he suffered much from neuralgia, and was, in addition, of a niggardly disposition, the marriage was not a happy one. An intrigue between Madame Vabre and Octave Mouret followed, and on its discovery she returned to her parents. For a considerable time Vabre refused to forgive his wife, but a reconciliation was ultimately brought about through the intervention of Abbe Mauduit. Vabre's fortunes were adversely affected by the extension of Madame Hedouin's business, known as "The Ladies' Paradise." Pot-Bouille.

The rapid success of Octave Mouret's business led to the ruin of Vabre, a result to which the extravagance of his wife also contributed. Au Bonheur des Dames.

VABRE (MADAME AUGUSTE), wife of the preceding. See Berthe Josserand. Pot-Bouille.

VABRE (CAMILLE), son of Theophile Vabre and his wife Valerie Louhette. Pot-Bouille.

VABRE (CLOTILDE), daughter of Vabre the notary, and wife of Duveyrier. She did not get on well with her husband, whom she hated, and her only passion was for music, which she practised to an inordinate extent. Pot-Bouille.

VABRE (THEOPHILE), second son of M. Vabre, "a little old man of twenty-eight, a victim to coughs and toothache, who first tried all sorts of trades and then married the daughter of a neighbouring haberdasher." His life was shadowed by suspicions of his wife, with whom he constantly quarrelled. He was with difficulty prevented from making a scene at the marriage of his brother Auguste to Berthe Josserand. Pot-Bouille.

VABRE (MADAME VALERIE), wife of the preceding, nee Louhette, was the daughter of a wealthy haberdasher. She did not get on well with her husband, who accused her, not entirely without reason, of carrying on a liaison with some one whose name he was unable to discover. Pot-Bouille.

VADON (MARGUERITE), daughter of a linen-draper at Grenoble, found it desirable to come to Paris for a time, and got a situation at "The Ladies' Paradise." She as a well-conducted girl, and ultimately returned to Grenoble to take charge of her parents' shop, and marry a cousin who was waiting for her. Au Bonheur des Dames.

VALENCAY (BARON DE), aide-de-camp to the Emperor. He married the eldest daughter of the Comtesse de Bretigny. L'Assommoir.

VALENCAY (MADEMOISELLE PAULE DE), was very rich and extremely beautiful when at nineteen years old she married the Marquis Jean XII de Hautecoeur. She died within a year, leaving a son named Felicien. Le Reve.

VALENTIN, son of Guiraude, and brother of Sophie. His father, a journeyman tanner, died of phthisis, and Valentin, who had been in daily contact with him, developed the disease. Doctor Pascal Rougon prolonged his life for some time by hypodermic injections of a substance discovered by himself, but the respite was only temporary, for at twenty-one years of age Valentine died of hereditary phthisis. Le Docteur Pascal.

VALERIO II, a horse which belonged to M. Corbreuse and ran in the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

VALLAGNOSC (MADAME DE), belonged to an old family of Plassans. Left a widow with two daughters and one son, she found life difficult on the small remains of a former fortune. In order to assist his mother, the son, Paul, secured an appointment at Paris in a Government office. Au Bonheur des Dames.

VALLAGNOSC (PAUL DE), an old friend of Octave Mouret, whom he had known at Plassans. He belonged to an old family, but, being a younger son without money, was obliged to select a profession. He studied law, but meeting with no success, was obliged to accept an appointment in the Ministry of the Interior. He married Mademoiselle de Boves. Au Bonheur des Dames.

VALLAGNOSC (MADAME PAUL DE), wife of the preceding. See Blanche de Boves.

VALQUEYRAS (COMTE DE), a relation of Marquis de Carnavant, who lived in his house. La Fortune des Rougon.

He was a supporter of the Marquis de Lagrifoul, the Legitimist Deputy for Plassans, who visited him for a fortnight before the election which was dominated by Abbe Faujas. La Conquete de Plassans.

VALQUEYRAS (MARQUISE DE), in 1873, she was the only representative of a very old family. She was a widow with a little daughter of six, very rich, and equally parsimonious. When Doctor Pascal Rougon called on her to ask payment of his fees, he allowed himself to be put off, and even gave advice regarding the health of the child. Le Docteur Pascal.

VANDERGHAGEN, the medical man employed by the Mining Company of Montsou. He was so much overworked that it was said he gave his consultations while he was running from place to place. Germinal.

VANDEUVRES (COMTE XAVIER DE), the last member of a noble family, had gone through a large fortune in Paris. His racing-stable was famous, as were his losses at the Imperial Club, while his ruin was completed by the vast sums which he spent on Nana. His final hope was centred on the race for the Grand Prix de Paris in which he was running two horses, Lusignan and a filly named Nana. Lusignan was the favourite, but Vandeuvres, having arranged his betting, caused the horse to be pulled, so that the filly might win. The ruse was successful, and Vandeuvres gained a large sum, but suspicions having been aroused, he was warned off the turf and expelled from the Imperial Club. Driven to madness, the Comte shut himself up in his stable, and, having set it on fire, perished among his horses. Nana.

VANDORPE, the head stationmaster of the Western Railway Company at Paris. La Bete Humaine.

VANPOUILLE BROTHERS, a firm of furriers in Rue Neuve-des-Petits Champs, who were practically ruined when Octave Mouret added a fur department to "The Ladies' Paradise." Au Bonheur des Dames.

VANSKA (COMTESSE), a well-known and rich mondaine of the Second Empire. La Curee.

VANZADE (MADAME), the widow of a general. She was an old lady, rich, nearly blind, and practically helpless. At Passy she lived, in a silent old house, a life so retired and regular that it might have been actuated by clockwork. As she required a companion, her old friend, La Mere des Saints-Anges, recommended Christine Hallegrain to her; but the girl, stifling in that dwelling of rigid piety, ended by running off with her lover, Claude Lantier. Madame Vanzade died four years later, and the bulk of her fortune went to charities. L'Oeuvre.

VAQUEZ (JUDITH), an artist's model who lived in Rue du Rocher. She was a Jewess, fresh enough in colouring but too thin. L'Oeuvre.

VAUCOGNE (HECTOR), husband of Estelle Badeuil. At the time of his marriage, Vaucogne was a junior officer of customs, but when his wife's parents retired he took over their maison publique. He left everything to the care of his wife, and after her death the establishment ceased to be prosperous. In the end he was turned out by his father-in-law, and the business was given to his daughter Elodie, who showed all the family capacity for management. La Terre.

VAUCOGNE (MADAME HECTOR), wife of the preceding. See Estelle Badeuil. La Terre.

VAUCOGNE (ELODIE), daughter of the preceding, and granddaughter of M. and Madame Charles Badeuil. She was seven years old when her parents took over the maison publique of her grandfather, and she was then sent to a convent at Chateaudun to be educated by the Sisters of the Visitation. Her holidays were spent with her grandparents, and she was supposed to be under the impression that her parents were carrying on a large confectionery business, but Victorine, a servant who had been dismissed for misconduct, had made her aware of the facts, and when, at eighteen years of age, she was asked in marriage by her cousin Ernest Delhomme, she astonished her grandparents by joining with him in a desire to succeed to the family establishment. La Terre.

VAUGELADE (DUC DE), at one time the master of Gourd, who was his valet. Pot-Bouille.

VENOT (THEOPHILE), an old lawyer who made a speciality of ecclesiastical cases, and had acquired a fortune by serving the Jesuits. He had retired with a comfortable sum, and led an existence slightly mysterious; received everywhere, saluted very low, even a little feared, as he represented a great and unknown force which he had behind him. An intimate friend of the Muffats, he did everything in his power to put an end to the liaison between the Comte and Nana, and, though no success attended his efforts for a considerable time, he was able when ruin seemed imminent to save Muffat from scandal and to console him by a return to the practice of religion. Nana.

VERDIER (BARON), proprietor of a racing-stable. Frangipane, one of his horses, ran in the Grand Prix de Paris. Nana.

VERDIER, a lawyer who had been for a long time engaged to Hortense Josserand. The marriage was put off from time to time, as he had got entangled with a woman from whom he found separation difficult. Pot-Bouille.

VERDONCK, a grocer at Montsou. His business was much affected by the competition of Maigrat, and he gave credit during the first week of the strike in the hope of getting back some of his old customers. Germinal.

VERLAQUE, an inspector in the fish-market at the Halles Centrales. Having fallen into bad health, he was allowed to find a substitute to keep the place open for him in case he should recover. Florent was appointed, and paid a considerable portion of the salary to Verlaque. Le Ventre de Paris.

VERLAQUE (MADAME), wife of the preceding. Florent assisted her after the death of her husband. Le Ventre de Paris.

VERNIER, an art critic who published an article on Fagerolles the artist. L'Oeuvre.

VERONIQUE, maid-servant to the Chanteau family, was a tall, stout young woman of unattractive appearance and uncertain temper. She had been in the service of the Chanteaus for twenty years, and having become necessary to them, took advantage of her position. From the first, Veronique resented Pauline Quenu's presence in the Chanteau household, and treated her as an intruder. In course of time, however, she came to see that Pauline was being despoiled of her means by Madame Chanteau, and her sense of justice made her take the young girl's part. The death of Madame Chanteau made a deep impression on Veronique whose ill-will towards Pauline gradually returned. Her mind, not strong at best, became unhinged, and in a fit of temper she went into the orchard and hanged herself. La Joie de Vivre.

VIAL (ABBE), one of the clergy of Plassans. When his appointment became vacant it was promised to Abbe Bourrette, but was eventually given to Abbe Faujas. La Conquete de Plassans.

VIAL (MELANIE), second wife of Jean Macquart, to whom she was married in 1871. She was the only daughter of a peasant in easy circumstances, and was of a fine robust physique. She had three healthy children in as many years. Le Docteur Pascal.

VIAN, a wheelwright of Plassans, to whom Silvere Mouret was apprenticed. La Fortune des Rougon.

VICTOIRE, Madame Campardon's cook. She had been in the service of her master's father when Campardon was a baby, and though now old, and not over clean, they were unwilling to part with her. Pot-Bouille.

VICTOIRE (LA MERE), wife of Pecqueux, the railway stoker. She had been the nurse of Severine Aubry, and later, as the wife of Pecqueux, who spent all his earnings on drink, she was leading a wretched existence in Paris by the aid of a little sewing, when, happening to meet her foster-daughter, the former intimacy had been renewed, and President Grandmorin took her under his protection, obtaining for her the post of attendant at the ladies' cloakroom. She occupied a room in the Impasse d'Amsterdam, which the Roubauds regarded as their head-quarters when they spent a day in Paris. Having become helpless as the result of a sprain, she was obliged to resign her post and seek admittance to a hospital. La Bete Humaine.

VICTORINE, cook in the employment of Nana. She married Francois, the footman. Nana.

VICTORINE, a servant in the employment of the Badeuils after they retired to Rognes. She was dismissed for misconduct, and in revenge told Elodie Vaucogne the occupation of her parents. La Terre.

VIGOUROUX, a coal merchant in Rue de la Goutte d'Or. He sold coke to Gervaise at the same price as the Gas Company. L'Assommoir.

VIGOUROUX (MADAME), wife of the preceding. She was a little woman with bright eyes who liked to laugh with the men. L'Assommoir.

VIMEUX, a miserable little sheriff officer, who was celebrated in the Canton for the bad usage he got from the peasants when he was obliged to serve summonses upon them. La Terre.

VINCARD, a silk merchant, who, seeing that his business was likely to be seriously affected by the competition of "The Ladies' Paradise," he sold it to Robineau, and took a restaurant at Vincennes. Au Bonheur des Dames.

VINCENT, a tavern-keeper in the neighbourhood of Montsou. Germinal.

VINEUIL (COMMANDANT DE), father of Gilberte. Retired from active service on account of his wounds, he was appointed Director of Customs at Charleville. His wife died of consumption, and he sent his daughter, about whose health he was alarmed, to reside for a time at a farm near Chene-Populeux. He died soon after Gilberte's marriage to Maginot, the Inspector of State Forests. La Debacle.

VINEUIL (COLONEL DE), brother of the preceding. In 1870 he commanded the 106th Regiment of the line, which formed part of the Seventh Army corps. He was a man of fine appearance and character, and bore his part bravely through the disastrous campaign, until he was severely wounded on the battlefield of Sedan. Notwithstanding his wound, he remained on his horse till the end, when he was removed to the house of Delaherche, the husband of his niece Gilberte. By December his wound was cured, but crushed by his country's defeats, his mental depression was so great that he remained in a darkened room, refusing to hear news from the outer world, and associating only with his old friend Madame Delaherche, the mother of his niece's husband. At the end of December he died suddenly, horror-struck by an account of the surrender of Metz, which he chanced to read in an old newspaper. La Debacle.

VINEUIL (GILBERTE DE), daughter of Commandant de Vineuil. She was first married to Maginot, and afterwards to Jules Delaherche. When she was nine years old, her father, alarmed at a cough she had, sent her to live at a farm, where she came to know Henriette Levasseur. Even at that age she was a coquette, and when at twenty she married Maginot, the Inspector of the State Forests at Mezieres, her character had not changed. Mezieres she found dull, but her husband allowed her full liberty, and she found all the gaiety she desired at Charleville. There she lived solely for pleasure, and Captain Beaudoin became her lover. In 1869 she became a widow, and in spite of the stories told about her she found a second husband, Jules Delaherche. On the eve of the battle of Sedan she resumed for the nonce her former relations with Beaudoin. Gay and irresponsible by nature, she flirted with Captain von Gartlauben, a Prussian officer, who was quartered on her husband after the capitulation of Sedan, while at the same time she carried on a liaison with Edmond Lagarde, a young soldier who had been wounded, and whom she had assisted to nurse. La Debacle.

VIOLAINE (LOUISE), an actress at the Theatre des Varietes. She took the part in the Blonde Venus originally played by Nana, and secured a great success. Nana.

VIRGINIE, sister of Adele, for whose sake Auguste Lantier deserted Gervaise Macquart. Gervaise, meeting Virginie in a public washing-house, was taunted by her on the subject of her lover, and a terrible fight between the two women followed, Virginie being severely beaten. Gervaise did not see her again for some years, by which time she had married M. Poisson, an ex-soldier, who later became a policeman. She professed to have overlooked the fight with Gervaise, but appears to have been not without hope that an opportunity of repaying her injuries might eventually arise. When the Coupeaus gave way to drink, Lantier, who had again established friendly relations, suggested that Virginie should take the Coupeaus' shop and buy a stock of groceries and sweetmeats with a legacy she had received from an aunt. Partly moved by a desire for revenge on Gervaise, she did so, and Lantier retained with the Poissons the place as a lodger he formerly occupied with the Coupeaus. Soon after, he became Virginie's lover, and, by paying nothing for his support, while he gradually ate the contents of the shop, he accomplished the downfall of the Poissons in much the same manner as he had already ruined the Coupeaus. L'Assommoir.

VISCARDI (SIGNOR), a Venetian political refugee, and a friend of Comtesse Balbi. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

VOINCOURT (COMTESSE DE), mother of Claire de Voincourt. She occupied at Beaumont a house adjoining the bishop's palace. Le Reve.

VOINCOURT (CLAIRE DE), the daughter of an old family of great wealth who lived at Beaumont. Monseigneur d'Hautecoeur wished to arrange a marriage between her and Felicien, his son; his plans were assisted by the belief of Felicien that Angelique, with whom he had fallen in love, no longer cared for him. This belief having proved false, the proposed marriage between Felicien and Claire de Voincourt did not take place. Le Reve.

VORIAU, a large black dog which belonged to Bambousse, the Mayor of Artaud. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

VUILLAUME (M. and MADAME), the parents of Madame Pichon, whom they visited every Sunday afternoon. They were, later, much annoyed with the Pichons, whose family became, they considered, too large for their means. Pot-Bouille.

VUILLAUME (MARIE). See Madame Marie Pichon.

VUILLET, a bookseller of Plassans, who published a biweekly journal, the Gazette de Plassans, which was devoted exclusively to the interests of the clergy. La Fortune des Rougon.

W

WEISS, husband of Henriette Levasseur, and cousin of Otto Gunther. He got a situation in the refinery at Chene-Populeux, almost in a menial position, but he gradually educated himself, and by dint of hard work raised himself to the position of accountant. A clear-headed man, he early saw the causes that were to lead to the downfall of his country, and expressed himself strongly regarding the unprepared state of the army. Weiss lived at Sedan, but in 1870 he had just bought a little house at Bazeilles, where he slept the night before the battle. He was frantic at the idea that the Prussians might pillage and perhaps destroy the dwelling so long desired and so hardly acquired, and when the attack was made he took an active part in the fighting. Captured by the Prussians, and being a civilian, he was at once condemned to be shot, and the sentence was carried out before the eyes of his wife, who had come from Sedan to look for him. La Debacle.

WEISS (MADAME), wife of the preceding. See Henriette Levasseur. La Debacle.

WORMS, a famous costumier, before whom the ladies of the Second Empire bowed the knee. Renee Saccard was one of his customers, and when she died owed him an account of two hundred and fifty-seven thousand francs. La Curee.

Z

ZEPHIR, the horse ridden by Prosper Sambuc, who loved it like a brother. The animal received a mortal wound at the battle of Sedan, and fell on its rider, crushing under it his right leg. It lay upon him for some hours, but eventually, on his speaking to it, moved with a great effort sufficiently to allow him to escape. La Debacle.

ZEPHYRIN, a worker on the farm of La Borderie. He laughed at the agricultural machinery introduced by Alexandre Hourdequin. La Terre.

ZIDORE, a youth of seventeen, who was an apprentice zinc-worker. He was Coupeau's assistant at one time. L'Assommoir.

ZIZI, the pet name given by Nana to Georges Hugon. Nana.

ZOE, waiting-maid in the employment of Nana. She was entirely in Nana's confidence, and was always ready with shrewd advice, though there is no doubt she arranged matters so that a great deal of money came into her own hands. She ultimately took over the establishment of La Tricon, which she had long coveted, and, having large ideas, proposed to extend the business by renting a larger house. Nana.

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PRINCIPAL SCENES

ARROMANCHES, a small town on the Normandy coast, not far from Caen. It is about six miles from Bonneville, the scene of La Joie de Vivre.

ARTAUD (LES), a small village a few miles from Plassans (q.v.). Abbe Mouret was its priest during the events related in La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

ASSOMMOIR (Pere Colombe's) was situated at the corner of Rue des Poissonniers and Boulevard de Rochechouart, which is a continuation of Boulevard de Clichy, in the northern district of Paris. L'Assommoir.

AUGUSTIN (RUE NEUVE SAINT), a street which joins the Avenue de l'Opera a short distance from the Opera House. It is intersected by Rue Michodiere, at the corner of which is situated Octave Mouret's great drapery establishment, known as "Au Bonheur des Dames." Au Bonheur des Dames.

BARENTIN, a small town on the Western Railway of France, about twelve miles from Rouen. It was at a point between Barentin and the previous station, Malaunay, that President Grandmorin was murdered by Roubaud. La Bete Humaine.

BAZEILLES, a village about three miles south-east of Sedan (q.v.). It was the scene of some of the most important events in La Debacle.

BEAUCE (LA), a fertile agricultural plain stretching between Chartres and Orleans, and intersected by the road from the latter town to Chateaudun. The district is the scene of La Terre.

BEAUMONT, a town of about 3000 inhabitants, picturesquely situated on a height on the left bank of the Oise about twenty-five miles north of Paris. Its church, the scene of some of the principal events in Le Reve, is an interesting building, dating from the thirteenth century. Le Reve.

BONCOEUR (HOTEL) was situated in the Boulevard de la Chapelle (q.v.). L'Assommoir.

BONNEVILLE, a village on the Normandy coast, about six miles from Arromanches. It is in an extremely exposed position, and many houses have been destroyed by the inroads of the sea. To prevent further damage, Lazare Chanteau constructed a breakwater, which was, however, washed away by the first storm. The inhabitants of the village were mostly engaged in fishing. La Joie de Vivre.

BORDERIE (LA), a farm on the plain of La Beauce, which belonged to Alexandre Hourdequin, whose father bought it after the Revolution. La Terre.

CAEN, a town of about 40,000 inhabitants, situated on the River Orne, about nine miles from the Normandy coast. Chanteau pere carried on business there before he retired and went to live at Bonneville, and his son Lazare received his education at its college. La Joie de Vivre.

CHALONS, a town of about 24,000 inhabitants, is situated on the Marne 107 miles east of Paris. It is the head-quarters of the Sixth Army Corps, and was occupied by the Prussians in August, 1870. La Debacle.

CHAPELLE (BOULEVARD DE LA) is a continuation of the Boulevard de Clichy, in the Montmartre district of Paris. In it was situated the Hotel Boncoeur, where Lantier and Gervaise Macquart found lodgings when they first came to Paris. L'Assommoir.

CHARLEVILLE, a town of about 17,000 inhabitants, situated about ten miles north-west of Sedan. It is close to Mezieres, of which it really forms the commercial and industrial portion. La Debacle.

CHARTRES, an important and interesting town, situated on the left bank of the Eure, fifty-five miles south-west of Paris. It is the principal town in the grain-producing district of La Beauce, and reference is frequently made to it in La Terre. In it M. and Madame Charles Badeuil carried on business for a number of years with considerable success. La Terre.

CHATEAUDUN, a town of 7000 inhabitants, situated on the left bank of the Loire, about eighty-four miles south-west of Paris. It is in the district of La Beauce, and is frequently referred to in La Terre.

CHOISEUL (RUE DE), a street which connects the Boulevard des Italiens, and Rue Neuve Saint-Augustin. It is parallel to Avenue de l'Opera and Rue Michodiere, being slightly to the east of the latter. Pot-Bouille.

CLOYES, a market-town in the district of La Beauce, about seven miles from Chateaudun and ninety-one miles south-west of Paris. It is frequently referred to in La Terre.

CROIX DE MAUFRAS (LE), a level crossing on the Western Railway of France, between Malaunay and Barentin, about nine miles west of Rouen. The crossing, which was looked after by Misard and his daughter Flore, was the scene of a terrible railway accident, and it was in the same vicinity that President Grandmorin was murdered by Roubaud. La Bete Humaine.

EAUX (PASSAGE DES), a steep lane which runs from Rue Raynouard at Passy down to the Seine. In an old house which abutted on the passage lived Mere Fetu, and in the same building was the room where Helene Grandjean went to meet Doctor Deberle. Une Pate d'Amour.

GOUTTE D'OR (RUE DE LA), a street in the Montmartre district of Paris. It enters from Rue des Poissonniers and runs parallel to and behind Boulevard de la Chapelle, which is a continuation of Boulevard de Clichy. The Coupeaus and the Lorilleux lived in Rue de la Goutte d'Or. L'Assommoir.

HALLES CENTRALES (LES), the great provision markets of Paris, are situated on the right bank of the river, and are directly north of the Pont Neuf, from which they are not far distant. Le Ventre de Paris.

HAUSSMANN (BOULEVARD) runs from east to west a short distance behind the Opera House. Its eastern end connects with the Boulevard des Italiens. Nana.

HAVRE (LE), an important seaport, which forms the terminus of the Western Railway of France, the line upon which Jacques Lantier was employed as an engine-driver. The Roubauds lived at Le Havre, and many of the principal scenes in La Bete Humaine were enacted there. La Bete Humaine.

LAZARE (RUE SAINT-), is in the neighbourhood of the railway station of the same name. In it was situated the Orviedo mansion, in which Aristide Saccard started the Universal Bank. L'Argent.

LILLE, an important manufacturing town in the north of France, near the Belgian frontier. Etienne Lantier was at one time employed in the railway workshop there. Germinal.

MALAUNAY, a station on the Western Railway of France, six miles from Rouen, and about midway between that town and Barentin. It is referred to in La Bete Humaine.

MARBEUF (RUE), a street which connects the Avenue des Champs Elysees and the Avenue de l'Alma. Eugene Rougon lived there. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

MARCHIENNES, a town in the mining district of the north of France, about thirty miles south-east of Lille. It is frequently referred to in Germinal.

METZ, a town of 55,000 inhabitants, is situated on the Moselle, about 263 miles east of Paris and about eighty miles south-east of Sedan. It was surrendered to the Prussians on 27th October, 1870, and is now the capital of German Lorraine. La Debacle.

MEZIERES, a small town of 7000 inhabitants, situated on a peninsula formed by the Meuse about ten miles north-west of Sedan. Its situation has prevented its extension, and the closely adjoining town of Charleville has become its commercial and industrial quarter. Mezieres was three times invested during the Franco-Prussian War, and surrendered on 2nd January, 1871, after a bombardment of three days. La Debacle.

MICHODIERE (RUE), a street which connects the Boulevard des Capucines and the Rue Neuve Saint-Augustin. At the corner where it joins the latter street was situated Octave Mouret's great drapery establishment, known as "Au Bonheur des Dames," and in it also Baudu carried on business. The street is almost parallel to the Avenue de l'Opera. Au Bonheur des Dames.

MOINES (RUE DES) was situated at Batignolles, in the extreme north-west of Paris. Madame Lerat lived there. L'Assommoir.

MONCEAU (RUE), a street which runs northward from Rue du Faubourg St. Honore. It is a short distance to the north-east of the Arc de Triomphe, and in it was situated Aristide Saccard's magnificent mansion. La Curee.

MONTSOU, a mining village in the north of France, about ten kilometres from Marchiennes (q.v.). It is the scene of many of the chief events in Germinal.

ORLEANS, an important town situated on the Loire, seventy-five miles south of Paris. It is referred to in La Terre and Nana.

PARADOU, the name of a neglected demesne near Plassans (q.v.). It was the scene of a large part of La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret.

PLASSANS, the name under which Zola disguised his native town of Aix. It is a place of about 30,000 inhabitants, and is situated eighteen miles north of Marseilles. Aix was at one time the capital of Provence, is the seat of an archbishop, and contains a university and an Ecole des Art et Metiers.

In the Rougon-Macquart novels Zola made Plassans the cradle of an imaginary family, and throughout the whole series of books the town is constantly referred to. La Fortune des Rougon, etc.

RAUCOURT, a small town about six miles south of Sedan. It is frequently referred to in La Debacle.

REIMS, an important town of 98,000 inhabitants, situated about 100 miles to the north-east of Paris. In 1870-71 it was occupied by the Prussians, who laid heavy requisitions upon it. The town is frequently referred to in La Debacle.

REMILLY, a village about five miles south of Sedan. Old Fouchard's farm was situated in its vicinity. La Debacle.

ROUEN, an important town of over 100,000 inhabitants, situated on the Seine, about eighty-seven miles from Paris and fifty-seven miles from Le Havre. It was the scene of the judicial inquiry regarding the murder of President Grandmorin. La Bete Humaine.

SEDAN, a town of 20,000 inhabitants, situated on the Meuse, about 170 miles north-east of Paris. It was the scene of one of the chief battles of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and capitulated to the Prussian forces on 2nd September of that year. The town is frequently referred to in La Debacle.

VALOGNES, a small town in Normandy, not far from Cherbourg. It was the birthplace of Denise Baudu and her brothers. Au Bonheur des Dames.

VINEUSE (RUE DE), a street in the Passy district of Paris, at the extreme west end of the city. It is near the Trocadero Palace. Madame Helene Grandjean and Doctor Deberle both lived in this street. Une Page d'Amour.

VOREUX, the name of a large coal-pit, situated about two kilometres from Montsou, on the road between that village and Marchiennes (q.v.). Germinal.

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fête At Coqueville, by Emile Zola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Fête At Coqueville
1907

Author: Emile Zola

Translator: L. G. Meyer

Release Date: October 27, 2007 [EBook #23222]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FÊTE AT COQUEVILLE ***

Produced by David Widger

THE FÊTE AT COQUEVILLE

By Emile Zola

Translated by L. G. Meyer.

Copyright, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son

Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

I

Coqueville is a little village planted in a cleft in the rocks, two leagues from Grandport. A fine sandy beach stretches in front of the huts lodged half-way up in the side of the cliff like shells left there by the tide. As one climbs to the heights of Grandport, on the left the yellow sheet of sand can be very clearly seen to the west like a river of gold dust streaming from the gaping cleft in the rock; and with good eyes one can even distinguish the houses, whose tones of rust spot the rock and whose chimneys send up their bluish trails to the very crest of the great slope, streaking the sky. It is a deserted hole. Coqueville has never been able to attain to the figure of two hundred inhabitants. The gorge which opens into the sea, and on the threshold of which the village is planted, burrows into the earth by turns so abrupt and by descents so steep that it is almost impossible to pass there with wagons. It cuts off all communication and isolates the country so that one seems to be a hundred leagues from the neighboring hamlets.

Moreover, the inhabitants have communication with Grandport only by water. Nearly all of them fishermen, living by the ocean, they carry their fish there every day in their barks. A great commission house, the firm of Dufeu, buys their fish on contract. The father Dufeu has been dead some years, but the widow Dufeu has continued the business; she has simply engaged a clerk, M. Mouchel, a big blond devil, charged with beating up the coast and dealing with the fishermen. This M. Mouchel is the sole link between Coque-ville and the civilized world.

Coqueville merits a historian. It seems certain that the village, in the night of time, was founded by the Mahés; a family which happened to establish itself there and which grew vigorous at the foot of the cliff. These Mahés continued to prosper at first, marrying continually among themselves, for during centuries one finds none but Mahés there. Then under Louis XIII appeared one Floche. No one knew too much of where he came from.. He married a Mahé, and from that time a phenomenon was brought forth; the Floches in their turn prospered and multiplied exceedingly, so that they ended little by little in absorbing the Mahés, whose numbers diminished until their fortune passed entirely into the hands of the newcomers. Without doubt, the Floches brought new blood, more vigorous physical organs, a temperament which adapted itself better to that hard condition of high wind and of high sea. At any rate, they are to-day masters of Coqueville.

It can easily be understood that this displacement of numbers and of riches was not accomplished without terrible disturbances. The Mahés and the Hoches detest each other. Between them is a hatred of centuries. The Mahés in spite of their decline retain the pride of ancient conquerors. After all they are the founders, the ancestors. They speak with contempt of the first Floche, a beggar, a vagabond picked up by them from feelings of pity, and to have given away one of their daughters to whom was their eternal regret. This Floche, to hear them speak, had engendered nothing but a descent of libertines and thieves, who pass their nights in raising children and their days in coveting legacies. And there is not an insult they do not heap upon the powerful tribe of Floche, seized with that bitter rage of nobles, decimated, ruined, who see the spawn of the bourgeoisie master of their rents and of their château. The Floches, on their side, naturally have the insolence of those who triumph. They are in full possession, a thing to make them insolent. Full of contempt for the ancient race of the Mahés, they threaten to drive them from the village if they do not bow their heads. To them they are starvelings, who instead of draping themselves in their rags would do much better to mend them.

So Coqueville finds itself a prey to two fierce factions—something like one hundred and thirty inhabitants bent upon devouring the other fifty for the simple reason that they are the stronger.

The struggle between two great empires has no other history.

Among the quarrels which have lately upset Coqueville, they cite the famous enmity of the brothers, Fouasse and Tupain, and the ringing battles of the Rouget ménage. You must know that every inhabitant in former days received a surname, which has become to-day the regular name of the family; for it was difficult to distinguish one's self among the cross-breedings of the Mahés and the Floches. Rouget assuredly had an ancestor of fiery blood. As for Fouasse and Tupain, they were called thus without knowing why, many surnames having lost all rational meaning in course of time. Well, old Françoise, a wanton of eighty years who lived forever, had had Fouasse by a Mahé, then becoming a widow, she remarried with a Floche and brought forth Tupain. Hence the hatred of the two brothers, made specially lively by the question of inheritance. At the Rouget's they beat each other to a jelly because Rouget accused his wife, Marie, of being unfaithful to him for a Floche, the tall Brisemotte, a strong, dark man, on whom he had already twice thrown himself with a knife, yelling that he would rip open his belly. Rouget, a small, nervous man, was a great spitfire.

But that which interested Coqueville most deeply was neither the tantrums of Rouget nor the differences between Tupain and Fouasse. A great rumor circulated: Delphin, a Mahé, a rascal of twenty years, dared to love the beautiful Margot, the daughter of La Queue, the richest of the Floches and chief man of the country. This La Queue was, in truth, a considerable personage. They called him La Queue because his father, in the days of Louis Philippe, had been the last to tie up his hair, with the obstinacy of old age that clings to the fashions of its youth. Well, then, La Queue owned one of the two large fishing smacks of Coqueville, the "Zephir," by far the best, still quite new and seaworthy. The other big boat, the "Baleine," a rotten old patache, {1} belonged to Rouget, whose sailors were Delphin and Fouasse, while La Queue took with him Tupain and Brisemotte. These last had grown weary of laughing contemptuously at the "Baleine"; a sabot, they said, which would disappear some fine day under the billows like a handful of mud. So when La Queue learned that that ragamuffin of a Delphin, the froth of the "Baleine," allowed himself to go prowling around his daughter, he delivered two sound whacks at Margot, a trifle merely to warn her that she should never be the wife of a Mahé. As a result, Margot, furious, declared that she would pass that pair of slaps on to Delphin if he ever ventured to rub against her skirts. It was vexing to be boxed on the ears for a boy whom she had never looked in the face!

1 Naval term signifying a rickety old concern.

Margot, at sixteen years strong as a man and handsome as a lady, had the reputation of being a scornful person, very hard on lovers. And from that, added to the trifle of the two slaps, of the presumptuousness of Delphin, and of the wrath of Margot, one ought easily to comprehend the endless gossip of Coqueville.

Notwithstanding, certain persons said that Margot, at bottom, was not so very furious at sight of Delphin circling around her. This Delphin was a little blonde, with skin bronzed by the sea-glare, and with a mane of curly hair that fell over his eyes and in his neck. And very powerful despite his slight figure; quite capable of thrashing any one three times his size. They said that at times he ran away and passed the night in Grandport. That gave him the reputation of a werwolf with the girls, who accused him, among themselves, of "making a life of it"—a vague expression in which they included all sorts of unknown pleasures. Margot, when she spoke of Delphin, betrayed too much feeling. He, smiling with an artful air, looked at her with eyes half shut and glittering, without troubling himself the least in the world over her scorn or her transports of passion. He passed before her door, he glided along by the bushes watching for her hours at a time, full of the patience and the I cunning of a cat lying in wait for a tomtit; and when suddenly she discovered him behind her skirts, so close to her at times that she guessed it by the warmth of his breath, he did not fly, he took on an air gentle and melancholy which left her abashed, stifled, not regaining her wrath until he was some distance away. Surely, if her father saw her he would smite her again. But she boasted in vain that Delphin would some day get that pair of slaps she had promised him; she never seized the moment to apply them when he was there; which made people say that she ought not to talk so much, since in the end she kept the slaps herself.

No one, however, supposed she could ever be Delphin's wife. In her case they saw the weakness of a coquette. As for a marriage between the most beggardly of the Mahés, a fellow who had not six shirts to set up housekeeping with, and the daughter of the mayor, the richest heiress of the Floches, it would seem simply monstrous.

Evil tongues insinuated that she could perfectly go with him all the same, but that she would certainly not marry him. A rich girl takes her pleasure as it suits her; only, if she has a head, she does not commit a folly. Finally all Coque-ville interested itself in the matter, curious to know how things would turn out. Would Delphin get his two slaps? or else Margot, would she let herself be kissed on both cheeks in some hole in the cliff? They must see! There were some for the slaps and there were some for the kisses. Coqueville was in revolution.

In the village two people only, the curé and the garde champêtre? belonged neither to the Mahés nor to the Floches. The garde champêtre, {2} a tall, dried-up fellow, whose name no one knew, but who was called the Emperor, no doubt because he had served under Charles X, as a matter of fact exercised no burdensome supervision over the commune which was all bare rocks and waste lands. A sub-prefect who patronized him had created for him the sinecure where he devoured in peace his very small living.

2 Watchman.

As for the Abbé Radiguet, he was one of those simple-minded priests whom the bishop, in his desire to be rid of him, buries in some out of the way hole. He lived the life of an honest man, once more turned peasant, hoeing his little garden redeemed from the rock, smoking his pipe and watching his salads grow. His sole fault was a gluttony which he knew not how to refine, reduced to adoring mackerel and to drinking, at times, more cider than he could contain. In other respects, the father of his parishioners, who came at long intervals to hear a mass to please him.

But the curé and the garde champêtre were obliged to take sides after having succeeded for a long time in remaining neutral. Now, the Emperor held for the Mahés, while the Abbé Radiguet supported the Floches. Hence complications. As the Emperor, from morning to night, lived like a bourgeois [citizen], and as he wearied of counting the boats which put out from Grand-port, he took it upon himself to act as village police. Having become the partizan of the Mahés, through native instinct for the preservation of society, he sided with Fouasse against Tupain; he tried to catch the wife of Rouget in flagrante delicto with Brisemotte, and above all he closed his eyes when he saw Delphin slipping into Margot's courtyard. The worst of it was that these tactics brought about heated quarrels between the Emperor and his natural superior, the mayor La Queue. Respectful of discipline, the former heard the reproaches of the latter, then recommenced to act as his head dictated; which disorganized the public authority of Coqueville. One could not pass before the shed ornamented with the name of the town hall without being deafened by the noise of some dispute. On the other hand, the Abbé Radiguet rallied to the triumphant Floches, who loaded him with superb mackerel, secretly encouraged the resistance of Rouget's wife and threatened Margot with the flames of hell if she should ever allow Delphin to touch her with his finger. It was, to sum up, complete anarchy; the army in revolt against the civil power, religion making itself complaisant toward the pleasures of the bourgeoisie; a whole people, a hundred and eighty inhabitants, devouring each other in a hole, in face of the vast sea, and of the infinite sky.

Alone, in the midst of topsy-turvy Coqueville, Delphin preserved the laughter of a love-sick boy, who scorned the rest, provided Margot was for him. He followed her zigzags as one follows hares. Very wise, despite his simple look, he wanted the curé to marry them, so that his bliss might last forever.

One evening, in a byway where he was watching for her, Margot at last raised her hand. But she stopped, all red; for without waiting for the slap, he had seized the hand that threatened him and kissed it furiously. As she trembled, he said to her in a low voice: "I love you. Won't you have me?"

"Never!" she cried, in rebellion.

He shrugged his shoulders, then with an air, calm and tender, "Pray do not say that—we shall be very comfortable together, we two. You will see how nice it is."

II

That Sunday the weather was appalling, one of those sudden calamities of September that unchain such fearful tempests on the rocky coast of Grandport. At nightfall Coqueville sighted a ship in distress driven by the wind. But the shadows deepened, they could not dream of rendering help. Since the evening before, the "Zéphir" and the "Baleine" had been moored in the little natural harbor situated at the left of the beach, between two walls of granite. Neither La Queue nor Rouget had dared to go out, the worst of it was that M. Mouchel, representing the Widow Dufeu, had taken the trouble to come in person that Saturday to promise them a reward if they would make a serious effort; fish was scarce, they were complaining at the markets. So, Sunday evening, going to bed under squalls of rain, Coqueville growled in a bad humor. It was the everlasting story: orders kept coming in while the sea guarded its fish. And all the village talked of the ship which they had seen passing in the hurricane, and which must assuredly by that time be sleeping at the bottom of the water. The next day, Monday, the sky was dark as ever. The sea, still high, raged without being able to calm itself, although the wind was blowing less strong. It fell completely, but the waves kept up their furious motion. In spite of everything, the two boats went out in the afternoon. Toward four o'clock, the "Zéphir" came in again, having caught nothing. While the sailors, Tupain and Brisemotte, anchored in the little harbor, La Queue, exasperated, on the shore, shook his fist at the ocean. And M. Mouchel was waiting! Margot was there, with the half of Coqueville, watching the last surg-ings of the tempest, sharing her father's rancor against the sea and the sky.

"But where is the 'Baleine'?" demanded some one.

"Out there beyond the point," said La Queue. "If that carcass comes back whole to-day, it will be by a chance."

He was full of contempt. Then he informed them that it was good for the Mahés to risk their skins in that way; when one is not worth a sou, one may perish. As for him, he preferred to break his word to M. Mouchel.

In the meantime, Margot was examining the point of rocks behind which the "Baleine" was hidden.

"Father," she asked at last, "have they caught something?"

"They?" he cried. "Nothing at all."

He calmed himself and added more gently, seeing the Emperor, who was sneering at him:

"I do not know whether they have caught anything, but as they never do catch anything—"

"Perhaps, to-day, all the same, they have taken something," said the Emperor ill-naturedly. "Such things have been seen." La Queue was about to reply angrily. But the Abbé Radiguet, who came up, calmed him. From the porch of the church the abbé had happened to observe the "Baleine"; and the bark seemed to be giving chase to some big fish. This news greatly interested Coqueville. In the groups reunited on the shore there were Mahés and Floches, the former praying that the boat might come in with a miraculous catch, the others making vows that it might come in empty.

Margot, holding herself very straight, did not take her eyes from the sea. "There they are!" said she simply.

And in fact a black dot showed itself beyond the point. All looked at it. One would have said a cork dancing on the water. The Emperor did not see even the black dot. One must be of Coqueville to recognize at that distance the "Baleine" and those who manned her.

"See!" said Margot, who had the best eyes of the coast, "it is Fouasse and Rouget who are rowing—The little one is standing up in the bow."

She called Delphin "the little one" so as not to mention his name. And from then on they followed the course of the bark, trying to account for her strange movements. As the curé said, she appeared to be giving chase to some great fish that might be fleeing before her. That seemed extraordinary. The Emperor pretended that their net was without doubt being carried away. But La Queue cried that they were do-nothings, and that they were just amusing themselves. Quite certain they were not fishing for seals! All the Floches made merry over that joke; while the Mahés, vexed, declared that Rouget was a fine fellow all the same, and that he was risking his skin while others at the least puff of wind preferred terra firma. The Abbé Radiguet was forced to interpose again for there were slaps in the air.

"What ails them?" said Margot abruptly. "They are off again!" They ceased menacing one another, and every eye searched the horizon, The "Baleine" was once more hidden behind the point. This time La Queue himself became uneasy. He could not account for such maneuvres. The fear that Rouget was really in a fair way to catch some fish threw him off his mental balance. No one left the beach, although there was nothing strange to be seen. They stayed there nearly two hours, they watched incessantly for the bark, which appeared from time to time, then disappeared. It finished by not showing itself at all any more. La Queue, enraged, breathing in his heart the abominable wish, declared that she must have sunk; and, as just at that moment Rouget's wife appeared with Brisemotte, he looked at them both, sneering, while he patted Tupain on the shoulder to console him already for the death of his brother, Fouasse. But he stopped laughing when he caught sight of his daughter Margot, silent and looming, her eyes on the distance; it was quite possibly for Delphin.

"What are you up to over there?" he scolded. "Be off home with you! Mind, Margot!"

She did not stir. Then all at once: "Ah! there they are!"

He gave a cry of surprise. Margot, with her good eyes, swore that she no longer saw a soul in the bark; neither Rouget, nor Fouasse, nor any one! The "Baleine," as if abandoned, ran before the wind, tacking about every minute, rocking herself with a lazy air.

A west wind had fortunately risen and was driving her toward the land, but with strange caprices which tossed her to right and to left. Then all Coqueville ran down to the shore. One half shouted to the other half, there remained not a girl in the houses to look after the soup. It was a catastrophe; something inexplicable, the strangeness of which completely turned their heads. Marie, the wife of Rouget, after a moment's reflection, thought it her duty to burst into tears. Tupain succeeded in merely carrying an air of affliction. All the Mahés were in great distress, while the Floches tried to appear conventional. Margot collapsed as if she had her legs broken.

"What are you up to again!" cried La Queue, who stumbled upon her.

"I am tired," she answered simply.

And she turned her face toward the sea, her cheeks between her hands, shading her eyes with the ends of her fingers, gazing fixedly at the bark rocking itself idly on the waves with the air of a good fellow who has drunk too much.

In the meanwhile suppositions were rife. Perhaps the three men had fallen into the water? Only, all three at a time, that seemed absurd.

La Queue would have liked well to persuade them that the "Baleine" had gone to pieces like a rotten egg; but the boat still held the sea; they shrugged their shoulders. Then, as if the three men had actually perished, he remembered that he was Mayor and spoke of formalities.

"Leave off!" cried the Emperor, "Does one die in such a silly way?" "If they had fallen overboard, little Delphin would have been here by this!"

All Coqueville had to agree, Delphin swam like a herring. But where then could the three men be? They shouted: "I tell you, yes!"—"I tell you, no!"—"Too stupid!"—"Stupid yourself!" And matters came to the point of exchanging blows. The Abbé Radiguet was obliged to make an appeal for reconciliation, while the Emperor hustled the crowd about to establish order. Meanwhile, the bark, without haste, continued to dance before the world. It waltzed, seeming to mock at the people; the sea carried her in, making her salute the land in long rhythmic reverences. Surely it was a bark in a crazy fit. Margot, her cheeks between her hands, kept always gazing. A yawl had just put out of the harbor to go to meet the "Baleine." It was Brisemotte, who had exhibited that impatience, as if he had been delayed in giving certainty to Rouget's wife. From that moment all Coqueville interested itself in the yawl. The voices rose higher: "Well, does he see anything?"

The "Baleine" advanced with her mysterious and mocking air. At last they saw him draw himself up and look into the bark that he had succeeded in taking in tow. All held their breath. But, abruptly, he burst out laughing. That was a surprise; what had he to be amused at? "What is it? What have you got there?" they shouted to him furiously.

He, without replying, laughed still louder. He made gestures as if to say that they would see. Then having fastened the "Baleine" to the yawl, he towed her back. And an unlooked-for spectacle stunned Coqueville. In the bottom of the bark, the three men—Rouget, Delphin, Fouasse—were beatifically stretched out on their backs, snoring, with fists clenched, dead drunk. In their midst was found a little cask stove in, some full cask they had come across at sea and which they had appreciated. Without doubt, it was very good, for they had drunk it all save a liter's worth which had leaked into the bark and which was mixed with the sea water.

"Ah! the pig!" cried the wife of Rouget, brutally, ceasing to whimper.

"Well, it's characteristic—their catch!" said La Queue, who affected great disgust.

"Forsooth!" replied the Emperor, "they catch what they can! They have at least caught a cask, while others have not caught anything at all."

The Mayor shut up, greatly vexed. Coqueville brayed. They understood now. When barks are intoxicated, they dance as men do; and that one, in truth, had her belly full of liquor. Ah, the slut! What a minx! She festooned over the ocean with the air of a sot who could no longer recognize his home. And Coqueville laughed, and fumed, the Mahés found it funny, while the Floches found it disgusting. They surrounded the "Baleine," they craned their necks, they strained their eyes to see sleeping there the three jolly dogs who were exposing the secret springs of their jubilation, oblivious of the crowd hanging over them. The abuse and the laughter troubled them but little. Rouget did not hear his wife accuse him of drinking up all they had; Fouasse did not feel the stealthy kicks with which his brother Tupain rammed his sides. As for Del-phin, he was pretty, after he had drunk, with his blond hair, his rosy face drowned in bliss. Mar-got had gotten up, and silently, for the present, she contemplated the little fellow with a hard expression.

"Must put them to bed!" cried a voice.

But just then Delphin opened his eyes. He rolled looks of rapture over the people. They questioned him on all sides with an eagerness that dazed him somewhat, the more easily since he was still as drunk as a thrush.

"Well! What?" he stuttered; "it was a little cask—There is no fish. Therefore, we have caught a little cask."

He did not get beyond that. To every sentence he added simply: "It was very good!"

"But what was it in the cask?" they asked him hotly.

"Ah! I don't know—it was very good."

By this time Coqueville was burning to know. Every one lowered their noses to the boat, sniffing vigorously. With one opinion, it smelt of liquor; only no one could guess what liquor. The Emperor, who flattered himself that he had drunk of everything that a man can drink, said that he would see. He solemnly took in the palm of his hand a little of the liquor that was swimming in the bottom of the bark. The crowd became all at once silent. They waited. But the Emperor, after sucking up a mouthful, shook his head as if still badly informed. He sucked twice, more and more embarrassed, with an air of uneasiness and surprise. And he was bound to confess:

"I do not know—It's strange—If there was no salt water in it, I would know, no doubt—My word of honor, it is very strange!"

They looked at him. They stood struck with awe before that which the Emperor himself did not venture to pronounce. Coqueville contemplated with respect the little empty cask.

"It was very good!" once more said Delphin, who seemed to be making game of the people. Then, indicating the sea with a comprehensive sweep, he added: "If you want some, there is more there—I saw them—little casks—little casks—little casks—"

And he rocked himself with the refrain which he kept singing, gazing tenderly at Margot. He had just caught sight of her. Furious, she made a motion as if to slap him; but he did not even close his eyes; he awaited the slap with an air of tenderness.

The Abbé Radiguet, puzzled by that unknown tipple, he, too, dipped his finger in the bark and sucked it. Like the Emperor, he shook his head: no, he was not familiar with that, it was very extraordinary. They agreed on but one point: the cask must have been wreckage from the ship in distress, signaled Sunday evening. The English ships often carried to Grandport such cargoes of liquor and fine wines.

Little by little the day faded and the people were withdrawn into shadow. But La Queue remained absorbed, tormented by an idea which he no longer expressed. He stopped, he listened a last time to Delphin, whom they were carrying along, and who was repeating in his sing-song voice: "Little casks—little casks—little casks—if you want some, there are more!"

III

That night the weather changed completely. When Coqueville awoke the following day an unclouded sun was shining; the sea spread out without a wrinkle, like a great piece of green satin. And it was warm, one of those pale glows of autumn.

First of the village, La Queue had risen, still clouded from the dreams of the night. He kept looking for a long time toward the sea, to the right, to the left. At last, with a sour look, he said that he must in any event satisfy M. Mouchel. And he went away at once with Tupain and Brisemotte, threatening Margot to touch up her sides if she did not walk straight. As the "Zéphir" left the harbor, and as he saw the "Baleine" swinging heavily at her anchor, he cheered up a little saying: "To-day, I guess, not a bit of it! Blow out the candle, Jeanetton! those gentlemen have gone to bed!"

And as soon as the "Zéphir" had reached the open sea, La Queue cast his nets. After that he went to visit his "jambins." The jambins are a kind of elongated eel-pot in which they catch more, especially lobsters and red garnet. But in spite of the calm sea, he did well to visit his jambins one by one. All were empty; at the bottom of the last one, as if in mockery, he found a little mackerel, which he threw back angrily into the sea. It was fate; there were weeks like that when the fish flouted Coqueville, and always at a time when M. Mouchel had expressed a particular desire for them. When La Queue drew in his nets, an hour later, he found nothing but a bunch of seaweed. Straightway he swore, his fists clenched, raging so much the more for the vast serenity of the ocean, lazy and sleeping like a sheet of burnished silver under the blue sky. The "Zéphir," without a waver, glided along in gentle ease. La Queue decided to go in again, after having cast his nets once more. In the afternoon he came to see them, and he menaced God and the saints, cursing in abominable words. In the meanwhile, Rouget, Fouasse, and Del-phin kept on sleeping. They did not succeed in standing up until the dinner hour. They recollected nothing, they were conscious only of having been treated to something extraordinary, something which they did not understand. In the afternoon, as they were all three down at the harbor, the Emperor tried to question them concerning the liquor, now that they had recovered their senses. It was like, perhaps, eau-de-vie with liquorice-juice in it; or rather one might say rum, sugared and burned. They said "Yes"; they said "No." From their replies, the Emperor suspected that it was ratafia; but he would not have sworn to it. That day Rouget and his men had too many pains in their sides to go a-fishing. Moreover, they knew that La Queue had gone out without success that morning, and they talked of waiting until the next day before visiting their jambins. All three of them, seated on blocks of stone, watched the tide come in, their backs rounded, their mouths clammy, half-asleep.

But suddenly Delphin woke up; he jumped on to the stone, his eyes on the distance, crying: "Look, Boss, off there!"

"What?" asked Rouget, who stretched his limbs.

"A cask."

Rouget and Fouasse were at once on their feet, their eyes gleaming, sweeping the horizon.

"Where is it, lad? Where is the cask?" repeated the boss, greatly moved.

"Off there—to the left—that black spot."

The others saw nothing. Then Rouget swore an oath. "Nom de Dieu!"

He had just spotted the cask, big as a lentil on the white water in a slanting ray of the setting sun. And he ran to the "Baleine," followed by Delphin and Fouasse, who darted forward tapping their backs with their heels and making the pebbles roll.

The "Baleine" was just putting out from the harbor when the news that they saw a cask out at sea was circulated in Coqueville. The children, the women, began to run. They shouted: "A cask! a cask!"

"Do you see it? The current is driving it toward Grandport."

"Ah, yes! on the left—a cask! Come, quick!"

And Coqueville came; tumbled down from its rock; the children arrived head over heels, while the women picked up their skirts with both hands to descend quickly. Soon the entire village was on the beach as on the night before.

Margot showed herself for an instant, then she ran back at full speed to the house, where she wished to forestall her father, who was discussing an official process with the Emperor. At last La Queue appeared. He was livid; he said to the garde champêtre: "Hold your peace! It's Rouget who has sent you here to beguile me. Well, then, he shall not get it. You'll see!"

When he saw the "Baleine," three hundred metres out, making with all her oars toward the black dot, rocking in the distance, his fury redoubled. And he shoved Tupain and Brisemotte into the "Zéphir," and he pulled out in turn, repeating: "No, they shall not have it; I'll die sooner!"

Then Coqueville had a fine spectacle; a mad race between the "Zéphir" and the "Baleine." When the latter saw the first leave the harbor, she understood the danger, and shot off with all her speed. She may have been four hundred metres ahead; but the chances remained even, for the "Zéphir" was otherwise light and swift; so excitement was at its height on the beach. The Mahès and the Floches had instinctively formed into two groups, following eagerly the vicissitudes of the struggle, each upholding its own boat. At first the "Baleine" kept her advantage, but as soon as the "Zéphir" spread herself, they saw that she was gaining little by little. The "Baleine" made a supreme effort and succeeded for a few minutes in holding her distance. Then the "Zéphir" once more gained upon the "Baleine," came up with her at extraordinary speed. From that moment on, it was evident that the two barks would meet in the neighborhood of the cask. Victory hung on a circumstance, on the slightest mishap.

"The 'Baleine'! The 'baleine'!" cried the Mahés.

But they soon ceased shouting. When the "Baleine" was almost touching the cask, the "Zephir," by a bold maneuvre, managed to pass in front of her and throw the cask to the left, where La Queue harpooned it with a thrust of the boat-hook.

"The 'Zéphir'! the 'Zéphir!" screamed the Floches.

And the Emperor, having spoken of foul play, big words were exchanged. Margot clapped her hands. The Abbé Radiguet came down with his breviary, made a profound remark which abruptly calmed the people, and then threw them into consternation.

"They will, perhaps, drink it all, these, too," he murmured with a melancholy air.

At sea, between the "Baleine" and the "Zéphir," a violent quarrel broke out. Rouget called La Queue a thief, while the latter called Rouget a good-for-nothing. The men even took up their oars to beat each other down, and the adventure lacked little of turning into a naval combat. More than this, they engaged to meet on land, showing their fists and threatening to disembowel each other as soon as they found each other again.

"The rascal!" grumbled Rouget. "You know, that cask is bigger than the one of yesterday. It's yellow, this one—it ought to be great." Then in accents of despair: "Let's go and see the jambins; there may very possibly be lobsters in them."

And the "Baleine" went on heavily to the left, steering toward the point.

In the "Zëphir," La Queue had to get in a passion in order to hold Tupain and Brisemotte from the cask. The boat-hook, in smashing a hoop, had made a leaking for the red liquid, which the two men tasted from the ends of their fingers and which they found exquisite. One might easily drink a glass without its producing much effect. But La Queue would not have it. He caulked the cask and declared that the first who sucked it should have a talk with him. On land, they would see.

"Then," asked Tupain, sullenly, "are we going to draw out the jambins?"

"Yes, right away; there is no hurry!" replied La Queue.

He also gazed lovingly at the barrel. He felt his limbs melt with longing to go in at once and taste it. The fish bored him.

"Bah!" said he at the end of a silence. "Let's go back, for it's late. We will return to-morrow." And he was relaxing his fishing when he noticed another cask at his right, this one very small, and which stood on end, turning on itself like a top. That was the last straw for the nets and the jambins. No one even spoke of them any longer. The "Zéphir" gave chase to the little barrel, which was caught very easily.

During this time a similar adventure overtook the "Baleine." After Rouget had already visited five jambins completely empty, Delphin, always on the watch, cried out that he saw something. But it did not have the appearance of a cask, it was too long.

"It's a beam," said Fouasse.

Rouget let fall his sixth jambin without drawing it out of the water. "Let's go and see, all the same," said he.

As they advanced, they thought they recognized at first a beam, a chest, the trunk of a tree. Then they gave a cry of joy.

It was a real cask, but a very queer cask, such as they had never seen before. One would have said a tube, bulging in the middle and closed at the two ends by a layer of plaster.

"Ah, that's comical!" cried Rouget, in rapture. "This one I want the Emperor to taste. Come, children, let's go in."

They all agreed not to touch it, and the "Baleine" returned to Coqueville at the same moment as the "Zéphir," in its turn, anchored in the little harbor. Not one inquisitive had left the beach. Cries of joy greeted that unexpected catch of three casks. The gamins hurled their caps into the air, while the women had at once gone on the run to look for glasses. It was decided to taste the liquid on the spot. The wreckage belonged to the village. Not one protest arose. Only they formed into two groups, the Mahés surrounded Rouget, the Floches would not let go of La Queue.

"Emperor, the first glass for you!" cried Rouget. "Tell us what it is."

The liquor was of a beautiful golden yellow. The garde champêtre raised his glass, looked at it, smelt it, then decided to drink.

"That comes from Holland," said he, after a long silence.

He did not give any other information. All the Mahés drank with deference. It was rather thick, and they stood surprised, for it tasted of flowers. The women found it very good. As for the men, they would have preferred less sugar. Nevertheless, at the bottom it ended by being strong at the third or fourth glass. The more they drank, the better they liked it. The men became jolly, the women grew funny.

But the Emperor, in spite of his recent quarrels with the Mayor, had gone to hang about the group of Floches.

The biggest cask gave out a dark-red liquor, while they drew from the smallest a liquid white as water from the rock; and it was this latter that was the stiff est, a regular pepper, something that skinned the tongue.

Not one of the Floches recognized it, neither the red nor the white.

There were, however, some wags there. It annoyed them to be regaling themselves without knowing over what.

"I say, Emperor, taste that for me!" said La Queue, thus taking the first step.

The Emperor, who had been waiting for the invitation, posed once more as connoisseur.

"As for the red," he said, "there is orange in that! And for the white," he declared, "that—that is excellent!"

They had to content themselves with these replies, for he shook his head with a knowing air, with the happy look of a man who has given satisfaction to the world.

The Abbé Radiguet, alone, did not seem convinced. As for him, he had the names on the tip of his tongue; and to thoroughly reassure himself, he drank small glasses, one after the other, repeating: "Wait, wait, I know what it is. In a moment I will tell you."

In the mean while, little by little, merriment grew in the group of the Mahés and the group of the Floches. The latter, particularly, laughed very loud because they had mixed the liquors, a thing that excited them the more. For the rest, the one and the other of the groups kept apart. They did not offer each other of their casks, they simply cast sympathetic glances, seized with the unavowed desire to taste their neighbor's liquor, which might possibly be better. The inimical brothers, Tupain and Fouasse, were in close proximity all the evening without showing their fists. It was remarked, also, that Rouget and his wife drank from the same glass. As for Margot, she distributed the liquor among the Floches, and as she filled the glasses too full, and the liquor ran over her fingers, she kept sucking them continually, so well that, though obeying her father who forbade her to drink, she became as fuddled as a girl in vintage time. It was not unbecoming to her; on the contrary, she got rosy all over, her eyes were like candles.

The sun set, the evening was like the softness of springtime. Coqueville had finished the casks and did not dream of going home to dine. They found themselves too comfortable on the beach. When it was pitch night, Margot, sitting apart, felt some one blowing on her neck. It was Del-phin, very gay, walking on all fours, prowling behind her like a wolf. She repressed a cry so as not to awaken her father, who would have sent Delphin a kick in the back.

"Go away, imbecile!" she murmured, half angry, half laughing; "you will get yourself caught!"

IV

The following day Coqueville, in rising, found the sun already high above the horizon. The air was softer still, a drowsy sea under a clear sky, one of those times of laziness when it is so good to do nothing. It was a Wednesday. Until breakfast time, Coqueville rested from the fête of the previous evening. Then they went down to the beach to see.

That Wednesday the fish, the Widow Dufeu, M. Mouchel, all were forgotten. La Queue and Rouget did not even speak of visiting their jam-bins. Toward three o'clock they sighted some casks. Four of them were dancing before the village. The "Zéphir" and the "Baleine" went in chase; but as there was enough for all, they disputed no longer. Each boat had its share. At six o'clock, after having swept all over the little gulf, Rouget and La Queue came in, each with three casks. And the fête began again. The women had brought down tables for convenience. They had brought benches as well; they set up two cafés in the open air, such as they had at Grandport. The Mahés were on the left; the Floches on the right, still separated by a bar of sand. Nevertheless, that evening the Emperor, who went from one group to the other, carried his glasses full, so at to give every one a taste of the six casks. At about nine o'clock they were much gayer than the night before.

The next day Coqueville could never remember how it had gone to bed.

Thursday the "Zéphir" and the "Baleine" caught but four casks, two each, but they were enormous. Friday the fishing was superb, undreamed of; there were seven casks, three for Rouget and four for La Queue. Coqueville was entering upon a golden age. They never did anything any more. The fishermen, working off the alcohol of the night before, slept till noon. Then they strolled down to the beach and interrogated the sea. Their sole anxiety was to know what liquor the sea was going to bring them. They waited there for hours, their eyes strained; they raised shouts of joy when wreckage appeared.

The women and the children, from the tops of the rocks, pointed with sweeping gestures even to the least bunch of seaweed rolled in by the waves. And, at all hours, the "Zéphir" and the "Baleine" stood ready to leave. They put out, they beat the gulf, they fished for casks, as they had fished for tun; disdaining now the tame mackerel who capered about in the sun, and the lazy sole rocked on the foam of the water. Coqueville watched the fishing, dying of laughter on the sands. Then in the evening they drank the catch.

That which enraptured Coqueville was that the casks did not cease. When there were no more, there were still more! The ship that had been lost must truly have had a pretty cargo aboard; and Coqueville became egoist and merry, joked over the wrecked ship, a regular wine-cellar, enough to intoxicate all the fish of the ocean. Added to that, never did they catch two casks alike; they were of all shapes, of all sizes, of all colors. Then, in every cask there was a different liquor. So the Emperor was plunged into profound reveries; he who had drunk everything, he could identify nothing any more. La Queue declared that never had he seen such a cargo. The Abbé Radiguet guessed it was an order from some savage king, wishing to set up his wine-cellar. Coqueville, rocked in mysterious intoxication, no longer tried to understand.

The ladies preferred the "creams"; they had cream of moka, of cacao, of mint, of vanilla. Marie Rouget drank one night so much anisette that she was sick.

Margot and the other young ladies tapped the curaçao, the bénédictine, the trappistine, the chartreuse. As to the cassis, it was reserved for the little children. Naturally the men rejoiced more when they caught cognacs, rums, gins, everything that burned the mouth. Then surprises produced themselves. A cask of raki of Chio, flavored with mastic, stupefied Coqueville, which thought that it had fallen on a cask of essence of turpentine. All the same they drank it, for they must lose nothing; but they talked about it for a long time. Arrack from Batavia, Swedish eau-de-vie with cumin, tuica calugaresca from Rumania, slivowitz from Servia, all equally overturned every idea that Coqueville had of what one should endure. At heart they had a weakness for kümmel and kirschwasser, for liqueurs as pale as water and stiff enough to kill a man.

Heavens! was it possible so many good things had been invented! At Coqueville they had known nothing but eau-de-vie; and, moreover, not every one at that. So their imaginations finished in exultation; they arrived at a state of veritable worship, in face of that inexhaustible variety, for that which intoxicates. Oh! to get drunk every night on something new, on something one does not even know the name of! It seemed like a fairy-tale, a rain, a fountain, that would spout extraordinary liquids, all the distilled alcohols, perfumed with all the flowers and all the fruits of creation.

So then, Friday evening, there were seven casks on the beach! Coqueville did not leave the beach. They lived there, thanks to the mildness of the season. Never in September had they enjoyed so fine a week. The fête had lasted since Monday, and there was no reason why it should not last forever if Providence should continue to send them casks; for the Abbé Radiguet saw therein the hand of Providence. All business was suspended; what use drudging when pleasure came to them in their sleep? They were all bourgeois, bourgeois who were drinking expensive liquors without having to pay anything at the café. With hands in pocket, Coqueville basked in the sunshine waiting for the evening's spree. Moreover, it did not sober up; it enjoyed side by side the gaieties of kümmel, of kirsch-wasser, of ratafia; in seven days they knew the wraths of gin, the tendernesses of curaçao, the laughter of cognac. And Coqueville remained as innocent as a new-born child, knowing nothing about anything, drinking with conviction that which the good Lord sent them.

It was on Friday that the Mahés and the Floches fraternized. They were very jolly that evening. Already, the evening before, distances had drawn nearer, the most intoxicated had trodden down the bar of sand which separated the two groups. There remained but one step to take. On the side of the Floches the four casks were emptying, while the Mahés were equally finishing their three little barrels; just three liqueurs which made the French flag; one blue, one white, and one red. The blue filled the Floches with jealousy, because a blue liqueur seemed to them something really supernatural. La Queue, grown good-natured since he had been drunk, advanced, a glass in his hand, feeling that he ought to take the first step as magistrate.

"See here, Rouget," he stuttered, "will you drink with me?"

"Willingly," replied Rouget, who was staggering under a feeling of tenderness.

And they fell upon each other's necks. Then they all wept, so great was their emotion. The Mahés and the Floches embraced, they who had been devouring one another for three centuries. The Abbé Radiguet, greatly touched, again spoke of the finger of God. They drank to each other in the three liqueurs, the blue, the white, and the red.

"Vive la France!" cried the Emperor.

The blue was worthless, the white of not much account, but the red was really a success. Then they tapped the casks of the Floches. Then they danced. As there was no band, some good-natured boys clapped their hands, whistling, which excited the girls. The fête became superb. The seven casks were placed in a row; each could choose that which he liked best. Those who had had enough stretched themselves out on the sands, where they slept for a while; and when they awoke they began again. Little by little the others spread the fun until they took up the whole beach. Right up to midnight they skipped in the open air. The sea had a soft sound, the stars shone in a deep sky, a sky of vast peace. It was the serenity of the infant ages enveloping the joy of a tribe of savages, intoxicated by their first cask of eau-de-vie.

Nevertheless, Coqueville went home to bed again. When there was nothing more left to drink, the Floches and the Mahés helped one another, carried one another, and ended by finding their beds again one way or another. On Saturday the fête lasted until nearly two o'clock in the morning. They had caught six casks, two of them enormous. Fouasse and Tupain almost fought. Tupain, who was wicked when drunk, talked of finishing his brother. But that quarrel disgusted every one, the Floches as well as the Mahés. Was it reasonable to keep on quarreling when the whole village was embracing? They forced the two brothers to drink together. They were sulky. The Emperor promised to watch them. Neither did the Rouget household get on well. When Marie had taken anisette she was prodigal in her attentions to Brisemotte, which Rouget could not behold with a calm eye, especially since having become sensitive, he also wished to be loved. The Abbé Radiguet, full of forbearance, did well in preaching forgiveness; they feared an accident. "Bah!" said La Queue; "all will arrange itself. If the fishing is good to-morrow, you will see—Your health!"

However, La Queue himself was not yet perfect. He still kept his eye on Delphin and leveled kicks at him whenever he saw him approach Margot. The Emperor was indignant, for there was no common sense in preventing two young people from laughing. But La Queue always swore to kill his daughter sooner than give her to "the little one." Moreover, Margot would not be willing.

"Isn't it so? You are too proud," he cried. "Never would you marry a ragamuffin!"

"Never, papa!" answered Margot.

Saturday, Margot drank a great deal of sugary liqueur. No one had any idea of such sugar. As she was no longer on her guard, she soon found herself sitting close to the cask. She laughed, happy, in paradise; she saw stars, and it seemed to her that there was music within her, playing dance tunes. Then it was that Delphin slipped into the shadow of the casks. He took her hand; he asked: "Say, Margot, will you?"

She kept on smiling. Then she replied: "It is papa who will not."

"Oh! that's nothing," said the little one; "you know the old ones never will—provided you are willing, you." And he grew bold, he planted a kiss on her neck. She bridled; shivers ran along her shoulders. "Stop! You tickle me."

But she talked no more of giving him a slap. In the first place, she was not able to, for her hands were too weak. Then it seemed nice to her, those little kisses on the neck. It was like the liqueur that enervated her so deliciously. She ended by turning her head and extending her chin, just like a cat.

"There!" she stammered, "there under the ear—that tickles me. Oh! that is nice!"

They had both forgotten La Queue. Fortunately the Emperor was on guard. He pointed them out to the Abbé.

"Look there, Curé—it would be better to marry them."

"Morals would gain thereby," declared the priest sententiously.

And he charged himself with the matter for the morrow. 'Twas he himself that would speak to La Queue. Meanwhile La Queue had drunk so much that the Emperor and the Curé were forced to carry him home. On the way they tried to reason with him on the subject of his daughter; but they could draw from him nothing but growls. Behind them, in the untroubled night, Delphin led Margot home.

The next day by four o'clock the "Zéphir" and the "Baleine" had already caught seven casks. At six o'clock the "Zéphir" caught two more. That made nine.

Then Coqueville feted Sunday. It was the seventh day that it had been drunk. And the fête was complete—a fête such as no one had ever seen, and which no one will ever see again. Speak of it in Lower Normandy, and they will tell you with laughter, "Ah! yes, the fête at Coqueville!"

V

In the mean while, since the Tuesday, M. Mouchel had been surprised at not seeing either Rouget or La Queue arrive at Grandport. What the devil could those fellows be doing? The sea was fine, the fishing ought to be splendid. Very possibly they wished to bring a whole load of soles and lobsters in all at once. And he was patient until the Wednesday.

Wednesday, M. Mouchel was angry. You must know that the Widow Dufeu was not a commodious person. She was a woman who in a flash came to high words. Although he was a handsome fellow, blond and powerful, he trembled before her, especially since he had dreams of marrying her, always with little attentions, free to subdue her with a slap if he ever became her master. Well, that Wednesday morning the Widow Dufeu stormed, complaining that the bundles were no longer forwarded, that the sea failed; and she accused him of running after the girls of the coast instead of busying himself with the whiting and the mackerel which ought to be yielding in abundance. M. Mouchel, vexed, fell back on Coqueville's singular breach of honor. For a moment surprise calmed the Widow Dufeu. What was Coqueville dreaming about? Never had it so conducted itself before. But she declared immediately that she had nothing to do with Coqueville; that it was M. Mouchel's business to look into matters, that she should take a partner if he allowed himself to be played with again by the fishermen. In a word, much disquieted, he sent Rouget and La Queue to the devil. Perhaps, after all, they would come tomorrow.

The next day, Thursday, neither the one nor the other appeared. Toward evening, M. Mouchel, desperate, climbed the rock to the left of Grandport, from which one could see in the distance Coqueville, with its yellow spot of beach. He gazed at it a long time. The village had a tranquil look in the sun, light smoke was rising from the chimneys; no doubt the women were preparing the soup. M. Mouchel was satisfied that Coqueville was still in its place, that a rock from the cliff had not crushed it, and he understood less and less. As he was about to descend again, he thought he could make out two black points on the gulf; the "Baleine" and the "Zëphir." After that he went back to calm the Widow Dufeu. Coqueville was fishing. The night passed. Friday was here. Still nothing of Coqueville. M. Mouchel climbed to his rock more than ten times. He was beginning to lose his head; the Widow Dufeu behaved abominably to him, without his finding anything to reply. Coqueville was always there, in the sun, warming itself like a lazy lizard. Only, M. Mouchel saw no more smoke. The village seemed dead. Had they all died in their holes? On the beach, there was quite a movement, but that might be seaweed rocked by the tide. Saturday, still no one. The Widow Dufeu scolded no more; her eyes were fixed, her lips white. M. Mouchel passed two hours on the rock. A curiosity grew in him, a purely personal need of accounting to himself for the strange immobility of the village. The old walls sleeping beatifically in the sun ended by worrying him. His resolution was taken; he would set out that Monday very early in the morning and try to get down there near nine o'clock.

It was not a promenade to go to Coqueville. M. Mouchel preferred to follow the route by land, in that way he would come upon the village without their expecting him. A wagon carried him as far as Robineux, where he left it under a shed, for it would not have been prudent to risk it in the middle of the gorge. And he set off bravely, having to make nearly seven kilometers over the most abominable of roads. The route was otherwise of a wild beauty; it descended by continual turns between two enormous ledges of rock, so narrow in places that three men could not walk abreast. Farther on it skirted the precipices; the gorge opened abruptly; and one caught glimpses of the sea, of immense blue horizons. But M. Mouchel was not in a state of mind to admire the landscape. He swore as the pebbles rolled under his feet. It was the fault of Coqueville, he promised to shake up those do-nothings well. But, in the meantime, he was approaching. All at once, in the turning at the last rock, he saw the twenty houses of the village hanging to the flank of the cliff.

Nine o'clock struck. One would have believed it June, so blue and warm was the sky; a superb season, limpid air, gilded by the dust of the sun, refreshed by the good smell of the sea. M. Mouchel entered the only street of the village, where he came very often; and as he passed before Rouget's house, he went in. The house was empty. Then he cast his eye toward Fouasse's—Tupain's—Brisemotte's. Not a soul; all the doors open, and no one in the rooms. What did it mean? A light chill began to creep over his flesh. Then he thought of the authorities. Certainly, the Emperor would reassure him. But the Emperor's house was empty like the others. Even to the garde champêtre, there was failure! That village, silent and deserted, terrified him now. He ran to the Mayor's. There another surprise awaited him: the house was found in an abominable mess; they had not made the beds in three days; dirty dishes littered the place; chairs seemed to indicate a fight. His mind upset, dreaming of cataclysms, M. Mouchel determined to go on to the end, and he entered the church. No more curé than mayor. All the authorities, even religion itself had vanished. Coqueville abandoned, slept without a breath, without a dog, without a cat. Not even a fowl; the hens had taken themselves off. Nothing, a void, silence, a leaden sleep under the great blue sky.

Parbleu! It was no wonder that Coqueville brought no more fish! Coqueville had moved away. Coqueville was dead. He must notify the police. The mysterious catastrophe exalted M. Mouchel, when, with the idea of descending to the beach, he uttered a cry. In the midst of the sands, the whole population lay stretched. He thought of a general massacre. But the sonorous snores came to undeceive him. During the night of Sunday, Coqueville had feasted so late that it had found itself in absolute inability to go home to bed. So it had slept on the sand, just where it had fallen, around the nine casks, completely empty.

Yes, all Coqueville was snoring there; I hear the children, the women, the old people, and the men. Not one was on his feet. There were some on their stomachs, there were some on their backs; others held themselves en chien de fusils {3} As one makes his bed so must one lie on it. And the fellows found themselves, happen what may, scattered in their drunkenness like a handful of leaves driven by the wind. The men had rolled over, heads lower than heels. It was a scene full of good-fellowship; a dormitory in the open air; honest family folk taking their ease; for where there is care, there is no pleasure.

3 Primed for the event

It was just at the new moon. Coqueville, thinking it had blown out its candle, had abandoned itself to the darkness. Then the day dawned; and now the sun was flaming, a sun which fell perpendicularly on the sleepers, powerless to make them open their eyelids. They slept rudely, all their faces beaming with the fine innocence of drunkards. The hens at early morning must have strayed down to peck at the casks, for they were drunk; they, too, sleeping on the sands. There were also five cats and five dogs, their paws in the air, drunk from licking the glasses glistening with sugar.

For a moment M. Mouchel walked about among the sleepers, taking care not to step on any of them. He understood, for at Grandport they, too, had received casks from the wreck of the English ship. All his wrath left him. What a touching and moral spectacle! Coqueville reconciled, the Mahés and the Floches sleeping together! With the last glass the deadliest enemies had embraced. Tupain and Fouasse lay there snoring, hand in hand, like brothers, incapable of coming to dispute a legacy. As to the Rouget household, it offered a still more amiable picture, Marie slept between Rouget and Brisemotte, as much as to say that henceforth they were to live thus, happy, all the three.

But one group especially exhibited a scene of family tenderness. It was Delphin and Margot; one on the neck of the other, they slept cheek to cheek, their lips still opened for a kiss. At their feet the Emperor, sleeping crosswise, guarded them. Above them La Queue snored like a father satisfied at having settled his daughter, while the Abbé Radiguet, fallen there like the others, with arms outspread, seemed to bless them. In her sleep Margot still extended her rosy muzzle like an amorous cat who loves to have one scratch her under the chin.

The fête ended with a marriage. And M. Mouchel himself later married the Widow Dufeu, whom he beat to a jelly. Speak of that in Lower Normandy, they will tell you with a laugh, "Ah! yes, the fête at Coqueville!"

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of His Masterpiece, by Emile Zola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: His Masterpiece

Author: Emile Zola

Editor: Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Translator: Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Release Date: May 30, 2009 [EBook #15900]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HIS MASTERPIECE ***

Produced by Dagny; and David Widger

HIS MASTERPIECE

By Emile Zola

Edited, With a Preface, By Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Contents

PREFACE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

PREFACE

'HIS MASTERPIECE,' which in the original French bears the title of L'Oeuvre, is a strikingly accurate story of artistic life in Paris during the latter years of the Second Empire. Amusing at times, extremely pathetic and even painful at others, it not only contributes a necessary element to the Rougon-Macquart series of novels—a series illustrative of all phases of life in France within certain dates—but it also represents a particular period of M. Zola's own career and work. Some years, indeed, before the latter had made himself known at all widely as a novelist, he had acquired among Parisian painters and sculptors considerable notoriety as a revolutionary art critic, a fervent champion of that 'Open-air' school which came into being during the Second Empire, and which found its first real master in Edouard Manet, whose then derided works are regarded, in these later days, as masterpieces. Manet died before his genius was fully recognised; still he lived long enough to reap some measure of recognition and to see his influence triumph in more than one respect among his brother artists. Indeed, few if any painters left a stronger mark on the art of the second half of the nineteenth century than he did, even though the school, which he suggested rather than established, lapsed largely into mere impressionism—a term, by the way, which he himself coined already in 1858; for it is an error to attribute it—as is often done—to his friend and junior, Claude Monet.

It was at the time of the Salon of 1866 that M. Zola, who criticised that exhibition in the Evenement newspaper,* first came to the front as an art critic, slashing out, to right and left, with all the vigour of a born combatant, and championing M. Manet—whom he did not as yet know personally—with a fervour born of the strongest convictions. He had come to the conclusion that the derided painter was being treated with injustice, and that opinion sufficed to throw him into the fray; even as, in more recent years, the belief that Captain Dreyfus was innocent impelled him in like manner to plead that unfortunate officer's cause. When M. Zola first championed Manet and his disciples he was only twenty-six years old, yet he did not hesitate to pit himself against men who were regarded as the most eminent painters and critics of France; and although (even as in the Dreyfus case) the only immediate result of his campaign was to bring him hatred and contumely, time, which always has its revenges, has long since shown how right he was in forecasting the ultimate victory of Manet and his principal methods.

* Some of the articles will be found in the volume of his
miscellaneous writings entitled Mes Haines.

In those days M. Zola's most intimate friend—a companion of his boyhood and youth—was Paul Cezanne, a painter who developed talent as an impressionist; and the lives of Cezanne and Manet, as well as that of a certain rather dissolute engraver, who sat for the latter's famous picture Le Bon Bock, suggested to M. Zola the novel which he has called L'Oeuvre. Claude Lantier, the chief character in the book, is, of course, neither Cezanne nor Manet, but from the careers of those two painters, M. Zola has borrowed many little touches and incidents.* The poverty which falls to Claude's lot is taken from the life of Cezanne, for Manet—the only son of a judge—was almost wealthy. Moreover, Manet married very happily, and in no wise led the pitiful existence which in the novel is ascribed to Claude Lantier and his helpmate, Christine. The original of the latter was a poor woman who for many years shared the life of the engraver to whom I have alluded; and, in that connection, it as well to mention that what may be called the Bennecourt episode of the novel is virtually photographed from life.

* So far as Manet is concerned, the curious reader may consult M.
Antonin Proust's interesting 'Souvenirs,' published in the Revue
Blanche, early in 1897.

Whilst, however, Claude Lantier, the hero of L'Oeuvre, is unlike Manet in so many respects, there is a close analogy between the artistic theories and practices of the real painter and the imaginary one. Several of Claude's pictures are Manet's, slightly modified. For instance, the former's painting, 'In the Open Air,' is almost a replica of the latter's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe ('A Lunch on the Grass'), shown at the Salon of the Rejected in 1863. Again, many of the sayings put into Claude's mouth in the novel are really sayings of Manet's. And Claude's fate, at the end of the book, is virtually that of a moody young fellow who long assisted Manet in his studio, preparing his palette, cleaning his brushes, and so forth. This lad, whom Manet painted in L'Enfant aux Cerises ('The Boy with the Cherries'), had artistic aspirations of his own and, being unable to justify them, ended by hanging himself.

I had just a slight acquaintance with Manet, whose studio I first visited early in my youth, and though the exigencies of life led me long ago to cast aside all artistic ambition of my own, I have been for more than thirty years on friendly terms with members of the French art world. Thus it would be comparatively easy for me to identify a large number of the characters and the incidents figuring in 'His Masterpiece'; but I doubt if such identification would have any particular interest for English readers. I will just mention that Mahoudeau, the sculptor, is, in a measure, Solari, another friend of M. Zola's boyhood and youth; that Fagerolles, in his main features, is Gervex; and that Bongrand is a commingling of Courbet, Cabanel and Gustave Flaubert. For instance, his so-called 'Village Wedding' is suggested by Courbet's 'Funeral at Ornans'; his friendship for Claude is Cabanel's friendship for Manet; whilst some of his mannerisms, such as his dislike for the praise accorded to certain of his works, are simply those of Flaubert, who (like Balzac in the case of Eugenie Grandet) almost invariably lost his temper if one ventured to extol Madame Bovary in his presence. Courbet, by the way, so far as disposition goes, crops up again in M. Zola's pages in the person of Champbouvard, a sculptor, who, artistically, is a presentment of Clesinger.

I now come to a personage of a very different character, Pierre Sandoz, clerk, journalist, and novelist; and Sandoz, it may be frankly admitted, is simply M. Zola himself. Personal appearance, life, habits, opinions, all are those of the novelist at a certain period of his career; and for this reason, no doubt, many readers of 'His Masterpiece' will find Sandoz the most interesting personage in the book. It is needless, I think, to enter into particulars on the subject. The reader may take it from me that everything attributed in the following pages to Pierre Sandoz was done, experienced, felt or said by Emile Zola. In this respect, then 'His Masterpiece' is virtually M. Zola's 'David Copperfield'—the book into which he has put most of his real life. I may also mention, perhaps, that the long walks on the quays of Paris which in the narrative are attributed to Claude Lantier are really M. Zola's walks; for, in his youth, when he vainly sought employment after failing in his examinations, he was wont, at times of great discouragement, to roam the Paris quays, studying their busy life and their picturesque vistas, whenever he was not poring over the second-hand books set out for sale upon their parapets. From a purely literary standpoint, the pictures of the quays and the Seine to be found in L'Oeuvre are perhaps the best bits of the book, though it is all of interest, because it is essentially a livre vecu, a work really 'lived' by its author. And if in the majority of its characters, those readers possessing some real knowledge of French art life find one man's qualities blended with another's defects, the appearance of a third, and the habits of a fourth, the whole none the less makes a picture of great fidelity to life and truth. This is the Parisian art world as it really was, with nothing improbable or overstrained in the narrative, save its very first chapter, in which romanticism is certainly allowed full play.

It is quite possible that some readers may not judge Claude Lantier, the 'hero,' very favourably; he is like the dog in the fable who forsakes the substance for the shadow; but it should be borne in mind that he is only in part responsible for his actions, for the fatal germ of insanity has been transmitted to him from his great-grandmother. He is, indeed, the son of Gervaise, the heroine of L'Assommoir ('The Dram Shop'), by her lover Lantier. And Gervaise, it may be remembered, was the daughter of Antoine Macquart (of 'The Fortune of the Rougons' and 'Dr. Pascal'), the latter being the illegitimate son of Adelaide Fouque, from whom sprang the insanity of the Rougon-Macquarts. At the same time, whatever view may be taken of Claude's artistic theories, whatever interest his ultimate fate may inspire, it cannot be denied that his opinions on painting are very ably expressed, and that his 'case,' from a pathological point of view, is diagnosticated by M. Zola with all the skill of a physician. Moreover, there can be but one opinion concerning the helpmate of his life, the poor devoted Christine; and no one possessed of feeling will be able to read the history of little Jacques unmoved.

Stories of artistic life are not as a rule particularly popular with English readers, but this is not surprising when one remembers that those who take a genuine interest in art, in this country, are still a small minority. Quite apart from artistic matters, however, there is, I think, an abundance of human interest in the pages of 'His Masterpiece,' and thus I venture to hope that the present version, which I have prepared as carefully as my powers permit, will meet with the favour of those who have supported me, for a good many years now, in my endeavours to make the majority of M. Zola's works accessible in this country.

E. A. V.

MERTON, SURREY.

HIS MASTERPIECE

I

CLAUDE was passing in front of the Hotel de Ville, and the clock was striking two o'clock in the morning when the storm burst forth. He had been roaming forgetfully about the Central Markets, during that burning July night, like a loitering artist enamoured of nocturnal Paris. Suddenly the raindrops came down, so large and thick, that he took to his heels and rushed, wildly bewildered, along the Quai de la Greve. But on reaching the Pont Louis Philippe he pulled up, ragefully breathless; he considered this fear of the rain to be idiotic; and so amid the pitch-like darkness, under the lashing shower which drowned the gas-jets, he crossed the bridge slowly, with his hands dangling by his side.

He had only a few more steps to go. As he was turning on to the Quai Bourbon, on the Isle of St. Louis, a sharp flash of lightning illumined the straight, monotonous line of old houses bordering the narrow road in front of the Seine. It blazed upon the panes of the high, shutterless windows, showing up the melancholy frontages of the old-fashioned dwellings in all their details; here a stone balcony, there the railing of a terrace, and there a garland sculptured on a frieze. The painter had his studio close by, under the eaves of the old Hotel du Martoy, nearly at the corner of the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tete.* So he went on while the quay, after flashing forth for a moment, relapsed into darkness, and a terrible thunder-clap shook the drowsy quarter.

* The street of the Headless woman.—ED.

When Claude, blinded by the rain, got to his door—a low, rounded door, studded with iron—he fumbled for the bell knob, and he was exceedingly surprised—indeed, he started—on finding a living, breathing body huddled against the woodwork. Then, by the light of a second flash, he perceived a tall young girl, dressed in black, and drenched already, who was shivering with fear. When a second thunder-clap had shaken both of them, Claude exclaimed:

'How you frighten one! Who are you, and what do you want?'

He could no longer see her; he only heard her sob, and stammer:

'Oh, monsieur, don't hurt me. It's the fault of the driver, whom I hired at the station, and who left me at this door, after ill-treating me. Yes, a train ran off the rails, near Nevers. We were four hours late, and a person who was to wait for me had gone. Oh, dear me; I have never been in Paris before, and I don't know where I am....'

Another blinding flash cut her short, and with dilated eyes she stared, terror-stricken, at that part of the strange capital, that violet-tinted apparition of a fantastic city. The rain had ceased falling. On the opposite bank of the Seine was the Quai des Ormes, with its small grey houses variegated below by the woodwork of their shops and with their irregular roofs boldly outlined above, while the horizon suddenly became clear on the left as far as the blue slate eaves of the Hotel de Ville, and on the right as far as the leaden-hued dome of St. Paul. What startled her most of all, however, was the hollow of the stream, the deep gap in which the Seine flowed, black and turgid, from the heavy piles of the Pont Marie, to the light arches of the new Pont Louis Philippe. Strange masses peopled the river, a sleeping flotilla of small boats and yawls, a floating washhouse, and a dredger moored to the quay. Then, farther down, against the other bank, were lighters, laden with coals, and barges full of mill stone, dominated as it were by the gigantic arm of a steam crane. But, suddenly, everything disappeared again.

Claude had an instinctive distrust of women—that story of an accident, of a belated train and a brutal cabman, seemed to him a ridiculous invention. At the second thunder-clap the girl had shrunk farther still into her corner, absolutely terrified.

'But you cannot stop here all night,' he said.

She sobbed still more and stammered, 'I beseech you, monsieur, take me to Passy. That's where I was going.'

He shrugged his shoulders. Did she take him for a fool? Mechanically, however, he turned towards the Quai des Celestins, where there was a cabstand. Not the faintest glimmer of a lamp to be seen.

'To Passy, my dear? Why not to Versailles? Where do you think one can pick up a cab at this time of night, and in such weather?'

Her only answer was a shriek; for a fresh flash of lightning had almost blinded her, and this time the tragic city had seemed to her to be spattered with blood. An immense chasm had been revealed, the two arms of the river stretching far away amidst the lurid flames of a conflagration. The smallest details had appeared: the little closed shutters of the Quai des Ormes, and the two openings of the Rue de la Masure, and the Rue du Paon-Blanc, which made breaks in the line of frontages; then near the Pont Marie one could have counted the leaves on the lofty plane trees, which there form a bouquet of magnificent verdure; while on the other side, beneath the Pont Louis Philippe, at the Mail, the barges, ranged in a quadruple line, had flared with the piles of yellow apples with which they were heavily laden. And there was also the ripple of the water, the high chimney of the floating washhouse, the tightened chain of the dredger, the heaps of sand on the banks, indeed, an extraordinary agglomeration of things, quite a little world filling the great gap which seemed to stretch from one horizon to the other. But the sky became dark again, and the river flowed on, all obscurity, amid the crashing of the thunder.

'Thank heaven it's over. Oh, heaven! what's to become of me?'

Just then the rain began to fall again, so stiffly and impelled by so strong a wind that it swept along the quay with the violence of water escaping through an open lock.

'Come, let me get in,' said Claude; 'I can stand this no longer.'

Both were getting drenched. By the flickering light of the gas lamp at the corner of the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tete the young man could see the water dripping from the girl's dress, which was clinging to her skin, in the deluge that swept against the door. He was seized with compassion. Had he not once picked up a cur on such a stormy night as this? Yet he felt angry with himself for softening. He never had anything to do with women; he treated them all as if ignorant of their existence, with a painful timidity which he disguised under a mask of bravado. And that girl must really think him a downright fool, to bamboozle him with that story of adventure—only fit for a farce. Nevertheless, he ended by saying, 'That's enough. You had better come in out of the wet. You can sleep in my rooms.'

But at this the girl became even more frightened, and threw up her arms.

'In your rooms? Oh! good heavens. No, no; it's impossible. I beseech you, monsieur, take me to Passy. Let me beg of you.'

But Claude became angry. Why did she make all this fuss, when he was willing to give her shelter? He had already rung the bell twice. At last the door opened and he pushed the girl before him.

'No, no, monsieur; I tell you, no—'

But another flash dazzled her, and when the thunder growled she bounded inside, scarce knowing what she was about. The heavy door had closed upon them, she was standing under a large archway in complete darkness.

'It's I, Madame Joseph,' cried Claude to the doorkeeper. Then he added, in a whisper, 'Give me your hand, we have to cross the courtyard.'

The girl did as she was told; she no longer resisted; she was overwhelmed, worn out. Once more they encountered the diluvian rain, as they ran side by side as hard as they could across the yard. It was a baronial courtyard, huge, and surrounded with stone arcades, indistinct amidst the gloom. However, they came to a narrow passage without a door, and he let go her hand. She could hear him trying to strike some matches, and swearing. They were all damp. It was necessary for them to grope their way upstairs.

'Take hold of the banisters, and be careful,' said Claude; 'the steps are very high.'

The staircase, a very narrow one, a former servants' staircase, was divided into three lofty flights, which she climbed, stumbling, with unskilful, weary limbs. Then he warned her that they had to turn down a long passage. She kept behind him, touching the walls on both sides with her outstretched hands, as she advanced along that endless passage which bent and came back to the front of the building on the quay. Then there were still other stairs right under the roof—creaking, shaky wooden stairs, which had no banister, and suggested the unplaned rungs of a miller's ladder. The landing at the top was so small that the girl knocked against the young man, as he fumbled in his pocket for his key. At last, however, he opened the door.

'Don't come in, but wait, else you'll hurt yourself again.'

She did not stir. She was panting for breath, her heart was beating fast, there was a buzzing in her ears, and she felt indeed exhausted by that ascent in the dense gloom. It seemed to her as if she had been climbing for hours, in such a maze, amidst such a turning and twisting of stairs that she would never be able to find her way down again. Inside the studio there was a shuffling of heavy feet, a rustling of hands groping in the dark, a clatter of things being tumbled about, accompanied by stifled objurgations. At last the doorway was lighted up.

'Come in, it's all right now.'

She went in and looked around her, without distinguishing anything. The solitary candle burned dim in that garret, more than fifteen feet high, and filled with a confused jumble of things whose big shadows showed fantastically on the walls, which were painted in grey distemper. No, she did not distinguish anything. She mechanically raised her eyes to the large studio-window, against which the rain was beating with a deafening roll like that of a drum, but at that moment another flash of lightning illumined the sky, followed almost immediately by a thunder-clap that seemed to split the roof. Dumb-stricken, pale as death, she dropped upon a chair.

'The devil!' muttered Claude, who also was rather pale. 'That clap wasn't far off. We were just in time. It's better here than in the streets, isn't it?'

Then he went towards the door, closed it with a bang and turned the key, while she watched him with a dazed look.

'There, now, we are at home.'

But it was all over. There were only a few more thunder-claps in the distance, and the rain soon ceased altogether. Claude, who was now growing embarrassed, had examined the girl, askance. She seemed by no means bad looking, and assuredly she was young: twenty at the most. This scrutiny had the effect of making him more suspicious of her still, in spite of an unconscious feeling, a vague idea, that she was not altogether deceiving him. In any case, no matter how clever she might be, she was mistaken if she imagined she had caught him. To prove this he wilfully exaggerated his gruffness and curtness of manner.

Her very anguish at his words and demeanour made her rise, and in her turn she examined him, though without daring to look him straight in the face. And the aspect of that bony young man, with his angular joints and wild bearded face, increased her fears. With his black felt hat and his old brown coat, discoloured by long usage, he looked like a kind of brigand.

Directly he told her to make herself at home and go to bed, for he placed his bed at her disposal, she shrinkingly replied: 'Thank you; I'll do very well as I am; I'll not undress.'

'But your clothes are dripping,' he retorted. 'Come now, don't make an idiot of yourself.'

And thereupon he began to knock about the chairs, and flung aside an old screen, behind which she noticed a washstand and a tiny iron bedstead, from which he began to remove the coverlet.

'No, no, monsieur, it isn't worth while; I assure you that I shall stay here.'

At this, however, Claude became angry, gesticulating and shaking his fists.

'How much more of this comedy are we to have?' said he. 'As I give you my bed, what have you to complain of? You need not pay any attention to me. I shall sleep on that couch.'

He strode towards her with a threatening look, and thereupon, beside herself with fear, thinking that he was going to strike her, she tremblingly unfastened her hat. The water was dripping from her skirts. He kept on growling. Nevertheless, a sudden scruple seemed to come to him, for he ended by saying, condescendingly:

'Perhaps you don't like to sleep in my sheets. I'll change them.'

He at once began dragging them from the bed and flinging them on to the couch at the other end of the studio. And afterwards he took a clean pair from the wardrobe and began to make the bed with all the deftness of a bachelor accustomed to that kind of thing. He carefully tucked in the clothes on the side near the wall, shook the pillows, and turned back a corner of the coverlet.

'There, that'll do; won't it?' said he.

And as she did not answer, but remained motionless, he pushed her behind the screen. 'Good heavens! what a lot of fuss,' he thought. And after spreading his own sheets on the couch, and hanging his clothes on an easel, he quickly went to bed himself. When he was on the point of blowing out the candle, however, he reflected that if he did so she would have to undress in the dark, and so he waited. At first he had not heard her stir; she had no doubt remained standing against the iron bedstead. But at last he detected a slight rustling, a slow, faint movement, as if amidst her preparations she also were listening, frightened perchance by the candle which was still alight. At last, after several minutes, the spring mattress creaked, and then all became still.

'Are you comfortable, mademoiselle?' now asked Claude, in a much more gentle voice.

'Yes, monsieur, very comfortable,' she replied, in a scarcely audible voice, which still quivered with emotion.

'Very well, then. Good-night.'

'Good-night.'

He blew out the candle, and the silence became more intense. In spite of his fatigue, his eyes soon opened again, and gazed upward at the large window of the studio. The sky had become very clear again, the stars were twinkling in the sultry July night, and, despite the storm, the heat remained oppressive. Claude was thinking about the girl—agitated for a moment by contrary feelings, though at last contempt gained the mastery. He indeed believed himself to be very strong-minded; he imagined a romance concocted to destroy his tranquillity, and he gibed contentedly at having frustrated it. His experience of women was very slight, nevertheless he endeavoured to draw certain conclusions from the story she had told him, struck as he was at present by certain petty details, and feeling perplexed. But why, after all, should he worry his brain? What did it matter whether she had told him the truth or a lie? In the morning she would go off; there would be an end to it all, and they would never see each other again. Thus Claude lay cogitating, and it was only towards daybreak, when the stars began to pale, that he fell asleep. As for the girl behind the screen, in spite of the crushing fatigue of her journey, she continued tossing about uneasily, oppressed by the heaviness of the atmosphere beneath the hot zinc-work of the roof; and doubtless, too, she was rendered nervous by the strangeness of her surroundings.

In the morning, when Claude awoke, his eyes kept blinking. It was very late, and the sunshine streamed through the large window. One of his theories was, that young landscape painters should take studios despised by the academical figure painters—studios which the sun flooded with living beams. Nevertheless he felt dazzled, and fell back again on his couch. Why the devil had he been sleeping there? His eyes, still heavy with sleep, wandered mechanically round the studio, when, all at once, beside the screen he noticed a heap of petticoats. Then he at once remembered the girl. He began to listen, and heard a sound of long-drawn, regular breathing, like that of a child comfortably asleep. Ah! so she was still slumbering, and so calmly, that it would be a pity to disturb her. He felt dazed and somewhat annoyed at the adventure, however, for it would spoil his morning's work. He got angry at his own good nature; it would be better to shake her, so that she might go at once. Nevertheless he put on his trousers and slippers softly, and walked about on tiptoes.

The cuckoo clock struck nine, and Claude made a gesture of annoyance. Nothing had stirred; the regular breathing continued. The best thing to do, he thought, would be to set to work on his large picture; he would see to his breakfast later on, when he was able to move about. But, after all, he could not make up his mind. He who lived amid chronic disorder felt worried by that heap of petticoats lying on the floor. Some water had dripped from them, but they were damp still. And so, while grumbling in a low tone, he ended by picking them up one by one and spreading them over the chairs in the sunlight. Had one ever seen the like, clothes thrown about anyhow? They would never get dry, and she would never go off! He turned all that feminine apparel over very awkwardly, got entangled with the black dress-body, and went on all fours to pick up the stockings that had fallen behind an old canvas. They were Balbriggan stockings of a dark grey, long and fine, and he examined them, before hanging them up to dry. The water oozing from the edge of the dress had soaked them, so he wrung and stretched them with his warm hands, in order that he might be able to send her away the quicker.

Since he had been on his legs, Claude had felt sorely tempted to push aside the screen and to take a look at his guest. This self-condemned curiosity only increased his bad temper. At last, with his habitual shrug of the shoulders, he was taking up his brushes, when he heard some words stammered amidst a rustling of bed-clothes. Then, however, soft breathing was heard again, and this time he yielded to the temptation, dropping his brushes, and peeping from behind the screen. The sight that met his eyes rooted him to the spot, so fascinated that he muttered, 'Good gracious! good gracious!'

The girl, amidst the hot-house heat that came from the window, had thrown back her coverlet, and, overcome with the fatigue of a restless night, lay steeped in a flood of sunshine, unconscious of everything. In her feverish slumbers a shoulder button had become unfastened, and a sleeve slipping down allowed her bosom to be seen, with skin which looked almost gilded and soft like satin. Her right arm rested beneath her neck, her head was thrown back, and her black unwound tresses enwrapped her like a dusky cloak.

'Good gracious! But she's a beauty!' muttered Claude once more.

There, in every point, was the figure he had vainly sought for his picture, and it was almost in the right pose. She was rather spare, perhaps, but then so lithe and fresh.

With a light step, Claude ran to take his box of crayons, and a large sheet of paper. Then, squatting on a low chair, he placed a portfolio on his knees and began to sketch with an air of perfect happiness. All else vanished amidst artistic surprise and enthusiasm. No thought of sex came to him. It was all a mere question of chaste outlines, splendid flesh tints, well-set muscles. Face to face with nature, an uneasy mistrust of his powers made him feel small; so, squaring his elbows, he became very attentive and respectful. This lasted for about a quarter of an hour, during which he paused every now and then, blinking at the figure before him. As he was afraid, however, that she might change her position, he speedily set to work again, holding his breath, lest he should awaken her.

And yet, while steadily applying himself to his work, vague fancies again assailed his mind. Who could she be? Assuredly no mere hussy. But why had she told him such an unbelievable tale? Thereupon he began to imagine other stories. Perhaps she had but lately arrived in Paris with a lover, who had abandoned her; perhaps she was some young woman of the middle classes led into bad company by a female friend, and not daring to go home to her relatives; or else there was some still more intricate drama beneath it all; something horrible, inexplicable, the truth of which he would never fathom. All these hypotheses increased his perplexity. Meanwhile, he went on sketching her face, studying it with care. The whole of the upper part, the clear forehead, as smooth as a polished mirror, the small nose, with its delicately chiselled and nervous nostrils, denoted great kindliness and gentleness. One divined the sweet smile of the eyes beneath the closed lids; a smile that would light up the whole of the features. Unfortunately, the lower part of the face marred that expression of sweetness; the jaw was prominent, and the lips, rather too full, showed almost blood-like over the strong white teeth. There was here, like a flash of passion, something that spoke of awakening womanhood, still unconscious of itself amidst those other traits of childlike softness.

But suddenly a shiver rippled over the girl's satiny skin. Perhaps she had felt the weight of that gaze thus mentally dissecting her. She opened her eyes very wide and uttered a cry.

'Ah! great heavens!'

Sudden terror paralysed her at the sight of that strange room, and that young man crouching in his shirt-sleeves in front of her and devouring her with his eyes. Flushing hotly, she impulsively pulled up the counterpane.

'Well, what's the matter?' cried Claude, angrily, his crayon suspended in mid-air; 'what wasp has stung you now?'

He, whose knowledge of womankind was largely limited to professional models, was at a loss to understand the girl's action.

She neither spoke nor stirred, but remained with the counterpane tightly wrapped round her throat, her body almost doubled up, and scarcely showing an outline beneath her coverings.

'I won't eat you, will I?' urged Claude. 'Come, just lie as you were, there's a good girl.'

Again she blushed to her very ears. At last she stammered, 'Oh, no, monsieur, no—pray!'

But he began to lose his temper altogether. One of the angry fits to which he was subject was coming upon him. He thought her obstinacy stupid. And as in response to his urgent requests she only began to sob, he quite lost his head in despair before his sketch, thinking that he would never be able to finish it, and would thus lose a capital study for his picture.

'Well, you won't, eh? But it's idiotic. What do you take me for? Have I annoyed you at all? You know I haven't. Besides, listen, it is very unkind of you to refuse me this service, because, after all, I sheltered you—I gave up my bed to you.'

She only continued to cry, with her head buried in the pillow.

'I assure you that I am very much in want of this sketch, else I wouldn't worry you.'

He grew surprised at the girl's abundant tears, and ashamed at having been so rough with her, so he held his tongue at last, feeling embarrassed, and wishing too that she might have time to recover a bit. Then he began again, in a very gentle tone:

'Well, as it annoys you, let's say no more about it. But if you only knew. I've got a figure in my picture yonder which doesn't make head-way at all, and you were just in the very note. As for me, when it's a question of painting, I'd kill father and mother, you know. Well, you'll excuse me, won't you? And if you'd like me to be very nice, you'd just give me a few minutes more. No, no; keep quiet as you are; I only want the head—nothing but the head. If I could finish that, it would be all right. Really now, be kind; put your arm as it was before, and I shall be very grateful to you—grateful all my life long.'

It was he who was entreating now, pitifully waving his crayon amid the emotion of his artistic craving. Besides, he had not stirred, but remained crouching on his low chair, at a distance from the bed. At last she risked the ordeal, and uncovered her tranquillised face. What else could she do? She was at his mercy, and he looked so wretchedly unhappy.

Nevertheless, she still hesitated, she felt some last scruples. But eventually, without saying a word, she slowly brought her bare arm from beneath the coverings, and again slipped it under her head, taking care, however, to keep the counterpane tightly round her throat.

'Ah! how kind you are! I'll make haste, you will be free in a minute.'

He bent over his drawing, and only looked at her now and then with the glance of a painter who simply regards the woman before him as a model. At first she became pink again; the consciousness that she was showing her bare arm—which she would have shown in a ball-room without thinking at all about it—filled her with confusion. Nevertheless, the young man seemed so reasonable that she became reassured. The blush left her cheeks, and her lips parted in a vague confiding smile. And from between her half-opened eyelids she began to study him. How he had frightened her the previous night with his thick brown beard, his large head, and his impulsive gestures. And yet he was not ugly; she even detected great tenderness in the depths of his brown eyes, while his nose altogether surprised her. It was a finely-cut woman's nose, almost lost amidst the bristling hair on his lips. He shook slightly with a nervous anxiety which made his crayon seem a living thing in his slender hand, and which touched her though she knew not why. She felt sure he was not bad-natured, his rough, surly ways arose from bashfulness. She did not decipher all this very clearly, but she divined it, and began to put herself at her ease, as if she were with a friend.

Nevertheless, the studio continued to frighten her a little. She cast sidelong glances around it, astonished at so much disorder and carelessness. Before the stove the cinders of the previous winter still lay in a heap. Besides the bed, the small washstand, and the couch, there was no other furniture than an old dilapidated oaken wardrobe and a large deal table, littered with brushes, colours, dirty plates, and a spirit lamp, atop of which was a saucepan, with shreds of vermicelli sticking to its sides. Some rush-bottomed chairs, their seats the worse for wear, were scattered about beside spavined easels. Near the couch the candlestick used on the previous night stood on the floor, which looked as if it had not been swept for fully a month. There was only the cuckoo clock, a huge one, with a dial illuminated with crimson flowers, that looked clean and bright, ticking sonorously all the while. But what especially frightened her were some sketches in oils that hung frameless from the walls, a serried array of sketches reaching to the floor, where they mingled with heaps of canvases thrown about anyhow. She had never seen such terrible painting, so coarse, so glaring, showing a violence of colour, that jarred upon her nerves like a carter's oath heard on the doorstep of an inn. She cast her eyes down for a moment, and then became attracted by a picture, the back of which was turned to her. It was the large canvas at which the painter was working, and which he pushed against the wall every night, the better to judge it on the morrow in the surprise of the first glance. What could it be, that one, she wondered, since he dared not even show it? And, meantime, through the vast room, a sheet of burning sunlight, falling straight from the window panes, unchecked by any blind, spread with the flow of molten gold over all the broken-down furniture, whose devil-may-care shabbiness it threw into bold relief.

Claude began to feel the silence oppressive; he wanted to say something, no matter what, first, in order to be polite, and more especially to divert her attention from her pose. But cudgel his brain as he would, he could only think of asking: 'Pray, what is your name?'

She opened her eyes, which she had closed, as if she were feeling sleepy.

'Christine,' she said.

At which he seemed surprised. Neither had he told her his name. Since the night before they had been together, side by side, without knowing one another.

'My name is Claude.'

And, having looked at her just at that moment, he saw her burst into a pretty laugh. It was the sudden, merry peal of a big girl, still scarcely more than a hoyden. She considered this tardy exchange of names rather droll. Then something else amused her.

'How funny—Claude, Christine—they begin with the same letter.'

They both became silent once more. He was blinking at his work, growing absorbed in it, and at a loss how to continue the conversation. He fancied that she was beginning to feel tired and uncomfortable, and in his fear lest she should stir, he remarked at random, merely to occupy her thoughts, 'It feels rather warm.'

This time she checked her laughter, her natural gaiety that revived and burst forth in spite of herself ever since she had felt easier in mind. Truth to tell, the heat was indeed so oppressive that it seemed to her as if she were in a bath, with skin moist and pale with the milky pallor of a camellia.

'Yes, it feels rather warm,' she said, seriously, though mirth was dancing in her eyes.

Thereupon Claude continued, with a good-natured air:

'It's the sun falling straight in; but, after all, a flood of sunshine on one's skin does one good. We could have done with some of it last night at the door, couldn't we?'

At this both burst out laughing, and he, delighted at having hit upon a subject of conversation, questioned her about her adventure, without, however, feeling inquisitive, for he cared little about discovering the real truth, and was only intent upon prolonging the sitting.

Christine simply, and in a few words, related what had befallen her. Early on the previous morning she had left Clermont for Paris, where she was to take up a situation as reader and companion to the widow of a general, Madame Vanzade, a rich old lady, who lived at Passy. The train was timed to reach Paris at ten minutes past nine in the evening, and a maid was to meet her at the station. They had even settled by letter upon a means of recognition. She was to wear a black hat with a grey feather in it. But, a little above Nevers, her train had come upon a goods train which had run off the rails, its litter of smashed trucks still obstructing the line. There was quite a series of mishaps and delays. First an interminable wait in the carriages, which the passengers had to quit at last, luggage and all, in order to trudge to the next station, three kilometres distant, where the authorities had decided to make up another train. By this time they had lost two hours, and then another two were lost in the general confusion which the accident had caused from one end of the line to the other, in such wise that they reached the Paris terminus four hours behind time, that is, at one o'clock in the morning.

'Bad luck, indeed,' interrupted Claude, who was still sceptical, though half disarmed, in his surprise at the neat way in which the girl arranged the details of her story.

'And, of course, there was no one at the station to meet you?' he added.

Christine had, indeed, missed Madame Vanzade's maid, who, no doubt, had grown tired of waiting. She told Claude of her utter helplessness at the Lyons terminus—that large, strange, dark station, deserted at that late hour of night. She had not dared to take a cab at first, but had kept on walking up and down, carrying her small bag, and still hoping that somebody would come for her. When at last she made up her mind there only remained one driver, very dirty and smelling of drink, who prowled round her, offering his cab in a knowing, impudent way.

'Yes, I know, a dawdler,' said Claude, getting as interested as if he were listening to a fairy tale. 'So you got into his cab?'

Looking up at the ceiling, Christine continued, without shifting her position: 'He made me; he called me his little dear, and frightened me. When he found out that I was going to Passy, he became very angry, and whipped his horse so hard that I was obliged to hold on by the doors. After that I felt more easy, because the cab trundled along all right through the lighted streets, and I saw people about. At last I recognised the Seine, for though I was never in Paris before, I had often looked at a map. Naturally I thought he would keep along the quay, so I became very frightened again on noticing that we crossed a bridge. Just then it began to rain, and the cab, which had got into a very dark turning, suddenly stopped. The driver got down from his seat, and declared it was raining too hard for him to remain on the box—'

Claude burst out laughing. He no longer doubted. She could not have invented that driver. And as she suddenly stopped, somewhat confused, he said, 'All right, the cabman was having a joke.'

'I jumped out at once by the other door,' resumed Christine. 'Then he began to swear at me, saying that we had arrived at Passy, and that he would tear my hat from my head if I did not pay him. It was raining in torrents, and the quay was absolutely deserted. I was losing my head, and when I had pulled out a five-franc piece, he whipped up his horse and drove off, taking my little bag, which luckily only contained two pocket-handkerchiefs, a bit of cake, and the key of my trunk, which I had been obliged to leave behind in the train.'

'But you ought to have taken his number,' exclaimed the artist indignantly. In fact he now remembered having been brushed against by a passing cab, which had rattled by furiously while he was crossing the Pont Louis Philippe, amid the downpour of the storm. And he reflected how improbable truth often was. The story he had conjured up as being the most simple and logical was utterly stupid beside the natural chain of life's many combinations.

'You may imagine how I felt under the doorway,' concluded Christine. 'I knew well enough that I was not at Passy, and that I should have to spend the night there, in this terrible Paris. And there was the thunder and the lightning—those horrible blue and red flashes, which showed me things that made me tremble.'

She closed her eyelids once more, she shivered, and the colour left her cheeks as, in her fancy, she again beheld the tragic city—that line of quays stretching away in a furnace-like blaze, the deep moat of the river, with its leaden waters obstructed by huge black masses, lighters looking like lifeless whales, and bristling with motionless cranes which stretched forth gallows-like arms. Was that a welcome to Paris?

Again did silence fall. Claude had resumed his drawing. But she became restless, her arm was getting stiff.

'Just put your elbow a little lower, please,' said Claude. Then, with an air of concern, as if to excuse his curtness: 'Your parents will be very uneasy, if they have heard of the accident.'

'I have no parents.'

'What! neither father nor mother? You are all alone in the world?'

'Yes; all alone.'

She was eighteen years old, and had been born in Strasburg, quite by chance, though, between two changes of garrison, for her father was a soldier, Captain Hallegrain. Just as she entered upon her twelfth year, the captain, a Gascon, hailing from Montauban, had died at Clermont, where he had settled when paralysis of the legs had obliged him to retire from active service. For nearly five years afterwards, her mother, a Parisian by birth, had remained in that dull provincial town, managing as well as she could with her scanty pension, but eking it out by fan-painting, in order that she might bring up her daughter as a lady. She had, however, now been dead for fifteen months, and had left her child penniless and unprotected, without a friend, save the Superior of the Sisters of the Visitation, who had kept her with them. Christine had come straight to Paris from the convent, the Superior having succeeded in procuring her a situation as reader and companion to her old friend, Madame Vanzade, who was almost blind.

At these additional particulars, Claude sat absolutely speechless. That convent, that well-bred orphan, that adventure, all taking so romantic a turn, made him relapse into embarrassment again, into all his former awkwardness of gesture and speech. He had left off drawing, and sat looking, with downcast eyes, at his sketch.

'Is Clermont pretty?' he asked, at last.

'Not very; it's a gloomy town. Besides, I don't know; I scarcely ever went out.'

She was resting on her elbow, and continued, as if talking to herself in a very low voice, still tremulous from the thought of her bereavement.

'Mamma, who wasn't strong, killed herself with work. She spoilt me; nothing was too good for me. I had all sorts of masters, but I did not get on very well; first, because I fell ill, then because I paid no attention. I was always laughing and skipping about like a featherbrain. I didn't care for music, piano playing gave me a cramp in my arms. The only thing I cared about at all was painting.'

He raised his head and interrupted her. 'You can paint?'

'Oh, no; I know nothing, nothing at all. Mamma, who was very talented, made me do a little water-colour, and I sometimes helped her with the backgrounds of her fans. She painted some lovely ones.'

In spite of herself, she then glanced at the startling sketches with which the walls seemed ablaze, and her limpid eyes assumed an uneasy expression at the sight of that rough, brutal style of painting. From where she lay she obtained a topsy-turvy view of the study of herself which the painter had begun, and her consternation at the violent tones she noticed, the rough crayon strokes, with which the shadows were dashed off, prevented her from asking to look at it more closely. Besides, she was growing very uncomfortable in that bed, where she lay broiling; she fidgetted with the idea of going off and putting an end to all these things which, ever since the night before, had seemed to her so much of a dream.

Claude, no doubt, became aware of her discomfort. A sudden feeling of shame brought with it one of compunction.

He put his unfinished sketch aside, and hastily exclaimed: 'Much obliged for your kindness, mademoiselle. Forgive me, I have really abused it. Yes, indeed, pray get up; it's time for you to look for your friends.'

And without appearing to understand why she did not follow his advice, but hid more and more of her bare arm in proportion as he drew nearer, he still insisted upon advising her to rise. All at once, as the real state of things struck him, he swung his arms about like a madman, set the screen in position, and went to the far end of the studio, where he began noisily setting his crockery in order, so that she might jump out and dress herself, without fear of being overheard.

Amidst the din he had thus raised, he failed to hear her hesitating voice, 'Monsieur, monsieur—'

At last he caught her words.

'Monsieur, would you be so kind—I can't find my stockings.'

Claude hurried forward. What had he been thinking of? What was she to do behind that screen, without her stockings and petticoats, which he had spread out in the sunlight? The stockings were dry, he assured himself of that by gently rubbing them together, and he handed them to her over the partition; again noticing her arm, bare, plump and rosy like that of a child. Then he tossed the skirts on to the foot of the bed and pushed her boots forward, leaving nothing but her bonnet suspended from the easel. She had thanked him and that was all; he scarcely distinguished the rustling of her clothes and the discreet splashing of water. Still he continued to concern himself about her.

'You will find the soap in a saucer on the table. Open the drawer and take a clean towel. Do you want more water? I'll give you the pitcher.'

Suddenly the idea that he was blundering again exasperated him.

'There, there, I am only worrying you. I will leave you to your own devices. Do as if you were at home.'

And he continued to potter about among the crockery. He was debating with himself whether he should ask her to stay to breakfast. He ought not to let her go like that. On the other hand, if she did stay, he would never get done; it would mean a loss of his whole morning. Without deciding anything, as soon as he had lighted his spirit lamp, he washed his saucepan and began to make some chocolate. He thought it more distingue, feeling rather ashamed of his vermicelli, which he mixed with bread and soused with oil as people do in the South of France. However, he was still breaking the chocolate into bits, when he uttered a cry of surprise, 'What, already?'

It was Christine, who had pushed back the screen, and who appeared looking neat and correct in her black dress, duly laced and buttoned up, equipped, as it were, in a twinkle. Her rosy face did not even show traces of the water, her thick hair was twisted in a knot at the back of her head, not a single lock out of place. And Claude remained open-mouthed before that miracle of quickness, that proof of feminine skill in dressing well and promptly.

'The deuce, if you go about everything in that way!' said he.

He found her taller and handsomer than he had fancied. But what struck him most was her look of quiet decision. She was evidently no longer afraid of him. It seemed as though she had re-donned her armour and become an amazon again. She smiled and looked him straight in the face. Whereupon he said what he was still reluctant to say:

'You'll breakfast with me, won't you?'

But she refused the offer. 'No, thank you. I am going to the station, where my trunk must have arrived by now, and then I shall drive to Passy.'

It was in vain that he told her that she must be hungry, that it was unreasonable for her to go out without eating something.

'Well, if you won't, I'll go down and fetch you a cab,' he ended by exclaiming.

'Pray don't take such trouble.'

'But you can't go such a distance on foot. Let me at least take you to the cabstand, as you don't know Paris.'

'No, really I do not need you. If you wish to oblige me, let me go away by myself.'

She had evidently made up her mind. She no doubt shrank from the idea of being seen with a man, even by strangers. She meant to remain silent about that strange night, she meant to tell some falsehood, and keep the recollection of her adventure entirely to herself. He made a furious gesture, which was tantamount to sending her to the devil. Good riddance; it suited him better not to have to go down. But, all the same, he felt hurt at heart, and considered that she was ungrateful.

'As you please, then. I sha'n't resort to force,' he said.

At these words, Christine's vague smile became more accentuated. She did not reply, but took her bonnet and looked round in search of a glass. Failing to find one, she tied the strings as best she could. With her arms uplifted, she leisurely arranged and smoothed the ribbons, her face turned towards the golden rays of the sun. Somewhat surprised, Claude looked in vain for the traits of childish softness that he had just portrayed; the upper part of her face, her clear forehead, her gentle eyes had become less conspicuous; and now the lower part stood out, with its somewhat sensual jaw, ruddy mouth, and superb teeth. And still she smiled with that enigmatical, girlish smile, which was, perhaps, an ironical one.

'At any rate,' he said, in a vexed tone, 'I do not think you have anything to reproach me with.'

At which she could not help laughing, with a slight, nervous laugh.

'No, no, monsieur, not in the least.'

He continued staring at her, fighting the battle of inexperience and bashfulness over again, and fearing that he had been ridiculous. Now that she no longer trembled before him, had she become contemptuously surprised at having trembled at all? What! he had not made the slightest attempt at courtship, not even pressed a kiss on her finger-tips. The young fellow's bearish indifference, of which she had assuredly been conscious, must have hurt her budding womanly feelings.

'You were saying,' she resumed, becoming sedate once more, 'that the cabstand is at the end of the bridge on the opposite quay?'

'Yes; at the spot where there is a clump of trees.'

She had finished tying her bonnet strings, and stood ready gloved, with her hands hanging by her side, and yet she did not go, but stared straight in front of her. As her eyes met the big canvas turned to the wall she felt a wish to see it, but did not dare to ask. Nothing detained her; still she seemed to be looking around as if she had forgotten something there, something which she could not name. At last she stepped towards the door.

Claude was already opening it, and a small loaf placed erect against the post tumbled into the studio.

'You see,' he said, 'you ought to have stopped to breakfast with me. My doorkeeper brings the bread up every morning.'

She again refused with a shake of the head. When she was on the landing she turned round, and for a moment remained quite still. Her gay smile had come back; she was the first to hold out her hand.

'Thank you, thank you very much.'

He had taken her small gloved hand within his large one, all pastel-stained as it was. Both hands remained like that for a few moments, closely and cordially pressed. The young girl was still smiling at him, and he had a question on the tip of his tongue: 'When shall I see you again?' But he felt ashamed to ask it, and after waiting a while she withdrew her hand.

'Good-bye, monsieur.'

'Good-bye, mademoiselle.'

Christine, without another glance, was already descending the steep ladder-like stairway whose steps creaked, when Claude turned abruptly into his studio, closing the door with a bang, and shouting to himself: 'Ah, those confounded women!'

He was furious—furious with himself, furious with everyone. Kicking about the furniture, he continued to ease his feelings in a loud voice. Was not he right in never allowing them to cross his threshold? They only turned a fellow's head. What proof had he after all that yonder chit with the innocent look, who had just gone, had not fooled him most abominably? And he had been silly enough to believe in her cock-and-bull stories! All his suspicions revived. No one would ever make him swallow that fairy tale of the general's widow, the railway accident, and especially the cabman. Did such things ever happen in real life? Besides, that mouth of hers told a strange tale, and her looks had been very singular just as she was going. Ah! if he could only have understood why she had told him all those lies; but no, they were profitless, inexplicable. It was art for art's sake. How she must be laughing at him by this time.

He roughly folded up the screen and sent it flying into a corner. She had no doubt left all in disorder. And when he found that everything was in its proper place—basin, towel, and soap—he flew into a rage because she had not made the bed. With a great deal of fuss he began to make it himself, lifting the mattress in his arms, banging the pillow about with his fists, and feeling oppressed by the pure scent of youth that rose from everything. Then he had a good wash to cool himself, and in the damp towel he found the same virgin fragrance, which seemed to spread through the studio. Swearing the while, he drank his chocolate from the saucepan, so excited, so eager to set to work, as to swallow large mouthfuls of bread without taking breath.

'Why, it's enough to kill one here,' he suddenly exclaimed. 'It must be this confounded heat that's making me ill.'

After all, the sun had shifted, and it was far less hot. But he opened a small window on a level with the roof, and inhaled, with an air of profound relief, the whiff of warm air that entered. Then he took up his sketch of Christine's head and for a long while he lingered looking at it.

II

IT had struck twelve, and Claude was working at his picture when there was a loud, familiar knock at the door. With an instinctive yet involuntary impulse, the artist slipped the sketch of Christine's head, by the aid of which he was remodelling the principal figure of his picture, into a portfolio. After which he decided to open the door.

'You, Pierre!' he exclaimed, 'already!'

Pierre Sandoz, a friend of his boyhood, was about twenty-two, very dark, with a round and determined head, a square nose, and gentle eyes, set in energetic features, girt round with a sprouting beard.

'I breakfasted earlier than usual,' he answered, 'in order to give you a long sitting. The devil! you are getting on with it.'

He had stationed himself in front of the picture, and he added almost immediately: 'Hallo! you have altered the character of your woman's features!'

Then came a long pause; they both kept staring at the canvas. It measured about sixteen feet by ten, and was entirely painted over, though little of the work had gone beyond the roughing-out. This roughing-out, hastily dashed off, was superb in its violence and ardent vitality of colour. A flood of sunlight streamed into a forest clearing, with thick walls of verdure; to the left, stretched a dark glade with a small luminous speck in the far distance. On the grass, amidst all the summer vegetation, lay a nude woman with one arm supporting her head, and though her eyes were closed she smiled amidst the golden shower that fell around her. In the background, two other women, one fair, and the other dark, wrestled playfully, setting light flesh tints amidst all the green leaves. And, as the painter had wanted something dark by way of contrast in the foreground, he had contented himself with seating there a gentleman, dressed in a black velveteen jacket. This gentleman had his back turned and the only part of his flesh that one saw was his left hand, with which he was supporting himself on the grass.

'The woman promises well,' said Sandoz, at last; 'but, dash it, there will be a lot of work in all this.'

Claude, with his eyes blazing in front of his picture, made a gesture of confidence. 'I've lots of time from now till the Salon. One can get through a deal of work in six months. And perhaps this time I'll be able to prove that I am not a brute.'

Thereupon he set up a whistle, inwardly pleased at the sketch he had made of Christine's head, and buoyed up by one of those flashes of hope whence he so often dropped into torturing anguish, like an artist whom passion for nature consumed.

'Come, no more idling,' he shouted. 'As you're here, let us set to.'

Sandoz, out of pure friendship, and to save Claude the cost of a model, had offered to pose for the gentleman in the foreground. In four or five Sundays, the only day of the week on which he was free, the figure would be finished. He was already donning the velveteen jacket, when a sudden reflection made him stop.

'But, I say, you haven't really lunched, since you were working when I came in. Just go down and have a cutlet while I wait here.'

The idea of losing time revolted Claude. 'I tell you I have breakfasted. Look at the saucepan. Besides, you can see there's a crust of bread left. I'll eat it. Come, to work, to work, lazy-bones.'

And he snatched up his palette and caught his brushes, saying, as he did so, 'Dubuche is coming to fetch us this evening, isn't he?'

'Yes, about five o'clock.'

'Well, that's all right then. We'll go down to dinner directly he comes. Are you ready? The hand more to the left, and your head a little more forward.'

Having arranged some cushions, Sandoz settled himself on the couch in the required attitude. His back was turned, but all the same the conversation continued for another moment, for he had that very morning received a letter from Plassans, the little Provencal town where he and the artist had known each other when they were wearing out their first pairs of trousers on the eighth form of the local college. However, they left off talking. The one was working with his mind far away from the world, while the other grew stiff and cramped with the sleepy weariness of protracted immobility.

It was only when Claude was nine years old that a lucky chance had enabled him to leave Paris and return to the little place in Provence, where he had been born. His mother, a hardworking laundress,* whom his ne'er-do-well father had scandalously deserted, had afterwards married an honest artisan who was madly in love with her. But in spite of their endeavours, they failed to make both ends meet. Hence they gladly accepted the offer of an elderly and well-to-do townsman to send the lad to school and keep him with him. It was the generous freak of an eccentric amateur of painting, who had been struck by the little figures that the urchin had often daubed. And thus for seven years Claude had remained in the South, at first boarding at the college, and afterwards living with his protector. The latter, however, was found dead in his bed one morning. He left the lad a thousand francs a year, with the faculty of disposing of the principal when he reached the age of twenty-five. Claude, already seized with a passion for painting, immediately left school without even attempting to secure a bachelor's degree, and rushed to Paris whither his friend Sandoz had preceded him.

* Gervaise of 'The Dram Shop'(L'Assommoir).—ED.

At the College of Plassans, while still in the lowest form, Claude Lantier, Pierre Sandoz, and another lad named Louis Dubuche, had been three inseparables. Sprung from three different classes of society, by no means similar in character, but simply born in the same year at a few months' interval, they had become friends at once and for aye, impelled thereto by certain secret affinities, the still vague promptings of a common ambition, the dawning consciousness of possessing greater intelligence than the set of dunces who maltreated them. Sandoz's father, a Spaniard, who had taken refuge in France in consequence of some political disturbances in which he had been mixed up, had started, near Plassans, a paper mill with new machinery of his own invention. When he had died, heart-broken by the petty local jealousy that had sought to hamper him in every way, his widow had found herself in so involved a position, and burdened with so many tangled law suits, that the whole of her remaining means were swallowed up. She was a native of Burgundy. Yielding to her hatred of the Provencals, and laying at their door even the slow paralysis from which she was suffering, she removed to Paris with her son, who then supported her out of a meagre clerk's salary, he himself haunted by the vision of literary glory. As for Dubuche, he was the son of a baker of Plassans. Pushed by his mother, a covetous and ambitious woman, he had joined his friends in Paris later on. He was attending the courses at the School of Arts as a pupil architect, living as best he might upon the last five-franc pieces that his parents staked on his chances, with the obstinacy of usurers discounting the future at the rate of a hundred per cent.

'Dash it!' at last exclaimed Sandoz, breaking the intense silence that hung upon the room. 'This position isn't at all easy; my wrist feels broken. Can I move for a moment?'

Claude let him stretch himself without answering. He was now working at the velveteen jacket, laying on the colour with thick strokes, However, stepping backward and blinking, he suddenly burst into loud laughter at some reminiscence.

'I say, do you recollect, when we were in the sixth form, how, one day, Pouillaud lighted the candles in that idiot Lalubie's cupboard? And how frightened Lalubie was when, before going to his desk, he opened the cupboard to take his books, and found it transformed into a mortuary chapel? Five hundred lines to every one in the form.'

Sandoz, unable to withstand the contagion of the other's gaiety, flung himself back on the couch. As he resumed his pose, he remarked, 'Ah, that brute of a Pouillaud. You know that in his letter this morning he tells me of Lalubie's forthcoming marriage. The old hack is marrying a pretty girl. But you know her, she's the daughter of Gallissard, the haberdasher—the little fair-haired girl whom we used to serenade!'

Once on the subject of their recollections there was no stopping them, though Claude went on painting with growing feverishness, while Pierre, still turned towards the wall, spoke over his shoulders, shaking every now and then with excitement.

First of all came recollections of the college, the old, dank convent, that extended as far as the town ramparts; the two courtyards with their huge plane trees; the slimy sedge-covered pond, where they had learned to swim, and the class-rooms with dripping plaster walls on the ground floor; then the refectory, with its atmosphere constantly poisoned by the fumes of dish-water; the dormitory of the little ones, famous for its horrors, the linen room, and the infirmary, full of gentle sisters, nuns in black gowns who looked so sweet beneath their white coifs. What a to-do there had been when Sister Angela, she whose Madonna-like face had turned the heads of all the big fellows, disappeared one morning with Hermeline, a stalwart first-form lad, who, from sheer love, purposely cut his hands with his penknife so as to get an opportunity of seeing and speaking to her while she dressed his self-inflicted injuries with gold-beater's skin.

Then they passed the whole college staff in review; a pitiful, grotesque, and terrible procession it was, with such heads as are seen on meerschaum pipes, and profiles instinct with hatred and suffering. There was the head master, who ruined himself in giving parties, in order to marry his daughters—two tall, elegant girls, the butt of constant and abominable insults, written and sketched on every wall; there was the comptroller Pifard, whose wonderful nose betrayed his presence behind every door, when he went eavesdropping; and there were all the teachers, each befouled with some insulting nickname: the severe 'Rhadamantus,' who had never been seen to smile; 'Filth,' who by the constant rubbing of his head had left his mark on the wall behind every professional seat he occupied; 'Thou-hast-deceived-me-Adele,' the professor of physics, at whom ten generations of schoolboys had tauntingly flung the name of his unfaithful wife. There were others still: Spontini, the ferocious usher, with his Corsican knife, rusty with the blood of three cousins; little Chantecaille, who was so good-natured that he allowed the pupils to smoke when out walking; and also a scullion and a scullery maid, two ugly creatures who had been nicknamed Paraboulomenos and Paralleluca, and who were accused of kissing one another over the vegetable parings.

Then came comical reminiscences; the sudden recollection of practical jokes, at which they shook with laughter after all those years. Oh! the morning when they had burned the shoes of Mimi-la-Mort, alias the Skeleton Day Boarder, a lank lad, who smuggled snuff into the school for the whole of the form. And then that winter evening when they had bagged some matches lying near the lamp in the chapel, in order to smoke dry chestnut leaves in reed pipes. Sandoz, who had been the ringleader on that occasion, now frankly avowed his terror; the cold perspiration that had come upon him when he had scrambled out of the choir, wrapt in darkness. And again there was the day when Claude had hit upon the sublime idea of roasting some cockchafers in his desk to see whether they were good to eat, as people said they were. So terrible had been the stench, so dense the smoke that poured from the desk, that the usher had rushed to the water pitcher, under the impression that the place was on fire. And then their marauding expeditions; the pillaging of onion beds while they were out walking; the stones thrown at windows, the correct thing being to make the breakage resemble a well-known geographical map. Also the Greek exercises, written beforehand in large characters on the blackboard, so that every dunce might easily read them though the master remained unaware of it; the wooden seats of the courtyard sawn off and carried round the basin like so many corpses, the boys marching in procession and singing funeral dirges. Yes! that had been a capital prank. Dubuche, who played the priest, had tumbled into the basin while trying to scoop some water into his cap, which was to serve as a holy water pot. But the most comical and amusing of all the pranks had perhaps been that devised by Pouillaud, who one night had fastened all the unmentionable crockery of the dormitory to one long string passed under the beds. At dawn—it was the very morning when the long vacation began—he had pulled the string and skedaddled down the three flights of stairs with this frightful tail of crockery bounding and smashing to pieces behind him.

At the recollection of this last incident, Claude remained grinning from ear to ear, his brush suspended in mid-air. 'That brute of a Pouillaud!' he laughed. 'And so he has written to you. What is he doing now?'

'Why, nothing at all, old man,' answered Sandoz, seating himself more comfortably on the cushions. 'His letter is idiotic. He is just finishing his law studies, and he will inherit his father's practice as a solicitor. You ought to see the style he has already assumed—all the idiotic austerity of a philistine, who has turned over a new leaf.'

They were silent once more until Sandoz added, 'You see, old boy, we have been protected against that sort of thing.'

Then they relapsed again into reminiscences, but such as made their hearts thump; the remembrance of the many happy days they had spent far away from the college, in the open air and the full sunlight. When still very young, and only in the sixth form, the three inseparables had become passionately fond of taking long walks. The shortest holidays were eagerly seized upon to tramp for miles and miles; and, getting bolder as they grew up, they finished by scouring the whole of the country-side, by making journeys that sometimes lasted for days. They slept where they could, in the cleft of a rock, on some threshing-floor, still burning hot, where the straw of the beaten corn made them a soft couch, or in some deserted hut, the ground of which they covered with wild thyme and lavender. Those were flights far from the everyday world, when they became absorbed in healthy mother Nature herself, adoring trees and streams and mountains; revelling in the supreme joy of being alone and free.

Dubuche, who was a boarder, had only joined them on half-holidays and during the long vacation. Besides, his legs were heavy, and he had the quiet nature of a studious lad. But Claude and Sandoz never wearied; they awakened each other every Sunday morning by throwing stones at their respective shutters. In summer, above all, they were haunted by the thought of the Viorne, the torrent, whose tiny stream waters the low-lying pastures of Plassans. When scarcely twelve they already knew how to swim, and it became a passion with them to potter about in the holes where the water accumulated; to spend whole days there, stark naked, drying themselves on the burning sand, and then replunging into the river, living there as it were, on their backs, on their stomachs, searching among the reeds on the banks, immersed up to their ears, and watching the hiding-places of the eels for hours at a stretch. That constant contact of water beneath a burning sun prolonged their childhood, as it were, and lent them the joyous laughter of truant urchins, though they were almost young men, when of an evening they returned to the town amidst the still oppressive heat of a summer sunset. Later on they became very fond of shooting, but shooting such as is carried on in a region devoid of game, where they had to trudge a score of miles to pick off half a dozen pettychaps, or fig-peckers; wonderful expeditions, whence they returned with their bags empty, or with a mere bat, which they had managed to bring down while discharging their guns at the outskirts of the town. Their eyes moistened at the recollection of those happy days; they once more beheld the white endless roads, covered with layers of dust, as if there had been a fall of snow. They paced them again and again in their imagination, happy to hear the fancied creaking of their heavy shoes. Then they cut across the fields, over the reddish-brown ferruginous soil, careering madly on and on; and there was a sky of molten lead above them, not a shadow anywhere, nothing but dwarf olive trees and almond trees with scanty foliage. And then the delicious drowsiness of fatigue on their return, their triumphant bravado at having covered yet more ground than on the precious journey, the delight of being no longer conscious of effort, of advancing solely by dint of strength acquired, spurring themselves on with some terrible martial strain which helped to make everything like a dream.

Already at that time Claude, in addition to his powder-flask and cartridge-belt, took with him an album, in which he sketched little bits of country, while Sandoz, on his side, always had some favourite poet in his pocket. They lived in a perfect frenzy of romanticism, winged strophes alternated with coarse garrison stories, odes were flung upon the burning, flashing, luminous atmosphere that enwrapt them. And when perchance they came upon a small rivulet, bordered by half a dozen willows, casting grey shadows on the soil all ablaze with colour, they at once went into the seventh heaven. They there by themselves performed the dramas they knew by heart, inflating their voices when repeating the speeches of the heroes, and reducing them to the merest whisper when they replied as queens and love-sick maidens. On such days the sparrows were left in peace. In that remote province, amidst the sleepy stupidity of that small town, they had thus lived on from the age of fourteen, full of enthusiasm, devoured by a passion for literature and art. The magnificent scenarios devised by Victor Hugo, the gigantic phantasies which fought therein amidst a ceaseless cross-fire of antithesis, had at first transported them into the fulness of epic glory; gesticulating, watching the sun decline behind some ruins, seeing life pass by amidst all the superb but false glitter of a fifth act. Then Musset had come to unman them with his passion and his tears; they heard their own hearts throb in response to his, a new world opened to them—a world more human—that conquered them by its cries for pity, and of eternal misery, which henceforth they were to hear rising from all things. Besides, they were not difficult to please; they showed the voracity of youth, a furious appetite for all kinds of literature, good and bad alike. So eager were they to admire something, that often the most execrable works threw them into a state of exaltation similar to that which the purest masterpieces produce.

And as Sandoz now remarked, it was their great love of bodily exercise, their very revels of literature that had protected them against the numbing influence of their ordinary surroundings. They never entered a cafe, they had a horror of the streets, even pretending to moult in them like caged eagles, whereas their schoolfellows were already rubbing their elbows over the small marble tables and playing at cards for drinks. Provincial life, which dragged other lads, when still young, within its cogged mechanism, that habit of going to one's club, of spelling out the local paper from its heading to the last advertisement, the everlasting game of dominoes no sooner finished than renewed, the same walk at the self-same hour and ever along the same roads—all that brutifies the mind, like a grindstone crushing the brain, filled them with indignation, called forth their protestations. They preferred to scale the neighbouring hills in search of some unknown solitary spot, where they declaimed verses even amidst drenching showers, without dreaming of shelter in their very hatred of town-life. They had even planned an encampment on the banks of the Viorne, where they were to live like savages, happy with constant bathing, and the company of five or six books, which would amply suffice for their wants. Even womankind was to be strictly banished from that camp. Being very timid and awkward in the presence of the gentler sex, they pretended to the asceticism of superior intellects. For two years Claude had been in love with a 'prentice hat-trimmer, whom every evening he had followed at a distance, but to whom he had never dared to address a word. Sandoz nursed dreams of ladies met while travelling, beautiful girls who would suddenly spring up in some unknown wood, charm him for a whole day, and melt into air at dusk. The only love adventure which they had ever met with still evoked their laughter, so silly did it seem to them now. It consisted of a series of serenades which they had given to two young ladies during the time when they, the serenaders, had formed part of the college band. They passed their nights beneath a window playing the clarinet and the cornet-a-piston, and thus raising a discordant din which frightened all the folk of the neighbourhood, until one memorable evening the indignant parents had emptied all the water pitchers of the family over them.

Ah! those were happy days, and how loving was the laughter with which they recalled them. On the walls of the studio hung a series of sketches, which Claude, it so happened, had made during a recent trip southward. Thus it seemed as if they were surrounded by the familiar vistas of bright blue sky overhanging a tawny country-side. Here stretched a plain dotted with little greyish olive trees as far as a rosy network of distant hills. There, between sunburnt russet slopes, the exhausted Viorne was almost running dry beneath the span of an old dust-bepowdered bridge, without a bit of green, nothing save a few bushes, dying for want of moisture. Farther on, the mountain gorge of the Infernets showed its yawning chasm amidst tumbled rocks, struck down by lightning, a huge chaos, a wild desert, rolling stony billows as far as the eye could reach. Then came all sorts of well remembered nooks: the valley of Repentance, narrow and shady, a refreshing oasis amid calcined fields; the wood of Les Trois Bons-Dieux, with hard, green, varnished pines shedding pitchy tears beneath the burning sun; the sheep walk of Bouffan, showing white, like a mosque, amidst a far-stretching blood-red plain. And there were yet bits of blinding, sinuous roads; ravines, where the heat seemed even to wring bubbling perspiration from the pebbles; stretches of arid, thirsty sand, drinking up rivers drop by drop; mole hills, goat paths, and hill crests, half lost in the azure sky.

'Hallo!' exclaimed Sandoz, turning towards one sketch, 'what's that?'

Claude, indignant, waved his palette. 'What! don't you remember? We were very nigh breaking our necks there. Surely you recollect the day we clambered from the very bottom of Jaumegarde with Dubuche? The rock was as smooth as your hand, and we had to cling to it with our nails, so that at one moment we could neither get up nor go down again. When we were once atop and about to cook our cutlets, we, you and I, nearly came to blows.'

Sandoz now remembered. 'Yes, yes; each had to roast his own cutlet on rosemary sticks, and, as mine took fire, you exasperated me by chaffing my cutlet, which was being reduced to cinders.'

They both shook with laughter, until the painter resumed his work, gravely concluding, 'That's all over, old man. There is to be no more idling at present.'

He spoke the truth. Since the three inseparables had realised their dream of meeting together in Paris, which they were bent upon conquering, their life had been terribly hard. They had tried to renew the long walks of old. On certain Sunday mornings they had started on foot from the Fontainebleau gate, had scoured the copses of Verrieres, gone as far as the Bievre, crossed the woods of Meudon and Bellevue, and returned home by way of Grenelle. But they taxed Paris with spoiling their legs; they scarcely ever left the pavement now, entirely taken up as they were with their struggle for fortune and fame.

From Monday morning till Saturday night Sandoz sat fuming and fretting at the municipal building of the fifth Arrondissement in a dark corner of the registry office for births, rooted to his stool by the thought of his mother, whom his salary of a hundred and fifty francs a month helped in some fashion to keep. Dubuche, anxious to pay his parents the interest of the money placed on his head, was ever on the look-out for some petty jobs among architects, outside his studies at the School of Arts. As for Claude, thanks to his thousand francs a year, he had his full liberty; but the latter days of each month were terrible enough, especially if he had to share the fag-end of his allowance. Luckily he was beginning to sell a little; disposing of tiny canvases, at the rate of ten and twelve francs a-piece, to Papa Malgras, a wary picture dealer. After all, he preferred starvation to turning his art into mere commerce by manufacturing portraits of tradesmen and their wives; concocting conventional religious pictures or daubing blinds for restaurants or sign-boards for accoucheuses. When first he had returned to Paris, he had rented a very large studio in the Impasse des Bourdonnais; but he had moved to the Quai de Bourbon from motives of economy. He lived there like a savage, with an absolute contempt for everything that was not painting. He had fallen out with his relatives, who disgusted him; he had even ceased visiting his aunt, who kept a pork-butcher's shop near the Central Markets, because she looked too flourishing and plump.* Respecting the downfall of his mother, who was being eaten out of doors and driven into the streets, he nursed a secret grief.

* This aunt is Lisa of 'The Fat and the Thin' (Le Ventre de Paris)
in a few chapters of which Claude figures.—ED.

Suddenly he shouted to Sandoz, 'Will you be kind enough not to tumble to pieces?' But Sandoz declared that he was getting stiff, and jumped from the couch to stretch his legs a bit. They took ten minutes' rest, talking meanwhile about many things. Claude felt condescendingly good-tempered. When his work went smoothly he brightened up and became talkative; he, who painted with his teeth set, and raged inwardly directly he felt that nature was escaping him. Hence his friend had scarcely resumed his attitude before he went on chattering, without, however, missing a stroke of his brush.

'It's going on all right, old boy, isn't it? You look all there in it. Oh, the brutes, I'll just see whether they'll refuse me this time. I am more severe for myself than they are for themselves, I'm sure of it; and whenever I pass one of my own pictures, it's more serious than if it had passed before all the hanging committees on earth. You know my picture of the markets, with the two urchins tumbling about on a heap of vegetables? Well, I've scratched it all out, it didn't come right. I found that I had got hold of a beastly machine,* a deal too heavy for my strength. But, never you fear, I'll take the subject up again some day, when I know better, and I'll take up others, machines which will knock them all cock-a-hoop with surprise.'

* In familiar conversation, French artists, playwrights, and
novelists invariably call their productions by the slang
term 'machines.'—ED.

He made a magnificent gesture, as if to sweep a whole crowd away; emptied a tube of cobalt on his palette; and then began to jeer, asking what his first master would say to a picture like this? His first master indeed, Papa Belloque, a retired infantry captain, with one arm, who for a quarter of a century had taught drawing to the youth of Plassans in one of the galleries of the Museum! Then, in Paris, hadn't the celebrated Berthou, the painter of 'Nero in the Circus'—Berthou, whose lessons he had attended for six long months—told him a score of times that he would never be able to do anything? How he now regretted those six months wasted in idiotic efforts, absurd 'studies,' under the iron rule of a man whose ideas differed so much from his own. He at last began to hold forth against working at the Louvre. He would, he said, sooner chop his hand off than return there to spoil his perception of nature by undertaking one of those copies which for ever dim the vision of the world in which one lives.

Was there aught else in art than the rendering of what one felt within oneself? Was not the whole of art reduced to placing a woman in front of one—and then portraying her according to the feelings that she inspired? Was not a bunch of carrots—yes, a bunch of carrots—studied from nature, and painted unaffectedly, in a personal style, worth all the ever-lasting smudges of the School of Arts, all that tobacco-juice painting, cooked up according to certain given recipes? The day would come when one carrot, originally rendered, would lead to a revolution. It was because of this that he now contented himself with going to the Boutin studio, a free studio, kept by a former model, in the Rue de la Huchette. When he had paid his twenty francs he was put in front of as many men and women as he cared for, and set about his work with a will, never thinking of eating or drinking, but struggling unrestingly with nature, mad almost with the excitement of work, by the side of a pack of dandies who accused him of ignorant laziness, and arrogantly prated about their 'studies,' because they copied noses and mouths, under the eye of a master.

'Listen to this, old man: when one of those whipper-snappers can build up a torso like that one over yonder, he may come up and tell me, and we'll have a talk together.'

With the end of his brush he pointed to a study of the nude, suspended from the wall near the door. It was really magnificent, full of masterly breadth of colouring. By its side were some other admirable bits, a girl's feet exquisite in their delicate truthfulness, and a woman's trunk with quivering satin-like skin. In his rare moments of content he felt proud of those few studies, the only ones which satisfied him, which, as it were, foretold a great painter, admirably gifted, but hampered by sudden and inexplicable fits of impotency.

Dealing sabre-like strokes at the velveteen jacket, he continued lashing himself into excitement with his uncompromising theories which respected nobody:

'They are all so many daubers of penny prints, who have stolen their reputations; a set of idiots or knaves on their knees before public imbecility! Not one among them dares to give the philistines a slap in the face. And, while we are about it, you know that old Ingres turns me sick with his glairy painting. Nevertheless, he's a brick, and a plucky fellow, and I take off my hat to him, for he did not care a curse for anybody, and he used to draw like the very devil. He ended by making the idiots, who nowadays believe they understand him, swallow that drawing of his. After him there are only two worth speaking of, Delacroix and Courbet. The others are only numskulls. Oh, that old romantic lion, the carriage of him! He was a decorator who knew how to make the colours blaze. And what a grasp he had! He would have covered every wall in Paris if they had let him; his palette boiled, and boiled over. I know very well that it was only so much phantasmagoria. Never mind, I like it for all that, as it was needed to set the School on fire. Then came the other, a stout workman—that one, the truest painter of the century, and altogether classical besides, a fact which not one of the dullards understood. They yelled, of course; they shouted about profanation and realism, when, after all, the realism was only in the subject. The perception remained that of the old masters, and the execution resumed and continued the best bits of work one can find in our public galleries. Both Delacroix and Courbet came at the proper time. Each made a stride forward. And now—ah, now!'

He ceased speaking and drew back a few steps to judge of the effect of his picture, becoming absorbed in contemplation for a moment, and then resuming:

'Yes, nowadays we want something different—what, I don't exactly know. If I did, and could do it, I should be clever indeed. No one else would be in the race with me. All I do know and feel is that Delacroix's grand romantic scenes are foundering and splitting, that Courbet's black painting already reeks of the mustiness of a studio which the sun never penetrates. You understand me, don't you? We, perhaps, want the sun, the open air, a clear, youthful style of painting, men and things such as they appear in the real light. In short, I myself am unable to say what our painting should be; the painting that our eyes of to-day should execute and behold.'

His voice again fell; he stammered and found himself unable to explain the formulas of the future that were rising within him. Deep silence came while he continued working at the velveteen jacket, quivering all the time.

Sandoz had been listening to him without stirring from his position. His back was still turned, and he said slowly, as if speaking to the wall in a kind of dream:

'No; one does not know, and still we ought to know. But each time a professor has wanted to impress a truth upon me, I have mistrustfully revolted, thinking: "He is either deceiving himself or deceiving me." Their ideas exasperate me. It seems to me that truth is larger, more general. How beautiful would it be if one could devote the whole of one's existence to one single work, into which one would endeavour to put everything, the beasts of the field as well as mankind; in short, a kind of immense ark. And not in the order indicated by manuals of philosophy, or according to the idiotic hierarchy on which we pride ourselves, but according to the full current of life; a world in which we should be nothing more than an accident, in which the passing cur, even the stones of the roads, would complete and explain us. In sum, the grand whole, without low or high, or clean or unclean, such as it indeed is in reality. It is certainly to science that poets and novelists ought to address themselves, for it is the only possible source of inspiration to-day. But what are we to borrow from it? How are we to march in its company? The moment I begin to think about that sort of thing I feel that I am floundering. Ah, if I only knew, what a series of books I would hurl at the heads of the crowd!'

He also became silent. The previous winter he had published his first book: a series of little sketches, brought from Plassans, among which only a few rougher notes indicated that the author was a mutineer, a passionate lover of truth and power. And lately he had been feeling his way, questioning himself while all sorts of confused ideas throbbed in his brain. At first, smitten with the thought of undertaking something herculean, he had planned a genesis of the universe, in three phases or parts; the creation narrated according to science; mankind supervening at the appointed hour and playing its part in the chain of beings and events; then the future—beings constantly following one another, and finishing the creation of the world by the endless labour of life. But he had calmed down in presence of the venturesome hypotheses of this third phase; and he was now looking out for a more restricted, more human framework, in which, however, his vast ambition might find room.

'Ah, to be able to see and paint everything,' exclaimed Claude, after a long interval. 'To have miles upon miles of walls to cover, to decorate the railway stations, the markets, the municipal offices, everything that will be built, when architects are no longer idiots. Only strong heads and strong muscles will be wanted, for there will be no lack of subjects. Life such as it runs about the streets, the life of the rich and the poor, in the market places, on the race-courses, on the boulevards, in the populous alleys; and every trade being plied, and every passion portrayed in full daylight, and the peasants, too, and the beasts of the fields and the landscapes—ah! you'll see it all, unless I am a downright brute. My very hands are itching to do it. Yes! the whole of modern life! Frescoes as high as the Pantheon! A series of canvases big enough to burst the Louvre!'

Whenever they were thrown together the painter and the author generally reached this state of excitement. They spurred each other mutually, they went mad with dreams of glory; and there was such a burst of youth, such a passion for work about their plans, that they themselves often smiled afterwards at those great, proud dreams which seemed to endow them with suppleness, strength, and spirit.

Claude, who had stepped back as far as the wall, remained leaning against it, and gazing at his work. Seeing which, Sandoz, overcome by fatigue, left the couch and joined him. Then both looked at the picture without saying a word. The gentleman in the velveteen jacket was entirely roughed in. His hand, more advanced than the rest, furnished a pretty fresh patch of flesh colour amid the grass, and the dark coat stood out so vigorously that the little silhouettes in the background, the two little women wrestling in the sunlight, seemed to have retreated further into the luminous quivering of the glade. The principal figure, the recumbent woman, as yet scarcely more than outlined, floated about like some aerial creature seen in dreams, some eagerly desired Eve springing from the earth, with her features vaguely smiling and her eyelids closed.

'Well, now, what are you going to call it?' asked Sandoz.

'The Open Air,' replied Claude, somewhat curtly.

The title sounded rather technical to the writer, who, in spite of himself, was sometimes tempted to introduce literature into pictorial art.

'The Open Air! that doesn't suggest anything.'

'There is no occasion for it to suggest anything. Some women and a man are reposing in a forest in the sunlight. Does not that suffice? Don't fret, there's enough in it to make a masterpiece.'

He threw back his head and muttered between his teeth: 'Dash it all! it's very black still. I can't get Delacroix out of my eye, do what I will. And then the hand, that's Courbet's manner. Everyone of us dabs his brush into the romantic sauce now and then. We had too much of it in our youth, we floundered in it up to our very chins. We need a jolly good wash to get clear of it.'

Sandoz shrugged his shoulders with a gesture of despair. He also bewailed the fact that he had been born at what he called the confluence of Hugo and Balzac. Nevertheless, Claude remained satisfied, full of the happy excitement of a successful sitting. If his friend could give him two or three more Sundays the man in the jacket would be all there. He had enough of him for the present. Both began to joke, for, as a rule, Claude almost killed his models, only letting them go when they were fainting, half dead with fatigue. He himself now very nigh dropped, his legs bending under him, and his stomach empty. And as the cuckoo clock struck five, he snatched at his crust of bread and devoured it. Thoroughly worn out, he broke it with trembling fingers, and scarcely chewed it, again standing before his picture, pursued by his passion to such a degree as to be unconscious even that he was eating.

'Five o'clock,' said Sandoz, as he stretched himself, with his arms upraised. 'Let's go and have dinner. Ah! here comes Dubuche, just in time.'

There was a knock at the door, and Dubuche came in. He was a stout young fellow, dark, with regular but heavy features, close-cropped hair, and moustaches already full-blown. He shook hands with both his friends, and stopped before the picture, looking nonplussed. In reality that harum-scarum style of painting upset him, such was the even balance of his nature, such his reverence as a steady student for the established formulas of art; and it was only his feeling of friendship which, as a rule, prevented him from criticising. But this time his whole being revolted visibly.

'Well, what's the matter? Doesn't it suit you?' asked Sandoz, who was watching him.

'Yes, oh yes, it's very well painted—but—'

'Well, spit it out. What is it that ruffles you?'

'Not much, only the gentleman is fully dressed, and the women are not. People have never seen anything like that before.'

This sufficed to make both the others wild. Why, were there not a hundred pictures in the Louvre composed in precisely the same way? Hadn't all Paris and all the painters and tourists of the world seen them? And besides, if people had never seen anything like it, they would see it now. After all, they didn't care a fig for the public!

Not in the least disconcerted by these violent replies, Dubuche repeated quietly: 'The public won't understand—the public will think it indecorous—and so it is!'

'You wretched bourgeois philistine!' exclaimed Claude, exasperated. 'They are making a famous idiot of you at the School of Arts. You weren't such a fool formerly.'

These were the current amenities of his two friends since Dubuche had attended the School of Arts. He thereupon beat a retreat, rather afraid of the turn the dispute was taking, and saved himself by belabouring the painters of the School. Certainly his friends were right in one respect, the School painters were real idiots. But as for the architects, that was a different matter. Where was he to get his tuition, if not there? Besides his tuition would not prevent him from having ideas of his own, later on. Wherewith he assumed a very revolutionary air.

'All right,' said Sandoz, 'the moment you apologise, let's go and dine.'

But Claude had mechanically taken up a brush and set to work again. Beside the gentleman in the velveteen jacket the figure of the recumbent woman seemed to be fading away. Feverish and impatient, he traced a bold outline round her so as to bring her forward.

'Are you coming?'

'In a minute; hang it, what's the hurry? Just let me set this right, and I'll be with you.'

Sandoz shook his head and then remarked very quietly, lest he should still further annoy him: 'You do wrong to worry yourself like that, old man. Yes, you are knocked up, and have had nothing to eat, and you'll only spoil your work, as you did the other day.'

But the painter waved him off with a peevish gesture. It was the old story—he did not know when to leave off; he intoxicated himself with work in his craving for an immediate result, in order to prove to himself that he held his masterpiece at last. Doubts had just driven him to despair in the midst of his delight at having terminated a successful sitting. Had he done right, after all, in making the velveteen jacket so prominent, and would he not afterwards fail to secure the brilliancy which he wished the female figure to show? Rather than remain in suspense he would have dropped down dead on the spot. Feverishly drawing the sketch of Christine's head from the portfolio where he had hidden it, he compared it with the painting on the canvas, assisting himself, as it were, by means of this document derived from life.

'Hallo!' exclaimed Dubuche, 'where did you get that from? Who is it?'

Claude, startled by the questions, did not answer; then, without reflecting, he who usually told them everything, brusquely lied, prompted by a delicate impulse to keep silent respecting the adventure of the night.

'Tell us who it is?' repeated the architect.

'Nobody at all—a model.'

'A model! a very young one, isn't she? She looks very nice. I wish you would give me her address. Not for myself, but for a sculptor I know who's on the look-out for a Psyche. Have you got the address there?'

Thereupon Dubuche turned to a corner of the greyish wall on which the addresses of several models were written in chalk, haphazard. The women particularly left their cards in that way, in awkward, childish handwriting. Zoe Piedefer, 7 Rue Campagne-Premiere, a big brunette, who was getting rather too stout, had scrawled her sign manual right across the names of little Flore Beauchamp, 32 Rue de Laval, and Judith Vaquez, 69 Rue du Rocher, a Jewess, both of whom were too thin.

'I say, have you got the address?' resumed Dubuche.

Then Claude flew into a passion. 'Don't pester me! I don't know and don't care. You're a nuisance, worrying like that just when a fellow wants to work.'

Sandoz had not said a word. Surprised at first, he had soon smiled. He was gifted with more penetration than Dubuche, so he gave him a knowing nod, and they then began to chaff. They begged Claude's pardon; the moment he wanted to keep the young person for his personal use, they would not ask him to lend her. Ha! ha! the scamp went hunting about for pretty models. And where had he picked up that one?

More and more embarrassed by these remarks, Claude went on fidgetting. 'What a couple of idiots you are!' he exclaimed, 'If you only knew what fools you are making of yourselves. That'll do. You really make me sorry for both of you.'

His voice sounded so stern that they both became silent immediately, while he, after once more scratching out the woman's head, drew it anew and began to paint it in, following his sketch of Christine, but with a feverish, unsteady touch which went at random.

'Just give me another ten minutes, will you?' he repeated. 'I will rough in the shoulders to be ready for to-morrow, and then we'll go down.'

Sandoz and Dubuche, knowing that it was of no use to prevent him from killing himself in this fashion, resigned themselves to the inevitable. The latter lighted his pipe, and flung himself on the couch. He was the only one of the three who smoked; the others had never taken kindly to tobacco, always feeling qualmish after a cigar. And when Dubuche was stretched on his back, his eyes turned towards the clouds of smoke he raised, he began to talk about himself in an interminable monotonous fashion. Ah! that confounded Paris, how one had to work one's fingers to the bone in order to get on. He recalled the fifteen months of apprenticeship he had spent with his master, the celebrated Dequersonniere, a former grand-prize man, now architect of the Civil Branch of Public Works, an officer of the Legion of Honour and a member of the Institute, whose chief architectural performance, the church of St. Mathieu, was a cross between a pastry-cook's mould and a clock in the so-called First Empire style. A good sort of fellow, after all, was this Dequersonniere whom Dubuche chaffed, while inwardly sharing his reverence for the old classical formulas. However, but for his fellow-pupils, the young man would not have learnt much at the studio in the Rue du Four, for the master only paid a running visit to the place some three times a week. A set of ferocious brutes, were those comrades of his, who had made his life jolly hard in the beginning, but who, at least, had taught him how to prepare a surface, outline, and wash in a plan. And how often had he had to content himself with a cup of chocolate and a roll for dejeuner in order to pay the necessary five-and-twenty francs to the superintendent! And the sheets of paper he had laboriously smudged, and the hours he had spent in poring over books before he had dared to present himself at the School! And he had narrowly escaped being plucked in spite of all his assiduous endeavours. He lacked imagination, and the drawings he submitted, a caryatide and a summer dining-room, both extremely mediocre performances, had classed him at the bottom of the list. Fortunately, he had made up for this in his oral examination with his logarithms, geometry, and history of architecture, for he was very strong in the scientific parts. Now that he was attending the School as a second-class student, he had to toil and moil in order to secure a first-class diploma. It was a dog's life, there was no end to it, said he.

He stretched his legs apart, high upon the cushions, and smoked vigorously and regularly.

'What with their courses of perspective, of descriptive geometry, of stereotomy, of building, and of the history of art—ah! upon my word, they do make one blacken paper with notes. And every month there is a competitive examination in architecture, sometimes a simple sketch, at others a complete design. There's no time for pleasure if a fellow wishes to pass his examinations and secure the necessary honourable mentions, especially if, besides all that, he has to find time to earn his bread. As for myself, it's almost killing me.'

One of the cushions having slipped upon the floor, he fished it up with his feet. 'All the same, I'm lucky. There are so many of us scouring the town every day without getting the smallest job. The day before yesterday I discovered an architect who works for a large contractor. You can have no idea of such an ignoramus of an architect—a downright numskull, incapable even of tracing a plan. He gives me twenty-five sous an hour, and I set his houses straight for him. It came just in time, too, for my mother sent me word that she was quite cleared out. Poor mother, what a lot of money I have to refund her!'

As Dubuche was evidently talking to himself, chewing the cud of his everyday thoughts—his constant thoughts of making a rapid fortune—Sandoz did not even trouble to listen to him. He had opened the little window, and seated himself on a level with the roof, for he felt oppressed by the heat in the studio. But all at once he interrupted the architect.

'I say, are you coming to dinner on Thursday? All the other fellows will be there—Fagerolles, Mahoudeau, Jory, Gagniere.'

Every Thursday, quite a band met at Sandoz's: friends from Plassans and others met in Paris—revolutionaries to a man, and all animated by the same passionate love of art.

'Next Thursday? No, I think not,' answered Dubuche.

'I am obliged to go to a dance at a family's I know.'

'Where you expect to get hold of a dowry, I suppose?'

'Well, it wouldn't be such a bad spec.'

He shook the ashes from his pipe on to his left palm, and then, suddenly raising his voice—'I almost forgot. I have had a letter from Pouillaud.'

'You, too!—well, I think he's pretty well done for, Pouillaud. Another good fellow gone wrong.'

'Why gone wrong? He'll succeed his father; he'll spend his money quietly down there. He writes rationally enough. I always said he'd show us a thing or two, in spite of all his practical jokes. Ah! that beast of a Pouillaud.'

Sandoz, furious, was about to reply, when a despairing oath from Claude stopped him. The latter had not opened his lips since he had so obstinately resumed his work. To all appearance he had not even listened.

'Curse it—I have failed again. Decidedly, I'm a brute, I shall never do anything.' And in a fit of mad rage he wanted to rush at his picture and dash his fist through it. His friends had to hold him back. Why, it was simply childish to get into such a passion. Would matters be improved when, to his mortal regret, he had destroyed his work? Still shaking, he relapsed into silence, and stared at the canvas with an ardent fixed gaze that blazed with all the horrible agony born of his powerlessness. He could no longer produce anything clear or life-like; the woman's breast was growing pasty with heavy colouring; that flesh which, in his fancy, ought to have glowed, was simply becoming grimy; he could not even succeed in getting a correct focus. What on earth was the matter with his brain that he heard it bursting asunder, as it were, amidst his vain efforts? Was he losing his sight that he was no longer able to see correctly? Were his hands no longer his own that they refused to obey him? And thus he went on winding himself up, irritated by the strange hereditary lesion which sometimes so greatly assisted his creative powers, but at others reduced him to a state of sterile despair, such as to make him forget the first elements of drawing. Ah, to feel giddy with vertiginous nausea, and yet to remain there full of a furious passion to create, when the power to do so fled with everything else, when everything seemed to founder around him—the pride of work, the dreamt-of glory, the whole of his existence!

'Look here, old boy,' said Sandoz at last, 'we don't want to worry you, but it's half-past six, and we are starving. Be reasonable, and come down with us.'

Claude was cleaning a corner of his palette. Then he emptied some more tubes on it, and, in a voice like thunder, replied with one single word, 'No.'

For the next ten minutes nobody spoke; the painter, beside himself, wrestled with his picture, whilst his friends remained anxious at this attack, which they did not know how to allay. Then, as there came a knock at the door, the architect went to open it.

'Hallo, it's Papa Malgras.'

Malgras, the picture-dealer, was a thick-set individual, with close-cropped, brush-like, white hair, and a red splotchy face. He was wrapped in a very dirty old green coat, that made him look like an untidy cabman. In a husky voice, he exclaimed: 'I happened to pass along the quay, on the other side of the way, and I saw that gentleman at the window. So I came up.'

Claude's continued silence made him pause. The painter had turned to his picture again with an impatient gesture. Not that this silence in any way embarrassed the new comer, who, standing erect on his sturdy legs and feeling quite at home, carefully examined the new picture with his bloodshot eyes. Without any ceremony, he passed judgment upon it in one phrase—half ironic, half affectionate: 'Well, well, there's a machine.'

Then, seeing that nobody said anything, he began to stroll round the studio, looking at the paintings on the walls.

Papa Malgras, beneath his thick layer of grease and grime, was really a very cute customer, with taste and scent for good painting. He never wasted his time or lost his way among mere daubers; he went straight, as if from instinct, to individualists, whose talent was contested still, but whose future fame his flaming, drunkard's nose sniffed from afar. Added to this he was a ferocious hand at bargaining, and displayed all the cunning of a savage in his efforts to secure, for a song, the pictures that he coveted. True, he himself was satisfied with very honest profits, twenty per cent., thirty at the most. He based his calculations on quickly turning over his small capital, never purchasing in the morning without knowing where to dispose of his purchase at night. As a superb liar, moreover, he had no equal.

Pausing near the door, before the studies from the nude, painted at the Boutin studio, he contemplated them in silence for a few moments, his eyes glistening the while with the enjoyment of a connoisseur, which his heavy eyelids tried to hide. Assuredly, he thought, there was a great deal of talent and sentiment of life about that big crazy fellow Claude, who wasted his time in painting huge stretches of canvas which no one would buy. The girl's pretty legs, the admirably painted woman's trunk, filled the dealer with delight. But there was no sale for that kind of stuff, and he had already made his choice—a tiny sketch, a nook of the country round Plassans, at once delicate and violent—which he pretended not to notice. At last he drew near, and said, in an off-hand way:

'What's this? Ah! yes, I know, one of the things you brought back with you from the South. It's too crude. I still have the two I bought of you.'

And he went on in mellow, long-winded phrases. 'You'll perhaps not believe me, Monsieur Lantier, but that sort of thing doesn't sell at all—not at all. I've a set of rooms full of them. I'm always afraid of smashing something when I turn round. I can't go on like that, honour bright; I shall have to go into liquidation, and I shall end my days in the hospital. You know me, eh? my heart is bigger than my pocket, and there's nothing I like better than to oblige young men of talent like yourself. Oh, for the matter of that, you've got talent, and I keep on telling them so—nay, shouting it to them—but what's the good? They won't nibble, they won't nibble!'

He was trying the emotional dodge; then, with the spirit of a man about to do something rash: 'Well, it sha'n't be said that I came in to waste your time. What do you want for that rough sketch?'

Claude, still irritated, was painting nervously. He dryly answered, without even turning his head: 'Twenty francs.'

'Nonsense; twenty francs! you must be mad. You sold me the others ten francs a-piece—and to-day I won't give a copper more than eight francs.'

As a rule the painter closed with him at once, ashamed and humbled at this miserable chaffering, glad also to get a little money now and then. But this time he was obstinate, and took to insulting the picture-dealer, who, giving tit for tat, all at once dropped the formal 'you' to assume the glib 'thou,' denied his talent, overwhelmed him with invective, and taxed him with ingratitude. Meanwhile, however, he had taken from his pocket three successive five-franc pieces, which, as if playing at chuck-farthing, he flung from a distance upon the table, where they rattled among the crockery.

'One, two, three—not one more, dost hear? for there is already one too many, and I'll take care to get it back; I'll deduct it from something else of thine, as I live. Fifteen francs for that! Thou art wrong, my lad, and thou'lt be sorry for this dirty trick.'

Quite exhausted, Claude let him take down the little canvas, which disappeared as if by magic in his capacious green coat. Had it dropped into a special pocket, or was it reposing on Papa Malgras' ample chest? Not the slightest protuberance indicated its whereabouts.

Having accomplished his stroke of business, Papa Malgras abruptly calmed down and went towards the door. But he suddenly changed his mind and came back. 'Just listen, Lantier,' he said, in the honeyest of tones; 'I want a lobster painted. You really owe me that much after fleecing me. I'll bring you the lobster, you'll paint me a bit of still life from it, and keep it for your pains. You can eat it with your friends. It's settled, isn't it?'

At this proposal Sandoz and Dubuche, who had hitherto listened inquisitively, burst into such loud laughter that the picture-dealer himself became gay. Those confounded painters, they did themselves no good, they simply starved. What would have become of the lazy beggars if he, Papa Malgras, hadn't brought a leg of mutton now and then, or a nice fresh plaice, or a lobster, with its garnish of parsley?

'You'll paint me my lobster, eh, Lantier? Much obliged.' And he stationed himself anew before the large canvas, with his wonted smile of mingled derision and admiration. And at last he went off, repeating, 'Well, well, there's a machine.'

Claude wanted to take up his palette and brushes once more. But his legs refused their service; his arms fell to his side, stiff, as if pinioned there by some occult force. In the intense melancholy silence that had followed the din of the dispute he staggered, distracted, bereft of sight before his shapeless work.

'I'm done for, I'm done for,' he gasped. 'That brute has finished me off!'

The clock had just struck seven; he had been at work for eight mortal hours without tasting anything but a crust of bread, without taking a moment's rest, ever on his legs, shaken by feverish excitement. And now the sun was setting, shadows began to darken the studio, which in the gloaming assumed a most melancholy aspect. When the light went down like this on the crisis of a bad day's work, it seemed to Claude as if the sun would never rise again, but had for ever carried life and all the jubilant gaiety of colour away.

'Come,' implored Sandoz, with all the gentleness of brotherly compassion. 'Come, there's a good fellow.'

Even Dubuche added, 'You'll see more clearly into it to-morrow. Come and dine.'

For a moment Claude refused to surrender. He stood rooted to the spot, deaf to their friendly voices, and fiercely obstinate.

What did he want to do then, since his tired fingers were no longer able to grasp the brush? He did not know, but, however powerless he might be, he was gnawed by a mad craving to go on working still and to create in spite of everything. Even if he did nothing, he would at least stay there, he would not vacate the spot. All at once, however, he made up his mind, shaken the while as by a big sob. He clutched firmly hold of his broadest palette-knife, and, with one deep, slow sweep, he obliterated the woman's head and bosom. It was veritable murder, a pounding away of human flesh; the whole disappeared in a murky, muddy mash. By the side of the gentleman in the dark jacket, amidst the bright verdure, where the two little wrestlers so lightly tinted were disporting themselves, there remained naught of the nude, headless, breastless woman but a mutilated trunk, a vague cadaverous stump, an indistinct, lifeless patch of visionary flesh.

Sandoz and Dubuche were already descending the stairs with a great clatter, and Claude followed them, fleeing his work, in agony at having to leave it thus scarred with a gaping gash.

III

THE beginning of the week proved disastrous to Claude. He had relapsed into one of those periods of self-doubt that made him hate painting, with the hatred of a lover betrayed, who overwhelms the faithless one with insults although tortured by an uncontrollable desire to worship her yet again. So on the Thursday, after three frightful days of fruitless and solitary battling, he left home as early as eight in the morning, banging his door violently, and feeling so disgusted with himself that he swore he would never take up a brush again. When he was unhinged by one of these attacks there was but one remedy, he had to forget himself, and, to do so, it was needful that he should look up some comrades with whom to quarrel, and, above all, walk about and trudge across Paris, until the heat and odour of battle rising from her paving-stones put heart into him again.

That day, like every other Thursday, he was to dine at Sandoz's, in company with their friends. But what was he to do until the evening? The idea of remaining by himself, of eating his heart out, disgusted him. He would have gone straight to his friend, only he knew that the latter must be at his office. Then the thought of Dubuche occurred to him, but he hesitated, for their old friendship had lately been cooling down. He felt that the fraternity of the earlier times of effort no longer existed between them. He guessed that Dubuche lacked intelligence, had become covertly hostile, and was occupied with ambitions different from his own. However, he, Claude, must go somewhere. So he made up his mind, and repaired to the Rue Jacob, where the architect rented a small room on the sixth floor of a big frigid-looking house.

Claude was already on the landing of the second floor, when the doorkeeper, calling him back, snappishly told him that M. Dubuche was not at home, and had, in fact, stayed out all night. The young man slowly descended the stairs and found himself in the street, stupefied, as it were, by so prodigious an event as an escapade on the part of Dubuche. It was a piece of inconceivable bad luck. For a moment he strolled along aimlessly; but, as he paused at the corner of the Rue de Seine, not knowing which way to go, he suddenly recollected what his friend had told him about a certain night spent at the Dequersonniere studio—a night of terrible hard work, the eve of the day on which the pupils' designs had to be deposited at the School of Arts. At once he walked towards the Rue du Four, where the studio was situated. Hitherto he had carefully abstained from calling there for Dubuche, from fear of the yells with which outsiders were greeted. But now he made straight for the place without flinching, his timidity disappearing so thoroughly before the anguish of loneliness that he felt ready to undergo any amount of insult could he but secure a companion in misfortune.

The studio was situated in the narrowest part of the Rue du Four, at the far end of a decrepit, tumble-down building. Claude had to cross two evil-smelling courtyards to reach a third, across which ran a sort of big closed shed, a huge out-house of board and plaster work, which had once served as a packing-case maker's workshop. From outside, through the four large windows, whose panes were daubed with a coating of white lead, nothing could be seen but the bare whitewashed ceiling.

Having pushed the door open, Claude remained motionless on the threshold. The place stretched out before him, with its four long tables ranged lengthwise to the windows—broad double tables they were, which had swarms of students on either side, and were littered with moist sponges, paint saucers, iron candlesticks, water bowls, and wooden boxes, in which each pupil kept his white linen blouse, his compasses, and colours. In one corner, the stove, neglected since the previous winter, stood rusting by the side of a pile of coke that had not been swept away; while at the other end a large iron cistern with a tap was suspended between two towels. And amidst the bare untidiness of this shed, the eye was especially attracted by the walls which, above, displayed a litter of plaster casts ranged in haphazard fashion on shelves, and disappeared lower down behind forests of T-squares and bevels, and piles of drawing boards, tied together with webbing straps. Bit by bit, such parts of the partitions as had remained unoccupied had become covered with inscriptions and drawings, a constantly rising flotsam and jetsam of scrawls traced there as on the margin of an ever-open book. There were caricatures of the students themselves, coarse witticisms fit to make a gendarme turn pale, epigrammatic sentences, addition sums, addresses, and so forth; while, above all else, written in big letters, and occupying the most prominent place, appeared this inscription: 'On the 7th of June, Gorfu declared that he didn't care a hang for Rome.—Signed, Godemard.'*

* The allusion is to the French Art School at Rome, and the
competitions into which students enter to obtain admission
to it, or to secure the prizes offered for the best exhibits
which, during their term of residence, they send to Paris.—ED.

Claude was greeted with a growl like that of wild beasts disturbed in their lair. What kept him motionless was the strange aspect of this place on the morning of the 'truck night,' as the embryo architects termed the crucial night of labour. Since the previous evening, the whole studio, some sixty pupils, had been shut up there; those who had no designs to exhibit—'the niggers,' as they were called remaining to help the others, the competitors who, being behind time, had to knock off the work of a week in a dozen hours. Already, at midnight, they had stuffed themselves with brawn, saveloys, and similar viands, washed down with cheap wine. Towards one o'clock they had secured the company of some 'ladies'; and, without the work abating, the feast had turned into a Roman orgy, blended with a smoking competition. On the damp, stained floor there remained a great litter of greasy paper and broken bottles; while the atmosphere reeked of burnt tallow, musk, highly seasoned sausages, and cheap bluish wine.

And now many voices savagely yelled: 'Turn him out. Oh, that mug! What does he want, that guy? Turn him out, turn him out.'

For a moment Claude, quite dazed, staggered beneath the violence of the onslaught. But the epithets became viler, for the acme of elegance, even for the more refined among these young fellows, was to rival one's friends in beastly language. He was, nevertheless, recovering and beginning to answer, when Dubuche recognised him. The latter turned crimson, for he detested that kind of adventure. He felt ashamed of his friend, and rushed towards him, amidst the jeers, which were now levelled at himself:

'What, is it you?' he gasped. 'I told you never to come in. Just wait for me a minute in the yard.'

At that moment, Claude, who was stepping back, narrowly escaped being knocked down by a little hand-truck which two big full-bearded fellows brought up at a gallop. It was from this truck that the night of heavy toil derived its name: and for the last week the students who had got behindhand with their work, through taking up petty paid jobs outside, had been repeating the cry, 'Oh! I'm in the truck and no mistake.' The moment the vehicle appeared, a clamour arose. It was a quarter to nine o'clock, there was barely time to reach the School of Arts. However, a helter-skelter rush emptied the studio; each brought out his chases, amidst a general jostling; those who obstinately wished to give their designs a last finishing touch were knocked about and carried away with their comrades. In less than five minutes every frame was piled upon the truck, and the two bearded fellows, the most recent additions to the studio, harnessed themselves to it like cattle and drew it along with all their strength, the others vociferating, and pushing from behind. It was like the rush of a sluice; the three courtyards were crossed amidst a torrential crash, and the street was invaded, flooded by the howling throng.

Claude, nevertheless, had set up running by the side of Dubuche, who came at the fag-end, very vexed at not having had another quarter of an hour to finish a tinted drawing more carefully.

'What are you going to do afterwards?' asked Claude.

'Oh! I've errands which will take up my whole day.'

The painter was grieved to see that even this friend escaped him. 'All right, then,' said he; 'in that case I leave you. Shall we see you at Sandoz's to-night?'

'Yes, I think so; unless I'm kept to dinner elsewhere.'

Both were getting out of breath. The band of embryo architects, without slackening their pace, had purposely taken the longest way round for the pleasure of prolonging their uproar. After rushing down the Rue du Four, they dashed across the Place Gozlin and swept into the Rue de l'Echaude. Heading the procession was the truck, drawn and pushed along more and more vigorously, and constantly rebounding over the rough paving-stones, amid the jolting of the frames with which it was laden. Its escort galloped along madly, compelling the passers-by to draw back close to the houses in order to save themselves from being knocked down; while the shop-keepers, standing open-mouthed on their doorsteps, believed in a revolution. The whole neighbourhood seemed topsy-turvy. In the Rue Jacob, such was the rush, so frightful were the yells, that several house shutters were hastily closed. As the Rue Bonaparte was, at last, being reached, one tall, fair fellow thought it a good joke to catch hold of a little servant girl who stood bewildered on the pavement, and drag her along with them, like a wisp of straw caught in a torrent.

'Well,' said Claude, 'good-bye, then; I'll see you to-night.'

'Yes, to-night.'

The painter, out of breath, had stopped at the corner of the Rue des Beaux Arts. The court gates of the Art School stood wide open in front of him, and the procession plunged into the yard.

After drawing breath, Claude retraced his steps to the Rue de Seine. His bad luck was increasing; it seemed ordained that he should not be able to beguile a chum from work that morning. So he went up the street, and slowly walked on as far as the Place du Pantheon, without any definite aim. Then it occurred to him that he might just look into the Municipal Offices, if only to shake hands with Sandoz. That would, at any rate, mean ten minutes well spent. But he positively gasped when he was told by an attendant that M. Sandoz had asked for a day off to attend a funeral. However, he knew the trick of old. His friend always found the same pretext whenever he wanted to do a good day's work at home. He had already made up his mind to join him there, when a feeling of artistic brotherliness, the scruple of an honest worker, made him pause; yes, it would be a crime to go and disturb that good fellow, and infect him with the discouragement born of a difficult task, at the very moment when he was, no doubt, manfully accomplishing his own work.

So Claude had to resign himself to his fate. He dragged his black melancholy along the quays until mid-day, his head so heavy, so full of thoughts of his lack of power, that he only espied the well-loved horizons of the Seine through a mist. Then he found himself once more in the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tete, where he breakfasted at Gomard's wine shop, whose sign 'The Dog of Montargis,' inspired him with interest. Some stonemasons, in their working blouses, bespattered with mortar, were there at table, and, like them, and with them, he ate his eight sous' 'ordinary'—some beef broth in a bowl, in which he soaked some bread, followed by a slice of boiled soup-beef, garnished with haricot beans, and served up on a plate damp with dish-water. However, it was still too good, he thought, for a brute unable to earn his bread. Whenever his work miscarried, he undervalued himself, ranked himself lower than a common labourer, whose sinewy arms could at least perform their appointed task. For an hour he lingered in the tavern brutifying himself by listening to the conversation at the tables around him. Once outside he slowly resumed his walk in haphazard fashion.

When he got to the Place de l'Hotel de Ville, however, a fresh idea made him quicken his pace. Why had he not thought of Fagerolles? Fagerolles was a nice fellow, gay, and by no means a fool, although he studied at the School of Arts. One could talk with him, even when he defended bad painting. If he had lunched at his father's, in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, he must certainly still be there.

On entering the narrow street, Claude felt a sensation of refreshing coolness come over him. In the sun it had grown very warm, and moisture rose from the pavement, which, however bright the sky, remained damp and greasy beneath the constant tramping of the pedestrians. Every minute, when a push obliged Claude to leave the footwalk, he found himself in danger of being knocked down by trucks or vans. Still the street amused him, with its straggling houses out of line, their flat frontages chequered with signboards up to the very eaves, and pierced with small windows, whence came the hum of every kind of handiwork that can be carried on at home. In one of the narrowest parts of the street a small newspaper shop made him stop. It was betwixt a hairdresser's and a tripeseller's, and had an outdoor display of idiotic prints, romantic balderdash mixed with filthy caricatures fit for a barrack-room. In front of these 'pictures,' a lank hobbledehoy stood lost in reverie, while two young girls nudged each other and jeered. He felt inclined to slap their faces, but he hurried across the road, for Fagerolles' house happened to be opposite. It was a dark old tenement, standing forward from the others, and was bespattered like them with the mud from the gutters. As an omnibus came up, Claude barely had time to jump upon the foot pavement, there reduced to the proportions of a simple ledge; the wheels brushed against his chest, and he was drenched to his knees.

M. Fagerolles, senior, a manufacturer of artistic zinc-work, had his workshops on the ground floor of the building, and having converted two large front rooms on the first floor into a warehouse, he personally occupied a small, dark, cellar-like apartment overlooking the courtyard. It was there that his son Henri had grown up, like a true specimen of the flora of the Paris streets, at the edge of that narrow pavement constantly struck by the omnibus wheels, always soddened by the gutter water, and opposite the print and newspaper shop, flanked by the barber's and tripeseller's. At first his father had made an ornamental draughtsman of him for personal use. But when the lad had developed higher ambition, taking to painting proper, and talking about the School of Arts, there had been quarrels, blows, a series of separations and reconciliations. Even now, although Henri had already achieved some successes, the manufacturer of artistic zinc-work, while letting him have his will, treated him harshly, like a lad who was spoiling his career.

After shaking off the water, Claude went up the deep archway entrance, to a courtyard, where the light was quite greenish, and where there was a dank, musty smell, like that at the bottom of a tank. There was an overhanging roofing of glass and iron at the foot of the staircase, which was a wide one, with a wrought-iron railing, eaten with rust. As the painter passed the warehouse on the first floor, he glanced through a glass door and noticed M. Fagerolles examining some patterns. Wishing to be polite, he entered, in spite of the artistic disgust he felt for all that zinc, coloured to imitate bronze, and having all the repulsive mendacious prettiness of spurious art.

'Good morning, monsieur. Is Henri still at home?'

The manufacturer, a stout, sallow-looking man, drew himself straight amidst all his nosegay vases and cruets and statuettes. He had in his hand a new model of a thermometer, formed of a juggling girl who crouched and balanced the glass tube on her nose.

'Henri did not come in to lunch,' he answered drily.

This cool reception upset Claude. 'Ah! he did not come back; I beg pardon for having disturbed you, then. Good-day, monsieur.'

'Good-day.'

Once more outside, Claude began to swear to himself. His ill-luck was complete, Fagerolles escaped him also. He even felt vexed with himself for having gone there, and having taken an interest in that picturesque old street; he was infuriated by the romantic gangrene that ever sprouted afresh within him, do what he might. It was his malady, perhaps, the false principle which he sometimes felt like a bar across his skull. And when he had reached the quays again, he thought of going home to see whether his picture was really so very bad. But the mere idea made him tremble all over. His studio seemed a chamber of horrors, where he could no more continue to live, as if, indeed, he had left the corpse of some beloved being there. No, no; to climb the three flights of stairs, to open the door, to shut himself up face to face with 'that,' would have needed strength beyond his courage. So he crossed the Seine and went along the Rue St. Jacques. He felt too wretched and lonely; and, come what might, he would go to the Rue d'Enfer to turn Sandoz from his work.

Sandoz's little fourth-floor flat consisted of a dining-room, a bedroom, and a strip of kitchen. It was tenanted by himself alone; his mother, disabled by paralysis, occupied on the other side of the landing a single room, where she lived in morose and voluntary solitude. The street was a deserted one; the windows of the rooms overlooked the gardens of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, above which rose the rounded crest of a lofty tree, and the square tower of St. Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.

Claude found Sandoz in his room, bending over his table, busy with a page of 'copy.'

'I am disturbing you?' said Claude.

'Not at all. I have been working ever since morning, and I've had enough of it. I've been killing myself for the last hour over a sentence that reads anyhow, and which has worried me all through my lunch.'

The painter made a gesture of despair, and the other, seeing him so gloomy, at once understood matters.

'You don't get on either, eh? Well, let's go out. A sharp walk will take a little of the rust off us. Shall we go?'

As he was passing the kitchen, however, an old woman stopped him. It was his charwoman, who, as a rule, came only for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. On Thursdays, however, she remained the whole afternoon in order to look after the dinner.

'Then it's decided, monsieur?' she asked. 'It's to be a piece of skate and a leg of mutton, with potatoes.'

'Yes, if you like.'

'For how many am I to lay the cloth?'

'Oh! as for that, one never knows. Lay for five, at any rate; we'll see afterwards. Dinner at seven, eh? we'll try to be home by then.'

When they were on the landing, Sandoz, leaving Claude to wait for him, stole into his mother's room. When he came out again, in the same discreet affectionate manner, they both went downstairs in silence. Outside, having sniffed to right and left, as if to see which way the wind blew, they ended by going up the street, reached the Place de l'Observatoire, and turned down the Boulevard du Montparnasse. This was their ordinary promenade; they reached the spot instinctively, being fond of the wide expanse of the outer boulevards, where they could roam and lounge at ease. They continued silent, for their heads were heavy still, but the comfort of being together gradually made them more serene. Still it was only when they were opposite the Western Railway Station that Sandoz spoke.

'I say, suppose we go to Mahoudeau's, to see how he's getting on with his big machine. I know that he has given "his gods and saints" the slip to-day.'

'All right,' answered Claude. 'Let's go to Mahoudeau's.'

They at once turned into the Rue du Cherche-Midi. There, at a few steps from the boulevard, Mahoudeau, a sculptor, had rented the shop of a fruiterer who had failed in business, and he had installed his studio therein, contenting himself with covering the windows with a layer of whitening. At this point, the street, wide and deserted, has a quiet, provincial aspect, with a somewhat ecclesiastical touch. Large gateways stand wide open showing a succession of deep roomy yards; from a cowkeeper's establishment comes a tepid, pungent smell of litter; and the dead wall of a convent stretches away for a goodly length. It was between this convent and a herbalist's that the shop transformed into a studio was situated. It still bore on its sign-board the inscription, 'Fruit and Vegetables,' in large yellow letters.

Claude and Sandoz narrowly missed being blinded by some little girls who were skipping in the street. On the foot pavement sat several families whose barricades of chairs compelled the friends to step down on to the roadway. However, they were drawing nigh, when the sight of the herbalist's shop delayed them for a moment. Between its windows, decked with enemas, bandages, and similar things, beneath the dried herbs hanging above the doorway, whence came a constant aromatic smell, a thin, dark woman stood taking stock of them, while, behind her, in the gloom of the shop, one saw the vague silhouette of a little sickly-looking man, who was coughing and expectorating. The friends nudged each other, their eyes lighted up with bantering mirth; and then they turned the handle of Mahoudeau's door.

The shop, though tolerably roomy, was almost filled by a mass of clay: a colossal Bacchante, falling back upon a rock. The wooden stays bent beneath the weight of that almost shapeless pile, of which nothing but some huge limbs could as yet be distinguished. Some water had been spilt on the floor, several muddy buckets straggled here and there, while a heap of moistened plaster was lying in a corner. On the shelves, formerly occupied by fruit and vegetables, were scattered some casts from the antique, covered with a tracery of cinder-like dust which had gradually collected there. A wash-house kind of dampness, a stale smell of moist clay, rose from the floor. And the wretchedness of this sculptor's studio and the dirt attendant upon the profession were made still more conspicuous by the wan light that filtered through the shop windows besmeared with whitening.

'What! is it you?' shouted Mahoudeau, who sat before his female figure, smoking a pipe.

He was small and thin, with a bony face, already wrinkled at twenty-seven. His black mane-like hair lay entangled over his very low forehead, and his sallow mask, ugly almost to ferociousness, was lighted up by a pair of childish eyes, bright and empty, which smiled with winning simplicity. The son of a stonemason of Plassans, he had achieved great success at the local art competitions, and had afterwards come to Paris as the town laureate, with an allowance of eight hundred francs per annum, for a period of four years. In the capital, however, he had found himself at sea, defenceless, failing in his competitions at the School of Arts, and spending his allowance to no purpose; so that, at the end of his term, he had been obliged for a livelihood to enter the employment of a dealer in church statues, at whose establishment, for ten hours a day, he scraped away at St. Josephs, St. Rochs, Mary Magdalens, and, in fact, all the saints of the calendar. For the last six months, however, he had experienced a revival of ambition, on finding himself once more among his comrades of Provence, the eldest of whom he was—fellows whom he had known at Geraud's boarding-school for little boys, and who had since grown into savage revolutionaries. At present, through his constant intercourse with impassioned artists, who troubled his brain with all sorts of wild theories, his ambition aimed at the gigantic.

'The devil!' said Claude, 'there's a lump.'

The sculptor, delighted, gave a long pull at his pipe, and blew a cloud of smoke.

'Eh, isn't it? I am going to give them some flesh, and living flesh, too; not the bladders of lard that they turn out.'

'It's a woman bathing, isn't it?' asked Sandoz.

'No; I shall put some vine leaves around her head. A Bacchante, you understand.'

At this Claude flew into a violent passion.

'A Bacchante? Do you want to make fools of people? Does such a thing as a Bacchante exist? A vintaging girl, eh? And quite modern, dash it all. I know she's nude, so let her be a peasant woman who has undressed. And that must be properly conveyed, mind; people must realise that she lives.'

Mahoudeau, taken aback, listened, trembling. He was afraid of Claude, and bowed to his ideal of strength and truth. So he even improved upon the painter's idea.

'Yes, yes, that's what I meant to say—a vintaging girl. And you'll see whether there isn't a real touch of woman about her.'

At that moment Sandoz, who had been making the tour of the huge block of clay, exclaimed: 'Why, here's that sneak of a Chaine.'

Behind the pile, indeed, sat Chaine, a burly fellow who was quietly painting away, copying the fireless rusty stove on a small canvas. It could be told that he was a peasant by his heavy, deliberate manner and his bull-neck, tanned and hardened like leather. His only noticeable feature was his forehead, displaying all the bumps of obstinacy; for his nose was so small as to be lost between his red cheeks, while a stiff beard hid his powerful jaws. He came from Saint Firmin, a village about six miles from Plassans, where he had been a cow-boy, until he drew for the conscription; and his misfortunes dated from the enthusiasm that a gentleman of the neighbourhood had shown for the walking-stick handles which he carved out of roots with his knife. From that moment, having become a rustic genius, an embryo great man for this local connoisseur, who happened to be a member of the museum committee, he had been helped by him, adulated and driven crazy with hopes; but he had successively failed in everything—his studies and competitions—thus missing the town's purse. Nevertheless, he had started for Paris, after worrying his father, a wretched peasant, into premature payment of his heritage, a thousand francs, on which he reckoned to live for a twelvemonth while awaiting the promised victory. The thousand francs had lasted eighteen months. Then, as he had only twenty francs left, he had taken up his quarters with his friend, Mahoudeau. They both slept in the same bed, in the dark back shop; they both in turn cut slices from the same loaves of bread—of which they bought sufficient for a fortnight at a time, so that it might get very hard, and that they might thus be able to eat but little of it.

'I say, Chaine,' continued Sandoz, 'your stove is really very exact.'

Chaine, without answering, gave a chuckle of triumph which lighted up his face like a sunbeam. By a crowning stroke of imbecility, and to make his misfortunes perfect, his protector's advice had thrown him into painting, in spite of the real taste that he showed for wood carving. And he painted like a whitewasher, mixing his colours as a hodman mixes his mortar, and managing to make the clearest and brightest of them quite muddy. His triumph consisted, however, in combining exactness with awkwardness; he displayed all the naive minuteness of the primitive painters; in fact, his mind, barely raised from the clods, delighted in petty details. The stove, with its perspective all awry, was tame and precise, and in colour as dingy as mire.

Claude approached and felt full of compassion at the sight of that painting, and though he was as a rule so harsh towards bad painters, his compassion prompted him to say a word of praise.

'Ah! one can't say that you are a trickster; you paint, at any rate, as you feel. Very good, indeed.'

However, the door of the shop had opened, and a good-looking, fair fellow, with a big pink nose, and large, blue, short-sighted eyes, entered shouting:

'I say, why does that herbalist woman next door always stand on her doorstep? What an ugly mug she's got!'

They all laughed, except Mahoudeau, who seemed very much embarrassed.

'Jory, the King of Blunderers,' declared Sandoz, shaking hands with the new comer.

'Why? What? Is Mahoudeau interested in her? I didn't know,' resumed Jory, when he had at length grasped the situation. 'Well, well, what does it matter? When everything's said, they are all irresistible.'

'As for you,' the sculptor rejoined, 'I can see you have tumbled on your lady-love's finger-nails again. She has dug a bit out of your cheek!'

They all burst out laughing anew, while Jory, in his turn, reddened. In fact, his face was scratched: there were even two deep gashes across it. The son of a magistrate of Plassans, whom he had driven half-crazy by his dissolute conduct, he had crowned everything by running away with a music-hall singer under the pretext of going to Paris to follow the literary profession. During the six months that they had been camping together in a shady hotel of the Quartier Latin, the girl had almost flayed him alive each time she caught him paying attention to anybody else of her sex. And, as this often happened, he always had some fresh scar to show—a bloody nose, a torn ear, or a damaged eye, swollen and blackened.

At last they all began to talk, with the exception of Chaine, who went on painting with the determined expression of an ox at the plough. Jory had at once gone into ecstasies over the roughly indicated figure of the vintaging girl. He worshipped a massive style of beauty. His first writings in his native town had been some Parnassian sonnets celebrating the copious charms of a handsome pork-butcheress. In Paris—where he had fallen in with the whole band of Plassans—he had taken to art criticism, and, for a livelihood, he wrote articles for twenty francs apiece in a small, slashing paper called 'The Drummer.' Indeed, one of these articles, a study on a picture by Claude exhibited at Papa Malgras's, had just caused a tremendous scandal; for Jory had therein run down all the painters whom the public appreciated to extol his friend, whom he set up as the leader of a new school, the school of the 'open air.' Very practical at heart, he did not care in reality a rap about anything that did not conduce to his own pleasures; he simply repeated the theories he heard enunciated by his friends. 'I say, Mahoudeau,' he now exclaimed, 'you shall have an article; I'll launch that woman of yours. What limbs, my boys! She's magnificent!'

Then suddenly changing the conversation: 'By the way,' he said, 'my miserly father has apologised. He is afraid I shall drag his name through the mud, so he sends me a hundred francs a month now. I am paying my debts.'

'Debts! you are too careful to have any,' muttered Sandoz, with a smile.

In fact, Jory displayed a hereditary tightness of fist which much amused his friends. He managed to lead a profligate life without money and without incurring debts; and with the skill he thus displayed was allied constant duplicity, a habit of incessantly lying, which he had contracted in the devout sphere of his family, where his anxiety to hide his vices had made him lie about everything at all hours, and even without occasion. But he now gave a superb reply, the cry of a sage of deep experience.

'Oh, you fellows, you don't know the worth of money!'

This time he was hooted. What a philistine! And the invectives continued, when some light taps on one of the window-panes suddenly made the din cease.

'She is really becoming a nuisance,' said Mahoudeau, with a gesture of annoyance.

'Eh? Who is it? The herbalist woman?' asked Jory. 'Let her come in; it will be great fun.'

The door indeed had already been opened, and Mahoudeau's neighbour, Madame Jabouille, or Mathilde, as she was familiarly called, appeared on the threshold. She was about thirty, with a flat face horribly emaciated, and passionate eyes, the lids of which had a bluish tinge as if they were bruised. It was said that some members of the clergy had brought about her marriage with little Jabouille, at a time when the latter's business was still flourishing, thanks to the custom of all the pious folk of the neighbourhood. The truth was, that one sometimes espied black cassocks stealthily crossing that mysterious shop, where all the aromatic herbs set a perfume of incense. A kind of cloistral quietude pervaded the place; the devotees who came in spoke in low voices, as if in a confessional, slipped their purchases into their bags furtively, and went off with downcast eyes. Unfortunately, some very horrid rumours had got abroad—slander invented by the wine-shop keeper opposite, said pious folks. At any rate, since the widower had re-married, the business had been going to the dogs. The glass jars seemed to have lost all their brightness, and the dried herbs, suspended from the ceiling, were tumbling to dust. Jabouille himself was coughing his life out, reduced to a very skeleton. And although Mathilde professed to be religious, the pious customers gradually deserted her, being of opinion that she made herself too conspicuous with young fellows of the neighbourhood now that Jabouille was almost eaten out of house and home.

For a moment Mathilde remained motionless, blinking her eyes. A pungent smell had spread through the shop, a smell of simples, which she brought with her in her clothes and greasy, tumbled hair; the sickly sweetness of mallow, the sharp odour of elderseed, the bitter effluvia of rhubarb, but, above all, the hot whiff of peppermint, which seemed like her very breath.

She made a gesture of feigned surprise. 'Oh, dear me! you have company—I did not know; I'll drop in again.'

'Yes, do,' said Mahoudeau, looking very vexed. 'Besides, I am going out; you can give me a sitting on Sunday.'

At this Claude, stupefied, fairly stared at the emaciated Mathilde, and then at the huge vintaging woman.

'What?' he cried, 'is it madame who poses for that figure? The dickens, you exaggerate!'

Then the laughter began again, while the sculptor stammered his explanations. 'Oh! she only poses for the head and the hands, and merely just to give me a few indications.'

Mathilde, however, laughed with the others, with a sharp, brazen-faced laughter, showing the while the gaping holes in her mouth, where several teeth were wanting.

'Yes,' resumed Mahoudeau. 'I have to go out on some business now. Isn't it so, you fellows, we are expected over yonder?'

He had winked at his friends, feeling eager for a good lounge. They all answered that they were expected, and helped him to cover the figure of the vintaging girl with some strips of old linen which were soaking in a pail of water.

However, Mathilde, looking submissive but sad, did not stir. She merely shifted from one place to another, when they pushed against her, while Chaine, who was no longer painting, glanced at her over his picture. So far, he had not opened his lips. But as Mahoudeau at last went off with his three friends, he made up his mind to ask, in his husky voice:

'Shall you come home to-night?'

'Very late. Have your dinner and go to bed. Good-bye.'

Then Chaine remained alone with Mathilde in the damp shop, amidst the heaps of clay and the puddles of water, while the chalky light from the whitened windows glared crudely over all the wretched untidiness.

Meantime the four others, Claude and Mahoudeau, Jory and Sandoz, strolled along, seeming to take up the whole width of the Boulevard des Invalides. It was the usual thing, the band was gradually increased by the accession of comrades picked up on the way, and then came the wild march of a horde upon the war-path. With the bold assurance of their twenty summers, these young fellows took possession of the foot pavement. The moment they were together trumpets seemed to sound in advance of them; they seized upon Paris and quietly dropped it into their pockets. There was no longer the slightest doubt about their victory; they freely displayed their threadbare coats and old shoes, like destined conquerors of to-morrow who disdained bagatelles, and had only to take the trouble to become the masters of all the luxury surrounding them. And all this was attended by huge contempt for everything that was not art—contempt for fortune, contempt for the world at large, and, above all, contempt for politics. What was the good of all such rubbish? Only a lot of incapables meddled with it. A warped view of things, magnificent in its very injustice, exalted them; an intentional ignorance of the necessities of social life, the crazy dream of having none but artists upon earth. They seemed very stupid at times, but, all the same, their passion made them strong and brave.

Claude became excited. Faith in himself revived amidst the glow of common hopes. His worry of the morning had only left a vague numbness behind, and he now once more began to discuss his picture with Sandoz and Mahoudeau, swearing, it is true, that he would destroy it the next day. Jory, who was very short-sighted, stared at all the elderly ladies he met, and aired his theories on artistic work. A man ought to give his full measure at once in the first spurt of inspiration; as for himself, he never corrected anything. And, still discussing, the four friends went on down the boulevard, which, with its comparative solitude, and its endless rows of fine trees, seemed to have been expressly designed as an arena for their disputations. When they reached the Esplanade, the wrangling became so violent that they stopped in the middle of that large open space. Beside himself, Claude called Jory a numskull; was it not better to destroy one's work than to launch a mediocre performance upon the world? Truckling to trade was really disgusting. Mahoudeau and Sandoz, on their side, shouted both together at the same time. Some passers-by, feeling uneasy, turned round to look, and at last gathered round these furious young fellows, who seemed bent on swallowing each other. But they went off vexed, thinking that some practical joke had been played upon them, when they suddenly saw the quartette, all good friends again, go into raptures over a wet-nurse, dressed in light colours, with long cherry-tinted ribbons streaming from her cap. There, now! That was something like—what a tint, what a bright note it set amid the surroundings! Delighted, blinking their eyes, they followed the nurse under the trees, and then suddenly seemed roused and astonished to find they had already come so far. The Esplanade, open on all sides, save on the south, where rose the distant pile of the Hotel des Invalides, delighted them—it was so vast, so quiet; they there had plenty of room for their gestures; and they recovered breath there, although they were always declaring that Paris was far too small for them, and lacked sufficient air to inflate their ambitious lungs.

'Are you going anywhere particular?' asked Sandoz of Mahoudeau and Jory.

'No,' answered the latter, 'we are going with you. Where are you going?'

Claude, gazing carelessly about him, muttered: 'I don't know. That way, if you like.'

They turned on to the Quai d'Orsay, and went as far as the Pont de la Concorde. In front of the Corps Legislatif the painter remarked, with an air of disgust: 'What a hideous pile!'

'Jules Favre made a fine speech the other day. How he did rile Rouher,' said Jory.

However, the others left him no time to proceed, the disputes began afresh. 'Who was Jules Favre? Who was Rouher? Did they exist? A parcel of idiots whom no one would remember ten years after their death.' The young men had now begun to cross the bridge, and they shrugged their shoulders with compassion. Then, on reaching the Place de la Concorde, they stopped short and relapsed into silence.

'Well,' opined Claude at last, 'this isn't bad, by any means.'

It was four o'clock, and the day was waning amidst a glorious powdery shimmer. To the right and left, towards the Madeleine and towards the Corps Legislatif, lines of buildings stretched away, showing against the sky, while in the Tuileries Gardens rose gradients of lofty rounded chestnut trees. And between the verdant borders of the pleasure walks, the avenue of the Champs Elysees sloped upward as far as the eye could reach, topped by the colossal Arc de Triomphe, agape in front of the infinite. A double current, a twofold stream rolled along—horses showing like living eddies, vehicles like retreating waves, which the reflections of a panel or the sudden sparkle of the glass of a carriage lamp seemed to tip with white foam. Lower down, the square—with its vast footways, its roads as broad as lakes—was filled with a constant ebb and flow, crossed in every direction by whirling wheels, and peopled with black specks of men, while the two fountains plashed and streamed, exhaling delicious coolness amid all the ardent life.

Claude, quivering with excitement, kept saying: 'Ah! Paris! It's ours. We have only to take it.'

They all grew excited, their eyes opened wide with desire. Was it not glory herself that swept from the summit of that avenue over the whole capital? Paris was there, and they longed to make her theirs.

'Well, we'll take her one day,' said Sandoz, with his obstinate air.

'To be sure we shall,' said Mahoudeau and Jory in the simplest manner.

They had resumed walking; they still roamed about, found themselves behind the Madeleine, and went up the Rue Tronchet. At last, as they reached the Place du Havre, Sandoz exclaimed, 'So we are going to Baudequin's, eh?'

The others looked as if they had dropped from the sky; in fact, it did seem as if they were going to Baudequin's.

'What day of the week is it?' asked Claude. 'Thursday, eh? Then Fagerolles and Gagniere are sure to be there. Let's go to Baudequin's.'

And thereupon they went up the Rue d'Amsterdam. They had just crossed Paris, one of their favourite rambles, but they took other routes at times—from one end of the quays to the other; or from the Porte St. Jacques to the Moulineaux, or else to Pere-la-Chaise, followed by a roundabout return along the outer boulevards. They roamed the streets, the open spaces, the crossways; they rambled on for whole days, as long as their legs would carry them, as if intent on conquering one district after another by hurling their revolutionary theories at the house-fronts; and the pavement seemed to be their property—all the pavement touched by their feet, all that old battleground whence arose intoxicating fumes which made them forget their lassitude.

The Cafe Baudequin was situated on the Boulevard des Batignolles, at the corner of the Rue Darcet. Without the least why or wherefore, it had been selected by the band as their meeting-place, though Gagniere alone lived in the neighbourhood. They met there regularly on Sunday nights; and on Thursday afternoons, at about five o'clock, those who were then at liberty had made it a habit to look in for a moment. That day, as the weather was fine and bright, the little tables outside under the awning were occupied by rows of customers, obstructing the footway. But the band hated all elbowing and public exhibition, so they jostled the other people in order to go inside, where all was deserted and cool.

'Hallo, there's Fagerolles by himself,' exclaimed Claude.

He had gone straight to their usual table at the end of the cafe, on the left, where he shook hands with a pale, thin, young man, whose pert girlish face was lighted up by a pair of winning, satirical grey eyes, which at times flashed like steel. They all sat down and ordered beer, after which the painter resumed:

'Do you know that I went to look for you at your father's; and a nice reception he gave me.'

Fagerolles, who affected a low devil-may-care style, slapped his thighs. 'Oh, the old fellow plagues me! I hooked it this morning, after a row. He wants me to draw some things for his beastly zinc stuff. As if I hadn't enough zinc stuff at the Art School.'

This slap at the professors delighted the young man's friends. He amused them and made himself their idol by dint of alternate flattery and blame. His smile went from one to the other, while, by the aid of a few drops of beer spilt on the table, his long nimble fingers began tracing complicated sketches. His art evidently came very easily to him; it seemed as if he could do anything with a turn of the hand.

'And Gagniere?' asked Mahoudeau; 'haven't you seen him?'

'No; I have been here for the last hour.'

Just then Jory, who had remained silent, nudged Sandoz, and directed his attention to a girl seated with a gentleman at a table at the back of the room. There were only two other customers present, two sergeants, who were playing cards. The girl was almost a child, one of those young Parisian hussies who are as lank as ever at eighteen. She suggested a frizzy poodle—with the shower of fair little locks that fell over her dainty little nose, and her large smiling mouth, set between rosy cheeks. She was turning over the leaves of an illustrated paper, while the gentleman accompanying her gravely sipped a glass of Madeira; but every other minute she darted gay glances from over the newspaper towards the band of artists.

'Pretty, isn't she?' whispered Jory. 'Who is she staring at? Why, she's looking at me.'

But Fagerolles suddenly broke in: 'I say, no nonsense. Don't imagine that I have been here for the last hour merely waiting for you.'

The others laughed; and lowering his voice he told them about the girl, who was named Irma Becot. She was the daughter of a grocer in the Rue Montorgueil, and had been to school in the neighbourhood till she was sixteen, writing her exercises between two bags of lentils, and finishing off her education on her father's doorstep, lolling about on the pavement, amidst the jostling of the throng, and learning all about life from the everlasting tittle-tattle of the cooks, who retailed all the scandal of the neighbourhood while waiting for five sous' worth of Gruyere cheese to be served them. Her mother having died, her father himself had begun to lead rather a gay life, in such wise that the whole of the grocery stores—tea, coffee, dried vegetables, and jars and drawers of sweetstuff—were gradually devoured. Irma was still going to school, when, one day, the place was sold up. Her father died of a fit of apoplexy, and Irma sought refuge with a poor aunt, who gave her more kicks than halfpence, with the result that she ended by running away, and taking her flight through all the dancing-places of Montmartre and Batignolles.

Claude listened to the story with his usual air of contempt for women. Suddenly, however, as the gentleman rose and went out after whispering in her ear, Irma Becot, after watching him disappear, bounded from her seat with the impulsiveness of a school girl, in order to join Fagerolles, beside whom she made herself quite at home, giving him a smacking kiss, and drinking out of his glass. And she smiled at the others in a very engaging manner, for she was partial to artists, and regretted that they were generally so miserably poor. As Jory was smoking, she took his cigarette out of his mouth and set it in her own, but without pausing in her chatter, which suggested that of a saucy magpie.

'You are all painters, aren't you? How amusing! But why do those three look as if they were sulking. Just laugh a bit, or I shall make you, you'll see!'

As a matter of fact, Sandoz, Claude, and Mahoudeau, quite taken aback, were watching her most gravely. She herself remained listening, and, on hearing her companion come back, she hastily gave Fagerolles an appointment for the morrow. Then, after replacing the cigarette between Jory's lips, she strode off with her arms raised, and making a very comical grimace; in such wise that when the gentleman reappeared, looking sedate and somewhat pale, he found her in her former seat, still looking at the same engraving in the newspaper. The whole scene had been acted so quickly, and with such jaunty drollery, that the two sergeants who sat nearby, good-natured fellows both of them, almost died of laughter as they shuffled their cards afresh.

In fact, Irma had taken them all by storm. Sandoz declared that her name of Becot was very well suited for a novel; Claude asked whether she would consent to pose for a sketch; while Mahoudeau already pictured her as a Paris gamin, a statuette that would be sure to sell. She soon went off, however, and behind the gentleman's back she wafted kisses to the whole party, a shower of kisses which quite upset the impressionable Jory.

It was five o'clock, and the band ordered some more beer. Some of the usual customers had taken possession of the adjacent tables, and these philistines cast sidelong glances at the artists' corner, glances in which contempt was curiously mingled with a kind of uneasy deference. The artists were indeed well known; a legend was becoming current respecting them. They themselves were now talking on common-place subjects: about the heat, the difficulty of finding room in the omnibus to the Odeon, and the discovery of a wine-shop where real meat was obtainable. One of them wanted to start a discussion about a number of idiotic pictures that had lately been hung in the Luxembourg Museum; but there was only one opinion on the subject, that the pictures were not worth their frames. Thereupon they left off conversing; they smoked, merely exchanging a word or a significant smile now and then.

'Well,' asked Claude at last, 'are we going to wait for Gagniere?'

At this there was a protest. Gagniere was a bore. Besides, he would turn up as soon as he smelt the soup.

'Let's be off, then,' said Sandoz. 'There's a leg of mutton this evening, so let's try to be punctual.'

Each paid his score, and they all went out. Their departure threw the cafe into a state of emotion. Some young fellows, painters, no doubt, whispered together as they pointed at Claude, much in the same manner as if he were the redoubtable chieftain of a horde of savages. Jory's famous article was producing its effect; the very public was becoming his accomplice, and of itself was soon to found that school of the open air, which the band had so far only joked about. As they gaily said, the Cafe Baudequin was not aware of the honour they had done it on the day when they selected it to be the cradle of a revolution.

Fagerolles having reinforced the group, they now numbered five, and slowly they took their way across Paris, with their tranquil look of victory. The more numerous they were, the more did they stretch across the pavement, and carry away on their heels the burning life of the streets. When they had gone down the Rue de Clichy, they went straight along the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin, turned towards the Rue de Richelieu, crossed the Seine by the Pont des Arts, so as to fling their gibes at the Institute, and finally reached the Luxembourg by way of the Rue de Seine, where a poster, printed in three colours, the garish announcement of a travelling circus, made them all shout with admiration. Evening was coming on; the stream of wayfarers flowed more slowly; the tired city was awaiting the shadows of night, ready to yield to the first comer who might be strong enough to take her.

On reaching the Rue d'Enfer, when Sandoz had ushered his four friends into his own apartments, he once more vanished into his mother's room. He remained there for a few moments, and then came out without saying a word, but with the tender, gentle smile habitual to him on such occasions. And immediately afterwards a terrible hubbub, of laughter, argument, and mere shouting, arose in his little flat. Sandoz himself set the example, all the while assisting the charwoman, who burst into bitter language because it was half-past seven, and her leg of mutton was drying up. The five companions, seated at table, were already swallowing their soup, a very good onion soup, when a new comer suddenly appeared.

'Hallo! here's Gagniere,' was the vociferous chorus.

Gagniere, short, slight, and vague looking, with a doll-like startled face, set off by a fair curly beard, stood for a moment on the threshold blinking his green eyes. He belonged to Melun, where his well-to-do parents, who were both dead, had left him two houses; and he had learnt painting, unassisted, in the forest of Fontainebleau. His landscapes were at least conscientiously painted, excellent in intention; but his real passion was music, a madness for music, a cerebral bonfire which set him on a level with the wildest of the band.

'Am I in the way?' he gently asked.

'Not at all; come in!' shouted Sandoz.

The charwoman was already laying an extra knife and fork.

'Suppose she lays a place for Dubuche, while she is about it,' said Claude. 'He told me he would perhaps come.'

But they were all down upon Dubuche, who frequented women in society. Jory said that he had seen him in a carriage with an old lady and her daughter, whose parasols he was holding on his knees.

'Where have you come from to be so late?' asked Fagerolles of Gagniere.

The latter, who was about to swallow his first spoonful of soup, set it in his plate again.

'I was in the Rue de Lancry—you know, where they have chamber music. Oh! my boy, some of Schumann's machines! You haven't an idea of them! They clutch hold of you at the back of your head just as if somebody were breathing down your back. Yes, yes, it's something much more immaterial than a kiss, just a whiff of breath. 'Pon my honour, a fellow feels as if he were going to die.'

His eyes were moistening and he turned pale, as if experiencing some over-acute enjoyment.

'Eat your soup,' said Mahoudeau; 'you'll tell us all about it afterwards.'

The skate was served, and they had the vinegar bottle put on the table to improve the flavour of the black butter, which seemed rather insipid. They ate with a will, and the hunks of bread swiftly disappeared. There was nothing refined about the repast, and the wine was mere common stuff, which they watered considerably from a feeling of delicacy, in order to lessen their host's expenses. They had just saluted the leg of mutton with a hurrah, and the host had begun to carve it, when the door opened anew. But this time there were furious protests.

'No, no, not another soul! Turn him out, turn him out.'

Dubuche, out of breath with having run, bewildered at finding himself amidst such howling, thrust his fat, pallid face forward, whilst stammering explanations.

'Really, now, I assure you it was the fault of the omnibuses. I had to wait for five of them in the Champs Elysees.'

'No, no, he's lying!—Let him go, he sha'n't have any of that mutton. Turn him out, turn him out!'

All the same, he ended by coming in, and it was then noticed that he was stylishly attired, all in black, trousers and frock-coat alike, and cravated and booted in the stiff ceremonious fashion of some respectable member of the middle classes going out to dinner.

'Hallo! he has missed his invitation,' chaffed Fagerolles. 'Don't you see that his fine ladies didn't ask him to stay to dinner, and so now he's come to gobble up our leg of mutton, as he doesn't know where else to go?'

At this Dubuche turned red, and stammered: 'Oh! what an idea! How ill-natured you are! And, besides, just attend to your own business.'

Sandoz and Claude, seated next to each other, smiled, and the former, beckoning to Dubuche, said to him: 'Lay your own place, bring a plate and a glass, and sit between us—like that, they'll leave you alone.'

However, the chaff continued all the time that the mutton was being eaten. When the charwoman had brought Dubuche a plate of soup and a piece of skate, he himself fell in with the jokes good-naturedly. He pretended to be famished, greedily mopped out his plate, and related a story about a mother having refused him her daughter because he was an architect. The end of the dinner thus became very boisterous; they all rattled on together. The only dessert, a piece of Brie cheese, met with enormous success. Not a scrap of it was left, and the bread almost ran short. The wine did run short, so they each swallowed a clear draught of water, smacking their lips the while amidst great laughter. And, with faces beaming, and well-filled paunches, they passed into the bedroom with the supreme content of folks who have fared very sumptuously indeed.

Those were Sandoz's jolly evenings. Even at the times when he was hard up he had always had some boiled beef and broth to share with his comrades. He felt delighted at having a number of them around him, all friends, inspired by the same ideas. Though he was of their own age, he beamed with fatherly feelings and satisfied good-nature when he saw them in his rooms, around him, hand in hand, and intoxicated with hope. As he had but two rooms, the bedroom did duty as a drawing-room, and became as much theirs as his. For lack of sufficient chairs, two or three had to seat themselves on the bed. And on those warm summer evenings the window remained wide open to let in the air. From it two black silhouettes were to be seen rising above the houses, against the clear sky—the tower of St. Jacques du Haut-Pas and the tree of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. When money was plentiful there was beer. Every one brought his own tobacco, the room soon became full of smoke, and without seeing each other they ended by conversing far into the night, amidst the deep mournful silence of that deserted district.

On that particular evening, at about nine o'clock, the charwoman came in.

'Monsieur, I have done. Can I go?'

'Yes, go to bed. You have left the kettle on the fire, haven't you? I'll make the tea myself.'

Sandoz had risen. He went off at the heels of the charwoman, and only returned a quarter of an hour afterwards. He had no doubt been to kiss his mother, whom he tucked up every night before she dozed off.

Meanwhile the voices had risen to a high pitch again. Fagerolles was telling a story.

'Yes, old fellow; at the School they even correct Nature herself. The other day Mazel comes up to me and says: "Those two arms don't correspond"; whereupon I reply: "Look for yourself, monsieur—the model's are like that." It was little Flore Beauchamp, you know. "Well," Mazel furiously replies, "if she has them like that, it's very wrong of her."'

They almost all shrieked, especially Claude, to whom Fagerolles told the story by way of paying court. For some time previously the younger artist had yielded to the elder's influence; and although he continued to paint with purely tricky skill, he no longer talked of anything but substantial, thickly-painted work, of bits of nature thrown on to canvas, palpitating with life, such as they really were. This did not prevent him, though, from elsewhere chaffing the adepts of the open-air school, whom he accused of impasting with a kitchen ladle.

Dubuche, who had not laughed, his sense of rectitude being offended, made so bold as to reply:

'Why do you stop at the School if you think you are being brutified there? It's simple enough, one goes away—Oh, I know you are all against me, because I defend the School. But, you see, my idea is that, when a fellow wants to carry on a trade, it is not a bad thing for him to begin by learning it.'

Ferocious shouts arose at this, and Claude had need of all his authority to secure a hearing.

'He is right. One must learn one's trade. But it won't do to learn it under the ferule of professors who want to cram their own views forcibly into your nut. That Mazel is a perfect idiot!'

He flung himself backward on the bed, on which he had been sitting, and with his eyes raised to the ceiling, he went on, in an excited tone:

'Ah! life! life! to feel it and portray it in its reality, to love it for itself, to behold in it the only real, lasting, and changing beauty, without any idiotic idea of ennobling it by mutilation. To understand that all so-called ugliness is nothing but the mark of individual character, to create real men and endow them with life—yes, that's the only way to become a god!'

His faith was coming back to him, the march across Paris had spurred him on once more; he was again seized by his passion for living flesh. They listened to him in silence. He made a wild gesture, then calmed down.

'No doubt every one has his own ideas; but the annoyance is that at the Institute they are even more intolerant than we are. The hanging committee of the Salon is in their hands. I am sure that that idiot Mazel will refuse my picture.'

Thereupon they all broke out into imprecations, for this question of the hanging committee was the everlasting subject of their wrath. They demanded reforms; every one had a solution of the problem ready—from universal suffrage, applied to the election of a hanging committee, liberal in the widest sense of the word, down to unrestricted liberty, a Salon open to all exhibitors.*

* The reader will bear in mind that all these complaints made by
Claude and his friends apply to the old Salons, as organized
under Government control, at the time of the Second Empire.—ED.

While the others went on discussing the subject, Gagniere drew Mahoudeau to the open window, where, in a low voice, his eyes the while staring into space, he murmured:

'Oh, it's nothing at all, only four bars; a simple impression jotted down there and then. But what a deal there is in it! To me it's first of all a landscape, dwindling away in the distance; a bit of melancholy road, with the shadow of a tree that one cannot see; and then a woman passes along, scarcely a silhouette; on she goes and you never meet her again, no, never more again.'

Just at that moment, however, Fagerolles exclaimed, 'I say, Gagniere, what are you going to send to the Salon this year?'

Gagniere did not hear, but continued talking, enraptured, as it were.

'In Schumann one finds everything—the infinite. And Wagner, too, whom they hissed again last Sunday!'

But a fresh call from Fagerolles made him start.

'Eh! what? What am I going to send to the Salon? A small landscape, perhaps; a little bit of the Seine. It is so difficult to decide; first of all I must feel pleased with it myself.'

He had suddenly become timid and anxious again. His artistic scruples, his conscientiousness, kept him working for months on a canvas the size of one's hand. Following the track of the French landscape painters, those masters who were the first to conquer nature, he worried about correctness of tone, pondering and pondering over the precise value of tints, till theoretical scruples ended by making his touch heavy. And he often did not dare to chance a bright dash of colour, but painted in a greyish gloomy key which was astonishing, when one remembered his revolutionary passions.

'For my part,' said Mahoudeau, 'I feel delighted at the prospect of making them squint with my woman.'

Claude shrugged his shoulders. 'Oh! you'll get in, the sculptors have broader minds than the painters. And, besides, you know very well what you are about; you have something at your fingers' ends that pleases. There will be plenty of pretty bits about your vintaging girl.'

The compliment made Mahoudeau feel serious. He posed above all for vigour of execution; he was unconscious of his real vein of talent, and despised gracefulness, though it ever invincibly sprung from his big, coarse fingers—the fingers of an untaught working-man—like a flower that obstinately sprouts from the hard soil where the wind has flung its seed.

Fagerolles, who was very cunning, had decided to send nothing, for fear of displeasing his masters; and he chaffed the Salon, calling it 'a foul bazaar, where all the bad painting made even the good turn musty.' In his inmost heart he was dreaming of one day securing the Rome prize, though he ridiculed it, as he did everything else.

However, Jory stationed himself in the middle of the room, holding up his glass of beer. Sipping every now and then, he declared: 'Well, your hanging committee quite disgusts me! I say, shall I demolish it? I'll begin bombarding it in our very next number. You'll give me some notes, eh? and we'll knock it to pieces. That will be fine fun.'

Claude was at last fully wound up, and general enthusiasm prevailed. Yes, yes, they must start a campaign. They would all be in it, and, pressing shoulder to shoulder, march to the battle together. At that moment there was not one of them who reserved his share of fame, for nothing divided them as yet; neither the profound dissemblance of their various natures, of which they themselves were ignorant, nor their rivalries, which would some day bring them into collision. Was not the success of one the success of all the others? Their youth was fermenting, they were brimming over with mutual devotion; they indulged anew in their everlasting dream of gathering into a phalanx to conquer the world, each contributing his individual effort; this one helping that one forward, and the whole band reaching fame at once in one row. Claude, as the acknowledged chief, was already sounding the victory, distributing laurels with such lyrical abundance that he overlooked himself. Fagerolles himself, gibing Parisian though he might be, believed in the necessity of forming an army; while even Jory, although he had a coarser appetite, with a deal of the provincial still about him, displayed much useful comradeship, catching various artistic phrases as they fell from his companions' lips, and already preparing in his mind the articles which would herald the advent of the band and make them known. And Mahoudeau purposely exaggerated his intentional roughness, and clasped his hands like an ogre kneading human flesh; while Gagniere, in ecstasy, as if freed from the everlasting greyishness of his art, sought to refine sensation to the utmost limits of intelligence; and Dubuche, with his matter-of-fact convictions, threw in but a word here and there; words, however, which were like club-blows in the very midst of the fray. Then Sandoz, happy and smiling at seeing them so united, 'all in one shirt,' as he put it, opened another bottle of beer. He would have emptied every one in the house.

'Eh?' he cried, 'we're agreed, let's stick to it. It's really pleasant to come to an understanding among fellows who have something in their nuts, so may the thunderbolts of heaven sweep all idiots away!'

At that same moment a ring at the bell stupefied him. Amidst the sudden silence of the others, he inquired—'Who, to the deuce, can that be—at eleven o'clock?'

He ran to open the door, and they heard him utter a cry of delight. He was already coming back again, throwing the door wide open as he said—'Ah! it's very kind indeed to think of us and surprise us like this! Bongrand, gentlemen.'

The great painter, whom the master of the house announced in this respectfully familiar way, entered, holding out both hands. They all eagerly rose, full of emotion, delighted with that manly, cordial handshake so willingly bestowed. Bongrand was then forty-five years old, stout, and with a very expressive face and long grey hair. He had recently become a member of the Institute, and wore the rosette of an officer of the Legion of Honour in the top button-hole of his unpretentious alpaca jacket. He was fond of young people; he liked nothing so much as to drop in from time to time and smoke a pipe among these beginners, whose enthusiasm warmed his heart.

'I am going to make the tea,' exclaimed Sandoz.

When he came back from the kitchen, carrying the teapot and cups, he found Bongrand installed astride a chair, smoking his short cutty, amidst the din which had again arisen. Bongrand himself was holding forth in a stentorian voice. The grandson of a farmer of the Beauce region, the son of a man risen to the middle classes, with peasant blood in his veins, indebted for his culture to a mother of very artistic tastes, he was rich, had no need to sell his pictures, and retained many tastes and opinions of Bohemian life.

'The hanging committee? Well, I'd sooner hang myself than belong to it!' said he, with sweeping gestures. 'Am I an executioner to kick poor devils, who often have to earn their bread, out of doors?'

'Still, you might render us great service by defending our pictures before the committee,' observed Claude.

'Oh, dear, no! I should only make matters worse for you—I don't count; I'm nobody.'

There was a chorus of protestations; Fagerolles objected, in a shrill voice:

'Well, if the painter of "The Village Wedding" does not count—'

But Bongrand was getting angry; he had risen, his cheeks afire.

'Eh? Don't pester me with "The Wedding"; I warn you I am getting sick of that picture. It is becoming a perfect nightmare to me ever since it has been hung in the Luxembourg Museum.'

This 'Village Wedding'—a party of wedding guests roaming through a corn-field, peasants studied from life, with an epic look of the heroes of Homer about them—had so far remained his masterpiece. The picture had brought about an evolution in art, for it had inaugurated a new formula. Coming after Delacroix, and parallel with Courbet, it was a piece of romanticism tempered by logic, with more correctness of observation, more perfection in the handling. And though it did not squarely tackle nature amidst the crudity of the open air, the new school claimed connection with it.

'There can be nothing more beautiful,' said Claude, 'than the two first groups, the fiddler, and then the bride with the old peasant.'

'And the strapping peasant girl, too,' added Mahoudeau; the one who is turning round and beckoning! I had a great mind to take her for the model of a statue.'

'And that gust of wind among the corn,' added Gagniere, 'and the pretty bit of the boy and girl skylarking in the distance.'

Bongrand sat listening with an embarrassed air, and a smile of inward suffering; and when Fagerolles asked him what he was doing just then, he answered, with a shrug of his shoulders:

'Well, nothing; some little things. But I sha'n't exhibit this time. I should like to find a telling subject. Ah, you fellows are happy at still being at the bottom of the hill. A man has good legs then, he feels so plucky when it's a question of getting up. But when once he is a-top, the deuce take it! the worries begin. A real torture, fisticuffs, efforts which must be constantly renewed, lest one should slip down too quickly. Really now, one would prefer being below, for the pleasure of still having everything to do—Ah, you may laugh, but you'll see it all for yourselves some day!'

They were indeed laughing, thinking it a paradox, or a little piece of affectation, which they excused. To be hailed, like Bongrand, with the name of master—was that not the height of bliss? He, with his arms resting on the back of his chair, listened to them in silence, leisurely puffing his pipe, and renouncing the idea of trying to make them understand him.

Meanwhile, Dubuche, who had rather domesticated tastes, helped Sandoz to hand the tea round, and the din continued. Fagerolles related a story about Daddy Malgras and a female cousin by marriage, whom the dealer offered as a model on conditions that he was given a presentment of her in oils. Then they began to talk of models. Mahoudeau waxed furious, because the really well-built female models were disappearing. It was impossible to find one with a decent figure now. Then suddenly the tumult increased again; Gagniere was being congratulated about a connoisseur whose acquaintance he had made in the Palais Royal one afternoon, while the band played, an eccentric gentleman living on a small income, who never indulged in any other extravagance than that of buying pictures. The other artists laughed and asked for the gentleman's address. Then they fell foul of the picture dealers, dirty black-guards, who preyed on artists and starved them. It was really a pity that connoisseurs mistrusted painters to such a degree as to insist upon a middleman under the impression that they would thus make a better bargain. This question of bread and butter excited them yet more, though Claude showed magnificent contempt for it all. The artist was robbed, no doubt, but what did that matter, if he had painted a masterpiece, and had some water to drink? Jory, having again expressed some low ideas about lucre, aroused general indignation. Out with the journalist! He was asked stringent questions. Would he sell his pen? Would he not sooner chop off his wrist than write anything against his convictions? But they scarcely waited for his answer, for the excitement was on the increase; it became the superb madness of early manhood, contempt for the whole world, an absorbing passion for good work, freed from all human weaknesses, soaring in the sky like a very sun. Ah! how strenuous was their desire to lose themselves, consume themselves, in that brazier of their own kindling!

Bongrand, who had not stirred the while, made a vague gesture of suffering at the sight of that boundless confidence, that boisterous joy at the prospect of attack. He forgot the hundred paintings which had brought him his glory, he was thinking of the work which he had left roughed out on his easel now. Taking his cutty from between his lips, he murmured, his eyes glistening with kindliness, 'Oh, youth, youth!'

Until two in the morning, Sandoz, who seemed ubiquitous, kept on pouring fresh supplies of hot water into the teapot. From the neighbourhood, now asleep, one now only heard the miawing of an amorous tabby. They all talked at random, intoxicated by their own words, hoarse with shouting, their eyes scorched, and when at last they made up their minds to go, Sandoz took the lamp to show them a light over the banisters, saying very softly:

'Don't make a noise, my mother is asleep.'

The hushed tread of their boots on the stairs died away at last, and deep silence fell upon the house.

It struck four. Claude, who had accompanied Bongrand, still went on talking to him in the deserted streets. He did not want to go to bed; he was waiting for daylight, with impatient fury, so that he might set to work at his picture again. This time he felt certain of painting a masterpiece, exalted as he was by that happy day of good-fellowship, his mind pregnant with a world of things. He had discovered at last what painting meant, and he pictured himself re-entering his studio as one returns into the presence of a woman one adores, his heart throbbing violently, regretting even this one day's absence, which seemed to him endless desertion. And he would go straight to his canvas, and realise his dream in one sitting. However, at every dozen steps or so, amidst the flickering light of the gaslamps, Bongrand caught him by a button of his coat, to repeat to him that, after all, painting was an accursed trade. Sharp as he, Bongrand, was supposed to be, he did not understand it yet. At each new work he undertook, he felt as if he were making a debut; it was enough to make one smash one's head against the wall. The sky was now brightening, some market gardeners' carts began rolling down towards the central markets; and the pair continued chattering, each talking for himself, in a loud voice, beneath the paling stars.

IV

SIX weeks later, Claude was painting one morning amidst a flood of sunshine that streamed through the large window of his studio. Constant rain had made the middle of August very dull, but his courage for work returned with the blue sky. His great picture did not make much progress, albeit he worked at it throughout long, silent mornings, like the obstinate, pugnacious fellow he was.

All at once there came a knock at his door. He thought that Madame Joseph, the doorkeeper, was bringing up his lunch, and as the key was always in the door, he simply called: 'Come in!'

The door had opened; there was a slight rustle, and then all became still. He went on painting without even turning his head. But the quivering silence, and the consciousness of some vague gentle breathing near him, at last made him fidgety. He looked up, and felt amazed; a woman stood there clad in a light gown, her features half-hidden by a white veil, and he did not know her, and she was carrying a bunch of roses, which completed his bewilderment.

All at once he recognised her.

'You, mademoiselle? Well, I certainly didn't expect you!'

It was Christine. He had been unable to restrain that somewhat unamiable exclamation, which was a cry from the heart itself. At first he had certainly thought of her; then, as the days went by for nearly a couple of months without sign of life from her, she had become for him merely a fleeting, regretted vision, a charming silhouette which had melted away in space, and would never be seen again.

'Yes, monsieur, it's I. I wished to come. I thought it was wrong not to come and thank you—'

She blushed and stammered, at a loss for words. She was out of breath, no doubt through climbing the stairs, for her heart was beating fast. What! was this long-debated visit out of place after all? It had ended by seeming quite natural to her. The worst was that, in passing along the quay, she had bought that bunch of roses with the delicate intention of thereby showing her gratitude to the young fellow, and the flowers now dreadfully embarrassed her. How was she to give them to him? What would he think of her? The impropriety of the whole proceeding had only struck her as she opened the door.

But Claude, more embarrassed still, resorted to exaggerated politeness. He had thrown aside his palette and was turning the studio upside down in order to clear a chair.

'Pray be seated, mademoiselle. This is really a surprise. You are too kind.'

Once seated, Christine recovered her equanimity. He looked so droll with his wild sweeping gestures, and she felt so conscious of his shyness that she began to smile, and bravely held out the bunch of roses.

'Look here; I wished to show you that I am not ungrateful.'

At first he said nothing, but stood staring at her, thunderstruck. When he saw, though, that she was not making fun of him, he shook both her hands, with almost sufficient energy to dislocate them. Then he at once put the flowers in his water-jug, repeating:

'Ah! now you are a good fellow, you really are. This is the first time I pay that compliment to a woman, honour bright.'

He came back to her, and, looking straight into her eyes, he asked:

'Then you have not altogether forgotten me?'

'You see that I have not,' she replied, laughing.

'Why, then, did you wait two months before coming to see me?'

Again she blushed. The falsehood she was about to tell revived her embarrassment for a moment.

'But you know that I am not my own mistress,' she said. 'Oh, Madame Vanzade is very kind to me, only she is a great invalid, and never leaves the house. But she grew anxious as to my health and compelled me to go out to breathe a little fresh air.'

She did not allude to the shame which she had felt during the first few days after her adventure on the Quai de Bourbon. Finding herself in safety, beneath the old lady's roof, the recollection of the night she had spent in Claude's room had filled her with remorse; but she fancied at last that she had succeeded in dismissing the matter from her mind. It was no longer anything but a bad dream, which grew more indistinct each day. Then, how it was she could not tell, but amidst the profound quietude of her existence, the image of that young man who had befriended her had returned to her once more, becoming more and more precise, till at last it occupied her daily thoughts. Why should she forget him? She had nothing to reproach him with; on the contrary, she felt she was his debtor. The thought of seeing him again, dismissed at first, struggled against later on, at last became an all-absorbing craving. Each evening the temptation to go and see him came strong upon her in the solitude of her own room. She experienced an uncomfortable irritating feeling, a vague desire which she could not define, and only calmed down somewhat on ascribing this troubled state of mind to a wish to evince her gratitude. She was so utterly alone, she felt so stifled in that sleepy abode, the exuberance of youth seethed so strongly within her, her heart craved so desperately for friendship!

'So I took advantage of my first day out,' she continued. 'And besides, the weather was so nice this morning after all the dull rain.'

Claude, feeling very happy and standing before her, also confessed himself, but he had nothing to hide.

'For my part,' said he, 'I dared not think of you any more. You are like one of the fairies of the story-books, who spring from the floor and disappear into the walls at the very moment one least expects it; aren't you now? I said to myself, "It's all over: it was perhaps only in my fancy that I saw her come to this studio." Yet here you are. Well, I am pleased at it, very pleased indeed.'

Smiling, but embarrassed, Christine averted her head, pretending to look around her. But her smile soon died away. The ferocious-looking paintings which she again beheld, the glaring sketches of the South, the terrible anatomical accuracy of the studies from the nude, all chilled her as on the first occasion. She became really afraid again, and she said gravely, in an altered voice:

'I am disturbing you; I am going.'

'Oh! not at all, not at all,' exclaimed Claude, preventing her from rising. 'It does me good to have a talk with you, for I was working myself to death. Oh! that confounded picture; it's killing me as it is.'

Thereupon Christine, lifting her eyes, looked at the large picture, the canvas that had been turned to the wall on the previous occasion, and which she had vainly wished to see.

The background—the dark glade pierced by a flood of sunlight—was still only broadly brushed in. But the two little wrestlers—the fair one and the dark—almost finished by now, showed clearly in the light. In the foreground, the gentleman in the velveteen jacket, three times begun afresh, had now been left in distress. The painter was more particularly working at the principal figure, the woman lying on the grass. He had not touched the head again. He was battling with the body, changing his model every week, so despondent at being unable to satisfy himself that for a couple of days he had been trying to improve the figure from imagination, without recourse to nature, although he boasted that he never invented.

Christine at once recognised herself. Yes, that nude girl sprawling on the grass, one arm behind her head, smiling with lowered eyelids, was herself, for she had her features. The idea absolutely revolted her, and she was wounded too by the wildness of the painting, so brutal indeed that she considered herself abominably insulted. She did not understand that kind of art; she thought it execrable, and felt a hatred against it, the instinctive hatred of an enemy. She rose at last, and curtly repeated, 'I must be going.'

Claude watched her attentively, both grieved and surprised by her sudden change of manner.

'Going already?'

'Yes, they are waiting for me. Good-bye.'

And she had already reached the door before he could take her hand, and venture to ask her:

'When shall I see you again?'

She allowed her hand to remain in his. For a moment she seemed to hesitate.

'I don't know. I am so busy.'

Then she withdrew her hand and went off, hastily, saying: 'One of these days, when I can. Good-bye.'

Claude remained stock-still on the threshold. He wondered what had come over her again to cause her sudden coolness, her covert irritation. He closed the door, and walked about, with dangling arms, and without understanding, seeking vainly for the phrase, the gesture that could have offended her. And he in his turn became angry, and launched an oath into space, with a terrific shrug of the shoulders, as if to rid himself of this silly worry. Did a man ever understand women? However, the sight of the roses, overlapping the water-jug, pacified him; they smelt so sweet. Their scent pervaded the whole studio, and silently he resumed his work amidst the perfume.

Two more months passed by. During the earlier days Claude, at the slightest stir of a morning, when Madame Joseph brought him up his breakfast or his letters, quickly turned his head, and could not control a gesture of disappointment. He no longer went out until after four, and the doorkeeper having told him one evening, on his return home, that a young person had called to see him at about five, he had only grown calm on ascertaining that the visitor was merely a model, Zoe Piedefer. Then, as the days went by, he was seized with a furious fit of work, becoming unapproachable to every one, indulging in such violent theories that even his friends did not venture to contradict him. He swept the world from his path with one gesture; there was no longer to be anything but painting left. One might murder one's parents, comrades, and women especially, and it would all be a good riddance. After this terrible fever he fell into abominable despondency, spending a week of impotence and doubt, a whole week of torture, during which he fancied himself struck silly. But he was getting over it, he had resumed his usual life, his resigned solitary struggle with his great picture, when one foggy morning, towards the end of October, he started and hastily set his palette aside. There had been no knock, but he had just recognised the footfall coming up the stairs. He opened the door and she walked in. She had come at last.

Christine that day wore a large cloak of grey material which enveloped her from head to foot. Her little velvet hat was dark, and the fog outside had pearled her black lace veil. But he thought her looking very cheerful, with the first slight shiver of winter upon her. She at once began to make excuses for having so long delayed her return. She smiled at him in her pretty candid manner, confessed that she had hesitated, and that she had almost made up her mind to come no more. Yes, she had her own opinions about things, which she felt sure he understood. As it happened, he did not understand at all—he had no wish to understand, seeing that she was there. It was quite sufficient that she was not vexed with him, that she would consent to look in now and then like a chum. There were no explanations; they kept their respective torments and the struggles of recent times to themselves. For nearly an hour they chatted together right pleasantly, with nothing hidden nor antagonistic remaining between them; it was as if an understanding had been arrived at, unknown to themselves, and while they were far apart. She did not even appear to notice the sketches and studies on the walls. For a moment she looked fixedly at the large picture, at the figure of the woman lying on the grass under the blazing golden sun. No, it was not like herself, that girl had neither her face nor her body. How silly to have fancied that such a horrid mess of colour was herself! And her friendship for the young fellow was heightened by a touch of pity; he could not even convey a likeness. When she went off, it was she who on the threshold cordially held out her hand.

'You know, I shall come back again—'

'Yes, in two months' time.'

'No, next week. You'll see, next Thursday.'

On the Thursday she punctually returned, and after that she did not miss a week. At first she had no particular day for calling, simply taking advantage of her opportunities; but subsequently she selected Monday, the day allowed her by Madame Vanzade in order that she might have a walk in the fresh, open air of the Bois de Boulogne. She had to be back home by eleven, and she walked the whole way very quickly, coming in all aglow from the run, for it was a long stretch from Passy to the Quai de Bourbon. During four winter months, from October to February, she came in this fashion, now in drenching rain, now among the mists from the Seine, now in the pale sunlight that threw a little warmth over the quays. Indeed, after the first month, she at times arrived unexpectedly, taking advantage of some errand in town to look in, and then she could only stay for a couple of minutes; they had barely had time enough to say 'How do you do?' when she was already scampering down the stairs again, exclaiming 'Good-bye.'

And now Claude learned to know Christine. With his everlasting mistrust of woman a suspicion had remained to him, the suspicion of some love adventure in the provinces; but the girl's soft eyes and bright laughter had carried all before them; he felt that she was as innocent as a big child. As soon as she arrived, quite unembarrassed, feeling fully at her ease, as with a friend, she began to indulge in a ceaseless flow of chatter. She had told him a score of times about her childhood at Clermont, and she constantly reverted to it. On the evening that her father, Captain Hallegrain, had suddenly died, she and her mother had been to church. She perfectly remembered their return home and the horrible night that had followed; the captain, very stout and muscular, lying stretched on a mattress, with his lower jaw protruding to such a degree that in her girlish memory she could not picture him otherwise. She also had that same jaw, and when her mother had not known how to master her, she had often cried: 'Ah, my girl, you'll eat your heart's blood out like your father.' Poor mother! how she, Christine, had worried her with her love of horseplay, with her mad turbulent fits. As far back as she could remember, she pictured her mother ever seated at the same window, quietly painting fans, a slim little woman with very soft eyes, the only thing she had inherited of her. When people wanted to please her mother they told her, 'she has got your eyes.' And then she smiled, happy in the thought of having contributed at least that touch of sweetness to her daughter's features. After the death of her husband, she had worked so late as to endanger her eyesight. But how else could she have lived? Her widow's pension—five hundred francs per annum—barely sufficed for the needs of her child. For five years Christine had seen her mother grow thinner and paler, wasting away a little bit each day until she became a mere shadow. And now she felt remorseful at not having been more obedient, at having driven her mother to despair by lack of application. She had begun each week with magnificent intentions, promising that she would soon help her to earn money; but her arms and legs got the fidgets, in spite of her efforts; the moment she became quiet she fell ill. Then one morning her mother had been unable to get up, and had died; her voice too weak to make itself heard, her eyes full of big tears. Ever did Christine behold her thus dead, with her weeping eyes wide open and fixed on her.

At other times, Christine, when questioned by Claude about Clermont, forgot those sorrows to recall more cheerful memories. She laughed gaily at the idea of their encampment, as she called it, in the Rue de l'Eclache; she born in Strasburg, her father a Gascon, her mother a Parisian, and all three thrown into that nook of Auvergne, which they detested. The Rue de l'Eclache, sloping down to the Botanical Gardens, was narrow and dank, gloomy, like a vault. Not a shop, never a passer-by—nothing but melancholy frontages, with shutters always closed. At the back, however, their windows, overlooking some courtyards, were turned to the full sunlight. The dining-room opened even on to a spacious balcony, a kind of wooden gallery, whose arcades were hung with a giant wistaria which almost smothered them with foliage. And the girl had grown up there, at first near her invalid father, then cloistered, as it were, with her mother, whom the least exertion exhausted. She had remained so complete a stranger to the town and its neighbourhood, that Claude and herself burst into laughter when she met his inquiries with the constant answer, 'I don't know.' The mountains? Yes, there were mountains on one side, they could be seen at the end of the streets; while on the other side of the town, after passing along other streets, there were flat fields stretching far away; but she never went there, the distance was too great. The only height she remembered was the Puy de Dome, rounded off at the summit like a hump. In the town itself she could have found her way to the cathedral blindfold; one had to turn round by the Place de Jaude and take the Rue des Gras; but more than that she could not tell him; the rest of the town was an entanglement, a maze of sloping lanes and boulevards; a town of black lava ever dipping downward, where the rain of the thunderstorms swept by torrentially amidst formidable flashes of lightning. Oh! those storms; she still shuddered to think of them. Just opposite her room, above the roofs, the lightning conductor of the museum was always on fire. In the sitting-room she had her own window—a deep recess as big as a room itself—where her work-table and personal nick-nacks stood. It was there that her mother had taught her to read; it was there that, later on, she had fallen asleep while listening to her masters, so greatly did the fatigue of learning daze her. And now she made fun of her own ignorance; she was a well-educated young lady, and no mistake, unable even to repeat the names of the Kings of France, with the dates of their accessions; a famous musician too, who had never got further than that elementary pianoforte exercise, 'The little boats'; a prodigy in water-colour painting, who scamped her trees because foliage was too difficult to imitate. Then she skipped, without any transition, to the fifteen months she had spent at the Convent of the Visitation after her mother's death—a large convent, outside the town, with magnificent gardens. There was no end to her stories about the good sisters, their jealousies, their foolish doings, their simplicity, that made one start. She was to have taken the veil, but she felt stifled the moment she entered a church. It had seemed to be all over with her, when the Superior, by whom she was treated with great affection, diverted her from the cloister by procuring her that situation at Madame Vanzade's. She had not yet got over the surprise. How had Mother des Saints Anges been able to read her mind so clearly? For, in fact, since she had been living in Paris she had dropped into complete indifference about religion.

When all the reminiscences of Clermont were exhausted, Claude wanted to hear about her life at Madame Vanzade's, and each week she gave him fresh particulars. The life led in the little house at Passy, silent and shut off from the outer world, was a very regular one, with no more noise about it than the faint tic-tac of an old-fashioned timepiece. Two antiquated domestics, a cook and a manservant, who had been with the family for forty years, alone glided in their slippers about the deserted rooms, like a couple of ghosts. Now and then, at very long intervals, there came a visitor: some octogenarian general, so desiccated, so slight of build that he scarcely pressed on the carpet. The house was also the home of shadows; the sun filtered with the mere gleam of a night light through the Venetian blinds. Since madame had become paralysed in the knees and stone blind, so that she no longer left her room, she had had no other recreation than that of listening to the reading of religious books. Ah! those endless readings, how they weighed upon the girl at times! If she had only known a trade, how gladly she would have cut out dresses, concocted bonnets, or goffered the petals of artificial flowers. And to think that she was capable of nothing, when she had been taught everything, and that there was only enough stuff in her to make a salaried drudge, a semi-domestic! She suffered horribly, too, in that stiff, lonely dwelling which smelt of the tomb. She was seized once more with the vertigo of her childhood, as when she had striven to compel herself to work, in order to please her mother; her blood rebelled; she would have liked to shout and jump about, in her desire for life. But madame treated her so gently, sending her away from her room, and ordering her to take long walks, that she felt full of remoras when, on her return to the Quai de Bourbon, she was obliged to tell a falsehood; to talk of the Bois de Boulogne or invent some ceremony at church where she now never set foot. Madame seemed to take to her more and more every day; there were constant presents, now a silk dress, now a tiny gold watch, even some underlinen. She herself was very fond of Madame Vanzade; she had wept one day when the latter had called her daughter; she had sworn never to leave her, such was her heart-felt pity at seeing her so old and helpless.

'Well,' said Claude one morning, 'you'll be rewarded; she'll leave you her money.'

Christine looked astonished. 'Do you think so? It is said that she is worth three millions of francs. No, no, I have never dreamt of such a thing, and I won't. What would become of me?'

Claude had averted his head, and hastily replied, 'Well, you'd become rich, that's all. But no doubt she'll first of all marry you off—'

On hearing this, Christine could hold out no longer, but burst into laughter. 'To one of her old friends, eh? perhaps the general who has a silver chin. What a good joke!'

So far they had gone no further than chumming like old friends. He was almost as new to life as she, having had nothing but chance adventures, and living in an ideal world of his own, fanciful amid romantic amours. To see each other in secret like this, from pure friendship, without anything more tender passing between them than a cordial shake of the hand at her arrival, and another one when she left, seemed to them quite natural. Still for her part she scented that he was shy, and at times she looked at him fixedly, with the wondering perturbation of unconscious passion. But as yet nothing ardent or agitating spoilt the pleasure they felt in being together. Their hands remained cool; they spoke cheerfully on all subjects; they sometimes argued like friends, who feel sure they will not fall out. Only, this friendship grew so keen that they could no longer live without seeing one another.

The moment Christine came, Claude took the key from outside the door. She herself insisted upon this, lest somebody might disturb them. After a few visits she had taken absolute possession of the studio. She seemed to be at home there. She was tormented by a desire to make the place a little more tidy, for such disorder worried her and made her uncomfortable. But it was not an easy matter. The painter had strictly forbidden Madame Joseph to sweep up things, lest the dust should get on the fresh paint. So, on the first occasions when his companion attempted to clean up a bit, he watched her with anxious entreating eyes. What was the good of changing the place of things? Didn't it suffice to have them at hand? However, she exhibited such gay determination, she seemed so happy at playing the housewife, that he let her have her own way at last. And now, the moment she had arrived and taken off her gloves, she pinned up her dress to avoid soiling it, and set the big studio in order in the twinkling of an eye. There was no longer a pile of cinders before the stove; the screen hid the bedstead and the washstand; the couch was brushed, the wardrobe polished; the deal table was cleared of the crockery, and had not a stain of paint; and above the chairs, which were symmetrically arranged, and the spanned easels propped against the walls, the big cuckoo clock, with full-blown pink flowers on its dial, seemed to tick more sonorously. Altogether it was magnificent; one would not have recognised the place. He, stupefied, watched her trotting to and fro, twisting about and singing as she went. Was this then the lazybones who had such dreadful headaches at the least bit of work? But she laughed; at headwork, yes; but exertion with her hands and feet did her good, seemed to straighten her like a young sapling. She confessed, even as she would have confessed some depraved taste, her liking for lowly household cares; a liking which had greatly worried her mother, whose educational ideal consisted of accomplishments, and who would have made her a governess with soft hands, touching nothing vulgar. How Christine had been chided indeed whenever she was caught, as a little girl, sweeping, dusting, and playing delightedly at being cook! Even nowadays, if she had been able to indulge in a bout with the dust at Madame Vanzade's, she would have felt less bored. But what would they have said to that? She would no longer have been considered a lady. And so she came to satisfy her longings at the Quai de Bourbon, panting with the exercise, all aglow, her eyes glistening with a woman's delight at biting into forbidden fruit.

Claude by this time grew conscious of having a woman's care around him. In order to make her sit down and chat quietly, he would ask her now and then to sew a torn cuff or coat-tail. She herself had offered to look over his linen; but it was no longer with the ardour of a housewife, eager to be up and doing. First of all, she hardly knew how to work; she held her needle like a girl brought up in contempt of sewing. Besides, the enforced quiescence and the attention that had to be given to such work, the small stitches which had to be looked to one by one, exasperated her. Thus the studio was bright with cleanliness like a drawing-room, but Claude himself remained in rags, and they both joked about it, thinking it great fun.

How happy were those months that they spent together, those four months of frost and rain whiled away in the studio, where the red-hot stove roared like an organ-pipe! The winter seemed to isolate them from the world still more. When the snow covered the adjacent roofs, when the sparrows fluttered against the window, they smiled at feeling warm and cosy, at being lost, as it were, amidst the great silent city. But they did not always confine themselves to that one little nook, for she allowed him at last to see her home. For a long while she had insisted upon going away by herself, feeling ashamed of being seen in the streets on a man's arm. Then, one day when the rain fell all of a sudden, she was obliged to let him come downstairs with an umbrella. The rain having ceased almost immediately, she sent him back when they reached the other side of the Pont Louis-Philippe. They only remained a few moments beside the parapet, looking at the Mail, and happy at being together in the open air. Down below, large barges, moored against the quay, and full of apples, were ranged four rows deep, so close together that the planks thrown across them made a continuous path for the women and children running to and fro. They were amused by the sight of all that fruit, those enormous piles littering the banks, the round baskets which were carried hither and thither, while a strong odour, suggestive of cider in fermentation, mingled with the moist gusts from the river.

A week later, when the sun again showed itself, and Claude extolled the solitude of the quays round the Isle Saint Louis, Christine consented to take a walk. They strolled up the Quai de Bourbon and the Quai d'Anjou, pausing at every few steps and growing interested in the various scenes of river life; the dredger whose buckets grated against their chains, the floating wash-house, which resounded with the hubbub of a quarrel, and the steam cranes busy unloading the lighters. She did not cease to wonder at one thought which came to her. Was it possible that yonder Quai des Ormes, so full of life across the stream, that this Quai Henri IV., with its broad embankment and lower shore, where bands of children and dogs rolled over in the sand, that this panorama of an active, densely-populated capital was the same accursed scene that had appeared to her for a moment in a gory flash on the night of her arrival? They went round the point of the island, strolling more leisurely still to enjoy the solitude and tranquillity which the old historic mansions seem to have implanted there. They watched the water seething between the wooden piles of the Estacade, and returned by way of the Quai de Bethune and the Quai d'Orleans, instinctively drawn closer to each other by the widening of the stream, keeping elbow to elbow at sight of the vast flow, with their eyes fixed on the distant Halle aux Vins and the Jardin des Plantes. In the pale sky, the cupolas of the public buildings assumed a bluish hue. When they reached the Pont St. Louis, Claude had to point out Notre-Dame by name, for Christine did not recognise the edifice from the rear, where it looked like a colossal creature crouching down between its flying buttresses, which suggested sprawling paws, while above its long leviathan spine its towers rose like a double head. Their real find that day, however, was at the western point of the island, that point like the prow of a ship always riding at anchor, afloat between two swift currents, in sight of Paris, but ever unable to get into port. They went down some very steep steps there, and discovered a solitary bank planted with lofty trees. It was a charming refuge—a hermitage in the midst of a crowd. Paris was rumbling around them, on the quays, on the bridges, while they at the water's edge tasted the delight of being alone, ignored by the whole world. From that day forth that bank became a little rustic coign of theirs, a favourite open-air resort, where they took advantage of the sunny hours, when the great heat of the studio, where the red-hot stove kept roaring, oppressed them too much, filling their hands with a fever of which they were afraid.

Nevertheless, Christine had so far objected to be accompanied farther than the Mail. At the Quai des Ormes she always bade Claude go back, as if Paris, with her crowds and possible encounters, began at the long stretch of quays which she had to traverse on her way home. But Passy was so far off, and she felt so dull at having to go such a distance alone, that gradually she gave way. She began by allowing Claude to see her as far as the Hotel de Ville; then as far as the Pont-Neuf; at last as far as the Tuileries. She forgot the danger; they walked arm in arm like a young married couple; and that constantly repeated promenade, that leisurely journey over the self-same ground by the river side, acquired an infinite charm, full of a happiness such as could scarcely be surpassed in after-times. They truly belonged to each other, though they had not erred. It seemed as if the very soul of the great city, rising from the river, wrapped them around with all the love that had throbbed behind the grey stone walls through the long lapse of ages.

Since the nipping colds of December, Christine only came in the afternoon, and it was about four o'clock, when the sun was sinking, that Claude escorted her back on his arm. On days when the sky was clear, they could see the long line of quays stretching away into space directly they had crossed the Pont Louis-Philippe. From one end to the other the slanting sun powdered the houses on the right bank with golden dust, while, on the left, the islets, the buildings, stood out in a black line against the blazing glory of the sunset. Between the sombre and the brilliant margin, the spangled river sparkled, cut in twain every now and then by the long bars of its bridges; the five arches of the Pont Notre-Dame showing under the single span of the Pont d'Arcole; then the Pont-au-Change and the Pont-Neuf, beyond each of whose shadows appeared a luminous patch, a sheet of bluish satiny water, growing paler here and there with a mirror-like reflection. And while the dusky outlines on the left terminated in the silhouettes of the pointed towers of the Palais de Justice, sharply and darkly defined against the sky, a gentle curve undulated on the right, stretching away so far that the Pavillon de Flore, who stood forth like a citadel at the curve's extreme end, seemed a fairy castle, bluey, dreamlike and vague, amidst the rosy mist on the horizon. But Claude and Christine, with the sunlight streaming on them, athwart the leafless plane trees, turned away from the dazzlement, preferring to gaze at certain spots, one above all—a block of old houses just above the Mail. Below, there was a series of one-storied tenements, little huckster and fishing-tackle shops, with flat terrace roofs, ornamented with laurel and Virginia creeper. And in the rear rose loftier, but decrepit, dwellings, with linen hung out to dry at their windows, a collection of fantastic structures, a confused mass of woodwork and masonry, overtoppling walls, and hanging gardens, in which coloured glass balls shone out like stars. They walked on, leaving behind them the big barracks and the Hotel de Ville, and feeling much more interest in the Cite which appeared across the river, pent between lofty smooth embankments rising from the water. Above the darkened houses rose the towers of Notre-Dame, as resplendent as if they had been newly gilt. Then the second-hand bookstalls began to invade the quays. Down below a lighter full of charcoal struggled against the strong current beneath an arch of the Pont Notre-Dame. And then, on the days when the flower market was held, they stopped, despite the inclement weather, to inhale the scent of the first violets and the early gillyflowers. On their left a long stretch of bank now became visible; beyond the pepper-caster turrets of the Palais de Justice, the small, murky tenements of the Quai de l'Horloge showed as far as the clump of trees midway across the Pont-Neuf; then, as they went farther on, other quays emerged from the mist, in the far distance: the Quai Voltaire, the Quai Malaquais, the dome of the Institute of France, the square pile of the Mint, a long grey line of frontages of which they could not even distinguish the windows, a promontory of roofs, which, with their stacks of chimney-pots, looked like some rugged cliff, dipping down into a phosphorescent sea. In front, however, the Pavillon de Flore lost its dreamy aspect, and became solidified in the final sun blaze. Then right and left, on either bank of the river, came the long vistas of the Boulevard de Sebastopol and the Boulevard du Palais; the handsome new buildings of the Quai de la Megisserie, with the new Prefecture of Police across the water; and the old Pont-Neuf, with its statue of Henri IV. looking like a splash of ink. The Louvre, the Tuileries followed, and beyond Grenelle there was a far-stretching panorama of the slopes of Sevres, the country steeped in a stream of sun rays. Claude never went farther. Christine always made him stop just before they reached the Pont Royal, near the fine trees beside Vigier's swimming baths; and when they turned round to shake hands once more in the golden sunset now flushing into crimson, they looked back and, on the horizon, espied the Isle Saint Louis, whence they had come, the indistinct distance of the city upon which night was already descending from the slate-hued eastern sky.

Ah! what splendid sunsets they beheld during those weekly strolls. The sun accompanied them, as it were, amid the throbbing gaiety of the quays, the river life, the dancing ripples of the currents; amid the attractions of the shops, as warm as conservatories, the flowers sold by the seed merchants, and the noisy cages of the bird fanciers; amid all the din of sound and wealth of colour which ever make a city's waterside its youthful part. As they proceeded, the ardent blaze of the western sky turned to purple on their left, above the dark line of houses, and the orb of day seemed to wait for them, falling gradually lower, slowly rolling towards the distant roofs when once they had passed the Pont Notre-Dame in front of the widening stream. In no ancient forest, on no mountain road, beyond no grassy plain will there ever be such triumphal sunsets as behind the cupola of the Institute. It is there one sees Paris retiring to rest in all her glory. At each of their walks the aspect of the conflagration changed; fresh furnaces added their glow to the crown of flames. One evening, when a shower had surprised them, the sun, showing behind the downpour, lit up the whole rain cloud, and upon their heads there fell a spray of glowing water, irisated with pink and azure. On the days when the sky was clear, however, the sun, like a fiery ball, descended majestically in an unruffled sapphire lake; for a moment the black cupola of the Institute seemed to cut away part of it and make it look like the waning moon; then the globe assumed a violet tinge and at last became submerged in the lake, which had turned blood-red. Already, in February, the planet described a wider curve, and fell straight into the Seine, which seemed to seethe on the horizon as at the contact of red-hot iron. However, the grander scenes, the vast fairy pictures of space only blazed on cloudy evenings. Then, according to the whim of the wind, there were seas of sulphur splashing against coral reefs; there were palaces and towers, marvels of architecture, piled upon one another, burning and crumbling, and throwing torrents of lava from their many gaps; or else the orb which had disappeared, hidden by a veil of clouds, suddenly transpierced that veil with such a press of light that shafts of sparks shot forth from one horizon to the other, showing as plainly as a volley of golden arrows. And then the twilight fell, and they said good-bye to each other, while their eyes were still full of the final dazzlement. They felt that triumphal Paris was the accomplice of the joy which they could not exhaust, the joy of ever resuming together that walk beside the old stone parapets.

One day, however, there happened what Claude had always secretly feared. Christine no longer seemed to believe in the possibility of meeting anybody who knew her. In fact, was there such a person? She would always pass along like this, remaining altogether unknown. He, however, thought of his own friends, and at times felt a kind of tremor when he fancied he recognised in the distance the back of some acquaintance. He was troubled by a feeling of delicacy; the idea that somebody might stare at the girl, approach them, and perhaps begin to joke, gave him intolerable worry. And that very evening, as she was close beside him on his arm, and they were approaching the Pont des Arts, he fell upon Sandoz and Dubuche, who were coming down the steps of the bridge. It was impossible to avoid them, they were almost face to face; besides, his friends must have seen him, for they smiled. Claude, very pale, kept advancing, and he thought it all up on seeing Dubuche take a step towards him; but Sandoz was already holding the architect back, and leading him away. They passed on with an indifferent air and disappeared into the courtyard of the Louvre without as much as turning round. They had both just recognised the original of the crayon sketch, which the painter hid away with all the jealousy of a lover. Christine, who was chattering, had noticed nothing. Claude, with his heart throbbing, answered her in monosyllables, moved to tears, brimming over with gratitude to his old chums for their discreet behaviour.

A few days later, however, he had another shock. He did not expect Christine, and had therefore made an appointment with Sandoz. Then, as she had run up to spend an hour—it was one of those surprises that delighted them—they had just withdrawn the key, as usual, when there came a familiar knock with the fist on the door. Claude at once recognised the rap, and felt so upset at the mishap that he overturned a chair. After that it was impossible to pretend to be out. But Christine turned so pale, and implored him with such a wild gesture, that he remained rooted to the spot, holding his breath. The knocks continued, and a voice called, 'Claude, Claude!' He still remained quite still, debating with himself, however, with ashen lips and downcast eyes. Deep silence reigned, and then footsteps were heard, making the stairs creak as they went down. Claude's breast heaved with intense sadness; he felt it bursting with remorse at the sound of each retreating step, as if he had denied the friendship of his whole youth.

However, one afternoon there came another knock, and Claude had only just time to whisper despairingly, 'The key has been left in the door.'

In fact, Christine had forgotten to take it out. She became quite scared and darted behind the screen, with her handkerchief over her mouth to stifle the sound of her breathing.

The knocks became louder, there was a burst of laughter, and the painter had to reply, 'Come in.'

He felt more uncomfortable still when he saw Jory, who gallantly ushered in Irma Becot, whose acquaintance he had made through Fagerolles, and who was flinging her youth about the Paris studios.

'She insisted upon seeing your studio, so I brought her,' explained the journalist.

The girl, however, without waiting, was already walking about and making remarks, with perfect freedom of manner. 'Oh! how funny it is here. And what funny painting. Come, there's a good fellow, show me everything. I want to see everything.'

Claude, apprehensively anxious, was afraid that she might push the screen aside. He pictured Christine behind it, and felt distracted already at what she might hear.

'You know what she has come to ask of you?' resumed Jory cheerfully. 'What, don't you remember? You promised that she might pose for something. And she'll do so if you like.'

'Of course I will,' said Irma.

'The fact is,' replied Claude, in an embarrassed tone, 'my picture here will take up all my time till the Salon. I have a figure in it that gives me a deal of trouble. It's impossible to perfect it with those confounded models.'

Irma had stationed herself in front of the picture, and looked at it with a knowing air. 'Oh! I see,' she said, 'that woman in the grass, eh? Do you think I could be of any use to you?'

Jory flared up in a moment, warmly approving the idea, but Claude with the greatest energy replied, 'No, no madame wouldn't suit. She is not at all what I want for this picture; not at all.'

Then he went on stammering excuses. He would be only too pleased later on, but just now he was afraid that another model would quite complete his confusion over that picture; and Irma responded by shrugging her shoulders, and looking at him with an air of smiling contempt.

Jory, however, now began to chat about their friends. Why had not Claude come to Sandoz's on the previous Thursday? One never saw him now. Dubuche asserted all sorts of things about him. There had been a row between Fagerolles and Mahoudeau on the subject whether evening dress was a thing to be reproduced in sculpture. Then on the previous Sunday Gagniere had returned home from a Wagner concert with a black eye. He, Jory, had nearly had a duel at the Cafe Baudequin on account of one of his last articles in 'The Drummer.' The fact was he was giving it hot to the twopenny-halfpenny painters, the men with the usurped reputations! The campaign against the hanging committee of the Salon was making a deuce of a row; not a shred would be left of those guardians of the ideal, who wanted to prevent nature from entering their show.

Claude listened to him with impatient irritation. He had taken up his palette and was shuffling about in front of his picture. The other one understood at last.

'You want to work, I see; all right, we'll leave you.'

Irma, however, still stared at the painter, with her vague smile, astonished at the stupidity of this simpleton, who did not seem to appreciate her, and seized despite herself with a whim to please him. His studio was ugly, and he himself wasn't handsome; but why should he put on such bugbear airs? She chaffed him for a moment, and on going off again offered to sit for him, emphasising her offer by warmly pressing his hand.

'Whenever you like,' were her parting words.

They had gone at last, and Claude was obliged to pull the screen aside, for Christine, looking very white, remained seated behind it, as if she lacked the strength to rise. She did not say a word about the girl, but simply declared that she had felt very frightened; and—trembling lest there should come another knock—she wanted to go at once, carrying away with her, as her startled looks testified, the disturbing thought of many things which she did not mention.

In fact, for a long time that sphere of brutal art, that studio full of glaring pictures, had caused her a feeling of discomfort. Wounded in all her feelings, full of repugnance, she could not get used to it all. She had grown up full of affectionate admiration for a very different style of art—her mother's fine water-colours, those fans of dreamy delicacy, in which lilac-tinted couples floated about in bluish gardens—and she quite failed to understand Claude's work. Even now she often amused herself by painting tiny girlish landscapes, two or three subjects repeated over and over again—a lake with a ruin, a water-mill beating a stream, a chalet and some pine trees, white with snow. And she felt surprised that an intelligent young fellow should paint in such an unreasonable manner, so ugly and so untruthful besides. For she not only thought Claude's realism monstrously ugly, but considered it beyond every permissible truth. In fact, she thought at times that he must be mad.

One day Claude absolutely insisted upon seeing a small sketch-book which she had brought away from Clermont, and which she had spoken about. After objecting for a long while, she brought it with her, flattered at heart and feeling very curious to know what he would say. He turned over the leaves, smiling all the while, and as he did not speak, she was the first to ask:

'You think it very bad, don't you?'

'Not at all,' he replied. 'It's innocent.'

The reply hurt her, despite Claude's indulgent tone, which aimed at making it amiable.

'Well, you see I had so few lessons from mamma. I like painting to be well done, and pleasing.'

Thereupon he burst into frank laughter.

'Confess now that my painting makes you feel ill! I have noticed it. You purse your lips and open your eyes wide with fright. Certainly it is not the style of painting for ladies, least of all for young girls. But you'll get used to it; it's only a question of educating your eyes and you'll end by seeing that what I am doing is very honest and healthy.'

Indeed, Christine slowly became used to it. But, at first, artistic conviction had nothing to do with the change, especially as Claude, with his contempt for female opinion, did not take the trouble to indoctrinate her. On the contrary, in her company he avoided conversing about art, as if he wished to retain for himself that passion of his life, apart from the new passion which was gradually taking possession of him. Still, Christine glided into the habit of the thing, and became familiarised with it; she began to feel interested in those abominable pictures, on noticing the important place they held in the artist's existence. This was the first stage on the road to conversion; she felt greatly moved by his rageful eagerness to be up and doing, the whole-heartedness with which he devoted himself to his work. Was it not very touching? Was there not something very creditable in it? Then, on noticing his joy or suffering, according to the success or the failure of the day's work, she began to associate herself with his efforts. She felt saddened when she found him sad, she grew cheerful when he received her cheerfully; and from that moment her worry was—had he done a lot of work? was he satisfied with what he had done since they had last seen each other? At the end of the second month she had been gained over; she stationed herself before his pictures to judge whether they were progressing or not. She no longer felt afraid of them. She still did not approve particularly of that style of painting, but she began to repeat the artistic expressions which she had heard him use; declared this bit to be 'vigorous in tone,' 'well built up,' or 'just in the light it should be.' He seemed to her so good-natured, and she was so fond of him, that after finding excuses for him for daubing those horrors, she ended by discovering qualities in them in order that she might like them a little also.

Nevertheless, there was one picture, the large one, the one intended for the Salon, to which for a long while she was quite unable to reconcile herself. She already looked without dislike at the studies made at the Boutin studio and the sketches of Plassans, but she was still irritated by the sight of the woman lying in the grass. It was like a personal grudge, the shame of having momentarily thought that she could detect in it a likeness of herself, and silent embarrassment, too, for that big figure continued to wound her feelings, although she now found less and less of a resemblance in it. At first she had protested by averting her eyes. Now she remained for several minutes looking at it fixedly, in mute contemplation. How was it that the likeness to herself had disappeared? The more vigorously that Claude struggled on, never satisfied, touching up the same bit a hundred times over, the more did that likeness to herself gradually fade away. And, without being able to account for it, without daring to admit as much to herself, she, whom the painting had so greatly offended when she had first seen it, now felt a growing sorrow at noticing that nothing of herself remained.

Indeed it seemed to her as if their friendship suffered from this obliteration; she felt herself further away from him as trait after trait vanished. Didn't he care for her that he thus allowed her to be effaced from his work? And who was the new woman, whose was the unknown indistinct face that appeared from beneath hers?

Claude, in despair at having spoilt the figure's head, did not know exactly how to ask her for a few hours' sitting. She would merely have had to sit down, and he would only have taken some hints. But he had previously seen her so pained that he felt afraid of irritating her again. Moreover, after resolving in his own mind to ask her this favour in a gay, off-hand way, he had been at a loss for words, feeling all at once ashamed at the notion.

One afternoon he quite upset her by one of those bursts of anger which he found it impossible to control, even in her presence. Everything had gone wrong that week; he talked of scraping his canvas again, and he paced up and down, beside himself, and kicking the furniture about. Then all of a sudden he caught her by the shoulders, and made her sit down on the couch.

'I beg of you, do me this favour, or it'll kill me, I swear it will.'

She did not understand him.

'What—what is it you want?'

Then as soon as she saw him take up his brushes, she added, without heeding what she said, 'Ah, yes! Why did not you ask me before?'

And of her own accord she threw herself back on a cushion and slipped her arm under her neck. But surprise and confusion at having yielded so quickly made her grave, for she did not know that she was prepared for this kind of thing; indeed, she could have sworn that she would never serve him as a model again. Her compliance already filled her with remorse, as if she were lending herself to something wrong by letting him impart her own countenance to that big creature, lying refulgent under the sun.

However, in two sittings, Claude worked in the head all right. He exulted with delight, and exclaimed that it was the best bit of painting he had ever done; and he was right, never had he thrown such a play of real light over such a life-like face. Happy at seeing him so pleased, Christine also became gay, going as far as to express approval of her head, which, though not extremely like her, had a wonderful expression. They stood for a long while before the picture, blinking at it, and drawing back as far as the wall.

'And now,' he said at last, 'I'll finish her off with a model. Ah! so I've got her at last.'

In a burst of childish glee, he took the girl round the waist, and they performed 'a triumphant war dance,' as he called it. She laughed very heartily, fond of romping as she was, and no longer feeling aught of her scruples and discomfort.

But the very next week Claude became gloomy again. He had chosen Zoe Piedefer as a model, but she did not satisfy him. Christine's delicate head, as he expressed it, did not set well on the other's shoulders. He, nevertheless, persisted, scratched out, began anew, and worked so hard that he lived in a constant state of fever. Towards the middle of January, seized with despair, he abandoned his picture and turned it against the wall, swearing that he would not finish it. But a fortnight later, he began to work at it again with another model, and then found himself obliged to change the whole tone of it. Thus matters got still worse; so he sent for Zoe again; became altogether at sea, and quite ill with uncertainty and anguish. And the pity of it was, that the central figure alone worried him, for he was well satisfied with the rest of the painting, the trees of the background, the two little women and the gentleman in the velvet coat, all finished and vigorous. February was drawing to a close; he had only a few days left to send his picture to the Salon; it was quite a disaster.

One evening, in Christine's presence, he began swearing, and all at once a cry of fury escaped him: 'After all, by the thunder of heaven, is it possible to stick one woman's head on another's shoulders? I ought to chop my hand off.'

From the depths of his heart a single idea now rose to his brain: to obtain her consent to pose for the whole figure. It had slowly sprouted, first as a simple wish, quickly discarded as absurd; then had come a silent, constantly-renewed debate with himself; and at last, under the spur of necessity, keen and definite desire. The recollection of the morning after the storm, when she had accepted his hospitality, haunted and tortured him. It was she whom he needed; she alone could enable him to realise his dream, and he beheld her again in all her youthful freshness, beaming and indispensable. If he could not get her to pose, he might as well give up his picture, for no one else would ever satisfy him. At times, while he remained seated for hours, distracted in front of the unfinished canvas, so utterly powerless that he no longer knew where to give a stroke of the brush, he formed heroic resolutions. The moment she came in he would throw himself at her feet; he would tell her of his distress in such touching words that she would perhaps consent. But as soon as he beheld her, he lost all courage, he averted his eyes, lest she might decipher his thoughts in his instinctive glances. Such a request would be madness. One could not expect such a service from a friend; he would never have the audacity to ask.

Nevertheless, one evening as he was getting ready to accompany her, and as she was putting on her bonnet, with her arms uplifted, they remained for a moment looking into each other's eyes, he quivering, and she suddenly becoming so grave, so pale, that he felt himself detected. All along the quays they scarcely spoke; the matter remained unmentioned between them while the sun set in the coppery sky. Twice afterwards he again read in her looks that she was aware of his all-absorbing thought. In fact, since he had dreamt about it, she had began to do the same, in spite of herself, her attention roused by his involuntary allusions. They scarcely affected her at first, though she was obliged at last to notice them; still the question seemed to her to be beyond the range of possibility, to be one of those unavowable ideas which people do not even speak of. The fear that he would dare to ask her did not even occur to her; she knew him well by now; she could have silenced him with a gesture, before he had stammered the first words, and in spite of his sudden bursts of anger. It was simple madness. Never, never!

Days went by, and between them that fixed idea grew in intensity. The moment they were together they could not help thinking of it. Not a word was spoken on the subject, but their very silence was eloquent; they no longer made a movement, no longer exchanged a smile without stumbling upon that thought, which they found impossible to put into words, though it filled their minds. Soon nothing but that remained in their fraternal intercourse. And the perturbation of heart and senses which they had so far avoided in the course of their familiar intimacy, came at last, under the influence of the all-besetting thought. And then the anguish which they left unmentioned, but which they could not hide from one another, racked and stifled them, left them heaving distressfully with painful sighs.

Towards the middle of March, Christine, at one of her visits, found Claude seated before his picture, overcome with sorrow. He had not even heard her enter. He remained motionless, with vacant, haggard eyes staring at his unfinished work. In another three days the delay for sending in exhibits for the Salon would expire.

'Well,' she inquired gently, after standing for a long time behind him, grief-stricken at seeing him in such despair.

He started and turned round.

'Well, it's all up. I sha'n't exhibit anything this year. Ah! I who relied so much upon this Salon!'

Both relapsed into despondency—a despondency and agitation full of confused thoughts. Then she resumed, thinking aloud as it were:

'There would still be time.'

'Time? Oh! no indeed. A miracle would be needed. Where am I to find a model so late in the day? Do you know, since this morning I have been worrying, and for a moment I thought I had hit upon an idea: Yes, it would be to go and fetch that girl, that Irma who came while you were here. I know well enough that she is short and not at all such as I thought of, and so I should perhaps have to change everything once more; but all the same it might be possible to make her do. Decidedly, I'll try her—'

He stopped short. The glowing eyes with which he gazed at her clearly said: 'Ah! there's you! ah! it would be the hoped-for miracle, and triumph would be certain, if you were to make this supreme sacrifice for me. I beseech you, I ask you devoutly, as a friend, the dearest, the most beauteous, the most pure.'

She, erect, looking very pale, seemed to hear each of those words, though all remained unspoken, and his ardently beseeching eyes overcame her. She herself did not speak. She simply did as she was desired, acting almost like one in a dream. Beneath it all there lurked the thought that he must not ask elsewhere, for she was now conscious of her earlier jealous disquietude and wished to share his affections with none. Yet it was in silence and all chastity that she stretched herself on the couch, and took up the pose, with one arm under her head, her eyes closed.

And Claude? Startled, full of gratitude, he had at last found again the sudden vision that he had so often evoked. But he himself did not speak; he began to paint in the deep solemn silence that had fallen upon them both. For two long hours he stood to his work with such manly energy that he finished right off a superb roughing out of the whole figure. Never before had he felt such enthusiasm in his art. It seemed to him as if he were in the presence of some saint; and at times he wondered at the transfiguration of Christine's face, whose somewhat massive jaws seemed to have receded beneath the gentle placidity which her brow and cheeks displayed. During those two hours she did not stir, she did not speak, but from time to time she opened her clear eyes, fixing them on some vague, distant point, and remaining thus for a moment, then closing them again, and relapsing into the lifelessness of fine marble, with the mysterious fixed smile required by the pose.

It was by a gesture that Claude apprized her he had finished. He turned away, and when they stood face to face again, she ready to depart, they gazed at one another, overcome by emotion which still prevented them from speaking. Was it sadness, then, unconscious, unnameable sadness? For their eyes filled with tears, as if they had just spoilt their lives and dived to the depths of human misery. Then, moved and grieved, unable to find a word, even of thanks, he kissed her religiously upon the brow.

V

ON the 15th May, a Friday, Claude, who had returned at three o'clock in the morning from Sandoz's, was still asleep at nine, when Madame Joseph brought him up a large bouquet of white lilac which a commissionaire had just left downstairs. He understood at once. Christine had wished to be beforehand in celebrating the success of his painting. For this was a great day for him, the opening day of the 'Salon of the Rejected,' which was first instituted that year,* and at which his picture—refused by the hanging committee of the official Salon—was to be exhibited.

* This was in 1863.—ED.

That delicate attention on Christine's part, that fresh and fragrant lilac, affected him greatly, as if presaging a happy day. Still in his nightshirt, with his feet bare, he placed the flowers in his water-jug on the table. Then, with his eyes still swollen with sleep, almost bewildered, he dressed, scolding himself the while for having slept so long. On the previous night he had promised Dubuche and Sandoz to call for them at the latter's place at eight o'clock, in order that they might all three go together to the Palais de l'Industrie, where they would find the rest of the band. And he was already an hour behind time.

Then, as luck would have it, he could not lay his hands upon anything in his studio, which had been turned topsy-turvy since the despatch of the big picture. For more than five minutes he hunted on his knees for his shoes, among a quantity of old chases. Some particles of gold leaf flew about, for, not knowing where to get the money for a proper frame, he had employed a joiner of the neighbourhood to fit four strips of board together, and had gilded them himself, with the assistance of his friend Christine, who, by the way, had proved a very unskilful gilder. At last, dressed and shod, and having his soft felt hat bespangled with yellow sparks of the gold, he was about to go, when a superstitious thought brought him back to the nosegay, which had remained alone on the centre of the table. If he did not kiss the lilac he was sure to suffer an affront. So he kissed it and felt perfumed by its strong springtide aroma.

Under the archway, he gave his key as usual to the doorkeeper. 'Madame Joseph,' he said, 'I shall not be home all day.'

In less than twenty minutes he was in the Rue d'Enfer, at Sandoz's. But the latter, whom he feared would have already gone, was equally late in consequence of a sudden indisposition which had come upon his mother. It was nothing serious. She had merely passed a bad night, but it had for a while quite upset him with anxiety. Now, easy in mind again, Sandoz told Claude that Dubuche had written saying that they were not to wait for him, and giving an appointment at the Palais. They therefore started off, and as it was nearly eleven, they decided to lunch in a deserted little cremerie in the Rue St. Honore, which they did very leisurely, seized with laziness amidst all their ardent desire to see and know; and enjoying, as it were, a kind of sweet, tender sadness from lingering awhile and recalling memories of their youth.

One o'clock was striking when they crossed the Champs Elysees. It was a lovely day, with a limpid sky, to which the breeze, still somewhat chilly, seemed to impart a brighter azure. Beneath the sun, of the hue of ripe corn, the rows of chestnut trees showed new foliage of a delicate and seemingly freshly varnished green; and the fountains with their leaping sheafs of water, the well-kept lawns, the deep vistas of the pathways, and the broad open spaces, all lent an air of luxurious grandeur to the panorama. A few carriages, very few at that early hour, were ascending the avenue, while a stream of bewildered, bustling people, suggesting a swarm of ants, plunged into the huge archway of the Palais de l'Industrie.

When they were inside, Claude shivered slightly while crossing the gigantic vestibule, which was as cold as a cellar, with a damp pavement which resounded beneath one's feet, like the flagstones of a church. He glanced right and left at the two monumental stairways, and asked contemptuously: 'I say, are we going through their dirty Salon?'

'Oh! no, dash it!' answered Sandoz. 'Let's cut through the garden. The western staircase over there leads to "the Rejected."'

Then they passed disdainfully between the two little tables of the catalogue vendors. Between the huge red velvet curtains and beyond a shady porch appeared the garden, roofed in with glass. At that time of day it was almost deserted; there were only some people at the buffet under the clock, a throng of people lunching. The crowd was in the galleries on the first floor, and the white statues alone edged the yellow-sanded pathways which with stretches of crude colour intersected the green lawns. There was a whole nation of motionless marble there steeped in the diffuse light falling from the glazed roof on high. Looking southwards, some holland screens barred half of the nave, which showed ambery in the sunlight and was speckled at both ends by the dazzling blue and crimson of stained-glass windows. Just a few visitors, tired already, occupied the brand-new chairs and seats, shiny with fresh paint; while the flights of sparrows, who dwelt above, among the iron girders, swooped down, quite at home, raking up the sand and twittering as they pursued each other.

Claude and Sandoz made a show of walking very quickly without giving a glance around them. A stiff classical bronze statue, a Minerva by a member of the Institute, had exasperated them at the very door. But as they hastened past a seemingly endless line of busts, they recognised Bongrand, who, all alone, was going slowly round a colossal, overflowing, recumbent figure, which had been placed in the middle of the path. With his hands behind his back, quite absorbed, he bent his wrinkled face every now and then over the plaster.

'Hallo, it's you?' he said, as they held out their hands to him. 'I was just looking at our friend Mahoudeau's figure, which they have at least had the intelligence to admit, and to put in a good position.' Then, breaking off: 'Have you been upstairs?' he asked.

'No, we have just come in,' said Claude.

Thereupon Bongrand began to talk warmly about the Salon of the Rejected. He, who belonged to the Institute, but who lived apart from his colleagues, made very merry over the affair; the everlasting discontent of painters; the campaign conducted by petty newspapers like 'The Drummer'; the protestations, the constant complaints that had at last disturbed the Emperor, and the artistic coup d'etat carried out by that silent dreamer, for this Salon of the Rejected was entirely his work. Then the great painter alluded to all the hubbub caused by the flinging of such a paving-stone into that frog's pond, the official art world.

'No,' he continued, 'you can have no idea of the rage and indignation among the members of the hanging committee. And remember I'm distrusted, they generally keep quiet when I'm there. But they are all furious with the realists. It was to them that they systematically closed the doors of the temple; it is on account of them that the Emperor has allowed the public to revise their verdict; and finally it is they, the realists, who triumph. Ah! I hear some nice things said; I wouldn't give a high price for your skins, youngsters.'

He laughed his big, joyous laugh, stretching out his arms the while as if to embrace all the youthfulness that he divined rising around him.

'Your disciples are growing,' said Claude, simply.

But Bongrand, becoming embarrassed, silenced him with a wave of his hand. He himself had not sent anything for exhibition, and the prodigious mass of work amidst which he found himself—those pictures, those statues, all those proofs of creative effort—filled him with regret. It was not jealousy, for there lived not a more upright and better soul; but as a result of self-examination, a gnawing fear of impotence, an unavowed dread haunted him.

'And at "the Rejected,"' asked Sandoz; 'how goes it there?'

'Superb; you'll see.'

Then turning towards Claude, and keeping both the young man's hands in his own, 'You, my good fellow, you are a trump. Listen! they say I am clever: well, I'd give ten years of my life to have painted that big hussy of yours.'

Praise like that, coming from such lips, moved the young painter to tears. Victory had come at last, then? He failed to find a word of thanks, and abruptly changed the conversation, wishing to hide his emotion.

'That good fellow Mahoudeau!' he said, 'why his figure's capital! He has a deuced fine temperament, hasn't he?'

Sandoz and Claude had begun to walk round the plaster figure. Bongrand replied with a smile.

'Yes, yes; there's too much fulness and massiveness in parts. But just look at the articulations, they are delicate and really pretty. Come, good-bye, I must leave you. I'm going to sit down a while. My legs are bending under me.'

Claude had raised his head to listen. A tremendous uproar, an incessant crashing that had not struck him at first, careered through the air; it was like the din of a tempest beating against a cliff, the rumbling of an untiring assault, dashing forward from endless space.

'Hallow, what's that?' he muttered.

'That,' said Bongrand, as he walked away, 'that's the crowd upstairs in the galleries.'

And the two young fellows, having crossed the garden, then went up to the Salon of the Rejected.

It had been installed in first-rate style. The officially received pictures were not lodged more sumptuously: lofty hangings of old tapestry at the doors; 'the line' set off with green baize; seats of crimson velvet; white linen screens under the large skylights of the roof. And all along the suite of galleries the first impression was the same—there were the same gilt frames, the same bright colours on the canvases. But there was a special kind of cheerfulness, a sparkle of youth which one did not altogether realise at first. The crowd, already compact, increased every minute, for the official Salon was being deserted. People came stung by curiosity, impelled by a desire to judge the judges, and, above all, full of the conviction that they were going to see some very diverting things. It was very hot; a fine dust arose from the flooring; and certainly, towards four o'clock people would stifle there.

'Hang it!' said Sandoz, trying to elbow his way, 'it will be no easy job to move about and find your picture.'

A burst of fraternal feverishness made him eager to get to it. That day he only lived for the work and glory of his old chum.

'Don't worry!' exclaimed Claude; 'we shall get to it all right. My picture won't fly off.'

And he affected to be in no hurry, in spite of the almost irresistible desire that he felt to run. He raised his head and looked around him; and soon, amidst the loud voices of the crowd that had bewildered him, he distinguished some restrained laughter, which was almost drowned by the tramp of feet and the hubbub of conversation. Before certain pictures the public stood joking. This made him feel uneasy, for despite all his revolutionary brutality he was as sensitive and as credulous as a woman, and always looked forward to martyrdom, though he was ever grieved and stupefied at being repulsed and railed at.

'They seem gay here,' he muttered.

'Well, there's good reason,' remarked Sandoz. 'Just look at those extravagant jades!'

At the same moment, while still lingering in the first gallery, Fagerolles ran up against them without seeing them. He started, being no doubt annoyed by the meeting. However, he recovered his composure immediately, and behaved very amiably.

'Hallo! I was just thinking of you. I have been here for the last hour.'

'Where have they put Claude's picture?' asked Sandoz. Fagerolles, who had just remained for twenty minutes in front of that picture studying it and studying the impression which it produced on the public, answered without wincing, 'I don't know; I haven't been able to find it. We'll look for it together if you like.'

And he joined them. Terrible wag as he was, he no longer affected low-bred manners to the same degree as formerly; he already began to dress well, and although with his mocking nature he was still disposed to snap at everybody as of old, he pursed his lips into the serious expression of a fellow who wants to make his way in the world. With an air of conviction he added: 'I must say that I now regret not having sent anything this year! I should be here with all the rest of you, and have my share of success. And there are really some astonishing things, my boys! those horses, for instance.'

He pointed to a huge canvas in front of them, before which the crowd was gathering and laughing. It was, so people said, the work of an erstwhile veterinary surgeon, and showed a number of life-size horses in a meadow, fantastic horses, blue, violet, and pink, whose astonishing anatomy transpierced their sides.

'I say, don't you humbug us,' exclaimed Claude, suspiciously.

But Fagerolles pretended to be enthusiastic. 'What do you mean? The picture's full of talent. The fellow who painted it understands horses devilish well. No doubt he paints like a brute. But what's the odds if he's original, and contributes a document?'

As he spoke Fagerolles' delicate girlish face remained perfectly grave, and it was impossible to tell whether he was joking. There was but the slightest yellow twinkle of spitefulness in the depths of his grey eyes. And he finished with a sarcastic allusion, the drift of which was as yet patent to him alone. 'Ah, well! if you let yourself be influenced by the fools who laugh, you'll have enough to do by and by.'

The three friends had gone on again, only advancing, however, with infinite difficulty amid that sea of surging shoulders. On entering the second gallery they gave a glance round the walls, but the picture they sought was not there. In lieu thereof they perceived Irma Becot on the arm of Gagniere, both of them pressed against a hand-rail, he busy examining a small canvas, while she, delighted at being hustled about, raised her pink little mug and laughed at the crowd.

'Hallo!' said Sandoz, surprised, 'here she is with Gagniere now!'

'Oh, just a fancy of hers!' exclaimed Fagerolles quietly. 'She has a very swell place now. Yes, it was given her by that young idiot of a marquis, whom the papers are always talking about. She's a girl who'll make her way; I've always said so! But she seems to retain a weakness for painters, and every now and then drops into the Cafe Baudequin to look up old friends!'

Irma had now seen them, and was making gestures from afar. They could but go to her. When Gagniere, with his light hair and little beardless face, turned round, looking more grotesque than over, he did not show the least surprise at finding them there.

'It's wonderful,' he muttered.

'What's wonderful?' asked Fagerolles.

'This little masterpiece—and withal honest and naif, and full of conviction.'

He pointed to a tiny canvas before which he had stood absorbed, an absolutely childish picture, such as an urchin of four might have painted; a little cottage at the edge of a little road, with a little tree beside it, the whole out of drawing, and girt round with black lines. Not even a corkscrew imitation of smoke issuing from the roof was forgotten.

Claude made a nervous gesture, while Fagerolles repeated phlegmatically:

'Very delicate, very delicate. But your picture, Gagniere, where is it?'

'My picture, it is there.'

In fact, the picture he had sent happened to be very near the little masterpiece. It was a landscape of a pearly grey, a bit of the Seine banks, painted carefully, pretty in tone, though somewhat heavy, and perfectly ponderated without a sign of any revolutionary splash.

'To think that they were idiotic enough to refuse that!' said Claude, who had approached with an air of interest. But why, I ask you, why?'

'Because it's realistic,' said Fagerolles, in so sharp a voice that one could not tell whether he was gibing at the jury or at the picture.

Meanwhile, Irma, of whom no one took any notice, was looking fixedly at Claude with the unconscious smile which the savage loutishness of that big fellow always brought to her lips. To think that he had not even cared to see her again. She found him so much altered since the last time she had seen him, so funny, and not at all prepossessing, with his hair standing on end, and his face wan and sallow, as if he had had a severe fever. Pained that he did not seem to notice her, she wanted to attract his attention, and touched his arm with a familiar gesture.

'I say, isn't that one of your friends over there, looking for you?'

It was Dubuche, whom she knew from having seen him on one occasion at the Cafe Baudequin. He was, with difficulty, elbowing his way through the crowd, and staring vaguely at the sea of heads around him. But all at once, when Claude was trying to attract his notice by dint of gesticulations, the other turned his back to bow very low to a party of three—the father short and fat, with a sanguine face; the mother very thin, of the colour of wax, and devoured by anemia; and the daughter so physically backward at eighteen, that she retained all the lank scragginess of childhood.

'All right!' muttered the painter. 'There he's caught now. What ugly acquaintances the brute has! Where can he have fished up such horrors?'

Gagniere quietly replied that he knew the strangers by sight. M. Margaillan was a great masonry contractor, already a millionaire five or six times over, and was making his fortune out of the great public works of Paris, running up whole boulevards on his own account. No doubt Dubuche had become acquainted with him through one of the architects he worked for.

However, Sandoz, compassionating the scragginess of the girl, whom he kept watching, judged her in one sentence.

'Ah! the poor little flayed kitten. One feels sorry for her.'

'Let them alone!' exclaimed Claude, ferociously. 'They have all the crimes of the middle classes stamped on their faces; they reek of scrofula and idiocy. It serves them right. But hallo! our runaway friend is making off with them. What grovellers architects are! Good riddance. He'll have to look for us when he wants us!'

Dubuche, who had not seen his friends, had just offered his arm to the mother, and was going off, explaining the pictures with gestures typical of exaggerated politeness.

'Well, let's proceed then,' said Fagerolles; and, addressing Gagniere, he asked, 'Do you know where they have put Claude's picture?'

'I? no, I was looking for it—I am going with you.'

He accompanied them, forgetting Irma Becot against the 'line.' It was she who had wanted to visit the Salon on his arm, and he was so little used to promenading a woman about, that he had constantly lost her on the way, and was each time stupefied to find her again beside him, no longer knowing how or why they were thus together. She ran after them, and took his arm once more in order to follow Claude, who was already passing into another gallery with Fagerolles and Sandoz.

Then the five roamed about in Indian file, with their noses in the air, now separated by a sudden crush, now reunited by another, and ever carried along by the stream. An abomination of Chaine's, a 'Christ pardoning the Woman taken in Adultery,' made them pause; it was a group of dry figures that looked as if cut out of wood, very bony of build, and seemingly painted with mud. But close by they admired a very fine study of a woman, seen from behind, with her head turned sideways. The whole show was a mixture of the best and the worst, all styles were mingled together, the drivellers of the historical school elbowed the young lunatics of realism, the pure simpletons were lumped together with those who bragged about their originality. A dead Jezabel, that seemed to have rotted in the cellars of the School of Arts, was exhibited near a lady in white, the very curious conception of a future great artist*; then a huge shepherd looking at the sea, a weak production, faced a little painting of some Spaniards playing at rackets, a dash of light of splendid intensity. Nothing execrable was wanting, neither military scenes full of little leaden soldiers, nor wan antiquity, nor the middle ages, smeared, as it were, with bitumen. But from amidst the incoherent ensemble, and especially from the landscapes, all of which were painted in a sincere, correct key, and also from the portraits, most of which were very interesting in respect to workmanship, there came a good fresh scent of youth, bravery and passion. If there were fewer bad pictures in the official Salon, the average there was assuredly more commonplace and mediocre. Here one found the smell of battle, of cheerful battle, given jauntily at daybreak, when the bugle sounds, and when one marches to meet the enemy with the certainty of beating him before sunset.

* Edouard Manet.—ED.

Claude, whose spirits had revived amidst that martial odour, grew animated and pugnacious as he listened to the laughter of the public. He looked as defiant, indeed, as if he had heard bullets whizzing past him. Sufficiently discreet at the entrance of the galleries, the laughter became more boisterous, more unrestrained, as they advanced. In the third room the women ceased concealing their smiles behind their handkerchiefs, while the men openly held their sides the better to ease themselves. It was the contagious hilarity of people who had come to amuse themselves, and who were growing gradually excited, bursting out at a mere trifle, diverted as much by the good things as by the bad. Folks laughed less before Chaine's Christ than before the back view of the nude woman, who seemed to them very comical indeed. The 'Lady in White' also stupefied people and drew them together; folks nudged each other and went into hysterics almost; there was always a grinning group in front of it. Each canvas thus had its particular kind of success; people hailed each other from a distance to point out something funny, and witticisms flew from mouth to mouth; to such a degree indeed that, as Claude entered the fourth gallery, lashed into fury by the tempest of laughter that was raging there as well, he all but slapped the face of an old lady whose chuckles exasperated him.

'What idiots!' he said, turning towards his friends. 'One feels inclined to throw a lot of masterpieces at their heads.'

Sandoz had become fiery also, and Fagerolles continued praising the most dreadful daubs, which only tended to increase the laughter, while Gagniere, at sea amid the hubbub, dragged on the delighted Irma, whose skirts somehow wound round the legs of all the men.

But of a sudden Jory stood before them. His fair handsome face absolutely beamed. He cut his way through the crowd, gesticulated, and exulted, as if over a personal victory. And the moment he perceived Claude, he shouted:

'Here you are at last! I have been looking for you this hour. A success, old fellow, oh! a success—'

'What success?'

'Why, the success of your picture. Come, I must show it you. You'll see, it's stunning.'

Claude grew pale. A great joy choked him, while he pretended to receive the news with composure. Bongrand's words came back to him. He began to believe that he possessed genius.

'Hallo, how are you?' continued Jory, shaking hands with the others.

And, without more ado, he, Fagerolles and Gagniere surrounded Irma, who smiled on them in a good-natured way.

'Perhaps you'll tell us where the picture is,' said Sandoz, impatiently. 'Take us to it.'

Jory assumed the lead, followed by the band. They had to fight their way into the last gallery. But Claude, who brought up the rear, still heard the laughter that rose on the air, a swelling clamour, the roll of a tide near its full. And as he finally entered the room, he beheld a vast, swarming, closely packed crowd pressing eagerly in front of his picture. All the laughter arose, spread, and ended there. And it was his picture that was being laughed at.

'Eh!' repeated Jory, triumphantly, 'there's a success for you.'

Gagniere, intimidated, as ashamed as if he himself had been slapped, muttered: 'Too much of a success—I should prefer something different.'

'What a fool you are,' replied Jory, in a burst of exalted conviction. 'That's what I call success. Does it matter a curse if they laugh? We have made our mark; to-morrow every paper will talk about us.'

'The idiots,' was all that Sandoz could gasp, choking with grief.

Fagerolles, disinterested and dignified like a family friend following a funeral procession, said nothing. Irma alone remained gay, thinking it all very funny. And, with a caressing gesture, she leant against the shoulder of the derided painter, and whispered softly in his ear: 'Don't fret, my boy. It's all humbug, be merry all the same.'

But Claude did not stir. An icy chill had come over him. For a moment his heart had almost ceased to beat, so cruel had been the disappointment And with his eyes enlarged, attracted and fixed by a resistless force, he looked at his picture. He was surprised, and scarcely recognised it; it certainly was not such as it had seemed to be in his studio. It had grown yellow beneath the livid light of the linen screens; it seemed, moreover, to have become smaller; coarser and more laboured also; and whether it was the effect of the light in which it now hung, or the contrast of the works beside it, at all events he now at the first glance saw all its defects, after having remained blind to them, as it were, for months. With a few strokes of the brush he, in thought, altered the whole of it, deepened the distances, set a badly drawn limb right, and modified a tone. Decidedly, the gentleman in the velveteen jacket was worth nothing at all, he was altogether pasty and badly seated; the only really good bit of work about him was his hand. In the background the two little wrestlers—the fair and the dark one—had remained too sketchy, and lacked substance; they were amusing only to an artist's eye. But he was pleased with the trees, with the sunny glade; and the nude woman—the woman lying on the grass appeared to him superior to his own powers, as if some one else had painted her, and as if he had never yet beheld her in such resplendency of life.

He turned to Sandoz, and said simply:

'They do right to laugh; it's incomplete. Never mind, the woman is all right! Bongrand was not hoaxing me.'

His friend wished to take him away, but he became obstinate, and drew nearer instead. Now that he had judged his work, he listened and looked at the crowd. The explosion continued—culminated in an ascending scale of mad laughter. No sooner had visitors crossed the threshold than he saw their jaws part, their eyes grow small, their entire faces expand; and he heard the tempestuous puffing of the fat men, the rusty grating jeers of the lean ones, amidst all the shrill, flute-like laughter of the women. Opposite him, against the hand-rails, some young fellows went into contortions, as if somebody had been tickling them. One lady had flung herself on a seat, stifling and trying to regain breath with her handkerchief over her mouth. Rumours of this picture, which was so very, very funny, must have been spreading, for there was a rush from the four corners of the Salon, bands of people arrived, jostling each other, and all eagerness to share the fun. 'Where is it?' 'Over there.' 'Oh, what a joke!' And the witticisms fell thicker than elsewhere. It was especially the subject that caused merriment; people failed to understand it, thought it insane, comical enough to make one ill with laughter. 'You see the lady feels too hot, while the gentleman has put on his velveteen jacket for fear of catching cold.' 'Not at all; she is already blue; the gentleman has pulled her out of a pond, and he is resting at a distance, holding his nose.' 'I tell you it's a young ladies' school out for a ramble. Look at the two playing at leap-frog.' 'Hallo! washing day; the flesh is blue; the trees are blue; he's dipped his picture in the blueing tub!'

Those who did not laugh flew into a rage: that bluish tinge, that novel rendering of light seemed an insult to them. Some old gentlemen shook their sticks. Was art to be outraged like this? One grave individual went away very wroth, saying to his wife that he did not like practical jokes. But another, a punctilious little man, having looked in the catalogue for the title of the work, in order to tell his daughter, read out the words, 'In the Open Air,' whereupon there came a formidable renewal of the clamour, hisses and shouts, and what not else besides. The title sped about; it was repeated, commented on. 'In the Open Air! ah, yes, the open air, the nude woman in the air, everything in the air, tra la la laire.' The affair was becoming a scandal. The crowd still increased. People's faces grew red with congestion in the growing heat. Each had the stupidly gaping mouth of the ignoramus who judges painting, and between them they indulged in all the asinine ideas, all the preposterous reflections, all the stupid spiteful jeers that the sight of an original work can possibly elicit from bourgeois imbecility.

At that moment, as a last blow, Claude beheld Dubuche reappear, dragging the Margaillans along. As soon as he came in front of the picture, the architect, ill at ease, overtaken by cowardly shame, wished to quicken his pace and lead his party further on, pretending that he saw neither the canvas nor his friends. But the contractor had already drawn himself up on his short, squat legs, and was staring at the picture, and asking aloud in his thick hoarse voice:

'I say, who's the blockhead that painted this?'

That good-natured bluster, that cry of a millionaire parvenu resuming the average opinion of the assembly, increased the general merriment; and he, flattered by his success, and tickled by the strange style of the painting, started laughing in his turn, so sonorously that he could be heard above all the others. This was the hallelujah, a final outburst of the great organ of opinion.

'Take my daughter away,' whispered pale-faced Madame Margaillan in Dubuche's ear.

He sprang forward and freed Regine, who had lowered her eyelids, from the crowd; displaying in doing so as much muscular energy as if it had been a question of saving the poor creature from imminent death. Then having taken leave of the Margaillans at the door, with a deal of handshaking and bows, he came towards his friends, and said straightway to Sandoz, Fagerolles, and Gagniere:

'What would you have? It isn't my fault—I warned him that the public would not understand him. It's improper; yes, you may say what you like, it's improper.'

'They hissed Delacroix,' broke in Sandoz, white with rage, and clenching his fists. 'They hissed Courbet. Oh, the race of enemies! Oh, the born idiots!'

Gagniere, who now shared this artistic vindictiveness, grew angry at the recollection of his Sunday battles at the Pasdeloup Concerts in favour of real music.

'And they hiss Wagner too; they are the same crew. I recognise them. You see that fat fellow over there—'

Jory had to hold him back. The journalist for his part would rather have urged on the crowd. He kept on repeating that it was famous, that there was a hundred thousand francs' worth of advertisements in it. And Irma, left to her own devices once more, went up to two of her friends, young Bourse men who were among the most persistent scoffers, but whom she began to indoctrinate, forcing them, as it were, into admiration, by rapping them on the knuckles.

Fagerolles, however, had not opened his lips. He kept on examining the picture, and glancing at the crowd. With his Parisian instinct and the elastic conscience of a skilful fellow, he at once fathomed the misunderstanding. He was already vaguely conscious of what was wanted for that style of painting to make the conquest of everybody—a little trickery perhaps, some attenuations, a different choice of subject, a milder method of execution. In the main, the influence that Claude had always had over him persisted in making itself felt; he remained imbued with it; it had set its stamp upon him for ever. Only he considered Claude to be an arch-idiot to have exhibited such a thing as that. Wasn't it stupid to believe in the intelligence of the public? What was the meaning of that nude woman beside that gentleman who was fully dressed? And what did those two little wrestlers in the background mean? Yet the picture showed many of the qualities of a master. There wasn't another bit of painting like it in the Salon! And he felt a great contempt for that artist, so admirably endowed, who through lack of tact made all Paris roar as if he had been the worst of daubers.

This contempt became so strong that he was unable to hide it. In a moment of irresistible frankness he exclaimed:

'Look here, my dear fellow, it's your own fault, you are too stupid.'

Claude, turning his eyes from the crowd, looked at him in silence. He had not winced, he had only turned pale amidst the laughter, and if his lips quivered it was merely with a slight nervous twitching; nobody knew him, it was his work alone that was being buffeted. Then for a moment he glanced again at his picture, and slowly inspected the other canvases in the gallery. And amidst the collapse of his illusions, the bitter agony of his pride, a breath of courage, a whiff of health and youth came to him from all that gaily-brave painting which rushed with such headlong passion to beat down classical conventionality. He was consoled and inspirited by it all; he felt no remorse nor contrition, but, on the contrary, was impelled to fight the popular taste still more. No doubt there was some clumsiness and some puerility of effort in his work, but on the other hand what a pretty general tone, what a play of light he had thrown into it, a silvery grey light, fine and diffuse, brightened by all the dancing sunbeams of the open air. It was as if a window had been suddenly opened amidst all the old bituminous cookery of art, amidst all the stewing sauces of tradition, and the sun came in and the walls smiled under that invasion of springtide. The light note of his picture, the bluish tinge that people had been railing at, flashed out among the other paintings also. Was this not the expected dawn, a new aurora rising on art? He perceived a critic who stopped without laughing, some celebrated painters who looked surprised and grave, while Papa Malgras, very dirty, went from picture to picture with the pout of a wary connoisseur, and finally stopped short in front of his canvas, motionless, absorbed. Then Claude turned round to Fagerolles, and surprised him by this tardy reply:

'A fellow can only be an idiot according to his own lights, my dear chap, and it looks as if I am going to remain one. So much the better for you if you are clever!'

Fagerolles at once patted him on the shoulder, like a chum who had only been in fun, and Claude allowed Sandoz to take his arm. They led him off at last. The whole band left the Salon of the Rejected, deciding that they would pass on their way through the gallery of architecture; for a design for a museum by Dubuche had been accepted, and for some few minutes he had been fidgeting and begging them with so humble a look, that it seemed difficult indeed to deny him this satisfaction.

'Ah!' said Jory, jocularly, on entering the gallery, 'what an ice-well! One can breathe here.'

They all took off their hats and wiped their foreheads, with a feeling of relief, as if they had reached some big shady trees after a long march in full sunlight. The gallery was empty. From the roof, shaded by a white linen screen, there fell a soft, even, rather sad light, which was reflected like quiescent water by the well-waxed, mirror-like floor. On the four walls, of a faded red, hung the plans and designs in large and small chases, edged with pale blue borders. Alone—absolutely alone—amidst this desert stood a very hirsute gentleman, who was lost in the contemplation of the plan of a charity home. Three ladies who appeared became frightened and fled across the gallery with hasty steps.

Dubuche was already showing and explaining his work to his comrades. It was only a drawing of a modest little museum gallery, which he had sent in with ambitious haste, contrary to custom and against the wishes of his master, who, nevertheless, had used his influence to have it accepted, thinking himself pledged to do so.

'Is your museum intended for the accommodation of the paintings of the "open air" school?' asked Fagerolles, very gravely.

Gagniere pretended to admire the plan, nodding his head, but thinking of something else; while Claude and Sandoz examined it with sincere interest.

'Not bad, old boy,' said the former. 'The ornamentation is still bastardly traditional; but never mind; it will do.'

Jory, becoming impatient at last, cut him short.

'Come along, let's go, eh? I'm catching my death of cold here.'

The band resumed its march. The worst was that to make a short cut they had to go right through the official Salon, and they resigned themselves to doing so, notwithstanding the oath they had taken not to set foot in it, as a matter of protest. Cutting their way through the crowd, keeping rigidly erect, they followed the suite of galleries, casting indignant glances to right and left. There was none of the gay scandal of their Salon, full of fresh tones and an exaggeration of sunlight, here. One after the other came gilt frames full of shadows; black pretentious things, nude figures showing yellowish in a cellar-like light, the frippery of so-called classical art, historical, genre and landscape painting, all showing the same conventional black grease. The works reeked of uniform mediocrity, they were characterised by a muddy dinginess of tone, despite their primness—the primness of impoverished, degenerate blood. And the friends quickened their steps: they ran to escape from that reign of bitumen, condemning everything in one lump with their superb sectarian injustice, repeating that there was nothing in the place worth looking at—nothing, nothing at all!

At last they emerged from the galleries, and were going down into the garden when they met Mahoudeau and Chaine. The former threw himself into Claude's arms.

'Ah, my dear fellow, your picture; what artistic temperament it shows!'

The painter at once began to praise the 'Vintaging Girl.'

'And you, I say, you have thrown a nice big lump at their heads!'

But the sight of Chaine, to whom no one spoke about the 'Woman taken in Adultery,' and who went silently wandering around, awakened Claude's compassion. He thought there was something very sad about that execrable painting, and the wasted life of that peasant who was a victim of middle-class admiration. He always gave him the delight of a little praise; so now he shook his hand cordially, exclaiming:

'Your machine's very good too. Ah, my fine fellow, draughtsmanship has no terrors for you!'

'No, indeed,' declared Chaine, who had grown purple with vanity under his black bushy beard.

He and Mahoudeau joined the band, and the latter asked the others whether they had seen Chambouvard's 'Sower.' It was marvellous; the only piece of statuary worth looking at in the Salon. Thereupon they all followed him into the garden, which the crowd was now invading.

'There,' said Mahoudeau, stopping in the middle of the central path: 'Chambouvard is standing just in front of his "Sower."'

In fact, a portly man stood there, solidly planted on his fat legs, and admiring his handiwork. With his head sunk between his shoulders, he had the heavy, handsome features of a Hindu idol. He was said to be the son of a veterinary surgeon of the neighbourhood of Amiens. At forty-five he had already produced twenty masterpieces: statues all simplicity and life, flesh modern and palpitating, kneaded by a workman of genius, without any pretension to refinement; and all this was chance production, for he furnished work as a field bears harvest, good one day, bad the next, in absolute ignorance of what he created. He carried the lack of critical acumen to such a degree that he made no distinction between the most glorious offspring of his hands and the detestably grotesque figures which now and then he chanced to put together. Never troubled by nervous feverishness, never doubting, always solid and convinced, he had the pride of a god.

'Wonderful, the "Sower"!' whispered Claude. 'What a figure! and what an attitude!'

Fagerolles, who had not looked at the statue, was highly amused by the great man, and the string of young, open-mouthed disciples whom as usual he dragged at his tail.

'Just look at them, one would think they are taking the sacrament, 'pon my word—and he himself, eh? What a fine brutish face he has!'

Isolated, and quite at his ease, amidst the general curiosity, Chambouvard stood there wondering, with the stupefied air of a man who is surprised at having produced such a masterpiece. He seemed to behold it for the first time, and was unable to get over his astonishment. Then an expression of delight gradually stole over his broad face, he nodded his head, and burst into soft, irresistible laughter, repeating a dozen times, 'It's comical, it's really comical!'

His train of followers went into raptures, while he himself could find nothing more forcible to express how much he worshipped himself. All at once there was a slight stir. Bongrand, who had been walking about with his hands behind his back, glancing vaguely around him, had just stumbled on Chambouvard, and the public, drawing back, whispered, and watched the two celebrated artists shaking hands; the one short and of a sanguine temperament, the other tall and restless. Some expressions of good-fellowship were overheard. 'Always fresh marvels.' 'Of course! And you, nothing this year?' 'No, nothing; I am resting, seeking—' 'Come, you joker! There's no need to seek, the thing comes by itself.' 'Good-bye.' 'Good-bye.' And Chambouvard, followed by his court, was already moving slowly away among the crowd, with the glances of a king, who enjoys life, while Bongrand, who had recognised Claude and his friends, approached them with outstretched feverish hands, and called attention to the sculptor with a nervous jerk of the chin, saying, 'There's a fellow I envy! Ah! to be confident of always producing masterpieces!'

He complimented Mahoudeau on his 'Vintaging Girl'; showed himself paternal to all of them, with that broad-minded good-nature of his, the free and easy manner of an old Bohemian of the romantic school, who had settled down and was decorated. Then, turning to Claude:

'Well, what did I tell you? Did you see upstairs? You have become the chief of a school.'

'Ah! yes,' replied Claude. 'They are giving it me nicely. You are the master of us all.'

But Bongrand made his usual gesture of vague suffering and went off, saying, 'Hold your tongue! I am not even my own master.'

For a few moments longer the band wandered through the garden. They had gone back to look at the 'Vintaging Girl,' when Jory noticed that Gagniere no longer had Irma Becot on his arm. Gagniere was stupefied; where the deuce could he have lost her? But when Fagerolles had told him that she had gone off in the crowd with two gentlemen, he recovered his composure, and followed the others, lighter of heart now that he was relieved of that girl who had bewildered him.

People now only moved about with difficulty. All the seats were taken by storm; groups blocked up the paths, where the promenaders paused every now and then, flowing back around the successful bits of bronze and marble. From the crowded buffet there arose a loud buzzing, a clatter of saucers and spoons which mingled with the throb of life pervading the vast nave. The sparrows had flown up to the forest of iron girders again, and one could hear their sharp little chirps, the twittering with which they serenaded the setting sun, under the warm panes of the glass roof. The atmosphere, moreover, had become heavy, there was a damp greenhouse-like warmth; the air, stationary as it was, had an odour as of humus, freshly turned over. And rising above the garden throng, the din of the first-floor galleries, the tramping of feet on their iron-girdered flooring still rolled on with the clamour of a tempest beating against a cliff.

Claude, who had a keen perception of that rumbling storm, ended by hearing nothing else; it had been let loose and was howling in his ears. It was the merriment of the crowd whose jeers and laughter swept hurricane-like past his picture. With a weary gesture he exclaimed:

'Come, what are we messing about here for? I sha'n't take anything at the refreshment bar, it reeks of the Institute. Let's go and have a glass of beer outside, eh?'

They all went out, with sinking legs and tired faces, expressive of contempt. Once outside, on finding themselves again face to face with healthy mother Nature in her springtide season, they breathed noisily with an air of delight. It had barely struck four o'clock, the slanting sun swept along the Champs Elysees and everything flared: the serried rows of carriages, like the fresh foliage of the trees, and the sheaf-like fountains which spouted up and whirled away in golden dust. With a sauntering step they went hesitatingly down the central avenue, and finally stranded in a little cafe, the Pavillon de la Concorde, on the left, just before reaching the Place. The place was so small that they sat down outside it at the edge of the footway, despite the chill which fell from a vault of leaves, already fully grown and gloomy. But beyond the four rows of chestnut-trees, beyond the belt of verdant shade, they could see the sunlit roadway of the main avenue where Paris passed before them as in a nimbus, the carriages with their wheels radiating like stars, the big yellow omnibuses, looking even more profusely gilded than triumphal chariots, the horsemen whose steeds seemed to raise clouds of sparks, and the foot passengers whom the light enveloped in splendour.

And during nearly three hours, with his beer untasted before him, Claude went on talking and arguing amid a growing fever, broken down as he was in body, and with his mind full of all the painting he had just seen. It was the usual winding up of their visit to the Salon, though this year they were more impassioned on account of the liberal measure of the Emperor.

'Well, and what of it, if the public does laugh?' cried Claude. 'We must educate the public, that's all. In reality it's a victory. Take away two hundred grotesque canvases, and our Salon beats theirs. We have courage and audacity—we are the future. Yes, yes, you'll see it later on; we shall kill their Salon. We shall enter it as conquerors, by dint of producing masterpieces. Laugh, laugh, you big stupid Paris—laugh until you fall on your knees before us!'

And stopping short, he pointed prophetically to the triumphal avenue, where the luxury and happiness of the city went rolling by in the sunlight. His arms stretched out till they embraced even the Place de la Concorde, which could be seen slantwise from where they sat under the trees—the Place de la Concorde, with the plashing water of one of its fountains, a strip of balustrade, and two of its statues—Rouen, with the gigantic bosom, and Lille, thrusting forward her huge bare foot.

'"In the open air"—it amuses them, eh?' he resumed. 'All right, since they are bent on it, the "open air" then, the school of the "open air!" Eh! it was a thing strictly between us, it didn't exist yesterday beyond the circle of a few painters. But now they throw the word upon the winds, and they found the school. Oh! I'm agreeable. Let it be the school of the "open air!"'

Jory slapped his thighs.

'Didn't I tell you? I felt sure of making them bite with those articles of mine, the idiots that they are. Ah! how we'll plague them now.'

Mahoudeau also was singing victory, constantly dragging in his 'Vintaging Girl,' the daring points of which he explained to the silent Chaine, the only one who listened to him; while Gagniere, with the sternness of a timid man waxing wroth over questions of pure theory, spoke of guillotining the Institute; and Sandoz, with the glowing sympathy of a hard worker, and Dubuche, giving way to the contagion of revolutionary friendship, became exasperated, and struck the table, swallowing up Paris with each draught of beer. Fagerolles, very calm, retained his usual smile. He had accompanied them for the sake of amusement, for the singular pleasure which he found in urging his comrades into farcical affairs that were bound to turn out badly. At the very moment when he was lashing their spirit of revolt, he himself formed the firm resolution to work in future for the Prix de Rome. That day had decided him; he thought it idiotic to compromise his prospects any further.

The sun was declining on the horizon, there was now only a returning stream of carriages, coming back from the Bois in the pale golden shimmer of the sunset. And the exodus from the Salon must have been nearly over; a long string of pedestrians passed by, gentlemen who looked like critics, each with a catalogue under his arm.

But all at once Gagniere became enthusiastic: 'Ah! Courajod, there was one who had his share in inventing landscape painting! Have you seen his "Pond of Gagny" at the Luxembourg?'

'A marvel!' exclaimed Claude. 'It was painted thirty years ago, and nothing more substantial has been turned out since. Why is it left at the Luxembourg? It ought to be in the Louvre.'

'But Courajod isn't dead,' said Fagerolles.

'What! Courajod isn't dead! No one ever sees him or speaks of him now.'

There was general stupefaction when Fagerolles assured them that the great landscape painter, now seventy years of age, lived somewhere in the neighbourhood of Montmartre, in a little house among his fowls, ducks, and dogs. So one might outlive one's own glory! To think that there were such melancholy instances of old artists disappearing before their death! Silence fell upon them all; they began to shiver when they perceived Bongrand pass by on a friend's arm, with a congestive face and a nervous air as he waved his hand to them; while almost immediately behind him, surrounded by his disciples, came Chambouvard, laughing very loudly, and tapping his heels on the pavement with the air of absolute mastery that comes from confidence in immortality.

'What! are you going?' said Mahoudeau to Chaine, who was rising from his chair.

The other mumbled some indistinct words in his beard, and went off after distributing handshakes among the party.

'I know,' said Jory to Mahoudeau. 'I believe he has a weakness for your neighbour, the herbalist woman. I saw his eyes flash all at once; it comes upon him like toothache. Look how he's running over there.'

The sculptor shrugged his shoulders amidst the general laughter.

But Claude did not hear. He was now discussing architecture with Dubuche. No doubt, that plan of a museum gallery which he exhibited wasn't bad; only there was nothing new in it. It was all so much patient marquetry of the school formulas. Ought not all the arts to advance in one line of battle? Ought not the evolution that was transforming literature, painting, even music itself, to renovate architecture as well? If ever the architecture of a period was to have a style of its own, it was assuredly the architecture of the period they would soon be entering, a new period when they would find the ground freshly swept, ready for the rebuilding of everything. Down with the Greek temples! there was no reason why they should continue to exist under our sky, amid our society! down with the Gothic cathedrals, since faith in legend was dead! down with the delicate colonnades, the lace-like work of the Renaissance—that revival of the antique grafted on mediaevalism—precious art-jewellery, no doubt, but in which democracy could not dwell. And he demanded, he called with violent gestures for an architectural formula suited to democracy; such work in stone as would express its tenets; edifices where it would really be at home; something vast and strong, great and simple at the same time; the something that was already being indicated in the new railway stations and markets, whose ironwork displayed such solid elegance, but purified and raised to a standard of beauty, proclaiming the grandeur of the intellectual conquests of the age.

'Ah! yes, ah! yes,' repeated Dubuche, catching Claude's enthusiasm; 'that's what I want to accomplish, you'll see some day. Give me time to succeed, and when I'm my own master—ah! when I'm my own master.'

Night was coming on apace, and Claude was growing more and more animated and passionate, displaying a fluency, an eloquence which his comrades had not known him to possess. They all grew excited in listening to him, and ended by becoming noisily gay over the extraordinary witticisms he launched forth. He himself, having returned to the subject of his picture, again discussed it with a deal of gaiety, caricaturing the crowd he had seen looking at it, and imitating the imbecile laughter. Along the avenue, now of an ashy hue, one only saw the shadows of infrequent vehicles dart by. The side-walk was quite black; an icy chill fell from the trees. Nothing broke the stillness but the sound of song coming from a clump of verdure behind the cafe; there was some rehearsal at the Concert de l'Horloge, for one heard the sentimental voice of a girl trying a love-song.

'Ah! how they amused me, the idiots!' exclaimed Claude, in a last burst. 'Do you know, I wouldn't take a hundred thousand francs for my day's pleasure!'

Then he relapsed into silence, thoroughly exhausted. Nobody had any saliva left; silence reigned; they all shivered in the icy gust that swept by. And they separated in a sort of bewilderment, shaking hands in a tired fashion. Dubuche was going to dine out; Fagerolles had an appointment; in vain did Jory, Mahoudeau, and Gagniere try to drag Claude to Foucart's, a twenty-five sous' restaurant; Sandoz was already taking him away on his arm, feeling anxious at seeing him so excited.

'Come along, I promised my mother to be back for dinner. You'll take a bit with us. It will be nice; we'll finish the day together.'

They both went down the quay, past the Tuileries, walking side by side in fraternal fashion. But at the Pont des Saints-Peres the painter stopped short.

'What, are you going to leave me?' exclaimed Sandoz.

'Why, I thought you were going to dine with me?'

'No, thanks; I've too bad a headache—I'm going home to bed.'

And he obstinately clung to this excuse.

'All right, old man,' said Sandoz at last, with a smile. 'One doesn't see much of you nowadays. You live in mystery. Go on, old boy, I don't want to be in your way.'

Claude restrained a gesture of impatience; and, letting his friend cross the bridge, he went his way along the quays by himself. He walked on with his arms hanging beside him, with his face turned towards the ground, seeing nothing, but taking long strides like a somnambulist who is guided by instinct. On the Quai de Bourbon, in front of his door, he looked up, full of surprise on seeing a cab waiting at the edge of the foot pavement, and barring his way. And it was with the same automatical step that he entered the doorkeeper's room to take his key.

'I have given it to that lady,' called Madame Joseph from the back of the room. 'She is upstairs.'

'What lady?' he asked in bewilderment.

'That young person. Come, you know very well, the one who always comes.'

He had not the remotest idea whom she meant. Still, in his utter confusion of mind, he decided to go upstairs. The key was in the door, which he slowly opened and closed again.

For a moment Claude stood stock still. Darkness had invaded the studio; a violet dimness, a melancholy gloom fell from the large window, enveloping everything. He could no longer plainly distinguish either the floor, or the furniture, or the sketches; everything that was lying about seemed to be melting in the stagnant waters of a pool. But on the edge of the couch there loomed a dark figure, stiff with waiting, anxious and despairing amid the last gasp of daylight. It was Christine; he recognised her.

She held out her hands, and murmured in a low, halting voice:

'I have been here for three hours; yes, for three hours, all alone, and listening. I took a cab on leaving there, and I only wanted to stay a minute, and get back as soon as possible. But I should have stayed all night; I could not go away without shaking hands with you.'

She continued, and told him of her mad desire to see the picture; her prank of going to the Salon, and how she had tumbled into it amidst the storm of laughter, amidst the jeers of all those people. It was she whom they had hissed like that; it was on herself that they had spat. And seized with wild terror, distracted with grief and shame, she had fled, as if she could feel that laughter lashing her like a whip, until the blood flowed. But she now forgot about herself in her concern for him, upset by the thought of the grief he must feel, for her womanly sensibility magnified the bitterness of the repulse, and she was eager to console.

'Oh, friend, don't grieve! I wished to see and tell you that they are jealous of it all, that I found the picture very nice, and that I feel very proud and happy at having helped you—at being, if ever so little, a part of it.'

Still, motionless, he listened to her as she stammered those tender words in an ardent voice, and suddenly he sank down at her feet, letting his head fall upon her knees, and bursting into tears. All his excitement of the afternoon, all the bravery he had shown amidst the jeering, all his gaiety and violence now collapsed, in a fit of sobs which well nigh choked him. From the gallery where the laughter had buffeted him, he heard it pursuing him through the Champs Elysees, then along the banks of the Seine, and now in his very studio. His strength was utterly spent; he felt weaker than a child; and rolling his head from one side to another he repeated in a stifled voice:

'My God! how I do suffer!'

Then she, with both hands, raised his face to her lips in a transport of passion. She kissed him, and with her warm breath she blew to his very heart the words: 'Be quiet, be quiet, I love you!'

They adored each other; it was inevitable. Near them, on the centre of the table, the lilac she had sent him that morning embalmed the night air, and, alone shiny with lingering light, the scattered particles of gold leaf, wafted from the frame of the big picture, twinkled like a swarming of stars.

VI

THE very next morning, at seven o'clock, Christine was at the studio, her face still flushed by the falsehood which she had told Madame Vanzade about a young friend from Clermont whom she was to meet at the station, and with whom she should spend the day.

Claude, overjoyed by the idea of spending a whole day with her, wanted to take her into the country, far away under the glorious sunlight, so as to have her entirely to himself. She was delighted; they scampered off like lunatics, and reached the St. Lazare Station just in time to catch the Havre train. He knew, beyond Mantes, a little village called Bennecourt, where there was an artists' inn which he had at times invaded with some comrades; and careless as to the two hours' rail, he took her to lunch there, just as he would have taken her to Asnieres. She made very merry over this journey, to which there seemed no end. So much the better if it were to take them to the end of the world! It seemed to them as if evening would never come.

At ten o'clock they alighted at Bonnieres; and there they took the ferry—an old ferry-boat that creaked and grated against its chain—for Bennecourt is situated on the opposite bank of the Seine. It was a splendid May morning, the rippling waters were spangled with gold in the sunlight, the young foliage showed delicately green against the cloudless azure. And, beyond the islets situated at this point of the river, how delightful it was to find the country inn, with its little grocery business attached, its large common room smelling of soapsuds, and its spacious yard full of manure, on which the ducks disported themselves.

'Hallo, Faucheur! we have come to lunch. An omelette, some sausages, and some cheese, eh?'

'Are you going to stay the night, Monsieur Claude?'

'No, no; another time. And some white wine; eh? you know that pinky wine, that grates a bit in the throat.'

Christine had already followed mother Faucheur to the barn-yard, and when the latter came back with her eggs, she asked Claude with her artful peasant's laugh:

'And so now you're married?'

'Well,' replied the painter without hesitation, 'it looks like it since I'm with my wife.'

The lunch was exquisite: the omelette overdone, the sausages too greasy, and the bread so hard that he had to cut it into fingers for Christine lest she should hurt her wrist. They emptied two bottles of wine, and began a third, becoming so gay and noisy that they ended by feeling bewildered in the long room, where they partook of the meal all alone. She, with her cheeks aflame, declared that she was tipsy; it had never happened to her before, and she thought it very funny. Oh! so funny, and she burst into uncontrollable laughter.

'Let us get a breath of air,' she said at last.

'Yes, let's take a stroll. We must start back at four o'clock; so we have three hours before us.'

They went up the village of Bennecourt, whose yellow houses straggle along the river bank for about a couple of thousand yards. All the villagers were in the fields; they only met three cows, led by a little girl. He, with an outstretched arm, told her all about the locality; seemed to know whither he was going, and when they had reached the last house—an old building, standing on the bank of the Seine, just opposite the slopes of Jeufosse—turned round it, and entered a wood of oak trees. It was like the end of the world, roofed in with foliage, through which the sun alone penetrated in narrow tongues of flame. And there they could stroll and talk and kiss in freedom.

When at last it became necessary for them to retrace their steps, they found a peasant standing at the open doorway of the house by the wood-side. Claude recognised the man and called to him:

'Hallo, Porrette! Does that shanty belong to you?'

At this the old fellow, with tears in his eyes, related that it did, and that his tenants had gone away without paying him, leaving their furniture behind. And he invited them inside.

'There's no harm in looking; you may know somebody who would like to take the place. There are many Parisians who'd be glad of it. Three hundred francs a year, with the furniture; it's for nothing, eh?'

They inquisitively followed him inside. It was a rambling old place that seemed to have been cut out of a barn. Downstairs they found an immense kitchen and a dining-room, in which one might have given a dance; upstairs were two rooms also, so vast that one seemed lost in them. As for the furniture, it consisted of a walnut bedstead in one of the rooms, and of a table and some household utensils in the kitchen. But in front of the house the neglected garden was planted with magnificent apricot trees, and overgrown with large rose-bushes in full bloom; while at the back there was a potato field reaching as far as the oak wood, and surrounded by a quick-set hedge.

'I'd leave the potatoes as they are,' said old Porrette.

Claude and Christine looked at each other with one of those sudden cravings for solitude and forgetfulness common to lovers. Ah! how sweet it would be to love one another there in the depths of that nook, so far away from everybody else! But they smiled. Was such a thing to be thought of? They had barely time to catch the train that was to take them back to Paris. And the old peasant, who was Madame Faucheur's father, accompanied them along the river bank, and as they were stepping into the ferry-boat, shouted to them, after quite an inward struggle:

'You know, I'll make it two hundred and fifty francs—send me some people.'

On reaching Paris, Claude accompanied Christine to Madame Vanzade's door. They had grown very sad. They exchanged a long handshake, silent and despairing, not daring to kiss each other there.

A life of torment then began. In the course of a fortnight she was only able to call on three occasions; and she arrived panting, having but a few minutes at her disposal, for it so happened that the old lady had just then become very exacting. Claude questioned her, feeling uneasy at seeing her look so pale and out of sorts, with her eyes bright with fever. Never had that pious house, that vault, without air or light, where she died of boredom, caused her so much suffering. Her fits of giddiness had come upon her again; the want of exercise made the blood throb in her temples. She owned to him that she had fainted one evening in her room, as if she had been suddenly strangled by a leaden hand. Still she did not say a word against her employer; on the contrary, she softened on speaking of her: the poor creature, so old and so infirm, and so kind-hearted, who called her daughter! She felt as if she were committing a wicked act each time that she forsook her to hurry to her lover's.

Two more weeks went by, and the falsehoods with which Christine had to buy, as it were, each hour of liberty became intolerable to her. She loved, she would have liked to proclaim it aloud, and her feelings revolted at having to hide her love like a crime, at having to lie basely, like a servant afraid of being sent away.

At last, one evening in the studio, at the moment when she was leaving, she threw herself with a distracted gesture into Claude's arms, sobbing with suffering and passion. 'Ah! I cannot, I cannot—keep me with you; prevent me from going back.'

He had caught hold of her, and was almost smothering her with kisses.

'You really love me, then! Oh, my darling! But I am so very poor, and you would lose everything. Can I allow you to forego everything like this?'

She sobbed more violently still; her halting words were choked by her tears.

'The money, eh? which she might leave me? Do you think I calculate? I have never thought of it, I swear it to you! Ah! let her keep everything and let me be free! I have no ties, no relatives; can't I be allowed to do as I like?'

Then, in a last sob of agony: 'Ah, you are right; it's wrong to desert the poor woman. Ah! I despise myself. I wish I had the strength. But I love you too much, I suffer too much; surely you won't let me die?'

'Oh!' he cried in a passionate transport. 'Let others die, there are but we two on earth.'

It was all so much madness. Christine left Madame Vanzade in the most brutal fashion. She took her trunk away the very next morning. She and Claude had at once remembered the deserted old house at Bennecourt, the giant rose-bushes, the immense rooms. Ah! to go away, to go away without the loss of an hour, to live at the world's end in all the bliss of their passion! She clapped her hands for very joy. He, still smarting from his defeat, at the Salon, and anxious to recover from it, longed for complete rest in the country; yonder he would find the real 'open air,' he would work away with grass up to his neck and bring back masterpieces. In a couple of days everything was ready, the studio relinquished, the few household chattels conveyed to the railway station. Besides, they met with a slice of luck, for Papa Malgras gave some five hundred francs for a score of sketches, selected from among the waifs and strays of the removal. Thus they would be able to live like princes. Claude still had his income of a thousand francs a year; Christine, too, had saved some money, besides having her outfit and dresses. And away they went; it was perfect flight, friends avoided and not even warned by letter, Paris despised and forsaken amid laughter expressive of relief.

June was drawing to a close, and the rain fell in torrents during the week they spent in arranging their new home. They discovered that old Porrette had taken away half the kitchen utensils before signing the agreement. But that matter did not affect them. They took a delight in dabbling about amidst the showers; they made journeys three leagues long, as far as Vernon, to buy plates and saucepans, which they brought back with them in triumph. At last they got shipshape, occupying one of the upstairs rooms, abandoning the other to the mice, and transforming the dining-room into a studio; and, above all, as happy as children at taking their meals in the kitchen off a deal table, near the hearth where the soup sang in the pot. To wait upon them they engaged a girl from the village, who came every morning and went home at night. She was called Melie, she was a niece of the Faucheurs, and her stupidity delighted them. In fact, one could not have found a greater idiot in the whole region.

The sun having shown itself again, some delightful days followed, the months slipping away amid monotonous felicity. They never knew the date, they were for ever mixing up the days of the week. Every day, after the second breakfast, came endless strolls, long walks across the tableland planted with apple trees, over the grassy country roads, along the banks of the Seine through the meadows as far as La Roche-Guyon; and there were still more distant explorations, perfect journeys on the opposite side of the river, amid the cornfields of Bonnieres and Jeufosse. A person who was obliged to leave the neighbourhood sold them an old boat for thirty francs, so that they also had the river at their disposal, and, like savages, became seized with a passion for it, living on its waters for days together, rowing about, discovering new countries, and lingering for hours under the willows on the banks, or in little creeks, dark with shade. Betwixt the eyots scattered along the stream there was a shifting and mysterious city, a network of passages along which, with the lower branches of the trees caressingly brushing against them, they softly glided, alone, as it were, in the world, with the ringdoves and the kingfishers. He at times had to spring out upon the sand, with bare legs, to push off the skiff. She bravely plied the oars, bent on forcing her way against the strongest currents, and exulting in her strength. And in the evening they ate cabbage soup in the kitchen, laughing at Melie's stupidity, as they had laughed at it the day before; to begin the morrow just in the same fashion.

Every evening, however, Christine said to Claude:

'Now, my dear, you must promise me one thing—that you'll set to work to-morrow.'

'Yes, to-morrow; I give you my word.'

'And you know if you don't, I shall really get angry this time. Is it I who prevent you?'

'You! what an idea. Since I came here to work—dash it all! you'll see to-morrow.'

On the morrow they started off again in the skiff; she looked at him with an embarrassed smile when she saw that he took neither canvas nor colours. Then she kissed him, laughing, proud of her power, moved by the constant sacrifice he made to her. And then came fresh affectionate remonstrances: 'To-morrow, ah! to-morrow she would tie him to his easel!'

However, Claude did make some attempts at work. He began a study of the slopes of Jeufosse, with the Seine in the foreground; but Christine followed him to the islet where he had installed himself, and sat down on the grass close to him with parted lips, her eyes watching the blue sky. And she looked so pretty there amidst the verdure, in that solitude, where nothing broke the silence but the rippling of the water, that every minute he relinquished his palette to nestle by her side. On another occasion, he was altogether charmed by an old farmhouse, shaded by some antiquated apple trees which had grown to the size of oaks. He came thither two days in succession, but on the third Christine took him to the market at Bonnieres to buy some hens. The next day was also lost; the canvas had dried; then he grew impatient in trying to work at it again, and finally abandoned it altogether. Throughout the warm weather he thus made but a pretence to work—barely roughing out little bits of painting, which he laid aside on the first pretext, without an effort at perseverance. His passion for toil, that fever of former days that had made him rise at daybreak to battle with his rebellious art, seemed to have gone; a reaction of indifference and laziness had set in, and he vegetated delightfully, like one who is recovering from some severe illness.

But Christine lived indeed. All the latent passion of her nature burst into being. She was indeed an amorosa, a child of nature and of love.

Thus their days passed by and solitude did not prove irksome to them. No desire for diversion, of paying or receiving visits, as yet made them look beyond themselves. Such hours as she did not spend near him, she employed in household cares, turning the house upside down with great cleanings, which Melie executed under her supervision, and falling into fits of reckless activity, which led her to engage in personal combats with the few saucepans in the kitchen. The garden especially occupied her; provided with pruning shears, careless of the thorns which lacerated her hands, she reaped harvests of roses from the giant rose-bushes; and she gave herself a thorough back-ache in gathering the apricots, which she sold for two hundred francs to some of the Englishmen who scoured the district every year. She was very proud of her bargain, and seriously talked of living upon the garden produce. Claude cared less for gardening; he had placed his couch in the large dining-room, transformed into a studio; and he stretched himself upon it, and through the open window watched her sow and plant. There was profound peace, the certainty that nobody would come, that no ring at the bell would disturb them at any moment of the day. Claude carried this fear of coming into contact with people so far as to avoid passing Faucheur's inn, for he dreaded lest he might run against some party of chums from Paris. Not a soul came, however, throughout the livelong summer. And every night as they went upstairs, he repeated that, after all, it was deuced lucky.

There was, however, a secret sore in the depths of his happiness. After their flight from Paris, Sandoz had learnt their address, and had written to ask whether he might go to see Claude, but the latter had not answered the letter, and so coolness had followed, and the old friendship seemed dead. Christine was grieved at this, for she realised well enough that he had broken off all intercourse with his comrades for her sake. She constantly reverted to the subject; she did not want to estrange him from his friends, and indeed she insisted that he should invite them. But, though he promised to set matters right, he did nothing of the kind. It was all over; what was the use of raking up the past?

However, money having become scarce towards the latter days of July, he was obliged to go to Paris to sell Papa Malgras half a dozen of his old studies, and Christine, on accompanying him to the station, made him solemnly promise that he would go to see Sandoz. In the evening she was there again, at the Bonnieres Station, waiting for him.

'Well, did you see him? did you embrace each other?'

He began walking by her side in silent embarrassment. Then he answered in a husky voice:

'No; I hadn't time.'

Thereupon, sorely distressed, with two big tears welling to her eyes, she replied:

'You grieve me very much indeed.'

Then, as they were walking under the trees, he kissed her, crying also, and begging her not to make him sadder still. 'Could people alter life? Did it not suffice that they were happy together?'

During the earlier months they only once met some strangers. This occurred a little above Bennecourt, in the direction of La Roche-Guyon. They were strolling along a deserted, wooded lane, one of those delightful dingle paths of the region, when, at a turning, they came upon three middle-class people out for a walk—father, mother, and daughter. It precisely happened that, believing themselves to be quite alone, Claude and Christine had passed their arms round each other's waists; she, bending towards him, was offering her lips; while he laughingly protruded his; and their surprise was so sudden that they did not change their attitude, but, still clasped together, advanced at the same slow pace. The amazed family remained transfixed against one of the side banks, the father stout and apoplectic, the mother as thin as a knife-blade, and the daughter, a mere shadow, looking like a sick bird moulting—all three of them ugly, moreover, and but scantily provided with the vitiated blood of their race. They looked disgraceful amidst the throbbing life of nature, beneath the glorious sun. And all at once the sorry girl, who with stupefied eyes thus watched love passing by, was pushed off by her father, dragged along by her mother, both beside themselves, exasperated by the sight of that embrace, and asking whether there was no longer any country police, while, still without hurrying, the lovers went off triumphantly in their glory.

Claude, however, was wondering and searching his memory. Where had he previously seen those heads, so typical of bourgeois degeneracy, those flattened, crabbed faces reeking of millions earned at the expense of the poor? It was assuredly in some important circumstance of his life. And all at once he remembered; they were the Margaillans, the man was that building contractor whom Dubuche had promenaded through the Salon of the Rejected, and who had laughed in front of his picture with the roaring laugh of a fool. A couple of hundred steps further on, as he and Christine emerged from the lane and found themselves in front of a large estate, where a big white building stood, girt with fine trees, they learnt from an old peasant woman that La Richaudiere, as it was called, had belonged to the Margaillans for three years past. They had paid fifteen hundred thousand francs for it, and had just spent more than a million in improvements.

'That part of the country won't see much of us in future,' said Claude, as they returned to Bennecourt. 'Those monsters spoil the landscape.'

Towards the end of the summer, an important event changed the current of their lives. Christine was enceinte. At first, both she and Claude felt amazed and worried. Now for the first time they seemed to dread some terrible complications in their life. Later on, however, they gradually grew accustomed to the thought of what lay before them and made all necessary preparations. But the winter proved a terribly inclement one, and Christine was compelled to remain indoors, whilst Claude went walking all alone over the frost-bound, clanking roads. And he, finding himself in solitude during these walks, after months of constant companionship, wondered at the way his life had turned, against his own will, as it were. He had never wished for home life even with her; had he been consulted, he would have expressed his horror of it; it had come about, however, and could not be undone, for—without mentioning the child—he was one of those who lack the courage to break off. This fate had evidently been in store for him, he felt; he had been destined to succumb to the first woman who did not feel ashamed of him. The hard ground resounded beneath his wooden-soled shoes, and the blast froze the current of his reverie, which lingered on vague thoughts, on his luck of having, at any rate, met with a good and honest girl, on how cruelly he would have suffered had it been otherwise. And then his love came back to him; he hurried home to take Christine in his trembling arms as if he had been in danger of losing her.

The child, a boy, was born about the middle of February, and at once began to revolutionise the home, for Christine, who had shown herself such an active housewife, proved to be a very awkward nurse. She failed to become motherly, despite her kind heart and her distress at the sight of the slightest pimple. She soon grew weary, gave in, and called for Melie, who only made matters worse by her gaping stupidity. The father had to come to the rescue, and proved still more awkward than the two women. The discomfort which needlework had caused Christine of old, her want of aptitude as regards the usual occupations of her sex, revived amid the cares that the baby required. The child was ill-kept, and grew up anyhow in the garden, or in the large rooms left untidy in sheer despair, amidst broken toys, uncleanliness and destruction. And when matters became too bad altogether, Christine could only throw herself upon the neck of the man she loved. She was pre-eminently an amorosa and would have sacrificed her son for his father twenty times over.

It was at this period, however, that Claude resumed work a little. The winter was drawing to a close; he did not know how to spend the bright sunny mornings, since Christine could no longer go out before mid-day on account of Jacques, whom they had named thus after his maternal grandfather, though they neglected to have him christened. Claude worked in the garden, at first, in a random way: made a rough sketch of the lines of apricot trees, roughed out the giant rose-bushes, composed some bits of 'still life,' out of four apples, a bottle, and a stoneware jar, disposed on a table-napkin. This was only to pass his time. But afterwards he warmed to his work; the idea of painting a figure in the full sunlight ended by haunting him; and from that moment his wife became his victim, she herself agreeable enough, offering herself, feeling happy at affording him pleasure, without as yet understanding what a terrible rival she was giving herself in art. He painted her a score of times, dressed in white, in red, amidst the verdure, standing, walking, or reclining on the grass, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, or bare-headed, under a parasol, the cherry-tinted silk of which steeped her features in a pinky glow. He never felt wholly satisfied; he scratched out the canvases after two or three sittings, and at once began them afresh, obstinately sticking to the same subject. Only a few studies, incomplete, but charmingly indicated in a vigorous style, were saved from the palette-knife, and hung against the walls of the dining-room.

And after Christine it became Jacques' turn to pose. They stripped him to the skin, like a little St. John the Baptist, on warm days, and stretched him on a blanket, where he was told not to stir. But devil a bit could they make him keep still. Getting frisky, in the sunlight, he crowed and kicked with his tiny pink feet in the air, rolling about and turning somersaults. The father, after laughing, became angry, and swore at the tiresome mite, who would not keep quiet for a minute. Who ever heard of trifling with painting? Then the mother made big eyes at the little one, and held him while the painter quickly sketched an arm or a leg. Claude obstinately kept at it for weeks, tempted as he felt by the pretty tones of that childish skin. It was not as a father, but as an artist, that he gloated over the boy as the subject for a masterpiece, blinking his eyes the while, and dreaming of some wonderful picture he would paint. And he renewed the experiment again and again, watching the lad for days, and feeling furious when the little scamp would not go to sleep at times when he, Claude, might so well have painted him.

One day, when Jacques was sobbing, refusing to keep still, Christine gently remarked:

'My dear, you tire the poor pet.'

At this Claude burst forth, full of remorse:

'After all! you are right; I'm a fool with this painting of mine. Children are not intended for that sort of thing.'

The spring and summer sped by amidst great quietude. They went out less often; they had almost given up the boat, which finished rotting against the bank, for it was quite a job to take the little one with them among the islets. But they often strolled along the banks of the Seine, without, however, going farther afield than a thousand yards or so. Claude, tired of the everlasting views in the garden, now attempted some sketches by the river-side, and on such days Christine went to fetch him with the child, sitting down to watch him paint, until they all three returned home with flagging steps, beneath the ashen dusk of waning daylight. One afternoon Claude was surprised to see Christine bring with her the old album which she had used as a young girl. She joked about it, and explained that to sit behind him like that had roused in her a wish to work herself. Her voice was a little unsteady as she spoke; the truth was that she felt a longing to share his labour, since this labour took him away from her more and more each day. She drew and ventured to wash in two or three water-colours in the careful style of a school-girl. Then, discouraged by his smiles, feeling that no community of ideas would be arrived at on that ground, she once more put her album aside, making him promise to give her some lessons in painting whenever he should have time.

Besides, she thought his more recent pictures very pretty. After that year of rest in the open country, in the full sunlight, he painted with fresh and clearer vision, as it were, with a more harmonious and brighter colouring. He had never before been able to treat reflections so skilfully, or possessed a more correct perception of men and things steeped in diffuse light. And henceforth, won over by that feast of colours, she would have declared it all capital if he would only have condescended to finish his work a little more, and if she had not remained nonplussed now and then before a mauve ground or a blue tree, which upset all her preconceived notions of colour. One day when she ventured upon a bit of criticism, precisely about an azure-tinted poplar, he made her go to nature and note for herself the delicate bluishness of the foliage. It was true enough, the tree was blue; but in her inmost heart she did not surrender, and condemned reality; there ought not to be any blue trees in nature.

She no longer spoke but gravely of the studies hanging in the dining-room. Art was returning into their lives, and it made her muse. When she saw him go off with his bag, his portable easel, and his sunshade, it often happened that she flung herself upon his neck, asking:

'You love me, say?'

'How silly you are! Why shouldn't I love you?'

'Then kiss me, since you love me, kiss me a great deal, a great deal.'

Then accompanying him as far as the road, she added:

'And mind you work; you know that I have never prevented you from working. Go, go; I am very pleased when you work.'

Anxiety seemed to seize hold of Claude, when the autumn of the second year tinged the leaves yellow, and ushered in the cold weather. The season happened to be abominable; a fortnight of pouring rain kept him idle at home; and then fog came at every moment, hindering his work. He sat in front of the fire, out of sorts; he never spoke of Paris, but the city rose up over yonder, on the horizon, the winter city, with its gaslamps flaring already at five o'clock, its gatherings of friends, spurring each other on to emulation, and its life of ardent production, which even the frosts of December could not slacken. He went there thrice in one month, on the pretext of seeing Malgras, to whom he had, again, sold a few small pictures. He no longer avoided passing in front of Faucheur's inn; he even allowed himself to be waylaid at times by old Porrette, and to accept a glass of white wine at the inn, and his glance scoured the room as if, despite the season, he had been looking for some comrades of yore, who had arrived there, perchance, that morning. He lingered as if awaiting them; then, in despair at his solitude, he returned home, stifling with all that was fermenting within him, ill at having nobody to whom he might shout the thoughts which made his brain almost burst.

However, the winter went by, and Claude had the consolation of being able to paint some lovely snow scenes. A third year was beginning, when, towards the close of May, an unexpected meeting filled him with emotion. He had that morning climbed up to the plateau to find a subject, having at last grown tired of the banks of the Seine; and at the bend of a road he stopped short in amazement on seeing Dubuche, in a silk hat, and carefully-buttoned frock coat, coming towards him, between the double row of elder hedges.

'What! is it you?'

The architect stammered from sheer vexation:

'Yes, I am going to pay a visit. It's confoundedly idiotic in the country, eh? But it can't be helped. There are certain things one's obliged to do. And you live near here, eh? I knew—that is to say, I didn't. I had been told something about it, but I thought it was on the opposite side, farther down.'

Claude, very much moved at seeing him, helped him out of his difficulty.

'All right, all right, old man, there is no need to apologise. I am the most guilty party. Ah! it's a long while since we saw one another! If you knew what a thump my heart gave when I saw your nose appear from behind the leaves!'

Then he took his arm and accompanied him, giggling with pleasure, while the other, in his constant worry about his future, which always made him talk about himself, at once began speaking of his prospects. He had just become a first-class pupil at the School, after securing the regulation 'honourable mentions,' with infinite trouble. But his success left him as perplexed as ever. His parents no longer sent him a penny, they wailed about their poverty so much that he might have to support them in his turn. He had given up the idea of competing for the Prix de Rome, feeling certain of being beaten in the effort, and anxious to earn his living. And he was weary already; sick at scouring the town, at earning twenty-five sous an hour from ignorant architects, who treated him like a hodman. What course should he adopt? How was he to guess at the shortest route? He might leave the School; he would get a lift from his master, the influential Dequersonniere, who liked him for his docility and diligence; only what a deal of trouble and uncertainty there would still be before him! And he bitterly complained of the Government schools, where one slaved away for years, and which did not even provide a position for all those whom they cast upon the pavement.

Suddenly he stopped in the middle of the path. The elder hedges were leading to an open plain, and La Richaudiere appeared amid its lofty trees.

'Hold hard! of course,' exclaimed Claude, 'I hadn't thought about it—you're going to that shanty. Oh! the baboons; there's a lot of ugly mugs, if you like!'

Dubuche, looking vexed at this outburst of artistic feeling, protested stiffly. 'All the same, Papa Margaillan, idiot as he seems to you, is a first-rate man of business. You should see him in his building-yards, among the houses he runs up, as active as the very fiend, showing marvellous good management, and a wonderful scent as to the right streets to build and what materials to buy! Besides, one does not earn millions without becoming a gentleman. And then, too, it would be very silly of me not to be polite to a man who can be useful to me.'

While talking, he barred the narrow path, preventing his friend from advancing further—no doubt from a fear of being compromised by being seen in his company, and in order to make him understand that they ought to separate there.

Claude was on the point of inquiring about their comrades in Paris, but he kept silent. Not even a word was said respecting Christine, and he was reluctantly deciding to quit Dubuche, holding out his hand to take leave, when, in spite of himself, this question fell from his quivering lips:

'And is Sandoz all right?'

'Yes, he's pretty well. I seldom see him. He spoke to me about you last month. He is still grieved at your having shown us the door.'

'But I didn't show you the door,' exclaimed Claude, beside himself. 'Come and see me, I beg of you. I shall be so glad!'

'All right, then, we'll come. I'll tell him to come, I give you my word—good-bye, old man, good-bye; I'm in a hurry.'

And Dubuche went off towards La Richaudiere, whilst Claude watched his figure dwindle as he crossed the cultivated plain, until nothing remained but the shiny silk of his hat and the black spot of his coat. The young man returned home slowly, his heart bursting with nameless sadness. However, he said nothing about this meeting to Christine.

A week later she had gone to Faucheur's to buy a pound of vermicelli, and was lingering on her way back, gossiping with a neighbour, with her child on her arm, when a gentleman who alighted from the ferry-boat approached and asked her:

'Does not Monsieur Claude Lantier live near here?'

She was taken aback, and simply answered:

'Yes, monsieur; if you'll kindly follow me—'

They walked on side by side for about a hundred yards. The stranger, who seemed to know her, had glanced at her with a good-natured smile; but as she hurried on, trying to hide her embarrassment by looking very grave, he remained silent. She opened the door and showed the visitor into the studio, exclaiming:

'Claude, here is somebody for you.'

Then a loud cry rang out; the two men were already in each other's arms.

'Oh, my good old Pierre! how kind of you to come! And Dubuche?'

'He was prevented at the last moment by some business, and he sent me a telegram to go without him.'

'All right, I half expected it; but you are here. By the thunder of heaven, I am glad!'

And, turning towards Christine, who was smiling, sharing their delight:

'It's true, I didn't tell you. But the other day I met Dubuche, who was going up yonder, to the place where those monsters live—'

But he stopped short again, and then with a wild gesture shouted:

'I'm losing my wits, upon my word. You have never spoken to each other, and I leave you there like that. My dear, you see this gentleman? He's my old chum, Pierre Sandoz, whom I love like a brother. And you, my boy; let me introduce my wife. And you have got to give each other a kiss.'

Christine began to laugh outright, and tendered her cheek heartily. Sandoz had pleased her at once with his good-natured air, his sound friendship, the fatherly sympathy with which he looked at her. Tears of emotion came to her eyes as he kept both her hands in his, saying:

'It is very good of you to love Claude, and you must love each other always, for love is, after all, the best thing in life.'

Then, bending to kiss the little one, whom she had on her arm, he added: 'So there's one already!'

While Christine, preparing lunch, turned the house up-side down, Claude retained Sandoz in the studio. In a few words he told him the whole of the story, who she was, how they had met each other, and what had led them to start housekeeping together, and he seemed to be surprised when his friend asked him why they did not get married. In faith, why? Because they had never even spoken about it, because they would certainly be neither more nor less happy; in short it was a matter of no consequence whatever.

'Well,' said the other, 'it makes no difference to me; but, if she was a good and honest girl when she came to you, you ought to marry her.'

'Why, I'll marry her whenever she likes, old man. Surely I don't mean to leave her in the lurch!'

Sandoz then began to marvel at the studies hanging on the walls. Ha, the scamp had turned his time to good account! What accuracy of colouring! What a dash of real sunlight! And Claude, who listened to him, delighted, and laughing proudly, was just going to question him about the comrades in Paris, about what they were all doing, when Christine reappeared, exclaiming: 'Make haste, the eggs are on the table.'

They lunched in the kitchen, and an extraordinary lunch it was; a dish of fried gudgeons after the boiled eggs; then the beef from the soup of the night before, arranged in salad fashion, with potatoes, and a red herring. It was delicious; there was the pungent and appetising smell of the herring which Melie had upset on the live embers, and the song of the coffee, as it passed, drop by drop, into the pot standing on the range; and when the dessert appeared—some strawberries just gathered, and a cream cheese from a neighbour's dairy—they gossiped and gossiped with their elbows squarely set on the table. In Paris? Well, to tell the truth, the comrades were doing nothing very original in Paris. And yet they were fighting their way, jostling each other in order to get first to the front. Of course, the absent ones missed their chance; it was as well to be there if one did not want to be altogether forgotten. But was not talent always talent? Wasn't a man always certain to get on with strength and will? Ah! yes, it was a splendid dream to live in the country, to accumulate masterpieces, and then, one day, to crush Paris by simply opening one's trunks.

In the evening, when Claude accompanied Sandoz to the station, the latter said to him:

'That reminds me, I wanted to tell you something. I think I am going to get married.'

The painter burst out laughing.

'Ah, you wag, now I understand why you gave me a lecture this morning.'

While waiting for the train to arrive, they went on chatting. Sandoz explained his ideas on marriage, which, in middle-class fashion, he considered an indispensable condition for good work, substantial orderly labour, among great modern producers. The theory of woman being a destructive creature—one who killed an artist, pounded his heart, and fed upon his brain—was a romantic idea against which facts protested. Besides, as for himself, he needed an affection that would prove the guardian of his tranquillity, a loving home, where he might shut himself up, so as to devote his whole life to the huge work which he ever dreamt of. And he added that everything depended upon a man's choice—that he believed he had found what he had been looking for, an orphan, the daughter of petty tradespeople, without a penny, but handsome and intelligent. For the last six months, after resigning his clerkship, he had embraced journalism, by which he gained a larger income. He had just moved his mother to a small house at Batignolles, where the three would live together—two women to love him, and he strong enough to provide for the household.

'Get married, old man,' said Claude. 'One should act according to one's feelings. And good-bye, for here's your train. Don't forget your promise to come and see us again.'

Sandoz returned very often. He dropped in at odd times whenever his newspaper work allowed him, for he was still free, as he was not to be married till the autumn. Those were happy days, whole afternoons of mutual confidences when all their old determination to secure fame revived.

One day, while Sandoz was alone with Claude on an island of the Seine, both of them lying there with their eyes fixed on the sky, he told the painter of his vast ambition, confessed himself aloud.

'Journalism, let me tell you, is only a battle-ground. A man must live, and he has to fight to do so. Then, again, that wanton, the Press, despite the unpleasant phases of the profession, is after all a tremendous power, a resistless weapon in the hands of a fellow with convictions. But if I am obliged to avail myself of journalism, I don't mean to grow grey in it! Oh, dear no! And, besides, I've found what I wanted, a machine that'll crush one with work, something I'm going to plunge into, perhaps never to come out of it.'

Silence reigned amid the foliage, motionless in the dense heat. He resumed speaking more slowly and in jerky phrases:

'To study man as he is, not man the metaphysical puppet but physiological man, whose nature is determined by his surroundings, and to show all his organism in full play. That's my idea! Is it not farcical that some should constantly and exclusively study the functions of the brain on the pretext that the brain alone is the noble part of our organism? Thought, thought, confound it all! thought is the product of the whole body. Let them try to make a brain think by itself alone; see what becomes of the nobleness of the brain when the stomach is ailing! No, no, it's idiotic; there is no philosophy nor science in it! We are positivists, evolutionists, and yet we are to stick to the literary lay-figures of classic times, and continue disentangling the tangled locks of pure reason! He who says psychologist says traitor to truth. Besides, psychology, physiology, it all signifies nothing. The one has become blended with the other, and both are but one nowadays, the mechanism of man leading to the sum total of his functions. Ah, the formula is there, our modern revolution has no other basis; it means the certain death of old society, the birth of a new one, and necessarily the upspringing of a new art in a new soil. Yes, people will see what literature will sprout forth for the coming century of science and democracy.'

His cry uprose and was lost in the immense vault of heaven. Not a breath stirred; there was nought but the silent ripple of the river past the willows. And Sandoz turned abruptly towards his companion, and said to him, face to face:

'So I have found what I wanted for myself. Oh, it isn't much, a little corner of study only, but one that should be sufficient for a man's life, even when his ambition is over-vast. I am going to take a family, and I shall study its members, one by one, whence they come, whither they go, how they re-act one upon another—in short, I shall have mankind in a small compass, the way in which mankind grows and behaves. On the other hand, I shall set my men and women in some given period of history, which will provide me with the necessary surroundings and circumstances,—you understand, eh? a series of books, fifteen, twenty books, episodes that will cling together, although each will have a separate framework, a series of novels with which I shall be able to build myself a house for my old days, if they don't crush me!'

He fell on his back again, spread out his arms on the grass, as if he wanted to sink into the earth, laughing and joking all the while.

'Oh, beneficent earth, take me unto thee, thou who art our common mother, our only source of life! thou the eternal, the immortal one, in whom circulates the soul of the world, the sap that spreads even into the stones, and makes the trees themselves our big, motionless brothers! Yes, I wish to lose myself in thee; it is thou that I feel beneath my limbs, clasping and inflaming me; thou alone shalt appear in my work as the primary force, the means and the end, the immense ark in which everything becomes animated with the breath of every being!'

Though begun as mere pleasantry, with all the bombast of lyrical emphasis, the invocation terminated in a cry of ardent conviction, quivering with profound poetical emotion, and Sandoz's eyes grew moist; and, to hide how much he felt moved, he added, roughly, with a sweeping gesture that took in the whole scene around:

'How idiotic it is! a soul for every one of us, when there is that big soul there!'

Claude, who had disappeared amid the grass, had not stirred. After a fresh spell of silence he summed up everything:

'That's it, old boy! Run them through, all of them. Only you'll get trounced.'

'Oh,' said Sandoz, rising up and stretching himself, 'my bones are too hard. They'll smash their own wrists. Let's go back; I don't want to miss the train.'

Christine had taken a great liking to him, seeing him so robust and upright in his doings, and she plucked up courage at last to ask a favour of him: that of standing godfather to Jacques. True, she never set foot in church now, but why shouldn't the lad be treated according to custom? What influenced her above all was the idea of giving the boy a protector in this godfather, whom she found so serious and sensible, even amidst the exuberance of his strength. Claude expressed surprise, but gave his consent with a shrug of the shoulders. And the christening took place; they found a godmother, the daughter of a neighbour, and they made a feast of it, eating a lobster, which was brought from Paris.

That very day, as they were saying good-bye, Christine took Sandoz aside, and said, in an imploring voice:

'Do come again soon, won't you? He is bored.'

In fact, Claude had fits of profound melancholy. He abandoned his work, went out alone, and prowled in spite of himself about Faucheur's inn, at the spot where the ferry-boat landed its passengers, as if ever expecting to see all Paris come ashore there. He had Paris on the brain; he went there every month and returned desolate, unable to work. Autumn came, then winter, a very wet and muddy winter, and he spent it in a state of morose torpidity, bitter even against Sandoz, who, having married in October, could no longer come to Bennecourt so often. Claude only seemed to wake up at each of the other's visits; deriving a week's excitement from them, and never ceasing to comment feverishly about the news brought from yonder. He, who formerly had hidden his regret of Paris, nowadays bewildered Christine with the way in which he chatted to her from morn till night about things she was quite ignorant of, and people she had never seen. When Jacques fell asleep, there were endless comments between the parents as they sat by the fireside. Claude grew passionate, and Christine had to give her opinion and to pronounce judgment on all sorts of matters.

Was not Gagniere an idiot for stultifying his brain with music, he who might have developed so conscientious a talent as a landscape painter? It was said that he was now taking lessons on the piano from a young lady—the idea, at his age! What did she, Christine, think of it? And Jory had been trying to get into the good graces of Irma Becot again, ever since she had secured that little house in the Rue de Moscou! Christine knew those two; two jades who well went together, weren't they? But the most cunning of the whole lot was Fagerolles, to whom he, Claude, would tell a few plain truths and no mistake, when he met him. What! the turn-coat had competed for the Prix de Rome, which, of course, he had managed to miss. To think of it. That fellow did nothing but jeer at the School, and talked about knocking everything down, yet took part in official competitions! Ah, there was no doubt but that the itching to succeed, the wish to pass over one's comrades and be hailed by idiots, impelled some people to very dirty tricks. Surely Christine did not mean to stick up for him, eh? She was not sufficiently a philistine to defend him. And when she had agreed with everything Claude said, he always came back with nervous laughter to the same story—which he thought exceedingly comical—the story of Mahoudeau and Chaine, who, between them, had killed little Jabouille, the husband of Mathilde, that dreadful herbalist woman. Yes, killed the poor consumptive fellow with kindness one evening when he had had a fainting fit, and when, on being called in by the woman, they had taken to rubbing him with so much vigour that he had remained dead in their hands.

And if Christine failed to look amused at all this, Claude rose up and said, in a churlish voice: 'Oh, you; nothing will make you laugh—let's go to bed.'

He still adored her, but she no longer sufficed. Another torment had invincibly seized hold of him—the passion for art, the thirst for fame.

In the spring, Claude, who, with an affectation of disdain, had sworn he would never again exhibit, began to worry a great deal about the Salon. Whenever he saw Sandoz he questioned him about what the comrades were going to send. On the opening day he went to Paris and came back the same evening, stern and trembling. There was only a bust by Mahoudeau, said he, good enough, but of no importance. A small landscape by Gagniere, admitted among the ruck, was also of a pretty sunny tone. Then there was nothing else, nothing but Fagerolles' picture—an actress in front of her looking-glass painting her face. He had not mentioned it at first; but he now spoke of it with indignant laughter. What a trickster that Fagerolles was! Now that he had missed his prize he was no longer afraid to exhibit—he threw the School overboard; but you should have seen how skilfully he managed it, what compromises he effected, painting in a style which aped the audacity of truth without possessing one original merit. And it would be sure to meet with success, the bourgeois were only too fond of being titillated while the artist pretended to hustle them. Ah! it was time indeed for a true artist to appear in that mournful desert of a Salon, amid all the knaves and the fools. And, by heavens, what a place might be taken there!

Christine, who listened while he grew angry, ended by faltering:

'If you liked, we might go back to Paris.'

'Who was talking of that?' he shouted. 'One can never say a word to you but you at once jump to false conclusions.'

Six weeks afterwards he heard some news that occupied his mind for a week. His friend Dubuche was going to marry Mademoiselle Regine Margaillan, the daughter of the owner of La Richaudiere. It was an intricate story, the details of which surprised and amused him exceedingly. First of all, that cur Dubuche had managed to hook a medal for a design of a villa in a park, which he had exhibited; that of itself was already sufficiently amusing, as it was said that the drawing had been set on its legs by his master, Dequersonniere, who had quietly obtained this medal for him from the jury over which he presided. Then the best of it was that this long-awaited reward had decided the marriage. Ah! it would be nice trafficking if medals were now awarded to settle needy pupils in rich families! Old Margaillan, like all parvenus, had set his heart upon having a son-in-law who could help him, by bringing authentic diplomas and fashionable clothes into the business; and for some time past he had had his eyes on that young man, that pupil of the School of Arts, whose notes were excellent, who was so persevering, and so highly recommended by his masters. The medal aroused his enthusiasm; he at once gave the young fellow his daughter and took him as a partner, who would soon increase his millions now lying idle, since he knew all that was needful in order to build properly. Besides, by this arrangement poor Regine, always low-spirited and ailing, would at least have a husband in perfect health.

'Well, a man must be fond of money to marry that wretched flayed kitten,' repeated Claude.

And as Christine compassionately took the girl's part, he added:

'But I am not down upon her. So much the better if the marriage does not finish her off. She is certainly not to be blamed, if her father, the ex-stonemason, had the stupid ambition to marry a girl of the middle-classes. Her father, you know, has the vitiated blood of generations of drunkards in his veins, and her mother comes of a stock in the last stages of degeneracy. Ah! they may coin money, but that doesn't prevent them from being excrescences on the face of the earth!'

He was growing ferocious, and Christine had to clasp him in her arms and kiss him, and laugh, to make him once more the good-natured fellow of earlier days. Then, having calmed down, he professed to understand things, saying that he approved of the marriages of his old chums. It was true enough, all three had taken wives unto themselves. How funny life was!

Once more the summer drew to an end; it was the fourth spent at Bennecourt. In reality they could never be happier than now; life was peaceful and cheap in the depths of that village. Since they had been there they had never lacked money. Claude's thousand francs a year and the proceeds of the few pictures he had sold had sufficed for their wants; they had even put something by, and had bought some house linen. On the other hand, little Jacques, by now two years and a half old, got on admirably in the country. From morning till night he rolled about the garden, ragged and dirt-begrimed, but growing as he listed in robust ruddy health. His mother often did not know where to take hold of him when she wished to wash him a bit. However, when she saw him eat and sleep well she did not trouble much; she reserved her anxious affection for her big child of an artist, whose despondency filled her with anguish. The situation grew worse each day, and although they lived on peacefully without any cause for grief, they, nevertheless, drifted to melancholy, to a discomfort that showed itself in constant irritation.

It was all over with their first delights of country life. Their rotten boat, staved in, had gone to the bottom of the Seine. Besides, they did not even think of availing themselves of the skiff that the Faucheurs had placed at their disposal. The river bored them; they had grown too lazy to row. They repeated their exclamations of former times respecting certain delightful nooks in the islets, but without ever being tempted to return and gaze upon them. Even the walks by the river-side had lost their charm—one was broiled there in summer, and one caught cold there in winter. And as for the plateau, the vast stretch of land planted with apple trees that overlooked the village, it became like a distant country, something too far off for one to be silly enough to risk one's legs there. Their house also annoyed them—that barracks where they had to take their meals amid the greasy refuse of the kitchen, where their room seemed a meeting-place for the winds from every point of the compass. As a finishing stroke of bad luck, the apricots had failed that year, and the finest of the giant rose-bushes, which were very old, had been smitten with some canker or other and died. How sorely time and habit wore everything away! How eternal nature herself seemed to age amidst that satiated weariness. But the worst was that the painter himself was getting disgusted with the country, no longer finding a single subject to arouse his enthusiasm, but scouring the fields with a mournful tramp, as if the whole place were a void, whose life he had exhausted without leaving as much as an overlooked tree, an unforeseen effect of light to interest him. No, it was over, frozen, he should never again be able to paint anything worth looking at in that confounded country!

October came with its rain-laden sky. On one of the first wet evenings Claude flew into a passion because dinner was not ready. He turned that goose of a Melie out of the house and clouted Jacques, who got between his legs. Whereupon, Christine, crying, kissed him and said:

'Let's go, oh, let us go back to Paris.'

He disengaged himself, and cried in an angry voice: 'What, again! Never! do you hear me?'

'Do it for my sake,' she said, warmly. 'It's I who ask it of you, it's I that you'll please.'

'Why, are you tired of being here, then?'

'Yes, I shall die if we stay here much longer; and, besides I want you to work. I feel quite certain that your place is there. It would be a crime for you to bury yourself here any longer.'

'No, leave me!'

He was quivering. On the horizon Paris was calling him, the Paris of winter-tide which was being lighted up once more. He thought he could hear from where he stood the great efforts that his comrades were making, and, in fancy, he returned thither in order that they might not triumph without him, in order that he might become their chief again, since not one of them had strength or pride enough to be such. And amid this hallucination, amid the desire he felt to hasten to Paris, he yet persisted in refusing to do so, from a spirit of involuntary contradiction, which arose, though he could not account for it, from his very entrails. Was it the fear with which the bravest quivers, the mute struggle of happiness seeking to resist the fatality of destiny?

'Listen,' said Christine, excitedly. 'I shall get our boxes ready, and take you away.'

Five days later, after packing and sending their chattels to the railway, they started for Paris.

Claude was already on the road with little Jacques, when Christine fancied that she had forgotten something. She returned alone to the house; and finding it quite bare and empty, she burst out crying. It seemed as if something were being torn from her, as if she were leaving something of herself behind—what, she could not say. How willingly would she have remained! how ardent was her wish to live there always—she who had just insisted on that departure, that return to the city of passion where she scented the presence of a rival. However, she continued searching for what she lacked, and in front of the kitchen she ended by plucking a rose, a last rose, which the cold was turning brown. And then she slowly closed the gate upon the deserted garden.

VII

WHEN Claude found himself once more on the pavement of Paris he was seized with a feverish longing for hubbub and motion, a desire to gad about, scour the whole city, and see his chums. He was off the moment he awoke, leaving Christine to get things shipshape by herself in the studio which they had taken in the Rue de Douai, near the Boulevard de Clichy. In this way, on the second day of his arrival, he dropped in at Mahoudeau's at eight o'clock in the morning, in the chill, grey November dawn which had barely risen.

However, the shop in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, which the sculptor still occupied, was open, and Mahoudeau himself, half asleep, with a white face, was shivering as he took down the shutters.

Ah! it's you. The devil! you've got into early habits in the country. So it's settled—you are back for good?'

'Yes; since the day before yesterday.'

'That's all right. Then we shall see something of each other. Come in; it's sharp this morning.'

But Claude felt colder in the shop than outside. He kept the collar of his coat turned up, and plunged his hands deep into his pockets; shivering before the dripping moisture of the bare walls, the muddy heaps of clay, and the pools of water soddening the floor. A blast of poverty had swept into the place, emptying the shelves of the casts from the antique, and smashing stands and buckets, which were now held together with bits of rope. It was an abode of dirt and disorder, a mason's cellar going to rack and ruin. On the window of the door, besmeared with whitewash, there appeared in mockery, as it were, a large beaming sun, roughly drawn with thumb-strokes, and ornamented in the centre with a face, the mouth of which, describing a semicircle, seemed likely to burst with laughter.

'Just wait,' said Mahoudeau, 'a fire's being lighted. These confounded workshops get chilly directly, with the water from the covering cloths.'

At that moment, Claude, on turning round, noticed Chaine on his knees near the stove, pulling the straw from the seat of an old stool to light the coals with. He bade him good-morning, but only elicited a muttered growl, without succeeding in making him look up.

'And what are you doing just now, old man?' he asked the sculptor.

'Oh! nothing of much account. It's been a bad year—worse than the last one, which wasn't worth a rap. There's a crisis in the church-statue business. Yes, the market for holy wares is bad, and, dash it, I've had to tighten my belt! Look, in the meanwhile, I'm reduced to this.'

He thereupon took the linen wraps off a bust, showing a long face still further elongated by whiskers, a face full of conceit and infinite imbecility.

'It's an advocate who lives near by. Doesn't he look repugnant, eh? And the way he worries me about being very careful with his mouth. However, a fellow must eat, mustn't he?'

He certainly had an idea for the Salon; an upright figure, a girl about to bathe, dipping her foot in the water, and shivering at its freshness with that slight shiver that renders a woman so adorable. He showed Claude a little model of it, which was already cracking, and the painter looked at it in silence, surprised and displeased at certain concessions he noticed in it: a sprouting of prettiness from beneath a persistent exaggeration of form, a natural desire to please, blended with a lingering tendency to the colossal. However, Mahoudeau began lamenting; an upright figure was no end of a job. He would want iron braces that cost money, and a modelling frame, which he had not got; in fact, a lot of appliances. So he would, no doubt, decide to model the figure in a recumbent attitude beside the water.

'Well, what do you say—what do you think of it?' he asked.

'Not bad,' answered the painter at last. 'A little bit sentimental, in spite of the strapping limbs; but it'll all depend upon the execution. And put her upright, old man; upright, for there would be nothing in it otherwise.'

The stove was roaring, and Chaine, still mute, rose up. He prowled about for a minute, entered the dark back shop, where stood the bed that he shared with Mahoudeau, and then reappeared, his hat on his head, but more silent, it seemed, than ever. With his awkward peasant fingers he leisurely took up a stick of charcoal and then wrote on the wall: 'I am going to buy some tobacco; put some more coals in the stove.' And forthwith he went out.

Claude, who had watched him writing, turned to the other in amazement.

'What's up?'

'We no longer speak to one another; we write,' said the sculptor, quietly.

'Since when?'

'Since three months ago.'

'And you sleep together?'

'Yes.'

Claude burst out laughing. Ah! dash it all! they must have hard nuts. But what was the reason of this falling-out? Then Mahoudeau vented his rage against that brute of a Chaine! Hadn't he, one night on coming home unexpectedly, found him treating Mathilde, the herbalist woman, to a pot of jam? No, he would never forgive him for treating himself in that dirty fashion to delicacies on the sly, while he, Mahoudeau, was half starving, and eating dry bread. The deuce! one ought to share and share alike.

And the grudge had now lasted for nearly three months without a break, without an explanation. They had arranged their lives accordingly; they had reduced their strictly necessary intercourse to a series of short phrases charcoaled on the walls. As for the rest, they lived as before, sharing the same bed in the back shop. After all, there was no need for so much talk in life, people managed to understand one another all the same.

While filling the stove, Mahoudeau continued to relieve his mind.

'Well, you may believe me if you like, but when a fellow's almost starving it isn't disagreeable to keep quiet. Yes, one gets numb amidst silence; it's like an inside coating that stills the gnawing of the stomach a bit. Ah, that Chaine! You haven't a notion of his peasant nature. When he had spent his last copper without earning the fortune he expected by painting, he went into trade, a petty trade, which was to enable him to finish his studies. Isn't the fellow a sharp 'un, eh? And just listen to his plan. He had some olive oil sent to him from Saint-Firmin, his village, and then he tramped the streets and found a market for the oil among well-to-do families from Provence living in Paris. Unfortunately, it did not last. He is such a clod-hopper that they showed him the door on all sides. And as there was a jar of oil left which nobody would buy, well, old man, we live upon it. Yes, on the days when we happen to have some bread we dip our bread into it.'

Thereupon he pointed to the jar standing in a corner of the shop. Some of the oil having been spilt, the wall and the floor were darkened by large greasy stains.

Claude left off laughing. Ah! misery, how discouraging it was! how could he show himself hard on those whom it crushed? He walked about the studio, no longer vexed at finding models weakened by concessions to middle-class taste; he even felt tolerant with regard to that hideous bust. But, all at once, he came across a copy that Chaine had made at the Louvre, a Mantegna, which was marvellously exact in its dryness.

'Oh, the brute,' he muttered, 'it's almost the original; he's never done anything better than that. Perhaps his only fault is that he was born four centuries too late.'

Then, as the heat became too great, he took off his over-coat, adding:

'He's a long while fetching his tobacco.'

'Oh! his tobacco! I know what that means,' said Mahoudeau, who had set to work at his bust, finishing the whiskers; 'he has simply gone next door.'

'Oh! so you still see the herbalist?'

'Yes, she comes in and out.'

He spoke of Mathilde and Chaine without the least show of anger, simply saying that he thought the woman crazy. Since little Jabouille's death she had become devout again, though this did not prevent her from scandalising the neighbourhood. Her business was going to wreck, and bankruptcy seemed impending. One night, the gas company having cut off the gas in default of payment, she had come to borrow some of their olive oil, which, after all, would not burn in the lamps. In short, it was quite a disaster; that mysterious shop, with its fleeting shadows of priests' gowns, its discreet confessional-like whispers, and its odour of sacristy incense, was gliding to the abandonment of ruin. And the wretchedness had reached such a point that the dried herbs suspended from the ceiling swarmed with spiders, while defunct leeches, which had already turned green, floated on the tops of the glass jars.

'Hallo, here he comes!' resumed the sculptor. 'You'll see her arrive at his heels.'

In fact, Chaine came in. He made a great show of drawing a screw of tobacco from his pocket, then filled his pipe, and began to smoke in front of the stove, remaining obstinately silent, as if there were nobody present. And immediately afterwards Mathilde made her appearance like a neighbour who comes in to say 'Good morning.' Claude thought that she had grown still thinner, but her eyes were all afire, and her mouth was seemingly enlarged by the loss of two more teeth. The smell of aromatic herbs which she always carried in her uncombed hair seemed to have become rancid. There was no longer the sweetness of camomile, the freshness of aniseed; she filled the place with a horrid odour of peppermint that seemed to be her very breath.

'Already at work!' she exclaimed. 'Good morning.' And, without minding Claude, she kissed Mahoudeau. Then, after going to shake hands with the painter in her brazen way, she continued:

'What do you think? I've found a box of mallow root, and we will treat ourselves to it for breakfast. Isn't that nice of me now! We'll share.'

'Thanks,' said the sculptor, 'it makes my mouth sticky. I prefer to smoke a pipe.'

And, seeing that Claude was putting on his overcoat again, he asked: 'Are you going?'

'Yes. I want to get the rust off, and breathe the air of Paris a bit.'

All the same, he stopped for another few minutes watching Chaine and Mathilde, who stuffed themselves with mallow root, each taking a piece by turns. And though he had been warned, he was again amazed when he saw Mahoudeau take up the stick of charcoal and write on the wall: 'Give me the tobacco you have shoved into your pocket.'

Without a word, Chaine took out the screw and handed it to the sculptor, who filled his pipe.

'Well, I'll see you again soon,' said Claude.

'Yes, soon—at any rate, next Thursday, at Sandoz's.'

Outside, Claude gave an exclamation of surprise on jostling a gentleman, who stood in front of the herbalist's peering into the shop.

'What, Jory! What are you doing there?'

Jory's big pink nose gave a sniff.

'I? Nothing. I was passing and looked in,' said he in dismay.

Then he decided to laugh, and, as if there were any one to overhear him, lowered his voice to ask:

'She is next door with our friends, isn't she? All right; let's be off, quick!'

And he took the painter with him, telling him all manner of strange stories of that creature Mathilde.

'But you used to say that she was frightful,' said Claude, laughing.

Jory made a careless gesture. Frightful? No, he had not gone as far as that. Besides, there might be something attractive about a woman even though she had a plain face. Then he expressed his surprise at seeing Claude in Paris, and, when he had been fully posted, and learned that the painter meant to remain there for good, he all at once exclaimed:

'Listen, I am going to take you with me. You must come to lunch with me at Irma's.'

The painter, taken aback, refused energetically, and gave as a reason that he wasn't even wearing a frock-coat.

'What does that matter? On the contrary, it makes it more droll. She'll be delighted. I believe she has a secret partiality for you. She is always talking about you to us. Come, don't be a fool. I tell you she expects me this morning, and we shall be received like princes.'

He did not relax his hold on Claude's arm, and they both continued their way towards the Madeleine, talking all the while. As a rule, Jory kept silent about his many love adventures, just as a drunkard keeps silent about his potations. But that morning he brimmed over with revelations, chaffed himself and owned to all sorts of scandalous things. After all he was delighted with existence, his affairs went apace. His miserly father had certainly cut off the supplies once more, cursing him for obstinately pursuing a scandalous career, but he did not care a rap for that now; he earned between seven and eight thousand francs a year by journalism, in which he was making his way as a gossipy leader writer and art critic. The noisy days of 'The Drummer,' the articles at a louis apiece, had been left far behind. He was getting steady, wrote for two widely circulated papers, and although, in his inmost heart he remained a sceptical voluptuary, a worshipper of success at any price, he was acquiring importance, and readers began to look upon his opinions as fiats. Swayed by hereditary meanness, he already invested money every month in petty speculations, which were only known to himself, for never had his vices cost him less than nowadays.

As he and Claude reached the Rue de Moscou, he told the painter that it was there that Irma Becot now lived. 'Oh! she is rolling in wealth,' said he, 'paying twenty thousand francs a year rent and talking of building a house which would cost half a million.' Then suddenly pulling up he exclaimed: 'Come, here we are! In with you, quick!'

But Claude still objected. His wife was waiting for him to lunch; he really couldn't. And Jory was obliged to ring the bell, and then push him inside the hall, repeating that his excuse would not do; for they would send the valet to the Rue de Douai to tell his wife. A door opened and they found themselves face to face with Irma Becot, who uttered a cry of surprise as soon as she perceived the painter.

'What! is it you, savage?' she said.

She made him feel at home at once by treating him like an old chum, and, in fact, he saw well enough that she did not even notice his old clothes. He himself was astonished, for he barely recognised her. In the course of four years she had become a different being; her head was 'made up' with all an actress's skill, her brow hidden beneath a mass of curly hair, and her face elongated, by a sheer effort of will, no doubt. And from a pale blonde she had become flaringly carrotty; so that a Titianesque creature seemed to have sprung from the little urchin-like girl of former days. Her house, with all its show of luxury, still had its bald spots. What struck the painter were some good pictures on the walls, a Courbet, and, above all, an unfinished study by Delacroix. So this wild, wilful creature was not altogether a fool, although there was a frightful cat in coloured biscuit standing on a console in the drawing-room.

When Jory spoke of sending the valet to his friend's place, she exclaimed in great surprise:

'What! you are married?'

'Why, yes,' said Claude, simply.

She glanced at Jory, who smiled; then she understood, and added:

'Ah! But why did people tell me that you were a woman-hater? I'm awfully vexed, you know. I frightened you, don't you remember, eh? You still think me very ugly, don't you? Well, well, we'll talk about it all some other day.'

It was the coachman who went to the Rue de Douai with a note from Claude, for the valet had opened the door of the dining-room, to announce that lunch was served. The repast, a very delicate one, was partaken of in all propriety, under the icy stare of the servant. They talked about the great building works that were revolutionising Paris; and then discussed the price of land, like middle-class people with money to invest. But at dessert, when they were all three alone with the coffee and liqueurs, which they had decided upon taking there, without leaving the table, they gradually became animated, and dropped into their old familiar ways, as if they had met each other at the Cafe Baudequin.

'Ah, my lads,' said Irma, 'this is the only real enjoyment, to be jolly together and to snap one's fingers at other people.'

She was twisting cigarettes; she had just placed the bottle of chartreuse near her, and had begun to empty it, looking the while very flushed, and lapsing once more to her low street drollery.

'So,' continued Jory, who was apologising for not having sent her that morning a book she wanted, 'I was going to buy it last night at about ten o'clock, when I met Fagerolles—'

'You are telling a lie,' said she, interrupting him in a clear voice. And to cut short his protestations—'Fagerolles was here,' she added, 'so you see that you are telling a lie.'

Then, turning to Claude, 'No, it's too disgusting. You can't conceive what a liar he is. He tells lies like a woman, for the pleasure of it, for the merest trifle. Now, the whole of his story amounts simply to this: that he didn't want to spend three francs to buy me that book. Each time he was to have sent me a bouquet, he had dropped it under the wheels of a carriage, or there were no flowers to be had in all Paris. Ah! there's a fellow who only cares for himself, and no mistake.'

Jory, without getting in the least angry, tilted back his chair and sucked his cigar, merely saying with a sneer:

'Oh! if you see Fagerolles now—'

'Well, what of it?' she cried, becoming furious. 'It's no business of yours. I snap my fingers at your Fagerolles, do you hear? He knows very well that people don't quarrel with me. We know each other; we sprouted in the same crack between the paving-stones. Look here, whenever I like, I have only to hold up my finger, and your Fagerolles will be there on the floor, licking my feet.'

She was growing animated, and Jory thought it prudent to beat a retreat.

'My Fagerolles,' he muttered; 'my Fagerolles.'

'Yes, your Fagerolles. Do you think that I don't see through you both? He is always patting you on the back, as he hopes to get articles out of you, and you affect generosity and calculate the advantage you'll derive if you write up an artist liked by the public.'

This time Jory stuttered, feeling very much annoyed on account of Claude being there. He did not attempt to defend himself, however, preferring to turn the quarrel into a joke. Wasn't she amusing, eh? when she blazed up like that, with her lustrous wicked eyes, and her twitching mouth, eager to indulge in vituperation?

'But remember, my dear, this sort of thing cracks your Titianesque "make-up,"' he added.

She began to laugh, mollified at once.

Claude, basking in physical comfort, kept on sipping small glasses of cognac one after another, without noticing it. During the two hours they had been there a kind of intoxication had stolen over them, the hallucinatory intoxication produced by liqueurs and tobacco smoke. They changed the conversation; the high prices that pictures were fetching came into question. Irma, who no longer spoke, kept a bit of extinguished cigarette between her lips, and fixed her eyes on the painter. At last she abruptly began to question him about his wife.

Her questions did not appear to surprise him; his ideas were going astray: 'She had just come from the provinces,' he said. 'She was in a situation with a lady, and was a very good and honest girl.'

'Pretty?'

'Why, yes, pretty.'

For a moment Irma relapsed into her reverie, then she said, smiling: 'Dash it all! How lucky you are!'

Then she shook herself, and exclaimed, rising from the table: 'Nearly three o'clock! Ah! my children, I must turn you out of the house. Yes, I have an appointment with an architect; I am going to see some ground near the Parc Monceau, you know, in the new quarter which is being built. I have scented a stroke of business in that direction.'

They had returned to the drawing-room. She stopped before a looking-glass, annoyed at seeing herself so flushed.

'It's about that house, isn't it?' asked Jory. 'You have found the money, then?'

She brought her hair down over her brow again, then with her hands seemed to efface the flush on her cheeks; elongated the oval of her face, and rearranged her tawny head, which had all the charm of a work of art; and finally, turning round, she merely threw Jory these words by way of reply: Look! there's my Titianesque effect back again.'

She was already, amidst their laughter, edging them towards the hall, where once more, without speaking, she took Claude's hands in her own, her glance yet again diving into the depths of his eyes. When he reached the street he felt uncomfortable. The cold air dissipated his intoxication; he remorsefully reproached himself for having spoken of Christine in that house, and swore to himself that he would never set foot there again.

Indeed, a kind of shame deterred Claude from going home, and when his companion, excited by the luncheon and feeling inclined to loaf about, spoke of going to shake hands with Bongrand, he was delighted with the idea, and both made their way to the Boulevard de Clichy.

For the last twenty years Bongrand had there occupied a very large studio, in which he had in no wise sacrificed to the tastes of the day, to that magnificence of hangings and nick-nacks with which young painters were then beginning to surround themselves. It was the bare, greyish studio of the old style, exclusively ornamented with sketches by the master, which hung there unframed, and in close array like the votive offerings in a chapel. The only tokens of elegance consisted of a cheval glass, of the First Empire style, a large Norman wardrobe, and two arm-chairs upholstered in Utrecht velvet, and threadbare with usage. In one corner, too, a bearskin which had lost nearly all its hair covered a large couch. However, the artist had retained since his youthful days, which had been spent in the camp of the Romanticists, the habit of wearing a special costume, and it was in flowing trousers, in a dressing-gown secured at the waist by a silken cord, and with his head covered with a priest's skull-cap, that he received his visitors.

He came to open the door himself, holding his palette and brushes.

'So here you are! It was a good idea of yours to come! I was thinking about you, my dear fellow. Yes, I don't know who it was that told me of your return, but I said to myself that it wouldn't be long before I saw you.'

The hand that he had free grasped Claude's in a burst of sincere affection. He then shook Jory's, adding:

'And you, young pontiff; I read your last article, and thank you for your kind mention of myself. Come in, come in, both of you! You don't disturb me; I'm taking advantage of the daylight to the very last minute, for there's hardly time to do anything in this confounded month of November.'

He had resumed his work, standing before his easel, on which there was a small canvas, which showed two women, mother and daughter, sitting sewing in the embrasure of a sunlit window. The young fellows stood looking behind him.

'Exquisite,' murmured Claude, at last.

Bongrand shrugged his shoulders without turning round.

'Pooh! A mere nothing at all. A fellow must occupy his time, eh? I did this from life at a friend's house, and I am cleaning it a bit.'

'But it's perfect—it is a little gem of truth and light,' replied Claude, warming up. 'And do you know, what overcomes me is its simplicity, its very simplicity.'

On hearing this the painter stepped back and blinked his eyes, looking very much surprised.

'You think so? It really pleases you? Well, when you came in I was just thinking it was a foul bit of work. I give you my word, I was in the dumps, and felt convinced that I hadn't a scrap of talent left.'

His hands shook, his stalwart frame trembled as with the agony of travail. He rid himself of his palette, and came back towards them, his arms sawing the air, as it were; and this artist, who had grown old amidst success, who was assured of ranking in the French School, cried to them:

'It surprises you, eh? but there are days when I ask myself whether I shall be able to draw a nose correctly. Yes, with every one of my pictures I still feel the emotion of a beginner; my heart beats, anguish parches my mouth—in fact, I funk abominably. Ah! you youngsters, you think you know what funk means; but you haven't as much as a notion of it, for if you fail with one work, you get quits by trying to do something better. Nobody is down upon you; whereas we, the veterans, who have given our measure, who are obliged to keep up to the level previously attained, if not to surpass it, we mustn't weaken under penalty of rolling down into the common grave. And so, Mr. Celebrity, Mr. Great Artist, wear out your brains, consume yourself in striving to climb higher, still higher, ever higher, and if you happen to kick your heels on the summit, think yourself lucky! Wear your heels out in kicking them up as long as possible, and if you feel that you are declining, why, make an end of yourself by rolling down amid the death rattle of your talent, which is no longer suited to the period; roll down forgetful of such of your works as are destined to immortality, and in despair at your powerless efforts to create still further!'

His full voice had risen to a final outburst like thunder, and his broad flushed face wore an expression of anguish. He strode about, and continued, as if carried away, in spite of himself, by a violent whirlwind:

'I have told you a score of times that one was for ever beginning one's career afresh, that joy did not consist in having reached the summit, but in the climbing, in the gaiety of scaling the heights. Only, you don't understand, you cannot understand; a man must have passed through it. Just remember! You hope for everything, you dream of everything; it is the hour of boundless illusions, and your legs are so strong that the most fatiguing roads seem short; you are consumed with such an appetite for glory, that the first petty successes fill your mouth with a delicious taste. What a feast it will be when you are able to gratify ambition to satiety! You have nearly reached that point, and you look right cheerfully on your scratches! Well, the thing is accomplished; the summit has been gained; it is now a question of remaining there. Then a life of abomination begins; you have exhausted intoxication, and you have discovered that it does not last long enough, that it is not worth the struggle it has cost, and that the dregs of the cup taste bitter. There is nothing left to be learnt, no new sensation to be felt; pride has had its allowance of fame; you know that you have produced your greatest works; and you are surprised that they did not bring keener enjoyment with them. From that moment the horizon becomes void; no fresh hope inflames you; there is nothing left but to die. And yet you still cling on, you won't admit that it's all up with you, you obstinately persist in trying to produce—just as old men cling to love with painful, ignoble efforts. Ah! a man ought to have the courage and the pride to strangle himself before his last masterpiece!'

While he spoke he seemed to have increased in stature, reaching to the elevated ceiling of the studio, and shaken by such keen emotion that the tears started to his eyes. And he dropped into a chair before his picture, asking with the anxious look of a beginner who has need of encouragement:

'Then this really seems to you all right? I myself no longer dare to believe anything. My unhappiness springs from the possession of both too much and not enough critical acumen. The moment I begin a sketch I exalt it, then, if it's not successful, I torture myself. It would be better not to know anything at all about it, like that brute Chambouvard, or else to see very clearly into the business and then give up painting.... Really now, you like this little canvas?'

Claude and Jory remained motionless, astonished and embarrassed by those tokens of the intense anguish of art in its travail. Had they come at a moment of crisis, that this master thus groaned with pain, and consulted them like comrades? The worst was that they had been unable to disguise some hesitation when they found themselves under the gaze of the ardent, dilated eyes with which he implored them—eyes in which one could read the hidden fear of decline. They knew current rumours well enough; they agreed with the opinion that since his 'Village Wedding' the painter had produced nothing equal to that famous picture. Indeed, after maintaining something of that standard of excellence in a few works, he was now gliding into a more scientific, drier manner. Brightness of colour was vanishing; each work seemed to show a decline. However, these were things not to be said; so Claude, when he had recovered his composure, exclaimed:

'You never painted anything so powerful!'

Bongrand looked at him again, straight in the eyes. Then he turned to his work, in which he became absorbed, making a movement with his herculean arms, as if he were breaking every bone of them to lift that little canvas which was so very light. And he muttered to himself: 'Confound it! how heavy it is! Never mind, I'll die at it rather than show a falling-off.'

He took up his palette and grew calm at the first stroke of the brush, while bending his manly shoulders and broad neck, about which one noticed traces of peasant build remaining amid the bourgeois refinement contributed by the crossing of classes of which he was the outcome.

Silence had ensued, but Jory, his eyes still fixed on the picture, asked:

'Is it sold?'

Bongrand replied leisurely, like the artist who works when he likes without care of profit:

'No; I feel paralysed when I've a dealer at my back.' And, without pausing in his work, he went on talking, growing waggish.

'Ah! people are beginning to make a trade of painting now. Really and truly I have never seen such a thing before, old as I am getting. For instance, you, Mr. Amiable Journalist, what a quantity of flowers you fling to the young ones in that article in which you mentioned me! There were two or three youngsters spoken of who were simply geniuses, nothing less.'

Jory burst out laughing.

'Well, when a fellow has a paper, he must make use of it. Besides, the public likes to have great men discovered for it.'

'No doubt, public stupidity is boundless, and I am quite willing that you should trade on it. Only I remember the first starts that we old fellows had. Dash it! We were not spoiled like that, I can tell you. We had ten years' labour and struggle before us ere we could impose on people a picture the size of your hand; whereas nowadays the first hobbledehoy who can stick a figure on its legs makes all the trumpets of publicity blare. And what kind of publicity is it? A hullabaloo from one end of France to the other, sudden reputations that shoot up of a night, and burst upon one like thunderbolts, amid the gaping of the throng. And I say nothing of the works themselves, those works announced with salvoes of artillery, awaited amid a delirium of impatience, maddening Paris for a week, and then falling into everlasting oblivion!'

'This is an indictment against journalism,' said Jory, who had stretched himself on the couch and lighted another cigar. 'There is a great deal to be said for and against it, but devil a bit, a man must keep pace with the times.'

Bongrand shook his head, and then started off again, amid a tremendous burst of mirth:

'No! no! one can no longer throw off the merest daub without being hailed as a young "master." Well, if you only knew how your young masters amuse me!'

But as if these words had led to some other ideas, he cooled down, and turned towards Claude to ask this question: 'By the way, have you seen Fagerolles' picture?'

'Yes,' said the young fellow, quietly.

They both remained looking at each other: a restless smile had risen to their lips, and Bongrand eventually added:

'There's a fellow who pillages you right and left.'

Jory, becoming embarrassed, had lowered his eyes, asking himself whether he should defend Fagerolles. He, no doubt, concluded that it would be profitable to do so, for he began to praise the picture of the actress in her dressing-room, an engraving of which was then attracting a great deal of notice in the print-shops. Was not the subject a really modern one? Was it not well painted, in the bright clear tone of the new school? A little more vigour might, perhaps, have been desirable; but every one ought to be left to his own temperament. And besides, refinement and charm were not so common by any means, nowadays.

Bending over his canvas, Bongrand, who, as a rule, had nothing but paternal praise for the young ones, shook and made a visible effort to avoid an outburst. The explosion took place, however, in spite of himself.

'Just shut up, eh? about your Fagerolles! Do you think us greater fools than we really are? There! you see the great painter here present. Yes; I mean the young gentleman in front of you. Well, the whole trick consists in pilfering his originality, and dishing it up with the wishy-washy sauce of the School of Arts! Quite so! you select a modern subject, and you paint in the clear bright style, only you adhere to correctly commonplace drawing, to all the habitual pleasing style of composition—in short, to the formula which is taught over yonder for the pleasure of the middle-classes. And you souse all that with deftness, that execrable deftness of the fingers which would just as well carve cocoanuts, the flowing, pleasant deftness that begets success, and which ought to be punished with penal servitude, do you hear?'

He brandished his palette and brushes aloft, in his clenched fists.

'You are severe,' said Claude, feeling embarrassed. 'Fagerolles shows delicacy in his work.'

'I have been told,' muttered Jory, mildly, 'that he has just signed a very profitable agreement with Naudet.'

That name, thrown haphazard into the conversation, had the effect of once more soothing Bongrand, who repeated, shrugging his shoulders:

'Ah! Naudet—ah! Naudet.'

And he greatly amused the young fellows by telling them about Naudet, with whom he was well acquainted. He was a dealer, who, for some few years, had been revolutionising the picture trade. There was nothing of the old fashion about his style—the greasy coat and keen taste of Papa Malgras, the watching for the pictures of beginners, bought at ten francs, to be resold at fifteen, all the little humdrum comedy of the connoisseur, turning up his nose at a coveted canvas in order to depreciate it, worshipping painting in his inmost heart, and earning a meagre living by quickly and prudently turning over his petty capital. No, no; the famous Naudet had the appearance of a nobleman, with a fancy-pattern jacket, a diamond pin in his scarf, and patent-leather boots; he was well pomaded and brushed, and lived in fine style, with a livery-stable carriage by the month, a stall at the opera, and his particular table at Bignon's. And he showed himself wherever it was the correct thing to be seen. For the rest, he was a speculator, a Stock Exchange gambler, not caring one single rap about art. But he unfailingly scented success, he guessed what artist ought to be properly started, not the one who seemed likely to develop the genius of a great painter, furnishing food for discussion, but the one whose deceptive talent, set off by a pretended display of audacity, would command a premium in the market. And that was the way in which he revolutionised that market, giving the amateur of taste the cold shoulder, and only treating with the moneyed amateur, who knew nothing about art, but who bought a picture as he might buy a share at the Stock Exchange, either from vanity or with the hope that it would rise in value.

At this stage of the conversation Bongrand, very jocular by nature, and with a good deal of the mummer about him, began to enact the scene. Enter Naudet in Fagerolles' studio.

'"You've real genius, my dear fellow. Your last picture is sold, then? For how much?"

'"For five hundred francs."

'"But you must be mad; it was worth twelve hundred. And this one which you have by you—how much?"

'"Well, my faith, I don't know. Suppose we say twelve hundred?"

'"What are you talking about? Twelve hundred francs! You don't understand me, then, my boy; it's worth two thousand. I take it at two thousand. And from this day forward you must work for no one but myself—for me, Naudet. Good-bye, good-bye, my dear fellow; don't overwork yourself—your fortune is made. I have taken it in hand." Wherewith he goes off, taking the picture with him in his carriage. He trots it round among his amateurs, among whom he has spread the rumour that he has just discovered an extraordinary painter. One of the amateurs bites at last, and asks the price.

"'Five thousand."

'"What, five thousand francs for the picture of a man whose name hasn't the least notoriety? Are you playing the fool with me?"

'"Look here, I'll make you a proposal; I'll sell it you for five thousand francs, and I'll sign an agreement to take it back in a twelvemonth at six thousand, if you no longer care for it."

Of course the amateur is tempted. What does he risk after all? In reality it's a good speculation, and so he buys. After that Naudet loses no time, but disposes in a similar manner of nine or ten paintings by the same man during the course of the year. Vanity gets mingled with the hope of gain, the prices go up, the pictures get regularly quoted, so that when Naudet returns to see his amateur, the latter, instead of returning the picture, buys another one for eight thousand francs. And the prices continue to go up, and painting degenerates into something shady, a kind of gold mine situated on the heights of Montmartre, promoted by a number of bankers, and around which there is a constant battle of bank-notes.'

Claude was growing indignant, but Jory thought it all very clever, when there came a knock at the door. Bongrand, who went to open it, uttered a cry of surprise.

'Naudet, as I live! We were just talking about you.'

Naudet, very correctly dressed, without a speck of mud on him, despite the horrible weather, bowed and came in with the reverential politeness of a man of society entering a church.

'Very pleased—feel flattered, indeed, dear master. And you only spoke well of me, I'm sure of it.'

'Not at all, Naudet, not at all,' said Bongrand, in a quiet tone. 'We were saying that your manner of trading was giving us a nice generation of artists—tricksters crossed with dishonest business men.'

Naudet smiled, without losing his composure.

'The remark is harsh, but so charming! Never mind, never mind, dear master, nothing that you say offends me.'

And, dropping into ecstasy before the picture of the two little women at needlework:

'Ah! Good heavens, I didn't know this, it's a little marvel! Ah! that light, that broad substantial treatment! One has to go back to Rembrandt for anything like it; yes, to Rembrandt! Look here, I only came in to pay my respects, but I thank my lucky star for having brought me here. Let us do a little bit of business. Let me have this gem. Anything you like to ask for it—I'll cover it with gold.'

One could see Bongrand's back shake, as if his irritation were increasing at each sentence. He curtly interrupted the dealer.

'Too late; it's sold.'

'Sold, you say. And you cannot annul your bargain? Tell me, at any rate, to whom it's sold? I'll do everything, I'll give anything. Ah! What a horrible blow! Sold, are you quite sure of it? Suppose you were offered double the sum?'

'It's sold, Naudet. That's enough, isn't it?'

However, the dealer went on lamenting. He remained for a few minutes longer, going into raptures before other sketches, while making the tour of the studio with the keen glances of a speculator in search of luck. When he realised that his time was badly chosen, and that he would be able to take nothing away with him, he went off, bowing with an air of gratitude, and repeating remarks of admiration as far as the landing.

As soon as he had gone, Jory, who had listened to the conversation with surprise, ventured to ask a question:

'But you told us, I thought—It isn't sold, is it?'

Without immediately answering, Bongrand went back to his picture. Then, in his thundering voice, resuming in one cry all his hidden suffering, the whole of the nascent struggle within him which he dared not avow, he said:

'He plagues me. He shall never have anything of mine! Let him go and buy of Fagerolles!'

A quarter of an hour later, Claude and Jory also said good-bye, leaving Bongrand struggling with his work in the waning daylight. Once outside, when the young painter had left his companion, he did not at once return home to the Rue de Douai, in spite of his long absence. He still felt the want of walking about, of surrendering himself up to that great city of Paris, where the meetings of one single day sufficed to fill his brain; and this need of motion made him wander about till the black night had fallen, through the frozen mud of the streets, beneath the gas-lamps, which, lighted up one by one, showed like nebulous stars amidst the fog.

Claude impatiently awaited the Thursday when he was to dine at Sandoz's, for the latter, immutable in his habits, still invited his cronies to dinner once a week. All those who chose could come, their covers were laid. His marriage, his change of life, the ardent literary struggle into which he had thrown himself, made no difference; he kept to his day 'at home,' that Thursday which dated from the time he had left college, from the time they had all smoked their first pipes. As he himself expressed it, alluding to his wife, there was only one chum more.

'I say, old man,' he had frankly said to Claude, 'I'm greatly worried—'

'What about?'

'Why, about inviting Madame Christine. There are a lot of idiots, a lot of philistines watching me, who would say all manner of things—'

'You are quite right, old man. But Christine herself would decline to come. Oh! we understand the position very well. I'll come alone, depend upon it.'

At six o'clock, Claude started for Sandoz's place in the Rue Nollet, in the depths of Batignolles, and he had no end of trouble in finding the small pavilion which his friend had rented. First of all he entered a large house facing the street, and applied to the doorkeeper, who made him cross three successive courtyards; then he went down a passage, between two other buildings, descended some steps, and tumbled upon the iron gate of a small garden. That was the spot, the pavilion was there at the end of a path. But it was so dark, and he had nearly broken his legs coming down the steps, that he dared not venture any further, the more so as a huge dog was barking furiously. At last he heard the voice of Sandoz, who was coming forward and trying to quiet the dog.

'Ah, it's you! We are quite in the country, aren't we? We are going to set up a lantern, so that our company may not break their necks. Come in, come in! Will you hold your noise, you brute of a Bertrand? Don't you see that it's a friend, fool?'

Thereupon the dog accompanied them as far as the pavilion, wagging his tail and barking joyously. A young servant-girl had come out with a lantern, which she fastened to the gate, in order to light up the breakneck steps. In the garden there was simply a small central lawn, on which there stood a large plum tree, diffusing a shade around that rotted the grass; and just in front of the low house, which showed only three windows, there stretched an arbour of Virginia creeper, with a brand-new seat shining there as an ornament amid the winter showers, pending the advent of the summer sun.

'Come in,' repeated Sandoz.

On the right-hand side of the hall he ushered Claude into the parlour, which he had turned into a study. The dining-room and kitchen were on the left. Upstairs, his mother, who was now altogether bedridden, occupied the larger room, while he and his wife contented themselves with the other one, and a dressing-room that parted the two. That was the whole place, a real cardboard box, with rooms like little drawers separated by partitions as thin as paper. Withal, it was the abode of work and hope, vast in comparison with the ordinary garrets of youth, and already made bright by a beginning of comfort and luxury.

'There's room here, eh?' he exclaimed. 'Ah! it's a jolly sight more comfortable than the Rue d'Enfer. You see that I've a room to myself. And I have bought myself an oaken writing-table, and my wife made me a present of that dwarf palm in that pot of old Rouen ware. Isn't it swell, eh?'

His wife came in at that very moment. Tall, with a pleasant, tranquil face and beautiful brown hair, she wore a large white apron over her plainly made dress of black poplin; for although they had a regular servant, she saw to the cooking, for she was proud of certain of her dishes, and she put the household on a footing of middle-class cleanliness and love of cheer.

She and Claude became old chums at once.

'Call him Claude, my darling. And you, old man, call her Henriette. No madame nor monsieur, or I shall fine you five sous each time.'

They laughed, and she scampered away, being wanted in the kitchen to look after a southern dish, a bouillabaisse, with which she wished to surprise the Plassans friend. She had obtained the recipe from her husband himself, and had become marvellously deft at it, so he said.

'Your wife is charming,' said Claude, 'and I see she spoils you.'

But Sandoz, seated at his table, with his elbows among such pages of the book he was working at as he had written that morning, began to talk of the first novel of his series, which he had published in October. Ah! they had treated his poor book nicely! It had been a throttling, a butchering, all the critics yelling at his heels, a broadside of imprecations, as if he had murdered people in a wood. He himself laughed at it, excited rather than otherwise, for he had sturdy shoulders and the quiet bearing of a toiler who knows what he's after. Mere surprise remained to him at the profound lack of intelligence shown by those fellows the critics, whose articles, knocked off on the corner of some table, bespattered him with mud, without appearing as much as to guess at the least of his intentions. Everything was flung into the same slop-pail of abuse: his studies of physiological man; the important part he assigned to circumstances and surroundings; his allusions to nature, ever and ever creating; in short, life—entire, universal life—existent through all the animal world without there really being either high or low, beauty or ugliness; he was insulted, too, for his boldness of language for the conviction he expressed that all things ought to be said, that there are abominable expressions which become necessary, like branding irons, and that a language emerges enriched from such strength-giving baths. He easily granted their anger, but he would at least have liked them to do him the honour of understanding him and getting angry at his audacity, not at the idiotic, filthy designs of which he was accused.

'Really,' he continued, 'I believe that the world still contains more idiots than downright spiteful people. They are enraged with me on account of the form I give to my productions, the written sentences, the similes, the very life of my style. Yes, the middle-classes fairly split with hatred of literature!'

Then he became silent, having grown sad.

'Never mind,' said Claude, after an interval, 'you are happy, you at least work, you produce—'

Sandoz had risen from his seat with a gesture of sudden pain.

'True, I work. I work out my books to their last pages—But if you only knew, if I told you amidst what discouragement, amidst what torture! Won't those idiots take it into their heads to accuse me of pride! I, whom the imperfection of my work pursues even in my sleep—I, who never look over the pages of the day before, lest I should find them so execrable that I might afterwards lack the courage to continue. Oh, I work, no doubt, I work! I go on working, as I go on living, because I am born to it, but I am none the gayer on account of it. I am never satisfied; there is always a great collapse at the end.'

He was interrupted by a loud exclamation outside, and Jory appeared, delighted with life, and relating that he had just touched up an old article in order to have the evening to himself. Almost immediately afterwards Gagniere and Mahoudeau, who had met at the door, came in conversing together. The former, who had been absorbed for some months in a theory of colours, was explaining his system to the other.

'I paint my shade in,' he continued, as if in a dream. 'The red of the flag loses its brightness and becomes yellowish because it stands out against the blue of the sky, the complementary shade of which—orange—blends with red—'

Claude, interested at once, was already questioning him when the servant brought in a telegram.

'All right,' said Sandoz, 'it's from Dubuche, who apologises; he promises to come and surprise us at about eleven o'clock.'

At this moment Henriette threw the door wide open, and personally announced that dinner was ready. She had doffed her white apron, and cordially shook hands, as hostess, with all of them. 'Take your seats! take your seats!' was her cry. It was half-past seven already, the bouillabaisse could not wait. Jory, having observed that Fagerolles had sworn to him that he would come, they would not believe it. Fagerolles was getting ridiculous with his habit of aping the great artist overwhelmed with work!

The dining-room into which they passed was so small that, in order to make room for a piano, a kind of alcove had been made out of a dark closet which had formerly served for the accommodation of crockery. However, on grand occasions half a score of people still gathered round the table, under the white porcelain hanging lamp, but this was only accomplished by blocking up the sideboard, so that the servant could not even pass to take a plate from it. However, it was the mistress of the house who carved, while the master took his place facing her, against the blockaded sideboard, in order to hand round whatever things might be required.

Henriette had placed Claude on her right hand, Mahoudeau on her left, while Gagniere and Jory were seated next to Sandoz.

'Francoise,' she called, 'give me the slices of toast. They are on the range.'

And the girl having brought the toast, she distributed two slices to each of them, and was beginning to ladle the bouillabaisse into the plates, when the door opened once more.

'Fagerolles at last!' she said. 'I have given your seat to Mahoudeau. Sit down there, next to Claude.'

He apologised with an air of courtly politeness, by alleging a business appointment. Very elegantly dressed, tightly buttoned up in clothes of an English cut, he had the carriage of a man about town, relieved by the retention of a touch of artistic free-and-easiness. Immediately on sitting down he grasped his neighbour's hand, affecting great delight.

'Ah, my old Claude! I have for such a long time wanted to see you. A score of times I intended going after you into the country; but then, you know, circumstances—'

Claude, feeling uncomfortable at these protestations, endeavoured to meet them with a like cordiality. But Henriette, who was still serving, saved the situation by growing impatient.

'Come, Fagerolles, just answer me. Do you wish two slices of toast?'

'Certainly, madame, two, if you please. I am very fond of bouillabaisse. Besides, yours is delicious, a marvel!'

In fact, they all went into raptures over it, especially Jory and Mahoudeau, who declared they had never tasted anything better at Marseilles; so much so, that the young wife, delighted and still flushed with the heat of the kitchen, her ladle in her hand, had all she could do to refill the plates held out to her; and, indeed, she rose up and ran in person to the kitchen to fetch the remains of the soup, for the servant-girl was losing her wits.

'Come, eat something,' said Sandoz to her. 'We'll wait well enough till you have done.'

But she was obstinate and remained standing.

'Never mind me. You had better pass the bread—yes, there, behind you on the sideboard. Jory prefers crumb, which he can soak in the soup.'

Sandoz rose in his turn and assisted his wife, while the others chaffed Jory on his love for sops. And Claude, moved by the pleasant cordiality of his hosts, and awaking, as it were, from a long sleep, looked at them all, asking himself whether he had only left them on the previous night, or whether four years had really elapsed since he had dined with them one Thursday. They were different, however; he felt them to be changed: Mahoudeau soured by misery, Jory wrapt up in his own pleasures, Gagniere more distant, with his thoughts elsewhere. And it especially seemed to him that Fagerolles was chilly, in spite of his exaggerated cordiality of manner. No doubt their features had aged somewhat amid the wear and tear of life; but it was not only that which he noticed, it seemed to him also as if there was a void between them; he beheld them isolated and estranged from each other, although they were seated elbow to elbow in close array round the table. Then the surroundings were different; nowadays, a woman brought her charm to bear on them, and calmed them by her presence. Then why did he, face to face with the irrevocable current of things, which die and are renewed, experience that sensation of beginning something over again—why was it that he could have sworn that he had been seated at that same place only last Thursday? At last he thought he understood. It was Sandoz who had not changed, who remained as obstinate as regards his habits of friendship, as regards his habits of work, as radiant at being able to receive his friends at the board of his new home as he had formerly been, when sharing his frugal bachelor fare with them. A dream of eternal friendship made him changeless. Thursdays similar one to another followed and followed on until the furthest stages of their lives. All of them were eternally together, all started at the self-same hour, and participated in the same triumph!

Sandoz must have guessed the thought that kept Claude mute, for he said to him across the table, with his frank, youthful smile:

'Well, old man, here you are again! Ah, confound it! we missed you sorely. But, you see, nothing is changed; we are all the same—aren't we, all of you?'

They answered by nodding their heads—no doubt, no doubt!

'With this difference,' he went on, beaming—'with this difference, that the cookery is somewhat better than in the Rue d'Enfer! What a lot of messes I did make you swallow!'

After the bouillabaisse there came a civet of hare; and a roast fowl and salad terminated the dinner. But they sat for a long time at table, and the dessert proved a protracted affair, although the conversation lacked the fever and violence of yore. Every one spoke of himself and ended by relapsing into silence on perceiving that the others did not listen to him. With the cheese, however, when they had tasted some burgundy, a sharp little growth, of which the young couple had ordered a cask out of the profits of Sandoz's first novel, their voices rose to a higher key, and they all grew animated.

'So you have made an arrangement with Naudet, eh?' asked Mahoudeau, whose bony cheeks seemed to have grown yet more hollow. 'Is it true that he guarantees you fifty thousand francs for the first year?'

Fagerolles replied, with affected carelessness, 'Yes, fifty thousand francs. But nothing is settled; I'm thinking it over. It is hard to engage oneself like that. I am not going to do anything precipitately.'

'The deuce!' muttered the sculptor; 'you are hard to please. For twenty francs a day I'd sign whatever you like.'

They all now listened to Fagerolles, who posed as being wearied by his budding success. He still had the same good-looking, disturbing hussy-like face, but the fashion in which he wore his hair and the cut of his beard lent him an appearance of gravity. Although he still came at long intervals to Sandoz's, he was separating from the band; he showed himself on the boulevards, frequented the cafes and newspaper offices—all the places where a man can advertise himself and make useful acquaintances. These were tactics of his own, a determination to carve his own victory apart from the others; the smart idea that if he wished to triumph he ought to have nothing more in common with those revolutionists, neither dealer, nor connections, nor habits. It was even said that he had interested the female element of two or three drawing-rooms in his success, not in Jory's style, but like a vicious fellow who rises superior to his passions, and is content to adulate superannuated baronesses.

Just then Jory, in view of lending importance to himself, called Fagerolles' attention to a recently published article; he pretended that he had made Fagerolles just as he pretended that he had made Claude. 'I say, have you read that article of Vernier's about yourself? There's another fellow who repeats my ideas!'

'Ah, he does get articles, and no mistake!' sighed Mahoudeau.

Fagerolles made a careless gesture, but he smiled with secret contempt for all those poor beggars who were so utterly deficient in shrewdness that they clung, like simpletons, to their crude style, when it was so easy to conquer the crowd. Had it not sufficed for him to break with them, after pillaging them, to make his own fortune? He benefited by all the hatred that folks had against them; his pictures, of a softened, attenuated style, were held up in praise, so as to deal the death-blow to their ever obstinately violent works.

'Have you read Vernier's article?' asked Jory of Gagniere. 'Doesn't he say exactly what I said?'

For the last few moments Gagniere had been absorbed in contemplating his glass, the wine in which cast a ruddy reflection on the white tablecloth. He started:

'Eh, what, Vernier's article?'

'Why, yes; in fact, all those articles which appear about Fagerolles.'

Gagniere in amazement turned to the painter.

'What, are they writing articles about you? I know nothing about them, I haven't seen them. Ah! they are writing articles about you, but whatever for?'

There was a mad roar of laughter. Fagerolles alone grinned with an ill grace, for he fancied himself the butt of some spiteful joke. But Gagniere spoke in absolute good faith. He felt surprised at the success of a painter who did not even observe the laws regulating the value of tints. Success for that trickster! Never! For in that case what would become of conscientiousness?

This boisterous hilarity enlivened the end of the dinner. They all left off eating, though the mistress of the house still insisted upon filling their plates.

'My dear, do attend to them,' she kept saying to Sandoz, who had grown greatly excited amidst the din. 'Just stretch out your hand; the biscuits are on the side-board.'

They all declined anything more, and rose up. As the rest of the evening was to be spent there, round the table, drinking tea, they leaned back against the walls and continued chatting while the servant cleared away. The young couple assisted, Henriette putting the salt-cellars in a drawer, and Sandoz helping to fold the cloth.

'You can smoke,' said Henriette. 'You know that it doesn't inconvenience me in the least.'

Fagerolles, who had drawn Claude into the window recess, offered him a cigar, which was declined.

'True, I forgot; you don't smoke. Ah! I say, I must go to see what you have brought back with you. Some very interesting things, no doubt. You know what I think of your talent. You are the cleverest of us all.'

He showed himself very humble, sincere at heart, and allowing his admiration of former days to rise once more to the surface; indeed, he for ever bore the imprint of another's genius, which he admitted, despite the complex calculations of his cunning mind. But his humility was mingled with a certain embarrassment very rare with him—the concern he felt at the silence which the master of his youth preserved respecting his last picture. At last he ventured to ask, with quivering lips:

'Did you see my actress at the Salon? Do you like it? Tell me candidly.'

Claude hesitated for a moment; then, like the good-natured fellow he was, said:

'Yes; there are some very good bits in it.'

Fagerolles already repented having asked that stupid question, and he ended by altogether floundering; he tried to excuse himself for his plagiarisms and his compromises. When with great difficulty he had got out of the mess, enraged with himself for his clumsiness, he for a moment became the joker of yore again, made even Claude laugh till he cried, and amused them all. At last he held out his hand to take leave of Henriette.

'What, going so soon?'

'Alas! yes, dear madame. This evening my father is entertaining the head of a department at one of the ministries, an official whom he's trying to influence in view of obtaining a decoration; and, as I am one of his titles to that distinction, I had to promise that I would look in.'

When he was gone, Henriette, who had exchanged a few words in a low voice with Sandoz, disappeared; and her light footfall was heard on the first floor. Since her marriage it was she who tended the old, infirm mother, absenting herself in this fashion several times during the evening, just as the son had done formerly.

Not one of the guests, however, had noticed her leave the room. Mahoudeau and Gagniere were now talking about Fagerolles; showing themselves covertly bitter, without openly attacking him. As yet they contented themselves with ironical glances and shrugs of the shoulders—all the silent contempt of fellows who don't wish to slash a chum. Then they fell back on Claude; they prostrated themselves before him, overwhelmed him with the hopes they set in him. Ah! it was high time for him to come back, for he alone, with his great gifts, his vigorous touch, could become the master, the recognised chief. Since the Salon of the Rejected the 'school of the open air' had increased in numbers; a growing influence was making itself felt; but unfortunately, the efforts were frittered away; the new recruits contented themselves with producing sketches, impressions thrown off with a few strokes of the brush; they were awaiting the necessary man of genius, the one who would incarnate the new formula in masterpieces. What a position to take! to master the multitude, to open up a century, to create a new art! Claude listened to them, with his eyes turned to the floor and his face very pale. Yes, that indeed was his unavowed dream, the ambition he dared not confess to himself. Only, with the delight that the flattery caused him, there was mingled a strange anguish, a dread of the future, as he heard them raising him to the position of dictator, as if he had already triumphed.

'Don't,' he exclaimed at last; 'there are others as good as myself. I am still seeking my real line.'

Jory, who felt annoyed, was smoking in silence. Suddenly, as the others obstinately kept at it, he could not refrain from remarking:

'All this, my boys, is because you are vexed at Fagerolles' success.'

They energetically denied it; they burst out in protestations. Fagerolles, the young master! What a good joke!

'Oh, you are turning your back upon us, we know it,' said Mahoudeau. 'There's no fear of your writing a line about us nowadays.'

'Well, my dear fellow,' answered Jory, vexed, 'everything I write about you is cut out. You make yourselves hated everywhere. Ah! if I had a paper of my own!'

Henriette came back, and Sandoz's eyes having sought hers, she answered him with a glance and the same affectionate, quiet smile that he had shown when leaving his mother's room in former times. Then she summoned them all. They sat down again round the table while she made the tea and poured it out. But the gathering grew sad, benumbed, as it were, with lassitude. Sandoz vainly tried a diversion by admitting Bertrand, the big dog, who grovelled at sight of the sugar-basin, and ended by going to sleep near the stove, where he snored like a man. Since the discussion on Fagerolles there had been intervals of silence, a kind of bored irritation, which fell heavily upon them amidst the dense tobacco smoke. And, in fact, Gagniere felt so out of sorts that he left the table for a moment to seat himself at the piano, murdering some passages from Wagner in a subdued key, with the stiff fingers of an amateur who tries his first scale at thirty.

Towards eleven o'clock Dubuche, arriving at last, contributed the finishing touch to the general frost. He had made his escape from a ball to fulfil what he considered a remaining duty towards his old comrades; and his dress-coat, his white necktie, his fat, pale face, all proclaimed his vexation at having come, the importance he attached to the sacrifice, and the fear he felt of compromising his new position. He avoided mentioning his wife, so that he might not have to bring her to Sandoz's. When he had shaken hands with Claude, without showing more emotion than if he had met him the day before, he declined a cup of tea and spoke slowly—puffing out his cheeks the while—of his worry in settling in a brand-new house, and of the work that had overwhelmed him since he had attended to the business of his father-in-law, who was building a whole street near the Parc Monceau.

Then Claude distinctly felt that something had snapped. Had life then already carried away the evenings of former days, those evenings so fraternal in their very violence, when nothing had as yet separated them, when not one of them had thought of keeping his part of glory to himself? Nowadays the battle was beginning. Each hungry one was eagerly biting. And a fissure was there, a scarcely perceptible crack that had rent the old, sworn friendships, and some day would make them crumble into a thousand pieces.

However, Sandoz, with his craving for perpetuity, had so far noticed nothing; he still beheld them as they had been in the Rue d'Enfer, all arm in arm, starting off to victory. Why change what was well? Did not happiness consist in one pleasure selected from among all, and then enjoyed for ever afterwards? And when, an hour later, the others made up their minds to go off, wearied by the dull egotism of Dubuche, who had not left off talking about his own affairs; when they had dragged Gagniere, in a trance, away from the piano, Sandoz, followed by his wife, absolutely insisted, despite the coldness of the night, on accompanying them all to the gate at the end of the garden. He shook hands all round, and shouted after them:

'Till Thursday, Claude; till next Thursday, all of you, eh? Mind you all come!'

'Till Thursday!' repeated Henriette, who had taken the lantern and was holding it aloft so as to light the steps.

And, amid the laughter, Gagniere and Mahoudeau replied, jokingly: 'Till Thursday, young master! Good-night, young master!'

Once in the Rue Nollet, Dubuche immediately hailed a cab, in which he drove away. The other four walked together as far as the outer boulevards, scarcely exchanging a word, looking dazed, as it were, at having been in each other's company so long. At last Jory decamped, pretending that some proofs were waiting for him at the office of his newspaper. Then Gagniere mechanically stopped Claude in front of the Cafe Baudequin, the gas of which was still blazing away. Mahoudeau refused to go in, and went off alone, sadly ruminating, towards the Rue du Cherche-Midi.

Without knowing how, Claude found himself seated at their old table, opposite Gagniere, who was silent. The cafe had not changed. The friends still met there of a Sunday, showing a deal of fervour, in fact, since Sandoz had lived in the neighbourhood; but the band was now lost amid a flood of new-comers; it was slowly being submerged by the increasing triteness of the young disciples of the 'open air.' At that hour of night, however, the establishment was getting empty. Three young painters, whom Claude did not know, came to shake hands with him as they went off; and then there merely remained a petty retired tradesman of the neighbourhood, asleep in front of a saucer.

Gagniere, quite at his ease, as if he had been at home, absolutely indifferent to the yawns of the solitary waiter, who was stretching his arms, glanced towards Claude, but without seeing him, for his eyes were dim.

'By the way,' said the latter, 'what were you explaining to Mahoudeau this evening? Yes, about the red of a flag turning yellowish amid the blue of the sky. That was it, eh? You are studying the theory of complementary colours.'

But the other did not answer. He took up his glass of beer, set it down again without tasting its contents, and with an ecstatic smile ended by muttering:

'Haydn has all the gracefulness of a rhetorician—his is a gentle music, quivering like the voice of a great-grandmother in powdered hair. Mozart, he's the precursory genius—the first who endowed an orchestra with an individual voice; and those two will live mostly because they created Beethoven. Ah, Beethoven! power and strength amidst serene suffering, Michael Angelo at the tomb of the Medici! A heroic logician, a kneader of human brains; for the symphony, with choral accompaniments, was the starting-point of all the great ones of to-day!'

The waiter, tired of waiting, began to turn off the gas, wearily dragging his feet along as he did so. Mournfulness pervaded the deserted room, dirty with saliva and cigar ends, and reeking of spilt drink; while from the hushed boulevard the only sound that came was the distant blubbering of some drunkard.

Gagniere, still in the clouds, however, continued to ride his hobby-horse.

'Weber passes by us amid a romantic landscape, conducting the ballads of the dead amidst weeping willows and oaks with twisted branches. Schumann follows him, beneath the pale moonlight, along the shores of silvery lakes. And behold, here comes Rossini, incarnation of the musical gift, so gay, so natural, without the least concern for expression, caring nothing for the public, and who isn't my man by a long way—ah! certainly not—but then, all the same, he astonishes one by his wealth of production, and the huge effects he derives from an accumulation of voices and an ever-swelling repetition of the same strain. These three led to Meyerbeer, a cunning fellow who profited by everything, introducing symphony into opera after Weber, and giving dramatic expression to the unconscious formulas of Rossini. Oh! the superb bursts of sound, the feudal pomp, the martial mysticism, the quivering of fantastic legends, the cry of passion ringing out through history! And such finds!—each instrument endowed with a personality, the dramatic recitatives accompanied symphoniously by the orchestra—the typical musical phrase on which an entire work is built! Ah! he was a great fellow—a very great fellow indeed!'

'I am going to shut up, sir,' said the waiter, drawing near.

And, seeing that Gagniere did not as much as look round, he went to awaken the petty retired tradesman, who was still dozing in front of his saucer.

'I am going to shut up, sir.'

The belated customer rose up, shivering, fumbled in the dark corner where he was seated for his walking-stick, and when the waiter had picked it up for him from under the seats he went away.

And Gagniere rambled on:

'Berlioz has mingled literature with his work. He is the musical illustrator of Shakespeare, Virgil, and Goethe. But what a painter!—the Delacroix of music, who makes sound blaze forth amidst effulgent contrasts of colour. And withal he has romanticism in his brain, a religious mysticism that carries him away, an ecstasy that soars higher than mountain summits. A bad builder of operas, but marvellous in detached pieces, asking too much at times of the orchestra which he tortures, having pushed the personality of instruments to its furthest limits; for each instrument represents a character to him. Ah! that remark of his about clarionets: "They typify beloved women." Ah! it has always made a shiver run down my back. And Chopin, so dandified in his Byronism; the dreamy poet of those who suffer from neurosis! And Mendelssohn, that faultless chiseller! a Shakespeare in dancing pumps, whose "songs without words" are gems for women of intellect! And after that—after that—a man should go down on his knees.'

There was now only one gas-lamp alight just above his head, and the waiter standing behind him stood waiting amid the gloomy, chilly void of the room. Gagniere's voice had come to a reverential tremolo. He was reaching devotional fervour as he approached the inner tabernacle, the holy of holies.

'Oh! Schumann, typical of despair, the voluptuousness of despair! Yes, the end of everything, the last song of saddened purity hovering above the ruins of the world! Oh! Wagner, the god in whom centuries of music are incarnated! His work is the immense ark, all the arts blended in one; the real humanity of the personages at last expressed, the orchestra itself living apart the life of the drama. And what a massacre of conventionality, of inept formulas! what a revolutionary emancipation amid the infinite! The overture of "Tannhauser," ah! that's the sublime hallelujah of the new era. First of all comes the chant of the pilgrims, the religious strain, calm, deep and slowly throbbing; then the voices of the sirens gradually drown it; the voluptuous pleasures of Venus, full of enervating delight and languor, grow more and more imperious and disorderly; and soon the sacred air gradually returns, like the aspiring voice of space, and seizes hold of all other strains and blends them in one supreme harmony, to waft them away on the wings of a triumphal hymn!'

'I am going to shut up, sir,' repeated the waiter.

Claude, who no longer listened, he also being absorbed in his own passion, emptied his glass of beer and cried: 'Eh, old man, they are going to shut up.'

Then Gagniere trembled. A painful twitch came over his ecstatic face, and he shivered as if he had dropped from the stars. He gulped down his beer, and once on the pavement outside, after pressing his companion's hand in silence, he walked off into the gloom.

It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when Claude returned to the Rue de Douai. During the week that he had been scouring Paris anew, he had each time brought back with him the feverish excitement of the day. But he had never before returned so late, with his brain so hot and smoky. Christine, overcome with fatigue, was asleep under the lamp, which had gone out, her brow resting on the edge of the table.

VIII

AT last Christine gave a final stroke with her feather-broom, and they were settled. The studio in the Rue de Douai, small and inconvenient, had only one little room, and a kitchen, as big as a cupboard, attached to it. They were obliged to take their meals in the studio; they had to live in it, with the child always tumbling about their legs. And Christine had a deal of trouble in making their few sticks suffice, as she wished to do, in order to save expense. After all, she was obliged to buy a second-hand bedstead; and yielded to the temptation of having some white muslin curtains, which cost her seven sous the metre. The den then seemed charming to her, and she began to keep it scrupulously clean, resolving to do everything herself, and to dispense with a servant, as living would be a difficult matter.

During the first months Claude lived in ever-increasing excitement. His peregrinations through the noisy streets; his feverish discussions on the occasion of his visits to friends; all the rage and all the burning ideas he thus brought home from out of doors, made him hold forth aloud even in his sleep. Paris had seized hold of him again; and in the full blaze of that furnace, a second youth, enthusiastic ambition to see, do, and conquer, had come upon him. Never had he felt such a passion for work, such hope, as if it sufficed for him to stretch out his hand in order to create masterpieces that should set him in the right rank, which was the first. While crossing Paris he discovered subjects for pictures everywhere; the whole city, with its streets, squares, bridges, and panoramas of life, suggested immense frescoes, which he, however, always found too small, for he was intoxicated with the thought of doing something colossal. Thus he returned home quivering, his brain seething with projects; and of an evening threw off sketches on bits of paper, in the lamp-light, without being able to decide by what he ought to begin the series of grand productions that he dreamt about.

One serious obstacle was the smallness of his studio. If he had only had the old garret of the Quai de Bourbon, or even the huge dining-room of Bennecourt! But what could he do in that oblong strip of space, that kind of passage, which the landlord of the house impudently let to painters for four hundred francs a year, after roofing it in with glass? The worst was that the sloping glazed roof looked to the north, between two high walls, and only admitted a greenish cellar-like light. He was therefore obliged to postpone his ambitious projects, and he decided to begin with average-sized canvases, wisely saying to himself that the dimensions of a picture are not a proper test of an artist's genius.

The moment seemed to him favourable for the success of a courageous artist who, amidst the breaking up of the old schools, would at length bring some originality and sincerity into his work. The formulas of recent times were already shaken. Delacroix had died without leaving any disciples. Courbet had barely a few clumsy imitators behind him; their best pieces would merely become so many museum pictures, blackened by age, tokens only of the art of a certain period. It seemed easy to foresee the new formula that would spring from theirs, that rush of sunshine, that limpid dawn which was rising in new works under the nascent influence of the 'open air' school. It was undeniable; those light-toned paintings over which people had laughed so much at the Salon of the Rejected were secretly influencing many painters, and gradually brightening every palette. Nobody, as yet, admitted it, but the first blow had been dealt, and an evolution was beginning, which became more perceptible at each succeeding Salon. And what a stroke it would be if, amidst the unconscious copies of impotent essayists, amidst the timid artful attempts of tricksters, a master were suddenly to reveal himself, giving body to the new formula by dint of audacity and power, without compromise, showing it such as it should be, substantial, entire, so that it might become the truth of the end of the century!

In that first hour of passion and hope, Claude, usually so harassed by doubts, believed in his genius. He no longer experienced any of those crises, the anguish of which had driven him for days into the streets in quest of his vanished courage. A fever stiffened him, he worked on with the blind obstinacy of an artist who dives into his entrails, to drag therefrom the fruit that tortures him. His long rest in the country had endowed him with singular freshness of visual perception, and joyous delight in execution; he seemed to have been born anew to his art, and endowed with a facility and balance of power he had never hitherto possessed. He also felt certain of progress, and experienced great satisfaction at some successful bits of work, in which his former sterile efforts at last culminated. As he had said at Bennecourt, he had got hold of his 'open air,' that carolling gaiety of tints which astonished his comrades when they came to see him. They all admired, convinced that he would only have to show his work to take a very high place with it, such was its individuality of style, for the first time showing nature flooded with real light, amid all the play of reflections and the constant variations of colours.

Thus, for three years, Claude struggled on, without weakening, spurred to further efforts by each rebuff, abandoning nought of his ideas, but marching straight before him, with all the vigour of faith.

During the first year he went forth amid the December snows to place himself for four hours a day behind the heights of Montmartre, at the corner of a patch of waste land whence as a background he painted some miserable, low, tumble-down buildings, overtopped by factory chimneys, whilst in the foreground, amidst the snow, he set a girl and a ragged street rough devouring stolen apples. His obstinacy in painting from nature greatly complicated his work, and gave rise to almost insuperable difficulties. However, he finished this picture out of doors; he merely cleaned and touched it up a bit in his studio. When the canvas was placed beneath the wan daylight of the glazed roof, he himself was startled by its brutality. It showed like a scene beheld through a doorway open on the street. The snow blinded one. The two figures, of a muddy grey in tint, stood out, lamentable. He at once felt that such a picture would not be accepted, but he did not try to soften it; he sent it to the Salon, all the same. After swearing that he would never again try to exhibit, he now held the view that one should always present something to the hanging committee if merely to accentuate its wrong-doing. Besides, he admitted the utility of the Salon, the only battlefield on which an artist might come to the fore at one stroke. The hanging committee refused his picture.

The second year Claude sought a contrast. He selected a bit of the public garden of Batignolles in May; in the background were some large chestnut trees casting their shade around a corner of greensward and several six-storied houses; while in front, on a seat of a crude green hue, some nurses and petty cits of the neighbourhood sat in a line watching three little girls making sand pies. When permission to paint there had been obtained, he had needed some heroism to bring his work to a successful issue amid the bantering crowd. At last he made up his mind to go there at five in the morning, in order to paint in the background; reserving the figures, he contented himself with making mere sketches of them from nature, and finishing them in his studio. This time his picture seemed to him less crude; it had acquired some of the wan, softened light which descended through the glass roof. He thought his picture accepted, for all his friends pronounced it to be a masterpiece, and went about saying that it would revolutionise the Salon. There was stupefaction and indignation when a fresh refusal of the hanging committee was rumoured. The committee's intentions could not be denied: it was a question of systematically strangling an original artist. He, after his first burst of passion, vented all his anger upon his work, which he stigmatised as false, dishonest, and execrable. It was a well-deserved lesson, which he should remember: ought he to have relapsed into that cellar-like studio light? Was he going to revert to the filthy cooking of imaginary figures? When the picture came back, he took a knife and ripped it from top to bottom.

And so during the third year he obstinately toiled on a work of revolt. He wanted the blazing sun, that Paris sun which, on certain days, turns the pavement to a white heat in the dazzling reflection from the house frontages. Nowhere is it hotter; even people from burning climes mop their faces; you would say you were in some region of Africa beneath the heavily raining glow of a sky on fire. The subject Claude chose was a corner of the Place du Carrousel, at one o'clock in the afternoon, when the sunrays fall vertically. A cab was jolting along, its driver half asleep, its horse steaming, with drooping head, vague amid the throbbing heat. The passers-by seemed, as it were, intoxicated, with the one exception of a young woman, who, rosy and gay under her parasol, walked on with an easy queen-like step, as if the fiery element were her proper sphere. But what especially rendered this picture terrible was a new interpretation of the effects of light, a very accurate decomposition of the sunrays, which ran counter to all the habits of eyesight, by emphasising blues, yellows and reds, where nobody had been accustomed to see any. In the background the Tuileries vanished in a golden shimmer; the paving-stones bled, so to say; the figures were only so many indications, sombre patches eaten into by the vivid glare. This time his comrades, while still praising, looked embarrassed, all seized with the same apprehensions. Such painting could only lead to martyrdom. He, amidst their praises, understood well enough the rupture that was taking place, and when the hanging committee had once more closed the Salon against him, he dolorously exclaimed, in a moment of lucidity:

'All right; it's an understood thing—I'll die at the task.'

However, although his obstinate courage seemed to increase, he now and then gradually relapsed into his former doubts, consumed by the struggle he was waging with nature. Every canvas that came back to him seemed bad to him—above all incomplete, not realising what he had aimed at. It was this idea of impotence that exasperated him even more than the refusals of the hanging committee. No doubt he did not forgive the latter; his works, even in an embryo state, were a hundred times better than all the trash which was accepted. But what suffering he felt at being ever unable to show himself in all his strength, in such a master-piece as he could not bring his genius to yield! There were always some superb bits in his paintings. He felt satisfied with this, that, and the other. Why, then, were there sudden voids? Why were there inferior bits, which he did not perceive while he was at work, but which afterwards utterly killed the picture like ineffaceable defects? And he felt quite unable to make any corrections; at certain moments a wall rose up, an insuperable obstacle, beyond which he was forbidden to venture. If he touched up the part that displeased him a score of times, so a score of times did he aggravate the evil, till everything became quite muddled and messy.

He grew anxious, and failed to see things clearly; his brush refused to obey him, and his will was paralysed. Was it his hands or his eyes that ceased to belong to him amid those progressive attacks of the hereditary disorder that had already made him anxious? Those attacks became more frequent; he once more lapsed into horrible weeks, wearing himself out, oscillating betwixt uncertainty and hope; and his only support during those terrible hours, which he spent in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle with his rebellious work, was the consoling dream of his future masterpiece, the one with which he would at last be fully satisfied, in painting which his hands would show all the energy and deftness of true creative skill. By some ever-recurring phenomenon, his longing to create outstripped the quickness of his fingers; he never worked at one picture without planning the one that was to follow. Then all that remained to him was an eager desire to rid himself of the work on which he was engaged, for it brought him torture; no doubt it would be good for nothing; he was still making fatal concessions, having recourse to trickery, to everything that a true artist should banish from his conscience. But what he meant to do after that—ah! what he meant to do—he beheld it superb and heroic, above attack and indestructible. All this was the everlasting mirage that goads on the condemned disciples of art, a falsehood that comes in a spirit of tenderness and compassion, and without which production would become impossible to those who die of their failure to create life.

In addition to those constantly renewed struggles with himself, Claude's material difficulties now increased. Was it not enough that he could not give birth to what he felt existing within him? Must he also battle with every-day cares? Though he refused to admit it, painting from nature in the open air became impossible when a picture was beyond a certain size. How could he settle himself in the streets amidst the crowd?—how obtain from each person the necessary number of sittings? That sort of painting must evidently be confined to certain determined subjects, landscapes, small corners of the city, in which the figures would be but so many silhouettes, painted in afterwards. There were also a thousand and one difficulties connected with the weather; the wind which threatened to carry off the easel, the rain which obliged one to interrupt one's work. On such days Claude came home in a rage, shaking his fist at the sky and accusing nature of resisting him in order that he might not take and vanquish her. He also complained bitterly of being poor; for his dream was to have a movable studio, a vehicle in Paris, a boat on the Seine, in both of which he would have lived like an artistic gipsy. But nothing came to his aid, everything conspired against his work.

And Christine suffered with Claude. She had shared his hopes very bravely, brightening the studio with her housewifely activity; but now she sat down, discouraged, when she saw him powerless. At each picture which was refused she displayed still deeper grief, hurt in her womanly self-love, taking that pride in success which all women have. The painter's bitterness soured her also; she entered into his feelings and passions, identified herself with his tastes, defended his painting, which had become, as it were, part of herself, the one great concern of their lives—indeed, the only important one henceforth, since it was the one whence she expected all her happiness. She understood well enough that art robbed her more and more of her lover each day, but the real struggle between herself and art had not yet begun. For the time she yielded, and let herself be carried away with Claude, so that they might be but one—one only in the self-same effort. From that partial abdication of self there sprang, however, a sadness, a dread of what might be in store for her later on. Every now and then a shudder chilled her to the very heart. She felt herself growing old, while intense melancholy upset her, an unreasoning longing to weep, which she satisfied in the gloomy studio for hours together, when she was alone there.

At that period her heart expanded, as it were, and a mother sprang from the loving woman. That motherly feeling for her big artist child was made up of all the vague infinite pity which filled her with tenderness, of the illogical fits of weakness into which she saw him fall each hour, of the constant pardons which she was obliged to grant him. He was beginning to make her unhappy, his caresses were few and far between, a look of weariness constantly overspread his features. How could she love him then if not with that other affection of every moment, remaining in adoration before him, and unceasingly sacrificing herself? In her inmost being insatiable passion still lingered; she was still the sensuous woman with thick lips set in obstinately prominent jaws. Yet there was a gentle melancholy, in being merely a mother to him, in trying to make him happy amid that life of theirs which now was spoilt.

Little Jacques was the only one to suffer from that transfer of tenderness. She neglected him more; the man, his father, became her child, and the poor little fellow remained as mere testimony of their great passion of yore. As she saw him grow up, and no longer require so much care, she began to sacrifice him, without intentional harshness, but merely because she felt like that. At meal-times she only gave him the inferior bits; the cosiest nook near the stove was not for his little chair; if ever the fear of an accident made her tremble now and then, her first cry, her first protecting movement was not for her helpless child. She ever relegated him to the background, suppressed him, as it were: 'Jacques, be quiet; you tire your father. Jacques, keep still; don't you see that your father is at work?'

The urchin suffered from being cooped up in Paris. He, who had had the whole country-side to roll about in, felt stifled in the narrow space where he now had to keep quiet. His rosy cheeks became pale, he grew up puny, serious, like a little man, with eyes which stared at things in wonder. He was five by now, and his head by a singular phenomenon had become disproportionately large, in such wise as to make his father say, 'He has a great man's nut!' But the child's intelligence seemed, on the contrary, to decrease in proportion as his skull became larger. Very gentle and timid, he became absorbed in thought for hours, incapable of answering a question. And when he emerged from that state of immobility he had mad fits of shouting and jumping, like a young animal giving rein to instinct. At such times warnings 'to keep quiet' rained upon him, for his mother failed to understand his sudden outbursts, and became uneasy at seeing the father grow irritated as he sat before his easel. Getting cross herself, she would then hastily seat the little fellow in his corner again. Quieted all at once, giving the startled shudder of one who has been too abruptly awakened, the child would after a time doze off with his eyes wide open, so careless of enjoying life that his toys, corks, pictures, and empty colour-tubes dropped listlessly from his hands. Christine had already tried to teach him his alphabet, but he had cried and struggled, so they had decided to wait another year or two before sending him to school, where his masters would know how to make him learn.

Christine at last began to grow frightened at the prospect of impending misery. In Paris, with that growing child beside them, living proved expensive, and the end of each month became terrible, despite her efforts to save in every direction. They had nothing certain but Claude's thousand francs a year; and how could they live on fifty francs a month, which was all that was left to them after deducting four hundred francs for the rent? At first they had got out of embarrassment, thanks to the sale of a few pictures, Claude having found Gagniere's old amateur, one of those detested bourgeois who possess the ardent souls of artists, despite the monomaniacal habits in which they are confined. This one, M. Hue, a retired chief clerk in a public department, was unfortunately not rich enough to be always buying, and he could only bewail the purblindness of the public, which once more allowed a genius to die of starvation; for he himself, convinced, struck by grace at the first glance, had selected Claude's crudest works, which he hung by the side of his Delacroix, predicting equal fortune for them. The worst was that Papa Malgras had just retired after making his fortune. It was but a modest competence after all, an income of about ten thousand francs, upon which he had decided to live in a little house at Bois Colombes, like the careful man he was.

It was highly amusing to hear him speak of the famous Naudet, full of disdain for the millions turned over by that speculator, 'millions that would some day fall upon his nose,' said Malgras. Claude, having casually met him, only succeeded in selling him a last picture, one of his sketches from the nude made at the Boutin studio, that superb study of a woman's trunk which the erstwhile dealer had not been able to see afresh without feeling a revival of his old passion for it. So misery was imminent; outlets were closing instead of new ones opening; disquieting rumours were beginning to circulate concerning the young painter's works, so constantly rejected at the Salon; and besides, Claude's style of art, so revolutionary and imperfect, in which the startled eye found nought of admitted conventionality, would of itself have sufficed to drive away wealthy buyers. One evening, being unable to settle his bill at his colour shop, the painter had exclaimed that he would live upon the capital of his income rather than lower himself to the degrading production of trade pictures. But Christine had violently opposed such an extreme measure; she would retrench still further; in short, she preferred anything to such madness, which would end by throwing them into the streets without even bread to eat.

After the rejection of Claude's third picture, the summer proved so wonderfully fine that the painter seemed to derive new strength from it. There was not a cloud; limpid light streamed day after day upon the giant activity of Paris. Claude had resumed his peregrinations through the city, determined to find a masterstroke, as he expressed it, something huge, something decisive, he did not exactly know what. September came, and still he had found nothing that satisfied him; he simply went mad for a week about one or another subject, and then declared that it was not the thing after all. His life was spent in constant excitement; he was ever on the watch, on the point of setting his hand on the realisation of his dream, which always flew away. In reality, beneath his intractable realism lay the superstition of a nervous woman; he believed in occult and complex influences; everything, luck or ill-luck, must depend upon the view selected.

One afternoon—it was one of the last fine days of the season—Claude took Christine out with him, leaving little Jacques in the charge of the doorkeeper, a kind old woman, as was their wont when they wanted to go out together. That day the young painter was possessed by a sudden whim to ramble about and revisit in Christine's company the nooks beloved in other days; and behind this desire of his there lurked a vague hope that she would bring him luck. And thus they went as far as the Pont Louis-Philippe, and remained for a quarter of an hour on the Quai des Ormes, silent, leaning against the parapet, and looking at the old Hotel du Martoy, across the Seine, where they had first loved each other. Then, still without saying a word, they went their former round; they started along the quays, under the plane trees, seeing the past rise up before them at every step. Everything spread out again: the bridges with their arches opening upon the sheeny water; the Cite, enveloped in shade, above which rose the flavescent towers of Notre-Dame; the great curve of the right bank flooded with sunlight, and ending in the indistinct silhouette of the Pavillon de Flore, together with the broad avenues, the monuments and edifices on both banks, and all the life of the river, the floating wash-houses, the baths, and the lighters.

As of old, the orb in its decline followed them, seemingly rolling along the distant housetops, and assuming a crescent shape, as it appeared from behind the dome of the Institute. There was a dazzling sunset, they had never beheld a more magnificent one, such a majestic descent amidst tiny cloudlets that changed into purple network, between the meshes of which a shower of gold escaped. But of the past that thus rose up before their eyes there came to them nought but invincible sadness—a sensation that things escaped them, and that it was impossible for them to retrace their way up stream and live their life over again. All those old stones remained cold. The constant current beneath the bridges, the water that had ever flowed onward and onward, seemed to have borne away something of their own selves, the delight of early desire and the joyfulness of hope. Now that they belonged to one another, they no longer tasted the simple happiness born of feeling the warm pressure of their arms as they strolled on slowly, enveloped by the mighty vitality of Paris.

On reaching the Pont des Saints-Peres, Claude, in sheer despair, stopped short. He had relinquished Christine's arm, and had turned his face towards the point of the Cite. She no doubt felt the severance that was taking place and became very sad. Seeing that he lingered there obliviously, she wished to regain her hold upon him.

'My dear,' said she, 'let us go home; it's time. Jacques will be waiting for us, you know.'

But he went half way across the bridge, and she had to follow him. Then once more he remained motionless, with his eyes still fixed on the Cite, on that island which ever rode at anchor, the cradle and heart of Paris, where for centuries all the blood of her arteries had converged amid the constant growth of faubourgs invading the plain. And a glow came over Claude's face, his eyes sparkled, and at last he made a sweeping gesture:

'Look! Look!'

In the immediate foreground beneath them was the port of St. Nicolas, with the low shanties serving as offices for the inspectors of navigation, and the large paved river-bank sloping down, littered with piles of sand, barrels, and sacks, and edged with a row of lighters, still full, in which busy lumpers swarmed beneath the gigantic arm of an iron crane. Then on the other side of the river, above a cold swimming-bath, resounding with the shouts of the last bathers of the season, the strips of grey linen that served as a roofing flapped in the wind. In the middle, the open stream flowed on in rippling, greenish wavelets tipped here and there with white, blue, and pink. And then there came the Pont des Arts, standing back, high above the water on its iron girders, like black lace-work, and animated by a ceaseless procession of foot-passengers, who looked like ants careering over the narrow line of the horizontal plane. Below, the Seine flowed away to the far distance; you saw the old arches of the Pont-Neuf, browny with stone-rust; on the left, as far as the Isle of St. Louis, came a mirror-like gap; and the other arm of the river curved sharply, the lock gates of the Mint shutting out the view with a bar of foam. Along the Pont-Neuf passed big yellow omnibuses, motley vehicles of all kinds, with the mechanical regularity of so many children's toys. The whole of the background was inframed within the perspective of the two banks; on the right were houses on the quays, partly hidden by a cluster of lofty trees, from behind which on the horizon there emerged a corner of the Hotel de Villa, together with the square clock tower of St. Gervais, both looking as indistinct as if they had stood far away in the suburbs. And on the left bank there was a wing of the Institute, the flat frontage of the Mint, and yet another enfilade of trees.

But the centre of the immense picture, that which rose most prominently from the stream and soared to the sky, was the Cite, showing like the prow of an antique vessel, ever burnished by the setting sun. Down below, the poplars on the strip of ground that joins the two sections of the Pont-Neuf hid the statue of Henri IV. with a dense mass of green foliage. Higher up, the sun set the two lines of frontages in contrast, wrapping the grey buildings of the Quai de l'Horloge in shade, and illumining with a blaze those of the Quai des Orfevres, rows of irregular houses which stood out so clearly that one distinguished the smallest details, the shops, the signboards, even the curtains at the windows. Higher up, amid the jagged outlines of chimney stacks, behind a slanting chess-board of smaller roofs, the pepper-caster turrets of the Palais de Justice and the garrets of the Prefecture of Police displayed sheets of slate, intersected by a colossal advertisement painted in blue upon a wall, with gigantic letters which, visible to all Paris, seemed like some efflorescence of the feverish life of modern times sprouting on the city's brow. Higher, higher still, betwixt the twin towers of Notre-Dame, of the colour of old gold, two arrows darted upwards, the spire of the cathedral itself, and to the left that of the Sainte-Chapelle, both so elegantly slim that they seemed to quiver in the breeze, as if they had been the proud topmasts of the ancient vessel rising into the brightness of the open sky.

'Are you coming, dear?' asked Christine, gently.

Claude did not listen to her; this, the heart of Paris, had taken full possession of him. The splendid evening seemed to widen the horizon. There were patches of vivid light, and of clearly defined shadow; there was a brightness in the precision of each detail, a transparency in the air, which throbbed with gladness. And the river life, the turmoil of the quays, all the people, streaming along the streets, rolling over the bridges, arriving from every side of that huge cauldron, Paris, steamed there in visible billows, with a quiver that was apparent in the sunlight. There was a light breeze, high aloft a flight of small cloudlets crossed the paling azure sky, and one could hear a slow but mighty palpitation, as if the soul of Paris here dwelt around its cradle.

But Christine, frightened at seeing Claude so absorbed, and seized herself with a kind of religious awe, took hold of his arm and dragged him away, as if she had felt that some great danger was threatening him.

'Let us go home. You are doing yourself harm. I want to get back.'

At her touch he started like a man disturbed in sleep. Then, turning his head to take a last look, he muttered: 'Ah! heavens! Ah! heavens, how beautiful!'

He allowed himself to be led away. But throughout the evening, first at dinner, afterwards beside the stove, and until he went to bed, he remained like one dazed, so deep in his cogitations that he did not utter half a dozen sentences. And Christine, failing to draw from him any answer to her questions, at last became silent also. She looked at him anxiously; was it the approach of some serious illness, had he inhaled some bad air whilst standing midway across the bridge yonder? His eyes stared vaguely into space, his face flushed as if with some inner straining. One would have thought it the mute travail of germination, as if something were springing into life within him.

The next morning, immediately after breakfast, he set off, and Christine spent a very sorrowful day, for although she had become more easy in mind on hearing him whistle some of his old southern tunes as he got up, she was worried by another matter, which she had not mentioned to him for fear of damping his spirits again. That day they would for the first time lack everything; a whole week separated them from the date when their little income would fall due, and she had spent her last copper that morning. She had nothing left for the evening, not even the wherewithal to buy a loaf. To whom could she apply? How could she manage to hide the truth any longer from him when he came home hungry? She made up her mind to pledge the black silk dress which Madame Vanzade had formerly given her, but it was with a heavy heart; she trembled with fear and shame at the idea of the pawnshop, that familiar resort of the poor which she had never as yet entered. And she was tortured by such apprehension about the future, that from the ten francs which were lent her she only took enough to make a sorrel soup and a stew of potatoes. On coming out of the pawn-office, a meeting with somebody she knew had given her the finishing stroke.

As it happened, Claude came home very late, gesticulating merrily, and his eyes very bright, as if he were excited by some secret joy; he was very hungry, and grumbled because the cloth was not laid. Then, having sat down between Christine and little Jacques, he swallowed his soup and devoured a plateful of potatoes.

'Is that all?' he asked, when he had finished. 'You might as well have added a scrap of meat. Did you have to buy some boots again?'

She stammered, not daring to tell him the truth, but hurt at heart by this injustice. He, however, went on chaffing her about the coppers she juggled away to buy herself things with; and getting more and more excited, amid the egotism of feelings which he seemingly wished to keep to himself, he suddenly flew out at Jacques.

'Hold your noise, you brat!—you drive one mad.'

The child, forgetting all about his dinner, had been tapping the edge of his plate with his spoon, his eyes full of mirthful delight at this music.

'Jacques, be quiet,' scoldingly said his mother, in her turn. 'Let your father have his dinner in peace.'

Then the little one, abashed, at once became very quiet, and relapsed into gloomy stillness, with his lustreless eyes fixed on his potatoes, which, however, he did not eat.

Claude made a show of stuffing himself with cheese, while Christine, quite grieved, offered to fetch some cold meat from a ham and beef shop; but he declined, and prevented her going by words that pained her still more. Then, the table having been cleared, they all sat round the lamp for the evening, she sewing, the little one turning over a picture-book in silence, and Claude drumming on the table with his fingers, his mind the while wandering back to the spot whence he had come. Suddenly he rose, sat down again with a sheet of paper and a pencil, and began sketching rapidly, in the vivid circle of light that fell from under the lamp-shade. And such was his longing to give outward expression to the tumultuous ideas beating in his skull, that soon this sketch did not suffice for his relief. On the contrary, it goaded him on, and he finished by unburthening his mind in a flood of words. He would have shouted to the walls; and if he addressed himself to his wife it was because she happened to be there.

'Look, that's what we saw yesterday. It's magnificent. I spent three hours there to-day. I've got hold of what I want—something wonderful, something that'll knock everything else to pieces. Just look! I station myself under the bridge; in the immediate foreground I have the Port of St. Nicolas, with its crane, its lighters which are being unloaded, and its crowd of labourers. Do you see the idea—it's Paris at work—all those brawny fellows displaying their bare arms and chests? Then on the other side I have the swimming-baths—Paris at play—and some skiff there, no doubt, to occupy the centre of the composition; but of that I am not as yet certain. I must feel my way. As a matter of course, the Seine will be in the middle, broad, immense.'

While talking, he kept on indicating outlines with his pencil, thickening his strokes over and over again, and tearing the paper in his very energy. She, in order to please him, bent over the sketch, pretending to grow very interested in his explanations. But there was such a labyrinth of lines, such a confusion of summary details, that she failed to distinguish anything.

'You are following me, aren't you?'

'Yes, yes, very beautiful indeed.'

'Then I have the background, the two arms of the rivet with their quays, the Cite, rising up triumphantly in the centre, and standing out against the sky. Ah! that background, what a marvel! People see it every day, pass before it without stopping; but it takes hold of one all the same; one's admiration accumulates, and one fine afternoon it bursts forth. Nothing in the world can be grander; it is Paris herself, glorious in the sunlight. Ah! what a fool I was not to think of it before! How many times I have looked at it without seeing! However, I stumbled on it after that ramble along the quays! And, do you remember, there's a dash of shadow on that side; while here the sunrays fall quite straight. The towers are yonder; the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle tapers upward, as slim as a needle pointing to the sky. But no, it's more to the right. Wait, I'll show you.'

He began again, never wearying, but constantly retouching the sketch, and adding innumerable little characteristic details which his painter's eye had noticed; here the red signboard of a distant shop vibrated in the light; closer by was a greenish bit of the Seine, on whose surface large patches of oil seemed to be floating; and then there was the delicate tone of a tree, the gamut of greys supplied by the house frontages, and the luminous cast of the sky. She complaisantly approved of all he said and tried to look delighted.

But Jacques once again forgot what he had been told. After long remaining silent before his book, absorbed in the contemplation of a wood-cut depicting a black cat, he began to hum some words of his own composition: 'Oh, you pretty cat; oh, you ugly cat; oh, you pretty, ugly cat,' and so on, ad infinitum, ever in the same lugubrious manner.

Claude, who was made fidgety by the buzzing noise, did not at first understand what was upsetting him. But after a time the child's harassing phrase fell clearly upon his ear.

'Haven't you done worrying us with your cat?' he shouted furiously.

'Hold your tongue, Jacques, when your father is talking!' repeated Christine.

Upon my word, I do believe he is becoming an idiot. Just look at his head, if it isn't like an idiot's. It's dreadful. Just say; what do you mean by your pretty and ugly cat?'

The little fellow, turning pale and wagging his big head, looked stupid, and replied: 'Don't know.'

Then, as his father and mother gazed at each other with a discouraged air, he rested his cheek on the open picture-book, and remained like that, neither stirring nor speaking, but with his eyes wide open.

It was getting late; Christine wanted to put him to bed, but Claude had already resumed his explanations. He now told her that, the very next morning, he should go and make a sketch on the spot, just in order to fix his ideas. And, as he rattled on, he began to talk of buying a small camp easel, a thing upon which he had set his heart for months. He kept harping on the subject, and spoke of money matters till she at last became embarrassed, and ended by telling him of everything—the last copper she had spent that morning, and the silk dress she had pledged in order to dine that evening. Thereupon he became very remorseful and affectionate; he kissed her and asked her forgiveness for having complained about the dinner. She would excuse him, surely; he would have killed father and mother, as he kept on repeating, when that confounded painting got hold of him. As for the pawn-shop, it made him laugh; he defied misery.

'I tell you that we are all right,' he exclaimed. 'That picture means success.'

She kept silent, thinking about her meeting of the morning, which she wished to hide from him; but without apparent cause or transition, in the kind of torpor that had come over her, the words she would have kept back rose invincibly to her lips.

'Madame Vanzade is dead,' she said.

He looked surprised. Ah! really? How did she, Christine, know it?

'I met the old man-servant. Oh, he's a gentleman by now, looking very sprightly, in spite of his seventy years. I did not know him again. It was he who spoke to me. Yes, she died six weeks ago. Her millions have gone to various charities, with the exception of an annuity to the old servants, upon which they are living snugly like people of the middle-classes.'

He looked at her, and at last murmured, in a saddened voice: 'My poor Christine, you are regretting things now, aren't you? She would have given you a marriage portion, have found you a husband! I told you so in days gone by. She would, perhaps, have left you all her money, and you wouldn't now be starving with a crazy fellow like myself.'

She then seemed to wake from her dream. She drew her chair to his, caught hold of one of his arms and nestled against him, as if her whole being protested against his words:

'What are you saying? Oh! no; oh! no. It would have been shameful to have thought of her money. I would confess it to you if it were the case, and you know that I never tell lies; but I myself don't know what came over me when I heard the news. I felt upset and saddened, so sad that I imagined everything was over for me. It was no doubt remorse; yes, remorse at having deserted her so brutally, poor invalid that she was, the good old soul who called me her daughter! I behaved very badly, and it won't bring me luck. Ah! don't say "No," I feel it well enough; henceforth there's an end to everything for me.'

Then she wept, choked by those confused regrets, the significance of which she failed to understand, regrets mingling with the one feeling that her life was spoilt, and that she now had nothing but unhappiness before her.

'Come, wipe your eyes,' said Claude, becoming affectionate once more. 'Is it possible that you, who were never nervous, can conjure up chimeras and worry yourself in this way? Dash it all, we shall get out of our difficulties! First of all, you know that it was through you that I found the subject for my picture. There cannot be much of a curse upon you, since you bring me luck.'

He laughed, and she shook her head, seeing well enough that he wanted to make her smile. She was suffering on account of his picture already; for on the bridge he had completely forgotten her, as if she had ceased to belong to him! And, since the previous night, she had realised that he was farther and farther removed from her, alone in a world to which she could not ascend. But she allowed him to soothe her, and they exchanged one of their kisses of yore, before rising from the table to retire to rest.

Little Jacques had heard nothing. Benumbed by his stillness, he had fallen asleep, with his cheek on his picture-book; and his big head, so heavy at times that it bent his neck, looked pale in the lamplight. Poor little offspring of genius, which, when it begets at all, so often begets idiocy or physical imperfection! When his mother put him to bed Jacques did not even open his eyes.

It was only at this period that the idea of marrying Christine came to Claude. Though yielding to the advice of Sandoz, who expressed his surprise at the prolongation of an irregular situation which no circumstances justified, he more particularly gave way to a feeling of pity, to a desire to show himself kind to his mistress, and to win forgiveness for his delinquencies. He had seen her so sad of late, so uneasy with respect to the future, that he did not know how to revive her spirits. He himself was growing soured, and relapsing into his former fits of anger, treating her, at times, like a servant, to whom one flings a week's notice. Being his lawful wife, she would, no doubt, feel herself more in her rightful home, and would suffer less from his rough behaviour. She herself, for that matter, had never again spoken of marriage. She seemed to care nothing for earthly things, but entirely reposed upon him; however, he understood well enough that it grieved her that she was not able to visit at Sandoz's. Besides, they no longer lived amid the freedom and solitude of the country; they were in Paris, with its thousand and one petty spites, everything that is calculated to wound a woman in an irregular position. In reality, he had nothing against marriage save his old prejudices, those of an artist who takes life as he lists. Since he was never to leave her, why not afford her that pleasure? And, in fact, when he spoke to her about it, she gave a loud cry and threw her arms round his neck, surprised at experiencing such great emotion. During a whole week it made her feel thoroughly happy. But her joy subsided long before the ceremony.

Moreover, Claude did not hurry over any of the formalities, and they had to wait a long while for the necessary papers. He continued getting the sketches for his picture together, and she, like himself, did not seem in the least impatient. What was the good? It would assuredly make no difference in their life. They had decided to be married merely at the municipal offices, not in view of displaying any contempt for religion, but to get the affair over quickly and simply. That would suffice. The question of witnesses embarrassed them for a moment. As she was absolutely unacquainted with anybody, he selected Sandoz and Mahoudeau to act for her. For a moment he had thought of replacing the latter by Dubuche, but he never saw the architect now, and he feared to compromise him. He, Claude, would be content with Jory and Gagniere. In that way the affair would pass off among friends, and nobody would talk of it.

Several weeks had gone by; they were in December, and the weather proved terribly cold. On the day before the wedding, although they barely had thirty-five francs left them, they agreed that they could not send their witnesses away with a mere shake of the hand; and, rather than have a lot of trouble in the studio, they decided to offer them lunch at a small restaurant on the Boulevard de Clichy, after which they would all go home.

In the morning, while Christine was tacking a collar to a grey linsey gown which, with the coquetry of woman, she had made for the occasion, it occurred to Claude, who was already wearing his frock-coat and kicking his heels impatiently, to go and fetch Mahoudeau, for the latter, he asserted, was quite capable of forgetting all about the appointment. Since autumn, the sculptor had been living at Montmartre, in a small studio in the Rue des Tilleuls. He had moved thither in consequence of a series of affairs that had quite upset him. First of all, he had been turned out of the fruiterer's shop in the Rue du Cherche-Midi for not paying his rent; then had come a definite rupture with Chaine, who, despairing of being able to live by his brush, had rushed into commercial enterprise, betaking himself to all the fairs around Paris as the manager of a kind of 'fortune's wheel' belonging to a widow; while last of all had come the sudden flight of Mathilde, her herbalist's business sold up, and she herself disappearing, it seemed, with some mysterious admirer. At present Mahoudeau lived all by himself in greater misery than ever, only eating when he secured a job at scraping some architectural ornaments, or preparing work for some more prosperous fellow-sculptor.

'I am going to fetch him, do you hear?' Claude repeated to Christine. 'We still have a couple of hours before us. And, if the others come, make them wait. We'll go to the municipal offices all together.'

Once outside, Claude hurried along in the nipping cold which loaded his moustache with icicles. Mahoudeau's studio was at the end of a conglomeration of tenements—'rents,' so to say—and he had to cross a number of small gardens, white with rime, and showing the bleak, stiff melancholy of cemeteries. He could distinguish his friend's place from afar on account of the colossal plaster statue of the 'Vintaging Girl,' the once successful exhibit of the Salon, for which there had not been sufficient space in the narrow ground-floor studio. Thus it was rotting out in the open like so much rubbish shot from a cart, a lamentable spectacle, weather-bitten, riddled by the rain's big, grimy tears. The key was in the door, so Claude went in.

'Hallo! have you come to fetch me?' said Mahoudeau, in surprise. 'I've only got my hat to put on. But wait a bit, I was asking myself whether it wouldn't be better to light a little fire. I am uneasy about my woman there.'

Some water in a bucket was ice-bound. So cold was the studio that it froze inside as hard as it did out of doors, for, having been penniless for a whole week, Mahoudeau had gingerly eked out the little coal remaining to him, only lighting the stove for an hour or two of a morning. His studio was a kind of tragic cavern, compared with which the shop of former days evoked reminiscences of snug comfort, such was the tomb-like chill that fell on one's shoulders from the creviced ceiling and the bare walls. In the various corners some statues, of less bulky dimensions than the 'Vintaging Girl,' plaster figures which had been modelled with passion and exhibited, and which had then come back for want of buyers, seemed to be shivering with their noses turned to the wall, forming a melancholy row of cripples, some already badly damaged, showing mere stumps of arms, and all dust-begrimed and clay-bespattered. Under the eyes of their artist creator, who had given them his heart's blood, those wretched nudities dragged out years of agony. At first, no doubt, they were preserved with jealous care, despite the lack of room, but then they lapsed into the grotesque honor of all lifeless things, until a day came when, taking up a mallet, he himself finished them off, breaking them into mere lumps of plaster, so as to be rid of them.

'You say we have got two hours, eh?' resumed Mahoudeau. 'Well, I'll just light a bit of fire; it will be the wiser perhaps.'

Then, while lighting the stove, he began bewailing his fate in an angry voice. What a dog's life a sculptor's was! The most bungling stonemason was better off. A figure which the Government bought for three thousand francs cost well nigh two thousand, what with its model, clay, marble or bronze, all sorts of expenses, indeed, and for all that it remained buried in some official cellar on the pretext that there was no room for it elsewhere. The niches of the public buildings remained empty, pedestals were awaiting statues in the public gardens. No matter, there was never any room! And there were no possible commissions from private people; at best one received an order for a few busts, and at very rare intervals one for a memorial statue, subscribed for by the public and hurriedly executed at reduced terms. Sculpture was the noblest of arts, the most manly, yes, but the one which led the most surely to death by starvation!

'Is your machine progressing?' asked Claude.

'Without this confounded cold, it would be finished,' answered Mahoudeau. 'I'll show it you.'

He rose from his knees after listening to the snorting of the stove. In the middle of the studio, on a packing-case, strengthened by cross-pieces, stood a statue swathed is linen wraps which were quite rigid, hard frozen, draping the figure with the whiteness of a shroud. This statue embodied Mahoudeau's old dream, unrealised until now from lack of means—it was an upright figure of that bathing girl of whom more than a dozen small models had been knocking about his place for years. In a moment of impatient revolt he himself had manufactured trusses and stays out of broom-handles, dispensing with the necessary iron work in the hope that the wood would prove sufficiently solid. From time to time he shook the figure to try it, but as yet it had not budged.

'The devil!' he muttered; 'some warmth will do her good. These wraps seem glued to her—they form quite a breastplate.'

The linen was crackling between his fingers, and splinters of ice were breaking off. He was obliged to wait until the heat produced a slight thaw, and then with great care he stripped the figure, baring the head first, then the bosom, and then the hips, well pleased at finding everything intact, and smiling like a lover at a woman fondly adored.

'Well, what do you think of it?'

Claude, who had only previously seen a little rough model of the statue, nodded his head, in order that he might not have to answer immediately. Decidedly, that good fellow Mahoudeau was turning traitor, and drifting towards gracefulness, in spite of himself, for pretty things ever sprang from under his big fingers, former stonecutter though he was. Since his colossal 'Vintaging Girl,' he had gone on reducing and reducing the proportions of his figures without appearing to be aware of it himself, always ready to stick out ferociously for the gigantic, which agreed with his temperament, but yielding to the partiality of his eyes for sweetness and gracefulness. And indeed real nature broke at last through inflated ambition. Exaggerated still, his 'Bathing Girl' was already possessed of great charm, with her quivering shoulders and her tightly-crossed arms that supported her breast.

'Well, you don't like her?' he asked, looking annoyed.

'Oh, yes, I do! I think you are right to tone things down a bit, seeing that you feel like that. You'll have a great success with this. Yes, it's evident it will please people very much.'

Mahoudeau, whom such praises would once have thrown into consternation, seemed delighted. He explained that he wished to conquer public opinion without relinquishing a tithe of his convictions.

'Ah! dash it! it takes a weight off my mind to find you pleased,' said he, 'for I should have destroyed it if you had told me to do so, I give you my word! Another fortnight's work, and I'll sell my skin to no matter whom in order to pay the moulder. I say, I shall have a fine show at the Salon, perhaps get a medal.'

He laughed, waved his arms about, and then, breaking off:

'As we are not in a hurry, sit down a bit. I want to get the wraps quite thawed.'

The stove, which was becoming red hot, diffused great heat. The figure, placed close by, seemed to revive under the warm air that now crept up her from her shins to her neck. And the two friends, who had sat down, continued looking the statue full in the face, chatting about it and noting each detail. The sculptor especially grew excited in his delight, and indulged in caressing gestures.

All at once, however, Claude fancied he was the victim of some hallucination. To him the figure seemed to be moving; a quiver like the ripple of a wavelet crossed her stomach, and her left hip became straightened, as if the right leg were about to step out.

'Have you noticed the smooth surface just about the loins?' Mahoudeau went on, without noticing anything. 'Ah, my boy, I took great pains over that!'

But by degrees the whole statue was becoming animated. The loins swayed and the bosom swelled, as with a deep sigh, between the parted arms. And suddenly the head drooped, the thighs bent, and the figure came forward like a living being, with all the wild anguish, the grief-inspired spring of a woman who is flinging herself down.

Claude at last understood things, when Mahoudeau uttered a terrible cry. 'By heavens, she's breaking to pieces!—she is coming down!'

The clay, in thawing, had snapped the weak wooden trusses. There came a cracking noise, as if bones indeed were splitting; and Mahoudeau, with the same passionate gesture with which he had caressed the figure from afar, working himself into a fever, opened both arms, at the risk of being killed by the fall. For a moment the bathing girl swayed to and fro, and then with one crash came down on her face, broken in twain at the ankles, and leaving her feet sticking to the boards.

Claude had jumped up to hold his friend back.

'Dash it! you'll be smashed!' he cried.

But dreading to see her finish herself off on the floor, Mahoudeau remained with hands outstretched. And the girl seemed to fling herself on his neck. He caught her in his arms, winding them tightly around her. Her bosom was flattened against his shoulder and her thighs beat against his own, while her decapitated head rolled upon the floor. The shock was so violent that Mahoudeau was carried off his legs and thrown over, as far back as the wall; and there, without relaxing his hold on the girl's trunk, he remained as if stunned lying beside her.

'Ah! confound it!' repeated Claude, furiously, believing that his friend was dead.

With great difficulty Mahoudeau rose to his knees, and burst into violent sobs. He had only damaged his face in the fall. Some blood dribbled down one of his cheeks, mingling with his tears.

'Ah! curse poverty!' he said. 'It's enough to make a fellow drown himself not to be able to buy a couple of rods! And there she is, there she is!'

His sobs grew louder; they became an agonising wail; the painful shrieking of a lover before the mutilated corpse of his affections. With unsteady hands he touched the limbs lying in confusion around him; the head, the torso, the arms that had snapped in twain; above aught else the bosom, now caved in. That bosom, flattened, as if it had been operated upon for some terrible disease, suffocated him, and he unceasingly returned to it, probing the sore, trying to find the gash by which life had fled, while his tears, mingled with blood, flowed freely, and stained the statue's gaping wounds with red.

'Do help me!' he gasped. 'One can't leave her like this.'

Claude was overcome also, and his own eyes grew moist from a feeling of artistic brotherliness. He hastened to his comrade's aide, but the sculptor, after claiming his assistance, persisted in picking up the remains by himself, as if dreading the rough handling of anybody else. He slowly crawled about on his knees, took up the fragments one by one, and put them together on a board. The figure soon lay there in its entirety, as if it had been one of those girls who, committing suicide from love, throw themselves from some monument and are shattered by their fall, and put together again, looking both grotesque and lamentable, to be carried to the Morgue. Mahoudeau, seated on the floor before his statue, did not take his eyes from it, but became absorbed in heart-rending contemplation. However, his sobs subsided, and at last he said with a long-drawn sigh: 'I shall have to model her lying down! There's no other way! Ah, my poor old woman, I had such trouble to set her on her legs, and I thought her so grand like that!'

But all at once Claude grew uneasy. What about his wedding? Mahoudeau must change his clothes. As he had no other frock-coat than the one he was wearing, he was obliged to make a jacket do. Then, the figure having been covered with linen wraps once more, like a corpse over which a sheet has been pulled, they both started off at a run. The stove was roaring away, the thaw filled the whole studio with water, and slush streamed from the old dust-begrimed plaster casts.

When they reached the Rue de Douai there was no one there except little Jacques, in charge of the doorkeeper. Christine, tired of waiting, had just started off with the three others, thinking that there had been some mistake—that Claude might have told her that he would go straight to the mayor's offices with Mahoudeau. The pair fell into a sharp trot, but only overtook Christine and their comrades in the Rue Drouot in front of the municipal edifice. They all went upstairs together, and as they were late they met with a very cool reception from the usher on duty. The wedding was got over in a few minutes, in a perfectly empty room. The mayor mumbled on, and the bride and bridegroom curtly uttered the binding 'Yes,' while their witnesses were marvelling at the bad taste of the appointments of the apartment. Once outside, Claude took Christine's arm again, and that was all.

It was pleasant walking in the clear frosty weather. Thus the party quietly went back on foot, climbing the Rue des Martyrs to reach the restaurant on the Boulevard de Clichy. A small private room had been engaged; the lunch was a very friendly affair, and not a word was said about the simple formality that had just been gone through; other subjects were spoken of all the while, as at one of their customary gatherings.

It was thus that Christine, who in reality was very affected despite her pretended indifference, heard her husband and his friends excite themselves for three mortal hours about Mahoudeau's unfortunate statue. Since the others had been made acquainted with the story, they kept harping on every particular of it. Sandoz thought the whole thing very wonderful; Jory and Gagniere discussed the strength of stays and trusses; the former mainly concerned about the monetary loss involved, and the other demonstrating with a chair that the statue might have been kept up. As for Mahoudeau, still very shaky and growing dazed; he complained of a stiffness which he had not felt before; his limbs began to hurt him, he had strained his muscles and bruised his skin as if he had been caught in the embrace of a stone siren. Christine washed the scratch on his cheek, which had begun to bleed again, and it seemed to her as if the mutilated bathing girl had sat down to table with them, as if she alone was of any importance that day; for she alone seemed to interest Claude, whose narrative, repeated a score of times, was full of endless particulars about the emotion he had felt on seeing that bosom and those hips of clay shattered at his feet.

However, at dessert there came a diversion, for Gagniere all at once remarked to Jory:

'By the way, I saw you with Mathilde the day before yesterday. Yes, yes, in the Rue Dauphine.'

Jory, who had turned very red, tried to deny it; 'Oh, a mere accidental meeting—honour bright!' he stammered. 'I don't know where she hangs out, or I would tell you.'

'What! is it you who are hiding her?' exclaimed Mahoudeau. 'Well, nobody wants to see her again!'

The truth was that Jory, throwing to the winds all his habits of prudence and parsimony, was now secretly providing for Mathilde. She had gained an ascendency over him by his vices.

They still lingered at table, and night was falling when they escorted Mahoudeau to his own door. Claude and Christine, on reaching home, took Jacques from the doorkeeper, and found the studio quite chilly, wrapped in such dense gloom that they had to grope about for several minutes before they were able to light the lamp. They also had to light the stove again, and it struck seven o'clock before they were able to draw breath at their ease. They were not hungry, so they merely finished the remains of some boiled beef, mainly by way of encouraging the child to eat his soup; and when they had put him to bed, they settled themselves with the lamp betwixt them, as was their habit every evening.

However, Christine had not put out any work, she felt too much moved to sew. She sat there with her hands resting idly on the table, looking at Claude, who on his side had at once become absorbed in a sketch, a bit of his picture, some workmen of the Port Saint Nicolas, unloading plaster. Invincible dreaminess came over the young woman, all sorts of recollections and regrets became apparent in the depths of her dim eyes; and by degrees growing sadness, great mute grief took absolute possession of her, amid the indifference, the boundless solitude into which she seemed to be drifting, although she was so near to Claude. He was, indeed, on the other side of the table, yet how far away she felt him to be! He was yonder before that point of the Cite, he was even farther still, in the infinite inaccessible regions of art; so far, indeed, that she would now never more be able to join him! She several times tried to start a conversation, but without eliciting any answer. The hours went by, she grew weary and numb with doing nothing, and she ended by taking out her purse and counting her money.

'Do you know how much we have to begin our married life with?'

Claude did not even raise his head.

'We've nine sous. Ah! talk of poverty—'

He shrugged his shoulders, and finally growled: 'We shall be rich some day; don't fret.'

Then the silence fell again, and she did not even attempt to break it, but gazed at her nine coppers laid in a row upon the table. At last, as it struck midnight, she shivered, ill with waiting and chilled by the cold.

'Let's go to bed, dear,' she murmured; 'I'm dead tired.'

He, however, was working frantically, and did not even hear her.

'The fire's gone out,' she began again, 'we shall make ourselves ill; let's go to bed.'

Her imploring voice reached him at last, and made him start with sudden exasperation.

'Oh! go if you like! You can see very well that I want to finish something!'

She remained there for another minute, amazed by his sudden anger, her face expressive of deep sorrow. Then, feeling that he would rather be without her, that the very presence of a woman doing nothing upset him, she rose from the table and went off, leaving the door wide open. Half an hour, three-quarters went by, nothing stirred, not a sound came from her room; but she was not asleep, her eyes were staring into the gloom; and at last she timidly ventured upon a final appeal, from the depths of the dark alcove.

An oath was the only reply she received. And nothing stirred after that. She perhaps dozed off. The cold in the studio grew keener, and the wick of the lamp began to carbonise and burn red, while Claude, still bending over his sketch, did not seem conscious of the passing minutes.

At two o'clock, however, he rose up, furious to find the lamp going out for lack of oil. He only had time to take it into the other room, so that he might not have to undress in the dark. But his displeasure increased on seeing that Christine's eyes were wide open. He felt inclined to complain of it. However, after some random remarks, he suddenly exclaimed:

'The most surprising thing is that her trunk wasn't hurt!'

'What do you mean?' asked Christine, in amazement.

'Why, Mahoudeau's girl,' he answered.

At this she shook nervously, turned and buried her face in the pillow; and he was quite surprised on hearing her burst into sobs.

'What! you are crying?' he exclaimed.

She was choking, sobbing with heart-rending violence.

'Come, what's the matter with you?—I've said nothing to you. Come, darling, what's the matter?'

But, while he was speaking, the cause of her great grief dawned upon him. No doubt, on a day like that, he ought to have shown more affection; but his neglect was unintentional enough; he had not even given the matter a thought. She surely knew him, said he; he became a downright brute when he was at work. Then he bent over and embraced her. But it was as if something irreparable had taken place, as if something had for ever snapped, leaving a void between them. The formality of marriage seemed to have killed love.

IX

AS Claude could not paint his huge picture in the small studio of the Rue de Douai, he made up his mind to rent some shed that would be spacious enough, elsewhere; and strolling one day on the heights of Montmartre, he found what he wanted half way down the slope of the Rue Tourlaque, a street that descends abruptly behind the cemetery, and whence one overlooks Clichy as far as the marshes of Gennevilliers. It had been a dyer's drying shed, and was nearly fifty feet long and more than thirty broad, with walls of board and plaster admitting the wind from every point of the compass. The place was let to him for three hundred francs. Summer was at hand; he would soon work off his picture and then quit.

This settled, feverish with hope, Claude decided to go to all the necessary expenses; as fortune was certain to come in the end, why trammel its advent by unnecessary scruples? Taking advantage of his right, he broke in upon the principal of his income, and soon grew accustomed to spend money without counting. At first he kept the matter from Christine, for she had already twice stopped him from doing so; and when he was at last obliged to tell her, she also, after a week of reproaches and apprehension, fell in with it, happy at the comfort in which she lived, and yielding to the pleasure of always having a little money in her purse. Thus there came a few years of easy unconcern.

Claude soon became altogether absorbed in his picture. He had furnished the huge studio in a very summary style: a few chairs, the old couch from the Quai de Bourbon, and a deal table bought second-hand for five francs sufficed him. In the practice of his art he was entirely devoid of that vanity which delights in luxurious surroundings. The only real expense to which he went was that of buying some steps on castors, with a platform and a movable footboard. Next he busied himself about his canvas, which he wished to be six and twenty feet in length and sixteen in height. He insisted upon preparing it himself; ordered a framework and bought the necessary seamless canvas, which he and a couple of friends had all the work in the world to stretch properly by the aid of pincers. Then he just coated the canvas with ceruse, laid on with a palette-knife, refusing to size it previously, in order that it might remain absorbent, by which method he declared that the painting would be bright and solid. An easel was not to be thought of. It would not have been possible to move a canvas of such dimensions on it. So he invented a system of ropes and beams, which held it slightly slanting against the wall in a cheerful light. And backwards and forwards in front of the big white surface rolled the steps, looking like an edifice, like the scaffolding by means of which a cathedral is to be reared.

But when everything was ready, Claude once more experienced misgivings. An idea that he had perhaps not chosen the proper light in which to paint his picture fidgeted him. Perhaps an early morning effect would have been better? Perhaps, too, he ought to have chosen a dull day, and so he went back to the Pont des Saint-Peres, and lived there for another three months.

The Cite rose up before him, between the two arms of the river, at all hours and in all weather. After a late fall of snow he beheld it wrapped in ermine, standing above mud-coloured water, against a light slatey sky. On the first sunshiny days he saw it cleanse itself of everything that was wintry and put on an aspect of youth, when verdure sprouted from the lofty trees which rose from the ground below the bridge. He saw it, too, on a somewhat misty day recede to a distance and almost evaporate, delicate and quivering, like a fairy palace. Then, again, there were pelting rains, which submerged it, hid it as with a huge curtain drawn from the sky to the earth; storms, with lightning flashes which lent it a tawny hue, the opaque light of some cut-throat place half destroyed by the fall of the huge copper-coloured clouds; and there were winds that swept over it tempestuously, sharpening its angles and making it look hard, bare, and beaten against the pale blue sky. Then, again, when the sunbeams broke into dust amidst the vapours of the Seine, it appeared steeped in diffused brightness, without a shadow about it, lighted up equally on every side, and looking as charmingly delicate as a cut gem set in fine gold. He insisted on beholding it when the sun was rising and transpiercing the morning mists, when the Quai de l'Horloge flushes and the Quai des Orfevres remains wrapt in gloom; when, up in the pink sky, it is already full of life, with the bright awakening of its towers and spires, while night, similar to a falling cloak, slides slowly from its lower buildings. He beheld it also at noon, when the sunrays fall on it vertically, when a crude glare bites into it, and it becomes discoloured and mute like a dead city, retaining nought but the life of heat, the quiver that darts over its distant housetops. He beheld it, moreover, beneath the setting sun, surrendering itself to the night which was slowly rising from the river, with the salient edges of its buildings still fringed with a glow as of embers, and with final conflagrations rekindling in its windows, from whose panes leapt tongue-like flashes. But in presence of those twenty different aspects of the Cite, no matter what the hour or the weather might be, he ever came back to the Cite that he had seen the first time, at about four o'clock one fine September afternoon, a Cite all serenity under a gentle breeze, a Cite which typified the heart of Paris beating in the limpid atmosphere, and seemingly enlarged by the vast stretch of sky which a flight of cloudlets crossed.

Claude spent his time under the Pont des Saints-Peres, which he had made his shelter, his home, his roof. The constant din of the vehicles overhead, similar to the distant rumbling of thunder, no longer disturbed him. Settling himself against the first abutment, beneath the huge iron arches, he took sketches and painted studies. The employes of the river navigation service, whose offices were hard by, got to know him, and, indeed, the wife of an inspector, who lived in a sort of tarred cabin with her husband, two children, and a cat, kept his canvases for him, to save him the trouble of carrying them to and fro each day. It became his joy to remain in that secluded nook beneath Paris, which rumbled in the air above him, whose ardent life he ever felt rolling overhead. He at first became passionately interested in Port St. Nicolas, with its ceaseless bustle suggesting that of a distant genuine seaport. The steam crane, The Sophia, worked regularly, hauling up blocks of stone; tumbrels arrived to fetch loads of sand; men and horses pulled, panting for breath on the big paving-stones, which sloped down as far as the water, to a granite margin, alongside which two rows of lighters and barges were moored. For weeks Claude worked hard at a study of some lightermen unloading a cargo of plaster, carrying white sacks on their shoulders, leaving a white pathway behind them, and bepowdered with white themselves, whilst hard by the coal removed from another barge had stained the waterside with a huge inky smear. Then he sketched the silhouette of a swimming-bath on the left bank, together with a floating wash-house somewhat in the rear, showing the windows open and the washerwomen kneeling in a row, on a level with the stream, and beating their dirty linen. In the middle of the river, he studied a boat which a waterman sculled over the stern; then, farther behind, a steamer of the towing service straining its chain, and dragging a series of rafts loaded with barrels and boards up stream. The principal backgrounds had been sketched a long while ago, still he did several bits over again—the two arms of the Seine, and a sky all by itself, into which rose only towers and spires gilded by the sun. And under the hospitable bridge, in that nook as secluded as some far-off cleft in a rock, he was rarely disturbed by anybody. Anglers passed by with contemptuous unconcern. His only companion was virtually the overseer's cat, who cleaned herself in the sunlight, ever placid beneath the tumult of the world overhead.

At last Claude had all his materials ready. In a few days he threw off an outline sketch of the whole, and the great work was begun. However, the first battle between himself and his huge canvas raged in the Rue Tourlaque throughout the summer; for he obstinately insisted upon personally attending to all the technical calculations of his composition, and he failed to manage them, getting into constant muddles about the slightest deviation from mathematical accuracy, of which he had no experience. It made him indignant with himself. So he let it go, deciding to make what corrections might be necessary afterwards. He covered his canvas with a rush—in such a fever as to live all day on his steps, brandishing huge brushes, and expending as much muscular force as if he were anxious to move mountains. And when evening came he reeled about like a drunken man, and fell asleep as soon as he had swallowed his last mouthful of food. His wife even had to put him to bed like a child. From those heroic efforts, however, sprang a masterly first draught in which genius blazed forth amidst the somewhat chaotic masses of colour. Bongrand, who came to look at it, caught the painter in his big arms, and stifled him with embraces, his eyes full of tears. Sandoz, in his enthusiasm, gave a dinner; the others, Jory, Mahoudeau and Gagniere, again went about announcing a masterpiece. As for Fagerolles, he remained motionless before the painting for a moment, then burst into congratulations, pronouncing it too beautiful.

And, in fact, subsequently, as if the irony of that successful trickster had brought him bad luck, Claude only spoilt his original draught. It was the old story over again. He spent himself in one effort, one magnificent dash; he failed to bring out all the rest; he did not know how to finish. He fell into his former impotence; for two years he lived before that picture only, having no feeling for anything else. At times he was in a seventh heaven of exuberant joy; at others flung to earth, so wretched, so distracted by doubt, that dying men gasping in their beds in a hospital were happier than himself. Twice already had he failed to be ready for the Salon, for invariably, at the last moment, when he hoped to have finished in a few sittings, he found some void, felt his composition crack and crumble beneath his fingers. When the third Salon drew nigh, there came a terrible crisis; he remained for a fortnight without going to his studio in the Rue Tourlaque, and when he did so, it was as to a house desolated by death. He turned the huge canvas to the wall and rolled his steps into a corner; he would have smashed and burned everything if his faltering hands had found strength enough. Nothing more existed; amid a blast of anger he swept the floor clean, and spoke of setting to work at little things, since he was incapable of perfecting paintings of any size.

In spite of himself, his first idea of a picture on a smaller scale took him back to the Cite. Why should not he paint a simple view, on a moderate sized canvas? But a kind of shame, mingled with strange jealousy, prevented him from settling himself in his old spot under the Pont des Saints-Peres. It seemed to him as if that spot were sacred now; that he ought not to offer any outrage to his great work, dead as it was. So he stationed himself at the end of the bank, above the bridge. This time, at any rate, he would work directly from nature; and he felt happy at not having to resort to any trickery, as was unavoidable with works of a large size. The small picture, very carefully painted, more highly finished than usual, met, however, with the same fate as the others before the hanging committee, who were indignant with this style of painting, executed with a tipsy brush, as was said at the time in the studios. The slap in the face which Claude thus received was all the more severe, as a report had spread of concessions, of advances made by him to the School of Arts, in order that his work might be received. And when the picture came back to him, he, deeply wounded, weeping with rage, tore it into narrow shreds, which he burned in his stove. It was not sufficient that he should kill that one with a knife-thrust, it must be annihilated.

Another year went by for Claude in desultory toil. He worked from force of habit, but finished nothing; he himself saying, with a dolorous laugh, that he had lost himself, and was trying to find himself again. In reality, tenacious consciousness of his genius left him a hope which nothing could destroy, even during his longest crises of despondency. He suffered like some one damned, for ever rolling the rock which slipped back and crushed him; but the future remained, with the certainty of one day seizing that rock in his powerful arms and flinging it upward to the stars. His friends at last beheld his eyes light up with passion once more. It was known that he again secluded himself in the Rue Tourlaque. He who formerly had always been carried beyond the work on which he was engaged, by some dream of a picture to come, now stood at bay before that subject of the Cite. It had become his fixed idea—the bar that closed up his life. And soon he began to speak freely of it again in a new blaze of enthusiasm, exclaiming, with childish delight, that he had found his way and that he felt certain of victory.

One day Claude, who, so far, had not opened his door to his friends, condescended to admit Sandoz. The latter tumbled upon a study with a deal of dash in it, thrown off without a model, and again admirable in colour. The subject had remained the same—the Port St. Nicolas on the left, the swimming-baths on the right, the Seine and Cite in the background. But Sandoz was amazed at perceiving, instead of the boat sculled by a waterman, another large skiff taking up the whole centre of the composition—a skiff occupied by three women. One, in a bathing costume, was rowing; another sat over the edge with her legs dangling in the water, her costume partially unfastened, showing her bare shoulder; while the third stood erect and nude at the prow, so bright in tone that she seemed effulgent, like the sun.

'Why, what an idea!' muttered Sandoz. 'What are those women doing there?'

'Why, they are bathing,' Claude quietly answered. 'Don't you see that they have come out of the swimming-baths? It supplies me with a motive for the nude; it's a real find, eh? Does it shock you?'

His old friend, who knew him well by now, dreaded lest he should give him cause for discouragement.

'I? Oh, no! Only I am afraid that the public will again fail to understand. That nude woman in the very midst of Paris—it's improbable.'

Claude looked naively surprised.

'Ah! you think so? Well, so much the worse. What's the odds, as long as the woman is well painted? Besides, I need something like that to get my courage up.'

On the following occasions, Sandoz gently reverted to the strangeness of the composition, pleading, as was his nature, the cause of outraged logic. How could a modern painter who prided himself on painting merely what was real—how could he so bastardise his work as to introduce fanciful things into it? It would have been so easy to choose another subject, in which the nude would have been necessary. But Claude became obstinate, and resorted to lame and violent explanations, for he would not avow his real motive: an idea which had come to him and which he would have been at a loss to express clearly. It was, however, a longing for some secret symbolism. A recrudescence of romanticism made him see an incarnation of Paris in that nude figure; he pictured the city bare and impassioned, resplendent with the beauty of woman.

Before the pressing objections of his friend he pretended to be shaken in his resolutions.

'Well, I'll see; I'll dress my old woman later on, since she worries you,' he said. 'But meanwhile I shall do her like that. You understand, she amuses me.'

He never reverted to the subject again, remaining silently obstinate, merely shrugging his shoulders and smiling with embarrassment whenever any allusion betrayed the general astonishment which was felt at the sight of that Venus emerging triumphantly from the froth of the Seine amidst all the omnibuses on the quays and the lightermen working at the Port of St. Nicolas.

Spring had come round again, and Claude had once more resolved to work at his large picture, when in a spirit of prudence he and Christine modified their daily life. She, at times, could not help feeling uneasy at seeing all their money so quickly spent. Since the supply had seemed inexhaustible, they had ceased counting. But, at the end of four years, they had woke up one morning quite frightened, when, on asking for accounts, they found that barely three thousand francs were left out of the twenty thousand. They immediately reverted to severe economy, stinting themselves as to bread, planning the cutting down of the most elementary expenses; and it was thus that, in the first impulse of self-sacrifice, they left the Rue de Douai. What was the use of paying two rents? There was room enough in the old drying-shed in the Rue Tourlaque—still stained with the dyes of former days—to afford accommodation for three people. Settling there was, nevertheless, a difficult affair; for however big the place was, it provided them, after all, with but one room. It was like a gipsy's shed, where everything had to be done in common. As the landlord was unwilling, the painter himself had to divide it at one end by a partition of boards, behind which he devised a kitchen and a bedroom. They were then delighted with the place, despite the chinks through which the wind blew, and although on rainy days they had to set basins beneath the broader cracks in the roof. The whole looked mournfully bare; their few poor sticks seemed to dance alongside the naked walls. They themselves pretended to be proud at being lodged so spaciously; they told their friends that Jacques would at least have a little room to run about. Poor Jacques, in spite of his nine years, did not seem to be growing; his head alone became larger and larger. They could not send him to school for more than a week at a stretch, for he came back absolutely dazed, ill from having tried to learn, in such wise that they nearly always allowed him to live on all fours around them, crawling from one corner to another.

Christine, who for quite a long while had not shared Claude's daily work, now once more found herself beside him throughout his long hours of toil. She helped him to scrape and pumice the old canvas of the big picture, and gave him advice about attaching it more securely to the wall. But they found that another disaster had befallen them—the steps had become warped by the water constantly trickling through the roof, and, for fear of an accident, Claude had to strengthen them with an oak cross-piece, she handing him the necessary nails one by one. Then once more, and for the second time, everything was ready. She watched him again outlining the work, standing behind him the while, till she felt faint with fatigue, and finally dropping to the floor, where she remained squatting, and still looking at him.

Ah! how she would have liked to snatch him from that painting which had seized hold of him! It was for that purpose that she made herself his servant, only too happy to lower herself to a labourer's toil. Since she shared his work again, since the three of them, he, she, and the canvas, were side by side, her hope revived. If he had escaped her when she, all alone, cried her eyes out in the Rue de Douai, if he lingered till late in the Rue Tourlaque, fascinated as by a mistress, perhaps now that she was present she might regain her hold over him. Ah, painting, painting! in what jealous hatred she held it! Hers was no longer the revolt of a girl of the bourgeoisie, who painted neatly in water-colours, against independent, brutal, magnificent art. No, little by little she had come to understand it, drawn towards it at first by her love for the painter, and gained over afterwards by the feast of light, by the original charm of the bright tints which Claude's works displayed. And now she had accepted everything, even lilac-tinted soil and blue trees. Indeed, a kind of respect made her quiver before those works which had at first seemed so horrid to her. She recognised their power well enough, and treated them like rivals about whom one could no longer joke. But her vindictiveness grew in proportion to her admiration; she revolted at having to stand by and witness, as it were, a diminution of herself, the blow of another love beneath her own roof.

At first there was a silent struggle of every minute. She thrust herself forward, interposed whatever she could, a hand, a shoulder, between the painter and his picture. She was always there, encompassing him with her breath, reminding him that he was hers. Then her old idea revived—she also would paint; she would seek and join him in the depths of his art fever. Every day for a whole month she put on a blouse, and worked like a pupil by the side of a master, diligently copying one of his sketches, and she only gave in when she found the effort turn against her object; for, deceived, as it were, by their joint work, he finished by forgetting that she was a woman, and lived with her on a footing of mere comradeship as between man and man. Accordingly she resorted to what was her only strength.

To perfect some of the small figures of his latter pictures, Claude had many a time already taken the hint of a head, the pose of an arm, the attitude of a body from Christine. He threw a cloak over her shoulders, and caught her in the posture he wanted, shouting to her not to stir. These were little services which she showed herself only too pleased to render him, but she had not hitherto cared to go further, for she was hurt by the idea of being a model now that she was his wife. However, since Claude had broadly outlined the large upright female figure which was to occupy the centre of his picture, Christine had looked at the vague silhouette in a dreamy way, worried by an ever-pursuing thought before which all scruples vanished. And so, when he spoke of taking a model, she offered herself, reminding him that she had posed for the figure in the 'Open Air' subject, long ago. 'A model,' she added, 'would cost you seven francs a sitting. We are not so rich, we may as well save the money.'

The question of economy decided him at once.

'I'm agreeable, and it's even very good of you to show such courage, for you know that it is not a bit of pastime to sit for me. Never mind, you had better confess to it, you big silly, you are afraid of another woman coming here; you are jealous.'

Jealous! Yes, indeed she was jealous, so she suffered agony. But she snapped her fingers at other women; all the models in Paris might have sat to him for what she cared. She had but one rival, that painting, that art which robbed her of him.

Claude, who was delighted, at first made a study, a simple academic study, in the attitude required for his picture. They waited until Jacques had gone to school, and the sitting lasted for hours. During the earlier days Christine suffered a great deal from being obliged to remain in the same position; then she grew used to it, not daring to complain, lest she might vex him, and even restraining her tears when he roughly pushed her about. And he soon acquired the habit of doing so, treating her like a mere model; more exacting with her, however, than if he had paid her, never afraid of unduly taxing her strength, since she was his wife. He employed her for every purpose, at every minute, for an arm, a foot, the most trifling detail that he stood in need of. And thus in a way he lowered her to the level of a 'living lay figure,' which he stuck in front of him and copied as he might have copied a pitcher or a stew-pan for a bit of still life.

This time Claude proceeded leisurely, and before roughing in the large figure he tired Christine for months by making her pose in twenty different ways. At last, one day, he began the roughing in. It was an autumnal morning, the north wind was already sharp, and it was by no means warm even in the big studio, although the stove was roaring. As little Jacques was poorly again and unable to go to school, they had decided to lock him up in the room at the back, telling him to be very good. And then the mother settled herself near the stove, motionless, in the attitude required.

During the first hour, the painter, perched upon his steps, kept glancing at her, but did not speak a word. Unutterable sadness stole over her, and she felt afraid of fainting, no longer knowing whether she was suffering from the cold or from a despair that had come from afar, and the bitterness of which she felt to be rising within her. Her fatigue became so great that she staggered and hobbled about on her numbed legs.

'What, already?' cried Claude. 'Why, you haven't been at it more than a quarter of an hour. You don't want to earn your seven francs, then?'

He was joking in a gruff voice, delighted with his work. And she had scarcely recovered the use of her limbs, beneath the dressing-gown she had wrapped round her, when he went on shouting: 'Come on, come on, no idling! It's a grand day to-day is! I must either show some genius or else kick the bucket.'

Then, in a weary way, she at last resumed the pose.

The misfortune was that before long, both by his glances and the language he used, she fully realised that she herself was as nothing to him. If ever he praised a limb, a tint, a contour, it was solely from the artistic point of view. Great enthusiasm and passion he often showed, but it was not passion for herself as in the old days. She felt confused and deeply mortified. Ah! this was the end; in her he no longer loved aught but his art, the example of nature and life! And then, with her eyes gazing into space, she would remain rigid, like a statue, keeping back the tears which made her heart swell, lacking even the wretched consolation of being able to cry. And day by day the same sorry life began afresh for her. To stand there as his model had become her profession. She could not refuse, however bitter her grief. Their once happy life was all over, there now seemed to be three people in the place; it was as if Claude had introduced a mistress into it—that woman he was painting. The huge picture rose up between them, parted them as with a wall, beyond which he lived with the other. That duplication of herself well nigh drove Christine mad with jealousy, and yet she was conscious of the pettiness of her sufferings, and did not dare to confess them lest he should laugh at her. However, she did not deceive herself; she fully realised that he preferred her counterfeit to herself, that her image was the worshipped one, the sole thought, the affection of his every hour. He almost killed her with long sittings in that cold draughty studio, in order to enhance the beauty of the other; upon whom depended all his joys and sorrows according as to whether he beheld her live or languish beneath his brush. Was not this love? And what suffering to have to lend herself so that the other might be created, so that she might be haunted by a nightmare of that rival, so that the latter might for ever rise between them, more powerful than reality! To think of it! So much dust, the veriest trifle, a patch of colour on a canvas, a mere semblance destroying all their happiness!—he, silent, indifferent, brutal at times, and she, tortured by his desertion, in despair at being unable to drive away that creature who ever encroached more and more upon their daily life!

And it was then that Christine, finding herself altogether beaten in her efforts to regain Claude's love, felt all the sovereignty of art weigh down upon her. That painting, which she had already accepted without restriction, she raised still higher in her estimation, placed inside an awesome tabernacle before which she remained overcome, as before those powerful divinities of wrath which one honours from the very hatred and fear that they inspire. Hers was a holy awe, a conviction that struggling was henceforth useless, that she would be crushed like a bit of straw if she persisted in her obstinacy. Each of her husband's canvases became magnified in her eyes, the smallest assumed triumphal dimensions, even the worst painted of them overwhelmed her with victory, and she no longer judged them, but grovelled, trembling, thinking them all formidable, and invariably replying to Claude's questions:

'Oh, yes; very good! Oh, superb! Oh, very, very extraordinary that one!'

Nevertheless, she harboured no anger against him; she still worshipped him with tearful tenderness, as she saw him thus consume himself with efforts. After a few weeks of successful work, everything got spoilt again; he could not finish his large female figure. At times he almost killed his model with fatigue, keeping hard at work for days and days together, then leaving the picture untouched for a whole month. The figure was begun anew, relinquished, painted all over again at least a dozen times. One year, two years went by without the picture reaching completion. Though sometimes it was almost finished, it was scratched out the next morning and painted entirely over again.

Ah! what an effort of creation it was, an effort of blood and tears, filling Claude with agony in his attempt to beget flesh and instil life! Ever battling with reality, and ever beaten, it was a struggle with the Angel. He was wearing himself out with this impossible task of making a canvas hold all nature; he became exhausted at last with the pains which racked his muscles without ever being able to bring his genius to fruition. What others were satisfied with, a more or less faithful rendering, the various necessary bits of trickery, filled him with remorse, made him as indignant as if in resorting to such practices one were guilty of ignoble cowardice; and thus he began his work over and over again, spoiling what was good through his craving to do better. He would always be dissatisfied with his women—so his friends jokingly declared—until they flung their arms round his neck. What was lacking in his power that he could not endow them with life? Very little, no doubt. Sometimes he went beyond the right point, sometimes he stopped short of it. One day the words, 'an incomplete genius,' which he overheard, both flattered and frightened him. Yes, it must be that; he jumped too far or not far enough; he suffered from a want of nervous balance; he was afflicted with some hereditary derangement which, because there were a few grains the more or the less of some substance in his brain, was making him a lunatic instead of a great man. Whenever a fit of despair drove him from his studio, whenever he fled from his work, he now carried about with him that idea of fatal impotence, and he heard it beating against his skull like the obstinate tolling of a funeral bell.

His life became wretched. Never had doubt of himself pursued him in that way before. He disappeared for whole days together; he even stopped out a whole night, coming back the next morning stupefied, without being able to say where he had gone. It was thought that he had been tramping through the outskirts of Paris rather than find himself face to face with his spoilt work. His sole relief was to flee the moment that work filled him with shame and hatred, and to remain away until he felt sufficient courage to face it once more. And not even his wife dared to question him on his return—indeed, she was only too happy to see him back again after her anxious waiting. At such times he madly scoured Paris, especially the outlying quarters, from a longing to debase himself and hob-nob with labourers. He expressed at each recurring crisis his old regret at not being some mason's hodman. Did not happiness consist in having solid limbs, and in performing the work one was built for well and quickly? He had wrecked his life; he ought to have got himself engaged in the building line in the old times when he had lunched at the 'Dog of Montargis,' Gomard's tavern, where he had known a Limousin, a big, strapping, merry fellow, whose brawny arms he envied. Then, on coming back to the Rue Tourlaque, with his legs faint and his head empty, he gave his picture much the same distressful, frightened glance as one casts at a corpse in a mortuary, until fresh hope of resuscitating it, of endowing it with life, brought a flush to his face once more.

One day Christine was posing, and the figure of the woman was again well nigh finished. For the last hour, however, Claude had been growing gloomy, losing the childish delight that he had displayed at the beginning of the sitting. So his wife scarcely dared to breathe, feeling by her own discomfort that everything must be going wrong once more, and afraid that she might accelerate the catastrophe if she moved as much as a finger. And, surely enough, he suddenly gave a cry of anguish, and launched forth an oath in a thunderous voice.

'Oh, curse it! curse it!'

He had flung his handful of brushes from the top of the steps. Then, blinded with rage, with one blow of his fist he transpierced the canvas.

Christine held out her trembling hands.

'My dear, my dear!'

But when she had flung a dressing-gown over her shoulders, and approached the picture, she experienced keen delight, a burst of satisfied hatred. Claude's fist had struck 'the other one' full in the bosom, and there was a gaping hole! At last, then, that other one was killed!

Motionless, horror-struck by that murder, Claude stared at the perforated bosom. Poignant grief came upon him at the sight of the wound whence the blood of his work seemed to flow. Was it possible? Was it he who had thus murdered what he loved best of all on earth? His anger changed into stupor; his fingers wandered over the canvas, drawing the ragged edges of the rent together, as if he had wished to close the bleeding gash. He was choking; he stammered, distracted with boundless grief:

'She is killed, she is killed!'

Then Christine, in her maternal love for that big child of an artist, felt moved to her very entrails. She forgave him as usual. She saw well enough that he now had but one thought—to mend the rent, to repair the evil at once; and she helped him; it was she who held the shreds together, whilst he from behind glued a strip of canvas against them. When she dressed herself, 'the other one' was there again, immortal, simply retaining near her heart a slight scar, which seemed to make her doubly dear to the painter.

As this unhinging of Claude's faculties increased, he drifted into a sort of superstition, into a devout belief in certain processes and methods. He banished oil from his colours, and spoke of it as of a personal enemy. On the other hand, he held that turpentine produced a solid unpolished surface, and he had some secrets of his own which he hid from everybody; solutions of amber, liquefied copal, and other resinous compounds that made colours dry quickly, and prevented them from cracking. But he experienced some terrible worries, as the absorbent nature of the canvas at once sucked in the little oil contained in the paint. Then the question of brushes had always worried him greatly; he insisted on having them with special handles; and objecting to sable, he used nothing but oven-dried badger hair. More important, however, than everything else was the question of palette-knives, which, like Courbet, he used for his backgrounds. He had quite a collection of them, some long and flexible, others broad and squat, and one which was triangular like a glazier's, and which had been expressly made for him. It was the real Delacroix knife. Besides, he never made use of the scraper or razor, which he considered beneath an artist's dignity. But, on the other hand, he indulged in all sorts of mysterious practices in applying his colours, concocted recipes and changed them every month, and suddenly fancied that he had bit on the right system of painting, when, after repudiating oil and its flow, he began to lay on successive touches until he arrived at the exact tone he required. One of his fads for a long while was to paint from right to left; for, without confessing as much, he felt sure that it brought him luck. But the terrible affair which unhinged him once more was an all-invading theory respecting the complementary colours. Gagniere had been the first to speak to him on the subject, being himself equally inclined to technical speculation. After which Claude, impelled by the exuberance of his passion, took to exaggerating the scientific principles whereby, from the three primitive colours, yellow, red, and blue, one derives the three secondary ones, orange, green, and violet, and, further, a whole series of complementary and similar hues, whose composites are obtained mathematically from one another. Thus science entered into painting, there was a method for logical observation already. One only had to take the predominating hue of a picture, and note the complementary or similar colours, to establish experimentally what variations would occur; for instance, red would turn yellowish if it were near blue, and a whole landscape would change in tint by the refractions and the very decomposition of light, according to the clouds passing over it. Claude then accurately came to this conclusion: That objects have no real fixed colour; that they assume various hues according to ambient circumstances; but the misfortune was that when he took to direct observation, with his brain throbbing with scientific formulas, his prejudiced vision lent too much force to delicate shades, and made him render what was theoretically correct in too vivid a manner: thus his style, once so bright, so full of the palpitation of sunlight, ended in a reversal of everything to which the eye was accustomed, giving, for instance, flesh of a violet tinge under tricoloured skies. Insanity seemed to be at the end of it all.

Poverty finished off Claude. It had gradually increased, while the family spent money without counting; and, when the last copper of the twenty thousand francs had gone, it swooped down upon them—horrible and irreparable. Christine, who wanted to look for work, was incapable of doing anything, even ordinary needlework. She bewailed her lot, twirling her fingers and inveighing against the idiotic young lady's education that she had received, since it had given her no profession, and her only resource would be to enter into domestic service, should life still go against them. Claude, on his side, had become a subject of chaff with the Parisians, and no longer sold a picture. An independent exhibition at which he and some friends had shown some pictures, had finished him off as regards amateurs—so merry had the public become at the sight of his canvases, streaked with all the colours of the rainbow. The dealers fled from him. M. Hue alone now and then made a pilgrimage to the Rue Tourlaque, and remained in ecstasy before the exaggerated bits, those which blazed in unexpected pyrotechnical fashion, in despair at being unable to cover them with gold. And though the painter wanted to make him a present of them, implored him to accept them, the old fellow displayed extraordinary delicacy of feeling. He pinched himself to amass a small sum of money from time to time, and then religiously took away the seemingly delirious picture, to hang it beside his masterpieces. Such windfalls came too seldom, and Claude was obliged to descend to 'trade art,' repugnant as it was to him. Such, indeed, was his despair at having fallen into that poison house, where he had sworn never to set foot, that he would have preferred starving to death, but for the two poor beings who were dependent on him and who suffered like himself. He became familiar with 'viae dolorosae' painted at reduced prices, with male and female saints at so much per gross, even with 'pounced' shop blinds—in short, all the ignoble jobs that degrade painting and make it so much idiotic delineation, lacking even the charm of naivete. He even suffered the humiliation of having portraits at five-and-twenty francs a-piece refused, because he failed to produce a likeness; and he reached the lowest degree of distress—he worked according to size for the petty dealers who sell daubs on the bridges, and export them to semi-civilised countries. They bought his pictures at two and three francs a-piece, according to the regulation dimensions. This was like physical decay, it made him waste away; he rose from such tasks feeling ill, incapable of serious work, looking at his large picture in distress, and leaving it sometimes untouched for a week, as if he had felt his hands befouled and unworthy of working at it.

They scarcely had bread to eat, and the huge shanty, which Christine had shown herself so proud of, on settling in it, became uninhabitable in the winter. She, once such an active housewife, now dragged herself about the place, without courage even to sweep the floor, and thus everything lapsed into abandonment. In the disaster little Jacques was sadly weakened by unwholesome and insufficient food, for their meals often consisted of a mere crust, eaten standing. With their lives thus ill-regulated, uncared for, they were drifting to the filth of the poor who lose even all self-pride.

At the close of another year, Claude, on one of those days of defeat, when he fled from his miscarried picture, met an old acquaintance. This time he had sworn he would never go home again, and he had been tramping across Paris since noon, as if at his heels he had heard the wan spectre of the big, nude figure of his picture—ravaged by constant retouching, and always left incomplete—pursuing him with a passionate craving for birth. The mist was melting into a yellowish drizzle, befouling the muddy streets. It was about five o'clock, and he was crossing the Rue Royale like one walking in his sleep, at the risk of being run over, his clothes in rags and mud-bespattered up to his neck, when a brougham suddenly drew up.

'Claude, eh? Claude!—is that how you pass your friends?'

It was Irma Becot who spoke, Irma in a charming grey silk dress, covered with Chantilly lace. She had hastily let down the window, and she sat smiling, beaming in the frame-work of the carriage door.

'Where are you going?'

He, staring at her open-mouthed, replied that he was going nowhere. At which she merrily expressed surprise in a loud voice, looking at him with her saucy eyes.

'Get in, then; it's such a long while since we met,' said she. 'Get in, or you'll be knocked down.'

And, in fact, the other drivers were getting impatient, and urging their horses on, amidst a terrible din, so he did as he was bidden, feeling quite dazed; and she drove him away, dripping, with the unmistakable signs of his poverty upon him, in the brougham lined with blue satin, where he sat partly on the lace of her skirt, while the cabdrivers jeered at the elopement before falling into line again.

When Claude came back to the Rue Tourlaque he was in a dazed condition, and for a couple of days remained musing whether after all he might not have taken the wrong course in life. He seemed so strange that Christine questioned him, whereupon he at first stuttered and stammered, and finally confessed everything. There was a scene; she wept for a long while, then pardoned him once more, full of infinite indulgence for him. And, indeed, amidst all her bitter grief there sprang up a hope that he might yet return to her, for if he could deceive her thus he could not care as much as she had imagined for that hateful painted creature who stared down from the big canvas.

The days went by, and towards the middle of the winter Claude's courage revived once more. One day, while putting some old frames in order, he came upon a roll of canvas which had fallen behind the other pictures. On opening the roll he found on it the nude figure, the reclining woman of his old painting, 'In the Open Air,' which he had cut out when the picture had come back to him from the Salon of the Rejected. And, as he gazed at it, he uttered a cry of admiration:

'By the gods, how beautiful it is!'

He at once secured it to the wall with four nails, and remained for hours in contemplation before it. His hands shook, the blood rushed to his face. Was it possible that he had painted such a masterly thing? He had possessed genius in those days then. So his skull, his eyes, his fingers had been changed. He became so feverishly excited and felt such a need of unburthening himself to somebody, that at last he called his wife.

'Just come and have a look. Isn't her attitude good, eh? How delicately her muscles are articulated! Just look at that bit there, full of sunlight. And at the shoulder here. Ah, heavens! it's full of life; I can feel it throb as I touch it.'

Christine, standing by, kept looking and answering in monosyllables. This resurrection of herself, after so many years, had at first flattered and surprised her. But on seeing him become so excited, she gradually felt uncomfortable and irritated, without knowing why.

'Tell me,' he continued, 'don't you think her beautiful enough for one to go on one's knees to her?'

'Yes, yes. But she has become rather blackish—'

Claude protested vehemently. Become blackish, what an idea! That woman would never grow black; she possessed immortal youth! Veritable passion had seized hold of him; he spoke of the figure as of a living being; he had sudden longings to look at her that made him leave everything else, as if he were hurrying to an appointment.

Then, one morning, he was taken with a fit of work.

'But, confound it all, as I did that, I can surely do it again,' he said. 'Ah, this time, unless I'm a downright brute, we'll see about it.'

And Christine had to give him a sitting there and then. For eight hours a day, indeed, during a whole month he kept her before him, without compassion for her increasing exhaustion or for the fatigue he felt himself. He obstinately insisted upon producing a masterpiece; he was determined that the upright figure of his big picture should equal that reclining one which he saw on the wall, beaming with life. He constantly referred to it, compared it with the one he was painting, distracted by the fear of being unable to equal it. He cast one glance at it, another at Christine, and a third at his canvas, and burst into oaths whenever he felt dissatisfied. He ended by abusing his wife.

She was no longer young. Age had spoilt her figure, and that it was which spoilt his work. She listened, and staggered in her very grief. Those sittings, from which she had already suffered so much, were becoming unbearable torture now. What was this new freak of crushing her with her own girlhood, of fanning her jealousy by filling her with regret for vanished beauty? She was becoming her own rival, she could no longer look at that old picture of herself without being stung at the heart by hateful envy. Ah, how heavily had that picture, that study she had sat for long ago, weighed upon her existence! The whole of her misfortunes sprang from it. It had changed the current of her existence. And it had come to life again, it rose from the dead, endowed with greater vitality than herself, to finish killing her, for there was no longer aught but one woman for Claude—she who was shown reclining on the old canvas, and who now arose and became the upright figure of his new picture.

Then Christine felt herself growing older and older at each successive sitting. And she experienced the infinite despair which comes upon passionate women when love, like beauty, abandons them. Was it because of this that Claude no longer cared for her, that he sought refuge in an unnatural passion for his work? She soon lost all clear perception of things; she fell into a state of utter neglect, going about in a dressing jacket and dirty petticoats, devoid of all coquettish feeling, discouraged by the idea that it was useless for her to continue struggling, since she had become old.

There were occasionally abominable scenes between her and Claude, who this time, however, obstinately stuck to his work and finished his picture, swearing that, come what might, he would send it to the Salon. He lived on his steps, cleaning up his backgrounds until dark. At last, thoroughly exhausted, he declared that he would touch the canvas no more; and Sandoz, on coming to see him one day, at four o'clock, did not find him at home. Christine declared that he had just gone out to take a breath of air on the height of Montmartre.

The breach between Claude and his old friends had gradually widened. With time the latters' visits had become brief and far between, for they felt uncomfortable when they found themselves face to face with that disturbing style of painting; and they were more and more upset by the unhinging of a mind which had been the admiration of their youth. Now all had fled; none excepting Sandoz ever came. Gagniere had even left Paris, to settle down in one of the two houses he owned at Melun, where he lived frugally upon the proceeds of the other one, after suddenly marrying, to every one's surprise, an old maid, his music mistress, who played Wagner to him of an evening. As for Mahoudeau, he alleged work as an excuse for not coming, and indeed he was beginning to earn some money, thanks to a bronze manufacturer, who employed him to touch up his models. Matters were different with Jory, whom no one saw, since Mathilde despotically kept him sequestrated. She had conquered him, and he had fallen into a kind of domesticity comparable to that of a faithful dog, yielding up the keys of his cashbox, and only carrying enough money about him to buy a cigar at a time. It was even said that Mathilde, like the devotee she had once been, had thrown him into the arms of the Church, in order to consolidate her conquest, and that she was constantly talking to him about death, of which he was horribly afraid. Fagerolles alone affected a lively, cordial feeling towards his old friend Claude whenever he happened to meet him. He then always promised to go and see him, but never did so. He was so busy since his great success, in such request, advertised, celebrated, on the road to every imaginable honour and form of fortune! And Claude regretted nobody save Dubuche, to whom he still felt attached, from a feeling of affection for the old reminiscences of boyhood, notwithstanding the disagreements which difference of disposition had provoked later on. But Dubuche, it appeared, was not very happy either. No doubt he was gorged with millions, but he led a wretched life, constantly at logger-heads with his father-in-law (who complained of having been deceived with regard to his capabilities as an architect), and obliged to pass his life amidst the medicine bottles of his ailing wife and his two children, who, having been prematurely born, had to be reared virtually in cotton wool.

Of all the old friends, therefore, there only remained Sandoz, who still found his way to the Rue Tourlaque. He came thither for little Jacques, his godson, and for the sorrowing woman also, that Christine whose passionate features amidst all this distress moved him deeply, like a vision of one of the ardently amorous creatures whom he would have liked to embody in his books. But, above all, his feeling of artistic brotherliness had increased since he had seen Claude losing ground, foundering amidst the heroic folly of art. At first he had remained utterly astonished at it, for he had believed in his friend more than in himself. Since their college days, he had always placed himself second, while setting Claude very high on fame's ladder—on the same rung, indeed, as the masters who revolutionise a period. Then he had been grievously affected by that bankruptcy of genius; he had become full of bitter, heartfelt pity at the sight of the horrible torture of impotency. Did one ever know who was the madman in art? Every failure touched him to the quick, and the more a picture or a book verged upon aberration, sank to the grotesque and lamentable, the more did Sandoz quiver with compassion, the more did he long to lull to sleep, in the soothing extravagance of their dreams, those who were thus blasted by their own work.

On the day when Sandoz called, and failed to find Claude at home, he did not go away; but, seeing Christine's eyelids red with crying, he said:

'If you think that he'll be in soon, I'll wait for him.'

'Oh! he surely won't be long.'

'In that case I'll wait, unless I am in your way.'

Never had her demeanour, the crushed look of a neglected woman, her listless movements, her slow speech, her indifference for everything but the passion that was consuming her, moved him so deeply. For the last week, perhaps, she had not put a chair in its place, or dusted a piece of furniture; she left the place to go to wreck and ruin, scarcely having the strength to drag herself about. And it was enough to break one's heart to behold that misery ending in filth beneath the glaring light from the big window; to gaze on that ill-pargetted shanty, so bare and disorderly, where one shivered with melancholy although it was a bright February afternoon.

Christine had slowly sat down beside an iron bedstead, which Sandoz had not noticed when he came in.

'Hallo,' he said, 'is Jacques ill?'

She was covering up the child, who constantly flung off the bedclothes.

'Yes, he hasn't been up these three days. We brought his bed in here so that he might be with us. He was never very strong. But he is getting worse and worse, it's distracting.'

She had a fixed stare in her eyes and spoke in a monotonous tone, and Sandoz felt frightened when he drew up to the bedside. The child's pale head seemed to have grown bigger still, so heavy that he could no longer support it. He lay perfectly still, and one might have thought he was dead, but for the heavy breathing coming from between his discoloured lips.

'My poor little Jacques, it's I, your godfather. Won't you say how d'ye do?'

The child made a fruitless, painful effort to lift his head; his eyelids parted, showing his white eyeballs, then closed again.

'Have you sent for a doctor?'

Christine shrugged her shoulders.

'Oh! doctors, what do they know?' she answered. 'We sent for one; he said that there was nothing to be done. Let us hope that it will pass over again. He is close upon twelve years old now, and maybe he is growing too fast.'

Sandoz, quite chilled, said nothing for fear of increasing her anxiety, since she did not seem to realise the gravity of the disease. He walked about in silence and stopped in front of the picture.

'Ho, ho! it's getting on; it's on the right road this time.'

'It's finished.'

'What! finished?'

And when she told him that the canvas was to be sent to the Salon that next week, he looked embarrassed, and sat down on the couch, like a man who wishes to judge the work leisurely. The background, the quays, the Seine, whence arose the triumphal point of the Cite, still remained in a sketchy state—masterly, however, but as if the painter had been afraid of spoiling the Paris of his dream by giving it greater finish. There was also an excellent group on the left, the lightermen unloading the sacks of plaster being carefully and powerfully treated. But the boat full of women in the centre transpierced the picture, as it were, with a blaze of flesh-tints which were quite out of place; and the brilliancy and hallucinatory proportions of the large nude figure which Claude had painted in a fever seemed strangely, disconcertingly false amidst the reality of all the rest.

Sandoz, silent, fell despair steal over him as he sat in front of that magnificent failure. But he saw Christine's eyes fixed upon him, and had sufficient strength of mind to say:

'Astounding!—the woman, astounding!'

At that moment Claude came in, and on seeing his old chum he uttered a joyous exclamation and shook his hand vigorously. Then he approached Christine, and kissed little Jacques, who had once more thrown off the bedclothes.

'How is he?'

'Just the same.'

'To be sure, to be sure; he is growing too fast. A few days' rest will set him all right. I told you not to be uneasy.'

And Claude thereupon sat down beside Sandoz on the couch. They both took their ease, leaning back, with their eyes surveying the picture; while Christine, seated by the bed, looked at nothing, and seemingly thought of nothing, in the everlasting desolation of her heart. Night was slowly coming on, the vivid light from the window paled already, losing its sheen amidst the slowly-falling crepuscular dimness.

'So it's settled; your wife told me that you were going to send it in.'

'Yes.'

'You are right; you had better have done with it once for all. Oh, there are some magnificent bits in it. The quay in perspective to the left, the man who shoulders that sack below. But—'

He hesitated, then finally took the bull by the horns.

'But, it's odd that you have persisted in leaving those women nude. It isn't logical, I assure you; and, besides, you promised me you would dress them—don't you remember? You have set your heart upon them very much then?'

'Yes.'

Claude answered curtly, with the obstinacy of one mastered by a fixed idea and unwilling to give any explanations. Then he crossed his arms behind his head, and began talking of other things, without, however, taking his eyes off his picture, over which the twilight began to cast a slight shadow.

'Do you know where I have just come from?' he asked. 'I have been to Courajod's. You know, the great landscape painter, whose "Pond of Gagny" is at the Luxembourg. You remember, I thought he was dead, and we were told that he lived hereabouts, on the other side of the hill, in the Rue de l'Abreuvoir. Well, old boy, he worried me, did Courajod. While taking a breath of air now and then up there, I discovered his shanty, and I could no longer pass in front of it without wanting to go inside. Just think, a master, a man who invented our modern landscape school, and who lives there, unknown, done for, like a mole in its hole! You can have no idea of the street or the caboose: a village street, full of fowls, and bordered by grassy banks; and a caboose like a child's toy, with tiny windows, a tiny door, a tiny garden. Oh! the garden—a mere patch of soil, sloping down abruptly, with a bed where four pear trees stand, and the rest taken up by a fowl-house, made out of green boards, old plaster, and wire network, held together with bits of string.'

His words came slowly; he blinked while he spoke as if the thought of his picture had returned to him and was gradually taking possession of him, to such a degree as to hamper him in his speech about other matters.

'Well, as luck would have it, I found Courajod on his doorstep to-day. An old man of more than eighty, wrinkled and shrunk to the size of a boy. I should like you to see him, with his clogs, his peasant's jersey and his coloured handkerchief wound over his head as if he were an old market-woman. I pluckily went up to him, saying, "Monsieur Courajod, I know you very well; you have a picture in the Luxembourg Gallery which is a masterpiece. Allow a painter to shake hands with you as he would with his master." And then you should have seen him take fright, draw back and stutter, as if I were going to strike him. A regular flight! However, I followed him, and gradually he recovered his composure, and showed me his hens, his ducks, his rabbits and dogs—an extraordinary collection of birds and beasts; there was even a raven among them. He lives in the midst of them all; he speaks to no one but his animals. As for the view, it's simply magnificent; you see the whole of the St. Denis plain for miles upon miles; rivers and towns, smoking factory-chimneys, and puffing railway-engines; in short, the place is a real hermitage on a hill, with its back turned to Paris and its eyes fixed on the boundless country. As a matter of course, I came back to his picture. "Oh, Monsieur Courajod," said I, "what talent you showed! If you only knew how much we all admire you. You are one of our illustrious men; you'll remain the ancestor of us all." But his lips began to tremble again; he looked at me with an air of terror-stricken stupidity; I am sure he would not have waved me back with a more imploring gesture if I had unearthed under his very eyes the corpse of some forgotten comrade of his youth. He kept chewing disconnected words between his toothless gums; it was the mumbling of an old man who had sunk into second childhood, and whom it's impossible to understand. "Don't know—so long ago—too old—don't care a rap." To make a long story short, he showed me the door; I heard him hurriedly turn the key in lock, barricading himself and his birds and animals against the admiration of the outside world. Ah, my good fellow, the idea of it! That great man ending his life like a retired grocer; that voluntary relapse into "nothingness" even before death. Ah, the glory, the glory for which we others are ready to die!'

Claude's voice, which had sunk lower and lower, died away at last in a melancholy sigh. Darkness was still coming on; after gradually collecting in the corners, it rose like a slow, inexorable tide, first submerging the legs of the chairs and the table, all the confusion of things that littered the tiled floor. The lower part of the picture was already growing dim, and Claude, with his eyes still desperately fixed on it, seemed to be watching the ascent of the darkness as if he had at last judged his work in the expiring light. And no sound was heard save the stertorous breathing of the sick child, near whom there still loomed the dark silhouette of the motionless mother.

Then Sandoz spoke in his turn, his hands also crossed behind his head, and his back resting against one of the cushions of the couch.

'Does one ever know? Would it not be better, perhaps, to live and die unknown? What a sell it would be if artistic glory existed no more than the Paradise which is talked about in catechisms and which even children nowadays make fun of! We, who no longer believe in the Divinity, still believe in our own immortality. What a farce it all is!'

Then, affected to melancholy himself by the mournfulness of the twilight, and stirred by all the human suffering he beheld around him, he began to speak of his own torments.

'Look here, old man, I, whom you envy, perhaps—yes, I, who am beginning to get on in the world, as middle-class people say—I, who publish books and earn a little money—well, I am being killed by it all. I have often already told you this, but you don't believe me, because, as you only turn out work with a deal of trouble and cannot bring yourself to public notice, happiness in your eyes could naturally consist in producing a great deal, in being seen, and praised or slated. Well, get admitted to the next Salon, get into the thick of the battle, paint other pictures, and then tell me whether that suffices, and whether you are happy at last. Listen; work has taken up the whole of my existence. Little by little, it has robbed me of my mother, of my wife, of everything I love. It is like a germ thrown into the cranium, which feeds on the brain, finds its way into the trunk and limbs, and gnaws up the whole of the body. The moment I jump out of bed of a morning, work clutches hold of me, rivets me to my desk without leaving me time to get a breath of fresh air; then it pursues me at luncheon—I audibly chew my sentences with my bread. Next it accompanies me when I go out, comes back with me and dines off the same plate as myself; lies down with me on my pillow, so utterly pitiless that I am never able to set the book in hand on one side; indeed, its growth continues even in the depth of my sleep. And nothing outside of it exists for me. True, I go upstairs to embrace my mother, but in so absent-minded a way, that ten minutes after leaving her I ask myself whether I have really been to wish her good-morning. My poor wife has no husband; I am not with her even when our hands touch. Sometimes I have an acute feeling that I am making their lives very sad, and I feel very remorseful, for happiness is solely composed of kindness, frankness and gaiety in one's home; but how can I escape from the claws of the monster? I at once relapse into the somnambulism of my working hours, into the indifference and moroseness of my fixed idea. If the pages I have written during the morning have been worked off all right, so much the better; if one of them has remained in distress, so much the worse. The household will laugh or cry according to the whim of that all-devouring monster—Work. No, no! I have nothing that I can call my own. In my days of poverty I dreamt of rest in the country, of travel in distant lands; and now that I might make those dreams reality, the work that has been begun keeps me shut up. There is no chance of a walk in the morning's sun, no chance of running round to a friend's house, or of a mad bout of idleness! My strength of will has gone with the rest; all this has become a habit; I have locked the door of the world behind me, and thrown the key out of the window. There is no longer anything in my den but work and myself—and work will devour me, and then there will be nothing left, nothing at all!'

He paused, and silence reigned once more in the deepening gloom. Then he began again with an effort:

'And if one were only satisfied, if one only got some enjoyment out of such a nigger's life! Ah! I should like to know how those fellows manage who smoke cigarettes and complacently stroke their beards while they are at work. Yes, it appears to me that there are some who find production an easy pleasure, to be set aside or taken up without the least excitement. They are delighted, they admire themselves, they cannot write a couple of lines but they find those lines of a rare, distinguished, matchless quality. Well, as for myself, I bring forth in anguish, and my offspring seems a horror to me. How can a man be sufficiently wanting in self-doubt as to believe in himself? It absolutely amazes me to see men, who furiously deny talent to everybody else, lose all critical acumen, all common-sense, when it becomes a question of their own bastard creations. Why, a book is always very ugly. To like it one mustn't have had a hand in the cooking of it. I say nothing of the jugsful of insults that are showered upon one. Instead of annoying, they rather encourage me. I see men who are upset by attacks, who feel a humiliating craving to win sympathy. It is a simple question of temperament; some women would die if they failed to please. But, to my thinking, insult is a very good medicine to take; unpopularity is a very manly school to be brought up in. Nothing keeps one in such good health and strength as the hooting of a crowd of imbeciles. It suffices that a man can say that he has given his life's blood to his work; that he expects neither immediate justice nor serious attention; that he works without hope of any kind, and simply because the love of work beats beneath his skin like his heart, irrespective of any will of his own. If he can do all this, he may die in the effort with the consoling illusion that he will be appreciated one day or other. Ah! if the others only knew how jauntily I bear the weight of their anger. Only there is my own choler, which overwhelms me; I fret that I cannot live for a moment happy. What hours of misery I spend, great heavens! from the very day I begin a novel. During the first chapters there isn't so much trouble. I have plenty of room before me in which to display genius. But afterwards I become distracted, and am never satisfied with the daily task; I condemn the book before it is finished, judging it inferior to its elders; and I torture myself about certain pages, about certain sentences, certain words, so that at last the very commas assume an ugly look, from which I suffer. And when it is finished—ah! when it is finished, what a relief! Not the enjoyment of the gentleman who exalts himself in the worship of his offspring, but the curse of the labourer who throws down the burden that has been breaking his back. Then, later on, with another book, it all begins afresh; it will always begin afresh, and I shall die under it, furious with myself, exasperated at not having had more talent, enraged at not leaving a "work" more complete, of greater dimensions—books upon books, a pile of mountain height! And at my death I shall feel horrible doubts about the task I may have accomplished, asking myself whether I ought not to have gone to the left when I went to the right, and my last word, my last gasp, will be to recommence the whole over again—'

He was thoroughly moved; the words stuck in his throat; he was obliged to draw breath for a moment before delivering himself of this passionate cry in which all his impenitent lyricism took wing:

Ah, life! a second span of life, who shall give it to me, that work may rob me of it again—that I may die of it once more?'

It had now become quite dark; the mother's rigid silhouette was no longer visible; the hoarse breathing of the child sounded amidst the obscurity like a terrible and distant signal of distress, uprising from the streets. In the whole studio, which had become lugubriously black, the big canvas only showed a glimpse of pallidity, a last vestige of the waning daylight. The nude figure, similar to an agonising vision, seemed to be floating about, without definite shape, the legs having already vanished, one arm being already submerged, and the only part at all distinct being the trunk, which shone like a silvery moon.

After a protracted pause, Sandoz inquired:

'Shall I go with you when you take your picture?'

Getting no answer from Claude, he fancied he could hear him crying. Was it with the same infinite sadness, the despair by which he himself had been stirred just now? He waited for a moment, then repeated his question, and at last the painter, after choking down a sob, stammered:

'Thanks, the picture will remain here; I sha'n't send it.'

'What? Why, you had made up your mind?'

'Yes, yes, I had made up my mind; but I had not seen it as I saw it just now in the waning daylight. I have failed with it, failed with it again—it struck my eyes like a blow, it went to my very heart.'

His tears now flowed slow and scalding in the gloom that hid him from sight. He had been restraining himself, and now the silent anguish which had consumed him burst forth despite all his efforts.

'My poor friend,' said Sandoz, quite upset; 'it is hard to tell you so, but all the same you are right, perhaps, in delaying matters to finish certain parts rather more. Still I am angry with myself, for I shall imagine that it was I who discouraged you by my everlasting stupid discontent with things.'

Claude simply answered:

'You! what an idea! I was not even listening to you. No; I was looking, and I saw everything go helter-skelter in that confounded canvas. The light was dying away, and all at once, in the greyish dusk, the scales suddenly dropped from my eyes. The background alone is pretty; the nude woman is altogether too loud; what's more, she's out of the perpendicular, and her legs are badly drawn. When I noticed that, ah! it was enough to kill me there and then; I felt life departing from me. Then the gloom kept rising and rising, bringing a whirling sensation, a foundering of everything, the earth rolling into chaos, the end of the world. And soon I only saw the trunk waning like a sickly moon. And look, look! there now remains nothing of her, not a glimpse; she is dead, quite black!'

In fact, the picture had at last entirely disappeared. But the painter had risen and could be heard swearing in the dense obscurity.

'D—n it all, it doesn't matter, I'll set to work at it again—'

Then Christine, who had also risen from her chair, against which he stumbled, interrupted him, saying: 'Take care, I'll light the lamp.'

She lighted it and came back looking very pale, casting a glance of hatred and fear at the picture. It was not to go then? The abomination was to begin once more!

'I'll set to work at it again,' repeated Claude, 'and it shall kill me, it shall kill my wife, my child, the whole lot; but, by heaven, it shall be a masterpiece!'

Christine sat down again; they approached Jacques, who had thrown the clothes off once more with his feverish little hands. He was still breathing heavily, lying quite inert, his head buried in the pillow like a weight, with which the bed seemed to creak. When Sandoz was on the point of going, he expressed his uneasiness. The mother appeared stupefied; while the father was already returning to his picture, the masterpiece which awaited creation, and the thought of which filled him with such passionate illusions that he gave less heed to the painful reality of the sufferings of his child, the true living flesh of his flesh.

On the following morning, Claude had just finished dressing, when he heard Christine calling in a frightened voice. She also had just woke with a start from the heavy sleep which had benumbed her while she sat watching the sick child.

'Claude! Claude! Oh, look! He is dead.'

The painter rushed forward, with heavy eyes, stumbling, and apparently failing to understand, for he repeated with an air of profound amazement, 'What do you mean by saying he is dead?'

For a moment they remained staring wildly at the bed. The poor little fellow, with his disproportionate head—the head of the progeny of genius, exaggerated as to verge upon cretinism—did not appear to have stirred since the previous night; but no breath came from his mouth, which had widened and become discoloured, and his glassy eyes were open. His father laid his hands upon him and found him icy cold.

'It is true, he is dead.'

And their stupor was such that for yet another moment they remained with their eyes dry, simply thunderstruck, as it were, by the abruptness of that death which they considered incredible.

Then, her knees bending under her, Christine dropped down in front of the bed, bursting into violent sobs which shook her from head to foot, and wringing her hands, whilst her forehead remained pressed against the mattress. In that first moment of horror her despair was aggravated above all by poignant remorse—the remorse of not having sufficiently cared for the poor child. Former days started up before her in a rapid vision, each bringing with it regretfulness for unkind words, deferred caresses, rough treatment even. And now it was all over; she would never be able to compensate the lad for the affection she had withheld from him. He whom she thought so disobedient had obeyed but too well at last. She had so often told him when at play to be still, and not to disturb his father at his work, that he was quiet at last, and for ever. The idea suffocated her; each sob drew from her a dull moan.

Claude had begun walking up and down the studio, unable to remain still. With his features convulsed, he shed a few big tears, which he brushed away with the back of his hand. And whenever he passed in front of the little corpse he could not help glancing at it. The glassy eyes, wide open, seemed to exercise a spell over him. At first he resisted, but a confused idea assumed shape within him, and would not be shaken off. He yielded to it at last, took a small canvas, and began to paint a study of the dead child. For the first few minutes his tears dimmed his sight, wrapping everything in a mist; but he kept wiping them away, and persevered with his work, even though his brush shook. Then the passion for art dried his tears and steadied his hand, and in a little while it was no longer his icy son that lay there, but merely a model, a subject, the strange interest of which stirred him. That huge head, that waxy flesh, those eyes which looked like holes staring into space—all excited and thrilled him. He stepped back, seemed to take pleasure in his work, and vaguely smiled at it.

When Christine rose from her knees, she found him thus occupied. Then, bursting into tears again, she merely said:

'Ah! you can paint him now, he'll never stir again.'

For five hours Claude kept at it, and on the second day, when Sandoz came back with him from the cemetery, after the funeral, he shuddered with pity and admiration at the sight of the small canvas. It was one of the fine bits of former days, a masterpiece of limpidity and power, to which was added a note of boundless melancholy, the end of everything—all life ebbing away with the death of that child.

But Sandoz, who had burst out into exclamations fall of praise, was quite taken aback on hearing Claude say to him:

'You are sure you like it? In that case, as the other machine isn't ready, I'll send this to the Salon.'

X

ONE morning, as Claude, who had taken 'The Dead Child' to the Palais de l'Industrie the previous day, was roaming round about the Parc Monceau, he suddenly came upon Fagerolles.

'What!' said the latter, cordially, 'is it you, old fellow? What's becoming of you? What are you doing? We see so little of each other now.'

Then, Claude having mentioned what he had sent to the Salon—that little canvas which his mind was full of—Fagerolles added:

'Ah! you've sent something; then I'll get it "hung" for you. You know that I'm a candidate for the hanging committee this year.'

Indeed, amid the tumult and everlasting discontent of the artists, after attempts at reform, repeated a score of times and then abandoned, the authorities had just invested the exhibitors with the privilege of electing the members of the hanging committee; and this had quite upset the world of painters and sculptors, a perfect electoral fever had set in, with all sorts of ambitious cabals and intrigues—all the low jobbery, indeed, by which politics are dishonoured.

'I'm going to take you with me,' continued Fagerolles; you must come and see how I'm settled in my little house, in which you haven't yet set foot, in spite of all your promises. It's there, hard by, at the corner of the Avenue de Villiers.'

Claude, whose arm he had gaily taken, was obliged to follow him. He was seized with a fit of cowardice; the idea that his old chum might get his picture 'hung' for him filled him with mingled shame and desire. On reaching the avenue, he stopped in front of the house to look at its frontage, a bit of coquettish, precioso architectural tracery—the exact copy of a Renaissance house at Bourges, with lattice windows, a staircase tower, and a roof decked with leaden ornaments. It looked like the abode of a harlot; and Claude was struck with surprise when, on turning round, he recognised Irma Becot's regal mansion just over the way. Huge, substantial, almost severe of aspect, it had all the importance of a palace compared to its neighbour, the dwelling of the artist, who was obliged to limit himself to a fanciful nick-nack.

'Ah! that Irma, eh?' said Fagerolles with just a shade of respect in his tone. 'She has got a cathedral and no mistake! But come in.'

The interior of Fagerolles' house was strangely and magnificently luxurious. Old tapestry, old weapons, a heap of old furniture, Chinese and Japanese curios were displayed even in the very hall. On the left there was a dining-room, panelled with lacquer work and having its ceiling draped with a design of a red dragon. Then there was a staircase of carved wood above which banners drooped, whilst tropical plants rose up like plumes. Overhead, the studio was a marvel, though rather small and without a picture visible. The walls, indeed, were entirely covered with Oriental hangings, while at one end rose up a huge chimney-piece with chimerical monsters supporting the tablet, and at the other extremity appeared a vast couch under a tent—the latter quite a monument, with lances upholding the sumptuous drapery, above a collection of carpets, furs and cushions heaped together almost on a level with the flooring.

Claude looked at it all, and there came to his lips a question which he held back—Was all this paid for? Fagerolles, who had been decorated with the Legion of Honour the previous year, now asked, it was said, ten thousand francs for painting a mere portrait. Naudet, who, after launching him, duly turned his success to profit in a methodical fashion, never let one of his pictures go for less than twenty, thirty, forty thousand francs. Orders would have fallen on the painter's shoulders as thick as hail, if he had not affected the disdain, the weariness of the man whose slightest sketches are fought for. And yet all this display of luxury smacked of indebtedness, there was only so much paid on account to the upholsterers; all the money—the money won by lucky strokes as on 'Change—slipped through the artist's fingers, and was spent without trace of it remaining. Moreover, Fagerolles, still in the full flush of his sudden good fortune, did not calculate or worry, being confident that he would always sell his works at higher and higher prices, and feeling glorious at the high position he was acquiring in contemporary art.

Eventually, Claude espied a little canvas on an ebony easel, draped with red plush. Excepting a rosewood tube case and box of crayons, forgotten on an article of furniture, nothing reminding one of the artistic profession could be seen lying about.

'Very finely treated,' said Claude, wishing to be amiable, as he stood in front of the little canvas. 'And is your picture for the Salon sent?'

'Ah! yes, thank heavens! What a number of people I had here! A perfect procession which kept me on my legs from morning till evening during a week. I didn't want to exhibit it, as it lowers one to do so, and Naudet also opposed it. But what would you have done? I was so begged and prayed; all the young fellows want to set me on the committee, so that I may defend them. Oh! my picture is simple enough—I call it "A Picnic." There are a couple of gentlemen and three ladies under some trees—guests at some chateau, who have brought a collation with them and are eating it in a glade. You'll see, it's rather original.'

He spoke in a hesitating manner, and when his eyes met those of Claude, who was looking at him fixedly, he lost countenance altogether, and joked about the little canvas on the easel.

'That's a daub Naudet asked me for. Oh! I'm not ignorant of what I lack—a little of what you have too much of, old man. You know that I'm still your friend; why, I defended you only yesterday with some painters.'

He tapped Claude on the shoulders, for he had divined his old master's secret contempt, and wished to win him back by his old-time caresses—all the wheedling practices of a hussy. Very sincerely and with a sort of anxious deference he again promised Claude that he would do everything in his power to further the hanging of his picture, 'The Dead Child.'

However, some people arrived; more than fifteen persons came in and went off in less than an hour—fathers bringing young pupils, exhibitors anxious to say a good word on their own behalf, friends who wanted to barter influence, even women who placed their talents under the protection of their charms. And one should have seen the painter play his part as a candidate, shaking hands most lavishly, saying to one visitor: 'Your picture this year is so pretty, it pleases me so much!' then feigning astonishment with another: 'What! you haven't had a medal yet?' and repeating to all of them: 'Ah! If I belonged to the committee, I'd make them walk straight.' He sent every one away delighted, closed the door behind each visitor with an air of extreme amiability, through which, however, there pierced the secret sneer of an ex-lounger on the pavement.

'You see, eh?' he said to Claude, at a moment when they happened to be left alone. 'What a lot of time I lose with those idiots!'

Then he approached the large window, and abruptly opened one of the casements; and on one of the balconies of the house over the way a woman clad in a lace dressing-gown could be distinguished waving her handkerchief. Fagerolles on his side waved his hand three times in succession. Then both windows were closed again.

Claude had recognised Irma; and amid the silence which fell Fagerolles quietly explained matters:

'It's convenient, you see, one can correspond. We have a complete system of telegraphy. She wants to speak to me, so I must go—'

Since he and Irma had resided in the avenue, they met, it was said, on their old footing. It was even asserted that he, so 'cute,' so well-acquainted with Parisian humbug, let himself be fleeced by her, bled at every moment of some good round sum, which she sent her maid to ask for—now to pay a tradesman, now to satisfy a whim, often for nothing at all, or rather for the sole pleasure of emptying his pockets; and this partly explained his embarrassed circumstances, his indebtedness, which ever increased despite the continuous rise in the quotations of his canvases.

Claude had put on his hat again. Fagerolles was shuffling about impatiently, looking nervously at the house over the way.

'I don't send you off, but you see she's waiting for me,' he said, 'Well, it's understood, your affair's settled—that is, unless I'm not elected. Come to the Palais de l'Industrie on the evening the voting-papers are counted. Oh! there will be a regular crush, quite a rumpus! Still, you will always learn if you can rely on me.'

At first, Claude inwardly swore that he would not trouble about it. Fagerolles' protection weighed heavily upon him; and yet, in his heart of hearts, he really had but one fear, that the shifty fellow would not keep his promise, but would ultimately be taken with a fit of cowardice at the idea of protecting a defeated man. However, on the day of the vote Claude could not keep still, but went and roamed about the Champs Elysees under the pretence of taking a long walk. He might as well go there as elsewhere, for while waiting for the Salon he had altogether ceased work. He himself could not vote, as to do so it was necessary to have been 'hung' on at least one occasion. However, he repeatedly passed before the Palais de l'Industrie,* the foot pavement in front of which interested him with its bustling aspect, its procession of artist electors, whom men in dirty blouses caught hold of, shouting to them the titles of their lists of candidates—lists some thirty in number emanating from every possible coterie, and representing every possible opinion. There was the list of the studios of the School of Arts, the liberal list, the list of the uncompromising radical painters, the conciliatory list, the young painters' list, even the ladies' list, and so forth. The scene suggested all the turmoil at the door of an electoral polling booth on the morrow of a riot.

* This palace, for many years the home of the 'Salon,' was built
for the first Paris International Exhibition, that of 1855,
and demolished in connection with that of 1900.—ED.

At four o'clock in the afternoon, when the voting was over, Claude could not resist a fit of curiosity to go and have a look. The staircase was now free, and whoever chose could enter. Upstairs, he came upon the huge gallery, overlooking the Champs Elysees, which was set aside for the hanging committee. A table, forty feet long, filled the centre of this gallery, and entire trees were burning in the monumental fireplace at one end of it. Some four or five hundred electors, who had remained to see the votes counted, stood there, mingled with friends and inquisitive strangers, talking, laughing, and setting quite a storm loose under the lofty ceiling. Around the table, parties of people who had volunteered to count the votes were already settled and at work; there were some fifteen of these parties in all, each comprising a chairman and two scrutineers. Three or four more remained to be organised, and nobody else offered assistance; in fact, every one turned away in fear of the crushing labour which would rivet the more zealous people to the spot far into the night.

It precisely happened that Fagerolles, who had been in the thick of it since the morning, was gesticulating and shouting, trying to make himself heard above the hubbub.

'Come, gentlemen, we need one more man here! Come, some willing person, over here!'

And at that moment, perceiving Claude, he darted forward and forcibly dragged him off.

'Ah! as for you, you will just oblige me by sitting down there and helping us! It's for the good cause, dash it all!'

Claude abruptly found himself chairman of one of the counting committees, and began to perform his functions with all the gravity of a timid man, secretly experiencing a good deal of emotion, as if the hanging of his canvas would depend upon the conscientiousness he showed in his work. He called out the names inscribed upon the voting-papers, which were passed to him in little packets, while the scrutineers, on sheets of paper prepared for the purpose, noted each successive vote that each candidate obtained. And all this went on amidst a most frightful uproar, twenty and thirty names being called out at the same time by different voices, above the continuous rumbling of the crowd. As Claude could never do anything without throwing passion into it, he waxed excited, became despondent whenever a voting-paper did not bear Fagerolles' name, and grew happy as soon as he had to shout out that name once more. Moreover, he often tasted that delight, for his friend had made himself popular, showing himself everywhere, frequenting the cafes where influential groups of artists assembled, even venturing to expound his opinions there, and binding himself to young artists, without neglecting to bow very low to the members of the Institute. Thus there was a general current of sympathy in his favour. Fagerolles was, so to say, everybody's spoilt child.

Night came on at about six o'clock that rainy March day. The assistants brought lamps; and some mistrustful artists, who, gloomy and silent, were watching the counting askance, drew nearer. Others began to play jokes, imitated the cries of animals, or attempted a tyrolienne. But it was only at eight o'clock, when a collation of cold meat and wine was served, that the gaiety reached its climax. The bottles were hastily emptied, the men stuffed themselves with whatever they were lucky enough to get hold of, and there was a free-and-easy kind of Kermesse in that huge hall which the logs in the fireplace lit up with a forge-like glow. Then they all smoked, and the smoke set a kind of mist around the yellow light from the lamps, whilst on the floor trailed all the spoilt voting-papers thrown away during the polling; indeed, quite a layer of dirty paper, together with corks, breadcrumbs, and a few broken plates. The heels of those seated at the table disappeared amidst this litter. Reserve was cast aside; a little sculptor with a pale face climbed upon a chair to harangue the assembly, and a painter, with stiff moustaches under a hook nose, bestrode a chair and galloped, bowing, round the table, in mimicry of the Emperor.

Little by little, however, a good many grew tired and went off. At eleven o'clock there were not more than a couple of hundred persons present. Past midnight, however, some more people arrived, loungers in dress-coats and white ties, who had come from some theatre or soiree and wished to learn the result of the voting before all Paris knew it. Reporters also appeared; and they could be seen darting one by one out of the room as soon as a partial result was communicated to them.

Claude, hoarse by now, still went on calling names. The smoke and the heat became intolerable, a smell like that of a cow-house rose from the muddy litter on the floor. One o'clock, two o'clock in the morning struck, and he was still unfolding voting-papers, the conscientiousness which he displayed delaying him to such a point that the other parties had long since finished their work, while his was still a maze of figures. At last all the additions were centralised and the definite result proclaimed. Fagerolles was elected, coming fifteenth among forty, or five places ahead of Bongrand, who had been a candidate on the same list, but whose name must have been frequently struck out. And daylight was breaking when Claude reached home in the Rue Tourlaque, feeling both worn out and delighted.

Then, for a couple of weeks he lived in a state of anxiety. A dozen times he had the idea of going to Fagerolles' for information, but a feeling of shame restrained him. Besides, as the committee proceeded in alphabetical order, nothing perhaps was yet decided. However, one evening, on the Boulevard de Clichy, he felt his heart thump as he saw two broad shoulders, with whose lolloping motion he was well acquainted, coming towards him.

They were the shoulders of Bongrand, who seemed embarrassed. He was the first to speak, and said:

'You know matters aren't progressing very well over yonder with those brutes. But everything isn't lost. Fagerolles and I are on the watch. Still, you must rely on Fagerolles; as for me, my dear fellow, I am awfully afraid of compromising your chances.'

To tell the truth, there was constant hostility between Bongrand and the President of the hanging committee, Mazel, a famous master of the School of Arts, and the last rampart of the elegant, buttery, conventional style of art. Although they called each other 'dear colleague' and made a great show of shaking hands, their hostility had burst forth the very first day; one of them could never ask for the admission of a picture without the other one voting for its rejection. Fagerolles, who had been elected secretary, had, on the contrary, made himself Mazel's amuser, his vice, and Mazel forgave his old pupil's defection, so skilfully did the renegade flatter him. Moreover, the young master, a regular turncoat, as his comrades said, showed even more severity than the members of the Institute towards audacious beginners. He only became lenient and sociable when he wanted to get a picture accepted, on those occasions showing himself extremely fertile in devices, intriguing and carrying the vote with all the supple deftness of a conjurer.

The committee work was really a hard task, and even Bongrand's strong legs grew tired of it. It was cut out every day by the assistants. An endless row of large pictures rested on the ground against the handrails, all along the first-floor galleries, right round the Palace; and every afternoon, at one o'clock precisely, the forty committee-men, headed by their president, who was equipped with a bell, started off on a promenade, until all the letters in the alphabet, serving as exhibitors' initials, had been exhausted. They gave their decisions standing, and the work was got through as fast as possible, the worst canvases being rejected without going to the vote. At times, however, discussions delayed the party, there came a ten minutes' quarrel, and some picture which caused a dispute was reserved for the evening revision. Two men, holding a cord some thirty feet long, kept it stretched at a distance of four paces from the line of pictures, so as to restrain the committee-men, who kept on pushing each other in the heat of their dispute, and whose stomachs, despite everything, were ever pressing against the cord. Behind the committee marched seventy museum-keepers in white blouses, executing evolutions under the orders of a brigadier. At each decision communicated to them by the secretaries, they sorted the pictures, the accepted paintings being separated from the rejected ones, which were carried off like corpses after a battle. And the round lasted during two long hours, without a moment's respite, and without there being a single chair to sit upon. The committee-men had to remain on their legs, tramping on in a tired way amid icy draughts, which compelled even the least chilly among them to bury their noses in the depths of their fur-lined overcoats.

Then the three o'clock snack proved very welcome: there was half an hour's rest at a buffet, where claret, chocolate, and sandwiches could be obtained. It was there that the market of mutual concessions was held, that the bartering of influence and votes was carried on. In order that nobody might be forgotten amid the hailstorm of applications which fell upon the committee-men, most of them carried little note-books, which they consulted; and they promised to vote for certain exhibitors whom a colleague protected on condition that this colleague voted for the ones in whom they were interested. Others, however, taking no part in these intrigues, either from austerity or indifference, finished the interval in smoking a cigarette and gazing vacantly about them.

Then the work began again, but more agreeably, in a gallery where there were chairs, and even tables with pens and paper and ink. All the pictures whose height did not reach four feet ten inches were judged there—'passed on the easel,' as the expression goes—being ranged, ten or twelve together, on a kind of trestle covered with green baize. A good many committee-men then grew absent-minded, several wrote their letters, and the president had to get angry to obtain presentable majorities. Sometimes a gust of passion swept by; they all jostled each other; the votes, usually given by raising the hand, took place amid such feverish excitement that hats and walking-sticks were waved in the air above the tumultuous surging of heads.

And it was there, 'on the easel,' that 'The Dead Child' at last made its appearance. During the previous week Fagerolles, whose pocket-book was full of memoranda, had resorted to all kinds of complicated bartering in order to obtain votes in Claude's favour; but it was a difficult business, it did not tally with his other engagements, and he only met with refusals as soon as he mentioned his friend's name. He complained, moreover, that he could get no help from Bongrand, who did not carry a pocket-book, and who was so clumsy, too, that he spoilt the best causes by his outbursts of unseasonable frankness. A score of times already would Fagerolles have forsaken Claude, had it not been for his obstinate desire to try his power over his colleagues by asking for the admittance of a work by Lantier, which was a reputed impossibility. However, people should see if he wasn't yet strong enough to force the committee into compliance with his wishes. Moreover, perhaps from the depths of his conscience there came a cry for justice, an unconfessed feeling of respect for the man whose ideas he had stolen.

As it happened, Mazel was in a frightfully bad humour that day. At the outset of the sitting the brigadier had come to him, saying: 'There was a mistake yesterday, Monsieur Mazel. A hors-concours* picture was rejected. You know, No. 2520, a nude woman under a tree.'

* A painting by one of those artists who, from the fact that they
had obtained medals at previous Salons, had the right to go on
exhibiting at long as they lived, the committee being debarred
from rejecting their work however bad it might be.—ED.

In fact, on the day before, this painting had been consigned to the grave amid unanimous contempt, nobody having noticed that it was the work of an old classical painter highly respected by the Institute; and the brigadier's fright, and the amusing circumstance of a picture having thus been condemned by mistake, enlivened the younger members of the committee and made them sneer in a provoking manner.

Mazel, who detested such mishaps, which he rightly felt were disastrous for the authority of the School of Arts, made an angry gesture, and drily said:

'Well, fish it out again, and put it among the admitted pictures. It isn't so surprising, there was an intolerable noise yesterday. How can one judge anything like that at a gallop, when one can't even obtain silence?'

He rang his bell furiously, and added:

'Come, gentlemen, everything is ready—a little good will, if you please.'

Unluckily, a fresh misfortune occurred as soon as the first paintings were set on the trestle. One canvas among others attracted Mazel's attention, so bad did he consider it, so sharp in tone as to make one's very teeth grate. As his sight was failing him, he leant forward to look at the signature, muttering the while: 'Who's the pig—'

But he quickly drew himself up, quite shocked at having read the name of one of his friends, an artist who, like himself, was a rampart of healthy principles. Hoping that he had not been overheard, he thereupon called out:

'Superb! No. 1, eh, gentlemen?'

No. 1 was granted—the formula of admission which entitled the picture to be hung on the line. Only, some of the committee-men laughed and nudged each other, at which Mazel felt very hurt, and became very fierce.

Moreover, they all made such blunders at times. A great many of them eased their feelings at the first glance, and then recalled their words as soon as they had deciphered the signature. This ended by making them cautious, and so with furtive glances they made sure of the artist's name before expressing any opinion. Besides, whenever a colleague's work, some fellow committee-man's suspicious-looking canvas, was brought forward, they took the precaution to warn each other by making signs behind the painter's back, as if to say, 'Take care, no mistake, mind; it's his picture.'

Fagerolles, despite his colleagues' fidgety nerves, carried the day on a first occasion. It was a question of admitting a frightful portrait painted by one of his pupils, whose family, a very wealthy one, received him on a footing of intimacy. To achieve this he had taken Mazel on one side in order to try to move him with a sentimental story about an unfortunate father with three daughters, who were starving. But the president let himself be entreated for a long while, saying that a man shouldn't waste his time painting when he was dying for lack of food, and that he ought to have a little more consideration for his three daughters! However, in the result, Mazel raised his hand, alone, with Fagerolles. Some of the others then angrily protested, and even two members of the Institute seemed disgusted, whereupon Fagerolles whispered to them in a low key:

'It's for Mazel! He begged me to vote. The painter's a relative of his, I think; at all events, he greatly wants the picture to be accepted.'

At this the two academicians promptly raised their hands, and a large majority declared itself in favour of the portrait.

But all at once laughter, witticisms, and indignant cries rang out: 'The Dead Child' had just been placed on the trestle. Were they to have the Morgue sent to them now? said some. And while the old men drew back in alarm, the younger ones scoffed at the child's big head, which was plainly that of a monkey who had died from trying to swallow a gourd.

Fagerolles at once understood that the game was lost. At first he tried to spirit the vote away by a joke, in accordance with his skilful tactics:

'Come, gentlemen, an old combatant—'

But furious exclamations cut him short. Oh, no! not that one. They knew him, that old combatant! A madman who had been persevering in his obstinacy for fifteen years past—a proud, stuck-up fellow who posed for being a genius, and who had talked about demolishing the Salon, without even sending a picture that it was possible to accept. All their hatred of independent originality, of the competition of the 'shop over the way,' which frightened them, of that invincible power which triumphs even when it is seemingly defeated, resounded in their voices. No, no; away with it!

Then Fagerolles himself made the mistake of getting irritated, yielding to the anger he felt at finding what little real influence he possessed.

'You are unjust; at least, be impartial,' he said.

Thereupon the tumult reached a climax. He was surrounded and jostled, arms waved about him in threatening fashion, and angry words were shot out at him like bullets.

'You dishonour the committee, monsieur!'

'If you defend that thing, it's simply to get your name in the newspapers!'

'You aren't competent to speak on the subject!'

Then Fagerolles, beside himself, losing even the pliancy of his bantering disposition, retorted:

'I'm as competent as you are.'

'Shut up!' resumed a comrade, a very irascible little painter with a fair complexion. 'You surely don't want to make us swallow such a turnip as that?'

Yes, yes, a turnip! They all repeated the word in tones of conviction—that word which they usually cast at the very worst smudges, at the pale, cold, glairy painting of daubers.

'All right,' at last said Fagerolles, clenching his teeth. 'I demand the vote.'

Since the discussion had become envenomed, Mazel had been ringing his bell, extremely flushed at finding his authority ignored.

'Gentlemen—come, gentlemen; it's extraordinary that one can't settle matters without shouting—I beg of you, gentlemen—'

At last he obtained a little silence. In reality, he was not a bad-hearted man. Why should not they admit that little picture, although he himself thought it execrable? They admitted so many others!

'Come, gentlemen, the vote is asked for.'

He himself was, perhaps, about to raise his hand, when Bongrand, who had hitherto remained silent, with the blood rising to his cheeks in the anger he was trying to restrain, abruptly went off like a pop-gun, most unseasonably giving vent to the protestations of his rebellious conscience.

'But, curse it all! there are not four among us capable of turning out such a piece of work!'

Some grunts sped around; but the sledge-hammer blow had come upon them with such force that nobody answered.

'Gentlemen, the vote is asked for,' curtly repeated Mazel, who had turned pale.

His tone sufficed to explain everything: it expressed all his latent hatred of Bongrand, the fierce rivalry that lay hidden under their seemingly good-natured handshakes.

Things rarely came to such a pass as this. They almost always arranged matters. But in the depths of their ravaged pride there were wounds which always bled; they secretly waged duels which tortured them with agony, despite the smile upon their lips.

Bongrand and Fagerolles alone raised their hands, and 'The Dead Child,' being rejected, could only perhaps be rescued at the general revision.

This general revision was the terrible part of the task. Although, after twenty days' continuous toil, the committee allowed itself forty-eight hours' rest, so as to enable the keepers to prepare the final work, it could not help shuddering on the afternoon when it came upon the assemblage of three thousand rejected paintings, from among which it had to rescue as many canvases as were necessary for the then regulation total of two thousand five hundred admitted works to be complete. Ah! those three thousand pictures, placed one after the other alongside the walls of all the galleries, including the outer one, deposited also even on the floors, and lying there like stagnant pools, between which the attendants devised little paths—they were like an inundation, a deluge, which rose up, streamed over the whole Palais de l'Industrie, and submerged it beneath the murky flow of all the mediocrity and madness to be found in the river of Art. And but a single afternoon sitting was held, from one till seven o'clock—six hours of wild galloping through a maze! At first they held out against fatigue and strove to keep their vision clear; but the forced march soon made their legs give way, their eyesight was irritated by all the dancing colours, and yet it was still necessary to march on, to look and judge, even until they broke down with fatigue. By four o'clock the march was like a rout—the scattering of a defeated army. Some committee-men, out of breath, dragged themselves along very far in the rear; others, isolated, lost amid the frames, followed the narrow paths, renouncing all prospect of emerging from them, turning round and round without any hope of ever getting to the end! How could they be just and impartial, good heavens? What could they select from amid that heap of horrors? Without clearly distinguishing a landscape from a portrait, they made up the number they required in pot-luck fashion. Two hundred, two hundred and forty—another eight, they still wanted eight more. That one? No, that other. As you like! Seven, eight, it was over! At last they had got to the end, and they hobbled away, saved—free!

In one gallery a fresh scene drew them once more round 'The Dead Child,' lying on the floor among other waifs. But this time they jested. A joker pretended to stumble and set his foot in the middle of the canvas, while others trotted along the surrounding little paths, as if trying to find out which was the picture's top and which its bottom, and declaring that it looked much better topsy-turvy.

Fagerolles himself also began to joke.

'Come, a little courage, gentlemen; go the round, examine it, you'll be repaid for your trouble. Really now, gentlemen, be kind, rescue it; pray do that good action!'

They all grew merry in listening to him, but with cruel laughter they refused more harshly than ever. 'No, no, never!'

'Will you take it for your "charity"?' cried a comrade.

This was a custom; the committee-men had a right to a 'charity'; each of them could select a canvas among the lot, no matter how execrable it might be, and it was thereupon admitted without examination. As a rule, the bounty of this admission was bestowed upon poor artists. The forty paintings thus rescued at the eleventh hour, were those of the beggars at the door—those whom one allowed to glide with empty stomachs to the far end of the table.

'For my "charity,"' repeated Fagerolles, feeling very much embarrassed; 'the fact is, I meant to take another painting for my "charity." Yes, some flowers by a lady—'

He was interrupted by loud jeers. Was she pretty? In front of the women's paintings the gentlemen were particularly prone to sneer, never displaying the least gallantry. And Fagerolles remained perplexed, for the 'lady' in question was a person whom Irma took an interest in. He trembled at the idea of the terrible scene which would ensue should he fail to keep his promise. An expedient occurred to him.

'Well, and you, Bongrand? You might very well take this funny little dead child for your charity.'

Bongrand, wounded to the heart, indignant at all the bartering, waved his long arms:

'What! I? I insult a real painter in that fashion? Let him be prouder, dash it, and never send anything to the Salon!'

Then, as the others still went on sneering, Fagerolles, desirous that victory should remain to him, made up his mind, with a proud air, like a man who is conscious of his strength and does not fear being compromised.

'All right, I'll take it for my "charity,"' he said.

The others shouted bravo, and gave him a bantering ovation, with a series of profound bows and numerous handshakes. All honour to the brave fellow who had the courage of his opinions! And an attendant carried away in his arms the poor derided, jolted, soiled canvas; and thus it was that a picture by the painter of 'In the Open Air' was at last accepted by the hanging committee of the Salon.

On the very next morning a note from Fagerolles apprised Claude, in a couple of lines, that he had succeeded in getting 'The Dead Child' admitted, but that it had not been managed without trouble. Claude, despite the gladness of the tidings, felt a pang at his heart; the note was so brief, and was written in such a protecting, pitying style, that all the humiliating features of the business were apparent to him. For a moment he felt sorry over this victory, so much so that he would have liked to take his work back and hide it. Then his delicacy of feeling, his artistic pride again gave way, so much did protracted waiting for success make his wretched heart bleed. Ah! to be seen, to make his way despite everything! He had reached the point when conscience capitulates; he once more began to long for the opening of the Salon with all the feverish impatience of a beginner, again living in a state of illusion which showed him a crowd, a press of moving heads acclaiming his canvas.

By degrees Paris had made it the fashion to patronise 'varnishing day'—that day formerly set aside for painters only to come and finish the toilets of their pictures. Now, however, it was like a feast of early fruit, one of those solemnities which set the city agog and attract a tremendous crowd. For a week past the newspaper press, the streets, and the public had belonged to the artists. They held Paris in their grasp; the only matters talked of were themselves, their exhibits, their sayings or doings—in fact, everything connected with them. It was one of those infatuations which at last draw bands of country folk, common soldiers, and even nursemaids to the galleries on days of gratuitous admission, in such wise that fifty thousand visitors are recorded on some fine Sundays, an entire army, all the rear battalions of the ignorant lower orders, following society, and marching, with dilated eyes, through that vast picture shop.

That famous 'varnishing day' at first frightened Claude, who was intimidated by the thought of all the fine people whom the newspapers spoke about, and he resolved to wait for the more democratic day of the real inauguration. He even refused to accompany Sandoz. But he was consumed by such a fever, that after all he started off abruptly at eight o'clock in the morning, barely taking time to eat a bit of bread and cheese beforehand. Christine, who lacked the courage to go with him, kissed him again and again, feeling anxious and moved.

'Mind, my dear, don't worry, whatever happens,' said she.

Claude felt somewhat oppressed as he entered the Gallery of Honour. His heart was beating fast from the swiftness with which he had climbed the grand staircase. There was a limpid May sky out of doors, and through the linen awnings, stretched under the glazed roof, there filtered a bright white light, while the open doorways, communicating with the garden gallery, admitted moist gusts of quivering freshness. For a moment Claude drew breath in that atmosphere which was already tainted with a vague smell of varnish and the odour of the musk with which the women present perfumed themselves. At a glance he took stock of the pictures on the walls: a huge massacre scene in front of him, streaming with carmine; a colossal, pallid, religious picture on his left; a Government order, the commonplace delineation of some official festivity, on the right; and then a variety of portraits, landscapes, and indoor scenes, all glaring sharply amid the fresh gilding of their frames. However, the fear which he retained of the folks usually present at this solemnity led him to direct his glances upon the gradually increasing crowd. On a circular settee in the centre of the gallery, from which sprang a sheaf of tropical foliage, there sat three ladies, three monstrously fat creatures, attired in an abominable fashion, who had settled there to indulge in a whole day's backbiting. Behind him he heard somebody crushing harsh syllables in a hoarse voice. It was an Englishman in a check-pattern jacket, explaining the massacre scene to a yellow woman buried in the depths of a travelling ulster. There were some vacant spaces; groups of people formed, scattered, and formed again further on; all heads were raised; the men carried walking-sticks and had overcoats on their arms, the women strolled about slowly, showing distant profiles as they stopped before the pictures; and Claude's artistic eye was caught by the flowers in their hats and bonnets, which seemed very loud in tint amid the dark waves of the men's silk hats. He perceived three priests, two common soldiers who had found their way there no one knew whence, some endless processions of gentlemen decorated with the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, and troops of girls and their mothers, who constantly impeded the circulation. However, a good many of these people knew each other; there were smiles and bows from afar, at times a rapid handshake in passing. And conversation was carried on in a discreet tone of voice, above which rose the continuous tramping of feet.

Then Claude began to look for his own picture. He tried to find his way by means of the initial letters inscribed above the entrances of the galleries, but made a mistake, and went through those on the left hand. There was a succession of open entrances, a perspective of old tapestry door-hangings, with glimpses of the distant pictures. He went as far as the great western gallery, and came back by the parallel suite of smaller galleries without finding that allotted to the letter L. And when he reached the Gallery of Honour again, the crowd had greatly increased. In fact, it was now scarcely possible for one to move about there. Being unable to advance, he looked around, and recognised a number of painters, that nation of painters which was at home there that day, and was therefore doing the honours of its abode. Claude particularly remarked an old friend of the Boutin Studio—a young fellow consumed with the desire to advertise himself, who had been working for a medal, and who was now pouncing upon all the visitors possessed of any influence and forcibly taking them to see his pictures. Then there was a celebrated and wealthy painter who received his visitors in front of his work with a smile of triumph on his lips, showing himself compromisingly gallant with the ladies, who formed quite a court around him. And there were all the others: the rivals who execrated one another, although they shouted words of praise in full voices; the savage fellows who covertly watched their comrades' success from the corner of a doorway; the timid ones whom one could not for an empire induce to pass through the gallery where their pictures were hung; the jokers who hid the bitter mortification of their defeat under an amusing witticism; the sincere ones who were absorbed in contemplation, trying to understand the various works, and already in fancy distributing the medals. And the painters' families were also there. One charming young woman was accompanied by a coquettishly bedecked child; a sour-looking, skinny matron of middle-class birth was flanked by two ugly urchins in black; a fat mother had foundered on a bench amid quite a tribe of dirty brats; and a lady of mature charms, still very good-looking, stood beside her grown-up daughter, quietly watching a hussy pass—this hussy being the father's mistress. And then there were also the models—women who pulled one another by the sleeve, who showed one another their own forms in the various pictorial nudities, talking very loudly the while and dressed without taste, spoiling their superb figures by such wretched gowns that they seemed to be hump-backed beside the well-dressed dolls—those Parisiennes who owed their figures entirely to their dressmakers.

When Claude got free of the crowd, he enfiladed the line of doorways on the right hand. His letter was on that side; but he searched the galleries marked with an L without finding anything. Perhaps his canvas had gone astray and served to fill up a vacancy elsewhere. So when he had reached the large eastern gallery, he set off along a number of other little ones, a secluded suite visited by very few people, where the pictures seemed to frown with boredom. And there again he found nothing. Bewildered, distracted, he roamed about, went on to the garden gallery, searching among the superabundant exhibits which overflowed there, pallid and shivering in the crude light; and eventually, after other distant excursions, he tumbled into the Gallery of Honour for the third time.

There was now quite a crush there. All those who in any way create a stir in Paris were assembled together—the celebrities, the wealthy, the adored, talent, money and grace, the masters of romance, of the drama and of journalism, clubmen, racing men and speculators, women of every category, hussies, actresses and society belles. And Claude, angered by his vain search, grew amazed at the vulgarity of the faces thus massed together, at the incongruity of the toilets—but a few of which were elegant, while so many were common looking—at the lack of majesty which that vaunted 'society' displayed, to such a point, indeed, that the fear which had made him tremble was changed into contempt. Were these the people, then, who were going to jeer at his picture, provided it were found again? Two little reporters with fair complexions were completing a list of persons whose names they intended to mention. A critic pretended to take some notes on the margin of his catalogue; another was holding forth in professor's style in the centre of a party of beginners; a third, all by himself, with his hands behind his back, seemed rooted to one spot, crushing each work beneath his august impassibility. And what especially struck Claude was the jostling flock-like behaviour of the people, their banded curiosity in which there was nothing youthful or passionate, the bitterness of their voices, the weariness to be read on their faces, their general appearance of suffering. Envy was already at work; there was the gentleman who makes himself witty with the ladies; the one who, without a word, looks, gives a terrible shrug of the shoulders, and then goes off; and there were the two who remain for a quarter of an hour leaning over the handrail, with their noses close to a little canvas, whispering very low and exchanging the knowing glances of conspirators.

But Fagerolles had just appeared, and amid the continuous ebb and flow of the groups there seemed to be no one left but him. With his hand outstretched, he seemed to show himself everywhere at the same time, lavishly exerting himself to play the double part of a young 'master' and an influential member of the hanging committee. Overwhelmed with praise, thanks, and complaints, he had an answer ready for everybody without losing aught of his affability. Since early morning he had been resisting the assault of the petty painters of his set who found their pictures badly hung. It was the usual scamper of the first moment, everybody looking for everybody else, rushing to see one another and bursting into recriminations—noisy, interminable fury. Either the picture was too high up, or the light did not fall upon it properly, or the paintings near it destroyed its effect; in fact, some talked of unhooking their works and carrying them off. One tall thin fellow was especially tenacious, going from gallery to gallery in pursuit of Fagerolles, who vainly explained that he was innocent in the matter and could do nothing. Numerical order was followed, the pictures for each wall were deposited on the floor below and then hung up without anybody being favoured. He carried his obligingness so far as to promise his intervention when the galleries were rearranged after the medals had been awarded; but even then he did not manage to calm the tall thin fellow, who still continued pursuing him.

Claude for a moment elbowed his way through the crowd to go and ask Fagerolles where his picture had been hung. But on seeing his friend so surrounded, pride restrained him. Was there not something absurd and painful about this constant need of another's help? Besides, he suddenly reflected that he must have skipped a whole suite of galleries on the right-hand side; and, indeed, there were fresh leagues of painting there. He ended by reaching a gallery where a stifling crowd was massed in front of a large picture which filled the central panel of honour. At first he could not see it, there was such a surging sea of shoulders, such a thick wall of heads, such a rampart of hats. People rushed forward with gaping admiration. At length, however, by dint of rising on tiptoe, he perceived the marvel, and recognised the subject, by what had been told him.

It was Fagerolles' picture. And in that 'Picnic' he found his own forgotten work, 'In the Open Air,' the same light key of colour, the same artistic formula, but softened, trickishly rendered, spoilt by skin-deep elegance, everything being 'arranged' with infinite skill to satisfy the low ideal of the public. Fagerolles had not made the mistake of stripping his three women; but, clad in the audacious toilets of women of society, they showed no little of their persons. As for the two gallant gentlemen in summer jackets beside them, they realised the ideal of everything most distingue; while afar off a footman was pulling a hamper off the box of a landau drawn up behind the trees. The whole of it, the figures, the drapery, the bits of still life of the repast, stood out gaily in full sunlight against the darkened foliage of the background; and the supreme skill of the painter lay in his pretended audacity, in a mendacious semblance of forcible treatment which just sufficed to send the multitude into ecstasies. It was like a storm in a cream-jug!

Claude, being unable to approach, listened to the remarks around him. At last there was a man who depicted real truth! He did not press his points like those fools of the new school; he knew how to convey everything without showing anything. Ah! the art of knowing where to draw the line, the art of letting things be guessed, the respect due to the public, the approval of good society! And withal such delicacy, such charm and art! He did not unseasonably deliver himself of passionate things of exuberant design; no, when he had taken three notes from nature, he gave those three notes, nothing more. A newspaper man who arrived went into raptures over the 'Picnic,' and coined the expression 'a very Parisian style of painting.' It was repeated, and people no longer passed without declaring that the picture was 'very Parisian' indeed.

All those bent shoulders, all those admiring remarks rising from a sea of spines, ended by exasperating Claude; and seized with a longing to see the faces of the folk who created success, he manoeuvred in such a way as to lean his back against the handrail hard by. From that point, he had the public in front of him in the grey light filtering through the linen awning which kept the centre of the gallery in shade; whilst the brighter light, gliding from the edges of the blinds, illumined the paintings on the walls with a white flow, in which the gilding of the frames acquired a warm sunshiny tint. Claude at once recognised the people who had formerly derided him—if these were not the same, they were at least their relatives—serious, however, and enraptured, their appearance greatly improved by their respectful attention. The evil look, the weariness, which he had at first remarked on their faces, as envious bile drew their skin together and dyed it yellow, disappeared here while they enjoyed the treat of an amiable lie. Two fat ladies, open-mouthed, were yawning with satisfaction. Some old gentlemen opened their eyes wide with a knowing air. A husband explained the subject to his young wife, who jogged her chin with a pretty motion of the neck. There was every kind of marvelling, beatifical, astonished, profound, gay, austere, amidst unconscious smiles and languid postures of the head. The men threw back their black silk hats, the flowers in the women's bonnets glided to the napes of their necks. And all the faces, after remaining motionless for a moment, were then drawn aside and replaced by others exactly like them.

Then Claude, stupefied by that triumph, virtually forgot everything else. The gallery was becoming too small, fresh bands of people constantly accumulated inside it. There were no more vacant spaces, as there had been early in the morning; no more cool whiffs rose from the garden amid the ambient smell of varnish; the atmosphere was now becoming hot and bitter with the perfumes scattered by the women's dresses. Before long the predominant odour suggested that of a wet dog. It must have been raining outside; one of those sudden spring showers had no doubt fallen, for the last arrivals brought moisture with them—their clothes hung about them heavily and seemed to steam as soon as they encountered the heat of the gallery. And, indeed, patches of darkness had for a moment been passing above the awning of the roof. Claude, who raised his eyes, guessed that large clouds were galloping onward lashed by the north wind, that driving rain was beating upon the glass panes. Moire-like shadows darted along the walls, all the paintings became dim, the spectators themselves were blended in obscurity until the cloud was carried away, whereupon the painter saw the heads again emerge from the twilight, ever agape with idiotic rapture.

But there was another cup of bitterness in reserve for Claude. On the left-hand panel, facing Fagerolles', he perceived Bongrand's picture. And in front of that painting there was no crush whatever; the visitors walked by with an air of indifference. Yet it was Bongrand's supreme effort, the thrust he had been trying to give for years, a last work conceived in his obstinate craving to prove the virility of his decline. The hatred he harboured against the 'Village Wedding,' that first masterpiece which had weighed upon all his toilsome after-life, had impelled him to select a contrasting but corresponding subject: the 'Village Funeral'—the funeral of a young girl, with relatives and friends straggling among fields of rye and oats. Bongrand had wrestled with himself, saying that people should see if he were done for, if the experience of his sixty years were not worth all the lucky dash of his youth; and now experience was defeated, the picture was destined to be a mournful failure, like the silent fall of an old man, which does not even stay passers-by in their onward course. There were still some masterly bits, the choirboy holding the cross, the group of daughters of the Virgin carrying the bier, whose white dresses and ruddy flesh furnished a pretty contrast with the black Sunday toggery of the rustic mourners, among all the green stuff; only the priest in his alb, the girl carrying the Virgin's banner, the family following the body, were drily handled; the whole picture, in fact, was displeasing in its very science and the obstinate stiffness of its treatment. One found in it a fatal, unconscious return to the troubled romanticism which had been the starting-point of the painter's career. And the worst of the business was that there was justification for the indifference with which the public treated that art of another period, that cooked and somewhat dull style of painting, which no longer stopped one on one's way, since great blazes of light had come into vogue.

It precisely happened that Bongrand entered the gallery with the hesitating step of a timid beginner, and Claude felt a pang at his heart as he saw him give a glance at his neglected picture and then another at Fagerolles', which was bringing on a riot. At that moment the old painter must have been acutely conscious of his fall. If he had so far been devoured by the fear of slow decline, it was because he still doubted; and now he obtained sudden certainty; he was surviving his reputation, his talent was dead, he would never more give birth to living, palpitating works. He became very pale, and was about to turn and flee, when Chambouvard, the sculptor, entering the gallery by the other door, followed by his customary train of disciples, called to him without caring a fig for the people present:

'Ah! you humbug, I catch you at it—admiring yourself!'

He, Chambouvard, exhibited that year an execrable 'Reaping Woman,' one of those stupidly spoilt figures which seemed like hoaxes on his part, so unworthy they were of his powerful hands; but he was none the less radiant, feeling certain that he had turned out yet another masterpiece, and promenading his god-like infallibility through the crowd which he did not hear laughing at him.

Bongrand did not answer, but looked at him with eyes scorched by fever.

'And my machine downstairs?' continued the sculptor. 'Have you seen it? The little fellows of nowadays may try it on, but we are the only masters—we, old France!'

And thereupon he went off, followed by his court and bowing to the astonished public.

'The brute!' muttered Bongrand, suffocating with grief, as indignant as at the outburst of some low-bred fellow beside a deathbed.

He perceived Claude, and approached him. Was it not cowardly to flee from this gallery? And he determined to show his courage, his lofty soul, into which envy had never entered.

'Our friend Fagerolles has a success and no mistake,' he said. 'I should be a hypocrite if I went into ecstasies over his picture, which I scarcely like; but he himself is really a very nice fellow indeed. Besides, you know how he exerted himself on your behalf.'

Claude was trying to find a word of admiration for the 'Village Funeral.'

'The little cemetery in the background is so pretty!' he said at last. 'Is it possible that the public—'

But Bongrand interrupted him in a rough voice:

'No compliments of condolence, my friend, eh? I see clear enough.'

At this moment somebody nodded to them in a familiar way, and Claude recognised Naudet—a Naudet who had grown and expanded, gilded by the success of his colossal strokes of business. Ambition was turning his head; he talked about sinking all the other picture dealers; he had built himself a palace, in which he posed as the king of the market, centralising masterpieces, and there opening large art shops of the modern style. One heard a jingle of millions on the very threshold of his hall; he held exhibitions there, even ran up other galleries elsewhere; and each time that May came round, he awaited the visits of the American amateurs whom he charged fifty thousand francs for a picture which he himself had purchased for ten thousand. Moreover, he lived in princely style, with a wife and children, a mistress, a country estate in Picardy, and extensive shooting grounds. His first large profits had come from the rise in value of works left by illustrious artists, now defunct, whose talent had been denied while they lived, such as Courbet, Millet, and Rousseau; and this had ended by making him disdain any picture signed by a still struggling artist. However, ominous rumours were already in circulation. As the number of well-known pictures was limited, and the number of amateurs could barely be increased, a time seemed to be coming when business would prove very difficult. There was talk of a syndicate, of an understanding with certain bankers to keep up the present high prices; the expedient of simulated sales was resorted to at the Hotel Drouot—pictures being bought in at a big figure by the dealer himself—and bankruptcy seemed to be at the end of all that Stock Exchange jobbery, a perfect tumble head-over-heels after all the excessive, mendacious agiotage.

'Good-day, dear master,' said Naudet, who had drawn near. 'So you have come, like everybody else, to see my Fagerolles, eh?'

He no longer treated Bongrand in the wheedling, respectful manner of yore. And he spoke of Fagerolles as of a painter belonging to him, of a workman to whom he paid wages, and whom he often scolded. It was he who had settled the young artist in the Avenue de Villiers, compelling him to have a little mansion of his own, furnishing it as he would have furnished a place for a hussy, running him into debt with supplies of carpets and nick-nacks, so that he might afterwards hold him at his mercy; and now he began to accuse him of lacking orderliness and seriousness, of compromising himself like a feather-brain. Take that picture, for instance, a serious painter would never have sent it to the Salon; it made a stir, no doubt, and people even talked of its obtaining the medal of honour; but nothing could have a worse effect on high prices. When a man wanted to get hold of the Yankees, he ought to know how to remain at home, like an idol in the depths of his tabernacle.

'You may believe me or not, my dear fellow,' he said to Bongrand, 'but I would have given twenty thousand francs out of my pocket to prevent those stupid newspapers from making all this row about my Fagerolles this year.'

Bongrand, who, despite his sufferings, was listening bravely, smiled.

'In point of fact,' he said, 'they are perhaps carrying indiscretion too far. I read an article yesterday in which I learnt that Fagerolles ate two boiled eggs every morning.'

He laughed over the coarse puffery which, after a first article on the 'young master's' picture, as yet seen by nobody, had for a week past kept all Paris occupied about him. The whole fraternity of reporters had been campaigning, stripping Fagerolles to the skin, telling their readers all about his father, the artistic zinc manufacturer, his education, the house in which he resided, how he lived, even revealing the colour of his socks, and mentioning a habit he had of pinching his nose. And he was the passion of the hour, the 'young master' according to the tastes of the day, one who had been lucky enough to miss the Prix de Rome, and break off with the School of Arts, whose principles, however, he retained. After all, the success of that style of painting which aims merely at approximating reality, not at rendering it in all its truth, was the fortune of a season which the wind brings and blows away again, a mere whim on the part of the great lunatic city; the stir it caused was like that occasioned by some accident, which upsets the crowd in the morning and is forgotten by night amidst general indifference.

However, Naudet noticed the 'Village Funeral.'

'Hullo! that's your picture, eh?' he said. 'So you wanted to give a companion to the "Wedding"? Well, I should have tried to dissuade you! Ah! the "Wedding"! the "Wedding"!'

Bongrand still listened to him without ceasing to smile. Barely a twinge of pain passed over his trembling lips. He forgot his masterpieces, the certainty of leaving an immortal name, he was only cognisant of the vogue which that youngster, unworthy of cleaning his palette, had so suddenly and easily acquired, that vogue which seemed to be pushing him, Bongrand, into oblivion—he who had struggled for ten years before he had succeeded in making himself known. Ah! when the new generations bury a man, if they only knew what tears of blood they make him shed in death!

However, as he had remained silent, he was seized with the fear that he might have let his suffering be divined. Was he falling to the baseness of envy? Anger with himself made him raise his head—a man should die erect. And instead of giving the violent answer which was rising to his lips, he said in a familiar way:

'You are right, Naudet, I should have done better if I had gone to bed on the day when the idea of that picture occurred to me.'

'Ah! there he is; excuse me!' cried the dealer, making off.

It was Fagerolles showing himself at the entrance of the gallery. He discreetly stood there without entering, carrying his good fortune with the ease of a man who knows what he is about. Besides, he was looking for somebody; he made a sign to a young man, and gave him an answer, a favourable one, no doubt, for the other brimmed over with gratitude. Then two other persons sprang forward to congratulate him; a woman detained him, showing him, with a martyr's gesture, a bit of still life hung in a dark corner. And finally he disappeared, after casting but one glance at the people in raptures before his picture.

Claude, who had looked and listened, was overwhelmed with sadness. The crush was still increasing, he now had nought before him but faces gaping and sweating in the heat, which had become intolerable. Above the nearer shoulders rose others, and so on and so on as far as the door, whence those who could see nothing pointed out the painting to each other with the tips of their umbrellas, from which dripped the water left by the showers outside. And Bongrand remained there out of pride, erect in defeat, firmly planted on his legs, those of an old combatant, and gazing with limpid eyes upon ungrateful Paris. He wished to finish like a brave man, whose kindness of heart is boundless. Claude, who spoke to him without receiving any answer, saw very well that there was nothing behind that calm, gay face; the mind was absent, it had flown away in mourning, bleeding with frightful torture; and thereupon, full of alarm and respect, he did not insist, but went off. And Bongrand, with his vacant eyes, did not even notice his departure.

A new idea had just impelled Claude onward through the crowd. He was lost in wonderment at not having been able to discover his picture. But nothing could be more simple. Was there not some gallery where people grinned, some corner full of noise and banter, some gathering of jesting spectators, insulting a picture? That picture would assuredly be his. He could still hear the laughter of the bygone Salon of the Rejected. And now at the door of each gallery he listened to ascertain if it were there that he was being hissed.

However, as he found himself once more in the eastern gallery, that hall where great art agonises, that depository where vast, cold, and gloomy historical and religious compositions are accumulated, he started, and remained motionless with his eyes turned upward. He had passed through that gallery twice already, and yet that was certainly his picture up yonder, so high up that he hesitated about recognising it. It looked, indeed, so little, poised like a swallow at the corner of a frame—the monumental frame of an immense painting five-and-thirty feet long, representing the Deluge, a swarming of yellow figures turning topsy-turvy in water of the hue of wine lees. On the left, moreover, there was a pitiable ashen portrait of a general; on the right a colossal nymph in a moonlit landscape, the bloodless corpse of a murdered woman rotting away on some grass; and everywhere around there were mournful violet-shaded things, mixed up with a comic scene of some bibulous monks, and an 'Opening of the Chamber of Deputies,' with a whole page of writing on a gilded cartouch, bearing the heads of the better-known deputies, drawn in outline, together with their names. And high up, high up, amid those livid neighbours, the little canvas, over-coarse in treatment, glared ferociously with the painful grimace of a monster.

Ah! 'The Dead Child.' At that distance the wretched little creature was but a confused lump of flesh, the lifeless carcase of some shapeless animal. Was that swollen, whitened head a skull or a stomach? And those poor hands twisted among the bedclothes, like the bent claws of a bird killed by cold! And the bed itself, that pallidity of the sheets, below the pallidity of the limbs, all that white looking so sad, those tints fading away as if typical of the supreme end! Afterwards, however, one distinguished the light eyes staring fixedly, one recognised a child's head, and it all seemed to suggest some disease of the brain, profoundly and frightfully pitiful.

Claude approached, and then drew back to see the better. The light was so bad that refractions darted from all points across the canvas. How they had hung his little Jacques! no doubt out of disdain, or perhaps from shame, so as to get rid of the child's lugubrious ugliness. But Claude evoked the little fellow such as he had once been, and beheld him again over yonder in the country, so fresh and pinky, as he rolled about in the grass; then in the Rue de Douai, growing pale and stupid by degrees, and then in the Rue Tourlaque, no longer able to carry his head, and dying one night, all alone, while his mother was asleep; and he beheld her also, that mother, the sad woman who had stopped at home, to weep there, no doubt, as she was now in the habit of doing for entire days. No matter, she had done right in not coming; 'twas too mournful—their little Jacques, already cold in his bed, cast on one side like a pariah, and so brutalised by the dancing light that his face seemed to be laughing, distorted by an abominable grin.

But Claude suffered still more from the loneliness of his work. Astonishment and disappointment made him look for the crowd, the rush which he had anticipated. Why was he not hooted? Ah! the insults of yore, the mocking, the indignation that had rent his heart, but made him live! No, nothing more, not even a passing expectoration: this was death. The visitors filed rapidly through the long gallery, seized with boredom. There were merely some people in front of the 'Opening of the Chamber,' where they collected to read the inscriptions, and show each other the deputies' heads. At last, hearing some laughter behind him, he turned round; but nobody was jeering, some visitors were simply making merry over the tipsy monks, the comic success of the Salon, which some gentlemen explained to some ladies, declaring that it was brilliantly witty. And all these people passed beneath little Jacques, and not a head was raised, not a soul even knew that he was up there.

However, the painter had a gleam of hope. On the central settee, two personages, one of them fat and the other thin, and both of them decorated with the Legion of Honour, sat talking, reclining against the velvet, and looking at the pictures in front of them. Claude drew near them and listened.

'And I followed them,' said the fat fellow. 'They went along the Rue St. Honore, the Rue St. Roch, the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin, the Rue la Fayette—'

'And you spoke to them?' asked the thin man, who appeared to be deeply interested.

'No, I was afraid of getting in a rage.'

Claude went off and returned on three occasions, his heart beating fast each time that some visitor stopped short and glanced slowly from the line to the ceiling. He felt an unhealthy longing to hear one word, but one. Why exhibit? How fathom public opinion? Anything rather than such torturing silence! And he almost suffocated when he saw a young married couple approach, the husband a good-looking fellow with little fair moustaches, the wife, charming, with the delicate slim figure of a shepherdess in Dresden china. She had perceived the picture, and asked what the subject was, stupefied that she could make nothing out of it; and when her husband, turning over the leaves of the catalogue, had found the title, 'The Dead Child,' she dragged him away, shuddering, and raising this cry of affright:

'Oh, the horror! The police oughtn't to allow such horrors!'

Then Claude remained there, erect, unconscious and haunted, his eyes raised on high, amid the continuous flow of the crowd which passed on, quite indifferent, without one glance for that unique sacred thing, visible to him alone. And it was there that Sandoz came upon him, amid the jostling.

The novelist, who had been strolling about alone—his wife having remained at home beside his ailing mother—had just stopped short, heart-rent, below the little canvas, which he had espied by chance. Ah! how disgusted he felt with life! He abruptly lived the days of his youth over again. He recalled the college of Plassans, his freaks with Claude on the banks of the Viorne, their long excursions under the burning sun, and all the flaming of their early ambition; and, later on, when they had lived side by side, he remembered their efforts, their certainty of coming glory, that fine irresistible, immoderate appetite that had made them talk of swallowing Paris at one bite! How many times, at that period, had he seen in Claude a great man, whose unbridled genius would leave the talent of all others far behind in the rear! First had come the studio of the Impasse des Bourdonnais; later, the studio of the Quai de Bourbon, with dreams of vast compositions, projects big enough to make the Louvre burst; and, meanwhile, the struggle was incessant; the painter laboured ten hours a day, devoting his whole being to his work. And then what? After twenty years of that passionate life he ended thus—he finished with that poor, sinister little thing, which nobody noticed, which looked so distressfully sad in its leper-like solitude! So much hope and torture, a lifetime spent in the toil of creating, to come to that, to that, good God!

Sandoz recognised Claude standing by, and fraternal emotion made his voice quake as he said to him:

'What! so you came? Why did you refuse to call for me, then?'

The painter did not even apologise. He seemed very tired, overcome with somniferous stupor.

'Well, don't stay here,' added Sandoz. 'It's past twelve o'clock, and you must lunch with me. Some people were to wait for me at Ledoyen's; but I shall give them the go-by. Let's go down to the buffet; we shall pick up our spirits there, eh, old fellow?'

And then Sandoz led him away, holding his arm, pressing it, warming it, and trying to draw him from his mournful silence.

'Come, dash it all! you mustn't give way like that. Although they have hung your picture badly, it is all the same superb, a real bit of genuine painting. Oh! I know that you dreamt of something else! But you are not dead yet, it will be for later on. And, just look, you ought to be proud, for it's you who really triumph at the Salon this year. Fagerolles isn't the only one who pillages you; they all imitate you now; you have revolutionised them since your "Open Air," which they laughed so much about. Look, look! there's an "open air" effect, and there's another, and here and there—they all do it.'

He waved his hand towards the pictures as he and Claude passed along the galleries. In point of fact, the dash of clear light, introduced by degrees into contemporary painting, had fully burst forth at last. The dingy Salons of yore, with their pitchy canvases, had made way for a Salon full of sunshine, gay as spring itself. It was the dawn, the aurora which had first gleamed at the Salon of the Rejected, and which was now rising and rejuvenating art with a fine, diffuse light, full of infinite shades. On all sides you found Claude's famous 'bluey tinge,' even in the portraits and the genre scenes, which had acquired the dimensions and the serious character of historical paintings. The old academical subjects had disappeared with the cooked juices of tradition, as if the condemned doctrine had carried its people of shadows away with it; rare were the works of pure imagination, the cadaverous nudities of mythology and catholicism, the legendary subjects painted without faith, the anecdotic bits destitute of life—in fact, all the bric-a-brac of the School of Arts used up by generations of tricksters and fools; and the influence of the new principle was evident even among those artists who lingered over the antique recipes, even among the former masters who had now grown old. The flash of sunlight had penetrated to their studios. From afar, at every step you took, you saw a painting transpierce the wall and form, as it were, a window open upon Nature. Soon the walls themselves would fall, and Nature would walk in; for the breach was a broad one, and the assault had driven routine away in that gay battle waged by audacity and youth.

'Ah! your lot is a fine one, all the same, old fellow!' continued Sandoz. 'The art of to-morrow will be yours; you have made them all.'

Claude thereupon opened his mouth, and, with an air of gloomy brutality, said in a low voice:

'What do I care if I have made them all, when I haven't made myself? See here, it's too big an affair for me, and that's what stifles me.'

He made a gesture to finish expressing his thought, his consciousness of his inability to prove the genius of the formula he had brought with him, the torture he felt at being merely a precursor, the one who sows the idea without reaping the glory, his grief at seeing himself pillaged, devoured by men who turned out hasty work, by a whole flight of fellows who scattered their efforts and lowered the new form of art, before he or another had found strength enough to produce the masterpiece which would make the end of the century a date in art.

But Sandoz protested, the future lay open. Then, to divert Claude, he stopped him while crossing the Gallery of Honour and said:

'Just look at that lady in blue before that portrait! What a slap Nature does give to painting! You remember when we used to look at the dresses and the animation of the galleries in former times? Not a painting then withstood the shock. And yet now there are some which don't suffer overmuch. I even noticed over there a landscape, the general yellowish tinge of which completely eclipsed all the women who approached it.'

Claude was quivering with unutterable suffering.

'Pray, let's go,' he said. 'Take me away—I can't stand it any longer.'

They had all the trouble in the world to find a free table in the refreshment room. People were pressed together in that big, shady retreat, girt round with brown serge drapery under the girders of the lofty iron flooring of the upstairs galleries. In the background, and but partially visible in the darkness, stood three dressers displaying dishes of preserved fruit symmetrically ranged on shelves; while, nearer at hand, at counters placed on the right and left, two ladies, a dark one and a fair one, watched the crowd with a military air; and from the dim depths of this seeming cavern rose a sea of little marble tables, a tide of chairs, serried, entangled, surging, swelling, overflowing and spreading into the garden, under the broad, pallid light which fell from the glass roof.

At last Sandoz saw some people rise. He darted forward and conquered the vacant table by sheer struggling with the mob.

'Ah! dash it! we are here at all events. What will you have to eat?'

Claude made a gesture of indifference. The lunch was execrable; there was some trout softened by over-boiling, some undercut of beef dried up in the oven, some asparagus smelling of moist linen, and, in addition, one had to fight to get served; for the hustled waiters, losing their heads, remained in distress in the narrow passages which the chairs were constantly blocking. Behind the hangings on the left, one could hear a racket of saucepans and crockery; the kitchen being installed there on the sand, like one of those Kermesse cook-shops set up by the roadside in the open air.

Sandoz and Claude had to eat, seated obliquely and half strangled between two parties of people whose elbows almost ended by getting into their plates; and each time that a waiter passed he gave their chairs a shake with his hips. However, the inconvenience, like the abominable cookery, made one gay. People jested about the dishes, different tables fraternised together, common misfortune brought about a kind of pleasure party. Strangers ended by sympathising; friends kept up conversations, although they were seated three rows distant from one another, and were obliged to turn their heads and gesticulate over their neighbours' shoulders. The women particularly became animated, at first rather anxious as to the crush, and then ungloving their hands, catching up their skirts, and laughing at the first thimbleful of neat wine they drank.

However, Sandoz, who had renounced finishing his meat, raised his voice amid the terrible hubbub caused by the chatter and the serving:

'A bit of cheese, eh? And let's try to get some coffee.'

Claude, whose eyes looked dreamy, did not hear. He was gazing into the garden. From his seat he could see the central clump of verdure, some lofty palms which stood in relief against the grey hangings with which the garden was decorated all round. A circle of statues was set out there; and you could see the back of a faun; the profile of a young girl with full cheeks; the face of a bronze Gaul, a colossal bit of romanticism which irritated one by its stupid assumption of patriotism; the trunk of a woman hanging by the wrists, some Andromeda of the Place Pigalle; and others, and others still following the bends of the pathways; rows of shoulders and hips, heads, breasts, legs, and arms, all mingling and growing indistinct in the distance. On the left stretched a line of busts—such delightful ones—furnishing a most comical and uncommon suite of noses. There was the huge pointed nose of a priest, the tip-tilted nose of a soubrette, the handsome classical nose of a fifteenth-century Italian woman, the mere fancy nose of a sailor—in fact, every kind of nose, both the magistrate's and the manufacturer's, and the nose of the gentleman decorated with the Legion of Honour—all of them motionless and ranged in endless succession!

However, Claude saw nothing of them; to him they were but grey spots in the hazy, greenish light. His stupor still lasted, and he was only conscious of one thing, the luxuriousness of the women's dresses, of which he had formed a wrong estimate amid the pushing in the galleries, and which were here freely displayed, as if the wearers had been promenading over the gravel in the conservatory of some chateau. All the elegance of Paris passed by, the women who had come to show themselves, in dresses thoughtfully combined and destined to be described in the morrow's newspapers. People stared a great deal at an actress, who walked about with a queen-like tread, on the arm of a gentleman who assumed the complacent airs of a prince consort. The women of society looked like so many hussies, and they all of them took stock of one another with that slow glance which estimates the value of silk and the length of lace, and which ferrets everywhere, from the tips of boots to the feathers upon bonnets. This was neutral ground, so to say; some ladies who were seated had drawn their chairs together, after the fashion in the garden of the Tuileries, and occupied themselves exclusively with criticising those of their own sex who passed by. Two female friends quickened their pace, laughing. Another woman, all alone, walked up and down, mute, with a black look in her eyes. Some others, who had lost one another, met again, and began ejaculating about the adventure. And, meantime, the dark moving mass of men came to a standstill, then set off again till it stopped short before a bit of marble, or eddied back to a bit of bronze. And among the mere bourgeois, who were few in number, though all of them looked out of their element there, moved men with celebrated names—all the illustrations of Paris. A name of resounding glory re-echoed as a fat, ill-clad gentleman passed by; the winged name of a poet followed as a pale man with a flat, common face approached. A living wave was rising from this crowd in the even, colourless light when suddenly a flash of sunshine, from behind the clouds of a final shower, set the glass panes on high aflame, making the stained window on the western side resplendent, and raining down in golden particles through the still atmosphere; and then everything became warm—the snowy statues amid the shiny green stuff, the soft lawns parted by the yellow sand of the pathways, the rich dresses with their glossy satin and bright beads, even the very voices, whose hilarious murmur seemed to crackle like a bright fire of vine shoots. Some gardeners, completing the arrangements of the flower-beds, turned on the taps of the stand-pipes and promenaded about with their pots, the showers squirting from which came forth again in tepid steam from the drenched grass. And meanwhile a plucky sparrow, who had descended from the iron girders, despite the number of people, dipped his beak in the sand in front of the buffet, eating some crumbs which a young woman threw him by way of amusement. Of all the tumult, however, Claude only heard the ocean-like din afar, the rumbling of the people rolling onwards in the galleries. And a recollection came to him, he remembered that noise which had burst forth like a hurricane in front of his picture at the Salon of the Rejected. But nowadays people no longer laughed at him; upstairs the giant roar of Paris was acclaiming Fagerolles!

It so happened that Sandoz, who had turned round, said to Claude: 'Hallo! there's Fagerolles!'

And, indeed, Fagerolles and Jory had just laid hands on a table near by without noticing their friends, and the journalist, continuing in his gruff voice a conversation which had previously begun, remarked:

'Yes, I saw his "Dead Child"! Ah! the poor devil! what an ending!'

But Fagerolles nudged Jory, and the latter, having caught sight of his two old comrades, immediately added:

'Ah! that dear old Claude! How goes it, eh? You know that I haven't yet seen your picture. But I'm told that it's superb.'

'Superb!' declared Fagerolles, who then began to express his surprise. 'So you lunched here. What an idea! Everything is so awfully bad. We two have just come from Ledoyen's. Oh! such a crowd and such hustling, such mirth! Bring your table nearer and let us chat a bit.'

They joined the two tables together. But flatterers and petitioners were already after the triumphant young master. Three friends rose up and noisily saluted him from afar. A lady became smilingly contemplative when her husband had whispered his name in her ear. And the tall, thin fellow, the artist whose picture had been badly hung, and who had pursued him since the morning, as enraged as ever, left a table where he was seated at the further end of the buffet, and again hurried forward to complain, imperatively demanding 'the line' at once.

'Oh! go to the deuce!' at last cried Fagerolles, his patience and amiability exhausted. And he added, when the other had gone off, mumbling some indistinct threats: 'It's true; a fellow does all he can to be obliging, but those chaps would drive one mad! All of them on the "line"! leagues of "line" then! Ah! what a business it is to be a committee-man! One wears out one's legs, and one only reaps hatred as reward.'

Claude, who was looking at him with his oppressed air, seemed to wake up for a moment, and murmured:

'I wrote to you; I wanted to go and see you to thank you. Bongrand told me about all the trouble you had. So thanks again.'

But Fagerolles hastily broke in:

'Tut, tut! I certainly owed that much to our old friendship. It's I who am delighted to have given you any pleasure.'

He showed the embarrassment which always came upon him in presence of the acknowledged master of his youth, that kind of humility which filled him perforce when he was with the man whose mute disdain, even at this moment, sufficed to spoil all his triumph.

'Your picture is very good,' slowly added Claude, who wished to be kind-hearted and generous.

This simple praise made Fagerolles' heart swell with exaggerated, irresistible emotion, springing he knew not whence; and this rascal, who believed in nothing, who was usually so proficient in humbug, answered in a shaky voice:

'Ah! my dear fellow, ah! it's very kind of you to tell me that!'

Sandoz had at last obtained two cups of coffee, and as the waiter had forgotten to bring any sugar, he had to content himself with some pieces which a party had left on an adjoining table. A few tables, indeed, had now become vacant, but the general freedom had increased, and one woman's laughter rang out so loudly that every head turned round. The men were smoking, and a bluish cloud slowly rose above the straggling tablecloths, stained by wine and littered with dirty plates and dishes. When Fagerolles, on his aide, succeeded in obtaining two glasses of chartreuse for himself and Jory, he began to talk to Sandoz, whom he treated with a certain amount of deference, divining that the novelist might become a power. And Jory thereupon appropriated Claude, who had again become mournful and silent.

'You know, my dear fellow,' said the journalist, 'I didn't send you any announcement of my marriage. On account of our position we managed it on the quiet without inviting any guests. All the same, I should have liked to let you know. You will excuse me, won't you?'

He showed himself expansive, gave particulars, full of the happiness of life, and egotistically delighted to feel fat and victorious in front of that poor vanquished fellow. He succeeded with everything, he said. He had given up leader-writing, feeling the necessity of settling down seriously, and he had risen to the editorship of a prominent art review, on which, so it was asserted, he made thirty thousand francs a year, without mentioning certain profits realised by shady trafficking in the sale of art collections. The middle-class rapacity which he had inherited from his mother, the hereditary passion for profit which had secretly impelled him to embark in petty speculations as soon as he had gained a few coppers, now openly displayed itself, and ended by making him a terrible customer, who bled all the artists and amateurs who came under his clutches.

It was amidst this good luck of his that Mathilde, now all-powerful, had brought him to the point of begging her, with tears in his eyes, to become his wife, a request which she had proudly refused during six long months.

'When folks are destined to live together,' he continued, 'the best course is to set everything square. You experienced it yourself, my dear fellow; you know something about it, eh? And if I told you that she wouldn't consent at first—yes, it's a fact—for fear of being misjudged and of doing me harm. Oh! she has such grandeur, such delicacy of mind! No, nobody can have an idea of that woman's qualities. Devoted, taking all possible care of one, economical, and acute, too, and such a good adviser! Ah! it was a lucky chance that I met her! I no longer do anything without consulting her; I let her do as she likes; she manages everything, upon my word.'

The truth was that Mathilde had finished by reducing him to the frightened obedience of a little boy. The once dissolute she-ghoul had become a dictatorial spouse, eager for respect, and consumed with ambition and love of money. She showed, too, every form of sourish virtue. It was said that they had been seen taking the Holy Communion together at Notre Dame de Lorette. They kissed one another before other people, and called each other by endearing nicknames. Only, of an evening, he had to relate how he had spent his time during the day, and if the employment of a single hour remained suspicious, if he did not bring home all the money he had received, down to the odd coppers, she led him the most abominable life imaginable.

This, of course, Jory left unmentioned. By way of conclusion he exclaimed: 'And so we waited for my father's death, and then I married her.'

Claude, whose mind had so far been wandering, and who had merely nodded without listening, was struck by that last sentence.

'What! you married her—married Mathilde?'

That exclamation summed up all the astonishment that the affair caused him, all the recollections that occurred to him of Mahoudeau's shop. That Jory, why, he could still hear him talking about Mathilde in an abominable manner; and yet he had married her! It was really stupid for a fellow to speak badly of a woman, for he never knew if he might not end by marrying her some day or other!

However, Jory was perfectly serene, his memory was dead, he never allowed himself an allusion to the past, never showed the slightest embarrassment when his comrades' eyes were turned on him. Besides, Mathilde seemed to be a new-comer. He introduced her to them as if they knew nothing whatever about her.

Sandoz, who had lent an ear to the conversation, greatly interested by this fine business, called out as soon as Jory and Claude became silent:

'Let's be off, eh? My legs are getting numbed.'

But at that moment Irma Becot appeared, and stopped in front of the buffet. With her hair freshly gilded, she had put on her best looks—all the tricky sheen of a tawny hussy, who seemed to have just stepped out of some old Renaissance frame; and she wore a train of light blue brocaded silk, with a satin skirt covered with Alencon lace, of such richness that quite an escort of gentlemen followed her in admiration. On perceiving Claude among the others, she hesitated for a moment, seized, as it were, with cowardly shame in front of that ill-clad, ugly, derided devil. Then, becoming valiant, as it were, it was his hand that she shook the first amid all those well-dressed men, who opened their eyes in amazement. She laughed with an affectionate air, and spoke to him in a friendly, bantering way.

Fagerolles, however, was already paying for the two chartreuses he had ordered, and at last he went off with Irma, whom Jory also decided to follow. Claude watched them walk away together, she between the two men, moving on in regal fashion, greatly admired, and repeatedly bowed to by people in the crowd.

'One can see very well that Mathilde isn't here,' quietly remarked Sandoz. 'Ah! my friend, what clouts Jory would receive on getting home!'

The novelist now asked for the bill. All the tables were becoming vacant; there only remained a litter of bones and crusts. A couple of waiters were wiping the marble slabs with sponges, whilst a third raked up the soiled sand. Behind the brown serge hangings the staff of the establishment was lunching—one could hear a grinding of jaws and husky laughter, a rumpus akin to that of a camp of gipsies devouring the contents of their saucepans.

Claude and Sandoz went round the garden, where they discovered a statue by Mahoudeau, very badly placed in a corner near the eastern vestibule. It was the bathing girl at last, standing erect, but of diminutive proportions, being scarcely as tall as a girl ten years old, but charmingly delicate—with slim hips and a tiny bosom, displaying all the exquisite hesitancy of a sprouting bud. The figure seemed to exhale a perfume, that grace which nothing can give, but which flowers where it lists, stubborn, invincible, perennial grace, springing still and ever from Mahoudeau's thick fingers, which were so ignorant of their special aptitude that they had long treated this very grace with derision.

Sandoz could not help smiling.

'And to think that this fellow has done everything he could to warp his talent. If his figure were better placed, it would meet with great success.'

'Yes, great success,' repeated Claude. 'It is very pretty.'

Precisely at that moment they perceived Mahoudeau, already in the vestibule, and going towards the staircase. They called him, ran after him, and then all three remained talking together for a few minutes. The ground-floor gallery stretched away, empty, with its sanded pavement, and the pale light streaming through its large round windows. One might have fancied oneself under a railway bridge. Strong pillars supported the metallic framework, and an icy chillness blew from above, moistening the sand in which one's feet sank. In the distance, behind a torn curtain, one could see rows of statues, the rejected sculptural exhibits, the casts which poor sculptors did not even remove, gathered together in a livid kind of Morgue, in a state of lamentable abandonment. But what surprised one, on raising one's head, was the continuous din, the mighty tramp of the public over the flooring of the upper galleries. One was deafened by it; it rolled on without a pause, as if interminable trains, going at full speed, were ever and ever shaking the iron girders.

When Mahoudeau had been complimented, he told Claude that he had searched for his picture in vain. In the depths of what hole could they have put it? Then, in a fit of affectionate remembrance for the past, he asked anxiously after Gagniere and Dubuche. Where were the Salons of yore which they had all reached in a band, the mad excursions through the galleries as in an enemy's country, the violent disdain they had felt on going away, the discussions which had made their tongues swell and emptied their brains? Nobody now saw Dubuche. Two or three times a month Gagniere came from Melun, in a state of bewilderment, to attend some concert; and he now took such little interest in painting that he had not even looked in at the Salon, although he exhibited his usual landscape, the same view of the banks of the Seine which he had been sending for the last fifteen years—a picture of a pretty greyish tint, so conscientious and quiet that the public had never remarked it.

'I was going upstairs,' resumed Mahoudeau. 'Will you come with me?'

Claude, pale with suffering, raised his eyes every second. Ah! that terrible rumbling, that devouring gallop of the monster overhead, the shock of which he felt in his very limbs!

He held out his hand without speaking.

'What! are you going to leave us?' exclaimed Sandoz. Take just another turn with us, and we'll go away together.'

Then, on seeing Claude so weary, a feeling of pity made his heart contract. He divined that the poor fellow's courage was exhausted, that he was desirous of solitude, seized with a desire to fly off alone and hide his wound.

'Then, good-bye, old man: I'll call and see you to-morrow.'

Staggering, and as if pursued by the tempest upstairs, Claude disappeared behind the clumps of shrubbery in the garden. But two hours later Sandoz, who after losing Mahoudeau had just found him again with Jory and Fagerolles, perceived the unhappy painter again standing in front of his picture, at the same spot where he had met him the first time. At the moment of going off the wretched fellow had come up there again, harassed and attracted despite himself.

There was now the usual five o'clock crush. The crowd, weary of winding round the galleries, became distracted, and pushed and shoved without ever finding its way out. Since the coolness of the morning, the heat of all the human bodies, the odour of all the breath exhaled there had made the atmosphere heavy, and the dust of the floors, flying about, rose up in a fine mist. People still took each other to see certain pictures, the subjects of which alone struck and attracted the crowd. Some went off, came back, and walked about unceasingly. The women were particularly obstinate in not retiring; they seemed determined to remain there till the attendants should push them out when six o'clock began to strike. Some fat ladies had foundered. Others, who had failed to find even the tiniest place to sit down, leaned heavily on their parasols, sinking, but still obstinate. Every eye was turned anxiously and supplicatingly towards the settees laden with people. And all that those thousands of sight-seers were now conscious of, was that last fatigue of theirs, which made their legs totter, drew their features together, and tortured them with headache—that headache peculiar to fine-art shows, which is caused by the constant straining of one's neck and the blinding dance of colours.

Alone on the little settee where at noon already they had been talking about their private affairs, the two decorated gentlemen were still chatting quietly, with their minds a hundred leagues away from the place. Perhaps they had returned thither, perhaps they had not even stirred from the spot.

'And so,' said the fat one, 'you went in, pretending not to understand?'

'Quite so,' replied the thin one. 'I looked at them and took off my hat. It was clear, eh?'

'Astonishing! You really astonish me, my dear friend.'

Claude, however, only heard the low beating of his heart, and only beheld the 'Dead Child' up there in the air, near the ceiling. He did not take his eyes off it, a prey to a fascination which held him there, quite independent of his will. The crowd turned round him, people's feet trod on his own, he was pushed and carried away; and, like some inert object, he abandoned himself, waved about, and ultimately found himself again on the same spot as before without having once lowered his head, quite ignorant of what was occurring below, all his life being concentrated up yonder beside his work, his little Jacques, swollen in death. Two big tears which stood motionless between his eyelids prevented him from seeing clearly. And it seemed to him as if he would never have time to see enough.

Then Sandoz, in his deep compassion, pretended he did not perceive his old friend; it was as if he wished to leave him there, beside the tomb of his wrecked life. Their comrades once more went past in a band. Fagerolles and Jory darted on ahead, and, Mahoudeau having asked Sandoz where Claude's picture was hung, the novelist told a lie, drew him aside and took him off. All of them went away.

In the evening Christine only managed to draw curt words from Claude; everything was going on all right, said he; the public showed no ill-humour; the picture had a good effect, though it was hung perhaps rather high up. However, despite this semblance of cold tranquillity, he seemed so strange that she became frightened.

After dinner, as she returned from carrying the dirty plates into the kitchen, she no longer found him near the table. He had opened a window which overlooked some waste ground, and he stood there, leaning out to such a degree that she could scarcely see him. At this she sprang forward, terrified, and pulled him violently by his jacket.

'Claude! Claude! what are you doing?'

He turned round, with his face as white as a sheet and his eyes haggard.

'I'm looking,' he said.

But she closed the window with trembling hands, and after that significant incident such anguish clung to her that she no longer slept at night-time.

XI

CLAUDE set to work again on the very next day, and months elapsed, indeed the whole summer went by, in heavy quietude. He had found a job, some little paintings of flowers for England, the proceeds of which sufficed for their daily bread. All his available time was again devoted to his large canvas, and he no longer went into the same fits of anger over it, but seemed to resign himself to that eternal task, evincing obstinate, hopeless industry. However, his eyes retained their crazy expression—one could see the death of light, as it were, in them, when they gazed upon the failure of his existence.

About this period Sandoz also experienced great grief. His mother died, his whole life was upset—that life of three together, so homely in its character, and shared merely by a few friends. He began to hate the pavilion of the Rue Nollet, and, moreover, success suddenly declared itself with respect to his books, which hitherto had sold but moderately well. So, prompted by the advent of comparative wealth, he rented in the Rue de Londres a spacious flat, the arrangements of which occupied him and his wife for several months. Sandoz's grief had drawn him closer to Claude again, both being disgusted with everything. After the terrible blow of the Salon, the novelist had felt very anxious about his old chum, divining that something had irreparably snapped within him, that there was some wound by which life ebbed away unseen. Then, however, finding Claude so cold and quiet, he ended by growing somewhat reassured.

Sandoz often walked up to the Rue Tourlaque, and whenever he found only Christine at home, he questioned her, realising that she also lived in apprehension of a calamity of which she never spoke. Her face bore a look of worry, and now and again she started nervously, like a mother who watches over her child and trembles at the slightest sound, with the fear that death may be entering the chamber.

One July morning Sandoz asked her: 'Well, are you pleased? Claude's quiet, he works a deal.'

She gave the large picture her usual glance, a side glance full of terror and hatred.

'Yes, yes, he works,' she said. 'He wants to finish everything else before taking up the woman again.' And without confessing the fear that harassed her, she added in a lower tone: 'But his eyes—have you noticed his eyes? They always have the same wild expression. I know very well that he lies, despite his pretence of taking things so easily. Pray, come and see him, and take him out with you, so as to change the current of his thoughts. He only has you left; help me, do help me!'

After that Sandoz diligently devised motives for various walks, arriving at Claude's early in the morning, and carrying him away from his work perforce. It was almost always necessary to drag him from his steps, on which he habitually sat, even when he was not painting. A feeling of weariness stopped him, a kind of torpor benumbed him for long minutes, during which he did not give a single stroke with the brush. In those moments of mute contemplation, his gaze reverted with pious fervour to the woman's figure which he no longer touched: it was like a hesitating desire combined with sacred awe, a passion which he refused to satisfy, as he felt certain that it would cost him his life. When he set to work again at the other figures and the background of the picture, he well knew that the woman's figure was still there, and his glance wavered whenever he espied it; he felt that he would only remain master of himself as long as he did not touch it again.

One evening, Christine, who now visited at Sandoz's and never missed a single Thursday there, in the hope of seeing her big sick child of an artist brighten up in the society of his friends, took the novelist aside and begged him to drop in at their place on the morrow. And on the next day Sandoz, who, as it happened, wanted to take some notes for a novel, on the other side of Montmartre, went in search of Claude, carried him off and kept him idling about until night-time.

On this occasion they went as far as the gate of Clignancourt, where a perpetual fair was held, with merry-go-rounds, shooting-galleries, and taverns, and on reaching the spot they were stupefied to find themselves face to face with Chaine, who was enthroned in a large and stylish booth. It was a kind of chapel, highly ornamented. There were four circular revolving stands set in a row and loaded with articles in china and glass, all sorts of ornaments and nick-nacks, whose gilding and polish shone amid an harmonica-like tinkling whenever the hand of a gamester set the stand in motion. It then spun round, grating against a feather, which, on the rotatory movement ceasing, indicated what article, if any, had been won. The big prize was a live rabbit, adorned with pink favours, which waltzed and revolved unceasingly, intoxicated with fright. And all this display was set in red hangings, scalloped at the top; and between the curtains one saw three pictures hanging at the rear of the booth, as in the sanctuary of some tabernacle. They were Chaine's three masterpieces, which now followed him from fair to fair, from one end of Paris to the other. The 'Woman taken in Adultery' in the centre, the copy of the Mantegna on the left, and Mahoudeau's stove on the right. Of an evening, when the petroleum lamps flamed and the revolving stands glowed and radiated like planets, nothing seemed finer than those pictures hanging amid the blood-tinged purple of the hangings, and a gaping crowd often flocked to view them.

The sight was such that it wrung an exclamation from Claude: 'Ah, good heavens! But those paintings look very well—they were surely intended for this.'

The Mantegna, so naively harsh in treatment, looked like some faded coloured print nailed there for the delectation of simple-minded folk; whilst the minutely painted stove, all awry, hanging beside the gingerbread Christ absolving the adulterous woman, assumed an unexpectedly gay aspect.

However, Chaine, who had just perceived the two friends, held out his hand to them, as if he had left them merely the day before. He was calm, neither proud nor ashamed of his booth, and he had not aged, having still a leathery aspect; though, on the other hand, his nose had completely vanished between his cheeks, whilst his mouth, clammy with prolonged silence, was buried in his moustache and beard.

'Hallo! so we meet again!' said Sandoz, gaily. 'Do you know, your paintings have a lot of effect?'

'The old humbug!' added Claude. 'Why, he has his little Salon all to himself. That's very cute indeed.'

Chaine's face became radiant, and he dropped the remark: 'Of course!'

Then, as his artistic pride was roused, he, from whom people barely wrung anything but growls, gave utterance to a whole sentence:

'Ah! it's quite certain that if I had had any money, like you fellows, I should have made my way, just as you have done, in spite of everything.'

That was his conviction. He had never doubted of his talent, he had simply forsaken the profession because it did not feed him. When he visited the Louvre, at sight of the masterpieces hanging there he felt convinced that time alone was necessary to turn out similar work.

'Ah, me!' said Claude, who had become gloomy again. 'Don't regret what you've done; you alone have succeeded. Business is brisk, eh?'

But Chaine muttered bitter words. No, no, there was nothing doing, not even in his line. People wouldn't play for prizes; all the money found its way to the wine-shops. In spite of buying paltry odds and ends, and striking the table with the palm of one's hand, so that the feather might not indicate one of the big prizes, a fellow barely had water to drink nowadays. Then, as some people had drawn near, he stopped short in his explanation to call out: 'Walk up, walk up, at every turn you win!' in a gruff voice which the two others had never known him to possess, and which fairly stupefied them.

A workman who was carrying a sickly little girl with large covetous eyes, let her play two turns. The revolving stands grated and the nick-nacks danced round in dazzling fashion, while the live rabbit, with his ears lowered, revolved and revolved so rapidly that the outline of his body vanished and he became nothing but a whitish circle. There was a moment of great emotion, for the little girl had narrowly missed winning him.

Then, after shaking hands with Chaine, who was still trembling with the fright this had given him, the two friends walked away.

'He's happy,' said Claude, after they had gone some fifty paces in silence.

'He!' cried Sandoz; 'why, he believes he has missed becoming a member of the Institute, and it's killing him.'

Shortly after this meeting, and towards the middle of August, Sandoz devised a real excursion which would take up a whole day. He had met Dubuche—Dubuche, careworn and mournful, who had shown himself plaintive and affectionate, raking up the past and inviting his two old chums to lunch at La Richaudiere, where he should be alone with his two children for another fortnight. Why shouldn't they go and surprise him there, since he seemed so desirous of renewing the old intimacy? But in vain did Sandoz repeat that he had promised Dubuche on oath to bring Claude with him; the painter obstinately refused to go, as if he were frightened at the idea of again beholding Bennecourt, the Seine, the islands, all the stretch of country where his happy years lay dead and buried. It was necessary for Christine to interfere, and he finished by giving way, although full of repugnance to the trip. It precisely happened that on the day prior to the appointment he had worked at his painting until very late, being taken with the old fever again. And so the next morning—it was Sunday—being devoured with a longing to paint, he went off most reluctantly, tearing himself away from his picture with a pang. What was the use of returning to Bennecourt? All that was dead, it no longer existed. Paris alone remained, and even in Paris there was but one view, the point of the Cite, that vision which haunted him always and everywhere, that one corner where he ever left his heart.

Sandoz, finding him nervous in the railway carriage, and seeing that his eyes remained fixed on the window as if he had been leaving the city—which had gradually grown smaller and seemed shrouded in mist—for years, did all he could to divert his mind, telling him, for instance, what he knew about Dubuche's real position. At the outset, old Margaillan, glorifying in his bemedalled son-in-law, had trotted him about and introduced him everywhere as his partner and successor. There was a fellow who would conduct business briskly, who would build houses more cheaply and in finer style than ever, for hadn't he grown pale over books? But Dubuche's first idea proved disastrous; on some land belonging to his father-in-law in Burgundy he established a brickyard in so unfavourable a situation, and after so defective a plan, that the venture resulted in the sheer loss of two hundred thousand francs. Then he turned his attention to erecting houses, insisting upon bringing personal ideas into execution, a certain general scheme of his which would revolutionise the building art. These ideas were the old theories he held from the revolutionary chums of his youth, everything that he had promised he would realise when he was free; but he had not properly reduced the theories to method, and he applied them unseasonably, with the awkwardness of a pupil lacking the sacred fire; he experimented with terra-cotta and pottery ornamentation, large bay windows, and especially with the employment of iron—iron girders, iron staircases, and iron roofings; and as the employment of these materials increased the outlay, he again ended with a catastrophe, which was all the greater as he was a pitiful manager, and had lost his head since he had become rich, rendered the more obtuse, it seemed, by money, quite spoilt and at sea, unable even to revert to his old habits of industry. This time Margaillan grew angry; he for thirty years had been buying ground, building and selling again, estimating at a glance the cost and return of house property; so many yards of building at so much the foot having to yield so many suites of rooms at so much rent. He wouldn't have anything more to do with a fellow who blundered about lime, bricks, millstones, and in fact everything, who employed oak when deal would have suited, and who could not bring himself to cut up a storey—like a consecrated wafer—into as many little squares as was necessary. No, no, none of that! He rebelled against art, after having been ambitious to introduce a little of it into his routine, in order to satisfy a long-standing worry about his own ignorance. And after that matters had gone from bad to worse, terrible quarrels had arisen between the son-in-law and the father-in-law, the former disdainful, intrenching himself behind his science, and the latter shouting that the commonest labourer knew more than an architect did. The millions were in danger, and one fine day Margaillan turned Dubuche out of his offices, forbidding him ever to set foot in them again, since he did not even know how to direct a building-yard where only four men worked. It was a disaster, a lamentable failure, the School of Arts collapsing, derided by a mason!

At this point of Sandoz's story, Claude, who had begun to listen to his friend, inquired:

'Then what is Dubuche doing now?'

'I don't know—nothing probably,' answered Sandoz. 'He told me that he was anxious about his children's health, and was taking care of them.'

That pale woman, Madame Margaillan, as slender as the blade of a knife, had died of tubercular consumption, which was plainly the hereditary disease, the source of the family's degeneracy, for her daughter, Regine, had been coughing ever since her marriage. She was now drinking the waters at Mont-Dore, whither she had not dared to take her children, as they had been very poorly the year before, after a season spent in that part, where the air was too keen for them. This explained the scattering of the family: the mother over yonder with her maid; the grandfather in Paris, where he had resumed his great building enterprises, battling amid his four hundred workmen, and crushing the idle and the incapable beneath his contempt; and the father in exile at La Richaudiere, set to watch over his son and daughter, shut up there, after the very first struggle, as if it had broken him down for life. In a moment of effusion Dubuche had even let Sandoz understand that as his wife was so extremely delicate he now lived with her merely on friendly terms.

'A nice marriage,' said Sandoz, simply, by way of conclusion.

It was ten o'clock when the two friends rang at the iron gate of La Richaudiere. The estate, with which they were not acquainted, amazed them. There was a superb park, a garden laid out in the French style, with balustrades and steps spreading away in regal fashion; three huge conservatories and a colossal cascade—quite a piece of folly, with its rocks brought from afar, and the quantity of cement and the number of conduits that had been employed in arranging it. Indeed, the owner had sunk a fortune in it, out of sheer vanity. But what struck the friends still more was the melancholy, deserted aspect of the domain; the gravel of the avenues carefully raked, with never a trace of footsteps; the distant expanses quite deserted, save that now and then a solitary gardener passed by; and the house looking lifeless, with all its windows closed, excepting two, which were barely set ajar.

However, a valet who had decided to show himself began to question them, and when he learnt that they wished to see 'monsieur,' he became insolent, and replied that 'monsieur' was behind the house in the gymnasium, and then went indoors again.

Sandoz and Claude followed a path which led them towards a lawn, and what they saw there made them pause. Dubuche, who stood in front of a trapeze, was raising his arms to support his son, Gaston, a poor sickly boy who, at ten years of age, still had the slight, soft limbs of early childhood; while the girl, Alice, sat in a perambulator awaiting her turn. She was so imperfectly developed that, although she was six years old, she could not yet walk. The father, absorbed in his task, continued exercising the slim limbs of his little boy, swinging him backwards and forwards, and vainly trying to make him raise himself up by his wrists. Then, as this slight effort sufficed to bring on perspiration, he removed the little fellow from the trapeze and rolled him in a rug. And all this was done amid complete silence, alone under the far expanse of sky, his face wearing a look of distressful pity as he knelt there in that splendid park. However, as he rose up he perceived the two friends.

'What! it's you? On a Sunday, and without warning me!'

He had made a gesture of annoyance, and at once explained that the maid, the only woman to whom he could trust the children, went to Paris on Sundays, and that it was consequently impossible for him to leave Gaston and Alice for a minute.

'I'll wager that you came to lunch?' he added.

As Claude gave Sandoz an imploring glance, the novelist made haste to answer:

'No, no. As it happens, we only have time enough to shake hands with you. Claude had to come down here on a business matter. He lived at Bennecourt, as you know. And as I accompanied him, we took it into our heads to walk as far as here. But there are people waiting for us, so don't disturb yourself in the least.'

Thereupon, Dubuche, who felt relieved, made a show of detaining them. They certainly had an hour to spare, dash it all! And they all three began to talk. Claude looked at Dubuche, astonished to find him so aged; his flabby face had become wrinkled—it was of a yellowish hue, and streaked with red, as if bile had splashed his skin; whilst his hair and his moustaches were already growing grey. In addition, his figure appeared to have become more compact; a bitter weariness made each of his gestures seem an effort. Were defeats in money matters as hard to bear, then, as defeats in art? Everything about this vanquished man—his voice, his glance—proclaimed the shameful dependency in which he had to live: the bankruptcy of his future which was cast in his teeth, with the accusation of having allowed a talent he did not possess to be set down as an asset in the marriage contract. Then there was the family money which he nowadays stole, the money spent on what he ate, the clothes he wore, and the pocket-money he needed—in fact, the perpetual alms which were bestowed upon him, just as they might have been bestowed upon some vulgar swindler, whom one unluckily could not get rid of.

'Wait a bit,' resumed Dubuche; 'I have to stop here five minutes longer with one of my poor duckies, and afterwards we'll go indoors.'

Gently, and with infinite motherly precautions, he removed little Alice from the perambulator and lifted her to the trapeze. Then, stammering coaxing words and smiling, he encouraged her, and left her hanging for a couple of minutes, so as to develop her muscles; but he remained with open arms, watching each movement with the fear of seeing her smashed to pieces, should her weak little wax-like hands relax their hold. She did not say anything, but obeyed him in spite of the terror that this exercise caused her; and she was so pitifully light in weight that she did not even fully stretch the ropes, being like one of those poor scraggy little birds which fall from a young tree without as much as bending it.

At this moment, Dubuche, having given Gaston a glance, became distracted on remarking that the rug had slipped and that the child's legs were uncovered.

'Good heavens! good heavens! Why, he'll catch cold on this grass! And I, who can't move! Gaston, my little dear! It's the same thing every day; you wait till I'm occupied with your sister. Sandoz, pray cover him over! Ah, thanks! Pull the rug up more; don't be afraid!'

So this was the outcome of his splendid marriage—those two poor, weak little beings, whom the least breath from the sky threatened to kill like flies. Of the fortune he had married, all that remained to him was the constant grief of beholding those woeful children stricken by the final degeneracy of scrofula and phthisis. However, this big, egotistical fellow showed himself an admirable father. The only energy that remained to him consisted in a determination to make his children live, and he struggled on hour after hour, saving them every morning, and dreading to lose them every night. They alone existed now amid his finished existence, amid the bitterness of his father-in-law's insulting reproaches, the coldness of his sorry, ailing wife. And he kept to his task in desperation; he finished bringing those children into the world, as it were, by dint of unremitting tenderness.

'There, my darling, that's enough, isn't it?' he said. 'You'll soon see how big and pretty you'll become.'

He then placed Alice in the perambulator again, took Gaston, who was still wrapped up, on one of his arms; and when his friends wished to help him, he declined their offer, pushing the little girl's vehicle along with his right hand, which had remained free.

'Thanks,' he said, 'I'm accustomed to it. Ah! the poor darlings are not heavy; and besides, with servants one can never be sure of anything.'

On entering the house, Sandoz and Claude again saw the valet who had been so insolent; and they noticed that Dubuche trembled before him. The kitchen and the hall shared the contempt of the father-in-law, who paid for everything, and treated 'madame's' husband like a beggar whose presence was merely tolerated out of charity. Each time that a shirt was got ready for him, each time that he asked for some more bread, the servants' impolite gestures made him feel that he was receiving alms.

'Well, good-bye, we must leave you,' said Sandoz, who suffered at the sight of it all.

'No, no, wait a bit. The children are going to breakfast, and afterwards I'll accompany you with them. They must go for their outing.'

Each day was regulated hour by hour. Of a morning came the baths and the gymnastics; then the breakfast, which was quite an affair, as the children needed special food, which was duly discussed and weighed. And matters were carried to such a point that even their wine and water was slightly warmed, for fear that too chilly a drop might give them a cold. On this occasion they each partook of the yolk of an egg diluted in some broth, and a mutton cutlet, which the father cut up into tiny morsels. Then, prior to the siesta, came the promenade.

Sandoz and Claude found themselves once more out-of-doors, walking down the broad avenues with Dubuche, who again propelled Alice's perambulator, whilst Gaston walked beside him. They talked about the estate as they went towards the gate. The master glanced over the park with timid, nervous eyes, as if he did not feel at home. Besides he did not know anything; he did not occupy himself about anything. He appeared even to have forgotten the profession which he was said to be ignorant of, and seemed to have gone astray, to be bowed down by sheer inaction.

'And your parents, how are they?' asked Sandoz.

A spark was once more kindled in Dubuche's dim eyes.

'Oh! my parents are happy,' he said; 'I bought them a little house, where they live on the annuity which I had specified in my marriage contract. Well, you see, mamma had advanced enough money for my education, and I had to return it to her, as I had promised, eh? Yes, I can at least say that my parents have nothing to reproach me with.'

Having reached the gate, they tarried there for a few minutes. At last, still looking crushed, Dubuche shook hands with his old comrades; and retaining Claude's hand in his, he concluded, as if making a simple statement of fact quite devoid of anger:

'Good-bye; try to get out of worry! As for me, I've spoilt my life.'

And they watched him walk back towards the house, pushing the perambulator, and supporting Gaston, who was already stumbling with fatigue—he, Dubuche, himself having his back bent and the heavy tread of an old man.

One o'clock was striking, and they both hurried down towards Bennecourt, saddened and ravenous. But mournfulness awaited them there as well; a murderous blast had swept over the place, both Faucheurs, husband and wife, and old Porrette, were all dead; and the inn, having fallen into the hands of that goose Melie, was becoming repugnant with its filth and coarseness. An abominable repast was served them, an omelette with hairs in it, and cutlets smelling of grease, in the centre of the common room, to which an open window admitted the pestilential odour of a dung heap, while the place was so full of flies that they positively blackened the tables. The heat of the burning afternoon came in with the stench, and Claude and Sandoz did not even feel the courage to order any coffee; they fled.

'And you who used to extol old Mother Faucheur's omelettes!' said Sandoz. 'The place is done for. We are going for a turn, eh?'

Claude was inclined to refuse. Ever since the morning he had had but one idea—that of walking on as fast as possible, as if each step would shorten the disagreeable task and bring him back to Paris. His heart, his head, his whole being had remained there. He looked neither to right nor to left, he glided along without distinguishing aught of the fields or trees, having but one fixed idea in his brain, a prey to such hallucinations that at certain moments he fancied the point of the Cite rose up and called to him from amid the vast expanse of stubble. However, Sandoz's proposal aroused memories in his mind; and, softening somewhat, he replied:

'Yes, that's it, we'll have a look.'

But as they advanced along the river bank, he became indignant and grieved. He could scarcely recognise the place. A bridge had been built to connect Bennecourt with Bonnieres: a bridge, good heavens! in the place of the old ferry-boat, grating against its chain—the old black boat which, cutting athwart the current, had been so full of interest to the artistic eye. Moreover, a dam established down-stream at Port-Villez had raised the level of the river, most of the islands of yore were now submerged, and the little armlets of the stream had become broader. There were no more pretty nooks, no more rippling alleys amid which one could lose oneself; it was a disaster that inclined one to strangle all the river engineers!

'Why, that clump of pollards still emerging from the water on the left,' cried Claude, 'was the Barreux Island, where we used to chat together, lying on the grass! You remember, don't you? Ah! the scoundrels!'

Sandoz, who could never see a tree felled without shaking his fist at the wood-cutter, turned pale with anger, and felt exasperated that the authorities had thus dared to mutilate nature.

Then, as Claude approached his old home, he became silent, and his teeth clenched. The house had been sold to some middle-class folk, and now there was an iron gate, against which he pressed his face. The rose-bushes were all dead, the apricot trees were dead also; the garden, which looked very trim, with its little pathways and its square-cut beds of flowers and vegetables, bordered with box, was reflected in a large ball of plated glass set upon a stand in the very centre of it; and the house, newly whitewashed and painted at the corners and round the doors and windows, in a manner to imitate freestone, suggested some clownish parvenu awkwardly arrayed in his Sunday toggery. The sight fairly enraged the painter. No, no, nothing of himself, nothing of Christine, nothing of the great love of their youth remained there! He wished to look still further; he turned round behind the house, and sought for the wood of oak trees where they had left the living quiver of their embraces; but the wood was dead, dead like all the rest, felled, sold, and burnt! Then he made a gesture of anathema, in which he cast all his grief to that stretch of country which was now so changed that he could not find in it one single token of his past life. And so a few years sufficed to efface the spot where one had laboured, loved, and suffered! What was the use of man's vain agitation if the wind behind him swept and carried away all the traces of his footsteps? He had rightly realised that he ought not to return thither, for the past is simply the cemetery of our illusions, where our feet for ever stumble against tombstones!

'Let us go!' he cried; 'let us go at once! It's stupid to torture one's heart like this!'

When they were on the new bridge, Sandoz tried to calm him by showing him the view which had not formerly existed, the widened bed of the Seine, full to the brim, as it were, and the water flowing onward, proudly and slowly. But this water failed to interest Claude, until he reflected that it was the same water which, as it passed through Paris, had bathed the old quay walls of the Cite; and then he felt touched, he leant over the parapet of the bridge for a moment, and thought that he could distinguish glorious reflections in it—the towers of Notre-Dame, and the needle-like spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, carried along by the current towards the sea.

The two friends missed the three o'clock train, and it was real torture to have to spend two long hours more in that region, where everything weighed so heavily on their shoulders. Fortunately, they had forewarned Christine and Madame Sandoz that they might return by a night train if they were detained. So they resolved upon a bachelor dinner at a restaurant on the Place du Havre, hoping to set themselves all right again by a good chat at dessert as in former times. Eight o'clock was about to strike when they sat down to table.

Claude, on leaving the terminus, with his feet once more on the Paris pavement, had lost his nervous agitation, like a man who at last finds himself once more at home. And with the cold, absent-minded air which he now usually displayed, he listened to Sandoz trying to enliven him. The novelist treated his friend like a mistress whose head he wished to turn; they partook of delicate, highly spiced dishes and heady wines. But mirth was rebellious, and Sandoz himself ended by becoming gloomy. All his hopes of immortality were shaken by his excursion to that ungrateful country village, that Bennecourt, so loved and so forgetful, where he and Claude had not found a single stone retaining any recollection of them. If things which are eternal forget so soon, can one place any reliance for one hour on the memory of man?

'Do you know, old fellow,' said the novelist, 'it's that which sometimes sends me into a cold sweat. Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by relying on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! what a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life—to have screwed oneself down to one's work—all for a mere delusion! Please notice that it's quite possible, after all. There are some consecrated reputations which I wouldn't give a rap for. Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track. To them one may prefer men of free tendencies, whose work is at times unequal; but these are only known to a few people of real culture, so that it looks as if immortality might really go merely to the middle-class "average" talent, to the men whose names are forced into our brains at school, when we are not strong enough to defend ourselves. But no, no, one mustn't say those things; they make me shudder! Should I have the courage to go on with my task, should I be able to remain erect amid all the jeering around me if I hadn't the consoling illusion that I shall some day be appreciated?'

Claude had listened with his dolorous expression, and he now made a gesture of indifference tinged with bitterness.

'Bah! what does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust.'

'That's quite true,' summed up Sandoz, who was very pale. 'What's the use of trying to fill up the void of space? And to think that we know it, and that our pride still battles all the same!'

They left the restaurant, roamed about the streets, and foundered again in the depths of a cafe, where they philosophised. They had come by degrees to raking up the memories of their childhood, and this ended by filling their hearts with sadness. One o'clock in the morning struck when they decided to go home.

However, Sandoz talked of seeing Claude as far as the Rue Tourlaque. That August night was a superb one, the air was warm, the sky studded with stars. And as they went the round by way of the Quartier de l'Europe, they passed before the old Cafe Baudequin on the Boulevard des Batignolles. It had changed hands three times. It was no longer arranged inside in the same manner as formerly; there were now a couple of billiard tables on the right hand; and several strata of customers had followed each other thither, one covering the other, so that the old frequenters had disappeared like buried nations. However, curiosity, the emotion they had derived from all the past things they had been raking up together, induced them to cross the boulevard and to glance into the cafe through the open doorway. They wanted to see their table of yore, on the left hand, right at the back of the room.

'Oh, look!' said Sandoz, stupefied.

'Gagniere!' muttered Claude.

It was indeed Gagniere, seated all alone at that table at the end of the empty cafe. He must have come from Melun for one of the Sunday concerts to which he treated himself; and then, in the evening, while astray in Paris, an old habit of his legs had led him to the Cafe Baudequin. Not one of the comrades ever set foot there now, and he, who had beheld another age, obstinately remained there alone. He had not yet touched his glass of beer; he was looking at it, so absorbed in thought that he did not even stir when the waiters began piling the chairs on the tables, in order that everything might be ready for the morrow's sweeping.

The two friends hurried off, upset by the sight of that dim figure, seized as it were with a childish fear of ghosts. They parted in the Rue Tourlaque.

'Ah! that poor devil Dubuche!' said Sandoz as he pressed Claude's hand, 'he spoilt our day for us.'

As soon as November had come round, and when all the old friends were back in Paris again, Sandoz thought of gathering them together at one of those Thursday dinners which had remained a habit with him. They were always his greatest delight. The sale of his books was increasing, and he was growing rich; the flat in the Rue de Londres was becoming quite luxurious compared with the little house at Batignolles; but he himself remained immutable. On this occasion, he was anxious, in his good nature, to procure real enjoyment for Claude by organising one of the dear evenings of their youth. So he saw to the invitations; Claude and Christine naturally must come; next Jory and his wife, the latter of whom it had been necessary to receive since her marriage, then Dubuche, who always came alone, with Fagerolles, Mahoudeau, and finally Gagniere. There would be ten of them—all the men comrades of the old band, without a single outsider, in order that the good understanding and jollity might be complete.

Henriette, who was more mistrustful than her husband, hesitated when this list of guests was decided upon.

'Oh! Fagerolles? You believe in having Fagerolles with the others? They hardly like him—nor Claude either; I fancied I noticed a coolness—'

But he interrupted her, bent on not admitting it.

'What! a coolness? It's really funny, but women can't understand that fellows chaff each other. All that doesn't prevent them from having their hearts in the right place.'

Henriette took especial care in preparing the menu for that Thursday dinner. She now had quite a little staff to overlook, a cook, a man-servant, and so on; and if she no longer prepared any of the dishes herself, she still saw that very delicate fare was provided, out of affection for her husband, whose sole vice was gluttony. She went to market with the cook, and called in person on the tradespeople. She and her husband had a taste for gastronomical curiosities from the four corners of the world. On this occasion they decided to have some ox-tail soup, grilled mullet, undercut of beef with mushrooms, raviolis in the Italian fashion, hazel-hens from Russia, and a salad of truffles, without counting caviare and kilkis as side-dishes, a glace pralinee, and a little emerald-coloured Hungarian cheese, with fruit and pastry. As wine, some old Bordeaux claret in decanters, chambertin with the roast, and sparkling moselle at dessert, in lieu of champagne, which was voted commonplace.

At seven o'clock Sandoz and Henriette were waiting for their guests, he simply wearing a jacket, and she looking very elegant in a plain dress of black satin. People dined at their house in frock-coats, without any fuss. The drawing-room, the arrangements of which they were now completing, was becoming crowded with old furniture, old tapestry, nick-nacks of all countries and all times—a rising and now overflowing stream of things which had taken source at Batignolles with an old pot of Rouen ware, which Henriette had given her husband on one of his fete days. They ran about to the curiosity shops together; a joyful passion for buying possessed them. Sandoz satisfied the longings of his youth, the romanticist ambitions which the first books he had read had given birth to. Thus this writer, so fiercely modern, lived amid the worm-eaten middle ages which he had dreamt of when he was a lad of fifteen. As an excuse, he laughingly declared that handsome modern furniture cost too much, whilst with old things, even common ones, you immediately obtained something with effect and colour. There was nothing of the collector about him, he was entirely concerned as to decoration and broad effects; and to tell the truth, the drawing-room, lighted by two lamps of old Delft ware, had quite a soft warm tint with the dull gold of the dalmaticas used for upholstering the seats, the yellowish incrustations of the Italian cabinets and Dutch show-cases, the faded hues of the Oriental door-hangings, the hundred little notes of the ivory, crockery and enamel work, pale with age, which showed against the dull red hangings of the room.

Claude and Christine were the first to arrive. The latter had put on her only silk dress—an old, worn-out garment which she preserved with especial care for such occasions. Henriette at once took hold of both her hands and drew her to a sofa. She was very fond of her, and questioned her, seeing her so strange, touchingly pale, and with anxious eyes. What was the matter? Did she feel poorly? No, no, she answered that she was very gay and very pleased to come; but while she spoke, she kept on glancing at Claude, as if to study him, and then looked away. He seemed excited, evincing a feverishness in his words and gestures which he had not shown for a month past. At intervals, however, his agitation subsided, and he remained silent, with his eyes wide open, gazing vacantly into space at something which he fancied was calling him.

'Ah! old man,' he said to Sandoz, 'I finished reading your book last night. It's deucedly clever; you have shut up their mouths this time!'

They both talked standing in front of the chimney-piece, where some logs were blazing. Sandoz had indeed just published a new novel, and although his critics did not disarm, there was at last that stir of success which establishes a man's reputation despite the persistent attacks of his adversaries. Besides, he had no illusions; he knew very well that the battle, even if it were won, would begin again at each fresh book he wrote. The great work of his life was advancing, that series of novels which he launched forth in volumes one after another in stubborn, regular fashion, marching towards the goal he had selected without letting anything, obstacles, insults, or fatigue, conquer him.

'It's true,' he gaily replied, 'they are weakening this time. There's even one who has been foolish enough to admit that I'm an honest man! See how everything degenerates! But they'll make up for it, never fear! I know some of them whose nuts are too much unlike my own to let them accept my literary formula, my boldness of language, and my physiological characters acting under the influence of circumstances; and I refer to brother writers who possess self-respect; I leave the fools and the scoundrels on one side. For a man to be able to work on pluckily, it is best for him to expect neither good faith nor justice. To be in the right he must begin by dying.'

At this Claude's eyes abruptly turned towards a corner of the drawing-room, as if to pierce the wall and go far away yonder, whither something had summoned him. Then they became hazy and returned from their journey, whilst he exclaimed:

'Oh! you speak for yourself! I should do wrong to kick the bucket. No matter, your book sent me into a deuced fever. I wanted to paint to-day, but I couldn't. Ah! it's lucky that I can't get jealous of you, else you would make me too unhappy.'

However, the door had opened, and Mathilde came in, followed by Jory. She was richly attired in a tunic of nasturtium-hued velvet and a skirt of straw-coloured satin, with diamonds in her ears and a large bouquet of roses on her bosom. What astonished Claude the most was that he did not recognise her, for she had become plump, round, and fair skinned, instead of thin and sunburnt as he had known her. Her disturbing ugliness had departed in a swelling of the face; her mouth, once noted for its black voids, now displayed teeth which looked over-white whenever she condescended to smile, with a disdainful curling of the upper lip. You could guess that she had become immoderately respectable; her five and forty summers gave her weight beside her husband, who was younger than herself and seemed to be her nephew. The only thing of yore that clung to her was a violent perfume; she drenched herself with the strongest essences, as if she had been anxious to wash from her skin the smell of all the aromatic simples with which she had been impregnated by her herbalist business; however, the sharpness of rhubarb, the bitterness of elder-seed, and the warmth of peppermint clung to her; and as soon as she crossed the drawing-room, it was filled with an undefinable smell like that of a chemist's shop, relieved by an acute odour of musk.

Henriette, who had risen, made her sit down beside Christine, saying:

'You know each other, don't you? You have already met here.'

Mathilde gave but a cold glance at the modest attire of that woman who had lived for a long time with a man, so it was said, before being married to him. She herself was exceedingly rigid respecting such matters since the tolerance prevailing in literary and artistic circles had admitted her to a few drawing-rooms. Henriette hated her, however, and after the customary exchange of courtesies, not to be dispensed with, resumed her conversation with Christine.

Jory had shaken hands with Claude and Sandoz, and, standing near them, in front of the fireplace, he apologised for an article slashing the novelist's new book which had appeared that very morning in his review.

'As you know very well, my dear fellow, one is never the master in one's own house. I ought to see to everything, but I have so little time! I hadn't even read that article, I relied on what had been told me about it. So you will understand how enraged I was when I read it this afternoon. I am dreadfully grieved, dreadfully grieved—'

'Oh, let it be! It's the natural order of things,' replied Sandoz, quietly. 'Now that my enemies are beginning to praise me, it's only proper that my friends should attack me.'

The door again opened, and Gagniere glided in softly, like a will-o'-the-wisp. He had come straight from Melun, and was quite alone, for he never showed his wife to anybody. When he thus came to dinner he brought the country dust with him on his boots, and carried it back with him the same night on taking the last train. On the other hand, he did not alter; or, rather, age seemed to rejuvenate him; his complexion became fairer as he grew old.

'Hallo! Why, Gagniere's here!' exclaimed Sandoz.

Then, just as Gagniere was making up his mind to bow to the ladies, Mahoudeau entered. He had already grown grey, with a sunken, fierce-looking face and childish, blinking eyes. He still wore trousers which were a good deal too short for him, and a frock-coat which creased in the back, in spite of the money which he now earned; for the bronze manufacturer for whom he worked had brought out some charming statuettes of his, which one began to see on middle-class mantel-shelves and consoles.

Sandoz and Claude had turned round, inquisitive to witness the meeting between Mahoudeau and Mathilde. However, matters passed off very quietly. The sculptor bowed to her respectfully, while Jory, the husband, with his air of serene unconsciousness, thought fit to introduce her to him, for the twentieth time, perhaps.

'Eh! It's my wife, old fellow. Shake hands together.'

Thereupon, both very grave, like people of society who are forced somewhat over-promptly into familiarity, Mathilde and Mahoudeau shook hands. Only, as soon as the latter had got rid of the job and had found Gagniere in a corner of the drawing-room, they both began sneering and recalling, in terrible language, all the abominations of yore.

Dubuche was expected that evening, for he had formally promised to come.

'Yes,' explained Henriette, 'there will only be nine of us. Fagerolles wrote this morning to apologise; he is forced to go to some official dinner, but he hopes to escape, and will join us at about eleven o'clock.'

At that moment, however, a servant came in with a telegram. It was from Dubuche, who wired: 'Impossible to stir. Alice has an alarming cough.'

'Well, we shall only be eight, then,' resumed Henriette, with the somewhat peevish resignation of a hostess disappointed by her guests.

And the servant having opened the dining-room door and announced that dinner was ready, she added:

'We are all here. Claude, offer me your arm.'

Sandoz took Mathilde's, Jory charged himself with Christine, while Mahoudeau and Gagniere brought up the rear, still joking coarsely about what they called the beautiful herbalist's padding.

The dining-room which they now entered was very spacious, and the light was gaily bright after the subdued illumination of the drawing-room. The walls, covered with specimens of old earthenware, displayed a gay medley of colours, reminding one of cheap coloured prints. Two sideboards, one laden with glass and the other with silver plate, sparkled like jewellers' show-cases. And in the centre of the room, under the big hanging lamp girt round with tapers, the table glistened like a catafalque with the whiteness of its cloth, laid in perfect style, with decorated plates, cut-glass decanters white with water or ruddy with wine, and symmetrical side-dishes, all set out around the centre-piece, a silver basket full of purple roses.

They sat down, Henriette between Claude and Mahoudeau, Sandoz with Mathilde and Christine beside him, Jory and Gagniere at either end; and the servant had barely finished serving the soup, when Madame Jory made a most unfortunate remark. Wishing to show herself amiable, and not having heard her husband's apologies, she said to the master of the house:

'Well, were you pleased with the article in this morning's number? Edouard personally revised the proofs with the greatest care!'

On hearing this, Jory became very much confused and stammered:

'No, no! you are mistaken! It was a very bad article indeed, and you know very well that it was "passed" the other evening while I was away.'

By the silent embarrassment which ensued she guessed her blunder. But she made matters still worse, for, giving her husband a sharp glance, she retorted in a very loud voice, so as to crush him, as it were, and disengage her own responsibility:

'Another of your lies! I repeat what you told me. I won't allow you to make me ridiculous, do you hear?'

This threw a chill over the beginning of the dinner. Henriette recommended the kilkis, but Christine alone found them very nice. When the grilled mullet appeared, Sandoz, who was amused by Jory's embarrassment, gaily reminded him of a lunch they had had together at Marseilles in the old days. Ah! Marseilles, the only city where people know how to eat!

Claude, who for a little while had been absorbed in thought, now seemed to awaken from a dream, and without any transition he asked:

'Is it decided? Have they selected the artists for the new decorations of the Hotel de Ville?'

'No,' said Mahoudeau, 'they are going to do so. I sha'n't get anything, for I don't know anybody. Fagerolles himself is very anxious. If he isn't here to-night, it's because matters are not going smoothly. Ah! he has had his bite at the cherry; all that painting for millions is cracking to bits!'

There was a laugh, expressive of spite finally satisfied, and even Gagniere at the other end of the table joined in the sneering. Then they eased their feelings in malicious words, and rejoiced over the sudden fall of prices which had thrown the world of 'young masters' into consternation. It was inevitable, the predicted time was coming, the exaggerated rise was about to finish in a catastrophe. Since the amateurs had been panic-stricken, seized with consternation like that of speculators when a 'slump' sweeps over a Stock Exchange, prices were giving way day by day, and nothing more was sold. It was a sight to see the famous Naudet amid the rout; he had held out at first, he had invented 'the dodge of the Yankee'—the unique picture hidden deep in some gallery, in solitude like an idol—the picture of which he would not name the price, being contemptuously certain that he could never find a man rich enough to purchase it, but which he finally sold for two or three hundred thousand francs to some pig-dealer of Chicago, who felt glorious at carrying off the most expensive canvas of the year. But those fine strokes of business were not to be renewed at present, and Naudet, whose expenditure had increased with his gains, drawn on and swallowed up in the mad craze which was his own work, could now hear his regal mansion crumbling beneath him, and was reduced to defend it against the assault of creditors.

'Won't you take some more mushrooms, Mahoudeau?' obligingly interrupted Henriette.

The servant was now handing round the undercut. They ate, and emptied the decanters; but their bitterness was so great that the best things were offered without being tasted, which distressed the master and mistress of the house.

'Mushrooms, eh?' the sculptor ended by repeating. 'No, thanks.' And he added: 'The funny part of it all is, that Naudet is suing Fagerolles. Oh, quite so! he's going to distrain on him. Ah! it makes me laugh! We shall see a pretty scouring in the Avenue de Villiers among all those petty painters with mansions of their own. House property will go for nothing next spring! Well, Naudet, who had compelled Fagerolles to build a house, and who furnished it for him as he would have furnished a place for a hussy, wanted to get hold of his nick-nacks and hangings again. But Fagerolles had borrowed money on them, so it seems. You can imagine the state of affairs; the dealer accuses the artist of having spoilt his game by exhibiting with the vanity of a giddy fool; while the painter replies that he doesn't mean to be robbed any longer; and they'll end by devouring each other—at least, I hope so.'

Gagniere raised his voice, the gentle but inexorable voice of a dreamer just awakened.

'Fagerolles is done for. Besides, he never had any success.'

The others protested. Well, what about the hundred thousand francs' worth of pictures he had sold a year, and his medals and his cross of the Legion of Honour? But Gagniere, still obstinate, smiled with a mysterious air, as if facts could not prevail against his inner conviction. He wagged his head and, full of disdain, replied:

'Let me be! He never knew anything about chiaroscuro.'

Jory was about to defend the talent of Fagerolles, whom he considered to be his own creation, when Henriette solicited a little attention for the raviolis. There was a short slackening of the quarrel amid the crystalline clinking of the glasses and the light clatter of the forks. The table, laid with such fine symmetry, was already in confusion, and seemed to sparkle still more amid the ardent fire of the quarrel. And Sandoz, growing anxious, felt astonished. What was the matter with them all that they attacked Fagerolles so harshly? Hadn't they all begun together, and were they not all to reach the goal in the same victory? For the first time, a feeling of uneasiness disturbed his dream of eternity, that delight in his Thursdays, which he had pictured following one upon another, all alike, all of them happy ones, into the far distance of the future. But the feeling was as yet only skin deep, and he laughingly exclaimed:

'Husband your strength, Claude, here are the hazel-hens. Eh! Claude, where are you?'

Since silence had prevailed, Claude had relapsed into his dream, gazing about him vacantly, and taking a second help of raviolis without knowing what he was about; Christine, who said nothing, but sat there looking sad and charming, did not take her eyes off him. He started when Sandoz spoke, and chose a leg from amid the bits of hazel-hen now being served, the strong fumes of which filled the room with a resinous smell.

'Do you smell that?' exclaimed Sandoz, amused; 'one would think one were swallowing all the forests of Russia.'

But Claude returned to the matter which worried him.

'Then you say that Fagerolles will be entrusted with the paintings for the Municipal Council's assembly room?'

And this remark sufficed; Mahoudeau and Gagniere, set on the track, at once started off again. Ah! a nice wishy-washy smearing it would be if that assembly room were allotted to him; and he was doing plenty of dirty things to get it. He, who had formerly pretended to spit on orders for work, like a great artist surrounded by amateurs, was basely cringing to the officials, now that his pictures no longer sold. Could anything more despicable be imagined than a painter soliciting a functionary, bowing and scraping, showing all kinds of cowardice and making all kinds of concessions? It was shameful that art should be dependent upon a Minister's idiotic good pleasure! Fagerolles, at that official dinner he had gone to, was no doubt conscientiously licking the boots of some chief clerk, some idiot who was only fit to be made a guy of.

'Well,' said Jory, 'he effects his purpose, and he's quite right. You won't pay his debts.'

'Debts? Have I any debts, I who have always starved?' answered Mahoudeau in a roughly arrogant tone. 'Ought a fellow to build himself a palace and spend money on creatures like that Irma Becot, who's ruining Fagerolles?'

At this Jory grew angry, while the others jested, and Irma's name went flying over the table. But Mathilde, who had so far remained reserved and silent by way of making a show of good breeding, became intensely indignant. 'Oh! gentlemen, oh! gentlemen,' she exclaimed, 'to talk before us about that creature. No, not that creature, I implore you!

After that Henriette and Sandoz, who were in consternation, witnessed the rout of their menu. The truffle salad, the ice, the dessert, everything was swallowed without being at all appreciated amidst the rising anger of the quarrel; and the chambertin and sparkling moselle were imbibed as if they had merely been water. In vain did Henriette smile, while Sandoz good-naturedly tried to calm them by making allowances for human weakness. Not one of them retreated from his position; a single word made them spring upon each other. There was none of the vague boredom, the somniferous satiety which at times had saddened their old gatherings; at present there was real ferocity in the struggle, a longing to destroy one another. The tapers of the hanging lamp flared up, the painted flowers of the earthenware on the walls bloomed, the table seemed to have caught fire amid the upsetting of its symmetrical arrangements and the violence of the talk, that demolishing onslaught of chatter which had filled them with fever for a couple of hours past.

And amid the racket, when Henriette made up her mind to rise so as to silence them, Claude at length remarked:

'Ah! if I only had the Hotel de Ville work, and if I could! It used to be my dream to cover all the walls of Paris!'

They returned to the drawing-room, where the little chandelier and the bracket-candelabra had just been lighted. It seemed almost cold there in comparison with the kind of hot-house which had just been left; and for a moment the coffee calmed the guests. Nobody beyond Fagerolles was expected. The house was not an open one by any means, the Sandozes did not recruit literary dependents or muzzle the press by dint of invitations. The wife detested society, and the husband said with a laugh that he needed ten years to take a liking to anybody, and then he must like him always. But was not that real happiness, seldom realised? A few sound friendships and a nook full of family affection. No music was ever played there, and nobody had ever read a page of his composition aloud.

On that particular Thursday the evening seemed a long one, on account of the persistent irritation of the men. The ladies had begun to chat before the smouldering fire; and when the servant, after clearing the table, reopened the door of the dining-room, they were left alone, the men repairing to the adjoining apartment to smoke and sip some beer.

Sandoz and Claude, who were not smokers, soon returned, however, and sat down, side by side, on a sofa near the doorway. The former, who was glad to see his old friend excited and talkative, recalled the memories of Plassans apropos of a bit of news he had learnt the previous day. Pouillaud, the old jester of their dormitory, who had become so grave a lawyer, was now in trouble over some adventure with a woman. Ah! that brute of a Pouillaud! But Claude did not answer, for, having heard his name mentioned in the dining-room, he listened attentively, trying to understand.

Jory, Mahoudeau, and Gagniere, unsatiated and eager for another bite, had started on the massacre again. Their voices, at first mere whispers, gradually grew louder, till at last they began to shout.

'Oh! the man, I abandon the man to you,' said Jory, who was speaking of Fagerolles. 'He isn't worth much. And he out-generalled you, it's true. Ah! how he did get the better of you fellows, by breaking off from you and carving success for himself on your backs! You were certainly not at all cute.'

Mahoudeau, waxing furious, replied:

'Of course! It sufficed for us to be with Claude, to be turned away everywhere.'

'It was Claude who did for us!' so Gagniere squarely asserted.

And thus they went on, relinquishing Fagerolles, whom they reproached for toadying the newspapers, for allying himself with their enemies and wheedling sexagenarian baronesses, to fall upon Claude, who now became the great culprit. Well, after all, the other was only a hussy, one of the many found in the artistic fraternity, fellows who accost the public at street corners, leave their comrades in the lurch, and victimise them so as to get the bourgeois into their studios. But Claude, that abortive great artist, that impotent fellow who couldn't set a figure on its legs in spite of all his pride, hadn't he utterly compromised them, hadn't he let them in altogether? Ah! yes, success might have been won by breaking off. If they had been able to begin over again, they wouldn't have been idiots enough to cling obstinately to impossible principles! And they accused Claude of having paralysed them, of having traded on them—yes, traded on them, but in so clumsy and dull-witted a manner that he himself had not derived any benefit by it.

'Why, as for me,' resumed Mahoudeau, 'didn't he make me quite idiotic at one moment? When I think of it, I sound myself, and remain wondering why I ever joined his band. Am I at all like him? Was there ever any one thing in common between us, eh? Ah! it's exasperating to find the truth out so late in the day!'

'And as for myself,' said Gagniere, 'he robbed me of my originality. Do you think it has amused me, each time I have exhibited a painting during the last fifteen years, to hear people saying behind me, "That's a Claude!" Oh! I've had enough of it, I prefer not to paint any more. All the same, if I had seen clearly in former times, I shouldn't have associated with him.'

It was a stampede, the snapping of the last ties, in their stupefaction at suddenly finding that they were strangers and enemies, after a long youth of fraternity together. Life had disbanded them on the road, and the great dissimilarity of their characters stood revealed; all that remained in them was the bitterness left by the old enthusiastic dream, that erstwhile hope of battle and victory to be won side by side, which now increased their spite.

'The fact is,' sneered Jory, 'that Fagerolles did not let himself be pillaged like a simpleton.'

But Mahoudeau, feeling vexed, became angry. 'You do wrong to laugh,' he said, 'for you are a nice backslider yourself. Yes, you always told us that you would give us a lift up when you had a paper of your own.'

'Ah! allow me, allow me—'

Gagniere, however, united with Mahoudeau: 'That's quite true!' he said. 'You can't say any more that what you write about us is cut out, for you are the master now. And yet, never a word! You didn't even name us in your articles on the last Salon.'

Then Jory, embarrassed and stammering, in his turn flew into a rage.

'Ah! well, it's the fault of that cursed Claude! I don't care to lose my subscribers simply to please you fellows. It's impossible to do anything for you! There! do you understand? You, Mahoudeau, may wear yourself out in producing pretty little things; you, Gagniere, may even never do anything more; but you each have a label on the back, and you'll need ten years' efforts before you'll be able to get it off. In fact, there have been some labels that would never come off! The public is amused by it, you know; there were only you fellows to believe in the genius of that big ridiculous lunatic, who will be locked up in a madhouse one of these fine mornings!'

Then the dispute became terrible, they all three spoke at once, coming at last to abominable reproaches, with such outbursts, and such furious motion of the jaw, that they seemed to be biting one another.

Sandoz, seated on the sofa, and disturbed in the gay memories he was recalling, was at last obliged to lend ear to the tumult which reached him through the open doorway.

'You hear them?' whispered Claude, with a dolorous smile; 'they are giving it me nicely! No, no, stay here, I won't let you stop them; I deserve it, since I have failed to succeed.'

And Sandoz, turning pale, remained there, listening to that bitter quarrelling, the outcome of the struggle for life, that grappling of conflicting personalities, which bore all his chimera of everlasting friendship away.

Henriette, fortunately, became anxious on hearing the violent shouting. She rose and went to shame the smokers for thus forsaking the ladies to go and quarrel together. They then returned to the drawing-room, perspiring, breathing hard, and still shaken by their anger. And as Henriette, with her eyes on the clock, remarked that they certainly would not see Fagerolles that evening, they, began to sneer again, exchanging glances. Ah! he had a fine scent, and no mistake; he wouldn't be caught associating with old friends, who had become troublesome, and whom he hated.

In fact, Fagerolles did not come. The evening finished laboriously. They once more went back to the dining-room, where the tea was served on a Russian tablecloth embroidered with a stag-hunt in red thread; and under the tapers a plain cake was displayed, with plates full of sweetstuff and pastry, and a barbarous collection of liqueurs and spirits, whisky, hollands, Chio raki, and kummel. The servant also brought some punch, and bestirred himself round the table, while the mistress of the house filled the teapot from the samovar boiling in front of her. But all the comfort, all the feast for the eyes and the fine perfume of the tea did not move their hearts. The conversation again turned on the success that some men achieved and the ill-luck that befell others. For instance, was it not shameful that art should be dishonoured by all those medals, all those crosses, all those rewards, which were so badly distributed to boot? Were artists always to remain like little boys at school? All the universal platitude came from the docility and cowardice which were shown, as in the presence of ushers, so as to obtain good marks.

They had repaired to the drawing-room once more, and Sandoz, who was greatly distressed, had begun to wish that they would take themselves off, when he noticed Mathilde and Gagniere seated side by side on a sofa and talking languishingly of music, while the others remained exhausted, lacking saliva and power of speech. Gagniere philosophised and poetised in a state of ecstasy, while Mathilde rolled up her eyes and went into raptures as if titillated by some invisible wing. They had caught sight of each other on the previous Sunday at the concert at the Cirque, and they apprised each other of their enjoyment in alternate, far-soaring sentences.

'Ah! that Meyerbeer, monsieur, the overture of "Struensee," that funereal strain, and then that peasant dance, so full of dash and colour; and then the mournful burden which returns, the duo of the violoncellos. Ah! monsieur, the violoncellos, the violoncellos!'

'And Berlioz, madame, the festival air in "Romeo." Oh! the solo of the clarionets, the beloved women, with the harp accompaniment! Something enrapturing, something white as snow which ascends! The festival bursts upon you, like a picture by Paul Veronese, with the tumultuous magnificence of the "Marriage of Cana"; and then the love-song begins again, oh, how softly! Oh! always higher! higher still—'

'Did you notice, monsieur, in Beethoven's Symphony in A, that knell which ever and ever comes back and beats upon your heart? Yes, I see very well, you feel as I do, music is a communion—Beethoven, ah, me! how sad and sweet it is to be two to understand him and give way—'

'And Schumann, madame, and Wagner, madame—Schumann's "Reverie," nothing but the stringed instruments, a warm shower falling on acacia leaves, a sunray which dries them, barely a tear in space. Wagner! ah, Wagner! the overture of the "Flying Dutchman," are you not fond of it?—tell me you are fond of it! As for myself, it overcomes me. There is nothing left, nothing left, one expires—'

Their voices died away; they did not even look at each other, but sat there elbow to elbow, with their faces turned upward, quite overcome.

Sandoz, who was surprised, asked himself where Mathilde could have picked up that jargon. In some article of Jory's, perhaps. Besides, he had remarked that women talk music very well, even without knowing a note of it. And he, whom the bitterness of the others had only grieved, became exasperated at sight of Mathilde's languishing attitude. No, no, that was quite enough; the men tore each other to bits; still that might pass, after all; but what an end to the evening it was, that feminine fraud, cooing and titillating herself with thoughts of Beethoven's and Schumann's music! Fortunately, Gagniere suddenly rose. He knew what o'clock it was even in the depths of his ecstasy, and he had only just time left him to catch his last train. So, after exchanging nerveless and silent handshakes with the others, he went off to sleep at Melun.

'What a failure he is!' muttered Mahoudeau. 'Music has killed painting; he'll never do anything!'

He himself had to leave, and the door had scarcely closed behind his back when Jory declared:

'Have you seen his last paperweight? He'll end by sculpturing sleeve-links. There's a fellow who has missed his mark! To think that he prided himself on being vigorous!'

But Mathilde was already afoot, taking leave of Christine with a curt little inclination of the head, affecting social familiarity with Henriette, and carrying off her husband, who helped her on with her cloak in the ante-room, humble and terrified at the severe glance she gave him, for she had an account to settle.

Then, the door having closed behind them, Sandoz, beside himself, cried out: 'That's the end! The journalist was bound to call the others abortions—yes, the journalist who, after patching up articles, has fallen to trading upon public credulity! Ah! luckily there's Mathilde the Avengeress!'

Of the guests Christine and Claude alone were left. The latter, since the drawing-room had been growing empty, had remained ensconced in the depths of an arm-chair, no longer speaking, but overcome by that species of magnetic slumber which stiffened him, and fixed his eyes on something far away beyond the walls. He protruded his face, a convulsive kind of attention seemed to carry it forward; he certainly beheld something invisible, and heard a summons in the silence.

Christine having risen in her turn, and apologised for being the last to leave, Henriette took hold of her hands, repeated how fond she was of her, begged her to come and see her frequently, and to dispose of her in all things as she would with a sister. But Claude's sorrowful wife, looking so sadly charming in her black dress, shook her head with a pale smile.

'Come,' said Sandoz in her ear, after giving a glance at Claude, 'you mustn't distress yourself like that. He has talked a great deal, he has been gayer this evening. He's all right.'

But in a terrified voice she answered:

'No, no; look at his eyes—I shall tremble as long as he has his eyes like that. You have done all you could, thanks. What you haven't done no one will do. Ah! how I suffer at being unable to hope, at being unable to do anything!'

Then in a loud tone she asked:

'Are you coming, Claude?'

She had to repeat her question twice, for at first he did not hear her; he ended by starting, however, and rose to his feet, saying, as if he had answered the summons from the horizon afar off:

'Yes, I'm coming, I'm coming.'

When Sandoz and his wife at last found themselves alone in the drawing-room, where the atmosphere now was stifling—heated by the lights and heavy, as it were, with melancholy silence after all the outbursts of the quarrelling—they looked at one another and let their arms fall, quite heart-rent by the unfortunate issue of their dinner party. Henrietta tried to laugh it off, however, murmuring:

'I warned you, I quite understood—'

But he interrupted her with a despairing gesture. What! was that, then, the end of his long illusion, that dream of eternity which had made him set happiness in a few friendships, formed in childhood, and shared until extreme old age? Ah! what a wretched band, what a final rending, what a terrible balance-sheet to weep over after that bankruptcy of the human heart! And he grew astonished on thinking of the friends who had fallen off by the roadside, of the great affections lost on the way, of the others unceasingly changing around himself, in whom he found no change. His poor Thursdays filled him with pity, so many memories were in mourning, it was the slow death of all that one loves! Would his wife and himself have to resign themselves to live as in a desert, to cloister themselves in utter hatred of the world? Ought they rather to throw their doors wide open to a throng of strangers and indifferent folk? By degrees a certainty dawned in the depths of his grief: everything ended and nothing began again in life. He seemed to yield to evidence, and, heaving a big sigh, exclaimed:

'You were right. We won't invite them to dinner again—they would devour one another.'

As soon as Claude and Christine reached the Place de la Trinite on their way home, the painter let go of his wife's arm; and, stammering that he had to go somewhere, he begged her to return to the Rue Tourlaque without him. She had felt him shuddering, and she remained quite scared with surprise and fear. Somewhere to go at that hour—past midnight! Where had he to go, and what for? He had turned round and was making off, when she overtook him, and, pretending that she was frightened, begged that he would not leave her to climb up to Montmartre alone at that time of night. This consideration alone brought him back. He took her arm again; they ascended the Rue Blanche and the Rue Lepic, and at last found themselves in the Rue Tourlaque. And on reaching their door, he rang the bell, and then again left her.

'Here you are,' he said; 'I'm going.'

He was already hastening away, taking long strides, and gesticulating like a madman. Without even closing the door which had been opened, she darted off, bent on following him. In the Rue Lepic she drew near; but for fear of exciting him still more she contented herself with keeping him in sight, walking some thirty yards in the rear, without his knowing that she was behind him. On reaching the end of the Rue Lepic he went down the Rue Blanche again, and then proceeded by way of the Rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin and the Rue du Dix Decembre as far as the Rue de Richelieu. When she saw him turn into the last-named thoroughfare, a mortal chill came over her: he was going towards the Seine; it was the realisation of the frightful fear which kept her of a night awake, full of anguish! And what could she do, good Lord? Go with him, hang upon his neck over yonder? She was now only able to stagger along, and as each step brought them nearer to the river, she felt life ebbing from her limbs. Yes, he was going straight there; he crossed the Place du Theatre Francais, then the Carrousel, and finally reached the Pont des Saints-Peres. After taking a few steps along the bridge, he approached the railing overlooking the water; and at the thought that he was about to jump over, a loud cry was stifled in her contracted throat.

But no; he remained motionless. Was it then only the Cite over yonder that haunted him, that heart of Paris which pursued him everywhere, which he conjured up with his fixed eyes, even through walls, and which, when he was leagues away, cried out the constant summons heard by him alone? She did not yet dare to hope it; she had stopped short, in the rear, watching him with giddy anxiety, ever fancying that she saw him take the terrible leap, but resisting her longing to draw nearer, for fear lest she might precipitate the catastrophe by showing herself. Oh, God! to think that she was there with her devouring passion, her bleeding motherly heart—that she was there beholding everything, without daring to risk one movement to hold him back!

He stood erect, looking very tall, quite motionless, and gazing into the night.

It was a winter's night, with a misty sky of sooty blackness, and was rendered extremely cold by a sharp wind blowing from the west. Paris, lighted up, had gone to sleep, showing no signs of life save such as attached to the gas-jets, those specks which scintillated and grew smaller and smaller in the distance till they seemed but so much starry dust. The quays stretched away showing double rows of those luminous beads whose reverberation glimmered on the nearer frontages. On the left were the houses of the Quai du Louvre, on the right the two wings of the Institute, confused masses of monuments and buildings, which became lost to view in the darkening gloom, studded with sparks. Then between those cordons of burners, extending as far as the eye could reach, the bridges stretched bars of lights, ever slighter and slighter, each formed of a train of spangles, grouped together and seemingly hanging in mid-air. And in the Seine there shone the nocturnal splendour of the animated water of cities; each gas-jet there cast a reflection of its flame, like the nucleus of a comet, extending into a tail. The nearer ones, mingling together, set the current on fire with broad, regular, symmetrical fans of light, glowing like live embers, while the more distant ones, seen under the bridges, were but little motionless sparks of fire. But the large burning tails appeared to be animated, they waggled as they spread out, all black and gold, with a constant twirling of scales, in which one divined the flow of the water. The whole Seine was lighted up by them, as if some fete were being given in its depths—some mysterious, fairy-like entertainment, at which couples were waltzing beneath the river's red-flashing window-panes. High above those fires, above the starry quays, the sky, in which not a planet was visible, showed a ruddy mass of vapour, that warm, phosphorescent exhalation which every night, above the sleep of the city, seems to set the crater of a volcano.

The wind blew hard, and Christine, shivering, her eyes full of tears, felt the bridge move under her, as if it were bearing her away amid a smash up of the whole scene. Had not Claude moved? Was he not climbing over the rail? No; everything became motionless again, and she saw him still on the same spot, obstinately stiff, with his eyes turned towards the point of the Cite, which he could not see.

It had summoned him, and he had come, and yet he could not see it in the depths of the darkness. He could only distinguish the bridges, with their light framework standing out blackly against the sparkling water. But farther off everything became confused, the island had disappeared, he could not even have told its exact situation if some belated cabs had not passed from time to time over the Pont-Neuf, with their lamps showing like those shooting sparks which dart at times through embers. A red lantern, on a level with the dam of the Mint, cast a streamlet of blood, as it were, into the water. Something huge and lugubrious, some drifting form, no doubt a lighter which had become unmoored, slowly descended the stream amid the reflections. Espied for a moment, it was immediately afterwards lost in the darkness. Where had the triumphal island sunk? In the depths of that flow of water? Claude still gazed, gradually fascinated by the great rushing of the river in the night. He leant over its broad bed, chilly like an abyss, in which the mysterious flames were dancing. And the loud, sad wail of the current attracted him, and he listened to its call, despairing, unto death.

By a shooting pain at her heart, Christine this time realised that the terrible thought had just occurred to him. She held out her quivering hands which the wind was lashing. But Claude remained there, struggling against the sweetness of death; indeed he did not move for another hour, he lingered there unconscious of the lapse of time, with his eyes still turned in the direction of the Cite, as if by a miracle of power they were about to create light, and conjure up the island so that he might behold it.

When Claude at last left the bridge, with stumbling steps, Christine had to pass in front and run in order to be home in the Rue Tourlaque before him.

XII

IT was nearly three o'clock when they went to bed that night, with the bitter cold November wind blowing through their little room and the big studio. Christine, breathless from her run, had quickly slipped between the sheets so that he might not know that she had followed him; and Claude, quite overcome, had taken his clothes off, one garment after another, without saying a word. For long months they had been as strangers; until then, however, she had never felt such a barrier between them, such tomb-like coldness.

She struggled for nearly a quarter of an hour against the sleepiness coming over her. She was very tired, and a kind of torpor numbed her; still she would not give way, feeling anxious at leaving him awake. She thus waited every night until he dozed off, so that she herself might afterwards sleep in peace. But he had not extinguished the candle, he lay there with his eyes open, fixed upon its flame. What could he be thinking of? Had he remained in fancy over yonder in the black night, amid the moist atmosphere of the quays, in front of Paris studded with stars like a frosty sky? And what inner conflict, what matter that had to be decided, contracted his face like that? Then, resistance being impossible, she succumbed and glided into the slumber following upon great weariness.

An hour later, the consciousness of something missing, the anguish of uneasiness awoke her with a sudden start. She at once felt the bed beside her, it was already cold: he was no longer there, she had already divined it while asleep. And she was growing alarmed, still but half awake, her head heavy and her ears buzzing, when through the doorway, left ajar, she perceived a ray of light coming from the studio. She then felt reassured, she thought that in a fit of sleeplessness he had gone to fetch some book or other; but at last, as he did not return, she ended by softly rising so as to take a peep. What she beheld quite unsettled her, and kept her standing on the tiled floor, with her feet bare, in such surprise that she did not at first dare to show herself.

Claude, who was in his shirt-sleeves, despite the coldness of the temperature, having merely put on his trousers and slippers in his haste, was standing on the steps in front of his large picture. His palette was lying at his feet, and with one hand he held the candle, while with the other he painted. His eyes were dilated like those of a somnambulist, his gestures were precise and stiff; he stooped every minute to take some colour on his brush, and then rose up, casting a large fantastic shadow on the wall. And there was not a sound; frightful silence reigned in the big dim room.

Christine guessed the truth and shuddered. The besetting worry, made more acute by that hour spent on the Pont des Saints-Peres, had prevented him from sleeping and had brought him once more before his canvas, consumed with a longing to look at it again, in spite of the lateness of the hour. He had, no doubt, only climbed the steps to fill his eyes the nearer. Then, tortured by the sight of some faulty shade, upset by some defect, to such a point that he could not wait for daylight, he had caught up a brush, at first merely wishing to give a simple touch, and then had been carried on from correction to correction, until at last, with the candle in his hand, he painted there like a man in a state of hallucination, amid the pale light which darted hither and thither as he gesticulated. His powerless creative rage had seized hold of him again, he was wearing himself out, oblivious of the hour, oblivious of the world; he wished to infuse life into his work at once.

Ah, what a pitiful sight! And with what tear-drenched eyes did Christine gaze at him! At first she thought of leaving him to that mad work, as a maniac is left to the pleasures of his craziness. He would never finish that picture, that was quite certain now. The more desperately he worked at it, the more incoherent did it become; the colouring had grown heavy and pasty, the drawing was losing shape and showing signs of effort. Even the background and the group of labourers, once so substantial and satisfactory, were getting spoiled; yet he clung to them, he had obstinately determined to finish everything else before repainting the central figure, the nude woman, which remained the dread and the desire of his hours of toil, and which would finish him off whenever he might again try to invest it with life. For months he had not touched it, and this had tranquillised Christine and made her tolerant and compassionate, amid her jealous spite; for as long as he did not return to that feared and desired mistress, she thought that he betrayed her less.

Her feet were freezing on the tiles, and she was turning to get into bed again when a shock brought her back to the door. She had not understood at first, but now at last she saw. With broad curved strokes of his brush, full of colour, Claude was at once wildly and caressingly modelling flesh. He had a fixed grin on his lips, and did not feel the burning candle-grease falling on his fingers, while with silent, passionate see-sawing, his right arm alone moved against the wall, casting black confusion upon it. He was working at the nude woman.

Then Christine opened the door and walked into the studio. An invincible revolt, the anger of a wife buffeted at home, impelled her forward. Yes, he was with that other, he was painting her like a visionary, whom wild craving for truth had brought to the madness of the unreal; and those limbs were being gilded like the columns of a tabernacle, that trunk was becoming a star, shimmering with yellow and red, splendid and unnatural. Such strange nudity—like unto a monstrance gleaming with precious stones and intended for religious adoration—brought her anger to a climax. She had suffered too much, she would not tolerate it.

And yet at first she simply showed herself despairing and supplicating. It was but the mother remonstrating with her big mad boy of an artist that spoke.

'What are you doing there, Claude? Is it reasonable, Claude, to have such ideas? Come to bed, I beg of you, don't stay on those steps where you will catch your death of cold!'

He did not answer; he stooped again to take some more paint on his brush, and made the figure flash with two bright strokes of vermilion.

'Listen to me, Claude, in pity come to me—you know that I love you—you see how anxious you have made me. Come, oh! come, if you don't want me to die of cold and waiting for you.'

With his face haggard, he did not look at her; but while he bedecked a part of the figure with carmine, he grumbled in a husky voice:

'Just leave me alone, will you? I'm working.'

Christine remained silent for a moment. She was drawing herself erect, her eyes began to gleam with fire, rebellion inflated her gentle, charming form. Then she burst forth, with the growl of a slave driven to extremities.

'Well, no, I won't leave you alone! I've had enough of it. I'll tell you what's stifling me, what has been killing me ever since I have known you. Ah! that painting, yes, your painting, she's the murderess who has poisoned my life! I had a presentiment of it on the first day; your painting frightened me as if it were a monster. I found it abominable, execrable; but then, one's cowardly, I loved you too much not to like it also; I ended by growing accustomed to it! But later on, how I suffered!—how it tortured me! For ten years I don't recollect having spent a day without shedding tears. No, leave me! I am easing my mind, I must speak out, since I have found strength enough to do so. For ten years I have been abandoned and crushed every day. Ah! to be nothing more to you, to feel myself cast more and more on one side, to fall to the rank of a servant; and to see that other one, that thief, place herself between you and me and clutch hold of you and triumph and insult me! For dare, yes, dare to say that she hasn't taken possession of you, limb by limb, glided into your brain, your heart, your flesh, everywhere! She holds you like a vice, she feeds on you; in fact, she's your wife, not I. She's the only one you care for! Ah! the cursed wretch, the hussy!'

Claude was now listening to her, in his astonishment at that dolorous outburst; and being but half roused from his exasperated creative dream, he did not as yet very well understand why she was talking to him like that. And at sight of his stupor, the shuddering of a man surprised in a debauch, she flew into a still greater passion; she mounted the steps, tore the candlestick from his hand, and in her turn flashed the light in front of the picture.

'Just look!' she cried, 'just tell me how you have improved matters? It's hideous, it's lamentable and grotesque; you'll end by seeing so yourself. Come, isn't it ugly, isn't it idiotic? You see very well that you are conquered, so why should you persist any longer? There is no sense in it, that's what upsets me. If you can't be a great painter, life, at least, remains to us. Ah! life, life!'

She had placed the candle on the platform of the steps, and as he had gone down, staggering, she sprang off to join him, and they both found themselves below, he crouching on the last step, and she pressing his inert, dangling hands with all her strength.

'Come, there's life! Drive your nightmare away, and let us live, live together. Isn't it too stupid, to be we two together, to be growing old already, and to torture ourselves, and fail in every attempt to find happiness? Oh! the grave will take us soon enough, never fear. Let's try to live, and love one another. Remember Bennecourt! Listen to my dream. I should like to be able to take you away to-morrow. We would go far from this cursed Paris, we would find a quiet spot somewhere, and you would see how pleasant I would make your life; how nice it would be to forget everything together! Of a morning there are strolls in the sunlight, the breakfast which smells nice, the idle afternoon, the evening spent side by side under the lamp! And no more worrying about chimeras, nothing but the delight of living! Doesn't it suffice that I love you, that I adore you, that I am willing to be your servant, your slave, to exist solely for your pleasures? Do you hear, I love you, I love you? there is nothing else, and that is enough—I love you!'

He had freed his hands, and making a gesture of refusal, he said, in a gloomy voice:

'No, it is not enough! I won't go away with you, I won't be happy, I will paint!'

'And I shall die of it, eh? And you will die of it, and we shall end by leaving all our blood and all our tears in it! There's nothing beyond Art, that is the fierce almighty god who strikes us with his thunder, and whom you honour! he may crush us, since he is the master, and you will still bless his name!'

'Yes, I belong to that god, he may do what he pleases with me. I should die if I no longer painted, and I prefer to paint and die of it. Besides, my will is nothing in the matter. Nothing exists beyond art; let the world burst!'

She drew herself up in a fresh spurt of anger. Her voice became harsh and passionate again.

'But I—I am alive, and the women you love are lifeless! Oh! don't say no! I know very well that all those painted women of yours are the only ones you care about! Before I was yours I had already perceived it. Then, for a short time you appeared to love me. It was at that period you told me all that nonsense about your fondness for your creations. You held such shadows in pity when you were with me; but it didn't last. You returned to them, oh! like a maniac returns to his mania. I, though living, no longer existed for you; it was they, the visions, who again became the only realities of your life. What I then endured you never knew, for you are wonderfully ignorant of women. I have lived by your side without your ever understanding me. Yes, I was jealous of those painted creatures. When I posed to you, only one idea lent me the courage that I needed. I wanted to fight them, I hoped to win you back; but you granted me nothing, not even a kiss on my shoulder! Oh, God! how ashamed I sometimes felt! What grief I had to force back at finding myself thus disdained and thus betrayed!'

She continued boldly, she spoke out freely—she, so strangely compounded of passion and modesty. And she was not mistaken in her jealousy when she accused his art of being responsible for his neglect of herself. At the bottom of it all, there was the theory which he had repeated a hundred times in her presence: genius should be chaste, an artist's only spouse should be his work.

'You repulse me,' she concluded violently; 'you draw back from me as if I displeased you! And you love what? A nothing, a mere semblance, a little dust, some colour spread upon a canvas! But, once more, look at her, look at your woman up yonder! See what a monster you have made of her in your madness! Are there any women like that? Have any women golden limbs, and flowers on their bodies? Wake up, open your eyes, return to life again!'

Claude, obeying the imperious gesture with which she pointed to the picture, had now risen and was looking. The candle, which had remained upon the platform of the steps, illumined the nude woman like a taper in front of an altar, whilst the whole room around remained plunged in darkness. He was at length awakening from his dream, and the woman thus seen from below, at a distance of a few paces, filled him with stupefaction. Who had just painted that idol of some unknown religion? Who had wrought her of metals, marbles, and gems? Was it he who had unconsciously created that symbol of insatiable passion, that unhuman presentment of flesh, which had become transformed into gold and diamonds under his fingers, in his vain effort to make it live? He gasped and felt afraid of his work, trembling at the thought of that sudden plunge into the infinite, and understanding at last that it had become impossible for him even to depict Reality, despite his long effort to conquer and remould it, making it yet more real with his human hands.

'You see! you see!' Christine repeated, victoriously. And he, in a very low voice, stammered:

'Oh! what have I done? Is it impossible to create, then? Haven't our hands the power to create beings?'

She felt that he was giving way, and she caught him in her arms:

'But why all this folly?—why think of anyone but me—I who love you? You took me for your model, but what was the use, say? Are those paintings of yours worth me? They are frightful, they are as stiff, as cold as corpses. But I am alive, and I love you!'

She seemed to be at that moment the very incarnation of passionate love. He turned and looked at her, and little by little he returned her embrace; she was softening him and conquering him.

'Listen!' she continued. 'I know that you had a frightful thought; yes, I never dared to speak to you about it, because one must never bring on misfortune; but I no longer sleep of a night, you frighten me. This evening I followed you to that bridge which I hate, and I trembled, oh! I thought that it was all over—that I had lost you. Oh, God! what would become of me? I need you—you surely do not wish to kill me! Let us live and love one another—yes, love one another!'

Then, in the emotion caused him by her infinite passion and grief, he yielded. He pressed her to him, sobbing and stammering:

'It is true I had that frightful thought—I should have done it, and I only resisted on thinking of that unfinished picture. But can I still live if work will have nothing more to do with me? How can I live after that, after what's there, what I spoilt just now?'

'I will love you, and you will live.'

'Ah! you will never love me enough—I know myself. Something which does not exist would be necessary—something which would make me forget everything. You were already unable to change me. You cannot accomplish a miracle!'

Then, as she protested and kissed him passionately, he went on: 'Well, yes, save me! Yes, save me, if you don't want me to kill myself! Lull me, annihilate me, so that I may become your thing, slave enough, small enough to dwell under your feet, in your slippers. Ah! to live only on your perfume, to obey you like a dog, to eat and sleep—if I could, if I only could!'

She raised a cry of victory: 'At last you are mine! There is only I left, the other is quite dead!'

And she dragged him from the execrated painting, she carried him off triumphantly. The candle, now nearly consumed, flared up for a minute behind them on the steps, before the big painting, and then went out. It was victory, yes, but could it last?

Daylight was about to break, and Christine lay asleep beside Claude. She was breathing softly, and a smile played upon her lips. He had closed his eyes; and yet, despite himself, he opened them afresh and gazed into the darkness. Sleep fled from him, and confused ideas again ascended to his brain. As the dawn appeared, yellowishly dirty, like a splash of liquid mud on the window-panes, he started, fancying that he heard a loud voice calling to him from the far end of the studio. Then, irresistibly, despite a few brief hours' forgetfulness, all his old thoughts returned, overflowing and torturing him, hollowing his cheeks and contracting his jaws in the disgust he felt for mankind. Two wrinkles imparted intense bitterness to the expression of his face, which looked like the wasted countenance of an old man. And suddenly the loud voice from the far end of the studio imperiously summoned him a second time. Then he quite made up his mind: it was all over, he suffered too much, he could no longer live, since everything was a lie, since there was nothing left upon earth. Love! what was it? Nought but a passing illusion. This thought at last mastered him, possessed him entirely; and soon the craving for nothingness as his only refuge came on him stronger than ever. At first he let Christine's head slip down from his shoulder on which it rested. And then, as a third summons rang out in his mind, he rose and went to the studio, saying:

'Yes, yes, I'm coming,'

The sky did not clear, it still remained dirty and mournful—it was one of those lugubrious winter dawns; and an hour later Christine herself awoke with a great chilly shiver. She did not understand at first. How did it happen that she was alone? Then she remembered: she had fallen asleep with her cheek against his. How was it then that he had left her? Where could he be? Suddenly, amid her torpor, she sprang out of bed and ran into the studio. Good God! had he returned to the other then? Had the other seized hold of him again, when she herself fancied that she had conquered him for ever?

She saw nothing at the first glance she took; in the cold and murky morning twilight the studio seemed to her to be deserted. But whilst she was tranquillising herself at seeing nobody there, she raised her eyes to the canvas, and a terrible cry leapt from her gaping mouth:

'Claude! oh, Claude!'

Claude had hanged himself from the steps in front of his spoilt work. He had simply taken one of the cords which held the frame to the wall, and had mounted the platform, so as to fasten the rope to an oaken crosspiece, which he himself had one day nailed to the uprights to consolidate them. Then from up above he had leapt into space. He was hanging there in his shirt, with his feet bare, looking horrible, with his black tongue protruding, and his bloodshot eyes starting from their orbits; he seemed to have grown frightfully tall in his motionless stiffness, and his face was turned towards the picture, close to the nude woman, as if he had wished to infuse his soul into her with his last gasp, and as if he were still looking at her with his expressionless eyes.

Christine, however, remained erect, quite overwhelmed with the grief, fright, and anger which dilated her body. Only a continuous howl came from her throat. She opened her arms, stretched them towards the picture, and clenched both hands.

'Oh, Claude! oh, Claude!' she gasped at last, 'she has taken you back—the hussy has killed you, killed you, killed you!'

Then her legs gave way. She span round and fell all of a heap upon the tiled flooring. Her excessive suffering had taken all the blood from her heart, and, fainting away, she lay there, as if she were dead, like a white rag, miserable, done for, crushed beneath the fierce sovereignty of Art. Above her the nude woman rose radiant in her symbolic idol's brightness; painting triumphed, alone immortal and erect, even when mad.

At nine o'clock on the Monday morning, when Sandoz, after the formalities and delay occasioned by the suicide, arrived in the Rue Tourlaque for the funeral, he found only a score of people on the footway. Despite his great grief, he had been running about for three days, compelled to attend to everything. At first, as Christine had been picked up half dead, he had been obliged to have her carried to the Hopital de Lariboisiere; then he had gone from the municipal offices, to the undertaker's and the church, paying everywhere, and full of indifference so far as that went, since the priests were willing to pray over that corpse with a black circle round its neck. Among the people who were waiting he as yet only perceived some neighbours, together with a few inquisitive folk; while other people peered out of the house windows and whispered together, excited by the tragedy. Claude's friends would, no doubt, soon come. He, Sandoz, had not been able to write to any members of the family, as he did not know their addresses. However, he retreated into the background on the arrival of two relatives, whom three lines in the newspapers had roused from the forgetfulness in which Claude himself, no doubt, had left them. There was an old female cousin,* with the equivocal air of a dealer in second-hand goods, and a male cousin, of the second degree, a wealthy man, decorated with the Legion of Honour, and owning one of the large Paris drapery shops. He showed himself good-naturedly condescending in his elegance, and desirous of displaying an enlightened taste for art. The female cousin at once went upstairs, turned round the studio, sniffed at all the bare wretchedness, and then walked down again, with a hard mouth, as if she were irritated at having taken the trouble to come. The second cousin, on the contrary, drew himself up and walked first behind the hearse, filling the part of chief mourner with proud and pleasant fitness.

* Madame Sidonie, who figures in M. Zola's novel, 'La Curee.'
The male cousin, mentioned immediately afterwards, is Octave
Mouret, the leading character of 'Pot-Bouille' and 'Au Bonheur
des Dames.'—ED.

As the procession was starting off, Bongrand came up, and, after shaking hands with Sandoz, remained beside him. He was gloomy, and, glancing at the fifteen or twenty strangers who followed, he murmured:

'Ah! poor chap! What! are there only we two?'

Dubuche was at Cannes with his children. Jory and Fagerolles kept away, the former hating the deceased and the latter being too busy. Mahoudeau alone caught the party up at the rise of the Rue Lepic, and he explained that Gagniere must have missed the train.

The hearse slowly ascended the steep thoroughfare which winds round the flanks of the height of Montmartre; and now and then cross streets, sloping downward, sudden gaps amid the houses, showed one the immensity of Paris as deep and as broad as a sea. When the party arrived in front of the Church of St. Pierre, and the coffin was carried up the steps, it overtopped the great city for a moment. There was a grey wintry sky overhead, large masses of clouds swept along, carried away by an icy wind, and in the mist Paris seemed to expand, to become endless, filling the horizon with threatening billows. The poor fellow who had wished to conquer it, and had broken his neck in his fruitless efforts, now passed in front of it, nailed under an oaken board, returning to the earth like one of the city's muddy waves.

On leaving the church the female cousin disappeared, Mahoudeau likewise; while the second cousin again took his position behind the hearse. Seven other unknown persons decided to follow, and they started for the new cemetery of St. Ouen, to which the populace has given the disquieting and lugubrious name of Cayenne. There were ten mourners in all.

'Well, we two shall be the only old friends,' repeated Bongrand as he walked on beside Sandoz.

The procession, preceded by the mourning coach in which the priest and the choirboy were seated, now descended the other side of the height, along winding streets as precipitous as mountain paths. The horses of the hearse slipped over the slimy pavement; one could hear the wheels jolting noisily. Right behind, the ten mourners took short and careful steps, trying to avoid the puddles, and being so occupied with the difficulty of the descent that they refrained from speaking. But at the bottom of the Rue du Ruisseau, when they reached the Porte de Clignancourt and the vast open spaces, where the boulevard running round the city, the circular railway, the talus and moat of the fortifications are displayed to view, there came sighs of relief, a few words were exchanged, and the party began to straggle.

Sandoz and Bongrand by degrees found themselves behind all the others, as if they had wished to isolate themselves from those folk whom they had never previously seen. Just as the hearse was passing the city gate, the painter leant towards the novelist.

'And the little woman, what is going to be done with her?'

'Ah! how dreadful it is!' replied Sandoz. 'I went to see her yesterday at the hospital. She has brain fever. The house doctor maintains that they will save her, but that she will come out of it ten years older and without any strength. Do you know that she had come to such a point that she no longer knew how to spell. Such a crushing fall, a young lady abased to the level of a drudge! Yes, if we don't take care of her like a cripple, she will end by becoming a scullery-maid somewhere.'

'And not a copper, of course?'

'Not a copper. I thought I should find the studies Claude made from nature for his large picture, those superb studies which he afterwards turned to such poor account. But I ferreted everywhere; he gave everything away; people robbed him. No, nothing to sell, not a canvas that could be turned to profit, nothing but that huge picture, which I demolished and burnt with my own hands, and right gladly, I assure you, even as one avenges oneself.'

They became silent for a moment. The broad road leading to St. Ouen stretched out quite straight as far as the eye could reach; and over the plain went the procession, pitifully small, lost, as it were, on that highway, along which there flowed a river of mud. A line of palings bordered it on either side, waste land extended both to right and left, while afar off one only saw some factory chimneys and a few lofty white houses, standing alone, obliquely to the road. They passed through the Clignancourt fete, with booths, circuses, and roundabouts on either side, all shivering in the abandonment of winter, empty dancing cribs, mouldy swings, and a kind of stage homestead, 'The Picardy Farm,' looking dismally sad between its broken fences.

'Ah! his old canvases,' resumed Bongrand, 'the things he had at the Quai de Bourbon, do you remember them? There were some extraordinary bits among them. The landscapes he brought back from the south and the academy studies he painted at Boutin's—a girl's legs and a woman's trunk, for instance. Oh, that trunk! Old Malgras must have it. A magisterial study it was, which not one of our "young masters" could paint. Yes, yes, the fellow was no fool—simply a great painter.'

'When I think,' said Sandoz, 'that those little humbugs of the School and the press accused him of idleness and ignorance, repeating one after the other that he had always refused to learn his art. Idle! good heavens! why, I have seen him faint with fatigue after sittings ten hours long; he gave his whole life to his work, and killed himself in his passion for toil! And they call him ignorant—how idiotic! They will never understand that the individual gift which a man brings in his nature is superior to all acquired knowledge. Delacroix also was ignorant of his profession in their eyes, simply because he could not confine himself to hard and fast rules! Ah! the ninnies, the slavish pupils who are incapable of painting anything incorrectly!'

He took a few steps in silence, and then he added:

'A heroic worker, too—a passionate observer whose brain was crammed with science—the temperament of a great artist endowed with admirable gifts. And to think that he leaves nothing, nothing!'

'Absolutely nothing, not a canvas,' declared Bongrand. 'I know nothing of his but rough drafts, sketches, notes carelessly jotted down, as it were, all that artistic paraphernalia which can't be submitted to the public. Yes, indeed, it is really a dead man, dead completely, who is about to be lowered into the grave.'

However, the painter and the novelist now had to hasten their steps, for they had got far behind the others while talking; and the hearse, after rolling past taverns and shops full of tombstones and crosses, was turning to the right into the short avenue leading to the cemetery. They overtook it, and passed through the gateway with the little procession. The priest in his surplice and the choirboy carrying the holy water receiver, who had both alighted from the mourning coach, walked on ahead.

It was a large flat cemetery, still in its youth, laid out by rule and line in the suburban waste land, and divided into squares by broad symmetrical paths. A few raised tombs bordered the principal avenues, but most of the graves, already very numerous, were on a level with the soil. They were hastily arranged temporary sepulchres, for five-year grants were the only ones to be obtained, and families hesitated to go to any serious expense. Thus, the stones sinking into the ground for lack of foundations, the scrubby evergreens which had not yet had time to grow, all the provisional slop kind of mourning that one saw there, imparted to that vast field of repose a look of poverty and cold, clean, dismal bareness like that of a barracks or a hospital. There was not a corner to be found recalling the graveyard nooks sung of in the ballads of the romantic period, not one leafy turn quivering with mystery, not a single large tomb speaking of pride and eternity. You were in the new style of Paris cemetery, where everything is set out straight and duly numbered—the cemetery of democratic times, where the dead seem to slumber at the bottom of an office drawer, after filing past one by one, as people do at a fete under the eyes of the police, so as to avoid obstruction.

'Dash it!' muttered Bongrand, 'it isn't lively here.'

'Why not?' asked Sandoz. 'It's commodious; there is plenty of air. And even although there is no sun, see what a pretty colour it all has.'

In fact, under the grey sky of that November morning, in the penetrating quiver of the wind, the low tombs, laden with garlands and crowns of beads, assumed soft tints of charming delicacy. There were some quite white, and others all black, according to the colour of the beads. But the contrast lost much of its force amid the pale green foliage of the dwarfish trees. Poor families exhausted their affection for the dear departed in decking those five-year grants; there were piles of crowns and blooming flowers—freshly brought there on the recent Day of the Dead. Only the cut flowers had as yet faded, between their paper collars. Some crowns of yellow immortelles shone out like freshly chiselled gold. But the beads predominated to such a degree that at the first glance there seemed to be nothing else; they gushed forth everywhere, hiding the inscriptions and covering the stones and railings. There were beads forming hearts, beads in festoons and medallions, beads framing either ornamental designs or objects under glass, such as velvet pansies, wax hands entwined, satin bows, or, at times, even photographs of women—yellow, faded, cheap photographs, showing poor, ugly, touching faces that smiled awkwardly.

As the hearse proceeded along the Avenue du Rond Point, Sandoz, whose last remark—since it was of an artistic nature—had brought him back to Claude, resumed the conversation, saying:

'This is a cemetery which he would have understood, he who was so mad on modern things. No doubt he suffered physically, wasted away by the over-severe lesion that is so often akin to genius, "three grains too little, or three grains too much, of some substance in the brain," as he himself said when he reproached his parents for his constitution. However, his disorder was not merely a personal affair, he was the victim of our period. Yes, our generation has been soaked in romanticism, and we have remained impregnated with it. It is in vain that we wash ourselves and take baths of reality, the stain is obstinate, and all the scrubbing in the world won't take it away.'

Bongrand smiled. 'Oh! as for romanticism,' said he, 'I'm up to my ears in it. It has fed my art, and, indeed, I'm impenitent. If it be true that my final impotence is due to that, well, after all, what does it matter? I can't deny the religion of my artistic life. However, your remark is quite correct; you other fellows, you are rebellious sons. Claude, for instance, with his big nude woman amid the quays, that extravagant symbol—'

'Ah, that woman!' interrupted Sandoz, 'it was she who throttled him! If you knew how he worshipped her! I was never able to cast her out of him. And how can one possibly have clear perception, a solid, properly-balanced brain when such phantasmagoria sprouts forth from your skull? Though coming after yours, our generation is too imaginative to leave healthy work behind it. Another generation, perhaps two, will be required before people will be able to paint and write logically, with the high, pure simplicity of truth. Truth, nature alone, is the right basis, the necessary guide, outside of which madness begins; and the toiler needn't be afraid of flattening his work, his temperament is there, which will always carry him sufficiently away. Does any one dream of denying personality, the involuntary thumb-stroke which deforms whatever we touch and constitutes our poor creativeness?'

However, he turned his head, and involuntarily added:

'Hallo! what's burning? Are they lighting bonfires here?'

The procession had turned on reaching the Rond Point, where the ossuary was situated—the common vault gradually filled with all the remnants removed from the graves, and the stone slab of which, in the centre of a circular lawn, disappeared under a heap of wreaths, deposited there by the pious relatives of those who no longer had an individual resting-place. And, as the hearse rolled slowly to the left in transversal Avenue No. 2, there had come a sound of crackling, and thick smoke had risen above the little plane trees bordering the path. Some distance ahead, as the party approached, they could see a large pile of earthy things beginning to burn, and they ended by understanding. The fire was lighted at the edge of a large square patch of ground, which had been dug up in broad parallel furrows, so as to remove the coffins before allotting the soil to other corpses; just as the peasant turns the stubble over before sowing afresh. The long empty furrows seemed to yawn, the mounds of rich soil seemed to be purifying under the broad grey sky; and the fire thus burning in that corner was formed of the rotten wood of the coffins that had been removed—slit, broken boards, eaten into by the earth, often reduced to a ruddy humus, and gathered together in an enormous pile. They broke up with faint detonations, and being damp with human mud, they refused to flame, and merely smoked with growing intensity. Large columns of the smoke rose into the pale sky, and were beaten down by the November wind, and torn into ruddy shreds, which flew across the low tombs of quite one half of the cemetery.

Sandoz and Bongrand had looked at the scene without saying a word. Then, having passed the fire, the former resumed:

'No, he did not prove to be the man of the formula he laid down. I mean that his genius was not clear enough to enable him to set that formula erect and impose it upon the world by a definite masterpiece. And now see how other fellows scatter their efforts around him, after him! They go no farther than roughing off, they give us mere hasty impressions, and not one of them seems to have strength enough to become the master who is awaited. Isn't it irritating, this new notion of light, this passion for truth carried as far as scientific analysis, this evolution begun with so much originality, and now loitering on the way, as it were, falling into the hands of tricksters, and never coming to a head, simply because the necessary man isn't born? But pooh! the man will be born; nothing is ever lost, light must be.'

'Who knows? not always,' said Bongrand. 'Life miscarries, like everything else. I listen to you, you know, but I'm a despairer. I am dying of sadness, and I feel that everything else is dying. Ah! yes, there is something unhealthy in the atmosphere of the times—this end of a century is all demolition, a litter of broken monuments, and soil that has been turned over and over a hundred times, the whole exhaling a stench of death! Can anybody remain in good health amid all that? One's nerves become unhinged, the great neurosis is there, art grows unsettled, there is general bustling, perfect anarchy, all the madness of self-love at bay. Never have people quarrelled more and seen less clearly than since it is pretended that one knows everything.'

Sandoz, who had grown pale, watched the large ruddy coils of smoke rolling in the wind.

'It was fated,' he mused in an undertone. 'Our excessive activity and pride of knowledge were bound to cast us back into doubt. This century, which has already thrown so much light over the world, was bound to finish amid the threat of a fresh flow of darkness—yes, our discomfort comes from that! Too much has been promised, too much has been hoped for; people have looked forward to the conquest and explanation of everything, and now they growl impatiently. What! don't things go quicker than that? What! hasn't science managed to bring us absolute certainty, perfect happiness, in a hundred years? Then what is the use of going on, since one will never know everything, and one's bread will always be as bitter? It is as if the century had become bankrupt, as if it had failed; pessimism twists people's bowels, mysticism fogs their brains; for we have vainly swept phantoms away with the light of analysis, the supernatural has resumed hostilities, the spirit of the legends rebels and wants to conquer us, while we are halting with fatigue and anguish. Ah! I certainly don't affirm anything; I myself am tortured. Only it seems to me that this last convulsion of the old religious terrors was to be foreseen. We are not the end, we are but a transition, a beginning of something else. It calms me and does me good to believe that we are marching towards reason, and the substantiality of science.'

His voice had become husky with emotion, and he added:

'That is, unless madness plunges us, topsy-turvy, into night again, and we all go off throttled by the ideal, like our old friend who sleeps there between his four boards.'

The hearse was leaving transversal Avenue No. 2 to turn, on the right, into lateral Avenue No. 3, and the painter, without speaking, called the novelist's attention to a square plot of graves, beside which the procession was now passing.

There was here a children's cemetery, nothing but children's tombs, stretching far away in orderly fashion, separated at regular intervals by narrow paths, and looking like some infantile city of death. There were tiny little white crosses, tiny little white railings, disappearing almost beneath an efflorescence of white and blue wreaths, on a level with the soil; and that peaceful field of repose, so soft in colour, with the bluish tint of milk about it, seemed to have been made flowery by all the childhood lying in the earth. The crosses recorded various ages, two years, sixteen months, five months. One poor little cross, destitute of any railing, was out of line, having been set up slantingly across a path, and it simply bore the words: 'Eugenie, three days.' Scarcely to exist as yet, and withal to sleep there already, alone, on one side, like the children who on festive occasions dine at a little side table!

However, the hearse had at last stopped, in the middle of the avenue; and when Sandoz saw the grave ready at the corner of the next division, in front of the cemetery of the little ones, he murmured tenderly:

'Ah! my poor old Claude, with your big child's heart, you will be in your place beside them.'

The under-bearers removed the coffin from the hearse. The priest, who looked surly, stood waiting in the wind; some sextons were there with their shovels. Three neighbours had fallen off on the road, the ten had dwindled into seven. The second cousin, who had been holding his hat in his hand since leaving the church, despite the frightful weather, now drew nearer. All the others uncovered, and the prayers were about to begin, when a loud piercing whistle made everybody look up.

Beyond this corner of the cemetery as yet untenanted, at the end of lateral Avenue No. 3, a train was passing along the high embankment of the circular railway which overlooked the graveyard. The grassy slope rose up, and a number of geometrical lines, as it were, stood out blackly against the grey sky; there were telegraph-posts, connected by thin wires, a superintendent's box, and a red signal plate, the only bright throbbing speck visible. When the train rolled past, with its thunder-crash, one plainly distinguished, as on the transparency of a shadow play, the silhouettes of the carriages, even the heads of the passengers showing in the light gaps left by the windows. And the line became clear again, showing like a simple ink stroke across the horizon; while far away other whistles called and wailed unceasingly, shrill with anger, hoarse with suffering, or husky with distress. Then a guard's horn resounded lugubriously.

'Revertitur in terram suam unde erat,' recited the priest, who had opened a book and was making haste.

But he was not heard, for a large engine had come up puffing, and was manoeuvring backwards and forwards near the funeral party. It had a loud thick voice, a guttural whistle, which was intensely mournful. It came and went, panting; and seen in profile it looked like a heavy monster. Suddenly, moreover, it let off steam, with all the furious blowing of a tempest.

'Requiescat in pace,' said the priest.

'Amen,' replied the choirboy.

But the words were again lost amid the lashing, deafening detonation, which was prolonged with the continuous violence of a fusillade.

Bongrand, quite exasperated, turned towards the engine. It became silent, fortunately, and every one felt relieved. Tears had risen to the eyes of Sandoz, who had already been stirred by the words which had involuntarily passed his lips, while he walked behind his old comrade, talking as if they had been having one of their familiar chats of yore; and now it seemed to him as if his youth were about to be consigned to the earth. It was part of himself, the best part, his illusions and his enthusiasm, which the sextons were taking away to lower into the depths. At that terrible moment an accident occurred which increased his grief. It had rained so hard during the preceding days, and the ground was so soft, that a sudden subsidence of soil took place. One of the sextons had to jump into the grave and empty it with his shovel with a slow rhythmical movement. There was no end to the matter, the funeral seemed likely to last for ever amid the impatience of the priest and the interest of the four neighbours who had followed on to the end, though nobody could say why. And up above, on the embankment, the engine had begun manoeuvring again, retreating and howling at each turn of its wheels, its fire-box open the while, and lighting up the gloomy scene with a rain of sparks.

At last the pit was emptied, the coffin lowered, and the aspergillus passed round. It was all over. The second cousin, standing erect, did the honours with his correct, pleasant air, shaking hands with all these people whom he had never previously seen, in memory of the relative whose name he had not remembered the day before.

'That linen-draper is a very decent fellow,' said Bongrand, who was swallowing his tears.

'Quite so,' replied Sandoz, sobbing.

All the others were going off, the surplices of the priest and the choirboy disappeared between the green trees, while the straggling neighbours loitered reading the inscriptions on the surrounding tombs.

Then Sandoz, making up his mind to leave the grave, which was now half filled, resumed:

'We alone shall have known him. There is nothing left of him, not even a name!'

'He is very happy,' said Bongrand; 'he has no picture on hand, in the earth where he sleeps. It is as well to go off as to toil as we do merely to turn out infirm children, who always lack something, their legs or their head, and who don't live.'

'Yes, one must really be wanting in pride to resign oneself to turning out merely approximate work and resorting to trickery with life. I, who bestow every care on my books—I despise myself, for I feel that, despite all my efforts, they are incomplete and untruthful.'

With pale faces, they slowly went away, side by side, past the children's white tombs, the novelist then in all the strength of his toil and fame, the painter declining but covered with glory.

'There, at least, lies one who was logical and brave,' continued Sandoz; 'he confessed his powerlessness and killed himself.'

'That's true,' said Bongrand; 'if we didn't care so much for our skins we should all do as he has done, eh?'

'Well, yes; since we cannot create anything, since we are but feeble copyists, we might as well put an end to ourselves at once.'

Again they found themselves before the burning pile of old rotten coffins, now fully alight, sweating and crackling; but there were still no flames to be seen, the smoke alone had increased—a thick acrid smoke, which the wind carried along in whirling coils, so that it now covered the whole cemetery as with a cloud of mourning.

'Dash it! Eleven o'clock!' said Bongrand, after pulling out his watch. 'I must get home again.'

Sandoz gave an exclamation of surprise:

'What, already eleven?'

Over the low-lying graves, over the vast bead-flowered field of death, so formal of aspect and so cold, he cast a long look of despair, his eyes still bedimmed by his tears. And then he added:

'Let's go to work.'

THE END

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Downfall, by Emile Zola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Downfall

Author: Emile Zola

Translator: E. P. Robins

Release Date: May 29, 2009 [EBook #13851]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOWNFALL ***

Produced by Dagny, John Bickers, and David Widger

THE DOWNFALL

(La Debacle) (The Smash-up)

By Emile Zola

Translated By E. P. Robins

Contents

THE DOWNFALL

PART FIRST

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

PART SECOND

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

PART THIRD

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

THE DOWNFALL

PART FIRST

I.

In the middle of the broad, fertile plain that stretches away in the direction of the Rhine, a mile and a quarter from Mulhausen, the camp was pitched. In the fitful light of the overcast August day, beneath the lowering sky that was filled with heavy drifting clouds, the long lines of squat white shelter-tents seemed to cower closer to the ground, and the muskets, stacked at regular intervals along the regimental fronts, made little spots of brightness, while over all the sentries with loaded pieces kept watch and ward, motionless as statues, straining their eyes to pierce the purplish mists that lay on the horizon and showed where the mighty river ran.

It was about five o'clock when they had come in from Belfort; it was now eight, and the men had only just received their rations. There could be no distribution of wood, however, the wagons having gone astray, and it had therefore been impossible for them to make fires and warm their soup. They had consequently been obliged to content themselves as best they might, washing down their dry hard-tack with copious draughts of brandy, a proceeding that was not calculated greatly to help their tired legs after their long march. Near the canteen, however, behind the stacks of muskets, there were two soldiers pertinaciously endeavoring to elicit a blaze from a small pile of green wood, the trunks of some small trees that they had chopped down with their sword-bayonets, and that were obstinately determined not to burn. The cloud of thick, black smoke, rising slowly in the evening air, added to the general cheerlessness of the scene.

There were but twelve thousand men there, all of the 7th corps that the general, Felix Douay, had with him at the time. The 1st division had been ordered to Froeschwiller the day before; the 3d was still at Lyons, and it had been decided to leave Belfort and hurry to the front with the 2d division, the reserve artillery, and an incomplete division of cavalry. Fires had been seen at Lorrach. The sous-prefet at Schelestadt had sent a telegram announcing that the Prussians were preparing to pass the Rhine at Markolsheim. The general did not like his unsupported position on the extreme right, where he was cut off from communication with the other corps, and his movement in the direction of the frontier had been accelerated by the intelligence he had received the day before of the disastrous surprise at Wissembourg. Even if he should not be called on to face the enemy on his own front, he felt that he was likely at any moment to be ordered to march to the relief of the 1st corps. There must be fighting going on, away down the river near Froeschwiller, on that dark and threatening Saturday, that ominous 6th of August; there was premonition of it in the sultry air, and the stray puffs of wind passed shudderingly over the camp as if fraught with tidings of impending evil. And for two days the division had believed that it was marching forth to battle; the men had expected to find the Prussians in their front, at the termination of their forced march from Belfort to Mulhausen.

The day was drawing to an end, and from a remote corner of the camp the rattling drums and the shrill bugles sounded retreat, the sound dying away faintly in the distance on the still air of evening. Jean Macquart, who had been securing the tent and driving the pegs home, rose to his feet. When it began to be rumored that there was to be war he had left Rognes, the scene of the bloody drama in which he had lost his wife, Francoise and the acres that she brought him; he had re-enlisted at the age of thirty-nine, and been assigned to the 106th of the line, of which they were at that time filling up the cadres, with his old rank of corporal, and there were moments when he could not help wondering how it ever came about that he, who after Solferino had been so glad to quit the service and cease endangering his own and other people's lives, was again wearing the capote of the infantry man. But what is a man to do, when he has neither trade nor calling, neither wife, house, nor home, and his heart is heavy with mingled rage and sorrow? As well go and have a shot at the enemy, if they come where they are not wanted. And he remembered his old battle cry: Ah! bon sang! if he had no longer heart for honest toil, he would go and defend her, his country, the old land of France!

When Jean was on his legs he cast a look about the camp, where the summons of the drums and bugles, taken up by one command after another, produced a momentary bustle, the conclusion of the business of the day. Some men were running to take their places in the ranks, while others, already half asleep, arose and stretched their stiff limbs with an air of exasperated weariness. He stood waiting patiently for roll-call, with that cheerful imperturbability and determination to make the best of everything that made him the good soldier that he was. His comrades were accustomed to say of him that if he had only had education he would have made his mark. He could just barely read and write, and his aspirations did not rise even so high as to a sergeantcy. Once a peasant, always a peasant.

But he found something to interest him in the fire of green wood that was still smoldering and sending up dense volumes of smoke, and he stepped up to speak to the two men who were busying themselves over it, Loubet and Lapoulle, both members of his squad.

"Quit that! You are stifling the whole camp."

Loubet, a lean, active fellow and something of a wag, replied:

"It will burn, corporal; I assure you it will—why don't you blow, you!"

And by way of encouragement he bestowed a kick on Lapoulle, a colossus of a man, who was on his knees puffing away with might and main, his cheeks distended till they were like wine-skins, his face red and swollen, and his eyes starting from their orbits and streaming with tears. Two other men of the squad, Chouteau and Pache, the former stretched at length upon his back like a man who appreciates the delight of idleness, and the latter engrossed in the occupation of putting a patch on his trousers, laughed long and loud at the ridiculous expression on the face of their comrade, the brutish Lapoulle.

Jean did not interfere to check their merriment. Perhaps the time was at hand when they would not have much occasion for laughter, and he, with all his seriousness and his humdrum, literal way of taking things, did not consider that it was part of his duty to be melancholy, preferring rather to close his eyes or look the other way when his men were enjoying themselves. But his attention was attracted to a second group not far away, another soldier of his squad, Maurice Levasseur, who had been conversing earnestly for near an hour with a civilian, a red-haired gentleman who was apparently about thirty-six years old, with an intelligent, honest face, illuminated by a pair of big protruding blue eyes, evidently the eyes of a near-sighted man. They had been joined by an artilleryman, a quartermaster-sergeant from the reserves, a knowing, self-satisfied-looking person with brown mustache and imperial, and the three stood talking like old friends, unmindful of what was going on about them.

In the kindness of his heart, in order to save them a reprimand, if not something worse, Jean stepped up to them and said:

"You had better be going, sir. It is past retreat, and if the lieutenant should see you—" Maurice did not permit him to conclude his sentence:

"Stay where you are, Weiss," he said, and turning to the corporal, curtly added: "This gentleman is my brother-in-law. He has a pass from the colonel, who is acquainted with him."

What business had he to interfere with other people's affairs, that peasant whose hands were still reeking of the manure-heap? He was a lawyer, had been admitted to the bar the preceding autumn, had enlisted as a volunteer and been received into the 106th without the formality of passing through the recruiting station, thanks to the favor of the colonel; it was true that he had condescended to carry a musket, but from the very start he had been conscious of a feeling of aversion and rebellion toward that ignorant clown under whose command he was.

"Very well," Jean tranquilly replied; "don't blame me if your friend finds his way to the guardhouse."

Thereon he turned and went away, assured that Maurice had not been lying, for the colonel, M. de Vineuil, with his commanding, high-bred manner and thick white mustache bisecting his long yellow face, passed by just then and saluted Weiss and the soldier with a smile. The colonel pursued his way at a good round pace toward a farmhouse that was visible off to the right among the plum trees, a few hundred feet away, where the staff had taken up their quarters for the night. No one could say whether the general commanding the 7th corps was there or not; he was in deep affliction on account of the death of his brother, slain in the action at Wissembourg. The brigadier, however, Bourgain-Desfeuilles, in whose command the 106th was, was certain to be there, brawling as loud as ever, and trundling his fat body about on his short, pudgy legs, with his red nose and rubicund face, vouchers for the good dinners he had eaten, and not likely ever to become top-heavy by reason of excessive weight in his upper story. There was a stir and movement about the farmhouse that seemed to be momentarily increasing; couriers and orderlies were arriving and departing every minute; they were awaiting there, with feverish anxiety of impatience, the belated dispatches which should advise them of the result of the battle that everyone, all that long August day, had felt to be imminent. Where had it been fought? what had been the issue? As night closed in and darkness shrouded the scene, a foreboding sense of calamity seemed to settle down upon the orchard, upon the scattered stacks of grain about the stables, and spread, and envelop them in waves of inky blackness. It was said, also, that a Prussian spy had been caught roaming about the camp, and that he had been taken to the house to be examined by the general. Perhaps Colonel de Vineuil had received a telegram of some kind, that he was in such great haste.

Meantime Maurice had resumed his conversation with his brother-in-law Weiss and his cousin Honore Fouchard, the quartermaster-sergeant. Retreat, commencing in the remote distance, then gradually swelling in volume as it drew near with its blare and rattle, reached them, passed them, and died away in the solemn stillness of the twilight; they seemed to be quite unconscious of it. The young man was grandson to a hero of the Grand Army, and had first seen the light at Chene-Populeux, where his father, not caring to tread the path of glory, had held an ill-paid position as collector of taxes. His mother, a peasant, had died in giving him birth, him and his twin sister Henriette, who at an early age had become a second mother to him, and that he was now what he was, a private in the ranks, was owing entirely to his own imprudence, the headlong dissipation of a weak and enthusiastic nature, his money squandered and his substance wasted on women, cards, the thousand follies of the all-devouring minotaur, Paris, when he had concluded his law studies there and his relatives had impoverished themselves to make a gentleman of him. His conduct had brought his father to the grave; his sister, when he had stripped her of her little all, had been so fortunate as to find a husband in that excellent young fellow Weiss, who had long held the position of accountant in the great sugar refinery at Chene-Populeux, and was now foreman for M. Delaherche, one of the chief cloth manufacturers of Sedan. And Maurice, always cheered and encouraged when he saw a prospect of amendment in himself, and equally disheartened when his good resolves failed him and he relapsed, generous and enthusiastic but without steadiness of purpose, a weathercock that shifted with every varying breath of impulse, now believed that experience had done its work and taught him the error of his ways. He was a small, light-complexioned man, with a high, well-developed forehead, small nose, and retreating chin, and a pair of attractive gray eyes in a face that indicated intelligence; there were times when his mind seemed to lack balance.

Weiss, on the eve of the commencement of hostilities, had found that there were family matters that made it necessary for him to visit Mulhausen, and had made a hurried trip to that city. That he had been able to employ the good offices of Colonel de Vineuil to afford him an opportunity of shaking hands with his brother-in-law was owing to the circumstance that that officer was own uncle to young Mme. Delaherche, a pretty young widow whom the cloth manufacturer had married the year previous, and whom Maurice and Henriette, thanks to their being neighbors, had known as a girl. In addition to the colonel, moreover, Maurice had discovered that the captain of his company, Beaudoin, was an acquaintance of Gilberte, Delaherche's young wife; report even had it that she and the captain had been on terms of intimacy in the days when she was Mme. Maginot, living at Meziere, wife of M. Maginot, the timber inspector.

"Give Henriette a good kiss for me, Weiss," said the young man, who loved his sister passionately. "Tell her that she shall have no reason to complain of me, that I wish her to be proud of her brother."

Tears rose to his eyes at the remembrance of his misdeeds. The brother-in-law, who was also deeply affected, ended the painful scene by turning to Honore Fouchard, the artilleryman.

"The first time I am anywhere in the neighborhood," he said, "I will run up to Remilly and tell Uncle Fouchard that I saw you and that you are well."

Uncle Fouchard, a peasant, who owned a bit of land and plied the trade of itinerant butcher, serving his customers from a cart, was a brother of Henriette's and Maurice's mother. He lived at Remilly, in a house perched upon a high hill, about four miles from Sedan.

"Good!" Honore calmly answered; "the father don't worry his head a great deal on my account, but go there all the same if you feel inclined."

At that moment there was a movement over in the direction of the farmhouse, and they beheld the straggler, the man who had been arrested as a spy, come forth, free, accompanied only by a single officer. He had likely had papers to show, or had trumped up a story of some kind, for they were simply expelling him from the camp. In the darkening twilight, and at the distance they were, they could not make him out distinctly, only a big, square-shouldered fellow with a rough shock of reddish hair. And yet Maurice gave vent to an exclamation of surprise.

"Honore! look there. If one wouldn't swear he was the Prussian—you know, Goliah!"

The name made the artilleryman start as if he had been shot; he strained his blazing eyes to follow the receding shape. Goliah Steinberg, the journeyman butcher, the man who had set him and his father by the ears, who had stolen from him his Silvine; the whole base, dirty, miserable story, from which he had not yet ceased to suffer! He would have run after, would have caught him by the throat and strangled him, but the man had already crossed the line of stacked muskets, was moving off and vanishing in the darkness.

"Oh!" he murmured, "Goliah! no, it can't be he. He is down yonder, fighting on the other side. If I ever come across him—"

He shook his fist with an air of menace at the dusky horizon, at the wide empurpled stretch of eastern sky that stood for Prussia in his eyes. No one spoke; they heard the strains of retreat again, but very distant now, away at the extreme end of the camp, blended and lost among the hum of other indistinguishable sounds.

"Fichtre!" exclaimed Honore, "I shall have the pleasure of sleeping on the soft side of a plank in the guard-house unless I make haste back to roll-call. Good-night—adieu, everybody!"

And grasping Weiss by both his hands and giving them a hearty squeeze, he strode swiftly away toward the slight elevation where the guns of the reserves were parked, without again mentioning his father's name or sending any word to Silvine, whose name lay at the end of his tongue.

The minutes slipped away, and over toward the left, where the 2d brigade lay, a bugle sounded. Another, near at hand, replied, and then a third, in the remote distance, took up the strain. Presently there was a universal blaring, far and near, throughout the camp, whereon Gaude, the bugler of the company, took up his instrument. He was a tall, lank, beardless, melancholy youth, chary of his words, saving his breath for his calls, which he gave conscientiously, with the vigor of a young hurricane.

Forthwith Sergeant Sapin, a ceremonious little man with large vague eyes, stepped forward and began to call the roll. He rattled off the names in a thin, piping voice, while the men, who had come up and ranged themselves in front of him, responded in accents of varying pitch, from the deep rumble of the violoncello to the shrill note of the piccolo. But there came a hitch in the proceedings.

"Lapoulle!" shouted the sergeant, calling the name a second time with increased emphasis.

There was no response, and Jean rushed off to the place where Private Lapoulle, egged on by his comrades, was industriously trying to fan the refractory fuel into a blaze; flat on his stomach before the pile of blackening, spluttering wood, his face resembling an underdone beefsteak, the warrior was now propelling dense clouds of smoke horizontally along the surface of the plain.

"Thunder and ouns! Quit that, will you!" yelled Jean, "and come and answer to your name."

Lapoulle rose to his feet with a dazed look on his face, then appeared to grasp the situation and yelled: "Present!" in such stentorian tones that Loubet, pretending to be upset by the concussion, sank to the ground in a sitting posture. Pache had finished mending his trousers and answered in a voice that was barely audible, that sounded more like the mumbling of a prayer. Chouteau, not even troubling himself to rise, grunted his answer unconcernedly and turned over on his side.

Lieutenant Rochas, the officer of the guard, was meantime standing a few steps away, motionlessly awaiting the conclusion of the ceremony. When Sergeant Sapin had finished calling the roll and came up to report that all were present, the officer, with a glance at Weiss, who was still conversing with Maurice, growled from under his mustache:

"Yes, and one over. What is that civilian doing here?"

"He has the colonel's pass, Lieutenant," explained Jean, who had heard the question.

Rochas made no reply; he shrugged his shoulders disapprovingly and resumed his round among the company streets while waiting for taps to sound. Jean, stiff and sore after his day's march, went and sat down a little way from Maurice, whose murmured words fell indistinctly upon his unlistening ear, for he, too, had vague, half formed reflections of his own that were stirring sluggishly in the recesses of his muddy, torpid mind.

Maurice was a believer in war in the abstract; he considered it one of the necessary evils, essential to the very existence of nations. This was nothing more than the logical sequence of his course in embracing those theories of evolution which in those days exercised such a potent influence on our young men of intelligence and education. Is not life itself an unending battle? Does not all nature owe its being to a series of relentless conflicts, the survival of the fittest, the maintenance and renewal of force by unceasing activity; is not death a necessary condition to young and vigorous life? And he remembered the sensation of gladness that had filled his heart when first the thought occurred to him that he might expiate his errors by enlisting and defending his country on the frontier. It might be that France of the plebiscite, while giving itself over to the Emperor, had not desired war; he himself, only a week previously, had declared it to be a culpable and idiotic measure. There were long discussions concerning the right of a German prince to occupy the throne of Spain; as the question gradually became more and more intricate and muddled it seemed as if everyone must be wrong, no one right; so that it was impossible to tell from which side the provocation came, and the only part of the entire business that was clear to the eyes of all was the inevitable, the fatal law which at a given moment hurls nation against nation. Then Paris was convulsed from center to circumference; he remembered that burning summer's night, the tossing, struggling human tide that filled the boulevards, the bands of men brandishing torches before the Hotel de Ville, and yelling: "On to Berlin! on to Berlin!" and he seemed to hear the strains of the Marseillaise, sung by a beautiful, stately woman with the face of a queen, wrapped in the folds of a flag, from her elevation on the box of a coach. Was it all a lie, was it true that the heart of Paris had not beaten then? And then, as was always the case with him, that condition of nervous excitation had been succeeded by long hours of doubt and disgust; there were all the small annoyances of the soldier's life; his arrival at the barracks, his examination by the adjutant, the fitting of his uniform by the gruff sergeant, the malodorous bedroom with its fetid air and filthy floor, the horseplay and coarse language of his new comrades, the merciless drill that stiffened his limbs and benumbed his brain. In a week's time, however, he had conquered his first squeamishness, and from that time forth was comparatively contented with his lot; and when the regiment was at last ordered forward to Belfort the fever of enthusiasm had again taken possession of him.

For the first few days after they took the field Maurice was convinced that their success was absolutely certain. The Emperor's plan appeared to him perfectly clear: he would advance four hundred thousand men to the left bank of the Rhine, pass the river before the Prussians had completed their preparations, separate northern and southern Germany by a vigorous inroad, and by means of a brilliant victory or two compel Austria and Italy to join hands immediately with France. Had there not been a short-lived rumor that that 7th corps of which his regiment formed a part was to be embarked at Brest and landed in Denmark, where it would create a diversion that would serve to neutralize one of the Prussian armies? They would be taken by surprise; the arrogant nation would be overrun in every direction and crushed utterly within a few brief weeks. It would be a military picnic, a holiday excursion from Strasbourg to Berlin. While they were lying inactive at Belfort, however, his former doubts and fears returned to him. To the 7th corps had been assigned the duty of guarding the entrance to the Black Forest; it had reached its position in a state of confusion that exceeded imagination, deficient in men, material, everything. The 3d division was in Italy; the 2d cavalry brigade had been halted at Lyons to check a threatened rising among the people there, and three batteries had straggled off in some direction—where, no one could say. Then their destitution in the way of stores and supplies was something wonderful; the depots at Belfort, which were to have furnished everything, were empty; not a sign of a tent, no mess-kettles, no flannel belts, no hospital supplies, no farriers' forges, not even a horse-shackle. The quartermaster's and medical departments were without trained assistants. At the very last moment it was discovered that thirty thousand rifles were practically useless owing to the absence of some small pin or other interchangeable mechanism about the breech-blocks, and the officer who posted off in hot haste to Paris succeeded with the greatest difficulty in securing five thousand of the missing implements. Their inactivity, again, was another matter that kept him on pins and needles; why did they idle away their time for two weeks? why did they not advance? He saw clearly that each day of delay was a mistake that could never be repaired, a chance of victory gone. And if the plan of campaign that he had dreamed of was clear and precise, its manner of execution was most lame and impotent, a fact of which he was to learn a great deal more later on and of which he had then only a faint and glimmering perception: the seven army corps dispersed along the extended frontier line en echelon, from Metz to Bitche and from Bitche to Belfort; the many regiments and squadrons that had been recruited up to only half-strength or less, so that the four hundred and thirty thousand men on paper melted away to two hundred and thirty thousand at the outside; the jealousies among the generals, each of whom thought only of securing for himself a marshal's baton, and gave no care to supporting his neighbor; the frightful lack of foresight, mobilization and concentration being carried on simultaneously in order to gain time, a process that resulted in confusion worse confounded; a system, in a word, of dry rot and slow paralysis, which, commencing with the head, with the Emperor himself, shattered in health and lacking in promptness of decision, could not fail ultimately to communicate itself to the whole army, disorganizing it and annihilating its efficiency, leading it into disaster from which it had not the means of extricating itself. And yet, over and above the dull misery of that period of waiting, in the intuitive, shuddering perception of what must infallibly happen, his certainty that they must be victors in the end remained unimpaired.

On the 3d of August the cheerful news had been given to the public of the victory of Sarrebruck, fought and won the day before. It could scarcely be called a great victory, but the columns of the newspapers teemed with enthusiastic gush; the invasion of Germany was begun, it was the first step in their glorious march to triumph, and the little Prince Imperial, who had coolly stooped and picked up a bullet from the battlefield, then commenced to be celebrated in legend. Two days later, however, when intelligence came of the surprise and defeat at Wissembourg, every mouth was opened to emit a cry of rage and distress. That five thousand men, caught in a trap, had faced thirty-five thousand Prussians all one long summer day, that was not a circumstance to daunt the courage of anyone; it simply called for vengeance. Yes, the leaders had doubtless been culpably lacking in vigilance and were to be censured for their want of foresight, but that would soon be mended; MacMahon had sent for the 1st division of the 7th corps, the 1st corps would be supported by the 5th, and the Prussians must be across the Rhine again by that time, with the bayonets of our infantry at their backs to accelerate their movement. And so, beneath the deep, dim vault of heaven, the thought of the battle that must have raged that day, the feverish impatience with which the tidings were awaited, the horrible feeling of suspense that pervaded the air about them, spread from man to man and became each minute more tense and unendurable.

Maurice was just then saying to Weiss:

"Ah! we have certainly given them a righteous good drubbing to-day."

Weiss made no reply save to nod his head with an air of anxiety. His gaze was directed toward the Rhine, on that Orient region where now the night had settled down in earnest, like a wall of blackness, concealing strange forms and shapes of mystery. The concluding strains of the bugles for roll-call had been succeeded by a deep silence, which had descended upon the drowsy camp and was only broken now and then by the steps and voices of some wakeful soldiers. A light had been lit—it looked like a twinkling star—in the main room of the farmhouse where the staff, which is supposed never to sleep, was awaiting the telegrams that came in occasionally, though as yet they were undecided. And the green wood fire, now finally left to itself, was still emitting its funereal wreaths of dense black smoke, which drifted in the gentle breeze over the unsleeping farmhouse, obscuring the early stars in the heavens above.

"A drubbing!" Weiss at last replied, "God grant it may be so!"

Jean, still seated a few steps away, pricked up his ears, while Lieutenant Rochas, noticing that the wish was attended by a doubt, stopped to listen.

"What!" Maurice rejoined, "have you not confidence? can you believe that defeat is possible?"

His brother-in-law silenced him with a gesture; his hands were trembling with agitation, his kindly pleasant face was pale and bore an expression of deep distress.

"Defeat, ah! Heaven preserve us from that! You know that I was born in this country; my grandfather and grandmother were murdered by the Cossacks in 1814, and whenever I think of invasion it makes me clench my fist and grit my teeth; I could go through fire and flood, like a trooper, in my shirt sleeves! Defeat—no, no! I cannot, I will not believe it possible."

He became calmer, allowing his arms to fall by his side in discouragement.

"But my mind is not easy, do you see. I know Alsace; I was born there; I am just off a business trip through the country, and we civilians have opportunities of seeing many things that the generals persist in ignoring, although they have them thrust beneath their very eyes. Ah, we wanted war with Prussia as badly as anyone; for a long, long time we have been waiting patiently for a chance to pay off old scores, but that did not prevent us from being on neighborly terms with the people in Baden and Bavaria; every one of us, almost, has friends or relatives across the Rhine. It was our belief that they felt like us and would not be sorry to humble the intolerable insolence of the Prussians. And now, after our long period of uncomplaining expectation, for the past two weeks we have seen things going from bad to worse, and it vexes and terrifies us. Since the declaration of war the enemy's horse have been suffered to come among us, terrorizing the villages, reconnoitering the country, cutting the telegraph wires. Baden and Bavaria are rising; immense bodies of troops are being concentrated in the Palatinate; information reaches us from every quarter, from the great fairs and markets, that our frontier is threatened, and when the citizens, the mayors of the communes, take the alarm at last and hurry off to tell your officers what they know, those gentlemen shrug their shoulders and reply: Those things spring from the imagination of cowards; there is no enemy near here. And when there is not an hour to lose, days and days are wasted. What are they waiting for? To give the whole German nation time to concentrate on the other bank of the river?"

His words were uttered in a low, mournful, voice, as if he were reciting to himself a story that had long occupied his thoughts.

"Ah! Germany, I know her too well; and the terrible part of the business is that you soldiers seem to know no more about her than you do about China. You must remember my cousin Gunther, Maurice, the young man, who came to pay me a flying visit at Sedan last spring. His mother is a sister of my mother, and married a Berliner; the young man is a German out and out; he detests everything French. He is a captain in the 5th Prussian corps. I accompanied him to the railway station that night, and he said to me in his sharp, peremptory way: 'If France declares war on us, she will be soundly whipped!' I can hear his words ringing in my ears yet."

Forthwith, Lieutenant Rochas, who had managed to contain himself until then, not without some difficulty, stepped forward in a towering rage. He was a tall, lean individual of about fifty, with a long, weather-beaten, and wrinkled face; his inordinately long nose, curved like the beak of a bird of prey, over a strong but well-shaped mouth, concealed by a thick, bristling mustache that was beginning to be touched with silver. And he shouted in a voice of thunder:

"See here, you, sir! what yarns are those that you are retailing to dishearten my men?"

Jean did not interfere with his opinion, but he thought that the last speaker was right, for he, too, while beginning to be conscious of the protracted delay, and the general confusion in their affairs, had never had the slightest doubt about that terrible thrashing they were certain to give the Prussians. There could be no question about the matter, for was not that the reason of their being there?

"But I am not trying to dishearten anyone, Lieutenant," Weiss answered in astonishment. "Quite the reverse; I am desirous that others should know what I know, because then they will be able to act with their eyes open. Look here! that Germany of which we were speaking—"

And he went on in his clear, demonstrative way to explain the reason of his fears: how Prussia had increased her resources since Sadowa; how the national movement had placed her at the head of the other German states, a mighty empire in process of formation and rejuvenation, with the constant hope and desire for unity as the incentive to their irresistible efforts; the system of compulsory military service, which made them a nation of trained soldiers, provided with the most effective arms of modern invention, with generals who were masters in the art of strategy, proudly mindful still of the crushing defeat they had administered to Austria; the intelligence, the moral force that resided in that army, commanded as it was almost exclusively by young generals, who in turn looked up to a commander-in-chief who seemed destined to revolutionize the art of war, whose prudence and foresight were unparalleled, whose correctness of judgment was a thing to wonder at. And in contrast to that picture of Germany he pointed to France: the Empire sinking into senile decrepitude, sanctioned by the plebiscite, but rotten at its foundation, destroying liberty, and therein stifling every idea of patriotism, ready to give up the ghost as soon as it should cease to satisfy the unworthy appetites to which it had given birth; then there was the army, brave, it was true, as was to be expected from men of their race, and covered with Crimean and Italian laurels, but vitiated by the system that permitted men to purchase substitutes for a money consideration, abandoned to the antiquated methods of African routine, too confident of victory to keep abreast with the more perfect science of modern times; and, finally, the generals, men for the most part not above mediocrity, consumed by petty rivalries, some of them of an ignorance beyond all belief, and at their head the Emperor, an ailing, vacillating man, deceiving himself and everyone with whom he had dealings in that desperate venture on which they were embarking, into which they were all rushing blindfold, with no preparation worthy of the name, with the panic and confusion of a flock of sheep on its way to the shambles.

Rochas stood listening, open-mouthed, and with staring eyes; his terrible nose dilated visibly. Then suddenly his lantern jaws parted to emit an obstreperous, Homeric peal of laughter.

"What are you giving us there, you? what do you mean by all that silly lingo? Why, there is not the first word of sense in your whole harangue—it is too idiotic to deserve an answer. Go and tell those things to the recruits, but don't tell them to me; no! not to me, who have seen twenty-seven years of service."

And he gave himself a thump on the breast with his doubled fist. He was the son of a master mason who had come from Limousin to Paris, where the son, not taking kindly to the paternal handicraft, had enlisted at the age of eighteen. He had been a soldier of fortune and had carried the knapsack, was corporal in Africa, sergeant in the Crimea, and after Solferino had been made lieutenant, having devoted fifteen years of laborious toil and heroic bravery to obtaining that rank, and was so illiterate that he had no chance of ever getting his captaincy.

"You, sir, who think you know everything, let me tell you a thing you don't know. Yes, at Mazagran I was scarce nineteen years old, and there were twenty-three of us, not a living soul more, and for more than four days we held out against twelve thousand Arabs. Yes, indeed! for years and years, if you had only been with us out there in Africa, sir, at Mascara, at Biskra, at Dellys, after that in Grand Kabylia, after that again at Laghouat, you would have seen those dirty niggers run like deer as soon as we showed our faces. And at Sebastopol, sir, fichtre! you wouldn't have said it was the pleasantest place in the world. The wind blew fit to take a man's hair out by the roots, it was cold enough to freeze a brass monkey, and those beggars kept us on a continual dance with their feints and sorties. Never mind; we made them dance in the end; we danced them into the big hot frying pan, and to quick music, too! And Solferino, you were not there, sir! then why do you speak of it? Yes, at Solferino, where it was so hot, although I suppose more rain fell there that day than you have seen in your whole life, at Solferino, where we had our little brush with the Austrians, it would have warmed your heart to see how they vanished before our bayonets, riding one another down in their haste to get away from us, as if their coat tails were on fire!"

He laughed the gay, ringing laugh of the daredevil French soldier; he seemed to expand and dilate with satisfaction. It was the old story: the French trooper going about the world with his girl on his arm and a glass of good wine in his hand; thrones upset and kingdoms conquered in the singing of a merry song. Given a corporal and four men, and great armies would bite the dust. His voice suddenly sank to a low, rumbling bass:

"What! whip France? We, whipped by those Prussian pigs, we!" He came up to Weiss and grasped him violently by the lapel of his coat. His entire long frame, lean as that of the immortal Knight Errant, seemed to breathe defiance and unmitigated contempt for the foe, whoever he might be, regardless of time, place, or any other circumstance. "Listen to what I tell you, sir. If the Prussians dare to show their faces here, we will kick them home again. You hear me? we will kick them from here to Berlin." His bearing and manner were superb; the serene tranquillity of the child, the candid conviction of the innocent who knows nothing and fears nothing. "Parbleu! it is so, because it is so, and that's all there is about it!"

Weiss, stunned and almost convinced, made haste to declare that he wished for nothing better. As for Maurice, who had prudently held his tongue, not venturing to express an opinion in presence of his superior officer, he concluded by joining in the other's merriment; he warmed the cockles of his heart, that devil of a man, whom he nevertheless considered rather stupid. Jean, too, had nodded his approval at every one of the lieutenant's assertions. He had also been at Solferino, where it rained so hard. And that showed what it was to have a tongue in one's head and know how to use it. If all the leaders had talked like that they would not be in such a mess, and there would be camp-kettles and flannel belts in abundance.

It was quite dark by this time, and Rochas continued to gesticulate and brandish his long arms in the obscurity. His historical studies had been confined to a stray volume of Napoleonic memoirs that had found its way to his knapsack from a peddler's wagon. His excitement refused to be pacified and all his book-learning burst from his lips in a torrent of eloquence:

"We flogged the Austrians at Castiglione, at Marengo, at Austerlitz, at Wagram; we flogged the Prussians at Eylau, at Jena, at Lutzen; we flogged the Russians at Friedland, at Smolensk and at the Moskowa; we flogged Spain and England everywhere; all creation flogged, flogged, flogged, up and down, far and near, at home and abroad, and now you tell me that it is we who are to take the flogging! Why, pray tell me? How? Is the world coming to an end?" He drew his tall form up higher still and raised his arm aloft, like the staff of a battle-flag. "Look you, there has been a fight to-day, down yonder, and we are waiting for the news. Well! I will tell you what the news is—I will tell you, I! We have flogged the Prussians, flogged them until they didn't know whether they were a-foot or a-horseback, flogged them to powder, so that they had to be swept up in small pieces!"

At that moment there passed over the camp, beneath the somber heavens, a loud, wailing cry. Was it the plaint of some nocturnal bird? Or was it a mysterious voice, reaching them from some far-distant field of carnage, ominous of disaster? The whole camp shuddered, lying there in the shadows, and the strained, tense sensation of expectant anxiety that hung, miasma-like, in the air became more strained, more feverish, as they waited for telegrams that seemed as if they would never come. In the distance, at the farmhouse, the candle that lighted the dreary watches of the staff burned up more brightly, with an erect, unflickering flame, as if it had been of wax instead of tallow.

But it was ten o'clock, and Gaude, rising to his feet from the ground where he had been lost in the darkness, sounded taps, the first in all the camp. Other bugles, far and near, took up the strain, and it passed away in the distance with a dying, melancholy wail, as if the angel of slumber had already brushed with his wings the weary men. And Weiss, who had lingered there so late, embraced Maurice affectionately; courage, and hope! he would kiss Henriette for her brother and would have many things to tell uncle Fouchard when they met. Then, just as he was turning to go, a rumor began to circulate, accompanied by the wildest excitement. A great victory had been won by Marshal MacMahon, so the report ran; the Crown Prince of Prussia a prisoner, with twenty-five thousand men, the enemy's army repulsed and utterly destroyed, its guns and baggage abandoned to the victors.

"Didn't I tell you so!" shouted Rochas, in his most thundering voice. Then, running after Weiss, who, light of heart, was hastening to get back to Mulhausen: "To Berlin, sir, and we'll kick them every step of the way!"

A quarter of an hour later came another dispatch, announcing that the army had been compelled to evacuate Woerth and was retreating. Ah, what a night was that! Rochas, overpowered by sleep, wrapped his cloak about him, threw himself down on the bare ground, as he had done many a time before. Maurice and Jean sought the shelter of the tent, into which were crowded, a confused tangle of arms and legs, Loubet, Chouteau, Pache, and Lapoulle, their heads resting on their knapsacks. There was room for six, provided they were careful how they disposed of their legs. Loubet, by way of diverting his comrades and making them forget their hunger, had labored for some time to convince Lapoulle that there was to be a ration of poultry issued the next morning, but they were too sleepy to keep up the joke; they were snoring, and the Prussians might come, it was all one to them. Jean lay for a moment without stirring, pressing close against Maurice; notwithstanding his fatigue he was unable to sleep; he could not help thinking of the things that gentleman had said, how all Germany was up in arms and preparing to pour her devastating hordes across the Rhine; and he felt that his tent-mate was not sleeping, either—was thinking of the same things as he. Then the latter turned over impatiently and moved away, and the other understood that his presence was not agreeable. There was a lack of sympathy between the peasant and the man of culture, an enmity of caste and education that amounted almost to physical aversion. The former, however, experienced a sensation of shame and sadness at this condition of affairs; he shrinkingly drew in his limbs so as to occupy as small a space as possible, endeavoring to escape from the hostile scorn that he was vaguely conscious of in his neighbor. But although the night wind without had blown up chill, the crowded tent was so stifling hot and close that Maurice, in a fever of exasperation, raised the flap, darted out, and went and stretched himself on the ground a few steps away. That made Jean still more unhappy, and in his half-sleeping, half-waking condition he had troubled dreams, made up of a regretful feeling that no one cared for him, and a vague apprehension of impending calamity of which he seemed to hear the steps approaching with measured tread from the shadowy, mysterious depths of the unknown.

Two hours passed, and all the camp lay lifeless, motionless under the oppression of the deep, weird darkness, that was instinct with some dreadful horror as yet without a name. Out of the sea of blackness came stifled sighs and moans; from an invisible tent was heard something that sounded like the groan of a dying man, the fitful dream of some tired soldier. Then there were other sounds that to the strained ear lost their familiarity and became menaces of approaching evil; the neighing of a charger, the clank of a sword, the hurrying steps of some belated prowler. And all at once, off toward the canteens, a great light flamed up. The entire front was brilliantly illuminated; the long, regularly aligned array of stacks stood out against the darkness, and the ruddy blaze, reflected from the burnished barrels of the rifles, assumed the hue of new-shed blood; the erect, stern figures of the sentries became visible in the fiery glow. Could it be the enemy, whose presence the leaders had been talking of for the past two days, and on whose trail they had come out from Belfort to Mulhausen? Then a shower of sparks rose high in the air and the conflagration subsided. It was only the pile of green wood that had been so long the object of Loubet's and Lapoulle's care, and which, after having smoldered for many hours, had at last flashed up like a fire of straw.

Jean, alarmed by the vivid light, hastily left the tent and was near falling over Maurice, who had raised himself on his elbow. The darkness seemed by contrast more opaque than it had been before, and the two men lay stretched on the bare ground, a few paces from each other. All that they could descry before them in the dense shadows of the night was the window of the farm-house, faintly illuminated by the dim candle, which shone with a sinister gleam, as if it were doing duty by the bedside of a corpse. What time was it? two o'clock, or three, perhaps. It was plain that the staff had not made acquaintance with their beds that night. They could hear Bourgain-Desfeuilles' loud, disputatious voice; the general was furious that his rest should be broken thus, and it required many cigars and toddies to pacify him. More telegrams came in; things must be going badly; silhouettes of couriers, faintly drawn against the uncertain sky line, could be descried, galloping madly. There was the sound of scuffling steps, imprecations, a smothered cry as of a man suddenly stricken down, followed by a blood-freezing silence. What could it be? Was it the end? A breath, chill and icy as that from the lips of death, had passed over the camp that lay lost in slumber and agonized expectation.

It was at that moment that Jean and Maurice recognized in the tall, thin, spectral form that passed swiftly by, their colonel, de Vineuil. He was accompanied by the regimental surgeon, Major Bouroche, a large man with a leonine face They were conversing in broken, unfinished sentences, whisperingly, such a conversation as we sometimes hear in dreams.

"It came by the way of Basle. Our 1st division all cut to pieces. The battle lasted twelve hours; the whole army is retreating—"

The colonel's specter halted and called by name another specter, which came lightly forward; it was an elegant ghost, faultless in uniform and equipment.

"Is that you, Beaudoin?"

"Yes, Colonel."

"Ah! bad news, my friend, terrible news! MacMahon beaten at Froeschwiller, Frossard beaten at Spickeren, and between them de Failly, held in check where he could give no assistance. At Froeschwiller it was a single corps against an entire army; they fought like heroes. It was a complete rout, a panic, and now France lies open to their advance—"

His tears choked further utterance, the words came from his lips unintelligible, and the three shadows vanished, swallowed up in the obscurity.

Maurice rose to his feet; a shudder ran through his frame.

"Good God!" he stammeringly exclaimed.

And he could think of nothing else to say, while Jean, in whose bones the very marrow seemed to be congealing, murmured in his resigned manner:

"Ah, worse luck! The gentleman, that relative of yours, was right all the same in saying that they are stronger than we."

Maurice was beside himself, could have strangled him. The Prussians stronger than the French! The thought made his blood boil. The peasant calmly and stubbornly added:

"That don't matter, mind you. A man don't give up whipped at the first knock-down he gets. We shall have to keep hammering away at them all the same."

But a tall figure arose before them. They recognized Rochas, still wrapped in his long mantle, whom the fugitive sounds about him, or it may have been the intuition of disaster, had awakened from his uneasy slumber. He questioned them, insisted on knowing all. When he was finally brought, with much difficulty, to see how matters stood, stupor, immense and profound, filled his boyish, inexpressive eyes. More than ten times in succession he repeated:

"Beaten! How beaten? Why beaten?"

And that was the calamity that had lain hidden in the blackness of that night of agony. And now the pale dawn was appearing at the portals of the east, heralding a day heavy with bitterest sorrow and striking white upon the silent tents, in one of which began to be visible the ashy faces of Loubet and Lapoulle, of Chouteau and of Pache, who were snoring still with wide-open mouths. Forth from the thin mists that were slowly creeping upward from the river off yonder in the distance came the new day, bringing with it mourning and affliction.

II.

About eight o'clock the sun dispersed the heavy clouds, and the broad, fertile plain about Mulhausen lay basking in the warm, bright light of a perfect August Sunday. From the camp, now awake and bustling with life, could be heard the bells of the neighboring parishes, pealing merrily in the limpid air. The cheerful Sunday following so close on ruin and defeat had its own gayety, its sky was as serene as on a holiday.

Gaude suddenly took his bugle and gave the call that announced the distribution of rations, whereat Loubet appeared astonished. What was it? What did it mean? Were they going to give out chickens, as he had promised Lapoulle the night before? He had been born in the Halles, in the Rue de la Cossonerie, was the unacknowledged son of a small huckster, had enlisted "for the money there was in it," as he said, after having been a sort of Jack-of-all-trades, and was now the gourmand, the epicure of the company, continually nosing after something good to eat. But he went off to see what was going on, while Chouteau, the company artist, house-painter by trade at Belleville, something of a dandy and a revolutionary republican, exasperated against the government for having called him back to the colors after he had served his time, was cruelly chaffing Pache, whom he had discovered on his knees, behind the tent, preparing to say his prayers. There was a pious man for you! Couldn't he oblige him, Chouteau, by interceding with God to give him a hundred thousand francs or some such small trifle? But Pache, an insignificant little fellow with a head running up to a point, who had come to them from some hamlet in the wilds of Picardy, received the other's raillery with the uncomplaining gentleness of a martyr. He was the butt of the squad, he and Lapoulle, the colossal brute who had got his growth in the marshes of the Sologne, so utterly ignorant of everything that on the day of his joining the regiment he had asked his comrades to show him the King. And although the terrible tidings of the disaster at Froeschwiller had been known throughout the camp since early morning, the four men laughed, joked, and went about their usual tasks with the indifference of so many machines.

But there arose a murmur of pleased surprise. It was occasioned by Jean, the corporal, coming back from the commissary's, accompanied by Maurice, with a load of firewood. So, they were giving out wood at last, the lack of which the night before had deprived the men of their soup! Twelve hours behind time, only!

"Hurrah for the commissary!" shouted Chouteau.

"Never mind, so long as it is here," said Loubet. "Ah! won't I make you a bully pot-au-feu!"

He was usually quite willing to take charge of the mess arrangements, and no one was inclined to say him nay, for he cooked like an angel. On those occasions, however, Lapoulle would be given the most extraordinary commissions to execute.

"Go and look after the champagne—Go out and buy some truffles—"

On that morning a queer conceit flashed across his mind, such a conceit as only a Parisian gamin contemplating the mystification of a greenhorn is capable of entertaining:

"Look alive there, will you! Come, hand me the chicken."

"The chicken! what chicken, where?"

"Why, there on the ground at your feet, stupid; the chicken that I promised you last night, and that the corporal has just brought in."

He pointed to a large, white, round stone, and Lapoulle, speechless with wonder, finally picked it up and turned it about between his fingers.

"A thousand thunders! Will you wash the chicken! More yet; wash its claws, wash its neck! Don't be afraid of the water, lazybones!"

And for no reason at all except the joke of it, because the prospect of the soup made him gay and sportive, he tossed the stone along with the meat into the kettle filled with water.

"That's what will give the bouillon a flavor! Ah, you didn't know that, sacree andouille! You shall have the pope's nose; you'll see how tender it is."

The squad roared with laughter at sight of Lapoulle's face, who swallowed everything and was licking his chops in anticipation of the feast. That funny dog, Loubet, he was the man to cure one of the dumps if anybody could! And when the fire began to crackle in the sunlight, and the kettle commenced to hum and bubble, they ranged themselves reverently about it in a circle with an expression of cheerful satisfaction on their faces, watching the meat as it danced up and down and sniffing the appetizing odor that it exhaled. They were as hungry as a pack of wolves, and the prospect of a square meal made them forgetful of all beside. They had had to take a thrashing, but that was no reason why a man should not fill his stomach. Fires were blazing and pots were boiling from one end of the camp to the other, and amid the silvery peals of the bells that floated from Mulhausen steeples mirth and jollity reigned supreme.

But just as the clocks were on the point of striking nine a commotion arose and spread among the men; officers came running up, and Lieutenant Rochas, to whom Captain Beaudoin had come and communicated an order, passed along in front of the tents of his platoon and gave the command:

"Pack everything! Get yourselves ready to march!"

"But the soup?"

"You will have to wait for your soup until some other day; we are to march at once."

Gaude's bugle rang out in imperious accents. Then everywhere was consternation; dumb, deep rage was depicted on every countenance. What, march on an empty stomach! Could they not wait a little hour until the soup was ready! The squad resolved that their bouillon should not go to waste, but it was only so much hot water, and the uncooked meat was like leather to their teeth. Chouteau growled and grumbled, almost mutinously. Jean had to exert all his authority to make the men hasten their preparations. What was the great urgency that made it necessary for them to hurry off like that? What good was there in hazing people about in that style, without giving them time to regain their strength? And Maurice shrugged his shoulders incredulously when someone said in his hearing that they were about to march against the Prussians and settle old scores with them. In less than fifteen minutes the tents were struck, folded, and strapped upon the knapsacks, the stacks were broken, and all that remained of the camp was the dying embers of the fires on the bare ground.

There were reasons, of importance that had induced General Douay's determination to retreat immediately. The despatch from the sous-prefet at Schelestadt, now three days old, was confirmed; there were telegrams that the fires of the Prussians, threatening Markolsheim, had again been seen, and again, another telegram informed them that one of the enemy's army corps was crossing the Rhine at Huningue: the intelligence was definite and abundant; cavalry and artillery had been sighted in force, infantry had been seen, hastening from every direction to their point of concentration. Should they wait an hour the enemy would surely be in their rear and retreat on Belfort would be impossible. And now, in the shock consequent on defeat, after Wissembourg and Froeschwiller, the general, feeling himself unsupported in his exposed position at the front, had nothing left to do but fall back in haste, and the more so that what news he had received that morning made the situation look even worse than it had appeared the night before.

The staff had gone on ahead at a sharp trot, spurring their horses in the fear lest the Prussians might get into Altkirch before them. General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, aware that he had a hard day's work before him, had prudently taken Mulhausen in his way, where he fortified himself with a copious breakfast, denouncing in language more forcible than elegant such hurried movements. And Mulhausen watched with sorrowful eyes the officers trooping through her streets; as the news of the retreat spread the citizens streamed out of their houses, deploring the sudden departure of the army for whose coming they had prayed so earnestly: they were to be abandoned, then, and all the costly merchandise that was stacked up in the railway station was to become the spoil of the enemy; within a few hours their pretty city was to be in the hands of foreigners? The inhabitants of the villages, too, and of isolated houses, as the staff clattered along the country roads, planted themselves before their doors with wonder and consternation depicted on their faces. What! that army, that a short while before they had seen marching forth to battle, was now retiring without having fired a shot? The leaders were gloomy, urged their chargers forward and refused to answer questions, as if ruin and disaster were galloping at their heels. It was true, then, that the Prussians had annihilated the army and were streaming into France from every direction, like the angry waves of a stream that had burst its barriers? And already to the frightened peasants the air seemed filled with the muttering of distant invasion, rising louder and more threatening at every instant, and already they were beginning to forsake their little homes and huddle their poor belongings into farm-carts; entire families might be seen fleeing in single file along the roads that were choked with the retreating cavalry.

In the hurry and confusion of the movement the 106th was brought to a halt at the very first kilometer of their march, near the bridge over the canal of the Rhone and Rhine. The order of march had been badly planned and still more badly executed, so that the entire 2d division was collected there in a huddle, and the way was so narrow, barely more than sixteen feet in width, that the passage of the troops was obstructed.

Two hours elapsed, and still the 106th stood there watching the seemingly endless column that streamed along before their eyes. In the end the men, standing at rest with ordered arms, began to become impatient. Jean's squad, whose position happened to be opposite a break in the line of poplars where the sun had a fair chance at them, felt themselves particularly aggrieved.

"Guess we must be the rear-guard," Loubet observed with good-natured raillery.

But Chouteau scolded: "They don't value us at a brass farthing, and that's why they let us wait this way. We were here first; why didn't we take the road while it was empty?"

And as they began to discern more clearly beyond the canal, across the wide fertile plain, along the level roads lined with hop-poles and fields of ripening grain, the movement of the troops retiring along the same way by which they had advanced but yesterday, gibes and jeers rose on the air in a storm of angry ridicule.

"Ah, we are taking the back track," Chouteau continued. "I wonder if that is the advance against the enemy that they have been dinning in our ears of late! Strikes me as rather queer! No sooner do we get into camp than we turn tail and make off, never even stopping to taste our soup."

The derisive laughter became louder, and Maurice, who was next to Chouteau in the ranks, took sides with him. Why could they not have been allowed to cook their soup and eat it in peace, since they had done nothing for the last two hours but stand there in the road like so many sticks? Their hunger was making itself felt again; they had a resentful recollection of the savory contents of the kettle dumped out prematurely upon the ground, and they could see no necessity for this headlong retrograde movement, which appeared to them idiotic and cowardly. What chicken-livers they must be, those generals!

But Lieutenant Rochas came along and blew up Sergeant Sapin for not keeping his men in better order, and Captain Beaudoin, very prim and starchy, attracted by the disturbance, appeared upon the scene.

"Silence in the ranks!"

Jean, an old soldier of the army of Italy who knew what discipline was, looked in silent amazement at Maurice, who appeared to be amused by Chouteau's angry sneers; and he wondered how it was that a monsieur, a young man of his acquirements, could listen approvingly to things—they might be true, all the same—but that should not be blurted out in public. The army would never accomplish much, that was certain, if the privates were to take to criticizing the generals and giving their opinions.

At last, after another hour's waiting, the order was given for the 106th to advance, but the bridge was still so encumbered by the rear of the division that the greatest confusion prevailed. Several regiments became inextricably mingled, and whole companies were swept away and compelled to cross whether they would or no, while others, crowded off to the side of the road, had to stand there and mark time; and by way of putting the finishing touch to the muddle; a squadron of cavalry insisted on passing, pressing back into the adjoining fields the stragglers that the infantry had scattered along the roadside. At the end of an hour's march the column had entirely lost its formation and was dragging its slow length along, a mere disorderly rabble.

Thus it happened that Jean found himself away at the rear, lost in a sunken road, together with his squad, whom he had been unwilling to abandon. The 106th had disappeared, nor was there a man or an officer of their company in sight. About them were soldiers, singly or in little groups, from all the regiments, a weary, foot-sore crew, knocked up at the beginning of the retreat, each man straggling on at his own sweet will whithersoever the path that he was on might chance to lead him. The sun beat down fiercely, the heat was stifling, and the knapsack, loaded as it was with the tent and implements of every description, made a terrible burden on the shoulders of the exhausted men. To many of them the experience was an entirely new one, and the heavy great-coats they wore seemed to them like vestments of lead. The first to set an example for the others was a little pale faced soldier with watery eyes; he drew beside the road and let his knapsack slide off into the ditch, heaving a deep sigh as he did so, the long drawn breath of a dying man who feels himself coming back to life.

"There's a man who knows what he is about," muttered Chouteau.

He still continued to plod along, however, his back bending beneath its weary burden, but when he saw two others relieve themselves as the first had done he could stand it no longer. "Ah! zut!" he exclaimed, and with a quick upward jerk of the shoulder sent his kit rolling down an embankment. Fifty pounds at the end of his backbone, he had had enough of it, thank you! He was no beast of burden to lug that load about.

Almost at the same moment Loubet followed his lead and incited Lapoulle to do the same. Pache, who had made the sign of the cross at every stone crucifix they came to, unbuckled the straps and carefully deposited his load at the foot of a low wall, as if fully intending to come back for it at some future time. And when Jean turned his head for a look at his men he saw that every one of them had dropped his burden except Maurice.

"Take up your knapsacks unless you want to have me put under arrest!"

But the men, although they did not mutiny as yet, were silent and looked ugly; they kept advancing along the narrow road, pushing the corporal before them.

"Will you take up your knapsacks! if you don't I will report you."

It was as if Maurice had been lashed with a whip across the face. Report them! that brute of a peasant would report those poor devils for easing their aching shoulders! And looking Jean defiantly in the face, he, too, in an impulse of blind rage, slipped the buckles and let his knapsack fall to the road.

"Very well," said the other in his quiet way, knowing that resistance would be of no avail, "we will settle accounts to-night."

Maurice's feet hurt him abominably; the big, stiff shoes, to which he was not accustomed, had chafed the flesh until the blood came. He was not strong; his spinal column felt as if it were one long raw sore, although the knapsack that had caused the suffering was no longer there, and the weight of his piece, which he kept shifting from one shoulder to the other, seemed as if it would drive all the breath from his body. Great as his physical distress was, however, his moral agony was greater still, for he was in the depths of one of those fits of despair to which he was subject. At Paris the sum of his wrongdoing had been merely the foolish outbreaks of "the other man," as he put it, of his weak, boyish nature, capable of more serious delinquency should he be subjected to temptation, but now, in this retreat that was so like a rout, in which he was dragging himself along with weary steps beneath a blazing sun, he felt all hope and courage vanishing from his heart, he was but a beast in that belated, straggling herd that filled the roads and fields. It was the reaction after the terrible disasters at Wissembourg and Froeschwiller, the echo of the thunder-clap that had burst in the remote distance, leagues and leagues away, rattling at the heels of those panic-stricken men who were flying before they had ever seen an enemy. What was there to hope for now? Was it not all ended? They were beaten; all that was left them was to lie down and die.

"It makes no difference," shouted Loubet, with the blague of a child of the Halles, "but this is not the Berlin road we are traveling, all the same."

To Berlin! To Berlin! The cry rang in Maurice's ears, the yell of the swarming mob that filled the boulevards on that midsummer night of frenzied madness when he had determined to enlist. The gentle breeze had become a devastating hurricane; there had been a terrific explosion, and all the sanguine temper of his nation had manifested itself in his absolute, enthusiastic confidence, which had vanished utterly at the very first reverse, before the unreasoning impulse of despair that was sweeping him away among those vagrant soldiers, vanquished and dispersed before they had struck a stroke.

"This confounded blunderbuss must weigh a ton, I think," Loubet went on. "This is fine music to march by!" And alluding to the sum he received as substitute: "I don't care what people say, but fifteen hundred 'balls' for a job like this is downright robbery. Just think of the pipes he'll smoke, sitting by his warm fire, the stingy old miser in whose place I'm going to get my brains knocked out!"

"As for me," growled Chouteau, "I had finished my time. I was going to cut the service, and they keep me for their beastly war. Ah! true as I stand here, I must have been born to bad luck to have got myself into such a mess. And now the officers are going to let the Prussians knock us about as they please, and we're dished and done for." He had been swinging his piece to and fro in his hand; in his discouragement he gave it a toss and landed it on the other side of the hedge. "Eh! get you gone for a dirty bit of old iron!"

The musket made two revolutions in the air and fell into a furrow, where it lay, long and motionless, reminding one somehow of a corpse. Others soon flew to join it, and presently the field was filled with abandoned arms, lying in long winrows, a sorrowful spectacle beneath the blazing sky. It was an epidemic of madness, caused by the hunger that was gnawing at their stomach, the shoes that galled their feet, their weary march, the unexpected defeat that had brought the enemy galloping at their heels. There was nothing more to be accomplished; their leaders were looking out for themselves, the commissariat did not even feed them; nothing but weariness and worriment; better to leave the whole business at once, before it was begun. And what then? why, the musket might go and keep the knapsack company; in view of the work that was before them they might at least as well keep their arms free. And all down the long line of stragglers that stretched almost far as the eye could reach in the smooth and fertile country the muskets flew through the air to the accompaniment of jeers and laughter such as would have befitted the inmates of a lunatic asylum out for a holiday.

Loubet, before parting with his, gave it a twirl as a drum-major does his cane. Lapoulle, observing what all his comrades were doing, must have supposed the performance to be some recent innovation in the manual, and followed suit, while Pache, in the confused idea of duty that he owed to his religious education, refused to do as the rest were doing and was loaded with obloquy by Chouteau, who called him a priest's whelp.

"Look at the sniveling papist! And all because his old peasant of a mother used to make him swallow the holy wafer every Sunday in the village church down there! Be off with you and go serve mass; a man who won't stick with his comrades when they are right is a poor-spirited cur."

Maurice toiled along dejectedly in silence, bowing his head beneath the blazing sun. At every step he took he seemed to be advancing deeper into a horrid, phantom-haunted nightmare; it was as if he saw a yawning, gaping gulf before him toward which he was inevitably tending; it meant that he was suffering himself to be degraded to the level of the miserable beings by whom he was surrounded, that he was prostituting his talents and his position as a man of education.

"Hold!" he said abruptly to Chouteau, "what you say is right; there is truth in it."

And already he had deposited his musket upon a pile of stones, when Jean, who had tried without success to check the shameful proceedings of his men, saw what he was doing and hurried toward him.

"Take up your musket, at once! Do you hear me? take it up at once!"

Jean's face had flushed with sudden anger. Meekest and most pacific of men, always prone to measures of conciliation, his eyes were now blazing with wrath, his voice spoke with the thunders of authority. His men had never before seen him in such a state, and they looked at one another in astonishment.

"Take up your musket at once, or you will have me to deal with!"

Maurice was quivering with anger; he let fall one single word, into which he infused all the insult that he had at command:

"Peasant!"

"Yes, that's just it; I am a peasant, while you, you, are a gentleman! And it is for that reason that you are a pig! Yes! a dirty pig! I make no bones of telling you of it."

Yells and cat-calls arose all around him, but the corporal continued with extraordinary force and dignity:

"When a man has learning he shows it by his actions. If we are brutes and peasants, you owe us the benefit of your example, since you know more than we do. Take up your musket, or Nom de Dieu! I will have you shot the first halt we make."

Maurice was daunted; he stooped and raised the weapon in his hand. Tears of rage stood in his eyes. He reeled like a drunken man as he labored onward, surrounded by his comrades, who now were jeering at him for having yielded. Ah, that Jean! he felt that he should never cease to hate him, cut to the quick as he had been by that bitter lesson, which he could not but acknowledge he had deserved. And when Chouteau, marching at his side, growled: "When corporals are that way, we just wait for a battle and blow a hole in 'em," the landscape seemed red before his eyes, and he had a distinct vision of himself blowing Jean's brains out from behind a wall.

But an incident occurred to divert their thoughts; Loubet noticed that while the dispute was going on Pache had also abandoned his musket, laying it down tenderly at the foot of an embankment. Why? What were the reasons that had made him resist the example of his comrades in the first place, and what were the reasons that influenced him now? He probably could not have told himself, nor did he trouble his head about the matter, chuckling inwardly with silent enjoyment, like a schoolboy who, having long been held up as a model for his mates, commits his first offense. He strode along with a self-contented, rakish air, swinging his arms; and still along the dusty, sunlit roads, between the golden grain and the fields of hops that succeeded one another with tiresome monotony, the human tide kept pouring onward; the stragglers, without arms or knapsacks, were now but a shuffling, vagrant mob, a disorderly array of vagabonds and beggars, at whose approach the frightened villagers barred their doors.

Something that happened just then capped the climax of Maurice's misery. A deep, rumbling noise had for some time been audible in the distance; it was the artillery, that had been the last to leave the camp and whose leading guns now wheeled into sight around a bend in the road, barely giving the footsore infantrymen time to seek safety in the fields. It was an entire regiment of six batteries, and came up in column, in splendid order, at a sharp trot, the colonel riding on the flank at the center of the line, every officer at his post. The guns went rattling, bounding by, accurately maintaining their prescribed distances, each accompanied by its caisson, men and horses, beautiful in the perfect symmetry of its arrangement; and in the 5th battery Maurice recognized his cousin Honore. A very smart and soldierly appearance the quartermaster-sergeant presented on horseback in his position on the left hand of the forward driver, a good-looking light-haired man, Adolphe by name, whose mount was a sturdy chestnut, admirably matched with the mate that trotted at his side, while in his proper place among the six men who were seated on the chests of the gun and its caisson was the gunner, Louis, a small, dark man, Adolphe's comrade; they constituted a team, as it is called, in accordance with the rule of the service that couples a mounted and an unmounted man together. They all appeared bigger and taller to Maurice, somehow, than when he first made their acquaintance at the camp, and the gun, to which four horses were attached, followed by the caisson drawn by six, seemed to him as bright and refulgent as a sun, tended and cherished as it was by its attendants, men and animals, who closed around it protectingly as if it had been a living sentient relative; and then, besides, the contemptuous look that Honore, astounded to behold him among that unarmed rabble, cast on the stragglers, distressed him terribly. And now the tail end of the regiment was passing, the materiel of the batteries, prolonges, forges, forage-wagons, succeeded by the rag-tag, the spare men and horses, and then all vanished in a cloud of dust at another turn in the road amid the gradually decreasing clatter of hoofs and wheels.

"Pardi!" exclaimed Loubet, "it's not such a difficult matter to cut a dash when one travels with a coach and four!"

The staff had found Altkirch free from the enemy; not a Prussian had shown his face there yet. It had been the general's wish, not knowing at what moment they might fall upon his rear, that the retreat should be continued to Dannemarie, and it was not until five o'clock that the heads of columns reached that place. Tents were hardly pitched and fires lighted at eight, when night closed in, so great was the confusion of the regiments, depleted by the absence of the stragglers. The men were completely used up, were ready to drop with fatigue and hunger. Up to eight o'clock soldiers, singly and in squads, came trailing in, hunting for their commands; all that long train of the halt, the lame, and the disaffected that we have seen scattered along the roads.

As soon as Jean discovered where his regiment lay he went in quest of Lieutenant Rochas to make his report. He found him, together with Captain Beaudoin, in earnest consultation with the colonel at the door of a small inn, all of them anxiously waiting to see what tidings roll-call would give them as to the whereabouts of their missing men. The moment the corporal opened his mouth to address the lieutenant, Colonel Vineuil, who heard what the subject was, called him up and compelled him to tell the whole story. On his long, yellow face, where the intensely black eyes looked blacker still contrasted with the thick snow-white hair and the long, drooping mustache, there was an expression of patient, silent sorrow, and as the narrative proceeded, how the miserable wretches deserted their colors, threw away arms and knapsacks, and wandered off like vagabonds, grief and shame traced two new furrows on his blanched cheeks.

"Colonel," exclaimed Captain Beaudoin, in his incisive voice, not waiting for his superior to give an opinion, "it will best to shoot half a dozen of those wretches."

And the lieutenant nodded his head approvingly. But the colonel's despondent look expressed his powerlessness.

"There are too many of them. Nearly seven hundred! how are we to go to work, whom are we to select? And then you don't know it, but the general is opposed. He wants to be a father to his men, says he never punished a soldier all the time he was in Africa. No, no; we shall have to overlook it. I can do nothing. It is dreadful."

The captain echoed: "Yes, it is dreadful. It means destruction for us all."

Jean was walking off, having said all he had to say, when he heard Major Bouroche, whom he had not seen where he was standing in the doorway of the inn, growl in a smothered voice: "No more punishment, an end to discipline, the army gone to the dogs! Before a week is over the scoundrels will be ripe for kicking their officers out of camp, while if a few of them had been made an example of on the spot it might have brought the remainder to their senses."

No one was punished. Some officers of the rear-guard that was protecting the trains had been thoughtful enough to collect the muskets and knapsacks scattered along the road. They were almost all recovered, and by daybreak the men were equipped again, the operation being conducted very quietly, as if to hush the matter up as much as possible. Orders were given to break camp at five o'clock, but reveille sounded at four and the retreat to Belfort was hurriedly continued, for everyone was certain that the Prussians were only two or three leagues away. Again there was nothing to eat but dry biscuit, and as a consequence of their brief, disturbed rest and the lack of something to warm their stomachs the men were weak as cats. Any attempt to enforce discipline on the march that morning was again rendered nugatory by the manner of their departure.

The day was worse than its predecessor, inexpressibly gloomy and disheartening. The aspect of the landscape had changed, they were now in a rolling country where the roads they were always alternately climbing and descending were bordered with woods of pine and hemlock, while the narrow gorges were golden with tangled thickets of broom. But panic and terror lay heavy on the fair land that slumbered there beneath the bright sun of August, and had been hourly gathering strength since the preceeding day. A fresh dispatch, bidding the mayors of communes warn the people that they would do well to hide their valuables, had excited universal consternation. The enemy was at hand, then! Would time be given them to make their escape? And to all it seemed that the roar of invasion was ringing in their ears, coming nearer and nearer, the roar of the rushing torrent that, starting from Mulhausen, had grown louder and more ominous as it advanced, and to which every village that it encountered in its course contributed its own alarm amid the sound of wailing and lamentation.

Maurice stumbled along as best he might, like a man walking in a dream; his feet were bleeding, his shoulders sore with the weight of gun and knapsack. He had ceased to think, he advanced automatically into the vision of horrors that lay before his eyes; he had ceased to be conscious even of the shuffling tramp of the comrades around him, and the only thing that was not dim and unreal to his sense was Jean, marching at his side and enduring the same fatigue and horrible distress. It was lamentable to behold the villages they passed through, a sight to make a man's heart bleed with anguish. No sooner did the inhabitants catch sight of the troops retreating in disorderly array, with haggard faces and bloodshot eyes, than they bestirred themselves to hasten their flight. They who had been so confident only a short half month ago, those men and women of Alsace, who smiled when war was mentioned, certain that it would be fought out in Germany! And now France was invaded, and it was among them, above their abodes, in their fields, that the tempest was to burst, like one of those dread cataclysms that lay waste a province in an hour when the lightnings flash and the gates of heaven are opened! Carts were backed up against doors and men tumbled their furniture into them in wild confusion, careless of what they broke. From the upper windows the women threw out a last mattress, or handed down the child's cradle, that they had been near forgetting, whereon baby would be tucked in securely and hoisted to the top of the load, where he reposed serenely among a grove of legs of chairs and upturned tables. At the back of another cart was the decrepit old grandfather tied with cords to a wardrobe, and he was hauled away for all the world as if he had been one of the family chattels. Then there were those who did not own a vehicle, so they piled their household goods haphazard on a wheelbarrow, while others carried an armful of clothing, and others still had thought only of saving the clock, which they went off pressing to their bosom as if it had been a darling child. They found they could not remove everything, and there were chairs and tables, and bundles of linen too heavy to carry, lying abandoned in the gutter, Some before leaving had carefully locked their dwellings, and the houses had a deathlike appearance, with their barred doors and windows, but the greater number, in their haste to get away and with the sorrowful conviction that nothing would escape destruction, had left their poor abodes open, and the yawning apertures displayed the nakedness of the dismantled rooms; and those were the saddest to behold, with the horrible sadness of a city upon which some great dread has fallen, depopulating it, those poor houses opened to the winds of heaven, whence the very cats had fled as if forewarned of the impending doom. At every village the pitiful spectacle became more heartrending, the number of the fugitives was greater, as they clove their way through the ever thickening press, with hands upraised, amid oaths and tears.

But in the open country as they drew near Belfort, Maurice's heart was still more sorely wrung, for there the homeless fugitives were in greater numbers and lined the borders of the road in an unbroken cortege. Ah! the unhappy ones, who had believed that they were to find safety under the walls of the fortifications! The father lashed the poor old nag, the mother followed after, leading her crying children by the hand, and in this way entire families, sinking beneath the weight of their burdens, were strung along the white, blinding road in the fierce sunlight, where the tired little legs of the smaller children were unable to keep up with the headlong flight. Many had taken off their shoes and were going barefoot so as to get over the ground more rapidly, and half-dressed mothers gave the breast to their crying babies as they strode along. Affrighted faces turned for a look backward, trembling hands were raised as if to shut out the horizon from their sight, while the gale of panic tumbled their unkempt locks and sported with their ill-adjusted garments. Others there were, farmers and their men, who pushed straight across the fields, driving before them their flocks and herds, cows, oxen, sheep, horses, that they had driven with sticks and cudgels from their stables; these were seeking the shelter of the inaccessible forests, of the deep valleys and the lofty hill-tops, their course marked by clouds of dust, as in the great migrations of other days, when invaded nations made way before their barbarian conquerors. They were going to live in tents, in some lonely nook among the mountains, where the enemy would never venture to follow them; and the bleating and bellowing of the animals and the trampling of their hoofs upon the rocks grew fainter in the distance, and the golden nimbus that overhung them was lost to sight among the thick pines, while down in the road beneath the tide of vehicles and pedestrians was flowing still as strong as ever, blocking the passage of the troops, and as they drew near Belfort the men had to be brought to a halt again and again, so irresistible was the force of that torrent of humanity.

It was during one of those short halts that Maurice witnessed a scene that was destined to remain indelibly impressed upon his memory.

Standing by the road-side was a lonely house, the abode of some poor peasant, whose lean acres extended up the mountainside in the rear. The man had been unwilling to leave the little field that was his all and had remained, for to go away would have been to him like parting with life. He could be seen within the low-ceiled room, sitting stupidly on a bench, watching with dull, lack-luster eyes the passing of the troops whose retreat would give his ripe grain over to be the spoil of the enemy. Standing beside him was his wife, still a young woman, holding in her arms a child, while another was hanging by her skirts; all three were weeping bitterly. Suddenly the door was thrown open with violence and in its enframement appeared the grandmother, a very old woman, tall and lean of form, with bare, sinewy arms like knotted cords that she raised above her head and shook with frantic gestures. Her gray, scanty locks had escaped from her cap and were floating about her skinny face, and such was her fury that the words she shouted choked her utterance and came from her lips almost unintelligible.

At first the soldiers had laughed. Wasn't she a beauty, the old crazy hag! Then words reached their ears; the old woman was screaming:

"Scum! Robbers! Cowards! Cowards!"

With a voice that rose shriller and more piercing still she kept lashing them with her tongue, expectorating insult on them, and taunting them for dastards with the full force of her lungs. And the laughter ceased, it seemed as if a cold wind had blown over the ranks. The men hung their heads, looked any way save that.

"Cowards! Cowards! Cowards!"

Then all at once her stature seemed to dilate; she drew herself up, tragic in her leanness, in her poor old apology for a gown, and sweeping the heavens with her long arm from west to east, with a gesture so broad that it seemed to fill the dome:

"Cowards, the Rhine is not there! The Rhine lies yonder! Cowards, cowards!"

They got under way again at last, and Maurice, whose look just then encountered Jean's, saw that the latter's eyes were filled with tears, and it did not alleviate his distress to think that those rough soldiers, compelled to swallow an insult that they had done nothing to deserve, were shamed by it. He was conscious of nothing save the intolerable aching in his poor head, and in after days could never remember how the march of that day ended, prostrated as he was by his terrible suffering, mental and physical.

The 7th corps had spent the entire day in getting over the fourteen or fifteen miles between Dannemarie and Belfort, and it was night again before the troops got settled in their bivouacs under the walls of the town, in the very same place whence they had started four days before to march against the enemy. Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour and their spent condition, the men insisted on lighting fires and making soup; it was the first time since their departure that they had had an opportunity to put warm food into their stomachs, and seated about the cheerful blaze in the cool air of evening they were dipping their noses in the porringers and grunting inarticulately in token of satisfaction when news came in that burst upon the camp like a thunderbolt, dumfoundering everyone. Two telegrams had just been received: the Prussians had not crossed the Rhine at Markolsheim, and there was not a single Prussian at Huningue. The passage of the Rhine at Markolsheim and the bridge of boats constructed under the electric light had existed merely in imagination, were an unexplained, inexplicable nightmare of the prefet at Schelestadt; and as for the army corps that had menaced Huningue, that famous corps of the Black Forest, that had made so much talk, it was but an insignificant detachment of Wurtemburgers, a couple of battalions of infantry and a squadron of cavalry, which had maneuvered with such address, marching and countermarching, appearing in one place and then suddenly popping up in another at a distance, as to gain for themselves the reputation of being thirty or forty thousand strong. And to think that that morning they had been near blowing up the viaduct at Dannemarie! Twenty leagues of fertile country had been depopulated by the most idiotic of panics, and at the recollection of what they had seen during their lamentable day's march, the inhabitants flying in consternation to the mountains, driving their cattle before them; the press of vehicles, laden with household effects, streaming cityward and surrounded by bands of weeping women and children, the soldiers waxed wroth and gave way to bitter, sneering denunciation of their leaders.

"Ah! it is too ridiculous too talk about!" sputtered Loubet, not stopping to empty his mouth, brandishing his spoon. "They take us out to fight the enemy, and there's not a soul to fight with! Twelve leagues there and twelve leagues back, and not so much as a mouse in front of us! All that for nothing, just for the fun of being scared to death!"

Chouteau, who was noisily absorbing the last drops in his porringer, bellowed his opinion of the generals, without mentioning names:

"The pigs! what miserable boobies they are, hein! A pretty pack of dunghill-cocks the government has given us as commanders! Wonder what they would do if they had an army actually before them, if they show the white feather this way when there's not a Prussian in sight, hein!—Ah no, not any of it in mine, thank you; soldiers don't obey such pigeon-livered gentlemen."

Someone had thrown another armful of wood on the fire for the pleasurable sensation of comfort there was in the bright, dancing flame, and Lapoulle, who was engaged in the luxurious occupation of toasting his shins, suddenly went off into an imbecile fit of laughter without in the least understanding what it was about, whereon Jean, who had thus far turned a deaf ear to their talk, thought it time to interfere, which he did by saying in a fatherly way:

"You had better hold your tongue, you fellows! It might be the worse for you if anyone should hear you."

He himself, in his untutored, common-sense way of viewing things, was exasperated by the stupid incompetency of their commanders, but then discipline must be maintained, and as Chouteau still kept up a low muttering he cut him short:

"Be silent, I say! Here is the lieutenant: address yourself to him if you have anything to say."

Maurice had listened in silence to the conversation from his place a little to one side. Ah, truly, the end was near! Scarcely had they made a beginning, and all was over. That lack of discipline, that seditious spirit among the men at the very first reverse, had already made the army a demoralized, disintegrated rabble that would melt away at the first indication of catastrophe. There they were, under the walls of Belfort, without having sighted a Prussian, and they were whipped.

The succeeding days were a period of monotony, full of uncertainty and anxious forebodings. To keep his troops occupied General Douay set them to work on the defenses of the place, which were in a state of incompleteness; there was great throwing up of earth and cutting through rock. And not the first item of news! Where was MacMahon's army? What was going on at Metz? The wildest rumors were current, and the Parisian journals, by their system of printing news only to contradict it the next day, kept the country in an agony of suspense. Twice, it was said, the general had written and asked for instructions, and had not even received an answer. On the 12th of August, however, the 7th corps was augmented by the 3d division, which landed from Italy, but there were still only two divisions for duty, for the 1st had participated in the defeat at Froeschwiller, had been swept away in the general rout, and as yet no one had learned where it had been stranded by the current. After a week of this abandonment, of this entire separation from the rest of France, a telegram came bringing them the order to march. The news was well received, for anything was preferable to the prison life they were leading in Belfort. And while they were getting themselves in readiness conjecture and surmise were the order of the day, for no one as yet knew what their destination was to be, some saying that they were to be sent to the defense of Strasbourg, while others spoke with confidence of a bold dash into the Black Forest that was to sever the Prussian line of communication.

Early the next morning the 106th was bundled into cattle-cars and started off among the first. The car that contained Jean's squad was particularly crowded, so much so that Loubet declared there was not even room in it to sneeze. It was a load of humanity, sent off to the war just as a load of sacks would have been dispatched to the mill, crowded in so as to get the greatest number into the smallest space, and as rations had been given out in the usual hurried, slovenly manner and the men had received in brandy what they should have received in food, the consequence was that they were all roaring drunk, with a drunkenness that vented itself in obscene songs, varied by shrieks and yells. The heavy train rolled slowly onward; pipes were alight and men could no longer see one another through the dense clouds of smoke; the heat and odor that emanated from that mass of perspiring human flesh were unendurable, while from the jolting, dingy van came volleys of shouts and laughter that drowned the monotonous rattle of the wheels and were lost amid the silence of the deserted fields. And it was not until they reached Langres that the troops learned that they were being carried back to Paris.

"Ah, nom de Dieu!" exclaimed Chouteau, who already, by virtue of his oratorical ability, was the acknowledged sovereign of his corner, "they will station us at Charentonneau, sure, to keep old Bismarck out of the Tuileries."

The others laughed loud and long, considering the joke a very good one, though no one could say why. The most trivial incidents of the journey, however, served to elicit a storm of yells, cat-calls, and laughter: a group of peasants standing beside the roadway, or the anxious faces of the people who hung about the way-stations in the hope of picking up some bits of news from the passing trains, epitomizing on a small scale the breathless, shuddering alarm that pervaded all France in the presence of invasion. And so it happened that as the train thundered by, a fleeting vision of pandemonium, all that the good burghers obtained in the way of intelligence was the salutations of that cargo of food for powder as it hurried onward to its destination, fast as steam could carry it. At a station where they stopped, however, three well-dressed ladies, wealthy bourgeoises of the town, who distributed cups of bouillon among the men, were received with great respect. Some of the soldiers shed tears, and kissed their hands as they thanked them.

But as soon as they were under way again the filthy songs and the wild shouts began afresh, and so it went on until, a little while after leaving Chaumont, they met another train that was conveying some batteries of artillery to Metz. The locomotives slowed down and the soldiers in the two trains fraternized with a frightful uproar. The artillerymen were also apparently very drunk; they stood up in their seats, and thrusting hands and arms out of the car-windows, gave this cry with a vehemence that silenced every other sound:

"To the slaughter! to the slaughter! to the slaughter!"

It was as if a cold wind, a blast from the charnel-house, had swept through the car. Amid the sudden silence that descended on them Loubet's irreverent voice was heard, shouting:

"Not very cheerful companions, those fellows!"

"But they are right," rejoined Chouteau, as if addressing some pot-house assemblage; "it is a beastly thing to send a lot of brave boys to have their brains blown out for a dirty little quarrel about which they don't know the first word."

And much more in the same strain. He was the type of the Belleville agitator, a lazy, dissipated mechanic, perverting his fellow workmen, constantly spouting the ill-digested odds and ends of political harangues that he had heard, belching forth in the same breath the loftiest sentiments and the most asinine revolutionary clap-trap. He knew it all, and tried to inoculate his comrades with his ideas, especially Lapoulle, of whom he had promised to make a lad of spirit.

"Don't you see, old man, it's all perfectly simple. If Badinguet and Bismarck have a quarrel, let 'em go to work with their fists and fight it out and not involve in their row some hundreds of thousands of men who don't even know one another by sight and have not the slightest desire to fight."

The whole car laughed and applauded, and Lapoulle, who did not know who Badinguet[*] was, and could not have told whether it was a king or an emperor in whose cause he was fighting, repeated like the gigantic baby that he was:

[*] Napoleon III.

"Of course, let 'em fight it out, and take a drink together afterward."

But Chouteau had turned to Pache, whom he now proceeded to take in hand.

"You are in the same boat, you, who pretend to believe in the good God. He has forbidden men to fight, your good God has. Why, then, are you here, you great simpleton?"

"Dame!" Pache doubtfully replied, "it is not for any pleasure of mine that I am here—but the gendarmes—"

"Oh, indeed, the gendarmes! let the gendarmes go milk the ducks!—say, do you know what we would do, all of us, if we had the least bit of spirit? I'll tell you; just the minute that they land us from the cars we'd skip; yes, we'd go straight home, and leave that pig of a Badinguet and his gang of two-for-a-penny generals to settle accounts with their beastly Prussians as best they may!"

There was a storm of bravos; the leaven of perversion was doing its work and it was Chouteau's hour of triumph, airing his muddled theories and ringing the changes on the Republic, the Rights of Man, the rottenness of the Empire, which must be destroyed, and the treason of their commanders, who, as it had been proved, had sold themselves to the enemy at the rate of a million a piece. He was a revolutionist, he boldly declared; the others could not even say that they were republicans, did not know what their opinions were, in fact, except Loubet, the concocter of stews and hashes, and he had an opinion, for he had been for soup, first, last, and always; but they all, carried away by his eloquence, shouted none the less lustily against the Emperor, their officers, the whole d——d shop, which they would leave the first chance they got, see if they wouldn't! And Chouteau, while fanning the flame of their discontent, kept an eye on Maurice, the fine gentleman, who appeared interested and whom he was proud to have for a companion; so that, by way of inflaming his passions also, it occurred to him to make an attack on Jean, who had thus far been tranquilly watching the proceedings out of his half-closed eyes, unmoved among the general uproar. If there was any remnant of resentment in the bosom of the volunteer since the time when the corporal had inflicted such a bitter humiliation on him by forcing him to resume his abandoned musket, now was a fine chance to set the two men by the ears.

"I know some folks who talk of shooting us," Chouteau continued, with an ugly look at Jean; "dirty, miserable skunks, who treat us worse than beasts, and, when a man's back is broken with the weight of his knapsack and Brownbess, aie! aie! object to his planting them in the fields to see if a new crop will grow from them. What do you suppose they would say, comrades, hein! now that we are masters, if we should pitch them all out upon the track, and teach them better manners? That's the way to do, hein! We'll show 'em that we won't be bothered any longer with their mangy wars. Down with Badinguet's bed-bugs! Death to the curs who want to make us fight!"

Jean's face was aflame with the crimson tide that never failed to rush to his cheeks in his infrequent fits of anger. He rose, wedged in though as he was between his neighbors as firmly as in a vise, and his blazing eyes and doubled fists had such a look of business about them that the other quailed.

"Tonnerre de Dieu! will you be silent, pig! For hours I have sat here without saying anything, because we have no longer any leaders, and I could not even send you to the guard-house. Yes, there's no doubt of it, it would be a good thing to shoot such men as you and rid the regiment of the vermin. But see here, as there's no longer any discipline, I will attend to your case myself. There's no corporal here now, but a hard-fisted fellow who is tired of listening to your jaw, and he'll see if he can't make you keep your potato-trap shut. Ah! you d——d coward! You won't fight yourself and you want to keep others from fighting! Repeat your words once and I'll knock your head off!"

By this time the whole car, won over by Jean's manly attitude, had deserted Chouteau, who cowered back in his seat as if not anxious to face his opponent's big fists.

"And I care no more for Badinguet than I do for you, do you understand? I despise politics, whether they are republican or imperial, and now, as in the past, when I used to cultivate my little farm, there is but one thing that I wish for, and that is the happiness of all, peace and good-order, freedom for every man to attend to his affairs. No one denies that war is a terrible business, but that is no reason why a man should not be treated to the sight of a firing-party when he comes trying to dishearten people who already have enough to do to keep their courage up. Good Heavens, friends, how it makes a man's pulses leap to be told that the Prussians are in the land and that he is to go help drive them out!"

Then, with the customary fickleness of a mob, the soldiers applauded the corporal, who again announced his determination to thrash the first man of his squad who should declare non-combatant principles. Bravo, the corporal! they would soon settle old Bismarck's hash! And, in the midst of the wild ovation of which he was the object, Jean, who had recovered his self-control, turned politely to Maurice and addressed him as if he had not been one of his men:

"Monsieur, you cannot have anything in common with those poltroons. Come, we haven't had a chance at them yet; we are the boys who will give them a good basting yet, those Prussians!"

It seemed to Maurice at that moment as if a ray of cheering sunshine had penetrated his heart. He was humiliated, vexed with himself. What! that man was nothing more than an uneducated rustic! And he remembered the fierce hatred that had burned in his bosom the day he was compelled to pick up the musket that he had thrown away in a moment of madness. But he also remembered his emotion at seeing the two big tears that stood in the corporal's eyes when the old grandmother, her gray hairs streaming in the wind, had so bitterly reproached them and pointed to the Rhine that lay beneath the horizon in the distance. Was it the brotherhood of fatigue and suffering endured in common that had served thus to dissipate his wrathful feelings? He was Bonapartist by birth, and had never thought of the Republic except in a speculative, dreamy way; his feeling toward the Emperor, personally, too, inclined to friendliness, and he was favorable to the war, the very condition of national existence, the great regenerative school of nationalities. Hope, all at once, with one of those fitful impulses of the imagination, that were common in his temperament, revived in him, while the enthusiastic ardor that had impelled him to enlist one night again surged through his veins and swelled his heart with confidence of victory.

"Why, of course, Corporal," he gayly replied, "we shall give them a basting!"

And still the car kept rolling onward with its load of human freight, filled with reeking smoke of pipes and emanations of the crowded men, belching its ribald songs and drunken shouts among the expectant throngs of the stations through which it passed, among the rows of white-faced peasants who lined the iron-way. On the 20th of August they were at the Pantin Station in Paris, and that same evening boarded another train which landed them next day at Rheims en route for the camp at Chalons.

III.

Maurice was greatly surprised when the 106th, leaving the cars at Rheims, received orders to go into camp there. So they were not to go to Chalons, then, and unite with the army there? And when, two hours later, his regiment had stacked muskets a league or so from the city over in the direction of Courcelles, in the broad plain that lies along the canal between the Aisne and Marne, his astonishment was greater still to learn that the entire army of Chalons had been falling back all that morning and was about to bivouac at that place. From one extremity of the horizon to the other, as far as Saint Thierry and Menvillette, even beyond the Laon road, the tents were going up, and when it should be night the fires of four army-corps would be blazing there. It was evident that the plan now was to go and take a position under the walls of Paris and there await the Prussians; and it was fortunate that that plan had received the approbation of the government, for was it not the wisest thing they could do?

Maurice devoted the afternoon of the 21st to strolling about the camp in search of news. The greatest freedom prevailed; discipline appeared to have been relaxed still further, the men went and came at their own sweet will. He found no obstacle in the way of his return to the city, where he desired to cash a money-order for a hundred francs that his sister Henriette had sent him. While in a cafe he heard a sergeant telling of the disaffection that existed in the eighteen battalions of the garde mobile of the Seine, which had just been sent back to Paris; the 6th battalion had been near killing their officers. Not a day passed at the camp that the generals were not insulted, and since Froeschwiller the soldiers had ceased to give Marshal MacMahon the military salute. The cafe resounded with the sound of voices in excited conversation; a violent dispute arose between two sedate burghers in respect to the number of men that MacMahon would have at his disposal. One of them made the wild assertion that there would be three hundred thousand; the other, who seemed to be more at home upon the subject, stated the strength of the four corps: the 12th, which had just been made complete at the camp with great difficulty with the assistance of provisional regiments and a division of infanterie de marine; the 1st, which had been coming straggling in in fragments ever since the 14th of the month and of which they were doing what they could to perfect the organization; the 5th, defeated before it had ever fought a battle, swept away and broken up in the general panic, and finally, the 7th, then landing from the cars, demoralized like all the rest and minus its 1st division, of which it had just recovered the remains at Rheims; in all, one hundred and twenty thousand at the outside, including the cavalry, Bonnemain's and Margueritte's divisions. When the sergeant took a hand in the quarrel, however, speaking of the army in terms of the utmost contempt, characterizing it as a ruffianly rabble, with no esprit de corps, with nothing to keep it together,—a pack of greenhorns with idiots to conduct them, to the slaughter,—the two bourgeois began to be uneasy, and fearing there might be trouble brewing, made themselves scarce.

When outside upon the street Maurice hailed a newsboy and purchased a copy of every paper he could lay hands on, stuffing some in his pockets and reading others as he walked along under the stately trees that line the pleasant avenues of the old city. Where could the German armies be? It seemed as if obscurity had suddenly swallowed them up. Two were over Metz way, of course: the first, the one commanded by General von Steinmetz, observing the place; the second, that of Prince Frederick Charles, aiming to ascend the right bank of the Moselle in order to cut Bazaine off from Paris. But the third army, that of the Crown Prince of Prussia, the army that had been victorious at Wissembourg and Froeschwiller and had driven our 1st and 5th corps, where was it now, where was it to be located amid the tangled mess of contradictory advices? Was it still in camp at Nancy, or was it true that it had arrived before Chalons, and was that the reason why we had abandoned our camp there in such hot haste, burning our stores, clothing, forage, provisions, everything—property of which the value to the nation was beyond compute? And when the different plans with which our generals were credited came to be taken into consideration, then there was more confusion, a fresh set of contradictory hypotheses to be encountered. Maurice had until now been cut off in a measure from the outside world, and now for the first time learned what had been the course of events in Paris; the blasting effect of defeat upon a populace that had been confident of victory, the terrible commotions in the streets, the convoking of the Chambers, the fall of the liberal ministry that had effected the plebiscite, the abrogation of the Emperor's rank as General of the Army and the transfer of the supreme command to Marshal Bazaine. The Emperor had been present at the camp of Chalons since the 16th, and all the newspapers were filled with a grand council that had been held on the 17th, at which Prince Napoleon and some of the generals were present, but none of them were agreed upon the decisions that had been arrived at outside of the resultant facts, which were that General Trochu had been appointed governor of Paris and Marshal MacMahon given the command of the army of Chalons, and the inference from this was that the Emperor was to be shorn of all his authority. Consternation, irresolution, conflicting plans that were laid aside and replaced by fresh ones hour by hour; these were the things that everybody felt were in the air. And ever and always the question: Where were the German armies? Who were in the right, those who asserted that Bazaine had no force worth mentioning in front of him and was free to make his retreat through the towns of the north whenever he chose to do so, or those who declared that he was already besieged in Metz? There was a constantly recurring rumor of a series of engagements that had raged during an entire week, from the 14th until the 20th, but it failed to receive confirmation.

Maurice's legs ached with fatigue; he went and sat down upon a bench. Around him the life of the city seemed to be going on as usual; there were nursemaids seated in the shade of the handsome trees watching the sports of their little charges, small property owners strolled leisurely about the walks enjoying their daily constitutional. He had taken up his papers again, when his eyes lighted on an article that had escaped his notice, the "leader" in a rabid republican sheet; then everything was made clear to him. The paper stated that at the council of the 17th at the camp of Chalons the retreat of the army on Paris had been fully decided on, and that General Trochu's appointment to the command of the city had no other object than to facilitate the Emperor's return; but those resolutions, the journal went on to say, were rendered unavailing by the attitude of the Empress-regent and the new ministry. It was the Empress's opinion that the Emperor's return would certainly produce a revolution; she was reported to have said: "He will never reach the Tuileries alive." Starting with these premises she insisted with the utmost urgency that the army should advance, at every risk, whatever might be the cost of human life, and effect a junction with the army of Metz, in which course she was supported moreover by General de Palikao, the Minister of War, who had a plan of his own for reaching Bazaine by a rapid and victorious march. And Maurice, letting his paper fall from his hand, his eyes bent on space, believed that he now had the key to the entire mystery; the two conflicting plans, MacMahon's hesitation to undertake that dangerous flank movement with the unreliable army at his command, the impatient orders that came to him from Paris, each more tart and imperative than its predecessor, urging him on to that mad, desperate enterprise. Then, as the central figure in that tragic conflict, the vision of the Emperor suddenly rose distinctly before his inner eyes, deprived of his imperial authority, which he had committed to the hands of the Empress-regent, stripped of his military command, which he had conferred on Marshal Bazaine; a nullity, the vague and unsubstantial shadow of an emperor, a nameless, cumbersome nonentity whom no one knew what to do with, whom Paris rejected and who had ceased to have a position in the army, for he had pledged himself to issue no further orders.

The next morning, however, after a rainy night through which he slept outside his tent on the bare ground, wrapped in his rubber blanket, Maurice was cheered by the tidings that the retreat on Paris had finally carried the day. Another council had been held during the night, it was said, at which M. Rouher, the former vice-Emperor, had been present; he had been sent by the Empress to accelerate the movement toward Verdun, and it would seem that the marshal had succeeded in convincing him of the rashness of such an undertaking. Were there unfavorable tidings from Bazaine? no one could say for certain. But the absence of news was itself a circumstance of evil omen, and all among the most influential of the generals had cast their vote for the march on Paris, for which they would be the relieving army. And Maurice, happy in the conviction that the retrograde movement would commence not later than the morrow, since the orders for it were said to be already issued, thought he would gratify a boyish longing that had been troubling him for some time past, to give the go-by for one day to soldier's fare, to wit and eat his breakfast off a cloth, with the accompaniment of plate, knife and fork, carafe, and a bottle of good wine, things of which it seemed to him that he had been deprived for months and months. He had money in his pocket, so off he started with quickened pulse, as if going out for a lark, to search for a place of entertainment.

It was just at the entrance of the village of Courcelles, across the canal, that he found the breakfast for which his mouth was watering. He had been told the day before that the Emperor had taken up his quarters in one of the houses of the village, and having gone to stroll there out of curiosity, now remembered to have seen at the junction of the two roads this little inn with its arbor, the trellises of which were loaded with big clusters of ripe, golden, luscious grapes. There was an array of green-painted tables set out in the shade of the luxuriant vine, while through the open door of the vast kitchen he had caught glimpses of the antique clock, the colored prints pasted on the walls, and the comfortable landlady watching the revolving spit. It was cheerful, smiling, hospitable; a regular type of the good old-fashioned French hostelry.

A pretty, white-necked waitress came up and asked him with a great display of flashing teeth:

"Will monsieur have breakfast?"

"Of course I will! Give me some eggs, a cutlet, and cheese. And a bottle of white wine!"

She turned to go; he called her back. "Tell me, is it not in one of those houses that the Emperor has his quarters?"

"There, monsieur, in that one right before you. Only you can't see it, for it is concealed by the high wall with the overhanging trees."

He loosed his belt so as to be more at ease in his capote, and entering the arbor, chose his table, on which the sunlight, finding its way here and there through the green canopy above, danced in little golden spangles. And constantly his thoughts kept returning to that high wall behind which was the Emperor. A most mysterious house it was, indeed, shrinking from the public gaze, even its slated roof invisible. Its entrance was on the other side, upon the village street, a narrow winding street between dead-walls, without a shop, without even a window to enliven it. The small garden in the rear, among the sparse dwellings that environed it, was like an island of dense verdure. And across the road he noticed a spacious courtyard, surrounded by sheds and stables, crowded with a countless train of carriages and baggage-wagons, among which men and horses, coming and going, kept up an unceasing bustle.

"Are those all for the service of the Emperor?" he inquired, meaning to say something humorous to the girl, who was laying a snow-white cloth upon the table.

"Yes, for the Emperor himself, and no one else!" she pleasantly replied, glad of a chance to show her white teeth once more; and then she went on to enumerate the suite from information that she had probably received from the stablemen, who had been coming to the inn to drink since the preceding day; there were the staff, comprising twenty-five officers, the sixty cent-gardes and the half-troop of guides for escort duty, the six gendarmes of the provost-guard; then the household, seventy-three persons in all, chamberlains, attendants for the table and the bedroom, cooks and scullions; then four saddle-horses and two carriages for the Emperor's personal use, ten horses for the equerries, eight for the grooms and outriders, not mentioning forty-seven post-horses; then a char a banc and twelve baggage wagons, two of which, appropriated to the cooks, had particularly excited her admiration by reason of the number and variety of the utensils they contained, all in the most splendid order.

"Oh, sir, you never saw such stew-pans! they shone like silver. And all sorts of dishes, and jars and jugs, and lots of things of which it would puzzle me to tell the use! And a cellar of wine, claret, burgundy, and champagne—yes! enough to supply a wedding feast."

The unusual luxury of the snowy table-cloth and the white wine sparkling in his glass sharpened Maurice's appetite; he devoured his two poached eggs with a zest that made him fear he was developing epicurean tastes. When he turned to the left and looked out through the entrance of the leafy arbor he had before him the spacious plain, covered with long rows of tents: a busy, populous city that had risen like an exhalation from the stubble-fields between Rheims city and the canal. A few clumps of stunted trees, three wind-mills lifting their skeleton arms in the air, were all there was to relieve the monotony of the gray waste, but above the huddled roofs of Rheims, lost in the sea of foliage of the tall chestnut-trees, the huge bulk of the cathedral with its slender spires was profiled against the blue sky, looming colossal, notwithstanding the distance, beside the modest houses. Memories of school and boyhood's days came over him, the tasks he had learned and recited: all about the sacre of our kings, the sainte ampoule, Clovis, Jeanne d'Arc, all the long list of glories of old France.

Then Maurice's thoughts reverted again to that unassuming bourgeoise house, so mysterious in its solitude, and its imperial occupant; and directing his eyes upon the high, yellow wall he was surprised to read, scrawled there in great, awkward letters, the legend: Vive Napoleon! among the meaningless obscenities traced by schoolboys. Winter's storms and summer's sun had half effaced the lettering; evidently the inscription was very ancient. How strange, to see upon that wall that old heroic battle-cry, which probably had been placed there in honor of the uncle, not of the nephew! It brought all his childhood back to him, and Maurice was again a boy, scarcely out of his mother's arms, down there in distant Chene-Populeux, listening to the stories of his grandfather, a veteran of the Grand Army. His mother was dead, his father, in the inglorious days that followed the collapse of the empire, had been compelled to accept a humble position as collector, and there the grandfather lived, with nothing to support him save his scanty pension, in the poor home of the small public functionary, his sole comfort to fight his battles o'er again for the benefit of his two little twin grandchildren, the boy and the girl, a pair of golden-haired youngsters to whom he was in some sense a mother. He would place Maurice on his right knee and Henriette on his left, and then for hours on end the narrative would run on in Homeric strain.

But small attention was paid to dates; his story was of the dire shock of conflicting nations, and was not to be hampered by the minute exactitude of the historian. Successively or together English, Austrians, Prussians, Russians appeared upon the scene, according to the then prevailing condition of the ever-changing alliances, and it was not always an easy matter to tell why one nation received a beating in preference to another, but beaten they all were in the end, inevitably beaten from the very commencement, in a whirlwind of genius and heroic daring that swept great armies like chaff from off the earth. There was Marengo, the classic battle of the plain, with the consummate generalship of its broad plan and the faultless retreat of the battalions by squares, silent and impassive under the enemy's terrible fire; the battle, famous in story, lost at three o'clock and won at six, where the eight hundred grenadiers of the Consular Guard withstood the onset of the entire Austrian cavalry, where Desaix arrived to change impending defeat to glorious victory and die. There was Austerlitz, with its sun of glory shining forth from amid the wintry sky, Austerlitz, commencing with the capture of the plateau of Pratzen and ending with the frightful catastrophe on the frozen lake, where an entire Russian corps, men, guns, horses, went crashing through the ice, while Napoleon, who in his divine omniscience had foreseen it all, of course, directed his artillery to play upon the struggling mass. There was Jena, where so many of Prussia's bravest found a grave; at first the red flames of musketry flashing through the October mists, and Ney's impatience, near spoiling all until Augereau comes wheeling into line and saves him; the fierce charge that tore the enemy's center in twain, and finally panic, the headlong rout of their boasted cavalry, whom our hussars mow down like ripened grain, strewing the romantic glen with a harvest of men and horses. And Eylau, cruel Eylau, bloodiest battle of them all, where the maimed corpses cumbered the earth in piles; Eylau, whose new-fallen snow was stained with blood, the burial-place of heroes; Eylau, in whose name reverberates still the thunder of the charge of Murat's eighty squadrons, piercing the Russian lines in every direction, heaping the ground so thick with dead that Napoleon himself could not refrain from tears. Then Friedland, the trap into which the Russians again allowed themselves to be decoyed like a flock of brainless sparrows, the masterpiece of the Emperor's consummate strategy; our left held back as in a leash, motionless, without a sign of life, while Ney was carrying the city, street by street, and destroying the bridges, then the left hurled like a thunderbolt on the enemy's right, driving it into the river and annihilating it in that cul-de-sac; the slaughter so great that at ten o'clock at night the bloody work was not completed, most wonderful of all the successes of the great imperial epic. And Wagram, where it was the aim of the Austrians to cut us off from the Danube; they keep strengthening their left in order to overwhelm Massena, who is wounded and issues his orders from an open carriage, and Napoleon, like a malicious Titan, lets them go on unchecked; then all at once a hundred guns vomit their terrible fire upon their weakened center, driving it backward more than a league, and their left, terror-stricken to find itself unsupported, gives way before the again victorious Massena, sweeping away before it the remainder of the army, as when a broken dike lets loose its torrents upon the fields. And finally the Moskowa, where the bright sun of Austerlitz shone for the last time; where the contending hosts were mingled in confused melee amid deeds of the most desperate daring: mamelons carried under an unceasing fire of musketry, redoubts stormed with the naked steel, every inch of ground fought over again and again; such determined resistance on the part of the Russian Guards that our final victory was only assured by Murat's mad charges, the concentrated fire of our three hundred pieces of artillery, and the valor of Ney, who was the hero of that most obstinate of conflicts. And be the battle what it might, ever our flags floated proudly on the evening air, and as the bivouac fires were lighted on the conquered field out rang the old battle-cry: Vive Napoleon! France, carrying her invincible Eagles from end to end of Europe, seemed everywhere at home, having but to raise her finger to make her will respected by the nations, mistress of a world that in vain conspired to crush her and upon which she set her foot.

Maurice was contentedly finishing his cutlet, cheered not so much by the wine that sparkled in his glass as by the glorious memories that were teeming in his brain, when his glance encountered two ragged, dust-stained soldiers, less like soldiers than weary tramps just off the road; they were asking the attendant for information as to the position of the regiments that were encamped along the canal. He hailed them.

"Hallo there, comrades, this way! You are 7th corps men, aren't you?"

"Right you are, sir; 1st division—at least I am, more by token that I was at Froeschwiller, where it was warm enough, I can tell you. The comrade, here, belongs in the 1st corps; he was at Wissembourg, another beastly hole."

They told their story, how they had been swept away in the general panic, had crawled into a ditch half-dead with fatigue and hunger, each of them slightly wounded, and since then had been dragging themselves along in the rear of the army, compelled to lie over in towns when the fever-fits came on, until at last they had reached the camp and were on the lookout to find their regiments.

Maurice, who had a piece of Gruyere before him, noticed the hungry eyes fixed on his plate.

"Hi there, mademoiselle! bring some more cheese, will you—and bread and wine. You will join me, won't you, comrades? It is my treat. Here's to your good health!"

They drew their chairs up to the table, only too delighted with the invitation. Their entertainer watched them as they attacked the food, and a thrill of pity ran through him as he beheld their sorry plight, dirty, ragged, arms gone, their sole attire a pair of red trousers and the capote, kept in place by bits of twine and so patched and pieced with shreds of vari-colored cloth that one would have taken them for men who had been looting some battle-field and were wearing the spoil they had gathered there.

"Ah! foutre, yes!" continued the taller of the two as he plied his jaws, "it was no laughing matter there! You ought to have seen it,—tell him how it was, Coutard."

And the little man told his story with many gestures, describing figures on the air with his bread.

"I was washing my shirt, you see, while the rest of them were making soup. Just try and picture to yourself a miserable hole, a regular trap, all surrounded by dense woods that gave those Prussian pigs a chance to crawl up to us before we ever suspected they were there. So, then, about seven o'clock the shells begin to come tumbling about our ears. Nom de Dieu! but it was lively work! we jumped for our shooting-irons, and up to eleven o'clock it looked as if we were going to polish 'em off in fine style. But you must know that there were only five thousand of us, and the beggars kept coming, coming as if there was no end to them. I was posted on a little hill, behind a bush, and I could see them debouching in front, to right, to left, like rows of black ants swarming from their hill, and when you thought there were none left there were always plenty more. There's no use mincing matters, we all thought that our leaders must be first-class nincompoops to thrust us into such a hornet's nest, with no support at hand, and leave us to be crushed there without coming to our assistance. And then our General, Douay,[*] poor devil! neither a fool nor a coward, that man,—a bullet comes along and lays him on his back. That ended it; no one left to command us! No matter, though, we kept on fighting all the same; but they were too many for us, we had to fall back at last. We held the railway station for a long time, and then we fought behind a wall, and the uproar was enough to wake the dead. And then, when the city was taken, I don't exactly remember how it came about, but we were upon a mountain, the Geissberg, I think they call it, and there we intrenched ourselves in a sort of castle, and how we did give it to the pigs! they jumped about the rocks like kids, and it was fun to pick 'em off and see 'em tumble on their nose. But what would you have? they kept coming, coming, all the time, ten men to our one, and all the artillery they could wish for. Courage is a very good thing in its place, but sometimes it gets a man into difficulties, and so, at last, when it got too hot to stand it any longer, we cut and run. But regarded as nincompoops, our officers were a decided success; don't you think so, Picot?"

[*] This was Abel Douay—not to be confounded with his brother, Felix, who commanded the 7th corps.-TR.

There was a brief interval of silence. Picot tossed off a glass of the white wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Of course," said he. "It was just the same at Froeschwiller; the general who would give battle under such circumstances is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum. That's what my captain said, and he's a little man who knows what he is talking about. The truth of the matter is that no one knew anything; we were only forty thousand strong, and we were surprised by a whole army of those pigs. And no one was expecting to fight that day; battle was joined by degrees, one portion after another of our troops became engaged, against the wishes of our commanders, as it seems. Of course, I didn't see the whole of the affair, but what I do know is that the dance lasted by fits and starts all day long; a body would think it was ended; not a bit of it! away would go the music more furiously than ever. The commencement was at Woerth, a pretty little village with a funny clock-tower that looks like a big stove, owing to the earthenware tiles they have stuck all over it. I'll be hanged if I know why we let go our hold of it that morning, for we broke all our teeth and nails trying to get it back again in the afternoon, without succeeding. Oh, my children, if I were to tell you of the slaughter there, the throats that were cut and the brains knocked out, you would refuse to believe me! The next place where we had trouble was around a village with the jaw-breaking name of Elsasshausen. We got a peppering from a lot of guns that banged away at us at their ease from the top of a blasted hill that we had also abandoned that morning, why, no one has ever been able to tell. And there it was that with these very eyes of mine I saw the famous charge of the cuirassiers. Ah, how gallantly they rode to their death, poor fellows! A shame it was, I say, to let men and horses charge over ground like that, covered with brush and furze, cut up by ditches. And on top of it all, nom de Dieu! what good could they accomplish? But it was very chic all the same; it was a beautiful sight to see. The next thing for us to do, shouldn't you suppose so? was to go and sit down somewhere and try to get our wind again. They had set fire to the village and it was burning like tinder, and the whole gang of Bavarian, Wurtemburgian and Prussian pigs, more than a hundred and twenty thousand of them there were, as we found out afterward, had got around into our rear and on our flanks. But there was to be no rest for us then, for just at that time the fiddles began to play again a livelier tune than ever around Froeschwiller. For there's no use talking, fellows, MacMahon may be a blockhead but he is a brave man; you ought to have seen him on his big horse, with the shells bursting all about him! The best thing to do would have been to give leg-bail at the beginning, for it is no disgrace to a general to refuse to fight an army of superior numbers, but he, once we had gone in, was bound to see the thing through to the end. And see it through he did! why, I tell you that the men down in Froeschwiller were no longer human beings; they were ravening wolves devouring one another. For near two hours the gutters ran red with blood. All the same, however, we had to knuckle under in the end. And to think that after it was all over they should come and tell us that we had whipped the Bavarians over on our left! By the piper that played before Moses, if we had only had a hundred and twenty thousand men, if we had had guns, and leaders with a little pluck!"

Loud and angry were the denunciations of Coutard and Picot in their ragged, dusty uniforms as they cut themselves huge slices of bread and bolted bits of cheese, evoking their bitter memories there in the shade of the pretty trellis, where the sun played hide and seek among the purple and gold of the clusters of ripening grapes. They had come now to the horrible flight that succeeded the defeat; the broken, demoralized, famishing regiments flying through the fields, the highroads blocked with men, horses, wagons, guns, in inextricable confusion; all the wreck and ruin of a beaten army that pressed on, on, on, with the chill breath of panic on their backs. As they had not had wit enough to fall back while there was time and take post among the passes of the Vosges, where ten thousand men would have sufficed to hold in check a hundred thousand, they should at least have blown up the bridges and destroyed the tunnels; but the generals had lost their heads, and both sides were so dazed, each was so ignorant of the other's movements, that for a time each of them was feeling to ascertain the position of its opponent, MacMahon hurrying off toward Luneville, while the Crown Prince of Prussia was looking for him in the direction of the Vosges. On the 7th the remnant of the 1st corps passed through Saverne, like a swollen stream that carries away upon its muddy bosom all with which it comes in contact. On the 8th, at Sarrebourg, the 5th corps came tumbling in upon the 1st, like one mad mountain torrent pouring its waters into another. The 5th was also flying, defeated without having fought a battle, sweeping away with it its commander, poor General de Failly, almost crazy with the thought that to his inactivity was imputed the responsibility of the defeat, when the fault all rested in the Marshal's having failed to send him orders. The mad flight continued on the 9th and 10th, a stampede in which no one turned to look behind him. On the 11th, in order to turn Nancy, which a mistaken rumor had reported to be occupied by the enemy, they made their way in a pouring rainstorm to Bayon; the 12th they camped at Haroue, the 13th at Vicherey, and on the 14th were at Neufchateau, where at last they struck the railroad, and for three days the work went on of loading the weary men into the cars that were to take them to Chalons. Twenty-four hours after the last train rolled out of the station the Prussians entered the town. "Ah, the cursed luck!" said Picot in conclusion; "how we had to ply our legs! And we who should by rights have been in hospital!"

Coutard emptied what was left in the bottle into his own and his comrade's glass. "Yes, we got on our pins, somehow, and are running yet. Bah! it is the best thing for us, after all, since it gives us a chance to drink the health of those who were not knocked over."

Maurice saw through it all. The sledge hammer blow of Froeschwiller, following so close on the heels of the idiotic surprise at Wissembourg, was the lightning flash whose baleful light disclosed to him the entire naked, terrible truth. We were taken unprepared; we had neither guns, nor men, nor generals, while our despised foe was an innumerable host, provided with all modern appliances and faultless in discipline and leadership. The three German armies had burst apart the weak line of our seven corps, scattered between Metz and Strasbourg, like three powerful wedges. We were doomed to fight our battle out unaided; nothing could be hoped for now from Austria and Italy, for all the Emperor's plans were disconcerted by the tardiness of our operations and the incapacity of the commanders. Fate, even, seemed to be working against us, heaping all sorts of obstacles and ill-timed accidents in our path and favoring the secret plan of the Prussians, which was to divide our armies, throwing one portion back on Metz, where it would be cut off from France, while they, having first destroyed the other fragment, should be marching on Paris. It was as plain now as a problem in mathematics that our defeat would be owing to causes that were patent to everyone; it was bravery without intelligent guidance pitted against numbers and cold science. Men might discuss the question as they would in after days; happen what might, defeat was certain in spite of everything, as certain and inexorable as the laws of nature that rule our planet.

In the midst of his uncheerful revery, Maurice's eyes suddenly lighted on the legend scrawled on the wall before him—Vive Napoleon! and a sensation of intolerable distress seemed to pierce his heart like a red hot iron. Could it be true, then, that France, whose victories were the theme of song and story everywhere, the great nation whose drums had sounded throughout the length and breadth of Europe, had been thrown in the dust at the first onset by an insignificant race, despised of everyone? Fifty years had sufficed to compass it; the world had changed, and defeat most fearful had overtaken those who had been deemed invincible. He remembered the words that had been uttered by Weiss his brother-in-law, during that evening of anxiety when they were at Mulhausen. Yes, he alone of them had been clear of vision, had penetrated the hidden causes that had long been slowly sapping our strength, had felt the freshening gale of youth and progress under the impulse of which Germany was being wafted onward to prosperity and power. Was not the old warlike age dying and a new one coming to the front? Woe to that one among the nations which halted in its onward march! the victory is to those who are with the advance-guard, to those who are clear of head and strong of body, to the most powerful.

But just then there came from the smoke-blackened kitchen, where the walls were bright with the colored prints of Epinal, a sound of voices and the squalling of a girl who submits, not unwillingly, to be tousled. It was Lieutenant Rochas, availing himself of his privilege as a conquering hero, to catch and kiss the pretty waitress. He came out into the arbor, where he ordered a cup of coffee to be served him, and as he had heard the concluding words of Picot's narrative, proceeded to take a hand in the conversation:

"Bah! my children, those things that you are speaking of don't amount to anything. It is only the beginning of the dance; you will see the fun commence in earnest presently. Pardi! up to the present time they have been five to our one, but things are going to take a change now; just put that in your pipe and smoke it. We are three hundred thousand strong here, and every move we make, which nobody can see through, is made with the intention of bringing the Prussians down on us, while Bazaine, who has got his eye on them, will take them in their rear. And then we'll smash 'em, crac! just as I smash this fly!"

Bringing his hands together with a sounding clap he caught and crushed a fly on the wing, and he laughed loud and cheerily, believing with all his simple soul in the feasibility of a plan that seemed so simple, steadfast in his faith in the invincibility of French courage. He good-naturedly informed the two soldiers of the exact position of their regiments, then lit a cigar and seated himself contentedly before his demitasse.

"The pleasure was all mine, comrades!" Maurice replied to Coutard and Picot, who, as they were leaving, thanked him for the cheese and wine.

He had also called for a cup of coffee and sat watching the Lieutenant, whose hopefulness had communicated itself to him, a little surprised, however, to hear him enumerate their strength at three hundred thousand men, when it was not more than a hundred thousand, and at his happy-go-lucky way of crushing the Prussians between the two armies of Chalons and Metz. But then he, too, felt such need of some comforting illusion! Why should he not continue to hope when all those glorious memories of the past that he had evoked were still ringing in his ears? The old inn was so bright and cheerful, with its trellis hung with the purple grapes of France, ripening in the golden sunlight! And again his confidence gained a momentary ascendancy over the gloomy despair that the late events had engendered in him.

Maurice's eyes had rested for a moment on an officer of chasseurs d'Afrique who, with his orderly, had disappeared at a sharp trot around the corner of the silent house where the Emperor was quartered, and when the orderly came back alone and stopped with his two horses before the inn door he gave utterance to an exclamation of surprise:

"Prosper! Why, I supposed you were at Metz!"

It was a young man of Remilly, a simple farm-laborer, whom he had known as a boy in the days when he used to go and spend his vacations with his uncle Fouchard. He had been drawn, and when the war broke out had been three years in Africa; he cut quite a dashing figure in his sky-blue jacket, his wide red trousers with blue stripes and red woolen belt, with his sun-dried face and strong, sinewy limbs that indicated great strength and activity.

"Hallo! it's Monsieur Maurice! I'm glad to see you!"

He took things very easily, however, conducting the steaming horses to the stable, and to his own, more particularly, giving a paternal attention. It was no doubt his affection for the noble animal, contracted when he was a boy and rode him to the plow, that had made him select the cavalry arm of the service.

"We've just come in from Monthois, more than ten leagues at a stretch," he said when he came back, "and Poulet will be wanting his breakfast."

Poulet was the horse. He declined to eat anything himself; would only accept a cup of coffee. He had to wait for his officer, who had to wait for the Emperor; he might be five minutes, and then again he might be two hours, so his officer had told him to put the horses in the stable. And as Maurice, whose curiosity was aroused, showed some disposition to pump him, his face became as vacant as a blank page.

"Can't say. An errand of some sort—papers to be delivered."

But Rochas looked at the chasseur with an eye of tenderness, for the uniform awakened old memories of Africa.

"Eh! my lad, where were you stationed out there?"

"At Medeah, Lieutenant."

Ah, Medeah! And drawing their chairs closer together they started a conversation, regardless of difference in rank. The life of the desert had become a second nature, for Prosper, where the trumpet was continually calling them to arms, where a large portion of their time was spent on horseback, riding out to battle as they would to the chase, to some grand battue of Arabs. There was just one soup-basin for every six men, or tribe, as it was called, and each tribe was a family by itself, one of its members attending to the cooking, another washing their linen, the others pitching the tent, caring for the horses, and cleaning the arms. By day they scoured the country beneath a sun like a ball of blazing copper, loaded down with the burden of their arms and utensils; at night they built great fires to drive away the mosquitoes and sat around them, singing the songs of France. Often it happened that in the luminous darkness of the night, thick set with stars, they had to rise and restore peace among their four-footed friends, who, in the balmy softness of the air, had set to biting and kicking one another, uprooting their pickets and neighing and snorting furiously. Then there was the delicious coffee, their greatest, indeed their only, luxury, which they ground by the primitive appliances of a carbine-butt and a porringer, and afterward strained through a red woolen sash. But their life was not one of unalloyed enjoyment; there were dark days, also, when they were far from the abodes of civilized man with the enemy before them. No more fires, then; no singing, no good times. There were times when hunger, thirst and want of sleep caused them horrible suffering, but no matter; they loved that daring, adventurous life, that war of skirmishes, so propitious for the display of personal bravery and as interesting as a fairy tale, enlivened by the razzias, which were only public plundering on a larger scale, and by marauding, or the private peculations of the chicken-thieves, which afforded many an amusing story that made even the generals laugh.

"Ah!" said Prosper, with a more serious face, "it's different here; the fighting is done in quite another way."

And in reply to a question asked by Maurice, he told the story of their landing at Toulon and the long and wearisome march to Luneville. It was there that they first received news of Wissembourg and Froeschwiller. After that his account was less clear, for he got the names of towns mixed, Nancy and Saint-Mihiel, Saint-Mihiel and Metz. There must have been heavy fighting on the 14th, for the sky was all on fire, but all he saw of it was four uhlans behind a hedge. On the 16th there was another engagement; they could hear the artillery going as early as six o'clock in the morning, and he had been told that on the 18th they started the dance again, more lively than ever. But the chasseurs were not in it that time, for at Gravelotte on the 16th, as they were standing drawn up along a road waiting to wheel into column, the Emperor, who passed that way in a victoria, took them to act as his escort to Verdun. And a pretty little jaunt it was, twenty-six miles at a hard gallop, with the fear of being cut off by the Prussians at any moment!

"And what of Bazaine?" asked Rochas.

"Bazaine? they say that he is mightily well pleased that the Emperor lets him alone."

But the Lieutenant wanted to know if Bazaine was coming to join them, whereon Prosper made a gesture expressive of uncertainty; what did any one know? Ever since the 16th their time had been spent in marching and countermarching in the rain, out on reconnoissance and grand-guard duty, and they had not seen a sign of an enemy. Now they were part of the army of Chalons. His regiment, together with two regiments of chasseurs de France and one of hussars, formed one of the divisions of the cavalry of reserve, the first division, commanded by General Margueritte, of whom he spoke with most enthusiastic warmth.

"Ah, the bougre! the enemy will catch a Tartar in him! But what's the good talking? the only use they can find for us is to send us pottering about in the mud."

There was silence for a moment, then Maurice gave some brief news of Remilly and uncle Fouchard, and Prosper expressed his regret that he could not go and shake hands with Honore, the quartermaster-sergeant, whose battery was stationed more than a league away, on the other side of the Laon road. But the chasseur pricked up his ears at hearing the whinnying of a horse and rose and went out to make sure that Poulet was not in want of anything. It was the hour sacred to coffee and pousse-cafe, and it was not long before the little hostelry was full to overflowing with officers and men of every arm of the service. There was not a vacant table, and the bright uniforms shone resplendent against the green background of leaves checkered with spots of sunshine. Major Bouroche had just come in and taken a seat beside Rochas, when Jean presented himself with an order.

"Lieutenant, the captain desires me to say that he wishes to see you at three o'clock on company business."

Rochas signified by a nod of the head that he had heard, and Jean did not go away at once, but stood smiling at Maurice, who was lighting a cigarette. Ever since the occurrence in the railway car there had been a sort of tacit truce between the two men; they seemed to be reciprocally studying each other, with an increasing interest and attraction. But just then Prosper came back, a little out of temper.

"I mean to have something to eat unless my officer comes out of that shanty pretty quick. The Emperor is just as likely as not to stay away until dark, confound it all."

"Tell me," said Maurice, his curiosity again getting the better of him, "isn't it possible that the news you are bringing may be from Bazaine?"

"Perhaps so. There was a good deal of talk about him down there at Monthois."

At that moment there was a stir outside in the street, and Jean, who was standing by one of the doors of the arbor, turned and said:

"The Emperor!"

Immediately everyone was on his feet. Along the broad, white road, with its rows of poplars on either side, came a troop of cent-gardes, spick and span in their brilliant uniforms, their cuirasses blazing in the sunlight, and immediately behind them rode the Emperor, accompanied by his staff, in a wide open space, followed by a second troop of cent-gardes.

There was a general uncovering of heads, and here and there a hurrah was heard; and the Emperor raised his head as he passed; his face looked drawn, the eyes were dim and watery. He had the dazed appearance of one suddenly aroused from slumber, smiled faintly at sight of the cheerful inn, and saluted. From behind them Maurice and Jean distinctly heard old Bouroche growl, having first surveyed the sovereign with his practiced eye:

"There's no mistake about it, that man is in a bad way." Then he succinctly completed his diagnosis: "His jig is up!"

Jean shook his head and thought in his limited, common sense way: "It is a confounded shame to let a man like that have command of the army!" And ten minutes later, when Maurice, comforted by his good breakfast, shook hands with Prosper and strolled away to smoke more cigarettes, he carried with him the picture of the Emperor, seated on his easy-gaited horse, so pale, so gentle, the man of thought, the dreamer, wanting in energy when the moment for action came. He was reputed to be good-hearted, capable, swayed by generous and noble thoughts, a silent man of strong and tenacious will; he was very brave, too, scorning danger with the scorn of the fatalist for whom destiny has no fears; but in critical moments a fatal lethargy seemed to overcome him; he appeared to become paralyzed in presence of results, and powerless thereafter to struggle against Fortune should she prove adverse. And Maurice asked himself if his were not a special physiological condition, aggravated by suffering; if the indecision and increasing incapacity that the Emperor had displayed ever since the opening of the campaign were not to be attributed to his manifest illness. That would explain everything: a minute bit of foreign substance in a man's system, and empires totter.

The camp that evening was all astir with activity; officers were bustling about with orders and arranging for the start the following morning at five o'clock. Maurice experienced a shock of surprise and alarm to learn that once again all their plans were changed, that they were not to fall back on Paris, but proceed to Verdun and effect a junction with Bazaine. There was a report that dispatches had come in during the day from the marshal announcing that he was retreating, and the young man's thoughts reverted to the officer of chasseurs and his rapid ride from Monthois; perhaps he had been the bearer of a copy of the dispatch. So, then, the opinions of the Empress-regent and the Council of Ministers had prevailed with the vacillating MacMahon, in their dread to see the Emperor return to Paris and their inflexible determination to push the army forward in one supreme attempt to save the dynasty; and the poor Emperor, that wretched man for whom there was no place in all his vast empire, was to be bundled to and fro among the baggage of his army like some worthless, worn-out piece of furniture, condemned to the irony of dragging behind him in his suite his imperial household, cent-gardes, horses, carriages, cooks, silver stew-pans and cases of champagne, trailing his flaunting mantle, embroidered with the Napoleonic bees, through the blood and mire of the highways of his retreat.

At midnight Maurice was not asleep; he was feverishly wakeful, and his gloomy reflections kept him tossing and tumbling on his pallet. He finally arose and went outside, where he found comfort and refreshment in the cool night air. The sky was overspread with clouds, the darkness was intense; along the front of the line the expiring watch-fires gleamed with a red and sullen light at distant intervals, and in the deathlike, boding silence could be heard the long-drawn breathing of the hundred thousand men who slumbered there. Then Maurice became more tranquil, and there descended on him a sentiment of brotherhood, full of compassionate kindness for all those slumbering fellow-creatures, of whom thousands would soon be sleeping the sleep of death. Brave fellows! True, many of them were thieves and drunkards, but think of what they had suffered and the excuse there was for them in the universal demoralization! The glorious veterans of Solferino and Sebastopol were but a handful, incorporated in the ranks of the newly raised troops, too few in number to make their example felt. The four corps that had been got together and equipped so hurriedly, devoid of every element of cohesion, were the forlorn hope, the expiatory band that their rulers were sending to the sacrifice in the endeavor to avert the wrath of destiny. They would bear their cross to the bitter end, atoning with their life's blood for the faults of others, glorious amid disaster and defeat.

And then it was that Maurice, there in the darkness that was instinct with life, became conscious that a great duty lay before him. He ceased to beguile himself with the illusive prospect of great victories to be gained; the march to Verdun was a march to death, and he so accepted it, since it was their lot to die, with brave and cheerful resignation.

IV.

On Tuesday, the 23d of August, at six o'clock in the morning, camp was broken, and as a stream that has momentarily expanded into a lake resumes its course again, the hundred and odd thousand men of the army of Chalons put themselves in motion and soon were pouring onward in a resistless torrent; and notwithstanding the rumors that had been current since the preceding day, it was a great surprise to most to see that instead of continuing their retrograde movement they were leaving Paris behind them and turning their faces toward the unknown regions of the East.

At five o'clock in the morning the 7th corps was still unsupplied with cartridges. For two days the artillerymen had been working like beavers to unload the materiel, horses, and stores that had been streaming from Metz into the overcrowded station, and it was only at the very last moment that some cars of cartridges were discovered among the tangled trains, and that a detail which included Jean among its numbers was enabled to bring back two hundred and forty thousand on carts that they had hurriedly requisitioned. Jean distributed the regulation number, one hundred cartridges to a man, among his squad, just as Gaude, the company bugler, sounded the order to march.

The 106th was not to pass through Rheims, their orders being to turn the city and debouch into the Chalons road farther on, but on this occasion there was the usual failure to regulate the order and time of marching, so that, the four corps having commenced to move at the same moment, they collided when they came out upon the roads that they were to traverse in common and the result was inextricable confusion. Cavalry and artillery were constantly cutting in among the infantry and bringing them to a halt; whole brigades were compelled to leave the road and stand at ordered arms in the plowed fields for more than an hour, waiting until the way should be cleared. And to make matters worse, they had hardly left the camp when a terrible storm broke over them, the rain pelting down in torrents, drenching the men completely and adding intolerably to the weight of knapsacks and great-coats. Just as the rain began to hold up, however, the 106th saw a chance to go forward, while some zouaves in an adjoining field, who were forced to wait yet for a while, amused themselves by pelting one another with balls of moist earth, and the consequent condition of their uniforms afforded them much merriment.

The sun suddenly came shining out again in the clear sky, the warm, bright sun of an August morning, and with it came returning gayety; the men were steaming like a wash of linen hung out to dry in the open air: the moisture evaporated from their clothing in little more time than it takes to tell it, and when they were warm and dry again, like dogs who shake the water from them when they emerge from a pond, they chaffed one another good-naturedly on their bedraggled appearance and the splashes of mud on their red trousers. Wherever two roads intersected another halt was necessitated; the last one was in a little village just beyond the walls of the city, in front of a small saloon that seemed to be doing a thriving business. Thereon it occurred to Maurice to treat the squad to a drink, by way of wishing them all good luck.

"Corporal, will you allow me—"

Jean, after hesitating a moment, accepted a "pony" of brandy for himself. Loubet and Chouteau were of the party (the latter had been watchful and submissive since that day when the corporal had evinced a disposition to use his heavy fists), and also Pache and Lapoulle, a couple of very decent fellows when there was no one to set them a bad example.

"Your good health, corporal!" said Chouteau in a respectful, whining tone.

"Thank you; here's hoping that you may bring back your head and all your legs and arms!" Jean politely replied, while the others laughed approvingly.

But the column was about to move; Captain Beaudoin came up with a scandalized look on his face and a reproof at the tip of his tongue, while Lieutenant Rochas, more indulgent to the small weaknesses of his men, turned his head so as not to see what was going on. And now they were stepping out at a good round pace along the Chalons road, which stretched before them for many a long league, bordered with trees on either side, undeviatingly straight, like a never-ending ribbon unrolled between the fields of yellow stubble that were dotted here and there with tall stacks and wooden windmills brandishing their lean arms. More to the north were rows of telegraph poles, indicating the position of other roads, on which they could distinguish the black, crawling lines of other marching regiments. In many places the troops had left the highway and were moving in deep columns across the open plain. To the left and front a cavalry brigade was seen, jogging along at an easy trot in a blaze of sunshine. The entire wide horizon, usually so silent and deserted, was alive and populous with those streams of men, pressing onward, onward, in long drawn, black array, like the innumerable throng of insects from some gigantic ant-hill.

About nine o'clock the regiment left the Chalons road and wheeled to the left into another that led to Suippe, which, like the first, extended, straight as an arrow's flight, far as the eye could see. The men marched at the route-step in two straggling files along either side of the road, thus leaving the central space free for the officers, and Maurice could not help noticing their anxious, care-worn air, in striking contrast with the jollity and good-humor of the soldiers, who were happy as children to be on the move once more. As the squad was near the head of the column he could even distinguish the Colonel, M. de Vineuil, in the distance, and was impressed by the grave earnestness of his manner, and his tall, rigid form, swaying in cadence to the motion of his charger. The band had been sent back to the rear, to keep company with the regimental wagons; it played but once during that entire campaign. Then came the ambulances and engineer's train attached to the division, and succeeding that the corps train, an interminable procession of forage wagons, closed vans for stores, carts for baggage, and vehicles of every known description, occupying a space of road nearly four miles in length, and which, at the infrequent curves in the highway, they could see winding behind them like the tail of some great serpent. And last of all, at the extreme rear of the column, came the herds, "rations on the hoof," a surging, bleating, bellowing mass of sheep and oxen, urged on by blows and raising clouds of dust, reminding one of the old warlike peoples of the East and their migrations.

Lapoulle meantime would every now and then give a hitch of his shoulders in an attempt to shift the weight of his knapsack when it began to be too heavy. The others, alleging that he was the strongest, were accustomed to make him carry the various utensils that were common to the squad, including the big kettle and the water-pail; on this occasion they had even saddled him with the company shovel, assuring him that it was a badge of honor. So far was he from complaining that he was now laughing at a song with which Loubet, the tenor of the squad, was trying to beguile the tedium of the way. Loubet had made himself quite famous by reason of his knapsack, in which was to be found a little of everything: linen, an extra pair of shoes, haberdashery, chocolate, brushes, a plate and cup, to say nothing of his regular rations of biscuit and coffee, and although the all-devouring receptacle also contained his cartridges, and his blankets were rolled on top of it, together with the shelter-tent and stakes, the load nevertheless appeared light, such an excellent system he had of packing his trunk, as he himself expressed it.

"It's a beastly country, all the same!" Chouteau kept repeating from time to time, casting a look of intense disgust over the dreary plains of "lousy Champagne."

Broad expanses of chalky ground of a dirty white lay before and around them, and seemed to have no end. Not a farmhouse to be seen anywhere, not a living being; nothing but flocks of crows, forming small spots of blackness on the immensity of the gray waste. On the left, far away in the distance, the low hills that bounded the horizon in that direction were crowned by woods of somber pines, while on the right an unbroken wall of trees indicated the course of the river Vesle. But over there behind the hills they had seen for the last hour a dense smoke was rising, the heavy clouds of which obscured the sky and told of a dreadful conflagration raging at no great distance.

"What is burning over there?" was the question that was on the lips of everyone.

The answer was quickly given and ran through the column from front to rear. The camp of Chalons had been fired, it was said, by order of the Emperor, to keep the immense collection of stores there from falling into the hands of the Prussians, and for the last two days it had been going up in flame and smoke. The cavalry of the rear-guard had been instructed to apply the torch to two immense warehouses, filled with tents, tent-poles, mattresses, clothing, shoes, blankets, mess utensils, supplies of every kind sufficient for the equipment of a hundred thousand men. Stacks of forage also had been lighted, and were blazing like huge beacon-fires, and an oppressive silence settled down upon the army as it pursued its march across the wide, solitary plain at sight of that dusky, eddying column that rose from behind the distant hills, filling the heavens with desolation. All that was to be heard in the bright sunlight was the measured tramp of many feet upon the hollow ground, while involuntarily the eyes of all were turned on that livid cloud whose baleful shadows rested on their march for many a league.

Their spirits rose again when they made their midday halt in a field of stubble, where the men could seat themselves on their unslung knapsacks and refresh themselves with a bite. The large square biscuits could only be eaten by crumbling them in the soup, but the little round ones were quite a delicacy, light and appetizing; the only trouble was that they left an intolerable thirst behind them. Pache sang a hymn, being invited thereto, the squad joining in the chorus. Jean smiled good-naturedly without attempting to check them in their amusement, while Maurice, at sight of the universal cheerfulness and the good order with which their first day's march was conducted, felt a revival of confidence. The remainder of the allotted task of the day was performed with the same light-hearted alacrity, although the last five miles tried their endurance. They had abandoned the high road, leaving the village of Prosnes to their right, in order to avail themselves of a short cut across a sandy heath diversified by an occasional thin pine wood, and the entire division, with its interminable train at its heels, turned and twisted in and out among the trees, sinking ankle deep in the yielding sand at every step. It seemed as if the cheerless waste would never end; all that they met was a flock of very lean sheep, guarded by a big black dog.

It was about four o'clock when at last the 106th halted for the night at Dontrien, a small village on the banks of the Suippe. The little stream winds among some pretty groves of trees; the old church stands in the middle of the graveyard, which is shaded in its entire extent by a magnificent chestnut. The regiment pitched its tents on the left bank, in a meadow that sloped gently down to the margin of the river. The officers said that all the four corps would bivouac that evening on the line of the Suippe between Auberive and Hentregiville, occupying the intervening villages of Dontrien, Betheniville and Pont-Faverger, making a line of battle nearly five leagues long.

Gaude immediately gave the call for "distribution," and Jean had to run for it, for the corporal was steward-in-chief, and it behooved him to be on the lookout to protect his men's interests. He had taken Lapoulle with him, and in a quarter of an hour they returned with some ribs of beef and a bundle of firewood. In the short space of time succeeding their arrival three steers of the herd that followed the column had been knocked in the head under a great oak-tree, skinned, and cut up. Lapoulle had to return for bread, which the villagers of Dontrien had been baking all that afternoon in their ovens. There was really no lack of anything on that first day, setting aside wine and tobacco, with which the troops were to be obliged to dispense during the remainder of the campaign.

Upon Jean's return he found Chouteau engaged in raising the tent, assisted by Pache; he looked at them for a moment with the critical eye of an old soldier who had no great opinion of their abilities.

"It will do very well if the weather is fine to-night," he said at last, "but if it should come on to blow we would like enough wake up and find ourselves in the river. Let me show you."

And he was about to send Maurice with the large pail for water, but the young man had sat down on the ground, taken off his shoe, and was examining his right foot.

"Hallo, there! what's the matter with you?"

"My shoe has chafed my foot and raised a blister. My other shoes were worn out, and when we were at Rheims I bought these, like a big fool, because they were a good fit. I should have selected gunboats."

Jean kneeled and took the foot in his hand, turning it over as carefully as if it had been a little child's, with a disapproving shake of his head.

"You must be careful; it is no laughing matter, a thing like that. A soldier without the use of his feet is of no good to himself or anyone else. When we were in Italy my captain used always to say that it is the men's legs that win battles."

He bade Pache go for the water, no very hard task, as the river was but a few yards away, and Loubet, having in the meantime dug a shallow trench and lit his fire, was enabled to commence operations on his pot-au-feu, which he did by putting on the big kettle full of water and plunging into it the meat that he had previously corded together with a bit of twine, secundum artem. Then it was solid comfort for them to watch the boiling of the soup; the whole squad, their chores done up and their day's labor ended, stretched themselves on the grass around the fire in a family group, full of tender anxiety for the simmering meat, while Loubet occasionally stirred the pot with a gravity fitted to the importance of his position. Like children and savages, their sole instinct was to eat and sleep, careless of the morrow, while advancing to face unknown risks and dangers.

But Maurice had unpacked his knapsack and come across a newspaper that he had bought at Rheims, and Chouteau asked:

"Is there anything about the Prussians in it? Read us the news!"

They were a happy family under Jean's mild despotism. Maurice good-naturedly read such news as he thought might interest them, while Pache, the seamstress of the company, mended his greatcoat for him and Lapoulle cleaned his musket. The first item was a splendid victory won by Bazaine, who had driven an entire Prussian corps into the quarries of Jaumont, and the trumped-up tale was told with an abundance of dramatic detail, how men and horses went over the precipice and were crushed on the rocks beneath out of all semblance of humanity, so that there was not one whole corpse found for burial. Then there were minute details of the pitiable condition of the German armies ever since they had invaded France: the ill-fed, poorly equipped soldiers were actually falling from inanition and dying by the roadside of horrible diseases. Another article told how the king of Prussia had the diarrhea, and how Bismarck had broken his leg in jumping from the window of an inn where a party of zouaves had just missed capturing him. Capital news! Lapoulle laughed over it as if he would split his sides, while Chouteau and the others, without expressing the faintest doubt, chuckled at the idea that soon they would be picking up Prussians as boys pick up sparrows in a field after a hail-storm. But they laughed loudest at old Bismarck's accident; oh! the zouaves and the turcos, they were the boys for one's money! It was said that the Germans were in an ecstasy of fear and rage, declaring that it was unworthy of a nation that claimed to be civilized to employ such heathen savages in its armies. Although they had been decimated at Froeschwiller, the foreign troops seemed to have a good deal of life left in them.

It was just striking six from the steeple of the little church of Dontrien when Loubet shouted:

"Come to supper!"

The squad lost no time in seating themselves in a circle. At the very last moment Loubet had succeeded in getting some vegetables from a peasant who lived hard by. That made the crowning glory of the feast: a soup perfumed with carrots and onions, that went down the throat soft as velvet—what could they have desired more? The spoons rattled merrily in the little wooden bowls. Then it devolved on Jean, who always served the portions, to distribute the beef, and it behooved him that day to do it with the strictest impartiality, for hungry eyes were watching him and there would have been a growl had anyone received a larger piece than his neighbors. They concluded by licking the porringers, and were smeared with soup up to their eyes.

"Ah, nom de Dieu!" Chouteau declared when he had finished, throwing himself flat on his back; "I would rather take that than a beating, any day!"

Maurice, too, whose foot pained him less now that he could give it a little rest, was conscious of that sensation of well-being that is the result of a full stomach. He was beginning to take more kindly to his rough companions, and to bring himself down nearer to their level under the pressure of the physical necessities of their life in common. That night he slept the same deep sleep as did his five tent-mates; they all huddled close together, finding the sensation of animal warmth not disagreeable in the heavy dew that fell. It is necessary to state that Lapoulle, at the instigation of Loubet, had gone to a stack not far away and feloniously appropriated a quantity of straw, in which our six gentlemen snored as if it had been a bed of down. And from Auberive to Hentregiville, along the pleasant banks of the Suippe as it meandered sluggishly between its willows, the fires of those hundred thousand sleeping men illuminated the starlit night for fifteen miles, like a long array of twinkling stars.

At sunrise they made coffee, pulverizing the berries in a wooden bowl with a musket-butt, throwing the powder into boiling water, and settling it with a drop of cold water. The luminary rose that morning in a bank of purple and gold, affording a spectacle of royal magnificence, but Maurice had no eye for such displays, and Jean, with the weather-wisdom of a peasant, cast an anxious glance at the red disk, which presaged rain; and it was for that reason that, the surplus of bread baked the day before having been distributed and the squad having received three loaves, he reproved severely Loubet and Pache for making them fast on the outside of their knapsacks; but the tents were folded and the knapsacks packed, and so no one paid any attention to him. Six o'clock was sounding from all the bells of the village when the army put itself in motion and stoutly resumed its advance in the bright hopefulness of the dawn of the new day.

The 106th, in order to reach the road that leads from Rheims to Vouziers, struck into a cross-road, and for more than an hour their way was an ascending one. Below them, toward the north, Betheniville was visible among the trees, where the Emperor was reported to have slept, and when they reached the Vouziers road the level country of the preceding day again presented itself to their gaze and the lean fields of "lousy Champagne" stretched before them in wearisome monotony. They now had the Arne, an insignificant stream, flowing on their left, while to the right the treeless, naked country stretched far as the eye could see in an apparently interminable horizon. They passed through a village or two: Saint-Clement, with its single winding street bordered by a double row of houses, Saint-Pierre, a little town of miserly rich men who had barricaded their doors and windows. The long halt occurred about ten o'clock, near another village, Saint-Etienne, where the men were highly delighted to find tobacco once more. The 7th corps had been cut up into several columns, and the 106th headed one of these columns, having behind it only a battalion of chasseurs and the reserve artillery. Maurice turned his head at every bend in the road to catch a glimpse of the long train that had so excited his interest the day before, but in vain; the herds had gone off in some other direction, and all he could see was the guns, looming inordinately large upon those level plains, like monster insects of somber mien.

After leaving Saint-Etienne, however, there was a change for the worse, and the road from bad became abominable, rising by an easy ascent between great sterile fields in which the only signs of vegetation were the everlasting pine woods with their dark verdure, forming a dismal contrast with the gray-white soil. It was the most forlorn spot they had seen yet. The ill-paved road, washed by the recent rains, was a lake of mud, of tenacious, slippery gray clay, which held the men's feet like so much pitch. It was wearisome work; the troops were exhausted and could not get forward, and as if things were not bad enough already, the rain suddenly began to come down most violently. The guns were mired and had to be left in the road.

Chouteau, who had been given the squad's rice to carry, fatigued and exasperated with his heavy load, watched for an opportunity when no one was looking and dropped the package. But Loubet had seen him.

"See here, that's no way! you ought not to do that. The comrades will be hungry by and by."

"Let be!" replied Chouteau. "There is plenty of rice; they will give us more at the end of the march."

And Loubet, who had the bacon, convinced by such cogent reasoning, dropped his load in turn.

Maurice was suffering more and more with his foot, of which the heel was badly inflamed. He limped along in such a pitiable state that Jean's sympathy was aroused.

"Does it hurt? is it no better, eh?" And as the men were halted just then for a breathing spell, he gave him a bit of good advice. "Take off your shoe and go barefoot; the cool earth will ease the pain."

And in that way Maurice found that he could keep up with his comrades with some degree of comfort; he experienced a sentiment of deep gratitude. It was a piece of great good luck that their squad had a corporal like him, a man who had seen service and knew all the tricks of the trade: he was an uncultivated peasant, of course, but a good fellow all the same.

It was late when they reached their place of bivouac at Contreuve, after marching a long time on the Chalons and Vouziers road and descending by a steep path into the valley of the Semide, up which they came through a stretch of narrow meadows. The landscape had undergone a change; they were now in the Ardennes, and from the lofty hills above the village where the engineers had staked off the ground for the 7th corps' camp, the valley of the Aisne was dimly visible in the distance, veiled in the pale mists of the passing shower.

Six o'clock came and there had been no distribution of rations, whereon Jean, in order to keep occupied, apprehensive also of the consequences that might result from the high wind that was springing up, determined to attend in person to the setting up of the tent. He showed his men how it should be done, selecting a bit of ground that sloped away a little to one side, setting the pegs at the proper angle, and digging a little trench around the whole to carry off the water. Maurice was excused from the usual nightly drudgery on account of his sore foot, and was an interested witness of the intelligence and handiness of the big young fellow whose general appearance was so stolid and ungainly. He was completely knocked up with fatigue, but the confidence that they were now advancing with a definite end in view served to sustain him. They had had a hard time of it since they left Rheims, making nearly forty miles in two days' marching; if they could maintain the pace and if they kept straight on in the direction they were pursuing, there could be no doubt that they would destroy the second German army and effect a junction with Bazaine before the third, the Crown Prince of Prussia's, which was said to be at Vitry-le Francois, could get up to Verdun.

"Oh, come now! I wonder if they are going to let us starve!" was Chouteau's remark when, at seven o'clock, there was still no sign of rations.

By way of taking time by the forelock, Jean had instructed Loubet to light the fire and put on the pot, and, as there was no issue of firewood, he had been compelled to be blind to the slight irregularity of the proceeding when that individual remedied the omission by tearing the palings from an adjacent fence. When he suggested knocking up a dish of bacon and rice, however, the truth had to come out, and he was informed that the rice and bacon were lying in the mud of the Saint-Etienne road. Chouteau lied with the greatest effrontery declaring that the package must have slipped from his shoulders without his noticing it.

"You are a couple of pigs!" Jean shouted angrily, "to throw away good victuals, when there are so many poor devils going with an empty stomach!"

It was the same with the three loaves that had been fastened outside the knapsacks; they had not listened to his warning, and the consequence was that the rain had soaked the bread and reduced it to paste.

"A pretty pickle we are in!" he continued. "We had food in plenty, and now here we are, without a crumb! Ah! you are a pair of dirty pigs!"

At that moment the first sergeant's call was heard, and Sergeant Sapin, returning presently with his usual doleful air, informed the men that it would be impossible to distribute rations that evening, and that they would have to content themselves with what eatables they had on their persons. It was reported that the trains had been delayed by the bad weather, and as to the herds, they must have straggled off as a result of conflicting orders. Subsequently it became known that on that day the 5th and 12th corps had got up to Rethel, where the headquarters of the army were established, and the inhabitants of the neighboring villages, possessed with a mad desire to see the Emperor, had inaugurated a hegira toward that town, taking with them everything in the way of provisions; so that when the 7th corps came up they found themselves in a land of nakedness: no bread, no meat, no people, even. To add to their distress a misconception of orders had caused the supplies of the commissary department to be directed on Chene-Populeux. This was a state of affairs that during the entire campaign formed the despair of the wretched commissaries, who had to endure the abuse and execrations of the whole army, while their sole fault lay in being punctual at rendezvous at which the troops failed to appear.

"It serves you right, you dirty pigs!" continued Jean in his wrath, "and you don't deserve the trouble that I am going to have in finding you something to eat, for I suppose it is my duty not to let you starve, all the same." And he started off to see what he could find, as every good corporal does under such circumstances, taking with him Pache, who was a favorite on account of his quiet manner, although he considered him rather too priest-ridden.

But Loubet's attention had just been attracted to a little farmhouse, one of the last dwellings in Contreuve, some two or three hundred yards away, where there seemed to him to be promise of good results. He called Chouteau and Lapoulle to him and said:

"Come along, and let's see what we can do. I've a notion there's grub to be had over that way."

So Maurice was left to keep up the fire and watch the kettle, in which the water was beginning to boil. He had seated himself on his blanket and taken off his shoe in order to give his blister a chance to heal. It amused him to look about the camp and watch the behavior of the different squads now that there was to be no issue of rations; the deduction that he arrived at was that some of them were in a chronic state of destitution, while others reveled in continual abundance, and that these conditions were ascribable to the greater or less degree of tact and foresight of the corporal and his men. Amid the confusion that reigned about the stacks and tents he remarked some squads who had not been able even to start a fire, others of which the men had abandoned hope and lain themselves resignedly down for the night, while others again were ravenously devouring, no one knew what, something good, no doubt. Another thing that impressed him was the good order that prevailed in the artillery, which had its camp above him, on the hillside. The setting sun peeped out from a rift in the clouds and his rays were reflected from the burnished guns, from which the men had cleansed the coat of mud that they had picked up along the road.

In the meantime General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, commanding the brigade, had found quarters suited to his taste in the little farmhouse toward which the designs of Loubet and his companions were directed. He had discovered something that had the semblance of a bed and was seated at table with a roasted chicken and an omelette before him; consequently he was in the best of humors, and as Colonel de Vineuil happened in just then on regimental business, had invited him to dine. They were enjoying their repast, therefore, waited on by a tall, light-haired individual who had been in the farmer's service only three days and claimed to be an Alsatian, one of those who had been forced to leave their country after the disaster of Froeschwiller. The general did not seem to think it necessary to use any restraint in presence of the man, commenting freely on the movements of the army, and finally, forgetful of the fact that he was not an inhabitant of the country, began to question him about localities and distances. His questions displayed such utter ignorance of the country that the colonel, who had once lived at Mezieres, was astounded; he gave such information as he had at command, which elicited from the chief the exclamation:

"It is just like our idiotic government! How can they expect us to fight in a country of which we know nothing?"

The colonel's face assumed a look of vague consternation. He knew that immediately upon the declaration of war maps of Germany had been distributed among the officers, while it was quite certain that not one of them had a map of France. He was amazed and confounded by what he had seen and heard since the opening of the campaign. His unquestioned bravery was his distinctive trait; he was a somewhat weak and not very brilliant commander, which caused him to be more loved than respected in his regiment.

"It's too bad that a man can't eat his dinner in peace!" the general suddenly blurted out. "What does all that uproar mean? Go and see what the matter is, you Alsatian fellow!"

But the farmer anticipated him by appearing at the door, sobbing and gesticulating like a crazy man. They were robbing him, the zouaves and chasseurs were plundering his house. As he was the only one in the village who had anything to sell he had foolishly allowed himself to be persuaded to open shop. At first he had sold his eggs and chickens, his rabbits, and potatoes, without exacting an extortionate profit, pocketing his money and delivering the merchandise; then the customers had streamed in in a constantly increasing throng, jostling and worrying the old man, finally crowding him aside and taking all he had without pretense of payment. And thus it was throughout the war; if many peasants concealed their property and even denied a drink of water to the thirsty soldier, it was because of their fear of the irresistible inroads of that ocean of men, who swept everything clean before them, thrusting the wretched owners from their houses and beggaring them.

"Eh! will you hold your tongue, old man!" shouted the general in disgust. "Those rascals ought to be shot at the rate of a dozen a day. What is one to do?" And to avoid taking the measures that the case demanded he gave orders to close the door, while the colonel explained to him that there had been no issue of rations and the men were hungry.

While these things were going on within the house Loubet outside had discovered a field of potatoes; he and Lapoulle scaled the fence and were digging the precious tubers with their hands and stuffing their pockets with them when Chouteau, who in the pursuit of knowledge was looking over a low wall, gave a shrill whistle that called them hurriedly to his side. They uttered an exclamation of wonder and delight; there was a flock of geese, ten fat, splendid geese, pompously waddling about a small yard. A council of war was held forthwith, and it was decided that Lapoulle should storm the place and make prisoners of the garrison. The conflict was a bloody one; the venerable gander on which the soldier laid his predaceous hands had nearly deprived him of his nose with its bill, hard and sharp as a tailor's shears. Then he caught it by the neck and tried to choke it, but the bird tore his trousers with its strong claws and pummeled him about the body with its great wings. He finally ended the battle by braining it with his fist, and it had not ceased to struggle when he leaped the wall, hotly pursued by the remainder of the flock, pecking viciously at his legs.

When they got back to camp, with the unfortunate gander and the potatoes hidden in a bag, they found that Jean and Pache had also been successful in their expedition, and had enriched the common larder with four loaves of fresh bread and a cheese that they had purchased from a worthy old woman.

"The water is boiling and we will make some coffee," said the corporal. "Here are bread and cheese; it will be a regular feast!"

He could not help laughing, however, when he looked down and saw the goose lying at his feet. He raised it, examining and hefting it with the judgment of an expert.

"Ah! upon my word, a fine bird! it must weigh twenty pounds."

"We were out walking and met the bird," Loubet explained in an unctuously sanctimonious voice, "and it insisted on making our acquaintance."

Jean made no reply, but his manner showed that he wished to hear nothing more of the matter. Men must live, and then why in the name of common sense should not those poor fellows, who had almost forgotten how poultry tasted, have a treat once in a way!

Loubet had already kindled the fire into a roaring blaze; Pache and Lapoulle set to work to pluck the goose; Chouteau, who had run off to the artillerymen and begged a bit of twine, came back and stretched it between two bayonets; the bird was suspended in front of the hot fire and Maurice was given a cleaning rod and enjoined to keep it turning. The big tin basin was set beneath to catch the gravy. It was a triumph of culinary art; the whole regiment, attracted by the savory odor, came and formed a circle about the fire and licked their chops. And what a feast it was! roast goose, boiled potatoes, bread, cheese, and coffee! When Jean had dissected the bird the squad applied itself vigorously to the task before it; there was no talk of portions, every man ate as much as he was capable of holding. They even sent a plate full over to the artillerymen who had furnished the cord.

The officers of the regiment that evening were a very hungry set of men, for owing to some mistake the canteen wagon was among the missing, gone off to look after the corps train, maybe. If the men were inconvenienced when there was no issue of ration they scarcely ever failed to find something to eat in the end; they helped one another out; the men of the different squads "chipped in" their resources, each contributing his mite, while the officer, with no one to look to save himself, was in a fair way of starving as soon as he had not the canteen to fall back on. So there was a sneer on Chouteau's face, buried in the carcass of the goose, as he saw Captain Beaudoin go by with his prim, supercilious air, for he had heard that officer summoning down imprecations on the driver of the missing wagon; and he gave him an evil look out of the corner of his eye.

"Just look at him! See, his nose twitches like a rabbit's. He would give a dollar for the pope's nose."

They all made merry at the expense of the captain, who was too callow and too harsh to be a favorite with his men; they called him a pete-sec. He seemed on the point of taking the squad in hand for the scandal they were creating with their goose dinner, but thought better of the matter, ashamed, probably, to show his hunger, and walked off, holding his head very erect, as if he had seen nothing.

As for Lieutenant Rochas, who was also conscious of a terribly empty sensation in his epigastric region, he put on a brave face and laughed good-naturedly as he passed the thrice-lucky squad. His men adored him, in the first place because he was at sword's points with the captain, that little whipper-snapper from Saint-Cyr, and also because he had once carried a musket like themselves. He was not always easy to get along with, however, and there were times when they would have given a good deal could they have cuffed him for his brutality.

Jean glanced inquiringly at his comrades, and their mute reply being propitious, arose and beckoned to Rochas to follow him behind the tent.

"See here, Lieutenant, I hope you won't be offended, but if it is agreeable to you—"

And he handed him half a loaf of bread and a wooden bowl in which there were a second joint of the bird and six big mealy potatoes.

That night again the six men required no rocking; they digested their dinner while sleeping the sleep of the just. They had reason to thank the corporal for the scientific way in which he had set up their tent, for they were not even conscious of a small hurricane that blew up about two o'clock, accompanied by a sharp down-pour of rain; some of the tents were blown down, and the men, wakened out of their sound slumber, were drenched and had to scamper in the pitchy darkness, while theirs stood firm and they were warm and dry, thanks to the ingenious device of the trench.

Maurice awoke at daylight, and as they were not to march until eight o'clock it occurred to him to walk out to the artillery camp on the hill and say how do you do to his cousin Honore. His foot was less painful after his good night's rest. His wonder and admiration were again excited by the neatness and perfect order that prevailed throughout the encampment, the six guns of a battery aligned with mathematical precision and accompanied by their caissons, prolonges, forage-wagons, and forges. A short way off, lined up to their rope, stood the horses, whinnying impatiently and turning their muzzles to the rising sun. He had no difficulty in finding Honore's tent, thanks to the regulation which assigns to the men of each piece a separate street, so that a single glance at a camp suffices to show the number of guns.

When Maurice reached his destination the artillerymen were already stirring and about to drink their coffee, and a quarrel had arisen between Adolphe, the forward driver, and Louis, the gunner, his mate. For the entire three years that they had been "married," in accordance with the custom which couples a driver with a gunner, they had lived happily together, with the one exception of meal-times. Louis, an intelligent man and the better informed of the two, did not grumble at the airs of superiority that are affected by every mounted over every unmounted man: he pitched the tent, made the soup, and did the chores, while Adolphe groomed his horses with the pride of a reigning potentate. When the former, a little black, lean man, afflicted with an enormous appetite, rose in arms against the exactions of the latter, a big, burly fellow with huge blonde mustaches, who insisted on being waited on like a lord, then the fun began. The subject matter of the dispute on the present morning was that Louis, who had made the coffee, accused Adolphe of having drunk it all. It required some diplomacy to reconcile them.

Not a morning passed that Honore failed to go and look after his piece, seeing to it that it was carefully dried and cleansed from the night dew, as if it had been a favorite animal that he was fearful might take cold, and there it was that Maurice found him, exercising his paternal supervision in the crisp morning air.

"Ah, it's you! I knew that the 106th was somewhere in the vicinity; I got a letter from Remilly yesterday and was intending to start out and hunt you up. Let's go and have a glass of white wine."

For the sake of privacy he conducted his cousin to the little farmhouse that the soldiers had looted the day before, where the old peasant, undeterred by his losses and allured by the prospect of turning an honest penny, had tapped a cask of wine and set up a kind of public bar. He had extemporized a counter from a board rested on two empty barrels before the door of his house, and over it he dealt out his stock in trade at four sous a glass, assisted by the strapping young Alsatian whom he had taken into his service three days before.

As Honore was touching glasses with Maurice his eyes lighted on this man. He gazed at him a moment as if stupefied, then let slip a terrible oath.

"Tonnerre de Dieu! Goliah!"

And he darted forward and would have caught him by the throat, but the peasant, foreseeing in his action a repetition of his yesterday's experience, jumped quickly within the house and locked the door behind him. For a moment confusion reigned about the premises; soldiers came rushing up to see what was going on, while the quartermaster-sergeant shouted at the top of his voice:

"Open the door, open the door, you confounded idiot! It is a spy, I tell you, a Prussian spy!"

Maurice doubted no longer; there was no room for mistake now; the Alsatian was certainly the man whom he had seen arrested at the camp of Mulhausen and released because there was not evidence enough to hold him, and that man was Goliah, old Fouchard's quondam assistant on his farm at Remilly. When finally the peasant opened his door the house was searched from top to bottom, but to no purpose; the bird had flown, the gawky Alsatian, the tow-headed, simple-faced lout whom General Bourgain-Desfeuilles had questioned the day before at dinner without learning anything and before whom, in the innocence of his heart, he had disclosed things that would have better been kept secret. It was evident enough that the scamp had made his escape by a back window which was found open, but the hunt that was immediately started throughout the village and its environs had no results; the fellow, big as he was, had vanished as utterly as a smoke-wreath dissolves upon the air.

Maurice thought it best to take Honore away, lest in his distracted state he might reveal to the spectators unpleasant family secrets which they had no concern to know.

"Tonnerre de Dieu!" he cried again, "it would have done me such good to strangle him!—The letter that I was speaking of revived all my old hatred for him."

And the two of them sat down upon the ground against a stack of rye a little way from the house, and he handed the letter to his cousin.

It was the old story: the course of Honore Fouchard's and Silvine Morange's love had not run smooth. She, a pretty, meek-eyed, brown-haired girl, had in early childhood lost her mother, an operative in one of the factories of Raucourt, and Doctor Dalichamp, her godfather, a worthy man who was greatly addicted to adopting the wretched little beings whom he ushered into the world, had conceived the idea of placing her in Father Fouchard's family as small maid of all work. True it was that the old boor was a terrible skinflint and a harsh, stern taskmaster; he had gone into the butchering business from sordid love of lucre, and his cart was to be seen daily, rain or shine, on the roads of twenty communes; but if the child was willing to work she would have a home and a protector, perhaps some small prospect in the future. At all events she would be spared the contamination of the factory. And naturally enough it came to pass that in old Fouchard's household the son and heir and the little maid of all work fell in love with each other. Honore was then just turned sixteen and she was twelve, and when she was sixteen and he twenty there was a drawing for the army; Honore, to his great delight, secured a lucky number and determined to marry. Nothing had ever passed between them, thanks to the unusual delicacy that was inherent in the lad's tranquil, thoughtful nature, more than an occasional hug and a furtive kiss in the barn. But when he spoke of the marriage to his father, the old man, who had the stubbornness of the mule, angrily told him that his son might kill him, but never, never would he consent, and continued to keep the girl about the house, not worrying about the matter, expecting it would soon blow over. For two years longer the young folks kept on adoring and desiring each other, and never the least breath of scandal sullied their names. Then one day there was a frightful quarrel between the two men, after which the young man, feeling he could no longer endure his father's tyranny, enlisted and was packed off to Africa, while the butcher still retained the servant-maid, because she was useful to him. Soon after that a terrible thing happened: Silvine, who had sworn that she would be true to her lover and await his return, was detected one day, two short weeks after his departure, in the company of a laborer who had been working on the farm for some months past, that Goliah Steinberg, the Prussian, as he was called; a tall, simple young fellow with short, light hair, wearing a perpetual smile on his broad, pink face, who had made himself Honore's chum. Had Father Fouchard traitorously incited the man to take advantage of the girl? or had Silvine, sick at heart and prostrated by the sorrow of parting with her lover, yielded in a moment of unconsciousness? She could not tell herself; was dazed, and saw herself driven by the necessity of her situation to a marriage with Goliah. He, for his part, always with the everlasting smile on his face, made no objection, only insisted on deferring the ceremony until the child should be born. When that event occurred he suddenly disappeared; it was rumored, subsequently that he had found work on another farm, over Beaumont way. These things had happened three years before the breaking out of the war, and now everyone was convinced that that artless, simple Goliah, who had such a way of ingratiating himself with the girls, was none else than one of those Prussian spies who filled our eastern provinces. When Honore learned the tidings over in Africa he was three months in hospital, as if the fierce sun of that country had smitten him on the neck with one of his fiery javelins, and never thereafter did he apply for leave of absence to return to his country for fear lest he might again set eyes on Silvine and her child.

The artilleryman's hands shook with agitation as Maurice perused the letter. It was from Silvine, the first, the only one that she had ever written him. What had been her guiding impulse, that silent, submissive woman, whose handsome black eyes at times manifested a startling fixedness of purpose in the midst of her never-ending slavery? She simply said that she knew he was with the army, and though she might never see him again, she could not endure the thought that he might die and believe that she had ceased to love him. She loved him still, had never loved another; and this she repeated again and again through four closely written pages, in words of unvarying import, without the slightest word of excuse for herself, without even attempting to explain what had happened. There was no mention of the child, nothing but an infinitely mournful and tender farewell.

The letter produced a profound impression upon Maurice, to whom his cousin had once imparted the whole story. He raised his eyes and saw that Honore was weeping; he embraced him like a brother.

"My poor Honore."

But the sergeant quickly got the better of his emotion. He carefully restored the letter to its place over his heart and rebuttoned his jacket.

"Yes, those are things that a man does not forget. Ah! the scoundrel, if I could but have laid hands on him! But we shall see."

The bugles were sounding the signal to prepare for breaking camp, and each had to hurry away to rejoin his command. The preparations for departure dragged, however, and the troops had to stand waiting in heavy marching order until nearly nine o'clock. A feeling of hesitancy seemed to have taken possession of their leaders; there was not the resolute alacrity of the first two days, when the 7th corps had accomplished forty miles in two marches. Strange and alarming news, moreover, had been circulating through the camp since morning, that the three other corps were marching northward, the 1st at Juniville, the 5th and 12th at Rethel, and this deviation from their route was accounted for on the ground of the necessities of the commissariat. Montmedy had ceased to be their objective, then? why were they thus idling away their time again? What was most alarming of all was that the Prussians could not now be far away, for the officers had cautioned their men not to fall behind the column, as all stragglers were liable to be picked up by the enemy's light cavalry. It was the 25th of August, and Maurice, when he subsequently recalled to mind Goliah's disappearance, was certain that the man had been instrumental in affording the German staff exact information as to the movements of the army of Chalons, and thus producing the change of front of their third army. The succeeding morning the Crown Prince of Prussia left Revigny and the great maneuver was initiated, that gigantic movement by the flank, surrounding and enmeshing us by a series of forced marches conducted in the most admirable order through Champagne and the Ardennes. While the French were stumbling aimlessly about the country, oscillating uncertainly between one place and another, the Prussians were making their twenty miles a day and more, gradually contracting their immense circle of beaters upon the band of men whom they held within their toils, and driving their prey onward toward the forests of the frontier.

A start was finally made, and the result of the day's movement showed that the army was pivoting on its left; the 7th corps only traversed the two short leagues between Contreuve and Vouziers, while the 5th and 12th corps did not stir from Rethel, and the 1st went no farther than Attigny. Between Contreuve and the valley of the Aisne the country became level again and was more bare than ever; as they drew near to Vouziers the road wound among desolate hills and naked gray fields, without a tree, without a house, as gloomy and forbidding as a desert, and the day's march, short as it was, was accomplished with such fatigue and distress that it seemed interminably long. Soon after midday, however, the 1st and 3d divisions had passed through the city and encamped in the meadows on the farther bank of the Aisne, while a brigade of the second, which included the 106th, had remained upon the left bank, bivouacking among the waste lands of which the low foot-hills overlooked the valley, observing from their position the Monthois road, which skirts the stream and by which the enemy was expected to make his appearance.

And Maurice was dumfoundered to behold advancing along that Monthois road Margueritte's entire division, the body of cavalry to which had been assigned the duty of supporting the 7th corps and watching the left flank of the army. The report was that it was on its way to Chene-Populeux. Why was the left wing, where alone they were threatened by the enemy, stripped in that manner? What sense was there in summoning in upon the center, where they could be of no earthly use, those two thousand horsemen, who should have been dispersed upon our flank, leagues away, as videttes to observe the enemy? And what made matters worse was that they caused the greatest confusion among the columns of the 7th corps, cutting in upon their line of march and producing an inextricable jam of horses, guns, and men. A squadron of chasseurs d'Afrique were halted for near two hours at the gate of Vouziers, and by the merest chance Maurice stumbled on Prosper, who had ridden his horse down to the bank of a neighboring pond to let him drink, and the two men were enabled to exchange a few words. The chasseur appeared stunned, dazed, knew nothing and had seen nothing since they left Rheims; yes, though, he had: he had seen two uhlans more; oh! but they were will o' the wisps, phantoms, they were, that appeared and vanished, and no one could tell whence they came nor whither they went. Their fame had spread, and stories of them were already rife throughout the country, such, for instance, as that of four uhlans galloping into a town with drawn revolvers and taking possession of it, when the corps to which they belonged was a dozen miles away. They were everywhere, preceding the columns like a buzzing, stinging swarm of bees, a living curtain, behind which the infantry could mask their movements and march and countermarch as securely as if they were at home upon parade. And Maurice's heart sank in his bosom as he looked at the road, crowded with chasseurs and hussars which our leaders put to such poor use.

"Well, then, au revoir," said he, shaking Prosper by the hand; "perhaps they will find something for you to do down yonder, after all."

But the chasseur appeared disgusted with the task assigned him. He sadly stroked Poulet's neck and answered:

"Ah, what's the use talking! they kill our horses and let us rot in idleness. It is sickening."

When Maurice took off his shoe that evening to have a look at his foot, which was aching and throbbing feverishly, the skin came with it; the blood spurted forth and he uttered a cry of pain. Jean was standing by, and exhibited much pity and concern.

"Look here, that is becoming serious; you are going to lie right down and not attempt to move. That foot of yours must be attended to. Let me see it."

He knelt down, washed the sore with his own hands and bound it up with some clean linen that he took from his knapsack. He displayed the gentleness of a woman and the deftness of a surgeon, whose big fingers can be so pliant when necessity requires it.

A great wave of tenderness swept over Maurice, his eyes were dimmed with tears, the familiar thou rose from his heart to his lips with an irresistible impulse of affection, as if in that peasant whom he once had hated and abhorred, whom only yesterday he had despised, he had discovered a long lost brother.

"Thou art a good fellow, thou! Thanks, good friend."

And Jean, too, looking very happy, dropped into the second person singular, with his tranquil smile.

"Now, my little one, wilt thou have a cigarette? I have some tobacco left."

V.

On the morning of the following day, the 26th, Maurice arose with stiffened limbs and an aching back, the result of his night under the tent. He was not accustomed yet to sleeping on the bare ground; orders had been given before the men turned in that they were not to remove their shoes, and during the night the sergeants had gone the rounds, feeling in the darkness to see if all were properly shod and gaitered, so that his foot was much inflamed and very painful. In addition to his other troubles he had imprudently stretched his legs outside the canvas to relieve their cramped feeling and taken cold in them.

Jean said as soon as he set eyes on him:

"If we are to do any marching to-day, my lad, you had better see the surgeon and get him to give you a place in one of the wagons."

But no one seemed to know what were the plans for the day, and the most conflicting reports prevailed. It appeared for a moment as if they were about to resume their march; the tents were struck and the entire corps took the road and passed through Vouziers, leaving on the right bank of the Aisne only one brigade of the second division, apparently to continue the observation of the Monthois road; but all at once, as soon as they had put the town behind them and were on the left bank of the stream, they halted and stacked muskets in the fields and meadows that skirt the Grand-Pre road on either hand, and the departure of the 4th hussars, who just then moved off on that road at a sharp trot, afforded fresh food for conjecture.

"If we are to remain here I shall stay with you," declared Maurice, who was not attracted by the prospect of riding in an ambulance.

It soon became known that they were to occupy their present camp until General Douay could obtain definite information as to the movements of the enemy. The general had been harassed by an intense and constantly increasing anxiety since the day before, when he had seen Margueritte's division moving toward Chene, for he knew that his flank was uncovered, that there was not a man to watch the passes of the Argonne, and that he was liable to be attacked at any moment. Therefore he had sent out the 4th hussars to reconnoiter the country as far as the defiles of Grand-Pre and Croix-aux-Bois, with strict orders not to return without intelligence.

There had been an issue of bread, meat, and forage the day before, thanks to the efficient mayor of Vouziers, and about ten o'clock that morning permission had been granted the men to make soup, in the fear that they might not soon again have so good an opportunity, when another movement of troops, the departure of Bordas' brigade over the road taken by the hussars, set all tongues wagging afresh. What! were they going to march again? were they not to be given a chance to eat their breakfast in peace, now that the kettle was on the fire? But the officers explained that Bordas' brigade had only been sent to occupy Buzancy, a few kilometers from there. There were others, indeed, who asserted that the hussars had encountered a strong force of the enemy's cavalry and that the brigade had been dispatched to help them out of their difficulty.

Maurice enjoyed a few hours of delicious repose. He had thrown himself on the ground in a field half way up the hill where the regiment had halted, and in a drowsy state between sleeping and waking was contemplating the verdant valley of the Aisne, the smiling meadows dotted with clumps of trees, among which the little stream wound lazily. Before him and closing the valley in that direction lay Vouziers, an amphitheater of roofs rising one above another and overtopped by the church with its slender spire and dome-crowned tower. Below him, near the bridge, smoke was curling upward from the tall chimneys of the tanneries, while farther away a great mill displayed its flour-whitened buildings among the fresh verdure of the growths that lined the waterside. The little town that lay there, bounding his horizon, hidden among the stately trees, appeared to him to possess a gentle charm; it brought him memories of boyhood, of the journeys that he had made to Vouziers in other days, when he had lived at Chene, the village where he was born. For an hour he was oblivious of the outer world.

The soup had long since been made and eaten and everyone was waiting to see what would happen next, when, about half-past two o'clock, the smoldering excitement began to gain strength, and soon pervaded the entire camp. Hurried orders came to abandon the meadows, and the troops ascended a line of hills between two villages, Chestres and Falaise, some two or three miles apart, and took position there. Already the engineers were at work digging rifle-pits and throwing up epaulments; while over to the left the artillery had occupied the summit of a rounded eminence. The rumor spread that General Bordas had sent in a courier to announce that he had encountered the enemy in force at Grand-Pre and had been compelled to fall back on Buzancy, which gave cause to apprehend that he might soon be cut off from retreat on Vouziers. For these reasons, the commander of the 7th corps, believing an attack to be imminent, had placed his men in position to sustain the first onset until the remainder of the army should have time to come to his assistance, and had started off one of his aides-de-camp with a letter to the marshal, apprising him of the danger, and asking him for re-enforcements. Fearing for the safety of the subsistence train, which had come up with the corps during the night and was again dragging its interminable length in the rear, he summarily sent it to the right about and directed it to make the best of its way to Chagny. Things were beginning to look like fight.

"So, it looks like business this time—eh, Lieutenant?" Maurice ventured to ask Rochas.

"Yes, thank goodness," replied the Lieutenant, his long arms going like windmills. "Wait a little; you'll find it warm enough!"

The soldiers were all delighted; the animation in the camp was still more pronounced. A feverish impatience had taken possession of the men, now that they were actually in line of battle between Chestres and Falaise. At last they were to have a sight of those Prussians who, if the newspapers were to be believed, were knocked up by their long marches, decimated by sickness, starving, and in rags, and every man's heart beat high with the prospect of annihilating them at a single blow.

"We are lucky to come across them again," said Jean. "They've been playing hide-and-seek about long enough since they slipped through our fingers after their battle down yonder on the frontier. But are these the same troops that whipped MacMahon, I wonder?"

Maurice could not answer his question with any degree of certainty. It seemed to him hardly probable, in view of what he had read in the newspapers at Rheims, that the third army, commanded by the Crown Prince of Prussia, could be at Vouziers, when, only two days before, it was just on the point of going into camp at Vitry-le-Francois. There had been some talk of a fourth army, under the Prince of Saxony, which was to operate on the line of the Meuse; this was doubtless the one that was now before them, although their promptitude in occupying Grand-Pre was a matter of surprise, considering the distances. But what put the finishing touch to the confusion of his ideas was his stupefaction to hear General Bourgain-Desfeuilles ask a countryman if the Meuse did not flow past Buzancy, and if the bridges there were strong. The general announced, moreover, in the confidence of his sublime ignorance, that a column of one hundred thousand men was on the way from Grand-Pre to attack them, while another, of sixty thousand, was coming up by the way of Sainte-Menehould.

"How's your foot, Maurice?" asked Jean.

"It don't hurt now," the other laughingly replied. "If there is to be a fight, I think it will be quite well."

It was true; his nervous excitement was so great that he was hardly conscious of the ground on which he trod. To think that in the whole campaign he had not yet burned powder! He had gone forth to the frontier, he had endured the agony of that terrible night of expectation before Mulhausen, and had not seen a Prussian, had not fired a shot; then he had retreated with the rest to Belfort, to Rheims, had now been marching five days trying to find the enemy, and his useless chassepot was as clean as the day it left the shop, without the least smell of smoke on it. He felt an aching desire to discharge his piece once, if no more, to relieve the tension of his nerves. Since the day, near six weeks ago, when he had enlisted in a fit of enthusiasm, supposing that he would surely have to face the foe in a day or two, all that he had done had been to tramp up and down the country on his poor, sore feet—the feet of a man who had lived in luxury, far from the battle-field; and so, among all those impatient watchers, there was none who watched more impatiently than he the Grand-Pre road, extending straight away to a seemingly infinite distance between two rows of handsome trees. Beneath him was unrolled the panorama of the valley; the Aisne was, like a silver ribbon, flowing between its willows and poplars, and ever his gaze returned, solicited by an irresistible attraction, to that road down yonder that stretched away, far as the eye could see, to the horizon.

About four o'clock the 4th hussars returned, having made a wide circuit in the country round about, and stories, which grew as they were repeated, began to circulate of conflicts with uhlans, tending to confirm the confident belief which everyone had that an attack was imminent. Two hours later a courier came galloping in, breathless with terror, to announce that General Bordas had positive information that the enemy were on the Vouziers road, and dared not leave Grand-Pre. It was evident that that could not be true, since the courier had just passed over the road unharmed, but no one could tell at what moment it might be the case, and General Dumont, commanding the division, set out at once with his remaining brigade to bring off his other brigade that was in difficulty. The sun went down behind Vouziers and the roofs of the town were sharply profiled in black against a great red cloud. For a long time the brigade was visible as it receded between the double row of trees, until finally it was swallowed up in the gathering darkness.

Colonel de Vineuil came to look after his regiment's position for the night. He was surprised not to find Captain Beaudoin at his post, and as that officer just then chanced to come in from Vouziers, where he alleged in excuse for his absence that he had been breakfasting with the Baronne de Ladicourt, he received a sharp reprimand, which he digested in silence, with the rigid manner of a martinet conscious of being in the wrong.

"My children," said the Colonel, as he passed along the line of men, "we shall probably be attacked to-night, or if not, then by day-break to-morrow morning at the latest. Be prepared, and remember that the 106th has never retreated before the enemy."

The little speech was received with loud hurrahs; everyone, in the prevailing suspense and discouragement, preferred to "take the wipe of the dish-clout" and have done with it. Rifles were examined to see that they were in good order, belts were refilled with cartridges. As they had eaten their soup that morning, the men were obliged to content themselves with biscuits and coffee. An order was promulgated that there was to be no sleeping. The grand-guards were out nearly a mile to the front, and a chain of sentinels at frequent intervals extended down to the Aisne. The officers were seated in little groups about the camp-fires, and beside a low wall at the left of the road the fitful blaze occasionally flared up and rescued from the darkness the gold embroideries and bedizened uniforms of the Commander-in-Chief and his staff, flitting to and fro like phantoms, watching the road and listening for the tramp of horses in the mortal anxiety they were in as to the fate of the third division.

It was about one o'clock in the morning when it came Maurice's turn to take his post as sentry at the edge of an orchard of plum-trees, between the road and the river. The night was black as ink, and as soon as his comrades left him and he found himself alone in the deep silence of the sleeping fields he was conscious of a sensation of fear creeping over him, a feeling of abject terror such as he had never known before and which he trembled with rage and shame at his inability to conquer. He turned his head to cheer himself by a sight of the camp-fires, but they were hidden from him by a wood; there was naught behind him but an unfathomable sea of blackness; all that he could discern was a few distant lights still dimly burning in Vouziers, where the inhabitants, doubtless forewarned and trembling at the thought of the impending combat, were keeping anxious vigil. His terror was increased, if that were possible, on bringing his piece to his shoulder to find that he could not even distinguish the sights on it. Then commenced a period of suspense that tried his nerves most cruelly; every faculty of his being was strained and concentrated in the one sense of hearing; sounds so faint as to be imperceptible reverberated in his ears like the crash of thunder; the plash of a distant waterfall, the rustling of a leaf, the movement of an insect in the grass, were like the booming of artillery. Was that the tramp of cavalry, the deep rumbling of gun-carriages driven at speed, that he heard down there to the right? And there on his left, what was that? was it not the sound of stealthy whispers, stifled voices, a party creeping up to surprise him under cover of the darkness? Three times he was on the point of giving the alarm by firing his piece. The fear that he might be mistaken and incur the ridicule of his comrades served to intensify his distress. He had kneeled upon the ground, supporting his left shoulder against a tree; it seemed to him that he had been occupying that position for hours, that they had forgotten him there, that the army had moved away without him. Then suddenly, at once, his fear left him; upon the road, that he knew was not two hundred yards away, he distinctly heard the cadenced tramp of marching men. Immediately it flashed across his mind as a certainty that they were the troops from Grand-Pre, whose coming had been awaited with such anxiety—General Dumont bringing in Bordas' brigade. At that same moment the corporal of the guard came along with the relief; he had been on post a little less than the customary hour.

He had been right; it was the 3d division returning to camp. Everyone felt a sensation of deep relief. Increased precautions were taken, nevertheless, for what fresh intelligence they received tended to confirm what they supposed they already knew of the enemy's approach. A few uhlans, forbidding looking fellows in their long black cloaks, were brought in as prisoners, but they were uncommunicative, and so daylight came at last, the pale, ghastly light of a rainy morning, bringing with it no alleviation of their terrible suspense. No one had dared to close an eye during that long night. About seven o'clock Lieutenant Rochas affirmed that MacMahon was coming up with the whole army. The truth of the matter was that General Douay, in reply to his dispatch of the preceding day announcing that a battle at Vouziers was inevitable, had received a letter from the marshal enjoining him to hold the position until re-enforcements could reach him; the forward movement had been arrested; the 1st corps was being directed on Terron, the 5th on Buzancy, while the 12th was to remain at Chene and constitute our second line. Then the suspense became more breathless still; it was to be no mere skirmish that the peaceful valley of the Aisne was to witness that day, but a great battle, in which would participate the entire army, that was even now turning its back upon the Meuse and marching southward; and there was no making of soup, the men had to content themselves with coffee and hard-tack, for everyone was saying, without troubling himself to ask why, that the "wipe of the dish-clout" was set down for midday. An aide-de-camp had been dispatched to the marshal to urge him to hurry forward their supports, as intelligence received from every quarter made it more and more certain that the two Prussian armies were close at hand, and three hours later still another officer galloped off like mad toward Chene, where general headquarters were located, with a request for instructions, for consternation had risen to a higher pitch then ever with the receipt of fresh tidings from the maire of a country commune, who told of having seen a hundred thousand men at Grand-Pre, while another hundred thousand were advancing by way of Buzancy.

Midday came, and not a sign of the Prussians. At one o'clock, at two, it was the same, and a reaction of lassitude and doubt began to prevail among the troops. Derisive jeers were heard at the expense of the generals: perhaps they had seen their shadow on the wall; they should be presented with a pair of spectacles. A pretty set of humbugs they were, to have caused all that trouble for nothing! A fellow who passed for a wit among his comrades shouted:

"It is like it was down there at Mulhausen, eh?"

The words recalled to Maurice's mind a flood of bitter memories. He thought of that idiotic flight, that panic that had swept away the 7th corps when there was not a German visible, nor within ten leagues of where they were, and now he had a distinct certainty that they were to have a renewal of that experience. It was plain that if twenty-four hours had elapsed since the skirmish at Grand-Pre and they had not been attacked, the reason was that the 4th hussars had merely struck up against a reconnoitering body of cavalry; the main body of the Prussians must be far away, probably a day's march or two. Then the thought suddenly struck him of the time they had wasted, and it terrified him; in three days they had only accomplished the distance from Contreuve to Vouziers, a scant two leagues. On the 25th the other corps, alleging scarcity of supplies, had diverted their course to the north, while now, on the 27th, here they were coming southward again to fight a battle with an invisible enemy. Bordas' brigade had followed the 4th hussars into the abandoned passes of the Argonne, and was supposed to have got itself into trouble; the division had gone to its assistance, and that had been succeeded by the corps, and that by the entire army, and all those movements had amounted to nothing. Maurice trembled as he reflected how pricelessly valuable was every hour, every minute, in that mad project of joining forces with Bazaine, a project that could be carried to a successful issue only by an officer of genius, with seasoned troops under him, who should press forward to his end with the resistless energy of a whirlwind, crushing every obstacle that lay in his path.

"It is all up with us!" said he, as the whole truth flashed through his mind, to Jean, who had given way to despair. Then as the corporal, failing to catch his meaning, looked at him wonderingly, he went on in an undertone, for his friend's ear alone, to speak of their commanders:

"They mean well, but they have no sense, that's certain—and no luck! They know nothing; they foresee nothing; they have neither plans nor ideas, nor happy intuitions. Allons! everything is against us; it is all up!"

And by slow degrees that same feeling of discouragement that Maurice had arrived at by a process of reasoning settled down upon the denser intellects of the troops who lay there inactive, anxiously awaiting to see what the end would be. Distrust, as a result of their truer perception of the position they were in, was obscurely burrowing in those darkened minds, and there was no man so ignorant as not to feel a sense of injury at the ignorance and irresolution of their leaders, although he might not have been able to express in distinct terms the causes of his exasperation. In the name of Heaven, what were they doing there, since the Prussians had not shown themselves? either let them fight and have it over with, or else go off to some place where they could get some sleep; they had had enough of that kind of work. Since the departure of the second aide-de-camp, who had been dispatched in quest of orders, this feeling of unrest had been increasing momentarily; men collected in groups, talking loudly and discussing the situation pro and con, and the general inquietude communicating itself to the officers, they knew not what answer to make to those of their men who ventured to question them. They ought to be marching, it would not answer to dawdle thus; and so, when it became known about five o'clock that the aide-de-camp had returned and that they were to retreat, there was a sigh of relief throughout the camp and every heart was lighter.

It seemed that the wiser counsel was to prevail, then, after all! The Emperor and MacMahon had never looked with favor on the movement toward Montmedy, and now, alarmed to learn that they were again out-marched and out-maneuvered, and that they were to have the army of the Prince of Saxony as well as that of the Crown Prince to contend with, they had renounced the hazardous scheme of uniting their forces with Bazaine, and would retreat through the northern strongholds with a view to falling back ultimately on Paris. The 7th corps' destination would be Chagny, by way of Chene, while the 5th corps would be directed on Poix, and the 1st and 12th on Vendresse. But why, since they were about to fall back, had they advanced to the line of the Aisne? Why all that waste of time and labor, when it would have been so easy and so rational to move straight from Rheims and occupy the strong positions in the valley of the Marne? Was there no guiding mind, no military talent, no common sense? But there should be no more questioning; all should be forgiven, in the universal joy at the adoption of that eminently wise counsel, which was the only means at their command of extricating themselves from the hornets' nest into which they had rushed so imprudently. All, officers and men, felt that they would be the stronger for the retrograde movement, that under the walls of Paris they would be invincible, and that there it was that the Prussians would sustain their inevitable defeat. But Vouziers must be evacuated before daybreak, and they must be well on the road to Chene before the enemy should learn of the movement, and forthwith the camp presented a scene of the greatest animation: trumpets sounding, officers hastening to and fro with orders, while the baggage and quartermaster's trains, in order not to encumber the rear-guard, were sent forward in advance.

Maurice was delighted. As he was endeavoring to explain to Jean the rationale of the impending movement, however, a cry of pain escaped him; his excitement had subsided, and he was again conscious of his foot, aching and burning as if it had been a ball of red-hot metal.

"What's the matter? is it hurting you again?" the corporal asked sympathizingly. And with his calm and sensible resourcefulness he said: "See here, little one, you told me yesterday that you have acquaintances in the town, yonder. You ought to get permission from the major and find some one to drive you over to Chene, where you could have a good night's rest in a comfortable bed. We can pick you up as we go by to-morrow if you are fit to march. What do you say to that, hein?"

In Falaise, the village near which the camp was pitched, Maurice had come across a small farmer, an old friend of his father's, who was about to drive his daughter over to Chene to visit an aunt in that town, and the horse was even then standing waiting, hitched to a light carriole. The prospect was far from encouraging, however, when he broached the subject to Major Bouroche.

"I have a sore foot, monsieur the doctor—"

Bouroche, with a savage shake of his big head with its leonine mane, turned on him with a roar:

"I am not monsieur the doctor; who taught you manners?"

And when Maurice, taken all aback, made a stammering attempt to excuse himself, he continued:

"Address me as major, do you hear, you great oaf!"

He must have seen that he had not one of the common herd to deal with and felt a little ashamed of himself; he carried it off with a display of more roughness.

"All a cock-and-bull story, that sore foot of yours!—Yes, yes; you may go. Go in a carriage, go in a balloon, if you choose. We have too many of you malingerers in the army!"

When Jean assisted Maurice into the carriole the latter turned to thank him, whereon the two men fell into each other's arms and embraced as if they were never to meet again. Who could tell, amid the confusion and disorder of the retreat, with those bloody Prussians on their track? Maurice could not tell how it was that there was already such a tender affection between him and the young man, and twice he turned to wave him a farewell. As he left the camp they were preparing to light great fires in order to mislead the enemy when they should steal away, in deepest silence, before the dawn of day.

As they jogged along the farmer bewailed the terrible times through which they were passing. He had lacked the courage to remain at Falaise, and already was regretting that he had left it, declaring that if the Prussians burned his house it would ruin him. His daughter, a tall, pale young woman, wept copiously. But Maurice was like a dead man for want of sleep, and had no ears for the farmer's lamentations; he slumbered peacefully, soothed by the easy motion of the vehicle, which the little horse trundled over the ground at such a good round pace that it took them less than an hour and a half to accomplish the four leagues between Vouziers and Chene. It was not quite seven o'clock and scarcely beginning to be dark when the young man rubbed his eyes and alighted in a rather dazed condition on the public square, near the bridge over the canal, in front of the modest house where he was born and had passed twenty years of his life. He got down there in obedience to an involuntary impulse, although the house had been sold eighteen months before to a veterinary surgeon, and in reply to the farmer's questions said that he knew quite well where he was going, adding that he was a thousand times obliged to him for his kindness.

He continued to stand stock-still, however, beside the well in the middle of the little triangular place; he was as if stunned; his memory was a blank. Where had he intended to go? and suddenly his wits returned to him and he remembered that it was to the notary's, whose house was next door to his father's, and whose mother, Madame Desvallieres, an aged and most excellent lady, had petted him when he was an urchin on account of their being neighbors. But he hardly recognized Chene in the midst of the hurly-burly and confusion into which the little town, ordinarily so dead, was thrown by the presence of an army corps encamped at its gates and filling its quiet streets with officers, couriers, soldiers, and camp-followers and stragglers of every description. The canal was there as of old, passing through the town from end to end and bisecting the market-place in the center into two equal-sized triangles connected by a narrow stone bridge; and there, on the other bank, was the old market with its moss-grown roofs, and the Rue Berond leading away to the left and the Sedan road to the right, but filling the Rue de Vouziers in front of him and extending as far as the Hotel de Ville was such a compact, swarming, buzzing crowd that he was obliged to raise his eyes and take a look over the roof of the notary's house at the slate-covered bell tower in order to assure himself that that was the quiet spot where he had played hop-scotch when he was a youngster. There seemed to be an effort making to clear the square; some men were roughly crowding back the throng of idlers and gazers, and looking more closely he was surprised to see, parked like the guns of a battery, a collection of vans, baggage-wagons, and carriages open and closed; a miscellaneous assortment of traps that he had certainly set eyes on before.

It was daylight still; the sun had just sunk in the canal at the point where it vanished in the horizon and the long, straight stretch of water was like a sea of blood, and Maurice was trying to make up his mind what to do when a woman who stood near stared at him a moment and then exclaimed:

"Why goodness gracious, is it possible! Are you the Levasseur boy?"

And thereon he recognized Madame Combette, the wife of the druggist, whose shop was on the market-place. As he was trying to explain to her that he was going to ask good Madame Desvallieres to give him a bed for the night she excitedly hurried him away.

"No, no; come to our house. I will tell you why—" When they were in the shop and she had cautiously closed the door she continued: "You could not know, my dear boy, that the Emperor is at the Desvallieres. His officers took possession of the house in his name and the family are not any too well pleased with the great honor done them, I can tell you. To think that the poor old mother, a woman more than seventy, was compelled to give up her room and go up and occupy a servant's bed in the garret! Look, there, on the place. All that you see there is the Emperor's; those are his trunks, don't you see!"

And then Maurice remembered; they were the imperial carriages and baggage-wagons, the entire magnificent train that he had seen at Rheims.

"Ah! my dear boy, if you could but have seen the stuff they took from them, the silver plate, and the bottles of wine, and the baskets of good things, and the beautiful linen, and everything! I can't help wondering where they find room for such heaps of things, for the house is not a large one. Look, look! see what a fire they have lighted in the kitchen!"

He looked over at the small white, two-storied house that stood at the corner of the market-place and the Rue de Vouziers, a comfortable, unassuming house of bourgeois aspect; how well he remembered it, inside and out, with its central hall and four rooms on each floor; why, it was as if he had just left it! There were lights in the corner room on the first floor overlooking the square; the apothecary's wife informed him that it was the bedroom of the Emperor. But the chief center of activity seemed, as she had said, to be the kitchen, the window of which opened on the Rue de Vouziers. In all their lives the good people of Chene had witnessed no such spectacle, and the street before the house was filled with a gaping crowd, constantly coming and going, who stared with all their eyes at the range on which was cooking the dinner of an Emperor. To obtain a breath of air the cooks had thrown open the window to its full extent. They were three in number, in jackets of resplendent whiteness, superintending the roasting of chickens impaled on a huge spit, stirring the gravies and sauces in copper vessels that shone like gold. And the oldest inhabitant, evoking in memory all the civic banquets that he had beheld at the Silver Lion, could truthfully declare that never at any one time had he seen so much wood burning and so much food cooking.

Combette, a bustling, wizened little man, came in from the street in a great state of excitement from all that he had seen and heard. His position as deputy-mayor gave him facilities for knowing what was going on. It was about half-past three o'clock when MacMahon had telegraphed Bazaine that the Crown Prince of Prussia was approaching Chalons, thus necessitating the withdrawal of the army to the places along the Belgian frontier, and further dispatches were also in preparation for the Minister of War, advising him of the projected movement and explaining the terrible dangers of their position. It was uncertain whether or not the dispatch for Bazaine would get through, for communication with Metz had seemed to be interrupted for the past few days, but the second dispatch was another and more serious matter; and lowering his voice almost to a whisper the apothecary repeated the words that he had heard uttered by an officer of rank: "If they get wind of this in Paris, our goose is cooked!" Everyone was aware of the unrelenting persistency with which the Empress and the Council of Ministers urged the advance of the army. Moreover, the confusion went on increasing from hour to hour, the most conflicting advices were continually coming in as to the whereabouts of the German forces. Could it be possible that the Crown Prince was at Chalons? What, then, were the troops that the 7th corps had encountered among the passes of the Argonne?

"They have no information at staff headquarters," continued the little druggist, raising his arms above his head with a despairing gesture. "Ah, what a mess we are in! But all will be well if the army retreats to-morrow." Then, dropping public for private matters, the kind-hearted man said: "Look here, my young friend, I am going to see what I can do for that foot of yours; then we'll give you some dinner and put you to bed in my apprentice's little room, who has cleared out."

But Maurice was tormented by such an itching desire for further intelligence that he could neither eat nor sleep until he had carried into execution his original design of paying a visit to his old friend, Madame Desvallieres, over the way. He was surprised that he was not halted at the door, which, in the universal confusion, had been left wide open, without so much as a sentry to guard it. People were going out and coming in incessantly, military men and officers of the household, and the roar from the blazing kitchen seemed to rise and pervade the whole house. There was no light in the passage and on the staircase, however, and he had to grope his way up as best he might. On reaching the first floor he paused for a few seconds, his heart beating violently, before the door of the apartment that he knew contained the Emperor, but not a sound was to be heard in the room; the stillness that reigned there was as of death. Mounting the last flight he presented himself at the door of the servant's room to which Madame Desvallieres had been consigned; the old lady was at first terrified at sight of him. When she recognized him presently she said:

"Ah, my poor child, what a sad meeting is this! I would cheerfully have surrendered my house to the Emperor, but the people he has about him have no sense of decency. They lay hands on everything, without so much as saying, 'By your leave,' and I am afraid they will burn the house down with their great fires! He, poor man, looks like a corpse, and such sadness in his face—"

And when the young man took leave of her with a few murmured words of comfort she went with him to the door, and leaning over the banister: "Look!" she softly said, "you can see him from where you are. Ah! we are all undone. Adieu, my child!"

Maurice remained planted like a statue on one of the steps of the dark staircase. Craning his neck and directing his glance through the glazed fanlight over the door of the apartment, he beheld a sight that was never to fade from his memory.

In the bare and cheerless room, the conventional bourgeois "parlor," was the Emperor, seated at a table on which his plate was laid, lighted at either end by wax candles in great silver candelabra. Silent in the background stood two aides-de-camp with folded arms. The wine in the glass was untasted, the bread untouched, a breast of chicken was cooling on the plate. The Emperor did not stir; he sat staring down at the cloth with those dim, lusterless, watery eyes that the young man remembered to have seen before at Rheims; but he appeared more weary than then, and when, evidently at the cost of a great effort, he had raised a couple of mouthfuls to his lips, he impatiently pushed the remainder of the food from him with his hand. That was his dinner. His pale face was blanched with an expression of suffering endured in silence.

As Maurice was passing the dining room on the floor beneath, the door was suddenly thrown open, and through the glow of candles and the steam of smoking joints he caught a glimpse of a table of equerries, chamberlains, and aides-de-camp, engaged in devouring the Emperor's game and poultry and drinking his champagne, amid a great hubbub of conversation. Now that the marshal's dispatch had been sent off, all these people were delighted to know that the retreat was assured. In a week they would be at Paris and could sleep between clean sheets.

Then, for the first time, Maurice suddenly became conscious of the terrible fatigue that was oppressing him like a physical burden; there was no longer room for doubt, the whole army was about to fall back, and the best thing for him to do was to get some sleep while waiting for the 7th corps to pass. He made his way back across the square to the house of his friend Combette, where, like one in a dream, he ate some dinner, after which he was mistily conscious of someone dressing his foot and then conducting him upstairs to a bedroom. And then all was blackness and utter annihilation; he slept a dreamless, unstirring sleep. But after an uncertain length of time—hours, days, centuries, he knew not—he gave a start and sat bolt upright in bed in the surrounding darkness. Where was he? What was that continuous rolling sound, like the rattling of thunder, that had aroused him from his slumber? His recollection suddenly returned to him; he ran to the window to see what was going on. In the obscurity of the street beneath, where the night was usually so peaceful, the artillery was passing, horses, men, and guns, in interminable array, with a roar and clatter that made the lifeless houses quake and tremble. The abrupt vision filled him with unreasoning alarm. What time might it be? The great bell in the Hotel de Ville struck four. He was endeavoring to allay his uneasiness by assuring himself that it was simply the initial movement in the retreat that had been ordered the day previous, when, raising his eyes, he beheld a sight that gave him fresh cause for inquietude: there was a light still in the corner window of the notary's house opposite, and the shadow of the Emperor, drawn in dark profile on the curtain, appeared and disappeared at regularly spaced intervals.

Maurice hastily slipped on his trousers preparatory to going down to the street, but just then Combette appeared at the door with a bed-candle in his hand, gesticulating wildly.

"I saw you from the square as I was coming home from the Mairie, and I came up to tell you the news. They have been keeping me out of my bed all this time; would you believe it, for more than two hours the mayor and I have been busy attending to fresh requisitions. Yes, everything is upset again; there has been another change of plans. Ah! he knew what he was about, that officer did, who wanted to keep the folks in Paris from getting wind of matters!"

He went on for a long time in broken, disjointed phrases, and when he had finished the young man, speechless, brokenhearted, saw it all. About midnight the Emperor had received a dispatch from the Minister of War in reply to the one that had been sent by the marshal. Its exact terms were not known, but an aide-de-camp at the Hotel de Ville had stated openly that the Empress and the Council declared there would be a revolution in Paris should the Emperor retrace his steps and abandon Bazaine. The dispatch, which evinced the utmost ignorance as to the position of the German armies and the resources of the army of Chalons, advised, or rather ordered, an immediate forward movement, regardless of all considerations, in spite of everything, with a heat and fury that seemed incredible.

"The Emperor sent for the marshal," added the apothecary, "and they were closeted together for near an hour; of course I am not in position to say what passed between them, but I am told by all the officers that there is to be no more retreating, and the advance to the Meuse is to be resumed at once. We have been requisitioning all the ovens in the city for the 1st corps, which will come up to-morrow morning and take the place of the 12th, whose artillery you see at this moment starting for la Besace. The matter is decided for good this time; you will smell powder before you are much older."

He ceased. He also was gazing at the lighted window over in the notary's house. Then he went on in a low voice, as if talking to himself, with an expression on his face of reflective curiosity:

"I wonder what they had to say to each other? It strikes one as a rather peculiar proceeding, all the same, to run away from a threatened danger at six in the evening, and at midnight, when nothing has occurred to alter the situation, to rush headlong into the very self-same danger."

Below them in the street Maurice still heard the gun-carriages rumbling and rattling over the stones of the little sleeping city, that ceaseless tramp of horse and man, that uninterrupted tide of humanity, pouring onward toward the Meuse, toward the unknown, terrible fate that the morrow had in store for them. And still upon the mean, cheap curtains of that bourgeois dwelling he beheld the shadow of the Emperor passing and repassing at regular intervals, the restless activity of the sick man, to whom his cares made sleep impossible, whose sole repose was motion, in whose ears was ever ringing that tramp of horses and men whom he was suffering to be sent forward to their death. A few brief hours, then, had sufficed; the slaughter was decided on; it was to be. What, indeed, could they have found to say to each other, that Emperor and that marshal, conscious, both of them, of the inevitable disaster that lay before them? Assured as they were at night of defeat, from their knowledge of the wretched condition the army would be in when the time should come for it to meet the enemy, how, knowing as they did that the peril was hourly becoming greater, could they have changed their mind in the morning? Certain it was that General de Palikao's plan of a swift, bold dash on Montmedy, which seemed hazardous on the 23d and was, perhaps, still not impracticable on the 25th, if conducted with veteran troops and a leader of ability, would on the 27th be an act of sheer madness amid the divided counsels of the chiefs and the increasing demoralization of the troops. This they both well knew; why, then, did they obey those merciless drivers who were flogging them onward in their irresolution? why did they hearken to those furious passions that were spurring them forward? The marshal's, it might be said, was the temperament of the soldier, whose duty is limited to obedience to his instructions, great in its abnegation; while the Emperor, who had ceased entirely to issue orders, was waiting on destiny. They were called on to surrender their lives and the life of the army; they surrendered them. It was the accomplishment of a crime, the black, abominable night that witnessed the murder of a nation, for thenceforth the army rested in the shadow of death; a hundred thousand men and more were sent forward to inevitable destruction.

While pursuing this train of thought Maurice was watching the shadow that still kept appearing and vanishing on the muslin of good Madame Desvallieres' curtain, as if it felt the lash of the pitiless voice that came to it from Paris. Had the Empress that night desired the death of the father in order that the son might reign? March! forward ever! with no look backward, through mud, through rain, to bitter death, that the final game of the agonizing empire may be played out, even to the last card. March! march! die a hero's death on the piled corpses of your people, let the whole world gaze in awe-struck admiration, for the honor and glory of your name! And doubtless the Emperor was marching to his death. Below, the fires in the kitchen flamed and flashed no longer; equerries, aides-de-camp and chamberlains were slumbering, the whole house was wrapped in darkness, while ever the lone shade went and came unceasingly, accepting with resignation the sacrifice that was to be, amid the deafening uproar of the 12th corps, that was defiling still through the black night.

Maurice suddenly reflected that, if the advance was to be resumed, the 7th corps would not pass through Chene, and he beheld himself left behind, separated from his regiment, a deserter from his post. His foot no longer pained him; his friend's dressing and a few hours of complete rest had allayed the inflammation. Combette gave him a pair of easy shoes of his own that were comfortable to his feet, and as soon as he had them on he wanted to be off, hoping that he might yet be able to overtake the 106th somewhere on the road between Chene and Vouziers. The apothecary labored vainly to dissuade him, and had almost made up his mind to put his horse in the gig and drive him over in person, trusting to fortune to befriend him in finding the regiment, when Fernand, the apprentice, appeared, alleging as an excuse for his absence that he had been to see his sister. The youth was a tall, tallow-faced individual, who looked as if he had not the spirit of a mouse; the horse was quickly hitched to the carriage and he drove off with Maurice. It was not yet five o'clock; the rain was pouring in torrents from a sky of inky blackness, and the dim carriage-lamps faintly illuminated the road and cast little fitful gleams of light across the streaming fields on either side, over which came mysterious sounds that made them pull up from time to time in the belief that the army was at hand.

Jean, meantime, down there before Vouziers, had not been slumbering. Maurice had explained to him how the retreat was to be salvation to them all, and he was keeping watch, holding his men together and waiting for the order to move, which might come at any minute. About two o'clock, in the intense darkness that was dotted here and there by the red glow of the watch-fires, a great trampling of horses resounded through the camp; it was the advance-guard of cavalry moving off toward Balay and Quatre-Champs so as to observe the roads from Boult-aux-Bois and Croix-aux-Bois; then an hour later the infantry and artillery also put themselves in motion, abandoning at last the positions of Chestre and Falaise that they had defended so persistently for two long days against an enemy who never showed himself. The sky had become overcast, the darkness was profound, and one by one the regiments marched out in deepest silence, an array of phantoms stealing away into the bosom of the night. Every heart beat joyfully, however, as if they were escaping from some treacherous pitfall; already in imagination the troops beheld themselves under the walls of Paris, where their revenge was awaiting them.

Jean looked out into the thick blackness. The road was bordered with trees on either hand and, as far as he could see, appeared to lie between wide meadows. Presently the country became rougher; there was a succession of sharp rises and descents, and just as they were entering a village which he supposed to be Balay, two straggling rows of houses bordering the road, the dense cloud that had obscured the heavens burst in a deluge of rain. The men had received so many duckings within the past few days that they took this one without a murmur, bowing their heads and plodding patiently onward; but when they had left Balay behind them and were crossing a wide extent of level ground near Quatre-Champs a violent wind began to rise. Beyond Quatre-Champs, when they had fought their way upward to the wide plateau that extends in a dreary stretch of waste land as far as Noirval, the wind increased to a hurricane and the driving rain stung their faces. There it was that the order, proceeding from the head of the column and re-echoed down the line, brought the regiments one after another to a halt, and the entire 7th corps, thirty-odd thousand men, found itself once more reunited in the mud and rain of the gray dawn. What was the matter? Why were they halted there? An uneasy feeling was already beginning to pervade the ranks; it was asserted in some quarters that there had been a change of orders. The men had been brought to ordered arms and forbidden to leave the ranks or sit down. At times the wind swept over the elevated plateau with such violence that they had to press closely to one another to keep from being carried off their feet. The rain blinded them and trickled in ice-cold streams beneath their collars down their backs. And two hours passed, a period of waiting that seemed as if it would never end, for what purpose no one could say, in an agony of expectancy that chilled the hearts of all.

As the daylight increased Jean made an attempt to discern where they were. Someone had shown him where the Chene road lay off to the northwest, passing over a hill beyond Quatre-Champs. Why had they turned to the right instead of to the left? Another object of interest to him was the general and his staff, who had established themselves at the Converserie, a farm on the edge of the plateau. There seemed to be a heated discussion going on; officers were going and coming and the conversation was carried on with much gesticulation. What could they be waiting for? nothing was coming that way. The plateau formed a sort of amphitheater, broad expanses of stubble that were commanded to the north and east by wooded heights; to the south were thick woods, while to the west an opening afforded a glimpse of the valley of the Aisne with the little white houses of Vouziers. Below the Converserie rose the slated steeple of Quatre-Champs church, looming dimly through the furious storm, which seemed as if it would sweep away bodily the few poor moss-grown cottages of the village. As Jean's glance wandered down the ascending road he became conscious of a doctor's gig coming up at a sharp trot along the stony road, that was now the bed of a rapid torrent.

It was Maurice, who, at a turn in the road, from the hill that lay beyond the valley, had finally discerned the 7th corps. For two hours he had been wandering about the country, thanks to the stupidity of a peasant who had misdirected him and the sullen ill-will of his driver, whom fear of the Prussians had almost deprived of his wits. As soon as he reached the farmhouse he leaped from the gig and had no further trouble in finding the regiment.

Jean addressed him in amazement:

"What, is it you? What is the meaning of this? I thought you were to wait until we came along."

Maurice's tone and manner told of his rage and sorrow.

"Ah, yes! we are no longer going in that direction; it is down yonder we are to go, to get ourselves knocked in the head, all of us!"

"Very well," said the other presently, with a very white face. "We will die together, at all events."

The two men met, as they had parted, with an embrace. In the drenching rain that still beat down as pitilessly as ever, the humble private resumed his place in the ranks, while the corporal, in his streaming garments, never murmured as he gave him the example of what a soldier should be.

And now the tidings became more definite and spread among the men; they were no longer retreating on Paris; the advance to the Meuse was again the order of the day. An aide-de-camp had brought to the 7th corps instructions from the marshal to go and encamp at Nonart; the 5th was to take the direction of Beauclair, where it would be the right wing of the army, while the 1st was to move up to Chene and relieve the 12th, then on the march to la Besace on the extreme left. And the reason why more than thirty thousand men had been kept waiting there at ordered arms, for nearly three hours in the midst of a blinding storm, was that General Douay, in the deplorable confusion incident on this new change of front, was alarmed for the safety of the train that had been sent forward the day before toward Chagny; the delay was necessary to give the several divisions time to close up. In the confusion of all these conflicting movements it was said that the 12th corps train had blocked the road at Chene, thus cutting off that of the 7th. On the other hand, an important part of the materiel, all the forges of the artillery, had mistaken their road and strayed off in the direction of Terron; they were now trying to find their way back by the Vouziers road, where they were certain to fall into the hands of the Germans. Never was there such utter confusion, never was anxiety so intense.

A feeling of bitterest discouragement took possession of the troops. Many of them in their despair would have preferred to seat themselves on their knapsacks, in the midst of that sodden, wind-swept plain, and wait for death to come to them. They reviled their leaders and loaded them with insult: ah! famous leaders, they; brainless boobies, undoing at night what they had done in the morning, idling and loafing when there was no enemy in sight, and taking to their heels as soon as he showed his face! Each minute added to the demoralization that was already rife, making of that army a rabble, without faith or hope, without discipline, a herd that their chiefs were conducting to the shambles by ways of which they themselves were ignorant. Down in the direction of Vouziers the sound of musketry was heard; shots were being exchanged between the rear-guard of the 7th corps and the German skirmishers; and now every eye was turned upon the valley of the Aisne, where volumes of dense black smoke were whirling upward toward the sky from which the clouds had suddenly been swept away; they all knew it was the village of Falaise burning, fired by the uhlans. Every man felt his blood boil in his veins; so the Prussians were there at last; they had sat and waited two days for them to come up, and then had turned and fled. The most ignorant among the men had felt their cheeks tingle for very shame as, in their dull way, they recognized the idiocy that had prompted that enormous blunder, that imbecile delay, that trap into which they had walked blindfolded; the light cavalry of the IVth army feinting in front of Bordas' brigade and halting and neutralizing, one by one, the several corps of the army of Chalons, solely to give the Crown Prince time to hasten up with the IIId army. And now, thanks to the marshal's complete and astounding ignorance as to the identity of the troops he had before him, the junction was accomplished, and the 5th and 7th corps were to be roughly handled, with the constant menace of disaster overshadowing them.

Maurice's eyes were bent on the horizon, where it was reddened with the flames of burning Falaise. They had one consolation, however: the train that had been believed to be lost came crawling along out of the Chene road. Without delay the 2d division put itself in motion and struck out across the forest for Boult-aux-Bois; the 3d took post on the heights of Belleville to the left in order to keep an eye to the communications, while the 1st remained at Quatre-Champs to wait for the coming up of the train and guard its countless wagons. Just then the rain began to come down again with increased violence, and as the 106th moved off the plateau, resuming the march that should have never been, toward the Meuse, toward the unknown, Maurice thought he beheld again his vision of the night: the shadow of the Emperor, incessantly appearing and vanishing, so sad, so pitiful a sight, on the white curtain of good old Madame Desvallieres. Ah! that doomed army, that army of despair, that was being driven forward to inevitable destruction for the salvation of a dynasty! March, march, onward ever, with no look behind, through mud, through rain, to the bitter end!

VI.

"Thunder!" Chouteau ejaculated the following morning when he awoke, chilled and with aching bones, under the tent, "I wouldn't mind having a bouillon with plenty of meat in it."

At Boult-aux-Bois, where they were now encamped, the only ration issued to the men the night before had been an extremely slender one of potatoes; the commissariat was daily more and more distracted and disorganized by the everlasting marches and countermarches, never reaching the designated points of rendezvous in time to meet the troops. As for the herds, no one had the faintest idea where they might be upon the crowded roads, and famine was staring the army in the face.

Loubet stretched himself and plaintively replied:

"Ah, fichtre, yes!—No more roast goose for us now."

The squad was out of sorts and sulky. Men couldn't be expected to be lively on an empty stomach. And then there was the rain that poured down incessantly, and the mud in which they had to make their beds.

Observing Pache make the sign of the cross after mumbling his morning prayer, Chouteau captiously growled:

"Ask that good God of yours, if he is good for anything, to send us down a couple of sausages and a mug of beer apiece."

"Ah, if we only had a good big loaf of bread!" sighed Lapoulle, whose ravenous appetite made hunger a more grievous affliction to him than to the others.

But Lieutenant Rochas, passing by just then, made them be silent. It was scandalous, never to think of anything but their stomachs! When he was hungry he tightened up the buckle of his trousers. Now that things were becoming decidedly squally and the popping of rifles was to be heard occasionally in the distance, he had recovered all his old serene confidence: it was all plain enough, now; the Prussians were there—well, all they had to do was, go out and lick 'em. And he gave a significant shrug of the shoulders, standing behind Captain Beaudoin, the very young man, as he called him, with his pale face and pursed up lips, whom the loss of his baggage had afflicted so grievously that he had even ceased to fume and scold. A man might get along without eating, at a pinch, but that he could not change his linen was a circumstance productive of sorrow and anger.

Maurice awoke to a sensation of despondency and physical discomfort. Thanks to his easy shoes the inflammation in his foot had gone down, but the drenching he had received the day before, from the effects of which his greatcoat seemed to weigh a ton, had left him with a distinct and separate ache in every bone of his body. When he was sent to the spring to get water for the coffee he took a survey of the plain on the edge of which Boult-aux-Bois is situated: forests rise to the west and north, and there is a hill crowned by the hamlet of Belleville, while, over to the east, Buzancy way, there is a broad, level expanse, stretching far as the eye can see, with an occasional shallow depression concealing a small cluster of cottages. Was it from that direction that they were to expect the enemy? As he was returning from the stream with his bucket filled with water, the father of a family of wretched peasants hailed him from the door of his hovel, and asked him if the soldiers were this time going to stay and defend them. In the confusion of conflicting orders the 5th corps had already traversed the region no less than three times. The sound of cannonading had reached them the day before from the direction of Bar; the Prussians could not be more than a couple of leagues away. And when Maurice made answer to the poor folks that doubtless the 7th corps would also be called away after a time, their tears flowed afresh. Then they were to be abandoned to the enemy, and the soldiers had not come there to fight, whom they saw constantly vanishing and reappearing, always on the run?

"Those who like theirs sweet," observed Loubet, as he poured the coffee, "have only to stick their thumb in it and wait for it to melt."

Not a man of them smiled. It was too bad, all the same, to have to drink their coffee without sugar; and then, too, if they only had some biscuit! Most of them had devoured what eatables they had in their knapsacks, to the very last crumb, to while away their time of waiting, the day before, on the plateau of Quatre-Champs. Among them, however, the members of the squad managed to collect a dozen potatoes, which they shared equally.

Maurice, who began to feel a twinging sensation in his stomach, uttered a regretful cry:

"If I had known of this I would have bought some bread at Chene."

Jean listened in silence. He had had a dispute with Chouteau that morning, who, on being ordered to go for firewood, had insolently refused, alleging that it was not his turn. Now that everything was so rapidly going to the dogs, insubordination among the men had increased to such a point that those in authority no longer ventured to reprimand them, and Jean, with his sober good sense and pacific disposition, saw that if he would preserve his influence with his squad he must keep the corporal in the background as far as possible. For this reason he was hail-fellow-well-met with his men, who could not fail to see what a treasure they had in a man of his experience, for if those committed to his care did not always have all they wanted to eat, they had, at all events, not suffered from hunger, as had been the case with so many others. But he was touched by the sight of Maurice's suffering. He saw that he was losing strength, and looked at him anxiously, asking himself how that delicate young man would ever manage to sustain the privations of that horrible campaign.

When Jean heard Maurice bewail the lack of bread he arose quietly, went to his knapsack, and, returning, slipped a biscuit into the other's hand.

"Here! don't let the others see it; I have not enough to go round."

"But what will you do?" asked the young man, deeply affected.

"Oh, don't be alarmed about me—I have two left."

It was true; he had carefully put aside three biscuits, in case there should be a fight, knowing that men are often hungry on the battlefield. And then, besides, he had just eaten a potato; that would be sufficient for him. Perhaps something would turn up later on.

About ten o'clock the 7th corps made a fresh start. The marshal's first intention had been to direct it by way of Buzancy upon Stenay, where it would have passed the Meuse, but the Prussians, outmarching the army of Chalons, were already in Stenay, and were even reported to be at Buzancy. Crowded back in this manner to the northward, the 7th corps had received orders to move to la Besace, some twelve or fifteen miles from Boult-aux-Bois, whence, on the next day, they would proceed to pass the Meuse at Mouzon. The start was made in a very sulky humor; the men, with empty stomachs and bodies unrefreshed by repose, unnerved, mentally and physically, by the experience of the past few days, vented their dissatisfaction by growling and grumbling, while the officers, without a spark of their usual cheerful gayety, with a vague sense of impending disaster awaiting them at the end of their march, taxed the dilatoriness of their chiefs, and reproached them for not going to the assistance of the 5th corps at Buzancy, where the sound of artillery-firing had been heard. That corps, too, was on the retreat, making its way toward Nonart, while the 12th was even then leaving la Besace for Mouzon and the 1st was directing its course toward Raucourt. It was like nothing so much as the passage of a drove of panic-stricken cattle, with the dogs worrying them and snapping at their heels—a wild stampede toward the Meuse.

When, in the outstreaming torrent of the three divisions that striped the plain with columns of marching men, the 106th left Boult-aux-Bois in the rear of the cavalry and artillery, the sky was again overspread with a pall of dull leaden clouds that further lowered the spirits of the soldiers. Its route was along the Buzancy highway, planted on either side with rows of magnificent poplars. When they reached Germond, a village where there was a steaming manure-heap before every one of the doors that lined the two sides of the straggling street, the sobbing women came to their thresholds with their little children in their arms, and held them out to the passing troops, as if begging the men to take them with them. There was not a mouthful of bread to be had in all the hamlet, nor even a potato, After that, the regiment, instead of keeping straight on toward Buzancy, turned to the left and made for Authe, and when the men turned their eyes across the plain and beheld upon the hilltop Belleville, through which they had passed the day before, the fact that they were retracing their steps was impressed more vividly on their consciousness.

"Heavens and earth!" growled Chouteau, "do they take us for tops?"

And Loubet chimed in:

"Those cheap-John generals of ours are all at sea again! They must think that men's legs are cheap."

The anger and disgust were general. It was not right to make men suffer like that, just for the fun of walking them up and down the country. They were advancing in column across the naked plain in two files occupying the sides of the road, leaving a free central space in which the officers could move to and fro and keep an eye on their men, but it was not the same now as it had been in Champagne after they left Rheims, a march of song and jollity, when they tramped along gayly and the knapsack was like a feather to their shoulders, in the belief that soon they would come up with the Prussians and give them a sound drubbing; now they were dragging themselves wearily forward in angry silence, cursing the musket that galled their shoulder and the equipments that seemed to weigh them to the ground, their faith in their leaders gone, and possessed by such bitterness of despair that they only went forward as does a file of manacled galley-slaves, in terror of the lash. The wretched army had begun to ascend its Calvary.

Maurice, however, within the last few minutes had made a discovery that interested him greatly. To their left was a range of hills that rose one above another as they receded from the road, and from the skirt of a little wood, far up on the mountain-side, he had seen a horseman emerge. Then another appeared, and then still another. There they stood, all three of them, without sign of life, apparently no larger than a man's hand and looking like delicately fashioned toys. He thought they were probably part of a detachment of our hussars out on a reconnoissance, when all at once he was surprised to behold little points of light flashing from their shoulders, doubtless the reflection of the sunlight from epaulets of brass.

"Look there!" he said, nudging Jean, who was marching at his side. "Uhlans!"

The corporal stared with all his eyes. "They, uhlans!"

They were indeed uhlans, the first Prussians that the 106th had set eyes on. They had been in the field nearly six weeks now, and in all that time not only had they never smelt powder, but had never even seen an enemy. The news spread through the ranks, and every head was turned to look at them. Not such bad-looking fellows, those uhlans, after all.

"One of them looks like a jolly little fat fellow," Loubet remarked.

But presently an entire squadron came out and showed itself on a plateau to the left of the little wood, and at sight of the threatening demonstration the column halted. An officer came riding up with orders, and the 106th moved off a little and took position on the bank of a small stream behind a clump of trees. The artillery had come hurrying back from the front on a gallop and taken possession of a low, rounded hill. For near two hours they remained there thus in line of battle without the occurrence of anything further; the body of hostile cavalry remained motionless in the distance, and finally, concluding that they were only wasting time that was valuable, the officers set the column moving again.

"Ah well," Jean murmured regretfully, "we are not booked for it this time."

Maurice, too, had felt his finger-tips tingling with the desire to have just one shot. He kept harping on the theme of the mistake they had made the day before in not going to the support of the 5th corps. If the Prussians had not made their attack yet, it must be because their infantry had not got up in sufficient strength, whence it was evident that their display of cavalry in the distance was made with no other end than to harass us and check the advance of our corps. We had again fallen into the trap set for us, and thenceforth the regiment was constantly greeted with the sight of uhlans popping up on its left flank wherever the ground was favorable for them, tracking it like sleuthhounds, disappearing behind a farmhouse only to reappear at the corner of a wood.

It eventually produced a disheartening effect on the troops to see that cordon closing in on them in the distance and enveloping them as in the meshes of some gigantic, invisible net. Even Pache and Lapoulle had an opinion on the subject.

"It is beginning to be tiresome!" they said. "It would be a comfort to send them our compliments in the shape of a musket-ball!"

But they kept toiling wearily onward on their tired feet, that seemed to them as if they were of lead. In the distress and suffering of that day's march there was ever present to all the undefined sensation of the proximity of the enemy, drawing in on them from every quarter, just as we are conscious of the coming storm before we have seen a cloud on the horizon. Instructions were given the rear-guard to use severe measures, if necessary, to keep the column well closed up; but there was not much straggling, aware as everyone was that the Prussians were close in our rear, and ready to snap up every unfortunate that they could lay hands on. Their infantry was coming up with the rapidity of the whirlwind, making its twenty-five miles a day, while the French regiments, in their demoralized condition, seemed in comparison to be marking time.

At Authe the weather cleared, and Maurice, taking his bearings by the position of the sun, noticed that instead of bearing off toward Chene, which lay three good leagues from where they were, they had turned and were moving directly eastward. It was two o'clock; the men, after shivering in the rain for two days, were now suffering from the intense heat. The road ascended, with long sweeping curves, through a region of utter desolation: not a house, not a living being, the only relief to the dreariness of the waste lands an occasional little somber wood; and the oppressive silence communicated itself to the men, who toiled onward with drooping heads, bathed in perspiration. At last Saint-Pierremont appeared before them, a few empty houses on a small elevation. They did not pass through the village. Maurice observed that here they made a sudden wheel to the left, resuming their northern course, toward la Besace. He now understood the route that had been adopted in their attempt to reach Mouzon ahead of the Prussians; but would they succeed, with such weary, demoralized troops? At Saint-Pierremont the three uhlans had shown themselves again, at a turn in the road leading to Buzancy, and just as the rear-guard was leaving the village a battery was unmasked and a few shells came tumbling among them, without doing any injury, however. No response was attempted, and the march was continued with constantly increasing effort.

From Saint-Pierremont to la Besace the distance is three good leagues, and when Maurice imparted that information to Jean the latter made a gesture of discouragement: the men would never be able to accomplish it; they showed it by their shortness of breath, by their haggard faces. The road continued to ascend, between gently sloping hills on either side that were gradually drawing closer together. The condition of the men necessitated a halt, but the only effect of their brief repose was to increase the stiffness of their benumbed limbs, and when the order was given to march the state of affairs was worse than it had been before; the regiments made no progress, men were everywhere falling in the ranks. Jean, noticing Maurice's pallid face and glassy eyes, infringed on what was his usual custom and conversed, endeavoring by his volubility to divert the other's attention and keep him awake as he moved automatically forward, unconscious of his actions.

"Your sister lives in Sedan, you say; perhaps we shall be there before long."

"What, at Sedan? Never! You must be crazy; it don't lie in our way."

"Is your sister young?"

"Just my age; you know I told you we are twins."

"Is she like you?"

"Yes, she is fair-haired, too; and oh! such pretty curling hair! She is a mite of a woman, with a little thin face, not one of your noisy, flashy hoydens, ah, no!—Dear Henriette!"

"You love her very dearly!"

"Yes, yes—"

There was silence between them after that, and Jean, glancing at Maurice, saw that his eyes were closing and he was about to fall.

"Hallo there, old fellow! Come, confound it all, brace up! Let me take your gun a moment; that will give you a chance to rest. They can't have the cruelty to make us march any further to-day! we shall leave half our men by the roadside."

At that moment he caught sight of Osches lying straight ahead of them, its few poor hovels climbing in straggling fashion up the hillside, and the yellow church, embowered in trees, looking down on them from its perch upon the summit.

"There's where we shall rest, for certain."

He had guessed aright; General Douay saw the exhausted condition of the troops, and was convinced that it would be useless to attempt to reach la Besace that day. What particularly influenced his determination, however, was the arrival of the train, that ill-starred train that had been trailing in his rear since they left Rheims, and of which the nine long miles of vehicles and animals had so terribly impeded his movements. He had given instructions from Quatre-Champs to direct it straight on Saint-Pierremont, and it was not until Osches that the teams came up with the corps, in such a state of exhaustion that the horses refused to stir. It was now five o'clock; the general, not liking the prospect of attempting the pass of Stonne at that late hour, determined to take the responsibility of abridging the task assigned them by the marshal. The corps was halted and proceeded to encamp; the train below in the meadows, guarded by a division, while the artillery took position on the hills to the rear, and the brigade detailed to act as rear-guard on the morrow rested on a height facing Saint-Pierremont. The other division, which included Bourgain-Desfeuilles' brigade, bivouacked on a wide plateau, bordered by an oak wood, behind the church. There was such confusion in locating the bodies of troops that it was dark before the 106th could move into its position at the edge of the wood.

"Zut!" said Chouteau in a furious rage, "no eating for me; I want to sleep!"

And that was the cry of all; they were overcome with fatigue. Many of them lacked strength and courage to erect their tents, but dropping where they stood, at once fell fast asleep on the bare ground. In order to eat, moreover, rations would have been necessary, and the commissary wagons, which were waiting for the 7th corps to come to them at la Besace, could not well be at Osches at the same time. In the universal relaxation of order and system even the customary corporal's call was omitted: it was everyone for himself. There were to be no more issues of rations from that time forth; the soldiers were to subsist on the provisions they were supposed to carry in their knapsacks, and that evening the sacks were empty; few indeed were those who could muster a crust of bread or some crumbs of the abundance in which they had been living at Vouziers of late. There was coffee, and those who were not too tired made and drank it without sugar.

When Jean thought to make a division of his wealth by eating one of his biscuits himself and giving the other to Maurice, he discovered that the latter was sound asleep. He thought at first he would awake him, but changed his mind and stoically replaced the biscuits in his sack, concealing them with as much caution as if they had been bags of gold; he could get along with coffee, like the rest of the boys. He had insisted on having the tent put up, and they were all stretched on the ground beneath its shelter when Loubet returned from a foraging expedition, bringing in some carrots that he had found in a neighboring field. As there was no fire to cook them by they munched them raw, but the vegetables only served to aggravate their hunger, and they made Pache ill.

"No, no; let him sleep," said Jean to Chouteau, who was shaking Maurice to wake him and give him his share.

"Ah," Lapoulle broke in, "we shall be at Angouleme to-morrow, and then we'll have some bread. I had a cousin in the army once, who was stationed at Angouleme. Nice garrison, that."

They all looked surprised, and Chouteau exclaimed:

"Angouleme—what are you talking about! Just listen to the bloody fool, saying he is at Angouleme!"

It was impossible to extract any explanation from Lapoulle. He had insisted that morning that the uhlans that they sighted were some of Bazaine's troops.

Then darkness descended on the camp, black as ink, silent as death. Notwithstanding the coolness of the night air the men had not been permitted to make fires; the Prussians were known to be only a few miles away, and it would not do to put them on the alert; orders even were transmitted in a hushed voice. The officers had notified their men before retiring that the start would be made at about four in the morning, in order that they might have all the rest possible, and all had hastened to turn in and were sleeping greedily, forgetful of their troubles. Above the scattered camps the deep respiration of all those slumbering crowds, rising upon the stillness of the night, was like the long-drawn breathing of old Mother Earth.

Suddenly a shot rang out in the darkness and aroused the sleepers. It was about three o'clock, and the obscurity was profound. Immediately everyone was on foot, the alarm spread through the camp; it was supposed the Prussians were attacking. It was only Loubet who, unable to sleep longer, had taken it in his head to make a foray into the oak-wood, which he thought gave promise of rabbits: what a jolly good lark it would be if he could bring in a pair of nice rabbits for the comrades' breakfast! But as he was looking about for a favorable place in which to conceal himself, he heard the sound of voices and the snapping of dry branches under heavy footsteps; men were coming toward him; he took alarm and discharged his piece, believing the Prussians were at hand. Maurice, Jean, and others came running up in haste, when a hoarse voice made itself heard:

"For God's sake, don't shoot!"

And there at the edge of the wood stood a tall, lanky man, whose thick, bristling beard they could just distinguish in the darkness. He wore a gray blouse, confined at the waist by a red belt, and carried a musket slung by a strap over his shoulder. He hurriedly explained that he was French, a sergeant of francs-tireurs, and had come with two of his men from the wood of Dieulet, bringing important information for the general.

"Hallo there, Cabasse! Ducat!" he shouted, turning his head, "hallo! you infernal poltroons, come here!"

The men were evidently badly scared, but they came forward. Ducat, short and fat, with a pale face and scanty hair; Cabasse short and lean, with a black face and a long nose not much thicker than a knife-blade.

Meantime Maurice had stepped up and taken a closer look at the sergeant; he finally asked him:

"Tell me, are you not Guillaume Sambuc, of Remilly?"

And when the man hesitatingly answered in the affirmative Maurice recoiled a step or two, for this Sambuc had the reputation of being a particularly hard case, the worthy son of a family of woodcutters who had all gone to the bad, the drunken father being found one night lying by the roadside with his throat cut, the mother and daughter, who lived by begging and stealing, having disappeared, most likely, in the seclusion of some penitentiary. He, Guillaume, did a little in the poaching and smuggling lines, and only one of that litter of wolves' whelps had grown up to be an honest man, and that was Prosper, the hussar, who had gone to work on a farm before he was conscripted, because he hated the life of the forest.

"I saw your brother at Vouziers," Maurice continued; "he is well."

Sambuc made no reply. To end the situation he said:

"Take me to the general. Tell him that the francs-tireurs of the wood of Dieulet have something important to say to him."

On the way back to the camp Maurice reflected on those free companies that had excited such great expectations at the time of their formation, and had since been the object of such bitter denunciation throughout the country. Their professed purpose was to wage a sort of guerilla warfare, lying in ambush behind hedges, harassing the enemy, picking off his sentinels, holding the woods, from which not a Prussian was to emerge alive; while the truth of the matter was that they had made themselves the terror of the peasantry, whom they failed utterly to protect and whose fields they devastated. Every ne'er-do-well who hated the restraints of the regular service made haste to join their ranks, well pleased with the chance that exempted him from discipline and enabled him to lead the life of a tramp, tippling in pothouses and sleeping by the roadside at his own sweet will. Some of the companies were recruited from the very worst material imaginable.

"Hallo there, Cabasse! Ducat!" Sambuc was constantly repeating, turning to his henchmen at every step he took, "Come along, will you, you snails!"

Maurice was as little charmed with the two men as with their leader. Cabasse, the little lean fellow, was a native of Toulon, had served as waiter in a cafe at Marseilles, had failed at Sedan as a broker in southern produce, and finally had brought up in a police-court, where it came near going hard with him, in connection with a robbery of which the details were suppressed. Ducat, the little fat man, quondam huissier at Blainville, where he had been forced to sell out his business on account of a malodorous woman scrape, had recently been brought face to face with the court of assizes for an indiscretion of a similar nature at Raucourt, where he was accountant in a factory. The latter quoted Latin in his conversation, while the other could scarcely read, but the two were well mated, as unprepossessing a pair as one could expect to meet in a summer's day.

The camp was already astir; Jean and Maurice took the francs-tireurs to Captain Beaudoin, who conducted them to the quarters of Colonel Vineuil. The colonel attempted to question them, but Sambuc, intrenching himself in his dignity, refused to speak to anyone except the general. Now Bourgain-Desfeuilles had taken up his quarters that night with the cure of Osches, and just then appeared, rubbing his eyes, in the doorway of the parsonage; he was in a horribly bad humor at his slumbers having been thus prematurely cut short, and the prospect that he saw before him of another day of famine and fatigue; hence his reception of the men who were brought before him was not exactly lamblike. Who were they? Whence did they come? What did they want? Ah, some of those francs-tireurs gentlemen—eh! Same thing as skulkers and riff-raff!

"General," Sambuc replied, without allowing himself to be disconcerted, "we and our comrades are stationed in the woods of Dieulet—"

"The woods of Dieulet—where's that?"

"Between Stenay and Mouzon, General."

"What do I know of your Stenay and Mouzon? Do you expect me to be familiar with all these strange names?"

The colonel was distressed by his chief's display of ignorance; he hastily interfered to remind him that Stenay and Mouzon were on the Meuse, and that, as the Germans had occupied the former of those towns, the army was about to attempt the passage of the river at the other, which was situated more to the northward.

"So you see, General," Sambuc continued, "we've come to tell you that the woods of Dieulet are alive with Prussians. There was an engagement yesterday as the 5th corps was leaving Bois-les-Dames, somewhere about Nonart—"

"What, yesterday? There was fighting yesterday?"

"Yes, General, the 5th corps was engaged as it was falling back; it must have been at Beaumont last night. So, while some of us hurried off to report to it the movements of the enemy, we thought it best to come and let you know how matters stood, so that you might go to its assistance, for it will certainly have sixty thousand men to deal with in the morning."

General Bourgain-Desfeuilles gave a contemptuous shrug of his shoulders.

"Sixty thousand men! Why the devil don't you call it a hundred thousand at once? You were dreaming, young man; your fright has made you see double. It is impossible there should be sixty thousand Germans so near us without our knowing it."

And so he went on. It was to no purpose that Sambuc appealed to Ducat and Cabasse to confirm his statement.

"We saw the guns," the Provencal declared; "and those chaps must be crazy to take them through the forest, where the rains of the past few days have left the roads in such a state that they sink in the mud up to the hubs."

"They have someone to guide them, for certain," said the ex-bailiff.

Since leaving Vouziers the general had stoutly refused to attach any further credit to reports of the junction of the two German armies which, as he said, they had been trying to stuff down his throat. He did not even consider it worth his while to send the francs-tireurs before his corps commander, to whom the partisans supposed, all along, that they were talking; if they should attempt to listen to all the yarns that were brought them by tramps and peasants, they would have their hands full and be driven from pillar to post without ever advancing a step. He directed the three men to remain with the column, however, since they were acquainted with the country.

"They are good fellows, all the same," Jean said to Maurice, as they were returning to fold the tent, "to have tramped three leagues across lots to let us know."

The young man agreed with him and commended their action, knowing as he did the country, and deeply alarmed to hear that the Prussians were in Dieulet forest and moving on Sommanthe and Beaumont. He had flung himself down by the roadside, exhausted before the march had commenced, with a sorrowing heart and an empty stomach, at the dawning of that day which he felt was to be so disastrous for them all. Distressed to see him looking so pale, the corporal affectionately asked him:

"Are you feeling so badly still? What is it? Does your foot pain you?"

Maurice shook his head. His foot had ceased to trouble him, thanks to the big shoes.

"Then you are hungry." And Jean, seeing that he did not answer, took from his knapsack one of the two remaining biscuits, and with a falsehood for which he may be forgiven: "Here, take it; I kept your share for you. I ate mine a while ago."

Day was breaking when the 7th corps marched out of Osches en route for Mouzon by way of la Besace, where they should have bivouacked. The train, cause of so many woes, had been sent on ahead, guarded by the first division, and if its own wagons, well horsed as for the most part they were, got over the ground at a satisfactory pace, the requisitioned vehicles, most of them empty, delayed the troops and produced sad confusion among the hills of the defile of Stonne. After leaving the hamlet of la Berliere the road rises more sharply between wooded hills on either side. Finally, about eight o'clock, the two remaining divisions got under way, when Marshal MacMahon came galloping up, vexed to find there those troops that he supposed had left la Besace that morning, with only a short march between them and Mouzon; his comment to General Douay on the subject was expressed in warm language. It was determined that the first division and the train should be allowed to proceed on their way to Mouzon, but that the two other divisions, that they might not be further retarded by this cumbrous advance-guard, should move by the way of Raucourt and Autrecourt so as to pass the Meuse at Villers. The movement to the north was dictated by the marshal's intense anxiety to place the river between his army and the enemy; cost what it might, they must be on the right bank that night. The rear-guard had not yet left Osches when a Prussian battery, recommencing the performance of the previous day, began to play on them from a distant eminence, over in the direction of Saint-Pierremont. They made the mistake of firing a few shots in reply; then the last of the troops filed out of the town.

Until nearly eleven o'clock the 106th slowly pursued its way along the road which zigzags through the pass of Stonne between high hills. On the left hand the precipitous summits rear their heads, devoid of vegetation, while to the right the gentler slopes are clad with woods down to the roadside. The sun had come out again, and the heat was intense down in the inclosed valley, where an oppressive solitude prevailed. After leaving la Berliere, which lies at the foot of a lofty and desolate mountain surmounted by a Calvary, there is not a house to be seen, not a human being, not an animal grazing in the meadows. And the men, the day before so faint with hunger, so spent with fatigue, who since that time had had no food to restore, no slumber, to speak of, to refresh them, were now dragging themselves listlessly along, disheartened, filled with sullen anger.

Soon after that, just as the men had been halted for a short rest along the roadside, the roar of artillery was heard away at their right; judging from the distinctness of the detonations the firing could not be more than two leagues distant. Upon the troops, weary with waiting, tired of retreating, the effect was magical; in the twinkling of an eye everyone was on his feet, eager, in a quiver of excitement, no longer mindful of his hunger and fatigue: why did they not advance? They preferred to fight, to die, rather than keep on flying thus, no one knew why or whither.

General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, accompanied by Colonel de Vineuil, had climbed a hill on the right to reconnoiter the country. They were visible up there in a little clearing between two belts of wood, scanning the surrounding hills with their field-glasses, when all at once they dispatched an aide-de-camp to the column, with instructions to send up to them the francs-tireurs if they were still there. A few men, Jean and Maurice among them, accompanied the latter, in case there should be need of messengers.

"A beastly country this, with its everlasting hills and woods!" the general shouted, as soon as he caught sight of Sambuc. "You hear the music—where is it? where is the fighting going on?"

Sambuc, with Ducat and Cabasse close at his heels, listened a moment before he answered, casting his eye over the wide horizon, and Maurice, standing beside him and gazing out over the panorama of valley and forest that lay beneath him, was struck with admiration. It was like a boundless sea, whose gigantic waves had been arrested by some mighty force. In the foreground the somber verdure of the woods made splashes of sober color on the yellow of the fields, while in the brilliant sunlight the distant hills were bathed in purplish vapors. And while nothing was to be seen, not even the tiniest smoke-wreath floating on the cloudless sky, the cannon were thundering away in the distance, like the muttering of a rising storm.

"Here is Sommanthe, to the right," Sambuc said at last, pointing to a high hill crowned by a wood. "Yoncq lies off yonder to the left. The fighting is at Beaumont, General."

"Either at Varniforet or Beaumont," Ducat observed.

The general muttered below his breath: "Beaumont, Beaumont—a man can never tell where he is in this d——d country." Then raising his voice: "And how far may this Beaumont be from here?"

"A little more than six miles, if you take the road from Chene to Stenay, which runs up the valley yonder."

There was no cessation of the firing, which seemed to be advancing from west to east with a continuous succession of reports like peals of thunder. Sambuc added:

"Bigre! it's getting warm. It is just what I expected; you know what I told you this morning, General; it is certainly the batteries that we saw in the wood of Dieulet. By this time the whole army that came up through Buzancy and Beauclair is at work mauling the 5th corps."

There was silence among them, while the battle raging in the distance growled more furiously than ever, and Maurice had to set tight his teeth to keep himself from speaking his mind aloud. Why did they not hasten whither the guns were calling them, without such waste of words? He had never known what it was to be excited thus; every discharge found an echo in his bosom and inspired him with a fierce longing to be present at the conflict, to put an end to it. Were they to pass by that battle, so near almost that they could stretch forth their arm and touch it with their hand, and never expend a cartridge? It must be to decide a wager that some one had made, that since the beginning of the campaign they were dragged about the country thus, always flying before the enemy! At Vouziers they had heard the musketry of the rear-guard, at Osches the German guns had played a moment on their retreating backs; and now they were to run for it again, they were not to be allowed to advance at double-quick to the succor of comrades in distress! Maurice looked at Jean, who was also very pale, his eyes shining with a bright, feverish light. Every heart leaped in every bosom at the loud summons of the artillery.

While they were waiting a general, attended by his staff, was seen ascending the narrow path that wound up the hill. It was Douay, their corps-commander, who came hastening up, with anxiety depicted on his countenance, and when he had questioned the francs-tireurs he gave utterance to an exclamation of despair. But what could he have done, even had he learned their tidings that morning? The marshal's orders were explicit: they must be across the Meuse that night, cost what it might. And then again, how was he to collect his scattered troops, strung out along the road to Raucourt, and direct then on Beaumont? Could they arrive in time to be of use? The 5th corps must be in full retreat on Mouzon by that time, as was indicated by the sound of the firing, which was receding more and more to the eastward, as a deadly hurricane moves off after having accomplished its disastrous work. With a fierce gesture, expressive of his sense of impotency, General Douay outstretched his arms toward the wide horizon of hill and dale, of woods and fields, and the order went forth to proceed with the march to Raucourt.

Ah, what a march was that through that dismal pass of Stonne, with the lofty summits o'erhanging them on either side, while through the woods on their right came the incessant volleying of the artillery. Colonel de Vineuil rode at the head of his regiment, bracing himself firmly in his saddle, his face set and very pale, his eyes winking like those of one trying not to weep. Captain Beaudoin strode along in silence, gnawing his mustache, while Lieutenant Rochas let slip an occasional imprecation, invoking ruin and destruction on himself and everyone besides. Even the most cowardly among the men, those who had the least stomach for fighting, were shamed and angered by their continuous retreat; they felt the bitter humiliation of turning their backs while those beasts of Prussians were murdering their comrades over yonder.

After emerging from the pass the road, from a tortuous path among the hills, increased in width and led through a broad stretch of level country, dotted here and there with small woods. The 106th was now a portion of the rear-guard, and at every moment since leaving Osches had been expecting to feel the enemy's attack, for the Prussians were following the column step by step, never letting it escape their vigilant eyes, waiting, doubtless, for a favorable opportunity to fall on its rear. Their cavalry were on the alert to take advantage of any bit of ground that promised them an opportunity of getting in on our flank; several squadrons of Prussian Guards were seen advancing from behind a wood, but they gave up their purpose upon a demonstration made by a regiment of our hussars, who came up at a gallop, sweeping the road. Thanks to the breathing-spell afforded them by this circumstance the retreat went on in sufficiently good order, and Raucourt was not far away, when a spectacle greeted their eyes that filled them with consternation and completely demoralized the troops. Upon coming to a cross-road they suddenly caught sight of a hurrying, straggling, flying throng, wounded officers, soldiers without arms and without organization, runaway teams from the train, all—men and animals—mingled in wildest confusion, wild with panic. It was the wreck of one of the brigades of the 1st division, which had been sent that morning to escort the train to Mouzon; there had been an unfortunate misconception of orders, and this brigade and a portion of the wagons had taken a wrong road and reached Varniforet, near Beaumont, at the very time when the 5th corps was being driven back in disorder. Taken unawares, overborne by the flank attack of an enemy superior in numbers, they had fled; and bleeding, with haggard faces, crazed with fear, were now returning to spread consternation among their comrades; it was as if they had been wafted thither on the breath of the battle that had been raging incessantly since noon.

Alarm and anxiety possessed everyone, from highest to lowest, as the column poured through Raucourt in wild stampede. Should they turn to the left, toward Autrecourt, and attempt to pass the Meuse at Villers, as had been previously decided? The general hesitated, fearing to encounter difficulties in crossing there, even if the bridge were not already in possession of the Prussians; he finally decided to keep straight on through the defile of Harancourt and thus reach Remilly before nightfall. First Mouzon, then Villers, and last Remilly; they were still pressing on northward, with the tramp of the uhlans on the road behind them. There remained scant four miles for them to accomplish, but it was five o'clock, and the men were sinking with fatigue. They had been under arms since daybreak, twelve hours had been consumed in advancing three short leagues; they were harassed and fatigued as much by their constant halts and the stress of their emotions as by the actual toil of the march. For the last two nights they had had scarce any sleep; their hunger had been unappeased since they left Vouziers. In Raucourt the distress was terrible; men fell in the ranks from sheer inanition.

The little town is rich, with its numerous factories, its handsome thoroughfare lined with two rows of well-built houses, and its pretty church and mairie; but the night before Marshal MacMahon and the Emperor had passed that way with their respective staffs and all the imperial household, and during the whole of the present morning the entire 1st corps had been streaming like a torrent through the main street. The resources of the place had not been adequate to meet the requirements of these hosts; the shelves of the bakers and grocers were empty, and even the houses of the bourgeois had been swept clean of provisions; there was no bread, no wine, no sugar, nothing capable of allaying hunger or thirst. Ladies had been seen to station themselves before their doors and deal out glasses of wine and cups of bouillon until cask and kettle alike were drained of their last drop. And so there was an end, and when, about three o'clock, the first regiments of the 7th corps began to appear the scene was a pitiful one; the broad street was filled from curb to curb with weary, dust-stained men, dying with hunger, and there was not a mouthful of food to give them. Many of them stopped, knocking at doors and extending their hands beseechingly toward windows, begging for a morsel of bread, and women were seen to cry and sob as they motioned that they could not help them, that they had nothing left.

At the corner of the Rue Dix-Potiers Maurice had an attack of dizziness and reeled as if about to fall. To Jean, who came hastening up, he said:

"No, leave me; it is all up with me. I may as well die here!"

He had sunk down upon a door-step. The corporal spoke in a rough tone of displeasure assumed for the occasion:

"Nom de Dieu! why don't you try to behave like a soldier! Do you want the Prussians to catch you? Come, get up!"

Then, as the young man, lividly pale, his eyes tight-closed, almost unconscious, made no reply, he let slip another oath, but in another key this time, in a tone of infinite gentleness and pity:

"Nom de Dieu! Nom de Dieu!"

And running to a drinking-fountain near by, he filled his basin with water and hurried back to bathe his friend's face. Then, without further attempt at concealment, he took from his sack the last remaining biscuit that he had guarded with such jealous caution, and commenced crumbling it into small bits that he introduced between the other's teeth. The famishing man opened his eyes and ate greedily.

"But you," he asked, suddenly recollecting himself, "how comes it that you did not eat it?"

"Oh, I!" said Jean. "I'm tough, I can wait. A good drink of Adam's ale, and I shall be all right."

He went and filled his basin again at the fountain, emptied it at a single draught, and came back smacking his lips in token of satisfaction with his feast. He, too, was cadaverously pale, and so faint with hunger that his hands were trembling like a leaf.

"Come, get up, and let's be going. We must be getting back to the comrades, little one."

Maurice leaned on his arm and suffered himself to be helped along as if he had been a child; never had woman's arm about him so warmed his heart. In that extremity of distress, with death staring him in the face, it afforded him a deliciously cheering sense of comfort to know that someone loved and cared for him, and the reflection that that heart, which was so entirely his, was the heart of a simple-minded peasant, whose aspirations scarcely rose above the satisfaction of his daily wants, for whom he had recently experienced a feeling of repugnance, served to add to his gratitude a sensation of ineffable joy. Was it not the brotherhood that had prevailed in the world in its earlier days, the friendship that had existed before caste and culture were; that friendship which unites two men and makes them one in their common need of assistance, in the presence of Nature, the common enemy? He felt the tie of humanity uniting him and Jean, and was proud to know that the latter, his comforter and savior, was stronger than he; while to Jean, who did not analyze his sensations, it afforded unalloyed pleasure to be the instrument of protecting, in his friend, that cultivation and intelligence which, in himself, were only rudimentary. Since the death of his wife, who had been snatched away from him by a frightful catastrophe, he had believed that his heart was dead, he had sworn to have nothing more to do with those creatures, who, even when they are not wicked and depraved, are cause of so much suffering to man. And thus, to both of them their friendship was a comfort and relief. There was no need of any demonstrative display of affection; they understood each other; there was close community of sympathy between them, and, notwithstanding their apparent external dissimilarity, the bond of pity and common suffering made them as one during their terrible march that day to Remilly.

As the French rear-guard left Raucourt by one end of the town the Germans came in at the other, and forthwith two of their batteries commenced firing from the position they had taken on the heights to the left; the 106th, retreating along the road that follows the course of the Emmane, was directly in the line of fire. A shell cut down a poplar on the bank of the stream; another came and buried itself in the soft ground close to Captain Beaudoin, but did not burst. From there on to Harancourt, however, the walls of the pass kept approaching nearer and nearer, and the troops were crowded together in a narrow gorge commanded on either side by hills covered with trees. A handful of Prussians in ambush on those heights might have caused incalculable disaster. With the cannon thundering in their rear and the menace of a possible attack on either flank, the men's uneasiness increased with every step they took, and they were in haste to get out of such a dangerous neighborhood; hence they summoned up their reserved strength, and those soldiers who, but now in Raucourt, had scarce been able to drag themselves along, now, with the peril that lay behind them as an incentive, struck out at a good round pace. The very horses seemed to be conscious that the loss of a minute might cost them dear. And the impetus thus given continued; all was going well, the head of the column must have reached Remilly, when, all at once, their progress was arrested.

"Heavens and earth!" said Chouteau, "are they going to leave us here in the road?"

The regiment had not yet reached Harancourt, and the shells were still tumbling about them; while the men were marking time, awaiting the word to go ahead again, one burst, on the right of the column, without injuring anyone, fortunately. Five minutes passed, that seemed to them long as an eternity, and still they did not move; there was some obstacle on ahead that barred their way as effectually as if a strong wall had been built across the road. The colonel, standing up in his stirrups, peered nervously to the front, for he saw that it would require but little to create a panic among his men.

"We are betrayed; everybody can see it," shouted Chouteau.

Murmurs of reproach arose on every side, the sullen muttering of their discontent exasperated by their fears. Yes, yes! they had been brought there to be sold, to be delivered over to the Prussians. In the baleful fatality that pursued them, and among all the blunders of their leaders, those dense intelligences were unable to account for such an uninterrupted succession of disasters on any other ground than that of treachery.

"We are betrayed! we are betrayed!" the men wildly repeated.

Then Loubet's fertile intellect evolved an idea: "It is like enough that that pig of an Emperor has sat himself down in the road, with his baggage, on purpose to keep us here."

The idle fancy was received as true, and immediately spread up and down the line; everyone declared that the imperial household had blocked the road and was responsible for the stoppage. There was a universal chorus of execration, of opprobrious epithets, an unchaining of the hatred and hostility that were inspired by the insolence of the Emperor's attendants, who took possession of the towns where they stopped at night as if they owned them, unpacking their luxuries, their costly wines and plate of gold and silver, before the eyes of the poor soldiers who were destitute of everything, filling the kitchens with the steam of savory viands while they, poor devils, had nothing for it but to tighten the belt of their trousers. Ah! that wretched Emperor, that miserable man, deposed from his throne and stripped of his command, a stranger in his own empire; whom they were conveying up and down the country along with the other baggage, like some piece of useless furniture, whose doom it was ever to drag behind him the irony of his imperial state: cent-gardes, horses, carriages, cooks, and vans, sweeping, as it were, the blood and mire from the roads of his defeat with the magnificence of his court mantle, embroidered with the heraldic bees!

In rapid succession, one after the other, two more shells fell; Lieutenant Rochas had his kepi carried away by a fragment. The men huddled closer together and began to crowd forward, the movement gathering strength as it ran from rear to front. Inarticulate cries were heard, Lapoulle shouted furiously to go ahead. A minute longer and there would have been a horrible catastrophe, and many men must have been crushed to death in the mad struggle to escape from the funnel-like gorge.

The colonel—he was very pale—turned and spoke to the soldiers:

"My children, my children, be a little patient. I have sent to see what is the matter—it will only be a moment—"

But they did not advance, and the seconds seemed like centuries. Jean, quite cool and collected, resumed his hold of Maurice's hand, and whispered to him that, in case their comrades began to shove, they two could leave the road, climb the hill on the left, and make their way to the stream. He looked about to see where the francs-tireurs were, thinking he might gain some information from them regarding the roads, but was told they had vanished while the column was passing through Raucourt. Just then the march was resumed, and almost immediately a bend in the road took them out of range of the German batteries. Later in the day it was ascertained that it was four cuirassier regiments of Bonnemain's division who, in the disorder of that ill-starred retreat, had thus blocked the road of the 7th corps and delayed the march.

It was nearly dark when the 106th passed through Angecourt. The wooded hills continued on the right, but to the left the country was more level, and a valley was visible in the distance, veiled in bluish mists. At last, just as the shades of night were descending, they stood on the heights of Remilly and beheld a ribbon of pale silver unrolling its length upon a broad expanse of verdant plain. It was the Meuse, that Meuse they had so longed to see, and where it seemed as if victory awaited them.

Pointing to some lights in the distance that were beginning to twinkle cheerily among the trees, down in that fertile valley that lay there so peaceful in the mellow twilight, Maurice said to Jean, with the glad content of a man revisiting a country that he knows and loves:

"Look! over that way—that is Sedan!"

VII.

Remilly is built on a hill that rises from the left bank of the Meuse, presenting the appearance of an amphitheater; the one village street that meanders circuitously down the sharp descent was thronged with men, horses, and vehicles in dire confusion. Half-way up the hill, in front of the church, some drivers had managed to interlock the wheels of their guns, and all the oaths and blows of the artillerymen were unavailing to get them forward. Further down, near the woolen mill, where the Emmane tumbles noisily over the dam, the road was choked with a long line of stranded baggage wagons, while close at hand, at the inn of the Maltese Cross, a constantly increasing crowd of angry soldiers pushed and struggled, and could not obtain so much as a glass of wine.

All this mad hurly-burly was going on at the southern end of the village, which is here separated from the Meuse by a little grove of trees, and where the engineers had that morning stretched a bridge of boats across the river. There was a ferry to the right; the ferryman's house stood by itself, white and staring, amid a rank growth of weeds. Great fires had been built on either bank, which, being replenished from time to time, glared ruddily in the darkness and made the stream and both its shores as light as day. They served to show the immense multitude of men massed there, awaiting a chance to cross, while the footway only permitted the passage of two men abreast, and over the bridge proper the cavalry and artillery were obliged to proceed at a walk, so that the crossing promised to be a protracted operation. It was said that the troops still on the left bank comprised a brigade of the 1st corps, an ammunition train, and the four regiments of cuirassiers belonging to Bonnemain's division, while coming up in hot haste behind them was the 7th corps, over thirty thousand strong, possessed with the belief that the enemy was at their heels and pushing on with feverish eagerness to gain the security of the other shore.

For a while despair reigned. What! they had been marching since morning with nothing to eat, they had summoned up all their energies to escape that deadly trap at Harancourt pass, only in the end to be landed in that slough of despond, with an insurmountable wall staring them in the face! It would be hours, perhaps, before it became the last comer's turn to cross, and everyone knew that even if the Prussians should not be enterprising enough to continue their pursuit in the darkness they would be there with the first glimpse of daylight. Orders came for them to stack muskets, however, and they made their camp on the great range of bare hills which slope downward to the meadows of the Meuse, with the Mouzon road running at their base. To their rear and occupying the level plateau on top of the range the guns of the reserve artillery were arranged in battery, pointed so as to sweep the entrance of the pass should there be necessity for it. And thus commenced another period of agonized, grumbling suspense.

When finally the preparations were all completed the 106th found themselves posted in a field of stubble above the road, in a position that commanded a view of the broad plain. The men had parted regretfully with their arms, casting timorous looks behind them that showed they were apprehensive of a night attack. Their faces were stern and set, and silence reigned, only broken from time to time by some sullen murmur of angry complaint. It was nearly nine o'clock, they had been there two hours, and yet many of them, notwithstanding their terrible fatigue, could not sleep; stretched on the bare ground, they would start and bend their ears to catch the faintest sound that rose in the distance. They had ceased to fight their torturing hunger; they would eat over yonder, on the other bank, when they had passed the river; they would eat grass if nothing else was to be found. The crowd at the bridge, however, seemed to increase rather than diminish; the officers that General Douay had stationed there came back to him every few minutes, always bringing the same unwelcome report, that it would be hours and hours before any relief could be expected. Finally the general determined to go down to the bridge in person, and the men saw him on the bank, bestirring himself and others and hurrying the passage of the troops.

Maurice, seated with Jean against a wall, pointed to the north, as he had done before. "There is Sedan in the distance. And look! Bazeilles is over yonder—and then comes Douzy, and then Carignan, more to the right. We shall concentrate at Carignan, I feel sure we shall. Ah! there is plenty of room, as you would see if it were daylight!"

And his sweeping gesture embraced the entire valley that lay beneath them, enfolded in shadow. There was sufficient light remaining in the sky that they could distinguish the pale gleam of the river where it ran its course among the dusky meadows. The scattered trees made clumps of denser shade, especially a row of poplars to the left, whose tops were profiled on the horizon like the fantastic ornaments on some old castle gateway. And in the background, behind Sedan, dotted with countless little points of brilliant light, the shadows had mustered, denser and darker, as if all the forests of the Ardennes had collected the inky blackness of their secular oaks and cast it there.

Jean's gaze came back to the bridge of boats beneath them.

"Look there! everything is against us. We shall never get across."

The fires upon both banks blazed up more brightly just then, and their light was so intense that the whole fearful scene was pictured on the darkness with vivid distinctness. The boats on which the longitudinal girders rested, owing to the weight of the cavalry and artillery that had been crossing uninterruptedly since morning, had settled to such an extent that the floor of the bridge was covered with water. The cuirassiers were passing at the time, two abreast, in a long unbroken file, emerging from the obscurity of the hither shore to be swallowed up in the shadows of the other, and nothing was to be seen of the bridge; they appeared to be marching on the bosom of the ruddy stream, that flashed and danced in the flickering firelight. The horses snorted and hung back, manifesting every indication of terror as they felt the unstable pathway yielding beneath their feet, and the cuirassiers, standing erect in their stirrups and clutching at the reins, poured onward in a steady, unceasing stream, wrapped in their great white mantles, their helmets flashing in the red light of the flames. One might have taken them for some spectral band of knights, with locks of fire, going forth to do battle with the powers of darkness.

Jean's suffering wrested from him a deep-toned exclamation:

"Oh! I am hungry!"

On every side, meantime, the men, notwithstanding the complainings of their empty stomachs, had thrown themselves down to sleep. Their fatigue was so great that it finally got the better of their fears and struck them down upon the bare earth, where they lay on their back, with open mouth and arms outstretched, like logs beneath the moonless sky. The bustle of the camp was stilled, and all along the naked range, from end to end, there reigned a silence as of death.

"Oh! I am hungry; I am so hungry that I could eat dirt!"

Jean, patient as he was and inured to hardship, could not restrain the cry; he had eaten nothing in thirty-six hours, and it was torn from him by sheer stress of physical suffering. Then Maurice, knowing that two or three hours at all events must elapse before their regiment could move to pass the stream, said:

"See here, I have an uncle not far from here—you know, Uncle Fouchard, of whom you have heard me speak. His house is five or six hundred yards from here; I didn't like the idea, but as you are so hungry—The deuce! the old man can't refuse us bread!"

His comrade made no objection and they went off together. Father Fouchard's little farm was situated just at the mouth of Harancourt pass, near the plateau where the artillery was posted. The house was a low structure, surrounded by quite an imposing cluster of dependencies; a barn, a stable, and cow-sheds, while across the road was a disused carriage-house which the old peasant had converted into an abattoir, where he slaughtered with his own hands the cattle which he afterward carried about the country in his wagon to his customers.

Maurice was surprised as he approached the house to see no light.

"Ah, the old miser! he has locked and barred everything tight and fast. Like as not he won't let us in."

But something that he saw brought him to a standstill. Before the house a dozen soldiers were moving to and fro, hungry plunderers, doubtless, on the prowl in quest of something to eat. First they had called, then had knocked, and now, seeing that the place was dark and deserted, they were hammering at the door with the butts of their muskets in an attempt to force it open. A growling chorus of encouragement greeted them from the outsiders of the circle.

"Nom de Dieu! go ahead! smash it in, since there is no one at home!"

All at once the shutter of a window in the garret was thrown back and a tall old man presented himself, bare-headed, wearing the peasant's blouse, with a candle in one hand and a gun in the other. Beneath the thick shock of bristling white hair was a square face, deeply seamed and wrinkled, with a strong nose, large, pale eyes, and stubborn chin.

"You must be robbers, to smash things as you are doing!" he shouted in an angry tone. "What do you want?"

The soldiers, taken by surprise, drew back a little way.

"We are perishing with hunger; we want something to eat."

"I have nothing, not a crust. Do you suppose that I keep victuals in my house to fill a hundred thousand mouths? Others were here before you; yes, General Ducrot's men were here this morning, I tell you, and they cleaned me out of everything."

The soldiers came forward again, one by one.

"Let us in, all the same; we can rest ourselves, and you can hunt up something—"

And they were commencing to hammer at the door again, when the old fellow, placing his candle on the window-sill, raised his gun to his shoulder.

"As true as that candle stands there, I'll put a hole in the first man that touches that door!"

The prospect looked favorable for a row. Oaths and imprecations resounded, and one of the men was heard to shout that they would settle matters with the pig of a peasant, who was like all the rest of them and would throw his bread in the river rather than give a mouthful to a starving soldier. The light of the candle glinted on the barrels of the chassepots as they were brought to an aim; the angry men were about to shoot him where he stood, while he, headstrong and violent, would not yield an inch.

"Nothing, nothing! Not a crust! I tell you they cleaned me out!"

Maurice rushed in in affright, followed by Jean.

"Comrades, comrades—"

He knocked up the soldiers' guns, and raising his eyes, said entreatingly:

"Come, be reasonable. Don't you know me? It is I."

"Who, I?"

"Maurice Levasseur, your nephew."

Father Fouchard took up his candle. He recognized his nephew, beyond a doubt, but was firm in his resolve not to give so much as a glass of water.

"How can I tell whether you are my nephew or not in this infernal darkness? Clear out, everyone of you, or I will fire!"

And amid an uproar of execration, and threats to bring him down and burn the shanty, he still had nothing to say but: "Clear out, or I'll fire!" which he repeated more than twenty times.

Suddenly a loud clear voice was heard rising above the din:

"But not on me, father?"

The others stood aside, and in the flickering light of the candle a man appeared, wearing the chevrons of a quartermaster-sergeant. It was Honore, whose battery was a short two hundred yards from there and who had been struggling for the last two hours against an irresistible longing to come and knock at that door. He had sworn never to set foot in that house again, and in all his four years of army life had not exchanged a single letter with that father whom he now addressed so curtly. The marauders had drawn apart and were conversing excitedly among themselves; what, the old man's son, and a "non-com."! it wouldn't answer; better go and try their luck elsewhere! So they slunk away and vanished in the darkness.

When Fouchard saw that he had nothing more to fear he said in a matter-of-course way, as if he had seen his son only the day before:

"It's you—All right, I'll come down."

His descent was a matter of time. He could be heard inside the house opening locked doors and carefully fastening them again, the maneuvers of a man determined to leave nothing at loose ends. At last the door was opened, but only for a few inches, and the strong grasp that held it would let it go no further.

"Come in, thou! and no one besides!"

He could not turn away his nephew, however, notwithstanding his manifest repugnance.

"Well, thou too!"

He shut the door flat in Jean's face, in spite of Maurice's entreaties. But he was obdurate. No, no! he wouldn't have it; he had no use for strangers and robbers in his house, to smash and destroy his furniture! Finally Honore shoved their comrade inside the door by main strength and the old man had to make the best of it, grumbling and growling vindictively. He had carried his gun with him all this time. When at last he had ushered the three men into the common sitting-room and had stood his gun in a corner and placed the candle on the table, he sank into a mulish silence.

"Say, father, we are perishing with hunger. You will let us have a little bread and cheese, won't you?"

He made a pretense of not hearing and did not answer, turning his head at every instant toward the window as if listening for some other band that might be coming to lay siege to his house.

"Uncle, Jean has been a brother to me; he deprived himself of food to give it to me. And we have seen such suffering together!"

He turned and looked about the room to assure himself that nothing was missing, not giving the three soldiers so much as a glance, and at last, still without a word spoken, appeared to come to a decision. He suddenly arose, took the candle and went out, leaving them in darkness and carefully closing and locking the door behind him in order that no one might follow him. They could hear his footsteps on the stairs that led to the cellar. There was another long period of waiting, and when he returned, again locking and bolting everything after him, he placed upon the table a big loaf of bread and a cheese, amid a silence which, once his anger had blown over, was merely the result of cautious cunning, for no one can ever tell what may come of too much talking. The three men threw themselves ravenously upon the food, and the only sound to be heard in the room was the fierce grinding of their jaws.

Honore rose, and going to the sideboard brought back a pitcher of water.

"I think you might have given us some wine, father."

Whereupon Fouchard, now master of himself and no longer fearing that this anger might lead him into unguarded speech, once more found his tongue.

"Wine! I haven't any, not a drop! The others, those fellows of Ducrot's, ate and drank all I had, robbed me of everything!"

He was lying, and try to conceal it as he might the shifty expression in his great light eyes showed it. For the past two days he had been driving away his cattle, as well those reserved for work on the farm as those he had purchased to slaughter, and hiding them, no one knew where, in the depths of some wood or in some abandoned quarry, and he had devoted hours to burying all his household stores, wine, bread, and things of the least value, even to the flour and salt, so that anyone might have ransacked his cupboards and been none the richer for it. He had refused to sell anything to the first soldiers who came along; no one knew, he might be able to do better later on; and the patient, sly old curmudgeon indulged himself with vague dreams of wealth.

Maurice, who was first to satisfy his appetite, commenced to talk.

"Have you seen my sister Henriette lately?"

The old man was pacing up and down the room, casting an occasional glance at Jean, who was bolting huge mouthfuls of bread; after apparently giving the subject long consideration he deliberately answered:

"Henriette, yes, I saw her last month when I was in Sedan. But I saw Weiss, her husband, this morning. He was with Monsieur Delaherche, his boss, who had come over in his carriage to see the soldiers at Mouzon—which is the same as saying that they were out for a good time."

An expression of intense scorn flitted over the old peasant's impenetrable face.

"Perhaps they saw more of the army than they wanted to, and didn't have such a very good time after all, for ever since three o'clock the roads have been impassable on account of the crowds of flying soldiers."

In the same unmoved voice, as if the matter were one of perfect indifference to him, he gave them some tidings of the defeat of the 5th corps, that had been surprised at Beaumont while the men were making their soup and chased by the Bavarians all the way to Mouzon. Some fugitives who had passed through Remilly, mad with terror, had told him that they had been betrayed once more and that de Failly had sold them to Bismarck. Maurice's thoughts reverted to the aimless, blundering movements of the last two days, to Marshal MacMahon hurrying on their retreat and insisting on getting them across the Meuse at every cost, after wasting so many precious hours in incomprehensible delays. It was too late. Doubtless the marshal, who had stormed so on finding the 7th corps still at Osches when he supposed it to be at la Besace, had felt assured that the 5th corps was safe in camp at Mouzon when, lingering in Beaumont, it had come to grief there. But what could they expect from troops so poorly officered, demoralized by suspense and incessant retreat, dying with hunger and fatigue?

Fouchard had finally come and planted himself behind Jean's chair, watching with astonishment the inroads he was making on the bread and cheese. In a coldly sarcastic tone he asked:

"Are you beginning to feel better, hein?"

The corporal raised his head and replied with the same peasant-like directness:

"Just beginning, thank you!"

Honore, notwithstanding his hunger, had ceased from eating whenever it seemed to him that he heard a noise about the house. If he had struggled long, and finally been false to his oath never to set foot in that house again, the reason was that he could no longer withstand his craving desire to see Silvine. The letter that he had received from her at Rheims lay on his bosom, next his skin, that letter, so tenderly passionate, in which she told him that she loved him still, that she should never love anyone save him, despite the cruel past, despite Goliah and little Charlot, that man's child. He was thinking of naught save her, was wondering why he had not seen her yet, all the time watching himself that he might not let his father see his anxiety. At last his passion became too strong for him, however, and he asked in a tone as natural as he could command:

"Is not Silvine with you any longer?"

Fouchard gave his son a glance out of the corner of his eye, chuckling internally.

"Yes, yes."

Then he expectorated and was silent, so that the artillery man had presently to broach the subject again.

"She has gone to bed, then?"

"No, no."

Finally the old fellow condescended to explain that he, too, had been taking an outing that morning, had driven over to Raucourt market in his wagon and taken his little servant with him. He saw no reason, because a lot of soldiers happened to pass that way, why folks should cease to eat meat or why a man should not attend to his business, so he had taken a sheep and a quarter of beef over there, as it was his custom to do every Tuesday, and had just disposed of the last of his stock-in-trade when up came the 7th corps and he found himself in the middle of a terrible hubbub. Everyone was running, pushing, and crowding. Then he became alarmed lest they should take his horse and wagon from him, and drove off, leaving his servant, who was just then making some purchases in the town.

"Oh, Silvine will come back all right," he concluded in his tranquil voice. "She must have taken shelter with Doctor Dalichamp, her godfather. You would think to look at her that she wouldn't dare to say boo to a goose, but she is a girl of courage, all the same. Yes, yes; she has lots of good qualities, Silvine has."

Was it an attempt on his part to be jocose? or did he wish to explain why it was he kept her in his service, that girl who had caused dissension between father and son, whose child by the Prussian was in the house? He again gave his boy that sidelong look and laughed his voiceless laugh.

"Little Charlot is asleep there in his room; she surely won't be long away, now."

Honore, with quivering lips, looked so intently at his father that the old man began to pace the floor again. Mon Dieu! yes, the child was there; doubtless he would have to look on him. A painful silence filled the room, while he mechanically cut himself more bread and began to eat again. Jean also continued his operations in that line, without finding it necessary to say a word. Maurice contemplated the furniture, the old sideboard, the antique clock, and reflected on the long summer days that he had spent at Remilly in bygone times with his sister Henriette. The minutes slipped away, the clock struck eleven.

"The devil!" he murmured, "it will never do to let the regiment go off without us!"

He stepped to the window and opened it, Fouchard making no objection. Beneath lay the valley, a great bowl filled to the brim with blackness; presently, however, when his eyes became more accustomed to the obscurity, he had no difficulty in distinguishing the bridge, illuminated by the fires on the two banks. The cuirassiers were passing still, like phantoms in their long white cloaks, while their steeds trod upon the bosom of the stream and a chill wind of terror breathed on them from behind; and so the spectral train moved on, apparently interminable, in an endless, slow-moving vision of unsubstantial forms. Toward the right, over the bare hills where the slumbering army lay, there brooded a stillness and repose like death.

"Ah well!" said Maurice with a gesture of disappointment, "'twill be to-morrow morning."

He had left the window open, and Father Fouchard, seizing his gun, straddled the sill and stepped outside, as lightly as a young man. For a time they could hear his tramp upon the road, as regular as that of a sentry pacing his beat, but presently it ceased and the only sound that reached their ears was the distant clamor on the crowded bridge; it must be that he had seated himself by the wayside, where he could watch for approaching danger and at slightest sign leap to defend his property.

Honore's anxiety meantime was momentarily increasing; his eyes were fixed constantly on the clock. It was less than four miles from Raucourt to Remilly, an easy hour's walk for a woman as young and strong as Silvine. Why had she not returned in all that time since the old man lost sight of her in the confusion? He thought of the disorder of a retreating army corps, spreading over the country and blocking the roads; some accident must certainly have happened, and he pictured her in distress, wandering among the lonely fields, trampled under foot by the horsemen.

But suddenly the three men rose to their feet, moved by a common impulse. There was a sound of rapid steps coming up the road and the old man was heard to cock his weapon.

"Who goes there?" he shouted. "Is it you, Silvine?"

There was no reply. He repeated his question, threatening to fire. Then a laboring, breathless voice managed to articulate:

"Yes, yes, Father Fouchard; it is I." And she quickly asked: "And Charlot?"

"He is abed and asleep."

"That is well! Thanks."

There was no longer cause for her to hasten; she gave utterance to a deep-drawn sigh, as if to rid herself of her burden of fatigue and distress.

"Go in by the window," said Fouchard. "There is company in there."

She was greatly agitated when, leaping lightly into the room, she beheld the three men. In the uncertain candle-light she gave the impression of being very dark, with thick black hair and a pair of large, fine, lustrous eyes, the chief adornment of a small oval face, strong by reason of its tranquil resignation. The sudden meeting with Honore had sent all the blood rushing from her heart to her cheeks; and yet she was hardly surprised to find him there; he had been in her thoughts all the way home from Raucourt.

He, trembling with agitation, his heart in his throat, spoke with affected calmness:

"Good-evening, Silvine."

"Good-evening, Honore."

Then, to keep from breaking down and bursting into tears, she turned away, and recognizing Maurice, gave him a smile. Jean's presence was embarrassing to her. She felt as if she were choking somehow, and removed the foulard that she wore about her neck.

Honore continued, dropping the friendly thou of other days:

"We were anxious about you, Silvine, on account of the Prussians being so near at hand."

All at once her face became very pale and showed great distress; raising her hand to her eyes as if to shut out some atrocious vision, and directing an involuntary glance toward the room where Charlot was slumbering, she murmured:

"The Prussians—Oh! yes, yes, I saw them."

Sinking wearily upon a chair she told how, when the 7th corps came into Raucourt, she had fled for shelter to the house of her godfather, Doctor Dalichamp, hoping that Father Fouchard would think to come and take her up before he left the town. The main street was filled with a surging throng, so dense that not even a dog could have squeezed his way through it, and up to four o'clock she had felt no particular alarm, tranquilly employed in scraping lint in company with some of the ladies of the place; for the doctor, with the thought that they might be called on to care for some of the wounded, should there be a battle over in the direction of Metz and Verdun, had been busying himself for the last two weeks with improvising a hospital in the great hall of the mairie. Some people who dropped in remarked that they might find use for their hospital sooner than they expected, and sure enough, a little after midday, the roar of artillery had reached their ears from over Beaumont way. But that was not near enough to cause anxiety and no one was alarmed, when, all at once, just as the last of the French troops were filing out of Raucourt, a shell, with a frightful crash, came tearing through the roof of a neighboring house. Two others followed in quick succession; it was a German battery shelling the rear-guard of the 7th corps. Some of the wounded from Beaumont had already been brought in to the mairie, where it was feared that the enemy's projectiles would finish them as they lay on their mattresses waiting for the doctor to come and operate on them. The men were crazed with fear, and would have risen and gone down into the cellars, notwithstanding their mangled limbs, which extorted from them shrieks of agony.

"And then," continued Silvine, "I don't know how it happened, but all at once the uproar was succeeded by a deathlike stillness. I had gone upstairs and was looking from a window that commanded a view of the street and fields. There was not a soul in sight, not a 'red-leg' to be seen anywhere, when I heard the tramp, tramp of heavy footsteps, and then a voice shouted something that I could not understand and all the muskets came to the ground together with a great crash. And I looked down into the street below, and there was a crowd of small, dirty-looking men in black, with ugly, big faces and wearing helmets like those our firemen wear. Someone told me they were Bavarians. Then I raised my eyes again and saw, oh! thousands and thousands of them, streaming in by the roads, across the fields, through the woods, in serried, never-ending columns. In the twinkling of an eye the ground was black with them, a black swarm, a swarm of black locusts, coming thicker and thicker, so that, in no time at all, the earth was hid from sight."

She shivered and repeated her former gesture, veiling her vision from some atrocious spectacle.

"And the things that occurred afterward would exceed belief. It seems those men had been marching three days, and on top of that had fought at Beaumont like tigers; hence they were perishing with hunger, their eyes were starting from their sockets, they were beside themselves. The officers made no effort to restrain them; they broke into shops and private houses, smashing doors and windows, demolishing furniture, searching for something to eat and drink, no matter what, bolting whatever they could lay their hands on. I saw one in the shop of Monsieur Simonin, the grocer, ladling molasses from a cask with his helmet. Others were chewing strips of raw bacon, others again had filled their mouths with flour. They were told that our troops had been passing through the town for the last two days and there was nothing left, but here and there they found some trifling store that had been hid away, not sufficient to feed so many hungry mouths, and that made them think the folks were lying to them, and they went on to smash things more furiously than ever. In less than an hour, there was not a butcher's, grocer's, or baker's shop in the city left ungutted; even the private houses were entered, their cellars emptied, and their closets pillaged. At the doctor's—did you ever hear of such a thing? I caught one big fellow devouring the soap. But the cellar was the place where they did most mischief; we could hear them from upstairs smashing the bottles and yelling like demons, and they drew the spigots of the casks, so that the place was flooded with wine; when they came out their hands were red with the good wine they had spilled. And to show what happens, men when they make such brutes of themselves: a soldier found a large bottle of laudanum and drank it all down, in spite of Monsieur Dalichamp's efforts to prevent him. The poor wretch was in horrible agony when I came away; he must be dead by this time."

A great shudder ran through her, and she put her hand to her eyes to shut out the horrid sight.

"No, no! I cannot bear it; I saw too much!"

Father Fouchard had crossed the road and stationed himself at the open window where he could hear, and the tale of pillage made him uneasy; he had been told that the Prussians paid for all they took; were they going to start out as robbers at that late day? Maurice and Jean, too, were deeply interested in those details about an enemy whom the girl had seen, and whom they had not succeeded in setting eyes on in their whole month's campaigning, while Honore, pensive and with dry, parched lips, was conscious only of the sound of her voice; he could think of nothing save her and the misfortune that had parted them.

Just then the door of the adjoining room was opened, and little Charlot appeared. He had heard his mother's voice, and came trotting into the apartment in his nightgown to give her a kiss. He was a chubby, pink little urchin, large and strong for his age, with a thatch of curling, straw-colored hair and big blue eyes. Silvine shivered at his sudden appearance, as if the sight of him had recalled to her mind the image of someone else that affected her disagreeably. Did she no longer recognize him, then, her darling child, that she looked at him thus, as if he were some evocation of that horrid nightmare! She burst into tears.

"My poor, poor child!" she exclaimed, and clasped him wildly to her breast, while Honore, ghastly pale, noted how strikingly like the little one was to Goliah; the same broad, pink face, the true Teutonic type, in all the health and strength of rosy, smiling childhood. The son of the Prussian, the Prussian, as the pothouse wits of Remilly had styled him! And the French mother, who sat there, pressing him to her bosom, her heart still bleeding with the recollection of the cruel sights she had witnessed that day!

"My poor child, be good; come with me back to bed. Say good-night, my poor child."

She vanished, bearing him away. When she returned from the adjoining room she was no longer weeping; her face wore its customary expression of calm and courageous resignation.

It was Honore who, with a trembling voice, started the conversation again.

"And what did the Prussians do then?"

"Ah, yes; the Prussians. Well, they plundered right and left, destroying everything, eating and drinking all they could lay hands on. They stole linen as well, napkins and sheets, and even curtains, tearing them in strips to make bandages for their feet. I saw some whose feet were one raw lump of flesh, so long and hard had been their march. One little group I saw, seated at the edge of the gutter before the doctor's house, who had taken off their shoes and were bandaging themselves with handsome chemises, trimmed with lace, stolen, doubtless, from pretty Madame Lefevre, the manufacturer's wife. The pillage went on until night. The houses had no doors or windows left, and one passing in the street could look within and see the wrecked furniture, a scene of destruction that would have aroused the anger of a saint. For my part, I was almost wild, and could remain there no longer. They tried in vain to keep me, telling me that the roads were blocked, that I would certainly be killed; I started, and as soon as I was out of Raucourt, struck off to the right and took to the fields. Carts, loaded with wounded French and Prussians, were coming in from Beaumont. Two passed quite close to me in the darkness; I could hear the shrieks and groans, and I ran, oh! how I ran, across fields, through woods, I could not begin to tell you where, except that I made a wide circuit over toward Villers.

"Twice I thought I heard soldiers coming and hid, but the only person I met was another woman, a fugitive like myself. She was from Beaumont, she said, and she told me things too horrible to repeat. After that we ran harder than ever. And at last I am here, so wretched, oh! so wretched with what I have seen!"

Her tears flowed again in such abundance as to choke her utterance. The horrors of the day kept rising to her memory and would not down; she related the story that the woman of Beaumont had told her. That person lived in the main street of the village, where she had witnessed the passage of all the German artillery after nightfall. The column was accompanied on either side of the road by a file of soldiers bearing torches of pitch-pine, which illuminated the scene with the red glare of a great conflagration, and between the flaring, smoking lights the impetuous torrent of horses, guns, and men tore onward at a mad gallop. Their feet were winged with the tireless speed of victory as they rushed on in devilish pursuit of the French, to overtake them in some last ditch and crush them, annihilate them there. They stopped for nothing; on, on they went, heedless of what lay in their way. Horses fell; their traces were immediately cut, and they were left to be ground and torn by the pitiless wheels until they were a shapeless, bleeding mass. Human beings, prisoners and wounded men, who attempted to cross the road, were ruthlessly borne down and shared their fate. Although the men were dying with hunger the fierce hurricane poured on unchecked; was a loaf thrown to the drivers, they caught it flying; the torch-bearers passed slices of meat to them on the end of their bayonets, and then, with the same steel that had served that purpose, goaded their maddened horses on to further effort. And the night grew old, and still the artillery was passing, with the mad roar of a tempest let loose upon the land, amid the frantic cheering of the men.

Maurice's fatigue was too much for him, and notwithstanding the interest with which he listened to Silvine's narrative, after the substantial meal he had eaten he let his head decline upon the table on his crossed arms. Jean's resistance lasted a little longer, but presently he too was overcome and fell dead asleep at the other end of the table. Father Fouchard had gone and taken his position in the road again; Honore was alone with Silvine, who was seated, motionless, before the still open window.

The artilleryman rose, and drawing his chair to the window, stationed himself there beside her. The deep peacefulness of the night was instinct with the breathing of the multitude that lay lost in slumber there, but on it now rose other and louder sounds; the straining and creaking of the bridge, the hollow rumble of wheels; the artillery was crossing on the half-submerged structure. Horses reared and plunged in terror at sight of the swift-running stream, the wheel of a caisson ran over the guard-rail; immediately a hundred strong arms seized the encumbrance and hurled the heavy vehicle to the bottom of the river that it might not obstruct the passage. And as the young man watched the slow, toilsome retreat along the opposite bank, a movement that had commenced the day before and certainly would not be ended by the coming dawn, he could not help thinking of that other artillery that had gone storming through Beaumont, bearing down all before it, crushing men and horses in its path that it might not be delayed the fraction of a second.

Honore drew his chair nearer to Silvine, and in the shuddering darkness, alive with all those sounds of menace, gently whispered:

"You are unhappy?"

"Oh! yes; so unhappy!"

She was conscious of the subject on which he was about to speak, and her head sank sorrowfully on her bosom.

"Tell me, how did it happen? I wish to know."

But she could not find words to answer him.

"Did he take advantage of you, or was it with your consent?"

Then she stammered, in a voice that was barely audible:

"Mon Dieu! I do not know; I swear to you, I do not know, more than a babe unborn. I will not lie to you—I cannot! No, I have no excuse to offer; I cannot say he beat me. You had left me, I was beside myself, and it happened, how, I cannot, no, I cannot tell!"

Sobs choked her utterance, and he, ashy pale and with a great lump rising in his throat, waited silently for a moment. The thought that she was unwilling to tell him a lie, however, was an assuagement to his rage and grief; he went on to question her further, anxious to know the many things, that as yet he had been unable to understand.

"My father has kept you here, it seems?"

She replied with her resigned, courageous air, without raising her eyes:

"I work hard for him, it does not cost much to keep me, and as there is now another mouth to feed he has taken advantage of it to reduce my wages. He knows well enough that now, when he orders, there is nothing left for me but to obey."

"But why do you stay with him?"

The question surprised her so that she looked him in the face.

"Where would you have me go? Here my little one and I have at least a home and enough to keep us from starving."

They were silent again, both intently reading in the other's eyes, while up the shadowy valley the sounds of the sleeping camp came faintly to their ears, and the dull rumble of wheels upon the bridge of boats went on unceasingly. There was a shriek, the loud, despairing cry of man or beast in mortal peril, that passed, unspeakably mournful, through the dark night.

"Listen, Silvine," Honore slowly and feelingly went on; "you sent me a letter that afforded me great pleasure. I should have never come back here, but that letter—I have been reading it again this evening—speaks of things that could not have been expressed more delicately—"

She had turned pale when first she heard the subject mentioned. Perhaps he was angry that she had dared to write to him, like one devoid of shame; then, as his meaning became more clear, her face reddened with delight.

"I know you to be truthful, and knowing it, I believe what you wrote in that letter—yes, I believe it now implicitly. You were right in supposing that, if I were to die in battle without seeing you again, it would be a great sorrow to me to leave this world with the thought that you no longer loved me. And therefore, since you love me still, since I am your first and only love—" His tongue became thick, his emotion was so deep that expression failed him. "Listen, Silvine; if those beasts of Prussians let me live, you shall yet be mine, yes, as soon as I have served my time out we will be married."

She rose and stood erect upon her feet, gave a cry of joy, and threw herself upon the young man's bosom. She could not speak a word; every drop of blood in her veins was in her cheeks. He seated himself upon the chair and drew her down upon his lap.

"I have thought the matter over carefully; it was to say what I have said that I came here this evening. Should my father refuse us his consent, the earth is large; we will go away. And your little one, no one shall harm him, mon Dieu! More will come along, and among them all I shall not know him from the others."

She was forgiven, fully and entirely. Such happiness seemed too great to be true; she resisted, murmuring:

"No, it cannot be; it is too much; perhaps you might repent your generosity some day. But how good it is of you, Honore, and how I love you!"

He silenced her with a kiss upon the lips, and strength was wanting her longer to put aside the great, the unhoped-for good fortune that had come to her; a life of happiness where she had looked forward to one of loneliness and sorrow! With an involuntary, irresistible impulse she threw her arms about him, kissing him again and again, straining him to her bosom with all her woman's strength, as a treasure that was lost and found again, that was hers, hers alone, that thenceforth no one was ever to take from her. He was hers once more, he whom she had lost, and she would die rather than let anyone deprive her of him.

At that moment confused sounds reached their ears; the sleeping camp was awaking amid a tumult that rose and filled the dark vault of heaven. Hoarse voices were shouting orders, bugles were sounding, drums beating, and from the naked fields shadowy forms were seen emerging in indistinguishable masses, a surging, billowing sea whose waves were already streaming downward to the road beneath. The fires on the banks of the stream were dying down; all that could be seen there was masses of men moving confusedly to and fro; it was not even possible to tell if the movement across the river was still in progress. Never had the shades of night veiled such depths of distress, such abject misery of terror.

Father Fouchard came to the window and shouted that the troops were moving. Jean and Maurice awoke, stiff and shivering, and got on their feet. Honore took Silvine's hands in his and gave them a swift parting clasp.

"It is a promise. Wait for me."

She could find no word to say in answer, but all her soul went out to him in one long, last look, as he leaped from the window and hurried away to find his battery.

"Good-by, father!"

"Good-by, my boy!"

And that was all; peasant and soldier parted as they had met, without embracing, like a father and son whose existence was of little import to each other.

Maurice and Jean also left the farmhouse, and descended the steep hill on a run. When they reached the bottom the 106th was nowhere to be found; the regiments had all moved off. They made inquiries, running this way and that, and were directed first one way and then another. At last, when they had near lost their wits in the fearful confusion, they stumbled on their company, under the command of Lieutenant Rochas; as for the regiment and Captain Beaudoin, no one could say where they were. And Maurice was astounded when he noticed for the first time that that mob of men, guns, and horses was leaving Remilly and taking the Sedan road that lay on the left bank. Something was wrong again; the passage of the Meuse was abandoned, they were in full retreat to the north!

An officer of chasseurs, who was standing near, spoke up in a loud voice:

"Nom de Dieu! the time for us to make the movement was the 28th, when we were at Chene!"

Others were more explicit in their information; fresh news had been received. About two o'clock in the morning one of Marshal MacMahon's aides had come riding up to say to General Douay that the whole army was ordered to retreat immediately on Sedan, without loss of a minute's time. The disaster of the 5th corps at Beaumont had involved the three other corps. The general, who was at that time down at the bridge of boats superintending operations, was in despair that only a portion of his 3d division had so far crossed the stream; it would soon be day, and they were liable to be attacked at any moment. He therefore sent instructions to the several organizations of his command to make at once for Sedan, each independently of the others, by the most direct roads, while he himself, leaving orders to burn the bridge of boats, took the road on the left bank with his 2d division and the artillery, and the 3d division pursued that on the right bank; the 1st, that had felt the enemy's claws at Beaumont, was flying in disorder across the country, no one knew where. Of the 7th corps, that had not seen a battle, all that remained were those scattered, incoherent fragments, lost among lanes and by-roads, running away in the darkness.

It was not yet three o'clock, and the night was as black as ever. Maurice, although he knew the country, could not make out where they were in the noisy, surging throng that filled the road from ditch to ditch, pouring onward like a brawling mountain stream. Interspersed among the regiments were many fugitives from the rout at Beaumont, in ragged uniforms, begrimed with blood and dirt, who inoculated the others with their own terror. Down the wide valley, from the wooded hills across the stream, came one universal, all-pervading uproar, the scurrying tramp of other hosts in swift retreat; the 1st corps, coming from Carignan and Douzy, the 12th flying from Mouzon with the shattered remnants of the 5th, moved like puppets and driven onward, all of them, by that one same, inexorable, irresistible pressure that since the 28th had been urging the army northward and driving it into the trap where it was to meet its doom.

Day broke as Maurice's company was passing through Pont Maugis, and then he recognized their locality, the hills of Liry to the left, the Meuse running beside the road on the right. Bazeilles and Balan presented an inexpressibly funereal aspect, looming among the exhalations of the meadows in the chill, wan light of dawn, while against the somber background of her great forests Sedan was profiled in livid outlines, indistinct as the creation of some hideous nightmare. When they had left Wadelincourt behind them and were come at last to the Torcy gate, the governor long refused them admission; he only yielded, after a protracted conference, upon their threat to storm the place. It was five o'clock when at last the 7th corps, weary, cold, and hungry, entered Sedan.

VIII.

In the crush on the Place de Torcy that ensued upon the entrance of the troops into the city Jean became separated from Maurice, and all his attempts to find him again among the surging crowd were fruitless. It was a piece of extreme ill-luck, for he had accepted the young man's invitation to go with him to his sister's, where there would be rest and food for them, and even the luxury of a comfortable bed. The confusion was so great—the regiments disintegrated, no discipline, and no officers to enforce it—that the men were free to do pretty much as they pleased. There was plenty of time to look about them and hunt up their commands; they would have a few hours of sleep first.

Jean in his bewilderment found himself on the viaduct of Torcy, overlooking the broad meadows which, by the governor's orders, had been flooded with water from the river. Then, passing through another archway and crossing the Pont de Meuse, he entered the old, rampart-girt city, where, among the tall and crowded houses and the damp, narrow streets, it seemed to him that night was descending again, notwithstanding the increasing daylight. He could not so much as remember the name of Maurice's brother-in-law; he only knew that his sister's name was Henriette. The outlook was not encouraging; all that kept him awake was the automatic movement of walking; he felt that he should drop were he to stop. The indistinct ringing in his ears was the same that is experienced by one drowning; he was only conscious of the ceaseless onpouring of the stream of men and animals that carried him along with it on its current. He had partaken of food at Remilly, sleep was now his great necessity; and the same was true of the shadowy bands that he saw flitting past him in those strange, fantastic streets. At every moment a man would sink upon the sidewalk or tumble into a doorway, and there would remain, as if struck by death.

Raising his eyes, Jean read upon a signboard: Avenue de la Sous-Prefecture. At the end of the street was a monument standing in a public garden, and at the corner of the avenue he beheld a horseman, a chasseur d'Afrique, whose face seemed familiar to him. Was it not Prosper, the young man from Remilly, whom he had seen in Maurice's company at Vouziers? Perhaps he had been sent in with dispatches. He had dismounted, and his skeleton of a horse, so weak that he could scarcely stand, was trying to satisfy his hunger by gnawing at the tail-board of an army wagon that was drawn up against the curb. There had been no forage for the animals for the last two days, and they were literally dying of starvation. The big strong teeth rasped pitifully on the woodwork of the wagon, while the soldier stood by and wept as he watched the poor brute.

Jean was moving away when it occurred to him that the trooper might be able to give him the address of Maurice's sister. He returned, but the other was gone, and it would have been useless to attempt to find him in that dense throng. He was utterly disheartened, and wandering aimlessly from street to street at last found himself again before the Sous-Prefecture, whence he struggled onward to the Place Turenne. Here he was comforted for an instant by catching sight of Lieutenant Rochas, standing in front of the Hotel de Ville with a few men of his company, at the foot of the statue he had seen before; if he could not find his friend he could at all events rejoin the regiment and have a tent to sleep under. Nothing had been seen of Captain Beaudoin; doubtless he had been swept away in the press and landed in some place far away, while the lieutenant was endeavoring to collect his scattered men and fruitlessly inquiring of everyone he met where division headquarters were. As he advanced into the city, however, his numbers, instead of increasing, dwindled. One man, with the gestures of a lunatic, entered an inn and was seen no more. Three others were halted in front of a grocer's shop by a party of zouaves who had obtained possession of a small cask of brandy; one was already lying senseless in the gutter, while the other two tried to get away, but were too stupid and dazed to move. Loubet and Chouteau had nudged each other with the elbow and disappeared down a blind alley in pursuit of a fat woman with a loaf of bread, so that all who remained with the lieutenant were Pache and Lapoulle, with some ten or a dozen more.

Rochas was standing by the base of the bronze statue of Turenne, making heroic efforts to keep his eyes open. When he recognized Jean he murmured:

"Ah, is it you, corporal? Where are your men?"

Jean, by a gesture expressive in its vagueness, intimated that he did not know, but Pache, pointing to Lapoulle, answered with tears in his eyes:

"Here we are; there are none left but us two. The merciful Lord have pity on our sufferings; it is too hard!"

The other, the colossus with the colossal appetite, looked hungrily at Jean's hands, as if to reproach them for being always empty in those days. Perhaps, in his half-sleeping state, he had dreamed that Jean was away at the commissary's for rations.

"D——n the luck!" he grumbled, "we'll have to tighten up our belts another hole!"

Gaude, the bugler, was leaning against the iron railing, waiting for the lieutenant's order to sound the assembly; sleep came to him so suddenly that he slid from his position and within a second was lying flat on his back, unconscious. One by one they all succumbed to the drowsy influence and snored in concert, except Sergeant Sapin alone, who, with his little pinched nose in his small pale face, stood staring with distended eyes at the horizon of that strange city, as if trying to read his destiny there.

Lieutenant Rochas meantime had yielded to an irresistible impulse and seated himself on the ground. He attempted to give an order.

"Corporal, you will—you will—"

And that was as far as he could proceed, for fatigue sealed his lips, and like the rest he suddenly sank down and was lost in slumber.

Jean, not caring to share his comrades' fate and pillow his head on the hard stones, moved away; he was bent on finding a bed in which to sleep. At a window of the Hotel of the Golden Cross, on the opposite side of the square, he caught a glimpse of General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, already half-undressed and on the point of tasting the luxury of clean white sheets. Why should he be more self-denying than the rest of them? he asked himself; why should he suffer longer? And just then a name came to his recollection that caused him a thrill of delight, the name of the manufacturer in whose employment Maurice's brother-in-law was. M. Delaherche! yes, that was it. He accosted an old man who happened to be passing.

"Can you tell me where M. Delaherche lives?"

"In the Rue Maqua, near the corner of the Rue au Beurre; you can't mistake it; it is a big house, with statues in the garden."

The old man turned away, but presently came running back. "I see you belong to the 106th. If it is your regiment you are looking for, it left the city by the Chateau, down there. I just met the colonel, Monsieur de Vineuil; I used to know him when he lived at Mezieres."

But Jean went his way, with an angry gesture of impatience. No, no! no sleeping on the hard ground for him, now that he was certain of finding Maurice. And yet he could not help feeling a twinge of remorse as he thought of the dignified old colonel, who stood fatigue so manfully in spite of his years, sharing the sufferings of his men, with no more luxurious shelter than his tent. He strode across the Grande Rue with rapid steps and soon was in the midst of the tumult and uproar of the city; there he hailed a small boy, who conducted him to the Rue Maqua.

There it was that in the last century a grand-uncle of the present Delaherche had built the monumental structure that had remained in the family a hundred and sixty years. There is more than one cloth factory in Sedan that dates back to the early years of Louis XV.; enormous piles, they are, covering as much ground as the Louvre, and with stately facades of royal magnificence. The one in the Rue Maqua was three stories high, and its tall windows were adorned with carvings of severe simplicity, while the palatial courtyard in the center was filled with grand old trees, gigantic elms that were coeval with the building itself. In it three generations of Delaherches had amassed comfortable fortunes for themselves. The father of Charles, the proprietor in our time, had inherited the property from a cousin who had died without being blessed with children, so that it was now a younger branch that was in possession. The affairs of the house had prospered under the father's control, but he was something of a blade and a roisterer, and his wife's existence with him was not one of unmixed happiness; the consequence of which was that the lady, when she became a widow, not caring to see a repetition by the son of the performances of the father, made haste to find a wife for him in the person of a simple-minded and exceedingly devout young woman, and subsequently kept him tied to her apron string until he had attained the mature age of fifty and over. But no one in this transitory world can tell what time has in store for him; when the devout young person's time came to leave this life Delaherche, who had known none of the joys of youth, fell head over ears in love with a young widow of Charleville, pretty Madame Maginot, who had been the subject of some gossip in her day, and in the autumn preceding the events recorded in this history had married her, in spite of all his mother's prayers and tears. It is proper to add that Sedan, which is very straitlaced in its notions of propriety, has always been inclined to frown on Charleville, the city of laughter and levity. And then again the marriage would never have been effected but for the fact that Gilberte's uncle was Colonel de Vineuil, who it was supposed would soon be made a general. This relationship and the idea that he had married into army circles was to the cloth manufacturer a source of great delight.

That morning Delaherche, when he learned that the army was to pass through Mouzon, had invited Weiss, his accountant, to accompany him on that carriage ride of which we have heard Father Fouchard speak to Maurice. Tall and stout, with a florid complexion, prominent nose and thick lips, he was of a cheerful, sanguine temperament and had all the French bourgeois' boyish love for a handsome display of troops. Having ascertained from the apothecary at Mouzon that the Emperor was at Baybel, a farm in the vicinity, he had driven up there; had seen the monarch, and even had been near speaking to him, an adventure of such thrilling interest that he had talked of it incessantly ever since his return. But what a terrible return that had been, over roads choked with the panic-stricken fugitives from Beaumont! twenty times their cabriolet was near being overturned into the ditch. Obstacle after obstacle they had encountered, and it was night before the two men reached home. The element of the tragic and unforeseen there was in the whole business, that army that Delaherche had driven out to pass in review and which had brought him home with it, whether he would or no, in the mad gallop of its retreat, made him repeat again and again during their long drive:

"I supposed it was moving on Verdun and would have given anything rather than miss seeing it. Ah well! I have seen it now, and I am afraid we shall see more of it in Sedan than we desire."

The following morning he was awakened at five o'clock by the hubbub, like the roar of water escaping from a broken dam, made by the 7th corps as it streamed through the city; he dressed in haste and went out, and almost the first person he set eyes on in the Place Turenne was Captain Beaudoin. When pretty Madame Maginot was living at Charleville the year before the captain had been one of her best friends, and Gilberte had introduced him to her husband before they were married. Rumor had it that the captain had abdicated his position as first favorite and made way for the cloth merchant from motives of delicacy, not caring to stand in the way of the great good fortune that seemed coming to his fair friend.

"Hallo, is that you?" exclaimed Delaherche. "Good Heavens, what a state you're in!"

It was but too true; the dandified Beaudoin, usually so trim and spruce, presented a sorry spectacle that morning in his soiled uniform and with his grimy face and hands. Greatly to his disgust he had had a party of Turcos for traveling companions, and could not explain how he had become separated from his company. Like all the others he was ready to drop with fatigue and hunger, but that was not what most afflicted him; he had not been able to change his linen since leaving Rheims, and was inconsolable.

"Just think of it!" he wailed, "those idiots, those scoundrels, lost my baggage at Vouziers. If I ever catch them I will break every bone in their body! And now I haven't a thing, not a handkerchief, not a pair of socks! Upon my word, it is enough to make one mad!"

Delaherche was for taking him home to his house forthwith, but he resisted. No, no; he was no longer a human being, he would not frighten people out of their wits. The manufacturer had to make solemn oath that neither his wife nor his mother had risen yet; and besides he should have soap, water, linen, everything he needed.

It was seven o'clock when Captain Beaudoin, having done what he could with the means at his disposal to improve his appearance, and comforted by the sensation of wearing under his uniform a clean shirt of his host's, made his appearance in the spacious, high-ceiled dining room with its somber wainscoting. The elder Madame Delaherche was already there, for she was always on foot at daybreak, notwithstanding she was seventy-eight years old. Her hair was snowy white; in her long, lean face was a nose almost preternaturally thin and sharp and a mouth that had long since forgotten how to laugh. She rose, and with stately politeness invited the captain to be seated before one of the cups of cafe au lait that stood on the table.

"But, perhaps, sir, you would prefer meat and wine after the fatigue to which you have been subjected?"

He declined the offer, however. "A thousand thanks, madame; a little milk, with bread and butter, will be best for me."

At that moment a door was smartly opened and Gilberte entered the room with outstretched hand. Delaherche must have told her who was there, for her ordinary hour of rising was ten o'clock. She was tall, lithe of form and well-proportioned, with an abundance of handsome black hair, a pair of handsome black eyes, and a very rosy, wholesome complexion withal; she had a laughing, rather free and easy way with her, and it did not seem possible she could ever look angry. Her peignoir of beige, embroidered with red silk, was evidently of Parisian manufacture.

"Ah, Captain," she rapidly said, shaking hands with the young man, "how nice of you to stop and see us, away up in this out-of-the-world place!" But she was the first to see that she had "put her foot in it" and laugh at her own blunder. "Oh, what a stupid thing I am! I might know you would rather be somewhere else than at Sedan, under the circumstances. But I am very glad to see you once more."

She showed it; her face was bright and animated, while Madame Delaherche, who could not have failed to hear something of the gossip that had been current among the scandalmongers of Charleville, watched the pair closely with her puritanical air. The captain was very reserved in his behavior, however, manifesting nothing more than a pleasant recollection of hospitalities previously received in the house where he was visiting.

They had no more than sat down at table than Delaherche, burning to relieve himself of the subject that filled his mind, commenced to relate his experiences of the day before.

"You know I saw the Emperor at Baybel."

He was fairly started and nothing could stop him. He began by describing the farmhouse, a large structure with an interior court, surrounded by an iron railing, and situated on a gentle eminence overlooking Mouzon, to the left of the Carignan road. Then he came back to the 12th corps, whom he had visited in their camp among the vines on the hillsides; splendid troops they were, with their equipments brightly shining in the sunlight, and the sight of them had caused his heart to beat with patriotic ardor.

"And there I was, sir, when the Emperor, who had alighted to breakfast and rest himself a bit, came out of the farmhouse. He wore a general's uniform and carried an overcoat across his arm, although the sun was very hot. He was followed by a servant bearing a camp stool. He did not look to me like a well man; ah no, far from it; his stooping form, the sallowness of his complexion, the feebleness of his movements, all indicated him to be in a very bad way. I was not surprised, for the druggist at Mouzon, when he recommended me to drive on to Baybel, told me that an aide-de-camp had just been in his shop to get some medicine—you understand what I mean, medicine for—" The presence of his wife and mother prevented him from alluding more explicitly to the nature of the Emperor's complaint, which was an obstinate diarrhea that he had contracted at Chene and which compelled him to make those frequent halts at houses along the road. "Well, then, the attendant opened the camp stool and placed it in the shade of a clump of trees at the edge of a field of wheat, and the Emperor sat down on it. Sitting there in a limp, dejected attitude, perfectly still, he looked for all the world like a small shopkeeper taking a sun bath for his rheumatism. His dull eyes wandered over the wide horizon, the Meuse coursing through the valley at his feet, before him the range of wooded heights whose summits recede and are lost in the distance, on the left the waving tree-tops of Dieulet forest, on the right the verdure-clad eminence of Sommanthe. He was surrounded by his military family, aides and officers of rank, and a colonel of dragoons, who had already applied to me for information about the country, had just motioned me not to go away, when all at once—" Delaherche rose from his chair, for he had reached the point where the dramatic interest of his story culminated and it became necessary to re-enforce words by gestures. "All at once there is a succession of sharp reports and right in front of us, over the wood of Dieulet, shells are seen circling through the air. It produced on me no more effect than a display of fireworks in broad daylight, sir, upon my word it didn't! The people about the Emperor, of course, showed a good deal of agitation and uneasiness. The colonel of dragoons comes running up again to ask if I can give them an idea whence the firing proceeds. I answer him off-hand: 'It is at Beaumont; there is not the slightest doubt about it.' He returns to the Emperor, on whose knees an aide-de-camp was unfolding a map. The Emperor was evidently of opinion that the fighting was not at Beaumont, for he sent the colonel back to me a third time. But I couldn't well do otherwise than stick to what I had said before, could I, now? the more that the shells kept flying through the air, nearer and nearer, following the line of the Mouzon road. And then, sir, as sure as I see you standing there, I saw the Emperor turn his pale face toward me. Yes sir, he looked at me a moment with those dim eyes of his, that were filled with an expression of melancholy and distrust. And then his face declined upon his map again and he made no further movement."

Delaherche, although he was an ardent Bonapartist at the time of the plebiscite, had admitted after our early defeats that the government was responsible for some mistakes, but he stood up for the dynasty, compassionating and excusing Napoleon III., deceived and betrayed as he was by everyone. It was his firm opinion that the men at whose door should be laid the responsibility for all our disasters were none other than those Republican deputies of the opposition who had stood in the way of voting the necessary men and money.

"And did the Emperor return to the farmhouse?" asked Captain Beaudoin.

"That's more than I can say, my dear sir; I left him sitting on his stool. It was midday, the battle was drawing nearer, and it occurred to me that it was time to be thinking of my own return. All that I can tell you besides is that a general to whom I pointed out the position of Carignan in the distance, in the plain to our rear, appeared greatly surprised to learn that the Belgian frontier lay in that direction and was only a few miles away. Ah, that the poor Emperor should have to rely on such servants!"

Gilberte, all smiles, was giving her attention to the captain and keeping him supplied with buttered toast, as much at ease as she had ever been in bygone days when she received him in her salon during her widowhood. She insisted that he should accept a bed with them, but he declined, and it was agreed that he should rest for an hour or two on a sofa in Delaherche's study before going out to find his regiment. As he was taking the sugar bowl from the young woman's hands old Madame Delaherche, who had kept her eye on them, distinctly saw him squeeze her fingers, and the old lady's suspicions were confirmed. At that moment a servant came to the door.

"Monsieur, there is a soldier outside who wants to know the address of Monsieur Weiss."

There was nothing "stuck-up" about Delaherche, people said; he was fond of popularity and was always delighted to have a chat with those of an inferior station.

"He wants Weiss's address! that's odd. Bring the soldier in here."

Jean entered the room in such an exhausted state that he reeled as if he had been drunk. He started at seeing his captain seated at the table with two ladies, and involuntarily withdrew the hand that he had extended toward a chair in order to steady himself; he replied briefly to the questions of the manufacturer, who played his part of the soldier's friend with great cordiality. In a few words he explained his relation toward Maurice and the reason why he was looking for him.

"He is a corporal in my company," the captain finally said by way of cutting short the conversation, and inaugurated a series of questions on his own account to learn what had become of the regiment. As Jean went on to tell that the colonel had been seen crossing the city to reach his camp at the head of what few men were left him, Gilberte again thoughtlessly spoke up, with the vivacity of a woman whose beauty is supposed to atone for her indiscretion:

"Oh! he is my uncle; why does he not come and breakfast with us? We could fix up a room for him here. Can't we send someone for him?"

But the old lady discouraged the project with an authority there was no disputing. The good old bourgeois blood of the frontier towns flowed in her veins; her austerely patriotic sentiments were almost those of a man. She broke the stern silence that she had preserved during the meal by saying:

"Never mind Monsieur de Vineuil; he is doing his duty."

Her short speech was productive of embarrassment among the party. Delaherche conducted the captain to his study, where he saw him safely bestowed upon the sofa; Gilberte moved lightly off about her business, no more disconcerted by her rebuff than is the bird that shakes its wings in gay defiance of the shower; while the handmaid to whom Jean had been intrusted led him by a very labyrinth of passages and staircases through the various departments of the factory.

The Weiss family lived in the Rue des Voyards, but their house, which was Delaherche's property, communicated with the great structure in the Rue Maqua. The Rue des Voyards was at that time one of the most squalid streets in Sedan, being nothing more than a damp, narrow lane, its normal darkness intensified by the proximity of the ramparts, which ran parallel to it. The roofs of the tall houses almost met, the dark passages were like the mouths of caverns, and more particularly so at that end where rose the high college walls. Weiss, however, with free quarters and free fuel on his third floor, found the location a convenient one on account of its nearness to his office, to which he could descend in slippers without having to go around by the street. His life had been a happy one since his marriage with Henriette, so long the object of his hopes and wishes since first he came to know her at Chene, filling her dead mother's place when only six years old and keeping the house for her father, the tax-collector; while he, entering the big refinery almost on the footing of a laborer, was picking up an education as best he could, and fitting himself for the accountant's position which was the reward of his unremitting toil. And even when he had attained to that measure of success his dream was not to be realized; not until the father had been removed by death, not until the brother at Paris had been guilty of those excesses: that brother Maurice to whom his twin sister had in some sort made herself a servant, to whom she had sacrificed her little all to make him a gentleman—not until then was Henriette to be his wife. She had never been aught more than a little drudge at home; she could barely read and write; she had sold house, furniture, all she had, to pay the young man's debts, when good, kind Weiss came to her with the offer of his savings, together with his heart and his two strong arms; and she had accepted him with grateful tears, bringing him in return for his devotion a steadfast, virtuous affection, replete with tender esteem, if not the stormier ardors of a passionate love. Fortune had smiled on them; Delaherche had spoken of giving Weiss an interest in the business, and when children should come to bless their union their felicity would be complete.

"Look out!" the servant said to Jean; "the stairs are steep."

He was stumbling upward as well as the intense darkness of the place would let him, when suddenly a door above was thrown open, a broad belt of light streamed out across the landing, and he heard a soft voice saying:

"It is he."

"Madame Weiss," cried the servant, "here is a soldier who has been inquiring for you."

There came the sound of a low, pleased laugh, and the same soft voice replied:

"Good! good! I know who it is." Then to the corporal, who was hesitating, rather diffidently, on the landing: "Come in, Monsieur Jean. Maurice has been here nearly two hours, and we have been wondering what detained you."

Then, in the pale sunlight that filled the room, he saw how like she was to Maurice, with that wonderful resemblance that often makes twins so like each other as to be indistinguishable. She was smaller and slighter than he, however; more fragile in appearance, with a rather large mouth and delicately molded features, surmounted by an opulence of the most beautiful hair imaginable, of the golden yellow of ripened grain. The feature where she least resembled him was her gray eyes, great calm, brave orbs, instinct with the spirit of the grandfather, the hero of the Grand Army. She used few words, was noiseless in her movements, and was so gentle, so cheerful, so helpfully active that where she passed her presence seemed to linger in the air, like a fragrant caress.

"Come this way, Monsieur Jean," she said. "Everything will soon be ready for you."

He stammered something inarticulately, for his emotion was such that he could find no word of thanks. In addition to that his eyes were closing he beheld her through the irresistible drowsiness that was settling on him as a sea-fog drifts in and settles on the land, in which she seemed floating in a vague, unreal way, as if her feet no longer touched the earth. Could it be that it was all a delightful apparition, that friendly young woman who smiled on him with such sweet simplicity? He fancied for a moment that she had touched his hand and that he had felt the pressure of hers, cool and firm, loyal as the clasp of an old tried friend.

That was the last moment in which Jean was distinctly conscious of what was going on about him. They were in the dining room; bread and meat were set out on the table, but for the life of him he could not have raised a morsel to his lips. A man was there, seated on a chair. Presently he knew it was Weiss, whom he had seen at Mulhausen, but he had no idea what the man was saying with such a sober, sorrowful air, with slow and emphatic gestures. Maurice was already sound asleep, with the tranquillity of death resting on his face, on a bed that had been improvised for him beside the stove, and Henriette was busying herself about a sofa on which a mattress had been thrown; she brought in a bolster, pillow and coverings; with nimble, dexterous hands she spread the white sheets, snowy white, dazzling in their whiteness.

Ah! those clean, white sheets, so long coveted, so ardently desired; Jean had eyes for naught save them. For six weeks he had not had his clothes off, had not slept in a bed. He was as impatient as a child waiting for some promised treat, or a lover expectant of his mistress's coming; the time seemed long, terribly long to him, until he could plunge into those cool, white depths and lose himself there. Quickly, as soon as he was alone, he removed his shoes and tossed his uniform across a chair, then, with a deep sigh of satisfaction, threw himself on the bed. He opened his eyes a little way for a last look about him before his final plunge into unconsciousness, and in the pale morning light that streamed in through the lofty window beheld a repetition of his former pleasant vision, only fainter, more aerial; a vision of Henriette entering the room on tiptoe, and placing on the table at his side a water-jug and glass that had been forgotten before. She seemed to linger there a moment, looking at the sleeping pair, him and her brother, with her tranquil, ineffably tender smile upon her lips, then faded into air, and he, between his white sheets, was as if he were not.

Hours—or was it years? slipped by; Jean and Maurice were like dead men, without a dream, without consciousness of the life that was within them. Whether it was ten years or ten minutes, time had stood still for them; the overtaxed body had risen against its oppressor and annihilated their every faculty. They awoke simultaneously with a great start and looked at each other inquiringly; where were they? what had happened? how long had they slept? The same pale light was entering through the tall window. They felt as if they had been racked; joints stiffer, limbs wearier, mouth more hot and dry than when they had lain down; they could not have slept more than an hour, fortunately. It did not surprise them to see Weiss sitting where they had seen him before, in the same dejected attitude, apparently waiting for them to awake.

"Fichtre!" exclaimed Jean, "we must get up and report ourselves to the first sergeant before noon."

He uttered a smothered cry of pain as he jumped to the floor and began to dress.

"Before noon!" said Weiss. "Are you aware that it is seven o'clock in the evening? You have slept about twelve hours."

Great heavens, seven o'clock! They were thunderstruck. Jean, who by that time was completely dressed, would have run for it, but Maurice, still in bed, found he no longer had control of his legs; how were they ever to find their comrades? would not the army have marched away? They took Weiss to task for having let them sleep so long. But the accountant shook his head sorrowfully and said:

"You have done just as well to remain in bed, for all that has been accomplished."

All that day, from early morning, he had been scouring Sedan and its environs in quest of news, and was just come in, discouraged with the inactivity of the troops and the inexplicable delay that had lost them the whole of that precious day, the 31st. The sole excuse was that the men were worn out and rest was an absolute necessity for them, but granting that, he could not see why the retreat should not have been continued after giving them a few hours of repose.

"I do not pretend to be a judge of such matters," he continued, "but I have a feeling, so strong as to be almost a conviction, that the army is very badly situated at Sedan. The 12th corps is at Bazeilles, where there was a little fighting this morning; the 1st is strung out along the Givonne between la Moncelle and Holly, while the 7th is encamped on the plateau of Floing, and the 5th, what is left of it, is crowded together under the ramparts of the city, on the side of the Chateau. And that is what alarms me, to see them all concentrated thus about the city, waiting for the coming of the Prussians. If I were in command I would retreat on Mezieres, and lose no time about it, either. I know the country; it is the only line of retreat that is open to us, and if we take any other course we shall be driven into Belgium. Come here! let me show you something."

He took Jean by the hand and led him to the window.

"Tell me what you see over yonder on the crest of the hills."

Looking from the window over the ramparts, over the adjacent buildings, their view embraced the valley of the Meuse to the southward of Sedan. There was the river, winding through broad meadows; there, to the left, was Remilly in the background, Pont Maugis and Wadelincourt before them and Frenois to the right; and shutting in the landscape the ranges of verdant hills, Liry first, then la Marfee and la Croix Piau, with their dense forests. A deep tranquillity, a crystalline clearness reigned over the wide prospect that lay there in the mellow light of the declining day.

"Do you see that moving line of black upon the hilltops, that procession of small black ants?"

Jean stared in amazement, while Maurice, kneeling on his bed, craned his neck to see.

"Yes, yes!" they cried. "There is a line, there is another, and another, and another! They are everywhere."

"Well," continued Weiss, "those are Prussians. I have been watching them since morning, and they have been coming, coming, as if there were no end to them! You may be sure of one thing: if our troops are waiting for them, they have no intention of disappointing us. And not I alone, but every soul in the city saw them; it is only the generals who persist in being blind. I was talking with a general officer a little while ago; he shrugged his shoulders and told me that Marshal MacMahon was absolutely certain that he had not over seventy thousand men in his front. God grant he may be right! But look and see for yourselves; the ground is hid by them! they keep coming, ever coming, the black swarm!"

At this juncture Maurice threw himself back in his bed and gave way to a violent fit of sobbing. Henriette came in, a smile on her face. She hastened to him in alarm.

"What is it?"

But he pushed her away. "No, no! leave me, have nothing more to do with me; I have never been anything but a burden to you. When I think that you were making yourself a drudge, a slave, while I was attending college—oh! to what miserable use have I turned that education! And I was near bringing dishonor on our name; I shudder to think where I might be now, had you not beggared yourself to pay for my extravagance and folly."

Her smile came back to her face, together with her serenity.

"Is that all? Your sleep don't seem to have done you good, my poor friend. But since that is all gone and past, forget it! Are you not doing your duty now, like a good Frenchman? I am very proud of you, I assure you, now that you are a soldier."

She had turned toward Jean, as if to ask him to come to her assistance, and he looked at her with some surprise that she appeared to him less beautiful than yesterday; she was paler, thinner, now that the glamour was no longer in his drowsy eyes. The one striking point that remained unchanged was her resemblance to her brother, and yet the difference in their two natures was never more strongly marked than at that moment; he, weak and nervous as a woman, swayed by the impulse of the hour, displaying in his person all the fitful and emotional temperament of his nation, vibrating from one moment to another between the loftiest enthusiasm and the most abject despair; she, the patient, indomitable housewife, such an inconsiderable little creature in her resignation and self-effacement, meeting adversity with a brave face and eyes full of inexpugnable courage and resolution, fashioned from the stuff of which heroes are made.

"Proud of me!" cried Maurice. "Ah! truly, you have great reason to be. For a month and more now we have been flying, like the cowards that we are!"

"What of it? we are not the only ones," said Jean with his practical common sense; "we do what we are told to do."

But the young man broke out more furiously than ever: "I have had enough of it, I tell you! Our imbecile leaders, our continual defeats, our brave soldiers led like sheep to the slaughter—is it not enough, seeing all these things, to make one weep tears of blood? We are here now in Sedan, caught in a trap from which there is no escape; you can see the Prussians closing in on us from every quarter, and certain destruction is staring us in the face; there is no hope, the end is come. No! I shall remain where I am; I may as well be shot as a deserter. Jean, do you go, and leave me here. No! I won't go back there; I will stay here."

He sank upon the pillow in a renewed outpour of tears. It was an utter breakdown of the nervous system, sweeping everything before it, one of those sudden lapses into hopelessness to which he was so subject, in which he despised himself and all the world. His sister, knowing as she did the best way of treating such crises, kept an unruffled face.

"That would not be a nice thing to do, dear Maurice—desert your post in the hour of danger."

He rose impetuously to a sitting posture: "Then give me my musket! I will go and blow my brains out; that will be the shortest way of ending it." Then, pointing with outstretched arm to Weiss, where he sat silent and motionless, he said: "There! that is the only sensible man I have seen; yes, he is the only one who saw things as they were. You remember what he said to me, Jean, at Mulhausen, a month ago?"

"It is true," the corporal assented; "the gentleman said we should be beaten."

And the scene rose again before their mind's eye, that night of anxious vigil, the agonized suspense, the prescience of the disaster at Froeschwiller hanging in the sultry heavy air, while the Alsatian told his prophetic fears; Germany in readiness, with the best of arms and the best of leaders, rising to a man in a grand outburst of patriotism; France dazed, a century behind the age, debauched, and a prey to intestine disorder, having neither commanders, men, nor arms to enable her to cope with her powerful adversary. How quickly the horrible prediction had proved itself true!

Weiss raised his trembling hands. Profound sorrow was depicted on his kind, honest face, with its red hair and beard and its great prominent blue eyes.

"Ah!" he murmured, "I take no credit to myself for being right. I don't claim to be wiser than others, but it was all so clear, when one only knew the true condition of affairs! But if we are to be beaten we shall first have the pleasure of killing some of those Prussians of perdition. There is that comfort for us; I believe that many of us are to leave their bones there, and I hope there will be plenty of Prussians to keep them company; I would like to see the ground down there in the valley heaped with dead Prussians!" He arose and pointed down the valley of the Meuse. Fire flashed from his myopic eyes, which had exempted him from service with the army. "A thousand thunders! I would fight, yes, I would, if they would have me. I don't know whether it is seeing them assume the airs of masters in my country—in this country where once the Cossacks did such mischief; but whenever I think of their being here, of their entering our houses, I am seized with an uncontrollable desire to cut a dozen of their throats. Ah! if it were not for my eyes, if they would take me, I would go!" Then, after a moment's silence: "And besides; who can tell?"

It was the hope that sprang eternal, even in the breast of the least confident, of the possibility of victory, and Maurice, ashamed by this time of his tears, listened and caught at the pleasing speculation. Was it not true that only the day before there had been a rumor that Bazaine was at Verdun? Truly, it was time that Fortune should work a miracle for that France whose glories she had so long protected. Henriette, with an imperceptible smile on her lips, silently left the room, and was not the least bit surprised when she returned to find her brother up and dressed, and ready to go back to his duty. She insisted, however, that he and Jean should take some nourishment first. They seated themselves at the table, but the morsels choked them; their stomachs, weakened by their heavy slumber, revolted at the food. Like a prudent old campaigner Jean cut a loaf in two halves and placed one in Maurice's sack, the other in his own. It was growing dark, it behooved them to be going. Henriette, who was standing at the window watching the Prussian troops incessantly defiling on distant la Marfee, the swarming legions of black ants that were gradually being swallowed up in the gathering shadows, involuntarily murmured:

"Oh, war! what a dreadful thing it is!"

Maurice, seeing an opportunity to retort her sermon to him, immediately took her up:

"How is this, little sister? you are anxious to have people fight, and you speak disrespectfully of war!"

She turned and faced him, valiantly as ever: "It is true; I abhor it, because it is an abomination and an injustice. It may be simply because I am a woman, but the thought of such butchery sickens me. Why cannot nations adjust their differences without shedding blood?"

Jean, the good fellow, seconded her with a nod of the head, and nothing to him, too, seemed easier—to him, the unlettered man—than to come together and settle matters after a fair, honest talk; but Maurice, mindful of his scientific theories, reflected on the necessity of war—war, which is itself existence, the universal law. Was it not poor, pitiful man who conceived the idea of justice and peace, while impassive nature revels in continual slaughter?

"That is all very fine!" he cried. "Yes, centuries hence, if it shall come to pass that then all the nations shall be merged in one; centuries hence man may look forward to the coming of that golden age; and even in that case would not the end of war be the end of humanity? I was a fool but now; we must go and fight, since it is nature's law." He smiled and repeated his brother-in-law's expression: "And besides, who can tell?"

He saw things now through the mirage of his vivid self-delusion, they came to his vision distorted through the lens of his diseased nervous sensibility.

"By the way," he continued cheerfully, "what do you hear of our cousin Gunther? You know we have not seen a German yet, so you can't look to me to give you any foreign news."

The question was addressed to his brother-in-law, who had relapsed into a thoughtful silence and answered by a motion of his hand, expressive of his ignorance.

"Cousin Gunther?" said Henriette, "Why, he belongs to the Vth corps and is with the Crown Prince's army; I read it in one of the newspapers, I don't remember which. Is that army in this neighborhood?"

Weiss repeated his gesture, which was imitated by the two soldiers, who could not be supposed to know what enemies were in front of them when their generals did not know. Rising to his feet, the master of the house at last made use of articulate speech.

"Come along; I will go with you. I learned this afternoon where the 106th's camp is situated." He told his wife that she need not expect to see him again that night, as he would sleep at Bazeilles, where they had recently bought and furnished a little place to serve them as a residence during the hot months. It was near a dyehouse that belonged to M. Delaherche. The accountant's mind was ill at ease in relation to certain stores that he had placed in the cellar—a cask of wine and a couple of sacks of potatoes; the house would certainly be visited by marauders if it was left unprotected, he said, while by occupying it that night he would doubtless save it from pillage. His wife watched him closely while he was speaking.

"You need not be alarmed," he added, with a smile; "I harbor no darker design than the protection of our property, and I pledge my word that if the village is attacked, or if there is any appearance of danger, I will come home at once."

"Well, then, go," she said. "But remember, if you are not back in good season you will see me out there looking for you."

Henriette went with them to the door, where she embraced Maurice tenderly and gave Jean a warm clasp of the hand.

"I intrust my brother to your care once more. He has told me of your kindness to him, and I love you for it."

He was too flustered to do more than return the pressure of the small, firm hand. His first impression returned to him again, and he beheld Henriette in the light in which she had first appeared to him, with her bright hair of the hue of ripe golden grain, so alert, so sunny, so unselfish, that her presence seemed to pervade the air like a caress.

Once they were outside they found the same gloomy and forbidding Sedan that had greeted their eyes that morning. Twilight with its shadows had invaded the narrow streets, sidewalk and carriage-way alike were filled with a confused, surging throng. Most of the shops were closed, the houses seemed to be dead or sleeping, while out of doors the crowd was so dense that men trod on one another. With some little difficulty, however, they succeeded in reaching the Place de l'Hotel de Ville, where they encountered M. Delaherche, intent on picking up the latest news and seeing what was to be seen. He at once came up and greeted them, apparently delighted to meet Maurice, to whom he said that he had just returned from accompanying Captain Beaudoin over to Floing, where the regiment was posted, and he became, if that were possible, even more gracious than ever upon learning that Weiss proposed to pass the night at Bazeilles, where he himself, he declared, had just been telling the captain that he intended to take a bed, in order to see how things were looking at the dyehouse.

"We'll go together and be company for each other, Weiss. But first let's go as far as the Sous-Prefecture; we may be able to catch a glimpse of the Emperor."

Ever since he had been so near having the famous conversation with him at Baybel his mind had been full of Napoleon III.; he was not satisfied until he had induced the two soldiers to accompany him. The Place de la Sous-Prefecture was comparatively empty; a few men were standing about in groups, engaged in whispered conversation, while occasionally an officer hurried by, haggard and careworn. The bright hues of the foliage were beginning to fade and grow dim in the melancholy, thick-gathering shades of night; the hoarse murmur of the Meuse was heard as its current poured onward beneath the houses to the right. Among the whisperers it was related how the Emperor—who with the greatest difficulty had been prevailed on to leave Carignan the night before about eleven o'clock—when entreated to push on to Mezieres had refused point-blank to abandon the post of danger and take a step that would prove so demoralizing to the troops. Others asserted that he was no longer in the city, that he had fled, leaving behind him a dummy emperor, one of his officers dressed in his uniform, a man whose startling resemblance to his imperial master had often puzzled the army. Others again declared, and called upon their honor to substantiate their story, that they had seen the army wagons containing the imperial treasure, one hundred millions, all in brand-new twenty-franc pieces, drive into the courtyard of the Prefecture. This convoy was, in fact, neither more nor less than the vehicles for the personal use of the Emperor and his suite, the char a banc, the two caleches, the twelve baggage and supply wagons, which had almost excited a riot in the villages through which they had passed—Courcelles, le Chene, Raucourt; assuming in men's imagination the dimensions of a huge train that had blocked the road and arrested the march of armies, and which now, shorn of their glory, execrated by all, had come in shame and disgrace to hide themselves among the sous-prefect's lilac bushes.

While Delaherche was raising himself on tiptoe and trying to peer through the windows of the rez-de-chaussee, an old woman at his side, some poor day-worker of the neighborhood, with shapeless form and hands calloused and distorted by many years of toil, was mumbling between her teeth:

"An emperor—I should like to see one once—just once—so I could say I had seen him."

Suddenly Delaherche exclaimed, seizing Maurice by the arm:

"See, there he is! at the window, to the left. I had a good view of him yesterday; I can't be mistaken. There, he has just raised the curtain; see, that pale face, close to the glass."

The old woman had overheard him and stood staring with wide-open mouth and eyes, for there, full in the window, was an apparition that resembled a corpse more than a living being; its eyes were lifeless, its features distorted; even the mustache had assumed a ghastly whiteness in that final agony. The old woman was dumfounded; forthwith she turned her back and marched off with a look of supreme contempt.

"That thing an emperor! a likely story."

A zouave was standing near, one of those fugitive soldiers who were in no haste to rejoin their commands. Brandishing his chassepot and expectorating threats and maledictions, he said to his companion:

"Wait! see me put a bullet in his head!"

Delaherche remonstrated angrily, but by that time the Emperor had disappeared. The hoarse murmur of the Meuse continued uninterruptedly; a wailing lament, inexpressibly mournful, seemed to pass above them through the air, where the darkness was gathering intensity. Other sounds rose in the distance, like the hollow muttering of the rising storm; were they the "March! march!" that terrible order from Paris that had driven that ill-starred man onward day by day, dragging behind him along the roads of his defeat the irony of his imperial escort, until now he was brought face to face with the ruin he had foreseen and come forth to meet? What multitudes of brave men were to lay down their lives for his mistakes, and how complete the wreck, in all his being, of that sick man, that sentimental dreamer, awaiting in gloomy silence the fulfillment of his destiny!

Weiss and Delaherche accompanied the two soldiers to the plateau of Floing, where the 7th corps camps were.

"Adieu!" said Maurice as he embraced his brother-in-law.

"No, no; not adieu, the deuce! Au revoir!" the manufacturer gayly cried.

Jean's instinct led him at once to their regiment, the tents of which were pitched behind the cemetery, where the ground of the plateau begins to fall away. It was nearly dark, but there was sufficient light yet remaining in the sky to enable them to distinguish the black huddle of roofs above the city, and further in the distance Balan and Bazeilles, lying in the broad meadows that stretch away to the range of hills between Remilly and Frenois, while to the right was the dusky wood of la Garenne, and to the left the broad bosom of the Meuse had the dull gleam of frosted silver in the dying daylight. Maurice surveyed the broad landscape that was momentarily fading in the descending shadows.

"Ah, here is the corporal!" said Chouteau. "I wonder if he has been looking after our rations!"

The camp was astir with life and bustle. All day the men had been coming in, singly and in little groups, and the crowd and confusion were such that the officers made no pretense of punishing or even reprimanding them; they accepted thankfully those who were so kind as to return and asked no questions. Captain Beaudoin had made his appearance only a short time before, and it was about two o'clock when Lieutenant Rochas had brought in his collection of stragglers, about one-third of the company strength. Now the ranks were nearly full once more. Some of the men were drunk, others had not been able to secure even a morsel of bread and were sinking from inanition; again there had been no distribution of rations. Loubet, however, had discovered some cabbages in a neighboring garden, and cooked them after a fashion, but there was no salt or lard; the empty stomachs continued to assert their claims.

"Come, now, corporal, you are a knowing old file," Chouteau tauntingly continued, "what have you got for us? Oh, it's not for myself I care; Loubet and I had a good breakfast; a lady gave it us. You were not at distribution, then?"

Jean beheld a circle of expectant eyes bent on him; the squad had been waiting for him with anxiety, Pache and Lapoulle in particular, luckless dogs, who had found nothing they could appropriate; they all relied on him, who, as they expressed it, could get bread out of a stone. And the corporal's conscience smote him for having abandoned his men; he took pity on them and divided among them half the bread that he had in his sack.

"Name o' God! Name o' God!" grunted Lapoulle as he contentedly munched the dry bread; it was all he could find to say; while Pache repeated a Pater and an Ave under his breath to make sure that Heaven should not forget to send him his breakfast in the morning.

Gaude, the bugler, with his darkly mysterious air, as of a man who has had troubles of which he does not care to speak, sounded the call for evening muster with a glorious fanfare; but there was no necessity for sounding taps that night, the camp was immediately enveloped in profound silence. And when he had verified the names and seen that none of his half-section were missing, Sergeant Sapin, with his thin, sickly face and his pinched nose, softly said:

"There will be one less to-morrow night."

Then, as he saw Jean looking at him inquiringly, he added with calm conviction, his eyes bent upon the blackness of the night, as if reading there the destiny that he predicted:

"It will be mine; I shall be killed to-morrow."

It was nine o'clock, with promise of a chilly, uncomfortable night, for a dense mist had risen from the surface of the river, so that the stars were no longer visible. Maurice shivered, where he lay with Jean beneath a hedge, and said they would do better to go and seek the shelter of the tent; the rest they had taken that day had left them wakeful, their joints seemed stiffer and their bones sorer than before; neither could sleep. They envied Lieutenant Rochas, who, stretched on the damp ground and wrapped in his blanket, was snoring like a trooper, not far away. For a long time after that they watched with interest the feeble light of a candle that was burning in a large tent where the colonel and some officers were in consultation. All that evening M. de Vineuil had manifested great uneasiness that he had received no instructions to guide him in the morning. He felt that his regiment was too much "in the air," too much advanced, although it had already fallen back from the exposed position that it had occupied earlier in the day. Nothing had been seen of General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, who was said to be ill in bed at the Hotel of the Golden Cross, and the colonel decided to send one of his officers to advise him of the danger of their new position in the too extended line of the 7th corps, which had to cover the long stretch from the bend in the Meuse to the wood of la Garenne. There could be no doubt that the enemy would attack with the first glimpse of daylight; only for seven or eight hours now would that deep tranquillity remain unbroken. And shortly after the dim light in the colonel's tent was extinguished Maurice was amazed to see Captain Beaudoin glide by, keeping close to the hedge, with furtive steps, and vanish in the direction of Sedan.

The darkness settled down on them, denser and denser; the chill mists rose from the stream and enshrouded everything in a dank, noisome fog.

"Are you asleep, Jean?"

Jean was asleep, and Maurice was alone. He could not endure the thought of going to the tent where Lapoulle and the rest of them were slumbering; he heard their snoring, responsive to Rochas' strains, and envied them. If our great captains sleep soundly the night before a battle, it is like enough for the reason that their fatigue will not let them do otherwise. He was conscious of no sound save the equal, deep-drawn breathing of that slumbering multitude, rising from the darkening camp like the gentle respiration of some huge monster; beyond that all was void. He only knew that the 5th corps was close at hand, encamped beneath the rampart, that the 1st's line extended from the wood of la Garenne to la Moncelle, while the 12th was posted on the other side of the city, at Bazeilles; and all were sleeping; the whole length of that long line, from the nearest tent to the most remote, for miles and miles, that low, faint murmur ascended in rhythmic unison from the dark, mysterious bosom of the night. Then outside this circle lay another region, the realm of the unknown, whence also sounds came intermittently to his ears, so vague, so distant, that he scarcely knew whether they were not the throbbings of his own excited pulses; the indistinct trot of cavalry plashing over the low ground, the dull rumble of gun and caisson along the roads, and, still more marked, the heavy tramp of marching men; the gathering on the heights above of that black swarm, engaged in strengthening the meshes of their net, from which night itself had not served to divert them. And below, there by the river's side, was there not the flash of lights suddenly extinguished, was not that the sound of hoarse voices shouting orders, adding to the dread suspense of that long night of terror while waiting for the coming of the dawn?

Maurice put forth his hand and felt for Jean's; at last he slumbered, comforted by the sense of human companionship. From a steeple in Sedan came the deep tones of a bell, slowly, mournfully, tolling the hour; then all was blank and void.

PART SECOND

I.

Weiss, in the obscurity of his little room at Bazeilles, was aroused by a commotion that caused him to leap from his bed. It was the roar of artillery. Groping about in the darkness he found and lit a candle to enable him to consult his watch: it was four o'clock, just beginning to be light. He adjusted his double eyeglass upon his nose and looked out into the main street of the village, the road that leads to Douzy, but it was filled with a thick cloud of something that resembled dust, which made it impossible to distinguish anything. He passed into the other room, the windows of which commanded a view of the Meuse and the intervening meadows, and saw that the cause of his obstructed vision was the morning mist arising from the river. In the distance, behind the veil of fog, the guns were barking more fiercely across the stream. All at once a French battery, close at hand, opened in reply, with such a tremendous crash that the walls of the little house were shaken.

Weiss's house was situated near the middle of the village, on the right of the road and not far from the Place de l'Eglise. Its front, standing back a little from the street, displayed a single story with three windows, surmounted by an attic; in the rear was a garden of some extent that sloped gently downward toward the meadows and commanded a wide panoramic view of the encircling hills, from Remilly to Frenois. Weiss, with the sense of responsibility of his new proprietorship strong upon him, had spent the night in burying his provisions in the cellar and protecting his furniture, as far as possible, against shot and shell by applying mattresses to the windows, so that it was nearly two o'clock before he got to bed. His blood boiled at the idea that the Prussians might come and plunder the house, for which he had toiled so long and which had as yet afforded him so little enjoyment.

He heard a voice summoning him from the street.

"I say, Weiss, are you awake?"

He descended and found it was Delaherche, who had passed the night at his dyehouse, a large brick structure, next door to the accountant's abode. The operatives had all fled, taking to the woods and making for the Belgian frontier, and there was no one left to guard the property but the woman concierge, Francoise Quittard by name, the widow of a mason; and she also, beside herself with terror, would have gone with the others had it not been for her ten-year-old boy Charles, who was so ill with typhoid fever that he could not be moved.

"I say," Delaherche continued, "do you hear that? It is a promising beginning. Our best course is to get back to Sedan as soon as possible."

Weiss's promise to his wife, that he would leave Bazeilles at the first sign of danger, had been given in perfect good faith, and he had fully intended to keep it; but as yet there was only an artillery duel at long range, and the aim could not be accurate enough to do much damage in the uncertain, misty light of early morning.

"Wait a bit, confound it!" he replied. "There is no hurry."

Delaherche, too, was curious to see what would happen; his curiosity made him valiant. He had been so interested in the preparations for defending the place that he had not slept a wink. General Lebrun, commanding the 12th corps, had received notice that he would be attacked at daybreak, and had kept his men occupied during the night in strengthening the defenses of Bazeilles, which he had instructions to hold in spite of everything. Barricades had been thrown up across the Douzy road, and all the smaller streets; small parties of soldiers had been thrown into the houses by way of garrison; every narrow lane, every garden had become a fortress, and since three o'clock the troops, awakened from their slumbers without beat of drum or call of bugle in the inky blackness, had been at their posts, their chassepots freshly greased and cartridge boxes filled with the obligatory ninety rounds of ammunition. It followed that when the enemy opened their fire no one was taken unprepared, and the French batteries, posted to the rear between Balan and Bazeilles, immediately commenced to answer, rather with the idea of showing they were awake than for any other purpose, for in the dense fog that enveloped everything the practice was of the wildest.

"The dyehouse will be well defended," said Delaherche. "I have a whole section in it. Come and see."

It was true; forty and odd men of the infanterie de marine had been posted there under the command of a lieutenant, a tall, light-haired young fellow, scarcely more than a boy, but with an expression of energy and determination on his face. His men had already taken full possession of the building, some of them being engaged in loopholing the shutters of the ground-floor windows that commanded the street, while others, in the courtyard that overlooked the meadows in the rear, were breaching the wall for musketry. It was in this courtyard that Delaherche and Weiss found the young officer, straining his eyes to discover what was hidden behind the impenetrable mist.

"Confound this fog!" he murmured. "We can't fight when we don't know where the enemy is." Presently he asked, with no apparent change of voice or manner: "What day of the week is this?"

"Thursday," Weiss replied.

"Thursday, that's so. Hanged if I don't think the world might come to an end and we not know it!"

But just at that moment the uninterrupted roar of the artillery was diversified by a brisk rattle of musketry proceeding from the edge of the meadows, at a distance of two or three hundred yards. And at the same time there was a transformation, as rapid and startling, almost, as the stage effect in a fairy spectacle: the sun rose, the exhalations of the Meuse were whirled away like bits of finest, filmiest gauze, and the blue sky was revealed, in serene limpidity, undimmed by a single cloud. It was the exquisite morning of a faultless summer day.

"Ah!" exclaimed Delaherche, "they are crossing the railway bridge. See, they are making their way along the track. How stupid of us not to have blown up the bridge!"

The officer's face bore an expression of dumb rage. The mines had been prepared and charged, he averred, but they had fought four hours the day before to regain possession of the bridge and then had forgot to touch them off.

"It is just our luck," he curtly said.

Weiss was silent, watching the course of events and endeavoring to form some idea of the true state of affairs. The position of the French in Bazeilles was a very strong one. The village commanded the meadows, and was bisected by the Douzy road, which, turning sharp to the left, passed under the walls of the Chateau, while another road, the one that led to the railway bridge, bent around to the right and forked at the Place de l'Eglise. There was no cover for any force advancing by these two approaches; the Germans would be obliged to traverse the meadows and the wide, bare level that lay between the outskirts of the village and the Meuse and the railway. Their prudence in avoiding unnecessary risks was notorious, hence it seemed improbable that the real attack would come from that quarter. They kept coming across the bridge, however, in deep masses, and that notwithstanding the slaughter that a battery of mitrailleuses, posted at the edge of the village, effected in their ranks, and all at once those who had crossed rushed forward in open order, under cover of the straggling willows, the columns were re-formed and began to advance. It was from there that the musketry fire, which was growing hotter, had proceeded.

"Oh, those are Bavarians," Weiss remarked. "I recognize them by the braid on their helmets."

But there were other columns, moving to the right and partially concealed by the railway embankment, whose object, it seemed to him, was to gain the cover of some trees in the distance, whence they might descend and take Bazeilles in flank and rear. Should they succeed in effecting a lodgment in the park of Montivilliers, the village might become untenable. This was no more than a vague, half-formed idea, that flitted through his mind for a moment and faded as rapidly as it had come; the attack in front was becoming more determined, and his every faculty was concentrated on the struggle that was assuming, with every moment, larger dimensions.

Suddenly he turned his head and looked away to the north, over the city of Sedan, where the heights of Floing were visible in the distance. A battery had just commenced firing from that quarter; the smoke rose in the bright sunshine in little curls and wreaths, and the reports came to his ears very distinctly. It was in the neighborhood of five o'clock.

"Well, well," he murmured, "they are all going to have a hand in the business, it seems."

The lieutenant of marines, who had turned his eyes in the same direction, spoke up confidently:

"Oh! Bazeilles is the key of the position. This is the spot where the battle will be won or lost."

"Do you think so?" Weiss exclaimed.

"There is not the slightest doubt of it. It is certainly the marshal's opinion, for he was here last night and told us that we must hold the village if it cost the life of every man of us."

Weiss slowly shook his head, and swept the horizon with a glance; then in a low, faltering voice, as if speaking to himself, he said:

"No—no! I am sure that is a mistake. I fear the danger lies in another quarter—where, or what it is, I dare not say—"

He said no more. He simply opened wide his arms, like the jaws of a vise, then, turning to the north, brought his hands together, as if the vise had closed suddenly upon some object there.

This was the fear that had filled his mind for the last twenty-four hours, for he was thoroughly acquainted with the country and had watched narrowly every movement of the troops during the previous day, and now, again, while the broad valley before him lay basking in the radiant sunlight, his gaze reverted to the hills of the left bank, where, for the space of all one day and all one night, his eyes had beheld the black swarm of the Prussian hosts moving steadily onward to some appointed end. A battery had opened fire from Remilly, over to the left, but the one from which the shells were now beginning to reach the French position was posted at Pont-Maugis, on the river bank. He adjusted his binocle by folding the glasses over, the one upon the other, to lengthen its range and enable him to discern what was hidden among the recesses of the wooded slopes, but could distinguish nothing save the white smoke-wreaths that rose momentarily on the tranquil air and floated lazily away over the crests. That human torrent that he had seen so lately streaming over those hills, where was it now—where were massed those innumerable hosts? At last, at the corner of a pine wood, above Noyers and Frenois, he succeeded in making out a little cluster of mounted men in uniform—some general, doubtless, and his staff. And off there to the west the Meuse curved in a great loop, and in that direction lay their sole line of retreat on Mezieres, a narrow road that traversed the pass of Saint-Albert, between that loop and the dark forest of Ardennes. While reconnoitering the day before he had met a general officer who, he afterward learned, was Ducrot, commanding the 1st corps, on a by-road in the valley of Givonne, and had made bold to call his attention to the importance of that, their only line of retreat. If the army did not retire at once by that road while it was still open to them, if it waited until the Prussians should have crossed the Meuse at Donchery and come up in force to occupy the pass, it would be hemmed in and driven back on the Belgian frontier. As early even as the evening of that day the movement would have been too late. It was asserted that the uhlans had possession of the bridge, another bridge that had not been destroyed, for the reason, this time, that some one had neglected to provide the necessary powder. And Weiss sorrowfully acknowledged to himself that the human torrent, the invading horde, could now be nowhere else than on the plain of Donchery, invisible to him, pressing onward to occupy Saint-Albert pass, pushing forward its advanced guards to Saint-Menges and Floing, whither, the day previous, he had conducted Jean and Maurice. In the brilliant sunshine the steeple of Floing church appeared like a slender needle of dazzling whiteness.

And off to the eastward the other arm of the powerful vise was slowly closing in on them. Casting his eyes to the north, where there was a stretch of level ground between the plateaus of Illy and of Floing, he could make out the line of battle of the 7th corps, feebly supported by the 5th, which was posted in reserve under the ramparts of the city; but he could not discern what was occurring to the east, along the valley of the Givonne, where the 1st corps was stationed, its line stretching from the wood of la Garenne to Daigny village. Now, however, the guns were beginning to thunder in that direction also; the conflict seemed to be raging in Chevalier's wood, in front of Daigny. His uneasiness was owing to reports that had been brought in by peasants the day previous, that the Prussian advance had reached Francheval, so that the movement which was being conducted at the west, by way of Donchery, was also in process of execution at the east, by way of Francheval, and the two jaws of the vise would come together up there at the north, near the Calvary of Illy, unless the two-fold flanking movement could be promptly checked. He knew nothing of tactics or strategy, had nothing but his common sense to guide him; but he looked with fear and trembling on that great triangle that had the Meuse for one of its sides, and for the other two the 7th and 1st corps on the north and east respectively, while the extreme angle at the south was occupied by the 12th at Bazeilles—all the three corps facing outward on the periphery of a semicircle, awaiting the appearance of an enemy who was to deliver his attack at some one point, where or when no one could say, but who, instead, fell on them from every direction at once. And at the very center of all, as at the bottom of a pit, lay the city of Sedan, her ramparts furnished with antiquated guns, destitute of ammunition and provisions.

"Understand," said Weiss, with a repetition of his previous gesture, extending his arms and bringing his hands slowly together, "that is how it will be unless your generals keep their eyes open. The movement at Bazeilles is only a feint—"

But his explanation was confused and unintelligible to the lieutenant, who knew nothing of the country, and the young man shrugged his shoulders with an expression of impatience and disdain for the bourgeois in spectacles and frock coat who presumed to set his opinion against the marshal's. Irritated to hear Weiss reiterate his view that the attack on Bazeilles was intended only to mask other and more important movements, he finally shouted:

"Hold your tongue, will you! We shall drive them all into the Meuse, those Bavarian friends of yours, and that is all they will get by their precious feint."

While they were talking the enemy's skirmishers seemed to have come up closer; every now and then their bullets were heard thudding against the dyehouse wall, and our men, kneeling behind the low parapet of the courtyard, were beginning to reply. Every second the report of a chassepot rang out, sharp and clear, upon the air.

"Oh, of course! drive them into the Meuse, by all means," muttered Weiss, "and while we are about it we might as well ride them down and regain possession of the Carignan road." Then addressing himself to Delaherche, who had stationed himself behind the pump where he might be out of the way of the bullets: "All the same, it would have been their wisest course to make tracks last night for Mezieres, and if I were in their place I would much rather be there than here. As it is, however, they have got to show fight, since retreat is out of the question now."

"Are you coming?" asked Delaherche, who, notwithstanding his eager curiosity, was beginning to look pale in the face. "We shall be unable to get into the city if we remain here longer."

"Yes, in one minute I will be with you."

In spite of the danger that attended the movement he raised himself on tiptoe, possessed by an irresistible desire to see how things were shaping. On the right lay the meadows that had been flooded by order of the governor for the protection of the city, now a broad lake stretching from Torcy to Balan, its unruffled bosom glimmering in the morning sunlight with a delicate azure luster. The water did not extend as far as Bazeilles, however, and the Prussians had worked their way forward across the fields, availing themselves of the shelter of every ditch, of every little shrub and tree. They were now distant some five hundred yards, and Weiss was impressed by the caution with which they moved, the dogged resolution and patience with which they advanced, gaining ground inch by inch and exposing themselves as little as possible. They had a powerful artillery fire, moreover, to sustain them; the pure, cool air was vocal with the shrieking of shells. Raising his eyes he saw that the Pont-Maugis battery was not the only one that was playing on Bazeilles; two others, posted half way up the hill of Liry, had opened fire, and their projectiles not only reached the village, but swept the naked plain of la Moncelle beyond, where the reserves of the 12th corps were, and even the wooded slopes of Daigny, held by a division of the 1st corps, were not beyond their range. There was not a summit, moreover, on the left bank of the stream that was not tipped with flame. The guns seemed to spring spontaneously from the soil, like some noxious growth; it was a zone of fire that grew hotter and fiercer every moment; there were batteries at Noyers shelling Balan, batteries at Wadelincourt shelling Sedan, and at Frenois, down under la Marfee, there was a battery whose guns, heavier than the rest, sent their missiles hurtling over the city to burst among the troops of the 7th corps on the plateau of Floing. Those hills that he had always loved so well, that he had supposed were planted there solely to delight the eye, encircling with their verdurous slopes the pretty, peaceful valley that lay beneath, were now become a gigantic, frowning fortress, vomiting ruin and destruction on the feeble defenses of Sedan, and Weiss looked on them with terror and detestation. Why had steps not been taken to defend them the day before, if their leaders had suspected this, or why, rather, had they insisted on holding the position?

A sound of falling plaster caused him to raise his head; a shot had grazed his house, the front of which was visible to him above the party wall. It angered him excessively, and he growled:

"Are they going to knock it about my ears, the brigands!"

Then close behind him there was a little dull, strange sound that he had never heard before, and turning quickly he saw a soldier, shot through the heart, in the act of falling backward. There was a brief convulsive movement of the legs; the youthful, tranquil expression of the face remained, stamped there unalterably by the hand of death. It was the first casualty, and the accountant was startled by the crash of the musket falling and rebounding from the stone pavement of the courtyard.

"Ah, I have seen enough, I am going," stammered Delaherche. "Come, if you are coming; if not, I shall go without you."

The lieutenant, whom their presence made uneasy, spoke up:

"It will certainly be best for you to go, gentlemen. The enemy may attempt to carry the place at any moment."

Then at last, casting a parting glance at the meadows, where the Bavarians were still gaining ground, Weiss gave in and followed Delaherche, but when they had gained the street he insisted upon going to see if the fastening of his door was secure, and when he came back to his companion there was a fresh spectacle, which brought them both to a halt.

At the end of the street, some three hundred yards from where they stood, a strong Bavarian column had debouched from the Douzy road and was charging up the Place de l'Eglise. The square was held by a regiment of sailor-boys, who appeared to slacken their fire for a moment as if with the intention of drawing their assailants on; then, when the close-massed column was directly opposite their front, a most surprising maneuver was swiftly executed: the men abandoned their formation, some of them stepping from the ranks and flattening themselves against the house fronts, others casting themselves prone upon the ground, and down the vacant space thus suddenly formed the mitrailleuses that had been placed in battery at the farther end poured a perfect hailstorm of bullets. The column disappeared as if it had been swept bodily from off the face of the earth. The recumbent men sprang to their feet with a bound and charged the scattered Bavarians with the bayonet, driving them and making the rout complete. Twice the maneuver was repeated, each time with the same success. Two women, unwilling to abandon their home, a small house at the corner of an intersecting lane, were sitting at their window; they laughed approvingly and clapped their hands, apparently glad to have an opportunity to behold such a spectacle.

"There, confound it!" Weiss suddenly said, "I forgot to lock the cellar door! I must go back. Wait for me; I won't be a minute."

There was no indication that the enemy contemplated a renewal of their attack, and Delaherche, whose curiosity was reviving after the shock it had sustained, was less eager to get away. He had halted in front of his dyehouse and was conversing with the concierge, who had come for a moment to the door of the room she occupied in the rez-de-chaussee.

"My poor Francoise, you had better come along with us. A lone woman among such dreadful sights—I can't bear to think of it!"

She raised her trembling hands. "Ah, sir, I would have gone when the others went, indeed I would, if it had not been for my poor sick boy. Come in, sir, and look at him."

He did not enter, but glanced into the apartment from the threshold, and shook his head sorrowfully at sight of the little fellow in his clean, white bed, his face exhibiting the scarlet hue of the disease, and his glassy, burning eyes bent wistfully on his mother.

"But why can't you take him with you?" he urged. "I will find quarters for you in Sedan. Wrap him up warmly in a blanket, and come along with us."

"Oh, no, sir, I cannot. The doctor told me it would kill him. If only his poor father were alive! but we two are all that are left, and we must live for each other. And then, perhaps the Prussians will be merciful; perhaps they won't harm a lone woman and a sick boy."

Just then Weiss reappeared, having secured his premises to his satisfaction. "There, I think it will trouble them some to get in now. Come on! And it is not going to be a very pleasant journey, either; keep close to the houses, unless you want to come to grief."

There were indications, indeed, that the enemy were making ready for another assault. The infantry fire was spluttering away more furiously than ever, and the screaming of the shells was incessant. Two had already fallen in the street a hundred yards away, and a third had imbedded itself, without bursting, in the soft ground of the adjacent garden.

"Ah, here is Francoise," continued the accountant. "I must have a look at your little Charles. Come, come, you have no cause for alarm; he will be all right in a couple of days. Keep your courage up, and the first thing you do go inside, and don't put your nose outside the door." And the two men at last started to go.

"Au revoir, Francoise."

"Au revoir, sirs."

And as they spoke, there came an appalling crash. It was a shell, which, having first wrecked the chimney of Weiss's house, fell upon the sidewalk, where it exploded with such terrific force as to break every window in the vicinity. At first it was impossible to distinguish anything in the dense cloud of dust and smoke that rose in the air, but presently this drifted away, disclosing the ruined facade of the dyehouse, and there, stretched across the threshold, Francoise, a corpse, horribly torn and mangled, her skull crushed in, a fearful spectacle.

Weiss sprang to her side. Language failed him; he could only express his feelings by oaths and imprecations.

"Nom de Dieu! Nom de Dieu!"

Yes, she was dead. He had stooped to feel her pulse, and as he arose he saw before him the scarlet face of little Charles, who had raised himself in bed to look at his mother. He spoke no word, he uttered no cry; he gazed with blazing, tearless eyes, distended as if they would start from their sockets, upon the shapeless mass that was strange, unknown to him; and nothing more.

Weiss found words at last: "Nom de Dieu! they have taken to killing women!"

He had risen to his feet; he shook his fist at the Bavarians, whose braid-trimmed helmets were commencing to appear again in the direction of the church. The chimney, in falling, had crushed a great hole in the roof of his house, and the sight of the havoc made him furious.

"Dirty loafers! You murder women, you have destroyed my house. No, no! I will not go now, I cannot; I shall stay here."

He darted away and came running back with the dead soldier's rifle and ammunition. He was accustomed to carry a pair of spectacles on his person for use on occasions of emergency, when he wished to see with great distinctness, but did not wear them habitually out of respect for the wishes of his young wife. He now impatiently tore off his double eyeglass and substituted the spectacles, and the big, burly bourgeois, his overcoat flapping about his legs, his honest, kindly, round face ablaze with wrath, who would have been ridiculous had he not been so superbly heroic, proceeded to open fire, peppering away at the Bavarians at the bottom of the street. It was in his blood, he said; he had been hankering for something of the kind ever since the days of his boyhood, down there in Alsace, when he had been told all those tales of 1814. "Ah! you dirty loafers! you dirty loafers!" And he kept firing away with such eagerness that, finally, the barrel of his musket became so hot it burned his fingers.

The assault was made with great vigor and determination. There was no longer any sound of musketry in the direction of the meadows. The Bavarians had gained possession of a narrow stream, fringed with willows and poplars, and were making preparations for storming the houses, or rather fortresses, in the Place de l'Eglise. Their skirmishers had fallen back with the same caution that characterized their advance, and the wide grassy plain, dotted here and there with a black form where some poor fellow had laid down his life, lay spread in the mellow, slumbrous sunshine like a great cloth of gold. The lieutenant, knowing that the street was now to be the scene of action, had evacuated the courtyard of the dyehouse, leaving there only one man as guard. He rapidly posted his men along the sidewalk with instructions, should the enemy carry the position, to withdraw into the building, barricade the first floor, and defend themselves there as long as they had a cartridge left. The men fired at will, lying prone upon the ground, and sheltering themselves as best they might behind posts and every little projection of the walls, and the storm of lead, interspersed with tongues of flame and puffs of smoke, that tore through that broad, deserted, sunny avenue was like a downpour of hail beaten level by the fierce blast of winter. A woman was seen to cross the roadway, running with wild, uncertain steps, and she escaped uninjured. Next, an old man, a peasant, in his blouse, who would not be satisfied until he saw his worthless nag stabled, received a bullet square in his forehead, and the violence of the impact was such that it hurled him into the middle of the street. A shell had gone crashing through the roof of the church; two others fell and set fire to houses, which burned with a pale flame in the intense daylight, with a loud snapping and crackling of their timbers. And that poor woman, who lay crushed and bleeding in the doorway of the house where her sick boy was, that old man with a bullet in his brain, all that work of ruin and devastation, maddened the few inhabitants who had chosen to end their days in their native village rather than seek safety in Belgium. Other bourgeois, and workingmen as well, the neatly attired citizen alongside the man in overalls, had possessed themselves of the weapons of dead soldiers, and were in the street defending their firesides or firing vengefully from the windows.

"Ah!" suddenly said Weiss, "the scoundrels have got around to our rear. I saw them sneaking along the railroad track. Hark! don't you hear them off there to the left?"

The heavy fire of musketry that was now audible behind the park of Montivilliers, the trees of which overhung the road, made it evident that something of importance was occurring in that direction. Should the enemy gain possession of the park Bazeilles would be at their mercy, but the briskness of the firing was in itself proof that the general commanding the 12th corps had anticipated the movement and that the position was adequately defended.

"Look out, there, you blockhead!" exclaimed the lieutenant, violently forcing Weiss up against the wall; "do you want to get yourself blown to pieces?"

He could not help laughing a little at the queer figure of the big gentleman in spectacles, but his bravery had inspired him with a very genuine feeling of respect, so, when his practiced ear detected a shell coming their way, he had acted the part of a friend and placed the civilian in a safer position. The missile landed some ten paces from where they were and exploded, covering them both with earth and debris. The citizen kept his feet and received not so much as a scratch, while the officer had both legs broken.

"It is well!" was all he said; "they have sent me my reckoning!"

He caused his men to take him across the sidewalk and place him with his back to the wall, near where the dead woman lay, stretched across her doorstep. His boyish face had lost nothing of its energy and determination.

"It don't matter, my children; listen to what I say. Don't fire too hurriedly; take your time. When the time comes for you to charge, I will tell you."

And he continued to command them still, with head erect, watchful of the movements of the distant enemy. Another house was burning, directly across the street. The crash and rattle of musketry, the roar of bursting shells, rent the air, thick with dust and sulphurous smoke. Men dropped at the corner of every lane and alley; corpses scattered here and there upon the pavement, singly or in little groups, made splotches of dark color, hideously splashed with red. And over the doomed village a frightful uproar rose and swelled, the vindictive shouts of thousands, devoting to destruction a few hundred brave men, resolute to die.

Then Delaherche, who all this time had been frantically shouting to Weiss without intermission, addressed him one last appeal:

"You won't come? Very well! then I shall leave you to your fate. Adieu!"

It was seven o'clock, and he had delayed his departure too long. So long as the houses were there to afford him shelter he took advantage of every doorway, of every bit of projecting wall, shrinking at every volley into cavities that were ridiculously small in comparison with his bulk. He turned and twisted in and out with the sinuous dexterity of the serpent; he would never have supposed that there was so much of his youthful agility left in him. When he reached the end of the village, however, and had to make his way for a space of some three hundred yards along the deserted, empty road, swept by the batteries on Liry hill, although the perspiration was streaming from his face and body, he shivered and his teeth chattered. For a minute or so he advanced cautiously along the bed of a dry ditch, bent almost double, then, suddenly forsaking the protecting shelter, burst into the open and ran for it with might and main, wildly, aimlessly, his ears ringing with detonations that sounded to him like thunder-claps. His eyes burned like coals of fire; it seemed to him that he was wrapt in flame. It was an eternity of torture. Then he suddenly caught sight of a little house to his left, and he rushed for the friendly refuge, gained it, with a sensation as if an immense load had been lifted from his breast. The place was tenanted, there were men and horses there. At first he could distinguish nothing. What he beheld subsequently filled him with amazement.

Was not that the Emperor, attended by his brilliant staff? He hesitated, although for the last two days he had been boasting of his acquaintance with him, then stood staring, open-mouthed. It was indeed Napoleon III.; he appeared larger, somehow, and more imposing on horseback, and his mustache was so stiffly waxed, there was such a brilliant color on his cheeks, that Delaherche saw at once he had been "made up" and painted like an actor. He had had recourse to cosmetics to conceal from his army the ravages that anxiety and illness had wrought in his countenance, the ghastly pallor of his face, his pinched nose, his dull, sunken eyes, and having been notified at five o'clock that there was fighting at Bazeilles, had come forth to see, sadly and silently, like a phantom with rouged cheeks.

There was a brick-kiln near by, behind which there was safety from the rain of bullets that kept pattering incessantly on its other front and the shells that burst at every second on the road. The mounted group had halted.

"Sire," someone murmured, "you are in danger—"

But the Emperor turned and motioned to his staff to take refuge in the narrow road that skirted the kiln, where men and horses would be sheltered from the fire.

"Really, Sire, this is madness. Sire, we entreat you—"

His only answer was to repeat his gesture; probably he thought that the appearance of a group of brilliant uniforms on that deserted road would draw the fire of the batteries on the left bank. Entirely unattended he rode forward into the midst of the storm of shot and shell, calmly, unhurriedly, with his unvarying air of resigned indifference, the air of one who goes to meet his appointed fate. Could it be that he heard behind him the implacable voice that was urging him onward, that voice from Paris: "March! march! die the hero's death on the piled corpses of thy countrymen, let the whole world look on in awe-struck admiration, so that thy son may reign!"—could that be what he heard? He rode forward, controlling his charger to a slow walk. For the space of a hundred yards he thus rode forward, then halted, awaiting the death he had come there to seek. The bullets sang in concert with a music like the fierce autumnal blast; a shell burst in front of him and covered him with earth. He maintained his attitude of patient waiting. His steed, with distended eyes and quivering frame, instinctively recoiled before the grim presence who was so close at hand and yet refused to smite horse or rider. At last the trying experience came to an end, and the Emperor, with his stoic fatalism, understanding that his time was not yet come, tranquilly retraced his steps, as if his only object had been to reconnoiter the position of the German batteries.

"What courage, Sire! We beseech you, do not expose yourself further—"

But, unmindful of their solicitations, he beckoned to his staff to follow him, not offering at present to consult their safety more than he did his own, and turned his horse's head toward la Moncelle, quitting the road and taking the abandoned fields of la Ripaille. A captain was mortally wounded, two horses were killed. As he passed along the line of the 12th corps, appearing and vanishing like a specter, the men eyed him with curiosity, but did not cheer.

To all these events had Delaherche been witness, and now he trembled at the thought that he, too, as soon as he should have left the brick works, would have to run the gauntlet of those terrible projectiles. He lingered, listening to the conversation of some dismounted officers who had remained there.

"I tell you he was killed on the spot; cut in two by a shell."

"You are wrong, I saw him carried off the field. His wound was not severe; a splinter struck him on the hip."

"What time was it?"

"Why, about an hour ago—say half-past six. It was up there around la Moncelle, in a sunken road."

"I know he is dead."

"But I tell you he is not! He even sat his horse for a moment after he was hit, then he fainted and they carried him into a cottage to attend to his wound."

"And then returned to Sedan?"

"Certainly; he is in Sedan now."

Of whom could they be speaking? Delaherche quickly learned that it was of Marshal MacMahon, who had been wounded while paying a visit of inspection to his advanced posts. The marshal wounded! it was "just our luck," as the lieutenant of marines had put it. He was reflecting on what the consequences of the mishap were likely to be when an estafette dashed by at top speed, shouting to a comrade, whom he recognized:

"General Ducrot is made commander-in-chief! The army is ordered to concentrate at Illy in order to retreat on Mezieres!"

The courier was already far away, galloping into Bazeilles under the constantly increasing fire, when Delaherche, startled by the strange tidings that came to him in such quick succession and not relishing the prospect of being involved in the confusion of the retreating troops, plucked up courage and started on a run for Balan, whence he regained Sedan without much difficulty.

The estafette tore through Bazeilles on a gallop, disseminating the news, hunting up the commanders to give them their instructions, and as he sped swiftly on the intelligence spread among the troops: Marshal MacMahon wounded, General Ducrot in command, the army falling back on Illy!

"What is that they are saying?" cried Weiss, whose face by this time was grimy with powder. "Retreat on Mezieres at this late hour! but it is absurd, they will never get through!"

And his conscience pricked him, he repented bitterly having given that counsel the day before to that very general who was now invested with the supreme command. Yes, certainly, that was yesterday the best, the only plan, to retreat, without loss of a minute's time, by the Saint-Albert pass, but now the way could be no longer open to them, the black swarms of Prussians had certainly anticipated them and were on the plain of Donchery. There were two courses left for them to pursue, both desperate; and the most promising, as well as the bravest, of them was to drive the Bavarians into the Meuse, and cut their way through and regain possession of the Carignan road.

Weiss, whose spectacles were constantly slipping down upon his nose, adjusted them nervously and proceeded to explain matters to the lieutenant, who was still seated against the wall with his two stumps of legs, very pale and slowly bleeding to death.

"Lieutenant, I assure you I am right. Tell your men to stand their ground. You can see for yourself that we are doing well. One more effort like the last, and we shall drive them into the river."

It was true that the Bavarians' second attack had been repulsed. The mitrailleuses had again swept the Place de l'Eglise, the heaps of corpses in the square resembled barricades, and our troops, emerging from every cross street, had driven the enemy at the point of the bayonet through the meadows toward the river in headlong flight, which might easily have been converted into a general rout had there been fresh troops to support the sailor-boys, who had suffered severely and were by this time much distressed. And in Montivilliers Park, again, the firing did not seem to advance, which was a sign that in that quarter, also, reinforcements, could they have been had, would have cleared the wood.

"Order your men to charge them with the bayonet, lieutenant."

The waxen pallor of death was on the poor boy-officer's face; yet he had strength to murmur in feeble accents:

"You hear, my children; give them the bayonet!"

It was his last utterance; his spirit passed, his ingenuous, resolute face and his wide open eyes still turned on the battle. The flies already were beginning to buzz about Francoise's head and settle there, while lying on his bed little Charles, in an access of delirium, was calling on his mother in pitiful, beseeching tones to give him something to quench his thirst.

"Mother, mother, awake; get up—I am thirsty, I am so thirsty."

But the instructions of the new chief were imperative, and the officers, vexed and grieved to see the successes they had achieved thus rendered nugatory, had nothing for it but to give orders for the retreat. It was plain that the commander-in-chief, possessed by a haunting dread of the enemy's turning movement, was determined to sacrifice everything in order to escape from the toils. The Place de l'Eglise was evacuated, the troops fell back from street to street; soon the broad avenue was emptied of its defenders. Women shrieked and sobbed, men swore and shook their fists at the retiring troops, furious to see themselves abandoned thus. Many shut themselves in their houses, resolved to die in their defense.

"Well, I am not going to give up the ship!" shouted Weiss, beside himself with rage. "No! I will leave my skin here first. Let them come on! let them come and smash my furniture and drink my wine!"

Wrath filled his mind to the exclusion of all else, a wild, fierce desire to fight, to kill, at the thought that the hated foreigner should enter his house, sit in his chair, drink from his glass. It wrought a change in all his nature; everything that went to make up his daily life—wife, business, the methodical prudence of the small bourgeois—seemed suddenly to become unstable and drift away from him. And he shut himself up in his house and barricaded it, he paced the empty apartments with the restless impatience of a caged wild beast, going from room to room to make sure that all the doors and windows were securely fastened. He counted his cartridges and found he had forty left, then, as he was about to give a final look to the meadows to see whether any attack was to be apprehended from that quarter, the sight of the hills on the left bank arrested his attention for a moment. The smoke-wreaths indicated distinctly the position of the Prussian batteries, and at the corner of a little wood on la Marfee, over the powerful battery at Frenois, he again beheld the group of uniforms, more numerous than before, and so distinct in the bright sunlight that by supplementing his spectacles with his binocle he could make out the gold of their epaulettes and helmets.

"You dirty scoundrels, you dirty scoundrels!" he twice repeated, extending his clenched fist in impotent menace.

Those who were up there on la Marfee were King William and his staff. As early as seven o'clock he had ridden up from Vendresse, where he had had quarters for the night, and now was up there on the heights, out of reach of danger, while at his feet lay the valley of the Meuse and the vast panorama of the field of battle. Far as the eye could reach, from north to south, the bird's-eye view extended, and standing on the summit of the hill, as from his throne in some colossal opera box, the monarch surveyed the scene.

In the central foreground of the picture, and standing out in bold relief against the venerable forests of the Ardennes, that stretched away on either hand from right to left, filling the northern horizon like a curtain of dark verdure, was the city of Sedan, with the geometrical lines and angles of its fortifications, protected on the south and west by the flooded meadows and the river. In Bazeilles houses were already burning, and the dark cloud of war hung heavy over the pretty village. Turning his eyes eastward he might discover, holding the line between la Moncelle and Givonne, some regiments of the 12th and 1st corps, looking like diminutive insects at that distance and lost to sight at intervals in the dip of the narrow valley in which the hamlets lay concealed; and beyond that valley rose the further slope, an uninhabited, uncultivated heath, of which the pale tints made the dark green of Chevalier's Wood look black by contrast. To the north the 7th corps was more distinctly visible in its position on the plateau of Floing, a broad belt of sere, dun fields, that sloped downward from the little wood of la Garenne to the verdant border of the stream. Further still were Floing, Saint-Menges, Fleigneux, Illy, small villages that lay nestled in the hollows of that billowing region where the landscape was a succession of hill and dale. And there, too, to the left was the great bend of the Meuse, where the sluggish stream, shimmering like molten silver in the bright sunlight, swept lazily in a great horseshoe around the peninsula of Iges and barred the road to Mezieres, leaving between its further bank and the impassable forest but one single gateway, the defile of Saint-Albert.

It was in that triangular space that the hundred thousand men and five hundred guns of the French army had now been crowded and brought to bay, and when His Prussian Majesty condescended to turn his gaze still further to the westward he might perceive another plain, the plain of Donchery, a succession of bare fields stretching away toward Briancourt, Marancourt, and Vrigne-aux-Bois, a desolate expanse of gray waste beneath the clear blue sky; and did he turn him to the east, he again had before his eyes, facing the lines in which the French were so closely hemmed, a vast level stretch of country in which were numerous villages, first Douzy and Carignan, then more to the north Rubecourt, Pourru-aux-Bois, Francheval, Villers-Cernay, and last of all, near the frontier, Chapelle. All about him, far as he could see, the land was his; he could direct the movements of the quarter of a million of men and the eight hundred guns that constituted his army, could master at a glance every detail of the operations of his invading host. Even then the XIth corps was pressing forward toward Saint-Menges, while the Vth was at Vrigne-aux-Bois, and the Wurtemburg division was near Donchery, awaiting orders. This was what he beheld to the west, and if, turning to the east, he found his view obstructed in that quarter by tree-clad hills, he could picture to himself what was passing, for he had seen the XIIth corps entering the wood of Chevalier, he knew that by that time the Guards were at Villers-Cernay. There were the two arms of the gigantic vise, the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia on the left, the Saxon Prince's army on the right, slowly, irresistibly closing on each other, while the two Bavarian corps were hammering away at Bazeilles.

Underneath the King's position the long line of batteries, stretching with hardly an interval from Remilly to Frenois, kept up an unintermittent fire, pouring their shells into Daigny and la Moncelle, sending them hurtling over Sedan city to sweep the northern plateaus. It was barely eight o'clock, and with eyes fixed on the gigantic board he directed the movements of the game, awaiting the inevitable end, calmly controlling the black cloud of men that beneath him swept, an array of pigmies, athwart the smiling landscape.

II.

In the dense fog up on the plateau of Floing Gaude, the bugler, sounded reveille at peep of day with all the lung-power he was possessed of, but the inspiring strain died away and was lost in the damp, heavy air, and the men, who had not had courage even to erect their tents and had thrown themselves, wrapped in their blankets, upon the muddy ground, did not awake or stir, but lay like corpses, their ashen features set and rigid in the slumber of utter exhaustion. To arouse them from their trance-like sleep they had to be shaken, one by one, and, with ghastly faces and haggard eyes, they rose to their feet, like beings summoned, against their will, back from another world. It was Jean who awoke Maurice.

"What is it? Where are we!" asked the younger man. He looked affrightedly around him, and beheld only that gray waste, in which were floating the unsubstantial forms of his comrades. Objects twenty yards away were undistinguishable; his knowledge of the country availed him not; he could not even have indicated in which direction lay Sedan. Just then, however, the boom of cannon, somewhere in the distance, fell upon his ear. "Ah! I remember; the battle is for to-day; they are fighting. So much the better; there will be an end to our suspense!"

He heard other voices around him expressing the same idea. There was a feeling of stern satisfaction that at last their long nightmare was to be dispelled, that at last they were to have a sight of those Prussians whom they had come out to look for, and before whom they had been retreating so many weary days; that they were to be given a chance to try a shot at them, and lighten the load of cartridges that had been tugging at their belts so long, with never an opportunity to burn a single one of them. Everyone felt that, this time, the battle would not, could not be avoided.

But the guns began to thunder more loudly down at Bazeilles, and Jean bent his ear to listen.

"Where is the firing?"

"Faith," replied Maurice, "it seems to me to be over toward the Meuse; but I'll be hanged if I know where we are."

"Look here, youngster," said the corporal, "you are going to stick close by me to-day, for unless a man has his wits about him, don't you see, he is likely to get in trouble. Now, I have been there before, and can keep an eye out for both of us."

The others of the squad, meantime, were growling angrily because they had nothing with which to warm their stomachs. There was no possibility of kindling fires without dry wood in such weather as prevailed then, and so, at the very moment when they were about to go into battle, the inner man put in his claim for recognition, and would not be denied. Hunger is not conducive to heroism; to those poor fellows eating was the great, the momentous question of life; how lovingly they watched the boiling pot on those red-letter days when the soup was rich and thick; how like children or savages they were in their wrath when rations were not forthcoming!

"No eat, no fight!" declared Chouteau. "I'll be blowed if I am going to risk my skin to-day!"

The radical was cropping out again in the great hulking house-painter, the orator of Belleville, the pothouse politician, who drowned what few correct ideas he picked up here and there in a nauseous mixture of ineffable folly and falsehood.

"Besides," he went on, "what good was there in making fools of us as they have been doing all along, telling us that the Prussians were dying of hunger and disease, that they had not so much as a shirt to their back, and were tramping along the highways like ragged, filthy paupers!"

Loubet laughed the laugh of the Parisian gamin, who has experienced the various vicissitudes of life in the Halles.

"Oh, that's all in my eye! it is we fellows who have been catching it right along; we are the poor devils whose leaky brogans and tattered toggery would make folks throw us a copper. And then those great victories about which they made such a fuss! What precious liars they must be, to tell us that old Bismarck had been made prisoner and that a German army had been driven over a quarry and dashed to pieces! Oh yes, they fooled us in great shape."

Pache and Lapoulle, who were standing near, shook their heads and clenched their fists ominously. There were others, also, who made no attempt to conceal their anger, for the course of the newspapers in constantly printing bogus news had had most disastrous results; all confidence was destroyed, men had ceased to believe anything or anybody. And so it was that in the soldiers, children of a larger growth, their bright dreams of other days had now been supplanted by exaggerated anticipations of misfortune.

"Pardi!" continued Chouteau, "the thing is accounted for easily enough, since our rulers have been selling us to the enemy right from the beginning. You all know that it is so."

Lapoulle's rustic simplicity revolted at the idea.

"For shame! what wicked people they must be!"

"Yes, sold, as Judas sold his master," murmured Pache, mindful of his studies in sacred history.

It was Chouteau's hour of triumph. "Mon Dieu! it is as plain as the nose on your face. MacMahon got three millions and each of the other generals got a million, as the price of bringing us up here. The bargain was made at Paris last spring, and last night they sent up a rocket as a signal to let Bismarck know that everything was fixed and he might come and take us."

The story was so inanely stupid that Maurice was disgusted. There had been a time when Chouteau, thanks to his facundity of the faubourg, had interested and almost convinced him, but now he had come to detest that apostle of falsehood, that snake in the grass, who calumniated honest effort of every kind in order to sicken others of it.

"Why do you talk such nonsense?" he exclaimed. "You know very well there is no truth in it."

"What, not true? Do you mean to say it is not true that we are betrayed? Ah, come, my aristocratic friend, perhaps you are one of them, perhaps you belong to the d—d band of dirty traitors?" He came forward threateningly. "If you are you have only to say so, my fine gentleman, for we will attend to your case right here, and won't wait for your friend Bismarck, either."

The others were also beginning to growl and show their teeth, and Jean thought it time that he should interfere.

"Silence there! I will report the first man who says another word!"

But Chouteau sneered and jeered at him; what did he care whether he reported him or not! He was not going to fight unless he chose, and they need not try to ride him rough-shod, because he had cartridges in his box for other people beside the Prussians. They were going into action now, and what discipline had been maintained by fear would be at an end: what could they do to him, anyway? he would just skip as soon as he thought he had enough of it. And he was profane and obscene, egging the men on against the corporal, who had been allowing them to starve. Yes, it was his fault that the squad had had nothing to eat in the last three days, while their neighbors had soup and fresh meat in plenty, but "monsieur" had to go off to town with the "aristo" and enjoy himself with the girls. People had spotted 'em, over in Sedan.

"You stole the money belonging to the squad; deny it if you dare, you bougre of a belly-god!"

Things were beginning to assume an ugly complexion; Lapoulle was doubling his big fists in a way that looked like business, and Pache, with the pangs of hunger gnawing at his vitals, laid aside his natural douceness and insisted on an explanation. The only reasonable one among them was Loubet, who gave one of his pawky laughs and suggested that, being Frenchmen, they might as well dine off the Prussians as eat one another. For his part, he took no stock in fighting, either with fists or firearms, and alluding to the few hundred francs that he had earned as substitute, added:

"And so, that was all they thought my hide was worth! Well, I am not going to give them more than their money's worth."

Maurice and Jean were in a towering rage at the idotic onslaught, talking loudly and repelling Chouteau's insinuations, when out from the fog came a stentorian voice, bellowing:

"What's this? what's this? Show me the rascals who dare quarrel in the company street!"

And Lieutenant Rochas appeared upon the scene, in his old kepi, whence the rain had washed all the color, and his great coat, minus many of its buttons, evincing in all his lean, shambling person the extreme of poverty and distress. Notwithstanding his forlorn aspect, however, his sparkling eye and bristling mustache showed that his old time confidence had suffered no impairment.

Jean spoke up, scarce able to restrain himself. "Lieutenant, it is these men, who persist in saying that we are betrayed. Yes, they dare to assert that our generals have sold us—"

The idea of treason did not appear so extremely unnatural to Rochas's thick understanding, for it served to explain those reverses that he could not account for otherwise.

"Well, suppose they are sold, is it any of their business? What concern is it of theirs? The Prussians are there all the same, aren't they? and we are going to give them one of the old-fashioned hidings, such as they won't forget in one while." Down below them in the thick sea of fog the guns at Bazeilles were still pounding away, and he extended his arms with a broad, sweeping gesture: "Hein! this is the time that we've got them! We'll see them back home, and kick them every step of the way!"

All the trials and troubles of the past were to him as if they had not been, now that his ears were gladdened by the roar of the guns: the delays and conflicting orders of the chiefs, the demoralization of the troops, the stampede at Beaumont, the distress of the recent forced retreat on Sedan—all were forgotten. Now that they were about to fight at last, was not victory certain? He had learned nothing and forgotten nothing; his blustering, boastful contempt of the enemy, his entire ignorance of the new arts and appliances of war, his rooted conviction that an old soldier of Africa, Italy, and the Crimea could by no possibility be beaten, had suffered no change. It was really a little too comical that a man at his age should take the back track and begin at the beginning again!

All at once his lantern jaws parted and gave utterance to a loud laugh. He was visited by one of those impulses of good-fellowship that made his men swear by him, despite the roughness of the jobations that he frequently bestowed on them.

"Look here, my children, in place of quarreling it will be a great deal better to take a good nip all around. Come, I'm going to treat, and you shall drink my health."

From the capacious pocket of his capote he extracted a bottle of brandy, adding, with his all-conquering air, that it was the gift of a lady. (He had been seen the day before, seated at the table of a tavern in Floing and holding the waitress on his lap, evidently on the best of terms with her.) The soldiers laughed and winked at one another, holding out their porringers, into which he gayly poured the golden liquor.

"Drink to your sweethearts, my children, if you have any and don't forget to drink to the glory of France. Them's my sentiments, so vive la joie!"

"That's right, Lieutenant. Here's to your health, and everybody else's!"

They all drank, and their hearts were warmed and peace reigned once more. The "nip" had much of comfort in it, in the chill morning, just as they were going into action, and Maurice felt it tingling in his veins, giving him cheer and a sort of what is known colloquially as "Dutch courage." Why should they not whip the Prussians? Have not battles their surprises? has not history embalmed many an instance of the fickleness of fortune? That mighty man of war, the lieutenant, added that Bazaine was on the way to join them, would be with them before the day was over: oh, the information was positive; he had it from an aid to one of the generals; and although, in speaking of the route the marshal was to come by, he pointed to the frontier of Belgium, Maurice yielded to one of those spasmodic attacks of hopefulness of his, without which life to him would not have been worth living. Might it not be that the day of reckoning was at hand?

"Why don't we move, Lieutenant?" he made bold to ask. "What are we waiting for?"

Rochas made a gesture, which the other interpreted to mean that no orders had been received. Presently he asked:

"Has anybody seen the captain?"

No one answered. Jean remembered perfectly having seen him making for Sedan the night before, but to the soldier who knows what is good for himself, his officers are always invisible when they are not on duty. He held his tongue, therefore, until happening to turn his head, he caught sight of a shadowy form flitting along the hedge.

"Here he is," said he.

It was Captain Beaudoin in the flesh. They were all surprised by the nattiness of his appearance, his resplendent shoes, his well-brushed uniform, affording such a striking contrast to the lieutenant's pitiful state. And there was a finicking completeness, moreover, about his toilet, greater than the male being is accustomed to bestow upon himself, in his scrupulously white hands and his carefully curled mustache, and a faint perfume of Persian lilac, which had the effect of reminding one in some mysterious way of the dressing room of a young and pretty woman.

"Hallo!" said Loubet, with a sneer, "the captain has recovered his baggage!"

But no one laughed, for they all knew him to be a man with whom it was not well to joke. He was stiff and consequential with his men, and was detested accordingly; a pete sec, to use Rochas's expression. He had seemed to regard the early reverses of the campaign as personal affronts, and the disaster that all had prognosticated was to him an unpardonable crime. He was a strong Bonapartist by conviction; his prospects for promotion were of the brightest; he had several important salons looking after his interests; naturally, he did not take kindly to the changed condition of affairs that promised to make his cake dough. He was said to have a remarkably fine tenor voice, which had helped him no little in his advancement. He was not devoid of intelligence, though perfectly ignorant as regarded everything connected with his profession; eager to please, and very brave, when there was occasion for being so, without superfluous rashness.

"What a nasty fog!" was all he said, pleased to have found his company at last, for which he had been searching for more than half an hour.

At the same time their orders came, and the battalion moved forward. They had to proceed with caution, feeling their way, for the exhalations continued to rise from the stream and were now so dense that they were precipitated in a fine, drizzling rain. A vision rose before Maurice's eyes that impressed him deeply; it was Colonel de Vineuil, who loomed suddenly from out the mist, sitting his horse, erect and motionless, at the intersection of two roads—the man appearing of preternatural size, and so pale and rigid that he might have served a sculptor as a study for a statue of despair; the steed shivering in the raw, chill air of morning, his dilated nostrils turned in the direction of the distant firing. Some ten paces to their rear were the regimental colors, which the sous-lieutenant whose duty it was to bear them had thus early taken from their case and proudly raised aloft, and as the driving, vaporous rack eddied and swirled about them, they shone like a radiant vision of glory emblazoned on the heavens, soon to fade and vanish from the sight. Water was dripping from the gilded eagle, and the tattered, shot-riddled tri-color, on which were embroidered the names of former victories, was stained and its bright hues dimmed by the smoke of many a battlefield; the sole bit of brilliant color in all the faded splendor was the enameled cross of honor that was attached to the cravate.

Another billow of vapor came scurrying up from the river, enshrouding in its fleecy depths colonel, standard, and all, and the battalion passed on, whitherward no one could tell. First their route had conducted them over descending ground, now they were climbing a hill. On reaching the summit the command, halt! started at the front and ran down the column; the men were cautioned not to leave the ranks, arms were ordered, and there they remained, the heavy knapsacks forming a grievous burden to weary shoulders. It was evident that they were on a plateau, but to discern localities was out of the question; twenty paces was the extreme range of vision. It was now seven o'clock; the sound of firing reached them more distinctly, other batteries were apparently opening on Sedan from the opposite bank.

"Oh! I," said Sergeant Sapin with a start, addressing Jean and Maurice, "I shall be killed to-day."

It was the first time he had opened his lips that morning; an expression of dreamy melancholy had rested on his thin face, with its big, handsome eyes and thin, pinched nose.

"What an idea!" Jean exclaimed; "who can tell what is going to happen him? Every bullet has its billet, they say, but you stand no worse chance than the rest of us."

"Oh, but me—I am as good as dead now. I tell you I shall be killed to-day."

The near files turned and looked at him curiously, asking him if he had had a dream. No, he had dreamed nothing, but he felt it; it was there.

"And it is a pity, all the same, because I was to be married when I got my discharge."

A vague expression came into his eyes again; his past life rose before him. He was the son of a small retail grocer at Lyons, and had been petted and spoiled by his mother up to the time of her death; then rejecting the proffer of his father, with whom he did not hit it off well, to assist in purchasing his discharge, he had remained with the army, weary and disgusted with life and with his surroundings. Coming home on furlough, however, he fell in love with a cousin and they became engaged; their intention was to open a little shop on the small capital which she would bring him, and then existence once more became desirable. He had received an elementary education; could read, write, and cipher. For the past year he had lived only in anticipation of this happy future.

He shivered, and gave himself a shake to dispel his revery, repeating with his tranquil air:

"Yes, it is too bad; I shall be killed to-day."

No one spoke; the uncertainty and suspense continued. They knew not whether the enemy was on their front or in their rear. Strange sounds came to their ears from time to time from out the depths of the mysterious fog: the rumble of wheels, the deadened tramp of moving masses, the distant clatter of horses' hoofs; it was the evolutions of troops, hidden from view behind the misty curtain, the batteries, battalions, and squadrons of the 7th corps taking up their positions in line of battle. Now, however, it began to look as if the fog was about to lift; it parted here and there and fragments floated lightly off, like strips of gauze torn from a veil, and bits of sky appeared, not transparently blue, as on a bright summer's day, but opaque and of the hue of burnished steel, like the cheerless bosom of some deep, sullen mountain tarn. It was in one of those brighter moments when the sun was endeavoring to struggle forth that the regiments of chasseurs d'Afrique, constituting part of Margueritte's division, came riding by, giving the impression of a band of spectral horsemen. They sat very stiff and erect in the saddle, with their short cavalry jackets, broad red sashes and smart little kepis, accurate in distance and alignment and managing admirably their lean, wiry mounts, which were almost invisible under the heterogeneous collection of tools and camp equipage that they had to carry. Squadron after squadron they swept by in long array, to be swallowed in the gloom from which they had just emerged, vanishing as if dissolved by the fine rain. The truth was, probably, that they were in the way, and their leaders, not knowing what use to put them to, had packed them off the field, as had often been the case since the opening of the campaign. They had scarcely ever been employed on scouting or reconnoitering duty, and as soon as there was prospect of a fight were trotted about for shelter from valley to valley, useless objects, but too costly to be endangered.

Maurice thought of Prosper as he watched them. "That fellow, yonder, looks like him," he said, under his breath. "I wonder if it is he?"

"Of whom are you speaking?" asked Jean.

"Of that young man of Remilly, whose brother we met at Osches, you remember."

Behind the chasseurs, when they had all passed, came a general officer and his staff dashing down the descending road, and Maurice recognized the general of their brigade, Bourgain-Desfeuilles, shouting and gesticulating wildly. He had torn himself reluctantly from his comfortable quarters at the Hotel of the Golden Cross, and it was evident from the horrible temper he was in that the condition of affairs that morning was not satisfactory to him. In a tone of voice so loud that everyone could hear he roared:

"In the devil's name, what stream is that off yonder, the Meuse or the Moselle?"

The fog dispersed at last, this time in earnest. As at Bazeilles the effect was theatrical; the curtain rolled slowly upward to the flies, disclosing the setting of the stage. From a sky of transparent blue the sun poured down a flood of bright, golden light, and Maurice was no longer at a loss to recognize their position.

"Ah!" he said to Jean, "we are on the plateau de l'Algerie. That village that you see across the valley, directly in our front, is Floing, and that more distant one is Saint-Menges, and that one, more distant still, a little to the right, is Fleigneux. Then those scrubby trees on the horizon, away in the background, are the forest of the Ardennes, and there lies the frontier—"

He went on to explain their position, naming each locality and pointing to it with outstretched hand. The plateau de l'Algerie was a belt of reddish ground, something less than two miles in length, sloping gently downward from the wood of la Garenne toward the Meuse, from which it was separated by the meadows. On it the line of the 7th corps had been established by General Douay, who felt that his numbers were not sufficient to defend so extended a position and properly maintain his touch with the 1st corps, which was posted at right angles with his line, occupying the valley of la Givonne, from the wood of la Garenne to Daigny.

"Oh, isn't it grand, isn't it magnificent!"

And Maurice, revolving on his heel, made with his hand a sweeping gesture that embraced the entire horizon. From their position on the plateau the whole wide field of battle lay stretched before them to the south and west: Sedan, almost at their feet, whose citadel they could see overtopping the roofs, then Balan and Bazeilles, dimly seen through the dun smoke-clouds that hung heavily in the motionless air, and further in the distance the hills of the left bank, Liry, la Marfee, la Croix-Piau. It was away toward the west, however, in the direction of Donchery, that the prospect was most extensive. There the Meuse curved horseshoe-wise, encircling the peninsula of Iges with a ribbon of pale silver, and at the northern extremity of the loop was distinctly visible the narrow road of the Saint-Albert pass, winding between the river bank and a beetling, overhanging hill that was crowned with the little wood of Seugnon, an offshoot of the forest of la Falizette. At the summit of the hill, at the carrefour of la Maison-Rouge, the road from Donchery to Vrigne-aux-Bois debouched into the Mezieres pike.

"See, that is the road by which we might retreat on Mezieres."

Even as he spoke the first gun was fired from Saint-Menges. The fog still hung over the bottom-lands in shreds and patches, and through it they dimly descried a shadowy body of men moving through the Saint-Albert defile.

"Ah, they are there," continued Maurice, instinctively lowering his voice. "Too late, too late; they have intercepted us!"

It was not eight o'clock. The guns, which were thundering more fiercely than ever in the direction of Bazeilles, now also began to make themselves heard at the eastward, in the valley of la Givonne, which was hid from view; it was the army of the Crown Prince of Saxony, debouching from the Chevalier wood and attacking the 1st corps, in front of Daigny village; and now that the XIth Prussian corps, moving on Floing, had opened fire on General Douay's troops, the investment was complete at every point of the great periphery of several leagues' extent, and the action was general all along the line.

Maurice suddenly perceived the enormity of their blunder in not retreating on Mezieres during the night; but as yet the consequences were not clear to him; he could not foresee all the disaster that was to result from that fatal error of judgment. Moved by some indefinable instinct of danger, he looked with apprehension on the adjacent heights that commanded the plateau de l'Algerie. If time had not been allowed them to make good their retreat, why had they not backed up against the frontier and occupied those heights of Illy and Saint-Menges, whence, if they could not maintain their position, they would at least have been free to cross over into Belgium? There were two points that appeared to him especially threatening, the mamelon of Hattoy, to the north of Floing on the left, and the Calvary of Illy, a stone cross with a linden tree on either side, the highest bit of ground in the surrounding country, to the right. General Douay was keenly alive to the importance of these eminences, and the day before had sent two battalions to occupy Hattoy; but the men, feeling that they were "in the air" and too remote from support, had fallen back early that morning. It was understood that the left wing of the 1st corps was to take care of the Calvary of Illy. The wide expanse of naked country between Sedan and the Ardennes forest was intersected by deep ravines, and the key of the position was manifestly there, in the shadow of that cross and the two lindens, whence their guns might sweep the fields in every direction for a long distance.

Two more cannon shots rang out, quickly succeeded by a salvo; they detected the bluish smoke rising from the underbrush of a low hill to the left of Saint-Menges.

"Our turn is coming now," said Jean.

Nothing more startling occurred just then, however. The men, still preserving their formation and standing at ordered arms, found something to occupy their attention in the fine appearance made by the 2d division, posted in front of Floing, with their left refused and facing the Meuse, so as to guard against a possible attack from that quarter. The ground to the east, as far as the wood of la Garenne, beneath Illy village, was held by the 3d division, while the 1st, which had lost heavily at Beaumont, formed a second line. All night long the engineers had been busy with pick and shovel, and even after the Prussians had opened fire they were still digging away at their shelter trenches and throwing up epaulments.

Then a sharp rattle of musketry, quickly silenced, however, was heard proceeding from a point beneath Floing, and Captain Beaudoin received orders to move his company three hundred yards to the rear. Their new position was in a great field of cabbages, upon reaching which the captain made his men lie down. The sun had not yet drunk up the moisture that had descended on the vegetables in the darkness, and every fold and crease of the thick, golden-green leaves was filled with trembling drops, as pellucid and luminous as brilliants of the fairest water.

"Sight for four hundred yards," the captain ordered.

Maurice rested the barrel of his musket on a cabbage that reared its head conveniently before him, but it was impossible to see anything in his recumbent position: only the blurred surface of the fields traversed by his level glance, diversified by an occasional tree or shrub. Giving Jean, who was beside him, a nudge with his elbow, he asked what they were to do there. The corporal, whose experience in such matters was greater, pointed to an elevation not far away, where a battery was just taking its position; it was evident that they had been placed there to support that battery, should there be need of their services. Maurice, wondering whether Honore and his guns were not of the party, raised his head to look, but the reserve artillery was at the rear, in the shelter of a little grove of trees.

"Nom de Dieu!" yelled Rochas, "will you lie down!"

And Maurice had barely more than complied with this intimation when a shell passed screaming over him. From that time forth there seemed to be no end to them. The enemy's gunners were slow in obtaining the range, their first projectiles passing over and landing well to the rear of the battery, which was now opening in reply. Many of their shells, too, fell upon the soft ground, in which they buried themselves without exploding, and for a time there was a great display of rather heavy wit at the expense of those bloody sauerkraut eaters.

"Well, well!" said Loubet, "their fireworks are a fizzle!"

"They ought to take them in out of the rain," sneered Chouteau.

Even Rochas thought it necessary to say something. "Didn't I tell you that the dunderheads don't know enough even to point a gun?"

But they were less inclined to laugh when a shell burst only ten yards from them and sent a shower of earth flying over the company; Loubet affected to make light of it by ordering his comrades to get out their brushes from the knapsacks, but Chouteau suddenly became very pale and had not a word to say. He had never been under fire, nor had Pache and Lapoulle, nor any member of the squad, in fact, except Jean. Over eyes that had suddenly lost their brightness lids flickered tremulously; voices had an unnatural, muffled sound, as if arrested by some obstruction in the throat. Maurice, who was sufficiently master of himself as yet, endeavored to diagnose his symptoms; he could not be afraid, for he was not conscious that he was in danger; he only felt a slight sensation of discomfort in the epigastric region, and his head seemed strangely light and empty; ideas and images came and went independent of his will. His recollection of the brave show made by the troops of the 2d division made him hopeful, almost to buoyancy; victory appeared certain to him if only they might be allowed to go at the enemy with the bayonet.

"Listen!" he murmured, "how the flies buzz; the place is full of them." Thrice he had heard something that sounded like the humming of a swarm of bees.

"That was not a fly," Jean said, with a laugh. "It was a bullet."

Again and again the hum of those invisible wings made itself heard. The men craned their necks and looked about them with eager interest; their curiosity was uncontrollable—would not allow them to remain quiet.

"See here," Loubet said mysteriously to Lapoulle, with a view to raise a laugh at the expense of his simple-minded comrade, "when you see a bullet coming toward you you must raise your forefinger before your nose—like that; it divides the air, and the bullet will go by to the right or left."

"But I can't see them," said Lapoulle.

A loud guffaw burst from those near.

"Oh, crickey! he says he can't see them! Open your garret windows, stupid! See! there's one—see! there's another. Didn't you see that one? It was of the most beautiful green."

And Lapoulle rolled his eyes and stared, placing his finger before his nose, while Pache fingered the scapular he wore and wished it was large enough to shield his entire person.

Rochas, who had remained on his feet, spoke up and said jocosely:

"Children, there is no objection to your ducking to the shells when you see them coming. As for the bullets, it is useless; they are too numerous!"

At that very instant a soldier in the front rank was struck on the head by a fragment of an exploding shell. There was no outcry; simply a spurt of blood and brain, and all was over.

"Poor devil!" tranquilly said Sergeant Sapin, who was quite cool and exceedingly pale. "Next!"

But the uproar had by this time become so deafening that the men could no longer hear one another's voice; Maurice's nerves, in particular, suffered from the infernal charivari. The neighboring battery was banging away as fast as the gunners could load the pieces; the continuous roar seemed to shake the ground, and the mitrailleuses were even more intolerable with their rasping, grating, grunting noise. Were they to remain forever reclining there among the cabbages? There was nothing to be seen, nothing to be learned; no one had any idea how the battle was going. And was it a battle, after all—a genuine affair? All that Maurice could make out, projecting his eyes along the level surface of the fields, was the rounded, wood-clad summit of Hattoy in the remote distance, and still unoccupied. Neither was there a Prussian to be seen anywhere on the horizon; the only evidence of life were the faint, blue smoke-wreaths that rose and floated an instant in the sunlight. Chancing to turn his head, he was greatly surprised to behold at the bottom of a deep, sheltered valley, surrounded by precipitous heights, a peasant calmly tilling his little field, driving the plow through the furrow with the assistance of a big white horse. Why should he lose a day? The corn would keep growing, let them fight as they would, and folks must live.

Unable longer to control his impatience, the young man jumped to his feet. He had a fleeting vision of the batteries of Saint-Menges, crowned with tawny vapors and spewing shot and shell upon them; he had also time to see, what he had seen before and had not forgotten, the road from Saint-Albert's pass black with minute moving objects—the swarming hordes of the invader. Then Jean seized him by the legs and pulled him violently to his place again.

"Are you crazy? Do you want to leave your bones here?"

And Rochas chimed in:

"Lie down, will you! What am I to do with such d——d rascals, who get themselves killed without orders!"

"But you don't lie down, lieutenant," said Maurice.

"That's a different thing. I have to know what is going on."

Captain Beaudoin, too, kept his legs like a man, but never opened his lips to say an encouraging word to his men, having nothing in common with them. He appeared nervous and unable to remain long in one place, striding up and down the field, impatiently awaiting orders.

No orders came, nothing occurred to relieve their suspense. Maurice's knapsack was causing him horrible suffering; it seemed to be crushing his back and chest in that recumbent position, so painful when maintained for any length of time. The men had been cautioned against throwing away their sacks unless in case of actual necessity, and he kept turning over, first on his right side, then on the left, to ease himself a moment of his burden by resting it on the ground. The shells continued to fall around them, but the German gunners did not succeed in getting the exact range; no one was killed after the poor fellow who lay there on his stomach with his skull fractured.

"Say, is this thing to last all day?" Maurice finally asked Jean, in sheer desperation.

"Like enough. At Solferino they put us in a field of carrots, and there we stayed five mortal hours with our noses to the ground." Then he added, like the sensible fellow he was: "Why do you grumble? we are not so badly off here. You will have an opportunity to distinguish yourself before the day is over. Let everyone have his chance, don't you see; if we should all be killed at the beginning there would be none left for the end."

"Look," Maurice abruptly broke in, "look at that smoke over Hattoy. They have taken Hattoy; we shall have plenty of music to dance to now!"

For a moment his burning curiosity, which he was conscious was now for the first time beginning to be dashed with personal fear, had sufficient to occupy it; his gaze was riveted on the rounded summit of the mamelon, the only elevation that was within his range of vision, dominating the broad expanse of plain that lay level with his eye. Hattoy was too far distant to permit him to distinguish the gunners of the batteries that the Prussians had posted there; he could see nothing at all, in fact, save the smoke that at each discharge rose above a thin belt of woods that served to mask the guns. The enemy's occupation of the position, of which General Douay had been forced to abandon the defense, was, as Maurice had instinctively felt, an event of the gravest importance and destined to result in the most disastrous consequences; its possessors would have entire command of all the surrounding plateau. This was quickly seen to be the case, for the batteries that opened on the second division of the 7th corps did fearful execution. They had now perfected their range, and the French battery, near which Beaudoin's company was stationed, had two men killed in quick succession. A quartermaster's man in the company had his left heel carried away by a splinter and began to howl most dismally, as if visited by a sudden attack of madness.

"Shut up, you great calf!" said Rochas. "What do you mean by yelling like that for a little scratch!"

The man suddenly ceased his outcries and subsided into a stupid silence, nursing his foot in his hand.

And still the tremendous artillery duel raged, and the death-dealing missiles went screaming over the recumbent ranks of the regiments that lay there on the sullen, sweltering plain, where no thing of life was to be seen beneath the blazing sun. The crashing thunder, the destroying hurricane, were masters in that solitude, and many long hours would pass before the end. But even thus early in the day the Germans had demonstrated the superiority of their artillery; their percussion shells had an enormous range, and exploded, with hardly an exception, on reaching their destination, while the French time-fuse shells, with a much shorter range, burst for the most part in the air and were wasted. And there was nothing left for the poor fellows exposed to that murderous fire save to hug the ground and make themselves as small as possible; they were even denied the privilege of firing in reply, which would have kept their mind occupied and given them a measure of relief; but upon whom or what were they to direct their rifles? since there was not a living soul to be seen upon the entire horizon!

"Are we never to have a shot at them? I would give a dollar for just one chance!" said Maurice, in a frenzy of impatience. "It is disgusting to have them blazing away at us like this and not be allowed to answer."

"Be patient; the time will come," Jean imperturbably replied.

Their attention was attracted by the sound of mounted men approaching on their left, and turning their heads they beheld General Douay, who, accompanied by his staff, had come galloping up to see how his troops were behaving under the terrible fire from Hattoy. He appeared well pleased with what he saw and was in the act of making some suggestions to the officers grouped around him, when, emerging from a sunken road, General Bourgain-Desfeuilles also rode up. This officer, though he owed his advancement to "influence" was wedded to the antiquated African routine and had learned nothing by experience, sat his horse with great composure under the storm of projectiles. He was shouting to the men and gesticulating wildly, after the manner of Rochas: "They are coming, they will be here right away, and then we'll let them have the bayonet!" when he caught sight of General Douay and drew up to his side.

"Is it true that the marshal is wounded, general?" he asked.

"It is but too true, unfortunately. I received a note from Ducrot only a few minutes ago, in which he advises me of the fact, and also notifies me that, by the marshal's appointment, he is in command of the army."

"Ah! so it is Ducrot who is to have his place! And what are the orders now?"

The general shook his head sorrowfully. He had felt that the army was doomed, and for the last twenty-four hours had been strenuously recommending the occupation of Illy and Saint-Menges in order to keep a way of retreat open on Mezieres.

"Ducrot will carry out the plan we talked of yesterday: the whole army is to be concentrated on the plateau of Illy."

And he repeated his previous gesture, as if to say it was too late.

His words were partly inaudible in the roar of the artillery, but Maurice caught their significance clearly enough, and it left him dumfounded by astonishment and alarm. What! Marshal MacMahon wounded since early that morning, General Ducrot commanding in his place for the last two hours, the entire army retreating to the northward of Sedan—and all these important events kept from the poor devils of soldiers who were squandering their life's blood! and all their destinies, dependent on the life of a single man, were to be intrusted to the direction of fresh and untried hands! He had a distinct consciousness of the fate that was in reserve for the army of Chalons, deprived of its commander, destitute of any guiding principle of action, dragged purposelessly in this direction and in that, while the Germans went straight and swift to their preconcerted end with mechanical precision and directness.

Bourgain-Desfeuilles had wheeled his horse and was moving away, when General Douay, to whom a grimy, dust-stained hussar had galloped up with another dispatch, excitedly summoned him back.

"General! General!"

His voice rang out so loud and clear, with such an accent of surprise, that it drowned the uproar of the guns.

"General, Ducrot is no longer in command; de Wimpffen is chief. You know he reached here yesterday, just in the very thick of the disaster at Beaumont, to relieve de Failly at the head of the 5th corps—and he writes me that he has written instructions from the Minister of War assigning him to the command of the army in case the post should become vacant. And there is to be no more retreating; the orders now are to reoccupy our old positions, and defend them to the last."

General Bourgain-Desfeuilles drank in the tidings, his eyes bulging with astonishment. "Nom de Dieu!" he at last succeeded in ejaculating, "one would like to know—But it is no business of mine, anyhow." And off he galloped, not allowing himself to be greatly agitated by this unexpected turn of affairs, for he had gone into the war solely in the hope of seeing his name raised a grade higher in the army list, and it was his great desire to behold the end of the beastly campaign as soon as possible, since it was productive of so little satisfaction to anyone.

Then there was an explosion of derision and contempt among the men of Beaudoin's company. Maurice said nothing, but he shared the opinion of Chouteau and Loubet, who chaffed and blackguarded everyone without mercy. "See-saw, up and down, move as I pull the string! A fine gang they were, those generals! they understood one another; they were not going to pull all the blankets off the bed! What was a poor devil of a soldier to do when he had such leaders put over him? Three commanders in two hours' time, three great numskulls, none of whom knew what was the right thing to do, and all of them giving different orders! Demoralized, were they? Good Heavens, it was enough to demoralize God Almighty himself, and all His angels!" And the inevitable accusation of treason was again made to do duty; Ducrot and de Wimpffen wanted to get three millions apiece out of Bismarck, as MacMahon had done.

Alone in advance of his staff General Douay sat on his horse a long time, his gaze bent on the distant positions of the enemy and in his eyes an expression of infinite melancholy. He made a minute and protracted observation of Hattoy, the shells from which came tumbling almost at his very feet; then, giving a glance at the plateau of Illy, called up an officer to carry an order to the brigade of the 5th corps that he had borrowed the day previous from General de Wimpffen, and which served to connect his right with the left of General Ducrot. He was distinctly heard to say these words:

"If the Prussians should once get possession of the Calvary it would be impossible for us to hold this position an hour; we should be driven into Sedan."

He rode off and was lost to view, together with his escort, at the entrance of the sunken road, and the German fire became hotter than before. They had doubtless observed the presence of the group of mounted officers; but now the shells, which hitherto had come from the front, began to fall upon them laterally, from the left; the batteries at Frenois, together with one which the enemy had carried across the river and posted on the peninsula of Iges, had established, in connection with the guns on Hattoy, an enfilading fire which swept the plateau de l'Algerie in its entire length and breadth. The position of the company now became most lamentable; the men, with death in front of them and on their flank, knew not which way to turn or which of the menacing perils to guard themselves against. In rapid succession three men were killed outright and two severely wounded.

It was then that Sergeant Sapin met the death that he had predicted for himself. He had turned his head, and caught sight of the approaching missile when it was too late for him to avoid it.

"Ah, here it is!" was all he said.

There was no terror in the thin face, with its big handsome eyes; it was only pale; very pale and inexpressibly mournful. The wound was in the abdomen.

"Oh! do not leave me here," he pleaded; "take me to the ambulance, I beseech you. Take me to the rear."

Rochas endeavored to silence him, and it was on his brutal lips to say that it was useless to imperil two comrades' lives for one whose wound was so evidently mortal, when his better nature made its influence felt and he murmured:

"Be patient for a little, my poor boy, and the litter-bearers will come and get you."

But the wretched man, whose tears were now flowing, kept crying, as one distraught that his dream of happiness was vanishing with his trickling life-blood:

"Take me away, take me away—"

Finally Captain Beaudoin, whose already unstrung nerves were further irritated by his pitiful cries, called for two volunteers to carry him to a little piece of woods a short way off where a flying ambulance had been established. Chouteau and Loubet jumped to their feet simultaneously, anticipating the others, seized the sergeant, one of them by the shoulders, the other by the legs, and bore him away on a run. They had gone but a little way, however, when they felt the body becoming rigid in the final convulsion; he was dying.

"I say, he's dead," exclaimed Loubet. "Let's leave him here."

But Chouteau, without relaxing his speed, angrily replied:

"Go ahead, you booby, will you! Do you take me for a fool, to leave him here and have them call us back!"

They pursued their course with the corpse until they came to the little wood, threw it down at the foot of a tree, and went their way. That was the last that was seen of them until nightfall.

The battery beside them had been strengthened by three additional guns; the cannonade on either side went on with increased fury, and in the hideous uproar terror—a wild, unreasoning terror—filled Maurice's soul. It was his first experience of the sensation; he had not until now felt that cold sweat trickling down his back, that terrible sinking at the pit of the stomach, that unconquerable desire to get on his feet and run, yelling and screaming, from the field. It was nothing more than the strain from which his nervous, high-strung temperament was suffering from reflex action; but Jean, who was observing him narrowly, detected the incipient crisis in the wandering, vacant eyes, and seizing him with his strong hand, held him down firmly at his side. The corporal lectured him paternally in a whisper, not mincing his words, but employing good, vigorous language to restore him to a sense of self-respect, for he knew by experience that a man in panic is not to be coaxed out of his cowardice. There were others also who were showing the white feather, among them Pache, who was whimpering involuntarily, in the low, soft voice of a little baby, his eyes suffused with tears. Lapoulle's stomach betrayed him and he was very ill; and there were many others who also found relief in vomiting, amid their comrade's loud jeers and laughter, which helped to restore their courage to them all.

"My God!" ejaculated Maurice, ghastly pale, his teeth chattering. "My God!"

Jean shook him roughly. "You infernal coward, are you going to be sick like those fellows over yonder? Behave yourself, or I'll box your ears."

He was trying to put heart into his friend by gruff but friendly speeches like the above, when they suddenly beheld a dozen dark forms emerging from a little wood upon their front and about four hundred yards away. Their spiked helmets announced them to be Prussians; the first Prussians they had had within reach of their rifles since the opening of the campaign. This first squad was succeeded by others, and in front of their position the little dust clouds that rose where the French shells struck were distinctly visible. It was all very vivid and clear-cut in the transparent air of morning; the Germans, outlined against the dark forest, presented the toy-like appearance of those miniature soldiers of lead that are the delight of children; then, as the enemy's shells began to drop in their vicinity with uncomfortable frequency, they withdrew and were lost to sight within the wood whence they had come.

But Beaudoin's company had seen them there once, and to their eyes they were there still; the chassepots seemed to go off of their own accord. Maurice was the first man to discharge his piece; Jean, Pache, Lapoulle and the others all followed suit. There had been no order given to commence firing, and the captain made an attempt to check it, but desisted upon Rochas's representation that it was absolutely necessary as a measure of relief for the men's pent-up feelings. So, then, they were at liberty to shoot at last, they could use up those cartridges that they had been lugging around with them for the last month, without ever burning a single one! The effect on Maurice in particular was electrical; the noise he made had the effect of dispelling his fear and blunting the keenness of his sensations. The little wood had resumed its former deserted aspect; not a leaf stirred, no more Prussians showed themselves; and still they kept on blazing away as madly as ever at the immovable trees.

Raising his eyes presently Maurice was startled to see Colonel de Vineuil sitting his big horse at no great distance, man and steed impassive and motionless as if carved from stone, patient were they under the leaden hail, with face turned toward the enemy. The entire regiment was now collected in that vicinity, the other companies being posted in the adjacent fields; the musketry fire seemed to be drawing nearer. The young man also beheld the regimental colors a little to the rear, borne aloft by the sturdy arm of the standard-bearer, but it was no longer the phantom flag that he had seen that morning, shrouded in mist and fog; the golden eagle flashed and blazed in the fierce sunlight, and the tri-colored silk, despite the rents and stains of many a battle, flaunted its bright hues defiantly to the breeze. Waving in the breath of the cannon, floating proudly against the blue of heaven, it shone like an emblem of victory.

And why, now that the day of battle had arrived, should not victory perch upon that banner? With that reflection Maurice and his companions kept on industriously wasting their powder on the distant wood, producing havoc there among the leaves and twigs.

III.

Sleep did not visit Henriette's eyes that night. She knew her husband to be a prudent man, but the thought that he was in Bazeilles, so near the German lines, was cause to her of deep anxiety. She tried to soothe her apprehensions by reminding herself that she had his solemn promise to return at the first appearance of danger; it availed not, and at every instant she detected herself listening to catch the sound of his footstep on the stair. At ten o'clock, as she was about to go to bed, she opened her window, and resting her elbows on the sill, gazed out into the night.

The darkness was intense; looking downward, she could scarce discern the pavement of the Rue des Voyards, a narrow, obscure passage, overhung by old frowning mansions. Further on, in the direction of the college, a smoky street lamp burned dimly. A nitrous exhalation rose from the street; the squall of a vagrant cat; the heavy step of a belated soldier. From the city at her back came strange and alarming sounds: the patter of hurrying feet, an ominous, incessant rumbling, a muffled murmur without a name that chilled her blood. Her heart beat loudly in her bosom as she bent her ear to listen, and still she heard not the familiar echo of her husband's step at the turning of the street below.

Hours passed, and now distant lights that began to twinkle in the open fields beyond the ramparts excited afresh her apprehensions. It was so dark that it cost her an effort of memory to recall localities. She knew that the broad expanse that lay beneath her, reflecting a dim light, was the flooded meadows, and that flame that blazed up and was suddenly extinguished, surely it must be on la Marfee. But never, to her certain knowledge, had there been farmer's house or peasant's cottage on those heights; what, then, was the meaning of that light? And then on every hand, at Pont-Maugis, Noyers, Frenois, other fires arose, coruscating fitfully for an instant and giving mysterious indication of the presence of the swarming host that lay hidden in the bosom of the night. Yet more: there were strange sounds and voices in the air, subdued murmurings such as she had never heard before, and that made her start in terror; the stifled hum of marching men, the neighing and snorting of steeds, the clash of arms, hoarse words of command, given in guttural accents; an evil dream of a demoniac crew, a witch's sabbat, in the depths of those unholy shades. Suddenly a single cannon-shot rang out, ear-rending, adding fresh terror to the dead silence that succeeded it. It froze her very marrow; what could it mean? A signal, doubtless, telling of the successful completion of some movement, announcing that everything was ready, down there, and that now the sun might rise.

It was about two o'clock when Henriette, forgetting even to close her window, at last threw herself, fully dressed, upon her bed. Her anxiety and fatigue had stupefied her and benumbed her faculties. What could ail her, thus to shiver and burn alternately, she who was always so calm and self-reliant, moving with so light a step that those about her were unconscious of her existence? Finally she sank into a fitful, broken slumber that brought with it no repose, in which was present still that persistent sensation of impending evil that filled the dusky heavens. All at once, arousing her from her unrefreshing stupor, the firing commenced again, faint and muffled in the distance, not a single shot this time, but peal after peal following one another in quick succession. Trembling, she sat upright in bed. The firing continued. Where was she? The place seemed strange to her; she could not distinguish the objects in her chamber, which appeared to be filled with dense clouds of smoke. Then she remembered: the fog must have rolled in from the near-by river and entered the room through the window. Without, the distant firing was growing fiercer. She leaped from her bed and ran to the casement to listen.

Four o'clock was striking from a steeple in Sedan, and day was breaking, tingeing the purplish mists with a sickly, sinister light. It was impossible to discern objects; even the college buildings, distant but a few yards, were undistinguishable. Where could the firing be, mon Dieu! Her first thought was for her brother Maurice; for the reports were so indistinct that they seemed to her to come from the north, above the city; then, listening more attentively, her doubt became certainty; the cannonading was there, before her, and she trembled for her husband. It was surely at Bazeilles. For a little time, however, she suffered herself to be cheered by a ray of hope, for there were moments when the reports seemed to come from the right. Perhaps the fighting was at Donchery, where she knew that the French had not succeeded in blowing up the bridge. Then she lapsed into a condition of most horrible uncertainty; it seemed to be now at Donchery, now at Bazeilles; which, it was impossible to decide, there was such a ringing, buzzing sensation in her head. At last the feeling of suspense became so acute that she felt she could not endure it longer; she must know; every nerve in her body was quivering with the ungovernable desire, so she threw a shawl over her shoulders and left the house in quest of news.

When she had descended and was in the street Henriette hesitated a brief moment, for the little light that was in the east had not yet crept downward along the weather-blackened house-fronts to the roadway, and in the old city, shrouded in opaque fog, the darkness still reigned impenetrable. In the tap-room of a low pot-house in the Rue au Beurre, dimly lighted by a tallow candle, she saw two drunken Turcos and a woman. It was not until she turned into the Rue Maqua that she encountered any signs of life: soldiers slinking furtively along the sidewalk and hugging the walls, deserters probably, on the lookout for a place in which to hide; a stalwart trooper with despatches, searching for his captain and knocking thunderously at every door; a group of fat burghers, trembling with fear lest they had tarried there too long, and preparing to crowd themselves into one small carriole if so be they might yet reach Bouillon, in Belgium, whither half the population of Sedan had emigrated within the last two days. She instinctively turned her steps toward the Sous-Prefecture, where she might depend on receiving information, and her desire to avoid meeting acquaintances determined her to take a short cut through lanes and by-ways. On reaching the Rue du Four and the Rue des Laboureurs, however, she found an obstacle in her way; the place had been pre-empted by the ordnance department, and guns, caissons, forges were there in interminable array, having apparently been parked away in that remote corner the day before and then forgotten there. There was not so much as a sentry to guard them. It sent a chill to her heart to see all that artillery lying there silent and ineffective, sleeping its neglected sleep in the concealment of those deserted alleys. She was compelled to retrace her steps, therefore, which she did by passing through the Place du College to the Grande-Rue, where in front of the Hotel de l'Europe she saw a group of orderlies holding the chargers of some general officers, whose high-pitched voices were audible from the brilliantly lighted dining room. On the Place du Rivage and the Place Turenne the crowd was even greater still, composed of anxious groups of citizens, with women and children interspersed among the struggling, terror-stricken throng, hurrying in every direction; and there she saw a general emerge from the Hotel of the Golden Cross, swearing like a pirate, and spur his horse off up the street at a mad gallop, careless whom he might overturn. For a moment she seemed about to enter the Hotel de Ville, then changed her mind, and taking the Rue du Pont-de-Meuse, pushed on to the Sous-Prefecture.

Never had Sedan appeared to her in a light so tragically sinister as now, when she beheld it in the livid, forbidding light of early dawn, enveloped in its shroud of fog. The houses were lifeless and silent as tombs; many of them had been empty and abandoned for the last two days, others the terrified owners had closely locked and barred. Shuddering, the city awoke to the cares and occupations of the new day; the morning was fraught with chill misery in those streets, still half deserted, peopled only by a few frightened pedestrians and those hurrying fugitives, the remnant of the exodus of previous days. Soon the sun would rise and send down its cheerful light upon the scene; soon the city, overwhelmed in the swift-rising tide of disaster, would be crowded as it had never been before. It was half-past five o'clock; the roar of the cannon, caught and deadened among the tall dingy houses, sounded more faintly in her ears.

At the Sous-Prefecture Henriette had some acquaintance with the concierge's daughter, Rose by name, a pretty little blonde of refined appearance who was employed in Delaherche's factory. She made her way at once to the lodge; the mother was not there, but Rose received her with her usual amiability.

"Oh! dear lady, we are so tired we can scarcely stand; mamma has gone to lie down and rest a while. Just think! all night long people have been coming and going, and we have not been able to get a wink of sleep."

And burning to tell all the wonderful sights that she had been witness to since the preceding day, she did not wait to be questioned, but ran on volubly with her narrative.

"As for the marshal, he slept very well, but that poor Emperor! you can't think what suffering he has to endure! Yesterday evening, do you know, I had gone upstairs to help give out the linen, and as I entered the apartment that adjoins his dressing-room I heard groans, oh, such groans! just like someone dying. I thought a moment and knew it must be the Emperor, and I was so frightened I couldn't move; I just stood and trembled. It seems he has some terrible complaint that makes him cry out that way. When there are people around he holds in, but as soon as he is alone it is too much for him, and he groans and shrieks in a way to make your hair stand on end."

"Do you know where the fighting is this morning?" asked Henriette, desiring to check her loquacity.

Rose dismissed the question with a wave of her little hand and went on with her narrative.

"That made me curious to know more, you see, and I went upstairs four or five times during the night and listened, and every time it was just the same; I don't believe he was quiet an instant all night long, or got a minute's sleep. Oh! what a terrible thing it is to suffer like that with all he has to worry him! for everything is upside down; it is all a most dreadful mess. Upon my word, I believe those generals are out of their senses; such ghostly faces and frightened eyes! And people coming all the time, and doors banging and some men scolding and others crying, and the whole place like a sailor's boarding-house; officers drinking from bottles and going to bed in their boots! The Emperor is the best of the whole lot, and the one who gives least trouble, in the corner where he conceals himself and his suffering!" Then, in reply to Henriette's reiterated question: "The fighting? there has been fighting at Bazeilles this morning. A mounted officer brought word of it to the marshal, who went immediately to notify the Emperor. The marshal has been gone ten minutes, and I shouldn't wonder if the Emperor intends to follow him, for they are dressing him upstairs. I just now saw them combing him and plastering his face with all sorts of cosmetics."

But Henriette, having finally learned what she desired to know, rose to go.

"Thank you, Rose. I am in somewhat of a hurry this morning."

The young girl went with her to the street door, and took leave of her with a courteous:

"Glad to have been of service to you, Madame Weiss. I know that anything said to you will go no further."

Henriette hurried back to her house in the Rue des Voyards. She felt quite certain that her husband would have returned, and even reflected that he would be alarmed at not finding her there, and hastened her steps in consequence. As she drew near the house she raised her eyes in the expectation of seeing him at the window watching for her, but the window, wide open as she had left it when she went out, was vacant, and when she had run up the stairs and given a rapid glance through her three rooms, it was with a sinking heart that she saw they were untenanted save for the chill fog and continuous roar of the cannonade. The distant firing was still going on. She went and stood for a moment at the window; although the encircling wall of vapor was not less dense than it had been before, she seemed to have a clearer apprehension, now that she had received oral information, of the details of the conflict raging at Bazeilles, the grinding sound of the mitrailleuses, the crashing volleys of the French batteries answering the German batteries in the distance. The reports seemed to be drawing nearer to the city, the battle to be waxing fiercer and fiercer with every moment.

Why did not Weiss return? He had pledged himself so faithfully not to outstay the first attack! And Henriette began to be seriously alarmed, depicting to herself the various obstacles that might have detained him: perhaps he had not been able to leave the village, perhaps the roads were blocked or rendered impassable by the projectiles. It might even be that something had happened him, but she put the thought aside and would not dwell on it, preferring to view things on their brighter side and finding in hope her safest mainstay and reliance. For an instant she harbored the design of starting out and trying to find her husband, but there were considerations that seemed to render that course inadvisable: supposing him to have started on his return, what would become of her should she miss him on the way? and what would be his anxiety should he come in and find her absent? Her guiding principle in all her thoughts and actions was her gentle, affectionate devotedness, and she saw nothing strange or out of the way in a visit to Bazeilles under such extraordinary circumstances, accustomed as she was, like an affectionate little woman, to perform her duty in silence and do the thing that she deemed best for their common interest. Where her husband was, there was her place; that was all there was about it.

She gave a sudden start and left the window, saying:

"Monsieur Delaherche, how could I forget—"

It had just come to her recollection that the cloth manufacturer had also passed the night at Bazeilles, and if he had returned would be able to give her the intelligence she wanted. She ran swiftly down the stairs again. In place of taking the more roundabout way by the Rue des Voyards, she crossed the little courtyard of her house and entered the passage that conducted to the huge structure that fronted on the Rue Maqua. As she came out into the great central garden, paved with flagstones now and retaining of its pristine glories only a few venerable trees, magnificent century-old elms, she was astonished to see a sentry mounting guard at the door of a carriage-house; then it occurred to her that she had been told the day before that the camp chests of the 7th corps had been deposited there for safe keeping, and it produced a strange impression on her mind that all the gold, millions, it was said to amount to, should be lying in that shed while the men for whom it was destined were being killed not far away. As she was about to ascend the private staircase, however, that conducted to the apartment of Gilberte, young Madame Delaherche, she experienced another surprise in an encounter that startled her so that she retraced her steps a little way, doubtful whether it would not be better to abandon her intention, and go home again. An officer, a captain, had crossed her path, as noiselessly as a phantom and vanishing as swiftly, and yet she had had time to recognize him, having seen him in the past at Gilberte's house in Charleville, in the days when she was still Madame Maginot. She stepped back a few steps in the courtyard and raised her eyes to the two tall windows of the bedroom, the blinds of which were closed, then dismissed her scruples and entered.

Upon reaching the first floor, availing herself of that privilege of old acquaintanceship by virtue of which one woman often drops in upon another for an unceremonious early morning chat, she was about to knock at the door of the dressing-room, but apparently someone had left the room hastily and failed to secure the door, so that it was standing ajar, and all she had to do was give it a push to find herself in the dressing room, whence she passed into the bedroom. From the lofty ceiling of the latter apartment depended voluminous curtains of red velvet, protecting the large double bed. The warm, moist air was fragrant with a faint perfume of Persian lilac, and there was no sound to break the silence save a gentle, regular respiration, scarcely audible.

"Gilberte!" said Henriette, very softly.

The young woman was sleeping peacefully, and the dim light that entered the room between the red curtains of the high windows displayed her exquisitely rounded head resting upon a naked arm and her profusion of beautiful hair straying in disorder over the pillow. Her lips were parted in a smile.

"Gilberte!"

She slightly moved and stretched her arms, without opening her eyes.

"Yes, yes; good-by. Oh! please—" Then, raising her head and recognizing Henriette: "What, is it you! How late is it?"

When she learned that it had not yet struck six she seemed disconcerted, assuming a sportive air to hide her embarrassment, saying it was unfair to come waking people up at such an hour. Then, to her friend, questioning her about her husband, she made answer:

"Why, he has not returned; I don't look for him much before nine o'clock. What makes you so eager to see him at this hour of the morning?"

Henriette's voice had a trace of sternness in it as she answered, seeing the other so smiling, so dull of comprehension in her happy waking.

"I tell you there has been fighting all the morning at Bazeilles, and I am anxious about my husband."

"Oh, my dear," exclaimed Gilberte, "I assure you there is not the slightest reason for your feeling so. My husband is so prudent that he would have been home long ago had there been any danger. Until you see him back here you may rest easy, take my word for it."

Henriette was struck by the justness of the argument; Delaherche, it was true, was distinctly not a man to expose himself uselessly. She was reassured, and went and drew the curtains and threw back the blinds; the tawny light from without, where the sun was beginning to pierce the fog with his golden javelins, streamed in a bright flood into the apartment. One of the windows was part way open, and in the soft air of the spacious bedroom, but now so close and stuffy, the two women could hear the sound of the guns. Gilberte, half recumbent, her elbow resting on the pillow, gazed out upon the sky with her lustrous, vacant eyes.

"So, then, they are fighting," she murmured. Her chemise had slipped downward, exposing a rosy, rounded shoulder, half hidden beneath the wandering raven tresses, and her person exhaled a subtle, penetrating odor, the odor of love. "They are fighting, so early in the morning, mon Dieu! It would be ridiculous if it were not for the horror of it."

But Henriette, in looking about the room, had caught sight of a pair of gauntlets, the gloves of a man, lying forgotten on a small table, and she started perceptibly. Gilberte blushed deeply, and extending her arms with a conscious, caressing movement, drew her friend to her and rested her head upon her bosom.

"Yes," she almost whispered, "I saw that you noticed it. Darling, you must not judge me too severely. He is an old friend; I told you all about it at Charleville, long ago, you remember." Her voice sank lower still; there was something that sounded very like a laugh of satisfaction in her tender tones. "He pleaded so with me yesterday that I would see him just once more. Just think, this morning he is in action; he may be dead by this. How could I refuse him?" It was all so heroic and so charming, the contrast was so delicious between war's stern reality and tender sentiment; thoughtless as a linnet, she smiled again, notwithstanding her confusion. Never could she have found it in her heart to drive him from her door, when circumstances all were propitious for the interview. "Do you condemn me?"

Henriette had listened to her confidences with a very grave face. Such things surprised her, for she could not understand them; it must be that she was constituted differently from other women. Her heart that morning was with her husband, her brother, down there where the battle was raging. How was it possible that anyone could sleep so peacefully and be so gay and cheerful when the loved ones were in peril?

"But think of your husband, my dear, and of that poor young man as well. Does not your heart yearn to be with them? You do not reflect that their lifeless forms may be brought in and laid before your eyes at any moment."

Gilberte raised her adorable bare arm before her face to shield her vision from the frightful picture.

"O Heaven! what is that you say? It is cruel of you to destroy all the pleasure of my morning in this way. No, no; I won't think of such things. They are too mournful."

Henriette could not refrain from smiling in spite of her anxiety. She was thinking of the days of their girlhood, and how Gilberte's father, Captain de Vineuil, an old naval officer who had been made collector of customs at Charleville when his wounds had incapacitated him for active service, hearing his daughter cough and fearing for her the fate of his young wife, who had been snatched from his arms by that terrible disease, consumption, had sent her to live at a farm-house near Chene-Populeux. The little maid was not nine years old, and already she was a consummate actress—a perfect type of the village coquette, queening it over her playmates, tricked out in what old finery she could lay hands on, adorning herself with bracelets and tiaras made from the silver paper wrappings of the chocolate. She had not changed a bit when, later, at the age of twenty, she married Maginot, the inspector of woods and forests. Mezieres, a dark, gloomy town, surrounded by ramparts, was not to her taste, and she continued to live at Charleville, where the gay, generous life, enlivened by many festivities, suited her better. Her father was dead, and with a husband whom, by reason of his inferior social position, her friends and acquaintances treated with scant courtesy, she was absolutely mistress of her own actions. She did not escape the censure of the stern moralists who inhabit our provincial cities, and in those days was credited with many lovers; but of the gay throng of officers who, thanks to her father's old connection and her kinship to Colonel de Vineuil, disported themselves in her drawing-room, Captain Beaudoin was the only one who had really produced an impression. She was light and frivolous—nothing more—adoring pleasure and living entirely in the present, without the least trace of perverse inclination; and if she accepted the captain's attentions, it is pretty certain that she did it out of good-nature and love of admiration.

"You did very wrong to see him again," Henriette finally said, in her matter-of-fact way.

"Oh! my dear, since I could not possibly do otherwise, and it was only for just that once. You know very well I would die rather than deceive my new husband."

She spoke with much feeling, and seemed distressed to see her friend shake her head disapprovingly. They dropped the subject, and clasped each other in an affectionate embrace, notwithstanding their diametrically different natures. Each could hear the beating of the other's heart, and they might have understood the tongues those organs spoke—one, the slave of pleasure, wasting and squandering all that was best in herself; the other, with the mute heroism of a lofty soul, devoting herself to a single ennobling affection.

"But hark! how the cannon are roaring," Gilberte presently exclaimed. "I must make haste and dress."

The reports sounded more distinctly in the silent room now that their conversation had ceased. Leaving her bed, the young woman accepted the assistance of her friend, not caring to summon her maid, and rapidly made her toilet for the day, in order that she might be ready to go downstairs should she be needed there. As she was completing the arrangement of her hair there was a knock at the door, and, recognizing the voice of the elder Madame Delaherche, she hastened to admit her.

"Certainly, dear mother, you may come in."

With the thoughtlessness that was part of her nature, she allowed the old lady to enter without having first removed the gauntlets from the table. It was in vain that Henriette darted forward to seize them and throw them behind a chair. Madame Delaherche stood glaring for some seconds at the spot where they had been with an expression on her face as if she were slowly suffocating. Then her glance wandered involuntarily from object to object in the room, stopping finally at the great red-curtained bed, the coverings thrown back in disorder.

"I see that Madame Weiss has disturbed your slumbers. Then you were able to sleep, daughter?"

It was plain that she had had another purpose in coming there than to make that speech. Ah, that marriage that her son had insisted on contracting, contrary to her wish, at the mature age of fifty, after twenty years of joyless married life with a shrewish, bony wife; he, who had always until then deferred so to her will, now swayed only by his passion for this gay young widow, lighter than thistle-down! She had promised herself to keep watch over the present, and there was the past coming back to plague her. But ought she to speak? Her life in the household was one of silent reproach and protest; she kept herself almost constantly imprisoned in her chamber, devoting herself rigidly to the observances of her austere religion. Now, however, the wrong was so flagrant that she resolved to speak to her son.

Gilberte blushingly replied, without an excessive manifestation of embarrassment, however:

"Oh, yes, I had a few hours of refreshing sleep. You know that Jules has not returned—"

Madame Delaherche interrupted her with a grave nod of her head. Ever since the artillery had commenced to roar she had been watching eagerly for her son's return, but she was a Spartan mother, and concealed her gnawing anxiety under a cloak of brave silence. And then she remembered what was the object of her visit there.

"Your uncle, the colonel, has sent the regimental surgeon with a note in pencil, to ask if we will allow them to establish a hospital here. He knows that we have abundance of space in the factory, and I have already authorized the gentlemen to make use of the courtyard and the big drying-room. But you should go down in person—"

"Oh, at once, at once!" exclaimed Henriette, hastening toward the door. "We will do what we can to help."

Gilberte also displayed much enthusiasm for her new occupation as nurse; she barely took the time to throw a lace scarf over her head, and the three women went downstairs. When they reached the bottom and stood in the spacious vestibule, looking out through the main entrance, of which the leaves had been thrown wide back, they beheld a crowd collected in the street before the house. A low-hung carriage was advancing slowly along the roadway, a sort of carriole, drawn by a single horse, which a lieutenant of zouaves was leading by the bridle. They took it to be a wounded man that they were bringing to them, the first of their patients.

"Yes, yes! This is the place; this way!"

But they were quickly undeceived. The sufferer recumbent in the carriole was Marshal MacMahon, severely wounded in the hip, who, his hurt having been provisionally cared for in the cottage of a gardener, was now being taken to the Sous-Prefecture. He was bareheaded and partially divested of his clothing, and the gold embroidery on his uniform was tarnished with dust and blood. He spoke no word, but had raised his head from the pillow where it lay and was looking about him with a sorrowful expression, and perceiving the three women where they stood, wide eyed with horror, their joined hands resting on their bosom, in presence of that great calamity, the whole army stricken in the person of its chief at the very beginning of the conflict, he slightly bowed his head, with a faint, paternal smile. A few of those about him removed their hats; others, who had no time for such idle ceremony, were circulating the report of General Ducrot's appointment to the command of the army. It was half-past seven o'clock.

"And what of the Emperor?" Henriette inquired of a bookseller, who was standing at his door.

"He left the city near an hour ago," replied the neighbor. "I was standing by and saw him pass out at the Balan gate. There is a rumor that his head was taken off by a cannon ball."

But this made the grocer across the street furious. "Hold your tongue," he shouted, "it is an infernal lie! None but the brave will leave their bones there to-day!"

When near the Place du College the marshal's carriole was lost to sight in the gathering crowd, among whose numbers the most strange and contradictory reports from the field of battle were now beginning to circulate. The fog was clearing; the streets were bright with sunshine.

A hail, in no gentle terms, was heard proceeding from the courtyard: "Now then, ladies, here is where you are wanted, not outside!"

They all three hastened inside and found themselves in presence of Major Bouroche, who had thrown his uniform coat upon the floor, in a corner of the room, and donned a great white apron. Above the broad expanse of, as yet, unspotted white, his blazing, leonine eyes and enormous head, with shock of harsh, bristling hair, seemed to exhale energy and determination. So terrible did he appear to them that the women were his most humble servants from the very start, obedient to his every sign, treading on one another to anticipate his wishes.

"There is nothing here that is needed. Get me some linen; try and see if you can't find some more mattresses; show my men where the pump is—"

And they ran as if their life was at stake to do his bidding; were so active that they seemed to be ubiquitous.

The factory was admirably adapted for a hospital. The drying-room was a particularly noticeable feature, a vast apartment with numerous and lofty windows for light and ventilation, where they could put in a hundred beds and yet have room to spare, and at one side was a shed that seemed to have been built there especially for the convenience of the operators: three long tables had been brought in, the pump was close at hand, and a small grass-plot adjacent might serve as ante-chamber for the patients while awaiting their turn. And the handsome old elms, with their deliciously cool shade, roofed the spot in most agreeably.

Bouroche had considered it would be best to establish himself in Sedan at the commencement, foreseeing the dreadful slaughter and the inevitable panic that would sooner or later drive the troops to the shelter of the ramparts. All that he had deemed it necessary to leave with the regiment was two flying ambulances and some "first aids," that were to send him in the casualties as rapidly as possible after applying the primary dressings. The details of litter-bearers were all out there, whose duty it was to pick up the wounded under fire, and with them were the ambulance wagons and fourgons of the medical train. The two assistant-surgeons and three hospital stewards whom he had retained, leaving two assistants on the field, would doubtless be sufficient to perform what operations were necessary. He had also a corps of dressers under him. But he was not gentle in manner and language, for all he did was done impulsively, zealously, with all his heart and soul.

"Tonnerre de Dieu! how do you suppose we are going to distinguish the cases from one another when they begin to come in presently? Take a piece of charcoal and number each bed with a big figure on the wall overhead, and place those mattresses closer together, do you hear? We can strew some straw on the floor in that corner if it becomes necessary."

The guns were barking, preparing his work for him; he knew that at any moment now the first carriage might drive up and discharge its load of maimed and bleeding flesh, and he hastened to get all in readiness in the great, bare room. Outside in the shed the preparations were of another nature: the chests were opened and their contents arranged in order on a table, packages of lint, bandages, compresses, rollers, splints for fractured limbs, while on another table, alongside a great jar of cerate and a bottle of chloroform, were the surgical cases with their blood-curdling array of glittering instruments, probes, forceps, bistouries, scalpels, scissors, saws, an arsenal of implements of every imaginable shape adapted to pierce, cut, slice, rend, crush. But there was a deficient supply of basins.

"You must have pails, pots, jars about the house—something that will hold water. We can't work besmeared with blood all day, that's certain. And sponges, try to get me some sponges."

Madame Delaherche hurried away and returned, followed by three women bearing a supply of the desired vessels. Gilberte, standing by the table where the instruments were laid out, summoned Henriette to her side by a look and pointed to them with a little shudder. They grasped each other's hand and stood for a moment without speaking, but their mute clasp was eloquent of the solemn feeling of terror and pity that filled both their souls. And yet there was a difference, for one retained, even in her distress, the involuntary smile of her bright youth, while in the eyes of the other, pale as death, was the grave earnestness of the heart which, one love lost, can never love again.

"How terrible it must be, dear, to have an arm or leg cut off!"

"Poor fellows!"

Bouroche had just finished placing a mattress on each of the three tables, covering them carefully with oil-cloth, when the sound of horses' hoofs was heard outside and the first ambulance wagon rolled into the court. There were ten men in it, seated on the lateral benches, only slightly wounded; two or three of them carrying their arm in a sling, but the majority hurt about the head. They alighted with but little assistance, and the inspection of their cases commenced forthwith.

One of them, scarcely more than a boy, had been shot through the shoulder, and as Henriette was tenderly assisting him to draw off his greatcoat, an operation that elicited cries of pain, she took notice of the number of his regiment.

"Why, you belong to the 106th! Are you in Captain Beaudoin's company?"

No, he belonged to Captain Bonnaud's company, but for all that he was well acquainted with Corporal Macquart and felt pretty certain that his squad had not been under fire as yet. The tidings, meager as they were, sufficed to remove a great load from the young woman's heart: her brother was alive and well; if now her husband would only return, as she was expecting every moment he would do, her mind would be quite at rest.

At that moment, just as Henriette raised her head to listen to the cannonade, which was then roaring with increased viciousness, she was thunderstruck to see Delaherche standing only a few steps away in the middle of a group of men, to whom he was telling the story of the frightful dangers he had encountered in getting from Bazeilles to Sedan. How did he happen to be there? She had not seen him come in. She darted toward him.

"Is not my husband with you?"

But Delaherche, who was just then replying to the fond questions of his wife and mother, was in no haste to answer.

"Wait, wait a moment." And resuming his narrative: "Twenty times between Bazeilles and Balan I just missed being killed. It was a storm, a regular hurricane, of shot and shell! And I saw the Emperor, too. Oh! but he is a brave man!—And after leaving Balan I ran—"

Henriette shook him by the arm.

"My husband?"

"Weiss? why, he stayed behind there, Weiss did."

"What do you mean, behind there?"

"Why, yes; he picked up the musket of a dead soldier, and is fighting away with the best of them."

"He is fighting, you say?—and why?"

"He must be out of his head, I think. He would not come with me, and of course I had to leave him."

Henriette gazed at him fixedly, with wide-dilated eyes. For a moment no one spoke; then in a calm voice she declared her resolution.

"It is well; I will go to him."

What, she, go to him? But it was impossible, it was preposterous! Delaherche had more to say of his hurricane of shot and shell. Gilberte seized her by the wrists to detain her, while Madame Delaherche used all her persuasive powers to convince her of the folly of the mad undertaking. In the same gentle, determined tone she repeated:

"It is useless; I will go to him."

She would only wait to adjust upon her head the lace scarf that Gilberte had been wearing and which the latter insisted she should accept. In the hope that his offer might cause her to abandon her resolve Delaherche declared that he would go with her at least as far as the Balan gate, but just then he caught sight of the sentry, who, in all the turmoil and confusion of the time, had been pacing uninterruptedly up and down before the building that contained the treasure chests of the 7th corps, and suddenly he remembered, was alarmed, went to give a look and assure himself that the millions were there still. In the meantime Henriette had reached the portico and was about to pass out into the street.

"Wait for me, won't you? Upon my word, you are as mad as your husband!"

Another ambulance had driven up, moreover, and they had to wait to let it pass in. It was smaller than the other, having but two wheels, and the two men whom it contained, both severely wounded, rested on stretchers placed upon the floor. The first one whom the attendants took out, using the most tender precaution, had one hand broken and his side torn by a splinter of shell; he was a mass of bleeding flesh. The second had his left leg shattered; and Bouroche, giving orders to extend the latter on one of the oil-cloth-covered mattresses, proceeded forthwith to operate on him, surrounded by the staring, pushing crowd of dressers and assistants. Madame Delaherche and Gilberte were seated near the grass-plot, employed in rolling bandages.

In the street outside Delaherche had caught up with Henriette.

"Come, my dear Madame Weiss, abandon this foolhardy undertaking. How can you expect to find Weiss in all that confusion? Most likely he is no longer there by this time; he is probably making his way home through the fields. I assure you that Bazeilles is inaccessible."

But she did not even listen to him, only increasing her speed, and had now entered the Rue de Menil, her shortest way to the Balan gate. It was nearly nine o'clock, and Sedan no longer wore the forbidding, funereal aspect of the morning, when it awoke to grope and shudder amid the despair and gloom of its black fog. The shadows of the houses were sharply defined upon the pavement in the bright sunlight, the streets were filled with an excited, anxious throng, through which orderlies and staff officers were constantly pushing their way at a gallop. The chief centers of attraction were the straggling soldiers who, even at this early hour of the day, had begun to stream into the city, minus arms and equipments, some of them slightly wounded, others in an extreme condition of nervous excitation, shouting and gesticulating like lunatics. And yet the place would have had very much its every-day aspect, had it not been for the tight-closed shutters of the shops, the lifeless house-fronts, where not a blind was open. Then there was the cannonade, that never-ceasing cannonade, beneath which earth and rocks, walls and foundations, even to the very slates upon the roofs, shook and trembled.

What between the damage that his reputation as a man of bravery and politeness would inevitably suffer should he desert Henriette in her time of trouble, and his disinclination to again face the iron hail on the Bazeilles road, Delaherche was certainly in a very unpleasant predicament. Just as they reached the Balan gate a bevy of mounted officers, returning to the city, suddenly came riding up, and they were parted. There was a dense crowd of people around the gate, waiting for news. It was all in vain that he ran this way and that, looking for the young woman in the throng; she must have been beyond the walls by that time, speeding along the road, and pocketing his gallantry for use on some future occasion, he said to himself aloud:

"Very well, so much the worse for her; it was too idiotic."

Then the manufacturer strolled about the city, bourgeois-like desirous to lose no portion of the spectacle, and at the same time tormented by a constantly increasing feeling of anxiety. How was it all to end? and would not the city suffer heavily should the army be defeated? The questions were hard ones to answer; he could not give a satisfactory solution to the conundrum when so much depended on circumstances, but none the less he was beginning to feel very uneasy for his factory and house in the Rue Maqua, whence he had already taken the precaution to remove his securities and valuables and bury them in a place of safety. He dropped in at the Hotel de Ville, found the Municipal Council sitting in permanent session, and loitered away a couple of hours there without hearing any fresh news, unless that affairs outside the walls were beginning to look very threatening. The army, under the pushing and hauling process, pushed back to the rear by General Ducrot during the hour and a half while the command was in his hands, hauled forward to the front again by de Wimpffen, his successor, knew not where to yield obedience, and the entire lack of plan and competent leadership, the incomprehensible vacillation, the abandonment of positions only to retake them again at terrible cost of life, all these things could not fail to end in ruin and disaster.

From there Delaherche pushed forward to the Sous-Prefecture to ascertain whether the Emperor had returned yet from the field of battle. The only tidings he gleaned here were of Marshal MacMahon, who was said to be resting comfortably, his wound, which was not dangerous, having been dressed by a surgeon. About eleven o'clock, however, as he was again going the rounds, his progress was arrested for a moment in the Grande-Rue, opposite the Hotel de l'Europe, by a sorry cavalcade of dust-stained horsemen, whose jaded nags were moving at a walk, and at their head he recognized the Emperor, who was returning after having spent four hours on the battle-field. It was plain that death would have nothing to do with him. The big drops of anguish had washed the rouge from off those painted cheeks, the waxed mustache had lost its stiffness and drooped over the mouth, and in that ashen face, in those dim eyes, was the stupor of one in his last agony. One of the officers alighted in front of the hotel and proceeded to give some friends, who were collected there, an account of their route, from la Moncelle to Givonne, up the entire length of the little valley among the soldiers of the 1st corps, who had already been pressed back by the Saxons across the little stream to the right bank; and they had returned by the sunken road of the Fond de Givonne, which was even then in such an encumbered condition that had the Emperor desired to make his way to the front again he would have found the greatest difficulty in doing so. Besides, what would it have availed?

As Delaherche was drinking in these particulars with greedy ears a loud explosion shook the quarter. It was a shell, which had demolished a chimney in the Rue Sainte-Barbe, near the citadel. There was a general rush and scramble; men swore and women shrieked. He had flattened himself against the wall, when another explosion broke the windows in a house not far away. The consequences would be dreadful if they should shell Sedan; he made his way back to the Rue Maqua on a keen run, and was seized by such an imperious desire to learn the truth that he did not pause below stairs, but hurried to the roof, where there was a terrace that commanded a view of the city and its environs.

A glance of the situation served to reassure him; the German fire was not directed against the city; the batteries at Frenois and la Marfee were shelling the Plateau de l'Algerie over the roofs of the houses, and now that his alarm had subsided he could even watch with a certain degree of admiration the flight of the projectiles as they sailed over Sedan in a wide, majestic curve, leaving behind them a faint trail of smoke upon the air, like gigantic birds, invisible to mortal eye and to be traced only by the gray plumage shed by their pinions. At first it seemed to him quite evident that what damage had been done so far was the result of random practice by the Prussian gunners: they were not bombarding the city yet; then, upon further consideration, he was of opinion that their firing was intended as a response to the ineffectual fire of the few guns mounted on the fortifications of the place. Turning to the north he looked down from his position upon the extended and complex system of defenses of the citadel, the frowning curtains black with age, the green expanses of the turfed glacis, the stern bastions that reared their heads at geometrically accurate angles, prominent among them the three cyclopean salients, the Ecossais, the Grand Jardin, and la Rochette, while further to the west, in extension of the line, were Fort Nassau and Fort Palatinat, above the faubourg of Menil. The sight produced in him a melancholy impression of immensity and futility. Of what avail were they now against the powerful modern guns with their immense range? Besides, the works were not manned; cannon, ammunition, men were wanting. Some three weeks previously the governor had invited the citizens to organize and form a National Guard, and these volunteers were now doing duty as gunners; and thus it was that there were three guns in service at Palatinat, while at the Porte de Paris there may have been a half dozen. As they had only seven or eight rounds to each gun, however, the men husbanded their ammunition, limiting themselves to a shot every half hour, and that only as a sort of salve to their self-respect, for none of their missiles reached the enemy; all were lost in the meadows opposite them. Hence the enemy's batteries, disdainful of such small game, contemptuously pitched a shell at them from time to time, out of charity, as it were.

Those batteries over across the river were objects of great interest to Delaherche. He was eagerly scanning the heights of la Marfee with his naked eye, when all at once he thought of the spy-glass with which he sometimes amused himself by watching the doings of his neighbors from the terrace. He ran downstairs and got it, returned and placed it in position, and as he was slowly sweeping the horizon and trees, fields, houses came within his range of vision, he lighted on that group of uniforms, at the angle of a pine wood, over the main battery at Frenois, of which Weiss had caught a glimpse from Bazeilles. To him, however, thanks to the excellence of his glass, it would have been no difficult matter to count the number of officers of the staff, so distinctly he made them out. Some of them were reclining carelessly on the grass, others were conversing in little groups, and in front of them all stood a solitary figure, a spare, well-proportioned man to appearances, in an unostentatious uniform, who yet asserted in some indefinable way his masterhood. It was the Prussian King, scarce half finger high, one of those miniature leaden toys that afford children such delight. Although he was not certain of this identity until later on the manufacturer found himself, by reason of some inexplicable attraction, constantly returning to that diminutive puppet, whose face, scarce larger than a pin's head, was but a pale point against the immense blue sky.

It was not midday yet, and since nine o'clock the master had been watching the movements, inexorable as fate, of his armies. Onward, ever onward, they swept, by roads traced for them in advance, completing the circle, slowly but surely closing in and enveloping Sedan in their living wall of men and guns. The army on his left, that had come up across the level plain of Donchery, was debouching still from the pass of Saint-Albert and, leaving Saint-Menges in its rear, was beginning to show its heads of columns at Fleigneux; and, in the rear of the XIth corps, then sharply engaged with General Douay's force, he could discern the Vth corps, availing itself of the shelter of the woods and advancing stealthily on Illy, while battery upon battery came wheeling into position, an ever-lengthening line of thundering guns, until the horizon was an unbroken ring of fire. On the right the army was now in undisputed possession of the valley of the Givonne; the XIIth corps had taken la Moncelle, the Guards had forced the passage of the stream at Daigny, compelling General Ducrot to seek the protection of the wood of la Garenne, and were pushing up the right bank, likewise in full march upon the plateau of Illy. Their task was almost done; one effort more, and up there at the north, among those barren fields, on the very verge of the dark forests of the Ardennes, the Crown Prince of Prussia would join hands with the Crown Prince of Saxony. To the south of Sedan the village of Bazeilles was lost to sight in the dense smoke of its burning houses, in the clouds of dun vapor that rose above the furious conflict.

And tranquilly, ever since the morning, the King had been watching and waiting. An hour yet, two hours, it might be three, it mattered not; it was only a question of time. Wheel and pinion, cog and lever, were working in harmony, the great engine of destruction was in motion, and soon would have run its course. In the center of the immense horizon, beneath the deep vault of sunlit sky, the bounds of the battlefield were ever becoming narrower, the black swarms were converging, closing in on doomed Sedan. There were fiery reflexions in the windows of the city; to the left, in the direction of the Faubourg de la Cassine, it seemed as if a house was burning. And outside the circle of flame and smoke, in the fields no longer trodden by armed men, over by Donchery, over by Carignan, peace, warm and luminous, lay upon the land; the bright waters of the Meuse, the lusty trees rejoicing in their strength, the broad, verdant meadows, the fertile, well-kept farms, all rested peacefully beneath the fervid noonday sun.

Turning to his staff, the King briefly called for information upon some point. It was the royal will to direct each move on the gigantic chessboard; to hold in the hollow of his hand the hosts who looked to him for guidance. At his left, a flock of swallows, affrighted by the noise of the cannonade, rose high in air, wheeled, and vanished in the south.

IV.

Between the city and Balan, Henriette got over the ground at a good, round pace. It was not yet nine o'clock; the broad footpath, bordered by gardens and pretty cottages, was as yet comparatively free, although as she approached the village it began to be more and more obstructed by flying citizens and moving troops. When she saw a great surge of the human tide advancing on her she hugged the walls and house-fronts, and by dint of address and perseverance slipped through, somehow. The fold of black lace that half concealed her fair hair and small, pale face, the sober gown that enveloped her slight form, made her an inconspicuous object among the throng; she went her way unnoticed by the by-passers, and nothing retarded her light, silent steps.

At Balan, however, she found the road blocked by a regiment of infanterie de marine. It was a compact mass of men, drawn up under the tall trees that concealed them from the enemy's observation, awaiting orders. She raised herself on tiptoe, and could not see the end; still, she made herself as small as she could and attempted to worm her way through. The men shoved her with their elbows, and the butts of their muskets made acquaintance with her ribs; when she had advanced a dozen paces there was a chorus of shouts and angry protests. A captain turned on her and roughly cried:

"Hi, there, you woman! are you crazy? Where are you going?"

"I am going to Bazeilles."

"What, to Bazeilles?"

There was a shout of laughter. The soldiers pointed at her with their fingers; she was the object of their witticisms. The captain, also, greatly amused by the incident, had to have his joke.

"You should take us along with you, my little dear, if you are going to Bazeilles. We were there a short while ago, and I am in hope that we shall go back there, but I can tell you that the temperature of the place is none too cool."

"I am going to Bazeilles to look for my husband," Henriette declared, in her gentle voice, while her blue eyes shone with undiminished resolution.

The laughter ceased; an old sergeant extricated her from the crowd that had collected around her, and forced her to retrace her steps.

"My poor child, you see it is impossible to get through. Bazeilles is no place for you. You will find your husband by and by. Come, listen to reason!"

She had to obey, and stood aside beneath the trees, raising herself on her toes at every moment to peer before her, firm in her resolve to continue her journey as soon as she should be allowed to pass. She learned the condition of affairs from the conversation that went on around her. Some officers were criticising with great acerbity the order for the abandonment of Bazeilles, which had occurred at a quarter-past eight, at the time when General Ducrot, taking over the command from the marshal, had considered it best to concentrate the troops on the plateau of Illy. What made matters worse was, that the valley of the Givonne having fallen into the hands of the Germans through the premature retirement of the 1st corps, the 12th corps, which was even then sustaining a vigorous attack in front, was overlapped on its left flank. Now that General de Wimpffen had relieved General Ducrot, it seemed that the original plan was to be carried out. Orders had been received to retake Bazeilles at every cost, and drive the Bavarians into the Meuse. And so, in the ranks of that regiment that had been halted there in full retreat at the entrance of the village and ordered to resume the offensive, there was much bitter feeling, and angry words were rife. Was ever such stupidity heard of? to make them abandon a position, and immediately tell them to turn round and retake it from the enemy! They were willing enough to risk their life in the cause, but no one cared to throw it away for nothing!

A body of mounted men dashed up the street and General de Wimpffen appeared among them, and raising himself erect on his stirrups, with flashing eyes, he shouted, in ringing tones:

"Friends, we cannot retreat; it would be ruin to us all. And if we do have to retreat, it shall be on Carignan, and not on Mezieres. But we shall be victorious! You beat the enemy this morning; you will beat them again!"

He galloped off on a road that conducted to la Moncelle. It was said that there had been a violent altercation between him and General Ducrot, each upholding his own plan, and decrying the plan of the other—one asserting that retreat by way of Mezieres had been impracticable all that morning; the other predicting that, unless they fell back on Illy, the army would be surrounded before night. And there was a great deal of bitter recrimination, each taxing the other with ignorance of the country and of the situation of the troops. The pity of it was that both were right.

But Henriette, meantime, had made an encounter that caused her to forget her project for a moment. In some poor outcasts; stranded by the wayside, she had recognized a family of honest weavers from Bazeilles, father, mother, and three little girls, of whom the largest was only nine years old. They were utterly disheartened and forlorn, and so weary and footsore that they could go no further, and had thrown themselves down at the foot of a wall.

"Alas! dear lady," the wife and mother said to Henriette, "we have lost our all. Our house—you know where our house stood on the Place de l'Eglise—well, a shell came and burned it. Why we and the children did not stay and share its fate I do not know—"

At these words the three little ones began to cry and sob afresh, while the mother, in distracted language, gave further details of the catastrophe.

"The loom, I saw it burn like seasoned kindling wood, and the bed, the chairs and tables, they blazed like so much straw. And even the clock—yes, the poor old clock that I tried to save and could not."

"My God! my God!" the man exclaimed, his eyes swimming with tears, "what is to become of us?"

Henriette endeavored to comfort them, but it was in a voice that quavered strangely.

"You have been preserved to each other, you are safe and unharmed; your three little girls are left you. What reason have you to complain?"

Then she proceeded to question them to learn how matters stood in Bazeilles, whether they had seen her husband, in what state they had left her house, but in their half-dazed condition they gave conflicting answers. No, they had not seen M. Weiss. One of the little girls, however, declared that she had seen him, and that he was lying on the ground with a great hole in his head, whereon the father gave her a box on the ear, bidding her hold her tongue and not tell such lies to the lady. As for the house, they could say with certainty that it was intact at the time of their flight; they even remembered to have observed, as they passed it, that the doors and windows were tightly secured, as if it was quite deserted. At that time, moreover, the only foothold that the Bavarians had secured for themselves was in the Place de l'Eglise, and to carry the village they would have to fight for it, street by street, house by house. They must have been gaining ground since then, though; all Bazeilles was in flames by that time, like enough, and not a wall left standing, thanks to the fierceness of the assailants and the resolution of the defenders. And so the poor creatures went on, with trembling, affrighted gestures, evoking the horrid sights their eyes had seen and telling their dreadful tale of slaughter and conflagration and corpses lying in heaps upon the ground.

"But my husband?" Henriette asked again.

They made no answer, only continued to cover their face with their hands and sob. Her cruel anxiety, as she stood there erect, with no outward sign of weakness, was only evinced by a slight quivering of the lips. What was she to believe? Vainly she told herself the child was mistaken; her mental vision pictured her husband lying there dead before her in the street with a bullet wound in the head. Again, that house, so securely locked and bolted, was another source of alarm; why was it so? was he no longer in it? The conviction that he was dead sent an icy chill to her heart; but perhaps he was only wounded, perhaps he was breathing still; and so sudden and imperious was the need she felt of flying to his side that she would again have attempted to force her passage through the troops had not the bugles just then sounded the order for them to advance.

The regiment was largely composed of raw, half-drilled recruits from Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort, men who had never fired a shot, but all that morning they had fought with a bravery and firmness that would not have disgraced veteran troops. They had not shown much aptitude for marching on the road from Rheims to Mouzon, weighted as they were with their unaccustomed burdens, but when they came to face the enemy their discipline and sense of duty made themselves felt, and notwithstanding the righteous anger that was in their hearts, the bugle had but to sound and they returned to brave the fire and encounter the foe. Three several times they had been promised a division to support them; it never came. They felt that they were deserted, sacrificed; it was the offering of their life that was demanded of them by those who, having first made them evacuate the place, were now sending them back into the fiery furnace of Bazeilles. And they knew it, and they gave their life, freely, without a murmur, closing up their ranks and leaving the shelter of the trees to meet afresh the storm of shell and bullets.

Henriette gave a deep sigh of relief; at last they were about to move! She followed them, with the hope that she might enter the village unperceived in their rear, prepared to run with them should they take the double-quick. But they had scarcely begun to move when they came to a halt again. The projectiles were now falling thick and fast; to regain possession of Bazeilles it would be necessary to dispute every inch of the road, occupying the cross-streets, the houses and gardens on either side of the way. A brisk fire of musketry proceeded from the head of the column, the advance was irregular, by fits and starts, every petty obstacle entailed a delay of many minutes. She felt that she would never attain her end by remaining there at the rear of the column, waiting for it to fight its way through, and with prompt decision she bent her course to the right and took a path that led downward between two hedges to the meadows.

Henriette's plan now was to reach Bazeilles by those broad levels that border the Meuse. She was not very clear about it in her mind, however, and continued to hasten onward in obedience to that blind instinct which had originally imparted to her its impulse. She had not gone far before she found herself standing and gazing in dismay at a miniature ocean which barred her further progress in that direction. It was the inundated fields, the low-lying lands that a measure of defense had converted into a lake, which had escaped her memory. For a single moment she thought of turning back; then, at the risk of leaving her shoes behind, she pushed on, hugging the bank, through the water that covered the grass and rose above her ankles. For a hundred yards her way, though difficult, was not impracticable; then she encountered a garden-wall directly in her front; the ground fell off sharply, and where the wall terminated the water was six feet deep. Her path was closed effectually; she clenched her little fists and had to summon up all her resolution to keep from bursting into tears. When the first shock of disappointment had passed over she made her way along the enclosure and found a narrow lane that pursued a tortuous course among the scattered houses. She believed that now her troubles were at an end, for she was acquainted with that labyrinth, that tangled maze of passages, which, to one who had the key to them, ended at the village.

But the missiles seemed to be falling there even more thickly than elsewhere. Henriette stopped short in her tracks and all the blood in her body seemed to flow back upon her heart at a frightful detonation, so close that she could feel the wind upon her cheek. A shell had exploded directly before her and only a few yards away. She turned her head and scrutinized for a moment the heights of the left bank, above which the smoke from the German batteries was curling upward; she saw what she must do, and when she started on her way again it was with eyes fixed on the horizon, watching for the shells in order to avoid them. There was method in the rash daring of her proceeding, and all the brave tranquillity that the prudent little housewife had at her command. She was not going to be killed if she could help it; she wished to find her husband and bring him back with her, that they might yet have many days of happy life together. The projectiles still came tumbling frequently as ever; she sped along behind walls, made a cover of boundary stones, availed herself of every slight depression. But presently she came to an open space, a bit of unprotected road where splinters and fragments of exploded shells lay thick, and she was watching behind a shed for a chance to make a dash when she perceived, emerging from a sort of cleft in the ground in front of her, a human head and two bright eyes that peered about inquisitively. It was a little, bare-footed, ten-year-old boy, dressed in a shirt and ragged trousers, an embryonic tramp, who was watching the battle with huge delight. At every report his small black beady eyes would snap and sparkle, and he jubilantly shouted:

"Oh my! aint it bully!—Look out, there comes another one! don't stir! Boom! that was a rouser!—Don't stir! don't stir!"

And each time there came a shell he dived to the bottom of his hole, then reappeared, showing his dirty, elfish face, until it was time to duck again.

Henriette now noticed that the projectiles all came from Liry, while the batteries at Pont-Maugis and Noyers were confining their attention to Balan. At each discharge she could see the smoke distinctly, immediately afterward she heard the scream of the shell, succeeded by the explosion. Just then the gunners afforded them a brief respite; the bluish haze above the heights drifted slowly away upon the wind.

"They've stopped to take a drink, you can go your money on it," said the urchin. "Quick, quick, give me your hand! Now's the time to skip!"

He took her by the hand and dragged her along with him, and in this way they crossed the open together, side by side, running for dear life, with head and shoulders down. When they were safely ensconced behind a stack that opportunely offered its protection at the end of their course and turned to look behind them, they beheld another shell come rushing through the air and alight upon the shed at the very spot they had occupied so lately. The crash was fearful; the shed was knocked to splinters. The little ragamuffin considered that a capital joke, and fairly danced with glee.

"Bravo, hit 'em agin! that's the way to do it!—But it was time for us to skip, though, wasn't it?"

But again Henriette struck up against insurmountable obstacles in the shape of hedges and garden-walls, that offered absolutely no outlet. Her irrepressible companion, still wearing his broad grin and remarking that where there was a will there was a way, climbed to the coping of a wall and assisted her to scale it. On reaching the further side they found themselves in a kitchen garden among beds of peas and string-beans and surrounded by fences on every side; their sole exit was through the little cottage of the gardener. The boy led the way, swinging his arms and whistling unconcernedly, with an expression on his face of most profound indifference. He pushed open a door that admitted him to a bedroom, from which he passed on into another room, where there was an old woman, apparently the only living being upon the premises. She was standing by a table, in a sort of dazed stupor; she looked at the two strangers who thus unceremoniously made a highway of her dwelling, but addressed them no word, nor did they speak a word to her. They vanished as quickly as they had appeared, emerging by the exit opposite their entrance upon an alley that they followed for a moment. After that there were other difficulties to be surmounted, and thus they went on for more than half a mile, scaling walls, struggling through hedges, availing themselves of every short cut that offered, it might be the door of a stable or the window of a cottage, as the exigencies of the case demanded. Dogs howled mournfully; they had a narrow escape from being run down by a cow that was plunging along, wild with terror. It seemed as if they must be approaching the village, however; there was an odor of burning wood in the air, and momentarily volumes of reddish smoke, like veils of finest gauze floating in the wind, passed athwart the sun and obscured his light.

All at once the urchin came to a halt and planted himself in front of Henriette.

"I say, lady, tell us where you're going, will you?"

"You can see very well where I am going; to Bazeilles."

He gave a low whistle of astonishment, following it up with the shrill laugh of the careless vagabond to whom nothing is sacred, who is not particular upon whom or what he launches his irreverent gibes.

"To Bazeilles—oh, no, I guess not; I don't think my business lies that way—I have another engagement. Bye-bye, ta-ta!"

He turned on his heel and was off like a shot, and she was none the wiser as to whence he came or whither he went. She had found him in a hole, she had lost sight of him at the corner of a wall, and never was she to set eyes on him again.

When she was alone again Henriette experienced a strange sensation of fear. He had been no protection to her, that scrubby urchin, but his chatter had been a distraction; he had kept her spirits up by his way of making game of everything, as if it was all one huge raree show. Now she was beginning to tremble, her strength was failing her, she, who by nature was so courageous. The shells no longer fell around her: the Germans had ceased firing on Bazeilles, probably to avoid killing their own men, who were now masters of the village; but within the last few minutes she had heard the whistling of bullets, that peculiar sound like the buzzing of a bluebottle fly, that she recognized by having heard it described. There was such a raging, roaring clamor rising to the heavens in the distance, the confused uproar of other sounds was so violent, that in it she failed to distinguish the report of musketry. As she was turning the corner of a house there was a deadened thud close at her ear, succeeded by the sound of falling plaster, which brought her to a sudden halt; it was a bullet that had struck the facade. She was pale as death, and asked herself if her courage would be sufficient to carry her through to the end; and before she had time to frame an answer, she received what seemed to her a blow from a hammer upon her forehead, and sank, stunned, upon her knees. It was a spent ball that had ricocheted and struck her a little above the left eyebrow with sufficient force to raise an ugly contusion. When she came to, raising her hands to her forehead, she withdrew them covered with blood. But the pressure of her fingers had assured her that the bone beneath was uninjured, and she said aloud, encouraging herself by the sound of her own voice:

"It is nothing, it is nothing. Come, I am not afraid; no, no! I am not afraid."

And it was the truth; she arose, and from that time walked amid the storm of bullets with absolute indifference, like one whose soul is parted from his body, who reasons not, who gives his life. She marched straight onward, with head erect, no longer seeking to shelter herself, and if she struck out at a swifter pace it was only that she might reach her appointed end more quickly. The death-dealing missiles pattered on the road before and behind her; twenty times they were near taking her life; she never noticed them. At last she was at Bazeilles, and struck diagonally across a field of lucerne in order to regain the road, the main street that traversed the village. Just as she turned into it she cast her eyes to the right, and there, some two hundred paces from her, beheld her house in a blaze. The flames were invisible against the bright sunlight; the roof had already fallen in in part, the windows were belching dense clouds of black smoke. She could restrain herself no longer, and ran with all her strength.

Ever since eight o'clock Weiss, abandoned by the retiring troops, had been a self-made prisoner there. His return to Sedan had become an impossibility, for the Bavarians, immediately upon the withdrawal of the French, had swarmed down from the park of Montivilliers and occupied the road. He was alone and defenseless, save for his musket and what few cartridges were left him, when he beheld before his door a little band of soldiers, ten in number, abandoned, like himself, and parted from their comrades, looking about them for a place where they might defend themselves and sell their lives dearly. He ran downstairs to admit them, and thenceforth the house had a garrison, a lieutenant, corporal and eight men, all bitterly inflamed against the enemy, and resolved never to surrender.

"What, Laurent, you here!" he exclaimed, surprised to recognize among the soldiers a tall, lean young man, who held in his hand a musket, doubtless taken from some corpse.

Laurent was dressed in jacket and trousers of blue cloth; he was helper to a gardener of the neighborhood, and had lately lost his mother and his wife, both of whom had been carried off by the same insidious fever.

"And why shouldn't I be?" he replied. "All I have is my skin, and I'm willing to give that. And then I am not such a bad shot, you know, and it will be just fun for me to blaze away at those rascals and knock one of 'em over every time."

The lieutenant and the corporal had already begun to make an inspection of the premises. There was nothing to be done on the ground floor; all they did was to push the furniture against the door and windows in such a way as to form as secure a barricade as possible. After attending to that they proceeded to arrange a plan for the defense of the three small rooms of the first floor and the open attic, making no change, however, in the measures that had been already taken by Weiss, the protection of the windows by mattresses, the loopholes cut here and there in the slats of the blinds. As the lieutenant was leaning from the window to take a survey of their surroundings, he heard the wailing cry of a child.

"What is that?" he asked.

Weiss looked from the window, and, in the adjoining dyehouse, beheld the little sick boy, Charles, his scarlet face resting on the white pillow, imploringly begging his mother to bring him a drink: his mother, who lay dead across the threshold, beyond hearing or answering. With a sorrowful expression he replied:

"It is a poor little child next door, there, crying for his mother, who was killed by a Prussian shell."

"Tonnerre de Dieu!" muttered Laurent, "how are they ever going to pay for all these things!"

As yet only a few random shots had struck the front of the house. Weiss and the lieutenant, accompanied by the corporal and two men, had ascended to the attic, where they were in better position to observe the road, of which they had an oblique view as far as the Place de l'Eglise. The square was now occupied by the Bavarians, but any further advance was attended by difficulties that made them very circumspect. A handful of French soldiers, posted at the mouth of a narrow lane, held them in check for nearly a quarter of an hour, with a fire so rapid and continuous that the dead bodies lay in piles. The next obstacle they encountered was a house on the opposite corner, which also detained them some time before they could get possession of it. At one time a woman, with a musket in her hands, was seen through the smoke, firing from one of the windows. It was the abode of a baker, and a few soldiers were there in addition to the regular occupants; and when the house was finally carried there was a hoarse shout: "No quarter!" a surging, struggling, vociferating throng poured from the door and rolled across the street to the dead-wall opposite, and in the raging torrent were seen the woman's skirt, the jacket of a man, the white hairs of the grandfather; then came the crash of a volley of musketry, and the wall was splashed with blood from base to coping. This was a point on which the Germans were inexorable; everyone caught with arms in his hands and not belonging to some uniformed organization was shot without the formality of a trial, as having violated the law of nations. They were enraged at the obstinate resistance offered them by the village, and the frightful loss they had sustained during the five hours' conflict provoked them to the most atrocious reprisals. The gutters ran red with blood, the piled dead in the streets formed barricades, some of the more open places were charnel-houses, from whose depths rose the death-rattle of men in their last agony. And in every house that they had to carry by assault in this way men were seen distributing wisps of lighted straw, others ran to and fro with blazing torches, others smeared the walls and furniture with petroleum; soon whole streets were burning, Bazeilles was in flames.

And now Weiss's was the only house in the central portion of the village that still continued to hold out, preserving its air of menace, like some stern citadel determined not to yield.

"Look out! here they come!" shouted the lieutenant.

A simultaneous discharge from the attic and the first floor laid low three of the Bavarians, who had come forward hugging the walls. The remainder of the body fell back and posted themselves under cover wherever the street offered facilities, and the siege of the house began; the bullets pelted on the front like rattling hail. For nearly ten minutes the fusillade continued without cessation, damaging the stucco, but not doing much mischief otherwise, until one of the men whom the lieutenant had taken with him to the garret was so imprudent as to show himself at a window, when a bullet struck him square in the forehead, killing him instantly. It was plain that whoever exposed himself would do so at peril of his life.

"Doggone it! there's one gone!" growled the lieutenant. "Be careful, will you; there's not enough of us that we can afford to let ourselves be killed for the fun of it!"

He had taken a musket and was firing away like the rest of them from behind the protection of a shutter, at the same time watching and encouraging his men. It was Laurent, the gardener's helper, however, who more than all the others excited his wonder and admiration. Kneeling on the floor, with his chassepot peering out of the narrow aperture of a loophole, he never fired until absolutely certain of his aim; he even told in advance where he intended hitting his living target.

"That little officer in blue that you see down there, in the heart.—That other fellow, the tall, lean one, between the eyes.—I don't like the looks of that fat man with the red beard; I think I'll let him have it in the stomach."

And each time his man went down as if struck by lightning, hit in the very spot he had mentioned, and he continued to fire at intervals, coolly, without haste, there being no necessity for hurrying himself, as he remarked, since it would require too long a time to kill them all in that way.

"Oh! if I had but my eyes!" Weiss impatiently exclaimed. He had broken his spectacles a while before, to his great sorrow. He had his double eye-glass still, but the perspiration was rolling down his face in such streams that it was impossible to keep it on his nose. His usual calm collectedness was entirely lost in his over-mastering passion; and thus, between his defective vision and his agitated nerves, many of his shots were wasted.

"Don't hurry so, it is only throwing away powder," said Laurent. "Do you see that man who has lost his helmet, over yonder by the grocer's shop? Well, now draw a bead on him,—carefully, don't hurry. That's first-rate! you have broken his paw for him and made him dance a jig in his own blood."

Weiss, rather pale in the face, gave a look at the result of his marksmanship.

"Put him out of his misery," he said.

"What, waste a cartridge! Not, much. Better save it for another of 'em."

The besiegers could not have failed to notice the remarkable practice of the invisible sharpshooter in the attic. Whoever of them showed himself in the open was certain to remain there. They therefore brought up re-enforcements and placed them in position, with instructions to maintain an unremitting fire upon the roof of the building. It was not long before the attic became untenable; the slates were perforated as if they had been tissue paper, the bullets found their way to every nook and corner, buzzing and humming as if the room had been invaded by a swarm of angry bees. Death stared them all in the face if they remained there longer.

"We will go downstairs," said the lieutenant. "We can hold the first floor for awhile yet." But as he was making for the ladder a bullet struck him in the groin and he fell. "Too late, doggone it!"

Weiss and Laurent, aided by the remaining soldiers, carried him below, notwithstanding his vehement protests; he told them not to waste their time on him, his time had come; he might as well die upstairs as down. He was still able to be of service to them, however, when they had laid him on a bed in a room of the first floor, by advising them what was best to do.

"Fire into the mass," he said; "don't stop to take aim. They are too cowardly to risk an advance unless they see your fire begin to slacken."

And so the siege of the little house went on as if it was to last for eternity. Twenty times it seemed as if it must be swept away bodily by the storm of iron that beat upon it, and each time, as the smoke drifted away, it was seen amid the sulphurous blasts, torn, pierced, mangled, but erect and menacing, spitting fire and lead with undiminished venom from each one of its orifices. The assailants, furious that they should be detained for such length of time and lose so many men before such a hovel, yelled and fired wildly in the distance, but had not courage to attempt to carry the lower floor by a rush.

"Look out!" shouted the corporal, "there is a shutter about to fall!"

The concentrated fire had torn one of the inside blinds from its hinges, but Weiss darted forward and pushed a wardrobe before the window, and Laurent was enabled to continue his operations under cover. One of the soldiers was lying at his feet with his jaw broken, losing blood freely. Another received a bullet in his chest, and dragged himself over to the wall, where he lay gasping in protracted agony, while convulsive movements shook his frame at intervals. They were but eight, now, all told, not counting the lieutenant, who, too weak to speak, his back supported by the headboard of the bed, continued to give his directions by signs. As had been the case with the attic, the three rooms of the first floor were beginning to be untenable, for the mangled mattresses no longer afforded protection against the missiles; at every instant the plaster fell in sheets from the walls and ceiling, and the furniture was in process of demolition: the sides of the wardrobe yawned as if they had been cloven by an ax. And worse still, the ammunition was nearly exhausted.

"It's too bad!" grumbled Laurent; "just when everything was going so beautifully!"

But suddenly Weiss was struck with an idea.

"Wait!"

He had thought of the dead soldier up in the garret above, and climbed up the ladder to search for the cartridges he must have about him. A wide space of the roof had been crushed in; he saw the blue sky, a patch of bright, wholesome light that made him start. Not wishing to be killed, he crawled over the floor on his hands and knees, then, when he had the cartridges in his possession, some thirty of them, he made haste down again as fast his legs could carry him.

Downstairs, as he was sharing his newly acquired treasure with the gardener's lad, a soldier uttered a piercing cry and sank to his knees. They were but seven; and presently they were but six, a bullet having entered the corporal's head at the eye and lodged in the brain.

From that time on, Weiss had no distinct consciousness of what was going on around him; he and the five others continued to blaze away like lunatics, expending their cartridges, with not the faintest idea in their heads that there could be such a thing as surrender. In the three small rooms the floor was strewn with fragments of the broken furniture. Ingress and egress were barred by the corpses that lay before the doors; in one corner a wounded man kept up a pitiful wail that was frightful to hear. Every inch of the floor was slippery with blood; a thin stream of blood from the attic was crawling lazily down the stairs. And the air was scarce respirable, an air thick and hot with sulphurous fumes, heavy with smoke, filled with an acrid, nauseating dust; a darkness dense as that of night, through which darted the red flame-tongues of the musketry.

"By God's thunder!" cried Weiss, "they are bringing up artillery!"

It was true. Despairing of ever reducing that handful of madmen, who had consumed so much of their time, the Bavarians had run up a gun to the corner of the Place de l'Eglise, and were putting it into position; perhaps they would be allowed to pass when they should have knocked the house to pieces with their solid shot. And the honor there was to them in the proceeding, the gun trained on them down there in the square, excited the bitter merriment of the besieged; the utmost intensity of scorn was in their gibes. Ah! the cowardly bougres, with their artillery! Kneeling in his old place still, Laurent carefully adjusted his aim and each time picked off a gunner, so that the service of the piece became impossible, and it was five or six minutes before they fired their first shot. It ranged high, moreover, and only clipped away a bit of the roof.

But the end was now at hand. It was all in vain that they searched the dead men's belts; there was not a single cartridge left. With vacillating steps and haggard faces the six groped around the room, seeking what heavy objects they might find to hurl from the windows upon their enemies. One of them showed himself at the casement, vociferating insults, and shaking his fist; instantly he was pierced by a dozen bullets; and there remained but five. What were they to do? go down and endeavor to make their escape by way of the garden and the meadows? The question was never answered, for at that moment a tumult arose below, a furious mob came tumbling up the stairs: it was the Bavarians, who had at last thought of turning the position by breaking down the back door and entering the house by that way. For a brief moment a terrible hand-to-hand conflict raged in the small rooms among the dead bodies and the debris of the furniture. One of the soldiers had his chest transfixed by a bayonet thrust, the two others were made prisoners, while the attitude of the lieutenant, who had given up the ghost, was that of one about to give an order, his mouth open, his arm raised aloft.

While these things were occurring an officer, a big, flaxen-haired man, carrying a revolver in his hand, whose bloodshot eyes seemed bursting from their sockets, had caught sight of Weiss and Laurent, both in their civilian attire; he roared at them in French:

"Who are you, you fellows? and what are you doing here?"

Then, glancing at their faces, black with powder-stains, he saw how matters stood, he heaped insult and abuse on them in guttural German, in a voice that shook with anger. Already he had raised his revolver and was about to send a bullet into their heads, when the soldiers of his command rushed in, seized Laurent and Weiss, and hustled them out to the staircase. The two men were borne along like straws upon a mill-race amidst that seething human torrent, under whose pressure they were hurled from out the door and sent staggering, stumbling across the street to the opposite wall amid a chorus of execration that drowned the sound of their officers' voices. Then, for a space of two or three minutes, while the big fair-haired officer was endeavoring to extricate them in order to proceed with their execution, an opportunity was afforded them to raise themselves erect and look about them.

Other houses had taken fire; Bazeilles was now a roaring, blazing furnace. Flames had begun to appear at the tall windows of the church and were creeping upward toward the roof. Some soldiers who were driving a venerable lady from her home had compelled her to furnish the matches with which to fire her own beds and curtains. Lighted by blazing brands and fed by petroleum in floods, fires were rising and spreading in every quarter; it was no longer civilized warfare, but a conflict of savages, maddened by the long protracted strife, wreaking vengeance for their dead, their heaps of dead, upon whom they trod at every step they took. Yelling, shouting bands traversed the streets amid the scurrying smoke and falling cinders, swelling the hideous uproar into which entered sounds of every kind: shrieks, groans, the rattle of musketry, the crash of falling walls. Men could scarce see one another; great livid clouds drifted athwart the sun and obscured his light, bearing with them an intolerable stench of soot and blood, heavy with the abominations of the slaughter. In every quarter the work of death and destruction still went on: the human brute unchained, the imbecile wrath, the mad fury, of man devouring his brother man.

And Weiss beheld his house burn before his eyes. Some soldiers had applied the torch, others fed the flame by throwing upon it the fragments of the wrecked furniture. The rez-de-chaussee was quickly in a blaze, the smoke poured in dense black volumes from the wounds in the front and roof. But now the dyehouse adjoining was also on fire, and horrible to relate, the voice of little Charles, lying on his bed delirious with fever, could be heard through the crackling of the flames, beseeching his mother to bring him a draught of water, while the skirts of the wretched woman who, with her disfigured face, lay across the door-sill, were even then beginning to kindle.

"Mamma, mamma, I am thirsty! Mamma, bring me a drink of water—"

The weak, faint voice was drowned in the roar of the conflagration; the cheering of the victors rose on the air in the distance.

But rising above all other sounds, dominating the universal clamor, a terrible cry was heard. It was Henriette, who had reached the place at last, and now beheld her husband, backed up against the wall, facing a platoon of men who were loading their muskets.

She flew to him and threw her arms about his neck.

"My God! what is it! They cannot be going to kill you!"

Weiss looked at her with stupid, unseeing eyes. She! his wife, so long the object of his desire, so fondly idolized! A great shudder passed through his frame and he awoke to consciousness of his situation. What had he done? why had he remained there, firing at the enemy, instead of returning to her side, as he had promised he would do? It all flashed upon him now, as the darkness is illuminated by the lightning's glare: he had wrecked their happiness, they were to be parted, forever parted. Then he noticed the blood upon her forehead.

"Are you hurt?" he asked. "You were mad to come—"

She interrupted him with an impatient gesture.

"Never mind me; it is a mere scratch. But you, you! why are you here? They shall not kill you; I will not suffer it!"

The officer, who was endeavoring to clear the road in order to give the firing party the requisite room, came up on hearing the sound of voices, and beholding a woman with her arms about the neck of one of his prisoners, exclaimed loudly in French:

"Come, come, none of this nonsense here! Whence come you? What is your business here?"

"Give me my husband."

"What, is he your husband, that man? His sentence is pronounced; the law must take its course."

"Give me my husband."

"Come, be rational. Stand aside; we do not wish to harm you."

"Give me my husband."

Perceiving the futility of arguing with her, the officer was about to give orders to remove her forcibly from the doomed man's arms when Laurent, who until then had maintained an impassive silence, ventured to interfere.

"See here, Captain, I am the man who killed so many of your men; go ahead and shoot me—that will be all right, especially as I have neither chick nor child in all the world. But this gentleman's case is different; he is a married man, don't you see. Come, now, let him go; then you can settle my business as soon as you choose."

Beside himself with anger, the captain screamed:

"What is all this lingo? Are you trying to make game of me? Come, step out here, some one of you fellows, and take away this woman!"

He had to repeat his order in German, whereon a soldier came forward from the ranks, a short stocky Bavarian, with an enormous head surrounded by a bristling forest of red hair and beard, beneath which all that was to be seen were a pair of big blue eyes and a massive nose. He was besmeared with blood, a hideous spectacle, like nothing so much as some fierce, hairy denizen of the woods, emerging from his cavern and licking his chops, still red with the gore of the victims whose bones he has been crunching.

With a heart-rending cry Henriette repeated:

"Give me my husband, or let me die with him."

This seemed to cause the cup of the officer's exasperation to overrun; he thumped himself violently on the chest, declaring that he was no executioner, that he would rather die than harm a hair of an innocent head. There was nothing against her; he would cut off his right hand rather than do her an injury. And then he repeated his order that she be taken away.

As the Bavarian came up to carry out his instructions Henriette tightened her clasp on Weiss's neck, throwing all her strength into her frantic embrace.

"Oh, my love! Keep me with you, I beseech you; let me die with you—"

Big tears were rolling down his cheeks as, without answering, he endeavored to loosen the convulsive clasp of the fingers of the poor creature he loved so dearly.

"You love me no longer, then, that you wish to die without me. Hold me, keep me, do not let them take me. They will weary at last, and will kill us together."

He had loosened one of the little hands, and carried it to his lips and kissed it, working all the while to make the other release its hold.

"No, no, it shall not be! I will not leave thy bosom; they shall pierce my heart before reaching thine. I will not survive—"

But at last, after a long struggle, he held both the hands in his. Then he broke the silence that he had maintained until then, uttering one single word:

"Farewell, dear wife."

And with his own hands he placed her in the arms of the Bavarian, who carried her away. She shrieked and struggled, while the soldier, probably with intent to soothe her, kept pouring in her ear an uninterrupted stream of words in unmelodious German. And, having freed her head, looking over the shoulder of the man, she beheld the end.

It lasted not five seconds. Weiss, whose eye-glass had slipped from its position in the agitation of their parting, quickly replaced it upon his nose, as if desirous to look death in the face. He stepped back and placed himself against the wall, and the face of the self-contained, strong young man, as he stood there in his tattered coat, was sublimely beautiful in its expression of tranquil courage. Laurent, who stood beside him, had thrust his hands deep down into his pockets. The cold cruelty of the proceeding disgusted him; it seemed to him that they could not be far removed from savagery who could thus slaughter men before the eyes of their wives. He drew himself up, looked them square in the face, and in a tone of deepest contempt expectorated:

"Dirty pigs!"

The officer raised his sword; the signal was succeeded by a crashing volley, and the two men sank to the ground, an inert mass, the gardener's lad upon his face, the other, the accountant, upon his side, lengthwise of the wall. The frame of the latter, before he expired, contracted in a supreme convulsion, the eyelids quivered, the mouth opened as if he was about to speak. The officer came up and stirred him with his foot, to make sure that he was really dead.

Henriette had seen the whole: the fading eyes that sought her in death, the last struggle of the strong man in agony, the brutal boot spurning the corpse. And while the Bavarian still held her in his arms, conveying her further and further from the object of her love, she uttered no cry; she set her teeth, in silent fury, into what was nearest: a human hand, it chanced to be. The soldier gave vent to a howl of anguish and dashed her to the ground; raising his uninjured fist above her head he was on the point of braining her. And for a moment their faces were in contact; she experienced a feeling of intensest loathing for the monster, and that blood-stained hair and beard, those blue eyes, dilated and brimming with hate and rage, were destined to remain forever indelibly imprinted on her memory.

In after days Henriette could never account distinctly to herself for the time immediately succeeding these events. She had but one desire: to return to the spot where her loved one had died, take possession of his remains, and watch and weep over them; but, as in an evil dream, obstacles of every sort arose before her and barred the way. First a heavy infantry fire broke out afresh, and there was great activity among the German troops who were holding Bazeilles; it was due to the arrival of the infanterie de marine and other regiments that had been despatched from Balan to regain possession of the village, and the battle commenced to rage again with the utmost fury. The young woman, in company with a band of terrified citizens, was swept away to the left into a dark alley. The result of the conflict could not remain long doubtful, however; it was too late to reconquer the abandoned positions. For near half an hour the infantry struggled against superior numbers and faced death with splendid bravery, but the enemy's strength was constantly increasing, their re-enforcements were pouring in from every direction, the roads, the meadows, the park of Montivilliers; no force at our command could have dislodged them from the position, so dearly bought, where they had left thousands of their bravest. Destruction and devastation now had done their work; the place was a shambles, disgraceful to humanity, where mangled forms lay scattered among smoking ruins, and poor Bazeilles, having drained the bitter cup, went up at last in smoke and flame.

Henriette turned and gave one last look at her little house, whose floors fell in even as she gazed, sending myriads of little sparks whirling gayly upward on the air. And there, before her, prone at the wall's foot, she saw her husband's corpse, and in her despair and grief would fain have returned to him, but just then another crowd came up and surged around her, the bugles were sounding the signal to retire, she was borne away, she knew not how, among the retreating troops. Her faculty of self-guidance left her; she was as a bit of flotsam swept onward by the eddying human tide that streamed along the way. And that was all she could remember until she became herself again and found she was at Balan, among strangers, her head reclined upon a table in a kitchen, weeping.

V.

It was nearly ten o'clock up on the Plateau de l'Algerie, and still the men of Beaudoin's company were resting supine, among the cabbages, in the field whence they had not budged since early morning. The cross fire from the batteries on Hattoy and the peninsula of Iges was hotter than ever; it had just killed two more of their number, and there were no orders for them to advance. Were they to stay there and be shelled all day, without a chance to see anything of the fighting?

They were even denied the relief of discharging their chassepots. Captain Beaudoin had at last put his foot down and stopped the firing, that senseless fusillade against the little wood in front of them, which seemed entirely deserted by the Prussians. The heat was stifling; it seemed to them that they should roast, stretched there on the ground under the blazing sky.

Jean was alarmed, on turning to look at Maurice, to see that he had declined his head and was lying, with closed eyes, apparently inanimate, his cheek against the bare earth. He was very pale, there was no sign of life in his face.

"Hallo there! what's the matter?"

But Maurice was only sleeping. The mental strain, conjointly with his fatigue, had been too much for him, in spite of the dangers that menaced them at every moment. He awoke with a start and stared about him, and the peace that slumber had left in his wide-dilated eyes was immediately supplanted by a look of startled affright as it dawned on him where he was. He had not the remotest idea how long he had slept; all he knew was that the state from which he had been recalled to the horrors of the battlefield was one of blessed oblivion and tranquillity.

"Hallo! that's funny; I must have been asleep!" he murmured. "Ah! it has done me good."

It was true that he suffered less from that pressure about his temples and at his heart, that horrible constriction that seems as if it would crush one's bones. He chaffed Lapoulle, who had manifested much uneasiness since the disappearance of Chouteau and Loubet and spoke of going to look for them. A capital idea! so he might get away and hide behind a tree, and smoke a pipe! Pache thought that the surgeons had detained them at the ambulance, where there was a scarcity of sick-bearers. That was a job that he had no great fancy for, to go around under fire and collect the wounded! And haunted by a lingering superstition of the country where he was born, he added that it was unlucky to touch a corpse; it brought death.

"Shut up, confound you!" roared Lieutenant Rochas. "Who is going to die?"

Colonel de Vineuil, sitting his tall horse, turned his head and gave a smile, the first that had been seen on his face that morning. Then he resumed his statue-like attitude, waiting for orders as impassively as ever under the tumbling shells.

Maurice's attention was attracted to the sick-bearers, whose movements he watched with interest as they searched for wounded men among the depressions of the ground. At the end of a sunken road, and protected by a low ridge not far from their position, a flying ambulance of first aid had been established, and its emissaries had begun to explore the plateau. A tent was quickly erected, while from the hospital van the attendants extracted the necessary supplies; compresses, bandages, linen, and the few indispensable instruments required for the hasty dressings they gave before dispatching the patients to Sedan, which they did as rapidly as they could secure wagons, the supply of which was limited. There was an assistant surgeon in charge, with two subordinates of inferior rank under him. In all the army none showed more gallantry and received less acknowledgment than the litter-bearers. They could be seen all over the field in their gray uniform, with the distinctive red badge on their cap and on their arm, courageously risking their lives and unhurriedly pushing forward through the thickest of the fire to the spots where men had been seen to fall. At times they would creep on hands and knees: would always take advantage of a hedge or ditch, or any shelter that was afforded by the conformation of the ground, never exposing themselves unnecessarily out of bravado. When at last they reached the fallen men their painful task commenced, which was made more difficult and protracted by the fact that many of the subjects had fainted, and it was hard to tell whether they were alive or dead. Some lay face downward with their mouths in a pool of blood, in danger of suffocating, others had bitten the ground until their throats were choked with dry earth, others, where a shell had fallen among a group, were a confused, intertwined heap of mangled limbs and crushed trunks. With infinite care and patience the bearers would go through the tangled mass, separating the living from the dead, arranging their limbs and raising the head to give them air, cleansing the face as well as they could with the means at their command. Each of them carried a bucket of cool water, which he had to use very savingly. And Maurice could see them thus engaged, often for minutes at a time, kneeling by some man whom they were trying to resuscitate, waiting for him to show some sign of life.

He watched one of them, some fifty yards away to the left, working over the wound of a little soldier from the sleeve of whose tunic a thin stream of blood was trickling, drop by drop. The man of the red cross discovered the source of the hemorrhage and finally checked it by compressing the artery. In urgent cases, like that of the little soldier, they rendered these partial attentions, locating fractures, bandaging and immobilizing the limbs so as to reduce the danger of transportation. And the transportation, even, was an affair that called for a great deal of judgment and ingenuity; they assisted those who could walk, and carried others, either in their arms, like little children, or pickaback when the nature of the hurt allowed it; at other times they united in groups of two, three, or four, according to the requirements of the case, and made a chair by joining their hands, or carried the patient off by his legs and shoulders in a recumbent posture. In addition to the stretchers provided by the medical department there were all sorts of temporary makeshifts, such as the stretchers improvised from knapsack straps and a couple of muskets. And in every direction on the unsheltered, shell-swept plain they could be seen, singly or in groups, hastening with their dismal loads to the rear, their heads bowed and picking their steps, an admirable spectacle of prudent heroism.

Maurice saw a pair on his right, a thin, puny little fellow lugging a burly sergeant, with both legs broken, suspended from his neck; the sight reminded the young man of an ant, toiling under a burden many times larger than itself; and even as he watched them a shell burst directly in their path and they were lost to view. When the smoke cleared away the sergeant was seen lying on his back, having received no further injury, while the bearer lay beside him, disemboweled. And another came up, another toiling ant, who, when he had turned his dead comrade on his back and examined him, took the sergeant up and made off with his load.

It gave Maurice a chance to read Lapoulle a lesson.

"I say, if you like the business, why don't you go and give that man a lift!"

For some little time the batteries at Saint-Menges had been thundering as if determined to surpass all previous efforts, and Captain Beaudoin, who was still tramping nervously up and down before his company line, at last stepped up to the colonel. It was a pity, he said, to waste the men's morale in that way and keep their minds on the stretch for hours and hours.

"I can't help it; I have no orders," the colonel stoically replied.

They had another glimpse of General Douay as he flew by at a gallop, followed by his staff. He had just had an interview with General de Wimpffen, who had ridden up to entreat him to hold his ground, which he thought he could promise to do, but only so long as the Calvary of Illy, on his right, held out; Illy once taken, he would be responsible for nothing; their defeat would be inevitable. General de Wimpffen averred that the 1st corps would look out for the position at Illy, and indeed a regiment of zouaves was presently seen to occupy the Calvary, so that General Douay, his anxiety being relieved on that score, sent Dumont's division to the assistance of the 12th corps, which was then being hard pushed. Scarcely fifteen minutes later, however, as he was returning from the left, whither he had ridden to see how affairs were looking, he was surprised, raising his eyes to the Calvary, to see it was unoccupied; there was not a zouave to be seen there, they had abandoned the plateau that was no longer tenable by reason of the terrific fire from the batteries at Fleigneux. With a despairing presentiment of impending disaster he was spurring as fast as he could to the right, when he encountered Dumont's division, flying in disorder, broken and tangled in inextricable confusion with the debris of the 1st corps. The latter, which, after its retrograde movement, had never been able to regain possession of the posts it had occupied in the morning, leaving Daigny in the hands of the XIIth Saxon corps and Givonne to the Prussian Guards, had been compelled to retreat in a northerly direction across the wood of Garenne, harassed by the batteries that the enemy had posted on every summit from one end of the valley to the other. The terrible circle of fire and flame was contracting; a portion of the Guards had continued their march on Illy, moving from east to west and turning the eminences, while from west to east, in the rear of the XIth corps, now masters of Saint-Menges, the Vth, moving steadily onward, had passed Fleigneux and with insolent temerity was constantly pushing its batteries more and more to the front, and so contemptuous were they of the ignorance and impotence of the French that they did not even wait for the infantry to come up to support their guns. It was midday; the entire horizon was aflame, concentrating its destructive fire on the 7th and 1st corps.

Then General Douay, while the German artillery was thus preparing the way for the decisive movement that should make them masters of the Calvary, resolved to make one last desperate attempt to regain possession of the hill. He dispatched his orders, and throwing himself in person among the fugitives of Dumont's division, succeeded in forming a column which he sent forward to the plateau. It held its ground for a few minutes, but the bullets whistled so thick, the naked, treeless fields were swept by such a tornado of shot and shell, that it was not long before the panic broke out afresh, sweeping the men adown the slopes, rolling them up as straws are whirled before the wind. And the general, unwilling to abandon his project, ordered up other regiments.

A staff officer galloped by, shouting to Colonel de Vineuil as he passed an order that was lost in the universal uproar. Hearing, the colonel was erect in his stirrups in an instant, his face aglow with the gladness of battle, and pointing to the Calvary with a grand movement of his sword:

"Our turn has come at last, boys!" he shouted. "Forward!"

A thrill of enthusiasm ran through the ranks at the brief address, and the regiment put itself in motion. Beaudoin's company was among the first to get on its feet, which it did to the accompaniment of much good-natured chaff, the men declaring they were so rusty they could not move; the gravel must have penetrated their joints. The fire was so hot, however, that by the time they had advanced a few feet they were glad to avail themselves of the protection of a shelter trench that lay in their path, along which they crept in an undignified posture, bent almost double.

"Now, young fellow, look out for yourself!" Jean said to Maurice; "we're in for it. Don't let 'em see so much as the end of your nose, for if you do they will surely snip it off, and keep a sharp lookout for your legs and arms unless you have more than you care to keep. Those who come out of this with a whole skin will be lucky."

Maurice did not hear him very distinctly; the words were lost in the all-pervading clamor that buzzed and hummed in the young man's ears. He could not have told now whether he was afraid or not; he went forward because the others did, borne along with them in their headlong rush, without distinct volition of his own; his sole desire was to have the affair ended as soon as possible. So true was it that he was a mere drop in the on-pouring torrent that when the leading files came to the end of the trench and began to waver at the prospect of climbing the exposed slope that lay before them, he immediately felt himself seized by a sensation of panic, and was ready to turn and fly. It was simply an uncontrollable instinct, a revolt of the muscles, obedient to every passing breath.

Some of the men had already faced about when the colonel came hurrying up.

"Steady there, my children. You won't cause me this great sorrow; you won't behave like cowards. Remember, the 106th has never turned its back upon the enemy; will you be the first to disgrace our flag?"

And he spurred his charger across the path of the fugitives, addressing them individually, speaking to them, of their country, in a voice that trembled with emotion.

Lieutenant Rochas was so moved by his words that he gave way to an ungovernable fit of anger, raising his sword and belaboring the men with the flat as if it had been a club.

"You dirty loafers, I'll see whether you will go up there or not! I'll kick you up! About face! and I'll break the jaw of the first man that refuses to obey!"

But such an extreme measure as kicking a regiment into action was repugnant to the colonel.

"No, no, lieutenant; they will follow me. Won't you, my children? You won't let your old colonel fight it out alone with the Prussians! Up there lies the way; forward!"

He turned his horse and left the trench, and they did all follow, to a man, for he would have been considered the lowest of the low who could have abandoned their leader after that brave, kind speech. He was the only one, however, who, while crossing the open fields, erect on his tall horse, was cool and unconcerned; the men scattered, advancing in open order and availing themselves of every shelter afforded by the ground. The land sloped upward; there were fully five hundred yards of stubble and beet fields between them and the Calvary, and in place of the correctly aligned columns that the spectator sees advancing when a charge is ordered in field maneuvers, all that was to be seen was a loose array of men with rounded backs, singly or in small groups, hugging the ground, now crawling warily a little way on hands and knees, now dashing forward for the next cover, like huge insects fighting their way upward to the crest by dint of agility and address. The enemy's batteries seemed to have become aware of the movement; their fire was so rapid that the reports of the guns were blended in one continuous roar. Five men were killed, a lieutenant was cut in two.

Maurice and Jean had considered themselves fortunate that their way led along a hedge behind which they could push forward unseen, but the man immediately in front of them was shot through the temples and fell back dead in their arms; they had to cast him down at one side. By this time, however, the casualties had ceased to excite attention; they were too numerous. A man went by, uttering frightful shrieks and pressing his hands upon his protruding entrails; they beheld a horse dragging himself along with both thighs broken, and these anguishing sights, these horrors of the battlefield, affected them no longer. They were suffering from the intolerable heat, the noonday sun that beat upon their backs and burned like hot coals.

"How thirsty I am!" Maurice murmured. "My throat is like an ash barrel. Don't you notice that smell of something scorching, a smell like burning woolen?"

Jean nodded. "It was just the same at Solferino; perhaps it is the smell that always goes with war. But hold, I have a little brandy left; we'll have a sup."

And they paused behind the hedge a moment and raised the flask to their lips, but the brandy, instead of relieving their thirst, burned their stomach. It irritated them, that nasty taste of burnt rags in their mouths. Moreover they perceived that their strength was commencing to fail for want of sustenance and would have liked to take a bite from the half loaf that Maurice had in his knapsack, but it would not do to stop and breakfast there under fire, and then they had to keep up with their comrades. There was a steady stream of men coming up behind them along the hedge who pressed them forward, and so, doggedly bending their backs to the task before them, they resumed their course. Presently they made their final rush and reached the crest. They were on the plateau, at the very foot of the Calvary, the old weather-beaten cross that stood between two stunted lindens.

"Good for our side!" exclaimed Jean; "here we are! But the next thing is to remain here!"

He was right; it was not the pleasantest place in the world to be in, as Lapoulle remarked in a doleful tone that excited the laughter of the company. They all lay down again, in a field of stubble, and for all that three men were killed in quick succession. It was pandemonium let loose up there on the heights; the projectiles from Saint-Menges, Fleigneux, and Givonne fell in such numbers that the ground fairly seemed to smoke, as it does at times under a heavy shower of rain. It was clear that the position could not be maintained unless artillery was dispatched at once to the support of the troops who had been sent on such a hopeless undertaking. General Douay, it was said, had given instructions to bring up two batteries of the reserve artillery, and the men were every moment turning their heads, watching anxiously for the guns that did not come.

"It is absurd, ridiculous!" declared Beaudoin, who was again fidgeting up and down before the company. "Who ever heard of placing a regiment in the air like this and giving it no support!" Then, observing a slight depression on their left, he turned to Rochas: "Don't you think, Lieutenant, that the company would be safer there?"

Rochas stood stock still and shrugged his shoulders. "It is six of one and half a dozen of the other, Captain. My opinion is that we will do better to stay where we are."

Then the captain, whose principles were opposed to swearing, forgot himself.

"But, good God! there won't a man of us escape! We can't allow the men to be murdered like this!"

And he determined to investigate for himself the advantages of the position he had mentioned, but had scarcely taken ten steps when he was lost to sight in the smoke of an exploding shell; a splinter of the projectile had fractured his right leg. He fell upon his back, emitting a shrill cry of alarm, like a woman's.

"He might have known as much," Rochas muttered. "There's no use his making such a fuss over it; when the dose is fixed for one, he has to take it."

Some members of the company had risen to their feet on seeing their captain fall, and as he continued to call lustily for assistance, Jean finally ran to him, immediately followed by Maurice.

"Friends, friends, for Heaven's sake do not leave me here; carry me to the ambulance!"

"Dame, Captain, I don't know that we shall be able to get so far, but we can try."

As they were discussing how they could best take hold to raise him they perceived, behind the hedge that had sheltered them on their way up, two stretcher-bearers who seemed to be waiting for something to do, and finally, after protracted signaling, induced them to draw near. All would be well if they could only get the wounded man to the ambulance without accident, but the way was long and the iron hail more pitiless than ever.

The bearers had tightly bandaged the injured limb in order to keep the bones in position and were about to bear the captain off the field on what children call a "chair," formed by joining their hands and slipping an arm of the patient over each of their necks, when Colonel de Vineuil, who had heard of the accident, came up, spurring his horse. He manifested much emotion, for he had known the young man ever since his graduation from Saint-Cyr.

"Cheer up, my poor boy; have courage. You are in no danger; the doctors will save your leg."

The captain's face wore an expression of resignation, as if he had summoned up all his courage to bear his misfortune manfully.

"No, my dear Colonel; I feel it is all up with me, and I would rather have it so. The only thing that distresses me is the waiting for the inevitable end."

The bearers carried him away, and were fortunate enough to reach the hedge in safety, behind which they trotted swiftly away with their burden. The colonel's eyes followed them anxiously, and when he saw them reach the clump of trees where the ambulance was stationed a look of deep relief rose to his face.

"But you, Colonel," Maurice suddenly exclaimed, "you are wounded too!"

He had perceived blood dripping from the colonel's left boot. A projectile of some description had carried away the heel of the foot-covering and forced the steel shank into the flesh.

M. de Vineuil bent over his saddle and glanced unconcernedly at the member, in which the sensation at that time must have been far from pleasurable.

"Yes, yes," he replied, "it is a little remembrance that I received a while ago. A mere scratch, that don't prevent me from sitting my horse—" And he added, as he turned to resume his position to the rear of his regiment: "As long as a man can stick on his horse he's all right."

At last the two batteries of reserve artillery came up. Their arrival was an immense relief to the anxiously expectant men, as if the guns were to be a rampart of protection to them and at the same time demolish the hostile batteries that were thundering against them from every side. And then, too, it was in itself an exhilarating spectacle to see the magnificent order they preserved as they came dashing up, each gun followed by its caisson, the drivers seated on the near horse and holding the off horse by the bridle, the cannoneers bolt upright on the chests, the chiefs of detachment riding in their proper position on the flank. Distances were preserved as accurately as if they were on parade, and all the time they were tearing across the fields at headlong speed, with the roar and crash of a hurricane.

Maurice, who had lain down again, arose and said to Jean in great excitement:

"Look! over there on the left, that is Honore's battery. I can recognize the men."

Jean gave him a back-handed blow that brought him down to his recumbent position.

"Lie down, will you! and make believe dead!"

But they were both deeply interested in watching the maneuvers of the battery, and never once removed their eyes from it; it cheered their heart to witness the cool and intrepid activity of those men, who, they hoped, might yet bring victory to them.

The battery had wheeled into position on a bare summit to the left, where it brought up all standing; then, quick as a flash, the cannoneers leaped from the chests and unhooked the limbers, and the drivers, leaving the gun in position, drove fifteen yards to the rear, where they wheeled again so as to bring team and limber face to the enemy and there remained, motionless as statues. In less time than it takes to tell it the guns were in place, with the proper intervals between them, distributed into three sections of two guns each, each section commanded by a lieutenant, and over the whole a captain, a long maypole of a man, who made a terribly conspicuous landmark on the plateau. And this captain, having first made a brief calculation, was heard to shout:

"Sight for sixteen hundred yards!"

Their fire was to be directed upon a Prussian battery, screened by some bushes, to the left of Fleigneux, the shells from which were rendering the position of the Calvary untenable.

"Honore's piece, you see," Maurice began again, whose excitement was such that he could not keep still, "Honore's piece is in the center section. There he is now, bending over to speak to the gunner; you remember Louis, the gunner, don't you? the little fellow with whom we had a drink at Vouziers? And that fellow in the rear, who sits so straight on his handsome chestnut, is Adolphe, the driver—"

First came the gun with its chief and six cannoneers, then the limber with its four horses ridden by two men, beyond that the caisson with its six horses and three drivers, still further to the rear were the prolonge, forge, and battery wagon; and this array of men, horses and materiel extended to the rear in a straight unbroken line of more than a hundred yards in length; to say nothing of the spare caisson and the men and beasts who were to fill the places of those removed by casualties, who were stationed at one side, as much as possible out of the enemy's line of fire.

And now Honore was attending to the loading of his gun. The two men whose duty it was to fetch the cartridge and the projectile returned from the caisson, where the corporal and the artificer were stationed; two other cannoneers, standing at the muzzle of the piece, slipped into the bore the cartridge, a charge of powder in an envelope of serge, and gently drove it home with the rammer, then in like manner introduced the shell, the studs of which creaked faintly in the spirals of the rifling. When the primer was inserted in the vent and all was in readiness, Honore thought he would like to point the gun himself for the first shot, and throwing himself in a semi-recumbent posture on the trail, working with one hand the screw that regulated the elevation, with the other he signaled continually to the gunner, who, standing behind him, moved the piece by imperceptible degrees to right or left with the assistance of the lever.

"That ought to be about right," he said as he arose.

The captain came up, and stooping until his long body was bent almost double, verified the elevation. At each gun stood the assistant gunner, waiting to pull the lanyard that should ignite the fulminate by means of a serrated wire. And the orders were given in succession, deliberately, by number:

"Number one, Fire! Number two, Fire!"

Six reports were heard, the guns recoiled, and while they were being brought back to position the chiefs of detachment observed the effect of the shots and found that the range was short. They made the necessary correction and the evolution was repeated, in exactly the same manner as before; and it was that cool precision, that mechanical routine of duty, without agitation and without haste, that did so much to maintain the morale of the men. They were a little family, united by the tie of a common occupation, grouped around the gun, which they loved and reverenced as if it had been a living thing; it was the object of all their care and attention, to it all else was subservient, men, horses, caisson, everything. Thence also arose the spirit of unity and cohesion that animated the battery at large, making all its members work together for the common glory and the common good, like a well-regulated household.

The 106th had cheered lustily at the completion of the first round; they were going to make those bloody Prussian guns shut their mouths at last! but their elation was succeeded by dismay when it was seen that the projectiles fell short, many of them bursting in the air and never reaching the bushes that served to mask the enemy's artillery.

"Honore," Maurice continued, "says that all the other pieces are popguns and that his old girl is the only one that is good for anything. Ah, his old girl! He talks as if she were his wife and there were not another like her in the world! Just notice how jealously he watches her and makes the men clean her off! I suppose he is afraid she will overheat herself and take cold!"

He continued rattling on in this pleasant vein to Jean, both of them cheered and encouraged by the cool bravery with which the artillerymen served their guns; but the Prussian batteries, after firing three rounds, had now got the range, which, too long at the beginning, they had at last ciphered down to such a fine point that their shells were landed invariably among the French pieces, while the latter, notwithstanding the efforts that were made to increase their range, still continued to place their projectiles short of the enemy's position. One of Honore's cannoneers was killed while loading the piece; the others pushed the body out of their way, and the service went on with the same methodical precision, with neither more nor less haste. In the midst of the projectiles that fell and burst continually the same unvarying rhythmical movements went on uninterruptedly about the gun; the cartridge and shell were introduced, the gun was pointed, the lanyard pulled, the carriage brought back to place; and all with such undeviating regularity that the men might have been taken for automatons, devoid of sight and hearing.

What impressed Maurice, however, more than anything else, was the attitude of the drivers, sitting straight and stiff in their saddles fifteen yards to the rear, face to the enemy. There was Adolphe, the broad-chested, with his big blond mustache across his rubicund face; and who shall tell the amount of courage a man must have to enable him to sit without winking and watch the shells coming toward him, and he not allowed even to twirl his thumbs by way of diversion! The men who served the guns had something to occupy their minds, while the drivers, condemned to immobility, had death constantly before their eyes, and plenty of leisure to speculate on probabilities. They were made to face the battlefield because, had they turned their backs to it, the coward that so often lurks at the bottom of man's nature might have got the better of them and swept away man and beast. It is the unseen danger that makes dastards of us; that which we can see we brave. The army has no more gallant set of men in its ranks than the drivers in their obscure position.

Another man had been killed, two horses of a caisson had been disemboweled, and the enemy kept up such a murderous fire that there was a prospect of the entire battery being knocked to pieces should they persist in holding that position longer. It was time to take some step to baffle that tremendous fire, notwithstanding the danger there was in moving, and the captain unhesitatingly gave orders to bring up the limbers.

The risky maneuver was executed with lightning speed; the drivers came up at a gallop, wheeled their limber into position in rear of the gun, when the cannoneers raised the trail of the piece and hooked on. The movement, however, collecting as it did, momentarily, men and horses on the battery front in something of a huddle, created a certain degree of confusion, of which the enemy took advantage by increasing the rapidity of their fire; three more men dropped. The teams darted away at breakneck speed, describing an arc of a circle among the fields, and the battery took up its new position some fifty or sixty yards more to the right, on a gentle eminence that was situated on the other flank of the 106th. The pieces were unlimbered, the drivers resumed their station at the rear, face to the enemy, and the firing was reopened; and so little time was lost between leaving their old post and taking up the new that the earth had barely ceased to tremble under the concussion.

Maurice uttered a cry of dismay, when, after three attempts, the Prussians had again got their range; the first shell landed squarely on Honore's gun. The artilleryman rushed forward, and with a trembling hand felt to ascertain what damage had been done his pet; a great wedge had been chipped from the bronze muzzle. But it was not disabled, and the work went on as before, after they had removed from beneath the wheels the body of another cannoneer, with whose blood the entire carriage was besplashed.

"It was not little Louis; I am glad of that," said Maurice, continuing to think aloud. "There he is now, pointing his gun; he must be wounded, though, for he is only using his left arm. Ah, he is a brave lad, is little Louis; and how well he and Adolphe get on together, in spite of their little tiffs, only provided the gunner, the man who serves on foot, shows a proper amount of respect for the driver, the man who rides a horse, notwithstanding that the latter is by far the more ignorant of the two. Now that they are under fire, though, Louis is as good a man as Adolphe—"

Jean, who had been watching events in silence, gave utterance to a distressful cry:

"They will have to give it up! No troops in the world could stand such a fire."

Within the space of five minutes the second position had become as untenable as was the first; the projectiles kept falling with the same persistency, the same deadly precision. A shell dismounted a gun, fracturing the chase, killing a lieutenant and two men. Not one of the enemy's shots failed to reach, and at each discharge they secured a still greater accuracy of range, so that if the battery should remain there another five minutes they would not have a gun or a man left. The crushing fire threatened to wipe them all out of existence.

Again the captain's ringing voice was heard ordering up the limbers. The drivers dashed up at a gallop and wheeled their teams into place to allow the cannoneers to hook on the guns, but before Adolphe had time to get up Louis was struck by a fragment of shell that tore open his throat and broke his jaw; he fell across the trail of the carriage just as he was on the point of raising it. Adolphe was there instantly, and beholding his prostrate comrade weltering in his blood, jumped from his horse and was about to raise him to his saddle and bear him away. And at that moment, just as the battery was exposed flank to the enemy in the act of wheeling, offering a fair target, a crashing discharge came, and Adolphe reeled and fell to the ground, his chest crushed in, with arms wide extended. In his supreme convulsion he seized his comrade about the body, and thus they lay, locked in each other's arms in a last embrace, "married" even in death.

Notwithstanding the slaughtered horses and the confusion that that death-dealing discharge had caused among the men, the battery had rattled up the slope of a hillock and taken post a few yards from the spot where Jean and Maurice were lying. For the third time the guns were unlimbered, the drivers retired to the rear and faced the enemy, and the cannoneers, with a gallantry that nothing could daunt, at once reopened fire.

"It is as if the end of all things were at hand!" said Maurice, the sound of whose voice was lost in the uproar.

It seemed indeed as if heaven and earth were confounded in that hideous din. Great rocks were cleft asunder, the sun was hid from sight at times in clouds of sulphurous vapor. When the cataclysm was at its height the horses stood with drooping heads, trembling, dazed with terror. The captain's tall form was everywhere upon the eminence; suddenly he was seen no more; a shell had cut him clean in two, and he sank, as a ship's mast that is snapped off at the base.

But it was about Honore's gun, even more than the others, that the conflict raged, with cool efficiency and obstinate determination. The non-commissioned officer found it necessary to forget his chevrons for the time being and lend a hand in working the piece, for he had now but three cannoneers left; he pointed the gun and pulled the lanyard, while the others brought ammunition from the caisson, loaded, and handled the rammer and the sponge. He had sent for men and horses from the battery reserves that were kept to supply the places of those removed by casualties, but they were slow in coming, and in the meantime the survivors must do the work of the dead. It was a great discouragement to all that their projectiles ranged short and burst almost without exception in the air, inflicting no injury on the powerful batteries of the foe, the fire of which was so efficient. And suddenly Honore let slip an oath that was heard above the thunder of the battle; ill-luck, ill-luck, nothing but ill-luck! the right wheel of his piece was smashed! Tonnerre de Dieu! what a state she was in, the poor darling! stretched on her side with a broken paw, her nose buried in the ground, crippled and good for nothing! The sight brought big tears to his eyes, he laid his trembling hand upon the breech, as if the ardor of his love might avail to warm his dear mistress back to life. And the best gun of them all, the only one that had been able to drop a few shells among the enemy! Then suddenly he conceived a daring project, nothing less than to repair the injury there and then, under that terrible fire. Assisted by one of his men he ran back to the caisson and secured the spare wheel that was attached to the rear axle, and then commenced the most dangerous operation that can be executed on a battlefield. Fortunately the extra men and horses that he had sent for came up just then, and he had two cannoneers to lend him a hand.

For the third time, however, the strength of the battery was so reduced as practically to disable it. To push their heroic daring further would be madness; the order was given to abandon the position definitely.

"Make haste, comrades!" Honore exclaimed. "Even if she is fit for no further service we'll carry her off; those fellows shan't have her!"

To save the gun, even as men risk their life to save the flag; that was his idea. And he had not ceased to speak when he was stricken down as by a thunderbolt, his right arm torn from its socket, his left flank laid open. He had fallen upon his gun he loved so well, and lay there as if stretched on a bed of honor, with head erect, his unmutilated face turned toward the enemy, and bearing an expression of proud defiance that made him beautiful in death. From his torn jacket a letter had fallen to the ground and lay in the pool of blood that dribbled slowly from above.

The only lieutenant left alive shouted the order: "Bring up the limbers!"

A caisson had exploded with a roar that rent the skies. They were obliged to take the horses from another caisson in order to save a gun of which the team had been killed. And when, for the last time, the drivers had brought up their smoking horses and the guns had been limbered up, the whole battery flew away at a gallop and never stopped until they reached the edge of the wood of la Garenne, nearly twelve hundred yards away.

Maurice had seen the whole. He shivered with horror, and murmured mechanically, in a faint voice:

"Oh! poor fellow, poor fellow!"

In addition to this feeling of mental distress he had a horrible sensation of physical suffering, as if something was gnawing at his vitals. It was the animal portion of his nature asserting itself; he was at the end of his endurance, was ready to sink with hunger. His perceptions were dimmed, he was not even conscious of the dangerous position the regiment was in now it no longer was protected by the battery. It was more than likely that the enemy would not long delay to attack the plateau in force.

"Look here," he said to Jean, "I must eat—if I am to be killed for it the next minute, I must eat."

He opened his knapsack and, taking out the bread with shaking hands, set his teeth in it voraciously. The bullets were whistling above their heads, two shells exploded only a few yards away, but all was as naught to him in comparison with his craving hunger.

"Will you have some, Jean?"

The corporal was watching him with hungry eyes and a stupid expression on his face; his stomach was also twinging him.

"Yes, I don't care if I do; this suffering is more than I can stand."

They divided the loaf between them and each devoured his portion gluttonously, unmindful of what was going on about them so long as a crumb remained. And it was at that time that they saw their colonel for the last time, sitting his big horse, with his blood-stained boot. The regiment was surrounded on every side; already some of the companies had left the field. Then, unable longer to restrain their flight, with tears standing in his eyes and raising his sword above his head:

"My children," cried M. de Vineuil, "I commend you to the protection of God, who thus far has spared us all!"

He rode off down the hill, surrounded by a swarm of fugitives, and vanished from their sight.

Then, they knew not how, Maurice and Jean found themselves once more behind the hedge, with the remnant of their company. Some forty men at the outside were all that remained, with Lieutenant Rochas as their commander, and the regimental standard was with them; the subaltern who carried it had furled the silk about the staff in order to try to save it. They made their way along the hedge, as far as it extended, to a cluster of small trees upon a hillside, where Rochas made them halt and reopen fire. The men, dispersed in skirmishing order and sufficiently protected, could hold their ground, the more that an important calvary movement was in preparation on their right and regiments of infantry were being brought up to support it.

It was at that moment that Maurice comprehended the full scope of that mighty, irresistible turning movement that was now drawing near completion. That morning he had watched the Prussians debouching by the Saint-Albert pass and had seen their advanced guard pushed forward, first to Saint-Menges, then to Fleigneux, and now, behind the wood of la Garenne, he could hear the thunder of the artillery of the Guard, could behold other German uniforms arriving on the scene over the hills of Givonne. Yet a few moments, it might be, and the circle would be complete; the Guard would join hands with the Vth corps, surrounding the French army with a living wall, girdling them about with a belt of flaming artillery. It was with the resolve to make one supreme, desperate effort, to try to hew a passage through that advancing wall, that General Margueritte's division of the reserve cavalry was massing behind a protecting crest preparatory to charging. They were about to charge into the jaws of death, with no possibility of achieving any useful result, solely for the glory of France and the French army. And Maurice, whose thoughts turned to Prosper, was a witness of the terrible spectacle.

What between the messages that were given him to carry and their answers, Prosper had been kept busy since daybreak spurring up and down the plateau of Illy. The cavalrymen had been awakened at peep of dawn, man by man, without sound of trumpet, and to make their morning coffee had devised the ingenious expedient of screening their fires with a greatcoat so as not to attract the attention of the enemy. Then there came a period when they were left entirely to themselves, with nothing to occupy them; they seemed to be forgotten by their commanders. They could hear the sound of the cannonading, could descry the puffs of smoke, could see the distant movements of the infantry, but were utterly ignorant of the battle, its importance, and its results. Prosper, as far as he was concerned, was suffering from want of sleep. The cumulative fatigue induced by many nights of broken rest, the invincible somnolency caused by the easy gait of his mount, made life a burden. He dreamed dreams and saw visions; now he was sleeping comfortably in a bed between clean sheets, now snoring on the bare ground among sharpened flints. For minutes at a time he would actually be sound asleep in his saddle, a lifeless clod, his steed's intelligence answering for both. Under such circumstances comrades had often tumbled from their seats upon the road. They were so fagged that when they slept the trumpets no longer awakened them; the only way to rouse them from their lethargy and get them on their feet was to kick them soundly.

"But what are they going to do, what are they going to do with us?" Prosper kept saying to himself. It was the only thing he could think of to keep himself awake.

For six hours the cannon had been thundering. As they climbed a hill two comrades, riding at his side, had been struck down by a shell, and as they rode onward seven or eight others had bit the dust, pierced by rifle-balls that came no one could say whence. It was becoming tiresome, that slow parade, as useless as it was dangerous, up and down the battlefield. At last—it was about one o'clock—he learned that it had been decided they were to be killed off in a somewhat more decent manner. Margueritte's entire division, comprising three regiments of chasseurs d'Afrique, one of chasseurs de France, and one of hussars, had been drawn in and posted in a shallow valley a little to the south of the Calvary of Illy. The trumpets had sounded: "Dismount!" and then the officers' command ran down the line to tighten girths and look to packs.

Prosper alighted, stretched his cramped limbs, and gave Zephyr a friendly pat upon the neck. Poor Zephyr! he felt the degradation of the ignominious, heartbreaking service they were subjected to almost as keenly as his master; and not only that, but he had to carry a small arsenal of stores and implements of various kinds: the holsters stuffed with his master's linen and underclothing and the greatcoat rolled above, the stable suit, blouse, and overalls, and the sack containing brushes, currycomb, and other articles of equine toilet behind the saddle, the haversack with rations slung at his side, to say nothing of such trifles as side-lines and picket-pins, the watering bucket and the wooden basin. The cavalryman's tender heart was stirred by a feeling of compassion, as he tightened up the girth and looked to see that everything was secure in its place.

It was a trying moment. Prosper was no more a coward than the next man, but his mouth was intolerably dry and hot; he lit a cigarette in the hope that it would relieve the unpleasant sensation. When about to charge no man can assert with any degree of certainty that he will ride back again. The suspense lasted some five or six minutes; it was said that General Margueritte had ridden forward to reconnoiter the ground over which they were to charge; they were awaiting his return. The five regiments had been formed in three columns, each column having a depth of seven squadrons; enough to afford an ample meal to the hostile guns.

Presently the trumpets rang out: "To horse!" and this was succeeded almost immediately by the shrill summons: "Draw sabers!"

The colonel of each regiment had previously ridden out and taken his proper position, twenty-five yards to the front, the captains were all at their posts at the head of their squadrons. Then there was another period of anxious waiting, amid a silence heavy as that of death. Not a sound, not a breath, there, beneath the blazing sun; nothing, save the beating of those brave hearts. One order more, the supreme, the decisive one, and that mass, now so inert and motionless, would become a resistless tornado, sweeping all before it.

At that juncture, however, an officer appeared coming over the crest of the hill in front, wounded, and preserving his seat in the saddle only by the assistance of a man on either side. No one recognized him at first, but presently a deep, ominous murmur began to run from squadron to squadron, which quickly swelled into a furious uproar. It was General Margueritte, who had received a wound from which he died a few days later; a musket-ball had passed through both cheeks, carrying away a portion of the tongue and palate. He was incapable of speech, but waved his arm in the direction of the enemy. The fury of his men knew no bounds; their cries rose louder still upon the air.

"It is our general! Avenge him, avenge him!"

Then the colonel of the first regiment, raising aloft his saber, shouted in a voice of thunder:

"Charge!"

The trumpets sounded, the column broke into a trot and was away. Prosper was in the leading squadron, but almost at the extreme right of the right wing, a position of less danger than the center, upon which the enemy always naturally concentrate their hottest fire. When they had topped the summit of the Calvary and began to descend the slope beyond that led downward into the broad plain he had a distinct view, some two-thirds of a mile away, of the Prussian squares that were to be the object of their attack. Beside that vision all the rest was dim and confused before his eyes; he moved onward as one in a dream, with a strange ringing in his ears, a sensation of voidness in his mind that left him incapable of framing an idea. He was a part of the great engine that tore along, controlled by a superior will. The command ran along the line: "Keep touch of knees! Keep touch of knees!" in order to keep the men closed up and give their ranks the resistance and rigidity of a wall of granite, and as their trot became swifter and swifter and finally broke into a mad gallop, the chasseurs d'Afrique gave their wild Arab cry that excited their wiry steeds to the verge of frenzy. Onward they tore, faster and faster still, until their gallop was a race of unchained demons, their shouts the shrieks of souls in mortal agony; onward they plunged amid a storm of bullets that rattled on casque and breastplate, on buckle and scabbard, with a sound like hail; into the bosom of that hailstorm flashed that thunderbolt beneath which the earth shook and trembled, leaving behind it, as it passed, an odor of burned woolen and the exhalations of wild beasts.

At five hundred yards the line wavered an instant, then swirled and broke in a frightful eddy that brought Prosper to the ground. He clutched Zephyr by the mane and succeeded in recovering his seat. The center had given way, riddled, almost annihilated as it was by the musketry fire, while the two wings had wheeled and ridden back a little way to renew their formation. It was the foreseen, foredoomed destruction of the leading squadron. Disabled horses covered the ground, some quiet in death, but many struggling violently in their strong agony; and everywhere dismounted riders could be seen, running as fast as their short legs would let them, to capture themselves another mount. Many horses that had lost their master came galloping back to the squadron and took their place in line of their own accord, to rush with their comrades back into the fire again, as if there was some strange attraction for them in the smell of gunpowder. The charge was resumed; the second squadron went forward, like the first, at a constantly accelerated rate of speed, the men bending upon their horses' neck, holding the saber along the thigh, ready for use upon the enemy. Two hundred yards more were gained this time, amid the thunderous, deafening uproar, but again the center broke under the storm of bullets; men and horses went down in heaps, and the piled corpses made an insurmountable barrier for those who followed. Thus was the second squadron in its turn mown down, annihilated, leaving its task to be accomplished by those who came after.

When for the third time the men were called upon to charge and responded with invincible heroism, Prosper found that his companions were principally hussars and chasseurs de France. Regiments and squadrons, as organizations, had ceased to exist; their constituent elements were drops in the mighty wave that alternately broke and reared its crest again, to swallow up all that lay in its destructive path. He had long since lost distinct consciousness of what was going on around him, and suffered his movements to be guided by his mount, faithful Zephyr, who had received a wound in the ear that seemed to madden him. He was now in the center, where all about him horses were rearing, pawing the air, and falling backward; men were dismounted as if torn from their saddle by the blast of a tornado, while others, shot through some vital part, retained their seat and rode onward in the ranks with vacant, sightless eyes. And looking back over the additional two hundred yards that this effort had won for them, they could see the field of yellow stubble strewn thick with dead and dying. Some there were who had fallen headlong from their saddle and buried their face in the soft earth. Others had alighted on their back and were staring up into the sun with terror-stricken eyes that seemed bursting from their sockets. There was a handsome black horse, an officer's charger, that had been disemboweled, and was making frantic efforts to rise, his fore feet entangled in his entrails. Beneath the fire, that became constantly more murderous as they drew nearer, the survivors in the wings wheeled their horses and fell back to concentrate their strength for a fresh onset.

Finally it was the fourth squadron, which, on the fourth attempt, reached the Prussian lines. Prosper made play with his saber, hacking away at helmets and dark uniforms as well as he could distinguish them, for all was dim before him, as in a dense mist. Blood flowed in torrents; Zephyr's mouth was smeared with it, and to account for it he said to himself that the good horse must have been using his teeth on the Prussians. The clamor around him became so great that he could not hear his own voice, although his throat seemed splitting from the yells that issued from it. But behind the first Prussian line there was another, and then another, and then another still. Their gallant efforts went for nothing; those dense masses of men were like a tangled jungle that closed around the horses and riders who entered it and buried them in its rank growths. They might hew down those who were within reach of their sabers; others stood ready to take their place, the last squadrons were lost and swallowed up in their vast numbers. The firing, at point-blank range, was so furious that the men's clothing was ignited. Nothing could stand before it, all went down; and the work that it left unfinished was completed by bayonet and musket butt. Of the brave men who rode into action that day two-thirds remained upon the battlefield, and the sole end achieved by that mad charge was to add another glorious page to history. And then Zephyr, struck by a musket-ball full in the chest, dropped in a heap, crushing beneath him Prosper's right thigh; and the pain was so acute that the young man fainted.

Maurice and Jean, who had watched the gallant effort with burning interest, uttered an exclamation of rage.

"Tonnerre de Dieu! what bravery wasted!"

And they resumed their firing from among the trees of the low hill where they were deployed in skirmishing order. Rochas himself had picked up an abandoned musket and was blazing away with the rest. But the plateau of Illy was lost to them by this time beyond hope of recovery; the Prussians were pouring in upon it from every quarter. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of two o'clock, and their great movement was accomplished; the Vth corps and the Guards had effected their junction, the investment of the French army was complete.

Jean was suddenly brought to the ground.

"I am done for," he murmured.

He had received what seemed to him like a smart blow of a hammer on the crown of his head, and his kepi lay behind him with a great furrow plowed through its top. At first he thought that the bullet had certainly penetrated the skull and laid bare the brain; his dread of finding a yawning orifice there was so great that for some seconds he dared not raise his hand to ascertain the truth. When finally he ventured, his fingers, on withdrawing them, were red with an abundant flow of blood, and the pain was so intense that he fainted.

Just then Rochas gave the order to fall back. The Prussians had crept up on them and were only two or three hundred yards away; they were in danger of being captured.

"Be cool, don't hurry; face about and give 'em another shot. Rally behind that low wall that you see down there."

Maurice was in despair; he knew not what to do.

"We are not going to leave our corporal behind, are we, lieutenant?"

"What are we to do? he has turned up his toes."

"No, no! he is breathing still. Take him along!"

Rochas shrugged his shoulders as if to say they could not bother themselves for every man that dropped. A wounded man is esteemed of little value on the battlefield. Then Maurice addressed his supplications to Lapoulle and Pache.

"Come, give me a helping hand. I am not strong enough to carry him unassisted."

They were deaf to his entreaties; all they could hear was the voice that urged them to seek safety for themselves. The Prussians were now not more than a hundred yards from them; already they were on their hands and knees, crawling as fast as they could go toward the wall.

And Maurice, weeping tears of rage, thus left alone with his unconscious companion, raised him in his arms and endeavored to lug him away, but he found his puny strength unequal to the task, exhausted as he was by fatigue and the emotions of the day. At the first step he took he reeled and fell with his burden. If only he could catch sight of a stretcher-bearer! He strained his eyes, thought he had discovered one among the crowd of fugitives, and made frantic gestures of appeal; no one came, they were left behind, alone. Summoning up his strength with a determined effort of the will he seized Jean once more and succeeded in advancing some thirty paces, when a shell burst near them and he thought that all was ended, that he, too, was to die on the body of his comrade.

Slowly, cautiously, Maurice picked himself up. He felt his body, arms, and legs; nothing, not a scratch. Why should he not look out for himself and fly, alone? There was time left still; a few bounds would take him to the wall and he would be saved. His horrible sensation of fear returned and made him frantic. He was collecting his energies to break away and run, when a feeling stronger than death intervened and vanquished the base impulse. What, abandon Jean! he could not do it. It would be like mutilating his own being; the brotherly affection that had bourgeoned and grown between him and that rustic had struck its roots down into his life, too deep to be slain like that. The feeling went back to the earliest days, was perhaps as old as the world itself; it was as if there were but they two upon earth, of whom one could not forsake the other without forsaking himself, and being doomed thenceforth to an eternity of solitude. Molded of the same clay, quickened by the same spirit, duty imperiously commanded to save himself in saving his brother.

Had it not been for the crust of bread he ate an hour before under the Prussian shells Maurice could never have done what he did; how he did it he could never in subsequent days remember. He must have hoisted Jean upon his shoulders and crawled through the brush and brambles, falling a dozen times only to pick himself up and go on again, stumbling at every rut, at every pebble. His indomitable will sustained him, his dogged resolution would have enabled him to bear a mountain on his back. Behind the low wall he found Rochas and the few men that were left of the squad, firing away as stoutly as ever and defending the flag, which the subaltern held beneath his arm. It had not occurred to anyone to designate lines of retreat for the several army corps in case the day should go against them; owing to this want of foresight every general was at liberty to act as seemed to him best, and at this stage of the conflict they all found themselves being crowded back upon Sedan under the steady, unrelaxing pressure of the German armies. The second division of the 7th corps fell back in comparatively good order, while the remnants of the other divisions, mingled with the debris of the 1st corps, were already streaming into the city in terrible disorder, a roaring torrent of rage and fright that bore all, men and beasts, before it.

But to Maurice, at that moment, was granted the satisfaction of seeing Jean unclose his eyes, and as he was running to a stream that flowed near by, for water with which to bathe his friend's face, he was surprised, looking down on his right into a sheltered valley that lay between rugged slopes, to behold the same peasant whom he had seen that morning, still leisurely driving the plow through the furrow with the assistance of his big white horse. Why should he lose a day? Men might fight, but none the less the corn would keep on growing; and folks must live.

VI.

Up on his lofty terrace, whither he had betaken himself to watch how affairs were shaping, Delaherche at last became impatient and was seized with an uncontrollable desire for news. He could see that the enemy's shells were passing over the city and that the few projectiles which had fallen on the houses in the vicinity were only responses, made at long intervals, to the irregular and harmless fire from Fort Palatinat, but he could discern nothing of the battle, and his agitation was rising to fever heat; he experienced an imperious longing for intelligence, which was constantly stimulated by the reflection that his life and fortune would be in danger should the army be defeated. He found it impossible to remain there longer, and went downstairs, leaving behind him the telescope on its tripod, turned on the German batteries.

When he had descended, however, he lingered a moment, detained by the aspect of the central garden of the factory. It was near one o'clock, and the ambulance was crowded with wounded men; the wagons kept driving up to the entrance in an unbroken stream. The regular ambulance wagons of the medical department, two-wheeled and four-wheeled, were too few in number to meet the demand, and vehicles of every description from the artillery and other trains, prolonges, provision vans, everything on wheels that could be picked up on the battlefield, came rolling up with their ghastly loads; and later in the day even carrioles and market-gardeners' carts were pressed into the service and harnessed to horses that were found straying along the roads. Into these motley conveyances were huddled the men collected from the flying ambulances, where their hurts had received such hasty attention as could be afforded. It was a sight to move the most callous to behold the unloading of those poor wretches, some with a greenish pallor on their face, others suffused with the purple hue that denotes congestion; many were in a state of coma, others uttered piercing cries of anguish; some there were who, in their semi-conscious condition, yielded themselves to the arms of the attendants with a look of deepest terror in their eyes, while a few, the minute a hand was laid on them, died of the consequent shock. They continued to arrive in such numbers that soon every bed in the vast apartment would have its occupant, and Major Bouroche had given orders to make use of the straw that had been spread thickly upon the floor at one end. He and his assistants had thus far been able to attend to all the cases with reasonable promptness; he had requested Mme. Delaherche to furnish him with another table, with mattress and oilcloth cover, for the shed where he had established his operating room. The assistant would thrust a napkin saturated with chloroform to the patient's nostrils, the keen knife flashed in the air, there was the faint rasping of the saw, barely audible, the blood spurted in short, sharp jets that were checked immediately. As soon as one subject had been operated on another was brought in, and they followed one another in such quick succession that there was barely time to pass a sponge over the protecting oilcloth. At the extremity of the grass plot, screened from sight by a clump of lilac bushes, they had set up a kind of morgue whither they carried the bodies of the dead, which were removed from the beds without a moment's delay in order to make room for the living, and this receptacle also served to receive the amputated legs, and arms, whatever debris of flesh and bone remained upon the table.

Mme. Delaherche and Gilberte, seated at the foot of one of the great trees, found it hard work to keep pace with the demand for bandages. Bouroche, who happened to be passing, his face very red, his apron white no longer, threw a bundle of linen to Delaherche and shouted:

"Here! be doing something; make yourself useful!"

But the manufacturer objected. "Oh! excuse me; I must go and try to pick up some news. One can't tell whether his neck is safe or not." Then, touching his lips to his wife's hair: "My poor Gilberte, to think that a shell may burn us out of house and home at any moment! It is horrible."

She was very pale; she raised her head and glanced about her, shuddering as she did so. Then, involuntarily, her unextinguishable smile returned to her lips.

"Oh, horrible, indeed! and all those poor men that they are cutting and carving. I don't see how it is that I stay here without fainting."

Mme. Delaherche had watched her son as he kissed the young woman's hair. She made a movement as if to part them, thinking of that other man who must have kissed those tresses so short a time ago; then her old hands trembled, she murmured beneath her breath:

"What suffering all about us, mon Dieu! It makes one forget his own."

Delaherche left them, with the assurance that he would be away no longer than was necessary to ascertain the true condition of affairs. In the Rue Maqua he was surprised to observe the crowds of soldiers that were streaming into the city, without arms and in torn, dust-stained uniforms. It was in vain, however, that he endeavored to slake his thirst for news by questioning them; some answered with vacant, stupid looks that they knew nothing, while others told long rambling stories, with the maniacal gestures and whirling words of one bereft of reason. He therefore mechanically turned his steps again toward the Sous Prefecture as the likeliest quarter in which to look for information. As he was passing along the Place du College two guns, probably all that remained of some battery, came dashing up to the curb on a gallop, and were abandoned there. When at last he turned into the Grande Rue he had further evidence that the advanced guards of the fugitives were beginning to take possession, of the city; three dismounted hussars had seated themselves in a doorway and were sharing a loaf of bread; two others were walking their mounts up and down, leading them by the bridle, not knowing where to look for stabling for them; officers were hurrying to and fro distractedly, seemingly without any distinct purpose. On the Place Turenne a lieutenant counseled him not to loiter unnecessarily, for the shells had an unpleasant way of dropping there every now and then; indeed, a splinter had just demolished the railing about the statue of the great commander who overran the Palatinate. And as if to emphasize the officer's advice, while he was making fast time down the Rue de la Sous Prefecture he saw two projectiles explode, with a terrible crash, on the Pont de Meuse.

He was standing in front of the janitor's lodge, debating with himself whether it would be best to send in his card and try to interview one of the aides-de-camp, when he heard a girlish voice calling him by name.

"M. Delaherche! Come in here, quick; it is not safe out there."

It was Rose, his little operative, whose existence he had quite forgotten. She might be a useful ally in assisting him to gain access to headquarters; he entered the lodge and accepted her invitation to be seated.

"Just think, mamma is down sick with the worry and confusion; she can't leave her bed, so, you see, I have to attend to everything, for papa is with the National Guards up in the citadel. A little while ago the Emperor left the building—I suppose he wanted to let people see he is not a coward—and succeeded in getting as far as the bridge down at the end of the street. A shell alighted right in front of him; one of his equerries had his horse killed under him. And then he came back—he couldn't do anything else, could he, now?"

"You must have heard some talk of how the battle is going. What do they say, those gentlemen upstairs?"

She looked at him in surprise. Her pretty face was bright and smiling, with its fluffy golden hair and the clear, childish eyes of one who bestirred herself among her multifarious duties, in the midst of all those horrors, which she did not well understand.

"No, I know nothing. About midday I sent up a letter for Marshal MacMahon, but it could not be given him right away, because the Emperor was in the room. They were together nearly an hour, the Marshal lying on his bed, the Emperor close beside him seated on a chair. That much I know for certain, because I saw them when the door was opened."

"And then, what did they say to each other?"

She looked at him again, and could not help laughing.

"Why, I don't know; how could you expect me to? There's not a living soul knows what they said to each other."

She was right; he made an apologetic gesture in recognition of the stupidity of his question. But the thought of that fateful conversation haunted him; the interest there was in it for him who could have heard it! What decision had they arrived at?

"And now," Rose added, "the Emperor is back in his cabinet again, where he is having a conference with two generals who have just come in from the battlefield." She checked herself, casting a glance at the main entrance of the building. "See! there is one of them, now—and there comes the other."

He hurried from the room, and in the two generals recognized Ducrot and Douay, whose horses were standing before the door. He watched them climb into their saddles and gallop away. They had hastened into the city, each independently of the other, after the plateau of Illy had been captured by the enemy, to notify the Emperor that the battle was lost. They placed the entire situation distinctly before him; the army and Sedan were even then surrounded on every side; the result could not help but be disastrous.

For some minutes the Emperor continued silently to pace the floor of his cabinet, with the feeble, uncertain step of an invalid. There was none with him save an aide-de-camp, who stood by the door, erect and mute. And ever, to and fro, from the window to the fireplace, from the fireplace to the window, the sovereign tramped wearily, the inscrutable face now drawn and twitching spasmodically with a nervous tic. The back was bent, the shoulders bowed, as if the weight of his falling empire pressed on them more heavily, and the lifeless eyes, veiled by their heavy lids, told of the anguish of the fatalist who has played his last card against destiny and lost. Each time, however, that his walk brought him to the half-open window he gave a start and lingered there a second. And during one of those brief stoppages he faltered with trembling lips:

"Oh! those guns, those guns, that have been going since the morning!"

The thunder of the batteries on la Marfee and at Frenois seemed, indeed, to resound with more terrific violence there than elsewhere. It was one continuous, uninterrupted crash, that shook the windows, nay, the very walls themselves; an incessant uproar that exasperated the nerves by its persistency. And he could not banish the reflection from his mind that, as the struggle was now hopeless, further resistance would be criminal. What would avail more bloodshed, more maiming and mangling; why add more corpses to the dead that were already piled high upon that bloody field? They were vanquished, it was all ended; then why not stop the slaughter? The abomination of desolation raised its voice to heaven: let it cease.

The Emperor, again before the window, trembled and raised his hands to his ears, as if to shut out those reproachful voices.

"Oh, those guns, those guns! Will they never be silent!"

Perhaps the dreadful thought of his responsibilities arose before him, with the vision of all those thousands of bleeding forms with which his errors had cumbered the earth; perhaps, again, it was but the compassionate impulse of the tender-hearted dreamer, of the well-meaning man whose mind was stocked with humanitarian theories. At the moment when he beheld utter ruin staring him in the face, in that frightful whirlwind of destruction that broke him like a reed and scattered his fortunes in the dust, he could yet find tears for others. Almost crazed at the thought of the slaughter that was mercilessly going on so near him, he felt he had not strength to endure it longer; each report of that accursed cannonade seemed to pierce his heart and intensified a thousandfold his own private suffering.

"Oh, those guns, those guns! they must be silenced at once, at once!"

And that monarch who no longer had a throne, for he had delegated all his functions to the Empress regent, that chief without an army, since he had turned over the supreme command to Marshal Bazaine, now felt that he must once more take the reins in his hand and be the master. Since they left Chalons he had kept himself in the background, had issued no orders, content to be a nameless nullity without recognized position, a cumbrous burden carried about from place to place among the baggage of his troops, and it was only in their hour of defeat that the Emperor reasserted itself in him; the one order that he was yet to give, out of the pity of his sorrowing heart, was to raise the white flag on the citadel to request an armistice.

"Those guns, oh! those guns! Take a sheet, someone, a tablecloth, it matters not what! only hasten, hasten, and see that it is done!"

The aide-de-camp hurried from the room, and with unsteady steps the Emperor continued to pace his beat, back and forth, between the window and the fireplace, while still the batteries kept thundering, shaking the house from garret to foundation.

Delaherche was still chatting with Rose in the room below when a non-commissioned officer of the guard came running in and interrupted them.

"Mademoiselle, the house is in confusion, I cannot find a servant. Can you let me have something from your linen closet, a white cloth of some kind?"

"Will a napkin answer?"

"No, no, it would not be large enough. Half of a sheet, say."

Rose, eager to oblige, was already fumbling in her closet.

"I don't think I have any half-sheets. No, I don't see anything that looks as if it would serve your purpose. Oh, here is something; could you use a tablecloth?"

"A tablecloth! just the thing. Nothing could be better." And he added as he left the room: "It is to be used as a flag of truce, and hoisted on the citadel to let the enemy know we want to stop the fighting. Much obliged, mademoiselle."

Delaherche gave a little involuntary start of delight; they were to have a respite at last, then! Then he thought it might be unpatriotic to be joyful at such a time, and put on a long face again; but none the less his heart was very glad and he contemplated with much interest a colonel and captain, followed by the sergeant, as they hurriedly left the Sous-Prefecture. The colonel had the tablecloth, rolled in a bundle, beneath his arm. He thought he should like to follow them, and took leave of Rose, who was very proud that her napery was to be put to such use. It was then just striking two o'clock.

In front of the Hotel de Ville Delaherche was jostled by a disorderly mob of half-crazed soldiers who were pushing their way down from the Faubourg de la Cassine; he lost sight of the colonel, and abandoned his design of going to witness the raising of the white flag. He certainly would not be allowed to enter the citadel, and then again he had heard it reported that shells were falling on the college, and a new terror filled his mind; his factory might have been burned since he left it. All his feverish agitation returned to him and he started off on a run; the rapid motion was a relief to him. But the streets were blocked by groups of men, at every crossing he was delayed by some new obstacle. It was only when he reached the Rue Maqua and beheld the monumental facade of his house intact, no smoke or sign of fire about it, that his anxiety was allayed, and he heaved a deep sigh of satisfaction. He entered, and from the doorway shouted to his mother and wife:

"It is all right! they are hoisting the white flag; the cannonade won't last much longer."

He said nothing more, for the appearance presented by the ambulance was truly horrifying.

In the vast drying-room, the wide door of which was standing open, not only was every bed occupied, but there was no more room upon the litter that had been shaken down on the floor at the end of the apartment. They were commencing to strew straw in the spaces between the beds, the wounded were crowded together so closely that they were in contact. Already there were more than two hundred patients there, and more were arriving constantly; through the lofty windows the pitiless white daylight streamed in upon that aggregation of suffering humanity. Now and then an unguarded movement elicited an involuntary cry of anguish. The death-rattle rose on the warm, damp air. Down the room a low, mournful wail, almost a lullaby, went on and ceased not. And all about was silence, intense, profound, the stolid resignation of despair, the solemn stillness of the death-chamber, broken only by the tread and whispers of the attendants. Rents in tattered, shell-torn uniforms disclosed gaping wounds, some of which had received a hasty dressing on the battlefield, while others were still raw and bleeding. There were feet, still incased in their coarse shoes, crushed into a mass like jelly; from knees and elbows, that were as if they had been smashed by a hammer, depended inert limbs. There were broken hands, and fingers almost severed, ready to drop, retained only by a strip of skin. Most numerous among the casualties were the fractures; the poor arms and legs, red and swollen, throbbed intolerably and were heavy as lead. But the most dangerous hurts were those in the abdomen, chest, and head. There were yawning fissures that laid open the entire flank, the knotted viscera were drawn into great hard lumps beneath the tight-drawn skin, while as the effect of certain wounds the patient frothed at the mouth and writhed like an epileptic. Here and there were cases where the lungs had been penetrated, the puncture now so minute as to permit no escape of blood, again a wide, deep orifice through which the red tide of life escaped in torrents; and the internal hemorrhages, those that were hid from sight, were the most terrible in their effects, prostrating their victim like a flash, making him black in the face and delirious. And finally the head, more than any other portion of the frame, gave evidence of hard treatment; a broken jaw, the mouth a pulp of teeth and bleeding tongue, an eye torn from its socket and exposed upon the cheek, a cloven skull that showed the palpitating brain beneath. Those in whose case the bullet had touched the brain or spinal marrow were already as dead men, sunk in the lethargy of coma, while the fractures and other less serious cases tossed restlessly on their pallets and beseechingly called for water to quench their thirst.

Leaving the large room and passing out into the courtyard, the shed where the operations were going on presented another scene of horror. In the rush and hurry that had continued unabated since morning it was impossible to operate on every case that was brought in, so their attention had been confined to those urgent cases that imperatively demanded it. Whenever Bouroche's rapid judgment told him that amputation was necessary, he proceeded at once to perform it. In the same way he lost not a moment's time in probing the wound and extracting the projectile whenever it had lodged in some locality where it might do further mischief, as in the muscles of the neck, the region of the arm pit, the thigh joint, the ligaments of the knee and elbow. Severed arteries, too, had to be tied without delay. Other wounds were merely dressed by one of the hospital stewards under his direction and left to await developments. He had already with his own hand performed four amputations, the only rest that he allowed himself being to attend to some minor cases in the intervals between them, and was beginning to feel fatigue. There were but two tables, his own and another, presided over by one of his assistants; a sheet had been hung between them, to isolate the patients from each other. Although the sponge was kept constantly at work the tables were always red, and the buckets that were emptied over a bed of daisies a few steps away, the clear water in which a single tumbler of blood sufficed to redden, seemed to be buckets of unmixed blood, torrents of blood, inundating the gentle flowers of the parterre. Although the room was thoroughly ventilated a nauseating smell arose from the tables and their horrid burdens, mingled with the sweetly insipid odor of chloroform.

Delaherche, naturally a soft-hearted man, was in a quiver of compassionate emotion at the spectacle that lay before his eyes, when his attention was attracted by a landau that drove up to the door. It was a private carriage, but doubtless the ambulance attendants had found none other ready to their hand and had crowded their patients into it. There were eight of them, sitting on one another's knees, and as the last man alighted the manufacturer recognized Captain Beaudoin, and gave utterance to a cry of terror and surprise.

"Ah, my poor friend! Wait, I will call my mother and my wife."

They came running up, leaving the bandages to be rolled by servants. The attendants had already raised the captain and brought him into the room, and were about to lay him down upon a pile of straw when Delaherche noticed, lying on a bed, a soldier whose ashy face and staring eyes exhibited no sign of life.

"Look, is he not dead, that man?"

"That's so!" replied the attendant. "He may as well make room for someone else!"

He and one of his mates took the body by the arms and legs and carried it off to the morgue that had been extemporized behind the lilac bushes. A dozen corpses were already there in a row, stiff and stark, some drawn out to their full length as if in an attempt to rid themselves of the agony that racked them, others curled and twisted in every attitude of suffering. Some seemed to have left the world with a sneer on their faces, their eyes retroverted till naught was visible but the whites, the grinning lips parted over the glistening teeth, while in others, with faces unspeakably sorrowful, big tears still stood on the cheeks. One, a mere boy, short and slight, half whose face had been shot away by a cannon-ball, had his two hands clasped convulsively above his heart, and in them a woman's photograph, one of those pale, blurred pictures that are made in the quarters of the poor, bedabbled with his blood. And at the feet of the dead had been thrown in a promiscuous pile the amputated arms and legs, the refuse of the knife and saw of the operating table, just as the butcher sweeps into a corner of his shop the offal, the worthless odds and ends of flesh and bone.

Gilberte shuddered as she looked on Captain Beaudoin. Good God! how pale he was, stretched out on his mattress, his face so white beneath the encrusting grime! And the thought that but a few short hours before he had held her in his arms, radiant in all his manly strength and beauty, sent a chill of terror to her heart. She kneeled beside him.

"What a terrible misfortune, my friend! But it won't amount to anything, will it?" And she drew her handkerchief from her pocket and began mechanically to wipe his face, for she could not bear to look at it thus soiled with powder, sweat, and clay. It seemed to her, too, that she would be helping him by cleansing him a little. "Will it? it is only your leg that is hurt; it won't amount to anything."

The captain made an effort to rouse himself from his semi-conscious state, and opened his eyes. He recognized his friends and greeted them with a faint smile.

"Yes, it is only the leg. I was not even aware of being hit; I thought I had made a misstep and fallen—" He spoke with great difficulty. "Oh! I am so thirsty!"

Mme. Delaherche, who was standing at the other side of the mattress, looking down compassionately on the young man, hastily left the room. She returned with a glass and a carafe of water into which a little cognac had been poured, and when the captain had greedily swallowed the contents of the glass, she distributed what remained in the carafe among the occupants of the adjacent beds, who begged with trembling outstretched hands and tearful voices for a drop. A zouave, for whom there was none left, sobbed like a child in his disappointment.

Delaherche was meantime trying to gain the major's ear to see if he could not prevail on him to take up the captain's case out of its regular turn. Bouroche came into the room just then, with his blood-stained apron and lion's mane hanging in confusion about his perspiring face, and the men raised their heads as he passed and endeavored to stop him, all clamoring at once for recognition and immediate attention: "This way, major! It's my turn, major!" Faltering words of entreaty went up to him, trembling hands clutched at his garments, but he, wrapped up in the work that lay before him and puffing with his laborious exertions, continued to plan and calculate and listened to none of them. He communed with himself aloud, counting them over with his finger and classifying them, assigning them their numbers; this one first, then that one, then that other fellow; one, two, three; the jaw, the arm, then the thigh; while the assistant who accompanied him on his round made himself all ears in his effort to memorize his directions.

"Major," said Delaherche, plucking him by the sleeve, "there is an officer over here, Captain Beaudoin—"

Bouroche interrupted him. "What, Beaudoin here! Ah, the poor devil!" And he crossed over at once to the side of the wounded man. A single glance, however, must have sufficed to show him that the case was a bad one, for he added in the same breath, without even stooping to examine the injured member: "Good! I will have them bring him to me at once, just as soon as I am through with the operation that is now in hand."

And he went back to the shed, followed by Delaherche, who would not lose sight of him for fear lest he might forget his promise.

The business that lay before him now was the rescision of a shoulder-joint in accordance with Lisfranc's method, which surgeons never fail to speak of as a "very pretty" operation, something neat and expeditious, barely occupying forty seconds in the performance. The patient was subjected to the influence of chloroform, while an assistant grasped the shoulder with both hands, the fingers under the armpit, the thumbs on top. Bouroche, brandishing the long, keen knife, cried: "Raise him!" seized the deltoid with his left hand and with a swift movement of the right cut through the flesh of the arm and severed the muscle; then, with a deft rearward cut, he disarticulated the joint at a single stroke, and presto! the arm fell on the table, taken off in three motions. The assistant slipped his thumbs over the brachial artery in such manner as to close it. "Let him down!" Bouroche could not restrain a little pleased laugh as he proceeded to secure the artery, for he had done it in thirty-five seconds. All that was left to do now was to bring a flap of skin down over the wound and stitch it, in appearance something like a flat epaulette. It was not only "pretty," but exciting, on account of the danger, for a man will pump all the blood out of his body in two minutes through the brachial, to say nothing of the risk there is in bringing a patient to a sitting posture when under the influence of anaesthetics.

Delaherche was white as a ghost; a thrill of horror ran down his back. He would have turned and fled, but time was not given him; the arm was already off. The soldier was a new recruit, a sturdy peasant lad; on emerging from his state of coma he beheld a hospital attendant carrying away the amputated limb to conceal it behind the lilacs. Giving a quick downward glance at his shoulder, he saw the bleeding stump and knew what had been done, whereon he became furiously angry.

"Ah, nom de Dieu! what have you been doing to me? It is a shame!"

Bouroche was too done up to make him an immediate answer, but presently, in his fatherly way:

"I acted for the best; I didn't want to see you kick the bucket, my boy. Besides, I asked you, and you told me to go ahead."

"I told you to go ahead! I did? How could I know what I was saying!" His anger subsided and he began to weep scalding tears. "What is going to become of me now?"

They carried him away and laid him on the straw, and gave the table and its covering a thorough cleansing; and the buckets of blood-red water that they threw out across the grass plot gave to the pale daisies a still deeper hue of crimson.

When Delaherche had in some degree recovered his equanimity he was astonished to notice that the bombardment was still going on. Why had it not been silenced? Rose's tablecloth must have been hoisted over the citadel by that time, and yet it seemed as if the fire of the Prussian batteries was more rapid and furious than ever. The uproar was such that one could not hear his own voice; the sustained vibration tried the stoutest nerves. On both operators and patients the effect could not but be most unfavorable of those incessant detonations that seemed to penetrate the inmost recesses of one's being. The entire hospital was in a state of feverish alarm and apprehension.

"I supposed it was all over; what can they mean by keeping it up?" exclaimed Delaherche, who was nervously listening, expecting each shot would be the last.

Returning to Bouroche to remind him of his promise and conduct him to the captain, he was astonished to find him seated on a bundle of straw before two pails of iced water, into which he had plunged both his arms, bared to the shoulder. The major, weary and disheartened, overwhelmed by a sensation of deepest melancholy and dejection, had reached one of those terrible moments when the practitioner becomes conscious of his own impotency; he had exhausted his strength, physical and moral, and taken this means to restore it. And yet he was not a weakling; he was steady of hand and firm of heart; but the inexorable question had presented itself to him: "What is the use?" The feeling that he could accomplish so little, that so much must be left undone, had suddenly paralyzed him. What was the use? since Death, in spite of his utmost effort, would always be victorious. Two attendants came in, bearing Captain Beaudoin on a stretcher.

"Major," Delaherche ventured to say, "here is the captain."

Bouroche opened his eyes, withdrew his arms from their cold bath, shook and dried them on the straw. Then, rising to his feet:

"Ah, yes; the next one—Well, well, the day's work is not yet done." And he shook the tawny locks upon his lion's head, rejuvenated and refreshed, restored to himself once more by the invincible habit of duty and the stern discipline of his profession.

"Good! just above the right ankle," said Bouroche, with unusual garrulity, intended to quiet the nerves of the patient. "You displayed wisdom in selecting the location of your wound; one is not much the worse for a hurt in that quarter. Now we'll just take a little look at it."

But Beaudoin's persistently lethargic condition evidently alarmed him. He inspected the contrivance that had been applied by the field attendant to check the flow of blood, which was simply a cord passed around the leg outside the trousers and twisted tight with the assistance of a bayonet sheath, with a growling request to be informed what infernal ignoramus had done that. Then suddenly he saw how matters were and was silent; while they were bringing him in from the field in the overcrowded landau the improvised tourniquet had become loosened and slipped down, thus giving rise to an extensive hemorrhage. He relieved his feelings by storming at the hospital steward who was assisting him.

"You confounded snail, cut! Are you going to keep me here all day?"

The attendant cut away the trousers and drawers, then the shoe and sock, disclosing to view the leg and foot in their pale nudity, stained with blood. Just over the ankle was a frightful laceration, into which the splinter of the bursting shell had driven a piece of the red cloth of the trousers. The muscle protruded from the lips of the gaping orifice, a roll of whitish, mangled tissue.

Gilberte had to support herself against one of the uprights of the shed. Ah! that flesh, that poor flesh that was so white; now all torn and maimed and bleeding! Despite the horror and terror of the sight she could not turn away her eyes.

"Confound it!" Bouroche exclaimed, "they have made a nice mess here!"

He felt the foot and found it cold; the pulse, if any, was so feeble as to be undistinguishable. His face was very grave, and he pursed his lips in a way that was habitual with him when he had a more than usually serious case to deal with.

"Confound it," he repeated, "I don't like the looks of that foot!"

The captain, whom his anxiety had finally aroused from his semi-somnolent state, asked:

"What were you saying, major?"

Bouroche's tactics, whenever an amputation became necessary, were never to appeal directly to the patient for the customary authorization. He preferred to have the patient accede to it voluntarily.

"I was saying that I don't like the looks of that foot," he murmured, as if thinking aloud. "I am afraid we shan't be able to save it."

In a tone of alarm Beaudoin rejoined: "Come, major, there is no use beating about the bush. What is your opinion?"

"My opinion is that you are a brave man, captain, and that you are going to let me do what the necessity of the case demands."

To Captain Beaudoin it seemed as if a sort of reddish vapor arose before his eyes through which he saw things obscurely. He understood. But notwithstanding the intolerable fear that appeared to be clutching at his throat, he replied, unaffectedly and bravely:

"Do as you think best, major."

The preparations did not consume much time. The assistant had saturated a cloth with chloroform and was holding it in readiness; it was at once applied to the patient's nostrils. Then, just at the moment that the brief struggle set in that precedes anaesthesia, two attendants raised the captain and placed him on the mattress upon his back, in such a position that the legs should be free; one of them retained his grasp on the left limb, holding it flexed, while an assistant, seizing the right, clasped it tightly with both his hands in the region of the groin in order to compress the arteries.

Gilberte, when she saw Bouroche approach the victim with the glittering steel, could endure no more.

"Oh, don't! oh, don't! it is too horrible!"

And she would have fallen had it not been that Mme. Delaherche put forth her arm to sustain her.

"But why do you stay here?"

Both the women remained, however. They averted their eyes, not wishing to see the rest; motionless and trembling they stood locked in each other's arms, notwithstanding the little love there was between them.

At no time during the day had the artillery thundered more loudly than now. It was three o'clock, and Delaherche declared angrily that he gave it up—he could not understand it. There could be no doubt about it now, the Prussian batteries, instead of slackening their fire, were extending it. Why? What had happened? It was as if all the forces of the nether regions had been unchained; the earth shook, the heavens were on fire. The ring of flame-belching mouths of bronze that encircled Sedan, the eight hundred guns of the German armies, that were served with such activity and raised such an uproar, were expending their thunders on the adjacent fields; had that concentric fire been focused upon the city, had the batteries on those commanding heights once begun to play upon Sedan, it would have been reduced to ashes and pulverized into dust in less than fifteen minutes. But now the projectiles were again commencing to fall upon the houses, the crash that told of ruin and destruction was heard more frequently. One exploded in the Rue des Voyards, another grazed the tall chimney of the factory, and the bricks and mortar came tumbling to the ground directly in front of the shed where the surgeons were at work. Bouroche looked up and grumbled:

"Are they trying to finish our wounded for us? Really, this racket is intolerable."

In the meantime an attendant had seized the captain's leg, and the major, with a swift circular motion of his hand, made an incision in the skin below the knee and some two inches below the spot where he intended to saw the bone; then, still employing the same thin-bladed knife, that he did not change in order to get on more rapidly, he loosened the skin on the superior side of the incision and turned it back, much as one would peel an orange. But just as he was on the point of dividing the muscles a hospital steward came up and whispered in his ear:

"Number two has just slipped his cable."

The major did not hear, owing to the fearful uproar.

"Speak up, can't you! My ear drums are broken with their d——-d cannon."

"Number two has just slipped his cable."

"Who is that, number two?"

"The arm, you know."

"Ah, very good! Well, then, you can bring me number three, the jaw."

And with wonderful dexterity, never changing his position, he cut through the muscles clean down to the bone with a single motion of his wrist. He laid bare the tibia and fibula, introduced between them an implement to keep them in position, drew the saw across them once, and they were sundered. And the foot remained in the hands of the attendant who was holding it.

The flow of blood had been small, thanks to the pressure maintained by the assistant higher up the leg, at the thigh. The ligature of the three arteries was quickly accomplished, but the major shook his head, and when the assistant had removed his fingers he examined the stump, murmuring, certain that the patient could not hear as yet:

"It looks bad; there's no blood coming from the arterioles."

And he completed his diagnosis of the case by an expressive gesture: Another poor fellow who was soon to answer the great roll-call! while on his perspiring face was again seen that expression of weariness and utter dejection, that hopeless, unanswerable: "What is the use?" since out of every ten cases that they assumed the terrible responsibility of operating on they did not succeed in saving four. He wiped his forehead, and set to work to draw down the flap of skin and put in the three sutures that were to hold it in place.

Delaherche having told Gilberte that the operation was completed, she turned her gaze once more upon the table; she caught a glimpse of the captain's foot, however, as the attendant was carrying it away to the place behind the lilacs. The charnel house there continued to receive fresh occupants; two more corpses had recently been brought in and added to the ghastly array, one with blackened lips still parted wide as if rending the air with shrieks of anguish, the other, his form so contorted and contracted in the convulsions of the last agony that he was like a stunted, malformed boy. Unfortunately, there was beginning to be a scarcity of room in the little secluded corner, and the human debris had commenced to overflow and invade the adjacent alley. The attendant hesitated a moment, in doubt what to do with the captain's foot, then finally concluded to throw it on the general pile.

"Well, captain, that's over with," the major said to Beaudoin when he regained consciousness. "You'll be all right now."

But the captain did not show the cheeriness that follows a successful operation. He opened his eyes and made an attempt to raise himself, then fell back on his pillow, murmuring wearily, in a faint voice:

"Thanks, major. I'm glad it's over."

He was conscious of the pain, however, when the alcohol of the dressing touched the raw flesh. He flinched a little, complaining that they were burning him. And just as they were bringing up the stretcher preparatory to carrying him back into the other room the factory was shaken to its foundations by a most terrific explosion; a shell had burst directly in the rear of the shed, in the small courtyard where the pump was situated. The glass in the windows was shattered into fragments, and a dense cloud of smoke came pouring into the ambulance. The wounded men, stricken with panic terror, arose from their bed of straw; all were clamoring with affright; all wished to fly at once.

Delaherche rushed from the building in consternation to see what damage had been done. Did they mean to burn his house down over his head? What did it all mean? Why did they open fire again when the Emperor had ordered that it should cease?

"Thunder and lightning! Stir yourselves, will you!" Bouroche shouted to his staff, who were standing about with pallid faces, transfixed by terror. "Wash off the table; go and bring me in number three!"

They cleansed the table; and once more the crimson contents of the buckets were hurled across the grass plot upon the bed of daisies, which was now a sodden, blood-soaked mat of flowers and verdure. And Bouroche, to relieve the tedium until the attendants should bring him "number three," applied himself to probing for a musket-ball, which, having first broken the patient's lower jaw, had lodged in the root of the tongue. The blood flowed freely and collected on his fingers in glutinous masses.

Captain Beaudoin was again resting on his mattress in the large room. Gilberte and Mme. Delaherche had followed the stretcher when he was carried from the operating table, and even Delaherche, notwithstanding his anxiety, came in for a moment's chat.

"Lie here and rest a few minutes, Captain. We will have a room prepared for you, and you shall be our guest."

But the wounded man shook off his lethargy and for a moment had command of his faculties.

"No, it is not worth while; I feel that I am going to die."

And he looked at them with wide eyes, filled with the horror of death.

"Oh, Captain! why do you talk like that?" murmured Gilberte, with a shiver, while she forced a smile to her lips. "You will be quite well a month hence."

He shook his head mournfully, and in the room was conscious of no presence save hers; on all his face was expressed his unutterable yearning for life, his bitter, almost craven regret that he was to be snatched away so young, leaving so many joys behind untasted.

"I am going to die, I am going to die. Oh! 'tis horrible—"

Then suddenly he became conscious of his torn, soiled uniform and the grime upon his hands, and it made him feel uncomfortable to be in the company of women in such a state. It shamed him to show such weakness, and his desire to look and be the gentleman to the last restored to him his manhood. When he spoke again it was in a tone almost of cheerfulness.

"If I have got to die, though, I would rather it should be with clean hands. I should count it a great kindness, madame, if you would moisten a napkin and let me have it."

Gilberte sped away and quickly returned with the napkin, with which she herself cleansed the hands of the dying man. Thenceforth, desirous of quitting the scene with dignity, he displayed much firmness. Delaherche did what he could to cheer him, and assisted his wife in the small attentions she offered for his comfort. Old Mme. Delaherche, too, in presence of the man whose hours were numbered, felt her enmity subsiding. She would be silent, she who knew all and had sworn to impart her knowledge to her son. What would it avail to excite discord in the household, since death would soon obliterate all trace of the wrong?

The end came very soon. Captain Beaudoin, whose strength was ebbing rapidly, relapsed into his comatose condition, and a cold sweat broke out and stood in beads upon his neck and forehead. He opened his eyes again, and began to feebly grope about him with his stiffening fingers, as if feeling for a covering that was not there, pulling at it with a gentle, continuous movement, as if to draw it up around his shoulders.

"It is cold—Oh! it is so cold."

And so he passed from life, peacefully, without a struggle; and on his wasted, tranquil face rested an expression of unspeakable melancholy.

Delaherche saw to it that the remains, instead of being borne away and placed among the common dead, were deposited in one of the outbuildings of the factory. He endeavored to prevail on Gilberte, who was tearful and disconsolate, to retire to her apartment, but she declared that to be alone now would be more than her nerves could stand, and begged to be allowed to remain with her mother-in-law in the ambulance, where the noise and movement would be a distraction to her. She was seen presently running to carry a drink of water to a chasseur d'Afrique whom his fever had made delirious, and she assisted a hospital steward to dress the hand of a little recruit, a lad of twenty, who had had his thumb shot away and come in on foot from the battlefield; and as he was jolly and amusing, treating his wound with all the levity and nonchalance of the Parisian rollicker, she was soon laughing and joking as merrily as he.

While the captain lay dying the cannonade seemed, if that were possible, to have increased in violence; another shell had landed in the garden, shattering one of the old elms. Terror-stricken men came running in to say that all Sedan was in danger of destruction; a great fire had broken out in the Faubourg de la Cassine. If the bombardment should continue with such fury for any length of time there would be nothing left of the city.

"It can't be; I am going to see about it!" Delaherche exclaimed, violently excited.

"Where are you going, pray?" asked Bouroche.

"Why, to the Sous-Prefecture, to see what the Emperor means by fooling us in this way, with his talk of hoisting the white flag."

For some few seconds the major stood as if petrified at the idea of defeat and capitulation, which presented itself to him then for the first time in the midst of his impotent efforts to save the lives of the poor maimed creatures they were bringing in to him from the field. Rage and grief were in his voice as he shouted:

"Go to the devil, if you will! All you can do won't keep us from being soundly whipped!"

On leaving the factory Delaherche found it no easy task to squeeze his way through the throng; at every instant the crowd of straggling soldiers that filled the streets received fresh accessions. He questioned several of the officers whom he encountered; not one of them had seen the white flag on the citadel. Finally he met a colonel, who declared that he had caught a momentary glimpse of it: that it had been run up and then immediately hauled down. That explained matters; either the Germans had not seen it, or seeing it appear and disappear so quickly, had inferred the distressed condition of the French and redoubled their fire in consequence. There was a story in circulation how a general officer, enraged beyond control at the sight of the flag, had wrested it from its bearer, broken the staff, and trampled it in the mud. And still the Prussian batteries continued to play upon the city, shells were falling upon the roofs and in the streets, houses were in flames; a woman had just been killed at the corner of the Rue Pont de Meuse and the Place Turenne.

At the Sous-Prefecture Delaherche failed to find Rose at her usual station in the janitor's lodge. Everywhere were evidences of disorder; all the doors were standing open; the reign of terror had commenced. As there was no sentry or anyone to prevent, he went upstairs, encountering on the way only a few scared-looking men, none of whom made any offer to stop him. He had reached the first story and was hesitating what to do next when he saw the young girl approaching him.

"Oh, M. Delaherche! isn't this dreadful! Here, quick! this way, if you would like to see the Emperor."

On the left of the corridor a door stood ajar, and through the narrow opening a glimpse could be had of the sovereign, who had resumed his weary, anguished tramp between the fireplace and the window. Back and forth he shuffled with heavy, dragging steps, and ceased not, despite his unendurable suffering. An aide-de-camp had just entered the room—it was he who had failed to close the door behind him—and Delaherche heard the Emperor ask him in a sorrowfully reproachful voice:

"What is the reason of this continued firing, sir, after I gave orders to hoist the white flag?"

The torture to him had become greater than he could bear, that never-ceasing cannonade, that seemed to grow more furious with every minute. Every time he approached the window it pierced him to the heart. More spilling of blood, more useless squandering of human life! At every moment the piles of corpses were rising higher on the battlefield, and his was the responsibility. The compassionate instincts that entered so largely into his nature revolted at it, and more than ten times already he had asked that question of those who approached him.

"I gave orders to raise the white flag; tell me, why do they continue firing?"

The aide-de-camp made answer in a voice so low that Delaherche failed to catch its purport. The Emperor, moreover, seemed not to pause to listen, drawn by some irresistible attraction to that window at which, each time he approached it, he was greeted by that terrible salvo of artillery that rent and tore his being. His pallor was greater even than it had been before; his poor, pinched, wan face, on which were still visible traces of the rouge that had been applied that morning, bore witness to his anguish.

At that moment a short, quick-motioned man in dust-soiled uniform, whom Delaherche recognized as General Lebrun, hurriedly crossed the corridor and pushed open the door, without waiting to be announced. And scarcely was he in the room when again was heard the Emperor's so oft repeated question.

"Why do they continue to fire, General, when I have given orders to hoist the white flag?"

The aide-de-camp left the apartment, shutting the door behind him, and Delaherche never knew what was the general's answer. The vision had faded from his sight.

"Ah!" said Rose, "things are going badly; I can see that clearly enough by all those gentlemen's faces. It is bad for my tablecloth, too; I am afraid I shall never see it again; somebody told me it had been torn in pieces. But it is for the Emperor that I feel most sorry in all this business, for he is in a great deal worse condition than the marshal; he would be much better off in his bed than in that room, where he is wearing himself out with his everlasting walking."

She spoke with much feeling, and on her pretty pink and white face there was an expression of sincere pity, but Delaherche, whose Bonapartist ardor had somehow cooled considerably during the last two days, said to himself that she was a little fool. He nevertheless remained chatting with her a moment in the hall below while waiting for General Lebrun to take his departure, and when that officer appeared and left the building he followed him.

General Lebrun had explained to the Emperor that if it was thought best to apply for an armistice, etiquette demanded that a letter to that effect, signed by the commander-in-chief of the French forces, should be dispatched to the German commander-in-chief. He had also offered to write the letter, go in search of General de Wimpffen, and obtain his signature to it. He left the Sous-Prefecture with the letter in his pocket, but apprehensive he might not succeed in finding de Wimpffen, entirely ignorant as he was of the general's whereabouts on the field of battle. Within the ramparts of Sedan, moreover, the crowd was so dense that he was compelled to walk his horse, which enabled Delaherche to keep him in sight until he reached the Minil gate.

Once outside upon the road, however, General Lebrun struck into a gallop, and when near Balan had the good fortune to fall in with the chief. Only a few minutes previous to this the latter had written to the Emperor: "Sire, come and put yourself at the head of your troops; they will force a passage through the enemy's lines for you, or perish in the attempt;" therefore he flew into a furious passion at the mere mention of the word armistice. No, no! he would sign nothing, he would fight it out! This was about half-past three o'clock, and it was shortly afterward that occurred the gallant, but mad attempt, the last serious effort of the day, to pierce the Bavarian lines and regain possession of Bazeilles. In order to put heart into the troops a ruse was resorted to: in the streets of Sedan and in the fields outside the walls the shout was raised: "Bazaine is coming up! Bazaine is at hand!" Ever since morning many had allowed themselves to be deluded by that hope; each time that the Germans opened fire with a fresh battery it was confidently asserted to be the guns of the army of Metz. In the neighborhood of twelve hundred men were collected, soldiers of all arms, from every corps, and the little column bravely advanced into the storm of missiles that swept the road, at double time. It was a splendid spectacle of heroism and endurance while it lasted; the numerous casualties did not check the ardor of the survivors, nearly five hundred yards were traversed with a courage and nerve that seemed almost like madness; but soon there were great gaps in the ranks, the bravest began to fall back. What could they do against overwhelming numbers? It was a mad attempt, anyway; the desperate effort of a commander who could not bring himself to acknowledge that he was defeated. And it ended by General de Wimpffen finding himself and General Lebrun alone together on the Bazeilles road, which they had to make up their mind to abandon to the enemy, for good and all. All that remained for them to do was to retreat and seek security under the walls of Sedan.

Upon losing sight of the general at the Minil gate Delaherche had hurried back to the factory at the best speed he was capable of, impelled by an irresistible longing to have another look from his observatory at what was going on in the distance. Just as he reached his door, however, his progress was arrested a moment by encountering Colonel de Vineuil, who, with his blood-stained boot, was being brought in for treatment in a condition of semi-consciousness, upon a bed of straw that had been prepared for him on the floor of a market-gardener's wagon. The colonel had persisted in his efforts to collect the scattered fragments of his regiment until he dropped from his horse. He was immediately carried upstairs and put to bed in a room on the first floor, and Bouroche, who was summoned at once, finding the injury not of a serious character, had only to apply a dressing to the wound, from which he first extracted some bits of the leather of the boot. The worthy doctor was wrought up to a high pitch of excitement; he exclaimed, as he went downstairs, that he would rather cut off one of his own legs than continue working in that unsatisfactory, slovenly way, without a tithe of either the assistants or the appliances that he ought to have. Below in the ambulance, indeed, they no longer knew where to bestow the cases that were brought them, and had been obliged to have recourse to the lawn, where they laid them on the grass. There were already two long rows of them, exposed beneath the shrieking shells, filling the air with their dismal plaints while waiting for his ministrations. The number of cases brought in since noon exceeded four hundred, and in response to Bouroche's repeated appeals for assistance he had been sent one young doctor from the city. Good as was his will, he was unequal to the task; he probed, sliced, sawed, sewed like a man frantic, and was reduced to despair to see his work continually accumulating before him. Gilberte, satiated with sights of horror, unable longer to endure the sad spectacle of blood and tears, remained upstairs with her uncle, the colonel, leaving to Mme. Delaherche the care of moistening fevered lips and wiping the cold sweat from the brow of the dying.

Rapidly climbing the stairs to his terrace, Delaherche endeavored to form some idea for himself of how matters stood. The city had suffered less injury than was generally supposed; there was one great conflagration, however, over in the Faubourg de la Cassine, from which dense volumes of smoke were rising. Fort Palatinat had discontinued its fire, doubtless because the ammunition was all expended; the guns mounted on the Porte de Paris alone continued to make themselves heard at infrequent intervals. But something that he beheld presently had greater interest for his eyes than all beside; they had run up the white flag on the citadel again, but it must be that it was invisible from the battlefield, for there was no perceptible slackening of the fire. The Balan road was concealed from his vision by the neighboring roofs; he was unable to make out what the troops were doing in that direction. Applying his eye to the telescope, however, which remained as he had left it, directed on la Marfee, he again beheld the cluster of officers that he had seen in that same place about midday. The master of them all, that miniature toy-soldier in lead, half finger high, in whom he had thought to recognize the King of Prussia, was there still, erect in his plain, dark uniform before the other officers, who, in their showy trappings, were for the most part reclining carelessly on the grass. Among them were officers from foreign lands, aides-de-camp, generals, high officials, princes; all of them with field glasses in their hands, with which, since early morning, they had been watching every phase of the death-struggle of the army of Chalons, as if they were at the play. And the direful drama was drawing to its end.

From among the trees that clothed the summit of la Marfee King William had just witnessed the junction of his armies. It was an accomplished fact; the third army, under the leadership of his son, the Crown Prince, advancing by the way of Saint-Menges and Fleigneux, had secured possession of the plateau of Illy, while the fourth, commanded by the Crown Prince of Saxony, turning the wood of la Garenne and, coming up through Givonne and Daigny, had also reached its appointed rendezvous. There, too, the XIth and Vth corps had joined hands with the XIIth corps and the Guards. The gallant but ineffectual charge of Margueritte's division in its supreme effort to break through the hostile lines at the very moment when the circle was being rounded out had elicited from the king the exclamation: "Ah, the brave fellows!" Now the great movement, inexorable as fate, the details of which had been arranged with such mathematical precision, was complete, the jaws of the vise had closed, and stretching on his either hand far in the distance, a mighty wall of adamant surrounding the army of the French, were the countless men and guns that called him master. At the north the contracting lines maintained a constantly increasing pressure on the vanquished, forcing them back upon Sedan under the merciless fire of the batteries that lined the horizon in an array without a break. Toward the south, at Bazeilles, where the conflict had ceased to rage and the scene was one of mournful desolation, great clouds of smoke were rising from the ruins of what had once been happy homes, while the Bavarians, now masters of Balan, had advanced their batteries to within three hundred yards of the city gates. And the other batteries, those posted on the left bank at Pont Maugis, Noyers, Frenois, Wadelincourt, completing the impenetrable rampart of flame and bringing it around to the sovereign's feet on his right, that had been spouting fire uninterruptedly for nearly twelve hours, now thundered more loudly still.

But King William, to give his tired eyes a moment's rest, dropped his glass to his side and continued his observations with unassisted vision. The sun was slanting downward to the woods on his left, about to set in a sky where there was not a cloud, and the golden light that lay upon the landscape was so transcendently clear and limpid that the most insignificant objects stood out with startling distinctness. He could almost count the houses in Sedan, whose windows flashed back the level rays of the departing day-star, and the ramparts and fortifications, outlined in black against the eastern sky, had an unwonted aspect of frowning massiveness. Then, scattered among the fields to right and left, were the pretty, smiling villages, reminding one of the toy villages that come packed in boxes for the little ones; to the west Donchery, seated at the border of her broad plain; Douzy and Carignan to the east, among the meadows. Shutting in the picture to the north was the forest of the Ardennes, an ocean of sunlit verdure, while the Meuse, loitering with sluggish current through the plain with many a bend and curve, was like a stream of purest molten gold in that caressing light. And seen from that height, with the sun's parting kiss resting on it, the horrible battlefield, with its blood and smoke, became an exquisite and highly finished miniature; the dead horsemen and disemboweled steeds on the plateau of Floing were so many splashes of bright color; on the right, in the direction of Givonne, those minute black specks that whirled and eddied with such apparent lack of aim, like motes dancing in the sunshine, were the retreating fragments of the beaten army; while on the left a Bavarian battery on the peninsula of Iges, its guns the size of matches, might have been taken for some mechanical toy as it performed its evolutions with clockwork regularity. The victory was crushing, exceeding all that the victor could have desired or hoped, and the King felt no remorse in presence of all those corpses, of those thousands of men that were as the dust upon the roads of that broad valley where, notwithstanding the burning of Bazeilles, the slaughter of Illy, the anguish of Sedan, impassive nature yet could don her gayest robe and put on her brightest smile as the perfect day faded into the tranquil evening.

But suddenly Delaherche descried a French officer climbing the steep path up the flank of la Marfee; he was a general, wearing a blue tunic, mounted on a black horse, and preceded by a hussar bearing a white flag. It was General Reille, whom the Emperor had entrusted with this communication for the King of Prussia: "My brother, as it has been denied me to die at the head of my army, all that is left me is to surrender my sword to Your Majesty. I am Your Majesty's affectionate brother, Napoleon." Desiring to arrest the butchery and being no longer master, the Emperor yielded himself a prisoner, in the hope to placate the conqueror by the sacrifice. And Delaherche saw General Reille rein up his charger and dismount at ten paces from the King, then advance and deliver his letter; he was unarmed and merely carried a riding whip. The sun was setting in a flood of rosy light; the King seated himself on a chair in the midst of a grassy open space, and resting his hand on the back of another chair that was held in place by a secretary, replied that he accepted the sword and would await the appearance of an officer empowered to settle the terms of the capitulation.

VII.

As when the ice breaks up and the great cakes come crashing, grinding down upon the bosom of the swollen stream, carrying away all before them, so now, from every position about Sedan that had been wrested from the French, from Floing and the plateau of Illy, from the wood of la Garenne, the valley of la Givonne and the Bazeilles road, the stampede commenced; a mad torrent of horses, guns, and affrighted men came pouring toward the city. It was a most unfortunate inspiration that brought the army under the walls of that fortified place. There was too much in the way of temptation there; the shelter that it afforded the skulker and the deserter, the assurance of safety that even the bravest beheld behind its ramparts, entailed widespread panic and demoralization. Down there behind those protecting walls, so everyone imagined, was safety from that terrible artillery that had been blazing without intermission for near twelve hours; duty, manhood, reason were all lost sight of; the man disappeared and was succeeded by the brute, and their fierce instinct sent them racing wildly for shelter, seeking a place where they might hide their head and lie down and sleep.

When Maurice, bathing Jean's face with cool water behind the shelter of their bit of wall, saw his friend open his eyes once more, he uttered an exclamation of delight.

"Ah, poor old chap, I was beginning to fear you were done for! And don't think I say it to find fault, but really you are not so light as you were when you were a boy."

It seemed to Jean, in his still dazed condition, that he was awaking from some unpleasant dream. Then his recollection returned to him slowly, and two big tears rolled down his cheeks. To think that little Maurice, so frail and slender, whom he had loved and petted like a child, should have found strength to lug him all that distance!

"Let's see what damage your knowledge-box has sustained."

The wound was not serious; the bullet had plowed its way through the scalp and considerable blood had flowed. The hair, which was now matted with the coagulated gore, had served to stanch the current, therefore Maurice refrained from applying water to the hurt, so as not to cause it to bleed afresh.

"There, you look a little more like a civilized being, now that you have a clean face on you. Let's see if I can find something for you to wear on your head." And picking up the kepi of a soldier who lay dead not far away, he tenderly adjusted it on his comrade. "It fits you to a T. Now if you can only walk everyone will say we are a very good-looking couple."

Jean got on his legs and gave his head a shake to assure himself it was secure. It seemed a little heavier than usual, that was all; he thought he should get along well enough. A great wave of tenderness swept through his simple soul; he caught Maurice in his arms and hugged him to his bosom, while all he could find to say was:

"Ah! dear boy, dear boy!"

But the Prussians were drawing near: it would not answer to loiter behind the wall. Already Lieutenant Rochas, with what few men were left him, was retreating, guarding the flag, which the sous-lieutenant still carried under his arm, rolled around the staff. Lapoulle's great height enabled him to fire an occasional shot at the advancing enemy over the coping of the wall, while Pache had slung his chassepot across his shoulder by the strap, doubtless considering that he had done a fair day's work and it was time to eat and sleep. Maurice and Jean, stooping until they were bent almost double, hastened to rejoin them. There was no scarcity of muskets and ammunition; all they had to do was stoop and pick them up. They equipped themselves afresh, having left everything behind, knapsacks included, when one lugged the other out of danger on his shoulders. The wall extended to the wood of la Garenne, and the little band, believing that now their safety was assured, made a rush for the protection afforded by some farm buildings, whence they readily gained the shelter of the trees.

"Ah!" said Rochas, drawing a long breath, "we will remain here a moment and get our wind before we resume the offensive." No adversity could shake his unwavering faith.

They had not advanced many steps before all felt that they were entering the valley of death, but it was useless to think of retracing their steps; their only line of retreat lay through the wood, and cross it they must, at every hazard. At that time, instead of la Garenne, its more fitting name would have been the wood of despair and death; the Prussians, knowing that the French troops were retiring in that direction, were riddling it with artillery and musketry. Its shattered branches tossed and groaned as if enduring the scourging of a mighty tempest. The shells hewed down the stalwart trees, the bullets brought the leaves fluttering to the earth in showers; wailing voices seemed to issue from the cleft trunks, sobs accompanied the little twigs as they fell bleeding from the parent stem. It might have been taken for the agony of some vast multitude, held there in chains and unable to flee under the pelting of that pitiless iron hail; the shrieks, the terror of thousands of creatures rooted to the ground. Never was anguish so poignant as of that bombarded forest.

Maurice and Jean, who by this time had caught up with their companions, were greatly alarmed. The wood where they then were was a growth of large trees, and there was no obstacle to their running, but the bullets came whistling about their ears from every direction, making it impossible for them to avail themselves of the shelter of the trunks. Two men were killed, one of them struck in the back, the other in front. A venerable oak, directly in Maurice's path, had its trunk shattered by a shell, and sank, with the stately grace of a mailed paladin, carrying down all before it, and even as the young man was leaping back the top of a gigantic ash on his left, struck by another shell, came crashing to the ground like some tall cathedral spire. Where could they fly? whither bend their steps? Everywhere the branches were falling; it was as one who should endeavor to fly from some vast edifice menaced with destruction, only to find himself in each room he enters in succession confronted with crumbling walls and ceilings. And when, in order to escape being crushed by the big trees, they took refuge in a thicket of bushes, Jean came near being killed by a projectile, only it fortunately failed to explode. They could no longer make any progress now on account of the dense growth of the shrubbery; the supple branches caught them around the shoulders, the rank, tough grass held them by the ankles, impenetrable walls of brambles rose before them and blocked their way, while all the time the foliage was fluttering down about them, clipped by the gigantic scythe that was mowing down the wood. Another man was struck dead beside them by a bullet in the forehead, and he retained his erect position, caught in some vines between two small birch trees. Twenty times, while they were prisoners in that thicket, did they feel death hovering over them.

"Holy Virgin!" said Maurice, "we shall never get out of this alive."

His face was ashy pale, he was shivering again with terror; and Jean, always so brave, who had cheered and comforted him that morning, he, also, was very white and felt a strange, chill sensation creeping down his spine. It was fear, horrible, contagious, irresistible fear. Again they were conscious of a consuming thirst, an intolerable dryness of the mouth, a contraction of the throat, painful as if someone were choking them. These symptoms were accompanied by nausea and qualms at the pit of the stomach, while maleficent goblins kept puncturing their aguish, trembling legs with needles. Another of the physical effects of their fear was that in the congested condition of the blood vessels of the retina they beheld thousands upon thousands of small black specks flitting past them, as if it had been possible to distinguish the flying bullets.

"Confound the luck!" Jean stammered. "It is not worth speaking of, but it's vexatious all the same, to be here getting one's head broken for other folks, when those other folks are at home, smoking their pipe in comfort."

"Yes, that's so," Maurice replied, with a wild look. "Why should it be I rather than someone else?"

It was the revolt of the individual Ego, the unaltruistic refusal of the one to make himself a sacrifice for the benefit of the species.

"And then again," Jean continued, "if a fellow could but know the rights of the matter; if he could be sure that any good was to come from it all." Then turning his head and glancing at the western sky: "Anyway, I wish that blamed sun would hurry up and go to roost. Perhaps they'll stop fighting when it's dark."

With no distinct idea of what o'clock it was and no means of measuring the flight of time, he had long been watching the tardy declination of the fiery disk, which seemed to him to have ceased to move, hanging there in the heavens over the woods of the left bank. And this was not owing to any lack of courage on his part; it was simply the overmastering, ever increasing desire, amounting to an imperious necessity, to be relieved from the screaming and whistling of those projectiles, to run away somewhere and find a hole where he might hide his head and lose himself in oblivion. Were it not for the feeling of shame that is implanted in men's breasts and keeps them from showing the white feather before their comrades, every one of them would lose his head and run, in spite of himself, like the veriest poltroon.

Maurice and Jean, meanwhile, were becoming somewhat more accustomed to their surroundings, and even when their terror was at its highest there came to them a sort of exalted self-unconsciousness that had in it something of bravery. They finally reached a point when they did not even hasten their steps as they made their way through the accursed wood. The horror of the bombardment was even greater than it had been previously among that race of sylvan denizens, killed at their post, struck down on every hand, like gigantic, faithful sentries. In the delicious twilight that reigned, golden-green, beneath their umbrageous branches, among the mysterious recesses of romantic, moss-carpeted retreats, Death showed his ill-favored, grinning face. The solitary fountains were contaminated; men fell dead in distant nooks whose depths had hitherto been trod by none save wandering lovers. A bullet pierced a man's chest; he had time to utter the one word: "hit!" and fell forward on his face, stone dead. Upon the lips of another, who had both legs broken by a shell, the gay laugh remained; unconscious of his hurt, he supposed he had tripped over a root. Others, injured mortally, would run on for some yards, jesting and conversing, until suddenly they went down like a log in the supreme convulsion. The severest wounds were hardly felt at the moment they were received; it was only at a later period that the terrible suffering commenced, venting itself in shrieks and hot tears.

Ah, that accursed wood, that wood of slaughter and despair, where, amid the sobbing of the expiring trees, arose by degrees and swelled the agonized clamor of wounded men. Maurice and Jean saw a zouave, nearly disemboweled, propped against the trunk of an oak, who kept up a most terrific howling, without a moment's intermission. A little way beyond another man was actually being slowly roasted; his clothing had taken fire and the flames had run up and caught his beard, while he, paralyzed by a shot that had broken his back, was silently weeping scalding tears. Then there was a captain, who, one arm torn from its socket and his flank laid open to the thigh, was writhing on the ground in agony unspeakable, beseeching, in heartrending accents, the by-passers to end his suffering. There were others, and others, and others still, whose torments may not be described, strewing the grass-grown paths in such numbers that the utmost caution was required to avoid treading them under foot. But the dead and wounded had ceased to count; the comrade who fell by the way was abandoned to his fate, forgotten as if he had never been. No one turned to look behind. It was his destiny, poor devil! Next it would be someone else, themselves, perhaps.

They were approaching the edge of the wood when a cry of distress was heard behind them.

"Help! help!"

It was the subaltern standard-bearer, who had been shot through the left lung. He had fallen, the blood pouring in a stream from his mouth, and as no one heeded his appeal he collected his fast ebbing strength for another effort:

"To the colors!"

Rochas turned and in a single bound was at his side. He took the flag, the staff of which had been broken in the fall, while the young officer murmured in words that were choked by the bubbling tide of blood and froth:

"Never mind me; I am a goner. Save the flag!"

And they left him to himself in that charming woodland glade to writhe in protracted agony upon the ground, tearing up the grass with his stiffening fingers and praying for death, which would be hours yet ere it came to end his misery.

At last they had left the wood and its horrors behind them. Beside Maurice and Jean all that were left of the little band were Lieutenant Rochas, Lapoulle and Pache. Gaude, who had strayed away from his companions, presently came running from a thicket to rejoin them, his bugle hanging from his neck and thumping against his back with every step he took. It was a great comfort to them all to find themselves once again in the open country, where they could draw their breath; and then, too, there were no longer any whistling bullets and crashing shells to harass them; the firing had ceased on this side of the valley.

The first object they set eyes on was an officer who had reined in his smoking, steaming charger before a farm-yard gate and was venting his towering rage in a volley of Billingsgate. It was General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, the commander of their brigade, covered with dust and looking as if he was about to tumble from his horse with fatigue. The chagrin on his gross, high-colored, animal face told how deeply he took to heart the disaster that he regarded in the light of a personal misfortune. His command had seen nothing of him since morning. Doubtless he was somewhere on the battlefield, striving to rally the remnants of his brigade, for he was not the man to look closely to his own safety in his rage against those Prussian batteries that had at the same time destroyed the empire and the fortunes of a rising officer, the favorite of the Tuileries.

"Tonnerre de Dieu!" he shouted, "is there no one of whom one can ask a question in this d——-d country?"

The farmer's people had apparently taken to the woods. At last a very old woman appeared at the door, some servant who had been forgotten, or whose feeble legs had compelled her to remain behind.

"Hallo, old lady, come here! Which way from here is Belgium?"

She looked at him stupidly, as one who failed to catch his meaning. Then he lost all control of himself and effervesced, forgetful that the woman was only a poor peasant, bellowing that he had no idea of going back to Sedan to be caught like a rat in a trap; not he! he was going to make tracks for foreign parts, he was, and d——-d quick, too! Some soldiers had come up and stood listening.

"But you won't get through, General," spoke up a sergeant; "the Prussians are everywhere. This morning was the time for you to cut stick."

There were stories even then in circulation of companies that had become separated from their regiments and crossed the frontier without any intention of doing so, and of others that, later in the day, had succeeded in breaking through the enemy's lines before the armies had effected their final junction.

The general shrugged his shoulders impatiently. "What, with a few daring fellows of your stripe, do you mean to say we couldn't go where we please? I think I can find fifty daredevils to risk their skin in the attempt." Then, turning again to the old peasant: "Eh! you old mummy, answer, will you, in the devil's name! where is the frontier?"

She understood him this time. She extended her skinny arm in the direction of the forest.

"That way, that way!"

"Eh? What's that you say? Those houses that we see down there, at the end of the field?"

"Oh! farther, much farther. Down yonder, away down yonder!"

The general seemed as if his anger must suffocate him. "It is too disgusting, an infernal country like this! one can make neither top nor tail of it. There was Belgium, right under our nose; we were all afraid we should put our foot in it without knowing it; and now that one wants to go there it is somewhere else. No, no! it is too much; I've had enough of it; let them take me prisoner if they will, let them do what they choose with me; I am going to bed!" And clapping spurs to his horse, bobbing up and down on his saddle like an inflated wine skin, he galloped off toward Sedan.

A winding path conducted the party down into the Fond de Givonne, an outskirt of the city lying between two hills, where the single village street, running north and south and sloping gently upward toward the forest, was lined with gardens and modest houses. This street was just then so obstructed by flying soldiers that Lieutenant Rochas, with Pache, Lapoulle, and Gaude, found himself caught in the throng and unable for the moment to move in either direction. Maurice and Jean had some difficulty in rejoining them; and all were surprised to hear themselves hailed by a husky, drunken voice, proceeding from the tavern on the corner, near which they were blockaded.

"My stars, if here ain't the gang! Hallo, boys, how are you? My stars, I'm glad to see you!"

They turned, and recognized Chouteau, leaning from a window of the ground floor of the inn. He seemed to be very drunk, and went on, interspersing his speech with hiccoughs:

"Say, fellows, don't stand on ceremony if you're thirsty. There's enough left for the comrades." He turned unsteadily and called to someone who was invisible within the room: "Come here, you lazybones. Give these gentlemen something to drink—"

Loubet appeared in turn, advancing with a flourish and holding aloft in either hand a full bottle, which he waved above his head triumphantly. He was not so far gone as his companion; with his Parisian blague, imitating the nasal drawl of the coco-venders of the boulevards on a public holiday, he cried:

"Here you are, nice and cool, nice and cool! Who'll have a drink?"

Nothing had been seen of the precious pair since they had vanished under pretense of taking Sergeant Sapin into the ambulance. It was sufficiently evident that since then they had been strolling and seeing the sights, taking care to keep out of the way of the shells, until finally they had brought up at this inn that was given over to pillage.

Lieutenant Rochas was very angry. "Wait a bit, you scoundrels, just wait, and I'll attend to your case! deserting and getting drunk while the rest of your company were under fire!"

But Chouteau would have none of his reprimand. "See here, you old lunatic, I want you to understand that the grade of lieutenant is abolished; we are all free and equal now. Aren't you satisfied with the basting the Prussians gave you to-day, or do you want some more?"

The others had to restrain the lieutenant to keep him from assaulting the socialist. Loubet himself, dandling his bottles affectionately in his arms, did what he could to pour oil upon the troubled waters.

"Quit that, now! what's the use quarreling, when all men are brothers!" And catching sight of Lapoulle and Pache, his companions in the squad: "Don't stand there like great gawks, you fellows! Come in here and take something to wash the dust out of your throats."

Lapoulle hesitated a moment, dimly conscious of the impropriety there was in the indulgence when so many poor devils were in such sore distress, but he was so knocked up with fatigue, so terribly hungry and thirsty! He said not a word, but suddenly making up his mind, gave one bound and landed in the room, pushing before him Pache, who, equally silent, yielded to the temptation he had not strength to resist. And they were seen no more.

"The infernal scoundrels!" muttered Rochas. "They deserve to be shot, every mother's son of them!"

He had now remaining with him of his party only Jean, Maurice, and Gaude, and all four of them, notwithstanding their resistance, were gradually involved and swallowed up in the torrent of stragglers and fugitives that streamed along the road, filling its whole width from ditch to ditch. Soon they were at a distance from the inn. It was the routed army rolling down upon the ramparts of Sedan, a roily, roaring flood, such as the disintegrated mass of earth and boulders that the storm, scouring the mountainside, sweeps down into the valley. From all the surrounding plateaus, down every slope, up every narrow gorge, by the Floing road, by Pierremont, by the cemetery, by the Champ de Mars, as well as through the Fond de Givonne, the same sorry rabble was streaming cityward in panic haste, and every instant brought fresh accessions to its numbers. And who could reproach those wretched men, who, for twelve long, mortal hours, had stood in motionless array under the murderous artillery of an invisible enemy, against whom they could do nothing? The batteries now were playing on them from front, flank, and rear; as they drew nearer the city they presented a fairer mark for the convergent fire; the guns dealt death and destruction out by wholesale on that dense, struggling mass of men in that accursed hole, where there was no escape from the bursting shells. Some regiments of the 7th corps, more particularly those that had been stationed about Floing, had left the field in tolerably good order, but in the Fond de Givonne there was no longer either organization or command; the troops were a pushing, struggling mob, composed of debris from regiments of every description, zouaves, turcos, chasseurs, infantry of the line, most of them without arms, their uniforms soiled and torn, with grimy hands, blackened faces, bloodshot eyes starting from their sockets and lips swollen and distorted from their yells of fear or rage. At times a riderless horse would dash through the throng, overturning those who were in his path and leaving behind him a long wake of consternation. Then some guns went thundering by at breakneck speed, a retreating battery abandoned by its officers, and the drivers, as if drunk, rode down everything and everyone, giving no word of warning. And still the shuffling tramp of many feet along the dusty road went on and ceased not, the close-compacted column pressed on, breast to back, side to side; a retreat en masse, where vacancies in the ranks were filled as soon as made, all moved by one common impulse, to reach the shelter that lay before them and be behind a wall.

Again Jean raised his head and gave an anxious glance toward the west; through the dense clouds of dust raised by the tramp of that great multitude the luminary still poured his scorching rays down upon the exhausted men. The sunset was magnificent, the heavens transparently, beautifully blue.

"It's a nuisance, all the same," he muttered, "that plaguey sun that stays up there and won't go to roost!"

Suddenly Maurice became aware of the presence of a young woman whom the movement of the resistless throng had jammed against a wall and who was in danger of being injured, and on looking more attentively was astounded to recognize in her his sister Henriette. For near a minute he stood gazing at her in open-mouthed amazement, and finally it was she who spoke, without any appearance of surprise, as if she found the meeting entirely natural.

"They shot him at Bazeilles—and I was there. Then, in the hope that they might at least let me have his body, I had an idea—"

She did not mention either Weiss or the Prussians by name; it seemed to her that everyone must understand. Maurice did understand. It made his heart bleed; he gave a great sob.

"My poor darling!"

When, about two o'clock, Henriette recovered consciousness, she found herself at Balan, in the kitchen of some people who were strangers to her, her head resting on a table, weeping. Almost immediately, however, she dried her tears; already the heroic element was reasserting itself in that silent woman, so frail, so gentle, yet of a spirit so indomitable that she could suffer martyrdom for the faith, or the love, that was in her. She knew not fear; her quiet, undemonstrative courage was lofty and invincible. When her distress was deepest she had summoned up her resolution, devoting her reflections to how she might recover her husband's body, so as to give it decent burial. Her first project was neither more nor less than to make her way back to Bazeilles, but everyone advised her against this course, assuring her that it would be absolutely impossible to get through the German lines. She therefore abandoned the idea, and tried to think of someone among her acquaintance who would afford her the protection of his company, or at least assist her in the necessary preliminaries. The person to whom she determined she would apply was a M. Dubreuil, a cousin of hers, who had been assistant superintendent of the refinery at Chene at the time her husband was employed there; Weiss had been a favorite of his; he would not refuse her his assistance. Since the time, now two years ago, when his wife had inherited a handsome fortune, he had been occupying a pretty villa, called the Hermitage, the terraces of which could be seen skirting the hillside of a suburb of Sedan, on the further side of the Fond de Givonne. And thus it was toward the Hermitage that she was now bending her steps, compelled at every moment to pause before some fresh obstacle, continually menaced with being knocked down and trampled to death.

Maurice, to whom she briefly explained her project, gave it his approval.

"Cousin Dubreuil has always been a good friend to us. He will be of service to you."

Then an idea of another nature occurred to him. Lieutenant Rochas was greatly embarrassed as to what disposition he should make of the flag. They all were firmly resolved to save it—to do anything rather than allow it to fall into the hands of the Prussians. It had been suggested to cut it into pieces, of which each should carry one off under his shirt, or else to bury it at the foot of a tree, so noting the locality in memory that they might be able to come and disinter it at some future day; but the idea of mutilating the flag, or burying it like a corpse, affected them too painfully, and they were considering if they might not preserve it in some other manner. When Maurice, therefore, proposed to entrust the standard to a reliable person who would conceal it and, in case of necessity, defend it, until such day as he should restore it to them intact, they all gave their assent.

"Come," said the young man, addressing his sister, "we will go with you to the Hermitage and see if Dubreuil is there. Besides, I do not wish to leave you without protection."

It was no easy matter to extricate themselves from the press, but they succeeded finally and entered a path that led upward on their left. They soon found themselves in a region intersected by a perfect labyrinth of lanes and narrow passages, a district where truck farms and gardens predominated, interspersed with an occasional villa and small holdings of extremely irregular outline, and these lanes and passages wound circuitously between blank walls, turning sharp corners at every few steps and bringing up abruptly in the cul-de-sac of some courtyard, affording admirable facilities for carrying on a guerilla warfare; there were spots where ten men might defend themselves for hours against a regiment. Desultory firing was already beginning to be heard, for the suburb commanded Balan, and the Bavarians were already coming up on the other side of the valley.

When Maurice and Henriette, who were in the rear of the others, had turned once to the left, then to the right and then to the left again, following the course of two interminable walls, they suddenly came out before the Hermitage, the door of which stood wide open. The grounds, at the top of which was a small park, were terraced off in three broad terraces, on one of which stood the residence, a roomy, rectangular structure, approached by an avenue of venerable elms. Facing it, and separated from it by the deep, narrow valley, with its steeply sloping banks, were other similar country seats, backed by a wood.

Henriette's anxiety was aroused at sight of the open door, "They are not at home," she said; "they must have gone away."

The truth was that Dubreuil had decided the day before to take his wife and children to Bouillon, where they would be in safety from the disaster he felt was impending. And yet the house was not unoccupied; even at a distance and through the intervening trees the approaching party were conscious of movements going on within its walls. As the young woman advanced into the avenue she recoiled before the dead body of a Prussian soldier.

"The devil!" exclaimed Rochas; "so they have already been exchanging civilities in this quarter!"

Then all hands, desiring to ascertain what was going on, hurried forward to the house, and there their curiosity was quickly gratified; the doors and windows of the rez-de-chaussee had been smashed in with musket-butts and the yawning apertures disclosed the destruction that the marauders had wrought in the rooms within, while on the graveled terrace lay various articles of furniture that had been hurled from the stoop. Particularly noticeable was a drawing-room suite in sky-blue satin, its sofa and twelve fauteuils piled in dire confusion, helter-skelter, on and around a great center table, the marble top of which was broken in twain. And there were zouaves, chasseurs, liners, and men of the infanterie de marine running to and fro excitedly behind the buildings and in the alleys, discharging their pieces into the little wood that faced them across the valley.

"Lieutenant," a zouave said to Rochas, by way of explanation, "we found a pack of those dirty Prussian hounds here, smashing things and raising Cain generally. We settled their hash for them, as you can see for yourself; only they will be coming back here presently, ten to our one, and that won't be so pleasant."

Three other corpses of Prussian soldiers were stretched upon the terrace. As Henriette was looking at them absently, her thoughts doubtless far away with her husband, who, amid the blood and ashes of Bazeilles, was also sleeping his last sleep, a bullet whistled close to her head and struck a tree that stood behind her. Jean sprang forward.

"Madame, don't stay there. Go inside the house, quick, quick!"

His heart overflowed with pity as he beheld the change her terrible affliction had wrought in her, and he recalled her image as she had appeared to him only the day before, her face bright with the kindly smile of the happy, loving wife. At first he had found no word to say to her, hardly knowing even if she would recognize him. He felt that he could gladly give his life, if that would serve to restore her peace of mind.

"Go inside, and don't come out. At the first sign of danger we will come for you, and we will all escape together by way of the wood up yonder."

But she apathetically replied:

"Ah, M. Jean, what is the use?"

Her brother, however, was also urging her, and finally she ascended the stoop and took her position within the vestibule, whence her vision commanded a view of the avenue in its entire length. She was a spectator of the ensuing combat.

Maurice and Jean had posted themselves behind one of the elms near the house. The gigantic trunks of the centenarian monarchs were amply sufficient to afford shelter to two men. A little way from them Gaude, the bugler, had joined forces with Lieutenant Rochas, who, unwilling to confide the flag to other hands, had rested it against the tree at his side while he handled his musket. And every trunk had its defenders; from end to end the avenue was lined with men covered, Indian fashion, by the trees, who only exposed their head when ready to fire.

In the wood across the valley the Prussians appeared to be receiving re-enforcements, for their fire gradually grew warmer. There was no one to be seen; at most, the swiftly vanishing form now and then of a man changing his position. A villa, with green shutters, was occupied by their sharpshooters, who fired from the half-open windows of the rez-de-chaussee. It was about four o'clock, and the noise of the cannonade in the distance was diminishing, the guns were being silenced one by one; and there they were, French and Prussians, in that out-of-the-way-corner whence they could not see the white flag floating over the citadel, still engaged in the work of mutual slaughter, as if their quarrel had been a personal one. Notwithstanding the armistice there were many such points where the battle continued to rage until it was too dark to see; the rattle of musketry was heard in the faubourg of the Fond de Givonne and in the gardens of Petit-Pont long after it had ceased elsewhere.

For a quarter of an hour the bullets flew thick and fast from one side of the valley to the other. Now and again someone who was so incautious as to expose himself went down with a ball in his head or chest. There were three men lying dead in the avenue. The rattling in the throat of another man who had fallen prone upon his face was something horrible to listen to, and no one thought to go and turn him on his back to ease his dying agony. Jean, who happened to look around just at that moment, beheld Henriette glide tranquilly down the steps, approach the wounded man and turn him over, then slip a knapsack beneath his head by way of pillow. He ran and seized her and forcibly brought her back behind the tree where he and Maurice were posted.

"Do you wish to be killed?"

She appeared to be entirely unconscious of the danger to which she had exposed herself.

"Why, no—but I am afraid to remain in that house, all alone. I would rather be outside."

And so she stayed with them. They seated her on the ground at their feet, against the trunk of the tree, and went on expending the few cartridges that were left them, blazing away to right and left, with such fury that they quite forgot their sensations of fear and fatigue. They were utterly unconscious of what was going on around them, acting mechanically, with but one end in view; even the instinct of self-preservation had deserted them.

"Look, Maurice," suddenly said Henriette; "that dead soldier there before us, does he not belong to the Prussian Guard?"

She had been eying attentively for the past minute or two one of the dead bodies that the enemy had left behind them when they retreated, a short, thick-set young man, with big mustaches, lying upon his side on the gravel of the terrace.

The chin-strap had broken, releasing the spiked helmet, which had rolled away a few steps. And it was indisputable that the body was attired in the uniform of the Guard; the dark gray trousers, the blue tunic with white facings, the greatcoat rolled and worn, belt-wise, across the shoulder.

"It is the Guard uniform," she said; "I am quite certain of it. It is exactly like the colored plate I have at home, and then the photograph that Cousin Gunther sent us—" She stopped suddenly, and with her unconcerned, fearless air, before anyone could make a motion to detain her, walked up to the corpse, bent down and read the number of the regiment. "Ah, the Forty-third!" she exclaimed. "I knew it."

And she returned to her position, while a storm of bullets whistled around her ears. "Yes, the Forty-third; Cousin Gunther's regiment—something told me it must be so. Ah! if my poor husband were only here!"

After that all Jean's and Maurice's entreaties were ineffectual to make her keep quiet. She was feverishly restless, constantly protruding her head to peer into the opposite wood, evidently harassed by some anxiety that preyed upon her mind. Her companions continued to load and fire with the same blind fury, pushing her back with their knee whenever she exposed herself too rashly. It looked as if the Prussians were beginning to consider that their numbers would warrant them in attacking, for they showed themselves more frequently and there were evidences of preparations going on behind the trees. They were suffering severely, however, from the fire of the French, whose bullets at that short range rarely failed to bring down their man.

"That may be your cousin," said Jean. "Look, that officer over there, who has just come out of the house with the green shutters."

He was a captain, as could be seen by the gold braid on the collar of his tunic and the golden eagle on his helmet that flashed back the level ray of the setting sun. He had discarded his epaulettes, and carrying his saber in his right hand, was shouting an order in a sharp, imperative voice; and the distance between them was so small, a scant two hundred yards, that every detail of his trim, slender figure was plainly discernible, as well as the pinkish, stern face and slight blond mustache.

Henriette scrutinized him with attentive eyes. "It is he," she replied, apparently unsurprised. "I recognize him perfectly."

With a look of concentrated rage Maurice drew his piece to his shoulder and covered him. "The cousin—Ah! sure as there is a God in heaven he shall pay for Weiss."

But, quivering with excitement, she jumped to her feet and knocked up the weapon, whose charge was wasted on the air.

"Stop, stop! we must not kill acquaintances, relatives! It is too barbarous."

And, all her womanly instincts coming back to her, she sank down behind the tree and gave way to a fit of violent weeping. The horror of it all was too much for her; in her great dread and sorrow she was forgetful of all beside.

Rochas, meantime, was in his element. He had excited the few zouaves and other troops around him to such a pitch of frenzy, their fire had become so murderously effective at sight of the Prussians, that the latter first wavered and then retreated to the shelter of their wood.

"Stand your ground, my boys! don't give way an inch! Aha, see 'em run, the cowards! we'll fix their flint for 'em!"

He was in high spirits and seemed to have recovered all his unbounded confidence, certain that victory was yet to crown their efforts. There had been no defeat. The handful of men before him stood in his eyes for the united armies of Germany, and he was going to destroy them at his leisure. All his long, lean form, all his thin, bony face, where the huge nose curved down upon the self-willed, sensual mouth, exhaled a laughing, vain-glorious satisfaction, the joy of the conquering trooper who goes through the world with his sweetheart on his arm and a bottle of good wine in his hand.

"Parbleu, my children, what are we here for, I'd like to know, if not to lick 'em out of their boots? and that's the way this affair is going to end, just mark my words. We shouldn't know ourselves any longer if we should let ourselves be beaten. Beaten! come, come, that is too good! When the neighbors tread on our toes, or when we feel we are beginning to grow rusty for want of something to do, we just turn to and give 'em a thrashing; that's all there is to it. Come, boys, let 'em have it once more, and you'll see 'em run like so many jackrabbits!"

He bellowed and gesticulated like a lunatic, and was such a good fellow withal in the comforting illusion of his ignorance that the men were inoculated with his confidence. He suddenly broke out again:

"And we'll kick 'em, we'll kick 'em, we'll kick 'em to the frontier! Victory, victory!"

But at that juncture, just as the enemy across the valley seemed really to be falling back, a hot fire of musketry came pouring in on them from the left. It was a repetition of the everlasting flanking movement that had done the Prussians such good service; a strong detachment of the Guards had crept around toward the French rear through the Fond de Givonne. It was useless to think of holding the position longer; the little band of men who were defending the terraces were caught between two fires and menaced with being cut off from Sedan. Men fell on every side, and for a moment the confusion was extreme; the Prussians were already scaling the wall of the park, and advancing along the pathways. Some zouaves rushed forward to repel them, and there was a fierce hand-to-hand struggle with the bayonet. There was one zouave, a big, handsome, brown-bearded man, bare-headed and with his jacket hanging in tatters from his shoulders, who did his work with appalling thoroughness, driving his reeking bayonet home through splintering bones and yielding tissues, cleansing it of the gore that it had contracted from one man by plunging it into the flesh of another; and when it broke he laid about him, smashing many a skull, with the butt of his musket; and when finally he made a misstep and lost his weapon he sprung, bare-handed, for the throat of a burly Prussian, with such tigerish fierceness that both men rolled over and over on the gravel to the shattered kitchen door, clasped in a mortal embrace. The trees of the park looked down on many such scenes of slaughter, and the green lawn was piled with corpses. But it was before the stoop, around the sky-blue sofa and fauteuils, that the conflict raged with greatest fury; a maddened mob of savages, firing at one another at point-blank range, so that hair and beards were set on fire, tearing one another with teeth and nails when a knife was wanting to slash the adversary's throat.

Then Gaude, with his sorrowful face, the face of a man who has had his troubles of which he does not care to speak, was seized with a sort of sudden heroic madness. At that moment of irretrievable defeat, when he must have known that the company was annihilated and that there was not a man left to answer his summons, he grasped his bugle, carried it to his lips and sounded the general, in so tempestuous, ear-splitting strains that one would have said he wished to wake the dead. Nearer and nearer came the Prussians, but he never stirred, only sounding the call the louder, with all the strength of his lungs. He fell, pierced with many bullets, and his spirit passed in one long-drawn, parting wail that died away and was lost upon the shuddering air.

Rochas made no attempt to fly; he seemed unable to comprehend. Even more erect than usual, he waited the end, stammering:

"Well, what's the matter? what's the matter?"

Such a possibility had never entered his head as that they could be defeated. They were changing everything in these degenerate days, even to the manner of fighting; had not those fellows a right to remain on their own side of the valley and wait for the French to go and attack them? There was no use killing them; as fast as they were killed more kept popping up. What kind of a d——-d war was it, anyway, where they were able to collect ten men against their opponent's one, where they never showed their face until evening, after blazing away at you all day with their artillery until you didn't know on which end you were standing? Aghast and confounded, having failed so far to acquire the first idea of the rationale of the campaign, he was dimly conscious of the existence of some mysterious, superior method which he could not comprehend, against which he ceased to struggle, although in his dogged stubbornness he kept repeating mechanically:

"Courage, my children! victory is before us!"

Meanwhile he had stooped and clutched the flag. That was his last, his only thought, to save the flag, retreating again, if necessary, so that it might not be defiled by contact with Prussian hands. But the staff, although it was broken, became entangled in his legs; he narrowly escaped falling. The bullets whistled past him, he felt that death was near; he stripped the silk from the staff and tore it into shreds, striving to destroy it utterly. And then it was that, stricken at once in the neck, chest, and legs, he sank to earth amid the bright tri-colored rags, as if they had been his pall. He survived a moment yet, gazing before him with fixed, dilated eyes, reading, perhaps, in the vision he beheld on the horizon the stern lesson that War conveys, the cruel, vital struggle that is to be accepted not otherwise than gravely, reverently, as immutable law. Then a slight tremor ran through his frame, and darkness succeeded to his infantine bewilderment; he passed away, like some poor dumb, lowly creature of a day, a joyous insect that mighty, impassive Nature, in her relentless fatality, has caught and crushed. In him died all a legend.

When the Prussians began to draw near Jean and Maurice had retreated, retiring from tree to tree, face to the enemy, and always, as far as possible, keeping Henriette behind them. They did not give over firing, discharging their pieces and then falling back to seek a fresh cover. Maurice knew where there was a little wicket in the wall at the upper part of the park, and they were so fortunate as to find it unfastened. With lighter hearts when they had left it behind them, they found themselves in a narrow by-road that wound between two high walls, but after following it for some distance the sound of firing in front caused them to turn into a path on their left. As luck would have it, it ended in an impasse; they had to retrace their steps, running the gauntlet of the bullets, and take the turning to the right. When they came to exchange reminiscences in later days they could never agree on which road they had taken. In that tangled network of suburban lanes and passages there was firing still going on from every corner that afforded a shelter, protracted battles raged at the gates of farmyards, everything that could be converted into a barricade had its defenders, from whom the assailants tried to wrest it; all with the utmost fury and vindictiveness. And all at once they came out upon the Fond de Givonne road, not far from Sedan.

For the third time Jean raised his eyes toward the western sky, that was all aflame with a bright, rosy light; and he heaved a sigh of unspeakable relief.

"Ah, that pig of a sun! at last he is going to bed!"

And they ran with might and main, all three of them, never once stopping to draw breath. About them, filling the road in all its breadth, was the rear-guard of fugitives from the battlefield, still flowing onward with the irresistible momentum of an unchained mountain torrent. When they came to the Balan gate they had a long period of waiting in the midst of the impatient, ungovernable throng. The chains of the drawbridge had given way, and the only path across the fosse was by the foot-bridge, so that the guns and horses had to turn back and seek admission by the bridge of the chateau, where the jam was said to be even still more fearful. At the gate of la Cassine, too, people were trampled to death in their eagerness to gain admittance. From all the adjacent heights the terror-stricken fragments of the army came tumbling into the city, as into a cesspool, with the hollow roar of pent-up water that has burst its dam. The fatal attraction of those walls had ended by making cowards of the bravest; men trod one another down in their blind haste to be under cover.

Maurice had caught Henriette in his arms, and in a voice that trembled with suspense:

"It cannot be," he said, "that they will have the cruelty to close the gate and shut us out."

That was what the crowd feared would be done. To right and left, however, upon the glacis soldiers were already arranging their bivouacs, while entire batteries, guns, caissons, and horses, in confusion worse confounded, had thrown themselves pell-mell into the fosse for safety.

But now shrill, impatient bugle calls rose on the evening air, followed soon by the long-drawn strains of retreat. They were summoning the belated soldiers back to their comrades, who came running in, singly and in groups. A dropping fire of musketry still continued in the faubourgs, but it was gradually dying out. Heavy guards were stationed on the banquette behind the parapet to protect the approaches, and at last the gate was closed. The Prussians were within a hundred yards of the sally-port; they could be seen moving on the Balan road, tranquilly establishing themselves in the houses and gardens.

Maurice and Jean, pushing Henriette before them to protect her from the jostling of the throng, were among the last to enter Sedan. Six o'clock was striking. The artillery fire had ceased nearly an hour ago. Soon the distant musketry fire, too, was silenced. Then, to the deafening uproar, to the vengeful thunder that had been roaring since morning, there succeeded a stillness as of death. Night came, and with it came a boding silence, fraught with terror.

VIII.

At half-past five o'clock, after the closing of the gates, Delaherche, in his eager thirst for news, now that he knew the battle lost, had again returned to the Sous-Prefecture. He hung persistently about the approaches of the janitor's lodge, tramping up and down the paved courtyard with feverish impatience, for more than three hours, watching for every officer who came up and interviewing him, and thus it was that he had become acquainted, piecemeal, with the rapid series of events; how General de Wimpffen had tendered his resignation and then withdrawn it upon the peremptory refusal of Generals Ducrot and Douay to append their names to the articles of capitulation, how the Emperor had thereupon invested the General with full authority to proceed to the Prussian headquarters and treat for the surrender of the vanquished army on the most advantageous terms obtainable; how, finally, a council of war had been convened with the object of deciding what possibilities there were of further protracting the struggle successfully by the defense of the fortress. During the deliberations of this council, which consisted of some twenty officers of the highest rank and seemed to him as if it would never end, the cloth manufacturer climbed the steps of the huge public building at least twenty times, and at last his curiosity was gratified by beholding General de Wimpffen emerge, very red in the face and his eyelids puffed and swollen with tears, behind whom came two other generals and a colonel. They leaped into the saddle and rode away over the Pont de Meuse. The bells had struck eight some time before; the inevitable capitulation was now to be accomplished, from which there was no escape.

Delaherche, somewhat relieved in mind by what he had heard and seen, remembered that it was a long time since he had tasted food and resolved to turn his steps homeward, but the terrific crowd that had collected since he first came made him pause in dismay. It is no exaggeration to say that the streets and squares were so congested, so thronged, so densely packed with horses, men, and guns, that one would have declared the closely compacted mass could only have been squeezed and wedged in there thus by the effort of some gigantic mechanism. While the ramparts were occupied by the bivouacs of such regiments as had fallen back in good order, the city had been invaded and submerged by an angry, surging, desperate flood, the broken remnants of the various corps, stragglers and fugitives from all arms of the service, and the dammed-up tide made it impossible for one to stir foot or hand. The wheels of the guns, of the caissons, and the innumerable vehicles of every description, had interlocked and were tangled in confusion worse confounded, while the poor horses, flogged unmercifully by their drivers and pulled, now in this direction, now in that, could only dance in their bewilderment, unable to move a step either forward or back. And the men, deaf to reproaches and threats alike, forced their way into the houses, devoured whatever they could lay hands on, flung themselves down to sleep wherever they could find a vacant space, it might be in the best bedroom or in the cellar. Many of them had fallen in doorways, where they blocked the vestibule; others, without strength to go farther, lay extended on the sidewalks and slept the sleep of death, not even rising when some by-passer trod on them and bruised an arm or leg, preferring the risk of death to the fatigue of changing their location.

These things all helped to make Delaherche still more keenly conscious of the necessity of immediate capitulation. There were some quarters in which numerous caissons were packed so close together that they were in contact, and a single Prussian shell alighting on one of them must inevitably have exploded them all, entailing the immediate destruction of the city by conflagration. Then, too, what could be accomplished with such an assemblage of miserable wretches, deprived of all their powers, mental and physical, by reason of their long-endured privations, and destitute of either ammunition or subsistence? Merely to clear the streets and reduce them to a condition of something like order would require a whole day. The place was entirely incapable of defense, having neither guns nor provisions.

These were the considerations that had prevailed at the council among those more reasonable officers who, in the midst of their grief and sorrow for their country and the army, had retained a clear and undistorted view of the situation as it was; and the more hot-headed among them, those who cried with emotion that it was impossible for an army to surrender thus, had been compelled to bow their head upon their breast in silence and admit that they had no practicable scheme to offer whereby the conflict might be recommenced on the morrow.

In the Place Turenne and Place du Rivage, Delaherche succeeded with the greatest difficulty in working his way through the press. As he passed the Hotel of the Golden Cross a sorrowful vision greeted his eyes, that of the generals seated in the dining room, gloomily silent, around the empty board; there was nothing left to eat in the house, not even bread. General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, however, who had been storming and vociferating in the kitchen, appeared to have found something, for he suddenly held his peace and ran away swiftly up the stairs, holding in his hands a large paper parcel of a greasy aspect. Such was the crowd assembled there, to stare through the lighted windows upon the guests assembled around that famine-stricken table d'hote, that the manufacturer was obliged to make vigorous play with his elbows, and was frequently driven back by some wild rush of the mob and lost all the distance, and more, that he had just gained. In the Grande Rue, however, the obstacles became actually impassable, and there was a moment when he was inclined to give up in despair; a complete battery seemed to have been driven in there and the guns and materiel piled, pell-mell, on top of one another. Deciding finally to take the bull by the horns, he leaped to the axle of a piece and so pursued his way, jumping from wheel to wheel, straddling the guns, at the imminent risk of breaking his legs, if not his neck. Afterward it was some horses that blocked his way, and he made himself lowly and stooped, creeping among the feet and underneath the bellies of the sorry jades, who were ready to die of inanition, like their masters. Then, when after a quarter of an hour's laborious effort he reached the junction of the Rue Saint-Michel, he was terrified at the prospect of the dangers and obstacles that he had still to face, and which, instead of diminishing, seemed to be increasing, and made up his mind to turn down the street above mentioned, which would take him into the Rue des Laboureurs; he hoped that by taking these usually quiet and deserted passages he should escape the crowd and reach his home in safety. As luck would have it he almost directly came upon a house of ill-fame to which a band of drunken soldiers were in process of laying siege, and considering that a stray shot, should one reach him in the fracas, would be equally as unpleasant as one intended for him, he made haste to retrace his steps. Resolving to have done with it he pushed on to the end of the Grande Rue, now gaining a few feet by balancing himself, rope-walker fashion, along the pole of some vehicle, now climbing over an army wagon that barred his way. At the Place du College he was carried along—bodily on the shoulders of the throng for a space of thirty paces; he fell to the ground, narrowly escaped a set of fractured ribs, and saved himself only by the proximity of a friendly iron railing, by the bars of which he pulled himself to his feet. And when at last he reached the Rue Maqua, inundated with perspiration, his clothing almost torn from his back, he found that he had been more than an hour in coming from the Sous-Prefecture, a distance which in ordinary times he was accustomed to accomplish in less than five minutes.

Major Bouroche, with the intention of keeping the ambulance and garden from being overrun with intruders, had caused two sentries to be mounted at the door. This measure was a source of great comfort to Delaherche, who had begun to contemplate the possibilities of his house being subjected to pillage. The sight of the ambulance in the garden, dimly lighted by a few candles and exhaling its fetid, feverish emanations, caused him a fresh constriction of the heart; then, stumbling over the body of a soldier who was stretched in slumber on the stone pavement of the walk, he supposed him to be one of the fugitives who had managed to find his way in there from outside, until, calling to mind the 7th corps treasure that had been deposited there and the sentry who had been set over it, he saw how matters stood: the poor fellow, stationed there since early morning, had been overlooked by his superiors and had succumbed to his fatigue. Besides, the house seemed quite deserted; the ground floor was black as Egypt, and the doors stood wide open. The servants were doubtless all at the ambulance, for there was no one in the kitchen, which was faintly illuminated by the light of a wretched little smoky lamp. He lit a candle and ascended the main staircase very softly, in order not to awaken his wife and mother, whom he had begged to go to bed early after a day where the stress, both mental and physical, had been so intense.

On entering his study, however, he beheld a sight that caused his eyes to dilate with astonishment. Upon the sofa on which Captain Beaudoin had snatched a few hours' repose the day before a soldier lay outstretched; and he could not understand the reason of it until he had looked and recognized young Maurice Levasseur, Henriette's brother. He was still more surprised when, on turning his head, he perceived, stretched on the floor and wrapped in a bed quilt, another soldier, that Jean, whom he had seen for a moment just before the battle. It was plain that the poor fellows, in their distress and fatigue after the conflict, not knowing where else to bestow themselves, had sought refuge there; they were crushed, annihilated, like dead men. He did not linger there, but pushed on to his wife's chamber, which was the next room on the corridor. A lamp was burning on a table in a corner; the profound silence seemed to shudder. Gilberte had thrown herself crosswise on the bed, fully dressed, doubtless in order to be prepared for any catastrophe, and was sleeping peacefully, while, seated on a chair at her side with her head declined and resting lightly on the very edge of the mattress, Henriette was also slumbering, with a fitful, agitated sleep, while big tears welled up beneath her swollen eyelids. He contemplated them silently for a moment, strongly tempted to awake and question the young woman in order to ascertain what she knew. Had she succeeded in reaching Bazeilles? and why was it that she was back there? Perhaps she would be able to give him some tidings of his dyehouse were he to ask her? A feeling of compassion stayed him, however, and he was about to leave the room when his mother, ghost-like, appeared at the threshold of the open door and beckoned him to follow her.

As they were passing through the dining room he expressed his surprise.

"What, have you not been abed to-night?"

She shook her head, then said below her breath:

"I cannot sleep; I have been sitting in an easy-chair beside the colonel. He is very feverish; he awakes at every instant, almost, and then plies me with questions. I don't know how to answer them. Come in and see him, you."

M. de Vineuil had fallen asleep again. His long face, now brightly red, barred by the sweeping mustache that fell across it like a snowy avalanche, was scarce distinguishable on the pillow. Mme. Delaherche had placed a newspaper before the lamp and that corner of the room was lost in semi-darkness, while all the intensity of the bright lamplight was concentrated on her where she sat, uncompromisingly erect, in her fauteuil, her hands crossed before her in her lap, her vague eyes bent on space, in sorrowful reverie.

"I think he must have heard you," she murmured; "he is awaking again."

It was so; the colonel, without moving his head, had reopened his eyes and bent them on Delaherche. He recognized him, and immediately asked in a voice that his exhausted condition made tremulous:

"It is all over, is it not? We have capitulated."

The manufacturer, who encountered the look his mother cast on him at that moment, was on the point of equivocating. But what good would it do? A look of discouragement passed across his face.

"What else remained to do? A single glance at the streets of the city would convince you. General de Wimpffen has just set out for Prussian general headquarters to discuss conditions."

M. de Vineuil's eyes closed again, his long frame was shaken with a protracted shiver of supremely bitter grief, and this deep, long-drawn moan escaped his lips:

"Ah! merciful God, merciful God!" And without opening his eyes he went on in faltering, broken accents: "Ah! the plan I spoke of yesterday—they should have adopted it. Yes, I knew the country; I spoke of my apprehensions to the general, but even him they would not listen to. Occupy all the heights up there to the north, from Saint-Menges to Fleigneux, with your army looking down on and commanding Sedan, able at any time to move on Vrigne-aux-Bois, mistress of Saint-Albert's pass—and there we are; our positions are impregnable, the Mezieres road is under our control—"

His speech became more confused as he proceeded; he stammered a few more unintelligible words, while the vision of the battle that had been born of his fever little by little grew blurred and dim and at last was effaced by slumber. He slept, and in his sleep perhaps the honest officer's dreams were dreams of victory.

"Does the major speak favorably of his case?" Delaherche inquired in a whisper.

Madame Delaherche nodded affirmatively.

"Those wounds in the foot are dreadful things, though," he went on. "I suppose he is likely to be laid up for a long time, isn't he?"

She made him no answer this time, as if all her being, all her faculties were concentrated on contemplating the great calamity of their defeat. She was of another age; she was a survivor of that strong old race of frontier burghers who defended their towns so valiantly in the good days gone by. The clean-cut lines of her stern, set face, with its fleshless, uncompromising nose and thin lips, which the brilliant light of the lamp brought out in high relief against the darkness of the room, told the full extent of her stifled rage and grief and the wound sustained by her antique patriotism, the revolt of which refused even to let her sleep.

About that time Delaherche became conscious of a sensation of isolation, accompanied by a most uncomfortable feeling of physical distress. His hunger was asserting itself again, a griping, intolerable hunger, and he persuaded himself that it was debility alone that was thus robbing him of courage and resolution. He tiptoed softly from the room and, with his candle, again made his way down to the kitchen, but the spectacle he witnessed there was even still more cheerless; the range cold and fireless, the closets empty, the floor strewn with a disorderly litter of towels, napkins, dish-clouts and women's aprons; as if the hurricane of disaster had swept through that place as well, bearing away on its wings all the charm and cheer that appertain naturally to the things we eat and drink. At first he thought he was not going to discover so much as a crust, what was left over of the bread having all found its way to the ambulance in the form of soup. At last, however, in the dark corner of a cupboard he came across the remainder of the beans from yesterday's dinner, where they had been forgotten, and ate them. He accomplished his luxurious repast without the formality of sitting down, without the accompaniment of salt and butter, for which he did not care to trouble himself to ascend to the floor above, desirous only to get away as speedily as possible from that dismal kitchen, where the blinking, smoking little lamp perfumed the air with fumes of petroleum.

It was not much more than ten o'clock, and Delaherche had no other occupation than to speculate on the various probabilities connected with the signing of the capitulation. A persistent apprehension haunted him; a dread lest the conflict might be renewed, and the horrible thought of what the consequences must be in such an event, of which he could not speak, but which rested on his bosom like an incubus. When he had reascended to his study, where he found Maurice and Jean in exactly the same position he had left them in, it was all in vain that he settled himself comfortably in his favorite easy-chair; sleep would not come to him; just as he was on the point of losing himself the crash of a shell would arouse him with a great start. It was the frightful cannonade of the day, the echoes of which were still ringing in his ears; and he would listen breathlessly for a moment, then sit and shudder at the equally appalling silence by which he was now surrounded. As he could not sleep he preferred to move about; he wandered aimlessly among the rooms, taking care to avoid that in which his mother was sitting by the colonel's bedside, for the steady gaze with which she watched him as he tramped nervously up and down had finally had the effect of disconcerting him. Twice he returned to see if Henriette had not awakened, and he paused an instant to glance at his wife's pretty face, so calmly peaceful, on which seemed to be flitting something like the faint shadow of a smile. Then, knowing not what to do, he went downstairs again, came back, moved about from room to room, until it was nearly two in the morning, wearying his ears with trying to decipher some meaning in the sounds that came to him from without.

This condition of affairs could not last. Delaherche resolved to return once more to the Sous-Prefecture, feeling assured that all rest would be quite out of the question for him so long as his ignorance continued. A feeling of despair seized him, however, when he went downstairs and looked out upon the densely crowded street, where the confusion seemed to be worse than ever; never would he have the strength to fight his way to the Place Turenne and back again through obstacles the mere memory of which caused every bone in his body to ache again. And he was mentally discussing matters, when who should come up but Major Bouroche, panting, perspiring, and swearing.

"Tonnerre de Dieu! I wonder if my head's on my shoulders or not!"

He had been obliged to visit the Hotel de Ville to see the mayor about his supply of chloroform, and urge him to issue a requisition for a quantity, for he had many operations to perform, his stock of the drug was exhausted, and he was afraid, he said, that he should be compelled to carve up the poor devils without putting them to sleep.

"Well?" inquired Delaherche.

"Well, they can't even tell whether the apothecaries have any or not!"

But the manufacturer was thinking of other things than chloroform. "No, no," he continued. "Have they brought matters to a conclusion yet? Have they signed the agreement with the Prussians?"

The major made a gesture of impatience. "There is nothing concluded," he cried. "It appears that those scoundrels are making demands out of all reason. Ah, well; let 'em commence afresh, then, and we'll all leave our bones here. That will be best!"

Delaherche's face grew very pale as he listened. "But are you quite sure these things are so?"

"I was told them by those fellows of the municipal council, who are in permanent session at the city hall. An officer had been dispatched from the Sous-Prefecture to lay the whole affair before them."

And he went on to furnish additional details. The interview had taken place at the Chateau de Bellevue, near Donchery, and the participants were General de Wimpffen, General von Moltke, and Bismarck. A stern and inflexible man was that von Moltke, a terrible man to deal with! He began by demonstrating that he was perfectly acquainted with the hopeless situation of the French army; it was destitute of ammunition and subsistence, demoralization and disorder pervaded its ranks, it was utterly powerless to break the iron circle by which it was girt about; while on the other hand the German armies occupied commanding positions from which they could lay the city in ashes in two hours. Coldly, unimpassionedly, he stated his terms: the entire French army to surrender arms and baggage and be treated as prisoners of war. Bismarck took no part in the discussion beyond giving the general his support, occasionally showing his teeth, like a big mastiff, inclined to be pacific on the whole, but quite ready to rend and tear should there be occasion for it. General de Wimpffen in reply protested with all the force he had at his command against these conditions, the most severe that ever were imposed on a vanquished army. He spoke of his personal grief and ill-fortune, the bravery of the troops, the danger there was in driving a proud nation to extremity; for three hours he spoke with all the energy and eloquence of despair, alternately threatening and entreating, demanding that they should content themselves with interning their prisoners in France, or even in Algeria; and in the end the only concession granted was, that the officers might retain their swords, and those among them who should enter into a solemn arrangement, attested by a written parole, to serve no more during the war, might return to their homes. Finally, the armistice to be prolonged until the next morning at ten o'clock; if at that time the terms had not been accepted, the Prussian batteries would reopen fire and the city would be burned.

"That's stupid!" exclaimed Delaherche; "they have no right to burn a city that has done nothing to deserve it!"

The major gave him still further food for anxiety by adding that some officers whom he had met at the Hotel de l'Europe were talking of making a sortie en masse just before daylight. An extremely excited state of feeling had prevailed since the tenor of the German demands had become known, and measures the most extravagant were proposed and discussed. No one seemed to be deterred by the consideration that it would be dishonorable to break the truce, taking advantage of the darkness and giving the enemy no notification, and the wildest, most visionary schemes were offered; they would resume the march on Carignan, hewing their way through the Bavarians, which they could do in the black night; they would recapture the plateau of Illy by a surprise; they would raise the blockade of the Mezieres road, or, by a determined, simultaneous rush, would force the German lines and throw themselves into Belgium. Others there were, indeed, who, feeling the hopelessness of their position, said nothing; they would have accepted any terms, signed any paper, with a glad cry of relief, simply to have the affair ended and done with.

"Good-night!" Bouroche said in conclusion. "I am going to try to sleep a couple of hours; I need it badly."

When left by himself Delaherche could hardly breathe. What, could it be true that they were going to fight again, were going to burn and raze Sedan! It was certainly to be, soon as the morrow's sun should be high enough upon the hills to light the horror of the sacrifice. And once again he almost unconsciously climbed the steep ladder that led to the roofs and found himself standing among the chimneys, at the edge of the narrow terrace that overlooked the city; but at that hour of the night the darkness was intense and he could distinguish absolutely nothing amid the swirling waves of the Cimmerian sea that lay beneath him. Then the buildings of the factory below were the first objects which, one by one, disentangled themselves from the shadows and stood out before his vision in indistinct masses, which he had no difficulty in recognizing: the engine-house, the shops, the drying rooms, the storehouses, and when he reflected that within twenty-four hours there would remain of that imposing block of buildings, his fortune and his pride, naught save charred timbers and crumbling walls, he overflowed with pity for himself. He raised his glance thence once more to the horizon, and sent it traveling in a circuit around that profound, mysterious veil of blackness behind which lay slumbering the menace of the morrow. To the south, in the direction of Bazeilles, a few quivering little flames that rose fitfully on the air told where had been the site of the unhappy village, while toward the north the farmhouse in the wood of la Garenne, that had been fired late in the afternoon, was burning still, and the trees about were dyed of a deep red with the ruddy blaze. Beyond the intermittent flashing of those two baleful fires no light to be seen; the brooding silence unbroken by any sound save those half-heard mutterings that pass through the air like harbingers of evil; about them, everywhere, the unfathomable abyss, dead and lifeless. Off there in the distance, very far away, perhaps, perhaps upon the ramparts, was a sound of someone weeping. It was all in vain that he strained his eyes to pierce the veil, to see something of Liry, la Marfee, the batteries of Frenois, and Wadelincourt, that encircling belt of bronze monsters of which he could instinctively feel the presence there, with their outstretched necks and yawning, ravenous muzzles. And as he recalled his glance and let it fall upon the city that lay around and beneath him, he heard its frightened breathing. It was not alone the unquiet slumbers of the soldiers who had fallen in the streets, the blending of inarticulate sounds produced by that gathering of guns, men, and horses; what he fancied he could distinguish was the insomnia, the alarmed watchfulness of his bourgeois neighbors, who, no more than he, could sleep, quivering with feverish terrors, awaiting anxiously the coming of the day. They all must be aware that the capitulation had not been signed, and were all counting the hours, quaking at the thought that should it not be signed the sole resource left them would be to go down into their cellars and wait for their own walls to tumble in on them and crush the life from their bodies. The voice of one in sore straits came up, it seemed to him, from the Rue des Voyards, shouting: "Help! murder!" amid the clash of arms. He bent over the terrace to look, then remained aloft there in the murky thickness of the night where there was not a star to cheer him, wrapped in such an ecstasy of terror that the hairs of his body stood erect.

Below-stairs, at early daybreak, Maurice awoke upon his sofa. He was sore and stiff as if he had been racked; he did not stir, but lay looking listlessly at the windows, which gradually grew white under the light of a cloudy dawn. The hateful memories of the day before all came back to him with that distinctness that characterizes the impressions of our first waking, how they had fought, fled, surrendered. It all rose before his vision, down to the very least detail, and he brooded with horrible anguish on the defeat, whose reproachful echoes seemed to penetrate to the inmost fibers of his being, as if he felt that all the responsibility of it was his. And he went on to reason on the cause of the evil, analyzing himself, reverting to his old habit of bitter and unavailing self-reproach. He would have felt so brave, so glorious had victory remained with them! And now, in defeat, weak and nervous as a woman, he once again gave way to one of those overwhelming fits of despair in which the entire world, seemed to him to be foundering. Nothing was left them; the end of France was come. His frame was shaken by a storm of sobs, he wept hot tears, and joining his hands, the prayers of his childhood rose to his lips in stammering accents.

"O God! take me unto Thee! O God! take unto Thyself all those who are weary and heavy-laden!"

Jean, lying on the floor wrapped in his bed-quilt, began to show some signs of life. Finally, astonished at what he heard, he arose to a sitting posture.

"What is the matter, youngster? Are you ill?" Then, with a glimmering perception of how matters stood, he adopted a more paternal tone. "Come, tell me what the matter is. You must not let yourself be worried by such a little thing as this, you know."

"Ah!" exclaimed Maurice, "it is all up with us, va! we are Prussians now, and we may as well make up our mind to it."

As the peasant, with the hard-headedness of the uneducated, expressed surprise to hear him talk thus, he endeavored to make it clear to him that, the race being degenerate and exhausted, it must disappear and make room for a newer and more vigorous strain. But the other, with an obstinate shake of the head, would not listen to the explanation.

"What! would you try to make me believe that my bit of land is no longer mine? that I would permit the Prussians to take it from me while I am alive and my two arms are left to me? Come, come!"

Then painfully, in such terms as he could command, he went on to tell how affairs looked to him. They had received an all-fired good basting, that was sure as sure could be! but they were not all dead yet, he didn't believe; there were some left, and those would suffice to rebuild the house if they only behaved themselves, working hard and not drinking up what they earned. When a family has trouble, if its members work and put by a little something, they will pull through, in spite of all the bad luck in the world. And further, it is not such a bad thing to get a good cuffing once in a way; it sets one thinking. And, great heavens! if a man has something rotten about him, if he has gangrene in his arms or legs that is spreading all the time, isn't it better to take a hatchet and lop them off rather than die as he would from cholera?

"All up, all up! Ah, no, no! no, no!" he repeated several times. "It is not all up with me, I know very well it is not."

And notwithstanding his seedy condition and demoralized appearance, his hair all matted and pasted to his head by the blood that had flowed from his wound, he drew himself up defiantly, animated by a keen desire to live, to take up the tools of his trade or put his hand to the plow, in order, to use his own expression, to "rebuild the house." He was of the old soil where reason and obstinacy grow side by side, of the land of toil and thrift.

"All the same, though," he continued, "I am sorry for the Emperor. Affairs seemed to be going on well; the farmers were getting a good price for their grain. But surely it was bad judgment on his part to allow himself to become involved in this business!"

Maurice, who was still in "the blues," spoke regretfully: "Ah, the Emperor! I always liked him in my heart, in spite of my republican ideas. Yes, I had it in the blood, on account of my grandfather, I suppose. And now that that limb is rotten and we shall have to lop it off, what is going to become of us?"

His eyes began to wander, and his voice and manner evinced such distress that Jean became alarmed and was about to rise and go to him, when Henriette came into the room. She had just awakened on hearing the sound of voices in the room adjoining hers. The pale light of a cloudy morning now illuminated the apartment.

"You come just in time to give him a scolding," he said, with an affectation of liveliness. "He is not a good boy this morning."

But the sight of his sister's pale, sad face and the recollection of her affliction had had a salutary effect on Maurice by determining a sudden crisis of tenderness. He opened his arms and took her to his bosom, and when she rested her head upon his shoulder, when he held her locked in a close embrace, a feeling of great gentleness pervaded him and they mingled their tears.

"Ah, my poor, poor darling, why have I not more strength and courage to console you! for my sorrows are as nothing compared with yours. That good, faithful Weiss, the husband who loved you so fondly! What will become of you? You have always been the victim; always, and never a murmur from your lips. Think of the sorrow I have already caused you, and who can say that I shall not cause you still more in the future!"

She was silencing him, placing her hand upon his mouth, when Delaherche came into the room, beside himself with indignation. While still on the terrace he had been seized by one of those uncontrollable nervous fits of hunger that are aggravated by fatigue, and had descended to the kitchen in quest of something warm to drink, where he had found, keeping company with his cook, a relative of hers, a carpenter of Bazeilles, whom she was in the act of treating to a bowl of hot wine. This person, who had been one of the last to leave the place while the conflagrations were at their height, had told him that his dyehouse was utterly destroyed, nothing left of it but a heap of ruins.

"The robbers, the thieves! Would you have believed it, hein?" he stammered, addressing Jean and Maurice. "There is no hope left; they mean to burn Sedan this morning as they burned Bazeilles yesterday. I'm ruined, I'm ruined!" The scar that Henriette bore on her forehead attracted his attention, and he remembered that he had not spoken to her yet. "It is true, you went there, after all; you got that wound—Ah! poor Weiss!"

And seeing by the young woman's tears that she was acquainted with her husband's fate, he abruptly blurted out the horrible bit of news that the carpenter had communicated to him among the rest.

"Poor Weiss! it seems they burned him. Yes, after shooting all the civilians who were caught with arms in their hands, they threw their bodies into the flames of a burning house and poured petroleum over them."

Henriette was horror-stricken as she listened. Her tears burst forth, her frame was shaken by her sobs. My God, my God, not even the poor comfort of going to claim her dear dead and give him decent sepulture; his ashes were to be scattered by the winds of heaven! Maurice had again clasped her in his arms and spoke to her endearingly, calling her his poor Cinderella, beseeching her not to take the matter so to heart, a brave woman as she was.

After a time, during which no word was spoken, Delaherche, who had been standing at the window watching the growing day, suddenly turned and addressed the two soldiers:

"By the way, I was near forgetting. What I came up here to tell you is this: down in the courtyard, in the shed where the treasure chests were deposited, there is an officer who is about to distribute the money among the men, so as to keep the Prussians from getting it. You had better go down, for a little money may be useful to you, that is, provided we are all alive a few hours hence."

The advice was good, and Maurice and Jean acted on it, having first prevailed on Henriette to take her brother's place on the sofa. If she could not go to sleep again, she would at least be securing some repose. As for Delaherche, he passed through the adjoining chamber, where Gilberte with her tranquil, pretty face was slumbering still as soundly as a child, neither the sound of conversation nor even Henriette's sobs having availed to make her change her position. From there he went to the apartment where his mother was watching at Colonel de Vineuil's bedside, and thrust his head through the door; the old lady was asleep in her fauteuil, while the colonel, his eyes closed, was like a corpse. He opened them to their full extent and asked:

"Well, it's all over, isn't it?"

Irritated by the question, which detained him at the very moment when he thought he should be able to slip away unobserved, Delaherche gave a wrathful look and murmured, sinking his voice:

"Oh, yes, all over! until it begins again! There is nothing signed."

The colonel went on in a voice scarcely higher than a whisper; delirium was setting in.

"Merciful God, let me die before the end! I do not hear the guns. Why have they ceased firing? Up there at Saint-Menges, at Fleigneux, we have command of all the roads; should the Prussians dare turn Sedan and attack us, we will drive them into the Meuse. The city is there, an insurmountable obstacle between us and them; our positions, too, are the stronger. Forward! the 7th corps will lead, the 12th will protect the retreat—"

And his fingers kept drumming on the counterpane with a measured movement, as if keeping time with the trot of the charger he was riding in his vision. Gradually the motion became slower and slower as his words became more indistinct and he sank off into slumber. It ceased, and he lay motionless and still, as if the breath had left his body.

"Lie still and rest," Delaherche whispered; "when I have news I will return."

Then, having first assured himself that he had not disturbed his mother's slumber, he slipped away and disappeared.

Jean and Maurice, on descending to the shed in the courtyard, had found there an officer of the pay department, seated on a common kitchen chair behind a little unpainted pine table, who, without pen, ink, or paper, without taking receipts or indulging in formalities of any kind, was dispensing fortunes. He simply stuck his hand into the open mouth of the bags filled with bright gold pieces, and as the sergeants of the 7th corps passed in line before him he filled their kepis, never counting what he bestowed with such rapid liberality. The understanding was that the sergeants were subsequently to divide what they received with the surviving men of their half-sections. Each of them received his portion awkwardly, as if it had been a ration of meat or coffee, then stalked off in an embarrassed, self-conscious sort of way, transferring the contents of the kepi to his trousers' pockets so as not to display his wealth to the world at large. And not a word was spoken; there was not a sound to be heard but the crystalline chink and rattle of the coin as it was received by those poor devils, dumfounded to see the responsibility of such riches thrust on them when there was not a place in the city where they could purchase a loaf of bread or a quart of wine.

When Jean and Maurice appeared before him the officer, who was holding outstretched his hand filled, as usual, with louis, drew it back.

"Neither of you fellows is a sergeant. No one except sergeants is entitled to receive the money." Then, in haste to be done with his task, he changed his mind: "Never mind, though; here, you corporal, take this. Step lively, now. Next man!"

And he dropped the gold coins into the kepi that Jean held out to him. The latter, oppressed by the magnitude of the amount, nearly six hundred francs, insisted that Maurice should take one-half. No one could say what might happen; they might be parted from each other.

They made the division in the garden, before the ambulance, and when they had concluded their financial business they entered, having recognized on the straw near the entrance the drummer-boy of their company, Bastian, a fat, good-natured little fellow, who had had the ill-luck to receive a spent ball in the groin about five o'clock the day before, when the battle was ended. He had been dying by inches for the last twelve hours.

In the dim, white light of morning, at that hour of awakening, the sight of the ambulance sent a chill of horror through them. Three more patients had died during the night, without anyone being aware of it, and the attendants were hurriedly bearing away the corpses in order to make room for others. Those who had been operated on the day before opened wide their eyes in their somnolent, semi-conscious state, and looked with dazed astonishment on that vast dormitory of suffering, where the victims of the knife, only half-slaughtered, rested on their straw. It was in vain that some attempts had been made the night before to clean up the room after the bloody work of the operations; there were great splotches of blood on the ill-swept floor; in a bucket of water a great sponge was floating, stained with red, for all the world like a human brain; a hand, its fingers crushed and broken, had been overlooked and lay on the floor of the shed. It was the parings and trimmings of the human butcher shop, the horrible waste and refuse that ensues upon a day of slaughter, viewed in the cold, raw light of dawn.

Bouroche, who, after a few hours of repose, had already resumed his duties, stopped in front of the wounded drummer-boy, Bastian, then passed on with an imperceptible shrug of his shoulders. A hopeless case; nothing to be done. The lad had opened his eyes, however, and emerging from the comatose state in which he had been lying, was eagerly watching a sergeant who, his kepi filled with gold in his hand, had come into the room to see if there were any of his men among those poor wretches. He found two, and to each of them gave twenty francs. Other sergeants came in, and the gold began to fall in showers upon the straw, among the dying men. Bastian, who had managed to raise himself, stretched out his two hands, even then shaking in the final agony.

"Don't forget me! don't forget me!"

The sergeant would have passed on and gone his way, as Bouroche had done. What good could money do there? Then yielding to a kindly impulse, he threw some coins, never stopping to count them, into the poor hands that were already cold.

"Don't forget me! don't forget me!"

Bastian fell backward on his straw. For a long time he groped with stiffening fingers for the elusive gold, which seemed to avoid him. And thus he died.

"The gentleman has blown his candle out; good-night!" said a little, black, wizened zouave, who occupied the next bed. "It's vexatious, when one has the wherewithal to pay for wetting his whistle!"

He had his left foot done up in splints. Nevertheless he managed to raise himself on his knees and elbows and in this posture crawl over to the dead man, whom he relieved of all his money, forcing open his hands, rummaging among his clothing and the folds of his capote. When he got back to his place, noticing that he was observed, he simply said:

"There's no use letting the stuff be wasted, is there?"

Maurice, sick at heart in that atmosphere of human distress and suffering, had long since dragged Jean away. As they passed out through the shed where the operations were performed they saw Bouroche preparing to amputate the leg of a poor little man of twenty, without chloroform, he having been unable to obtain a further supply of the anaesthetic. And they fled, running, so as not to hear the poor boy's shrieks.

Delaherche, who came in from the street just then, beckoned to them and shouted:

"Come upstairs, come, quick! we are going to have breakfast. The cook has succeeded in procuring some milk, and it is well she did, for we are all in great need of something to warm our stomachs." And notwithstanding his efforts to do so, he could not entirely repress his delight and exultation. With a radiant countenance he added, lowering his voice: "It is all right this time. General de Wimpffen has set out again for the German headquarters to sign the capitulation."

Ah, how much those words meant to him, what comfort there was in them, what relief! his horrid nightmare dispelled, his property saved from destruction, his daily life to be resumed, under changed conditions, it is true, but still it was to go on, it was not to cease! It was little Rose who had told him of the occurrences of the morning at the Sous-Prefecture; the girl had come hastening through the streets, now somewhat less choked than they had been, to obtain a supply of bread from an aunt of hers who kept a baker's shop in the quarter; it was striking nine o'clock. As early as eight General de Wimpffen had convened another council of war, consisting of more than thirty generals, to whom he related the results that had been reached so far, the hard conditions imposed by the victorious foe, and his own fruitless efforts to secure a mitigation of them. His emotion was such that his hands shook like a leaf, his eyes were suffused with tears. He was still addressing the assemblage when a colonel of the German staff presented himself, on behalf of General von Moltke, to remind them that, unless a decision were arrived at by ten o'clock, their guns would open fire on the city of Sedan. With this horrible alternative before them the council could do nothing save authorize the general to proceed once more to the Chateau of Bellevue and accept the terms of the victors. He must have accomplished his mission by that time, and the entire French army were prisoners of war.

When she had concluded her narrative Rose launched out into a detailed account of the tremendous excitement the tidings had produced in the city. At the Sous-Prefecture she had seen officers tear the epaulettes from their shoulders, weeping meanwhile like children. Cavalrymen had thrown their sabers from the Pont de Meuse into the river; an entire regiment of cuirassiers had passed, each man tossing his blade over the parapet and sorrowfully watching the water close over it. In the streets many soldiers grasped their muskets by the barrel and smashed them against a wall, while there were artillerymen who removed the mechanism from the mitrailleuses and flung it into the sewer. Some there were who buried or burned the regimental standards. In the Place Turenne an old sergeant climbed upon a gate-post and harangued the throng as if he had suddenly taken leave of his senses, reviling the leaders, stigmatizing them as poltroons and cowards. Others seemed as if dazed, shedding big tears in silence, and others also, it must be confessed (and it is probable that they were in the majority), betrayed by their laughing eyes and pleased expression the satisfaction they felt at the change in affairs. There was an end to their suffering at last; they were prisoners of war, they could not be obliged to fight any more! For so many days they had been distressed by those long, weary marches, with never food enough to satisfy their appetite! And then, too, they were the weaker; what use was there in fighting? If their chiefs had betrayed them, had sold them to the enemy, so much the better; it would be the sooner ended! It was such a delicious thing to think of, that they were to have white bread to eat, were to sleep between sheets!

As Delaherche was about to enter the dining room in company with Maurice and Jean, his mother called to him from above.

"Come up here, please; I am anxious about the colonel."

M. de Vineuil, with wide-open eyes, was talking rapidly and excitedly of the subject that filled his bewildered brain.

"The Prussians have cut us off from Mezieres, but what matters it! See, they have outmarched us and got possession of the plain of Donchery; soon they will be up with the wood of la Falizette and flank us there, while more of them are coming up along the valley of the Givonne. The frontier is behind us; let us kill as many of them as we can and cross it at a bound. Yesterday, yes, that is what I would have advised—"

At that moment his burning eyes lighted on Delaherche. He recognized him; the sight seemed to sober him and dispel the hallucination under which he was laboring, and coming back to the terrible reality, he asked for the third time:

"It is all over, is it not?"

The manufacturer explosively blurted out the expression of his satisfaction; he could not restrain it.

"Ah, yes, God be praised! it is all over, completely over. The capitulation must be signed by this time."

The colonel raised himself at a bound to a sitting posture, notwithstanding his bandaged foot; he took his sword from the chair by the bedside where it lay and made an attempt to break it, but his hands trembled too violently, and the blade slipped from his fingers.

"Look out! he will cut himself!" Delaherche cried in alarm. "Take that thing away from him; it is dangerous!"

Mme. Delaherche took possession of the sword. With a feeling of compassionate respect for the poor colonel's grief and despair she did not conceal it, as her son bade her do, but with a single vigorous effort snapped it across her knee, with a strength of which she herself would never have supposed her poor old hands capable. The colonel laid himself down again, casting a look of extreme gentleness upon his old friend, who went back to her chair and seated herself in her usual rigid attitude.

In the dining room the cook had meantime served bowls of hot coffee and milk for the entire party. Henriette and Gilberte had awakened, the latter, completely restored by her long and refreshing slumber, with bright eyes and smiling face; she embraced most tenderly her friend, whom she pitied, she said, from the bottom of her heart. Maurice seated himself beside his sister, while Jean, who was unused to polite society, but could not decline the invitation that was extended to him, was Delaherche's right-hand neighbor. It was Mme. Delaherche's custom not to come to the table with the family; a servant carried her a bowl, which she drank while sitting by the colonel. The party of five, however, who sat down together, although they commenced their meal in silence, soon became cheerful and talkative. Why should they not rejoice and be glad to find themselves there, safe and sound, with food before them to satisfy their hunger, when the country round about was covered with thousands upon thousands of poor starving wretches? In the cool, spacious dining room the snow-white tablecloth was a delight to the eye and the steaming cafe au lait seemed delicious.

They conversed, Delaherche, who had recovered his assurance and was again the wealthy manufacturer, the condescending patron courting popularity, severe only toward those who failed to succeed, spoke of Napoleon III., whose face as he saw it last continued to haunt his memory. He addressed himself to Jean, having that simple-minded young man as his neighbor. "Yes, sir, the Emperor has deceived me, and I don't hesitate to say so. His henchmen may put in the plea of mitigating circumstances, but it won't go down, sir; he is evidently the first, the only cause of our misfortunes."

He had quite forgotten that only a few months before he had been an ardent Bonapartist and had labored to ensure the success of the plebiscite, and now he who was henceforth to be known as the Man of Sedan was not even worthy to be pitied; he ascribed to him every known iniquity.

"A man of no capacity, as everyone is now compelled to admit; but let that pass, I say nothing of that. A visionary, a theorist, an unbalanced mind, with whom affairs seemed to succeed as long as he had luck on his side. And there's no use, don't you see, sir, in attempting to work on our sympathies and excite our commiseration by telling us that he was deceived, that the opposition refused him the necessary grants of men and money. It is he who has deceived us, he whose crimes and blunders have landed us in the horrible muddle where we are."

Maurice, who preferred to say nothing on the subject, could not help smiling, while Jean, embarrassed by the political turn the conversation had taken and fearful lest he might make some ill-timed remark, simply replied:

"They say he is a brave man, though."

But those few words, modestly expressed, fairly made Delaherche jump. All his past fear and alarm, all the mental anguish he had suffered, burst from his lips in a cry of concentrated passion, closely allied to hatred.

"A brave man, forsooth; and what does that amount to! Are you aware, sir, that my factory was struck three times by Prussian shells, and that it is no fault of the Emperor's that it was not burned! Are you aware that I, I shall lose a hundred thousand francs by this idiotic business! No, no; France invaded, pillaged, and laid waste, our industries compelled to shut down, our commerce ruined; it is a little too much, I tell you! One brave man like that is quite sufficient; may the Lord preserve us from any more of them! He is down in the blood and mire, and there let him remain!"

And he made a forcible gesture with his closed fist as if thrusting down and holding under the water some poor wretch who was struggling to save himself, then finished his coffee, smacking his lips like a true gourmand. Gilberte waited on Henriette as if she had been a child, laughing a little involuntary laugh when the latter made some exhibition of absent-mindedness. And when at last the coffee had all been drunk they still lingered on in the peaceful quiet of the great cool dining room.

And at that same hour Napoleon III. was in the weaver's lowly cottage on the Donchery road. As early as five o'clock in the morning he had insisted on leaving the Sous-Prefecture; he felt ill at ease in Sedan, which was at once a menace and a reproach to him, and moreover he thought he might, in some measure, alleviate the sufferings of his tender heart by obtaining more favorable terms for his unfortunate army. His object was to have a personal interview with the King of Prussia. He had taken his place in a hired caleche and been driven along the broad highway, with its row of lofty poplars on either side, and this first stage of his journey into exile, accomplished in the chill air of early dawn, must have reminded him forcibly of the grandeur that had been his and that he was putting behind him forever. It was on this road that he had his encounter with Bismarck, who came hurrying to meet him in an old cap and coarse, greased boots, with the sole object of keeping him occupied and preventing him from seeing the King until the capitulation should have been signed. The King was still at Vendresse, some nine miles away. Where was he to go? What roof would afford him shelter while he waited? In his own country, so far away, the Palace of the Tuileries had disappeared from his sight, swallowed up in the bosom of a storm-cloud, and he was never to see it more. Sedan seemed already to have receded into the distance, leagues and leagues, and to be parted from him by a river of blood. In France there were no longer imperial chateaus, nor official residences, nor even a chimney-nook in the house of the humblest functionary, where he would have dared to enter and claim hospitality. And it was in the house of the weaver that he determined to seek shelter, the squalid cottage that stood close to the roadside, with its scanty kitchen-garden inclosed by a hedge and its front of a single story with little forbidding windows. The room above-stairs was simply whitewashed and had a tiled floor; the only furniture was a common pine table and two straw-bottomed chairs. He spent two hours there, at first in company with Bismarck, who smiled to hear him speak of generosity, after that alone in silent misery, flattening his ashy face against the panes, taking his last look at French soil and at the Meuse, winding in and out, so beautiful, among the broad fertile fields.

Then the next day and the days that came after were other wretched stages of that journey; the Chateau of Bellevue, a pretty bourgeois retreat overlooking the river, where he rested that night, where he shed tears after his interview with King William; the sorrowful departure, that most miserable flight in a hired caleche over remote roads to the north of the city, which he avoided, not caring to face the wrath of the vanquished troops and the starving citizens, making a wide circuit over cross-roads by Floing, Fleigneux, and Illy and crossing the stream on a bridge of boats, laid down by the Prussians at Iges; the tragic encounter, the story of which has been so often told, that occurred on the corpse-cumbered plateau of Illy: the miserable Emperor, whose state was such that his horse could not be allowed to trot, had sunk under some more than usually violent attack of his complaint, mechanically smoking, perhaps, his everlasting cigarette, when a band of haggard, dusty, blood-stained prisoners, who were being conducted from Fleigneux to Sedan, were forced to leave the road to let the carriage pass and stood watching it from the ditch; those who were at the head of the line merely eyed him in silence; presently a hoarse, sullen murmur began to make itself heard, and finally, as the caleche proceeded down the line, the men burst out with a storm of yells and cat-calls, shaking their fists and calling down maledictions on the head of him who had been their ruler. After that came the interminable journey across the battlefield, as far as Givonne, amid scenes of havoc and devastation, amid the dead, who lay with staring eyes upturned that seemed to be full of menace; came, too, the bare, dreary fields, the great silent forest, then the frontier, running along the summit of a ridge, marked only by a stone, facing a wooden post that seemed ready to fall, and beyond the soil of Belgium, the end of all, with its road bordered with gloomy hemlocks descending sharply into the narrow valley.

And that first night of exile, that he spent at a common inn, the Hotel de la Poste at Bouillon, what a night it was! When the Emperor showed himself at his window in deference to the throng of French refugees and sight-seers that filled the place, he was greeted with a storm of hisses and hostile murmurs. The apartment assigned him, the three windows of which opened on the public square and on the Semoy, was the typical tawdry bedroom of the provincial inn with its conventional furnishings: the chairs covered with crimson damask, the mahogany armoire a glace, and on the mantel the imitation bronze clock, flanked by a pair of conch shells and vases of artificial flowers under glass covers. On either side of the door was a little single bed, to one of which the wearied aide-de-camp betook himself at nine o'clock and was immediately wrapped in soundest slumber. On the other the Emperor, to whom the god of sleep was less benignant, tossed almost the whole night through, and if he arose to try to quiet his excited nerves by walking, the sole distraction that his eyes encountered was a pair of engravings that were hung to right and left of the chimney, one depicting Rouget de Lisle singing the Marseillaise, the other a crude representation of the Last Judgment, the dead rising from their graves at the sound of the Archangel's trump, the resurrection of the victims of the battlefield, about to appear before their God to bear witness against their rulers.

The imperial baggage train, cause in its day of so much scandal, had been left behind at Sedan, where it rested in ignominious hiding behind the Sous-Prefet's lilac bushes. It puzzled the authorities somewhat to devise means for ridding themselves of what was to them a bete noire, for getting it away from the city unseen by the famishing multitude, upon whom the sight of its flaunting splendor would have produced much the same effect that a red rag does on a maddened bull. They waited until there came an unusually dark night, when horses, carriages, and baggage-wagons, with their silver stew-pans, plate, linen, and baskets of fine wines, all trooped out of Sedan in deepest mystery and shaped their course for Belgium, noiselessly, without beat of drum, over the least frequented roads like a thief stealing away in the night.

PART THIRD

I.

All the long, long day of the battle Silvine, up on Remilly hill, where Father Fouchard's little farm was situated, but her heart and soul absent with Honore amid the dangers of the conflict, never once took her eyes from off Sedan, where the guns were roaring. The following day, moreover, her anxiety was even greater still, being increased by her inability to obtain any definite tidings, for the Prussians who were guarding the roads in the vicinity refused to answer questions, as much from reasons of policy as because they knew but very little themselves. The bright sun of the day before was no longer visible, and showers had fallen, making the valley look less cheerful than usual in the wan light.

Toward evening Father Fouchard, who was also haunted by a sensation of uneasiness in the midst of his studied taciturnity, was standing on his doorstep reflecting on the probable outcome of events. His son had no place in his thoughts, but he was speculating how he best might convert the misfortunes of others into fortune for himself, and as he revolved these considerations in his mind he noticed a tall, strapping young fellow, dressed in the peasant's blouse, who had been strolling up and down the road for the last minute or so, looking as if he did not know what to do with himself. His astonishment on recognizing him was so great that he called him aloud by name, notwithstanding that three Prussians happened to be passing at the time.

"Why, Prosper! Is that you?"

The chasseur d'Afrique imposed silence on him with an emphatic gesture; then, coming closer, he said in an undertone:

"Yes, it is I. I have had enough of fighting for nothing, and I cut my lucky. Say, Father Fouchard, you don't happen to be in need of a laborer on your farm, do you?"

All the old man's prudence came back to him in a twinkling. He was looking for someone to help him, but it would be better not to say so at once.

"A lad on the farm? faith, no—not just now. Come in, though, all the same, and have a glass. I shan't leave you out on the road when you're in trouble, that's sure."

Silvine, in the kitchen, was setting the pot of soup on the fire, while little Charlot was hanging by her skirts, frolicking and laughing. She did not recognize Prosper at first, although they had formerly served together in the same household, and it was not until she came in, bringing a bottle of wine and two glasses, that she looked him squarely in the face. She uttered a cry of joy and surprise; her sole thought was of Honore.

"Ah, you were there, weren't you? Is Honore all right?"

Prosper's answer was ready to slip from his tongue; he hesitated. For the last two days he had been living in a dream, among a rapid succession of strange, ill-defined events which left behind them no precise memory, as a man starts, half-awakened, from a slumber peopled with fantastic visions. It was true, doubtless, he believed he had seen Honore lying upon a cannon, dead, but he would not have cared to swear to it; what use is there in afflicting people when one is not certain?

"Honore," he murmured, "I don't know, I couldn't say."

She continued to press him with her questions, looking at him steadily.

"You did not see him, then?"

He waved his hands before him with a slow, uncertain motion and an expressive shake of the head.

"How can you expect one to remember! There were such lots of things, such lots of things. Look you, of all that d——-d battle, if I was to die for it this minute, I could not tell you that much—no, not even the place where I was. I believe men get to be no better than idiots, 'pon my word I do!" And tossing off a glass of wine, he sat gloomily silent, his vacant eyes turned inward on the dark recesses of his memory. "All that I remember is that it was beginning to be dark when I recovered consciousness. I went down while we were charging, and then the sun was very high. I must have been lying there for hours, my right leg caught under poor old Zephyr, who had received a piece of shell in the middle of his chest. There was nothing to laugh at in my position, I can tell you; the dead comrades lying around me in piles, not a living soul in sight, and the certainty that I should have to kick the bucket too unless someone came to put me on my legs again. Gently, gently, I tried to free my leg, but it was no use; Zephyr's weight must have been fully up to that of the five hundred thousand devils. He was warm still. I patted him, I spoke to him, saying all the pretty things I could think of, and here's a thing, do you see, that I shall never forget as long as I live: he opened his eyes and made an effort to raise his poor old head, which was resting on the ground beside my own. Then we had a talk together: 'Poor old fellow,' says I, 'I don't want to say a word to hurt your feelings, but you must want to see me croak with you, you hold me down so hard.' Of course he didn't say he did; he couldn't, but for all that I could read in his great sorrowful eyes how bad he felt to have to part with me. And I can't say how the thing happened, whether he intended it or whether it was part of the death struggle, but all at once he gave himself a great shake that sent him rolling away to one side. I was enabled to get on my feet once more, but ah! in what a pickle; my leg was swollen and heavy as a leg of lead. Never mind, I took Zephyr's head in my arms and kept on talking to him, telling him all the kind thoughts I had in my heart, that he was a good horse, that I loved him dearly, that I should never forget him. He listened to me, he seemed to be so pleased! Then he had another long convulsion, and so he died, with his big vacant eyes fixed on me till the last. It is very strange, though, and I don't suppose anyone will believe me; still, it is the simple truth that great, big tears were standing in his eyes. Poor old Zephyr, he cried just like a man—"

At this point Prosper's emotion got the better of him; tears choked his utterance and he was obliged to break off. He gulped down another glass of wine and went on with his narrative in disjointed, incomplete sentences. It kept growing darker and darker, until there was only a narrow streak of red light on the horizon at the verge of the battlefield; the shadows of the dead horses seemed to be projected across the plain to an infinite distance. The pain and stiffness in his leg kept him from moving; he must have remained for a long time beside Zephyr. Then, with his fears as an incentive, he had managed to get on his feet and hobble away; it was an imperative necessity to him not to be alone, to find comrades who would share his fears with him and make them less. Thus from every nook and corner of the battlefield, from hedges and ditches and clumps of bushes, the wounded who had been left behind dragged themselves painfully in search of companionship, forming when possible little bands of four or five, finding it less hard to agonize and die in the company of their fellow-beings. In the wood of la Garenne Prosper fell in with two men of the 43d regiment; they were not wounded, but had burrowed in the underbrush like rabbits, waiting for the coming of the night. When they learned that he was familiar with the roads they communicated to him their plan, which was to traverse the woods under cover of the darkness and make their escape into Belgium. At first he declined to share their undertaking, for he would have preferred to proceed direct to Remilly, where he was certain to find a refuge, but where was he to obtain the blouse and trousers that he required as a disguise? to say nothing of the impracticability of getting past the numerous Prussian pickets and outposts that filled the valley all the way from la Garenne to Remilly. He therefore ended by consenting to act as guide to the two comrades. His leg was less stiff than it had been, and they were so fortunate as to secure a loaf of bread at a farmhouse. Nine o'clock was striking from the church of a village in the distance as they resumed their way. The only point where they encountered any danger worth mentioning was at la Chapelle, where they fell directly into the midst of a Prussian advanced post before they were aware of it; the enemy flew to arms and blazed away into the darkness, while they, throwing themselves on the ground and alternately crawling and running until the fire slackened, ultimately regained the shelter of the trees. After that they kept to the woods, observing the utmost vigilance. At a bend in the road, they crept up behind an out-lying picket and, leaping on his back, buried a knife in his throat. Then the road was free before them and they no longer had to observe precaution; they went ahead, laughing and whistling. It was about three in the morning when they reached a little Belgian village, where they knocked up a worthy farmer, who at once opened his barn to them; they snuggled among the hay and slept soundly until morning.

The sun was high in the heavens when Prosper awoke. As he opened his eyes and looked about him, while the two comrades were still snoring, he beheld their entertainer engaged in hitching a horse to a great carriole loaded with bread, rice, coffee, sugar, and all sorts of eatables, the whole concealed under sacks of charcoal, and a little questioning elicited from the good man the fact that he had two married daughters living at Raucourt, in France, whom the passage of the Bavarian troops had left entirely destitute, and that the provisions in the carriole were intended for them. He had procured that very morning the safe-conduct that was required for the journey. Prosper was immediately seized by an uncontrollable desire to take a seat in that carriole and return to the country that he loved so and for which his heart was yearning with such a violent nostalgia. It was perfectly simple; the farmer would have to pass through Remilly to reach Raucourt; he would alight there. The matter was arranged in three minutes; he obtained a loan of the longed-for blouse and trousers, and the farmer gave out, wherever they stopped, that he was his servant; so that about six o'clock he got down in front of the church, not having been stopped more than two or three times by the German outposts.

They were all silent for a while, then: "No, I had enough of it!" said Prosper. "If they had but set us at work that amounted to something, as out there in Africa! but this going up the hill only to come down again, the feeling that one is of no earthly use to anyone, that is no kind of a life at all. And then I should be lonely, now that poor Zephyr is dead; all that is left me to do is to go to work on a farm. That will be better than living among the Prussians as a prisoner, don't you think so? You have horses, Father Fouchard; try me, and see whether or not I will love them and take good care of them."

The old fellow's eyes gleamed, but he touched glasses once more with the other and concluded the arrangement without any evidence of eagerness.

"Very well; I wish to be of service to you as far as lies in my power; I will take you. As regards the question of wages, though, you must not speak of it until the war is over, for really I am not in need of anyone and the times are too hard."

Silvine, who had remained seated with Charlot on her lap, had never once taken her eyes from Prosper's face. When she saw him rise with the intention of going to the stable and making immediate acquaintance with its four-footed inhabitants, she again asked:

"Then you say you did not see Honore?"

The question repeated thus abruptly made him start, as if it had suddenly cast a flood of light in upon an obscure corner of his memory. He hesitated for a little, but finally came to a decision and spoke.

"See here, I did not wish to grieve you just now, but I don't believe Honore will ever come back."

"Never come back—what do you mean?"

"Yes, I believe that the Prussians did his business for him. I saw him lying across his gun, his head erect, with a great wound just beneath the heart."

There was silence in the room. Silvine's pallor was frightful to behold, while Father Fouchard displayed his interest in the narrative by replacing upon the table his glass, into which he had just poured what wine remained in the bottle.

"Are you quite certain?" she asked in a choking voice.

"Dame! as certain as one can be of a thing he has seen with his own two eyes. It was on a little hillock, with three trees in a group right beside it; it seems to me I could go to the spot blindfolded."

If it was true she had nothing left to live for. That lad who had been so good to her, who had forgiven her her fault, had plighted his troth and was to marry her when he came home at the end of the campaign! and they had robbed her of him, they had murdered him, and he was lying out there on the battlefield with a wound under the heart! She had never known how strong her love for him had been, and now the thought that she was to see him no more, that he who was hers was hers no longer, aroused her almost to a pitch of madness and made her forget her usual tranquil resignation. She set Charlot roughly down upon the floor, exclaiming:

"Good! I shall not believe that story until I see the evidence of it, until I see it with my own eyes. Since you know the spot you shall conduct me to it. And if it is true, if we find him, we will bring him home with us."

Her tears allowed her to say no more; she bowed her head upon the table, her frame convulsed by long-drawn, tumultuous sobs that shook her from head to foot, while the child, not knowing what to make of such unusual treatment at his mother's hands, also commenced to weep violently. She caught him up and pressed him to her heart, with distracted, stammering words:

"My poor child! my poor child!"

Consternation was depicted on old Fouchard's face. Appearances notwithstanding, he did love his son, after a fashion of his own. Memories of the past came back to him, of days long vanished, when his wife was still living and Honore was a boy at school, and two big tears appeared in his small red eyes and trickled down his old leathery cheeks. He had not wept before in more than ten years. In the end he grew angry at the thought of that son who was his and upon whom he was never to set eyes again; he rapped out an oath or two.

"Nom de Dieu! it is provoking all the same, to have only one boy, and that he should be taken from you!"

When their agitation had in a measure subsided, however, Fouchard was annoyed that Silvine still continued to talk of going to search for Honore's body out there on the battlefield. She made no further noisy demonstration, but harbored her purpose with the dogged silence of despair, and he failed to recognize in her the docile, obedient servant who was wont to perform her daily tasks without a murmur; her great, submissive eyes, in which lay the chief beauty of her face, had assumed an expression of stern determination, while beneath her thick brown hair her cheeks and brow wore a pallor that was like death. She had torn off the red kerchief that was knotted about her neck, and was entirely in black, like a widow in her weeds. It was all in vain that he tried to impress on her the difficulties of the undertaking, the dangers she would be subjected to, the little hope there was of recovering the corpse; she did not even take the trouble to answer him, and he saw clearly that unless he seconded her in her plan she would start out alone and do some unwise thing, and this aspect of the case worried him on account of the complications that might arise between him and the Prussian authorities. He therefore finally decided to go and lay the matter before the mayor of Remilly, who was a kind of distant cousin of his, and they two between them concocted a story: Silvine was to pass as the actual widow of Honore, Prosper became her brother, so that the Bavarian colonel, who had his quarters in the Hotel of the Maltese Cross down in the lower part of the village, made no difficulty about granting a pass which authorized the brother and sister to bring home the body of the husband, provided they could find it. By this time it was night; the only concession that could be obtained from the young woman was that she would delay starting on her expedition until morning.

When morning came old Fouchard could not be prevailed on to allow one of his horses to be taken, fearing he might never set eyes on it again. What assurance had he that the Prussians would not confiscate the entire equipage? At last he consented, though with very bad grace, to loan her the donkey, a little gray animal, and his cart, which, though small, would be large enough to hold a dead man. He gave minute instructions to Prosper, who had had a good night's sleep, but was anxious and thoughtful at the prospect of the expedition now that, being rested and refreshed, he attempted to remember something of the battle. At the last moment Silvine went and took the counterpane from her own bed, folding and spreading it on the floor of the cart. Just as she was about to start she came running back to embrace Charlot.

"I entrust him to your care, Father Fouchard; keep an eye on him and see that he doesn't get hold of the matches."

"Yes, yes; never fear!"

They were late in getting off; it was near seven o'clock when the little procession, the donkey, hanging his head and drawing the narrow cart, leading, descended the steep hill of Remilly. It had rained heavily during the night, and the roads were become rivers of mud; great lowering clouds hung in the heavens, imparting an air of cheerless desolation to the scene.

Prosper, wishing to save all the distance he could, had determined on taking the route that lay through the city of Sedan, but before they reached Pont-Maugis a Prussian outpost halted the cart and held it for over an hour, and finally, after their pass had been referred, one after another, to four or five officials, they were told they might resume their journey, but only on condition of taking the longer, roundabout route by way of Bazeilles, to do which they would have to turn into a cross-road on their left. No reason was assigned; their object was probably to avoid adding to the crowd that encumbered the streets of the city. When Silvine crossed the Meuse by the railroad bridge, that ill-starred bridge that the French had failed to destroy and which, moreover, had been the cause of such slaughter among the Bavarians, she beheld the corpse of an artilleryman floating lazily down with the sluggish current. It caught among some rushes near the bank, hung there a moment, then swung clear and started afresh on its downward way.

Bazeilles, through which they passed from end to end at a slow walk, afforded a spectacle of ruin and desolation, the worst that war can perpetrate when it sweeps with devastating force, like a cyclone, through a land. The dead had been removed; there was not a single corpse to be seen in the village streets, and the rain had washed away the blood; pools of reddish water were to be seen here and there in the roadway, with repulsive, frowzy-looking debris, matted masses that one could not help associating in his mind with human hair. But what shocked and saddened one more than all the rest was the ruin that was visible everywhere; that charming village, only three days before so bright and smiling, with its pretty houses standing in their well-kept gardens, now razed, demolished, annihilated, nothing left of all its beauties save a few smoke-stained walls. The church was burning still, a huge pyre of smoldering beams and girders, whence streamed continually upward a column of dense black smoke that, spreading in the heavens, overshadowed the city like a gigantic funeral pall. Entire streets had been swept away, not a house left on either side, nor any trace that houses had ever been there, save the calcined stone-work lying in the gutter in a pasty mess of soot and ashes, the whole lost in the viscid, ink-black mud of the thoroughfare. Where streets intersected the corner houses were razed down to their foundations, as if they had been carried away bodily by the fiery blast that blew there. Others had suffered less; one in particular, owing to some chance, had escaped almost without injury, while its neighbors on either hand, literally torn to pieces by the iron hail, were like gaunt skeletons. An unbearable stench was everywhere, noticeable, the nauseating odor that follows a great fire, aggravated by the penetrating smell of petroleum, that had been used without stint upon floors and walls. Then, too, there was the pitiful, mute spectacle of the household goods that the people had endeavored to save, the poor furniture that had been thrown from windows and smashed upon the sidewalk, crazy tables with broken legs, presses with cloven sides and split doors, linen, also, torn and soiled, that was trodden under foot; all the sorry crumbs, the unconsidered trifles of the pillage, of which the destruction was being completed by the dissolving rain. Through the breach in a shattered house-front a clock was visible, securely fastened high up on the wall above the mantel-shelf, that had miraculously escaped intact.

"The beasts! the pigs!" growled Prosper, whose blood, though he was no longer a soldier, ran hot at the sight of such atrocities.

He doubled his fists, and Silvine, who was white as a ghost, had to exert the influence of her glance to calm him every time they encountered a sentry on their way. The Bavarians had posted sentinels near all the houses that were still burning, and it seemed as if those men, with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets, were guarding the fires in order that the flames might finish their work. They drove away the mere sightseers who strolled about in the vicinity, and the persons who had an interest there as well, employing first a menacing gesture, and in case that was not sufficient, uttering a single brief, guttural word of command. A young woman, her hair streaming about her shoulders, her gown plastered with mud, persisted in hanging about the smoking ruins of a little house, of which she desired to search the hot ashes, notwithstanding the prohibition of the sentry. The report ran that the woman's little baby had been burned with the house. And all at once, as the Bavarian was roughly thrusting her aside with his heavy hand, she turned on him, vomiting in his face all her despair and rage, lashing him with taunts and insults that were redolent of the gutter, with obscene words which likely afforded her some consolation in her grief and distress. He could not have understood her, for he drew back a pace or two, eying her with apprehension. Three comrades came running up and relieved him of the fury, whom they led away screaming at the top of her voice. Before the ruins of another house a man and two little girls, all three so weary and miserable that they could not stand, lay on the bare ground, sobbing as if their hearts would break; they had seen their little all go up in smoke and flame, and had no place to go, no place to lay their head. But just then a patrol went by, dispersing the knots of idlers, and the street again assumed its deserted aspect, peopled only by the stern, sullen sentries, vigilant to see that their iniquitous instructions were enforced.

"The beasts! the pigs!" Prosper repeated in a stifled voice. "How I should like, oh! how I should like to kill a few of them!"

Silvine again made him be silent. She shuddered. A dog, shut up in a carriage-house that the flames had spared and forgotten there for the last two days, kept up an incessant, continuous howling, in a key so inexpressibly mournful that a brooding horror seemed to pervade the low, leaden sky, from which a drizzling rain had now begun to fall. They were then just abreast of the park of Montivilliers, and there they witnessed a most horrible sight. Three great covered carts, those carts that pass along the streets in the early morning before it is light and collect the city's filth and garbage, stood there in a row, loaded with corpses; and now, instead of refuse, they were being filled with dead, stopping wherever there was a body to be loaded, then going on again with the heavy rumbling of their wheels to make another stop further on, threading Bazeilles in its every nook and corner until their hideous cargo overflowed. They were waiting now upon the public road to be driven to the place of their discharge, the neighboring potter's field. Feet were seen projecting from the mass into the air. A head, half-severed from its trunk, hung over the side of the vehicle. When the three lumbering vans started again, swaying and jolting over the inequalities of the road, a long, white hand was hanging outward from one of them; the hand caught upon the wheel, and little by little the iron tire destroyed it, eating through skin and flesh clean down to the bones.

By the time they reached Balan the rain had ceased, and Prosper prevailed on Silvine to eat a bit of the bread he had had the foresight to bring with them. When they were near Sedan, however, they were brought to a halt by another Prussian post, and this time the consequences threatened to be serious; the officer stormed at them, and even refused to restore their pass, which he declared, in excellent French, to be a forgery. Acting on his orders some soldiers had run the donkey and the little cart under a shed. What were they to do? were they to be forced to abandon their undertaking? Silvine was in despair, when all at once she thought of M. Dubreuil, Father Fouchard's relative, with whom she had some slight acquaintance and whose place, the Hermitage, was only a few hundred yards distant, on the summit of the eminence that overlooked the faubourg. Perhaps he might have some influence with the military, seeing that he was a citizen of the place. As they were allowed their freedom, conditionally upon abandoning their equipage, she left the donkey and cart under the shed and bade Prosper accompany her. They ascended the hill on a run, found the gate of the Hermitage standing wide open, and on turning into the avenue of secular elms beheld a spectacle that filled them with amazement.

"The devil!" said Prosper; "there are a lot of fellows who seem to be taking things easy!"

On the fine-crushed gravel of the terrace, at the bottom of the steps that led to the house, was a merry company. Arranged in order around a marble-topped table were a sofa and some easy-chairs in sky-blue satin, forming a sort of fantastic open-air drawing-room, which must have been thoroughly soaked by the rain of the preceding day. Two zouaves, seated in a lounging attitude at either end of the sofa, seemed to be laughing boisterously. A little infantryman, who occupied one of the fauteuils, his head bent forward, was apparently holding his sides to keep them from splitting. Three others were seated in a negligent pose, their elbows resting on the arms of their chairs, while a chasseur had his hand extended as if in the act of taking a glass from the table. They had evidently discovered the location of the cellar, and were enjoying themselves.

"But how in the world do they happen to be here?" murmured Prosper, whose stupefaction increased as he drew nearer to them. "Have the rascals forgotten there are Prussians about?"

But Silvine, whose eyes had dilated far beyond their natural size, suddenly uttered an exclamation of horror. The soldiers never moved hand or foot; they were stone dead. The two zouaves were stiff and cold; they both had had the face shot away, the nose was gone, the eyes were torn from their sockets. If there appeared to be a laugh on the face of him who was holding his sides, it was because a bullet had cut a great furrow through the lower portion of his countenance, smashing all his teeth. The spectacle was an unimaginably horrible one, those poor wretches laughing and conversing in their attitude of manikins, with glassy eyes and open mouths, when Death had laid his icy hand on them and they were never more to know the warmth and motion of life. Had they dragged themselves, still living, to that place, so as to die in one another's company? or was it not rather a ghastly prank of the Prussians, who had collected the bodies and placed them in a circle about the table, out of derision for the traditional gayety of the French nation?

"It's a queer start, though, all the same," muttered Prosper, whose face was very pale. And casting a look at the other dead who lay scattered about the avenue, under the trees and on the turf, some thirty brave fellows, among them Lieutenant Rochas, riddled with wounds and surrounded still by the shreds of the flag, he added seriously and with great respect: "There must have been some very pretty fighting about here! I don't much believe we shall find the bourgeois for whom you are looking."

Silvine entered the house, the doors and windows of which had been battered in and afforded admission to the damp, cold air from without. It was clear enough that there was no one there; the masters must have taken their departure before the battle. She continued to prosecute her search, however, and had entered the kitchen, when she gave utterance to another cry of terror. Beneath the sink were two bodies, fast locked in each other's arms in mortal embrace, one of them a zouave, a handsome, brown-bearded man, the other a huge Prussian with red hair. The teeth of the former were set in the latter's cheek, their arms, stiff in death, had not relaxed their terrible hug, binding the pair with such a bond of everlasting hate and fury that ultimately it was found necessary to bury them in a common grave.

Then Prosper made haste to lead Silvine away, since they could accomplish nothing in that house where Death had taken up his abode, and upon their return, despairing, to the post where the donkey and cart had been detained, it so chanced that they found, in company with the officer who had treated them so harshly, a general on his way to visit the battlefield. This gentleman requested to be allowed to see the pass, which he examined attentively and restored to Silvine; then, with an expression of compassion on his face, he gave directions that the poor woman should have her donkey returned to her and be allowed to go in quest of her husband's body. Stopping only long enough to thank her benefactor, she and her companion, with the cart trundling after them, set out for the Fond de Givonne, obedient to the instructions that were again given them not to pass through Sedan.

After that they bent their course to the left in order to reach the plateau of Illy by the road that crosses the wood of la Garenne, but here again they were delayed; twenty times they nearly abandoned all hope of getting through the wood, so numerous were the obstacles they encountered. At every step their way was barred by huge trees that had been laid low by the artillery fire, stretched on the ground like mighty giants fallen. It was the part of the forest that had suffered so severely from the cannonade, where the projectiles had plowed their way through the secular growths as they might have done through a square of the Old Guard, meeting in either case with the sturdy resistance of veterans. Everywhere the earth was cumbered with gigantic trunks, stripped of their leaves and branches, pierced and mangled, even as mortals might have been, and this wholesale destruction, the sight of the poor limbs, maimed, slaughtered and weeping tears of sap, inspired the beholder with the sickening horror of a human battlefield. There were corpses of men there, too; soldiers, who had stood fraternally by the trees and fallen with them. A lieutenant, from whose mouth exuded a bloody froth, had been tearing up the grass by handfuls in his agony, and his stiffened fingers were still buried in the ground. A little farther on a captain, prone on his stomach, had raised his head to vent his anguish in yells and screams, and death had caught and fixed him in that strange attitude. Others seemed to be slumbering among the herbage, while a zouave; whose blue sash had taken fire, had had his hair and beard burned completely from his head. And several times it happened, as they traversed those woodland glades, that they had to remove a body from the path before the donkey could proceed on his way. Presently they came to a little valley, where the sights of horror abruptly ended. The battle had evidently turned at this point and expended its force in another direction, leaving this peaceful nook of nature untouched. The trees were all uninjured; the carpet of velvety moss was undefiled by blood. A little brook coursed merrily among the duckweed, the path that ran along its bank was shaded by tall beeches. A penetrating charm, a tender peacefulness pervaded the solitude of the lovely spot, where the living waters gave up their coolness to the air and the leaves whispered softly in the silence.

Prosper had stopped to let the donkey drink from the stream.

"Ah, how pleasant it is here!" he involuntarily exclaimed in his delight.

Silvine cast an astonished look about her, as if wondering how it was that she, too, could feel the influence of the peaceful scene. Why should there be repose and happiness in that hidden nook, when surrounding it on every side were sorrow and affliction? She made a gesture of impatience.

"Quick, quick, let us be gone. Where is the spot? Where did you tell me you saw Honore?"

And when, at some fifty paces from there, they at last came out on the plateau of Illy, the level plain unrolled itself in its full extent before their vision. It was the real, the true battlefield that they beheld now, the bare fields stretching away to the horizon under the wan, cheerless sky, whence showers were streaming down continually. There were no piles of dead visible; all the Prussians must have been buried by this time, for there was not a single one to be seen among the corpses of the French that were scattered here and there, along the roads and in the fields, as the conflict had swayed in one direction or another. The first that they encountered was a sergeant, propped against a hedge, a superb man, in the bloom of his youthful vigor; his face was tranquil and a smile seemed to rest on his parted lips. A hundred paces further on, however, they beheld another, lying across the road, who had been mutilated most frightfully, his head almost entirely shot away, his shoulders covered with great splotches of brain matter. Then, as they advanced further into the field, after the single bodies, distributed here and there, they came across little groups; they saw seven men aligned in single rank, kneeling and with their muskets at the shoulder in the position of aim, who had been hit as they were about to fire, while close beside them a subaltern had also fallen as he was in the act of giving the word of command. After that the road led along the brink of a little ravine, and there they beheld a spectacle that aroused their horror to the highest pitch as they looked down into the chasm, into which an entire company seemed to have been blown by the fiery blast; it was choked with corpses, a landslide, an avalanche of maimed and mutilated men, bent and twisted in an inextricable tangle, who with convulsed fingers had caught at the yellow clay of the bank to save themselves in their descent, fruitlessly. And a dusky flock of ravens flew away, croaking noisily, and swarms of flies, thousands upon thousands of them, attracted by the odor of fresh blood, were buzzing over the bodies and returning incessantly.

"Where is the spot?" Silvine asked again.

They were then passing a plowed field that was completely covered with knapsacks. It was manifest that some regiment had been roughly handled there, and the men, in a moment of panic, had relieved themselves of their burdens. The debris of every sort with which the ground was thickly strewn served to explain the episodes of the conflict. There was a stubble field where the scattered kepis, resembling huge poppies, shreds of uniforms, epaulettes, and sword-belts told the story of one of those infrequent hand-to-hand contests in the fierce artillery duel that had lasted twelve hours. But the objects that were encountered most frequently, at every step, in fact, were abandoned weapons, sabers, bayonets, and, more particularly, chassepots; and so numerous were they that they seemed to have sprouted from the earth, a harvest that had matured in a single ill-omened day. Porringers and buckets, also, were scattered along the roads, together with the heterogeneous contents of knapsacks, rice, brushes, clothing, cartridges. The fields everywhere presented an uniform scene of devastation: fences destroyed, trees blighted as if they had been struck by lightning, the very soil itself torn by shells, compacted and hardened by the tramp of countless feet, and so maltreated that it seemed as if seasons must elapse before it could again become productive. Everything had been drenched and soaked by the rain of the preceding day; an odor arose and hung in the air persistently, that odor of the battlefield that smells like fermenting straw and burning cloth, a mixture of rottenness and gunpowder.

Silvine, who was beginning to weary of those fields of death over which she had tramped so many long miles, looked about her with increasing distrust and uneasiness.

"Where is the spot? where is it?"

But Prosper made no answer; he also was becoming uneasy. What distressed him even more than the sights of suffering among his fellow-soldiers was the dead horses, the poor brutes that lay outstretched upon their side, that were met with in great numbers. Many of them presented a most pitiful spectacle, in all sorts of harrowing attitudes, with heads torn from the body, with lacerated flanks from which the entrails protruded. Many were resting on their back, with their four feet elevated in the air like signals of distress. The entire extent of the broad plain was dotted with them. There were some that death had not released after their two days' agony; at the faintest sound they would raise their head, turning it eagerly from right to left, then let it fall again upon the ground, while others lay motionless and momentarily gave utterance to that shrill scream which one who has heard it can never forget, the lament of the dying horse, so piercingly mournful that earth and heaven seemed to shudder in unison with it. And Prosper, with a bleeding heart, thought of poor Zephyr, and told himself that perhaps he might see him once again.

Suddenly he became aware that the ground was trembling under the thundering hoof-beats of a headlong charge. He turned to look, and had barely time to shout to his companion:

"The horses, the horses! Get behind that wall!"

From the summit of a neighboring eminence a hundred riderless horses, some of them still bearing the saddle and master's kit, were plunging down upon them at break-neck speed. They were cavalry mounts that had lost their masters and remained on the battlefield, and instinct had counseled them to associate together in a band. They had had neither hay nor oats for two days, and had cropped the scanty grass from off the plain, shorn the hedge-rows of leaves and twigs, gnawed the bark from the trees, and when they felt the pangs of hunger pricking at their vitals like a keen spur, they started all together at a mad gallop and charged across the deserted, silent fields, crushing the dead out of all human shape, extinguishing the last spark of life in the wounded.

The band came on like a whirlwind; Silvine had only time to pull the donkey and cart to one side where they would be protected by the wall.

"Mon Dieu! we shall be killed!"

But the horses had taken the obstacle in their stride and were already scouring away in the distance on the other side with a rumble like that of a receding thunder-storm; striking into a sunken road they pursued it as far as the corner of a little wood, behind which they were lost to sight.

Silvine, when she had brought the cart back into the road, insisted that Prosper should answer her question before they proceeded further.

"Come, where is it? You told me you could find the spot with your eyes bandaged; where is it? We have reached the ground."

He, drawing himself up and anxiously scanning the horizon in every direction, seemed to become more and more perplexed.

"There were three trees, I must find those three trees in the first place. Ah, dame! see here, one's sight is not of the clearest when he is fighting, and it is no such easy matter to remember afterward the roads one has passed over!"

Then perceiving people to his left, two men and a woman, it occurred to him to question them, but the woman ran away at his approach and the men repulsed him with threatening gestures; and he saw others of the same stripe, clad in sordid rags, unspeakably filthy, with the ill-favored faces of thieves and murderers, and they all shunned him, slinking away among the corpses like jackals or other unclean, creeping beasts. Then he noticed that wherever these villainous gentry passed the dead behind them were shoeless, their bare, white feet exposed, devoid of covering, and he saw how it was: they were the tramps and thugs who followed the German armies for the sake of plundering the dead, the detestable crew who followed in the wake of the invasion in order that they might reap their harvest from the field of blood. A tall, lean fellow arose in front of him and scurried away on a run, a sack slung across his shoulder, the watches and small coins, proceeds of his robberies, jingling in his pockets.

A boy about fourteen or fifteen years old, however, allowed Prosper to approach him, and when the latter, seeing him to be French, rated him soundly, the boy spoke up in his defense. What, was it wrong for a poor fellow to earn his living? He was collecting chassepots, and received five sous for every chassepot he brought in. He had run away from his village that morning, having eaten nothing since the day before, and engaged himself to a contractor from Luxembourg, who had an arrangement with the Prussians by virtue of which he was to gather the muskets from the field of battle, the Germans fearing that should the scattered arms be collected by the peasants of the frontier, they might be conveyed into Belgium and thence find their way back to France. And so it was that there was quite a flock of poor devils hunting for muskets and earning their five sous, rummaging among the herbage, like the women who may be seen in the meadows, bent nearly double, gathering dandelions.

"It's a dirty business," Prosper growled.

"What would you have! A chap must eat," the boy replied. "I am not robbing anyone."

Then, as he did not belong to that neighborhood and could not give the information that Prosper wanted, he pointed out a little farmhouse not far away where he had seen some people stirring.

Prosper thanked him and was moving away to rejoin Silvine when he caught sight of a chassepot, partially buried in a furrow. His first thought was to say nothing of his discovery; then he turned about suddenly and shouted, as if he could not help it:

"Hallo! here's one; that will make five sous more for you."

As they approached the farmhouse Silvine noticed other peasants engaged with spades and picks in digging long trenches; but these men were under the direct command of Prussian officers, who, with nothing more formidable than a light walking-stick in their hands, stood by, stiff and silent, and superintended the work. They had requisitioned the inhabitants of all the villages of the vicinity in this manner, fearing that decomposition might be hastened, owing to the rainy weather. Two cart-loads of dead bodies were standing near, and a gang of men was unloading them, laying the corpses side by side in close contiguity to one another, not searching them, not even looking at their faces, while two men followed after, equipped with great shovels, and covered the row with a layer of earth, so thin that the ground had already begun to crack beneath the showers. The work was so badly and hastily done that before two weeks should have elapsed each of those fissures would be breathing forth pestilence. Silvine could not resist the impulse to pause at the brink of the trench and look at those pitiful corpses as they were brought forward, one after another. She was possessed by a horrible fear that in each fresh body the men brought from the cart she might recognize Honore. Was not that he, that poor wretch whose left eye had been destroyed? No! Perhaps that one with the fractured jaw was he? The one thing certain to her mind was that if she did not make haste to find him, wherever he might be on that boundless, indeterminate plateau, they would pick him up and bury him in a common grave with the others. She therefore hurried to rejoin Prosper, who had gone on to the farmhouse with the cart.

"Mon Dieu! how is it that you are not better informed? Where is the place? Ask the people, question them."

There were none but Prussians at the farm, however, together with a woman servant and her child, just come in from the woods, where they had been near perishing of thirst and hunger. The scene was one of patriarchal simplicity and well-earned repose after the fatigues of the last few days. Some of the soldiers had hung their uniforms from a clothes-line and were giving them a thorough brushing, another was putting a patch on his trousers, with great neatness and dexterity, while the cook of the detachment had built a great fire in the middle of the courtyard on which the soup was boiling in a huge pot from which ascended a most appetizing odor of cabbage and bacon. There is no denying that the Prussians generally displayed great moderation toward the inhabitants of the country after the conquest, which was made the easier to them by the spirit of discipline that prevailed among the troops. These men might have been taken for peaceable citizens just come in from their daily avocations, smoking their long pipes. On a bench beside the door sat a stout, red-bearded man, who had taken up the servant's child, a little urchin five or six years old, and was dandling it and talking baby-talk to it in German, delighted to see the little one laugh at the harsh syllables which it could not understand.

Prosper, fearing there might be more trouble in store for them, had turned his back on the soldiers immediately on entering, but those Prussians were really good fellows; they smiled at the little donkey, and did not even trouble themselves to ask for a sight of the pass.

Then ensued a wild, aimless scamper across the bosom of the great, sinister plain. The sun, now sinking rapidly toward the horizon, showed its face for a moment from between two clouds. Was night to descend and surprise them in the midst of that vast charnel-house? Another shower came down; the sun was obscured, the rain and mist formed an impenetrable barrier about them, so that the country around, roads, fields, trees, was shut out from their vision. Prosper knew not where they were; he was lost, and admitted it: his memory was all astray, he could recall nothing precise of the occurrences of that terrible day but one before. Behind them, his head lowered almost to the ground, the little donkey trotted along resignedly, dragging the cart, with his customary docility. First they took a northerly course, then they returned toward Sedan. They had lost their bearings and could not tell in which direction they were going; twice they noticed that they were passing localities that they had passed before and retraced their steps. They had doubtless been traveling in a circle, and there came a moment when in their exhaustion and despair they stopped at a place where three roads met, without courage to pursue their search further, the rain pelting down on them, lost and utterly miserable in the midst of a sea of mud.

But they heard the sound of groans, and hastening to a lonely little house on their left, found there, in one of the bedrooms, two wounded men. All the doors were standing open; the two unfortunates had succeeded in dragging themselves thus far and had thrown themselves on the beds, and for the two days that they had been alternately shivering and burning, their wounds having received no attention, they had seen no one, not a living soul. They were tortured by a consuming thirst, and the beating of the rain against the window-panes added to their torment, but they could not move hand or foot. Hence, when they heard Silvine approaching, the first word that escaped their lips was: "Drink! Give us to drink!" that longing, pathetic cry, with which the wounded always pursue the by-passer whenever the sound of footsteps arouses them from their lethargy. There were many cases similar to this, where men were overlooked in remote corners, whither they had fled for refuge. Some were picked up even five and six days later, when their sores were filled with maggots and their sufferings had rendered them delirious.

When Silvine had given the wretched men a drink Prosper, who, in the more sorely injured of the twain, had recognized a comrade of his regiment, a chasseur d'Afrique, saw that they could not be far from the ground over which Margueritte's division had charged, inasmuch as the poor devil had been able to drag himself to that house. All the information he could get from him, however, was of the vaguest; yes, it was over that way; you turned to the left, after passing a big field of potatoes.

Immediately she was in possession of this slender clue Silvine insisted on starting out again. An inferior officer of the medical department chanced to pass with a cart just then, collecting the dead; she hailed him and notified him of the presence of the wounded men, then, throwing the donkey's bridle across her arm, urged him along over the muddy road, eager to reach the designated spot, beyond the big potato field. When they had gone some distance she stopped, yielding to her despair.

"My God, where is the place! Where can it be?"

Prosper looked about him, taxing his recollection fruitlessly.

"I told you, it is close beside the place where we made our charge. If only I could find my poor Zephyr—"

And he cast a wistful look on the dead horses that lay around them. It had been his secret hope, his dearest wish, during the entire time they had been wandering over the plateau, to see his mount once more, to bid him a last farewell.

"It ought to be somewhere in this vicinity," he suddenly said. "See! over there to the left, there are the three trees. You see the wheel-tracks? And, look, over yonder is a broken-down caisson. We have found the spot; we are here at last!"

Quivering with emotion, Silvine darted forward and eagerly scanned the faces of two corpses, two artillerymen who had fallen by the roadside.

"He is not here! He is not here! You cannot have seen aright. Yes, that is it; some delusion must have cheated your eyes." And little by little an air-drawn hope, a wild delight crept into her mind. "If you were mistaken, if he should be alive! And be sure he is alive, since he is not here!"

Suddenly she gave utterance to a low, smothered cry. She had turned, and was standing on the very position that the battery had occupied. The scene was most frightful, the ground torn and fissured as by an earthquake and covered with wreckage of every description, the dead lying as they had fallen in every imaginable attitude of horror, arms bent and twisted, legs doubled under them, heads thrown back, the lips parted over the white teeth as if their last breath had been expended in shouting defiance to the foe. A corporal had died with his hands pressed convulsively to his eyes, unable longer to endure the dread spectacle. Some gold coins that a lieutenant carried in a belt about his body had been spilled at the same time as his life-blood, and lay scattered among his entrails. There were Adolphe, the driver, and the gunner, Louis, clasped in each other's arms in a fierce embrace, their sightless orbs starting from their sockets, mated even in death. And there, at last, was Honore, recumbent on his disabled gun as on a bed of honor, with the great rent in his side that had let out his young life, his face, unmutilated and beautiful in its stern anger, still turned defiantly toward the Prussian batteries.

"Oh! my friend," sobbed Silvine, "my friend, my friend—"

She had fallen to her knees on the damp, cold ground, her hands joined as if in prayer, in an outburst of frantic grief. The word friend, the only name by which it occurred to her to address him, told the story of the tender affection she had lost in that man, so good, so loving, who had forgiven her, had meant to make her his wife, despite the ugly past. And now all hope was dead within her bosom, there was nothing left to make life desirable. She had never loved another; she would put away her love for him at the bottom of her heart and hold it sacred there. The rain had ceased; a flock of crows that circled above the three trees, croaking dismally, affected her like a menace of evil. Was he to be taken from her again, her cherished dead, whom she had recovered with such difficulty? She dragged herself along upon her knees, and with a trembling hand brushed away the hungry flies that were buzzing about her friend's wide-open eyes.

She caught sight of a bit of blood-stained paper between Honore's stiffened fingers. It troubled her; she tried to gain possession of the paper, pulling at it gently, but the dead man would not surrender it, seemingly tightening his hold on it, guarding it so jealously that it could not have been taken from him without tearing it in bits. It was the letter she had written him, that he had always carried next his heart, and that he had taken from its hiding place in the moment of his supreme agony, as if to bid her a last farewell. It seemed so strange, was such a revelation, that he should have died thinking of her; when she saw what it was a profound delight filled her soul in the midst of her affliction. Yes, surely, she would leave it with him, the letter that was so dear to him! she would not take it from him, since he was so bent on carrying it with him to the grave. Her tears flowed afresh, but they were beneficent tears this time, and brought healing and comfort with them. She arose and kissed his hands, kissed him on the forehead, uttering meanwhile but that one word, which was in itself a prolonged caress:

"My friend! my friend—"

Meantime the sun was declining; Prosper had gone and taken the counterpane from the cart, and between them they raised Honore's body, slowly, reverently, and laid it on the bed-covering, which they had stretched upon the ground; then, first wrapping him in its folds, they bore him to the cart. It was threatening to rain again, and they had started on their return, forming, with the donkey, a sorrowful little cortege on the broad bosom of the accursed plain, when a deep rumbling as of thunder was heard in the distance. Prosper turned his head and had only time to shout:

"The horses! the horses!"

It was the starving, abandoned cavalry mounts making another charge. They came up this time in a deep mass across a wide, smooth field, manes and tails streaming in the wind, froth flying from their nostrils, and the level rays of the fiery setting sun sent the shadow of the infuriated herd clean across the plateau. Silvine rushed forward and planted herself before the cart, raising her arms above her head as if her puny form might have power to check them. Fortunately the ground fell off just at that point, causing them to swerve to the left; otherwise they would have crushed donkey, cart, and all to powder. The earth trembled, and their hoofs sent a volley of clods and small stones flying through the air, one of which struck the donkey on the head and wounded him. The last that was seen of them they were tearing down a ravine.

"It's hunger that starts them off like that," said Prosper. "Poor beasts!"

Silvine, having bandaged the donkey's ear with her handkerchief, took him again by the bridle, and the mournful little procession began to retrace its steps across the plateau, to cover the two leagues that lay between it and Remilly. Prosper had turned and cast a look on the dead horses, his heart heavy within him to leave the field without having seen Zephyr.

A little below the wood of la Garenne, as they were about to turn off to the left to take the road that they had traversed that morning, they encountered another German post and were again obliged to exhibit their pass. And the officer in command, instead of telling them to avoid Sedan, ordered them to keep straight on their course and pass through the city; otherwise they would be arrested. This was the most recent order; it was not for them to question it. Moreover, their journey would be shortened by a mile and a quarter, which they did not regret, weary and foot-sore as they were.

When they were within Sedan, however, they found their progress retarded owing to a singular cause. As soon as they had passed the fortifications their nostrils were saluted by such a stench, they were obliged to wade through such a mass of abominable filth, reaching almost to their knees, as fairly turned their stomachs. The city, where for three days a hundred thousand men had lived without the slightest provision being made for decency or cleanliness, had become a cesspool, a foul sewer, and this devil's broth was thickened by all sorts of solid matter, rotting hay and straw, stable litter, and the excreta of animals. The carcasses of the horses, too, that were knocked on the head, skinned, and cut up in the public squares, in full view of everyone, had their full share in contaminating the atmosphere; the entrails lay decaying in the hot sunshine, the bones and heads were left lying on the pavement, where they attracted swarms of flies. Pestilence would surely break out in the city unless they made haste to rid themselves of all that carrion, of that stratum of impurity, which, in the Rue de Minil, the Rue Maqua, and even on the Place Turenne, reached a depth of twelve inches. The Prussian authorities had taken the matter up, and their placards were to be seen posted about the city, requisitioning the inhabitants, irrespective of rank, laborers, merchants, bourgeois, magistrates, for the morrow; they were ordered to assemble, armed with brooms and shovels, and apply themselves to the task, and were warned that they would be subjected to heavy penalties if the city was not clean by night. The President of the Tribunal had taken time by the forelock, and might even then be seen scraping away at the pavement before his door and loading the results of his labors upon a wheelbarrow with a fire-shovel.

Silvine and Prosper, who had selected the Grande Rue as their route for traversing the city, advanced but slowly through that lake of malodorous slime. In addition to that the place was in a state of ferment and agitation that made it necessary for them to pull up almost at every moment. It was the time that the Prussians had selected for searching the houses in order to unearth those soldiers, who, determined that they would not give themselves up, had hidden themselves away. When, at about two o'clock of the preceding day, General de Wimpffen had returned from the chateau of Bellevue after signing the capitulation, the report immediately began to circulate that the surrendered troops were to be held under guard in the peninsula of Iges until such time as arrangements could be perfected for sending them off to Germany. Some few officers had expressed their intention of taking advantage of that stipulation which accorded them their liberty conditionally on their signing an agreement not to serve again during the campaign. Only one general, so it was said, Bourgain-Desfeuilles, alleging his rheumatism as a reason, had bound himself by that pledge, and when, that very morning, his carriage had driven up to the door of the Hotel of the Golden Cross and he had taken his seat in it to leave the city, the people had hooted and hissed him unmercifully. The operation of disarming had been going on since break of day; the manner of its performance was, the troops defiled by battalions on the Place Turenne, where each man deposited his musket and bayonet on the pile, like a mountain of old iron, which kept rising higher and higher, in a corner of the place. There was a Prussian detachment there under the command of a young officer, a tall, pale youth, wearing a sky-blue tunic and a cap adorned with a cock's feather, who superintended operations with a lofty but soldier-like air, his hands encased in white gloves. A zouave, in a fit of insubordination, having refused to give up his chassepot, the officer ordered that he be taken away, adding, in the same even tone of voice: "And let him be shot forthwith!" The rest of the battalion continued to defile with a sullen and dejected air, throwing down their arms mechanically, as if in haste to have the ceremony ended. But who could estimate the number of those who had disarmed themselves voluntarily, those whose muskets lay scattered over the country, out yonder on the field of battle? And how many, too, within the last twenty-four hours had concealed themselves, flattering themselves with the hope that they might escape in the confusion that reigned everywhere! There was scarcely a house but had its crew of those headstrong idiots who refused to respond when called on, hiding away in corners and shamming death; the German patrols that were sent through the city even discovered them stowed away under beds. And as many, even after they were unearthed, stubbornly persisted in remaining in the cellars whither they had fled for shelter, the patrols were obliged to fire on them through the coal-holes. It was a man-hunt, a brutal and cruel battue, during which the city resounded with rifle-shots and outlandish oaths.

At the Pont du Meuse they found a throng which the donkey was unable to penetrate and were brought to a stand-still. The officer commanding the guard at the bridge, suspecting they were endeavoring to carry on an illicit traffic in bread or meat, insisted on seeing with his own eyes what was contained in the cart; drawing aside the covering, he gazed for an instant on the corpse with a feeling expression, then motioned them to go their way. Still, however, they were unable to get forward, the crowd momentarily grew denser and denser; one of the first detachments of French prisoners was being conducted to the peninsula of Iges under escort of a Prussian guard. The sorry band streamed on in long array, the men in their tattered, dirty uniforms crowding one another, treading on one another's heels, with bowed heads and sidelong, hang-dog looks, the dejected gait and bearing of the vanquished to whom had been left not even so much as a knife with which to cut their throat. The harsh, curt orders of the guard urging them forward resounded like the cracking of a whip in the silence, which was unbroken save for the plashing of their coarse shoes through the semi-liquid mud. Another shower began to fall, and there could be no more sorrowful sight than that band of disheartened soldiers, shuffling along through the rain, like beggars and vagabonds on the public highway.

All at once Prosper, whose heart was beating as if it would burst his bosom with repressed sorrow and indignation, nudged Silvine and called her attention to two soldiers who were passing at the moment. He had recognized Maurice and Jean, trudging along with their companions, like brothers, side by side. They were near the end of the line, and as there was now no impediment in their way, he was enabled to keep them in view as far as the Faubourg of Torcy, as they traversed the level road which leads to Iges between gardens and truck farms.

"Ah!" murmured Silvine, distressed by what she had just seen, fixing her eyes on Honore's body, "it may be that the dead have the better part!"

Night descended while they were at Wadelincourt, and it was pitchy dark long before they reached Remilly. Father Fouchard was greatly surprised to behold the body of his son, for he had felt certain that it would never be recovered. He had been attending to business during the day, and had completed an excellent bargain; the market price for officers' chargers was twenty francs, and he had bought three for forty-five francs.

II.

The crush was so great as the column of prisoners was leaving Torcy that Maurice, who had stopped a moment to buy some tobacco, was parted from Jean, and with all his efforts was unable thereafter to catch up with his regiment through the dense masses of men that filled the road. When he at last reached the bridge that spans the canal which intersects the peninsula of Iges at its base, he found himself in a mixed company of chasseurs d'Afrique and troops of the infanterie de marine.

There were two pieces of artillery stationed at the bridge, their muzzles turned upon the interior of the peninsula; it was a place easy of access, but from which exit would seem to be attended with some difficulties. Immediately beyond the canal was a comfortable house, where the Prussians had established a post, commanded by a captain, upon which devolved the duty of receiving and guarding the prisoners. The formalities observed were not excessive; they merely counted the men, as if they had been sheep, as they came streaming in a huddle across the bridge, without troubling themselves overmuch about uniforms or organizations, after which the prisoners were free of the fields and at liberty to select their dwelling-place wherever chance and the road they were on might direct.

The first thing that Maurice did was to address a question to a Bavarian officer, who was seated astride upon a chair, enjoying a tranquil smoke.

"The 106th of the line, sir, can you tell me where I shall find it?"

Either the officer was unlike most German officers and did not understand French, or thought it a good joke to mystify a poor devil of a soldier. He smiled and raised his hand, indicating by his motion that the other was to keep following the road he was pursuing.

Although Maurice had spent a good part of his life in the neighborhood he had never before been on the peninsula; he proceeded to explore his new surroundings, as a mariner might do when cast by a tempest on the shore of a desolate island. He first skirted the Tour a Glaire, a very handsome country-place, whose small park, situated as it was on the bank of the Meuse, possessed a peculiarly attractive charm. After that the road ran parallel with the river, of which the sluggish current flowed on the right hand at the foot of high, steep banks. The way from there was a gradually ascending one, until it wound around the gentle eminence that occupied the central portion of the peninsula, and there were abandoned quarries there and excavations in the ground, in which a network of narrow paths had their termination. A little further on was a mill, seated on the border of the stream. Then the road curved and pursued a descending course until it entered the village of Iges, which was built on the hillside and connected by a ferry with the further shore, just opposite the rope-walk at Saint-Albert. Last of all came meadows and cultivated fields, a broad expanse of level, treeless country, around which the river swept in a wide, circling bend. In vain had Maurice scrutinized every inch of uneven ground on the hillside; all he could distinguish there was cavalry and artillery, preparing their quarters for the night. He made further inquiries, applying among others to a corporal of chasseurs d'Afrique, who could give him no information. The prospect for finding his regiment looked bad; night was coming down, and, leg-weary and disheartened, he seated himself for a moment on a stone by the wayside.

As he sat there, abandoning himself to the sensation of loneliness and despair that crept over him, he beheld before him, across the Meuse, the accursed fields where he had fought the day but one before. Bitter memories rose to his mind, in the fading light of that day of gloom and rain, as he surveyed the saturated, miry expanse of country that rose from the river's bank and was lost on the horizon. The defile of Saint-Albert, the narrow road by which the Prussians had gained their rear, ran along the bend of the stream as far as the white cliffs of the quarries of Montimont. The summits of the trees in the wood of la Falizette rose in rounded, fleecy masses over the rising ground of Seugnon. Directly before his eyes, a little to the left, was Saint-Menges, the road from which descended by a gentle slope and ended at the ferry; there, too, were the mamelon of Hattoy in the center, and Illy, in the far distance, in the background, and Fleigneux, almost hidden in its shallow vale, and Floing, less remote, on the right. He recognized the plateau where he had spent interminable hours among the cabbages, and the eminences that the reserve artillery had struggled so gallantly to hold, where he had seen Honore meet his death on his dismounted gun. And it was as if the baleful scene were again before him with all its abominations, steeping his mind in horror and disgust, until he was sick at heart.

The reflection that soon it would be quite dark and it would not do to loiter there, however, caused him to resume his researches. He said to himself that perhaps the regiment was encamped somewhere beyond the village on the low ground, but the only ones he encountered there were some prowlers, and he decided to make the circuit of the peninsula, following the bend of the stream. As he was passing through a field of potatoes he was sufficiently thoughtful to dig a few of the tubers and put them in his pockets; they were not ripe, but he had nothing better, for Jean, as luck would have it, had insisted on carrying both the two loaves of bread that Delaherche had given them when they left his house. He was somewhat surprised at the number of horses he met with, roaming about the uncultivated lands, that fell off in an easy descent from the central elevation to the Meuse, in the direction of Donchery. Why should they have brought all those animals with them? how were they to be fed? And now it was night in earnest, and quite dark, when he came to a small piece of woods on the water's brink, in which he was surprised to find the cent-gardes of the Emperor's escort, providing for their creature comforts and drying themselves before roaring fires. These gentlemen, who had a separate encampment to themselves, had comfortable tents; their kettles were boiling merrily, there was a milch cow tied to a tree. It did not take Maurice long to see that he was not regarded with favor in that quarter, poor devil of an infantryman that he was, with his ragged, mud-stained uniform. They graciously accorded him permission to roast his potatoes in the ashes of their fires, however, and he withdrew to the shelter of a tree, some hundred yards away, to eat them. It was no longer raining; the sky was clear, the stars were shining brilliantly in the dark blue vault. He saw that he should have to spend the night in the open air and defer his researches until the morrow. He was so utterly used up that he could go no further; the trees would afford him some protection in case it came on to rain again.

The strangeness of his situation, however, and the thought of his vast prison house, open to the winds of heaven, would not let him sleep. It had been an extremely clever move on the part of the Prussians to select that place of confinement for the eighty thousand men who constituted the remnant of the army of Chalons. The peninsula was approximately three miles long by one wide, affording abundant space for the broken fragments of the vanquished host, and Maurice could not fail to observe that it was surrounded on every side by water, the bend of the Meuse encircling it on the north, east and west, while on the south, at the base, connecting the two arms of the loop at the point where they drew together most closely, was the canal. Here alone was an outlet, the bridge, that was defended by two guns; wherefore it may be seen that the guarding of the camp was a comparatively easy task, notwithstanding its great extent. He had already taken note of the chain of sentries on the farther bank, a soldier being stationed by the waterside at every fifty paces, with orders to fire on any man who should attempt to escape by swimming. In the rear the different posts were connected by patrols of uhlans, while further in the distance, scattered over the broad fields, were the dark lines of the Prussian regiments; a threefold living, moving wall, immuring the captive army.

Maurice, in his sleeplessness, lay gazing with wide-open eyes into the blackness of the night, illuminated here and there by the smoldering watch-fires; the motionless forms of the sentinels were dimly visible beyond the pale ribbon of the Meuse. Erect they stood, duskier spots against the dusky shadows, beneath the faint light of the twinkling stars, and at regular intervals their guttural call came to his ears, a menacing watch-cry that was drowned in the hoarse murmur of the river in the distance. At sound of those unmelodious phrases in a foreign tongue, rising on the still air of a starlit night in the sunny land of France, the vision of the past again rose before him: all that he had beheld in memory an hour before, the plateau of Illy cumbered still with dead, the accursed country round about Sedan that had been the scene of such dire disaster; and resting on the ground in that cool, damp corner of a wood, his head pillowed on a root, he again yielded to the feeling of despair that had overwhelmed him the day before while lying on Delaherche's sofa. And that which, intensifying the suffering of his wounded pride, now harassed and tortured him, was the question of the morrow, the feverish longing to know how deep had been their fall, how great the wreck and ruin sustained by their world of yesterday. The Emperor had surrendered his sword to King William; was not, therefore, the abominable war ended? But he recalled the remark he had heard made by two of the Bavarians of the guard who had escorted the prisoners to Iges: "We're all in France, we're all bound for Paris!" In his semi-somnolent, dreamy state the vision of what was to be suddenly rose before his eyes: the empire overturned and swept away amid a howl of universal execration, the republic proclaimed with an outburst of patriotic fervor, while the legend of '92 would incite men to emulate the glorious past, and, flocking to the standards, drive from the country's soil the hated foreigner with armies of brave volunteers. He reflected confusedly upon all the aspects of the case, and speculations followed one another in swift succession through his poor wearied brain: the harsh terms imposed by the victors, the bitterness of defeat, the determination of the vanquished to resist even to the last drop of blood, the fate of those eighty thousand men, his companions, who were to be captives for weeks, months, years, perhaps, first on the peninsula and afterward in German fortresses. The foundations were giving way, and everything was going down, down to the bottomless depths of perdition.

The call of the sentinels, now loud, now low, seemed to sound more faintly in his ears and to be receding in the distance, when suddenly, as he turned on his hard couch, a shot rent the deep silence. A hollow groan rose on the calm air of night, there was a splashing in the water, the brief struggle of one who sinks to rise no more. It was some poor wretch who had attempted to escape by swimming the Meuse and had received a bullet in his brain.

The next morning Maurice was up and stirring with the sun. The sky was cloudless; he was desirous to rejoin Jean and his other comrades of the company with the least possible delay. For a moment he had an idea of going to see what there was in the interior of the peninsula, then resolved he would first complete its circuit. And on reaching the canal his eyes were greeted with the sight of the 106th—or rather what was left of it—a thousand men, encamped along the river bank among some waste lands, with no protection save a row of slender poplars. If he had only turned to the left the night before instead of pursuing a straight course he could have been with his regiment at once. And he noticed that almost all the line regiments were collected along that part of the bank that extends from the Tour a Glaire to the Chateau of Villette—another bourgeois country place, situated more in the direction of Donchery and surrounded by a few hovels—all of them having selected their bivouac near the bridge, sole issue from their prison, as sheep will instinctively huddle together close to the door of their fold, knowing that sooner or later it will be opened for them.

Jean uttered a cry of pleasure. "Ah, so it's you, at last! I had begun to think you were in the river."

He was there with what remained of the squad, Pache and Lapoulle, Loubet and Chouteau. The last named had slept under doorways in Sedan until the attention of the Prussian provost guard had finally restored them to their regiment. The corporal, moreover, was the only surviving officer of the company, death having taken away Sergeant Sapin, Lieutenant Rochas and Captain Beaudoin, and although the victors had abolished distinction of rank among the prisoners, deciding that obedience was due to the German officers alone, the four men had, nevertheless, rallied to him, knowing him to be a leader of prudence and experience, upon whom they could rely in circumstances of difficulty. Thus it was that peace and harmony reigned among them that morning, notwithstanding the stupidity of some and the evil designs of others. In the first place, the night before he had found them a place to sleep in that was comparatively dry, where they had stretched themselves on the ground, the only thing they had left in the way of protection from the weather being the half of a shelter-tent. After that he had managed to secure some wood and a kettle, in which Loubet made coffee for them, the comforting warmth of which had fortified their stomachs. The rain had ceased, the day gave promise of being bright and warm, they had a small supply of biscuit and bacon left, and then, as Chouteau said, it was a comfort to have no orders to obey, to have their fill of loafing. They were prisoners, it was true, but there was plenty of room to move about. Moreover, they would be away from there in two or three days. Under these circumstances the day, which was Sunday, the 4th, passed pleasantly enough.

Maurice, whose courage had returned to him now that he was with the comrades once more, found nothing to annoy him except the Prussian bands, which played all the afternoon beyond the canal. Toward evening there was vocal music, and the men sang in chorus. They could be seen outside the chain of sentries, walking to and fro in little groups and singing solemn melodies in a loud, ringing voice in honor of the Sabbath.

"Confound those bands!" Maurice at last impatiently exclaimed. "They will drive me wild!"

Jean, whose nerves were less susceptible, shrugged his shoulders.

"Dame! they have reason to feel good; and then perhaps they think it affords us pleasure. It hasn't been such a bad day; don't let's find fault."

As night approached, however, the rain began to fall again. Some of the men had taken possession of what few unoccupied houses there were on the peninsula, others were provided with tents that they erected, but by far the greater number, without shelter of any sort, destitute of blankets even, were compelled to pass the night in the open air, exposed to the pouring rain.

About one o'clock Maurice, who had been sleeping soundly as a result of his fatigue, awoke and found himself in the middle of a miniature lake. The trenches, swollen by the heavy downpour, had overflowed and inundated the ground where he lay. Chouteau's and Loubet's wrath vented itself in a volley of maledictions, while Pache shook Lapoulle, who, unmindful of his ducking, slept through it all as if he was never to wake again. Then Jean, remembering the row of poplars on the bank of the canal, collected his little band and ran thither for shelter; and there they passed the remainder of that wretched night, crouching with their backs to the trees, their legs doubled under them, so as to expose as little of their persons as might be to the big drops.

The next day, and the day succeeding it, the weather was truly detestable, what with the continual showers, that came down so copiously and at such frequent intervals that the men's clothing had not time to dry on their backs. They were threatened with famine, too; there was not a biscuit left in camp, and the coffee and bacon were exhausted. During those two days, Monday and Tuesday, they existed on potatoes that they dug in the adjacent fields, and even those vegetables had become so scarce toward the end of the second day that those soldiers who had money paid as high as five sous apiece for them. It was true that the bugles sounded the call for "distribution"; the corporal had nearly run his legs off trying to be the first to reach a great shed near the Tour a Glaire, where it was reported that rations of bread were to be issued, but on the occasion of a first visit he had waited there three hours and gone away empty-handed, and on a second had become involved in a quarrel with a Bavarian. It was well known that the French officers were themselves in deep distress and powerless to assist their men; had the German staff driven the vanquished army out there in the mud and rain with the intention of letting them starve to death? Not the first step seemed to have been taken, not an effort had been made, to provide for the subsistence of those eighty thousand men in that hell on earth that the soldiers subsequently christened Camp Misery, a name that the bravest of them could never hear mentioned in later days without a shudder.

On his return from his wearisome and fruitless expedition to the shed, Jean forgot his usual placidity and gave way to anger.

"What do they mean by calling us up when there's nothing for us? I'll be hanged if I'll put myself out for them another time!"

And yet, whenever there was a call, he hurried off again. It was inhuman to sound the bugles thus, merely because regulations prescribed certain calls at certain hours, and it had another effect that was near breaking Maurice's heart. Every time that the trumpets sounded the French horses, that were running free on the other side of the canal, came rushing up and dashed into the water to rejoin their squadron, as excited at the well-known sound as they would be at the touch of the spur; but in their exhausted condition they were swept away by the current and few attained the shore. It was a cruel sight to see their struggles; they were drowned in great numbers, and their bodies, decomposing and swelling in the hot sunshine, drifted on the bosom of the canal. As for those of them that got to land, they seemed as if stricken with sudden madness, galloping wildly off and hiding among the waste places of the peninsula.

"More bones for the crows to pick!" sorrowfully said Maurice, remembering the great droves of horses that he had encountered on a previous occasion. "If we remain here a few days we shall all be devouring one another. Poor brutes!"

The night between Tuesday and Wednesday was most terrible of all, and Jean, who was beginning to feel seriously alarmed for Maurice's feverish state, made him wrap himself in an old blanket that they had purchased from a zouave for ten francs, while he, with no protection save his water-soaked capote, cheerfully took the drenching of the deluge which that night pelted down without cessation. Their position under the poplars had become untenable; it was a streaming river of mud, the water rested in deep puddles on the surface of the saturated ground. What was worst of all was that they had to suffer on an empty stomach, the evening meal of the six men having consisted of two beets which they had been compelled to eat raw, having no dry wood to make a fire with, and the sweet taste and refreshing coolness of the vegetables had quickly been succeeded by an intolerable burning sensation. Some cases of dysentery had appeared among the men, caused by fatigue, improper food and the persistent humidity of the atmosphere. More than ten times that night did Jean stretch forth his hand to see that Maurice had not uncovered himself in the movements of his slumber, and thus he kept watch and ward over his friend—his back supported by the same tree-trunk, his legs in a pool of water—with tenderness unspeakable. Since the day that on the plateau of Illy his comrade had carried him off in his arms and saved him from the Prussians he had repaid the debt a hundred-fold. He stopped not to reason on it; it was the free gift of all his being, the total forgetfulness of self for love of the other, the finest, most delicate, grandest exhibition of friendship possible, and that, too, in a peasant, whose lot had always been the lowly one of a tiller of the soil and who had never risen far above the earth, who could not find words to express what he felt, acting purely from instinct, in all simplicity of soul. Many a time already he had taken the food from his mouth, as the men of the squad were wont to say; now he would have divested himself of his skin if with it he might have covered the other, to protect his shoulders, to warm his feet. And in the midst of the savage egoism that surrounded them, among that aggregation of suffering humanity whose worst appetites were inflamed and intensified by hunger, he perhaps owed it to his complete abnegation of self that he had preserved thus far his tranquillity of mind and his vigorous health, for he among them all, his great strength unimpaired, alone maintained his composure and something like a level head.

After that distressful night Jean determined to carry into execution a plan that he had been reflecting over since the day previous.

"See here, little one, we can get nothing to eat, and everyone seems to have forgotten us here in this beastly hole; now unless we want to die the death of dogs, it behooves us to stir about a bit. How are your legs?"

The sun had come out again, fortunately, and Maurice was warmed and comforted.

"Oh, my legs are all right!"

"Then we'll start off on an exploring expedition. We've money in our pockets, and the deuce is in it if we can't find something to buy. And we won't bother our heads about the others; they don't deserve it. Let them take care of themselves."

The truth was that Loubet and Chouteau had disgusted him by their trickiness and low selfishness, stealing whatever they could lay hands on and never dividing with their comrades, while no good was to be got out of Lapoulle, the brute, and Pache, the sniveling devotee.

The pair, therefore, Maurice and Jean, started out by the road along the Meuse which the former had traversed once before, on the night of his arrival. At the Tour a Glaire the park and dwelling-house presented a sorrowful spectacle of pillage and devastation, the trim lawns cut up and destroyed, the trees felled, the mansion dismantled. A ragged, dirty crew of soldiers, with hollow cheeks and eyes preternaturally bright from fever, had taken possession of the place and were living like beasts in the filthy chambers, not daring to leave their quarters for a moment lest someone else might come along and occupy them. A little further on they passed the cavalry and artillery, encamped on the hillsides, once so conspicuous by reason of the neatness and jauntiness of their appearance, now run to seed like all the rest, their organization gone, demoralized by that terrible, torturing hunger that drove the horses wild and sent the men straggling through the fields in plundering bands. Below them, to the right, they beheld an apparently interminable line of artillerymen and chasseurs d'Afrique defiling slowly before the mill; the miller was selling them flour, measuring out two handfuls into their handkerchiefs for a franc. The prospect of the long wait that lay before them, should they take their place at the end of the line, determined them to pass on, in the hope that some better opportunity would present itself at the village of Iges; but great was their consternation when they reached it to find the little place as bare and empty as an Algerian village through which has passed a swarm of locusts; not a crumb, not a fragment of anything eatable, neither bread, nor meat, nor vegetables, the wretched inhabitants utterly destitute. General Lebrun was said to be there, closeted with the mayor. He had been endeavoring, ineffectually, to arrange for an issue of bonds, redeemable at the close of the war, in order to facilitate the victualing of the troops. Money had ceased to have any value when there was nothing that it could purchase. The day before two francs had been paid for a biscuit, seven francs for a bottle of wine, a small glass of brandy was twenty sous, a pipeful of tobacco ten sous. And now officers, sword in hand, had to stand guard before the general's house and the neighboring hovels, for bands of marauders were constantly passing, breaking down doors and stealing even the oil from the lamps and drinking it.

Three zouaves invited Maurice and Jean to join them. Five would do the work more effectually than three.

"Come along. There are horses dying in plenty, and if we can but get some dry wood—"

Then they fell to work on the miserable cabin of a poor peasant, smashing the closet doors, tearing the thatch from the roof. Some officers, who came up on a run, threatened them with their revolvers and put them to flight.

Jean, who saw that the few villagers who had remained at Iges were no better off than the soldiers, perceived he had made a mistake in passing the mill without buying some flour.

"There may be some left; we had best go back."

But Maurice was so reduced from inanition and was beginning to suffer so from fatigue that he left him behind in a sheltered nook among the quarries, seated on a fragment of rock, his face turned upon the wide horizon of Sedan. He, after waiting in line for two long hours, finally returned with some flour wrapped in a piece of rag. And they ate it uncooked, dipping it up in their hands, unable to devise any other way. It was not so very bad; It had no particular flavor, only the insipid taste of dough. Their breakfast, such as it was, did them some good, however. They were even so fortunate as to discover a little pool of rain-water, comparatively pure, in a hollow of a rock, at which they quenched their thirst with great satisfaction.

But when Jean proposed that they should spend the remainder of the afternoon there, Maurice negatived the motion with a great display of violence.

"No, no; not here! I should be ill if I were to have that scene before my eyes for any length of time—" With a hand that trembled he pointed to the remote horizon, the hill of Hattoy, the plateaux of Floing and Illy, the wood of la Garenne, those abhorred, detested fields of slaughter and defeat. "While you were away just now I was obliged to turn my back on it, else I should have broken out and howled with rage. Yes, I should have howled like a dog tormented by boys—you can't imagine how it hurts me; it drives me crazy!"

Jean looked at him in surprise; he could not understand that pride, sensitive as a raw sore, that made defeat so bitter to him; he was alarmed to behold in his eyes that wandering, flighty look that he had seen there before. He affected to treat the matter lightly.

"Good! we'll seek another country; that's easy enough to do."

Then they wandered as long as daylight lasted, wherever the paths they took conducted them. They visited the level portion of the peninsula in the hope of finding more potatoes there, but the artillerymen had obtained a plow and turned up the ground, and not a single potato had escaped their sharp eyes. They retraced their steps, and again they passed through throngs of listless, glassy-eyed, starving soldiers, strewing the ground with their debilitated forms, falling by hundreds in the bright sunshine from sheer exhaustion. They were themselves many times overcome by fatigue and forced to sit down and rest; then their deep-seated sensation of suffering would bring them to their feet again and they would recommence their wandering, like animals impelled by instinct to move on perpetually in quest of pasturage. It seemed to them to last for years, and yet the moments sped by rapidly. In the more inland region, over Donchery way, they received a fright from the horses and sought the protection of a wall, where they remained a long time, too exhausted to rise, watching with vague, lack-luster eyes the wild course of the crazed beasts as they raced athwart the red western sky where the sun was sinking.

As Maurice had foreseen, the thousands of horses that shared the captivity of the army, and for which it was impossible to provide forage, constituted a peril that grew greater day by day. At first they had nibbled the vegetation and gnawed the bark off trees, then had attacked the fences and whatever wooden structures they came across, and now they seemed ready to devour one another. It was a frequent occurrence to see one of them throw himself upon another and tear out great tufts from his mane or tail, which he would grind between his teeth, slavering meanwhile at the mouth profusely. But it was at night that they became most terrible, as if they were visited by visions of terror in the darkness. They collected in droves, and, attracted by the straw, made furious rushes upon what few tents there were, overturning and demolishing them. It was to no purpose that the men built great fires to keep them away; the device only served to madden them the more. Their shrill cries were so full of anguish, so dreadful to the ear, that they might have been mistaken for the howls of wild beasts. Were they driven away, they returned, more numerous and fiercer than before. Scarce a moment passed but out in the darkness could be heard the shriek of anguish of some unfortunate soldier whom the crazed beasts had crushed in their wild stampede.

The sun was still above the horizon when Jean and Maurice, on their way back to the camp, were astonished by meeting with the four men of the squad, lurking in a ditch, apparently for no good purpose. Loubet hailed them at once, and Chouteau constituted himself spokesman:

"We are considering ways and means for dining this evening. We shall die if we go on this way; it is thirty-six hours since we have had anything to put in our stomach—so, as there are horses plenty, and horse-meat isn't such bad eating—"

"You'll join us, won't you, corporal?" said Loubet, interrupting, "for, with such a big, strong animal to handle, the more of us there are the better it will be. See, there is one, off yonder, that we've been keeping an eye on for the last hour; that big bay that is in such a bad way. He'll be all the easier to finish."

And he pointed to a horse that was dying of starvation, on the edge of what had once been a field of beets. He had fallen on his flank, and every now and then would raise his head and look about him pleadingly, with a deep inhalation that sounded like a sigh.

"Ah, how long we have to wait!" grumbled Lapoulle, who was suffering torment from his fierce appetite. "I'll go and kill him—shall I?"

But Loubet stopped him. Much obliged! and have the Prussians down on them, who had given notice that death would be the penalty for killing a horse, fearing that the carcass would breed a pestilence. They must wait until it was dark. And that was the reason why the four men were lurking in the ditch, waiting, with glistening, hungry eyes fixed on the dying brute.

"Corporal," asked Pache, in a voice that faltered a little, "you have lots of ideas in your head; couldn't you kill him painlessly?"

Jean refused the cruel task with a gesture of disgust. What, kill that poor beast that was even then in its death agony! oh, no, no! His first impulse had been to fly and take Maurice with him, that neither of them might be concerned in the revolting butchery; but looking at his companion and beholding him so pale and faint, he reproached himself for such an excess of sensibility. What were animals created for after all, mon Dieu, unless to afford sustenance to man! They could not allow themselves to starve when there was food within reach. And it rejoiced him to see Maurice cheer up a little at the prospect of eating; he said in his easy, good-natured way:

"Faith, you're wrong there; I've no ideas in my head, and if he has got to be killed without pain—"

"Oh! that's all one to me," interrupted Lapoulle. "I'll show you."

The two newcomers seated themselves in the ditch and joined the others in their expectancy. Now and again one of the men would rise and make certain that the horse was still there, its neck outstretched to catch the cool exhalations of the Meuse and the last rays of the setting sun, as if bidding farewell to life. And when at last twilight crept slowly o'er the scene the six men were erect upon their feet, impatient that night was so tardy in its coming, casting furtive, frightened looks about them to see they were not observed.

"Ah, zut!" exclaimed Chouteau, "the time is come!"

Objects were still discernible in the fields by the uncertain, mysterious light "between dog and wolf," and Lapoulle went forward first, followed by the five others. He had taken from the ditch a large, rounded boulder, and, with it in his two brawny hands, rushing upon the horse, commenced to batter at his skull as with a club. At the second blow, however, the horse, stung by the pain, attempted to get on his feet. Chouteau and Loubet had thrown themselves across his legs and were endeavoring to hold him down, shouting to the others to help them. The poor brute's cries were almost human in their accent of terror and distress; he struggled desperately to shake off his assailants, and would have broken them like a reed had he not been half dead with inanition. The movements of his head prevented the blows from taking effect; Lapoulle was unable to despatch him.

"Nom de Dieu! how hard his bones are! Hold him, somebody, until I finish him."

Jean and Maurice stood looking at the scene in silent horror; they heard not Chouteau's appeals for assistance; were powerless to raise a hand. And Pache, in a sudden outburst of piety and pity, dropped on his knees, joined his hands, and began to mumble the prayers that are repeated at the bedside of the dying.

"Merciful God, have pity on him. Let him, good Lord, depart in peace—"

Again Lapoulle struck ineffectually, with no other effect than to destroy an ear of the wretched creature, that threw back its head and gave utterance to a loud, shrill scream.

"Hold on!" growled Chouteau; "this won't do; he'll get us all in the lockup. We must end the matter. Hold him fast, Loubet."

He took from his pocket a penknife, a small affair of which the blade was scarcely longer than a man's finger, and casting himself prone on the animal's body and passing an arm about its neck, began to hack away at the live flesh, cutting away great morsels, until he found and severed the artery. He leaped quickly to one side; the blood spurted forth in a torrent, as when the plug is removed from a fountain, while the feet stirred feebly and convulsive movements ran along the skin, succeeding one another like waves of the sea. It was near five minutes before the horse was dead. His great eyes, dilated wide and filled with melancholy and affright, were fixed upon the wan-visaged men who stood waiting for him to die; then they grew dim and the light died from out them.

"Merciful God," muttered Pache, still on his knees, "keep him in thy holy protection—succor him, Lord, and grant him eternal rest."

Afterward, when the creature's movements had ceased, they were at a loss to know where the best cut lay and how they were to get at it. Loubet, who was something of a Jack-of-all-trades, showed them what was to be done in order to secure the loin, but as he was a tyro at the butchering business and, moreover, had only his small penknife to work with, he quickly lost his way amid the warm, quivering flesh. And Lapoulle, in his impatience, having attempted to be of assistance by making an incision in the belly, for which there was no necessity whatever, the scene of bloodshed became truly sickening. They wallowed in the gore and entrails that covered the ground about them, like a pack of ravening wolves collected around the carcass of their prey, fleshing their keen fangs in it.

"I don't know what cut that may be," Loubet said at last, rising to his feet with a huge lump of meat in his hands, "but by the time we've eaten it, I don't believe any of us will be hungry."

Jean and Maurice had averted their eyes in horror from the disgusting spectacle; still, however, the pangs of hunger were gnawing at their vitals, and when the band slunk rapidly away, so as not to be caught in the vicinity of the incriminating carcass, they followed it. Chouteau had discovered three large beets, that had somehow been overlooked by previous visitors to the field, and carried them off with him. Loubet had loaded the meat on Lapoulle's shoulders so as to have his own arms free, while Pache carried the kettle that belonged to the squad, which they had brought with them on the chance of finding something to cook in it. And the six men ran as if their lives were at stake, never stopping to take breath, as if they heard the pursuers at their heels.

Suddenly Loubet brought the others to a halt.

"It's idiotic to run like this; let's decide where we shall go to cook the stuff."

Jean, who was beginning to recover his self-possession, proposed the quarries. They were only three hundred yards distant, and in them were secret recesses in abundance where they could kindle a fire without being seen. When they reached the spot, however, difficulties of every description presented themselves. First, there was the question of wood; fortunately a laborer, who had been repairing the road, had gone home and left his wheelbarrow behind him; Lapoulle quickly reduced it to fragments with the heel of his boot. Then there was no water to be had that was fit to drink; the hot sunshine had dried up all the pools of rain-water. True there was a pump at the Tour a Glaire, but that was too far away, and besides it was never accessible before midnight; the men forming in long lines with their bowls and porringers, only too happy when, after waiting for hours, they could escape from the jam with their supply of the precious fluid unspilled. As for the few wells in the neighborhood, they had been dry for the last two days, and the bucket brought up nothing save mud and slime. Their sole resource appeared to be the water of the Meuse, which was parted from them by the road.

"I'll take the kettle and go and fill it," said Jean.

The others objected.

"No, no! We don't want to be poisoned; it is full of dead bodies!"

They spoke the truth. The Meuse was constantly bringing down corpses of men and horses; they could be seen floating with the current at any moment of the day, swollen and of a greenish hue, in the early stages of decomposition. Often they were caught in the weeds and bushes on the bank, where they remained to poison the atmosphere, swinging to the tide with a gentle, tremulous motion that imparted to them a semblance of life. Nearly every soldier who had drunk that abominable water had suffered from nausea and colic, often succeeded afterward by dysentery. It seemed as if they must make up their mind to use it, however, as there was no other; Maurice explained that there would be no danger in drinking it after it was boiled.

"Very well, then; I'll go," said Jean. And he started, taking Lapoulle with him to carry the kettle.

By the time they got the kettle filled and on the fire it was quite dark. Loubet had peeled the beets and thrown them into the water to cook—a feast fit for the gods, he declared it would be—and fed the fire with fragments of the wheelbarrow, for they were all suffering so from hunger that they could have eaten the meat before the pot began to boil. Their huge shadows danced fantastically in the firelight on the rocky walls of the quarry. Then they found it impossible longer to restrain their appetite, and threw themselves upon the unclean mess, tearing the flesh with eager, trembling fingers and dividing it among them, too impatient even to make use of the knife. But, famishing as they were, their stomachs revolted; they felt the want of salt, they could not swallow that tasteless, sickening broth, those chunks of half-cooked, viscid meat that had a taste like clay. Some among them had a fit of vomiting. Pache was very ill. Chouteau and Loubet heaped maledictions on that infernal old nag, that had caused them such trouble to get him to the pot and then given them the colic. Lapoulle was the only one among them who ate abundantly, but he was in a very bad way that night when, with his three comrades, he returned to their resting-place under the poplars by the canal.

On their way back to camp Maurice, without uttering a word, took advantage of the darkness to seize Jean by the arm and drag him into a by-path. Their comrades inspired him with unconquerable disgust; he thought he should like to go and sleep in the little wood where he had spent his first night on the peninsula. It was a good idea, and Jean commended it highly when he had laid himself down on the warm, dry ground, under the shelter of the dense foliage. They remained there until the sun was high in the heavens, and enjoyed a sound, refreshing slumber, which restored to them something of their strength.

The following day was Thursday, but they had ceased to note the days; they were simply glad to observe that the weather seemed to be coming off fine again. Jean overcame Maurice's repugnance and prevailed on him to return to the canal, to see if their regiment was not to move that day. Not a day passed now but detachments of prisoners, a thousand to twelve hundred strong, were sent off to the fortresses in Germany. The day but one before they had seen, drawn up in front of the Prussian headquarters, a column of officers of various grades, who were going to Pont-a-Mousson, there to take the railway. Everyone was possessed with a wild, feverish longing to get away from that camp where they had seen such suffering. Ah! if it but might be their turn! And when they found the 106th still encamped on the bank of the canal, in the inevitable disorder consequent upon such distress, their courage failed them and they despaired.

Jean and Maurice that day thought they saw a prospect of obtaining something to eat. All the morning a lively traffic had been going on between the prisoners and the Bavarians on the other side of the canal; the former would wrap their money in a handkerchief and toss it across to the opposite shore, the latter would return the handkerchief with a loaf of coarse brown bread, or a plug of their common, damp tobacco. Even soldiers who had no money were not debarred from participating in this commerce, employing, instead of currency, their white uniform gloves, for which the Germans appeared to have a weakness. For two hours packages were flying across the canal in its entire length under this primitive system of exchanges. But when Maurice dispatched his cravat with a five-franc piece tied in it to the other bank, the Bavarian who was to return him a loaf of bread gave it, whether from awkwardness or malice, such an ineffectual toss that it fell in the water. The incident elicited shouts of laughter from the Germans. Twice again Maurice repeated the experiment, and twice his loaf went to feed the fishes. At last the Prussian officers, attracted by the uproar, came running up and prohibited their men from selling anything to the prisoners, threatening them with dire penalties and punishments in case of disobedience. The traffic came to a sudden end, and Jean had hard work to pacify Maurice, who shook his fists at the scamps, shouting to them to give him back his five-franc pieces.

This was another terrible day, notwithstanding the warm, bright sunshine. Twice the bugle sounded and sent Jean hurrying off to the shed whence rations were supposed to be issued, but on each occasion he only got his toes trod on and his ribs racked in the crush. The Prussians, whose organization was so wonderfully complete, continued to manifest the same brutal inattention to the necessities of the vanquished army. On the representations of Generals Douay and Lebrun, they had indeed sent in a few sheep as well as some wagon-loads of bread, but so little care was taken to guard them that the sheep were carried off bodily and the wagons pillaged as soon as they reached the bridge, the consequence of which was that the troops who were encamped a hundred yards further on were no better off than before; it was only the worst element, the plunderers and bummers, who benefited by the provision trains. And thereon Jean, who, as he said, saw how the trick was done, brought Maurice with him to the bridge to keep an eye on the victuals.

It was four o'clock, and they had not had a morsel to eat all that beautiful bright Thursday, when suddenly their eyes were gladdened by the sight of Delaherche. A few among the citizens of Sedan had with infinite difficulty obtained permission to visit the prisoners, to whom they carried provisions, and Maurice had on several occasions expressed his surprise at his failure to receive any tidings of his sister. As soon as they recognized Delaherche in the distance, carrying a large basket and with a loaf of bread under either arm, they darted forward fast as their legs could carry them, but even thus they were too late; a crowding, jostling mob closed in, and in the confusion the dazed manufacturer was relieved of his basket and one of his loaves, which vanished from his sight so expeditiously that he was never able to tell the manner of their disappearance.

"Ah, my poor friends!" he stammered, utterly crestfallen in his bewilderment and stupefaction, he who but a moment before had come through the gate with a smile on his lips and an air of good-fellowship, magnanimously forgetting his superior advantages in his desire for popularity.

Jean had taken possession of the remaining loaf and saved it from the hungry crew, and while he and Maurice, seated by the roadside, were making great inroads in it, Delaherche opened his budget of news for their benefit. His wife, the Lord be praised! was very well, but he was greatly alarmed for the colonel, who had sunk into a condition of deep prostration, although his mother continued to bear him company from morning until night.

"And my sister?" Maurice inquired.

"Ah, yes! your sister; true. She insisted on coming with me; it was she who brought the two loaves of bread. She had to remain over yonder, though, on the other side of the canal; the sentries wouldn't let her pass the gate. You know the Prussians have strictly prohibited the presence of women in the peninsula."

Then he spoke of Henriette, and of her fruitless attempts to see her brother and come to his assistance. Once in Sedan chance had brought her face to face with Cousin Gunther, the man who was captain in the Prussian Guards. He had passed her with his haughty, supercilious air, pretending not to recognize her. She, also, with a sensation of loathing, as if she were in the presence of one of her husband's murderers, had hurried on with quickened steps; then, with a sudden change of purpose for which she could not account, had turned back and told him all the manner of Weiss's death, in harsh accents of reproach. And he, thus learning how horribly a relative had met his fate, had taken the matter coolly; it was the fortune of war; the same thing might have happened to himself. His face, rendered stoically impassive by the discipline of the soldier, had barely betrayed the faintest evidence of interest. After that, when she informed him that her brother was a prisoner and besought him to use his influence to obtain for her an opportunity of seeing him, he had excused himself on the ground that he was powerless in the matter; the instructions were explicit and might not be disobeyed. He appeared to place the regimental orderly book on a par with the Bible. She left him with the clearly defined impression that he believed he was in the country for the sole purpose of sitting in judgment on the French people, with all the intolerance and arrogance of the hereditary enemy, swollen by his personal hatred for the nation whom it had devolved on him to chastise.

"And now," said Delaherche in conclusion, "you won't have to go to bed supperless to-night; you have had a little something to eat. The worst is that I am afraid I shall not be able to secure another pass."

He asked them if there was anything he could do for them outside, and obligingly consented to take charge of some pencil-written letters confided to him by other soldiers, for the Bavarians had more than once been seen to laugh as they lighted their pipes with missives which they had promised to forward. Then, when Jean and Maurice had accompanied him to the gate, he exclaimed:

"Look! over yonder, there's Henriette! Don't you see her waving her handkerchief?"

True enough, among the crowd beyond the line of sentinels they distinguished a little, thin, pale face, a white dot that trembled in the sunshine. Both were deeply affected, and, with moist eyes, raising their hands above their head, answered her salutation by waving them frantically in the air.

The following day was Friday, and it was then that Maurice felt that his cup of horror was full to overflowing. After another night of tranquil slumber in the little wood he was so fortunate as to secure another meal, Jean having come across an old woman at the Chateau of Villette who was selling bread at ten francs the pound. But that day they witnessed a spectacle of which the horror remained imprinted on their minds for many weeks and months.

The day before Chouteau had noticed that Pache had ceased complaining and was going about with a careless, satisfied air, as a man might do who had dined well. He immediately jumped at the conclusion that the sly fox must have a concealed treasure somewhere, the more so that he had seen him absent himself for near an hour that morning and come back with a smile lurking on his face and his mouth filled with unswallowed food. It must be that he had had a windfall, had probably joined some marauding party and laid in a stock of provisions. And Chouteau labored with Loubet and Lapoulle to stir up bad feeling against the comrade, with the latter more particularly. Hein! wasn't he a dirty dog, if he had something to eat, not to go snacks with the comrades! He ought to have a lesson that he would remember, for his selfishness.

"To-night we'll keep a watch on him, don't you see. We'll learn whether he dares to stuff himself on the sly, when so many poor devils are starving all around him."

"Yes, yes, that's the talk! we'll follow him," Lapoulle angrily declared. "We'll see about it!"

He doubled his fists; he was like a crazy man whenever the subject of eating was mentioned in his presence. His enormous appetite caused him to suffer more than the others; his torment at times was such that he had been known to stuff his mouth with grass. For more than thirty-six hours, since the night when they had supped on horseflesh and he had contracted a terrible dysentery in consequence, he had been without food, for he was so little able to look out for himself that, notwithstanding his bovine strength, whenever he joined the others in a marauding raid he never got his share of the booty. He would have been willing to give his blood for a pound of bread.

As it was beginning to be dark Pache stealthily made his way to the Tour a Glaire and slipped into the park, while the three others cautiously followed him at a distance.

"It won't do to let him suspect anything," said Chouteau. "Be on your guard in case he should look around."

But when he had advanced another hundred paces Pache evidently had no idea there was anyone near, for he began to hurry forward at a swift gait, not so much as casting a look behind. They had no difficulty in tracking him to the adjacent quarries, where they fell on him as he was in the act of removing two great flat stones, to take from the cavity beneath part of a loaf of bread. It was the last of his store; he had enough left for one more meal.

"You dirty, sniveling priest's whelp!" roared Lapoulle, "so that is why you sneak away from us! Give me that; it's my share!"

Why should he give his bread? Weak and puny as he was, his slight form dilated with anger, while he clutched the loaf against his bosom with all the strength he could master. For he also was hungry.

"Let me alone. It's mine."

Then, at sight of Lapoulle's raised fist, he broke away and ran, sliding down the steep banks of the quarries, making his way across the bare fields in the direction of Donchery, the three others after him in hot pursuit. He gained on them, however, being lighter than they, and possessed by such overmastering fear, so determined to hold on to what was his property, that his speed seemed to rival the wind. He had already covered more than half a mile and was approaching the little wood on the margin of the stream when he encountered Jean and Maurice, who were on their way back to their resting-place for the night. He addressed them an appealing, distressful cry as he passed; while they, astounded by the wild hunt that went fleeting by, stood motionless at the edge of a field, and thus it was that they beheld the ensuing tragedy.

As luck would have it, Pache tripped over a stone and fell. In an instant the others were on top of him—shouting, swearing, their passion roused to such a pitch of frenzy that they were like wolves that had run down their prey.

"Give me that," yelled Lapoulle, "or by G-d I'll kill you!"

And he had raised his fist again when Chouteau, taking from his pocket the penknife with which he had slaughtered the horse and opening it, placed it in his hand.

"Here, take it! the knife!"

But Jean meantime had come hurrying up, desirous to prevent the mischief he saw brewing, losing his wits like the rest of them, indiscreetly speaking of putting them all in the guardhouse; whereon Loubet, with an ugly laugh, told him he must be a Prussian, since they had no longer any commanders, and the Prussians were the only ones who issued orders.

"Nom de Dieu!" Lapoulle repeated, "will you give me that?"

Despite the terror that blanched his cheeks Pache hugged the bread more closely to his bosom, with the obstinacy of the peasant who never cedes a jot or tittle of that which is his.

"No!"

Then in a second all was over; the brute drove the knife into the other's throat with such violence that the wretched man did not even utter a cry. His arms relaxed, the bread fell to the ground, into the pool of blood that had spurted from the wound.

At sight of the imbecile, uncalled-for murder, Maurice, who had until then been a silent spectator of the scene, appeared as if stricken by a sudden fit of madness. He raved and gesticulated, shaking his fist in the face of the three men and calling them murderers, assassins, with a violence that shook his frame from head to foot. But Lapoulle seemed not even to hear him. Squatted on the ground beside the corpse, he was devouring the bloodstained bread, an expression of stupid ferocity on his face, with a loud grinding of his great jaws, while Chouteau and Loubet, seeing him thus terrible in the gratification of his wild-beast appetite, did not even dare claim their portion.

By this time night had fallen, a pleasant night with a clear sky thick-set with stars, and Maurice and Jean, who had regained the shelter of their little wood, presently perceived Lapoulle wandering up and down the river bank. The two others had vanished, had doubtless returned to the encampment by the canal, their mind troubled by reason of the corpse they left behind them. He, on the other hand, seemed to dread going to rejoin the comrades. When he was more himself and his brutish, sluggish intellect showed him the full extent of his crime, he had evidently experienced a twinge of anguish that made motion a necessity, and not daring to return to the interior of the peninsula, where he would have to face the body of his victim, had sought the bank of the stream, where he was now tramping to and fro with uneven, faltering steps. What was going on within the recesses of that darkened mind that guided the actions of that creature, so degraded as to be scarce higher than the animal? Was it the awakening of remorse? or only the fear lest his crime might be discovered? He could not remain there; he paced his beat as a wild beast shambles up and down its cage, with a sudden and ever-increasing longing to fly, a longing that ached and pained like a physical hurt, from which he felt he should die, could he do nothing to satisfy it. Quick, quick, he must fly, must fly at once, from that prison where he had slain a fellow-being. And yet, the coward in him, it may be, gaining the supremacy, he threw himself on the ground, and for a long time lay crouched among the herbage.

And Maurice said to Jean in his horror and disgust:

"See here, I cannot remain longer in this place; I tell you plainly I should go mad. I am surprised that the physical part of me holds out as it does; my bodily health is not so bad, but the mind is going; yes! it is going, I am certain of it. If you leave me another day in this hell I am lost. I beg you, let us go away, let us start at once!"

And he went on to propound the wildest schemes for getting away. They would swim the Meuse, would cast themselves on the sentries and strangle them with a cord he had in his pocket, or would beat out their brains with rocks, or would buy them over with the money they had left and don their uniform to pass through the Prussian lines.

"My dear boy, be silent!" Jean sadly answered; "it frightens me to hear you talk so wildly. Is there any reason in what you say, are any of your plans feasible? Wait; to-morrow we'll see about it. Be silent!"

He, although his heart, no less than his friend's, was wrung by the horrors that surrounded them on every side, had preserved his mental balance amid the debilitating effects of famine, among the grisly visions of that existence than which none could approach more nearly the depth of human misery. And as his companion's frenzy continued to increase and he talked of casting himself into the Meuse, he was obliged to restrain him, even to the point of using violence, scolding and supplicating, tears standing in his eyes. Then suddenly he said:

"See! look there!"

A splash was heard coming from the river, and they saw it was Lapoulle, who had finally decided to attempt to escape by the stream, first removing his capote in order that it might not hinder his movements; and his white shirt made a spot of brightness that was distinctly visible upon the dusky bosom of the moving water. He was swimming up-stream with a leisurely movement, doubtless on the lookout for a place where he might land with safety, while on the opposite shore there was no difficulty in discerning the shadowy forms of the sentries, erect and motionless in the semi-obscurity. There came a sudden flash that tore the black veil of night, a report that went with bellowing echoes and spent itself among the rocks of Montimont. The water boiled and bubbled for an instant, as it does under the wild efforts of an unpracticed oarsman. And that was all; Lapoulle's body, the white spot on the dusky stream, floated away, lifeless, upon the tide.

The next day, which was Saturday, Jean aroused Maurice as soon as it was day and they returned to the camp of the 106th, with the hope that they might move that day, but there were no orders; it seemed as though the regiment's existence were forgotten. Many of the troops had been sent away, the peninsula was being depopulated, and sickness was terribly prevalent among those who were left behind. For eight long days disease had been germinating in that hell on earth; the rains had ceased, but the blazing, scorching sunlight had only wrought a change of evils. The excessive heat completed the exhaustion of the men and gave to the numerous cases of dysentery an alarmingly epidemic character. The excreta of that army of sick poisoned the air with their noxious emanations. No one could approach the Meuse or the canal, owing to the overpowering stench that rose from the bodies of drowned soldiers and horses that lay festering among the weeds. And the horses, that dropped in the fields from inanition, were decomposing so rapidly and forming such a fruitful source of pestilence that the Prussians, commencing to be alarmed on their own account, had provided picks and shovels and forced the prisoners to bury them.

That day, however, was the last on which they suffered from famine. As their numbers were so greatly reduced and provisions kept pouring in from every quarter, they passed at a single bound from the extreme of destitution to the most abundant plenty. Bread, meat, and wine, even, were to be had without stint; eating went on from morning till night, until they were ready to drop. Darkness descended, and they were eating still; in some quarters the gorging was continued until the next morning. To many it proved fatal.

That whole day Jean made it his sole business to keep watch over Maurice, who he saw was ripe for some rash action. He had been drinking; he spoke of his intention of cuffing a Prussian officer in order that he might be sent away. And at night Jean, having discovered an unoccupied corner in the cellar of one of the outbuildings at the Tour a Glaire, thought it advisable to go and sleep there with his companion, thinking that a good night's rest would do him good, but it turned out to be the worst night in all their experience, a night of terror during which neither of them closed an eye. The cellar was inhabited by other soldiers; lying in the same corner were two who were dying of dysentery, and as soon as it was fairly dark they commenced to relieve their sufferings by moans and inarticulate cries, a hideous death-rattle that went on uninterruptedly until morning. These sounds finally became so horrific there in the intense darkness, that the others who were resting there, wishing to sleep, allowed their anger to get the better of them and shouted to the dying men to be silent. They did not hear; the rattle went on, drowning all other sounds, while from without came the drunken clamor of those who were eating and drinking still, with insatiable appetite.

Then commenced for Maurice a period of agony unspeakable. He would have fled from the awful sounds that brought the cold sweat of anguish in great drops to his brow, but when he arose and attempted to grope his way out he trod on the limbs of those extended there, and finally fell to the ground, a living man immured there in the darkness with the dying. He made no further effort to escape from this last trial. The entire frightful disaster arose before his mind, from the time of their departure from Rheims to the crushing defeat of Sedan. It seemed to him that in that night, in the inky blackness of that cellar, where the groans of two dying soldiers drove sleep from the eyelids of their comrades, the ordeal of the army of Chalons had reached its climax. At each of the stations of its passion the army of despair, the expiatory band, driven forward to the sacrifice, had spent its life-blood in atonement for the faults of others; and now, unhonored amid disaster, covered with contumely, it was enduring martyrdom in that cruel scourging, the severity of which it had done nothing to deserve. He felt it was too much; he was heartsick with rage and grief, hungering for justice, burning with a fierce desire to be avenged on destiny.

When daylight appeared one of the soldiers was dead, the other was lingering on in protracted agony.

"Come along, little one," Jean gently said; "we'll go and get a breath of fresh air; it will do us good."

But when the pair emerged into the pure, warm morning air and, pursuing the river bank, were near the village of Iges, Maurice grew flightier still, and extending his hand toward the vast expanse of sunlit battlefield, the plateau of Illy in front of them, Saint-Menges to the left, the wood of la Garenne to the right, he cried:

"No, I cannot, I cannot bear to look on it! The sight pierces my heart and drives me mad. Take me away, oh! take me away, at once, at once!"

It was Sunday once more; the bells were pealing from the steeples of Sedan, while the music of a German military band floated on the air in the distance. There were still no orders for their regiment to move, and Jean, alarmed to see Maurice's deliriousness increasing, determined to attempt the execution of a plan that he had been maturing in his mind for the last twenty-four hours. On the road before the tents of the Prussians another regiment, the 5th of the line, was drawn up in readiness for departure. Great confusion prevailed in the column, and an officer, whose knowledge of the French language was imperfect, had been unable to complete the roster of the prisoners. Then the two friends, having first torn from their uniform coat the collar and buttons in order that the number might not betray their identity, quietly took their place in the ranks and soon had the satisfaction of crossing the bridge and leaving the chain of sentries behind them. The same idea must have presented itself to Loubet and Chouteau, for they caught sight of them somewhat further to the rear, peering anxiously about them with the guilty eyes of murderers.

Ah, what comfort there was for them in that first blissful moment! Outside their prison the sunlight was brighter, the air more bracing; it was like a resurrection, a bright renewal of all their hopes. Whatever evil fortune might have in store for them, they dreaded it not; they snapped their fingers at it in their delight at having seen the last of the horrors of Camp Misery.

III.

That morning Maurice and Jean listened for the last time to the gay, ringing notes of the French bugles, and now they were on their way to Pont-a-Mousson, marching in the ranks of the convoy of prisoners, which was guarded front and rear by platoons of Prussian infantry, while a file of men with fixed bayonets flanked the column on either side. Whenever they came to a German post they heard only the lugubrious, ear-piercing strains of the Prussian trumpets.

Maurice was glad to observe that the column took the left-hand road and would pass through Sedan; perhaps he would have an opportunity of seeing his sister Henriette. All the pleasure, however, that he had experienced at his release from that foul cesspool where he had spent nine days of agony was dashed to the ground and destroyed during the three-mile march from the peninsula of Iges to the city. It was but another form of his old distress to behold that array of prisoners, shuffling timorously through the dust of the road, like a flock of sheep with the dog at their heels. There is no spectacle in all the world more pitiful than that of a column of vanquished troops being marched off into captivity under guard of their conquerors, without arms, their empty hands hanging idly at their sides; and these men, clad in rags and tatters, besmeared with the filth in which they had lain for more than a week, gaunt and wasted after their long fast, were more like vagabonds than soldiers; they resembled loathsome, horribly dirty tramps, whom the gendarmes would have picked up along the highways and consigned to the lockup. As they passed through the Faubourg of Torcy, where men paused on the sidewalks and women came to their doors to regard them with mournful, compassionate interest, the blush of shame rose to Maurice's cheek, he hung his head and a bitter taste came to his mouth.

Jean, whose epidermis was thicker and mind more practical, thought only of their stupidity in not having brought off with them a loaf of bread apiece. In the hurry of their abrupt departure they had even gone off without breakfasting, and hunger soon made its presence felt by the nerveless sensation in their legs. Others among the prisoners appeared to be in the same boat, for they held out money, begging the people of the place to sell them something to eat. There was one, an extremely tall man, apparently very ill, who displayed a gold piece, extending it above the heads of the soldiers of the escort; and he was almost frantic that he could purchase nothing. Just at that time Jean, who had been keeping his eyes open, perceived a bakery a short distance ahead, before which were piled a dozen loaves of bread; he immediately got his money ready and, as the column passed, tossed the baker a five-franc piece and endeavored to secure two of the loaves; then, when the Prussian who was marching at his side pushed him back roughly into the ranks, he protested, demanding that he be allowed to recover his money from the baker. But at that juncture the captain commanding the detachment, a short, bald-headed man with a brutal expression of face, came hastening up; he raised his revolver over Jean's head as if about to strike him with the butt, declaring with an oath that he would brain the first man that dared to lift a finger. And the rest of the captives continued to shamble on, stirring up the dust of the road with their shuffling feet, with eyes averted and shoulders bowed, cowed and abjectly submissive as a drove of cattle.

"Oh! how good it would seem to slap the fellow's face just once!" murmured Maurice, as if he meant it. "How I should like to let him have just one from the shoulder, and drive his teeth down his dirty throat!"

And during the remainder of their march he could not endure to look on that captain, with his ugly, supercilious face.

They had entered Sedan and were crossing the Pont de Meuse, and the scenes of violence and brutality became more numerous than ever. A woman darted forward and would have embraced a boyish young sergeant—likely she was his mother—and was repulsed with a blow from a musket-butt that felled her to the ground. On the Place Turenne the guards hustled and maltreated some citizens because they cast provisions to the prisoners. In the Grande Rue one of the convoy fell in endeavoring to secure a bottle that a lady extended to him, and was assisted to his feet with kicks. For a week now Sedan had witnessed the saddening spectacle of the defeated driven like cattle through its streets, and seemed no more accustomed to it than at the beginning; each time a fresh detachment passed the city was stirred to its very depths by a movement of pity and indignation.

Jean had recovered his equanimity; his thoughts, like Maurice's, reverted to Henriette, and the idea occurred to him that they might see Delaherche somewhere among the throng. He gave his friend a nudge of the elbow.

"Keep your eyes open if we pass through their street presently, will you?"

They had scarce more than struck into the Rue Maqua, indeed, when they became aware of several pairs of eyes turned on the column from one of the tall windows of the factory, and as they drew nearer recognized Delaherche and his wife Gilberte, their elbows resting on the railing of the balcony, and behind them the tall, rigid form of old Madame Delaherche. They had a supply of bread with them, and the manufacturer was tossing the loaves down into the hands that were upstretched with tremulous eagerness to receive them. Maurice saw at once that his sister was not there, while Jean anxiously watched the flying loaves, fearing there might none be left for them. They both had raised their arms and were waving them frantically above their head, shouting meanwhile with all the force of their lungs:

"Here we are! This way, this way!"

The Delaherches seemed delighted to see them in the midst of their surprise. Their faces, pallid with emotion, suddenly brightened, and they displayed by the warmth of their gestures the pleasure they experienced in the encounter. There was one solitary loaf left, which Gilberte insisted on throwing with her own hands, and pitched it into Jean's extended arms in such a charmingly awkward way that she gave a winsome laugh at her own expense. Maurice, unable to stop on account of the pressure from the rear, turned his head and shouted, in a tone of anxious inquiry:

"And Henriette? Henriette?"

Delaherche replied with a long farrago, but his voice was inaudible in the shuffling tramp of so many feet. He seemed to understand that the young man had failed to catch his meaning, for he gesticulated like a semaphore; there was one gesture in particular that he repeated several times, extending his arm with a sweeping motion toward the south, apparently intending to convey the idea of some point in the remote distance: Off there, away off there. Already the head of the column was wheeling into the Rue du Minil, the facade of the factory was lost to sight, together with the kindly faces of the three Delaherches; the last the two friends saw of them was the fluttering of the white handkerchief with which Gilberte waved them a farewell.

"What did he say?" asked Jean.

Maurice, in a fever of anxiety, was still looking to the rear where there was nothing to be seen. "I don't know; I could not understand him; I shall have no peace of mind until I hear from her."

And the trailing, shambling line crept slowly onward, the Prussians urging on the weary men with the brutality of conquerors; the column left the city by the Minil gate in straggling, long-drawn array, hastening their steps, like sheep at whose heels the dogs are snapping.

When they passed through Bazeilles Jean and Maurice thought of Weiss, and cast their eyes about in an effort to distinguish the site of the little house that had been defended with such bravery. While they were at Camp Misery they had heard the woeful tale of slaughter and conflagration that had blotted the pretty village from existence, and the abominations that they now beheld exceeded all they had dreamed of or imagined. At the expiration of twelve days the ruins were smoking still; the tottering walls had fallen in, there were not ten houses standing. It afforded them some small comfort, however, to meet a procession of carts and wheelbarrows loaded with Bavarian helmets and muskets that had been collected after the conflict. That evidence of the chastisement that had been inflicted on those murderers and incendiaries went far toward mitigating the affliction of defeat.

The column was to halt at Douzy to give the men an opportunity to eat breakfast. It was not without much suffering that they reached that place; already the prisoners' strength was giving out, exhausted as they were by their ten days of fasting. Those who the day before had availed of the abundant supplies to gorge themselves were seized with vertigo, their enfeebled legs refused to support their weight, and their gluttony, far from restoring their lost strength, was a further source of weakness to them. The consequence was that, when the train was halted in a meadow to the left of the village, these poor creatures flung themselves upon the ground with no desire to eat. Wine was wanting; some charitable women who came, bringing a few bottles, were driven off by the sentries. One of them in her affright fell and sprained her ankle, and there ensued a painful scene of tears and hysterics, during which the Prussians confiscated the bottles and drank their contents amid jeers and insulting laughter. This tender compassion of the peasants for the poor soldiers who were being led away into captivity was manifested constantly along the route, while it was said the harshness they displayed toward the generals amounted almost to cruelty. At that same Douzy, only a few days previously, the villagers had hooted and reviled a number of paroled officers who were on their way to Pont-a-Mousson. The roads were not safe for general officers; men wearing the blouse—escaped soldiers, or deserters, it may be—fell on them with pitch-forks and endeavored to take their life as traitors, credulously pinning their faith to that legend of bargain and sale which, even twenty years later, was to continue to shed its opprobrium upon those leaders who had commanded armies in that campaign.

Maurice and Jean ate half their bread, and were so fortunate as to have a mouthful of brandy with which to wash it down, thanks to the kindness of a worthy old farmer. When the order was given to resume their advance, however, the distress throughout the convoy was extreme. They were to halt for the night at Mouzon, and although the march was a short one, it seemed as if it would tax the men's strength more severely than they could bear; they could not get on their feet without giving utterance to cries of pain, so stiff did their tired legs become the moment they stopped to rest. Many removed their shoes to relieve their galled and bleeding feet. Dysentery continued to rage; a man fell before they had gone half a mile, and they had to prop him against a wall and leave him. A little further on two others sank at the foot of a hedge, and it was night before an old woman came along and picked them up. All were stumbling, tottering, and dragging themselves along, supporting their forms with canes, which the Prussians, perhaps in derision, had suffered them to cut at the margin of a wood. They were a straggling array of tramps and beggars, covered with sores, haggard, emaciated, and footsore; a sight to bring tears to the eyes of the most stony-hearted. And the guards continued to be as brutally strict as ever; those who for any purpose attempted to leave the ranks were driven back with blows, and the platoon that brought up the rear had orders to prod with their bayonets those who hung back. A sergeant having refused to go further, the captain summoned two of his men and instructed them to seize him, one by either arm, and in this manner the wretched man was dragged over the ground until he agreed to walk. And what made the whole thing more bitter and harder to endure was the utter insignificance of that little pimply-faced, bald-headed officer, so insufferably consequential in his brutality, who took advantage of his knowledge of French to vituperate the prisoners in it in curt, incisive words that cut and stung like the lash of a whip.

"Oh!" Maurice furiously exclaimed, "to get the puppy in my hands and drain him of his blood, drop by drop!"

His powers of endurance were almost exhausted, but it was his rage that he had to choke down, even more than his fatigue, that was cause of his suffering. Everything exasperated him and set on edge his tingling nerves; the harsh notes of the Prussian trumpets particularly, which inspired him with a desire to scream each time he heard them. He felt he should never reach the end of their cruel journey without some outbreak that would bring down on him the utmost severity of the guard. Even now, when traversing the smallest hamlets, he suffered horribly and felt as if he should die with shame to behold the eyes of the women fixed pityingly on him; what would it be when they should enter Germany, and the populace of the great cities should crowd the streets to laugh and jeer at them as they passed? And he pictured to himself the cattle cars into which they would be crowded for transportation, the discomforts and humiliations they would have to suffer on the journey, the dismal life in German fortresses under the leaden, wintry sky. No, no; he would have none of it; better to take the risk of leaving his bones by the roadside on French soil than go and rot off yonder, for months and months, perhaps, in the dark depths of a casemate.

"Listen," he said below his breath to Jean, who was walking at his side; "we will wait until we come to a wood; then we'll break through the guards and run for it among the trees. The Belgian frontier is not far away; we shall have no trouble in finding someone to guide us to it."

Jean, accustomed as he was to look at things coolly and calculate chances, put his veto on the mad scheme, although he, too, in his revolt, was beginning to meditate the possibilities of an escape.

"Have you taken leave of your senses! the guard will fire on us, and we shall both be killed."

But Maurice replied there was a chance the soldiers might not hit them, and then, after all, if their aim should prove true, it would not matter so very much.

"Very well!" rejoined Jean, "but what is going to become of us afterward, dressed in uniform as we are? You know perfectly well that the country is swarming in every direction with Prussian troops; we could not go far unless we had other clothes to put on. No, no, my lad, it's too risky; I'll not let you attempt such an insane project."

And he took the young man's arm and held it pressed against his side, as if they were mutually sustaining each other, continuing meanwhile to chide and soothe him in a tone that was at once rough and affectionate.

Just then the sound of a whispered conversation close behind them caused them to turn and look around. It was Chouteau and Loubet, who had left the peninsula of Iges that morning at the same time as they, and whom they had managed to steer clear of until the present moment. Now the two worthies were close at their heels, and Chouteau must have overheard Maurice's words, his plan for escaping through the mazes of a forest, for he had adopted it on his own behalf. His breath was hot upon their neck as he murmured:

"Say, comrades, count us in on that. That's a capital idea of yours, to skip the ranch. Some of the boys have gone already, and sure we're not going to be such fools as to let those bloody pigs drag us away like dogs into their infernal country. What do you say, eh? Shall we four make a break for liberty?"

Maurice's excitement was rising to fever-heat again; Jean turned and said to the tempter:

"If you are so anxious to get away, why don't you go? there's nothing to prevent you. What are you up to, any way?"

He flinched a little before the corporal's direct glance, and allowed the true motive of his proposal to escape him.

"Dame! it would be better that four should share the undertaking. One or two of us might have a chance of getting off."

Then Jean, with an emphatic shake of the head, refused to have anything whatever to do with the matter; he distrusted the gentleman, he said, as he was afraid he would play them some of his dirty tricks. He had to exert all his authority with Maurice to retain him on his side, for at that very moment an opportunity presented itself for attempting the enterprise; they were passing the border of a small but very dense wood, separated from the road only by the width of a field that was covered by a thick growth of underbrush. Why should they not dash across that field and vanish in the thicket? was there not safety for them in that direction?

Loubet had so far said nothing. His mind was made up, however, that he was not going to Germany to run to seed in one of their dungeons, and his nose, mobile as a hound's, was sniffing the atmosphere, his shifty eyes were watching for the favorable moment. He would trust to his legs and his mother wit, which had always helped him out of his scrapes thus far. His decision was quickly made.

"Ah, zut! I've had enough of it; I'm off!"

He broke through the line of the escort, and with a single bound was in the field, Chouteau following his example and running at his side. Two of the Prussian soldiers immediately started in pursuit, but the others seemed dazed, and it did not occur to them to send a ball after the fugitives. The entire episode was so soon over that it was not easy to note its different phases. Loubet dodged and doubled among the bushes and it appeared as if he would certainly succeed in getting off, while Chouteau, less nimble, was on the point of being captured, but the latter, summoning up all his energies in a supreme burst of speed, caught up with his comrade and dexterously tripped him; and while the two Prussians were lumbering up to secure the fallen man, the other darted into the wood and vanished. The guard, finally remembering that they had muskets, fired a few ineffectual shots, and there was some attempt made to search the thicket, which resulted in nothing.

Meantime the two soldiers were pummeling poor Loubet, who had not regained his feet. The captain came running up, beside himself with anger, and talked of making an example, and with this encouragement kicks and cuffs and blows from musket-butts continued to rain down upon the wretched man with such fury that when at last they stood him on his feet he was found to have an arm broken and his skull fractured. A peasant came along, driving a cart, in which he was placed, but he died before reaching Mouzon.

"You see," was all that Jean said to Maurice.

The two friends cast a look in the direction of the wood that sufficiently expressed their sentiments toward the scoundrel who had gained his freedom by such base means, while their hearts were stirred with feelings of deepest compassion for the poor devil whom he had made his victim, a guzzler and a toper, who certainly did not amount to much, but a merry, good-natured fellow all the same, and nobody's fool. And that was always the way with those who kept bad company, Jean moralizingly observed: they might be very fly, but sooner or later a bigger rascal was sure to come along and make a meal of them.

Notwithstanding this terrible lesson Maurice, upon reaching Mouzon, was still possessed by his unalterable determination to attempt an escape. The prisoners were in such an exhausted condition when they reached the place that the Prussians had to assist them to set up the few tents that were placed at their disposal. The camp was formed near the town, on low and marshy ground, and the worst of the business was that another convoy having occupied the spot the day before, the field was absolutely invisible under the superincumbent filth; it was no better than a common cesspool, of unimaginable foulness. The sole means the men had of self-protection was to scatter over the ground some large flat stones, of which they were so fortunate as to find a number in the vicinity. By way of compensation they had a somewhat less hard time of it that evening; the strictness of their guardians was relaxed a little once the captain had disappeared, doubtless to seek the comforts of an inn. The sentries began by winking at the irregularity of the proceeding when some children came along and commenced to toss fruit, apples and pears, over their heads to the prisoners; the next thing was they allowed the people of the neighborhood to enter the lines, so that in a short time the camp was swarming with impromptu merchants, men and women, offering for sale bread, wine, cigars, even. Those who had money had no trouble in supplying their needs so far as eating, drinking, and smoking were concerned. A bustling animation prevailed in the dim twilight; it was like a corner of the market place in a town where a fair is being held.

But Maurice drew Jean behind their tent and again said to him in his nervous, flighty way:

"I can't stand it; I shall make an effort to get away as soon as it is dark. To-morrow our course will take us away from the frontier; it will be too late."

"Very well, we'll try it," Jean replied, his powers of resistance exhausted, his imagination, too, seduced by the pleasing idea of freedom. "They can't do more than kill us."

After that he began to scrutinize more narrowly the venders who surrounded him on every side. There were some among the comrades who had succeeded in supplying themselves with blouse and trousers, and it was reported that some of the charitable people of the place had regular stocks of garments on hand, designed to assist prisoners in escaping. And almost immediately his attention was attracted to a pretty girl, a tall blonde of sixteen with a pair of magnificent eyes, who had on her arm a basket containing three loaves of bread. She was not crying her wares like the rest; an anxious, engaging smile played on her red lips, her manner was hesitating. He looked her steadily in the face; their glances met and for an instant remained confounded. Then she came up, with the embarrassed smile of a girl unaccustomed to such business.

"Do you wish to buy some bread?"

He made no reply, but questioned her by an imperceptible movement of the eyelids. On her answering yes, by an affirmative nod of the head, he asked in a very low tone of voice:

"There is clothing?"

"Yes, under the loaves."

Then she began to cry her merchandise aloud: "Bread! bread! who'll buy my bread?" But when Maurice would have slipped a twenty-franc piece into her fingers she drew back her hand abruptly and ran away, leaving the basket with them. The last they saw of her was the happy, tender look in her pretty eyes, as in the distance she turned and smiled on them.

When they were in possession of the basket Jean and Maurice found difficulties staring them in the face. They had strayed away from their tent, and in their agitated condition felt they should never succeed in finding it again. Where were they to bestow themselves? and how effect their change of garments? It seemed to them that the eyes of the entire assemblage were focused on the basket, which Jean carried with an awkward air, as if it contained dynamite, and that its contents must be plainly visible to everyone. It would not do to waste time, however; they must be up and doing. They stepped into the first vacant tent they came to, where each of them hurriedly slipped on a pair of trousers and donned a blouse, having first deposited their discarded uniforms in the basket, which they placed on the ground in a dark corner of the tent and abandoned to its fate. There was a circumstance that gave them no small uneasiness, however; they found only one head-covering, a knitted woolen cap, which Jean insisted Maurice should wear. The former, fearing his bare-headedness might excite suspicion, was hanging about the precincts of the camp on the lookout for a covering of some description, when it occurred to him to purchase his hat from an extremely dirty old man who was selling cigars.

"Brussels cigars, three sous apiece, two for five!"

Customs regulations were in abeyance since the battle of Sedan, and the imports of Belgian merchandise had been greatly stimulated. The old man had been making a handsome profit from his traffic, but that did not prevent him from driving a sharp bargain when he understood the reason why the two men wanted to buy his hat, a greasy old affair of felt with a great hole in its crown. He finally consented to part with it for two five-franc pieces, grumbling that he should certainly have a cold in his head.

Then Jean had another idea, which was neither more nor less than to buy out the old fellow's stock in trade, the two dozen cigars that remained unsold. The bargain effected, he pulled his hat down over his eyes and began to cry in the itinerant hawker's drawling tone:

"Here you are, Brussels cigars, two for three sous, two for three sous!"

Their safety was now assured. He signaled Maurice to go on before. It happened to the latter to discover an umbrella lying on the grass; he picked it up and, as a few drops of rain began to fall just then, opened it tranquilly as they were about to pass the line of sentries.

"Two for three sous, two for three sous, Brussels cigars!"

It took Jean less than two minutes to dispose of his stock of merchandise. The men came crowding about him with chaff and laughter: a reasonable fellow, that; he didn't rob poor chaps of their money! The Prussians themselves were attracted by such unheard-of bargains, and he was compelled to trade with them. He had all the time been working his way toward the edge of the enceinte, and his last two cigars went to a big sergeant with an immense beard, who could not speak a word of French.

"Don't walk so fast, confound it!" Jean breathed in a whisper behind Maurice's back. "You'll have them after us."

Their legs seemed inclined to run away with them, although they did their best to strike a sober gait. It caused them a great effort to pause a moment at a cross-roads, where a number of people were collected before an inn. Some villagers were chatting peaceably with German soldiers, and the two runaways made a pretense of listening, and even hazarded a few observations on the weather and the probability of the rain continuing during the night. They trembled when they beheld a man, a fleshy gentleman, eying them attentively, but as he smiled with an air of great good-nature they thought they might venture to address him, asking in a whisper:

"Can you tell us if the road to Belgium is guarded, sir?"

"Yes, it is; but you will be safe if you cross this wood and afterward cut across the fields, to the left."

Once they were in the wood, in the deep, dark silence of the slumbering trees, where no sound reached their ears, where nothing stirred and they believed their safety was assured them, they sank into each other's arms in an uncontrollable impulse of emotion. Maurice was sobbing violently, while big tears trickled slowly down Jean's cheeks. It was the natural revulsion of their overtaxed feelings after the long-protracted ordeal they had passed through, the joy and delight of their mutual assurance that their troubles were at an end, and that thenceforth suffering and they were to be strangers. And united by the memory of what they had endured together in ties closer than those of brotherhood, they clasped each other in a wild embrace, and the kiss that they exchanged at that moment seemed to them to possess a savor and a poignancy such as they had never experienced before in all their life; a kiss such as they never could receive from lips of woman, sealing their undying friendship, giving additional confirmation to the certainty that thereafter their two hearts would be but one, for all eternity.

When they had separated at last: "Little one," said Jean, in a trembling voice, "it is well for us to be here, but we are not at the end. We must look about a bit and try to find our bearings."

Maurice, although he had no acquaintance with that part of the frontier, declared that all they had to do was to pursue a straight course, whereon they resumed their way, moving among the trees in Indian file with the greatest circumspection, until they reached the edge of the thicket. There, mindful of the injunction of the kind-hearted villager, they were about to turn to the left and take a short cut across the fields, but on coming to a road, bordered with a row of poplars on either side they beheld directly in their path the watch-fire of a Prussian detachment. The bayonet of the sentry, pacing his beat, gleamed in the ruddy light, the men were finishing their soup and conversing; the fugitives stood not upon the order of their going, but plunged into the recesses of the wood again, in mortal terror lest they might be pursued. They thought they heard the sound of voices, of footsteps on their trail, and thus for over an hour they wandered at random among the copses, until all idea of locality was obliterated from their brain; now racing like affrighted animals through the underbrush, again brought up all standing, the cold sweat trickling down their face, before a tree in which they beheld a Prussian. And the end of it was that they again came out on the poplar-bordered road not more than ten paces from the sentry, and quite near the soldiers, who were toasting their toes in tranquil comfort.

"Hang the luck!" grumbled Jean. "This must be an enchanted wood."

This time, however, they had been heard. The sound of snapping twigs and rolling stones betrayed them. And as they did not answer the challenge of the sentry, but made off at the double-quick, the men seized their muskets and sent a shower of bullets crashing through the thicket, into which the fugitives had plunged incontinently.

"Nom de Dieu!" ejaculated Jean, with a stifled cry of pain.

He had received something that felt like the cut of a whip in the calf of his left leg, but the impact was so violent that it drove him up against a tree.

"Are you hurt?" Maurice anxiously inquired.

"Yes, and in the leg, worse luck!"

They both stood holding their breath and listening, in dread expectancy of hearing their pursuers clamoring at their heels; but the firing had ceased and nothing stirred amid the intense stillness that had again settled down upon the wood and the surrounding country. It was evident that the Prussians had no inclination to beat up the thicket.

Jean, who was doing his best to keep on his feet; forced back a groan. Maurice sustained him with his arm.

"Can't you walk?"

"I should say not!" He gave way to a fit of rage, he, always so self-contained. He clenched his fists, could have thumped himself. "God in Heaven, if this is not hard luck! to have one's legs knocked from under him at the very time he is most in need of them! It's too bad, too bad, by my soul it is! Go on, you, and put yourself in safety!"

But Maurice laughed quietly as he answered:

"That is silly talk!"

He took his friend's arm and helped him along, for neither of them had any desire to linger there. When, laboriously and by dint of heroic effort, they had advanced some half-dozen paces further, they halted again with renewed alarm at beholding before them a house, standing at the margin of the wood, apparently a sort of farmhouse. Not a light was visible at any of the windows, the open courtyard gate yawned upon the dark and deserted dwelling. And when they plucked up their courage a little and ventured to enter the courtyard, great was their surprise to find a horse standing there with a saddle on his back, with nothing to indicate the why or wherefore of his being there. Perhaps it was the owner's intention to return, perhaps he was lying behind a bush with a bullet in his brain. They never learned how it was.

But Maurice had conceived a new scheme, which appeared to afford him great satisfaction.

"See here, the frontier is too far away; we should never succeed in reaching it without a guide. What do you say to changing our plan and going to Uncle Fouchard's, at Remilly? I am so well acquainted with every inch of the road that I'm sure I could take you there with my eyes bandaged. Don't you think it's a good idea, eh? I'll put you on this horse, and I suppose Uncle Fouchard will grumble, but he'll take us in."

Before starting he wished to take a look at the injured leg. There were two orifices; the ball appeared to have entered the limb and passed out, fracturing the tibia in its course. The flow of blood had not been great; he did nothing more than bandage the upper part of the calf tightly with his handkerchief.

"Do you fly, and leave me here," Jean said again.

"Hold your tongue; you are silly!"

When Jean was seated firmly in the saddle Maurice took the bridle and they made a start. It was somewhere about eleven o'clock, and he hoped to make the journey in three hours, even if they should be unable to proceed faster than a walk. A difficulty that he had not thought of until then, however, presented itself to his mind and for a moment filled him with consternation: how were they to cross the Meuse in order to get to the left bank? The bridge at Mouzon would certainly be guarded. At last he remembered that there was a ferry lower down the stream, at Villers, and trusting to luck to befriend him, he shaped his course for that village, striking across the meadows and tilled fields of the right bank. All went well enough at first; they had only to dodge a cavalry patrol which forced them to hide in the shadow of a wall and remain there half an hour. Then the rain began to come down in earnest and his progress became more laborious, compelled as he was to tramp through the sodden fields beside the horse, which fortunately showed itself to be a fine specimen of the equine race, and perfectly gentle. On reaching Villers he found that his trust in the blind goddess, Fortune, had not been misplaced; the ferryman, who, at that late hour, had just returned from setting a Bavarian officer across the river, took them at once and landed them on the other shore without delay or accident.

And it was not until they reached the village, where they narrowly escaped falling into the clutches of the pickets who were stationed along the entire length of the Remilly road, that their dangers and hardships really commenced; again they were obliged to take to the fields, feeling their way along blind paths and cart-tracks that could scarcely be discerned in the darkness. The most trivial obstacle sufficed to drive them a long way out of their course. They squeezed through hedges, scrambled down and up the steep banks of ditches, forced a passage for themselves through the densest thickets. Jean, in whom a low fever had developed under the drizzling rain, had sunk down crosswise on his saddle in a condition of semi-consciousness, holding on with both hands by the horse's mane, while Maurice, who had slipped the bridle over his right arm, had to steady him by the legs to keep him from tumbling to the ground. For more than a league, for two long, weary hours that seemed like an eternity, did they toil onward in this fatiguing way; floundering, stumbling, slipping in such a manner that it seemed at every moment as if men and beast must land together in a heap at the bottom of some descent. The spectacle they presented was one of utter, abject misery, besplashed with mud, the horse trembling in every limb, the man upon his back a helpless mass, as if at his last gasp, the other, wild-eyed and pale as death, keeping his feet only by an effort of fraternal love. Day was breaking; it was not far from five o'clock when at last they came to Remilly.

In the courtyard of his little farmhouse, which was situated at the extremity of the pass of Harancourt, overlooking the village, Father Fouchard was stowing away in his carriole the carcasses of two sheep that he had slaughtered the day before. The sight of his nephew, coming to him at that hour and in that sorry plight, caused him such perturbation of spirit that, after the first explanatory words, he roughly cried:

"You want me to take you in, you and your friend? and then settle matters with the Prussians afterward, I suppose. I'm much obliged to you, but no! I might as well die right straight off and have done with it."

He did not go so far, however, as to prohibit Maurice and Prosper from taking Jean from the horse and laying him on the great table in the kitchen. Silvine ran and got the bolster from her bed and slipped it beneath the head of the wounded man, who was still unconscious. But it irritated the old fellow to see the man lying on his table; he grumbled and fretted, saying that the kitchen was no place for him; why did they not take him away to the hospital at once? since there fortunately was a hospital at Remilly, near the church, in the old schoolhouse; and there was a big room in it, with everything nice and comfortable.

"To the hospital!" Maurice hotly replied, "and have the Prussians pack him off to Germany as soon as he is well, for you know they treat all the wounded as prisoners of war. Do you take me for a fool, uncle? I did not bring him here to give him up."

Things were beginning to look dubious, the uncle was threatening to pitch them out upon the road, when someone mentioned Henriette's name.

"What about Henriette?" inquired the young man.

And he learned that his sister had been an inmate of the house at Remilly for the last two days; her affliction had weighed so heavily on her that life at Sedan, where her existence had hitherto been a happy one, was become a burden greater than she could bear. Chancing to meet with Doctor Dalichamp of Raucourt, with whom she was acquainted, her conversation with him had been the means of bringing her to take up her abode with Father Fouchard, in whose house she had a little bedroom, in order to devote herself entirely to the care of the sufferers in the neighboring hospital. That alone, she said, would serve to quiet her bitter memories. She paid her board and was the means of introducing many small comforts into the life of the farmhouse, which caused Father Fouchard to regard her with an eye of favor. The weather was always fine with him, provided he was making money.

"Ah! so my sister is here," said Maurice. "That must have been what M. Delaherche wished to tell me, with his gestures that I could not understand. Very well; if she is here, that settles it; we shall remain."

Notwithstanding his fatigue he started off at once in quest of her at the ambulance, where she had been on duty during the preceding night, while the uncle cursed his luck that kept him from being off with the carriole to sell his mutton among the neighboring villages, so long as the confounded business that he had got mixed up in remained unfinished.

When Maurice returned with Henriette they caught the old man making a critical examination of the horse, that Prosper had led away to the stable. The animal seemed to please him; he was knocked up, but showed signs of strength and endurance. The young man laughed and told his uncle he might have him as a gift if he fancied him, while Henriette, taking her relative aside, assured him Jean should be no expense to him; that she would take charge of him and nurse him, and he might have the little room behind the cow-stables, where no Prussian would ever think to look for him. And Father Fouchard, still wearing a very sulky face and but half convinced that there was anything to be made out of the affair, finally closed the discussion by jumping into his carriole and driving off, leaving her at liberty to act as she pleased.

It took Henriette but a few minutes, with the assistance of Silvine and Prosper, to put the room in order; then she had Jean brought in and they laid him on a cool, clean bed, he giving no sign of life during the operation save to mutter some unintelligible words. He opened his eyes and looked about him, but seemed not to be conscious of anyone's presence in the room. Maurice, who was just beginning to be aware how utterly prostrated he was by his fatigue, was drinking a glass of wine and eating a bit of cold meat, left over from the yesterday's dinner, when Doctor Dalichamp came in, as was his daily custom previous to visiting the hospital, and the young man, in his anxiety for his friend, mustered up his strength to follow him, together with his sister, to the bedside of the patient.

The doctor was a short, thick-set man, with a big round head, on which the hair, as well as the fringe of beard about his face, had long since begun to be tinged with gray. The skin of his ruddy, mottled face was tough and indurated as a peasant's, spending as he did most of his time in the open air, always on the go to relieve the sufferings of his fellow-creatures; while the large, bright eyes, the massive nose, indicative of obstinacy, and the benignant if somewhat sensual mouth bore witness to the lifelong charities and good works of the honest country doctor; a little brusque at times, not a man of genius, but whom many years of practice in his profession had made an excellent healer.

When he had examined Jean, still in a comatose state, he murmured:

"I am very much afraid that amputation will be necessary."

The words produced a painful impression on Maurice and Henriette. Presently, however, he added:

"Perhaps we may be able to save the leg, but it will require the utmost care and attention, and will take a very long time. For the moment his physical and mental depression is such that the only thing to do is to let him sleep. To-morrow we shall know more."

Then, having applied a dressing to the wound, he turned to Maurice, whom he had known in bygone days, when he was a boy.

"And you, my good fellow, would be better off in bed than sitting there."

The young man continued to gaze before him into vacancy, as if he had not heard. In the confused hallucination that was due to his fatigue he developed a kind of delirium, a supersensitive nervous excitation that embraced all he had suffered in mind and body since the beginning of the campaign. The spectacle of his friend's wretched state, his own condition, scarce less pitiful, defeated, his hands tied, good for nothing, the reflection that all those heroic efforts had culminated in such disaster, all combined to incite him to frantic rebellion against destiny. At last he spoke.

"It is not ended; no, no! we have not seen the end, and I must go away. Since he must lie there on his back for weeks, for months, perhaps, I cannot stay; I must go, I must go at once. You will assist me, won't you, doctor? you will supply me with the means to escape and get back to Paris?"

Pale and trembling, Henriette threw her arms about him and caught him to her bosom.

"What words are those you speak? enfeebled as you are, after all the suffering you have endured! but think not I shall let you go; you shall stay here with me! Have you not paid the debt you owe your country? and should you not think of me, too, whom you would leave to loneliness? of me, who have nothing now in all the wide world save you?"

Their tears flowed and were mingled. They held each other in a wild tumultuous embrace, with that fond affection which, in twins, often seems as if it antedated existence. But for all that his exaltation did not subside, but assumed a higher pitch.

"I tell you I must go. Should I not go I feel I should die of grief and shame. You can have no idea how my blood boils and seethes in my veins at the thought of remaining here in idleness. I tell you that this business is not going to end thus, that we must be avenged. On whom, on what? Ah! that I cannot tell; but avenged we must and shall be for such misfortune, in order that we may yet have courage to live on!"

Doctor Dalichamp, who had been watching the scene with intense interest, cautioned Henriette by signal to make no reply. Maurice would doubtless be more rational after he should have slept; and sleep he did, all that day and all the succeeding night, for more than twenty hours, and never stirred hand or foot. When he awoke next morning, however, he was as inflexible as ever in his determination to go away. The fever had subsided; he was gloomy and restless, in haste to withdraw himself from influences that he feared might weaken his patriotic fervor. His sister, with many tears, made up her mind that he must be allowed to have his way, and Doctor Dalichamp, when he came to make his morning visit, promised to do what he could to facilitate the young man's escape by turning over to him the papers of a hospital attendant who had died recently at Raucourt. It was arranged that Maurice should don the gray blouse with the red cross of Geneva on its sleeve and pass through Belgium, thence to make his way as best he might to Paris, access to which was as yet uninterrupted.

He did not leave the house that day, keeping himself out of sight and waiting for night to come. He scarcely opened his mouth, although he did make an attempt to enlist the new farm-hand in his enterprise.

"Say, Prosper, don't you feel as if you would like to go back and have one more look at the Prussians?"

The ex-chasseur d'Afrique, who was eating a cheese sandwich, stopped and held his knife suspended in the air.

"It don't strike me that it is worth while, from what we were allowed to see of them before. Why should you wish me to go back there, when the only use our generals can find for the cavalry is to send it in after the battle is ended and let it be cut to pieces? No, faith, I'm sick of the business, giving us such dirty work as that to do!" There was silence between them for a moment; then he went on, doubtless to quiet the reproaches of his conscience as a soldier: "And then the work is too heavy here just now; the plowing is just commencing, and then there'll be the fall sowing to be looked after. We must think of the farm work, mustn't we? for fighting is well enough in its way, but what would become of us if we should cease to till the ground? You see how it is; I can't leave my work. Not that I am particularly in love with Father Fouchard, for I doubt very strongly if I shall ever see the color of his money, but the beasties are beginning to take to me, and faith! when I was up there in the Old Field this morning, and gave a look at that d——d Sedan lying yonder in the distance, you can't tell how good it made me feel to be guiding my oxen and driving the plow through the furrow, all alone in the bright sunshine."

As soon as it was fairly dark, Doctor Dalichamp came driving up in his old gig. It was his intention to see Maurice to the frontier. Father Fouchard, well pleased to be rid of one of his guests at least, stepped out upon the road to watch and make sure there were none of the enemy's patrols prowling in the neighborhood, while Silvine put a few stitches in the blouse of the defunct ambulance man, on the sleeve of which the red cross of the corps was prominently displayed. The doctor, before taking his place in the vehicle, examined Jean's leg anew, but could not as yet promise that he would be able to save it. The patient was still in a profound lethargy, recognizing no one, never opening his mouth to speak, and Maurice was about to leave him without the comfort of a farewell, when, bending over to give him a last embrace, he saw him open his eyes to their full extent; the lips parted, and in a faint voice he said:

"You are going away?" And in reply to their astonished looks: "Yes, I heard what you said, though I could not stir. Take the remainder of the money, then. Put your hand in my trousers' pocket and take it."

Each of them had remaining nearly two hundred francs of the sum they had received from the corps paymaster.

But Maurice protested. "The money!" he exclaimed. "Why, you have more need of it than I, who have the use of both my legs. Two hundred francs will be abundantly sufficient to see me to Paris, and to get knocked in the head afterward won't cost me a penny. I thank you, though, old fellow, all the same, and good-by and good-luck to you; thanks, too, for having always been so good and thoughtful, for, had it not been for you, I should certainly be lying now at the bottom of some ditch, like a dead dog."

Jean made a deprecating gesture. "Hush. You owe me nothing; we are quits. Would not the Prussians have gathered me in out there the other day had you not picked me up and carried me off on your back? and yesterday again you saved me from their clutches. Twice have I been beholden to you for my life, and now I am in your debt. Ah, how unhappy I shall be when I am no longer with you!" His voice trembled and tears rose to his eyes. "Kiss me, dear boy!"

They embraced, and, as it had been in the wood the day before, that kiss set the seal to the brotherhood of dangers braved in each other's company, those few weeks of soldier's life in common that had served to bind their hearts together with closer ties than years of ordinary friendship could have done. Days of famine, sleepless nights, the fatigue of the weary march, death ever present to their eyes, these things made the foundation on which their affection rested. When two hearts have thus by mutual gift bestowed themselves the one upon the other and become fused and molten into one, is it possible ever to sever the connection? But the kiss they had exchanged the day before, among the darkling shadows of the forest, was replete with the joy of their new-found safety and the hope that their escape awakened in their bosom, while this was the kiss of parting, full of anguish and doubt unutterable. Would they meet again some day? and how, under what circumstances of sorrow or of gladness?

Doctor Dalichamp had clambered into his gig and was calling to Maurice. The young man threw all his heart and soul into the embrace he gave his sister Henriette, who, pale as death in her black mourning garments, looked on his face in silence through her tears.

"He whom I leave to your care is my brother. Watch over him, love him as I love him!"

IV.

Jean's chamber was a large room, with floor of brick and whitewashed walls, that had once done duty as a store-room for the fruit grown on the farm. A faint, pleasant odor of pears and apples lingered there still, and for furniture there was an iron bedstead, a pine table and two chairs, to say nothing of a huge old walnut clothes-press, tremendously deep and wide, that looked as if it might hold an army. A lazy, restful quiet reigned there all day long, broken only by the deadened sounds that came from the adjacent stables, the faint lowing of the cattle, the occasional thud of a hoof upon the earthen floor. The window, which had a southern aspect, let in a flood of cheerful sunlight; all the view it afforded was a bit of hillside and a wheat field, edged by a little wood. And this mysterious chamber was so well hidden from prying eyes that never a one in all the world would have suspected its existence.

As it was to be her kingdom, Henriette constituted herself lawmaker from the beginning. The regulation was that no one save she and the doctor should have access to Jean; this in order to avert suspicion. Silvine, even, was never to set foot in the room unless by direction. Early each morning the two women came in and put things to rights, and after that, all the long day, the door was as impenetrable as if it had been a wall of stone. And thus it was that Jean found himself suddenly secluded from the world, after many weeks of tumultuous activity, seeing no face save that of the gentle woman whose footfall on the floor gave back no sound. She appeared to him, as he had beheld her for the first time down yonder in Sedan, like an apparition, with her somewhat large mouth, her delicate, small features, her hair the hue of ripened grain, hovering about his bedside and ministering to his wants with an air of infinite goodness.

The patient's fever was so violent during the first few days that Henriette scarce ever left him. Doctor Dalichamp dropped in every morning on his way to the hospital and examined and dressed the wound. As the ball had passed out, after breaking the tibia, he was surprised that the case presented no better aspect; he feared there was a splinter of the bone remaining there that he had not succeeded in finding with the probe, and that might make resection necessary. He mentioned the matter to Jean, but the young man could not endure the thought of an operation that would leave him with one leg shorter than the other and lame him permanently. No, no! he would rather die than be a cripple for life. So the good doctor, leaving the wound to develop further symptoms, confined himself for the present to applying a dressing of lint saturated with sweet oil and phenic acid having first inserted a drain—an India rubber tube—to carry off the pus. He frankly told his patient, however, that unless he submitted to an operation he must not hope to have the use of his limb for a very long time. Still, after the second week, the fever subsided and the young man's general condition was improved, so long as he could be content to rest quiet in his bed.

Then Jean's and Henriette's relations began to be established on a more systematic basis. Fixed habits commenced to prevail; it seemed to them that they had never lived otherwise—that they were to go on living forever in that way. All the hours and moments that she did not devote to the ambulance were spent with him; she saw to it that he had his food and drink at proper intervals. She assisted him to turn in bed with a strength of wrist that no one, seeing her slender arms, would have supposed was in her. At times they would converse; but as a general thing, especially in the earlier days, they had not much to say. They never seemed to tire of each other's company, though. On the whole it was a very pleasant life they led in that calm, restful atmosphere, he with the horrible scenes of the battlefield still fresh in his memory, she in her widow's weeds, her heart bruised and bleeding with the great loss she had sustained. At first he had experienced a sensation of embarrassment, for he felt she was his superior, almost a lady, indeed, while he had never been aught more than a common soldier and a peasant. He could barely read and write. When finally he came to see that she affected no airs of superiority, but treated him on the footing of an equal, his confidence returned to him in a measure and he showed himself in his true colors, as a man of intelligence by reason of his sound, unpretentious common sense. Besides, he was surprised at times to think he could note a change was gradually coming over him; it seemed to him that his mind was less torpid than it had been, that it was clearer and more active, that he had novel ideas in his head, and more of them; could it be that the abominable life he had been leading for the last two months, his horrible sufferings, physical and moral, had exerted a refining influence on him? But that which assisted him most to overcome his shyness was to find that she was really not so very much wiser than he. She was but a little child when, at her mother's death, she became the household drudge, with her three men to care for, as she herself expressed it—her grandfather, her father, and her brother—and she had not had the time to lay in a large stock of learning. She could read and write, could spell words that were not too long, and "do sums," if they were not too intricate; and that was the extent of her acquirement. And if she continued to intimidate him still, if he considered her far and away the superior of all other women upon earth, it was because he knew the ineffable tenderness, the goodness of heart, the unflinching courage, that animated that frail little body, who went about her duties silently and met them as if they had been pleasures.

They had in Maurice a subject of conversation that was of common interest to them both and of which they never wearied. It was to Maurice's friend, his brother, to whom she was devoting herself thus tenderly, the brave, kind man, so ready with his aid in time of trouble, who she felt had made her so many times his debtor. She was full to overflowing with a sentiment of deepest gratitude and affection, that went on widening and deepening as she came to know him better and recognize his sterling qualities of head and heart, and he, whom she was tending like a little child, was actuated by such grateful sentiments that he would have liked to kiss her hands each time she gave him a cup of bouillon. Day by day did this bond of tender sympathy draw them nearer to each other in that profound solitude amid which they lived, harassed by an anxiety that they shared in common. When he had utterly exhausted his recollections of the dismal march from Rheims to Sedan, to the particulars of which she never seemed to tire of listening, the same question always rose to their lips: what was Maurice doing then? why did he not write? Could it be that the blockade of Paris was already complete, and was that the reason why they received no news? They had as yet had but one letter from him, written at Rouen, three days after his leaving them, in which he briefly stated that he had reached that city on his way to Paris, after a long and devious journey. And then for a week there had been no further word; the silence had remained unbroken.

In the morning, after Doctor Dalichamp had attended to his patient, he liked to sit a while and chat, putting his cares aside for the moment. Sometimes he also returned at evening and made a longer visit, and it was in this way that they learned what was going on in the great world outside their peaceful solitude and the terrible calamities that were desolating their country. He was their only source of intelligence; his heart, which beat with patriotic ardor, overflowed with rage and grief at every fresh defeat, and thus it was that his sole topic of conversation was the victorious progress of the Prussians, who, since Sedan, had spread themselves over France like the waves of some black ocean. Each day brought its own tidings of disaster, and resting disconsolately on one of the two chairs that stood by the bedside, he would tell in mournful tones and with trembling gestures of the increasing gravity of the situation. Oftentimes he came with his pockets stuffed with Belgian newspapers, which he would leave behind him when he went away. And thus the echoes of defeat, days, weeks, after the event, reverberated in that quiet room, serving to unite yet more closely in community of sorrow the two poor sufferers who were shut within its walls.

It was from some of those old newspapers that Henriette read to Jean the occurrences at Metz, the Titanic struggle that was three times renewed, separated on each occasion by a day's interval. The story was already five weeks old, but it was new to him, and he listened with a bleeding heart to the repetition of the miserable narrative of defeat to which he was not a stranger. In the deathly stillness of the room the incidents of the woeful tale unfolded themselves as Henriette, with the sing-song enunciation of a schoolgirl, picked out her words and sentences. When, after Froeschwiller and Spickeren, the 1st corps, routed and broken into fragments, had swept away with it the 5th, the other corps stationed along the frontier en echelon from Metz to Bitche, first wavering, then retreating in their consternation at those reverses, had ultimately concentrated before the intrenched camp on the right bank of the Moselle. But what waste of precious time was there, when they should not have lost a moment in retreating on Paris, a movement that was presently to be attended with such difficulty! The Emperor had been compelled to turn over the supreme command to Marshal Bazaine, to whom everyone looked with confidence for a victory. Then, on the 14th[*] came the affair of Borny, when the army was attacked at the moment when it was at last about to cross the stream, having to sustain the onset of two German armies: Steinmetz's, which was encamped in observation in front of the intrenched camp, and Prince Frederick Charles's, which had passed the river higher up and come down along the left bank in order to bar the French from access to their country; Borny, where the firing did not begin until it was three o'clock; Borny, that barren victory, at the end of which the French remained masters of their positions, but which left them astride the Moselle, tied hand and foot, while the turning movement of the second German army was being successfully accomplished. After that, on the 16th, was the battle of Rezonville; all our corps were at last across the stream, although, owing to the confusion that prevailed at the junction of the Mars-la-Tour and Etain roads, which the Prussians had gained possession of early in the morning by a brilliant movement of their cavalry and artillery, the 3d and 4th corps were hindered in their march and unable to get up; a slow, dragging, confused battle, which, up to two o'clock, Bazaine, with only a handful of men opposed to him, should have won, but which he wound up by losing, thanks to his inexplicable fear of being cut off from Metz; a battle of immense extent, spreading over leagues of hill and plain, where the French, attacked in front and flank, seemed willing to do almost anything except advance, affording the enemy time to concentrate and to all appearances co-operating with them to ensure the success of the Prussian plan, which was to force their withdrawal to the other side of the river. And on the 18th, after their retirement to the intrenched camp, Saint-Privat was fought, the culmination of the gigantic struggle, where the line of battle extended more than eight miles in length, two hundred thousand Germans with seven hundred guns arrayed against a hundred and twenty thousand French with but five hundred guns, the Germans facing toward Germany, the French toward France, as if invaders and invaded had inverted their roles in the singular tactical movements that had been going on; after two o'clock the conflict was most sanguinary, the Prussian Guard being repulsed with tremendous slaughter and Bazaine, with a left wing that withstood the onsets of the enemy like a wall of adamant, for a long time victorious, up to the moment, at the approach of evening, when the weaker right wing was compelled by the terrific losses it had sustained to abandon Saint-Privat, involving in its rout the remainder of the army, which, defeated and driven back under the walls of Metz, was thenceforth to be imprisoned in a circle of flame and iron.

[*] August.—TR.

As Henriette pursued her reading Jean momentarily interrupted her to say:

"Ah, well! and to think that we fellows, after leaving Rheims, were looking for Bazaine! They were always telling us he was coming; now I can see why he never came!"

The marshal's despatch, dated the 19th, after the battle of Saint-Privat, in which he spoke of resuming his retrograde movement by way of Montmedy, that despatch which had for its effect the advance of the army of Chalons, would seem to have been nothing more than the report of a defeated general, desirous to present matters under their most favorable aspect, and it was not until a considerably later period, the 29th, when the tidings of the approach of this relieving army had reached him through the Prussian lines, that he attempted a final effort, on the right bank this time, at Noiseville, but in such a feeble, half-hearted way that on the 1st of September, the day when the army of Chalons was annihilated at Sedan, the army of Metz fell back to advance no more, and became as if dead to France. The marshal, whose conduct up to that time may fairly be characterized as that of a leader of only moderate ability, neglecting his opportunities and failing to move when the roads were open to him, after that blockaded by forces greatly superior to his own, was now about to be seduced by alluring visions of political greatness and become a conspirator and a traitor.

But in the papers that Doctor Dalichamp brought them Bazaine was still the great man and the gallant soldier, to whom France looked for her salvation.

And Jean wanted certain passages read to him again, in order that he might more clearly understand how it was that while the third German army, under the Crown Prince of Prussia, had been leading them such a dance, and the first and second were besieging Metz, the latter were so strong in men and guns that it had been possible to form from them a fourth army, which, under the Crown Prince of Saxony, had done so much to decide the fortune of the day at Sedan. Then, having obtained the information he desired, resting on that bed of suffering to which his wound condemned him, he forced himself to hope in spite of all.

"That's how it is, you see; we were not so strong as they! No one can ever get at the rights of such matters while the fighting is going on. Never mind, though; you have read the figures as the newspapers give them: Bazaine has a hundred and fifty thousand men with him, he has three hundred thousand small arms and more than five hundred pieces of artillery; take my word for it, he is not going to let himself be caught in such a scrape as we were. The fellows all say he is a tough man to deal with; depend on it he's fixing up a nasty dose for the enemy, and he'll make 'em swallow it."

Henriette nodded her head and appeared to agree with him, in order to keep him in a cheerful frame of mind. She could not follow those complicated operations of the armies, but had a presentiment of coming, inevitable evil. Her voice was fresh and clear; she could have gone on reading thus for hours; only too glad to have it in her power to relieve the tedium of his long day, though at times, when she came to some narrative of slaughter, her eyes would fill with tears that made the words upon the printed page a blur. She was doubtless thinking of her husband's fate, how he had been shot down at the foot of the wall and his body desecrated by the touch of the Bavarian officer's boot.

"If it gives you such pain," Jean said in surprise, "you need not read the battles; skip them."

But, gentle and self-sacrificing as ever, she recovered herself immediately.

"No, no; don't mind my weakness; I assure you it is a pleasure to me."

One evening early in October, when the wind was blowing a small hurricane outside, she came in from the ambulance and entered the room with an excited air, saying:

"A letter from Maurice! the doctor just gave it me."

With each succeeding morning the twain had been becoming more and more alarmed that the young man sent them no word, and now that for a whole week it had been rumored everywhere that the investment of Paris was complete, they were more disturbed in mind than ever, despairing of receiving tidings, asking themselves what could have happened him after he left Rouen. And now the reason of the long silence was made clear to them: the letter that he had addressed from Paris to Doctor Dalichamp on the 18th, the very day that ended railway communication with Havre, had gone astray and had only reached them at last by a miracle, after a long and circuitous journey.

"Ah, the dear boy!" said Jean, radiant with delight. "Read it to me, quick!"

The wind was howling and shrieking more dismally than ever, the window of the apartment strained and rattled as if someone were trying to force an entrance. Henriette went and got the little lamp, and placing it on the table beside the bed applied herself to the reading of the missive, so close to Jean that their faces almost touched. There was a sensation of warmth and comfort in the peaceful room amid the roaring of the storm that raged without.

It was a long letter of eight closely filled pages, in which Maurice first told how, soon after his arrival on the 16th, he had had the good fortune to get into a line regiment that was being recruited up to its full strength. Then, reverting to facts of history, he described in brief but vigorous terms the principal events of that month of terror: how Paris, recovering her sanity in a measure after the madness into which the disasters of Wissembourg and Froeschwiller had driven her, had comforted herself with hopes of future victories, had cheered herself with fresh illusions, such as lying stories of the army's successes, the appointment of Bazaine to the chief command, the levee en masse, bogus dispatches, which the ministers themselves read from the tribune, telling of hecatombs of slaughtered Prussians. And then he went on to tell how, on the 3d of September, the thunderbolt had a second time burst over the unhappy capital: all hope gone, the misinformed, abused, confiding city dazed by that crushing blow of destiny, the cries: "Down with the Empire!" that resounded at night upon the boulevards, the brief and gloomy session of the Chamber at which Jules Favre read the draft of the bill that conceded the popular demand. Then on the next day, the ever-memorable 4th of September, was the upheaval of all things, the second Empire swept from existence in atonement for its mistakes and crimes, the entire population of the capital in the streets, a torrent of humanity a half a million strong filling the Place de la Concorde and streaming onward in the bright sunshine of that beautiful Sabbath day to the great gates of the Corps Legislatif, feebly guarded by a handful of troops, who up-ended their muskets in the air in token of sympathy with the populace—smashing in the doors, swarming into the assembly chambers, whence Jules Favre, Gambetta and other deputies of the Left were even then on the point of departing to proclaim the Republic at the Hotel de Ville; while on the Place Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois a little wicket of the Louvre opened timidly and gave exit to the Empress-regent, attired in black garments and accompanied by a single female friend, both the women trembling with affright and striving to conceal themselves in the depths of the public cab, which went jolting with its scared inmates from the Tuileries, through whose apartments the mob was at that moment streaming. On the same day Napoleon III. left the inn at Bouillon, where he had passed his first night of exile, bending his way toward Wilhelmshohe.

Here Jean, a thoughtful expression on his face, interrupted Henriette.

"Then we have a republic now? So much the better, if it is going to help us whip the Prussians!"

But he shook his head; he had always been taught to look distrustfully on republics when he was a peasant. And then, too, it did not seem to him a good thing that they should be of differing minds when the enemy was fronting them. After all, though, it was manifest there had to be a change of some kind, since everyone knew the Empire was rotten to the core and the people would have no more of it.

Henriette finished the letter, which concluded with a mention of the approach of the German armies. On the 13th, the day when a committee of the Government of National Defense had established its quarters at Tours, their advanced guards had been seen at Lagny, to the east of Paris. On the 14th and 15th they were at the very gates of the city, at Creteil and Joinville-le-Pont. On the 18th, however, the day when Maurice wrote, he seemed to have ceased to believe in the possibility of maintaining a strict blockade of Paris; he appeared to be under the influence of one of his hot fits of blind confidence, characterising the siege as a senseless and impudent enterprise that would come to an ignominious end before they were three weeks older, relying on the armies that the provinces would surely send to their relief, to say nothing of the army of Metz, that was already advancing by way of Verdun and Rheims. And the links of the iron chain that their enemies had forged for them had been riveted together; it encompassed Paris, and now Paris was a city shut off from all the world, whence no letter, no word of tidings longer came, the huge prison-house of two millions of living beings, who were to their neighbors as if they were not.

Henriette was oppressed by a sense of melancholy. "Ah, merciful heaven!" she murmured, "how long will all this last, and shall we ever see him more!"

A more furious blast bent the sturdy trees out-doors and made the timbers of the old farmhouse creak and groan. Think of the sufferings the poor fellows would have to endure should the winter be severe, fighting in the snow, without bread, without fire!

"Bah!" rejoined Jean, "that's a very nice letter of his, and it's a comfort to have heard from him. We must not despair."

Thus, day by day, the month of October ran its course, with gray melancholy skies, and if ever the wind went down for a short space it was only to bring the clouds back in darker, heavier masses. Jean's wound was healing very slowly; the outflow from the drain was not the "laudable pus" which would have permitted the doctor to remove the appliance, and the patient was in a very enfeebled state, refusing, however, to be operated on in his dread of being left a cripple. An atmosphere of expectant resignation, disturbed at times by transient misgivings for which there was no apparent cause, pervaded the slumberous little chamber, to which the tidings from abroad came in vague, indeterminate shape, like the distorted visions of an evil dream. The hateful war, with its butcheries and disasters, was still raging out there in the world, in some quarter unknown to them, without their ever being able to learn the real course of events, without their being conscious of aught save the wails and groans that seemed to fill the air from their mangled, bleeding country. And the dead leaves rustled in the paths as the wind swept them before it beneath the gloomy sky, and over the naked fields brooded a funereal silence, broken only by the cawing of the crows, presage of a bitter winter.

A principal subject of conversation between them at this time was the hospital, which Henriette never left except to come and cheer Jean with her company. When she came in at evening he would question her, making the acquaintance of each of her charges, desirous to know who would die and who recover; while she, whose heart and soul were in her occupation, never wearied, but related the occurrences of the day in their minutest details.

"Ah," she would always say, "the poor boys, the poor boys!"

It was not the ambulance of the battlefield, where the blood from the wounded came in a fresh, bright stream, where the flesh the surgeon's knife cut into was firm and healthy; it was the decay and rottenness of the hospital, where the odor of fever and gangrene hung in the air, damp with the exhalations of the lingering convalescents and those who were dying by inches. Doctor Dalichamp had had the greatest difficulty in procuring the necessary beds, sheets and pillows, and every day he had to accomplish miracles to keep his patients alive, to obtain for them bread, meat and desiccated vegetables, to say nothing of bandages, compresses and other appliances. As the Prussian officers in charge of the military hospital in Sedan had refused him everything, even chloroform, he was accustomed to send to Belgium for what he required. And yet he had made no discrimination between French and Germans; he was even then caring for a dozen Bavarian soldiers who had been brought in there from Bazeilles. Those bitter adversaries who but a short time before had been trying to cut each other's throat now lay side by side, their passions calmed by suffering. And what abodes of distress and misery they were, those two long rooms in the old schoolhouse of Remilly, where, in the crude light that streamed through the tall windows, some thirty beds in each were arranged on either side of a narrow passage.

As late even as ten days after the battle wounded men had been discovered in obscure corners, where they had been overlooked, and brought in for treatment. There were four who had crawled into a vacant house at Balan and remained there, without attendance, kept from starving in some way, no one could tell how, probably by the charity of some kind-hearted neighbor, and their wounds were alive with maggots; they were as dead men, their system poisoned by the corruption that exuded from their wounds. There was a purulency, that nothing could check or overcome, that hovered over the rows of beds and emptied them. As soon as the door was passed one's nostrils were assailed by the odor of mortifying flesh. From drains inserted in festering sores fetid matter trickled, drop by drop. Oftentimes it became necessary to reopen old wounds in order to extract a fragment of bone that had been overlooked. Then abscesses would form, to break out after an interval in some remote portion of the body. Their strength all gone, reduced to skeletons, with ashen, clayey faces, the miserable wretches suffered the torments of the damned. Some, so weakened they could scarcely draw their breath, lay all day long upon their back, with tight shut, darkened eyes, like corpses in which decomposition had already set in; while others, denied the boon of sleep, tossing in restless wakefulness, drenched with the cold sweat that streamed from every pore, raved like lunatics, as if their suffering had made them mad. And whether they were calm or violent, it mattered not; when the contagion of the fever reached them, then was the end at hand, the poison doing its work, flying from bed to bed, sweeping them all away in one mass of corruption.

But worst of all was the condemned cell, the room to which were assigned those who were attacked by dysentery, typhus or small-pox. There were many cases of black small-pox. The patients writhed and shrieked in unceasing delirium, or sat erect in bed with the look of specters. Others had pneumonia and were wasting beneath the stress of their frightful cough. There were others again who maintained a continuous howling and were comforted only when their burning, throbbing wound was sprayed with cold water. The great hour of the day, the one that was looked forward to with eager expectancy, was that of the doctor's morning visit, when the beds were opened and aired and an opportunity was afforded their occupants to stretch their limbs, cramped by remaining long in one position. And it was the hour of dread and terror as well, for not a day passed that, as the doctor went his rounds, he was not pained to see on some poor devil's skin the bluish spots that denoted the presence of gangrene. The operation would be appointed for the following day, when a few more inches of the leg or arm would be sliced away. Often the gangrene kept mounting higher and higher, and amputation had to be repeated until the entire limb was gone.

Every evening on her return Henriette answered Jean's questions in the same tone of compassion:

"Ah, the poor boys, the poor boys!"

And her particulars never varied; they were the story of the daily recurring torments of that earthly hell. There had been an amputation at the shoulder-joint, a foot had been taken off, a humerus resected; but would gangrene or purulent contagion be clement and spare the patient? Or else they had been burying some one of their inmates, most frequently a Frenchman, now and then a German. Scarcely a day passed but a coarse coffin, hastily knocked together from four pine boards, left the hospital at the twilight hour, accompanied by a single one of the attendants, often by the young woman herself, that a fellow-creature might not be laid away in his grave like a dog. In the little cemetery at Remilly two trenches had been dug, and there they slumbered, side by side, French to the right, Germans to the left, their enmity forgotten in their narrow bed.

Jean, without ever having seen them, had come to feel an interest in certain among the patients. He would ask for tidings of them.

"And 'Poor boy,' how is he getting on to-day?"

This was a little soldier, a private in the 5th of the line, not yet twenty years old, who had doubtless enlisted as a volunteer. The by-name: "Poor boy" had been given him and had stuck because he always used the words in speaking of himself, and when one day he was asked the reason he replied that that was the name by which his mother had always called him. Poor boy he was, in truth, for he was dying of pleurisy brought on by a wound in his left side.

"Ah, poor fellow," replied Henriette, who had conceived a special fondness for this one of her charges, "he is no better; he coughed all the afternoon. It pained my heart to hear him."

"And your bear, Gutman, how about him?" pursued Jean, with a faint smile. "Is the doctor's report more favorable?"

"Yes, he thinks he may be able to save his life. But the poor man suffers dreadfully."

Although they both felt the deepest compassion for him, they never spoke of Gutman but a smile of gentle amusement came to their lips. Almost immediately upon entering on her duties at the hospital the young woman had been shocked to recognize in that Bavarian soldier the features: big blue eyes, red hair and beard and massive nose, of the man who had carried her away in his arms the day they shot her husband at Bazeilles. He recognized her as well, but could not speak; a musket ball, entering at the back of the neck, had carried away half his tongue. For two days she recoiled with horror, an involuntary shudder passed through her frame, each time she had to approach his bed, but presently her heart began to melt under the imploring, very gentle looks with which he followed her movements in the room. Was he not the blood-splashed monster, with eyes ablaze with furious rage, whose memory was ever present to her mind? It cost her an effort to recognize him now in that submissive, uncomplaining creature, who bore his terrible suffering with such cheerful resignation. The nature of his affliction, which is not of frequent occurrence, enlisted for him the sympathies of the entire hospital. It was not even certain that his name was Gutman; he was called so because the only sound he succeeded in articulating was a word of two syllables that resembled that more than it did anything else. As regarded all other particulars concerning him everyone was in the dark; it was generally believed, however, that he was married and had children. He seemed to understand a few words of French, for he would answer questions that were put to him with an emphatic motion of the head: "Married?" yes, yes! "Children?" yes, yes! The interest and excitement he displayed one day that he saw some flour induced them to believe he might have been a miller. And that was all. Where was the mill, whose wheel had ceased to turn? In what distant Bavarian village were the wife and children now weeping their lost husband and father? Was he to die, nameless, unknown, in that foreign country, and leave his dear ones forever ignorant of his fate?

"To-day," Henriette told Jean one evening, "Gutman kissed his hand to me. I cannot give him a drink of water, or render him any other trifling service, but he manifests his gratitude by the most extravagant demonstrations. Don't smile; it is too terrible to be buried thus alive before one's time has come."

Toward the end of October Jean's condition began to improve. The doctor thought he might venture to remove the drain, although he still looked apprehensive whenever he examined the wound, which, nevertheless appeared to be healing as rapidly as could be expected. The convalescent was able to leave his bed, and spent hours at a time pacing his room or seated at the window, looking out on the cheerless, leaden sky. Then time began to hang heavy on his hands; he spoke of finding something to do, asked if he could not be of service on the farm. Among the secret cares that disturbed his mind was the question of money, for he did not suppose he could have lain there for six long weeks and not exhaust his little fortune of two hundred francs, and if Father Fouchard continued to afford him hospitality it must be that Henriette had been paying his board. The thought distressed him greatly; he did not know how to bring about an explanation with her, and it was with a feeling of deep satisfaction that he accepted the position of assistant at the farm, with the understanding that he was to help Silvine with the housework, while Prosper was to be continued in charge of the out-door labors.

Notwithstanding the hardness of the times Father Fouchard could well afford to take on another hand, for his affairs were prospering. While the whole country was in the throes of dissolution and bleeding at every limb, he had succeeded in so extending his butchering business that he was now slaughtering three and even four times as many animals as he had ever done before. It was said that since the 31st of August he had been carrying on a most lucrative business with the Prussians. He who on the 30th had stood at his door with his cocked gun in his hand and refused to sell a crust of bread to the starving soldiers of the 7th corps had on the following day, upon the first appearance of the enemy, opened up as dealer in all kinds of supplies, had disinterred from his cellar immense stocks of provisions, had brought back his flocks and herds from the fastnesses where he had concealed them; and since that day he had been one of the heaviest purveyors of meat to the German armies, exhibiting consummate address in bargaining with them and in getting his money promptly for his merchandise. Other dealers at times suffered great inconvenience from the insolent arbitrariness of the victors, whereas he never sold them a sack of flour, a cask of wine or a quarter of beef that he did not get his pay for it as soon as delivered in good hard cash. It made a good deal of talk in Remilly; people said it was scandalous on the part of a man whom the war had deprived of his only son, whose grave he never visited, but left to be cared for by Silvine; but nevertheless they all looked up to him with respect as a man who was making his fortune while others, even the shrewdest, were having a hard time of it to keep body and soul together. And he, with a sly leer out of his small red eyes, would shrug his shoulders and growl in his bull-headed way:

"Who talks of patriotism! I am more a patriot than any of them. Would you call it patriotism to fill those bloody Prussians' mouths gratis? What they get from me they have to pay for. Folks will see how it is some of these days!"

On the second day of his employment Jean remained too long on foot, and the doctor's secret fears proved not to be unfounded; the wound opened, the leg became greatly inflamed and swollen, he was compelled to take to his bed again. Dalichamp suspected that the mischief was due to a spicule of bone that the two consecutive days of violent exercise had served to liberate. He explored the wound and was so fortunate as to find the fragment, but there was a shock attending the operation, succeeded by a high fever, which exhausted all Jean's strength. He had never in his life been reduced to a condition of such debility: his recovery promised to be a work of time, and faithful Henriette resumed her position as nurse and companion in the little chamber, where winter with icy breath now began to make its presence felt. It was early November, already the east wind had brought on its wings a smart flurry of snow, and between those four bare walls, on the uncarpeted floor where even the tall, gaunt old clothes-press seemed to shiver with discomfort, the cold was extreme. As there was no fireplace in the room they determined to set up a stove, of which the purring, droning murmur assisted to brighten their solitude a bit.

The days wore on, monotonously, and that first week of the relapse was to Jean and Henriette the dreariest and saddest in all their long, unsought intimacy. Would their suffering never end? were they to hope for no surcease of misery, the danger always springing up afresh? At every moment their thoughts sped away to Maurice, from whom they had received no further word. They were told that others were getting letters, brief notes written on tissue paper and brought in by carrier-pigeons. Doubtless the bullet of some hated German had slain the messenger that, winging its way through the free air of heaven, was bringing them their missive of joy and love. Everything seemed to retire into dim obscurity, to die and be swallowed up in the depths of the premature winter. Intelligence of the war only reached them a long time after the occurrence of events, the few newspapers that Doctor Dalichamp still continued to supply them with were often a week old by the time they reached their hands. And their dejection was largely owing to their want of information, to what they did not know and yet instinctively felt to be the truth, to the prolonged death-wail that, spite of all, came to their ears across the frozen fields in the deep silence that lay upon the country.

One morning the doctor came to them in a condition of deepest discouragement. With a trembling hand he drew from his pocket a Belgian newspaper and threw it on the bed, exclaiming:

"Alas, my friends, poor France is murdered; Bazaine has played the traitor!"

Jean, who had been dozing, his back supported by a couple of pillows, suddenly became wide-awake.

"What, a traitor?"

"Yes, he has surrendered Metz and the army. It is the experience of Sedan over again, only this time they drain us of our last drop of life-blood." Then taking up the paper and reading from it: "One hundred and fifty thousand prisoners, one hundred and fifty-three eagles and standards, one hundred and forty-one field guns, seventy-six machine guns, eight hundred casemate and barbette guns, three hundred thousand muskets, two thousand military train wagons, material for eighty-five batteries—"

And he went on giving further particulars: how Marshal Bazaine had been blockaded in Metz with the army, bound hand and foot, making no effort to break the wall of adamant that surrounded him; the doubtful relations that existed between him and Prince Frederick Charles, his indecision and fluctuating political combinations, his ambition to play a great role in history, but a role that he seemed not to have fixed upon himself; then all the dirty business of parleys and conferences, and the communications by means of lying, unsavory emissaries with Bismarck, King William and the Empress-regent, who in the end put her foot down and refused to negotiate with the enemy on the basis of a cession of territory; and, finally, the inevitable catastrophe, the completion of the web that destiny had been weaving, famine in Metz, a compulsory capitulation, officers and men, hope and courage gone, reduced to accept the bitter terms of the victor. France no longer had an army.

"In God's name!" Jean ejaculated in a deep, low voice. He had not fully understood it all, but until then Bazaine had always been for him the great captain, the one man to whom they were to look for salvation. "What is left us to do now? What will become of them at Paris?"

The doctor was just coming to the news from Paris, which was of a disastrous character. He called their attention to the fact that the paper from which he was reading was dated November 5. The surrender of Metz had been consummated on the 27th of October, and the tidings were not known in Paris until the 30th. Coming, as it did, upon the heels of the reverses recently sustained at Chevilly, Bagneux and la Malmaison, after the conflict at Bourget and the loss of that position, the intelligence had burst like a thunderbolt over the desperate populace, angered and disgusted by the feebleness and impotency of the government of National Defense. And thus it was that on the following day, the 31st, the city was threatened with a general insurrection, an immense throng of angry men, a mob ripe for mischief, collecting on the Place de l'Hotel de Ville, whence they swarmed into the halls and public offices, making prisoners the members of the Government, whom the National Guard rescued later in the day only because they feared the triumph of those incendiaries who were clamoring for the commune. And the Belgian journal wound up with a few stinging comments on the great City of Paris, thus torn by civil war when the enemy was at its gates. Was it not the presage of approaching decomposition, the puddle of blood and mire that was to engulf a world?

"That's true enough!" said Jean, whose face was very white. "They've no business to be squabbling when the Prussians are at hand!"

But Henriette, who had said nothing as yet, always making it her rule to hold her tongue when politics were under discussion, could not restrain a cry that rose from her heart. Her thoughts were ever with her brother.

"Mon Dieu, I hope that Maurice, with all the foolish ideas he has in his head, won't let himself get mixed up in this business!"

They were all silent in their distress; and it was the doctor, who was ardently patriotic, who resumed the conversation.

"Never mind; if there are no more soldiers, others will grow. Metz has surrendered, Paris may surrender, even; but it don't follow from that that France is wiped out. Yes, the strong-box is all right, as our peasants say, and we will live on in spite of all."

It was clear, however, that he was hoping against hope. He spoke of the army that was collecting on the Loire, whose initial performances, in the neighborhood of Arthenay, had not been of the most promising; it would become seasoned and would march to the relief of Paris. His enthusiasm was aroused to boiling pitch by the proclamations of Gambetta, who had left Paris by balloon on the 7th of October and two days later established his headquarters at Tours, calling on every citizen to fly to arms, and instinct with a spirit at once so virile and so sagacious that the entire country gave its adhesion to the dictatorial powers assumed for the public safety. And was there not talk of forming another army in the North, and yet another in the East, of causing soldiers to spring from the ground by sheer force of faith? It was to be the awakening of the provinces, the creation of all that was wanting by exercise of indomitable will, the determination to continue the struggle until the last sou was spent, the last drop of blood shed.

"Bah!" said the doctor in conclusion as he arose to go, "I have many a time given up a patient, and a week later found him as lively as a cricket."

Jean smiled. "Doctor, hurry up and make a well man of me, so I can go back to my post down yonder."

But those evil tidings left Henriette and him in a terribly disheartened state. There came another cold wave, with snow, and when the next day Henriette came in shivering from the hospital she told her friend that Gutman was dead. The intense cold had proved fatal to many among the wounded; it was emptying the rows of beds. The miserable man whom the loss of his tongue had condemned to silence had lain two days in the throes of death. During his last hour she had remained seated at his bedside, unable to resist the supplication of his pleading gaze. He seemed to be speaking to her with his tearful eyes, trying to tell, it may be, his real name and the name of the village, so far away, where a wife and little ones were watching for his return. And he had gone from them a stranger, known of none, sending her a last kiss with his uncertain, stiffening fingers, as if to thank her once again for all her gentle care. She was the only one who accompanied the remains to the cemetery, where the frozen earth, the unfriendly soil of the stranger's country, rattled with a dull, hollow sound on the pine coffin, mingled with flakes of snow.

The next day, again, Henriette said upon her return at evening:

"'Poor boy' is dead." She could not keep back her tears at mention of his name. "If you could but have seen and heard him in his pitiful delirium! He kept calling me: 'Mamma! mamma!' and stretched his poor thin arms out to me so entreatingly that I had to take him on my lap. His suffering had so wasted him that he was no heavier than a boy of ten, poor fellow. And I held and soothed him, so that he might die in peace; yes, I held him in my arms, I whom he called his mother and who was but a few years older than himself. He wept, and I myself could not restrain my tears; you can see I am weeping still—" Her utterance was choked with sobs; she had to pause. "Before his death he murmured several times the name which he had given himself: 'Poor boy, poor boy!' Ah, how just the designation! poor boys they are indeed, some of them so young and all so brave, whom your hateful war maims and mangles and causes to suffer so before they are laid away at last in their narrow bed!"

Never a day passed now but Henriette came in at night in this anguished state, caused by some new death, and the suffering of others had the effect of bringing them together even more closely still during the sorrowful hours that they spent, secluded from all the world, in the silent, tranquil chamber. And yet those hours were full of sweetness, too, for affection, a feeling which they believed to be a brother's and sister's love, had sprung up in those two hearts which little by little had come to know each other's worth. To him, with his observant, thoughtful nature, their long intimacy had proved an elevating influence, while she, noting his unfailing kindness of heart and evenness of temper, had ceased to remember that he was one of the lowly of the earth and had been a tiller of the soil before he became a soldier. Their understanding was perfect; they made a very good couple, as Silvine said with her grave smile. There was never the least embarrassment between them; when she dressed his leg the calm serenity that dwelt in the eyes of both was undisturbed. Always attired in black, in her widow's garments, it seemed almost as if she had ceased to be a woman.

But during those long afternoons when Jean was left to himself he could not help giving way to speculation. The sentiment he experienced for his friend was one of boundless gratitude, a sort of religious reverence, which would have made him repel the idea of love as if it were a sort of sacrilege. And yet he told himself that had he had a wife like her, so gentle, so loving, so helpful, his life would have been an earthly paradise. His great misfortune, his unhappy marriage, the evil years he had spent at Rognes, his wife's tragic end, all the sad past, arose before him with a softened feeling of regret, with an undefined hope for the future, but without distinct purpose to try another effort to master happiness. He closed his eyes and dropped off into a doze, and then he had a confused vision of being at Remilly, married again and owner of a bit of land, sufficient to support a family of honest folks whose wants were not extravagant. But it was all a dream, lighter than thistle-down; he knew it could never, never be. He believed his heart to be capable of no emotion stronger than friendship, he loved Henriette as he did solely because he was Maurice's brother. And then that vague dream of marriage had come to be in some measure a comfort to him, one of those fancies of the imagination that we know is never to be realized and with which we fondle ourselves in our hours of melancholy.

For her part, such thoughts had never for a moment presented themselves to Henriette's mind. Since the day of the horrible tragedy at Bazeilles her bruised heart had lain numb and lifeless in her bosom, and if consolation in the shape of a new affection had found its way thither, it could not be otherwise than without her knowledge; the latent movement of the seed deep-buried in the earth, which bursts its sheath and germinates, unseen of human eye. She failed even to perceive the pleasure it afforded her to remain for hours at a time by Jean's bedside, reading to him those newspapers that never brought them tidings save of evil. Never had her pulses beat more rapidly at the touch of his hand, never had she dwelt in dreamy rapture on the vision of the future with a longing to be loved once more. And yet it was in that chamber alone that she found comfort and oblivion. When she was there, busying herself with noiseless diligence for her patient's well-being, she was at peace; it seemed to her that soon her brother would return and all would be well, they would all lead a life of happiness together and never more be parted. And it appeared to her so natural that things should end thus that she talked of their relations without the slightest feeling of embarrassment, without once thinking to question her heart more closely, unaware that she had already made the chaste surrender of it.

But as she was on the point of leaving for the hospital one afternoon she looked into the kitchen as she passed and saw there a Prussian captain and two other officers, and the icy terror that filled her at the sight, then, for the first time, opened her eyes to the deep affection she had conceived for Jean. It was plain that the men had heard of the wounded man's presence at the farm and were come to claim him; he was to be torn from them and led away captive to the dungeon of some dark fortress deep in Germany. She listened tremblingly, her heart beating tumultuously.

The captain, a big, stout man, who spoke French with scarce a trace of foreign accent, was rating old Fouchard soundly.

"Things can't go on in this way; you are not dealing squarely by us. I came myself to give you warning, once for all, that if the thing happens again I shall take other steps to remedy it; and I promise you the consequences will not be agreeable."

Though entirely master of all his faculties the old scamp assumed an air of consternation, pretending not to understand, his mouth agape, his arms describing frantic circles on the air.

"How is that, sir, how is that?"

"Oh, come, there's no use attempting to pull the wool over my eyes; you know perfectly well that the three beeves you sold me on Sunday last were rotten—yes, diseased, and rotten through and through; they must have been where there was infection, for they poisoned my men; there are two of them in such a bad way that they may be dead by this time for all I know."

Fouchard's manner was expressive of virtuous indignation. "What, my cattle diseased! why, there's no better meat in all the country; a sick woman might feed on it to build her up!" And he whined and sniveled, thumping himself on the chest and calling God to witness he was an honest man; he would cut off his right hand rather than sell bad meat. For more than thirty years he had been known throughout the neighborhood, and not a living soul could say he had ever been wronged in weight or quality. "They were as sound as a dollar, sir, and if your men had the belly-ache it was because they ate too much—unless some villain hocussed the pot—"

And so he ran on, with such a flux of words and absurd theories that finally the captain, his patience exhausted, cut him short.

"Enough! You have had your warning; see you profit by it! And there is another matter: we have our suspicions that all you people of this village give aid and comfort to the francs-tireurs of the wood of Dieulet, who killed another of our sentries day before yesterday. Mind what I say; be careful!"

When the Prussians were gone Father Fouchard shrugged his shoulders with a contemptuous sneer. Why, yes, of course he sold them carcasses that had never been near the slaughter house; that was all they would ever get to eat from him. If a peasant had a cow die on his hands of the rinderpest, or if he found a dead ox lying in the ditch, was not the carrion good enough for those dirty Prussians? To say nothing of the pleasure there was in getting a big price out of them for tainted meat at which a dog would turn up his nose. He turned and winked slyly at Henriette, who was glad to have her fears dispelled, muttering triumphantly:

"Say, little girl, what do you think now of the wicked people who go about circulating the story that I am not a patriot? Why don't they do as I do, eh? sell the blackguards carrion and put their money in their pocket. Not a patriot! why, good Heavens! I shall have killed more of them with my diseased cattle than many a soldier with his chassepot!"

When the story reached Jean's ears, however, he was greatly disturbed. If the German authorities suspected that the people of Remilly were harboring the francs-tireurs from Dieulet wood they might at any time come and beat up his quarters and unearth him from his retreat. The idea that he should be the means of compromising his hosts or bringing trouble to Henriette was unendurable to him. Yielding to the young woman's entreaties, however, he consented to delay his departure yet for a few days, for his wound was very slow in healing and he was not strong enough to go away and join one of the regiments in the field, either in the North or on the Loire.

From that time forward, up to the middle of December, the stress of their anxiety and mental suffering exceeded even what had gone before. The cold was grown to be so intense that the stove no longer sufficed to heat the great, barn-like room. When they looked from their window on the crust of snow that covered the frozen earth they thought of Maurice, entombed down yonder in distant Paris, that was now become a city of death and desolation, from which they scarcely ever received reliable intelligence. Ever the same questions were on their lips: what was he doing, why did he not let them hear from him? They dared not voice their dreadful doubts and fears; perhaps he was ill, or wounded; perhaps even he was dead. The scanty and vague tidings that continued to reach them occasionally through the newspapers were not calculated to reassure them. After numerous lying reports of successful sorties, circulated one day only to be contradicted the next, there was a rumor of a great victory gained by General Ducrot at Champigny on the 2d of December; but they speedily learned that on the following day the general, abandoning the positions he had won, had been forced to recross the Marne and send his troops into cantonments in the wood of Vincennes. With each new day the Parisians saw themselves subjected to fresh suffering and privation: famine was beginning to make itself felt; the authorities, having first requisitioned horned cattle, were now doing the same with potatoes, gas was no longer furnished to private houses, and soon the fiery flight of the projectiles could be traced as they tore through the darkness of the unlighted streets. And so it was that neither of them could draw a breath or eat a mouthful without being haunted by the image of Maurice and those two million living beings, imprisoned in their gigantic sepulcher.

From every quarter, moreover, from the northern as well as from the central districts, most discouraging advices continued to arrive. In the north the 22d army corps, composed of gardes mobiles, depot companies from various regiments and such officers and men as had not been involved in the disasters of Sedan and Metz, had been forced to abandon Amiens and retreat on Arras, and on the 5th of December Rouen had also fallen into the hands of the enemy, after a mere pretense of resistance on the part of its demoralized, scanty garrison. In the center the victory of Coulmiers, achieved on the 3d of November by the army of the Loire, had resuscitated for a moment the hopes of the country: Orleans was to be reoccupied, the Bavarians were to be put to flight, the movement by way of Etampes was to culminate in the relief of Paris; but on December 5 Prince Frederick Charles had retaken Orleans and cut in two the army of the Loire, of which three corps fell back on Bourges and Vierzon, while the remaining two, commanded by General Chanzy, retired to Mans, fighting and falling back alternately for a whole week, most gallantly. The Prussians were everywhere, at Dijon and at Dieppe, at Vierzon as well as at Mans. And almost every morning came the intelligence of some fortified place that had capitulated, unable longer to hold out under the bombardment. Strasbourg had succumbed as early as the 28th of September, after standing forty-six days of siege and thirty-seven of shelling, her walls razed and her buildings riddled by more than two hundred thousand projectiles. The citadel of Laon had been blown into the air; Toul had surrendered; and following them, a melancholy catalogue, came Soissons with its hundred and twenty-eight pieces of artillery, Verdun, which numbered a hundred and thirty-six, Neufbrisach with a hundred, La Fere with seventy, Montmedy, sixty-five. Thionville was in flames, Phalsbourg had only opened her gates after a desperate resistance that lasted eighty days. It seemed as if all France were doomed to burn and be reduced to ruins by the never-ceasing cannonade.

One morning that Jean manifested a fixed determination to be gone, Henriette seized both his hands and held them tight clasped in hers.

"Ah, no! I beg you, do not go and leave me here alone. You are not strong enough; wait a few days yet, only a few days. I will let you go, I promise you I will, whenever the doctor says you are well enough to go and fight."

V.

The cold was intense on that December evening. Silvine and Prosper, together with little Charlot, were alone in the great kitchen of the farmhouse, she busy with her sewing, he whittling away at a whip that he proposed should be more than usually ornate. It was seven o'clock; they had dined at six, not waiting for Father Fouchard, who they supposed had been detained at Raucourt, where there was a scarcity of meat, and Henriette, whose turn it was to watch that night at the hospital, had just left the house, after cautioning Silvine to be sure to replenish Jean's stove with coal before she went to bed.

Outside a sky of inky blackness overhung the white expanse of snow. No sound came from the village, buried among the drifts; all that was to be heard in the kitchen was the scraping of Prosper's knife as he fashioned elaborate rosettes and lozenges on the dogwood stock. Now and then he stopped and cast a glance at Charlot, whose flaxen head was nodding drowsily. When the child fell asleep at last the silence seemed more profound than ever. The mother noiselessly changed the position of the candle that the light might not strike the eyes of her little one; then sitting down to her sewing again, she sank into a deep reverie. And Prosper, after a further period of hesitation, finally mustered up courage to disburden himself of what he wished to say.

"Listen, Silvine; I have something to tell you. I have been watching for an opportunity to speak to you in private—"

Alarmed by his preface, she raised her eyes and looked him in the face.

"This is what it is. You'll forgive me for frightening you, but it is best you should be forewarned. In Remilly this morning, at the corner by the church, I saw Goliah; I saw him as plain as I see you sitting there. Oh, no! there can be no mistake; I was not dreaming!"

Her face suddenly became white as death; all she was capable of uttering was a stifled moan:

"My God! my God!"

Prosper went on, in words calculated to give her least alarm, and related what he had learned during the day by questioning one person and another. No one doubted now that Goliah was a spy, that he had formerly come and settled in the country with the purpose of acquainting himself with its roads, its resources, the most insignificant details pertaining to the life of its inhabitants. Men reminded one another of the time when he had worked for Father Fouchard on his farm and of his sudden disappearance; they spoke of the places he had had subsequently to that over toward Beaumont and Raucourt. And now he was back again, holding a position of some sort at the military post of Sedan, its duties apparently not very well defined, going about from one village to another, denouncing this man, fining that, keeping an eye to the filling of the requisitions that made the peasants' lives a burden to them. That very morning he had frightened the people of Remilly almost out of their wits in relation to a delivery of flour, alleging it was short in weight and had not been furnished within the specified time.

"You are forewarned," said Prosper in conclusion, "and now you'll know what to do when he shows his face here—"

She interrupted him with a terrified cry.

"Do you think he will come here?"

"Dame! it appears to me extremely probable he will. It would show great lack of curiosity if he didn't, since he knows he has a young one here that he has never seen. And then there's you, besides, and you're not so very homely but he might like to have another look at you."

She gave him an entreating glance that silenced his rude attempt at gallantry. Charlot, awakened by the sound of their voices, had raised his head. With the blinking eyes of one suddenly aroused from slumber he looked about the room, and recalled the words that some idle fellow of the village had taught him; and with the solemn gravity of a little man of three he announced:

"Dey're loafers, de Prussians!"

His mother went and caught him frantically in her arms and seated him on her lap. Ah! the poor little waif, at once her delight and her despair, whom she loved with all her soul and who brought the tears to her eyes every time she looked on him, flesh of her flesh, whom it wrung her heart to hear the urchins with whom he consorted in the street tauntingly call "the little Prussian!" She kissed him, as if she would have forced the words back into his mouth.

"Who taught my darling such naughty words? It's not nice; you must not say them again, my loved one."

Whereon Charlot, with the persistency of childhood, laughing and squirming, made haste to reiterate:

"Dey're dirty loafers, de Prussians!"

And when his mother burst into tears he clung about her neck and also began to howl dismally. Mon Dieu, what new evil was in store for her! Was it not enough that she had lost in Honore the one single hope of her life, the assured promise of oblivion and future happiness? and was that man to appear upon the scene again to make her misery complete?

"Come," she murmured, "come along, darling, and go to bed. Mamma will kiss her little boy all the same, for he does not know the sorrow he causes her."

And she went from the room, leaving Prosper alone. The good fellow, not to add to her embarrassment, had averted his eyes from her face and was apparently devoting his entire attention to his carving.

Before putting Charlot to bed it was Silvine's nightly custom to take him in to say good-night to Jean, with whom the youngster was on terms of great friendship. As she entered the room that evening, holding her candle before her, she beheld the convalescent seated upright in bed, his open eyes peering into the obscurity. What, was he not asleep? Faith, no; he had been ruminating on all sorts of subjects in the silence of the winter night; and while she was cramming the stove with coal he frolicked for a moment with Charlot, who rolled and tumbled on the bed like a young kitten. He knew Silvine's story, and had a very kindly feeling for the meek, courageous girl whom misfortune had tried so sorely, mourning the only man she had ever loved, her sole comfort that child of shame whose existence was a daily reproach to her. When she had replaced the lid on the stove, therefore, and came to the bedside to take the boy from his arms, he perceived by her red eyes that she had been weeping. What, had she been having more trouble? But she would not answer his question: some other day she would tell him what it was if it seemed worth the while. Mon Dieu! was not her life one of continual suffering now?

Silvine was at last lugging Charlot away in her arms when there arose from the courtyard of the farm a confused sound of steps and voices. Jean listened in astonishment.

"What is it? It can't be Father Fouchard returning, for I did not hear his wagon wheels." Lying on his back in his silent chamber, with nothing to occupy his mind, he had become acquainted with every detail of the routine of home life on the farm, of which the sounds were all familiar to his ears. Presently he added: "Ah, I see; it is those men again, the francs-tireurs from Dieulet, after something to eat."

"Quick, I must be gone!" said Silvine, hurrying from the room and leaving him again in darkness. "I must make haste and see they get their loaves."

A loud knocking was heard at the kitchen door and Prosper, who was beginning to tire of his solitude, was holding a hesitating parley with the visitors. He did not like to admit strangers when the master was away, fearing he might be held responsible for any damage that might ensue. His good luck befriended him in this instance, however, for just then Father Fouchard's carriole came lumbering up the acclivity, the tramp of the horse's feet resounding faintly on the snow that covered the road. It was the old man who welcomed the newcomers.

"Ah, good! it's you fellows. What have you on that wheelbarrow?"

Sambuc, lean and hungry as a robber and wrapped in the folds of a blue woolen blouse many times too large for him, did not even hear the farmer; he was storming angrily at Prosper, his honest brother, as he called him, who had only then made up his mind to unbar the door.

"Say, you! do you take us for beggars that you leave us standing in the cold in weather such as this?"

But Prosper did not trouble himself to make any other reply than was expressed in a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders, and while he was leading the horse off to the stable old Fouchard, bending over the wheelbarrow, again spoke up.

"So, it's two dead sheep you've brought me. It's lucky it's freezing weather, otherwise we should know what they are by the smell."

Cabasse and Ducat, Sambuc's two trusty henchmen, who accompanied him in all his expeditions, raised their voices in protest.

"Oh!" cried the first, with his loud-mouthed Provencal volubility, "they've only been dead three days. They're some of the animals that died on the Raffins farm, where the disease has been putting in its fine work of late."

"Procumbit humi bos," spouted the other, the ex-court officer whose excessive predilection for the ladies had got him into difficulties, and who was fond of airing his Latin on occasion.

Father Fouchard shook his head and continued to disparage their merchandise, declaring it was too "high." Finally he took the three men into the kitchen, where he concluded the business by saying:

"After all, they'll have to take it and make the best of it. It comes just in season, for there's not a cutlet left in Raucourt. When a man's hungry he'll eat anything, won't he?" And very well pleased at heart, he called to Silvine, who just then came in from putting Charlot to bed: "Let's have some glasses; we are going to drink to the downfall of old Bismarck."

Fouchard maintained amicable relations with these francs-tireurs from Dieulet wood, who for some three months past had been emerging at nightfall from the fastnesses where they made their lurking place, killing and robbing a Prussian whenever they could steal upon him unawares, descending on the farms and plundering the peasants when there was a scarcity of the other kind of game. They were the terror of all the villages in the vicinity, and the more so that every time a provision train was attacked or a sentry murdered the German authorities avenged themselves on the adjacent hamlets, the inhabitants of which they accused of abetting the outrages, inflicting heavy penalties on them, carrying off their mayors as prisoners, burning their poor hovels. Nothing would have pleased the peasants more than to deliver Sambuc and his band to the enemy, and they were only deterred from doing so by their fear of being shot in the back at a turn in the road some night should their attempt fail of success.

It had occurred to Fouchard to inaugurate a traffic with them. Roaming about the country in every direction, peering with their sharp eyes into ditches and cattle sheds, they had become his purveyors of dead animals. Never an ox or a sheep within a radius of three leagues was stricken down by disease but they came by night with their barrow and wheeled it away to him, and he paid them in provisions, most generally in bread, that Silvine baked in great batches expressly for the purpose. Besides, if he had no great love for them, he experienced a secret feeling of admiration for the francs-tireurs, a set of handy rascals who went their way and snapped their fingers at the world, and although he was making a fortune from his dealings with the Prussians, he could never refrain from chuckling to himself with grim, savage laughter as often as he heard that one of them had been found lying at the roadside with his throat cut.

"Your good health!" said he, touching glasses with the three men. Then, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand: "Say, have you heard of the fuss they're making over the two headless uhlans that they picked up over there near Villecourt? Villecourt was burned yesterday, you know; they say it was the penalty the village had to pay for harboring you. You'll have to be prudent, don't you see, and not show yourselves about here for a time. I'll see the bread is sent you somewhere."

Sambuc shrugged his shoulders and laughed contemptuously. What did he care for the Prussians, the dirty cowards! And all at once he exploded in a fit of anger, pounding the table with his fist.

"Tonnerre de Dieu! I don't mind the uhlans so much; they're not so bad, but it's the other one I'd like to get a chance at once—you know whom I mean, the other fellow, the spy, the man who used to work for you."

"Goliah?" said Father Fouchard.

Silvine, who had resumed her sewing, dropped it in her lap and listened with intense interest.

"That's his name, Goliah! Ah, the brigand! he is as familiar with every inch of the wood of Dieulet as I am with my pocket, and he's like enough to get us pinched some fine morning. I heard of him to-day at the Maltese Cross making his boast that he would settle our business for us before we're a week older. A dirty hound, he is, and he served as guide to the Prussians the day before the battle of Beaumont; I leave it to these fellows if he didn't."

"It's as true as there's a candle standing on that table!" attested Cabasse.

"Per silentia amica lunoe," added Ducat, whose quotations were not always conspicuous for their appositeness.

But Sambuc again brought his heavy fist down upon the table. "He has been tried and adjudged guilty, the scoundrel! If ever you hear of his being in the neighborhood just send me word, and his head shall go and keep company with the heads of the two uhlans in the Meuse; yes, by G-d! I pledge you my word it shall."

There was silence. Silvine was very white, and gazed at the men with unwinking, staring eyes.

"Those are things best not be talked too much about," old Fouchard prudently declared. "Your health, and good-night to you."

They emptied the second bottle, and Prosper, who had returned from the stable, lent a hand to load upon the wheelbarrow, whence the dead sheep had been removed, the loaves that Silvine had placed in an old grain-sack. But he turned his back and made no reply when his brother and the other two men, wheeling the barrow before them through the snow, stalked away and were lost to sight in the darkness, repeating:

"Good-night, good-night! an plaisir!"

They had breakfasted the following morning, and Father Fouchard was alone in the kitchen when the door was thrown open and Goliah in the flesh entered the room, big and burly, with the ruddy hue of health on his face and his tranquil smile. If the old man experienced anything in the nature of a shock at the suddenness of the apparition he let no evidence of it escape him. He peered at the other through his half-closed lids while he came forward and shook his former employer warmly by the hand.

"How are you, Father Fouchard?"

Then only the old peasant seemed to recognize him.

"Hallo, my boy, is it you? You've been filling out; how fat you are!"

And he eyed him from head to foot as he stood there, clad in a sort of soldier's greatcoat of coarse blue cloth, with a cap of the same material, wearing a comfortable, prosperous air of self-content. His speech betrayed no foreign accent, moreover; he spoke with the slow, thick utterance of the peasants of the district.

"Yes, Father Fouchard, it's I in person. I didn't like to be in the neighborhood without dropping in just to say how-do-you-do to you."

The old man could not rid himself of a feeling of distrust. What was the fellow after, anyway? Could he have heard of the francs-tireurs' visit to the farmhouse the night before? That was something he must try to ascertain. First of all, however, it would be best to treat him politely, as he seemed to have come there in a friendly spirit.

"Well, my lad, since you are so pleasant we'll have a glass together for old times' sake."

He went himself and got a bottle and two glasses. Such expenditure of wine went to his heart, but one must know how to be liberal when he has business on hand. The scene of the preceding night was repeated, they touched glasses with the same words, the same gestures.

"Here's to your good health, Father Fouchard."

"And here's to yours, my lad."

Then Goliah unbent and his face assumed an expression of satisfaction; he looked about him like a man pleased with the sight of objects that recalled bygone times. He did not speak of the past, however, nor, for the matter of that, did he speak of the present. The conversation ran on the extremely cold weather, which would interfere with farming operations; there was one good thing to be said for the snow, however: it would kill off the insects. He barely alluded, with a slightly pained expression, to the partially concealed hatred, the affright and scorn, with which he had been received in the other houses of Remilly. Every man owes allegiance to his country, doesn't he? It is quite clear he should serve his country as well as he knows how. In France, however, no one looked at the matter in that light; there were things about which people had very queer notions. And as the old man listened and looked at that broad, innocent, good-natured face, beaming with frankness and good-will, he said to himself that surely that excellent fellow had had no evil designs in coming there.

"So you are all alone to-day, Father Fouchard?"

"Oh, no; Silvine is out at the barn, feeding the cows. Would you like to see her?"

Goliah laughed. "Well, yes. To be quite frank with you, it was on Silvine's account that I came."

Old Fouchard felt as if a great load had been taken off his mind; he went to the door and shouted at the top of his voice:

"Silvine! Silvine! There's someone here to see you."

And he went away about his business without further apprehension, since the lass was there to look out for the property. A man must be in a bad way, he reflected, to let a fancy for a girl keep such a hold on him after such a length of time, years and years.

When Silvine entered the room she was not surprised to find herself in presence of Goliah, who remained seated and contemplated her with his broad smile, in which, however, there was a trace of embarrassment. She had been expecting him, and stood stock-still immediately she stepped across the doorsill, nerving herself and bracing all her faculties. Little Charlot came running up and hid among her petticoats, astonished and frightened to see a strange man there. Then succeeded a few seconds of awkward silence.

"And this is the little one, then?" Goliah asked at last in his most dulcet tone.

"Yes," was Silvine's curt, stern answer.

Silence again settled down upon the room. He had known there was a child, although he had gone away before the birth of his offspring, but this was the first time he had laid eyes on it. He therefore wished to explain matters, like a young man of sense who is confident he can give good reasons for his conduct.

"Come, Silvine, I know you cherish bitter feelings against me—and yet there is no reason why you should. If I went away, if I have been cause to you of so much suffering, you might have told yourself that perhaps it was because I was not my own master. When a man has masters over him he must obey them, mustn't he? If they had sent me off on foot to make a journey of a hundred leagues I should have been obliged to go. And, of course, I couldn't say a word to you about it; you have no idea how bad it made me feel to go away as I did without bidding you good-by. I won't say to you now that I felt certain I should return to you some day; still, I always fully expected that I should, and, as you see, here I am again—"

She had turned away her head and was looking through the window at the snow that carpeted the courtyard, as if resolved to hear no word he said. Her persistent silence troubled him; he interrupted his explanations to say:

"Do you know you are prettier than ever!"

True enough, she was very beautiful in her pallor, with her magnificent great eyes that illuminated all her face. The heavy coils of raven hair that crowned her head seemed the outward symbol of the inward sorrow that was gnawing at her heart.

"Come, don't be angry! you know that I mean you no harm. If I did not love you still I should not have come back, that's very certain. Now that I am here and everything is all right once more we shall see each other now and then, shan't we?"

She suddenly stepped a pace backward, and looking him squarely in the face:

"Never!"

"Never!—and why? Are you not my wife, is not that child ours?"

She never once took her eyes from off his face, speaking with impressive slowness:

"Listen to me; it will be better to end that matter once for all. You knew Honore; I loved him, he was the only man who ever had my love. And now he is dead; you robbed me of him, you murdered him over there on the battlefield, and never again will I be yours. Never!"

She raised her hand aloft as if invoking heaven to record her vow, while in her voice was such depth of hatred that for a moment he stood as if cowed, then murmured:

"Yes, I heard that Honore was dead; he was a very nice young fellow. But what could you expect? Many another has died as well; it is the fortune of war. And then it seemed to me that once he was dead there would no longer be a barrier between us, and let me remind you, Silvine, that after all I was never brutal toward you—"

But he stopped short at sight of her agitation; she seemed as if about to tear her own flesh in her horror and distress.

"Oh! that is just it; yes, it is that which seems as if it would drive me wild. Why, oh! why did I yield when I never loved you? Honore's departure left me so broken down, I was so sick in mind and body that never have I been able to recall any portion of the circumstances; perhaps it was because you talked to me of him and appeared to love him. My God! the long nights I have spent thinking of that time and weeping until the fountain of my tears was dry! It is dreadful to have done a thing that one had no wish to do and afterward be unable to explain the reason of it. And he had forgiven me, he had told me that he would marry me in spite of all when his time was out, if those hateful Prussians only let him live. And you think I will return to you. No, never, never! not if I were to die for it!"

Goliah's face grew dark. She had always been so submissive, and now he saw she was not to be shaken in her fixed resolve. Notwithstanding his easy-going nature he was determined he would have her, even if he should be compelled to use force, now that he was in a position to enforce his authority, and it was only his inherent prudence, the instinct that counseled him to patience and diplomacy, that kept him from resorting to violent measures now. The hard-fisted colossus was averse to bringing his physical powers into play; he therefore had recourse to another method for making her listen to reason.

"Very well; since you will have nothing more to do with me I will take away the child."

"What do you mean?"

Charlot, whose presence had thus far been forgotten by them both, had remained hanging to his mother's skirts, struggling bravely to keep down his rising sobs as the altercation waxed more warm. Goliah, leaving his chair, approached the group.

"You're my boy, aren't you? You're a good little Prussian. Come along with me."

But before he could lay hands on the child Silvine, all a-quiver with excitement, had thrown her arms about it and clasped it to her bosom.

"He, a Prussian, never! He's French, was born in France!"

"You say he's French! Look at him, and look at me; he's my very image. Can you say he resembles you in any one of his features?"

She turned her eyes on the big, strapping lothario, with his curling hair and beard and his broad, pink face, in which the great blue eyes gleamed like globes of polished porcelain; and it was only too true, the little one had the same yellow thatch, the same rounded cheeks, the same light eyes; every feature of the hated race was reproduced faithfully in him. A tress of her jet black hair that had escaped from its confinement and wandered down upon her shoulder in the agitation of the moment showed her how little there was in common between the child and her.

"I bore him; he is mine!" she screamed in fury. "He's French, and will grow up to be a Frenchman, knowing no word of your dirty German language; and some day he shall go and help to kill the whole pack of you, to avenge those whom you have murdered!"

Charlot, tightening his clasp about her neck, began to cry, shrieking:

"Mammy, mammy, I'm 'fraid! take me away!"

Then Goliah, doubtless because he did not wish to create a scandal, stepped back, and in a harsh, stern voice, unlike anything she had ever heard from his lips before, made this declaration:

"Bear in mind what I am about to tell you, Silvine. I know all that happens at this farm. You harbor the francs-tireurs from the wood of Dieulet, among them that Sambuc who is brother to your hired man; you supply the bandits with provisions. And I know that that hired man, Prosper, is a chasseur d'Afrique and a deserter, and belongs to us by rights. Further, I know that you are concealing on your premises a wounded man, another soldier, whom a word from me would suffice to consign to a German fortress. What do you think: am I not well informed?"

She was listening to him now, tongue-tied and terror-stricken, while little Charlot kept piping in her ear with lisping voice:

"Oh! mammy, mammy, take me away, I'm 'fraid!"

"Come," resumed Goliah, "I'm not a bad fellow, and I don't like quarrels and bickering, as you are well aware, but I swear by all that's holy I will have them all arrested, Father Fouchard and the rest, unless you consent to admit me to your chamber on Monday next. I will take the child, too, and send him away to Germany to my mother, who will be very glad to have him; for you have no further right to him, you know, if you are going to leave me. You understand me, don't you? The folks will all be gone, and all I shall have to do will be to come and carry him away. I am the master; I can do what pleases me—come, what have you to say?"

But she made no answer, straining the little one more closely to her breast as if fearing he might be torn from her then and there, and in her great eyes was a look of mingled terror and execration.

"It is well; I give you three days to think the matter over. See to it that your bedroom window that opens on the orchard is left open. If I do not find the window open next Monday evening at seven o'clock I will come with a detail the following day and arrest the inmates of the house and then will return and bear away the little one. Think of it well; au revoir, Silvine."

He sauntered quietly away, and she remained standing, rooted to her place, her head filled with such a swarming, buzzing crowd of terrible thoughts that it seemed to her she must go mad. And during the whole of that long day the tempest raged in her. At first the thought occurred to her instinctively to take her child in her arms and fly with him, wherever chance might direct, no matter where; but what would become of them when night should fall and envelop them in darkness? how earn a livelihood for him and for herself? Then she determined she would speak to Jean, would notify Prosper, and Father Fouchard himself, and again she hesitated and changed her mind: was she sufficiently certain of the friendship of those people that she could be sure they would not sacrifice her to the general safety, she who was cause that they were menaced all with such misfortune? No, she would say nothing to anyone; she would rely on her own efforts to extricate herself from the peril she had incurred by braving that bad man. But what scheme could she devise; mon Dieu! how could she avert the threatened evil, for her upright nature revolted; she could never have forgiven herself had she been the instrument of bringing disaster to so many people, to Jean in particular, who had always been so good to Charlot.

The hours passed, one by one; the next day's sun went down, and still she had decided upon nothing. She went about her household duties as usual, sweeping the kitchen, attending to the cows, making the soup. No word fell from her lips, and rising ever amid the ominous silence she preserved, her hatred of Goliah grew with every hour and impregnated her nature with its poison. He had been her curse; had it not been for him she would have waited for Honore, and Honore would be living now, and she would be happy. Think of his tone and manner when he made her understand he was the master! He had told her the truth, moreover; there were no longer gendarmes or judges to whom she could apply for protection; might made right. Oh, to be the stronger! to seize and overpower him when he came, he who talked of seizing others! All she considered was the child, flesh of her flesh; the chance-met father was naught, never had been aught, to her. She had no particle of wifely feeling toward him, only a sentiment of concentrated rage, the deep-seated hatred of the vanquished for the victor, when she thought of him. Rather than surrender the child to him she would have killed it, and killed herself afterward. And as she had told him, the child he had left her as a gift of hate she would have wished were already grown and capable of defending her; she looked into the future and beheld him with a musket, slaughtering hecatombs of Prussians. Ah, yes! one Frenchman more to assist in wreaking vengeance on the hereditary foe!

There was but one day remaining, however; she could not afford to waste more time in arriving at a decision. At the very outset, indeed, a hideous project had presented itself among the whirling thoughts that filled her poor, disordered mind: to notify the francs-tireurs, to give Sambuc the information he desired so eagerly; but the idea had not then assumed definite form and shape, and she had put it from her as too atrocious, not suffering herself even to consider it: was not that man the father of her child? she could not be accessory to his murder. Then the thought returned, and kept returning at more frequently recurring intervals, little by little forcing itself upon her and enfolding her in its unholy influence; and now it had entire possession of her, holding her captive by the strength of its simple and unanswerable logic. The peril and calamity that overhung them all would vanish with that man; he in his grave, Jean, Prosper, Father Fouchard would have nothing more to fear, while she herself would retain possession of Charlot and there would be never a one in all the world to challenge her right to him. All that day she turned and re-turned the project in her mind, devoid of further strength to bid it down, considering despite herself the murder in its different aspects, planning and arranging its most minute details. And now it was become the one fixed, dominant idea, making a portion of her being, that she no longer stopped to reason on, and when finally she came to act, in obedience to that dictate of the inevitable, she went forward as in a dream, subject to the volition of another, a someone within her whose presence she had never known till then.

Father Fouchard had taken alarm, and on Sunday he dispatched a messenger to the francs-tireurs to inform them that their supply of bread would be forwarded to the quarries of Boisville, a lonely spot a mile and a quarter from the house, and as Prosper had other work to do the old man sent Silvine with the wheelbarrow. It was manifest to the young woman that Destiny had taken the matter in its hands; she spoke, she made an appointment with Sambuc for the following evening, and there was no tremor in her voice, as if she were pursuing a course marked out for her from which she could not depart. The next day there were still other signs which proved that not only sentient beings, but inanimate objects as well, favored the crime. In the first place Father Fouchard was called suddenly away to Raucourt, and knowing he could not get back until after eight o'clock, instructed them not to wait dinner for him. Then Henriette, whose night off it was, received word from the hospital late in the afternoon that the nurse whose turn it was to watch was ill and she would have to take her place; and as Jean never left his chamber under any circumstances, the only remaining person from whom interference was to be feared was Prosper. It revolted the chasseur d'Afrique, the idea of killing a man that way, three against one, but when his brother arrived, accompanied by his faithful myrmidons, the disgust he felt for the villainous crew was lost in his detestation of the Prussians; sure he wasn't going to put himself out to save one of the dirty hounds, even if they did do him up in a way that was not according to rule; and he settled matters with his conscience by going to bed and burying his head under the blankets, that he might hear nothing that would tempt him to act in accordance with his soldierly instincts.

It lacked a quarter of seven, and Charlot seemed determined not to go to sleep. As a general thing his head declined upon the table the moment he had swallowed his last mouthful of soup.

"Come, my darling, go to sleep," said Silvine, who had taken him to Henriette's room; "mamma has put you in the nice lady's big bed."

But the child was excited by the novelty of the situation; he kicked and sprawled upon the bed, bubbling with laughter and animal spirits.

"No, no—stay, little mother—play, little mother."

She was very gentle and patient, caressing him tenderly and repeating:

"Go to sleep, my darling; shut your eyes and go to sleep, to please mamma."

And finally slumber overtook him, with a happy laugh upon his lips. She had not taken the trouble to undress him; she covered him warmly and left the room, and so soundly was he in the habit of sleeping that she did not even think it necessary to turn the key in the door.

Silvine had never known herself to be so calm, so clear and alert of mind. Her decision was prompt, her movements were light, as if she had parted company with her material frame and were acting under the domination of that other self, that inner being which she had never known till then. She had already let in Sambuc, with Cabasse and Ducat, enjoining upon them the exercise of the strictest caution, and now she conducted them to her bedroom and posted them on either side the window, which she threw open wide, notwithstanding the intense cold. The darkness was profound; barely a faint glimmer of light penetrated the room, reflected from the bosom of the snow without. A deathlike stillness lay on the deserted fields, the minutes lagged interminably. Then, when at last the deadened sound was heard of footsteps drawing near, Silvine withdrew and returned to the kitchen, where she seated herself and waited, motionless as a corpse, her great eyes fixed on the flickering flame of the solitary candle.

And the suspense was long protracted, Goliah prowling warily about the house before he would risk entering. He thought he could depend on the young woman, and had therefore come unarmed save for a single revolver in his belt, but he was haunted by a dim presentiment of evil; he pushed open the window to its entire extent and thrust his head into the apartment, calling below his breath:

"Silvine! Silvine!"

Since he found the window open to him it must be that she had thought better of the matter and changed her mind. It gave him great pleasure to have it so, although he would rather she had been there to welcome him and reassure his fears. Doubtless Father Fouchard had summoned her away; some odds and ends of work to finish up. He raised his voice a little:

"Silvine! Silvine!"

No answer, not a sound. And he threw his leg over the window-sill and entered the room, intending to get into bed and snuggle away among the blankets while waiting, it was so bitter cold.

All at once there was a furious rush, with the noise of trampling, shuffling feet, and smothered oaths and the sound of labored breathing. Sambuc and his two companions had thrown themselves on Goliah, and notwithstanding their superiority in numbers they found it no easy task to overpower the giant, to whom his peril lent tenfold strength. The panting of the combatants, the straining of sinews and cracking of joints, resounded for a moment in the obscurity. The revolver, fortunately, had fallen to the floor in the struggle. Cabasse's choking, inarticulate voice was heard exclaiming: "The cords, the cords!" and Ducat handed to Sambuc the coil of thin rope with which they had had the foresight to provide themselves. Scant ceremony was displayed in binding their hapless victim; the operation was conducted to the accompaniment of kicks and cuffs. The legs were secured first, then the arms were firmly pinioned to the sides, and finally they wound the cord at random many times around the Prussian's body, wherever his contortions would allow them to place it, with such an affluence of loops and knots that he had the appearance of being enmeshed in a gigantic net. To his unintermitting outcries Ducat's voice responded: "Shut your jaw!" and Cabasse silenced him more effectually by gagging him with an old blue handkerchief. Then, first waiting a moment to get their breath, they carried him, an inert mass, to the kitchen and deposited him upon the big table, beside the candle.

"Ah, the Prussian scum!" exclaimed Sambuc, wiping the sweat from his forehead, "he gave us trouble enough! Say, Silvine, light another candle, will you, so we can get a good view of the d——d pig and see what he looks like."

Silvine arose, her wide-dilated eyes shining bright from out her colorless face. She spoke no word, but lit another candle and came and placed it by Goliah's head on the side opposite the other; he produced the effect, thus brilliantly illuminated, of a corpse between two mortuary tapers. And in that brief moment their glances met; his was the wild, agonized look of the supplicant whom his fears have overmastered, but she affected not to understand, and withdrew to the sideboard, where she remained standing with her icy, unyielding air.

"The beast has nearly chewed my finger off," growled Cabasse, from whose hand blood was trickling. "I'm going to spoil his ugly mug for him."

He had taken the revolver from the floor and was holding it poised by the barrel in readiness to strike, when Sambuc disarmed him.

"No, no! none of that. We are not murderers, we francs-tireurs; we are judges. Do you hear, you dirty Prussian? we're going to try you; and you need have no fear, your rights shall be respected. We can't let you speak in your own defense, for if we should unmuzzle you you would split our ears with your bellowing, but I'll see that you have a lawyer presently, and a famous good one, too!"

He went and got three chairs and placed them in a row, forming what it pleased him to call the court, he sitting in the middle with one of his followers on either hand. When all three were seated he arose and commenced to speak, at first ironically aping the gravity of the magistrate, but soon launching into a tirade of blood-thirsty invective.

"I have the honor to be at the same time President of the Court and Public Prosecutor. That, I am aware, is not strictly in order, but there are not enough of us to fill all the roles. I accuse you, therefore, of entering France to play the spy on us, recompensing us for our hospitality with the most abominable treason. It is to you to whom we are principally indebted for our recent disasters, for after the battle of Nouart you guided the Bavarians across the wood of Dieulet by night to Beaumont. No one but a man who had lived a long time in the country and was acquainted with every path and cross-road could have done it, and on this point the conviction of the court is unalterable; you were seen conducting the enemy's artillery over roads that had become lakes of liquid mud, where eight horses had to be hitched to a single gun to drag it out of the slough. A person looking at those roads would hesitate to believe that an army corps could ever have passed over them. Had it not been for you and your criminal action in settling among us and betraying us the surprise of Beaumont would have never been, we should not have been compelled to retreat on Sedan, and perhaps in the end we might have come off victorious. I will say nothing of the disgusting career you have been pursuing since then, coming here in disguise, terrorizing and denouncing the poor country people, so that they tremble at the mention of your name. You have descended to a depth of depravity beyond which it is impossible to go, and I demand from the court sentence of death."

Silence prevailed in the room. He had resumed his seat, and finally, rising again, said:

"I assign Ducat to you as counsel for the defense. He has been sheriff's officer, and might have made his mark had it not been for his little weakness. You see that I deny you nothing; we are disposed to treat you well."

Goliah, who could not stir a finger, bent his eyes on his improvised defender. It was in his eyes alone that evidence of life remained, eyes that burned intensely with ardent supplication under the ashy brow, where the sweat of anguish stood in big drops, notwithstanding the cold.

Ducat arose and commenced his plea. "Gentlemen, my client, to tell the truth, is the most noisome blackguard that I ever came across in my life, and I should not have been willing to appear in his defense had I not a mitigating circumstance to plead, to wit: they are all that way in the country he came from. Look at him closely; you will read his astonishment in his eyes; he does not understand the gravity of his offense. Here in France we may employ spies, but no one would touch one of them unless with a pair of pincers, while in that country espionage is considered a highly honorable career and an extremely meritorious manner of serving the state. I will even go so far as to say, gentlemen, that possibly they are not wrong; our noble sentiments do us honor, but they have also the disadvantage of bringing us defeat. If I may venture to speak in the language of Cicero and Virgil, quos vult perdere Jupiter dementat. You will understand the allusion, gentlemen."

And he took his seat again, while Sambuc resumed:

"And you, Cabasse, have you nothing to say either for or against the defendant?"

"All I have to say," shouted the Provencal, "is that we are wasting a deal of breath in settling that scoundrel's hash. I've had my little troubles in my lifetime, and plenty of 'em, but I don't like to see people trifle with the affairs of the law; it's unlucky. Let him die, I say!"

Sambuc rose to his feet with an air of profound gravity.

"This you both declare to be your verdict, then—death?"

"Yes, yes! death!"

The chairs were pushed back, he advanced to the table where Goliah lay, saying:

"You have been tried and sentenced; you are to die."

The flame of the two candles rose about their unsnuffed wicks and flickered in the draught, casting a fitful, ghastly light on Goliah's distorted features. The fierce efforts he made to scream for mercy, to vociferate the words that were strangling him, were such that the handkerchief knotted across his mouth was drenched with spume, and it was a sight most horrible to see, that strong man reduced to silence, voiceless already as a corpse, about to die with that torrent of excuse and entreaty pent in his bosom.

Cabasse cocked the revolver. "Shall I let him have it?" he asked.

"No, no!" Sambuc shouted in reply; "he would be only too glad." And turning to Goliah: "You are not a soldier; you are not worthy of the honor of quitting the world with a bullet in your head. No, you shall die the death of a spy and the dirty pig that you are."

He looked over his shoulder and politely said:

"Silvine, if it's not troubling you too much, I would like to have a tub."

During the whole of the trial scene Silvine had not moved a muscle. She had stood in an attitude of waiting, with drawn, rigid features, as if mind and body had parted company, conscious of nothing but the one fixed idea that had possessed her for the last two days. And when she was asked for a tub she received the request as a matter of course and proceeded at once to comply with it, disappearing into the adjoining shed, whence she returned with the big tub in which she washed Charlot's linen.

"Hold on a minute! place it under the table, close to the edge."

She placed the vessel as directed, and as she rose to her feet her eyes again encountered Goliah's. In the look of the poor wretch was a supreme prayer for mercy, the revolt of the man who cannot bear the thought of being stricken down in the pride of his strength. But in that moment there was nothing of the woman left in her; nothing but the fierce desire for that death for which she had been waiting as a deliverance. She retreated again to the buffet, where she remained standing in silent expectation.

Sambuc opened the drawer of the table and took from it a large kitchen knife, the one that the household employed to slice their bacon.

"So, then, as you are a pig, I am going to stick you like a pig."

He proceeded in a very leisurely manner, discussing with Cabasse, and Ducat the proper method of conducting the operation. They even came near quarreling, because Cabasse alleged that in Provence, the country he came from, they hung pigs up by the heels to stick them, at which Ducat expressed great indignation, declaring that the method was a barbarous and inconvenient one.

"Bring him well forward to the edge of the table, his head over the tub, so as to avoid soiling the floor."

They drew him forward, and Sambuc went about his task in a tranquil, decent manner. With a single stroke of the keen knife he slit the throat crosswise from ear to ear, and immediately the blood from the severed carotid artery commenced to drip, drip into the tub with the gentle plashing of a fountain. He had taken care not to make the incision too deep; only a few drops spurted from the wound, impelled by the action of the heart. Death was the slower in coming for that, but no convulsion was to be seen, for the cords were strong and the body was utterly incapable of motion. There was no death-rattle, not a quiver of the frame. On the face alone was evidence of the supreme agony, on that terror-distorted mask whence the blood retreated drop by drop, leaving the skin colorless, with a whiteness like that of linen. The expression faded from the eyes; they became dim, the light died from out them.

"Say, Silvine, we shall want a sponge, too."

She made no reply, standing riveted to the floor in an attitude of unconsciousness, her arms folded tightly across her bosom, her throat constricted as by the clutch of a mailed hand, gazing on the horrible spectacle. Then all at once she perceived that Charlot was there, grasping her skirts with his little hands; he must have awaked and managed to open the intervening doors, and no one had seen him come stealing in, childlike, curious to know what was going on. How long had he been there, half-concealed behind his mother? From beneath his shock of yellow hair his big blue eyes were fixed on the trickling blood, the thin red stream that little by little was filling the tub. Perhaps he had not understood at first and had found something diverting in the sight, but suddenly he seemed to become instinctively aware of all the abomination of the thing; he gave utterance to a sharp, startled cry:

"Oh, mammy! oh, mammy! I'm 'fraid, take me away!"

It gave Silvine a shock, so violent that it convulsed her in every fiber of her being. It was the last straw; something seemed to give way in her, the excitement that had sustained her for the last two days while under the domination of her one fixed idea gave way to horror. It was the resurrection of the dormant woman in her; she burst into tears, and with a frenzied movement caught Charlot up and pressed him wildly to her heart. And she fled with him, running with distracted terror, unable to see or hear more, conscious of but one overmastering need, to find some secret spot, it mattered not where, in which she might cast herself upon the ground and seek oblivion.

It was at this crisis that Jean rose from his bed and, softly opening his door, looked out into the passage. Although he generally gave but small attention to the various noises that reached him from the farmhouse, the unusual activity that prevailed this evening, the trampling of feet, the shouts and cries, in the end excited his curiosity. And it was to the retirement of his sequestered chamber that Silvine, sobbing and disheveled, came for shelter, her form convulsed by such a storm of anguish that at first he could not grasp the meaning of the rambling, inarticulate words that fell from her blanched lips. She kept constantly repeating the same terrified gesture, as if to thrust from before her eyes some hideous, haunting vision. At last he understood, the entire abominable scene was pictured clearly to his mind: the traitorous ambush, the slaughter, the mother, her little one clinging to her skirts, watching unmoved the murdered father, whose life-blood was slowly ebbing; and it froze his marrow—the peasant and the soldier was sick at heart with anguished horror. Ah, hateful, cruel war! that changed all those poor folks to ravening wolves, bespattering the child with the father's blood! An accursed sowing, to end in a harvest of blood and tears!

Resting on the chair where she had fallen, covering with frantic kisses little Charlot, who clung, sobbing, to her bosom, Silvine repeated again and again the one unvarying phrase, the cry of her bleeding heart.

"Ah, my poor child, they will no more say you are a Prussian! Ah, my poor child, they will no more say you are a Prussian!"

Meantime Father Fouchard had returned and was in the kitchen. He had come hammering at the door with the authority of the master, and there was nothing left to do but open to him. The surprise he experienced was not exactly an agreeable one on beholding the dead man outstretched on his table and the blood-filled tub beneath. It followed naturally, his disposition not being of the mildest, that he was very angry.

"You pack of rascally slovens! say, couldn't you have gone outdoors to do your dirty work? Do you take my place for a shambles, eh? coming here and ruining the furniture with such goings-on?" Then, as Sambuc endeavored to mollify him and explain matters, the old fellow went on with a violence that was enhanced by his fears: "And what do you suppose I am to do with the carcass, pray? Do you consider it a gentlemanly thing to do, to come to a man's house like this and foist a stiff off on him without so much as saying by your leave? Suppose a patrol should come along, what a nice fix I should be in! but precious little you fellows care whether I get my neck stretched or not. Now listen: do you take that body at once and carry it away from here; if you don't, by G-d, you and I will have a settlement! You hear me; take it by the head, take it by the heels, take it any way you please, but get it out of here and don't let there be a hair of it remaining in this room at the end of three minutes from now!"

In the end Sambuc prevailed on Father Fouchard to let him have a sack, although it wrung the old miser's heartstrings to part with it. He selected one that was full of holes, remarking that anything was good enough for a Prussian. Cabasse and Ducat had all the trouble in the world to get Goliah into it; it was too short and too narrow for the long, broad body, and the feet protruded at its mouth. Then they carried their burden outside and placed it on the wheelbarrow that had served to convey to them their bread.

"You'll not be troubled with him any more, I give you my word of honor!" declared Sambuc. "We'll go and toss him into the Meuse."

"Be sure and fasten a couple of big stones to his feet," recommended Fouchard, "so the lubber shan't come up again."

And the little procession, dimly outlined against the white waste of snow, started and soon was buried in the blackness of the night, giving no sound save the faint, plaintive creaking of the barrow.

In after days Sambuc swore by all that was good and holy he had obeyed the old man's directions, but none the less the corpse came to the surface and was discovered two days afterward by the Prussians among the weeds at Pont-Maugis, and when they saw the manner of their countryman's murder, his throat slit like a pig, their wrath and fury knew no bounds. Their threats were terrible, and were accompanied by domiciliary visits and annoyances of every kind. Some of the villagers must have blabbed, for there came a party one night and arrested Father Fouchard and the Mayor of Remilly on the charge of giving aid and comfort to the francs-tireurs, who were manifestly the perpetrators of the crime. And Father Fouchard really came out very strong under those untoward circumstances, exhibiting all the impassability of a shrewd old peasant, who knew the value of silence and a tranquil demeanor. He went with his captors without the least sign of perturbation, without even asking them for an explanation. The truth would come out. In the country roundabout it was whispered that he had already made an enormous fortune from the Prussians, sacks and sacks of gold pieces, that he buried away somewhere, one by one, as he received them.

All these stories were a terrible source of alarm to Henriette when she came to hear of them. Jean, fearing he might endanger the safety of his hosts, was again eager to get away, although the doctor declared he was still too weak, and she, saddened by the prospect of their approaching separation, insisted on his delaying his departure for two weeks. At the time of Father Fouchard's arrest Jean had escaped a like fate by hiding in the barn, but he was liable to be taken and led away captive at any moment should there be further searches made. She was also anxious as to her uncle's fate, and so she resolved one morning to go to Sedan and see the Delaherches, who had, it was said, a Prussian officer of great influence quartered in their house.

"Silvine," she said, as she was about to start, "take good care of our patient; see he has his bouillon at noon and his medicine at four o'clock."

The maid of all work, ever busy with her daily recurring tasks, was again the submissive and courageous woman she had been of old; she had the care of the farm now, moreover, in the absence of the master, while little Charlot was constantly at her heels, frisking and gamboling around her.

"Have no fear, madame, he shall want for nothing. I am here and will look out for him."

VI.

Life had fallen back into something like its accustomed routine with the Delaherches at their house in the Rue Maqua after the terrible shock of the capitulation, and for nearly four months the long days had been slowly slipping by under the depressing influence of the Prussian occupation.

There was one corner, however, of the immense structure that was always closed, as if it had no occupant: it was the chamber that Colonel de Vineuil still continued to inhabit, at the extreme end of the suite where the master and his family spent their daily life. While the other windows were thrown open, affording evidence by sight and sound of the activity that prevailed within, those of that room were dark and lifeless, their blinds invariably drawn. The colonel had complained that the daylight hurt his eyes; no one knew whether or not this was strictly true, but a lamp was kept burning at his bedside day and night to humor him in his fancy. For two long months he had kept his bed, although Major Bouroche asserted there was nothing more serious than a contusion of the ankle and a fragment of bone chipped away; the wound refused to heal and complications of various kinds had ensued. He was able to get up now, but was in such a state of utter mental prostration, his mysterious ailment had taken such firm hold upon his system, that he was content to spend his days in idleness, stretched on a lounge before a great wood fire. He had wasted away until he was little more than a shadow, and still the physician who was attending him could find no lesion to account for that lingering death. He was slowly fading away, like the flame of a lamp in which the supply of oil is giving out.

Mme. Delaherche, the mother, had immured herself there with him on the day succeeding the occupation. No doubt they understood each other, and had expressed in two words, once for all, their common purpose to seclude themselves in that apartment so long as there should be Prussians quartered in the house. They had afforded compulsory hospitality to many of the enemy for various lengths of time; one, a Captain, M. Gartlauben, was there still, had taken up his abode with them permanently. But never since that first day had mention of those things passed the colonel's and the old lady's lips. Notwithstanding her seventy-eight years she was up every morning soon as it was day and came and took her position in the fauteuil that was awaiting her in the chimney nook opposite her old friend. There, by the steady, tranquil lamplight, she applied herself industriously to knitting socks for the children of the poor, while he, his eyes fixed on the crumbling brands, with no occupation for body or mind, was as one already dead, in a state of constantly increasing stupor. They certainly did not exchange twenty words in the course of a day; whenever she, who still continued to go about the house at intervals, involuntarily allowed some bit of news from the outer world to escape her lips, he silenced her with a gesture, so that no tidings of the siege of Paris, the disasters on the Loire and all the daily renewed horrors of the invasion had gained admission there. But the colonel might stop his ears and shut out the light of day as he would in his self-appointed tomb; the air he breathed must have brought him through key-hole and crevices intelligence of the calamity that was everywhere throughout the land, for every new day beheld him sinking, slowly dying, despite his determination not to know the evil news.

While matters were in this condition at one end of the house Delaherche, who was never contented unless occupied, was bustling about and making attempts to start up his business once more, but what with the disordered condition of the labor market and the pecuniary embarrassment of many among his customers, he had so far only put a few looms in motion. Then it occurred to him, as a means of killing the time that hung heavy on his hands, to make a complete inventory of his business and perfect certain changes and improvements that he had long had in mind. To assist him in his labors he had just then at his disposal a young man, the son of an old business acquaintance, who had drifted in on him after the battle. Edmond Lagarde, who, although he was twenty-three years old, would not have been taken for more than eighteen, had grown to man's estate in his father's little dry-goods shop at Passy; he was a sergeant in the 5th line regiment and had fought with great bravery throughout the campaign, so much so that he had been knocked over near the Minil gate about five o'clock, when the battle was virtually ended, his left arm shattered by one of the last shots fired that day, and Delaherche, when the other wounded were removed from the improvised ambulance in the drying room, had good-naturedly received him as an inmate of his house. It was under these circumstances that Edmond was now one of the family, having an apartment in the house and taking his meals at the common table, and, now that his wound was healed, acting as a sort of secretary to the manufacturer while waiting for a chance to get back to Paris. He had signed a parole binding himself not to attempt to leave the city, and owing to this and to his protector's influence the Prussian authorities did not interfere with him. He was fair, with blue eyes, and pretty as a woman; so timid withal that his face assumed a beautiful hue of rosy red whenever anyone spoke to him. He had been his mother's darling; she had impoverished herself, expending all the profits of their little business to send him to college. And he adored Paris and bewailed his compulsory absence from it when talking to Gilberte, did this wounded cherub, whom the young woman had displayed great good-fellowship in nursing.

Finally, their household had received another addition in the person of M. de Gartlauben, a captain in the German landwehr, whose regiment had been sent to Sedan to supply the place of troops dispatched to service in the field. He was a personage of importance, notwithstanding his comparatively modest rank, for he was nephew to the governor-general, who, from his headquarters at Rheims, exercised unlimited power over all the district. He, too, prided himself on having lived at Paris, and seized every occasion ostentatiously to show he was not ignorant of its pleasures and refinements; concealing beneath this film of varnish his inborn rusticity, he assumed as well as he was able the polish of one accustomed to good society. His tall, portly form was always tightly buttoned in a close-fitting uniform, and he lied outrageously about his age, never being able to bring himself to own up to his forty-five years. Had he had more intelligence he might have made himself an object of greater dread, but as it was his over-weening vanity, kept him in a continual state of satisfaction with himself, for never could such a thing have entered his mind as that anyone could dare to ridicule him.

At a subsequent period he rendered Delaherche services that were of inestimable value. But what days of terror and distress were those that followed upon the heels of the capitulation! the city, overrun with German soldiery, trembled in momentary dread of pillage and conflagration. Then the armies of the victors streamed away toward the valley of the Seine, leaving behind them only sufficient men to form a garrison, and the quiet that settled upon the place was that of a necropolis: the houses all closed, the shops shut, the streets deserted as soon as night closed in, the silence unbroken save for the hoarse cries and heavy tramp of the patrols. No letters or newspapers reached them from the outside world; Sedan was become a dungeon, where the immured citizens waited in agonized suspense for the tidings of disaster with which the air was instinct. To render their misery complete they were threatened with famine; the city awoke one morning from its slumbers to find itself destitute of bread and meat and the country roundabout stripped naked, as if a devouring swarm of locusts had passed that way, by the hundreds of thousands of men who for a week past had been pouring along its roads and across its fields in a devastating torrent. There were provisions only for two days, and the authorities were compelled to apply to Belgium for relief; all supplies now came from their neighbors across the frontier, whence the customs guards had disappeared, swept away like all else in the general cataclysm. Finally there were never-ending vexations and annoyances, a conflict that commenced to rage afresh each morning between the Prussian governor and his underlings, quartered at the Sous-Prefecture, and the Municipal Council, which was in permanent session at the Hotel de Ville. It was all in vain that the city fathers fought like heroes, discussing, objecting, protesting, contesting the ground inch by inch; the inhabitants had to succumb to the exactions that constantly became more burdensome, to the whims and unreasonableness of the stronger.

In the beginning Delaherche suffered great tribulation from the officers and soldiers who were billeted on him. It seemed as if representatives from every nationality on the face of the globe presented themselves at his door, pipe in mouth. Not a day passed but there came tumbling in upon the city two or three thousand men, horse, foot and dragoons, and although they were by rights entitled to nothing more than shelter and firing, it was often found expedient to send out in haste and get them provisions. The rooms they occupied were left in a shockingly filthy condition. It was not an infrequent occurrence that the officers came in drunk and made themselves even more obnoxious than their men. Such strict discipline was maintained, however, that instances of violence and marauding were rare; in all Sedan there were but two cases reported of outrages committed on women. It was not until a later period, when Paris displayed such stubbornness in her resistance, that, exasperated by the length to which the struggle was protracted, alarmed by the attitude of the provinces and fearing a general rising of the populace, the savage war which the francs-tireurs had inaugurated, they laid the full weight of their heavy hand upon the suffering people.

Delaherche had just had an experience with a lodger who had been quartered on him, a captain of cuirassiers, who made a practice of going to bed with his boots on and when he went away left his apartment in an unmentionably filthy condition, when in the last half of September Captain de Gartlauben came to his door one evening when it was raining in torrents. The first hour he was there did not promise well for the pleasantness of their future relations; he carried matters with a high hand, insisting that he should be given the best bedroom, trailing the scabbard of his sword noisily up the marble staircase; but encountering Gilberte in the corridor he drew in his horns, bowed politely, and passed stiffly on. He was courted with great obsequiousness, for everyone was well aware that a word from him to the colonel commanding the post of Sedan would suffice to mitigate a requisition or secure the release of a friend or relative. It was not very long since his uncle, the governor-general at Rheims, had promulgated a particularly detestable and cold-blooded order, proclaiming martial law and decreeing the penalty of death to whomsoever should give aid and comfort to the enemy, whether by acting for them as a spy, by leading astray German troops that had been entrusted to their guidance, by destroying bridges and artillery, or by damaging the railroads and telegraph lines. The enemy meant the French, of course, and the citizens scowled and involuntarily doubled their fists as they read the great white placard nailed against the door of post headquarters which attributed to them as a crime their best and most sacred aspirations. It was so hard, too, to have to receive their intelligence of German victories through the cheering of the garrison! Hardly a day passed over their heads that they were spared this bitter humiliation; the soldiers would light great fires and sit around them, feasting and drinking all night long, while the townspeople, who were not allowed to be in the streets after nine o'clock, listened to the tumult from the depths of their darkened houses, crazed with suspense, wondering what new catastrophe had befallen. It was on one of these occasions, somewhere about the middle of October, that M. de Gartlauben for the first time proved himself to be possessed of some delicacy of feeling. Sedan had been jubilant all that day with renewed hopes, for there was a rumor that the army of the Loire, then marching to the relief of Paris, had gained a great victory; but how many times before had the best of news been converted into tidings of disaster! and sure enough, early in the evening it became known for certain that the Bavarians had taken Orleans. Some soldiers had collected in a house across the way from the factory in the Rue Maqua, and were so boisterous in their rejoicings that the Captain, noticing Gilberte's annoyance, went and silenced them, remarking that he himself thought their uproar ill-timed.

Toward the close of the month M. de Gartlauben was in position to render some further trifling services. The Prussian authorities, in the course of sundry administrative reforms inaugurated by them, had appointed a German Sous-Prefect, and although this step did not put an end to the exactions to which the city was subjected, the new official showed himself to be comparatively reasonable. One of the most frequent among the causes of difference that were constantly springing up between the officers of the post and the municipal council was that which arose from the custom of requisitioning carriages for the use of the staff, and there was a great hullaballoo raised one morning that Delaherche failed to send his caleche and pair to the Sous-Prefecture: the mayor was arrested and the manufacturer would have gone to keep him company up in the citadel had it not been for M. de Gartlauben, who promptly quelled the rising storm. Another day he secured a stay of proceedings for the city, which had been mulcted in the sum of thirty thousand francs to punish it for its alleged dilatoriness in rebuilding the bridge of Villette, a bridge that the Prussians themselves had destroyed: a disastrous piece of business that was near being the ruin of Sedan. It was after the surrender at Metz, however, that Delaherche contracted his main debt of gratitude to his guest. The terrible news burst on the citizens like a thunderclap, dashing to the ground all their remaining hopes, and early in the ensuing week the streets again began to be encumbered with the countless hosts of the German forces, streaming down from the conquered fortress: the army of Prince Frederick Charles moving on the Loire, that of General Manteuffel, whose destination was Amiens and Rouen, and other corps on the march to reinforce the besiegers before Paris. For several days the houses were full to overflowing with soldiers, the butchers' and bakers' shops were swept clean, to the last bone, to the last crumb; the streets were pervaded by a greasy, tallowy odor, as after the passage of the great migratory bands of olden times. The buildings in the Rue Maqua, protected by a friendly influence, escaped the devastating irruption, and were only called on to give shelter to a few of the leaders, men of education and refinement.

Owing to these circumstances, Delaherche at last began to lay aside his frostiness of manner. As a general thing the bourgeois families shut themselves in their apartments and avoided all communication with the officers who were billeted on them; but to him, who was of a sociable nature and liked to extract from life what enjoyment it had to offer, this enforced sulkiness in the end became unbearable. His great, silent house, where the inmates lived apart from one another in a chill atmosphere of distrust and mutual dislike, damped his spirits terribly. He began by stopping M. de Gartlauben on the stairs one day to thank him for his favors, and thus by degrees it became a regular habit with the two men to exchange a few words when they met. The result was that one evening the Prussian captain found himself seated in his host's study before the fireplace where some great oak logs were blazing, smoking a cigar and amicably discussing the news of the day. For the first two weeks of their new intimacy Gilberte did not make her appearance in the room; he affected to ignore her existence, although, at every faintest sound, his glance would be directed expectantly upon the door of the connecting apartment. It seemed to be his object to keep his position as an enemy as much as possible in the background, trying to show he was not narrow-minded or a bigoted patriot, laughing and joking pleasantly over certain rather ridiculous requisitions. For example, a demand was made one day for a coffin and a shroud; that shroud and coffin afforded him no end of amusement. As regarded other things, such as coal, oil, milk, sugar, butter, bread, meat, to say nothing of clothing, stoves and lamps—all the necessaries of daily life, in a word—he shrugged his shoulders: mon Dieu! what would you have? No doubt it was vexatious; he was even willing to admit that their demands were excessive, but that was how it was in war times; they had to keep themselves alive in the enemy's country. Delaherche, who was very sore over these incessant requisitions, expressed his opinion of them with frankness, pulling them to pieces mercilessly at their nightly confabs, in much the same way as he might have criticised the cook's kitchen accounts. On only one occasion did their discussion become at all acrimonious, and that was in relation to the impost of a million francs that the Prussian prefet at Rethel had levied on the department of the Ardennes, the alleged pretense of which was to indemnify Germany for damages caused by French ships of war and by the expulsion of Germans domiciled in French territory. Sedan's proportionate share of the assessment was forty-two thousand francs. And he labored strenuously with his visitor to convince him of the iniquity of the imposition; the city was differently circumstanced from the other towns, it had had more than its share of affliction, and should not be burdened with that new exaction. The pair always came out of their discussions better friends than when they went in; one delighted to have had an opportunity of hearing himself talk, the other pleased with himself for having displayed a truly Parisian urbanity.

One evening Gilberte came into the room, with her air of thoughtless gayety. She paused at the threshold, affecting embarrassment. M. de Gartlauben rose, and with much tact presently withdrew, but on repeating his visit the following evening and finding Gilberte there again, he settled himself in his usual seat in the chimney-corner. It was the commencement of a succession of delightful evenings that they passed together in the study of the master of the house, not in the drawing-room—wherein lay a nice distinction. And at a later period when, yielding to their guest's entreaties, the young woman consented to play for him, she did not invite him to the salon, but entered the room alone, leaving the communicating door open. In those bitter winter evenings the old oaks of the Ardennes gave out a grateful warmth from the depths of the great cavernous fireplace; there was a cup of fragrant tea for them about ten o'clock; they laughed and chatted in the comfortable, bright room. And it did not require extra powers of vision to see that M. de Gartlauben was rapidly falling head over ears in love with that sprightly young woman, who flirted with him as audaciously as she had flirted in former days at Charleville with Captain Beaudoin's friends. He began to pay increased attention to his person, displayed a gallantry that verged on the fantastic, was raised to the pinnacle of bliss by the most trifling favor, tormented by the one ever-present anxiety not to appear a barbarian in her eyes, a rude soldier who did not know the ways of women.

And thus it was that in the big, gloomy house in the Rue Maqua a twofold life went on. While at meal-times Edmond, the wounded cherub with the pretty face, lent a listening ear to Delaherche's unceasing chatter, blushing if ever Gilberte asked him to pass her the salt, while at evening M. de Gartlauben, seated in the study, with eyes upturned in silent ecstasy, listened to a sonata by Mozart performed for his benefit by the young woman in the adjoining drawing-room, a stillness as of death continued to pervade the apartment where Colonel de Vineuil and Madame Delaherche spent their days, the blinds tight drawn, the lamp continually burning, like a votive candle illuminating a tomb. December had come and wrapped the city in a winding-sheet of snow; the cruel news seemed all the bitterer for the piercing cold. After General Ducrot's repulse at Champigny, after the loss of Orleans, there was left but one dark, sullen hope: that the soil of France might avenge their defeat, exterminate and swallow up the victors. Let the snow fall thicker and thicker still, let the earth's crust crack and open under the biting frost, that in it the entire German nation might find a grave! And there came another sorrow to wring poor Madame Delaherche's heart. One night when her son was from home, having been suddenly called away to Belgium on business, chancing to pass Gilberte's door she heard within a low murmur of voices and smothered laughter. Disgusted and sick at heart she returned to her own room, where her horror of the abominable thing she suspected the existence of would not let her sleep: it could have been none other but the Prussian whose voice she heard; she had thought she had noticed glances of intelligence passing; she was prostrated by this supreme disgrace. Ah, that woman, that abandoned woman, whom her son had insisted on bringing to the house despite her commands and prayers, whom she had forgiven, by her silence, after Captain Beaudoin's death! And now the thing was repeated, and this time the infamy was even worse. What was she to do? Such an enormity must not go unpunished beneath her roof. Her mind was torn by the conflict that raged there, in her uncertainty as to the course she should pursue. The colonel, desiring to know nothing of what occurred outside his room, always checked her with a gesture when he thought she was about to give him any piece of news, and she had said nothing to him of the matter that had caused her such suffering; but on those days when she came to him with tears standing in her eyes and sat for hours in mournful silence, he would look at her and say to himself that France had sustained yet another defeat.

This was the condition of affairs in the house in the Rue Maqua when Henriette dropped in there one morning to endeavor to secure Delaherche's influence in favor of Father Fouchard. She had heard people speak, smiling significantly as they did so, of the servitude to which Gilberte had reduced Captain de Gartlauben; she was, therefore, somewhat embarrassed when she encountered old Madame Delaherche, to whom she thought it her duty to explain the object of her visit, ascending the great staircase on her way to the colonel's apartment.

"Dear madame, it would be so kind of you to assist us! My uncle is in great danger; they talk of sending him away to Germany."

The old lady, although she had a sincere affection for Henriette, could scarce conceal her anger as she replied:

"I am powerless to help you, my child; you should not apply to me." And she continued, notwithstanding the agitation on the other's face: "You have selected an unfortunate moment for your visit; my son has to go to Belgium to-night. Besides, he could not have helped you; he has no more influence than I have. Go to my daughter-in-law; she is all powerful."

And she passed on toward the colonel's room, leaving Henriette distressed to have unwittingly involved herself in a family drama. Within the last twenty-four hours Madame Delaherche had made up her mind to lay the whole matter before her son before his departure for Belgium, whither he was going to negotiate a large purchase of coal to enable him to put some of his idle looms in motion. She could not endure the thought that the abominable thing should be repeated beneath her eyes while he was absent, and was only waiting to make sure he would not defer his departure until some other day, as he had been doing all the past week. It was a terrible thing to contemplate: the wreck of her son's happiness, the Prussian disgraced and driven from their doors, the wife, too, thrust forth upon the street and her name ignominiously placarded on the walls, as had been threatened would be done with any woman who should dishonor herself with a German.

Gilberte gave a little scream of delight on beholding Henriette.

"Ah, how glad I am to see you! It seems an age since we met, and one grows old so fast in the midst of all these horrors!" Thus running on she dragged her friend to her bedroom, where she seated her on the lounge and snuggled down close beside her. "Come, take off your things; you must stay and breakfast with us. But first we'll talk a bit; you must have such lots and lots of things to tell me! I know that you are without news of your brother. Ah, that poor Maurice, how I pity him, shut up in Paris, with no gas, no wood, no bread, perhaps! And that young man whom you have been nursing, that friend of your brother's—oh! a little bird has told me all about it—isn't it for his sake you are here to-day?"

Henriette's conscience smote her, and she did not answer. Was it not really for Jean's sake that she had come, in order that, the old uncle being released, the invalid, who had grown so dear to her, might have no further cause for alarm? It distressed her to hear his name mentioned by Gilberte; she could not endure the thought of enlisting in his favor an influence that was of so ambiguous a character. Her inbred scruples of a pure, honest woman made themselves felt, now it seemed to her that the rumors of a liaison with the Prussian captain had some foundation.

"Then I'm to understand that it's in behalf of this young man that you come to us for assistance?" Gilberte insistently went on, as if enjoying her friend's discomfiture. And as the latter, cornered and unable to maintain silence longer, finally spoke of Father Fouchard's arrest: "Why, to be sure! What a silly thing I am—and I was talking of it only this morning! You did well in coming to us, my dear; we must go about your uncle's affair at once and see what we can do for him, for the last news I had was not reassuring. They are on the lookout for someone of whom to make an example."

"Yes, I have had you in mind all along," Henriette hesitatingly replied. "I thought you might be willing to assist me with your advice, perhaps with something more substantial—"

The young woman laughed merrily. "You little goose, I'll have your uncle released inside three days. Don't you know that I have a Prussian captain here in the house who stands ready to obey my every order? Understand, he can refuse me nothing!" And she laughed more heartily than ever, in the giddy, thoughtless triumph of her coquettish nature, holding in her own and patting the hands of her friend, who was so uncomfortable that she could not find words in which to express her thanks, horrified by the avowal that was implied in what she had just heard. But how to account for such serenity, such childlike gayety? "Leave it to me; I'll send you home to-night with a mind at rest."

When they passed into the dining room Henriette was struck by Edmond's delicate beauty, never having seen him before. She eyed him with the pleasure she would have felt in looking at a pretty toy. Could it be possible that that boy had served in the army? and how could they have been so cruel as to break his arm? The story of his gallantry in the field made him even more interesting still, and Delaherche, who had received Henriette with the cordiality of a man to whom the sight of a new face is a godsend, while the servants were handing round the cutlets and the potatoes cooked in their jackets, never seemed to tire of eulogizing his secretary, who was as industrious and well behaved as he was handsome. They made a very pleasant and homelike picture, the four, thus seated around the bright table in the snug, warm dining room.

"So you want us to interest ourselves in Father Fouchard's case, and it's to that we owe the pleasure of your visit, eh?" said the manufacturer. "I'm extremely sorry that I have to go away to-night, but my wife will set things straight for you in a jiffy; there's no resisting her, she has only to ask for a thing to get it." He laughed as he concluded his speech, which was uttered in perfect simplicity of soul, evidently pleased and flattered that his wife possessed such influence, in which he shone with a kind of reflected glory. Then turning suddenly to her: "By the way, my dear, has Edmond told you of his great discovery?"

"No; what discovery?" asked Gilberte, turning her pretty caressing eyes full on the young sergeant.

The cherub blushed whenever a woman looked at him in that way, as if the exquisiteness of his sensations was too much for him. "It's nothing, madame; only a bit of old lace; I heard you saying the other day you wanted some to put on your mauve peignoir. I happened yesterday to come across five yards of old Bruges point, something really handsome and very cheap. The woman will be here presently to show it to you."

She could have kissed him, so delighted was she. "Oh, how nice of you! You shall have your reward."

Then, while a terrine of foie-gras, purchased in Belgium, was being served, the conversation took another turn; dwelling for an instant on the quantities of fish that were dying of poison in the Meuse, and finally coming around to the subject of the pestilence that menaced Sedan when there should be a thaw. Even as early as November, there had been several cases of disease of an epidemic character. Six thousand francs had been expended after the battle in cleansing the city and collecting and burning clothing, knapsacks, haversacks, all the debris that was capable of harboring infection; but, for all that, the surrounding fields continued to exhale sickening odors whenever there came a day or two of warmer weather, so replete were they with half-buried corpses, covered only with a few inches of loose earth. In every direction the ground was dotted with graves; the soil cracked and split in obedience to the forces acting beneath its surface, and from the fissures thus formed the gases of putrefaction issued to poison the living. In those more recent days, moreover, another center of contamination had been discovered, the Meuse, although there had already been removed from it the bodies of more than twelve hundred dead horses. It was generally believed that there were no more human remains left in the stream, until, one day, a garde champetre, looking attentively down into the water where it was some six feet deep, discovered some objects glimmering at the bottom, that at first he took for stones; but they proved to be corpses of men, that had been mutilated in such a manner as to prevent the gas from accumulating in the cavities of the body and hence had been kept from rising to the surface. For near four months they had been lying there in the water among the eel-grass. When grappled for the irons brought them up in fragments, a head, an arm, or a leg at a time; at times the force of the current would suffice to detach a hand or foot and send it rolling down the stream. Great bubbles of gas rose to the surface and burst, still further empoisoning the air.

"We shall get along well enough as long as the cold weather lasts," remarked Delaherche, "but as soon as the snow is off the ground we shall have to go to work in earnest to abate the nuisance; if we don't we shall be wanting graves for ourselves." And when his wife laughingly asked him if he could not find some more agreeable subject to talk about at the table, he concluded by saying: "Well, it will be a long time before any of us will care to eat any fish out of the Meuse."

They had finished their repast, and the coffee was being poured, when the maid came to the door and announced that M. de Gartlauben presented his compliments and wanted to know if he might be allowed to see them for a moment. There was a slight flutter of excitement, for it was the first time he had ever presented himself at that hour of the day. Delaherche, seeing in the circumstance a favorable opportunity for presenting Henriette to him, gave orders that he should be introduced at once. The doughty captain, when he beheld another young woman in the room, surpassed himself in politeness, even accepting a cup of coffee, which he took without sugar, as he had seen many people do at Paris. He had only asked to be received at that unusual hour, he said, that he might tell Madame he had succeeded in obtaining the pardon of one of her proteges, a poor operative in the factory who had been arrested on account of a squabble with a Prussian. And Gilberte thereon seized the opportunity to mention Father Fouchard's case.

"Captain, I wish to make you acquainted with one of my dearest friends, who desires to place herself under your protection. She is the niece of the farmer who was arrested lately at Remilly, as you are aware, for being mixed up with that business of the francs-tireurs."

"Yes, yes, I know; the affair of the spy, the poor fellow who was found in a sack with his throat cut. It's a bad business, a very bad business. I am afraid I shall not be able to do anything."

"Oh, Captain, don't say that! I should consider it such a favor!"

There was a caress in the look she cast on him, while he beamed with satisfaction, bowing his head in gallant obedience. Her wish was his law!

"You would have all my gratitude, sir," faintly murmured Henriette, to whose memory suddenly rose the image of her husband, her dear Weiss, slaughtered down yonder at Bazeilles, filling her with invincible repugnance.

Edmond, who had discreetly taken himself off on the arrival of the captain, now reappeared and whispered something in Gilberte's ear. She rose quickly from the table, and, announcing to the company that she was going to inspect her lace, excused herself and followed the young man from the room. Henriette, thus left alone with the two men, went and took a seat by herself in the embrasure of a window, while they remained seated at the table and went on talking in a loud tone.

"Captain, you'll have a petit verre with me. You see I don't stand on ceremony with you; I say whatever comes into my head, because I know you to be a fair-minded man. Now I tell you your prefet is all wrong in trying to extort those forty-two thousand francs from the city. Just think once of all our losses since the beginning of the war. In the first place, before the battle, we had the entire French army on our hands, a set of ragged, hungry, exhausted men; and then along came your rascals, and their appetites were not so very poor, either. The passage of those troops through the place, what with requisitions, repairing damages and expenses of all sorts, stood us in a million and a half. Add as much more for the destruction caused by your artillery and by conflagration during the battle; there you have three millions. Finally, I am well within bounds in estimating the loss sustained by our trade and manufactures at two millions. What do you say to that, eh? A grand total of five million francs for a city of thirteen thousand inhabitants! And now you come and ask us for forty-two thousand more as a contribution to the expense of carrying on the war against us! Is it fair, is it reasonable? I leave it to your own sense of justice."

M. de Gartlauben nodded his head with an air of profundity, and made answer:

"What can you expect? It is the fortune of war, the fortune of war."

To Henriette, seated in her window seat, her ears ringing, and vague, sad images of every sort fleeting through her brain, the time seemed to pass with mortal slowness, while Delaherche asserted on his word of honor that Sedan could never have weathered the crisis produced by the exportation of all their specie had it not been for the wisdom of the local magnates in emitting an issue of paper money, a step that had saved the city from financial ruin.

"Captain, will you have just a drop of cognac more?" and he skipped to another topic. "It was not France that started the war; it was the Emperor. Ah, I was greatly deceived in the Emperor. He need never expect to sit on the throne again; we would see the country dismembered first. Look here! there was just one man in this country last July who saw things as they were, and that was M. Thiers; and his action at the present time in visiting the different capitals of Europe is most wise and patriotic. He has the best wishes of every good citizen; may he be successful!"

He expressed the conclusion of his idea by a gesture, for he would have considered it improper to speak of his desire for peace before a Prussian, no matter how friendly he might be, although the desire burned fiercely in his bosom, as it did in that of every member of the old conservative bourgeoisie who had favored the plebiscite. Their men and money were exhausted, it was time for them to throw up the sponge; and a deep-seated feeling of hatred toward Paris, for the obstinacy with which it held out, prevailed in all the provinces that were in possession of the enemy. He concluded in a lower tone, his allusion being to Gambetta's inflammatory proclamations:

"No, no, we cannot give our suffrages to fools and madmen. The course they advocate would end in general massacre. I, for my part, am for M. Thiers, who would submit the questions at issue to the popular vote, and as for their Republic, great heavens! let them have it if they want it, while waiting for something better; it don't trouble me in the slightest."

Captain de Gartlauben continued to nod his head very politely with an approving air, murmuring:

"To be sure, to be sure—"

Henriette, whose feeling of distress had been increasing, could stand their talk no longer. She could assign no definite reason for the sensation of inquietude that possessed her; it was only a longing to get away, and she rose and left the room quietly in quest of Gilberte, whose absence had been so long protracted. On entering the bedroom, however, she was greatly surprised to find her friend stretched on the lounge, weeping bitterly and manifestly suffering from some extremely painful emotion.

"Why, what is the matter? What has happened you?"

The young woman's tears flowed faster still and she would not speak, manifesting a confusion that sent every drop of blood coursing from her heart up to her face. At last, throwing herself into the arms that were opened to receive her and concealing her face in the other's bosom, she stammered:

"Oh, darling if you but knew. I shall never dare to tell you—and yet I have no one but you, you alone perhaps can tell me what is best to do." A shiver passed through her frame, her voice was scarcely audible. "I was with Edmond—and then—and then Madame Delaherche came into the room and caught me—"

"Caught you! What do you mean?"

"Yes, we were here in the room; he was holding me in his arms and kissing me—" And clasping Henriette convulsively in her trembling arms she told her all. "Oh, my darling, don't judge me severely; I could not bear it! I know I promised you it should never happen again, but you have seen Edmond, you know how brave he is, how handsome! And think once of the poor young man, wounded, ill, with no one to give him a mother's care! And then he has never had the enjoyments that wealth affords; his family have pinched themselves to give him an education. I could not be harsh with him."

Henriette listened, the picture of surprise; she could not recover from her amazement. "What! you don't mean to say it was the little sergeant! Why, my dear, everyone believes the Prussian to be your lover!"

Gilberte straightened herself up with an indignant air, and dried her eyes. "The Prussian my lover? No, thank you! He's detestable; I can't endure him. I wonder what they take me for? What have I ever done that they should suppose I could be guilty of such baseness? No, never! I would rather die than do such a thing!" In the earnestness of her protestations her beauty had assumed an angry and more lofty cast that made her look other than she was. And all at once, sudden as a flash, her coquettish gayety, her thoughtless levity, came back to her face, accompanied by a peal of silvery laughter. "I won't deny that I amuse myself at his expense. He adores me, and I have only to give him a look to make him obey. You have no idea what fun it is to bamboozle that great big man, who seems to think he will have his reward some day."

"But that is a very dangerous game you're playing," Henriette gravely said.

"Oh, do you think so? What risk do I incur? When he comes to see he has nothing to expect he can't do more than be angry with me and go away. But he will never see it! You don't know the man; I read him like a book from the very start: he is one of those men with whom a woman can do what she pleases and incur no danger. I have an instinct that guides me in these matters and which has never deceived me. He is too consumed by vanity; no human consideration will ever drive it into his head that by any possibility a woman could get the better of him. And all he will get from me will be permission to carry away my remembrance, with the consoling thought that he has done the proper thing and behaved himself like a gallant man who has long been an inhabitant of Paris." And with her air of triumphant gayety she added: "But before he leaves he shall cause Uncle Fouchard to be set at liberty, and all his recompense for his trouble shall be a cup of tea sweetened by these fingers."

But suddenly her fears returned to her: she remembered what must be the terrible consequences of her indiscretion, and her eyes were again bedewed with tears.

"Mon Dieu! and Madame Delaherche—how will it all end? She bears me no love; she is capable of telling the whole story to my husband."

Henriette had recovered her composure. She dried her friend's eyes, and made her rise from the lounge and arrange her disordered clothing.

"Listen, my dear; I cannot bring myself to scold you, and yet you know what my sentiments must be. But I was so alarmed by the stories I heard about the Prussian, the business wore such an extremely ugly aspect, that this affair really comes to me as a sort of relief by comparison. Cease weeping; things may come out all right."

Her action was taken none too soon, for almost immediately Delaherche and his mother entered the room. He said that he had made up his mind to take the train for Brussels that afternoon and had been giving orders to have a carriage ready to carry him across the frontier into Belgium; so he had come to say good-by to his wife. Then turning and addressing Henriette:

"You need have no further fears. M. de Gartlauben, just is he was going away, promised me he would attend to your uncle's case, and although I shall not be here, my wife will keep an eye to it."

Since Madame Delaherche had made her appearance in the apartment Gilberte had not once taken her anxious eyes from off her face. Would she speak, would she tell what she had seen, and keep her son from starting on his projected journey? The elder lady, also, soon as she crossed the threshold, had bent her fixed gaze in silence on her daughter-in-law. Doubtless her stern patriotism induced her to view the matter in somewhat the same light that Henriette had viewed it. Mon Dieu! since it was that young man, that Frenchman who had fought so bravely, was it not her duty to forgive, even as she had forgiven once before, in Captain Beaudoin's case? A look of greater softness rose to her eyes; she averted her head. Her son might go; Edmond would be there to protect Gilberte against the Prussian. She even smiled faintly, she whose grim face had never once relaxed since the news of the victory at Coulmiers.

"Au revoir," she said, folding her son in her arms. "Finish up your business quickly as you can and come back to us."

And she took herself slowly away, returning to the prison-like chamber across the corridor, where the colonel, with his dull gaze, was peering into the shadows that lay outside the disk of bright light which fell from the lamp.

Henriette returned to Remilly that same evening, and one morning, three days afterward, had the pleasure to see Father Fouchard come walking into the house, as calmly as if he had merely stepped out to transact some business in the neighborhood. He took a seat by the table and refreshed himself with some bread and cheese, and to all the questions that were put to him replied with cool deliberation, like a man who had never seen anything to alarm him in his situation. What reason had he to be afraid? He had done nothing wrong; it was not he who had killed the Prussian, was it? So he had just said to the authorities: "Investigate the matter; I know nothing about it." And they could do nothing but release him, and the mayor as well, seeing they had no proofs against them. But the eyes of the crafty, sly old peasant gleamed with delight at the thought of how nicely he had pulled the wool over the eyes of those dirty blackguards, who were beginning to higgle with him over the quality of the meat he furnished to them.

December was drawing near its end, and Jean insisted on going away. His leg was quite strong again, and the doctor announced that he was fit to go and join the army. This was to Henriette a subject of profoundest sorrow, which she kept locked in her bosom as well as she was able. No tidings from Paris had reached them since the disastrous battle of Champigny; all they knew was that Maurice's regiment had been exposed to a murderous fire and had suffered severely. Ever that deep, unbroken silence; no letter, never the briefest line for them, when they knew that families in Raucourt and Sedan were receiving intelligence of their loved ones by circuitous ways. Perhaps the pigeon that was bringing them the so eagerly wished-for news had fallen a victim to some hungry bird of prey, perhaps the bullet of a Prussian had brought it to the ground at the margin of a wood. But the fear that haunted them most of all was that Maurice was dead; the silence of the great city off yonder in the distance, uttering no cry in the mortal hug of the investment, was become to them in their agonized suspense the silence of death. They had abandoned all hope of tidings, and when Jean declared his settled purpose to be gone, Henriette only gave utterance to this stifled cry of despair:

"My God! then all is ended, and I am to be left alone!"

It was Jean's desire to go and serve with the Army of the North, which had recently been re-formed under General Faidherbe. Now that General Manteuffel's corps had moved forward to Dieppe there were three departments, cut off from the rest of France, that this army had to defend, le Nord, le Pas-de-Calais, and la Somme, and Jean's plan, not a difficult one to carry into execution, was simply to make for Bouillon and thence complete his journey across Belgian territory. He knew that the 23d corps was being recruited, mainly from such old soldiers of Sedan and Metz as could be gathered to the standards. He had heard it reported that General Faidherbe was about to take the field, and had definitely appointed the next ensuing Sunday as the day of his departure, when news reached him of the battle of Pont-Noyelle, that drawn battle which came so near being a victory for the French.

It was Dr. Dalichamp again in this instance who offered the services of his gig and himself as driver to Bouillon. The good man's courage and kindness were boundless. At Raucourt, where typhus was raging, communicated by the Bavarians, there was not a house where he had not one or more patients, and this labor was additional to his regular attendance at the two hospitals at Raucourt and Remilly. His ardent patriotism, the impulse that prompted him to protest against unnecessary barbarity, had twice led to his being arrested by the Prussians, only to be released on each occasion. He gave a little laugh of satisfaction, therefore, the morning he came with his vehicle to take up Jean, pleased to be the instrument of assisting the escape of another of the victims of Sedan, those poor, brave fellows, as he called them, to whom he gave his professional services and whom he aided with his purse. Jean, who knew of Henriette's straitened circumstances and had been suffering from lack of funds since his relapse, accepted gratefully the fifty francs that the doctor offered him for traveling expenses.

Father Fouchard did things handsomely at the leave-taking, sending Silvine to the cellar for two bottles of wine and insisting that everyone should drink a glass to the extermination of the Germans. He was a man of importance in the country nowadays and had his "plum" hidden away somewhere or other; he could sleep in peace now that the francs-tireurs had disappeared, driven like wild beasts from their lair, and his sole wish was for a speedy conclusion of the war. He had even gone so far in one of his generous fits as to pay Prosper his wages in order to retain his services on the farm, which the young man had no thought of leaving. He touched glasses with Prosper, and also with Silvine, whom he at times was half inclined to marry, knowing what a treasure he had in his faithful, hard-working little servant; but what was the use? he knew she would never leave him, that she would still be there when Charlot should be grown and go in turn to serve his country as a soldier. And touching his glass to Henriette's, Jean's, and the doctor's, he exclaimed:

"Here's to the health of you all! May you all prosper and be no worse off than I am!"

Henriette would not let Jean go away without accompanying him as far as Sedan. He was in citizen's dress, wearing a frock coat and derby hat that the doctor had loaned him. The day was piercingly cold; the sun's rays were reflected from a crust of glittering snow. Their intention had been to pass through the city without stopping, but when Jean learned that his old colonel was still at the Delaherches' he felt an irresistible desire to go and pay his respects to him, and at the same time thank the manufacturer for his many kindnesses. His visit was destined to bring him an additional, a final sorrow, in that city of mournful memories. On reaching the structure in the Rue Maqua they found the household in a condition of the greatest distress and disorder, Gilberte wringing her hands, Madame Delaherche weeping great silent tears, while her son, who had come in from the factory, where work was gradually being resumed, uttered exclamations of surprise. The colonel had just been discovered, stone dead, lying exactly as he had fallen, in a heap on the floor of his chamber. The physician, who was summoned with all haste, could assign no cause for the sudden death; there was no indication of paralysis or heart trouble. The colonel had been stricken down, and no one could tell from what quarter the blow came; but the following morning, when the room was thrown open, a piece of an old newspaper was found, lying on the carpet, that had been wrapped around a book and contained the account of the surrender of Metz.

"My, dear," said Gilberte to Henriette, "as Captain de Gartlauben was coming downstairs just now he removed his hat as he passed the door of the room where my uncle's body is lying. Edmond saw it; he's an extremely well-bred man, don't you think so?"

In all their intimacy Jean had never yet kissed Henriette. Before resuming his seat in the gig with the doctor he endeavored to thank her for all her devoted kindness, for having nursed and loved him as a brother, but somehow the words would not come at his command; he opened his arms and, with a great sob, clasped her in a long embrace, and she, beside herself with the grief of parting, returned his kiss. Then the horse started, he turned about in his seat, there was a waving of hands, while again and again two sorrowful voices repeated in choking accents:

"Farewell! Farewell!"

On her return to Remilly that evening Henriette reported for duty at the hospital. During the silent watches of the night she was visited by another convulsive attack of sobbing, and wept, wept as if her tears would never cease to flow, clasping her hands before her as if between them to strangle her bitter sorrow.

VII.

On the day succeeding the battle of Sedan the mighty hosts of the two German armies, without the delay of a moment, commenced their march on Paris, the army of the Meuse coming in by the north through the valley of the Marne, while the third army, passing the Seine at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, turned the city to the south and moved on Versailles; and when, on that bright, warm September morning, General Ducrot, to whom had been assigned the command of the as yet incomplete 14th corps, determined to attack the latter force while it was marching by the flank, Maurice's new regiment, the 115th, encamped in the woods to the left of Meudon, did not receive its orders to advance until the day was lost. A few shells from the enemy sufficed to do the work; the panic started with a regiment of zouaves made up of raw recruits, and quickly spreading to the other troops, all were swept away in a headlong rout that never ceased until they were safe behind the walls of Paris, where the utmost consternation prevailed. Every position in advance of the southern line of fortifications was lost, and that evening the wires of the Western Railway telegraph, the city's sole remaining means of communicating with the rest of France, were cut. Paris was cut off from the world.

The condition of their affairs caused Maurice a terrible dejection. Had the Germans been more enterprising they might have pitched their tents that night in the Place du Carrousel, but with the prudence of their race they had determined that the siege should be conducted according to rule and precept, and had already fixed upon the exact lines of investment, the position of the army of the Meuse being at the north, stretching from Croissy to the Marne, through Epinay, the cordon of the third army at the south, from Chennevieres to Chatillon and Bougival, while general headquarters, with King William, Bismarck, and General von Moltke, were established at Versailles. The gigantic blockade, that no one believed could be successfully completed, was an accomplished fact; the city, with its girdle of fortifications eight leagues and a half in length, embracing fifteen forts and six detached redoubts, was henceforth to be transformed into a huge prison-pen. And the army of the defenders comprised only the 13th corps, commanded by General Vinoy, and the 14th, then in process of reconstruction under General Ducrot, the two aggregating an effective strength of eighty thousand men; to which were to be added fourteen thousand sailors, fifteen thousand of the francs corps, and a hundred and fifteen thousand mobiles, not to mention the three hundred thousand National Guards distributed among the sectional divisions of the ramparts. If this seems like a large force it must be remembered that there were few seasoned and trained soldiers among its numbers. Men were constantly being drilled and equipped; Paris was a great intrenched camp. The preparations for the defense went on from hour to hour with feverish haste; roads were built, houses demolished within the military zone; the two hundred siege guns and the twenty-five hundred pieces of lesser caliber were mounted in position, other guns were cast; an arsenal, complete in every detail, seemed to spring from the earth under the tireless efforts of Dorian, the patriotic war minister. When, after the rupture of the negotiations at Ferrieres, Jules Favre acquainted the country with M. von Bismarck's demands—the cession of Alsace, the garrison of Strasbourg to be surrendered, three milliards of indemnity—a cry of rage went up and the continuation of the war was demanded by acclaim as a condition indispensable to the country's existence. Even with no hope of victory Paris must defend herself in order that France might live.

On a Sunday toward the end of September Maurice was detailed to carry a message to the further end of the city, and what he witnessed along the streets he passed through filled him with new hope. Ever since the defeat of Chatillon it had seemed to him that the courage of the people was rising to a level with the great task that lay before them. Ah! that Paris that he had known so thoughtless, so wayward, so keen in the pursuit of pleasure; he found it now quite changed, simple, earnest, cheerfully brave, ready for every sacrifice. Everyone was in uniform; there was scarce a head that was not decorated with the kepi of the National Guard. Business of every sort had come to a sudden standstill, as the hands of a watch cease to move when the mainspring snaps, and at the public meetings, among the soldiers in the guard-room, or where the crowds collected in the streets, there was but one subject of conversation, inflaming the hearts and minds of all—the determination to conquer. The contagious influence of illusion, scattered broadcast, unbalanced weaker minds; the people were tempted to acts of generous folly by the tension to which they were subjected. Already there was a taint of morbid, nervous excitability in the air, a feverish condition in which men's hopes and fears alike became distorted and exaggerated, arousing the worst passions of humanity at the slightest breath of suspicion. And Maurice was witness to a scene in the Rue des Martyrs that produced a profound impression on him, the assault made by a band of infuriated men on a house from which, at one of the upper windows, a bright light had been displayed all through the night, a signal, evidently, intended to reach the Prussians at Bellevue over the roofs of Paris. There were jealous citizens who spent all their nights on their house-tops, watching what was going on around them. The day before a poor wretch had had a narrow escape from drowning at the hands of the mob, merely because he had opened a map of the city on a bench in the Tuileries gardens and consulted it.

And that epidemic of suspicion Maurice, who had always hitherto been so liberal and fair-minded, now began to feel the influence of in the altered views he was commencing to entertain concerning men and things. He had ceased to give way to despair, as he had done after the rout at Chatillon, when he doubted whether the French army would ever muster up sufficient manhood to fight again: the sortie of the 30th of September on l'Hay and Chevilly, that of the 13th of October, in which the mobiles gained possession of Bagneux, and finally that of October 21, when his regiment captured and held for some time the park of la Malmaison, had restored to him all his confidence, that flame of hope that a spark sufficed to light and was extinguished as quickly. It was true the Prussians had repulsed them in every direction, but for all that the troops had fought bravely; they might yet be victorious in the end. It was Paris now that was responsible for the young man's gloomy forebodings, that great fickle city that at one moment was cheered by bright illusions and the next was sunk in deepest despair, ever haunted by the fear of treason in its thirst for victory. Did it not seem as if Trochu and Ducrot were treading in the footsteps of the Emperor and Marshal MacMahon and about to prove themselves incompetent leaders, the unconscious instruments of their country's ruin? The same movement that had swept away the Empire was now threatening the Government of National Defense, a fierce longing of the extremists to place themselves in control in order that they might save France by the methods of '92; even now Jules Favre and his co-members were more unpopular than the old ministers of Napoleon III. had ever been. Since they would not fight the Prussians, they would do well to make way for others, for those revolutionists who saw an assurance of victory in decreeing the levee en masse, in lending an ear to those visionaries who proposed to mine the earth beneath the Prussians' feet, or annihilate them all by means of a new fashioned Greek fire.

Just previous to the 31st of October Maurice was more than usually a victim to this malady of distrust and barren speculation. He listened now approvingly to crude fancies that would formerly have brought a smile of contempt to his lips. Why should he not? Were not imbecility and crime abroad in the land? Was it unreasonable to look for the miraculous when his world was falling in ruins about him? Ever since the time he first heard the tidings of Froeschwiller, down there in front of Mulhausen, he had harbored a deep-seated feeling of rancor in his breast; he suffered from Sedan as from a raw sore, that bled afresh with every new reverse; the memory of their defeats, with all the anguish they entailed, was ever present to his mind; body and mind enfeebled by long marches, sleepless nights, and lack of food, inducing a mental torpor that left them doubtful even if they were alive; and the thought that so much suffering was to end in another and an irremediable disaster maddened him, made of that cultured man an unreflecting being, scarce higher in the scale than a very little child, swayed by each passing impulse of the moment. Anything, everything, destruction, extermination, rather than pay a penny of French money or yield an inch of French soil! The revolution that since the first reverse had been at work within him, sweeping away the legend of Napoleonic glory, the sentimental Bonapartism that he owed to the epic narratives of his grandfather, was now complete. He had ceased to be a believer in Republicanism, pure and simple, considering the remedy not drastic enough; he had begun to dabble in the theories of the extremists, he was a believer in the necessity of the Terror as the only means of ridding them of the traitors and imbeciles who were about to slay the country. And so it was that he was heart and soul with the insurgents when, on the 31st of October, tidings of disaster came pouring in on them in quick succession: the loss of Bourget, that had been captured from the enemy only a few days before by a dashing surprise; M. Thiers' return to Versailles from his visit to the European capitals, prepared to treat for peace, so it was said, in the name of Napoleon III.; and finally the capitulation of Metz, rumors of which had previously been current and which was now confirmed, the last blow of the bludgeon, another Sedan, only attended by circumstances of blacker infamy. And when he learned next day the occurrences at the Hotel de Ville—how the insurgents had been for a brief time successful, how the members of the Government of National Defense had been made prisoners and held until four o'clock in the morning, how finally the fickle populace, swayed at one moment by detestation for the ministers and at the next terrified by the prospect of a successful revolution, had released them—he was filled with regret at the miscarriage of the attempt, at the non-success of the Commune, which might have been their salvation, calling the people to arms, warning them of the country's danger, arousing the cherished memories of a nation that wills it will not perish. Thiers did not dare even to set his foot in Paris, where there was some attempt at illumination to celebrate the failure of the negotiations.

The month of November was to Maurice a period of feverish expectancy. There were some conflicts of no great importance, in which he had no share. His regiment was in cantonments at the time in the vicinity of Saint-Ouen, whence he made his escape as often as he could to satisfy his craving for news. Paris, like him, was awaiting the issue of events in eager suspense. The election of municipal officers seemed to have appeased political passion for the time being, but a circumstance that boded no good for the future was that those elected were rabid adherents of one or another party. And what Paris was watching and praying for in that interval of repose was the grand sortie that was to bring them victory and deliverance. As it had always been, so it was now; confidence reigned everywhere: they would drive the Prussians from their position, would pulverize them, annihilate them. Great preparations were being made in the peninsula of Gennevilliers, the point where there was most likelihood of the operation being attended with success. Then one morning came the joyful tidings of the victory at Coulmiers; Orleans was recaptured, the army of the Loire was marching to the relief of Paris, was even then, so it was reported, in camp at Etampes. The aspect of affairs was entirely changed: all they had to do now was to go and effect a junction with it beyond the Marne. There had been a general reorganization of the forces; three armies had been created, one composed of the battalions of National Guards and commanded by General Clement Thomas, another, comprising the 13th and 14th corps, to which were added a few reliable regiments, selected indiscriminately wherever they could be found, was to form the main column of attack under the lead of General Ducrot, while the third, intended to act as a reserve, was made up entirely of mobiles and turned over to General Vinoy. And when Maurice laid him down to sleep in the wood of Vincennes on the night of the 28th of November, with his comrades of the 115th, he was without a doubt of their success. The three corps of the second army were all there, and it was common talk that their junction with the army of the Loire had been fixed for the following day at Fontainebleau. Then ensued a series of mischances, the usual blunders arising from want of foresight; a sudden rising of the river, which prevented the engineers from laying the pontoon bridge; conflicting orders, which delayed the movement of the troops. The 115th was among the first regiments to pass the river on the following night, and in the neighborhood of ten o'clock, with Maurice in its ranks, it entered Champigny under a destructive fire. The young man was wild with excitement; he fired so rapidly that his chassepot burned his fingers, notwithstanding the intense cold. His sole thought was to push onward, ever onward, surmounting every obstacle until they should join their brothers from the provinces over there across the river. But in front of Champigny and Bry the army fell up against the park walls of Coeuilly and Villiers, that the Prussians had converted into impregnable fortresses, more than a quarter of a mile in length. The men's courage faltered, and after that the action went on in a half-hearted way; the 3d corps was slow in getting up, the 1st and 2d, unable to advance, continued for two days longer to hold Champigny, which they finally abandoned on the night of December 2, after their barren victory. The whole army retired to the wood of Vincennes, where the men's only shelter was the snow-laden branches of the trees, and Maurice, whose feet were frost-bitten, laid his head upon the cold ground and cried.

The gloom and dejection that reigned in the city, after the failure of that supreme effort, beggars the powers of description. The great sortie that had been so long in preparation, the irresistible eruption that was to be the deliverance of Paris, had ended in disappointment, and three days later came a communication from General von Moltke under a flag of truce, announcing that the army of the Loire had been defeated and that the German flag again waved over Orleans. The girdle was being drawn tighter and tighter about the doomed city all whose struggles were henceforth powerless to burst its iron fetters. But Paris seemed to accumulate fresh powers of resistance in the delirium of its despair. It was certain that ere long they would have to count famine among the number of their foes. As early as October the people had been restricted in their consumption of butcher's meat, and in December, of all the immense herds of beeves and flocks of sheep that had been turned loose in the Bois de Boulogne, there was not a single creature left alive, and horses were being slaughtered for food. The stock of flour and wheat, with what was subsequently taken for the public use by forced sale, it was estimated would keep the city supplied with bread for four months. When the flour was all consumed mills were erected in the railway stations to grind the grain. The supply of coal, too, was giving out; it was reserved to bake the bread and for use in the mills and arms factories. And Paris, her streets without gas and lighted by petroleum lamps at infrequent intervals; Paris, shivering under her icy mantle; Paris, to whom the authorities doled out her scanty daily ration of black bread and horse flesh, continued to hope—in spite of all, talking of Faidherbe in the north, of Chanzy on the Loire, of Bourbaki in the east, as if their victorious armies were already beneath the walls. The men and women who stood waiting, their feet in snow and slush, in interminable lines before the bakers' and butchers' shops, brightened up a bit at times at the news of some imaginary success of the army. After the discouragement of each defeat the unquenchable flame of their illusion would burst out and blaze more brightly than ever among those wretched people, whom starvation and every kind of suffering had rendered almost delirious. A soldier on the Place du Chateau d'Eau having spoken of surrender, the by-standers mobbed and were near killing him. While the army, its endurance exhausted, feeling the end was near, called for peace, the populace clamored still for the sortie en masse, the torrential sortie, in which the entire population of the capital, men, women, and children, even, should take part, rushing upon the Prussians like water from a broken dyke and overwhelming them by sheer force of numbers.

And Maurice kept himself apart from his comrades, with an ever-increasing disgust for the life and duties of a soldier, that condemned him to inactivity and uselessness behind the ramparts of Mont-Valerien. He grasped every occasion to get away and hasten to Paris, where his heart was. It was in the midst of the great city's thronging masses alone that he found rest and peace of mind; he tried to force himself to hope as they hoped. He often went to witness the departure of the balloons, which were sent up every other day from the station of the Northern Railway with a freight of despatches and carrier pigeons. They rose when the ropes were cast loose and soon were lost to sight in the cheerless wintry sky, and all hearts were filled with anguish when the wind wafted them in the direction of the German frontier. Many of them were never heard of more. He had himself twice written to his sister Henriette, without ever learning if she had received his letters. The memory of his sister and of Jean, living as they did in that outer, shadowy world from which no tidings ever reached him now, was become so blurred and faint that he thought of them but seldom, as of affections that he had left behind him in some previous existence. The incessant conflict of despair and hope in which he lived occupied all the faculties of his being too fully to leave room for mere human feelings. Then, too, in the early days of January he was goaded to the verge of frenzy by the action of the enemy in shelling the district on the left bank of the river. He had come to credit the Prussians with reasons of humanity for their abstention, which was in fact due simply to the difficulties they experienced in bringing up their guns and getting them in position. Now that a shell had killed two little girls at the Val-de-Grace, his scorn and hatred knew no bounds for those barbarous ruffians who murdered little children and threatened to burn the libraries and museums. After the first days of terror, however, Paris had resumed its life of dogged, unfaltering heroism.

Since the reverse of Champigny there had been but one other attempt, ending in disaster like the rest, in the direction of Bourget; and the evening when the plateau of Avron was evacuated, under the fire of the heavy siege artillery battering away at the forts, Maurice was a sharer in the rage and exasperation that possessed the entire city. The growing unpopularity that threatened to hurl from power General Trochu and the Government of National Defense was so augmented by this additional repulse that they were compelled to attempt a supreme and hopeless effort. What, did they refuse the services of the three hundred thousand National Guards, who from the beginning had been demanding their share in the peril and in the victory! This time it was to be the torrential sortie that had all along been the object of the popular clamor; Paris was to throw open its dikes and drown the Prussians beneath the on-pouring waves of its children. Notwithstanding the certainty of a fresh defeat, there was no way of avoiding a demand that had its origin in such patriotic motives; but in order to limit the slaughter as far as possible, the chiefs determined to employ, in connection with the regular army, only the fifty-nine mobilized battalions of the National Guard. The day preceding the 19th of January resembled some great public holiday; an immense crowd gathered on the boulevards and in the Champs-Elysees to witness the departing regiments, which marched proudly by, preceded by their bands, the men thundering out patriotic airs. Women and children followed them along the sidewalk, men climbed on the benches to wish them Godspeed. The next morning the entire population of the city hurried out to the Arc de Triomphe, and it was almost frantic with delight when at an early hour news came of the capture of Montretout; the tales that were told of the gallant behavior of the National Guard sounded like epics; the Prussians had been beaten all along the line, the French would occupy Versailles before night. As a natural result the consternation was proportionately great when, at nightfall, the inevitable defeat became known. While the left wing was seizing Montretout the center, which had succeeded in carrying the outer wall of Buzanval Park, had encountered a second inner wall, before which it broke. A thaw had set in, the roads were heavy from the effects of a fine, drizzling rain, and the guns, those guns that had been cast by popular subscription and were to the Parisians as the apple of their eye, could not get up. On the right General Ducrot's column was tardy in getting into action and saw nothing of the fight. Further effort was useless, and General Trochu was compelled to order a retreat. Montretout was abandoned, and Saint-Cloud as well, which the Prussians burned, and when it became fully dark the horizon of Paris was illuminated by the conflagration.

Maurice himself this time felt that the end was come. For four hours he had remained in the park of Buzanval with the National Guards under the galling fire from the Prussian intrenchments, and later, when he got back to the city, he spoke of their courage in the highest terms. It was undisputed that the Guards fought bravely on that occasion; after that was it not self-evident that all the disasters of the army were to be attributed solely to the imbecility and treason of its leaders? In the Rue de Rivoli he encountered bands of men shouting: "Hurrah for the Commune! down with Trochu!" It was the leaven of revolution beginning to work again in the popular mind, a fresh outbreak of public opinion, and so formidable this time that the Government of National Defense, in order to preserve its own existence, thought it necessary to compel General Trochu's resignation and put General Vinoy in his place. On that same day Maurice, chancing to enter a hall in Belleville where a public meeting was going on, again heard the levee en masse demanded with clamorous shouts. He knew the thing to be chimerical, and yet it set his heart a-beating more rapidly to see such a determined will to conquer. When all is ended, is it not left us to attempt the impossible? All that night he dreamed of miracles.

Then a long week went by, during which Paris lay agonizing without a murmur. The shops had ceased to open their doors; in the lonely streets the infrequent wayfarer never met a carriage. Forty thousand horses had been eaten; dogs, cats and rats were now luxuries, commanding a high price. Ever since the supply of wheat had given out the bread was made from rice and oats, and was black, damp, and slimy, and hard to digest; to obtain the ten ounces that constituted a day's ration involved a wait, often of many hours, in line before the bake-house. Ah, the sorrowful spectacle it was, to see those poor women shivering in the pouring rain, their feet in the ice-cold mud and water! the misery and heroism of the great city that would not surrender! The death rate had increased threefold; the theaters were converted into hospitals. As soon as it became dark the quarters where luxury and vice had formerly held carnival were shrouded in funereal blackness, like the faubourgs of some accursed city, smitten by pestilence. And in that silence, in that obscurity, naught was to be heard save the unceasing roar of the cannonade and the crash of bursting shells, naught to be seen save the red flash of the guns illuminating the wintry sky.

On the 28th of January the news burst on Paris like a thunderclap that for the past two days negotiations had been going on, between Jules Favre and M. von Bismarck, looking to an armistice, and at the same time it learned that there was bread for only ten days longer, a space of time that would hardly suffice to revictual the city. Capitulation was become a matter of material necessity. Paris, stupefied by the hard truths that were imparted to it at that late day, remained sullenly silent and made no sign. Midnight of that day heard the last shot from the German guns, and on the 29th, when the Prussians had taken possession of the forts, Maurice went with his regiment into the camp that was assigned them over by Montrouge, within the fortifications. The life that he led there was an aimless one, made up of idleness and feverish unrest. Discipline was relaxed; the soldiers did pretty much as they pleased, waiting in inactivity to be dismissed to their homes. He, however, continued to hang around the camp in a semi-dazed condition, moody, nervous, irritable, prompt to take offense on the most trivial provocation. He read with avidity all the revolutionary newspapers he could lay hands on; that three weeks' armistice, concluded solely for the purpose of allowing France to elect an assembly that should ratify the conditions of peace, appeared to him a delusion and a snare, another and a final instance of treason. Even if Paris were forced to capitulate, he was with Gambetta for the prosecution of the war in the north and on the line of the Loire. He overflowed with indignation at the disaster of Bourbaki's army in the east, which had been compelled to throw itself into Switzerland, and the result of the elections made him furious: it would be just as he had always predicted; the base, cowardly provinces, irritated by Paris' protracted resistance, would insist on peace at any price and restore the monarchy while the Prussian guns were still directed on the city. After the first sessions, at Bordeaux, Thiers, elected in twenty-six departments and constituted by unanimous acclaim the chief executive, appeared to his eyes a monster of iniquity, the father of lies, a man capable of every crime. The terms of the peace concluded by that assemblage of monarchists seemed to him to put the finishing touch to their infamy, his blood boiled merely at the thought of those hard conditions: an indemnity of five milliards, Metz to be given up, Alsace to be ceded, France's blood and treasure pouring from the gaping wound, thenceforth incurable, that was thus opened in her flank.

Late in February Maurice, unable to endure his situation longer, made up his mind he would desert. A stipulation of the treaty provided that the troops encamped about Paris should be disarmed and returned to their abodes, but he did not wait to see it enforced; it seemed to him that it would break his heart to leave brave, glorious Paris, which only famine had been able to subdue, and so he bade farewell to army life and hired for himself a small furnished room next the roof of a tall apartment house in the Rue des Orties, at the top of the butte des Moulins, whence he had an outlook over the immense sea of roofs from the Tuileries to the Bastille. An old friend, whom he had known while pursuing his law studies, had loaned him a hundred francs. In addition to that he had caused his name to be inscribed on the roster of a battalion of National Guards as soon as he was settled in his new quarters, and his pay, thirty sous a day, would be enough to keep him alive. The idea of going to the country and there leading a tranquil life, unmindful of what was happening to the country, filled him with horror; the letters even that he received from his sister Henriette, to whom he had written immediately after the armistice, annoyed him by their tone of entreaty, their ardent solicitations that he would come home to Remilly and rest. He refused point-blank; he would go later on when the Prussians should be no longer there.

And so Maurice went on leading an idle, vagabondish sort of life, in a state of constant feverish agitation. He had ceased to be tormented by hunger; he devoured the first white bread he got with infinite gusto; but the city was a prison still: German guards were posted at the gates, and no one was allowed to pass them until he had been made to give an account of himself. There had been no resumption of social life as yet; industry and trade were at a standstill; the people lived from day to day, watching to see what would happen next, doing nothing, simply vegetating in the bright sunshine of the spring that was now coming on apace. During the siege there had been the military service to occupy men's minds and tire their limbs, while now the entire population, isolated from all the world, had suddenly been reduced to a state of utter stagnation, mental as well as physical. He did as others did, loitering his time away from morning till night, living in an atmosphere that for months had been vitiated by the germs arising from the half-crazed mob. He read the newspapers and was an assiduous frequenter of public meetings, where he would often smile and shrug his shoulders at the rant and fustian of the speakers, but nevertheless would go away with the most ultra notions teeming in his brain, ready to engage in any desperate undertaking in the defense of what he considered truth and justice. And sitting by the window in his little bedroom, and looking out over the city, he would still beguile himself with dreams of victory; would tell himself that France and the Republic might yet be saved, so long as the treaty of peace remained unsigned.

The 1st of March was the day fixed for the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, and a long-drawn howl of wrath and execration went up from every heart. Maurice never attended a meeting now that he did not hear Thiers, the Assembly, even the men of September 4th themselves, cursed and reviled because they had not spared the great heroic city that crowning degradation. He was himself one night aroused to such a pitch of frenzy that he took the floor and shouted that it was the duty of all Paris to go and die on the ramparts rather than suffer the entrance of a single Prussian. It was quite natural that the spirit of insurrection should show itself thus, should bud and blossom in the full light of day, among that populace that had first been maddened by months of distress and famine and then had found itself reduced to a condition of idleness that afforded it abundant leisure to brood on the suspicions and fancied wrongs that were largely the product of its own disordered imagination. It was one of those moral crises that have been noticed as occurring after every great siege, in which excessive patriotism, thwarted in its aims and aspirations, after having fired men's minds, degenerates into a blind rage for vengeance and destruction. The Central Committee, elected by delegates from the National Guard battalions, had protested against any attempt to disarm their constituents. Then came an immense popular demonstration on the Place de la Bastille, where there were red flags, incendiary speeches and a crowd that overflowed the square, the affair ending with the murder of a poor inoffensive agent of police, who was bound to a plank, thrown into the canal, and then stoned to death. And forty-eight hours later, during the night of the 26th of February, Maurice, awakened by the beating of the long roll and the sound of the tocsin, beheld bands of men and women streaming along the Boulevard des Batignolles and dragging cannon after them. He descended to the street, and laying hold of the rope of a gun along with some twenty others, was told how the people had gone to the Place Wagram and taken the pieces in order that the Assembly might not deliver them to the Prussians. There were seventy of them; teams were wanting, but the strong arms of the mob, tugging at the ropes and pushing at the limbers and axles, finally brought them to the summit of Montmartre with the mad impetuosity of a barbarian horde assuring the safety of its idols. When on March 1 the Prussians took possession of the quarter of the Champs Elysees, which they were to occupy only for one day, keeping themselves strictly within the limits of the barriers, Paris looked on in sullen silence, its streets deserted, its houses closed, the entire city lifeless and shrouded in its dense veil of mourning.

Two weeks more went by, during which Maurice could hardly have told how he spent his time while awaiting the approach of the momentous events of which he had a distinct presentiment. Peace was concluded definitely at last, the Assembly was to commence its regular sessions at Versailles on the 20th of the month; and yet for him nothing was concluded: he felt that they were ere long to witness the beginning of a dreadful drama of atonement. On the 18th of March, as he was about to leave his room, he received a letter from Henriette urging him to come and join her at Remilly, coupled with a playful threat that she would come and carry him off with her if he delayed too long to afford her that great pleasure. Then she went on to speak of Jean, concerning whose affairs she was extremely anxious; she told how, after leaving her late in December to join the Army of the North, he had been seized with a low fever that had kept him long a prisoner in a Belgian hospital, and only the preceding week he had written her that he was about to start for Paris, notwithstanding his enfeebled condition, where he was determined to seek active service once again. Henriette closed her letter by begging her brother to give her a faithful account of how matters were with Jean as soon as he should have seen him. Maurice laid the open letter before him on the table and sank into a confused revery. Henriette, Jean; his sister whom he loved so fondly, his brother in suffering and privation; how absent from his daily thoughts had those dear ones been since the tempest had been raging in his bosom! He aroused himself, however, and as his sister advised him that she had been unable to give Jean the number of the house in the Rue des Orties, promised himself to go that very day to the office where the regimental records were kept and hunt up his friend. But he had barely got beyond his door and was crossing the Rue Saint-Honore when he encountered two fellow-soldiers of his battalion, who gave him an account of what had happened that morning and during the night before at Montmartre, and the three men started off on a run toward the scene of the disturbance.

Ah, that day of the 18th of March, the elation and enthusiasm that it aroused in Maurice! In after days he could never remember clearly what he said and did. First he beheld himself dimly, as through a veil of mist, convulsed with rage at the recital of how the troops had attempted, in the darkness and quiet that precedes the dawn, to disarm Paris by seizing the guns on Montmartre heights. It was evident that Thiers, who had arrived from Bordeaux, had been meditating the blow for the last two days, in order that the Assembly at Versailles might proceed without fear to proclaim the monarchy. Then the scene shifted, and he was on the ground at Montmartre itself—about nine o'clock it was—fired by the narrative of the people's victory: how the soldiery had come sneaking up in the darkness, how the delay in bringing up the teams had given the National Guards an opportunity to fly to arms, the troops, having no heart to fire on women and children, reversing their muskets and fraternizing with the people. Then he had wandered desultorily about the city, wherever chance directed his footsteps, and by midday had satisfied himself that the Commune was master of Paris, without even the necessity of striking a blow, for Thiers and the ministers had decamped from their quarters in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the entire government was flying in disorder to Versailles, the thirty thousand troops had been hastily conducted from the city, leaving more than five thousand deserters from their numbers along the line of their retreat. And later, about half-past five in the afternoon, he could recall being at a corner of the exterior boulevard in the midst of a mob of howling lunatics, listening without the slightest evidence of disapproval to the abominable story of the murder of Generals Lecomte and Clement Thomas. Generals, they called themselves; fine generals, they! The leaders they had had at Sedan rose before his memory, voluptuaries and imbeciles; one more, one less, what odds did it make! And the remainder of the day passed in the same state of half-crazed excitement, which served to distort everything to his vision; it was an insurrection that the very stones of the streets seemed to have favored, spreading, swelling, finally becoming master of all at a stroke in the unforeseen fatality of its triumph, and at ten o'clock in the evening delivering the Hotel de Ville over to the members of the Central Committee, who were greatly surprised to find themselves there.

There was one memory, however, that remained very distinct to Maurice's mind: his unexpected meeting with Jean. It was three days now since the latter had reached Paris, without a sou in his pocket, emaciated and enfeebled by the illness that had consigned him to a hospital in Brussels and kept him there two months, and having had the luck to fall in with Captain Ravaud, who had commanded a company in the 106th, he had enlisted at once in his former acquaintance's new company in the 124th. His old rank as corporal had been restored to him, and that evening he had just left the Prince Eugene barracks with his squad on his way to the left bank, where the entire army was to concentrate, when a mob collected about his men and stopped them as they were passing along the boulevard Saint-Martin. The insurgents yelled and shouted, and evidently were preparing to disarm his little band. With perfect coolness he told them to let him alone, that he had no business with them or their affairs; all he wanted was to obey his orders without harming anybody. Then a cry of glad surprise was heard, and Maurice, who had chanced to pass that way, threw himself on the other's neck and gave him a brotherly hug.

"What, is it you! My sister wrote me about you. And just think, no later than this very morning I was going to look you up at the war office!"

Jean's eyes were dim with big tears of pleasure.

"Ah, my dear lad how glad I am to see you once more! I have been looking for you, too, but where could a fellow expect to find you in this confounded great big place?"

To the crowd, continuing their angry muttering, Maurice turned and said:

"Let me talk to them, citizens! They're good fellows; I'll answer for them." He took his friend's hands in his, and lowering his voice: "You'll join us, won't you?"

Jean's face was the picture of surprise. "How, join you? I don't understand." Then for a moment he listened while Maurice railed against the government, against the army, raking up old sores and recalling all their sufferings, telling how at last they were going to be masters, punish dolts and cowards and preserve the Republic. And as he struggled to get the problems the other laid before him through his brain, the tranquil face of the unlettered peasant was clouded with an increasing sorrow. "Ah, no! ah, no! my boy. I can't join you if it's for that fine work you want me. My captain told me to go with my men to Vaugirard, and there I'm going. In spite of the devil and his angels I will go there. That's natural enough; you ought to know how it is yourself." He laughed with frank simplicity and added:

"It's you who'll come along with us."

But Maurice released his hands with an angry gesture of dissent, and thus they stood for some seconds, face to face, one under the influence of that madness that was sweeping all Paris off its feet, the malady that had been bequeathed to them by the crimes and follies of the late reign, the other strong in his ignorance and practical common sense, untainted as yet because he had grown up apart from the contaminating principle, in the land where industry and thrift were honored. They were brothers, however, none the less; the tie that united them was strong, and it was a pang to them both when the crowd suddenly surged forward and parted them.

"Au revoir, Maurice!"

"Au revoir, Jean!"

It was a regiment, the 79th, debouching from a side street, that had caused the movement among the crowd, forcing the rioters back to the sidewalks by the weight of its compact column, closed in mass. There was some hooting, but no one ventured to bar the way against the soldier boys, who went by at double time, well under control of their officers. An opportunity was afforded the little squad of the 124th to make their escape, and they followed in the wake of the larger body.

"Au revoir, Jean!"

"Au revoir, Maurice!"

They waved their hands once more in a parting salute, yielding to the fatality that decreed their separation in that manner, but each none the less securely seated in the other's heart.

The extraordinary occurrences of the next and the succeeding days crowded on the heels of one another in such swift sequence that Maurice had scarcely time to think. On the morning of the 19th Paris awoke without a government, more surprised than frightened to learn that a panic during the night had sent army, ministers, and all the public service scurrying away to Versailles, and as the weather happened to be fine on that magnificent March Sunday, Paris stepped unconcernedly down into the streets to have a look at the barricades. A great white poster, bearing the signature of the Central Committee and convoking the people for the communal elections, attracted attention by the moderation of its language, although much surprise was expressed at seeing it signed by names so utterly unknown. There can be no doubt that at this incipient stage of the Commune Paris, in the bitter memory of what it had endured, in the suspicions by which it was haunted, and in its unslaked thirst for further fighting, was against Versailles. It was a condition of absolute anarchy, moreover, the conflict for the moment being between the mayors and the Central Committee, the former fruitlessly attempting to introduce measures of conciliation, while the latter, uncertain as yet to what extent it could rely on the federated National Guard, continued modestly to lay claim to no higher title than that of defender of the municipal liberties. The shots fired against the pacific demonstration in the Place Vendome, the few corpses whose blood reddened the pavements, first sent a thrill of terror circulating through the city. And while these things were going on, while the insurgents were taking definite possession of the ministries and all the public buildings, the agitation, rage and alarm prevailing at Versailles were extreme, the government there hastening to get together sufficient troops to repel the attack which they felt sure they should not have to wait for long. The steadiest and most reliable divisions of the armies of the North and of the Loire were hurried forward. Ten days sufficed to collect a force of nearly eighty thousand men, and the tide of returning confidence set in so strongly that on the 2d of April two divisions opened hostilities by taking from the federates Puteaux and Courbevoie.

It was not until the day following the events just mentioned that Maurice, starting out with his battalion to effect the conquest of Versailles, beheld, amid the throng of misty, feverish memories that rose to his poor wearied brain, Jean's melancholy face as he had seen it last, and seemed to hear the tones of his last mournful au revoir. The military operations of the Versaillese had filled the National Guard with alarm and indignation; three columns, embracing a total strength of fifty thousand men, had gone storming that morning through Bougival and Meudon on their way to seize the monarchical Assembly and Thiers, the murderer. It was the torrential sortie that had been demanded with such insistence during the siege, and Maurice asked himself where he should ever see Jean again unless among the dead lying on the field of battle down yonder. But it was not long before he knew the result; his battalion had barely reached the Plateau des Bergeres, on the road to Reuil, when the shells from Mont-Valerien came tumbling among the ranks. Universal consternation reigned; some had supposed that the fort was held by their comrades of the Guard, while others averred that the commander had promised solemnly to withhold his fire. A wild panic seized upon the men; the battalions broke and rushed back to Paris fast as their legs would let them, while the head of the column, diverted by a flanking movement of General Vinoy, was driven back on Reuil and cut to pieces there.

Then Maurice, who had escaped unharmed from the slaughter, his nerves still quivering with the fury that had inspired him on the battlefield, was filled with fresh detestation for that so-called government of law and order which always allowed itself to be beaten by the Prussians, and could only muster up a little courage when it came to oppressing Paris. And the German armies were still there, from Saint-Denis to Charenton, watching the shameful spectacle of internecine conflict! Thus, in the fierce longing for vengeance and destruction that animated him, he could not do otherwise than sanction the first measures of communistic violence, the building of barricades in the streets and public squares, the arrest of the archbishop, some priests, and former officeholders, who were to be held as hostages. The atrocities that distinguished either side in that horrible conflict were already beginning to manifest themselves, Versailles shooting the prisoners it made, Paris retaliating with a decree that for each one of its soldiers murdered three hostages should forfeit their life. The horror of it, that fratricidal conflict, that wretched nation completing the work of destruction by devouring its own children! And the little reason that remained to Maurice, in the ruin of all the things he had hitherto held sacred, was quickly dissipated in the whirlwind of blind fury that swept all before it. In his eyes the Commune was to be the avenger of all the wrongs they had suffered, the liberator, coming with fire and sword to purify and punish. He was not quite clear in mind about it all, but remembered having read how great and flourishing the old free cities had become, how wealthy provinces had federated and imposed their law upon the world. If Paris should be victorious he beheld her, crowned with an aureole of glory, building up a new France, where liberty and justice should be the watchwords, organizing a new society, having first swept away the rotten debris of the old. It was true that when the result of the elections became known he was somewhat surprised by the strange mixture of moderates, revolutionists, and socialists of every sect and shade to whom the accomplishment of the great work was intrusted; he was acquainted with several of the men and knew them to be of extremely mediocre abilities. Would not the strongest among them come in collision and neutralize one another amid the clashing ideas which they represented? But on the day when the ceremony of the inauguration of the Commune took place before the Hotel de Ville, amid the thunder of artillery and trophies and red banners floating in the air, his boundless hopes again got the better of his fears and he ceased to doubt. Among the lies of some and the unquestioning faith of others, the illusion started into life again with renewed vigor, in the acute crisis of the malady raised to paroxysmal pitch.

During the entire month of April Maurice was on duty in the neighborhood of Neuilly. The gentle warmth of the early spring had brought out the blossoms on the lilacs, and the fighting was conducted among the bright verdure of the gardens; the National Guards came into the city at night with bouquets of flowers stuck in their muskets. The troops collected at Versailles were now so numerous as to warrant their formation in two armies, a first line under the orders of Marshal MacMahon and a reserve commanded by General Vinoy. The Commune had nearly a hundred thousand National Guards mobilized and as many more on the rosters who could be called out at short notice, but fifty thousand were as many as they ever brought into the field at one time. Day by day the plan of attack adopted by the Versaillese became more manifest: after occupying Neuilly they had taken possession of the Chateau of Becon and soon after of Asnieres, but these movements were simply to make the investment more complete, for their intention was to enter the city by the Point-du-Jour soon as the converging fire from Mont-Valerien and Fort d'Issy should enable them to carry the rampart there. Mont-Valerien was theirs already, and they were straining every nerve to capture Issy, utilizing the works abandoned by the Germans for the purpose. Since the middle of April the fire of musketry and artillery had been incessant; at Levallois and Neuilly the fighting never ceased, the skirmishers blazing away uninterruptedly, by night as well as by day. Heavy guns, mounted on armored cars, moved to and fro on the Belt Railway, shelling Asnieres over the roofs of Levallois. It was at Vanves and Issy, however, that the cannonade was fiercest; it shook the windows of Paris as the siege had done when it was at its height. And when finally, on the 9th of May, Fort d'Issy was obliged to succumb and fell into the hands of the Versailles army the defeat of the Commune was assured, and in their frenzy of panic the leaders resorted to most detestable measures.

Maurice favored the creation of a Committee of Public Safety. The warnings of history came to his mind; had not the hour struck for adopting energetic methods if they wished to save the country? There was but one of their barbarities that really pained him, and that was the destruction of the Vendome column; he reproached himself for the feeling as being a childish weakness, but his grandfather's voice still sounded in his ears repeating the old familiar tales of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram, the Moskowa—those epic narratives that thrilled his pulses yet as often as he thought of them. But that they should demolish the house of the murderer Thiers, that they should retain the hostages as a guarantee and a menace, was not that right and just when the Versaillese were unchaining their fury on Paris, bombarding it, destroying its edifices, slaughtering women and children with their shells? As he saw the end of his dream approaching dark thoughts of ruin and destruction filled his mind. If their ideas of justice and retribution were not to prevail, if they were to be crushed out of them with their life-blood, then perish the world, swept away in one of those cosmic upheavals that are the beginning of a new life. Let Paris sink beneath the waves, let it go up in smoke and flame, like a gigantic funeral pyre, sooner than let it be again delivered over to its former state of vice and misery, to that old vicious social system of abominable injustice. And he dreamed another dark, terrible dream, the great city reduced to ashes, naught to be seen on either side the Seine but piles of smoldering ruins, the festering wound purified and healed with fire, a catastrophe without a name, such as had never been before, whence should arise a new race. Wild stories were everywhere circulated, which interested him intensely, of the mines that were driven under all the quarters of the city, the barrels of powder with which the catacombs were stuffed, the monuments and public buildings ready to be blown into the air at a moment's notice; and all were connected by electric wires in such a way that a single spark would suffice to set them off; there were great stores of inflammable substances, too, especially petroleum, with which the streets and avenues were to be converted into seething lakes of flame. The Commune had sworn that should the Versaillese enter the city not one of them would ever get beyond the barricades that closed the ends of the streets; the pavements would yawn, the houses would sink in ruins, Paris would go up in flames, and bury assailants and assailed under its ashes.

And if Maurice solaced himself with these crazy dreams, it was because of his secret discontent with the Commune itself. He had lost all confidence in its members, he felt it was inefficient, drawn this way and that by so many conflicting elements, losing its head and becoming purposeless and driveling as it saw the near approach of the peril with which it was menaced. Of the social reforms it had pledged itself to it had not been able to accomplish a single one, and it was now quite certain that it would leave behind it no great work to perpetuate its name. But what more than all beside was gnawing at its vitals was the rivalries by which it was distracted, the corroding suspicion and distrust in which each of its members lived. For some time past many of them, the more moderate and the timid, had ceased to attend its sessions. The others shaped their course day by day in accordance with events, trembling at the idea of a possible dictatorship; they had reached that point where the factions of revolutionary assemblages exterminate one another by way of saving the country. Cluzeret had become suspected, then Dombrowski, and Rossel was about to share their fate. Delescluze, appointed Civil Delegate at War, could do nothing of his own volition, notwithstanding his great authority. And thus the grand social effort that they had had in view wasted itself in the ever-widening isolation about those men, whose power had become a nullity, whose actions were the result of their despair.

In Paris there was an increasing feeling of terror. Paris, irritated at first against Versailles, shivering at the recollection of what it had suffered during the siege, was now breaking away from the Commune. The compulsory enrollment, the decree incorporating every man under forty in the National Guard, had angered the more sedate citizens and been the means of bringing about a general exodus: men in disguise and provided with forged papers of Alsatian citizenship made their escape by way of Saint-Denis; others let themselves down into the moat in the darkness of the night with ropes and ladders. The wealthy had long since taken their departure. None of the factories and workshops had opened their doors; trade and commerce there was none; there was no employment for labor; the life of enforced idleness went on amid the alarmed expectancy of the frightful denouement that everyone felt could not be far away. And the people depended for their daily bread on the pay of the National Guards, that dole of thirty sous that was paid from the millions extorted from the Bank of France, the thirty sous for the sake of which alone many men were wearing the uniform, which had been one of the primary causes and the raison d'etre of the insurrection. Whole districts were deserted, the shops closed, the house-fronts lifeless. In the bright May sunshine that flooded the empty streets the few pedestrians beheld nothing moving save the barbaric display of the burial of some federates killed in action, the funeral train where no priest walked, the hearse draped with red flags, followed by a crowd of men and women bearing bouquets of immortelles. The churches were closed and did duty each evening as political club-rooms. The revolutionary journals alone were hawked about the streets; the others had been suppressed. Great Paris was indeed an unhappy city in those days, what with its republican sympathies that made it detest the monarchical Assembly at Versailles and its ever-increasing terror of the Commune, from which it prayed most fervently to be delivered among all the grisly stories that were current, the daily arrests of citizens as hostages, the casks of gunpowder that filled the sewers, where men patrolled by day and night awaiting the signal to apply the torch.

Maurice, who had never been a drinking man, allowed himself to be seduced by the too prevalent habit of over-indulgence. It had become a thing of frequent occurrence with him now, when he was out on picket duty or had to spend the night in barracks, to take a "pony" of brandy, and if he took a second it was apt to go to his head in the alcohol-laden atmosphere that he was forced to breathe. It had become epidemic, that chronic drunkenness, among those men with whom bread was scarce and who could have all the brandy they wanted by asking for it. Toward evening on Sunday, the 21st of May, Maurice came home drunk, for the first time in his life, to his room in the Rue des Orties, where he was in the habit of sleeping occasionally. He had been at Neuilly again that day, blazing away at the enemy and taking a nip now and then with the comrades, to see if it would not relieve the terrible fatigue from which he was suffering. Then, with a light head and heavy legs, he came and threw himself on the bed in his little chamber; it must have been through force of instinct, for he could never remember how he got there. And it was not until the following morning, when the sun was high in the heavens, that he awoke, aroused by the ringing of the alarm bells, the blare of trumpets and beating of drums. During the night the Versaillese, finding a gate undefended, had effected an unresisted entrance at the Point-du-Jour.

When he had thrown on his clothes and hastened down into the street, his musket slung across his shoulder by the strap, a band of frightened soldiers whom he fell in with at the mairie of the arrondissement related to him the occurrences of the night, in the midst of a confusion such that at first he had hard work to understand. Fort d'Issy and the great battery at Montretout, seconded by Mont Valerien, for the last ten days had been battering the rampart at the Point-du-Jour, as a consequence of which the Saint-Cloud gate was no longer tenable and an assault had been ordered for the following morning, the 22d; but someone who chanced to pass that way at about five o'clock perceived that the gate was unprotected and immediately notified the guards in the trenches, who were not more than fifty yards away. Two companies of the 37th regiment of regulars were the first to enter the city, and were quickly followed by the entire 4th corps under General Douay. All night long the troops were pouring in in an uninterrupted stream. At seven o'clock Verge's division marched down to the bridge at Grenelle, crossed, and pushed on to the Trocadero. At nine General Clinchamp was master of Passy and la Muette. At three o'clock in the morning the 1st corps had pitched its tents in the Bois de Boulogne, while at about the same hour Bruat's division was passing the Seine to seize the Sevres gate and facilitate the movement of the 2d Corps, General de Cissey's, which occupied the district of Grenelle an hour later. The Versailles army, therefore, on the morning of the 22d, was master of the Trocadero and the Chateau of la Muette on the right bank, and of Grenelle on the left; and great was the rage and consternation that prevailed among the Communists, who were already accusing one another of treason, frantic at the thought of their inevitable defeat.

When Maurice at last understood the condition of affairs his first thought was that the end had come, that all left him was to go forth and meet his death. But the tocsin was pealing, drums were beating, women and children, even, were working on the barricades, the streets were alive with the stir and bustle of the battalions hurrying to assume the positions assigned them in the coming conflict. By midday it was seen that the Versaillese were remaining quiet in their new positions, and then fresh courage returned to the hearts of the soldiers of the Commune, who were resolved to conquer or die. The enemy's army, which they had feared to see in possession of the Tuileries by that time, profiting by the stern lessons of experience and imitating the prudent tactics of the Prussians, conducted its operations with the utmost caution. The Committee of Public Safety and Delescluze, Delegate at War, directed the defense from their quarters in the Hotel de Ville. It was reported that a last proposal for a peaceable arrangement had been rejected by them with disdain. That served to inspire the men with still more courage, the triumph of Paris was assured, the resistance would be as unyielding as the attack was vindictive, in the implacable hate, swollen by lies and cruelties, that inflamed the heart of either army. And that day was spent by Maurice in the quarters of the Champ de Mars and the Invalides, firing and falling back slowly from street to street. He had not been able to find his battalion; he fought in the ranks with comrades who were strangers to him, accompanying them in their march to the left bank without taking heed whither they were going. About four o'clock they had a furious conflict behind a barricade that had been thrown across the Rue de l'Universite, where it comes out on the Esplanade, and it was not until twilight that they abandoned it on learning that Bruat's division, stealing up along the quai, had seized the Corps Legislatif. They had a narrow escape from capture, and it was with great difficulty that they managed to reach the Rue de Lille after a long circuit through the Rue Saint-Dominique and the Rue Bellechasse. At the close of that day the army of Versailles occupied a line which, beginning at the Vanves gate, led past the Corps Legislatif, the Palace of the Elysee, St. Augustine's Church, the Lazare station, and ended at the Asnieres gate.

The next day, Tuesday, the 23d, was warm and bright, and a terrible day it was for Maurice. The few hundred federates with whom he was, and in whose ranks were men of many different battalions, were charged with the defense of the entire quartier, from the quai to the Rue Saint-Dominique. Most of them had bivouacked in the gardens of the great mansions that line the Rue de Lille; he had had an unbroken night's rest on a grass-plot at one side of the Palace of the Legion of Honor. It was his belief that soon as it was light enough the troops would move out from their shelter behind the Corps Legislatif and force them back upon the strong barricades in the Rue du Bac, but hour after hour passed and there was no sign of an attack. There was only some desultory firing at long range between parties posted at either end of the streets. The Versaillese, who were not desirous of attempting a direct attack on the front of the formidable fortress into which the insurgents had converted the terrace of the Tuileries, developed their plan of action with great circumspection; two strong columns were sent out to right and left that, skirting the ramparts, should first seize Montmartre and the Observatory and then, wheeling inward, swoop down on the central quarters, surrounding them and capturing all they contained, as a shoal of fish is captured in the meshes of a gigantic net. About two o'clock Maurice heard that the tricolor was floating over Montmartre: the great battery of the Moulin de la Galette had succumbed to the combined attack of three army corps, which hurled their battalions simultaneously on the northern and western faces of the butte through the Rues Lepic, des Saules and du Mont-Cenis; then the waves of the victorious troops had poured back on Paris, carrying the Place Saint-Georges, Notre-Dame de Lorette, the mairie in the Rue Drouot and the new Opera House, while on the left bank the turning movement, starting from the cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, had reached the Place d'Enfer and the Horse Market. These tidings of the rapid progress of the hostile army were received by the communards with mingled feelings of rage and terror amounting almost to stupefaction. What, Montmartre carried in two hours; Montmartre, the glorious, the impregnable citadel of the insurrection! Maurice saw that the ranks were thinning about him; trembling soldiers, fearing the fate that was in store for them should they be caught, were slinking furtively away to look for a place where they might wash the powder grime from hands and face and exchange their uniform for a blouse. There was a rumor that the enemy were making ready to attack the Croix-Rouge and take their position in flank. By this time the barricades in the Rues Martignac and Bellechasse had been carried, the red-legs were beginning to make their appearance at the end of the Rue de Lille, and soon all that remained was a little band of fanatics and men with the courage of their opinions, Maurice and some fifty more, who were resolved to sell their lives dearly, killing as many as they could of those Versaillese, who treated the federates like thieves and murderers, dragging away the prisoners they made and shooting them in the rear of the line of battle. Their bitter animosity had broadened and deepened since the days before; it was war to the knife between those rebels dying for an idea and that army, inflamed with reactionary passions and irritated that it was kept so long in the field.

About five o'clock, as Maurice and his companions were finally falling back to seek the shelter of the barricades in the Rue du Bac, descending the Rue de Lille and pausing at every moment to fire another shot, he suddenly beheld volumes of dense black smoke pouring from an open window in the Palace of the Legion of Honor. It was the first fire kindled in Paris, and in the furious insanity that possessed him it gave him a fierce delight. The hour had struck; let the whole city go up in flame, let its people be cleansed by the fiery purification! But a sight that he saw presently filled him with surprise: a band of five or six men came hurrying out of the building, headed by a tall varlet in whom he recognized Chouteau, his former comrade in the squad of the 106th. He had seen him once before, after the 18th of March, wearing a gold-laced kepi; he seemed by his bedizened uniform to have risen in rank, was probably on the staff of some one of the many generals who were never seen where there was fighting going on. He remembered the account somebody had given him of that fellow Chouteau, of his quartering himself in the Palace of the Legion of Honor and living there, guzzling and swilling, in company with a mistress, wallowing with his boots on in the great luxurious beds, smashing the plate-glass mirrors with shots from his revolver, merely for the amusement there was in it. It was even asserted that the woman left the building every morning in one of the state carriages, under pretense of going to the Halles for her day's marketing, carrying off with her great bundles of linen, clocks, and even articles of furniture, the fruit of their thieveries. And Maurice, as he watched him running away with his men, carrying a bucket of petroleum on his arm, experienced a sickening sensation of doubt and felt his faith beginning to waver. How could the terrible work they were engaged in be good, when men like that were the workmen?

Hours passed, and still he fought on, but with a bitter feeling of distress, with no other wish than that he might die. If he had erred, let him at least atone for his error with his blood! The barricade across the Rue de Lille, near its intersection with the Rue du Bac, was a formidable one, composed of bags and casks filled with earth and faced by a deep ditch. He and a scant dozen of other federates were its only defenders, resting in a semi-recumbent position on the ground, infallibly causing every soldier who exposed himself to bite the dust. He lay there, without even changing his position, until nightfall, using up his cartridges in silence, in the dogged sullenness of his despair. The dense clouds of smoke from the Palace of the Legion of Honor were billowing upward in denser masses, the flames undistinguishable as yet in the dying daylight, and he watched the fantastic, changing forms they took as the wind whirled them downward to the street. Another fire had broken out in an hotel not far away. And all at once a comrade came running up to tell him that the enemy, not daring to advance along the street, were making a way for themselves through the houses and gardens, breaking down the walls with picks. The end was close at hand; they might come out in the rear of the barricade at any moment. A shot having been fired from an upper window of a house on the corner, he saw Chouteau and his gang, with their petroleum and their lighted torch, rush with frantic speed to the buildings on either side and climb the stairs, and half an hour later, in the increasing darkness, the entire square was in flames, while he, still prone on the ground behind his shelter, availed himself of the vivid light to pick off any venturesome soldier who stepped from his protecting doorway into the narrow street.

How long did Maurice keep on firing? He could not tell; he had lost all consciousness of time and place. It might be nine o'clock, or ten, perhaps. He continued to load and fire; his condition of hopelessness and gloom was pitiable; death seemed to him long in coming. The detestable work he was engaged in gave him now a sensation of nausea, as the fumes of the wine he has drunk rise and nauseate the drunkard. An intense heat began to beat on him from the houses that were burning on every side—an air that scorched and asphyxiated. The carrefour, with the barricades that closed it in, was become an intrenched camp, guarded by the roaring flames that rose on every side and sent down showers of sparks. Those were the orders, were they not? to fire the adjacent houses before they abandoned the barricades, arrest the progress of the troops by an impassable sea of flame, burn Paris in the face of the enemy advancing to take possession of it. And presently he became aware that the houses in the Rue du Bac were not the only ones that were devoted to destruction; looking behind him he beheld the whole sky suffused with a bright, ruddy glow; he heard an ominous roar in the distance, as if all Paris were bursting into conflagration. Chouteau was no longer to be seen; he had long since fled to save his skin from the bullets. His comrades, too, even those most zealous in the cause, had one by one stolen away, affrighted at the approaching prospect of being outflanked. At last he was left alone, stretched at length between two sand bags, his every faculty bent on defending the front of the barricade, when the soldiers, who had made their way through the gardens in the middle of the block, emerged from a house in the Rue du Bac and pounced on him from the rear.

For two whole days, in the fevered excitement of the supreme conflict, Maurice had not once thought of Jean, nor had Jean, since he entered Paris with his regiment, which had been assigned to Bruat's division, for a single moment remembered Maurice. The day before his duties had kept him in the neighborhood of the Champ de Mars and the Esplanade of the Invalides, and on this day he had remained in the Place du Palais-Bourbon until nearly noon, when the troops were sent forward to clean out the barricades of the quartier, as far as the Rue des Saints-Peres. A feeling of deep exasperation against the rioters had gradually taken possession of him, usually so calm and self-contained, as it had of all his comrades, whose ardent wish it was to be allowed to go home and rest after so many months of fatigue. But of all the atrocities of the Commune that stirred his placid nature and made him forgetful even of his tenderest affections, there were none that angered him as did those conflagrations. What, burn houses, set fire to palaces, and simply because they had lost the battle! Only robbers and murderers were capable of such work as that. And he who but the day before had sorrowed over the summary executions of the insurgents was now like a madman, ready to rend and tear, yelling, shouting, his eyes starting from their sockets.

Jean burst like a hurricane into the Rue du Bac with the few men of his squad. At first he could distinguish no one; he thought the barricade had been abandoned. Then, looking more closely, he perceived a communard extended on the ground between two sand bags; he stirred, he brought his piece to the shoulder, was about to discharge it down the Rue du Bac. And impelled by blind fate, Jean rushed upon the man and thrust his bayonet through him, nailing him to the barricade.

Maurice had not had time to turn. He gave a cry and raised his head. The blinding light of the burning buildings fell full on their faces.

"O Jean, dear old boy, is it you?"

To die, that was what he wished, what he had been longing for. But to die by his brother's hand, ah! the cup was too bitter; the thought of death no longer smiled on him.

"Is it you, Jean, old friend?"

Jean, sobered by the terrible shock, looked at him with wild eyes. They were alone; the other soldiers had gone in pursuit of the fugitives. About them the conflagrations roared and crackled and blazed up higher than before; great sheets of white flame poured from the windows, while from within came the crash of falling ceilings. And Jean cast himself on the ground at Maurice's side, sobbing, feeling him, trying to raise him to see if he might not yet be saved.

"My boy, oh! my poor, poor boy!"

VIII.

When at about nine o'clock the train from Sedan, after innumerable delays along the way, rolled into the Saint-Denis station, the sky to the south was lit up by a fiery glow as if all Paris was burning. The light had increased with the growing darkness, and now it filled the horizon, climbing constantly higher up the heavens and tingeing with blood-red hues some clouds, that lay off to the eastward in the gloom which the contrast rendered more opaque than ever.

The travelers alighted, Henriette among the first, alarmed by the glare they had beheld from the windows of the cars as they rushed onward across the darkling fields. The soldiers of a Prussian detachment, moreover, that had been sent to occupy the station, went through the train and compelled the passengers to leave it, while two of their number, stationed on the platform, shouted in guttural French:

"Paris is burning. All out here! this train goes no further. Paris is burning, Paris is burning!"

Henriette experienced a terrible shock. Mon Dieu! was she too late, then? Receiving no reply from Maurice to her two last letters, the alarming news from Paris had filled her with such mortal terror that she determined to leave Remilly and come and try to find her brother in the great city. For months past her life at Uncle Fouchard's had been a melancholy one; the troops occupying the village and the surrounding country had become harsher and more exacting as the resistance of Paris was protracted, and now that peace was declared and the regiments were stringing along the roads, one by one, on their way home to Germany, the country and the cities through which they passed were taxed to their utmost to feed the hungry soldiers. The morning when she arose at daybreak to go and take the train at Sedan, looking out into the courtyard of the farmhouse she had seen a body of cavalry who had slept there all night, scattered promiscuously on the bare ground, wrapped in their long cloaks. They were so numerous that the earth was hidden by them. Then, at the shrill summons of a trumpet call, all had risen to their feet, silent, draped in the folds of those long mantles, and in such serried, close array that she involuntarily thought of the graves of a battlefield opening and giving up their dead at the call of the last trump. And here again at Saint-Denis she encountered the Prussians, and it was from Prussian lips that came that cry which caused her such distress:

"All out here! this train goes no further. Paris is burning!"

Henriette, her little satchel in her hand, rushed distractedly up to the men in quest of information. There had been heavy fighting in Paris for the last two days, they told her, the railway had been destroyed, the Germans were watching the course of events. But she insisted on pursuing her journey at every risk, and catching sight upon the platform of the officer in command of the detachment detailed to guard the station, she hurried up to him.

"Sir, I am terribly distressed about my brother, and am trying to get to him. I entreat you, furnish me with the means to reach Paris." The light from a gas jet fell full on the captain's face she stopped in surprise. "What, Otto, is it you! Oh, mon Dieu, be good to me, since chance has once more brought us together!"

It was Otto Gunther, the cousin, as stiff and ceremonious as ever, tight-buttoned in his Guard's uniform, the picture of a narrow-minded martinet. At first he failed to recognize the little, thin, insignificant-looking woman, with the handsome light hair and the pale, gentle face; it was only by the brave, honest look that filled her eyes that he finally remembered her. His only answer was a slight shrug of the shoulders.

"You know I have a brother in the army," Henriette eagerly went on. "He is in Paris; I fear he has allowed himself to become mixed up with this horrible conflict. O Otto, I beseech you, assist me to continue my journey."

At last he condescended to speak. "But I can do nothing to help you; really I cannot. There have been no trains running since yesterday; I believe the rails have been torn up over by the ramparts somewhere. And I have neither a horse and carriage nor a man to guide you at my disposal."

She looked him in the face with a low, stifled murmur of pain and sorrow to behold him thus obdurate. "Oh, you will do nothing to aid me. My God, to whom then can I turn!"

It was an unlikely story for one of those Prussians to tell, whose hosts were everywhere all-powerful, who had the city at their beck and call, could have requisitioned a hundred carriages and brought a thousand horses from their stables. And he denied her prayer with the haughty air of a victor who has made it a law to himself not to interfere with the concerns of the vanquished, lest thereby he might defile himself and tarnish the luster of his new-won laurels.

"At all events," continued Henriette, "you know what is going on in the city; you won't refuse to tell me that much."

He gave a smile, so faint as scarce to be perceptible. "Paris is burning. Look! come this way, you can see more clearly."

Leaving the station, he preceded her along the track for a hundred steps or so until they came to an iron foot-bridge that spanned the road. When they had climbed the narrow stairs and reached the floor of the structure, resting their elbows on the railing, they beheld the broad level plain outstretched before them, at the foot of the slope of the embankment.

"You see, Paris is burning."

It was in the neighborhood of ten o'clock. The fierce red glare that lit the southern sky was ever mounting higher. The blood-red clouds had disappeared from where they had floated in the east; the zenith was like a great inverted bowl of inky blackness, across which ran the reflections of the distant flames. The horizon was one unbroken line of fire, but to the right they could distinguish spots where the conflagration was raging with greater fury, sending up great spires and pinnacles of flame, of the most vivid scarlet, to pierce the dense opacity above, amid billowing clouds of smoke. It was like the burning of some great forest, where the fire bridges intervening space, and leaps from tree to tree; one would have said the very earth must be calcined and reduced to ashes beneath the heat of Paris' gigantic funeral pyre.

"Look," said Otto, "that eminence that you see profiled in black against the red background is Montmartre. There on the left, at Belleville and la Villette, there has not been a house burned yet; it must be they are selecting the districts of the wealthy for their work; and it spreads, it spreads. Look! there is another conflagration breaking out; watch the flames there to the right, how they seethe and rise and fall; observe the shifting tints of the vapors that rise from the blazing furnace. And others, and others still; the heavens are on fire!"

He did not raise his voice or manifest any sign of feeling, and it froze Henriette's blood that a human being could stand by and witness such a spectacle unmoved. Ah, that those Prussians should be there to see that sight! She saw an insult in his studied calmness, in the faint smile that played upon his lips, as if he had long foreseen and been watching for that unparalleled disaster. So, Paris was burning then at last, Paris, upon whose monuments the German shells had scarce been able to inflict more than a scratch! and he was there to see it burn, and in the spectacle found compensation for all his grievances, the inordinate length to which the siege had been protracted, the bitter, freezing weather, the difficulties they had surmounted only to see them present themselves anew under some other shape, the toil and trouble they had had in mounting their heavy guns, while all the time Germany from behind was reproaching them with their dilatoriness. Nothing in all the glory of their victory, neither the ceded provinces nor the indemnity of five milliards, appealed to him so strongly as did that sight of Paris, in a fit of furious madness, immolating herself and going up in smoke and flame on that beautiful spring night.

"Ah, it was sure to come," he added in a lower voice. "Fine work, my masters!"

It seemed to Henriette as if her heart would break in presence of that dire catastrophe. Her personal grief was lost to sight for some minutes, swallowed up in the great drama of a people's atonement that was being enacted before her eyes. The thought of the lives that would be sacrificed to the devouring flames, the sight of the great capital blazing on the horizon, emitting the infernal light of the cities that were accursed and smitten for their iniquity, elicited from her an involuntary cry of anguish. She clasped her hands, asking:

"Oh, merciful Father, of what have we been guilty that we should be punished thus?"

Otto raised his arm in an oratorical attitude. He was on the point of speaking, with the stern, cold-blooded vehemence of the military bigot who has ever a quotation from Holy Writ at his tongue's end, but glancing at the young woman, the look he encountered from her candid, gentle eyes checked him. Besides, his gesture had spoken for him; it told his hatred for the nation, his conviction that he was in France to mete out justice, delegated by the God of Armies, to chastise a perverse and stiff-necked generation. Paris was burning off there on the horizon in expiation of its centuries of dissolute life, of its heaped-up measure of crime and lust. Once again the German race were to be the saviors of the world, were to purge Europe of the remnant of Latin corruption. He let his arm fall to his side and simply said:

"It is the end of all. There is another quartier doomed, for see, a fresh fire has broken out there to the right. In that direction, that line of flame that creeps onward like a stream of lava—"

Neither spoke for a long time; an awed silence rested on them. The great waves of flame continued to ascend, sending up streamers and ribbons of vivid light high into the heavens. Beneath the sea of fire was every moment extending its boundaries, a tossing, stormy, burning ocean, whence now arose dense clouds of smoke that collected over the city in a huge pall of a somber coppery hue, which was wafted slowly athwart the blackness of the night, streaking the vault of heaven with its accursed rain of ashes and of soot.

Henriette started as if awaking from an evil dream, and, the thought of her brother flowing in again upon her mind, once more became a supplicant.

"Can you do nothing for me? won't you assist me to get to Paris?"

With his former air of unconcern Otto again raised his eyes to the horizon, smiling vaguely.

"What would be the use? since to-morrow morning the city will be a pile of ruins!"

And that was all; she left the bridge, without even bidding him good-by, flying, she knew not whither, with her little satchel, while he remained yet a long time at his post of observation, a motionless figure, rigid and erect, lost in the darkness of the night, feasting his eyes on the spectacle of that Babylon in flames.

Almost the first person that Henriette encountered on emerging from the station was a stout lady who was chaffering with a hackman over his charge for driving her to the Rue Richelieu in Paris, and the young woman pleaded so touchingly, with tears in her eyes, that finally the lady consented to let her occupy a seat in the carriage. The driver, a little swarthy man, whipped up his horse and did not open his lips once during the ride, but the stout lady was extremely loquacious, telling how she had left the city the day but one before after tightly locking and bolting her shop, but had been so imprudent as to leave some valuable papers behind, hidden in a hole in the wall; hence her mind had been occupied by one engrossing thought for the two hours that the city had been burning, how she might return and snatch her property from the flames. The sleepy guards at the barrier allowed the carriage to pass without much difficulty, the worthy lady allaying their scruples with a fib, telling them she was bringing back her niece with her to Paris to assist in nursing her husband, who had been wounded by the Versaillese. It was not until they commenced to make their way along the paved streets that they encountered serious obstacles; they were obliged at every moment to turn out in order to avoid the barricades that were erected across the roadway, and when at last they reached the boulevard Poissoniere the driver declared he would go no further. The two women were therefore forced to continue their way on foot, through the Rue du Sentier, the Rue des Jeuneurs, and all the circumscribing region of the Bourse. As they approached the fortifications the blazing sky had made their way as bright before them as if it had been broad day; now they were surprised by the deserted and tranquil condition of the streets, where the only sound that disturbed the stillness was a dull, distant roar. In the vicinity of the Bourse, however, they were alarmed by the sound of musketry; they slipped along with great caution, hugging the walls. On reaching the Rue Richelieu and finding her shop had not been disturbed, the stout lady was so overjoyed that she insisted on seeing her traveling companion safely housed; they struck through the Rue du Hazard, the Rue Saint-Anne, and finally reached the Rue des Orties. Some federates, whose battalion was still holding the Rue Saint-Anne, attempted to prevent them from passing. It was four o'clock and already quite light when Henriette, exhausted by the fatigue of her long day and the stress of her emotions, reached the old house in the Rue des Orties and found the door standing open. Climbing the dark, narrow staircase, she turned to the left and discovered behind a door a ladder that led upward toward the roof.

Maurice, meantime, behind the barricade in the Rue du Bac, had succeeded in raising himself to his knees, and Jean's heart throbbed with a wild, tumultuous hope, for he believed he had pinned his friend to the earth.

"Oh, my little one, are you alive still? is that great happiness in store for me, brute that I am? Wait a moment, let me see."

He examined the wound with great tenderness by the light of the burning buildings. The bayonet had gone through the right arm near the shoulder, but a more serious part of the business was that it had afterward entered the body between two of the ribs and probably touched the lung. Still, the wounded man breathed without much apparent difficulty, but the right arm hung useless at his side.

"Poor old boy, don't grieve! We shall have time to say good-by to each other, and it is better thus, you see; I am glad to have done with it all. You have done enough for me to make up for this, for I should have died long ago in some ditch, even as I am dying now, had it not been for you."

But Jean, hearing him speak thus, again gave way to an outburst of violent grief.

"Hush, hush! Twice you saved me from the clutches of the Prussians. We were quits; it was my turn to devote my life, and instead of that I have slain you. Ah, tonnerre de Dieu! I must have been drunk not to recognize you; yes, drunk as a hog from glutting myself with blood."

Tears streamed from his eyes at the recollection of their last parting, down there, at Remilly, when they embraced, asking themselves if they should ever meet again, and how, under what circumstances of sorrow or of gladness. It was nothing, then, that they had passed toilsome days and sleepless nights together, with death staring them in the face? It was to bring them to this abominable thing, to this senseless, atrocious fratricide, that their hearts had been fused in the crucible of those weeks of suffering endured in common? No, no, it could not be; he turned in horror from the thought.

"Let's see what I can do, little one; I must save you."

The first thing to be done was to remove him to a place of safety, for the troops dispatched the wounded Communists wherever they found them. They were alone, fortunately; there was not a minute to lose. He first ripped the sleeve from wrist to shoulder with his knife, then took off the uniform coat. Some blood flowed; he made haste to bandage the arm securely with strips that he tore from the lining of the garment for the purpose. After that he staunched as well as he could the wound in the side and fastened the injured arm over it, He luckily had a bit of cord in his pocket, which he knotted tightly around the primitive dressing, thus assuring the immobility of the injured parts and preventing hemorrhage.

"Can you walk?"

"Yes, I think so."

But he did not dare to take him through the streets thus, in his shirt sleeves. Remembering to have seen a dead soldier lying in an adjacent street, he hurried off and presently came back with a capote and a kepi. He threw the greatcoat over his friend's shoulders and assisted him to slip his uninjured arm into the left sleeve. Then, when he had put the kepi on his head:

"There, now you are one of us—where are we to go?"

That was the question. His reviving hope and courage were suddenly damped by a horrible uncertainty. Where were they to look for a shelter that gave promise of security? the troops were searching the houses, were shooting every Communist they took with arms in his hands. And in addition to that, neither of them knew a soul in that portion of the city to whom they might apply for succor and refuge; not a place where they might hide their heads.

"The best thing to do would be to go home where I live," said Maurice. "The house is out of the way; no one will ever think of visiting it. But it is in the Rue des Orties, on the other side of the river."

Jean gave vent to a muttered oath in his irresolution and despair.

"Nom de Dieu! What are we to do?"

It was useless to think of attempting to pass the Pont Royal, which could not have been more brilliantly illuminated if the noonday sun had been shining on it. At every moment shots were heard coming from either bank of the river. Besides that, the blazing Tuileries lay directly in their path, and the Louvre, guarded and barricaded, would be an insurmountable obstacle.

"That ends it, then; there's no way open," said Jean, who had spent six months in Paris on his return from the Italian campaign.

An idea suddenly flashed across his brain. There had formerly been a place a little below the Pont Royal where small boats were kept for hire; if the boats were there still they would make the venture. The route was a long and dangerous one, but they had no choice, and, further, they must act with decision.

"See here, little one, we're going to clear out from here; the locality isn't healthy. I'll manufacture an excuse for my lieutenant; I'll tell him the communards took me prisoner and I got away."

Taking his unhurt arm he sustained him for the short distance they had to traverse along the Rue du Bac, where the tall houses on either hand were now ablaze from cellar to garret, like huge torches. The burning cinders fell on them in showers, the heat was so intense that the hair on their head and face was singed, and when they came out on the quai they stood for a moment dazed and blinded by the terrific light of the conflagrations, rearing their tall crests heavenward, on either side the Seine.

"One wouldn't need a candle to go to bed by here," grumbled Jean, with whose plans the illumination promised to interfere. And it was only when he had helped Maurice down the steps to the left and a little way down stream from the bridge that he felt somewhat easy in mind. There was a clump of tall trees standing on the bank of the stream, whose shadow gave them a measure of security. For near a quarter of an hour the dark forms moving to and fro on the opposite quai kept them in a fever of apprehension. There was firing, a scream was heard, succeeded by a loud splash, and the bosom of the river was disturbed. The bridge was evidently guarded.

"Suppose we pass the night in that shed?" suggested Maurice, pointing to the wooden structure that served the boatman as an office.

"Yes, and get pinched to-morrow morning!"

Jean was still harboring his idea. He had found quite a flotilla of small boats there, but they were all securely fastened with chains; how was he to get one loose and secure a pair of oars? At last he discovered two oars that had been thrown aside as useless; he succeeded in forcing a padlock, and when he had stowed Maurice away in the bow, shoved off and allowed the boat to drift with the current, cautiously hugging the shore and keeping in the shadow of the bathing-houses. Neither of them spoke a word, horror-stricken as they were by the baleful spectacle that presented itself to their vision. As they floated down the stream and their horizon widened the enormity of the terrible sight increased, and when they reached the bridge of Solferino a single glance sufficed to embrace both the blazing quais.

On their left the palace of the Tuileries was burning. It was not yet dark when the Communists had fired the two extremities of the structure, the Pavilion de Flore and the Pavilion de Marsan, and with rapid strides the flames had gained the Pavilion de l'Horloge in the central portion, beneath which, in the Salle des Marechaux, a mine had been prepared by stacking up casks of powder. At that moment the intervening buildings were belching from their shattered windows dense volumes of reddish smoke, streaked with long ribbons of blue flame. The roofs, yawning as does the earth in regions where volcanic agencies prevail, were seamed with great cracks through which the raging sea of fire beneath was visible. But the grandest, saddest spectacle of all was that afforded by the Pavilion de Flore, to which the torch had been earliest applied and which was ablaze from its foundation to its lofty summit, burning with a deep, fierce roar that could be heard far away. The petroleum with which the floors and hangings had been soaked gave the flames an intensity such that the ironwork of the balconies was seen to twist and writhe in the convolutions of a serpent, and the tall monumental chimneys, with their elaborate carvings, glowed with the fervor of live coals.

Then, still on their left, were, first, the Chancellerie of the Legion of Honor, which was fired at five o'clock in the afternoon and had been burning nearly seven hours, and next, the Palace of the Council of State, a huge rectangular structure of stone, which was spouting torrents of fire from every orifice in each of its two colonnaded stories. The four structures surrounding the great central court had all caught at the same moment, and the petroleum, which here also had been distributed by the barrelful, had poured down the four grand staircases at the four corners of the building in rivers of hellfire. On the facade that faced the river the black line of the mansard was profiled distinctly against the ruddy sky, amid the red tongues that rose to lick its base, while colonnades, entablatures, friezes, carvings, all stood out with startling vividness in the blinding, shimmering glow. So great was the energy of the fire, so terrible its propulsive force, that the colossal structure was in some sort raised bodily from the earth, trembling and rumbling on its foundations, preserving intact only its four massive walls, in the fierce eruption that hurled its heavy zinc roof high in air. Then, close at one side were the d'Orsay barracks, which burned with a flame that seemed to pierce the heavens, so purely white and so unwavering that it was like a tower of light. And finally, back from the river, were still other fires, the seven houses in the Rue du Bac, the twenty-two houses in the Rue de Lille, helping to tinge the sky a deeper crimson, profiling their flames on other flames, in a blood-red ocean that seemed to have no end.

Jean murmured in awed tone:

"Did ever mortal man look on the like of this! the very river is on fire."

Their boat seemed to be sailing on the bosom of an incandescent stream. As the dancing lights of the mighty conflagrations were caught by the ripples of the current the Seine seemed to be pouring down torrents of living coals; flashes of intensest crimson played fitfully across its surface, the blazing brands fell in showers into the water and were extinguished with a hiss. And ever they floated downward with the tide on the bosom of that blood-red stream, between the blazing palaces on either hand, like wayfarers in some accursed city, doomed to destruction and burning on the banks of a river of molten lava.

"Ah!" exclaimed Maurice, with a fresh access of madness at the sight of the havoc he had longed for, "let it burn, let it all go up in smoke!"

But Jean silenced him with a terrified gesture, as if he feared such blasphemy might bring them evil. Where could a young man whom he loved so fondly, so delicately nurtured, so well informed, have picked up such ideas? And he applied himself more vigorously to the oars, for they had now passed the bridge of Solferino and were come out into a wide open space of water. The light was so intense that the river was illuminated as by the noonday sun when it stands vertically above men's heads and casts no shadow. The most minute objects, such as the eddies in the stream, the stones piled on the banks, the small trees along the quais, stood out before their vision with wonderful distinctness. The bridges, too, were particularly noticeable in their dazzling whiteness, and so clearly defined that they could have counted every stone; they had the appearance of narrow gangways thrown across the fiery stream to connect one conflagration with the other. Amid the roar of the flames and the general clamor a loud crash occasionally announced the fall of some stately edifice. Dense clouds of soot hung in the air and settled everywhere, the wind brought odors of pestilence on its wings. And another horror was that Paris, those more distant quarters of the city that lay back from the banks of the Seine, had ceased to exist for them. To right and left of the conflagration that raged with such fierce resplendency was an unfathomable gulf of blackness; all that presented itself to their strained gaze was a vast waste of shadow, an empty void, as if the devouring element had reached the utmost limits of the city and all Paris were swallowed up in everlasting night. And the heavens, too, were dead and lifeless; the flames rose so high that they extinguished the stars.

Maurice, who was becoming delirious, laughed wildly.

"High carnival at the Consoil d'Etat and at the Tuileries to-night! They have illuminated the facades, women are dancing beneath the sparkling chandeliers. Ah, dance, dance and be merry, in your smoking petticoats, with your chignons ablaze—"

And he drew a picture of the feasts of Sodom and Gomorrah, the music, the lights, the flowers, the unmentionable orgies of lust and drunkenness, until the candles on the walls blushed at the shamelessness of the display and fired the palaces that sheltered such depravity. Suddenly there was a terrific explosion. The fire, approaching from either extremity of the Tuileries, had reached the Salle des Marechaux, the casks of powder caught, the Pavilion de l'Horloge was blown into the air with the violence of a powder mill. A column of flame mounted high in the heavens, and spreading, expanded in a great fiery plume on the inky blackness of the sky, the crowning display of the horrid fete.

"Bravo!" exclaimed Maurice, as at the end of the play, when the lights are extinguished and darkness settles on the stage.

Again Jean, in stammering, disconnected sentences, besought him to be quiet. No, no, it was not right to wish evils to anyone! And if they invoked destruction, would not they themselves perish in the general ruin? His sole desire was to find a landing place so that he might no longer have that horrid spectacle before his eyes. He considered it best not to attempt to land at the Pont de la Concorde, but, rounding the elbow of the Seine, pulled on until they reached the Quai de la Conference, and even at that critical moment, instead of shoving the skiff out into the stream to take its chances, he wasted some precious moments in securing it, in his instinctive respect for the property of others. While doing this he had seated Maurice comfortably on the bank; his plan was to reach the Rue des Orties through the Place de la Concorde and the Rue Saint-Honore. Before proceeding further he climbed alone to the top of the steps that ascended from the quai to explore the ground, and on witnessing the obstacles they would have to surmount his courage was almost daunted. There lay the impregnable fortress of the Commune, the terrace of the Tuileries bristling with cannon, the Rues Royale, Florentin, and Rivoli obstructed by lofty and massive barricades; and this state of affairs explained the tactics of the army of Versailles, whose line that night described an immense arc, the center and apex resting on the Place de la Concorde, one of the two extremities being at the freight depot of the Northern Railway on the right bank, the other on the left bank, at one of the bastions of the ramparts, near the gate of Arcueil. But as the night advanced the Communards had evacuated the Tuileries and the barricades and the regular troops had taken possession of the quartier in the midst of further conflagrations; twelve houses at the junction of the Rue Saint-Honore and the Rue Royale had been burning since nine o'clock in the evening.

When Jean descended the steps and reached the river-bank again he found Maurice in a semi-comatose condition, the effects of the reaction after his hysterical outbreak.

"It will be no easy job. I hope you are going to be able to walk, youngster?"

"Yes, yes; don't be alarmed. I'll get there somehow, alive or dead."

It was not without great difficulty that he climbed the stone steps, and when he reached the level ground of the quai at the summit he walked very slowly, supported by his companion's arm, with the shuffling gait of a somnambulist. The day had not dawned yet, but the reflected light from the burning buildings cast a lurid illumination on the wide Place. They made their way in silence across its deep solitude, sick at heart to behold the mournful scene of devastation it presented. At either extremity, beyond the bridge and at the further end of the Rue Royale, they could faintly discern the shadowy outlines of the Palais Bourbon and the Church of the Madeleine, torn by shot and shell. The terrace of the Tuileries had been breached by the fire of the siege guns and was partially in ruins. On the Place itself the bronze railings and ornaments of the fountains had been chipped and defaced by the balls; the colossal statue of Lille lay on the ground shattered by a projectile, while near at hand the statue of Strasbourg, shrouded in heavy veils of crape, seemed to be mourning the ruin that surrounded it on every side. And near the Obelisk, which had escaped unscathed, a gas-pipe in its trench had been broken by the pick of a careless workman, and the escaping gas, fired by some accident, was flaring up in a great undulating jet, with a roaring, hissing sound.

Jean gave a wide berth to the barricade erected across the Rue Royale between the Ministry of Marine and the Garde-Meuble, both of which the fire had spared; he could hear the voices of the soldiers behind the sand bags and casks of earth with which it was constructed. Its front was protected by a ditch, filled with stagnant, greenish water, in which was floating the dead body of a federate, and through one of its embrasures they caught a glimpse of the houses in the carrefour Saint-Honore, which were burning still in spite of the engines that had come in from the suburbs, of which they heard the roar and clatter. To right and left the trees and the kiosks of the newspaper venders were riddled by the storm of bullets to which they had been subjected. Loud cries of horror arose; the firemen, in exploring the cellar of one of the burning houses, had come across the charred bodies of seven of its inmates.

Although the barricade that closed the entrance to the Rue Saint-Florentin and the Rue de Rivoli by its skilled construction and great height appeared even more formidable than the other, Jean's instinct told him they would have less difficulty in getting by it. It was completely evacuated, indeed, and the Versailles troops had not yet entered it. The abandoned guns were resting in the embrasures in peaceful slumber, the only living thing behind that invincible rampart was a stray dog, that scuttled away in haste. But as Jean was making what speed he could along the Rue Saint-Florentin, sustaining Maurice, whose strength was giving out, that which he had been in fear of came to pass; they fell directly into the arms of an entire company of the 88th of the line, which had turned the barricade.

"Captain," he explained, "this is a comrade of mine, who has just been wounded by those bandits. I am taking him to the hospital."

It was then that the capote which he had thrown over Maurice's shoulders stood them in good stead, and Jean's heart was beating like a trip-hammer as at last they turned into the Rue Saint-Honore. Day was just breaking, and the sound of shots reached their ears from the cross-streets, for fighting was going on still throughout the quartier. It was little short of a miracle that they finally reached the Rue des Frondeurs without sustaining any more disagreeable adventure. Their progress was extremely slow; the last four or five hundred yards appeared interminable. In the Rue des Frondeurs they struck up against a communist picket, but the federates, thinking a whole regiment was at hand, took to their heels. And now they had but a short bit of the Rue d'Argenteuil to traverse and they would be safe in the Rue des Orties.

For four long hours that seemed like an eternity Jean's longing desire had been bent on that Rue des Orties with feverish impatience, and now they were there it appeared like a haven of safety. It was dark, silent, and deserted, as if there were no battle raging within a hundred leagues of it. The house, an old, narrow house without a concierge, was still as the grave.

"I have the keys in my pocket," murmured Maurice. "The big one opens the street door, the little one is the key of my room, way at the top of the house."

He succumbed and fainted dead away in Jean's arms, whose alarm and distress were extreme. They made him forget to close the outer door, and he had to grope his way up that strange, dark staircase, bearing his lifeless burden and observing the greatest caution not to stumble or make any noise that might arouse the sleeping inmates of the rooms. When he had gained the top he had to deposit the wounded man on the floor while he searched for the chamber door by striking matches, of which he fortunately had a supply in his pocket, and only when he had found and opened it did he return and raise him in his arms again. Entering, he laid him on the little iron bed that faced the window, which he threw open to its full extent in his great need of air and light. It was broad day; he dropped on his knees beside the bed, sobbing as if his heart would break, suddenly abandoned by all his strength as the fearful thought again smote him that he had slain his friend.

Minutes passed; he was hardly surprised when, raising his eyes, he saw Henriette standing by the bed. It was perfectly natural: her brother was dying, she had come. He had not even seen her enter the room; for all he knew she might have been standing there for hours. He sank into a chair and watched her with stupid eyes as she hovered about the bed, her heart wrung with mortal anguish at sight of her brother lying there senseless, in his blood-stained garments. Then his memory began to act again; he asked:

"Tell me, did you close the street door?"

She answered with an affirmative motion of the head, and as she came toward him, extending her two hands in her great need of sympathy and support, he added:

"You know it was I who killed him."

She did not understand; she did not believe him. He felt no flutter in the two little hands that rested confidingly in his own.

"It was I who killed him—yes, 'twas over yonder, behind a barricade, I did it. He was fighting on one side, I on the other—"

There began to be a fluttering of the little hands.

"We were like drunken men, none of us knew what he as about—it was I who killed him."

Then Henriette, shivering, pale as death, withdrew her hands, fixing on him a gaze that was full of horror. Father of Mercy, was the end of all things come! was her crushed and bleeding heart to know no peace for ever more! Ah, that Jean, of whom she had been thinking that very day, happy in the unshaped hope that perhaps she might see him once again! And it was he who had done that abominable thing; and yet he had saved Maurice, for was it not he who had brought him home through so many perils? She could not yield her hands to him now without a revolt of all her being, but she uttered a cry into which she threw the last hope of her tortured and distracted heart.

"Oh! I will save him; I must save him, now!"

She had acquired considerable experience in surgery during the long time she had been in attendance on the hospital at Remilly, and now she proceeded without delay to examine her brother's hurt, who remained unconscious while she was undressing him. But when she undid the rude bandage of Jean's invention, he stirred feebly and uttered a faint cry of pain, opening wide his eyes that were bright with fever. He recognized her at once and smiled.

"You here! Ah, how glad I am to see you once more before I die!"

She silenced him, speaking in a tone of cheerful confidence.

"Hush, don't talk of dying; I won't allow it! I mean that you shall live! There, be quiet, and let me see what is to be done."

However, when Henriette had examined the injured arm and the wound in the side, her face became clouded and a troubled look rose to her eyes. She installed herself as mistress in the room, searching until she found a little oil, tearing up old shirts for bandages, while Jean descended to the lower regions for a pitcher of water. He did not open his mouth, but looked on in silence as she washed and deftly dressed the wounds, incapable of aiding her, seemingly deprived of all power of action by her presence there. When she had concluded her task, however, noticing her alarmed expression, he proposed to her that he should go and secure a doctor, but she was in possession of all her clear intelligence. No, no; she would not have a chance-met doctor, of whom they knew nothing, who, perhaps, would betray her brother to the authorities. They must have a man they could depend on; they could afford to wait a few hours. Finally, when Jean said he must go and report for duty with his company, it was agreed that he should return as soon as he could get away, and try to bring a surgeon with him.

He delayed his departure, seemingly unable to make up his mind to leave that room, whose atmosphere was pervaded by the evil he had unintentionally done. The window, which had been closed for a moment, had been opened again, and from it the wounded man, lying on his bed, his head propped up by pillows, was looking out over the city, while the others, also, in the oppressive silence that had settled on the chamber, were gazing out into vacancy.

From that elevated point of the Butte des Moulins a good half of Paris lay stretched beneath their eyes in a vast panorama: first the central districts, from the Faubourg Saint-Honore to the Bastille, then the Seine in its entire course through the city, with the thickly-built, densely-populated regions of the left bank, an ocean of roofs, treetops, steeples, domes, and towers. The light was growing stronger, the abominable night, than which there have been few more terrible in history, was ended; but beneath the rosy sky, in the pure, clear light of the rising sun, the fires were blazing still. Before them lay the burning Tuileries, the d'Orsay barracks, the Palaces of the Council of State and the Legion of Honor, the flames from which were paled by the superior refulgence of the day-star. Even beyond the houses in the Rue de Lille and the Rue du Bac there must have been other structures burning, for clouds of smoke were visible rising from the carrefour of la Croix-Rouge, and, more distant still, from the Rue Vavin and the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Nearer at hand and to their right the fires in the Rue Saint-Honore were dying out, while to the left, at the Palais-Royal and the new Louvre, to which the torch had not been applied until near morning, the work of the incendiaries was apparently a failure. But what they were unable to account for at first was the dense volume of black smoke which, impelled by the west wind, came driving past their window. Fire had been set to the Ministry of Finance at three o'clock in the morning and ever since that time it had been smoldering, emitting no blaze, among the stacks and piles of documents that were contained in the low-ceiled, fire-proof vaults and chambers. And if the terrific impressions of the night were not there to preside at the awakening of the great city—the fear of total destruction, the Seine pouring its fiery waves past their doors, Paris kindling into flame from end to end—a feeling of gloom and despair, hung heavy over the quartiers that had been spared, with that dense, on-pouring smoke, whose dusky cloud was ever spreading. Presently the sun, which had risen bright and clear, was hid by it, and the golden sky was filled with the great funeral pall.

Maurice, who appeared to be delirious again, made a slow, sweeping gesture that embraced the entire horizon, murmuring:

"Is it all burning? Ah, how long it takes!"

Tears rose to Henriette's eyes, as if her burden of misery was made heavier for her by the share her brother had had in those deeds of horror. And Jean, who dared neither take her hand nor embrace his friend, left the room with the air of one crazed by grief.

"I will return soon. Au revoir!"

It was dark, however, nearly eight o'clock, before he was able to redeem his promise. Notwithstanding his great distress he was happy; his regiment had been transferred from the first to the second line and assigned the task of protecting the quartier, so that, bivouacking with his company in the Place du Carrousel, he hoped to get a chance to run in each evening to see how the wounded man was getting on. And he did not return alone; as luck would have it he had fallen in with the former surgeon of the 106th and had brought him along with him, having been unable to find another doctor, consoling himself with the reflection that the terrible, big man with the lion's mane was not such a bad sort of fellow after all.

When Bouroche, who knew nothing of the patient he was summoned with such insistence to attend and grumbled at having to climb so many stairs, learned that it was a Communist he had on his hands he commenced to storm.

"God's thunder, what do you take me for? Do you suppose I'm going to waste my time on those thieving, murdering, house-burning scoundrels? As for this particular bandit, his case is clear, and I'll take it upon me to see he is cured; yes, with a bullet in his head!"

But his anger subsided suddenly at sight of Henriette's pale face and her golden hair streaming in disorder over her black dress.

"He is my brother, doctor, and he was with you at Sedan."

He made no reply, but uncovered the injuries and examined them in silence; then, taking some phials from his pocket, he made a fresh dressing, explaining to the young woman how it was done. When he had finished he turned suddenly to the patient and asked in his loud, rough voice:

"Why did you take sides with those ruffians? What could cause you to be guilty of such an abomination?"

Maurice, with a feverish luster in his eyes, had been watching him since he entered the room, but no word had escaped his lips. He answered in a voice that was almost fierce, so eager was it:

"Because there is too much suffering in the world, too much wickedness, too much infamy!"

Bouroche's shrug of the shoulders seemed to indicate that he thought a young man was likely to make his mark who carried such ideas about in his head. He appeared to be about to say something further, but changed his mind and bowed himself out, simply adding:

"I will come in again."

To Henriette, on the landing, he said he would not venture to make any promises. The injury to the lung was serious; hemorrhage might set in and carry off the patient without a moment's warning. And when she re-entered the room she forced a smile to her lips, notwithstanding the sharp stab with which the doctor's words had pierced her heart, for had she not promised herself to save him? and could she permit him to be snatched from them now that they three were again united, with a prospect of a lifetime of affection and happiness before them? She had not left the room since morning, an old woman who lived on the landing having kindly offered to act as her messenger for the purchase of such things as she required. And she returned and resumed her place upon a chair at her brother's bedside.

But Maurice, in his febrile excitation, questioned Jean, insisting on knowing what had happened since the morning. The latter did not tell him everything, maintaining a discreet silence upon the furious rage which Paris, now it was delivered from its tyrants, was manifesting toward the dying Commune. It was now Wednesday. For two interminable days succeeding the Sunday evening when the conflict first broke out the citizens had lived in their cellars, quaking with fear, and when they ventured out at last on Wednesday morning, the spectacle of bloodshed and devastation that met their eyes on every side, and more particularly the frightful ruin entailed by the conflagrations, aroused in their breasts feelings the bitterest and most vindictive. It was felt in every quarter that the punishment must be worthy of the crime. The houses in the suspected quarters were subjected to a rigorous search and men and women who were at all tainted with suspicion were led away in droves and shot without formality. At six o'clock of the evening of that day the army of the Versaillese was master of the half of Paris, following the line of the principal avenues from the park of Montsouris to the station of the Northern Railway, and the remainder of the braver members of the Commune, a mere handful, some twenty or so, had taken refuge in the mairie of the eleventh arrondissement, in the Boulevard Voltaire.

They were silent when he concluded his narration, and Maurice, his glance vaguely wandering over the city through the open window that let in the soft, warm air of evening, murmured:

"Well, the work goes on; Paris continues to burn!"

It was true: the flames were becoming visible again in the increasing darkness and the heavens were reddened once more with the ill-omened light. That afternoon the powder magazine at the Luxembourg had exploded with a frightful detonation, which gave rise to a report that the Pantheon had collapsed and sunk into the catacombs. All that day, moreover, the conflagrations of the night pursued their course unchecked; the Palace of the Council of State and the Tuileries were burning still, the Ministry of Finance continued to belch forth its billowing clouds of smoke. A dozen times Henriette was obliged to close the window against the shower of blackened, burning paper that the hot breath of the fire whirled upward into the sky, whence it descended to earth again in a fine rain of fragments; the streets of Paris were covered with them, and some were found in the fields of Normandy, thirty leagues away. And now it was not the western and southern districts alone which seemed devoted to destruction, the houses in the Rue Royale and those of the Croix-Rouge and the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs: the entire eastern portion of the city appeared to be in flames, the Hotel de Ville glowed on the horizon like a mighty furnace. And in that direction also, blazing like gigantic beacon-fires upon the mountain tops, were the Theatre-Lyrique, the mairie of the fourth arrondissement, and more than thirty houses in the adjacent streets, to say nothing of the theater of the Porte-Saint-Martin, further to the north, which illuminated the darkness of its locality as a stack of grain lights up the deserted, dusky fields at night. There is no doubt that in many cases the incendiaries were actuated by motives of personal revenge; perhaps, too, there were criminal records which the parties implicated had an object in destroying. It was no longer a question of self-defense with the Commune, of checking the advance of the victorious troops by fire; a delirium of destruction raged among its adherents: the Palace of Justice, the Hotel-Dieu and the cathedral of Notre-Dame escaped by the merest chance. They would destroy solely for the sake of destroying, would bury the effete, rotten humanity beneath the ruins of a world, in the hope that from the ashes might spring a new and innocent race that should realize the primitive legends of an earthly paradise. And all that night again did the sea of flame roll its waves over Paris.

"Ah; war, war, what a hateful thing it is!" said Henriette to herself, looking out on the sore-smitten city.

Was it not indeed the last act, the inevitable conclusion of the tragedy, the blood-madness for which the lost fields of Sedan and Metz were responsible, the epidemic of destruction born from the siege of Paris, the supreme struggle of a nation in peril of dissolution, in the midst of slaughter and universal ruin?

But Maurice, without taking his eyes from the fires that were raging in the distance, feebly, and with an effort, murmured:

"No, no; do not be unjust toward war. It is good; it has its appointed work to do—"

There were mingled hatred and remorse in the cry with which Jean interrupted him.

"Good God! When I see you lying there, and know it is through my fault—Do not say a word in defense of it; it is an accursed thing, is war!"

The wounded man smiled faintly.

"Oh, as for me, what matters it? There is many another in my condition. It may be that this blood-letting was necessary for us. War is life, which cannot exist without its sister, death."

And Maurice closed his eyes, exhausted by the effort it had cost him to utter those few words. Henriette signaled Jean not to continue the discussion. It angered her; all her being rose in protest against such suffering and waste of human life, notwithstanding the calm bravery of her frail woman's nature, with her clear, limpid eyes, in which lived again all the heroic spirit of the grandfather, the veteran of the Napoleonic wars.

Two days more, Thursday and Friday, passed, like their predecessors, amid scenes of slaughter and conflagration. The thunder of the artillery was incessant; the batteries of the army of Versailles on the heights of Montmartre roared against those that the federates had established at Belleville and Pare-Lachaise without a moment's respite, while the latter maintained a desultory fire on Paris. Shells had fallen in the Rue Richelieu and the Place Vendome. At evening on the 25th the entire left bank was in possession of the regular troops, but on the right bank the barricades in the Place Chateau d'Eau and the Place de la Bastille continued to hold out; they were veritable fortresses, from which proceeded an uninterrupted and most destructive fire. At twilight, while the last remaining members of the Commune were stealing off to make provision for their safety, Delescluze took his cane and walked leisurely away to the barricade that was thrown across the Boulevard Voltaire, where he died a hero's death. At daybreak on the following morning, the 26th, the Chateau d'Eau and Bastille positions were carried, and the Communists, now reduced to a handful of brave men who were resolved to sell their lives dearly, had only la Villette, Belleville, and Charonne left to them, And for two more days they remained and fought there with the fury of despair.

On Friday evening, as Jean was on his way from the Place du Carrousel to the Rue des Orties, he witnessed a summary execution in the Rue Richelieu that filled him with horror. For the last forty-eight hours two courts-martial had been sitting, one at the Luxembourg, the other at the Theatre du Chatelet; the prisoners convicted by the former were taken into the garden and shot, while those found guilty by the latter were dragged away to the Lobau barracks, where a platoon of soldiers that was kept there in constant attendance for the purpose mowed them down, almost at point-blank range. The scenes of slaughter there were most horrible: there were men and women who had been condemned to death on the flimsiest evidence: because they had a stain of powder on their hands, because their feet were shod with army shoes; there were innocent persons, the victims of private malice, who had been wrongfully denounced, shrieking forth their entreaties and explanations and finding no one to lend an ear to them; and all were driven pell-mell against a wall, facing the muzzles of the muskets, often so many poor wretches in the band at once that the bullets did not suffice for all and it became necessary to finish the wounded with the bayonet. From morning until night the place was streaming with blood; the tumbrils were kept busy bearing away the bodies of the dead. And throughout the length and breadth of the city, keeping pace with the revengeful clamors of the people, other executions were continually taking place, in front of barricades, against the walls in the deserted streets, on the steps of the public buildings. It was under such circumstances that Jean saw a woman and two men dragged by the residents of the quartier before the officer commanding the detachment that was guarding the Theatre Francais. The citizens showed themselves more bloodthirsty than the soldiery, and those among the newspapers that had resumed publication were howling for measures of extermination. A threatening crowd surrounded the prisoners and was particularly violent against the woman, in whom the excited bourgeois beheld one of those petroleuses who were the constant bugbear of terror-haunted imaginations, whom they accused of prowling by night, slinking along the darkened streets past the dwellings of the wealthy, to throw cans of lighted petroleum into unprotected cellars. This woman, was the cry, had been found bending over a coal-hole in the Rue Sainte-Anne. And notwithstanding her denials, accompanied by tears and supplications, she was hurled, together with the two men, to the bottom of the ditch in front of an abandoned barricade, and there, lying in the mud and slime, they were shot with as little pity as wolves caught in a trap. Some by-passers stopped and looked indifferently on the scene, among them a lady hanging on her husband's arm, while a baker's boy, who was carrying home a tart to someone in the neighborhood, whistled the refrain of a popular air.

As Jean, sick at heart, was hurrying along the street toward the house in the Rue des Orties, a sudden recollection flashed across his mind. Was not that Chouteau, the former member of his squad, whom he had seen, in the blouse of a respectable workman, watching the execution and testifying his approval of it in a loud-mouthed way? He was a proficient in his role of bandit, traitor, robber, and assassin! For a moment the corporal thought he would retrace his steps, denounce him, and send him to keep company with the other three. Ah, the sadness of the thought; the guilty ever escaping punishment, parading their unwhipped infamy in the bright light of day, while the innocent molder in the earth!

Henriette had come out upon the landing at the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs, where she welcomed Jean with a manner that indicated great alarm.

"'Sh! he has been extremely violent all day long. The major was here, I am in despair—"

Bouroche, in fact, had shaken his head ominously, saying he could promise nothing as yet. Nevertheless the patient might pull through, in spite of all the evil consequences he feared; he had youth on his side.

"Ah, here you are at last," Maurice said impatiently to Jean, as soon as he set eyes on him. "I have been waiting for you. What is going on—how do matters stand?" And supported by the pillows at his back, his face to the window which he had forced his sister to open for him, he pointed with his finger to the city, where, on the gathering darkness, the lambent flames were beginning to rise anew. "You see, it is breaking out again; Paris is burning. All Paris will burn this time!"

As soon as daylight began to fade, the distant quarters beyond the Seine had been lighted up by the burning of the Grenier d'Abondance. From time to time there was an outburst of flame, accompanied by a shower of sparks, from the smoking ruins of the Tuileries, as some wall or ceiling fell and set the smoldering timbers blazing afresh. Many houses, where the fire was supposed to be extinguished, flamed up anew; for the last three days, as soon as darkness descended on the city it seemed as if it were the signal for the conflagrations to break out again; as if the shades of night had breathed upon the still glowing embers, reanimating them, and scattering them to the four corners of the horizon. Ah, that city of the damned, that had harbored for a week within its bosom the demon of destruction, incarnadining the sky each evening as soon as twilight fell, illuminating with its infernal torches the nights of that week of slaughter! And when, that night, the docks at la Villette burned, the light they shed upon the huge city was so intense that it seemed to be on fire in every part at once, overwhelmed and drowned beneath the sea of flame.

"Ah, it is the end!" Maurice repeated. "Paris is doomed!"

He reiterated the words again and again with apparent relish, actuated by a feverish desire to hear the sound of his voice once more, after the dull lethargy that had kept him tongue-tied for three days. But the sound of stifled sobs causes him to turn his head.

"What, sister, you, brave little woman that you are! You weep because I am about to die—"

She interrupted him, protesting:

"But you are not going to die!"

"Yes, yes; it is better it should be so; it must be so. Ah, I shall be no great loss to anyone. Up to the time the war broke out I was a source of anxiety to you, I cost you dearly in heart and purse. All the folly and the madness I was guilty of, and which would have landed me, who knows where? in prison, in the gutter—"

Again she took the words from his mouth, exclaiming hotly:

"Hush! be silent!—you have atoned for all."

He reflected a moment. "Yes, perhaps I shall have atoned, when I am dead. Ah, Jean, old fellow, you didn't know what a service you were rendering us all when you gave me that bayonet thrust."

But the other protested, his eyes swimming with tears:

"Don't, I entreat you, say such things! do you wish to make me go and dash out my brains against a wall?"

Maurice pursued his train of thought, speaking in hurried, eager tones.

"Remember what you said to me the day after Sedan, that it was not such a bad thing, now and then, to receive a good drubbing. And you added that if a man had gangrene in his system, if he saw one of his limbs wasting from mortification, it would be better to take an ax and chop off that limb than to die from the contamination of the poison. I have many a time thought of those words since I have been here, without a friend, immured in this city of distress and madness. And I am the diseased limb, and it is you who have lopped it off—" He went on with increasing vehemence, regardless of the supplications of his terrified auditors, in a fervid tirade that abounded with symbols and striking images. It was the untainted, the reasoning, the substantial portion of France, the peasantry, the tillers of the soil, those who had always kept close contact with their mother Earth, that was suppressing the outbreak of the crazed, exasperated part, the part that had been vitiated by the Empire and led astray by vain illusions and empty dreams; and in the performance of its duty it had had to cut deep into the living flesh, without being fully aware of what it was doing. But the baptism of blood, French blood, was necessary; the abominable holocaust, the living sacrifice, in the midst of the purifying flames. Now they had mounted the steps of the Calvary and known their bitterest agony; the crucified nation had expiated its faults and would be born again. "Jean, old friend, you and those like you are strong in your simplicity and honesty. Go, take up the spade and the trowel, turn the sod in the abandoned field, rebuild the house! As for me, you did well to lop me off, since I was the ulcer that was eating away your strength!"

After that his language became more and more incoherent; he insisted on rising and going to sit by the window. "Paris burns, Paris burns; not a stone of it will be left standing. Ah! the fire that I invoked, it destroys, but it heals; yes, the work it does is good. Let me go down there; let me help to finish the work of humanity and liberty—"

Jean had the utmost difficulty in getting him back to bed, while Henriette tearfully recalled memories of their childhood, and entreated him, for the sake of the love they bore each other, to be calm. Over the immensity of Paris the fiery glow deepened and widened; the sea of flame seemed to be invading the remotest quarters of the horizon; the heavens were like the vaults of a colossal oven, heated to red heat. And athwart the red light of the conflagrations the dense black smoke-clouds from the Ministry of Finance, which had been burning three days and given forth no blaze, continued to pour in unbroken, slow procession.

The following, Saturday, morning brought with it a decided improvement in Maurice's condition: he was much calmer, the fever had subsided, and it afforded Jean inexpressible delight to behold a smile on Henriette's face once more, as the young woman fondly reverted to her cherished dream, a pact of reciprocal affection between the three of them, that should unite them in a future that might yet be one of happiness, under conditions that she did not care to formulate even to herself. Would destiny be merciful? Would it save them all from an eternal farewell by saving her brother? Her nights were spent in watching him; she never stirred outside that chamber, where her noiseless activity and gentle ministrations were like a never-ceasing caress. And Jean, that evening, while sitting with his friends, forgot his great sorrow in a delight that astonished him and made him tremble. The troops had carried Belleville and the Buttes-Chaumont that day; the only remaining point where there was any resistance now was the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, which had been converted into a fortified camp. It seemed to him that the insurrection was ended; he even declared that the troops had ceased to shoot their prisoners, who were being collected in droves and sent on to Versailles. He told of one of those bands that he had seen that morning on the quai, made up of men of every class, from the most respectable to the lowest, and of women of all ages and conditions, wrinkled old bags and young girls, mere children, not yet out of their teens; pitiful aggregation of misery and revolt, driven like cattle by the soldiers along the street in the bright sunshine, and that the people of Versailles, so it was said, received with revilings and blows.

But Sunday was to Jean a day of terror. It rounded out and fitly ended that accursed week. With the triumphant rising of the sun on that bright, warm Sabbath morning he shudderingly heard the news that was the culmination of all preceding horrors. It was only at that late day that the public was informed of the murder of the hostages; the archbishop, the cure of the Madeleine and others, shot at la Roquette on Wednesday, the Dominicans of Arcueil coursed like hares on Thursday, more priests and gendarmes, to the number of forty-seven in all, massacred in cold blood in the Rue Haxo on Friday; and a furious cry went up for vengeance, the soldiers bunched the last prisoners they made and shot them in mass. All day long on that magnificent Sunday the volleys of musketry rang out in the courtyard of the Lobau barracks, that were filled with blood and smoke and the groans of the dying. At la Roquette two hundred and twenty-seven miserable wretches, gathered in here and there by the drag-net of the police, were collected in a huddle, and the soldiers fired volley after volley into the mass of human beings until there was no further sign of life. At Pere-Lachaise, which had been shelled continuously for four days and was finally carried by a hand-to-hand conflict among the graves, a hundred and forty-eight of the insurgents were drawn up in line before a wall, and when the firing ceased the stones were weeping great tears of blood; and three of them, despite their wounds, having succeeded in making their escape, they were retaken and despatched. Among the twelve thousand victims of the Commune, who shall say how many innocent people suffered for every malefactor who met his deserts! An order to stop the executions had been issued from Versailles, so it was said, but none the less the slaughter still went on; Thiers, while hailed as the savior of his country, was to bear the stigma of having been the Jack Ketch of Paris, and Marshal MacMahon, the vanquished of Froeschwiller, whose proclamation announcing the triumph of law and order was to be seen on every wall, was to receive the credit of the victory of Pere-Lachaise. And in the pleasant sunshine Paris, attired in holiday garb, appeared to be en fete; the reconquered streets were filled with an enormous crowd; men and women, glad to breathe the air of heaven once more, strolled leisurely from spot to spot to view the smoking ruins; mothers, holding their little children by the hand, stopped for a moment and listened with an air of interest to the deadened crash of musketry from the Lobau barracks.

When Jean ascended the dark staircase of the house in the Rue des Orties, in the gathering obscurity of that Sunday evening, his heart was oppressed by a chill sense of impending evil. He entered the room, and saw at once that the inevitable end was come; Maurice lay dead on the little bed; the hemorrhage predicted by Bouroche had done its work. The red light of the setting sun streamed through the open window and rested on the wall as if in a last farewell; two tapers were burning on a table beside the bed. And Henriette, alone with her dead, in her widow's weeds that she had not laid aside, was weeping silently.

At the noise of footsteps she raised her head, and shuddered on beholding Jean. He, in his wild despair, was about to hurry toward her and seize her hands, mingle his grief with hers in a sympathetic clasp, but he saw the little hands were trembling, he felt as by instinct the repulsion that pervaded all her being and was to part them for evermore. Was not all ended between them now? Maurice's grave would be there, a yawning chasm, to part them as long as they should live. And he could only fall to his knees by the bedside of his dead friend, sobbing softly. After the silence had lasted some moments, however, Henriette spoke:

"I had turned my back and was preparing a cup of bouillon, when he gave a cry. I hastened to his side, but had barely time to reach the bed before he expired, with my name upon his lips, and yours as well, amid an outgush of blood—"

Her Maurice, her twin brother, whom she might almost be said to have loved in the prenatal state, her other self, whom she had watched over and saved! sole object of her affection since at Bazeilles she had seen her poor Weiss set against a wall and shot to death! And now cruel war had done its worst by her, had crushed her bleeding heart; henceforth her way through life was to be a solitary one, widowed and forsaken as she was, with no one upon whom to bestow her love.

"Ah, bon sang!" cried Jean, amid his sobs, "behold my work! My poor little one, for whom I would have laid down my life, and whom I murdered, brute that I am! What is to become of us? Can you ever forgive me?"

At that moment their glances met, and they were stricken with consternation at what they read in each other's eyes. The past rose before them, the secluded chamber at Remilly, where they had spent so many melancholy yet happy days. His dream returned to him, that dream of which at first he had been barely conscious and which even at a later period could not be said to have assumed definite shape: life down there in the pleasant country by the Meuse, marriage, a little house, a little field to till whose produce should suffice for the needs of two people whose ideas were not extravagant. Now the dream was become an eager longing, a penetrating conviction that, with a wife as loving and industrious as she, existence would be a veritable earthly paradise. And she, the tranquillity of whose mind had never in those days been ruffled by thoughts of that nature, in the chaste and unconscious bestowal of her heart, now saw clearly and understood the true condition of her feelings. That marriage, of which she had not admitted to herself the possibility, had been, unknown to her, the object of her desire. The seed that had germinated had pushed its way in silence and in darkness; it was love, not sisterly affection, that she bore toward that young man whose company had at first been to her nothing more than a source of comfort and consolation. And that was what their eyes told each other, and the love thus openly expressed could have no other fruition than an eternal farewell. It needed but that frightful sacrifice, the rending of their heart-strings by that supreme parting, the prospect of their life's happiness wrecked amid all the other ruins, swept away by the crimson tide that ended their brother's life.

With a slow and painful effort Jean rose from his knees.

"Farewell!"

Henriette stood motionless in her place.

"Farewell!"

But Jean could not tear himself away thus. Advancing to the bedside he sorrowfully scanned the dead man's face, with its lofty forehead that seemed loftier still in death, its wasted features, its dull eyes, whence the wild look that had occasionally been seen there in life had vanished. He longed to give a parting kiss to his little one, as he had called him so many times, but dared not. It seemed to him that his hands were stained with his friend's blood; he shrank from the horror of the ordeal. Ah, what a death to die, amid the crashing ruins of a sinking world! On the last day, among the shattered fragments of the dying Commune, might not this last victim have been spared? He had gone from life, hungering for justice, possessed by the dream that haunted him, the sublime and unattainable conception of the destruction of the old society, of Paris chastened by fire, of the field dug up anew, that from the soil thus renewed and purified might spring the idyl of another golden age.

His heart overflowing with bitter anguish, Jean turned and looked out on Paris. The setting sun lay on the edge of the horizon, and its level rays bathed the city in a flood of vividly red light. The windows in thousands of houses flamed as if lighted by fierce fires within; the roofs glowed like beds of live coals; bits of gray wall and tall, sober-hued monuments flashed in the evening air with the sparkle of a brisk fire of brushwood. It was like the show-piece that is reserved for the conclusion of a fete, the huge bouquet of gold and crimson, as if Paris were burning like a forest of old oaks and soaring heavenward in a rutilant cloud of sparks and flame. The fires were burning still; volumes of reddish smoke continued to rise into the air; a confused murmur in the distance sounded on the ear, perhaps the last groans of the dying Communists at the Lobau barracks, or it may have been the happy laughter of women and children, ending their pleasant afternoon by dining in the open air at the doors of the wine-shops. And in the midst of all the splendor of that royal sunset, while a large part of Paris was crumbling away in ashes, from plundered houses and gutted palaces, from the torn-up streets, from the depths of all that ruin and suffering, came sounds of life.

Then Jean had a strange experience. It seemed to him that in the slowly fading daylight, above the roofs of that flaming city, he beheld the dawning of another day. And yet the situation might well be considered irretrievable. Destiny appeared to have pursued them with her utmost fury; the successive disasters they had sustained were such as no nation in history had ever known before; defeat treading on the heels of defeat, their provinces torn from them, an indemnity of milliards to be raised, a most horrible civil war that had been quenched in blood, their streets cumbered with ruins and unburied corpses, without money, their honor gone, and order to be re-established out of chaos! His share of the universal ruin was a heart lacerated by the loss of Maurice and Henriette, the prospect of a happy future swept away in the furious storm! And still, beyond the flames of that furnace whose fiery glow had not subsided yet, Hope, the eternal, sat enthroned in the limpid serenity of the tranquil heavens. It was the certain assurance of the resurrection of perennial nature, of imperishable humanity; the harvest that is promised to him who sows and waits; the tree throwing out a new and vigorous shoot to replace the rotten limb that has been lopped away, which was blighting the young leaves with its vitiated sap.

"Farewell!" Jean repeated with a sob.

"Farewell!" murmured Henriette, her bowed face hidden in her hands.

The neglected field was overgrown with brambles, the roof-tree of the ruined house lay on the ground; and Jean, bearing his heavy burden of affliction with humble resignation, went his way, his face set resolutely toward the future, toward the glorious and arduous task that lay before him and his countrymen, to create a new France.

THE END.

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Title: The Fortune of the Rougons

Author: Emile Zola

Editor: Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Release Date: April 22, 2006 [EBook #5135]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS ***

Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; David Widger

THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS

By Emile Zola

Edited With Introduction By Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Contents

INTRODUCTION

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

INTRODUCTION

"The Fortune of the Rougons" is the initial volume of the Rougon-Macquart series. Though it was by no means M. Zola's first essay in fiction, it was undoubtedly his first great bid for genuine literary fame, and the foundation of what must necessarily be regarded as his life-work. The idea of writing the "natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire," extending to a score of volumes, was doubtless suggested to M. Zola by Balzac's immortal "Comedie Humaine." He was twenty-eight years of age when this idea first occurred to him; he was fifty-three when he at last sent the manuscript of his concluding volume, "Dr. Pascal," to the press. He had spent five-and-twenty years in working out his scheme, persevering with it doggedly and stubbornly, whatever rebuffs he might encounter, whatever jeers and whatever insults might be directed against him by the ignorant, the prejudiced, and the hypocritical. Truth was on the march and nothing could stay it; even as, at the present hour, its march, if slow, none the less continues athwart another and a different crisis of the illustrious novelist's career.

It was in the early summer of 1869 that M. Zola first began the actual writing of "The Fortune of the Rougons." It was only in the following year, however, that the serial publication of the work commenced in the columns of "Le Siecle," the Republican journal of most influence in Paris in those days of the Second Empire. The Franco-German war interrupted this issue of the story, and publication in book form did not take place until the latter half of 1871, a time when both the war and the Commune had left Paris exhausted, supine, with little or no interest in anything. No more unfavourable moment for the issue of an ambitious work of fiction could have been found. Some two or three years went by, as I well remember, before anything like a revival of literature and of public interest in literature took place. Thus, M. Zola launched his gigantic scheme under auspices which would have made many another man recoil. "The Fortune of the Rougons," and two or three subsequent volumes of his series, attracted but a moderate degree of attention, and it was only on the morrow of the publication of "L'Assommoir" that he awoke, like Byron, to find himself famous.

As previously mentioned, the Rougon-Macquart series forms twenty volumes. The last of these, "Dr. Pascal," appeared in 1893. Since then M. Zola has written "Lourdes," "Rome," and "Paris." Critics have repeated ad nauseam that these last works constitute a new departure on M. Zola's part, and, so far as they formed a new series, this is true. But the suggestion that he has in any way repented of the Rougon-Macquart novels is ridiculous. As he has often told me of recent years, it is, as far as possible, his plan to subordinate his style and methods to his subject. To have written a book like "Rome," so largely devoted to the ambitions of the Papal See, in the same way as he had written books dealing with the drunkenness or other vices of Paris, would have been the climax of absurdity.

Yet the publication of "Rome," was the signal for a general outcry on the part of English and American reviewers that Zolaism, as typified by the Rougon-Macquart series, was altogether a thing of the past. To my thinking this is a profound error. M. Zola has always remained faithful to himself. The only difference that I perceive between his latest work, "Paris," and certain Rougon-Macquart volumes, is that with time, experience and assiduity, his genius has expanded and ripened, and that the hesitation, the groping for truth, so to say, which may be found in some of his earlier writings, has disappeared.

At the time when "The Fortune of the Rougons" was first published, none but the author himself can have imagined that the foundation-stone of one of the great literary monuments of the century had just been laid. From the "story" point of view the book is one of M. Zola's very best, although its construction—particularly as regards the long interlude of the idyll of Miette and Silvere—is far from being perfect. Such a work when first issued might well bring its author a measure of popularity, but it could hardly confer fame. Nowadays, however, looking backward, and bearing in mind that one here has the genius of M. Zola's lifework, "The Fortune of the Rougons" becomes a book of exceptional interest and importance. This has been so well understood by French readers that during the last six or seven years the annual sales of the work have increased threefold. Where, over a course of twenty years, 1,000 copies were sold, 2,500 and 3,000 are sold to-day. How many living English novelists can say the same of their early essays in fiction, issued more than a quarter of a century ago?

I may here mention that at the last date to which I have authentic figures, that is, Midsummer 1897 (prior, of course, to what is called "L'Affaire Dreyfus"), there had been sold of the entire Rougon-Macquart series (which had begun in 1871) 1,421,000 copies. These were of the ordinary Charpentier editions of the French originals. By adding thereto several editions de luxe and the widely-circulated popular illustrated editions of certain volumes, the total amounts roundly to 2,100,000. "Rome," "Lourdes," "Paris," and all M. Zola's other works, apart from the "Rougon-Macquart" series, together with the translations into a dozen different languages—English, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Portuguese, Bohemian, Hungarian, and others—are not included in the above figures. Otherwise the latter might well be doubled. Nor is account taken of the many serial issues which have brought M. Zola's views to the knowledge of the masses of all Europe.

It is, of course, the celebrity attaching to certain of M. Zola's literary efforts that has stimulated the demand for his other writings. Among those which are well worthy of being read for their own sakes, I would assign a prominent place to the present volume. Much of the story element in it is admirable, and, further, it shows M. Zola as a genuine satirist and humorist. The Rougons' yellow drawing-room and its habitues, and many of the scenes between Pierre Rougon and his wife Felicite, are worthy of the pen of Douglas Jerrold. The whole account, indeed, of the town of Plassans, its customs and its notabilities, is satire of the most effective kind, because it is satire true to life, and never degenerates into mere caricature.

It is a rather curious coincidence that, at the time when M. Zola was thus portraying the life of Provence, his great contemporary, bosom friend, and rival for literary fame, the late Alphonse Daudet, should have been producing, under the title of "The Provencal Don Quixote," that unrivalled presentment of the foibles of the French Southerner, with everyone nowadays knows as "Tartarin of Tarascon." It is possible that M. Zola, while writing his book, may have read the instalments of "Le Don Quichotte Provencal" published in the Paris "Figaro," and it may be that this perusal imparted that fillip to his pen to which we owe the many amusing particulars that he gives us of the town of Plassans. Plassans, I may mention, is really the Provencal Aix, which M. Zola's father provided with water by means of a canal still bearing his name. M. Zola himself, though born in Paris, spent the greater part of his childhood there. Tarascon, as is well known, never forgave Alphonse Daudet for his "Tartarin"; and in a like way M. Zola, who doubtless counts more enemies than any other literary man of the period, has none bitterer than the worthy citizens of Aix. They cannot forget or forgive the rascally Rougon-Macquarts.

The name Rougon-Macquart has to me always suggested that splendid and amusing type of the cynical rogue, Robert Macaire. But, of course, both Rougon and Macquart are genuine French names and not inventions. Indeed, several years ago I came by chance upon them both, in an old French deed which I was examining at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. I there found mention of a Rougon family and a Macquart family dwelling virtually side by side in the same village. This, however, was in Champagne, not in Provence. Both families farmed vineyards for a once famous abbey in the vicinity of Epernay, early in the seventeenth century. To me, personally, this trivial discovery meant a great deal. It somehow aroused my interest in M. Zola and his works. Of the latter I had then only glanced through two or three volumes. With M. Zola himself I was absolutely unacquainted. However, I took the liberty to inform him of my little discovery; and afterwards I read all the books that he had published. Now, as it is fairly well known, I have given the greater part of my time, for several years past, to the task of familiarising English readers with his writings. An old deed, a chance glance, followed by the great friendship of my life and years of patient labour. If I mention this matter, it is solely with the object of endorsing the truth of the saying that the most insignificant incidents frequently influence and even shape our careers.

But I must come back to "The Fortune of the Rougons." It has, as I have said, its satirical and humorous side; but it also contains a strong element of pathos. The idyll of Miette and Silvere is a very touching one, and quite in accord with the conditions of life prevailing in Provence at the period M. Zola selects for his narrative. Miette is a frank child of nature; Silvere, her lover, in certain respects foreshadows, a quarter of a century in advance, the Abbe Pierre Fromont of "Lourdes," "Rome," and "Paris." The environment differs, of course, but germs of the same nature may readily be detected in both characters. As for the other personages of M. Zola's book—on the one hand, Aunt Dide, Pierre Rougon, his wife, Felicite, and their sons Eugene, Aristide and Pascal, and, on the other, Macquart, his daughter Gervaise of "L'Assommoir," and his son Jean of "La Terre" and "La Debacle," together with the members of the Mouret branch of the ravenous, neurotic, duplex family—these are analysed or sketched in a way which renders their subsequent careers, as related in other volumes of the series, thoroughly consistent with their origin and their up-bringing. I venture to asset that, although it is possible to read individual volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series while neglecting others, nobody can really understand any one of these books unless he makes himself acquainted with the alpha and the omega of the edifice, that is, "The Fortune of the Rougons" and "Dr. Pascal."

With regard to the present English translation, it is based on one made for my father several years ago. But to convey M. Zola's meaning more accurately I have found it necessary to alter, on an average, at least one sentence out of every three. Thus, though I only claim to edit the volume, it is, to all intents and purposes, quite a new English version of M. Zola's work.

E. A. V. MERTON, SURREY: August, 1898.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

I wish to explain how a family, a small group of human beings, conducts itself in a given social system after blossoming forth and giving birth to ten or twenty members, who, though they may appear, at the first glance, profoundly dissimilar one from the other, are, as analysis demonstrates, most closely linked together from the point of view of affinity. Heredity, like gravity, has its laws.

By resolving the duplex question of temperament and environment, I shall endeavour to discover and follow the thread of connection which leads mathematically from one man to another. And when I have possession of every thread, and hold a complete social group in my hands, I shall show this group at work, participating in an historical period; I shall depict it in action, with all its varied energies, and I shall analyse both the will power of each member, and the general tendency of the whole.

The great characteristic of the Rougon-Macquarts, the group or family which I propose to study, is their ravenous appetite, the great outburst of our age which rushes upon enjoyment. Physiologically the Rougon-Macquarts represent the slow succession of accidents pertaining to the nerves or the blood, which befall a race after the first organic lesion, and, according to environment, determine in each individual member of the race those feelings, desires and passions—briefly, all the natural and instinctive manifestations peculiar to humanity—whose outcome assumes the conventional name of virtue or vice. Historically the Rougon-Macquarts proceed from the masses, radiate throughout the whole of contemporary society, and ascend to all sorts of positions by the force of that impulsion of essentially modern origin, which sets the lower classes marching through the social system. And thus the dramas of their individual lives recount the story of the Second Empire, from the ambuscade of the Coup d'Etat to the treachery of Sedan.

For three years I had been collecting the necessary documents for this long work, and the present volume was even written, when the fall of the Bonapartes, which I needed artistically, and with, as if by fate, I ever found at the end of the drama, without daring to hope that it would prove so near at hand, suddenly occurred and furnished me with the terrible but necessary denouement for my work. My scheme is, at this date, completed; the circle in which my characters will revolve is perfected; and my work becomes a picture of a departed reign, of a strange period of human madness and shame.

This work, which will comprise several episodes, is therefore, in my mind, the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. And the first episode, here called "The Fortune of the Rougons," should scientifically be entitled "The Origin."

EMILE ZOLA PARIS, July 1, 1871.

THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS

CHAPTER I

On quitting Plassans by the Rome Gate, on the southern side of the town, you will find, on the right side of the road to Nice, and a little way past the first suburban houses, a plot of land locally known as the Aire Saint-Mittre.

This Aire Saint-Mittre is of oblong shape and on a level with the footpath of the adjacent road, from which it is separated by a strip of trodden grass. A narrow blind alley fringed with a row of hovels borders it on the right; while on the left, and at the further end, it is closed in by bits of wall overgrown with moss, above which can be seen the top branches of the mulberry-trees of the Jas-Meiffren—an extensive property with an entrance lower down the road. Enclosed upon three sides, the Aire Saint-Mittre leads nowhere, and is only crossed by people out for a stroll.

In former times it was a cemetery under the patronage of Saint-Mittre, a greatly honoured Provencal saint; and in 1851 the old people of Plassans could still remember having seen the wall of the cemetery standing, although the place itself had been closed for years. The soil had been so glutted with corpses that it had been found necessary to open a new burial-ground at the other end of town. Then the old abandoned cemetery had been gradually purified by the dark thick-set vegetation which had sprouted over it every spring. The rich soil, in which the gravediggers could no longer delve without turning up some human remains, was possessed of wondrous fertility. The tall weeds overtopped the walls after the May rains and the June sunshine so as to be visible from the high road; while inside, the place presented the appearance of a deep, dark green sea studded with large blossoms of singular brilliancy. Beneath one's feet amidst the close-set stalks one could feel that the damp soil reeked and bubbled with sap.

Among the curiosities of the place at that time were some large pear-trees, with twisted and knotty boughs; but none of the housewives of Plassans cared to pluck the large fruit which grew upon them. Indeed, the townspeople spoke of this fruit with grimaces of disgust. No such delicacy, however, restrained the suburban urchins, who assembled in bands at twilight and climbed the walls to steal the pears, even before they were ripe.

The trees and the weeds with their vigorous growth had rapidly assimilated all the decomposing matter in the old cemetery of Saint-Mittre; the malaria rising from the human remains interred there had been greedily absorbed by the flowers and the fruit; so that eventually the only odour one could detect in passing by was the strong perfume of wild gillyflowers. This had merely been a question of a few summers.

At last the townspeople determined to utilise this common property, which had long served no purpose. The walls bordering the roadway and the blind alley were pulled down; the weeds and the pear-trees uprooted; the sepulchral remains were removed; the ground was dug deep, and such bones as the earth was willing to surrender were heaped up in a corner. For nearly a month the youngsters, who lamented the loss of the pear-trees, played at bowls with the skulls; and one night some practical jokers even suspended femurs and tibias to all the bell-handles of the town. This scandal, which is still remembered at Plassans, did not cease until the authorities decided to have the bones shot into a hole which had been dug for the purpose in the new cemetery. All work, however, is usually carried out with discreet dilatoriness in country towns, and so during an entire week the inhabitants saw a solitary cart removing these human remains as if they had been mere rubbish. The vehicle had to cross Plassans from end to end, and owing to the bad condition of the roads fragments of bones and handfuls of rich mould were scattered at every jolt. There was not the briefest religious ceremony, nothing but slow and brutish cartage. Never before had a town felt so disgusted.

For several years the old cemetery remained an object of terror. Although it adjoined the main thoroughfare and was open to all comers, it was left quite deserted, a prey to fresh vegetable growth. The local authorities, who had doubtless counted on selling it and seeing houses built upon it, were evidently unable to find a purchaser. The recollection of the heaps of bones and the cart persistently jolting through the streets may have made people recoil from the spot; or perhaps the indifference that was shown was due to the indolence, the repugnance to pulling down and setting up again, which is characteristic of country people. At all events the authorities still retained possession of the ground, and at last forgot their desire to dispose of it. They did not even erect a fence round it, but left it open to all comers. Then, as time rolled on, people gradually grew accustomed to this barren spot; they would sit on the grass at the edges, walk about, or gather in groups. When the grass had been worn away and the trodden soil had become grey and hard, the old cemetery resembled a badly-levelled public square. As if the more effectually to efface the memory of all objectionable associations, the inhabitants slowly changed the very appellation of the place, retaining but the name of the saint, which was likewise applied to the blind alley dipping down at one corner of the field. Thus there was the Aire Saint-Mittre and the Impasse Saint-Mittre.

All this dates, however, from some considerable time back. For more than thirty years now the Aire Saint-Mittre has presented a different appearance. One day the townspeople, far too inert and indifferent to derive any advantage from it, let it, for a trifling consideration, to some suburban wheelwrights, who turned it into a wood-yard. At the present day it is still littered with huge pieces of timber thirty or forty feet long, lying here and there in piles, and looking like lofty overturned columns. These piles of timber, disposed at intervals from one end of the yard to the other, are a continual source of delight to the local urchins. In some places the ground is covered with fallen wood, forming a kind of uneven flooring over which it is impossible to walk, unless one balance one's self with marvellous dexterity. Troops of children amuse themselves with this exercise all day long. You will see them jumping over the big beams, walking in Indian file along the narrow ends, or else crawling astride them; various games which generally terminate in blows and bellowings. Sometimes, too, a dozen of them will sit, closely packed one against the other, on the thin end of a pole raised a few feet from the ground, and will see-saw there for hours together. The Aire Saint-Mittre thus serves as a recreation ground, where for more than a quarter of a century all the little suburban ragamuffins have been in the habit of wearing out the seats of their breeches.

The strangeness of the place is increased by the circumstance that wandering gipsies, by a sort of traditional custom always select the vacant portions of it for their encampments. Whenever any caravan arrives at Plassans it takes up its quarters on the Aire Saint-Mittre. The place is consequently never empty. There is always some strange band there, some troop of wild men and withered women, among whom groups of healthy-looking children roll about on the grass. These people live in the open air, regardless of everybody, setting their pots boiling, eating nameless things, freely displaying their tattered garments, and sleeping, fighting, kissing, and reeking with mingled filth and misery.

The field, formerly so still and deserted, save for the buzzing of hornets around the rich blossoms in the heavy sunshine, has thus become a very rowdy spot, resounding with the noisy quarrels of the gipsies and the shrill cries of the urchins of the suburb. In one corner there is a primitive saw-mill for cutting the timber, the noise from which serves as a dull, continuous bass accompaniment to the sharp voices. The wood is placed on two high tressels, and a couple of sawyers, one of whom stands aloft on the timber itself, while the other underneath is half blinded by the falling sawdust, work a large saw to and fro for hours together, with rigid machine-like regularity, as if they were wire-pulled puppets. The wood they saw is stacked, plank by plank, along the wall at the end, in carefully arranged piles six or eight feet high, which often remain there several seasons, and constitute one of the charms of the Aire Saint-Mittre. Between these stacks are mysterious, retired little alleys leading to a broader path between the timber and the wall, a deserted strip of verdure whence only small patches of sky can be seen. The vigorous vegetation and the quivering, deathlike stillness of the old cemetery still reign in this path. In all the country round Plassans there is no spot more instinct with languor, solitude, and love. It is a most delightful place for love-making. When the cemetery was being cleared the bones must have been heaped up in this corner; for even to-day it frequently happens that one's foot comes across some fragment of a skull lying concealed in the damp turf.

Nobody, however, now thinks of the bodies that once slept under that turf. In the daytime only the children go behind the piles of wood when playing at hide and seek. The green path remains virginal, unknown to others who see nought but the wood-yard crowded with timber and grey with dust. In the morning and afternoon, when the sun is warm, the whole place swarms with life. Above all the turmoil, above the ragamuffins playing among the timber, and the gipsies kindling fires under their cauldrons, the sharp silhouette of the sawyer mounted on his beam stands out against the sky, moving to and fro with the precision of clockwork, as if to regulate the busy activity that has sprung up in this spot once set apart for eternal slumber. Only the old people who sit on the planks, basking in the setting sun, speak occasionally among themselves of the bones which they once saw carted through the streets of Plassans by the legendary tumbrel.

When night falls the Aire Saint-Mittre loses its animation, and looks like some great black hole. At the far end one may just espy the dying embers of the gipsies' fires, and at times shadows slink noiselessly into the dense darkness. The place becomes quite sinister, particularly in winter time.

One Sunday evening, at about seven o'clock, a young man stepped lightly from the Impasse Saint-Mittre, and, closely skirting the walls, took his way among the timber in the wood-yard. It was in the early part of December, 1851. The weather was dry and cold. The full moon shone with that sharp brilliancy peculiar to winter moons. The wood-yard did not have the forbidding appearance which it wears on rainy nights; illumined by stretches of white light, and wrapped in deep and chilly silence, it spread around with a soft, melancholy aspect.

For a few seconds the young man paused on the edge of the yard and gazed mistrustfully in front of him. He carried a long gun, the butt-end of which was hidden under his jacket, while the barrel, pointed towards the ground, glittered in the moonlight. Pressing the weapon to his side, he attentively examined the square shadows cast by the piles of timber. The ground looked like a chess-board, with black and white squares clearly defined by alternate patches of light and shade. The sawyers' tressels in the centre of the plot threw long, narrow fantastic shadows, suggesting some huge geometrical figure, upon a strip of bare grey ground. The rest of the yard, the flooring of beams, formed a great couch on which the light reposed, streaked here and there with the slender black shadows which edged the different pieces of timber. In the frigid silence under the wintry moon, the motionless, recumbent poles, stiffened, as it were, with sleep and cold, recalled the corpses of the old cemetery. The young man cast but a rapid glance round the empty space; there was not a creature, not a sound, no danger of being seen or heard. The black patches at the further end caused him more anxiety, but after a brief examination he plucked up courage and hurriedly crossed the wood-yard.

As soon as he felt himself under cover he slackened his pace. He was now in the green pathway skirting the wall behind the piles of planks. Here his very footsteps became inaudible; the frozen grass scarcely crackled under his tread. He must have loved the spot, have feared no danger, sought nothing but what was pleasant there. He no longer concealed his gun. The path stretched away like a dark trench, except that the moonrays, gliding ever and anon between the piles of timber, then streaked the grass with patches of light. All slept, both darkness and light, with the same deep, soft, sad slumber. No words can describe the calm peacefulness of the place. The young man went right down the path, and stopped at the end where the walls of the Jas-Meiffren form an angle. Here he listened as if to ascertain whether any sound might be coming from the adjoining estate. At last, hearing nothing, he stooped down, thrust a plank aside, and hid his gun in a timber-stack.

An old tombstone, which had been overlooked in the clearing of the burial-ground, lay in the corner, resting on its side and forming a high and slightly sloping seat. The rain had worn its edges, and moss was slowly eating into it. Nevertheless, the following fragment of an inscription, cut on the side which was sinking into the ground, might still have been distinguished in the moonlight: "Here lieth . . . Marie . . . died . . ." The finger of time had effaced the rest.

When the young man had concealed his gun he again listened attentively, and still hearing nothing, resolved to climb upon the stone. The wall being low, he was able to rest his elbows on the coping. He could, however, perceive nothing except a flood of light beyond the row of mulberry-trees skirting the wall. The flat ground of the Jas-Meiffren spread out under the moon like an immense sheet of unbleached linen; a hundred yards away the farmhouse and its outbuildings formed a still whiter patch. The young man was still gazing anxiously in that direction when, suddenly, one of the town clocks slowly and solemnly struck seven. He counted the strokes, and then jumped down, apparently surprised and relieved.

He seated himself on the tombstone, like one who is prepared to wait some considerable time. And for about half an hour he remained motionless and deep in thought, apparently quite unconscious of the cold, while his eyes gazed fixedly at a mass of shadow. He had placed himself in a dark corner, but the beams of the rising moon had gradually reached him, and at last his head was in the full light.

He was a strong, sturdy-looking lad, with a fine mouth, and soft delicate skin that bespoke youthfulness. He looked about seventeen years of age, and was handsome in a characteristic way.

His thin, long face looked like the work of some master sculptor; his high forehead, overhanging brows, aquiline nose, broad flat chin, and protruding cheek bones, gave singularly bold relief to his countenance. Such a face would, with advancing age, become too bony, as fleshless as that of a knight errant. But at this stage of youth, with chin and cheek lightly covered with soft down, its latent harshness was attenuated by the charming softness of certain contours which had remained vague and childlike. His soft black eyes, still full of youth, also lent delicacy to his otherwise vigorous countenance. The young fellow would probably not have fascinated all women, as he was not what one calls a handsome man; but his features, as a whole, expressed such ardent and sympathetic life, such enthusiasm and energy, that they doubtless engaged the thoughts of the girls of his own part—those sunburnt girls of the South—as he passed their doors on sultry July evenings.

He remained seated upon the tombstone, wrapped in thought, and apparently quite unconscious of the moonlight which now fell upon his chest and legs. He was of middle stature, rather thick-set, with over-developed arms and a labourer's hands, already hardened by toil; his feet, shod with heavy laced boots, looked large and square-toed. His general appearance, more particularly the heaviness of his limbs, bespoke lowly origin. There was, however, something in him, in the upright bearing of his neck and the thoughtful gleams of his eyes, which seemed to indicate an inner revolt against the brutifying manual labour which was beginning to bend him to the ground. He was, no doubt, an intelligent nature buried beneath the oppressive burden of race and class; one of those delicate refined minds embedded in a rough envelope, from which they in vain struggle to free themselves. Thus, in spite of his vigour, he seemed timid and restless, feeling a kind of unconscious shame at his imperfection. An honest lad he doubtless was, whose very ignorance had generated enthusiasm, whose manly heart was impelled by childish intellect, and who could show alike the submissiveness of a woman and the courage of a hero. On the evening in question he was dressed in a coat and trousers of greenish corduroy. A soft felt hat, placed lightly on the back of his head, cast a streak of shadow over his brow.

As the neighbouring clock struck the half hour, he suddenly started from his reverie. Perceiving that the white moonlight was shining full upon him, he gazed anxiously ahead. Then he abruptly dived back into the shade, but was unable to recover the thread of his thoughts. He now realised that his hands and feet were becoming very cold, and impatience seized hold of him. So he jumped upon the stone again, and once more glanced over the Jas-Meiffren, which was still empty and silent. Finally, at a loss how to employ his time, he jumped down, fetched his gun from the pile of planks where he had concealed it, and amused himself by working the trigger. The weapon was a long, heavy carbine, which had doubtless belonged to some smuggler. The thickness of the butt and the breech of the barrel showed it to be an old flintlock which had been altered into a percussion gun by some local gunsmith. Such firearms are to be found in farmhouses, hanging against the wall over the chimney-piece. The young man caressed his weapon with affection; twenty times or more he pulled the trigger, thrust his little finger into the barrel, and examined the butt attentively. By degrees he grew full of youth enthusiasm, combined with childish frolicsomeness, and ended by levelling his weapon and aiming at space, like a recruit going through his drill.

It was now very nearly eight o'clock, and he had been holding his gun levelled for over a minute, when all at once a low, panting call, light as a breath, came from the direction of the Jas-Meiffren.

"Are you there, Silvere?" the voice asked.

Silvere dropped his gun and bounded on to the tombstone.

"Yes, yes," he replied, also in a hushed voice. "Wait, I'll help you."

Before he could stretch out his arms, however, a girl's head appeared above the wall. With singular agility the damsel had availed herself of the trunk of a mulberry-tree, and climbed aloft like a kitten. The ease and certainty with which she moved showed that she was familiar with this strange spot. In another moment she was seated on the coping of the wall. Then Silvere, taking her in his arms, carried her, though not without a struggle, to the seat.

"Let go," she laughingly cried; "let go, I can get down alone very well." And when she was seated on the stone slab she added:

"Have you been waiting for me long? I've been running, and am quite out of breath."

Silvere made no reply. He seemed in no laughing humour, but gazed sorrowfully into the girl's face. "I wanted to see you, Miette," he said, as he seated himself beside her. "I should have waited all night for you. I am going away at daybreak to-morrow morning."

Miette had just caught sight of the gun lying on the grass, and with a thoughtful air, she murmured: "Ah! so it's decided then? There's your gun!"

"Yes," replied Silvere, after a brief pause, his voice still faltering, "it's my gun. I thought it best to remove it from the house to-night; to-morrow morning aunt Dide might have seen me take it, and have felt uneasy about it. I am going to hide it, and shall fetch it just before starting."

Then, as Miette could not remove her eyes from the weapon which he had so foolishly left on the grass, he jumped up and again hid it among the woodstacks.

"We learnt this morning," he said, as he resumed his seat, "that the insurgents of La Palud and Saint Martin-de-Vaulx were on the march, and spent last night at Alboise. We have decided to join them. Some of the workmen of Plassans have already left the town this afternoon; those who still remain will join their brothers to-morrow."

He spoke the word brothers with youthful emphasis.

"A contest is becoming inevitable," he added; "but, at any rate, we have right on our side, and we shall triumph."

Miette listened to Silvere, her eyes meantime gazing in front of her, without observing anything.

"'Tis well," she said, when he had finished speaking. And after a fresh pause she continued: "You warned me, yet I still hoped. . . . However, it is decided."

Neither of them knew what else to say. The green path in the deserted corner of the wood-yard relapsed into melancholy stillness; only the moon chased the shadows of the piles of timber over the grass. The two young people on the tombstone remained silent and motionless in the pale light. Silvere had passed his arm round Miette's waist, and she was leaning against his shoulder. They exchanged no kisses, naught but an embrace in which love showed the innocent tenderness of fraternal affection.

Miette was enveloped in a long brown hooded cloak reaching to her feet, and leaving only her head and hands visible. The women of the lower classes in Provence—the peasantry and workpeople—still wear these ample cloaks, which are called pelisses; it is a fashion which must have lasted for ages. Miette had thrown back her hood on arriving. Living in the open air and born of a hotblooded race, she never wore a cap. Her bare head showed in bold relief against the wall, which the moonlight whitened. She was still a child, no doubt, but a child ripening into womanhood. She had reached that adorable, uncertain hour when the frolicsome girl changes to a young woman. At that stage of life a bud-like delicacy, a hesitancy of contour that is exquisitely charming, distinguishes young girls. The outlines of womanhood appear amidst girlhood's innocent slimness, and woman shoots forth at first all embarrassment, still retaining much of the child, and ever and unconsciously betraying her sex. This period is very unpropitious for some girls, who suddenly shoot up, become ugly, sallow and frail, like plants before their due season. For those, however, who, like Miette, are healthy and live in the open air, it is a time of delightful gracefulness which once passed can never be recalled.

Miette was thirteen years of age, and although strong and sturdy did not look any older, so bright and childish was the smile which lit up her countenance. However, she was nearly as tall as Silvere, plump and full of life. Like her lover, she had no common beauty. She would not have been considered ugly, but she might have appeared peculiar to many young exquisites. Her rich black hair rose roughly erect above her forehead, streamed back like a rushing wave, and flowed over her head and neck like an inky sea, tossing and bubbling capriciously. It was very thick and inconvenient to arrange. However, she twisted it as tightly as possible into coils as thick as a child's fist, which she wound together at the back of her head. She had little time to devote to her toilette, but this huge chignon, hastily contrived without the aid of any mirror, was often instinct with vigorous grace. On seeing her thus naturally helmeted with a mass of frizzy hair which hung about her neck and temples like a mane, one could readily understand why she always went bareheaded, heedless alike of rain and frost.

Under her dark locks appeared her low forehead, curved and golden like a crescent moon. Her large prominent eyes, her short tip-tilted nose with dilated nostrils, and her thick ruddy lips, when regarded apart from one another, would have looked ugly; viewed, however, all together, amidst the delightful roundness and vivacious mobility of her countenance, they formed an ensemble of strange, surprising beauty. When Miette laughed, throwing back her head and gently resting it on her right shoulder, she resembled an old-time Bacchante, her throat distending with sonorous gaiety, her cheeks round like those of a child, her teeth large and white, her twists of woolly hair tossed by every outburst of merriment, and waving like a crown of vine leaves. To realise that she was only a child of thirteen, one had to notice the innocence underlying her full womanly laughter, and especially the child-like delicacy of her chin and soft transparency of her temples. In certain lights Miette's sun-tanned face showed yellow like amber. A little soft black down already shaded her upper lip. Toil too was beginning to disfigure her small hands, which, if left idle, would have become charmingly plump and delicate.

Miette and Silvere long remained silent. They were reading their own anxious thoughts, and, as they pondered upon the unknown terrors of the morrow, they tightened their mutual embrace. Their hearts communed with each other, they understood how useless and cruel would be any verbal plaint. The girl, however, could at last no longer contain herself, and, choking with emotion, she gave expression, in one phrase, to their mutual misgivings.

"You will come back again, won't you?" she whispered, as she hung on Silvere's neck.

Silvere made no reply, but, half-stifling, and fearing lest he should give way to tears like herself, he kissed her in brotherly fashion on the cheek, at a loss for any other consolation. Then disengaging themselves they again lapsed into silence.

After a moment Miette shuddered. Now that she no longer leant against Silvere's shoulder she was becoming icy cold. Yet she would not have shuddered thus had she been in this deserted path the previous evening, seated on this tombstone, where for several seasons they had tasted so much happiness.

"I'm very cold," she said, as she pulled her hood over her head.

"Shall we walk about a little?" the young man asked her. "It's not yet nine o'clock; we can take a stroll along the road."

Miette reflected that for a long time she would probably not have the pleasure of another meeting—another of those evening chats, the joy of which served to sustain her all day long.

"Yes, let us walk a little," she eagerly replied. "Let us go as far as the mill. I could pass the whole night like this if you wanted to."

They rose from the tombstone, and were soon hidden in the shadow of a pile of planks. Here Miette opened her cloak, which had a quilted lining of red twill, and threw half of it over Silvere's shoulders, thus enveloping him as he stood there close beside her. The same garment cloaked them both, and they passed their arms round each other's waist, and became as it were but one being. When they were thus shrouded in the pelisse they walked slowly towards the high road, fearlessly crossing the vacant parts of the wood-yard, which looked white in the moonlight. Miette had thrown the cloak over Silvere, and he had submitted to it quite naturally, as though indeed the garment rendered them a similar service every evening.

The road to Nice, on either side of which the suburban houses are built, was, in the year 1851, lined with ancient elm-trees, grand and gigantic ruins, still full of vigour, which the fastidious town council has replaced, some years since, by some little plane-trees. When Silvere and Miette found themselves under the elms, the huge boughs of which cast shadows on the moonlit footpath, they met now and again black forms which silently skirted the house fronts. These, too, were amorous couples, closely wrapped in one and the same cloak, and strolling in the darkness.

This style of promenading has been instituted by the young lovers of Southern towns. Those boys and girls among the people who mean to marry sooner or later, but who do not dislike a kiss or two in advance, know no spot where they can kiss at their ease without exposing themselves to recognition and gossip. Accordingly, while strolling about the suburbs, the plots of waste land, the footpaths of the high road—in fact, all these places where there are few passers-by and numerous shady nooks—they conceal their identity by wrapping themselves in these long cloaks, which are capacious enough to cover a whole family. The parents tolerate these proceedings; however stiff may be provincial propriety, no apprehensions, seemingly, are entertained. And, on the other hand, nothing could be more charming than these lovers' rambles, which appeal so keenly to the Southerner's fanciful imagination. There is a veritable masquerade, fertile in innocent enjoyments, within the reach of the most humble. The girl clasps her sweetheart to her bosom, enveloping him in her own warm cloak; and no doubt it is delightful to be able to kiss one's sweetheart within those shrouding folds without danger of being recognised. One couple is exactly like another. And to the belated pedestrian, who sees the vague groups gliding hither and thither, 'tis merely love passing, love guessed and scarce espied. The lovers know they are safely concealed within their cloaks, they converse in undertones and make themselves quite at home; most frequently they do not converse at all, but walk along at random and in silence, content in their embrace. The climate alone is to blame for having in the first instance prompted these young lovers to retire to secluded spots in the suburbs. On fine summer nights one cannot walk round Plassans without coming across a hooded couple in every patch of shadow falling from the house walls. Certain places, the Aire Saint-Mittre, for instance, are full of these dark "dominoes" brushing past one another, gliding softly in the warm nocturnal air. One might imagine they were guests invited to some mysterious ball given by the stars to lowly lovers. When the weather is very warm and the girls do not wear cloaks, they simply turn up their over-skirts. And in the winter the more passionate lovers make light of the frosts. Thus, Miette and Silvere, as they descended the Nice road, thought little of the chill December night.

They passed through the slumbering suburb without exchanging a word, but enjoying the mute delight of their warm embrace. Their hearts were heavy; the joy which they felt in being side by side was tinged with the painful emotion which comes from the thought of approaching severance, and it seemed to them that they could never exhaust the mingled sweetness and bitterness of the silence which slowly lulled their steps. But the houses soon grew fewer, and they reached the end of the Faubourg. There stands the entrance to the Jas-Meiffren, an iron gate fixed to two strong pillars; a low row of mulberry-trees being visible through the bars. Silvere and Miette instinctively cast a glance inside as they passed on.

Beyond the Jas-Meiffren the road descends with a gentle slope to a valley, which serves as the bed of a little rivulet, the Viorne, a brook in summer but a torrent in winter. The rows of elms still extended the whole way at that time, making the high road a magnificent avenue, which cast a broad band of gigantic trees across the hill, which was planted with corn and stunted vines. On that December night, under the clear cold moonlight, the newly-ploughed fields stretching away on either hand resembled vast beds of greyish wadding which deadened every sound in the atmosphere. The dull murmur of the Viorne in the distance alone sent a quivering thrill through the profound silence of the country-side.

When the young people had begun to descend the avenue, Miette's thoughts reverted to the Jas-Meiffren which they had just left behind them.

"I had great difficulty in getting away this evening," she said. "My uncle wouldn't let me go. He had shut himself up in a cellar, where he was hiding his money, I think, for he seemed greatly frightened this morning at the events that are taking place."

Silvere clasped her yet more lovingly. "Be brave!" said he. "The time will come when we shall be able to see each other freely the whole day long. You must not fret."

"Oh," replied the girl, shaking her head, "you are very hopeful. For my part I sometimes feel very sad. It isn't the hard work which grieves me; on the contrary, I am often very glad of my uncle's severity, and the tasks he sets me. He was quite right to make me a peasant girl; I should perhaps have turned out badly, for, do you know, Silvere, there are moments when I fancy myself under a curse. . . . I feel, then, that I should like to be dead. . . . I think of you know whom."

As she spoke these last words, her voice broke into a sob. Silvere interrupted her somewhat harshly. "Be quiet," he said. "You promised not to think about it. It's no crime of yours. . . . We love each other very much, don't we?" he added in a gentler tone. "When we're married you'll have no more unpleasant hours."

"I know," murmured Miette. "You are so kind, you sustain me. But what am I to do? I sometimes have fears and feelings of revolt. I think at times that I have been wronged, and then I should like to do something wicked. You see I pour forth my heart to you. Whenever my father's name is thrown in my face, I feel my whole body burning. When the urchins cry at me as I pass, 'Eh, La Chantegreil,' I lose all control of myself, and feel that I should like to lay hold of them and whip them."

After a savage pause she resumed: "As for you, you're a man; you're going to fight; you're very lucky."

Silvere had let her speak on. After a few steps he observed sorrowfully: "You are wrong, Miette; yours is bad anger. You shouldn't rebel against justice. As for me, I'm going to fight in defence of our common rights, not to gratify any personal animosity."

"All the same," the young girl continued, "I should like to be a man and handle a gun. I feel that it would do me good."

Then, as Silvere remained silent, she perceived that she had displeased him. Her feverishness subsided, and she whispered in a supplicating tone: "You are not angry with me, are you? It's your departure which grieves me and awakens such ideas. I know very well you are right—that I ought to be humble."

Then she began to cry, and Silvere, moved by her tears, grasped her hands and kissed them.

"See, now, how you pass from anger to tears, like a child," he said lovingly. "You must be reasonable. I'm not scolding you. I only want to see you happier, and that depends largely upon yourself."

The remembrance of the drama which Miette had so sadly evoked cast a temporary gloom over the lovers. They continued their walk with bowed heads and troubled thoughts.

"Do you think I'm much happier than you?" Silvere at last inquired, resuming the conversation in spite of himself. "If my grandmother had not taken care of me and educated me, what would have become of me? With the exception of my Uncle Antoine, who is an artisan like myself, and who taught me to love the Republic, all my other relations seem to fear that I might besmirch them by coming near them."

He was now speaking with animation, and suddenly stopped, detaining Miette in the middle of the road.

"God is my witness," he continued, "that I do not envy or hate anybody. But if we triumph, I shall have to tell the truth to those fine gentlemen. Uncle Antoine knows all about this matter. You'll see when we return. We shall all live free and happy."

Then Miette gently led him on, and they resumed their walk.

"You dearly love your Republic?" the girl asked, essaying a joke. "Do you love me as much?"

Her smile was not altogether free from a tinge of bitterness. She was thinking, perhaps, how easily Silvere abandoned her to go and scour the country-side. But the lad gravely replied: "You are my wife, to whom I have given my whole heart. I love the Republic because I love you. When we are married we shall want plenty of happiness, and it is to procure a share of that happiness that I'm going way to-morrow morning. You surely don't want to persuade me to remain at home?"

"Oh, no!" cried the girl eagerly. "A man should be brave! Courage is beautiful! You must forgive my jealousy. I should like to be as strong-minded as you are. You would love me all the more, wouldn't you?"

After a moment's silence she added, with charming vivacity and ingenuousness: "Ah, how willingly I shall kiss you when you come back!"

This outburst of a loving and courageous heart deeply affected Silvere. He clasped Miette in his arms and printed several kisses on her cheek. As she laughingly struggled to escape him, her eyes filled with tears of emotion.

All around the lovers the country still slumbered amid the deep stillness of the cold. They were now half-way down the hill. On the top of a rather lofty hillock to the left stood the ruins of a windmill, blanched by the moon; the tower, which had fallen in on one side, alone remained. This was the limit which the young people had assigned to their walk. They had come straight from the Faubourg without casting a single glance at the fields between which they passed. When Silvere had kissed Miette's cheek, he raised his head and observed the mill.

"What a long walk we've had!" he exclaimed. "See—here is the mill. It must be nearly half-past nine. We must go home."

But Miette pouted. "Let us walk a little further," she implored; "only a few steps, just as far as the little cross-road, no farther, really."

Silvere smiled as he again took her round the waist. Then they continued to descend the hill, no longer fearing inquisitive glances, for they had not met a living soul since passing the last houses. They nevertheless remained enveloped in the long pelisse, which seemed, as it were, a natural nest for their love. It had shrouded them on so many happy evenings! Had they simply walked side by side, they would have felt small and isolated in that vast stretch of country, whereas, blended together as they were, they became bolder and seemed less puny. Between the folds of the pelisse they gazed upon the fields stretching on both sides of the road, without experiencing that crushing feeling with which far-stretching callous vistas oppress the human affections. It seemed to them as though they had brought their house with them; they felt a pleasure in viewing the country-side as from a window, delighting in the calm solitude, the sheets of slumbering light, the glimpses of nature vaguely distinguishable beneath the shroud of night and winter, the whole of that valley indeed, which while charming them could not thrust itself between their close-pressed hearts.

All continuity of conversation had ceased; they spoke no more of others, nor even of themselves. They were absorbed by the present, pressing each other's hands, uttering exclamations at the sight of some particular spot, exchanging words at rare intervals, and then understanding each other but little, for drowsiness came from the warmth of their embrace. Silvere forgot his Republican enthusiasm; Miette no longer reflected that her lover would be leaving her in an hour, for a long time, perhaps for ever. The transports of their affection lulled them into a feeling of security, as on other days, when no prospect of parting had marred the tranquility of their meetings.

They still walked on, and soon reached the little crossroad mentioned by Miette—a bit of a lane which led through the fields to a village on the banks of the Viorne. But they passed on, pretending not to notice this path, where they had agreed to stop. And it was only some minutes afterwards that Silvere whispered, "It must be very late; you will get tired."

"No; I assure you I'm not at all tired," the girl replied. "I could walk several leagues like this easily." Then, in a coaxing tone, she added: "Let us go down as far as the meadows of Sainte-Claire. There we will really stop and turn back."

Silvere, whom the girl's rhythmic gait lulled to semi-somnolence, made no objection, and their rapture began afresh. They now went on more slowly, fearing the moment when they would have to retrace their steps. So long as they walked onward, they felt as though they were advancing to the eternity of their mutual embrace; the return would mean separation and bitter leave-taking.

The declivity of the road was gradually becoming more gentle. In the valley below there are meadows extending as far as the Viorne, which runs at the other end, beneath a range of low hills. These meadows, separated from the high-road by thickset hedges, are the meadows of Sainte-Claire.

"Bah!" exclaimed Silvere this time, as he caught sight of the first patches of grass: "we may as well go as far as the bridge."

At this Miette burst out laughing, clasped the young man round the neck, and kissed him noisily.

At the spot where the hedges begin, there were in those days two elms forming the end of the long avenue, two colossal trees larger than any of the others. The treeless fields stretch out from the high road, like a broad band of green wool, as far as the willows and birches by the river. The distance from the last elms to the bridge is scarcely three hundred yards. The lovers took a good quarter of an hour to cover that space. At last, however slow their gait, they reached the bridge, and there they stopped.

The road to Nice ran up in front of them, along the opposite slope of the valley. But they could only see a small portion of it, as it takes a sudden turn about half a mile from the bridge, and is lost to view among the wooded hills. On looking round they caught sight of the other end of the road, that which they had just traversed, and which leads in a direct line from Plassans to the Viorne. In the beautiful winter moonlight it looked like a long silver ribbon, with dark edgings traced by the rows of elms. On the right and left the ploughed hill-land showed like vast, grey, vague seas intersected by this ribbon, this roadway white with frost, and brilliant as with metallic lustre. Up above, on a level with the horizon, lights shone from a few windows in the Faubourg, resembling glowing sparks. By degrees Miette and Silvere had walked fully a league. They gazed at the intervening road, full of silent admiration for the vast amphitheatre which rose to the verge of the heavens, and over which flowed bluish streams of light, as over the superposed rocks of a gigantic waterfall. The strange and colossal picture spread out amid deathlike stillness and silence. Nothing could have been of more sovereign grandeur.

Then the young people, having leant against the parapet of the bridge, gazed beneath them. The Viorne, swollen by the rains, flowed on with a dull, continuous sound. Up and down stream, despite the darkness which filled the hollows, they perceived the black lines of the trees growing on the banks; here and there glided the moonbeams, casting a trail of molten metal, as it were, over the water, which glittered and danced like rays of light on the scales of some live animal. The gleams darted with a mysterious charm along the gray torrent, betwixt the vague phantom-like foliage. You might have thought this an enchanted valley, some wondrous retreat where a community of shadows and gleams lived a fantastic life.

This part of the river was familiar to the lovers; they had often come here in search of coolness on warm July nights; they had spent hours hidden among the clusters of willows on the right bank, at the spot where the meadows of Sainte-Claire spread their verdant carpet to the waterside. They remembered every bend of the bank, the stones on which they had stepped in order to cross the Viorne, at that season as narrow as a brooklet, and certain little grassy hollows where they had indulged in their dreams of love. Miette, therefore, now gazed from the bridge at the right bank of the torrent with longing eyes.

"If it were warmer," she sighed, "we might go down and rest awhile before going back up the hill." Then, after a pause, during which she kept her eyes fixed on the banks, she resumed: "Look down there, Silvere, at that black mass yonder in front of the lock. Do you remember? That's the brushwood where we sat last Corpus Christi Day."

"Yes, so it is," replied Silvere, softly.

This was the spot where they had first ventured to kiss each other on the cheek. The remembrance just roused by the girl's words brought both of them a delightful feeling, an emotion in which the joys of the past mingled with the hopes of the morrow. Before their eyes, with the rapidity of lightening, there passed all the delightful evenings they had spent together, especially that evening of Corpus Christi Day, with the warm sky, the cool willows of the Viorne, and their own loving talk. And at the same time, whilst the past came back to their hearts full of a delightful savour, they fancied they could plunge into the unknown future, see their dreams realised, and march through life arm in arm—even as they had just been doing on the highway—warmly wrapped in the same cloak. Then rapture came to them again, and they smiled in each other's eyes, alone amidst all the silent radiance.

Suddenly, however, Silvere raised his head and, throwing off the cloak, listened attentively. Miette, in her surprise, imitated him, at a loss to understand why he had started so abruptly from her side.

Confused sounds had for a moment been coming from behind the hills in the midst of which the Nice road wends its way. They suggested the distant jolting of a procession of carts; but not distinctly, so loud was the roaring of the Viorne. Gradually, however, they became more pronounced, and rose at last like the tramping of an army on the march. Then amidst the continuous growing rumble one detected the shouts of a crowd, strange rhythmical blasts as of a hurricane. One could even have fancied they were the thunderclaps of a rapidly approaching storm which was already disturbing the slumbering atmosphere. Silvere listened attentively, unable to tell, however, what were those tempest-like shouts, for the hills prevented them from reaching him distinctly. Suddenly a dark mass appeared at the turn of the road, and then the "Marseillaise" burst forth, formidable, sung as with avenging fury.

"Ah, here they are!" cried Silvere, with a burst of joyous enthusiasm.

Forthwith he began to run up the hill, dragging Miette with him. On the left of the road was an embankment planted with evergreen oaks, up which he clambered with the young girl, to avoid being carried away by the surging, howling multitude.

When he had reached the top of the bank and the shadow of the brushwood, Miette, rather pale, gazed sorrowfully at those men whose distant song had sufficed to draw Silvere from her embrace. It seemed as if the whole band had thrust itself between them. They had been so happy a few minutes before, locked in each other's arms, alone and lost amidst the overwhelming silence and discreet glimmer of the moon! And now Silvere, whose head was turned away from her, who no longer seemed even conscious of her presence, had eyes only for those strangers whom he called his brothers.

The band descended the slope with a superb, irresistible stride. There could have been nothing grander than the irruption of those few thousand men into that cold, still, deathly scene. The highway became a torrent, rolling with living waves which seemed inexhaustible. At the bend in the road fresh masses ever appeared, whose songs ever helped to swell the roar of this human tempest. When the last battalions came in sight the uproar was deafening. The "Marseillaise" filled the atmosphere as if blown through enormous trumpets by giant mouths, which cast it, vibrating with a brazen clang, into every corner of the valley. The slumbering country-side awoke with a start—quivering like a beaten drum resonant to its very entrails, and repeating with each and every echo the passionate notes of the national song. And then the singing was no longer confined to the men. From the very horizon, from the distant rocks, the ploughed land, the meadows, the copses, the smallest bits of brushwood, human voices seemed to come. The great amphitheatre, extending from the river to Plassans, the gigantic cascade over which the bluish moonlight flowed, was as if filled with innumerable invisible people cheering the insurgents; and in the depths of the Viorne, along the waters streaked with mysterious metallic reflections, there was not a dark nook but seemed to conceal human beings, who took up each refrain with yet greater passion. With air and earth alike quivering, the whole country-side cried for vengeance and liberty. So long as the little army was descending the slope, the roar of the populace thus rolled on in sonorous waves broken by abrupt outbursts which shook the very stones in the roadway.

Silvere, pale with emotion, still listened and looked on. The insurgents who led the van of that swarming, roaring stream, so vague and monstrous in the darkness, were rapidly approaching the bridge.

"I thought," murmured Miette, "that you would not pass through Plassans?"

"They must have altered the plan of operations," Silvere replied; "we were, in fact, to have marched to the chief town by the Toulon road, passing to the left of Plassans and Orcheres. They must have left Alboise this afternoon and passed Les Tulettes this evening."

The head of the column had already arrived in front of the young people. The little army was more orderly than one would have expected from a band of undisciplined men. The contingents from the various towns and villages formed separate battalions, each separated by a distance of a few paces. These battalions were apparently under the orders of certain chiefs. For the nonce the pace at which they were descending the hillside made them a compact mass of invincible strength. There were probably about three thousand men, all united and carried away by the same storm of indignation. The strange details of the scene were not discernible amidst the shadows cast over the highway by the lofty slopes. At five or six feet from the brushwood, however, where Miette and Silvere were sheltered, the left-hand embankment gave place to a little pathway which ran alongside the Viorne; and the moonlight, flowing through this gap, cast a broad band of radiance across the road. When the first insurgents reached this patch of light they were suddenly illumined by a sharp white glow which revealed, with singular distinctness, every outline of visage or costume. And as the various contingents swept on, the young people thus saw them emerge, fiercely and without cessation, from the surrounding darkness.

As the first men passed through the light Miette instinctively clung to Silvere, although she knew she was safe, even from observation. She passed her arm round the young fellow's neck, resting her head against his shoulder. And with the hood of her pelisse encircling her pale face she gazed fixedly at that square patch of light as it was rapidly traversed by those strange faces, transfigured by enthusiasm, with dark open mouths full of the furious cry of the "Marseillaise." Silvere, whom she felt quivering at her side, then bent towards her and named the various contingents as they passed.

The column marched along eight abreast. In the van were a number of big, square-headed fellows, who seemed to possess the herculean strength and naïve confidence of giants. They would doubtless prove blind, intrepid defenders of the Republic. On their shoulders they carried large axes, whose edges, freshly sharpened, glittered in the moonlight.

"Those are the woodcutters of the forests of the Seille," said Silvere. "They have been formed into a corps of sappers. At a signal from their leaders they would march as far as Paris, battering down the gates of the towns with their axes, just as they cut down the old cork-trees on the mountain."

The young man spoke with pride of the heavy fists of his brethren. And on seeing a band of labourers and rough-bearded men, tanned by the sun, coming along behind the woodcutters, he continued: "That is the contingent from La Palud. That was the first place to rise. The men in blouses are labourers who cut up the cork-trees; the others in velveteen jackets must be sportsmen, poachers, and charcoal-burners living in the passes of the Seille. The poachers knew your father, Miette. They have good firearms, which they handle skilfully. Ah! if all were armed in the same manner! We are short of muskets. See, the labourers have only got cudgels!"

Miette, still speechless, looked on and listened. As Silvere spoke to her of her father, the blood surged to her cheeks. Her face burnt as she scrutinised the sportsmen with a strange air of mingled indignation and sympathy. From this moment she grew animated, yielding to the feverish quiver which the insurgents' songs awakened.

The column, which had just begun the "Marseillaise" afresh, was still marching down as though lashed on by the sharp blasts of the "Mistral." The men of La Palud were followed by another troop of workmen, among whom a goodly number of middle class folks in great-coats were to be seen.

"Those are the men of Saint-Martin-de-Vaulx," Silvere resumed. "That bourg rose almost at the same time as La Palud. The masters joined the workmen. There are some rich men there, Miette; men whose wealth would enable them to live peacefully at home, but who prefer to risk their lives in defence of liberty. One can but admire them. Weapons are very scarce, however; they've scarcely got a few fowling-pieces. But do you see those men yonder, Miette, with red bands round their left elbows? They are the leaders."

The contingents descended the hill more rapidly than Silvere could speak. While he was naming the men from Saint-Martin-de-Vaulx, two battalions had already crossed the ray of light which blanched the roadway.

"Did you see the insurgents from Alboise and Les Tulettes pass by just now?" he asked. "I recognised Burgat the blacksmith. They must have joined the band to-day. How they do run!"

Miette was now leaning forward, in order to see more of the little bands described to her by the young man. The quiver she felt rose from her bosom to her throat. Then a battalion larger and better disciplined than the others appeared. The insurgents composing it were nearly all dressed in blue blouses, with red sashes round their waists. One would have thought they were arrayed in uniform. A man on horseback, with a sabre at his side, was in the midst of them. And most of these improvised soldiers carried guns, probably carbines and old muskets of the National Guard.

"I don't know those," said Silvere. "The man on horseback must be the chief I've heard spoken of. He brought with him the contingents from Faverolles and the neighbouring villages. The whole column ought to be equipped in the same manner."

He had no time to take breath. "Ah! see, here are the country people!" he suddenly cried.

Small groups of ten or twenty men at the most were now advancing behind the men of Faverolles. They all wore the short jacket of the Southern peasantry, and as they sang they brandished pitchforks and scythes. Some of them even only carried large navvies' shovels. Every hamlet, however, had sent its able-bodied men.

Silvere, who recognised the parties by their leaders, enumerated them in feverish tones. "The contingent from Chavanoz!" said he. "There are only eight men, but they are strong; Uncle Antoine knows them. Here's Nazeres! Here's Poujols! They're all here; not one has failed to answer the summons. Valqueyras! Hold, there's the parson amongst them; I've heard about him, he's a staunch Republican."

He was becoming intoxicated with the spectacle. Now that each battalion consisted of only a few insurgents he had to name them yet more hastily, and his precipitancy gave him the appearance of one in a frenzy.

"Ah! Miette," he continued, "what a fine march past! Rozan! Vernoux! Corbiere! And there are more still, you'll see. These have only got scythes, but they'll mow down the troops as close as the grass in their meadows—Saint-Eutrope! Mazet! Les Gardes, Marsanne! The whole north side of the Seille! Ah, we shall be victorious! The whole country is with us. Look at those men's arms, they are hard and black as iron. There's no end to them. There's Pruinas! Roches Noires! Those last are smugglers: they are carrying carbines. Still more scythes and pitchforks, the contingents of country folk are still passing. Castel-le-Vieux! Sainte-Anne! Graille! Estourmel! Murdaran!"

His voice was husky with emotion as he finished naming these men, who seemed to be borne away by a whirlwind as fast as he enumerated them. Erect, with glowing countenance, he pointed out the several contingents with a nervous gesture. Miette followed his movements. The road below attracted her like the depths of a precipice. To avoid slipping down the incline she clung to the young man's neck. A strange intoxication emanated from those men, who themselves were inebriated with clamour, courage, and confidence. Those beings, seen athwart a moonbeam, those youths and those men in their prime, those old people brandishing strange weapons and dressed in the most diverse costumes, from working smock to middle class overcoat, those endless rows of heads, which the hour and the circumstances endowed with an expression of fanatical energy and enthusiasm, gradually appeared to the girl like a whirling, impetuous torrent. At certain moments she fancied they were not of themselves moving, that they were really being carried away by the force of the "Marseillaise," by that hoarse, sonorous chant. She could not distinguish any conversation, she heard but a continuous volume of sound, alternating from bass to shrill notes, as piercing as nails driven into one's flesh. This roar of revolt, this call to combat, to death, with its outbursts of indignation, its burning thirst for liberty, its remarkable blending of bloodthirsty and sublime impulses, unceasingly smote her heart, penetrating more deeply at each fierce outburst, and filling her with the voluptuous pangs of a virgin martyr who stands erect and smiles under the lash. And the crowd flowed on ever amidst the same sonorous wave of sound. The march past, which did not really last more than a few minutes, seemed to the young people to be interminable.

Truly, Miette was but a child. She had turned pale at the approach of the band, she had wept for the loss of love, but she was a brave child, whose ardent nature was easily fired by enthusiasm. Thus ardent emotions had gradually got possession of her, and she became as courageous as a youth. She would willingly have seized a weapon and followed the insurgents. As the muskets and scythes filed past, her white teeth glistened longer and sharper between her red lips, like the fangs of a young wolf eager to bite and tear. And as she listened to Silvere enumerating the contingents from the country-side with ever-increasing haste, the pace of the column seemed to her to accelerate still more. She soon fancied it all a cloud of human dust swept along by a tempest. Everything began to whirl before her. Then she closed her eyes; big hot tears were rolling down her cheeks.

Silvere's eyelashes were also moist. "I don't see the men who left Plassans this afternoon," he murmured.

He tried to distinguish the end of the column, which was still hidden by the darkness. Suddenly he cried with joyous exultation: "Ah, here they are! They've got the banner—the banner has been entrusted to them!"

Then he wanted to leap from the slope in order to join his companions. At this moment, however, the insurgents halted. Words of command ran along the column, the "Marseillaise" died out in a final rumble, and one could only hear the confused murmuring of the still surging crowd. Silvere, as he listened, caught the orders which were passed on from one contingent to another; they called the men of Plassans to the van. Then, as each battalion ranged itself alongside the road to make way for the banner, the young man reascended the embankment, dragging Miette with him.

"Come," he said; "we can get across the river before they do."

When they were on the top, among the ploughed land, they ran along to a mill whose lock bars the river. Then they crossed the Viorne on a plank placed there by the millers, and cut across the meadows of Sainte-Claire, running hand-in-hand, without exchanging a word. The column threw a dark line over the highway, which they followed alongside the hedges. There were some gaps in the hawthorns, and at last Silvere and Miette sprang on to the road through one of them.

In spite of the circuitous way they had come, they arrived at the same time as the men of Plassans. Silvere shook hands with some of them. They must have thought he had heard of the new route they had chosen, and had come to meet them. Miette, whose face was half-concealed by her hood, was scrutinised rather inquisitively.

"Why, it's Chantegreil," at last said one of the men from the Faubourg of Plassans, "the niece of Rebufat, the meger[*] of the Jas-Meiffren."

[*] A meger is a farmer in Provence who shares the
expenses and profits of his farm with the owner of the land.

"Where have you sprung from, gadabout?" cried another voice.

Silvere, intoxicated with enthusiasm, had not thought of the distress which his sweetheart would feel at the jeers of the workmen. Miette, all confusion, looked at him as if to implore his aid. But before he could even open his lips another voice rose from the crowd, brutally exclaiming:

"Her father's at the galleys; we don't want the daughter of a thief and murderer amongst us."

At this Miette turned dreadfully pale.

"You lie!" she muttered. "If my father did kill anybody, he never thieved!"

And as Silvere, pale and trembling more than she, began to clench his fists: "Stop!" she continued; "this is my affair."

Then, turning to the men, she repeated with a shout: "You lie! You lie! He never stole a copper from anybody. You know it well enough. Why do you insult him when he can't be here?"

She drew herself up, superb with indignation. With her ardent, half-wild nature she seemed to accept the charge of murder composedly enough, but that of theft exasperated her. They knew it, and that was why folks, from stupid malice, often cast the accusation in her face.

The man who had just called her father a thief was merely repeating what he had heard said for many years. The girl's defiant attitude only incited the workmen to jeer the more. Silvere still had his fists clenched, and matters might have become serious if a poacher from the Seille, who had been sitting on a heap of stones at the roadside awaiting the order to march, had not come to the girl's assistance.

"The little one's right," he said. "Chantegreil was one of us. I knew him. Nobody knows the real facts of his little matter. I always believed in the truth of his deposition before the judge. The gendarme whom he brought down with a bullet, while he was out shooting, was no doubt taking aim at him at the time. A man must defend himself! At all events Chantegreil was a decent fellow; he committed no robbery."

As often happens in such cases, the testimony of this poacher sufficed to bring other defenders to Miette's aid. Several workmen also professed to have known Chantegreil.

"Yes, yes, it's true!" they all said. "He wasn't a thief. There are some scoundrels at Plassans who ought to be sent to prison in his place. Chantegreil was our brother. Come, now, be calm, little one."

Miette had never before heard anyone speak well of her father. He was generally referred to as a beggar, a villain, and now she found good fellows who had forgiving words for him, and declared him to be an honest man. She burst into tears, again full of the emotion awakened in her by the "Marseillaise;" and she bethought herself how she might thank these men for their kindness to her in misfortune. For a moment she conceived the idea of shaking them all by the hand like a man. But her heart suggested something better. By her side stood the insurgent who carried the banner. She touched the staff, and, to express her gratitude, said in an entreating tone, "Give it to me; I will carry it."

The simple-minded workmen understood the ingenuous sublimity of this form of gratitude.

"Yes," they all cried, "Chantegreil shall carry the banner."

However, a woodcutter remarked that she would soon get tired, and would not be able to go far.

"Oh! I'm quite strong," she retorted proudly, tucking up her sleeves and showing a pair of arms as big as those of a grown woman. Then as they handed her the flag she resumed, "Wait just a moment."

Forthwith she pulled off her cloak, and put it on again after turning the red lining outside. In the clear moonlight she appeared to be arrayed in a purple mantle reaching to her feet. The hood resting on the edge of her chignon formed a kind of Phrygian cap. She took the flag, pressed the staff to her bosom, and held herself upright amid the folds of that blood-coloured banner which waved behind her. Enthusiastic child that she was, her countenance, with its curly hair, large eyes moist with tears, and lips parted in a smile, seemed to rise with energetic pride as she turned it towards the sky. At that moment she was the virgin Liberty.

The insurgents burst into applause. The vivid imagination of those Southerners was fired with enthusiasm at the sudden apparition of this girl so nervously clasping their banner to her bosom. Shouts rose from the nearest group:

"Bravo, Chantegreil! Chantegreil for ever! She shall remain with us; she'll bring us luck!"

They would have cheered her for a long time yet had not the order to resume the march arrived. Whilst the column moved on, Miette pressed Silvere's hand and whispered in his ear: "You hear! I shall remain with you. Are you glad?"

Silvere, without replying, returned the pressure. He consented. In fact, he was deeply affected, unable to resist the enthusiasm which fired his companions. Miette seemed to him so lovely, so grand, so saintly! During the whole climb up the hill he still saw her before him, radiant, amidst a purple glory. She was now blended with his other adored mistress—the Republic. He would have liked to be in action already, with his gun on his shoulder. But the insurgents moved slowly. They had orders to make as little noise as possible. Thus the column advanced between the rows of elms like some gigantic serpent whose every ring had a strange quivering. The frosty December night had again sunk into silence, and the Viorne alone seemed to roar more loudly.

On reaching the first houses of the Faubourg, Silvere ran on in front to fetch his gun from the Aire Saint-Mittre, which he found slumbering in the moonlight. When he again joined the insurgents they had reached the Porte de Rome. Miette bent towards him, and with her childish smile observed: "I feel as if I were at the procession on Corpus Christi Day carrying the banner of the Virgin."

CHAPTER II

Plassans is a sub-prefecture with about ten thousand inhabitants. Built on a plateau overlooking the Viorne, and resting on the north side against the Garrigues hills, one of the last spurs of the Alps, the town is situated, as it were, in the depths of a cul-de-sac. In 1851 it communicated with the adjoining country by two roads only, the Nice road, which runs down to the east, and the Lyons road, which rises to the west, the one continuing the other on almost parallel lines. Since that time a railway has been built which passes to the south of the town, below the hill which descends steeply from the old ramparts to the river. At the present day, on coming out of the station on the right bank of the little torrent, one can see, by raising one's head, the first houses of Plassans, with their gardens disposed in terrace fashion. It is, however, only after an uphill walk lasting a full quarter of an hour that one reaches these houses.

About twenty years ago, owing, no doubt, to deficient means of communication, there was no town that had more completely retained the pious and aristocratic character of the old Provencal cities. Plassans then had, and has even now, a whole district of large mansions built in the reigns of Louis XIV. and Louis XV., a dozen churches, Jesuit and Capuchin houses, and a considerable number of convents. Class distinctions were long perpetuated by the town's division into various districts. There were three of them, each forming, as it were, a separate and complete locality, with its own churches, promenades, customs, and landscapes.

The district of the nobility, called Saint-Marc, after the name of one of its parish churches, is a sort of miniature Versailles, with straight streets overgrown with grass, and large square houses which conceal extensive gardens. It extends to the south along the edge of the plateau. Some of the mansions built on the declivity itself have a double row of terraces whence one can see the whole valley of the Viorne, a most charming vista much vaunted in that part of the country. Then on the north-west, the old quarter, formed of the original town, rears its narrow, tortuous lanes bordered with tottering hovels. The Town-Hall, the Civil Court, the Market, and the Gendarmerie barracks are situated here. This, the most populous part of the Plassans, is inhabited by working-men and shop-keepers, all the wretched, toiling, common folk. The new town forms a sort of parallelogram to the north-east; the well-to-do, those who have slowly amassed a fortune, and those engaged in the liberal professions, here occupy houses set out in straight lines and coloured a light yellow. This district, which is embellished by the Sub-Prefecture, an ugly plaster building decorated with rose-mouldings, numbered scarcely five or six streets in 1851; it is of quite recent formation, and it is only since the construction of the railway that it has been growing in extent.

One circumstance which even at the present time tends to divide Plassans into three distinct independent parts is that the limits of the districts are clearly defined by the principal thoroughfares. The Cours Sauvaire and the Rue de Rome, which is, as it were, a narrow extension of the former, run from west to east, from the Grand'-Porte to the Porte de Rome, thus cutting the town into two portions, and dividing the quarter of the nobility from the others. The latter are themselves parted by the Rue de la Banne. This street, the finest in the locality, starts from the extremity of the Cours Sauvaire, and ascends northwards, leaving the black masses of the old quarter on its left, and the light-yellow houses of the new town on its right. It is here, about half-way along the street, that stands the Sub-Prefecture, in the rear of a small square planted with sickly trees; the people of Plassans are very proud of this edifice.

As if to keep more isolated and shut up within itself, the town is belted with old ramparts, which only serve to increase its gloom and render it more confined. These ridiculous fortifications, preyed upon by ivy and crowned with wild gillyflowers, are about as high and as thick as the walls of a convent, and could be demolished by gunshot. They have several openings, the principal of which, the Porte de Rome and the Grand'-Porte, afford access to the Nice road and the Lyons road, at the other end of town. Until 1853 these openings were furnished with huge wooden two-leaved gates, arched at the top, and strengthened with bars of iron. These gates were double-locked at eleven o'clock in summer, and ten o'clock in winter. The town having thus shot its bolts like a timid girl, went quietly to sleep. A keeper, who lived in a little cell in one of the inner corners of each gateway, was authorised to admit belated persons. But it was necessary to stand parleying a long time. The keeper would not let people in until, by the light of his lantern, he had carefully scrutinised their faces through a peep-hole. If their looks displeased him they had to sleep outside. This custom of locking the gates every evening was highly characteristic of the spirit of the town, which was a commingling of cowardice, egotism, routine, exclusiveness, and devout longing for a cloistered life. Plassans, when it had shut itself up, would say to itself, "I am at home," with the satisfaction of some pious bourgeois, who, assured of the safety of his cash-box, and certain that no noise will disturb him, duly says his prayers and retires gladly to bed. No other town, I believe, has so long persisted in thus incarcerating itself like a nun.

The population of Plassans is divided into three groups, corresponding with the same number of districts. Putting aside the functionaries—the sub-prefect, the receiver of taxes, the mortgage commissioner, and the postmaster, who are all strangers to the locality, where they are objects of envy rather than of esteem, and who live after their own fashion—the real inhabitants, those who were born there and have every intention of ending their days there, feel too much respect for traditional usages and established boundaries not to pen themselves of their own accord in one or other of the town's social divisions.

The nobility virtually cloister themselves. Since the fall of Charles X. they scarcely ever go out, and when they do they are eager to return to their large dismal mansions, and walk along furtively as though they were in a hostile country. They do not visit anyone, nor do they even receive each other. Their drawing-rooms are frequented by a few priests only. They spend the summer in the chateaux which they possess in the environs; in the winter, they sit round their firesides. They are, as it were, dead people weary of life. And thus the gloomy silence of a cemetery hangs over their quarter of the town. The doors and windows are carefully barricaded; one would think their mansions were so many convents shut off from all the tumult of the world. At rare intervals an abbe, whose measured tread adds to the gloomy silence of these sealed houses, passes by and glides like a shadow through some half-opened doorway.

The well-to-do people, the retired tradesmen, the lawyers and notaries, all those of the little easy-going, ambitious world that inhabits the new town, endeavour to infuse some liveliness into Plassans. They go to the parties given by the sub-prefect, and dream of giving similar entertainments. They eagerly seek popularity, call a workman "my good fellow," chat with the peasants about the harvest, read the papers, and walk out with their wives on Sundays. Theirs are the enlightened minds of the district, they are the only persons who venture to speak disparagingly of the ramparts; in fact, they have several times demanded of the authorities the demolition of those old walls, relics of a former age. At the same time, the most sceptical among them experience a shock of delight whenever a marquis or a count deigns to honour them with a stiff salutation. Indeed, the dream of every citizen of the new town is to be admitted to a drawing-room of the Saint-Marc quarter. They know very well that their ambition is not attainable, and it is this which makes them proclaim all the louder that they are freethinkers. But they are freethinkers in words only; firm friends of the authorities, they are ready to rush into the arms of the first deliverer at the slightest indication of popular discontent.

The group which toils and vegetates in the old quarter is not so clearly defined as the others. The labouring classes are here in a majority; but retail dealers and even a few wholesale traders are to be found among them. As a matter of fact, Plassans is far from being a commercial centre; there is only just sufficient trade to dispose of the products of the country—oil, wine, and almonds. As for industrial labour, it is represented almost entirely by three or four evil-smelling tanyards, a felt hat manufactory, and some soap-boiling works, which last are relegated to a corner of the Faubourg. This little commercial and industrial world, though it may on high days and holidays visit the people of the new district, generally takes up its quarters among the operatives of the old town. Merchants, retail traders, and artisans have common interests which unite them together. On Sundays only, the masters make themselves spruce and foregather apart. On the other hand, the labouring classes, which constitute scarcely a fifth of the population, mingle with the idlers of the district.

It is only once a week, and during the fine weather, that the three districts of Plassans come together face to face. The whole town repairs to the Cours Sauvaire on Sunday after vespers; even the nobility venture thither. Three distinct currents flow along this sort of boulevard planted with rows of plane-trees. The well-to-do citizens of the new quarter merely pass along before quitting the town by the Grand'-Porte and taking the Avenue du Mail on the right, where they walk up and down till nightfall. Meantime, the nobility and the lower classes share the Cours Sauvaire between them. For more than a century past the nobility have selected the walk on the south side, which is bordered with large mansions, and is the first to escape the heat of the sun; the lower classes have to rest content with the walk on the north, where the cafes, inns, and tobacconists' shops are located. The people and the nobility promenade the whole afternoon, walking up and down the Cours without anyone of either party thinking of changing sides. They are only separated by a distance of some seven or eight yards, yet it is as if they were a thousand leagues away from each other, for they scrupulously follow those two parallel lines, as though they must not come in contact here below. Even during the revolutionary periods each party kept to its own side. This regulation walk on Sunday and the locking of the town gates in the evening are analogous instances which suffice to indicate the character of the ten thousand people inhabiting the town.

Here, amidst these surroundings, until the year 1848, there vegetated an obscure family that enjoyed little esteem, but whose head, Pierre Rougon, subsequently played an important part in life owing to certain circumstances.

Pierre Rougon was the son of a peasant. His mother's family, the Fouques, owned, towards the end of the last century, a large plot of ground in the Faubourg, behind the old cemetery of Saint-Mittre; this ground was subsequently joined to the Jas-Meiffren. The Fouques were the richest market-gardeners in that part of the country; they supplied an entire district of Plassans with vegetables. However, their name died out a few years before the Revolution. Only one girl, Adelaide, remained; born in 1768, she had become an orphan at the age of eighteen. This girl, whose father had died insane, was a long, lank, pale creature, with a scared look and strange ways which one might have taken for shyness so long as she was a little girl. As she grew up, however, she became still stranger; she did certain things which were inexplicable even to the cleverest folk of the Faubourg, and from that time it was rumoured that she was cracked like her father.

She had scarcely been an orphan six months, in possession of a fortune which rendered her an eagerly sought heiress, when it transpired that she had married a young gardener named Rougon, a rough-hewn peasant from the Basses-Alpes. This Rougon, after the death of the last of the male Fouques, who had engaged him for a term, had remained in the service of the deceased's daughter. From the situation of salaried servant he ascended rapidly to the enviable position of husband. This marriage was a first shock to public opinion. No one could comprehend why Adelaide preferred this poor fellow, coarse, heavy, vulgar, scarce able to speak French, to those other young men, sons of well-to-do farmers, who had been seen hovering round her for some time. And, as provincial people do not allow anything to remain unexplained, they made sure there was some mystery at the bottom of this affair, alleging even that the marriage of the two young people had become an absolute necessity. But events proved the falsity of the accusation. More than a year went by before Adelaide had a son. The Faubourg was annoyed; it could not admit that it was wrong, and determined to penetrate the supposed mystery; accordingly all the gossips kept a watch upon the Rougons. They soon found ample matter for tittle-tattle. Rougon died almost suddenly, fifteen months after his marriage, from a sunstroke received one afternoon while he was weeding a bed of carrots.

Scarcely a year then elapsed before the young widow caused unheard-of scandal. It became known, as an indisputable fact, that she had a lover. She did not appear to make any secret of it; several persons asserted that they had heard her use endearing terms in public to poor Rougon's successor. Scarcely a year of widowhood and a lover already! Such a disregard of propriety seemed monstrous out of all reason. And the scandal was heightened by Adelaide's strange choice. At that time there dwelt at the end of the Impasse Saint-Mittre, in a hovel the back of which abutted on the Fouques' land, a man of bad repute, who was generally referred to as "that scoundrel Macquart." This man would vanish for weeks and then turn up some fine evening, sauntering about with his hands in his pockets and whistling as though he had just come from a short walk. And the women sitting at their doorsteps as he passed: "There's that scoundrel Macquart! He has hidden his bales and his gun in some hollow of the Viorne." The truth was, Macquart had no means, and yet ate and drank like a happy drone during his short sojourns in the town. He drank copiously and with fierce obstinacy. Seating himself alone at a table in some tavern, he would linger there evening after evening, with his eyes stupidly fixed on his glass, neither seeing nor hearing anything around him. When the landlord closed his establishment, he would retire with a firm step, with his head raised, as if he were kept yet more erect by inebriation. "Macquart walks so straight, he's surely dead drunk," people used to say, as they saw him going home. Usually, when he had had no drink, he walked with a slight stoop and shunned the gaze of curious people with a kind of savage shyness.

Since the death of his father, a journeyman tanner who had left him as sole heritage the hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre, he had never been known to have either relatives or friends. The proximity of the frontiers and the neighbouring forests of the Seille had turned this singular, lazy fellow into a combination of smuggler and poacher, one of those suspicious-looking characters of whom passers-by observe: "I shouldn't care to meet that man at midnight in a dark wood." Tall, with a formidable beard and lean face, Macquart was the terror of the good women of the Faubourg of Plassans; they actually accused him of devouring little children raw. Though he was hardly thirty years old, he looked fifty. Amidst his bushy beard and the locks of hair which hung over his face in poodle fashion, one could only distinguish the gleam of his brown eyes, the furtive sorrowful glance of a man of vagrant instincts, rendered vicious by wine and a pariah life. Although no crimes had actually been brought home to him, no theft or murder was ever perpetrated in the district without suspicion at once falling upon him.

And it was this ogre, this brigand, this scoundrel Macquart, whom Adelaide had chosen! In twenty months she had two children by him, first a boy and then a girl. There was no question of marriage between them. Never had the Faubourg beheld such audacious impropriety. The stupefaction was so great, the idea of Macquart having found a young and wealthy mistress so completely upset the gossips, that they even spoke gently of Adelaide. "Poor thing! She's gone quite mad," they would say. "If she had any relatives she would have been placed in confinement long ago." And as they never knew anything of the history of those strange amours, they accused that rogue Macquart of having taken advantage of Adelaide's weak mind to rob her of her money.

The legitimate son, little Pierre Rougon, grew up with his mother's other offspring. The latter, Antoine and Ursule, the young wolves as they were called in the district, were kept at home by Adelaide, who treated them as affectionately as her first child. She did not appear to entertain a very clear idea of the position in life reserved for these two poor creatures. To her they were the same in every respect as her first-born. She would sometimes go out holding Pierre with one hand and Antoine with the other, never noticing how differently the two little fellows were already regarded.

It was a strange home. For nearly twenty years everyone lived there after his or her fancy, the children like the mother. Everything went on free from control. In growing to womanhood, Adelaide had retained the strangeness which had been taken for shyness when she was fifteen. It was not that she was insane, as the people of the Faubourg asserted, but there was a lack of equilibrium between her nerves and her blood, a disorder of the brain and heart which made her lead a life out of the ordinary, different from that of the rest of the world. She was certainly very natural, very consistent with herself; but in the eyes of the neighbours her consistency became pure insanity. She seemed desirous of making herself conspicuous, it was thought she was wickedly determined to turn things at home from bad to worse, whereas with great naivete she simply acted according to the impulses of her nature.

Ever since giving birth to her first child she had been subject to nervous fits which brought on terrible convulsions. These fits recurred periodically, every two or three months. The doctors whom she consulted declared they could do nothing for her, that age would weaken the severity of the attacks. They simply prescribed a dietary regimen of underdone meat and quinine wine. However, these repeated shocks led to cerebral disorder. She lived on from day to day like a child, like a fawning animal yielding to its instincts. When Macquart was on his rounds, she passed her time in lazy, pensive idleness. All she did for her children was to kiss and play with them. Then as soon as her lover returned she would disappear.

Behind Macquart's hovel there was a little yard, separated from the Fouques' property by a wall. One morning the neighbours were much astonished to find in this wall a door which had not been there the previous evening. Before an hour had elapsed, the entire Faubourg had flocked to the neighbouring windows. The lovers must have worked the whole night to pierce the opening and place the door there. They could now go freely from one house to the other. The scandal was revived, everyone felt less pity for Adelaide, who was certainly the disgrace of the suburb; she was reproached more wrathfully for that door, that tacit, brutal admission of her union, than even for her two illegitimate children. "People should at least study appearances," the most tolerant women would say. But Adelaide did not understand what was meant by studying appearances. She was very happy, very proud of her door; she had assisted Macquart to knock the stones from the wall and had even mixed the mortar so that the work might proceed the quicker; and she came with childish delight to inspect the work by daylight on the morrow—an act which was deemed a climax of shamelessness by three gossips who observed her contemplating the masonry. From that date, whenever Macquart reappeared, it was thought, as no one then ever saw the young woman, that she was living with him in the hovel of the Impasse Saint-Mittre.

The smuggler would come very irregularly, almost always unexpectedly, to Plassans. Nobody ever knew what life the lovers led during the two or three days he spent there at distant intervals. They used to shut themselves up; the little dwelling seemed uninhabited. Then, as the gossips had declared that Macquart had simply seduced Adelaide in order to spend her money, they were astonished, after a time, to see him still lead his wonted life, ever up hill and down dale and as badly equipped as previously. Perhaps the young woman loved him all the more for seeing him at rare intervals, perhaps he had disregarded her entreaties, feeling an irresistible desire for a life of adventure. The gossips invented a thousand fables, without succeeding in giving any reasonable explanation of a connection which had originated and continued in so strange a manner. The hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre remained closed and preserved its secrets. It was merely guessed that Macquart had probably acquired the habit of beating Adelaide, although the sound of a quarrel never issued from the house. However, on several occasions she was seen with her face black and blue, and her hair torn away. At the same time, she did not display the least dejection or grief, nor did she seek in any way to hide her bruises. She smiled, and seemed happy. No doubt she allowed herself to be beaten without breathing a word. This existence lasted for more than fifteen years.

At times when Adelaide returned home she would find her house upside down, but would not take the least notice of it. She was utterly ignorant of the practical meaning of life, of the proper value of things and the necessity for order. She let her children grow up like those plum-trees which sprout along the highways at the pleasure of the rain and sun. They bore their natural fruits like wild stock which has never known grafting or pruning. Never was nature allowed such complete sway, never did such mischievous creatures grow up more freely under the sole influence of instinct. They rolled among the vegetables, passed their days in the open air playing and fighting like good-for-nothing urchins. They stole provisions from the house and pillaged the few fruit-trees in the enclosure; they were the plundering, squalling, familiar demons of this strange abode of lucid insanity. When their mother was absent for days together, they would make such an uproar, and hit upon such diabolical devices for annoying people, that the neighbours had to threaten them with a whipping. Moreover, Adelaide did not inspire them with much fear; if they were less obnoxious to other people when she was at home, it was because they made her their victim, shirking school five or six times a week and doing everything they could to receive some punishment which would allow them to squall to their hearts' content. But she never beat them, nor even lost her temper; she lived on very well, placidly, indolently, in a state of mental abstraction amidst all the uproar. At last, indeed, this uproar became indispensable to her, to fill the void in her brain. She smiled complacently when she heard anyone say, "Her children will beat her some day, and it will serve her right." To all remarks, her utter indifference seemed to reply, "What does it matter?" She troubled even less about her property than about her children. The Fouques' enclosure, during the many years that this singular existence lasted would have become a piece of waste ground if the young woman had not luckily entrusted the cultivation of her vegetables to a clever market-gardener. This man, who was to share the profits with her, robbed her impudently, though she never noticed it. This circumstance had its advantages, however; for, in order to steal the more, the gardener drew as much as possible from the land, which in the result almost doubled in value.

Pierre, the legitimate son, either from secret instinct or from his knowledge of the different manner in which he and the others were regarded by the neighbours, domineered over his brother and sister from an early age. In their quarrels, although he was much weaker than Antoine, he always got the better of the contest, beating the other with all the authority of a master. With regard to Ursule, a poor, puny, wan little creature, she was handled with equal roughness by both the boys. Indeed, until they were fifteen or sixteen, the three children fraternally beat each other without understanding their vague, mutual hatred, without realising how foreign they were to one another. It was only in youth that they found themselves face to face with definite, self-conscious personalities.

At sixteen, Antoine was a tall fellow, a blend of Macquart's and Adelaide's failings. Macquart, however, predominated in him, with his love of vagrancy, his tendency to drunkenness, and his brutish savagery. At the same time, under the influence of Adelaide's nervous nature, the vices which in the father assumed a kind of sanguinary frankness were in the son tinged with an artfulness full of hypocrisy and cowardice. Antoine resembled his mother by his total want of dignified will, by his effeminate voluptuous egotism, which disposed him to accept any bed of infamy provided he could lounge upon it at his ease and sleep warmly in it. People said of him: "Ah! the brigand! He hasn't even the courage of his villainy like Macquart; if ever he commits a murder, it will be with pin pricks." Physically, Antoine inherited Adelaide's thick lips only; his other features resembled those of the smuggler, but they were softer and more prone to change of expression.

In Ursule, on the other hand, physical and moral resemblance to the mother predominated. There was a mixture of certain characteristics in her also; but born the last, at a time when Adelaide's love was warmer than Macquart's, the poor little thing seemed to have received with her sex a deeper impress of her mother's temperament. Moreover, hers was not a fusion of the two natures, but rather a juxtaposition, a remarkably close soldering. Ursule was whimsical, and displayed at times the shyness, the melancholy, and the transports of a pariah; then she would often break out into nervous fits of laughter, and muse lazily, like a woman unsound both in head and heart. Her eyes, which at times had a scared expression like those of Adelaide, were as limpid as crystal, similar to those of kittens doomed to die of consumption.

In presence of those two illegitimate children Pierre seemed a stranger; to one who had not penetrated to the roots of his being he would have appeared profoundly dissimilar. Never did child's nature show a more equal balance of the characteristics of its parents. He was the exact mean between the peasant Rougon and the nervous Adelaide. Paternal grossness was attenuated by the maternal influence. One found in him the first phase of that evolution of temperaments which ultimately brings about the amelioration or deterioration of a race. Although he was still a peasant, his skin was less coarse, his face less heavy, his intellect more capacious and more supple. In him the defects of his father and his mother had advantageously reacted upon each other. If Adelaide's nature, rendered exquisitely sensitive by her rebellious nerves, had combated and lessened Rougon's full-bodied ponderosity, the latter had successfully prevented the young woman's tendency to cerebral disorder from being implanted in the child. Pierre knew neither the passions nor the sickly ravings of Macquart's young whelps. Very badly brought up, unruly and noisy, like all children who are not restrained during their infancy, he nevertheless possessed at bottom such sense and intelligence as would always preserve him from perpetrating any unproductive folly. His vices, his laziness, his appetite for indulgence, lacked the instinctiveness which characterised Antoine's; he meant to cultivate and gratify them honourably and openly. In his plump person of medium height, in his long pale face, in which the features derived from his father had acquired some of the maternal refinement, one could already detect signs of sly and crafty ambition and insatiable desire, with the hardness of heart and envious hatred of a peasant's son whom his mother's means and nervous temperament had turned into a member of the middle classes.

When, at the age of seventeen, Pierre observed and was able to understand Adelaide's disorders and the singular position of Antoine and Ursule, he seemed neither sorry nor indignant, but simply worried as to the course which would best serve his own interests. He was the only one of the three children who had pursued his studies with any industry. When a peasant begins to feel the need of instruction he most frequently becomes a fierce calculator. At school Pierre's playmates roused his first suspicions by the manner in which they treated and hooted his brother. Later on he came to understand the significance of many looks and words. And at last he clearly saw that the house was being pillaged. From that time forward he regarded Antoine and Ursule as shameless parasites, mouths that were devouring his own substance. Like the people of the Faubourg, he thought that his mother was a fit subject for a lunatic asylum, and feared she would end by squandering all her money, if he did not take steps to prevent it. What gave him the finishing stroke was the dishonesty of the gardener who cultivated the land. At this, in one day, the unruly child was transformed into a thrifty, selfish lad, hurriedly matured, as regards his instincts, by the strange improvident life which he could no longer bear to see around him without a feeling of anguish. Those vegetables, from the sale of which the market-gardener derived the largest profits, really belonged to him; the wine which his mother's offspring drank, the bread they ate, also belonged to him. The whole house, the entire fortune, was his by right; according to his boorish logic, he alone, the legitimate son, was the heir. And as his riches were in danger, as everybody was greedily gnawing at his future fortune, he sought a means of turning them all out—mother, brother, sister, servants—and of succeeding immediately to his inheritance.

The conflict was a cruel one; the lad knew that he must first strike his mother. Step by step, with patient tenacity, he executed a plan whose every detail he had long previously thought out. His tactics were to appear before Adelaide like a living reproach—not that he flew into a passion, or upbraided her for her misconduct; but he had acquired a certain manner of looking at her, without saying a word, which terrified her. Whenever she returned from a short sojourn in Macquart's hovel she could not turn her eyes on her son without a shudder. She felt his cold glances, as sharp as steel blades pierce her deeply and pitilessly. The severe, taciturn demeanour of the child of the man whom she had so soon forgotten strangely troubled her poor disordered brain. She would fancy at times that Rougon had risen from the dead to punish her for her dissoluteness. Every week she fell into one of those nervous fits which were shattering her constitution. She was left to struggle until she recovered consciousness, after which she would creep about more feebly than ever. She would also often sob the whole night long, holding her head in her hands, and accepting the wounds that Pierre dealt her with resignation, as if they had been the strokes of an avenging deity. At other times she repudiated him; she would not acknowledge her own flesh and blood in that heavy-faced lad, whose calmness chilled her own feverishness so painfully. She would a thousand times rather have been beaten than glared at like that. Those implacable looks, which followed her everywhere, threw her at last into such unbearable torments that on several occasions she determined to see her lover no more. As soon, however, as Macquart returned she forgot her vows and hastened to him. The conflict with her son began afresh, silent and terrible, when she came back home. At the end of a few months she fell completely under his sway. She stood before him like a child doubtful of her behaviour and fearing that she deserves a whipping. Pierre had skilfully bound her hand and foot, and made a very submissive servant of her, without opening his lips, without once entering into difficult and compromising explanations.

When the young man felt that his mother was in his power, that he could treat her like a slave, he began, in his own interest, to turn her cerebral weakness and the foolish terror with which his glances inspired her to his own advantage. His first care, as soon as he was master at home, was to dismiss the market-gardener and replace him by one of his own creatures. Then he took upon himself the supreme direction of the household, selling, buying, and holding the cash-box. On the other hand, he made no attempt to regulate Adelaide's actions, or to correct Antoine and Ursule for their laziness. That mattered little to him, for he counted upon getting rid of these people as soon as an opportunity presented itself. He contented himself with portioning out their bread and water. Then, having already got all the property in his own hands, he awaited an event which would permit him to dispose of it as he pleased.

Circumstances proved singularly favourable. He escaped the conscription on the ground of being a widow's eldest son. But two years later Antoine was called out. His bad luck did not affect him much; he counted on his mother purchasing a substitute for him. Adelaide, in fact, wished to save him from serving; Pierre, however, who held the money, turned a deaf ear to her. His brother's compulsory departure would be a lucky event for him, and greatly assist the accomplishment of his plans. When his mother mentioned the matter to him, he gave her such a look that she did not venture to pursue it. His glance plainly signified, "Do you wish, then, to ruin me for the sake of your illegitimate offspring?" Forthwith she selfishly abandoned Antoine, for before everything else she sought her own peace and quietness. Pierre, who did not like violent measures, and who rejoiced at being able to eject his brother without a disturbance, then played the part of a man in despair: the year had been a bad one, money was scarce, and to raise any he would be compelled to sell a portion of the land, which would be the beginning of their ruin. Then he pledged his word of honour to Antoine that he would buy him out the following year, though he meant to do nothing of the kind. Antoine then went off, duped, and half satisfied.

Pierre got rid of Ursule in a still more unexpected manner. A journeyman hatter of the Faubourg, named Mouret, conceived a real affection for the girl, whom he thought as white and delicate as any young lady from the Saint-Marc quarter. He married her. On his part it was a love match, free from all sordid motives. As for Ursule, she accepted the marriage in order to escape a home where her eldest brother rendered life intolerable. Her mother, absorbed in her own courses, and using her remaining energy to defend her own particular interests, regarded the matter with absolute indifference. She was even glad of Ursule's departure from the house, hoping that Pierre, now that he had no further cause for dissatisfaction, would let her live in peace after her own fashion. No sooner had the young people been married than Mouret perceived that he would have to quit Plassans, if he did not wish to hear endless disparaging remarks about his wife and his mother-in-law. Taking Ursule with him, he accordingly repaired to Marseilles, where he worked at his trade. It should be mentioned that he had not asked for one sou of dowry. When Pierre, somewhat surprised by this disinterestedness, commenced to stammer out some explanations, Mouret closed his mouth by saying that he preferred to earn his wife's bread. Nevertheless the worthy son of the peasant remained uneasy; Mouret's indifference seemed to him to conceal some trap.

Adelaide now remained to be disposed of. Nothing in the world would have induced Pierre to live with her any longer. She was compromising him; it was with her that he would have liked to make a start. But he found himself between two very embarrassing alternatives: to keep her, and thus, in a measure, share her disgrace, and bind a fetter to his feet which would arrest him in his ambitious flight; or to turn her out, with the certainty of being pointed at as a bad son, which would have robbed him of the reputation for good nature which he desired. Knowing that he would be in want of everybody, he desired to secure an untarnished name throughout Plassans. There was but one method to adopt, namely, to induce Adelaide to leave of her own accord. Pierre neglected nothing to accomplish this end. He considered his mother's misconduct a sufficient excuse for his own hard-heartedness. He punished her as one would chastise a child. The tables were turned. The poor woman cowered under the stick which, figuratively, was constantly held over her. She was scarcely forty-two years old, and already had the stammerings of terror, and vague, pitiful looks of an old woman in her dotage. Her son continued to stab her with his piercing glances, hoping that she would run away when her courage was exhausted. The unfortunate woman suffered terribly from shame, restrained desire and enforced cowardice, receiving the blows dealt her with passive resignation, and nevertheless returning to Macquart with the determination to die on the spot rather than submit. There were nights when she would have got out of bed, and thrown herself into the Viorne, if with her weak, nervous, nature she had not felt the greatest fear of death. On several occasions she thought of running away and joining her lover on the frontier. It was only because she did not know whither to go that she remained in the house, submitting to her son's contemptuous silence and secret brutality. Pierre divined that she would have left long ago if she had only had a refuge. He was waiting an opportunity to take a little apartment for her somewhere, when a fortuitous occurrence, which he had not ventured to anticipate, abruptly brought about the realisation of his desires. Information reached the Faubourg that Macquart had just been killed on the frontier by a shot from a custom-house officer, at the moment when he was endeavouring to smuggle a load of Geneva watches into France. The story was true. The smuggler's body was not even brought home, but was interred in the cemetery of a little mountain village. Adelaide's grief plunged her into stupor. Her son, who watched her curiously, did not see her shed a tear. Macquart had made her sole legatee. She inherited his hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre, and his carbine, which a fellow-smuggler, braving the balls of the custom-house officers, loyally brought back to her. On the following day she retired to the little house, hung the carbine above the mantelpiece, and lived there estranged from all the world, solitary and silent.

Pierre was at last sole master of the house. The Fouques' land belonged to him in fact, if not in law. He never thought of establishing himself on it. It was too narrow a field for his ambition. To till the ground and cultivate vegetables seemed to him boorish, unworthy of his faculties. He was in a hurry to divest himself of everything recalling the peasant. With his nature refined by his mother's nervous temperament, he felt an irresistible longing for the enjoyments of the middle classes. In all his calculations, therefore, he had regarded the sale of the Fouques' property as the final consummation. This sale, by placing a round sum of money in his hands, would enable him to marry the daughter of some merchant who would take him into partnership. At this period the wars of the First Empire were greatly thinning the ranks of eligible young men. Parents were not so fastidious as previously in the choice of a son-in-law. Pierre persuaded himself that money would smooth all difficulties, and that the gossip of the Faubourg would be overlooked; he intended to pose as a victim, as an honest man suffering from a family disgrace, which he deplored, without being soiled by it or excusing it.

For several months already he had cast his eyes on a certain Felicite Puech, the daughter of an oil-dealer. The firm of Puech & Lacamp, whose warehouses were in one of the darkest lanes of the old quarter, was far from prosperous. It enjoyed but doubtful credit in the market, and people talked vaguely of bankruptcy. It was precisely in consequence of these evil reports that Pierre turned his batteries in this direction. No well-to-do trader would have given him his daughter. He meant to appear on the scene at the very moment when old Puech should no longer know which way to turn; he would then purchase Felicite of him, and re-establish the credit of the house by his own energy and intelligence. It was a clever expedient for ascending the first rung of the social ladder, for raising himself above his station. Above all things, he wished to escape from that frightful Faubourg where everybody reviled his family, and to obliterate all these foul legends, by effacing even the very name of the Fouques' enclosure. For that reason the filthy streets of the old quarter seemed to him perfect paradise. There, only, he would be able to change his skin.

The moment which he had been awaiting soon arrived. The firm of Puech and Lacamp seemed to be at the last gasp. The young man then negotiated the match with prudent skill. He was received, if not as a deliverer, at least as a necessary and acceptable expedient. The marriage agreed upon, he turned his attention to the sale of the ground. The owner of the Jas-Meiffren, desiring to enlarge his estate, had made him repeated offers. A low, thin, party-wall alone separated the two estates. Pierre speculated on the eagerness of his wealthy neighbour, who, to gratify his caprice, offered as much as fifty thousand francs for the land. It was double its value. Pierre, whoever, with the craftiness of a peasant, pulled a long face, and said that he did not care to sell; that his mother would never consent to get rid of the property where the Fouques had lived from father to son for nearly two centuries. But all the time that he was seemingly holding back he was really making preparations for the sale. Certain doubts had arisen in his mind. According to his own brutal logic, the property belonged to him; he had the right to dispose of it as he chose. Beneath this assurance, however, he had vague presentiments of legal complications. So he indirectly consulted a lawyer of the Faubourg.

He learnt some fine things from him. According to the lawyer, his hands were completely tied. His mother alone could alienate the property, and he doubted whether she would. But what he did not know, what came as a heavy blow to him, was that Ursule and Antoine, those young wolves, had claims on the estate. What! they would despoil him, rob him, the legitimate child! The lawyer's explanations were clear and precise, however; Adelaide, it is true, had married Rougon under the common property system; but as the whole fortune consisted of land, the young woman, according to law, again came into possession of everything at her husband's death. Moreover, Macquart and Adelaide had duly acknowledged their children when declaring their birth for registration, and thus these children were entitled to inherit from their mother. For sole consolation, Pierre learnt that the law reduced the share of illegitimate children in favour of the others. This, however, did not console him at all. He wanted to have everything. He would not have shared ten sous with Ursule and Antoine.

This vista of the intricacies of the Code opened up a new horizon, which he scanned with a singularly thoughtful air. He soon recognised that a shrewd man must always keep the law on his side. And this is what he devised without consulting anyone, even the lawyer, whose suspicions he was afraid of arousing. He knew how to turn his mother round his finger. One fine morning he took her to a notary and made her sign a deed of sale. Provided she were left the hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre, Adelaide would have sold all Plassans. Besides, Pierre assured her an annual income of six hundred francs, and made the most solemn promises to watch over his brother and sister. This oath satisfied the good woman. She recited, before the notary, the lesson which it had pleased her son to teach her. On the following day the young man made her place her name at the foot of a document in which she acknowledged having received fifty thousand francs as the price of the property. This was his stroke of genius, the act of a rogue. He contented himself with telling his mother, who was a little surprised at signing such a receipt when she had not seen a centime of the fifty thousand francs, that it was a pure formality of no consequence whatever. As he slipped the paper into his pocket, he thought to himself, "Now, let the young wolves ask me to render an account. I will tell them the old woman has squandered everything. They will never dare to go to law with me about it." A week afterwards, the party-wall no longer existed: a plough had turned up the vegetable beds; the Fouques' enclosure, in accordance with young Rougon's wish, was about to become a thing of the past. A few months later, the owner of the Jas-Meiffren even had the old market-gardener's house, which was falling to pieces, pulled down.

When Pierre had secured the fifty thousand francs he married Felicite Puech with as little delay as possible. Felicite was a short, dark woman, such as one often meets in Provence. She looked like one of those brown, lean, noisy grasshoppers, which in their sudden leaps often strike their heads against the almond-trees. Thin, flat-breasted, with pointed shoulders and a face like that of a pole-cat, her features singularly sunken and attenuated, it was not easy to tell her age; she looked as near fifteen as thirty, although she was in reality only nineteen, four years younger than her husband. There was much feline slyness in the depths of her little black eyes, which suggested gimlet holes. Her low, bumpy forehead, her slightly depressed nose with delicate quivering nostrils, her thin red lips and prominent chin, parted from her cheeks by strange hollows, all suggested the countenance of an artful dwarf, a living mask of intrigue, an active, envious ambition. With all her ugliness, however, Felicite possessed a sort of gracefulness which rendered her seductive. People said of her that she could be pretty or ugly as she pleased. It would depend on the fashion in which she tied her magnificent hair; but it depended still more on the triumphant smile which illumined her golden complexion when she thought she had got the better of somebody. Born under an evil star, and believing herself ill-used by fortune, she was generally content to appear an ugly creature. She did not, however, intend to abandon the struggle, for she had vowed that she would some day make the whole town burst with envy, by an insolent display of happiness and luxury. Had she been able to act her part on a more spacious stage, where full play would have been allowed her ready wit, she would have quickly brought her dream to pass. Her intelligence was far superior to that of the girls of her own station and education. Evil tongues asserted that her mother, who had died a few years after she was born, had, during the early period of her married life, been familiar with the Marquis de Carnavant, a young nobleman of the Saint-Marc quarter. In fact, Felicite had the hands and feet of a marchioness, and, in this respect, did not appear to belong to that class of workers from which she was descended.

Her marriage with Pierre Rougon, that semi-peasant, that man of the Faubourg, whose family was in such bad odour, kept the old quarter in a state of astonishment for more than a month. She let people gossip, however, receiving the stiff congratulations of her friends with strange smiles. Her calculations had been made; she had chosen Rougon for a husband as one would choose an accomplice. Her father, in accepting the young man, had merely had eyes for the fifty thousand francs which were to save him from bankruptcy. Felicite, however, was more keen-sighted. She looked into the future, and felt that she would be in want of a robust man, even if he were somewhat rustic, behind whom she might conceal herself, and whose limbs she would move at will. She entertained a deliberate hatred for the insignificant little exquisites of provincial towns, the lean herd of notaries' clerks and prospective barristers, who stand shivering with cold while waiting for clients. Having no dowry, and despairing of ever marrying a rich merchant's son, she by far preferred a peasant whom she could use as a passive tool, to some lank graduate who would overwhelm her with his academical superiority, and drag her about all her life in search of hollow vanities. She was of opinion that the woman ought to make the man. She believed herself capable of carving a minister out of a cow-herd. That which had attracted her in Rougon was his broad chest, his heavy frame, which was not altogether wanting in elegance. A man thus built would bear with ease and sprightliness the mass of intrigues which she dreamt of placing on his shoulders. However, while she appreciated her husband's strength and vigour, she also perceived that he was far from being a fool; under his coarse flesh she had divined the cunning suppleness of his mind. Still she was a long way from really knowing her Rougon; she thought him far stupider than he was. A few days after her marriage, as she was by chance fumbling in the drawer of a secretaire, she came across the receipt for fifty thousand francs which Adelaide had signed. At sight of it she understood things, and felt rather frightened; her own natural average honesty rendered her hostile to such expedients. Her terror, however, was not unmixed with admiration; Rougon became in her eyes a very smart fellow.

The young couple bravely sought to conquer fortune. The firm of Puech & Lacamp was not, after all, so embarrassed as Pierre had thought. Its liabilities were small, it was merely in want of ready-money. In the provinces, traders adopt prudent courses to save them from serious disasters. Puech & Lacamp were prudent to an excessive degree; they never risked a thousand crowns without the greatest fear, and thus their house, a veritable hole, was an unimportant one. The fifty thousand francs that Pierre brought into it sufficed to pay the debts and extend the business. The beginnings were good. During three successive years the olive harvest was an abundant one. Felicite, by a bold stroke which absolutely frightened both Pierre and old Puech, made them purchase a considerable quantity of oil, which they stored in their warehouse. During the following years, as the young woman had foreseen, the crops failed, and a considerable rise in prices having set in, they realised large profits by selling out their stock.

A short time after this haul, Puech & Lacamp retired from the firm, content with the few sous they had just secured, and ambitious of living on their incomes.

The young couple now had sole control of the business, and thought that they had at last laid the foundation of their fortune. "You have vanquished my ill-luck," Felicite would sometimes say to her husband.

One of the rare weaknesses of her energetic nature was to believe herself stricken by misfortune. Hitherto, so she asserted, nothing had been successful with either herself or her father, in spite of all their efforts. Goaded by her southern superstition, she prepared to struggle with fate as one struggles with somebody who is endeavouring to strangle one. Circumstances soon justified her apprehensions in a singular manner. Ill-luck returned inexorably. Every year some fresh disaster shook Rougon's business. A bankruptcy resulted in the loss of a few thousand francs; his estimates of crops proved incorrect, through the most incredible circumstances; the safest speculations collapsed miserably. It was a truceless, merciless combat.

"You see I was born under an unlucky star!" Felicite would bitterly exclaim.

And yet she still struggled furiously, not understanding how it was that she, who had shown such keen scent in a first speculation, could now only give her husband the most deplorable advice.

Pierre, dejected and less tenacious than herself, would have gone into liquidation a score of times had it not been for his wife's firm obstinacy. She longed to be rich. She perceived that her ambition could only be attained by fortune. As soon as they possessed a few hundred thousand francs they would be masters of the town. She would get her husband appointed to an important post, and she would govern. It was not the attainment of honours which troubled her; she felt herself marvellously well armed for such a combat. But she could do nothing to get together the first few bags of money which were needed. Though the ruling of men caused her no apprehensions, she felt a sort of impotent rage at the thought of those inert, white, cold, five-franc pieces over which her intriguing spirit had no power, and which obstinately resisted her.

The battle lasted for more than thirty years. The death of Puech proved another heavy blow. Felicite, who had counted upon an inheritance of about forty thousand francs, found that the selfish old man, in order to indulge himself in his old age, had sunk all his money in a life annuity. The discovery made her quite ill. She was gradually becoming soured, she was growing more lean and harsh. To see her, from morning till night, whirling round the jars of oil, one would have thought she believed that she could stimulate the sales by continually flitting about like a restless fly. Her husband, on the contrary, became heavier; misfortune fattened him, making him duller and more indolent. These thirty years of combat did not, however, bring him to ruin. At each annual stock-taking they managed to make both ends meet fairly well; if they suffered any loss during one season, they recouped themselves the next. However, it was precisely this living from hand to mouth which exasperated Felicite. She would, by far, have preferred a big failure. They would then, perhaps, have been able to commence life over again, instead of obstinately persisting in their petty business, working themselves to death to gain the bare necessaries of life. During one third of a century they did not save fifty thousand francs.

It should be mentioned that, from the very first years of their married life, they had a numerous family, which in the long run became a heavy burden to them. In the course of five years, from 1811 to 1815, Felicite gave birth to three boys. Then during the four ensuing years she presented her husband with two girls. These had but an indifferent welcome; daughters are a terrible embarrassment when one has no dowry to give them.

However, the young woman did not regard this troop of children as the cause of their ruin. On the contrary, she based on her sons' heads the building of the fortune which was crumbling in her own hands. They were hardly ten years old before she discounted their future careers in her dreams. Doubting whether she would ever succeed herself, she centred in them all her hopes of overcoming the animosity of fate. They would provide satisfaction for her disappointed vanity, they would give her that wealthy, honourable position which she had hitherto sought in vain. From that time forward, without abandoning the business struggle, she conceived a second plan for obtaining the gratification of her domineering instincts. It seemed to her impossible that, amongst her three sons, there should not be a man of superior intellect, who would enrich them all. She felt it, she said. Accordingly, she nursed the children with a fervour in which maternal severity was blended with an usurer's solicitude. She amused herself by fattening them as though they constituted a capital which, later on, would return a large interest.

"Enough!" Pierre would sometimes exclaim, "all children are ungrateful. You are spoiling them, you are ruining us."

When Felicite spoke of sending them to college, he got angry. Latin was a useless luxury, it would be quite sufficient if they went through the classes of a little neighbouring school The young woman, however, persisted in her design. She possessed certain elevated instincts which made her take a great pride in surrounding herself with accomplished children; moreover, she felt that her sons must never remain as illiterate as her husband, if she wished to see them become prominent men. She fancied them all three in Paris in high positions, which she did not clearly define. When Rougon consented, and the three youngsters had entered the eighth class, Felicite felt the most lively satisfaction she had ever experienced. She listened with delight as they talked of their professors and their studies. When she heard her eldest son make one of his brothers decline Rosa, a rose, it sounded like delicious music to her. It is only fair to add that her delight was not tarnished by any sordid calculations. Even Rougon felt the satisfaction which an illiterate man experiences on perceiving his sons grow more learned than himself. Then the fellowship which grew up between their sons and those of the local big-wigs completed the parents' gratification. The youngsters were soon on familiar terms with the sons of the Mayor and the Sub-Prefect, and even with two or three young noblemen whom the Saint-Marc quarter had deigned to send to the Plassans College. Felicite was at a loss how to repay such an honour. The education of the three lads weighed seriously on the budget of the Rougon household.

Until the boys had taken their degrees, their parents, who kept them at college at enormous sacrifices, lived in hopes of their success. When they had obtained their diplomas Felicite wished to continue her work, and even persuaded her husband to send the three to Paris. Two of them devoted themselves to the study of law, and the third passed through the School of Medicine. Then, when they were men, and had exhausted the resources of the Rougon family and were obliged to return and establish themselves in the provinces, their parents' disenchantment began. They idled about and grew fat. And Felicite again felt all the bitterness of her ill-luck. Her sons were failing her. They had ruined her, and did not return any interest on the capital which they represented. This last blow of fate was the heaviest, as it fell on her ambition and her maternal vanity alike. Rougon repeated to her from morning till night, "I told you so!" which only exasperated her the more.

One day, as she was bitterly reproaching her eldest son with the large amount of money expended on his education, he said to her with equal bitterness, "I will repay you later on if I can. But as you had no means, you should have brought us up to a trade. We are out of our element, we are suffering more than you."

Felicite understood the wisdom of these words. From that time she ceased to accuse her children, and turned her anger against fate, which never wearied of striking her. She started her old complaints afresh, and bemoaned more and more the want of means which made her strand, as it were, in port. Whenever Rougon said to her, "Your sons are lazy fellows, they will eat up all we have," she sourly replied, "Would to God I had more money to give them; if they do vegetate, poor fellows, it's because they haven't got a sou to bless themselves with."

At the beginning of the year 1848, on the eve of the Revolution of February, the three young Rougons held very precarious positions at Plassans. They presented most curious and profoundly dissimilar characteristics, though they came of the same stock. They were in reality superior to their parents. The race of the Rougons was destined to become refined through its female side. Adelaide had made Pierre a man of moderate enterprise, disposed to low ambitions; Felicite had inspired her sons with a higher intelligence, with a capacity for greater vices and greater virtues.

At the period now referred to the eldest, Eugene, was nearly forty years old. He was a man of middle height, slightly bald, and already disposed to obesity. He had his father's face, a long face with broad features; beneath his skin one could divine the fat to which were due the flabby roundness of his features, and his yellowish, waxy complexion. Though his massive square head still recalled the peasant, his physiognomy was transfigured, lit up from within as it were, when his drooping eyelids were raised and his eyes awoke to life. In the son's case, the father's ponderousness had turned to gravity. This big fellow, Eugene, usually preserved a heavy somnolent demeanour. At the same time, certain of his heavy, languid movements suggested those of a giant stretching his limbs pending the time for action. By one of those alleged freaks of nature, of which, however, science is now commencing to discover the laws, if physical resemblance to Pierre was perfect in Eugene, Felicite on her side seemed to have furnished him with his brains. He offered an instance of certain moral and intellectual qualities of maternal origin being embedded in the coarse flesh he had derived from his father. He cherished lofty ambitions, possessed domineering instincts, and showed singular contempt for trifling expedients and petty fortunes.

He was a proof that Plassans was perhaps not mistaken in suspecting that Felicite had some blue blood in her veins. The passion for indulgence, which became formidably developed in the Rougons, and was, in fact, the family characteristic, attained in his case its highest pitch; he longed for self-gratification, but in the form of mental enjoyment such as would gratify his burning desire for domination. A man such as this was never intended to succeed in a provincial town. He vegetated there for fifteen years, his eyes turned towards Paris, watching his opportunities. On his return home he had entered his name on the rolls, in order to be independent of his parents. After that he pleaded from time to time, earning a bare livelihood, without appearing to rise above average mediocrity. At Plassans his voice was considered thick, his movements heavy. He generally wandered from the question at issue, rambled, as the wiseacres expressed it. On one occasion particularly, when he was pleading in a case for damages, he so forgot himself as to stray into a political disquisition, to such a point that the presiding judge interfered, whereupon he immediately sat down with a strange smile. His client was condemned to pay a considerable sum of money, a circumstance which did not, however, seem to cause Eugene the least regret for his irrelevant digression. He appeared to regard his speeches as mere exercises which would be of use to him later on. It was this that puzzled and disheartened Felicite. She would have liked to see her son dictating the law to the Civil Court of Plassans. At last she came to entertain a very unfavourable opinion of her first-born. To her mind this lazy fellow would never be the one to shed any lustre on the family. Pierre, on the contrary, felt absolute confidence in him, not that he had more intuition than his wife, but because external appearances sufficed him, and he flattered himself by believing in the genius of a son who was his living image. A month prior to the Revolution of February, 1848, Eugene became restless; some special inspiration made him anticipate the crisis. From that time forward he seemed to feel out of his element at Plassans. He would wander about the streets like a distressed soul. At last he formed a sudden resolution, and left for Paris, with scarcely five hundred francs in his pocket.

Aristide, the youngest son, was, so to speak, diametrically opposed to Eugene. He had his mother's face, and a covetousness and slyness of character prone to trivial intrigues, in which his father's instincts predominated. Nature has need of symmetry. Short, with a pitiful countenance suggesting the knob of a stick carved into a Punch's head, Aristide ferretted and fumbled everywhere, without any scruples, eager only to gratify himself. He loved money as his eldest brother loved power. While Eugene dreamed of bending a people to his will, and intoxicated himself with visions of future omnipotence, the other fancied himself ten times a millionaire, installed in a princely mansion, eating and drinking to his heart's content, and enjoying life to the fullest possible extent. Above all things, he longed to make a rapid fortune. When he was building his castles in the air, they would rise in his mind as if by magic; he would become possessed of tons of gold in one night. These visions agreed with his indolence, as he never troubled himself about the means, considering those the best which were the most expeditious. In his case the race of the Rougons, of those coarse, greedy peasants with brutish appetites, had matured too rapidly; every desire for material indulgence was found in him, augmented threefold by hasty education, and rendered the more insatiable and dangerous by the deliberate way in which the young man had come to regard their realisation as his set purpose. In spite of her keen feminine intuition, Felicite preferred this son; she did not perceive the greater affinity between herself and Eugene; she excused the follies and indolence of her youngest son under the pretext that he would some day be the superior genius of the family, and that such a man was entitled to live a disorderly life until his intellectual strength should be revealed.

Aristide subjected her indulgence to a rude test. In Paris he led a low, idle life; he was one of those students who enter their names at the taverns of the Quartier Latin. He did not remain there, however, more than two years; his father, growing apprehensive, and seeing that he had not yet passed a single examination, kept him at Plassans and spoke of finding a wife for him, hoping that domestic responsibility would make him more steady. Aristide let himself be married. He had no very clear idea of his own ambitions at this time; provincial life did not displease him; he was battening in his little town—eating, sleeping, and sauntering about. Felicite pleaded his cause so earnestly that Pierre consented to board and lodge the newly-married couple, on condition that the young man should turn his attention to the business. From that time, however, Aristide led a life of ease and idleness. He spent his days and the best part of his nights at the club, again and again slipping out of his father's office like a schoolboy to go and gamble away the few louis that his mother gave him clandestinely.

It is necessary to have lived in the depths of the French provinces to form an idea of the four brutifying years which the young fellow spent in this fashion. In every little town there is a group of individuals who thus live on their parents, pretending at times to work, but in reality cultivating idleness with a sort of religious zeal. Aristide was typical of these incorrigible drones. For four years he did little but play ecarte. While he passed his time at the club, his wife, a fair-complexioned nerveless woman, helped to ruin the Rougon business by her inordinate passion for showy gowns and her formidable appetite, a rather remarkable peculiarity in so frail a creature. Angele, however, adored sky-blue ribbons and roast beef. She was the daughter of a retired captain who was called Commander Sicardot, a good-hearted old gentleman, who had given her a dowry of ten thousand francs—all his savings. Pierre, in selecting Angele for his son had considered that he had made an unexpected bargain, so lightly did he esteem Aristide. However, that dowry of ten thousand francs, which determined his choice, ultimately became a millstone round his neck. His son, who was already a cunning rogue, deposited the ten thousand francs with his father, with whom he entered into partnership, declining, with the most sincere professions of devotion, to keep a single copper.

"We have no need of anything," he said; "you will keep my wife and myself, and we will reckon up later on."

Pierre was short of money at the time, and accepted, not, however, without some uneasiness at Aristide's disinterestedness. The latter calculated that it would be years before his father would have ten thousand francs in ready money to repay him, so that he and his wife would live at the paternal expense so long as the partnership could not be dissolved. It was an admirable investment for his few bank-notes. When the oil-dealer understood what a foolish bargain he had made he was not in a position to rid himself of Aristide; Angele's dowry was involved in speculations which were turning out unfavourably. He was exasperated, stung to the heart, at having to provide for his daughter-in-law's voracious appetite and keep his son in idleness. Had he been able to buy them out of the business he would twenty times have shut his doors on those bloodsuckers, as he emphatically expressed it. Felicite secretly defended them; the young man, who had divined her dreams of ambition, would every evening describe to her the elaborate plans by which he would shortly make a fortune. By a rare chance she had remained on excellent terms with her daughter-in-law. It must be confessed that Angele had no will of her own—she could be moved and disposed of like a piece of furniture.

Meantime Pierre became enraged whenever his wife spoke to him of the success their youngest son would ultimately achieve; he declared that he would really bring them to ruin. During the four years that the young couple lived with him he stormed in this manner, wasting his impotent rage in quarrels, without in the least disturbing the equanimity of Aristide and Angele. They were located there, and there they intended to remain like blocks of wood. At last Pierre met with a stroke of luck which enabled him to return the ten thousand francs to his son. When, however, he wanted to reckon up accounts with him, Aristide interposed so much chicanery that he had to let the couple go without deducting a copper for their board and lodging. They installed themselves but a short distance off, in a part of the old quarter called the Place Saint-Louis. The ten thousand francs were soon consumed. They had everything to get for their new home. Moreover Aristide made no change in his mode of living as long as any money was left in the house. When he had reached the last hundred-franc note he felt rather nervous. He was seen prowling about the town in a suspicious manner. He no longer took his customary cup of coffee at the club; he watched feverishly whilst play was going on, without touching a card. Poverty made him more spiteful than he would otherwise have been. He bore the blow for a long time, obstinately refusing to do anything in the way of work.

In 1840 he had a son, little Maxime, whom his grandmother Felicite fortunately sent to college, paying his fees clandestinely. That made one mouth less at home; but poor Angele was dying of hunger, and her husband was at last compelled to seek a situation. He secured one at the Sub-Prefecture. He remained there nearly ten years, and only attained a salary of eighteen hundred francs per annum. From that time forward it was with ever increasing malevolence and rancour that he hungered for the enjoyments of which he was deprived. His lowly position exasperated him; the paltry hundred and fifty francs which he received every month seemed to him an irony of fate. Never did man burn with such desire for self-gratification. Felicite, to whom he imparted his sufferings, was by no means grieved to see him so eager. She thought his misery would stimulate his energies. At last, crouching in ambush as it were, with his ears wide open, he began to look about him like a thief seeking his opportunity. At the beginning of 1848, when his brother left for Paris, he had a momentary idea of following him. But Eugene was a bachelor; and he, Aristide, could not take his wife so far without money. So he waited, scenting a catastrophe, and ready to fall on the first prey that might come within his reach.

The other son, Pascal, born between Eugene and Aristide, did not appear to belong to the family. He was one of those frequent cases which give the lie to the laws of heredity. During the evolution of a race nature often produces some one being whose every element she derives from her own creative powers. Nothing in the moral or physical constitution of Pascal recalled the Rougons. Tall, with a grave and gentle face, he had an uprightness of mind, a love of study, a retiring modesty which contrasted strangely with the feverish ambitions and unscrupulous intrigues of his relatives. After acquitting himself admirably of his medical studies in Paris, he had retired, by preference, to Plassans, notwithstanding the offers he received from his professors. He loved a quiet provincial life; he maintained that for a studious man such a life was preferable to the excitement of Paris. Even at Plassans he did not exert himself to extend his practice. Very steady, and despising fortune, he contented himself with the few patients sent him by chance. All his pleasures were centred in a bright little house in the new town, where he shut himself up, lovingly devoting his whole time to the study of natural history. He was particularly fond of physiology. It was known in the town that he frequently purchased dead bodies from the hospital grave-digger, a circumstance which rendered him an object of horror to delicate ladies and certain timid gentlemen. Fortunately, they did not actually look upon him as a sorcerer; but his practice diminished, and he was regarded as an eccentric character, to whom people of good society ought not to entrust even a finger-tip, for fear of being compromised. The mayor's wife was one day heard to say: "I would sooner die than be attended by that gentleman. He smells of death."

From that time, Pascal was condemned. He seemed to rejoice at the mute terror which he inspired. The fewer patients he had, the more time he could devote to his favourite sciences. As his fees were very moderate, the poorer people remained faithful to him; he earned just enough to live, and lived contentedly, a thousand leagues away from the rest of the country, absorbed in the pure delight of his researches and discoveries. From time to time he sent a memoir to the Academie des Sciences at Paris. Plassans did not know that this eccentric character, this gentleman who smelt of death was well-known and highly-esteemed in the world of science. When people saw him starting on Sundays for an excursion among the Garrigues hills, with a botanist's bag hung round his neck and a geologist's hammer in his hand, they would shrug their shoulders and institute a comparison between him and some other doctor of the town who was noted for his smart cravat, his affability to the ladies, and the delicious odour of violets which his garments always diffused. Pascal's parents did not understand him any better than other people. When Felicite saw him adopting such a strange, unpretentious mode of life she was stupefied, and reproached him for disappointing her hopes. She, who tolerated Aristide's idleness because she thought it would prove fertile, could not view without regret the slow progress of Pascal, his partiality for obscurity and contempt for riches, his determined resolve to lead a life of retirement. He was certainly not the child who would ever gratify her vanities.

"But where do you spring from?" she would sometimes say to him. "You are not one of us. Look at your brothers, how they keep their eyes open, striving to profit by the education we have given them, whilst you waste your time on follies and trifles. You make a very poor return to us, who have ruined ourselves for your education. No, you are certainly not one of us."

Pascal, who preferred to laugh whenever he was called upon to feel annoyed, replied cheerfully, but not without a sting of irony: "Oh, you need not be frightened, I shall never drive you to the verge of bankruptcy; when any of you are ill, I will attend you for nothing."

Moreover, though he never displayed any repugnance to his relatives, he very rarely saw them, following in this wise his natural instincts. Before Aristide obtained a situation at the Sub-Prefecture, Pascal had frequently come to his assistance. For his part he had remained a bachelor. He had not the least suspicion of the grave events that were preparing. For two or three years he had been studying the great problem of heredity, comparing the human and animal races together, and becoming absorbed in the strange results which he obtained. Certain observations which he had made with respect to himself and his relatives had been, so to say, the starting-point of his studies. The common people, with their natural intuition, so well understood that he was quite different from the other Rougons, that they invariably called him Monsieur Pascal, without ever adding his family name.

Three years prior to the Revolution of 1848 Pierre and Felicite retired from business. Old age was coming on apace; they were both past fifty and were weary enough of the struggle. In face of their ill fortune, they were afraid of being ultimately ruined if they obstinately persisted in the fight. Their sons, by disappointing their expectations, had dealt them the final blow. Now that they despaired of ever being enriched by them, they were anxious to make some little provision for old age. They retired with forty thousand francs at the utmost. This sum provided an annual income of two thousand francs, just sufficient to live in a small way in the provinces. Fortunately, they were by themselves, having succeeded in marrying their daughters Marthe and Sidonie, the former of whom resided at Marseilles and the latter in Paris.

After they had settled their affairs they would much have liked to take up their abode in the new town, the quarter of the retired traders, but they dared not do so. Their income was too small; they were afraid that they would cut but a poor figure there. So, as a sort of compromise, they took apartments in the Rue de la Banne, the street which separates the old quarter from the new one. As their abode was one of the row of houses bordering the old quarter, they still lived among the common people; nevertheless, they could see the town of the richer classes from their windows, so that they were just on the threshold of the promised land.

Their apartments, situated on the second floor, consisted of three large rooms—dining-room, drawing-room, and bedroom. The first floor was occupied by the owner of the house, a stick and umbrella manufacturer, who had a shop on the ground floor. The house, which was narrow and by no means deep, had only two storeys. Felicite moved into it with a bitter pang. In the provinces, to live in another person's house is an avowal of poverty. Every family of position at Plassans has a house of its own, landed property being very cheap there. Pierre kept the purse-strings well tied; he would not hear of any embellishments. The old furniture, faded, worn, damaged though it was, had to suffice, without even being repaired. Felicite, however, who keenly felt the necessity for this parsimony, exerted herself to give fresh polish to all the wreckage; she herself knocked nails into some of the furniture which was more dilapidated than the rest, and darned the frayed velvet of the arm-chairs.

The dining-room, which, like the kitchen, was at the back of the house, was nearly bare; a table and a dozen chairs were lost in the gloom of this large apartment, whose window faced the grey wall of a neighbouring building. As no strangers ever went into the bedroom, Felicite had stowed all her useless furniture there; thus, besides a bedstead, wardrobe, secretaire, and wash-stand, it contained two cradles, one perched atop of the other, a sideboard whose doors were missing, and an empty bookcase, venerable ruins which the old woman could not make up her mind to part with. All her cares, however, were bestowed upon the drawing-room, and she almost succeeded in making it comfortable and decent. The furniture was covered with yellowish velvet with satin flowers; in the middle stood a round table with a marble top, while a couple of pier tables, surmounted by mirrors, leant against the walls at either end of the room. There was even a carpet, which just covered the middle of the floor, and a chandelier in a white muslin cover which the flies had spotted with black specks. On the walls hung six lithographs representing the great battles of Napoleon I. Moreover, the furniture dated from the first years of the Empire. The only embellishment that Felicite could obtain was to have the walls hung with orange-hued paper covered with large flowers. Thus the drawing room had a strange yellow glow, which filled it with an artificial dazzling light. The furniture, the paper, and the window curtains were yellow; the carpet and even the marble table-tops showed touches of yellow. However, when the curtains were drawn the colours harmonised fairly well and the drawing-room looked almost decent.

But Felicite had dreamed of quite a different kind of luxury. She regarded with mute despair this ill-concealed misery. She usually occupied the drawing-room, the best apartment in the house, and the sweetest and bitterest of her pastimes was to sit at one of the windows which overlooked the Rue de la Banne and gave her a side view of the square in front of the Sub-Prefecture. That was the paradise of her dreams. That little, neat, tidy square, with its bright houses, seemed to her a Garden of Eden. She would have given ten years of her life to possess one of those habitations. The house at the left-hand corner, in which the receiver of taxes resided, particularly tempted her. She contemplated it with eager longing. Sometimes, when the windows of this abode were open, she could catch a glimpse of rich furniture and tasteful elegance which made her burn with envy.

At this period the Rougons passed through a curious crisis of vanity and unsatiated appetite. The few proper feelings which they had once entertained had become embittered. They posed as victims of evil fortune, not with resignation, however, for they seemed still more keenly determined that they would not die before they had satisfied their ambitions. In reality, they did not abandon any of their hopes, notwithstanding their advanced age. Felicite professed to feel a presentiment that she would die rich. However, each day of poverty weighed them down the more. When they recapitulated their vain attempts—when they recalled their thirty years' struggle, and the defection of their children—when they saw their airy castles end in this yellow drawing-room, whose shabbiness they could only conceal by drawing the curtains, they were overcome with bitter rage. Then, as a consolation, they would think of plans for making a colossal fortune, seeking all sorts of devices. Felicite would fancy herself the winner of the grand prize of a hundred thousand francs in some lottery, while Pierre pictured himself carrying out some wonderful speculation. They lived with one sole thought—that of making a fortune immediately, in a few hours—of becoming rich and enjoying themselves, if only for a year. Their whole beings tended to this, stubbornly, without a pause. And they still cherished some faint hopes with regard to their sons, with that peculiar egotism of parents who cannot bear to think that they have sent their children to college without deriving some personal advantage from it.

Felicite did not appear to have aged; she was still the same dark little woman, ever on the move, buzzing about like a grasshopper. Any person walking behind her on the pavement would have thought her a girl of fifteen, from the lightness of her step and the angularity of her shoulders and waist. Even her face had scarcely undergone any change; it was simply rather more sunken, rather more suggestive of the snout of a pole-cat.

As for Pierre Rougon, he had grown corpulent, and had become a highly respectable looking citizen, who only lacked a decent income to make him a very dignified individual. His pale, flabby face, his heaviness, his languid manner, seemed redolent of wealth. He had one day heard a peasant who did not know him say: "Ah! he's some rich fellow, that fat old gentleman there. He's no cause to worry about his dinner!" This was a remark which stung him to the heart, for he considered it cruel mockery to be only a poor devil while possessing the bulk and contented gravity of a millionaire. When he shaved on Sundays in front of a small five-sou looking-glass hanging from the fastening of a window, he would often think that in a dress coat and white tie he would cut a far better figure at the Sub-Prefect's than such or such a functionary of Plassans. This peasant's son, who had grown sallow from business worries, and corpulent from a sedentary life, whose hateful passions were hidden beneath naturally placid features, really had that air of solemn imbecility which gives a man a position in an official salon. People imagined that his wife held a rod over him, but they were mistaken. He was as self-willed as a brute. Any determined expression of extraneous will would drive him into a violent rage. Felicite was far too supple to thwart him openly; with her light fluttering nature she did not attack obstacles in front. When she wished to obtain something from her husband, or drive him the way she thought best, she would buzz round him in her grasshopper fashion, stinging him on all sides, and returning to the charge a hundred times until he yielded almost unconsciously. He felt, moreover, that she was shrewder than he, and tolerated her advice fairly patiently. Felicite, more useful than the coach fly, would sometimes do all the work while she was thus buzzing round Pierre's ears. Strange to say, the husband and wife never accused each other of their ill-success. The only bone of contention between them was the education lavished on their children.

The Revolution of 1848 found all the Rougons on the lookout, exasperated by their bad luck, and disposed to lay violent hands on fortune if ever they should meet her in a byway. They were a family of bandits lying in wait, ready to rifle and plunder. Eugene kept an eye on Paris; Aristide dreamed of strangling Plassans; the mother and father, perhaps the most eager of the lot, intended to work on their own account, and reap some additional advantage from their sons' doings. Pascal alone, that discreet wooer of science, led the happy, indifferent life of a lover in his bright little house in the new town.

CHAPTER III

In that closed, sequestered town of Plassans, where class distinction was so clearly marked in 1848, the commotion caused by political events was very slight. Even at the present day the popular voice sounds very faintly there; the middle classes bring their prudence to bear in the matter, the nobility their mute despair, and the clergy their shrewd cunning. Kings may usurp thrones, or republics may be established, without scarcely any stir in the town. Plassans sleeps while Paris fights. But though on the surface the town may appear calm and indifferent, in the depths hidden work goes on which it is curious to study. If shots are rare in the streets, intrigues consume the drawing-rooms of both the new town and the Saint-Marc quarter. Until the year 1830 the masses were reckoned of no account. Even at the present time they are similarly ignored. Everything is settled between the clergy, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie. The priests, who are very numerous, give the cue to the local politics; they lay subterranean mines, as it were, and deal blows in the dark, following a prudent tactical system, which hardly allows of a step in advance or retreat even in the course of ten years. The secret intrigues of men who desire above all things to avoid noise requires special shrewdness, a special aptitude for dealing with small matters, and a patient endurance such as one only finds in persons callous to all passions. It is thus that provincial dilatoriness, which is so freely ridiculed in Paris, is full of treachery, secret stabs, hidden victories and defeats. These worthy men, particularly when their interests are at stake, kill at home with a snap of the fingers, as we, the Parisians, kill with cannon in the public thoroughfares.

The political history of Plassans, like that of all little towns in Provence, is singularly characteristic. Until 1830, the inhabitants remained observant Catholics and fervent royalists; even the lower classes only swore by God and their legitimate sovereigns. Then there came a sudden change; faith departed, the working and middle classes deserted the cause of legitimacy, and gradually espoused the great democratic movement of our time. When the Revolution of 1848 broke out, the nobility and the clergy were left alone to labour for the triumph of Henri V. For a long time they had regarded the accession of the Orleanists as a ridiculous experiment, which sooner or later would bring back the Bourbons; although their hopes were singularly shaken, they nevertheless continued the struggle, scandalised by the defection of their former allies, whom they strove to win back to their cause. The Saint-Marc quarter, assisted by all the parish priests, set to work. Among the middle classes, and especially among the people, the enthusiasm was very great on the morrow of the events of February; these apprentice republicans were in haste to display their revolutionary fervour. As regards the gentry of the new town, however, the conflagration, bright though it was, lasted no longer than a fire of straw. The small houseowners and retired tradespeople who had had their good days, or had made snug little fortunes under the monarchy, were soon seized with panic; the Republic, with its constant shocks and convulsions, made them tremble for their money and their life of selfishness.

Consequently, when the Clerical reaction of 1849 declared itself, nearly all the middle classes passed over to the Conservative party. They were received with open arms. The new town had never before had such close relations with the Saint-Marc quarter: some of the nobility even went so far as to shake hands with lawyers and retired oil-dealers. This unexpected familiarity kindled the enthusiasm of the new quarter, which henceforward waged bitter warfare against the republican government. To bring about such a coalition, the clergy had to display marvellous skill and endurance. The nobility of Plassans for the most part lay prostrate, as if half dead. They retained their faith, but lethargy had fallen on them, and they preferred to remain inactive, allowing the heavens to work their will. They would gladly have contented themselves with silent protest, feeling, perhaps, a vague presentiment that their divinities were dead, and that there was nothing left for them to do but rejoin them. Even at this period of confusion, when the catastrophe of 1848 was calculated to give them a momentary hope of the return of the Bourbons, they showed themselves spiritless and indifferent, speaking of rushing into the melee, yet never quitting their hearths without a pang of regret.

The clergy battled indefatigably against this feeling of impotence and resignation. They infused a kind of passion into their work: a priest, when he despairs, struggles all the more fiercely. The fundamental policy of the Church is to march straight forward; even though she may have to postpone the accomplishment of her projects for several centuries, she never wastes a single hour, but is always pushing forward with increasing energy. So it was the clergy who led the reaction of Plassans; the nobility only lent them their name, nothing more. The priests hid themselves behind the nobles, restrained them, directed them, and even succeeded in endowing them with a semblance of life. When they had induced them to overcome their repugnance so far as to make common cause with the middle classes, they believed themselves certain of victory. The ground was marvellously well prepared. This ancient royalist town, with its population of peaceful householders and timorous tradespeople, was destined to range itself, sooner or later, on the side of law and order. The clergy, by their tactics, hastened the conversion. After gaining the landlords of the new town to their side, they even succeeded in convincing the little retail-dealers of the old quarter. From that time the reactionary movement obtained complete possession of the town. All opinions were represented in this reaction; such a mixture of embittered Liberals, Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, and Clericals had never before been seen. It mattered little, however, at that time. The sole object was to kill the Republic; and the Republic was at the point of death. Only a fraction of the people—a thousand workmen at most, out of the ten thousand souls in the town—still saluted the tree of liberty planted in the middle of the square in front of the Sub-Prefecture.

The shrewdest politicians of Plassans, those who led the reactionary movement, did not scent the approach of the Empire until very much later. Prince Louis Napoleon's popularity seemed to them a mere passing fancy of the multitude. His person inspired them with but little admiration. They reckoned him a nonentity, a dreamer, incapable of laying his hands on France, and especially of maintaining his authority. To them he was only a tool whom they would make use of, who would clear the way for them, and whom they would turn out as soon as the hour arrived for the rightful Pretender to show himself.[*] However, months went by, and they became uneasy. It was only then that they vaguely perceived they were being duped: they had no time, however, to take any steps; the Coup d'Etat burst over their heads, and they were compelled to applaud. That great abomination, the Republic, had been assassinated; that, at least, was some sort of triumph. So the clergy and the nobility accepted accomplished facts with resignation; postponing, until later, the realisation of their hopes, and making amends for their miscalculations by uniting with the Bonapartists for the purpose of crushing the last Republicans.

[*] The Count de Chambord, "Henri V."

It was these events that laid the foundation of the Rougons' fortune. After being mixed up with the various phases of the crisis, they rose to eminence on the ruins of liberty. These bandits had been lying in wait to rob the Republic; as soon as it had been strangled, they helped to plunder it.

After the events of February 1848, Felicite, who had the keenest scent of all the members of the family, perceived that they were at last on the right track. So she began to flutter round her husband, goading him on to bestir himself. The first rumours of the Revolution that had overturned King Louis Philippe had terrified Pierre. When his wife, however, made him understand that they had little to lose and much to gain from a convulsion, he soon came round to her way of thinking.

"I don't know what you can do," Felicite repeatedly said, "but it seems to me that there's plenty to be done. Did not Monsieur de Carnavant say to us one day that he would be rich if ever Henri V. should return, and that this sovereign would magnificently recompense those who had worked for his restoration? Perhaps our fortune lies in that direction. We may yet be lucky."

The Marquis de Carnavant, the nobleman who, according to the scandalous talk of the town, had been on very familiar terms with Felicite's mother, used occasionally to visit the Rougons. Evil tongues asserted that Madame Rougon resembled him. He was a little, lean, active man, seventy-five years old at that time, and Felicite certainly appeared to be taking his features and manner as she grew older. It was said that the wreck of his fortune, which had already been greatly diminished by his father at the time of the Emigration, had been squandered on women. Indeed, he cheerfully acknowledged his poverty. Brought up by one of his relatives, the Count de Valqueyras, he lived the life of a parasite, eating at the count's table and occupying a small apartment just under his roof.

"Little one," he would often say to Felicite, as he patted her on the cheek, "if ever Henri V. gives me a fortune, I will make you my heiress!"

He still called Felicite "little one," even when she was fifty years old. It was of these friendly pats, of these repeated promises of an inheritance, that Madame Rougon was thinking when she endeavoured to drive her husband into politics. Monsieur de Carnavant had often bitterly lamented his inability to render her any assistance. No doubt he would treat her like a father if ever he should acquire some influence. Pierre, to whom his wife half explained the situation in veiled terms, declared his readiness to move in any direction indicated.

The marquis's peculiar position qualified him to act as an energetic agent of the reactionary movement at Plassans from the first days of the Republic. This bustling little man, who had everything to gain from the return of his legitimate sovereigns, worked assiduously for their cause. While the wealthy nobility of the Saint-Marc quarter were slumbering in mute despair, fearing, perhaps that they might compromise themselves and again be condemned to exile, he multiplied himself, as it were, spread the propaganda and rallied faithful ones together. He was a weapon whose hilt was held by an invisible hand. From that time forward he paid daily visits to the Rougons. He required a centre of operations. His relative, Monsieur de Valqueyras, had forbidden him to bring any of his associates into his house, so he had chosen Felicite's yellow drawing-room. Moreover, he very soon found Pierre a valuable assistant. He could not go himself and preach the cause of Legitimacy to the petty traders and workmen of the old quarter; they would have hooted him. Pierre, on the other hand, who had lived among these people, spoke their language and knew their wants, was able to catechise them in a friendly way. He thus became an indispensable man. In less than a fortnight the Rougons were more determined royalists than the king himself. The marquis, perceiving Pierre's zeal, shrewdly sheltered himself behind him. What was the use of making himself conspicuous, when a man with such broad shoulders was willing to bear on them the burden of all the follies of a party? He allowed Pierre to reign, puff himself out with importance and speak with authority, content to restrain or urge him on, according to the necessities of the cause. Thus, the old oil-dealer soon became a personage of mark. In the evening, when they were alone, Felicite used to say to him: "Go on, don't be frightened. We're on the right track. If this continues we shall be rich; we shall have a drawing-room like the tax-receiver's, and be able to entertain people."

A little party of Conservatives had already been formed at the Rougons' house, and meetings were held every evening in the yellow drawing-room to declaim against the Republic.

Among those who came were three or four retired merchants who trembled for their money, and clamoured with all their might for a wise and strong government. An old almond-dealer, a member of the Municipal Council, Monsieur Isidore Granoux, was the head of this group. His hare-lipped mouth was cloven a little way from the nose; his round eyes, his air of mingled satisfaction and astonishment, made him resemble a fat goose whose digestion is attended by wholesome terror of the cook. He spoke little, having no command of words; and he only pricked up his ears when anyone accused the Republicans of wishing to pillage the houses of the rich; whereupon he would colour up to such a degree as to make one fear an approaching apoplectic fit, and mutter low imprecations, in which the words "idlers," "scoundrels," "thieves," and "assassins" frequently recurred.

All those who frequented the yellow drawing-room were not, however, as heavy as this fat goose. A rich landowner, Monsieur Roudier, with a plump, insinuating face, used to discourse there for hours altogether, with all the passion of an Orleanist whose calculations had been upset by the fall of Louis Philippe. He had formerly been a hosier at Paris, and a purveyor to the Court, but had now retired to Plassans. He had made his son a magistrate, relying on the Orleanist party to promote him to the highest dignities. The revolution having ruined all his hopes, he had rushed wildly into the reaction. His fortune, his former commercial relations with the Tuileries, which he transformed into friendly intercourse, that prestige which is enjoyed by every man in the provinces who has made his money in Paris and deigns to come and spend it in a far away department, gave him great influence in the district; some persons listened to him as though he were an oracle.

However, the strongest intellect of the yellow drawing-room was certainly Commander Sicardot, Aristide's father-in-law. Of Herculean frame, with a brick-red face, scarred and planted with tufts of grey hair, he was one of the most glorious old dolts of the Grande Armee. During the February Revolution he had been exasperated with the street warfare and never wearied of referring to it, proclaiming with indignation that this kind of fighting was shameful: whereupon he recalled with pride the grand reign of Napoleon.

Another person seen at the Rougons' house was an individual with clammy hands and equivocal look, one Monsieur Vuillet, a bookseller, who supplied all the devout ladies of the town with holy images and rosaries. Vuillet dealt in both classical and religious works; he was a strict Catholic, a circumstance which insured him the custom of the numerous convents and parish churches. Further, by a stroke of genius he had added to his business the publication of a little bi-weekly journal, the "Gazette de Plassans," which was devoted exclusively to the interests of the clergy. This paper involved an annual loss of a thousand francs, but it made him the champion of the Church, and enabled him to dispose of his sacred unsaleable stock. Though he was virtually illiterate and could not even spell correctly, he himself wrote the articles of the "Gazette" with a humility and rancour that compensated for his lack of talent. The marquis, in entering on the campaign, had perceived immediately the advantage that might be derived from the co-operation of this insipid sacristan with the coarse, mercenary pen. After the February Revolution the articles in the "Gazette" contained fewer mistakes; the marquis revised them.

One can now imagine what a singular spectacle the Rougons' yellow drawing-room presented every evening. All opinions met there to bark at the Republic. Their hatred of that institution made them agree together. The marquis, who never missed a meeting, appeased by his presence the little squabbles which occasionally arose between the commander and the other adherents. These plebeians were inwardly flattered by the handshakes which he distributed on his arrival and departure. Roudier, however, like a free-thinker of the Rue Saint-Honore, asserted that the marquis had not a copper to bless himself with, and was disposed to make light of him. M. de Carnavant on his side preserved the amiable smile of a nobleman lowering himself to the level of these middle class people, without making any of those contemptuous grimaces which any other resident of the Saint-Marc quarter would have thought fit under such circumstances. The parasite life he had led had rendered him supple. He was the life and soul of the group, commanding in the name of unknown personages whom he never revealed. "They want this, they don't want that," he would say. The concealed divinities who thus watched over the destinies of Plassans from behind some cloud, without appearing to interfere directly in public matters, must have been certain priests, the great political agents of the country. When the marquis pronounced that mysterious word "they," which inspired the assembly with such marvellous respect, Vuillet confessed, with a gesture of pious devotion, that he knew them very well.

The happiest person in all this was Felicite. At last she had people coming to her drawing-room. It was true she felt a little ashamed of her old yellow velvet furniture. She consoled herself, however, thinking of the rich things she would purchase when the good cause should have triumphed. The Rougons had, in the end, regarded their royalism as very serious. Felicite went as far as to say, when Roudier was not present, that if they had not made a fortune in the oil business the fault lay in the monarchy of July. This was her mode of giving a political tinge to their poverty. She had a friendly word for everybody, even for Granoux, inventing each evening some new polite method of waking him up when it was time for departure.

The drawing-room, that little band of Conservatives belonging to all parties, and daily increasing in numbers, soon wielded powerful influence. Owing to the diversified characters of its members, and especially to the secret impulse which each one received from the clergy, it became the centre of the reactionary movement and spread its influence throughout Plassans. The policy of the marquis, who sank his own personality, transformed Rougon into the leader of the party. The meetings were held at his house, and this circumstance sufficed in the eyes of most people to make him the head of the group, and draw public attention to him. The whole work was attributed to him; he was believed to be the chief artisan of the movement which was gradually bringing over to the Conservative party those who had lately been enthusiastic Republicans. There are some situations which benefit only persons of bad repute. These lay the foundations of their fortune where men of better position and more influence would never dare to risk theirs. Roudier, Granoux, and the others, all men of means and respectability, certainly seemed a thousand times preferable to Pierre as the acting leaders of the Conservative party. But none of them would have consented to turn his drawing-room into a political centre. Their convictions did not go so far as to induce them to compromise themselves openly; in fact, they were only so many provincial babblers, who liked to inveigh against the Republic at a neighbour's house as long as the neighbour was willing to bear the responsibility of their chatter. The game was too risky. There was no one among the middle classes of Plassans who cared to play it except the Rougons, whose ungratified longings urged them on to extreme measures.

In the month of April, 1849, Eugene suddenly left Paris, and came to stay with his father for a fortnight. Nobody ever knew the purpose of this journey. It is probable that Eugene wanted to sound his native town, to ascertain whether he might successfully stand as a candidate for the legislature which was about to replace the Constituent Assembly. He was too shrewd to risk a failure. No doubt public opinion appeared to him little in his favour, for he abstained from any attempt. It was not known at Plassans what had become of him in Paris, what he was doing there. On his return to his native place, folks found him less heavy and somnolent than formerly. They surrounded him and endeavoured to make him speak out concerning the political situation. But he feigned ignorance and compelled them to talk. A little perspicacity would have detected that beneath his apparent unconcern there was great anxiety with regard to the political opinions of the town. However, he seemed to be sounding the ground more on behalf of a party than on his own account.

Although he had renounced all hope for himself, he remained at Plassans until the end of the month, assiduously attending the meetings in the yellow drawing-room. As soon as the bell rang, announcing the first visitor, he would take up his position in one of the window recesses as far as possible from the lamp. And he remained there the whole evening, resting his chin on the palm of his right hand, and listening religiously. The greatest absurdities did not disturb his equanimity. He nodded approval even to the wild grunts of Granoux. When anyone asked him his own opinion, he politely repeated that of the majority. Nothing seemed to tire his patience, neither the hollow dreams of the marquis, who spoke of the Bourbons as if 1815 were a recent date, nor the effusions of citizen Roudier, who grew quite pathetic when he recounted how many pairs of socks he had supplied to the citizen king, Louis Philippe. On the contrary, he seemed quite at his ease in this Tower of Babel. Sometimes, when these grotesque personages were storming against the Republic, his eyes would smile, while his lips retained their expression of gravity. His meditative manner of listening, and his invariable complacency, had earned him the sympathy of everyone. He was considered a nonentity, but a very decent fellow. Whenever an old oil or almond dealer failed to get a hearing, amidst the clamour, for some plan by which he could save France if he were only a master, he took himself off to Eugene and shouted his marvellous suggestions in his ear. And Eugene gently nodded his head, as though delighted with the grand projects he was listening to. Vuillet, alone, regarded him with a suspicious eye. This bookseller, half-sacristan and half-journalist, spoke less than the others, but was more observant. He had noticed that Eugene occasionally conversed at times in a corner with Commander Sicardot. So he determined to watch them, but never succeeded in overhearing a word. Eugene silenced the commander by a wink whenever Vuillet approached them. From that time, Sicardot never spoke of the Napoleons without a mysterious smile.

Two days before his return to Paris, Eugene met his brother Aristide, on the Cours Sauvaire, and the latter accompanied him for a short distance with the importunity of a man in search of advice. As a matter of fact, Aristide was in great perplexity. Ever since the proclamation of the Republic, he had manifested the most lively enthusiasm for the new government. His intelligence, sharpened by two years' stay at Paris, enabled him to see farther than the thick heads of Plassans. He divined the powerlessness of the Legitimists and Orleanists, without clearly distinguishing, however, what third thief would come and juggle the Republic away. At all hazard he had ranged himself on the side of the victors, and he had severed his connection with his father, whom he publicly denounced as an old fool, an old dolt whom the nobility had bamboozled.

"Yet my mother is an intelligent woman," he would add. "I should never have thought her capable of inducing her husband to join a party whose hopes are simply chimerical. They are taking the right course to end their lives in poverty. But then women know nothing about politics."

For his part he wanted to sell himself as dearly as possible. His great anxiety as to the direction in which the wind was blowing, so that he might invariably range himself on the side of that party, which, in the hour of triumph, would be able to reward him munificently. Unfortunately, he was groping in the dark. Shut up in his far away province, without a guide, without any precise information, he felt quite lost. While waiting for events to trace out a sure and certain path, he preserved the enthusiastic republican attitude which he had assumed from the very first day. Thanks to this demeanour, he remained at the Sub-Prefecture; and his salary was even raised. Burning, however, with the desire to play a prominent part, he persuaded a bookseller, one of Vuillet's rivals, to establish a democratic journal, to which he became one of the most energetic contributors. Under his impulse the "Independant" waged merciless warfare against the reactionaries. But the current gradually carried him further than he wished to go; he ended by writing inflammatory articles, which made him shudder when he re-perused them. It was remarked at Plassans that he directed a series of attacks against all whom his father was in the habit of receiving of an evening in his famous yellow drawing-room. The fact is that the wealth of Roudier and Granoux exasperated Aristide to such a degree as to make him forget all prudence. Urged on by his jealous, insatiate bitterness, he had already made the middle classes his irreconcilable enemy, when Eugene's arrival and demeanour at Plassans caused him great consternation. He confessed to himself that his brother was a skilful man. According to him, that big, drowsy fellow always slept with one eye open, like a cat lying in wait before a mouse-hole. And now here was Eugene spending entire evenings in the yellow drawing-room, and devoting himself to those same grotesque personages whom he, Aristide, had so mercilessly ridiculed. When he discovered from the gossip of the town that his brother shook hands with Granoux and the marquis, he asked himself, with considerable anxiety, what was the meaning of it? Could he himself have been deceived? Had the Legitimists or the Orleanists really any chance of success? The thought terrified him. He lost his equilibrium, and, as frequently happens, he fell upon the Conservatives with increased rancour, as if to avenge his own blindness.

On the evening prior to the day when he stopped Eugene on the Cours Sauvaire, he had published, in the "Independant," a terrible article on the intrigues of the clergy, in response to a short paragraph from Vuillet, who had accused the Republicans of desiring to demolish the churches. Vuillet was Aristide's bugbear. Never a week passed but these two journalists exchanged the greatest insults. In the provinces, where a periphrastic style is still cultivated, polemics are clothed in high-sounding phrases. Aristide called his adversary "brother Judas," or "slave of Saint-Anthony." Vuillet gallantly retorted by terming the Republican "a monster glutted with blood whose ignoble purveyor was the guillotine."

In order to sound his brother, Aristide, who did not dare to appear openly uneasy, contented himself with asking: "Did you read my article yesterday? What do you think of it?"

Eugene lightly shrugged his shoulders. "You're a simpleton, brother," was his sole reply.

"Then you think Vuillet right?" cried the journalist, turning pale; "you believe in Vuillet's triumph?"

"I!—Vuillet——"

He was certainly about to add, "Vuillet is as big a fool as you are." But, observing his brother's distorted face anxiously extended towards him, he experienced sudden mistrust. "Vuillet has his good points," he calmly replied.

On parting from his brother, Aristide felt more perplexed than before. Eugene must certainly have been making game of him, for Vuillet was really the most abominable person imaginable. However, he determined to be prudent and not tie himself down any more; for he wished to have his hands free should he ever be called upon to help any party in strangling the Republic.

Eugene, on the morning of his departure, an hour before getting into the diligence, took his father into the bedroom and had a long conversation with him. Felicite, who remained in the drawing-room, vainly tried to catch what they were saying. They spoke in whispers, as if they feared lest a single word should be heard outside. When at last they quitted the bedroom they seemed in high spirits. After kissing his father and mother, Eugene, who usually spoke in a drawling tone, exclaimed with vivacity: "You have understood me, father? There lies our fortune. We must work with all our energy in that direction. Trust in me."

"I'll follow your instructions faithfully," Rougon replied. "Only don't forget what I asked you as the price of my cooperation."

"If we succeed your demands shall be satisfied, I give you my word. Moreover, I will write to you and guide you according to the direction which events may take. Mind, no panic or excitement. You must obey me implicitly."

"What have you been plotting there?" Felicite asked inquisitively.

"My dear mother," Eugene replied with a smile, "you have had too little faith in me thitherto to induce me to confide in you my hopes, particularly as at present they are only based on probabilities. To be able to understand me you would require faith. However, father will inform you when the right time comes."

Then, as Felicite assumed the demeanour of a woman who feels somewhat piqued, he added in her ear, as he kissed her once more: "I take after you, although you disowned me. Too much intelligence would be dangerous at the present moment. When the crisis comes, it is you who will have to manage the business."

He then quitted the room, but, suddenly re-opening the door, exclaimed in an imperious tone: "Above all things, do not trust Aristide; he is a mar-all, who would spoil everything. I have studied him sufficiently to feel certain that he will always fall on his feet. Don't have any pity; if we make a fortune, he'll know well enough how to rob us of his share."

When Eugene had gone, Felicite endeavoured to ferret out the secret that was being hidden from her. She knew her husband too well to interrogate him openly. He would have angrily replied that it was no business of hers. In spite, however, of the clever tactics she pursued, she learnt absolutely nothing. Eugene had chosen a good confidant for those troubled times, when the greatest discretion was necessary. Pierre, flattered by his son's confidence, exaggerated that passive ponderosity which made him so impenetrable. When Felicite saw she would not learn anything from him, she ceased to flutter round him. On one point only did she remain inquisitive, but in this respect her curiosity was intense. The two men had mentioned a price stipulated by Pierre himself. What could that price be? This after all was the sole point of interest for Felicite, who did not care a rap for political matters. She knew that her husband must have sold himself dearly, but she was burning to know the nature of the bargain. One evening, when they had gone to bed, finding Pierre in a good humour, she brought the conversation round to the discomforts of their poverty.

"It's quite time to put an end to this," she said. "We have been ruining ourselves in oil and fuel since those gentlemen have been coming here. And who will pay the reckoning? Nobody perhaps."

Her husband fell into the trap, and smiled with complacent superiority. "Patience," said he. And with an air of shrewdness he looked into his wife's eyes and added: "Would you be glad to be the wife of a receiver of taxes?"

Felicite's face flushed with a joyous glow. She sat up in bed and clapped her old withered little hands like a child.

"Really?" she stammered. "At Plassans?"

Pierre, without replying, gave a long affirmative nod. He enjoyed his consort's astonishment and emotion.

"But," she at last resumed, half sitting, "you would have to deposit an enormous sum as security. I have heard that our neighbour, Monsieur Peirotte, had to deposit eighty thousand francs with the Treasury."

"Eh!" said the retired oil-dealer, "that's nothing to do with me; Eugene will see to that. He will get the money advanced by a banker in Paris. You see, I selected an appointment bringing in a good income. Eugene at first made a wry face, saying one must be rich to occupy such posts, to which influential men were usually nominated. I persisted, however, and he yielded. To be a receiver of taxes one need not know either Greek or Latin. I shall have a representative, like Monsieur Peirotte, and he will do all the work."

Felicite listened to him with rapture.

"I guessed, however," he continued, "what it was that worried our dear son. We're not much liked here. People know that we have no means, and will make themselves obnoxious. But all sorts of things occur in a time of crisis. Eugene wished to get me an appointment in another town. However, I objected; I want to remain at Plassans."

"Yes, yes, we must remain here," the old woman quickly replied. "We have suffered here, and here we must triumph. Ah! I'll crush them all, those fine ladies on the Mail, who scornfully eye my woollen dresses! I didn't think of the appointment of receiver of taxes at all; I thought you wanted to become mayor."

"Mayor! Nonsense. That appointment is honorary. Eugene also mentioned the mayoralty to me. I replied: 'I'll accept, if you give me an income of fifteen thousand francs.'"

This conversation, in which high figures flew about like rockets, quite excited Felicite. She felt delightfully buoyant. But at last she put on a devout air, and gravely said: "Come, let us reckon it out. How much will you earn?"

"Well," said Pierre, "the fixed salary, I believe, is three thousand francs."

"Three thousand," Felicite counted.

"Then there is so much per cent on the receipts, which at Plassans, may produce the sum of twelve thousand francs."

"That makes fifteen thousand."

"Yes, about fifteen thousand francs. That's what Peirotte earns. That's not all. Peirotte does a little banking business on his own account. It's allowed. Perhaps I shall be disposed to make a venture when I feel luck on my side."

"Well, let us say twenty thousand. Twenty thousand francs a year!" repeated Felicite, overwhelmed by the amount.

"We shall have to repay the advances," Pierre observed.

"That doesn't matter," Felicite replied, "we shall be richer than many of those gentlemen. Are the marquis and the others going to share the cake with you?"

"No, no; it will be all for us," he replied.

Then, as she continued to importune him with her questions, Pierre frowned, thinking that she wanted to wrest his secret from him. "We've talked enough," he said, abruptly. "It's late, let us go to sleep. It will bring us bad luck to count our chickens beforehand. I haven't got the place yet. Above all things, be prudent."

When the lamp was extinguished, Felicite could not sleep. With her eyes closed she built the most marvellous castles in the air. Those twenty thousand francs a year danced a diabolical dance before her in the darkness. She occupied splendid apartments in the new town, enjoyed the same luxuries as Monsieur Peirotte, gave parties, and bespattered the whole place with her wealth. That, however, which tickled her vanity most was the high position that her husband would then occupy. He would pay their state dividends to Granoux, Roudier, and all those people who now came to her house as they might come to a cafe, to swagger and learn the latest news. She had noticed the free-and-easy manner in which these people entered her drawing-room, and it had made her take a dislike to them. Even the marquis, with his ironical politeness, was beginning to displease her. To triumph alone, therefore, to keep the cake for themselves, as she expressed it, was a revenge which she fondly cherished. Later on, when all those ill-bred persons presented themselves, hats off, before Monsieur Rougon the receiver of taxes, she would crush them in her turn. She was busy with these thoughts all night; and on the morrow, as she opened the shutters, she instinctively cast her first glance across the street towards Monsieur Peirotte's house, and smiled as she contemplated the broad damask curtains hanging in the windows.

Felicite's hopes, in becoming modified, had grown yet more intense. Like all women, she did not object to a tinge of mystery. The secret object that her husband was pursuing excited her far more than the Legitimist intrigues of Monsieur de Carnavant had ever done. She abandoned, without much regret, the calculations she had based on the marquis's success now that her husband declared he would be able to make large profits by other means. She displayed, moreover, remarkable prudence and discretion.

In reality, she was still tortured by anxious curiosity; she studied Pierre's slightest actions, endeavouring to discover their meaning. What if by chance he were following the wrong track? What if Eugene were dragging them in his train into some break-neck pit, whence they would emerge yet more hungry and impoverished? However, faith was dawning on her. Eugene had commanded with such an air of authority that she ultimately came to believe in him. In this case again some unknown power was at work. Pierre would speak mysteriously of the high personages whom their eldest son visited in Paris. For her part she did not know what he could have to do with them, but on the other hand she was unable to close her eyes to Aristide's ill-advised acts at Plassans. The visitors to her drawing-room did not scruple to denounce the democratic journalist with extreme severity. Granoux muttered that he was a brigand, and Roudier would three or four times a week repeat to Felicite: "Your son is writing some fine articles. Only yesterday he attacked our friend Vuillet with revolting scurrility."

The whole room joined in the chorus, and Commander Sicardot spoke of boxing his son-in-law's ears, while Pierre flatly disowned him. The poor mother hung her head, restraining her tears. For an instant she felt an inclination to burst forth, to tell Roudier that her dear child, in spite of his faults, was worth more than he and all the others put together. But she was tied down, and did not wish to compromise the position they had so laboriously attained. Seeing the whole town so bitter against Aristide, she despaired of his future, thinking he was hopelessly ruining himself. On two occasions she spoke to him in secret, imploring him to return to them, and not to irritate the yellow drawing-room any further. Aristide replied that she did not understand such matters; that she was the one who had committed a great blunder in placing her husband at the service of the marquis. So she had to abandon her son to his own courses, resolving, however that if Eugene succeeded she would compel him to share the spoils with the poor fellow who was her favourite child.

After the departure of his eldest son, Pierre Rougon pursued his reactionary intrigues. Nothing seemed to have changed in the opinions of the famous yellow drawing-room. Every evening the same men came to join in the same propaganda in favour of the establishment of a monarchy, while the master of the house approved and aided them with as much zeal as in the past. Eugene had left Plassans on May 1. A few days later, the yellow drawing-room was in raptures. The gossips were discussing the letter of the President of the Republic to General Oudinot, in which the siege of Rome had been decided upon. This letter was regarded as a brilliant victory, due to the firm demeanour of the reactionary party. Since 1848 the Chambers had been discussing the Roman question; but it had been reserved for a Bonaparte to stifle a rising Republic by an act of intervention which France, if free, would never have countenanced. The marquis declared, however, that one could not better promote the cause of legitimacy, and Vuillet wrote a superb article on the matter. The enthusiasm became unbounded when, a month later, Commander Sicardot entered the Rougons' house one evening and announced to the company that the French army was fighting under the walls of Rome. Then, while everybody was raising exclamations at this news, he went up to Pierre, and shook hands with him in a significant manner. And when he had taken a seat, he began to sound the praises of the President of the Republic, who, said he, was the only person able to save France from anarchy.

"Let him save it, then, as quickly as possible," interrupted the marquis, "and let him then understand his duty by restoring it to its legitimate masters."

Pierre seemed to approve this fine retort, and having thus given proof of his ardent royalism, he ventured to remark that Prince Louis Bonaparte had his entire sympathy in the matter. He thereupon exchanged a few short sentences with the commander, commending the excellent intentions of the President, which sentences one might have thought prepared and learnt beforehand. Bonapartism now, for the first time, made its entry into the yellow drawing-room. It is true that since the election of December 10 the Prince had been treated there with a certain amount of consideration. He was preferred a thousand times to Cavaignac, and the whole reactionary party had voted for him. But they regarded him rather as an accomplice than a friend; and, as such, they distrusted him, and even began to accuse him of a desire to keep for himself the chestnuts which he had pulled out of the fire. On that particular evening, however, owing to the fighting at Rome, they listened with favour to the praises of Pierre and the commander.

The group led by Granoux and Roudier already demanded that the President should order all republican rascals to be shot; while the marquis, leaning against the mantelpiece, gazed meditatively at a faded rose on the carpet. When he at last lifted his head, Pierre, who had furtively watched his countenance as if to see the effect of his words, suddenly ceased speaking. However, Monsieur de Carnavant merely smiled and glanced at Felicite with a knowing look. This rapid by-play was not observed by the other people. Vuillet alone remarked in a sharp tone:

"I would rather see your Bonaparte at London than at Paris. Our affairs would get along better then."

At this the old oil-dealer turned slightly pale, fearing that he had gone too far. "I'm not anxious to retain 'my' Bonaparte," he said, with some firmness; "you know where I would send him to if I were the master. I simply assert that the expedition to Rome was a good stroke."

Felicite had followed this scene with inquisitive astonishment. However, she did not speak of it to her husband, which proved that she adopted it as the basis of secret study. The marquis's smile, the significance of which escaped her, set her thinking.

From that day forward, Rougon, at distant intervals, whenever the occasion offered, slipped in a good word for the President of the Republic. On such evenings, Commander Sicardot acted the part of a willing accomplice. At the same time, Clerical opinions still reigned supreme in the yellow drawing-room. It was more particularly in the following year that this group of reactionaries gained decisive influence in the town, thanks to the retrograde movement which was going on at Paris. All those anti-Liberal laws which the country called "the Roman expedition at home" definitively secured the triumph of the Rougon faction. The last enthusiastic bourgeois saw the Republic tottering, and hastened to rally round the Conservatives. Thus the Rougons' hour had arrived; the new town almost gave them an ovation on the day when the tree of Liberty, planted on the square before the Sub-Prefecture, was sawed down. This tree, a young poplar brought from the banks of the Viorne, had gradually withered, much to the despair of the republican working-men, who would come every Sunday to observe the progress of the decay without being able to comprehend the cause of it. A hatter's apprentice at last asserted that he had seen a woman leave Rougon's house and pour a pail of poisoned water at the foot of the tree. It thenceforward became a matter of history that Felicite herself got up every night to sprinkle the poplar with vitriol. When the tree was dead the Municipal Council declared that the dignity of the Republic required its removal. For this, as they feared the displeasure of the working classes, they selected an advanced hour of the night. However, the conservative householders of the new town got wind of the little ceremony, and all came down to the square before the Sub-Prefecture in order to see how the tree of Liberty would fall. The frequenters of the yellow drawing-room stationed themselves at the windows there. When the poplar cracked and fell with a thud in the darkness, as tragically rigid as some mortally stricken hero, Felicite felt bound to wave a white handkerchief. This induced the crowd to applaud, and many responded to the salute by waving their handkerchiefs likewise. A group of people even came under the window shouting: "We'll bury it, we'll bury it."

They meant the Republic, no doubt. Such was Felicite's emotion, that she almost had a nervous attack. It was a fine evening for the yellow drawing-room.

However, the marquis still looked at Felicite with the same mysterious smile. This little old man was far too shrewd to be ignorant of whither France was tending. He was among the first to scent the coming of the Empire. When the Legislative Assembly, later on, exhausted its energies in useless squabbling, when the Orleanists and the Legitimists tacitly accepted the idea of the Coup d'Etat, he said to himself that the game was definitely lost. In fact, he was the only one who saw things clearly. Vuillet certainly felt that the cause of Henry V., which his paper defended, was becoming detestable; but it mattered little to him; he was content to be the obedient creature of the clergy; his entire policy was framed so as to enable him to dispose of as many rosaries and sacred images as possible. As for Roudier and Granoux, they lived in a state of blind scare; it was not certain whether they really had any opinions; all that they desired was to eat and sleep in peace; their political aspirations went no further. The marquis, though he had bidden farewell to his hopes, continued to come to the Rougons' as regularly as ever. He enjoyed himself there. The clash of rival ambitions among the middle classes, and the display of their follies, had become an extremely amusing spectacle to him. He shuddered at the thought of again shutting himself in the little room which he owed to the beneficence of the Count de Valqueyras. With a kind of malicious delight, he kept to himself the conviction that the Bourbons' hour had not yet arrived. He feigned blindness, working as hitherto for the triumph of Legitimacy, and still remaining at the orders of the clergy and nobility, though from the very first day he had penetrated Pierre's new course of action, and believed that Felicite was his accomplice.

One evening, being the first to arrive, he found the old lady alone in the drawing-room. "Well! little one," he asked, with his smiling familiarity, "are your affairs going on all right? Why the deuce do you make such mysteries with me?"

"I'm not hiding anything from you," Felicite replied, somewhat perplexed.

"Come, do you think you can deceive an old fox like me, eh? My dear child, treat me as a friend. I'm quite ready to help you secretly. Come now, be frank!"

A bright idea struck Felicite. She had nothing to tell; but perhaps she might find out something if she kept quiet.

"Why do you smile?" Monsieur de Carnavant resumed. "That's the beginning of a confession, you know. I suspected that you must be behind your husband. Pierre is too stupid to invent the pretty treason you are hatching. I sincerely hope the Bonapartists will give you what I should have asked for you from the Bourbons."

This single sentence confirmed the suspicions which the old woman had entertained for some time past.

"Prince Louis has every chance, hasn't he?" she eagerly inquired.

"Will you betray me if I tell you that I believe so?" the marquis laughingly replied. "I've donned my mourning over it, little one. I'm simply a poor old man, worn out and only fit to be laid on the shelf. It was for you, however, that I was working. Since you have been able to find the right track without me, I shall feel some consolation in seeing you triumph amidst my own defeat. Above all things, don't make any more mysteries. Come to me if you are ever in trouble."

And he added, with the sceptical smile of a nobleman who has lost caste: "Pshaw! I also can go in for a little treachery!"

At this moment the clan of retired oil and almond dealers arrived.

"Ah! the dear reactionaries!" Monsieur de Carnavant continued in an undertone. "You see, little one, the great art of politics consists in having a pair of good eyes when other people are blind. You hold all the best cards in the pack."

On the following day, Felicite, incited by this conversation, desired to make sure on the matter. They were then in the first days of the year 1851. For more than eighteen months, Rougon had been in the habit of receiving a letter from his son Eugene regularly every fortnight. He would shut himself in the bedroom to read these letters, which he then hid at the bottom of an old secretaire, the key of which he carefully kept in his waistcoat pocket. Whenever his wife questioned him about their son he would simply answer: "Eugene writes that he is going on all right." Felicite had long since thought of laying hands on her son's letters. So early on the morning after her chat with the marquis, while Pierre was still asleep, she got up on tiptoes, took the key of the secretaire from her husband's waistcoat and substituted in its place that of the chest of drawers, which was of the same size. Then, as soon as her husband had gone out, she shut herself in the room in her turn, emptied the drawer, and read all the letters with feverish curiosity.

Monsieur de Carnavant had not been mistaken, and her own suspicions were confirmed. There were about forty letters, which enabled her to follow the course of that great Bonapartist movement which was to terminate in the second Empire. The letters constituted a sort of concise journal, narrating events as they occurred, and drawing hopes and suggestions from each of them. Eugene was full of faith. He described Prince Louis Bonaparte to his father as the predestined necessary man who alone could unravel the situation. He had believed in him prior even to his return to France, at a time when Bonapartism was treated as a ridiculous chimera. Felicite understood that her son had been a very active secret agent since 1848. Although he did not clearly explain his position in Paris, it was evident that he was working for the Empire, under the orders of personages whose names he mentioned with a sort of familiarity. Each of his letters gave information as to the progress of the cause, to which an early denouement was foreshadowed; and usually concluded by pointing out the line of action that Pierre should pursue at Plassans. Felicite could now comprehend certain words and acts of her husband, whose significance had previously escaped her; Pierre was obeying his son, and blindly following his recommendations.

When the old woman had finished reading, she was convinced. Eugene's entire thoughts were clearly revealed to her. He reckoned upon making his political fortune in the squabble, and repaying his parents the debt he owed them for his education, by throwing them a scrap of the prey as soon as the quarry was secured. However small the assistance his father might render to him and to the cause, it would not be difficult to get him appointed receiver of taxes. Nothing would be refused to one who like Eugene had steeped his hands in the most secret machinations. His letters were simply a kind attention on his part, a device to prevent the Rougons from committing any act of imprudence, for which Felicite felt deeply grateful. She read certain passages of the letters twice over, notably those in which Eugene spoke, in vague terms, of "a final catastrophe." This catastrophe, the nature or bearings of which she could not well conceive became a sort of end of the world for her. God would range the chosen ones on His right hand and the damned on His left, and she placed herself among the former.

When she succeeded in replacing the key in her husband's waistcoat pocket on the following night, she made up her mind to employ the same expedient for reading every fresh letter that arrived. She resolved, likewise, to profess complete ignorance. This plan was an excellent one. Henceforward, she gave her husband the more assistance as she appeared to render it unconsciously. When Pierre thought he was working alone it was she who brought the conversation round to the desired topic, recruiting partisans for the decisive moment. She felt hurt at Eugene's distrust of her. She wanted to be able to say to him, after the triumph: "I knew all, and so far from spoiling anything, I have secured the victory." Never did an accomplice make less noise or work harder. The marquis, whom she had taken into her confidence, was astounded at it.

The fate of her dear Aristide, however, continued to make her uneasy. Now that she shared the faith of her eldest son, the rabid articles of the "Independant" alarmed her all the more. She longed to convert the unfortunate republican to Napoleonist ideas; but she did not know how to accomplish this in a discreet manner. She recalled the emphasis with which Eugene had told them to be on their guard against Aristide. At last she submitted the matter to Monsieur de Carnavant, who was entirely of the same opinion.

"Little one," he said to her, "in politics one must know how to look after one's self. If you were to convert your son, and the 'Independant' were to start writing in defence of Bonapartism, it would deal the party a rude blow. The 'Independant' has already been condemned, its title alone suffices to enrage the middle classes of Plassans. Let dear Aristide flounder about; this only moulds young people. He does not appear to me to be cut out for carrying on the role of a martyr for any length of time."

However, in her eagerness to point out the right way to her family, now that she believed herself in possession of the truth, Felicite even sought to convert her son Pascal. The doctor, with the egotism of a scientist immersed in his researches, gave little heed to politics. Empires might fall while he was making an experiment, yet he would not have deigned to turn his head. He at last yielded, however, to certain importunities of his mother, who accused him more than ever of living like an unsociable churl.

"If you were to go into society," she said to him, "you would get some well-to-do patients. Come, at least, and spend some evenings in our drawing-room. You will make the acquaintance of Messieurs Roudier, Granoux, and Sicardot, all gentlemen in good circumstances, who will pay you four or five francs a visit. The poor people will never enrich you."

The idea of succeeding in life, of seeing all her family attain to fortune, had become a form of monomania with Felicite. Pascal, in order to be agreeable to her, came and spent a few evenings in the yellow drawing-room. He was much less bored there than he had apprehended. At first he was rather stupefied at the degree of imbecility to which sane men can sink. The old oil and almond dealers, the marquis and the commander even, appeared to him so many curious animals, which he had not hitherto had an opportunity of studying. He looked with a naturalist's interest at their grimacing faces, in which he discerned traces of their occupations and appetites; he listened also to their inane chatter, just as he might have tried to catch the meaning of a cat's mew or a dog's bark. At this period he was occupied with comparative natural history, applying to the human race the observations which he had made upon animals with regard to the working of heredity. While he was in the yellow drawing-room, therefore, he amused himself with the belief that he had fallen in with a menagerie. He established comparisons between the grotesque creatures he found there and certain animals of his acquaintance. The marquis, with his leanness and small crafty-looking head, reminded him exactly of a long green grasshopper. Vuillet impressed him as a pale, slimy toad. He was more considerate for Roudier, a fat sheep, and for the commander, an old toothless mastiff. But the prodigious Granoux was a perpetual cause of astonishment to him. He spent a whole evening measuring this imbecile's facial angle. When he heard him mutter indistinct imprecations against those blood-suckers the Republicans, he always expected to hear him moan like a calf; and he could never see him rise from his chair without imagining that he was about to leave the room on all fours.

"Talk to them," his mother used to say in an undertone; "try and make a practice out of these gentlemen."

"I am not a veterinary surgeon," he at last replied, exasperated.

One evening Felicite took him into a corner and tired to catechise him. She was glad to see him come to her house rather assiduously. She thought him reconciled to Society, not suspecting for a moment the singular amusement that he derived from ridiculing these rich people. She cherished the secret project of making him the fashionable doctor of Plassans. It would be sufficient if men like Granoux and Roudier consented to give him a start. She wished, above all, to impart to him the political views of the family, considering that a doctor had everything to gain by constituting himself a warm partisan of the regime which was to succeed the Republic.

"My dear boy," she said to him, "as you have now become reasonable, you must give some thought to the future. You are accused of being a Republican, because you are foolish enough to attend all the beggars of the town without making any charge. Be frank, what are your real opinions?"

Pascal looked at his mother with naïve astonishment, then with a smile replied: "My real opinions? I don't quite know—I am accused of being a Republican, did you say? Very well! I don't feel at all offended. I am undoubtedly a Republican, if you understand by that word a man who wishes the welfare of everybody."

"But you will never attain to any position," Felicite quickly interrupted. "You will be crushed. Look at your brothers, they are trying to make their way."

Pascal then comprehended that he was not called upon to defend his philosophic egotism. His mother simply accused him of not speculating on the political situation. He began to laugh somewhat sadly, and then turned the conversation into another channel. Felicite could never induce him to consider the chances of the various parties, nor to enlist in that one of them which seemed likely to carry the day. However, he still occasionally came to spend an evening in the yellow drawing-room. Granoux interested him like an antediluvian animal.

In the meantime, events were moving. The year 1851 was a year of anxiety and apprehension for the politicians of Plassans, and the cause which the Rougons served derived advantage from this circumstance. The most contradictory news arrived from Paris; sometimes the Republicans were in the ascendant, sometimes the Conservative party was crushing the Republic. The echoes of the squabbles which were rending the Legislative Assembly reached the depths of the provinces, now in an exaggerated, now in an attenuated form, varying so greatly as to obscure the vision of the most clear-sighted. The only general feeling was that a denouement was approaching. The prevailing ignorance as to the nature of this denouement kept timid middle class people in a terrible state of anxiety. Everybody wished to see the end. They were sick of uncertainty, and would have flung themselves into the arms of the Grand Turk, if he would have deigned to save France from anarchy.

The marquis's smile became more acute. Of an evening, in the yellow drawing-room, when Granoux's growl was rendered indistinct by fright, he would draw near to Felicite and whisper in her ear: "Come, little one, the fruit is ripe—but you must make yourself useful."

Felicite, who continued to read Eugene's letters, and knew that a decisive crisis might any day occur, had already often felt the necessity of making herself useful, and reflected as to the manner in which the Rougons should employ themselves. At last she consulted the marquis.

"It all depends upon circumstances," the little old man replied. "If the department remains quiet, if no insurrection occurs to terrify Plassans, it will be difficult for you to make yourselves conspicuous and render any services to the new government. I advise you, in that case, to remain at home, and peacefully await the bounties of your son Eugene. But if the people rise, and our brave bourgeois think themselves in danger, there will be a fine part to play. Your husband is somewhat heavy—"

"Oh!" said Felicite, "I'll undertake to make him supple. Do you think the department will revolt?"

"To my mind it's a certainty. Plassans, perhaps, will not make a stir; the reaction has secured too firm a hold here for that. But the neighbouring towns, especially the small ones and the villages, have long been worked by certain secret societies, and belong to the advanced Republican party. If a Coup d'Etat should burst forth, the tocsin will be heard throughout the entire country, from the forests of the Seille to the plateau of Sainte-Roure."

Felicite reflected. "You think, then," she resumed, "that an insurrection is necessary to ensure our fortune!"

"That's my opinion," replied Monsieur de Carnavant. And he added, with a slightly ironical smile: "A new dynasty is never founded excepting upon an affray. Blood is good manure. It will be a fine thing for the Rougons to date from a massacre, like certain illustrious families."

These words, accompanied by a sneer, sent a cold chill through Felicite's bones. But she was a strong-minded woman, and the sight of Monsieur Peirotte's beautiful curtains, which she religiously viewed every morning, sustained her courage. Whenever she felt herself giving way, she planted herself at the window and contemplated the tax-receiver's house. For her it was the Tuileries. She had determined upon the most extreme measures in order to secure an entree into the new town, that promised land, on the threshold of which she had stood with burning longing for so many years.

The conversation which she had held with the marquis had at last clearly revealed the situation to her. A few days afterwards, she succeeded in reading one of Eugene's letters, in which he, who was working for the Coup d'Etat, seemed also to rely upon an insurrection as the means of endowing his father with some importance. Eugene knew his department well. All his suggestions had been framed with the object of placing as much influence as possible in the hands of the yellow drawing-room reactionaries, so that the Rougons might be able to hold the town at the critical moment. In accordance with his desires, the yellow drawing-room was master of Plassans in November, 1851. Roudier represented the rich citizens there, and his attitude would certainly decide that of the entire new town. Granoux was still more valuable; he had the Municipal Council behind him: he was its most powerful member, a fact which will give some idea of its other members. Finally, through Commander Sicardot, whom the marquis had succeeded in getting appointed as chief of the National Guard, the yellow drawing-room had the armed forces at their disposal.

The Rougons, those poor disreputable devils, had thus succeeded in rallying round themselves the instruments of their own fortune. Everyone, from cowardice or stupidity, would have to obey them and work in the dark for their aggrandisement. They simply had to fear those other influences which might be working with the same object as themselves, and might partially rob them of the merit of victory. That was their great fear, for they wanted to reserve to themselves the role of deliverers. They knew beforehand that they would be aided rather than hindered by the clergy and the nobility. But if the sub-prefect, the mayor, and the other functionaries were to take a step in advance and at once stifle the insurrection they would find themselves thrown into the shade, and even arrested in their exploits; they would have neither time nor means to make themselves useful. What they longed for was complete abstention, general panic among the functionaries. If only all regular administration should disappear, and they could dispose of the destinies of Plassans for a single day, their fortune would be firmly established.

Happily for them, there was not a man in the government service whose convictions were so firm or whose circumstances were so needy as to make him disposed to risk the game. The sub-prefect was a man of liberal spirit whom the executive had forgetfully left at Plassans, owing, no doubt, to the good repute of the town. Of timid character and incapable of exceeding his authority, he would no doubt be greatly embarrassed in the presence of an insurrection. The Rougons, who knew that he was in favour of the democratic cause, and who consequently never dreaded his zeal, were simply curious to know what attitude he would assume. As for the municipality, this did not cause them much apprehension. The mayor, Monsieur Garconnet, was a Legitimist whose nomination had been procured by the influence of the Saint-Marc quarter in 1849. He detested the Republicans and treated them with undisguised disdain; but he was too closely united by bonds of friendship with certain members of the church to lend any active hand in a Bonapartist Coup d'Etat. The other functionaries were in exactly the same position. The justices of the peace, the post-master, the tax-collector, as well as Monsieur Peirotte, the chief receiver of taxes, were all indebted for their posts to the Clerical reaction, and could not accept the Empire with any great enthusiasm. The Rougons, though they did not quite see how they might get rid of these people and clear the way for themselves, nevertheless indulged in sanguine hopes on finding there was little likelihood of anybody disputing their role as deliverers.

The denouement was drawing near. In the last few days of November, as the rumour of a Coup d'Etat was circulating, the prince-president was accused of seeking the position of emperor.

"Eh! we'll call him whatever he likes," Granoux exclaimed, "provided he has those Republican rascals shot!"

This exclamation from Granoux, who was believed to be asleep, caused great commotion. The marquis pretended not to have heard it; but all the bourgeois nodded approval. Roudier, who, being rich, did not fear to applaud the sentiment aloud, went so far as to declare, while glancing askance at Monsieur de Carnavant, that the position was no longer tenable, and that France must be chastised as soon as possible, never mind by what hand.

The marquis still maintained a silence which was interpreted as acquiescence. And thereupon the Conservative clan, abandoning the cause of Legitimacy, ventured to offer up prayers in favour of the Empire.

"My friends," said Commander Sicardot, rising from his seat, "only a Napoleon can now protect threatened life and property. Have no fear, I've taken the necessary precautions to preserve order at Plassans."

As a matter of fact the commander, in concert with Rougon, had concealed, in a kind of cart-house near the ramparts, both a supply of cartridges and a considerable number of muskets; he had also taken steps to secure the co-operation of the National Guard, on which he believed he could rely. His words produced a very favourable impression. On separating for the evening, the peaceful citizens of the yellow drawing-room spoke of massacring the "Reds" if they should dare to stir.

On December 1, Pierre Rougon received a letter from Eugene which he went to read in his bedroom, in accordance with his prudent habit. Felicite observed, however, that he was very agitated when he came out again. She fluttered round the secretaire all day. When night came, she could restrain her impatience no longer. Her husband had scarcely fallen asleep, when she quietly got up, took the key of the secretaire from the waistcoat pocket, and gained possession of the letter with as little noise as possible. Eugene, in ten lines, warned his father that the crisis was at hand, and advised him to acquaint his mother with the situation of affairs. The hour for informing her had arrived; he might stand in need of her advice.

Felicite awaited, on the morrow, a disclosure which did not come. She did not dare to confess her curiosity; but continued to feign ignorance, though enraged at the foolish distrust of her husband, who, doubtless, considered her a gossip, and weak like other women. Pierre, with that marital pride which inspires a man with the belief in his own superiority at home, had ended by attributing all their past ill-luck to his wife. From the time that he fancied he had been conducting matters alone everything seemed to him to have gone as he desired. He had decided, therefore, to dispense altogether with his consort's counsels, and to confide nothing to her, in spite of his son's recommendations.

Felicite was piqued to such a degree that she would have upset the whole affair had she not desired the triumph as ardently as Pierre. So she continued to work energetically for victory, while endeavouring to take her revenge.

"Ah! if he could only have some great fright," thought she; "if he would only commit some act of imprudence! Then I should see him come to me and humbly ask for advice; it would be my turn to lay down the law."

She felt somewhat uneasy at the imperious attitude Pierre would certainly assume if he were to triumph without her aid. On marrying this peasant's son, in preference to some notary's clerk, she had intended to make use of him as a strongly made puppet, whose strings she would pull in her own way; and now, at the decisive moment, the puppet, in his blind stupidity, wanted to work alone! All the cunning, all the feverish activity within the old woman protested against this. She knew Pierre was quite capable of some brutal resolve such as that which he had taken when he compelled his mother to sign the receipt for fifty thousand francs; the tool was indeed a useful and unscrupulous one; but she felt the necessity for guiding it, especially under present circumstances, when considerable suppleness was requisite.

The official news of the Coup d'Etat did not reach Plassans until the afternoon of December 3—a Thursday. Already, at seven o'clock in the evening, there was a full meeting in the yellow drawing-room. Although the crisis had been eagerly desired, vague uneasiness appeared on the faces of the majority. They discussed events amid endless chatter. Pierre, who like the others was slightly pale, thought it right, as an extreme measure of prudence, to excuse Prince Louis's decisive act to the Legitimists and Orleanists who were present.

"There is talk of an appeal to the people," he said; "the nation will then be free to choose whatever government it likes. The president is a man to retire before our legitimate masters."

The marquis, who had retained his aristocratic coolness, was the only one who greeted these words with a smile. The others, in the enthusiasm of the moment, concerned themselves very little about what might follow. All their opinions foundered. Roudier, forgetting the esteem which as a former shopkeeper he had entertained for the Orleanists, stopped Pierre rather abruptly. And everybody exclaimed: "Don't argue the matter. Let us think of preserving order."

These good people were terribly afraid of the Republicans. There had, however been very little commotion in the town on the announcement of the events in Paris. People had collected in front of the notices posted on the door of the Sub-Prefecture; it was also rumoured that a few hundred workmen had left their work and were endeavouring to organise resistance. That was all. No serious disturbance seemed likely to occur. The course which the neighbouring towns and rural districts might take seemed more likely to occasion anxiety; however, it was not yet known how they had received the news of the Coup d'Etat.

Granoux arrived at about nine o'clock, quite out of breath. He had just left a sitting of the Municipal Council which had been hastily summoned together. Choking with emotion, he announced that the mayor, Monsieur Garconnet, had declared, while making due reserves, that he was determined to preserve order by the most stringent measures. However, the intelligence which caused the noisiest chattering in the yellow drawing-room was that of the resignation of the sub-prefect. This functionary had absolutely refused to communicate the despatches of the Minister of the Interior to the inhabitants of Plassans; he had just left the town, so Granoux asserted, and it was thanks to the mayor that the messages had been posted. This was perhaps the only sub-prefect in France who ever had the courage of his democratic opinions.

Although Monsieur Garconnet's firm demeanour caused the Rougons some secret anxiety, they rubbed their hands at the flight of the sub-prefect, which left the post vacant for them. It was decided on this memorable evening that the yellow drawing-room party should accept the Coup d'Etat and openly declare that it was in favour of accomplished facts. Vuillet was commissioned to write an article to that effect, and publish it on the morrow in the "Gazette." Neither he nor the marquis raised any objection. They had, no doubt, received instructions from the mysterious individuals to whom they sometimes made pious allusions. The clergy and the nobility were already resigned to the course of lending a strong hand to the victors, in order to crush their common enemy, the Republic.

While the yellow drawing-room was deliberating on the evening in question, Aristide was perspiring with anxiety. Never had gambler, staking his last louis on a card, felt such anguish. During the day the resignation of his chief, the sub-prefect, had given him much matter for reflection. He had heard him repeat several times that the Coup d'Etat must prove a failure. This functionary, endowed with a limited amount of honesty, believed in the final triumph of the democracy, though he had not the courage to work for that triumph by offering resistance. Aristide was in the habit of listening at the doors of the Sub-Prefecture, in order to get precise information, for he felt that he was groping in the dark, and clung to the intelligence which he gleaned from the officials. The sub-prefect's opinion struck him forcibly; but he remained perplexed. He thought to himself: "Why does the fellow go away if he is so certain that the prince-president will meet with a check?" However, as he was compelled to espouse one side or the other, he resolved to continue his opposition. He wrote a very hostile article on the Coup d'Etat, and took it to the "Independant" the same evening for the following morning's issue. He had corrected the proofs of this article, and was returning home somewhat calmed, when, as he passed along the Rue de la Banne, he instinctively raised his head and glanced at the Rougons' windows. Their windows were brightly lighted up.

"What can they be plotting up there?" the journalist asked himself, with anxious curiosity.

A fierce desire to know the opinion of the yellow drawing-room with regard to recent events then assailed him. He credited this group of reactionaries with little intelligence; but his doubts recurred, he was in that frame of mind when one might seek advice from a child. He could not think of entering his father's home at that moment, after the campaign he had waged against Granoux and the others. Nevertheless, he went upstairs, reflecting what a singular figure he would cut if he were surprised on the way by anyone. On reaching the Rougons' door, he could only catch a confused echo of voices.

"What a child I am," said he, "fear makes me stupid." And he was going to descend again, when he heard the approach of his mother, who was about to show somebody out. He had barely time to hide in a dark corner formed by a little staircase leading to the garrets of the house. The Rougons' door opened, and the marquis appeared, followed by Felicite. Monsieur de Carnavant usually left before the gentlemen of the new town did, in order no doubt to avoid having to shake hands with them in the street.

"Eh! little one," he said on the landing, in a low voice, "these men are greater cowards than I should have thought. With such men France will always be at the mercy of whoever dares to lay his hands upon her!" And he added, with some bitterness, as though speaking to himself: "The monarchy is decidedly becoming too honest for modern times. Its day is over."

"Eugene announced the crisis to his father," replied Felicite. "Prince Louis's triumph seems to him certain."

"Oh, you can proceed without fear," the marquis replied, as he descended the first steps. "In two or three days the country will be well bound and gagged. Good-bye till to-morrow, little one."

Felicite closed the door again. Aristide had received quite a shock in his dark corner. However, without waiting for the marquis to reach the street, he bounded down the staircase, four steps at a time, rushed outside like a madman, and turned his steps towards the printing-office of the "Independant." A flood of thoughts surged through his mind. He was enraged, and accused his family of having duped him. What! Eugene kept his parents informed of the situation, and yet his mother had never given him any of his eldest brother's letters to read, in order that he might follow the advice given therein! And it was only now he learnt by chance that his eldest brother regarded the success of the Coup d'Etat as certain! This circumstance, moreover, confirmed certain presentiments which that idiot of a sub-prefect had prevented him from obeying. He was especially exasperated against his father, whom he had thought stupid enough to be a Legitimist, but who revealed himself as a Bonapartist at the right moment.

"What a lot of folly they have allowed me to perpetrate," he muttered as he ran along. "I'm a fine fellow now. Ah! what a lesson! Granoux is more capable than I."

He entered the office of the "Independant" like a hurricane, and asked for his article in a choking voice. The article had already been imposed. He had the forme unlocked and would not rest until he had himself destroyed the setting, mixing the type in a furious manner, like a set of dominoes. The bookseller who managed the paper looked at him in amazement. He was, in reality, rather glad of the incident, as the article had seemed to him somewhat dangerous. But he was absolutely obliged to have some copy, if the "Independant" was to appear.

"Are you going to give me something else?" he asked.

"Certainly," replied Aristide.

He sat down at the table and began a warm panegyric on the Coup d'Etat. At the very first line, he swore that Prince Louis had just saved the Republic; but he had hardly written a page before he stopped and seemed at a loss how to continue. A troubled look came over his pole-cat face.

"I must go home," he said at last. "I will send you this immediately. Your paper can appear a little later, if necessary."

He walked slowly on his way home, lost in meditation. He was again giving way to indecision. Why should he veer round so quickly? Eugene was an intelligent fellow, but his mother had perhaps exaggerated the significance of some sentence in his letter. In any case, it would be better to wait and hold his tongue.

An hour later Angele called at the bookseller's, feigning deep emotion.

"My husband has just severely injured himself," she said. "He jammed his four fingers in a door as he was coming in. In spite of his sufferings, he has dictated this little note, which he begs you to publish to-morrow."

On the following day the "Independant," made up almost entirely of miscellaneous items of news, appeared with these few lines at the head of the first column:

"A deplorable accident which has occurred to our eminent contributor Monsieur Aristide Rougon will deprive us of his articles for some time. He will suffer at having to remain silent in the present grave circumstances. None of our readers will doubt, however, the good wishes which he offers up with patriotic feelings for the welfare of France."

This burlesque note had been maturely studied. The last sentence might be interpreted in favour of all parties. By this expedient, Aristide devised a glorious return for himself on the morrow of battle, in the shape of a laudatory article on the victors. On the following day he showed himself to the whole town, with his arm in a sling. His mother, frightened by the notice in the paper, hastily called upon him, but he refused to show her his hand, and spoke with a bitterness which enlightened the old woman.

"It won't be anything," she said in a reassuring and somewhat sarcastic tone, as she was leaving. "You only want a little rest."

It was no doubt owing to this pretended accident, and the sub-prefect's departure, that the "Independant" was not interfered with, like most of the democratic papers of the departments.

The 4th day of the month proved comparatively quiet at Plassans. In the evening there was a public demonstration which the mere appearance of the gendarmes sufficed to disperse. A band of working-men came to request Monsieur Garconnet to communicate the despatches he had received from Paris, which the latter haughtily refused to do; as it retired the band shouted: "Long live the Republic! Long live the Constitution!" After this, order was restored. The yellow drawing-room, after commenting at some length on this innocent parade, concluded that affairs were going on excellently.

The 5th and 6th were, however, more disquieting. Intelligence was received of successive risings in small neighbouring towns; the whole southern part of the department had taken up arms; La Palud and Saint-Martin-de-Vaulx had been the first to rise, drawing after them the villages of Chavanos, Nazeres, Poujols, Valqueyras and Vernoux. The yellow drawing-room party was now becoming seriously alarmed. It felt particularly uneasy at seeing Plassans isolated in the very midst of the revolt. Bands of insurgents would certainly scour the country and cut off all communications. Granoux announced, with a terrified look, that the mayor was without any news. Some people even asserted that blood had been shed at Marseilles, and that a formidable revolution had broken out in Paris. Commander Sicardot, enraged at the cowardice of the bourgeois, vowed he would die at the head of his men.

On Sunday the 7th the terror reached a climax. Already at six o'clock the yellow drawing-room, where a sort of reactionary committee sat en permanence, was crowded with pale, trembling men, who conversed in undertones, as though they were in a chamber of death. It had been ascertained during the day that a column of insurgents, about three thousand strong, had assembled at Alboise, a big village not more than three leagues away. It was true that this column had been ordered to make for the chief town of the department, leaving Plassans on its left; but the plan of campaign might at any time be altered; moreover, it sufficed for these cowardly cits to know that there were insurgents a few miles off, to make them feel the horny hands of the toilers already tightened round their throats. They had had a foretaste of the revolt in the morning; the few Republicans at Plassans, seeing that they would be unable to make any determined move in the town, had resolved to join their brethren of La Palud and Saint-Martin-de-Vaulx; the first group had left at about eleven o'clock, by the Porte de Rome, shouting the "Marseillaise" and smashing a few windows. Granoux had had one broken. He mentioned the circumstance with stammerings of terror.

Meantime, the most acute anxiety agitated the yellow drawing-room. The commander had sent his servant to obtain some information as to the exact movements of the insurgents, and the others awaited this man's return, making the most astonishing surmises. They had a full meeting. Roudier and Granoux, sinking back in their arm-chairs, exchanged the most pitiable glances, whilst behind them moaned a terror-stricken group of retired tradesmen. Vuillet, without appearing over scared, reflected upon what precautions he should take to protect his shop and person; he was in doubt whether he should hide himself in his garret or cellar, and inclined towards the latter. For their part Pierre and the commander walked up and down, exchanging a word ever and anon. The old oil-dealer clung to this friend Sicardot as if to borrow a little courage from him. He, who had been awaiting the crisis for such a long time, now endeavoured to keep his countenance, in spite of the emotion which was stifling him. As for the marquis, more spruce and smiling than usual, he conversed in a corner with Felicite, who seemed very gay.

At last a ring came. The gentlemen started as if they had heard a gun-shot. Dead silence reigned in the drawing-room when Felicite went to open the door, towards which their pale, anxious faces were turned. Then the commander's servant appeared on the threshold, quite out of breath, and said abruptly to his master: "Sir, the insurgents will be here in an hour."

This was a thunderbolt. They all started up, vociferating, and raising their arms towards the ceiling. For several minutes it was impossible to hear one's self speak. The company surrounded the messenger, overwhelming him with questions.

"Damnation!" the commander at length shouted, "don't make such a row. Be calm, or I won't answer for anything."

Everyone sank back in his chair again, heaving long-drawn sighs. They then obtained a few particulars. The messenger had met the column at Les Tulettes, and had hastened to return.

"There are at least three thousand of them," said he. "They are marching in battalions, like soldiers. I thought I caught sight of some prisoners in their midst."

"Prisoners!" cried the terrified bourgeois.

"No doubt," the marquis interrupted in his shrill voice. "I've heard that the insurgents arrest all persons who are known to have conservative leanings."

This information gave a finishing touch to the consternation of the yellow drawing-room. A few bourgeois got up and stealthily made for the door, reflecting that they had not too much time before them to gain a place of safety.

The announcement of the arrests made by the Republicans appeared to strike Felicite. She took the marquis aside and asked him: "What do these men do with the people they arrest?"

"Why, they carry them off in their train," Monsieur de Carnavant replied. "They no doubt consider them excellent hostages."

"Ah!" the old woman rejoined, in a strange tone.

Then she again thoughtfully watched the curious scene of panic around her. The bourgeois gradually disappeared; soon there only remained Vuillet and Roudier, whom the approaching danger inspired with some courage. As for Granoux, he likewise remained in his corner, his legs refusing to perform their office.

"Well, I like this better," Sicardot remarked, as he observed the flight of the other adherents. "Those cowards were exasperating me at last. For more than two years they've been speaking of shooting all the Republicans in the province, and to-day they wouldn't even fire a halfpenny cracker under their noses."

Then he took up his hat and turned towards the door.

"Let's see," he continued, "time presses. Come, Rougon."

Felicite, it seemed, had been waiting for this moment. She placed herself between the door and her husband, who, for that matter, was not particularly eager to follow the formidable Sicardot.

"I won't have you go out," she cried, feigning sudden despair. "I won't let you leave my side. Those scoundrels will kill you."

The commander stopped in amazement.

"Hang it all!" he growled, "if the women are going to whine now—Come along, Rougon!'

"No, no," continued the old woman, affecting increase of terror, "he sha'n't follow you. I will hang on to his clothes and prevent him."

The marquis, very much surprised at the scene, looked inquiringly at Felicite. Was this really the woman who had just now been conversing so merrily? What comedy was she playing? Pierre, meantime, seeing that his wife wanted to detain him, deigned a determination to force his way out.

"I tell you you shall not go," the old woman reiterated, as she clung to one of his arms. And turning towards the commander, she said to him: "How can you think of offering any resistance? They are three thousand strong, and you won't be able to collect a hundred men of any spirit. You are rushing into the cannon's mouth to no purpose."

"Eh! that is our duty," said Sicardot, impatiently.

Felicite burst into sobs.

"If they don't kill him, they'll make him a prisoner," she continued, looked fixedly at her husband. "Good heavens! What will become of me, left alone in an abandoned town?"

"But," exclaimed the commander, "we shall be arrested just the same if we allow the insurgents to enter the town unmolested. I believe that before an hour has elapsed the mayor and all the functionaries will be prisoners, to say nothing of your husband and the frequenters of this drawing-room."

The marquis thought he saw a vague smile play about Felicite's lips as she answered, with a look of dismay: "Do you really think so?"

"Of course!" replied Sicardot; "the Republicans are not so stupid as to leave enemies behind them. To-morrow Plassans will be emptied of its functionaries and good citizens."

At these words, which she had so cleverly provoked, Felicite released her husband's arms. Pierre no longer looked as if he wanted to go out. Thanks to his wife, whose skilful tactics escaped him, however, and whose secret complicity he never for a moment suspected, he had just lighted on a whole plan of campaign.

"We must deliberate before taking any decision," he said to the commander. "My wife is perhaps not wrong in accusing us of forgetting the true interests of our families."

"No, indeed, madame is not wrong," cried Granoux, who had been listening to Felicite's terrified cries with the rapture of a coward.

Thereupon the commander energetically clapped his hat on his head, and said in a clear voice: "Right or wrong, it matters little to me. I am commander of the National Guard. I ought to have been at the mayor's before now. Confess that you are afraid, that you leaven me to act alone. . . . Well, good-night."

He was just turning the handle of the door, when Rougon forcibly detained him.

"Listen, Sicardot," he said.

He drew him into a corner, on seeing Vuillet prick up his big ears. And there he explained to him, in an undertone, that it would be a good plan to leave a few energetic men behind the insurgents, so as to restore order in the town. And as the fierce commander obstinately refused to desert his post, Pierre offered to place himself at the head of such a reserve corps.

"Give me the key of the cart-shed in which the arms and ammunition are kept," he said to him, "and order some fifty of our men not to stir until I call for them."

Sicardot ended by consenting to these prudent measures. He entrusted Pierre with the key of the cart-shed, convinced as he was of the inexpediency of present resistance, but still desirous of sacrificing himself.

During this conversation, the marquis had whispered a few words in Felicite's ear with a knowing look. He complimented her, no doubt, on her theatrical display. The old woman could not repress a faint smile. But, as Sicardot shook hands with Rougon and prepared to go, she again asked him with an air of fright: "Are you really determined to leave us?"

"It is not for one of Napoleon's old soldiers to let himself be intimidated by the mob," he replied.

He was already on the landing, when Granoux hurried after him, crying: "If you go to the mayor's tell him what's going on. I'll just run home to my wife to reassure her."

Then Felicite bent towards the marquis's ear, and whispered with discreet gaiety: "Upon my word, it is best that devil of a commander should go and get himself arrested. He's far too zealous."

However, Rougon brought Granoux back to the drawing-room. Roudier, who had quietly followed the scene from his corner, making signs in support of the proposed measures of prudence, got up and joined them. When the marquis and Vuillet had likewise risen, Pierre began:

"Now that we are alone, among peaceable men, I propose that we should conceal ourselves so as to avoid certain arrest, and be at liberty as soon as ours again becomes the stronger party."

Granoux was ready to embrace him. Roudier and Vuillet breathed more easily.

"I shall want you shortly, gentlemen," the oil-dealer continued, with an important air. "It is to us that the honour of restoring order in Plassans is reserved."

"You may rely upon us!" cried Vuillet, with an enthusiasm which disturbed Felicite.

Time was pressing. These singular defenders of Plassans, who hid themselves the better to protect the town, hastened away, to bury themselves in some hole or other. Pierre, on being left alone with his wife, advised her not to make the mistake of barricading herself indoors, but to reply, if anybody came to question her, that he, Pierre, had simply gone on a short journey. And as she acted the simpleton, feigning terror and asking what all this was coming to, he replied abruptly: "It's nothing to do with you. Let me manage our affairs alone. They'll get on all the better."

A few minutes later he was rapidly threading his way along the Rue de la Banne. On reaching the Cours Sauvaire, he saw a band of armed workmen coming out of the old quarter and singing the "Marseillaise."

"The devil!" he thought. "It was quite time, indeed; here's the town itself in revolt now!"

He quickened his steps in the direction of the Porte de Rome. Cold perspiration came over him while he waited there for the dilatory keeper to open the gate. Almost as soon as he set foot on the high road, he perceived in the moonlight at the other end of the Faubourg the column of insurgents, whose gun barrels gleamed like white flames. So it was at a run that he dived into the Impasse Saint-Mittre, and reached his mother's house, which he had not visited for many a long year.

CHAPTER IV

Antoine Macquart had returned to Plassans after the fall of the first Napoleon. He had had the incredible good fortune to escape all the final murderous campaigns of the Empire. He had moved from barracks to barracks, dragging on his brutifying military life. This mode of existence brought his natural vices to full development. His idleness became deliberate; his intemperance, which brought him countless punishments, became, to his mind, a veritable religious duty. But that which above all made him the worst of scapegraces was the supercilious disdain which he entertained for the poor devils who had to earn their bread.

"I've got money waiting for me at home," he often said to his comrades; "when I've served my time, I shall be able to live like a gentleman."

This belief, together with his stupid ignorance, prevented him from rising even to the grade of corporal.

Since his departure he had never spent a day's furlough at Plassans, his brother having invented a thousand pretexts to keep him at a distance. He was therefore completely ignorant of the adroit manner in which Pierre had got possession of their mother's fortune. Adelaide, with her profound indifference, did not even write to him three times to tell him how she was going on. The silence which generally greeted his numerous requests for money did not awaken the least suspicion in him; Pierre's stinginess sufficed to explain the difficulty he experienced in securing from time to time a paltry twenty-franc piece. This, however, only increased his animosity towards his brother, who left him to languish in military service in spite of his formal promise to purchase his discharge. He vowed to himself that on his return home he would no longer submit like a child, but would flatly demand his share of the fortune to enable him to live as he pleased. In the diligence which conveyed him home he dreamed of a delightful life of idleness. The shattering of his castles in the air was terrible. When he reached the Faubourg, and could no longer even recognise the Fouques' plot of ground, he was stupefied. He was compelled to ask for his mother's new address. There a terrible scene occurred. Adelaide calmly informed him of the sale of the property. He flew into a rage, and even raised his hand against her.

The poor woman kept repeating: "Your brother has taken everything; it is understood that he will take care of you."

At last he left her and ran off to see Pierre, whom he had previously informed of his return, and who was prepared to receive him in such a way as to put an end to the matter at the first word of abuse.

"Listen," the oil-dealer said to him, affecting distant coldness; "don't rouse my anger, or I'll turn you out. As a matter of fact, I don't know you. We don't bear the same name. It's quite misfortune enough for me that my mother misconducted herself, without having her offspring coming here and insulting me. I was well disposed towards you, but since you are insolent I shall do nothing for you, absolutely nothing."

Antoine was almost choking with rage.

"And what about my money," he cried; "will you give it up, you thief, or shall I have to drag you before the judges?"

Pierre shrugged his shoulders.

"I've got no money of yours," he replied, more calmly than ever. "My mother disposed of her fortune as she thought proper. I am certainly not going to poke my nose into her business. I willingly renounced all hope of inheritance. I am quite safe from your foul accusations."

And as his brother, exasperated by this composure, and not knowing what to think, muttered something, Pierre thrust Adelaide's receipt under his nose. The reading of this scrap of paper completed Antoine's dismay.

"Very well," he said, in a calmer voice, "I know now what I have to do."

The truth was, however, he did not know what to do. His inability to hit upon any immediate expedient for obtaining his share of the money and satisfying his desire of revenge increased his fury. He went back to his mother and subjected her to a disgraceful cross-examination. The wretched woman could do nothing but again refer him to Pierre.

"Do you think you are going to make me run to and fro like a shuttle?" he cried, insolently. "I'll soon find out which of you two has the hoard. You've already squandered it, perhaps?"

And making an allusion to her former misconduct he asked her if there were still not some low fellow to whom she gave her last sous? He did not even spare his father, that drunkard Macquart, as he called him, who must have lived on her till the day of his death, and who left his children in poverty. The poor woman listened with a stupefied air; big tears rolled down her cheeks. She defended herself with the terror of a child, replying to her son's questions as though he were a judge; she swore that she was living respectably, and reiterated with emphasis that she had never had a sou of the money, that Pierre had taken everything. Antoine almost came to believe it at last.

"Ah! the scoundrel!" he muttered; "that's why he wouldn't purchase my discharge."

He had to sleep at his mother's house, on a straw mattress flung in a corner. He had returned with his pockets perfectly empty, and was exasperated at finding himself destitute of resources, abandoned like a dog in the streets, without hearth or home, while his brother, as he thought, was in a good way of business, and living on the fat of the land. As he had no money to buy clothes with, he went out on the following day in his regimental cap and trousers. He had the good fortune to find, at the bottom of a cupboard, an old yellowish velveteen jacket, threadbare and patched, which had belonged to Macquart. In this strange attire he walked about the town, relating his story to everyone, and demanding justice.

The people whom he went to consult received him with a contempt which made him shed tears of rage. Provincial folks are inexorable towards fallen families. In the general opinion it was only natural that the Rougon-Macquarts should seek to devour each other; the spectators, instead of separating them, were more inclined to urge them on. Pierre, however, was at that time already beginning to purify himself of his early stains. People laughed at his roguery; some even went so far as to say that he had done quite right, if he really had taken possession of the money, and that it would be a good lesson to the dissolute folks of the town.

Antoine returned home discouraged. A lawyer had advised him, in a scornful manner, to wash his dirty linen at home, though not until he had skilfully ascertained whether Antoine possessed the requisite means to carry on a lawsuit. According to this man, the case was very involved, the pleadings would be very lengthy, and success was doubtful. Moreover, it would require money, and plenty of it.

Antoine treated his mother yet more harshly that evening. Not knowing on whom else to wreak his vengeance, he repeated his accusation of the previous day; he kept the wretched woman up till midnight, trembling with shame and fright. Adelaide having informed him that Pierre made her an allowance, he now felt certain that his brother had pocketed the fifty thousand francs. But, in his irritation, he still affected to doubt it, and did not cease to question the poor woman, again and again reproaching her with misconduct.

Antoine soon found out that, alone and without resources, he could not successfully carry on a contest with his brother. He then endeavoured to gain Adelaide to his cause; an accusation lodged by her might have serious consequences. But, at Antoine's first suggestion of it, the poor, lazy, lethargic creature firmly refused to bring trouble on her eldest son.

"I am an unhappy woman," she stammered; "it is quite right of you to get angry. But I should feel too much remorse if I caused one of my sons to be sent to prison. No; I'd rather let you beat me."

He saw that he would get nothing but tears out of her, and contented himself with saying that she was justly punished, and that he had no pity for her. In the evening, upset by the continual quarrels which her son had sought with her, Adelaide had one of those nervous attacks which kept her as rigid as if she had been dead. The young man threw her on her bed, and then began to rummage the house to see if the wretched woman had any savings hidden away. He found about forty francs. He took possession of them, and, while his mother still lay there, rigid and scarce able to breathe, he quietly took the diligence to Marseilles.

He had just bethought himself that Mouret, the journeyman hatter who had married his sister Ursule, must be indignant at Pierre's roguery, and would no doubt be willing to defend his wife's interests. But he did not find in him the man he expected. Mouret plainly told him that he had become accustomed to look upon Ursule as an orphan, and would have no contentions with her family at any price. Their affairs were prospering. Antoine was received so coldly that he hastened to take the diligence home again. But, before leaving, he was anxious to revenge himself for the secret contempt which he read in the workman's eyes; and, observing that his sister appeared rather pale and dejected, he said to her husband, in a slyly cruel way, as he took his departure: "Have a care, my sister was always sickly, and I find her much changed for the worse; you may lose her altogether."

The tears which rushed to Mouret's eyes convinced him that he had touched a sore wound. But then those work-people made too great a display of their happiness.

When he was back again in Plassans, Antoine became the more menacing from the conviction that his hands were tied. During a whole month he was seen all over the place. He paraded the streets, recounting his story to all who would listen to him. Whenever he succeeded in extorting a franc from his mother, he would drink it away at some tavern, where he would revile his brother, declaring that the rascal should shortly hear from him. In places like these, the good-natured fraternity which reigns among drunkards procured him a sympathetic audience; all the scum of the town espoused his cause, and poured forth bitter imprecations against that rascal Rougon, who left a brave soldier to starve; the discussion generally terminating with an indiscriminate condemnation of the rich. Antoine, the better to revenge himself, continued to march about in his regimental cap and trousers and his old yellow velvet jacket, although his mother had offered to purchase some more becoming clothes for him. But no; he preferred to make a display of his rags, and paraded them on Sundays in the most frequented parts of the Cours Sauvaire.

One of his most exquisite pleasures was to pass Pierre's shop ten times a day. He would enlarge the holes in his jacket with his fingers, slacken his step, and sometimes stand talking in front of the door, so as to remain longer in the street. On these occasions, too, he would bring one of his drunken friends and gossip to him; telling him about the theft of the fifty thousand francs, accompanying his narrative with loud insults and menaces, which could be heard by everyone in the street, and taking particular care that his abuse should reach the furthest end of the shop.

"He'll finish by coming to beg in front of our house," Felicite used to say in despair.

The vain little woman suffered terribly from this scandal. She even at this time felt some regret at ever having married Rougon; his family connections were so objectionable. She would have given all she had in the world to prevent Antoine from parading his rags. But Pierre, who was maddened by his brother's conduct, would not allow his name to be mentioned. When his wife tried to convince him that it would perhaps be better to free himself from all annoyance by giving Antoine a little money: "No, nothing; not a sou," he cried with rage. "Let him starve!"

He confessed, however, at last that Antoine's demeanour was becoming intolerable. One day, Felicite, desiring to put an end to it, called to "that man," as she styled him with a disdainful curl on her lip. "That man" was in the act of calling her a foul name in the middle of the street, where he stood with one of his friends, even more ragged than himself. They were both drunk.

"Come, they want us in there," said Antoine to his companion in a jeering tone.

But Felicite drew back, muttering: "It's you alone we wish to speak to."

"Bah!" the young man replied, "my friend's a decent fellow. You needn't mind him hearing. He'll be my witness."

The witness sank heavily on a chair. He did not take off his hat, but began to stare around him, with the maudlin, stupid grin of drunkards and coarse people who know that they are insolent. Felicite was so ashamed that she stood in front of the shop door in order that people outside might not see what strange company she was receiving. Fortunately her husband came to the rescue. A violent quarrel ensued between him and his brother. The latter, after stammering insults, reiterated his old grievances twenty times over. At last he even began to cry, and his companion was near following his example. Pierre had defended himself in a very dignified manner.

"Look here," he said at last, "you're unfortunate, and I pity you. Although you have cruelly insulted me, I can't forget that we are children of the same mother. If I give you anything, however, you must understand I give it you out of kindness, and not from fear. Would you like a hundred francs to help you out of your difficulties?"

This abrupt offer of a hundred francs dazzled Antoine's companion. He looked at the other with an air of delight, which clearly signified: "As the gentleman offers a hundred francs, it is time to leave off abusing him." But Antoine was determined to speculate on his brother's favourable disposition. He asked him whether he took him for a fool; it was his share, ten thousand francs, that he wanted.

"You're wrong, you're wrong," stuttered his friend.

At last, as Pierre, losing all patience, was threatening to turn them both out, Antoine lowered his demands and contented himself with claiming one thousand francs. They quarrelled for another quarter of an hour over this amount. Finally, Felicite interfered. A crowd was gathering round the shop.

"Listen," she said, excitedly; "my husband will give you two hundred francs. I'll undertake to buy you a suit of clothes, and hire a room for a year for you."

Rougon got angry at this. But Antoine's comrade cried, with transports of delight: "All right, it's settled, then; my friend accepts."

Antoine did, in fact, declare, in a surly way, that he would accept. He felt he would not be able to get any more. It was arranged that the money and clothes should be sent to him on the following day, and that a few days later, as soon as Felicite should have found a room for him, he would take up his quarters there. As they were leaving, the young man's sottish companion became as respectful as he had previously been insolent. He bowed to the company more than a dozen times, in an awkward and humble manner, muttering many indistinct thanks, as if the Rougons' gifts had been intended for himself.

A week later Antoine occupied a large room in the old quarter, in which Felicite, exceeding her promises, had placed a bed, a table, and some chairs, on the young man formally undertaking not to molest them in future. Adelaide felt no regret at her son leaving her; the short stay he had made with her had condemned her to bread and water for more than three months. However, Antoine had soon eaten and drunk the two hundred francs he received from Pierre. He never for a moment thought of investing them in some little business which would have helped him to live. When he was again penniless, having no trade, and being, moreover, unwilling to work, he again sought to slip a hand into the Rougons' purse. Circumstances were not the same as before, however, and he failed to intimidate them. Pierre even took advantage of this opportunity to turn him out, and forbade him ever to set foot in his house again. It was of no avail for Antoine to repeat his former accusations. The townspeople, who were acquainted with his brother's munificence from the publicity which Felicite had given to it, declared him to be in the wrong, and called him a lazy, idle fellow. Meantime his hunger was pressing. He threatened to turn smuggler like his father, and perpetrate some crime which would dishonour his family. At this the Rougons shrugged their shoulders; they knew he was too much of a coward to risk his neck. At last, blindly enraged against his relatives in particular and society in general, Antoine made up his mind to seek some work.

In a tavern of the Faubourg he made the acquaintance of a basket-maker who worked at home. He offered to help him. In a short time he learnt to plait baskets and hampers—a coarse and poorly-paid kind of labour which finds a ready market. He was very soon able to work on his own account. This trade pleased him, as it was not over laborious. He could still indulge his idleness, and that was what he chiefly cared for. He would only take to his work when he could no longer do otherwise; then he would hurriedly plait a dozen baskets and go and sell them in the market. As long as the money lasted he lounged about, visiting all the taverns and digesting his drink in the sunshine. Then, when he had fasted a whole day, he would once more take up his osier with a low growl and revile the wealthy who lived in idleness. The trade of a basket-maker, when followed in such a manner, is a thankless one. Antoine's work would not have sufficed to pay for his drinking bouts if he had not contrived a means of procuring his osier at low cost. He never bought any at Plassans, but used to say that he went each month to purchase a stock at a neighbouring town, where he pretended it was sold cheaper. The truth, however, was that he supplied himself from the osier-grounds of the Viorne on dark nights. A rural policeman even caught him once in the very act, and Antoine underwent a few days' imprisonment in consequence. It was from that time forward that he posed in the town as a fierce Republican. He declared that he had been quietly smoking his pipe by the riverside when the rural policeman arrested him. And he added: "They would like to get me out of the way because they know what my opinions are. But I'm not afraid of them, those rich scoundrels."

At last, at the end of ten years of idleness, Antoine considered that he had been working too hard. His constant dream was to devise some expedient by which he might live at his ease without having to do anything. His idleness would never have rested content with bread and water; he was not like certain lazy persons who are willing to put up with hunger provided they can keep their hands in their pockets. He liked good feeding and nothing to do. He talked at one time of taking a situation as servant in some nobleman's house in the Saint-Marc quarter. But one of his friends, a groom, frightened him by describing the exacting ways of his masters. Finally Macquart, sick of his baskets, and seeing the time approach when he would be compelled to purchase the requisite osier, was on the point of selling himself as an army substitute and resuming his military life, which he preferred a thousand times to that of an artisan, when he made the acquaintance of a woman, an acquaintance which modified his plans.

Josephine Gavaudan, who was known throughout the town by the familiar diminutive of Fine, was a tall, strapping wench of about thirty. With a square face of masculine proportions, and a few terribly long hairs about her chin and lips, she was cited as a doughty woman, one who could make the weight of her fist felt. Her broad shoulders and huge arms consequently inspired the town urchins with marvellous respect; and they did not even dare to smile at her moustache. Notwithstanding all this, Fine had a faint voice, weak and clear like that of a child. Those who were acquainted with her asserted that she was as gentle as a lamb, in spite of her formidable appearance. As she was very hard-working, she might have put some money aside if she had not had a partiality for liqueurs. She adored aniseed, and very often had to be carried home on Sunday evenings.

On week days she would toil with the stubbornness of an animal. She had three or four different occupations; she sold fruit or boiled chestnuts in the market, according to the season; went out charring for a few well-to-do people; washed up plates and dishes at houses when parties were given, and employed her spare time in mending old chairs. She was more particularly known in the town as a chair-mender. In the South large numbers of straw-bottomed chairs are used.

Antoine Macquart formed an acquaintance with Fine at the market. When he went to sell his baskets in the winter he would stand beside the stove on which she cooled her chestnuts and warm himself. He was astonished at her courage, he who was frightened of the least work. By degrees he discerned, beneath the apparent roughness of this strapping creature, signs of timidity and kindliness. He frequently saw her give handfuls of chestnuts to the ragged urchins who stood in ecstasy round her smoking pot. At other times, when the market inspector hustled her, she very nearly began to cry, apparently forgetting all about her heavy fists. Antoine at last decided that she was exactly the woman he wanted. She would work for both and he would lay down the law at home. She would be his beast of burden, an obedient, indefatigable animal. As for her partiality for liqueurs, he regarded this as quite natural. After well weighing the advantages of such an union, he declared himself to Fine, who was delighted with his proposal. No man had ever yet ventured to propose to her. Though she was told that Antoine was the most worthless of vagabonds, she lacked the courage to refuse matrimony. The very evening of the nuptials the young man took up his abode in his wife's lodgings in the Rue Civadiere, near the market. These lodgings, consisting of three rooms, were much more comfortably furnished than his own, and he gave a sigh of satisfaction as he stretched himself out on the two excellent mattresses which covered the bedstead.

Everything went on very well for the first few days. Fine attended to her various occupations as in the past; Antoine, seized with a sort of marital self-pride which astonished even himself, plaited in one week more baskets than he had ever before done in a month. On the first Sunday, however, war broke out. The couple had a goodly sum of money in the house, and they spent it freely. During the night, when they were both drunk, they beat each other outrageously, without being able to remember on the morrow how it was that the quarrel had commenced. They had remained on most affectionate terms until about ten o'clock, when Antoine had begun to beat Fine brutally, whereupon the latter, growing exasperated and forgetting her meekness, had given him back as much as she received. She went to work again bravely on the following day, as though nothing had happened. But her husband, with sullen rancour, rose late and passed the remainder of the day smoking his pipe in the sunshine.

From that time forward the Macquarts adopted the kind of life which they were destined to lead in the future. It became, as it were, tacitly understood between them that the wife should toil and moil to keep her husband. Fine, who had an instinctive liking for work, did not object to this. She was as patient as a saint, provided she had had no drink, thought it quite natural that her husband should remain idle, and even strove to spare him the most trifling labour. Her little weakness, aniseed, did not make her vicious, but just. On the evenings when she had forgotten herself in the company of a bottle of her favourite liqueur, if Antoine tried to pick a quarrel with her, she would set upon him with might and main, reproaching him with his idleness and ingratitude. The neighbours grew accustomed to the disturbances which periodically broke out in the couple's room. The two battered each other conscientiously; the wife slapped like a mother chastising a naughty child; but the husband, treacherous and spiteful as he was, measured his blows, and, on several occasions, very nearly crippled the unfortunate woman.

"You'll be in a fine plight when you've broken one of my arms or legs," she would say to him. "Who'll keep you then, you lazy fellow?"

Excepting for these turbulent scenes, Antoine began to find his new mode of existence quite endurable. He was well clothed, and ate and drank his fill. He had laid aside the basket work altogether; sometimes, when he was feeling over-bored, he would resolve to plait a dozen baskets for the next market day; but very often he did not even finish the first one. He kept, under a couch, a bundle of osier which he did not use up in twenty years.

The Macquarts had three children, two girls and a boy. Lisa,[*] born the first, in 1827, one year after the marriage, remained but little at home. She was a fine, big, healthy, full-blooded child, greatly resembling her mother. She did not, however, inherit the latter's animal devotion and endurance. Macquart had implanted in her a most decided longing for ease and comfort. While she was a child she would consent to work for a whole day in return for a cake. When she was scarcely seven years old, the wife of the postmaster, who was a neighbour of the Macquarts, took a liking to her. She made a little maid of her. And when she lost her husband in 1839, and went to live in Paris, she took Lisa with her. The parents had almost given her their daughter.

[*] The pork-butcher's wife in Le Ventre de Paris (The
Fat and the Thin).

The second girl, Gervaise,[*] born the following year, was a cripple from birth. Her right thigh was smaller than the left and showed signs of curvature, a curious hereditary result of the brutality which her mother had to endure during her fierce drunken brawls with Macquart. Gervaise remained puny, and Fine, observing her pallor and weakness, put her on a course of aniseed, under the pretext that she required something to strengthen her. But the poor child became still more emaciated. She was a tall, lank girl, whose frocks, invariably too large, hung round her as if they had nothing under them. Above a deformed and puny body she had a sweet little doll-like head, a tiny round face, pale and exquisitely delicate. Her infirmity almost became graceful. Her body swayed gently at every step with a sort of rhythmical swing.

[*] The chief female character in L'Assommoir (The Dramshop).

The Macquarts' son, Jean,[*] was born three years later. He was a robust child, in no respect recalling Gervaise. Like the eldest girl, he took after his mother, without having any physical resemblance to her. He was the first to import into the Rougon-Macquart stock a fat face with regular features, which showed all the coldness of a grave yet not over-intelligent nature. This boy grew up with the determination of some day making an independent position for himself. He attended school diligently, and tortured his dull brain to force a little arithmetic and spelling into it. After that he became an apprentice, repeating much the same efforts with a perseverance that was the more meritorious as it took him a whole day to learn what others acquired in an hour.

[*] Figures prominently in La Terre (The Earth) and La
Debacle (The Downfall).

As long as these poor little things remained a burden to the house, Antoine grumbled. They were useless mouths that lessened his own share. He vowed, like his brother, that he would have no more children, those greedy creatures who bring their parents to penury. It was something to hear him bemoan his lot when they sat five at table, and the mother gave the best morsels to Jean, Lisa, and Gervaise.

"That's right," he would growl; "stuff them, make them burst!"

Whenever Fine bought a garment or a pair of boots for them, he would sulk for days together. Ah! if he had only known, he would never had had that pack of brats, who compelled him to limit his smoking to four sous' worth of tobacco a day, and too frequently obliged him to eat stewed potatoes for dinner, a dish which he heartily detested.

Later on, however, as soon as Jean and Gervaise earned their first francs, he found some good in children after all. Lisa was no longer there. He lived upon the earnings of the two others without compunction, as he had already lived upon their mother. It was a well-planned speculation on his part. As soon as little Gervaise was eight years old, she went to a neighbouring dealer's to crack almonds; she there earned ten sous a day, which her father pocketed right royally, without even a question from Fine as to what became of the money. The young girl was next apprenticed to a laundress, and as soon as she received two francs a day for her work, the two francs strayed in a similar manner into Macquart's hands. Jean, who had learnt the trade of a carpenter, was likewise despoiled on pay-days, whenever Macquart succeeded in catching him before he had handed the money to his mother. If the money escaped Macquart, which sometimes happened, he became frightfully surly. He would glare at his wife and children for a whole week, picking a quarrel for nothing, although he was, as yet, ashamed to confess the real cause of his irritations. On the next pay-day, however, he would station himself on the watch, and as soon as he had succeeded in pilfering the youngster's earnings, he disappeared for days together.

Gervaise, beaten and brought up in the streets among all the lads of the neighbourhood, became a mother when she was fourteen years of age. The father of her child was not eighteen years old. He was a journeyman tanner named Lantier. At first Macquart was furious, but he calmed down somewhat when he learnt that Lantier's mother, a worthy woman, was willing to take charge of the child. He kept Gervaise, however; she was then already earning twenty-five sous a day, and he therefore avoided all question of marriage. Four years later she had a second child, which was likewise taken in by Lantier's mother. This time Macquart shut his eyes altogether. And when Fine timidly suggested that it was time to come to some understanding with the tanner, in order to end a state of things which made people chatter, he flatly declared that his daughter should not leave him, and that he would give her to her lover later on, "when he was worthy of her, and had enough money to furnish a home."

This was a fine time for Antoine Macquart. He dressed like a gentleman, in frock-coats and trousers of the finest cloth. Cleanly shaved, and almost fat, he was no longer the emaciated ragged vagabond who had been wont to frequent the taverns. He dropped into cafes, read the papers, and strolled on the Cours Sauvaire. He played the gentleman as long as he had any money in his pocket. At times of impecuniosity he remained at home, exasperated at being kept in his hovel and prevented from taking his customary cup of coffee. On such occasions he would reproach the whole human race with his poverty, making himself ill with rage and envy, until Fine, out of pity, would often give him the last silver coin in the house so that he might spend his evening at the cafe. This dear fellow was fiercely selfish. Gervaise, who brought home as much as sixty francs a month, wore only thin cotton frocks, while he had black satin waistcoats made for him by one of the best tailors in Plassans.

Jean, the big lad who earned three or four francs a day, was perhaps robbed even more impudently. The cafe where his father passed entire days was just opposite his master's workshop, and while he had plane or saw in hand he could see "Monsieur" Macquart on the other side of the way, sweetening his coffee or playing piquet with some petty annuitant. It was his money that the lazy old fellow was gambling away. He, Jean, never stepped inside a cafe, he never had so much as five sous to pay for a drink. Antoine treated him like a little girl, never leaving him a centime, and always demanding an exact account of the manner in which he had employed his time. If the unfortunate lad, led away by some of his mates, wasted a day somewhere in the country, on the banks of the Viorne, or on the slopes of Garrigues, his father would storm and raise his hand, and long bear him a grudge on account of the four francs less that he received at the end of the fortnight. He thus held his son in a state of dependence, sometimes even looking upon the sweethearts whom the young carpenter courted as his own. Several of Gervaise's friends used to come to the Macquarts' house, work-girls from sixteen to eighteen years of age, bold and boisterous girls who, on certain evenings, filled the room with youth and gaiety. Poor Jean, deprived of all pleasure, ever kept at home by the lack of money, looked at these girls with longing eyes; but the childish life which he was compelled to lead had implanted invincible shyness in him; in playing with his sister's friends, he was hardly bold enough to touch them with the tips of his fingers. Macquart used to shrug his shoulders with pity.

"What a simpleton!" he would mutter, with an air of ironical superiority.

And it was he who would kiss the girls, when his wife's back was turned. He carried his attentions even further with a little laundress whom Jean pursued rather more earnestly than the others. One fine evening he stole her almost from his arms. The old rogue prided himself on his gallantry.

There are some men who live upon their mistresses. Antoine Macquart lived on his wife and children with as much shamelessness and impudence. He did not feel the least compunction in pillaging the home and going out to enjoy himself when the house was bare. He still assumed a supercilious air, returning from the cafe only to rail against the poverty and wretchedness that awaited him at home. He found the dinner detestable, he called Gervaise a blockhead, and declared that Jean would never be a man. Immersed in his own selfish indulgence, he rubbed his hands whenever he had eaten the best piece in the dish; and then he smoked his pipe, puffing slowly, while the two poor children, overcome with fatigue, went to sleep with their heads resting on the table. Thus Macquart passed his days in lazy enjoyment. It seemed to him quite natural that he should be kept in idleness like a girl, to sprawl about on the benches of some tavern, or stroll in the cool of the day along the Cours or the Mail. At last he went so far as to relate his amorous escapades in the presence of his son, who listened with glistening eyes. The children never protested, accustomed as they were to see their mother humble herself before her husband.

Fine, that strapping woman who drubbed him soundly when they were both intoxicated, always trembled before him when she was sober, and allowed him to rule despotically at home. He robbed her in the night of the coppers which she had earned during the day at the market, but she never dared to protest, except by veiled rebukes. Sometimes, when he had squandered the week's money in advance, he accused her, poor thing, who worked herself to death, of being stupid and not knowing how to manage. Fine, as gentle as a lamb, replied, in her soft, clear voice, which contrasted so strangely with her big figure, that she was no longer twenty years old, and that money was becoming hard to earn. In order to console herself, she would buy a pint of aniseed, and drink little glassfuls of it with her daughter of an evening, after Antoine had gone back to the cafe. That was their dissipation. Jean went to bed, while the two women remained at the table, listening attentively in order to remove the bottle and glasses at the first sound.

When Macquart was late, they often became intoxicated by the many "nips" they thus thoughtlessly imbibed. Stupefied and gazing at each other with vague smiles, this mother and daughter would end by stuttering. Red patches appeared on Gervaise's cheeks; her delicate doll-like face assumed a look of maudlin beatitude. Nothing could be more heart-rending than to see this wretched, pale child, aglow with drink and wearing the idiotic smile of a confirmed sot about her moist lips. Fine, huddled up on her chair, became heavy and drowsy. They sometimes forgot to keep watch, or even lacked the strength to remove the bottle and glasses when Antoine's footsteps were heard on the stairs. On these occasions blows were freely exchanged among the Macquarts. Jean had to get up to separate his father and mother and make his sister go to bed, as otherwise she would have slept on the floor.

Every political party numbers its grotesques and its villains. Antoine Macquart, devoured by envy and hatred, and meditating revenge against society in general, welcomed the Republic as a happy era when he would be allowed to fill his pockets from his neighbour's cash-box, and even strangle the neighbour if the latter manifested any displeasure. His cafe life and all the newspaper articles he had read without understanding them had made him a terrible ranter who enunciated the strangest of political theories. It is necessary to have heard one of those malcontents who ill digest what they read, haranguing the company in some provincial taproom, in order to conceive the degree of hateful folly at which Macquart had arrived. As he talked a good deal, had seen active service, and was naturally regarded as a man of energy and spirit, he was much sought after and listened to by simpletons. Although he was not the chief of any party, he had succeeded in collecting round him a small group of working-men who took his jealous ravings for expressions of honest and conscientious indignation.

Directly after the Revolution of February '48, he persuaded himself that Plassans was his own, and, as he strolled along the streets, the jeering manner in which he regarded the little retail traders who stood terrified at their shop doors clearly signified: "Our day has come, my little lambs; we are going to lead you a fine dance!" He had grown insolent beyond belief; he acted the part of a victorious despot to such a degree that he ceased to pay for his drinks at the cafe, and the landlord, a simpleton who trembled whenever Antoine rolled his eyes, dared not present his bill. The number of cups of coffee he consumed during this period was incalculable; sometimes he invited his friends, and shouted for hours together that the people were dying of hunger, and that the rich ought to share their wealth with them. He himself would never have given a sou to a beggar.

That which chiefly converted him into a fierce Republican was the hope of at last being able to revenge himself on the Rougons, who had openly ranged themselves on the side of the reactionary party. Ah, what a triumph if he could only hold Pierre and Felicite at his mercy! Although the latter had not succeeded over well in business, they had at last become gentlefolks, while he, Macquart, had still remained a working-man. That exasperated him. Perhaps he was still more mortified because one of their sons was a barrister, another a doctor, and the third a clerk, while his son Jean merely worked at a carpenter's shop, and his daughter Gervaise at a washerwoman's. When he compared the Macquarts with the Rougons, he was still more ashamed to see his wife selling chestnuts in the market, and mending the greasy old straw-seated chairs of the neighbourhood in the evening. Pierre, after all, was but his brother, and had no more right than himself to live fatly on his income. Moreover, this brother was actually playing the gentleman with money stolen from him. Whenever Macquart touched upon this subject, he became fiercely enraged; he clamoured for hours together, incessantly repeating his old accusations, and never wearying of exclaiming: "If my brother was where he ought to be, I should be the moneyed man at the present time!"

And when anyone asked him where his brother ought to be, he would reply, "At the galleys!" in a formidable voice.

His hatred further increased when the Rougons had gathered the Conservatives round them, and thus acquired a certain influence in Plassans. The famous yellow drawing-room became, in his hare-brained chatter at the cafe, a cave of bandits, an assembly of villains who every evening swore on their daggers that they would murder the people. In order to incite the starvelings against Pierre, Macquart went so far as to circulate a report that the retired oil-dealer was not so poor as he pretended, but that he concealed his treasures through avarice and fear of robbery. His tactics thus tended to rouse the poor people by a repetition of absurdly ridiculous tales, which he often came to believe in himself. His personal animosity and his desire for revenge were ill concealed beneath his professions of patriotism; but he was heard so frequently, and he had such a loud voice, that no one would have dared to doubt the genuineness of his convictions.

At bottom, all the members of this family had the same brutish passions. Felicite, who clearly understood that Macquart's wild theories were simply the fruit of restrained rage and embittered envy, would much have liked to purchase his silence. Unfortunately, she was short of money, and did not dare to interest him in the dangerous game which her husband was playing. Antoine now injured them very much among the well-to-do people of the new town. It sufficed that he was a relation of theirs. Granoux and Roudier often scornfully reproached them for having such a man in their family. Felicite consequently asked herself with anguish how they could manage to cleanse themselves of such a stain.

It seemed to her monstrous and indecent that Monsieur Rougon should have a brother whose wife sold chestnuts, and who himself lived in crapulous idleness. She at last even trembled for the success of their secret intrigues, so long as Antoine seemingly took pleasure in compromising them. When the diatribes which he levelled at the yellow drawing-room were reported to her, she shuddered at the thought that he was capable of becoming desperate and ruining all their hopes by force of scandal.

Antoine knew what consternation his demeanour must cause the Rougons, and it was solely for the purpose of exhausting their patience that he from day to day affected fiercer opinions. At the cafe he frequented he used to speak of "my brother Pierre" in a voice which made everybody turn round; and if he happened to meet some reactionary from the yellow drawing-room in the street, he would mutter some low abuse which the worthy citizen, amazed at such audacity, would repeat to the Rougons in the evening, as though to make them responsible for his disagreeable encounter.

One day Granoux arrived in a state of fury.

"Really," he exclaimed, when scarcely across the threshold, "it's intolerable; one can't move a step without being insulted." Then, addressing Pierre, he added: "When one has a brother like yours, sir, one should rid society of him. I was just quietly walking past the Sub-Prefecture, when that rascal passed me muttering something in which I could clearly distinguish the words 'old rogue.'"

Felicite turned pale, and felt it necessary to apologise to Granoux, but he refused to accept any excuses, and threatened to leave altogether. The marquis, however, exerted himself to arrange matters.

"It is very strange," he said, "that the wretched fellow should have called you an old rogue. Are you sure that he intended the insult for you?"

Granoux was perplexed; he admitted at last, however, that Antoine might have muttered: "So you are again going to that old rogue's?"

At this Monsieur de Carnavant stroked his chin to conceal the smile which rose to his lips in spite of himself.

Then Rougon, with superb composure, replied: "I thought as much; the 'old rogue' was no doubt intended for me. I've very glad that this misunderstanding is now cleared up. Gentlemen, pray avoid the man in question, whom I formally repudiate."

Felicite, however, did not take matters so coolly; every fresh scandal caused by Macquart made her more and more uneasy; she would sometimes pass the whole night wondering what those gentlemen must think of the matter.

A few months before the Coup d'Etat, the Rougons received an anonymous letter, three pages of foul insults, in which they were warned that if their party should ever triumph, the scandalous story of Adelaide's amours would be published in some newspaper, together with an account of the robbery perpetrated by Pierre, when he had compelled his mother, driven out of her senses by debauchery, to sign a receipt for fifty thousand francs. This letter was a heavy blow for Rougon himself. Felicite could not refrain from reproaching her husband with his disreputable family; for the husband and wife never for a moment doubted that this letter was Antoine's work.

"We shall have to get rid of the blackguard at any price," said Pierre in a gloomy tone. "He's becoming too troublesome by far."

In the meantime, Macquart, resorting to his former tactics, looked round among his own relatives for accomplices who would join him against the Rougons. He had counted upon Aristide at first, on reading his terrible articles in the "Independant." But the young man, in spite of all his jealous rage, was not so foolish as to make common cause with such a fellow as his uncle. He never even minced matters with him, but invariably kept him at a distance, a circumstance which induced Antoine to regard him suspiciously. In the taverns, where Macquart reigned supreme, people went so far as to say the journalist was paid to provoke disturbances.

Baffled on this side, Macquart had no alternative but to sound his sister Ursule's children. Ursule had died in 1839, thus fulfilling her brother's evil prophecy. The nervous affection which she had inherited from her mother had turned into slow consumption, which gradually killed her. She left three children; a daughter, eighteen years of age, named Helene, who married a clerk, and two boys, the elder, Francois, a young man of twenty-three, and the younger, a sickly little fellow scarcely six years old, named Silvere. The death of his wife, whom he adored, proved a thunderbolt to Mouret. He dragged on his existence for another year, neglecting his business and losing all the money he had saved. Then, one morning, he was found hanging in a cupboard where Ursule's dresses were still suspended. His elder son, who had received a good commercial training, took a situation in the house of his uncle Rougon, where he replaced Aristide, who had just left.

Rougon, in spite of his profound hatred for the Macquarts, gladly welcomed this nephew, whom he knew to be industrious and sober. He was in want of a youth whom he could trust, and who would help him to retrieve his affairs. Moreover, during the time of Mouret's prosperity, he had learnt to esteem the young couple, who knew how to make money, and thus he had soon become reconciled with his sister. Perhaps he thought he was making Francois some compensation by taking him into his business; having robbed the mother, he would shield himself from remorse by giving employment to the son; even rogues make honest calculations sometimes. It was, however, a good thing for him. If the house of Rougon did not make a fortune at this time, it was certainly through no fault of that quiet, punctilious youth, Francois, who seemed born to pass his life behind a grocer's counter, between a jar of oil and a bundle of dried cod-fish. Although he physically resembled his mother, he inherited from his father a just if narrow mind, with an instinctive liking for a methodical life and the safe speculations of a small business.

Three months after his arrival, Pierre, pursuing his system of compensation, married him to his young daughter Marthe,[*] whom he did not know how to dispose of. The two young people fell in love with each other quite suddenly, in a few days. A peculiar circumstance had doubtless determined and enhanced their mutual affection. There was a remarkably close resemblance between them, suggesting that of brother and sister. Francois inherited, through Ursule, the face of his grandmother Adelaide. Marthe's case was still more curious; she was an equally exact portrait of Adelaide, although Pierre Rougon had none of his mother's features distinctly marked; the physical resemblance had, as it were, passed over Pierre, to reappear in his daughter. The similarity between husband and wife went, however, no further than their faces; if the worthy son of a steady matter-of-fact hatter was distinguishable in Francois, Marthe showed the nervousness and mental weakness of her grandmother. Perhaps it was this combination of physical resemblance and moral dissimilarity which threw the young people into each other's arms. From 1840 to 1844 they had three children. Francois remained in his uncle's employ until the latter retired. Pierre had desired to sell him the business, but the young man knew what small chance there was of making a fortune in trade at Plassans; so he declined the offer and repaired to Marseilles, where he established himself with his little savings.

[*] Both Francois and Marthe figure largely in The Conquest
of Plassans.

Macquart soon had to abandon all hope of dragging this big industrious fellow into his campaign against the Rougons; whereupon, with all the spite of a lazybones, he regarded him as a cunning miser. He fancied, however, that he had discovered the accomplice he was seeking in Mouret's second son, a lad of fifteen years of age. Young Silvere had never even been to school at the time when Mouret was found hanging among his wife's skirts. His elder brother, not knowing what to do with him, took him also to his uncle's. The latter made a wry face on beholding the child; he had no intention of carrying his compensation so far as to feed a useless mouth. Thus Silvere, to whom Felicite also took a dislike, was growing up in tears, like an unfortunate little outcast, when his grandmother Adelaide, during one of the rare visits she paid the Rougons, took pity on him, and expressed a wish to have him with her. Pierre was delighted; he let the child go, without even suggesting an increase of the paltry allowance that he made Adelaide, and which henceforward would have to suffice for two.

Adelaide was then nearly seventy-five years of age. Grown old while leading a cloistered existence, she was no longer the lanky ardent girl who formerly ran to embrace the smuggler Macquart. She had stiffened and hardened in her hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre, that dismal silent hole where she lived entirely alone on potatoes and dry vegetables, and which she did not leave once in the course of a month. On seeing her pass, you might have thought her to be one of those delicately white old nuns with automatic gait, whom the cloister has kept apart from all the concerns of this world. Her pale face, always scrupulously girt with a white cap, looked like that of a dying woman; a vague, calm countenance it was, wearing an air of supreme indifference. Prolonged taciturnity had made her dumb; the darkness of her dwelling and the continual sight of the same objects had dulled her glance and given her eyes the limpidity of spring water. Absolute renunciation, slow physical and moral death, had little by little converted this crazy amorosa into a grave matron. When, as often happened, a blank stare came into her eyes, and she gazed before her without seeing anything, one could detect utter, internal void through those deep bright cavities.

Nothing now remained of her former voluptuous ardour but weariness of the flesh and a senile tremor of the hands. She had once loved like a she-wolf, but was now wasted, already sufficiently worn out for the grave. There had been strange workings of her nerves during her long years of chastity. A dissolute life would perhaps have wrecked her less than the slow hidden ravages of unsatisfied fever which had modified her organism.

Sometimes, even now, this moribund, pale old woman, who seemed to have no blood left in her, was seized with nervous fits like electric shocks, which galvanised her, and for an hour brought her atrocious intensity of life. She would lie on her bed rigid, with her eyes open; then hiccoughs would come upon her and she would writhe and struggle, acquiring the frightful strength of those hysterical madwomen whom one has to tie down in order to prevent them from breaking their heads against a wall. This return to former vigour, these sudden attacks, gave her a terrible shock. When she came to again, she would stagger about with such a scared, stupefied look, that the gossips of the Faubourg used to say: "She's been drinking, the crazy old thing!"

Little Silvere's childish smile was for her the last pale ray which brought some warmth to her frozen limbs. Weary of solitude, and frightened at the thought of dying alone in one of her fits, she had asked to have the child. With the little fellow running about near her, she felt secure against death. Without relinquishing her habits of taciturnity, or seeking to render her automatic movements more supple, she conceived inexpressible affection for him. Stiff and speechless, she would watch him playing for hours together, listening with delight to the intolerable noise with which he filled the old hovel. That tomb had resounded with uproar ever since Silvere had been running about it, bestriding broomsticks, knocking up against the doors, and shouting and crying. He brought Adelaide back to the world, as it were; she looked after him with the most adorable awkwardness; she who, in her youth, had neglected the duties of a mother, now felt the divine pleasures of maternity in washing his face, dressing him, and watching over his sickly life. It was a reawakening of love, a last soothing passion which heaven had granted to this woman who had been so ravaged by the want of some one to love; the touching agony of a heart that had lived amidst the most acute desires, and which was now dying full of love for a child.

She was already too far gone to pour forth the babble of good plump grandmothers; she adored the child in secret with the bashfulness of a young girl, without knowing how to fondle him. Sometimes she took him on her knees, and gazed at him for a long time with her pale eyes. When the little one, frightened by her mute white visage, began to cry, she seemed perplexed by what she had done, and quickly put him down upon the floor without even kissing him. Perhaps she recognised in him a faint resemblance to Macquart the poacher.

Silvere grew up, ever tete-a-tete with Adelaide. With childish cajolery he used to call her aunt Dide, a name which ultimately clung to the old woman; the word "aunt" employed in this way is simply a term of endearment in Provence. The child entertained singular affection, not unmixed with respectful terror, for his grandmother. During her nervous fits, when he was quite a little boy, he ran away from her, crying, terrified by her disfigured countenance; and he came back very timidly after the attack, ready to run away again, as though the old woman were disposed to beat him. Later on, however, when he was twelve years old, he would stop there bravely and watch in order that she might not hurt herself by falling off the bed. He stood for hours holding her tightly in his arms to subdue the rude shocks which distorted her. During intervals of calmness he would gaze with pity on her convulsed features and withered frame, over which her skirts lay like a shroud. These hidden dramas, which recurred every month, this old woman as rigid as a corpse, this child bent over her, silently watching for the return of consciousness, made up amidst the darkness of the hovel a strange picture of mournful horror and broken-hearted tenderness.

When aunt Dide came round, she would get up with difficulty, and set about her work in the hovel without even questioning Silvere. She remembered nothing, and the child, from a sort of instinctive prudence, avoided the least allusion to what had taken place. These recurring fits, more than anything else, strengthened Silvere's deep attachment for his grandmother. In the same manner as she adored him without any garrulous effusiveness, he felt a secret, almost bashful, affection for her. While he was really very grateful to her for having taken him in and brought him up, he could not help regarding her as an extraordinary creature, a prey to some strange malady, whom he ought to pity and respect. No doubt there was not sufficient life left in Adelaide; she was too white and too stiff for Silvere to throw himself on her neck. Thus they lived together amidst melancholy silence, in the depths of which they felt the tremor of boundless love.

The sad, solemn atmosphere, which he had breathed from childhood, gave Silvere a strong heart, in which gathered every form of enthusiasm. He early became a serious, thoughtful little man, seeking instruction with a kind of stubbornness. He only learnt a little spelling and arithmetic at the school of the Christian Brothers, which he was compelled to leave when he was but twelve years old, on account of his apprenticeship. He never acquired the first rudiments of knowledge. However, he read all the odd volumes which fell into his hands, and thus provided himself with strange equipment; he had some notions of a multitude of subjects, ill-digested notions, which he could never classify distinctly in his head. When he was quite young, he had been in the habit of playing in the workshop of a master wheelwright, a worthy man named Vian, who lived at the entrance of the blind-alley in front of the Aire Saint-Mittre where he stored his timber. Silvere used to jump up on the wheels of the tilted carts undergoing repair, and amuse himself by dragging about the heavy tools which his tiny hands could scarcely lift. One of his greatest pleasures, too, was to assist the workmen by holding some piece of wood for them, or bringing them the iron-work which they required. When he had grown older he naturally became apprenticed to Vian. The latter had taken a liking to the little fellow who was always kicking about his heels, and asked Adelaide to let him come, refusing to take anything for his board and lodging. Silvere eagerly accepted, already foreseeing the time when he would be able to make his poor aunt Dide some return for all she had spent upon him.

In a short time he became an excellent workman. He cherished, however, much higher ambitions. Having once seen, at a coachbuilder's at Plassans, a fine new carriage, shining with varnish, he vowed that he would one day build carriages himself. He remembered this carriage as a rare and unique work of art, an ideal towards which his aspirations should tend. The tilted carts at which he worked in Vian's shop, those carts which he had lovingly cherished, now seemed unworthy of his affections. He began to attend the local drawing-school, where he formed a connection with a youngster who had left college, and who lent him an old treatise on geometry. He plunged into this study without a guide, racking his brains for weeks together in order to grasp the simplest problem in the world. In this matter he gradually became one of those learned workmen who can hardly sign their name and yet talk about algebra as though it were an intimate friend.

Nothing unsettles the mind so much as this desultory kind of education, which reposes on no firm basis. Most frequently such scraps of knowledge convey an absolutely false idea of the highest truths, and render persons of limited intellect insufferably stupid. In Silvere's case, however, his scraps of stolen knowledge only augmented his liberal aspirations. He was conscious of horizons which at present remained closed to him. He formed for himself divine conceptions of things beyond his reach, and lived on, regarding in a deep, innocent, religious way the noble thoughts and grand conceptions towards which he was raising himself, but which he could not as yet comprehend. He was one of the simple-minded, one whose simplicity was divine, and who had remained on the threshold of the temple, kneeling before the tapers which from a distance he took for stars.

The hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre consisted, in the first place, of a large room into which the street door opened. The only pieces of furniture in this room, which had a stone floor, and served both as a kitchen and a dining-room, were some straw-seated chairs, a table on trestles, and an old coffer which Adelaide had converted into a sofa, by spreading a piece of woollen stuff over the lid. In the left hand corner of the large fireplace stood a plaster image of the Holy Virgin, surrounded by artificial flowers; she is the traditional good mother of all old Provencal women, however irreligious they may be. A passage led from the room into a yard situated at the rear of the house; in this yard there was a well. Aunt Dide's bedroom was on the left side of the passage; it was a little apartment containing an iron bedstead and one chair; Silvere slept in a still smaller room on the right hand side, just large enough for a trestle bedstead; and he had been obliged to plan a set of shelves, reaching up to the ceiling, to keep by him all those dear odd volumes which he saved his sous to purchase from a neighbouring general dealer. When he read at night-time, he would hang his lamp on a nail at the head of the bed. If his grandmother had an attack, he merely had to leap out at the first gasp to be at her side in a moment.

The young man led the life of a child. He passed his existence in this lonely spot. Like his father, he felt a dislike for taverns and Sunday strolling. His mates wounded his delicate susceptibilities by their coarse jokes. He preferred to read, to rack his rain over some simple geometrical problem. Since aunt Dide had entrusted him with the little household commissions she did not go out at all, but ceased all intercourse even with her family. The young man sometimes thought of her forlornness; he reflected that the poor old woman lived but a few steps from the children who strove to forget her, as though she were dead; and this made him love her all the more, for himself and for the others. When he at times entertained a vague idea that aunt Dide might be expiating some former transgressions, he would say to himself: "I was born to pardon her."

A nature such as Silvere's, ardent yet self-restrained, naturally cherished the most exalted republican ideas. At night, in his little hovel, Silvere would again and again read a work of Rousseau's which he had picked up at the neighbouring dealer's among a number of old locks. The reading of this book kept him awake till daylight. Amidst his dream of universal happiness so dear to the poor, the words liberty, equality, fraternity, rang in his ears like those sonorous sacred calls of the bells, at the sound of which the faithful fall upon their knees. When, therefore, he learnt that the Republic had just been proclaimed in France he fancied that the whole world would enjoy a life of celestial beatitude. His knowledge, though imperfect, made him see farther than other workmen; his aspirations did not stop at daily bread; but his extreme ingenuousness, his complete ignorance of mankind, kept him in the dreamland of theory, a Garden of Eden where universal justice reigned. His paradise was for a long time a delightful spot in which he forgot himself.

When he came to perceive that things did not go on quite satisfactorily in the best of republics he was sorely grieved, and indulged in another dream, that of compelling men to be happy even by force. Every act which seemed to him prejudicial to the interest of the people roused him to revengeful indignation. Though he was as gentle as a child, he cherished the fiercest political animosity. He would not have killed a fly, and yet he was for ever talking of a call to arms. Liberty was his passion, an unreasoning, absolute passion, to which he gave all the feverish ardour of his blood. Blinded by enthusiasm, he was both too ignorant and too learned to be tolerant, and would not allow for men's weaknesses; he required an ideal government of perfect justice and perfect liberty. It was at this period that Antoine Macquart thought of setting him against the Rougons. He fancied that this young enthusiast would work terrible havoc if he were only exasperated to the proper pitch. This calculation was not altogether devoid of shrewdness.

Such being Antoine's scheme, he tried to induce Silvere to visit him, by professing inordinate admiration for the young man's ideas. But he very nearly compromised the whole matter at the outset. He had a way of regarding the triumph of the Republic as a question of personal interest, as an era of happy idleness and endless junketing, which chilled his nephew's purely moral aspirations. However, he perceived that he was on the wrong track, and plunged into strange bathos, a string of empty but high-sounding words, which Silvere accepted as a satisfactory proof of his civism. Before long the uncle and the nephew saw each other two or three times a week. During their long discussions, in which the fate of the country was flatly settled, Antoine endeavoured to persuade the young man that the Rougons' drawing-room was the chief obstacle to the welfare of France. But he again made a false move by calling his mother "old jade" in Silvere's presence. He even repeated to him the early scandals about the poor woman. The young man blushed for shame, but listened without interruption. He had not asked his uncle for this information; he felt heart-broken by such confidences, which wounded his feeling of respectful affection for aunt Dide. From that time forward he lavished yet more attention upon his grandmother, greeting her always with pleasant smiles and looks of forgiveness. However, Macquart felt that he had acted foolishly, and strove to take advantage of Silvere's affection for Adelaide by charging the Rougons with her forlornness and poverty. According to him, he had always been the best of sons, whereas his brother had behaved disgracefully; Pierre had robbed his mother, and now, when she was penniless, he was ashamed of her. He never ceased descanting on this subject. Silvere thereupon became indignant with his uncle Pierre, much to the satisfaction of his uncle Antoine.

The scene was much the same every time the young man called. He used to come in the evening, while the Macquarts were at dinner. The father would be swallowing some potato stew with a growl, picking out the pieces of bacon, and watching the dish when it passed into the hands of Jean and Gervaise.

"You see, Silvere," he would say with a sullen rage which was ill-concealed beneath his air of cynical indifference, "more potatoes, always potatoes! We never eat anything else now. Meat is only for rich people. It's getting quite impossible to make both ends meet with children who have the devil's appetite and their own too."

Gervaise and Jean bent over their plates, no longer even daring to cut some bread. Silvere, who in his dream lived in heaven, did not grasp the situation. In a calm voice he pronounced these storm-laden words:

"But you should work, uncle."

"Ah! yes," sneered Macquart, stung to the quick. "You want me to work, eh! To let those beggars, the rich folk, continue to prey upon me. I should earn probably twenty sous a day, and ruin my constitution. It's worth while, isn't it?"

"Everyone earns what he can," the young man replied. "Twenty sous are twenty sous; and it all helps in a home. Besides, you're an old soldier, why don't you seek some employment?"

Fine would then interpose, with a thoughtlessness of which she soon repented.

"That's what I'm always telling him," said she. "The market inspector wants an assistant; I mentioned my husband to him, and he seems well disposed towards us."

But Macquart interrupted her with a fulminating glance. "Eh! hold your tongue," he growled with suppressed anger. "Women never know what they're talking about! Nobody would have me; my opinions are too well-known."

Every time he was offered employment he displayed similar irritation. He did not cease, however, to ask for situations, though he always refused such as were found for him, assigning the most extraordinary reasons. When pressed upon the point he became terrible.

If Jean were to take up a newspaper after dinner he would at once exclaim: "You'd better go to bed. You'll be getting up late to-morrow, and that'll be another day lost. To think of that young rascal coming home with eight francs short last week! However, I've requested his master not give him his money in future; I'll call for it myself."

Jean would go to bed to avoid his father's recriminations. He had but little sympathy with Silvere; politics bored him, and he thought his cousin "cracked." When only the women remained, if they unfortunately started some whispered converse after clearing the table, Macquart would cry: "Now, you idlers! Is there nothing that requires mending? we're all in rags. Look here, Gervaise, I was at your mistress's to-day, and I learnt some fine things. You're a good-for-nothing, a gad-about."

Gervaise, now a grown girl of more than twenty, coloured up at thus being scolded in the presence of Silvere, who himself felt uncomfortable. One evening, having come rather late, when his uncle was not at home, he had found the mother and daughter intoxicated before an empty bottle. From that time he could never see his cousin without recalling the disgraceful spectacle she had presented, with the maudlin grin and large red patches on her poor, pale, puny face. He was not less shocked by the nasty stories that circulated with regard to her. He sometimes looked at her stealthily, with the timid surprise of a schoolboy in the presence of a disreputable character.

When the two women had taken up their needles, and were ruining their eyesight in order to mend his old shirts, Macquart, taking the best seat, would throw himself back with an air of delicious comfort, and sip and smoke like a man who relishes his laziness. This was the time when the old rogue generally railed against the wealthy for living on the sweat of the poor man's brow. He was superbly indignant with the gentlemen of the new town, who lived so idly, and compelled the poor to keep them in luxury. The fragments of communistic notions which he culled from the newspapers in the morning became grotesque and monstrous on falling from his lips. He would talk of a time near at hand when no one would be obliged to work. He always, however, kept his fiercest animosity for the Rougons. He never could digest the potatoes he had eaten.

"I saw that vile creature Felicite buying a chicken in the market this morning," he would say. "Those robbers of inheritances must eat chicken, forsooth!"

"Aunt Dide," interposed Silvere, "says that uncle Pierre was very kind to you when you left the army. Didn't he spend a large sum of money in lodging and clothing you?"

"A large sum of money!" roared Macquart in exasperation; "your grandmother is mad. It was those thieves who spread those reports themselves, so as to close my mouth. I never had anything."

Fine again foolishly interfered, reminding him that he had received two hundred francs, besides a suit of clothes and a year's rent. Antoine thereupon shouted to her to hold her tongue, and continued, with increasing fury: "Two hundred francs! A fine thing! I want my due, ten thousand francs. Ah! yes, talk of the hole they shoved me into like a dog, and the old frock-coat which Pierre gave me because he was ashamed to wear it any longer himself, it was so dirty and ragged!"

He was not speaking the truth; but, seeing the rage that he was in, nobody ventured to protest any further. Then, turning towards Silvere: "It's very stupid of you to defend them!" he added. "They robbed your mother, who, good woman, would be alive now if she had had the means of taking care of herself."

"Oh! you're not just, uncle," the young man said; "my mother did not die for want of attention, and I'm certain my father would never have accepted a sou from his wife's family!"

"Pooh! don't talk to me! your father would have taken the money just like anybody else. We were disgracefully plundered, and it's high time we had our rights."

Then Macquart, for the hundredth time, began to recount the story of the fifty thousand francs. His nephew, who knew it by heart, and all the variations with which he embellished it, listened to him rather impatiently.

"If you were a man," Antoine would say in conclusion, "you would come some day with me, and we would kick up a nice row at the Rougons. We would not leave without having some money given us."

Silvere, however, grew serious, and frankly replied: "If those wretches robbed us, so much the worse for them. I don't want their money. You see, uncle, it's not for us to fall on our relatives. If they've done wrong, well, one of these days they'll be severely punished for it."

"Ah! what a big simpleton you are!" the uncle cried. "When we have the upper hand, you'll see whether I sha'n't settle my own little affairs myself. God cares a lot about us indeed! What a foul family ours is! Even if I were starving to death, not one of those scoundrels would throw me a dry crust."

Whenever Macquart touched upon this subject, he proved inexhaustible. He bared all his bleeding wounds of envy and covetousness. He grew mad with rage when he came to think that he was the only unlucky one in the family, and was forced to eat potatoes, while the others had meat to their heart's content. He would pass all his relations in review, even his grand-nephews, and find some grievance and reason for threatening every one of them.

"Yes, yes," he repeated bitterly, "they'd leave me to die like a dog."

Gervaise, without raising her head or ceasing to ply her needle, would sometimes say timidly: "Still, father, cousin Pascal was very kind to us, last year, when you were ill."

"He attended you without charging a sou," continued Fine, coming to her daughter's aid, "and he often slipped a five-franc piece into my hand to make you some broth."

"He! he'd have killed me if I hadn't had a strong constitution!" Macquart retorted. "Hold your tongues, you fools! You'd let yourselves be twisted about like children. They'd all like to see me dead. When I'm ill again, I beg you not to go and fetch my nephew, for I didn't feel at all comfortable in his hands. He's only a twopenny-halfpenny doctor, and hasn't got a decent patient in all his practice."

When once Macquart was fully launched, he could not stop. "It's like that little viper, Aristide," he would say, "a false brother, a traitor. Are you taken in by his articles in the 'Independant,' Silvere? You would be a fine fool if you were. They're not even written in good French; I've always maintained that this contraband Republican is in league with his worthy father to humbug us. You'll see how he'll turn his coat. And his brother, the illustrious Eugene, that big blockhead of whom the Rougons make such a fuss! Why, they've got the impudence to assert that he occupies a good position in Paris! I know something about his position; he's employed at the Rue de Jerusalem; he's a police spy."

"Who told you so? You know nothing about it," interrupted Silvere, whose upright spirit at last felt hurt by his uncle's lying accusations.

"Ah! I know nothing about it? Do you think so? I tell you he is a police spy. You'll be shorn like a lamb one of these days, with your benevolence. You're not manly enough. I don't want to say anything against your brother Francois; but, if I were in your place, I shouldn't like the scurvy manner in which he treats you. He earns a heap of money at Marseilles, and yet he never sends you a paltry twenty-franc pierce for pocket money. If ever you become poor, I shouldn't advise you to look to him for anything."

"I've no need of anybody," the young man replied in a proud and slightly injured tone of voice. "My own work suffices for aunt Dide and myself. You're cruel, uncle."

"I only say what's true, that's all. I should like to open your eyes. Our family is a disreputable lot; it's sad but true. Even that little Maxime, Aristide's son, that little nine-year-old brat, pokes his tongue out at me when me meets me. That child will some day beat his own mother, and a good job too! Say what you like, all those folks don't deserve their luck; but it's always like this in families, the good ones suffer while the bad ones make their fortunes."

All this dirty linen, which Macquart washed with such complacency before his nephew, profoundly disgusted the young man. He would have liked to soar back into his dream. As soon as he began to show unmistakable signs of impatience, Antoine would employ strong expedients to exasperate him against their relatives.

"Defend them! Defend them!" he would say, appearing to calm down. "I, for my part, have arranged to have nothing more to do with them. I only mention the matter out of pity for my poor mother, whom all that gang treat in a most revolting manner."

"They are wretches!" Silvere murmured.

"Oh! you don't know, you don't understand. These Rougons pour all sorts of insults and abuse on the good woman. Aristide has forbidden his son even to recognise her. Felicite talks of having her placed in a lunatic asylum."

The young man, as white as a sheet, abruptly interrupted his uncle: "Enough!" he cried. "I don't want to know any more about it. There will have to be an end to all this."

"I'll hold my tongue, since it annoys you," the old rascal replied, feigning a good-natured manner. "Still, there are some things that you ought not to be ignorant of, unless you want to play the part of a fool."

Macquart, while exerting himself to set Silvere against the Rougons, experienced the keenest pleasure on drawing tears of anguish from the young man's eyes. He detested him, perhaps, more than he did the others, and this because he was an excellent workman and never drank. He brought all his instincts of refined cruelty into play, in order to invent atrocious falsehoods which should sting the poor lad to the heart; then he revelled in his pallor, his trembling hands and his heart-rending looks, with the delight of some evil spirit who measures his stabs and finds that he has struck his victim in the right place. When he thought that he had wounded and exasperated Silvere sufficiently, he would at last touch upon politics.

"I've been assured," he would say, lowering his voice, "that the Rougons are preparing some treachery."

"Treachery?" Silvere asked, becoming attentive.

"Yes, one of these nights they are going to seize all the good citizens of the town and throw them into prison."

The young man was at first disposed to doubt it, but his uncle gave precise details; he spoke of lists that had been drawn up, he mentioned the persons whose names were on these lists, he indicated in what manner, at what hour, and under what circumstances the plot would be carried into effect. Silvere gradually allowed himself to be taken in by this old woman's tale, and was soon raving against the enemies of the Republic.

"It's they that we shall have to reduce to impotence if they persist in betraying the country!" he cried. "And what do they intend to do with the citizens whom they arrest?"

"What do they intend to do with them? Why, they will shoot them in the lowest dungeons of the prison, of course," replied Macquart, with a hoarse laugh. And as the young man, stupefied with horror, looked at him without knowing what to say: "This will not be the first lot to be assassinated there," he continued. "You need only go and prowl about the Palais de Justice of an evening to hear the shots and groans."

"Oh, the wretches!" Silvere murmured.

Thereupon uncle and nephew launched out into high politics. Fine and Gervaise, on finding them hotly debating things, quietly went to bed without attracting their attention. Then the two men remained together till midnight, commenting on the news from Paris and discussing the approaching and inevitable struggle. Macquart bitterly denounced the men of his own party, Silvere dreamed his dream of ideal liberty aloud, and for himself only. Strange conversations these were, during which the uncle poured out many a little nip for himself, and from which the nephew emerged quite intoxicated with enthusiasm. Antoine, however, never succeeded in obtaining from the young Republican any perfidious suggestion or play of warfare against the Rougons. In vain he tried to goad him on; he seldom heard him suggest aught but an appeal to eternal justice, which sooner or later would punish the evil-doers.

The ingenuous youth did indeed speak warmly of taking up arms and massacring the enemies of the Republic; but, as soon as these enemies strayed out of his dream or became personified in his uncle Pierre or any other person of his acquaintance, he relied upon heaven to spare him the horror of shedding blood. It is very probable that he would have ceased visiting Macquart, whose jealous fury made him so uncomfortable, if he had not tasted the pleasure of being able to speak freely of his dear Republic there. In the end, however, his uncle exercised decisive influence over his destiny; he irritated his nerves by his everlasting diatribes, and succeeded in making him eager for an armed struggle, the conquest of universal happiness by violence.

When Silvere reached his sixteenth year, Macquart had him admitted into the secret society of the Montagnards, a powerful association whose influence extended throughout Southern France. From that moment the young Republican gazed with longing eyes at the smuggler's carbine, which Adelaide had hung over her chimney-piece. Once night, while his grandmother was asleep, he cleaned and put it in proper condition. Then he replaced it on its nail and waited, indulging in brilliant reveries, fancying gigantic epics, Homeric struggles, and knightly tournaments, whence the defenders of liberty would emerge victorious and acclaimed by the whole world.

Macquart meantime was not discouraged. He said to himself that he would be able to strangle the Rougons alone if he could ever get them into a corner. His envious rage and slothful greed were increased by certain successive accidents which compelled him to resume work. In the early part of 1850 Fine died, almost suddenly, from inflammation of the lungs, which she had caught by going one evening to wash the family linen in the Viorne, and carrying it home wet on her back. She returned soaked with water and perspiration, bowed down by her load, which was terribly heavy, and she never recovered.

Her death filled Macquart with consternation. His most reliable source of income was gone. When, a few days later, he sold the caldron in which his wife had boiled her chestnuts, and the wooden horse which she used in reseating old chairs, he foully accused the Divinity of having robbed him of that strong strapping woman of whom he had often felt ashamed, but whose real worth he now appreciated. He now also fell upon the children's earnings with greater avidity than ever. But, a month later, Gervaise, tired of his continual exactions, ran away with her two children and Lantier, whose mother was dead. The lovers took refuge in Paris. Antoine, overwhelmed, vented his rage against his daughter by expressing the hope that she might die in hospital like most of her kind. This abuse did not, however, improve the situation, which was decidedly becoming bad. Jean soon followed his sister's example. He waited for pay-day to come round, and then contrived to receive the money himself. As he was leaving he told one of his friends, who repeated it to Antoine, that he would no longer keep his lazy father, and that if the latter should take it into his head to have him brought back by the gendarmes he would touch neither saw nor plane.

On the morrow, when Antoine, having vainly sought him, found himself alone and penniless in the house where for twenty years he had been comfortably kept, he flew into the most frantic rage, kicked the furniture about, and yelled the vilest imprecations. Then he sank down exhausted, and began to drag himself about and moan like a convalescent. The fear of having to earn his bread made him positively ill. When Silvere came to see him, he complained, with tears, of his children's ingratitude. Had he not always been a good father to them? Jean and Gervaise were monsters, who had made him an evil return for all he had done for them. Now they abandoned him because he was old, and they could not get anything more out of him!

"But uncle," said Silvere, "you are not yet too old to work!"

Macquart, coughing and stooping, shook his head mournfully, as if to say that he could not bear the least fatigue for any length of time. Just as his nephew was about to withdraw, he borrowed ten francs of him. Then for a month he lived by taking his children's old clothes, one by one, to a second-hand dealer's, and in the same way, little by little, he sold all the small articles in the house. Soon nothing remained but a table, a chair, his bed, and the clothes on his back. He ended by exchanging the walnut-wood bedstead for a plain strap one. When he had exhausted all his resources, he cried with rage; and, with the fierce pallor of a man who is resigned to suicide, he went to look for the bundle of osier that he had forgotten in some corner for a quarter of a century past. As he took it up he seemed to be lifting a mountain. However, he again began to plait baskets and hampers, while denouncing the human race for their neglect.

It was particularly at this time that he talked of dividing and sharing the riches of the wealthy. He showed himself terrible. His speeches kept up a constant conflagration in the tavern, where his furious looks secured him unlimited credit. Moreover, he only worked when he had been unable to get a five-franc piece out of Silvere or a comrade. He was no longer "Monsieur" Macquart, the clean-shaven workman, who wore his Sunday clothes every day and played the gentleman; he again became the big slovenly devil who had once speculated on his rags. Felicite did not dare to go to market now that he was so often coming there to sell his baskets. He once had a violent quarrel with her there. His hatred against the Rougons grew with his wretchedness. He swore, with horrible threats, that he would wreak justice himself, since the rich were leagued together to compel him to toil.

In this state of mind, he welcomed the Coup d'Etat with the ardent, obstreperous delight of a hound scenting the quarry. As the few honest Liberals in the town had failed to arrive at an understanding amongst themselves, and therefore kept apart, he became naturally one of the most prominent agents of the insurrection. The working classes, notwithstanding the unfavourable opinion which they at last entertained of this lazy fellow, would, when the time arrived, have to accept him as a rallying flag. On the first few days, however, the town remained quiet, and Macquart thought that his plans were frustrated. It was not until the news arrived of the rising of the rural districts that he recovered hope. For his own part he would not have left Plassans for all the world; accordingly he invented some pretext for not following those workmen who, on the Sunday morning, set off to join the insurrectionary band of La Palud and Saint-Martin-de-Vaulx.

On the evening of the same day he was sitting in some disreputable tavern of the old quarter with a few friends, when a comrade came to inform him that the insurgents were only a few miles from Plassans. This news had just been brought by an express, who had succeeded in making his way into the town, and had been charged to get the gates opened for the column. There was an outburst of triumph. Macquart, especially, appeared to be delirious with enthusiasm. The unforeseen arrival of the insurgents seemed to him a delicate attention of Providence for his own particular benefit. His hands trembled at the idea that he would soon hold the Rougons by the throat.

He hastily quitted the tavern with his friends. All the Republicans who had not yet left the town were soon assembled on the Cours Sauvaire. It was this band that Rougon had perceived as he was hastening to conceal himself in his mother's house. When the band had reached the top of the Rue de la Banne, Macquart, who had stationed himself at the rear, detained four of his companions, big fellows who were not over-burdened with brains and whom he swayed by his tavern bluster. He easily persuaded them that the enemies of the Republic must be arrested immediately if they wished to prevent the greatest calamities. The truth was that he feared Pierre might escape him in the midst of the confusion which the entry of the insurgents would produce. However, the four big fellows followed him with exemplary docility, and knocked violently at the door of the Rougons' abode. In this critical situation Felicite displayed admirable courage. She went down and opened the street door herself.

"We want to go upstairs into your rooms," Macquart said to her brutally.

"Very well, gentlemen, walk up," she replied with ironical politeness, pretending that she did not recognise her brother-in-law.

Once upstairs, Macquart ordered her to fetch her husband.

"My husband is not here," she said with perfect calmness; "he is travelling on business. He took the diligence for Marseilles at six o'clock this evening."

Antoine at this declaration, which Felicite uttered in a clear voice, made a gesture of rage. He rushed through the drawing-room, and then into the bedroom, turned the bed up, looked behind the curtains and under the furniture. The four big fellows assisted him. They searched the place for a quarter of an hour. Felicite meantime quietly seated herself on the drawing-room sofa, and began to fasten the strings of her petticoats, like a person who has been surprised in her sleep and has not had time to dress properly.

"It's true then, he's run away, the coward!" Macquart muttered on returning to the drawing-room.

Nevertheless, he continued to look about him with a suspicious air. He felt a presentiment that Pierre could not have given up the game at the decisive moment. At last he approached Felicite, who was yawning: "Show us the place where your husband is hidden," he said to her, "and I promise no harm shall be done to him."

"I have told you the truth," she replied impatiently. "I can't deliver my husband to you, as he's not here. You have searched everywhere, haven't you? Then leave me alone now."

Macquart, exasperated by her composure, was just going to strike her, when a rumbling noise arose from the street. It was the column of insurgents entering the Rue de la Banne.

He then had to leave the yellow drawing-room, after shaking his fist at his sister-in-law, calling her an old jade, and threatening that he would soon return. At the foot of the staircase, he took one of the men who accompanied him, a navvy named Cassoute, the most wooden-headed of the four, and ordered him to sit on the first step, and remain there.

"You must come and inform me," he said to him, "if you see the scoundrel from upstairs return."

The man sat down heavily. When Macquart reached the pavement, he raised his eyes and observed Felicite leaning out of the window of the yellow-drawing room, watching the march past of the insurgents, as if it was nothing but a regiment passing through the town to the strains of its band. This last sign of perfect composure irritated him to such a degree that he was almost tempted to go up again and throw the old woman into the street. However, he followed the column, muttering in a hoarse voice: "Yes, yes, look at us passing. We'll see whether you will station yourself at your balcony to-morrow."

It was nearly eleven o'clock at night when the insurgents entered the town by the Porte de Rome. The workmen remaining in Plassans had opened the gate for them, in spite of the wailings of the keeper, from whom they could only wrest the keys by force. This man, very jealous of his office, stood dumbfoundered in the presence of the surging crowd. To think of it! he, who never allowed more than one person to pass in at a time, and then only after a prolonged examination of his face! And he murmured that he was dishonoured. The men of Plassans were still marching at the head of the column by way of guiding the others; Miette, who was in the front rank, with Silvere on her left, held up her banner more proudly than ever now that she could divine behind the closed blinds the scared looks of well-to-do bourgeois startled out of their sleep. The insurgents passed along the Rue de Rome and the Rue de la Banne slowly and warily; at every crossway, although they well knew the quiet disposition of the inhabitants, they feared they might be received with bullets. The town seemed lifeless, however; there was scarcely a stifled exclamation to be heard at the windows. Only five or six shutters opened. Some old householder then appeared in his night-shirt, candle in hand, and leant out to obtain a better view; but as soon as he distinguished the tall red girl who appeared to be drawing that crowd of black demons behind her, he hastily closed his window again, terrified by such a diabolical apparition.

The silence of the slumbering town reassured the insurgents, who ventured to make their way through the lanes of the old quarter, and thus reached the market-place and the Place de l'Hotel-de-Ville, which was connected by a short but broad street. These open spaces, planted with slender trees, were brilliantly illumined by the moon. Against the clear sky the recently restored town-hall appeared like a large patch of crude whiteness, the fine black lines of the wrought-iron arabesques of the first-floor balcony showing in bold relief. Several persons could be plainly distinguished standing on this balcony, the mayor, Commander Sicardot, three or four municipal councillors, and other functionaries. The doors below were closed. The three thousand Republicans, who covered both open spaces, halted with upraised heads, ready to force the doors with a single push.

The arrival of the insurrectionary column at such an hour took the authorities by surprise. Before repairing to the mayor's, Commander Sicardot had taken time to don his uniform. He then had to run and rouse the mayor. When the keeper of the Porte de Rome, who had been left free by the insurgents, came to announce that the villains were already in the town, the commander had so far only managed to assemble a score of the national guards. The gendarmes, though their barracks were close by, could not even be warned. It was necessary to shut the town-hall doors in all haste, in order to deliberate. Five minutes later a low continuous rumbling announced the approach of the column.

Monsieur Garconnet, out of hatred to the Republic, would have greatly liked to offer resistance. But he was of a prudent nature, and comprehended the futility of a struggle on finding only a few pale men, who were scarcely awake, around him. So the deliberations did not last long. Sicardot alone was obstinate; he wanted to fight, asserting that twenty men would suffice to bring these three thousand villains to reason. At this Monsieur Garconnet shrugged his shoulders, and declared that the only step to take was to make an honourable capitulation. As the uproar of the mob increased, he went out on the balcony, followed by all the persons present. Silence was gradually obtained. Below, among the black, quivering mass of insurgents, the guns and scythes glittered in the moonlight.

"Who are you, and what do you want?" cried the mayor in a loud voice.

Thereupon a man in a greatcoat, a landowner of La Palud, stepped forward.

"Open the doors," he said, without replying to Monsieur Garconnet's question. "Avoid a fratricidal conflict."

"I call upon you to withdraw," the mayor continued. "I protest in the name of the law."

These words provoked deafening shouts from the crowd. When the tumult had somewhat abated, vehement calls ascended to the balcony. Voices shouted: "It is in the name of the law that we have come here!"

"Your duty as a functionary is to secure respect for the fundamental law of the land, the constitution, which has just been outrageously violated."

"Long live the constitution! Long live the Republic!"

Then as Monsieur Garconnet endeavoured to make himself heard, and continued to invoke his official dignity, the land-owner of La Palud, who was standing under the balcony, interrupted him with great vehemence: "You are now nothing but the functionary of a fallen functionary; we have come to dismiss you from your office."

Hitherto, Commander Sicardot had been ragefully biting his moustache, and muttering insulting words. The sight of the cudgels and scythes exasperated him; and he made desperate efforts to restrain himself from treating these twopenny-halfpenny soldiers, who had not even a gun apiece, as they deserved. But when he heard a gentleman in a mere greatcoat speak of deposing a mayor girded with his scarf, he could no longer contain himself and shouted: "You pack of rascals! If I only had four men and a corporal, I'd come down and pull your ears for you, and make you behave yourselves!"

Less than this was needed to raise a serious disturbance. A long shout rose from the mob as it made a rush for the doors. Monsieur Garconnet, in consternation, hastily quitted the balcony, entreating Sicardot to be reasonable unless he wished to have them massacred. But in two minutes the doors gave way, the people invaded the building and disarmed the national guards. The mayor and the other functionaries present were arrested. Sicardot, who declined to surrender his sword, had to be protected from the fury of some insurgents by the chief of the contingent from Les Tulettes, a man of great self-possession. When the town-hall was in the hands of the Republicans, they led their prisoners to a small cafe in the market-place, and there kept them closely watched.

The insurrectionary army would have avoided marching through Plassans if its leaders had not decided that a little food and a few hours' rest were absolutely necessary for the men. Instead of pushing forward direct to the chief town of the department, the column, owing to the inexcusable weakness and the inexperience of the improvised general who commanded it, was now diverging to the left, making a detour which was destined, ultimately, to lead it to destruction. It was bound for the heights of Sainte-Roure, still about ten leagues distant, and it was in view of this long march that it had been decided to pass through Plassans, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour. It was now half-past eleven.

When Monsieur Garconnet learnt that the band was in quest of provisions, he offered his services to procure them. This functionary formed, under very difficult circumstances, a proper estimate of the situation. Those three thousand starving men would have to be satisfied; it would never do for Plassans, on waking up, to find them still squatting on the pavements; if they withdrew before daybreak they would simply have passed through the slumbering town like an evil dream, like one of those nightmares which depart with the arrival of dawn. And so, although he remained a prisoner, Monsieur Garconnet, followed by two guards, went about knocking at the bakers' doors, and had all the provisions that he could find distributed among the insurgents.

Towards one o'clock the three thousand men began to eat, squatting on the ground, with their weapons between their legs. The market-place and the neighbourhood of the town-hall were turned into vast open-air refectories. In spite of the bitter cold, humorous sallies were exchanged among the swarming multitude, the smallest groups of which showed forth in the brilliant moonlight. The poor famished fellows eagerly devoured their portions while breathing on their fingers to warm them; and, from the depths of adjoining streets, where vague black forms sat on the white thresholds of the houses, there came sudden bursts of laughter. At the windows emboldened, inquisitive women, with silk handkerchiefs tied round their heads, watched the repast of those terrible insurgents, those blood-suckers who went in turn to the market pump to drink a little water in the hollows of their hands.

While the town-hall was being invaded, the gendarmes' barracks, situated a few steps away, in the Rue Canquoin, which leads to the market, had also fallen into the hands of the mob. The gendarmes were surprised in their beds and disarmed in a few minutes. The impetus of the crowd had carried Miette and Silvere along in this direction. The girl, who still clasped her flagstaff to her breast, was pushed against the wall of the barracks, while the young man, carried away by the human wave, penetrated into the interior, and helped his comrades to wrest from the gendarmes the carbines which they had hastily caught up. Silvere, waxing ferocious, intoxicated by the onslaught, attacked a big devil of a gendarme named Rengade, with whom for a few moments he struggled. At last, by a sudden jerk, he succeeded in wresting his carbine from him. But the barrel struck Rengade a violent blow in the face, which put his right eye out. Blood flowed, and, some of it splashing Silvere's hands, quickly brought him to his senses. He looked at his hands, dropped the carbine, and ran out, in a state of frenzy, shaking his fingers.

"You are wounded!" cried Miette.

"No, no," he replied in a stifled voice, "I've just killed a gendarme."

"Is he really dead?" asked Miette.

"I don't know," replied Silvere, "his face was all covered with blood. Come quickly."

Then he hurried the girl away. On reaching the market, he made her sit down on a stone bench, and told her to wait there for him. He was still looking at his hands, muttering something at the same time. Miette at last understood from his disquieted words that he wished to go and kiss his grandmother before leaving.

"Well, go," she said; "don't trouble yourself about me. Wash your hands."

But he went quickly away, keeping his fingers apart, without thinking of washing them at the pump which he passed. Since he had felt Rengade's warm blood on his skin, he had been possessed by one idea, that of running to Aunt Dide's and dipping his hands in the well-trough at the back of the little yard. There only, he thought, would he be able to wash off the stain of that blood. Moreover, all his calm, gentle childhood seemed to return to him; he felt an irresistible longing to take refuge in his grandmother's skirts, if only for a minute. He arrived quite out of breath. Aunt Dide had not gone to bed, a circumstance which at any other time would have greatly surprised Silvere. But on entering he did not even see his uncle Rougon, who was seated in a corner on the old chest. He did not wait for the poor old woman's questions. "Grandmother," he said quickly, "you must forgive me; I'm going to leave with the others. You see I've got blood on me. I believe I've killed a gendarme."

"You've killed a gendarme?" Aunt Dide repeated in a strange voice.

Her eyes gleamed brightly as she fixed them on the red stains. And suddenly she turned towards the chimney-piece. "You've taken the gun," she said; "where's the gun?"

Silvere, who had left the weapon with Miette, swore to her that it was quite safe. And for the very first time, Adelaide made an allusion to the smuggler Macquart in her grandson's presence.

"You'll bring the gun back? You promise me!" she said with singular energy. "It's all I have left of him. You've killed a gendarme; ah, it was the gendarmes who killed him!"

She continued gazing fixedly at Silvere with an air of cruel satisfaction, and apparently without thought of detaining him. She never asked him for any explanation, nor wept like those good grandmothers who always imagine, at sight of the least scratch, that their grandchildren are dying. All her nature was concentrated in one unique thought, to which she at last gave expression with ardent curiosity: "Did you kill the gendarme with the gun?"

Either Silvere did not quite catch what she said, or else he misunderstood her.

"Yes!" he replied. "I'm going to wash my hands."

It was only on returning from the well that he perceived his uncle. Pierre had turned pale on hearing the young man's words. Felicite was indeed right; his family took a pleasure in compromising him. One of his nephews had now killed a gendarme! He would never get the post of receiver of taxes, if he did not prevent this foolish madman from rejoining the insurgents. So he planted himself in front of the door, determined to prevent Silvere from going out.

"Listen," he said to the young fellow, who was greatly surprised to find him there. "I am the head of the family, and I forbid you to leave this house. You're risking both your honour and ours. To-morrow I will try to get you across the frontier."

But Silvere shrugged his shoulders. "Let me pass," he calmly replied. "I'm not a police-spy; I shall not reveal your hiding-place, never fear." And as Rougon continued to speak of the family dignity and the authority with which his seniority invested him: "Do I belong to your family?" the young man continued. "You have always disowned me. To-day, fear has driven you here, because you feel that the day of judgment has arrived. Come, make way! I don't hide myself; I have a duty to perform."

Rougon did not stir. But Aunt Dide, who had listened with a sort of delight to Silvere's vehement language, laid her withered hand on her son's arm. "Get out of the way, Pierre," she said; "the lad must go."

The young man gave his uncle a slight shove, and dashed outside. Then Rougon, having carefully shut the door again, said to his mother in an angry, threatening tone: "If any mischief happens to him it will be your fault. You're an old mad-woman; you don't know what you've just done."

Adelaide, however, did not appear to hear him. She went and threw some vine-branches on the fire, which was going out, and murmured with a vague smile: "I'm used to it. He would remain away for months together, and then come back to me in much better health."

She was no doubt speaking of Macquart.

In the meantime, Silvere hastily regained the market-place. As he approached the spot where he had left Miette, he heard a loud uproar of voices and saw a crowd which made him quicken his steps. A cruel scene had just occurred. Some inquisitive people were walking among the insurgents, while the latter quietly partook of their meal. Amongst these onlookers was Justin Rebufat, the son of the farmer of the Jas-Meiffren, a youth of twenty years old, a sickly, squint-eyed creature, who harboured implacable hatred against his cousin Miette. At home he grudged her the bread she ate, and treated her like a beggar picked up from the gutter out of charity. It is probable that the young girl had rejected his advances. Lank and pale, with ill-proportioned limbs and face all awry, he revenged himself upon her for his own ugliness, and the contempt which the handsome, vigorous girl must have evinced for him. He ardently longed to induce his father to send her about her business; and for this reason he was always spying upon her. For some time past, he had become aware of the meetings with Silvere, and had only awaited a decisive opportunity to reveal everything to his father, Rebufat.

On the evening in question, having seen her leave home at about eight o'clock, Justin's hatred had overpowered him, and he had been unable to keep silent any longer. Rebufat, on hearing his story, fell into a terrible rage, and declared that he would kick the gadabout out of his house should she have the audacity to return. Justin then went to bed, relishing beforehand the fine scene which would take place on the morrow. Then, however, a burning desire came upon him for some immediate foretaste of his revenge. So he dressed himself again and went out. Perhaps he might meet Miette. In that case he was resolved to treat her insolently. This is how he came to witness the arrival of the insurgents, whom he followed to the town-hall with a vague presentiment that he would find the lovers there. And, indeed, he at last caught sight of his cousin on the seat where she was waiting for Silvere. Seeing her wrapped in her long pelisse, with the red flag at her side, resting against a market pillar, he began to sneer and deride her in foul language. The girl, thunderstruck at seeing him, was unable to speak. She wept beneath his abuse, and whist she was overcome by sobbing, bowing her head and hiding her face, Justin called her a convict's daughter, and shouted that old Rebufat would give her a good thrashing should she ever dare to return to Jas-Meiffren.

For a quarter of an hour he thus kept her smarting and trembling. Some people had gathered round, and grinned stupidly at the painful scene. At last a few insurgents interfered, and threatened the young man with exemplary chastisement if he did not leave Miette alone. But Justin, although he retreated, declared that he was not afraid of them. It was just at this moment that Silvere came up. Young Rebufat, on catching sight of him, made a sudden bound, as if to take flight; for he was afraid of him, knowing that he was much stronger than himself. He could not, however, resist the temptation to cast a parting insult on the girl in her lover's presence.

"Ah! I knew very well," he cried, "that the wheelwright could not be far off! You left us to run after that crack-brained fellow, eh? You wretched girl! When's the baptism to be?"

Then he retreated a few steps further on seeing Silvere clench his fists.

"And mind," he continued, with a vile sneer, "don't come to our house again. My father will kick you out if you do! Do you hear?"

But he ran away howling, with bruised visage. For Silvere had bounded upon him and dealt him a blow full in the face. The young man did not pursue him. When he returned to Miette he found her standing up, feverishly wiping her tears away with the palm of her hand. And as he gazed at her tenderly, in order to console her, she made a sudden energetic gesture. "No," she said, "I'm not going to cry any more, you'll see. I'm very glad of it. I don't feel any regret now for having left home. I am free."

She took up the flag and led Silvere back into the midst of the insurgents. It was now nearly two o'clock in the morning. The cold was becoming so intense that the Republicans had risen to their feet and were marching to and fro in order to warm themselves while they finished their bread. At last their leaders gave orders for departure. The column formed again. The prisoners were placed in the middle of it. Besides Monsieur Garconnet and Commander Sicardot, the insurgents had arrested Monsieur Peirotte, the receiver of taxes, and several other functionaries, all of whom they led away.

At this moment Aristide was observed walking about among the groups. In presence of this formidable rising, the dear fellow had thought it imprudent not to remain on friendly terms with the Republicans; but as, on the other hand, he did not desire to compromise himself too much, he had come to bid them farewell with his arm in a sling, complaining bitterly of the accursed injury which prevented him from carrying a weapon. As he walked through the crowd he came across his brother Pascal, provided with a case of surgical instruments and a little portable medicine chest. The doctor informed him, in his quiet, way, that he intended to follow the insurgents. At this Aristide inwardly pronounced him a great fool. At last he himself slunk away, fearing lest the others should entrust the care of the town to him, a post which he deemed exceptionally perilous.

The insurgents could not think of keeping Plassans in their power. The town was animated by so reactionary a spirit that it seemed impossible even to establish a democratic municipal commission there, as had already been done in other places. So they would simply have gone off without taking any further steps if Macquart, prompted and emboldened by his own private animosities, had not offered to hold Plassans in awe, on condition that they left him twenty determined men. These men were given him, and at their head he marched off triumphantly to take possession of the town-hall. Meantime the column of insurgents was wending its way along the Cours Sauvaire, and making its exit by the Grand'-Porte, leaving the streets, which it had traversed like a tempest, silent and deserted in its rear. The high road, whitened by the moonshine, stretched far into the distance. Miette had refused the support of Silvere's arm; she marched on bravely, steady and upright, holding the red flag aloft with both hands, without complaining of the cold which was turning her fingers blue.

CHAPTER V

The high roads stretched far way, white with moonlight.

The insurrectionary army was continuing its heroic march through the cold, clear country. It was like a mighty wave of enthusiasm. The thrill of patriotism, which transported Miette and Silvere, big children that they were, eager for love and liberty, sped, with generous fervour, athwart the sordid intrigues of the Macquarts and the Rougons. At intervals the trumpet-voice of the people rose and drowned the prattle of the yellow drawing-room and the hateful discourses of uncle Antoine. And vulgar, ignoble farce was turned into a great historical drama.

On quitting Plassans, the insurgents had taken the road to Orcheres. They expected to reach that town at about ten o'clock in the morning. The road skirts the course of the Viorne, following at some height the windings of the hillocks, below which the torrent flows. On the left, the plain spreads out like an immense green carpet, dotted here and there with grey villages. On the right, the chain of the Garrigues rears its desolate peaks, its plateaux of stones, its huge rusty boulders that look as though they had been reddened by the sun. The high road, embanked along the riverside, passes on amidst enormous rocks, between which glimpses of the valley are caught at every step. Nothing could be wilder or more strikingly grand than this road out of the hillside. At night time, especially, it inspires one with a feeling of deep awe. The insurgents advanced under the pale light, along what seemed the chief street of some ruined town, bordered on either side with fragments of temples. The moon turned each rock into a broken column, crumbling capital, or stretch of wall pierced with mysterious arches. On high slumbered the mass of the Garrigues, suffused with a milky tinge, and resembling some immense Cyclopean city whose towers, obelisks, houses and high terraces hid one half of the heavens; and in the depths below, on the side of the plain, was a spreading ocean of diffused light, vague and limitless, over which floated masses of luminous haze. The insurrectionary force might well have thought they were following some gigantic causeway, making their rounds along some military road built on the shore of a phosphorescent sea, and circling some unknown Babel.

On the night in question, the Viorne roared hoarsely at the foot of the rocks bordering the route. Amidst the continuous rumbling of the torrent, the insurgents could distinguish the sharp, wailing notes of the tocsin. The villages scattered about the plain, on the other side of the river, were rising, sounding alarm-bells, and lighting signal fires. Till daybreak the marching column, which the persistent tolling of a mournful knell seemed to pursue in the darkness, thus beheld the insurrection spreading along the valley, like a train of powder. The fires showed in the darkness like stains of blood; echoes of distant songs were wafted to them; the whole vague distance, blurred by the whitish vapours of the moon, stirred confusedly, and suddenly broke into a spasm of anger. For leagues and leagues the scene remained the same.

These men, marching on under the blind impetus of the fever with which the events in Paris had inspired Republican hearts, became elated at seeing that long stretch of country quivering with revolt. Intoxicated with enthusiastic belief in the general insurrection of which they dreamed, they fancied that France was following them; on the other side of the Viorne, in that vast ocean of diffused light, they imagined there were endless files of men rushing like themselves to the defence of the Republic. All simplicity and delusion, as multitudes so often are, they imagined, in their uncultured minds, that victory was easy and certain. They would have seized and shot as a traitor any one who had then asserted that they were the only ones who had the courage of their duty, and that the rest of the country, overwhelmed with fright, was pusillanimously allowing itself to be garrotted.

They derived fresh courage, too, from the welcome accorded to them by the few localities that lay along their route on the slopes of the Garrigues. The inhabitants rose en masse immediately the little army drew near; women ran to meet them, wishing them a speedy victory, while men, half clad, seized the first weapons they could find and rushed to join their ranks. There was a fresh ovation at every village, shouts of welcome and farewell many times reiterated.

Towards daybreak the moon disappeared behind the Garrigues and the insurgents continued their rapid march amidst the dense darkness of a winter night. They were now unable to distinguish the valley or the hills; they heard only the hoarse plaints of the bells, sounding through the deep obscurity like invisible drums, hidden they knew not where, but ever goading them on with despairing calls.

Miette and Silvere went on, all eagerness like the others. Towards daybreak, the girl suffered greatly from fatigue; she could only walk with short hurried steps, and was unable to keep up with the long strides of the men who surrounded her. Nevertheless she courageously strove to suppress all complaints; it would have cost her too much to confess that she was not as strong as a boy. During the first few leagues of the march Silvere gave her his arm; then, seeing that the standard was gradually slipping from her benumbed hands, he tried to take it in order to relieve her; but she grew angry, and would only allow him to hold it with one hand while she continued to carry it on her shoulder. She thus maintained her heroic demeanour with childish stubbornness, smiling at the young man each time he gave her a glance of loving anxiety. At last, when the moon hid itself, she gave way in the sheltering darkness. Silvere felt her leaning more heavily on his arm. He now had to carry the flag, and hold her round the waist to prevent her from stumbling. Nevertheless she still made no complaint.

"Are you very tired, poor Miette?" Silvere asked her.

"Yea, a little tired," she replied in a weary tone.

"Would you like to rest a bit?"

She made no reply; but he realised that she was staggering. He thereupon handed the flag to one of the other insurgents and quitted the ranks, almost carrying the girl in his arms. She struggled a little, she felt so distressed at appearing such a child. But he calmed her, telling her that he knew of a cross-road which shortened the distance by one half. They would be able to take a good hour's rest and reach Orcheres at the same time as the others.

It was then six o'clock. There must have been a slight mist rising from the Viorne, for the darkness seemed to be growing denser. The young people groped their way along the slope of the Garrigues, till they came to a rock on which they sat down. Around them lay an abyss of darkness. They were stranded, as it were, on some reef above a dense void. And athwart that void, when the dull tramp of the little army had died away, they only heard two bells, the one clear toned and ringing doubtless at their feet, in some village across the road; and the other far-off and faint, responding, as it were, with distant sobs to the feverish plaints of the first. One might have thought that these bells were recounting to each other, through the empty waste, the sinister story of a perishing world.

Miette and Silvere, warmed by their quick march, did not at first feel the cold. They remained silent, listening in great dejection to the sounds of the tocsin, which made the darkness quiver. They could not even see one another. Miette felt frightened, and, seeking for Silvere's hand, clasped it in her own. After the feverish enthusiasm which for several hours had carried them along with the others, this sudden halt and the solitude in which they found themselves side by side left them exhausted and bewildered as though they had suddenly awakened from a strange dream. They felt as if a wave had cast them beside the highway, then ebbed back and left them stranded. Irresistible reaction plunged them into listless stupor; they forgot their enthusiasm; they thought no more of the men whom they had to rejoin; they surrendered themselves to the melancholy sweetness of finding themselves alone, hand in hand, in the midst of the wild darkness.

"You are not angry with me?" the girl at length inquired. "I could easily walk the whole night with you; but they were running too quickly, I could hardly breathe."

"Why should I be angry with you?" the young man said.

"I don't know. I was afraid you might not love me any longer. I wish I could have taken long strides like you, and have walked along without stopping. You will think I am a child."

Silvere smiled, and Miette, though the darkness prevented her from seeing him, guessed that he was doing so. Then she continued with determination: "You must not always treat me like a sister. I want to be your wife some day."

Forthwith she clasped Silvere to her bosom, and, still with her arms about him, murmured: "We shall grow so cold; come close to me that we may be warm."

Then they lapsed into silence. Until that troublous hour, they had loved one another with the affection of brother and sister. In their ignorance they still mistook their feelings for tender friendship, although beneath their guileless love their ardent blood surged more wildly day by day. Given age and experience, a violent passion of southern intensity would at last spring from this idyll. Every girl who hangs on a youth's neck is already a woman, a woman unconsciously, whom a caress may awaken to conscious womanhood. When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another's lips. Lovers are made by a kiss. It was on that dark and cold December night, amid the bitter wailing of the tocsin, that Miette and Silvere exchanged one of those kisses that bring all the heart's blood to the lips.

They remained silent, close to one another. A gentle glow soon penetrated them, languor overcame them, and steeped them in feverish drowsiness. They were quite warm at last, and lights seemed to flit before their closed eyelids, while a buzzing mounted to their brains. This state of painful ecstasy, which lasted some minutes, seemed endless to them. Then, in a kind of dream, their lips met. The kiss they exchanged was long and greedy. It seemed to them as if they had never kissed before. Yet their embrace was fraught with suffering and they released one another. And the chilliness of the night having cooled their fever, they remained in great confusion at some distance one from the other.

Meantime the bells were keeping up their sinister converse in the dark abyss which surrounded the young people. Miette, trembling and frightened, did not dare to draw near to Silvere again. She did not even know if he were still there, for she could no longer hear him move. The stinging sweetness of their kiss still clung to their lips, to which passionate phrases surged, and they longed to kiss once more. But shame restrained them from the expression of any such desire. They felt that they would rather never taste that bliss again than speak of it aloud. If their blood had not been lashed by their rapid march, if the darkness had not offered complicity, they would, for a long time yet, have continued kissing each other on the cheeks like old playfellows. Feelings of modesty were coming to Miette. She remembered Justin's coarseness. A few hours previously she had listened, without a blush, to that fellow who called her a shameless girl. She had wept without understanding his meaning, she had wept simply because she guessed that what he spoke of must be base. Now that she was becoming a woman, she wondered in a last innocent transport whether that kiss, whose burning smart she could still feel, would not perhaps suffice to cover her with the shame to which her cousin had referred. Thereupon she was seized with remorse, and burst into sobs.

"What is the matter; why are you crying?" asked Silvere in an anxious voice.

"Oh, leave me," she faltered, "I do not know."

Then in spite of herself, as it were, she continued amidst her tears: "Ah! what an unfortunate creature I am! When I was ten years old people used to throw stones at me. To-day I am treated as the vilest of creatures. Justin did right to despise me before everybody. We have been doing wrong, Silvere."

The young man, quite dismayed, clasped her in his arms again, trying to console her. "I love you," he whispered, "I am your brother. Why say that we have been doing wrong? We kissed each other because we were cold. You know very well that we used to kiss each other every evening before separating."

"Oh! not as we did just now," she whispered. "It must be wrong, for a strange feeling came over me. The men will laugh at me now as I pass, and they will be right in doing so. I shall not be able to defend myself."

The young fellow remained silent, unable to find a word to calm the agitation of this big child, trembling at her first kiss of love. He clasped her gently, imagining that he might calm her by his embrace. She struggled, however, and continued: "If you like, we will go away; we will leave the province. I can never return to Plassans; my uncle would beat me; all the townspeople would point their fingers at me—" And then, as if seized with sudden irritation, she added: "But no! I am cursed! I forbid you to leave aunt Dide to follow me. You must leave me on the highway."

"Miette, Miette!" Silvere implored; "don't talk like that."

"Yes. I want to please you. Be reasonable. They have turned me out like a vagabond. If I went back with you, you would always be fighting for my sake, and I don't want that."

At this the young man again pressed a kiss upon her lips, murmuring: "You shall be my wife, and nobody will then dare to hurt you."

"Oh! please, I entreat you!" she said, with a stifled cry; "don't kiss me so. You hurt me."

Then, after a short silence: "You know quite well that I cannot be your wife now. We are too young. You would have to wait for me, and meanwhile I should die of shame. You are wrong in protesting; you will be forced to leave me in some corner."

At this Silvere, his fortitude exhausted, began to cry. A man's sobs are fraught with distressing hoarseness. Miette, quite frightened as she felt the poor fellow shaking in her arms, kissed him on the face, forgetting she was burning her lips. But it was all her fault. She was a little simpleton to have let a kiss upset her so completely. She now clasped her lover to her bosom as if to beg forgiveness for having pained him. These weeping children, so anxiously clasping one another, made the dark night yet more woeful than before. In the distance, the bells continued to complain unceasingly in panting accents.

"It is better to die," repeated Silvere, amidst his sobs; "it is better to die."

"Don't cry; forgive me," stammered Miette. "I will be brave; I will do all you wish."

When the young man had dried his tears: "You are right," he said; "we cannot return to Plassans. But the time for cowardice has not yet come. If we come out of the struggle triumphant, I will go for aunt Dide, and we will take her ever so far away with us. If we are beaten——"

He stopped.

"If we are beaten?" repeated Miette, softly.

"Then be it as God wills!" continued Silvere, in a softer voice. "I most likely shall not be there. You will comfort the poor woman. That would be better."

"Ah! as you said just now," the young girl murmured, "it would be better to die."

At this longing for death they tightened their embrace. Miette relied upon dying with Silvere; he had only spoken of himself, but she felt that he would gladly take her with him into the earth. They would there be able to love each other more freely than under the sun. Aunt Dide would die likewise and join them. It was, so to say, a rapid presentiment, a desire for some strange voluptuousness, to which Heaven, by the mournful accents of the tocsin, was promising early gratification. To die! To die! The bells repeated these words with increasing passion, and the lovers yielded to the calls of the darkness; they fancied they experienced a foretaste of the last sleep, in the drowsiness into which they again sank, whilst their lips met once more.

Miette no longer turned away. It was she, now, who pressed her lips to Silvere's, who sought with mute ardour for the delight whose stinging smart she had not at first been able to endure. The thought of approaching death had excited her; she no longer felt herself blushing, but hung upon her love, while he in faltering voice repeated: "I love you! I love you!"

But at this Miette shook her head, as if to say it was not true. With her free and ardent nature she had a secret instinct of the meaning and purposes of life, and though she was right willing to die she would fain have known life first. At last, growing calmer, she gently rested her head on the young man's shoulder, without uttering a word. Silvere kissed her again. She tasted those kisses slowly, seeking their meaning, their hidden sweetness. As she felt them course through her veins, she interrogated them, asking if they were all love, all passion. But languor at last overcame her, and she fell into gentle slumber. Silvere had enveloped her in her pelisse, drawing the skirt around himself at the same time. They no longer felt cold. The young man rejoiced to find, from the regularity of her breathing, that the girl was now asleep; this repose would enable them to proceed on their way with spirit. He resolved to let her slumber for an hour. The sky was still black, and the approach of day was but faintly indicated by a whitish line in the east. Behind the lovers there must have been a pine wood whose musical awakening it was that the young man heard amidst the morning breezes. And meantime the wailing of the bells grew more sonorous in the quivering atmosphere, lulling Miette's slumber even as it had accompanied her passionate fever.

Until that troublous night, these young people had lived through one of those innocent idylls that blossom among the toiling masses, those outcasts and folks of simple mind amidst whom one may yet occasionally find amours as primitive as those of the ancient Greek romances.

Miette had been scarcely nine years old at the time when her father was sent to the galleys for shooting a gendarme. The trial of Chantegreil had remained a memorable case in the province. The poacher boldly confessed that he had killed the gendarme, but he swore that the latter had been taking aim at him. "I only anticipated him," he said, "I defended myself; it was a duel, not a murder." He never desisted from this line of argument. The presiding Judge of the Assizes could not make him understand that, although a gendarme has the right to fire upon a poacher, a poacher has no right to fire upon a gendarme. Chantegreil escaped the guillotine, owing to his obviously sincere belief in his own innocence, and his previous good character. The man wept like a child when his daughter was brought to him prior to his departure for Toulon. The little thing, who had lost her mother in her infancy, dwelt at this time with her grandfather at Chavanoz, a village in the passes of the Seille. When the poacher was no longer there, the old man and the girl lived upon alms. The inhabitants of Chavanoz, all sportsmen and poachers, came to the assistance of the poor creatures whom the convict had left behind him. After a while, however, the old man died of grief, and Miette, left alone by herself, would have had to beg on the high roads, if the neighbours had not remembered that she had an aunt at Plassans. A charitable soul was kind enough to take her to this aunt, who did not, however, receive her very kindly.

Eulalie Chantegreil, the spouse of meger Rebufat, was a big, dark, stubborn creature, who ruled the home. She led her husband by the noise, said the people of the Faubourg of Plassans. The truth was, Rebufat, avaricious and eager for work and gain, felt a sort of respect for this big creature, who combined uncommon vigour with strict sobriety and economy.

Thanks to her, the household thrived. The meger grumbled one evening when, on returning home from work, he found Miette installed there. But his wife closed his mouth by saying in her gruff voice: "Bah, the little thing's strongly built, she'll do for a servant; we'll keep her and save wages."

This calculation pleased Rebufat. He went so far as to feel the little thing's arms, and declared with satisfaction that she was sturdy for her age. Miette was then nine years old. From the very next day he made use of her. The work of the peasant-woman in the South of France is much lighter than in the North. One seldom sees them employed in digging the ground, carrying loads, or doing other kinds of men's work. They bind sheaves, gather olives and mulberry leaves; perhaps their most laborious work is that of weeding. Miette worked away willingly. Open-air life was her delight, her health. So long as her aunt lived she was always smiling. The good woman, in spite of her roughness, at last loved her as her own child; she forbade her doing the hard work which her husband sometimes tried to force upon her, saying to the latter:

"Ah! you're a clever fellow! You don't understand, you fool, that if you tire her too much to-day, she won't be able to do anything to-morrow!"

This argument was decisive. Rebufat bowed his head, and carried the load which he had desired to set on the young girl's shoulders.

The latter would have lived in perfect happiness under the secret protection of her aunt Eulalie, but for the teasing of her cousin, who was then a lad of sixteen, and employed his idle hours in hating and persecuting her. Justin's happiest moments were those when by means of some gross falsehood he succeeded in getting her scolded. Whenever he could tread on her feet, or push her roughly, pretending not to have seen her, he laughed and felt the delight of those crafty folks who rejoice at other people's misfortunes. Miette, however, would stare at him with her large black childish eyes gleaming with anger and silent scorn, which checked the cowardly youngster's sneers. In reality he was terribly afraid of his cousin.

The young girl was just attaining her eleventh year when her aunt Eulalie suddenly died. From that day everything changed in the house. Rebufat gradually come to treat her like a farm-labourer. He overwhelmed her with all sorts of rough work, and made use of her as a beast of burden. She never even complained, however, thinking that she had a debt of gratitude to repay him. In the evening, when she was worn out with fatigue, she mourned for her aunt, that terrible woman whose latent kindliness she now realised. However, it was not the hard work that distressed her, for she delighted in her strength, and took a pride in her big arms and broad shoulders. What distressed her was her uncle's distrustful surveillance, his continual reproaches, and the irritated employer-like manner he assumed towards her. She had now become a stranger in the house. Yet even a stranger would not have been so badly treated as she was. Rebufat took the most unscrupulous advantage of this poor little relative, whom he pretended to keep out of charity. She repaid his harsh hospitality ten times over with her work, and yet never a day passed but he grudged her the bread she ate. Justin especially excelled in wounding her. Since his mother had been dead, seeing her without a protector, he had brought all his evil instincts into play in trying to make the house intolerable to her. The most ingenious torture which he invented was to speak to Miette of her father. The poor girl, living away from the world, under the protection of her aunt, who had forbidden any one ever to mention the words "galleys" or "convict" before her, hardly understood their meaning. It was Justin who explained it to her by relating, in his own manner, the story of the murder of the gendarme, and Chantegreil's conviction. There was no end to the horrible particulars he supplied: the convicts had a cannonball fastened to one ankle by a chain, they worked fifteen hours a day, and all died under their punishment; their prison, too, was a frightful place, the horrors of which he described minutely. Miette listened to him, stupefied, her eyes full of tears. Sometimes she was roused to sudden violence, and Justin quickly retired before her clenched fists. However, he took a savage delight in thus instructing her as to the nature of prison life. When his father flew into a passion with the child for any little negligence, he chimed in, glad to be able to insult her without danger. And if she attempted to defend herself, he would exclaim: "Bah! bad blood always shows itself. You'll end at the galleys like your father."

At this Miette sobbed, stung to the heart, powerless and overwhelmed with shame.

She was already growing to womanhood at this period. Of precocious nature, she endured her martyrdom with extraordinary fortitude. She rarely gave way, excepting when her natural pride succumbed to her cousin's outrages. Soon even, she was able to bear, without a tear, the incessant insults of this cowardly fellow, who ever watched her while he spoke, for fear lest she should fly at his face. Then, too, she learnt to silence him by staring at him fixedly. She had several times felt inclined to run away from the Jas-Meiffren; but she did not do so, as her courage could not brook the idea of confessing that she was vanquished by the persecution she endured. She certainly earned her bread, she did not steal the Rebufats' hospitality; and this conviction satisfied her pride. So she remained there to continue the struggle, stiffening herself and living on with the one thought of resistance. Her plan was to do her work in silence, and revenge herself for all harsh treatment by mute contempt. She knew that her uncle derived too much advantage from her to listen readily to the insinuations of Justin, who longed to get her turned out of doors. And in a defiant spirit she resolved that she would not go away of her own accord.

Her continuous voluntary silence was full of strange fancies. Passing her days in the enclosure, isolated from all the world, she formed ideas for herself which would have strangely shocked the good people of the Faubourg. Her father's fate particularly occupied her thoughts. All Justin's abuse recurred to her; and she ended by accepting the charge of murder, saying to herself, however, that her father had done well to kill the gendarme who had tried to kill him. She had learnt the real story from a labourer who had worked for a time at the Jas-Meiffren. From that moment, on the few occasions when she went out, she no longer even turned if the ragamuffins of the Faubourg followed her, crying: "Hey! La Chantegreil!"

She simply hastened her steps homeward, with lips compressed, and black, fierce eyes. Then after shutting the gate, she perhaps cast one long glance at the gang of urchins. She would have become vicious, have lapsed into fierce pariah savagery, if her childishness had not sometimes gained the mastery. Her extreme youth brought her little girlish weaknesses which relieved her. She would then cry with shame for herself and her father. She would hide herself in a stable so that she might sob to her heart's content, for she knew that, if the others saw her crying, they would torment her all the more. And when she had wept sufficiently, she would bathe her eyes in the kitchen, and then again subside into uncomplaining silence. It was not interest alone, however, which prompted her to hide herself; she carried her pride in her precocious strength so far that she was unwilling to appear a child. In time she would have become very unhappy. Fortunately she was saved by discovering the latent tenderness of her loving nature.

The well in the yard of the house occupied by aunt Dide and Silvere was a party-well. The wall of the Jas-Meiffren cut it in halves. Formerly, before the Fouques' property was united to the neighbouring estate, the market-gardeners had used this well daily. Since the transfer of the Fouques' ground, however, as it was at some distance from the outhouses, the inmates of the Jas, who had large cisterns at their disposal, did not draw a pail of water from it in a month. On the other side, one could hear the grating of the pulley every morning when Silvere drew the water for aunt Dide.

One day the pulley broke. The young wheelwright made a good strong one of oak, and put it up in the evening after his day's work. To do this he had to climb upon the wall. When he had finished the job he remained resting astride the coping, and surveyed with curiosity the large expanse of the Jas-Meiffren. At last a peasant-girl, who was weeding the ground a few feet from him, attracted his attention. It was in July, and the air was broiling, although the sun had already sank to the horizon. The peasant-girl had taken off her jacket. In a white bodice, with a coloured neckerchief tied over her shoulders, and the sleeves of her chemise turned up as far as her elbows, she was squatting amid the folds of her blue cotton skirt, which was secured to a pair of braces crossed behind her back. She crawled about on her knees as she pulled up the tares and threw them into a basket. The young man could only see her bare, sun-tanned arms stretching out right and left to seize some overlooked weed. He followed this rapid play of her arms complacently, deriving a singular pleasure from seeing them so firm and quick. The young person had slightly raised herself on noticing that he was no longer at work, but had again lowered her head before he could distinguish her features. This shyness kept him in suspense. Like an inquisitive lad he wondered who this weeder could be, and while he lingered there, whistling and beating time with a chisel, the latter suddenly slipped out of his hand. It fell into the Jas-Meiffren, striking the curb of the well, and then bounding a few feet from the wall. Silvere looked at it, leaning forward and hesitating to get over. But the peasant-girl must have been watching the young man askance, for she jumped up without saying anything, picked up the chisel, and handed it to Silvere, who then perceived that she was a mere child. He was surprised and rather intimidated. The young girl raised herself towards him in the red glare of the sunset. The wall at this spot was low, but nevertheless too high for her to reach him. So he bent low over the coping, while she still raised herself on tiptoes. They did not speak, but looked at each other with an air of smiling confusion. The young man would indeed have liked to keep the girl in that position. She turned to him a charming head, with handsome black eyes, and red lips, which quite astonished and stirred him. He had never before seen a girl so near; he had not known that lips and eyes could be so pleasant to look at. Everything about the girl seemed to possess a strange fascination for him—her coloured neckerchief, her white bodice, her blue cotton skirt hanging from braces which stretched with the motion of her shoulders. Then his glance glided along the arm which was handing him the tool; as far as the elbow this arm was of a golden brown, as though clothed with sun-burn; but higher up, in the shadow of the tucked-up sleeve, Silvere perceived a bare, milk-white roundness. At this he felt confused; however, he leant further over, and at last managed to grasp the chisel. The little peasant-girl was becoming embarrassed. Still they remained there, smiling at each other, the child beneath with upturned face, and the lad half reclining on the coping of the wall. They could not part from each other. So far they had not exchanged a word, and Silvere even forgot to say, "Thank you."

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Marie," replied the peasant-girl; "but everybody calls me Miette."

Again she raised herself slightly, and in a clear voice inquired in her turn: "And yours?"

"My name is Silvere," the young workman replied.

A pause ensued, during which they seemed to be listening complacently to the music of their names.

"I'm fifteen years old," resumed Silvere. "And you?"

"I!" said Miette; "oh, I shall be eleven on All Saints' Day."

The young workman made a gesture of surprise. "Ah! really!" he said, laughing, "and to think I took you for a woman! You've such big arms."

She also began to laugh, as she lowered her eyes to her arms. Then they ceased speaking. They remained for another moment gazing and smiling at each other. And finally, as Silvere seemingly had no more questions to ask her, Miette quietly withdrew and went on plucking her weeds, without raising her head. The lad for his part remained on the wall for a while. The sun was setting; a stream of oblique rays poured over the yellow soil of the Jas-Meiffren, which seemed to be all ablaze—one would have said that a fire was running along the ground—and, in the midst of the flaming expanse, Silvere saw the little stooping peasant-girl, whose bare arms had resumed their rapid motion. The blue cotton skirt was now becoming white; and rays of light streamed over the child's copper-coloured arms. At last Silvere felt somewhat ashamed of remaining there, and accordingly got off the wall.

In the evening, preoccupied with his adventure, he endeavoured to question aunt Dide. Perhaps she would know who this Miette was who had such black eyes and such red lips. But, since she had lived in the house in the alley, the old woman had never once given a look behind the wall of the little yard. It was, to her, like an impassable rampart, which shut off her past. She did not know—she did not want to know—what there might now be on the other side of that wall, in that old enclosure of the Fouques, where she had buried her love, her heart and her flesh. As soon as Silvere began to question her she looked at him with childish terror. Was he, then, going to stir up the ashes of those days now dead and gone, and make her weep like her son Antoine had done?

"I don't know," she said in a hasty voice; "I no longer go out, I never see anybody."

Silvere waited the morrow with considerable impatience. And as soon as he got to his master's workshop, he drew his fellow-workmen into conversation. He did not say anything about his interview with Miette; but spoke vaguely of a girl whom he had seen from a distance in the Jas-Meiffren.

"Oh! that's La Chantegreil!" cried one of the workmen.

There was no necessity for Silvere to question them further, for they told him the story of the poacher Chantegreil and his daughter Miette, with that unreasoning spite which is felt for social outcasts. The girl, in particular, they treated in a foul manner; and the insulting gibe of "daughter of a galley-slave" constantly rose to their lips like an incontestable reason for condemning the poor, dear innocent creature to eternal disgrace.

However, wheelwright Vian, an honest, worthy fellow, at last silenced his men.

"Hold your tongues, you foul mouths!" he said, as he let fall the shaft of a cart that he had been examining. "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves for being so hard upon the child. I've seen her, the little thing looks a very good girl. Besides, I'm told she doesn't mind work, and already does as much as any woman of thirty. There are some lazy fellows here who aren't a match for her. I hope, later on, that she'll get a good husband who'll stop this evil talk."

Silvere, who had been chilled by the workmen's gross jests and insults, felt tears rise to his eyes at the last words spoken by Vian. However, he did not open his lips. He took up his hammer, which he had laid down near him, and began with all his might to strike the nave of a wheel which he was binding with iron.

In the evening, as soon as he had returned home from the workshop, he ran to the wall and climbed upon it. He found Miette engaged upon the same labour as the day before. He called her. She came to him, with her smile of embarrassment, and the charming shyness of a child who from infancy had grown up in tears.

"You're La Chantegreil, aren't you?" he asked her, abruptly.

She recoiled, she ceased smiling, and her eyes turned sternly black, gleaming with defiance. So this lad was going to insult her, like the others! She was turning her back upon him, without giving an answer, when Silvere, perplexed by her sudden change of countenance, hastened to add: "Stay, I beg you—I don't want to pain you—I've got so many things to tell you!"

She turned round, still distrustful. Silvere, whose heart was full, and who had resolved to relieve it, remained for a moment speechless, not knowing how to continue, for he feared lest he should commit a fresh blunder. At last he put his whole heart in one phrase: "Would you like me to be your friend?" he said, in a voice full of emotion. And as Miette, in surprise, raised her eyes, which were again moist and smiling, he continued with animation: "I know that people try to vex you. It's time to put a stop to it. I will be your protector now. Shall I?"

The child beamed with delight. This proffered friendship roused her from all her evil dreams of taciturn hatred. Still she shook her head and answered: "No, I don't want you to fight on my account. You'd have too much to do. Besides which, there are persons from whom you cannot protect me."

Silvere wished to declare that he would defend her against the whole world, but she closed his mouth with a coaxing gesture, as she added: "I am satisfied to have you as a friend."

They then conversed together for a few minutes, lowering their voices as much as possible. Miette spoke to Silvere of her uncle and her cousin. For all the world she would not have liked them to catch him astride the coping of the wall. Justin would be implacable with such a weapon against her. She spoke of her misgivings with the fright of a schoolgirl on meeting a friend with whom her mother has forbidden her to associate. Silvere merely understood, however, that he would not be able to see Miette at his pleasure. This made him very sad. Still, he promised that he would not climb upon the wall any more. They were both endeavouring to find some expedient for seeing each other again, when Miette suddenly begged him to go away; she had just caught sight of Justin, who was crossing the grounds in the direction of the wall. Silvere quickly descended. When he was in the little yard again, he remained by the wall to listen, irritated by his flight. After a few minutes he ventured to climb again and cast a glance into the Jas-Meiffren, but he saw Justin speaking with Miette, and quickly withdrew his head. On the following day he could see nothing of his friend, not even in the distance; she must have finished her work in that part of the Jas. A week passed in this fashion, and the young people had no opportunity of exchanging a single word. Silvere was in despair; he thought of boldly going to the Rebufats to ask for Miette.

The party-well was a large one, but not very deep. On either side of the wall the curb formed a large semicircle. The water was only ten or twelve feet down at the utmost. This slumbering water reflected the two apertures of the well, two half-moons between which the shadow of the wall cast a black streak. On leaning over, one might have fancied in the vague light that the half-moons were two mirrors of singular clearness and brilliance. Under the morning sunshine, when the dripping of the ropes did not disturb the surface of the water, these mirrors, these reflections of the heavens, showed like white patches on the green water, and in them the leaves of the ivy which had spread along the wall over the well were repeated with marvellous exactness.

One morning, at an early hour, Silvere, as he came to draw water for aunt Dide, bent over the well mechanically, just as he was taking hold of the rope. He started, and then stood motionless, still leaning over. He had fancied that he could distinguish in the well the face of a young girl who was looking at him with a smile; however, he had shaken the rope, and the disturbed water was now but a dim mirror that no longer reflected anything clearly. Silvere, who did not venture to stir, and whose heart beat rapidly, then waited for the water to settle. As its ripples gradually widened and died away, he perceived the image reappearing. It oscillated for a long time, with a swing which lent a vague, phantom-like grace to its features, but at last it remained stationary. It was the smiling countenance of Miette, with her head and shoulders, her coloured neckerchief, her white bodice, and her blue braces. Silvere next perceived his own image in the other mirror. Then, knowing that they could see each other, they nodded their heads. For the first moment, they did not even think of speaking. At last they exchanged greetings.

"Good morning, Silvere."

"Good morning, Miette."

They were surprised by the strange sound of their voices, which became singularly soft and sweet in that damp hole. The sound seemed, indeed, to come from a distance, like the soft music of voices heard of an evening in the country. They understood that it would suffice to speak in a whisper in order to hear each other. The well echoed the faintest breath. Leaning over its brink, they conversed while gazing at one another's reflection. Miette related how sad she had been the last week. She was now working at the other end of the Jas, and could only get out early in the morning. Then she made a pout of annoyance which Silvere distinguished perfectly, and to which he replied by nodding his head with an air of vexation. They were exchanging all those gestures and facial expressions that speech entails. They cared but little for the wall which separated them now that they could see each other in those hidden depths.

"I knew," continued Miette, with a knowing look, "that you came here to draw water every morning at the same hour. I can hear the grating of the pulley from the house. So I made an excuse, I pretended that the water in this well boiled the vegetables better. I thought that I might come here every morning to draw water at the same time as you, so as to say good morning to you without anyone suspecting it."

She smiled innocently, as though well pleased with her device, and ended by saying: "But I did not imagine we should see each other in the water."

It was, in fact, this unhoped-for pleasure which so delighted them. They only spoke to see their lips move, so greatly did this new frolic amuse their childish natures. And they resolved to use all means in their power to meet here every morning. When Miette had said that she must go away, she told Silvere that he could draw his pail of water. But he did not dare to shake the rope; Miette was still leaning over—he could see her smiling face, and it was too painful to him to dispel that smile. As he slightly stirred his pail, the water murmured, and the smile faded. Then he stopped, seized with a strange fear; he fancied that he had vexed her and made her cry. But the child called to him, "Go on! go on!" with a laugh which the echo prolonged and rendered more sonorous. She herself then nosily sent down a pail. There was a perfect tempest. Everything disappeared under the black water. And Silvere made up his mind to fill two pitchers, while listening to the retreating steps of Miette on the other side of the wall.

From that day, the young people never missed their assignations. The slumbering water, the white mirrors in which they gazed at one another, imparted to their interviews a charm which long sufficed their playful, childish imaginations. They had no desire to see each other face to face: it seemed much more amusing to them to use the well as a mirror, and confide their morning greetings to its echo. They soon came to look upon the well as an old friend. They loved to bend over the motionless water that resembled molten silver. A greenish glimmer hovered below, in a mysterious half light, and seemed to change the damp hole into some hiding-place in the depths of a wood. They saw each other in a sort of greenish nest bedecked with moss, in the midst of fresh water and foliage. And all the strangeness of the deep spring, the hollow tower over which they bent, trembling with fascination, added unconfessed and delightful fear to their merry laughter. The wild idea occurred to them of going down and seating themselves on a row of large stones which formed a kind of circular bench at a few inches above the water. They would dip their feet in the latter, converse there for hours, and no one would think of coming to look for them in such a spot. But when they asked each other what there might be down there, their vague fears returned; they thought it quite sufficient to let their reflected images descend into the depths amidst those green glimmers which tinged the stones with strange moire-like reflections, and amidst those mysterious noises which rose from the dark corners. Those sounds issuing from the invisible made them particularly uneasy; they often fancied that voices were replying to their own; and then they would remain silent, detecting a thousand faint plaints which they could not understand. These came from the secret travail of the moisture, the sighs of the atmosphere, the drops that glided over the stones, and fell below with the sonorousness of sobs. They would nod affectionately to each other in order to reassure themselves. Thus the attraction which kept them leaning over the brink had a tinge of secret terror, like all poignant charms. But the well still remained their old friend. It was such an excellent pretext for meeting! Justin, who watched Miette's every movement, never suspected the cause of her eagerness to go and draw some water every morning. At times, he saw her from the distance, leaning over and loitering. "Ah! the lazy thing!" he muttered; "how fond she is of dawdling about!" How could he suspect that, on the other side of the wall, there was a wooer contemplating the girl's smile in the water, and saying to her: "If that red-haired donkey Justin should illtreat you, just tell me of it, and he shall hear from me!"

This amusement lasted for more than a month. It was July then; the mornings were sultry; the sun shone brightly, and it was quite a pleasure to come to that damp spot. It was delightful to feel the cold breath of the well on one's face, and make love amidst this spring water while the skies were kindling their fires. Miette would arrive out of breath after crossing the stubble fields; as she ran along, her hair fell down over her forehead and temples; and it was with flushed face and dishevelled locks that she would lean over, shaking with laughter, almost before she had had time to set her pitcher down. Silvere, who was almost always the first at the well, felt, as he suddenly saw her smiling face in the water, as keen a joy as he would have experienced had she suddenly thrown herself into his arms at the bend of a pathway. Around them the radiant morning hummed with mirth; a wave of warm light, sonorous with the buzzing of insects, beat against the old wall, the posts, and the curbstone. They, however, no longer saw the shower of morning sunshine, nor heard the thousand sounds rising from the ground; they were in the depths of their green hiding-place, under the earth, in that mysterious and awesome cavity, and quivered with pleasure as they lingered there enjoying its fresh coolness and dim light.

On some mornings, Miette, who by nature could not long maintain a contemplative attitude, began to tease; she would shake the rope, and make drops of water fall in order to ripple the mirrors and deface the reflections. Silvere would then entreat her to remain still; he, whose fervour was deeper than hers, knew no keener pleasure than that of gazing at his love's image reflected so distinctly in every feature. But she would not listen to him; she would joke and feign a rough old bogey's voice, to which the echo imparted a raucous melodiousness.

"No, no," she would say in chiding fashion; "I don't love you to-day! I'm making faces at you; see how ugly I am."

And she laughed at seeing the fantastic forms which their spreading faces assumed as they danced upon the disturbed water.

One morning she got angry in real earnest. She did not find Silvere at the trysting-place, and waited for him for nearly a quarter of an hour, vainly making the pulley grate. She was just about to depart in a rage when he arrived. As soon as she perceived him she let a perfect tempest loose in the well, shook her pail in an irritated manner, and made the blackish water whirl and splash against the stones. In vain did Silvere try to explain that aunt Dide had detained him. To all his excuses she replied: "You've vexed me; I don't want to see you."

The poor lad, in despair, vainly questioned that sombre cavity, now so full of lamentable sounds, where, on other days, such a bright vision usually awaited him amid the silence of the stagnant water. He had to go away without seeing Miette. On the morrow, arriving before the time, he gazed sadly into the well, hearing nothing, and thinking that the obstinate girl would not come, when she, who was already on the other side slyly watching his arrival, bent over suddenly with a burst of laughter. All was at once forgotten.

In this wise the well was the scene of many a little drama and comedy. That happy cavity, with its gleaming mirrors and musical echoes, quickly ripened their love. They endowed it with such strange life, so filled it with their youthful love, that, long after they had ceased to come and lean over the brink, Silvere, as he drew water every morning, would fancy he could see Miette's smiling face in the dim light that still quivered with the joy they had set there.

That month of playful love rescued Miette from her mute despair. She felt a revival of her affections, her happy childish carelessness, which had been held in check by the hateful loneliness in which she lived. The certainty that she was loved by somebody, and that she was no longer alone in the world, enabled her to endure the persecutions of Justin and the Faubourg urchins. A song of joy, whose glad notes drowned their hootings, now sounded in her heart. She thought of her father with tender compassion, and did not now so frequently yield to dreams of bitter vengeance. Her dawning love cooled her feverish broodings like the fresh breezes of the dawn. At the same time she acquired the instinctive cunning of a young girl in love. She felt that she must maintain her usual silent and rebellious demeanour if she were to escape Justin's suspicions. But, in spite of her efforts, her eyes retained a sweet unruffled expression when the lad bullied her; she was no longer able to put on her old black look of indignant anger. One morning he heard her humming to herself at breakfast-time.

"You seem very gay, Chantegreil!" he said to her suspiciously, glancing keenly at her from his lowering eyes. "I bet you've been up to some of your tricks again!"

She shrugged her shoulders, but she trembled inwardly; and she did all she could to regain her old appearance of rebellious martyrdom. However, though Justin suspected some secret happiness, it was long before he was able to discover how his victim had escaped him.

Silvere, on his side, enjoyed profound happiness. His daily meetings with Miette made his idle hours pass pleasantly away. During his long silent companionship with aunt Dide, he recalled one by one his remembrances of the morning, revelling in their most trifling details. From that time forward, the fulness of his heart cloistered him yet more in the lonely existence which he had adopted with his grandmother. He was naturally fond of hidden spots, of solitary retirement, where he could give himself up to his thoughts. At this period already he had eagerly begun to read all the old odd volumes which he could pick up at brokers' shops in the Faubourg, and which were destined to lead him to a strange and generous social religion and morality. His reading—ill-digested and lacking all solid foundation—gave him glimpses of the world's vanities and pleasures, especially with regard to women, which would have seriously troubled his mind if his heart had not been contented. When Miette came, he received her at first as a companion, then as the joy and ambition of his life. In the evening, when he had retired to the little nook where he slept, and hung his lamp at the head of his strap-bedstead, he would find Miette on every page of the dusty old volume which he had taken at random from a shelf above his head and was reading devoutly. He never came across a young girl, a good and beautiful creature, in his reading, without immediately identifying her with his sweetheart. And he would set himself in the narrative as well. If he were reading a love story, it was he who married Miette at the end, or died with her. If, on the contrary, he were perusing some political pamphlet, some grave dissertation on social economy, works which he preferred to romances, for he had that singular partiality for difficult subjects which characterises persons of imperfect scholarship, he still found some means of associating her with the tedious themes which frequently he could not even understand. For instance, he tried to persuade himself that he was learning how to be good and kind to her when they were married. He thus associated her with all his visionary dreamings. Protected by the purity of his affection against the obscenity of certain eighteenth-century tales which fell into his hands, he found particular pleasure in shutting himself up with her in those humanitarian Utopias which some great minds of our own time, infatuated by visions of universal happiness have imagined. Miette, in his mind, became quite essential to the abolition of pauperism and the definitive triumph of the principles of the Revolution. There were nights of feverish reading, when his mind could not tear itself from his book, which he would lay down and take up at least a score of times, nights of voluptuous weariness which he enjoyed till daybreak like some secret orgie, cramped up in that tiny room, his eyes troubled by the flickering yellow light, while he yielded to the fever of insomnia and schemed out new social schemes of the most absurdly ingenuous nature, in which woman, always personified by Miette, was worshipped by the nations on their knees.

He was predisposed to Utopian ideas by certain hereditary influences; his grandmother's nervous disorders became in him so much chronic enthusiasm, striving after everything that was grandiose and impossible. His lonely childhood, his imperfect education, had developed his natural tendencies in a singular manner. However, he had not yet reached the age when the fixed idea plants itself in a man's mind. In the morning, after he had dipped his head in a bucket of water, he remembered his thoughts and visions of the night but vaguely; nothing remained of his dreams save a childlike innocence, full of trustful confidence and yearning tenderness. He felt like a child again. He ran to the well, solely desirous of meeting his sweetheart's smile, and tasting the delights of the radiant morning. And during the day, when thoughts of the future sometimes made him silent and dreamy, he would often, prompted by some sudden impulse, spring up and kiss aunt Dide on both cheeks, whereat the old woman would gaze at him anxiously, perturbed at seeing his eyes so bright, and gleaming with a joy which she thought she could divine.

At last, as time went on, Miette and Silvere began to tire of only seeing each other's reflection. The novelty of their play was gone, and now they began to dream of keener pleasures than the well could afford them. In this longing for reality which came upon them, there was the wish to see each other face to face, to run through the open fields, and return out of breath with their arms around each other's waist, clinging closely together in order that they might the better feel each other's love. One morning Silvere spoke of climbing over the wall, and walking in the Jas with Miette. But the child implored him not to perpetrate such folly, which would place her at Justin's mercy. He then promised to seek some other means.

The wall in which the well was set made a sudden bend a few paces further on, thereby forming a sort of recess, where the lovers would be free from observation, if they were to take shelter there. The question was how to reach this recess. Silvere could no longer entertain the idea of climbing over, as Miette had appeared so afraid. He secretly thought of another plan. The little door which Macquart and Adelaide had set up one night long years previously had remained forgotten in this remote corner. The owner of the Jas-Meiffren had not even thought of blocking it up. Blackened by damp and green with moss, its lock and hinges eaten away with rust, it looked like a part of the old wall. Doubtless the key was lost; the grass growing beside the lower boards, against which slight mounds had formed, amply proved that no one had passed that way for many a long year. However, it was the lost key that Silvere hoped to find. He knew with what devotion his aunt Dide allowed the relics of the past to lie rotting wherever they might be. He searched the house for a week without any result, and went stealthily night by night to see if he had at last put his hand on the right key during the daytime. In this way he tried more than thirty keys which had doubtless come from the old property of the Fouques, and which he found all over the place, against the walls, on the floors, and at the bottom of drawers. He was becoming disheartened, when all at once he found the precious key. It was simply tied by a string to the street door latch-key, which always remained in the lock. It had hung there for nearly forty years. Aunt Dide must every day have touched it with her hand, without ever making up her mind to throw it away, although it could now only carry her back sorrowfully into the past. When Silvere had convinced himself that it really opened the little door, he awaited the ensuing day, dreaming of the joyful surprise which he was preparing for Miette. He had not told her for what he had been searching.

On the morrow, as soon as he heard the girl set her pitcher down, he gently opened the door, sweeping away with a push the tall weeds which covered the threshold. Stretching out his head, he saw Miette leaning over the brink of the well, looking into the water, absorbed in expectation. Thereupon, in a couple of strides, he reached the recess formed by the wall, and thence called, "Miette! Miette!" in a soft voice, which made her tremble. She raised her head, thinking he was on the coping of the wall. But when she saw him in the Jas, at a few steps from her, she gave a faint cry of surprise, and ran up to him. They took each other's hand, and looked at one another, delighted to be so near, thinking themselves far handsomer like this, in the warm sunshine. It was the middle of August, the Feast of the Assumption. In the distance, the bells were pealing in the limpid atmosphere that so often accompanies great days of festival, an atmosphere full of bright gaiety.

"Good morning, Silvere!"

"Good morning, Miette!"

The voices in which they exchanged their morning greetings sounded strange to them. They knew only the muffled accents transmitted by the echo of the well. And now their voices seemed to them as clear as the notes of a lark. And ah! how delightful it was in that warm corner, in that holiday atmosphere! They still held each other's hands. Silvere leaning against the wall, Miette with her figure slightly thrown backwards. They were about to tell each other all the soft things which they had not dared to confide to the reverberations of the well, when Silvere, hearing a slight noise, started, and, turning pale, dropped Miette's hands. He had just seen aunt Dide standing before him erect and motionless on the threshold of the doorway.

The grandmother had come to the well by chance. And on perceiving, in the old black wall, the white gap formed by the doorway which Silvere had left wide open, she had experienced a violent shock. That open gap seemed to her like a gulf of light violently illumining her past. She once more saw herself running to the door amidst the morning brightness, and crossing the threshold full of the transports of her nervous love. And Macquart was there awaiting her. She hung upon his neck and pressed against his bosom, whilst the rising sun, following her through the doorway, which she had left open in her hurry, enveloped them with radiance. It was a sudden vision which roused her cruelly from the slumber of old age, like some supreme chastisement, and awakened a multitude of bitter memories within her. Had the well, had the entire wall, disappeared beneath the earth, she would not have been more stupefied. She had never thought that this door would open again. In her mind it had been walled up ever since the hour of Macquart's death. And amidst her amazement she felt angry, indignant with the sacrilegious hand that had penetrated this violation, and left that white open space agape like a yawning tomb. She stepped forward, yielding to a kind of fascination, and halted erect within the framework of the door.

Then she gazed out before her, with a feeling of dolorous surprise. She had certainly been told that the old enclosure of the Fouques was now joined to the Jas-Meiffren; but she would never have thought the associations of her youth could have vanished so completely. It seemed as though some tempest had carried off everything that her memory cherished. The old dwelling, the large kitchen-garden, the beds of green vegetables, all had disappeared. Not a stone, not a tree of former times remained. And instead of the scene amidst which she had grown up, and which in her mind's eye she had seen but yesterday, there lay a strip of barren soil, a broad patch of stubbles, bare like a desert. Henceforward, when, on closing her eyes, she might try to recall the objects of the past, that stubble would always appear to her like a shroud of yellowish drugget spread over the soil, in which her youth lay buried. In the presence of that unfamiliar commonplace scene her heart died, as it were, a second time. Now all was completely, finally ended. She was robbed even of her dreams of the past. Then she began to regret that she had yielded to the attraction of that white opening, of that doorway gaping upon the days which were now for ever lost.

She was about to retire and close the accursed door, without even seeking to discover who had opened it, when she suddenly perceived Miette and Silvere. And the sight of the two young lovers, who, with hanging heads, nervously awaited her glance, kept her on the threshold, quivering with yet keener pain. She now understood all. To the very end, she was destined to picture herself there, clasped in Macquart's arms in the bright sunshine. Yet a second time had the door served as an accomplice. Where love had once passed, there was it passing again. 'Twas the eternal and endless renewal, with present joys and future tears. Aunt Dide could only see the tears, and a sudden presentiment showed her the two children bleeding, with stricken hearts. Overwhelmed by the recollection of her life's sorrow, which this spot had just awakened within her, she grieved for her dear Silvere. She alone was guilty; if she had not formerly had that door made Silvere would not now be at a girl's feet in that lonely nook, intoxicating himself with a bliss which prompts and angers the jealousy of death.

After a brief pause, she went up to the young man, and, without a word, took him by the hand. She might, perhaps, have left them there, chattering under the wall, had she not felt that she herself was, to some extent, an accomplice in this fatal love. As she came back with Silvere, she turned on hearing the light footfall of Miette, who, having quickly taken up her pitcher, was hastening across the stubble. She was running wildly, glad at having escaped so easily. And aunt Dide smiled involuntarily as she watched her bound over the ground like a runaway goat.

"She is very young," she murmured, "she has plenty of time."

She meant, no doubt, that Miette had plenty of time before her to suffer and weep. Then, turning her eyes upon Silvere, who with a glance of ecstasy had followed the child as she ran off in the bright sunshine, she simply added: "Take care, my boy; this sort of thing sometimes kills one."

These were the only words she spoke with reference to the incident which had awakened all the sorrows that lay slumbering in the depths of her being. Silence had become a real religion with her. When Silvere came in, she double-locked the door, and threw the key down the well. In this wise she felt certain that the door would no longer make her an accomplice. She examined it for a moment, glad at seeing it reassume its usual gloomy, barrier-like aspect. The tomb was closed once more; the white gap was for ever boarded up with that damp-stained mossy timber over which the snails had shed silvery tears.

In the evening, aunt Dide had another of those nervous attacks which came upon her at intervals. At these times she would often talk aloud and ramble incoherently, as though she was suffering from nightmare. That evening, while Silvere held her down on her bed, he heard her stammer in a panting voice such words as "custom-house officer," "fire," and "murder." And she struggled, and begged for mercy, and dreamed aloud of vengeance. At last, as always happened when the attack was drawing to a close, she fell into a strange fright, her teeth chattering, while her limbs quivered with abject terror. Finally, after raising herself into a sitting posture, she cast a haggard look of astonishment at one and another corner of the room, and then fell back upon the pillow, heaving deep sighs. She was, doubtless, a prey to some hallucination. However, she drew Silvere to her bosom, and seemed to some degree to recognise him, though ever and anon she confused him with someone else.

"There they are!" she stammered. "Do you see? They are going to take you, they will kill you again. I don't want them to—Send them away, tell them I won't; tell them they are hurting me, staring at me like that—"

Then she turned to the wall, to avoid seeing the people of whom she was talking. And after an interval of silence, she continued: "You are near me, my child, aren't you? You must not leave me. I thought I was going to die just now. We did wrong to make an opening in the wall. I have suffered ever since. I was certain that door would bring us further misfortune—Oh! the innocent darlings, what sorrow! They will kill them as well, they will be shot down like dogs."

Then she relapsed into catalepsy; she was no longer even aware of Silvere's presence. Suddenly, however, she sat up, and gazed at the foot of her bed, with a fearful expression of terror.

"Why didn't you send them away?" she cried, hiding her white head against the young man's breast. "They are still there. The one with the gun is making signs that he is going to fire."

Shortly afterwards she fell into the heavy slumber that usually terminated these attacks. On the next day, she seemed to have forgotten everything. She never again spoke to Silvere of the morning on which she had found him with a sweetheart behind the wall.

The young people did not see each other for a couple of days. When Miette ventured to return to the well, they resolved not to recommence the pranks which had upset aunt Dide. However, the meeting which had been so strangely interrupted had filled them with a keen desire to meet again in some happy solitude. Weary of the delights afforded by the well, and unwilling to vex aunt Dide by seeing Miette again on the other side of the wall, Silvere begged the girl to meet him somewhere else. She required but little pressing; she received the proposal with the willing smile of a frolicsome lass who has no thought of evil. What made her smile was the idea of outwitting that spy of a Justin. When the lovers had come to agreement, they discussed at length the choice of a favourable spot. Silvere proposed the most impossible trysting-places. He planned regular journeys, and even suggested meeting the young girl at midnight in the barns of the Jas-Meiffren. Miette, who was much more practical, shrugged her shoulders, declaring she would try to think of some spot. On the morrow, she tarried but a minute at the well, just time enough to smile at Silvere and tell him to be at the far end of the Aire Saint-Mittre at about ten o'clock in the evening. One may be sure that the young man was punctual. All day long Miette's choice had puzzled him, and his curiosity increased when he found himself in the narrow lane formed by the piles of planks at the end of the plot of ground. "She will come this way," he said to himself, looking along the road to Nice. But he suddenly heard a loud shaking of boughs behind the wall, and saw a laughing head, with tumbled hair, appear above the coping, whilst a joyous voice called out: "It's me!"

And it was, in fact, Miette, who had climbed like an urchin up one of the mulberry-trees, which even nowadays still border the boundary of the Jas-Meiffren. In a couple of leaps she reached the tombstone, half buried in the corner at the end of the lane. Silvere watched her descend with delight and surprise, without even thinking of helping her. As soon as she had alighted, however, he took both her hands in his, and said: "How nimble you are!—you climb better than I do."

It was thus that they met for the first time in that hidden corner where they were destined to pass such happy hours. From that evening forward they saw each other there nearly every night. They now only used the well to warn each other of unforeseen obstacles to their meetings, of a change of time, and of all the trifling little news that seemed important in their eyes, and allowed of no delay. It sufficed for the one who had a communication to make to set the pulley in motion, for its creaking noise could be heard a long way off. But although, on certain days, they summoned one another two or three times in succession to speak of trifles of immense importance, it was only in the evening in that lonely little passage that they tasted real happiness. Miette was exceptionally punctual. She fortunately slept over the kitchen, in a room where the winter provisions had been kept before her arrival, and which was reached by a little private staircase. She was thus able to go out at all hours, without being seen by Rebufat or Justin. Moreover, if the latter should ever see her returning she intended to tell him some tale or other, staring at him the while with that stern look which always reduced him to silence.

Ah! how happy those warm evenings were! The lovers had now reached the first days of September, a month of bright sunshine in Provence. It was hardly possible for them to join each other before nine o'clock. Miette arrived from over the wall, in surmounting which she soon acquired such dexterity that she was almost always on the old tombstone before Silvere had time to stretch out his arms. She would laugh at her own strength and agility as, for a moment, with her hair in disorder, she remained almost breathless, tapping her skirt to make it fall. Her sweetheart laughingly called her an impudent urchin. In reality he much admired her pluck. He watched her jump over the wall with the complacency of an older brother supervising the exercises of a younger one. Indeed, there was yet much that was childlike in their growing love. On several occasions they spoke of going on some bird's-nesting expedition on the banks of the Viorne.

"You'll see how I can climb," said Miette proudly. "When I lived at Chavanoz, I used to go right up to the top of old Andre's walnut-trees. Have you ever taken a magpie's nest? It's very difficult!"

Then a discussion arose as to how one ought to climb a poplar. Miette stated her opinions, with all a boy's confidence.

However, Silvere, clasping her round the knees, had by this time lifted her to the ground, and then they would walk on, side by side, their arms encircling each other's waist. Though they were but children, fond of frolicsome play and chatter, and knew not even how to speak of love, yet they already partook of love's delight. It sufficed them to press each other's hands. Ignorant whither their feelings and their hearts were drifting, they did not seek to hide the blissful thrills which the slightest touch awoke. Smiling, often wondering at the delight they experienced, they yielded unconsciously to the sweetness of new feelings even while talking, like a couple of schoolboys, of the magpies' nests which are so difficult to reach.

And as they talked they went down the silent path, between the piles of planks and the wall of the Jas-Meiffren. They never went beyond the end of that narrow blind alley, but invariably retraced their steps. They were quite at home there. Miette, happy in the knowledge of their safe concealment, would often pause and congratulate herself on her discovery.

"Wasn't I lucky!" she would gleefully exclaim. "We might walk a long way without finding such a good hiding-place."

The thick grass muffled the noise of their footsteps. They were steeped in gloom, shut in between two black walls, and only a strip of dark sky, spangled with stars, was visible above their heads. And as they stepped along, pacing this path which resembled a dark stream flowing beneath the black star-sprent sky, they were often thrilled with undefinable emotion, and lowered their voices, although there was nobody to hear them. Surrendering themselves as it were to the silent waves of night, over which they seemed to drift, they recounted to one another, with lovers' rapture, the thousand trifles of the day.

At other times, on bright nights, when the moonlight clearly outlined the wall and the timber-stacks, Miette and Silvere would romp about with all the carelessness of children. The path stretched out, alight with white rays, and retaining no suggestion of secrecy, and the young people laughed and chased each other like boys at play, at times venturing even to climb upon the piles of timber. Silvere was occasionally obliged to frighten Miette by telling her that Justin might be watching her from over the wall. Then, quite out of breath, they would stroll side by side, and plan how they might some day go for a scamper in the Sainte-Claire meadows, to see which of the two would catch the other.

Their growing love thus accommodated itself to dark and clear nights. Their hearts were ever on the alert, and a little shade sufficed to sweeten the pleasure of their embrace, and soften their laughter. This dearly-loved retreat—so gay in the moonshine, so strangely thrilling in the gloom—seemed an inexhaustible source of both gaiety and silent emotion. They would remain there until midnight, while the town dropped off to sleep and the lights in the windows of the Faubourg went out one by one.

They were never disturbed in their solitude. At that late hour children were no longer playing at hide-and-seek behind the piles of planks. Occasionally, when the young couple heard sounds in the distance—the singing of some workmen as they passed along the road, or conversation coming from the neighbouring sidewalks—they would cast stealthy glances over the Aire Saint-Mittre. The timber-yard stretched out, empty of all, save here and there some falling shadows. On warm evenings they sometimes caught glimpses of loving couples there, and of old men sitting on the big beams by the roadside. When the evenings grew colder, all that they ever saw on the melancholy, deserted spot was some gipsy fire, before which, perhaps, a few black shadows passed to and fro. Through the still night air words and sundry faint sounds were wafted to them, the "good-night" of a townsman shutting his door, the closing of a window-shutter, the deep striking of a clock, all the parting sounds of a provincial town retiring to rest. And when Plassans was slumbering, they might still hear the quarrelling of the gipsies and the crackling of their fires, amidst which suddenly rose the guttural voices of girls singing in a strange tongue, full of rugged accents.

But the lovers did not concern themselves much with what went on in the Aire Saint-Mittre; they hastened back into their own little privacy, and again walked along their favourite retired path. Little did they care for others, or for the town itself! The few planks which separated them from the wicked world seemed to them, after a while, an insurmountable rampart. They were so secluded, so free in this nook, situated though it was in the very midst of the Faubourg, at only fifty paces from the Rome Gate, that they sometimes fancied themselves far away in some hollow of the Viorne, with the open country around them. Of all the sounds which reached them, only one made them feel uneasy, that of the clocks striking slowly in the darkness. At times, when the hour sounded, they pretended not to hear, at other moments they stopped short as if to protest. However, they could not go on for ever taking just another ten minutes, and so the time came when they were at last obliged to say good-night. Then Miette reluctantly climbed upon the wall again. But all was not ended yet, they would linger over their leave-taking for a good quarter of an hour. When the girl had climbed upon the wall, she remained there with her elbows on the coping, and her feet supported by the branches of the mulberry-tree, which served her as a ladder. Silvere, perched on the tombstone, was able to take her hands again, and renew their whispered conversation. They repeated "till to-morrow!" a dozen times, and still and ever found something more to say. At last Silvere began to scold.

"Come, you must get down, it is past midnight."

But Miette, with a girl's waywardness, wished him to descend first; she wanted to see him go away. And as he persisted in remaining, she ended by saying abruptly, by way of punishment, perhaps: "Look! I am going to jump down."

Then she sprang from the mulberry-tree, to the great consternation of Silvere. He heard the dull thud of her fall, and the burst of laughter with which she ran off, without choosing to reply to his last adieu. For some minutes he would remain watching her vague figure as it disappeared in the darkness, then, slowly descending, he regained the Impasse Saint-Mittre.

During two years they came to the path every day. At the time of their first meetings they enjoyed some beautiful warm nights. They might almost have fancied themselves in the month of May, the month of seething sap, when a pleasant odour of earth and fresh leaves pervades the warm air. This renouveau, this second spring, was like a gift from heaven which allowed them to run freely about the path and tighten their bonds of affection.

At last came rain, and snow, and frost. But the disagreeableness of winter did not keep them away. Miette put on her long brown pelisse, and they both made light of the bad weather. When the nights were dry and clear, and puffs of wind raised the hoar frost beneath their footsteps and fell on their faces like taps from a switch, they refrained from sitting down. They walked quickly to and fro, wrapped in the pelisse, their cheeks blue with cold, and their eyes watering; and they laughed heartily, quite quivering with mirth, at the rapidity of their march through the freezing atmosphere. One snowy evening they amused themselves with making an enormous snowball, which they rolled into a corner. It remained there fully a month, which caused them fresh astonishment each time they met in the path. Nor did the rain frighten them. They came to see each other through the heaviest downpours, though they got wet to the skin in doing so. Silvere would hasten to the spot, saying to himself that Miette would never be mad enough to come; and when Miette arrived, he could not find it in his heart to scold her. In reality he had been expecting her. At last he sought some shelter against the inclement weather, knowing quite well that they would certainly come out, however much they might promise one another not to do so when it rained. To find a shelter he only had to disturb one of the timber-stacks; pulling out several pieces of wood and arranging them so that they would move easily, in such wise that he could displace and replace them at pleasure.

From that time forward the lovers possessed a sort of low and narrow sentry-box, a square hole, which was only big enough to hold them closely squeezed together on a beam which they had left at the bottom of the little cell. Whenever it rained, the first to arrive would take shelter here; and on finding themselves together again they would listen with delight to the rain beating on the piles of planks. Before and around them, through the inky blackness of the night, came a rush of water which they could not see, but which resounded continuously like the roar of a mob. They were nevertheless quite alone, as though they had been at the end of the world or beneath the sea. They never felt so happy, so isolated, as when they found themselves in that timber-stack, in the midst of some such deluge which threatened to carry them away at every moment. Their bent knees almost reached the opening, and though they thrust themselves back as far as possible, the spray of the rain bathed their cheeks and hands. The big drops, falling from the planks, splashed at regular intervals at their feet. The brown pelisse kept them warm, and the nook was so small that Miette was compelled to sit almost on Silvere's knees. And they would chatter and then lapse into silence, overcome with languor, lulled by the warmth of their embrace and the monotonous beating of the shower. For hours and hours they remained there, with that same enjoyment of the rain which prompts little children to stroll along solemnly in stormy weather with open umbrellas in their hands. After a while they came to prefer the rainy evenings, though their parting became more painful on those occasions. Miette was obliged to climb the wall in the driving rain, and cross the puddles of the Jas-Meiffren in perfect darkness. As soon as she had left his arms, she was lost to Silvere amidst the gloom and the noise of the falling water. In vain he listened, he was deafened, blinded. However, the anxiety caused by this brusque separation proved an additional charm, and, until the morrow, each would be uneasy lest anything should have befallen the other in such weather, when one would not even have turned a dog out of doors. Perchance one of them had slipped, or lost the way; such were the mutual fears which possessed them, and rendered their next interview yet more loving.

At last the fine days returned, April brought mild nights, and the grass in the green alley sprouted up wildly. Amidst the stream of life flowing from heaven and rising from the earth, amidst all the intoxication of the budding spring-time, the lovers sometimes regretted their winter solitude, the rainy evenings and the freezing nights, during which they had been so isolated so far from all human sounds. At present the days did not draw to a close soon enough, and they grew impatient with the lagging twilights. When the night had fallen sufficiently for Miette to climb upon the wall without danger of being seen, and they could at last glide along their dear path, they no longer found there the solitude congenial to their shy, childish love. People began to flock to the Aire Saint-Mittre, the urchins of the Faubourg remained there, romping about the beams, and shouting, till eleven o'clock at night. It even happened occasionally that one of them would go and hide behind the piles of timber, and assail Miette and Silvere with boyish jeers. The fear of being surprised amidst that general awakening of life as the season gradually grew warmer, tinged their meetings with anxiety.

Then, too, they began to stifle in the narrow lane. Never had it throbbed with so ardent a quiver; never had that soil, in which the last bones left of the former cemetery lay mouldering, sent forth such oppressive and disturbing odours. They were still too young to relish the voluptuous charm of that secluded nook which the springtide filled with fever. The grass grew to their knees, they moved to and fro with difficulty, and certain plants, when they crushed their young shoots, sent forth a pungent odour which made them dizzy. Then, seized with strange drowsiness and staggering with giddiness, their feet as though entangled in the grass, they would lean against the wall, with half-closed eyes, unable to move a step. All the soft languor from the skies seemed to penetrate them.

With the petulance of beginners, impatient and irritated at this sudden faintness, they began to think their retreat too confined, and decided to ramble through the open fields. Every evening came fresh frolics. Miette arrived with her pelisse; they wrapped themselves in it, and then, gliding past the walls, reached the high-road and the open country, the broad fields where the wind rolled with full strength, like the waves at high tide. And here they no longer felt stifled; they recovered all their youthfulness, free from the giddy intoxication born of the tall rank weeds of the Aire Saint-Mittre.

During two summers they rambled through the district. Every rock ledge, every bed of turf soon knew them; there was not a cluster of trees, a hedge, or a bush, which did not become their friend. They realized their dreams: they chased each other wildly over the meadows of Sainte-Claire, and Miette ran so well that Silvere had to put his best foot forward to catch her. Sometimes, too, they went in search of magpies' nests. Headstrong Miette, wishing to show how she had climbed trees at Chavanoz, would tie up her skirts with a piece of string, and ascend the highest poplars; while Silvere stood trembling beneath, with his arms outstretched to catch her should she slip. These frolics so turned them from thoughts of love that one evening they almost fought like a couple of lads coming out of school. But there were nooks in the country side which were not healthful for them. So long as they rambled on they were continually shouting with laughter, pushing and teasing one another. They covered miles and miles of ground; sometimes they went as far as the chain of the Garrigues, following the narrowest paths and cutting across the fields. The region belonged to them; they lived there as in a conquered territory, enjoying all that the earth and the sky could give them. Miette, with a woman's lack of scruple, did not hesitate to pluck a bunch of grapes, or a cluster of green almonds, from the vines and almond-trees whose boughs brushed her as she passed; and at this Silvere, with his absolute ideas of honesty, felt vexed, although he did not venture to find fault with the girl, whose occasional sulking distressed him. "Oh! the bad girl!" thought he, childishly exaggerating the matter, "she would make a thief of me." But Miette would thereupon force his share of the stolen fruit into his mouth. The artifices he employed, such as holding her round the waist, avoiding the fruit trees, and making her run after him when they were near the vines, so as to keep her out of the way of temptation, quickly exhausted his imagination. At last there was nothing to do but to make her sit down. And then they again began to experience their former stifling sensations. The gloomy valley of the Viorne particularly disturbed them. When weariness brought them to the banks of the torrent, all their childish gaiety seemed to disappear. A grey shadow floated under the willows, like the scented crape of a woman's dress. The children felt this crape descend warm and balmy from the voluptuous shoulders of the night, kiss their temples and envelop them with irresistible languor. In the distance the crickets chirped in the meadows of Sainte-Claire, and at their feet the ripples of the Viorne sounded like lovers' whispers—like the soft cooing of humid lips. The stars cast a rain of sparkles from the slumbering heavens. And, amidst the throbbing of the sky, the waters and the darkness, the children reposing on the grass sought each other's hands and pressed them.

Silvere, who vaguely understood the danger of these ecstasies, would sometimes jump up and propose to cross over to one of the islets left by the low water in the middle of the stream. Both ventured forth, with bare feet. Miette made light of the pebbles, refusing Silvere's help, and it once happened that she sat down in the very middle of the stream; however, there were only a few inches of water, and she escaped with nothing worse than a wet petticoat. Then, having reached the island, they threw themselves on the long neck of sand, their eyes on a level with the surface of the river whose silvery scales they saw quivering far away in the clear night. Then Miette would declare that they were in a boat, that the island was certainly floating; she could feel it carrying her along. The dizziness caused by the rippling of the water amused them for a moment, and they lingered there, singing in an undertone, like boatmen as they strike the water with their oars. At other times, when the island had a low bank, they sat there as on a bed of verdure, and let their bare feet dangle in the stream. And then for hours they chatted together, swinging their legs, and splashing the water, delighted to set a tempest raging in the peaceful pool whose freshness cooled their fever.

These footbaths suggested a dangerous idea to Miette. Nothing would satisfy her but a complete bath. A little above the bridge over the Viorne there was a very convenient spot, she said, barely three or four feet deep and quite safe; the weather was so warm, it would be so nice to have the water up to their necks; besides which, she had been dying to learn to swim for such a long time, and Silvere would be able to teach her. Silvere raised objections; it was not prudent at night time; they might be seen; perhaps, too they might catch cold. However, nothing could turn Miette from her purpose. One evening she came with a bathing costume which she had made out of an old dress; and Silvere was then obliged to go back to aunt Dide's for his bathing drawers. Their proceedings were characterised by great simplicity. Miette disrobed herself beneath the shade of a stout willow; and when both were ready, enveloped in the blackness which fell from the foliage around them, they gaily entered the cool water, oblivious of all previous scruples, and knowing in their innocence no sense of shame. They remained in the river quite an hour, splashing and throwing water into each other's faces; Miette now getting cross, now breaking out into laughter, while Silvere gave her her first lesson, dipping her head under every now and again so as to accustom her to the water. As long as he held her up she threw her arms and legs about violently, thinking she was swimming; but directly he let her go, she cried and struggled, striking the water with her outstretched hands, clutching at anything she could get hold of, the young man's waist or one of his wrists. She leant against him for an instant, resting, out of breath and dripping with water; and then she cried: "Once more; but you do it on purpose, you don't hold me."

At the end of a fortnight, the girl was able to swim. With her limbs moving freely, rocked by the stream, playing with it, she yielded form and spirit alike to its soft motion, to the silence of the heavens, and the dreaminess of the melancholy banks. As she and Silvere swam noiselessly along, she seemed to see the foliage of both banks thicken and hang over them, draping them round as with a huge curtain. When the moon shone, its rays glided between the trunks of the trees, and phantoms seemed to flit along the river-side in white robes. Miette felt no nervousness, however, only an indefinable emotion as she followed the play of the shadows. As she went onward with slower motion, the calm water, which the moon converted into a bright mirror, rippled at her approach like a silver-broidered cloth; eddies widened and lost themselves amid the shadows of the banks, under the hanging willow branches, whence issued weird, plashing sounds. At every stroke she perceived recesses full of sound; dark cavities which she hastened to pass by; clusters and rows of trees, whose sombre masses were continually changing form, stretching forward and apparently following her from the summit of the bank. And when she threw herself on her back, the depths of the heavens affected her still more. From the fields, from the distant horizon, which she could no longer see, a solemn lingering strain, composed of all the sighs of the night, was wafted to her.

She was not of a dreamy nature; it was physically, through the medium of each of her senses, that she derived enjoyment from the sky, the river, and the play of light and shadow. The river, in particular, bore her along with endless caresses. When she swam against the current she was delighted to feel the stream flow rapidly against her bosom and limbs. She dipped herself in it yet more deeply, with the water reaching to her lips, so that it might pass over her shoulders, and envelop her, from chin to feet, with flying kisses. Then she would float, languid and quiescent, on the surface, whilst the ripples glided softly between her costume and her skin. And she would also roll over in the still pools like a cat on a carpet; and swim from the luminous patches where the moonbeams were bathing, to the dark water shaded by the foliage, shivering the while, as though she had quitted a sunny plain and then felt the cold from the boughs falling on her neck.

She now remained quite silent in the water, and would not allow Silvere to touch her. Gliding softly by his side, she swam on with the light rustling of a bird flying across the copse, or else she would circle round him, a prey to vague disquietude which she did not comprehend. He himself darted quickly away if he happened to brush against her. The river was now but a source of enervating intoxication, voluptuous languor, which disturbed them strangely. When they emerged from their bath they felt dizzy, weary, and drowsy. Fortunately, the girl declared one evening that she would bathe no more, as the cold water made the blood run to her head. And it was in all truth and innocence that she said this.

Then their long conversations began anew. The dangers to which the innocence of their love had lately been exposed had left no other trace in Silvere's mind than great admiration for Miette's physical strength. She had learned to swim in a fortnight, and often, when they raced together, he had seen her stem the current with a stroke as rapid as his own. He, who delighted in strength and bodily exercises, felt a thrill of pleasure at seeing her so strong, so active and adroit. He entertained at heart a singular admiration for her stout arms. One evening, after one of the first baths that had left them so playful, they caught each other round the waist on a strip of sand, and wrestled for several minutes without Silvere being able to throw Miette. At last, indeed, it was the young man who lost his balance, while the girl remained standing. Her sweetheart treated her like a boy, and it was those long rambles of theirs, those wild races across the meadows, those birds' nests filched from the tree crests, those struggles and violent games of one and another kind that so long shielded them and their love from all impurity.

Then, too, apart from his youthful admiration for his sweetheart's dashing pluck, Silvere felt for her all the compassionate tenderness of a heart that ever softened towards the unfortunate. He, who could never see any forsaken creature, a poor man, or a child, walking barefooted along the dusty roads, without a throb of pity, loved Miette because nobody else loved her, because she virtually led an outcast's hard life. When he saw her smile he was deeply moved by the joy he brought her. Moreover, the child was a wildling, like himself, and they were of the same mind in hating all the gossips of the Faubourg. The dreams in which Silvere indulged in the daytime, while he plied his heavy hammer round the cartwheels in his master's shop, were full of generous enthusiasm. He fancied himself Miette's redeemer. All his reading rushed to his head; he meant to marry his sweetheart some day, in order to raise her in the eyes of the world. It was like a holy mission that he imposed upon himself, that of redeeming and saving the convict's daughter. And his head was so full of certain theories and arguments, that he did not tell himself these things in simple fashion, but became lost in perfect social mysticism; imagining rehabilitation in the form of an apotheosis in which he pictured Miette seated on a throne, at the end of the Cours Sauvaire, while the whole town prostrated itself before her, entreating her pardon and singing her praises. Happily he forgot all these fine things as soon as Miette jumped over the wall, and said to him on the high road: "Let us have a race! I'm sure you won't catch me."

However, if the young man dreamt like this of the glorification of his sweetheart, he also showed such passion for justice that he often made her weep on speaking to her about her father. In spite of the softening effect which Silvere's friendship had had upon her, she still at times gave way to angry outbreaks of temper, when all the stubbornness and rebellion latent in her nature stiffened her with scowling eyes and tightly-drawn lips. She would then contend that her father had done quite right to kill the gendarme, that the earth belongs to everybody, and that one has the right to fire a gun when and where one likes. Thereupon Silvere, in a grave voice, explained the law to her as he understood it, with strange commentaries which would have startled the whole magistracy of Plassans. These discussions took place most often in some remote corner of the Sainte-Claire meadows. The grassy carpet of a dusky green hue stretched further than they could see, undotted even by a single tree, and the sky seemed colossal, spangling the bare horizon with the stars. It seemed to the young couple as if they were being rocked on a sea of verdure. Miette argued the point obstinately; she asked Silvere if her father should have let the gendarme kill him, and Silvere, after a momentary silence, replied that, in such a case, it was better to be the victim than the murderer, and that it was a great misfortune for anyone to kill a fellow man, even in legitimate defence. The law was something holy to him, and the judges had done right in sending Chantegreil to the galleys. At this the girl grew angry, and almost struck her sweetheart, crying out that he was as heartless as the rest. And as he still firmly defended his ideas of justice, she finished by bursting into sobs, and stammering that he was doubtless ashamed of her, since he was always reminding her of her father's crime. These discussions ended in tears, in mutual emotion. But although the child cried, and acknowledged that she was perhaps wrong, she still retained deep within her a wild resentful temper. She once related, with hearty laughter, that she had seen a gendarme fall off his horse and break his leg. Apart from this, Miette only lived for Silvere. When he asked her about her uncle and cousin, she replied that "She did not know;" and if he pressed her, fearing that they were making her too unhappy at the Jas-Meiffren, she simply answered that she worked hard, and that nothing had changed. She believed, however, that Justin had at last found out what made her sing in the morning, and filled her eyes with delight. But she added: "What does it matter? If ever he comes to disturb us we'll receive him in such a way that he won't be in a hurry to meddle with our affairs any more."

Now and again the open country, their long rambles in the fresh air, wearied them somewhat. They then invariably returned to the Aire Saint-Mittre, to the narrow lane, whence they had been driven by the noisy summer evenings, the pungent scent of the trodden grass, all the warm oppressive emanations. On certain nights, however, the path proved cooler, and the winds freshened it so that they could remain there without feeling faint. They then enjoyed a feeling of delightful repose. Seated on the tombstone, deaf to the noise of the children and gipsies, they felt at home again. Silvere had on various occasions picked up fragments of bones, even pieces of skulls, and they were fond of speaking of the ancient burial-ground. It seemed to them, in their lively fancies, that their love had shot up like some vigorous plant in this nook of soil which dead men's bones had fertilised. It had grown, indeed, like those wild weeds, it had blossomed as blossom the poppies which sway like bare bleeding hearts at the slightest breeze. And they ended by fancying that the warm breaths passing over them, the whisperings heard in the gloom, the long quivering which thrilled the path, came from the dead folk sighing their departed passions in their faces, telling them the stories of their bridals, as they turned restlessly in their graves, full of a fierce longing to live and love again. Those fragments of bone, they felt convinced of it, were full of affection for them; the shattered skulls grew warm again by contact with their own youthful fire, the smallest particles surrounded them with passionate whispering, anxious solicitude, throbbing jealousy. And when they departed, the old burial-ground seemed to groan. Those weeds, in which their entangled feet often stumbled on sultry nights, were fingers, tapered by tomb life, that sprang up from the earth to detain them and cast them into each other's arms. That pungent and penetrating odour exhaled by the broken stems was the fertilising perfume, the mighty quintessence of life which is slowly elaborated in the grave, and intoxicates the lovers who wander in the solitude of the paths. The dead, the old departed dead, longed for the bridal of Miette and Silvere.

They were never afraid. The sympathy which seemed to hover around them thrilled them and made them love the invisible beings whose soft touch they often imagined they could feel, like a gentle flapping of wings. Sometimes they were saddened by sweet melancholy, and could not understand what the dead desired of them. They went on basking in their innocent love, amidst this flood of sap, this abandoned cemetery, whose rich soil teemed with life, and imperiously demanded their union. They still remained ignorant of the meaning of the buzzing voices which they heard ringing in their ears, the sudden glow which sent the blood flying to their faces.

They often questioned each other about the remains which they discovered. Miette, after a woman's fashion, was partial to lugubrious subjects. At each new discovery she launched into endless suppositions. If the bone were small, she spoke of some beautiful girl a prey to consumption, or carried off by fever on the eve of her marriage; if the bone were large, she pictured some big old man, a soldier or a judge, some one who had inspired others with terror. For a long time the tombstone particularly engaged their attention. One fine moonlight night Miette distinguished some half-obliterated letters on one side of it, and thereupon she made Silvere scrape the moss away with his knife. Then they read the mutilated inscription: "Here lieth . . . Marie . . . died . . ." And Miette, finding her own name on the stone, was quite terror-stricken. Silvere called her a "big baby," but she could not restrain her tears. She had received a stab in the heart, she said; she would soon die, and that stone was meant for her. The young man himself felt alarmed. However, he succeeded in shaming the child out of these thoughts. What! she so courageous, to dream about such trifles! They ended by laughing. Then they avoided speaking of it again. But in melancholy moments, when the cloudy sky saddened the pathway, Miette could not help thinking of that dead one, that unknown Marie, whose tomb had so long facilitated their meetings. The poor girl's bones were perhaps still lying there. And at this thought Miette one evening had a strange whim, and asked Silvere to turn the stone over to see what might be under it. He refused, as though it were sacrilege, and his refusal strengthened Miette's fancies with regard to the dear phantom which bore her name. She positively insisted that the girl had died young, as she was, and in the very midst of her love. She even began to pity the stone, that stone which she climbed so nimbly, and on which they had sat so often, a stone which death had chilled, and which their love had warmed again.

"You'll see, this tombstone will bring us misfortune," she added. "If you were to die, I should come and lie here, and then I should like to have this stone set over my body."

At this, Silvere, choking with emotion, scolded her for thinking of such mournful things.

And so, for nearly two years, their love grew alike in the narrow pathway and the open country. Their idyll passed through the chilling rains of December and the burning solicitations of July, free from all touch of impurity, ever retaining the sweet charm of some old Greek love-tale, all the naive hesitancy of youth which desires but knows not. In vain did the long-departed dead whisper in their ears. They carried nothing away from the old cemetery but emotional melancholy and a vague presentiment of a short life. A voice seemed to whisper to them that they would depart amidst their virginal love, long ere the bridal day would give them wholly to each other. It was there, on the tombstone and among the bones that lay hidden beneath the rank grass, that they had first come to indulge in that longing for death, that eager desire to sleep together in the earth, that now set them stammering and sighing beside the Orcheres road, on that December night, while the two bells repeated their mournful warnings to one another.

Miette was sleeping calmly, with her head resting on Silvere's chest while he mused upon their past meeting, their lovely years of unbroken happiness. At daybreak the girl awoke. The valley now spread out clearly under the bright sky. The sun was still behind the hills, but a stream of crystal light, limpid and cold as spring-water, flowed from the pale horizon. In the distance, the Viorne, like a white satin ribbon, disappeared among an expanse of red and yellow land. It was a boundless vista, with grey seas of olive-trees, and vineyards that looked like huge pieces of striped cloth. The whole country was magnified by the clearness of the atmosphere and the peaceful cold. However, sharp gusts of wind chilled the young people's faces. And thereupon they sprang to their feet, cheered by the sight of the clear morning. Their melancholy forebodings had vanished with the darkness, and they gazed with delight at the immense expanse of the plain, and listened to the tolling of the two bells that now seemed to be joyfully ringing in a holiday.

"Ah! I've had a good sleep!" Miette cried. "I dreamt you were kissing me. Tell me now, did you kiss me?"

"It's very possible," Silvere replied laughing. "I was not very warm. It is bitterly cold."

"I only feel cold in the feet," Miette rejoined.

"Well! let us have a run," said Silvere. "We have still two good leagues to go. You will get warm."

Thereupon they descended the hill and ran until they reached the high road. When they were below they raised their heads as if to say farewell to that rock on which they had wept while their kisses burned their lips. But they did not again speak of that ardent embrace which had thrilled them so strongly with vague, unknown desire. Under the pretext of walking more quickly they did not even take each other's arm. They experienced some slight confusion when they looked at one another, though why they could not tell. Meantime the dawn was rising around them. The young man, who had sometimes been sent to Orcheres by his master, knew all the shortest cuts. Thus they walked on for more than two leagues, along dingle paths by the side of interminable ledges and walls. Now and again Miette accused Silvere of having taken her the wrong way; for, at times—for a quarter of an hour at a stretch—they lost all sight of the surrounding country, seeing above the walls and hedges nothing but long rows of almond-trees whose slender branches showed sharply against the pale sky.

All at once, however, they came out just in front of Orcheres. Loud cries of joy, the shouting of a crowd, sounded clearly in the limpid air. The insurrectionary forces were only now entering the town. Miette and Silvere went in with the stragglers. Never had they seen such enthusiasm. To judge from the streets, one would have thought it was a procession day, when the windows are decked with the finest drapery to honour the passage of the Canopy. The townsfolk welcomed the insurgents as though they were deliverers. The men embraced them, while the women brought them food. Old men were to be seen weeping at the doors. And the joyousness was of an essentially Southern character, pouring forth in clamorous fashion, in singing, dancing, and gesticulation. As Miette passed along she was carried away by a farandole[*] which spread whirling all round the Grand' Place. Silvere followed her. His thoughts of death and his discouragement were now far away. He wanted to fight, to sell his life dearly at least. The idea of a struggle intoxicated him afresh. He dreamed of victory to be followed by a happy life with Miette, amidst the peacefulness of the universal Republic.

[*] The farandole is the popular dance of Provence.

The fraternal reception accorded them by the inhabitants of Orcheres proved to be the insurgents' last delight. They spent the day amidst radiant confidence and boundless hope. The prisoners, Commander Sicardot, Messieurs Garconnet, Peirotte and the others, who had been shut up in one of the rooms at the mayor's, the windows of which overlooked the Grand' Place, watched the farandoles and wild outbursts of enthusiasm with surprise and dismay.

"The villains!" muttered the Commander, leaning upon a window-bar, as though bending over the velvet-covered hand-rest of a box at a theatre: "To think that there isn't a battery or two to make a clean sweep of all that rabble!"

Then he perceived Miette, and addressing himself to Monsieur Garconnet, he added: "Do you see, sir, that big girl in red over yonder? How disgraceful! They've even brought their mistresses with them. If this continues much longer we shall see some fine goings-on."

Monsieur Garconnet shook his head, saying something about "unbridled passions," and "the most evil days of history." Monsieur Peirotte, as white as a sheet, remained silent; he only opened his lips once, to say to Sicardot, who was still bitterly railing: "Not so loud, sir; not so loud! You will get us all massacred."

As a matter of fact, the insurgents treated the gentlemen with the greatest kindness. They even provided them with an excellent dinner in the evening. Such attentions, however, were terrifying to such a quaker as the receiver of taxes; the insurgents he thought would not treat them so well unless they wished to make them fat and tender for the day when they might wish to devour them.

At dusk that day Silvere came face to face with his cousin, Doctor Pascal. The latter had followed the band on foot, chatting with the workmen who held him in the greatest respect. At first he had striven to dissuade them from the struggle; and then, as if convinced by their arguments, he had said to them with his kindly smile: "Well, perhaps you are right, my friends; fight if you like, I shall be here to patch up your arms and legs."

Then, in the morning he began to gather pebbles and plants along the high road. He regretted that he had not brought his geologist's hammer and botanical wallet with him. His pockets were now so full of stones that they were almost bursting, while bundles of long herbs peered forth from the surgeon's case which he carried under his arm.

"Hallo! You here, my lad?" he cried, as he perceived Silvere. "I thought I was the only member of the family here."

He spoke these last words with a touch of irony, as if deriding the intrigues of his father and his uncle Antoine. Silvere was very glad to meet his cousin; the doctor was the only one of the Rougons who ever shook hands with him in the street, and showed him any sincere friendship. Seeing him, therefore, still covered with dust from the march, the young man thought him gained over to the Republican cause, and was much delighted thereat. He talked to the doctor, with youthful magniloquence, of the people's rights, their holy cause, and their certain triumph. Pascal smiled as he listened, and watched the youth's gestures and the ardent play of his features with curiosity, as though he were studying a patient, or analysing an enthusiasm, to ascertain what might be at the bottom of it.

"How you run on! How you run on!" he finally exclaimed. "Ah! you are your grandmother's true grandson." And, in a whisper, he added, like some chemist taking notes: "Hysteria or enthusiasm, shameful madness or sublime madness. It's always those terrible nerves!" Then, again speaking aloud, as if summing up the matter, he said: "The family is complete now. It will count a hero among its members."

Silvere did not hear him. He was still talking of his dear Republic. Miette had dropped a few paces off; she was still wrapped in her large red pelisse. She and Silvere had traversed the town arm-in-arm. The sight of this tall red girl at last puzzled Pascal, and again interrupting his cousin, he asked him: "Who is this child with you?"

"She is my wife," Silvere gravely answered.

The doctor opened his eyes wide, for he did not understand. He was very shy with women; however, he raised his hat to Miette as he went away.

The night proved an anxious one. Forebodings of misfortune swept over the insurgents. The enthusiasm and confidence of the previous evening seemed to die away in the darkness. In the morning there were gloomy faces; sad looks were exchanged, followed by discouraging silence. Terrifying rumours were now circulating. Bad news, which the leaders had managed to conceal the previous evening, had spread abroad, though nobody in particular was known to have spoken. It was the work of that invisible voice, which, with a word, throws a mob into a panic. According to some reports Paris was subdued, and the provinces had offered their hands and feet, eager to be bound. And it was added that a large party of troops, which had left Marseilles under the command of Colonel Masson and Monsieur de Bleriot, the prefect of the department, was advancing by forced marches to disperse the insurrectionary bands. This news came like a thunderbolt, at once awakening rage and despair. These men, who on the previous evening had been all aglow with patriotic fever, now shivered with cold, chilled to their hearts by the shameful submissiveness of prostrate France. They alone, then, had had the courage to do their duty! And now they were to be left to perish amidst the general panic, the death-like silence of the country; they had become mere rebels, who would be hunted down like wild beasts; they, who had dreamed of a great war, of a whole nation in revolt, and of the glorious conquest of the people's rights! Miserably baffled and betrayed, this handful of men could but weep for their dead faith and their vanished dreams of justice. There were some who, while taunting France with her cowardice, flung away their arms, and sat down by the roadside, declaring that they would there await the bullets of the troops, and show how Republicans could die.

Although these men had nothing now but death or exile before them, there were very few desertions from their ranks. A splendid feeling of solidarity kept them together. Their indignation turned chiefly against their leaders, who had really proved incapable. Irreparable mistakes had been committed; and now the insurgents, without order or discipline, barely protected by a few sentries, and under the command of irresolute men, found themselves at the mercy of the first soldiers that might arrive.

They spent two more days at Orcheres, Tuesday and Wednesday, thus losing time and aggravating the situation. The general, the man with the sabre, whom Silvere had pointed out to Miette on the Plassans road, vacillated and hesitated under the terrible responsibility that weighed upon him. On Thursday he came to the conclusion that the position of Orcheres was a decidedly dangerous one; so towards one o'clock he gave orders to march, and led his little army to the heights of Sainte-Roure. That was, indeed, an impregnable position for any one who knew how to defend it. The houses of Sainte-Roure rise in tiers along a hill-side; behind the town all approach is shut off by enormous rocks, so that this kind of citadel can only be reached by the Nores plain, which spreads out at the foot of the plateau. An esplanade, converted into a public walk planted with magnificent elms, overlooks the plain. It was on this esplanade that the insurgents encamped. The hostages were imprisoned in the Hotel de la Mule-Blanche, standing half-way along the promenade. The night passed away heavy and black. The insurgents spoke of treachery. As soon as it was morning, however, the man with the sabre, who had neglected to take the simplest precautions, reviewed the troops. The contingents were drawn up in line with their backs turned to the plain. They presented a wonderful medley of costume, some wearing brown jackets, others dark greatcoats, and others again blue blouses girded with red sashes. Moreover, their arms were an equally odd collection: there were newly sharpened scythes, large navvies' spades, and fowling-pieces with burnished barrels glittering in the sunshine. And at the very moment when the improvised general was riding past the little army, a sentry, who had been forgotten in an olive-plantation, ran up gesticulating and shouting:

"The soldiers! The soldiers!"

There was indescribable emotion. At first, they thought it a false alarm. Forgetting all discipline, they rushed forward to the end of the esplanade in order to see the soldiers. The ranks were broken, and as the dark line of troops appeared, marching in perfect order with a long glitter of bayonets, on the other side of the greyish curtain of olive trees, there came a hasty and disorderly retreat, which sent a quiver of panic to the other end of the plateau. Nevertheless, the contingents of La Palud and Saint-Martin-de-Vaulx had again formed in line in the middle of the promenade, and stood there erect and fierce. A wood-cutter, who was a head taller than any of his companions, shouted, as he waved his red neckerchief: "To arms, Chavanoz, Graille, Poujols, Saint-Eutrope! To arms, Les Tulettes! To arms, Plassans!"

Crowds streamed across the esplanade. The man with the sabre, surrounded by the folks from Faverolles, marched off with several of the country contingents—Vernoux, Corbiere, Marsanne, and Pruinas—to outflank the enemy and then attack him. Other contingents, from Valqueyras, Nazere, Castel-le-Vieux, Les Roches-Noires, and Murdaran, dashed to the left, scattering themselves in skirmishing parties over the Nores plain.

And meantime the men of the towns and villages that the wood-cutter had called to his aid mustered together under the elms, there forming a dark irregular mass, grouped without regard to any of the rules of strategy, simply placed there like a rock, as it were, to bar the way or die. The men of Plassans stood in the middle of this heroic battalion. Amid the grey hues of the blouses and jackets, and the bluish glitter of the weapons, the pelisse worn by Miette, who was holding the banner with both hands, looked like a large red splotch—a fresh and bleeding wound.

All at once perfect silence fell. Monsieur Peirotte's pale face appeared at a window of the Hotel de la Mule-Blanche. And he began to speak, gesticulating with his hands.

"Go in, close the shutters," the insurgents furiously shouted; "you'll get yourself killed."

Thereupon the shutters were quickly closed, and nothing was heard save the regular, rhythmical tramp of the soldiers who were drawing near.

A minute, that seemed an age, went by. The troops had disappeared, hidden by an undulation of the ground; but over yonder, on the side of the Nores plain, the insurgents soon perceived the bayonets shooting up, one after another, like a field of steel-eared corn under the rising sun. At that moment Silvere, who was glowing with feverish agitation, fancied he could see the gendarme whose blood had stained his hands. He knew, from the accounts of his companions, that Rengade was not dead, that he had only lost an eye; and he clearly distinguished the unlucky man with his empty socket bleeding horribly. The keen recollection of this gendarme, to whom he had not given a thought since his departure from Plassans, proved unbearable. He was afraid that fear might get the better of him, and he tightened his hold on his carbine, while a mist gathered before his eyes. He felt a longing to discharge his gun and fire at the phantom of that one-eyed man so as to drive it away. Meantime the bayonets were still and ever slowly ascending.

When the heads of the soldiers appeared on a level with the esplanade, Silvere instinctively turned to Miette. She stood there with flushed face, looking taller than ever amidst the folds of the red banner; she was indeed standing on tiptoes in order to see the troops, and nervous expectation made her nostrils quiver and her red lips part so as to show her white, eager, gleaming teeth. Silvere smiled at her. But he had scarcely turned his head when a fusillade burst out. The soldiers, who could only be seen from their shoulders upwards, had just fired their first volley. It seemed to Silvere as though a great gust of wind was passing over his head, while a shower of leaves, lopped off by the bullets, fell from the elms. A sharp sound, like the snapping of a dead branch, made him look to his right. Then, prone on the ground, he saw the big wood-cutter, he who was a head taller than the others. There was a little black hole in the middle of his forehead. And thereupon Silvere fired straight before him, without taking aim, reloaded and fired again like a madman or an unthinking wild beast, in haste only to kill. He could not even distinguish the soldiers now; smoke, resembling strips of grey muslin, was floating under the elms. The leaves still rained upon the insurgents, for the troops were firing too high. Every now and then, athwart the fierce crackling of the fusillade, the young man heard a sigh or a low rattle, and a rush was made among the band as if to make room for some poor wretch clutching hold of his neighbours as he fell. The firing lasted ten minutes.

Then, between two volleys some one exclaimed in a voice of terror: "Every man for himself! Sauve qui peut!" This roused shouts and murmurs of rage, as if to say, "The cowards! Oh! the cowards!" sinister rumours were spreading—the general had fled; cavalry were sabring the skirmishers in the Nores plain. However, the irregular firing did not cease, every now and again sudden bursts of flame sped through the clouds of smoke. A gruff voice, the voice of terror, shouted yet louder: "Every man for himself! Sauve qui peut!" Some men took to flight, throwing down their weapons and leaping over the dead. The others closed their ranks. At last there were only some ten insurgents left. Two more took to flight, and of the remaining eight three were killed at one discharge.

The two children had remained there mechanically without understanding anything. As the battalion diminished in numbers, Miette raised the banner still higher in the air; she held it in front of her with clenched fists as if it were a huge taper. It was completely riddled by bullets. When Silvere had no more cartridges left in his pocket, he ceased firing, and gazed at the carbine with an air of stupor. It was then that a shadow passed over his face, as though the flapping wings of some colossal bird had brushed against his forehead. And raising his eyes he saw the banner fall from Miette's grasp. The child, her hands clasped to her breast, her head thrown back with an expression of excruciating suffering, was staggering to the ground. She did not utter a single cry, but sank at last upon the red banner.

"Get up; come quickly," Silvere said, in despair, as he held out his hand to her.

But she lay upon the ground without uttering a word, her eyes wide open. Then he understood, and fell on his knees beside her.

"You are wounded, eh? tell me? Where are you wounded?"

She still spoke no word; she was stifling, and gazing at him out of her large eyes, while short quivers shook her frame. Then he pulled away her hands.

"It's there, isn't it? it's there."

And he tore open her bodice, and laid her bosom bare. He searched, but saw nothing. His eyes were brimming with tears. At last under the left breast he perceived a small pink hole; a single drop of blood stained the wound.

"It's nothing," he whispered; "I'll go and find Pascal, he'll put you all right again. If you could only get up. Can't you move?"

The soldiers were not firing now; they had dashed to the left in pursuit of the contingents led away by the man with the sabre. And in the centre of the esplanade there only remained Silvere kneeling beside Miette's body. With the stubbornness of despair, he had taken her in his arms. He wanted to set her on her feet, but such a quiver of pain came upon the girl that he laid her down again, and said to her entreatingly: "Speak to me, pray. Why don't you say something to me?"

She could not; she slowly, gently shook her hand, as if to say that it was not her fault. Her close-pressed lips were already contracting beneath the touch of death. With her unbound hair streaming around her, and her head resting amid the folds of the blood-red banner, all her life now centred in her eyes, those black eyes glittering in her white face. Silvere sobbed. The glance of those big sorrowful eyes filled him with distress. He read in them bitter, immense regret for life. Miette was telling him that she was going away all alone, and before their bridal day; that she was leaving him ere she had become his wife. She was telling him, too, that it was he who had willed that it should be so, that he should have loved her as other lovers love their sweethearts. In the hour of her agony, amidst that stern conflict between death and her vigorous nature, she bewailed her fate in going like that to the grave. Silvere, as he bent over her, understood how bitter was the pang. He recalled their caresses, how she had hung round his neck, and had yearned for his love, but he had not understood, and now she was departing from him for evermore. Bitterly grieved at the thought that throughout her eternal rest she would remember him solely as a companion and playfellow, he kissed her on the bosom while his hot tears fell upon her lips. Those passionate kisses brought a last gleam of joy to Miette's eyes. They loved one another, and their idyll ended in death.

But Silvere could not believe she was dying. "No, you will see, it will prove only a trifle," he declared. "Don't speak if it hurts you. Wait, I will raise your head and then warm you; your hands are quite frozen."

But the fusillade had begun afresh, this time on the left, in the olive plantations. A dull sound of galloping cavalry rose from the plain. At times there were loud cries, as of men being slaughtered. And thick clouds of smoke were wafted along and hung about the elms on the esplanade. Silvere for his part no longer heard or saw anything. Pascal, who came running down in the direction of the plain, saw him stretched upon the ground, and hastened towards him, thinking he was wounded. As soon as the young man saw him, he clutched hold of him and pointed to Miette.

"Look," he said, "she's wounded, there, under the breast. Ah! how good of you to come! You will save her."

At that moment, however, a slight convulsion shook the dying girl. A pain-fraught shadow passed over her face, and as her contracted lips suddenly parted, a faint sigh escaped from them. Her eyes, still wide open, gazed fixedly at the young man.

Then Pascal, who had stooped down, rose again, saying in a low voice: "She is dead."

Dead! Silvere reeled at the sound of the word. He had been kneeling forward, but now he sank back, as though thrown down by Miette's last faint sigh.

"Dead! Dead!" he repeated; "it is not true, she is looking at me. See how she is looking at me!"

Then he caught the doctor by the coat, entreating him to remain there, assuring him that he was mistaken, that she was not dead, and that he could save her if he only would. Pascal resisted gently, saying, in his kindly voice: "I can do nothing for her, others are waiting for me. Let go, my poor child; she is quite dead."

At last Silvere released his hold and again fell back. Dead! Dead! Still that word, which rang like a knell in his dazed brain! When he was alone he crept up close to the corpse. Miette still seemed to be looking at him. He threw himself upon her, laid his head upon her bosom, and watered it with his tears. He was beside himself with grief. He pressed his lips wildly to her, and breathed out all his passion, all his soul, in one long kiss, as though in the hope that it might bring her to life again. But the girl was turning cold in spite of his caresses. He felt her lifeless and nerveless beneath his touch. Then he was seized with terror, and with haggard face and listless hanging arms he remained crouching in a state of stupor, and repeating: "She is dead, yet she is looking at me; she does not close her eyes, she sees me still."

This fancy was very sweet to him. He remained there perfectly still, exchanging a long look with Miette, in whose glance, deepened by death, he still seemed to read the girl's lament for her sad fate.

In the meantime, the cavalry were still sabring the fugitives over the Nores plain; the cries of the wounded and the galloping of the horses became more distant, softening like music wafted from afar through the clear air. Silvere was no longer conscious of the fighting. He did not even see his cousin, who mounted the slope again and crossed the promenade. Pascal, as he passed along, picked up Macquart's carbine which Silvere had thrown down; he knew it, as he had seen it hanging over aunt Dide's chimney-piece, and he thought he might as well save it from the hands of the victors. He had scarcely entered the Hotel de la Mule-Blanche, whither a large number of the wounded had been taken, when a band of insurgents, chased by the soldiers like a herd of cattle, once more rushed into the esplanade. The man with the sabre had fled; it was the last contingents from the country who were being exterminated. There was a terrible massacre. In vain did Colonel Masson and the prefect, Monsieur de Bleriot, overcome by pity, order a retreat. The infuriated soldiers continued firing upon the mass, and pinning isolated fugitives to the walls with their bayonets. When they had no more enemies before them, they riddled the facade of the Mule-Blanche with bullets. The shutters flew into splinters; one window which had been left half-open was torn out, and there was a loud rattle of broken glass. Pitiful voices were crying out from within; "The prisoners! The prisoners!" But the troops did not hear; they continued firing. All at once Commander Sicardot, growing exasperated, appeared at the door, waved his arms, and endeavoured to speak. Monsieur Peirotte, the receiver of taxes, with his slim figure and scared face, stood by his side. However, another volley was fired, and Monsieur Peirotte fell face foremost, with a heavy thud, to the ground.

Silvere and Miette were still looking at each other. Silvere had remained by the corpse, through all the fusillade and the howls of agony, without even turning his head. He was only conscious of the presence of some men around him, and, from a feeling of modesty, he drew the red banner over Miette's breast. Then their eyes still continued to gaze at one another.

The conflict, however, was at an end. The death of the receiver of taxes had satiated the soldiers. Some of these ran about, scouring every corner of the esplanade, to prevent the escape of a single insurgent. A gendarme who perceived Silvere under the trees, ran up to him, and seeing that it was a lad he had to deal with, called: "What are you doing there, youngster?"

Silvere, whose eyes were still fixed on those of Miette, made no reply.

"Ah! the bandit, his hands are black with powder," the gendarme exclaimed, as he stooped down. "Come, get up, you scoundrel! You know what you've got to expect."

Then, as Silvere only smiled vaguely and did not move, the other looked more attentively, and saw that the corpse swathed in the banner was that of a girl.

"A fine girl; what a pity!" he muttered. "Your mistress, eh? you rascal!"

Then he made a violent grab at Silvere, and setting him on his feet led him away like a dog that is dragged by one leg. Silvere submitted in silence, as quietly as a child. He just turned round to give another glance at Miette. He felt distressed at thus leaving her alone under the trees. For the last time he looked at her from afar. She was still lying there in all her purity, wrapped in the red banner, her head slightly raised, and her big eyes turned upward towards heaven.

CHAPTER VI

It was about five o'clock in the morning when Rougon at last ventured to leave his mother's house. The old woman had gone to sleep on a chair. He crept stealthily to the end of the Impasse Saint-Mittre. There was not a sound, not a shadow. He pushed on as far as the Porte de Rome. The gates stood wide open in the darkness that enveloped the slumbering town. Plassans was sleeping as sound as a top, quite unconscious, apparently, of the risk it was running in allowing the gates to remain unsecured. It seemed like a city of the dead. Rougon, taking courage, made his way into the Rue de Nice. He scanned from a distance the corners of each successive lane; and trembled at every door, fearing lest he should see a band of insurgents rush out upon him. However, he reached the Cours Sauvaire without any mishap. The insurgents seemed to have vanished in the darkness like a nightmare.

Pierre then paused for a moment on the deserted pavement, heaving a deep sigh of relief and triumph. So those rascals had really abandoned Plassans to him. The town belonged to him now; it slept like the foolish thing it was; there it lay, dark and tranquil, silent and confident, and he had only to stretch out his hand to take possession of it. That brief halt, the supercilious glance which he cast over the drowsy place, thrilled him with unspeakable delight. He remained there, alone in the darkness, and crossed his arms, in the attitude of a great general on the eve of a victory. He could hear nothing in the distance but the murmur of the fountains of the Cours Sauvaire, whose jets of water fell into the basins with a musical plashing.

Then he began to feel a little uneasy. What if the Empire should unhappily have been established without his aid? What if Sicardot, Garconnet, and Peirotte, instead of being arrested and led away by the insurrectionary band, had shut the rebels up in prison? A cold perspiration broke out over him, and he went on his way again, hoping that Felicite would give him some accurate information. He now pushed on more rapidly, and was skirting the houses of the Rue de la Banne, when a strange spectacle, which caught his eyes as he raised his head, riveted him to the ground. One of the windows of the yellow drawing-room was brilliantly illuminated, and, in the glare, he saw a dark form, which he recognized as that of his wife, bending forward, and shaking its arms in a violent manner. He asked himself what this could mean, but, unable to think of any explanation, was beginning to feel seriously alarmed, when some hard object bounded over the pavement at his feet. Felicite had thrown him the key of the cart-house, where he had concealed a supply of muskets. This key clearly signified that he must take up arms. So he turned away again, unable to comprehend why his wife had prevented him from going upstairs, and imagining the most horrible things.

He now went straight to Roudier, whom he found dressed and ready to march, but completely ignorant of the events of the night. Roudier lived at the far end of the new town, as in a desert, whither no tidings of the insurgents' movements had penetrated. Pierre, however, proposed to him that they should go to Granoux, whose house stood on one of the corners of the Place des Recollets, and under whose windows the insurgent contingents must have passed. The municipal councillor's servant remained for a long time parleying before consenting to admit them, and they heard poor Granoux calling from the first floor in a trembling voice:

"Don't open the door, Catherine! The streets are full of bandits."

He was in his bedroom, in the dark. When he recognised his two faithful friends he felt relieved; but he would not let the maid bring a lamp, fearing lest the light might attract a bullet. He seemed to think that the town was still full of insurgents. Lying back on an arm-chair near the window, in his pants, and with a silk handkerchief round his head, he moaned: "Ah! my friends, if you only knew!—I tried to go to bed, but they were making such a disturbance! At last I lay down in my arm-chair here. I've seen it all, everything. Such awful-looking men; a band of escaped convicts! Then they passed by again, dragging brave Commander Sicardot, worthy Monsieur Garconnet, the postmaster, and others away with them, and howling the while like cannibals!"

Rougon felt a thrill of joy. He made Granoux repeat to him how he had seen the mayor and the others surrounded by the "brigands."

"I saw it all!" the poor man wailed. "I was standing behind the blind. They had just seized Monsieur Peirotte, and I heard him saying as he passed under my window: 'Gentlemen, don't hurt me!' They were certainly maltreating him. It's abominable, abominable."

However, Roudier calmed Granoux by assuring him that the town was free. And the worthy gentleman began to feel quite a glow of martial ardour when Pierre informed him that he had come to recruit his services for the purpose of saving Plassans. These three saviours then took council together. They each resolved to go and rouse their friends, and appoint a meeting at the cart-shed, the secret arsenal of the reactionary party. Meantime Rougon constantly bethought himself of Felicite's wild gestures, which seemed to betoken danger somewhere. Granoux, assuredly the most foolish of the three, was the first to suggest that there must be some Republicans left in the town. This proved a flash of light, and Rougon, with a feeling of conviction, reflected: "There must be something of Macquart's doing under all this."

An hour or so later the friends met again in the cart-shed, which was situated in a very lonely spot. They had glided stealthily from door to door, knocking and ringing as quietly as possible, and picking up all the men they could. However, they had only succeeded in collecting some forty, who arrived one after the other, creeping along in the dark, with the pale and drowsy countenances of men who had been violently startled from their sleep. The cart-shed, let to a cooper, was littered with old hoops and broken casks, of which there were piles in every corner. The guns were stored in the middle, in three long boxes. A taper, stuck on a piece of wood, illumined the strange scene with a flickering glimmer. When Rougon had removed the covers of the three boxes, the spectacle became weirdly grotesque. Above the fire-arms, whose barrels shown with a bluish, phosphorescent glitter, were outstretched necks and heads that bent with a sort of secret fear, while the yellow light of the taper cast shadows of huge noses and locks of stiffened hair upon the walls.

However, the reactionary forces counted their numbers, and the smallness of the total filled them with hesitation. They were only thirty-nine all told, and this adventure would mean certain death for them. A father of a family spoke of his children; others, without troubling themselves about excuses, turned towards the door. Then, however, two fresh conspirators arrived, who lived in the neighbourhood of the Town Hall, and knew for certain that there were not more than about twenty Republicans still at the mayor's. The band thereupon deliberated afresh. Forty-one against twenty—these seemed practicable conditions. So the arms were distributed amid a little trembling. It was Rougon who took them from the boxes, and each man present, as he received his gun, the barrel of which on that December night was icy cold, felt a sudden chill freeze him to his bones. The shadows on the walls assumed the clumsy postures of bewildered conscripts stretching out their fingers. Pierre closed the boxes regretfully; he left there a hundred and nine guns which he would willingly have distributed; however, he now had to divide the cartridges. Of these, there were two large barrels full in the furthest corner of the cart-shed, sufficient to defend Plassans against an army. And as this corner was dark, one of the gentlemen brought the taper near, whereupon another conspirator—a burly pork-butcher, with immense fists—grew angry, declaring that it was most imprudent to bring a light so close. They strongly approved his words, so the cartridges were distributed in the dark. They completely filled their pockets with them. Then, after they had loaded their guns, with endless precautions, they lingered there for another moment, looking at each other with suspicious eyes, or exchanging glances in which cowardly ferocity was mingled with an expression of stupidity.

In the streets they kept close to the houses, marching silently and in single file, like savages on the war-path. Rougon had insisted upon having the honour of marching at their head; the time had come when he must needs run some risk, if he wanted to see his schemes successful. Drops of perspiration poured down his forehead in spite of the cold. Nevertheless he preserved a very martial bearing. Roudier and Granoux were immediately behind him. Upon two occasions the column came to an abrupt halt. They fancied they had heard some distant sound of fighting; but it was only the jingle of the little brass shaving-dishes hanging from chains, which are used as signs by the barbers of Southern France. These dishes were gently shaking to and fro in the breeze. After each halt, the saviours of Plassans continued their stealthy march in the dark, retaining the while the mien of terrified heroes. In this manner they reached the square in front of the Town Hall. There they formed a group round Rougon, and took counsel together once more. In the facade of the building in front of them only one window was lighted. It was now nearly seven o'clock and the dawn was approaching.

After a good ten minutes' discussion, it was decided to advance as far as the door, so as to ascertain what might be the meaning of this disquieting darkness and silence. The door proved to be half open. One of the conspirators thereupon popped his head in, but quickly withdrew it, announcing that there was a man under the porch, sitting against the wall fast asleep, with a gun between his legs. Rougon, seeing a chance of commencing with a deed of valour, thereupon entered first, and, seizing the man, held him down while Roudier gagged him. This first triumph, gained in silence, singularly emboldened the little troop, who had dreamed of a murderous fusillade. And Rougon had to make imperious signs to restrain his soldiers from indulging in over-boisterous delight.

They continued their advance on tip-toes. Then, on the left, in the police guard-room, which was situated there, they perceived some fifteen men lying on camp-beds and snoring, amid the dim glimmer of a lantern hanging from the wall. Rougon, who was decidedly becoming a great general, left half of his men in front of the guard-room with orders not to rouse the sleepers, but to watch them and make them prisoners if they stirred. He was personally uneasy about the lighted window which they had seen from the square. He still scented Macquart's hand in the business, and, as he felt that he would first have to make prisoners of those who were watching upstairs, he was not sorry to be able to adopt surprise tactics before the noise of a conflict should impel them to barricade themselves in the first-floor rooms. So he went up quietly, followed by the twenty heroes whom he still had at his disposal. Roudier commanded the detachment remaining in the courtyard.

As Rougon had surmised, it was Macquart who was comfortably installed upstairs in the mayor's office. He sat in the mayor's arm-chair, with his elbows on the mayor's writing-table. With the characteristic confidence of a man of coarse intellect, who is absorbed by a fixed idea and bent upon his own triumph, he had imagined after the departure of the insurgents that Plassans was now at his complete disposal, and that he would be able to act there like a conqueror. In his opinion that body of three thousand men who had just passed through the town was an invincible army, whose mere proximity would suffice to keep the bourgeois humble and docile in his hands. The insurgents had imprisoned the gendarmes in their barracks, the National Guard was already dismembered, the nobility must be quaking with terror, and the retired citizens of the new town had certainly never handled a gun in their lives. Moreover, there were no arms any more than there were soldiers. Thus Macquart did not even take the precaution to have the gates shut. His men carried their confidence still further by falling asleep, while he calmly awaited the dawn which he fancied would attract and rally all the Republicans of the district round him.

He was already meditating important revolutionary measures; the nomination of a Commune of which he would be the chief, the imprisonment of all bad patriots, and particularly of all such persons as had incurred his displeasure. The thought of the baffled Rougons and their yellow drawing-room, of all that clique entreating him for mercy, thrilled him with exquisite pleasure. In order to while away the time he resolved to issue a proclamation to the inhabitants of Plassans. Four of his party set to work to draw up this proclamation, and when it was finished Macquart, assuming a dignified manner in the mayor's arm-chair, had it read to him before sending it to the printing office of the "Independant," on whose patriotism he reckoned. One of the writers was commencing, in an emphatic voice, "Inhabitants of Plassans, the hour of independence has struck, the reign of justice has begun——" when a noise was heard at the door of the office, which was slowly pushed open.

"Is it you, Cassoute?" Macquart asked, interrupting the perusal.

Nobody answered; but the door opened wider.

"Come in, do!" he continued, impatiently. "Is my brigand of a brother at home?"

Then, all at once both leaves of the door were violently thrown back and slammed against the walls, and a crowd of armed men, in the midst of whom marched Rougon, with his face very red and his eyes starting out of their sockets, swarmed into the office, brandishing their guns like cudgels.

"Ah! the blackguards, they're armed!" shouted Macquart.

He was about to seize a pair of pistols which were lying on the writing-table, when five men caught hold of him by the throat and held him in check. The four authors of the proclamation struggled for an instant. There was a good deal of scuffling and stamping, and a noise of persons falling. The combatants were greatly hampered by their guns, which they would not lay aside, although they could not use them. In the struggle, Rougon's weapon, which an insurgent had tried to wrest from him, went off of itself with a frightful report, and filled the room with smoke. The bullet shattered a magnificent mirror that reached from the mantelpiece to the ceiling, and was reputed to be one of the finest mirrors in the town. This shot, fired no one knew why, deafened everybody, and put an end to the battle.

Then, while the gentlemen were panting and puffing, three other reports were heard in the courtyard. Granoux immediately rushed to one of the windows. And as he and the others anxiously leaned out, their faces lengthened perceptibly, for they were in nowise eager for a struggle with the men in the guard-room, whom they had forgotten amidst their triumph. However, Roudier cried out from below that all was right. And Granoux then shut the window again, beaming with joy. The fact of the matter was, that Rougon's shot had aroused the sleepers, who had promptly surrendered, seeing that resistance was impossible. Then, however, three of Roudier's men, in their blind haste to get the business over, had discharged their firearms in the air, as a sort of answer to the report from above, without knowing quite why they did so. It frequently happens that guns go off of their own accord when they are in the hands of cowards.

And now, in the room upstairs, Rougon ordered Macquart's hands to be bound with the bands of the large green curtains which hung at the windows. At this, Macquart, wild with rage, broke into scornful jeers. "All right; go on," he muttered. "This evening or to-morrow, when the others return, we'll settle accounts!"

This allusion to the insurrectionary forces sent a shudder to the victors' very marrow; Rougon for his part almost choked. His brother, who was exasperated at having been surprised like a child by these terrified bourgeois, who, old soldier that he was, he disdainfully looked upon as good-for-nothing civilians, defied him with a glance of the bitterest hatred.

"Ah! I can tell some pretty stories about you, very pretty ones!" the rascal exclaimed, without removing his eyes from the retired oil merchant. "Just send me before the Assize Court, so that I may tell the judge a few tales that will make them laugh."

At this Rougon turned pale. He was terribly afraid lest Macquart should blab then and there, and ruin him in the esteem of the gentlemen who had just been assisting him to save Plassans. These gentlemen, astounded by the dramatic encounter between the two brothers, and, foreseeing some stormy passages, had retired to a corner of the room. Rougon, however, formed a heroic resolution. He advanced towards the group, and in a very proud tone exclaimed: "We will keep this man here. When he has reflected on his position he will be able to give us some useful information." Then, in a still more dignified voice, he went on: "I will discharge my duty, gentlemen. I have sworn to save the town from anarchy, and I will save it, even should I have to be the executioner of my nearest relative."

One might have thought him some old Roman sacrificing his family on the altar of his country. Granoux, who felt deeply moved, came to press his hand with a tearful countenance, which seemed to say: "I understand you; you are sublime!" And then he did him the kindness to take everybody away, under the pretext of conducting the four other prisoners into the courtyard.

When Pierre was alone with his brother, he felt all his self-possession return to him. "You hardly expected me, did you?" he resumed. "I understand things now; you have been laying plots against me. You wretched fellow; see what your vices and disorderly life have brought you to!"

Macquart shrugged his shoulders. "Shut up," he replied; "go to the devil. You're an old rogue. He laughs best who laughs last."

Thereupon Rougon, who had formed no definite plan with regard to him, thrust him into a dressing-room whither Monsieur Garconnet retired to rest sometimes. This room lighted from above, had no other means of exit than the doorway by which one entered. It was furnished with a few arm-chairs, a sofa, and a marble wash-stand. Pierre double-locked the door, after partially unbinding his brother's hands. Macquart was then heard to throw himself on the sofa, and start singing the "Ca Ira" in a loud voice, as though he were trying to sing himself to sleep.

Rougon, who at last found himself alone, now in his turn sat down in the mayor's arm-chair. He heaved a sigh as he wiped his brow. How hard, indeed, it was to win fortune and honours! However, he was nearing the end at last. He felt the soft seat of the arm-chair yield beneath him, while with a mechanical movement he caressed the mahogany writing-table with his hands, finding it apparently quite silky and delicate, like the skin of a beautiful woman. Then he spread himself out, and assumed the dignified attitude which Macquart had previously affected while listening to the proclamation. The silence of the room seemed fraught with religious solemnity, which inspired Rougon with exquisite delight. Everything, even the dust and the old documents lying in the corners, seemed to exhale an odour of incense, which rose to his dilated nostrils. This room, with its faded hangings redolent of petty transactions, all the trivial concerns of a third-rate municipality, became a temple of which he was the god.

Nevertheless, amidst his rapture, he started nervously at every shout from Macquart. The words aristocrat and lamp-post, the threats of hanging that form the refrain of the famous revolutionary song, the "Ca Ira," reached him in angry bursts, interrupting his triumphant dream in the most disagreeable manner. Always that man! And his dream, in which he saw Plassans at his feet, ended with a sudden vision of the Assize Court, of the judges, the jury, and the public listening to Macquart's disgraceful revelations; the story of the fifty thousand francs, and many other unpleasant matters; or else, while enjoying the softness of Monsieur Garconnet's arm-chair, he suddenly pictured himself suspended from a lamp-post in the Rue de la Banne. Who would rid him of that wretched fellow? At last Antoine fell asleep, and then Pierre enjoyed ten good minutes' pure ecstasy.

Roudier and Granoux came to rouse him from this state of beatitude. They had just returned from the prison, whither they had taken the insurgents. Daylight was coming on apace, the town would soon be awake, and it was necessary to take some decisive step. Roudier declared that, before anything else, it would be advisable to issue a proclamation to the inhabitants. Pierre was, at that moment, reading the one which the insurgents had left upon the table.

"Why," cried he, "this will suit us admirably! There are only a few words to be altered."

And, in fact, a quarter of an hour sufficed for the necessary changes, after which Granoux read out, in an earnest voice: "Inhabitants of Plassans—The hour of resistance has struck, the reign of order has returned——"

It was decided that the proclamation should be printed at the office of the "Gazette," and posted at all the street corners.

"Now listen," said Rougon; "we'll go to my house; and in the meantime Monsieur Granoux will assemble here the members of the municipal council who had not been arrested and acquaint them with the terrible events of the night." Then he added, majestically: "I am quite prepared to accept the responsibility of my actions. If what I have already done appears a satisfactory pledge of my desire for order, I am willing to place myself at the head of a municipal commission, until such time as the regular authorities can be reinstated. But, in order, that nobody may accuse me of ambitious designs, I shall not re-enter the Town Hall unless called upon to do so by my fellow-citizens."

At this Granoux and Roudier protested that Plassans would not be ungrateful. Their friend had indeed saved the town. And they recalled all that he had done for the cause of order: the yellow drawing-room always open to the friends of authority, his services as spokesman in the three quarters of the town, the store of arms which had been his idea, and especially that memorable night—that night of prudence and heroism—in which he had rendered himself forever illustrious. Granoux added that he felt sure of the admiration and gratitude of the municipal councillors.

"Don't stir from your house," he concluded; "I will come and fetch you to lead you back in triumph."

Then Roudier said that he quite understood the tact and modesty of their friend, and approved it. Nobody would think of accusing him of ambition, but all would appreciate the delicacy which prompted him to take no office save with the consent of his fellow-citizens. That was very dignified, very noble, altogether grand.

Under this shower of eulogies, Rougon humbly bowed his head. "No, no; you go too far," he murmured, with voluptuous thrillings of exquisite pleasure. Each sentence that fell from the retired hosier and the old almond-merchant, who stood on his right and left respectively, fell sweetly on his ears; and, leaning back in the mayor's arm-chair, steeped in the odour of officiality which pervaded the room, he bowed to the right and to the left, like a royal pretender whom a coup d'etat is about to convert into an emperor.

When they were tired of belauding each other, they all three went downstairs. Granoux started off to call the municipal council together, while Roudier told Rougon to go on in front, saying that he would join him at his house, after giving the necessary orders for guarding the Town Hall. The dawn was now fast rising, and Pierre proceeded to the Rue de la Banne, tapping his heels in a martial manner on the still deserted pavement. He carried his hat in his hand in spite of the bitter cold; for puffs of pride sent all his blood to his head.

On reaching his house he found Cassoute at the bottom of the stairs. The navvy had not stirred, for he had seen nobody enter. He sat there, on the first step, resting his big head in his hands, and gazing fixedly in front of him, with the vacant stare and mute stubbornness of a faithful dog.

"You were waiting for me, weren't you?" Pierre said to him, taking in the situation at a glance. "Well, go and tell Monsieur Macquart that I've come home. Go and ask for him at the Town Hall."

Cassoute rose and took himself off, with an awkward bow. He was going to get himself arrested like a lamb, to the great delight of Pierre, who laughed as he went upstairs, asking himself, with a feeling of vague surprise: "I have certainly plenty of courage; shall I turn out as good a diplomatist?"

Felicite had not gone to bed last night. He found her dressed in her Sunday clothes, wearing a cap with lemon-coloured ribbons, like a lady expecting visitors. She had sat at the window in vain; she had heard nothing, and was dying with curiosity.

"Well?" she asked, rushing to meet her husband.

The latter, quite out of breath, entered the yellow drawing-room, whither she followed him, carefully closing the door behind her. He sank into an arm-chair, and, in a gasping voice, faltered: "It's done; we shall get the receivership."

At this she fell on his neck and kissed him.

"Really? Really?" she cried. "But I haven't heard anything. Oh, my darling husband, do tell me; tell me all!"

She felt fifteen years old again, and began to coax him and whirl round him like a grasshopper fascinated by the light and heat. And Pierre, in the effusion of his triumph, poured out his heart to her. He did not omit a single detail. He even explained his future projects, forgetting that, according to his theories, wives were good for nothing, and that his must be kept in complete ignorance of what went on if he wished to remain master. Felicite leant over him and drank in his words. She made him repeat certain parts of his story, declaring she had not heard; in fact, her delight bewildered her so much that at times she seemed quite deaf. When Pierre related the events at the Town Hall, she burst into a fit of laughter, changed her chair three times, and moved the furniture about, quite unable to sit still. After forty years of continuous struggle, fortune had at last yielded to them. Eventually she became so mad over it that she forgot all prudence.

"It's to me you owe all this!" she exclaimed, in an outburst of triumph. "If I hadn't looked after you, you would have been nicely taken in by the insurgents. You booby, it was Garconnet, Sicardot, and the others, that had got to be thrown to those wild beasts."

Then, showing her teeth, loosened by age, she added, with a girlish smile: "Well, the Republic for ever! It has made our path clear."

But Pierre had turned cross. "That's just like you!" he muttered; "you always fancy that you've foreseen everything. It was I who had the idea of hiding myself. As though women understood anything about politics! Bah, my poor girl, if you were to steer the bark we should very soon be shipwrecked."

Felicite bit her lip. She had gone too far and forgotten her self-assigned part of good, silent fairy. Then she was seized with one of those fits of covert exasperation, which she generally experienced when her husband tried to crush her with his superiority. And she again promised herself, when the right time should arrive, some exquisite revenge, which would deliver this man into her power, bound hand and foot.

"Ah! I was forgetting!" resumed Rougon, "Monsieur Peirotte is amongst them. Granoux saw him struggling in the hands of the insurgents."

Felicite gave a start. She was just at that moment standing at the window, gazing with longing eyes at the house where the receiver of taxes lived. She had felt a desire to do so, for in her mind the idea of triumph was always associated with envy of that fine house.

"So Monsieur Peirotte is arrested!" she exclaimed in a strange tone as she turned round.

For an instant she smiled complacently; then a crimson blush rushed to her face. A murderous wish had just ascended from the depths of her being. "Ah! if the insurgents would only kill him!"

Pierre no doubt read her thoughts in her eyes.

"Well, if some ball were to hit him," he muttered, "our business would be settled. There would be no necessity to supercede him, eh? and it would be no fault of ours."

But Felicite shuddered. She felt that she had just condemned a man to death. If Monsieur Peirotte should now be killed, she would always see his ghost at night time. He would come and haunt her. So she only ventured to cast furtive glances, full of fearful delight, at the unhappy man's windows. Henceforward all her enjoyment would be fraught with a touch of guilty terror.

Moreover, Pierre, having now poured out his soul, began to perceive the other side of the situation. He mentioned Macquart. How could they get rid of that blackguard? But Felicite, again fired with enthusiasm, exclaimed: "Oh! one can't do everything at once. We'll gag him, somehow. We'll soon find some means or other."

She was now walking to and fro, putting the arm-chairs in order, and dusting their backs. Suddenly, she stopped in the middle of the room, and gave the faded furniture a long glance.

"Good Heavens!" she said, "how ugly it is here! And we shall have everybody coming to call upon us!"

"Bah!" replied Pierre, with supreme indifference, "we'll alter all that."

He who, the night before, had entertained almost religious veneration for the arm-chairs and the sofa, would now have willingly stamped on them. Felicite, who felt the same contempt, even went so far as to upset an arm-chair which was short of a castor and did not yield to her quickly enough.

It was at this moment that Roudier entered. It at once occurred to the old woman that he had become much more polite. His "Monsieur" and "Madame" rolled forth in delightfully musical fashion. But the other habitues were now arriving one after the other; and the drawing-room was fast getting full. Nobody yet knew the full particulars of the events of the night, and all had come in haste, with wondering eyes and smiling lips, urged on by the rumours which were beginning to circulate through the town. These gentlemen who, on the previous evening, had left the drawing-room with such precipitation at the news of the insurgents' approach, came back, inquisitive and importunate, like a swarm of buzzing flies which a puff of wind would have dispersed. Some of them had not even taken time to put on their braces. They were very impatient, but it was evident that Rougon was waiting for some one else before speaking out. He constantly turned an anxious look towards the door. For an hour there was only significant hand-shaking, vague congratulation, admiring whispering, suppressed joy of uncertain origin, which only awaited a word of enlightenment to turn to enthusiasm.

At last Granoux appeared. He paused for a moment on the threshold, with his right hand pressed to his breast between the buttons of his frock-coat; his broad pale face was beaming; in vain he strove to conceal his emotion beneath an expression of dignity. All the others became silent on perceiving him; they felt that something extraordinary was about to take place. Granoux walked straight up to Rougon, through two lines of visitors, and held out his hand to him.

"My friend," he said, "I bring you the homage of the Municipal Council. They call you to their head, until our mayor shall be restored to us. You have saved Plassans. In the terrible crisis through which we are passing we want men who, like yourself, unite intelligence with courage. Come—"

At this point Granoux, who was reciting a little speech which he had taken great trouble to prepare on his way from the Town Hall to the Rue de la Banne felt his memory fail him. But Rougon, overwhelmed with emotion, broke in, shaking his hand and repeating: "Thank you, my dear Granoux; I thank you very much."

He could find nothing else to say. However, a loud burst of voices followed. Every one rushed upon him, tried to shake hands, poured forth praises and compliments, and eagerly questioned him. But he, already putting on official dignity, begged for a few minutes' delay in order that he might confer with Messieurs Granoux and Roudier. Business before everything. The town was in such a critical situation! Then the three accomplices retired to a corner of the drawing-room, where, in an undertone, they divided power amongst themselves; the rest of the visitors, who remained a few paces away, trying meanwhile to look extremely wise and furtively glancing at them with mingled admiration and curiosity. It was decided that Rougon should take the title of president of the Municipal Commission; Granoux was to be secretary; whilst, as for Roudier, he became commander-in-chief of the reorganised National Guard. They also swore to support each other against all opposition.

However, Felicite, who had drawn near, abruptly inquired: "And Vuillet?"

At this they looked at each other. Nobody had seen Vuillet. Rougon seemed somewhat uneasy.

"Perhaps they've taken him away with the others," he said, to ease his mind.

But Felicite shook her head. Vuillet was not the man to let himself be arrested. Since nobody had seen or heard him, it was certain he had been doing something wrong.

Suddenly the door opened and Vuillet entered, bowing humbly, with blinking glance and stiff sacristan's smile. Then he held out his moist hand to Rougon and the two others.

Vuillet had settled his little affairs alone. He had cut his own slice out of the cake, as Felicite would have said. While peeping through the ventilator of his cellar he had seen the insurgents arrest the postmaster, whose offices were near his bookshop. At daybreak, therefore, at the moment when Rougon was comfortably seated in the mayor's arm-chair, he had quietly installed himself in the postmaster's office. He knew the clerks; so he received them on their arrival, told them that he would replace their chief until his return, and that meantime they need be in nowise uneasy. Then he ransacked the morning mail with ill-concealed curiosity. He examined the letters, and seemed to be seeking a particular one. His new berth doubtless suited his secret plans, for his satisfaction became so great that he actually gave one of the clerks a copy of the "Oeuvres Badines de Piron." Vuillet, it should be mentioned, did business in objectionable literature, which he kept concealed in a large drawer, under the stock of heads and religious images. It is probable that he felt some slight qualms at the free-and-easy manner in which he had taken possession of the post office, and recognised the desirability of getting his usurpation confirmed as far as possible. At all events, he had thought it well to call upon Rougon, who was fast becoming an important personage.

"Why! where have you been?" Felicite asked him in a distrustful manner.

Thereupon he related his story with sundry embellishments. According to his own account he had saved the post-office from pillage.

"All right then! That's settled! Stay on there!" said Pierre, after a moment's reflection. "Make yourself useful."

This last sentence revealed the one great fear that possessed the Rougons. They were afraid that some one might prove too useful, and do more than themselves to save the town. Still, Pierre saw no serious danger in leaving Vuillet as provisional postmaster; it was even a convenient means of getting rid of him. Felicite, however, made a sharp gesture of annoyance.

The consultation having ended, the three accomplices mingled with the various groups that filled the drawing-room. They were at last obliged to satisfy the general curiosity by giving detailed accounts of recent events. Rougon proved magnificent. He exaggerated, embellished, and dramatised the story which he had related to his wife. The distribution of the guns and cartridges made everybody hold their breath. But it was the march through the deserted streets and the seizure of the town-hall that most amazed these worthy bourgeois. At each fresh detail there was an interruption.

"And you were only forty-one; it's marvellous!"

"Ah, indeed! it must have been frightfully dark!"

"No; I confess I never should have dared it!"

"Then you seized him, like that, by the throat?

"And the insurgents, what did they say?"

These remarks and questions only incited Rougon's imagination the more. He replied to everybody. He mimicked the action. This stout man, in his admiration of his own achievements, became as nimble as a schoolboy; he began afresh, repeated himself, amidst the exclamations of surprise and individual discussions which suddenly arose about some trifling detail. And thus he continued blowing his trumpet, making himself more and more important as if some irresistible force impelled him to turn his narrative into a genuine epic. Moreover Granoux and Roudier stood by his side prompting him, reminding him of such trifling matters as he omitted. They also were burning to put in a word, and occasionally they could not restrain themselves, so that all three went on talking together. When, in order to keep the episode of the broken mirror for the denouement, like some crowning glory, Rougon began to describe what had taken place downstairs in the courtyard, after the arrest of the guard, Roudier accused him of spoiling the narrative by changing the sequence of events. For a moment they wrangled about it somewhat sharply. Then Roudier, seeing a good opportunity for himself, suddenly exclaimed: "Very well, let it be so. But you weren't there. So let me tell it."

He thereupon explained at great length how the insurgents had awoke, and how the muskets of the town's deliverers had been levelled at them to reduce them to impotence. He added, however, that no blood, fortunately, had been shed. This last sentence disappointed his audience, who had counted upon one corpse at least.

"But I thought you fired," interrupted Felicite, recognising that the story was wretchedly deficient in dramatic interest.

"Yes, yes, three shots," resumed the old hosier. "The pork-butcher Dubruel, Monsieur Lievin, and Monsieur Massicot discharged their guns with really culpable alacrity." And as there were some murmurs at this remark; "Culpable, I repeat the word," he continued. "There are quite enough cruel necessities in warfare without any useless shedding of blood. Besides, these gentlemen swore to me that it was not their fault; they can't understand how it was their guns went off. Nevertheless, a spent ball after ricocheting grazed the cheek of one of the insurgents and left a mark on it."

This graze, this unexpected wound, satisfied the audience. Which cheek, right or left, had been grazed, and how was it that a bullet, a spent one, even, could strike a cheek without piercing it? These points supplied material for some long discussions.

"Meantime," continued Rougon at the top of his voice, without giving time for the excitement to abate; "meantime we had plenty to do upstairs. The struggle was quite desperate."

Then he described, at length, the arrival of his brother and the four other insurgents, without naming Macquart, whom he simply called "the leader." The words, "the mayor's office," "the mayor's arm-chair," "the mayor's writing table," recurred to him every instant, and in the opinion of his audience imparted marvellous grandeur to the terrible scene. It was not at the porter's lodge that the fight was now being waged, but in the private sanctum of the chief magistrate of the town. Roudier was quite cast in to the background. Then Rougon at last came to the episode which he had been keeping in reserve from the commencement, and which would certainly exalt him to the dignity of a hero.

"Thereupon," said he, "an insurgent rushes upon me. I push the mayor's arm-chair away, and seize the man by the throat. I hold him tightly, you may be sure of it! But my gun was in my way. I didn't want to let it drop; a man always sticks to his gun. I held it, like this, under the left arm. All of a sudden, it went off—"

The whole audience hung on Rougon's lips. But Granoux, who was opening his mouth wide with a violent itching to say something, shouted: "No, no, that isn't right. You were not in a position to see things, my friend; you were fighting like a lion. But I saw everything, while I was helping to bind one of the prisoners. The man tried to murder you; it was he who fired the gun; I saw him distinctly slip his black fingers under your arm."

"Really?" said Rougon, turning quite pale.

He did not know he had been in such danger, and the old almond merchant's account of the incident chilled him with fright. Granoux, as a rule, did not lie; but, on a day of battle, it is surely allowable to view things dramatically.

"I tell you the man tried to murder you," he repeated, with conviction.

"Ah," said Rougon in a faint voice, "that's how it is I heard the bullet whiz past my ear!"

At this, violent emotion came upon the audience. Everybody gazed at the hero with respectful awe. He had heard a bullet whiz past his ear! Certainly, none of the other bourgeois who were there could say as much. Felicite felt bound to rush into her husband's arms so as to work up the emotion to boiling point. But Rougon immediately freed himself, and concluded his narrative with this heroic sentence, which has become famous at Plassans: "The shot goes off; I hear the bullet whiz past my ear; and whish! it smashes the mayor's mirror."

This caused complete consternation. Such a magnificent mirror, too! It was scarcely credible! the damage done to that looking-glass almost out-balanced Rougon's heroism, in the estimation of the company. The glass became an object of absorbing interest, and they talked about it for a quarter of an hour, with many exclamations and expressions of regret, as though it had been some dear friend that had been stricken to the heart. This was the culminating point that Rougon had aimed at, the denouement of his wonderful Odyssey. A loud hubbub of voices filled the yellow drawing-room. The visitors were repeating what they had just heard, and every now and then one of them would leave a group to ask the three heroes the exact truth with regard to some contested incident. The heroes set the matter right with scrupulous minuteness, for they felt that they were speaking for history!

At last Rougon and his two lieutenants announced that they were expected at the town-hall. Respectful silence was then restored, and the company smiled at each other discreetly. Granoux was swelling with importance. He was the only one who had seen the insurgent pull the trigger and smash the mirror; this sufficed to exalt him, and almost made him burst his skin. On leaving the drawing-room, he took Roudier's arm with the air of a great general who is broken down with fatigue. "I've been up for thirty-six hours," he murmured, "and heaven alone knows when I shall get to bed!"

Rougon, as he withdrew, took Vuillet aside and told him that the party of order relied more than ever on him and the "Gazette." He would have to publish an effective article to reassure the inhabitants and treat the band of villains who had passed through Plassans as it deserved.

"Be easy!" replied Vuillet. "In the ordinary course the 'Gazette' ought not to appear till to-morrow morning, but I'll issue it this very evening."

When the leaders had left, the rest of the visitors remained in the yellow drawing-room for another moment, chattering like so many old women, whom the escape of a canary has gathered together on the pavement. These retired tradesmen, oil dealers, and wholesale hatters, felt as if they were in a sort of fairyland. Never had they experienced such thrilling excitement before. They could not get over their surprise at discovering such heroes as Rougon, Granoux, and Roudier in their midst. At last, half stifled by the stuffy atmosphere, and tired of ever telling each other the same things, they decided to go off and spread the momentous news abroad. They glided away one by one, each anxious to have the glory of being the first to know and relate everything, and Felicite, as she leaned out of the window, on being left alone, saw them dispersing in the Rue de la Banne, waving their arms in an excited manner, eager as they were to diffuse emotion to the four corners of the town.

It was ten o'clock, and Plassans, now wide awake, was running about the streets, wildly excited by the reports which were circulating. Those who had seen or heard the insurrectionary forces, related the most foolish stories, contradicting each other, and indulging in the wildest suppositions. The majority, however, knew nothing at all about the matter; they lived at the further end of the town, and listened with gaping mouths, like children to a nursery tale, to the stories of how several thousand bandits had invaded the streets during the night and vanished before daybreak like an army of phantoms. A few of the most sceptical said: "Nonsense!" Yet some of the details were very precise; and Plassans at last felt convinced that some frightful danger had passed over it while it slept. The darkness which had shrouded this danger, the various contradictory reports that spread, all invested the matter with mystery and vague horror, which made the bravest shudder. Whose hand had diverted the thunderbolt from them? There seemed to be something quite miraculous about it. There were rumours of unknown deliverers, of a handful of brave men who had cut off the hydra's head; but no one seemed acquainted with the exact particulars, and the whole story appeared scarcely credible, until the company from the yellow drawing-room spread through the streets, scattering tidings, ever repeating the same narrative at each door they came to.

It was like a train of powder. In a few minutes the story had spread from one end of the town to the other. Rougon's name flew from mouth to mouth, with exclamations of surprise in the new town, and of praise in the old quarter. The idea of being without a sub-prefect, a mayor, a postmaster, a receiver of taxes, or authorities of any kind, at first threw the inhabitants into consternation. They were stupefied at having been able to sleep through the night and get up as usual, in the absence of any settled government. Their first stupor over, they threw themselves recklessly into the arms of their liberators. The few Republicans shrugged their shoulders, but the petty shopkeepers, the small householders, the Conservatives of all shades, invoked blessings on those modest heroes whose achievements had been shrouded by the night. When it was known that Rougon had arrested his own brother, the popular admiration knew no bounds. People talked of Brutus, and thus the indiscretion which had made Pierre rather anxious, really redounded to his glory. At this moment when terror still hovered over them, the townsfolk were virtually unanimous in their gratitude. Rougon was accepted as their saviour without the slightest show of opposition.

"Just think of it!" the poltroons exclaimed, "there were only forty-one of them!"

That number of forty-one amazed the whole town, and this was the origin of the Plassans legend of how forty-one bourgeois had made three thousand insurgents bite the dust. There were only a few envious spirits of the new town, lawyers without work and retired military men ashamed of having slept ingloriously through that memorable night, who raised any doubts. The insurgents, these sceptics hinted, had no doubt left the town of their own accord. There were no indications of a combat, no corpses, no blood-stains. So the deliverers had certainly had a very easy task.

"But the mirror, the mirror!" repeated the enthusiasts. "You can't deny that the mayor's mirror has been smashed; go and see it for yourselves."

And, in fact, until night-time, quite a stream of town's-people flowed, under one pretext or another, into the mayor's private office, the door of which Rougon left wide open. The visitors planted themselves in front of the mirror, which the bullet had pierced and starred, and they all gave vent to the same exclamation: "By Jove; that ball must have had terrible force!"

Then they departed quite convinced.

Felicite, at her window, listened with delight to all the rumours and laudatory and grateful remarks which arose from the town. At that moment all Plassans was talking of her husband. She felt that the two districts below her were quivering, wafting her the hope of approaching triumph. Ah! how she would crush that town which she had been so long in getting beneath her feet! All her grievances crowded back to her memory, and her past disappointments redoubled her appetite for immediate enjoyment.

At last she left the window, and walked slowly round the drawing-room. It was there that, a little while previously, everybody had held out their hands to her husband and herself. He and she had conquered; the citizens were at their feet. The yellow drawing-room seemed to her a holy place. The dilapidated furniture, the frayed velvet, the chandelier soiled with fly-marks, all those poor wrecks now seemed to her like the glorious bullet-riddled debris of a battle-field. The plain of Austerlitz would not have stirred her to deeper emotion.

When she returned to the window, she perceived Aristide wandering about the place of the Sub-Prefecture, with his nose in the air. She beckoned to him to come up, which he immediately did. It seemed as if he had only been waiting for this invitation.

"Come in," his mother said to him on the landing, seeing that he hesitated. "Your father is not here."

Aristide evinced all the shyness of a prodigal son returning home. He had not been inside the yellow drawing-room for nearly four years. He still carried his arm in a sling.

"Does your hand still pain you?" his mother asked him, ironically.

He blushed as he answered with some embarrassment: "Oh! it's getting better; it's nearly well again now."

Then he lingered there, loitering about and not knowing what to say. Felicite came to the rescue. "I suppose you've heard them talking about your father's noble conduct?" she resumed.

He replied that the whole town was talking of it. And then, as he regained his self-possession, he paid his mother back for her raillery in her own coin. Looking her full in the face he added: "I came to see if father was wounded."

"Come, don't play the fool!" cried Felicite, petulantly. "If I were you I would act boldly and decisively. Confess now that you made a false move in joining those good-for-nothing Republicans. You would be very glad, I'm sure, to be well rid of them, and to return to us, who are the stronger party. Well, the house is open to you!"

But Aristide protested. The Republic was a grand idea. Moreover, the insurgents might still carry the day.

"Don't talk nonsense to me!" retorted the old woman, with some irritation. "You're afraid that your father won't have a very warm welcome for you. But I'll see to that. Listen to me: go back to your newspaper, and, between now and to-morrow, prepare a number strongly favouring the Coup d'Etat. To-morrow evening, when this number has appeared, come back here and you will be received with open arms."

Then seeing that the young man remained silent: "Do you hear?" she added, in a lower and more eager tone; "it is necessary for our sake, and for your own, too, that it should be done. Don't let us have any more nonsense and folly. You've already compromised yourself enough in that way."

The young man made a gesture—the gesture of a Caesar crossing the Rubicon—and by doing so escaped entering into any verbal engagement. As he was about to withdraw, his mother, looking for the knot in his sling, remarked: "First of all, you must let me take off this rag. It's getting a little ridiculous, you know!"

Aristide let her remove it. When the silk handkerchief was untied, he folded it neatly and placed it in his pocket. And as he kissed his mother he exclaimed: "Till to-morrow then!"

In the meanwhile, Rougon was taking official possession of the mayor's offices. There were only eight municipal councillors left; the others were in the hands of the insurgents, as well as the mayor and his two assessors. The eight remaining gentlemen, who were all on a par with Granoux, perspired with fright when the latter explained to them the critical situation of the town. It requires an intimate knowledge of the kind of men who compose the municipal councils of some of the smaller towns, in order to form an idea of the terror with which these timid folk threw themselves into Rougon's arms. At Plassans, the mayor had the most incredible blockheads under him, men without any ideas of their own, and accustomed to passive obedience. Consequently, as Monsieur Garconnet was no longer there, the municipal machine was bound to get out of order, and fall completely under the control of the man who might know how to set it working. Moreover, as the sub-prefect had left the district, Rougon naturally became sole and absolute master of the town; and thus, strange to relate, the chief administrative authority fell into the hands of a man of indifferent repute, to whom, on the previous evening, not one of his fellow-citizens would have lent a hundred francs.

Pierre's first act was to declare the Provisional Commission "en permanence." Then he gave his attention to the organisation of the national guard, and succeeded in raising three hundred men. The hundred and nine muskets left in the cart-shed were also distributed to volunteers, thereby bringing up the number of men armed by the reactionary party to one hundred and fifty; the remaining one hundred and fifty guards consisted of well-affected citizens and some of Sicardot's soldiers. When Commander Roudier reviewed the little army in front of the town-hall, he was annoyed to see the market-people smiling in their sleeves. The fact is that several of his men had no uniforms, and some of them looked very droll with their black hats, frock-coats, and muskets. But, at any rate, they meant well. A guard was left at the town-hall and the rest of the forces were sent in detachments to the various town gates. Roudier reserved to himself the command of the guard stationed at the Grand'-Porte, which seemed to be more liable to attack than the others.

Rougon, who now felt very conscious of his power, repaired to the Rue Canquoin to beg the gendarmes to remain in their barracks and interfere with nothing. He certainly had the doors of the gendarmerie opened—the keys having been carried off by the insurgents—but he wanted to triumph alone, and had no intention of letting the gendarmes rob him of any part of his glory. If he should really have need of them he could always send for them. So he explained to them that their presence might tend to irritate the working-men and thus aggravate the situation. The sergeant in command thereupon complimented him on his prudence. When Rougon was informed that there was a wounded man in the barracks, he asked to see him, by way of rendering himself popular. He found Rengade in bed, with his eye bandaged, and his big moustaches just peeping out from under the linen. With some high-sounding words about duty, Rougon endeavoured to comfort the unfortunate fellow who, having lost an eye, was swearing with exasperation at the thought that his injury would compel him to quit the service. At last Rougon promised to send the doctor to him.

"I'm much obliged to you, sir," Rengade replied; "but, you know, what would do me more good than any quantity of doctor's stuff would be to wring the neck of the villain who put my eye out. Oh! I shall know him again; he's a little thin, palish fellow, quite young."

Thereupon Pierre bethought himself of the blood he had seen on Silvere's hand. He stepped back a little, as though he was afraid that Rengade would fly at his throat, and cry: "It was your nephew who blinded me; and you will have to pay for it." And whilst he was mentally cursing his disreputable family, he solemnly declared that if the guilty person were found he should be punished with all the rigour of the law.

"No, no, it isn't worth all that trouble," the one-eyed man replied; "I'll just wring his neck for him when I catch him."

Rougon hastened back to the town-hall. The afternoon was employed in taking various measures. The proclamation posted up about one o'clock produced an excellent impression. It ended by an appeal to the good sense of the citizens, and gave a firm assurance that order would not again be disturbed. Until dusk, in fact, the streets presented a picture of general relief and perfect confidence. On the pavements, the groups who were reading the proclamation exclaimed:

"It's all finished now; we shall soon see the troops who have been sent in pursuit of the insurgents."

This belief that some soldiers were approaching was so general that the idles of the Cours Sauvaire repaired to the Nice road, in order to meet and hear the regimental band. But they returned at nightfall disappointed, having seen nothing; and then a feeling of vague alarm began to disturb the townspeople.

At the town-hall, the Provisional Commission had talked so much, without coming to any decision, that the members, whose stomachs were quite empty, began to feel alarmed again. Rougon dismissed them to dine, saying that they would meet afresh at nine o'clock in the evening. He was just about to leave the room himself, when Macquart awoke and began to pommel the door of his prison. He declared he was hungry, then asked what time it was, and when his brother had told him it was five o'clock, he feigned great astonishment, and muttered, with diabolical malice, that the insurgents had promised to return much earlier, and that they were very slow in coming to deliver him. Rougon, having ordered some food to be taken to him, went downstairs, quite worried by the earnestness with which the rascal spoke of the return of the insurgents.

When he reached the street, his disquietude increased. The town seemed to him quite altered. It was assuming a strange aspect; shadows were gliding along the footpaths, which were growing deserted and silent, while gloomy fear seemed, like fine rain, to be slowly, persistently falling with the dusk over the mournful-looking houses. The babbling confidence of the daytime was fatally terminating in groundless panic, in growing alarm as the night drew nearer; the inhabitants were so weary and so satiated with their triumph that they had no strength left but to dream of some terrible retaliation on the part of the insurgents. Rougon shuddered as he passed through this current of terror. He hastened his steps, feeling as if he would choke. As he passed a cafe on the Place des Recollets, where the lamps had just been lit, and where the petty cits of the new town were assembled, he heard a few words of terrifying conversation.

"Well! Monsieur Picou," said one man in a thick voice, "you've heard the news? The regiment that was expected has not arrived."

"But nobody expected any regiment, Monsieur Touche," a shrill voice replied.

"I beg your pardon. You haven't read the proclamation, then?"

"Oh yes, it's true the placards declare that order will be maintained by force, if necessary."

"You see, then, there's force mentioned; that means armed forces, of course."

"What do people say then?"

"Well, you know, folks are beginning to feel rather frightened; they say that this delay on the part of the soldiers isn't natural, and that the insurgents may well have slaughtered them."

A cry of horror resounded through the cafe. Rougon was inclined to go in and tell those bourgeois that the proclamation had never announced the arrival of a regiment, that they had no right to strain its meaning to such a degree, nor to spread such foolish theories abroad. But he himself, amidst the disquietude which was coming over him, was not quite sure he had not counted upon a despatch of troops; and he did, in fact, consider it strange that not a single soldier had made his appearance. So he reached home in a very uneasy state of mind. Felicite, still petulant and full of courage, became quite angry at seeing him upset by such silly trifles. Over the dessert she comforted him.

"Well, you great simpleton," she said, "so much the better, if the prefect does forget us! We shall save the town by ourselves. For my part, I should like to see the insurgents return, so that we might receive them with bullets and cover ourselves with glory. Listen to me, go and have the gates closed, and don't go to bed; bustle about all night; it will all be taken into account later on."

Pierre returned to the town-hall in rather more cheerful spirits. He required some courage to remain firm amidst the woeful maunderings of his colleagues. The members of the Provisional Commission seemed to reek with panic, just as they might with damp in the rainy season. They all professed to have counted upon the despatch of a regiment, and began to exclaim that brave citizens ought not to be abandoned in such a manner to the fury of the rabble. Pierre, to preserve peace, almost promised they should have a regiment on the morrow. Then he announced, in a solemn manner, that he was going to have the gates closed. This came as a relief. Detachments of the national guards had to repair immediately to each gate and double-lock it. When they had returned, several members confessed that they really felt more comfortable; and when Pierre remarked that the critical situation of the town imposed upon them the duty of remaining at their posts, some of them made arrangements with the view of spending the night in an arm-chair. Granoux put on a black silk skull cap which he had brought with him by way of precaution. Towards eleven o'clock, half of the gentlemen were sleeping round Monsieur Garconnet's writing table. Those who still managed to keep their eyes open fancied, as they listened to the measured tramp of the national guards in the courtyard, that they were heroes and were receiving decorations. A large lamp, placed on the writing-table, illumined this strange vigil. All at once, however, Rougon, who had seemed to be slumbering, jumped up, and sent for Vuillet. He had just remembered that he had not received the "Gazette."

The bookseller made his appearance in a very bad humour.

"Well!" Rougon asked him as he took him aside, "what about the article you promised me? I haven't seen the paper."

"Is that what you disturbed me for?" Vuillet angrily retorted. "The 'Gazette' has not been issued; I've no desire to get myself murdered to-morrow, should the insurgents come back."

Rougon tried to smile as he declared that, thank heaven, nobody would be murdered at all. It was precisely because false and disquieting rumours were running about that the article in question would have rendered great service to the good cause.

"Possibly," Vuillet resumed; "but the best of causes at the present time is to keep one's head on one's shoulders." And he added, with maliciousness, "And I was under the impression you had killed all the insurgents! You've left too many of them for me to run any risk."

Rougon, when he was alone again, felt amazed at this mutiny on the part of a man who was usually so meek and mild. Vuillet's conduct seemed to him suspicious. But he had no time to seek an explanation; he had scarcely stretched himself out afresh in his arm-chair, when Roudier entered, with a big sabre, which he had attached to his belt, clattering noisily against his legs. The sleepers awoke in a fright. Granoux thought it was a call to arms.

"Eh? what! What's the matter?" he asked, as he hastily put his black silk cap into his pocket.

"Gentlemen," said Roudier, breathlessly, without thinking of taking any oratorical precautions, "I believe that a band of insurgents is approaching the town."

These words were received with the silence of terror. Rougon alone had the strength to ask, "Have you seen them?"

"No," the retired hosier replied; "but we hear strange noises out in the country; one of my men assured me that he had seen fires along the slope of the Garrigues."

Then, as all the gentlemen stared at each other white and speechless, "I'll return to my post," he continued. "I fear an attack. You had better take precautions."

Rougon would have followed him, to obtain further particulars, but he was already too far away. After this the Commission was by no means inclined to go to sleep again. Strange noises! Fires! An attack! And in the middle of the night too! It was very easy to talk of taking precautions, but what were they to do? Granoux was very near advising the course which had proved so successful the previous evening: that is of hiding themselves, waiting till the insurgents has passed through Plassans, and then triumphing in the deserted streets. Pierre, however, fortunately remembering his wife's advice, said that Roudier might have made a mistake, and that the best thing would be to go and see for themselves. Some of the members made a wry face at this suggestion; but when it had been agreed that an armed escort should accompany the Commission, they all descended very courageously. They only left a few men downstairs; they surrounded themselves with about thirty of the national guards, and then they ventured into the slumbering town, where the moon, creeping over the house roofs, slowly cast lengthened shadows. They went along the ramparts, from one gate to the other, seeing nothing and hearing nothing. The national guards at the various posts certainly told them that peculiar sounds occasionally reached them from the country through the closed gates. When they strained their ears, however, they detected nothing but a distant murmur, which Granoux said was merely the noise of the Viorne.

Nevertheless they remained doubtful. And they were about to return to the town-hall in a state of alarm, though they made a show of shrugging their shoulders and of treating Roudier as a poltroon and a dreamer, when Rougon, anxious to reassure them, thought of enabling them to view the plain over a distance of several leagues. Thereupon he led the little company to the Saint-Marc quarter and knocked at the door of the Valqueyras mansion.

At the very outset of the disturbances Count de Valqueyras had left for his chateau at Corbiere. There was no one but the Marquis de Carnavant at the Plassans house. He, since the previous evening, had prudently kept aloof; not that he was afraid, but because he did not care to be seen plotting with the Rougons at the critical moment. As a matter of fact, he was burning with curiosity. He had been compelled to shut himself up in order to resist the temptation of hastening to the yellow drawing-room. When the footman came to tell him, in the middle of the night, that there were some gentlemen below asking for him, he could not hold back any longer. He got up and went downstairs in all haste.

"My dear Marquis," said Rougon, as he introduced to him the members of the Municipal Commission, "we want to ask a favour of you. Will you allow us to go into the garden of the mansion?"

"By all means," replied the astonished marquis, "I will conduct you there myself."

On the way thither he ascertained what their object was. At the end of the garden rose a terrace which overlooked the plain. A large portion of the ramparts had there tumbled in, leaving a boundless prospect to the view. It had occurred to Rougon that this would serve as an excellent post of observation. While conversing together the members of the Commission leaned over the parapet. The strange spectacle that spread out before them soon made them silent. In the distance, in the valley of the Viorne, across the vast hollow which stretched westward between the chain of the Garrigues and the mountains of the Seille, the rays of the moon were streaming like a river of pale light. The clumps of trees, the gloomy rocks, looked, here and there, like islets and tongues of land, emerging from a luminous sea; and, according to the bends of the Viorne one could now and again distinguish detached portions of the river, glittering like armour amidst the fine silvery dust falling from the firmament. It all looked like an ocean, a world, magnified by the darkness, the cold, and their own secret fears. At first the gentlemen could neither hear nor see anything. The quiver of light and of distant sound blinded their eyes and confused their ears. Granoux, though he was not naturally poetic, was struck by the calm serenity of that winter night, and murmured: "What a beautiful night, gentlemen!"

"Roudier was certainly dreaming," exclaimed Rougon, rather disdainfully.

But the marquis, whose ears were quick, had begun to listen. "Ah!" he observed in his clear voice, "I hear the tocsin."

At this they all leant over the parapet, holding their breath. And light and pure as crystal the distant tolling of a bell rose from the plain. The gentlemen could not deny it. It was indeed the tocsin. Rougon pretended that he recognised the bell of Beage, a village fully a league from Plassans. This he said in order to reassure his colleagues.

But the marquis interrupted him. "Listen, listen: this time it is the bell of Saint-Maur." And he indicated another point of the horizon to them. There was, in fact, a second bell wailing through the clear night. And very soon there were ten bells, twenty bells, whose despairing tollings were detected by their ears, which had by this time grown accustomed to the quivering of the darkness. Ominous calls rose from all sides, like the faint rattles of dying men. Soon the whole plain seemed to be wailing. The gentlemen no longer jeered at Roudier; particularly as the marquis, who took a malicious delight in terrifying them, was kind enough to explain the cause of all this bell-ringing.

"It is the neighbouring villages," he said to Rougon, "banding together to attack Plassans at daybreak."

At this Granoux opened his eyes wide. "Didn't you see something just this moment over there?" he asked all of a sudden.

Nobody had looked; the gentlemen had been keeping their eyes closed in order to hear the better.

"Ah! look!" he resumed after a short pause. "There, beyond the Viorne, near that black mass."

"Yes, I see," replied Rougon, in despair; "it's a fire they're kindling."

A moment later another fire appeared almost immediately in front of the first one, then a third, and a fourth. In this wise red splotches appeared at nearly equal distances throughout the whole length of the valley, resembling the lamps of some gigantic avenue. The moonlight, which dimmed their radiance, made them look like pools of blood. This melancholy illumination gave a finishing touch to the consternation of the Municipal Commission.

"Of course!" the marquis muttered, with his bitterest sneer, "those brigands are signalling to each other." And he counted the fires complacently, to get some idea, he said, as to how many men "the brave national guard of Plassans" would have to deal with. Rougon endeavoured to raise doubts by saying the villages were taking up arms in order to join the army of the insurgents, and not for the purpose of attacking the town. But the gentlemen, by their silent consternation, made it clear that they had formed their own opinion, and were not to be consoled.

"I can hear the 'Marseillaise' now," remarked Granoux in a hushed voice.

It was indeed true. A detachment must have been following the course of the Viorne, passing, at that moment, just under the town. The cry, "To arms, citizens! Form your battalions!" reached the on-lookers in sudden bursts with vibrating distinctness. Ah! what an awful night it was! The gentlemen spent it leaning over the parapet of the terrace, numbed by the terrible cold, and yet quite unable to tear themselves away from the sight of that plain which resounded with the tocsin and the "Marseillaise," and was all ablaze with signal-fires. They feasted their eyes upon that sea of light, flecked with blood-red flames; and they strained their ears in order to listen to the confused clamour, till at last their senses began to deceive them, and they saw and heard the most frightful things. Nothing in the world would have induced them to leave the spot. If they had turned their backs, they would have fancied that a whole army was at their heels. After the manner of a certain class of cowards, they wished to witness the approach of the danger, in order that they might take flight at the right moment. Towards morning, when the moon had set and they could see nothing in front of them but a dark void, they fell into a terrible fright. They fancied they were surrounded by invisible enemies, who were crawling along in the darkness, ready to fly at their throats. At the slightest noise they imagined there were enemies deliberating beneath the terrace, prior to scaling it. Yet there was nothing, nothing but darkness upon which they fixed their eyes distractedly. The marquis, as if to console them, said in his ironical way: "Don't be uneasy! They will certainly wait till daybreak."

Meanwhile Rougon cursed and swore. He felt himself again giving way to fear. As for Granoux, his hair turned completely white. At last the dawn appeared with weary slowness. This again was a terribly anxious moment. The gentlemen, at the first ray of light, expected to see an army drawn up in line before the town. It so happened that day that the dawn was lazy and lingered awhile on the edge of the horizon. With outstretched necks and fixed gaze, the party on the terrace peered anxiously into the misty expanse. In the uncertain light they fancied they caught glimpses of colossal profiles, the plain seemed to be transformed into a lake of blood, the rocks looked like corpses floating on its surface, and the clusters of trees took the forms of battalions drawn up and threatening attack. When the growing light had at last dispersed these phantoms, the morning broke so pale, so mournful, so melancholy, that even the marquis's spirits sank. Not a single insurgent was to be seen, and the high roads were free; but the grey valley wore a gruesomely sad and deserted aspect. The fires had now gone out, but the bells still rang on. Towards eight o'clock, Rougon observed a small party of men who were moving off along the Viorne.

By this time the gentlemen were half dead with cold and fatigue. Seeing no immediate danger, they determined to take a few hours' rest. A national guard was left on the terrace as a sentinel, with orders to run and inform Roudier if he should perceive any band approaching in the distance. Then Granoux and Rougon, quite worn out by the emotions of the night, repaired to their homes, which were close together, and supported each other on the way.

Felicite put her husband to bed with every care. She called him "poor dear," and repeatedly told him that he ought not to give way to evil fancies, and that all would end well. But he shook his head; he felt grave apprehensions. She let him sleep till eleven o'clock. Then, after he had had something to eat, she gently turned him out of doors, making him understand that he must go through with the matter to the end. At the town-hall, Rougon found only four members of the Commission in attendance; the others had sent excuses, they were really ill. Panic had been sweeping through the town with growing violence all through the morning. The gentlemen had not been able to keep quiet respecting the memorable night they had spent on the terrace of the Valqueyras mansion. Their servants had hastened to spread the news, embellishing it with various dramatic details. By this time it had already become a matter of history that from the heights of Plassans troops of cannibals had been seen dancing and devouring their prisoners. Yes, bands of witches had circled hand in hand round their caldrons in which they were boiling children, while on and on marched endless files of bandits, whose weapons glittered in the moonlight. People spoke too of bells that of their own accord, sent the tocsin ringing through the desolate air, and it was even asserted that the insurgents had fired the neighbouring forests, so that the whole country side was in flames.

It was Tuesday, the market-day at Plassans, and Roudier had thought it necessary to have the gates opened in order to admit the few peasants who had brought vegetables, butter, and eggs. As soon as it had assembled, the Municipal Commission, now composed of five members only, including its president, declared that this was unpardonable imprudence. Although the sentinel stationed at the Valqueyras mansion had seen nothing, the town ought to have been kept closed. Then Rougon decided that the public crier, accompanied by a drummer, should go through the streets, proclaim a state of siege, and announce to the inhabitants that whoever might go out would not be allowed to return. The gates were officially closed in broad daylight. This measure, adopted in order to reassure the inhabitants, raised the scare to its highest pitch. And there could scarcely have been a more curious sight than that of this little city, thus padlocking and bolting itself up beneath the bright sunshine, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

When Plassans had buckled and tightened its belt of dilapidated ramparts, when it had bolted itself in like a besieged fortress at the approach of an assault, the most terrible anguish passed over the mournful houses. At every moment, in the centre of the town, people fancied they could hear a discharge of musketry in the Faubourgs. They no longer received any news; they were, so to say, at the bottom of a cellar, in a walled hole, where they were anxiously awaiting either deliverance or the finishing stroke. For the last two days the insurgents, who were scouring the country, had cut off all communication. Plassans found itself isolated from the rest of France. It felt that it was surrounded by a region in open rebellion, where the tocsin was ever ringing and the "Marseillaise" was ever roaring like a river that has overflowed its banks. Abandoned to its fate and shuddering with alarm the town lay there like some prey which would prove the reward of the victorious party. The strollers on the Cours Sauvaire were ever swaying between fear and hope according as they fancied that they could see the blouses of insurgents or the uniforms of soldiers at the Grand'-Porte. Never had sub-prefecture, pent within tumble-down walls, endured more agonising torture.

Towards two o'clock it was rumoured that the Coup d'Etat had failed, that the prince-president was imprisoned at Vincennes, and that Paris was in the hands of the most advanced demagogues. It was reported also that Marseilles, Toulon, Draguignan, the entire South, belonged to the victorious insurrectionary army. The insurgents would arrive in the evening and put Plassans to the sword.

Thereupon a deputation repaired to the town-hall to expostulate with the Municipal Commission for closing the gates, whereby they would only irritate the insurgents. Rougon, who was losing his head, defended his order with all his remaining strength. This locking of the gates seemed to him one of the most ingenious acts of his administration; he advanced the most convincing arguments in its justification. But the others embarrassed him by their questions, asking him where were the soldiers, the regiment that he had promised. Then he began to lie, and told them flatly that he had promised nothing at all. The non-appearance of this legendary regiment, which the inhabitants longed for with such eagerness that they had actually dreamt of its arrival, was the chief cause of the panic. Well-informed people even named the exact spot on the high road where the soldiers had been butchered.

At four o'clock Rougon, followed by Granoux, again repaired to the Valqueyras mansion. Small bands, on their way to join the insurgents at Orcheres, still passed along in the distance, through the valley of the Viorne. Throughout the day urchins climbed the ramparts, and bourgeois came to peep through the loopholes. These volunteer sentinels kept up the terror by counting the various bands, which were taken for so many strong battalions. The timorous population fancied it could see from the battlements the preparations for some universal massacre. At dusk, as on the previous evening, the panic became yet more chilling.

On returning to the municipal offices Rougon and his inseparable companion, Granoux, recognised that the situation was growing intolerable. During their absence another member of the Commission had disappeared. They were only four now, and they felt they were making themselves ridiculous by staying there for hours, looking at each other's pale countenances, and never saying a word. Moreover, they were terribly afraid of having to spend a second night on the terrace of the Valqueyras mansion.

Rougon gravely declared that as the situation of affairs was unchanged, there was no need for them to continue to remain there en permanence. If anything serious should occur information would be sent to them. And, by a decision duly taken in council, he deputed to Roudier the carrying on of the administration. Poor Roudier, who remembered that he had served as a national guard in Paris under Louis-Philippe, was meantime conscientiously keeping watch at the Grand'-Porte.

Rougon went home looking very downcast, and creeping along under the shadows of the houses. He felt that Plassans was becoming hostile to him. He heard his name bandied about amongst the groups, with expressions of anger and contempt. He walked upstairs, reeling and perspiring. Felicite received him with speechless consternation. She, also, was beginning to despair. Their dreams were being completely shattered. They stood silent, face to face, in the yellow drawing-room. The day was drawing to a close, a murky winter day which imparted a muddy tint to the orange-coloured wall-paper with its large flower pattern; never had the room looked more faded, more mean, more shabby. And at this hour they were alone; they no longer had a crowd of courtiers congratulating them, as on the previous evening. A single day had sufficed to topple them over, at the very moment when they were singing victory. If the situation did not change on the morrow their game would be lost.

Felicite who, when gazing on the previous evening at the ruins of the yellow drawing-room, had thought of the plains of Austerlitz, now recalled the accursed field of Waterloo as she observed how mournful and deserted the place was. Then, as her husband said nothing, she mechanically went to the window—that window where she had inhaled with delight the incense of the entire town. She perceived numerous groups below on the square, but she closed the blinds upon seeing some heads turn towards their house, for she feared that she might be hooted. She felt quite sure that those people were speaking about them.

Indeed, voices rose through the twilight. A lawyer was clamouring in the tone of a triumphant pleader. "That's just what I said; the insurgents left of their own accord, and they won't ask the permission of the forty-one to come back. The forty-one indeed! a fine farce! Why, I believe there were at least two hundred."

"No, indeed," said a burly trader, an oil-dealer and a great politician, "there were probably not even ten. There was no fighting or else we should have seen some blood in the morning. I went to the town-hall myself to look; the courtyard was as clean as my hand."

Then a workman, who stepped timidly up to the group, added: "There was no need of any violence to seize the building; the door wasn't even shut."

This remark was received with laughter, and the workman, thus encouraged, continued: "As for those Rougons, everybody knows that they are a bad lot."

This insult pierced Felicite to the heart. The ingratitude of the people was heartrending to her, for she herself was at last beginning to believe in the mission of the Rougons. She called for her husband. She wanted him to learn how fickle was the multitude.

"It's all a piece with their mirror," continued the lawyer. "What a fuss they made about that broken glass! You know that Rougon is quite capable of having fired his gun at it just to make believe there had been a battle."

Pierre restrained a cry of pain. What! they did not even believe in his mirror now! They would soon assert that he had not heard a bullet whiz past his ear. The legend of the Rougons would be blotted out; nothing would remain of their glory. But his torture was not at an end yet. The groups manifested their hostility as heartily as they had displayed their approval on the previous evening. A retired hatter, an old man seventy years of age, whose factory had formerly been in the Faubourg, ferreted out the Rougons' past history. He spoke vaguely, with the hesitation of a wandering memory, about the Fouques' property, and Adelaide, and her amours with a smuggler. He said just enough to give a fresh start to the gossip. The tattlers drew closer together and such words as "rogues," "thieves," and "shameless intriguers," ascended to the shutter behind which Pierre and Felicite were perspiring with fear and indignation. The people on the square even went so far as to pity Macquart. This was the final blow. On the previous day Rougon had been a Brutus, a stoic soul sacrificing his own affections to his country; now he was nothing but an ambitious villain, who felled his brother to the ground and made use of him as a stepping-stone to fortune.

"You hear, you hear them?" Pierre murmured in a stifled voice. "Ah! the scoundrels, they are killing us; we shall never retrieve ourselves."

Felicite, enraged, was beating a tattoo on the shutter with her impatient fingers.

"Let them talk," she answered. "If we get the upper hand again they shall see what stuff I'm made of. I know where the blow comes from. The new town hates us."

She guessed rightly. The sudden unpopularity of the Rougons was the work of a group of lawyers who were very much annoyed at the importance acquired by an old illiterate oil-dealer, whose house had been on the verge of bankruptcy. The Saint-Marc quarter had shown no sign of life for the last two days. The inhabitants of the old quarter and the new town alone remained in presence, and the latter had taken advantage of the panic to injure the yellow drawing-room in the minds of the tradespeople and working-classes. Roudier and Granoux were said to be excellent men, honourable citizens, who had been led away by the Rougons' intrigues. Their eyes ought to be opened to it. Ought not Monsieur Isidore Granoux to be seated in the mayor's arm-chair, in the place of that big portly beggar who had not a copper to bless himself with? Thus launched, the envious folks began to reproach Rougon for all the acts of his administration, which only dated from the previous evening. He had no right to retain the services of the former Municipal Council; he had been guilty of grave folly in ordering the gates to be closed; it was through his stupidity that five members of the Commission had contracted inflammation of the lungs on the terrace of the Valqueyras mansion. There was no end to his faults. The Republicans likewise raised their heads. They talked of the possibility of a sudden attack upon the town-hall by the workmen of the Faubourg. The reaction was at its last gasp.

Pierre, at this overthrow of all his hopes, began to wonder what support he might still rely on if occasion should require any.

"Wasn't Aristide to come here this evening," he asked, "to make it up with us?"

"Yes," answered Felicite. "He promised me a good article. The 'Independant' has not appeared yet—"

But her husband interrupted her, crying: "See! isn't that he who is just coming out of the Sub-Prefecture?"

The old woman glanced in that direction. "He's got his arm in a sling again!" she cried.

Aristide's hand was indeed wrapped in the silk handkerchief once more. The Empire was breaking up, but the Republic was not yet triumphant, and he had judged it prudent to resume the part of a disabled man. He crossed the square stealthily, without raising his head. Then doubtless hearing some dangerous and compromising remarks among the groups of bystanders, he made all haste to turn the corner of the Rue de la Banne.

"Bah! he won't come here," said Felicite bitterly. "It's all up with us. Even our children forsake us!"

She shut the window violently, in order that she might not see or hear anything more. When she had lit the lamp, she and her husband sat down to dinner, disheartened and without appetite, leaving most of their food on their plates. They only had a few hours left them to take a decisive step. It was absolutely indispensable that before daybreak Plassans should be at their feet beseeching forgiveness, or else they must entirely renounce the fortune which they had dreamed of. The total absence of any reliable news was the sole cause of their anxious indecision. Felicite, with her clear intellect, had quickly perceived this. If they had been able to learn the result of the Coup d'Etat, they would either have faced it out and have still pursued their role of deliverers, or else have done what they could to efface all recollection of their unlucky campaign. But they had no precise information; they were losing their heads; the thought that they were thus risking their fortune on a throw, in complete ignorance of what was happening, brought a cold perspiration to their brows.

"And why the devil doesn't Eugene write to me?" Rougon suddenly cried, in an outburst of despair, forgetting that he was betraying the secret of his correspondence to his wife.

But Felicite pretended not to have heard. Her husband's exclamation had profoundly affected her. Why, indeed, did not Eugene write to his father? After keeping him so accurately informed of the progress of the Bonapartist cause, he ought at least to have announced the triumph or defeat of Prince Louis. Mere prudence would have counselled the despatch of such information. If he remained silent, it must be that the victorious Republic had sent him to join the pretender in the dungeons of Vincennes. At this thought Felicite felt chilled to the marrow; her son's silence destroyed her last hopes.

At that moment somebody brought up the "Gazette," which had only just appeared.

"Ah!" said Pierre, with surprise. "Vuillet has issued his paper!"

Thereupon he tore off the wrapper, read the leading article, and finished it looking as white as a sheet, and swaying on his chair.

"Here, read," he resumed, handing the paper to Felicite.

It was a magnificent article, attacking the insurgents with unheard of violence. Never had so much stinging bitterness, so many falsehoods, such bigoted abuse flowed from pen before. Vuillet commenced by narrating the entry of the insurgents into Plassans. The description was a perfect masterpiece. He spoke of "those bandits, those villainous-looking countenances, that scum of the galleys," invading the town, "intoxicated with brandy, lust, and pillage." Then he exhibited them "parading their cynicism in the streets, terrifying the inhabitants with their savage cries and seeking only violence and murder." Further on, the scene at the town-hall and the arrest of the authorities became a most horrible drama. "Then they seized the most respectable people by the throat; and the mayor, the brave commander of the national guard, the postmaster, that kindly functionary, were—even like the Divinity—crowned with thorns by those wretches, who spat in their faces." The passage devoted to Miette and her red pelisse was quite a flight of imagination. Vuillet had seen ten, twenty girls steeped in blood: "and who," he wrote, "did not behold among those monsters some infamous creatures clothed in red, who must have bathed themselves in the blood of the martyrs murdered by the brigands along the high roads? They were brandishing banners, and openly receiving the vile caresses of the entire horde." And Vuillet added, with Biblical magniloquence, "The Republic ever marches on amidst debauchery and murder."

That, however, was only the first part of the article; the narrative being ended, the editor asked if the country would any longer tolerate "the shamelessness of those wild beasts, who respected neither property nor persons." He made an appeal to all valorous citizens, declaring that to tolerate such things any longer would be to encourage them, and that the insurgents would then come and snatch "the daughter from her mother's arms, the wife from her husband's embraces." And at last, after a pious sentence in which he declared that Heaven willed the extermination of the wicked, he concluded with this trumpet blast: "It is asserted that these wretches are once more at our gates; well then let each one of us take a gun and shoot them down like dogs. I for my part shall be seen in the front rank, happy to rid the earth of such vermin."

This article, in which periphrastic abuse was strung together with all the heaviness of touch which characterises French provincial journalism, quite terrified Rougon, who muttered, as Felicite replaced the "Gazette" on the table: "Ah! the wretch! he is giving us the last blow; people will believe that I inspired this diatribe."

"But," his wife remarked, pensively, "did you not this morning tell me that he absolutely refused to write against the Republicans? The news that circulated had terrified him, and he was as pale as death, you said."

"Yes! yes! I can't understand it at all. When I insisted, he went so far as to reproach me for not having killed all the insurgents. It was yesterday that he ought to have written that article; to-day he'll get us all butchered!"

Felicite was lost in amazement. What could have prompted Vuillet's change of front? The idea of that wretched semi-sacristan carrying a musket and firing on the ramparts of Plassans seemed to her one of the most ridiculous things imaginable. There was certainly some determining cause underlying all this which escaped her. Only one thing seemed certain. Vuillet was too impudent in his abuse and too ready with his valour, for the insurrectionary band to be really so near the town as some people asserted.

"He's a spiteful fellow, I always said so," Rougon resumed, after reading the article again. "He has only been waiting for an opportunity to do us this injury. What a fool I was to leave him in charge of the post-office!"

This last sentence proved a flash of light. Felicite started up quickly, as though at some sudden thought. Then she put on a cap and threw a shawl over her shoulders.

"Where are you going, pray?" her husband asked her with surprise. "It's past nine o'clock."

"You go to bed," she replied rather brusquely, "you're not well; go and rest yourself. Sleep on till I come back; I'll wake you if necessary, and then we can talk the matter over."

She went out with her usual nimble gait, ran to the post-office, and abruptly entered the room where Vuillet was still at work. On seeing her he made a hasty gesture of vexation.

Never in his life had Vuillet felt so happy. Since he had been able to slip his little fingers into the mail-bag he had enjoyed the most exquisite pleasure, the pleasure of an inquisitive priest about to relish the confessions of his penitents. All the sly blabbing, all the vague chatter of sacristies resounded in his ears. He poked his long, pale nose into the letters, gazed amorously at the superscriptions with his suspicious eyes, sounded the envelopes just like little abbes sound the souls of maidens. He experienced endless enjoyment, was titillated by the most enticing temptation. The thousand secrets of Plassans lay there. He held in his hand the honour of women, the fortunes of men, and had only to break a seal to know as much as the grand vicar at the cathedral who was the confidant of all the better people of the town. Vuillet was one of those terribly bitter, frigid gossips, who worm out everything, but never repeat what they hear, except by way of dealing somebody a mortal blow. He had, consequently, often longed to dip his arms into the public letter-box. Since the previous evening the private room at the post-office had become a big confessional full of darkness and mystery, in which he tasted exquisite rapture while sniffing at the letters which exhaled veiled longings and quivering avowals. Moreover, he carried on his work with consummate impudence. The crisis through which the country was passing secured him perfect impunity. If some letters should be delayed, or others should miscarry altogether, it would be the fault of those villainous Republicans who were scouring the country and interrupting all communication. The closing of the town gates had for a moment vexed him, but he had come to an understanding with Roudier, whereby the couriers were allowed to enter and bring the mails direct to him without passing by the town-hall.

As a matter of fact he had only opened a few letters, the important ones, those in which his keen scent divined some information which it would be useful for him to know before anybody else. Then he contented himself by locking up in a drawer, for delivery subsequently, such letters as might give information and rob him of the merit of his valour at a time when the whole town was trembling with fear. This pious personage, in selecting the management of the post-office as his own share of the spoils, had given proof of singular insight into the situation.

When Madame Rougon entered, he was taking his choice of a heap of letters and papers, under the pretext, no doubt, of classifying them. He rose, with his humble smile, and offered her a seat; his reddened eyelids blinking rather uneasily. But Felicite did not sit down; she roughly exclaimed: "I want the letter."

At this Vuillet's eyes opened widely, with an expression of perfect innocence.

"What letter, madame?" he asked.

"The letter you received this morning for my husband. Come, Monsieur Vuillet, I'm in a hurry."

And as he stammered that he did not know, that he had not seen anything, that it was very strange, Felicite continued in a covertly threatening voice: "A letter from Paris, from my son, Eugene; you know what I mean, don't you? I'll look for it myself."

Thereupon she stepped forward as if intending to examine the various packets which littered the writing table. But he at once bestirred himself, and said he would go and see. The service was necessarily in great confusion! Perhaps, indeed, there might be a letter. In that case they would find it. But, as far as he was concerned, he swore he had not seen any. While he was speaking he moved about the office turning over all the papers. Then he opened the drawers and the portfolios. Felicite waited, quite calm and collected.

"Yes, indeed, you're right, here's a letter for you," he cried at last, as he took a few papers from a portfolio. "Ah! those confounded clerks, they take advantage of the situation to do nothing in the proper way."

Felicite took the letter and examined the seal attentively, apparently quite regardless of the fact that such scrutiny might wound Vuillet's susceptibilities. She clearly perceived that the envelope must have been opened; the bookseller, in his unskilful way, had used some sealing wax of a darker colour to secure it again. She took care to open the envelope in such a manner as to preserve the seal intact, so that it might serve as proof of this. Then she read the note. Eugene briefly announced the complete success of the Coup d'Etat. Paris was subdued, the provinces generally speaking remained quiet, and he counselled his parents to maintain a very firm attitude in face of the partial insurrection which was disturbing the South. In conclusion he told them that the foundation of their fortune was laid, if they did not weaken.

Madame Rougon put the letter in her pocket, and sat down slowly, looking into Vuillet's face. The latter had resumed his sorting in a feverish manner, as though he were very busy.

"Listen to me, Monsieur Vuillet," she said to him. And when he raised his head: "let us play our cards openly; you do wrong to betray us; some misfortune may befall you. If, instead of unsealing our letters—"

At this he protested, and feigned great indignation. But she calmly continued: "I know, I know your school, you never confess. Come, don't let us waste any more words, what interest have you in favouring the Coup d'Etat?"

And, as he continued to assert his perfect honesty, she at last lost patience. "You take me for a fool!" she cried. "I've read your article. You would do much better to act in concert with us."

Thereupon, without avowing anything, he flatly submitted that he wished to have the custom of the college. Formerly it was he who had supplied that establishment with school books. But it had become known that he sold objectionable literature clandestinely to the pupils; for which reason, indeed, he had almost been prosecuted at the Correctional Police Court. Since then he had jealously longed to be received back into the good graces of the directors.

Felicite was surprised at the modesty of his ambition, and told him so. To open letters and risk the galleys just for the sake of selling a few dictionaries and grammars!

"Eh!" he exclaimed in a shrill voice, "it's an assured sale of four or five thousand francs a year. I don't aspire to impossibilities like some people."

She did not take any notice of his last taunting words. No more was said about his opening the letters. A treaty of alliance was concluded, by which Vuillet engaged that he would not circulate any news or take any step in advance, on condition that the Rougons should secure him the custom of the college. As she was leaving, Felicite advised him not to compromise himself any further. It would be sufficient for him to detain the letters and distribute them only on the second day.

"What a knave," she muttered, when she reached the street, forgetting that she herself had just laid an interdict upon the mail.

She went home slowly, wrapped in thought. She even went out of her way, passing along the Cours Sauvaire, as if to gain time and ease for reflection before going in. Under the trees of the promenade she met Monsieur de Carnavant, who was taking advantage of the darkness to ferret about the town without compromising himself. The clergy of Plassans, to whom all energetic action was distasteful, had, since the announcement of the Coup d'Etat, preserved absolute neutrality. In the priests' opinion the Empire was virtually established, and they awaited an opportunity to resume in some new direction their secular intrigues. The marquis, who had now become a useless agent, remained only inquisitive on one point—he wished to know how the turmoil would finish, and in what manner the Rougons would play their role to the end.

"Oh! it's you, little one!" he exclaimed, as soon as he recognized Felicite. "I wanted to see you; your affairs are getting muddled!"

"Oh, no; everything is going on all right," she replied, in an absent-minded way.

"So much the better. You'll tell me all about it, won't you? Ah! I must confess that I gave your husband and his colleagues a terrible fright the other night. You should have seen how comical they looked on the terrace, while I was pointing out a band of insurgents in every cluster of trees in the valley! You forgive me?"

"I'm much obliged to you," said Felicite quickly. "You should have made them die of fright. My husband is a big sly-boots. Come and see me some morning, when I am alone."

Then she turned away, as though this meeting with the marquis had determined her. From head to foot the whole of her little person betokened implacable resolution. At last she was going to revenge herself on Pierre for his petty mysteries, have him under her heel, and secure, once for all, her omnipotence at home. There would be a fine scene, quite a comedy, indeed, the points of which she was already enjoying in anticipation, while she worked out her plan with all the spitefulness of an injured woman.

She found Pierre in bed, sleeping heavily; she brought the candle near him for an instant, and gazed with an air of compassion, at his big face, across which slight twitches occasionally passed; then she sat down at the head of the bed, took off her cap, let her hair fall loose, assumed the appearance of one in despair, and began to sob quite loudly.

"Hallo! What's the matter? What are you crying for?" asked Pierre, suddenly awaking.

She did not reply, but cried more bitterly.

"Come, come, do answer," continued her husband, frightened by this mute despair. "Where have you been? Have you seen the insurgents?"

She shook her head; then, in a faint voice, she said: "I've just come from the Valqueyras mansion. I wanted to ask Monsieur de Carnavant's advice. Ah! my dear, all is lost."

Pierre sat up in bed, very pale. His bull neck, which his unbuttoned night-shirt exposed to view, all his soft, flabby flesh seemed to swell with terror. At last he sank back, pale and tearful, looking like some grotesque Chinese figure in the middle of the untidy bed.

"The marquis," continued Felicite, "thinks that Prince Louis has succumbed. We are ruined; we shall never get a sou."

Thereupon, as often happens with cowards, Pierre flew into a passion. It was the marquis's fault, it was his wife's fault, the fault of all his family. Had he ever thought of politics at all, until Monsieur de Carnavant and Felicite had driven him to that tomfoolery?

"I wash my hands of it altogether," he cried. "It's you two who are responsible for the blunder. Wasn't it better to go on living on our little savings in peace and quietness? But then, you were always determined to have your own way! You see what it has brought us to."

He was losing his head completely, and forgot that he had shown himself as eager as his wife. However, his only desire now was to vent his anger, by laying the blame of his ruin upon others.

"And, moreover," he continued, "could we ever have succeeded with children like ours? Eugene abandons us just at the critical moment; Aristide has dragged us through the mire, and even that big simpleton Pascal is compromising us by his philanthropic practising among the insurgents. And to think that we brought ourselves to poverty simply to give them a university education!"

Then, as he drew breath, Felicite said to him softly: "You are forgetting Macquart."

"Ah! yes; I was forgetting him," he resumed more violently than ever; "there's another whom I can't think of without losing all patience! But that's not all; you know little Silvere. Well, I saw him at my mother's the other evening with his hands covered with blood. He has put some gendarme's eye out. I did not tell you of it, as I didn't want to frighten you. But you'll see one of my nephews in the Assize Court. Ah! what a family! As for Macquart, he has annoyed us to such an extent that I felt inclined to break his head for him the other day when I had a gun in my hand. Yes, I had a mind to do it."

Felicite let the storm pass over. She had received her husband's reproaches with angelic sweetness, bowing her head like a culprit, whereby she was able to smile in her sleeve. Her demeanour provoked and maddened Pierre. When speech failed the poor man, she heaved deep sighs, feigning repentance; and then she repeated, in a disconsolate voice: "Whatever shall we do! Whatever shall we do! We are over head and ears in debt."

"It's your fault!" Pierre cried, with all his remaining strength.

The Rougons, in fact, owed money on every side. The hope of approaching success had made them forget all prudence. Since the beginning of 1851 they had gone so far as to entertain the frequenters of the yellow drawing-room every evening with syrup and punch, and cakes—providing, in fact, complete collations, at which they one and all drank to the death of the Republic. Besides this, Pierre had placed a quarter of his capital at the disposal of the reactionary party, as a contribution towards the purchase of guns and cartridges.

"The pastry-cook's bill amounts to at least a thousand francs," Felicite resumed, in her sweetest tone, "and we probably owe twice as much to the liqueur-dealer. Then there's the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer——"

Pierre was in agony. And Felicite struck him a final blow by adding: "I say nothing of the ten thousand francs you gave for the guns."

"I, I!" he faltered, "but I was deceived, I was robbed! It was that idiot Sicardot who let me in for that by swearing that the Napoleonists would be triumphant. I thought I was only making an advance. But the old dolt will have to repay me my money."

"Ah! you won't get anything back," said his wife, shrugging her shoulders. "We shall suffer the fate of war. When we have paid off everything, we sha'n't even have enough to buy dry bread with. Ah! it's been a fine campaign. We can now go and live in some hovel in the old quarter."

This last phrase had a most lugubrious sound. It seemed like the knell of their existence. Pierre pictured the hovel in the old quarter, which had just been mentioned by Felicite. 'Twas there, then, that he would die on a pallet, after striving all his life for the enjoyment of ease and luxury. In vain had he robbed his mother, steeped his hands in the foulest intrigues, and lied and lied for many a long year. The Empire would not pay his debts—that Empire which alone could save him. He jumped out of bed in his night-shirt, crying: "No; I'll take my gun; I would rather let the insurgents kill me."

"Well!" Felicite rejoined, with great composure, "you can have that done to-morrow or the day after; the Republicans are not far off. And that way will do as well as another to make an end of matters."

Pierre shuddered. It seemed as if some one had suddenly poured a large pail of cold water over his shoulders. He slowly got into bed again, and when he was warmly wrapped up in the sheets, he began to cry. This fat fellow easily burst into tears—gently flowing, inexhaustible tears—which streamed from his eyes without an effort. A terrible reaction was now going on within him. After his wrath he became as weak as a child. Felicite, who had been waiting for this crisis, was delighted to see him so spiritless, so resourceless, and so humbled before her. She still preserved silence, and an appearance of distressed humility. After a long pause, her seeming resignation, her mute dejection, irritated Pierre's nerves.

"But do say something!" he implored; "let us think matters over together. Is there really no hope left us?"

"None, you know very well," she replied; "you explained the situation yourself just now; we have no help to expect from anyone; even our children have betrayed us."

"Let us flee, then. Shall we leave Plassans to-night—immediately?"

"Flee! Why, my dear, to-morrow we should be the talk of the whole town. Don't you remember, too, that you have had the gates closed?"

A violent struggle was going on in Pierre's mind, which he exerted to the utmost in seeking for some solution; at last, as though he felt vanquished, he murmured, in supplicating tones: "I beseech you, do try to think of something; you haven't said anything yet."

Felicite raised her head, feigning surprise; and with a gesture of complete powerlessness she said: "I am a fool in these matters. I don't understand anything about politics, you've told me so a hundred times."

And then, as her embarrassed husband held his tongue and lowered his eyes, she continued slowly, but not reproachfully: "You have not kept me informed of your affairs, have you? I know nothing at all about them, I can't even give you any advice. It was quite right of you, though; women chatter sometimes, and it is a thousand times better for the men to steer the ship alone."

She said this with such refined irony that her husband did not detect that she was deriding him. He simply felt profound remorse. And, all of a sudden, he burst out into a confession. He spoke of Eugene's letters, explained his plans, his conduct, with all the loquacity of a man who is relieving his conscience and imploring a saviour. At every moment he broke off to ask: "What would you have done in my place?" or else he cried, "Isn't that so? I was right, I could not act otherwise." But Felicite did not even deign to make a sign. She listened with all the frigid reserve of a judge. In reality she was tasting the most exquisite pleasure; she had got that sly-boots fast at last; she played with him like a cat playing with a ball of paper; and he virtually held out his hands to be manacled by her.

"But wait," he said hastily, jumping out of bed. "I'll give you Eugene's correspondence to read. You can judge the situation better then."

She vainly tried to hold him back by his night-shirt. He spread out the letters on the table by the bed-side, and then got into bed again, and read whole pages of them, and compelled her to go through them herself. She suppressed a smile, and began to feel some pity for the poor man.

"Well," he said anxiously, when he had finished, "now you know everything. Do you see any means of saving us from ruin!"

She still gave no answer. She appeared to be pondering deeply.

"You are an intelligent woman," he continued, in order to flatter her, "I did wrong in keeping any secret from you; I see it now."

"Let us say nothing more about that," she replied. "In my opinion, if you had enough courage——" And as he looked at her eagerly, she broke off and said, with a smile: "But you promise not to distrust me any more? You will tell me everything, eh? You will do nothing without consulting me?"

He swore, and accepted the most rigid conditions. Felicite then got into bed; and in a whisper, as if she feared somebody might hear them, she explained at length her plan of campaign. In her opinion the town must be allowed to fall into still greater panic, while Pierre was to maintain an heroic demeanour in the midst of the terrified inhabitants. A secret presentiment, she said, warned her that the insurgents were still at a distance. Moreover, the party of order would sooner or later carry the day, and the Rougons would be rewarded. After the role of deliverer, that of martyr was not to be despised. And she argued so well, and spoke with so much conviction, that her husband, surprised at first by the simplicity of her plan, which consisted in facing it out, at last detected in it a marvellous tactical scheme, and promised to conform to it with the greatest possible courage.

"And don't forget that it is I who am saving you," the old woman murmured in a coaxing tone. "Will you be nice to me?"

They kissed each other and said good-night. But neither of them slept; after a quarter of an hour had gone by, Pierre, who had been gazing at the round reflection of the night-lamp on the ceiling, turned, and in a faint whisper told his wife of an idea that had just occurred to him.

"Oh! no, no," Felicite murmured, with a shudder. "That would be too cruel."

"Well," he resumed, "but you want to spread consternation among the inhabitants! They would take me seriously, if what I told you should occur." Then perfecting his scheme, he cried: "We might employ Macquart. That would be a means of getting rid of him."

Felicite seemed to be struck with the idea. She reflected, seemed to hesitate, and then, in a distressful tone faltered: "Perhaps you are right. We must see. After all we should be very stupid if we were over-scrupulous, for it's a matter of life and death to us. Let me do it. I'll see Macquart to-morrow, and ascertain if we can come to an understanding with him. You would only wrangle and spoil all. Good-night; sleep well, my poor dear. Our troubles will soon be ended, you'll see."

They again kissed each other and fell asleep. The patch of light on the ceiling now seemed to be assuming the shape of a terrified eye, that stared wildly and fixedly upon the pale, slumbering couple who reeked with crime beneath their very sheets, and dreamt they could see a rain of blood falling in big drops which turned into golden coins as they plashed upon the floor.

On the morrow, before daylight, Felicite repaired to the town-hall, armed with instructions from Pierre to seek an interview with Macquart. She took her husband's national guard uniform with her, wrapped in a cloth. There were only a few men fast asleep in the guard-house. The doorkeeper, who was entrusted with the duty of supplying Macquart with food, went upstairs with her to open the door of the dressing-room, which had been turned into a cell. Then quietly he came down again.

Macquart had now been kept in the room for two days and two nights. He had had time to indulge in lengthy reflections. After his sleep, his first hours had been given up to outbursts of impotent rage. Goaded by the idea that his brother was lording it in the adjoining room, he had felt a great longing to break the door open. At all events he would strangle Rougon with his own hands, as soon as the insurgents should return and release him. But, in the evening, at twilight, he calmed down, and gave over striding furiously round the little room. He inhaled a sweet odour there; a feeling of comfort relaxed his nerves. Monsieur Garconnet, who was very rich, refined, and vain, had caused this little room to be arranged in a very elegant fashion; the sofa was soft and warm; scents, pomades, and soaps adorned the marble washstand, and the pale light fell from the ceiling with a soft glow, like the gleams of a lamp suspended in an alcove. Macquart, amidst this perfumed soporific atmosphere fell asleep, thinking that those scoundrels, the rich, "were very fortunate, all the same." He had covered himself with a blanket which had been given to him, and with his head and back and arms reposing on the cushions, he stretched himself out on the couch until morning. When he opened his eyes, a ray of sunshine was gliding through the opening above. Still he did not leave the sofa. He felt warm, and lay thinking as he gazed around him. He bethought himself that he would never again have such a place to wash in. The washstand particularly interested him. It was by no means hard, he thought, to keep oneself spruce when one had so many little pots and phials at one's disposal. This made him think bitterly of his own life of privation. The idea occurred to him that perhaps he had been on the wrong track. There is nothing to be gained by associating with beggars. He ought to have played the scamp; he should have acted in concert with the Rougons.

Then, however, he rejected this idea. The Rougons were villains who had robbed him. But the warmth and softness of the sofa, continued to work upon his feelings, and fill him with vague regrets. After all, the insurgents were abandoning him, and allowing themselves to be beaten like idiots. Eventually he came to the conclusion that the Republic was mere dupery. Those Rougons were lucky! And he recalled his own bootless wickedness and underhand intrigues. Not one member of the family had ever been on his side; neither Aristide, nor Silvere's brother, nor Silvere himself, who was a fool to grow so enthusiastic about the Republic and would never do any good for himself. Then Macquart reflected that his wife was dead, that his children had left him, and that he would die alone, like a dog in some wretched corner, without a copper to bless himself with. Decidedly, he ought to have sold himself to the reactionary party. Pondering in this fashion, he eyed the washstand, feeling a strong inclination to go and wash his hands with a certain powder soap which he saw in a glass jar. Like all lazy fellows who live upon their wives or children, he had foppish tastes. Although he wore patched trousers, he liked to inundate himself with aromatic oil. He spent hours with his barber, who talked politics, and brushed his hair for him between their discussions. So, at last, the temptation became too strong, and Macquart installed himself before the washstand. He washed his hands and face, dressed his hair, perfumed himself, in fact went through a complete toilet. He made use in turn of all the bottles, all the various soaps and powders; but his greatest pleasure was to dry his hands with the mayor's towels, which were so soft and thick. He buried his wet face in them, and inhaled, with delight, all the odour of wealth. Then, having pomaded himself, and smelling sweetly from head to foot, he once more stretched himself on the sofa, feeling quite youthful again, and disposed to the most conciliatory thoughts. He felt yet greater contempt for the Republic since he had dipped his nose into Monsieur Garconnet's phials. The idea occurred to him that there was, perhaps, still time for him to make peace with his brother. He wondered what he might well ask in return for playing the traitor. His rancour against the Rougons still gnawed at his heart; but he was in one of those moods when, lying on one's back in silence, one is apt to admit stern facts, and scold oneself for neglecting to feather a comfortable nest in which one may wallow in slothful ease, even at the cost of relinquishing one's most cherished animosities. Towards evening Antoine determined to send for his brother on the following day. But when, in the morning, he saw Felicite enter the room he understood that his aid was wanted, so he remained on his guard.

The negotiations were long and full of pitfalls, being conducted on either side with infinite skill. At first they both indulged in vague complaints, then Felicite, who was surprised to find Macquart almost polite, after the violent manner in which he had behaved at her house on the Sunday evening, assumed a tone of gentle reproach. She deplored the hatred which severed their families. But, in truth, he had so calumniated his brother, and manifested such bitter animosity towards him, that he had made poor Rougon quite lose his head.

"But, dash it, my brother has never behaved like a brother to me," Macquart replied, with restrained violence. "Has he ever given me any assistance? He would have let me die in my hovel! When he behaved differently towards me—you remember, at the time he gave me two hundred francs—I am sure no one can reproach me with having said a single unpleasant word about him. I said everywhere that he was a very good-hearted fellow."

This clearly signified: "If you had continued to supply me with money, I should have been very pleasant towards you, and would have helped you, instead of fighting against you. It's your own fault. You ought to have bought me."

Felicite understood this so well that she replied: "I know you have accused us of being hard upon you, because you imagine we are in comfortable circumstances; but you are mistaken, my dear brother; we are poor people; we have never been able to act towards you as our hearts would have desired." She hesitated a moment, and then continued: "If it were absolutely necessary in some serious contingency, we might perhaps be able to make a sacrifice; but, truly, we are very poor, very poor!"

Macquart pricked up his ears. "I have them!" he thought. Then, without appearing to understand his sister-in-law's indirect offer, he detailed the wretchedness of his life in a doleful manner, and spoke of his wife's death and his children's flight. Felicite, on her side, referred to the crisis through which the country was passing, and declared that the Republic had completely ruined them. Then from word to word she began to bemoan the exigencies of a situation which compelled one brother to imprison another. How their hearts would bleed if justice refused to release its prey! And finally she let slip the word "galleys!"

"Bah! I defy you," said Macquart calmly.

But she hastily exclaimed: "Oh! I would rather redeem the honour of the family with my own blood. I tell you all this to show you that we shall not abandon you. I have come to give you the means of effecting your escape, my dear Antoine."

They gazed at each other for a moment, sounding each other with a look, before engaging in the contest.

"Unconditionally?" he asked, at length.

"Without any condition," she replied.

Then she sat down beside him on the sofa, and continued, in a determined voice: "And even, before crossing the frontier, if you want to earn a thousand-franc note, I can put you in the way of doing so."

There was another pause.

"If it's all above board I shall have no objection," Antoine muttered, apparently reflecting. "You know I don't want to mix myself up with your underhand dealings."

"But there are no underhand dealings about it," Felicite resumed, smiling at the old rascal's scruples. "Nothing can be more simple: you will presently leave this room, and go and conceal yourself in your mother's house, and this evening you can assemble your friends and come and seize the town-hall again."

Macquart did not conceal his extreme surprise. He did not understand it at all.

"I thought," he said, "that you were victorious."

"Oh! I haven't got time now to tell you all about it," the old woman replied, somewhat impatiently. "Do you accept or not?"

"Well, no; I don't accept—I want to think it over. It would be very stupid of me to risk a possible fortune for a thousand francs."

Felicite rose. "Just as you like my dear fellow," she said, coldly. "You don't seem to realise the position you are in. You came to my house and treated me as though I were a mere outcast; and then, when I am kind enough to hold out a hand to you in the hole into which you have stupidly let yourself fall, you stand on ceremony, and refuse to be rescued. Well, then, stay here, wait till the authorities come back. As for me, I wash my hands of the whole business."

With these words she reached the door.

"But give me some explanations," he implored. "I can't strike a bargain with you in perfect ignorance of everything. For two days past I have been quite in the dark as to what's going on. How do I know that you are not cheating me?"

"Bah! you're a simpleton," replied Felicite, who had retraced her steps at Antoine's doleful appeal. "You are very foolish not to trust yourself implicitly to us. A thousand francs! That's a fine sum, a sum that one would only risk in a winning cause. I advise you to accept."

He still hesitated.

"But when we want to seize the place, shall we be allowed to enter quietly?"

"Ah! I don't know," she said, with a smile. "There will perhaps be a shot or two fired."

He looked at her fixedly.

"Well, but I say, little woman," he resumed in a hoarse voice, "you don't intend, do you, to have a bullet lodged in my head?"

Felicite blushed. She was, in fact, just thinking that they would be rendered a great service, if, during the attack on the town-hall, a bullet should rid them of Antoine. It would be a gain of a thousand francs, besides all the rest. So she muttered with irritation: "What an idea! Really, it's abominable to think such things!"

Then, suddenly calming down, she added:

"Do you accept? You understand now, don't you?"

Macquart had understood perfectly. It was an ambush that they were proposing to him. He did not perceive the reasons or the consequences of it, and this was what induced him to haggle. After speaking of the Republic as though it were a mistress whom, to his great grief, he could no longer love, he recapitulated the risks which he would have to run, and finished by asking for two thousand francs. But Felicite abided by her original offer. They debated the matter until she promised to procure him, on his return to France, some post in which he would have nothing to do, and which would pay him well. The bargain was then concluded. She made him don the uniform she had brought with her. He was to betake himself quietly to aunt Dide's, and afterwards, towards midnight, assemble all the Republicans he could in the neighbourhood of the town-hall, telling them that the municipal offices were unguarded, and that they had only to push open the door to take possession of them. Antoine then asked for earnest money, and received two hundred francs. Felicite undertook to pay the remaining eight hundred on the following day. The Rougons were risking the last sum they had at their disposal.

When Felicite had gone downstairs, she remained on the square for a moment to watch Macquart go out. He passed the guard-house, quietly blowing his nose. He had previously broken the skylight in the dressing-room, to make it appear that he had escaped that way.

"It's all arranged," Felicite said to her husband, when she returned home. "It will be at midnight. It doesn't matter to me at all now. I should like to see them all shot. How they slandered us yesterday in the street!"

"It was rather silly of you to hesitate," replied Pierre, who was shaving. "Every one would do the same in our place."

That morning—it was a Wednesday—he was particularly careful about his toilet. His wife combed his hair and tied his cravat, turning him about like a child going to a distribution of prizes. And when he was ready, she examined him, declared that he looked very nice, and that he would make a very good figure in the midst of the serious events that were preparing. His big pale face wore an expression of grave dignity and heroic determination. She accompanied him to the first landing, giving him her last advice: he was not to depart in any way from his courageous demeanour, however great the panic might be; he was to have the gates closed more hermetically than ever, and leave the town in agonies of terror within its ramparts; it would be all the better if he were to appear the only one willing to die for the cause of order.

What a day it was! The Rougons still speak of it as of a glorious and decisive battle. Pierre went straight to the town-hall, heedless of the looks or words that greeted him on his way. He installed himself there in magisterial fashion, like a man who did not intend to quit the place, whatever might happen. And he simply sent a note to Roudier, to advise him that he was resuming authority.

"Keep watch at the gates," he added, knowing that these lines might become public: "I myself will watch over the town and ensure the security of life and property. It is at the moment when evil passions reappear and threaten to prevail that good citizens should endeavour to stifle them, even at the peril of their lives." The style, and the very errors in spelling, made this note—the brevity of which suggested the laconic style of the ancients—appear all the more heroic. Not one of the gentlemen of the Provisional Commission put in an appearance. The last two who had hitherto remained faithful, and Granoux himself, even, prudently stopped at home. Thus Rougon was the only member of the Commission who remained at his post, in his presidential arm-chair, all the others having vanished as the panic increased. He did not even deign to issue an order summoning them to attend. He was there, and that sufficed, a sublime spectacle, which a local journal depicted later on in a sentence: "Courage giving the hand to duty."

During the whole morning Pierre was seen animating the town-hall with his goings and comings. He was absolutely alone in the large, empty building, whose lofty halls reechoed with the noise of his heels. All the doors were left open. He made an ostentatious show of his presidency over a non-existent council in the midst of this desert, and appeared so deeply impressed with the responsibility of his mission that the doorkeeper, meeting him two or three times in the passages, bowed to him with an air of mingled surprise and respect. He was seen, too, at every window, and, in spite of the bitter cold, he appeared several times on the balcony with bundles of papers in his hand, like a busy man attending to important despatches.

Then, towards noon, he passed through the town and visited the guard-houses, speaking of a possible attack, and letting it be understood, that the insurgents were not far off; but he relied, he said, on the courage of the brave national guards. If necessary they must be ready to die to the last man for the defence of the good cause. When he returned from this round, slowly and solemnly, after the manner of a hero who has set the affairs of his country in order, and now only awaits death, he observed signs of perfect stupor along his path; the people promenading in the Cours, the incorrigible little householders, whom no catastrophe would have prevented from coming at certain hours to bask in the sun, looked at him in amazement, as if they did not recognize him, and could not believe that one of their own set, a former oil-dealer, should have the boldness to face a whole army.

In the town the anxiety was at its height. The insurrectionists were expected every moment. The rumour of Macquart's escape was commented upon in a most alarming manner. It was asserted that he had been rescued by his friends, the Reds, and that he was only waiting for nighttime in order to fall upon the inhabitants and set fire to the four corners of the town. Plassans, closed in and terror-stricken, gnawing at its own vitals within its prison-like walls, no longer knew what to imagine in order to frighten itself. The Republicans, in the face of Rougon's bold demeanour, felt for a moment distrustful. As for the new town—the lawyers and retired tradespeople who had denounced the yellow drawing-room on the previous evening—they were so surprised that they dared not again openly attack such a valiant man. They contented themselves with saying "It was madness to brave victorious insurgents like that, and such useless heroism would bring the greatest misfortunes upon Plassans." Then, at about three o'clock, they organised a deputation. Pierre, though he was burning with desire to make a display of his devotion before his fellow-citizens, had not ventured to reckon upon such a fine opportunity.

He spoke sublimely. It was in the mayor's private room that the president of the Provisional Commission received the deputation from the new town. The gentlemen of the deputation, after paying homage to his patriotism, besought him to forego all resistance. But he, in a loud voice, talked of duty, of his country, of order, of liberty, and various other things. Moreover, he did not wish to compel any one to imitate him; he was simply discharging a duty which his conscience and his heart dictated to him.

"You see, gentlemen, I am alone," he said in conclusion. "I will take all the responsibility, so that nobody but myself may be compromised. And if a victim is required I willingly offer myself; I wish to sacrifice my own life for the safety of the inhabitants."

A notary, the wiseacre of the party, remarked that he was running to certain death.

"I know it," he resumed solemnly. "I am prepared!"

The gentlemen looked at each other. Those words "I am prepared!" filled them with admiration. Decidedly this man was a brave fellow. The notary implored him to call in the aid of the gendarmes; but he replied that the blood of those brave soldiers was precious, and he would not have it shed, except in the last extremity. The deputation slowly withdrew, feeling deeply moved. An hour afterwards, Plassans was speaking of Rougon as of a hero; the most cowardly called him "an old fool."

Towards evening, Rougon was much surprised to see Granoux hasten to him. The old almond-dealer threw himself in his arms, calling him "great man," and declaring that he would die with him. The words "I am prepared!" which had just been reported to him by his maid-servant, who had heard it at the greengrocer's, had made him quite enthusiastic. There was charming naivete in the nature of this grotesque, timorous old man. Pierre kept him with him, thinking that he would not be of much consequence. He was even touched by the poor fellow's devotion, and resolved to have him publicly complimented by the prefect, in order to rouse the envy of the other citizens who had so cowardly abandoned him. And so both of them awaited the night in the deserted building.

At the same time Aristide was striding about at home in an uneasy manner. Vuillet's article had astonished him. His father's demeanour stupefied him. He had just caught sight of him at the window, in a white cravat and black frock-coat, so calm at the approach of danger that all his ideas were upset. Yet the insurgents were coming back triumphant, that was the belief of the whole town. But Aristide felt some doubts on the point; he had suspicions of some lugubrious farce. As he did not dare to present himself at his parents' house, he sent his wife thither. And when Angele returned, she said to him, in her drawling voice: "Your mother expects you; she is not angry at all, she seems rather to be making fun of you. She told me several times that you could just put your sling back in your pocket."

Aristide felt terribly vexed. However, he ran to the Rue de la Banne, prepared to make the most humble submission. His mother was content to receive him with scornful laughter. "Ah! my poor fellow," said she, "you're certainly not very shrewd."

"But what can one do in a hole like Plassans!" he angrily retorted. "On my word of honour, I am becoming a fool here. No news, and everybody shivering! That's what it is to be shut up in these villainous ramparts. Ah! If I had only been able to follow Eugene to Paris!"

Then, seeing that his mother was still smiling, he added bitterly: "You haven't been very kind to me, mother. I know many things, I do. My brother kept you informed of what was going on, and you have never given me the faintest hint that might have been useful to me."

"You know that, do you?" exclaimed Felicite, becoming serious and distrustful. "Well, you're not so foolish as I thought, then. Do you open letters like some one of my acquaintance?"

"No; but I listen at doors," Aristide replied, with great assurance.

This frankness did not displease the old woman. She began to smile again, and asked more softly: "Well, then, you blockhead, how is it you didn't rally to us sooner?"

"Ah! that's where it is," the young man said, with some embarrassment. "I didn't have much confidence in you. You received such idiots: my father-in-law, Granoux, and the others!—And then, I didn't want to go too far. . . ." He hesitated, and then resumed, with some uneasiness: "To-day you are at least quite sure of the success of the Coup d'Etat, aren't you?"

"I!" cried Felicite, wounded by her son's doubts; "no, I'm not sure of anything."

"And yet you sent word to say that I was to take off my sling!"

"Yes; because all the gentlemen are laughing at you."

Aristide remained stock still, apparently contemplating one of the flowers of the orange-coloured wall-paper. And his mother felt sudden impatience as she saw him hesitating thus.

"Ah! well," she said, "I've come back again to my former opinion; you're not very shrewd. And you think you ought to have had Eugene's letters to read? Why, my poor fellow you would have spoilt everything, with your perpetual vacillation. You never can make up your mind. You are hesitating now."

"I hesitate?" he interrupted, giving his mother a cold, keen glance. "Ah! well, you don't know me. I would set the whole town on fire if it were necessary, and I wanted to warm my feet. But, understand me, I've no desire to take the wrong road! I'm tired of eating hard bread, and I hope to play fortune a trick. But I only play for certainties."

He spoke these words so sharply, with such a keen longing for success, that his mother recognised the cry of her own blood.

"Your father is very brave," she whispered.

"Yes, I've seen him," he resumed with a sneer. "He's got a fine look on him! He reminded me of Leonidas at Thermopylae. Is it you, mother, who have made him cut this figure?"

And he added cheerfully, with a gesture of determination: "Well, so much the worse! I'm a Bonapartist! Father is not the man to risk the chance of being killed unless it pays him well."

"You're quite right," his mother replied; "I mustn't say anything; but to-morrow you'll see."

He did not press her, but swore that she would soon have reason to be proud of him; and then he took his departure, while Felicite, feeling her old preference reviving, said to herself at the window, as she watched him going off, that he had the devil's own wit, that she would never have had sufficient courage to let him leave without setting him in the right path.

And now for the third time a night full of anguish fell upon Plassans. The unhappy town was almost at its death-rattle. The citizens hastened home and barricaded their doors with a great clattering of iron bolts and bars. The general feeling seemed to be that, by the morrow, Plassans would no longer exist, that it would either be swallowed up by the earth or would evaporate in the atmosphere. When Rougon went home to dine, he found the streets completely deserted. This desolation made him sad and melancholy. As a result of this, when he had finished his meal, he felt some slight misgivings, and asked his wife if it were necessary to follow up the insurrection that Macquart was preparing.

"Nobody will run us down now," said he. "You should have seen those gentlemen of the new town, how they bowed to me! It seems to me quite unnecessary now to kill anybody—eh? What do you think? We shall feather our nest without that."

"Ah! what a nerveless fellow you are!" Felicite cried angrily. "It was your own idea to do it, and now you back out! I tell you that you'll never do anything without me! Go then, go your own way. Do you think the Republicans would spare you if they got hold of you?"

Rougon went back to the town-hall, and prepared for the ambush. Granoux was very useful to him. He despatched him with orders to the different posts guarding the ramparts. The national guards were to repair to the town-hall in small detachments, as secretly as possible. Roudier, that bourgeois who was quite out of his element in the provinces, and who would have spoilt the whole affair with his humanitarian preaching, was not even informed of it. Towards eleven o'clock, the court-yard of the town-hall was full of national guards. Then Rougon frightened them; he told them that the Republicans still remaining in Plassans were about to attempt a desperate coup de main, and plumed himself on having been warned in time by his secret police. When he had pictured the bloody massacre which would overtake the town, should these wretches get the upper hand, he ordered his men to cease speaking, and extinguish all lights. He took a gun himself. Ever since the morning he had been living as in a dream; he no longer knew himself; he felt Felicite behind him. The crisis of the previous night had thrown him into her hands, and he would have allowed himself to be hanged, thinking: "It does not matter, my wife will come and cut me down." To augment the tumult, and prolong the terror of the slumbering town, he begged Granoux to repair to the cathedral and have the tocsin rung at the first shots he might hear. The marquis's name would open the beadle's door. And then, in darkness and dismal silence, the national guards waited in the yard, in a terrible state of anxiety, their eyes fixed on the porch, eager to fire, as though they were lying in wait for a pack of wolves.

In the meantime, Macquart had spent the day at aunt Dide's house. Stretching himself on the old coffer, and lamenting the loss of Monsieur Garconnet's sofa, he had several times felt a mad inclination to break into his two hundred francs at some neighbouring cafe. This money was burning a hole in his waistcoat pocket; however, he whiled away his time by spending it in imagination. His mother moved about, in her stiff, automatic way, as if she were not even aware of his presence. During the last few days her children had been coming to her rather frequently, in a state of pallor and desperation, but she departed neither from her taciturnity, nor her stiff, lifeless expression. She knew nothing of the fears which were throwing the pent-up town topsy-turvy, she was a thousand leagues away from Plassans, soaring into the one constant fixed idea which imparted such a blank stare to her eyes. Now and again, however, at this particular moment, some feeling of uneasiness, some human anxiety, occasionally made her blink. Antoine, unable to resist the temptation of having something nice to eat, sent her to get a roast chicken from an eating-house in the Faubourg. When it was set on the table: "Hey!" he said to her, "you don't often eat fowl, do you? It's only for those who work, and know how to manage their affairs. As for you, you always squandered everything. I bet you're giving all your savings to that little hypocrite, Silvere. He's got a mistress, the sly fellow. If you've a hoard of money hidden in some corner, he'll ease you of it nicely some day."

Macquart was in a jesting mood, glowing with wild exultation. The money he had in his pocket, the treachery he was preparing, the conviction that he had sold himself at a good price—all filled him with the self-satisfaction characteristic of vicious people who naturally became merry and scornful amidst their evil practices. Of all his talk, however, aunt Dide only heard Silvere's name.

"Have you seen him?" she asked, opening her lips at last.

"Who? Silvere?" Antoine replied. "He was walking about among the insurgents with a tall red girl on his arm. It will serve him right if he gets into trouble."

The grandmother looked at him fixedly, then, in a solemn voice, inquired: "Why?"

"Eh! Why, he shouldn't be so stupid," resumed Macquart, feeling somewhat embarrassed. "People don't risk their necks for the sake of ideas. I've settled my own little business. I'm no fool."

But aunt Dide was no longer listening to him. She was murmuring: "He had his hands covered with blood. They'll kill him like the other one. His uncles will send the gendarmes after him."

"What are you muttering there?" asked her son, as he finished picking the bones of the chicken. "You know I like people to accuse me to my face. If I have sometimes talked to the little fellow about the Republic, it was only to bring him round to a more reasonable way of thinking. He was dotty. I love liberty myself, but it mustn't degenerate into license. And as for Rougon, I esteem him. He's a man of courage and common-sense."

"He had the gun, hadn't he?" interrupted aunt Dide, whose wandering mind seemed to be following Silvere far away along the high road.

"The gun? Ah! yes; Macquart's carbine," continued Antoine, after casting a glance at the mantel-shelf, where the fire-arm was usually hung. "I fancy I saw it in his hands. A fine instrument to scour the country with, when one has a girl on one's arm. What a fool!"

Then he thought he might as well indulge in a few coarse jokes. Aunt Dide had begun to bustle about the room again. She did not say a word. Towards the evening Antoine went out, after putting on a blouse, and pulling over his eyes a big cap which his mother had bought for him. He returned into the town in the same manner as he had quitted it, by relating some nonsensical story to the national guards who were on duty at the Rome Gate. Then he made his way to the old quarter, where he crept from house to house in a mysterious manner. All the Republicans of advanced views, all the members of the brotherhood who had not followed the insurrectionary army, met in an obscure inn, where Macquart had made an appointment with them. When about fifty men were assembled, he made a speech, in which he spoke of personal vengeance that must be wreaked, of a victory that must be gained, and of a disgraceful yoke that must be thrown off. And he ended by undertaking to deliver the town-hall over to them in ten minutes. He had just left it, it was quite unguarded, he said, and the red flag would wave over it that very night if they so desired. The workmen deliberated. At that moment the reaction seemed to be in its death throes. The insurgents were virtually at the gates of the town. It would therefore be more honourable to make an effort to regain power without awaiting their return, so as to be able to receive them as brothers, with the gates wide open, and the streets and squares adorned with flags. Moreover, none of those present distrusted Macquart. His hatred of the Rougons, the personal vengeance of which he spoke, could be taken as guaranteeing his loyalty. It was arranged that each of them who was a sportsman and had a gun at home should fetch it, and that the band should assemble at midnight in the neighbourhood of the town-hall. A question of detail very nearly put an end to their plans—they had no bullets; however, they decided to load their weapons with small shot: and even that seemed unnecessary, as they were told that they would meet with no resistance.

Once more Plassans beheld a band of armed men filing along close to the houses, in the quiet moonlight. When the band was assembled in front of the town-hall, Macquart, while keeping a sharp look-out, boldly advanced to the building. He knocked, and when the door-keeper, who had learnt his lesson, asked what was wanted, he uttered such terrible threats, that the man, feigning fright, made haste to open the door. Both leaves of it swung back slowly, and the porch then lay open and empty before them, while Macquart shouted in a loud voice: "Come on, my friends!"

That was the signal. He himself quickly jumped aside, and as the Republicans rushed in, there came, from the darkness of the yard, a stream of fire and a hail of bullets, which swept through the gaping porch with a roar as of thunder. The doorway vomited death. The national guards, exasperated by their long wait, eager to shake off the discomfort weighing upon them in that dismal court-yard, had fired a volley with feverish haste. The flash of the firing was so bright, that, through the yellow gleams Macquart distinctly saw Rougon taking aim. He fancied that his brother's gun was deliberately levelled at himself, and he recalled Felicite's blush, and made his escape, muttering: "No tricks! The rascal would kill me. He owes me eight hundred francs."

In the meantime a loud howl had arisen amid the darkness. The surprised Republicans shouted treachery, and fired in their turn. A national guard fell under the porch. But the Republicans, on their side, had three dead. They took to flight, stumbling over the corpses, stricken with panic, and shouting through the quiet lanes: "Our brothers are being murdered!" in despairing voices which found no echo. Thereupon the defenders of order, having had time to reload their weapons, rushed into the empty square, firing at every street corner, wherever the darkness of a door, the shadow of a lamp-post, or the jutting of a stone made them fancy they saw an insurgent. In this wise they remained there ten minutes, firing into space.

The affray had burst over the slumbering town like a thunderclap. The inhabitants in the neighbouring streets, roused from sleep by this terrible fusillade, sat up in bed, their teeth chattering with fright. Nothing in the world would have induced them to poke their noses out of the window. And slowly, athwart the air, in which the shots had suddenly resounded, one of the cathedral bells began to ring the tocsin with so irregular, so strange a rhythm, that one might have thought the noise to be the hammering of an anvil or the echoes of a colossal kettle struck by a child in a fit of passion. This howling bell, whose sound the citizens did not recognise, terrified them yet more than the reports of the fire-arms had done; and there were some who thought they heard an endless train of artillery rumbling over the paving-stones. They lay down again and buried themselves beneath their blankets, as if they would have incurred some danger by still sitting up in bed in their closely-fastened rooms. With their sheets drawn up to their chins, they held their breath, and made themselves as small as possible, while their wives, by their side, almost fainted with terror as they buried their heads among the pillows.

The national guards who had remained at the ramparts had also heard the shots, and thinking that the insurgents had entered by means of some subterranean passage, they ran up helter-skelter, in groups of five or six, disturbing the silence of the streets with the tumult of their excited rush. Roudier was one of the first to arrive. However, Rougon sent them all back to their posts, after reprimanding them severely for abandoning the gates of the town. Thrown into consternation by this reproach—for in their panic, they had, in fact, left the gates absolutely defenceless—they again set off at a gallop, hurrying through the streets with still more frightful uproar. Plassans might well have thought that an infuriated army was crossing it in all directions. The fusillade, the tocsin, the marches and countermarches of the national guards, the weapons which were being dragged along like clubs, the terrified cries in the darkness, all produced a deafening tumult, such as might break forth in a town taken by assault and given over to plunder. It was the final blow of the unfortunate inhabitants, who really believed that the insurgents had arrived. They had, indeed, said that it would be their last night—that Plassans would be swallowed up in the earth, or would evaporate into smoke before daybreak; and now, lying in their beds, they awaited the catastrophe in the most abject terror, fancying at times that their houses were already tottering.

Meantime Granoux still rang the tocsin. When, in other respects, silence had again fallen upon the town, the mournfulness of that ringing became intolerable. Rougon, who was in a high fever, felt exasperated by its distant wailing. He hastened to the cathedral, and found the door open. The beadle was on the threshold.

"Ah! that's quite enough!" he shouted to the man; "anybody would think there was some one crying; it's quite unbearable."

"But it isn't me, sir," replied the beadle in a distressed manner. "It's Monsieur Granoux, he's gone up into the steeple. I must tell you that I removed the clapper of the bell, by his Reverence's order, precisely to prevent the tocsin from being sounded. But Monsieur Granoux wouldn't listen to reason. He climbed up, and I've no idea what he can be making that noise with."

Thereupon Rougon hastily ascended the staircase which led to the bells, shouting: "That will do! That will do! For goodness' sake leave off!"

When he had reached the top he caught sight of Granoux, by the light of the moon which glided through an embrasure; the ex almond dealer was standing there hatless, and dealing furious blows with a heavy hammer. He did so with a right good will. He first threw himself back, then took a spring, and finally fell upon the sonorous bronze as if he wanted to crack it. One might have thought he was a blacksmith striking hot iron—but a frock-coated blacksmith, short and bald, working in a wild and awkward way.

Surprise kept Rougon motionless for a moment at the sight of this frantic bourgeois thus belabouring the bell in the moonlight. Then he understood the kettle-like clang which this strange ringer had disseminated over the town. He shouted to him to stop, but Granoux did not hear. Rougon was obliged to take hold of his frock-coat, and then the other recognising him, exclaimed in a triumphant voice: "Ah! you've heard it. At first I tried to knock the bell with my fists, but that hurt me. Fortunately I found this hammer. Just a few more blows, eh?"

However, Rougon dragged him away. Granoux was radiant. He wiped his forehead, and made his companion promise to let everybody know in the morning that he had produced all that noise with a mere hammer. What an achievement, and what a position of importance that furious ringing would confer upon him!

Towards morning, Rougon bethought himself of reassuring Felicite. In accordance with his orders, the national guards had shut themselves up in the town-hall. He had forbidden them to remove the corpses, under the pretext that it was necessary to give the populace of the old quarter a lesson. And as, while hastening to the Rue de la Banne, he passed over the square, on which the moon was no longer shining, he inadvertently stepped on the clenched hand of a corpse that lay beside the footpath. At this he almost fell. That soft hand, which yielded beneath his heel, brought him an indefinable sensation of disgust and horror. And thereupon he hastened at full speed along the deserted streets, fancying that a bloody fist was pursuing him.

"There are four of them on the ground," he said, as he entered his house.

He and his wife looked at one another as though they were astonished at their crime.

The lamplight imparted the hue of yellow wax to their pale faces.

"Have you left them there?" asked Felicite; "they must be found there."

"Of course! I didn't pick them up. They are lying on their backs. I stepped on something soft——"

Then he looked at his boot; its heel was covered with blood. While he was putting on a pair of shoes, Felicite resumed:

"Well! so much the better! It's over now. People won't be inclined to repeat that you only fire at mirrors."

The fusillade which the Rougons had planned in order that they might be finally recognised as the saviours of Plassans, brought the whole terrified and grateful town to their feet. The day broke mournfully with the grey melancholy of a winter-morning. The inhabitants, hearing nothing further, ventured forth, weary of trembling beneath their sheets. At first some ten or fifteen appeared. Later on, when a rumour spread that the insurgents had taken flight, leaving their dead in every gutter, Plassans rose in a body and descended upon the town-hall. Throughout the morning people strolled inquisitively round the four corpses. They were horribly mutilated, particularly one, which had three bullets in the head. But the most horrible to look upon was the body of a national guard, who had fallen under the porch; he had received a charge of the small shot, used by the Republicans in lieu of bullets, full in the face; and blood oozed from his torn and riddled countenance. The crowd feasted their eyes upon this horror, with the avidity for revolting spectacles which is so characteristic of cowards. The national guard was freely recognised; he was the pork-butcher Dubruel, the man whom Roudier had accused on the Monday morning of having fired with culpable eagerness. Of the three other corpses, two were journeymen hatters; the third was not identified. For a long while gaping groups remained shuddering in front of the red pools which stained the pavement, often looking behind them with an air of mistrust, as though that summary justice which had restored order during the night by force of arms, were, even now, watching and listening to them, ready to shoot them down in their turn, unless they kissed with enthusiasm the hand that had just rescued them from the demagogy.

The panic of the night further augmented the terrible effect produced in the morning by the sight of the four corpses. The true history of the fusillade was never known. The firing of the combatants, Granoux's hammering, the helter-skelter rush of the national guards through the streets, had filled people's ears with such terrifying sounds that most of them dreamed of a gigantic battle waged against countless enemies. When the victors, magnifying the number of their adversaries with instinctive braggardism, spoke of about five hundred men, everybody protested against such a low estimate. Some citizens asserted that they had looked out of their windows and seen an immense stream of fugitives passing by for more than an hour. Moreover everybody had heard the bandits running about. Five hundred men would never have been able to rouse a whole town. It must have been an army, and a fine big army too, which the brave militia of Plassans had "driven back into the ground." This phrase of their having been "driven back into the ground," first used by Rougon, struck people as being singularly appropriate, for the guards who were charged with the defence of the ramparts swore by all that was holy that not a single man had entered or quitted the town, a circumstance which tinged what had happened with mystery, even suggesting the idea of horned demons who had vanished amidst flames, and thus fairly upsetting the minds of the multitude. It is true the guards avoided all mention of their mad gallops; and so the more rational citizens were inclined to believe that a band of insurgents had really entered the town either by a breach in the wall or some other channel. Later on, rumours of treachery were spread abroad, and people talked of an ambush. The cruel truth could no longer be concealed by the men whom Macquart had led to slaughter, but so much terror still prevailed, and the sight of blood had thrown so many cowards into the arms of the reactionary party, that these rumours were attributed to the rage of the vanquished Republicans. It was asserted, on the other hand, that Macquart had been made prisoner by Rougon, who kept him in a damp cell, where he was letting him slowly die of starvation. This horrible tale made people bow to the very ground whenever they encountered Rougon.

Thus it was that this grotesque personage, this pale, flabby, tun-bellied citizen became, in one night, a terrible captain, whom nobody dared to ridicule any more. He had steeped his foot in blood. The inhabitants of the old quarter stood dumb with fright before the corpses. But towards ten o'clock, when the respectable people of the new town arrived, the whole square hummed with subdued chatter. People spoke of the other attack, of the seizure of the mayor's office, in which a mirror only had been wounded; but this time they no longer pooh-poohed Rougon, they spoke of him with respectful dismay; he was indeed a hero, a deliverer. The corpses, with open eyes, stared at those gentlemen, the lawyers and householders, who shuddered as they murmured that civil war had many cruel necessities. The notary, the chief of the deputation sent to the town-hall on the previous evening, went from group to group, recalling the proud words "I am prepared!" then used by the energetic man to whom the town owed its safety. There was a general feeling of humiliation. Those who had railed most cruelly against the forty-one, those, especially, who had referred to the Rougons as intriguers and cowards who merely fired shots in the air, were the first to speak of granting a crown of laurels "to the noble citizen of whom Plassans would be for ever proud." For the pools of blood were drying on the pavement, and the corpses proclaimed to what a degree of audacity the party of disorder, pillage, and murder had gone, and what an iron hand had been required to put down the insurrection.

Moreover, the whole crowd was eager to congratulate Granoux, and shake hands with him. The story of the hammer had become known. By an innocent falsehood, however, of which he himself soon became unconscious, he asserted that, having been the first to see the insurgents, he had set about striking the bell, in order to sound the alarm, so that, but for him, the national guards would have been massacred. This doubled his importance. His achievement was declared prodigious. People spoke of him now as "Monsieur Isidore, don't you know? the gentleman who sounded the tocsin with a hammer!" Although the sentence was somewhat lengthy, Granoux would willingly have accepted it as a title of nobility; and from that day forward he never heard the word "hammer" pronounced without imagining it to be some delicate flattery.

While the corpses were being removed, Aristide came to look at them. He examined them on all sides, sniffing and looking inquisitively at their faces. His eyes were bright, and he had a sharp expression of countenance. In order to see some wound the better he even lifted up the blouse of one corpse with the very hand which on the previous day had been suspended in a sling. This examination seemed to convince him and remove all doubt from his mind. He bit his lips, remained there for a moment in silence, and then went off for the purpose of hastening the issue of the "Independant," for which he had written a most important article. And as he hurried along beside the houses he recalled his mother's words: "You will see to-morrow!" Well, he had seen now; it was very clever; it even frightened him somewhat.

In the meantime, Rougon's triumph was beginning to embarrass him. Alone in Monsieur Garconnet's office, hearing the buzzing of the crowd, he became conscious of a strange feeling, which prevented him from showing himself on the balcony. That blood, in which he had stepped, seemed to have numbed his legs. He wondered what he should do until the evening. His poor empty brain, upset by the events of the night, sought desperately for some occupation, some order to give, or some measure to be taken, which might afford him some distraction. But he could think about nothing clearly. Whither was Felicite leading him? Was it really all finished now, or would he still have to kill somebody else? Then fear again assailed him, terrible doubts arose in his mind, and he already saw the ramparts broken down on all sides by an avenging army of the Republicans, when a loud shout: "The insurgents! The insurgents!" burst forth under the very windows of his room. At this he jumped up, and raising a curtain, saw the crowd rushing about the square in a state of terror. What a thunderbolt! In less than a second he pictured himself ruined, plundered, and murdered; he cursed his wife, he cursed the whole town. Then, as he looked behind him in a suspicious manner, seeking some means of escape, he heard the mob break out into applause, uttering shouts of joy, making the very glass rattle with their wild delight. Then he returned to the window; the women were waving their handkerchiefs, and the men were embracing each other. There were some among them who joined hands and began to dance. Rougon stood there stupefied, unable to comprehend it all, and feeling his head swimming. The big, deserted, silent building, in which he was alone, quite frightened him.

When he afterwards confessed his feelings to Felicite, he was unable to say how long his torture had lasted. He only remembered that a noise of footsteps, re-echoing through the vast halls, had roused him from his stupor. He expected to be attacked by men in blouses, armed with scythes and clubs, whereas it was the Municipal Commission which entered, quite orderly and in evening dress, each member with a beaming countenance. Not one of them was absent. A piece of good news had simultaneously cured all these gentlemen. Granoux rushed into the arms of his dear president.

"The soldiers!" he stammered, "the soldiers!"

A regiment had, in fact, just arrived, under the command of Colonel Masson and Monsieur de Bleriot, prefect of the department. The gunbarrels which had been observed from the ramparts, far away in the plain, had at first suggested the approach of the insurgents. Rougon was so deeply moved on learning the truth, that two big tears rolled down his cheeks. He was weeping, the great citizen! The Municipal Commission watched those big tears with most respectful admiration. But Granoux again threw himself on his friend's neck, crying:

"Ah! how glad I am! You know I'm a straightforward man. Well, we were all of us afraid; it is not so, gentlemen? You, alone, were great, brave, sublime! What energy you must have had! I was just now saying to my wife: 'Rougon is a great man; he deserves to be decorated.'"

Then the gentlemen proposed to go and meet the prefect. For a moment Rougon felt both stunned and suffocated; he was unable to believe in this sudden triumph, and stammered like a child. However, he drew breath, and went downstairs with the quiet dignity suited to the solemnity of the occasion. But the enthusiasm which greeted the commission and its president outside the town-hall almost upset his magisterial gravity afresh. His name sped through the crowd, accompanied this time by the warmest eulogies. He heard everyone repeat Granoux's avowal, and treat him as a hero who had stood firm and resolute amidst universal panic. And, as far as the Sub-Prefecture, where the commission met the prefect, he drank his fill of popularity and glory.

Monsieur de Bleriot and Colonel Masson had entered the town alone, leaving their troops encamped on the Lyons road. They had lost considerable time through a misunderstanding as to the direction taken by the insurgents. Now, however, they knew the latter were at Orcheres; and it would only be necessary to stop an hour at Plassans, just sufficient time to reassure the population and publish the cruel ordinances which decreed the sequestration of the insurgents' property, and death to every individual who might be taken with arms in his hands. Colonel Masson smiled when, in accordance with the orders of the commander of the national guards, the bolts of the Rome Gate were drawn back with a great rattling of rusty old iron. The detachment on duty there accompanied the prefect and the colonel as a guard of honour. As they traversed the Cours Sauvaire, Roudier related Rougon's epic achievements to the gentlemen—the three days of panic that had terminated with the brilliant victory of the previous night. When the two processions came face to face therefore, Monsieur de Bleriot quickly advanced towards the president of the Commission, shook hands with him, congratulated him, and begged him to continue to watch over the town until the return of the authorities. Rougon bowed, while the prefect, having reached the door of the Sub-Prefecture, where he wished to take a brief rest, proclaimed in a loud voice that he would not forget to mention his brave and noble conduct in his report.

In the meantime, in spite of the bitter cold, everybody had come to their windows. Felicite, leaning forward at the risk of falling out, was quite pale with joy. Aristide had just arrived with a number of the "Independant," in which he had openly declared himself in favour of the Coup d'Etat, which he welcomed "as the aurora of liberty in order and of order in liberty." He had also made a delicate allusion to the yellow drawing-room, acknowledging his errors, declaring that "youth is presumptuous," and that "great citizens say nothing, reflect in silence, and let insults pass by, in order to rise heroically when the day of struggle comes." He was particularly pleased with this sentence. His mother thought his article extremely well written. She kissed her dear child, and placed him on her right hand. The Marquis de Carnavant, weary of incarcerating himself, and full of eager curiosity, had likewise come to see her, and stood on her left, leaning on the window rail.

When Monsieur de Bleriot offered his hand to Rougon on the square below Felicite began to weep. "Oh! see, see," she said to Aristide. "He has shaken hands with him. Look! he is doing it again!" And casting a glance at the windows, where groups of people were congregated, she added: "How wild they must be! Look at Monsieur Peirotte's wife, she's biting her handkerchief. And over there, the notary's daughter, and Madame Massicot, and the Brunet family, what faces, eh? how angry they look! Ah, indeed, it's our turn now."

She followed the scene which was being acted outside the Sub-Prefecture with thrills of delight, which shook her ardent, grasshopper-like figure from head to foot. She interpreted the slightest gesture, invented words which she was unable to catch, and declared that Pierre bowed very well indeed. She was a little vexed when the prefect deigned to speak to poor Granoux, who was hovering about him fishing for a word of praise. No doubt Monsieur de Bleriot already knew the story of the hammer, for the retired almond-dealer turned as red as a young girl, and seemed to be saying that he had only done his duty. However, that which angered Felicite still more was her husband's excessive amiability in presenting Vuillet to the authorities. Vuillet, it is true, pushed himself forward amongst them, and Rougon was compelled to mention him.

"What a schemer!" muttered Felicite. "He creeps in everywhere. How confused my poor dear husband must be! See, there's the colonel speaking to him. What can he be saying to him?"

"Ah! little one," the marquis replied with a touch of irony, "he is complimenting him for having closed the gates so carefully."

"My father has saved the town," Aristide retorted curtly. "Have you seen the corpses, sir?"

Monsieur de Carnavant did not answer. He withdrew from the window, and sat down in an arm-chair, shaking his head with an air of some disgust. At that moment, the prefect having taken his departure, Rougon came upstairs and threw himself upon his wife's neck.

"Ah! my dear!" he stammered.

He was unable to say more. Felicite made him kiss Aristide after telling him of the superb article which the young man had inserted in the "Independant." Pierre would have kissed the marquis as well, he was deeply affected. However, his wife took him aside, and gave him Eugene's letter which she had sealed up in an envelope again. She pretended that it had just been delivered. Pierre read it and then triumphantly held it out to her.

"You are a sorceress," he said to her laughing. "You guessed everything. What folly I should have committed without you! We'll manage our little affairs together now. Kiss me: you're a good woman."

He clasped her in his arms, while she discreetly exchanged a knowing smile with the marquis.

CHAPTER VII

It was not until Sunday, the day after the massacre at Sainte-Roure, that the troops passed through Plassans again. The prefect and the colonel, whom Monsieur Garconnet had invited to dinner, once more entered the town alone. The soldiers went round the ramparts and encamped in the Faubourg, on the Nice road. Night was falling; the sky, overcast since the morning, had a strange yellow tint, and illumined the town with a murky light, similar to the copper-coloured glimmer of stormy weather. The reception of the troops by the inhabitants was timid; the bloodstained soldiers, who passed by weary and silent, in the yellow twilight, horrified the cleanly citizens promenading on the Cours. They stepped out of the way whispering terrible stories of fusillades and revengeful reprisals which still live in the recollection of the region. The Coup d'Etat terror was beginning to make itself felt, an overwhelming terror which kept the South in a state of tremor for many a long month. Plassans, in its fear and hatred of the insurgents, had welcomed the troops on their first arrival with enthusiasm; but now, at the appearance of that gloomy taciturn regiment, whose men were ready to fire at a word from their officers, the retired merchants and even the notaries of the new town anxiously examined their consciences, asking if they had not committed some political peccadilloes which might be thought deserving of a bullet.

The municipal authorities had returned on the previous evening in a couple of carts hired at Sainte-Roure. Their unexpected entry was devoid of all triumphal display. Rougon surrendered the mayor's arm-chair without much regret. The game was over; and with feverish longing he now awaited the recompense for his devotion. On the Sunday—he had not hoped for it until the following day—he received a letter from Eugene. Since the previous Thursday Felicite had taken care to send her son the numbers of the "Gazette" and "Independant" which, in special second editions had narrated the battle of the night and the arrival of the prefect at Plassans. Eugene now replied by return of post that the nomination of a receivership would soon be signed; but added that he wished to give them some good news immediately. He had obtained the ribbon of the Legion of Honour for his father. Felicite wept with joy. Her husband decorated! Her proud dream had never gone as far as that. Rougon, pale with delight, declared they must give a grand dinner that very evening. He no longer thought of expense; he would have thrown his last fifty francs out of the drawing-room windows in order to celebrate that glorious day.

"Listen," he said to his wife; "you must invite Sicardot: he has annoyed me with that rosette of his for a long time! Then Granoux and Roudier; I shouldn't be at all sorry to make them feel that it isn't their purses that will ever win them the cross. Vuillet is a skinflint, but the triumph ought to be complete: invite him as well as the small fry. I was forgetting; you must go and call on the marquis in person; we will seat him on your right; he'll look very well at our table. You know that Monsieur Garconnet is entertaining the colonel and the prefect. That is to make me understand that I am nobody now. But I can afford to laugh at his mayoralty; it doesn't bring him in a sou! He has invited me, but I shall tell him that I also have some people coming. The others will laugh on the wrong side of their mouths to-morrow. And let everything be of the best. Have everything sent from the Hotel de Provence. We must outdo the mayor's dinner."

Felicite set to work. Pierre still felt some vague uneasiness amidst his rapture. The Coup d'Etat was going to pay his debts, his son Aristide had repented of his faults, and he was at last freeing himself from Macquart; but he feared some folly on Pascal's part, and was especially anxious about the lot reserved for Silvere. Not that he felt the least pity for the lad; he was simply afraid the matter of the gendarme might come before the Assize Court. Ah! if only some discriminating bullet had managed to rid him of that young scoundrel! As his wife had pointed out to him in the morning, all obstacles had fallen away before him; the family which had dishonoured him had, at the last moment, worked for his elevation; his sons Eugene and Aristide, those spend-thrifts, the cost of whose college life he had so bitterly regretted, were at last paying interest on the capital expended for their education. And yet the thought of that wretched Silvere must come to mar his hour of triumph!

While Felicite was running about to prepare the dinner for the evening, Pierre heard of the arrival of the troops and determined to go and make inquiries. Sicardot, whom he had questioned on his return, knew nothing; Pascal must have remained to look after the wounded; as for Silvere, he had not even been seen by the commander, who scarcely knew him. Rougon therefore repaired to the Faubourg, intending to make inquiries there and at the same time pay Macquart the eight hundred francs which he had just succeeded in raising with great difficulty. However, when he found himself in the crowded encampment, and from a distance saw the prisoners sitting in long files on the beams in the Aire Saint-Mittre, guarded by soldiers gun in hand, he felt afraid of being compromised, and so slunk off to his mother's house, with the intention of sending the old woman out to pick up some information.

When he entered the hovel it was almost night. At first the only person he saw there was Macquart smoking and drinking brandy.

"Is that you? I'm glad of it," muttered Antoine. "I'm growing deuced cold here. Have you got the money?"

But Pierre did not reply. He had just perceived his son Pascal leaning over the bed. And thereupon he questioned him eagerly. The doctor, surprised by his uneasiness, which he attributed to paternal affection, told him that the soldiers had taken him and would have shot him, had it not been for the intervention of some honest fellow whom he did not know. Saved by his profession of surgeon, he had returned to Plassans with the troops. This greatly relieved Rougon. So there was yet another who would not compromise him. He was evincing his delight by repeated hand-shakings, when Pascal concluded in a sorrowful voice: "Oh! don't make merry. I have just found my poor grandmother in a very dangerous state. I brought her back this carbine, which she values very much; I found her lying here, and she has not moved since."

Pierre's eyes were becoming accustomed to the dimness. In the fast fading light he saw aunt Dide stretched, rigid and seemingly lifeless, upon her bed. Her wretched frame, attacked by neurosis from the hour of birth, was at length laid prostrate by a supreme shock. Her nerves had so to say consumed her blood. Moreover some cruel grief seemed to have suddenly accelerated her slow wasting-away. Her pale nun-like face, drawn and pinched by a life of gloom and cloister-like self-denial, was now stained with red blotches. With convulsed features, eyes that glared terribly, and hands twisted and clenched, she lay at full length in her skirts, which failed to hide the sharp outlines of her scrawny limbs. Extended there with lips closely pressed she imparted to the dim room all the horror of a mute death-agony.

Rougon made a gesture of vexation. This heart-rending spectacle was very distasteful to him. He had company coming to dinner in the evening, and it would be extremely inconvenient for him to have to appear mournful. His mother was always doing something to bother him. She might just as well have chosen another day. However, he put on an appearance of perfect ease, as he said: "Bah! it's nothing. I've seen her like that a hundred times. You must let her lie still; it's the only thing that does her any good."

Pascal shook his head. "No, this fit isn't like the others," he whispered. "I have often studied her, and have never observed such symptoms before. Just look at her eyes: there is a peculiar fluidity, a pale brightness about them which causes me considerable uneasiness. And her face, how frightfully every muscle of it is distorted!"

Then bending over to observe her features more closely, he continued in a whisper, as though speaking to himself: "I have never seen such a face, excepting among people who have been murdered or have died from fright. She must have experienced some terrible shock."

"But how did the attack begin?" Rougon impatiently inquired, at a loss for an excuse to leave the room.

Pascal did not know. Macquart, as he poured himself out another glass of brandy, explained that he had felt an inclination to drink a little Cognac, and had sent her to fetch a bottle. She had not been long absent, and at the very moment when she returned she had fallen rigid on the floor without uttering a word. Macquart himself had carried her to the bed.

"What surprises me," he said, by way of conclusion, "is, that she did not break the bottle."

The young doctor reflected. After a short pause he resumed: "I heard two shots fired as I came here. Perhaps those ruffians have been shooting some more prisoners. If she passed through the ranks of the soldiers at that moment, the sight of blood may have thrown her into this fit. She must have had some dreadful shock."

Fortunately he had with him the little medicine-case which he had been carrying about ever since the departure of the insurgents. He tried to pour a few drops of reddish liquid between aunt Dide's closely-set teeth, while Macquart again asked his brother: "Have you got the money?"

"Yes, I've brought it; we'll settle now," Rougon replied, glad of this diversion.

Thereupon Macquart, seeing that he was about to be paid, began to moan. He had only learnt the consequence of his treachery when it was too late; otherwise he would have demanded twice or thrice as much. And he complained bitterly. Really now a thousand francs was not enough. His children had forsaken him, he was all alone in the world, and obliged to quit France. He almost wept as he spoke of his coming exile.

"Come now, will you take the eight hundred francs?" said Rougon, who was in haste to be off.

"No, certainly not; double the sum. Your wife cheated me. If she had told me distinctly what it was she expected of me, I would never have compromised myself for such a trifle."

Rougon laid the eight hundred francs upon the table.

"I swear I haven't got any more," he resumed. "I will think of you later. But do, for mercy's sake, get away this evening."

Macquart, cursing and muttering protests, thereupon carried the table to the window, and began to count the gold in the fading twilight. The coins tickled the tips of his fingers very pleasantly as he let them fall, and jingled musically in the darkness. At last he paused for a moment to say: "You promised to get me a berth, remember. I want to return to France. The post of rural guard in some pleasant neighbourhood which I could mention, would just suit me."

"Very well, I'll see about it," Rougon replied. "Have you got the eight hundred francs?"

Macquart resumed his counting. The last coins were just clinking when a burst of laughter made them turn their heads. Aunt Dide was standing up in front of the bed, with her bodice unfastened, her white hair hanging loose, and her face stained with red blotches. Pascal had in vain endeavoured to hold her down. Trembling all over, and with her arms outstretched, she shook her head deliriously.

"The blood-money! the blood-money!" she again and again repeated. "I heard the gold. And it is they, they who sold him. Ah! the murderers! They are a pack of wolves."

Then she pushed her hair aback, and passed her hand over her brow, as though seeking to collect her thoughts. And she continued: "Ah! I have long seen him with a bullet-hole in his forehead. There were always people lying in wait for him with guns. They used to sign to me that they were going to fire. . . . It's terrible! I feel some one breaking my bones and battering out my brains. Oh! Mercy! Mercy! I beseech you; he shall not see her any more—never, never! I will shut him up. I will prevent him from walking out with her. Mercy! Mercy! Don't fire. It is not my fault. If you knew——"

She had almost fallen on her knees, and was weeping and entreating while she stretched her poor trembling hands towards some horrible vision which she saw in the darkness. Then she suddenly rose upright, and her eyes opened still more widely as a terrible cry came from her convulsed throat, as though some awful sight, visible to her alone, had filled her with mad terror.

"Oh, the gendarme!" she said, choking and falling backwards on the bed, where she rolled about, breaking into long bursts of furious, insane laughter.

Pascal was studying the attack attentively. The two brothers, who felt very frightened, and only detected snatches of what their mother said, had taken refuge in a corner of the room. When Rougon heard the word gendarme, he thought he understood her. Ever since the murder of her lover, the elder Macquart, on the frontier, aunt Dide had cherished a bitter hatred against all gendarmes and custom-house officers, whom she mingled together in one common longing for vengeance.

"Why, it's the story of the poacher that she's telling us," he whispered.

But Pascal made a sign to him to keep quiet. The stricken woman had raised herself with difficulty, and was looking round her, with a stupefied air. She remained silent for a moment, endeavouring to recognise the various objects in the room, as though she were in some strange place. Then, with a sudden expression of anxiety, she asked: "Where is the gun?"

The doctor put the carbine into her hands. At this she raised a light cry of joy, and gazed at the weapon, saying in a soft, sing-song, girlish whisper: "That is it. Oh! I recognise it! It is all stained with blood. The stains are quite fresh to-day. His red hands have left marks of blood on the butt. Ah! poor, poor aunt Dide!"

Then she became dizzy once more, and lapsed into silent thought.

"The gendarme was dead," she murmured at last, "but I have seen him again; he has come back. They never die, those blackguards!"

Again did gloomy passion come over her, and, shaking the carbine, she advanced towards her two sons who, speechless with fright, retreated to the very wall. Her loosened skirts trailed along the ground, as she drew up her twisted frame, which age had reduced to mere bones.

"It's you who fired!" she cried. "I heard the gold. . . . Wretched woman that I am! . . . I brought nothing but wolves into the world—a whole family—a whole litter of wolves! . . . There was only one poor lad, and him they have devoured; each had a bite at him, and their lips are covered with blood. . . . Ah! the accursed villains! They have robbed, they have murdered. . . . And they live like gentlemen. Villains! Accursed villains!"

She sang, laughed, cried, and repeated "accursed villains!" in strangely sonorous tones, which suggested a crackling of a fusillade. Pascal, with tears in his eyes, took her in his arms and laid her on the bed again. She submitted like a child, but persisted in her wailing cries, accelerating their rhythm, and beating time on the sheet with her withered hands.

"That's just what I was afraid of," the doctor said; "she is mad. The blow has been too heavy for a poor creature already subject, as she is, to acute neurosis. She will die in a lunatic asylum like her father."

"But what could she have seen?" asked Rougon, at last venturing to quit the corner where he had hidden himself.

"I have a terrible suspicion," Pascal replied. "I was going to speak to you about Silvere when you came in. He is a prisoner. You must endeavour to obtain his release from the prefect, if there is still time."

The old oil-dealer turned pale as he looked at his son. Then, rapidly, he responded: "Listen to me; you stay here and watch her. I'm too busy this evening. We will see to-morrow about conveying her to the lunatic asylum at Les Tulettes. As for you, Macquart, you must leave this very night. Swear to me that you will! I'm going to find Monsieur de Bleriot."

He stammered as he spoke, and felt more eager than ever to get out into the fresh air of the streets. Pascal fixed a penetrating look on the madwoman, and then on his father and uncle. His professional instinct was getting the better of him, and he studied the mother and the sons, with all the keenness of a naturalist observing the metamorphosis of some insect. He pondered over the growth of that family to which he belonged, over the different branches growing from one parent stock, whose sap carried identical germs to the farthest twigs, which bent in divers ways according to the sunshine or shade in which they lived. And for a moment, as by the glow of a lightning flash, he thought he could espy the future of the Rougon-Macquart family, a pack of unbridled, insatiate appetites amidst a blaze of gold and blood.

Aunt Dide, however, had ceased her wailing chant at the mention of Silvere's name. For a moment she listened anxiously. Then she broke out into terrible shrieks. Night had now completely fallen, and the black room seemed void and horrible. The shrieks of the madwoman, who was no longer visible, rang out from the darkness as from a grave. Rougon, losing his head, took to flight, pursued by those taunting cries, whose bitterness seemed to increase amidst the gloom.

As he was emerging from the Impasse Saint-Mittre with hesitating steps, wondering whether it would not be dangerous to solicit Silvere's pardon from the prefect, he saw Aristide prowling about the timber-yard. The latter, recognising his father, ran up to him with an expression of anxiety and whispered a few words in his ear. Pierre turned pale, and cast a look of alarm towards the end of the yard, where the darkness was only relieved by the ruddy glow of a little gipsy fire. Then they both disappeared down the Rue de Rome, quickening their steps as though they had committed a murder, and turning up their coat-collars in order that they might not be recognised.

"That saves me an errand," Rougon whispered. "Let us go to dinner. They are waiting for us."

When they arrived, the yellow drawing-room was resplendent. Felicite was all over the place. Everybody was there; Sicardot, Granoux, Roudier, Vuillet, the oil-dealers, the almond-dealers, the whole set. The marquis, however, had excused himself on the plea of rheumatism; and, besides, he was about to leave Plassans on a short trip. Those bloodstained bourgeois offended his feelings of delicacy, and moreover his relative, the Count de Valqueyras, had begged him to withdraw from public notice for a little time. Monsieur de Carnavant's refusal vexed the Rougons; but Felicite consoled herself by resolving to make a more profuse display. She hired a pair of candelabra and ordered several additional dishes as a kind of substitute for the marquis. The table was laid in the yellow drawing-room, in order to impart more solemnity to the occasion. The Hotel de Provence had supplied the silver, the china, and the glass. The cloth had been laid ever since five o'clock in order that the guests on arriving might feast their eyes upon it. At either end of the table, on the white cloth, were bouquets of artificial roses, in porcelain vases gilded and painted with flowers.

When the habitual guests of the yellow drawing-room were assembled there they could not conceal their admiration of the spectacle. Several gentlemen smiled with an air of embarrassment while they exchanged furtive glances, which clearly signified, "These Rougons are mad, they are throwing their money out of the window." The truth was that Felicite, on going round to invite her guests, had been unable to hold her tongue. So everybody knew that Pierre had been decorated, and that he was about to be nominated to some post; at which, of course, they pulled wry faces. Roudier indeed observed that "the little black woman was puffing herself out too much." Now that "prize-day" had come this band of bourgeois, who had rushed upon the expiring Republic—each one keeping an eye on the other, and glorying in giving a deeper bite than his neighbour—did not think it fair that their hosts should have all the laurels of the battle. Even those who had merely howled by instinct, asking no recompense of the rising Empire, were greatly annoyed to see that, thanks to them, the poorest and least reputable of them all should be decorated with the red ribbon. The whole yellow drawing-room ought to have been decorated!

"Not that I value the decoration," Roudier said to Granoux, whom he had dragged into the embrasure of a window. "I refused it in the time of Louis-Philippe, when I was purveyor to the court. Ah! Louis-Philippe was a good king. France will never find his equal!"

Roudier was becoming an Orleanist once more. And he added, with the crafty hypocrisy of an old hosier from the Rue Saint-Honore: "But you, my dear Granoux; don't you think the ribbon would look well in your button-hole? After all, you did as much to save the town as Rougon did. Yesterday, when I was calling upon some very distinguished persons, they could scarcely believe it possible that you had made so much noise with a mere hammer."

Granoux stammered his thanks, and, blushing like a maiden at her first confession of love, whispered in Roudier's ear: "Don't say anything about it, but I have reason to believe that Rougon will ask the ribbon for me. He's a good fellow at heart, you know."

The old hosier thereupon became grave, and assumed a very affable manner. When Vuillet came and spoke to him of the well-deserved reward that their friend had just received, he replied in a loud voice, so as to be heard by Felicite, who was sitting a little way off, that "men like Rougon were an ornament to the Legion of Honour." The bookseller joined in the chorus; he had that morning received a formal assurance that the custom of the college would be restored to him. As for Sicardot, he at first felt somewhat annoyed to find himself no longer the only one of the set who was decorated. According to him, none but soldiers had a right to the ribbon. Pierre's valour surprised him. However, being in reality a good-natured fellow, he at last grew warmer, and ended by saying that the Napoleons always knew how to distinguish men of spirit and energy.

Rougon and Aristide consequently had an enthusiastic reception; on their arrival all hands were held out to them. Some of the guests went so far as to embrace them. Angele sat on the sofa, by the side of her mother-in-law, feeling very happy, and gazing at the table with the astonishment of a gourmand who has never seen so many dishes at once. When Aristide approached, Sicardot complimented his son-in-law upon his superb article in the "Independant." He restored his friendship to him. The young man, in answer to the fatherly questions which Sicardot addressed to him, replied that he was anxious to take his little family with him to Paris, where his brother Eugene would push him forward; but he was in want of five hundred francs. Sicardot thereupon promised him the money, already foreseeing the day when his daughter would be received at the Tuileries by Napoleon III.

In the meantime, Felicite had made a sign to her husband. Pierre, surrounded by everybody and anxiously questioned about his pallor, could only escape for a minute. He was just able to whisper in his wife's ear that he had found Pascal and that Macquart would leave that night. Then lowering his voice still more he told her of his mother's insanity, and placed his finger on his lips, as if to say: "Not a word; that would spoil the whole evening." Felicite bit her lips. They exchanged a look in which they read their common thoughts: so now the old woman would not trouble them any more: the poacher's hovel would be razed to the ground, as the walls of the Fouques' enclosure had been demolished; and they would for ever enjoy the respect and esteem of Plassans.

But the guests were looking at the table. Felicite showed the gentlemen their seats. It was perfect bliss. As each one took his spoon, Sicardot made a gesture to solicit a moment's delay. Then he rose and gravely said: "Gentlemen, on behalf of the company present, I wish to express to our host how pleased we are at the rewards which his courage and patriotism have procured for him. I now see that he must have acted upon a heaven-sent inspiration in remaining here, while those beggars were dragging myself and others along the high roads. Therefore, I heartily applaud the decision of the government. . . . Let me finish, you can then congratulate our friend. . . . Know, then, that our friend, besides being made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, is also to be appointed to a receiver of taxes."

There was a cry of surprise. They had expected a small post. Some of them tried to force a smile; but, aided by the sight of the table, the compliments again poured forth profusely.

Sicardot once more begged for silence. "Wait one moment," he resumed; "I have not finished. Just one word. It is probable that our friend will remain among us, owing to the death of Monsieur Peirotte."

Whilst the guests burst out into exclamations, Felicite felt a keen pain in her heart. Sicardot had already told her that the receiver had been shot; but at the mention of that sudden and shocking death, just as they were starting on that triumphal dinner, it seemed as if a chilling gust swept past her face. She remembered her wish; it was she who had killed that man. However, amidst the tinkling music of the silver, the company began to do honour to the banquet. In the provinces, people eat very much and very noisily. By the time the releve was served, the gentlemen were all talking together; they showered kicks upon the vanquished, flattered one another, and made disparaging remarks about the absence of the marquis. It was impossible, they said, to maintain intercourse with the nobility. Roudier even gave out that the marquis had begged to be excused because his fear of the insurgents had given him jaundice. At the second course they all scrambled like hounds at the quarry. The oil-dealers and almond-dealers were the men who saved France. They clinked glasses to the glory of the Rougons. Granoux, who was very red, began to stammer, while Vuillet, very pale, was quite drunk. Nevertheless Sicardot continued filling his glass. For her part Angele, who had already eaten too much, prepared herself some sugar and water. The gentlemen were so delighted at being freed from panic, and finding themselves together again in that yellow drawing-room, round a good table, in the bright light radiating from the candelabra and the chandelier—which they now saw for the first time without its fly-specked cover—that they gave way to most exuberant folly and indulged in the coarsest enjoyment. Their voices rose in the warm atmosphere more huskily and eulogistically at each successive dish till they could scarcely invent fresh compliments. However, one of them, an old retired master-tanner, hit upon this fine phrase—that the dinner was a "perfect feast worthy of Lucullus."

Pierre was radiant, and his big pale face perspired with triumph. Felicite, already accustoming herself to her new station in life, said that they would probably rent poor Monsieur Peirotte's flat until they could purchase a house of their own in the new town. She was already planning how she would place her future furniture in the receiver's rooms. She was entering into possession of her Tuileries. At one moment, however, as the uproar of voices became deafening, she seemed to recollect something, and quitting her seat she whispered in Aristide's ear: "And Silvere?"

The young man started with surprise at the question.

"He is dead," he replied, likewise in a whisper. "I was there when the gendarme blew his brains out with a pistol."

Felicite in her turn shuddered. She opened her mouth to ask her son why he had not prevented this murder by claiming the lad; but abruptly hesitating she remained there speechless. Then Aristide, who had read her question on her quivering lips, whispered: "You understand, I said nothing—so much the worse for him! I did quite right. It's a good riddance."

This brutal frankness displeased Felicite. So Aristide had his skeleton, like his father and mother. He would certainly not have confessed so openly that he had been strolling about the Faubourg and had allowed his cousin to be shot, had not the wine from the Hotel de Provence and the dreams he was building upon his approaching arrival in Paris, made him depart from his habitual cunning. The words once spoken, he swung himself to and fro on his chair. Pierre, who had watched the conversation between his wife and son from a distance, understood what had passed and glanced at them like an accomplice imploring silence. It was the last blast of terror, as it were, which blew over the Rougons, amidst the splendour and enthusiastic merriment of the dinner. True, Felicite, on returning to her seat, espied a taper burning behind a window on the other side of the road. Some one sat watching Monsieur Peirotte's corpse, which had been brought back from Sainte-Roure that morning. She sat down, feeling as if that taper were heating her back. But the gaiety was now increasing, and exclamations of rapture rang through the yellow drawing-room when the dessert appeared.

At that same hour, the Faubourg was still shuddering at the tragedy which had just stained the Aire Saint-Mittre with blood. The return of the troops, after the carnage on the Nores plain, had been marked by the most cruel reprisals. Men were beaten to death behind bits of wall, with the butt-ends of muskets, others had their brains blown out in ravines by the pistols of gendarmes. In order that terror might impose silence, the soldiers strewed their road with corpses. One might have followed them by the red trail which they left behind.[*] It was a long butchery. At every halting-place, a few insurgents were massacred. Two were killed at Sainte-Roure, three at Ocheres, one at Beage. When the troops were encamped at Plassans, on the Nice road, it was decided that one more prisoner, the most guilty, should be shot. The victors judged it wise to leave this fresh corpse behind them in order to inspire the town with respect for the new-born Empire. But the soldiers were now weary of killing; none offered himself for the fatal task. The prisoners, thrown on the beams in the timber-yard as though on a camp bed, and bound together in pairs by the hands, listened and waited in a state of weary, resigned stupor.

[*] Though M. Zola has changed his place in his account of
the insurrection, that account is strictly accurate in all
its chief particulars. What he says of the savagery both of
the soldiers and of their officers is confirmed by all
impartial historical writers.—EDITOR.

At that moment the gendarme Rengade roughly opened a way for himself through the crowd of inquisitive idlers. As soon as he heard that the troops had returned with several hundred insurgents, he had risen from bed, shivering with fever, and risking his life in the cold, dark December air. Scarcely was he out of doors when his wound reopened, the bandage which covered his eyeless socket became stained with blood, and a red streamlet trickled over his cheek and moustache. He looked frightful in his dumb fury with his pale face and blood-stained bandage, as he ran along closely scrutinising each of the prisoners. He followed the beams, bending down and going to and fro, making the bravest shudder by his abrupt appearance. And, all of a sudden: "Ah! the bandit, I've got him!" he cried.

He had just laid his hand on Silvere's shoulder. Silvere, crouching down on a beam, with lifeless and expressionless face, was looking straight before him into the pale twilight, with a calm, stupefied air. Ever since his departure from Sainte-Roure, he had retained that vacant stare. Along the high road, for many a league, whenever the soldiers urged on the march of their captives with the butt-ends of their rifles, he had shown himself as gentle as a child. Covered with dust, thirsty and weary, he trudged onward without saying a word, like one of those docile animals that herdsmen drive along. He was thinking of Miette. He ever saw her lying on the banner, under the trees with her eyes turned upwards. For three days he had seen none but her; and at this very moment, amidst the growing darkness, he still saw her.

Rengade turned towards the officer, who had failed to find among the soldiers the requisite men for an execution.

"This villain put my eye out," he said, pointing to Silvere. "Hand him over to me. It's as good as done for you."

The officer did not reply in words, but withdrew with an air of indifference, making a vague gesture. The gendarme understood that the man was surrendered to him.

"Come, get up!" he resumed, as he shook him.

Silvere, like all the other prisoners, had a companion attached to him. He was fastened by the arm to a peasant of Poujols named Mourgue, a man about fifty, who had been brutified by the scorching sun and the hard labour of tilling the ground. Crooked-backed already, his hands hardened, his face coarse and heavy, he blinked his eyes in a stupid manner, with the stubborn, distrustful expression of an animal subject to the lash. He had set out armed with a pitchfork, because his fellow villagers had done so; but he could not have explained what had thus set him adrift on the high roads. Since he had been made a prisoner he understood it still less. He had some vague idea that he was being conveyed home. His amazement at finding himself bound, the sight of all the people staring at him, stupefied him still more. As he only spoke and understood the dialect of the region, he could not imagine what the gendarme wanted. He raised his coarse, heavy face towards him with an effort; then, fancying he was being asked the name of his village, he said in his hoarse voice:

"I come from Poujols."

A burst of laughter ran through the crowd, and some voices cried: "Release the peasant."

"Bah!" Rengade replied; "the more of this vermin that's crushed the better. As they're together, they can both go."

There was a murmur.

But the gendarme turned his terrible blood-stained face upon the onlookers, and they slunk off. One cleanly little citizen went away declaring that if he remained any longer it would spoil his appetite for dinner. However some boys who recognised Silvere, began to speak of "the red girl." Thereupon the little citizen retraced his steps, in order to see the lover of the female standard-bearer, that depraved creature who had been mentioned in the "Gazette."

Silvere, for his part, neither saw nor heard anything; Rengade had to seize him by the collar. Thereupon he got up, forcing Mourgue to rise also.

"Come," said the gendarme. "It won't take long."

Silvere then recognised the one-eyed man. He smiled. He must have understood. But he turned his head away. The sight of the one-eyed man, of his moustaches which congealed blood stiffened as with sinister rime, caused him profound grief. He would have liked to die in perfect peace. So he avoided the gaze of Rengade's one eye, which glared from beneath the white bandage. And of his own accord he proceeded to the end of the Aire Saint-Mittre, to the narrow lane hidden by the timber stacks. Mourgue followed him thither.

The Aire stretched out, with an aspect of desolation under the sallow sky. A murky light fell here and there from the copper-coloured clouds. Never had a sadder and more lingering twilight cast its melancholy over this bare expanse—this wood-yard with its slumbering timber, so stiff and rigid in the cold. The prisoners, the soldiers, and the mob along the high road disappeared amid the darkness of the trees. The expanse, the beams, the piles of planks alone grew pale under the fading light, assuming a muddy tint that vaguely suggested the bed of a dried-up torrent. The sawyers' trestles, rearing their meagre framework in a corner, seemed to form gallows, or the uprights of a guillotine. And there was no living soul there excepting three gipsies who showed their frightened faces at the door of their van—an old man and woman, and a big girl with woolly hair, whose eyes gleamed like those of a wolf.

Before reaching the secluded path, Silvere looked round him. He bethought himself of a far away Sunday when he had crossed the wood-yard in the bright moonlight. How calm and soft it had been!—how slowly had the pale rays passed over the beams! Supreme silence had fallen from the frozen sky. And amidst this silence, the woolly-haired gipsy girl had sung in a low key and an unknown tongue. Then Silvere remembered that the seemingly far-off Sunday was only a week old. But a week ago he had come to bid Miette farewell! How long past it seemed! He felt as though he had not set foot in the wood-yard for years. But when he reached the narrow path his heart failed him. He recognised the odour of the grass, the shadows of the planks, the holes in the wall. A woeful voice rose from all those things. The path stretched out sad and lonely; it seemed longer to him than usual, and he felt a cold wind blowing down it. The spot had aged cruelly. He saw that the wall was moss-eaten, that the verdant carpet was dried up by frost, that the piles of timber had been rotted by rain. It was perfect devastation. The yellow twilight fell like fine dust upon the ruins of all that had been most dear to him. He was obliged to close his eyes that he might again behold the lane green, and live his happy hours afresh. It was warm weather; and he was racing with Miette in the balmy air. Then the cruel December rains fell unceasingly, yet they still came there, sheltering themselves beneath the planks and listening with rapture to the heavy plashing of the shower. His whole life—all his happiness—passed before him like a flash of lightning. Miette was climbing over the wall, running to him, shaking with sonorous laughter. She was there; he could see her, gleaming white through the darkness, with her living helm of ink-black hair. She was talking about the magpies' nests, which are so difficult to steal, and she dragged him along with her. Then he heard the gentle murmur of the Viorne in the distance, the chirping of the belated grasshoppers, and the blowing of the breeze among the poplars in the meadows of Sainte-Claire. Ah, how they used to run! How well he remembered it! She had learnt to swim in a fortnight. She was a plucky girl. She had only had one great fault: she was inclined to pilfering. But he would have cured her of that. Then the thought of their first embraces brought him back to the narrow path. They had always ended by returning to that nook. He fancied he could hear the gipsy girl's song dying away, the creaking of the last shutters, the solemn striking of the clocks. Then the hour of separation came, and Miette climbed the wall again and threw him a kiss. And he saw her no more. Emotion choked him at the thought: he would never see her again—never!

"When you're ready," jeered the one-eyed man; "come, choose your place."

Silvere took a few more steps. He was approaching the end of the path, and could see nothing but a strip of sky in which the rust-coloured light was fading away. Here had he spent his life for two years past. The slow approach of death added an ineffable charm to this pathway which had so long served as a lovers' walk. He loitered, bidding a long and lingering farewell to all he loved; the grass, the timber, the stone of the old wall, all those things into which Miette had breathed life. And again his thoughts wandered. They were waiting till they should be old enough to marry: Aunt Dide would remain with them. Ah! if they had fled far away, very far away, to some unknown village, where the scamps of the Faubourg would no longer have been able to come and cast Chantegreil's crime in his daughter's face. What peaceful bliss! They would have opened a wheelwright's workshop beside some high road. No doubt, he cared little for his ambitions now; he no longer thought of coachmaking, of carriages with broad varnished panels as shiny as mirrors. In the stupor of his despair he could not remember why his dream of bliss would never come to pass. Why did he not go away with Miette and aunt Dide? Then as he racked his memory, he heard the sharp crackling of a fusillade; he saw a standard fall before him, its staff broken and its folds drooping like the wings of a bird brought down by a shot. It was the Republic falling asleep with Miette under the red flag. Ah, what wretchedness! They were both dead, both had bleeding wounds in their breasts. And it was they—the corpses of his two loves—that now barred his path of life. He had nothing left him and might well die himself. These were the thoughts that had made him so gentle, so listless, so childlike all the way from Sainte-Roure. The soldiers might have struck him, he would not have felt it. His spirit no longer inhabited his body. It was far away, prostrate beside the loved ones who were dead under the trees amidst the pungent smoke of the gunpowder.

But the one-eyed man was growing impatient; giving a push to Mourgue, who was lagging behind, he growled: "Get along, do; I don't want to be here all night."

Silvere stumbled. He looked at his feet. A fragment of a skull lay whitening in the grass. He thought he heard a murmur of voices filling the pathway. The dead were calling him, those long departed ones, whose warm breath had so strangely perturbed him and his sweetheart during the sultry July evenings. He recognised their low whispers. They were rejoicing, they were telling him to come, and promising to restore Miette to him beneath the earth, in some retreat which would prove still more sequestered than this old trysting-place. The cemetery, whose oppressive odours and dark vegetation had breathed eager desire into the children's hearts, while alluringly spreading out its couches of rank grass, without succeeding however in throwing them into one another's arms, now longed to imbibe Silvere's warm blood. For two summers past it had been expecting the young lovers.

"Is it here?" asked the one-eyed man.

Silvere looked in front of him. He had reached the end of the path. His eyes fell on the tombstone, and he started. Miette was right, that stone was for her. "Here lieth . . . Marie . . . died . . . " She was dead, that slab had fallen over her. His strength failing him, he leant against the frozen stone. How warm it had been when they sat in that nook, chatting for many a long evening! She had always come that way, and the pressure of her foot, as she alighted from the wall, had worn away the stone's surface in one corner. The mark seemed instinct with something of her lissom figure. And to Silvere it appeared as if some fatalism attached to all these objects—as if the stone were there precisely in order that he might come to die beside it, there where he had loved.

The one-eyed man cocked his pistols.

Death! death! the thought fascinated Silvere. It was to this spot, then, that they had led him, by the long white road which descends from Sainte-Roure to Plassans. If he had known it, he would have hastened on yet more quickly in order to die on that stone, at the end of the narrow path, in the atmosphere where he could still detect the scent of Miette's breath! Never had he hoped for such consolation in his grief. Heaven was merciful. He waited, a vague smile playing on is face.

Mourgue, meantime, had caught sight of the pistols. Hitherto he had allowed himself to be dragged along stupidly. But fear now overcame him, and he repeated, in a tone of despair: "I come from Poujols—I come from Poujols!"

Then he threw himself on the ground, rolling at the gendarme's feet, breaking out into prayers for mercy, and imagining that he was being mistaken for some one else.

"What does it matter to me that you come from Poujols?" Rengade muttered.

And as the wretched man, shivering and crying with terror, and quite unable to understand why he was going to die, held out his trembling hands—his deformed, hard, labourer's hands—exclaiming in his patois that he had done nothing and ought to be pardoned, the one-eyed man grew quite exasperated at being unable to put the pistol to his temple, owing to his constant movements.

"Will you hold your tongue?" he shouted.

Thereupon Mourgue, mad with fright and unwilling to die, began to howl like a beast—like a pig that is being slaughtered.

"Hold your tongue, you scoundrel!" the gendarme repeated.

And he blew his brains out. The peasant fell with a thud. His body rolled to the foot of a timber-stack, where it remained doubled up. The violence of the shock had severed the rope which fastened him to his companion. Silvere fell on his knees before the tombstone.

It was to make his vengeance the more terrible that Rengade had killed Mourgue first. He played with his second pistol, raising it slowly in order to relish Silvere's agony. But the latter looked at him quietly. Then again the sight of this man, with the one fierce, scorching eye, made him feel uneasy. He averted his glance, fearing that he might die cowardly if he continued to look at that feverishly quivering gendarme, with blood-stained bandage and bleeding moustache. However, as he raised his eyes to avoid him, he perceived Justin's head just above the wall, at the very spot where Miette had been wont to leap over.

Justin had been at the Porte de Rome, among the crowd, when the gendarme had led the prisoners away. He had set off as fast as he could by way of the Jas-Meiffren, in his eagerness to witness the execution. The thought that he alone, of all the Faubourg scamps, would view the tragedy at his ease, as from a balcony, made him run so quickly that he twice fell down. And in spite of his wild chase, he arrived too late to witness the first shot. He climbed the mulberry tree in despair; but he smiled when he saw that Silvere still remained. The soldiers had informed him of his cousin's death, and now the murder of the wheelwright brought his happiness to a climax. He awaited the shot with that delight which the sufferings of others always afforded him—a delight increased tenfold by the horror of the scene, and a feeling of exquisite fear.

Silvere, on recognising that vile scamp's head all by itself above the wall—that pale grinning face, with hair standing on end—experienced a feeling of fierce rage, a sudden desire to live. It was the last revolt of his blood—a momentary mutiny. He again sank down on his knees, gazing straight before him. A last vision passed before his eyes in the melancholy twilight. At the end of the path, at the entrance of the Impasse Saint-Mittre, he fancied he could see aunt Dide standing erect, white and rigid like the statue of a saint, while she witnessed his agony from a distance.

At that moment he felt the cold pistol on his temple. There was a smile on Justin's pale face. Closing his eyes, Silvere heard the long-departed dead wildly summoning him. In the darkness, he now saw nothing save Miette, wrapped in the banner, under the trees, with her eyes turned towards heaven. Then the one-eyed man fired, and all was over; the lad's skull burst open like a ripe pomegranate; his face fell upon the stone, with his lips pressed to the spot which Miette's feet had worn—that warm spot which still retained a trace of his dead love.

And in the evening at dessert, at the Rougons' abode, bursts of laughter arose with the fumes from the table, which was still warm with the remains of the dinner. At last the Rougons were nibbling at the pleasures of the wealthy! Their appetites, sharpened by thirty years of restrained desire, now fell to with wolfish teeth. These fierce, insatiate wild beasts, scarcely entering upon indulgence, exulted at the birth of the Empire—the dawn of the Rush for the Spoils. The Coup d'Etat, which retrieved the fortune of the Bonapartes, also laid the foundation for that of the Rougons.

Pierre stood up, held out his glass, and exclaimed: "I drink to Prince Louis—to the Emperor!"

The gentlemen, who had drowned their jealousies in champagne, rose in a body and clinked glasses with deafening shouts. It was a fine spectacle. The bourgeois of Plassans, Roudier, Granoux, Vuillet, and all the others, wept and embraced each other over the corpse of the Republic, which as yet was scarcely cold. But a splendid idea occurred to Sicardot. He took from Felicite's hair a pink satin bow, which she had placed over her right ear in honour of the occasion, cut off a strip of the satin with his dessert knife, and then solemnly fastened it to Rougon's button-hole. The latter feigned modesty, and pretended to resist. But his face beamed with joy, as he murmured: "No, I beg you, it is too soon. We must wait until the decree is published."

"Zounds!" Sicardot exclaimed, "will you please keep that! It's an old soldier of Napoleon who decorates you!"

The whole company burst into applause. Felicite almost swooned with delight. Silent Granoux jumped up on a chair in his enthusiasm, waving his napkin and making a speech which was lost amid the uproar. The yellow drawing-room was wild with triumph.

But the strip of pink satin fastened to Pierre's button-hole was not the only red spot in that triumph of the Rougons. A shoe, with a blood-stained heel, still lay forgotten under the bedstead in the adjoining room. The taper burning at Monsieur Peirotte's bedside, over the way, gleamed too with the lurid redness of a gaping wound amidst the dark night. And yonder, far away, in the depths of the Aire Saint-Mittre, a pool of blood was congealing upon a tombstone.

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fat and the Thin, by Emile Zola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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Title: The Fat and the Thin

Author: Emile Zola

Translator: Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Release Date: April 22, 2006 [EBook #5744]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FAT AND THE THIN ***

Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; David Widger

THE FAT AND THE THIN

(LE VENTRE DE PARIS)

By Emile Zola

Translated, With An Introduction, By Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Let me have men about me that are fat:
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights:
Yond' Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
SHAKESPEARE: Julius Caesar, act i, sc. 2.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE FAT AND THE THIN

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

INTRODUCTION

"THE FAT AND THE THIN," or, to use the French title, "Le Ventre de Paris," is a story of life in and around those vast Central Markets which form a distinctive feature of modern Paris. Even the reader who has never crossed the Channel must have heard of the Parisian Halles, for much has been written about them, not only in English books on the French metropolis, but also in English newspapers, magazines, and reviews; so that few, I fancy, will commence the perusal of the present volume without having, at all events, some knowledge of its subject matter.

The Paris markets form such a world of their own, and teem at certain hours of the day and night with such exuberance of life, that it was only natural they should attract the attention of a novelist like M. Zola, who, to use his own words, delights "in any subject in which vast masses of people can be shown in motion." Mr. Sherard tells us[*] that the idea of "Le Ventre de Paris" first occurred to M. Zola in 1872, when he used continually to take his friend Paul Alexis for a ramble through the Halles. I have in my possession, however, an article written by M. Zola some five or six years before that time, and in this one can already detect the germ of the present work; just as the motif of another of M. Zola's novels, "La Joie de Vivre," can be traced to a short story written for a Russian review.

[*] Emile Zola: a Biographical and Critical Study, by Robert Harborough Sherard, pp. 103, 104. London, Chatto & Windus, 1893.

Similar instances are frequently to be found in the writings of English as well as French novelists, and are, of course, easily explained. A young man unknown to fame, and unable to procure the publication of a long novel, often contents himself with embodying some particular idea in a short sketch or story, which finds its way into one or another periodical, where it lies buried and forgotten by everybody—excepting its author. Time goes by, however, the writer achieves some measure of success, and one day it occurs to him to elaborate and perfect that old idea of his, only a faint apercu of which, for lack of opportunity, he had been able to give in the past. With a little research, no doubt, an interesting essay might be written on these literary resuscitations; but if one except certain novelists who are so deficient in ideas that they continue writing and rewriting the same story throughout their lives, it will, I think, be generally found that the revivals in question are due to some such reason as that given above.

It should be mentioned that the article of M. Zola's young days to which I have referred is not one on market life in particular, but one on violets. It contains, however, a vigorous, if brief, picture of the Halles in the small hours of the morning, and is instinct with that realistic descriptive power of which M. Zola has since given so many proofs. We hear the rumbling and clattering of the market carts, we see the piles of red meat, the baskets of silvery fish, the mountains of vegetables, green and white; in a few paragraphs the whole market world passes in kaleidoscopic fashion before our eyes by the pale, dancing light of the gas lamps and the lanterns. Several years after the paper I speak of was published, when M. Zola began to issue "Le Ventre de Paris," M. Tournachon, better known as Nadar, the aeronaut and photographer, rushed into print to proclaim that the realistic novelist had simply pilfered his ideas from an account of the Halles which he (Tournachon) had but lately written. M. Zola, as is so often his wont, scorned to reply to this charge of plagiarism; but, had he chosen, he could have promptly settled the matter by producing his own forgotten article.

At the risk of passing for a literary ghoul, I propose to exhume some portion of the paper in question, as, so far as translation can avail, it will show how M. Zola wrote and what he thought in 1867. After the description of the markets to which I have alluded, there comes the following passage:—

I was gazing at the preparations for the great daily orgy of Paris when I espied a throng of people bustling suspiciously in a corner. A few lanterns threw a yellow light upon this crowd. Children, women, and men with outstretched hands were fumbling in dark piles which extended along the footway. I thought that those piles must be remnants of meat sold for a trifling price, and that all those wretched people were rushing upon them to feed. I drew near, and discovered my mistake. The heaps were not heaps of meat, but heaps of violets. All the flowery poesy of the streets of Paris lay there, on that muddy pavement, amidst mountains of food. The gardeners of the suburbs had brought their sweet-scented harvests to the markets and were disposing of them to the hawkers. From the rough fingers of their peasant growers the violets were passing to the dirty hands of those who would cry them in the streets. At winter time it is between four and six o'clock in the morning that the flowers of Paris are thus sold at the Halles. Whilst the city sleeps and its butchers are getting all ready for its daily attack of indigestion, a trade in poetry is plied in dark, dank corners. When the sun rises the bright red meat will be displayed in trim, carefully dressed joints, and the violets, mounted on bits of osier, will gleam softly within their elegant collars of green leaves. But when they arrive, in the dark night, the bullocks, already ripped open, discharge black blood, and the trodden flowers lie prone upon the footways. . . . I noticed just in front of me one large bunch which had slipped off a neighbouring mound and was almost bathing in the gutter. I picked it up. Underneath, it was soiled with mud; the greasy, fetid sewer water had left black stains upon the flowers. And then, gazing at these exquisite daughters of our gardens and our woods, astray amidst all the filth of the city, I began to ponder. On what woman's bosom would those wretched flowerets open and bloom? Some hawker would dip them in a pail of water, and of all the bitter odours of the Paris mud they would retain but a slight pungency, which would remain mingled with their own sweet perfume. The water would remove their stains, they would pale somewhat, and become a joy both for the smell and for the sight. Nevertheless, in the depths of each corolla there would still remain some particle of mud suggestive of impurity. And I asked myself how much love and passion was represented by all those heaps of flowers shivering in the bleak wind. To how many loving ones, and how many indifferent ones, and how many egotistical ones, would all those thousands and thousands of violets go! In a few hours' time they would be scattered to the four corners of Paris, and for a paltry copper the passers-by would purchase a glimpse and a whiff of springtide in the muddy streets.

Imperfect as the rendering may be, I think that the above passage will show that M. Zola was already possessed of a large amount of his acknowledged realistic power at the early date I have mentioned. I should also have liked to quote a rather amusing story of a priggish Philistine who ate violets with oil and vinegar, strongly peppered, but considerations of space forbid; so I will pass to another passage, which is of more interest and importance. Both French and English critics have often contended that although M. Zola is a married man, he knows very little of women, as there has virtually never been any feminine romance in his life. There are those who are aware of the contrary, but whose tongues are stayed by considerations of delicacy and respect. Still, as the passage I am now about to reproduce is signed and acknowledged as fact by M. Zola himself, I see no harm in slightly raising the veil from a long-past episode in the master's life:—

The light was rising, and as I stood there before that footway transformed into a bed of flowers my strange night-fancies gave place to recollections at once sweet and sad. I thought of my last excursion to Fontenay-aux-Roses, with the loved one, the good fairy of my twentieth year. Springtime was budding into birth, the tender foliage gleamed in the pale April sunshine. The little pathway skirting the hill was bordered by large fields of violets. As one passed along, a strong perfume seemed to penetrate one and make one languid. She was leaning on my arm, faint with love from the sweet odour of the flowers. A whiteness hovered over the country-side, little insects buzzed in the sunshine, deep silence fell from the heavens, and so low was the sound of our kisses that not a bird in all the hedges showed sign of fear. At a turn of the path we perceived some old bent women, who with dry, withered hands were hurriedly gathering violets and throwing them into large baskets. She who was with me glanced longingly at the flowers, and I called one of the women. "You want some violets?" said she. "How much? A pound?"

God of Heaven! She sold her flowers by the pound! We fled in deep distress. It seemed as though the country-side had been transformed into a huge grocer's shop. . . . Then we ascended to the woods of Verrieres, and there, in the grass, under the soft, fresh foliage, we found some tiny violets which seemed to be dreadfully afraid, and contrived to hide themselves with all sorts of artful ruses. During two long hours I scoured the grass and peered into every nook, and as soon as ever I found a fresh violet I carried it to her. She bought it of me, and the price that I exacted was a kiss. . . . And I thought of all those things, of all that happiness, amidst the hubbub of the markets of Paris, before those poor dead flowers whose graveyard the footway had become. I remembered my good fairy, who is now dead and gone, and the little bouquet of dry violets which I still preserve in a drawer. When I returned home I counted their withered stems: there were twenty of them, and over my lips there passed the gentle warmth of my loved one's twenty kisses.

And now from violets I must, with a brutality akin to that which M. Zola himself displays in some of his transitions, pass to very different things, for some time back a well-known English poet and essayist wrote of the present work that it was redolent of pork, onions, and cheese. To one of his sensitive temperament, with a muse strictly nourished on sugar and water, such gross edibles as pork and cheese and onions were peculiarly offensive. That humble plant the onion, employed to flavour wellnigh every savoury dish, can assuredly need no defence; in most European countries, too, cheese has long been known as the poor man's friend; whilst as for pork, apart from all other considerations, I can claim for it a distinct place in English literature. A greater essayist by far than the critic to whom I am referring, a certain Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House, has left us an immortal page on the origin of roast pig and crackling. And, when everything is considered, I should much like to know why novels should be confined to the aspirations of the soul, and why they should not also treat of the requirements of our physical nature? From the days of antiquity we have all known what befell the members when, guided by the brain, they were foolish enough to revolt against the stomach. The latter plays a considerable part not only in each individual organism, but also in the life of the world. Over and over again—I could adduce a score of historical examples—it has thwarted the mightiest designs of the human mind. We mortals are much addicted to talking of our minds and our souls and treating our bodies as mere dross. But I hold—it is a personal opinion—that in the vast majority of cases the former are largely governed by the last. I conceive, therefore, that a novel which takes our daily sustenance as one of its themes has the best of all raisons d'etre. A foreign writer of far more consequence and ability than myself—Signor Edmondo de Amicis—has proclaimed the present book to be "one of the most original and happiest inventions of French genius," and I am strongly inclined to share his opinion.

It should be observed that the work does not merely treat of the provisioning of a great city. That provisioning is its scenario; but it also embraces a powerful allegory, the prose song of "the eternal battle between the lean of this world and the fat—a battle in which, as the author shows, the latter always come off successful. It is, too, in its way an allegory of the triumph of the fat bourgeois, who lives well and beds softly, over the gaunt and Ishmael artist—an allegory which M. Zola has more than once introduced into his pages, another notable instance thereof being found in 'Germinal,' with the fat, well-fed Gregoires on the one hand, and the starving Maheus on the other."

From this quotation from Mr. Sherard's pages it will be gathered that M. Zola had a distinct social aim in writing this book. Wellnigh the whole social question may, indeed, be summed up in the words "food and comfort"; and in a series of novels like "Les Rougon-Macquart," dealing firstly with different conditions and grades of society, and, secondly, with the influence which the Second Empire exercised on France, the present volume necessarily had its place marked out from the very first.

Mr. Sherard has told us of all the labour which M. Zola expended on the preparation of the work, of his multitudinous visits to the Paris markets, his patient investigation of their organism, and his keen artistic interest in their manifold phases of life. And bred as I was in Paris, a partaker as I have been of her exultations and her woes they have always had for me a strong attraction. My memory goes back to the earlier years of their existence, and I can well remember many of the old surroundings which have now disappeared. I can recollect the last vestiges of the antique piliers, built by Francis I, facing the Rue de la Tonnellerie. Paul Niquet's, with its "bowel-twisting brandy" and its crew of drunken ragpickers, was certainly before my time; but I can readily recall Baratte's and Bordier's and all the folly and prodigality which raged there; I knew, too, several of the noted thieves' haunts which took the place of Niquet's, and which one was careful never to enter without due precaution. And then, when the German armies were beleaguering Paris, and two millions of people were shut off from the world, I often strolled to the Halles to view their strangely altered aspect. The fish pavilion, of which M. Zola has so much to say, was bare and deserted. The railway drays, laden with the comestible treasures of the ocean, no longer thundered through the covered ways. At the most one found an auction going on in one or another corner, and a few Seine eels or gudgeons fetching wellnigh their weight in gold. Then, in the butter and cheese pavilions, one could only procure some nauseous melted fat, while in the meat department horse and mule and donkey took the place of beef and veal and mutton. Mule and donkey were very scarce, and commanded high prices, but both were of better flavour than horse; mule, indeed, being quite a delicacy. I also well remember a stall at which dog was sold, and, hunger knowing no law, I once purchased, cooked, and ate a couple of canine cutlets which cost me two francs apiece. The flesh was pinky and very tender, yet I would not willingly make such a repast again. However, peace and plenty at last came round once more, the Halles regained their old-time aspect, and in the years which followed I more than once saw the dawn rise slowly over the mounds of cabbages, carrots, leeks, and pumpkins, even as M. Zola describes in the following pages. He has, I think, depicted with remarkable accuracy and artistic skill the many varying effects of colour that are produced as the climbing sun casts its early beams on the giant larder and its masses of food—effects of colour which, to quote a famous saying of the first Napoleon, show that "the markets of Paris are the Louvre of the people" in more senses than one.

The reader will bear in mind that the period dealt with by the author in this work is that of 1857-60, when the new Halles Centrales were yet young, and indeed not altogether complete. Still, although many old landmarks have long since been swept away, the picture of life in all essential particulars remained the same. Prior to 1860 the limits of Paris were the so-called boulevards exterieurs, from which a girdle of suburbs, such as Montmartre, Belleville, Passy, and Montrouge, extended to the fortifications; and the population of the city was then only 1,400,000 souls. Some of the figures which will be found scattered through M. Zola's work must therefore be taken as applying entirely to the past.

Nowadays the amount of business transacted at the Halles has very largely increased, in spite of the multiplication of district markets. Paris seems to have an insatiable appetite, though, on the other hand, its cuisine is fast becoming all simplicity. To my thinking, few more remarkable changes have come over the Parisians of recent years than this change of diet. One by one great restaurants, formerly renowned for particular dishes and special wines, have been compelled through lack of custom to close their doors; and this has not been caused so much by inability to defray the cost of high feeding as by inability to indulge in it with impunity in a physical sense. In fact, Paris has become a city of impaired digestions, which nowadays seek the simplicity without the heaviness of the old English cuisine; and, should things continue in their present course, I fancy that Parisians anxious for high feeding will ultimately have to cross over to our side of the Channel.

These remarks, I trust, will not be considered out of place in an introduction to a work which to no small extent treats of the appetite of Paris. The reader will find that the characters portrayed by M. Zola are all types of humble life, but I fail to see that their circumstances should render them any the less interesting. A faithful portrait of a shopkeeper, a workman, or a workgirl is artistically of far more value than all the imaginary sketches of impossible dukes and good and wicked baronets in which so many English novels abound. Several of M. Zola's personages seem to me extremely lifelike—Gavard, indeed, is a chef-d'oeuvre of portraiture: I have known many men like him; and no one who lived in Paris under the Empire can deny the accuracy with which the author has delineated his hero Florent, the dreamy and hapless revolutionary caught in the toils of others. In those days, too, there was many such a plot as M. Zola describes, instigated by agents like Logre and Lebigre, and allowed to mature till the eve of an election or some other important event which rendered its exposure desirable for the purpose of influencing public opinion. In fact, in all that relates to the so-called "conspiracy of the markets," M. Zola, whilst changing time and place to suit the requirements of his story, has simply followed historical lines. As for the Quenus, who play such prominent parts in the narrative, the husband is a weakling with no soul above his stewpans, whilst his wife, the beautiful Lisa, in reality wears the breeches and rules the roast. The manner in which she cures Quenu of his political proclivities, though savouring of persuasiveness rather than violence, is worthy of the immortal Mrs. Caudle: Douglas Jerrold might have signed a certain lecture which she administers to her astounded helpmate. Of Pauline, the Quenus' daughter, we see but little in the story, but she becomes the heroine of another of M. Zola's novels, "La Joie de Vivre," and instead of inheriting the egotism of her parents, develops a passionate love and devotion for others. In a like way Claude Lantier, Florent's artist friend and son of Gervaise of the "Assommoir," figures more particularly in "L'Oeuvre," which tells how his painful struggle for fame resulted in madness and suicide. With reference to the beautiful Norman and the other fishwives and gossips scattered through the present volume, and those genuine types of Parisian gaminerie, Muche, Marjolin, and Cadine, I may mention that I have frequently chastened their language in deference to English susceptibilities, so that the story, whilst retaining every essential feature, contains nothing to which exception can reasonably be taken.

E. A. V.

THE FAT AND THE THIN

CHAPTER I

Amidst the deep silence and solitude prevailing in the avenue several market gardeners' carts were climbing the slope which led towards Paris, and the fronts of the houses, asleep behind the dim lines of elms on either side of the road, echoed back the rhythmical jolting of the wheels. At the Neuilly bridge a cart full of cabbages and another full of peas had joined the eight waggons of carrots and turnips coming down from Nanterre; and the horses, left to themselves, had continued plodding along with lowered heads, at a regular though lazy pace, which the ascent of the slope now slackened. The sleeping waggoners, wrapped in woollen cloaks, striped black and grey, and grasping the reins slackly in their closed hands, were stretched at full length on their stomachs atop of the piles of vegetables. Every now and then, a gas lamp, following some patch of gloom, would light up the hobnails of a boot, the blue sleeve of a blouse, or the peak of a cap peering out of the huge florescence of vegetables—red bouquets of carrots, white bouquets of turnips, and the overflowing greenery of peas and cabbages.

And all along the road, and along the neighbouring roads, in front and behind, the distant rumbling of vehicles told of the presence of similar contingents of the great caravan which was travelling onward through the gloom and deep slumber of that matutinal hour, lulling the dark city to continued repose with its echoes of passing food.

Madame Francois's horse, Balthazar, an animal that was far too fat, led the van. He was plodding on, half asleep and wagging his ears, when suddenly, on reaching the Rue de Longchamp, he quivered with fear and came to a dead stop. The horses behind, thus unexpectedly checked, ran their heads against the backs of the carts in front of them, and the procession halted amidst a clattering of bolts and chains and the oaths of the awakened waggoners. Madame Francois, who sat in front of her vehicle, with her back to a board which kept her vegetables in position, looked down; but, in the dim light thrown to the left by a small square lantern, which illuminated little beyond one of Balthazar's sheeny flanks, she could distinguish nothing.

"Come, old woman, let's get on!" cried one of the men, who had raised himself to a kneeling position amongst his turnips; "it's only some drunken sot."

Madame Francois, however, had bent forward and on her right hand had caught sight of a black mass, lying almost under the horse's hoofs, and blocking the road.

"You wouldn't have us drive over a man, would you?" said she, jumping to the ground.

It was indeed a man lying at full length upon the road, with his arms stretched out and his face in the dust. He seemed to be remarkably tall, but as withered as a dry branch, and the wonder was that Balthazar had not broken him in half with a blow from his hoof. Madame Francois thought that he was dead; but on stooping and taking hold of one of his hands, she found that it was quite warm.

"Poor fellow!" she murmured softly.

The waggoners, however, were getting impatient.

"Hurry up, there!" said the man kneeling amongst the turnips, in a hoarse voice. "He's drunk till he can hold no more, the hog! Shove him into the gutter."

Meantime, the man on the road had opened his eyes. He looked at Madame Francois with a startled air, but did not move. She herself now thought that he must indeed be drunk.

"You mustn't stop here," she said to him, "or you'll get run over and killed. Where were you going?"

"I don't know," replied the man in a faint voice.

Then, with an effort and an anxious expression, he added: "I was going to Paris; I fell down, and don't remember any more."

Madame Francois could now see him more distinctly, and he was truly a pitiable object, with his ragged black coat and trousers, through the rents in which you could espy his scraggy limbs. Underneath a black cloth cap, which was drawn low over his brows, as though he were afraid of being recognised, could be seen two large brown eyes, gleaming with peculiar softness in his otherwise stern and harassed countenance. It seemed to Madame Francois that he was in far too famished a condition to have got drunk.

"And what part of Paris were you going to?" she continued.

The man did not reply immediately. This questioning seemed to distress him. He appeared to be thinking the matter over, but at last said hesitatingly, "Over yonder, towards the markets."

He had now, with great difficulty, got to his feet again, and seemed anxious to resume his journey. But Madame Francois noticed that he tottered, and clung for support to one of the shafts of her waggon.

"Are you tired?" she asked him.

"Yes, very tired," he replied.

Then she suddenly assumed a grumpy tone, as though displeased, and, giving him a push, exclaimed: "Look sharp, then, and climb into my cart. You've made us lose a lot of time. I'm going to the markets, and I'll turn you out there with my vegetables."

Then, as the man seemed inclined to refuse her offer, she pushed him up with her stout arms, and bundled him down upon the turnips and carrots.

"Come, now, don't give us any more trouble," she cried angrily. "You are quite enough to provoke one, my good fellow. Don't I tell you that I'm going to the markets? Sleep away up there. I'll wake you when we arrive."

She herself then clambered into the cart again, and settled herself with her back against the board, grasping the reins of Balthazar, who started off drowsily, swaying his ears once more. The other waggons followed, and the procession resumed its lazy march through the darkness, whilst the rhythmical jolting of the wheels again awoke the echoes of the sleepy house fronts, and the waggoners, wrapped in their cloaks, dozed off afresh. The one who had called to Madame Francois growled out as he lay down: "As if we'd nothing better to do than pick up every drunken sot we come across! You're a scorcher, old woman!"

The waggons rumbled on, and the horses picked their own way, with drooping heads. The stranger whom Madame Francois had befriended was lying on his stomach, with his long legs lost amongst the turnips which filled the back part of the cart, whilst his face was buried amidst the spreading piles of carrot bunches. With weary, extended arms he clutched hold of his vegetable couch in fear of being thrown to the ground by one of the waggon's jolts, and his eyes were fixed on the two long lines of gas lamps which stretched away in front of him till they mingled with a swarm of other lights in the distance atop of the slope. Far away on the horizon floated a spreading, whitish vapour, showing where Paris slept amidst the luminous haze of all those flamelets.

"I come from Nanterre, and my name's Madame Francois," said the market gardener presently. "Since my poor man died I go to the markets every morning myself. It's a hard life, as you may guess. And who are you?"

"My name's Florent, I come from a distance," replied the stranger, with embarrassment. "Please excuse me, but I'm really so tired that it is painful to me to talk."

He was evidently unwilling to say anything more, and so Madame Francois relapsed into silence, and allowed the reins to fall loosely on the back of Balthazar, who went his way like an animal acquainted with every stone of the road.

Meantime, with his eyes still fixed upon the far-spreading glare of Paris, Florent was pondering over the story which he had refused to communicate to Madame Francois. After making his escape from Cayenne, whither he had been transported for his participation in the resistance to Louis Napoleon's Coup d'Etat, he had wandered about Dutch Guiana for a couple of years, burning to return to France, yet dreading the Imperial police. At last, however, he once more saw before him the beloved and mighty city which he had so keenly regretted and so ardently longed for. He would hide himself there, he told himself, and again lead the quiet, peaceable life that he had lived years ago. The police would never be any the wiser; and everyone would imagine, indeed, that he had died over yonder, across the sea. Then he thought of his arrival at Havre, where he had landed with only some fifteen francs tied up in a corner of his handkerchief. He had been able to pay for a seat in the coach as far as Rouen, but from that point he had been forced to continue his journey on foot, as he had scarcely thirty sous left of his little store. At Vernon his last copper had gone in bread. After that he had no clear recollection of anything. He fancied that he could remember having slept for several hours in a ditch, and having shown the papers with which he had provided himself to a gendarme; however, he had only a very confused idea of what had happened. He had left Vernon without any breakfast, seized every now and then with hopeless despair and raging pangs which had driven him to munch the leaves of the hedges as he tramped along. A prey to cramp and fright, his body bent, his sight dimmed, and his feet sore, he had continued his weary march, ever drawn onwards in a semi-unconscious state by a vision of Paris, which, far, far away, beyond the horizon, seemed to be summoning him and waiting for him.

When he at length reached Courbevoie, the night was very dark. Paris, looking like a patch of star-sprent sky that had fallen upon the black earth, seemed to him to wear a forbidding aspect, as though angry at his return. Then he felt very faint, and his legs almost gave way beneath him as he descended the hill. As he crossed the Neuilly bridge he sustained himself by clinging to the parapet, and bent over and looked at the Seine rolling inky waves between its dense, massy banks. A red lamp on the water seemed to be watching him with a sanguineous eye. And then he had to climb the hill if he would reach Paris on its summit yonder. The hundreds of leagues which he had already travelled were as nothing to it. That bit of a road filled him with despair. He would never be able, he thought, to reach yonder light crowned summit. The spacious avenue lay before him with its silence and its darkness, its lines of tall trees and low houses, its broad grey footwalks, speckled with the shadows of overhanging branches, and parted occasionally by the gloomy gaps of side streets. The squat yellow flames of the gas lamps, standing erect at regular intervals, alone imparted a little life to the lonely wilderness. And Florent seemed to make no progress; the avenue appeared to grow ever longer and longer, to be carrying Paris away into the far depths of the night. At last he fancied that the gas lamps, with their single eyes, were running off on either hand, whisking the road away with them; and then, overcome by vertigo, he stumbled and fell on the roadway like a log.

Now he was lying at ease on his couch of greenery, which seemed to him soft as a feather bed. He had slightly raised his head so as to keep his eyes on the luminous haze which was spreading above the dark roofs which he could divine on the horizon. He was nearing his goal, carried along towards it, with nothing to do but to yield to the leisurely jolts of the waggon; and, free from all further fatigue, he now only suffered from hunger. Hunger, indeed, had once more awoke within him with frightful and wellnigh intolerable pangs. His limbs seemed to have fallen asleep; he was only conscious of the existence of his stomach, horribly cramped and twisted as by a red-hot iron. The fresh odour of the vegetables, amongst which he was lying, affected him so keenly that he almost fainted away. He strained himself against that piled-up mass of food with all his remaining strength, in order to compress his stomach and silence its groans. And the nine other waggons behind him, with their mountains of cabbages and peas, their piles of artichokes, lettuces, celery, and leeks, seemed to him to be slowly overtaking him, as though to bury him whilst he was thus tortured by hunger beneath an avalanche of food. Presently the procession halted, and there was a sound of deep voices. They had reached the barriers, and the municipal customs officers were examining the waggons. A moment later Florent entered Paris, in a swoon, lying atop of the carrots, with clenched teeth.

"Hallow! You up there!" Madame Francois called out sharply.

And as the stranger made no attempt to move, she clambered up and shook him. Florent rose to a sitting posture. He had slept and no longer felt the pangs of hunger, but was dizzy and confused.

"You'll help me to unload, won't you?" Madame Francois said to him, as she made him get down.

He helped her. A stout man with a felt hat on his head and a badge in the top buttonhole of his coat was striking the ground with a stick and grumbling loudly:

"Come, come, now, make haste! You must get on faster than that! Bring the waggon a little more forward. How many yards' standing have you? Four, isn't it?"

Then he gave a ticket to Madame Francois, who took some coppers out of a little canvas bag and handed them to him; whereupon he went off to vent his impatience and tap the ground with his stick a little further away. Madame Francois took hold of Balthazar's bridle and backed him so as to bring the wheels of the waggon close to the footway. Then, having marked out her four yards with some wisps of straw, after removing the back of the cart, she asked Florent to hand her the vegetables bunch by bunch. She arranged them sort by sort on her standing, setting them out artistically, the "tops" forming a band of greenery around each pile; and it was with remarkable rapidity that she completed her show, which, in the gloom of early morning, looked like some piece of symmetrically coloured tapestry. When Florent had handed her a huge bunch of parsley, which he had found at the bottom of the cart, she asked him for still another service.

"It would be very kind of you," said she, "if you would look after my goods while I put the horse and cart up. I'm only going a couple of yards, to the Golden Compasses, in the Rue Montorgueil."

Florent told her that she might make herself easy. He preferred to remain still, for his hunger had revived since he had begun to move about. He sat down and leaned against a heap of cabbages beside Madame Francois's stock. He was all right there, he told himself, and would not go further afield, but wait. His head felt empty, and he had no very clear notion as to where he was. At the beginning of September it is quite dark in the early morning. Around him lighted lanterns were flitting or standing stationary in the depths of the gloom. He was sitting on one side of a broad street which he did not recognise; it stretched far away into the blackness of the night. He could make out nothing plainly, excepting the stock of which he had been left in charge. All around him along the market footways rose similar piles of goods. The middle of the roadway was blocked by huge grey tumbrels, and from one end of the street to the other a sound of heavy breathing passed, betokening the presence of horses which the eye could not distinguish.

Shouts and calls, the noise of falling wood, or of iron chains slipping to the ground, the heavy thud of loads of vegetables discharged from the waggons, and the grating of wheels as the carts were backed against the footways, filled the yet sonorous awakening, whose near approach could be felt and heard in the throbbing gloom. Glancing over the pile of cabbages behind him. Florent caught sight of a man wrapped like a parcel in his cloak, and snoring away with his head upon some baskets of plums. Nearer to him, on his left, he could distinguish a lad, some ten years old, slumbering between two heaps of endive, with an angelic smile on his face. And as yet there seemed to be nothing on that pavement that was really awake except the lanterns waving from invisible arms, and flitting and skipping over the sleep of the vegetables and human beings spread out there in heaps pending the dawn. However, what surprised Florent was the sight of some huge pavilions on either side of the street, pavilions with lofty roofs that seemed to expand and soar out of sight amidst a swarm of gleams. In his weakened state of mind he fancied he beheld a series of enormous, symmetrically built palaces, light and airy as crystal, whose fronts sparkled with countless streaks of light filtering through endless Venetian shutters. Gleaming between the slender pillar shafts these narrow golden bars seemed like ladders of light mounting to the gloomy line of the lower roofs, and then soaring aloft till they reached the jumble of higher ones, thus describing the open framework of immense square halls, where in the yellow flare of the gas lights a multitude of vague, grey, slumbering things was gathered together.

At last Florent turned his head to look about him, distressed at not knowing where he was, and filled with vague uneasiness by the sight of that huge and seemingly fragile vision. And now, as he raised his eyes, he caught sight of the luminous dial and the grey massive pile of Saint Eustache's Church. At this he was much astonished. He was close to Saint Eustache, yet all was novel to him.

However, Madame Francois had come back again, and was engaged in a heated discussion with a man who carried a sack over his shoulder and offered to buy her carrots for a sou a bunch.

"Really, now, you are unreasonable, Lacaille!" said she. "You know quite well that you will sell them again to the Parisians at four and five sous the bunch. Don't tell me that you won't! You may have them for two sous the bunch, if you like."

Then, as the man went off, she continued: "Upon my word, I believe some people think that things grow of their own accord! Let him go and find carrots at a sou the bunch elsewhere, tipsy scoundrel that he is! He'll come back again presently, you'll see."

These last remarks were addressed to Florent. And, seating herself by his side, Madame Francois resumed: "If you've been a long time away from Paris, you perhaps don't know the new markets. They haven't been built for more than five years at the most. That pavilion you see there beside us is the flower and fruit market. The fish and poultry markets are farther away, and over there behind us come the vegetables and the butter and cheese. There are six pavilions on this side, and on the other side, across the road, there are four more, with the meat and the tripe stalls. It's an enormous place, but it's horribly cold in the winter. They talk about pulling down the houses near the corn market to make room for two more pavilions. But perhaps you know all this?"

"No, indeed," replied Florent; "I've been abroad. And what's the name of that big street in front of us?"

"Oh, that's a new street. It's called the Rue du Pont Neuf. It leads from the Seine through here to the Rue Montmartre and the Rue Montorgueil. You would soon have recognized where you were if it had been daylight."

Madame Francois paused and rose, for she saw a woman heading down to examine her turnips. "Ah, is that you, Mother Chantemesse?" she said in a friendly way.

Florent meanwhile glanced towards the Rue Montorgueil. It was there that a body of police officers had arrested him on the night of December 4.[*] He had been walking along the Boulevard Montmartre at about two o'clock, quietly making his way through the crowd, and smiling at the number of soldiers that the Elysee had sent into the streets to awe the people, when the military suddenly began making a clean sweep of the thoroughfare, shooting folks down at close range during a quarter of an hour. Jostled and knocked to the ground, Florent fell at the corner of the Rue Vivienne and knew nothing further of what happened, for the panic-stricken crowd, in their wild terror of being shot, trampled over his body. Presently, hearing everything quiet, he made an attempt to rise; but across him there lay a young woman in a pink bonnet, whose shawl had slipped aside, allowing her chemisette, pleated in little tucks, to be seen. Two bullets had pierced the upper part of her bosom; and when Florent gently removed the poor creature to free his legs, two streamlets of blood oozed from her wounds on to his hands. Then he sprang up with a sudden bound, and rushed madly away, hatless and with his hands still wet with blood. Until evening he wandered about the streets, with his head swimming, ever seeing the young woman lying across his legs with her pale face, her blue staring eyes, her distorted lips, and her expression of astonishment at thus meeting death so suddenly. He was a shy, timid fellow. Albeit thirty years old he had never dared to stare women in the face; and now, for the rest of his life, he was to have that one fixed in his heart and memory. He felt as though he had lost some loved one of his own.

[*] 1851. Two days after the Coup d'Etat.—Translator.

In the evening, without knowing how he had got there, still dazed and horrified as he was by the terrible scenes of the afternoon, he had found himself at a wine shop in the Rue Montorgueil, where several men were drinking and talking of throwing up barricades. He went away with them, helped them to tear up a few paving-stones, and seated himself on the barricade, weary with his long wandering through the streets, and reflecting that he would fight when the soldiers came up. However, he had not even a knife with him, and was still bareheaded. Towards eleven o'clock he dozed off, and in his sleep could see the two holes in the dead woman's white chemisette glaring at him like eyes reddened by tears and blood. When he awoke he found himself in the grasp of four police officers, who were pummelling him with their fists. The men who had built the barricade had fled. The police officers treated him with still greater violence, and indeed almost strangled him when they noticed that his hands were stained with blood. It was the blood of the young woman.

Florent raised his eyes to the luminous dial of Saint Eustache with his mind so full of these recollections that he did not notice the position of the pointers. It was, however, nearly four o'clock. The markets were as yet wrapped in sleep. Madame Francois was still talking to old Madame Chantemesse, both standing and arguing about the price of turnips, and Florent now called to mind how narrowly he had escaped being shot over yonder by the wall of Saint Eustache. A detachment of gendarmes had just blown out the brains of five unhappy fellows caught at a barricade in the Rue Greneta. The five corpses were lying on the footway, at a spot where he thought he could now distinguish a heap of rosy radishes. He himself had escaped being shot merely because the policemen only carried swords. They took him to a neighbouring police station and gave the officer in charge a scrap of paper, on which were these words written in pencil: "Taken with blood-stained hands. Very dangerous." Then he had been dragged from station to station till the morning came. The scrap of paper accompanied him wherever he went. He was manacled and guarded as though he were a raving madman. At the station in the Rue de la Lingerie some tipsy soldiers wanted to shoot him; and they had already lighted a lantern with that object when the order arrived for the prisoners to be taken to the depot of the Prefecture of Police. Two days afterwards he found himself in a casemate of the fort of Bicetre. Ever since then he had been suffering from hunger. He had felt hungry in the casemate, and the pangs of hunger had never since left him. A hundred men were pent in the depths of that cellar-like dungeon, where, scarce able to breathe, they devoured the few mouthfuls of bread that were thrown to them, like so many captive wild beasts.

When Florent was brought before an investigating magistrate, without anyone to defend him, and without any evidence being adduced, he was accused of belonging to a secret society; and when he swore that this was untrue, the magistrate produced the scrap of paper from amongst the documents before him: "Taken with blood-stained hands. Very dangerous." That was quite sufficient. He was condemned to transportation. Six weeks afterwards, one January night, a gaoler awoke him and locked him up in a courtyard with more than four hundred other prisoners. An hour later this first detachment started for the pontoons and exile, handcuffed and guarded by a double file of gendarmes with loaded muskets. They crossed the Austerlitz bridge, followed the line of the boulevards, and so reached the terminus of the Western Railway line. It was a joyous carnival night. The windows of the restaurants on the boulevards glittered with lights. At the top of the Rue Vivienne, just at the spot where he ever saw the young woman lying dead—that unknown young woman whose image he always bore with him—he now beheld a large carriage in which a party of masked women, with bare shoulders and laughing voices, were venting their impatience at being detained, and expressing their horror of that endless procession of convicts. The whole of the way from Paris to Havre the prisoners never received a mouthful of bread or a drink of water. The officials had forgotten to give them their rations before starting, and it was not till thirty-six hours afterwards, when they had been stowed away in the hold of the frigate Canada, that they at last broke their fast.

No, Florent had never again been free from hunger. He recalled all the past to mind, but could not recollect a single hour of satiety. He had become dry and withered; his stomach seemed to have shrunk; his skin clung to his bones. And now that he was back in Paris once more, he found it fat and sleek and flourishing, teeming with food in the midst of the darkness. He had returned to it on a couch of vegetables; he lingered in its midst encompassed by unknown masses of food which still and ever increased and disquieted him. Had that happy carnival night continued throughout those seven years, then? Once again he saw the glittering windows on the boulevards, the laughing women, the luxurious, greedy city which he had quitted on that far-away January night; and it seemed to him that everything had expanded and increased in harmony with those huge markets, whose gigantic breathing, still heavy from the indigestion of the previous day, he now began to hear.

Old Mother Chantemesse had by this time made up her mind to buy a dozen bunches of turnips. She put them in her apron, which she held closely pressed to her person, thus making herself look yet more corpulent than she was; and for some time longer she lingered there, still gossiping in a drawling voice. When at last she went away, Madame Francois again sat down by the side of Florent.

"Poor old Mother Chantemesse!" she said; "she must be at least seventy-two. I can remember her buying turnips of my father when I was a mere chit. And she hasn't a relation in the world; no one but a young hussy whom she picked up I don't know where and who does nothing but bring her trouble. Still, she manages to live, selling things by the ha'p'orth and clearing her couple of francs profit a day. For my own part, I'm sure that I could never spend my days on the foot-pavement in this horrid Paris! And she hasn't even any relations here!"

"You have some relations in Paris, I suppose?" she asked presently, seeing that Florent seemed disinclined to talk.

Florent did not appear to hear her. A feeling of distrust came back to him. His head was teeming with old stories of the police, stories of spies prowling about at every street corner, and of women selling the secrets which they managed to worm out of the unhappy fellows they deluded. Madame Francois was sitting close beside him and certainly looked perfectly straightforward and honest, with her big calm face, above which was bound a black and yellow handkerchief. She seemed about five and thirty years of age, and was somewhat stoutly built, with a certain hardy beauty due to her life in the fresh air. A pair of black eyes, which beamed with kindly tenderness, softened the more masculine characteristics of her person. She certainly was inquisitive, but her curiosity was probably well meant.

"I've a nephew in Paris," she continued, without seeming at all offended by Florent's silence. "He's turned out badly though, and has enlisted. It's a pleasant thing to have somewhere to go to and stay at, isn't it? I dare say there's a big surprise in store for your relations when they see you. But it's always a pleasure to welcome one of one's own people back again, isn't it?"

She kept her eyes fixed upon him while she spoke, doubtless compassionating his extreme scragginess; fancying, too, that there was a "gentleman" inside those old black rags, and so not daring to slip a piece of silver into his hand. At last, however, she timidly murmured: "All the same, if you should happen just at present to be in want of anything——"

But Florent checked her with uneasy pride. He told her that he had everything he required, and had a place to go to. She seemed quite pleased to hear this, and, as though to tranquillise herself concerning him, repeated several times: "Well, well, in that case you've only got to wait till daylight."

A large bell at the corner of the fruit market, just over Florent's head, now began to ring. The slow regular peals seemed to gradually dissipate the slumber that yet lingered all around. Carts were still arriving, and the shouts of the waggoners, the cracking of their whips, and the grinding of the paving-stones beneath the iron-bound wheels and the horses' shoes sounded with an increasing din. The carts could now only advance by a series of spasmodic jolts, and stretched in a long line, one behind the other, till they were lost to sight in the distant darkness, whence a confused roar ascended.

Unloading was in progress all along the Rue du Pont Neuf, the vehicles being drawn up close to the edge of the footways, while their teams stood motionless in close order as at a horse fair. Florent felt interested in one enormous tumbrel which was piled up with magnificent cabbages, and had only been backed to the kerb with the greatest difficulty. Its load towered above the lofty gas lamp whose bright light fell full upon the broad leaves which looked like pieces of dark green velvet, scalloped and goffered. A young peasant girl, some sixteen years old, in a blue linen jacket and cap, had climbed on to the tumbrel, where, buried in the cabbages to her shoulders, she took them one by one and threw them to somebody concealed in the shade below. Every now and then the girl would slip and vanish, overwhelmed by an avalanche of the vegetables, but her rosy nose soon reappeared amidst the teeming greenery, and she broke into a laugh while the cabbages again flew down between Florent and the gas lamp. He counted them mechanically as they fell. When the cart was emptied he felt worried.

The piles of vegetables on the pavement now extended to the verge of the roadway. Between the heaps, the market gardeners left narrow paths to enable people to pass along. The whole of the wide footway was covered from end to end with dark mounds. As yet, in the sudden dancing gleams of light from the lanterns, you only just espied the luxuriant fulness of the bundles of artichokes, the delicate green of the lettuces, the rosy coral of the carrots, and dull ivory of the turnips. And these gleams of rich colour flitted along the heaps, according as the lanterns came and went. The footway was now becoming populated: a crowd of people had awakened, and was moving hither and thither amidst the vegetables, stopping at times, and chattering and shouting. In the distance a loud voice could be heard crying, "Endive! who's got endive?" The gates of the pavilion devoted to the sale of ordinary vegetables had just been opened; and the retail dealers who had stalls there, with white caps on their heads, fichus knotted over their black jackets, and skirts pinned up to keep them from getting soiled, now began to secure their stock for the day, depositing their purchases in some huge porters' baskets placed upon the ground. Between the roadway and the pavilion these baskets were to be seen coming and going on all sides, knocking against the crowded heads of the bystanders, who resented the pushing with coarse expressions, whilst all around was a clamour of voices growing hoarse by prolonged wrangling over a sou or two. Florent was astonished by the calmness of the female market gardeners, with bandanas and bronzed faces, displayed amidst all this garrulous bargaining of the markets.

Behind him, on the footway of the Rue Rambuteau, fruit was being sold. Hampers and low baskets covered with canvas or straw stood there in long lines, a strong odour of over-ripe mirabelle plums was wafted hither and thither. At last a subdued and gentle voice, which he had heard for some time past, induced him to turn his head, and he saw a charming darksome little woman sitting on the ground and bargaining.

"Come now, Marcel," said she, "you'll take a hundred sous, won't you?"

The man to whom she was speaking was closely wrapped in his cloak and made no reply; however, after a silence of five minutes or more, the young woman returned to the charge.

"Come now, Marcel; a hundred sous for that basket there, and four francs for the other one; that'll make nine francs altogether."

Then came another interval.

"Well, tell me what you will take."

"Ten francs. You know that well enough already; I told you so before. But what have you done with your Jules this morning, La Sarriette?"

The young woman began to laugh as she took a handful of small change out of her pocket.

"Oh," she replied, "Jules is still in bed. He says that men were not intended to work."

She paid for the two baskets, and carried them into the fruit pavilion, which had just been opened. The market buildings still retained their gloom-wrapped aspect of airy fragility, streaked with the thousand lines of light that gleamed from the venetian shutters. People were beginning to pass along the broad covered streets intersecting the pavilions, but the more distant buildings still remained deserted amidst the increasing buzz of life on the footways. By Saint Eustache the bakers and wine sellers were taking down their shutters, and the ruddy shops, with their gas lights flaring, showed like gaps of fire in the gloom in which the grey house-fronts were yet steeped. Florent noticed a baker's shop on the left-hand side of the Rue Montorgueil, replete and golden with its last baking, and fancied he could scent the pleasant smell of the hot bread. It was now half past four.

Madame Francois by this time had disposed of nearly all her stock. She had only a few bunches of carrots left when Lacaille once more made his appearance with his sack.

"Well," said he, "will you take a sou now?"

"I knew I should see you again," the good woman quietly answered. "You'd better take all I have left. There are seventeen bunches."

"That makes seventeen sous."

"No; thirty-four."

At last they agreed to fix the price at twenty-five sous. Madame Francois was anxious to be off.

"He'd been keeping his eye upon me all the time," she said to Florent, when Lacaille had gone off with the carrots in his sack. "That old rogue runs things down all over the markets, and he often waits till the last peal of the bell before spending four sous in purchase. Oh, these Paris folk! They'll wrangle and argue for an hour to save half a sou, and then go off and empty their purses at the wine shop."

Whenever Madame Francois talked of Paris she always spoke in a tone of disdain, and referred to the city as though it were some ridiculous, contemptible, far-away place, in which she only condescended to set foot at nighttime.

"There!" she continued, sitting down again, beside Florent, on some vegetables belonging to a neighbour, "I can get away now."

Florent bent his head. He had just committed a theft. When Lacaille went off he had caught sight of a carrot lying on the ground, and having picked it up he was holding it tightly in his right hand. Behind him were some bundles of celery and bunches of parsley were diffusing pungent odours which painfully affected him.

"Well, I'm off now!" said Madame Francois.

However, she felt interested in this stranger, and could divine that he was suffering there on that foot-pavement, from which he had never stirred. She made him fresh offers of assistance, but he again refused them, with a still more bitter show of pride. He even got up and remained standing to prove that he was quite strong again. Then, as Madame Francois turned her head away, he put the carrot to his mouth. But he had to remove it for a moment, in spite of the terrible longing which he felt to dig his teeth into it; for Madame Francois turned round again and looking him full in the face, began to question him with her good-natured womanly curiosity. Florent, to avoid speaking, merely answered by nods and shakes of the head. Then, slowly and gently, he began to eat the carrot.

The worthy woman was at last on the point of going off, when a powerful voice exclaimed close beside her, "Good morning, Madame Francois."

The speaker was a slim young man, with big bones and a big head. His face was bearded, and he had a very delicate nose and narrow sparkling eyes. He wore on his head a rusty, battered, black felt hat, and was buttoned up in an immense overcoat, which had once been of a soft chestnut hue, but which rain had discoloured and streaked with long greenish stains. Somewhat bent, and quivering with a nervous restlessness which was doubtless habitual with him, he stood there in a pair of heavy laced shoes, and the shortness of his trousers allowed a glimpse of his coarse blue hose.

"Good morning, Monsieur Claude," the market gardener replied cheerfully. "I expected you, you know, last Monday, and, as you didn't come, I've taken care of your canvas for you. I've hung it up on a nail in my room."

"You are really very kind, Madame Francois. I'll go to finish that study of mine one of these days. I wasn't able to go on Monday. Has your big plum tree still got all its leaves?"

"Yes, indeed."

"I wanted to know, because I mean to put it in a corner of the picture. It will come in nicely by the side of the fowl house. I have been thinking about it all the week. What lovely vegetables are in the market this morning! I came down very early, expecting a fine sunrise effect upon all these heaps of cabbages."

With a wave of the arm he indicated the footway.

"Well, well, I must be off now," said Madame Francois. "Good-bye for the present. We shall meet again soon, I hope, Monsieur Claude."

However, as she turned to go, she introduced Florent to the young artist.

"This gentleman, it seems, has just come from a distance," said she. "He feels quite lost in your scampish Paris. I dare say you might be of service to him."

Then she at last took her departure, feeling pleased at having left the two men together. Claude looked at Florent with a feeling of interest. That tall, slight, wavy figure seemed to him original. Madame Francois's hasty presentation was in his eyes quite sufficient, and he addressed Florent with the easy familiarity of a lounger accustomed to all sorts of chance encounters.

"I'll accompany you," he said; "which way are you going?"

Florent felt ill at ease; he was not wont to unbosom himself so readily. However, ever since his arrival in Paris, a question had been trembling on his lips, and now he ventured to ask it, with the evident fear of receiving an unfavourable reply.

"Is the Rue Pirouette still in existence?"

"Oh, yes," answered the artist. "A very curious corner of old Paris is the Rue Pirouette. It twists and turns like a dancing girl, and the houses bulge out like pot-bellied gluttons. I've made an etching of it that isn't half bad. I'll show it to you when you come to see me. Is it to the Rue Pirouette that you want to go?"

Florent, who felt easier and more cheerful now that he knew the street still existed, declared that he did not want to go there; in fact, he did not want to go anywhere in particular. All his distrust awoke into fresh life at Claude's insistence.

"Oh! never mind," said the artist, "let's go to the Rue Pirouette all the same. It has such a fine colour at night time. Come along; it's only a couple of yards away."

Florent felt constrained to follow him, and the two men walked off, side by side, stepping over the hampers and vegetables like a couple of old friends. On the footway of the Rue Rambuteau there were some immense heaps of cauliflowers, symmetrically piled up like so many cannonballs. The soft-white flowers spread out like huge roses in the midst of their thick green leaves, and the piles had something of the appearance of bridal bouquets ranged in a row in colossal flower stands. Claude stopped in front of them, venting cries of admiration.

Then, on turning into the Rue Pirouette, which was just opposite, he pointed out each house to his companion, and explained his views concerning it. There was only a single gas lamp, burning in a corner. The buildings, which had settled down and swollen, threw their pent-houses forward in such wise as to justify Claude's allusion to pot-bellied gluttons, whilst their gables receded, and on either side they clung to their neighbours for support. Three or four, however, standing in gloomy recesses, appeared to be on the point of toppling forward. The solitary gas lamp illumined one which was snowy with a fresh coat of whitewash, suggesting some flabby broken-down old dowager, powdered and bedaubed in the hope of appearing young. Then the others stretched away into the darkness, bruised, dented, and cracked, greeny with the fall of water from their roofs, and displaying such an extraordinary variety of attitudes and tints that Claude could not refrain from laughing as he contemplated them.

Florent, however, came to stand at the corner of the rue de Mondetour, in front of the last house but one on the left. Here the three floors, each with two shutterless windows, having little white curtains closely drawn, seemed wrapped in sleep; but, up above, a light could be seen flitting behind the curtains of a tiny gable casement. However, the sight of the shop beneath the pent-house seemed to fill Florent with the deepest emotion. It was kept by a dealer in cooked vegetables, and was just being opened. At its far end some metal pans were glittering, while on several earthen ones in the window there was a display of cooked spinach and endive, reduced to a paste and arranged in conical mounds from which customers were served with shovel-like carvers of white metal, only the handles of which were visible. This sight seemed to rivet Florent to the ground with surprise. He evidently could not recognize the place. He read the name of the shopkeeper, Godeboeuf, which was painted on a red sign board up above, and remained quite overcome by consternation. His arms dangling beside him, he began to examine the cooked spinach, with the despairing air of one on whom some supreme misfortune falls.

However, the gable casement was now opened, and a little old woman leaned out of it, and looked first at the sky and then at the markets in the distance.

"Ah, Mademoiselle Saget is an early riser," exclaimed Claude, who had just raised his head. And, turning to his companion, he added: "I once had an aunt living in that house. It's a regular hive of tittle-tattle! Ah, the Mehudins are stirring now, I see. There's a light on the second floor."

Florent would have liked to question his companion, but the latter's long discoloured overcoat give him a disquieting appearance. So without a word Florent followed him, whilst he went on talking about the Mehudins. These Mehudins were fish-girls, it seemed; the older one was a magnificent creature, while the younger one, who sold fresh-water fish, reminded Claude of one of Murillo's virgins, whenever he saw her standing with her fair face amidst her carps and eels.

From this Claude went on to remark with asperity that Murillo painted like an ignoramus. But all at once he stopped short in the middle of the street.

"Come!" he exclaimed, "tell me where it is that you want to go."

"I don't want to go anywhere just at present," replied Florent in confusion. "Let's go wherever you like."

Just as they were leaving the Rue Pirouette, some one called to Claude from a wine shop at the corner of the street. The young man went in, dragging Florent with him. The shutters had been taken down on one side only, and the gas was still burning in the sleepy atmosphere of the shop. A forgotten napkin and some cards that had been used in the previous evening's play were still lying on the tables; and the fresh breeze that streamed in through the open doorway freshened the close, warm vinous air. The landlord, Monsieur Lebigre, was serving his customers. He wore a sleeved waistcoat, and his fat regular features, fringed by an untidy beard, were still pale with sleep. Standing in front of the counter, groups of men, with heavy, tired eyes, were drinking, coughing, and spitting, whilst trying to rouse themselves by the aid of white wine and brandy. Amongst them Florent recognised Lacaille, whose sack now overflowed with various sorts of vegetables. He was taking his third dram with a friend, who was telling him a long story about the purchase of a hamper of potatoes.[*] When he had emptied his glass, he went to chat with Monsieur Lebigre in a little glazed compartment at the end of the room, where the gas had not yet been lighted.

[*] At the Paris central markets potatoes are sold by the
hamper, not by the sack as in England.—Translator.

"What will you take?" Claude asked of Florent.

He had on entering grasped the hand of the person who had called out to him. This was a market porter,[*] a well-built young man of two and twenty at the most. His cheeks and chin were clean-shaven, but he wore a small moustache, and looked a sprightly, strapping fellow with his broad-brimmed hat covered with chalk, and his wool-worked neck-piece, the straps falling from which tightened his short blue blouse. Claude, who called him Alexandre, patted his arms, and asked him when they were going to Charentonneau again. Then they talked about a grand excursion they had made together in a boat on the Marne, when they had eaten a rabbit for supper in the evening.

[*] Fort is the French term, literally "a strong man," as
every market porter needs to be.—Translator.

"Well, what will you take?" Claude again asked Florent.

The latter looked at the counter in great embarrassment. At one end of it some stoneware pots, encircled with brass bands and containing punch and hot wine, were standing over the short blue flames of a gas stove. Florent at last confessed that a glass of something warm would be welcome. Monsieur Lebigre thereupon served them with three glasses of punch. In a basket near the pots were some smoking hot rolls which had only just arrived. However, as neither of the others took one, Florent likewise refrained, and drank his punch. He felt it slipping down into his empty stomach, like a steam of molten lead. It was Alexandre who paid for the "shout."

"He's a fine fellow, that Alexandre!" said Claude, when he and Florent found themselves alone again on the footway of the Rue Rambuteau. "He's a very amusing companion to take into the country. He's fond of showing his strength. And then he's so magnificently built! I have seen him stripped. Ah, if I could only get him to pose for me in the nude out in the open air! Well, we'll go and take a turn through the markets now, if you like."

Florent followed, yielding entirely to his new friend's guidance. A bright glow at the far end of the Rue Rambuteau announced the break of day. The far-spreading voice of the markets was become more sonorous, and every now and then the peals of a bell ringing in some distant pavilion mingled with the swelling, rising clamour. Claude and Florent entered one of the covered streets between the fish and poultry pavilions. Florent raised his eyes and looked at the lofty vault overhead, the inner timbers of which glistened amidst a black lacework of iron supports. As he turned into the great central thoroughfare he pictured himself in some strange town, with its various districts and suburbs, promenades and streets, squares and cross-roads, all suddenly placed under shelter on a rainy day by the whim of some gigantic power. The deep gloom brooding in the hollows of the roofs multiplied, as it were, the forest of pillars, and infinitely increased the number of the delicate ribs, railed galleries, and transparent shutters. And over the phantom city and far away into the depths of the shade, a teeming, flowering vegetation of luxuriant metal-work, with spindle-shaped stems and twining knotted branches, covered the vast expanse as with the foliage of some ancient forest. Several departments of the markets still slumbered behind their closed iron gates. The butter and poultry pavilions displayed rows of little trellised stalls and long alleys, which lines of gas lights showed to be deserted. The fish market, however, had just been opened, and women were flitting to and fro amongst the white slabs littered with shadowy hampers and cloths. Among the vegetables and fruit and flowers the noise and bustle were gradually increasing. The whole place was by degree waking up, from the popular quarter where the cabbages are piled at four o'clock in the morning, to the lazy and wealthy district which only hangs up its pullets and pheasants when the hands of the clock point to eight.

The great covered alleys were now teeming with life. All along the footways on both sides of the road there were still many market gardeners, with other small growers from the environs of Paris, who displayed baskets containing their "gatherings" of the previous evening—bundles of vegetables and clusters of fruit. Whilst the crowd incessantly paced hither and thither, vehicles barred the road; and Florent, in order to pass them, had to press against some dingy sacks, like coal-sacks in appearance, and so numerous and heavy that the axle-trees of the vans bent beneath them. They were quite damp, and exhaled a fresh odour of seaweed. From a rent low down in the side of one of them a black stream of big mussels was trickling.

Florent and Claude had now to pause at every step. The fish was arriving and one after another the drays of the railway companies drove up laden with wooden cages full of the hampers and baskets that had come by train from the sea coast. And to get out of the way of the fish drays, which became more and more numerous and disquieting, the artist and Florent rushed amongst the wheels of the drays laden with butter and eggs and cheese, huge yellow vehicles bearing coloured lanterns, and drawn by four horses. The market porters carried the cases of eggs, and baskets of cheese and butter, into the auction pavilion, where clerks were making entries in note books by the light of the gas.

Claude was quite charmed with all this uproar, and forgot everything to gaze at some effect of light, some group of blouses, or the picturesque unloading of a cart. At last they extricated themselves from the crowd, and as they continued on their way along the main artery they presently found themselves amidst an exquisite perfume which seemed to be following them. They were in the cut-flower market. All over the footways, to the right and left, women were seated in front of large rectangular baskets full of bunches of roses, violets, dahlias, and marguerites. At times the clumps darkened and looked like splotches of blood, at others they brightened into silvery greys of the softest tones. A lighted candle, standing near one basket, set amidst the general blackness quite a melody of colour—the bright variegations of marguerites, the blood-red crimson of dahlias, the bluey purple of violets, and the warm flesh tints of roses. And nothing could have been sweeter or more suggestive of springtide than this soft breath of perfume encountered on the footway, on emerging from the sharp odours of the fish market and the pestilential smell of the butter and the cheese.

Claude and Florent turned round and strolled about, loitering among the flowers. They halted with some curiosity before several women who were selling bunches of fern and bundles of vine-leaves, neatly tied up in packets of five and twenty. Then they turned down another covered alley, which was almost deserted, and where their footsteps echoed as though they had been walking through a church. Here they found a little cart, scarcely larger than a wheelbarrow, to which was harnessed a diminutive donkey, who, no doubt, felt bored, for at sight of them he began braying with such prolonged and sonorous force that the vast roofing of the markets fairly trembled. Then the horses began to neigh in reply, there was a sound of pawing and tramping, a distant uproar, which swelled, rolled along, then died away.

Meantime, in the Rue Berger in front of them, Claude and Florent perceived a number of bare, frontless, salesmen's shops, where, by the light of flaring gas jets, they could distinguish piles of hampers and fruit, enclosed by three dirty walls which were covered with addition sums in pencil. And the two wanderers were still standing there, contemplating this scene, when they noticed a well-dressed woman huddled up in a cab which looked quite lost and forlorn in the block of carts as it stealthily made its way onwards.

"There's Cinderella coming back without her slippers," remarked Claude with a smile.

They began chatting together as they went back towards the markets. Claude whistled as he strolled along with his hands in his pockets, and expatiated on his love for this mountain of food which rises every morning in the very centre of Paris. He prowled about the footways night after night, dreaming of colossal still-life subjects, paintings of an extraordinary character. He had even started on one, having his friend Marjolin and that jade Cadine to pose for him; but it was hard work to paint those confounded vegetables and fruit and fish and meat—they were all so beautiful! Florent listened to the artist's enthusiastic talk with a void and hunger-aching stomach. It did not seem to occur to Claude that all those things were intended to be eaten. Their charm for him lay in their colour. Suddenly, however, he ceased speaking and, with a gesture that was habitual to him, tightened the long red sash which he wore under his green-stained coat.

And then with a sly expression he resumed:

"Besides, I breakfast here, through my eyes, at any rate, and that's better than getting nothing at all. Sometimes, when I've forgotten to dine on the previous day, I treat myself to a perfect fit of indigestion in the morning by watching the carts arrive here laden with all sorts of good things. On such mornings as those I love my vegetables more than ever. Ah! the exasperating part, the rank injustice of it all, is that those rascally Philistines really eat these things!"

Then he went on to tell Florent of a supper to which a friend had treated him at Baratte's on a day of affluence. They had partaken of oysters, fish, and game. But Baratte's had sadly fallen, and all the carnival life of the old Marche des Innocents was now buried. In place thereof they had those huge central markets, that colossus of ironwork, that new and wonderful town. Fools might say what they liked; it was the embodiment of the spirit of the times. Florent, however, could not at first make out whether he was condemning the picturesqueness of Baratte's or its good cheer.

But Claude next began to inveigh against romanticism. He preferred his piles of vegetables, he said, to the rags of the middle ages; and he ended by reproaching himself with guilty weakness in making an etching of the Rue Pirouette. All those grimy old places ought to be levelled to the ground, he declared, and modern houses ought to be built in their stead.

"There!" he exclaimed, coming to a halt, "look at the corner of the footway yonder! Isn't that a picture readymade, ever so much more human and natural than all their confounded consumptive daubs?"

Along the covered way women were now selling hot soup and coffee. At one corner of the foot-pavement a large circle of customers clustered round a vendor of cabbage soup. The bright tin caldron, full of broth, was steaming over a little low stove, through the holes of which came the pale glow of the embers. From a napkin-lined basket the woman took some thin slices of bread and dropped them into yellow cups; then with a ladle she filled the cups with liquor. Around her were saleswomen neatly dressed, market gardeners in blouses, porters with coats soiled by the loads they had carried, poor ragged vagabonds—in fact, all the early hungry ones of the markets, eating, and scalding their mouths, and drawing back their chins to avoid soiling them with the drippings from their spoons. The delighted artist blinked, and sought a point of view so as to get a good ensemble of the picture. That cabbage soup, however, exhaled a very strong odour. Florent, for his part, turned his head away, distressed by the sight of the full cups which the customers emptied in silence, glancing around them the while like suspicious animals. As the woman began serving a fresh customer, Claude himself was affected by the odorous steam of the soup, which was wafted full in his face.

He again tightened his sash, half amused and half annoyed. Then resuming his walk, and alluding to the punch paid for by Alexandre, he said to Florent in a low voice:

"It's very odd, but have you ever noticed that although a man can always find somebody to treat him to something to drink, he can never find a soul who will stand him anything to eat?"

The dawn was now rising. The houses on the Boulevard de Sebastopol at the end of the Rue de la Cossonnerie were still black; but above the sharp line of their slate roofs a patch of pale blue sky, circumscribed by the arch-pieces of the covered way, showed like a gleaming half-moon. Claude, who had been bending over some grated openings on a level with the ground, through which a glimpse could be obtained of deep cellars where gas lights glimmered, now glanced up into the air between the lofty pillars, as though scanning the dark roofs which fringed the clear sky. Then he halted again, with his eyes fixed on one of the light iron ladders which connect the superposed market roofs and give access from one to the other. Florent asked him what he was seeking there.

"I'm looking for that scamp of a Marjolin," replied the artist. "He's sure to be in some guttering up there, unless, indeed, he's been spending the night in the poultry cellars. I want him to give me a sitting."

Then he went on to relate how a market saleswoman had found his friend Marjolin one morning in a pile of cabbages, and how Marjolin had grown up in all liberty on the surrounding footways. When an attempt had been made to send him to school he had fallen ill, and it had been necessary to bring him back to the markets. He knew every nook and corner of them, and loved them with a filial affection, leading the agile life of a squirrel in that forest of ironwork. He and Cadine, the hussy whom Mother Chantemesse had picked up one night in the old Market of the Innocents, made a pretty couple—he, a splendid foolish fellow, as glowing as a Rubens, with a ruddy down on his skin which attracted the sunlight; and she, slight and sly, with a comical phiz under her tangle of black curly hair.

Whilst talking Claude quickened his steps, and soon brought his companion back to Saint Eustache again. Florent, whose legs were once more giving way, dropped upon a bench near the omnibus office. The morning air was freshening. At the far end of the Rue Rambuteau rosy gleams were streaking the milky sky, which higher up was slashed by broad grey rifts. Such was the sweet balsamic scent of this dawn, that Florent for a moment fancied himself in the open country, on the brow of a hill. But behind the bench Claude pointed out to him the many aromatic herbs and bulbs on sale. All along the footway skirting the tripe market there were, so to say, fields of thyme and lavender, garlic and shallots; and round the young plane-trees on the pavement the vendors had twined long branches of laurel, forming trophies of greenery. The strong scent of the laurel leaves prevailed over every other odour.

At present the luminous dial of Saint Eustache was paling as a night-light does when surprised by the dawn. The gas jets in the wine shops in the neighbouring streets went out one by one, like stars extinguished by the brightness. And Florent gazed at the vast markets now gradually emerging from the gloom, from the dreamland in which he had beheld them, stretching out their ranges of open palaces. Greenish-grey in hue, they looked more solid now, and even more colossal with their prodigious masting of columns upholding an endless expanse of roofs. They rose up in geometrically shaped masses; and when all the inner lights had been extinguished and the square uniform buildings were steeped in the rising dawn, they seemed typical of some gigantic modern machine, some engine, some caldron for the supply of a whole people, some colossal belly, bolted and riveted, built up of wood and glass and iron, and endowed with all the elegance and power of some mechanical motive appliance working there with flaring furnaces, and wild, bewildering revolutions of wheels.

Claude, however, had enthusiastically sprung on to the bench, and stood upon it. He compelled his companion to admire the effect of the dawn rising over the vegetables. There was a perfect sea of these extending between the two clusters of pavilions from Saint Eustache to the Rue des Halles. And in the two open spaces at either end the flood of greenery rose to even greater height, and quite submerged the pavements. The dawn appeared slowly, softly grey in hue, and spreading a light water-colour tint over everything. These surging piles akin to hurrying waves, this river of verdure rushing along the roadway like an autumn torrent, assumed delicate shadowy tints—tender violet, blush-rose, and greeny yellow, all the soft, light hues which at sunrise make the sky look like a canopy of shot silk. And by degrees, as the fires of dawn rose higher and higher at the far end of the Rue Rambuteau, the mass of vegetation grew brighter and brighter, emerging more and more distinctly from the bluey gloom that clung to the ground. Salad herbs, cabbage-lettuce, endive, and succory, with rich soil still clinging to their roots, exposed their swelling hearts; bundles of spinach, bundles of sorrel, clusters of artichokes, piles of peas and beans, mounds of cos-lettuce, tied round with straws, sounded every note in the whole gamut of greenery, from the sheeny lacquer-like green of the pods to the deep-toned green of the foliage; a continuous gamut with ascending and descending scales which died away in the variegated tones of the heads of celery and bundles of leeks. But the highest and most sonorous notes still came from the patches of bright carrots and snowy turnips, strewn in prodigious quantities all along the markets and lighting them up with the medley of their two colours.

At the crossway in the Rue des Halles cabbages were piled up in mountains; there were white ones, hard and compact as metal balls, curly savoys, whose great leaves made them look like basins of green bronze, and red cabbages, which the dawn seemed to transform into superb masses of bloom with the hue of wine-lees, splotched with dark purple and carmine. At the other side of the markets, at the crossway near Saint Eustache, the end of the Rue Rambuteau was blocked by a barricade of orange-hued pumpkins, sprawling with swelling bellies in two superposed rows. And here and there gleamed the glistening ruddy brown of a hamper of onions, the blood-red crimson of a heap of tomatoes, the quiet yellow of a display of marrows, and the sombre violet of the fruit of the eggplant; while numerous fat black radishes still left patches of gloom amidst the quivering brilliance of the general awakening.

Claude clapped his hands at the sight. He declared that those "blackguard vegetables" were wild, mad, sublime! He stoutly maintained that they were not yet dead, but, gathered in the previous evening, waited for the morning sun to bid him good-bye from the flag-stones of the market. He could observe their vitality, he declared, see their leaves stir and open as though their roots were yet firmly and warmly embedded in well-manured soil. And here, in the markets, he added, he heard the death-rattle of all the kitchen gardens of the environs of Paris.

A crowd of white caps, loose black jackets, and blue blouses was swarming in the narrow paths between the various piles. The big baskets of the market porters passed along slowly, above the heads of the throng. Retail dealers, costermongers, and greengrocers were making their purchases in haste. Corporals and nuns clustered round the mountains of cabbages, and college cooks prowled about inquisitively, on the look-out for good bargains. The unloading was still going on; heavy tumbrels, discharging their contents as though these were so many paving-stones, added more and more waves to the sea of greenery which was now beating against the opposite footways. And from the far end of the Rue du Pont Neuf fresh rows of carts were still and ever arriving.

"What a fine sight it is!" exclaimed Claude in an ecstasy of enthusiasm.

Florent was suffering keenly. He fancied that all this was some supernatural temptation, and, unwilling to look at the markets any longer, turned towards Saint Eustache, a side view of which he obtained from the spot where he now stood. With its roses, and broad arched windows, its bell-turret, and roofs of slate, it looked as though painted in sepia against the blue of the sky. He fixed his eyes at last on the sombre depths of the Rue Montorgueil, where fragments of gaudy sign boards showed conspicuously, and on the corner of the Rue Montmartre, where there were balconies gleaming with letters of gold. And when he again glanced at the cross-roads, his gaze was solicited by other sign boards, on which such inscriptions as "Druggist and Chemist," "Flour and Grain" appeared in big red and black capital letters upon faded backgrounds. Near these corners, houses with narrow windows were now awakening, setting amidst the newness and airiness of the Rue du Pont Neuf a few of the yellow ancient facades of olden Paris. Standing at the empty windows of the great drapery shop at the corner of the Rue Rambuteau a number of spruce-looking counter-jumpers in their shirt sleeves, with snowy-white wristbands and tight-fitting pantaloons, were "dressing" their goods. Farther away, in the windows of the severe looking, barrack-like Guillot establishment, biscuits in gilt wrappers and fancy cakes on glass stands were tastefully set out. All the shops were now open; and workmen in white blouses, with tools under their arms, were hurrying along the road.

Claude had not yet got down from the bench. He was standing on tiptoe in order to see the farther down the streets. Suddenly, in the midst of the crowd which he overlooked, he caught sight of a fair head with long wavy locks, followed by a little black one covered with curly tumbled hair.

"Hallo, Marjolin! Hallo, Cadine!" he shouted; and then, as his voice was drowned by the general uproar, he jumped to the ground and started off. But all at once, recollecting that he had left Florent behind him, he hastily came back. "I live at the end of the Impasse des Bourdonnais," he said rapidly. "My name's written in chalk on the door, Claude Lantier. Come and see the etching of the Rue Pirouette."

Then he vanished. He was quite ignorant of Florent's name, and, after favouring him with his views on art, parted from him as he had met him, at the roadside.

Florent was now alone, and at first this pleased him. Ever since Madame Francoise had picked him up in the Avenue de Neuilly he had been coming and going in a state of pain fraught somnolence which had quite prevented him from forming any definite ideas of his surroundings. Now at last he was at liberty to do what he liked, and he tried to shake himself free from that intolerable vision of teeming food by which he was pursued. But his head still felt empty and dizzy, and all that he could find within him was a kind of vague fear. The day was now growing quite bright, and he could be distinctly seen. He looked down at his wretched shabby coat and trousers. He buttoned the first, dusted the latter, and strove to make a bit of a toilet, fearing lest those black rags of his should proclaim aloud whence he had come. He was seated in the middle of the bench, by the side of some wandering vagabonds who had settled themselves there while waiting for the sunrise. The neighbourhood of the markets is a favourite spot with vagrants in the small hours of the morning. However, two constables, still in night uniform, with cloaks and kepis, paced up and down the footway side by side, their hands resting behind their backs; and every time they passed the bench they glanced at the game which they scented there. Florent felt sure that they recognised him, and were consulting together about arresting him. At this thought his anguish of mind became extreme. He felt a wild desire to get up and run away; but he did not dare to do so, and was quite at a loss as to how he might take himself off. The repeated glances of the constables, their cold, deliberate scrutiny caused him the keenest torture. At length he rose from the bench, making a great effort to restrain himself from rushing off as quickly as his long legs could carry him; and succeeded in walking quietly away, though his shoulders quivered in the fear he felt of suddenly feeling the rough hands of the constables clutching at his collar from behind.

He had now only one thought, one desire, which was to get away from the markets as quickly as possible. He would wait and make his investigations later on, when the footways should be clear. The three streets which met here—the Rue Montmartre, Rue Montorgueil, and Rue Turbigo—filled him with uneasiness. They were blocked by vehicles of all kinds, and their footways were crowded with vegetables. Florent went straight along as far as the Rue Pierre Lescot, but there the cress and the potato markets seemed to him insuperable obstacles. So he resolved to take the Rue Rambuteau. On reaching the Boulevard de Sebastopol, however, he came across such a block of vans and carts and waggonettes that he turned back and proceeded along the Rue Saint Denis. Then he got amongst the vegetables once more. Retail dealers had just set up their stalls, formed of planks resting on tall hampers; and the deluge of cabbages and carrots and turnips began all over again. The markets were overflowing. Florent tried to make his escape from this pursuing flood which ever overtook him in his flight. He tried the Rue de la Cossonnerie, the Rue Berger, the Square des Innocents, the Rue de la Ferronnerie, and the Rue des Halles. And at last he came to a standstill, quite discouraged and scared at finding himself unable to escape from the infernal circle of vegetables, which now seemed to dance around him, twining clinging verdure about his legs.

The everlasting stream of carts and horses stretched away as far as the Rue de Rivoli and the Place de l'Hotel de Ville. Huge vans were carrying away supplies for all the greengrocers and fruiterers of an entire district; chars-a-bancs were starting for the suburbs with straining, groaning sides. In the Rue de Pont Neuf Florent got completely bewildered. He stumbled upon a crowd of hand-carts, in which numerous costermongers were arranging their purchases. Amongst them he recognised Lacaille, who went off along the Rue Saint Honore, pushing a barrow of carrots and cauliflowers before him. Florent followed him, in the hope that he would guide him out of the mob. The pavement was now quite slippery, although the weather was dry, and the litter of artichoke stalks, turnip tops, and leaves of all kinds made walking somewhat dangerous. Florent stumbled at almost every step. He lost sight of Lacaille in the Rue Vauvilliers, and on approaching the corn market he again found the streets barricaded with vehicles. Then he made no further attempt to struggle; he was once more in the clutch of the markets, and their stream of life bore him back. Slowly retracing his steps, he presently found himself by Saint Eustache again.

He now heard the loud continuous rumbling of the waggons that were setting out from the markets. Paris was doling out the daily food of its two million inhabitants. These markets were like some huge central organ beating with giant force, and sending the blood of life through every vein of the city. The uproar was akin to that of colossal jaws—a mighty sound to which each phase of the provisioning contributed, from the whip-cracking of the larger retail dealers as they started off for the district markets to the dragging pit-a-pat of the old shoes worn by the poor women who hawked their lettuces in baskets from door to door.

Florent turned into a covered way on the left, intersecting the group of four pavilions whose deep silent gloom he had remarked during the night. He hoped that he might there find a refuge, discover some corner in which he could hide himself. But these pavilions were now as busy, as lively as the others. Florent walked on to the end of the street. Drays were driving up at a quick trot, crowding the market with cages full of live poultry, and square hampers in which dead birds were stowed in deep layers. On the other side of the way were other drays from which porters were removing freshly killed calves, wrapped in canvas, and laid at full length in baskets, whence only the four bleeding stumps of their legs protruded. There were also whole sheep, and sides and quarters of beef. Butchers in long white aprons marked the meat with a stamp, carried it off, weighted it, and hung it up on hooks in the auction room. Florent, with his face close to the grating, stood gazing at the rows of hanging carcasses, at the ruddy sheep and oxen and paler calves, all streaked with yellow fat and sinews, and with bellies yawning open. Then he passed along the sidewalk where the tripe market was held, amidst the pallid calves' feet and heads, the rolled tripe neatly packed in boxes, the brains delicately set out in flat baskets, the sanguineous livers, and purplish kidneys. He checked his steps in front of some long two-wheeled carts, covered with round awnings, and containing sides of pork hung on each side of the vehicle over a bed of straw. Seen from the back end, the interiors of the carts looked like recesses of some tabernacle, like some taper-lighted chapel, such was the glow of all the bare flesh they contained. And on the beds of straw were lines of tin cans, full of the blood that had trickled from the pigs. Thereupon Florent was attacked by a sort of rage. The insipid odour of the meat, the pungent smell of the tripe exasperated him. He made his way out of the covered road, preferring to return once more to the footwalk of the Rue de Pont Neuf.

He was enduring perfect agony. The shiver of early morning came upon him; his teeth chattered, and he was afraid of falling to the ground and finding himself unable to rise again. He looked about, but could see no vacant place on any bench. Had he found one he would have dropped asleep there, even at the risk of being awakened by the police. Then, as giddiness nearly blinded him, he leaned for support against a tree, with his eyes closed and his ears ringing. The raw carrot, which he had swallowed almost without chewing, was torturing his stomach, and the glass of punch which he had drunk seemed to have intoxicated him. He was indeed intoxicated with misery, weariness, and hunger. Again he felt a burning fire in the pit of the stomach, to which he every now and then carried his hands, as though he were trying to stop up a hole through which all his life was oozing away. As he stood there he fancied that the foot-pavement rocked beneath him; and thinking that he might perhaps lessen his sufferings by walking, he went straight on through the vegetables again. He lost himself among them. He went along a narrow footway, turned down another, was forced to retrace his steps, bungled in doing so, and once more found himself amidst piles of greenery. Some heaps were so high that people seemed to be walking between walls of bundles and bunches. Only their heads slightly overtopped these ramparts, and passed along showing whitely or blackly according to the colour of their hats or caps; whilst the huge swinging baskets, carried aloft on a level with the greenery, looked like osier boats floating on a stagnant, mossy lake.

Florent stumbled against a thousand obstacles—against porters taking up their burdens, and saleswomen disputing in rough tones. He slipped over the thick bed of waste leaves and stumps which covered the footway, and was almost suffocated by the powerful odour of crushed verdure. At last he halted in a sort of confused stupor, and surrendered to the pushing of some and the insults of others; and then he became a mere waif, a piece of wreckage tossed about on the surface of that surging sea.

He was fast losing all self-respect, and would willingly have begged. The recollection of his foolish pride during the night exasperated him. If he had accepted Madame Francois's charity, if he had not felt such idiotic fear of Claude, he would not now have been stranded there groaning in the midst of these cabbages. And he was especially angry with himself for not having questioned the artist when they were in the Rue Pirouette. Now, alas! he was alone and deserted, liable to die in the streets like a homeless dog.

For the last time he raised his eyes and looked at the markets. At present they were glittering in the sun. A broad ray was pouring through the covered road from the far end, cleaving the massy pavilions with an arcade of light, whilst fiery beams rained down upon the far expanse of roofs. The huge iron framework grew less distinct, assumed a bluey hue, became nothing but a shadowy silhouette outlined against the flaming flare of the sunrise. But up above a pane of glass took fire, drops of light trickled down the broad sloping zinc plates to the gutterings; and then, below, a tumultuous city appeared amidst a haze of dancing golden dust. The general awakening had spread, from the first start of the market gardeners snoring in their cloaks, to the brisk rolling of the food-laden railway drays. And the whole city was opening its iron gates, the footways were humming, the pavilions roaring with life. Shouts and cries of all kinds rent the air; it was as though the strain, which Florent had heard gathering force in the gloom ever since four in the morning, had now attained its fullest volume. To the right and left, on all sides indeed, the sharp cries accompanying the auction sales sounded shrilly like flutes amidst the sonorous bass roar of the crowd. It was the fish, the butter, the poultry, and the meat being sold.

The pealing of bells passed through the air, imparting a quiver to the buzzing of the opening markets. Around Florent the sun was setting the vegetables aflame. He no longer perceived any of those soft water-colour tints which had predominated in the pale light of early morning. The swelling hearts of the lettuces were now gleaming brightly, the scales of greenery showed forth with wondrous vigour, the carrots glowed blood-red, the turnips shone as if incandescent in the triumphant radiance of the sun.

On Florent's left some waggons were discharging fresh loads of cabbages. He turned his eyes, and away in the distance saw carts yet streaming out of the Rue Turbigo. The tide was still and ever rising. He had felt it about his ankles, then on a level with his stomach, and now it was threatening to drown him altogether. Blinded and submerged, his ears buzzing, his stomach overpowered by all that he had seen, he asked for mercy; and wild grief took possession of him at the thought of dying there of starvation in the very heart of glutted Paris, amidst the effulgent awakening of her markets. Big hot tears started from his eyes.

Walking on, he had now reached one of the larger alleys. Two women, one short and old, the other tall and withered, passed him, talking together as they made their way towards the pavilions.

"So you've come to do your marketing, Mademoiselle Saget?" said the tall withered woman.

"Well, yes, Madame Lecoeur, if you can give it such a name as marketing. I'm a lone woman, you know, and live on next to nothing. I should have liked a small cauliflower, but everything is so dear. How is butter selling to-day?"

"At thirty-four sous. I have some which is first rate. Will you come and look at it?"

"Well, I don't know if I shall want any to-day; I've still a little lard left."

Making a supreme effort, Florent followed these two women. He recollected having heard Claude name the old one—Mademoiselle Saget—when they were in the Rue Pirouette; and he made up his mind to question her when she should have parted from her tall withered acquaintance.

"And how's your niece?" Mademoiselle Saget now asked.

"Oh, La Sarriette does as she likes," Madame Lecoeur replied in a bitter tone. "She's chosen to set up for herself and her affairs no longer concern me. When her lovers have beggared her, she needn't come to me for any bread."

"And you were so good to her, too! She ought to do well this year; fruit is yielding big profits. And your brother-in-law, how is he?"

"Oh, he——"

Madame Lecoeur bit her lips, and seemed disinclined to say anything more.

"Still the same as ever, I suppose?" continued Mademoiselle Saget. "He's a very worthy man. Still, I once heard it said that he spent his money in such a way that—"

"But does anyone know how he spends his money?" interrupted Madame Lecoeur, with much asperity. "He's a miserly niggard, a scurvy fellow, that's what I say! Do you know, mademoiselle, he'd see me die of starvation rather than lend me five francs! He knows quite well that there's nothing to be made out of butter this season, any more than out of cheese and eggs; whereas he can sell as much poultry as ever he chooses. But not once, I assure you, not once has he offered to help me. I am too proud, as you know, to accept any assistance from him; still it would have pleased me to have had it offered."

"Ah, by the way, there he is, your brother-in-law!" suddenly exclaimed Mademoiselle Saget, lowering her voice.

The two women turned and gazed at a man who was crossing the road to enter the covered way close by.

"I'm in a hurry," murmured Madame Lecoeur. "I left my stall without anyone to look after it; and, besides, I don't want to speak to him."

However, Florent also had mechanically turned round and glanced at the individual referred to. This was a short, squarely-built man, with a cheery look and grey, close-cut brush-like hair. Under each arm he was carrying a fat goose, whose head hung down and flapped against his legs. And then all at once Florent made a gesture of delight. Forgetting his fatigue, he ran after the man, and, overtaking him, tapped him on the shoulder.

"Gavard!" he exclaimed.

The other raised his head and stared with surprise at Florent's tall black figure, which he did not at first recognise. Then all at once: "What! is it you?" he cried, as if overcome with amazement. "Is it really you?"

He all but let his geese fall, and seemed unable to master his surprise. On catching sight, however, of his sister-in-law and Mademoiselle Saget, who were watching the meeting at a distance, he began to walk on again.

"Come along; don't let us stop here," he said. "There are too many eyes and tongues about."

When they were in the covered way they began to chat. Florent related how he had gone to the Rue Pirouette, at which Gavard seemed much amused and laughed heartily. Then he told Florent that his brother Quenu had moved from that street and had reopened his pork shop close by, in the Rue Rambuteau, just in front of the markets. And afterwards he was again highly amused to hear that Florent had been wandering about all that morning with Claude Lantier, an odd kind of fish, who, strangely enough, said he, was Madame Quenu's nephew. Thus chatting, Gavard was on the point of taking Florent straight to the pork shop, but, on hearing that he had returned to France with false papers, he suddenly assumed all sorts of solemn and mysterious airs, and insisted upon walking some fifteen paces in front of him, to avoid attracting attention. After passing through the poultry pavilion, where he hung his geese up in his stall, he began to cross the Rue Rambuteau, still followed by Florent; and then, halting in the middle of the road, he glanced significantly towards a large and well-appointed pork shop.

The sun was obliquely enfilading the Rue Rambuteau, lighting up the fronts of the houses, in the midst of which the Rue Pirouette formed a dark gap. At the other end the great pile of Saint Eustache glittered brightly in the sunlight like some huge reliquary. And right through the crowd, from the distant crossway, an army of street-sweepers was advancing in file down the road, the brooms swishing rhythmically, while scavengers provided with forks pitched the collected refuse into tumbrels, which at intervals of a score of paces halted with a noise like the chattering of broken pots. However, all Florent's attention was concentrated on the pork shop, open and radiant in the rising sun.

It stood very near the corner of the Rue Pirouette and provided quite a feast for the eyes. Its aspect was bright and smiling, touches of brilliant colour showing conspicuously amidst all the snowy marble. The sign board, on which the name of QUENU-GRADELLE glittered in fat gilt letters encircled by leaves and branches painted on a soft-hued background, was protected by a sheet of glass. On two panels, one on each side of the shop-front, and both, like the board above, covered with glass, were paintings representing various chubby little cupids playing amidst boars' heads, pork chops and strings of sausages; and these latter still-life subjects, embellished with scrolls and bows, had been painted in such soft tones that the uncooked pork which they represented had the pinkiness of raspberry jam. Within this pleasing framework arose the window display, arranged upon a bed of fine blue-paper shavings. Here and there fern-leaves, tastefully disposed, changed the plates which they encircled into bouquets fringed with foliage. There was a wealth of rich, luscious, melting things. Down below, quite close to the window, jars of preserved sausage-meat were interspersed with pots of mustard. Above these were some small, plump, boned hams. Golden with their dressings of toasted bread-crumbs, and adorned at the knuckles with green rosettes. Next came the larger dishes, some containing preserved Strasburg tongues, enclosed in bladders coloured a bright red and varnished, so that they looked quite sanguineous beside the pale sausages and trotters; then there were black-puddings coiled like harmless snakes, healthy looking chitterlings piled up two by two; Lyons sausages in little silver copes that made them look like choristers; hot pies, with little banner-like tickets stuck in them; big hams, and great glazed joints of veal and pork, whose jelly was as limpid as sugar-candy. In the rear were other dishes and earthen pans in which meat, minced and sliced, slumbered beneath lakes of melted fat. And betwixt the various plates and dishes, jars and bottle of sauce, cullis, stock and preserved truffles, pans of foie gras and boxes of sardines and tunny-fish were strewn over the bed of paper shavings. A box of creamy cheeses, and one of edible snails, the apertures of whose shells were dressed with butter and parsley, had been placed carelessly at either corner. Finally, from a bar overhead strings of sausages and saveloys of various sizes hung down symmetrically like cords and tassels; while in the rear fragments of intestinal membranes showed like lacework, like some guipure of white flesh. And on the highest tier in this sanctuary of gluttony, amidst the membranes and between two bouquets of purple gladioli, the window stand was crowned by a small square aquarium, ornamented with rock-work, and containing a couple of gold-fish, which were continually swimming round it.

Florent's whole body thrilled at the sight. Then he perceived a woman standing in the sunlight at the door of the shop. With her prosperous, happy look in the midst of all those inviting things she added to the cherry aspect of the place. She was a fine woman and quite blocked the doorway. Still, she was not over stout, but simply buxom, with the full ripeness of her thirty years. She had only just risen, yet her glossy hair was already brushed smooth and arranged in little flat bands over her temples, giving her an appearance of extreme neatness. She had the fine skin, the pinky-white complexion common to those whose life is spent in an atmosphere of raw meat and fat. There was a touch of gravity about her demeanour, her movements were calm and slow; what mirth or pleasure she felt she expressed by her eyes, her lips retaining all their seriousness. A collar of starched linen encircled her neck, white sleevelets reached to her elbows, and a white apron fell even over the tips of her shoes, so that you saw but little of her black cashmere dress, which clung tightly to her well-rounded shoulders and swelling bosom. The sun rays poured hotly upon all the whiteness she displayed. However, although her bluish-black hair, her rosy face, and bright sleeves and apron were steeped in the glow of light, she never once blinked, but enjoyed her morning bath of sunshine with blissful tranquillity, her soft eyes smiling the while at the flow and riot of the markets. She had the appearance of a very worthy woman.

"That is your brother's wife, your sister-in-law, Lisa," Gavard said to Florent.

He had saluted her with a slight inclination of the head. Then he darted along the house passage, continuing to take the most minute precautions, and unwilling to let Florent enter the premises through the shop, though there was no one there. It was evident that he felt great pleasure in dabbling in what he considered to be a compromising business.

"Wait here," he said, "while I go to see whether your brother is alone. You can come in when I clap my hands."

Thereupon he opened a door at the end of the passage. But as soon as Florent heard his brother's voice behind it, he sprang inside at a bound. Quenu, who was much attached to him, threw his arms round his neck, and they kissed each other like children.

"Ah! dash it all! Is it really you, my dear fellow?" stammered the pork butcher. "I never expected to see you again. I felt sure you were dead! Why, only yesterday I was saying to Lisa, 'That poor fellow, Florent!'"

However, he stopped short, and popping his head into the shop, called out, "Lisa! Lisa!" Then turning towards a little girl who had crept into a corner, he added, "Pauline, go and find your mother."

The little one did not stir, however. She was an extremely fine child, five years of age, with a plump chubby face, bearing a strong resemblance to that of the pork butcher's wife. In her arms she was holding a huge yellow cat, which had cheerfully surrendered itself to her embrace, with its legs dangling downwards; and she now squeezed it tightly with her little arms, as if she were afraid that yonder shabby-looking gentleman might rob her of it.

Lisa, however, leisurely made her appearance.

"Here is my brother Florent!" exclaimed Quenu.

Lisa addressed him as "Monsieur," and gave him a kindly welcome. She scanned him quietly from head to foot, without evincing any disagreeable surprise. Merely a faint pout appeared for a moment on her lips. Then, standing by, she began to smile at her husband's demonstrations of affection. Quenu, however, at last recovered his calmness, and noticing Florent's fleshless, poverty-stricken appearance, exclaimed: "Ah, my poor fellow, you haven't improved in your looks since you were over yonder. For my part, I've grown fat; but what would you have!"

He had indeed grown fat, too fat for his thirty years. He seemed to be bursting through his shirt and apron, through all the snowy-white linen in which he was swathed like a huge doll. With advancing years his clean-shaven face had become elongated, assuming a faint resemblance to the snout of one of those pigs amidst whose flesh his hands worked and lived the whole day through. Florent scarcely recognised him. He had now seated himself, and his glance turned from his brother to handsome Lisa and little Pauline. They were all brimful of health, squarely built, sleek, in prime condition; and in their turn they looked at Florent with the uneasy astonishment which corpulent people feel at the sight of a scraggy person. The very cat, whose skin was distended by fat, dilated its yellow eyes and scrutinised him with an air of distrust.

"You'll wait till we have breakfast, won't you?" asked Quenu. "We have it early, at ten o'clock."

A penetrating odour of cookery pervaded the place; and Florent looked back upon the terrible night which he had just spent, his arrival amongst the vegetables, his agony in the midst of the markets, the endless avalanches of food from which he had just escaped. And then in a low tone and with a gentle smile he responded:

"No; I'm really very hungry, you see."

CHAPTER II

Florent had just begun to study law in Paris when his mother died. She lived at Le Vigan, in the department of the Gard, and had taken for her second husband one Quenu, a native of Yvetot in Normandy, whom some sub-prefect had transplanted to the south and then forgotten there. He had remained in employment at the sub-prefecture, finding the country charming, the wine good, and the women very amiable. Three years after his marriage he had been carried off by a bad attack of indigestion, leaving as sole legacy to his wife a sturdy boy who resembled him. It was only with very great difficulty that the widow could pay the college fees of Florent, her elder son, the issue of her first marriage. He was a very gentle youth, devoted to his studies, and constantly won the chief prizes at school. It was upon him that his mother lavished all her affection and based all her hopes. Perhaps, in bestowing so much love on this slim pale youth, she was giving evidence of her preference for her first husband, a tender-hearted, caressing Provencal, who had loved her devotedly. Quenu, whose good humour and amiability had at first attracted her, had perhaps displayed too much self-satisfaction, and shown too plainly that he looked upon himself as the main source of happiness. At all events she formed the opinion that her younger son—and in southern families younger sons are still often sacrificed—would never do any good; so she contented herself with sending him to a school kept by a neighbouring old maid, where the lad learned nothing but how to idle his time away. The two brothers grew up far apart from each other, as though they were strangers.

When Florent arrived at Le Vigan his mother was already buried. She had insisted upon having her illness concealed from him till the very last moment, for fear of disturbing his studies. Thus he found little Quenu, who was then twelve years old, sitting and sobbing alone on a table in the middle of the kitchen. A furniture dealer, a neighbour, gave him particulars of his mother's last hours. She had reached the end of her resources, had killed herself by the hard work which she had undertaken to earn sufficient money that her elder son might continue his legal studies. To her modest trade in ribbons, the profits of which were but small, she had been obliged to add other occupations, which kept her up very late at night. Her one idea of seeing Florent established as an advocate, holding a good position in the town, had gradually caused her to become hard and miserly, without pity for either herself or others. Little Quenu was allowed to wander about in ragged breeches, and in blouses from which the sleeves were falling away. He never dared to serve himself at table, but waited till he received his allowance of bread from his mother's hands. She gave herself equally thin slices, and it was to the effects of this regimen that she had succumbed, in deep despair at having failed to accomplish her self-allotted task.

This story made a most painful impression upon Florent's tender nature, and his sobs wellnigh choked him. He took his little half brother in his arms, held him to his breast, and kissed him as though to restore to him the love of which he had unwittingly deprived him. Then he looked at the lad's gaping shoes, torn sleeves, and dirty hands, at all the manifest signs of wretchedness and neglect. And he told him that he would take him away, and that they would both live happily together. The next day, when he began to inquire into affairs, he felt afraid that he would not be able to keep sufficient money to pay for the journey back to Paris. However, he was determined to leave Le Vigan at any cost. He was fortunately able to sell the little ribbon business, and this enabled him to discharge his mother's debts, for despite her strictness in money matters she had gradually run up bills. Then, as there was nothing left, his mother's neighbour, the furniture dealer, offered him five hundred francs for her chattels and stock of linen. It was a very good bargain for the dealer, but the young man thanked him with tears in his eyes. He bought his brother some new clothes, and took him away that same evening.

On his return to Paris he gave up all thought of continuing to attend the Law School, and postponed every ambitious project. He obtained a few pupils, and established himself with little Quenu in the Rue Royer Collard, at the corner of the Rue Saint Jacques, in a big room which he furnished with two iron bedsteads, a wardrobe, a table, and four chairs. He now had a child to look after, and this assumed paternity was very pleasing to him. During the earlier days he attempted to give the lad some lessons when he returned home in the evening, but Quenu was an unwilling pupil. He was dull of understanding, and refused to learn, bursting into tears and regretfully recalling the time when his mother had allowed him to run wild in the streets. Florent thereupon stopped his lessons in despair, and to console the lad promised him a holiday of indefinite length. As an excuse for his own weakness he repeated that he had not brought his brother to Paris to distress him. To see him grow up in happiness became his chief desire. He quite worshipped the boy, was charmed with his merry laughter, and felt infinite joy in seeing him about him, healthy and vigorous, and without a care. Florent for his part remained very slim and lean in his threadbare coat, and his face began to turn yellow amidst all the drudgery and worry of teaching; but Quenu grew up plump and merry, a little dense, indeed, and scarce able to read or write, but endowed with high spirits which nothing could ruffle, and which filled the big gloomy room in the Rue Royer Collard with gaiety.

Years, meantime, passed by. Florent, who had inherited all his mother's spirit of devotion, kept Quenu at home as though he were a big, idle girl. He did not even suffer him to perform any petty domestic duties, but always went to buy the provisions himself, and attended to the cooking and other necessary matters. This kept him, he said, from indulging in his own bad thoughts. He was given to gloominess, and fancied that he was disposed to evil. When he returned home in the evening, splashed with mud, and his head bowed by the annoyances to which other people's children had subjected him, his heart melted beneath the embrace of the sturdy lad whom he found spinning his top on the tiled flooring of the big room. Quenu laughed at his brother's clumsiness in making omelettes, and at the serious fashion in which he prepared the soup-beef and vegetables. When the lamp was extinguished, and Florent lay in bed, he sometimes gave way to feelings of sadness. He longed to resume his legal studies, and strove to map out his duties in such wise as to secure time to follow the programme of the faculty. He succeeded in doing this, and was then perfectly happy. But a slight attack of fever, which confined him to his room for a week, made such a hole in his purse, and caused him so much alarm, that he abandoned all idea of completing his studies. The boy was now getting a big fellow, and Florent took a post as teacher in a school in the Rue de l'Estrapade, at a salary of eighteen hundred francs per annum. This seemed like a fortune to him. By dint of economy he hoped to be able to amass a sum of money which would set Quenu going in the world. When the lad reached his eighteenth year Florent still treated him as though he were a daughter for whom a dowry must be provided.

However, during his brother's brief illness Quenu himself had made certain reflections. One morning he proclaimed his desire to work, saying that he was now old enough to earn his own living. Florent was deeply touched at this. Just opposite, on the other side of the street, lived a working watchmaker whom Quenu, through the curtainless window, could see leaning over a little table, manipulating all sorts of delicate things, and patiently gazing at them through a magnifying glass all day long. The lad was much attracted by the sight, and declared that he had a taste for watchmaking. At the end of a fortnight, however, he became restless, and began to cry like a child of ten, complaining that the work was too complicated, and that he would never be able to understand all the silly little things that enter into the construction of a watch.

His next whim was to be a locksmith; but this calling he found too fatiguing. In a couple of years he tried more than ten different trades. Florent opined that he acted rightly, that it was wrong to take up a calling one did not like. However, Quenu's fine eagerness to work for his living strained the resources of the little establishment very seriously. Since he had begun flitting from one workshop to another there had been a constant succession of fresh expenses; money had gone in new clothes, in meals taken away from home, and in the payment of footings among fellow workmen. Florent's salary of eighteen hundred francs was no longer sufficient, and he was obliged to take a couple of pupils in the evenings. For eight years he had continued to wear the same old coat.

However, the two brothers had made a friend. One side of the house in which they lived overlooked the Rue Saint Jacques, where there was a large poultry-roasting establishment[*] kept by a worthy man called Gavard, whose wife was dying from consumption amidst an atmosphere redolent of plump fowls. When Florent returned home too late to cook a scrap of meat, he was in the habit of laying out a dozen sous or so on a small portion of turkey or goose at this shop. Such days were feast days. Gavard in time grew interested in this tall, scraggy customer, learned his history, and invited Quenu into his shop. Before long the young fellow was constantly to be found there. As soon as his brother left the house he came downstairs and installed himself at the rear of the roasting shop, quite enraptured with the four huge spits which turned with a gentle sound in front of the tall bright flames.

[*] These rotisseries, now all but extinct, were at one time
a particular feature of the Parisian provision trade. I can
myself recollect several akin to the one described by M.
Zola. I suspect that they largely owed their origin to the
form and dimensions of the ordinary Parisian kitchen stove,
which did not enable people to roast poultry at home in a
convenient way. In the old French cuisine, moreover, roast
joints of meat were virtually unknown; roasting was almost
entirely confined to chickens, geese, turkeys, pheasants,
etc.; and among the middle classes people largely bought
their poultry already cooked of the rotisseur, or else
confided it to him for the purpose of roasting, in the same
way as our poorer classes still send their joints to the
baker's. Roasting was also long looked upon in France as a
very delicate art. Brillat-Savarin, in his famous
Physiologie du Gout, lays down the dictum that "A man may
become a cook, but is born a rotisseur."—Translator.

The broad copper bands of the fireplace glistened brightly, the poultry steamed, the fat bubbled melodiously in the dripping-pan, and the spits seemed to talk amongst themselves and to address kindly words to Quenu, who, with a long ladle, devoutly basted the golden breasts of the fat geese and turkeys. He would stay there for hours, quite crimson in the dancing glow of the flames, and laughing vaguely, with a somewhat stupid expression, at the birds roasting in front of him. Indeed, he did not awake from this kind of trance until the geese and turkeys were unspitted. They were placed on dishes, the spits emerged from their carcasses smoking hot, and a rich gravy flowed from either end and filled the shop with a penetrating odour. Then the lad, who, standing up, had eagerly followed every phase of the dishing, would clap his hands and begin to talk to the birds, telling them that they were very nice, and would be eaten up, and that the cats would have nothing but their bones. And he would give a start of delight whenever Gavard handed him a slice of bread, which he forthwith put into the dripping-pan that it might soak and toast there for half an hour.

It was in this shop, no doubt, that Quenu's love of cookery took its birth. Later on, when he had tried all sorts of crafts, he returned, as though driven by fate, to the spits and the poultry and the savoury gravy which induces one to lick one's fingers. At first he was afraid of vexing his brother, who was a small eater and spoke of good fare with the disdain of a man who is ignorant of it; but afterwards, on seeing that Florent listened to him when he explained the preparation of some very elaborate dish, he confessed his desires and presently found a situation at a large restaurant. From that time forward the life of the two brothers was settled. They continued to live in the room in the Rue Royer Collard, whither they returned every evening; the one glowing and radiant from his hot fire, the other with the depressed countenance of a shabby, impecunious teacher. Florent still wore his old black coat, as he sat absorbed in correcting his pupils' exercises; while Quenu, to put himself more at ease, donned his white apron, cap, and jacket, and, flitting about in front of the stove, amused himself by baking some dainty in the oven. Sometimes they smiled at seeing themselves thus attired, the one all in black, the other all in white. These different garbs, one bright and the other sombre, seemed to make the big room half gay and half mournful. Never, however, was there so much harmony in a household marked by such dissimilarity. Though the elder brother grew thinner and thinner, consumed by the ardent temperament which he had inherited from his Provencal father, and the younger one waxed fatter and fatter like a true son of Normandy, they loved each other in the brotherhood they derived from their mother—a mother who had been all devotion.

They had a relation in Paris, a brother of their mother's, one Gradelle, who was in business as a pork butcher in the Rue Pirouette, near the central markets. He was a fat, hard-hearted, miserly fellow, and received his nephews as though they were starving paupers the first time they paid him a visit. They seldom went to see him afterwards. On his nameday Quenu would take him a bunch of flowers, and receive a half-franc piece in return for it. Florent's proud and sensitive nature suffered keenly when Gradelle scrutinised his shabby clothes with the anxious, suspicious glance of a miser apprehending a request for a dinner, or the loan of a five-franc piece. One day, however, it occurred to Florent in all artlessness to ask his uncle to change a hundred-franc note for him, and after this the pork butcher showed less alarm at sight of the lads, as he called them. Still, their friendship got no further than these infrequent visits.

These years were like a long, sweet, sad dream to Florent. As they passed he tasted to the full all the bitter joys of self-sacrifice. At home, in the big room, life was all love and tenderness; but out in the world, amidst the humiliations inflicted on him by his pupils, and the rough jostling of the streets, he felt himself yielding to wicked thoughts. His slain ambitions embittered him. It was long before he could bring himself to bow to his fate, and accept with equanimity the painful lot of a poor, plain, commonplace man. At last, to guard against the temptations of wickedness, he plunged into ideal goodness, and sought refuge in a self-created sphere of absolute truth and justice. It was then that he became a republican, entering into the republican idea even as heart-broken girls enter a convent. And not finding a republic where sufficient peace and kindliness prevailed to lull his troubles to sleep, he created one for himself. He took no pleasure in books. All the blackened paper amidst which he lived spoke of evil-smelling class-rooms, of pellets of paper chewed by unruly schoolboys, of long, profitless hours of torture. Besides, books only suggested to him a spirit of mutiny and pride, whereas it was of peace and oblivion that he felt most need. To lull and soothe himself with the ideal imaginings, to dream that he was perfectly happy, and that all the world would likewise become so, to erect in his brain the republican city in which he would fain have lived, such now became his recreation, the task, again and again renewed, of all his leisure hours. He no longer read any books beyond those which his duties compelled him to peruse; he preferred to tramp along the Rue Saint Jacques as far as the outer boulevards, occasionally going yet a greater distance and returning by the Barriere d'Italie; and all along the road, with his eyes on the Quartier Mouffetard spread out at his feet, he would devise reforms of great moral and humanitarian scope, such as he thought would change that city of suffering into an abode of bliss. During the turmoil of February 1848, when Paris was stained with blood he became quite heartbroken, and rushed from one to another of the public clubs demanding that the blood which had been shed should find atonement in "the fraternal embrace of all republicans throughout the world." He became one of those enthusiastic orators who preached revolution as a new religion, full of gentleness and salvation. The terrible days of December 1851, the days of the Coup d'Etat, were required to wean him from his doctrines of universal love. He was then without arms; allowed himself to be captured like a sheep, and was treated as though he were a wolf. He awoke from his sermon on universal brotherhood to find himself starving on the cold stones of a casemate at Bicetre.

Quenu, when two and twenty, was distressed with anguish when his brother did not return home. On the following day he went to seek his corpse at the cemetery of Montmartre, where the bodies of those shot down on the boulevards had been laid out in a line and covered with straw, from beneath which only their ghastly heads projected. However, Quenu's courage failed him, he was blinded by his tears, and had to pass twice along the line of corpses before acquiring the certainty that Florent's was not among them. At last, at the end of a long and wretched week, he learned at the Prefecture of Police that his brother was a prisoner. He was not allowed to see him, and when he pressed the matter the police threatened to arrest him also. Then he hastened off to his uncle Gradelle, whom he looked upon as a person of importance, hoping that he might be able to enlist his influence in Florent's behalf. But Gradelle waxed wrathful, declared that Florent deserved his fate, that he ought to have known better than to have mixed himself up with those rascally republicans. And he even added that Florent was destined to turn out badly, that it was written on his face.

Quenu wept copiously and remained there, almost choked by his sobs. His uncle, a little ashamed of his harshness, and feeling that he ought to do something for him, offered to receive him into his house. He wanted an assistant, and knew that his nephew was a good cook. Quenu was so much alarmed by the mere thought of going back to live alone in the big room in the Rue Royer Collard, that then and there he accepted Gradelle's offer. That same night he slept in his uncle's house, in a dark hole of a garret just under the room, where there was scarcely space for him to lie at full length. However, he was less wretched there than he would have been opposite his brother's empty couch.

He succeeded at length in obtaining permission to see Florent; but on his return from Bicetre he was obliged to take to his bed. For nearly three weeks he lay fever-stricken, in a stupefied, comatose state. Gradelle meantime called down all sorts of maledictions on his republican nephew; and one morning, when he heard of Florent's departure for Cayenne, he went upstairs, tapped Quenu on the hands, awoke him, and bluntly told him the news, thereby bringing about such a reaction that on the following day the young man was up and about again. His grief wore itself out, and his soft flabby flesh seemed to absorb his tears. A month later he laughed again, and then grew vexed and unhappy with himself for having been merry; but his natural light-heartedness soon gained the mastery, and he laughed afresh in unconscious happiness.

He now learned his uncle's business, from which he derived even more enjoyment than from cookery. Gradelle told him, however, that he must not neglect his pots and pans, that it was rare to find a pork butcher who was also a good cook, and that he had been lucky in serving in a restaurant before coming to the shop. Gradelle, moreover, made full use of his nephew's acquirements, employed him to cook the dinners sent out to certain customers, and placed all the broiling, and the preparation of pork chops garnished with gherkins in his special charge. As the young man was of real service to him, he grew fond of him after his own fashion, and would nip his plump arms when he was in a good humour. Gradelle had sold the scanty furniture of the room in the Rue Royer Collard and retained possession of the proceeds—some forty francs or so—in order, said he, to prevent the foolish lad, Quenu, from making ducks and drakes of the cash. After a time, however, he allowed his nephew six francs a month a pocket-money.

Quenu now became quite happy, in spite of the emptiness of his purse and the harshness with which he was occasionally treated. He liked to have life doled out to him; Florent had treated him too much like an indolent girl. Moreover, he had made a friend at his uncle's. Gradelle, when his wife died, had been obliged to engage a girl to attend to the shop, and had taken care to choose a healthy and attractive one, knowing that a good-looking girl would set off his viands and help to tempt custom. Amongst his acquaintances was a widow, living in the Rue Cuvier, near the Jardin des Plantes, whose deceased husband had been postmaster at Plassans, the seat of a sub-prefecture in the south of France. This lady, who lived in a very modest fashion on a small annuity, had brought with her from Plassans a plump, pretty child, whom she treated as her own daughter. Lisa, as the young one was called, attended upon her with much placidity and serenity of disposition. Somewhat seriously inclined, she looked quite beautiful when she smiled. Indeed, her great charm came from the exquisite manner in which she allowed this infrequent smile of hers to escape her. Her eyes then became most caressing, and her habitual gravity imparted inestimable value to these sudden, seductive flashes. The old lady had often said that one of Lisa's smiles would suffice to lure her to perdition.

When the widow died she left all her savings, amounting to some ten thousand francs, to her adopted daughter. For a week Lisa lived alone in the Rue Cuvier; it was there that Gradelle came in search of her. He had become acquainted with her by often seeing her with her mistress when the latter called on him in the Rue Pirouette; and at the funeral she had struck him as having grown so handsome and sturdy that he had followed the hearse all the way to the cemetery, though he had not intended to do so. As the coffin was being lowered into the grave, he reflected what a splendid girl she would be for the counter of a pork butcher's shop. He thought the matter over, and finally resolved to offer her thirty francs a month, with board and lodging. When he made this proposal, Lisa asked for twenty-four hours to consider it. Then she arrived one morning with a little bundle of clothes, and her ten thousand francs concealed in the bosom of her dress. A month later the whole place belonged to her; she enslaved Gradelle, Quenu, and even the smallest kitchen-boy. For his part, Quenu would have cut off his fingers to please her. When she happened to smile, he remained rooted to the floor, laughing with delight as he gazed at her.

Lisa was the eldest daughter of the Macquarts of Plassans, and her father was still alive.[*] But she said that he was abroad, and never wrote to him. Sometimes she just dropped a hint that her mother, now deceased, had been a hard worker, and that she took after her. She worked, indeed, very assiduously. However, she sometimes added that the worthy woman had slaved herself to death in striving to support her family. Then she would speak of the respective duties of husband and wife in such a practical though modest fashion as to enchant Quenu. He assured her that he fully shared her ideas. These were that everyone, man or woman, ought to work for his or her living, that everyone was charged with the duty of achieving personal happiness, that great harm was done by encouraging habits of idleness, and that the presence of so much misery in the world was greatly due to sloth. This theory of hers was a sweeping condemnation of drunkenness, of all the legendary loafing ways of her father Macquart. But, though she did not know it, there was much of Macquart's nature in herself. She was merely a steady, sensible Macquart with a logical desire for comfort, having grasped the truth of the proverb that as you make your bed so you lie on it. To sleep in blissful warmth there is no better plan than to prepare oneself a soft and downy couch; and to the preparation of such a couch she gave all her time and all her thoughts. When no more than six years old she had consented to remain quietly on her chair the whole day through on condition that she should be rewarded with a cake in the evening.

[*] See M. Zola's novel, The Fortune of the Rougons.—Translator

At Gradelle's establishment Lisa went on leading the calm, methodical life which her exquisite smiles illumined. She had not accepted the pork butcher's offer at random. She reckoned upon finding a guardian in him; with the keen scent of those who are born lucky she perhaps foresaw that the gloomy shop in the Rue Pirouette would bring her the comfortable future she dreamed of—a life of healthy enjoyment, and work without fatigue, each hour of which would bring its own reward. She attended to her counter with the quiet earnestness with which she had waited upon the postmaster's widow; and the cleanliness of her aprons soon became proverbial in the neighbourhood. Uncle Gradelle was so charmed with this pretty girl that sometimes, as he was stringing his sausages, he would say to Quenu: "Upon my word, if I weren't turned sixty, I think I should be foolish enough to marry her. A wife like she'd make is worth her weight in gold to a shopkeeper, my lad."

Quenu himself was growing still fonder of her, though he laughed merrily one day when a neighbour accused him of being in love with Lisa. He was not worried with love-sickness. The two were very good friends, however. In the evening they went up to their bedrooms together. Lisa slept in a little chamber adjoining the dark hole which the young man occupied. She had made this room of hers quite bright by hanging it with muslin curtains. The pair would stand together for a moment on the landing, holding their candles in their hands, and chatting as they unlocked their doors. Then, as they closed them, they said in friendly tones:

"Good night, Mademoiselle Lisa."

"Good night, Monsieur Quenu."

As Quenu undressed himself he listened to Lisa making her own preparations. The partition between the two rooms was very thin. "There, she is drawing her curtains now," he would say to himself; "what can she be doing, I wonder, in front of her chest of drawers? Ah! she's sitting down now and taking off her shoes. Now she's blown her candle out. Well, good night. I must get to sleep"; and at times, when he heard her bed creak as she got into it, he would say to himself with a smile, "Dash it all! Mademoiselle Lisa is no feather." This idea seemed to amuse him, and presently he would fall asleep thinking about the hams and salt pork that he had to prepare the next morning.

This state of affairs went on for a year without causing Lisa a single blush or Quenu a moment's embarrassment. When the girl came into the kitchen in the morning at the busiest moment of the day's work, they grasped hands over the dishes of sausage-meat. Sometimes she helped him, holding the skins with her plump fingers while he filled them with meat and fat. Sometimes, too, with the tips of their tongues they just tasted the raw sausage-meat, to see if it was properly seasoned. She was able to give Quenu some useful hints, for she knew of many favourite southern recipes, with which he experimented with much success. He was often aware that she was standing behind his shoulder, prying into the pans. If he wanted a spoon or a dish, she would hand it to him. The heat of the fire would bring their blood to their skins; still, nothing in the world would have induced the young man to cease stirring the fatty bouillis which were thickening over the fire while the girl stood gravely by him, discussing the amount of boiling that was necessary. In the afternoon, when the shop lacked customers, they quietly chatted together for hours at a time. Lisa sat behind the counter, leaning back, and knitting in an easy, regular fashion; while Quenu installed himself on a big oak block, dangling his legs and tapping his heels against the wood. They got on wonderfully well together, discussing all sorts of subjects, generally cookery, and then Uncle Gradelle and the neighbours. Lisa also amused the young man with stories, just as though he were a child. She knew some very pretty ones—some miraculous legends, full of lambs and little angels, which she narrated in a piping voice, with all her wonted seriousness. If a customer happened to come in, she saved herself the trouble of moving by asking Quenu to get the required pot of lard or box of snails. And at eleven o'clock they went slowly up to bed as on the previous night. As they closed their doors, they calmly repeated the words:

"Good night, Mademoiselle Lisa."

"Good night, Monsieur Quenu."

One morning Uncle Gradelle was struck dead by apoplexy while preparing a galantine. He fell forward, with his face against the chopping-block. Lisa did not lose her self-possession. She remarked that the dead man could not be left lying in the middle of the kitchen, and had the body removed into a little back room where Gradelle had slept. Then she arranged with the assistants what should be said. It must be given out that the master had died in his bed; otherwise the whole district would be disgusted, and the shop would lose its customers. Quenu helped to carry the dead man away, feeling quite confused, and astonished at being unable to shed any tears. Presently, however, he and Lisa cried together. Quenu and his brother Florent were the sole heirs. The gossips of the neighbourhood credited old Gradelle with the possession of a considerable fortune. However, not a single crown could be discovered. Lisa seemed very restless and uneasy. Quenu noticed how pensive she became, how she kept on looking around her from morning till night, as though she had lost something. At last she decided to have a thorough cleaning of the premises, declaring that people were beginning to talk, that the story of the old man's death had got about, and that it was necessary they should make a great show of cleanliness. One afternoon, after remaining in the cellar for a couple of hours, whither she herself had gone to wash the salting-tubs, she came up again, carrying something in her apron. Quenu was just then cutting up a pig's fry. She waited till he had finished, talking awhile in an easy, indifferent fashion. But there was an unusual glitter in her eyes, and she smiled her most charming smile as she told him that she wanted to speak to him. She led the way upstairs with seeming difficulty, impeded by what she had in her apron, which was strained almost to bursting.

By the time she reached the third floor she found herself short of breath, and for a moment was obliged to lean against the balustrade. Quenu, much astonished, followed her into her bedroom without saying a word. It was the first time she had ever invited him to enter it. She closed the door, and letting go the corners of her apron, which her stiffened fingers could no longer hold up, she allowed a stream of gold and silver coins to flow gently upon her bed. She had discovered Uncle Gradelle's treasure at the bottom of a salting-tub. The heap of money made a deep impression in the softy downy bed.

Lisa and Quenu evinced a quiet delight. They sat down on the edge of the bed, Lisa at the head and Quenu at the foot, on either side of the heap of coins, and they counted the money out upon the counterpane, so as to avoid making any noise. There were forty thousand francs in gold, and three thousand francs in silver, whilst in a tin box they found bank notes to the value of forty-two thousand francs. It took them two hours to count up the treasure. Quenu's hands trembled slightly, and it was Lisa who did most of the work.

They arranged the gold on the pillow in little heaps, leaving the silver in the hollow depression of the counterpane. When they had ascertained the total amount—eighty-five thousand francs, to them an enormous sum—they began to chat. And their conversation naturally turned upon their future, and they spoke of their marriage, although there had never been any previous mention of love between them. But this heap of money seemed to loosen their tongues. They had gradually seated themselves further back on the bed, leaning against the wall, beneath the white muslin curtains; and as they talked together, their hands, playing with the heap of silver between them, met, and remained linked amidst the pile of five-franc pieces. Twilight surprised them still sitting together. Then, for the first time, Lisa blushed at finding the young man by her side. For a few moments, indeed, although not a thought of evil had come to them, they felt much embarrassed. Then Lisa went to get her own ten thousand francs. Quenu wanted her to put them with his uncle's savings. He mixed the two sums together, saying with a laugh that the money must be married also. Then it was agreed that Lisa should keep the hoard in her chest of drawers. When she had locked it up they both quietly went downstairs. They were now practically husband and wife.

The wedding took place during the following month. The neighbours considered the match a very natural one, and in every way suitable. They had vaguely heard the story of the treasure, and Lisa's honesty was the subject of endless eulogy. After all, said the gossips, she might well have kept the money herself, and not have spoken a word to Quenu about it; if she had spoken, it was out of pure honesty, for no one had seen her find the hoard. She well deserved, they added, that Quenu should make her his wife. That Quenu, by the way, was a lucky fellow; he wasn't a beauty himself, yet he had secured a beautiful wife, who had disinterred a fortune for him. Some even went so far as to whisper that Lisa was a simpleton for having acted as she had done; but the young woman only smiled when people speaking to her vaguely alluded to all these things. She and her husband lived on as previously, in happy placidity and quiet affection. She still assisted him as before, their hands still met amidst the sausage-meat, she still glanced over his shoulder into the pots and pans, and still nothing but the great fire in the kitchen brought the blood to their cheeks.

However, Lisa was a woman of practical common sense, and speedily saw the folly of allowing eighty-five thousand francs to lie idle in a chest of drawers. Quenu would have willingly stowed them away again at the bottom of the salting-tub until he had gained as much more, when they could have retired from business and have gone to live at Suresnes, a suburb to which both were partial. Lisa, however, had other ambitions. The Rue Pirouette did not accord with her ideas of cleanliness, her craving for fresh air, light, and healthy life. The shop where Uncle Gradelle had accumulated his fortune, sou by sou, was a long, dark place, one of those suspicious looking pork butchers' shops of the old quarters of the city, where the well-worn flagstones retain a strong odour of meat in spite of constant washings. Now the young woman longed for one of those bright modern shops, ornamented like a drawing-room, and fringing the footway of some broad street with windows of crystalline transparence. She was not actuated by any petty ambition to play the fine lady behind a stylish counter, but clearly realised that commerce in its latest development needed elegant surroundings. Quenu showed much alarm the first time his wife suggested that they ought to move and spend some of their money in decorating a new shop. However, Lisa only shrugged her shoulders and smiled at finding him so timorous.

One evening, when night was falling and the shop had grown dark, Quenu and Lisa overheard a woman of the neighbourhood talking to a friend outside their door.

"No, indeed! I've given up dealing with them," said she. "I wouldn't buy a bit of black-pudding from them now on any account. They had a dead man in their kitchen, you know."

Quenu wept with vexation. The story of Gradelle's death in the kitchen was clearly getting about; and his nephew began to blush before his customers when he saw them sniffing his wares too closely. So, of his own accord, he spoke to his wife of her proposal to take a new shop. Lisa, without saying anything, had already been looking out for other premises, and had found some, admirably situated, only a few yards away, in the Rue Rambuteau. The immediate neighbourhood of the central markets, which were being opened just opposite, would triple their business, and make their shop known all over Paris.

Quenu allowed himself to be drawn into a lavish expenditure of money; he laid out over thirty thousand francs in marble, glass, and gilding. Lisa spent hours with the workmen, giving her views about the slightest details. When she was at last installed behind the counter, customers arrived in a perfect procession, merely for the sake of examining the shop. The inside walls were lined from top to bottom with white marble. The ceiling was covered with a huge square mirror, framed by a broad gilded cornice, richly ornamented, whilst from the centre hung a crystal chandelier with four branches. And behind the counter, and on the left, and at the far end of the shop were other mirrors, fitted between the marble panels and looking like doors opening into an infinite series of brightly lighted halls, where all sorts of appetising edibles were displayed. The huge counter on the right hand was considered a very fine piece of work. At intervals along the front were lozenge-shaped panels of pinky marble. The flooring was of tiles, alternately white and pink, with a deep red fretting as border. The whole neighbourhood was proud of the shop, and no one again thought of referring to the kitchen in the Rue Pirouette, where a man had died. For quite a month women stopped short on the footway to look at Lisa between the saveloys and bladders in the window. Her white and pink flesh excited as much admiration as the marbles. She seemed to be the soul, the living light, the healthy, sturdy idol of the pork trade; and thenceforth one and all baptised her "Lisa the beauty."

To the right of the shop was the dining-room, a neat looking apartment containing a sideboard, a table, and several cane-seated chairs of light oak. The matting on the floor, the wallpaper of a soft yellow tint, the oil-cloth table-cover, coloured to imitate oak, gave the room a somewhat cold appearance, which was relieved only by the glitter of a brass hanging lamp, suspended from the ceiling, and spreading its big shade of transparent porcelain over the table. One of the dining-room doors opened into the huge square kitchen, at the end of which was a small paved courtyard, serving for the storage of lumber—tubs, barrels and pans, and all kinds of utensils not in use. To the left of the water-tap, alongside the gutter which carried off the greasy water, stood pots of faded flowers, removed from the shop window, and slowly dying.

Business was excellent. Quenu, who had been much alarmed by the initial outlay, now regarded his wife with something like respect, and told his friends that she had "a wonderful head." At the end of five years they had nearly eighty thousand francs invested in the State funds. Lisa would say that they were not ambitious, that they had no desire to pile up money too quickly, or else she would have enabled her husband to gain hundreds and thousands of francs by prompting him to embark in the wholesale pig trade. But they were still young, and had plenty of time before them; besides, they didn't care about a rough, scrambling business, but preferred to work at their ease, and enjoy life, instead of wearing themselves out with endless anxieties.

"For instance," Lisa would add in her expansive moments, "I have, you know, a cousin in Paris. I never see him, as the two families have fallen out. He has taken the name of Saccard,[*] on account of certain matters which he wants to be forgotten. Well, this cousin of mine, I'm told, makes millions and millions of francs; but he gets no enjoyment out of life. He's always in a state of feverish excitement, always rushing hither and thither, up to his neck in all sorts of worrying business. Well, it's impossible, isn't it, for such a man to eat his dinner peaceably in the evening? We, at any rate, can take our meals comfortably, and make sure of what we eat, and we are not harassed by worries as he is. The only reason why people should care for money is that money's wanted for one to live. People like comfort; that's natural. But as for making money simply for the sake of making it, and giving yourself far more trouble and anxiety to gain it than you can ever get pleasure from it when it's gained, why, as for me, I'd rather sit still and cross my arms. And besides, I should like to see all those millions of my cousin's. I can't say that I altogether believe in them. I caught sight of him the other day in his carriage. He was quite yellow, and looked ever so sly. A man who's making money doesn't have that kind of expression. But it's his business, and not mine. For our part, we prefer to make merely a hundred sous at a time, and to get a hundred sous' worth of enjoyment out of them."

[*] See M. Zola's novel, Money.

The household was undoubtedly thriving. A daughter had been born to the young couple during their first year of wedlock, and all three of them looked blooming. The business went on prosperously, without any laborious fatigue, just as Lisa desired. She had carefully kept free of any possible source of trouble or anxiety, and the days went by in an atmosphere of peaceful, unctuous prosperity. Their home was a nook of sensible happiness—a comfortable manger, so to speak, where father, mother, and daughter could grow sleek and fat. It was only Quenu who occasionally felt sad, through thinking of his brother Florent. Up to the year 1856 he had received letters from him at long intervals. Then no more came, and he had learned from a newspaper that three convicts having attempted to escape from the Ile du Diable, had been drowned before they were able to reach the mainland. He had made inquiries at the Prefecture of Police, but had not learnt anything definite; it seemed probable that his brother was dead. However, he did not lose all hope, though months passed without any tidings. Florent, in the meantime, was wandering about Dutch Guiana, and refrained from writing home as he was ever in hope of being able to return to France. Quenu at last began to mourn for him as one mourns for those whom one has been unable to bid farewell. Lisa had never known Florent, but she spoke very kindly whenever she saw her husband give way to his sorrow; and she evinced no impatience when for the hundredth time or so he began to relate stories of his early days, of his life in the big room in the Rue Royer Collard, the thirty-six trades which he had taken up one after another, and the dainties which he had cooked at the stove, dressed all in white, while Florent was dressed all in black. To such talk as this, indeed, she listened placidly, with a complacency which never wearied.

It was into the midst of all this happiness, ripening after careful culture, that Florent dropped one September morning just as Lisa was taking her matutinal bath of sunshine, and Quenu, with his eyes still heavy with sleep, was lazily applying his fingers to the congealed fat left in the pans from the previous evening. Florent's arrival caused a great commotion. Gavard advised them to conceal the "outlaw," as he somewhat pompously called Florent. Lisa, who looked pale, and more serious than was her wont, at last took him to the fifth floor, where she gave him the room belonging to the girl who assisted her in the shop. Quenu had cut some slices of bread and ham, but Florent was scarcely able to eat. He was overcome by dizziness and nausea, and went to bed, where he remained for five days in a state of delirium, the outcome of an attack of brain-fever, which fortunately received energetic treatment. When he recovered consciousness he perceived Lisa sitting by his bedside, silently stirring some cooling drink in a cup. As he tried to thank her, she told him that he must keep perfectly quiet, and that they could talk together later on. At the end of another three days Florent was on his feet again. Then one morning Quenu went up to tell him that Lisa awaited them in her room on the first floor.

Quenu and his wife there occupied a suite of three rooms and a dressing-room. You first passed through an antechamber, containing nothing but chairs, and then a small sitting-room, whose furniture, shrouded in white covers, slumbered in the gloom cast by the Venetian shutters, which were always kept closed so as to prevent the light blue of the upholstery from fading. Then came the bedroom, the only one of the three which was really used. It was very comfortably furnished in mahogany. The bed, bulky and drowsy of aspect in the depths of the damp alcove, was really wonderful, with its four mattresses, its four pillows, its layers of blankets, and its corpulent edredon. It was evidently a bed intended for slumber. A mirrored wardrobe, a washstand with drawers, a small central table with a worked cover, and several chairs whose seats were protected by squares of lace, gave the room an aspect of plain but substantial middle-class luxury. On the left-hand wall, on either side of the mantelpiece, which was ornamented with some landscape-painted vases mounted on bronze stands, and a gilt timepiece on which a figure of Gutenberg, also gilt, stood in an attitude of deep thought, hung portraits in oils of Quenu and Lisa, in ornate oval frames. Quenu had a smiling face, while Lisa wore an air of grave propriety; and both were dressed in black and depicted in flattering fashion, their features idealised, their skins wondrously smooth, their complexions soft and pinky. A carpet, in the Wilton style, with a complicated pattern of roses mingling with stars, concealed the flooring; while in front of the bed was a fluffy mat, made out of long pieces of curly wool, a work of patience at which Lisa herself had toiled while seated behind her counter. But the most striking object of all in the midst of this array of new furniture was a great square, thick-set secretaire, which had been re-polished in vain, for the cracks and notches in the marble top and the scratches on the old mahogany front, quite black with age, still showed plainly. Lisa had desired to retain this piece of furniture, however, as Uncle Gradelle had used it for more than forty years. It would bring them good luck, she said. It's metal fastenings were truly something terrible, it's lock was like that of a prison gate, and it was so heavy that it could scarcely be moved.

When Florent and Quenu entered the room they found Lisa seated at the lowered desk of the secretaire, writing and putting down figures in a big, round, and very legible hand. She signed to them not to disturb her, and the two men sat down. Florent looked round the room, and notably at the two portraits, the bed and the timepiece, with an air of surprise.

"There!" at last exclaimed Lisa, after having carefully verified a whole page of calculations. "Listen to me now; we have an account to render to you, my dear Florent."

It was the first time that she had so addressed him. However, taking up the page of figures, she continued: "Your Uncle Gradelle died without leaving a will. Consequently you and your brother are his sole heirs. We now have to hand your share over to you."

"But I do not ask you for anything!" exclaimed Florent, "I don't wish for anything!"

Quenu had apparently been in ignorance of his wife's intentions. He turned rather pale and looked at her with an expression of displeasure. Of course, he certainly loved his brother dearly; but there was no occasion to hurl his uncle's money at him in this way. There would have been plenty of time to go into the matter later on.

"I know very well, my dear Florent," continued Lisa, "that you did not come back with the intention of claiming from us what belongs to you; but business is business, you know, and we had better get things settled at once. Your uncle's savings amounted to eighty-five thousand francs. I have therefore put down forty-two thousand five hundred to your credit. See!"

She showed him the figures on the sheet of paper.

"It is unfortunately not so easy to value the shop, plant, stock-in-trade, and goodwill. I have only been able to put down approximate amounts, but I don't think I have underestimated anything. Well, the total valuation which I have made comes to fifteen thousand three hundred and ten francs; your half of which is seven thousand six hundred and fifty-five francs, so that your share amounts, in all, to fifty thousand one hundred and fifty-five francs. Please verify it for yourself, will you?"

She had called out the figures in a clear, distinct voice, and she now handed the paper to Florent, who was obliged to take it.

"But the old man's business was certainly never worth fifteen thousand francs!" cried Quenu. "Why, I wouldn't have given ten thousand for it!"

He had ended by getting quite angry with his wife. Really, it was absurd to carry honesty to such a point as that! Had Florent said one word about the business? No, indeed, he had declared that he didn't wish for anything.

"The business was worth fifteen thousand three hundred and ten francs," Lisa re-asserted, calmly. "You will agree with me, my dear Florent, that it is quite unnecessary to bring a lawyer into our affairs. It is for us to arrange the division between ourselves, since you have now turned up again. I naturally thought of this as soon as you arrived; and, while you were in bed with the fever, I did my best to draw up this little inventory. It contains, as you see, a fairly complete statement of everything. I have been through our old books, and have called up my memory to help me. Read it aloud, and I will give you any additional information you may want."

Florent ended by smiling. He was touched by this easy and, as it were, natural display of probity. Placing the sheet of figures on the young woman's knee, he took hold of her hand and said, "I am very glad, my dear Lisa, to hear that you are prosperous, but I will not take your money. The heritage belongs to you and my brother, who took care of my uncle up to the last. I don't require anything, and I don't intend to hamper you in carrying on your business."

Lisa insisted, and even showed some vexation, while Quenu gnawed his thumbs in silence to restrain himself.

"Ah!" resumed Florent with a laugh, "if Uncle Gradelle could hear you, I think he'd come back and take the money away again. I was never a favourite of his, you know."

"Well, no," muttered Quenu, no longer able to keep still, "he certainly wasn't over fond of you."

Lisa, however, still pressed the matter. She did not like to have money in her secretaire that did not belong to her; it would worry her, said she; the thought of it would disturb her peace. Thereupon Florent, still in a joking way, proposed to invest his share in the business. Moreover, said he, he did not intend to refuse their help; he would, no doubt, be unable to find employment all at once; and then, too, he would need a complete outfit, for he was scarcely presentable.

"Of course," cried Quenu, "you will board and lodge with us, and we will buy you all that you want. That's understood. You know very well that we are not likely to leave you in the streets, I hope!"

He was quite moved now, and even felt a trifle ashamed of the alarm he had experienced at the thought of having to hand over a large amount of money all at once. He began to joke, and told his brother that he would undertake to fatten him. Florent gently shook his hand; while Lisa folded up the sheet of figures and put it away in a drawer of the secretaire.

"You are wrong," she said by way of conclusion. "I have done what I was bound to do. Now it shall be as you wish. But, for my part, I should never have had a moment's peace if I had not put things before you. Bad thoughts would quite upset me."

They then began to speak of another matter. It would be necessary to give some reason for Florent's presence, and at the same time avoid exciting the suspicion of the police. He told them that in order to return to France he had availed himself of the papers of a poor fellow who had died in his arms at Surinam from yellow fever. By a singular coincidence this young fellow's Christian name was Florent.

Florent Laquerriere, to give him his name in full, had left but one relation in Paris, a female cousin, and had been informed of her death while in America. Nothing could therefore be easier than for Quenu's half brother to pass himself off as the man who had died at Surinam. Lisa offered to take upon herself the part of the female cousin. They then agreed to relate that their cousin Florent had returned from abroad, where he had failed in his attempts to make a fortune, and that they, the Quenu-Gradelles, as they were called in the neighbourhood, had received him into their house until he could find suitable employment. When this was all settled, Quenu insisted upon his brother making a thorough inspection of the rooms, and would not spare him the examination of a single stool. Whilst they were in the bare looking chamber containing nothing but chairs, Lisa pushed open a door, and showing Florent a small dressing room, told him that the shop girl should sleep in it, so that he could retain the bedroom on the fifth floor.

In the evening Florent was arrayed in new clothes from head to foot. He had insisted upon again having a black coat and black trousers, much against the advice of Quenu, upon whom black had a depressing effect. No further attempts were made to conceal his presence in the house, and Lisa told the story which had been planned to everyone who cared to hear it. Henceforth Florent spent almost all his time on the premises, lingering on a chair in the kitchen or leaning against the marble-work in the shop. At meal times Quenu plied him with food, and evinced considerable vexation when he proved such a small eater and left half the contents of his liberally filled plate untouched. Lisa had resumed her old life, evincing a kindly tolerance of her brother-in-law's presence, even in the morning, when he somewhat interfered with the work. Then she would momentarily forget him, and on suddenly perceiving his black form in front of her give a slight start of surprise, followed, however, by one of her sweet smiles, lest he might feel at all hurt. This skinny man's disinterestedness had impressed her, and she regarded him with a feeling akin to respect, mingled with vague fear. Florent had for his part only felt that there was great affection around him.

When bedtime came he went upstairs, a little wearied by his lazy day, with the two young men whom Quenu employed as assistants, and who slept in attics adjoining his own. Leon, the apprentice, was barely fifteen years of age. He was a slight, gentle looking lad, addicted to stealing stray slices of ham and bits of sausages. These he would conceal under his pillow, eating them during the night without any bread. Several times at about one o'clock in the morning Florent almost fancied that Leon was giving a supper-party; for he heard low whispering followed by a sound of munching jaws and rustling paper. And then a rippling girlish laugh would break faintly on the deep silence of the sleeping house like the soft trilling of a flageolet.

The other assistant, Auguste Landois, came from Troyes. Bloated with unhealthy fat, he had too large a head, and was already bald, although only twenty-eight years of age. As he went upstairs with Florent on the first evening, he told him his story in a confused, garrulous way. He had at first come to Paris merely for the purpose of perfecting himself in the business, intending to return to Troyes, where his cousin, Augustine Landois, was waiting for him, and there setting up for himself as a pork butcher. He and she had had the game godfather and bore virtually the same Christian name. However, he had grown ambitious; and now hoped to establish himself in business in Paris by the aid of the money left him by his mother, which he had deposited with a notary before leaving Champagne.

Auguste had got so far in his narrative when the fifth floor was reached; however, he still detained Florent, in order to sound the praises of Madame Quenu, who had consented to send for Augustine Landois to replace an assistant who had turned out badly. He himself was now thoroughly acquainted with his part of the business, and his cousin was perfecting herself in shop management. In a year or eighteen months they would be married, and then they would set up on their own account in some populous corner of Paris, at Plaisance most likely. They were in no great hurry, he added, for the bacon trade was very bad that year. Then he proceeded to tell Florent that he and his cousin had been photographed together at the fair of St. Ouen, and he entered the attic to have another look at the photograph, which Augustine had left on the mantelpiece, in her desire that Madame Quenu's cousin should have a pretty room. Auguste lingered there for a moment, looking quite livid in the dim yellow light of his candle, and casting his eyes around the little chamber which was still full of memorials of the young girl. Next, stepping up to the bed, he asked Florent if it was comfortable. His cousin slept below now, said he, and would be better there in the winter, for the attics were very cold. Then at last he went off, leaving Florent alone with the bed, and standing in front of the photograph. As shown on the latter Auguste looked like a sort of pale Quenu, and Augustine like an immature Lisa.

Florent, although on friendly terms with the assistants, petted by his brother, and cordially treated by Lisa, presently began to feel very bored. He had tried, but without success, to obtain some pupils; moreover, he purposely avoided the students' quarter for fear of being recognised. Lisa gently suggested to him that he had better try to obtain a situation in some commercial house, where he could take charge of the correspondence and keep the books. She returned to this subject again and again, and at last offered to find a berth for him herself. She was gradually becoming impatient at finding him so often in her way, idle, and not knowing what to do with himself. At first this impatience was merely due to the dislike she felt of people who do nothing but cross their arms and eat, and she had no thought of reproaching him for consuming her substance.

"For my own part," she would say to him, "I could never spend the whole day in dreamy lounging. You can't have any appetite for your meals. You ought to tire yourself."

Gavard, also, was seeking a situation for Florent, but in a very extraordinary and most mysterious fashion. He would have liked to find some employment of a dramatic character, or in which there should be a touch of bitter irony, as was suitable for an outlaw. Gavard was a man who was always in opposition. He had just completed his fiftieth year, and he boasted that he had already passed judgment on four Governments. He still contemptuously shrugged his shoulders at the thought of Charles X, the priests and nobles and other attendant rabble, whom he had helped to sweep away. Louis Philippe, with his bourgeois following, had been an imbecile, and he could tell how the citizen-king had hoarded his coppers in a woollen stocking. As for the Republic of '48, that had been a mere farce, the working classes had deceived him; however, he no longer acknowledged that he had applauded the Coup d'Etat, for he now looked upon Napoleon III as his personal enemy, a scoundrel who shut himself up with Morny and others to indulge in gluttonous orgies. He was never weary of holding forth upon this subject. Lowering his voice a little, he would declare that women were brought to the Tuileries in closed carriages every evening, and that he, who was speaking, had one night heard the echoes of the orgies while crossing the Place du Carrousel. It was Gavard's religion to make himself as disagreeable as possible to any existing Government. He would seek to spite it in all sorts of ways, and laugh in secret for several months at the pranks he played. To begin with, he voted for candidates who would worry the Ministers at the Corps Legislatif. Then, if he could rob the revenue, or baffle the police, and bring about a row of some kind or other, he strove to give the affair as much of an insurrectionary character as possible. He told a great many lies, too; set himself up as being a very dangerous man; talked as though "the satellites of the Tuileries" were well acquainted with him and trembled at the sight of him; and asserted that one half of them must be guillotined, and the other half transported, the next time there was "a flare-up." His violent political creed found food in boastful, bragging talk of this sort; he displayed all the partiality for a lark and a rumpus which prompts a Parisian shopkeeper to take down his shutters on a day of barricade-fighting to get a good view of the corpses of the slain. When Florent returned from Cayenne, Gavard opined that he had got hold of a splendid chance for some abominable trick, and bestowed much thought upon the question of how he might best vent his spleen on the Emperor and Ministers and everyone in office, down to the very lowest police constable.

Gavard's manners with Florent were altogether those of a man tasting some forbidden pleasure. He contemplated him with blinking eyes, lowered his voice even when making the most trifling remark, and grasped his hand with all sorts of masonic flummery. He had at last lighted upon something in the way of an adventure; he had a friend who was really compromised, and could, without falsehood speak of the dangers he incurred. He undoubtedly experienced a secret alarm at the sight of this man who had returned from transportation, and whose fleshlessness testified to the long sufferings he had endured; however, this touch of alarm was delightful, for it increased his notion of his own importance, and convinced him that he was really doing something wonderful in treating a dangerous character as a friend. Florent became a sort of sacred being in his eyes: he swore by him alone, and had recourse to his name whenever arguments failed him and he wanted to crush the Government once and for all.

Gavard had lost his wife in the Rue Saint Jacques some months after the Coup d'Etat; however, he had kept on his roasting shop till 1856. At that time it was reported that he had made large sums of money by going into partnership with a neighbouring grocer who had obtained a contract for supplying dried vegetables to the Crimean expeditionary corps. The truth was, however, that, having sold his shop, he lived on his income for a year without doing anything. He himself did not care to talk about the real origin of his fortune, for to have revealed it would have prevented him from plainly expressing his opinion of the Crimean War, which he referred to as a mere adventurous expedition, "undertaken simply to consolidate the throne and to fill certain persons' pockets." At the end of a year he had grown utterly weary of life in his bachelor quarters. As he was in the habit of visiting the Quenu-Gradelles almost daily, he determined to take up his residence nearer to them, and came to live in the Rue de la Cossonnerie. The neighbouring markets, with their noisy uproar and endless chatter, quite fascinated him; and he decided to hire a stall in the poultry pavilion, just for the purpose of amusing himself and occupying his idle hours with all the gossip. Thenceforth he lived amidst ceaseless tittle-tattle, acquainted with every little scandal in the neighbourhood, his head buzzing with the incessant yelping around him. He blissfully tasted a thousand titillating delights, having at last found his true element, and bathing in it, with the voluptuous pleasure of a carp swimming in the sunshine. Florent would sometimes go to see him at his stall. The afternoons were still very warm. All along the narrow alleys sat women plucking poultry. Rays of light streamed in between the awnings, and in the warm atmosphere, in the golden dust of the sunbeams, feathers fluttered hither and thither like dancing snowflakes. A trail of coaxing calls and offers followed Florent as he passed along. "Can I sell you a fine duck, monsieur?" "I've some very fine fat chickens here, monsieur; come and see!" "Monsieur! monsieur, do just buy this pair of pigeons!" Deafened and embarrassed he freed himself from the women, who still went on plucking as they fought for possession of him; and the fine down flew about and wellnigh choked him, like hot smoke reeking with the strong odour of the poultry. At last, in the middle of the alley, near the water-taps, he found Gavard ranting away in his shirt-sleeves, in front of his stall, with his arms crossed over the bib of his blue apron. He reigned there, in a gracious, condescending way, over a group of ten or twelve women. He was the only male dealer in that part of the market. He was so fond of wagging his tongue that he had quarrelled with five or six girls whom he had successively engaged to attend to his stall, and had now made up his mind to sell his goods himself, naively explaining that the silly women spent the whole blessed day in gossiping, and that it was beyond his power to manage them. As someone, however, was still necessary to supply his place whenever he absented himself he took in Marjolin, who was prowling about, after attempting in turn all the petty market callings.

Florent sometimes remained for an hour with Gavard, amazed by his ceaseless flow of chatter, and his calm serenity and assurance amid the crowd of petticoats. He would interrupt one woman, pick a quarrel with another ten stalls away, snatch a customer from a third, and make as much noise himself as his hundred and odd garrulous neighbours, whose incessant clamour kept the iron plates of the pavilion vibrating sonorously like so many gongs.

The poultry dealer's only relations were a sister-in-law and a niece. When his wife died, her eldest sister, Madame Lecoeur, who had become a widow about a year previously, had mourned for her in an exaggerated fashion, and gone almost every evening to tender consolation to the bereaved husband. She had doubtless cherished the hope that she might win his affection and fill the yet warm place of the deceased. Gavard, however, abominated lean women; and would, indeed, only stroke such cats and dogs as were very fat; so that Madame Lecoeur, who was long and withered, failed in her designs.

With her feelings greatly hurt, furious at the ex-roaster's five-franc pieces eluding her grasp, she nurtured great spite against him. He became the enemy to whom she devoted all her time. When she saw him set up in the markets only a few yards away from the pavilion where she herself sold butter and eggs and cheese, she accused him of doing so simply for the sake of annoying her and bringing her bad luck. From that moment she began to lament, and turned so yellow and melancholy that she indeed ended by losing her customers and getting into difficulties. She had for a long time kept with her the daughter of one of her sisters, a peasant woman who had sent her the child and then taken no further trouble about it.

This child grew up in the markets. Her surname was Sarriet, and so she soon became generally known as La Sarriette. At sixteen years of age she had developed into such a charming sly-looking puss that gentlemen came to buy cheeses at her aunt's stall simply for the purpose of ogling her. She did not care for the gentlemen, however; with her dark hair, pale face, and eyes glistening like live embers, her sympathies were with the lower ranks of the people. At last she chose as her lover a young man from Menilmontant who was employed by her aunt as a porter. At twenty she set up in business as a fruit dealer with the help of some funds procured no one knew how; and thenceforth Monsieur Jules, as her lover was called, displayed spotless hands, a clean blouse, and a velvet cap; and only came down to the market in the afternoon, in his slippers. They lived together on the third storey of a large house in the Rue Vauvilliers, on the ground floor of which was a disreputable cafe.

Madame Lecoeur's acerbity of temper was brought to a pitch by what she called La Sarriette's ingratitude, and she spoke of the girl in the most violent and abusive language. They broke off all intercourse, the aunt fairly exasperated, and the niece and Monsieur Jules concocting stories about the aunt, which the young man would repeat to the other dealers in the butter pavilion. Gavard found La Sarriette very entertaining, and treated her with great indulgence. Whenever they met he would good-naturedly pat her cheeks.

One afternoon, whilst Florent was sitting in his brother's shop, tired out with the fruitless pilgrimages he had made during the morning in search of work, Marjolin made his appearance there. This big lad, who had the massiveness and gentleness of a Fleming, was a protege of Lisa's. She would say that there was no evil in him; that he was indeed a little bit stupid, but as strong as a horse, and particularly interesting from the fact that nobody knew anything of his parentage. It was she who had got Gavard to employ him.

Lisa was sitting behind the counter, feeling annoyed by the sight of Florent's muddy boots which were soiling the pink and white tiles of the flooring. Twice already had she risen to scatter sawdust about the shop. However, she smiled at Marjolin as he entered.

"Monsieur Gavard," began the young man, "has sent me to ask—"

But all at once he stopped and glanced round; then in a lower voice he resumed: "He told me to wait till there was no one with you, and then to repeat these words, which he made me learn by heart: 'Ask them if there is no danger, and if I can come and talk to them of the matter they know about.'"

"Tell Monsieur Gavard that we are expecting him," replied Lisa, who was quite accustomed to the poultry dealer's mysterious ways.

Marjolin, however, did not go away; but remained in ecstasy before the handsome mistress of the shop, contemplating her with an expression of fawning humility.

Touched, as it were, by this mute adoration, Lisa spoke to him again.

"Are you comfortable with Monsieur Gavard?" she asked. "He's not an unkind man, and you ought to try to please him."

"Yes, Madame Lisa."

"But you don't behave as you should, you know. Only yesterday I saw you clambering about the roofs of the market again; and, besides, you are constantly with a lot of disreputable lads and lasses. You ought to remember that you are a man now, and begin to think of the future."

"Yes, Madame Lisa."

However, Lisa had to get up to wait upon a lady who came in and wanted a pound of pork chops. She left the counter and went to the block at the far end of the shop. Here, with a long, slender knife, she cut three chops in a loin of pork; and then, raising a small cleaver with her strong hand, dealt three sharp blows which separated the chops from the loin. At each blow she dealt, her black merino dress rose slightly behind her, and the ribs of her stays showed beneath her tightly stretched bodice. She slowly took up the chops and weighed them with an air of gravity, her eyes gleaming and her lips tightly closed.

When the lady had gone, and Lisa perceived Marjolin still full of delight at having seen her deal those three clean, forcible blows with the cleaver, she at once called out to him, "What! haven't you gone yet?"

He thereupon turned to go, but she detained him for a moment longer.

"Now, don't let me see you again with that hussy Cadine," she said. "Oh, it's no use to deny it! I saw you together this morning in the tripe market, watching men breaking the sheep's heads. I can't understand what attraction a good-looking young fellow like you can find in such a slipshod slattern as Cadine. Now then, go and tell Monsieur Gavard that he had better come at once, while there's no one about."

Marjolin thereupon went off in confusion, without saying a word.

Handsome Lisa remained standing behind her counter, with her head turned slightly in the direction of her markets, and Florent gazed at her in silence, surprised to see her looking so beautiful. He had never looked at her properly before; indeed, he did not know the right way to look at a woman. He now saw her rising above the viands on the counter. In front of her was an array of white china dishes, containing long Arles and Lyons sausages, slices of which had already been cut off, with tongues and pieces of boiled pork; then a pig's head in a mass of jelly; an open pot of preserved sausage-meat, and a large box of sardines disclosing a pool of oil. On the right and left, upon wooden platters, were mounds of French and Italian brawn, a common French ham, of a pinky hue, and a Yorkshire ham, whose deep red lean showed beneath a broad band of fat. There were other dishes too, round ones and oval ones, containing spiced tongue, truffled galantine, and a boar's head stuffed with pistachio nuts; while close to her, in reach of her hand, stood some yellow earthen pans containing larded veal, pate de foie gras, and hare-pie.

As there were no signs of Gavard's coming, she arranged some fore-end bacon upon a little marble shelf at the end of the counter, put the jars of lard and dripping back into their places, wiped the plates of each pair of scales, and saw to the fire of the heater, which was getting low. Then she turned her head again, and gazed in silence towards the markets. The smell of all the viands ascended around her, she was enveloped, as it were, by the aroma of truffles. She looked beautifully fresh that afternoon. The whiteness of all the dishes was supplemented by that of her sleevelets and apron, above which appeared her plump neck and rosy cheeks, which recalled the soft tones of the hams and the pallor of all the transparent fat.

As Florent continued to gaze at her he began to feel intimidated, disquieted by her prim, sedate demeanour; and in lieu of openly looking at her he ended by glancing surreptitiously in the mirrors around the shop, in which her back and face and profile could be seen. The mirror on the ceiling, too, reflected the top of her head, with its tightly rolled chignon and the little bands lowered over her temples. There seemed, indeed, to be a perfect crowd of Lisas, with broad shoulders, powerful arms, and round, full bosoms. At last Florent checked his roving eyes, and let them rest on a particularly pleasing side view of the young woman as mirrored between two pieces of pork. From the hooks running along the whole line of mirrors and marbles hung sides of pork and bands of larding fat; and Lisa, with her massive neck, rounded hips, and swelling bosom seen in profile, looked like some waxwork queen in the midst of the dangling fat and meat. However, she bent forward and smiled in a friendly way at the two gold-fish which were ever and ever swimming round the aquarium in the window.

Gavard entered the shop. With an air of great importance he went to fetch Quenu from the kitchen. Then he seated himself upon a small marble-topped table, while Florent remained on his chair and Lisa behind the counter; Quenu meantime leaning his back against a side of pork. And thereupon Gavard announced that he had at last found a situation for Florent. They would be vastly amused when they heard what it was, and the Government would be nicely caught.

But all at once he stopped short, for a passing neighbour, Mademoiselle Saget, having seen such a large party gossiping together at the Quenu-Gradelles', had opened the door and entered the shop. Carrying her everlasting black ribbonless straw hat, which appropriately cast a shadow over her prying white face, she saluted the men with a slight bow and Lisa with a sharp smile.

She was an acquaintance of the family, and still lived in the house in the Rue Pirouette where she had resided for the last forty years, probably on a small private income; but of that she never spoke. She had, however, one day talked of Cherbourg, mentioning that she had been born there. Nothing further was ever known of her antecedents. All her conversation was about other people; she could tell the whole story of their daily lives, even to the number of things they sent to be washed each month; and she carried her prying curiosity concerning her neighbours' affairs so far as to listen behind their doors and open their letters. Her tongue was feared from the Rue Saint Denis to the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and from the Rue Saint Honore to the Rue Mauconseil. All day long she went ferreting about with her empty bag, pretending that she was marketing, but in reality buying nothing, as her sole purpose was to retail scandal and gossip, and keep herself fully informed of every trifling incident that happened. Indeed, she had turned her brain into an encyclopaedia brimful of every possible particular concerning the people of the neighbourhood and their homes.

Quenu had always accused her of having spread the story of his Uncle Gradelle's death on the chopping-block, and had borne her a grudge ever since. She was extremely well posted in the history of Uncle Gradelle and the Quenus, and knew them, she would say, by heart. For the last fortnight, however, Florent's arrival had greatly perplexed her, filled her, indeed, with a perfect fever of curiosity. She became quite ill when she discovered any unforeseen gap in her information. And yet she could have sworn that she had seen that tall lanky fellow somewhere or other before.

She remained standing in front of the counter, examining the dishes one after another, and saying in a shrill voice:

"I hardly know what to have. When the afternoon comes I feel quite famished for my dinner, and then, later on, I don't seem able to fancy anything at all. Have you got a cutlet rolled in bread-crumbs left, Madame Quenu?"

Without waiting for a reply, she removed one of the covers of the heater. It was that of the compartment reserved for the chitterlings, sausages, and black-puddings. However, the chafing-dish was quite cold, and there was nothing left but one stray forgotten sausage.

"Look under the other cover, Mademoiselle Saget," said Lisa. "I believe there's a cutlet there."

"No, it doesn't tempt me," muttered the little old woman, poking her nose under the other cover, however, all the same. "I felt rather a fancy for one, but I'm afraid a cutlet would be rather too heavy in the evening. I'd rather have something, too, that I need not warm."

While speaking she had turned towards Florent and looked at him; then she looked at Gavard, who was beating a tattoo with his finger-tips on the marble table. She smiled at them, as though inviting them to continue their conversation.

"Wouldn't a little piece of salt pork suit you?" asked Lisa.

"A piece of salt pork? Yes, that might do."

Thereupon she took up the fork with plated handle, which was lying at the edge of the dish, and began to turn all the pieces of pork about, prodding them, lightly tapping the bones to judge of their thickness, and minutely scrutinising the shreds of pinky meat. And as she turned them over she repeated, "No, no; it doesn't tempt me."

"Well, then, have a sheep's tongue, or a bit of brawn, or a slice of larded veal," suggested Lisa patiently.

Mademoiselle Saget, however, shook her head. She remained there for a few minutes longer, pulling dissatisfied faces over the different dishes; then, seeing that the others were determined to remain silent, and that she would not be able to learn anything, she took herself off.

"No; I rather felt a fancy for a cutlet rolled in bread-crumbs," she said as she left the shop, "but the one you have left is too fat. I must come another time."

Lisa bent forward to watch her through the sausage-skins hanging in the shop-front, and saw her cross the road and enter the fruit market.

"The old she-goat!" growled Gavard.

Then, as they were now alone again, he began to tell them of the situation he had found for Florent. A friend of his, he said, Monsieur Verlaque, one of the fish market inspectors, was so ill that he was obliged to take a rest; and that very morning the poor man had told him that he should be very glad to find a substitute who would keep his berth open for him in case he should recover.

"Verlaque, you know, won't last another six months," added Gavard, "and Florent will keep the place. It's a splendid idea, isn't it? And it will be such a take-in for the police! The berth is under the Prefecture, you know. What glorious fun to see Florent getting paid by the police, eh?"

He burst into a hearty laugh; the idea struck him as so extremely comical.

"I won't take the place," Florent bluntly replied. "I've sworn I'll never accept anything from the Empire, and I would rather die of starvation than serve under the Prefecture. It is quite out of the question, Gavard, quite so!"

Gavard seemed somewhat put out on hearing this. Quenu had lowered his head, while Lisa, turning round, looked keenly at Florent, her neck swollen, her bosom straining her bodice almost to bursting point. She was just going to open her mouth when La Sarriette entered the shop, and there was another pause in the conversation.

"Dear me!" exclaimed La Sarriette with her soft laugh, "I'd almost forgotten to get any bacon fat. Please, Madame Quenu, cut me a dozen thin strips—very thin ones, you know; I want them for larding larks. Jules has taken it into his head to eat some larks. Ah! how do you do, uncle?"

She filled the whole shop with her dancing skirts and smiled brightly at everyone. Her face looked fresh and creamy, and on one side her hair was coming down, loosened by the wind which blew through the markets. Gavard grasped her hands, while she with merry impudence resumed: "I'll bet that you were talking about me just as I came in. Tell me what you were saying, uncle."

However, Lisa now called to her, "Just look and tell me if this is thin enough."

She was cutting the strips of bacon fat with great care on a piece of board in front of her. Then as she wrapped them up she inquired, "Can I give you anything else?"

"Well, yes," replied La Sarriette; "since I'm about it, I think I'll have a pound of lard. I'm awfully fond of fried potatoes; I can make a breakfast off a penn'orth of potatoes and a bunch of radishes. Yes, I'll have a pound of lard, please, Madame Quenu."

Lisa placed a sheet of stout paper in the pan of the scales. Then she took the lard out of a jar under the shelves with a boxwood spatula, gently adding small quantities to the fatty heap, which began to melt and run slightly. When the plate of the scale fell, she took up the paper, folded it, and rapidly twisted the ends with her finger-tips.

"That makes twenty-four sous," she said; "the bacon is six sous—thirty sous altogether. There's nothing else you want, is there?"

"No," said La Sarriette, "nothing." She paid her money, still laughing and showing her teeth, and staring the men in the face. Her grey skirt was all awry, and her loosely fastened red neckerchief allowed a little of her white bosom to appear. Before she went away she stepped up to Gavard again, and pretending to threaten him exclaimed: "So you won't tell me what you were talking about as I came in? I could see you laughing from the street. Oh, you sly fellow! Ah! I sha'n't love you any longer!"

Then she left the shop and ran across the road.

"It was Mademoiselle Saget who sent her here," remarked handsome Lisa drily.

Then silence fell again for some moments. Gavard was dismayed at Florent's reception of his proposal. Lisa was the first to speak. "It was wrong of you to refuse the post, Florent," she said in the most friendly tones. "You know how difficult it is to find any employment, and you are not in a position to be over-exacting."

"I have my reasons," Florent replied.

Lisa shrugged her shoulders. "Come now," said she, "you really can't be serious, I'm sure. I can understand that you are not in love with the Government, but it would be too absurd to let your opinions prevent you from earning your living. And, besides, my dear fellow, the Emperor isn't at all a bad sort of man. You don't suppose, do you, that he knew you were eating mouldy bread and tainted meat? He can't be everywhere, you know, and you can see for yourself that he hasn't prevented us here from doing pretty well. You are not at all just; indeed you are not."

Gavard, however, was getting very fidgety. He could not bear to hear people speak well of the Emperor.

"No, no, Madame Quenu," he interrupted; "you are going too far. It is a scoundrelly system altogether."

"Oh, as for you," exclaimed Lisa vivaciously, "you'll never rest until you've got yourself plundered and knocked on the head as the result of all your wild talk. Don't let us discuss politics; you would only make me angry. The question is Florent, isn't it? Well, for my part, I say that he ought to accept this inspectorship. Don't you think so too, Quenu?"

Quenu, who had not yet said a word, was very much put out by his wife's sudden appeal.

"It's a good berth," he replied, without compromising himself.

Then, amidst another interval of awkward silence, Florent resumed: "I beg you, let us drop the subject. My mind is quite made up. I shall wait."

"You will wait!" cried Lisa, losing patience.

Two rosy fires had risen to her cheeks. As she stood there, erect, in her white apron, with rounded, swelling hips, it was with difficulty that she restrained herself from breaking out into bitter words. However, the entrance of another person into the shop arrested her anger. The new arrival was Madame Lecoeur.

"Can you let me have half a pound of mixed meats at fifty sous the pound?" she asked.

She at first pretended not to notice her brother-in-law; but presently she just nodded her head to him, without speaking. Then she scrutinised the three men from head to foot, doubtless hoping to divine their secret by the manner in which they waited for her to go. She could see that she was putting them out, and the knowledge of this rendered her yet more sour and angular, as she stood there in her limp skirts, with her long, spider-like arms bent and her knotted fingers clasped beneath her apron. Then, as she coughed slightly, Gavard, whom the silence embarrassed, inquired if she had a cold.

She curtly answered in the negative. Her tightly stretched skin was of a red-brick colour on those parts of her face where her bones protruded, and the dull fire burning in her eyes and scorching their lids testified to some liver complaint nurtured by the querulous jealousy of her disposition. She turned round again towards the counter, and watched each movement made by Lisa as she served her with the distrustful glance of one who is convinced that an attempt will be made to defraud her.

"Don't give me any saveloy," she exclaimed; "I don't like it."

Lisa had taken up a slender knife, and was cutting some thin slices of sausage. She next passed on to the smoked ham and the common ham, cutting delicate slices from each, and bending forward slightly as she did so, with her eyes ever fixed on the knife. Her plump rosy hands, flitting about the viands with light and gentle touches, seemed to have derived suppleness from contact with all the fat.

"You would like some larded veal, wouldn't you?" she asked, bringing a yellow pan towards her.

Madame Lecoeur seemed to be thinking the matter over at considerable length; however, she at last said that she would have some. Lisa had now begun to cut into the contents of the pans, from which she removed slices of larded veal and hare pate on the tip of a broad-bladed knife. And she deposited each successive slice on the middle of a sheet of paper placed on the scales.

"Aren't you going to give me some of the boar's head with pistachio nuts?" asked Madame Lecoeur in her querulous voice.

Lisa was obliged to add some of the boar's head. But the butter dealer was getting exacting, and asked for two slices of galantine. She was very fond of it. Lisa, who was already irritated, played impatiently with the handles of the knives, and told her that the galantine was truffled, and that she could only include it in an "assortment" at three francs the pound. Madame Lecoeur, however, continued to pry into the dishes, trying to find something else to ask for. When the "assortment" was weighed she made Lisa add some jelly and gherkins to it. The block of jelly, shaped like a Savoy cake, shook on its white china dish beneath the angry violence of Lisa's hand; and as with her finger-tips she took a couple of gherkins from a jar behind the heater, she made the vinegar spurt over the sides.

"Twenty-five sous, isn't it?" Madame Lecoeur leisurely inquired.

She fully perceived Lisa's covert irritation, and greatly enjoyed the sight of it, producing her money as slowly as possible, as though, indeed, her silver had got lost amongst the coppers in her pocket. And she glanced askance at Gavard, relishing the embarrassed silence which her presence was prolonging, and vowing that she would not go off, since they were hiding some trickery or other from her. However, Lisa at last put the parcel in her hands, and she was then obliged to make her departure. She went away without saying a word, but darting a searching glance all round the shop.

"It was that Saget who sent her too!" burst out Lisa, as soon as the old woman was gone. "Is the old wretch going to send the whole market here to try to find out what we talk about? What a prying, malicious set they are! Did anyone ever hear before of crumbed cutlets and 'assortments' being bought at five o'clock in the afternoon? But then they'd rack themselves with indigestion rather than not find out! Upon my word, though, if La Saget sends anyone else here, you'll see the reception she'll get. I would bundle her out of the shop, even if she were my own sister!"

The three men remained silent in presence of this explosion of anger. Gavard had gone to lean over the brass rail of the window-front, where, seemingly lost in thought, he began playing with one of the cut-glass balusters detached from its wire fastening. Presently, however, he raised his head. "Well, for my part," he said, "I looked upon it all as an excellent joke."

"Looked upon what as a joke?" asked Lisa, still quivering with indignation.

"The inspectorship."

She raised her hands, gave a last glance at Florent, and then sat down upon the cushioned bench behind the counter and said nothing further. Gavard, however, began to explain his views at length; the drift of his argument being that it was the Government which would look foolish in the matter, since Florent would be taking its money.

"My dear fellow," he said complacently, "those scoundrels all but starved you to death, didn't they? Well, you must make them feed you now. It's a splendid idea; it caught my fancy at once!"

Florent smiled, but still persisted in his refusal. Quenu, in the hope of pleasing his wife, did his best to find some good arguments. Lisa, however, appeared to pay no further attention to them. For the last moment or two she had been looking attentively in the direction of the markets. And all at once she sprang to her feet again, exclaiming, "Ah! it is La Normande that they are sending to play the spy on us now! Well, so much the worse for La Normande; she shall pay for the others!"

A tall female pushed the shop door open. It was the handsome fish-girl, Louise Mehudin, generally known as La Normande. She was a bold-looking beauty, with a delicate white skin, and was almost as plump as Lisa, but there was more effrontery in her glance, and her bosom heaved with warmer life. She came into the shop with a light swinging step, her gold chain jingling on her apron, her bare hair arranged in the latest style, and a bow at her throat, a lace bow, which made her one of the most coquettish-looking queens of the markets. She brought a vague odour of fish with her, and a herring-scale showed like a tiny patch of mother-of-pearl near the little finger of one of her hands. She and Lisa having lived in the same house in the Rue Pirouette, were intimate friends, linked by a touch of rivalry which kept each of them busy with thoughts of the other. In the neighbourhood people spoke of "the beautiful Norman," just as they spoke of "beautiful Lisa." This brought them into opposition and comparison, and compelled each of them to do her utmost to sustain her reputation for beauty. Lisa from her counter could, by stooping a little, perceive the fish-girl amidst her salmon and turbot in the pavilion opposite; and each kept a watch on the other. Beautiful Lisa laced herself more tightly in her stays; and the beautiful Norman replied by placing additional rings on her fingers and additional bows on her shoulders. When they met they were very bland and unctuous and profuse in compliments; but all the while their eyes were furtively glancing from under their lowered lids, in the hope of discovering some flaw. They made a point of always dealing with each other, and professed great mutual affection.

"I say," said La Normande, with her smiling air, "it's to-morrow evening that you make your black-puddings, isn't it?"

Lisa maintained a cold demeanour. She seldom showed any anger; but when she did it was tenacious, and slow to be appeased. "Yes," she replied drily, with the tips of her lips.

"I'm so fond of black-puddings, you know, when they come straight out of the pot," resumed La Normande. "I'll come and get some of you to-morrow."

She was conscious of her rival's unfriendly greeting. However, she glanced at Florent, who seemed to interest her; and then, unwilling to go off without having the last word, she was imprudent enough to add: "I bought some black-pudding of you the day before yesterday, you know, and it wasn't quite sweet."

"Not quite sweet!" repeated Lisa, very pale, and her lips quivering.

She might, perhaps, have once more restrained herself, for fear of La Normande imagining that she was overcome by envious spite at the sight of the lace bow; but the girl, not content with playing the spy, proceeded to insult her, and that was beyond endurance. So, leaning forward, with her hands clenched on the counter, she exclaimed, in a somewhat hoarse voice: "I say! when you sold me that pair of soles last week, did I come and tell you, before everybody that they were stinking?"

"Stinking! My soles stinking!" cried the fish dealer, flushing scarlet.

For a moment they remained silent, choking with anger, but glaring fiercely at each other over the array of dishes. All their honeyed friendship had vanished; a word had sufficed to reveal what sharp teeth there were behind their smiling lips.

"You're a vulgar, low creature!" cried the beautiful Norman. "You'll never catch me setting foot in here again, I can tell you!"

"Get along with you, get along with you," exclaimed beautiful Lisa. "I know quite well whom I've got to deal with!"

The fish-girl went off, hurling behind her a coarse expression which left Lisa quivering. The whole scene had passed so quickly that the three men, overcome with amazement, had not had time to interfere. Lisa soon recovered herself, and was resuming the conversation, without making any allusion to what had just occurred, when the shop girl, Augustine, returned from an errand on which she had been sent. Lisa thereupon took Gavard aside, and after telling him to say nothing for the present to Monsieur Verlaque, promised that she would undertake to convince her brother-in-law in a couple of days' time at the utmost. Quenu then returned to his kitchen, while Gavard took Florent off with him. And as they were just going into Monsieur Lebigre's to drink a drop of vermouth together he called his attention to three women standing in the covered way between the fish and poultry pavilions.

"They're cackling together!" he said with an envious air.

The markets were growing empty, and Mademoiselle Saget, Madame Lecoeur, and La Sarriette alone lingered on the edge of the footway. The old maid was holding forth.

"As I told you before, Madame Lecoeur," said she, "they've always got your brother-in-law in their shop. You saw him there yourself just now, didn't you?"

"Oh yes, indeed! He was sitting on a table, and seemed quite at home."

"Well, for my part," interrupted La Sarriette, "I heard nothing wrong; and I can't understand why you're making such a fuss."

Mademoiselle Saget shrugged her shoulders. "Ah, you're very innocent yet, my dear," she said. "Can't you see why the Quenus are always attracting Monsieur Gavard to their place? Well, I'll wager that he'll leave all he has to their little Pauline."

"You believe that, do you?" cried Madame Lecoeur, white with rage. Then, in a mournful voice, as though she had just received some heavy blow, she continued: "I am alone in the world, and have no one to take my part; he is quite at liberty to do as he pleases. His niece sides with him too—you heard her just now. She has quite forgotten all that she cost me, and wouldn't stir a hand to help me."

"Indeed, aunt," exclaimed La Sarriette, "you are quite wrong there! It's you who've never had anything but unkind words for me."

They became reconciled on the spot, and kissed one another. The niece promised that she would play no more pranks, and the aunt swore by all she held most sacred that she looked upon La Sarriette as her own daughter. Then Mademoiselle Saget advised them as to the steps they ought to take to prevent Gavard from squandering his money. And they all agreed that the Quenu-Gradelles were very disreputable folks, and required closely watching.

"I don't know what they're up to just now," said the old maid, "but there's something suspicious going on, I'm sure. What's your opinion, now, of that fellow Florent, that cousin of Madame Quenu's?"

The three women drew more closely together, and lowered their voices.

"You remember," said Madame Lecoeur, "that we saw him one morning with his boots all split, and his clothes covered with dust, looking just like a thief who's been up to some roguery. That fellow quite frightens me."

"Well, he's certainly very thin," said La Sarriette, "but he isn't ugly."

Mademoiselle Saget was reflecting, and she expressed her thoughts aloud. "I've been trying to find out something about him for the last fortnight, but I can make nothing of it. Monsieur Gavard certainly knows him. I must have met him myself somewhere before, but I can't remember where."

She was still ransacking her memory when La Normande swept up to them like a whirlwind. She had just left the pork shop.

"That big booby Lisa has got nice manners, I must say!" she cried, delighted to be able to relieve herself. "Fancy her telling me that I sold nothing but stinking fish! But I gave her as good as she deserved, I can tell you! A nice den they keep, with their tainted pig meat which poisons all their customers!"

"But what had you been saying to her?" asked the old maid, quite frisky with excitement, and delighted to hear that the two women had quarrelled.

"I! I'd said just nothing at all—no, not that! I just went into the shop and told her very civilly that I'd buy some black-pudding to-morrow evening, and then she overwhelmed me with abuse. A dirty hypocrite she is, with her saint-like airs! But she'll pay more dearly for this than she fancies!"

The three women felt that La Normande was not telling them the truth, but this did not prevent them from taking her part with a rush of bad language. They turned towards the Rue Rambuteau with insulting mien, inventing all sorts of stories about the uncleanliness of the cookery at the Quenu's shop, and making the most extraordinary accusations. If the Quenus had been detected selling human flesh the women could not have displayed more violent and threatening anger. The fish-girl was obliged to tell her story three times over.

"And what did the cousin say?" asked Mademoiselle Saget, with wicked intent.

"The cousin!" repeated La Normande, in a shrill voice. "Do you really believe that he's a cousin? He's some lover or other, I'll wager, the great booby!"

The three others protested against this. Lisa's honourability was an article of faith in the neighbourhood.

"Stuff and nonsense!" retorted La Normande. "You can never be sure about those smug, sleek hypocrites."

Mademoiselle Saget nodded her head as if to say that she was not very far from sharing La Normande's opinion. And she softly added: "Especially as this cousin has sprung from no one knows where; for it's a very doubtful sort of account that the Quenus give of him."

"Oh, he's the fat woman's sweetheart, I tell you!" reaffirmed the fish-girl; "some scamp or vagabond picked up in the streets. It's easy enough to see it."

"She has given him a complete outfit," remarked Madame Lecoeur. "He must be costing her a pretty penny."

"Yes, yes," muttered the old maid; "perhaps you are right. I must really get to know something about him."

Then they all promised to keep one another thoroughly informed of whatever might take place in the Quenu-Gradelle establishment. The butter dealer pretended that she wished to open her brother-in-law's eyes as to the sort of places he frequented. However, La Normande's anger had by this time toned down, and, a good sort of girl at heart, she went off, weary of having talked so much on the matter.

"I'm sure that La Normande said something or other insolent," remarked Madame Lecoeur knowingly, when the fish-girl had left them. "It is just her way; and it scarcely becomes a creature like her to talk as she did of Lisa."

The three women looked at each other and smiled. Then, when Madame Lecoeur also had gone off, La Sarriette remarked to Mademoiselle Saget: "It is foolish of my aunt to worry herself so much about all these affairs. It's that which makes her so thin. Ah! she'd have willingly taken Gavard for a husband if she could only have got him. Yet she used to beat me if ever a young man looked my way."

Mademoiselle Saget smiled once more. And when she found herself alone, and went back towards the Rue Pirouette, she reflected that those three cackling hussies were not worth a rope to hang them. She was, indeed, a little afraid that she might have been seen with them, and the idea somewhat troubled her, for she realised that it would be bad policy to fall out with the Quenu-Gradelles, who, after all, were well-to-do folks and much esteemed. So she went a little out of her way on purpose to call at Taboureau the baker's in the Rue Turbigo—the finest baker's shop in the whole neighbourhood. Madame Taboureau was not only an intimate friend of Lisa's, but an accepted authority on every subject. When it was remarked that "Madame Taboureau had said this," or "Madame Taboureau had said that," there was no more to be urged. So the old maid, calling at the baker's under pretence of inquiring at what time the oven would be hot, as she wished to bring a dish of pears to be baked, took the opportunity to eulogise Lisa, and lavish praise upon the sweetness and excellence of her black-puddings. Then, well pleased at having prepared this moral alibi and delighted at having done what she could to fan the flames of a quarrel without involving herself in it, she briskly returned home, feeling much easier in her mind, but still striving to recall where she had previously seen Madame Quenu's so-called cousin.

That same evening, after dinner, Florent went out and strolled for some time in one of the covered ways of the markets. A fine mist was rising, and a grey sadness, which the gas lights studded as with yellow tears, hung over the deserted pavilions. For the first time Florent began to feel that he was in the way, and to recognise the unmannerly fashion in which he, thin and artless, had tumbled into this world of fat people; and he frankly admitted to himself that his presence was disturbing the whole neighbourhood, and that he was a source of discomfort to the Quenus—a spurious cousin of far too compromising appearance. These reflections made him very sad; not, indeed, that they had noticed the slightest harshness on the part of his brother or Lisa: it was their very kindness, rather, that was troubling him, and he accused himself of a lack of delicacy in quartering himself upon them. He was beginning to doubt the propriety of his conduct. The recollection of the conversation in the shop during the afternoon caused him a vague disquietude. The odour of the viands on Lisa's counter seemed to penetrate him; he felt himself gliding into nerveless, satiated cowardice. Perhaps he had acted wrongly in refusing the inspectorship offered him. This reflection gave birth to a stormy struggle in his mind, and he was obliged to brace and shake himself before he could recover his wonted rigidity of principles. However, a moist breeze had risen, and was blowing along the covered way, and he regained some degree of calmness and resolution on being obliged to button up his coat. The wind seemingly swept from his clothes all the greasy odour of the pork shop, which had made him feel so languid.

He was returning home when he met Claude Lantier. The artist, hidden in the folds of his greenish overcoat, spoke in a hollow voice full of suppressed anger. He was in a passion with painting, declared that it was a dog's trade, and swore that he would not take up a brush again as long as he lived. That very afternoon he had thrust his foot through a study which he had been making of the head of that hussy Cadine.

Claude was subject to these outbursts, the fruit of his inability to execute the lasting, living works which he dreamed of. And at such times life became an utter blank to him, and he wandered about the streets, wrapped in the gloomiest thoughts, and waiting for the morning as for a sort of resurrection. He used to say that he felt bright and cheerful in the morning, and horribly miserable in the evening.[*] Each of his days was a long effort ending in disappointment. Florent scarcely recognised in him the careless night wanderer of the markets. They had already met again at the pork shop, and Claude, who knew the fugitive's story, had grasped his hand and told him that he was a sterling fellow. It was very seldom, however, that the artist went to the Quenus'.

[*] Claude Lantier's struggle for fame is fully described in
M. Zola's novel, L'Oeuvre ("His Masterpiece").
—Translator.

"Are you still at my aunt's?" he asked. "I can't imagine how you manage to exist amidst all that cookery. The places reeks with the smell of meat. When I've been there for an hour I feel as though I shouldn't want anything to eat for another three days. I ought not to have gone there this morning; it was that which made me make a mess of my work."

Then, after he and Florent had taken a few steps in silence, he resumed:

"Ah! the good people! They quite grieve me with their fine health. I had thought of painting their portraits, but I've never been able to succeed with such round faces, in which there is never a bone. Ah! You wouldn't find my aunt Lisa kicking her foot through her pans! I was an idiot to have destroyed Cadine's head! Now that I come to think of it, it wasn't so very bad, perhaps, after all."

Then they began to talk about Aunt Lisa. Claude said that his mother[*] had not seen anything of her for a long time, and he hinted that the pork butcher's wife was somewhat ashamed of her sister having married a common working man; moreover, she wasn't at all fond of unfortunate folks. Speaking of himself, he told Florent that a benevolent gentleman had sent him to college, being very pleased with the donkeys and old women that he had managed to draw when only eight years old; but the good soul had died, leaving him an income of a thousand francs, which just saved him from perishing of hunger.

[*] Gervaise, the heroine of the Assommoir.

"All the same, I would rather have been a working man," continued Claude. "Look at the carpenters, for instance. They are very happy folks, the carpenters. They have a table to make, say; well, they make it, and then go off to bed, happy at having finished the table, and perfectly satisfied with themselves. Now I, on the other hand, scarcely get any sleep at nights. All those confounded pictures which I can't finish go flying about my brain. I never get anything finished and done with—never, never!"

His voice almost broke into a sob. Then he attempted to laugh; and afterwards began to swear and pour forth coarse expressions, with the cold rage of one who, endowed with a delicate, sensitive mind, doubts his own powers, and dreams of wallowing in the mire. He ended by squatting down before one of the gratings which admit air into the cellars beneath the markets—cellars where the gas is continually kept burning. And in the depths below he pointed out Marjolin and Cadine tranquilly eating their supper, whilst seated on one of the stone blocks used for killing the poultry. The two young vagabonds had discovered a means of hiding themselves and making themselves at home in the cellars after the doors had been closed.

"What a magnificent animal he is, eh!" exclaimed Claude, with envious admiration, speaking of Marjolin. "He and Cadine are happy, at all events! All they care for is eating and kissing. They haven't a care in the world. Ah, you do quite right, after all, to remain at the pork shop; perhaps you'll grow sleek and plump there."

Then he suddenly went off. Florent climbed up to his garret, disturbed by Claude's nervous restlessness, which revived his own uncertainty. On the morrow, he avoided the pork shop all the morning, and went for a long walk on the quays. When he returned to lunch, however, he was struck by Lisa's kindliness. Without any undue insistence she again spoke to him about the inspectorship, as of something which was well worth his consideration. As he listened to her, with a full plate in front of him, he was affected, in spite of himself, by the prim comfort of his surroundings. The matting beneath his feet seemed very soft; the gleams of the brass hanging lamp, the soft, yellow tint of the wallpaper, and the bright oak of the furniture filled him with appreciation of a life spent in comfort, which disturbed his notions of right and wrong. He still, however, had sufficient strength to persist in his refusal, and repeated his reasons; albeit conscious of the bad taste he was showing in thus ostentatiously parading his animosity and obstinacy in such a place. Lisa showed no signs of vexation; on the contrary, she smiled, and the sweetness of her smile embarrassed Florent far more than her suppressed irritation of the previous evening. At dinner the subject was not renewed; they talked solely of the great winter saltings, which would keep the whole staff of the establishment busily employed.

The evenings were growing cold, and as soon as they had dined they retired into the kitchen, where it was very warm. The room was so large, too, that several people could sit comfortably at the square central table, without in any way impeding the work that was going on. Lighted by gas, the walls were coated with white and blue tiles to a height of some five or six feet from the floor. On the left was a great iron stove, in the three apertures of which were set three large round pots, their bottoms black with soot. At the end was a small range, which, fitted with an oven and a smoking-place, served for the broiling; and up above, over the skimming-spoons, ladles, and long-handled forks, were several numbered drawers, containing rasped bread, both fine and coarse, toasted crumbs, spices, cloves, nutmegs, and pepper. On the right, leaning heavily against the wall, was the chopping-block, a huge mass of oak, slashed and scored all over. Attached to it were several appliances, an injecting pump, a forcing-machine, and a mechanical mincer, which, with their wheels and cranks, imparted to the place an uncanny and mysterious aspect, suggesting some kitchen of the infernal regions.

Then, all round the walls upon shelves, and even under the tables, were iron pots, earthenware pans, dishes, pails, various kinds of tin utensils, a perfect battery of deep copper saucepans, and swelling funnels, racks of knives and choppers, rows of larding-pins and needles—a perfect world of greasy things. In spite of the extreme cleanliness, grease was paramount; it oozed forth from between the blue and white tiles on the wall, glistened on the red tiles of the flooring, gave a greyish glitter to the stove, and polished the edges of the chopping-block with the transparent sheen of varnished oak. And, indeed, amidst the ever-rising steam, the continuous evaporation from the three big pots, in which pork was boiling and melting, there was not a single nail from ceiling to floor from which grease did not exude.

The Quenu-Gradelles prepared nearly all their stock themselves. All that they procured from outside were the potted meats of celebrated firms, with jars of pickles and preserves, sardines, cheese, and edible snails. They consequently became very busy after September in filling the cellars which had been emptied during the summer. They continued working even after the shop had been closed for the night. Assisted by Auguste and Leon, Quenu would stuff sausages-skins, prepare hams, melt down lard, and salt the different sorts of bacon. There was a tremendous noise of cauldrons and cleavers, and the odour of cooking spread through the whole house. All this was quite independent of the daily business in fresh pork, pate de fois gras, hare patty, galantine, saveloys and black-puddings.

That evening, at about eleven o'clock, Quenu, after placing a couple of pots on the fire in order to melt down some lard, began to prepare the black-puddings. Auguste assisted him. At one corner of the square table Lisa and Augustine sat mending linen, whilst opposite to them, on the other side, with his face turned towards the fireplace, was Florent. Leon was mincing some sausage-meat on the oak block in a slow, rhythmical fashion.

Auguste first of all went out into the yard to fetch a couple of jug-like cans full of pigs' blood. It was he who stuck the animals in the slaughter house. He himself would carry away the blood and interior portions of the pigs, leaving the men who scalded the carcasses to bring them home completely dressed in their carts. Quenu asserted that no assistant in all Paris was Auguste' equal as a pig-sticker. The truth was that Auguste was a wonderfully keen judge of the quality of the blood; and the black-pudding proved good every time that he said such would be the case.

"Well, will the black-pudding be good this time?" asked Lisa.

August put down the two cans and slowly answered: "I believe so, Madame Quenu; yes, I believe so. I tell it at first by the way the blood flows. If it spurts out very gently when I pull out the knife, that's a bad sign, and shows that the blood is poor."

"But doesn't that depend on how far the knife has been stuck in?" asked Quenu.

A smile came over Auguste's pale face. "No," he replied; "I always let four digits of the blade go in; that's the right way to measure. But the best sign of all is when the blood runs out and I beat it with my hand when it pours into the pail; it ought to be of a good warmth, and creamy, without being too thick."

Augustine had put down her needle, and with her eyes raised was now gazing at Auguste. On her ruddy face, crowned by wiry chestnut hair, there was an expression of profound attention. Lisa and even little Pauline were also listening with deep interest.

"Well, I beat it, and beat it, and beat it," continued the young man, whisking his hand about as though he were whipping cream. "And then, when I take my hand out and look at it, it ought to be greased, as it were, by the blood and equally coated all over. And if that's the case, anyone can say without fear of mistake that the black-puddings will be good."

He remained for a moment in an easy attitude, complacently holding his hand in the air. This hand, which spent so much of its time in pails of blood, had brightly gleaming nails, and looked very rosy above his white sleeve. Quenu had nodded his head in approbation, and an interval of silence followed. Leon was still mincing. Pauline, however, after remaining thoughtful for a little while, mounted upon Florent's feet again, and in her clear voice exclaimed: "I say, cousin, tell me the story of the gentleman who was eaten by the wild beasts!"

It was probably the mention of the pig's blood which had aroused in the child's mind the recollection of "the gentleman who had been eaten by the wild beasts." Florent did not at first understand what she referred to, and asked her what gentleman she meant. Lisa began to smile.

"She wants you to tell her," she said, "the story of that unfortunate man—you know whom I mean—which you told to Gavard one evening. She must have heard you."

At this Florent grew very grave. The little girl got up, and taking the big cat in her arms, placed it on his knees, saying that Mouton also would like to hear the story. Mouton, however, leapt on to the table, where, with rounded back, he remained contemplating the tall, scraggy individual who for the last fortnight had apparently afforded him matter for deep reflection. Pauline meantime began to grow impatient, stamping her feet and insisting on hearing the story.

"Oh, tell her what she wants," said Lisa, as the child persisted and became quite unbearable; "she'll leave us in peace then."

Florent remained silent for a moment longer, with his eyes turned towards the floor. Then slowly raising his head he let his gaze rest first on the two women who were plying their needles, and next on Quenu and Auguste, who were preparing the pot for the black-puddings. The gas was burning quietly, the stove diffused a gentle warmth, and all the grease of the kitchen glistened in an atmosphere of comfort such as attends good digestion

Then, taking little Pauline upon his knee, and smiling a sad smile, Florent addressed himself to the child as follows[*]:—

[*] Florent's narrative is not romance, but is based on the
statements of several of the innocent victims whom the third
Napoleon transported to Cayenne when wading through blood to
the power which he so misused.—Translator.

"Once upon a time there was a poor man who was sent away, a long, long way off, right across the sea. On the ship which carried him were four hundred convicts, and he was thrown among them. He was forced to live for five weeks amidst all those scoundrels, dressed like them in coarse canvas, and feeding at their mess. Foul insects preyed on him, and terrible sweats robbed him of all his strength. The kitchen, the bakehouse, and the engine-room made the orlop deck so terribly hot that ten of the convicts died from it. In the daytime they were sent up in batches of fifty to get a little fresh air from the sea; and as the crew of the ship feared them, a couple of cannons were pointed at the little bit of deck where they took exercise. The poor fellow was very glad indeed when his turn to go up came. His terrible perspiration then abated somewhat; still, he could not eat, and felt very ill. During the night, when he was manacled again, and the rolling of the ship in the rough sea kept knocking him against his companions, he quite broke down, and began to cry, glad to be able to do so without being seen."

Pauline was listening with dilated eyes, and her little hands crossed primly in front of her.

"But this isn't the story of the gentleman who was eaten by the wild beasts," she interrupted. "This is quite a different story; isn't it now, cousin?"

"Wait a bit, and you'll see," replied Florent gently. "I shall come to the gentleman presently. I'm telling you the whole story from the beginning."

"Oh, thank you," murmured the child, with a delighted expression. However, she remained thoughtful, evidently struggling with some great difficulty to which she could find no explanation. At last she spoke.

"But what had the poor man done," she asked, "that he was sent away and put in the ship?"

Lisa and Augustine smiled. They were quite charmed with the child's intelligence; and Lisa, without giving the little one a direct reply, took advantage of the opportunity to teach her a lesson by telling her that naughty children were also sent away in boats like that.

"Oh, then," remarked Pauline judiciously, "perhaps it served my cousin's poor man quite right if he cried all night long."

Lisa resumed her sewing, bending over her work. Quenu had not listened. He had been cutting some little rounds of onion over a pot placed on the fire; and almost at once the onions began to crackle, raising a clear shrill chirrup like that of grasshoppers basking in the heat. They gave out a pleasant odour too, and when Quenu plunged his great wooden spoon into the pot the chirruping became yet louder, and the whole kitchen was filled with the penetrating perfume of the onions. Auguste meantime was preparing some bacon fat in a dish, and Leon's chopper fell faster and faster, and every now and then scraped the block so as to gather together the sausage-meat, now almost a paste.

"When they got across the sea," Florent continued, "they took the man to an island called the Devil's Island,[*] where he found himself amongst others who had been carried away from their own country. They were all very unhappy. At first they were kept to hard labour, just like convicts. The gendarme who had charge of them counted them three times every day, so as to be sure that none were missing. Later on, they were left free to do as they liked, being merely locked up at night in a big wooden hut, where they slept in hammocks stretched between two bars. At the end of the year they went about barefooted, as their boots were quite worn out, and their clothes had become so ragged that their flesh showed through them. They had built themselves some huts with trunks of trees as a shelter against the sun, which is terribly hot in those parts; but these huts did not shield them against the mosquitoes, which covered them with pimples and swellings during the night. Many of them died, and the others turned quite yellow, so shrunken and wretched, with their long, unkempt beards, that one could not behold them without pity."

[*] The Ile du Diable. This spot was selected as the place
of detention of Captain Dreyfus, the French officer
convicted in 1894 of having divulged important military
documents to foreign powers.—Translator.

"Auguste, give me the fat," cried Quenu; and when the apprentice had handed him the dish he let the pieces of bacon-fat slide gently into the pot, and then stirred them with his spoon. A yet denser steam now rose from the fireplace.

"What did they give them to eat?" asked little Pauline, who seemed deeply interested.

"They gave them maggoty rice and foul meat," answered Florent, whose voice grew lower as he spoke. "The rice could scarcely be eaten. When the meat was roasted and very well done it was just possible to swallow it; but if it was boiled, it smelt so dreadfully that the men had nausea and stomach ache."

"I'd rather have lived upon dry bread," said the child, after thinking the matter carefully over.

Leon, having finished the mincing, now placed the sausage-meat upon the square table in a dish. Mouton, who had remained seated with his eyes fixed upon Florent, as though filled with amazement by his story, was obliged to retreat a few steps, which he did with a very bad grace. Then he rolled himself up, with his nose close to the sausage-meat, and began to purr.

Lisa was unable to conceal her disgust and amazement. That foul rice, that evil-smelling meat, seemed to her to be scarcely credible abominations, which disgraced those who had eaten them as much as it did those who had provided them; and her calm, handsome face and round neck quivered with vague fear of the man who had lived upon such horrid food.

"No, indeed, it was not a land of delights," Florent resumed, forgetting all about little Pauline, and fixing his dreamy eyes upon the steaming pot. "Every day brought fresh annoyances—perpetual grinding tyranny, the violation of every principle of justice, contempt for all human charity, which exasperated the prisoners, and slowly consumed them with a fever of sickly rancour. They lived like wild beasts, with the lash ceaselessly raised over their backs. Those torturers would have liked to kill the poor man—Oh, no; it can never be forgotten; it is impossible! Such sufferings will some day claim vengeance."

His voice had fallen, and the pieces of fat hissing merrily in the pot drowned it with the sound of their boiling. Lisa, however, heard him, and was frightened by the implacable expression which had suddenly come over his face; and, recollecting the gentle look which he habitually wore, she judged him to be a hypocrite.

Florent's hollow voice had brought Pauline's interest and delight to the highest pitch, and she fidgeted with pleasure on his knee.

"But the man?" she exclaimed. "Go on about the man!"

Florent looked at her, and then appeared to remember, and smiled his sad smile again.

"The man," he continued, "was weary of remaining on the island, and had but one thought—that of making his escape by crossing the sea and reaching the mainland, whose white coast line could be seen on the horizon in clear weather. But it was no easy matter to escape. It was necessary that a raft should be built, and as several of the prisoners had already made their escape, all the trees on the island had been felled to prevent the others from obtaining timber. The island was, indeed, so bare and naked, so scorched by the blazing sun, that life in it had become yet more perilous and terrible. However, it occurred to the man and two of his companions to employ the timbers of which their huts were built; and one evening they put out to sea on some rotten beams, which they had fastened together with dry branches. The wind carried them towards the coast. Just as daylight was about to appear, the raft struck on a sandbank with such violence that the beams were severed from their lashings and carried out to sea. The three poor fellows were almost engulfed in the sand. Two of them sank in it to their waists, while the third disappeared up to his chin, and his companions were obliged to pull him out. At last they reached a rock, so small that there was scarcely room for them to sit down upon it. When the sun rose they could see the coast in front of them, a bar of grey cliffs stretching all along the horizon. Two, who knew how to swim, determined to reach those cliffs. They preferred to run the risk of being drowned at once to that of slowly starving on the rock. But they promised their companion that they would return for him when they had reached land and had been able to procure a boat."

"Ah, I know now!" cried little Pauline, clapping her hands with glee. "It's the story of the gentleman who was eaten by the crabs!"

"They succeeded in reaching the coast," continued Florent, "but it was quite deserted; and it was only at the end of four days that they were able to get a boat. When they returned to the rock, they found their companion lying on his back, dead, and half-eaten by crabs, which were still swarming over what remained of his body."[*]

[*] In deference to the easily shocked feelings of the
average English reader I have somewhat modified this
passage. In the original M. Zola fully describes the awful
appearance of the body.—Translator.
A murmur of disgust escaped Lisa and Augustine, and a horrified grimace
passed over the face of Leon, who was preparing the skins for the
black-puddings. Quenu stopped in the midst of his work and looked
at Auguste, who seemed to have turned faint. Only little Pauline
was smiling. In imagination the others could picture those swarming,
ravenous crabs crawling all over the kitchen, and mingling gruesome
odours with the aroma of the bacon-fat and onions.

"Give me the blood," cried Quenu, who had not been following the story.

Auguste came up to him with the two cans, from which he slowly poured the blood, while Quenu, as it fell, vigorously stirred the now thickening contents of the pot. When the cans were emptied, Quenu reached up to one of the drawers above the range, and took out some pinches of spice. Then he added a plentiful seasoning of pepper.

"They left him there, didn't they," Lisa now asked of Florent, "and returned themselves in safety?"

"As they were going back," continued Florent, "the wind changed, and they were driven out into the open sea. A wave carried away one of their oars, and the water swept so furiously into the boat that their whole time was taken up in baling it out with their hands. They tossed about in this way in sight of the coast, carried away by squalls and then brought back again by the tide, without a mouthful of bread to eat, for their scanty stock of provisions had been consumed. This went on for three days."

"Three days!" cried Lisa in stupefaction; "three days without food!"

"Yes, three days without food. When the east wind at last brought them to shore, one of them was so weak that he lay on the beach the whole day. In the evening he died. His companion had vainly attempted to get him to chew some leaves which he gathered from the trees."

At this point Augustine broke into a slight laugh. Then, ashamed at having done so and not wishing to be considered heartless, she stammered out in confusion: "Oh! I wasn't laughing at that. It was Mouton. Do just look at Mouton, madame."

Then Lisa in her turn began to smile. Mouton, who had been lying all this time with his nose close to the dish of sausage-meat, had probably begun to feel distressed and disgusted by the presence of all this food, for he had risen and was rapidly scratching the table with his paws as though he wanted to bury the dish and its contents. At last, however, turning his back to it and lying down on his side, he stretched himself out, half closing his eyes and rubbing his head against the table with languid pleasure. Then they all began to compliment Mouton. He never stole anything, they said, and could be safely left with the meat. Pauline related that he licked her fingers and washed her face after dinner without trying to bite her.

However, Lisa now came back to the question as to whether it were possible to live for three days without food. In her opinion it was not. "No," she said, "I can't believe it. No one ever goes three days without food. When people talk of a person dying of hunger, it is a mere expression. They always get something to eat, more or less. It is only the most abandoned wretches, people who are utterly lost——"

She was doubtless going to add, "vagrant rogues," but she stopped short and looked at Florent. The scornful pout of her lips and the expression of her bright eyes plainly signified that in her belief only villains made such prolonged fasts. It seemed to her that a man able to remain without food for three days must necessarily be a very dangerous character. For, indeed, honest folks never placed themselves in such a position.

Florent was now almost stifling. In front of him the stove, into which Leon had just thrown several shovelfuls of coal, was snoring like a lay clerk asleep in the sun; and the heat was very great. Auguste, who had taken charge of the lard melting in the pots, was watching over it in a state of perspiration, and Quenu wiped his brow with his sleeve whilst waiting for the blood to mix. A drowsiness such as follows gross feeding, an atmosphere heavy with indigestion, pervaded the kitchen.

"When the man had buried his comrade in the sand," Florent continued slowly, "he walked off alone straight in front of him. Dutch Guiana, in which country he now was, is a land of forests intermingled with rivers and swamps. The man walked on for more than a week without coming across a single human dwelling-place. All around, death seemed to be lurking and lying in wait for him. Though his stomach was racked by hunger, he often did not dare to eat the bright-coloured fruits which hung from the trees; he was afraid to touch the glittering berries, fearing lest they should be poisonous. For whole days he did not see a patch of sky, but tramped on beneath a canopy of branches, amidst a greenish gloom that swarmed with horrible living creatures. Great birds flew over his head with a terrible flapping of wings and sudden strange calls resembling death groans; apes sprang, wild animals rushed through the thickets around him, bending the saplings and bringing down a rain of leaves, as though a gale were passing. But it was particularly the serpents that turned his blood cold when, stepping upon a matting of moving, withered leaves, he caught sight of their slim heads gliding amidst a horrid maze of roots. In certain nooks, nooks of dank shadow, swarming colonies of reptiles—some black, some yellow, some purple, some striped, some spotted, and some resembling withered reeds—suddenly awakened into life and wriggled away. At such times the man would stop and look about for a stone on which he might take refuge from the soft yielding ground into which his feet sank; and there he would remain for hours, terror-stricken on espying in some open space near by a boa, who, with tail coiled and head erect, swayed like the trunk of a big tree splotched with gold.

"At night he used to sleep in the trees, alarmed by the slightest rustling of the branches, and fancying that he could hear endless swarms of serpents gliding through the gloom. He almost stifled beneath the interminable expanse of foliage. The gloomy shade reeked with close, oppressive heat, a clammy dankness and pestilential sweat, impregnated with the coarse aroma of scented wood and malodorous flowers.

"And when at last, after a long weary tramp, the man made his way out of the forest and beheld the sky again, he found himself confronted by wide rivers which barred his way. He skirted their banks, keeping a watchful eye on the grey backs of the alligators and the masses of drifting vegetation, and then, when he came to a less suspicious-looking spot, he swam across. And beyond the rivers the forests began again. At other times there were vast prairie lands, leagues of thick vegetation, in which, at distant intervals, small lakes gleamed bluely. The man then made a wide detour, and sounded the ground beneath him before advancing, having but narrowly escaped from being swallowed up and buried beneath one of those smiling plains which he could hear cracking at each step he took. The giant grass, nourished by all the collected humus, concealed pestiferous marshes, depths of liquid mud; and amongst the expanses of verdure spread over the glaucous immensity to the very horizon there were only narrow stretches of firm ground with which the traveller must be acquainted if he would avoid disappearing for ever. One night the man sank down as far as his waist. At each effort he made to extricate himself the mud threatened to rise to his mouth. Then he remained quite still for nearly a couple of hours; and when the moon rose he was fortunately able to catch hold of a branch of a tree above his head. By the time he reached a human dwelling his hands and feet were bruised and bleeding, swollen with poisonous stings. He presented such a pitiable, famished appearance that those who saw him were afraid of him. They tossed him some food fifty yards away from the house, and the master of it kept guard over his door with a loaded gun."

Florent stopped, his voice choked by emotion, and his eyes gazing blankly before him. For some minutes he had seemed to be speaking to himself alone. Little Pauline, who had grown drowsy, was lying in his arms with her head thrown back, though striving to keep her wondering eyes open. And Quenu, for his part, appeared to be getting impatient.

"Why, you stupid!" he shouted to Leon, "don't you know how to hold a skin yet? What do you stand staring at me for? It's the skin you should look at, not me! There, hold it like that, and don't move again!"

With his right hand Leon was raising a long string of sausage-skin, at one end of which a very wide funnel was inserted; while with his left hand he coiled the black-pudding round a metal bowl as fast as Quenu filled the funnel with big spoonfuls of the meat. The latter, black and steaming, flowed through the funnel, gradually inflating the skin, which fell down again, gorged to repletion and curving languidly. As Quenu had removed the pot from the range both he and Leon stood out prominently, he broad visaged, and the lad slender of profile, in the burning glow which cast over their pale faces and white garments a flood of rosy light.

Lisa and Augustine watched the filling of the skin with great interest, Lisa especially; and she in her turn found fault with Leon because he nipped the skin too tightly with his fingers, which caused knots to form, she said. When the skin was quite full, Quenu let it slip gently into a pot of boiling water; and seemed quite easy in his mind again, for now nothing remained but to leave it to boil.

"And the man—go on about the man!" murmured Pauline, opening her eyes, and surprised at no longer hearing the narrative.

Florent rocked her on his knee, and resumed his story in a slow, murmuring voice, suggestive of that of a nurse singing an infant to sleep.

"The man," he said, "arrived at a large town. There he was at first taken for an escaped convict, and was kept in prison for several months. Then he was released, and turned his hand to all sorts of work. He kept accounts and taught children to read, and at one time he was even employed as a navvy in making an embankment. He was continually hoping to return to his own country. He had saved the necessary amount of money when he was attacked by yellow fever. Then, believing him to be dead, those about him divided his clothes amongst themselves; so that when he at last recovered he had not even a shirt left. He had to begin all over again. The man was very weak, and was afraid he might have to remain where he was. But at last he was able to get away, and he returned."

His voice had sunk lower and lower, and now died away altogether in a final quivering of his lips. The close of the story had lulled little Pauline to sleep, and she was now slumbering with her head on Florent's shoulder. He held her with one arm, and still gently rocked her on his knee. No one seemed to pay any further attention to him, so he remained still and quiet where he was, holding the sleeping child.

Now came the tug of war, as Quenu said. He had to remove the black-puddings from the pot. In order to avoid breaking them or getting them entangled, he coiled them round a thick wooden pin as he drew them out, and then carried them into the yard and hung them on screens, where they quickly dried. Leon helped him, holding up the drooping ends. And as these reeking festoons of black-pudding crossed the kitchen they left behind them a trail of odorous steam, which still further thickened the dense atmosphere.

Auguste, on his side, after giving a hasty glance at the lard moulds, now took the covers off the two pots in which the fat was simmering, and each bursting bubble discharged an acrid vapour into the kitchen. The greasy haze had been gradually rising ever since the beginning of the evening, and now it shrouded the gas and pervaded the whole room, streaming everywhere, and veiling the ruddy whiteness of Quenu and his two assistants. Lisa and Augustine had risen from their seats; and all were panting as though they had eaten too much.

Augustine carried the sleeping Pauline upstairs; and Quenu, who liked to fasten up the kitchen himself, gave Auguste and Leon leave to go to bed, saying that he would fetch the black-pudding himself. The younger apprentice stole off with a very red face, having managed to secrete under his shirt nearly a yard of the pudding, which must have almost scalded him. Then the Quenus and Florent remained alone, in silence. Lisa stood nibbling a little piece of the hot pudding, keeping her pretty lips well apart all the while, for fear of burning them, and gradually the black compound vanished in her rosy mouth.

"Well," said she, "La Normande was foolish in behaving so rudely; the black-pudding's excellent to-day."

However, there was a knock at the passage door, and Gavard, who stayed at Monsieur Lebigre's every evening until midnight, came in. He had called for a definite answer about the fish inspectorship.

"You must understand," he said, "that Monsieur Verlaque cannot wait any longer; he is too ill. So Florent must make up his mind. I have promised to give a positive answer early to-morrow."

"Well, Florent accepts," Lisa quietly remarked, taking another nibble at some black-pudding.

Florent, who had remained in his chair, overcome by a strange feeling of prostration, vainly endeavoured to rise and protest.

"No, no, say nothing," continued Lisa; "the matter is quite settled. You have suffered quite enough already, my dear Florent. What you have just been telling us is enough to make one shudder. It is time now for you to settle down. You belong to a respectable family, you received a good education, and it is really not fitting that you should go wandering about the highways like a vagrant. At your age childishness is no longer excusable. You have been foolish; well, all that will be forgotten and forgiven. You will take your place again among those of your own class—the class of respectable folks—and live in future like other people."

Florent listened in astonishment, quite unable to say a word. Lisa was, doubtless, right. She looked so healthy, so serene, that it was impossible to imagine that she desired anything but what was proper. It was he, with his fleshless body and dark, equivocal-looking countenance, who must be in the wrong, and indulging in unrighteous dreams. He could, indeed, no longer understand why he had hitherto resisted.

Lisa, however, continued to talk to him with an abundant flow of words, as though he were a little boy found in fault and threatened with the police. She assumed, indeed, a most maternal manner, and plied him with the most convincing reasons. And at last, as a final argument, she said:

"Do it for us, Florent. We occupy a fair position in the neighbourhood which obliges us to use a certain amount of circumspection; and, to tell you the truth, between ourselves, I'm afraid that people will begin to talk. This inspectorship will set everything right; you will be somebody; you will even be an honour to us."

Her manner had become caressingly persuasive, and Florent was penetrated by all the surrounding plenteousness, all the aroma filling the kitchen, where he fed, as it were, on the nourishment floating in the atmosphere. He sank into blissful meanness, born of all the copious feeding that went on in the sphere of plenty in which he had been living during the last fortnight. He felt, as it were, the titillation of forming fat which spread slowly all over his body. He experienced the languid beatitude of shopkeepers, whose chief concern is to fill their bellies. At this late hour of night, in the warm atmosphere of the kitchen, all his acerbity and determination melted away. That peaceable evening, with the odour of the black-pudding and the lard, and the sight of plump little Pauline slumbering on his knee, had so enervated him that he found himself wishing for a succession of such evenings—endless ones which would make him fat.

However, it was the sight of Mouton that chiefly decided him. Mouton was sound asleep, with his stomach turned upwards, one of his paws resting on his nose, and his tail twisted over this side, as though to keep him warm; and he was slumbering with such an expression of feline happiness that Florent, as he gazed at him, murmured: "No, it would be too foolish! I accept the berth. Say that I accept it, Gavard."

Then Lisa finished eating her black-pudding, and wiped her fingers on the edge of her apron. And next she got her brother-in-law's candle ready for him, while Gavard and Quenu congratulated him on his decision. It was always necessary for a man to settle down, said they; the breakneck freaks of politics did not provide one with food. And, meantime, Lisa, standing there with the lighted candle in her hand, looked at him with an expression of satisfaction resting on her handsome face, placid like that of some sacred cow.

CHAPTER III

Three days later the necessary formalities were gone through, and without demur the police authorities at the Prefecture accepted Florent on Monsieur Verlaque's recommendation as his substitute. Gavard, by the way, had made it a point to accompany them. When he again found himself alone with Florent he kept nudging his ribs with his elbow as they walked along together, and laughed, without saying anything, while winking his eyes in a jeering way. He seemed to find something very ridiculous in the appearance of the police officers whom they met on the Quai de l'Horloge, for, as he passed them, he slightly shrugged his shoulders and made the grimace of a man seeking to restrain himself from laughing in people's faces.

On the following morning Monsieur Verlaque began to initiate the new inspector into the duties of his office. It had been arranged that during the next few days he should make him acquainted with the turbulent sphere which he would have to supervise. Poor Verlaque, as Gavard called him was a pale little man, swathed in flannels, handkerchiefs, and mufflers. Constantly coughing, he made his way through the cool, moist atmosphere, and running waters of the fish market, on a pair of scraggy legs like those of a sickly child.

When Florent made his appearance on the first morning, at seven o'clock, he felt quite distracted; his eyes were dazed, his head ached with all the noise and riot. Retail dealers were already prowling about the auction pavilion; clerks were arriving with their ledgers, and consigners' agents, with leather bags slung over their shoulders, sat on overturned chairs by the salesmen's desks, waiting to receive their cash. Fish was being unloaded and unpacked not only in the enclosure, but even on the footways. All along the latter were piles of small baskets, an endless arrival of cases and hampers, and sacks of mussels, from which streamlets of water trickled. The auctioneers' assistants, all looking very busy, sprang over the heaps, tore away the straw at the tops of the baskets, emptied the latter, and tossed them aside. They then speedily transferred their contents in lots to huge wickerwork trays, arranging them with a turn of the hand so that they might show to the best advantage. And when the large tray-like baskets were all set out, Florent could almost fancy that a whole shoal of fish had got stranded there, still quivering with life, and gleaming with rosy nacre, scarlet coral, and milky pearl, all the soft, pale, sheeny hues of the ocean.

The deep-lying forests of seaweed, in which the mysterious life of the ocean slumbers, seemed at one haul of the nets to have yielded up all they contained. There were cod, keeling, whiting, flounders, plaice, dabs, and other sorts of common fish of a dingy grey with whitish splotches; there were conger-eels, huge serpent-like creatures, with small black eyes and muddy, bluish skins, so slimy that they still seemed to be gliding along, yet alive. There were broad flat skate with pale undersides edged with a soft red, and superb backs bumpy with vertebrae, and marbled down to the tautly stretched ribs of their fins with splotches of cinnabar, intersected by streaks of the tint of Florentine bronze—a dark medley of colour suggestive of the hues of a toad or some poisonous flower. Then, too, there were hideous dog-fish, with round heads, widely-gaping mouths like those of Chinese idols, and short fins like bats' wings; fit monsters to keep yelping guard over the treasures of the ocean grottoes. And next came the finer fish, displayed singly on the osier trays; salmon that gleamed like chased silver, every scale seemingly outlined by a graving-tool on a polished metal surface; mullet with larger scales and coarser markings; large turbot and huge brill with firm flesh white like curdled milk; tunny-fish, smooth and glossy, like bags of blackish leather; and rounded bass, with widely gaping mouths which a soul too large for the body seemed to have rent asunder as it forced its way out amidst the stupefaction of death. And on all sides there were sole, brown and grey, in pairs; sand-eels, slim and stiff, like shavings of pewter; herrings, slightly twisted, with bleeding gills showing on their silver-worked skins; fat dories tinged with just a suspicion of carmine; burnished mackerel with green-streaked backs, and sides gleaming with ever-changing iridescence; and rosy gurnets with white bellies, their head towards the centre of the baskets and their tails radiating all around, so that they simulated some strange florescence splotched with pearly white and brilliant vermilion. There were rock mullet, too, with delicious flesh, flushed with the pinky tinge peculiar to the Cyprinus family; boxes of whiting with opaline reflections; and baskets of smelts—neat little baskets, pretty as those used for strawberries, and exhaling a strong scent of violets. And meantime the tiny black eyes of the shrimps dotted as with beads of jet their soft-toned mass of pink and grey; and spiny crawfish and lobsters striped with black, all still alive, raised a grating sound as they tried to crawl along with their broken claws.

Florent gave but indifferent attention to Monsieur Verlaque's explanations. A flood of sunshine suddenly streamed through the lofty glass roof of the covered way, lighting up all these precious colours, toned and softened by the waves—the iridescent flesh-tints of the shell-fish, the opal of the whiting, the pearly nacre of the mackerel, the ruddy gold of the mullets, the plated skins of the herrings, and massive silver of the salmon. It was as though the jewel-cases of some sea-nymph had been emptied there—a mass of fantastical, undreamt-of ornaments, a streaming and heaping of necklaces, monstrous bracelets, gigantic brooches, barbaric gems and jewels, the use of which could not be divined. On the backs of the skate and the dog-fish you saw, as it were, big dull green and purple stones set in dark metal, while the slender forms of the sand-eels and the tails and fins of the smelts displayed all the delicacy of finely wrought silver-work.

And meantime Florent's face was fanned by a fresh breeze, a sharp, salt breeze redolent of the sea. It reminded him of the coasts of Guiana and his voyages. He half fancied that he was gazing at some bay left dry by the receding tide, with the seaweed steaming in the sun, the bare rocks drying, and the beach smelling strongly of the brine. All around him the fish in their perfect freshness exhaled a pleasant perfume, that slightly sharp, irritating perfume which depraves the appetite.

Monsieur Verlaque coughed. The dampness was affecting him, and he wrapped his muffler more closely about his neck.

"Now," said he, "we will pass on to the fresh water fish."

This was in a pavilion beside the fruit market, the last one, indeed, in the direction of the Rue Rambuteau. On either side of the space reserved for the auctions were large circular stone basins, divided into separate compartments by iron gratings. Slender streams of water flowed from brass jets shaped like swan's necks; and the compartments were filled with swarming colonies of crawfish, black-backed carp ever on the move, and mazy tangles of eels, incessantly knotting and unknotting themselves. Again was Monsieur Verlaque attacked by an obstinate fit of coughing. The moisture of the atmosphere was more insipid here than amongst the sea water fish: there was a riverside scent, as of sun-warmed water slumbering on a bed of sand.

A great number of crawfishes had arrived from Germany that morning in cases and hampers, and the market was also crowded with river fish from Holland and England. Several men were unpacking shiny carp from the Rhine, lustrous with ruddy metallic hues, their scales resembling bronzed cloisonne enamel; and others were busy with huge pike, the cruel iron-grey brigands of the waters, who ravenously protruded their savage jaws; or with magnificent dark-hued with verdigris. And amidst these suggestions of copper, iron, and bronze, the gudgeon and perch, the trout, the bleak, and the flat-fish taken in sweep-nets showed brightly white, the steel-blue tints of their backs gradually toning down to the soft transparency of their bellies. However, it was the fat snowy-white barbel that supplied the liveliest brightness in this gigantic collection of still life.

Bags of young carp were being gently emptied into the basins. The fish spun round, then remained motionless for a moment, and at last shot away and disappeared. Little eels were turned out of their hampers in a mass, and fell to the bottom of the compartments like tangled knots of snakes; while the larger ones—those whose bodies were about as thick as a child's arm—raised their heads and slipped of their own accord into the water with the supple motion of serpents gliding into the concealment of a thicket. And meantime the other fish, whose death agony had been lasting all the morning as they lay on the soiled osiers of the basket-trays, slowly expired amidst all the uproar of the auctions, opening their mouths as though to inhale the moisture of the air, with great silent gasps, renewed every few seconds.

However, Monsieur Verlaque brought Florent back to the salt water fish. He took him all over the place and gave him the minutest particulars about everything. Round the nine salesmen's desks ranged along three sides of the pavilion there was now a dense crowd of surging, swaying heads, above which appeared the clerks, perched upon high chairs and making entries in their ledgers.

"Are all these clerks employed by the salesmen?" asked Florent.

By way of reply Monsieur Verlaque made a detour along the outside footway, led him into the enclosure of one of the auctions, and then explained the working of the various departments of the big yellow office, which smelt strongly of fish and was stained all over by drippings and splashings from the hampers. In a little glazed compartment up above, the collector of the municipal dues took note of the prices realised by the different lots of fish. Lower down, seated upon high chairs and with their wrists resting upon little desks, were two female clerks, who kept account of the business on behalf of the salesmen. At each end of the stone table in front of the office was a crier who brought the basket-trays forward in turn, and in a bawling voice announced what each lot consisted of; while above him the female clerk, pen in hand, waited to register the price at which the lots were knocked down. And outside the enclosure, shut up in another little office of yellow wood, Monsieur Verlaque showed Florent the cashier, a fat old woman, who was ranging coppers and five-franc pierces in piles.

"There is a double control, you see," said Monsieur Verlaque; "the control of the Prefecture of the Seine and that of the Prefecture of Police. The latter, which licenses the salesmen, claims to have the right of supervision over them; and the municipality asserts its right to be represented at the transactions as they are subject to taxation."

He went on expatiating at length in his faint cold voice respecting the rival claims of the two Prefectures. Florent, however, was paying but little heed, his attention being concentrated on a female clerk sitting on one of the high chairs just in front of him. She was a tall, dark woman of thirty, with big black eyes and an easy calmness of manner, and she wrote with outstretched fingers like a girl who had been taught the regulation method of the art.

However, Florent's attention was diverted by the yelping of the crier, who was just offering a magnificent turbot for sale.

"I've a bid of thirty francs! Thirty francs, now; thirty francs!"

He repeated these words in all sorts of keys, running up and down a strange scale of notes full of sudden changes. Humpbacked and with his face twisted askew, and his hair rough and disorderly, he wore a great blue apron with a bib; and with flaming eyes and outstretched arms he cried vociferously: "Thirty-one! thirty-two! thirty-three! Thirty-three francs fifty centimes! thirty-three fifty!"

Then he paused to take breath, turning the basket-tray and pushing it farther upon the table. The fish-wives bent forward and gently touched the turbot with their finger-tips. Then the crier began again with renewed energy, hurling his figures towards the buyers with a wave of the hand and catching the slightest indication of a fresh bid—the raising of a finger, a twist of the eyebrows, a pouting of the lips, a wink, and all with such rapidity and such a ceaseless jumble of words that Florent, utterly unable to follow him, felt quite disconcerted when, in a sing-song voice like that of a priest intoning the final words of a versicle, he chanted: "Forty-two! forty-two! The turbot goes for forty-two francs."

It was the beautiful Norman who had made the last bid. Florent recognised her as she stood in the line of fish-wives crowding against the iron rails which surrounded the enclosure. The morning was fresh and sharp, and there was a row of tippets above the display of big white aprons, covering the prominent bosoms and stomachs and sturdy shoulders. With high-set chignon set off with curls, and white and dainty skin, the beautiful Norman flaunted her lace bow amidst tangled shocks of hair covered with dirty kerchiefs, red noses eloquent of drink, sneering mouths, and battered faces suggestive of old pots. And she also recognised Madame Quenu's cousin, and was so surprised to see him there that she began gossiping to her neighbours about him.

The uproar of voices had become so great that Monsieur Verlaque renounced all further attempt to explain matters to Florent. On the footway close by, men were calling out the larger fish with prolonged shouts, which sounded as though they came from gigantic speaking-trumpets; and there was one individual who roared "Mussels! Mussels!" in such a hoarse, cracked, clamorous voice that the very roofs of the market shook. Some sacks of mussels were turned upside down, and their contents poured into hampers, while others were emptied with shovels. And there was a ceaseless procession of basket-trays containing skate, soles, mackerel, conger-eels, and salmon, carried backwards and forwards amidst the ever-increasing cackle and pushing of the fish-women as they crowded against the iron rails which creaked with their pressure. The humpbacked crier, now fairly on the job, waved his skinny arms in the air and protruded his jaws. Presently, seemingly lashed into a state of frenzy by the flood of figures that spurted from his lips, he sprang upon a stool, where, with his mouth twisted spasmodically and his hair streaming behind him, he could force nothing more than unintelligible hisses from his parched throat. And in the meantime, up above, the collector of municipal dues, a little old man, muffled in a collar of imitation astrachan, remained with nothing but his nose showing under his black velvet skullcap. And the tall, dark-complexioned female clerk, with eyes shining calmly in her face, which had been slightly reddened by the cold, sat on her high wooden chair, quietly writing, apparently unruffled by the continuous rattle which came from the hunchback below her.

"That fellow Logre is wonderful," muttered Monsieur Verlaque with a smile. "He is the best crier in the markets. I believe he could make people buy boot soles in the belief they were fish!"

Then he and Florent went back into the pavilion. As they again passed the spot where the fresh water fish was being sold by auction, and where the bidding seemed much quieter, Monsieur Verlaque explained that French river fishing was in a bad way.[*] The crier here, a fair, sorry-looking fellow, who scarcely moved his arms, was disposing of some lots of eels and crawfish in a monotonous voice, while the assistants fished fresh supplies out of the stone basins with their short-handled nets.

[*] M. Zola refers, of course, to the earlier years of the
Second Empire. Under the present republican Government,
which has largely fostered fish culture, matters have
considerably improved.—Translator.

However, the crowd round the salesmen's desks was still increasing. Monsieur Verlaque played his part as Florent's instructor in the most conscientious manner, clearing the way by means of his elbows, and guiding his successor through the busiest parts. The upper-class retail dealers were there, quietly waiting for some of the finer fish, or loading the porters with their purchases of turbot, tunny, and salmon. The street-hawkers who had clubbed together to buy lots of herrings and small flat-fish were dividing them on the pavement. There were also some people of the smaller middle class, from distant parts of the city, who had come down at four o'clock in the morning to buy a really fresh fish, and had ended by allowing some enormous lot, costing from forty to fifty francs, to be knocked down to them, with the result that they would be obliged to spend the whole day in getting their friends and acquaintances to take the surplus off their hands. Every now and then some violent pushing would force a gap through part of the crowd. A fish-wife, who had got tightly jammed, freed herself, shaking her fists and pouring out a torrent of abuse. Then a compact mass of people again collected, and Florent, almost suffocated, declared that he had seen quite enough, and understood all that was necessary.

As Monsieur Verlaque was helping him to extricate himself from the crowd, they found themselves face to face with the handsome Norman. She remained stock-still in front of them, and with her queenly air inquired:

"Well, is it quite settled? You are going to desert us, Monsieur Verlaque?"

"Yes, yes," replied the little man; "I am going to take a rest in the country, at Clamart. The smell of the fish is bad for me, it seems. Here, this is the gentleman who is going to take my place."

So speaking he turned round to introduce Florent to her. The handsome Norman almost choked; however, as Florent went off, he fancied he could hear her whisper to her neighbours, with a laugh: "Well, we shall have some fine fun now, see if we don't!"

The fish-wives had begun to set out their stalls. From all the taps at the corners of the marble slabs water was gushing freely; and there was a rustling sound all round, like the plashing of rain, a streaming of stiff jets of water hissing and spurting. And then, from the lower side of the sloping slabs, great drops fell with a softened murmur, splashing on the flagstones where a mass of tiny streams flowed along here and there, turning holes and depressions into miniature lakes, and afterwards gliding in a thousand rills down the slope towards the Rue Rambuteau. A moist haze ascended, a sort of rainy dust, bringing fresh whiffs of air to Florent's face, whiffs of that salt, pungent sea breeze which he remembered so well; while in such fish as was already laid out he once more beheld the rosy nacres, gleaming corals, and milky pearls, all the rippling colour and glaucous pallidity of the ocean world.

That first morning left him much in doubt; indeed, he regretted that he had yielded to Lisa's insistence. Ever since his escape from the greasy drowsiness of the kitchen he had been accusing himself of base weakness with such violence that tears had almost risen in his eyes. But he did not dare to go back on his word. He was a little afraid of Lisa, and could see the curl of her lips and the look of mute reproach upon her handsome face. He felt that she was too serious a woman to be trifled with. However, Gavard happily inspired him with a consoling thought. On the evening of the day on which Monsieur Verlaque had conducted him through the auction sales, Gavard took him aside and told him, with a good deal of hesitation, that "the poor devil" was not at all well off. And after various remarks about the scoundrelly Government which ground the life out of its servants without allowing them even the means to die in comfort, he ended by hinting that it would be charitable on Florent's part to surrender a part of his salary to the old inspector. Florent welcomed the suggestion with delight. It was only right, he considered, for he looked upon himself simply as Monsieur Verlaque's temporary substitute; and besides, he himself really required nothing, as he boarded and lodged with his brother. Gavard added that he thought if Florent gave up fifty francs out of the hundred and fifty which he would receive monthly, the arrangement would be everything that could be desired; and, lowering his voice, he added that it would not be for long, for the poor fellow was consumptive to his very bones. Finally it was settled that Florent should see Monsieur Verlaque's wife, and arrange matters with her, to avoid any possibility of hurting the old man's feelings.

The thought of this kindly action afforded Florent great relief, and he now accepted his duties with the object of doing good, thus continuing to play the part which he had been fulfilling all his life. However, he made the poultry dealer promise that he would not speak of the matter to anyone; and as Gavard also felt a vague fear of Lisa, he kept the secret, which was really very meritorious in him.

And now the whole pork shop seemed happy. Handsome Lisa manifested the greatest friendliness towards her brother-in-law. She took care that he went to bed early, so as to be able to rise in good time; she kept his breakfast hot for him; and she no longer felt ashamed at being seen talking to him on the footway, now that he wore a laced cap. Quenu, quite delighted by all these good signs, sat down to table in the evening between his wife and brother with a lighter heart than ever. They often lingered over dinner till nine o'clock, leaving the shop in Augustine's charge, and indulging in a leisurely digestion interspersed with gossip about the neighbourhood, and the dogmatic opinions of Lisa on political topics; Florent also had to relate how matters had gone in the fish market that day. He gradually grew less frigid, and began to taste the happiness of a well-regulated existence. There was a well-to-do comfort and trimness about the light yellowish dining room which had a softening influence upon him as soon as he crossed its threshold. Handsome Lisa's kindly attentions wrapped him, as it were, in cotton-wool; and mutual esteem and concord reigned paramount.

Gavard, however, considered the Quenu-Gradelles' home to be too drowsy. He forgave Lisa her weakness for the Emperor, because, he said, one ought never to discuss politics with women, and beautiful Madame Quenu was, after all, a very worthy person, who managed her business admirably. Nevertheless, he much preferred to spend his evenings at Monsieur Lebigre's, where he met a group of friends who shared his own opinions. Thus when Florent was appointed to the inspectorship of the fish market, Gavard began to lead him astray, taking him off for hours, and prompting him to lead a bachelor's life now that he had obtained a berth.

Monsieur Lebigre was the proprietor of a very fine establishment, fitted up in the modern luxurious style. Occupying the right-hand corner of the Rue Pirouette, and looking on to the Rue Rambuteau, it formed, with its four small Norwegian pines in green-painted tubs flanking the doorway, a worthy pendant to the big pork shop of the Quenu-Gradelles. Through the clear glass windows you could see the interior, which was decorated with festoons of foliage, vine branches, and grapes, painted on a soft green ground. The floor was tiled with large black and white squares. At the far end was the yawning cellar entrance, above which rose a spiral staircase hung with red drapery, and leading to the billiard-room on the first floor. The counter or "bar" on the right looked especially rich, and glittered like polished silver. Its zinc-work, hanging with a broad bulging border over the sub-structure of white and red marble, edged it with a rippling sheet of metal as if it were some high altar laden with embroidery. At one end, over a gas stove, stood porcelain pots, decorated with circles of brass, and containing punch and hot wine. At the other extremity was a tall and richly sculptured marble fountain, from which a fine stream of water, so steady and continuous that it looked as though it were motionless, flowed into a basin. In the centre, edged on three sides by the sloping zinc surface of the counter, was a second basin for rinsing and cooling purposes, where quart bottles of draught wine, partially empty, reared their greenish necks. Then on the counter, to the right and left of this central basin, were batches of glasses symmetrically arranged: little glasses for brandy, thick tumblers for draught wine, cup glasses for brandied fruits, glasses for absinthe, glass mugs for beer, and tall goblets, all turned upside down and reflecting the glitter of the counter. On the left, moreover, was a metal urn, serving as a receptacle for gratuities; whilst a similar one on the right bristled with a fan-like arrangement of coffee spoons.

Monsieur Lebigre was generally to be found enthroned behind his counter upon a seat covered with buttoned crimson leather. Within easy reach of his hand were the liqueurs in cut-glass decanters protruding from the compartments of a stand. His round back rested against a huge mirror which completely filled the panel behind him; across it ran two glass shelves supporting an array of jars and bottles. Upon one of them the glass jars of preserved fruits, cherries, plums, and peaches, stood out darkly; while on the other, between symmetrically arranged packets of finger biscuits, were bright flasks of soft green and red and yellow glass, suggesting strange mysterious liqueurs, or floral extracts of exquisite limpidity. Standing on the glass shelf in the white glow of the mirror, these flasks, flashing as if on fire, seemed to be suspended in the air.

To give his premises the appearance of a cafe, Monsieur Lebigre had placed two small tables of bronzed iron and four chairs against the wall, in front of the counter. A chandelier with five lights and frosted globes hung down from the ceiling. On the left was a round gilt timepiece, above a tourniquet[*] fixed to the wall. Then at the far end came the private "cabinet," a corner of the shop shut off by a partition glazed with frosted glass of a small square pattern. In the daytime this little room received a dim light from a window that looked on to the Rue Pirouette; and in the evening, a gas jet burnt over the two tables painted to resemble marble. It was there that Gavard and his political friends met each evening after dinner. They looked upon themselves as being quite at home there, and had prevailed on the landlord to reserve the place for them. When Monsieur Lebigre had closed the door of the glazed partition, they knew themselves to be so safely screened from intrusion that they spoke quite unreservedly of the great "sweep out" which they were fond of discussing. No unprivileged customer would have dared to enter.

[*] This is a kind of dial turning on a pivot, and usually
enclosed in a brass frame, from which radiate a few small
handles or spokes. Round the face of the dial—usually of
paper—are various numerals, and between the face and its
glass covering is a small marble or wooden ball. The
appliance is used in lieu of dice or coins when two or more
customers are "tossing" for drinks. Each in turn sends the
dial spinning round, and wins or loses according to the
numeral against which the ball rests when the dial stops. As
I can find no English name for the appliance, I have thought
it best to describe it.—Translator.

On the first day that Gavard took Florent off he gave him some particulars of Monsieur Lebigre. He was a good fellow, he said, who sometimes came to drink his coffee with them; and, as he had said one day that he had fought in '48, no one felt the least constraint in his presence. He spoke but little, and seemed rather thick-headed. As the gentlemen passed him on their way to the private room they grasped his hand in silence across the glasses and bottles. By his side on the crimson leather seat behind the counter there was generally a fair little woman, whom he had engaged as counter assistant in addition to the white-aproned waiter who attended to the tables and the billiard-room. The young woman's name was Rose, and she seemed a very gentle and submissive being. Gavard, with a wink of his eye, told Florent that he fancied Lebigre had a weakness for her. It was she, by the way, who waited upon the friends in the private room, coming and going, with her happy, humble air, amidst the stormiest political discussions.

Upon the day on which the poultry dealer took Florent to Lebigre's to present him to his friends, the only person whom the pair found in the little room when they entered it was a man of some fifty years of age, of a mild and thoughtful appearance. He wore a rather shabby-looking hat and a long chestnut-coloured overcoat, and sat, with his chin resting on the ivory knob of a thick cane, in front of a glass mug full of beer. His mouth was so completely concealed by a vigorous growth of beard that his face had a dumb, lipless appearance.

"How are you, Robine?" exclaimed Gavard.

Robine silently thrust out his hand, without making any reply, though his eyes softened into a slight smile of welcome. Then he let his chin drop on to the knob of his cane again, and looked at Florent over his beer. Florent had made Gavard swear to keep his story a secret for fear of some dangerous indiscretion; and he was not displeased to observe a touch of distrust in the discreet demeanour of the gentleman with the heavy beard. However, he was really mistaken in this, for Robine never talked more than he did now. He was always the first to arrive, just as the clock struck eight; and he always sat in the same corner, never letting go his hold of his cane, and never taking off either his hat or his overcoat. No one had ever seen him without his hat upon his head. He remained there listening to the talk of the others till midnight, taking four hours to empty his mug of beer, and gazing successively at the different speakers as though he heard them with his eyes. When Florent afterwards questioned Gavard about Robine, the poultry dealer spoke of the latter as though he held him in high esteem. Robine, he asserted, was an extremely clever and able man, and, though he was unable to say exactly where he had given proof of his hostility to the established order of things, he declared that he was one of the most dreaded of the Government's opponents. He lived in the Rue Saint Denis, in rooms to which no one as a rule could gain admission. The poultry dealer, however, asserted that he himself had once been in them. The wax floors, he said, were protected by strips of green linen; and there were covers over the furniture, and an alabaster timepiece with columns. He had caught a glimpse of the back of a lady, who was just disappearing through one doorway as he was entering by another, and had taken her to be Madame Robine. She appeared to be an old lady of very genteel appearance, with her hair arranged in corkscrew curls; but of this he could not be quite certain. No one knew why they had taken up their abode amidst all the uproar of a business neighbourhood; for the husband did nothing at all, spending his days no one knew how and living on no one knew what, though he made his appearance every evening as though he were tired but delighted with some excursion into the highest regions of politics.

"Well, have you read the speech from the throne?" asked Gavard, taking up a newspaper that was lying on the table.

Robine shrugged his shoulders. Just at that moment, however, the door of the glazed partition clattered noisily, and a hunchback made his appearance. Florent at once recognised the deformed crier of the fish market, though his hands were now washed and he was neatly dressed, with his neck encircled by a great red muffler, one end of which hung down over his hump like the skirt of a Venetian cloak.

"Ah, here's Logre!" exclaimed the poultry dealer. "Now we shall hear what he thinks about the speech from the throne."

Logre, however, was apparently furious. To begin with he almost broke the pegs off in hanging up his hat and muffler. Then he threw himself violently into a chair, and brought his fist down on the table, while tossing away the newspaper.

"Do you think I read their fearful lies?" he cried.

Then he gave vent to the anger raging within him. "Did ever anyone hear," he cried, "of masters making such fools of their people? For two whole hours I've been waiting for my pay! There were ten of us in the office kicking our heels there. Then at last Monsieur Manoury arrived in a cab. Where he had come from I don't know, and don't care, but I'm quite sure it wasn't any respectable place. Those salesmen are all a parcel of thieves and libertines! And then, too, the hog actually gave me all my money in small change!"

Robine expressed his sympathy with Logre by the slight movement of his eyelids. But suddenly the hunchback bethought him of a victim upon whom to pour out his wrath. "Rose! Rose!" he cried, stretching his head out of the little room.

The young woman quickly responded to the call, trembling all over.

"Well," shouted Logre, "what do you stand staring at me like that for? Much good that'll do! You saw me come in, didn't you? Why haven't you brought me my glass of black coffee, then?"

Gavard ordered two similar glasses, and Rose made all haste to bring what was required, while Logre glared sternly at the glasses and little sugar trays as if studying them. When he had taken a drink he seemed to grow somewhat calmer.

"But it's Charvet who must be getting bored," he said presently. "He is waiting outside on the pavement for Clemence."

Charvet, however, now made his appearance, followed by Clemence. He was a tall, scraggy young man, carefully shaved, with a skinny nose and thin lips. He lived in the Rue Vavin, behind the Luxembourg, and called himself a professor. In politics he was a disciple of Hebert.[*] He wore his hair very long, and the collar and lapels of his threadbare frock-coat were broadly turned back. Affecting the manner and speech of a member of the National Convention, he would pour out such a flood of bitter words and make such a haughty display of pedantic learning that he generally crushed his adversaries. Gavard was afraid of him, though he would not confess it; still, in Charvet's absence he would say that he really went too far. Robine, for his part, expressed approval of everything with his eyes. Logre sometimes opposed Charvet on the question of salaries; but the other was really the autocrat of the coterie, having the greatest fund of information and the most overbearing manner. For more than ten years he and Clemence had lived together as man and wife, in accordance with a previously arranged contract, the terms of which were strictly observed by both parties to it. Florent looked at the young woman with some little surprise, but at last he recollected where he had previously seen her. This was at the fish auction. She was, indeed, none other than the tall dark female clerk whom he had observed writing with outstretched fingers, after the manner of one who had been carefully instructed in the art of holding a pen.

[*] Hebert, as the reader will remember, was the furious
demagogue with the foul tongue and poisoned pen who edited
the Pere Duchesne at the time of the first French
Revolution. We had a revival of his politics and his journal
in Paris during the Commune of 1871.—Translator.

Rose made her appearance at the heels of the two newcomers. Without saying a word she placed a mug of beer before Charvet and a tray before Clemence, who in a leisurely way began to compound a glass of "grog," pouring some hot water over a slice of lemon, which she crushed with her spoon, and glancing carefully at the decanter as she poured out some rum, so as not to add more of it than a small liqueur glass could contain.

Gavard now presented Florent to the company, but more especially to Charvet. He introduced them to one another as professors, and very able men, who would be sure to get on well together. But it was probable that he had already been guilty of some indiscretion, for all the men at once shook hands with a tight and somewhat masonic squeeze of each other's fingers. Charvet, for his part, showed himself almost amiable; and whether he and the others knew anything of Florent's antecedents, they at all events indulged in no embarrassing allusions.

"Did Manoury pay you in small change?" Logre asked Clemence.

She answered affirmatively, and produced a roll of francs and another of two-franc pieces, and unwrapped them. Charvet watched her, and his eyes followed the rolls as she replaced them in her pocket, after counting their contents and satisfying herself that they were correct.

"We have our accounts to settle," he said in a low voice.

"Yes, we'll settle up to-night," the young woman replied. "But we are about even, I should think. I've breakfasted with you four times, haven't I? But I lent you a hundred sous last week, you know."

Florent, surprised at hearing this, discreetly turned his head away. Then Clemence slipped the last roll of silver into her pocket, drank a little of her grog, and, leaning against the glazed partition, quietly settled herself down to listen to the men talking politics. Gavard had taken up the newspaper again, and, in tones which he strove to render comic, was reading out some passages of the speech from the throne which had been delivered that morning at the opening of the Chambers. Charvet made fine sport of the official phraseology; there was not a single line of it which he did not tear to pieces. One sentence afforded especial amusement to them all. It was this: "We are confident, gentlemen, that, leaning on your lights[*] and the conservative sentiments of the country, we shall succeed in increasing the national prosperity day by day."

[*] In the sense of illumination of mind. It has been
necessary to give a literal translation of this phrase to
enable the reader to realise the point of subsequent
witticisms in which Clemence and Gavard indulge.
—Translator.

Logre rose up and repeated this sentence, and by speaking through his nose succeeded fairly well in mimicking the Emperor's drawling voice.

"It's lovely, that prosperity of his; why, everyone's dying of hunger!" said Charvet.

"Trade is shocking," asserted Gavard.

"And what in the name of goodness is the meaning of anybody 'leaning on lights'?" continued Clemence, who prided herself upon literary culture.

Robine himself even allowed a faint laugh to escape from the depths of his beard. The discussion began to grow warm. The party fell foul of the Corps Legislatif, and spoke of it with great severity. Logre did not cease ranting, and Florent found him the same as when he cried the fish at the auctions—protruding his jaws and hurling his words forward with a wave of the arm, whilst retaining the crouching attitude of a snarling dog. Indeed, he talked politics in just the same furious manner as he offered a tray full of soles for sale.

Charvet, on the other hand, became quieter and colder amidst the smoke of the pipes and the fumes of the gas which were now filling the little den; and his voice assumed a dry incisive tone, sharp like a guillotine blade, while Robine gently wagged his head without once removing his chin from the ivory knob of his cane. However, some remark of Gavard's led the conversation to the subject of women.

"Woman," declared Charvet drily, "is the equal of man; and, that being so, she ought not to inconvenience him in the management of his life. Marriage is a partnership, in which everything should be halved. Isn't that so, Clemence?"

"Clearly so," replied the young woman, leaning back with her head against the wall and gazing into the air.

However, Florent now saw Lacaille, the costermonger, and Alexandre, the porter, Claude Lantier's friend, come into the little room. In the past these two had long remained at the other table in the sanctum; they did not belong to the same class as the others. By the help of politics, however, their chairs had drawn nearer, and they had ended by forming part of the circle. Charvet, in whose eyes they represented "the people," did his best to indoctrinate them with his advanced political theories, while Gavard played the part of the shopkeeper free from all social prejudices by clinking glasses with them. Alexandre was a cheerful, good-humoured giant, with the manner of a big merry lad. Lacaille, on the other hand, was embittered; his hair was already grizzling; and, bent and wearied by his ceaseless perambulations through the streets of Paris, he would at times glance loweringly at the placid figure of Robine, and his sound boots and heavy coat.

That evening both Lacaille and Alexandre called for a liqueur glass of brandy, and then the conversation was renewed with increased warmth and excitement, the party being now quite complete. A little later, while the door of the cabinet was left ajar, Florent caught sight of Mademoiselle Saget standing in front of the counter. She had taken a bottle from under her apron, and was watching Rose as the latter poured into it a large measureful of black-currant syrup and a smaller one of brandy. Then the bottle disappeared under the apron again, and Mademoiselle Saget, with her hands out of sight, remained talking in the bright glow of the counter, face to face with the big mirror, in which the flasks and bottles of liqueurs were reflected like rows of Venetian lanterns. In the evening all the metal and glass of the establishment helped to illuminate it with wonderful brilliancy. The old maid, standing there in her black skirts, looked almost like some big strange insect amidst all the crude brightness. Florent noticed that she was trying to inveigle Rose into a conversation, and shrewdly suspected that she had caught sight of him through the half open doorway. Since he had been on duty at the markets he had met her at almost every step, loitering in one or another of the covered ways, and generally in the company of Madame Lecoeur and La Sarriette. He had noticed also that the three women stealthily examined him, and seemed lost in amazement at seeing him installed in the position of inspector. That evening, however, Rose was no doubt loath to enter into conversation with the old maid, for the latter at last turned round, apparently with the intention of approaching Monsieur Lebigre, who was playing piquet with a customer at one of the bronzed tables. Creeping quietly along, Mademoiselle Saget had at last managed to install herself beside the partition of the cabinet, when she was observed by Gavard, who detested her.

"Shut the door, Florent!" he cried unceremoniously. "We can't even be by ourselves, it seems!"

When midnight came and Lacaille went away he exchanged a few whispered words with Monsieur Lebigre, and as the latter shook hands with him he slipped four five-franc pieces into his palm, without anyone noticing it. "That'll make twenty-two francs that you'll have to pay to-morrow, remember," he whispered in his ear. "The person who lends the money won't do it for less in future. Don't forget, too, that you owe three days' truck hire. You must pay everything off."

Then Monsieur Lebigre wished the friends good night. He was very sleepy and should sleep well, he said, with a yawn which revealed his big teeth, while Rose gazed at him with an air of submissive humility. However, he gave her a push, and told her to go and turn out the gas in the little room.

On reaching the pavement, Gavard stumbled and nearly fell. And being in a humorous vein, he thereupon exclaimed: "Confound it all! At any rate, I don't seem to be leaning on anybody's lights."

This remark seemed to amuse the others, and the party broke up. A little later Florent returned to Lebigre's, and indeed he became quite attached to the "cabinet," finding a seductive charm in Robine's contemplative silence, Logre's fiery outbursts, and Charvet's cool venom. When he went home, he did not at once retire to bed. He had grown very fond of his attic, that girlish bedroom, where Augustine had left scraps of ribbons, souvenirs, and other feminine trifles lying about. There still remained some hair-pins on the mantelpiece, with gilt cardboard boxes of buttons and lozenges, cutout pictures, and empty pomade pots that retained an odour of jasmine. Then there were some reels of thread, needles, and a missal lying by the side of a soiled Dream-book in the drawer of the rickety deal table. A white summer dress with yellow spots hung forgotten from a nail; while upon the board which served as a toilet-table a big stain behind the water-jug showed where a bottle of bandoline had been overturned. The little chamber, with its narrow iron bed, its two rush-bottomed chairs, and its faded grey wallpaper, was instinct with innocent simplicity. The plain white curtains, the childishness suggested by the cardboard boxes and the Dream-book, and the clumsy coquetry which had stained the walls, all charmed Florent and brought him back to dreams of youth. He would have preferred not to have known that plain, wiry-haired Augustine, but to have been able to imagine that he was occupying the room of a sister, some bright sweet girl of whose budding womanhood every trifle around him spoke.

Yet another pleasure which he took was to lean out of the garret window at nighttime. In front of it was a narrow ledge of roof, enclosed by an iron railing, and forming a sort of balcony, on which Augustine had grown a pomegranate in a box. Since the nights had turned cold, Florent had brought the pomegranate indoors and kept it by the foot of his bed till morning. He would linger for a few minutes by the open window, inhaling deep draughts of the sharp fresh air which was wafted up from the Seine, over the housetops of the Rue de Rivoli. Below him the roofs of the markets spread confusedly in a grey expanse, like slumbering lakes on whose surface the furtive reflection of a pane of glass gleamed every now and then like a silvery ripple. Farther away the roofs of the meat and poultry pavilions lay in deeper gloom, and became mere masses of shadow barring the horizon. Florent delighted in the great stretch of open sky in front of him, in that spreading expanse of the markets which amidst all the narrow city streets brought him a dim vision of some strip of sea coast, of the still grey waters of a bay scarce quivering from the roll of the distant billows. He used to lose himself in dreams as he stood there; each night he conjured up the vision of some fresh coast line. To return in mind to the eight years of despair which he had spent away from France rendered him both very sad and very happy. Then at last, shivering all over, he would close the window. Often, as he stood in front of the fireplace taking off his collar, the photograph of Auguste and Augustine would fill him with disquietude. They seemed to be watching him as they stood there, hand in hand, smiling faintly.

Florent's first few weeks at the fish market were very painful to him. The Mehudins treated him with open hostility, which infected the whole market with a spirit of opposition. The beautiful Norman intended to revenge herself on the handsome Lisa, and the latter's cousin seemed a victim ready to hand.

The Mehudins came from Rouen. Louise's mother still related how she had first arrived in Paris with a basket of eels. She had ever afterwards remained in the fish trade. She had married a man employed in the Octroi service, who had died leaving her with two little girls. It was she who by her full figure and glowing freshness had won for herself in earlier days the nickname of "the beautiful Norman," which her eldest daughter had inherited. Now five and sixty years of age, Madame Mehudin had become flabby and shapeless, and the damp air of the fish market had rendered her voice rough and hoarse, and given a bluish tinge to her skin. Sedentary life had made her extremely bulky, and her head was thrown backwards by the exuberance of her bosom. She had never been willing to renounce the fashions of her younger days, but still wore the flowered gown, the yellow kerchief, and turban-like head-gear of the classic fish-wife, besides retaining the latter's loud voice and rapidity of gesture as she stood with her hands on her hips, shouting out the whole abusive vocabulary of her calling.

She looked back regretfully to the old Marche des Innocents, which the new central markets had supplanted. She would talk of the ancient rights of the market "ladies," and mingle stories of fisticuffs exchanged with the police with reminiscences of the visits she had paid the Court in the time of Charles X and Louis Philippe, dressed in silk, and carrying a bouquet of flowers in her hand. Old Mother Mehudin, as she was now generally called, had for a long time been the banner-bearer of the Sisterhood of the Virgin at St. Leu. She would relate that in the processions in the church there she had worn a dress and cap of tulle trimmed with satin ribbons, whilst holding aloft in her puffy fingers the gilded staff of the richly-fringed silk standard on which the figure of the Holy Mother was embroidered.

According to the gossip of the neighbourhood, the old woman had made a fairly substantial fortune, though the only signs of it were the massive gold ornaments with which she loaded her neck and arms and bosom on important occasions. Her two daughters got on badly together as they grew up. The younger one, Claire, an idle, fair-complexioned girl, complained of the ill-treatment which she received from her sister Louise, protesting, in her languid voice, that she could never submit to be the other's servant. As they would certainly have ended by coming to blows, their mother separated them. She gave her stall in the fish market to Louise, while Claire, whom the smell of the skate and the herrings affected in the lungs, installed herself among the fresh water fish. And from that time the old mother, although she pretended to have retired from business altogether, would flit from one stall to the other, still interfering in the selling of the fish, and causing her daughters continual annoyance by the foul insolence with which she would at times speak to customers.

Claire was a fantastical creature, very gentle in her manner, and yet continually at loggerheads with others. People said that she invariably followed her own whimsical inclinations. In spite of her dreamy, girlish face she was imbued with a nature of silent firmness, a spirit of independence which prompted her to live apart; she never took things as other people did, but would one day evince perfect fairness, and the next day arrant injustice. She would sometimes throw the market into confusion by suddenly increasing or lowering the prices at her stall, without anyone being able to guess her reason for doing so. She herself would refuse to explain her motive. By the time she reached her thirtieth year, her delicate physique and fine skin, which the water of the tanks seemed to keep continually fresh and soft, her small, faintly-marked face and lissome limbs would probably become heavy, coarse, and flabby, till she would look like some faded saint that had stepped from a stained-glass window into the degrading sphere of the markets. At twenty-two, however, Claire, in the midst of her carp and eels, was, to use Claude Lantier's expression, a Murillo. A Murillo, that is, whose hair was often in disorder, who wore heavy shoes and clumsily cut dresses, which left her without any figure. But she was free from all coquetry, and she assumed an air of scornful contempt when Louise, displaying her bows and ribbons, chaffed her about her clumsily knotted neckerchiefs. Moreover, she was virtuous; it was said that the son of a rich shopkeeper in the neighbourhood had gone abroad in despair at having failed to induce her to listen to his suit.

Louise, the beautiful Norman, was of a different nature. She had been engaged to be married to a clerk in the corn market; but a sack of flour falling upon the young man had broken his back and killed him. Not very long afterwards Louise had given birth to a boy. In the Mehudins' circle of acquaintance she was looked upon as a widow; and the old fish-wife in conversation would occasionally refer to the time when her son-in-law was alive.

The Mehudins were a power in the markets. When Monsieur Verlaque had finished instructing Florent in his new duties, he advised him to conciliate certain of the stall-holders, if he wished his life to be endurable; and he even carried his sympathy so far as to put him in possession of the little secrets of the office, such as the various little breaches of rule that it was necessary to wink at, and those at which he would have to feign stern displeasure; and also the circumstances under which he might accept a small present. A market inspector is at once a constable and a magistrate; he has to maintain proper order and cleanliness, and settle in a conciliatory spirit all disputes between buyers and sellers. Florent, who was of a weak disposition put on an artificial sternness when he was obliged to exercise his authority, and generally over-acted his part. Moreover, his gloomy, pariah-like face and bitterness of spirit, the result of long suffering, were against him.

The beautiful Norman's idea was to involve him in some quarrel or other. She had sworn that he would not keep his berth a fortnight. "That fat Lisa's much mistaken," said she one morning on meeting Madame Lecoeur, "if she thinks that she's going to put people over us. We don't want such ugly wretches here. That sweetheart of hers is a perfect fright!"

After the auctions, when Florent commenced his round of inspection, strolling slowly through the dripping alleys, he could plainly see the beautiful Norman watching him with an impudent smile on her face. Her stall, which was in the second row on the left, near the fresh water fish department faced the Rue Rambuteau. She would turn round, however, and never take her eyes off her victim whilst making fun of him with her neighbours. And when he passed in front of her, slowly examining the slabs, she feigned hilarious merriment, slapped her fish with her hand, and turned her jets of water on at full stream, flooding the pathway. Nevertheless Florent remained perfectly calm.

At last, one morning as was bound to happen, war broke out. As Florent reached La Normande's stall that day an unbearable stench assailed his nostrils. On the marble slab, in addition to part of a magnificent salmon, showing its soft roseate flesh, there lay some turbots of creamy whiteness, a few conger-eels pierced with black pins to mark their divisions, several pairs of soles, and some bass and red mullet—in fact, quite a display of fresh fish. But in the midst of it, amongst all these fish whose eyes still gleamed and whose gills were of a bright crimson, there lay a huge skate of a ruddy tinge, splotched with dark stains—superb, indeed, with all its strange colourings. Unfortunately, it was rotten; its tail was falling off and the ribs of its fins were breaking through the skin.

"You must throw that skate away," said Florent as he came up.

The beautiful Norman broke into a slight laugh. Florent raised his eyes and saw her standing before him, with her back against the bronze lamp post which lighted the stalls in her division. She had mounted upon a box to keep her feet out of the damp, and appeared very tall as he glanced at her. She looked also handsomer than usual, with her hair arranged in little curls, her sly face slightly bent, her lips compressed, and her hands showing somewhat too rosily against her big white apron. Florent had never before seen her decked with so much jewellery. She had long pendants in her ears, a chain round her neck, a brooch in her dress body, and quite a collection of rings on two fingers of her left hand and one of her right.

As she still continued to look slyly at Florent, without making any reply, the latter continued: "Do you hear? You must remove that skate."

He had not yet noticed the presence of old Madame Mehudin, who sat all of a heap on a chair in a corner. She now got up, however, and, with her fists resting on the marble slap, insolently exclaimed: "Dear me! And why is she to throw her skate away? You won't pay her for it, I'll bet!"

Florent immediately understood the position. The women at the other stalls began to titter, and he felt that he was surrounded by covert rebellion, which a word might cause to blaze forth. He therefore restrained himself, and in person drew the refuse-pail from under the stall and dropped the skate into it. Old Madame Mehudin had already stuck her hands on her hips, while the beautiful Norman, who had not spoken a word, burst into another malicious laugh as Florent strode sternly away amidst a chorus of jeers, which he pretended not to hear.

Each day now some new trick was played upon him, and he was obliged to walk through the market alleys as warily as though he were in a hostile country. He was splashed with water from the sponges employed to cleanse the slabs; he stumbled and almost fell over slippery refuse intentionally spread in his way; and even the porters contrived to run their baskets against the nape of his neck. One day, moreover, when two of the fish-wives were quarrelling, and he hastened up to prevent them coming to blows, he was obliged to duck in order to escape being slapped on either cheek by a shower of little dabs which passed over his head. There was a general outburst of laughter on this occasion, and Florent always believed that the two fish-wives were in league with the Mehudins. However, his old-time experiences as a teacher had endowed him with angelic patience, and he was able to maintain a magisterial coolness of manner even when anger was hotly rising within him, and his whole being quivered with a sense of humiliation. Still, the young scamps of the Rue de l'Estrapade had never manifested the savagery of these fish-wives, the cruel tenacity of these huge females, whose massive figures heaved and shook with a giant-like joy whenever he fell into any trap. They stared him out of countenance with their red faces; and in the coarse tones of their voices and the impudent gesture of their hands he could read volumes of filthy abuse levelled at himself. Gavard would have been quite in his element amidst all these petticoats, and would have freely cuffed them all round; but Florent, who had always been afraid of women, gradually felt overwhelmed as by a sort of nightmare in which giant women, buxom beyond all imagination, danced threateningly around him, shouting at him in hoarse voices and brandishing bare arms, as massive as any prize-fighter's.

Amongst this hoard of females, however, Florent had one friend. Claire unhesitatingly declared that the new inspector was a very good fellow. When he passed in front of her, pursued by the coarse abuse of the others, she gave him a pleasant smile, sitting nonchalantly behind her stall, with unruly errant locks of pale hair straying over her neck and her brow, and the bodice of her dress pinned all askew. He also often saw her dipping her hands into her tanks, transferring the fish from one compartment to another, and amusing herself by turning on the brass taps, shaped like little dolphins with open mouths, from which the water poured in streamlets. Amidst the rustling sound of the water she had some of the quivering grace of a girl who has just been bathing and has hurriedly slipped on her clothes.

One morning she was particularly amiable. She called the inspector to her to show him a huge eel which had been the wonder of the market when exhibited at the auction. She opened the grating, which she had previously closed over the basin in whose depths the eel seemed to be lying sound asleep.

"Wait a moment," she said, "and I'll show it to you."

Then she gently slipped her bare arm into the water; it was not a very plump arm, and its veins showed softly blue beneath its satiny skin. As soon as the eel felt her touch, it rapidly twisted round, and seemed to fill the narrow trough with its glistening greenish coils. And directly it had settled down to rest again Claire once more stirred it with her fingertips.

"It is an enormous creature," Florent felt bound to say. "I have rarely seen such a fine one."

Claire thereupon confessed to him that she had at first been frightened of eels; but now she had learned how to tighten her grip so that they could not slip away. From another compartment she took a smaller one, which began to wriggle both with head and tail, as she held it about the middle in her closed fist. This made her laugh. She let it go, then seized another and another, scouring the basin and stirring up the whole heap of snaky-looking creatures with her slim fingers.

Afterwards she began to speak of the slackness of trade. The hawkers on the foot-pavement of the covered way did the regular saleswomen a great deal of injury, she said. Meantime her bare arm, which she had not wiped, was glistening and dripping with water. Big drops trickled from each finger.

"Oh," she exclaimed suddenly, "I must show you my carp, too!"

She now removed another grating, and, using both hands, lifted out a large carp, which began to flap its tail and gasp. It was too big to be held conveniently, so she sought another one. This was smaller, and she could hold it with one hand, but the latter was forced slightly open by the panting of the sides each time that the fish gasped. To amuse herself it occurred to Claire to pop the tip of her thumb into the carp's mouth whilst it was dilated. "It won't bite," said she with her gentle laugh; "it's not spiteful. No more are the crawfishes; I'm not the least afraid of them."

She plunged her arm into the water again, and from a compartment full of a confused crawling mass brought up a crawfish that had caught her little finger in its claws. She gave the creature a shake, but it no doubt gripped her too tightly, for she turned very red, and snapped off its claw with a quick, angry gesture, though still continuing to smile.

"By the way," she continued quickly, to conceal her emotion, "I wouldn't trust myself with a pike; he'd cut off my fingers like a knife."

She thereupon showed him some big pike arranged in order of size upon clean scoured shelves, beside some bronze-hued tench and little heaps of gudgeon. Her hands were now quite slimy with handling the carp, and as she stood there in the dampness rising from the tanks, she held them outstretched over the dripping fish on the stall. She seemed enveloped by an odour of spawn, that heavy scent which rises from among the reeds and water-lilies when the fish, languid in the sunlight, discharge their eggs. Then she wiped her hands on her apron, still smiling the placid smile of a girl who knew nothing of passion in that quivering atmosphere of the frigid loves of the river.

The kindliness which Claire showed to Florent was but a slight consolation to him. By stopping to talk to the girl he only drew upon himself still coarser jeers from the other stallkeepers. Claire shrugged her shoulders, and said that her mother was an old jade, and her sister a worthless creature. The injustice of the market folk towards the new inspector filled her with indignation. The war between them, however, grew more bitter every day. Florent had serious thoughts of resigning his post; indeed, he would not have retained it for another twenty-four hours if he had not been afraid that Lisa might imagine him to be a coward. He was frightened of what she might say and what she might think. She was naturally well aware of the contest which was going on between the fish-wives and their inspector; for the whole echoing market resounded with it, and the entire neighbourhood discussed each fresh incident with endless comments.

"Ah, well," Lisa would often say in the evening, after dinner, "I'd soon bring them to reason if I had anything to do with them! Why, they are a lot of dirty jades that I wouldn't touch with the tip of my finger! That Normande is the lowest of the low! I'd soon crush her, that I would! You should really use your authority, Florent. You are wrong to behave as you do. Put your foot down, and they'll all come to their senses very quickly, you'll see."

A terrible climax was presently reached. One morning the servant of Madame Taboureau, the baker, came to the market to buy a brill; and the beautiful Norman, having noticed her lingering near her stall for several minutes, began to make overtures to her in a coaxing way: "Come and see me; I'll suit you," she said. "Would you like a pair of soles, or a fine turbot?"

Then as the servant at last came up, and sniffed at a brill with that dissatisfied pout which buyers assume in the hope of getting what they want at a lower price, La Normande continued:

"Just feel the weight of that, now," and so saying she laid the brill, wrapped in a sheet of thick yellow paper, on the woman's open palm.

The servant, a mournful little woman from Auvergne, felt the weight of the brill, and examined its gills, still pouting, and saying not a word.

"And how much do you want for it?" she asked presently, in a reluctant tone.

"Fifteen francs," replied La Normande.

At this the servant hastily laid the brill on the stall again, and seemed anxious to hurry away, but the other detained her. "Wait a moment," said she. "What do you offer?"

"No, no, I can't take it. It is much too dear."

"Come, now, make me an offer."

"Well, will you take eight francs?"

Old Madame Mehudin, who was there, suddenly seemed to wake up, and broke out into a contemptuous laugh. Did people think that she and her daughter stole the fish they sold? "Eight francs for a brill that size!" she exclaimed. "You'll be wanting one for nothing next, to use as a cooling plaster!"

Meantime La Normande turned her head away, as though greatly offended. However, the servant came back twice and offered nine francs; and finally she increased her bid to ten.

"All right, come on, give me your money!" cried the fish-girl, seeing that the woman was now really going away.

The servant took her stand in front of the stall and entered into a friendly gossip with old Madame Mehudin. Madame Taboureau, she said, was so exacting! She had got some people coming to dinner that evening, some cousins from Blois a notary and his wife. Madame Taboureau's family, she added, was a very respectable one, and she herself, although only a baker, had received an excellent education.

"You'll clean it nicely for me, won't you?" added the woman, pausing in her chatter.

With a jerk of her finger La Normande had removed the fish's entrails and tossed them into a pail. Then she slipped a corner of her apron under its gills to wipe away a few grains of sand. "There, my dear," she said, putting the fish into the servant's basket, "you'll come back to thank me."

Certainly the servant did come back a quarter of an hour afterwards, but it was with a flushed, red face. She had been crying, and her little body was trembling all over with anger. Tossing the brill on to the marble slab, she pointed to a broad gash in its belly that reached the bone. Then a flood of broken words burst from her throat, which was still contracted by sobbing: "Madame Taboureau won't have it. She says she couldn't put it on her table. She told me, too, that I was an idiot, and let myself be cheated by anyone. You can see for yourself that the fish is spoilt. I never thought of turning it round; I quite trusted you. Give me my ten francs back."

"You should look at what you buy," the handsome Norman calmly observed.

And then, as the servant was just raising her voice again, old Madame Mehudin got up. "Just you shut up!" she cried. "We're not going to take back a fish that's been knocking about in other people's houses. How do we know that you didn't let it fall and damage it yourself?"

"I! I damage it!" The little servant was choking with indignation. "Ah! you're a couple of thieves!" she cried, sobbing bitterly. "Yes, a couple of thieves! Madame Taboureau herself told me so!"

Matters then became uproarious. Boiling over with rage and brandishing their fists, both mother and daughter fairly exploded; while the poor little servant, quite bewildered by their voices, the one hoarse and the other shrill, which belaboured her with insults as though they were battledores and she a shuttlecock, sobbed on more bitterly than ever.

"Be off with you! Your Madame Taboureau would like to be half as fresh as that fish is! She'd like us to sew it up for her, no doubt!"

"A whole fish for ten francs! What'll she want next!"

Then came coarse words and foul accusations. Had the servant been the most worthless of her sex she could not have been more bitterly upbraided.

Florent, whom the market keeper had gone to fetch, made his appearance when the quarrel was at its hottest. The whole pavilion seemed to be in a state of insurrection. The fish-wives, who manifest the keenest jealousy of each other when the sale of a penny herring is in question, display a united front when a quarrel arises with a buyer. They sang the popular old ditty, "The baker's wife has heaps of crowns, which cost her precious little"; they stamped their feet, and goaded the Mehudins as though the latter were dogs which they were urging on to bite and devour. And there were even some, having stalls at the other end of the alley, who rushed up wildly, as though they meant to spring at the chignon of the poor little woman, she meantime being quite submerged by the flood of insulting abuse poured upon her.

"Return mademoiselle her ten francs," said Florent sternly, when he had learned what had taken place.

But old Madame Mehudin had her blood up. "As for you, my little man," quoth she, "go to blazes! Here, that's how I'll return the ten francs!"

As she spoke, she flung the brill with all her force at the head of Madame Taboureau's servant, who received it full in the face. The blood spurted from her nose, and the brill, after adhering for a moment to her cheeks, fell to the ground and burst with a flop like that of a wet clout. This brutal act threw Florent into a fury. The beautiful Norman felt frightened and recoiled, as he cried out: "I suspend you for a week, and I will have your licence withdrawn. You hear me?"

Then, as the other fish-wives were still jeering behind him, he turned round with such a threatening air that they quailed like wild beasts mastered by the tamer, and tried to assume an expression of innocence. When the Mehudins had returned the ten francs, Florent peremptorily ordered them to cease selling at once. The old woman was choking with rage, while the daughter kept silent, but turned very white. She, the beautiful Norman, to be driven out of her stall!

Claire said in her quiet voice that it served her mother and sister right, a remark which nearly resulted in the two girls tearing each other's hair out that evening when they returned home to the Rue Pirouette. However, when the Mehudins came back to the market at the week's end, they remained very quiet, reserved, and curt of speech, though full of a cold-blooded wrath. Moreover, they found the pavilion quite calm and restored to order again. From that day forward the beautiful Norman must have harboured the thought of some terrible vengeance. She felt that she really had Lisa to thank for what had happened. She had met her, the day after the battle, carrying her head so high, that she had sworn she would make her pay dearly for her glance of triumph. She held interminable confabulations with Madame Saget, Madame Lecoeur, and La Sarriette, in quiet corners of the market; however, all their chatter about the shameless conduct which they slanderously ascribed to Lisa and her cousin, and about the hairs which they declared were found in Quenu's chitterlings, brought La Normande little consolation. She was trying to think of some very malicious plan of vengeance, which would strike her rival to the heart.

Her child was growing up in the fish market in all freedom and neglect. When but three years old the youngster had been brought there, and day by day remained squatting on some rag amidst the fish. He would fall asleep beside the big tunnies as though he were one of them, and awake among the mackerel and whiting. The little rascal smelt of fish as strongly as though he were some big fish's offspring. For a long time his favourite pastime, whenever his mother's back was turned, was to build walls and houses of herrings; and he would also play at soldiers on the marble slab, arranging the red gurnets in confronting lines, pushing them against each other, and battering their heads, while imitating the sound of drum and trumpet with his lips; after which he would throw them all into a heap again, and exclaim that they were dead. When he grew older he would prowl about his aunt Claire's stall to get hold of the bladders of the carp and pike which she gutted. He placed them on the ground and made them burst, an amusement which afforded him vast delight. When he was seven he rushed about the alleys, crawled under the stalls, ferreted amongst the zinc bound fish boxes, and became the spoiled pet of all the women. Whenever they showed him something fresh which pleased him, he would clasp his hands and exclaim in ecstasy, "Oh, isn't it stunning!" Muche was the exact word which he used; muche being the equivalent of "stunning" in the lingo of the markets; and he used the expression so often that it clung to him as a nickname. He became known all over the place as "Muche." It was Muche here, there and everywhere; no one called him anything else. He was to be met with in every nook; in out-of-the-way corners of the offices in the auction pavilion; among the piles of oyster baskets, and betwixt the buckets where the refuse was thrown. With a pinky fairness of skin, he was like a young barbel frisking and gliding about in deep water. He was as fond of running, streaming water as any young fry. He was ever dabbling in the pools in the alleys. He wetted himself with the drippings from the tables, and when no one was looking often slyly turned on the taps, rejoicing in the bursting gush of water. But it was especially beside the fountains near the cellar steps that his mother went to seek him in the evening, and she would bring him thence with his hands quite blue, and his shoes, and even his pockets, full of water.

At seven years old Muche was as pretty as an angel, and as coarse in his manners as any carter. He had curly chestnut hair, beautiful eyes, and an innocent-looking mouth which gave vent to language that even a gendarme would have hesitated to use. Brought up amidst all the ribaldry and profanity of the markets, he had the whole vocabulary of the place on the tip of his tongue. With his hands on his hips he often mimicked Grandmother Mehudin in her anger, and at these times the coarsest and vilest expressions would stream from his lips in a voice of crystalline purity that might have belonged to some little chorister chanting the Ave Maria. He would even try to assume a hoarse roughness of tone, seek to degrade and taint that exquisite freshness of childhood which made him resemble a bambino on the Madonna's knees. The fish-wives laughed at him till they cried; and he, encouraged, could scarcely say a couple of words without rapping out an oath. But in spite of all this he still remained charming, understanding nothing of the dirt amidst which he lived, kept in vigorous health by the fresh breezes and sharp odours of the fish market, and reciting his vocabulary of coarse indecencies with as pure a face as though he were saying his prayers.

The winter was approaching, and Muche seemed very sensitive to the cold. As soon as the chilly weather set in he manifested a strong predilection for the inspector's office. This was situated in the left-hand corner of the pavilion, on the side of the Rue Rambuteau. The furniture consisted of a table, a stack of drawers, an easy-chair, two other chairs, and a stove. It was this stove which attracted Muche. Florent quite worshipped children, and when he saw the little fellow, with his dripping legs, gazing wistfully through the window, he made him come inside. His first conversation with the lad caused him profound amazement. Muche sat down in front of the stove, and in his quiet voice exclaimed: "I'll just toast my toes, do you see? It's d——d cold this morning." Then he broke into a rippling laugh, and added: "Aunt Claire looks awfully blue this morning. Is it true, sir, that you are sweet on her?"

Amazed though he was, Florent felt quite interested in the odd little fellow. The handsome Norman retained her surly bearing, but allowed her son to frequent the inspector's office without a word of objection. Florent consequently concluded that he had the mother's permission to receive the boy, and every afternoon he asked him in; by degrees forming the idea of turning him into a steady, respectable young fellow. He could almost fancy that his brother Quenu had grown little again, and that they were both in the big room in the Rue Royer-Collard once more. The life which his self-sacrificing nature pictured to him as perfect happiness was a life spent with some young being who would never grow up, whom he could go on teaching for ever, and in whose innocence he might still love his fellow man. On the third day of his acquaintance with Muche he brought an alphabet to the office, and the lad delighted him by the intelligence he manifested. He learned his letters with all the sharp precocity which marks the Parisian street arab, and derived great amusement from the woodcuts illustrating the alphabet.

He found opportunities, too, for plenty of fine fun in the little office, where the stove still remained the chief attraction and a source of endless enjoyment. At first he cooked potatoes and chestnuts at it, but presently these seemed insipid, and he thereupon stole some gudgeons from his aunt Claire, roasted them one by one, suspended from a string in front of the glowing fire, and then devoured them with gusto, though he had no bread. One day he even brought a carp with him; but it was impossible to roast it sufficiently, and it made such a smell in the office that both window and door had to be thrown open. Sometimes, when the odour of all these culinary operations became too strong, Florent would throw the fish into the street, but as a rule he only laughed. By the end of a couple of months Muche was able to read fairly well, and his copy-books did him credit.

Meantime, every evening the lad wearied his mother with his talk about his good friend Florent. His good friend Florent had drawn him pictures of trees and of men in huts, said he. His good friend Florent waved his arm and said that men would be far better if they all knew how to read. And at last La Normande heard so much about Florent that she seemed to be almost intimate with this man against whom she harboured so much rancour. One day she shut Muche up at home to prevent him from going to the inspector's, but he cried so bitterly that she gave him his liberty again on the following morning. There was very little determination about her, in spite of her broad shoulders and bold looks. When the lad told her how nice and warm he had been in the office, and came back to her with his clothes quite dry, she felt a sort of vague gratitude, a pleasure in knowing that he had found a shelter-place where he could sit with his feet in front of a fire. Later on, she was quite touched when he read her some words from a scrap of soiled newspaper wrapped round a slice of conger-eel. By degrees, indeed, she began to think, though without admitting it, that Florent could not really be a bad sort of fellow. She felt respect for his knowledge, mingled with an increasing curiosity to see more of him and learn something of his life. Then, all at once, she found an excuse for gratifying this inquisitiveness. She would use it as a means of vengeance. It would be fine fun to make friends with Florent and embroil him with that great fat Lisa.

"Does your good friend Florent ever speak to you about me?" she asked Muche one morning as she was dressing him.

"Oh, no," replied the boy. "We enjoy ourselves."

"Well, you can tell him that I've quite forgiven him, and that I'm much obliged to him for having taught you to read."

Thenceforward the child was entrusted with some message every day. He went backwards and forwards from his mother to the inspector, and from the inspector to his mother, charged with kindly words and questions and answers, which he repeated mechanically without knowing their meaning. He might, indeed, have been safely trusted with the most compromising communications. However, the beautiful Norman felt afraid of appearing timid, and so one day she herself went to the inspector's office and sat down on the second chair, while Muche was having his writing lesson. She proved very suave and complimentary, and Florent was by far the more embarrassed of the two. They only spoke of the lad; and when Florent expressed a fear that he might not be able to continue the lessons in the office, La Normande invited him to come to their home in the evening. She spoke also of payment; but at this he blushed, and said that he certainly would not come if any mention were made of money. Thereupon the young woman determined in her own mind that she would recompense him with presents of choice fish.

Peace was thus made between them; the beautiful Norman even took Florent under her protection. Apart from this, however, the whole market was becoming reconciled to the new inspector, the fish-wives arriving at the conclusion that he was really a better fellow than Monsieur Verlaque, notwithstanding his strange eyes. It was only old Madame Mehudin who still shrugged her shoulders, full of rancour as she was against the "long lanky-guts," as she contemptuously called him. And then, too, a strange thing happened. One morning, when Florent stopped with a smile before Claire's tanks, the girl dropped an eel which she was holding and angrily turned her back upon him, her cheeks quite swollen and reddened by temper. The inspector was so much astonished that he spoke to La Normande about it.

"Oh, never mind her," said the young woman; "she's cracked. She makes a point of always differing from everybody else. She only behaved like that to annoy me."

La Normande was now triumphant—she strutted about her stall, and became more coquettish than ever, arranging her hair in the most elaborate manner. Meeting the handsome Lisa one day she returned her look of scorn, and even burst out laughing in her face. The certainty she felt of driving the mistress of the pork shop to despair by winning her cousin from her endowed her with a gay, sonorous laugh, which rolled up from her chest and rippled her white plump neck. She now had the whim of dressing Muche very showily in a little Highland costume and velvet bonnet. The lad had never previously worn anything but a tattered blouse. It unfortunately happened, however, that just about this time he again became very fond of the water. The ice had melted and the weather was mild, so he gave his Scotch jacket a bath, turning the fountain tap on at full flow and letting the water pour down his arm from his elbow to his hand. He called this "playing at gutters." Then a little later, when his mother came up and caught him, she found him with two other young scamps watching a couple of little fishes swimming about in his velvet cap, which he had filled with water.

For nearly eight months Florent lived in the markets, feeling continual drowsiness. After his seven years of suffering he had lighted upon such calm quietude, such unbroken regularity of life, that he was scarcely conscious of existing. He gave himself up to this jog-trot peacefulness with a dazed sort of feeling, continually experiencing surprise at finding himself each morning in the same armchair in the little office. This office with its bare hut-like appearance had a charm for him. He here found a quiet and secluded refuge amidst that ceaseless roar of the markets which made him dream of some surging sea spreading around him, and isolating him from the world. Gradually, however, a vague nervousness began to prey upon him; he became discontented, accused himself of faults which he could not define, and began to rebel against the emptiness which he experienced more and more acutely in mind and body. Then, too, the evil smells of the fish market brought him nausea. By degrees he became unhinged, his vague boredom developing into restless, nervous excitement.

All his days were precisely alike, spent among the same sounds and the same odours. In the mornings the noisy buzzing of the auction sales resounded in his ears like a distant echo of bells; and sometimes, when there was a delay in the arrival of the fish, the auctions continued till very late. Upon these occasions he remained in the pavilion till noon, disturbed at every moment by quarrels and disputes, which he endeavoured to settle with scrupulous justice. Hours elapsed before he could get free of some miserable matter or other which was exciting the market. He paced up and down amidst the crush and uproar of the sales, slowly perambulating the alleys and occasionally stopping in front of the stalls which fringed the Rue Rambuteau, and where lay rosy heaps of prawns and baskets of boiled lobsters with tails tied backwards, while live ones were gradually dying as they sprawled over the marble slabs. And then he would watch gentlemen in silk hats and black gloves bargaining with the fish-wives, and finally going off with boiled lobsters wrapped in paper in the pockets of their frock-coats.[*] Farther away, at the temporary stalls, where the commoner sorts of fish were sold, he would recognise the bareheaded women of the neighbourhood, who always came at the same hour to make their purchases.

[*] The little fish-basket for the use of customers, so
familiar in London, is not known in Paris.—Translator.

At times he took an interest in some well-dressed lady trailing her lace petticoats over the damp stones, and escorted by a servant in a white apron; and he would follow her at a little distance on noticing how the fish-wives shrugged their shoulders at sight of her air of disgust. The medley of hampers and baskets and bags, the crowd of skirts flitting along the damp alleys, occupied his attention until lunchtime. He took a delight in the dripping water and the fresh breeze as he passed from the acrid smell of the shell-fish to the pungent odour of the salted fish. It was always with the latter that he brought his official round of inspection to a close. The cases of red herrings, the Nantes sardines on their layers of leaves, and the rolled cod, exposed for sale under the eyes of stout, faded fish-wives, brought him thoughts of a voyage necessitating a vast supply of salted provisions.

In the afternoon the markets became quieter, grew drowsy; and Florent then shut himself up in his office, made out his reports, and enjoyed the happiest hours of his day. If he happened to go out and cross the fish market, he found it almost deserted. There was no longer the crushing and pushing and uproar of ten o'clock in the morning. The fish-wives, seated behind their stalls, leant back knitting, while a few belated purchasers prowled about casting sidelong glances at the remaining fish, with the thoughtful eyes and compressed lips of women closely calculating the price of their dinner. At last the twilight fell, there was a noise of boxes being moved, and the fish was laid for the night on beds of ice; and then, after witnessing the closing of the gates, Florent went off, seemingly carrying the fish market along with him in his clothes and his beard and his hair.

For the first few months this penetrating odour caused him no great discomfort. The winter was a severe one, the frosts converted the alleys into slippery mirrors, and the fountains and marble slabs were fringed with a lacework of ice. In the mornings it was necessary to place little braziers underneath the taps before a drop of water could be drawn. The frozen fish had twisted tails; and, dull of hue and hard to the touch like unpolished metal, gave out a ringing sound akin to that of pale cast-iron when it snaps. Until February the pavilion presented a most mournful appearance: it was deserted, and wrapped in a bristling shroud of ice. But with March came a thaw, with mild weather and fogs and rain. Then the fish became soft again, and unpleasant odours mingled with the smell of mud wafted from the neighbouring streets. These odours were as yet vague, tempered by the moisture which clung to the ground. But in the blazing June afternoons a reeking stench arose, and the atmosphere became heavy with a pestilential haze. The upper windows were then opened, and huge blinds of grey canvas were drawn beneath the burning sky. Nevertheless, a fiery rain seemed to be pouring down, heating the market as though it were a big stove, and there was not a breath of air to waft away the noxious emanations from the fish. A visible steam went up from the stalls.

The masses of food amongst which Florent lived now began to cause him the greatest discomfort. The disgust with which the pork shop had filled him came back in a still more intolerable fashion. He almost sickened as he passed these masses of fish, which, despite all the water lavished upon them, turned bad under a sudden whiff of hot air. Even when he shut himself up in his office his discomfort continued, for the abominable odour forced its way through the chinks in the woodwork of the window and door. When the sky was grey and leaden, the little room remained quite dark; and then the day was like a long twilight in the depths of some fetid march. He was often attacked by fits of nervous excitement, and felt a craving desire to walk; and he would then descend into the cellars by the broad staircase opening in the middle of the pavilion. In the pent-up air down below, in the dim light of the occasional gas jets, he once more found the refreshing coolness diffused by pure cold water. He would stand in front of the big tank where the reserve stock of live fish was kept, and listen to the ceaseless murmur of the four streamlets of water falling from the four corners of the central urn, and then spreading into a broad stream and gliding beneath the locked gratings of the basins with a gentle and continuous flow. This subterranean spring, this stream murmuring in the gloom, had a tranquillising effect upon him. Of an evening, too, he delighted in the fine sunsets which threw the delicate lacework of the market buildings blackly against the red glow of the heavens. The dancing dust of the last sun rays streamed through every opening, through every chink of the Venetian shutters, and the whole was like some luminous transparency on which the slender shafts of the columns, the elegant curves of the girders, and the geometrical tracery of the roofs were minutely outlined. Florent feasted his eyes on this mighty diagram washed in with Indian ink on phosphorescent vellum, and his mind reverted to his old fancy of a colossal machine with wheels and levers and beams espied in the crimson glow of the fires blazing beneath its boilers. At each consecutive hour of the day the changing play of the light—from the bluish haze of early morning and the black shadows of noon to the flaring of the sinking sun and the paling of its fires in the ashy grey of the twilight—revealed the markets under a new aspect; but on the flaming evenings, when the foul smells arose and forced their way across the broad yellow beams like hot puffs of steam, Florent again experienced discomfort, and his dream changed, and he imagined himself in some gigantic knacker's boiling-house where the fat of a whole people was being melted down.

The coarseness of the market people, whose words and gestures seemed to be infected with the evil smell of the place, also made him suffer. He was very tolerant, and showed no mock modesty; still, these impudent women often embarrassed him. Madame Francois, whom he had again met, was the only one with whom he felt at ease. She showed such pleasure on learning he had found a berth and was quite comfortable and out of worry, as she put it, that he was quite touched. The laughter of Lisa, the handsome Norman, and the others disquieted him; but of Madame Francois he would willingly have made a confidante. She never laughed mockingly at him; when she did laugh, it was like a woman rejoicing at another's happiness. She was a brave, plucky creature, too; hers was a hard business in winter, during the frosts, and the rainy weather was still more trying. On some mornings Florent saw her arrive in a pouring deluge which had been slowly, coldly falling ever since the previous night. Between Nanterre and Paris the wheels of her cart had sunk up to the axles in mud, and Balthazar was caked with mire to his belly. His mistress would pity him and sympathise with him as she wiped him down with some old aprons.

"The poor creatures are very sensitive," said she; "a mere nothing gives them a cold. Ah, my poor old Balthazar! I really thought that we had tumbled into the Seine as we crossed the Neuilly bridge, the rain came down in such a deluge!"

While Balthazar was housed in the inn stable his mistress remained in the pouring rain to sell her vegetables. The footway was transformed into a lake of liquid mud. The cabbages, carrots, and turnips were pelted by the grey water, quite drowned by the muddy torrent that rushed along the pavement. There was no longer any of that glorious greenery so apparent on bright mornings. The market gardeners, cowering in their heavy cloaks beneath the downpour, swore at the municipality which, after due inquiry, had declared that rain was in no way injurious to vegetables, and that there was accordingly no necessity to erect any shelters.

Those rainy mornings greatly worried Florent, who thought about Madame Francois. He always managed to slip away and get a word with her. But he never found her at all low-spirited. She shook herself like a poodle, saying that she was quite used to such weather, and was not made of sugar, to melt away beneath a few drops of rain. However, he made her seek refuge for a few minutes in one of the covered ways, and frequently even took her to Monsieur Lebigre's, where they had some hot wine together. While she with her peaceful face beamed on him in all friendliness, he felt quite delighted with the healthy odour of the fields which she brought into the midst of the foul market atmosphere. She exhaled a scent of earth, hay, fresh air, and open skies.

"You must come to Nanterre, my lad," she said to him, "and look at my kitchen garden. I have put borders of thyme everywhere. How bad your villainous Paris does smell!"

Then she went off, dripping. Florent, on his side, felt quite re-invigorated when he parted from her. He tried, too the effect of work upon the nervous depression from which he suffered. He was a man of a very methodical temperament, and sometimes carried out his plans for the allotment of his time with a strictness that bordered on mania. He shut himself up two evenings a week in order to write an exhaustive work on Cayenne. His modest bedroom was excellently adapted, he thought, to calm his mind and incline him to work. He lighted his fire, saw that the pomegranate at the foot of the bed was looking all right, and then seated himself at the little table, and remained working till midnight. He had pushed the missal and Dream-book back in the drawer, which was now filling with notes, memoranda, manuscripts of all kinds. The work on Cayenne made but slow progress, however, as it was constantly being interrupted by other projects, plans for enormous undertakings which he sketched out in a few words. He successively drafted an outline of a complete reform of the administrative system of the markets, a scheme for transforming the city dues, levied on produce as it entered Paris, into taxes levied upon the sales, a new system of victualling the poorer neighbourhoods, and, lastly, a somewhat vague socialist enactment for the storing in common warehouses of all the provisions brought to the markets, and the ensuring of a minimum daily supply to each household in Paris. As he sat there, with his head bent over his table, and his mind absorbed in thoughts of all these weighty matters, his gloomy figure cast a great black shadow on the soft peacefulness of the garret. Sometimes a chaffinch which he had picked up one snowy day in the market would mistake the lamplight for the day, and break the silence, which only the scratching of Florent's pen on his paper disturbed, by a cry.

Florent was fated to revert to politics. He had suffered too much through them not to make them the dearest occupation of his life. Under other conditions he might have become a good provincial schoolmaster, happy in the peaceful life of some little town. But he had been treated as though he were a wolf, and felt as though he had been marked out by exile for some great combative task. His nervous discomfort was the outcome of his long reveries at Cayenne, the brooding bitterness he had felt at his unmerited sufferings, and the vows he had secretly sworn to avenge humanity and justice—the former scourged with a whip, and the latter trodden under foot. Those colossal markets and their teeming odoriferous masses of food had hastened the crisis. To Florent they appeared symbolical of some glutted, digesting beast, of Paris, wallowing in its fat and silently upholding the Empire. He seemed to be encircled by swelling forms and sleek, fat faces, which ever and ever protested against his own martyrlike scragginess and sallow, discontented visage. To him the markets were like the stomach of the shopkeeping classes, the stomach of all the folks of average rectitude puffing itself out, rejoicing, glistening in the sunshine, and declaring that everything was for the best, since peaceable people had never before grown so beautifully fat. As these thoughts passed through his mind Florent clenched his fists, and felt ready for a struggle, more irritated now by the thought of his exile than he had been when he first returned to France. Hatred resumed entire possession of him. He often let his pen drop and became absorbed in dreams. The dying fire cast a bright glow upon his face; the lamp burned smokily, and the chaffinch fell asleep again on one leg, with its head tucked under its wing.

Sometimes Auguste, on coming upstairs at eleven o'clock and seeing the light shining under the door, would knock, before going to bed. Florent admitted him with some impatience. The assistant sat down in front of the fire, speaking but little, and never saying why he had come. His eyes would all the time remain fixed upon the photograph of himself and Augustine in their Sunday finery. Florent came to the conclusion that the young man took a pleasure in visiting the room for the simple reason that it had been occupied by his sweetheart; and one evening he asked him with a smile if he had guessed rightly.

"Well, perhaps it is so," replied Auguste, very much surprised at the discovery which he himself now made of the reasons which actuated him. "I'd really never thought of that before. I came to see you without knowing why. But if I were to tell Augustine, how she'd laugh!"

Whenever he showed himself at all loquacious, his one eternal theme was the pork shop which he was going to set up with Augustine at Plaisance. He seemed so perfectly assured of arranging his life in accordance with his desires, that Florent grew to feel a sort of respect for him, mingled with irritation. After all, the young fellow was very resolute and energetic, in spite of his seeming stupidity. He made straight for the goal he had in view, and would doubtless reach it in perfect assurance and happiness. On the evenings of these visits from the apprentice, Florent could not settle down to work again; he went off to bed in a discontented mood, and did not recover his equilibrium till the thought passed through his mind, "Why, that Auguste is a perfect animal!"

Every month he went to Clamart to see Monsieur Verlaque. These visits were almost a delight to him. The poor man still lingered on, to the great astonishment of Gavard, who had not expected him to last for more than six months. Every time that Florent went to see him Verlaque would declare that he was feeling better, and was most anxious to resume his work again. But the days glided by, and he had serious relapses. Florent would sit by his bedside, chat about the fish market, and do what he could to enliven him. He deposited on the pedestal table the fifty francs which he surrendered to him each month; and the old inspector, though the payment had been agreed upon, invariably protested, and seemed disinclined to take the money. Then they would begin to speak of something else, and the coins remained lying on the table. When Florent went away, Madame Verlaque always accompanied him to the street door. She was a gentle little woman, of a very tearful disposition. Her one topic of conversation was the expense necessitated by her husband's illness, the costliness of chicken broth, butcher's meat, Bordeaux wine, medicine, and doctors' fees. Her doleful conversation greatly embarrassed Florent, and on the first few occasions he did not understand the drift of it. But at last, as the poor woman seemed always in a state of tears, and kept saying how happy and comfortable they had been when they had enjoyed the full salary of eighteen hundred francs a year, he timidly offered to make her a private allowance, to be kept secret from her husband. This offer, however, she declined, inconsistently declaring that the fifty francs were sufficient. But in the course of the month she frequently wrote to Florent, calling him their saviour. Her handwriting was small and fine, yet she would contrive to fill three pages of letter paper with humble, flowing sentences entreating the loan of ten francs; and this she at last did so regularly that wellnigh the whole of Florent's hundred and fifty francs found its way to the Verlaques. The husband was probably unaware of it; however, the wife gratefully kissed Florent's hands. This charity afforded him the greatest pleasure, and he concealed it as though it were some forbidden selfish indulgence.

"That rascal Verlaque is making a fool of you," Gavard would sometimes say. "He's coddling himself up finely now that you are doing the work and paying him an income."

At last one day Florent replied:

"Oh, we've arranged matters together. I'm only to give him twenty-five francs a month in future."

As a matter of fact, Florent had but little need of money. The Quenus continued to provide him with board and lodging; and the few francs which he kept by him sufficed to pay for the refreshment he took in the evening at Monsieur Lebigre's. His life had gradually assumed all the regularity of clockwork. He worked in his bedroom, continued to teach little Muche twice a week from eight to nine o'clock, devoted an evening to Lisa, to avoid offending her, and spent the rest of his spare time in the little "cabinet" with Gavard and his friends.

When he went to the Mehudins' there was a touch of tutorial stiffness in his gentle demeanour. He was pleased with the old house in the Rue Pirouette. On the ground floor he passed through the faint odours pervading the premises of the purveyor of cooked vegetables. Big pans of boiled spinach and sorrel stood cooling in the little backyard. Then he ascended the winding staircase, greasy and dark, with worn and bulging steps which sloped in a disquieting manner. The Mehudins occupied the whole of the second floor. Even when they had attained to comfortable circumstances the old mother had always declined to move into fresh quarters, despite all the supplications of her daughters, who dreamt of living in a new house in a fine broad street. But on this point the old woman was not to be moved; she had lived there, she said, and meant to die there. She contented herself, moreover, with a dark little closet, leaving the largest rooms to Claire and La Normande. The later, with the authority of the elder born, had taken possession of the room that overlooked the street; it was the best and largest of the suite. Claire was so much annoyed at her sister's action in the matter that she refused to occupy the adjoining room, whose window overlooked the yard, and obstinately insisted on sleeping on the other side of the landing, in a sort of garret, which she did not even have whitewashed. However, she had her own key, and so was independent; directly anything happened to displease her she locked herself up in her own quarters.

As a rule, when Florent arrived the Mehudins were just finishing their dinner. Muche sprang to his neck, and for a moment the young man remained seated with the lad chattering between his legs. Then, when the oilcloth cover had been wiped, the lesson began on a corner of the table. The beautiful Norman gave Florent a cordial welcome. She generally began to knit or mend some linen, and would draw her chair up to the table and work by the light of the same lamp as the others; and she frequently put down her needle to listen to the lesson, which filled her with surprise. She soon began to feel warm esteem for this man who seemed so clever, who, in speaking to the little one, showed himself as gentle as a woman, and manifested angelic patience in again and again repeating the same instructions. She no longer considered him at all plain, but even felt somewhat jealous of beautiful Lisa. And then she drew her chair still nearer, and gazed at Florent with an embarrassing smile.

"But you are jogging my elbow, mother, and I can't write," Muche exclaimed angrily. "There! see what a blot you've made me make! Get further away, do!"

La Normande now gradually began to say a good many unpleasant things about beautiful Lisa. She pretended that the latter concealed her real age, that she laced her stays so tightly that she nearly suffocated herself, and that if she came down of a morning looking so trim and neat, without a single hair out of place, it must be because she looked perfectly hideous when in dishabille. Then La Normande would raise her arm a little, and say that there was no need for her to wear any stays to cramp and deform her figure. At these times the lessons would be interrupted, and Muche gazed with interest at his mother as she raised her arms. Florent listened to her, and even laughed, thinking to himself that women were very odd creatures. The rivalry between the beautiful Norman and beautiful Lisa amused him.

Muche, however, managed to finish his page of writing. Florent, who was a good penman, set him copies in large hand and round hand on slips of paper. The words he chose were very long and took up the whole line, and he evinced a marked partiality for such expressions as "tyrannically," "liberticide," "unconstitutional," and "revolutionary." At times also he made the boy copy such sentences as these: "The day of justice will surely come"; "The suffering of the just man is the condemnation of the oppressor"; "When the hour strikes, the guilty shall fall." In preparing these copy slips he was, indeed, influenced by the ideas which haunted his brain; he would for the time become quite oblivious of Muche, the beautiful Norman, and all his surroundings. The lad would have copied Rousseau's "Contrat Social" had he been told to do so; and thus, drawing each letter in turn, he filled page after page with lines of "tyrannically" and "unconstitutional."

As long as the tutor remained there, old Madame Mehudin kept fidgeting round the table, muttering to herself. She still harboured terrible rancour against Florent; and asserted that it was folly to make the lad work in that way at a time when children should be in bed. She would certainly have turned that "spindle-shanks" out of the house, if the beautiful Norman, after a stormy scene, had not bluntly told her that she would go to live elsewhere if she were not allowed to receive whom she chose. However, the pair began quarrelling again on the subject every evening.

"You may say what you like," exclaimed the old woman; "but he's got treacherous eyes. And, besides, I'm always suspicious of those skinny people. A skinny man's capable of anything. I've never come across a decent one yet. That one's as flat as a board. And he's got such an ugly face, too! Though I'm sixty-five and more, I'd precious soon send him about his business if he came a-courting of me!"

She said this because she had a shrewd idea of how matters were likely to turn out. And then she went on to speak in laudatory terms of Monsieur Lebigre, who, indeed, paid the greatest attention to the beautiful Norman. Apart from the handsome dowry which he imagined she would bring with her, he considered that she would be a magnificent acquisition to his counter. The old woman never missed an opportunity to sound his praises; there was no lankiness, at any rate, about him, said she; he was stout and strong, with a pair of calves which would have done honour even to one of the Emperor's footmen.

However, La Normande shrugged her shoulders and snappishly replied: "What do I care whether he's stout or not? I don't want him or anybody. And besides, I shall do as I please."

Then, if the old woman became too pointed in her remarks, the other added: "It's no business of yours, and besides, it isn't true. Hold your tongue and don't worry me." And thereupon she would go off into her room, banging the door behind her. Florent, however, had a yet more bitter enemy than Madame Mehudin in the house. As soon as ever he arrived there, Claire would get up without a word, take a candle, and go off to her own room on the other side of the landing; and she could be heard locking her door in a burst of sullen anger. One evening when her sister asked the tutor to dinner, she prepared her own food on the landing, and ate it in her bedroom; and now and again she secluded herself so closely that nothing was seen of her for a week at a time. She usually retained her appearance of soft lissomness, but periodically had a fit of iron rigidity, when her eyes blazed from under her pale tawny locks like those of a distrustful wild animal. Old Mother Mehudin, fancying that she might relieve herself in her company, only made her furious by speaking to her of Florent; and thereupon the old woman, in her exasperation, told everyone that she would have gone off and left her daughters to themselves had she not been afraid of their devouring each other if they remained alone together.

As Florent went away one evening, he passed in front of Claire's door, which was standing wide open. He saw the girl look at him, and turn very red. Her hostile demeanour annoyed him; and it was only the timidity which he felt in the presence of women that restrained him from seeking an explanation of her conduct. On this particular evening he would certainly have addressed her if he had not detected Mademoiselle Saget's pale face peering over the balustrade of the upper landing. So he went his way, but had not taken a dozen steps before Claire's door was closed behind him with such violence as to shake the whole staircase. It was after this that Mademoiselle Saget, eager to propagate slander, went about repeating everywhere that Madame Quenu's cousin was "carrying on" most dreadfully with both the Mehudin girls.

Florent, however, gave very little thought to these two handsome young women. His usual manner towards them was that of a man who has but little success with the sex. Certainly he had come to entertain a feeling of genuine friendship for La Normande, who really displayed a very good heart when her impetuous temper did not run away with her. But he never went any further than this. Moreover, the queenly proportions of her robust figure filled him with a kind of alarm; and of an evening, whenever she drew her chair up to the lamp and bent forward as though to look at Muche's copy-book, he drew in his own sharp bony elbows and shrunken shoulders as if realising what a pitiful specimen of humanity he was by the side of that buxom, hardy creature so full of the life of ripe womanhood. Moreover, there was another reason why he recoiled from her. The smells of the markets distressed him; on finishing his duties of an evening he would have liked to escape from the fishy odour amidst which his days were spent; but, alas! beautiful though La Normande was, this odour seemed to adhere to her silky skin. She had tried every sort of aromatic oil, and bathed freely; but as soon as the freshening influence of the bath was over her blood again impregnated her skin with the faint odour of salmon, the musky perfume of smelts, and the pungent scent of herrings and skate. Her skirts, too, as she moved about, exhaled these fishy smells, and she walked as though amidst an atmosphere redolent of slimy seaweed. With her tall, goddess-like figure, her purity of form, and transparency of complexion she resembled some lovely antique marble that had rolled about in the depths of the sea and had been brought to land in some fisherman's net.

Mademoiselle Saget, however, swore by all her gods that Florent was the young woman's lover. According to her account, indeed, he courted both the sisters. She had quarrelled with the beautiful Norman about a ten-sou dab; and ever since this falling-out she had manifested warm friendship for handsome Lisa. By this means she hoped the sooner to arrive at a solution of what she called the Quenus' mystery. Florent still continued to elude her curiosity, and she told her friends that she felt like a body without a soul, though she was careful not to reveal what was troubling her so grievously. A young girl infatuated with a hopeless passion could not have been in more distress than this terrible old woman at finding herself unable to solve the mystery of the Quenus' cousin. She was constantly playing the spy on Florent, following him about, and watching him, in a burning rage at her failure to satisfy her rampant curiosity. Now that he had begun to visit the Mehudins she was for ever haunting the stairs and landings. She soon discovered that handsome Lisa was much annoyed at Florent visiting "those women," and accordingly she called at the pork shop every morning with a budget of information. She went in shrivelled and shrunk by the frosty air, and, resting her hands on the heating-pan to warm them, remained in front of the counter buying nothing, but repeating in her shrill voice: "He was with them again yesterday; he seems to live there now. I heard La Normande call him 'my dear' on the staircase."

She indulged like this in all sorts of lies in order to remain in the shop and continue warming her hands for a little longer. On the morning after the evening when she had heard Claire close her door behind Florent, she spun out her story for a good half hour, inventing all sorts of mendacious and abominable particulars.

Lisa, who had assumed a look of contemptuous scorn, said but little, simply encouraging Mademoiselle Saget's gossip by her silence. At last, however, she interrupted her. "No, no," she said; "I can't really listen to all that. Is it possible that there can be such women?"

Thereupon Mademoiselle Saget told Lisa that unfortunately all women were not so well conducted as herself. And then she pretended to find all sorts of excuses for Florent: it wasn't his fault; he was no doubt a bachelor; these women had very likely inveigled him in their snares. In this way she hinted questions without openly asking them. But Lisa preserved silence with respect to her cousin, merely shrugging her shoulders and compressing her lips. When Mademoiselle Saget at last went away, the mistress of the shop glanced with disgust at the cover of the heating-pan, the glistening metal of which had been tarnished by the impression of the old woman's little hands.

"Augustine," she cried, "bring a duster, and wipe the cover of the heating-pan. It's quite filthy!"

The rivalry between the beautiful Lisa and the beautiful Norman now became formidable. The beautiful Norman flattered herself that she had carried a lover off from her enemy; and the beautiful Lisa was indignant with the hussy who, by luring the sly cousin to her home, would surely end by compromising them all. The natural temperament of each woman manifested itself in the hostilities which ensued. The one remained calm and scornful, like a lady who holds up her skirts to keep them from being soiled by the mud; while the other, much less subject to shame, displayed insolent gaiety and swaggered along the footways with the airs of a duellist seeking a cause of quarrel. Each of their skirmishes would be the talk of the fish market for the whole day. When the beautiful Norman saw the beautiful Lisa standing at the door of her shop, she would go out of her way in order to pass her, and brush against her with her apron; and then the angry glances of the two rivals crossed like rapiers, with the rapid flash and thrust of pointed steel. When the beautiful Lisa, on the other hand, went to the fish market, she assumed an expression of disgust on approaching the beautiful Norman's stall. And then she proceeded to purchase some big fish—a turbot or a salmon—of a neighbouring dealer, spreading her money out on the marble slab as she did so, for she had noticed that this seemed to have a painful effect upon the "hussy," who ceased laughing at the sight. To hear the two rivals speak, anyone would have supposed that the fish and pork they sold were quite unfit for food. However, their principal engagements took place when the beautiful Norman was seated at her stall and the beautiful Lisa at her counter, and they glowered blackly at each other across the Rue Rambuteau. They sat in state in their big white aprons, decked out with showy toilets and jewels, and the battle between them would commence early in the morning.

"Hallo, the fat woman's got up!" the beautiful Norman would exclaim. "She ties herself up as tightly as her sausages! Ah, she's got Saturday's collar on again, and she's still wearing that poplin dress!"

At the same moment, on the opposite side of the street, beautiful Lisa was saying to her shop girl: "Just look at that creature staring at us over yonder, Augustine! She's getting quite deformed by the life she leads. Do you see her earrings? She's wearing those big drops of hers, isn't she? It makes one feel ashamed to see a girl like that with brilliants."

All complaisance, Augustine echoed her mistress's words.

When either of them was able to display a new ornament it was like scoring a victory—the other one almost choked with spleen. Every day they would scrutinise and count each other's customers, and manifest the greatest annoyance if they thought that the "big thing over the way" was doing the better business. Then they spied out what each had for lunch. Each knew what the other ate, and even watched to see how she digested it. In the afternoon, while the one sat amidst her cooked meats and the other amidst her fish, they posed and gave themselves airs, as though they were queens of beauty. It was then that the victory of the day was decided. The beautiful Norman embroidered, selecting the most delicate and difficult work, and this aroused Lisa's exasperation.

"Ah!" she said, speaking of her rival, "she had far better mend her boy's stockings. He's running about quite barefooted. Just look at that fine lady, with her red hands stinking of fish!"

For her part, Lisa usually knitted.

"She's still at that same sock," La Normande would say, as she watched her. "She eats so much that she goes to sleep over her work. I pity her poor husband if he's waiting for those socks to keep his feet warm!"

They would sit glowering at each other with this implacable hostility until evening, taking note of every customer, and displaying such keen eyesight that they detected the smallest details of each other's dress and person when other women declared that they could see nothing at such a distance. Mademoiselle Saget expressed the highest admiration for Madame Quenu's wonderful sight when she one day detected a scratch on the fish-girl's left cheek. With eyes like those, said the old maid, one might even see through a door. However, the victory often remained undecided when night fell; sometimes one or other of the rivals was temporarily crushed, but she took her revenge on the morrow. Several people of the neighbourhood actually laid wagers on these contests, some backing the beautiful Lisa and others the beautiful Norman.

At last they ended by forbidding their children to speak to one another. Pauline and Muche had formerly been good friends, notwithstanding the girl's stiff petticoats and lady-like demeanour, and the lad's tattered appearance, coarse language, and rough manners. They had at times played together at horses on the broad footway in front of the fish market, Pauline always being the horse and Muche the driver. One day, however, when the boy came in all simplicity to seek his playmate, Lisa turned him out of the house, declaring that he was a dirty little street arab.

"One can't tell what may happen with children who have been so shockingly brought up," she observed.

"Yes, indeed; you are quite right," replied Mademoiselle Saget, who happened to be present.

When Muche, who was barely seven years old, came in tears to his mother to tell her of what had happened, La Normande broke out into a terrible passion. At the first moment she felt a strong inclination to rush over to the Quenu-Gradelles' and smash everything in their shop. But eventually she contented herself with giving Muche a whipping.

"If ever I catch you going there again," she cried, boiling over with anger, "you'll get it hot from me, I can tell you!"

Florent, however, was the real victim of the two women. It was he, in truth, who had set them by the ears, and it was on his account that they were fighting each other. Ever since he had appeared upon the scene things had been going from bad to worse. He compromised and disturbed and embittered all these people, who had previously lived in such sleek peace and harmony. The beautiful Norman felt inclined to claw him when he lingered too long with the Quenus, and it was chiefly from an impulse of hostile rivalry that she desired to win him to herself. The beautiful Lisa, on her side, maintained a cold judicial bearing, and although extremely annoyed, forced herself to silence whenever she saw Florent leaving the pork shop to go to the Rue Pirouette.

Still, there was now much less cordiality than formerly round the Quenus' dinner-table in the evening. The clean, prim dining-room seemed to have assumed an aspect of chilling severity. Florent divined a reproach, a sort of condemnation in the bright oak, the polished lamp, and the new matting. He scarcely dared to eat for fear of letting crumbs fall on the floor or soiling his plate. There was a guileless simplicity about him which prevented him from seeing how the land really lay. He still praised Lisa's affectionate kindliness on all sides; and outwardly, indeed, she did continue to treat him with all gentleness.

"It is very strange," she said to him one day with a smile, as though she were joking; "although you don't eat at all badly now, you don't get fatter. Your food doesn't seem to do you any good."

At this Quenu laughed aloud, and tapping his brother's stomach, protested that the whole contents of the pork shop might pass through it without depositing a layer of fat as thick as a two-sou piece. However, Lisa's insistence on this particular subject was instinct with that same suspicious dislike for fleshless men which Madame Mehudin manifested more outspokenly; and behind it all there was likewise a veiled allusion to the disorderly life which she imagined Florent was leading. She never, however, spoke a word to him about La Normande. Quenu had attempted a joke on the subject one evening, but Lisa had received it so icily that the good man had not ventured to refer to the matter again. They would remain seated at table for a few moments after dessert, and Florent, who had noticed his sister-in-law's vexation if ever he went off too soon, tried to find something to talk about. On these occasions Lisa would be near him, and certainly he did not suffer in her presence from that fishy smell which assailed him when he was in the company of La Normande. The mistress of the pork shop, on the contrary, exhaled an odour of fat and rich meats. Moreover, not a thrill of life stirred her tight-fitting bodice; she was all massiveness and all sedateness. Gavard once said to Florent in confidence that Madame Quenu was no doubt handsome, but that for his part he did not admire such armour-plated women.

Lisa avoided talking to Quenu of Florent. She habitually prided herself on her patience, and considered, too, that it would not be proper to cause any unpleasantness between the brothers, unless some peremptory reason for her interference should arise. As she said, she could put up with a good deal, but, of course, she must not be tried too far. She had now reached the period of courteous tolerance, wearing an expressionless face, affecting perfect indifference and strict politeness, and carefully avoiding everything which might seem to hint that Florent was boarding and lodging with them without their receiving the slightest payment from him. Not, indeed, that she would have accepted any payment from him, she was above all that; still he might, at any rate, she thought, have lunched away from the house.

"We never seem to be alone now," she remarked to Quenu one day. "If there is anything we want to say to one another we have to wait till we go upstairs at night."

And then, one night when they were in bed, she said to him: "Your brother earns a hundred and fifty francs a month, doesn't he? Well, it's strange he can't put a trifle by to buy himself some more linen. I've been obliged to give him three more of your old shirts."

"Oh, that doesn't matter," Quenu replied. "Florent's not hard to please; and we must let him keep his money for himself."

"Oh, yes, of course," said Lisa, without pressing the matter further. "I didn't mention it for that reason. Whether he spends his money well or ill, it isn't our business."

In her own mind she felt quite sure that he wasted his salary at the Mehudins'.

Only on one occasion did she break through her habitual calmness of demeanour, the quiet reserve which was the result of both natural temperament and preconceived design. The beautiful Norman had made Florent a present of a magnificent salmon. Feeling very much embarrassed with the fish, and not daring to refuse it, he brought it to Lisa.

"You can make a pasty of it," he said ingenuously.

Lisa looked at him sternly with whitening lips. Then, striving to restrain her anger, she exclaimed: "Do you think that we are short of food? Thank God, we've got quite enough to eat here! Take it back!"

"Well, at any rate, cook it for me," replied Florent, amazed by her anger; "I'll eat it myself."

At this she burst out furiously.

"The house isn't an inn! Tell those who gave you the fish to cook it for you! I won't have my pans tainted and infected! Take it back again! Do you hear?"

If he had not gone away with it, she would certainly have seized it and hurled it into the street. Florent took it to Monsieur Lebigre's, where Rose was ordered to make a pasty of it; and one evening the pasty was eaten in the little "cabinet," Gavard, who was present, "standing" some oysters for the occasion. Florent now gradually came more and more frequently to Monsieur Lebigre's, till at last he was constantly to be met in the little private room. He there found an atmosphere of heated excitement in which his political feverishness could pulsate freely. At times, now, when he shut himself up in his garret to work, the quiet simplicity of the little room irritated him, his theoretical search for liberty proved quite insufficient, and it became necessary that he should go downstairs, sally out, and seek satisfaction in the trenchant axioms of Charvet and the wild outbursts of Logre. During the first few evenings the clamour and chatter had made him feel ill at ease; he was then quite conscious of their utter emptiness, but he felt a need of drowning his thoughts, of goading himself on to some extreme resolution which might calm his mental disquietude. The atmosphere of the little room, reeking with the odour of spirits and warm with tobacco smoke, intoxicated him and filled him with peculiar beatitude, prompting a kind of self-surrender which made him willing to acquiesce in the wildest ideas. He grew attached to those he met there, and looked for them and awaited their coming with a pleasure which increased with habit. Robine's mild, bearded countenance, Clemence's serious profile, Charvet's fleshless pallor, Logre's hump, Gavard, Alexandre, and Lacaille, all entered into his life, and assumed a larger and larger place in it. He took quite a sensual enjoyment in these meetings. When his fingers closed round the brass knob on the door of the little cabinet it seemed to be animated with life, to warm him, and turn of its own accord. Had he grasped the supple wrist of a woman he could not have felt a more thrilling emotion.

To tell the truth, very serious things took place in that little room. One evening, Logre, after indulging in wilder outbursts than usual, banged his fist upon the table, declaring that if they were men they would make a clean sweep of the Government. And he added that it was necessary they should come to an understanding without further delay, if they desired to be fully prepared when the time for action arrived. Then they all bent their heads together, discussed the matter in lower tones, and decided to form a little "group," which should be ready for whatever might happen. From that day forward Gavard flattered himself that he was a member of a secret society, and was engaged in a conspiracy. The little circle received no new members, but Logre promised to put it into communication with other associations with which he was acquainted; and then, as soon as they held all Paris in their grasp, they would rise and make the Tuileries' people dance. A series of endless discussions, renewed during several months, then began—discussions on questions of organisation, on questions of ways and means, on questions of strategy, and of the form of the future Government. As soon as Rose had brought Clemence's grog, Charvet's and Robine's beer, the coffee for Logre, Gavard, and Florent, and the liqueur glasses of brandy for Lacaille and Alexandre, the door of the cabinet was carefully fastened, and the debate began.

Charvet and Florent were naturally those whose utterances were listened to with the greatest attention. Gavard had not been able to keep his tongue from wagging, but had gradually related the whole story of Cayenne; and Florent found himself surrounded by a halo of martyrdom. His words were received as though they were the expression of indisputable dogmas. One evening, however, the poultry dealer, vexed at hearing his friend, who happened to be absent, attacked, exclaimed: "Don't say anything against Florent; he's been to Cayenne!"

Charvet was rather annoyed by the advantage which this circumstance gave to Florent. "Cayenne, Cayenne," he muttered between his teeth. "Ah, well, they were not so badly off there, after all."

Then he attempted to prove that exile was a mere nothing, and that real suffering consisted in remaining in one's oppressed country, gagged in presence of triumphant despotism. And besides, he urged, it wasn't his fault that he hadn't been arrested on the Second of December. Next, however, he hinted that those who had allowed themselves to be captured were imbeciles. His secret jealousy made him a systematic opponent of Florent; and the general discussions always ended in a duel between these two, who, while their companions listened in silence, would speak against one another for hours at a time, without either of them allowing that he was beaten.

One of the favourite subjects of discussion was that of the reorganisation of the country which would have to be effected on the morrow of their victory.

"We are the conquerors, are we not?" began Gavard.

And, triumph being taken for granted, everyone offered his opinion. There were two rival parties. Charvet, who was a disciple of Hebert, was supported by Logre and Robine; while Florent, who was always absorbed in humanitarian dreams, and called himself a Socialist, was backed by Alexandre and Lacaille. As for Gavard, he felt no repugnance for violent action; but, as he was often twitted about his fortune with no end of sarcastic witticisms which annoyed him, he declared himself a Communist.

"We must make a clean sweep of everything," Charvet would curtly say, as though he were delivering a blow with a cleaver. "The trunk is rotten, and it must come down."

"Yes! yes!" cried Logre, standing up that he might look taller, and making the partition shake with the excited motion of his hump. "Everything will be levelled to the ground; take my word for it. After that we shall see what to do."

Robine signified approval by wagging his beard. His silence seemed instinct with delight whenever violent revolutionary propositions were made. His eyes assumed a soft ecstatic expression at the mention of the guillotine. He half closed them, as though he could see the machine, and was filled with pleasant emotion at the sight; and next he would gently rub his chin against the knob of his stick, with a subdued purr of satisfaction.

"All the same," said Florent, in whose voice a vague touch of sadness lingered, "if you cut down the tree it will be necessary to preserve some seed. For my part, I think that the tree ought to be preserved, so that we may graft new life on it. The political revolution, you know, has already taken place; to-day we have got to think of the labourer, the working man. Our movement must be altogether a social one. I defy you to reject the claims of the people. They are weary of waiting, and are determined to have their share of happiness."

These words aroused Alexandre's enthusiasm. With a beaming, radiant face he declared that this was true, that the people were weary of waiting.

"And we will have our share," added Lacaille, with a more menacing expression. "All the revolutions that have taken place have been for the good of the middle classes. We've had quite enough of that sort of thing, and the next one shall be for our benefit."

From this moment disagreement set in. Gavard offered to make a division of his property, but Logre declined, asserting that he cared nothing for money. Then Charvet gradually overcame the tumult, till at last he alone was heard speaking.

"The selfishness of the different classes does more than anything else to uphold tyranny," said he. "It is wrong of the people to display egotism. If they assist us they shall have their share. But why should I fight for the working man if the working man won't fight for me? Moreover, that is not the question at present. Ten years of revolutionary dictatorship will be necessary to accustom a nation like France to the fitting enjoyment of liberty."

"All the more so as the working man is not ripe for it, and requires to be directed," said Clemence bluntly.

She but seldom spoke. This tall, serious looking girl, alone among so many men, listened to all the political chatter with a learnedly critical air. She leaned back against the partition, and every now and then sipped her grog whilst gazing at the speakers with frowning brows or inflated nostrils, thus silently signifying her approval or disapproval, and making it quite clear that she held decided opinions upon the most complicated matters. At times she would roll a cigarette, and puff slender whiffs of smoke from the corners of her mouth, whilst lending increased attention to what was being debated. It was as though she were presiding over the discussion, and would award the prize to the victor when it was finished. She certainly considered that it became her, as a woman, to display some reserve in her opinions, and to remain calm whilst the men grew more and more excited. Now and then, however, in the heat of the debate, she would let a word or a phrase escape her and "clench the matter" even for Charvet himself, as Gavard said. In her heart she believed herself the superior of all these fellows. The only one of them for whom she felt any respect was Robine, and she would thoughtfully contemplate his silent bearing.

Neither Florent nor any of the others paid any special attention to Clemence. They treated her just as though she were a man, shaking hands with her so roughly as almost to dislocate her arms. One evening Florent witnessed the periodical settlement of accounts between her and Charvet. She had just received her pay, and Charvet wanted to borrow ten francs from her; but she first of all insisted that they must reckon up how matters stood between them. They lived together in a voluntary partnership, each having complete control of his or her earnings, and strictly paying his or her expenses. By so doing, said they, they were under no obligations to one another, but retained entire freedom. Rent, food, washing, and amusements, were all noted down and added up. That evening, when the accounts had been verified, Clemence proved to Charvet that he already owed her five francs. Then she handed him the other ten which he wished to borrow, and exclaimed: "Recollect that you now owe me fifteen. I shall expect you to repay me on the fifth, when you get paid for teaching little Lehudier."

When Rose was summoned to receive payment for the "drinks," each produced the few coppers required to discharge his or her liability. Charvet laughingly called Clemence an aristocrat because she drank grog. She wanted to humiliate him, said he, and make him feel that he earned less than she did, which, as it happened, was the fact. Beneath his laugh, however, there was a feeling of bitterness that the girl should be better circumstanced than himself, for, in spite of his theory of the equality of the sexes, this lowered him.

Although the discussions in the little room had virtually no result, they served to exercise the speakers' lungs. A tremendous hubbub proceeded from the sanctum, and the panes of frosted glass vibrated like drum-skins. Sometimes the uproar became so great that Rose, while languidly serving some blouse-wearing customer in the shop, would turn her head uneasily.

"Why, they're surely fighting together in there," the customer would say, as he put his glass down on the zinc-covered counter, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Oh, there's no fear of that," Monsieur Lebigre tranquilly replied. "It's only some gentlemen talking together."

Monsieur Lebigre, indeed, although very strict with his other customers, allowed the politicians to shout as loudly as they pleased, and never made the least remark on the subject. He would sit for hours together on the bench behind the counter, with his big head lolling drowsily against the mirror, whilst he watched Rose uncorking the bottles and giving a wipe here and there with her duster. And in spite of the somniferous effects of the wine fumes and the warm streaming gaslight, he would keep his ears open to the sounds proceeding from the little room. At times, when the voices grew noisier than usual, he got up from his seat and went to lean against the partition; and occasionally he even pushed the door open, and went inside and sat down there for a few minutes, giving Gavard a friendly slap on the thigh. And then he would nod approval of everything that was said. The poultry dealer asserted that although friend Lebigre hadn't the stuff of an orator in him, they might safely reckon on him when the "shindy" came.

One morning, however, at the markets, when a tremendous row broke out between Rose and one of the fish-wives, through the former accidentally knocking over a basket of herrings, Florent heard Rose's employer spoken of as a "dirty spy" in the pay of the police. And after he had succeeded in restoring peace, all sorts of stories about Monsieur Lebigre were poured into his ears. Yes, the wine seller was in the pay of the police, the fish-wives said; all the neighbourhood knew it. Before Mademoiselle Saget had begun to deal with him she had once met him entering the Prefecture to make his report. It was asserted, too, that he was a money-monger, a usurer, and lent petty sums by the day to costermongers, and let out barrows to them, exacting a scandalous rate of interest in return. Florent was greatly disturbed by all this, and felt it his duty to repeat it that evening to his fellow politicians. The latter, however, only shrugged their shoulders, and laughed at his uneasiness.

"Poor Florent!" Charvet exclaimed sarcastically; "he imagines the whole police force is on his track, just because he happens to have been sent to Cayenne!"

Gavard gave his word of honour that Lebigre was perfectly staunch and true, while Logre, for his part, manifested extreme irritation. He fumed and declared that it would be quite impossible for them to get on if everyone was to be accused of being a police spy; for his own part, he would rather stay at home, and have nothing more to do with politics. Why, hadn't people even dared to say that he, Logre himself, who had fought in '48 and '51, and had twice narrowly escaped transportation, was a spy as well? As he shouted this out, he thrust his jaws forward, and glared at the others as though he would have liked to ram the conviction that he had nothing to do with the police down their throats. At the sight of his furious glances his companions made gestures of protestation. However, Lacaille, on hearing Monsieur Lebigre accused of usury, silently lowered his head.

The incident was forgotten in the discussions which ensued. Since Logre had suggested a conspiracy, Monsieur Lebigre had grasped the hands of the frequenters of the little room with more vigor than ever. Their custom, to tell the truth, was of but small value to him, for they never ordered more than one "drink" apiece. They drained the last drops just as they rose to leave, having been careful to allow a little to remain in their glasses, even during their most heated arguments. In this wise the one "shout" lasted throughout the evening. They shivered as they turned out into the cold dampness of the night, and for a moment or two remained standing on the footway with dazzled eyes and buzzing ears, as though surprised by the dark silence of the street. Rose, meanwhile, fastened the shutters behind them. Then, quite exhausted, at a loss for another word they shook hands, separated, and went their different ways, still mentally continuing the discussion of the evening, and regretting that they could not ram their particular theories down each other's throats. Robine walked away, with his bent back bobbing up and down, in the direction of the Rue Rambuteau; whilst Charvet and Clemence went off through the markets on their return to the Luxembourg quarter, their heels sounding on the flag-stones in military fashion, whilst they still discussed some question of politics or philosophy, walking along side by side, but never arm-in-arm.

The conspiracy ripened very slowly. At the commencement of the summer the plotters had got no further than agreeing that it was necessary a stroke should be attempted. Florent, who had at first looked upon the whole business with a kind of distrust, had now, however, come to believe in the possibility of a revolutionary movement. He took up the matter seriously; making notes, and preparing plans in writing, while the others still did nothing but talk. For his part, he began to concentrate his whole life in the one persistent idea which made his brain throb night after night; and this to such a degree that he at last took his brother Quenu with him to Monsieur Lebigre's, as though such a course were quite natural. Certainly he had no thought of doing anything improper. He still looked upon Quenu as in some degree his pupil, and may even have considered it his duty to start him on the proper path. Quenu was an absolute novice in politics, but after spending five or six evenings in the little room he found himself quite in accord with the others. When Lisa was not present he manifested much docility, a sort of respect for his brother's opinions. But the greatest charm of the affair for him was really the mild dissipation of leaving his shop and shutting himself up in the little room where the others shouted so loudly, and where Clemence's presence, in his opinion, gave a tinge of rakishness and romance to the proceedings. He now made all haste with his chitterlings in order that he might get away as early as possible, anxious to lose not a single word of the discussions, which seemed to him to be very brilliant, though he was not always able to follow them. The beautiful Lisa did not fail to notice his hurry to be gone, but as yet she refrained from saying anything. When Florent took him off, she simply went to the door-step, and watched them enter Monsieur Lebigre's, her face paling somewhat, and a severe expression coming into her eyes.

One evening, as Mademoiselle Saget was peering out of her garret casement, she recognised Quenu's shadow on the frosted glass of the "cabinet" window facing the Rue Pirouette. She had found her casement an excellent post of observation, as it overlooked that milky transparency, on which the gaslight threw silhouettes of the politicians, with noses suddenly appearing and disappearing, gaping jaws abruptly springing into sight and then vanishing, and huge arms, apparently destitute of bodies, waving hither and thither. This extraordinary jumble of detached limbs, these silent but frantic profiles, bore witness to the heated discussions that went on in the little room, and kept the old maid peering from behind her muslin curtains until the transparency turned black. She shrewdly suspected some "bit of trickery," as she phrased it. By continual watching she had come to recognise the different shadows by their hands and hair and clothes. As she gazed upon the chaos of clenched fists, angry heads, and swaying shoulders, which seemed to have become detached from their trunks and to roll about one atop of the other, she would exclaim unhesitatingly, "Ah, there's that big booby of a cousin; there's that miserly old Gavard; and there's the hunchback; and there's that maypole of a Clemence!" Then, when the action of the shadow-play became more pronounced, and they all seemed to have lost control over themselves, she felt an irresistible impulse to go downstairs to try to find out what was happening. Thus she now made a point of buying her black-currant syrup at nights, pretending that she felt out-of-sorts in the morning, and was obliged to take a sip as soon as ever she was out of bed. On the evening when she noticed Quenu's massive head shadowed on the transparency in close proximity to Charvet's fist, she made her appearance at Monsieur Lebigre's in a breathless condition. To gain more time, she made Rose rinse out her little bottle for her; however, she was about to return to her room when she heard the pork butcher exclaim with a sort of childish candour:

"No, indeed, we'll stand for it no longer! We'll make a clean sweep of all those humbugging Deputies and Ministers! Yes, we'll send the whole lot packing."

Eight o'clock had scarcely struck on the following morning when Mademoiselle Saget was already at the pork shop. She found Madame Lecoeur and La Sarriette there, dipping their noses into the heating-pan, and buying hot sausages for breakfast. As the old maid had managed to draw them into her quarrel with La Normande with respect to the ten-sou dab, they had at once made friends again with Lisa, and they now had nothing but contempt for the handsome fish-girl, and assailed her and her sister as good-for-nothing hussies, whose only aim was to fleece men of their money. This opinion had been inspired by the assertions of Mademoiselle Saget, who had declared to Madame Lecoeur that Florent had induced one of the two girls to coquette with Gavard, and that the four of them had indulged in the wildest dissipation at Barratte's—of course, at the poultry dealer's expense. From the effects of this impudent story Madame Lecoeur had not yet recovered; she wore a doleful appearance, and her eyes were quite yellow with spleen.

That morning, however, it was for Madame Quenu that the old maid had a shock in store. She looked round the counter, and then in her most gentle voice remarked:

"I saw Monsieur Quenu last night. They seem to enjoy themselves immensely in that little room at Lebigre's, if one may judge from the noise they make."

Lisa had turned her head towards the street, listening very attentively, but apparently unwilling to show it. The old maid paused, hoping that one of the others would question her; and then, in a lower tone, she added: "They had a woman with them. Oh, I don't mean Monsieur Quenu, of course! I didn't say that; I don't know—"

"It must be Clemence," interrupted La Sarriette; "a big scraggy creature who gives herself all sorts of airs just because she went to boarding school. She lives with a threadbare usher. I've seen them together; they always look as though they were taking each other off to the police station."

"Oh, yes; I know," replied the old maid, who, indeed, knew everything about Charvet and Clemence, and whose only purpose was to alarm Lisa.

The mistress of the pork shop, however, never flinched. She seemed to be absorbed in watching something of great interest in the market yonder. Accordingly the old maid had recourse to stronger measures. "I think," said she, addressing herself to Madame Lecoeur, "that you ought to advise your brother-in-law to be careful. Last night they were shouting out the most shocking things in that little room. Men really seem to lose their heads over politics. If anyone had heard them, it might have been a very serious matter for them."

"Oh! Gavard will go his own way," sighed Madame Lecoeur. "It only wanted this to fill my cup. I shall die of anxiety, I am sure, if he ever gets arrested."

As she spoke, a gleam shot from her dim eyes. La Sarriette, however, laughed and wagged her little face, bright with the freshness of the morning air.

"You should hear what Jules says of those who speak against the Empire," she remarked. "They ought all to be thrown into the Seine, he told me; for it seems there isn't a single respectable person amongst them."

"Oh! there's no harm done, of course, so long as only people like myself hear their foolish talk," resumed Mademoiselle Saget. "I'd rather cut my hand off, you know, than make mischief. Last night now, for instance, Monsieur Quenu was saying——"

She again paused. Lisa had started slightly.

"Monsieur Quenu was saying that the Ministers and Deputies and all who are in power ought to be shot."

At this Lisa turned sharply, her face quite white and her hands clenched beneath her apron.

"Quenu said that?" she curtly asked.

"Yes, indeed, and several other similar things that I can't recollect now. I heard him myself. But don't distress yourself like that, Madame Quenu. You know very well that I sha'n't breathe a word. I'm quite old enough to know what might harm a man if it came out. Oh, no; it will go no further."

Lisa had recovered her equanimity. She took a pride in the happy peacefulness of her home; she would not acknowledge that there had ever been the slightest difference between herself and her husband. And so now she shrugged her shoulders and said with a smile: "Oh, it's all a pack of foolish nonsense."

When the three others were in the street together they agreed that handsome Lisa had pulled a very doleful face; and they were unanimously of opinion that the mysterious goings-on of the cousin, the Mehudins, Gavard, and the Quenus would end in trouble. Madame Lecoeur inquired what was done to the people who got arrested "for politics," but on this point Mademoiselle Saget could not enlighten her; she only knew that they were never seen again—no, never. And this induced La Sarriette to suggest that perhaps they were thrown into the Seine, as Jules had said they ought to be.

Lisa avoided all reference to the subject at breakfast and dinner that day; and even in the evening, when Florent and Quenu went off together to Monsieur Lebigre's, there was no unwonted severity in her glance. On that particular evening, however, the question of framing a constitution for the future came under discussion, and it was one o'clock in the morning before the politicians could tear themselves away from the little room. The shutters had already been fastened, and they were obliged to leave by a small door, passing out one at a time with bent backs. Quenu returned home with an uneasy conscience. He opened the three or four doors on his way to bed as gently as possible, walking on tip-toe and stretching out his hands as he passed through the sitting-room, to avoid a collision with any of the furniture. The whole house seemed to be asleep. When he reached the bedroom, he was annoyed to find that Lisa had not extinguished the candle, which was burning with a tall, mournful flame in the midst of the deep silence. As Quenu took off his shoes, and put them down in a corner, the time-piece struck half past one with such a clear, ringing sound that he turned in alarm, almost frightened to move, and gazing with an expression of angry reproach at the shining gilded Gutenberg standing there, with his finger on a book. Lisa's head was buried in her pillow, and Quenu could only see her back; but he divined that she was merely feigning sleep, and her conduct in turning her back upon him was so instinct with reproach that he felt sorely ill at ease. At last he slipped beneath the bed-clothes, blew out the candle, and lay perfectly still. He could have sworn that his wife was awake, though she did not speak to him; and presently he fell asleep, feeling intensely miserable, and lacking the courage to say good night.

He slept till late, and when he awoke he found himself sprawling in the middle of the bed with the eider-down quilt up to his chin, whilst Lisa sat in front of the secretaire, arranging some papers. His slumber had been so heavy that he had not heard her rise. However, he now took courage, and spoke to her from the depths of the alcove: "Why didn't you wake me? What are you doing there?"

"I'm sorting the papers in these drawers," she replied in her usual tone of voice.

Quenu felt relieved. But Lisa added: "One never knows what may happen. If the police were to come—"

"What! the police?"

"Yes, indeed, the police; for you're mixing yourself up with politics now."

At this Quenu sat up in bed, quite dazed and confounded by such a violent and unexpected attack.

"I mix myself up with politics! I mix myself up with politics!" he repeated. "It's no concern of the police. I've nothing to do with any compromising matters."

"No," replied Lisa, shrugging her shoulders; "you merely talk about shooting everybody."

"I! I!"

"Yes. And you bawl it out in a public-house! Mademoiselle Saget heard you. All the neighbourhood knows by this time that you are a Red Republican!"

Quenu fell back in bed again. He was not perfectly awake as yet. Lisa's words resounded in his ears as though he already heard the heavy tramp of gendarmes at the bedroom door. He looked at her as she sat there, with her hair already arranged, her figure tightly imprisoned in her stays, her whole appearance the same as it was on any other morning; and he felt more astonished than ever that she should be so neat and prim under such extraordinary circumstances.

"I leave you absolutely free, you know," she continued, as she went on arranging the papers. "I don't want to wear the breeches, as the saying goes. You are the master, and you are at liberty to endanger your position, compromise our credit, and ruin our business."

Then, as Quenu tried to protest, she silenced him with a gesture. "No, no; don't say anything," she continued. "This is no quarrel, and I am not even asking an explanation from you. But if you had consulted me, and we had talked the matter over together, I might have intervened. Ah! it's a great mistake to imagine that women understand nothing about politics. Shall I tell you what my politics are?"

She had risen from her seat whilst speaking, and was now walking to and fro between the bed and the window, wiping as she went some specks of dust from the bright mahogany of the mirrored wardrobe and the dressing-table.

"My politics are the politics of honest folks," said she. "I'm grateful to the Government when business is prosperous, when I can eat my meals in peace and comfort, and can sleep at nights without being awakened by the firing of guns. There were pretty times in '48, were there not? You remember our uncle Gradelle, the worthy man, showing us his books for that year? He lost more than six thousand francs. Now that we have got the Empire, however, everything prospers. We sell our goods readily enough. You can't deny it. Well, then, what is it that you want? How will you be better off when you have shot everybody?"

She took her stand in front of the little night-table, crossed her arms over her breast, and fixed her eyes upon Quenu, who had shuffled himself beneath the bed-clothes, almost out of sight. He attempted to explain what it was that his friends wanted, but he got quite confused in his endeavours to summarise Florent's and Charvet's political and social systems; and could only talk about the disregard shown to principles, the accession of the democracy to power, and the regeneration of society, in such a strange tangled way that Lisa shrugged her shoulders, quite unable to understand him. At last, however, he extricated himself from his difficulties by declaring that the Empire was the reign of licentiousness, swindling finance, and highway robbery. And, recalling an expression of Logre's he added: "We are the prey of a band of adventurers, who are pillaging, violating, and assassinating France. We'll have no more of them."

Lisa, however, still shrugged her shoulders.

"Well, and is that all you have got to say?" she asked with perfect coolness. "What has all that got to do with me? Even supposing it were true, what then? Have I ever advised you to practise dishonest courses? Have I ever prompted you to dishonour your acceptances, or cheat your customers, or pile up money by fraudulent practices? Really, you'll end by making me quite angry! We are honest folks, and we don't pillage or assassinate anybody. That's quite sufficient. What other folks do is no concern of ours. If they choose to be rogues it's their affair."

She looked quite majestic and triumphant; and again pacing the room, drawing herself up to her full height, she resumed: "A pretty notion it is that people are to let their business go to rack and ruin just to please those who are penniless. For my part, I'm in favour of making hay while the sun shines, and supporting a Government which promotes trade. If it does do dishonourable things, I prefer to know nothing about them. I know that I myself commit none, and that no one in the neighbourhood can point a finger at me. It's only fools who go tilting at windmills. At the time of the last elections, you remember, Gavard said that the Emperor's candidate had been bankrupt, and was mixed up in all sorts of scandalous matters. Well, perhaps that was true, I don't deny it; but all the same, you acted wisely in voting for him, for all that was not in question; you were not asked to lend the man any money or to transact any business with him, but merely to show the Government that you were pleased with the prosperity of the pork trade."

At this moment Quenu called to mind a sentence of Charvet's, asserting that "the bloated bourgeois, the sleek shopkeepers, who backed up that Government of universal gormandising, ought to be hurled into the sewers before all others, for it was owing to them and their gluttonous egotism that tyranny had succeeded in mastering and preying upon the nation." He was trying to complete this piece of eloquence when Lisa, carried off by her indignation, cut him short.

"Don't talk such stuff! My conscience doesn't reproach me with anything. I don't owe a copper to anybody; I'm not mixed up in any dishonest business; I buy and sell good sound stuff; and I charge no more than others do. What you say may perhaps apply to people like our cousins, the Saccards. They pretend to be even ignorant that I am in Paris; but I am prouder than they are, and I don't care a rap for their millions. It's said that Saccard speculates in condemned buildings, and cheats and robs everybody. I'm not surprised to hear it, for he was always that way inclined. He loves money just for the sake of wallowing in it, and then tossing it out of his windows, like the imbecile he is. I can understand people attacking men of his stamp, who pile up excessive fortunes. For my part, if you care to know it, I have but a bad opinion of Saccard. But we—we who live so quietly and peaceably, who will need at least fifteen years to put by sufficient money to make ourselves comfortably independent, we who have no reason to meddle in politics, and whose only aim is to bring up our daughter respectably, and to see that our business prospers—why you must be joking to talk such stuff about us. We are honest folks!"

She came and sat down on the edge of the bed. Quenu was already much shaken in his opinions.

"Listen to me, now," she resumed in a more serious voice. "You surely don't want to see your own shop pillaged, your cellar emptied, and your money taken from you? If these men who meet at Monsieur Lebigre's should prove triumphant, do you think that you would then lie as comfortably in your bed as you do now? And on going down into the kitchen, do you imagine that you would set about making your galantines as peacefully as you will presently? No, no, indeed! So why do you talk about overthrowing a Government which protects you, and enables you to put money by? You have a wife and a daughter, and your first duty is towards them. You would be in fault if you imperilled their happiness. It is only those who have neither home nor hearth, who have nothing to lose, who want to be shooting people. Surely you don't want to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them! So stay quietly at home, you foolish fellow, sleep comfortably, eat well, make money, keep an easy conscience, and leave France to free herself of the Empire if the Empire annoys her. France can get on very well without you."

She laughed her bright melodious laugh as she finished; and Quenu was now altogether convinced. Yes, she was right, after all; and she looked so charming, he thought, as she sat there on the edge of the bed, so trim, although it was so early, so bright, and so fresh in the dazzling whiteness of her linen. As he listened to her his eyes fell on their portraits hanging on either side of the fireplace. Yes, they were certainly honest folks; they had such a respectable, well-to-do air in their black clothes and their gilded frames! The bedroom, too, looked as though it belonged to people of some account in the world. The lace squares seemed to give a dignified appearance to the chairs; and the carpet, the curtains, and the vases decorated with painted landscapes—all spoke of their exertions to get on in the world and their taste for comfort. Thereupon he plunged yet further beneath the eider-down quilt, which kept him in a state of pleasant warmth. He began to feel that he had risked losing all these things at Monsieur Lebigre's—his huge bed, his cosy room, and his business, on which his thoughts now dwelt with tender remorse. And from Lisa, from the furniture, from all his cosy surroundings, he derived a sense of comfort which thrilled him with a delightful, overpowering charm.

"You foolish fellow!" said his wife, seeing that he was now quite conquered. "A pretty business it was that you'd embarked upon; but you'd have had to reckon with Pauline and me, I can tell you! And now don't bother your head any more about the Government. To begin with, all Governments are alike, and if we didn't have this one, we should have another. A Government is necessary. But the one thing is to be able to live on, to spend one's savings in peace and comfort when one grows old, and to know that one has gained one's means honestly."

Quenu nodded his head in acquiescence, and tried to commence a justification of his conduct.

"It was Gavard—," he began.

But Lisa's face again assumed a serious expression, and she interrupted him sharply.

"No, it was not Gavard. I know very well who it was; and it would be a great deal better if he would look after his own safety before compromising that of others."

"Is it Florent you mean?" Quenu timidly inquired after a pause.

Lisa did not immediately reply. She got up and went back to the secretaire, as if trying to restrain herself.

"Yes, it is Florent," she said presently, in incisive tones. "You know how patient I am. I would bear almost anything rather than come between you and your brother. The tie of relationship is a sacred thing. But the cup is filled to overflowing now. Since your brother came here things have been constantly getting worse and worse. But now, I won't say anything more; it is better that I shouldn't."

There was another pause. Then, as her husband gazed up at the ceiling with an air of embarrassment, she continued, with increased violence:

"Really, he seems to ignore all that we have done for him. We have put ourselves to great inconvenience for his sake; we have given him Augustine's bedroom, and the poor girl sleeps without a murmur in a stuffy little closet where she can scarcely breathe. We board and lodge him and give him every attention—but no, he takes it all quite as a matter of course. He is earning money, but what he does with it nobody knows; or, rather, one knows only too well."

"But there's his share of the inheritance, you know," Quenu ventured to say, pained at hearing his brother attacked.

Lisa suddenly stiffened herself as though she were stunned, and her anger vanished.

"Yes, you are right; there is his share of the inheritance. Here is the statement of it, in this drawer. But he refused to take it; you remember, you were present, and heard him. That only proves that he is a brainless, worthless fellow. If he had had an idea in his head, he would have made something out of that money by now. For my own part, I should be very glad to get rid of it; it would be a relief to us. I have told him so twice, but he won't listen to me. You ought to persuade him to take it. Talk to him about it, will you?"

Quenu growled something in reply; and Lisa refrained from pressing the point further, being of opinion that she had done all that could be expected of her.

"He is not like other men," she resumed. "He's not a comfortable sort of person to have in the house. I shouldn't have said this if we hadn't got talking on the subject. I don't busy myself about his conduct, though it's setting the whole neighbourhood gossiping about us. Let him eat and sleep here, and put us about, if he likes; we can get over that; but what I won't tolerate is that he should involve us in his politics. If he tries to lead you off again, or compromises us in the least degree, I shall turn him out of the house without the least hesitation. I warn you, and now you understand!"

Florent was doomed. Lisa was making a great effort to restrain herself, to prevent the animosity which had long been rankling in her heart from flowing forth. But Florent and his ways jarred against her every instinct; he wounded her, frightened her, and made her quite miserable.

"A man who has made such a discreditable career," she murmured, "who has never been able to get a roof of his own over his head! I can very well understand his partiality for bullets! He can go and stand in their way if he chooses; but let him leave honest folks to their families! And then, he isn't pleasant to have about one! He reeks of fish in the evening at dinner! It prevents me from eating. He himself never lets a mouthful go past him, though it's little better he seems to be for it all! He can't even grow decently stout, the wretched fellow, to such a degree do his bad instincts prey on him!"

She had stepped up to the window whilst speaking, and now saw Florent crossing the Rue Rambuteau on his way to the fish market. There was a very large arrival of fish that morning; the tray-like baskets were covered with rippling silver, and the auction rooms roared with the hubbub of their sales. Lisa kept her eyes on the bony shoulders of her brother-in-law as he made his way into the pungent smells of the market, stooping beneath the sickening sensation which they brought him; and the glance with which she followed his steps was that of a woman bent on combat and resolved to be victorious.

When she turned round again, Quenu was getting up. As he sat on the edge of the bed in his night-shirt, still warm from the pleasant heat of the eider-down quilt and with his feet resting on the soft fluffy rug below him, he looked quite pale, quite distressed at the misunderstanding between his wife and his brother. Lisa, however, gave him one of her sweetest smiles, and he felt deeply touched when she handed him his socks.

CHAPTER IV

Marjolin had been found in a heap of cabbages at the Market of the Innocents. He was sleeping under the shelter of a large white-hearted one, a broad leaf of which concealed his rosy childish face It was never known what poverty-stricken mother had laid him there. When he was found he was already a fine little fellow of two or three years of age, very plump and merry, but so backward and dense that he could scarcely stammer a few words, and only seemed able to smile. When one of the vegetable saleswomen found him lying under the big white cabbage she raised such a loud cry of surprise that her neighbours rushed up to see what was the matter, while the youngster, still in petticoats, and wrapped in a scrap of old blanket, held out his arms towards her. He could not tell who his mother was, but opened his eyes in wide astonishment as he squeezed against the shoulder of a stout tripe dealer who eventually took him up. The whole market busied itself about him throughout the day. He soon recovered confidence, ate slices of bread and butter, and smiled at all the women. The stout tripe dealer kept him for a time, then a neighbour took him; and a month later a third woman gave him shelter. When they asked him where his mother was, he waved his little hand with a pretty gesture which embraced all the women present. He became the adopted child of the place, always clinging to the skirts of one or another of the women, and always finding a corner of a bed and a share of a meal somewhere. Somehow, too, he managed to find clothes, and he even had a copper or two at the bottom of his ragged pockets. It was a buxom, ruddy girl dealing in medicinal herbs who gave him the name of Marjolin,[*] though no one knew why.

[*] Literally "Marjoram."

When Marjolin was nearly four years of age, old Mother Chantemesse also happened to find a child, a little girl, lying on the footway of the Rue Saint Denis, near the corner of the market. Judging by the little one's size, she seemed to be a couple of years old, but she could already chatter like a magpie, murdering her words in an incessant childish babble. Old Mother Chantemesse after a time gathered that her name was Cadine, and that on the previous evening her mother had left her sitting on a doorstep, with instructions to wait till she returned. The child had fallen asleep there, and did not cry. She related that she was beaten at home; and she gladly followed Mother Chantemesse, seemingly quite enchanted with that huge square, where there were so many people and such piles of vegetables. Mother Chantemesse, a retail dealer by trade, was a crusty but very worthy woman, approaching her sixtieth year. She was extremely fond of children, and had lost three boys of her own when they were mere babies. She came to the opinion that the chit she had found "was far too wide awake to kick the bucket," and so she adopted her.

One evening, however, as she was going off home with her right hand clasping Cadine's, Marjolin came up and unceremoniously caught hold of her left hand.

"Nay, my lad," said the old woman, stopping, "the place is filled. Have you left your big Therese, then? What a fickle little gadabout you are!"

The boy gazed at her with his smiling eyes, without letting go of her hand. He looked so pretty with his curly hair that she could not resist him. "Well, come along, then, you little scamp," said she; "I'll put you to bed as well."

Thus she made her appearance in the Rue au Lard, where she lived, with a child clinging to either hand. Marjolin made himself quite at home there. When the two children proved too noisy the old woman cuffed them, delighted to shout and worry herself, and wash the youngsters, and pack them away beneath the blankets. She had fixed them up a little bed in an old costermonger's barrow, the wheels and shafts of which had disappeared. It was like a big cradle, a trifle hard, but retaining a strong scent of the vegetables which it had long kept fresh and cool beneath a covering of damp cloths. And there, when four years old, Cadine and Marjolin slept locked in each other's arms.

They grew up together, and were always to be seen with their arms about one another's waist. At night time old Mother Chantemesse heard them prattling softly. Cadine's clear treble went chattering on for hours together, while Marjolin listened with occasional expressions of astonishment vented in a deeper tone. The girl was a mischievous young creature, and concocted all sorts of stories to frighten her companion; telling him, for instance, that she had one night seen a man, dressed all in white, looking at them and putting out a great red tongue, at the foot of the bed. Marjolin quite perspired with terror, and anxiously asked for further particulars; but the girl would then begin to jeer at him, and end by calling him a big donkey. At other times they were not so peaceably disposed, but kicked each other beneath the blankets. Cadine would pull up her legs, and try to restrain her laughter as Marjolin missed his aim, and sent his feet banging against the wall. When this happened, old Madame Chantemesse was obliged to get up to put the bed-clothes straight again; and, by way of sending the children to sleep, she would administer a box on the ear to both of them. For a long time their bed was a sort of playground. They carried their toys into it, and munched stolen carrots and turnips as they lay side by side. Every morning their adopted mother was amazed at the strange things she found in the bed—pebbles, leaves, apple cores, and dolls made out of scraps of rags. When the very cold weather came, she went off to her work, leaving them sleeping there, Cadine's black mop mingling with Marjolin's sunny curls, and their mouths so near together that they looked as though they were keeping each other warm with their breath.

The room in the Rue au Lard was a big, dilapidated garret, with a single window, the panes of which were dimmed by the rain. The children would play at hide-and-seek in the tall walnut wardrobe and underneath Mother Chantemesse's colossal bed. There were also two or three tables in the room, and they crawled under these on all fours. They found the place a very charming playground, on account of the dim light and the vegetables scattered about in the dark corners. The street itself, too, narrow and very quiet, with a broad arcade opening into the Rue de la Lingerie, provided them with plenty of entertainment. The door of the house was by the side of the arcade; it was a low door and could only be opened half way owing to the near proximity of the greasy corkscrew staircase. The house, which had a projecting pent roof and a bulging front, dark with damp, and displaying greenish drain-sinks near the windows of each floor, also served as a big toy for the young couple. They spent their mornings below in throwing stones up into the drain-sinks, and the stones thereupon fell down the pipes with a very merry clatter. In thus amusing themselves, however, they managed to break a couple of windows, and filled the drains with stones, so that Mother Chantemesse, who had lived in the house for three and forty years, narrowly escaped being turned out of it.

Cadine and Marjolin then directed their attention to the vans and drays and tumbrels which were drawn up in the quiet street. They clambered on to the wheels, swung from the dangling chains, and larked about amongst the piles of boxes and hampers. Here also were the back premises of the commission agents of the Rue de la Poterie—huge, gloomy warehouses, each day filled and emptied afresh, and affording a constant succession of delightful hiding-places, where the youngsters buried themselves amidst the scent of dried fruits, oranges, and fresh apples. When they got tired of playing in his way, they went off to join old Madame Chantemesse at the Market of the Innocents. They arrived there arm-in-arm, laughing gaily as they crossed the streets with never the slightest fear of being run over by the endless vehicles. They knew the pavement well, and plunged their little legs knee-deep in the vegetable refuse without ever slipping. They jeered merrily at any porter in heavy boots who, in stepping over an artichoke stem, fell sprawling full-length upon the ground. They were the rosy-cheeked familiar spirits of those greasy streets. They were to be seen everywhere.

On rainy days they walked gravely beneath the shelter of a ragged old umbrella, with which Mother Chantemesse had protected her stock-in-trade for twenty years, and sticking it up in a corner of the market they called it their house. On sunny days they romped to such a degree that when evening came they were almost too tired to move. They bathed their feet in the fountains, dammed up the gutters, or hid themselves beneath piles of vegetables, and remained there prattling to each other just as they did in bed at night. People passing some huge mountain of cos or cabbage lettuces often heard a muffled sound of chatter coming from it. And when the green-stuff was removed, the two children would be discovered lying side by side on their couch of verdure, their eyes glistening uneasily like those of birds discovered in the depth of a thicket. As time went on, Cadine could not get along without Marjolin, and Marjolin began to cry when he lost sight of Cadine. If they happened to get separated, they sought one another behind the petticoats of every stallkeeper in the markets, amongst the boxes and under the cabbages. If was, indeed, chiefly under the cabbages that they grew up and learned to love each other.

Marjolin was nearly eight years old, and Cadine six, when old Madame Chantemesse began to reproach them for their idleness. She told them that she would interest them in her business, and pay them a sou a day to assist her in paring her vegetables. During the first few days the children displayed eager zeal; they squatted down on either side of the big flat basket with little knives in their hands, and worked away energetically. Mother Chantemesse made a specialty of pared vegetables; on her stall, covered with a strip of damp black lining, were little lots of potatoes, turnips, carrots, and white onions, arranged in pyramids of four—three at the base and one at the apex, all quite ready to be popped into the pans of dilatory housewives. She also had bundles duly stringed in readiness for the soup-pot—four leeks, three carrots, a parsnip, two turnips, and a couple of springs of celery. Then there were finely cut vegetables for julienne soup laid out on squares of paper, cabbages cut into quarters, and little heaps of tomatoes and slices of pumpkin which gleamed like red stars and golden crescents amidst the pale hues of the other vegetables. Cadine evinced much more dexterity than Marjolin, although she was younger. The peelings of the potatoes she pared were so thin that you could see through them; she tied up the bundles for the soup-pot so artistically that they looked like bouquets; and she had a way of making the little heaps she set up, though they contained but three carrots or turnips, look like very big ones. The passers-by would stop and smile when she called out in her shrill childish voice: "Madame! madame! come and try me! Each little pile for two sous."

She had her regular customers, and her little piles and bundles were widely known. Old Mother Chantemesse, seated between the two children, would indulge in a silent laugh which made her bosom rise almost to her chin, at seeing them working away so seriously. She paid them their daily sous most faithfully. But they soon began to weary of the little heaps and bundles; they were growing up, and began to dream of some more lucrative business. Marjolin remained very childish for his years, and this irritated Cadine. He had no more brains than a cabbage, she often said. And it was, indeed, quite useless for her to devise any plan for him to make money; he never earned any. He could not even do an errand satisfactorily. The girl, on the other hand, was very shrewd. When but eight years old she obtained employment from one of those women who sit on a bench in the neighbourhood of the markets provided with a basket of lemons, and employ a troop of children to go about selling them. Carrying the lemons in her hands and offering them at two for three sous, Cadine thrust them under every woman's nose, and ran after every passer-by. Her hands empty, she hastened back for a fresh supply. She was paid two sous for every dozen lemons that she sold, and on good days she could earn some five or six sous. During the following year she hawked caps at nine sous apiece, which proved a more profitable business; only she had to keep a sharp look-out, as street trading of this kind is forbidden unless one be licensed. However, she scented a policeman at a distance of a hundred yards; and the caps forthwith disappeared under her skirts, whilst she began to munch an apple with an air of guileless innocence. Then she took to selling pastry, cakes, cherry-tarts, gingerbread, and thick yellow maize biscuits on wicker trays. Marjolin, however, ate up nearly the whole of her stock-in-trade. At last, when she was eleven years old, she succeeded in realising a grand idea which had long been worrying her. In a couple of months she put by four francs, bought a small hotte,[*] and then set up as a dealer in birds' food.

[*] A basket carried on the back.—Translator.

It was a big affair. She got up early in the morning and purchased her stock of groundsel, millet, and bird-cake from the wholesale dealers. Then she set out on her day's work, crossing the river, and perambulating the Latin Quarter from the Rue Saint Jacques to the Rue Dauphine, and even to the Luxembourg. Marjolin used to accompany her, but she would not let him carry the basket. He was only fit to call out, she said; and so, in his thick, drawling voice, he would raise the cry, "Chickweed for the little birds!"

Then Cadine herself, with her flute-like voice, would start on a strange scale of notes ending in a clear, protracted alto, "Chickweed for the little birds!"

They each took one side of the road, and looked up in the air as they walked along. In those days Marjolin wore a big scarlet waistcoat which hung down to his knees; it had belonged to the defunct Monsieur Chantemesse, who had been a cab-driver. Cadine for her part wore a white and blue check gown, made out of an old tartan of Madame Chantemesse's. All the canaries in the garrets of the Latin Quarter knew them; and, as they passed along, repeating their cry, each echoing the other's voice, every cage poured out a song.

Cadine sold water-cress, too. "Two sous a bunch! Two sous a bunch!" And Marjolin went into the shops to offer it for sale. "Fine water-cress! Health for the body! Fine fresh water-cress!"

However, the new central markets had just been erected, and the girl would stand gazing in ecstacy at the avenue of flower stalls which runs through the fruit pavilion. Here on either hand, from end to end, big clumps of flowers bloom as in the borders of a garden walk. It is a perfect harvest, sweet with perfume, a double hedge of blossoms, between which the girls of the neighbourhood love to walk, smiling the while, though almost stifled by the heavy perfume. And on the top tiers of the stalls are artificial flowers, with paper leaves, in which dewdrops are simulated by drops of gum; and memorial wreaths of black and white beads rippling with bluish reflections. Cadine's rosy nostrils would dilate with feline sensuality; she would linger as long as possible in that sweet freshness, and carry as much of the perfume away with her as she could. When her hair bobbed under Marjolin's nose he would remark that it smelt of pinks. She said that she had given over using pomatum; that is was quite sufficient for her to stroll through the flower walk in order to scent her hair. Next she began to intrigue and scheme with such success that she was engaged by one of the stallkeepers. And then Marjolin declared that she smelt sweet from head to foot. She lived in the midst of roses, lilacs, wall-flowers, and lilies of the valley; and Marjolin would playfully smell at her skirts, feign a momentary hesitation, and then exclaim, "Ah, that's lily of the valley!" Next he would sniff at her waist and bodice: "Ah, that's wall-flowers!" And at her sleeves and wrists: "Ah, that's lilac!" And at her neck, and her cheeks and lips: "Ah, but that's roses!" he would cry. Cadine used to laugh at him, and call him a "silly stupid," and tell him to get away, because he was tickling her with the tip of his nose. As she spoke her breath smelt of jasmine. She was verily a bouquet, full of warmth and life.

She now got up at four o'clock every morning to assist her mistress in her purchases. Each day they bought armfuls of flowers from the suburban florists, with bundles of moss, and bundles of fern fronds, and periwinkle leaves to garnish the bouquets. Cadine would gaze with amazement at the diamonds and Valenciennes worn by the daughters of the great gardeners of Montreuil, who came to the markets amidst their roses.

On the saints' days of popular observance, such as Saint Mary's, Saint Peter's, and Saint Joseph's days, the sale of flowers began at two o'clock. More than a hundred thousand francs' worth of cut flowers would be sold on the footways, and some of the retail dealers would make as much as two hundred francs in a few hours. On days like those only Cadine's curly locks peered over the mounds of pansies, mignonette, and marguerites. She was quite drowned and lost in the flood of flowers. Then she would spend all her time in mounting bouquets on bits of rush. In a few weeks she acquired considerable skillfulness in her business, and manifested no little originality. Her bouquets did not always please everybody, however. Sometimes they made one smile, sometimes they alarmed the eyes. Red predominated in them, mottled with violent tints of blue, yellow, and violet of a barbaric charm. On the mornings when she pinched Marjolin, and teased him till she made him cry, she made up fierce-looking bouquets, suggestive of her own bad temper, bouquets with strong rough scents and glaring irritating colours. On other days, however, when she was softened by some thrill of joy or sorrow, her bouquets would assume a tone of silvery grey, very soft and subdued, and delicately perfumed.

Then, too, she would set roses, as sanguineous as open hearts, in lakes of snow-white pinks; arrange bunches of tawny iris that shot up in tufts of flame from foliage that seemed scared by the brilliance of the flowers; work elaborate designs, as complicated as those of Smyrna rugs, adding flower to flower, as on a canvas; and prepare rippling fanlike bouquets spreading out with all the delicacy of lace. Here was a cluster of flowers of delicious purity, there a fat nosegay, whatever one might dream of for the hand of a marchioness or a fish-wife; all the charming quaint fancies, in short, which the brain of a sharp-witted child of twelve, budding into womanhood, could devise.

There were only two flowers for which Cadine retained respect; white lilac, which by the bundle of eight or ten sprays cost from fifteen to twenty francs in the winter time; and camellias, which were still more costly, and arrived in boxes of a dozen, lying on beds of moss, and covered with cotton wool. She handled these as delicately as though they were jewels, holding her breath for fear of dimming their lustre, and fastening their short stems to springs of cane with the tenderest care. She spoke of them with serious reverence. She told Marjolin one day that a speckless white camellia was a very rare and exceptionally lovely thing, and, as she was making him admire one, he exclaimed: "Yes; it's pretty; but I prefer your neck, you know. It's much more soft and transparent than the camellia, and there are some little blue and pink veins just like the pencillings on a flower." Then, drawing near and sniffing, he murmured: "Ah! you smell of orange blossom to-day."

Cadine was self-willed, and did not get on well in the position of a servant, so she ended by setting up in business on her own account. As she was only thirteen at the time, and could not hope for a big trade and a stall in the flower avenue, she took to selling one-sou bunches of violets pricked into a bed of moss in an osier tray which she carried hanging from her neck. All day long she wandered about the markets and their precincts with her little bit of hanging garden. She loved this continual stroll, which relieved the numbness of her limbs after long hours spent, with bent knees, on a low chair, making bouquets. She fastened her violets together with marvellous deftness as she walked along. She counted out six or eight flowers, according to the season, doubled a sprig of cane in half, added a leaf, twisted some damp thread round the whole, and broke off the thread with her strong young teeth. The little bunches seemed to spring spontaneously from the layer of moss, so rapidly did she stick them into it.

Along the footways, amidst the jostling of the street traffic, her nimble fingers were ever flowering though she gave them not a glance, but boldly scanned the shops and passers-by. Sometimes she would rest in a doorway for a moment; and alongside the gutters, greasy with kitchen slops, she sat, as it were a patch of springtime, a suggestion of green woods, and purple blossoms. Her flowers still betokened her frame of mind, her fits of bad temper and her thrills of tenderness. Sometimes they bristled and glowered with anger amidst their crumpled leaves; at other times they spoke only of love and peacefulness as they smiled in their prim collars. As Cadine passed along, she left a sweet perfume behind her; Marjolin followed her devoutly. From head to foot she now exhaled but one scent, and the lad repeated that she was herself a violet, a great big violet.

"Do you remember the day when we went to Romainville together?" he would say; "Romainville, where there are so many violets. The scent was just the same. Oh! don't change again—you smell too sweetly."

And she did not change again. This was her last trade. Still, she often neglected her osier tray to go rambling about the neighbourhood. The building of the central markets—as yet incomplete—provided both children with endless opportunities for amusement. They made their way into the midst of the work-yards through some gap or other between the planks; they descended into the foundations, and climbed up to the cast-iron pillars. Every nook, every piece of the framework witnessed their games and quarrels; the pavilions grew up under the touch of their little hands. From all this arose the affection which they felt for the great markets, and which the latter seemed to return. They were on familiar terms with that gigantic pile, old friends as they were, who had seen each pin and bolt put into place. They felt no fear of the huge monster; but slapped it with their childish hands, treated it like a good friend, a chum whose presence brought no constraint. And the markets seemed to smile at these two light-hearted children, whose love was the song, the idyll of their immensity.

Cadine alone now slept at Mother Chantemesse's. The old woman had packed Marjolin off to a neighbour's. This made the two children very unhappy. Still, they contrived to spend much of their time together. In the daytime they would hide themselves away in the warehouses of the Rue au Lard, behind piles of apples and cases of oranges; and in the evening they would dive into the cellars beneath the poultry market, and secret themselves among the huge hampers of feathers which stood near the blocks where the poultry was killed. They were quite alone there, amidst the strong smell of the poultry, and with never a sound but the sudden crowing of some rooster to break upon their babble and their laughter. The feathers amidst which they found themselves were of all sorts—turkey's feathers, long and black; goose quills, white and flexible; the downy plumage of ducks, soft like cotton wool; and the ruddy and mottled feathers of fowls, which at the faintest breath flew up in a cloud like a swarm of flies buzzing in the sun. And then in wintertime there was the purple plumage of the pheasants, the ashen grey of the larks, the splotched silk of the partridges, quails, and thrushes. And all these feathers freshly plucked were still warm and odoriferous, seemingly endowed with life. The spot was as cosy as a nest; at times a quiver as of flapping wings sped by, and Marjolin and Cadine, nestling amidst all the plumage, often imagined that they were being carried aloft by one of those huge birds with outspread pinions that one hears of in the fairy tales.

As time went on their childish affection took the inevitable turn. Veritable offsprings of Nature, knowing naught of social conventions and restraints, they loved one another in all innocence and guilelessness. They mated even as the birds of the air mate, even as youth and maid mated in primeval times, because such is Nature's law. At sixteen Cadine was a dusky town gipsy, greedy and sensual, whilst Marjolin, now eighteen, was a tall, strapping fellow, as handsome a youth as could be met, but still with his mental faculties quite undeveloped. He had lived, indeed, a mere animal life, which had strengthened his frame, but left his intellect in a rudimentary state.

When old Madame Chantemesse realised the turn that things were taking she wrathfully upbraided Cadine and struck out vigorously at her with her broom. But the hussy only laughed and dodged the blows, and then hied off to her lover. And gradually the markets became their home, their manger, their aviary, where they lived and loved amidst the meat, the butter, the vegetables, and the feathers.

They discovered another little paradise in the pavilion where butter, eggs, and cheese were sold wholesale. Enormous walls of empty baskets were here piled up every morning, and amidst these Cadine and Marjolin burrowed and hollowed out a dark lair for themselves. A mere partition of osier-work separated them from the market crowd, whose loud voices rang out all around them. They often shook with laughter when people, without the least suspicion of their presence, stopped to talk together a few yards away from them. On these occasions they would contrive peepholes, and spy through them, and when cherries were in season Cadine tossed the stones in the faces of all the old women who passed along—a pastime which amused them the more as the startled old crones could never make out whence the hail of cherry-stones had come. They also prowled about the depths of the cellars, knowing every gloomy corner of them, and contriving to get through the most carefully locked gates. One of their favourite amusements was to visit the track of the subterranean railway, which had been laid under the markets, and which those who planned the latter had intended to connect with the different goods' stations of Paris. Sections of this railway were laid beneath each of the covered ways, between the cellars of each pavilion; the work, indeed, was in such an advanced state that turn-tables had been put into position at all the points of intersection, and were in readiness for use. After much examination, Cadine and Marjolin had at last succeeded in discovering a loose plank in the hoarding which enclosed the track, and they had managed to convert it into a door, by which they could easily gain access to the line. There they were quite shut off from the world, though they could hear the continuous rumbling of the street traffic over their heads.

The line stretched through deserted vaults, here and there illumined by a glimmer of light filtering through iron gratings, while in certain dark corners gas jets were burning. And Cadine and Marjolin rambled about as in the secret recesses of some castle of their own, secure from all interruption, and rejoicing in the buzzy silence, the murky glimmer, and subterranean secrecy, which imparted a touch of melodrama to their experiences. All sorts of smells were wafted through the hoarding from the neighbouring cellars; the musty smell of vegetables, the pungency of fish, the overpowering stench of cheese, and the warm reek of poultry.

At other times, on clear nights and fine dawns, they would climb on to the roofs, ascending thither by the steep staircases of the turrets at the angles of the pavilions. Up above they found fields of leads, endless promenades and squares, a stretch of undulating country which belonged to them. They rambled round the square roofs of the pavilions, followed the course of the long roofs of the covered ways, climbed and descended the slopes, and lost themselves in endless perambulations of discovery. And when they grew tired of the lower levels they ascended still higher, venturing up the iron ladders, on which Cadine's skirts flapped like flags. Then they ran along the second tier of roofs beneath the open heavens. There was nothing save the stars above them. All sorts of sounds rose up from the echoing markets, a clattering and rumbling, a vague roar as of a distant tempest heard at nighttime. At that height the morning breeze swept away the evil smells, the foul breath of the awaking markets. They would kiss one another on the edge of the gutterings like sparrows frisking on the house-tops. The rising fires of the sun illumined their faces with a ruddy glow. Cadine laughed with pleasure at being so high up in the air, and her neck shone with iridescent tints like a dove's; while Marjolin bent down to look at the street still wrapped in gloom, with his hands clutching hold of the leads like the feet of a wood-pigeon. When they descended to earth again, joyful from their excursion in the fresh air, they would remark to one another that they were coming back from the country.

It was in the tripe market that they had made the acquaintance of Claude Lantier. They went there every day, impelled thereto by an animal taste for blood, the cruel instinct of urchins who find amusement in the sight of severed heads. A ruddy stream flowed along the gutters round the pavilion; they dipped the tips of their shoes in it, and dammed it up with leaves, so as to form large pools of blood. They took a strong interest in the arrival of the loads of offal in carts which always smelt offensively, despite all the drenchings of water they got; they watched the unloading of the bundles of sheep's trotters, which were piled up on the ground like filthy paving-stones, of the huge stiffened tongues, bleeding at their torn roots, and of the massive bell-shaped bullocks' hearts. But the spectacle which, above all others, made them quiver with delight was that of the big dripping hampers, full of sheep's heads, with greasy horns and black muzzles, and strips of woolly skin dangling from bleeding flesh. The sight of these conjured up in their minds the idea of some guillotine casting into the baskets the heads of countless victims.

They followed the baskets into the depths of the cellar, watching them glide down the rails laid over the steps, and listening to the rasping noise which the casters of these osier waggons made in their descent. Down below there was a scene of exquisite horror. They entered into a charnel-house atmosphere, and walked along through murky puddles, amidst which every now and then purple eyes seem to be glistening. At times the soles of their boots stuck to the ground, at others they splashed through the horrible mire, anxious and yet delighted. The gas jets burned low, like blinking, bloodshot eyes. Near the water-taps, in the pale light falling through the gratings, they came upon the blocks; and there they remained in rapture watching the tripe men, who, in aprons stiffened by gory splashings, broke the sheep's heads one after another with a blow of their mallets. They lingered there for hours, waiting till all the baskets were empty, fascinated by the crackling of the bones, unable to tear themselves away till all was over. Sometimes an attendant passed behind them, cleansing the cellar with a hose; floods of water rushed out with a sluice-like roar, but although the violence of the discharge actually ate away the surface of the flagstones, it was powerless to remove the ruddy stains and stench of blood.

Cadine and Marjolin were sure of meeting Claude between four and five in the afternoon at the wholesale auction of the bullocks' lights. He was always there amidst the tripe dealers' carts backed up against the kerb-stones and the blue-bloused, white-aproned men who jostled him and deafened his ears by their loud bids. But he never felt their elbows; he stood in a sort of ecstatic trance before the huge hanging lights, and often told Cadine and Marjolin that there was no finer sight to be seen. The lights were of a soft rosy hue, gradually deepening and turning at the lower edges to a rich carmine; and Claude compared them to watered satin, finding no other term to describe the soft silkiness of those flowing lengths of flesh which drooped in broad folds like ballet dancers' skirts. He thought, too, of gauze and lace allowing a glimpse of pinky skin; and when a ray of sunshine fell upon the lights and girdled them with gold an expression of languorous rapture came into his eyes, and he felt happier than if he had been privileged to contemplate the Greek goddesses in their sovereign nudity, or the chatelaines of romance in their brocaded robes.

The artist became a great friend of the two young scapegraces. He loved beautiful animals, and such undoubtedly they were. For a long time he dreamt of a colossal picture which should represent the loves of Cadine and Marjolin in the central markets, amidst the vegetables, the fish, and the meat. He would have depicted them seated on some couch of food, their arms circling each other's waists, and their lips exchanging an idyllic kiss. In this conception he saw a manifesto proclaiming the positivism of art—modern art, experimental and materialistic. And it seemed to him also that it would be a smart satire on the school which wishes every painting to embody an "idea," a slap for the old traditions and all they represented. But during a couple of years he began study after study without succeeding in giving the particular "note" he desired. In this way he spoilt fifteen canvases. His failure filled him with rancour; however, he continued to associate with his two models from a sort of hopeless love for his abortive picture. When he met them prowling about in the afternoon, he often scoured the neighbourhood with them, strolling around with his hands in his pockets, and deeply interested in the life of the streets.

They all three trudged along together, dragging their heels over the footways and monopolising their whole breadth so as to force others to step down into the road. With their noses in the air they sniffed in the odours of Paris, and could have recognised every corner blindfold by the spirituous emanations of the wine shops, the hot puffs that came from the bakehouses and confectioners', and the musty odours wafted from the fruiterers'. They would make the circuit of the whole district. They delighted in passing through the rotunda of the corn market, that huge massive stone cage where sacks of flour were piled up on every side, and where their footsteps echoed in the silence of the resonant roof. They were fond, too, of the little narrow streets in the neighbourhood, which had become as deserted, as black, and as mournful as though they formed part of an abandoned city. These were the Rue Babille, the Rue Sauval, the Rue des Deux Ecus, and the Rue de Viarmes, this last pallid from its proximity to the millers' stores, and at four o'clock lively by reason of the corn exchange held there. It was generally at this point that they started on their round. They made their way slowly along the Rue Vauvilliers, glancing as they went at the windows of the low eating-houses, and thus reaching the miserably narrow Rue des Prouvaires, where Claude blinked his eyes as he saw one of the covered ways of the market, at the far end of which, framed round by this huge iron nave, appeared a side entrance of St. Eustache with its rose and its tiers of arched windows. And then, with an air of defiance, he would remark that all the middle ages and the Renaissance put together were less mighty than the central markets. Afterwards, as they paced the broad new streets, the Rue du Pont Neuf and the Rue des Halles, he explained modern life with its wide footways, its lofty houses, and its luxurious shops, to the two urchins. He predicted, too, the advent of new and truly original art, whose approach he could divine, and despair filled him that its revelation should seemingly be beyond his own powers.

Cadine and Marjolin, however, preferred the provincial quietness of the Rue des Bourdonnais, where one can play at marbles without fear of being run over. The girl perked her head affectedly as she passed the wholesale glove and hosiery stores, at each door of which bareheaded assistants, with their pens stuck in their ears, stood watching her with a weary gaze. And she and her lover had yet a stronger preference for such bits of olden Paris as still existed: the Rue de la Poterie and the Rue de la Lingerie, with their butter and egg and cheese dealers; the Rue de la Ferronerie and the Rue de l'Aiguillerie (the beautiful streets of far-away times), with their dark narrow shops; and especially the Rue Courtalon, a dank, dirty by-way running from the Place Sainte Opportune to the Rue Saint Denis, and intersected by foul-smelling alleys where they had romped in their younger days. In the Rue Saint Denis they entered into the land of dainties; and they smiled upon the dried apples, the "Spanishwood," the prunes, and the sugar-candy in the windows of the grocers and druggists. Their ramblings always set them dreaming of a feast of good things, and inspired them with a desire to glut themselves on the contents of the windows. To them the district seemed like some huge table, always laid with an everlasting dessert into which they longed to plunge their fingers.

They devoted but a moment to visiting the other blocks of tumble-down old houses, the Rue Pirouette, the Rue de Mondetour, the Rue de la Petite Truanderie, and the Rue de la Grande Truanderie, for they took little interest in the shops of the dealers in edible snails, cooked vegetables, tripe, and drink. In the Rue de la Grand Truanderie, however, there was a soap factory, an oasis of sweetness in the midst of all the foul odours, and Marjolin was fond of standing outside it till some one happened to enter or come out, so that the perfume which swept through the doorway might blow full in his face. Then with all speed they returned to the Rue Pierre Lescot and the Rue Rambuteau. Cadine was extremely fond of salted provisions; she stood in admiration before the bundles of red-herrings, the barrels of anchovies and capers, and the little casks of gherkins and olives, standing on end with wooden spoons inside them. The smell of the vinegar titillated her throat; the pungent odour of the rolled cod, smoked salmon, bacon and ham, and the sharp acidity of the baskets of lemons, made her mouth water longingly. She was also fond of feasting her eyes on the boxes of sardines piled up in metallic columns amidst the cases and sacks. In the Rue Montorgueil and the Rue Montmartre were other tempting-looking groceries and restaurants, from whose basements appetising odours were wafted, with glorious shows of game and poultry, and preserved-provision shops, which last displayed beside their doors open kegs overflowing with yellow sourkrout suggestive of old lacework. Then they lingered in the Rue Coquilliere, inhaling the odour of truffles from the premises of a notable dealer in comestibles, which threw so strong a perfume into the street that Cadine and Marjolin closed their eyes and imagined they were swallowing all kinds of delicious things. These perfumes, however, distressed Claude. They made him realise the emptiness of his stomach, he said; and, leaving the "two animals" to feast on the odour of the truffles—the most penetrating odour to be found in all the neighbourhood—he went off again to the corn market by way of the Rue Oblin, studying on his road the old women who sold green-stuff in the doorways and the displays of cheap pottery spread out on the foot-pavements.

Such were their rambles in common; but when Cadine set out alone with her bunches of violets she often went farther afield, making it a point to visit certain shops for which she had a particular partiality. She had an especial weakness for the Taboureau bakery establishment, one of the windows of which was exclusively devoted to pastry. She would follow the Rue Turbigo and retrace her steps a dozen times in order to pass again and again before the almond cakes, the savarins, the St. Honore tarts, the fruit tarts, and the various dishes containing bunlike babas redolent of rum, eclairs combining the finger biscuit with chocolate, and choux a la crème, little rounds of pastry overflowing with whipped white of egg. The glass jars full of dry biscuits, macaroons, and madeleines also made her mouth water; and the bright shop with its big mirrors, its marble slabs, its gilding, its bread-bins of ornamental ironwork, and its second window in which long glistening loaves were displayed slantwise, with one end resting on a crystal shelf whilst above they were upheld by a brass rod, was so warm and odoriferous of baked dough that her features expanded with pleasure when, yielding to temptation, she went in to buy a brioche for two sous.

Another shop, one in front of the Square des Innocents, also filled her with gluttonous inquisitiveness, a fever of longing desire. This shop made a specialty of forcemeat pasties. In addition to the ordinary ones there were pasties of pike and pasties of truffled foie gras; and the girl would gaze yearningly at them, saying to herself that she would really have to eat one some day.

Cadine also had her moments of vanity and coquetry. When these fits were on her, she bought herself in imagination some of the magnificent dresses displayed in the windows of the "Fabriques de France" which made the Pointe Saint Eustache gaudy with their pieces of bright stuff hanging from the first floor to the footway and flapping in the breeze. Somewhat incommoded by the flat basket hanging before her, amidst the crowd of market women in dirty aprons gazing at future Sunday dresses, the girl would feel the woollens, flannels, and cottons to test the texture and suppleness of the material; and she would promise herself a gown of bright-coloured flannelling, flowered print, or scarlet poplin. Sometimes even from amongst the pieces draped and set off to advantage by the window-dressers she would choose some soft sky-blue or apple-green silk, and dream of wearing it with pink ribbons. In the evenings she would dazzle herself with the displays in the windows of the big jewellers in the Rue Montmartre. That terrible street deafened her with its ceaseless flow of vehicles, and the streaming crowd never ceased to jostle her; still she did not stir, but remained feasting her eyes on the blazing splendour set out in the light of the reflecting lamps which hung outside the windows. On one side all was white with the bright glitter of silver: watches in rows, chains hanging, spoons and forks laid crossways, cups, snuff-boxes, napkin-rings, and combs arranged on shelves. The silver thimbles, dotting a porcelain stand covered with a glass shade, had an especial attraction for her. Then on the other side the windows glistened with the tawny glow of gold. A cascade of long pendant chains descended from above, rippling with ruddy gleams; small ladies' watches, with the backs of their cases displayed, sparkled like fallen stars; wedding rings clustered round slender rods; bracelets, broaches, and other costly ornaments glittered on the black velvet linings of their cases; jewelled rings set their stands aglow with blue, green, yellow, and violet flamelets; while on every tier of the shelves superposed rows of earrings and crosses and lockets hung against the crystal like the rich fringes of altar-cloths. The glow of this gold illumined the street half way across with a sun-like radiance. And Cadine, as she gazed at it, almost fancied that she was in presence of something holy, or on the threshold of the Emperor's treasure chamber. She would for a long time scrutinise all this show of gaudy jewellery, adapted to the taste of the fish-wives, and carefully read the large figures on the tickets affixed to each article; and eventually she would select for herself a pair of earrings—pear-shaped drops of imitation coral hanging from golden roses.

One morning Claude caught her standing in ecstasy before a hair-dresser's window in the Rue Saint Honore. She was gazing at the display of hair with an expression of intense envy. High up in the window was a streaming cascade of long manes, soft wisps, loose tresses, frizzy falls, undulating comb-curls, a perfect cataract of silky and bristling hair, real and artificial, now in coils of a flaming red, now in thick black crops, now in pale golden locks, and even in snowy white ones for the coquette of sixty. In cardboard boxes down below were cleverly arranged fringes, curling side-ringlets, and carefully combed chignons glossy with pomade. And amidst this framework, in a sort of shrine beneath the ravelled ends of the hanging locks, there revolved the bust of a woman, arrayed in a wrapper of cherry-coloured satin fastened between the breasts with a brass brooch. The figure wore a lofty bridal coiffure picked out with sprigs of orange blossom, and smiled with a dollish smile. Its eyes were pale blue; its eyebrows were very stiff and of exaggerated length; and its waxen cheeks and shoulders bore evident traces of the heat and smoke of the gas. Cadine waited till the revolving figure again displayed its smiling face, and as its profile showed more distinctly and it slowly went round from left to right she felt perfectly happy. Claude, however, was indignant, and, shaking Cadine, he asked her what she was doing in front of "that abomination, that corpse-like hussy picked up at the Morgue!" He flew into a temper with the "dummy's" cadaverous face and shoulders, that disfigurement of the beautiful, and remarked that artists painted nothing but that unreal type of woman nowadays. Cadine, however, remained unconvinced by his oratory, and considered the lady extremely beautiful. Then, resisting the attempts of the artist to drag her away by the arm, and scratching her black mop in vexation, she pointed to an enormous ruddy tail, severed from the quarters of some vigorous mare, and told him she would have liked to have a crop of hair like that.

During the long rambles when Claude, Cadine, and Marjolin prowled about the neighbourhood of the markets, they saw the iron ribs of the giant building at the end of every street. Wherever they turned they caught sudden glimpses of it; the horizon was always bounded by it; merely the aspect under which it was seen varied. Claude was perpetually turning round, and particularly in the Rue Montmartre, after passing the church. From that point the markets, seen obliquely in the distance, filled him with enthusiasm. A huge arcade, a giant, gaping gateway, was open before him; then came the crowding pavilions with their lower and upper roofs, their countless Venetian shutters and endless blinds, a vision, as it were, of superposed houses and palaces; a Babylon of metal of Hindoo delicacy of workmanship, intersected by hanging terraces, aerial galleries, and flying bridges poised over space. The trio always returned to this city round which they strolled, unable to stray more than a hundred yards away. They came back to it during the hot afternoons when the Venetian shutters were closed and the blinds lowered. In the covered ways all seemed to be asleep, the ashy greyness was streaked by yellow bars of sunlight falling through the high windows. Only a subdued murmur broke the silence; the steps of a few hurrying passers-by resounded on the footways; whilst the badge-wearing porters sat in rows on the stone ledges at the corners of the pavilions, taking off their boots and nursing their aching feet. The quietude was that of a colossus at rest, interrupted at times by some cock-crow rising from the cellars below.

Claude, Cadine, and Marjolin then often went to see the empty hampers piled upon the drays, which came to fetch them every afternoon so that they might be sent back to the consignors. There were mountains of them, labelled with black letters and figures, in front of the salesmen's warehouses in the Rue Berger. The porters arranged them symmetrically, tier by tier, on the vehicles. When the pile rose, however, to the height of a first floor, the porter who stood below balancing the next batch of hampers had to make a spring in order to toss them up to his mate, who was perched aloft with arms extended. Claude, who delighted in feats of strength and dexterity, would stand for hours watching the flight of these masses of osier, and would burst into a hearty laugh whenever too vigorous a toss sent them flying over the pile into the roadway beyond. He was fond, too, of the footways of the Rue Rambuteau and the Rue du Pont Neuf, near the fruit market, where the retail dealers congregated. The sight of the vegetables displayed in the open air, on trestle-tables covered with damp black rags, was full of charm for him. At four in the afternoon the whole of this nook of greenery was aglow with sunshine; and Claude wandered between the stalls, inspecting the bright-coloured heads of the saleswomen with keen artistic relish. The younger ones, with their hair in nets, had already lost all freshness of complexion through the rough life they led; while the older ones were bent and shrivelled, with wrinkled, flaring faces showing under the yellow kerchiefs bound round their heads. Cadine and Marjolin refused to accompany him hither, as they could perceive old Mother Chantemesse shaking her fist at them, in her anger at seeing them prowling about together. He joined them again, however, on the opposite footway, where he found a splendid subject for a picture in the stallkeepers squatting under their huge umbrellas of faded red, blue, and violet, which, mounted upon poles, filled the whole market-side with bumps, and showed conspicuously against the fiery glow of the sinking sun, whose rays faded amidst the carrots and the turnips. One tattered harridan, a century old, was sheltering three spare-looking lettuces beneath an umbrella of pink silk, shockingly split and stained.

Cadine and Marjolin had struck up an acquaintance with Leon, Quenu's apprentice, one day when he was taking a pie to a house in the neighbourhood. They saw him cautiously raise the lid of his pan in a secluded corner of the Rue de Mondetour, and delicately take out a ball of forcemeat. They smiled at the sight, which gave them a very high opinion of Leon. And the idea came to Cadine that she might at last satisfy one of her most ardent longings. Indeed, the very next time that she met the lad with his basket she made herself very agreeable, and induced him to offer her a forcemeat ball. But, although she laughed and licked her fingers, she experienced some disappointment. The forcemeat did not prove nearly so nice as she had anticipated. On the other hand, the lad, with his sly, greedy phiz and his white garments, which made him look like a girl going to her first communion, somewhat took her fancy.

She invited him to a monster lunch which she gave amongst the hampers in the auction room at the butter market. The three of them—herself, Marjolin, and Leon—completely secluded themselves from the world within four walls of osier. The feast was laid out on a large flat basket. There were pears, nuts, cream-cheese, shrimps, fried potatoes, and radishes. The cheese came from a fruiterer's in the Rue de la Cossonnerie, and was a present; and a "frier" of the Rue de la Grande Truanderie had given Cadine credit for two sous' worth of potatoes. The rest of the feast, the pears, the nuts, the shrimps, and the radishes, had been pilfered from different parts of the market. It was a delicious treat; and Leon, desirous of returning the hospitality, gave a supper in his bedroom at one o'clock in the morning. The bill of fare included cold black-pudding, slices of polony, a piece of salt pork, some gherkins, and some goose-fat. The Quenu-Gradelles' shop had provided everything. And matters did not stop there. Dainty suppers alternated with delicate luncheons, and invitation upon invitation. Three times a week there were banquets, either amidst the hampers or in Leon's garret, where Florent, on the nights when he lay awake, could hear a stifled sound of munching and rippling laughter until day began to break.

The loves of Cadine and Marjolin now took another turn. The youth played the gallant, and just as another might entertain his innamorata at a champagne supper en tete a tete in a private room, he led Cadine into some quiet corner of the market cellars to munch apples or sprigs of celery. One day he stole a red-herring, which they devoured with immense enjoyment on the roof of the fish market beside the guttering. There was not a single shady nook in the whole place where they did not indulge in secret feasts. The district, with its rows of open shops full of fruit and cakes and preserves, was no longer a closed paradise, in front of which they prowled with greedy, covetous appetites. As they passed the shops they now extended their hands and pilfered a prune, a few cherries, or a bit of cod. They also provisioned themselves at the markets, keeping a sharp look-out as they made their way between the stalls, picking up everything that fell, and often assisting the fall by a push of their shoulders.

In spite, however, of all the marauding, some terrible scores had to be run up with the "frier" of the Rue de la Grand Truanderie. This "frier," whose shanty leaned against a tumble-down house, and was propped up by heavy joists, green with moss, made a display of boiled mussels lying in large earthenware bowls filled to the brim with clear water; of dishes of little yellow dabs stiffened by too thick a coating of paste; of squares of tripe simmering in a pan; and of grilled herrings, black and charred, and so hard that if you tapped them they sounded like wood. On certain weeks Cadine owed the frier as much as twenty sous, a crushing debt, which required the sale of an incalculable number of bunches of violets, for she could count upon no assistance from Marjolin. Moreover, she was bound to return Leon's hospitalities; and she even felt some little shame at never being able to offer him a scrap of meat. He himself had now taken to purloining entire hams. As a rule, he stowed everything away under his shirt; and at night when he reached his bedroom he drew from his bosom hunks of polony, slices of pate de foie gras, and bundles of pork rind. They had to do without bread, and there was nothing to drink; but no matter. One night Marjolin saw Leon kiss Cadine between two mouthfuls; however, he only laughed. He could have smashed the little fellow with a blow from his fist, but he felt no jealousy in respect of Cadine. He treated her simply as a comrade with whom he had chummed for years.

Claude never participated in these feasts. Having caught Cadine one day stealing a beet-root from a little hamper lined with hay, he had pulled her ears and given her a sound rating. These thieving propensities made her perfect as a ne'er-do-well. However, in spite of himself, he could not help feeling a sort of admiration for these sensual, pilfering, greedy creatures, who preyed upon everything that lay about, feasting off the crumbs that fell from the giant's table.

At last Marjolin nominally took service under Gavard, happy in having nothing to do except to listen to his master's flow of talk, while Cadine still continued to sell violets, quite accustomed by this time to old Mother Chantemesse's scoldings. They were still the same children as ever, giving way to their instincts and appetites without the slightest shame—they were the growth of the slimy pavements of the market district, where, even in fine weather, the mud remains black and sticky. However, as Cadine walked along the footways, mechanically twisting her bunches of violets, she was sometimes disturbed by disquieting reveries; and Marjolin, too, suffered from an uneasiness which he could not explain. He would occasionally leave the girl and miss some ramble or feast in order to go and gaze at Madame Quenu through the windows of her pork shop. She was so handsome and plump and round that it did him good to look at her. As he stood gazing at her, he felt full and satisfied, as though he had just eaten or drunk something extremely nice. And when he went off, a sort of hunger and thirst to see her again suddenly came upon him. This had been going on for a couple of months. At first he had looked at her with the respectful glance which he bestowed upon the shop-fronts of the grocers and provision dealers; but subsequently, when he and Cadine had taken to general pilfering, he began to regard her smooth cheeks much as he regarded the barrels of olives and boxes of dried apples.

For some time past Marjolin had seen handsome Lisa every day, in the morning. She would pass Gavard's stall, and stop for a moment or two to chat with the poultry dealer. She now did her marketing herself, so that she might be cheated as little as possible, she said. The truth, however, was that she wished to make Gavard speak out. In the pork shop he was always distrustful, but at his stall he chatted and talked with the utmost freedom. Now, Lisa had made up her mind to ascertain from him exactly what took place in the little room at Monsieur Lebigre's; for she had no great confidence in her secret police office, Mademoiselle Saget. In a short time she learnt from the incorrigible chatterbox a lot of vague details which very much alarmed her. Two days after her explanation with Quenu she returned home from the market looking very pale. She beckoned to her husband to follow her into the dining-room, and having carefully closed the door she said to him: "Is your brother determined to send us to the scaffold, then? Why did you conceal from me what you knew?"

Quenu declared that he knew nothing. He even swore a great oath that he had not returned to Monsieur Lebigre's, and would never go there again.

"You will do well not to do so," replied Lisa, shrugging her shoulders, "unless you want to get yourself into a serious scrape. Florent is up to some evil trick, I'm certain of it! I have just learned quite sufficient to show me where he is going. He's going back to Cayenne, do you hear?"

Then, after a pause, she continued in calmer ones: "Oh, the unhappy man! He had everything here that he could wish for. He might have redeemed his character; he had nothing but good examples before him. But no, it is in his blood! He will come to a violent end with his politics! I insist upon there being an end to all this! You hear me, Quenu? I gave you due warning long ago!"

She spoke the last words very incisively. Quenu bent his head, as if awaiting sentence.

"To begin with," continued Lisa, "he shall cease to take his meals here. It will be quite sufficient if we give him a bed. He is earning money; let him feed himself."

Quenu seemed on the point of protesting, but his wife silenced him by adding energetically:

"Make your choice between him and me. If he remains here, I swear to you that I will go away, and take my daughter with me. Do you want me to tell you the whole truth about him? He is a man capable of anything; he has come here to bring discord into our household. But I will set things right, you may depend on it. You have your choice between him and me; you hear me?"

Then, leaving her husband in silent consternation, she returned to the shop, where she served a customer with her usual affable smile. The fact was that, having artfully inveigled Gavard into a political discussion, the poultry dealer had told her that she would soon see how the land lay, that they were going to make a clean sweep of everything, and that two determined men like her brother-in-law and himself would suffice to set the fire blazing. This was the evil trick of which she had spoken to Quenu, some conspiracy to which Gavard was always making mysterious allusions with a sniggering grin from which he seemingly desired a great deal to be inferred. And in imagination Lisa already saw the gendarmes invading the pork shop, gagging herself, her husband, and Pauline, and casting them into some underground dungeon.

In the evening, at dinner, she evinced an icy frigidity. She made no offers to serve Florent, but several times remarked: "It's very strange what an amount of bread we've got through lately."

Florent at last understood. He felt that he was being treated like a poor relation who is gradually turned out of doors. For the last two months Lisa had dressed him in Quenu's old trousers and coats; and, as he was as thin as his brother was fat, these ragged garments had a most extraordinary appearance upon him. She also turned her oldest linen over to him: pocket-handkerchiefs which had been darned a score of times, ragged towels, sheets which were only fit to be cut up into dusters and dish-cloths, and worn-out shirts, distended by Quenu's corpulent figure, and so short that they would have served Florent as under-vests. Moreover, he no longer found around him the same good-natured kindliness as in the earlier days. The whole household seemed to shrug its shoulders after the example set by handsome Lisa. Auguste and Augustine turned their backs upon him, and little Pauline, with the cruel frankness of childhood, let fall some bitter remarks about the stains on his coat and the holes in his shirt. However, during the last days he suffered most at table. He scarcely dared to eat, as he saw the mother and daughter fix their gaze upon him whenever he cut himself a piece of bread. Quenu meantime peered into his plate, to avoid having to take any part in what went on.

That which most tortured Florent was his inability to invent a reason for leaving the house. During a week he kept on revolving in his mind a sentence expressing his resolve to take his meals elsewhere, but could not bring himself to utter it. Indeed, this man of tender nature lived in such a world of illusions that he feared he might hurt his brother and sister-in-law by ceasing to lunch and dine with them. It had taken him over two months to detect Lisa's latent hostility; and even now he was sometimes inclined to think that he must be mistaken, and that she was in reality kindly disposed towards him. Unselfishness with him extended to forgetfulness of his requirements; it was no longer a virtue, but utter indifference to self, an absolute obliteration of personality. Even when he recognised that he was being gradually turned out of the house, his mind never for a moment dwelt upon his share in old Gradelle's fortune, or upon the accounts which Lisa had offered him. He had already planned out his expenditure for the future; reckoning that with what Madame Verlaque still allowed him to retain of his salary, and the thirty francs a month which a pupil, obtained through La Normande, paid him he would be able to spend eighteen sous on his breakfast and twenty-six sous on his dinner. This, he thought, would be ample. And so, at last, taking as his excuse the lessons which he was giving his new pupil, he emboldened himself one morning to pretend that it would be impossible for him in future to come to the house at mealtimes. He blushed as he gave utterance to this laboriously constructed lie, which had given him so much trouble, and continued apologetically:

"You mustn't be offended; the boy only has those hours free. I can easily get something to eat, you know; and I will come and have a chat with you in the evenings."

Beautiful Lisa maintained her icy reserve, and this increased Florent's feeling of trouble. In order to have no cause for self-reproach she had been unwilling to send him about his business, preferring to wait till he should weary of the situation and go of his own accord. Now he was going, and it was a good riddance; and she studiously refrained from all show of kindliness for fear it might induce him to remain. Quenu, however, showed some signs of emotion, and exclaimed: "Don't think of putting yourself about; take your meals elsewhere by all means, if it is more convenient. It isn't we who are turning you way; you'll at all events dine with us sometimes on Sundays, eh?"

Florent hurried off. His heart was very heavy. When he had gone, the beautiful Lisa did not venture to reproach her husband for his weakness in giving that invitation for Sundays. She had conquered, and again breathed freely amongst the light oak of her dining-room, where she would have liked to burn some sugar to drive away the odour of perverse leanness which seemed to linger about. Moreover, she continued to remain on the defensive; and at the end of another week she felt more alarmed than ever. She only occasionally saw Florent in the evenings, and began to have all sorts of dreadful thoughts, imagining that her brother-in-law was constructing some infernal machine upstairs in Augustine's bedroom, or else making signals which would result in barricades covering the whole neighbourhood. Gavard, who had become gloomy, merely nodded or shook his head when she spoke to him, and left his stall for days together in Marjolin's charge. The beautiful Lisa, however, determined that she would get to the bottom of affairs. She knew that Florent had obtained a day's leave, and intended to spend it with Claude Lantier, at Madame Francois's, at Nanterre. As he would start in the morning, and remain away till night, she conceived the idea of inviting Gavard to dinner. He would be sure to talk freely, at table, she thought. But throughout the morning she was unable to meet the poultry dealer, and so in the afternoon she went back again to the markets.

Marjolin was in the stall alone. He used to drowse there for hours, recouping himself from the fatigue of his long rambles. He generally sat upon one chair with his legs resting upon another, and his head leaning against a little dresser. In the wintertime he took a keen delight in lolling there and contemplating the display of game; the bucks hanging head downwards, with their fore-legs broken and twisted round their necks; the larks festooning the stall like garlands; the big ruddy hares, the mottled partridges, the water-fowl of a bronze-grey hue, the Russian black cocks and hazel hens, which arrived in a packing of oat straw and charcoal;[*] and the pheasants, the magnificent pheasants, with their scarlet hoods, their stomachers of green satin, their mantles of embossed gold, and their flaming tails, that trailed like trains of court robes. All this show of plumage reminded Marjolin of his rambles in the cellars with Cadine amongst the hampers of feathers.

[*] The baskets in which these are sent to Paris are
identical with those which in many provinces of Russia serve
the moujiks as cradles for their infants.—Translator.

That afternoon the beautiful Lisa found Marjolin in the midst of the poultry. It was warm, and whiffs of hot air passed along the narrow alleys of the pavilion. She was obliged to stoop before she could see him stretched out inside the stall, below the bare flesh of the birds. From the hooked bar up above hung fat geese, the hooks sticking in the bleeding wounds of their long stiffened necks, while their huge bodies bulged out, glowing ruddily beneath their fine down, and, with their snowy tails and wings, suggesting nudity encompassed by fine linen. And also hanging from the bar, with ears thrown back and feet parted as though they were bent on some vigorous leap, were grey rabbits whose turned-up tails gleamed whitely, whilst their heads, with sharp teeth and dim eyes, laughed with the grin of death. On the counter of the stall plucked fowls showed their strained fleshy breasts; pigeons, crowded on osier trays, displayed the soft bare skin of innocents; ducks, with skin of rougher texture, exhibited their webbed feet; and three magnificent turkeys, speckled with blue dots, like freshly-shaven chins, slumbered on their backs amidst the black fans of their expanded tails. On plates near by were giblets, livers, gizzards, necks, feet, and wings; while an oval dish contained a skinned and gutted rabbit, with its four legs wide apart, its head bleeding, and is kidneys showing through its gashed belly. A streamlet of dark blood, after trickling along its back to its tail, had fallen drop by drop, staining the whiteness of the dish. Marjolin had not even taken the trouble to wipe the block, near which the rabbit's feet were still lying. He reclined there with his eyes half closed, encompassed by other piles of dead poultry which crowded the shelves of the stall, poultry in paper wrappers like bouquets, rows upon rows of protuberant breasts and bent legs showing confusedly. And amidst all this mass of food, the young fellow's big, fair figure, the flesh of his cheeks, hands, and powerful neck covered with ruddy down seemed as soft as that of the magnificent turkeys, and as plump as the breasts of the fat geese.

When he caught sight of Lisa, he at once sprang up, blushing at having been caught sprawling in this way. He always seemed very nervous and ill at ease in Madame Quenu's presence; and when she asked him if Monsieur Gavard was there, he stammered out: "No, I don't think so. He was here a little while ago, but he want away again."

Lisa looked at him, smiling; she had a great liking for him. But feeling something warm brush against her hand, which was hanging by her side, she raised a little shriek. Some live rabbits were thrusting their noses out of a box under the counter of the stall, and sniffing at her skirts.

"Oh," she exclaimed with a laugh, "it's your rabbits that are tickling me."

Then she stooped and attempted to stroke a white rabbit, which darted in alarm into a corner of the box.

"Will Monsieur Gavard be back soon, do you think?" she asked, as she again rose erect.

Marjolin once more replied that he did not know; then in a hesitating way he continued: "He's very likely gone down into the cellars. He told me, I think, that he was going there."

"Well, I think I'll wait for him, then," replied Lisa. "Could you let him know that I am here? or I might go down to him, perhaps. Yes, that's a good idea; I've been intending to go and have a look at the cellars for these last five years. You'll take me down, won't you, and explain things to me?"

Marjolin blushed crimson, and, hurrying out of the stall, walked on in front of her, leaving the poultry to look after itself. "Of course I will," said he. "I'll do anything you wish, Madame Lisa."

When they got down below, the beautiful Lisa felt quite suffocated by the dank atmosphere of the cellar. She stood at the bottom step, and raised her eyes to look at the vaulted roofing of red and white bricks arching slightly between the iron ribs upheld by small columns. What made her hesitate more than the gloominess of the place was a warm, penetrating odour, the exhalations of large numbers of living creatures, which irritated her nostrils and throat.

"What a nasty smell!" she exclaimed. "It must be very unhealthy down here."

"It never does me any harm," replied Marjolin in astonishment. "There's nothing unpleasant about the smell when you've got accustomed to it; and it's very warm and cosy down here in the wintertime."

As Lisa followed him, however, she declared that the strong scent of the poultry quite turned her stomach, and that she would certainly not be able to eat a fowl for the next two months. All around her, the storerooms, the small cabins where the stallkeepers keep their live stock, formed regular streets, intersecting each other at right angles. There were only a few scattered gas lights, and the little alleys seemed wrapped in sleep like the lanes of a village where the inhabitants have all gone to bed. Marjolin made Lisa feel the close-meshed wiring, stretched on a framework of cast iron; and as she made her way along one of the streets she amused herself by reading the names of the different tenants, which were inscribed on blue labels.

"Monsieur Gavard's place is quite at the far end," said the young man, still walking on.

They turned to the left, and found themselves in a sort of blind alley, a dark, gloomy spot where not a ray of light penetrated. Gavard was not there.

"Oh, it makes no difference," said Marjolin. "I can show you our birds just the same. I have a key of the storeroom."

Lisa followed him into the darkness.

"You don't suppose that I can see your birds in this black oven, do you?" she asked, laughing.

Marjolin did not reply at once; but presently he stammered out that there was always a candle in the storeroom. He was fumbling about the lock, and seemed quite unable to find the keyhole. As Lisa came up to help him, she felt a hot breath on her neck; and when the young man had at last succeeded in opening the door and lighted the candle, she saw that he was trembling.

"You silly fellow!" she exclaimed, "to get yourself into such a state just because a door won't open! Why, you're no better than a girl, in spite of your big fists!"

She stepped inside the storeroom. Gavard had rented two compartments, which he had thrown into one by removing the partition between them. In the dirt on the floor wallowed the larger birds—the geese, turkeys, and ducks—while up above, on tiers of shelves, were boxes with barred fronts containing fowls and rabbits. The grating of the storeroom was so coated with dust and cobwebs that it looked as though covered with grey blinds. The woodwork down below was rotting, and covered with filth. Lisa, however, not wishing to vex Marjolin, refrained from any further expression of disgust. She pushed her fingers between the bars of the boxes, and began to lament the fate of the unhappy fowls, which were so closely huddled together and could not even stand upright. Then she stroked a duck with a broken leg which was squatting in a corner, and the young man told her that it would be killed that very evening, for fear lest it should die during the night.

"But what do they do for food?" asked Lisa.

Thereupon he explained to her that poultry would not eat in the dark, and that it was necessary to light a candle and wait there till they had finished their meal.

"It amuses me to watch them," he continued; "I often stay here with a light for hours altogether. You should see how they peck away; and when I hide the flame of the candle with my hand they all stand stock-still with their necks in the air, just as though the sun had set. It is against the rules to leave a lighted candle here and go away. One of the dealers, old Mother Palette—you know her, don't you?—nearly burned the whole place down the other day. A fowl must have knocked the candle over into the straw while she was away."

"A pretty thing, isn't it," said Lisa, "for fowls to insist upon having the chandeliers lighted up every time they take a meal?"

This idea made her laugh. Then she came out of the storeroom, wiping her feet, and holding up her skirts to keep them from the filth. Marjolin blew out the candle and locked the door. Lisa felt rather nervous at finding herself in the dark again with this big young fellow, and so she hastened on in front.

"I'm glad I came, all the same," she presently said, as he joined her. "There is a great deal more under these markets than I ever imagined. But I must make haste now and get home again. They'll wonder what has become of me at the shop. If Monsieur Gavard comes back, tell him that I want to speak to him immediately."

"I expect he's in the killing-room," said Marjolin. "We'll go and see, if you like."

Lisa made no reply. She felt oppressed by the close atmosphere which warmed her face. She was quite flushed, and her bodice, generally so still and lifeless, began to heave. Moreover, the sound of Marjolin's hurrying steps behind her filled her with an uneasy feeling. At last she stepped aside, and let him go on in front. The lanes of this underground village were still fast asleep. Lisa noticed that her companion was taking the longest way. When they came out in front of the railway track he told her that he had wished to show it to her; and they stood for a moment or two looking through the chinks in the hoarding of heavy beams. Then Marjolin proposed to take her on to the line; but she refused, saying that it was not worth while, as she could see things well enough where she was.

As they returned to the poultry cellars they found old Madame Palette in front of her storeroom, removing the cords of a large square hamper, in which a furious fluttering of wings and scraping of feet could be heard. As she unfastened the last knot the lid suddenly flew open, as though shot up by a spring, and some big geese thrust out their heads and necks. Then, in wild alarm, they sprang from their prison and rushed away, craning their necks, and filling the dark cellars with a frightful noise of hissing and clattering of beaks. Lisa could not help laughing, in spite of the lamentations of the old woman, who swore like a carter as she caught hold of two of the absconding birds and dragged them back by the neck. Marjolin, meantime, set off in pursuit of a third. They could hear him running along the narrow alleys, hunting for the runaway, and delighting in the chase. Then, far off in the distance, they heard the sounds of a struggle, and presently Marjolin came back again, bringing the goose with him. Mother Palette, a sallow-faced old woman, took it in her arms and clasped it for a moment to her bosom, in the classic attitude of Leda.

"Well, well, I'm sure I don't know what I should have done if you hadn't been here," said she. "The other day I had a regular fight with one of the brutes; but I had my knife with me, and I cut its throat."

Marjolin was quite out of breath. When they reached the stone blocks where the poultry were killed, and where the gas burnt more brightly, Lisa could see that he was perspiring, and had bold, glistening eyes. She thought he looked very handsome like that, with his broad shoulders, big flushed face, and fair curly hair, and she looked at him so complacently, with that air of admiration which women feel they may safely express for quite young lads, that he relapsed into timid bashfulness again.

"Well, Monsieur Gavard isn't here, you see," she said. "You've only made me waste my time."

Marjolin, however, began rapidly explaining the killing of the poultry to her. Five huge stone slabs stretched out in the direction of the Rue Rambuteau under the yellow light of the gas jets. A woman was killing fowls at one end; and this led him to tell Lisa that the birds were plucked almost before they were dead, the operation thus being much easier. Then he wanted her to feel the feathers which were lying in heaps on the stone slabs; and told her that they were sorted and sold for as much as nine sous the pound, according to their quality. To satisfy him, she was also obliged to plunge her hand into the big hampers full of down. Then he turned the water-taps, of which there was one by every pillar. There was no end to the particulars he gave. The blood, he said, streamed along the stone blocks, and collected into pools on the paved floor, which attendants sluiced with water every two hours, removing the more recent stains with coarse brushes.

When Lisa stooped over the drain which carries away the swillings, Marjolin found a fresh text for talk. On rainy days, said he, the water sometimes rose through this orifice and flooded the place. It had once risen a foot high; and they had been obliged to transport all the poultry to the other end of the cellar, which is on a higher level. He laughed as he recalled the wild flutter of the terrified creatures. However, he had now finished, and it seemed as though there remained nothing else for him to show, when all at once he bethought himself of the ventilator. Thereupon he took Lisa off to the far end of the cellar, and told her to look up; and inside one of the turrets at the corner angles of the pavilion she observed a sort of escape-pipe, by which the foul atmosphere of the storerooms ascended into space.

Here, in this corner, reeking with abominable odours, Marjolin's nostrils quivered, and his breath came and went violently. His long stroll with Lisa in these cellars, full of warm animal perfumes, had gradually intoxicated him.

She had again turned towards him. "Well," said she, "it was very kind of you to show me all this, and when you come to the shop I will give you something."

Whilst speaking she took hold of his soft chin, as she often did, without recognising that he was no longer a child; and perhaps she allowed her hand to linger there a little longer than was her wont. At all events, Marjolin, usually so bashful, was thrilled by the caress, and all at once he impetuously sprang forward, clasped Lisa by the shoulders, and pressed his lips to her soft cheeks. She raised no cry, but turned very pale at this sudden attack, which showed her how imprudent she had been. And then, freeing herself from the embrace, she raised her arm, as she had seen men do in slaughter houses, clenched her comely fist, and knocked Marjolin down with a single blow, planted straight between his eyes; and as he fell his head came into collision with one of the stone slabs, and was split open. Just at that moment the hoarse and prolonged crowing of a cock sounded through the gloom.

Handsome Lisa, however, remained perfectly cool. Her lips were tightly compressed, and her bosom had recovered its wonted immobility. Up above she could hear the heavy rumbling of the markets, and through the vent-holes alongside the Rue Rambuteau the noise of the street traffic made its way into the oppressive silence of the cellar. Lisa reflected that her own strong arm had saved her; and then, fearing lest some one should come and find her there, she hastened off, without giving a glance at Marjolin. As she climbed the steps, after passing through the grated entrance of the cellars, the daylight brought her great relief.

She returned to the shop, quite calm, and only looking a little pale.

"You've been a long time," Quenu said to her.

"I can't find Gavard. I have looked for him everywhere," she quietly replied. "We shall have to eat our leg of mutton without him."

Then she filled the lard pot, which she noticed was empty; and cut some pork chops for her friend Madame Taboureau, who had sent her little servant for them. The blows which she dealt with her cleaver reminded her of Marjolin. She felt that she had nothing to reproach herself with. She had acted like an honest woman. She was not going to disturb her peace of mind; she was too happy to do anything to compromise herself. However, she glanced at Quenu, whose neck was coarse and ruddy, and whose shaven chin looked as rough as knotted wood; whereas Marjolin's chin and neck resembled rosy satin. But then she must not think of him any more, for he was no longer a child. She regretted it, and could not help thinking that children grew up much too quickly.

A slight flush came back to her cheeks, and Quenu considered that she looked wonderfully blooming. He came and sat down beside her at the counter for a moment or two. "You ought to go out oftener," said he; "it does you good. We'll go to the theatre together one of these nights, if you like; to the Gaite, eh? Madame Taboureau has been to see the piece they are playing there, and she declares it's splendid."

Lisa smiled, and said they would see about it, and then once more she took herself off. Quenu thought that it was too good of her to take so much trouble in running about after that brute Gavard. In point of fact, however, she had simply gone upstairs to Florent's bedroom, the key of which was hanging from a nail in the kitchen. She hoped to find out something or other by an inspection of this room, since the poultry dealer had failed her. She went slowly round it, examining the bed, the mantelpiece, and every corner. The window with the little balcony was open, and the budding pomegranate was steeped in the golden beams of the setting sun. The room looked to her as though Augustine had never left it—had slept there only the night before. There seemed to be nothing masculine about the place. She was quite surprised, for she had expected to find some suspicious-looking chests, and coffers with strong locks. She went to feel Augustine's summer gown, which was still hanging against the wall. Then she sat down at the table, and began to read an unfinished page of manuscript, in which the word "revolution" occurred twice. This alarmed her, and she opened the drawer, which she saw was full of papers. But her sense of honour awoke within her in presence of the secret which the rickety deal table so badly guarded. She remained bending over the papers, trying to understand them without touching them, in a state of great emotion, when the shrill song of the chaffinch, on whose cage streamed a ray of sunshine, made her start. She closed the drawer. It was a base thing that she had contemplated, she thought.

Then, as she lingered by the window, reflecting that she ought to go and ask counsel of Abbe Roustan, who was a very sensible man, she saw a crowd of people round a stretcher in the market square below. The night was falling, still she distinctly recognised Cadine weeping in the midst of the crowd; while Florent and Claude, whose boots were white with dust, stood together talking earnestly at the edge of the footway. She hurried downstairs again, surprised to see them back so soon, and scarcely had she reached her counter when Mademoiselle Saget entered the shop.

"They have found that scamp of a Marjolin in the cellar, with his head split open," exclaimed the old maid. "Won't you come to see him, Madame Quenu?"

Lisa crossed the road to look at him. The young fellow was lying on his back on the stretcher, looking very pale. His eyes were closed, and a stiff wisp of his fair hair was clotted with blood. The bystanders, however, declared that there was no serious harm done, and, besides, the scamp had only himself to blame, for he was always playing all sorts of wild pranks in the cellars. It was generally supposed that he had been trying to jump over one of the stone blocks—one of his favourite amusements—and had fallen with his head against the slab.

"I dare say that hussy there gave him a shove," remarked Mademoiselle Saget, pointing to Cadine, who was weeping. "They are always larking together."

Meantime the fresh air had restored Marjolin to consciousness, and he opened his eyes in wide astonishment. He looked round at everybody, and then, observing Lisa bending over him, he gently smiled at her with an expression of mingled humility and affection. He seemed to have forgotten all that had happened. Lisa, feeling relieved, said that he ought to be taken to the hospital at once, and promised to go and see him there, and take him some oranges and biscuits. However, Marjolin's head had fallen back, and when the stretcher was carried away Cadine followed it, with her flat basket slung round her neck, and her hot tears rolling down upon the bunches of violets in their mossy bed. She certainly had no thoughts for the flowers that she was thus scalding with her bitter grief.

As Lisa went back to her shop, she heard Claude say, as he shook hands with Florent and parted from him: "Ah! the confounded young scamp! He's quite spoiled my day for me! Still, we had a very enjoyable time, didn't we?"

Claude and Florent had returned both worried and happy, bringing with them the pleasant freshness of the country air. Madame Francois had disposed of all her vegetables that morning before daylight; and they had all three gone to the Golden Compasses, in the Rue Montorgueil, to get the cart. Here, in the middle of Paris, they found a foretaste of the country. Behind the Restaurant Philippe, with its frontage of gilt woodwork rising to the first floor, there was a yard like that of a farm, dirty, teeming with life, reeking with the odour of manure and straw. Bands of fowls were pecking at the soft ground. Sheds and staircases and galleries of greeny wood clung to the old houses around, and at the far end, in a shanty of big beams, was Balthazar, harnessed to the cart, and eating the oats in his nosebag. He went down the Rue Montorgueil at a slow trot, seemingly well pleased to return to Nanterre so soon. However, he was not going home without a load. Madame Francois had a contract with the company which undertook the scavenging of the markets, and twice a week she carried off with her a load of leaves, forked up from the mass of refuse which littered the square. It made excellent manure. In a few minutes the cart was filled to overflowing. Claude and Florent stretched themselves out on the deep bed of greenery; Madame Francois grasped her reins, and Balthazar went off at his slow, steady pace, his head somewhat bent by reason of there being so many passengers to pull along.

This excursion had been talked of for a long time past. Madame Francois laughed cheerily. She was partial to the two men, and promised them an omelette au lard as had never been eaten, said she, in "that villainous Paris." Florent and Claude revelled in the thought of this day of lounging idleness which as yet had scarcely begun to dawn. Nanterre seemed to be some distant paradise into which they would presently enter.

"Are you quite comfortable?" Madame Francois asked as the cart turned into the Rue du Pont Neuf.

Claude declared that their couch was as soft as a bridal bed. Lying on their backs, with their hands crossed under their heads, both men were looking up at the pale sky from which the stars were vanishing. All along the Rue de Rivoli they kept unbroken silence, waiting till they should have got clear of the houses, and listening to the worthy woman as she chattered to Balthazar: "Take your time, old man," she said to him in kindly tones. "We're in no hurry; we shall be sure to get there at last."

On reaching the Champs Elysees, when the artist saw nothing but tree-tops on either side of him, and the great green mass of the Tuileries gardens in the distance, he woke up, as it were, and began to talk. When the cart had passed the end of the Rue du Roule he had caught a glimpse of the side entrance of Saint Eustache under the giant roofing of one of the market covered-ways. He was constantly referring to this view of the church, and tried to give it a symbolical meaning.

"It's an odd mixture," he said, "that bit of church framed round by an avenue of cast iron. The one will kill the other; the iron will slay the stone, and the time is not very far off. Do you believe in chance, Florent? For my part, I don't think that it was any mere chance of position that set a rose-window of Saint Eustache right in the middle of the central markets. No; there's a whole manifesto in it. It is modern art, realism, naturalism—whatever you like to call it—that has grown up and dominates ancient art. Don't you agree with me?"

Then, as Florent still kept silence, Claude continued: "Besides, that church is a piece of bastard architecture, made up of the dying gasp of the middle ages, and the first stammering of the Renaissance. Have you noticed what sort of churches are built nowadays? They resemble all kinds of things—libraries, observatories, pigeon-cotes, barracks; and surely no one can imagine that the Deity dwells in such places. The pious old builders are all dead and gone; and it would be better to cease erecting those hideous carcasses of stone, in which we have no belief to enshrine. Since the beginning of the century there has only been one large original pile of buildings erected in Paris—a pile in accordance with modern developments—and that's the central markets. You hear me, Florent? Ah! they are a fine bit of building, though they but faintly indicate what we shall see in the twentieth century! And so, you see, Saint Eustache is done for! It stands there with its rose-windows, deserted by worshippers, while the markets spread out by its side and teem with noisy life. Yes! that's how I understand it all, my friend."

"Ah! Monsieur Claude," said Madame Francois, laughing, "the woman who cut your tongue-string certainly earned her money. Look at Balthazar laying his ears back to listen to you. Come, come, get along, Balthazar!"

The cart was slowly making its way up the incline. At this early hour of the morning the avenue, with its double lines of iron chairs on either pathway, and its lawns, dotted with flowerbeds and clumps of shrubbery, stretching away under the blue shadows of the trees, was quite deserted; however, at the Rond-Point a lady and gentleman on horseback passed the cart at a gentle trot. Florent, who had made himself a pillow with a bundle of cabbage-leaves, was still gazing at the sky, in which a far-stretching rosy glow was appearing. Every now and then he would close his eyes, the better to enjoy the fresh breeze of the morning as it fanned his face. He was so happy to escape from the markets, and travel on through the pure air, that he remained speechless, and did not even listen to what was being said around him.

"And then, too, what fine jokers are those fellows who imprison art in a toy-box!" resumed Claude, after a pause. "They are always repeating the same idiotic words: 'You can't create art out of science,' says one; 'Mechanical appliances kill poetry,' says another; and a pack of fools wail over the fate of the flowers, as though anybody wished the flowers any harm! I'm sick of all such twaddle; I should like to answer all that snivelling with some work of open defiance. I should take a pleasure in shocking those good people. Shall I tell you what was the finest thing I ever produced since I first began to work, and the one which I recall with the greatest pleasure? It's quite a story. When I was at my Aunt Lisa's on Christmas Eve last year that idiot of an Auguste, the assistant, was setting out the shop-window. Well, he quite irritated me by the weak, spiritless way in which he arranged the display; and at last I requested him to take himself off, saying that I would group the things myself in a proper manner. You see, I had plenty of bright colours to work with—the red of the tongues, the yellow of the hams, the blue of the paper shavings, the rosy pink of the things that had been cut into, the green of the sprigs of heath, and the black of the black-puddings—ah! a magnificent black, which I have never managed to produce on my palette. And naturally, the crepine, the small sausages, the chitterlings, and the crumbed trotters provided me with delicate greys and browns. I produced a perfect work of art. I took the dishes, the plates, the pans, and the jars, and arranged the different colours; and I devised a wonderful picture of still life, with subtle scales of tints leading up to brilliant flashes of colour. The red tongues seemed to thrust themselves out like greedy flames, and the black-puddings, surrounded by pale sausages, suggested a dark night fraught with terrible indigestion. I had produced, you see, a picture symbolical of the gluttony of Christmas Eve, when people meet and sup—the midnight feasting, the ravenous gorging of stomachs void and faint after all the singing of hymns.[*] At the top of everything a huge turkey exhibited its white breast, marbled blackly by the truffles showing through its skin. It was something barbaric and superb, suggesting a paunch amidst a halo of glory; but there was such a cutting, sarcastic touch about it all that people crowded to the window, alarmed by the fierce flare of the shop-front. When my aunt Lisa came back from the kitchen she was quite frightened, and thought I'd set the fat in the shop on fire; and she considered the appearance of the turkey so indelicate that she turned me out of the place while Auguste re-arranged the window after his own idiotic fashion. Such brutes will never understand the language of a red splotch by the side of a grey one. Ah, well! that was my masterpiece. I have never done anything better."

[*] An allusion to the "midnight mass" usually celebrated in
Roman Catholic churches on Christmas Eve.—Translator.

He relapsed into silence, smiling and dwelling with gratification on this reminiscence. The cart had now reached the Arc de Triomphe, and strong currents of air swept from the avenues across the expanse of open ground. Florent sat up, and inhaled with zest the first odours of grass wafted from the fortifications. He turned his back on Paris, anxious to behold the country in the distance. At the corner of the Rue de Longchamp, Madame Francois pointed out to him the spot where she had picked him up. This rendered him thoughtful, and he gazed at her as she sat there, so healthy-looking and serene, with her arms slightly extended so as to grasp the reins. She looked even handsomer than Lisa, with her neckerchief tied over her head, her robust glow of health, and her brusque, kindly air. When she gave a slight cluck with her tongue, Balthazar pricked up his ears and rattled down the road at a quicker pace.

On arriving at Nanterre, the cart turned to the left into a narrow lane, skirted some blank walls, and finally came to a standstill at the end of a sort of blind alley. It was the end of the world, Madame Francois used to say. The load of vegetable leaves now had to be discharged. Claude and Florent would not hear of the journeyman gardener, who was planting lettuces, leaving his work, but armed themselves with pitchforks and proceeded to toss the leaves into the manure pit. This occupation afforded them much amusement. Claude had quite a liking for manure, since it symbolises the world and its life. The strippings and parings of the vegetables, the scourings of the markets, the refuse that fell from that colossal table, remained full of life, and returned to the spot where the vegetables had previously sprouted, to warm and nourish fresh generations of cabbages, turnips, and carrots. They rose again in fertile crops, and once more went to spread themselves out upon the market square. Paris rotted everything, and returned everything to the soil, which never wearied of repairing the ravages of death.

"Ah!" exclaimed Claude, as he plied his fork for the last time, "here's a cabbage-stalk that I'm sure I recognise. It has grown up at least half a score of times in that corner yonder by the apricot tree."

This remark made Florent laugh. But he soon became grave again, and strolled slowly through the kitchen garden, while Claude made a sketch of the stable, and Madame Francois got breakfast ready. The kitchen garden was a long strip of ground, divided in the middle by a narrow path; it rose slightly, and at the top end, on raising the head, you could perceive the low barracks of Mont Valerien. Green hedges separated it from other plots of land, and these lofty walls of hawthorn fringed the horizon with a curtain of greenery in such wise that of all the surrounding country Mont Valerien alone seemed to rise inquisitively on tip-toe in order to peer into Madame Francois's close. Great peacefulness came from the countryside which could not be seen. Along the kitchen garden, between the four hedges, the May sun shone with a languid heat, a silence disturbed only by the buzzing of insects, a somnolence suggestive of painless parturition. Every now and then a faint cracking sound, a soft sigh, made one fancy that one could hear the vegetables sprout into being. The patches of spinach and sorrel, the borders of radishes, carrots, and turnips, the beds of potatoes and cabbages, spread out in even regularity, displaying their dark leaf-mould between their tufts of greenery. Farther away, the trenched lettuces, onions, leeks, and celery, planted by line in long straight rows, looked like soldiers on parade; while the peas and beans were beginning to twine their slender tendrils round a forest of sticks, which, when June came, they would transform into a thick and verdant wood. There was not a weed to be seen. The garden resembled two parallel strips of carpet of a geometrical pattern of green on a reddish ground, which were carefully swept every morning. Borders of thyme grew like greyish fringe along each side of the pathway.

Florent paced backwards and forwards amidst the perfume of the thyme, which the sun was warming. He felt profoundly happy in the peacefulness and cleanliness of the garden. For nearly a year past he had only seen vegetables bruised and crushed by the jolting of the market-carts; vegetables torn up on the previous evening, and still bleeding. He rejoiced to find them at home, in peace in the dark mould, and sound in every part. The cabbages had a bulky, prosperous appearance; the carrots looked bright and gay; and the lettuces lounged in line with an air of careless indolence. And as he looked at them all, the markets which he had left behind him that morning seemed to him like a vast mortuary, an abode of death, where only corpses could be found, a charnel-house reeking with foul smells and putrefaction. He slackened his steps, and rested in that kitchen garden, as after a long perambulation amidst deafening noises and repulsive odours. The uproar and the sickening humidity of the fish market had departed from him; and he felt as though he were being born anew in the pure fresh air. Claude was right, he thought. The markets were a sphere of death. The soil was the life, the eternal cradle, the health of the world.

"The omelet's ready!" suddenly cried Madame Francois.

When they were all three seated round the table in the kitchen, with the door thrown open to the sunshine, they ate their breakfast with such light-hearted gaiety that Madame Francois looked at Florent in amazement, repeating between each mouthful: "You're quite altered. You're ten years younger. It is that villainous Paris which makes you seem so gloomy. You've got a little sunshine in your eyes now. Ah! those big towns do one's health no good, you ought to come and live here."

Claude laughed, and retorted that Paris was a glorious place. He stuck up for it and all that belonged to it, even to its gutters; though at the same time retaining a keen affection for the country.

In the afternoon Madame Francois and Florent found themselves alone at the end of the garden, in a corner planted with a few fruit trees. Seated on the ground, they talked somewhat seriously together. The good woman advised Florent with an affectionate and quite maternal kindness. She asked him endless questions about his life, and his intentions for the future, and begged him to remember that he might always count upon her, if ever he thought that she could in the slightest degree contribute to his happiness. Florent was deeply touched. No woman had ever spoken to him in that way before. Madame Francois seemed to him like some healthy, robust plant that had grown up with the vegetables in the leaf-mould of the garden; while the Lisas, the Normans, and other pretty women of the markets appeared to him like flesh of doubtful freshness decked out for exhibition. He here enjoyed several hours of perfect well-being, delivered from all that reek of food which sickened him in the markets, and reviving to new life amidst the fertile atmosphere of the country, like that cabbage stalk which Claude declared he had seen sprout up more than half a score of times.

The two men took leave of Madame Francois at about five o'clock. They had decided to walk back to Paris; and the market gardener accompanied them into the lane. As she bade good-bye to Florent, she kept his hand in her own for a moment, and said gently: "If ever anything happens to trouble you, remember to come to me."

For a quarter of an hour Florent walked on without speaking, already getting gloomy again, and reflecting that he was leaving health behind him. The road to Courbevoie was white with dust. However, both men were fond of long walks and the ringing of stout boots on the hard ground. Little clouds of dust rose up behind their heels at every step, while the rays of the sinking sun darted obliquely over the avenue, lengthening their shadows in such wise that their heads reached the other side of the road, and journeyed along the opposite footway.

Claude, swinging his arms, and taking long, regular strides, complacently watched these two shadows, whilst enjoying the rhythmical cadence of his steps, which he accentuated by a motion of his shoulders. Presently, however, as though just awaking from a dream, he exclaimed: "Do you know the 'Battle of the Fat and the Thin'?"

Florent, surprised by the question, replied in the negative; and thereupon Claude waxed enthusiastic, talking of that series of prints in very eulogical fashion. He mentioned certain incidents: the Fat, so swollen that they almost burst, preparing their evening debauch, while the Thin, bent double by fasting, looked in from the street with the appearance of envious laths; and then, again, the Fat, with hanging cheeks, driving off one of the Thin, who had been audacious enough to introduce himself into their midst in lowly humility, and who looked like a ninepin amongst a population of balls.

In these designs Claude detected the entire drama of human life, and he ended by classifying men into Fat and Thin, two hostile groups, one of which devours the other, and grows fat and sleek and enjoys itself.

"Cain," said he, "was certainly one of the Fat, and Abel one of the Thin. Ever since that first murder, there have been rampant appetites which have drained the life-blood of small eaters. It's a continual preying of the stronger upon the weaker; each swallowing his neighbour, and then getting swallowed in his turn. Beware of the Fat, my friend."

He relapsed into silence for a moment, still watching their two shadows, which the setting sun elongated more than ever. Then he murmured: "You see, we belong to the Thin—you and I. Those who are no more corpulent than we are don't take up much room in the sunlight, eh?"

Florent glanced at the two shadows, and smiled. But Claude waxed angry, and exclaimed: "You make a mistake if you think it is a laughing matter. For my own part, I greatly suffer from being one of the Thin. If I were one of the Fat, I could paint at my ease; I should have a fine studio, and sell my pictures for their weight in gold. But, instead of that, I'm one of the Thin; and I have to grind my life out in producing things which simply make the Fat ones shrug their shoulders. I shall die of it all in the end, I'm sure of it, with my skin clinging to my bones, and so flattened that they will be able to bury me between two leaves of a book. And you, too, you are one of the Thin, a wonderful one; the very king of Thin, in fact! Do you remember your quarrel with the fish-wives? It was magnificent; all those colossal bosoms flying at your scraggy breast! Oh! they were simply acting from natural instinct; they were pursuing one of the Thin just as cats pursue a mouse. The Fat, you know, have an instinctive hatred of the Thin, to such an extent that they must needs drive the latter from their sight, either by means of their teeth or their feet. And that is why, if I were in your place, I should take my precautions. The Quenus belong to the Fat, and so do the Mehudins; indeed, you have none but Fat ones around you. I should feel uneasy under such circumstances."

"And what about Gavard, and Mademoiselle Saget, and your friend Marjolin?" asked Florent, still smiling.

"Oh, if you like, I will classify all our acquaintances for you," replied Claude. "I've had their heads in a portfolio in my studio for a long time past, with memoranda of the order to which they belong. Gavard is one of the Fat, but of the kind which pretends to belong to the Thin. The variety is by no means uncommon. Mademoiselle Saget and Madame Lecoeur belong to the Thin, but to a variety which is much to be feared—the Thin ones whom envy drives to despair, and who are capable of anything in their craving to fatten themselves. My friend Marjolin, little Cadine, and La Sarriette are three Fat ones, still innocent, however, and having nothing but the guileless hunger of youth. I may remark that the Fat, so long as they've not grown old, are charming creatures. Monsieur Lebigre is one of the Fat—don't you think so? As for your political friends, Charvet, Clemence, Logre, and Lacaille, they mostly belong to the Thin. I only except that big animal Alexandre, and that prodigy Robine, who has caused me a vast amount of annoyance."

The artist continued to talk in this strain from the Pont de Neuilly to the Arc de Triomphe. He returned to some of those whom he had already mentioned, and completed their portraits with a few characteristic touches. Logre, he said, was one of the Thin whose belly had been placed between his shoulders. Beautiful Lisa was all stomach, and the beautiful Norman all bosom. Mademoiselle Saget, in her earlier life, must have certainly lost some opportunity to fatten herself, for she detested the Fat, while, at the same time, she despised the Thin. As for Gavard, he was compromising his position as one of the Fat, and would end by becoming as flat as a bug.

"And what about Madame Francois?" Florent asked.

Claude seemed much embarrassed by this question. He cast about for an answer, and at last stammered:

"Madame Francois, Madame Francois—well, no, I really don't know; I never thought about classifying her. But she's a dear good soul, and that's quite sufficient. She's neither one of the Fat nor one of the Thin!"

They both laughed. They were now in front of the Arc de Triomphe. The sun, over by the hills of Suresnes, was so low on the horizon that their colossal shadows streaked the whiteness of the great structure even above the huge groups of statuary, like strokes made with a piece of charcoal. This increased Claude's merriment, he waved his arms and bent his body; and then, as he started on his way again, he said; "Did you notice—just as the sun set our two heads shot up to the sky!"

But Florent no longer smiled. Paris was grasping him again, that Paris which now frightened him so much, after having cost him so many tears at Cayenne. When he reached the markets night was falling, and there was a suffocating smell. He bent his head as he once more returned to the nightmare of endless food, whilst preserving the sweet yet sad recollection of that day of bright health odorous with the perfume of thyme.

CHAPTER V

At about four o'clock on the afternoon of the following day Lisa betook herself to Saint Eustache. For the short walk across the square she had arrayed herself very seriously in a black silk gown and thick woollen shawl. The handsome Norman, who, from her stall in the fish market, watched her till she vanished into the church porch, was quite amazed.

"Hallo! So the fat thing's gone in for priests now, has she?" she exclaimed, with a sneer. "Well, a little holy water may do her good!"

She was mistaken in her surmises, however, for Lisa was not a devotee. She did not observe the ordinances of the Church, but said that she did her best to lead an honest life, and that this was all that was necessary. At the same time, however, she disliked to hear religion spoken ill of, and often silenced Gavard, who delighted in scandalous stories of priests and their doings. Talk of that sort seemed to her altogether improper. Everyone, in her opinion, should be allowed to believe as they pleased, and every scruple should be respected. Besides, the majority of the clergy were most estimable men. She knew Abbe Roustan, of Saint Eustache—a distinguished priest, a man of shrewd sense, and one, she thought, whose friendship might be safely relied upon. And she would wind up by explaining that religion was absolutely necessary for the people; she looked upon it as a sort of police force that helped to maintain order, and without which no government would be possible. When Gavard went too far on this subject and asserted that the priests ought to be turned into the streets and have their shops shut up, Lisa, shrugged her shoulders and replied: "A great deal of good that would do! Why, before a month was over the people would be murdering one another in the streets, and you would be compelled to invent another God. That was just what happened in '93. You know very well that I'm not given to mixing with the priests, but for all that I say that they are necessary, as we couldn't do without them."

And so when Lisa happened to enter a church she always manifested the utmost decorum. She had bought a handsome missal, which she never opened, for use when she was invited to a funeral or a wedding. She knelt and rose at the proper times, and made a point of conducting herself with all propriety. She assumed, indeed, what she considered a sort of official demeanour, such as all well-to-do folks, tradespeople, and house-owners ought to observe with regard to religion.

As she entered Saint Eustache that afternoon she let the double doors, covered with green baize, faded and worn by the frequent touch of pious hands, close gently behind her. Then she dipped her fingers in the holy water and crossed herself in the correct fashion. And afterwards, with hushed footsteps, she made her way to the chapel of Saint Agnes, where two kneeling women with their faces buried in their hands were waiting, whilst the blue skirts of a third protruded from the confessional. Lisa seemed rather put out by the sight of these women, and, addressing a verger who happened to pass along, wearing a black skullcap and dragging his feet over the slabs, she inquired: "Is this Monsieur l'Abbe Roustan's day for hearing confessions?"

The verger replied that his reverence had only two more penitents waiting, and that they would not detain him long, so that if Lisa would take a chair her turn would speedily come. She thanked him, without telling him that she had not come to confess; and, making up her mind to wait, she began to pace the church, going as far as the chief entrance, whence she gazed at the lofty, severe, bare nave stretching between the brightly coloured aisles. Raising her head a little, she examined the high altar, which she considered too plain, having no taste for the cold grandeur of stonework, but preferring the gilding and gaudy colouring of the side chapels. Those on the side of the Rue du Jour looked greyish in the light which filtered through their dusty windows, but on the side of the markets the sunset was lighting up the stained glass with lovely tints, limpid greens and yellows in particular, which reminded Lisa of the bottle of liqueurs in front of Monsieur Lebigre's mirror. She came back by this side, which seemed to be warmed by the glow of light, and took a passing interest in the reliquaries, altar ornaments, and paintings steeped in prismatic reflections. The church was empty, quivering with the silence that fell from its vaulted roofing. Here and there a woman's dress showed like a dark splotch amidst the vague yellow of the chairs; and a low buzzing came from the closed confessionals. As Lisa again passed the chapel of Saint Agnes she saw the blue dress still kneeling at Abbe Roustan's feet.

"Why, if I'd wanted to confess I could have said everything in ten seconds," she thought, proud of her irreproachable integrity.

Then she went on to the end of the church. Behind the high altar, in the gloom of a double row of pillars, is the chapel of the Blessed Virgin, damp and dark and silent. The dim stained windows only show the flowing crimson and violet robes of saints, which blaze like flames of mystic love in the solemn, silent adoration of the darkness. It is a weird, mysterious spot, like some crepuscular nook of paradise solely illumined by the gleaming stars of two tapers. The four brass lamps hanging from the roof remain unlighted, and are but faintly seen; on espying them you think of the golden censers which the angels swing before the throne of Mary. And kneeling on the chairs between the pillars there are always women surrendering themselves languorously to the dim spot's voluptuous charm.

Lisa stood and gazed tranquilly around her. She did not feel the least emotion, but considered that it was a mistake not to light the lamps. Their brightness would have given the place a more cheerful look. The gloom even struck her as savouring of impropriety. Her face was warmed by the flames of some candles burning in a candelabrum by her side, and an old woman armed with a big knife was scraping off the wax which had trickled down and congealed into pale tears. And amidst the quivering silence, the mute ecstasy of adoration prevailing in the chapel, Lisa would distinctly hear the rumbling of the vehicles turning out of the Rue Montmartre, behind the scarlet and purple saints on the windows, whilst in the distance the markets roared without a moment's pause.

Just as Lisa was leaving the chapel, she saw the younger of the Mehudins, Claire, the dealer in fresh water fish, come in. The girl lighted a taper at the candelabrum, and then went to kneel behind a pillar, her knees pressed upon the hard stones, and her face so pale beneath her loose fair hair that she seemed a corpse. And believing herself to be securely screened from observation, she gave way to violent emotion, and wept hot tears with a passionate outpouring of prayer which bent her like a rushing wind. Lisa looked on in amazement, for the Mehudins were not known to be particularly pious; indeed, Claire was accustomed to speak of religion and priests in such terms as to horrify one.

"What's the meaning of this, I wonder?" pondered Lisa, as she again made her way to the chapel of Saint Agnes. "The hussy must have been poisoning some one or other."

Abbe Roustan was at last coming out of his confessional. He was a handsome man, of some forty years of age, with a smiling, kindly air. When he recognised Madame Quenu he grasped her hand, called her "dear lady," and conducted her to the vestry, where, taking off his surplice, he told her that he would be entirely at her service in a moment. They returned, the priest in his cassock, bareheaded, and Lisa strutting along in her shawl, and paced up and down in front of the side-chapels adjacent to the Rue du Jour. They conversed together in low tones. The sunlight was departing from the stained windows, the church was growing dark, and the retreating footsteps of the last worshippers sounded but faintly over the flagstones.

Lisa explained her doubts and scruples to Abbe Roustan. There had never been any question of religion between them; she never confessed, but merely consulted him in cases of difficulty, because he was shrewd and discreet, and she preferred him, as she sometimes said, to shady business men redolent of the galleys. The abbe, on his side, manifested inexhaustible complaisance. He looked up points of law for her in the Code, pointed out profitable investments, resolved her moral difficulties with great tact, recommended tradespeople to her, invariably having an answer ready however diverse and complicated her requirements might be. And he supplied all this help in a natural matter-of-fact way, without ever introducing the Deity into his talk, or seeking to obtain any advantage either for himself or the cause of religion. A word of thanks and a smile sufficed him. He seemed glad to have an opportunity of obliging the handsome Madame Quenu, of whom his housekeeper often spoke to him in terms of praise, as of a woman who was highly respected in the neighbourhood.

Their consultation that afternoon was of a peculiarly delicate nature. Lisa was anxious to know what steps she might legitimately take, as a woman of honour, with respect to her brother-in-law. Had she a right to keep a watch upon him, and to do what she could to prevent him from compromising her husband, her daughter, and herself? And then how far might she go in circumstances of pressing danger? She did not bluntly put these questions to the abbe, but asked them with such skilful circumlocutions that he was able to discuss the matter without entering into personalities. He brought forward arguments on both sides of the question, but the conclusion he came to was that a person of integrity was entitled, indeed bound, to prevent evil, and was justified in using whatever means might be necessary to ensure the triumph of that which was right and proper.

"That is my opinion, dear lady," he said in conclusion. "The question of means is always a very grave one. It is a snare in which souls of average virtue often become entangled. But I know your scrupulous conscience. Deliberate carefully over each step you think of taking, and if it contains nothing repugnant to you, go on boldly. Pure natures have the marvelous gift of purifying all that they touch."

Then, changing his tone of voice, he continued: "Pray give my kind regards to Monsieur Quenu. I'll come in to kiss my dear little Pauline some time when I'm passing. And now good-bye, dear lady; remember that I'm always at your service."

Thereupon he returned to the vestry. Lisa, on her way out, was curious to see if Claire was still praying, but the girl had gone back to her eels and carp; and in front of the Lady-chapel, which was already shrouded in darkness, there was now but a litter of chairs overturned by the ardent vehemence of the woman who had knelt there.

When the handsome Lisa again crossed the square, La Normande, who had been watching for her exit from the church, recognised her in the twilight by the rotundity of her skirts.

"Good gracious!" she exclaimed, "she's been more than an hour in there! When the priests set about cleansing her of her sins, the choir-boys have to form in line to pass the buckets of filth and empty them in the street!"

The next morning Lisa went straight up to Florent's bedroom and settled herself there with perfect equanimity. She felt certain that she would not be disturbed, and, moreover, she had made up her mind to tell a falsehood and say that she had come to see if the linen was clean, should Florent by any chance return. Whilst in the shop, however, she had observed him busily engaged in the fish market. Seating herself in front of the little table, she pulled out the drawer, placed it upon her knees, and began to examine its contents, taking the greatest care to restore them to their original positions.

First of all she came upon the opening chapters of the work on Cayenne; then upon the drafts of Florent's various plans and projects, his schemes for converting the Octroi duties into taxes upon sales, for reforming the administrative system of the markets, and all the others. These pages of small writing, which she set herself to read, bored her extremely, and she was about to restore the drawer to its place, feeling convinced that Florent concealed the proofs of his wicked designs elsewhere, and already contemplating a searching visitation of his mattress, when she discovered a photograph of La Normande in an envelope. The impression was rather dark. La Normande was standing up with her right arm resting on a broken column. Decked out with all her jewels, and attired in a new silk dress, the fish-girl was smiling impudently, and Lisa, at the sight, forgot all about her brother-in-law, her fears, and the purpose for which she had come into the room. She became quite absorbed in her examination of the portrait, as often happens when one woman scrutinises the photograph of another at her ease, without fear of being seen. Never before had she so favourable an opportunity to study her rival. She scrutinised her hair, her nose, her mouth; held the photograph at a distance, and then brought it closer again. And, finally, with compressed lips, she read on the back of it, in a big, ugly scrawl: "Louise, to her friend, Florent." This quite scandalised her; to her mind it was a confession, and she felt a strong impulse to take possession of the photograph, and keep it as a weapon against her enemy. However, she slowly replaced it in the envelope on coming to the conclusion that this course would be wrong, and reflecting that she would always know where to find it should she want it again.

Then, as she again began turning over the loose sheets of paper, it occurred to her to look at the back end of the drawer, where Florent had relegated Augustine's needles and thread; and there, between the missal and the Dream-book, she discovered what she sought, some extremely compromising memoranda, simply screened from observation by a wrapper of grey paper.

That idea of an insurrection, of the overthrow of the Empire by means of an armed rising, which Logre had one evening propounded at Monsieur Lebigre's, had slowly ripened in Florent's feverish brain. He soon grew to see a duty, a mission in it. Therein undoubtedly lay the task to which his escape from Cayenne and his return to Paris predestined him. Believing in a call to avenge his leanness upon the city which wallowed in food while the upholders of right and equity were racked by hunger in exile, he took upon himself the duties of a justiciary, and dreamt of rising up, even in the midst of those markets, to sweep away the reign of gluttony and drunkenness. In a sensitive nature like his, this idea quickly took root. Everything about him assumed exaggerated proportions, the wildest fancies possessed him. He imagined that the markets had been conscious of his arrival, and had seized hold of him that they might enervate him and poison him with their stenches. Then, too, Lisa wanted to cast a spell over him, and for two or three days at a time he would avoid her, as though she were some dissolving agency which would destroy all his power of will should he approach too closely. However, these paroxysms of puerile fear, these wild surgings of his rebellious brain, always ended in thrills of the gentlest tenderness, with yearnings to love and be loved, which he concealed with a boyish shame.

It was more especially in the evening that his mind became blurred by all his wild imaginings. Depressed by his day's work, but shunning sleep from a covert fear—the fear of the annihilation it brought with it—he would remain later than ever at Monsieur Lebigre's, or at the Mehudins'; and on his return home he still refrained from going to bed, and sat up writing and preparing for the great insurrection. By slow degrees he devised a complete system of organisation. He divided Paris into twenty sections, one for each arrondissement. Each section would have a chief, a sort of general, under whose orders there were to be twenty lieutenants commanding twenty companies of affiliated associates. Every week, among the chiefs, there would be a consultation, which was to be held in a different place each time; and, the better to ensure secrecy and discretion, the associates would only come in contact with their respective lieutenants, these alone communicating with the chiefs of the sections. It also occurred to Florent that it would be as well that the companies should believe themselves charged with imaginary missions, as a means of putting the police upon a wrong scent.

As for the employment of the insurrectionary forces, that would be all simplicity. It would, of course, be necessary to wait till the companies were quite complete, and then advantage would be taken of the first public commotion. They would doubtless only have a certain number of guns used for sporting purposes in their possession, so they would commence by seizing the police stations and guard-houses, disarming the soldiers of the line; resorting to violence as little as possible, and inviting the men to make common cause with the people. Afterwards they would march upon the Corps Legislatif, and thence to the Hotel de Ville. This plan, to which Florent returned night after night, as though it were some dramatic scenario which relieved his over-excited nervous system, was as yet simply jotted down on scraps of paper, full of erasures, which showed how the writer had felt his way, and revealed each successive phase of his scientific yet puerile conception. When Lisa had glanced through the notes, without understanding some of them, she remained there trembling with fear; afraid to touch them further lest they should explode in her hands like live shells.

A last memorandum frightened her more than any of the others. It was a half sheet of paper on which Florent had sketched the distinguishing insignia which the chiefs and the lieutenants were to wear. By the side of these were rough drawings of the standards which the different companies were to carry; and notes in pencil even described what colours the banners should assume. The chiefs were to wear red scarves, and the lieutenants red armlets.

To Lisa this seemed like an immediate realisation of the rising; she saw all the men with their red badges marching past the pork shop, firing bullets into her mirrors and marble, and carrying off sausages and chitterlings from the window. The infamous projects of her brother-in-law were surely directed against herself—against her own happiness. She closed the drawer and looked round the room, reflecting that it was she herself who had provided this man with a home—that he slept between her sheets and used her furniture. And she was especially exasperated at his keeping his abominable infernal machine in that little deal table which she herself had used at Uncle Gradelle's before her marriage—a perfectly innocent, rickety little table.

For a while she stood thinking what she should do. In the first place, it was useless to say anything to Quenu. For a moment it occurred to her to provoke an explanation with Florent, but she dismissed that idea, fearing lest he would only go and perpetrate his crime elsewhere, and maliciously make a point of compromising them. Then gradually growing somewhat calmer, she came to the conclusion that her best plan would be to keep a careful watch over her brother-in-law. It would be time enough to take further steps at the first sign of danger. She already had quite sufficient evidence to send him back to the galleys.

On returning to the shop again, she found Augustine in a state of great excitement. Little Pauline had disappeared more than half an hour before, and to Lisa's anxious questions the young woman could only reply: "I don't know where she can have got to, madame. She was on the pavement there with a little boy. I was watching them, and then I had to cut some ham for a gentleman, and I never saw them again."

"I'll wager it was Muche!" cried Lisa. "Ah, the young scoundrel!"

It was, indeed, Muche who had enticed Pauline away. The little girl, who was wearing a new blue-striped frock that day for the first time, had been anxious to exhibit it, and had accordingly taken her stand outside the shop, manifesting great propriety of bearing, and compressing her lips with the grave expression of a little woman of six who is afraid of soiling her clothes. Her short and stiffly-starched petticoats stood out like the skirts of a ballet girl, allowing a full view of her tightly stretched white stockings and little sky-blue boots. Her pinafore, which hung low about her neck, was finished off at the shoulders with an edging of embroidery, below which appeared her pretty little arms, bare and rosy. She had small turquoise rings in her ears, a cross at her neck, a blue velvet ribbon in her well-brushed hair; and she displayed all her mother's plumpness and softness—the gracefulness, indeed, of a new doll.

Muche had caught sight of her from the market, where he was amusing himself by dropping little dead fishes into the gutter, following them along the kerb as the water carried them away, and declaring that they were swimming. However, the sight of Pauline standing in front of the shop and looking so smart and pretty made him cross over to her, capless as he was, with his blouse ragged, his trousers slipping down, and his whole appearance suggestive of a seven-year-old street-arab. His mother had certainly forbidden him to play any more with "that fat booby of a girl who was stuffed by her parents till she almost burst"; so he stood hesitating for a moment, but at last came up to Pauline, and wanted to feel her pretty striped frock. The little girl, who had at first felt flattered, then put on a prim air and stepped back, exclaiming in a tone of displeasure: "Leave me alone. Mother says I'm not to have anything to do with you."

This brought a laugh to the lips of Muche, who was a wily, enterprising young scamp.

"What a little flat you are!" he retorted. "What does it matter what your mother says? Let's go and play at shoving each other, eh?"

He doubtless nourished some wicked idea of dirtying the neat little girl; but she, on seeing him prepare to give her a push in the back, retreated as though about to return inside the shop. Muche thereupon adopted a flattering tone like a born cajoler.

"You silly! I didn't mean it," said he. "How nice you look like that! Is that little cross your mother's?"

Pauline perked herself up, and replied that it was her own, whereupon Muche gently led her to the corner of the Rue Pirouette, touching her skirts the while and expressing his astonishment at their wonderful stiffness. All this pleased the little girl immensely. She had been very much vexed at not receiving any notice while she was exhibiting herself outside the shop. However, in spite of all Muche's blandishments, she still refused to leave the footway.

"You stupid fatty!" thereupon exclaimed the youngster, relapsing into coarseness. "I'll squat you down in the gutter if you don't look out, Miss Fine-airs!"

The girl was dreadfully alarmed. Muche had caught hold of her by the hand; but, recognising his mistake in policy, he again put on a wheedling air, and began to fumble in his pocket.

"I've got a sou," said he.

The sight of the coin had a soothing effect upon Pauline. The boy held up the sou with the tips of his fingers, and the temptation to follow it proved so great that the girl at last stepped down into the roadway. Muche's diplomacy was eminently successful.

"What do you like best?" he asked.

Pauline gave no immediate answer. She could not make up her mind; there were so many things that she liked. Muche, however, ran over a whole list of dainties—liquorice, molasses, gum-balls, and powdered sugar. The powdered sugar made the girl ponder. One dipped one's fingers into it and sucked them; it was very nice. For a while she gravely considered the matter. Then, at last making up her mind, she said:

"No, I like the mixed screws the best."

Muche thereupon took hold of her arm, and she unresistingly allowed him to lead her away. They crossed the Rue Rambuteau, followed the broad footway skirting the markets, and went as far as a grocer's shop in the Rue de la Cossonnerie which was celebrated for its mixed screws. These mixed screws are small screws of paper in which grocers put up all sorts of damaged odds and ends, broken sugar-plums, fragments of crystallised chestnuts—all the doubtful residuum of their jars of sweets. Muche showed himself very gallant, allowed Pauline to choose the screw—a blue one—paid his sou, and did not attempt to dispossess her of the sweets. Outside, on the footway, she emptied the miscellaneous collection of scraps into both pockets of her pinafore; and they were such little pockets that they were quite filled. Then in delight she began to munch the fragments one by one, wetting her fingers to catch the fine sugary dust, with such effect that she melted the scraps of sweets, and the pockets of her pinafore soon showed two brownish stains. Muche laughed slily to himself. He had his arm about the girl's waist, and rumpled her frock at his ease whilst leading her round the corner of the Rue Pierre Lescot, in the direction of the Place des Innocents.

"You'll come and play now, won't you?" he asked. "That's nice what you've got in your pockets, ain't it? You see that I didn't want to do you any harm, you big silly!"

Thereupon he plunged his own fingers into her pockets, and they entered the square together. To this spot, no doubt, he had all along intended to lure his victim. He did the honours of the square as though it were his own private property, and indeed it was a favourite haunt of his, where he often larked about for whole afternoons. Pauline had never before strayed so far from home, and would have wept like an abducted damsel had it not been that her pockets were full of sweets. The fountain in the middle of the flowered lawn was sending sheets of water down its tiers of basins, whilst, between the pilasters above, Jean Goujon's nymphs, looking very white beside the dingy grey stonework, inclined their urns and displayed their nude graces in the grimy air of the Saint Denis quarter. The two children walked round the fountain, watching the water fall into the basins, and taking an interest in the grass, with thoughts, no doubt, of crossing the central lawn, or gliding into the clumps of holly and rhododendrons that bordered the railings of the square. Little Muche, however, who had now effectually rumpled the back of the pretty frock, said with his sly smile:

"Let's play at throwing sand at each other, eh?"

Pauline had no will of her own left; and they began to throw the sand at each other, keeping their eyes closed meanwhile. The sand made its way in at the neck of the girl's low bodice, and trickled down into her stockings and boots. Muche was delighted to see the white pinafore become quite yellow. But he doubtless considered that it was still far too clean.

"Let's go and plant trees, shall we?" he exclaimed suddenly. "I know how to make such pretty gardens."

"Really, gardens!" murmured Pauline full of admiration.

Then, as the keeper of the square happened to be absent, Muche told her to make some holes in one of the borders; and dropping on her knees in the middle of the soft mould, and leaning forward till she lay at full length on her stomach, she dug her pretty little arms into the ground. He, meantime, began to hunt for scraps of wood, and broke off branches. These were the garden-trees which he planted in the holes that Pauline made. He invariably complained, however, that the holes were not deep enough, and rated the girl as though she were an idle workman and he an indignant master. When she at last got up, she was black from head to foot. Her hair was full of mould, her face was smeared with it, she looked such a sight with her arms as black as a coalheaver's that Muche clapped his hands with glee, and exclaimed: "Now we must water the trees. They won't grow, you know, if we don't water them."

That was the finishing stroke. They went outside the square, scooped the gutter-water up in the palms of their hands, and then ran back to pour it over the bits of wood. On the way, Pauline, who was so fat that she couldn't run properly, let the water trickle between her fingers on to her frock, so that by the time of her sixth journey she looked as if she had been rolled in the gutter. Muche chuckled with delight on beholding her dreadful condition. He made her sit down beside him under a rhododendron near the garden they had made, and told her that the trees were already beginning to grow. He had taken hold of her hand and called her his little wife.

"You're not sorry now that you came, are you," he asked, "instead of mooning about on the pavement, where there was nothing to do? I know all sorts of fun we can have in the streets; you must come with me again. You will, won't you? But you mustn't say anything to your mother, mind. If you say a word to her, I'll pull your hair the next time I come past your shop."

Pauline consented to everything; and then, as a last attention, Muche filled both pockets of her pinafore with mould. However, all the sweets were finished, and the girl began to get uneasy, and ceased playing. Muche thereupon started pinching her, and she burst into tears, sobbing that she wanted to go away. But at this the lad only grinned, and played the bully, threatening that he would not take her home at all. Then she grew terribly alarmed, and sobbed and gasped like a maiden in the power of a libertine. Muche would certainly have ended by punching her in order to stop her row, had not a shrill voice, the voice of Mademoiselle Saget, exclaimed, close by: "Why, I declare it's Pauline! Leave her alone, you wicked young scoundrel!"

Then the old maid took the girl by the hand, with endless expressions of amazement at the pitiful condition of her clothes. Muche showed no alarm, but followed them, chuckling to himself, and declaring that it was Pauline who had wanted to come with him, and had tumbled down.

Mademoiselle Saget was a regular frequenter of the Square des Innocents. Every afternoon she would spend a good hour there to keep herself well posted in the gossip of the common people. On either side there is a long crescent of benches placed end to end; and on these the poor folks who stifle in the hovels of the neighbouring narrow streets assemble in crowds. There are withered, chilly-looking old women in tumbled caps, and young ones in loose jackets and carelessly fastened skirts, with bare heads and tired, faded faces, eloquent of the wretchedness of their lives. There are some men also: tidy old buffers, porters in greasy jackets, and equivocal-looking individuals in black silk hats, while the foot-path is overrun by a swarm of youngsters dragging toy carts without wheels about, filling pails with sand, and screaming and fighting; a dreadful crew, with ragged clothes and dirty noses, teeming in the sunshine like vermin.

Mademoiselle Saget was so slight and thin that she always managed to insinuate herself into a place on one of the benches. She listened to what was being said, and started a conversation with her neighbour, some sallow-faced workingman's wife, who sat mending linen, from time to time producing handkerchiefs and stockings riddled with holes from a little basket patched up with string. Moreover, Mademoiselle Saget had plenty of acquaintances here. Amidst the excruciating squalling of the children, and the ceaseless rumble of the traffic in the Rue Saint Denis, she took part in no end of gossip, everlasting tales about the tradesmen of the neighbourhood, the grocers, the butchers, and the bakers, enough, indeed, to fill the columns of a local paper, and the whole envenomed by refusals of credit and covert envy, such as is always harboured by the poor. From these wretched creatures she also obtained the most disgusting revelations, the gossip of low lodging-houses and doorkeepers' black-holes, all the filthy scandal of the neighbourhood, which tickled her inquisitive appetite like hot spice.

As she sat with her face turned towards the markets, she had immediately in front of her the square and its three blocks of houses, into the windows of which her eyes tried to pry. She seemed to gradually rise and traverse the successive floors right up to the garret skylights. She stared at the curtains; based an entire drama on the appearance of a head between two shutters; and, by simply gazing at the facades, ended by knowing the history of all the dwellers in these houses. The Baratte Restaurant, with its wine shop, its gilt wrought-iron marquise, forming a sort of terrace whence peeped the foliage of a few plants in flower-pots, and its four low storeys, all painted and decorated, had an especial interest for her. She gazed at its yellow columns standing out against a background of tender blue, at the whole of its imitation temple-front daubed on the facade of a decrepit, tumble-down house, crowned at the summit by a parapet of painted zinc. Behind the red-striped window-blinds she espied visions of nice little lunches, delicate suppers, and uproarious, unlimited orgies. And she did not hesitate to invent lies about the place. It was there, she declared, that Florent came to gorge with those two hussies, the Mehudins, on whom he lavished his money.

However, Pauline cried yet louder than before when the old maid took hold of her hand. Mademoiselle Saget at first led her towards the gate of the square; but before she got there she seemed to change her mind; for she sat down at the end of a bench and tried to pacify the child.

"Come, now, give over crying, or the policeman will lock you up," she said to Pauline. "I'll take you home safely. You know me, don't you? I'm a good friend. Come, come, let me see how prettily you can smile."

The child, however, was choking with sobs and wanted to go away. Mademoiselle Saget thereupon quietly allowed her to continue weeping, reserving further remarks till she should have finished. The poor little creature was shivering all over; her petticoats and stockings were wet through, and as she wiped her tears away with her dirty hands she plastered the whole of her face with earth to the very tips of her ears. When at last she became a little calmer the old maid resumed in a caressing tone: "Your mamma isn't unkind, is she? She's very fond of you, isn't she?"

"Oh, yes, indeed," replied Pauline, still sobbing.

"And your papa, he's good to you, too, isn't he? He doesn't flog you, or quarrel with your mother, does he? What do they talk about when they go to bed?"

"Oh, I don't know. I'm asleep then."

"Do they talk about your cousin Florent?"

"I don't know."

Mademoiselle Saget thereupon assumed a severe expression, and got up as if about to go away.

"I'm afraid you are a little story-teller," she said. "Don't you know that it's very wicked to tell stories? I shall go away and leave you, if you tell me lies, and then Muche will come back and pinch you."

Pauline began to cry again at the threat of being abandoned. "Be quiet, be quiet, you wicked little imp!" cried the old maid shaking her. "There, there, now, I won't go away. I'll buy you a stick of barley-sugar; yes, a stick of barley-sugar! So you don't love your cousin Florent, eh?"

"No, mamma says he isn't good."

"Ah, then, so you see your mother does say something."

"One night when I was in bed with Mouton—I sleep with Mouton sometimes, you know—I heard her say to father, 'Your brother has only escaped from the galleys to take us all back with him there.'"

Mademoiselle Saget gave vent to a faint cry, and sprang to her feet, quivering all over. A ray of light had just broken upon her. Then without a word she caught hold of Pauline's hand and made her run till they reached the pork shop, her lips meanwhile compressed by an inward smile, and her eyes glistening with keen delight. At the corner of the Rue Pirouette, Muche, who had so far followed them, amused at seeing the girl running along in her muddy stockings, prudently disappeared.

Lisa was now in a state of terrible alarm; and when she saw her daughter so bedraggled and limp, her consternation was such that she turned the child round and round, without even thinking of beating her.

"She has been with little Muche," said the old maid, in her malicious voice. "I took her away at once, and I've brought her home. I found them together in the square. I don't know what they've been up to; but that young vagabond is capable of anything."

Lisa could not find a word to say; and she did not know where to take hold of her daughter, so great was her disgust at the sight of the child's muddy boots, soiled stockings, torn skirts, and filthy face and hands. The blue velvet ribbon, the earrings, and the necklet were all concealed beneath a crust of mud. But what put the finishing touch to Lisa's exasperation was the discovery of the two pockets filled with mould. She stooped and emptied them, regardless of the pink and white flooring of the shop. And as she dragged Pauline away, she could only gasp: "Come along, you filthy thing!"

Quite enlivened by this scene, Mademoiselle Saget now hurriedly made her way across the Rue Rambuteau. Her little feet scarcely touched the ground; her joy seemed to carry her along like a breeze which fanned her with a caressing touch. She had at last found out what she had so much wanted to know! For nearly a year she had been consumed by curiosity, and now at a single stroke she had gained complete power over Florent! This was unhoped-for contentment, positive salvation, for she felt that Florent would have brought her to the tomb had she failed much longer in satisfying her curiosity about him. At present she was complete mistress of the whole neighbourhood of the markets. There was no longer any gap in her information. She could have narrated the secret history of every street, shop by shop. And thus, as she entered the fruit market, she fairly gasped with delight, in a perfect transport of pleasure.

"Hallo, Mademoiselle Saget," cried La Sarriette from her stall, "what are you smiling to yourself like that about? Have you won the grand prize in the lottery?"

"No, no. Ah, my dear, if you only knew!"

Standing there amidst her fruit, La Sarriette, in her picturesque disarray, looked charming. Frizzy hair fell over her brow like vine branches. Her bare arms and neck, indeed all the rosy flesh she showed, bloomed with the freshness of peach and cherry. She had playfully hung some cherries on her ears, black cherries which dangled against her cheeks when she stooped, shaking with merry laughter. She was eating currants, and her merriment arose from the way in which she was smearing her face with them. Her lips were bright red, glistening with the juice of the fruit, as though they had been painted and perfumed with some seraglio face-paint. A perfume of plum exhaled from her gown, while from the kerchief carelessly fastened across her breast came an odour of strawberries.

Fruits of all kinds were piled around her in her narrow stall. On the shelves at the back were rows of melons, so-called "cantaloups" swarming with wart-like knots, "maraichers" whose skin was covered with grey lace-like netting, and "culs-de-singe" displaying smooth bare bumps. In front was an array of choice fruits, carefully arranged in baskets, and showing like smooth round cheeks seeking to hide themselves, or glimpses of sweet childish faces, half veiled by leaves. Especially was this the case with the peaches, the blushing peaches of Montreuil, with skin as delicate and clear as that of northern maidens, and the yellow, sun-burnt peaches from the south, brown like the damsels of Provence. The apricots, on their beds of moss, gleamed with the hue of amber or with that sunset glow which so warmly colours the necks of brunettes at the nape, just under the little wavy curls which fall below the chignon. The cherries, ranged one by one, resembled the short lips of smiling Chinese girls; the Montmorencies suggested the dumpy mouths of buxom women; the English ones were longer and graver-looking; the common black ones seemed as though they had been bruised and crushed by kisses; while the white-hearts, with their patches of rose and white, appeared to smile with mingled merriment and vexation. Then piles of apples and pears, built up with architectural symmetry, often in pyramids, displayed the ruddy glow of budding breasts and the gleaming sheen of shoulders, quite a show of nudity, lurking modestly behind a screen of fern-leaves. There were all sorts of varieties—little red ones so tiny that they seemed to be yet in the cradle, shapeless "rambours" for baking, "calvilles" in light yellow gowns, sanguineous-looking "Canadas," blotched "chataignier" apples, fair freckled rennets and dusky russets. Then came the pears—the "blanquettes," the "British queens," the "Beurres," the "messirejeans," and the "duchesses"—some dumpy, some long and tapering, some with slender necks, and others with thick-set shoulders, their green and yellow bellies picked out at times with a splotch of carmine. By the side of these the transparent plums resembled tender, chlorotic virgins; the greengages and the Orleans plums paled as with modest innocence, while the mirabelles lay like golden beads of a rosary forgotten in a box amongst sticks of vanilla. And the strawberries exhaled a sweet perfume—a perfume of youth—especially those little ones which are gathered in the woods, and which are far more aromatic than the large ones grown in gardens, for these breathe an insipid odour suggestive of the watering-pot. Raspberries added their fragrance to the pure scent. The currants—red, white, and black—smiled with a knowing air; whilst the heavy clusters of grapes, laden with intoxication, lay languorously at the edges of their wicker baskets, over the sides of which dangled some of the berries, scorched by the hot caresses of the voluptuous sun.

It was there that La Sarriette lived in an orchard, as it were, in an atmosphere of sweet, intoxicating scents. The cheaper fruits—the cherries, plums, and strawberries—were piled up in front of her in paper-lined baskets, and the juice coming from their bruised ripeness stained the stall-front, and steamed, with a strong perfume, in the heat. She would feel quite giddy on those blazing July afternoons when the melons enveloped her with a powerful, vaporous odour of musk; and then with her loosened kerchief, fresh as she was with the springtide of life, she brought sudden temptation to all who saw her. It was she—it was her arms and necks which gave that semblance of amorous vitality to her fruit. On the stall next to her an old woman, a hideous old drunkard, displayed nothing but wrinkled apples, pears as flabby as herself, and cadaverous apricots of a witch-like sallowness. La Sarriette's stall, however, spoke of love and passion. The cherries looked like the red kisses of her bright lips; the silky peaches were not more delicate than her neck; to the plums she seemed to have lent the skin from her brow and chin; while some of her own crimson blood coursed through the veins of the currants. All the scents of the avenue of flowers behind her stall were but insipid beside the aroma of vitality which exhaled from her open baskets and falling kerchief.

That day she was quite intoxicated by the scent of a large arrival of mirabelle plums, which filled the market. She could plainly see that Mademoiselle Saget had learnt some great piece of news, and she wished to make her talk. But the old maid stamped impatiently whilst she repeated: "No, no; I've no time. I'm in a great hurry to see Madame Lecoeur. I've just learnt something and no mistake. You can come with me, if you like."

As a matter of fact, she had simply gone through the fruit market for the purpose of enticing La Sarriette to go with her. The girl could not refuse temptation. Monsieur Jules, clean-shaven and as fresh as a cherub, was seated there, swaying to and fro on his chair.

"Just look after the stall for a minute, will you?" La Sarriette said to him. "I'll be back directly."

Jules, however, got up and called after her, in a thick voice: "Not I; no fear! I'm off! I'm not going to wait an hour for you, as I did the other day. And, besides, those cursed plums of yours quite make my head ache."

Then he calmly strolled off, with his hands in his pockets, and the stall was left to look after itself. Mademoiselle Saget went so fast that La Sarriette had to run. In the butter pavilion a neighbour of Madame Lecoeur's told them that she was below in the cellar; and so, whilst La Sarriette went down to find her, the old maid installed herself amidst the cheeses.

The cellar under the butter market is a very gloomy spot. The rows of storerooms are protected by a very fine wire meshing, as a safeguard against fire; and the gas jets, which are very few and far between, glimmer like yellow splotches destitute of radiance in the heavy, malordorous atmosphere beneath the low vault. Madame Lecoeur, however, was at work on her butter at one of the tables placed parallel with the Rue Berger, and here a pale light filtered through the vent-holes. The tables, which are continually sluiced with a flood of water from the taps, are as white as though they were quite new. With her back turned to the pump in the rear, Madame Lecoeur was kneading her butter in a kind of oak box. She took some of different sorts which lay beside her, and mixed the varieties together, correcting one by another, just as is done in the blending of wines. Bent almost double, and showing sharp, bony shoulders, and arms bared to the elbows, as scraggy and knotted as pea-rods, she dug her fists into the greasy paste in front of her, which was assuming a whitish and chalky appearance. It was trying work, and she heaved a sigh at each fresh effort.

"Mademoiselle Saget wants to speak to you, aunt," said La Sarriette.

Madame Lecoeur stopped her work, and pulled her cap over her hair with her greasy fingers, seemingly quite careless of staining it. "I've nearly finished. Ask her to wait a moment," she said.

"She's got something very particular to tell you," continued La Sarriette.

"I won't be more than a minute, my dear."

Then she again plunged her arms into the butter, which buried them up to the elbows. Previously softened in warm water, it covered Madame Lecoeur's parchment-like skin as with an oily film, and threw the big purple veins that streaked her flesh into strong relief. La Sarriette was quite disgusted by the sight of those hideous arms working so frantically amidst the melting mass. However, she could recall the time when her own pretty little hands had manipulated the butter for whole afternoons at a time. It had even been a sort of almond-paste to her, a cosmetic which had kept her skin white and her nails delicately pink; and even now her slender fingers retained the suppleness it had endowed them with.

"I don't think that butter of yours will be very good, aunt," she continued, after a pause. "Some of the sorts seem much too strong."

"I'm quite aware of that," replied Madame Lecoeur, between a couple of groans. "But what can I do? I must use everything up. There are some folks who insist upon having butter cheap, and so cheap butter must be made for them. Oh! it's always quite good enough for those who buy it."

La Sarriette reflected that she would hardly care to eat butter which had been worked by her aunt's arms. Then she glanced at a little jar full of a sort of reddish dye. "Your colouring is too pale," she said.

This colouring-matter—"raucourt," as the Parisians call it is used to give the butter a fine yellow tint. The butter women imagine that its composition is known only to themselves, and keep it very secret. However, it is merely made from anotta;[*] though a composition of carrots and marigold is at times substituted for it.

[*] Anotta, which is obtained from the pulp surrounding the
seeds of the Bixa Orellana, is used for a good many
purposes besides the colouring of butter and cheese. It
frequently enters into the composition of chocolate, and is
employed to dye nankeen. Police court proceedings have also
shown that it is well known to the London milkmen, who are
in the habit of adding water to their merchandise.
—Translator.

"Come, do be quick!" La Sarriette now exclaimed, for she was getting impatient, and was, moreover, no longer accustomed to the malodorous atmosphere of the cellar. "Mademoiselle Saget will be going. I fancy she's got something very important to tell you abut my uncle Gavard."

On hearing this, Madame Lecoeur abruptly ceased working. She at once abandoned both butter and dye, and did not even wait to wipe her arms. With a slight tap of her hand she settled her cap on her head again, and made her way up the steps, at her niece's heels, anxiously repeating: "Do you really think that she'll have gone away?"

She was reassured, however, on catching sight of Mademoiselle Saget amidst the cheeses. The old maid had taken good care not to go away before Madame Lecoeur's arrival. The three women seated themselves at the far end of the stall, crowding closely together, and their faces almost touching one another. Mademoiselle Saget remained silent for two long minutes, and then, seeing that the others were burning with curiosity, she began, in her shrill voice: "You know that Florent! Well, I can tell you now where he comes from."

For another moment she kept them in suspense; and then, in a deep, melodramatic voice, she said: "He comes from the galleys!"

The cheeses were reeking around the three women. On the two shelves at the far end of the stall were huge masses of butter: Brittany butters overflowing from baskets; Normandy butters, wrapped in canvas, and resembling models of stomachs over which some sculptor had thrown damp cloths to keep them from drying; while other great blocks had been cut into, fashioned into perpendicular rocky masses full of crevasses and valleys, and resembling fallen mountain crests gilded by the pale sun of an autumn evening.

Beneath the stall show-table, formed of a slab of red marble veined with grey, baskets of eggs gleamed with a chalky whiteness; while on layers of straw in boxes were Bondons, placed end to end, and Gournays, arranged like medals, forming darker patches tinted with green. But it was upon the table that the cheeses appeared in greatest profusion. Here, by the side of the pound-rolls of butter lying on white-beet leaves, spread a gigantic Cantal cheese, cloven here and there as by an axe; then came a golden-hued Cheshire, and next a Gruyere, resembling a wheel fallen from some barbarian chariot; whilst farther on were some Dutch cheeses, suggesting decapitated heads suffused with dry blood, and having all that hardness of skulls which in France has gained them the name of "death's heads." Amidst the heavy exhalations of these, a Parmesan set a spicy aroma. Then there came three Brie cheeses displayed on round platters, and looking like melancholy extinct moons. Two of them, very dry, were at the full; the third, in its second quarter, was melting away in a white cream, which had spread into a pool and flowed over the little wooden barriers with which an attempt had been made to arrest its course. Next came some Port Saluts, similar to antique discs, with exergues bearing their makers' names in print. A Romantour, in its tin-foil wrapper, suggested a bar of nougat or some sweet cheese astray amidst all these pungent, fermenting curds. The Roqueforts under their glass covers also had a princely air, their fat faces marbled with blue and yellow, as though they were suffering from some unpleasant malady such as attacks the wealthy gluttons who eat too many truffles. And on a dish by the side of these, the hard grey goats' milk cheeses, about the size of a child's fist, resembled the pebbles which the billy-goats send rolling down the stony paths as they clamber along ahead of their flocks. Next came the strong smelling cheeses: the Mont d'Ors, of a bright yellow hue, and exhaling a comparatively mild odour; the Troyes, very thick, and bruised at the edges, and of a far more pungent smell, recalling the dampness of a cellar; the Camemberts, suggestive of high game; the square Neufchatels, Limbourgs, Marolles, and Pont l'Eveques, each adding its own particular sharp scent to the malodorous bouquet, till it became perfectly pestilential; the Livarots, ruddy in hue, and as irritating to the throat as sulphur fumes; and, lastly, stronger than all the others, the Olivets, wrapped in walnut leaves, like the carrion which peasants cover with branches as it lies rotting in the hedgerow under the blazing sun.

The heat of the afternoon had softened the cheeses; the patches of mould on their crusts were melting, and glistening with tints of ruddy bronze and verdigris. Beneath their cover of leaves, the skins of the Olivets seemed to be heaving as with the slow, deep respiration of a sleeping man. A Livarot was swarming with life; and in a fragile box behind the scales a Gerome flavoured with aniseed diffused such a pestilential smell that all around it the very flies had fallen lifeless on the gray-veined slap of ruddy marble.

This Gerome was almost immediately under Mademoiselle Saget's nose; so she drew back, and leaned her head against the big sheets of white and yellow paper which were hanging in a corner.

"Yes," she repeated, with an expression of disgust, "he comes from the galleys! Ah, those Quenu-Gradelles have no reason to put on so many airs!"

Madame Lecoeur and La Sarriette, however, had burst into exclamations of astonishment: "It wasn't possible, surely! What had he done to be sent to the galleys? Could anyone, now, have ever suspected that Madame Quenu, whose virtue was the pride of the whole neighbourhood, would choose a convict for a lover?"

"Ah, but you don't understand at all!" cried the old maid impatiently. "Just listen, now, while I explain things. I was quite certain that I had seen that great lanky fellow somewhere before."

Then she proceeded to tell them Florent's story. She had recalled to mind a vague report which had circulated of a nephew of old Gradelle being transported to Cayenne for murdering six gendarmes at a barricade. She had even seen this nephew on one occasion in the Rue Pirouette. The pretended cousin was undoubtedly the same man. Then she began to bemoan her waning powers. Her memory was quite going, she said; she would soon be unable to remember anything. And she bewailed her perishing memory as bitterly as any learned man might bewail the loss of his notes representing the work of a life-time, on seeing them swept away by a gust of wind.

"Six gendarmes!" murmured La Sarriette, admiringly; "he must have a very heavy fist!"

"And he's made away with plenty of others, as well," added Mademoiselle Saget. "I shouldn't advise you to meet him at night!"

"What a villain!" stammered out Madame Lecoeur, quite terrified.

The slanting beams of the sinking sun were now enfilading the pavilion, and the odour of the cheeses became stronger than ever. That of the Marolles seemed to predominate, borne hither and thither in powerful whiffs. Then, however, the wind appeared to change, and suddenly the emanations of the Limbourgs were wafted towards the three women, pungent and bitter, like the last gasps of a dying man.

"But in that case," resumed Madame Lecoeur, "he must be fat Lisa's brother-in-law. And we thought that he was her lover!"

The women exchanged glances. This aspect of the case took them by surprise. They were loth to give up their first theory. However, La Sarriette, turning to Mademoiselle Saget, remarked: "That must have been all wrong. Besides, you yourself say that he's always running after the two Mehudin girls."

"Certainly he is," exclaimed Mademoiselle Saget sharply, fancying that her word was doubted. "He dangles about them every evening. But, after all, it's no concern of ours, is it? We are virtuous women, and what he does makes no difference to us, the horrid scoundrel!"

"No, certainly not," agreed the other two. "He's a consummate villain."

The affair was becoming tragical. Of course beautiful Lisa was now out of the question, but for this they found ample consolation in prophesying that Florent would bring about some frightful catastrophe. It was quite clear, they said, that he had got some base design in his head. When people like him escaped from gaol it was only to burn everything down; and if he had come to the markets it must assuredly be for some abominable purpose. Then they began to indulge in the wildest suppositions. The two dealers declared that they would put additional padlocks to the doors of their storerooms; and La Sarriette called to mind that a basket of peaches had been stolen from her during the previous week. Mademoiselle Saget, however, quite frightened the two others by informing them that that was not the way in which the Reds behaved; they despised such trifles as baskets of peaches; their plan was to band themselves together in companies of two or three hundred, kill everybody they came across, and then plunder and pillage at their ease. That was "politics," she said, with the superior air of one who knew what she was talking about. Madame Lecoeur felt quite ill. She already saw Florent and his accomplices hiding in the cellars, and rushing out during the night to set the markets in flames and sack Paris.

"Ah! by the way," suddenly exclaimed the old maid, "now I think of it, there's all that money of old Gradelle's! Dear me, dear me, those Quenus can't be at all at their ease!"

She now looked quite gay again. The conversation took a fresh turn, and the others fell foul of the Quenus when Mademoiselle Saget had told them the history of the treasure discovered in the salting-tub, with every particular of which she was acquainted. She was even able to inform them of the exact amount of the money found—eighty-five thousand francs—though neither Lisa nor Quenu was aware of having revealed this to a living soul. However, it was clear that the Quenus had not given the great lanky fellow his share. He was too shabbily dressed for that. Perhaps he had never even heard of the discovery of the treasure. Plainly enough, they were all thieves in his family. Then the three women bent their heads together and spoke in lower tones. They were unanimously of opinion that it might perhaps be dangerous to attack the beautiful Lisa, but it was decidedly necessary that they should settle the Red Republican's hash, so that he might no longer prey upon the purse of poor Monsieur Gavard.

At the mention of Gavard there came a pause. The gossips looked at each other with a circumspect air. And then, as they drew breath, they inhaled the odour of the Camemberts, whose gamy scent had overpowered the less penetrating emanations of the Marolles and the Limbourgs, and spread around with remarkable power. Every now and then, however, a slight whiff, a flutelike note, came from the Parmesan, while the Bries contributed a soft, musty scent, the gentle, insipid sound, as it were, of damp tambourines. Next followed an overpowering refrain from the Livarots, and afterwards the Gerome, flavoured with aniseed, kept up the symphony with a high prolonged note, like that of a vocalist during a pause in the accompaniment.

"I have seen Madame Leonce," Mademoiselle Saget at last continued, with a significant expression.

At this the two others became extremely attentive. Madame Leonce was the doorkeeper of the house where Gavard lived in the Rue de la Cossonnerie. It was an old house standing back, with its ground floor occupied by an importer of oranges and lemons, who had had the frontage coloured blue as high as the first floor. Madame Leonce acted as Gavard's housekeeper, kept the keys of his cupboards and closets, and brought him up tisane when he happened to catch cold. She was a severe-looking woman, between fifty and sixty years of age, and spoke slowly, but at endless length. Mademoiselle Saget, who went to drink coffee with her every Wednesday evening, had cultivated her friendship more closely than ever since the poultry dealer had gone to lodge in the house. They would talk about the worthy man for hours at a time. They both professed the greatest affection for him, and a keen desire to ensure his comfort and happiness.

"Yes, I have seen Madame Leonce," repeated the old maid. "We had a cup of coffee together last night. She was greatly worried. It seems that Monsieur Gavard never comes home now before one o'clock in the morning. Last Sunday she took him up some broth, as she thought he looked quite ill."

"Oh, she knows very well what she's about," exclaimed Madame Lecoeur, whom these attentions to Gavard somewhat alarmed.

Mademoiselle Saget felt bound to defend her friend. "Oh, really, you are quite mistaken," said she. "Madame Leonce is much above her position; she is quite a lady. If she wanted to enrich herself at Monsieur Gavard's expense, she might easily have done so long ago. It seems that he leaves everything lying about in the most careless fashion. It's about that, indeed, that I want to speak to you. But you'll not repeat anything I say, will you? I am telling it you in strict confidence."

Both the others swore that they would never breathe a word of what they might hear; and they craned out their necks with eager curiosity, whilst the old maid solemnly resumed: "Well, then, Monsieur Gavard has been behaving very strangely of late. He has been buying firearms—a great big pistol—one of those which revolve, you know. Madame Leonce says that things are awful, for this pistol is always lying about on the table or the mantelpiece; and she daren't dust anywhere near it. But that isn't all. His money—"

"His money!" echoed Madame Lecoeur, with blazing cheeks.

"Well, he's disposed of all his stocks and shares. He's sold everything, and keeps a great heap of gold in a cupboard."

"A heap of gold!" exclaimed La Sarriette in ecstasy.

"Yes, a great heap of gold. It covers a whole shelf, and is quite dazzling. Madame Leonce told me that one morning Gavard opened the cupboard in her presence, and that the money quite blinded her, it shone so."

There was another pause. The eyes of the three women were blinking as though the dazzling pile of gold was before them. Presently La Sarriette began to laugh.

"What a jolly time I would have with Jules if my uncle would give that money to me!" said she.

Madame Lecoeur, however, seemed quite overwhelmed by this revelation, crushed beneath the weight of the gold which she could not banish from her sight. Covetous envy thrilled her. But at last, raising her skinny arms and shrivelled hands, her finger-nails still stuffed with butter, she stammered in a voice full of bitter distress: "Oh, I mustn't think of it! It's too dreadful!"

"Well, it would all be yours, you know, if anything were to happen to Monsieur Gavard," retorted Mademoiselle Saget. "If I were in your place, I would look after my interests. That revolver means nothing good, you may depend upon it. Monsieur Gavard has got into the hands of evil counsellors; and I'm afraid it will all end badly."

Then the conversation again turned upon Florent. The three women assailed him more violently than ever. And afterwards, with perfect composure, they began to discuss what would be the result of all these dark goings-on so far as he and Gavard were concerned; certainly it would be no pleasant one if there was any gossiping. And thereupon they swore that they themselves would never repeat a word of what they knew; not, however, because that scoundrel Florent merited any consideration, but because it was necessary, at all costs, to save that worthy Monsieur Gavard from being compromised. Then they rose from their seats, and Mademoiselle Saget was burning as if to go away when the butter dealer asked her: "All the same, in case of accident, do you think that Madame Leonce can be trusted? I dare say she has the key of the cupboard."

"Well, that's more than I can tell you," replied the old maid. "I believe she's a very honest woman; but, after all, there's no telling. There are circumstances, you know, which tempt the best of people. Anyhow, I've warned you both; and you must do what you think proper."

As the three women stood there, taking leave of each other, the odour of the cheeses seemed to become more pestilential than ever. It was a cacophony of smells, ranging from the heavily oppressive odour of the Dutch cheeses and the Gruyeres to the alkaline pungency of the Olivets. From the Cantal, the Cheshire, and the goats' milk cheeses there seemed to come a deep breath like the sound of a bassoon, amidst which the sharp, sudden whiffs of the Neufchatels, the Troyes, and the Mont d'Ors contributed short, detached notes. And then the different odours appeared to mingle one with another, the reek of the Limbourgs, the Port Saluts, the Geromes, the Marolles, the Livarots, and the Pont l'Eveques uniting in one general, overpowering stench sufficient to provoke asphyxia. And yet it almost seemed as though it were not the cheeses but the vile words of Madame Lecoeur and Mademoiselle Saget that diffused this awful odour.

"I'm very much obliged to you, indeed I am," said the butter dealer. "If ever I get rich, you shall not find yourself forgotten."

The old maid still lingered in the stall. Taking up a Bondon, she turned it round, and put it down on the slab again. Then she asked its price.

"To me!" she added, with a smile.

"Oh, nothing to you," replied Madame Lecoeur. "I'll make you a present of it." And again she exclaimed: "Ah, if I were only rich!"

Mademoiselle Saget thereupon told her that some day or other she would be rich. The Bondon had already disappeared within the old maid's bag. And now the butter dealer returned to the cellar, while Mademoiselle Saget escorted La Sarriette back to her stall. On reaching it they talked for a moment or two about Monsieur Jules. The fruits around them diffused a fresh scent of summer.

"It smells much nicer here than at your aunt's," said the old maid. "I felt quite ill a little time ago. I can't think how she manages to exist there. But here it's very sweet and pleasant. It makes you look quite rosy, my dear."

La Sarriette began to laugh, for she was fond of compliments. Then she served a lady with a pound of mirabelle plums, telling her that they were as sweet as sugar.

"I should like to buy some of those mirabelles too," murmured Mademoiselle Saget, when the lady had gone away; "only I want so few. A lone woman, you know."

"Take a handful of them," exclaimed the pretty brunette. "That won't ruin me. Send Jules back to me if you see him, will you? You'll most likely find him smoking his cigar on the first bench to the right as you turn out of the covered way."

Mademoiselle Saget distended her fingers as widely as possible in order to take a handful of mirabelles, which joined the Bondon in the bag. Then she pretended to leave the market, but in reality made a detour by one of the covered ways, thinking, as she walked slowly along, that the mirabelles and Bondon would not make a very substantial dinner. When she was unable, during her afternoon perambulations, to wheedle stallkeepers into filling her bag for her, she was reduced to dining off the merest scraps. So she now slyly made her way back to the butter pavilions, where, on the side of the Rue Berger, at the back of the offices of the oyster salesmen, there were some stalls at which cooked meat was sold. Every morning little closed box-like carts, lined with zinc and furnished with ventilators, drew up in front of the larger Parisian kitchens and carried away the leavings of the restaurants, the embassies, and State Ministries. These leavings were conveyed to the market cellars and there sorted. By nine o'clock plates of food were displayed for sale at prices ranging from three to five sous, their contents comprising slices of meat, scraps of game, heads and tails of fishes, bits of galantine, stray vegetables, and, by way of dessert, cakes scarcely cut into, and other confectionery. Poor starving wretches, scantily-paid clerks, and women shivering with fever were to be seen crowding around, and the street lads occasionally amused themselves by hooting the pale-faced individuals, known to be misers, who only made their purchases after slyly glancing about them to see that they were not observed.[*] Mademoiselle Saget wriggled her way to a stall, the keeper of which boasted that the scraps she sold came exclusively from the Tuileries. One day, indeed, she had induced the old maid to buy a slice of leg of mutton by informing that it had come from the plate of the Emperor himself; and this slice of mutton, eaten with no little pride, had been a soothing consolation to Mademoiselle Saget's vanity. The wariness of her approach to the stall was, moreover, solely caused by her desire to keep well with the neighbouring shop people, whose premises she was eternally haunting without ever buying anything. Her usual tactics were to quarrel with them as soon as she had managed to learn their histories, when she would bestow her patronage upon a fresh set, desert it in due course, and then gradually make friends again with those with whom she had quarrelled. In this way she made the complete circuit of the market neighbourhood, ferreting about in every shop and stall. Anyone would have imagined that she consumed an enormous amount of provisions, whereas, in point of fact, she lived solely upon presents and the few scraps which she was compelled to buy when people were not in the giving vein.

[*] The dealers in these scraps are called bijoutiers, or
jewellers, whilst the scraps themselves are known as
harlequins, the idea being that they are of all colours
and shapes when mingled together, thus suggesting
harlequin's variegated attire.—Translator.

On that particular evening there was only a tall old man standing in front of the stall. He was sniffing at a plate containing a mixture of meat and fish. Mademoiselle Saget, in her turn, began to sniff at a plate of cold fried fish. The price of it was three sous, but, by dint of bargaining, she got it for two. The cold fish then vanished into the bag. Other customers now arrived, and with a uniform impulse lowered their noses over the plates. The smell of the stall was very disgusting, suggestive alike of greasy dishes and a dirty sink.[*]

[*] Particulars of the strange and repulsive trade in
harlequins, which even nowadays is not extinct, will be
found in Privat d'Anglemont's well-known book Paris
Anecdote, written at the very period with which M. Zola
deals in the present work. My father, Henry Vizetelly, also
gave some account of it in his Glances Back through Seventy
Years, in a chapter describing the odd ways in which
certain Parisians contrive to get a living.—Translator.

"Come and see me to-morrow," the stallkeeper called out to the old maid, "and I'll put something nice on one side for you. There's going to be a grand dinner at the Tuileries to-night."

Mademoiselle Saget was just promising to come, when, happening to turn round, she discovered Gavard looking at her and listening to what she was saying. She turned very red, and, contracting her skinny shoulders, hurried away, affecting not to recognise him. Gavard, however, followed her for a few yards, shrugging his shoulders and muttering to himself that he was no longer surprised at the old shrew's malice, now he knew that "she poisoned herself with the filth carted away from the Tuileries."

On the very next morning vague rumours began to circulate in the markets. Madame Lecoeur and La Sarriette were in their own fashion keeping the oaths of silence they had taken. For her own part, Mademoiselle Saget warily held her tongue, leaving the two others to circulate the story of Florent's antecedents. At first only a few meagre details were hawked about in low tones; then various versions of the facts got into circulation, incidents were exaggerated, and gradually quite a legend was constructed, in which Florent played the part of a perfect bogey man. He had killed ten gendarmes at the barricade in the Rue Greneta, said some; he had returned to France on a pirate ship whose crew scoured the seas to murder everyone they came across, said others; whilst a third set declared that ever since his arrival he had been observed prowling about at nighttime with suspicious-looking characters, of whom he was undoubtedly the leader. Soon the imaginative market women indulged in the highest flights of fancy, revelled in the most melodramatic ideas. There was talk of a band of smugglers plying their nefarious calling in the very heart of Paris, and of a vast central association formed for systematically robbing the stalls in the markets. Much pity was expressed for the Quenu-Gradelles, mingled with malicious allusions to their uncle's fortune. That fortune was an endless subject of discussion. The general opinion was that Florent had returned to claim his share of the treasure; however, as no good reason was forthcoming to explain why the division had not taken place already, it was asserted that Florent was waiting for some opportunity which might enable him to pocket the whole amount. The Quenu-Gradelles would certainly be found murdered some morning, it was said; and a rumour spread that dreadful quarrels already took place every night between the two brothers and beautiful Lisa.

When these stories reached the ears of the beautiful Norman, she shrugged her shoulders and burst out laughing.

"Get away with you!" she cried, "you don't know him. Why, the dear fellow's as gentle as a lamb."

She had recently refused the hand of Monsieur Lebigre, who had at last ventured upon a formal proposal. For two months past he had given the Mehudins a bottle of some liqueur every Sunday. It was Rose who brought it, and she was always charged with a compliment for La Normande, some pretty speech which she faithfully repeated, without appearing in the slightest degree embarrassed by the peculiar commission. When Monsieur Lebigre was rejected, he did not pine, but to show that he took no offence and was still hopeful, he sent Rose on the following Sunday with two bottles of champagne and a large bunch of flowers. She gave them into the handsome fish-girl's own hands, repeating, as she did so, the wine dealer's prose madrigal:

"Monsieur Lebigre begs you to drink this to his health, which has been greatly shaken by you know what. He hopes that you will one day be willing to cure him, by being for him as pretty and as sweet as these flowers."

La Normande was much amused by the servant's delighted air. She kissed her as she spoke to her of her master, and asked her if he wore braces, and snored at nights. Then she made her take the champagne and flowers back with her. "Tell Monsieur Lebigre," said she, "that he's not to send you here again. It quite vexes me to see you coming here so meekly, with your bottles under your arms."

"Oh, he wishes me to come," replied Rose, as she went away. "It is wrong of you to distress him. He is a very handsome man."

La Normande, however, was quite conquered by Florent's affectionate nature. She continued to follow Muche's lessons of an evening in the lamplight, indulging the while in a dream of marrying this man who was so kind to children. She would still keep her fish stall, while he would doubtless rise to a position of importance in the administrative staff of the markets. This dream of hers, however, was scarcely furthered by the tutor's respectful bearing towards her. He bowed to her, and kept himself at a distance, when she have liked to laugh with him, and love him as she knew how to love. But it was just this covert resistance on Florent's part which continually brought her back to the dream of marrying him. She realised that he lived in a loftier sphere than her own; and by becoming his wife she imagined that her vanity would reap no little satisfaction.

She was greatly surprised when she learned the history of the man she loved. He had never mentioned a word of those things to her; and she scolded him about it. His extraordinary adventures only increased her tenderness for him, and for evenings together she made him relate all that had befallen him. She trembled with fear lest the police should discover him; but he reassured her, saying that the matter was now too old for the police to trouble their heads about it. One evening he told her of the woman on the Boulevard Montmartre, the woman in the pink bonnet, whose blood had dyed his hands. He still frequently thought of that poor creature. His anguish-stricken mind had often dwelt upon her during the clear nights he had passed in Cayenne; and he had returned to France with a wild dream of meeting her again on some footway in the bright sunshine, even though he could still feel her corpse-like weight across his legs. And yet, he thought, she might perhaps have recovered. At times he received quite a shock while he was walking through the streets, on fancying that he recognised her; and he followed pink bonnets and shawl-draped shoulders with a wildly beating heart. When he closed his eyes he could see her walking, and advancing towards him; but she let her shawl slip down, showing the two red stains on her chemisette; and then he saw that her face was pale as wax, and that her eyes were blank, and her lips distorted by pain. For a long time he suffered from not knowing her name, from being forced to look upon her as a mere shadow, whose recollection filled him with sorrow. Whenever any idea of woman crossed his mind it was always she that rose up before him, as the one pure, tender wife. He often found himself fancying that she might be looking for him on that boulevard where she had fallen dead, and that if she had met him a few seconds sooner she would have given him a life of joy. And he wished for no other wife; none other existed for him. When he spoke of her, his voice trembled to such a degree that La Normande, her wits quickened by her love, guessed his secret, and felt jealous.

"Oh, it's really much better that you shouldn't see her again," she said maliciously. "She can't look particularly nice by this time."

Florent turned pale with horror at the vision which these words evoked. His love was rotting in her grave. He could not forgive La Normande's savage cruelty, which henceforth made him see the grinning jaws and hollow eyes of a skeleton within that lovely pink bonnet. Whenever the fish-girl tried to joke with him on the subject he turned quite angry, and silenced her with almost coarse language.

That, however, which especially surprised the beautiful Norman in these revelations was the discovery that she had been quite mistaken in supposing that she was enticing a lover away from handsome Lisa. This so diminished her feeling of triumph, that for a week or so her love for Florent abated. She consoled herself, however, with the story of the inheritance, no longer calling Lisa a strait-laced prude, but a thief who kept back her brother-in-law's money, and assumed sanctimonious airs to deceive people. Every evening, while Muche took his writing lesson, the conversation turned upon old Gradelle's treasure.

"Did anyone ever hear of such an idea?" the fish-girl would exclaim, with a laugh. "Did the old man want to salt his money, since he put it in a salting-tub? Eighty-five thousand francs! That's a nice sum of money! And, besides, the Quenus, no doubt, lied about it—there was perhaps two or three times as much. Ah, if I were in your place, I shouldn't lose any time about claiming my share; indeed I shouldn't."

"I've no need of anything," was Florent's invariable answer. "I shouldn't know what to do with the money if I had it."

"Oh, you're no man!" cried La Normande, losing all control over herself. "It's pitiful! Can't you see that the Quenus are laughing at you? That great fat thing passes all her husband's old clothes over to you. I'm not saying this to hurt your feelings, but everybody makes remarks about it. Why, the whole neighbourhood has seen the greasy pair of trousers, which you're now wearing, on your brother's legs for three years and more! If I were in your place I'd throw their dirty rags in their faces, and insist upon my rights. Your share comes to forty-two thousand five hundred francs, doesn't it? Well, I shouldn't go out of the place till I'd got forty-two thousand five hundred francs."

It was useless for Florent to explain to her that his sister-in-law had offered to pay him his share, that she was taking care of it for him, and that it was he himself who had refused to receive it. He entered into the most minute particulars, seeking to convince her of the Quenus' honesty, but she sarcastically replied: "Oh, yes, I dare say! I know all about their honesty. That fat thing folds it up every morning and puts it away in her wardrobe for fear it should get soiled. Really, I quite pity you, my poor friend. It's easy to gull you, for you can't see any further than a child of five. One of these days she'll simply put your money in her pocket, and you'll never look on it again. Shall I go, now, and claim your share for you, just to see what she says? There'd be some fine fun, I can tell you! I'd either have the money, or I'd break everything in the house—I swear I would!"

"No, no, it's no business of yours," Florent replied, quite alarmed. "I'll see about it; I may possibly be wanting some money soon."

At this La Normande assumed an air of doubt, shrugged her shoulders, and told him that he was really too chicken-hearted. Her one great aim now was to embroil him with the Quenu-Gradelles, and she employed every means she could think of to effect her purpose, both anger and banter, as well as affectionate tenderness. She also cherished another design. When she had succeeded in marrying Florent, she would go and administer a sound cuffing to beautiful Lisa, if the latter did not yield up the money. As she lay awake in her bed at night she pictured every detail of the scene. She saw herself sitting down in the middle of the pork shop in the busiest part of the day, and making a terrible fuss. She brooded over this idea to such an extent, it obtained such a hold upon her, that she would have been willing to marry Florent simply in order to be able to go and demand old Gradelle's forty-two thousand five hundred francs.

Old Madame Mehudin, exasperated by La Normande's dismissal of Monsieur Lebigre, proclaimed everywhere that her daughter was mad, and that the "long spindle-shanks" must have administered some insidious drug to her. When she learned the Cayenne story, her anger was terrible. She called Florent a convict and murderer, and said it was no wonder that his villainy had kept him lank and flat. Her versions of Florent's biography were the most horrible of all that were circulated in the neighbourhood. At home she kept a moderately quiet tongue in her head, and restricted herself to muttered indignation, and a show of locking up the drawer where the silver was kept whenever Florent arrived. One day, however, after a quarrel with her elder daughter, she exclaimed:

"Things can't go on much longer like this! It is that vile man who is setting you against me. Take care that you don't try me too far, or I'll go and denounce him to the police. I will, as true as I stand here!"

"You'll denounce him!" echoed La Normande, trembling violently, and clenching her fists. "You'd better not! Ah, if you weren't my mother——"

At this, Claire, who was a spectator of the quarrel, began to laugh, with a nervous laughter that seemed to rasp her throat. For some time past she had been gloomier and more erratic than ever, invariably showing red eyes and a pale face.

"Well, what would you do?" she asked. "Would you give her a cuffing? Perhaps you'd like to give me, your sister, one as well? I dare say it will end in that. But I'll clear the house of him. I'll go to the police to save mother the trouble."

Then, as La Normande almost choked with the angry threats that rose to her throat, the younger girl added: "I'll spare you the exertion of beating me. I'll throw myself into the river as I come back over the bridge."

Big tears were streaming from her eyes; and she rushed off to her bedroom, banging the doors violently behind her. Old Madame Mehudin said nothing more about denouncing Florent. Muche, however, told La Normande that he met his grandma talking with Monsieur Lebigre in every corner of the neighbourhood.

The rivalry between the beautiful Norman and the beautiful Lisa now assumed a less aggressive but more disturbing character. In the afternoon, when the red-striped canvas awning was drawn down in front of the pork shop, the fish-girl would remark that the big fat thing felt afraid, and was concealing herself. She was also much exasperated by the occasional lowering of the window-blind, on which was pictured a hunting-breakfast in a forest glade, with ladies and gentlemen in evening dress partaking of a red pasty, as big as themselves, on the yellow grass.

Beautiful Lisa, however, was by no means afraid. As soon as the sun began to sink she drew up the blind; and, as she sat knitting behind her counter, she serenely scanned the market square, where numerous urchins were poking about in the soil under the gratings which protected the roots of the plane-trees, while porters smoked their pipes on the benches along the footway, at either end of which was an advertisement column covered with theatrical posters, alternately green, yellow, red, and blue, like some harlequin's costume. And while pretending to watch the passing vehicles, Lisa would really be scrutinising the beautiful Norman. She might occasionally be seen bending forward, as though her eyes were following the Bastille and Place Wagram omnibus to the Pointe Saint Eustache, where it always stopped for a time. But this was only a manoeuvre to enable her to get a better view of the fish-girl, who, as a set-off against the blind, retorted by covering her head and fish with large sheets of brown paper, on the pretext of warding off the rays of the setting sun. The advantage at present was on Lisa's side, for as the time for striking the decisive blow approached she manifested the calmest serenity of bearing, whereas her rival, in spite of all her efforts to attain the same air of distinction, always lapsed into some piece of gross vulgarity, which she afterwards regretted. La Normande's ambition was to look "like a lady." Nothing irritated her more than to hear people extolling the good manners of her rival. This weak point of hers had not escaped old Madame Mehudin's observation, and she now directed all her attacks upon it.

"I saw Madame Quenu standing at her door this evening," she would say sometimes. "It is quite amazing how well she wears. And she's so refined-looking, too; quite the lady, indeed. It's the counter that does it, I'm sure. A fine counter gives a woman such a respectable look."

In this remark there was a veiled allusion to Monsieur Lebigre's proposal. The beautiful Norman would make no reply; but for a moment or two she would seem deep in thought. In her mind's eye she saw herself behind the counter of the wine shop at the other corner of the street, forming a pendent, as it were, to beautiful Lisa. It was this that first shook her love for Florent.

To tell the truth, it was now becoming a very difficult thing to defend Florent. The whole neighbourhood was in arms against him; it seemed as though everyone had an immediate interest in exterminating him. Some of the market people swore that he had sold himself to the police; while others asserted that he had been seen in the butter-cellar, attempting to make holes in the wire grating, with the intention of tossing lighted matches through them. There was a vast increase of slander, a perfect flood of abuse, the source of which could not be exactly determined. The fish pavilion was the last one to join in the revolt against the inspector. The fish-wives liked Florent on account of his gentleness, and for some time they defended him; but, influenced by the stallkeepers of the butter and fruit pavilions, they at last gave way. Then hostilities began afresh between these huge, swelling women and the lean and lank inspector. He was lost in the whirl of the voluminous petticoats and buxom bodices which surged furiously around his scraggy shoulders. However, he understood nothing, but pursued his course towards the realisation of his one haunting idea.

At every hour of the day, and in every corner of the market, Mademoiselle Saget's black bonnet was now to be seen in the midst of this outburst of indignation. Her little pale face seemed to multiply. She had sworn a terrible vengeance against the company which assembled in Monsieur Lebigre's little cabinet. She accused them of having circulated the story that she lived on waste scraps of meat. The truth was that old Gavard had told the others one evening that the "old nanny-goat" who came to play the spy upon them gorged herself with the filth which the Bonapartist clique tossed away. Clemence felt quite ill on hearing this, and Robine hurriedly gulped down a draught of beer, as though to wash his throat. In Gavard's opinion, the scraps of meat left on the Emperor's plate were so much political ordure, the putrid remnants of all the filth of the reign. Thenceforth the party at Monsieur Lebigre's looked on Mademoiselle Saget as a creature whom no one could touch except with tongs. She was regarded as some unclean animal that battened upon corruption. Clemence and Gavard circulated the story so freely in the markets that the old maid found herself seriously injured in her intercourse with the shopkeepers, who unceremoniously bade her go off to the scrap-stalls when she came to haggle and gossip at their establishments without the least intention of buying anything. This cut her off from her sources of information; and sometimes she was altogether ignorant of what was happening. She shed tears of rage, and in one such moment of anger she bluntly said to La Sarriette and Madame Lecoeur: "You needn't give me any more hints: I'll settle your Gavard's hash for him now—that I will!"

The two women were rather startled, but refrained from all protestation. The next day, however, Mademoiselle Saget had calmed down, and again expressed much tender-hearted pity for that poor Monsieur Gavard who was so badly advised, and was certainly hastening to his ruin.

Gavard was undoubtedly compromising himself. Ever since the conspiracy had begun to ripen he had carried the revolver, which caused Madame Leonce so much alarm, in his pocket wherever he went. It was a big, formidable-looking weapon, which he had bought of the principal gunmaker in Paris. He exhibited it to all the women in the poultry market, like a schoolboy who has got some prohibited novel hidden in his desk. First he would allow the barrel to peer out of his pocket, and call attention to it with a wink. Then he affected a mysterious reticence, indulged in vague hints and insinuations—played, in short, the part of a man who revelled in feigning fear. The possession of this revolver gave him immense importance, placed him definitely amongst the dangerous characters of Paris. Sometimes, when he was safe inside his stall, he would consent to take it out of his pocket, and exhibit it to two or three of the women. He made them stand before him so as to conceal him with their petticoats, and then he brandished the weapon, cocked the lock, caused the breech to revolve, and took aim at one of the geese or turkeys that were hanging in the stall. He was immensely delighted at the alarm manifested by the women; but eventually reassured them by stating that the revolver was not loaded. However, he carried a supply of cartridges about with him, in a case which he opened with the most elaborate precautions. When he had allowed his friends to feel the weight of the cartridges, he would again place both weapon and ammunition in his pockets. And afterwards, crossing his arms over his breast, he would chatter away jubilantly for hours.

"A man's a man when he's got a weapon like that," he would say with a swaggering air. "I don't care a fig now for the gendarmes. A friend and I went to try it last Sunday on the plain of Saint Denis. Of course, you know, a man doesn't tell everyone that he's got a plaything of that sort. But, ah! my dears, we fired at a tree, and hit it every time. Ah, you'll see, you'll see. You'll hear of Anatole one of these days, I can tell you."

He had bestowed the name of Anatole upon the revolver; and he carried things so far that in a week's time both weapon and cartridges were known to all the women in the pavilion. His friendship for Florent seemed to them suspicious; he was too sleek and rich to be visited with the hatred that was manifested towards the inspector; still, he lost the esteem of the shrewder heads amongst his acquaintances, and succeeded in terrifying the timid ones. This delighted him immensely.

"It is very imprudent for a man to carry firearms about with him," said Mademoiselle Saget. "Monsieur Gavard's revolver will end by playing him a nasty trick."

Gavard now showed the most jubilant bearing at Monsieur Lebigre's. Florent, since ceasing to take his meals with the Quenus, had come almost to live in the little "cabinet." He breakfasted, dined, and constantly shut himself up there. In fact he had converted the place almost into a sort of private room of his own, where he left his old coats and books and papers lying about. Monsieur Lebigre had offered no objection to these proceedings; indeed, he had even removed one of the tables to make room for a cushioned bench, on which Florent could have slept had he felt so inclined. When the inspector manifested any scruples about taking advantage of Monsieur Lebigre's kindness, the latter told him to do as he pleased, saying that the whole house was at his service. Logre also manifested great friendship for him, and even constituted himself his lieutenant. He was constantly discussing affairs with him, rendering an account of the steps he was supposed to take, and furnishing the names of newly affiliated associates. Logre, indeed, had now assumed the duties of organiser; on him rested the task of bringing the various plotters together, forming the different sections, and weaving each mesh of the gigantic net into which Paris was to fall at a given signal. Florent meantime remained the leader, the soul of the conspiracy.

However, much as the hunchback seemed to toil, he attained no appreciable result. Although he had loudly asserted that in each district of Paris he knew two or three groups of men as determined and trustworthy as those who met at Monsieur Lebigre's, he had never yet given any precise information about them, but had merely mentioned a name here and there, and recounted stories of endless alleged secret expeditions, and the wonderful enthusiasm that the people manifested for the cause. He made a great point of the hand-grasps he had received. So-and-so, whom he thou'd and thee'd, had squeezed his fingers and declared he would join them. At the Gros Caillou a big, burly fellow, who would make a magnificent sectional leader, had almost dislocated his arm in his enthusiasm; while in the Rue Popincourt a whole group of working men had embraced him. He declared that at a day's notice a hundred thousand active supporters could be gathered together. Each time that he made his appearance in the little room, wearing an exhausted air, and dropping with apparent fatigue on the bench, he launched into fresh variations of his usual reports, while Florent duly took notes of what he said, and relied on him to realise his many promises. And soon in Florent's pockets the plot assumed life. The notes were looked upon as realities, as indisputable facts, upon which the entire plan of the rising was constructed. All that now remained to be done was to wait for a favourable opportunity, and Logre asserted with passionate gesticulations that the whole thing would go on wheels.

Florent was at last perfectly happy. His feet no longer seemed to tread the ground; he was borne aloft by his burning desire to pass sentence on all the wickedness he had seen committed. He had all the credulity of a little child, all the confidence of a hero. If Logre had told him that the Genius of Liberty perched on the Colonne de Juillet[*] would have come down and set itself at their head, he would hardly have expressed any surprise. In the evenings, at Monsieur Lebigre's, he showed great enthusiasm and spoke effusively of the approaching battle, as though it were a festival to which all good and honest folks would be invited. But although Gavard in his delight began to play with his revolver, Charvet got more snappish than ever, and sniggered and shrugged his shoulders. His rival's assumption of the leadership angered him extremely; indeed, quite disgusted him with politics. One evening when, arriving early, he happened to find himself alone with Logre and Lebigre, he frankly unbosomed himself.

[*] The column erected on the Place de la Bastille in memory
of the Revolution of July 1830, by which Charles X was
dethroned.—Translator.

"Why," said he, "that fellow Florent hasn't an idea about politics, and would have done far better to seek a berth as writing master in a ladies' school! It would be nothing short of a misfortune if he were to succeed, for, with his visionary social sentimentalities, he would crush us down beneath his confounded working men! It's all that, you know, which ruins the party. We don't need any more tearful sentimentalists, humanitarian poets, people who kiss and slobber over each other for the merest scratch. But he won't succeed! He'll just get locked up, and that will be the end of it."

Logre and the wine dealer made no remark, but allowed Charvet to talk on without interruption.

"And he'd have been locked up long ago," he continued, "if he were anything as dangerous as he fancies he is. The airs he puts on just because he's been to Cayenne are quite sickening. But I'm sure that the police knew of his return the very first day he set foot in Paris, and if they haven't interfered with him it's simply because they hold him in contempt."

At this Logre gave a slight start.

"They've been dogging me for the last fifteen years," resumed the Hebertist, with a touch of pride, "but you don't hear me proclaiming it from the house-tops. However, he won't catch me taking part in his riot. I'm not going to let myself be nabbed like a mere fool. I dare say he's already got half a dozen spies at his heels, who will take him by the scruff of the neck whenever the authorities give the word."

"Oh, dear, no! What an idea!" exclaimed Monsieur Lebigre, who usually observed complete silence. He was rather pale, and looked at Logre, who was gently rubbing his hump against the partition.

"That's mere imagination," murmured the hunchback.

"Very well; call it imagination, if you like," replied the tutor; "but I know how these things are arranged. At all events, I don't mean to let the 'coppers' nab me this time. You others, of course, will please yourselves, but if you take my advice—and you especially, Monsieur Lebigre—you'll take care not to let your establishment be compromised, or the authorities will close it."

At this Logre could not restrain a smile. On several subsequent occasions Charvet plied him and Lebigre with similar arguments, as though he wished to detach them from Florent's project by frightening them; and he was much surprised at the calmness and confidence which they both continued to manifest. For his own part, he still came pretty regularly in the evening with Clemence. The tall brunette was no longer a clerk at the fish auctions—Monsieur Manoury had discharged her.

"Those salesmen are all scoundrels!" Logre growled, when he heard of her dismissal.

Thereupon Clemence, who, lolling back against the partition, was rolling a cigarette between her long, slim fingers, replied in a sharp voice: "Oh, it's fair fighting! We don't hold the same political views, you know. That fellow Manoury, who's making no end of money, would lick the Emperor's boots. For my part, if I were an auctioneer, I wouldn't keep him in my service for an hour."

The truth was that she had been indulging in some clumsy pleasantry, amusing herself one day by inscribing in the sale-book, alongside of the dabs and skate and mackerel sold by auction, the names of some of the best-known ladies and gentlemen of the Court. This bestowal of piscine names upon high dignitaries, these entries of the sale of duchesses and baronesses at thirty sous apiece, had caused Monsieur Manoury much alarm. Gavard was still laughing over it.

"Well, never mind!" said he, patting Clemence's arm; "you are every inch a man, you are!"

Clemence had discovered a new method of mixing her grog. She began by filling her glass with hot water; and after adding some sugar she poured the rum drop by drop upon the slice of lemon floating on the surface, in such wise that it did not mix with the water. Then she lighted it and with a grave expression watched it blaze, slowly smoking her cigarette while the flame of the alcohol cast a greenish tinge over her face. "Grog," however, was an expensive luxury in which she could not afford to indulge after she had lost her place. Charvet told her, with a strained laugh, that she was no longer a millionaire. She supported herself by giving French lessons, at a very early hour in the morning, to a young lady residing in the Rue de Miromesnil, who was perfecting her education in secrecy, unknown even to her maid. And so now Clemence merely ordered a glass of beer in the evenings, but this she drank, it must be admitted, with the most philosophical composure.

The evenings in the little sanctum were now far less noisy than they had been. Charvet would suddenly lapse into silence, pale with suppressed rage, when the others deserted him to listen to his rival. The thought that he had been the king of the place, had ruled the whole party with despotic power before Florent's appearance there, gnawed at his heart, and he felt all the regretful pangs of a dethroned monarch. If he still came to the meetings, it was only because he could not resist the attraction of the little room where he had spent so many happy hours in tyrannising over Gavard and Robine. In those days even Logre's hump had been his property, as well as Alexandre's fleshy arms and Lacaille's gloomy face. He had done what he liked with them, stuffed his opinions down their throats, belaboured their shoulders with his sceptre. But now he endured much bitterness of spirit; and ended by quite ceasing to speak, simply shrugging his shoulders and whistling disdainfully, without condescending to combat the absurdities vented in his presence. What exasperated him more than anything else was the gradual way in which he had been ousted from his position of predominance without being conscious of it. He could not see that Florent was in any way his superior, and after hearing the latter speak for hours, in his gentle and somewhat sad voice, he often remarked: "Why, the fellow's a parson! He only wants a cassock!"

The others, however, to all appearance eagerly absorbed whatever the inspector said. When Charvet saw Florent's clothes hanging from every peg, he pretended not to know where he could put his hat so that it would not be soiled. He swept away the papers that lay about the little room, declaring that there was no longer any comfort for anyone in the place since that "gentleman" had taken possession of it. He even complained to the landlord, and asked if the room belonged to a single customer or to the whole company. This invasion of his realm was indeed the last straw. Men were brutes, and he conceived an unspeakable scorn for humanity when he saw Logre and Monsieur Lebigre fixing their eyes on Florent with rapt attention. Gavard with his revolver irritated him, and Robine, who sat silent behind his glass of beer, seemed to him to be the only sensible person in the company, and one who doubtless judged people by their real value, and was not led away by mere words. As for Alexandre and Lacaille, they confirmed him in his belief that "the people" were mere fools, and would require at least ten years of revolutionary dictatorship to learn how to conduct themselves.

Logre, however, declared that the sections would soon be completely organised; and Florent began to assign the different parts that each would have to play. One evening, after a final discussion in which he again got worsted, Charvet rose up, took his hat, and exclaimed: "Well, I'll wish you all good night. You can get your skulls cracked if it amuses you; but I would have you understand that I won't take any part in the business. I have never abetted anybody's ambition."

Clemence, who had also risen and was putting on her shawl, coldly added: "The plan's absurd."

Then, as Robine sat watching their departure with a gentle glance, Charvet asked him if he were not coming with them; but Robine, having still some beer left in his glass, contented himself with shaking hands. Charvet and Clemence never returned again; and Lacaille one day informed the company that they now frequented a beer-house in the Rue Serpente. He had seen them through the window, gesticulating with great energy, in the midst of an attentive group of very young men.

Florent was never able to enlist Claude amongst his supporters. He had once entertained the idea of gaining him over to his own political views, of making a disciple of him, an assistant in his revolutionary task; and in order to initiate him he had taken him one evening to Monsieur Lebigre's. Claude, however, spent the whole time in making a sketch of Robine, in his hat and chestnut cloak, and with his beard resting on the knob of his walking-stick.

"Really, you know," he said to Florent, as they came away, "all that you have been saying inside there doesn't interest me in the least. It may be very clever, but, for my own part, I see nothing in it. Still, you've got a splendid fellow there, that blessed Robine. He's as deep as a well. I'll come with you again some other time, but it won't be for politics. I shall make sketches of Logre and Gavard, so as to put them with Robine in a picture which I was thinking about while you were discussing the question of—what do you call it? eh? Oh, the question of the two Chambers. Just fancy, now, a picture of Gavard and Logre and Robine talking politics, entrenched behind their glasses of beer! It would be the success of the Salon, my dear fellow, an overwhelming success, a genuine modern picture!"

Florent was grieved by the artist's political scepticism; so he took him up to his bedroom, and kept him on the narrow balcony in front of the bluish mass of the markets, till two o'clock in the morning, lecturing him, and telling him that he was no man to show himself so indifferent to the happiness of his country.

"Well, you're perhaps right," replied Claude, shaking his head; "I'm an egotist. I can't even say that I paint for the good of my country; for, in the first place, my sketches frighten everybody, and then, when I'm busy painting, I think about nothing but the pleasure I take in it. When I'm painting, it is as though I were tickling myself; it makes me laugh all over my body. Well, I can't help it, you know; it's my nature to be like that; and you can't expect me to go and drown myself in consequence. Besides, France can get on very well without me, as my aunt Lisa says. And—may I be quite frank with you?—if I like you it's because you seem to me to follow politics just as I follow painting. You titillate yourself, my good friend."

Then, as Florent protested, he continued:

"Yes, yes; you are an artist in your own way; you dream of politics, and I'll wager you spend hours here at night gazing at the stars and imagining they are the voting-papers of infinity. And then you titillate yourself with your ideas of truth and justice; and this is so evidently the case that those ideas of yours cause just as much alarm to commonplace middle-class folks as my sketches do. Between ourselves, now, do you imagine that if you were Robine I should take any pleasure in your friendship? Ah, no, my friend, you are a great poet!"

Then he began to joke on the subject, saying that politics caused him no trouble, and that he had got accustomed to hear people discussing them in beer shops and studios. This led him to speak of a cafe in the Rue Vauvilliers; the cafe on the ground-floor of the house where La Sarriette lodged. This smoky place, with its torn, velvet-cushioned seats, and marble table-tops discoloured by the drippings from coffee-cups, was the chief resort of the young people of the markets. Monsieur Jules reigned there over a company of porters, apprentices, and gentlemen in white blouses and velvet caps. Two curling "Newgate knockers" were glued against his temples; and to keep his neck white he had it scraped with a razor every Saturday at a hair-dresser's in the Rue des Deux Ecus. At the cafe he gave the tone to his associates, especially when he played billiards with studied airs and graces, showing off his figure to the best advantage. After the game the company would begin to chat. They were a very reactionary set, taking a delight in the doings of "society." For his part, Monsieur Jules read the lighter boulevardian newspapers, and knew the performers at the smaller theatres, talked familiarly of the celebrities of the day, and could always tell whether the piece first performed the previous evening had been a success or a failure. He had a weakness, however, for politics. His ideal man was Morny, as he curtly called him. He read the reports of the discussions of the Corps Legislatif, and laughed with glee over the slightest words that fell from Morny's lips. Ah, Morny was the man to sit upon your rascally republicans! And he would assert that only the scum detested the Emperor, for his Majesty desired that all respectable people should have a good time of it.

"I've been to the cafe occasionally," Claude said to Florent. "The young men there are vastly amusing, with their clay pipes and their talk about the Court balls! To hear them chatter you might almost fancy they were invited to the Tuileries. La Sarriette's young man was making great fun of Gavard the other evening. He called him uncle. When La Sarriette came downstairs to look for him she was obliged to pay his bill. It cost her six francs, for he had lost at billiards, and the drinks they had played for were owing. And now, good night, my friend, and pleasant dreams. If ever you become a Minister, I'll give you some hints on the beautifying of Paris."

Florent was obliged to relinquish the hope of making a docile disciple of Claude. This was a source of grief to him, for, blinded though he was by his fanatical ardour, he at last grew conscious of the ever-increasing hostility which surrounded him. Even at the Mehudins' he now met with a colder reception: the old woman would laugh slyly; Muche no longer obeyed him, and the beautiful Norman cast glances of hasty impatience at him, unable as she was to overcome his coldness. At the Quenus', too, he had lost Auguste's friendship. The assistant no longer came to see him in his room on the way to bed, being greatly alarmed by the reports which he heard concerning this man with whom he had previously shut himself up till midnight. Augustine had made her lover swear that he would never again be guilty of such imprudence; however, it was Lisa who turned the young man into Florent's determined enemy by begging him and Augustine to defer their marriage till her cousin should vacate the little bedroom at the top of the house, as she did not want to give that poky dressing-room on the first floor to the new shop girl whom she would have to engage. From that time forward Auguste was anxious that the "convict" should be arrested. He had found such a pork shop as he had long dreamed of, not at Plaisance certainly, but at Montrouge, a little farther away. And now trade had much improved, and Augustine, with her silly, overgrown girl's laugh, said that she was quite ready. So every night, whenever some slight noise awoke him, August was thrilled with delight as he imagined that the police were at last arresting Florent.

Nothing was said at the Quenu-Gradelles' about all the rumours which circulated. There was a tacit understanding amongst the staff of the pork shop to keep silent respecting them in the presence of Quenu. The latter, somewhat saddened by the falling-out between his brother and his wife, sought consolation in stringing his sausages and salting his pork. Sometimes he would come and stand on his door-step, with his red face glowing brightly above his white apron, which his increasing corpulence stretched quite taut, and never did he suspect all the gossip which his appearance set on foot in the markets. Some of the women pitied him, and thought that he was losing flesh, though he was, indeed, stouter than ever; while others, on the contrary, reproached him for not having grown thin with shame at having such a brother as Florent. He, however, like one of those betrayed husbands who are always the last to know what has befallen them, continued in happy ignorance, displaying a light-heartedness which was quite affecting. He would stop some neighbour's wife on the footway to ask her if she found his brawn or truffled boar's head to her liking, and she would at once assume a sympathetic expression, and speak in a condoling way, as though all the pork on his premises had got jaundice.

"What do they all mean by looking at me with such a funereal air?" he asked Lisa one day. "Do you think I'm looking ill?"

Lisa, well aware that he was terribly afraid of illness, and groaned and made a dreadful disturbance if he suffered the slightest ailment, reassured him on this point, telling him that he was as blooming as a rose. The fine pork shop, however, was becoming gloomy; the mirrors seemed to pale, the marbles grew frigidly white, and the cooked meats on the counter stagnated in yellow fat or lakes of cloudy jelly. One day, even, Claude came into the shop to tell his aunt that the display in the window looked quite "in the dumps." This was really the truth. The Strasburg tongues on their beds of blue paper-shavings had a melancholy whiteness of hue, like the tongues of invalids; and the whilom chubby hams seemed to be wasting away beneath their mournful green top-knots. Inside the shop, too, when customers asked for a black-pudding or ten sous' worth of bacon, or half a pound of lard, they spoke in subdued, sorrowful voices, as though they were in the bed-chamber of a dying man. There were always two or three lachrymose women in front of the chilled heating-pan. Beautiful Lisa meantime discharged the duties of chief mourner with silent dignity. Her white apron fell more primly than ever over her black dress. Her hands, scrupulously clean and closely girded at the wrists by long white sleevelets, her face with its becoming air of sadness, plainly told all the neighbourhood, all the inquisitive gossips who streamed into the shop from morning to night, that they, the Quenu-Gradelles, were suffering from unmerited misfortune, but that she knew the cause of it, and would triumph over it at last. And sometimes she stooped to look at the two gold-fish, who also seemed ill at ease as they swam languidly around the aquarium in the window, and her glance seemed to promise them better days in the future.

Beautiful Lisa now only allowed herself one indulgence. She fearlessly patted Marjolin's satiny chin. The young man had just come out of the hospital. His skull had healed, and he looked as fat and merry as ever; but even the little intelligence he had possessed had left him, he was now quite an idiot. The gash in his skull must have reached his brain, for he had become a mere animal. The mind of a child of five dwelt in his sturdy frame. He laughed and stammered, he could no longer pronounce his words properly, and he was as submissively obedient as a sheep. Cadine took entire possession of him again; surprised, at first, at the alteration in him, and then quite delighted at having this big fellow to do exactly as she liked with. He was her doll, her toy, her slave in all respects but one: she could not prevent him from going off to Madame Quenu's every now and then. She thumped him, but he did not seem to feel her blows; as soon as she had slung her basket round her neck, and set off to sell her violets in the Rue du Pont Neuf and the Rue de Turbigo, he went to prowl about in front of the pork shop.

"Come in!" Lisa cried to him.

She generally gave him some gherkins, of which he was extremely fond; and he ate them, laughing in a childish way, whilst he stood in front of the counter. The sight of the handsome mistress of the shop filled him with rapture; he often clapped his hands with joy and began to jump about and vent little cries of pleasure, like a child delighted at something shown to it. On the first few occasions when he came to see her after leaving the hospital Lisa had feared that he might remember what had happened.

"Does your head still hurt you?" she asked him.

But he swayed about and burst into a merry laugh as he answered no; and then Lisa gently inquired: "You had a fall, hadn't you?"

"Yes, a fall, fall, fall," he sang, in a happy voice, tapping his skull the while.

Then, as though he were in a sort of ecstasy, he continued in lingering notes, as he gazed at Lisa, "Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!" This quite touched Madame Quenu. She had prevailed upon Gavard to keep him in his service. It was on the occasions when he so humbly vented his admiration that she caressed his chin, and told him that he was a good lad. He smiled with childish satisfaction, at times closing his eyes like some domestic pet fondled by its mistress; and Lisa thought to herself that she was making him some compensation for the blow with which she had felled him in the cellar of the poultry market.

However, the Quenus' establishment still remained under a cloud. Florent sometimes ventured to show himself, and shook hands with his brother, while Lisa observed a frigid silence. He even dined with them sometimes on Sundays, at long intervals, and Quenu then made great efforts at gaiety, but could not succeed in imparting any cheerfulness to the meal. He ate badly, and ended by feeling altogether put out. One evening, after one of these icy family gatherings, he said to his wife with tears in his eyes:

"What can be the matter with me? Is it true that I'm not ill? Don't you really see anything wrong in my appearance? I feel just as though I'd got a heavy weight somewhere inside me. And I'm so sad and depressed, too, without in the least knowing why. What can it be, do you think?"

"Oh, a little attack of indigestion, I dare say," replied Lisa.

"No, no; it's been going on too long for that; I feel quite crushed down. Yet the business is going on all right; I've no great worries, and I am leading just the same steady life as ever. But you, too, my dear, don't look well; you seem melancholy. If there isn't a change for the better soon, I shall send for the doctor."

Lisa looked at him with a grave expression.

"There's no need of a doctor," she said, "things will soon be all right again. There's something unhealthy in the atmosphere just now. All the neighbourhood is unwell." Then, as if yielding to an impulse of anxious affection, she added: "Don't worry yourself, my dear. I can't have you falling ill; that would be the crowning blow."

As a rule she sent him back to the kitchen, knowing that the noise of the choppers, the tuneful simmering of the fat, and the bubbling of the pans had a cheering effect upon him. In this way, too, she kept him at a distance from the indiscreet chatter of Mademoiselle Saget, who now spent whole mornings in the shop. The old maid seemed bent on arousing Lisa's alarm, and thus driving her to some extreme step. She began by trying to obtain her confidence.

"What a lot of mischievous folks there are about!" she exclaimed; "folks who would be much better employed in minding their own business. If you only knew, my dear Madame Quenu—but no, really, I should never dare to repeat such things to you."

And, as Madame Quenu replied that she was quite indifferent to gossip, and that it had no effect upon her, the old maid whispered into her ear across the counter: "Well, people say, you know, that Monsieur Florent isn't your cousin at all."

Then she gradually allowed Lisa to see that she knew the whole story; by way of proving that she had her quite at her mercy. When Lisa confessed the truth, equally as a matter of diplomacy, in order that she might have the assistance of some one who would keep her well posted in all the gossip of the neighbourhood, the old maid swore that for her own part she would be as mute as a fish, and deny the truth of the reports about Florent, even if she were to be led to the stake for it. And afterwards this drama brought her intense enjoyment; every morning she came to the shop with some fresh piece of disturbing news.

"You must be careful," she whispered one day; "I have just heard two women in the tripe market talking about you know what. I can't interrupt people and tell them they are lying, you know. It would look so strange. But the story's got about, and it's spreading farther every day. It can't be stopped now, I fear; the truth will have to come out."

A few days later she returned to the assault in all earnest. She made her appearance looking quite scared, and waited impatiently till there was no one in the shop, when she burst out in her sibilant voice:

"Do you know what people are saying now? Well, they say that all those men who meet at Monsieur Lebigre's have got guns, and are going to break out again as they did in '48. It's quite distressing to see such a worthy man as Monsieur Gavard—rich, too, and so respectable—leaguing himself with such scoundrels! I was very anxious to let you know, on account of your brother-in-law."

"Oh, it's mere nonsense, I'm sure; it can't be serious," rejoined Lisa, just to incite the old maid to tell her more.

"Not serious, indeed! Why, when one passes along the Rue Pirouette in the evening one can hear them screaming out in the most dreadful way. Oh! they make no mystery of it all. You know yourself how they tried to corrupt your husband. And the cartridges which I have seen them making from my own window, are they mere nonsense? Well, well, I'm only telling you this for your own good."

"Oh! I'm sure of that, and I'm very much obliged to you," replied Lisa; "but people do invent such stories, you know."

"Ah, but this is no invention, unfortunately. The whole neighbourhood is talking of it. It is said, too, that if the police discover the matter there will be a great many people compromised—Monsieur Gavard, for instance."

Madame Quenu shrugged her shoulders as though to say that Monsieur Gavard was an old fool, and that it would do him good to be locked up.

"Well, I merely mention Monsieur Gavard as I might mention any of the others, your brother-in-law, for instance," resumed the old maid with a wily glance. "Your brother-in-law is the leader, it seems. That's very annoying for you, and I'm very sorry indeed; for if the police were to make a descent here they might march Monsieur Quenu off as well. Two brothers, you know, they're like two fingers of the same hand."

Beautiful Lisa protested against this, but she turned very pale, for Mademoiselle Saget's last thrust had touched a vulnerable point. From that day forward the old maid was ever bringing her stories of innocent people who had been thrown into prison for extending hospitality to criminal scoundrels. In the evening, when La Saget went to get her black-currant syrup at the wine dealer's, she prepared her budget for the next morning. Rose was but little given to gossiping, and the old main reckoned chiefly on her own eyes and ears. She had been struck by Monsieur Lebigre's extremely kind and obliging manner towards Florent, his eagerness to keep him at his establishment, all the polite civilities, for which the little money which the other spent in the house could never recoup him. And this conduct of Monsieur Lebigre's surprised her the more as she was aware of the position in which the two men stood in respect to the beautiful Norman.

"It looks as though Lebigre were fattening him up for sale," she reflected. "Whom can he want to sell him to, I wonder?"

One evening when she was in the bar she saw Logre fling himself on the bench in the sanctum, and heard him speak of his perambulations through the faubourgs, with the remark that he was dead beat. She cast a hasty glance at his feet, and saw that there was not a speck of dust on his boots. Then she smiled quietly, and went off with her black-currant syrup, her lips closely compressed.

She used to complete her budget of information on getting back to her window. It was very high up, commanding a view of all the neighbouring houses, and proved a source of endless enjoyment to her. She was constantly installed at it, as though it were an observatory from which she kept watch upon everything that went on in the neighbourhood. She was quite familiar with all the rooms opposite her, both on the right and the left, even to the smallest details of their furniture. She could have described, without the least omission, the habits of their tenants, have related if the latter's homes were happy or the contrary, have told when and how they washed themselves, what they had for dinner, and who it was that came to see them. Then she obtained a side view of the markets, and not a woman could walk along the Rue Rambuteau without being seen by her; and she could have correctly stated whence the woman had come and whither she was going, what she had got in her basket, and, in short, every detail about her, her husband, her clothes, her children, and her means. "That's Madame Loret, over there; she's giving her son a fine education; that's Madame Hutin, a poor little woman who's dreadfully neglected by her husband; that's Mademoiselle Cecile, the butcher's daughter, a girl that no one will marry because she's scrofulous." In this way she could have continued jerking out biographical scraps for days together, deriving extraordinary amusement from the most trivial, uninteresting incidents. However, as soon as eight o'clock struck, she only had eyes for the frosted "cabinet" window on which appeared the black shadows of the coterie of politicians. She discovered the secession of Charvet and Clemence by missing their bony silhouettes from the milky transparency. Not an incident occurred in that room but she sooner or later learnt it by some sudden motion of those silent arms and heads. She acquired great skill in interpretation, and could divine the meaning of protruding noses, spreading fingers, gaping mouths, and shrugging shoulders; and in this way she followed the progress of the conspiracy step by step, in such wise that she could have told day by day how matters stood. One evening the terrible outcome of it all was revealed to her. She saw the shadow of Gavard's revolver, a huge silhouette with pointed muzzle showing very blackly against the glimmering window. It kept appearing and disappearing so rapidly that it seemed as though the room was full of revolvers. Those were the firearms of which Mademoiselle Saget had spoken to Madame Quenu. On another evening she was much puzzled by the sight of endless lengths of some material or other, and came to the conclusion that the men must be manufacturing cartridges. The next morning, however, she made her appearance in the wine shop by eleven o'clock, on the pretext of asking Rose if she could let her have a candle, and, glancing furtively into the little sanctum, she espied a heap of red material lying on the table. This greatly alarmed her, and her next budget of news was one of decisive gravity.

"I don't want to alarm you, Madame Quenu," she said, "but matters are really looking very serious. Upon my word, I'm quite alarmed. You must on no account repeat what I am going to confide to you. They would murder me if they knew I had told you."

Then, when Lisa had sworn to say nothing that might compromise her, she told her about the red material.

"I can't think what it can be. There was a great heap of it. It looked just like rags soaked in blood. Logre, the hunchback, you know, put one of the pieces over his shoulder. He looked like a headsman. You may be sure this is some fresh trickery or other."

Lisa made no reply, but seemed deep in thought whilst with lowered eyes, she handled a fork and mechanically arranged some piece of salt pork on a dish.

"If I were you," resumed Mademoiselle Saget softly, "I shouldn't be easy in mind; I should want to know the meaning of it all. Why shouldn't you go upstairs and examine your brother-in-law's bedroom?"

At this Lisa gave a slight start, let the fork drop, and glanced uneasily at the old maid, believing that she had discovered her intentions. But the other continued: "You would certainly be justified in doing so. There's no knowing into what danger your brother-in-law may lead you, if you don't put a check on him. They were talking about you yesterday at Madame Taboureau's. Ah! you have a most devoted friend in her. Madame Taboureau said that you were much too easy-going, and that if she were you she would have put an end to all this long ago."

"Madame Taboureau said that?" murmured Lisa thoughtfully.

"Yes, indeed she did; and Madame Taboureau is a woman whose advice is worth listening to. Try to find out the meaning of all those red bands; and if you do, you'll tell me, won't you?"

Lisa, however, was no longer listening to her. She was gazing abstractedly at the edible snails and Gervais cheeses between the festoons of sausages in the window. She seemed absorbed in a mental conflict, which brought two little furrows to her brow. The old maid, however, poked her nose over the dishes on the counter.

"Ah, some slices of saveloy!" she muttered, as though she were speaking to herself. "They'll get very dry cut up like that. And that black-pudding's broken, I see—a fork's been stuck into it, I expect. It might be taken away—it's soiling the dish."

Lisa, still absent-minded, gave her the black-pudding and slices of saveloy. "You may take them," she said, "if you would care for them."

The black bag swallowed them up. Mademoiselle Saget was so accustomed to receiving presents that she had actually ceased to return thanks for them. Every morning she carried away all the scraps of the pork shop. And now she went off with the intention of obtaining her dessert from La Sarriette and Madame Lecoeur, by gossiping to them about Gavard.

When Lisa was alone again she installed herself on the bench, behind the counter, as though she thought she would be able to come to a sounder decision if she were comfortably seated. For the last week she had been very anxious. Florent had asked Quenu for five hundred francs one evening, in the easy, matter-of-course way of a man who had money lying to his credit at the pork shop. Quenu referred him to his wife. This was distasteful to Florent, who felt somewhat uneasy on applying to beautiful Lisa. But she immediately went up to her bedroom, brought the money down and gave it to him, without saying a word, or making the least inquiry as to what he intended to do with it. She merely remarked that she had made a note of the payment on the paper containing the particulars of Florent's share of the inheritance. Three days later he took a thousand francs.

"It was scarcely worth while trying to make himself out so disinterested," Lisa said to Quenu that night, as they went to bed. "I did quite right, you see, in keeping the account. By the way, I haven't noted down the thousand francs I gave him to-day."

She sat down at the secretaire, and glanced over the page of figures. Then she added: "I did well to leave a blank space. I'll put down what I pay him on the margin. You'll see, now, he'll fritter it all away by degrees. That's what I've been expecting for a long time past."

Quenu said nothing, but went to bed feeling very much put out. Every time that his wife opened the secretaire the drawer gave out a mournful creak which pierced his heart. He even thought of remonstrating with his brother, and trying to prevent him from ruining himself with the Mehudins; but when the time came, he did not dare to do it. Two days later Florent asked for another fifteen hundred francs. Logre had said one evening that things would ripen much faster if they could only get some money. The next day he was enchanted to find these words of his, uttered quite at random, result in the receipt of a little pile of gold, which he promptly pocketed, sniggering as he did so, and his hunch fairly shaking with delight. From that time forward money was constantly being needed: one section wished to hire a room where they could meet, while another was compelled to provide for various needy patriots. Then there were arms and ammunition to be purchased, men to be enlisted, and private police expenses. Florent would have paid for anything. He had bethought himself of Uncle Gradelle's treasure, and recalled La Normande's advice. So he made repeated calls upon Lisa's secretaire, being merely kept in check by the vague fear with which his sister-in-law's grave face inspired him. Never, thought he, could he have spent his money in a holier cause. Logre now manifested the greatest enthusiasm, and wore the most wonderful rose-coloured neckerchiefs and the shiniest of varnished boots, the sight of which made Lacaille glower blackly.

"That makes three thousand francs in seven days," Lisa remarked to Quenu. "What do you think of that? A pretty state of affairs, isn't it? If he goes on at this rate his fifty thousand francs will last him barely four months. And yet it took old Gradelle forty years to put his fortune together!"

"It's all your own fault!" cried Quenu. "There was no occasion for you to say anything to him about the money."

Lisa gave her husband a severe glance. "It is his own," she said; "and he is entitled to take it all. It's not the giving him the money that vexes me, but the knowledge that he must make a bad use of it. I tell you again, as I have been telling you for a long time past, all this must come to an end."

"Do whatever you like; I won't prevent you," at last exclaimed the pork butcher, who was tortured by his cupidity.

He still loved his brother; but the thought of fifty thousand francs squandered in four months was agony to him. As for his wife, after all Mademoiselle Saget's chattering she guessed what became of the money. The old maid having ventured to refer to the inheritance, Lisa had taken advantage of the opportunity to let the neighbourhood know that Florent was drawing his share, and spending it after his own fashion.

It was on the following day that the story of the strips of red material impelled Lisa to take definite actin. For a few moments she remained struggling with herself whilst gazing at the depressed appearance of the shop. The sides of pork hung all around in a sullen fashion, and Mouton, seated beside a bowl of fat, displayed the ruffled coat and dim eyes of a cat who no longer digests his meals in peace. Thereupon Lisa called to Augustine and told her to attend to the counter, and she herself went up to Florent's room.

When she entered it, she received quite a shock. The bed, hitherto so spotless, was quite ensanguined by a bundle of long red scarves dangling down to the floor. On the mantelpiece, between the gilt cardboard boxes and the old pomatum-pots, were several red armlets and clusters of red cockades, looking like pools of blood. And hanging from every nail and peg against the faded grey wallpaper were pieces of bunting, square flags—yellow, blue, green, and black—in which Lisa recognised the distinguishing banners of the twenty sections. The childish simplicity of the room seemed quite scared by all this revolutionary decoration. The aspect of guileless stupidity which the shop girl had left behind her, the white innocence of the curtains and furniture, now glared as with the reflection of a fire; while the photograph of Auguste and Augustine looked white with terror. Lisa walked round the room, examining the flags, the armlets, and the scarves, without touching any of them, as though she feared that the dreadful things might burn her. She was reflecting that she had not been mistaken, that it was indeed on these and similar things that Florent's money had been spent. And to her this seemed an utter abomination, an incredibility which set her whole being surging with indignation. To think that her money, that money which had been so honestly earned, was being squandered to organise and defray the expenses of an insurrection!

She stood there, gazing at the expanded blossoms of the pomegranate on the balcony—blossoms which seemed to her like an additional supply of crimson cockades—and listening to the sharp notes of the chaffinch, which resembled the echo of a distant fusillade. And then it struck her that the insurrection might break out the next day, or perhaps that very evening. She fancied she could see the banners streaming in the air and the scarves advancing in line, while a sudden roll of drums broke on her ear. Then she hastily went downstairs again, without even glancing at the papers which were lying on the table. She stopped on the first floor, went into her own room, and dressed herself.

In this critical emergency Lisa arranged her hair with scrupulous care and perfect calmness. She was quite resolute; not a quiver of hesitation disturbed her; but a sterner expression than usual had come into her eyes. As she fastened her black silk dress, straining the waistband with all the strength of her fingers, she recalled Abbe Roustan's words; and she questioned herself, and her conscience answered that she was going to fulfil a duty. By the time she drew her broidered shawl round her broad shoulders, she felt that she was about to perform a deed of high morality. She put on a pair of dark mauve gloves, secured a thick veil to her bonnet; and before leaving the room she double-locked the secretaire, with a hopeful expression on her face which seemed to say that that much worried piece of furniture would at last be able to sleep in peace again.

Quenu was exhibiting his white paunch at the shop door when his wife came down. He was surprised to see her going out in full dress at ten o'clock in the morning. "Hallo! Where are you off to?" he asked.

She pretended that she was going out with Madame Taboureau, and added that she would call at the Gaite Theatre to buy some tickets. Quenu hurried after her to tell her to secure some front seats, so that they might be able to see well. Then, as he returned to the shop, Lisa made her way to the cab-stand opposite St. Eustache, got into a cab, pulled down the blinds, and told the driver to go to the Gaite Theatre. She felt afraid of being followed. When she had booked two seats, however, she directed the cabman to drive her to the Palais de Justice. There, in front of the gate, she discharged him, and then quietly made her way through the halls and corridors to the Prefecture of Police.

She soon lost herself in a noisy crowd of police officers and gentlemen in long frock-coats, but at last gave a man half a franc to guide her to the Prefect's rooms. She found, however, that the Prefect only received such persons as came with letters of audience; and she was shown into a small apartment, furnished after the style of a boarding-house parlour. A fat, bald-headed official, dressed in black from head to foot, received her there with sullen coldness. What was her business? he inquired. Thereupon she raised her veil, gave her name, and told her story, clearly and distinctly, without a pause. The bald man listened with a weary air.

"You are this man's sister-in-law, are you not?" he inquired, when she had finished.

"Yes," Lisa candidly replied. "We are honest, straight-forward people, and I am anxious that my husband should not be compromised."

The official shrugged his shoulders, as though to say that the whole affair was a great nuisance.

"Do you know," he said impatiently, "that I have been pestered with this business for more than a year past? Denunciation after denunciation has been sent to me, and I am being continually goaded and pressed to take action. You will understand that if I haven't done so as yet, it is because I prefer to wait. We have good reasons for our conduct in the matter. Stay, now, here are the papers relating to it. I'll let you see them."

He laid before her an immense collection of papers in a blue wrapper. Lisa turned them over. They were like detached chapters of the story she had just been relating. The commissaires of police at Havre, Rouen, and Vernon notified Florent's arrival within their respective jurisdictions. Then came a report which announced that he had taken up his residence with the Quenu-Gradelles. Next followed his appointment at the markets, an account of his mode of life, the spending of his evenings at Monsieur Lebigre's; not a detail was deficient. Lisa, quite astounded as she was, noticed that the reports were in duplicate, so that they must have emanated from two different sources. And at last she came upon a pile of letters, anonymous letters of every shape, and in every description of handwriting. They brought her amazement to a climax. In one letter she recognised the villainous hand of Mademoiselle Saget, denouncing the people who met in the little sanctum at Lebigre's. On a large piece of greasy paper she identified the heavy pot-hooks of Madame Lecoeur; and there was also a sheet of cream-laid note-paper, ornamented with a yellow pansy, and covered with the scrawls of La Sarriette and Monsieur Jules. These two letters warned the Government to beware of Gavard. Farther on Lisa recognised the coarse style of old Madame Mehudin, who in four pages of almost indecipherable scribble repeated all the wild stories about Florent that circulated in the markets. However, what startled her more than anything else was the discovery of a bill-head of her own establishment, with the inscription Quenu-Gradelle, Pork Butcher, on its face, whilst on the back of it Auguste had penned a denunciation of the man whom he looked upon as an obstacle to his marriage.

The official had acted upon a secret idea in placing these papers before her. "You don't recognise any of these handwritings, do you?" he asked.

"No," she stammered, rising from her seat, quite oppressed by what she had just learned; and she hastily pulled down her veil again to conceal the blush of confusion which was rising to her cheeks. Her silk dress rustled, and her dark gloves disappeared beneath her heavy shawl.

"You see, madame," said the bald man with a faint smile, "your information comes a little late. But I promise you that your visit shall not be forgotten. And tell your husband not to stir. It is possible that something may happen soon that——"

He did not complete his sentence, but, half rising from his armchair, made a slight bow to Lisa. It was a dismissal, and she took her leave. In the ante-room she caught sight of Logre and Monsieur Lebigre, who hastily turned their faces away; but she was more disturbed than they were. She went her way through the halls and along the corridors, feeling as if she were in the clutches of this system of police which, it now seemed to her, saw and knew everything. At last she came out upon the Place Dauphine. When she reached the Quai de l'Horloge she slackened her steps, and felt refreshed by the cool breeze blowing from the Seine.

She now had a keen perception of the utter uselessness of what she had done. Her husband was in no danger whatever; and this thought, whilst relieving her, left her a somewhat remorseful feeling. She was exasperated with Auguste and the women who had put her in such a ridiculous position. She walked on yet more slowly, watching the Seine as it flowed past. Barges, black with coal-dust, were floating down the greenish water; and all along the bank anglers were casting their lines. After all, it was not she who had betrayed Florent. This reflection suddenly occurred to her and astonished her. Would she have been guilty of a wicked action, then, if she had been his betrayer? She was quite perplexed; surprised at the possibility of her conscience having deceived her. Those anonymous letters seemed extremely base. She herself had gone openly to the authorities, given her name, and saved innocent people from being compromised. Then at the sudden thought of old Gradelle's fortune she again examined herself, and felt ready to throw the money into the river if such a course should be necessary to remove the blight which had fallen on the pork shop. No, she was not avaricious, she was sure she wasn't; it was no thought of money that had prompted her in what she had just done. As she crossed the Pont au Change she grew quite calm again, recovering all her superb equanimity. On the whole, it was much better, she felt, that others should have anticipated her at the Prefecture. She would not have to deceive Quenu, and she would sleep with an easier conscience.

"Have you booked the seats?" Quenu asked her when she returned home.

He wanted to see the tickets, and made Lisa explain to him the exact position the seats occupied in the dress-circle. Lisa had imagined that the police would make a descent upon the house immediately after receiving her information, and her proposal to go to the theatre had only been a wily scheme for getting Quenu out of the way while the officers were arresting Florent. She had contemplated taking him for an outing in the afternoon—one of those little jaunts which they occasionally allowed themselves. They would then drive in an open cab to the Bois de Boulogne, dine at a restaurant, and amuse themselves for an hour or two at some cafe concern. But there was no need to go out now, she thought; so she spent the rest of the day behind her counter, with a rosy glow on her face, and seeming brighter and gayer, as though she were recovering from some indisposition.

"You see, I told you it was fresh air you wanted!" exclaimed Quenu. "Your walk this morning has brightened you up wonderfully!"

"No, indeed," she said after a pause, again assuming her look of severity; "the streets of Paris are not at all healthy places."

In the evening they went to the Gaite to see the performance of "La Grace de Dieu." Quenu, in a frock-coat and drab gloves, with his hair carefully pomatumed and combed, was occupied most of the time in hunting for the names of the performers in the programme. Lisa looked superb in her low dress as she rested her hands in their tight-fitting white gloves on the crimson velvet balustrade. They were both of them deeply affected by the misfortunes of Marie. The commander, they thought, was certainly a desperate villain; while Pierrot made them laugh from the first moment of his appearance on the stage. But at last Madame Quenu cried. The departure of the child, the prayer in the maiden's chamber, the return of the poor mad creature, moistened her eyes with gentle tears, which she brushed away with her handkerchief.

However, the pleasure which the evening afforded her turned into a feeling of triumph when she caught sight of La Normande and her mother sitting in the upper gallery. She thereupon puffed herself out more than ever, sent Quenu off to the refreshment bar for a box of caramels, and began to play with her fan, a mother-of-pearl fan, elaborately gilt. The fish-girl was quite crushed; and bent her head down to listen to her mother, who was whispering to her. When the performance was over and beautiful Lisa and the beautiful Norman met in the vestibule they exchanged a vague smile.

Florent had dined early at Monsieur Lebigre's that day. He was expecting Logre, who had promised to introduce to him a retired sergeant, a capable man, with whom they were to discuss the plan of attack upon the Palais Bourbon and the Hotel de Ville. The night closed in, and the fine rain, which had begun to fall in the afternoon, shrouded the vast markets in a leaden gloom. They loomed darkly against the copper-tinted sky, while wisps of murky cloud skimmed by almost on a level with the roofs, looking as though they were caught and torn by the points of the lightning-conductors. Florent felt depressed by the sight of the muddy streets, and the streaming yellowish rain which seemed to sweep the twilight away and extinguish it in the mire. He watched the crowds of people who had taken refuge on the foot-pavements of the covered ways, the umbrellas flitting past in the downpour, and the cabs that dashed with increased clatter and speed along the wellnigh deserted roads. Presently there was a rift in the clouds; and a red glow arose in the west. Then a whole army of street-sweepers came into sight at the end of the Rue Montmartre, driving a lake of liquid mud before them with their brooms.

Logre did not turn up with the sergeant; Gavard had gone to dine with some friends at Batignolles, and so Florent was reduced to spending the evening alone with Robine. He had all the talking to himself, and ended by feeling very low-spirited. His companion merely wagged his beard, and stretched out his hand every quarter of an hour to raise his glass of beer to his lips. At last Florent grew so bored that he went off to bed. Robine, however, though left to himself, still lingered there, contemplating his glass with an expression of deep thought. Rose and the waiter, who had hoped to shut up early, as the coterie of politicians was absent, had to wait a long half hour before he at last made up his mind to leave.

When Florent got to his room, he felt afraid to go to bed. He was suffering from one of those nervous attacks which sometimes plunged him into horrible nightmares until dawn. On the previous day he had been to Clamart to attend the funeral of Monsieur Verlaque, who had died after terrible sufferings; and he still felt sad at the recollection of the narrow coffin which he had seen lowered into the earth. Nor could he banish from his mind the image of Madame Verlaque, who, with a tearful voice, though there was not a tear in her eyes, kept following him and speaking to him about the coffin, which was not paid for, and of the cost of the funeral, which she was quite at a loss about, as she had not a copper in the place, for the druggist, on hearing of her husband's death on the previous day, had insisted upon his bill being paid. So Florent had been obliged to advance the money for the coffin and other funeral expenses, and had even given the gratuities to the mutes. Just as he was going away, Madame Verlaque looked at him with such a heartbroken expression that he left her twenty francs.

And now Monsieur Verlaque's death worried him very much. It affected his situation in the markets. He might lose his berth, or perhaps be formally appointed inspector. In either case he foresaw vexatious complications which might arouse the suspicions of the police. He would have been delighted if the insurrection could have broken out the very next day, so that he might at once have tossed the laced cap of his inspectorship into the streets. With his mind full of harassing thoughts like these, he stepped out upon the balcony, as though soliciting of the warm night some whiff of air to cool his fevered brow. The rain had laid the wind, and a stormy heat still reigned beneath the deep blue, cloudless heavens. The markets, washed by the downpour, spread out below him, similar in hue to the sky, and, like the sky, studded with the yellow stars of their gas lamps.

Leaning on the iron balustrade, Florent recollected that sooner or later he would certainly be punished for having accepted the inspectorship. It seemed to lie like a stain on his life. He had become an official of the Prefecture, forswearing himself, serving the Empire in spite of all the oaths he had taken in his exile. His anxiety to please Lisa, the charitable purpose to which he had devoted the salary he received, the just and scrupulous manner in which he had always struggled to carry out his duties, no longer seemed to him valid excuses for his base abandonment of principle. If he had suffered in the midst of all that sleek fatness, he had deserved to suffer. And before him arose a vision of the evil year which he had just spent, his persecution by the fish-wives, the sickening sensations he had felt on close, damp days, the continuous indigestion which had afflicted his delicate stomach, and the latent hostility which was gathering strength against him. All these things he now accepted as chastisement. That dull rumbling of hostility and spite, the cause of which he could not divine, must forebode some coming catastrophe before whose approach he already stooped, with the shame of one who knows there is a transgression that he must expiate. Then he felt furious with himself as he thought of the popular rising he was preparing; and reflected that he was no longer unsullied enough to achieve success.

In how many dreams he had indulged in that lofty little room, with his eyes wandering over the spreading roofs of the market pavilions! They usually appeared to him like grey seas that spoke to him of far-off countries. On moonless nights they would darken and turn into stagnant lakes of black and pestilential water. But on bright nights they became shimmering fountains of light, the moonbeams streaming over both tiers like water, gliding along the huge plates of zinc, and flowing over the edges of the vast superposed basins. Then frosty weather seemed to turn these roofs into rigid ice, like the Norwegian bays over which skaters skim; while the warm June nights lulled them into deep sleep. One December night, on opening his window, he had seen them white with snow, so lustrously white that they lighted up the coppery sky. Unsullied by a single footstep, they then stretched out like the lonely plains of the Far North, where never a sledge intrudes. Their silence was beautiful, their soft peacefulness suggestive of innocence.

And at each fresh aspect of the ever-changing panorama before him, Florent yielded to dreams which were now sweet, now full of bitter pain. The snow calmed him; the vast sheet of whiteness seemed to him like a veil of purity thrown over the filth of the markets. The bright, clear nights, the shimmering moonbeams, carried him away into the fairy-land of story-books. It was only the dark, black nights, the burning nights of June, when he beheld, as it were, a miasmatic marsh, the stagnant water of a dead and accursed sea, that filled him with gloom and grief; and then ever the same dreadful visions haunted his brain.

The markets were always there. He could never open the window and rest his elbows on the balustrade without having them before him, filling the horizon. He left the pavilions in the evening only to behold their endless roofs as he went to bed. They shut him off from the rest of Paris, ceaselessly intruded their huge bulk upon him, entered into every hour of his life. That night again horrible fancies came to him, fancies aggravated by the vague forebodings of evil which distressed him. The rain of the afternoon had filled the markets with malodorous dampness, and as they wallowed there in the centre of the city, like some drunken man lying, after his last bottle, under the table, they cast all their foul breath into his face. He seemed to see a thick vapour rising up from each pavilion. In the distance the meat and tripe markets reeked with the sickening steam of blood; nearer in, the vegetable and fruit pavilions diffused the odour of pungent cabbages, rotten apples, and decaying leaves; the butter and cheese exhaled a poisonous stench; from the fish market came a sharp, fresh gust; while from the ventilator in the tower of the poultry pavilion just below him, he could see a warm steam issuing, a fetid current rising in coils like the sooty smoke from a factory chimney. And all these exhalations coalesced above the roofs, drifted towards the neighbouring houses, and spread themselves out in a heavy cloud which stretched over the whole of Paris. It was as though the markets were bursting within their tight belt of iron, were beating the slumber of the gorged city with the stertorous fumes of their midnight indigestion.

However, on the footway down below Florent presently heard a sound of voices, the laughter of happy folks. Then the door of the passage was closed noisily. It was Quenu and Lisa coming home from the theatre. Stupefied and intoxicated, as it were, by the atmosphere he was breathing, Florent thereupon left the balcony, his nerves still painfully excited by the thought of the tempest which he could feel gathering round his head. The source of his misery was yonder, in those markets, heated by the day's excesses. He closed the window with violence, and left them wallowing in the darkness, naked and perspiring beneath the stars.

CHAPTER VI

A week later, Florent thought that he would at last be able to proceed to action. A sufficiently serious outburst of public dissatisfaction furnished an opportunity for launching his insurrectionary forces upon Paris. The Corps Legislatif, whose members had lately shown great variance of opinion respecting certain grants to the Imperial family, was now discussing a bill for the imposition of a very unpopular tax, at which the lower orders had already begun to growl. The Ministry, fearing a defeat, was straining every nerve. It was probable, thought Florent, that no better pretext for a rising would for a long time present itself.

One morning, at daybreak, he went to reconnoitre the neighbourhood of the Palais Bourbon. He forgot all about his duties as inspector, and lingered there, studying the approaches of the palace, till eight o'clock, without ever thinking that his absence would revolutionise the fish market. He perambulated all the surrounding streets, the Rue de Lille, the Rue de l'Universite, the Rue de Bourgogne, the Rue Saint Dominique, and even extended his examination to the Esplanade des Invalides, stopping at certain crossways, and measuring distances as he walked along. Then, on coming back to the Quai d'Orsay, he sat down on the parapet, and determined that the attack should be made simultaneously from all sides. The contingents from the Gros-Caillou district should arrive by way of the Champ de Mars; the sections from the north of Paris should come down by the Madeleine; while those from the west and the south would follow the quays, or make their way in small detachments through the then narrow streets of the Faubourg Saint Germain. However, the other side of the river, the Champs Elysees, with their open avenues, caused him some uneasiness; for he foresaw that cannon would be stationed there to sweep the quays. He thereupon modified several details of his plan, and marked down in a memorandum-book the different positions which the several sections should occupy during the combat. The chief attack, he concluded, must certainly be made from the Rue de Bourgogne and the Rue de l'Universite, while a diversion might be effected on the side of the river.

Whilst he thus pondered over his plans the eight o'clock sun, warming the nape of his neck, shone gaily on the broad footways, and gilded the columns of the great structure in front of him. In imagination he already saw the contemplated battle; clusters of men clinging round those columns, the gates burst open, the peristyle invaded; and then scraggy arms suddenly appearing high aloft and planting a banner there.

At last he slowly went his way homewards again with his gaze fixed upon the ground. But all at once a cooing sound made him look up, and he saw that he was passing through the garden of the Tuileries. A number of wood-pigeons, bridling their necks, were strutting over a lawn near by. Florent leant for a moment against the tub of an orange-tree, and looked at the grass and the pigeons steeped in sunshine. Right ahead under the chestnut-trees all was black. The garden was wrapped in a warm silence, broken only by the distant rumbling which came from behind the railings of the Rue de Rivoli. The scent of all the greenery affected Florent, reminding him of Madame Francois. However, a little girl ran past, trundling a hoop, and alarmed the pigeons. They flew off, and settled in a row on the arm of a marble statue of an antique wrestler standing in the middle of the lawn, and once more, but with less vivacity, they began to coo and bridle their necks.

As Florent was returning to the markets by way of the Rue Vauvilliers, he heard Claude Lantier calling to him. The artist was going down into the basement of the poultry pavilion. "Come with me!" he cried. "I'm looking for that brute Marjolin."

Florent followed, glad to forget his thoughts and to defer his return to the fish market for a little longer. Claude told him that his friend Marjolin now had nothing further to wish for: he had become an utter animal. Claude entertained an idea of making him pose on all-fours in future. Whenever he lost his temper over some disappointing sketch he came to spend whole hours in the idiot's company, never speaking, but striving to catch his expression when he laughed.

"He'll be feeding his pigeons, I dare say," he said; "but unfortunately I don't know whereabouts Monsieur Gavard's storeroom is."

They groped about the cellar. In the middle of it some water was trickling from a couple of taps in the dim gloom. The storerooms here are reserved for pigeons exclusively, and all along the trellising they heard faint cooings, like the hushed notes of birds nestling under the leaves when daylight is departing. Claude began to laugh as he heard it.

"It sounds as though all the lovers in Paris were embracing each other inside here, doesn't it?" he exclaimed to his companion.

However, they could not find a single storeroom open, and were beginning to think that Marjolin could not be in the cellar, when a sound of loud, smacking kisses made them suddenly halt before a door which stood slightly ajar. Claude pulled it open and beheld Marjolin, whom Cadine was kissing, whilst he, a mere dummy, offered his face without feeling the slightest thrill at the touch of her lips.

"Oh, so this is your little game, is it?" said Claude with a laugh.

"Oh," replied Cadine, quite unabashed, "he likes being kissed, because he feels afraid now in the dim light. You do feel frightened, don't you?"

Like the idiot he was, Marjolin stroked his face with his hands as though trying to find the kisses which the girl had just printed there. And he was beginning to stammer out that he was afraid, when Cadine continued: "And, besides, I came to help him; I've been feeding the pigeons."

Florent looked at the poor creatures. All along the shelves were rows of lidless boxes, in which pigeons, showing their motley plumage, crowded closely on their stiffened legs. Every now and then a tremor ran along the moving mass; and then the birds settled down again, and nothing was heard but their confused, subdued notes. Cadine had a saucepan near her; she filled her mouth with the water and tares which it contained, and then, taking up the pigeons one by one, shot the food down their throats with amazing rapidity. The poor creatures struggled and nearly choked, and finally fell down in the boxes with swimming eyes, intoxicated, as it were, by all the food which they were thus forced to swallow.[*]

[*] This is the customary mode of fattening pigeons at the
Paris markets. The work is usually done by men who make a
specialty of it, and are called gaveurs.—Translator.

"Poor creatures!" exclaimed Claude.

"Oh, so much the worse for them," said Cadine, who had now finished. "They are much nicer eating when they've been well fed. In a couple of hours or so all those over yonder will be given a dose of salt water. That makes their flesh white and tender. Then two hours afterwards they'll be killed. If you would like to see the killing, there are some here which are quite ready. Marjolin will settle their account for them in a jiffy."

Marjolin carried away a box containing some fifty pigeons, and Claude and Florent followed him. Squatting upon the ground near one of the water-taps, he placed the box by his side. Then he laid a framework of slender wooden bars on the top of a kind of zinc trough, and forthwith began to kill the pigeons. His knife flashed rapidly in his fingers, as he seized the birds by the wings, stunned them by a blow on the head from the knife-handle, and then thrust the point of the blade into their throats. They quivered for an instant, and ruffled their feathers as Marjolin laid them in a row, with their heads between the wooden bars above the zinc trough, into which their blood fell drop by drop. He repeated each different movement with the regularity of clockwork, the blows from the knife-handle falling with a monotonous tick-tack as he broke the birds' skulls, and his hand working backwards and forwards like a pendulum as he took up the living pigeons on one side and laid them down dead on the other. Soon, moreover, he worked with increasing rapidity, gloating over the massacre with glistening eyes, squatting there like a huge delighted bull-dog enjoying the sight of slaughtered vermin. "Tick-tack! Tick-tack!" whilst his tongue clucked as an accompaniment to the rhythmical movements of his knife. The pigeons hung down like wisps of silken stuff.

"Ah, you enjoy that, don't you, you great stupid?" exclaimed Cadine. "How comical those pigeons look when they bury their heads in their shoulders to hide their necks! They're horrid things, you know, and would give one nasty bites if they got the chance." Then she laughed more loudly at Marjolin's increasing, feverish haste; and added: "I've killed them sometimes myself, but I can't get on as quickly as he does. One day he killed a hundred in ten minutes."

The wooden frame was nearly full; the blood could be heard falling into the zinc trough; and as Claude happened to turn round he saw Florent looking so pale that he hurriedly led him away. When they got above-ground again he made him sit down on a step.

"Why, what's the matter with you?" he exclaimed, tapping him on the shoulder. "You're fainting away like a woman!"

"It's the smell of the cellar," murmured Florent, feeling a little ashamed of himself.

The truth was, however, that those pigeons, which were forced to swallow tares and salt water, and then had their skulls broken and their throats slit, had reminded him of the wood-pigeons of the Tuileries gardens, strutting over the green turf, with their satiny plumage flashing iridescently in the sunlight. He again heard them cooing on the arm of the marble wrestler amidst the hushed silence of the garden, while children trundled their hoops in the deep gloom of the chestnuts. And then, on seeing that big fair-haired animal massacring his boxful of birds, stunning them with the handle of his knife and driving its point into their throats, in the depths of that foul-smelling cellar, he had felt sick and faint, his legs had almost given way beneath him, while his eyelids quivered tremulously.

"Well, you'd never do for a soldier!" Claude said to him when he recovered from his faintness. "Those who sent you to Cayenne must have been very simple-minded folks to fear such a man as you! Why, my good fellow, if ever you do put yourself at the head of a rising, you won't dare to fire a shot. You'll be too much afraid of killing somebody."

Florent got up without making any reply. He had become very gloomy, his face was furrowed by deep wrinkles; and he walked off, leaving Claude to go back to the cellar alone. As he made his way towards the fish market his thoughts returned to his plan of attack, to the levies of armed men who were to invade the Palais Bourbon. Cannon would roar from the Champs Elysees; the gates would be burst open; blood would stain the steps, and men's brains would bespatter the pillars. A vision of the fight passed rapidly before him; and he beheld himself in the midst of it, deadly pale, and hiding his face in his hands, not daring to look around him.

As he was crossing the Rue du Pont Neuf he fancied he espied Auguste's pale face peering round the corner of the fruit pavilion. The assistant seemed to be watching for someone, and his eyes were starting from his head with an expression of intense excitement. Suddenly, however, he vanished and hastened back to the pork shop.

"What's the matter with him?" thought Florent. "Is he frightened of me, I wonder?"

Some very serious occurrences had taken place that morning at the Quenu-Gradelles'. Soon after daybreak, Auguste, breathless with excitement, had awakened his mistress to tell her that the police had come to arrest Monsieur Florent. And he added, with stammering incoherence, that the latter had gone out, and that he must have done so with the intention of escaping. Lisa, careless of appearances, at once hurried up to her brother-in-law's room in her dressing-wrapper, and took possession of La Normande's photograph, after glancing round to see if there was anything lying about that might compromise herself and Quenu. As she was making her way downstairs again, she met the police agents on the first floor. The commissary requested her to accompany them to Florent's room, where, after speaking to her for a moment in a low tone, he installed himself with his men, bidding her open the shop as usual so as to avoid giving the alarm to anyone. The trap was set.

Lisa's only worry in the matter was the terrible blow that the arrest would prove to poor Quenu. She was much afraid that if he learned that the police were in the house, he would spoil everything by his tears; so she made Auguste swear to observe the most rigid silence on the subject. Then she went back to her room, put on her stays, and concocted some story for the benefit of Quenu, who was still drowsy. Half an hour later she was standing at the door of the shop with all her usual neatness of appearance, her hair smooth and glossy, and her face glowing rosily. Auguste was quietly setting out the window. Quenu came for a moment on to the footway, yawning slightly, and ridding himself of all sleepiness in the fresh morning air. There was nothing to indicate the drama that was in preparation upstairs.

The commissary himself, however, gave the alarm to the neighbourhood by paying a domiciliary visit to the Mehudins' abode in the Rue Pirouette. He was in possession of the most precise information. In the anonymous letters which had been sent to the Prefecture, all sorts of statements were made respecting Florent's alleged intrigue with the beautiful Norman. Perhaps, thought the commissary, he had now taken refuge with her; and so, accompanied by two of his men, he proceeded to knock at the door in the name of the law. The Mehudins had only just got up. The old woman opened the door in a fury; but suddenly calmed down and began to smile when she learned the business on hand. She seated herself and fastened her clothes, while declaring to the officers: "We are honest folks here, and have nothing to be afraid of. You can search wherever you like."

However, as La Normande delayed to open the door of her room, the commissary told his men to break it open. The young woman was scarcely clad when the others entered, and this unceremonious invasion, which she could not understand, fairly exasperated her. She flushed crimson from anger rather than from shame, and seemed as though she were about to fly at the officers. The commissary, at the sight, stepped forward to protect his men, repeating in his cold voice: "In the name of the law! In the name of the law!"

Thereupon La Normande threw herself upon a chair, and burst into a wild fit of hysterical sobbing at finding herself so powerless. She was quite at a loss to understand what these men wanted with her. The commissary, however, had noticed how scantily she was clad, and taking a shawl from a peg, he flung it over her. Still she did not wrap it round her, but only sobbed the more bitterly as she watched the men roughly searching the apartment.

"But what have I done?" she at last stammered out. "What are you looking for here?"

Thereupon the commissary pronounced the name of Florent; and La Normande, catching sight of the old woman, who was standing at the door, cried out: "Oh, the wretch! This is her doing!" and she rushed at her mother.

She would have struck her if she had reached her; but the police agents held her back, and forcibly wrapped her in the shawl. Meanwhile, she struggled violently, and exclaimed in a choking voice:

"What do you take me for? That Florent has never been in this room, I tell you. There was nothing at all between us. People are always trying to injure me in the neighbourhood; but just let anyone come here and say anything before my face, and then you'll see! You'll lock me up afterwards, I dare say, but I don't mind that! Florent, indeed! What a lie! What nonsense!"

This flood of words seemed to calm her; and her anger now turned against Florent, who was the cause of all the trouble. Addressing the commissary, she sought to justify herself.

"I did not know his real character, sir," she said. "He had such a mild manner that he deceived us all. I was unwilling to believe all I heard, because I know people are so malicious. He only came here to give lessons to my little boy, and went away directly they were over. I gave him a meal here now and again, that's true and sometimes made him a present of a fine fish. That's all. But this will be a warning to me, and you won't catch me showing the same kindness to anyone again."

"But hasn't he given you any of his papers to take care of?" asked the commissary.

"Oh no, indeed! I swear it. I'd give them up to you at once if he had. I've had quite enough of this, I can tell you! It's no joke to see you tossing all my things about and ferreting everywhere in this way. Oh! you may look; there's nothing."

The officers, who examined every article of furniture, now wished to enter the little closet where Muche slept. The child had been awakened by the noise, and for the last few moments he had been crying bitterly, as though he imagined that he was going to be murdered.

"This is my boy's room," said La Normande, opening the door.

Muche, quite naked, ran up and threw his arms round his mother's neck. She pacified him, and laid him down in her own bed. The officers came out of the little room again almost immediately, and the commissary had just made up his mind to retire, when the child, still in tears, whispered in his mother's ear: "They'll take my copy-books. Don't let them have my copy-books."

"Oh, yes; that's true," cried La Normande; "there are some copy-books. Wait a moment, gentlemen, and I'll give them to you. I want you to see that I'm not hiding anything from you. Then, you'll find some of his writing inside these. You're quite at liberty to hang him as far as I'm concerned; you won't find me trying to cut him down."

Thereupon she handed Muche's books and the copies set by Florent to the commissary. But at this the boy sprang angrily out of bed, and began to scratch and bite his mother, who put him back again with a box on the ears. Then he began to bellow.

In the midst of the uproar, Mademoiselle Saget appeared on the threshold, craning her neck forward. Finding all the doors open, she had come in to offer her services to old Madame Mehudin. She spied about and listened, and expressed extreme pity for these poor women, who had no one to defend them. The commissary, however, had begun to read the copies with a grave air. The frequent repetition of such words as "tyrannically," "liberticide," "unconstitutional," and "revolutionary" made him frown; and on reading the sentence, "When the hour strikes, the guilty shall fall," he tapped his fingers on the paper and said: "This is very serious, very serious indeed."

Thereupon he gave the books to one of his men, and went off. Claire, who had hitherto not shown herself, now opened her door, and watched the police officers go down the stairs. And afterwards she came into her sister's bedroom, which she had not entered for a year. Mademoiselle Saget appeared to be on the best of terms with La Normande, and was hanging over her in a caressing way, bringing the shawl forward to cover her the better, and listening to her angry indignation with an expression of the deepest sympathy.

"You wretched coward!" exclaimed Claire, planting herself in front of her sister.

La Normande sprang up, quivering with anger, and let the shawl fall to the floor.

"Ah, you've been playing the spy, have you?" she screamed. "Dare to repeat what you've just said!"

"You wretched coward!" repeated Claire, in still more insulting tones than before.

Thereupon La Normande struck Claire with all her force; and in return Claire, turning terribly pale, sprang upon her sister and dug her nails into her neck. They struggled together for a moment or two, tearing at each other's hair and trying to choke one another. Claire, fragile though she was, pushed La Normande backward with such tremendous violence that they both fell against the wardrobe, smashing the mirror on its front. Muche was roaring, and old Madame Mehudin called to Mademoiselle Saget to come and help her separate the sisters. Claire, however, shook herself free.

"Coward! Coward!" she cried; "I'll go and tell the poor fellow that it is you who have betrayed him."

Her mother, however, blocked the doorway, and would not let her pass, while La Normande seized her from behind, and then, Mademoiselle Saget coming to the assistance of the other two, the three of them dragged Claire into her bedroom and locked the door upon her, in spite of all her frantic resistance. In her rage she tried to kick the door down, and smashed everything in the room. Soon afterwards, however, nothing could be heard except a furious scratching, the sound of metal scarping at the plaster. The girl was trying to loosen the door hinges with the points of her scissors.

"She would have murdered me if she had had a knife," said La Normande, looking about for her clothes, in order to dress herself. "She'll be doing something dreadful, you'll see, one of these days, with that jealousy of hers! We mustn't let her get out on any account: she'd bring the whole neighbourhood down upon us!"

Mademoiselle Saget went off in all haste. She reached the corner of the Rue Pirouette just as the commissary of police was re-entering the side passage of the Quenu-Gradelles' house. She grasped the situation at once, and entered the shop with such glistening eyes that Lisa enjoined silence by a gesture which called her attention to the presence of Quenu, who was hanging up some pieces of salt pork. As soon as he had returned to the kitchen, the old maid in a low voice described the scenes that had just taken place at the Mehudins'. Lisa, as she bent over the counter, with her hand resting on a dish of larded veal, listened to her with the happy face of one who triumphs. Then, as a customer entered the shop, and asked for a couple of pig's trotters, Lisa wrapped them up, and handed them over with a thoughtful air.

"For my own part, I bear La Normande no ill-will," she said to Mademoiselle Saget, when they were alone again. "I used to be very fond of her, and have always been sorry that other people made mischief between us. The proof that I've no animosity against her is here in this photograph, which I saved from falling into the hands of the police, and which I'm quite ready to give her back if she will come and ask me for it herself."

She took the photograph out of her pocket as she spoke. Mademoiselle Saget scrutinised it and sniggered as she read the inscription, "Louise, to her dear friend Florent."

"I'm not sure you'll be acting wisely," she said in her cutting voice. "You'd do better to keep it."

"No, no," replied Lisa; "I'm anxious for all this silly nonsense to come to an end. To-day is the day of reconciliation. We've had enough unpleasantness, and the neighbourhood's now going to be quiet and peaceful again."

"Well, well, shall I go and tell La Normande that you are expecting her?" asked the old maid.

"Yes; I shall be very glad if you will."

Mademoiselle Saget then made her way back to the Rue Pirouette, and greatly frightened the fish-girl by telling her that she had just seen her photograph in Lisa's pocket. She could not, however, at once prevail upon her to comply with her rival's terms. La Normande propounded conditions of her own. She would go, but Madame Quenu must come to the door of the shop to receive her. Thus the old maid was obliged to make another couple of journeys between the two rivals before their meeting could be satisfactorily arranged. At last, however, to her great delight, she succeeded in negotiating the peace which was destined to cause so much talk and excitement. As she passed Claire's door for the last time she still heard the sound of the scissors scraping away at the plaster.

When she had at last carried a definite reply to Madame Quenu, Mademoiselle Saget hurried off to find Madame Lecoeur and La Sarriette; and all three of them took up their position on the footway at the corner of the fish market, just in front of the pork shop. Here they would be certain to have a good view of every detail of the meeting. They felt extremely impatient, and while pretending to chat together kept an anxious look-out in the direction of the Rue Pirouette, along which La Normande must come. The news of the reconciliation was already travelling through the markets, and while some saleswomen stood up behind their stalls trying to get a view of what was taking place, others, still more inquisitive, actually left their places and took up a position in the covered way. Every eye in the markets was directed upon the pork shop; the whole neighbourhood was on the tip-toe of expectation.

It was a very solemn affair. When La Normande at last turned the corner of the Rue Pirouette the excitement was so great that the women held their breath.

"She has got her diamonds on," murmured La Sarriette.

"Just look how she stalks along," added Madame Lecoeur; "the stuck-up creature!"

The beautiful Norman was, indeed, advancing with the mien of a queen who condescends to make peace. She had made a most careful toilet, frizzing her hair and turning up a corner of her apron to display her cashmere skirt. She had even put on a new and rich lace bow. Conscious that the whole market was staring at her, she assumed a still haughtier air as she approached the pork shop. When she reached the door she stopped.

"Now it's beautiful Lisa's turn," remarked Mademoiselle Saget. "Mind you pay attention."

Beautiful Lisa smilingly quitted her counter. She crossed the shop-floor at a leisurely pace, and came and offered her hand to the beautiful Norman. She also was smartly dressed, with her dazzling linen and scrupulous neatness. A murmur ran through the crowd of fish-wives, all their heads gathered close together, and animated chatter ensued. The two women had gone inside the shop, and the crepines in the window prevented them from being clearly seen. However, they seemed to be conversing affectionately, addressing pretty compliments to one another.

"See!" suddenly exclaimed Mademoiselle Saget, "the beautiful Norman's buying something! What is it she's buying? It's a chitterling, I believe! Ah! Look! look! You didn't see it, did you? Well, beautiful Lisa just gave her the photograph; she slipped it into her hand with the chitterling."

Fresh salutations were then seen to pass between the two women; and the beautiful Lisa, exceeding even the courtesies which had been agreed upon, accompanied the beautiful Norman to the footway. There they stood laughing together, exhibiting themselves to the neighbourhood like a couple of good friends. The markets were quite delighted; and the saleswomen returned to their stalls, declaring that everything had passed off extremely well.

Mademoiselle Saget, however, detained Madame Lecoeur and La Sarriette. The drama was not over yet. All three kept their eyes fixed on the house opposite with such keen curiosity that they seemed trying to penetrate the very walls. To pass the time away they once more began to talk of the beautiful Norman.

"She's without a lover now," remarked Madame Lecoeur.

"Oh! she's got Monsieur Lebigre," replied La Sarriette, with a laugh.

"But surely Monsieur Lebigre won't have anything more to say to her."

Mademoiselle Saget shrugged her shoulders. "Ah, you don't know him," she said. "He won't care a straw about all this business. He knows what he's about, and La Normande is rich. They'll come together in a couple of months, you'll see. Old Madame Mehudin's been scheming to bring about their marriage for a long time past."

"Well, anyway," retorted the butter dealer, "the commissary found Florent at her lodgings."

"No, no, indeed; I'm sure I never told you that. The long spindle-shanks had gone way," replied the old maid. She paused to take a breath; then resumed in an indignant tone, "What distressed me most was to hear of all the abominable things that the villain had taught little Muche. You'd really never believe it. There was a whole bundle of papers."

"What sort of abominable things?" asked La Sarriette with interest.

"Oh, all kinds of filth. The commissary said there was quite sufficient there to hang him. The fellow's a perfect monster! To go and demoralise a child! Why, it's almost past believing! Little Muche is certainly a scamp, but that's no reason why he should be given over to the 'Reds,' is it?"

"Certainly not," assented the two others.

"However, all these mysterious goings-on will come to an end now. You remember my telling you once that there was some strange goings-on at the Quenus'? Well, you see, I was right in my conclusions, wasn't I? Thank God, however, the neighbourhood will now be able to breathe easily. It was high time strong steps were taken, for things had got to such a pitch that one actually felt afraid of being murdered in broad daylight. There was no pleasure in life. All the dreadful stories and reports one heard were enough to worry one to death. And it was all owing to that man, that dreadful Florent. Now beautiful Lisa and the beautiful Norman have sensibly made friends again. It was their duty to do so for the sake of the peace and quietness of us all. Everything will go on satisfactorily now, you'll find. Ah! there's poor Monsieur Quenu laughing yonder!"

Quenu had again come on to the footway, and was joking with Madame Taboureau's little servant. He seemed quite gay and skittish that morning. He took hold of the little servant's hands, and squeezed her fingers so tightly, in the exuberance of his spirits, that he made her cry out. Lisa had the greatest trouble to get him to go back into the kitchen. She was impatiently pacing about the shop, fearing lest Florent should make his appearance; and she called to her husband to come away, dreading a meeting between him and his brother.

"She's getting quite vexed," said Mademoiselle Saget. "Poor Monsieur Quenu, you see, knows nothing at all about what's taking place. Just look at him there, laughing like a child! Madame Taboureau, you know, said that she should have nothing more to do with the Quenus if they persisted in bringing themselves into discredit by keeping that Florent with them."

"Well, now, I suppose, they will stick to the fortune," remarked Madame Lecoeur.

"Oh, no, indeed, my dear. The other one has had his share already."

"Really? How do you know that?"

"Oh, it's clear enough, that is!" replied the old maid after a momentary hesitation, but without giving any proof of her assertions. "He's had even more than his share. The Quenus will be several thousand francs out of pocket. Money flies, you know, when a man has such vices as he has. I dare say you don't know that there was another woman mixed up in it all. Yes, indeed, old Madame Verlaque, the wife of the former inspector; you know the sallow-faced thing well enough."

The others protested that it surely wasn't possible. Why, Madame Verlaque was positively hideous!

"What! do you think me a liar?" cried Mademoiselle Saget, with angry indignation. "Why, her letters to him have been found, a whole pile of letters, in which she asks for money, ten and twenty francs at a time. There's no doubt at all about it. I'm quite certain in my own mind that they killed the husband between them."

La Sarriette and Madame Lecoeur were convinced; but they were beginning to get very impatient. They had been waiting on the footway for more than an hour, and feared that somebody might be robbing their stalls during their long absence. So Mademoiselle Saget began to give them some further interesting information to keep them from going off. Florent could not have taken to flight, said she; he was certain to return, and it would be very interesting to see him arrested. Then she went on to describe the trap that had been laid for him, while Madame Lecoeur and La Sarriette continued scrutinising the house from top to bottom, keeping watch upon every opening, and at each moment expecting to see the hats of the detectives appear at one of the doors or windows.

"Who would ever imagine, now, that the place was full of police?" observed the butter dealer.

"Oh! they're in the garret at the top," said the old maid. "They've left the window open, you see, just as they found it. Look! I think I can see one of them hiding behind the pomegranate on the balcony."

The others excitedly craned out their necks, but could see nothing.

"Ah, no, it's only a shadow," continued Mademoiselle Saget. "The little curtains even are perfectly still. The detectives must be sitting down in the room, and keeping quiet."

Just at that moment the women caught sight of Gavard coming out of the fish market with a thoughtful air. They looked at him with glistening eyes, without speaking. They had drawn close to one another, and stood there rigid in their drooping skirts. The poultry dealer came up to them.

"Have you seen Florent go by?" he asked.

They replied that they had not.

"I want to speak to him at once," continued Gavard. "He isn't in the fish market. He must have gone up to his room. But you would have seen him, though, if he had."

The women had turned rather pale. They still kept looking at each other with a knowing expression, their lips twitching slightly every now and then. "We have only been here some five minutes, said Madame Lecoeur unblushingly, as her brother-in-law still stood hesitating.

"Well, then, I'll go upstairs and see. I'll risk the five flights," rejoined Gavard with a laugh.

La Sarriette stepped forward as though she wished to detain him, but her aunt took hold of her arm and drew her back.

"Let him alone, you big simpleton!" she whispered. "It's the best thing that can happen to him. It'll teach him to treat us with respect in future."

"He won't say again that I ate tainted meat," muttered Mademoiselle Saget in a low tone.

They said nothing more. La Sarriette was very red; but the two others still remained quite yellow. But they now averted their heads, feeling confused by each other's looks, and at a loss what to do with their hands, which they buried beneath their aprons. Presently their eyes instinctively came back to the house, penetrating the walls, as it were, following Gavard in his progress up the stairs. When they imagined that he had entered Florent's room they again exchanged furtive glances. La Sarriette laughed nervously. All at once they fancied they could see the window curtains moving, and this led them to believe that a struggle was taking place. But the house-front remained as tranquil as ever in the sunshine; and another quarter of an hour of unbroken quietness passed away, during which the three women's nervous excitement became more and more intense. They were beginning to feel quite faint when a man hurriedly came out of the passage and ran off to get a cab. Five minutes later Gavard appeared, followed by two police officers. Lisa, who had stepped out on to the footway on observing the cab, hastily hurried back into the shop.

Gavard was very pale. The police had searched him upstairs, and had discovered the revolver and cartridge case in his possession. Judging by the commissary's stern expression on hearing his name, the poultry dealer deemed himself lost. This was a terrible ending to his plotting that had never entered into his calculations. The Tuileries would never forgive him! His legs gave way beneath him as though the firing party was already awaiting him outside. When he got into the street, however, his vanity lent him sufficient strength to walk erect; and he even managed to force a smile, as he knew the market people were looking at him. They should see him die bravely, he resolved.

However, La Sarriette and Madame Lecoeur rushed up to him and anxiously inquired what was the matter; and the butter dealer began to cry, while La Sarriette embraced her uncle, manifesting the deepest emotion. As Gavard held her clasped in his arms, he slipped a key into her hand, and whispered in her ear: "Take everything, and burn the papers."

Then he got into the cab with the same mien as he would have ascended the scaffold. As the vehicle disappeared round the corner of the Rue Pierre Lescot, Madame Lecoeur observed La Sarriette trying to hide the key in her pocket.

"It's of no use you trying that little game on me, my dear," she exclaimed, clenching her teeth; "I saw him slip it into your hand. As true as there's a God in Heaven, I'll go to the gaol and tell him everything, if you don't treat me properly."

"Of course I shall treat you properly, aunt, dear," replied La Sarriette, with an embarrassed smile.

"Very well, then, let us go to his rooms at once. It's of no use to give the police time to poke their dirty hands in the cupboards."

Mademoiselle Saget, who had been listening with gleaming eyes, followed them, running along in the rear as quickly as her short legs could carry her. She had no thought, now, of waiting for Florent. From the Rue Rambuteau to the Rue de la Cossonnerie she manifested the most humble obsequiousness, and volunteered to explain matters to Madame Leonce, the doorkeeper.

"We'll see, we'll see," the butter dealer curtly replied.

However, on reaching the house a preliminary parley—as Mademoiselle Saget had opined—proved to be necessary. Madame Leonce refused to allow the women to go up to her tenant's room. She put on an expression of severe austerity, and seemed greatly shocked by the sight of La Sarriette's loosely fastened fichu. However, after the old maid had whispered a few words to her and she was shown the key, she gave way. When they got upstairs she surrendered the rooms and furniture to the others article by article, apparently as heartbroken as if she had been compelled to show a party of burglars the place where her own money was secreted.

"There, take everything and have done with it!" she cried at last, throwing herself into an arm-chair.

La Sarriette was already eagerly trying the key in the locks of different closets. Madame Lecoeur, all suspicion, pressed her so closely that she exclaimed: "Really, aunt, you get in my way. Do leave my arms free, at any rate."

At last they succeeded in opening a wardrobe opposite the window, between the fireplace and the bed. And then all four women broke into exclamations. On the middle shelf lay some ten thousand francs in gold, methodically arranged in little piles. Gavard, who had prudently deposited the bulk of his fortune in the hands of a notary, had kept this sum by him for the purposes of the coming outbreak. He had been wont to say with great solemnity that his contribution to the revolution was quite ready. The fact was that he had sold out certain stock, and every night took an intense delight in contemplating those ten thousand francs, gloating over them, and finding something quite roysterous and insurrectional in their appearance. Sometimes when he was in bed he dreamed that a fight was going on in the wardrobe; he could hear guns being fired there, paving-stones being torn up and piled into barricades, and voices shouting in clamorous triumph; and he said to himself that it was his money fighting against the Government.

La Sarriette, however, had stretched out her hands with a cry of delight.

"Paws off, little one!" exclaimed Madame Lecoeur in a hoarse voice.

As she stood there in the reflection of the gold, she looked yellower than ever—her face discoloured by biliousness, her eyes glowing feverishly from the liver complaint which was secretly undermining her. Behind her Mademoiselle Saget on tip-toe was gazing ecstatically into the wardrobe, and Madame Leonce had now risen from her seat, and was growling sulkily.

"My uncle said I was to take everything," declared the girl.

"And am I to have nothing, then; I who have done so much for him?" cried the doorkeeper.

Madame Lecoeur was almost choking with excitement. She pushed the others away, and clung hold of the wardrobe, screaming: "It all belongs to me! I am his nearest relative. You are a pack of thieves, you are! I'd rather throw it all out of the window than see you have it!"

Then silence fell, and they all four stood glowering at each other. The kerchief that La Sarriette wore over her breast was now altogether unfastened, and she displayed her bosom heaving with warm life, her moist red lips, her rosy nostrils. Madame Lecoeur grew still more sour as she saw how lovely the girl looked in the excitement of her longing desire.

"Well," she said in a lower tone, "we won't fight about it. You are his niece, and I'll divide the money with you. We will each take a pile in turn."

Thereupon they pushed the other two aside. The butter dealer took the first pile, which at once disappeared within her skirts. Then La Sarriette took a pile. They kept a close watch upon one another, ready to fight at the slightest attempt at cheating. Their fingers were thrust forward in turn, the hideous knotted fingers of the aunt and the white fingers of the niece, soft and supple as silk. Slowly they filled their pockets. When there was only one pile left, La Sarriette objected to her aunt taking it, as she had commenced; and she suddenly divided it between Mademoiselle Saget and Madame Leonce, who had watched them pocket the gold with feverish impatience.

"Much obliged to you!" snarled the doorkeeper. "Fifty francs for having coddled him up with tisane and broth! The old deceiver told me he had no relatives!"

Before locking the wardrobe up again, Madame Lecoeur searched it thoroughly from top to bottom. It contained all the political works which were forbidden admission into the country, the pamphlets printed at Brussels, the scandalous histories of the Bonapartes, and the foreign caricatures ridiculing the Emperor. One of Gavard's greatest delights was to shut himself up with a friend, and show him all these compromising things.

"He told me that I was to burn all the papers," said La Sarriette.

"Oh, nonsense! we've no fire, and it would take up too long. The police will soon be here! We must get out of this!"

They all four hastened off; but they had not reached the bottom of the stairs before the police met them, and made Madame Leonce return with them upstairs. The three others, making themselves as small as possible, hurriedly escaped into the street. They walked away in single file at a brisk pace; the aunt and niece considerably incommoded by the weight of their drooping pockets. Mademoiselle Saget had kept her fifty francs in her closed fist, and remained deep in thought, brooding over a plan for extracting something more from the heavy pockets in front of her.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, as they reached the corner of the fish market, "we've got here at a lucky moment. There's Florent yonder, just going to walk into the trap."

Florent, indeed, was just then returning to the markets after his prolonged perambulation. He went into his office to change his coat, and then set about his daily duties, seeing that the marble slabs were properly washed, and slowly strolling along the alleys. He fancied that the fish-wives looked at him in a somewhat strange manner; they chuckled too, and smiled significantly as he passed them. Some new vexation, he thought, was in store for him. For some time past those huge, terrible women had not allowed him a day's peace. However, as he passed the Mehudins' stall he was very much surprised to hear the old woman address him in a honeyed tone: "There's just been a gentleman inquiring for you, Monsieur Florent; a middle-aged gentleman. He's gone to wait for you in your room."

As the old fish-wife, who was squatting, all of a heap, on her chair, spoke these words, she felt such a delicious thrill of satisfied vengeance that her huge body fairly quivered. Florent, still doubtful, glanced at the beautiful Norman; but the young woman, now completely reconciled with her mother, turned on her tap and slapped her fish, pretending not to hear what was being said.

"You are quite sure?" said Florent to Mother Mehudin.

"Oh, yes, indeed. Isn't that so, Louise?" said the old woman in a shriller voice.

Florent concluded that it must be some one who wanted to see him about the great business, and he resolved to go up to his room. He was just about to leave the pavilion, when, happening to turn round, he observed the beautiful Norman watching him with a grave expression on her face. Then he passed in front of the three gossips.

"Do you notice that there's no one in the pork shop?" remarked Mademoiselle Saget. "Beautiful Lisa's not the woman to compromise herself."

The shop was, indeed, quite empty. The front of the house was still bright with sunshine; the building looked like some honest, prosperous pile guilelessly warming itself in the morning rays. Up above, the pomegranate on the balcony was in full bloom. As Florent crossed the roadway he gave a friendly nod to Logre and Monsieur Lebigre, who appeared to be enjoying the fresh air on the doorstep of the latter's establishment. They returned his greeting with a smile. Florent was then about to enter the side-passage, when he fancied he saw Auguste's pale face hastily vanishing from its dark and narrow depths. Thereupon he turned back and glanced into the shop to make sure that the middle-aged gentleman was not waiting for him there. But he saw no one but Mouton, who sat on a block displaying his double chin and bristling whiskers, and gazed at him defiantly with his great yellow eyes. And when he had at last made up his mind to enter the passage, Lisa's face appeared behind the little curtain of a glazed door at the back of the shop.

A hush had fallen over the fish market. All the huge paunches and bosoms held their breath, waiting till Florent should disappear from sight. Then there was an uproarious outbreak; and the bosoms heaved wildly and the paunches nearly burst with malicious delight. The joke had succeeded. Nothing could be more comical. As old Mother Mehudin vented her merriment she shook and quivered like a wine-skin that is being emptied. Her story of the middle-aged gentleman went the round of the market, and the fish-wives found it extremely amusing. At last the long spindle-shanks was collared, and they would no longer always have his miserable face and gaol-bird's expression before their eyes. They all wished him a pleasant journey, and trusted that they might get a handsome fellow for their next inspector. And in their delight they rushed about from one stall to another, and felt inclined to dance round their marble slabs like a lot of holiday-making schoolgirls. The beautiful Norman, however, watched this outbreak of joy in a rigid attitude, not daring to move for fear she should burst into tears; and she kept her hands pressed upon a big skate to cool her feverish excitement.

"You see how those Mehudins turn their backs upon him now that he's come to grief," said Madame Lecoeur.

"Well, and they're quite right too," replied Mademoiselle Saget. "Besides, matters are settled now, my dear, and we're to have no more disputes. You've every reason to be satisfied; leave the others to act as they please."

"It's only the old woman who is laughing," La Sarriette remarked; "La Normande looks anything but happy."

Meantime, upstairs in his bedroom, Florent allowed himself to be taken as unresistingly as a sheep. The police officers sprang roughly upon him, expecting, no doubt, that they would meet with a desperate resistance. He quietly begged them to leave go of him; and then sat down on a chair while they packed up his papers, and the red scarves, armlets, and banners. He did not seem at all surprised at this ending; indeed, it was something of a relief to him, though he would not frankly confess it. But he suffered acutely at thought of the bitter hatred which had sent him into that room; he recalled Auguste's pale face and the sniggering looks of the fish-wives; he bethought himself of old Madame Mehudin's words, La Normande's silence, and the empty shop downstairs. The markets were leagued against him, he reflected; the whole neighbourhood had conspired to hand him over to the police. The mud of those greasy streets had risen up all around to overwhelm him!

And amidst all the round faces which flitted before his mind's eye there suddenly appeared that of Quenu, and a spasm of mortal agony contracted his heart.

"Come, get along downstairs!" exclaimed one of the officers, roughly.

Florent rose and proceeded to go downstairs. When he reached the second floor he asked to be allowed to return; he had forgotten something, he said. But the officers refused to let him go back, and began to hustle him forward. Then he besought them to let him return to his room again, and even offered them the money he had in his pocket. Two of them at last consented to return with him, threatening to blow his brains out should he attempt to play them any trick; and they drew their revolvers out of their pockets as they spoke. However, on reaching his room once more Florent simply went straight to the chaffinch's cage, took the bird out of it, kissed it between its wings, and set it at liberty. He watched it fly away through the open window, into the sunshine, and alight, as though giddy, on the roof of the fish market. Then it flew off again and disappeared over the markets in the direction of the Square des Innocents. For a moment longer Florent remained face to face with the sky, the free and open sky; and he thought of the wood-pigeons cooing in the garden of the Tuileries, and of those other pigeons down in the market cellars with their throats slit by Marjolin's knife. Then he felt quite broken, and turned and followed the officers, who were putting their revolvers back into their pockets as they shrugged their shoulders.

On reaching the bottom of the stairs, Florent stopped before the door which led into the kitchen. The commissary, who was waiting for him there, seemed almost touched by his gentle submissiveness, and asked him: "Would you like to say good-bye to your brother?"

For a moment Florent hesitated. He looked at the door. A tremendous noise of cleavers and pans came from the kitchen. Lisa, with the design of keeping her husband occupied, had persuaded him to make the black-puddings in the morning instead of in the evening, as was his wont. The onions were simmering on the fire, and over all the noisy uproar Florent could hear Quenu's joyous voice exclaiming, "Ah, dash it all, the pudding will be excellent, that it will! Auguste, hand me the fat!"

Florent thanked the commissary, but refused his offer. He was afraid to return any more into that warm kitchen, reeking with the odour of boiling onions, and so he went on past the door, happy in the thought that his brother knew nothing of what had happened to him, and hastening his steps as if to spare the establishment all further worry. However, on emerging into the open sunshine of the street he felt a touch of shame, and got into the cab with bent back and ashen face. He was conscious that the fish market was gazing at him in triumph; it seemed to him, indeed, as though the whole neighbourhood had gathered there to rejoice at his fall.

"What a villainous expression he's got!" said Mademoiselle Saget.

"Yes, indeed, he looks just like a thief caught with his hand in somebody's till," added Madame Lecoeur.

"I once saw a man guillotined who looked exactly like he does," asserted La Sarriette, showing her white teeth.

They stepped forward, lengthened their necks, and tried to see into the cab. Just as it was starting, however, the old maid tugged sharply at the skirts of her companions, and pointed to Claire, who was coming round the corner of the Rue Pirouette, looking like a mad creature, with her hair loose and her nails bleeding. She had at last succeeded in opening her door. When she discovered that she was too late, and that Florent was being taken off, she darted after the cab, but checked herself almost immediately with a gesture of impotent rage, and shook her fists at the receding wheels. Then, with her face quite crimson beneath the fine plaster dust with which she was covered, she ran back again towards the Rue Pirouette.

"Had he promised to marry her, eh?" exclaimed La Sarriette, laughing. "The silly fool must be quite cracked."

Little by little the neighbourhood calmed down, though throughout the day groups of people constantly assembled and discussed the events of the morning. The pork shop was the object of much inquisitive curiosity. Lisa avoided appearing there, and left the counter in charge of Augustine. In the afternoon she felt bound to tell Quenu of what had happened, for fear the news might cause him too great a shock should he hear it from some gossiping neighbour. She waited till she was alone with him in the kitchen, knowing that there he was always most cheerful, and would weep less than if he were anywhere else. Moreover, she communicated her tidings with all sorts of motherly precautions. Nevertheless, as soon as he knew the truth he fell on the chopping-block, and began to cry like a calf.

"Now, now, my poor dear, don't give way like that; you'll make yourself quite ill," exclaimed Lisa, taking him in her arms.

His tears were inundating his white apron, the whole of his massive, torpid form quivered with grief. He seemed to be sinking, melting away. When he was at last able to speak, he stammered: "Oh, you don't know how good he was to me when we lived together in the Rue Royer-Collard! He did everything. He swept the room and cooked the meals. He loved me as though I were his own child; and after his day's work he used to come back splashed with mud, and so tired that he could scarcely move, while I stayed warm and comfortable in the house, and had nothing to do but eat. And now they're going to shoot him!"

At this Lisa protested, saying that he would certainly not be shot. But Quenu only shook his head.

"I haven't loved him half as much as I ought to have done," he continued. "I can see that very well now. I had a wicked heart, and I hesitated about giving him his half of the money."

"Why, I offered it to him a dozen times and more!" Lisa interrupted. "I'm sure we've nothing to reproach ourselves with."

"Oh, yes, I know that you are everything that is good, and that you would have given him every copper. But I hesitated, I didn't like to part with it; and now it will be a sorrow to me for the rest of my life. I shall always think that if I'd shared the fortune with him he wouldn't have gone wrong a second time. Oh, yes; it's my fault! It is I who have driven him to this."

Then Lisa, expostulating still more gently, assured him that he had nothing to blame himself for, and even expressed some pity for Florent. But he was really very culpable, she said, and if he had had more money he would probably have perpetrated greater follies. Gradually she gave her husband to understand that it was impossible matters could have had any other termination, and that now everything would go on much better. Quenu was still weeping, wiping his cheeks with his apron, trying to suppress his sobs to listen to her, and then breaking into a wilder fit of tears than before. His fingers had mechanically sought a heap of sausage-meat lying on the block, and he was digging holes in it, and roughly kneading it together.

"And how unwell you were feeling, you know," Lisa continued. "It was all because our life had got so shifted out of its usual course. I was very anxious, though I didn't tell you so, at seeing you getting so low."

"Yes, wasn't I?" he murmured, ceasing to sob for a moment.

"And the business has been quite under a cloud this year. It was as though a spell had been cast on it. Come, now, don't take on so; you'll see that everything will look up again now. You must take care of yourself, you know, for my sake and your daughter's. You have duties to us as well as to others, remember."

Quenu was now kneading the sausage-meat more gently. Another burst of emotion was thrilling him, but it was a softer emotion, which was already bringing a vague smile to his grief-stricken face. Lisa felt that she had convinced him, and she turned and called to Pauline, who was playing in the shop, and sat her on Quenu's knee.

"Tell your father, Pauline, that he ought not to give way like this. Ask him nicely not to go on distressing us so."

The child did as she was told, and their fat, sleek forms united in a general embrace. They all three looked at one another, already feeling cured of that twelve months' depression from which they had but just emerged. Their big, round faces smiled, and Lisa softly repeated, "And after all, my dear, there are only we three, you know, only we three."

Two months later Florent was again sentenced to transportation. The affair caused a great stir. The newspapers published all possible details, and gave portraits of the accused, sketches of the banners and scarves, and plans of the places where the conspirators had met. For a fortnight nothing but the great plot of the central markets was talked of in Paris. The police kept on launching more and more alarming reports, and it was at last even declared that the whole of the Montmartre Quarter was undermined. The excitement in the Corps Legislatif was so intense that the members of the Centre and the Right forgot their temporary disagreement over the Imperial Grant Bill, and became reconciled. And then by an overwhelming majority they voted the unpopular tax, of which even the lower classes, in the panic which was sweeping over the city, dared no longer complain.

The trial lasted a week. Florent was very much surprised at the number of accomplices with which he found himself credited. Out of the twenty and more who were placed in the dock with him, he knew only some six or seven. After the sentence of the court had been read, he fancied he could see Robine's innocent-looking hat and back going off quietly through the crowd. Logre was acquitted, as was also Lacaille; Alexandre was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for his child-like complicity in the conspiracy; while as for Gavard, he, like Florent, was condemned to transportation. This was a heavy blow, which quite crushed him amidst the final enjoyment that he derived from those lengthy proceedings in which he had managed to make himself so conspicuous. He was paying very dearly for the way in which he had vented the spirit of perpetual opposition peculiar to the Paris shopkeeping classes. Two big tears coursed down his scared face—the face of a white-haired child.

And then one morning in August, amidst the busy awakening of the markets, Claude Lantier, sauntering about in the thick of the arriving vegetables, with his waist tightly girded by his red sash, came to grasp Madame Francois's hand close by Saint Eustache. She was sitting on her carrots and turnips, and her long face looked very sad. The artist, too, was gloomy, notwithstanding the bright sun which was already softening the deep-green velvet of the mountains of cabbages.

"Well, it's all over now," he said. "They are sending him back again. He's already on his way to Brest, I believe."

Madame Francois made a gesture of mute grief. Then she gently waved her hand around, and murmured in a low voice; "Ah, it is all Paris's doing, this villainous Paris!"

"No, no, not quite that; but I know whose doing it is, the contemptible creatures!" exclaimed Claude, clenching his fists. "Do you know, Madame Francois, there was nothing too ridiculous for those fellows in the court to say! Why, they even went ferreting in a child's copy-books! That great idiot of a Public Prosecutor made a tremendous fuss over them, and ranted about the respect due to children, and the wickedness of demagogical education! It makes me quite sick to think of it all!"

A shudder of disgust shook him, and then, burying himself more deeply in his discoloured cloak, he resumed: "To think of it! A man who was as gentle as a girl! Why, I saw him turn quite faint at seeing a pigeon killed! I couldn't help smiling with pity when I saw him between two gendarmes. Ah, well, we shall never see him again! He won't come back this time."

"He ought to have listened to me," said Madame Francois, after a pause, "and have come to live at Nanterre with my fowls and rabbits. I was very fond of him, you see, for I could tell that he was a good-hearted fellow. Ah, we might have been so happy together! It's a sad pity. Well, we must bear it as best we can, Monsieur Claude. Come and see me one of these days. I'll have an omelet ready for you."

Her eyes were dim with tears; but all at once she sprang up like a brave woman who bears her sorrows with fortitude.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, "here's old Mother Chantemesse coming to buy some turnips of me. The fat old lady's as sprightly as ever!"

Claude went off, and strolled about the footways. The dawn had risen in the white sheaf of light at the end of the Rue Rambuteau; and the sun, now level with the house-tops, was diffusing rosy rays which already fell in warm patches on the pavements. Claude was conscious of a gay awakening in the huge resonant markets—indeed, all over the neighbourhood—crowded with piles of food. It was like the joy that comes after cure, the mirth of folks who are at last relieved of a heavy weight which has been pulling them down. He saw La Sarriette displaying a gold chain and singing amidst her plums and strawberries, while she playfully pulled the moustaches of Monsieur Jules, who was arrayed in a velvet jacket. He also caught sight of Madame Lecoeur and Mademoiselle Saget passing along one of the covered ways, and looking less sallow than usual—indeed, almost rosy—as they laughed like bosom friends over some amusing story. In the fish market, old Madame Mehudin, who had returned to her stall, was slapping her fish, abusing customers, and snubbing the new inspector, a presumptuous young man whom she had sworn to spank; while Claire, seemingly more languid and indolent than ever, extended her hands, blue from immersion in the water of her tanks, to gather together a great heap of edible snails, shimmering with silvery slime. In the tripe market Auguste and Augustine, with the foolish expression of newly-married people, had just been purchasing some pigs' trotters, and were starting off in a trap for their pork shop at Montrouge. Then, as it was now eight o'clock and already quite warm, Claude, on again coming to the Rue Rambuteau, perceived Muche and Pauline playing at horses. Muche was crawling along on all-fours, while Pauline sat on his back, and clung to his hair to keep herself from falling. However, a moving shadow which fell from the eaves of the market roof made Claude look up; and he then espied Cadine and Marjolin aloft, kissing and warming themselves in the sunshine, parading their loves before the whole neighbourhood like a pair of light-hearted animals.

Claude shook his fist at them. All this joyousness down below and on high exasperated him. He reviled the Fat; the Fat, he declared, had conquered the Thin. All around him he could see none but the Fat protruding their paunches, bursting with robust health, and greeting with delight another day of gorging and digestion. And a last blow was dealt to him by the spectacle which he perceived on either hand as he halted opposite the Rue Pirouette.

On his right, the beautiful Norman, or the beautiful Madame Lebigre, as she was now called, stood at the door of her shop. Her husband had at length been granted the privilege of adding a State tobacco agency[*] to his wine shop, a long-cherished dream of his which he had finally been able to realise through the great services he had rendered to the authorities. And to Claude the beautiful Madame Lebigre looked superb, with her silk dress and her frizzed hair, quite ready to take her seat behind her counter, whither all the gentlemen in the neighbourhood flocked to buy their cigars and packets of tobacco. She had become quite distinguished, quite the lady. The shop behind her had been newly painted, with borders of twining vine-branches showing against a soft background; the zinc-plated wine-counter gleamed brightly, and in the tall mirror the flasks of liqueurs set brighter flashes of colour than ever. And the mistress of all these things stood smiling radiantly at the bright sunshine.

[*] Most readers will remember that the tobacco trade is a
State monopoly in France. The retail tobacconists are merely
Government agents.—Translator.

Then, on Claude's left, the beautiful Lisa blocked up the doorway of her shop as she stood on the threshold. Never before had her linen shone with such dazzling whiteness; never had her serene face and rosy cheeks appeared in a more lustrous setting of glossy locks. She displayed the deep calmness of repletion, a massive tranquillity unruffled even by a smile. She was a picture of absolute quietude, of perfect felicity, not only cloudless but lifeless, the simple felicity of basking in the warm atmosphere. Her tightly stretched bodice seemed to be still digesting the happiness of yesterday; while her dimpled hands, hidden in the folds of her apron, did not even trouble to grasp at the happiness of to-day, certain as they were that it would come of itself. And the shop-window at her side seemed to display the same felicity. It had recovered from its former blight; the tongues lolled out, red and healthy; the hams had regained their old chubbiness of form; the festoons of sausages no longer wore that mournful air which had so greatly distressed Quenu. Hearty laughter, accompanied by a jubilant clattering of pans, sounded from the kitchen in the rear. The whole place again reeked with fat health. The flitches of bacon and the sides of pork that hung against the marble showed roundly like paunches, triumphant paunches, whilst Lisa, with her imposing breadth of shoulders and dignity of mien, bade the markets good morning with those big eyes of hers which so clearly bespoke a gross feeder.

However, the two women bowed to each other. Beautiful Madame Lebigre and beautiful Madame Quenu exchanged a friendly salute.

And then Claude, who had certainly forgotten to dine on the previous day, was thrilled with anger at seeing them standing there, looking so healthy and well-to-do with their buxom bosoms; and tightening his sash, he growled in a tone of irritation:

"What blackguards respectable people are!"

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Therese Raquin, by Emile Zola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Therese Raquin

Author: Emile Zola

Translator: Edward Vizetelly

Release Date: April 22, 2006 [EBook #6626]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THERESE RAQUIN ***

Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; David Widger

THERESE RAQUIN

By Emile Zola

Translated and edited with a preface by Edward Vizetelly

Contents

PREFACE

THERESE RAQUIN

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

PREFACE

This volume, "Therese Raquin," was Zola's third book, but it was the one that first gave him notoriety, and made him somebody, as the saying goes.

While still a clerk at Hachette's at eight pounds a month, engaged in checking and perusing advertisements and press notices, he had already in 1864 published the first series of "Les Contes a Ninon"—a reprint of short stories contributed to various publications; and, in the following year, had brought out "La Confession de Claude." Both these books were issued by Lacroix, a famous go-ahead publisher and bookseller in those days, whose place of business stood at one of the corners of the Rue Vivienne and the Boulevard Montmartre, and who, as Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie., ended in bankruptcy in the early seventies.

"La Confession de Claude" met with poor appreciation from the general public, although it attracted the attention of the Public Prosecutor, who sent down to Hachette's to make a few inquiries about the author, but went no further. When, however, M. Barbey d'Aurevilly, in a critical weekly paper called the "Nain Jaune," spitefully alluded to this rather daring novel as "Hachette's little book," one of the members of the firm sent for M. Zola, and addressed him thus:

"Look here, M. Zola, you are earning eight pounds a month with us, which is ridiculous for a man of your talent. Why don't you go into literature altogether? It will bring you wealth and glory."

Zola had no choice but to take this broad hint, and send in his resignation, which was at once accepted. The Hachettes did not require the services of writers of risky, or, for that matter, any other novels, as clerks; and, besides, as Zola has told us himself, in an interview with my old friend and employer,[*] the late M. Fernand Xau, Editor of the Paris "Journal," they thought "La Confession de Claude" a trifle stiff, and objected to their clerks writing books in time which they considered theirs, as they paid for it.

[*] He sent me to Hamburg for ten days in 1892 to report on
the appalling outbreak of cholera in that city, with the
emoluments of ten pounds a day, besides printing several
articles from my pen on Parisian topics.—E. V.

Zola, cast, so to say, adrift, with "Les Contes a Ninon" and "La Confession de Claude" as scant literary baggage, buckled to, and set about "Les Mysteres de Marseille" and "Therese Raquin," while at the same time contributing art criticisms to the "Evenement"—a series of articles which raised such a storm that painters and sculptors were in the habit of purchasing copies of the paper and tearing it up in the faces of Zola and De Villemessant, the owner, whenever they chanced to meet them. Nevertheless it was these articles that first drew attention to Manet, who had hitherto been regarded as a painter of no account, and many of whose pictures now hang in the Luxembourg Gallery.

"Therese Raquin" originally came out under the title of "A Love Story" in a paper called the "Artiste," edited by that famous art critic and courtier of the Second Empire, Arsene Houssaye, author of "Les Grandes Dames," as well as of those charming volumes "Hommes et Femmes du 18eme Siecle," and many other works.

Zola received no more than twenty-four pounds for the serial rights of the novel, and he consented at the insistence of the Editor, who pointed out to him that the periodical was read by the Empress Eugenie, to draw his pen through certain passages, which were reinstated when the story was published in volume form. I may say here that in this translation, I have adopted the views of the late M. Arsene Houssaye; and, if I have allowed the appalling description of the Paris Morgue to stand, it is, first of all, because it constitutes a very important factor in the story; and moreover, it is so graphic, so true to life, as I have seen the place myself, times out of number, that notwithstanding its horror, it really would be a loss to pass it over.

Well, "Therese Raquin" having appeared as "A Love Story" in the "Artiste," was then published as a book, in 1867, by that same Lacroix as had issued Zola's preceding efforts in novel writing. I was living in Paris at the time, and I well recall the yell of disapprobation with which the volume was received by the reviewers. Louis Ulbach, then a writer on the "Figaro," to which Zola also contributed, and who subsequently founded and edited a paper called "La Cloche," when Zola, curiously enough, became one of his critics, made a particularly virulent attack on the novel and its author. Henri de Villemessant, the Editor, authorised Zola to reply to him, with the result that a vehement discussion ensued in print between author and critic, and "Therese Raquin" promptly went into a second edition, to which Zola appended a preface.

I have not thought it necessary to translate this preface, which is a long and rather tedious reply to the reviewers of the day. It will suffice to say, briefly, that the author meets the strictures of his critics by pointing out and insisting on the fact, that he has simply sought to make an analytic study of temperament and not of character.

"I have selected persons," says he, "absolutely swayed by their nerves and blood, deprived of free will, impelled in every action of life, by the fatal lusts of the flesh. Therese and Laurent are human brutes, nothing more. I have sought to follow these brutes, step by step, in the secret labour of their passions, in the impulsion of their instincts, in the cerebral disorder resulting from the excessive strain on their nerves."

EDWARD VIZETELLY SURBITON, 1 December, 1901.

THERESE RAQUIN

CHAPTER I

At the end of the Rue Guenegaud, coming from the quays, you find the Arcade of the Pont Neuf, a sort of narrow, dark corridor running from the Rue Mazarine to the Rue de Seine. This arcade, at the most, is thirty paces long by two in breadth. It is paved with worn, loose, yellowish tiles which are never free from acrid damp. The square panes of glass forming the roof, are black with filth.

On fine days in the summer, when the streets are burning with heavy sun, whitish light falls from the dirty glazing overhead to drag miserably through the arcade. On nasty days in winter, on foggy mornings, the glass throws nothing but darkness on the sticky tiles—unclean and abominable gloom.

To the left are obscure, low, dumpy shops whence issue puffs of air as cold as if coming from a cellar. Here are dealers in toys, cardboard boxes, second-hand books. The articles displayed in their windows are covered with dust, and owing to the prevailing darkness, can only be perceived indistinctly. The shop fronts, formed of small panes of glass, streak the goods with a peculiar greenish reflex. Beyond, behind the display in the windows, the dim interiors resemble a number of lugubrious cavities animated by fantastic forms.

To the right, along the whole length of the arcade, extends a wall against which the shopkeepers opposite have stuck some small cupboards. Objects without a name, goods forgotten for twenty years, are spread out there on thin shelves painted a horrible brown colour. A dealer in imitation jewelry, has set up shop in one of these cupboards, and there sells fifteen sous rings, delicately set out on a cushion of blue velvet at the bottom of a mahogany box.

Above the glazed cupboards, ascends the roughly plastered black wall, looking as if covered with leprosy, and all seamed with defacements.

The Arcade of the Pont Neuf is not a place for a stroll. You take it to make a short cut, to gain a few minutes. It is traversed by busy people whose sole aim is to go quick and straight before them. You see apprentices there in their working-aprons, work-girls taking home their work, persons of both sexes with parcels under their arms. There are also old men who drag themselves forward in the sad gloaming that falls from the glazed roof, and bands of small children who come to the arcade on leaving school, to make a noise by stamping their feet on the tiles as they run along. Throughout the day a sharp hurried ring of footsteps, resounds on the stone with irritating irregularity. Nobody speaks, nobody stays there, all hurry about their business with bent heads, stepping out rapidly, without taking a single glance at the shops. The tradesmen observe with an air of alarm, the passers-by who by a miracle stop before their windows.

The arcade is lit at night by three gas burners, enclosed in heavy square lanterns. These jets of gas, hanging from the glazed roof whereon they cast spots of fawn-coloured light, shed around them circles of pale glimmer that seem at moments to disappear. The arcade now assumes the aspect of a regular cut-throat alley. Great shadows stretch along the tiles, damp puffs of air enter from the street. Anyone might take the place for a subterranean gallery indistinctly lit-up by three funeral lamps. The tradespeople for all light are contented with the faint rays which the gas burners throw upon their windows. Inside their shops, they merely have a lamp with a shade, which they place at the corner of their counter, and the passer-by can then distinguish what the depths of these holes sheltering night in the daytime, contain. On this blackish line of shop fronts, the windows of a cardboard-box maker are flaming: two schist-lamps pierce the shadow with a couple of yellow flames. And, on the other side of the arcade a candle, stuck in the middle of an argand lamp glass, casts glistening stars into the box of imitation jewelry. The dealer is dozing in her cupboard, with her hands hidden under her shawl.

A few years back, opposite this dealer, stood a shop whose bottle-green woodwork excreted damp by all its cracks. On the signboard, made of a long narrow plank, figured, in black letters the word: MERCERY. And on one of the panes of glass in the door was written, in red, the name of a woman: Therese Raquin. To right and left were deep show cases, lined with blue paper.

During the daytime the eye could only distinguish the display of goods, in a soft, obscured light.

On one side were a few linen articles: crimped tulle caps at two and three francs apiece, muslin sleeves and collars: then undervests, stockings, socks, braces. Each article had grown yellow and crumpled, and hung lamentably suspended from a wire hook. The window, from top to bottom, was filled in this manner with whitish bits of clothing, which took a lugubrious aspect in the transparent obscurity. The new caps, of brighter whiteness, formed hollow spots on the blue paper covering the shelves. And the coloured socks hanging on an iron rod, contributed sombre notes to the livid and vague effacement of the muslin.

On the other side, in a narrower show case, were piled up large balls of green wool, white cards of black buttons, boxes of all colours and sizes, hair nets ornamented with steel beads, spread over rounds of bluish paper, fasces of knitting needles, tapestry patterns, bobbins of ribbon, along with a heap of soiled and faded articles, which doubtless had been lying in the same place for five or six years. All the tints had turned dirty grey in this cupboard, rotting with dust and damp.

In summer, towards noon, when the sun scorched the squares and streets with its tawny rays, you could distinguish, behind the caps in the other window, the pale, grave profile of a young woman. This profile issued vaguely from the darkness reigning in the shop. To a low parched forehead was attached a long, narrow, pointed nose; the pale pink lips resembled two thin threads, and the short, nervy chin was attached to the neck by a line that was supple and fat. The body, lost in the shadow, could not be seen. The profile alone appeared in its olive whiteness, perforated by a large, wide-open, black eye, and as though crushed beneath thick dark hair. This profile remained there for hours, motionless and peaceful, between a couple of caps for women, whereon the damp iron rods had imprinted bands of rust.

At night, when the lamp had been lit, you could see inside the shop which was greater in length than depth. At one end stood a small counter; at the other, a corkscrew staircase afforded communication with the rooms on the first floor. Against the walls were show cases, cupboards, rows of green cardboard boxes. Four chairs and a table completed the furniture. The shop looked bare and frigid; the goods were done up in parcels and put away in corners instead of lying hither and thither in a joyous display of colour.

As a rule two women were seated behind the counter: the young woman with the grave profile, and an old lady who sat dozing with a smile on her countenance. The latter was about sixty; and her fat, placid face looked white in the brightness of the lamp. A great tabby cat, crouching at a corner of the counter, watched her as she slept.

Lower down, on a chair, a man of thirty sat reading or chatting in a subdued voice with the young woman. He was short, delicate, and in manner languid. With his fair hair devoid of lustre, his sparse beard, his face covered with red blotches, he resembled a sickly, spoilt child arrived at manhood.

Shortly before ten o'clock, the old lady awoke. The shop was then closed, and all the family went upstairs to bed. The tabby cat followed the party purring, and rubbing its head against each bar of the banisters.

The lodging above comprised three apartments. The staircase led to a dining-room which also did duty as drawing-room. In a niche on the left stood a porcelain stove; opposite, a sideboard; then chairs were arranged along the walls, and a round table occupied the centre. At the further end a glazed partition concealed a dark kitchen. On each side of the dining-room was a sleeping apartment.

The old lady after kissing her son and daughter-in-law withdrew. The cat went to sleep on a chair in the kitchen. The married couple entered their room, which had a second door opening on a staircase that communicated with the arcade by an obscure narrow passage.

The husband who was always trembling with fever went to bed, while the young woman opened the window to close the shutter blinds. She remained there a few minutes facing the great black wall, which ascends and stretches above the arcade. She cast a vague wandering look upon this wall, and, without a word she, in her turn, went to bed in disdainful indifference.

CHAPTER II

Madame Raquin had formerly been a mercer at Vernon. For close upon five-and-twenty years, she had kept a small shop in that town. A few years after the death of her husband, becoming subject to fits of faintness, she sold her business. Her savings added to the price of this sale placed a capital of 40,000 francs in her hand which she invested so that it brought her in an income of 2,000 francs a year. This sum amply sufficed for her requirements. She led the life of a recluse. Ignoring the poignant joys and cares of this world, she arranged for herself a tranquil existence of peace and happiness.

At an annual rental of 400 francs she took a small house with a garden descending to the edge of the Seine. This enclosed, quiet residence vaguely recalled the cloister. It stood in the centre of large fields, and was approached by a narrow path. The windows of the dwelling opened to the river and to the solitary hillocks on the opposite bank. The good lady, who had passed the half century, shut herself up in this solitary retreat, where along with her son Camille and her niece Therese, she partook of serene joy.

Although Camille was then twenty, his mother continued to spoil him like a little child. She adored him because she had shielded him from death, throughout a tedious childhood of constant suffering. The boy contracted every fever, every imaginable malady, one after the other. Madame Raquin struggled for fifteen years against these terrible evils, which arrived in rapid succession to tear her son away from her. She vanquished them all by patience, care, and adoration. Camille having grown up, rescued from death, had contracted a shiver from the torture of the repeated shocks he had undergone. Arrested in his growth, he remained short and delicate. His long, thin limbs moved slowly and wearily. But his mother loved him all the more on account of this weakness that arched his back. She observed his thin, pale face with triumphant tenderness when she thought of how she had brought him back to life more than ten times over.

During the brief spaces of repose that his sufferings allowed him, the child attended a commercial school at Vernon. There he learned orthography and arithmetic. His science was limited to the four rules, and a very superficial knowledge of grammar. Later on, he took lessons in writing and bookkeeping. Madame Raquin began to tremble when advised to send her son to college. She knew he would die if separated from her, and she said the books would kill him. So Camille remained ignorant, and this ignorance seemed to increase his weakness.

At eighteen, having nothing to do, bored to death at the delicate attention of his mother, he took a situation as clerk with a linen merchant, where he earned 60 francs a month. Being of a restless nature idleness proved unbearable. He found greater calm and better health in this labour of a brute which kept him bent all day long over invoices, over enormous additions, each figure of which he patiently added up. At night, broken down with fatigue, without an idea in his head, he enjoyed infinite delight in the doltishness that settled on him. He had to quarrel with his mother to go with the dealer in linen. She wanted to keep him always with her, between a couple of blankets, far from the accidents of life.

But the young man spoke as master. He claimed work as children claim toys, not from a feeling of duty, but by instinct, by a necessity of nature. The tenderness, the devotedness of his mother had instilled into him an egotism that was ferocious. He fancied he loved those who pitied and caressed him; but, in reality, he lived apart, within himself, loving naught but his comfort, seeking by all possible means to increase his enjoyment. When the tender affection of Madame Raquin disgusted him, he plunged with delight into a stupid occupation that saved him from infusions and potions.

In the evening, on his return from the office, he ran to the bank of the Seine with his cousin Therese who was then close upon eighteen. One day, sixteen years previously, while Madame Raquin was still a mercer, her brother Captain Degans brought her a little girl in his arms. He had just arrived from Algeria.

"Here is a child," said he with a smile, "and you are her aunt. The mother is dead and I don't know what to do with her. I'll give her to you."

The mercer took the child, smiled at her and kissed her rosy cheeks. Although Degans remained a week at Vernon, his sister barely put a question to him concerning the little girl he had brought her. She understood vaguely that the dear little creature was born at Oran, and that her mother was a woman of the country of great beauty. The Captain, an hour before his departure, handed his sister a certificate of birth in which Therese, acknowledged by him to be his child, bore his name. He rejoined his regiment, and was never seen again at Vernon, being killed a few years later in Africa.

Therese grew up under the fostering care of her aunt, sleeping in the same bed as Camille. She who had an iron constitution, received the treatment of a delicate child, partaking of the same medicine as her cousin, and kept in the warm air of the room occupied by the invalid. For hours she remained crouching over the fire, in thought, watching the flames before her, without lowering her eyelids.

This obligatory life of a convalescent caused her to retire within herself. She got into the habit of talking in a low voice, of moving about noiselessly, of remaining mute and motionless on a chair with expressionless, open eyes. But, when she raised an arm, when she advanced a foot, it was easy to perceive that she possessed feline suppleness, short, potent muscles, and that unmistakable energy and passion slumbered in her soporous frame. Her cousin having fallen down one day in a fainting fit, she abruptly picked him up and carried him—an effort of strength that turned her cheeks scarlet. The cloistered life she led, the debilitating regimen to which she found herself subjected, failed to weaken her thin, robust form. Only her face took a pale, and even a slightly yellowish tint, making her look almost ugly in the shade. Ever and anon she went to the window, and contemplated the opposite houses on which the sun threw sheets of gold.

When Madame Raquin sold her business, and withdrew to the little place beside the river, Therese experienced secret thrills of joy. Her aunt had so frequently repeated to her: "Don't make a noise; be quiet," that she kept all the impetuosity of her nature carefully concealed within her. She possessed supreme composure, and an apparent tranquillity that masked terrible transports. She still fancied herself in the room of her cousin, beside a dying child, and had the softened movements, the periods of silence, the placidity, the faltering speech of an old woman.

When she saw the garden, the clear river, the vast green hillocks ascending on the horizon, she felt a savage desire to run and shout. She felt her heart thumping fit to burst in her bosom; but not a muscle of her face moved, and she merely smiled when her aunt inquired whether she was pleased with her new home.

Life now became more pleasant for her. She maintained her supple gait, her calm, indifferent countenance, she remained the child brought up in the bed of an invalid; but inwardly she lived a burning, passionate existence. When alone on the grass beside the water, she would lie down flat on her stomach like an animal, her black eyes wide open, her body writhing, ready to spring. And she stayed there for hours, without a thought, scorched by the sun, delighted at being able to thrust her fingers in the earth. She had the most ridiculous dreams; she looked at the roaring river in defiance, imagining that the water was about to leap on her and attack her. Then she became rigid, preparing for the defence, and angrily inquiring of herself how she could vanquish the torrent.

At night, Therese, appeased and silent, stitched beside her aunt, with a countenance that seemed to be dozing in the gleam that softly glided from beneath the lamp shade. Camille buried in an armchair thought of his additions. A word uttered in a low voice, alone disturbed, at moments, the peacefulness of this drowsy home.

Madame Raquin observed her children with serene benevolence. She had resolved to make them husband and wife. She continued to treat her son as if he were at death's door; and she trembled when she happened to reflect that she would one day die herself, and would leave him alone and suffering. In that contingency, she relied on Therese, saying to herself that the young girl would be a vigilant guardian beside Camille. Her niece with her tranquil manner, and mute devotedness, inspired her with unlimited confidence. She had seen Therese at work, and wished to give her to her son as a guardian angel. This marriage was a solution to the matter, foreseen and settled in her mind.

The children knew for a long time that they were one day to marry. They had grown up with this idea, which had thus become familiar and natural to them. The union was spoken of in the family as a necessary and positive thing. Madame Raquin had said:

"We will wait until Therese is one-and-twenty."

And they waited patiently, without excitement, and without a blush.

Camille, whose blood had become impoverished by illness, had remained a little boy in the eyes of his cousin. He kissed her as he kissed his mother, by habit, without losing any of his egotistic tranquillity. He looked upon her as an obliging comrade who helped him to amuse himself, and who, if occasion offered, prepared him an infusion. When playing with her, when he held her in his arms, it was as if he had a boy to deal with. He experienced no thrill, and at these moments the idea had never occurred to him of planting a warm kiss on her lips as she struggled with a nervous laugh to free herself.

The girl also seemed to have remained cold and indifferent. At times her great eyes rested on Camille and fixedly gazed at him with sovereign calm. On such occasions her lips alone made almost imperceptible little motions. Nothing could be read on her expressionless countenance, which an inexorable will always maintained gentle and attentive. Therese became grave when the conversation turned to her marriage, contenting herself with approving all that Madame Raquin said by a sign of the head. Camille went to sleep.

On summer evenings, the two young people ran to the edge of the water. Camille, irritated at the incessant attentions of his mother, at times broke out in open revolt. He wished to run about and make himself ill, to escape the fondling that disgusted him. He would then drag Therese along with him, provoking her to wrestle, to roll in the grass. One day, having pushed his cousin down, the young girl bounded to her feet with all the savageness of a wild beast, and, with flaming face and bloodshot eyes, fell upon him with clenched fists. Camille in fear sank to the ground.

Months and years passed by, and at length the day fixed for the marriage arrived. Madame Raquin took Therese apart, spoke to her of her father and mother, and related to her the story of her birth. The young girl listened to her aunt, and when she had finished speaking, kissed her, without answering a word.

At night, Therese, instead of going into her own room, which was on the left of the staircase, entered that of her cousin which was on the right. This was all the change that occurred in her mode of life. The following day, when the young couple came downstairs, Camille had still his sickly languidness, his righteous tranquillity of an egotist. Therese still maintained her gentle indifference, and her restrained expression of frightful calmness.

CHAPTER III

A week after the marriage, Camille distinctly told his mother that he intended quitting Vernon to reside in Paris. Madame Raquin protested: she had arranged her mode of life, and would not modify it in any way. Thereupon her son had a nervous attack, and threatened to fall ill, if she did not give way to his whim.

"Never have I opposed you in your plans," said he; "I married my cousin, I took all the drugs you gave me. It is only natural, now, when I have a desire of my own, that you should be of the same mind. We will move at the end of the month."

Madame Raquin was unable to sleep all night. The decision Camille had come to, upset her way of living, and, in despair, she sought to arrange another existence for herself and the married couple. Little by little, she recovered calm. She reflected that the young people might have children, and that her small fortune would not then suffice. It was necessary to earn money, to go into business again, to find lucrative occupation for Therese. The next day she had become accustomed to the idea of moving, and had arranged a plan for a new life.

At luncheon she was quite gay.

"This is what we will do," said she to her children. "I will go to Paris to-morrow. There I will look out for a small mercery business for sale, and Therese and myself will resume selling needles and cotton, which will give us something to do. You, Camille, will act as you like. You can either stroll about in the sun, or you can find some employment."

"I shall find employment," answered the young man.

The truth was that an idiotic ambition had alone impelled Camille to leave Vernon. He wished to find a post in some important administration. He blushed with delight when he fancied he saw himself in the middle of a large office, with lustring elbow sleeves, and a pen behind his ear.

Therese was not consulted: she had always displayed such passive obedience that her aunt and husband no longer took the trouble to ask her opinion. She went where they went, she did what they did, without a complaint, without a reproach, without appearing even to be aware that she changed her place of residence.

Madame Raquin came to Paris, and went straight to the Arcade of the Pont Neuf. An old maid at Vernon had sent her to one of her relatives who in this arcade kept a mercery shop which she desired to get rid of. The former mercer found the shop rather small, and rather dark; but, in passing through Paris, she had been taken aback by the noise in the streets, by the luxuriously dressed windows, and this narrow gallery, this modest shop front, recalled her former place of business which was so peaceful. She could fancy herself again in the provinces, and she drew a long breath thinking that her dear children would be happy in this out-of-the-way corner. The low price asked for the business, caused her to make up her mind. The owner sold it her for 2,000 francs, and the rent of the shop and first floor was only 1,200 francs a year. Madame Raquin, who had close upon 4,000 francs saved up, calculated that she could pay for the business and settle the rent for the first year, without encroaching on her fortune. The salary Camille would be receiving, and the profit on the mercery business would suffice, she thought, to meet the daily expenses; so that she need not touch the income of her funded money, which would capitalise, and go towards providing marriage portions for her grandchildren.

She returned to Vernon beaming with pleasure, relating that she had found a gem, a delightful little place right in the centre of Paris. Little by little, at the end of a few days, in her conversations of an evening, the damp, obscure shop in the arcade became a palace; she pictured it to herself, so far as her memory served her, as convenient, spacious, tranquil, and replete with a thousand inestimable advantages.

"Ah! my dear Therese," said she, "you will see how happy we shall be in that nook! There are three beautiful rooms upstairs. The arcade is full of people. We will make charming displays. There is no fear of our feeling dull."

But she did not stop there. All her instinct of a former shopkeeper was awakened. She gave advice to Therese, beforehand, as to buying and selling, and posted her up in all the tricks of small tradespeople. At length, the family quitted the house beside the Seine, and on the evening of the same day, were installed in the Arcade of the Pont Neuf.

When Therese entered the shop, where in future she was to live, it seemed to her that she was descending into the clammy soil of a grave. She felt quite disheartened, and shivered with fear. She looked at the dirty, damp gallery, visited the shop, and ascending to the first floor, walked round each room. These bare apartments, without furniture, looked frightful in their solitude and dilapidation. The young woman could not make a gesture, or utter a word. She was as if frozen. Her aunt and husband having come downstairs, she seated herself on a trunk, her hands rigid, her throat full of sobs, and yet she could not cry.

Madame Raquin, face to face with reality, felt embarrassed, and ashamed of her dreams. She sought to defend her acquisition. She found a remedy for every fresh inconvenience that was discovered, explaining the obscurity by saying the weather was overcast, and concluded by affirming that a sweep-up would suffice to set everything right.

"Bah!" answered Camille, "all this is quite suitable. Besides, we shall only come up here at night. I shall not be home before five or six o'clock. As to you two, you will be together, so you will not be dull."

The young man would never have consented to inhabit such a den, had he not relied on the comfort of his office. He said to himself that he would be warm all day at his administration, and that, at night, he would go to bed early.

For a whole week, the shop and lodging remained in disorder. Therese had seated herself behind the counter from the first day, and she did not move from that place. Madame Raquin was astonished at this depressed attitude. She had thought that the young woman would try to adorn her habitation. That she would place flowers at the windows, and ask for new papers, curtains and carpets. When she suggested some repairs, some kind of embellishment, her niece quietly replied:

"What need is there for it? We are very well as we are. There is no necessity for luxury."

It was Madame Raquin who had to arrange the rooms and tidy up the shop. Therese at last lost patience at seeing the good old lady incessantly turning round and round before her eyes; she engaged a charwoman, and forced her aunt to be seated beside her.

Camille remained a month without finding employment. He lived as little as possible in the shop, preferring to stroll about all day; and he found life so dreadfully dull with nothing to do, that he spoke of returning to Vernon. But he at length obtained a post in the administration of the Orleans Railway, where he earned 100 francs a month. His dream had become realised.

He set out in the morning at eight o'clock. Walking down the Rue Guenegaud, he found himself on the quays. Then, taking short steps with his hands in his pockets, he followed the Seine from the Institut to the Jardin des Plantes. This long journey which he performed twice daily, never wearied him. He watched the water running along, and he stopped to see the rafts of wood descending the river, pass by. He thought of nothing. Frequently he planted himself before Notre Dame, to contemplate the scaffolding surrounding the cathedral which was then undergoing repair. These huge pieces of timber amused him although he failed to understand why. Then he cast a glance into the Port aux Vins as he went past, and after that counted the cabs coming from the station.

In the evening, quite stupefied, with his head full of some silly story related to his office, he crossed the Jardin des Plantes, and went to have a look at the bears, if he was not in too great a hurry. There he remained half an hour, leaning over the rails at the top of the pit, observing the animals clumsily swaying to and fro. The behaviour of these huge beasts pleased him. He examined them with gaping mouth and rounded eyes, partaking of the joy of an idiot when he perceived them bestir themselves. At last he turned homewards, dragging his feet along, busying himself with the passers-by, with the vehicles, and the shops.

As soon as he arrived he dined, and then began reading. He had purchased the works of Buffon, and, every evening, he set himself to peruse twenty to thirty pages, notwithstanding the wearisome nature of the task. He also read in serial, at 10 centimes the number, "The History of the Consulate and Empire" by Thiers, and "The History of the Girondins" by Lamartine, as well as some popular scientific works. He fancied he was labouring at his education. At times, he forced his wife to listen to certain pages, to particular anecdotes, and felt very much astonished that Therese could remain pensive and silent the whole evening, without being tempted to take up a book. And he thought to himself that his wife must be a woman of very poor intelligence.

Therese thrust books away from her with impatience. She preferred to remain idle, with her eyes fixed, and her thoughts wandering and lost. But she maintained an even, easy temper, exercising all her will to render herself a passive instrument, replete with supreme complaisance and abnegation.

The shop did not do much business. The profit was the same regularly each month. The customers consisted of female workpeople living in the neighbourhood. Every five minutes a young girl came in to purchase a few sous worth of goods. Therese served the people with words that were ever the same, with a smile that appeared mechanically on her lisp. Madame Raquin displayed a more unbending, a more gossipy disposition, and, to tell the truth, it was she who attracted and retained the customers.

For three years, days followed days and resembled one another. Camille did not once absent himself from his office. His mother and wife hardly ever left the shop. Therese, residing in damp obscurity, in gloomy, crushing silence, saw life expand before her in all its nakedness, each night bringing the same cold couch, and each morn the same empty day.

CHAPTER IV

One day out of seven, on the Thursday evening, the Raquin family received their friends. They lit a large lamp in the dining-room, and put water on the fire to make tea. There was quite a set out. This particular evening emerged in bold relief from the others. It had become one of the customs of the family, who regarded it in the light of a middle-class orgie full of giddy gaiety. They did not retire to rest until eleven o'clock at night.

At Paris Madame Raquin had found one of her old friends, the commissary of police Michaud, who had held a post at Vernon for twenty years, lodging in the same house as the mercer. A narrow intimacy had thus been established between them; then, when the widow had sold her business to go and reside in the house beside the river, they had little by little lost sight of one another. Michaud left the provinces a few months later, and came to live peacefully in Paris, Rue de Seine, on his pension of 1,500 francs. One rainy day, he met his old friend in the Arcade of the Pont Neuf, and the same evening dined with the family.

The Thursday receptions began in this way: the former commissary of police got into the habit of calling on the Raquins regularly once a week. After a while he came accompanied by his son Olivier, a great fellow of thirty, dry and thin, who had married a very little woman, slow and sickly. This Olivier held the post of head clerk in the section of order and security at the Prefecture of Police, worth 3,000 francs a year, which made Camille feel particularly jealous. From the first day he made his appearance, Therese detested this cold, rigid individual, who imagined he honoured the shop in the arcade by making a display of his great shrivelled-up frame, and the exhausted condition of his poor little wife.

Camille introduced another guest, an old clerk at the Orleans Railway, named Grivet, who had been twenty years in the service of the company, where he now held the position of head clerk, and earned 2,100 francs a year. It was he who gave out the work in the office where Camille had found employment, and the latter showed him certain respect. Camille, in his day dreams, had said to himself that Grivet would one day die, and that he would perhaps take his place at the end of a decade or so. Grivet was delighted at the welcome Madame Raquin gave him, and he returned every week with perfect regularity. Six months later, his Thursday visit had become, in his way of thinking, a duty: he went to the Arcade of the Pont Neuf, just as he went every morning to his office, that is to say mechanically, and with the instinct of a brute.

From this moment, the gatherings became charming. At seven o'clock Madame Raquin lit the fire, set the lamp in the centre of the table, placed a box of dominoes beside it, and wiped the tea service which was in the sideboard. Precisely at eight o'clock old Michaud and Grivet met before the shop, one coming from the Rue de Seine, and the other from the Rue Mazarine. As soon as they entered, all the family went up to the first floor. There, in the dining-room, they seated themselves round the table waiting for Olivier Michaud and his wife who always arrived late. When the party was complete, Madame Raquin poured out the tea. Camille emptied the box of dominoes on the oilcloth table cover, and everyone became deeply interested in their hands. Henceforth nothing could be heard but the jingle of dominoes. At the end of each game, the players quarrelled for two or three minutes, then mournful silence was resumed, broken by the sharp clanks of the dominoes.

Therese played with an indifference that irritated Camille. She took Francois, the great tabby cat that Madame Raquin had brought from Vernon, on her lap, caressing it with one hand, whilst she placed her dominoes with the other. These Thursday evenings were a torture to her. Frequently she complained of being unwell, of a bad headache, so as not to play, and remain there doing nothing, and half asleep. An elbow on the table, her cheek resting on the palm of her hand, she watched the guests of her aunt and husband through a sort of yellow, smoky mist coming from the lamp. All these faces exasperated her. She looked from one to the other in profound disgust and secret irritation.

Old Michaud exhibited a pasty countenance, spotted with red blotches, one of those death-like faces of an old man fallen into second childhood; Grivet had the narrow visage, the round eyes, the thin lips of an idiot. Olivier, whose bones were piercing his cheeks, gravely carried a stiff, insignificant head on a ridiculous body; as to Suzanne, the wife of Olivier, she was quite pale, with expressionless eyes, white lips, and a soft face. And Therese could not find one human being, not one living being among these grotesque and sinister creatures, with whom she was shut up; sometimes she had hallucinations, she imagined herself buried at the bottom of a tomb, in company with mechanical corpses, who, when the strings were pulled, moved their heads, and agitated their legs and arms. The thick atmosphere of the dining-room stifled her; the shivering silence, the yellow gleams of the lamp penetrated her with vague terror, and inexpressible anguish.

Below, to the door of the shop, they had fixed a bell whose sharp tinkle announced the entrance of customers. Therese had her ear on the alert; and when the bell rang, she rapidly ran downstairs quite relieved, delighted at being able to quit the dining-room. She slowly served the purchaser, and when she found herself alone, she sat down behind the counter where she remained as long as possible, dreading going upstairs again, and in the enjoyment of real pleasure at no longer having Grivet and Olivier before her eyes. The damp air of the shop calmed the burning fever of her hands, and she again fell into the customary grave reverie.

But she could not remain like this for long. Camille became angry at her absence. He failed to comprehend how anyone could prefer the shop to the dining-room on a Thursday evening, and he leant over the banister, to look for his wife.

"What's the matter?" he would shout. "What are you doing there? Why don't you come up? Grivet has the devil's own luck. He has just won again."

The young woman rose painfully, and ascending to the dining-room resumed her seat opposite old Michaud, whose pendent lips gave heartrending smiles. And, until eleven o'clock, she remained oppressed in her chair, watching Francois whom she held in her arms, so as to avoid seeing the cardboard dolls grimacing around her.

CHAPTER V

One Thursday, Camille, on returning from his office, brought with him a great fellow with square shoulders, whom he pushed in a familiar manner into the shop.

"Mother," he said to Madame Raquin, pointing to the newcomer, "do you recognise this gentleman?"

The old mercer looked at the strapping blade, seeking among her recollections and finding nothing, while Therese placidly observed the scene.

"What!" resumed Camille, "you don't recognise Laurent, little Laurent, the son of daddy Laurent who owns those beautiful fields of corn out Jeufosse way. Don't you remember? I went to school with him; he came to fetch me of a morning on leaving the house of his uncle, who was our neighbour, and you used to give him slices of bread and jam."

All at once Madame Raquin recollected little Laurent, whom she found very much grown. It was quite ten years since she had seen him. She now did her best to make him forget her lapse of memory in greeting him, by recalling a thousand little incidents of the past, and by adopting a wheedling manner towards him that was quite maternal. Laurent had seated himself. With a peaceful smile on his lips, he replied to the questions addressed to him in a clear voice, casting calm and easy glances around him.

"Just imagine," said Camille, "this joker has been employed at the Orleans-Railway-Station for eighteen months, and it was only to-night that we met and recognised one another—the administration is so vast, so important!"

As the young man made this remark, he opened his eyes wider, and pinched his lips, proud to be a humble wheel in such a large machine. Shaking his head, he continued:

"Oh! but he is in a good position. He has studied. He already earns 1,500 francs a year. His father sent him to college. He had read for the bar, and learnt painting. That is so, is it not, Laurent? You'll dine with us?"

"I am quite willing," boldly replied the other.

He got rid of his hat and made himself comfortable in the shop, while Madame Raquin ran off to her stewpots. Therese, who had not yet pronounced a word, looked at the new arrival. She had never seen such a man before. Laurent, who was tall and robust, with a florid complexion, astonished her. It was with a feeling akin to admiration, that she contemplated his low forehead planted with coarse black hair, his full cheeks, his red lips, his regular features of sanguineous beauty. For an instant her eyes rested on his neck, a neck that was thick and short, fat and powerful. Then she became lost in the contemplation of his great hands which he kept spread out on his knees: the fingers were square; the clenched fist must be enormous and would fell an ox.

Laurent was a real son of a peasant, rather heavy in gait, with an arched back, with movements that were slow and precise, and an obstinate tranquil manner. One felt that his apparel concealed round and well-developed muscles, and a body of thick hard flesh. Therese examined him with curiosity, glancing from his fists to his face, and experienced little shivers when her eyes fell on his bull-like neck.

Camille spread out his Buffon volumes, and his serials at 10 centimes the number, to show his friend that he also studied. Then, as if answering an inquiry he had been making of himself for some minutes, he said to Laurent:

"But, surely you must know my wife? Don't you remember that little cousin who used to play with us at Vernon?"

"I had no difficulty in recognising Madame," answered Laurent, looking Therese full in the face.

This penetrating glance troubled the young woman, who, nevertheless, gave a forced smile, and after exchanging a few words with Laurent and her husband, hurried away to join her aunt, feeling ill at ease.

As soon as they had seated themselves at table, and commenced the soup, Camille thought it right to be attentive to his friend.

"How is your father?" he inquired.

"Well, I don't know," answered Laurent. "We are not on good terms; we ceased corresponding five years ago."

"Bah!" exclaimed the clerk, astonished at such a monstrosity.

"Yes," continued the other, "the dear man has ideas of his own. As he is always at law with his neighbours, he sent me to college, in the fond hope that later on, he would find in me an advocate who would win him all his actions. Oh! daddy Laurent has naught but useful ambitions; he even wants to get something out of his follies."

"And you wouldn't be an advocate?" inquired Camille, more and more astonished.

"Faith, no," answered his friend with a smile. "For a couple of years I pretended to follow the classes, so as to draw the allowance of 1,200 francs which my father made me. I lived with one of my college chums, who is a painter, and I set about painting also. It amused me. The calling is droll, and not at all fatiguing. We smoked and joked all the livelong day."

The Raquin family opened their eyes in amazement.

"Unfortunately," continued Laurent, "this could not last. My father found out that I was telling him falsehoods. He stopped my 100 francs a month, and invited me to return and plough the land with him. I then tried to paint pictures on religious subjects which proved bad business. As I could plainly see that I was going to die of hunger, I sent art to the deuce and sought employment. My father will die one of these days, and I am waiting for that event to live and do nothing."

Laurent spoke in a tranquil tone. In a few words he had just related a characteristic tale that depicted him at full length. In reality he was an idle fellow, with the appetite of a full-blooded man for everything, and very pronounced ideas as to easy and lasting employment. The only ambition of this great powerful frame was to do nothing, to grovel in idleness and satiation from hour to hour. He wanted to eat well, sleep well, to abundantly satisfy his passions, without moving from his place, without running the risk of the slightest fatigue.

The profession of advocate had terrified him, and he shuddered at the idea of tilling the soil. He had plunged into art, hoping to find therein a calling suitable to an idle man. The paint-brush struck him as being an instrument light to handle, and he fancied success easy. His dream was a life of cheap sensuality, a beautiful existence full of houris, of repose on divans, of victuals and intoxication.

The dream lasted so long as daddy Laurent sent the crown pieces. But when the young man, who was already thirty, perceived the wolf at the door, he began to reflect. Face to face with privations, he felt himself a coward. He would not have accepted a day without bread, for the utmost glory art could bestow. As he had said himself, he sent art to the deuce, as soon as he recognised that it would never suffice to satisfy his numerous requirements. His first efforts had been below mediocrity; his peasant eyes caught a clumsy, slovenly view of nature; his muddy, badly drawn, grimacing pictures, defied all criticism.

But he did not seem to have an over-dose of vanity for an artist; he was not in dire despair when he had to put aside his brushes. All he really regretted was the vast studio of his college chum, where he had been voluptuously grovelling for four or five years. He also regretted the women who came to pose there. Nevertheless he found himself at ease in his position as clerk; he lived very well in a brutish fashion, and he was fond of this daily task, which did not fatigue him, and soothed his mind. Still one thing irritated him: the food at the eighteen sous ordinaries failed to appease the gluttonous appetite of his stomach.

As Camille listened to his friend, he contemplated him with all the astonishment of a simpleton. This feeble man was dreaming, in a childish manner, of this studio life which his friend had been alluding to, and he questioned Laurent on the subject.

"So," said he, "there were lady models who posed before you in the nude?"

"Oh! yes," answered Laurent with a smile, and looking at Therese, who had turned deadly pale.

"You must have thought that very funny," continued Camille, laughing like a child. "It would have made me feel most awkward. I expect you were quite scandalised the first time it happened."

Laurent had spread out one of his great hands and was attentively looking at the palm. His fingers gave slight twitches, and his cheeks became flushed.

"The first time," he answered, as if speaking to himself, "I fancy I thought it quite natural. This devilish art is exceedingly amusing, only it does not bring in a sou. I had a red-haired girl as model who was superb, firm white flesh, gorgeous bust, hips as wide as . . ."

Laurent, raising his head, saw Therese mute and motionless opposite, gazing at him with ardent fixedness. Her dull black eyes seemed like two fathomless holes, and through her parted lips could be perceived the rosy tint of the inside of her mouth. She seemed as if overpowered by what she heard, and lost in thought. She continued listening.

Laurent looked from Therese to Camille, and the former painter restrained a smile. He completed his phrase by a broad voluptuous gesture, which the young woman followed with her eyes. They were at dessert, and Madame Raquin had just run downstairs to serve a customer.

When the cloth was removed Laurent, who for some minutes had been thoughtful, turned to Camille.

"You know," he blurted out, "I must paint your portrait."

This idea delighted Madame Raquin and her son, but Therese remained silent.

"It is summer-time," resumed Laurent, "and as we leave the office at four o'clock, I can come here, and let you give me a sitting for a couple of hours in the evening. The picture will be finished in a week."

"That will be fine," answered Camille, flushed with joy. "You shall dine with us. I will have my hair curled, and put on my black frock coat."

Eight o'clock struck. Grivet and Michaud made their entry. Olivier and Suzanne arrived behind them.

When Camille introduced his friend to the company, Grivet pinched his lips. He detested Laurent whose salary, according to his idea, had risen far too rapidly. Besides, the introduction of a new-comer was quite an important matter, and the guests of the Raquins could not receive an individual unknown to them, without some display of coldness.

Laurent behaved very amicably. He grasped the situation, and did his best to please the company, so as to make himself acceptable to them at once. He related anecdotes, enlivened the party by his merry laughter, and even won the friendship of Grivet.

That evening Therese made no attempt to go down to the shop. She remained seated on her chair until eleven o'clock, playing and talking, avoiding the eyes of Laurent, who for that matter did not trouble himself about her. The sanguineous temperament of this strapping fellow, his full voice and jovial laughter, troubled the young woman and threw her into a sort of nervous anguish.

CHAPTER VI

Henceforth, Laurent called almost every evening on the Raquins. He lived in the Rue Saint-Victor, opposite the Port aux Vins, where he rented a small furnished room at 18 francs a month. This attic, pierced at the top by a lift-up window, measured barely nine square yards, and Laurent was in the habit of going home as late as possible at night. Previous to his meeting with Camille, the state of his purse not permitting him to idle away his time in the cafes, he loitered at the cheap eating-houses where he took his dinner, smoking his pipe and sipping his coffee and brandy which cost him three sous. Then he slowly gained the Rue Saint-Victor, sauntering along the quays, where he seated himself on the benches, in mild weather.

The shop in the Arcade of the Pont Neuf became a charming retreat, warm and quiet, where he found amicable conversation and attention. He saved the three sous his coffee and brandy cost him, and gluttonously swallowed the excellent tea prepared by Madame Raquin. He remained there until ten o'clock, dozing and digesting as if he were at home; and before taking his departure, assisted Camille to put up the shutters and close the shop for the night.

One evening, he came with his easel and box of colours. He was to commence the portrait of Camille on the morrow. A canvas was purchased, minute preparations made, and the artist at last took the work in hand in the room occupied by the married couple, where Laurent said the light was the best.

He took three evenings to draw the head. He carefully trailed the charcoal over the canvas with short, sorry strokes, his rigid, cold drawing recalling in a grotesque fashion that of the primitive masters. He copied the face of Camille with a hesitating hand, as a pupil copies an academical figure, with a clumsy exactitude that conveyed a scowl to the face. On the fourth day, he placed tiny little dabs of colour on his palette, and commenced painting with the point of the brush; he then dotted the canvas with small dirty spots, and made short strokes altogether as if he had been using a pencil.

At the end of each sitting, Madame Raquin and Camille were in ecstasies. But Laurent said they must wait, that the resemblance would soon come.

Since the portrait had been commenced, Therese no longer quitted the room, which had been transformed into a studio. Leaving her aunt alone behind the counter, she ran upstairs at the least pretext, and forgot herself watching Laurent paint.

Still grave and oppressed, paler and more silent, she sat down and observed the labour of the brushes. But this sight did not seem to amuse her very much. She came to the spot, as though attracted by some power, and she remained, as if riveted there. Laurent at times turned round, with a smile, inquiring whether the portrait pleased her. But she barely answered, a shiver ran through her frame, and she resumed her meditative trance.

Laurent, returning at night to the Rue Saint-Victor, reasoned with himself at length, discussing in his mind, whether he should become the lover of Therese, or not.

"Here is a little woman," said he to himself, "who will be my sweetheart whenever I choose. She is always there, behind my back, examining, measuring me, summing me up. She trembles. She has a strange face that is mute and yet impassioned. What a miserable creature that Camille is, to be sure."

And Laurent inwardly laughed as he thought of his pale, thin friend. Then he resumed:

"She is bored to death in that shop. I go there, because I have nowhere else to go to, otherwise they would not often catch me in the Arcade of the Pont Neuf. It is damp and sad. A woman must be wearied to death there. I please her, I am sure of it; then, why not me rather than another?"

He stopped. Self-conceit was getting the better of him. Absorbed in thought, he watched the Seine running by.

"Anyhow, come what may," he exclaimed, "I shall kiss her at the first opportunity. I bet she falls at once into my arms."

As he resumed his walk, he was seized with indecision.

"But she is ugly," thought he. "She has a long nose, and a big mouth. Besides, I have not the least love for her. I shall perhaps get myself into trouble. The matter requires reflection."

Laurent, who was very prudent, turned these thoughts over in his head for a whole week. He calculated all the possible inconveniences of an intrigue with Therese, and only decided to attempt the adventure, when he felt convinced that it could be attended by no evil consequences. Therese would have every interest to conceal their intimacy, and he could get rid of her whenever he pleased. Even admitting that Camille discovered everything, and got angry, he would knock him down, if he became spiteful. From every point of view that matter appeared to Laurent easy and engaging.

Henceforth he enjoyed gentle quietude, waiting for the hour to strike. He had made up his mind to act boldly at the first opportunity. In the future he saw comfortable evenings, with all the Raquins contributing to his enjoyment: Therese giving him her love, Madame Raquin wheedling him like a mother, and Camille chatting with him so that he might not feel too dull, at night, in the shop.

The portrait was almost completed, but the opportunity he desired did not occur. Therese, depressed and anxious, continued to remain in the room. But so did Camille, and Laurent was in despair at being unable to get rid of him. Nevertheless, the time came when he found himself obliged to mention that the portrait would be finished on the morrow, and Madame Raquin thereupon announced that they would celebrate the completion of the work of the artist by dining together.

The next day, when Laurent had given the canvas the last touch, all the family assembled to go into raptures over the striking resemblance. The portrait was vile, a dirty grey colour with large violescent patches. Laurent could not use even the brightest colours, without making them dull and muddy. In spite of himself he had exaggerated the wan complexion of his model, and the countenance of Camille resembled the greenish visage of a person who had met death by drowning. The grimacing drawing threw the features into convulsions, thus rendering the sinister resemblance all the more striking. But Camille was delighted; he declared that he had the appearance of a person of distinction on the canvas.

When he had thoroughly admired his own face, he declared he would go and fetch a couple of bottles of champagne. Madame Raquin went down to the shop, and the artist was alone with Therese.

The young woman had remained seated, gazing vaguely in front of her. Laurent hesitated. He examined the portrait, and played with his brushes. There was not much time to lose. Camille might come back, and the opportunity would perhaps not occur again. The painter abruptly turned round, and found himself face to face with Therese.

They contemplated one another for a few seconds. Then, with a violent movement, Laurent bent down, and pressed the young woman to him. Throwing back her head he crushed her mouth beneath his lips. She made a savage, angry effort at revolt, and, then all at once gave in. They exchanged not a word. The act was silent and brutal.

CHAPTER VII

The two sweethearts from the commencement found their intrigue necessary, inevitable and quite natural. At their first interview they conversed familiarly, kissing one another without embarrassment, and without a blush, as if their intimacy had dated back several years. They lived quite at ease in their new situation, with a tranquillity and an independence that were perfect.

They made their appointments. Therese being unable to go out, it was arranged that Laurent should come to see her. In a clear, firm voice the young woman explained to him the plan she had conceived. The interview would take place in the nuptial chamber. The sweetheart would pass by the passage which ran into the arcade, and Therese would open the door on the staircase to him. During this time, Camille would be at his office, and Madame Raquin below, in the shop. This was a daring arrangement that ought to succeed.

Laurent accepted. There was a sort of brutal temerity in his prudence, the temerity of a man with big fists. Choosing a pretext, he obtained permission from his chief to absent himself for a couple of hours, and hastened to the Arcade of the Pont Neuf.

The dealer in imitation jewelry was seated just opposite the door of the passage, and he had to wait until she was busy, until some young work-girl came to purchase a ring or a brooch made of brass. Then, rapidly entering the passage, he ascended the narrow, dark staircase, leaning against the walls which were clammy with damp. He stumbled against the stone steps, and each time he did so, he felt a red-hot iron piercing his chest. A door opened, and on the threshold, in the midst of a gleam of white light he perceived Therese, who closing the door after him, threw her arms about his neck.

Laurent was astonished to find his sweetheart handsome. He had never seen her before as she appeared to him then. Therese, supple and strong, pressed him in her arms, flinging her head backward, while on her visage coursed ardent rays of light and passionate smiles. This face seemed as if transfigured, with its moist lips and sparkling eyes. It now had a fond caressing look. It radiated. She was beautiful with the strong beauty born of passionate abandon.

When Laurent parted from her, after his initial visit, he staggered like a drunken man, and the next day, on recovering his cunning prudent calm, he asked himself whether he should return to this young woman whose kisses gave him the fever. First of all he positively decided to keep to himself. Then he had a cowardly feeling. He sought to forget, to avoid seeing Therese, and yet she always seemed to be there, implacably extending her arms. The physical suffering that this spectacle caused him became intolerable.

He gave way. He arranged another meeting, and returned to the Arcade of the Pont Neuf.

From that day forth, Therese entered into his life. He did not yet accept her, although he bore with her. He had his hours of terror, his moments of prudence, and, altogether this intrigue caused him disagreeable agitation. But his discomfort and his fears disappeared. The meetings continued and multiplied.

Therese experienced no hesitation. She went straight where her passion urged her to go. This woman whom circumstances had bowed down, and who had at length drawn herself up erect, now revealed all her being and explained her life.

"Oh! if you only knew," said she, "how I have suffered. I was brought up in the tepid damp room of an invalid. I slept in the same bed as Camille. At night I got as far away from him as I could, to avoid the sickly odour of his body. He was naughty and obstinate. He would not take his physic unless I shared it with him. To please my aunt I was obliged to swallow a dose of every drug. I don't know how it is I have survived. They made me ugly. They robbed me of the only thing I possessed, and it is impossible for you to love me as I love you."

She broke off and wept, and after kissing Laurent, continued with bitter hatred:

"I do not wish them any harm. They brought me up, they received me, and shielded me from misery. But I should have preferred abandonment to their hospitality. I had a burning desire for the open air. When quite young, my dream was to rove barefooted along the dusty roads, holding out my hand for charity, living like a gipsy. I have been told that my mother was a daughter of the chief of a tribe in Africa. I have often thought of her, and I understood that I belonged to her by blood and instinct. I should have liked to have never parted from her, and to have crossed the sand slung at her back.

"Ah! what a childhood! I still feel disgust and rebellion, when I recall the long days I passed in the room where Camille was at death's door. I sat bent over the fire, stupidly watching the infusions simmer, and feeling my limbs growing stiff. And I could not move. My aunt scolded me if I made a noise. Later on, I tasted profound joy in the little house beside the river; but I was already half feeble, I could barely walk, and when I tried to run I fell down. Then they buried me alive in this vile shop."

After a pause, she resumed:

"You will hardly credit how bad they have made me. They have turned me into a liar and a hypocrite. They have stifled me with their middle-class gentleness, and I can hardly understand how it is that there is still blood in my veins. I have lowered my eyes, and given myself a mournful, idiotic face like theirs. I have led their deathlike life. When you saw me I looked like a blockhead, did I not? I was grave, overwhelmed, brutalised. I no longer had any hope. I thought of flinging myself into the Seine.

"But previous to this depression, what nights of anger I had. Down there at Vernon, in my frigid room, I bit my pillow to stifle my cries. I beat myself, taxed myself with cowardice. My blood was on the boil, and I would have lacerated my body. On two occasions, I wanted to run away, to go straight before me, towards the sun; but my courage failed. They had turned me into a docile brute with their tame benevolence and sickly tenderness. Then I lied, I always lied. I remained there quite gentle, quite silent, dreaming of striking and biting."

After a silence, she continued:

"I do not know why I consented to marry Camille. I did not protest, from a feeling of a sort of disdainful indifference. I pitied the child. When I played with him, I felt my fingers sink into the flesh of his limbs as into damp clay. I took him because my aunt offered him to me, and because I never intended to place any restraint on my actions on his account.

"I found my husband just the same little suffering boy whose bed I had shared when I was six years old. He was just as frail, just as plaintive, and he still had that insipid odour of a sick child that had been so repugnant to me previously. I am relating all this so that you may not be jealous. I was seized with a sort of disgust. I remembered the physic I had drank. I got as far away from him as the bed would allow, and I passed terrible nights. But you, you——"

Therese drew herself up, bending backward, her fingers imprisoned in the massive hands of Laurent, gazing at his broad shoulders, and enormous neck.

"You, I love you," she continued. "I loved you from the day Camille pushed you into the shop. You have perhaps no esteem for me, because I gave way at once. Truly, I know not how it happened. I am proud. I am passionate. I would have liked to have beaten you, the first day, when you kissed me. I do not know how it was I loved you; I hated you rather. The sight of you irritated me, and made me suffer. When you were there, my nerves were strained fit to snap. My head became quite empty. I was ready to commit a crime.

"Oh! how I suffered! And I sought this suffering. I waited for you to arrive. I loitered round your chair, so as to move in your breath, to drag my clothes over yours. It seemed as though your blood cast puffs of heat on me as I passed, and it was this sort of burning cloud in which you were enveloped, that attracted me, and detained me beside you in spite of my secret revolt. You remember when you were painting here: a fatal power attracted me to your side, and I breathed your air with cruel delight. I know I seemed to be begging for kisses, I felt ashamed of my bondage, I felt I should fall, if you were to touch me. But I gave way to my cowardice, I shivered with cold, waiting until you chose to take me in your arms."

When Therese ceased speaking, she was quivering, as though proud at being avenged. In this bare and chilly room were enacted scenes of burning lust, sinister in their brutality.

On her part Therese seemed to revel in daring. The only precaution she would take when expecting her lover was to tell her aunt she was going upstairs to rest. But then, when he was there she never bothered about avoiding noise, walking about and talking. At first this terrified Laurent.

"For God's sake," he whispered, "don't make so much noise. Madame Raquin will hear."

Therese would laugh. "Who cares, you are always so worried. She is at her counter and won't leave. She is too afraid of being robbed. Besides, you can hide."

Laurent's passion had not yet stifled his native peasant caution, but soon he grew used to the risks of these meetings, only a few yards from the old woman.

One day, fearing her niece was ill, Madame Raquin climbed the stairs. Therese never bothered to bolt the bedroom door.

At the sound of the woman's heavy step on the wooden stairs, Laurent became frantic. Therese laughed as she saw him searching for his waistcoat and hat. She grabbed his arm and pushed him down at the foot of the bed. With perfect self-possession she whispered:

"Stay there. Don't move."

She threw all his clothes that were lying about over him and covered them with a white petticoat she had taken off. Without losing her calm, she lay down, half-naked, with her hair loose.

When Madame Raquin quietly opened the door and tiptoed to the bed the younger woman pretended to be asleep. Laurent, under all the clothes was in a panic.

"Therese," asked the old lady with some concern, "are you all right, my dear?"

Therese, opening her eyes and yawning, answered that she had a terrible migraine. She begged her aunt to let her sleep some more. The old lady left the room as quietly as she had entered it.

"So you see," Therese said triumphantly, "there is no reason to worry. These people are not in love. They are blind."

At other times Therese seemed quite mad, wandering in her mind. She would see the cat, sitting motionless and dignified, looking at them. "Look at Francois," she said to Laurent. "You'd think he understands and is planning to tell Camille everything to-night. He knows a thing or two about us. Wouldn't it be funny if one day, in the shop, he just started talking."

This idea was delightful to Therese but Laurent felt a shudder run through him as he looked at the cat's big green eyes. Therese's hold on him was not total and he was scared. He got up and put the cat out of the room.

CHAPTER VIII

Laurent was perfectly happy of an evening, in the shop. He generally returned from the office with Camille. Madame Raquin had formed quite a motherly affection for him. She knew he was short of cash, and indifferently nourished, that he slept in a garret; and she had told him, once for all, that a seat would always be kept for him at their table. She liked this young fellow with that expansive feeling that old women display for people who come from their own part of the country, bringing with them memories of the past.

The young man took full advantage of this hospitality. Before going to dinner, after leaving the office for the night, he and Camille went for a stroll on the quays. Both found satisfaction in this intimacy. They dawdled along, chatting with one another, which prevented them feeling dull, and after a time decided to go and taste the soup prepared by Madame Raquin. Laurent opened the shop door as if he were master of the house, seated himself astride a chair, smoking and expectorating as though at home.

The presence of Therese did not embarrass him in the least. He treated the young woman with friendly familiarity, paying her commonplace compliments without a line of his face becoming disturbed. Camille laughed, and, as his wife confined herself to answering his friend in monosyllables, he firmly believed they detested one another. One day he even reproached Therese with what he termed her coldness for Laurent.

Laurent had made a correct guess: he had become the sweetheart of the woman, the friend of the husband, the spoilt child of the mother. Never had he enjoyed such a capital time. His position in the family struck him as quite natural. He was on the most friendly terms with Camille, in regard to whom he felt neither anger nor remorse. He was so sure of being prudent and calm that he did not even keep watch on his gestures and speech. The egotism he displayed in the enjoyment of his good fortune, shielded him from any fault. All that kept him from kissing Therese in the shop was the fear that he would not be allowed to come any more. He would not have cared a bit about hurting Camille and his mother.

Therese, who was of a more nervous and quivering temperament, was compelled to play a part, and she played it to perfection, thanks to the clever hypocrisy she had acquired in her bringing up. For nearly fifteen years, she had been lying, stifling her fever, exerting an implacable will to appear gloomy and half asleep. It cost her nothing to keep this mask on her face, which gave her an appearance of icy frigidity.

When Laurent entered the shop, he found her glum, her nose longer, her lips thinner. She was ugly, cross, unapproachable. Nevertheless, she did not exaggerate her effects, but only played her former part, without awakening attention by greater harshness. She experienced extraordinary pleasure in deceiving Camille and Madame Raquin. She was aware she was doing wrong, and at times she felt a ferocious desire to rise from table and smother Laurent with kisses, just to show her husband and aunt that she was not a fool, and that she had a sweetheart.

At moments, she felt giddy with joy; good actress as she proved herself, she could not on such occasions refrain from singing, when her sweetheart did not happen to be there, and she had no fear of betraying herself. These sudden outbursts of gaiety charmed Madame Raquin, who taxed her niece with being too serious. The young woman, moreover, decked the window of her room with pots of flowers, and then had new paper hung in the apartment. After this she wanted a carpet, curtains and rosewood furniture.

The nature of the circumstances seemed to have made this woman for this man, and to have thrust one towards the other. The two together, the woman nervous and hypocritical, the man sanguineous and leading the life of a brute, formed a powerful couple allied. The one completed the other, and they mutually protected themselves. At night, at table, in the pale light of the lamp, one felt the strength of their union, at the sight of the heavy, smiling face of Laurent, opposite the mute, impenetrable mask of Therese.

Those evenings were pleasant and calm. In the silence, in the transparent shadow and cool atmosphere, arose friendly conversation. The family and their guest sat close together round the table. After the dessert, they chatted about a thousand trifles of the day, about incidents that had occurred the day before, about their hopes for the morrow.

Camille liked Laurent, as much as he was capable of liking anybody, after the fashion of a contented egotist, and Laurent seemed to show him equal attachment. Between them there was an exchange of kind sentences, of obliging gestures, and thoughtful attentions. Madame Raquin, with placid countenance, contributed her peacefulness to the tranquillity of the scene, which resembled a gathering of old friends who knew one another to the heart, and who confidently relied on the faith of their friendship.

Therese, motionless, peaceful like the others, observed this joy, this smiling depression of these people of the middle class, and in her heart there was savage laughter; all her being jeered, but her face maintained its frigid rigidity. Ah! how she deceived these worthy people, and how delighted she was to deceive them with such triumphant impudence. Her sweetheart, at this moment, was like a person unknown to her, a comrade of her husband, a sort of simpleton and interloper concerning whom she had no need to concern herself. This atrocious comedy, these duperies of life, this comparison between the burning kisses in the daytime, and the indifference played at night, gave new warmth to the blood of the young woman.

When by chance Madame Raquin and Camille went downstairs, Therese bounded from her chair, to silently, and with brutal energy, press her lips to those of her sweetheart, remaining thus breathless and choking until she heard the stairs creak. Then, she briskly seated herself again, and resumed her glum grimace, while Laurent calmly continued the interrupted conversation with Camille. It was like a rapid, blinding flash of lightning in a leaden sky.

On Thursday, the evening became a little more animated. Laurent, although bored to death, nevertheless made a point of not missing one of these gatherings. As a measure of prudence he desired to be known and esteemed by the friends of Camille. So he had to lend an ear to the idle talk of Grivet and old Michaud. The latter always related the same tales of robbery and murder, while Grivet spoke at the same time about his clerks, his chiefs, and his administration, until the young man sought refuge beside Olivier and Suzanne, whose stupidity seemed less wearisome. But he soon asked for the dominoes.

It was on Thursday evening that Laurent and Therese arranged the day and hour of their meeting. In the bustle attending the departure, when Madame Raquin and Camille accompanied the guest to the door of the arcade, the young woman approached Laurent, to whom she spoke in an undertone, as she pressed his hand. At times, when all had turned their backs, she kissed him, out of a sort of bravado.

The life of shocks and appeasements, lasted eight months. The sweethearts lived in complete beatitude; Therese no longer felt dull, and was perfectly contented. Laurent satiated, pampered, fatter than before, had but one fear, that of seeing this delightful existence come to an end.

CHAPTER IX

One afternoon, as Laurent was leaving his office to run and meet Therese who was expecting him, his chief gave him to understand that in future he was forbidden to absent himself. He had taken too many holidays already, and the authorities had decided to dismiss him if he again went out in office hours.

Riveted to his chair, he remained in despair until eventide. He had to earn his living, and dared not lose his place. At night the wrathful countenance of Therese was a torture to him, and he was unable to find an opportunity to explain to her how it was he had broken his word. At length, as Camille was putting up the shutters, he briskly approached the young woman, to murmur in an undertone:

"We shall be unable to see one another any more. My chief refuses to give me permission to go out."

Camille came into the shop, and Laurent was obliged to withdraw without giving any further information, leaving Therese under the disagreeable influence of this abrupt and unpleasant announcement. Exasperated at anyone daring to interfere with her delectation, she passed a sleepless night, arranging extravagant plans for a meeting with her sweetheart. The following Thursday, she spoke with Laurent for a minute at the most. Their anxiety was all the keener as they did not know where to meet for the purpose of consulting and coming to an understanding. The young woman, on this occasion, gave her sweetheart another appointment which for the second time he failed to keep, and she then had but one fixed idea—to see him at any cost.

For a fortnight Laurent was unable to speak to Therese alone, and he then felt how necessary this woman had become to his existence. Far from experiencing any uneasiness, as formerly, at the kisses which his ladylove showered on him, he now sought her embraces with the obstinacy of a famished animal. A sanguineous passion had lurked in his muscles, and now that his sweetheart was taken from him, this passion burst out in blind violence. He was madly in love. This thriving brutish nature seemed unconscious in everything. He obeyed his instincts, permitting the will of his organism to lead him.

A year before, he would have burst into laughter, had he been told he would become the slave of a woman, to the point of risking his tranquillity. The hidden forces of lust that had brought about this result had been secretly proceeding within him, to end by casting him, bound hand and foot, into the arms of Therese. At this hour, he was in dread lest he should omit to be prudent. He no longer dared go of an evening to the shop in the Arcade of the Pont Neuf lest he should commit some folly. He no longer belonged to himself. His ladylove, with her feline suppleness, her nervous flexibility, had glided, little by little, into each fibre of his body. This woman was as necessary to his life as eating and drinking.

He would certainly have committed some folly, had he not received a letter from Therese, asking him to remain at home the following evening. His sweetheart promised him to call about eight o'clock.

On quitting the office, he got rid of Camille by saying he was tired, and should go to bed at once. Therese, after dinner, also played her part. She mentioned a customer who had moved without paying her, and acting the indignant creditor who would listen to nothing, declared that she intended calling on her debtor with the view of asking for payment of the money that was due. The customer now lived at Batignolles. Madame Raquin and Camille considered this a long way to go, and thought it doubtful whether the journey would have a satisfactory result; but they expressed no surprise, and allowed Therese to set out on her errand in all tranquillity.

The young woman ran to the Port aux Vins, gliding over the slippery pavement, and knocking up against the passers-by, in her hurry to reach her destination. Beads of perspiration covered her face, and her hands were burning. Anyone might have taken her for a drunken woman. She rapidly ascended the staircase of the hotel, and on reaching the sixth floor, out of breath, and with wandering eyes, she perceived Laurent, who was leaning over the banister awaiting her.

She entered the garret, which was so small that she could barely turn round in it, and tearing off her hat with one hand leant against the bedstead in a faint. Through the lift-up window in the roof, which was wide open, the freshness of the evening fell upon the burning couch.

The couple remained some time in this wretched little room, as though at the bottom of a hole. All at once, Therese heard a clock in the neighbourhood strike ten. She felt as if she would have liked to have been deaf. Nevertheless, she looked for her hat which she fastened to her hair with a long pin, and then seating herself, slowly murmured:

"I must go."

Laurent fell on his knees before her, and took her hands.

"Good-bye, till we see each other again," said she, without moving.

"No, not till we see each other again!" he exclaimed, "that is too indefinite. When will you come again?"

She looked him full in the face.

"Do you wish me to be frank with you?" she inquired. "Well, then, to tell you the truth, I think I shall come no more. I have no pretext, and I cannot invent one."

"Then we must say farewell," he remarked.

"No, I will not do that!" she answered.

She pronounced these words in terrified anger. Then she added more gently, without knowing what she was saying, and without moving from her chair:

"I am going."

Laurent reflected. He was thinking of Camille.

"I wish him no harm," said he at length, without pronouncing the name: "but really he is too much in our way. Couldn't you get rid of him, send him on a journey somewhere, a long way off?"

"Ah! yes, send him on a journey!" resumed the young woman, nodding her head. "And do you imagine a man like that would consent to travel? There is only one journey, that from which you never return. But he will bury us all. People who are at their last breath, never die."

Then came a silence which was broken by Laurent who remarked:

"I had a day dream. Camille met with an accident and died, and I became your husband. Do you understand?"

"Yes, yes," answered Therese, shuddering.

Then, abruptly bending over the face of Laurent, she smothered it with kisses, and bursting into sobs, uttered these disjoined sentences amidst her tears:

"Don't talk like that, for if you do, I shall lack the strength to leave you. I shall remain here. Give me courage rather. Tell me we shall see one another again. You have need of me, have you not? Well, one of these days we shall find a way to live together."

"Then come back, come back to-morrow," said Laurent.

"But I cannot return," she answered. "I have told you. I have no pretext."

She wrung her hands and continued:

"Oh! I do not fear the scandal. If you like, when I get back, I will tell Camille you are my sweetheart, and return here. I am trembling for you. I do not wish to disturb your life. I want to make you happy."

The prudent instincts of the young man were awakened.

"You are right," said he. "We must not behave like children. Ah! if your husband were to die!"

"If my husband were to die," slowly repeated Therese.

"We would marry," he continued, "and have nothing more to fear. What a nice, gentle life it would be!"

The young woman stood up erect. Her cheeks were pale, and she looked at her sweetheart with a clouded brow, while her lips were twitching.

"Sometimes people die," she murmured at last. "Only it is dangerous for those who survive."

Laurent did not reply.

"You see," she continued, "all the methods that are known are bad."

"You misunderstood me," said he quietly. "I am not a fool, I wish to love you in peace. I was thinking that accidents happen daily, that a foot may slip, a tile may fall. You understand. In the latter event, the wind alone is guilty."

He spoke in a strange voice. Then he smiled, and added in a caressing tone:

"Never mind, keep quiet. We will love one another fondly, and live happily. As you are unable to come here, I will arrange matters. Should we remain a few months without seeing one another, do not forget me, and bear in mind that I am labouring for your felicity."

As Therese opened the door to leave, he seized her in his arms.

"You are mine, are you not?" he continued. "You swear to belong to me, at any hour, when I choose."

"Yes!" exclaimed the young woman. "I am yours, do as you please with me."

For a moment they remained locked together and mute. Then Therese tore herself roughly away, and, without turning her head, quitted the garret and went downstairs. Laurent listened to the sound of her footsteps fading away.

When he heard the last of them, he returned to his wretched room, and went to bed. The sheets were still warm. Without closing the window, he lay on his back, his arms bare, his hands open, exposed to the fresh air. And he reflected, with his eyes on the dark blue square that the window framed in the sky.

He turned the same idea over in his head until daybreak. Previous to the visit of Therese, the idea of murdering Camille had not occurred to him. He had spoken of the death of this man, urged to do so by the facts, irritated at the thought that he would be unable to meet his sweetheart any more. And it was thus that a new corner of his unconscious nature came to be revealed.

Now that he was more calm, alone in the middle of the peaceful night, he studied the murder. The idea of death, blurted out in despair between a couple of kisses, returned implacable and keen. Racked by insomnia, and unnerved by the visit of Therese, he calculated the disadvantages and the advantages of his becoming an assassin.

All his interests urged him to commit the crime. He said to himself that as his father, the Jeufosse peasant, could not make up his mind to die, he would perhaps have to remain a clerk another ten years, eating in cheap restaurants, and living in a garret. This idea exasperated him. On the other hand, if Camille were dead, he would marry Therese, he would inherit from Madame Raquin, resign his clerkship, and saunter about in the sun. Then, he took pleasure in dreaming of this life of idleness; he saw himself with nothing to do, eating and sleeping, patiently awaiting the death of his father. And when the reality arose in the middle of his dream, he ran up against Camille, and clenched his fists to knock him down.

Laurent desired Therese; he wanted her for himself alone, to have her always within reach. If he failed to make the husband disappear, the woman would escape him. She had said so: she could not return. He would have eloped with her, carried her off somewhere, but then both would die of hunger. He risked less in killing the husband. There would be no scandal. He would simply push a man away to take his place. In his brutal logic of a peasant, he found this method excellent and natural. His innate prudence even advised this rapid expedient.

He grovelled on his bed, in perspiration, flat on his stomach, with his face against the pillow, and he remained there breathless, stifling, seeing lines of fire pass along his closed eyelids. He asked himself how he would kill Camille. Then, unable to breathe any more, he turned round at a bound to resume his position on his back, and with his eyes wide open, received full in the face, the puffs of cold air from the window, seeking in the stars, in the bluish square of sky, a piece of advice about murder, a plan of assassination.

And he found nothing. As he had told his ladylove, he was neither a child nor a fool. He wanted neither a dagger nor poison. What he sought was a subtle crime, one that could be accomplished without danger; a sort of sinister suffocation, without cries and without terror, a simple disappearance. Passion might well stir him, and urge him forward; all his being imperiously insisted on prudence. He was too cowardly, too voluptuous to risk his tranquillity. If he killed, it would be for a calm and happy life.

Little by little slumber overcame him. Fatigued and appeased, he sank into a sort of gentle and uncertain torpor. As he fell asleep, he decided he would await a favourable opportunity, and his thoughts, fleeting further and further away, lulled him to rest with the murmur:

"I will kill him, I will kill him."

Five minutes later, he was at rest, breathing with serene regularity.

Therese returned home at eleven o'clock, with a burning head, and her thoughts strained, reaching the Arcade of the Pont Neuf unconscious of the road she had taken. It seemed to her that she had just come downstairs from her visit to Laurent, so full were her ears of the words she had recently heard. She found Madame Raquin and Camille anxious and attentive; but she answered their questions sharply, saying she had been on a fools' errand, and had waited an hour on the pavement for an omnibus.

When she got into bed, she found the sheets cold and damp. Her limbs, which were still burning, shuddered with repugnance. Camille soon fell asleep, and for a long time Therese watched his wan face reposing idiotically on the pillow, with his mouth wide open. Therese drew away from her husband. She felt a desire to drive her clenched fist into that mouth.

CHAPTER X

More than three weeks passed. Laurent came to the shop every evening, looking weary and unwell. A light bluish circle surrounded his eyes, and his lips were becoming pale and chapped. Otherwise, he still maintained his obtuse tranquillity, he looked Camille in the face, and showed him the same frank friendship. Madame Raquin pampered the friend of the family the more, now that she saw him giving way to a sort of low fever.

Therese had resumed her mute, glum countenance and manner. She was more motionless, more impenetrable, more peaceful than ever. She did not seem to trouble herself in the least about Laurent. She barely looked at him, rarely exchanged a word with him, treating him with perfect indifference. Madame Raquin, who in her goodness of heart, felt pained at this attitude, sometimes said to the young man:

"Do not pay attention to the manner of my niece, I know her; her face appears cold, but her heart is warm with tenderness and devotedness."

The two sweethearts had no more meetings. Since the evening in the Rue Saint-Victor they had not met alone. At night, when they found themselves face to face, placid in appearance and like strangers to one another, storms of passion and dismay passed beneath the calm flesh of their countenance. And while with Therese, there were outbursts of fury, base ideas, and cruel jeers, with Laurent there were sombre brutalities, and poignant indecisions. Neither dared search to the bottom of their beings, to the bottom of that cloudy fever that filled their brains with a sort of thick and acrid vapour.

When they could press the hands of one another behind a door, without speaking, they did so, fit to crush them, in a short rough clasp. They would have liked, mutually, to have carried off strips of their flesh clinging to their fingers. They had naught but this pressure of hands to appease their feelings. They put all their souls into them, and asked for nothing more from one another. They waited.

One Thursday evening, before sitting down to the game of dominoes, the guests of the Raquin family had a chat, as usual. A favourite subject of conversation was afforded by the experiences of old Michaud who was plied with questions respecting the strange and sinister adventures with which he must have been connected in the discharge of his former functions. Then Grivet and Camille listened to the stories of the commissary with the affrighted and gaping countenances of small children listening to "Blue Beard" or "Tom Thumb." These tales terrified and amused them.

On this particular Thursday, Michaud, who had just given an account of a horrible murder, the details of which had made his audience shudder, added as he wagged his head:

"And a great deal never comes out at all. How many crimes remain undiscovered! How many murderers escape the justice of man!"

"What!" exclaimed Grivet astonished, "you think there are foul creatures like that walking about the streets, people who have murdered and are not arrested?"

Olivier smiled with an air of disdain.

"My dear sir," he answered in his dictatorial tone, "if they are not arrested it is because no one is aware that they have committed a murder."

This reasoning did not appear to convince Grivet, and Camille came to his assistance.

"I am of the opinion of M. Grivet," said he, with silly importance. "I should like to believe that the police do their duty, and that I never brush against a murderer on the pavement."

Olivier considered this remark a personal attack.

"Certainly the police do their duty," he exclaimed in a vexed tone. "Still we cannot do what is impossible. There are wretches who have studied crime at Satan's own school; they would escape the Divinity Himself. Isn't that so, father?"

"Yes, yes," confirmed old Michaud. "Thus, while I was at Vernon—you perhaps remember the incident, Madame Raquin—a wagoner was murdered on the highway. The corpse was found cut in pieces, at the bottom of a ditch. The authorities were never able to lay hands on the culprit. He is perhaps still living at this hour. Maybe he is our neighbour, and perhaps M. Grivet will meet him on his way home."

Grivet turned pale as a sheet. He dared not look round. He fancied the murderer of the wagoner was behind him. But for that matter, he was delighted to feel afraid.

"Well, no," he faltered, hardly knowing what he said, "well, no, I cannot believe that. But I also have a story: once upon a time a servant was put in prison for stealing a silver spoon and fork belonging to her master and mistress. Two months afterwards, while a tree was being felled, the knife and fork were discovered in the nest of a magpie. It was the magpie who was the thief. The servant was released. You see that the guilty are always punished."

Grivet triumphed. Olivier sneered.

"Then, they put the magpie in prison," said he.

"That is not what M. Grivet meant to say," answered Camille, annoyed to see his chief turned into ridicule. "Mother, give us the dominoes."

While Madame Raquin went to fetch the box, the young man, addressing Michaud, continued:

"Then you admit the police are powerless, that there are murderers walking about in the sunshine?"

"Unfortunately, yes," answered the commissary.

"It is immoral," concluded Grivet.

During this conversation, Therese and Laurent had remained silent. They had not even smiled at the folly of Grivet. Both leaning with their arms on the table, looking slightly pale, and with a vague expression in their eyes, listened. At one moment those dark, ardent orbs had met. And small drops of perspiration pearled at the roots of the hair of Therese, while chilly puffs of breath gave imperceptible shivers to the skin of Laurent.

CHAPTER XI

Sometimes on a Sunday, when the weather was fine, Camille forced Therese to go out with him, for a walk in the Champs Elysees. The young woman would have preferred to remain in the damp obscurity of the arcade, for the exercise fatigued her, and it worried her to be on the arm of her husband, who dragged her along the pavement, stopping before the shop windows, expressing his astonishment, making reflections, and then falling into ridiculous spells of silence.

But Camille insisted on these Sunday outings, which gave him the satisfaction of showing off his wife. When he met a colleague, particularly one of his chiefs, he felt quite proud to exchange bows with him, in the company of Madame. Besides, he walked for the sake of walking, and he did so almost in silence, stiff and deformed in his Sunday clothes, dragging along his feet, and looking silly and vain. It made Therese suffer to be seen arm in arm with such a man.

On these walking-out days, Madame Raquin accompanied her children to the end of the arcade, where she embraced them as if they were leaving on a journey, giving them endless advice, accompanied by fervent prayers.

"Particularly, beware of accidents," she would say. "There are so many vehicles in the streets of Paris! Promise me not to get in a crowd."

At last she allowed them to set out, but she followed them a considerable distance with her eyes, before returning to the shop. Her lower limbs were becoming unwieldy which prohibited her taking long walks.

On other occasions, but more rarely, the married couple went out of Paris, as far as Saint-Ouen or Asnieres, where they treated themselves to a dish of fried fish in one of the restaurants beside the river. These were regarded as days of great revelry which were spoken of a month beforehand. Therese engaged more willingly, almost with joy, in these excursions which kept her in the open air until ten or eleven o'clock at night. Saint-Ouen, with its green isles, reminded her of Vernon, and rekindled all the wild love she had felt for the Seine when a little girl.

She seated herself on the gravel, dipped her hands in the water, feeling full of life in the burning heat of the sun, attenuated by the fresh puffs of breeze in the shade. While she tore and soiled her frock on the stones and clammy ground, Camille neatly spread out his pocket-handkerchief and sank down beside her with endless precautions. Latterly the young couple almost invariably took Laurent with them. He enlivened the excursion by his laughter and strength of a peasant.

One Sunday, Camille, Therese and Laurent left for Saint-Ouen after breakfast, at about eleven o'clock. The outing had been projected a long time, and was to be the last of the season. Autumn approached, and the cold breezes at night, began to make the air chilly.

On this particular morning, the sky maintained all its blue serenity. It proved warm in the sun and tepid in the shade. The party decided that they must take advantage of the last fine weather.

Hailing a passing cab they set out, accompanied by the pitiful expressions of uneasiness, and the anxious effusions of the old mercer. Crossing Paris, they left the vehicle at the fortifications, and gained Saint-Ouen on foot. It was noon. The dusty road, brightly lit up by the sun, had the blinding whiteness of snow. The air was intensely warm, heavy and pungent. Therese, on the arm of Camille, walked with short steps, concealing herself beneath her umbrella, while her husband fanned his face with an immense handkerchief. Behind them came Laurent, who had the sun streaming fiercely on the back of his neck, without appearing to notice it. He whistled and kicked the stones before him as he strolled along. Now and again there was a fierce glint in his eyes as he watched Therese's swinging hips.

On reaching Saint-Ouen, they lost no time in looking for a cluster of trees, a patch of green grass in the shade. Crossing the water to an island, they plunged into a bit of underwood. The fallen leaves covered the ground with a russety bed which cracked beneath their feet with sharp, quivering sounds. Innumerable trunks of trees rose up erect, like clusters of small gothic columns; the branches descended to the foreheads of the three holiday makers, whose only view was the expiring copper-like foliage, and the black and white stems of the aspens and oaks. They were in the wilderness, in a melancholy corner, in a narrow clearing that was silent and fresh. All around them they heard the murmur of the Seine.

Camille having selected a dry spot, seated himself on the ground, after lifting up the skirt of his frock coat; while Therese, amid a loud crumpling of petticoats, had just flung herself among the leaves. Laurent lay on his stomach with his chin resting on the ground.

They remained three hours in this clearing, waiting until it became cooler, to take a run in the country before dinner. Camille talked about his office, and related silly stories; then, feeling fatigued, he let himself fall backward and went to sleep with the rim of his hat over his eyes. Therese had closed her eyelids some time previously, feigning slumber.

Laurent, who felt wide awake, and was tired of his recumbent position, crept up behind her and kissed her shoe and ankle. For a month his life had been chaste and this walk in the sun had set him on fire. Here he was, in a hidden retreat, and unable to hold to his breast the woman who was really his. Her husband might wake up and all his prudent calculations would be ruined by this obstacle of a man. So he lay, flat on the ground, hidden by his lover's skirts, trembling with exasperation as he pressed kiss after kiss upon the shoe and white stocking. Therese made no movement. Laurent thought she was asleep.

He rose to his feet and stood with his back to a tree. Then he perceived that the young woman was gazing into space with her great, sparkling eyes wide open. Her face, lying between her arms, with her hands clasped above her head, was deadly pale, and wore an expression of frigid rigidity. Therese was musing. Her fixed eyes resembled dark, unfathomable depths, where naught was visible save night. She did not move, she did not cast a glance at Laurent, who stood erect behind her.

Her sweetheart contemplated her, and was almost affrighted to see her so motionless and mute. He would have liked to have bent forward, and closed those great open eyes with a kiss. But Camille lay asleep close at hand. This poor creature, with his body twisted out of shape, displaying his lean proportions, was gently snoring. Under the hat, half concealing his face, could be seen his mouth contorted into a silly grimace in his slumber. A few short reddish hairs on a bony chin sullied his livid skin, and his head being thrown backward, his thin wrinkled neck appeared, with Adam's apple standing out prominently in brick red in the centre, and rising at each snore. Camille, spread out on the ground in this fashion, looked contemptible and vile.

Laurent who looked at him, abruptly raised his heel. He was going to crush his face at one blow.

Therese restrained a cry. She went a shade paler than before, closed her eyes and turned her head away as if to avoid being bespattered with blood.

Laurent, for a few seconds, remained with his heel in the air, above the face of the slumbering Camille. Then slowly, straightening his leg, he moved a few paces away. He reflected that this would be a form of murder such as an idiot would choose. This pounded head would have set all the police on him. If he wanted to get rid of Camille, it was solely for the purpose of marrying Therese. It was his intention to bask in the sun, after the crime, like the murderer of the wagoner, in the story related by old Michaud.

He went as far as the edge of the water, and watched the running river in a stupid manner. Then, he abruptly turned into the underwood again. He had just arranged a plan. He had thought of a mode of murder that would be convenient, and without danger to himself.

He awoke the sleeper by tickling his nose with a straw. Camille sneezed, got up, and pronounced the joke a capital one. He liked Laurent on account of his tomfoolery, which made him laugh. He now roused his wife, who kept her eyes closed. When she had risen to her feet, and shaken her skirt, which was all crumpled, and covered with dry leaves, the party quitted the clearing, breaking the small branches they found in their way.

They left the island, and walked along the roads, along the byways crowded with groups in Sunday finery. Between the hedges ran girls in light frocks; a number of boating men passed by singing; files of middle-class couples, of elderly persons, of clerks and shopmen with their wives, walked the short steps, besides the ditches. Each roadway seemed like a populous, noisy street. The sun alone maintained its great tranquility. It was descending towards the horizon, casting on the reddened trees and white thoroughfares immense sheets of pale light. Penetrating freshness began to fall from the quivering sky.

Camille had ceased giving his arm to Therese. He was chatting with Laurent, laughing at the jests, at the feats of strength of his friend, who leapt the ditches and raised huge stones above his head. The young woman, on the other side of the road, advanced with her head bent forward, stooping down from time to time to gather an herb. When she had fallen behind, she stopped and observed her sweetheart and husband in the distance.

"Heh! Aren't you hungry?" shouted Camille at her.

"Yes," she replied.

"Then, come on!" said he.

Therese was not hungry; but felt tired and uneasy. She was in ignorance as to the designs of Laurent, and her lower limbs were trembling with anxiety.

The three, returning to the riverside, found a restaurant, where they seated themselves at table on a sort of terrace formed of planks in an indifferent eating-house reeking with the odour of grease and wine. This place resounded with cries, songs, and the clatter of plates and dishes. In each private room and public saloon, were parties talking in loud voices, and the thin partitions gave vibrating sonority to all this riot. The waiters, ascending to the upper rooms, caused the staircase to shake.

Above, on the terrace, the puffs of air from the river drove away the smell of fat. Therese, leaning over the balustrade, observed the quay. To right and left, extended two lines of wine-shops and shanties of showmen. Beneath the arbours in the gardens of the former, amid the few remaining yellow leaves, one perceived the white tablecloths, the dabs of black formed by men's coats, and the brilliant skirts of women. People passed to and fro, bareheaded, running, and laughing; and with the bawling noise of the crowd, was mingled the lamentable strains of the barrel organs. An odour of dust and frying food hung in the calm air.

Below Therese, some tarts from the Latin Quarter were dancing in a ring on a patch of worn turf singing an infantine roundelay. With hats fallen on their shoulders, and hair unbound, they held one another by the hands, playing like little children. They still managed to find a small thread of fresh voice, and their pale countenances, ruffled by brutal caresses, became tenderly coloured with virgin-like blushes, while their great impure eyes filled with moisture. A few students, smoking clean clay pipes, who were watching them as they turned round, greeted them with ribald jests.

And beyond, on the Seine, on the hillocks, descended the serenity of night, a sort of vague bluish mist, which bathed the trees in transparent vapour.

"Heh! Waiter!" shouted Laurent, leaning over the banister, "what about this dinner?"

Then, changing his mind, he turned to Camille and said:

"I say, Camille, let us go for a pull on the river before sitting down to table. It will give them time to roast the fowl. We shall be bored to death waiting an hour here."

"As you like," answered Camille carelessly. "But Therese is hungry."

"No, no, I can wait," hastened to say the young woman, at whom Laurent was fixedly looking.

All three went downstairs again. Passing before the rostrum where the lady cashier was seated, they retained a table, and decided on a menu, saying they would return in an hour. As the host let out pleasure boats, they asked him to come and detach one. Laurent selected a skiff, which appeared so light that Camille was terrified by its fragility.

"The deuce," said he, "we shall have to be careful not to move about in this, otherwise we shall get a famous ducking."

The truth was that the clerk had a horrible dread of the water. At Vernon, his sickly condition did not permit him, when a child, to go and dabble in the Seine. Whilst his schoolfellows ran and threw themselves into the river, he lay abed between a couple of warm blankets. Laurent had become an intrepid swimmer, and an indefatigable oarsman. Camille had preserved that terror for deep water which is inherent in women and children. He tapped the end of the boat with his foot to make sure of its solidity.

"Come, get in," cried Laurent with a laugh, "you're always trembling."

Camille stepped over the side, and went staggering to seat himself at the stern. When he felt the planks under him, he was at ease, and joked to show his courage.

Therese had remained on the bank, standing grave and motionless beside her sweetheart, who held the rope. He bent down, and rapidly murmured in an undertone:

"Be careful. I am going to pitch him in the river. Obey me. I answer for everything."

The young woman turned horribly pale. She remained as if riveted to the ground. She was rigid, and her eyes had opened wider.

"Get into the boat," Laurent murmured again.

She did not move. A terrible struggle was passing within her. She strained her will with all her might, to avoid bursting into sobs, and falling to the ground.

"Ah! ah!" cried Camille. "Laurent, just look at Therese. It's she who is afraid. She'll get in; no, she won't get in."

He had now spread himself out on the back seat, his two arms on the sides of the boat, and was showing off with fanfaronade. The chuckles of this poor man were like cuts from a whip to Therese, lashing and urging her on. She abruptly sprang into the boat, remaining in the bows. Laurent grasped the skulls. The skiff left the bank, advancing slowly towards the isles.

Twilight came. Huge shadows fell from the trees, and the water ran black at the edges. In the middle of the river were great, pale, silver trails. The boat was soon in full steam. There, all the sounds of the quays softened; the singing, and the cries came vague and melancholy, with sad languidness. The odour of frying and dust had passed away. The air freshened. It turned cold.

Laurent, resting on his skulls, allowed the boat to drift along in the current.

Opposite, rose the great reddish mass of trees on the islands. The two sombre brown banks, patched with grey, were like a couple of broad bands stretching towards the horizon. The water and sky seemed as if cut from the same whitish piece of material. Nothing looks more painfully calm than an autumn twilight. The sun rays pale in the quivering air, the old trees cast their leaves. The country, scorched by the ardent beams of summer, feels death coming with the first cold winds. And, in the sky, there are plaintive sighs of despair. Night falls from above, bringing winding sheets in its shade.

The party were silent. Seated at the bottom of the boat drifting with the stream, they watched the final gleams of light quitting the tall branches. They approached the islands. The great russety masses grew sombre; all the landscape became simplified in the twilight; the Seine, the sky, the islands, the slopes were naught but brown and grey patches which faded away amidst milky fog.

Camille, who had ended by lying down on his stomach, with his head over the water, dipped his hands in the river.

"The deuce! How cold it is!" he exclaimed. "It would not be pleasant to go in there head foremost."

Laurent did not answer. For an instant he had been observing the two banks of the river with uneasiness. He advanced his huge hands to his knees, tightly compressing his lips. Therese, rigid and motionless, with her head thrown slightly backward, waited.

The skiff was about to enter a small arm of the river, that was sombre and narrow, penetrating between two islands. Behind one of these islands could be distinguished the softened melody of a boating party who seemed to be ascending the Seine. Up the river in the distance, the water was free.

Then Laurent rose and grasped Camille round the body. The clerk burst into laughter.

"Ah, no, you tickle me," said he, "none of those jokes. Look here, stop; you'll make me fall over."

Laurent grasped him tighter, and gave a jerk. Camille turning round, perceived the terrifying face of his friend, violently agitated. He failed to understand. He was seized with vague terror. He wanted to shout, and felt a rough hand seize him by the throat. With the instinct of an animal on the defensive, he rose to his knees, clutching the side of the boat, and struggled for a few seconds.

"Therese! Therese!" he called in a stifling, sibilant voice.

The young woman looked at him, clinging with both hands to the seat. The skiff creaked and danced upon the river. She could not close her eyes, a frightful contraction kept them wide open riveted on the hideous struggle. She remained rigid and mute.

"Therese! Therese!" again cried the unfortunate man who was in the throes of death.

At this final appeal, Therese burst into sobs. Her nerves had given way. The attack she had been dreading, cast her to the bottom of the boat, where she remained doubled up in a swoon, and as if dead.

Laurent continued tugging at Camille, pressing with one hand on his throat. With the other hand he ended by tearing his victim away from the side of the skiff, and held him up in the air, in his powerful arms, like a child. As he bent down his head, his victim, mad with rage and terror, twisted himself round, and reaching forward with his teeth, buried them in the neck of his aggressor. And when the murderer, restraining a yell of pain, abruptly flung the clerk into the river, the latter carried a piece of his flesh away with him.

Camille fall into the water with a shriek. He returned to the surface two or three times, uttering cries that were more and more hollow.

Laurent, without losing a second, raised the collar of his coat to hide his wound. Then seizing the unconscious Therese in his arms, he capsized the skiff with his foot, as he fell into the Seine with the young woman, whom he supported on the surface, whilst calling in a lamentable voice for help.

The boating party he had heard singing behind the point of the island, understanding that an accident had happened, advanced with long, rapid strokes of the oars, and rescued the immerged couple. While Therese was laid on a bench, Laurent gave vent to his despair at the death of his friend. Plunging into the water again, he searched for Camille in places where he knew he was not to be found, and returned in tears, wringing his hands, and tearing his hair, while the boating party did their best to calm and console him.

"It is all my fault," he exclaimed. "I ought never to have allowed that poor fellow to dance and move about as he did. At a certain moment we all three found ourselves on one side of the boat, and we capsized. As we fell into the water, he shouted out to me to save his wife."

In accordance with what usually happens under similar circumstances, three or four young fellows among the boating party, maintained that they had witnessed the accident.

"We saw you well enough," said they. "And, then, hang it all, a boat is not so firm as a dancing floor. Ah! the poor little woman, it'll be a nice awakening for her."

They took their oars, and towing the capsized skiff behind them, conducted Therese and Laurent to the restaurant, where the dinner was ready to be served.

The restaurant keeper and his wife were worthy people who placed their wardrobe at the service of the drenched pair. When Therese recovered consciousness, she had a nervous attack, and burst into heartrending sobs. It became necessary to put her to bed. Nature assisted the sinister comedy that had just been performed.

As soon as the young woman became calmer, Laurent entrusting her to the care of the host and his wife, set out to return to Paris, where he wished to arrive alone to break the frightful intelligence to Madame Raquin, with all possible precautions. The truth was that he feared the nervous feverish excitement of Therese, and preferred to give her time to reflect, and learn her part.

It was the boating men who sat down to the dinner prepared for Camille.

CHAPTER XII

Laurent, in the dark corner of the omnibus that took him back to Paris, continued perfecting his plan. He was almost certain of impunity, and he felt heavy, anxious joy, the joy of having got over the crime. On reaching the gate at Clichy, he hailed a cab, and drove to the residence of old Michaud in the Rue de Seine. It was nine o'clock at night when he arrived.

He found the former commissary of police at table, in the company of Olivier and Suzanne. The motive of his visit was to seek protection, in case he should be suspected, and also to escape breaking the frightful news to Madame Raquin himself. Such an errand was strangely repugnant to him. He anticipated encountering such terrible despair that he feared he would be unable to play his part with sufficient tears. Then the grief of this mother weighed upon him, although at the bottom of his heart, he cared but little about it.

When Michaud saw him enter, clothed in coarse-looking garments that were too tight for him, he questioned him with his eyes, and Laurent gave an account of the accident in a broken voice, as if exhausted with grief and fatigue.

"I have come to you," said he in conclusion, "because I do not know what to do about the two poor women so cruelly afflicted. I dare not go to the bereaved mother alone, and want you to accompany me."

As he spoke, Olivier looked at him fixedly, and with so straight a glance that he terrified him. The murderer had flung himself head down among these people belonging to the police, with an audacity calculated to save him. But he could not repress a shudder as he felt their eyes examining him. He saw distrust where there was naught but stupor and pity.

Suzanne weaker and paled than usual, seemed ready to faint. Olivier, who was alarmed at the idea of death, but whose heart remained absolutely cold, made a grimace expressing painful surprise, while by habit he scrutinised the countenance of Laurent, without having the least suspicion of the sinister truth. As to old Michaud, he uttered exclamations of fright, commiseration, and astonishment; he fidgeted on his chair, joined his hands together, and cast up his eyes to the ceiling.

"Ah! good heavens," said he in a broken voice, "ah! good heavens, what a frightful thing! To leave one's home, and die, like that, all of a sudden. It's horrible. And that poor Madame Raquin, his mother, whatever shall we say to her? Certainly, you were quite right to come and find us. We will go with you."

Rising from his seat, he walked hither and thither about the apartment, stamping with his feet, in search of his hat and walking-stick; and, as he bustled from corner to corner, he made Laurent repeat the details of the catastrophe, giving utterance to fresh exclamations at the end of each sentence.

At last all four went downstairs. On reaching the entrance to the Arcade of the Pont Neuf, Laurent was stopped by Michaud.

"Do not accompany us any further," said he; "your presence would be a sort of brutal avowal which must be avoided. The wretched mother would suspect a misfortune, and this would force us to confess the truth sooner than we ought to tell it to her. Wait for us here."

This arrangement relieved the murderer, who shuddered at the thought of entering the shop in the arcade. He recovered his calm, and began walking up and down the pavement, going and coming, in perfect peace of mind. At moments, he forgot the events that were passing. He looked at the shops, whistled between his teeth, turned round to ogle the women who brushed past him. He remained thus for a full half-hour in the street, recovering his composure more and more.

He had not eaten since the morning, and feeling hungry he entered a pastrycook's and stuffed himself with cakes.

A heartrending scene was passing at the shop in the arcade. Notwithstanding precautions, notwithstanding the soft, friendly sentences of old Michaud, there came a moment when Madame Raquin understood that her son had met with misfortune. From that moment, she insisted on knowing the truth with such a passionate outburst of despair, with such a violent flow of tears and shrieks, that her old friend could not avoid giving way to her.

And when she learnt the truth, her grief was tragic. She gave hollow sobs, she received shocks that threw her backward, in a distracting attack of terror and anguish. She remained there choking, uttering from time to time a piercing scream amidst the profound roar of her affliction. She would have dragged herself along the ground, had not Suzanne taken her round the waist, weeping on her knees, and raising her pale countenance towards her. Olivier and his father on their feet, unnerved and mute, turned aside their heads, being disagreeably affected at this painful sight which wounded them in their egotism.

The poor mother saw her son rolling along in the thick waters of the Seine, a rigid and horribly swollen corpse; while at the same time, she perceived him a babe, in his cradle, when she drove away death bending over him. She had brought him back into the world on more than ten occasions; she loved him for all the love she had bestowed on him during thirty years. And now he had met his death far away from her, all at once, in the cold and dirty water, like a dog.

Then she remembered the warm blankets in which she had enveloped him. What care she had taken of her boy! What a tepid temperature he had been reared in! How she had coaxed and fondled him! And all this to see him one day miserably drown himself! At these thoughts Madame Raquin felt a tightening at the throat, and she hoped she was going to die, strangled by despair.

Old Michaud hastened to withdraw. Leaving Suzanne behind to look after the mercer, he and Olivier went to find Laurent, so that they might hurry to Saint-Ouen with all speed.

During the journey, they barely exchanged a few words. Each of them buried himself in a corner of the cab which jolted along over the stones. There they remained motionless and mute in the obscurity that prevailed within the vehicle. Ever and anon a rapid flash from a gas lamp, cast a bright gleam on their faces. The sinister event that had brought them together, threw a sort of dismal dejection upon them.

When they at length arrived at the restaurant beside the river, they found Therese in bed with burning head and hands. The landlord told them in an undertone, that the young woman had a violent fever. The truth was that Therese, feeling herself weak in character and wanting in courage, feared she might confess the crime in one of her nervous attacks, and had decided to feign illness.

Maintaining sullen silence, she kept her lips and eyes closed, unwilling to see anyone lest she should speak. With the bedclothes to her chin, her face half concealed by the pillow, she made herself quite small, anxiously listening to all that was said around her. And, amidst the reddish gleam that passed beneath her closed lids, she could still see Camille and Laurent struggling at the side of the boat. She perceived her husband, livid, horrible, increased in height, rearing up straight above the turbid water, and this implacable vision heightened the feverish heat of her blood.

Old Michaud endeavoured to speak to her and console her. But she made a movement of impatience, and turning round, broke out into a fresh fit of sobbing.

"Leave her alone, sir," said the restaurant keeper, "she shudders at the slightest sound. You see, she wants rest."

Below, in the general room, was a policeman drawing up a statement of the accident. Michaud and his son went downstairs, followed by Laurent. When Olivier had made himself known as an upper official at the Prefecture of Police, everything was over in ten minutes. The boating men, who were still there, gave an account of the drowning in its smallest details, describing how the three holiday-makers had fallen into the water, as if they themselves had witnessed the misfortune. Had Olivier and his father the least suspicion, it would have been dispelled at once by this testimony.

But they had not doubted the veracity of Laurent for an instant. On the contrary, they introduced him to the policeman as the best friend of the victim, and they were careful to see inserted in the report, that the young man had plunged into the water to save Camille Raquin. The following day, the newspapers related the accident with a great display of detail: the unfortunate mother, the inconsolable widow, the noble and courageous friend, nothing was missing from this event of the day, which went the round of the Parisian press, and then found an echo in the provinces.

When the report was completed, Laurent experienced lively joy, which penetrated his being like new life. From the moment his victim had buried his teeth in his neck, he had been as if stiffened, acting mechanically, according to a plan arranged long in advance. The instinct of self-preservation alone impelled him, dictating to him his words, affording him advice as to his gestures.

At this hour, in the face of the certainty of impunity, the blood resumed flowing in his veins with delicious gentleness. The police had passed beside his crime, and had seen nothing. They had been duped, for they had just acquitted him. He was saved. This thought caused him to experience a feeling of delightful moisture all along his body, a warmth that restored flexibility to his limbs and to his intelligence. He continued to act his part of a weeping friend with incomparable science and assurance. At the bottom of his heart, he felt brutal satisfaction; and he thought of Therese who was in bed in the room above.

"We cannot leave this unhappy woman here," said he to Michaud. "She is perhaps threatened with grave illness. We must positively take her back to Paris. Come, let us persuade her to accompany us."

Upstairs, he begged and prayed of Therese to rise and dress, and allow herself to be conducted to the Arcade of the Pont Neuf. When the young woman heard the sound of his voice, she started, and stared at him with eyes wide open. She seemed as if crazy, and was shuddering. Painfully she raised herself into a sitting posture without answering. The men quitted the room, leaving her alone with the wife of the restaurant keeper. When ready to start, she came downstairs staggering, and was assisted into the cab by Olivier.

The journey was a silent one. Laurent, with perfect audacity and impudence, slipped his hand along the skirt of Therese and caught her fingers. He was seated opposite her, in a floating shadow, and could not see her face which she kept bowed down on her breast. As soon as he had grasped her hand, he pressed it vigorously, retaining it until they reached the Rue Mazarine. He felt the hand tremble; but it was not withdrawn. On the contrary it ever and anon gave a sudden caress.

These two hands, one in the other, were burning; the moist palms adhered, and the fingers tightly held together, were hurt at each pressure. It seemed to Laurent and Therese that the blood from one penetrated the chest of the other, passing through their joined fists. These fists became a live fire whereon their lives were boiling. Amidst the night, amidst the heartrending silence that prevailed, the furious grips they exchanged, were like a crushing weight cast on the head of Camille to keep him under water.

When the cab stopped, Michaud and his son got out the first, and Laurent bending towards his sweetheart gently murmured:

"Be strong, Therese. We have a long time to wait. Recollect."

Then the young woman opened her lips for the first time since the death of her husband.

"Oh! I shall recollect," said she with a shudder, and in a voice light as a puff of breath.

Olivier extended his hand, inviting her to get down. On this occasion, Laurent went as far as the shop. Madame Raquin was abed, a prey to violent delirium. Therese dragged herself to her room, where Suzanne had barely time to undress her before she gave way. Tranquillised, perceiving that everything was proceeding as well as he could wish, Laurent withdrew, and slowly gained his wretched den in the rue Saint-Victor.

It was past midnight. Fresh air circulated in the deserted, silent streets. The young man could hear naught but his own footsteps resounding on the pavement. The nocturnal coolness of the atmosphere cheered him up; the silence, the darkness gave him sharp sensations of delight, and he loitered on his way.

At last he was rid of his crime. He had killed Camille. It was a matter that was settled, and would be spoken of no more. He was now going to lead a tranquil existence, until he could take possession of Therese. The thought of the murder had at times half choked him, but now that it was accomplished, he felt a weight removed from his chest, and breathed at ease, cured of the suffering that hesitation and fear had given him.

At the bottom of his heart, he was a trifle hebetated. Fatigue had rendered his limbs and thoughts heavy. He went in to bed and slept soundly. During his slumber slight nervous crispations coursed over his face.

CHAPTER XIII

The following morning, Laurent awoke fresh and fit. He had slept well. The cold air entering by the open window, whipped his sluggish blood. He had no clear recollection of the scenes of the previous day, and had it not been for the burning sensation at his neck, he might have thought that he had retired to rest after a calm evening.

But the bite Camille had given him stung as if his skin had been branded with a red-hot iron. When his thoughts settled on the pain this gash caused him, he suffered cruelly. It seemed as though a dozen needles were penetrating little by little into his flesh.

He turned down the collar of his shirt, and examined the wound in a wretched fifteen sous looking-glass hanging against the wall. It formed a red hole, as big as a penny piece. The skin had been torn away, displaying the rosy flesh, studded with dark specks. Streaks of blood had run as far as the shoulder in thin threads that had dried up. The bite looked a deep, dull brown colour against the white skin, and was situated under the right ear. Laurent scrutinised it with curved back and craned neck, and the greenish mirror gave his face an atrocious grimace.

Satisfied with his examination, he had a thorough good wash, saying to himself that the wound would be healed in a few days. Then he dressed, and quietly repaired to his office, where he related the accident in an affected tone of voice. When his colleagues had read the account in the newspapers, he became quite a hero. During a whole week the clerks at the Orleans Railway had no other subject of conversation: they were all proud that one of their staff should have been drowned. Grivet never ceased his remarks on the imprudence of adventuring into the middle of the Seine, when it was so easy to watch the running water from the bridges.

Laurent retained a feeling of intense uneasiness. The decease of Camille had not been formally proved. The husband of Therese was indeed dead, but the murderer would have liked to have found his body, so as to obtain a certificate of death. The day following the accident, a fruitless search had been made for the corpse of the drowned man. It was thought that it had probably gone to the bottom of some hole near the banks of the islands, and men were actively dragging the Seine to get the reward.

In the meantime Laurent imposed on himself the task of passing each morning by the Morgue, on the way to his office. He had made up his mind to attend to the business himself. Notwithstanding that his heart rose with repugnance, notwithstanding the shudders that sometimes ran through his frame, for over a week he went and examined the countenance of all the drowned persons extended on the slabs.

When he entered the place an unsavoury odour, an odour of freshly washed flesh, disgusted him and a chill ran over his skin: the dampness of the walls seemed to add weight to his clothing, which hung more heavily on his shoulders. He went straight to the glass separating the spectators from the corpses, and with his pale face against it, looked. Facing him appeared rows of grey slabs, and upon them, here and there, the naked bodies formed green and yellow, white and red patches. While some retained their natural condition in the rigidity of death, others seemed like lumps of bleeding and decaying meat. At the back, against the wall, hung some lamentable rags, petticoats and trousers, puckered against the bare plaster. Laurent at first only caught sight of the wan ensemble of stones and walls, spotted with dabs of russet and black formed by the clothes and corpses. A melodious sound of running water broke the silence.

Little by little he distinguished the bodies, and went from one to the other. It was only the drowned that interested him. When several human forms were there, swollen and blued by the water, he looked at them eagerly, seeking to recognise Camille. Frequently, the flesh on the faces had gone away by strips, the bones had burst through the mellow skins, the visages were like lumps of boned, boiled beef. Laurent hesitated; he looked at the corpses, endeavouring to discover the lean body of his victim. But all the drowned were stout. He saw enormous stomachs, puffy thighs, and strong round arms. He did not know what to do. He stood there shuddering before those greenish-looking rags, which seemed like mocking him, with their horrible wrinkles.

One morning, he was seized with real terror. For some moments, he had been looking at a corpse, taken from the water, that was small in build and atrociously disfigured. The flesh of this drowned person was so soft and broken-up that the running water washing it, carried it away bit by bit. The jet falling on the face, bored a hole to the left of the nose. And, abruptly, the nose became flat, the lips were detached, showing the white teeth. The head of the drowned man burst out laughing.

Each time Laurent fancied he recognised Camille, he felt a burning sensation in the heart. He ardently desired to find the body of his victim, and he was seized with cowardice when he imagined it before him. His visits to the Morgue filled him with nightmare, with shudders that set him panting for breath. But he shook off his fear, taxing himself with being childish, when he wished to be strong. Still, in spite of himself, his frame revolted, disgust and terror gained possession of his being, as soon as ever he found himself in the dampness, and unsavoury odour of the hall.

When there were no drowned persons on the back row of slabs, he breathed at ease; his repugnance was not so great. He then became a simple spectator, who took strange pleasure in looking death by violence in the face, in its lugubriously fantastic and grotesque attitudes. This sight amused him, particularly when there were women there displaying their bare bosoms. These nudities, brutally exposed, bloodstained, and in places bored with holes, attracted and detained him.

Once he saw a young woman of twenty there, a child of the people, broad and strong, who seemed asleep on the stone. Her fresh, plump, white form displayed the most delicate softness of tint. She was half smiling, with her head slightly inclined on one side. Around her neck she had a black band, which gave her a sort of necklet of shadow. She was a girl who had hanged herself in a fit of love madness.

Each morning, while Laurent was there, he heard behind him the coming and going of the public who entered and left.

The morgue is a sight within reach of everybody, and one to which passers-by, rich and poor alike, treat themselves. The door stands open, and all are free to enter. There are admirers of the scene who go out of their way so as not to miss one of these performances of death. If the slabs have nothing on them, visitors leave the building disappointed, feeling as if they had been cheated, and murmuring between their teeth; but when they are fairly well occupied, people crowd in front of them and treat themselves to cheap emotions; they express horror, they joke, they applaud or whistle, as at the theatre, and withdraw satisfied, declaring the Morgue a success on that particular day.

Laurent soon got to know the public frequenting the place, that mixed and dissimilar public who pity and sneer in common. Workmen looked in on their way to their work, with a loaf of bread and tools under their arms. They considered death droll. Among them were comical companions of the workshops who elicited a smile from the onlookers by making witty remarks about the faces of each corpse. They styled those who had been burnt to death, coalmen; the hanged, the murdered, the drowned, the bodies that had been stabbed or crushed, excited their jeering vivacity, and their voices, which slightly trembled, stammered out comical sentences amid the shuddering silence of the hall.

There came persons of small independent means, old men who were thin and shrivelled-up, idlers who entered because they had nothing to do, and who looked at the bodies in a silly manner with the pouts of peaceful, delicate-minded men. Women were there in great numbers: young work-girls, all rosy, with white linen, and clean petticoats, who tripped along briskly from one end of the glazed partition to the other, opening great attentive eyes, as if they were before the dressed shop window of a linendraper. There were also women of the lower orders looking stupefied, and giving themselves lamentable airs; and well-dressed ladies, carelessly dragging their silk gowns along the floor.

On a certain occasion Laurent noticed one of the latter standing at a few paces from the glass, and pressing her cambric handkerchief to her nostrils. She wore a delicious grey silk skirt with a large black lace mantle; her face was covered by a veil, and her gloved hands seemed quite small and delicate. Around her hung a gentle perfume of violet.

She stood scrutinising a corpse. On a slab a few paces away, was stretched the body of a great, big fellow, a mason who had recently killed himself on the spot by falling from a scaffolding. He had a broad chest, large short muscles, and a white, well-nourished body; death had made a marble statue of him. The lady examined him, turned him round and weighed him, so to say, with her eyes. For a time, she seemed quite absorbed in the contemplation of this man. She raised a corner of her veil for one last look. Then she withdrew.

At moments, bands of lads arrived—young people between twelve and fifteen, who leant with their hands against the glass, nudging one another with their elbows, and making brutal observations.

At the end of a week, Laurent became disheartened. At night he dreamt of the corpses he had seen in the morning. This suffering, this daily disgust which he imposed on himself, ended by troubling him to such a point, that he resolved to pay only two more visits to the place. The next day, on entering the Morgue, he received a violent shock in the chest. Opposite him, on a slab, Camille lay looking at him, extended on his back, his head raised, his eyes half open.

The murderer slowly approached the glass, as if attracted there, unable to detach his eyes from his victim. He did not suffer; he merely experienced a great inner chill, accompanied by slight pricks on his skin. He would have thought that he would have trembled more violently. For fully five minutes, he stood motionless, lost in unconscious contemplation, engraving, in spite of himself, in his memory, all the horrible lines, all the dirty colours of the picture he had before his eyes.

Camille was hideous. He had been a fortnight in the water. His face still appeared firm and rigid; the features were preserved, but the skin had taken a yellowish, muddy tint. The thin, bony, and slightly tumefied head, wore a grimace. It was a trifle inclined on one side, with the hair sticking to the temples, and the lids raised, displaying the dull globes of the eyes. The twisted lips were drawn to a corner of the mouth in an atrocious grin; and a piece of blackish tongue appeared between the white teeth. This head, which looked tanned and drawn out lengthwise, while preserving a human appearance, had remained all the more frightful with pain and terror.

The body seemed a mass of ruptured flesh; it had suffered horribly. You could feel that the arms no longer held to their sockets; and the clavicles were piercing the skin of the shoulders. The ribs formed black bands on the greenish chest; the left side, ripped open, was gaping amidst dark red shreds. All the torso was in a state of putrefaction. The extended legs, although firmer, were daubed with dirty patches. The feet dangled down.

Laurent gazed at Camille. He had never yet seen the body of a drowned person presenting such a dreadful aspect. The corpse, moreover, looked pinched. It had a thin, poor appearance. It had shrunk up in its decay, and the heap it formed was quite small. Anyone might have guessed that it belonged to a clerk at 1,200 francs a year, who was stupid and sickly, and who had been brought up by his mother on infusions. This miserable frame, which had grown to maturity between warm blankets, was now shivering on a cold slab.

When Laurent could at last tear himself from the poignant curiosity that kept him motionless and gaping before his victim, he went out and begun walking rapidly along the quay. And as he stepped out, he repeated:

"That is what I have done. He is hideous."

A smell seemed to be following him, the smell that the putrefying body must be giving off.

He went to find old Michaud, and told him he had just recognized Camille lying on one of the slabs in the Morgue. The formalities were performed, the drowned man was buried, and a certificate of death delivered. Laurent, henceforth at ease, felt delighted to be able to bury his crime in oblivion, along with the vexatious and painful scenes that had followed it.

CHAPTER XIV

The shop in the Arcade of the Pont Neuf remained closed for three days. When it opened again, it appeared darker and damper. The shop-front display, which the dust had turned yellow, seemed to be wearing the mourning of the house; the various articles were scattered at sixes and sevens in the dirty windows. Behind the linen caps hanging from the rusty iron rods, the face of Therese presented a more olive, a more sallow pallidness, and the immobility of sinister calm.

All the gossips in the arcade were moved to pity. The dealer in imitation jewelry pointed out the emaciated profile of the young widow to each of her customers, as an interesting and lamentable curiosity.

For three days, Madame Raquin and Therese had remained in bed without speaking, and without even seeing one another. The old mercer, propped up by pillows in a sitting posture, gazed vaguely before her with the eyes of an idiot. The death of her son had been like a blow on the head that had felled her senseless to the ground. For hours she remained tranquil and inert, absorbed in her despair; then she was at times seized with attacks of weeping, shrieking and delirium.

Therese in the adjoining room, seemed to sleep. She had turned her face to the wall, and drawn the sheet over her eyes. There she lay stretched out at full length, rigid and mute, without a sob raising the bed-clothes. It looked as if she was concealing the thoughts that made her rigid in the darkness of the alcove.

Suzanne, who attended to the two women, went feebly from one to the other, gently dragging her feet along the floor, bending her wax-like countenance over the two couches, without succeeding in persuading Therese, who had sudden fits of impatience, to turn round, or in consoling Madame Raquin, whose tears began to flow as soon as a voice drew her from her prostration.

On the third day, Therese, rapidly and with a sort of feverish decision, threw the sheet from her, and seated herself up in bed. She thrust back her hair from her temples, and for a moment remained with her hands to her forehead and her eyes fixed, seeming still to reflect. Then, she sprang to the carpet. Her limbs were shivering, and red with fever; large livid patches marbled her skin, which had become wrinkled in places as if she had lost flesh. She had grown older.

Suzanne, on entering the room, was struck with surprise to find her up. In a placid, drawling tone, she advised her to go to bed again, and continue resting. Therese paid no heed to her, but sought her clothes and put them on with hurried, trembling gestures. When she was dressed, she went and looked at herself in a glass, rubbing her eyes, and passing her hands over her countenance, as if to efface something. Then, without pronouncing a syllable, she quickly crossed the dining-room and entered the apartment occupied by Madame Raquin.

She caught the old mercer in a moment of doltish calm. When Therese appeared, she turned her head following the movements of the young widow with her eyes, while the latter came and stood before her, mute and oppressed. The two women contemplated one another for some seconds, the niece with increasing anxiety, the aunt with painful efforts of memory. Madame Raquin, at last remembering, stretched out her trembling arms, and, taking Therese by the neck, exclaimed:

"My poor child, my poor Camille!"

She wept, and her tears dried on the burning skin of the young widow, who concealed her own dry eyes in the folds of the sheet. Therese remained bending down, allowing the old mother to exhaust her outburst of grief. She had dreaded this first interview ever since the murder; and had kept in bed to delay it, to reflect at ease on the terrible part she had to play.

When she perceived Madame Raquin more calm, she busied herself about her, advising her to rise, and go down to the shop. The old mercer had almost fallen into dotage. The abrupt apparition of her niece had brought about a favourable crisis that had just restored her memory, and the consciousness of things and beings around her. She thanked Suzanne for her attention. Although weakened, she talked, and had ceased wandering, but she spoke in a voice so full of sadness that at moments she was half choked. She watched the movements of Therese with sudden fits of tears; and would then call her to the bedside, and embrace her amid more sobs, telling her in a suffocating tone that she, now, had nobody but her in the world.

In the evening, she consented to get up, and make an effort to eat. Therese then saw what a terrible shock her aunt had received. The legs of the old lady had become so ponderous that she required a stick to assist her to drag herself into the dining-room, and there she thought the walls were vacillating around her.

Nevertheless, the following day she wished the shop to be opened. She feared she would go mad if she continued to remain alone in her room. She went down the wooden staircase with heavy tread, placing her two feet on each step, and seated herself behind the counter. From that day forth, she remained riveted there in placid affliction.

Therese, beside her, mused and waited. The shop resumed its gloomy calm.

CHAPTER XV

Laurent resumed calling of an evening, every two or three days, remaining in the shop talking to Madame Raquin for half an hour. Then he went off without looking Therese in the face. The old mercer regarded him as the rescuer of her niece, as a noble-hearted young man who had done his utmost to restore her son to her, and she welcomed him with tender kindness.

One Thursday evening, when Laurent happened to be there, old Michaud and Grivet entered. Eight o'clock was striking. The clerk and the former commissary of police had both thought, independently of one another, that they could resume their dear custom, without appearing importunate, and they arrived at the same moment, as if urged by the same impulse. Behind them, came Olivier and Suzanne.

Everyone went upstairs to the dining-room. Madame Raquin who expected nobody, hastened to light the lamp, and prepare the tea. When all were seated round the table, each before a cup, when the box of dominoes had been emptied on the board, the old mother, with the past suddenly brought back to her, looked at her guests, and burst into sobs. There was a vacant place, that of her son.

This despair cast a chill upon the company and annoyed them. Every countenance wore an air of egotistic beatitude. These people fell ill at ease, having no longer the slightest recollection of Camille alive in their hearts.

"Come, my dear lady," exclaimed old Michaud, slightly impatiently, "you must not give way to despair like that. You will make yourself ill."

"We are all mortal," affirmed Grivet.

"Your tears will not restore your son to you," sententiously observed Olivier.

"Do not cause us pain, I beg you," murmured Suzanne.

And as Madame Raquin sobbed louder, unable to restrain her tears, Michaud resumed:

"Come, come, have a little courage. You know we come here to give you some distraction. Then do not let us feel sad. Let us try to forget. We are playing two sous a game. Eh! What do you say?"

The mercer stifled her sobs with a violent effort. Perhaps she was conscious of the happy egotism of her guests. She dried her tears, but was still quite upset. The dominoes trembled in her poor hands, and the moisture in her eyes prevented her seeing.

The game began.

Laurent and Therese had witnessed this brief scene in a grave and impassive manner. The young man was delighted to see these Thursday evenings resumed. He ardently desired them to be continued, aware that he would have need of these gatherings to attain his end. Besides, without asking himself the reason, he felt more at ease among these few persons whom he knew, and it gave him courage to look Therese in the face.

The young woman, attired in black, pale and meditative, seemed to him to possess a beauty that he had hitherto ignored. He was happy to meet her eyes, and to see them rest upon his own with courageous fixedness. Therese still belonged to him, heart and soul.

CHAPTER XVI

A fortnight passed. The bitterness of the first hours was softening; each day brought additional tranquillity and calm; life resumed its course with weary languidness, and with the monotonous intellectual insensibility which follows great shocks. At the commencement, Laurent and Therese allowed themselves to drift into this new existence which was transforming them; within their beings was proceeding a silent labour which would require analysing with extreme delicacy if one desired to mark all its phases.

It was not long before Laurent came every night to the shop as formerly. But he no longer dined there, he no longer made the place a lounge during the entire evening. He arrived at half-past nine, and remained until he had put up the shutters. It seemed as if he was accomplishing a duty in placing himself at the service of the two women. If he happened occasionally to neglect the tiresome job, he apologised with the humility of a valet the following day. On Thursdays he assisted Madame Raquin to light the fire, to do the honours of the house, and displayed all kinds of gentle attentions that charmed the old mercer.

Therese peacefully watched the activity of his movements round about her. The pallidness of her face had departed. She appeared in better health, more smiling and gentle. It was only rarely that her lips, becoming pinched in a nervous contraction, produced two deep pleats which conveyed to her countenance a strange expression of grief and fright.

The two sweethearts no longer sought to see one another in private. Not once did they suggest a meeting, nor did they ever furtively exchange a kiss. The murder seemed to have momentarily appeased their warmth. In killing Camille, they had succeeded in satisfying their passion. Their crime appeared to have given them a keen pleasure that sickened and disgusted them of their embraces.

They had a thousand facilities for enjoying the freedom that had been their dream, and the attainment of which had urged them on to murder. Madame Raquin, impotent and childish, ceased to be an obstacle. The house belonged to them. They could go abroad where they pleased. But love did not trouble them, its fire had died out. They remained there, calmly talking, looking at one another without reddening and without a thrill. They even avoided being alone. In their intimacy, they found nothing to say, and both were afraid that they appeared too cold. When they exchanged a pressure of the hand, they experienced a sort of discomfort at the touch of their skins.

Both imagined they could explain what made them so indifferent and alarmed when face to face with one another. They put the coldness of their attitude down to prudence. Their calm, according to them, was the result of great caution on their part. They pretended they desired this tranquillity, and somnolence of their hearts. On the other hand, they regarded the repugnance, the uncomfortable feeling experienced as a remains of terror, as the secret dread of punishment. Sometimes, forcing themselves to hope, they sought to resume the burning dreams of other days, and were quite astonished to find they had no imagination.

Then, they clung to the idea of their forthcoming marriage. They fancied that having attained their end, without a single fear to trouble them, delivered over to one another, their passion would burn again, and they would taste the delights that had been their dream. This prospect brought them calm, and prevented them descending to the void hollowed out beneath them. They persuaded themselves they loved one another as in the past, and they awaited the moment when they were to be perfectly happy bound together for ever.

Never had Therese possessed so placid a mind. She was certainly becoming better. All her implacable, natural will was giving way. She felt happy at night, alone in her bed; no longer did she find the thin face, and piteous form of Camille at her side to exasperate her. She imagined herself a little girl, a maid beneath the white curtains, lying peacefully amidst the silence and darkness. Her spacious, and slightly cold room rather pleased her, with its lofty ceiling, its obscure corners, and its smack of the cloister.

She even ended by liking the great black wall which rose up before her window. Every night during one entire summer, she remained for hours gazing at the grey stones in this wall, and at the narrow strips of starry sky cut out by the chimneys and roofs. She only thought of Laurent when awakened with a start by nightmare. Then, sitting up, trembling, with dilated eyes, and pressing her nightdress to her, she said to herself that she would not experience these sudden fears, if she had a man lying beside her. She thought of her sweetheart as of a dog who would have guarded and protected her.

Of a daytime, in the shop, she took an interest in what was going on outside; she went out at her own instigation, and no longer lived in sullen revolt, occupied with thoughts of hatred and vengeance. It worried her to sit musing. She felt the necessity of acting and seeing. From morning to night, she watched the people passing through the arcade. The noise, and going and coming diverted her. She became inquisitive and talkative, in a word a woman, for hitherto she had only displayed the actions and ideas of a man.

From her point of observation, she remarked a young man, a student, who lived at an hotel in the neighbourhood, and who passed several times daily before the shop. This youth had a handsome, pale face, with the long hair of a poet, and the moustache of an officer. Therese thought him superior looking. She was in love with him for a week, in love like a schoolgirl. She read novels, she compared the young man to Laurent, and found the latter very coarse and heavy. Her reading revealed to her romantic scenes that, hitherto, she had ignored. She had only loved with blood and nerves, as yet, and she now began to love with her head. Then, one day, the student disappeared. No doubt he had moved. In a few hours Therese had forgotten him.

She now subscribed to a circulating library, and conceived a passion for the heroes of all the stories that passed under her eyes. This sudden love for reading had great influence on her temperament. She acquired nervous sensibility which caused her to laugh and cry without any motive. The equilibrium which had shown a tendency to be established in her, was upset. She fell into a sort of vague meditation. At moments, she became disturbed by thoughts of Camille, and she dreamt of Laurent and fresh love, full of terror and distrust. She again became a prey to anguish. At one moment she sought for the means of marrying her sweetheart at that very instant, at another she had an idea of running away never to see him again.

The novels, which spoke to her of chastity and honour, placed a sort of obstacle between her instincts and her will. She remained the ungovernable creature who had wanted to struggle with the Seine and who had thrown herself violently into illicit love; but she was conscious of goodness and gentleness, she understood the putty face and lifeless attitude of the wife of Olivier, and she knew it was possible to be happy without killing one's husband. Then, she did not see herself in a very good light, and lived in cruel indecision.

Laurent, on his side, passed through several different phases of love and fever. First of all he enjoyed profound tranquility; he seemed as if relieved of an enormous weight. At times he questioned himself with astonishment, fancying he had had a bad dream. He asked himself whether it was really true that he had flung Camille into the water, and had seen his corpse on the slab at the Morgue.

The recollection of his crime caused him strange surprise; never could he have imagined himself capable of murder. He so prudent, so cowardly, shuddered at the mere thought, ice-like beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead when he reflected that the authorities might have discovered his crime and guillotined him. Then he felt the cold knife on his neck. So long as he had acted, he had gone straight before him, with the obstinacy and blindness of a brute. Now, he turned round, and at the sight of the gulf he had just cleared, grew faint with terror.

"Assuredly, I must have been drunk," thought he; "that woman must have intoxicated me with caresses. Good heavens! I was a fool and mad! I risked the guillotine in a business like that. Fortunately it passed off all right. But if it had to be done again, I would not do it."

Laurent lost all his vigor. He became inactive, and more cowardly and prudent than ever. He grew fat and flabby. No one who had studied this great body, piled up in a lump, apparently without bones or muscles, would ever have had the idea of accusing the man of violence and cruelty.

He resumed his former habits. For several months, he proved himself a model clerk, doing his work with exemplary brutishness. At night, he took his meal at a cheap restaurant in the Rue Saint-Victor, cutting his bread into thin slices, masticating his food slowly, making his repast last as long as possible. When it was over, he threw himself back against the wall and smoked his pipe. Anyone might have taken him for a stout, good-natured father. In the daytime, he thought of nothing; at night, he reposed in heavy sleep free from dreams. With his face fat and rosy, his belly full, his brain empty, he felt happy.

His frame seemed dead, and Therese barely entered his mind. Occasionally he thought of her as one thinks of a woman one has to marry later on, in the indefinite future. He patiently awaited the time for his marriage, forgetful of the bride, and dreaming of the new position he would then enjoy. He would leave his office, he would paint for amusement, and saunter about hither and thither. These hopes brought him night after night, to the shop in the arcade, in spite of the vague discomfort he experienced on entering the place.

One Sunday, with nothing to do and being bored, he went to see his old school friend, the young painter he had lived with for a time. The artist was working on a picture of a nude Bacchante sprawled on some drapery. The model, lying with her head thrown back and her torso twisted sometimes laughed and threw her bosom forward, stretching her arms. As Laurent smoked his pipe and chatted with his friend, he kept his eyes on the model. He took the woman home with him that evening and kept her as his mistress for many months. The poor girl fell in love with him. Every morning she went off and posed as a model all day. Then she came back each evening. She didn't cost Laurent a penny, keeping herself out of her own earnings. Laurent never bothered to find out about her, where she went, what she did. She was a steadying influence in his life, a useful and necessary thing. He never wondered if he loved her and he never considered that he was being unfaithful to Therese. He simply felt better and happier.

In the meanwhile the period of mourning that Therese had imposed on herself, had come to an end, and the young woman put on light-coloured gowns. One evening, Laurent found her looking younger and handsomer. But he still felt uncomfortable in her presence. For some time past, she seemed to him feverish, and full of strange capriciousness, laughing and turning sad without reason. This unsettled demeanour alarmed him, for he guessed, in part, what her struggles and troubles must be like.

He began to hesitate, having an atrocious dread of risking his tranquillity. He was now living peacefully, in wise contentment, and he feared to endanger the equilibrium of his life, by binding himself to a nervous woman, whose passion had already driven him crazy. But he did not reason these matters out, he felt by instinct all the anguish he would be subjected to, if he made Therese his wife.

The first shock he received, and one that roused him in his sluggishness, was the thought that he must at length begin to think of his marriage. It was almost fifteen months since the death of Camille. For an instant, Laurent had the idea of not marrying at all, of jilting Therese. Then he said to himself that it was no good killing a man for nothing. In recalling the crime, and the terrible efforts he had made to be the sole possessor of this woman who was now troubling him, he felt that the murder would become useless and atrocious should he not marry her. Besides, was he not bound to Therese by a bond of blood and horror? Moreover, he feared his accomplice; perhaps, if he failed to marry her, she would go and relate everything to the judicial authorities out of vengeance and jealousy. With these ideas beating in his head the fever settled on him again.

Now, one Sunday the model did not return; no doubt she had found a warmer and more comfortable place to lodge. Laurent was only moderately upset, but he felt a sudden gap in his life without a woman lying beside him at night. In a week his passions rebelled and he began spending entire evenings at the shop again. He watched Therese who was still palpitating from the novels which she read.

After a year of indifferent waiting they both were again tormented by desire. One evening while shutting up the shop, Laurent spoke to Therese in the passage.

"Do you want me to come to your room to-night," he asked passionately.

She started with fear. "No, let's wait. Let's be prudent."

"It seems to me that I've already waited a long time," he went on. "I'm sick of waiting."

Therese, her hands and face burning hot, looked at him wildly. She seemed to hesitate, and then said quickly:

"Let's get married."

CHAPTER XVII

Laurent left the arcade with a strained mind. Therese had filled him with the old longing lusts again. He walked along with his hat in his hand, so as to get the fresh air full in his face.

On reaching the door of his hotel in the Rue Saint-Victor, he was afraid to go upstairs, and remain alone. A childish, inexplicable, unforeseen terror made him fear he would find a man hidden in his garret. Never had he experienced such poltroonery. He did not even seek to account for the strange shudder that ran through him. He entered a wine-shop and remained an hour there, until midnight, motionless and silent at a table, mechanically absorbing great glasses of wine. Thinking of Therese, his anger raged at her refusal to have him in her room that very night. He felt that with her he would not have been afraid.

When the time came for closing the shop, he was obliged to leave. But he went back again to ask for matches. The office of the hotel was on the first floor. Laurent had a long alley to follow and a few steps to ascend, before he could take his candle. This alley, this bit of staircase which was frightfully dark, terrified him. Habitually, he passed boldly through the darkness. But on this particular night he had not even the courage to ring. He said to himself that in a certain recess, formed by the entrance to the cellar, assassins were perhaps concealed, who would suddenly spring at his throat as he passed along.

At last he pulled the bell, and lighting a match, made up his mind to enter the alley. The match went out. He stood motionless, breathless, without the courage to run away, rubbing lucifers against the damp wall in such anxiety that his hand trembled. He fancied he heard voices, and the sound of footsteps before him. The matches broke between his fingers; but he succeeded in striking one. The sulphur began to boil, to set fire to the wood, with a tardiness that increased his distress. In the pale bluish light of the sulphur, in the vacillating glimmer, he fancied he could distinguish monstrous forms. Then the match crackled, and the light became white and clear.

Laurent, relieved, advanced with caution, careful not to be without a match. When he had passed the entrance to the cellar, he clung to the opposite wall where a mass of darkness terrified him. He next briskly scaled the few steps separating him from the office of the hotel, and thought himself safe when he held his candlestick. He ascended to the other floors more gently, holding aloft his candle, lighting all the corners before which he had to pass. The great fantastic shadows that come and go, in ascending a staircase with a light, caused him vague discomfort, as they suddenly rose and disappeared before him.

As soon as he was upstairs, and had rapidly opened his door and shut himself in, his first care was to look under his bed, and make a minute inspection of the room to see that nobody was concealed there. He closed the window in the roof thinking someone might perhaps get in that way, and feeling more calm after taking these measures, he undressed, astonished at his cowardice. He ended by laughing and calling himself a child. Never had he been afraid, and he could not understand this sudden fit of terror.

He went to bed. When he was in the warmth beneath the bedclothes, he again thought of Therese, whom fright had driven from his mind. Do what he would, obstinately close his eyes, endeavour to sleep, he felt his thoughts at work commanding his attention, connecting one with the other, to ever point out to him the advantage he would reap by marrying as soon as possible. Ever and anon he would turn round, saying to himself:

"I must not think any more; I shall have to get up at eight o'clock to-morrow morning to go to my office."

And he made an effort to slip off to sleep. But the ideas returned one by one. The dull labour of his reasoning began again; and he soon found himself in a sort of acute reverie that displayed to him in the depths of his brain, the necessity for his marriage, along with the arguments his desire and prudence advanced in turn, for and against the possession of Therese.

Then, seeing he was unable to sleep, that insomnia kept his body in a state of irritation, he turned on his back, and with his eyes wide open, gave up his mind to the young woman. His equilibrium was upset, he again trembled with violent fever, as formerly. He had an idea of getting up, and returning to the Arcade of the Pont Neuf. He would have the iron gate opened, and Therese would receive him. The thought sent his blood racing.

The lucidity of his reverie was astonishing. He saw himself in the streets walking rapidly beside the houses, and he said to himself:

"I will take this Boulevard, I will cross this Square, so as to arrive there quicker."

Then the iron gate of the arcade grated, he followed the narrow, dark, deserted corridor, congratulating himself at being able to go up to Therese without being seen by the dealer in imitation jewelry. Next he imagined he was in the alley, in the little staircase he had so frequently ascended. He inhaled the sickly odour of the passage, he touched the sticky walls, he saw the dirty shadow that hung about there. And he ascended each step, breathless, and with his ear on the alert. At last he scratched against the door, the door opened, and Therese stood there awaiting him.

His thoughts unfolded before him like real scenes. With his eyes fixed on darkness, he saw. When at the end of his journey through the streets, after entering the arcade, and climbing the little staircase, he thought he perceived Therese, ardent and pale, he briskly sprang from his bed, murmuring:

"I must go there. She's waiting for me."

This abrupt movement drove away the hallucination. He felt the chill of the tile flooring, and was afraid. For a moment he stood motionless on his bare feet, listening. He fancied he heard a sound on the landing. And he reflected that if he went to Therese, he would again have to pass before the door of the cellar below. This thought sent a cold shiver down his back. Again he was seized with fright, a sort of stupid crushing terror. He looked distrustfully round the room, where he distinguished shreds of whitish light. Then gently, with anxious, hasty precautions, he went to bed again, and there huddling himself together, hid himself, as if to escape a weapon, a knife that threatened him.

The blood had flown violently to his neck, which was burning him. He put his hand there, and beneath his fingers felt the scar of the bite he had received from Camille. He had almost forgotten this wound and was terrified when he found it on his skin, where it seemed to be gnawing into his flesh. He rapidly withdrew his hand so as not to feel the scar, but he was still conscious of its being there boring into and devouring his neck. Then, when he delicately scratched it with his nail, the terrible burning sensation increased twofold. So as not to tear the skin, he pressed his two hands between his doubled-up knees, and he remained thus, rigid and irritated, with the gnawing pain in his neck, and his teeth chattering with fright.

His mind now settled on Camille with frightful tenacity. Hitherto the drowned man had not troubled him at night. And behold the thought of Therese brought up the spectre of her husband. The murderer dared not open his eyes, afraid of perceiving his victim in a corner of the room. At one moment, he fancied his bedstead was being shaken in a peculiar manner. He imagined Camille was beneath it, and that it was he who was tossing him about in this way so as to make him fall and bite him. With haggard look and hair on end, he clung to his mattress, imagining the jerks were becoming more and more violent.

Then, he perceived the bed was not moving, and he felt a reaction. He sat up, lit his candle, and taxed himself with being an idiot. He next swallowed a large glassful of water to appease his fever.

"I was wrong to drink at that wine-shop," thought he. "I don't know what is the matter with me to-night. It's silly. I shall be worn out to-morrow at my office. I ought to have gone to sleep at once, when I got into bed, instead of thinking of a lot of things. That is what gave me insomnia. I must get to sleep at once."

Again he blew out the light. He buried his head in the pillow, feeling slightly refreshed, and thoroughly determined not to think any more, and to be no more afraid. Fatigue began to relax his nerves.

He did not fall into his usual heavy, crushing sleep, but glided lightly into unsettled slumber. He simply felt as if benumbed, as if plunged into gentle and delightful stupor. As he dozed, he could feel his limbs. His intelligence remained awake in his deadened frame. He had driven away his thoughts, he had resisted the vigil. Then, when he became appeased, when his strength failed and his will escaped him, his thoughts returned quietly, one by one, regaining possession of his faltering being.

His reverie began once more. Again he went over the distance separating him from Therese: he went downstairs, he passed before the cellar at a run, and found himself outside the house; he took all the streets he had followed before, when he was dreaming with his eyes open; he entered the Arcade of the Pont Neuf, ascended the little staircase and scratched at the door. But instead of Therese, it was Camille who opened the door, Camille, just as he had seen him at the Morgue, looking greenish, and atrociously disfigured. The corpse extended his arms to him, with a vile laugh, displaying the tip of a blackish tongue between its white teeth.

Laurent shrieked, and awoke with a start. He was bathed in perspiration. He pulled the bedclothes over his eyes, swearing and getting into a rage with himself. He wanted to go to sleep again. And he did so as before, slowly.

The same feeling of heaviness overcame him, and as soon as his will had again escaped in the languidness of semi-slumber, he set out again. He returned where his fixed idea conducted him; he ran to see Therese, and once more it was the drowned man who opened the door.

The wretch sat up terrified. He would have given anything in the world to be able to drive away this implacable dream. He longed for heavy sleep to crush his thoughts. So long as he remained awake, he had sufficient energy to expel the phantom of his victim; but as soon as he lost command of his mind it led him to the acme of terror.

He again attempted to sleep. Then came a succession of delicious spells of drowsiness, and abrupt, harrowing awakenings. In his furious obstinacy, he still went to Therese, but only to always run against the body of Camille. He performed the same journey more than ten times over. He started all afire, followed the same itinerary, experienced the same sensations, accomplished the same acts, with minute exactitude; and more than ten times over, he saw the drowned man present himself to be embraced, when he extended his arms to seize and clasp his love.

This same sinister catastrophe which awoke him on each occasion, gasping and distracted, did not discourage him. After an interval of a few minutes, as soon as he had fallen asleep again, forgetful of the hideous corpse awaiting him, he once more hurried away to seek the young woman.

Laurent passed an hour a prey to these successive nightmares, to these bad dreams that followed one another ceaselessly, without any warning, and he was struck with more acute terror at each start they gave him.

The last of these shocks proved so violent, so painful that he determined to get up, and struggle no longer. Day was breaking. A gleam of dull, grey light was entering at the window in the roof which cut out a pale grey square in the sky.

Laurent slowly dressed himself, with a feeling of sullen irritation, exasperated at having been unable to sleep, exasperated at allowing himself to be caught by a fright which he now regarded as childish. As he drew on this trousers he stretched himself, he rubbed his limbs, he passed his hands over his face, harassed and clouded by a feverish night. And he repeated:

"I ought not to have thought of all that, I should have gone to sleep. Had I done so, I should be fresh and well-disposed now."

Then it occurred to him that if he had been with Therese, she would have prevented him being afraid, and this idea brought him a little calm. At the bottom of his heart he dreaded passing other nights similar to the one he had just gone through.

After splashing some water in his face, he ran the comb through his hair, and this bit of toilet while refreshing his head, drove away the final vestiges of terror. He now reasoned freely, and experienced no other inconvenience from his restless night, than great fatigue in all his limbs.

"I am not a poltroon though," he said to himself as he finished dressing. "I don't care a fig about Camille. It's absurd to think that this poor devil is under my bed. I shall, perhaps, have the same idea, now, every night. I must certainly marry as soon as possible. When Therese has me in her arms, I shall not think much about Camille. She will kiss me on the neck, and I shall cease to feel the atrocious burn that troubles me at present. Let me examine this bite."

He approached his glass, extended his neck and looked. The scar presented a rosy appearance. Then, Laurent, perceiving the marks of the teeth of his victim, experienced a certain emotion. The blood flew to his head, and he now observed a strange phenomenon. The ruby flood rushing to the scar had turned it purple, it became raw and sanguineous, standing out quite red against the fat, white neck. Laurent at the same time felt a sharp pricking sensation, as if needles were being thrust into the wound, and he hurriedly raised the collar of his shirt again.

"Bah!" he exclaimed, "Therese will cure that. A few kisses will suffice. What a fool I am to think of these matters!"

He put on his hat, and went downstairs. He wanted to be in the open air and walk. Passing before the door of the cellar, he smiled. Nevertheless, he made sure of the strength of the hook fastening the door. Outside, on the deserted pavement, he moved along with short steps in the fresh matutinal air. It was then about five o'clock.

Laurent passed an atrocious day. He had to struggle against the overpowering drowsiness that settled on him in the afternoon at his office. His heavy, aching head nodded in spite of himself, but he abruptly brought it up, as soon as he heard the step of one of his chiefs. This struggle, these shocks completed wearing out his limbs, while causing him intolerable anxiety.

In the evening, notwithstanding his lassitude, he went to see Therese, only to find her feverish, extremely low-spirited, and as weary as himself.

"Our poor Therese has had a bad night," Madame Raquin said to him, as soon as he had seated himself. "It seems she was suffering from nightmare, and terrible insomnia. I heard her crying out on several occasions. This morning she was quite ill."

Therese, while her aunt was speaking, looked fixedly at Laurent. No doubt, they guessed their common terror, for a nervous shudder ran over their countenances. Until ten o'clock they remained face to face with one another, talking of commonplace matters, but still understanding each other, and mutually imploring themselves with their eyes, to hasten the moment when they could unite against the drowned man.

CHAPTER XVIII

Therese also had been visited by the spectre of Camille, during this feverish night.

After over a year of indifference, Laurent's sudden attentions had aroused her senses. As she tossed herself about in insomnia, she had seen the drowned man rise up before her; like Laurent she had writhed in terror, and she had said as he had done, that she would no longer be afraid, that she would no more experience such sufferings, when she had her sweetheart in her arms.

This man and woman had experienced at the same hour, a sort of nervous disorder which set them panting with terror. A consanguinity had become established between them. They shuddered with the same shudder; their hearts in a kind of poignant friendship, were wrung with the same anguish. From that moment they had one body and one soul for enjoyment and suffering.

This communion, this mutual penetration is a psychological and physiological phenomenon which is often found to exist in beings who have been brought into violent contact by great nervous shocks.

For over a year, Therese and Laurent lightly bore the chain riveted to their limbs that united them. In the depression succeeding the acute crisis of the murder, amidst the feelings of disgust, and the need for calm and oblivion that had followed, these two convicts might fancy they were free, that they were no longer shackled together by iron fetters. The slackened chain dragged on the ground. They reposed, they found themselves struck with a sort of delightful insensibility, they sought to love elsewhere, to live in a state of wise equilibrium. But from the day when urged forward by events, they came to the point of again exchanging burning sentences, the chain became violently strained, and they received such a shock, that they felt themselves for ever linked to one another.

The day following this first attack of nightmare, Therese secretly set to work to bring about her marriage with Laurent. It was a difficult task, full of peril. The sweethearts trembled lest they should commit an imprudence, arouse suspicions, and too abruptly reveal the interest they had in the death of Camille.

Convinced that they could not mention marriage themselves, they arranged a very clever plan which consisted in getting Madame Raquin herself, and the Thursday evening guests, to offer them what they dared not ask for. It then only became necessary to convey to these worthy people the idea of remarrying Therese, and particularly to make them believe that this idea originated with themselves, and was their own.

The comedy was long and delicate to perform. Therese and Laurent took the parts adapted to them, and proceeded with extreme prudence, calculating the slightest gesture, and the least word. At the bottom of their hearts, they were devoured by a feeling of impatience that stiffened and strained their nerves. They lived in a state of constant irritation, and it required all their natural cowardice to compel them to show a smiling and peaceful exterior.

If they yearned to bring the business to an end, it was because they could no longer remain separate and solitary. Each night, the drowned man visited them, insomnia stretched them on beds of live coal and turned them over with fiery tongs. The state of enervation in which they lived, nightly increased the fever of their blood, which resulted in atrocious hallucinations rising up before them.

Therese no longer dared enter her room after dusk. She experienced the keenest anguish, when she had to shut herself until morning in this large apartment, which became lit-up with strange glimmers, and peopled with phantoms as soon as the light was out. She ended by leaving her candle burning, and by preventing herself falling asleep, so as to always have her eyes wide open. But when fatigue lowered her lids, she saw Camille in the dark, and reopened her eyes with a start. In the morning she dragged herself about, broken down, having only slumbered for a few hours at dawn.

As to Laurent, he had decidedly become a poltroon since the night he had taken fright when passing before the cellar door. Previous to that incident he had lived with the confidence of a brute; now, at the least sound, he trembled and turned pale like a little boy. A shudder of terror had suddenly shaken his limbs, and had clung to him. At night, he suffered even more than Therese; and fright, in this great, soft, cowardly frame, produced profound laceration to the feelings. He watched the fall of day with cruel apprehension. On several occasions, he failed to return home, and passed whole nights walking in the middle of the deserted streets.

Once he remained beneath a bridge, until morning, while the rain poured down in torrents; and there, huddled up, half frozen, not daring to rise and ascend to the quay, he for nearly six hours watched the dirty water running in the whitish shadow. At times a fit of terror brought him flat down on the damp ground: under one of the arches of the bridge he seemed to see long lines of drowned bodies drifting along in the current. When weariness drove him home, he shut himself in, and double-locked the door. There he struggled until daybreak amidst frightful attacks of fever.

The same nightmare returned persistently: he fancied he fell from the ardent clasp of Therese into the cold, sticky arms of Camille. He dreamt, first of all, that his sweetheart was stifling him in a warm embrace, and then that the corpse of the drowned man pressed him to his chest in an ice-like strain. These abrupt and alternate sensations of voluptuousness and disgust, these successive contacts of burning love and frigid death, set him panting for breath, and caused him to shudder and gasp in anguish.

Each day, the terror of the lovers increased, each day their attacks of nightmare crushed and maddened them the more. They no longer relied on their kisses to drive away insomnia. By prudence, they did not dare make appointments, but looked forward to their wedding-day as a day of salvation, to be followed by an untroubled night.

It was their desire for calm slumber that made them wish for their union. They had hesitated during the hours of indifference, both being oblivious of the egotistic and impassioned reasons that had urged them to the crime, and which were now dispelled. It was in vague despair that they took the supreme resolution to unite openly. At the bottom of their hearts they were afraid. They had leant, so to say, one on the other above an unfathomable depth, attracted to it by its horror. They bent over the abyss together, clinging silently to one another, while feelings of intense giddiness enfeebled their limbs and gave them falling madness.

But at the present moment, face to face with their anxious expectation and timorous desires, they felt the imperative necessity of closing their eyes, and of dreaming of a future full of amorous felicity and peaceful enjoyment. The more they trembled one before the other, the better they foresaw the horror of the abyss to the bottom of which they were about to plunge, and the more they sought to make promises of happiness to themselves, and to spread out before their eyes the invincible facts that fatally led them to marriage.

Therese desired her union with Laurent solely because she was afraid and wanted a companion. She was a prey to nervous attacks that drove her half crazy. In reality she reasoned but little, she flung herself into love with a mind upset by the novels she had recently been reading, and a frame irritated by the cruel insomnia that had kept her awake for several weeks.

Laurent, who was of a stouter constitution, while giving way to his terror and his desire, had made up his mind to reason out his decision. To thoroughly prove to himself that his marriage was necessary, that he was at last going to be perfectly happy, and to drive away the vague fears that beset him, he resumed all his former calculations.

His father, the peasant of Jeufosse, seemed determined not to die, and Laurent said to himself that he might have to wait a long time for the inheritance. He even feared that this inheritance might escape him, and go into the pockets of one of his cousins, a great big fellow who turned the soil over to the keen satisfaction of the old boy. And he would remain poor; he would live the life of a bachelor in a garret, with a bad bed and a worse table. Besides, he did not contemplate working all his life; already he began to find his office singularly tedious. The light labour entrusted to him became irksome owing to his laziness.

The invariable result of these reflections was that supreme happiness consisted in doing nothing. Then he remembered that if he had drowned Camille, it was to marry Therese, and work no more. Certainly, the thought of having his sweetheart all to himself had greatly influenced him in committing the crime, but he had perhaps been led to it still more, by the hope of taking the place of Camille, of being looked after in the same way, and of enjoying constant beatitude. Had passion alone urged him to the deed, he would not have shown such cowardice and prudence. The truth was that he had sought by murder to assure himself a calm, indolent life, and the satisfaction of his cravings.

All these thoughts, avowedly or unconsciously, returned to him. To find encouragement, he repeated that it was time to gather in the harvest anticipated by the death of Camille, and he spread out before him, the advantages and blessings of his future existence: he would leave his office, and live in delicious idleness; he would eat, drink and sleep to his heart's content; he would have an affectionate wife beside him; and, he would shortly inherit the 40,000 francs and more of Madame Raquin, for the poor old woman was dying, little by little, every day; in a word, he would carve out for himself the existence of a happy brute, and would forget everything.

Laurent mentally repeated these ideas at every moment, since his marriage with Therese had been decided on. He also sought other advantages that would result therefrom, and felt delighted when he found a new argument, drawn from his egotism, in favour of his union with the widow of the drowned man. But however much he forced himself to hope, however much he dreamed of a future full of idleness and pleasure, he never ceased to feel abrupt shudders that gave his skin an icy chill, while at moments he continued to experience an anxiety that stifled his joy in his throat.

CHAPTER XIX

In the meanwhile, the secret work of Therese and Laurent was productive of results. The former had assumed a woeful and despairing demeanour which at the end of a few days alarmed Madame Raquin. When the old mercer inquired what made her niece so sad, the young woman played the part of an inconsolable widow with consummate skill. She spoke in a vague manner of feeling weary, depressed, of suffering from her nerves, without making any precise complaint. When pressed by her aunt with questions, she replied that she was well, that she could not imagine what it was that made her so low-spirited, and that she shed tears without knowing why.

Then, the constant choking fits of sobbing, the wan, heartrending smiles, the spells of crushing silence full of emptiness and despair, continued.

The sight of this young woman who was always giving way to her grief, who seemed to be slowly dying of some unknown complaint, ended by seriously alarming Madame Raquin. She had, now, no one in the whole world but her niece, and she prayed the Almighty every night to preserve her this relative to close her eyes. A little egotism was mingled with this final love of her old age. She felt herself affected in the slight consolations that still assisted her to live, when it crossed her mind that she might die alone in the damp shop in the arcade. From that time, she never took her eyes off her niece, and it was with terror that she watched her sadness, wondering what she could do to cure her of her silent despair.

Under these grave circumstances, she thought she ought to take the advice of her old friend Michaud. One Thursday evening, she detained him in the shop, and spoke to him of her alarm.

"Of course," answered the old man, with that frank brutality he had acquired in the performance of his former functions, "I have noticed for some time past that Therese has been looking sour, and I know very well why her face is quite yellow and overspread with grief."

"You know why!" exclaimed the widow. "Speak out at once. If we could only cure her!"

"Oh! the treatment is simple," resumed Michaud with a laugh. "Your niece finds life irksome because she had been alone for nearly two years. She wants a husband; you can see that in her eyes."

The brutal frankness of the former commissary, gave Madame Raquin a painful shock. She fancied that the wound Therese had received through the fatal accident at Saint-Ouen, was still as fresh, still as cruel at the bottom of her heart. It seemed to her that her son, once dead, Therese could have no thought for a husband, and here was Michaud affirming, with a hearty laugh, that Therese was out of sorts because she wanted one.

"Marry her as soon as you can," said he, as he took himself off, "if you do not wish to see her shrivel up entirely. That is my advice, my dear lady, and it is good, believe me."

Madame Raquin could not, at first, accustom herself to the thought that her son was already forgotten. Old Michaud had not even pronounced the name of Camille, and had made a joke of the pretended illness of Therese. The poor mother understood that she alone preserved at the bottom of her heart, the living recollection of her dear child, and she wept, for it seemed to her that Camille had just died a second time.

Then, when she had had a good cry, and was weary of mourning, she thought, in spite of herself, of what Michaud had said, and became familiar with the idea of purchasing a little happiness at the cost of a marriage which, according to her delicate mind, was like killing her son again.

Frequently, she gave way to feelings of cowardice when she came face to face with the dejected and broken-down Therese, amidst the icy silence of the shop. She was not one of those dry, rigid persons who find bitter delight in living a life of eternal despair. Her character was full of pliancy, devotedness, and effusion, which contributed to make up her temperament of a stout and affable good lady, and prompted her to live in a state of active tenderness.

Since her niece no longer spoke, and remained there pale and feeble, her own life became intolerable, while the shop seemed to her like a tomb. What she required was to find some warm affection beside her, some liveliness, some caresses, something sweet and gay which would help her to wait peacefully for death. It was these unconscious desires that made her accept the idea of marrying Therese again; she even forgot her son a little. In the existence of the tomb that she was leading, came a sort of awakening, something like a will, and fresh occupation for the mind. She sought a husband for her niece, and this search gave her matter for consideration.

The choice of a husband was an important business. The poor old lady thought much more of her own comfort than of Therese. She wished to marry her niece in order to be happy herself, for she had keen misgivings lest the new husband of the young woman should come and trouble the last hours of her old age. The idea that she was about to introduce a stranger into her daily existence terrified her. It was this thought alone that stopped her, that prevented her from talking openly with her niece about matrimony.

While Therese acted the comedy of weariness and dejection with that perfect hypocrisy she had acquired by her education, Laurent took the part of a sensible and serviceable man. He was full of little attentions for the two women, particularly for Madame Raquin, whom he overwhelmed with delicate attention. Little by little he made himself indispensable in the shop; it was him alone who brought a little gaiety into this black hole. When he did not happen to be there of an evening, the old mercer searched round her, ill at ease, as if she missed something, being almost afraid to find herself face to face with the despairing Therese.

But Laurent only occasionally absented himself to better prove his power. He went to the shop daily, on quitting his office, and remained there until the arcade was closed at night. He ran the errands, and handed Madame Raquin, who could only walk with difficulty, the small articles she required. Then he seated himself and chatted. He had acquired the gentle penetrating voice of an actor which he employed to flatter the ears and heart of the good old lady. In a friendly way, he seemed particularly anxious about the health of Therese, like a tender-hearted man who feels for the sufferings of others. On repeated occasions, he took Madame Raquin to one side, and terrified her by appearing very much alarmed himself at the changes and ravages he said he perceived on the face of the young woman.

"We shall soon lose her," he murmured in a tearful voice. "We cannot conceal from ourselves that she is extremely ill. Ah! alas, for our poor happiness, and our nice tranquil evenings!"

Madame Raquin listened to him with anguish. Laurent even had the audacity to speak of Camille.

"You see," said he to the mercer, "the death of my poor friend has been a terrible blow to her. She had been dying for the last two years, since that fatal day when she lost Camille. Nothing will console her, nothing will cure her. We must be resigned."

These impudent falsehoods made the old lady shed bitter tears. The memory of her son troubled and blinded her. Each time the name of Camille was pronounced, she gave way, bursting into sobs. She would have embraced the person who mentioned her poor boy. Laurent had noticed the trouble, and outburst of tender feeling that this name produced. He could make her weep at will, upset her with such emotion that she failed to distinguish the clear aspect of things; and he took advantage of this power to always hold her pliant and in pain in his hand, as it were.

Each evening in spite of the secret revolt of his trembling inner being, he brought the conversation to bear on the rare qualities, on the tender heart and mind of Camille, praising his victim with most shameless impudence. At moments, when he found the eyes of Therese fixed with a strange expression on his own, he shuddered, and ended by believing all the good he had been saying about the drowned man. Then he held his tongue, suddenly seized with atrocious jealousy, fearing that the young widow loved the man he had flung into the water, and whom he now lauded with the conviction of an enthusiast.

Throughout the conversation Madame Raquin was in tears, and unable to distinguish anything around her. As she wept, she reflected that Laurent must have a loving and generous heart. He alone remembered her son, he alone still spoke of him in a trembling and affected voice. She dried her eyes, gazing at the young man with infinite tenderness, and feeling that she loved him as her own child.

One Thursday evening, Michaud and Grivet were already in the dining-room, when Laurent coming in, approached Therese, and with gentle anxiety inquired after her health. He seated himself for a moment beside her, performing for the edification of the persons present, his part of an alarmed and affectionate friend. As the young couple sat close together, exchanging a few words, Michaud, who was observing them, bent down, and said in a low voice to the old mercer, as he pointed to Laurent:

"Look, there is the husband who will suit your niece. Arrange this marriage quickly. We will assist you if it be necessary."

This remark came as a revelation to Madame Raquin. She saw, at once, all the advantages she would derive, personally, from the union of Therese and Laurent. The marriage would tighten the bonds already connecting her and her niece with the friend of her son, with that good-natured fellow who came to amuse them in the evening.

In this manner, she would not be introducing a stranger into her home, she would not run the risk of unhappiness. On the contrary, while giving Therese a support, she added another joy to her old age, she found a second son in this young man who for three years had shown her such filial affection.

Then it occurred to her that Therese would be less faithless to the memory of Camille by marrying Laurent. The religion of the heart is peculiarly delicate. Madame Raquin, who would have wept to see a stranger embrace the young widow, felt no repulsion at the thought of giving her to the comrade of her son.

Throughout the evening, while the guests played at dominoes, the old mercer watched the couple so tenderly, that they guessed the comedy had succeeded, and that the denouement was at hand. Michaud, before withdrawing, had a short conversation in an undertone with Madame Raquin. Then, he pointedly took the arm of Laurent saying he would accompany him a bit of the way. As Laurent went off, he exchanged a rapid glance with Therese, a glance full of urgent enjoinment.

Michaud had undertaken to feel the ground. He found the young man very much devoted to the two ladies, but exceedingly astonished at the idea of a marriage between Therese and himself. Laurent added, in an unsteady tone of voice, that he loved the widow of his poor friend as a sister, and that it would seem to him a perfect sacrilege to marry her. The former commissary of police insisted, giving numerous good reasons with a view to obtaining his consent. He even spoke of devotedness, and went so far as to tell the young man that it was clearly his duty to give a son to Madame Raquin and a husband to Therese.

Little by little Laurent allowed himself to be won over, feigning to give way to emotion, to accept the idea of this marriage as one fallen from the clouds, dictated by feelings of devotedness and duty, as old Michaud had said. When the latter had obtained a formal answer in the affirmative, he parted with his companion, rubbing his hands, for he fancied he had just gained a great victory. He prided himself on having had the first idea of this marriage which would convey to the Thursday evenings all their former gaiety.

While Michaud was talking with Laurent, slowly following the quays, Madame Raquin had an almost identical conversation with Therese. At the moment when her niece, pale and unsteady in gait, as usual, was about to retire to rest, the old mercer detained her an instant. She questioned her in a tender tone, imploring her to be frank, and confess the cause of the trouble that overwhelmed her. Then, as she only obtained vague replies, she spoke of the emptiness of widowhood, and little by little came to talk in a more precise manner of the offer of a second marriage, concluding by asking Therese, plainly, whether she had not a secret desire to marry again.

Therese protested, saying that such a thought had never entered her mind, and that she intended remaining faithful to Camille. Madame Raquin began to weep. Pleading against her heart, she gave her niece to understand that despair should not be eternal; and, finally, in response to an exclamation of the young woman saying she would never replace Camille, Madame Raquin abruptly pronounced the name of Laurent. Then she enlarged with a flood of words on the propriety and advantages of such an union. She poured out her mind, repeating aloud all she had been thinking during the evening, depicting with naive egotism, the picture of her final days of happiness, between her two dear children. Therese, resigned and docile, listened to her with bowed head, ready to give satisfaction to her slightest wish.

"I love Laurent as a brother," said she grievously, when her aunt had ceased speaking. "But, as you desire it, I will endeavour to love him as a husband. I wish to make you happy. I had hoped that you would have allowed me to weep in peace, but I will dry my tears, as it is a question of your happiness."

She kissed the old lady, who remained surprised and frightened at having been the first to forget her son. As Madame Raquin went to bed, she sobbed bitterly, accusing herself of having less strength than Therese, and of desiring, out of egotism, a marriage that the young widow accepted by simple abnegation.

The following morning, Michaud and his old friend had a short conversation in the arcade, before the door of the shop, where they communicated to one another the result of their efforts, and agreed to hurry matters on by forcing the young people to become affianced the same evening.

At five o'clock, Michaud was already in the shop when Laurent entered. As soon as the young man had seated himself, the former commissary of police said in his ear:

"She accepts."

This blunt remark was overheard by Therese who remained pale, with her eyes impudently fixed on Laurent. The two sweethearts looked at each other for a few seconds as if consulting. Both understood that they must accept the position without hesitation, and finish the business at one stroke. Laurent, rising, went and took the hand of Madame Raquin, who made every effort to restrain her tears.

"Dear mother," said he smiling, "I was talking about your felicity, last night, with M. Michaud. Your children wish to make you happy."

The poor old lady, on hearing herself called "dear mother," allowed her tears to flow. She quietly seized the hand of Therese and placed it in that of Laurent, unable to utter a single word.

The two sweethearts shivered on feeling their skins touch, and remained with their burning fingers pressed together, in a nervous clasp. After a pause, the young man, in a hesitating tone, resumed:

"Therese, shall we give your aunt a bright and peaceful existence?"

"Yes," feebly replied the young woman, "we have a duty to perform."

Then Laurent, becoming very pale, turned towards Madame Raquin, and added:

"When Camille fell into the water, he shouted out to me: 'Save my wife, I entrust her to you.' I believe I am acting in accordance with his last wish in marrying Therese."

Therese, on hearing these words, let go the hand of Laurent. She had received a shock like a blow in the chest. The impudence of her sweetheart overwhelmed her. She observed him with a senseless look, while Madame Raquin, half stifled by sobs, stammered:

"Yes, yes, my friend, marry her, make her happy; my son, from the depth of his tomb, will thank you."

Laurent, feeling himself giving way, leant on the back of a chair, while Michaud, who was himself moved to tears, pushed him towards Therese with the remark:

"Kiss one another. It will be your betrothal."

When the lips of the young man came in contact with the cheeks of the widow, he experienced a peculiarly uncomfortable feeling, while the latter abruptly drew back, as if the two kisses of her sweetheart burnt her. This was the first caress he had given her in the presence of witnesses. All her blood rushed to her face, and she felt herself red and burning.

After this crisis, the two murderers breathed. Their marriage was decided on. At last they approached the goal they had so long had in view. Everything was settled the same evening. The Thursday following, the marriage was announced to Grivet, as well as to Olivier and his wife. Michaud, in communicating the news to them, did not conceal his delight. He rubbed his hands, repeating as he did so:

"It was I who thought of it. It is I who have married them. You will see what a nice couple they'll make!"

Suzanne silently embraced Therese. This poor creature, who was half dead, and as white as a sheet, had formed a friendship for the rigid and sombre young widow. She showed her a sort of childlike affection mingled with a kind of respectful terror. Olivier complimented the aunt and niece, while Grivet hazarded a few spicy jokes that met with middling success. Altogether the company were delighted, enchanted, and declared that everything was for the best; in reality all they thought about was the wedding feast.

Therese and Laurent were clever enough to maintain a suitable demeanour, by simply displaying tender and obliging friendship to one another. They gave themselves an air of accomplishing an act of supreme devotedness. Nothing in their faces betrayed a suspicion of the terror and desire that disturbed them. Madame Raquin watched the couple with faint smiles, and a look of feeble, but grateful goodwill.

A few formalities required fulfilling. Laurent had to write to his father to ask his consent to the marriage. The old peasant of Jeufosse who had almost forgotten that he had a son at Paris, answered him, in four lines, that he could marry, and go and get hanged if he chose. He gave him to understand that being resolved never to give him a sou, he left him master of his body, and authorised him to be guilty of all imaginable follies. A permission accorded in such terms, caused Laurent singular anxiety.

Madame Raquin, after reading the letter of this unnatural father, in a transport of kind-heartedness, acted very foolishly. She made over to her niece the 40,000 francs and more, that she possessed, stripping herself entirely for the young couple, on whose affection she relied, with the desire of being indebted to them for all her happiness.

Laurent brought nothing into the community, and he even gave it to be understood that he did not always intend to remain in his present employment, but would perhaps take up painting again. In any case, the future of the little family was assured; the interest on the money put aside added to the profit on the mercery business, would be sufficient to keep three persons comfortably. As a matter of fact it was only just sufficient to make them happy.

The preparations for the marriage were hurried on, the formalities being abridged as much as possible, and at last the welcome day arrived.

CHAPTER XX

In the morning, Laurent and Therese, awoke in their respective rooms, with the same feeling of profound joy in their hearts: both said to themselves that their last night of terror had passed. They would no longer have to sleep alone, and they would mutually defend themselves against the drowned man.

Therese looked around her, giving a strange smile as she measured her great bed with her eyes. She rose and began to slowly dress herself, in anticipation of the arrival of Suzanne, who was to come and assist her with her bridal toilet.

Laurent, on awakening, sat up in bed, and remained in that position for a few minutes, bidding farewell to his garret, which struck him as vile. At last he was to quit this kennel and have a wife. It was in the month of December and he shivered. He sprang on the tile floor, saying to himself that he would be warm at night.

A week previously, Madame Raquin, knowing how short he was of money, had slipped a purse into his hand containing 500 francs, which represented all her savings. The young man had accepted this present without difficulty, and had rigged himself out from tip to toe. Moreover, the money of the old mercer permitted him to make Therese the customary presents.

The black trousers, dress coat, white waistcoat, shirt and cambric tie, hung spread out on a couple of chairs. Laurent washed, perfumed himself with a bottle of eau de Cologne, and then proceeded to carefully attire himself. He wished to look handsome. As he fastened his collar, a collar which was high and stiff, he experienced keen pain in the neck. The button escaped from his fingers. He lost patience. The starched linen seemed to cut into his flesh. Wishing to see what was the matter, he raised his chin, and perceived the bite Camille had given him looking quite red. The collar had slightly galled the scar.

Laurent pressed his lips together, and turned pale; the sight of this mark seaming his neck, frightened and irritated him at this moment. He crumpled up the collar, and selected another which he put on with every precaution, and then finished dressing himself. As he went downstairs his new clothes made him look rigid. With his neck imprisoned in the inflexible linen, he dared not turn his head. At every movement he made, a pleat pinched the wound that the teeth of the drowned man had made in his flesh, and it was under the irritation of these sharp pricks, that he got into the carriage, and went to fetch Therese to conduct her to the town-hall and church.

On the way, he picked up a clerk employed at the Orleans Railway Company, and old Michaud, who were to act as witnesses. When they reached the shop, everyone was ready: Grivet and Olivier, the witnesses of Therese, were there, along with Suzanne, who looked at the bride as little girls look at dolls they have just dressed up. Although Madame Raquin was no longer able to walk, she desired to accompany the couple everywhere, so she was hoisted into a conveyance and the party set out.

Everything passed off in a satisfactory manner at the town-hall and church. The calm and modest attitude of the bride and bridegroom was remarked and approved. They pronounced the sacramental "yes" with an emotion that moved Grivet himself. They were as if in a dream. Whether seated, or quietly kneeling side by side, they were rent by raging thoughts that flashed through their minds in spite of themselves, and they avoided looking at one another. When they seated themselves in their carriage, they seemed to be greater strangers than before.

It had been decided that the wedding feast should be a family affair at a little restaurant on the heights of Belleville. The Michauds and Grivet alone were invited. Until six in the evening, the wedding party drove along the boulevards, and then repaired to the cheap eating-house where a table was spread with seven covers in a small private room painted yellow, and reeking of dust and wine.

The repast was not accompanied by much gaiety. The newly married pair were grave and thoughtful. Since the morning, they had been experiencing strange sensations, which they did not seek to fathom. From the commencement, they had felt bewildered at the rapidity with which the formalities and ceremony were performed, that had just bound them together for ever.

Then, the long drive on the boulevards had soothed them and made them drowsy. It appeared to them that this drive lasted months. Nevertheless, they allowed themselves to be taken through the monotonous streets without displaying impatience, looking at the shops and people with sparkless eyes, overcome by a numbness that made them feel stupid, and which they endeavoured to shake off by bursting into fits of laughter. When they entered the restaurant, they were weighed down by oppressive fatigue, while increasing stupor continued to settle on them.

Placed at table opposite one another, they smiled with an air of constraint, and then fell into the same heavy reverie as before, eating, answering questions, moving their limbs like machines. Amidst the idle lassitude of their minds, the same string of flying thoughts returned ceaselessly. They were married, and yet unconscious of their new condition, which caused them profound astonishment. They imagined an abyss still separated them, and at moments asked themselves how they could get over this unfathomable depth. They fancied they were living previous to the murder, when a material obstacle stood between them.

Then they abruptly remembered they would occupy the same apartment that night, in a few hours, and they gazed at one another in astonishment, unable to comprehend why they should be permitted to do so. They did not feel they were united, but, on the contrary, were dreaming that they had just been violently separated, and one cast far from the other.

The silly chuckling of the guests beside them, who wished to hear them talk familiarly, so as to dispel all restraint, made them stammer and colour. They could never make up their minds to treat one another as sweethearts in the presence of company.

Waiting had extinguished the flame that had formerly fired them. All the past had disappeared. They had forgotten their violent passion, they forgot even their joy of the morning, that profound joy they had experienced at the thought that they would no more be afraid. They were simply wearied and bewildered at all that was taking place. The events of the day turned round and round in their heads, appearing incomprehensible and monstrous. They sat there mute and smiling, expecting nothing, hoping for nothing. Mingled with their dejection of spirits, was a restless anxiety that proved vaguely painful.

At every movement Laurent made with his neck, he felt a sharp burn devouring his flesh; his collar cut and pinched the bite of Camille. While the mayor read out to him the law bearing on marriage, while the priest spoke to him of the Almighty, at every minute of this long day, he had felt the teeth of the drowned man entering his skin. At times, he imagined a streak of blood was running down his chest, and would bespatter his white waistcoat with crimson.

Madame Raquin was inwardly grateful to the newly married couple for their gravity. Noisy joy would have wounded the poor mother. In her mind, her son was there, invisible, handing Therese over to Laurent.

Grivet had other ideas. He considered the wedding party sad, and wanted to enliven it, notwithstanding the looks of Michaud and Olivier which riveted him to his chair each time he wished to get up and say something silly. Nevertheless, he managed to rise once and propose a toast.

"I drink to the offspring of monsieur and madame," quoth he in a sprightly tone.

It was necessary to touch glasses. Therese and Laurent had turned extremely pale on hearing this sentence. They had never dreamed that they might have children. The thought flashed through them like an icy shiver. They nervously joined glasses with the others, examining one another, surprised and alarmed to find themselves there, face to face.

The party rose from table early. The guests wished to accompany the newly married pair to the nuptial chamber. It was barely half-past nine when they all returned to the shop in the arcade. The dealer in imitation jewelry was still there in her cupboard, before the box lined with blue velvet. She raised her head inquisitively, gazing at the young husband and wife with a smile. The latter caught her eyes, and was terrified. It struck her that perhaps this old woman was aware of their former meetings, by having noticed Laurent slipping into the little corridor.

When they all arrived on the upper floor, Therese withdrew almost immediately, with Madame Raquin and Suzanne, the men remaining in the dining-room, while the bride performed her toilet for the night. Laurent, nerveless and depressed, did not experience the least impatience, but listened complacently to the coarse jokes of old Michaud and Grivet, who indulged themselves to their hearts' content, now that the ladies were no longer present. When Suzanne and Madame Raquin quitted the nuptial apartment, and the old mercer in an unsteady voice told the young man that his wife awaited him, he started. For an instant he remained bewildered. Then he feverishly grasped the hands extended to him, and entered the room, clinging to the door like a man under the influence of drink.

CHAPTER XXI

Laurent carefully closed the door behind him, and for a moment or two stood leaning against it, gazing round the apartment in anxiety and embarrassment.

A clear fire burned on the hearth, sending large sheets of light dancing on ceiling and walls. The room was thus lit-up by bright vacillating gleams, that in a measure annulled the effects of the lamp placed on a table in their midst. Madame Raquin had done her best to convey a coquettish aspect to the apartment. It was one mass of white, and perfumed throughout, as if to serve as a nest for young, fresh love. The good lady, moreover, had taken pleasure in adding a few bits of lace to the bed, and in filling the vases on the chimney-piece with bunches of roses. Gentle warmth and pleasant fragrance reigned over all, and not a sound broke the silence, save the crackling and little sharp reports of the wood aglow on the hearth.

Therese was seated on a low chair to the right of the chimney, staring fixedly at the bright flames, with her chin in her hand. She did not turn her head when Laurent entered. Clothed in a petticoat and linen night-jacket bordered with lace, she looked snowy white in the bright light of the fire. Her jacket had become disarranged, and part of her rosy shoulder appeared, half hidden by a tress of raven hair.

Laurent advanced a few paces without speaking, and took off his coat and waistcoat. When he stood in his shirt sleeves, he again looked at Therese, who had not moved, and he seemed to hesitate. Then, perceiving the bit of shoulder, he bent down quivering, to press his lips to it. The young woman, abruptly turning round, withdrew her shoulder, and in doing so, fixed on Laurent such a strange look of repugnance and horror, that he shrank back, troubled and ill at ease, as if himself seized with terror and disgust.

Laurent then seated himself opposite Therese, on the other side of the chimney, and they remained thus, silent and motionless, for fully five minutes. At times, tongues of reddish flame escaped from the wood, and then the faces of the murderers were touched with fleeting gleams of blood.

It was more than a couple of years since the two sweethearts had found themselves shut up alone in this room. They had arranged no love-meetings since the day when Therese had gone to the Rue Saint-Victor to convey to Laurent the idea of murder. Prudence had kept them apart. Barely had they, at long intervals, ventured on a pressure of the hand, or a stealthy kiss. After the murder of Camille, they had restrained their passion, awaiting the nuptial night. This had at last arrived, and now they remained anxiously face to face, overcome with sudden discomfort.

They had but to stretch forth their arms to clasp one another in a passionate embrace, and their arms remained lifeless, as if worn out with fatigue. The depression they had experienced during the daytime, now oppressed them more and more. They observed one another with timid embarrassment, pained to remain so silent and cold. Their burning dreams ended in a peculiar reality: it sufficed that they should have succeeded in killing Camille, and have become married, it sufficed that the lips of Laurent should have grazed the shoulder of Therese, for their lust to be satisfied to the point of disgust and horror.

In despair, they sought to find within them a little of that passion which formerly had devoured them. Their frames seemed deprived of muscles and nerves, and their embarrassment and anxiety increased. They felt ashamed of remaining so silent and gloomy face to face with one another. They would have liked to have had the strength to squeeze each other to death, so as not to pass as idiots in their own eyes.

What! they belonged one to the other, they had killed a man, and played an atrocious comedy in order to be able to love in peace, and they sat there, one on either side of a mantelshelf, rigid, exhausted, their minds disturbed and their frames lifeless! Such a denouement appeared to them horribly and cruelly ridiculous. It was then that Laurent endeavoured to speak of love, to conjure up the remembrances of other days, appealing to his imagination for a revival of his tenderness.

"Therese," he said, "don't you recall our afternoons in this room? Then I came in by that door, but today I came in by this one. We are free now. We can make love in peace."

He spoke in a hesitating, spiritless manner, and the young woman, huddled up on her low chair, continued gazing dreamily at the flame without listening. Laurent went on:

"Remember how I used to dream of staying a whole night with you? I dreamed of waking up in the morning to your kisses, now it can come true."

Therese all at once started as though surprised to hear a voice stammering in her ears. Turning towards Laurent, on whose countenance the fire, at this moment, cast a broad reddish reflection, she gazed at his sanguinary face, and shuddered.

The young man, more troubled and anxious, resumed:

"We have succeeded, Therese; we have broken through all obstacles, and we belong to one another. The future is ours, is it not? A future of tranquil happiness, of satisfied love. Camille is no longer here——"

Laurent ceased speaking. His throat had suddenly become dry, and he was choking, unable to continue. On hearing the name of Camille, Therese received a violent shock. The two murderers contemplated one another, stupefied, pale, and trembling. The yellow gleams of light from the fire continued to dance on ceiling and walls, the soft odour of roses lingered in the air, the crackling of the wood broke the silence with short, sharp reports.

Remembrances were abandoned. The spectre of Camille which had been evoked, came and seated itself between the newly married pair, in front of the flaming fire. Therese and Laurent recognised the cold, damp smell of the drowned man in the warm air they were breathing. They said to themselves that a corpse was there, close to them, and they examined one another without daring to move. Then all the terrible story of their crime was unfolded in their memory. The name of their victim sufficed to fill them with thoughts of the past, to compel them to go through all the anguish of the murder over again. They did not open their lips, but looked at one another, and both at the same time were troubled with the same nightmare, both with their eyes broached the same cruel tale.

This exchange of terrified looks, this mute narration they were about to make to themselves of the murder, caused them keen and intolerable apprehension. The strain on their nerves threatened an attack, they might cry out, perhaps fight. Laurent, to drive away his recollections, violently tore himself from the ecstasy of horror that enthralled him in the gaze of Therese. He took a few strides in the room; he removed his boots and put on slippers; then, returning to his former place, he sat down at the chimney corner, and tried to talk on matters of indifference.

Therese, understanding what he desired, strove to answer his questions. They chatted about the weather, endeavouring to force on a commonplace conversation. Laurent said the room was warm, and Therese replied that, nevertheless, a draught came from under the small door on the staircase, and both turned in that direction with a sudden shudder. The young man hastened to speak about the roses, the fire, about everything he saw before him. The young woman, with an effort, rejoined in monosyllables, so as not to allow the conversation to drop. They had drawn back from one another, and were giving themselves easy airs, endeavouring to forget whom they were, treating one another as strangers brought together by chance.

But, in spite of themselves, by a strange phenomenon, whilst they uttered these empty phrases, they mutually guessed the thoughts concealed in their banal words. Do what they would, they both thought of Camille. Their eyes continued the story of the past. They still maintained by looks a mute discourse, apart from the conversation they held aloud, which ran haphazard. The words they cast here and there had no signification, being disconnected and contradictory; all their intelligence was bent on the silent exchange of their terrifying recollections.

When Laurent spoke of the roses, or of the fire, of one thing or another, Therese was perfectly well aware that he was reminding her of the struggle in the skiff, of the dull fall of Camille; and, when Therese answered yes or no to an insignificant question, Laurent understood that she said she remembered or did not remember a detail of the crime. They charted it in this manner open-heartedly without needing words, while they spoke aloud of other matters.

Moreover, unconscious of the syllables they pronounced, they followed their secret thoughts sentence by sentence; they might abruptly have continued their confidences aloud, without ceasing to understand each other. This sort of divination, this obstinacy of their memory in presenting to themselves without pause, the image of Camille, little by little drove them crazy. They thoroughly well perceived that they guessed the thoughts of one another, and that if they did not hold their tongues, the words would rise of themselves to their mouths, to name the drowned man, and describe the murder. Then they closely pinched their lips and ceased their conversation.

In the overwhelming silence that ensued, the two murderers continued to converse about their victim. It appeared to them that their eyes mutually penetrated their flesh, and buried clear, keen phrases in their bodies. At moments, they fancied they heard themselves speaking aloud. Their senses changed. Sight became a sort of strange and delicate hearing. They so distinctly read their thoughts upon their countenances, that these thoughts took a peculiarly piercing sound that agitated all their organism. They could not have understood one another better, had they shouted in a heartrending voice:

"We have killed Camille, and his corpse is there, extended between us, making our limbs like ice."

And the terrible confidence continued, more manifest, more resounding, in the calm moist air of the room.

Laurent and Therese had commenced the mute narration from the day of their first interview in the shop. Then the recollections had come one by one in order; they had related their hours of love, their moments of hesitation and anger, the terrible incident of the murder. It was then that they pinched their lips, ceasing to talk of one thing and another, in fear lest they should all at once name Camille without desiring to do so.

But their thoughts failing to cease, had then led them into great distress, into the affrighted period of expectancy following the crime. They thus came to think of the corpse of the drowned man extended on a slab at the Morgue. Laurent, by a look, told Therese all the horror he had felt, and the latter, driven to extremities, compelled by a hand of iron to part her lips, abruptly continued the conversation aloud:

"You saw him at the Morgue?" she inquired of Laurent without naming Camille.

Laurent looked as if he expected this question. He had been reading it for a moment on the livid face of the young woman.

"Yes," answered he in a choking voice.

The murderers shivered, and drawing nearer the fire, extended their hands towards the flame as if an icy puff of wind had suddenly passed through the warm room. For an instant they maintained silence, coiled up like balls, cowering on their chairs. Then Therese, in a hollow voice, resumed:

"Did he seem to have suffered much?"

Laurent could not answer. He made a terrified gesture as if to put aside some hideous vision, and rising went towards the bed. Then, returning violently with open arms, he advanced towards Therese.

"Kiss me," said he, extending his neck.

Therese had risen, looking quite pale in her nightdress, and stood half thrown back, with her elbow resting on the marble mantelpiece. She gazed at the neck of her husband. On the white skin she had just caught sight of a pink spot. The rush of blood to the head, increased the size of this spot, turning it bright red.

"Kiss me, kiss me," repeated Laurent, his face and neck scarlet.

The young woman threw her head further back, to avoid an embrace, and pressing the tip of her finger on the bite Camille had given her husband, addressed him thus:

"What have you here? I never noticed this wound before."

It seemed to Laurent as if the finger of Therese was boring a hole in his throat. At the contact of this finger, he suddenly started backward, uttering a suppressed cry of pain.

"That," he stammered, "that——"

He hesitated, but he could not lie, and in spite of himself, he told the truth.

"That is the bite Camille gave me. You know, in the boat. It is nothing. It has healed. Kiss me, kiss me."

And the wretch craned his neck which was burning him. He wanted Therese to kiss the scar, convinced that the lips of this woman would appease the thousand pricks lacerating his flesh, and with raised chin he presented his extended neck for the embrace. Therese, who was almost lying back on the marble chimney-piece, gave a supreme gesture of disgust, and in a supplicating voice exclaimed:

"Oh! no, not on that part. There is blood."

She sank down on the low chair, trembling, with her forehead between her hands. Laurent remained where he stood for a moment, looking stupid. Then, all at once, with the clutch of a wild beast, he grasped the head of Therese in his two great hands, and by force brought her lips to the bite he had received from Camille on his neck. For an instant he kept, he crushed, this head of a woman against his skin. Therese had given way, uttering hollow groans. She was choking on the neck of Laurent. When she had freed herself from his hands, she violently wiped her mouth, and spat in the fire. She had not said a word.

Laurent, ashamed of his brutality, began walking slowly from the bed to the window. Suffering alone—the horrible burn—had made him exact a kiss from Therese, and when her frigid lips met the scorching scar, he felt the pain more acutely. This kiss obtained by violence had just crushed him. The shock had been so painful, that for nothing in the world would he have received another.

He cast his eyes upon the woman with whom he was to live, and who sat shuddering, doubled up before the fire, turning her back to him; and he repeated to himself that he no longer loved this woman, and that she no longer loved him.

For nearly an hour Therese maintained her dejected attitude, while Laurent silently walked backward and forward. Both inwardly acknowledged, with terror, that their passion was dead, that they had killed it in killing Camille. The embers on the hearth were gently dying out; a sheet of bright, clear fire shone above the ashes. Little by little, the heat of the room had become stifling; the flowers were fading, making the thick air sickly, with their heavy odour.

Laurent, all at once, had an hallucination. As he turned round, coming from the window to the bed, he saw Camille in a dark corner, between the chimney and wardrobe. The face of his victim looked greenish and distorted, just as he had seen it on the slab at the Morgue. He remained glued to the carpet, fainting, leaning against a piece of furniture for support. At a hollow rattle in his throat, Therese raised her head.

"There, there!" exclaimed Laurent in a terrified tone.

With extended arm, he pointed to the dark corner where he perceived the sinister face of Camille. Therese, infected by his terror, went and pressed against him.

"It is his portrait," she murmured in an undertone, as if the face of her late husband could hear her.

"His portrait?" repeated Laurent, whose hair stood on end.

"Yes, you know, the painting you did," she replied. "My aunt was to have removed it to her room. No doubt she forgot to take it down."

"Really; his portrait," said he.

The murderer had some difficulty in recognising the canvas. In his trouble he forgot that it was he who had drawn those clashing strokes, who had spread on those dirty tints that now terrified him. Terror made him see the picture as it was, vile, wretchedly put together, muddy, displaying the grimacing face of a corpse on a black ground. His own work astonished and crushed him by its atrocious ugliness; particularly the two eyes which seemed floating in soft, yellowish orbits, reminding him exactly of the decomposed eyes of the drowned man at the Morgue. For a moment, he remained breathless, thinking Therese was telling an untruth to allay his fears. Then he distinguished the frame, and little by little became calm.

"Go and take it down," said he in a very low tone to the young woman.

"Oh! no, I'm afraid," she answered with a shiver.

Laurent began to tremble again. At moments the frame of the picture disappeared, and he only saw the two white eyes giving him a long, steady look.

"I beg you to go and unhook it," said he, beseeching his companion.

"No, no," she replied.

"We will turn it face to the wall, and then it will not frighten us," he suggested.

"No," said she, "I cannot do it."

The murderer, cowardly and humble, thrust the young woman towards the canvas, hiding behind her, so as to escape the gaze of the drowned man. But she escaped, and he wanted to brazen the matter out. Approaching the picture, he raised his hand in search of the nail, but the portrait gave such a long, crushing, ignoble look, that Laurent after seeking to stare it out, found himself vanquished, and started back overpowered, murmuring as he did so:

"No, you are right, Therese, we cannot do it. Your aunt shall take it down to-morrow."

He resumed his walk up and down, with bowed head, feeling the portrait was staring at him, following him with its eyes. At times, he could not prevent himself casting a side glance at the canvas; and, then, in the depth of the darkness, he still perceived the dull, deadened eyes of the drowned man. The thought that Camille was there, in a corner, watching him, present on his wedding night, examining Therese and himself, ended by driving him mad with terror and despair.

One circumstance, which would have brought a smile to the lips of anyone else, made him completely lose his head. As he stood before the fire, he heard a sort of scratching sound. He turned pale, imagining it came from the portrait, that Camille was descending from his frame. Then he discovered that the noise was at the small door opening on the staircase, and he looked at Therese who also showed signs of fear.

"There is someone on the staircase," he murmured. "Who can be coming that way?"

The young woman gave no answer. Both were thinking of the drowned man, and their temples became moist with icy perspiration. They sought refuge together at the end of the room, expecting to see the door suddenly open, and the corpse of Camille fall on the floor. As the sound continued, but more sharply and irregularly, they thought their victim must be tearing away the wood with his nails to get in. For the space of nearly five minutes, they dared not stir. Finally, a mewing was heard, and Laurent advancing, recognised the tabby cat belonging to Madame Raquin, which had been accidentally shut up in the room, and was endeavouring to get out by clawing at the door.

Francois, frightened by Laurent, sprang upon a chair at a bound. With hair on end and stiffened paws, he looked his new master in the face, in a harsh and cruel manner. The young man did not like cats, and Francois almost terrified him. In this moment of excitement and alarm, he imagined the cat was about to fly in his face to avenge Camille. He fancied the beast must know everything, that there were thoughts in his strangely dilated round eyes. The fixed gaze of the animal caused Laurent to lower his lids. As he was about to give Francois a kick, Therese exclaimed:

"Don't hurt him."

This sentence produced a strange impression on Laurent, and an absurd idea got into his head.

"Camille has entered into this cat," thought he. "I shall have to kill the beast. It looks like a human being."

He refrained from giving the kick, being afraid of hearing Francois speak to him with the voice of Camille. Then he said to himself that this animal knew too much, and that he should have to throw it out of the window. But he had not the pluck to accomplish his design. Francois maintained a fighting attitude. With claws extended, and back curved in sullen irritation, he followed the least movement of his enemy with superb tranquillity. The metallic sparkle of his eyes troubled Laurent, who hastened to open the dining-room door, and the cat fled with a shrill mew.

Therese had again seated herself before the extinguished fire. Laurent resumed his walk from bed to window. It was thus that they awaited day-light. They did not think of going to bed; their hearts were thoroughly dead. They had but one, single desire: to leave the room they were in, and where they were choking. They experienced a real discomfort in being shut up together, and in breathing the same atmosphere. They would have liked someone to be there to interrupt their privacy, to drag them from the cruel embarrassment in which they found themselves, sitting one before the other without opening their lips, and unable to resuscitate their love. Their long silences tortured them, silence loaded with bitter and despairing complaints, with mute reproaches, which they distinctly heard in the tranquil air.

Day came at last, a dirty, whitish dawn, bringing penetrating cold with it. When the room had filled with dim light, Laurent, who was shivering, felt calmer. He looked the portrait of Camille straight in the face, and saw it as it was, commonplace and puerile. He took it down, and shrugging his shoulders, called himself a fool. Therese had risen from the low chair, and was tumbling the bed about for the purpose of deceiving her aunt, so as to make her believe they had passed a happy night.

"Look here," Laurent brutally remarked to her, "I hope we shall sleep well to-night! There must be an end to this sort of childishness."

Therese cast a deep, grave glance at him.

"You understand," he continued. "I did not marry for the purpose of passing sleepless nights. We are just like children. It was you who disturbed me with your ghostly airs. To-night you will try to be gay, and not frighten me."

He forced himself to laugh without knowing why he did so.

"I will try," gloomily answered the young woman.

Such was the wedding night of Therese and Laurent.

CHAPTER XXII

The following nights proved still more cruel. The murderers had wished to pass this part of the twenty-four hours together, so as to be able to defend themselves against the drowned man, and by a strange effect, since they had been doing so, they shuddered the more. They were exasperated, and their nerves so irritated, that they underwent atrocious attacks of suffering and terror, at the exchange of a simple word or look. At the slightest conversation between them, at the least talk, they had alone, they began raving, and were ready to draw blood.

The sort of remorse Laurent experienced was purely physical. His body, his irritated nerves and trembling frame alone were afraid of the drowned man. His conscience was for nothing in his terror. He did not feel the least regret at having killed Camille. When he was calm, when the spectre did not happen to be there, he would have committed the murder over again, had he thought his interests absolutely required it.

During the daytime he laughed at himself for his fright, making up his mind to be stronger, and he harshly rebuked Therese, whom he accused of troubling him. According to what he said, it was Therese who shuddered, it was Therese alone who brought on the frightful scenes, at night, in the bedroom. And, as soon as night came, as soon as he found himself shut in with his wife, icy perspiration pearled on his skin, and his frame shook with childish terror.

He thus underwent intermittent nervous attacks that returned nightly, and threw his senses into confusion while showing him the hideous green face of his victim. These attacks resembled the accesses of some frightful illness, a sort of hysteria of murder. The name of illness, of nervous affection, was really the only one to give to the terror that Laurent experienced. His face became convulsed, his limbs rigid, his nerves could be seen knotting beneath his skin. The body suffered horribly, while the spirit remained absent. The wretch felt no repentance. His passion for Therese had conveyed a frightful evil to him, and that was all.

Therese also found herself a prey to these heavy shocks. But, in her terror, she showed herself a woman: she felt vague remorse, unavowed regret. She, at times, had an inclination to cast herself on her knees and beseech the spectre of Camille to pardon her, while swearing to appease it by repentance. Maybe Laurent perceived these acts of cowardice on the part of Therese, for when they were agitated by the common terror, he laid the blame on her, and treated her with brutality.

On the first nights, they were unable to go to bed. They waited for daylight, seated before the fire, or pacing to and fro as on the evening of the wedding-day. The thought of lying down, side by side, on the bed, caused them a sort of terrifying repugnance. By tacit consent, they avoided kissing one another, and they did not even look at their couch, which Therese tumbled about in the morning.

When overcome with fatigue, they slept for an hour or two in the armchairs, to awaken with a start, under the influence of the sinister denouement of some nightmare. On awakening, with limbs stiff and tired, shivering all over with discomfort and cold, their faces marbled with livid blotches, they contemplated one another in bewilderment astonished to see themselves there. And they displayed strange bashfulness towards each other, ashamed at showing their disgust and terror.

But they struggled against sleep as much as they could. They seated themselves, one on each side of the chimney, and talked of a thousand trifles, being very careful not to let the conversation drop. There was a broad space between them in front of the fire. When they turned their heads, they imagined that Camille had drawn a chair there, and occupied this space, warming his feet in a lugubrious, bantering fashion. This vision, which they had seen on the evening of the wedding-day, returned each night.

And this corpse taking a mute, but jeering part, in their interviews, this horribly disfigured body ever remaining there, overwhelmed them with continued anxiety. Not daring to move, they half blinded themselves staring at the scorching flames, and, when unable to resist any longer, they cast a timid glance aside, their eyes irritated by the glowing coal, created the vision, and conveyed to it a reddish glow.

Laurent, in the end, refused to remain seated any longer, without avowing the cause of this whim to Therese. The latter understood that he must see Camille as she saw him; and, in her turn, she declared that the heat made her feel ill, and that she would be more comfortable a few steps away from the chimney. Pushing back her armchair to the foot of the bed, she remained there overcome, while her husband resumed his walk in the room. From time to time, he opened the window, allowing the icy air of the cold January night to fill the apartment, and this calmed his fever.

For a week, the newly-married couple passed the nights in this fashion, dozing and getting a little rest in the daytime, Therese behind the counter in the shop, Laurent in his office. At night they belonged to pain and fear. And the strangest part of the whole business was the attitude they maintained towards each other. They did not utter one word of love, but feigned to have forgotten the past; and seemed to accept, to tolerate one another like sick people, feeling secret pity for their mutual sufferings.

Both hoped to conceal their disgust and fear, and neither seemed to think of the peculiar nights they passed, which should have enlightened them as to the real state of their beings. When they sat up until morning, barely exchanging a word, turning pale at the least sound, they looked as if they thought all newly-married folk conducted themselves in the same way, during the first days of their marriage. This was the clumsy hypocrisy of two fools.

They were soon so overcome by weariness that they one night decided to lie on the bed. They did not undress, but threw themselves, as they were, on the quilt, fearing lest their bare skins should touch, for they fancied they would receive a painful shock at the least contact. Then, when they had slept thus, in an anxious sleep, for two nights, they risked removing their clothes, and slipping between the sheets. But they remained apart, and took all sorts of precautions so as not to come together.

Therese got into bed first, and lay down close to the wall. Laurent waited until she had made herself quite comfortable, and then ventured to stretch himself out at the opposite edge of the mattress, so that there was a broad space between them. It was there that the corpse of Camille lay.

When the two murderers were extended under the same sheet, and had closed their eyes, they fancied they felt the damp corpse of their victim, lying in the middle of the bed, and turning their flesh icy cold. It was like a vile obstacle separating them. They were seized with fever and delirium, and this obstacle, in their minds, became material. They touched the corpse, they saw it spread out, like a greenish and dissolved shred of something, and they inhaled the infectious odour of this lump of human putrefaction. All their senses were in a state of hallucination, conveying intolerable acuteness to their sensations.

The presence of this filthy bedfellow kept them motionless, silent, abstracted with anguish. Laurent, at times, thought of taking Therese violently in his arms; but he dared not move. He said to himself that he could not extend his hand, without getting it full of the soft flesh of Camille. Next he fancied that the drowned man came to sleep between them so as to prevent them clasping one another, and he ended by understanding that Camille was jealous.

Nevertheless, ever and anon, they sought to exchange a timid kiss, to see what would happen. The young man jeered at his wife, and ordered her to embrace him. But their lips were so cold that it seemed as if the dead man had got between their mouths. Both felt disgusted. Therese shuddered with horror, and Laurent who heard her teeth chattering, railed at her:

"Why are you trembling?" he exclaimed. "Are you afraid of Camille? Ah! the poor man is as dead as a doornail at this moment."

Both avoided saying what made them shudder. When an hallucination brought the countenance of the drowned man before Therese, she closed her eyes, keeping her terror to herself, not daring to speak to her husband of her vision, lest she should bring on a still more terrible crisis. And it was just the same with Laurent. When driven to extremities, he, in a fit of despair, accused Therese of being afraid of Camille. The name, uttered aloud, occasioned additional anguish. The murderer raved.

"Yes, yes," he stammered, addressing the young woman, "you are afraid of Camille. I can see that plain enough! You are a silly thing, you have no pluck at all. Look here! just go to sleep quietly. Do you think your husband will come and pull you out of bed by the heels, because I happen to be sleeping with you?"

This idea that the drowned man might come and pull them out of bed by the heels, made the hair of Laurent stand on end, and he continued with greater violence, while still in the utmost terror himself.

"I shall have to take you some night to the cemetery. We will open the coffin Camille is in, and you will see what he looks like! Then you will perhaps cease being afraid. Go on, he doesn't know we threw him in the water."

Therese with her head under the bedclothes, was uttering smothered groans.

"We threw him into the water, because he was in our way," resumed her husband. "And we'll throw him in again, will we not? Don't act like a child. Show a little strength. It's silly to trouble our happiness. You see, my dear, when we are dead and underground, we shall be neither less nor more happy, because we cast an idiot in the Seine, and we shall have freely enjoyed our love which will have been an advantage. Come, give me a kiss."

The young woman kissed him, but she was icy cold, and half crazy, while he shuddered as much as she did.

For a fortnight Laurent was asking himself how he could kill Camille again. He had flung him in the water; and yet he was not dead enough, because he came every night to sleep in the bed of Therese. While the murderers thought that having committed the crime, they could love one another in peace, their resuscitated victim arrived to make their touch like ice. Therese was not a widow. Laurent found that he was mated to a woman who already had a drowned man for husband.

CHAPTER XXIII

Little by little, Laurent became furiously mad, and resolved to drive Camille from his bed. He had first of all slept with his clothes on, then he had avoided touching Therese. In rage and despair, he wanted, at last, to take his wife in his arms, and crush the spectre of his victim rather than leave her to it. This was a superb revolt of brutality.

The hope that the kisses of Therese would cure him of his insomnia, had alone brought him into the room of the young woman. When he had found himself there, in the position of master, he had become a prey to such atrocious attacks, that it had not even occurred to him to attempt the cure. And he had remained overwhelmed for three weeks, without remembering that he had done everything to obtain Therese, and now that she was in his possession, he could not touch her without increased suffering.

His excessive anguish drew him from this state of dejection. In the first moment of stupor, amid the strange discouragement of the wedding-night, he had forgotten the reasons that had urged him to marry. But his repeated bad dreams had aroused in him a feeling of sullen irritation, which triumphed over his cowardice, and restored his memory. He remembered he had married in order to drive away nightmare, by pressing his wife closely to his breast. Then, one night, he abruptly took Therese in his arms, and, at the risk of passing over the corpse of the drowned man, drew her violently to him.

The young woman, who was also driven to extremes, would have cast herself into the fire had she thought that flames would have purified her flesh, and delivered her from her woe. She returned Laurent his advances, determined to be either consumed by the caresses of this man, or to find relief in them.

And they clasped one another in a hideous embrace. Pain and horror took the place of love. When their limbs touched, it was like falling on live coal. They uttered a cry, pressing still closer together, so as not to leave room for the drowned man. But they still felt the shreds of Camille, which were ignobly squeezed between them, freezing their skins in parts, whilst in others they were burning hot.

Their kisses were frightfully cruel. Therese sought the bite that Camille had given in the stiff, swollen neck of Laurent, and passionately pressed her lips to it. There was the raw sore; this wound once healed, and the murderers would sleep in peace. The young woman understood this, and she endeavoured to cauterise the bad place with the fire of her caresses. But she scorched her lips, and Laurent thrust her violently away, giving a dismal groan. It seemed to him that she was pressing a red-hot iron to his neck. Therese, half mad, came back. She wanted to kiss the scar again. She experienced a keenly voluptuous sensation in placing her mouth on this piece of skin wherein Camille had buried his teeth.

At one moment she thought of biting her husband in the same place, of tearing away a large piece of flesh, of making a fresh and deeper wound, that would remove the trace of the old one. And she said to herself that she would no more turn pale when she saw the marks of her own teeth. But Laurent shielded his neck from her kisses. The smarting pain he experienced was too acute, and each time his wife presented her lips, he pushed her back. They struggled in this manner with a rattling in their throats, writhing in the horror of their caresses.

They distinctly felt that they only increased their suffering. They might well strain one another in these terrible clasps, they cried out with pain, they burnt and bruised each other, but were unable to calm their frightfully excited nerves. Each strain rendered their disgust more intense. While exchanging these ghastly embraces, they were a prey to the most terrible hallucinations, imagining that the drowned man was dragging them by the heels, and violently jerking the bedstead.

For a moment they let one another go, feeling repugnance and invincible nervous agitation. Then they determined not to be conquered. They clasped each other again in a fresh embrace, and once more were obliged to separate, for it seemed as if red-hot bradawls were entering their limbs. At several intervals they attempted in this way to overcome their disgust, by tiring, by wearing out their nerves. And each time their nerves became irritated and strained, causing them such exasperation, that they would perhaps have died of enervation had they remained in the arms of one another. This battle against their own bodies excited them to madness, and they obstinately sought to gain the victory. Finally, a more acute crisis exhausted them. They received a shock of such incredible violence that they thought they were about to have a fit.

Cast back one on each side of the bed, burning and bruised, they began to sob. And amidst their tears, they seemed to hear the triumphant laughter of the drowned man, who again slid, chuckling, under the sheet. They had been unable to drive him from the bed and were vanquished. Camille gently stretched himself between them, whilst Laurent deplored his want of power to thrust him away, and Therese trembled lest the corpse should have the idea of taking advantage of the victory to press her, in his turn, in his arms, in the quality of legitimate master.

They had made a supreme effort. In face of their defeat, they understood that, in future, they dared not exchange the smallest kiss. What they had attempted, in order to drive away their terror, had plunged them into greater fright. And, as they felt the chill of the corpse, which was now to separate them for ever, they shed bitter tears, asking themselves, with anguish, what would become of them.

CHAPTER XXIV

In accordance with the hopes of old Michaud, when doing his best to bring about the marriage of Therese and Laurent, the Thursday evenings resumed their former gaiety, as soon as the wedding was over.

These evenings were in great peril at the time of the death of Camille. The guests came, in fear, into this house of mourning; each week they were trembling with anxiety, lest they should be definitely dismissed.

The idea that the door of the shop would no doubt at last be closed to them, terrified Michaud and Grivet, who clung to their habits with the instinct and obstinacy of brutes. They said to themselves that the old woman and young widow would one day go and weep over the defunct at Vernon or elsewhere, and then, on Thursday nights, they would not know what to do. In the mind's eye they saw themselves wandering about the arcade in a lamentable fashion, dreaming of colossal games at dominoes.

Pending the advent of these bad times, they timidly enjoyed their final moments of happiness, arriving with an anxious, sugary air at the shop, and repeating to themselves, on each occasion, that they would perhaps return no more. For over a year they were beset with these fears. In face of the tears of Madame Raquin and the silence of Therese, they dared not make themselves at ease and laugh. They felt they were no longer at home as in the time of Camille; it seemed, so to say, that they were stealing every evening they passed seated at the dining-room table. It was in these desperate circumstances that the egotism of Michaud urged him to strike a masterly stroke by finding a husband for the widow of the drowned man.

On the Thursday following the marriage, Grivet and Michaud made a triumphant entry into the dining-room. They had conquered. The dining-room belonged to them again. They no longer feared dismissal. They came there as happy people, stretching out their legs, and cracking their former jokes, one after the other. It could be seen from their delighted and confident attitude that, in their idea, a revolution had been accomplished. All recollection of Camille had been dispelled. The dead husband, the spectre that cast a chill over everyone, had been driven away by the living husband. The past and its joys were resuscitated. Laurent took the place of Camille, all cause for sadness disappeared, the guests could now laugh without grieving anyone; and, indeed, it was their duty to laugh to cheer up this worthy family who were good enough to receive them.

Henceforth, Grivet and Michaud, who for nearly eighteen months had visited the house under the pretext of consoling Madame Raquin, could set their little hypocrisy aside, and frankly come and doze opposite one another to the sharp ring of the dominoes.

And each week brought a Thursday evening, each week those lifeless and grotesque heads which formerly had exasperated Therese, assembled round the table. The young woman talked of showing these folk the door; their bursts of foolish laughter and silly reflections irritated her. But Laurent made her understand that such a step would be a mistake; it was necessary that the present should resemble the past as much as possible; and, above all, they must preserve the friendship of the police, of those idiots who protected them from all suspicion. Therese gave way. The guests were well received, and they viewed with delight a future full of a long string of warm Thursday evenings.

It was about this time that the lives of the couple became, in a way, divided in two.

In the morning, when day drove away the terror of night, Laurent hastily dressed himself. But he only recovered his ease and egotistic calm when in the dining-room, seated before an enormous bowl of coffee and milk, which Therese prepared for him. Madame Raquin, who had become even more feeble and could barely get down to the shop, watched him eating with a maternal smile. He swallowed the toast, filled his stomach and little by little became tranquillised. After the coffee, he drank a small glass of brandy which completely restored him. Then he said "good-bye" to Madame Raquin and Therese, without ever kissing them, and strolled to his office.

Spring was at hand; the trees along the quays were becoming covered with leaves, with light, pale green lacework. The river ran with caressing sounds below; above, the first sunny rays of the year shed gentle warmth. Laurent felt himself another man in the fresh air; he freely inhaled this breath of young life descending from the skies of April and May; he sought the sun, halting to watch the silvery reflection streaking the Seine, listening to the sounds on the quays, allowing the acrid odours of early day to penetrate him, enjoying the clear, delightful morn.

He certainly thought very little about Camille. Sometimes he listlessly contemplated the Morgue on the other side of the water, and his mind then reverted to his victim, like a man of courage might think of a silly fright that had come over him. With stomach full, and face refreshed, he recovered his thick-headed tranquillity. He reached his office, and passed the whole day gaping, and awaiting the time to leave. He was a mere clerk like the others, stupid and weary, without an idea in his head, save that of sending in his resignation and taking a studio. He dreamed vaguely of a new existence of idleness, and this sufficed to occupy him until evening.

Thoughts of the shop in the arcade never troubled him. At night, after longing for the hour of release since the morning, he left his office with regret, and followed the quays again, secretly troubled and anxious. However slowly he walked, he had to enter the shop at last, and there terror awaited him.

Therese experienced the same sensations. So long as Laurent was not beside her, she felt at ease. She had dismissed her charwoman, saying that everything was in disorder, and the shop and apartment filthy dirty. She all at once had ideas of tidiness. The truth was that she felt the necessity of moving about, of doing something, of exercising her stiff limbs. She went hither and thither all the morning, sweeping, dusting, cleaning the rooms, washing up the plates and dishes, doing work that would have disgusted her formerly. These household duties kept her on her feet, active and silent, until noon, without allowing her time to think of aught else than the cobwebs hanging from the ceiling and the greasy plates.

On the stroke of twelve, she went to the kitchen to prepare lunch. At table, Madame Raquin was pained to see her always rising to fetch the dishes; she was touched and annoyed at the activity displayed by her niece; she scolded her, and Therese replied that it was necessary to economise. When the meal was over, the young woman dressed, and at last decided to join her aunt behind the counter. There, sleep overtook her; worn out by her restless nights, she dozed off, yielding to the voluptuous feeling of drowsiness that gained her, as soon as she sat down.

These were only light spells of heaviness, replete with vague charm that calmed her nerves. The thoughts of Camille left her; she enjoyed that tranquil repose of invalids who are all at once freed from pain. She felt relieved in body, her mind free, she sank into a gentle and repairing state of nothingness. Deprived of these few calm moments, she would have broken down under the tension of her nervous system. These spells of somnolence gave her strength to suffer again, and become terrified the ensuing night. As a matter of fact she did not sleep, she barely closed her lids, and was lost in a dream of peace. When a customer entered, she opened her eyes, served the few sous worth of articles asked for, and fell back into the floating reverie.

In this manner she passed three or four hours of perfect happiness, answering her aunt in monosyllables, and yielding with real enjoyment to these moments of unconsciousness which relieved her of her thoughts, and completely overcame her. She barely, at long intervals, cast a glance into the arcade, and was particularly at her ease in cloudy weather, when it was dark and she could conceal her lassitude in the gloom.

The damp and disgusting arcade, crossed by a lot of wretched drenched pedestrians, whose umbrellas dripped upon the tiles, seemed to her like an alley in a low quarter, a sort of dirty, sinister corridor, where no one would come to seek and trouble her. At moments, when she saw the dull gleams of light that hung around her, when she smelt the bitter odour of the dampness, she imagined she had just been buried alive, that she was underground, at the bottom of a common grave swarming with dead. And this thought consoled and appeased her, for she said to herself that she was now in security, that she was about to die and would suffer no more.

But sometimes she had to keep her eyes open; Suzanne paid her a visit, and remained embroidering near the counter all the afternoon. The wife of Olivier, with her putty face and slow movements, now pleased Therese, who experienced strange relief in observing this poor, broken-up creature, and had made a friend of her. She loved to see her at her side, smiling with her faint smile, more dead than alive, and bringing into the shop the stuffy odour of the cemetery. When the blue eyes of Suzanne, transparent as glass, rested fixedly on those of Therese, the latter experienced a beneficent chill in the marrow of her bones.

Therese remained thus until four o'clock, when she returned to the kitchen, and there again sought fatigue, preparing dinner for Laurent with febrile haste. But when her husband appeared on the threshold she felt a tightening in the throat, and all her being once more became a prey to anguish.

Each day, the sensations of the couple were practically the same. During the daytime, when they were not face to face, they enjoyed delightful hours of repose; at night, as soon as they came together, both experienced poignant discomfort.

The evenings, nevertheless, were calm. Therese and Laurent, who shuddered at the thought of going to their room, sat up as long as possible. Madame Raquin, reclining in a great armchair, was placed between them, and chatted in her placid voice. She spoke of Vernon, still thinking of her son, but avoiding to mention him from a sort of feeling of diffidence for the others; she smiled at her dear children, and formed plans for their future. The lamp shed its faint gleams on her white face, and her words sounded particularly sweet in the silence and stillness of the room.

The murderers, one seated on each side of her, silent and motionless, seemed to be attentively listening to what she said. In truth they did not attempt to follow the sense of the gossip of the good old lady. They were simply pleased to hear this sound of soft words which prevented them attending the crash of their own thoughts. They dared not cast their eyes on one another, but looked at Madame Raquin to give themselves countenances. They never breathed a word about going to bed; they would have remained there until morning, listening to the affectionate nonsense of the former mercer, amid the appeasement she spread around her, had she not herself expressed the desire to retire. It was only then that they quitted the dining-room and entered their own apartment in despair, as if casting themselves to the bottom of an abyss.

But they soon had much more preference for the Thursday gatherings, than for these family evenings. When alone with Madame Raquin, they were unable to divert their thoughts; the feeble voice of their aunt, and her tender gaiety, did not stifle the cries that lacerated them. They could feel bedtime coming on, and they shuddered when their eyes caught sight of the door of their room. Awaiting the moment when they would be alone, became more and more cruel as the evening advanced. On Thursday night, on the contrary, they were giddy with folly, one forgot the presence of the other, and they suffered less. Therese ended by heartily longing for the reception days. Had Michaud and Grivet not arrived, she would have gone and fetched them. When strangers were in the dining-room, between herself and Laurent, she felt more calm. She would have liked to always have guests there, to hear a noise, something to divert her, and detach her from her thoughts. In the presence of other people, she displayed a sort of nervous gaiety. Laurent also recovered his previous merriment, returning to his coarse peasant jests, his hoarse laughter, his practical jokes of a former canvas dauber. Never had these gatherings been so gay and noisy.

It was thus that Laurent and Therese could remain face to face, once a week, without shuddering.

But they were soon beset with further anxiety. Paralysis was little by little gaining on Madame Raquin, and they foresaw the day when she would be riveted to her armchair, feeble and doltish. The poor old lady already began to stammer fragments of disjointed phrases; her voice was growing weaker, and her limbs were one by one losing their vitality. She was becoming a thing. It was with terror that Therese and Laurent observed the breaking up of this being who still separated them, and whose voice drew them from their bad dreams. When the old mercer lost her intelligence, and remained stiff and silent in her armchair, they would find themselves alone, and in the evening would no longer be able to escape the dreadful face to face conversation. Then their terror would commence at six o'clock instead of midnight. It would drive them mad.

They made every effort to give Madame Raquin that health which had become so necessary to them. They called in doctors, and bestowed on the patient all sorts of little attentions. Even this occupation of nurses caused them to forget, and afforded them an appeasement that encouraged them to double in zeal. They did not wish to lose a third party who rendered their evenings supportable; and they did not wish the dining-room and the whole house to become a cruel and sinister spot like their room.

Madame Raquin was singularly touched at the assiduous care they took of her. She applauded herself, amid tears, at having united them, and at having abandoned to them her forty thousand francs. Never, since the death of her son, had she counted on so much affection in her final moments. Her old age was quite softened by the tenderness of her dear children. She did not feel the implacable paralysis which, in spite of all, made her more and more rigid day by day.

Nevertheless, Therese and Laurent continued to lead their double existence. In each of them there were like two distinct beings: a nervous, terrified being who shuddered as soon as dusk set in, and a torpid forgetful being, who breathed at ease when the sun rose. They lived two lives, crying out in anguish when alone, and peacefully smiling in company. Never did their faces, in public, show the slightest trace of the sufferings that had reached them in private. They appeared calm and happy, and instinctively concealed their troubles.

To see them so tranquil in the daytime, no one would have suspected the hallucinations that tortured them every night. They would have been taken for a couple blessed by heaven, and living in the enjoyment of full felicity. Grivet gallantly called them the "turtle-doves." When he jested about their fatigued looks, Laurent and Therese barely turned pale, and even succeeded in forcing on a smile. They became accustomed to the naughty jokes of the old clerk.

So long as they remained in the dining-room, they were able to keep their terror under control. The mind could not imagine the frightful change that came over them, as soon as they were shut up in their bedroom. On the Thursday night, particularly, this transformation was so violently brutal, that it seemed as if accomplished in a supernatural world. The drama in the bedroom, by its strangeness, by its savage passion, surpassed all belief, and remained deeply concealed within their aching beings. Had they spoken of it, they would have been taken for mad.

"How happy those sweethearts are!" frequently remarked old Michaud. "They hardly say a word, but that does not prevent them thinking. I bet they devour one another with kisses when we have gone."

Such was the opinion of the company. Therese and Laurent came to be spoken of as a model couple. All the tenants in the Arcade of the Pont Neuf extolled the affection, the tranquil happiness, the everlasting honeymoon of the married pair. They alone knew that the corpse of Camille slept between them; they alone felt, beneath the calm exterior of their faces, the nervous contractions that, at night, horribly distorted their features, and changed the placid expression of their physiognomies into hideous masks of pain.

CHAPTER XXV

At the expiration of four months, Laurent thought of taking advantage of the profit he had calculated on deriving from his marriage. He would have abandoned his wife, and fled from the spectre of Camille, three days after the wedding, had not his interest detained him at the shop in the arcade. He accepted his nights of terror, he remained in the anguish that was choking him, so as not to be deprived of the benefit of his crime.

If he parted from Therese, he would again be plunged in poverty, and be forced to retain his post; by remaining with her, he would, on the contrary, be able to satisfy his inclination for idleness, and to live liberally, doing nothing, on the revenue Madame Raquin had placed in the name of his wife. Very likely he would have fled with the 40,000 francs, had he been able to realise them; but the old mercer, on the advice of Michaud, had shown the prudence to protect the interests of her niece in the marriage contract.

Laurent, in this manner, found himself attached to Therese by a powerful bond. As a set-off against his atrocious nights, he determined at least to be kept in blissful laziness, well fed, warmly clothed, and provided with the necessary cash in his pocket to satisfy his whims. At this price alone, would he consent to sleep with the corpse of the drowned man.

One evening, he announced to Madame Raquin and his wife that he had sent in his resignation, and would quit his office at the end of a fortnight. Therese gave a gesture of anxiety. He hastened to add that he intended taking a small studio where he would go on with his painting. He spoke at length about the annoyance of his employment, and the broad horizons that Art opened to him. Now that he had a few sous and could make a bid for success, he wished to see whether he was not capable of great achievements.

The speech he made on this subject simply concealed a ferocious desire to resume his former studio life. Therese sat with pinched lips without replying; she had no idea of allowing Laurent to squander the small fortune that assured her liberty. When her husband pressed her with questions in view of obtaining her consent, she answered curtly, giving him to understand that if he left his office, he would no longer be earning any money, and would be living entirely at her expense.

But, as she spoke, Laurent observed her so keenly, that he troubled her, and arrested on her lips the refusal she was about to utter. She fancied she read in the eyes of her accomplice, this menacing threat:

"If you do not consent, I shall reveal everything."

She began to stammer, and Madame Raquin exclaimed that the desire of her dear son was no more than what was just, and that they must give him the means to become a man of talent. The good lady spoilt Laurent as she had spoilt Camille. Quite mollified by the caresses the young man lavished on her, she belonged to him, and never failed to take his part.

It was therefore decided that Laurent should have a studio, and receive one hundred francs a month pocket-money. The budget of the family was arranged in this way: the profits realised in the mercery business would pay the rent of the shop and apartment, and the balance would almost suffice for the daily expenses of the family; Laurent would receive the rent of his studio and his one hundred francs a month, out of the two thousand and a few hundred francs income from the funded money, the remainder going into the general purse. In that way the capital would remain intact. This arrangement somewhat tranquillised Therese, who nevertheless made her husband swear that he would never go beyond the sum allowed him. But as to that matter, she said to herself that Laurent could not get possession of the 40,000 francs without her signature, and she was thoroughly determined that she would never place her name to any document.

On the morrow, Laurent took a small studio in the lower part of the Rue Mazarine, which his eye had been fixed on for a month. He did not mean to leave his office without having a refuge where he could quietly pass his days far away from Therese. At the end of the fortnight, he bade adieu to his colleagues. Grivet was stupefied at his departure. A young man, said he, who had such a brilliant future before him, a young man who in the space of four years, had reached a salary that he, Grivet, had taken twenty years to attain! Laurent stupefied him still more, when he told him he was going to give his whole time to painting.

At last the artist installed himself in his studio, which was a sort of square loft about seven or eight yards long by the same breadth. The ceiling which inclined abruptly in a rapid slope, was pierced by a large window conveying a white raw light to the floor and blackish walls. The sounds in the street did not ascend so high. This silent, wan room, opening above on the sky, resembled a hole, or a vault dug out of grey clay. Laurent furnished the place anywise; he brought a couple of chairs with holes in the rush seats, a table that he set against the wall so that it might not slip down, an old kitchen dresser, his colour-box and easel; all the luxury in the place consisted of a spacious divan which he purchased for thirty francs from a second-hand dealer.

He remained a fortnight without even thinking of touching his brushes. He arrived between eight and nine o'clock in the morning, smoked, stretched himself on the divan, and awaited noon, delighted that it was morning, and that he had many hours of daylight before him. At twelve he went to lunch. As soon as the meal was over, he hastened back, to be alone, and get away from the pale face of Therese. He next went through the process of digestion, sleeping spread out on the divan until evening. His studio was an abode of peace where he did not tremble. One day his wife asked him if she might visit this dear refuge. He refused, and as, notwithstanding his refusal, she came and knocked at the door, he refrained from opening to her, telling her in the evening that he had spent the day at the Louvre Museum. He was afraid that Therese might bring the spectre of Camille with her.

Idleness ended by weighing heavily on his shoulders, so he purchased a canvas and colours, and set to work. As he had not sufficient money to pay models, he resolved to paint according to fancy, without troubling about nature, and he began the head of a man.

But at this time, he did not shut himself up so much as he had done; he worked for two or three hours every morning and passed the afternoon strolling hither and thither in Paris and its vicinity. It was opposite the Institut, on his return from one of these long walks, that he knocked up against his old college friend, who had met with a nice little success, thanks to the good fellowship of his comrades, at the last Salon.

"What, is it you?" exclaimed the painter. "Ah! my poor Laurent, I hardly recognise you. You have lost flesh."

"I am married," answered Laurent in an embarrassed tone.

"Married, you!" said the other. "Then I am not surprised to see you look so funny: and what are you doing now?"

"I have taken a small studio," replied Laurent; "and I paint a little, in the morning."

Then, in a feverish voice, he briefly related the story of his marriage, and explained his future plans. His friend observed him with an air of astonishment that troubled and alarmed him. The truth was that the painter no longer found in the husband of Therese, the coarse, common fellow he had known formerly. It seemed to him that Laurent was acquiring a gentlemanly bearing; his face had grown thinner, and had taken the pale tint of good taste, while his whole frame looked more upright and supple.

"But you are becoming a handsome chap," the artist could not refrain from exclaiming. "You are dressed like an ambassador, in the latest style. Who's your model?"

Laurent, who felt the weight of the examination he was undergoing, did not dare to abruptly take himself off.

"Will you come up to my studio for a moment?" he at last asked his friend, who showed no signs of leaving him.

"Willingly," answered the latter.

The painter, who could not understand the change he noticed in his old comrade, was anxious to visit his studio. He had no idea of climbing five floors to gaze on the new pictures of Laurent, which assuredly would disgust him; he merely wished to satisfy his curiosity.

When he had reached the studio, and had glanced at the canvases hanging against the walls, his astonishment redoubled. They comprised five studies, two heads of women, and three of men painted with real vigour. They looked thick and substantial, each part being dashed off with magnificent dabs of colour on a clear grey background. The artist quickly approached, and was so astounded that he did not even seek to conceal his amazement.

"Did you do those?" he inquired of Laurent.

"Yes," replied the latter. "They are studies that I intend to utilise in a large picture I am preparing."

"Come, no humbug, are you really the author of those things?"

"Eh! Yes. Why should I not be the author of them?"

The painter did not like to answer what he thought, which was as follows:

"Because those canvases are the work of an artist, and you have never been anything but a vile bungler."

For a long time, he remained before the studies in silence. Certainly they were clumsy, but they were original, and so powerfully executed that they indicated a highly developed idea of art. They were life-like. Never had this friend of Laurent seen rough painting so full of high promise. When he had examined all the canvases, he turned to the author of them and said:

"Well, frankly, I should never have thought you capable of painting like that. Where the deuce did you learn to have talent? It is not usually a thing that one acquires."

And he considered Laurent, whose voice appeared to him more gentle, while every gesture he made had a sort of elegance. The artist had no idea of the frightful shock this man had received, and which had transformed him, developing in him the nerves of a woman, along with keen, delicate sensations. No doubt a strange phenomenon had been accomplished in the organism of the murderer of Camille. It is difficult for analysis to penetrate to such depths. Laurent had, perhaps, become an artist as he had become afraid, after the great disorder that had upset his frame and mind.

Previously, he had been half choked by the fulness of his blood, blinded by the thick vapour of breath surrounding him. At present, grown thin, and always shuddering, his manner had become anxious, while he experienced the lively and poignant sensations of a man of nervous temperament. In the life of terror that he led, his mind had grown delirious, ascending to the ecstasy of genius. The sort of moral malady, the neurosis wherewith all his being was agitated, had developed an artistic feeling of peculiar lucidity. Since he had killed, his frame seemed lightened, his distracted mind appeared to him immense; and, in this abrupt expansion of his thoughts, he perceived exquisite creations, the reveries of a poet passing before his eyes. It was thus that his gestures had suddenly become elegant, that his works were beautiful, and were all at once rendered true to nature, and life-like.

The friend did not seek further to fathom the mystery attending this birth of the artist. He went off carrying his astonishment along with him. But before he left, he again gazed at the canvases and said to Laurent:

"I have only one thing to reproach you with: all these studies have a family likeness. The five heads resemble each other. The women, themselves, have a peculiarly violent bearing that gives them the appearance of men in disguise. You will understand that if you desire to make a picture out of these studies, you must change some of the physiognomies; your personages cannot all be brothers, or brothers and sisters, it would excite hilarity."

He left the studio, and on the landing merrily added:

"Really, my dear boy, I am very pleased to have seen you. Henceforth, I shall believe in miracles. Good heavens! How highly respectable you do look!"

As he went downstairs, Laurent returned to the studio, feeling very much upset. When his friend had remarked that all his studies of heads bore a family likeness, he had abruptly turned round to conceal his paleness. The fact was that he had already been struck by this fatal resemblance. Slowly entering the room, he placed himself before the pictures, and as he contemplated them, as he passed from one to the other, ice-like perspiration moistened his back.

"He is quite right," he murmured, "they all resemble one another. They resemble Camille."

He retired a step or two, and seated himself on the divan, unable to remove his eyes from the studies of heads. The first was an old man with a long white beard; and under this white beard, the artist traced the lean chin of Camille. The second represented a fair young girl, who gazed at him with the blue eyes of his victim. Each of the other three faces presented a feature of the drowned man. It looked like Camille with the theatrical make-up of an old man, of a young girl, assuming whatever disguise it pleased the painter to give him, but still maintaining the general expression of his own countenance.

There existed another terrible resemblance among these heads: they all appeared suffering and terrified, and seemed as though overburdened with the same feeling of horror. Each of them had a slight wrinkle to the left of the mouth, which drawing down the lips, produced a grimace. This wrinkle, which Laurent remembered having noticed on the convulsed face of the drowned man, marked them all with a sign of vile relationship.

Laurent understood that he had taken too long a look at Camille at the Morgue. The image of the drowned man had become deeply impressed on his mind; and now, his hand, without his being conscious of it, never failed to draw the lines of this atrocious face which followed him everywhere.

Little by little, the painter, who was allowing himself to fall back on the divan, fancied he saw the faces become animated. He had five Camilles before him, five Camilles whom his own fingers had powerfully created, and who, by terrifying peculiarity were of various ages and of both sexes. He rose, he lacerated the pictures and threw them outside. He said to himself that he would die of terror in his studio, were he to people it with portraits of his victim.

A fear had just come over him: he dreaded that he would no more be able to draw a head without reproducing that of the drowned man. He wished to ascertain, at once, whether he were master of his own hand. He placed a white canvas on his easel; and, then, with a bit of charcoal, sketched out a face in a few lines. The face resembled Camille. Laurent swiftly effaced this drawing and tried another.

For an hour he struggled against futility, which drove along his fingers. At each fresh attempt, he went back to the head of the drowned man. He might indeed assert his will, and avoid the lines he knew so well. In spite of himself, he drew those lines, he obeyed his muscles and his rebellious nerves. He had first of all proceeded rapidly with his sketches; he now took pains to pass the stick of charcoal slowly over the canvas. The result was the same: Camille, grimacing and in pain, appeared ceaselessly.

The artist sketched the most different heads successively: the heads of angels, of virgins with aureoles, of Roman warriors with their helmets, of fair, rosy children, of old bandits seamed with scars; and the drowned man always, always reappeared; he became, in turn, angel, virgin, warrior, child and bandit.

Then, Laurent plunged into caricature: he exaggerated the features, he produced monstrous profiles, he invented grotesque heads, but only succeeded in rendering the striking portrait of his victim more horrible. He finished by drawing animals, dogs and cats; but even the dogs and cats vaguely resembled Camille.

Laurent then became seized with sullen rage. He smashed the canvas with his fist, thinking in despair of his great picture. Now, he must put that idea aside; he was convinced that, in future, he would draw nothing but the head of Camille, and as his friend had told him, faces all alike would cause hilarity. He pictured to himself what his work would have been, and perceived upon the shoulders of his personages, men and women, the livid and terrified face of the drowned man. The strange picture he thus conjured up, appeared to him atrociously ridiculous and exasperated him.

He no longer dared to paint, always dreading that he would resuscitate his victim at the least stroke of his brush. If he desired to live peacefully in his studio he must never paint there. This thought that his fingers possessed the fatal and unconscious faculty of reproducing without end the portrait of Camille, made him observe his hand in terror. It seemed to him that his hand no longer belonged to him.

CHAPTER XXVI

The crisis threatening Madame Raquin took place. The paralysis, which for several months had been creeping along her limbs, always ready to strangle her, at last took her by the throat and linked her body. One evening, while conversing peacefully with Therese and Laurent, she remained in the middle of a sentence with her mouth wide open: she felt as if she was being throttled. When she wanted to cry out and call for help, she could only splutter a few hoarse sounds. Her hands and feet were rigid. She found herself struck dumb, and powerless to move.

Therese and Laurent rose from their chairs, terrified at this stroke, which had contorted the old mercer in less than five seconds. When she became rigid, and fixed her supplicating eyes on them, they pressed her with questions in order to ascertain the cause of her suffering. Unable to reply, she continued gazing at them in profound anguish.

They then understood that they had nothing but a corpse before them, a corpse half alive that could see and hear, but could not speak to them. They were in despair at this attack. At the bottom of their hearts, they cared little for the suffering of the paralysed woman. They mourned over themselves, who in future would have to live alone, face to face.

From this day the life of the married couple became intolerable. They passed the most cruel evenings opposite the impotent old lady, who no longer lulled their terror with her gentle, idle chatter. She reposed in an armchair, like a parcel, a thing, while they remained alone, one at each end of the table, embarrassed and anxious. This body no longer separated them; at times they forgot it, confounding it with the articles of furniture.

They were now seized with the same terror as at night. The dining-room became, like the bedroom, a terrible spot, where the spectre of Camille arose, causing them to suffer an extra four or five hours daily. As soon as twilight came, they shuddered, lowering the lamp-shade so as not to see one another, and endeavouring to persuade themselves that Madame Raquin was about to speak and thus remind them of her presence. If they kept her with them, if they did not get rid of her, it was because her eyes were still alive, and they experienced a little relief in watching them move and sparkle.

They always placed the impotent old lady in the bright beam of the lamp, so as to thoroughly light up her face and have it always before them. This flabby, livid countenance would have been a sight that others could not have borne, but Therese and Laurent experienced such need for company, that they gazed upon it with real joy.

This face looked like that of a dead person in the centre of which two living eyes had been fixed. These eyes alone moved, rolling rapidly in their orbits. The cheeks and mouth maintained such appalling immobility that they seemed as though petrified. When Madame Raquin fell asleep and lowered her lids, her countenance, which was then quite white and mute, was really that of a corpse. Therese and Laurent, who no longer felt anyone with them, then made a noise until the paralysed woman raised her eyelids and looked at them. In this manner they compelled her to remain awake.

They regarded her as a distraction that drew them from their bad dreams. Since she had been infirm, they had to attend to her like a child. The care they lavished on her forced them to scatter their thoughts. In the morning Laurent lifted her up and bore her to her armchair; at night he placed her on her bed again. She was still heavy, and he had to exert all his strength to raise her delicately in his arms, and carry her. It was also he who rolled her armchair along. The other attentions fell to Therese. She dressed and fed the impotent old lady, and sought to understand her slightest wish.

For a few days Madame Raquin preserved the use of her hands. She could write on a slate, and in this way asked for what she required; then the hands withered, and it became impossible for her to raise them or hold a pencil. From that moment her eyes were her only language, and it was necessary for her niece to guess what she desired. The young woman devoted herself to the hard duties of sick-nurse, which gave her occupation for body and mind that did her much good.

So as not to remain face to face, the married couple rolled the armchair of the poor old lady into the dining-room, the first thing in the morning. They placed her between them, as if she were necessary to their existence. They caused her to be present at their meals, and at all their interviews. When she signified the desire to retire to her bedroom, they feigned not to understand. She was only of use to interrupt their private conversations, and had no right to live apart.

At eight o'clock, Laurent went to his studio, Therese descended to the shop, while the paralyzed woman remained alone in the dining-room until noon; then, after lunch, she found herself without company again until six o'clock. Frequently, during the day, her niece ran upstairs, and, hovering round her, made sure she did not require anything. The friends of the family were at a loss for sufficiently laudatory phrases wherein to extol the virtues of Therese and Laurent.

The Thursday receptions continued, the impotent old lady being present, as in the past. Her armchair was advanced to the table, and from eight o'clock till eleven she kept her eyes open, casting penetrating glances from one to another of her guests in turn. On the first few of these evenings, old Michaud and Grivet felt some embarrassment in the presence of the corpse of their old friend. They did not know what countenance to put on. They only experienced moderate sorrow, and they were inquiring in their minds in what measure it would be suitable to display their grief. Should they speak to this lifeless form? Should they refrain from troubling about it? Little by little, they decided to treat Madame Raquin as though nothing had happened to her. They ended by feigning to completely ignore her condition. They chatted with her, putting questions and giving the answers, laughing both for her and for themselves, and never permitting the rigid expression on the countenance to baffle them.

It was a strange sight: these men who appeared to be speaking sensibly to a statue, just as little girls talk to their dolls. The paralysed woman sat rigid and mute before them, while they babbled, multiplying their gestures in exceedingly animated conversations with her. Michaud and Grivet prided themselves on their correct attitude. In acting as they did, they believed they were giving proof of politeness; they, moreover, avoided the annoyance of the customary condolences. They fancied that Madame Raquin must feel flattered to find herself treated as a person in good health; and, from that moment, it became possible for them to be merry in her presence, without the least scruple.

Grivet had contracted a mania. He affirmed that Madame Raquin and himself understood one another perfectly; and that she could not look at him without him at once comprehending what she desired. This was another delicate attention. Only Grivet was on every occasion in error. He frequently interrupted the game of dominoes, to observe the infirm woman whose eyes were quietly following the game, and declare that she wanted such or such a thing. On further inquiry it was found that she wanted nothing at all, or that she wanted something entirely different. This did not discourage Grivet, who triumphantly exclaimed:

"Just as I said!" And he began again a few moments later.

It was quite another matter when the impotent old lady openly expressed a desire; Therese, Laurent, and the guests named one object after another that they fancied she might wish for. Grivet then made himself remarkable by the clumsiness of his offers. He mentioned, haphazard, everything that came into his head, invariably offering the contrary to what Madame Raquin desired. But this circumstance did not prevent him repeating:

"I can read in her eyes as in a book. Look, she says I am right. Is it not so, dear lady? Yes, yes."

Nevertheless, it was no easy matter to grasp the wishes of the poor old woman. Therese alone possessed this faculty. She communicated fairly well with this walled-up brain, still alive, but buried in a lifeless frame. What was passing within this wretched creature, just sufficiently alive to be present at the events of life, without taking part in them? She saw and heard, she no doubt reasoned in a distinct and clear manner. But she was without gesture and voice to express the thoughts originating in her mind. Her ideas were perhaps choking her, and yet she could not raise a hand, nor open her mouth, even though one of her movements or words should decide the destiny of the world.

Her mind resembled those of the living buried by mistake, who awaken in the middle of the night in the earth, three or four yards below the surface of the ground. They shout, they struggle, and people pass over them without hearing their atrocious lamentations.

Laurent frequently gazed at Madame Raquin, his lips pressed together, his hands stretched out on his knees, putting all his life into his sparkling and swiftly moving eyes. And he said to himself:

"Who knows what she may be thinking of all alone? Some cruel drama must be passing within this inanimate frame."

Laurent made a mistake. Madame Raquin was happy, happy at the care and affection bestowed on her by her dear children. She had always dreamed of ending in this gentle way, amidst devotedness and caresses. Certainly she would have been pleased to have preserved her speech, so as to be able to thank the friends who assisted her to die in peace. But she accepted her condition without rebellion. The tranquil and retired life she had always led, the sweetness of her character, prevented her feeling too acutely the suffering of being mute and unable to make a movement. She had entered second childhood. She passed days without weariness, gazing before her, and musing on the past. She even tasted the charm of remaining very good in her armchair, like a little girl.

Each day the sweetness and brightness of her eyes became more penetrating. She had reached the point of making them perform the duties of a hand or mouth, in asking for what she required and in expressing her thanks. In this way she replaced the organs that were wanting, in a most peculiar and charming manner. Her eyes, in the centre of her flabby and grimacing face, were of celestial beauty.

Since her twisted and inert lips could no longer smile, she smiled with adorable tenderness, by her looks; moist beams and rays of dawn issued from her orbits. Nothing was more peculiar than those eyes which laughed like lips in this lifeless countenance. The lower part of the face remained gloomy and wan, while the upper part was divinely lit up. It was particularly for her beloved children that she placed all her gratitude, all the affection of her soul into a simple glance. When Laurent took her in his arms, morning and night, to carry her, she thanked him lovingly by looks full of tender effusion.

She lived thus for weeks, awaiting death, fancying herself sheltered from any fresh misfortune. She thought she had already received her share of suffering. But she was mistaken. One night she was crushed by a frightful blow.

Therese and Laurent might well place her between them, in the full light, but she was no longer sufficiently animated to separate and defend them against their anguish. When they forgot that she was there and could hear and see them, they were seized with folly. Perceiving Camille, they sought to drive him away. Then, in unsteady tones, they allowed the truth to escape them, uttering words that revealed everything to Madame Raquin. Laurent had a sort of attack, during which he spoke like one under the influence of hallucination, and the paralysed woman abruptly understood.

A frightful contraction passed over her face, and she experienced such a shock that Therese thought she was about to bound to her feet and shriek, but she fell backward, rigid as iron. This shock was all the more terrible as it seemed to galvanise a corpse. Sensibility which had for a moment returned, disappeared; the impotent woman remained more crushed and wan than before. Her eyes, usually so gentle, had become dark and harsh, resembling pieces of metal.

Never had despair fallen more rigorously on a being. The sinister truth, like a flash of flame, scorched the eyes of the paralysed woman and penetrated within her with the concussion of a shaft of lightning. Had she been able to rise, to utter the cry of horror that ascended to her throat, and curse the murderers of her son, she would have suffered less. But, after hearing and understanding everything, she was forced to remain motionless and mute, inwardly preserving all the glare of her grief.

It seemed to her that Therese and Laurent had bound her, riveted her to her armchair to prevent her springing up, and that they took atrocious pleasure in repeating to her, after gagging her to stifle her cries—

"We have killed Camille!"

Terror and anguish coursed furiously in her body unable to find an issue. She made superhuman efforts to raise the weight crushing her, to clear her throat and thus give passage to her flood of despair. In vain did she strain her final energy; she felt her tongue cold against her palate, she could not tear herself from death. Cadaverous impotence held her rigid. Her sensations resembled those of a man fallen into lethargy, who is being buried, and who, bound by the bonds of his own frame, hears the deadened sound of the shovels of mould falling on his head.

The ravages to which her heart was subjected, proved still more terrible. She felt a blow inwardly that completely undid her. Her entire life was afflicted: all her tenderness, all her goodness, all her devotedness had just been brutally upset and trampled under foot. She had led a life of affection and gentleness, and in her last hours, when about to carry to the grave a belief in the delight of a calm life, a voice shouted to her that all was falsehood and all crime.

The veil being rent, she perceived apart from the love and friendship which was all she had hitherto been able to see, a frightful picture of blood and shame. She would have cursed the Almighty had she been able to shout out a blasphemy. Providence had deceived her for over sixty years, by treating her as a gentle, good little girl, by amusing her with lying representations of tranquil joy. And she had remained a child, senselessly believing in a thousand silly things, and unable to see life as it really is, dragging along in the sanguinary filth of passions. Providence was bad; it should have told her the truth before, or have allowed her to continue in her innocence and blindness. Now, it only remained for her to die, denying love, denying friendship, denying devotedness. Nothing existed but murder and lust.

What! Camille had been killed by Therese and Laurent, and they had conceived the crime in shame! For Madame Raquin, there was such a fathomless depth in this thought, that she could neither reason it out, nor grasp it clearly. She experienced but one sensation, that of a horrible disaster; it seemed to her that she was falling into a dark, cold hole. And she said to herself:

"I shall be smashed to pieces at the bottom."

After the first shock, the crime appeared to her so monstrous that it seemed impossible. Then, when convinced of the misbehaviour and murder, by recalling certain little incidents which she had formerly failed to understand, she was afraid of going out of her mind. Therese and Laurent were really the murderers of Camille: Therese whom she had reared, Laurent whom she had loved with the devoted and tender affection of a mother. These thoughts revolved in her head like an immense wheel, accompanied by a deafening noise.

She conjectured such vile details, fathomed such immense hypocrisy, assisting in thought at a double vision so atrocious in irony, that she would have liked to die, mechanical and implacable, pounded her brain with the weight and ceaseless action of a millstone. She repeated to herself:

"It is my children who have killed my child."

And she could think of nothing else to express her despair.

In the sudden change that had come over her heart, she no longer recognised herself. She remained weighed down by the brutal invasion of ideas of vengeance that drove away all the goodness of her life. When she had been thus transformed, all was dark inwardly; she felt the birth of a new being within her frame, a being pitiless and cruel, who would have liked to bite the murderers of her son.

When she had succumbed to the overwhelming stroke of paralysis, when she understood that she could not fly at the throats of Therese and Laurent, whom she longed to strangle, she resigned herself to silence and immobility, and great tears fell slowly from her eyes. Nothing could be more heartrending than this mute and motionless despair. Those tears coursing, one by one, down this lifeless countenance, not a wrinkle of which moved, that inert, wan face which could not weep with its features, and whose eyes alone sobbed, presented a poignant spectacle.

Therese was seized with horrified pity.

"We must put her to bed," said she to Laurent, pointing to her aunt.

Laurent hastened to roll the paralysed woman into her bedroom. Then, as he stooped down to take her in his arms, Madame Raquin hoped that some powerful spring would place her on her feet; and she attempted a supreme effort. The Almighty would not permit Laurent to press her to his bosom; she fully anticipated he would be struck down if he displayed such monstrous impudence. But no spring came into action, and heaven reserved its lightning. Madame Raquin remained huddled up and passive like a bundle of linen. She was grasped, raised and carried along by the assassin; she experienced the anguish of feeling herself feeble and abandoned in the arms of the murderer of Camille. Her head rolled on to the shoulder of Laurent, whom she observed with eyes increased in volume by horror.

"You may look at me," he murmured. "Your eyes will not eat me."

And he cast her brutally on the bed. The impotent old lady fell unconscious on the mattress. Her last thought had been one of terror and disgust. In future, morning and night, she would have to submit to the vile pressure of the arms of Laurent.

CHAPTER XXVII

A shock of terror alone had made the married pair speak, and avow their crime in the presence of Madame Raquin. Neither one nor the other was cruel; they would have avoided such a revelation out of feelings of humanity, had not their own security already made it imperative on their part to maintain silence.

On the ensuing Thursday, they felt particularly anxious. In the morning, Therese inquired of Laurent whether he considered it prudent to leave the paralysed woman in the dining-room during the evening. She knew all and might give the alarm.

"Bah!" replied Laurent, "it is impossible for her to raise her little finger. How can she babble?"

"She will perhaps discover a way to do so," answered Therese. "I have noticed an implacable thought in her eyes since the other evening."

"No," said Laurent. "You see, the doctor told me it was absolutely all over with her. If she ever speaks again it will be in the final death-rattle. She will not last much longer, you may be sure. It would be stupid to place an additional load on our conscience by preventing her being present at the gathering this evening."

Therese shuddered.

"You misunderstand me," she exclaimed. "Oh! You are right. There has been enough crime. I meant to say that we might shut our aunt up in her own room, pretending she was not well, and was sleeping."

"That's it," replied Laurent, "and that idiot Michaud would go straight into the room to see his old friend, notwithstanding. It would be a capital way to ruin us."

He hesitated. He wanted to appear calm, and anxiety gave a tremor to his voice.

"It will be best to let matters take their course," he continued. "These people are as silly as geese. The mute despair of the old woman will certainly teach them nothing. They will never have the least suspicion of the thing, for they are too far away from the truth. Once the ordeal is over, we shall be at ease as to the consequences of our imprudence. All will be well, you will see."

When the guests arrived in the evening, Madame Raquin occupied her usual place, between the stove and table. Therese and Laurent feigned to be in good spirits, concealing their shudders and awaiting, in anguish, the incident that was bound to occur. They had brought the lamp-shade very low down, so that the oilcloth table covering alone was lit up.

The guests engaged in the usual noisy, common-place conversation that invariably preceded the first game of dominoes. Grivet and Michaud did not fail to address the usual questions to the paralysed woman, on the subject of her health, and to give excellent answers to them, as was their custom. After which, the company, without troubling any further about the poor old lady, plunged with delight into the game.

Since Madame Raquin had become aware of the horrible secret, she had been awaiting this evening with feverish impatience. She had gathered together all her remaining strength to denounce the culprits. Up to the last moment, she feared she would not be present at the gathering; she thought Laurent would make her disappear, perhaps kill her, or at least shut her up in her own apartment. When she saw that her niece and nephew allowed her to remain in the dining-room, she experienced lively joy at the thought of attempting to avenge her son.

Aware that her tongue was powerless, she resorted to a new kind of language. With astonishing power of will, she succeeded, in a measure, in galvanising her right hand, in slightly raising it from her knee, where it always lay stretched out, inert; she then made it creep little by little up one of the legs of the table before her, and thus succeeded in placing it on the oilcloth table cover. Then, she feebly agitated the fingers as if to attract attention.

When the players perceived this lifeless hand, white and nerveless, before them, they were exceedingly surprised. Grivet stopped short, with his arm in the air, at the moment when he was about to play the double-six. Since the impotent woman had been struck down, she had never moved her hands.

"Hey! Just look, Therese," cried Michaud. "Madame Raquin is agitating her fingers. She probably wants something."

Therese could not reply. Both she and Laurent had been following the exertion of the paralysed woman, and she was now looking at the hand of her aunt, which stood out wan in the raw light of the lamp, like an avenging hand that was about to speak. The two murderers waited, breathless.

"Of course," said Grivet, "she wants something. Oh! We thoroughly understand one another. She wants to play dominoes. Eh! Isn't it so, dear lady?"

Madame Raquin made a violent sign indicating that she wanted nothing of the kind. She extended one finger, folded up the others with infinite difficulty, and began to painfully trace letters on the table cover. She had barely indicated a stroke or two, when Grivet again exclaimed in triumph:

"I understand; she says I do right to play the double-six."

The impotent woman cast a terrible glance at the old clerk, and returned to the word she wished to write. But Grivet interrupted her at every moment, declaring it was needless, that he understood, and he then brought out some stupidity. Michaud at last made him hold his tongue.

"The deuce! Allow Madame Raquin to speak," said he. "Speak, my old friend."

And he gazed at the oilcloth table cover as if he had been listening. But the fingers of the paralysed woman were growing weary. They had begun the word more than ten times over, and now, in tracing this word, they wandered to right and left. Michaud and Olivier bent forward, and being unable to read, forced the impotent old lady to resume the first letters.

"Ah! Bravo!" exclaimed Olivier, all at once, "I can read it, this time. She has just written your name, Therese. Let me see: 'Therese and——' Complete the sentence, dear lady."

Therese almost shrieked in anguish. She watched the finger of her aunt gliding over the oilcloth, and it seemed to her that this finger traced her name, and the confession of her crime in letters of fire. Laurent had risen violently, with half a mind to fling himself on the paralysed woman and break her arm. When he saw this hand return to life to reveal the murder of Camille, he thought all was lost, and already felt the weight and frigidity of the knife on the nape of his neck.

Madame Raquin still wrote, but in a manner that became more and more hesitating.

"This is perfect. I can read it very well indeed," resumed Olivier after an instant, and with his eyes on the married pair. "Your aunt writes your two names: 'Therese and Laurent.'"

The old lady made sign after sign in the affirmative, casting crushing glances on the murderers. Then she sought to complete the sentence, but her fingers had stiffened, the supreme will that galvanised them, escaped her. She felt the paralysis slowly descending her arm and again grasping her wrist. She hurried on, and traced another word.

Old Michaud read out in a loud voice:

"Therese and Laurent have——"

And Olivier inquired:

"What have your dear children?"

The murderers, seized with blind terror, were on the point of completing the sentence aloud. They contemplated the avenging hand with fixed and troubled eyes, when, all at once this hand became convulsed, and flattened out on the table. It slipped down and fell on the knee of the impotent woman like a lump of inanimate flesh and bone. The paralysis had returned and arrested the punishment. Michaud and Olivier sat down again disappointed, while Therese and Laurent experienced such keen joy that they felt like fainting under the influence of the sudden rush of blood that beat in their bosoms.

Grivet who felt vexed at not having been believed on trust, thought the moment had arrived to regain his infallibility, by completing the unfinished sentence. While every one was endeavouring to supply the missing words, he exclaimed:

"It is quite clear. I can read the whole phrase in the eyes of the lady. It is not necessary for her to write on the table to make me understand; a mere look suffices. She means to say:

"Therese and Laurent have been very kind to me."

Grivet, on this occasion, had cause to be proud of his imagination, for all the company were of his opinion; and the guests began to sing the praises of the married couple, who were so good for the poor lady.

"It is certain," old Michaud gravely remarked, "that Madame Raquin wishes to bear testimony to the tender affection her children lavish on her, and this does honour to the whole family."

Then, taking up his dominoes again, he added:

"Come, let us continue. Where were we? Grivet was about to play the double-six, I think."

Grivet played the double six, and the stupid, monotonous game went on.

The paralysed woman, cut up by frightful despair, looked at her hand, which had just betrayed her. She felt it as heavy as lead, now; never would she be able to raise it again. Providence would not permit Camille to be avenged. It withdrew from his mother the only means she had of making known the crime to which he had fallen a victim. And the wretched woman said to herself that she was now only fit to go and join her child underground. She lowered her lids, feeling herself, henceforth, useless, and with the desire of imagining herself already in the darkness of the tomb.

CHAPTER XXVIII

For two months, Therese and Laurent had been struggling in the anguish of their union. One suffered through the other. Then hatred slowly gained them, and they ended by casting angry glances at one another, full of secret menace.

Hatred was forced to come. They had loved like brutes, with hot passion, entirely sanguineous. Then, amidst the enervation of their crime, their love had turned to fright, and their kisses had produced a sort of physical terror. At present, amid the suffering which marriage, which life in common imposed on them, they revolted and flew into anger.

It was a bitter hatred, with terrible outbursts. They felt they were in the way of one another, and both inwardly said that they would lead a tranquil existence were they not always face to face. When in presence of each other, it seemed as if an enormous weight were stifling them, and they would have liked to remove this weight, to destroy it. Their lips were pinched, thoughts of violence passed in their clear eyes, and a craving beset them to devour one another.

In reality, one single thought tormented them: they were irritated at their crime, and in despair at having for ever troubled their lives. Hence all their anger and hatred. They felt the evil incurable, that they would suffer for the murder of Camille until death, and this idea of perpetual suffering exasperated them. Not knowing whom to strike, they turned in hatred on one another.

They would not openly admit that their marriage was the final punishment of the murder; they refused to listen to the inner voice that shouted out the truth to them, displaying the story of their life before their eyes. And yet, in the fits of rage that bestirred them, they both saw clearly to the bottom of their anger, they were aware it was the furious impulse of their egotistic nature that had urged them to murder in order to satisfy their desire, and that they had only found in assassination, an afflicted and intolerable existence. They recollected the past, they knew that their mistaken hopes of lust and peaceful happiness had alone brought them to remorse. Had they been able to embrace one another in peace, and live in joy, they would not have mourned Camille, they would have fattened on their crime. But their bodies had rebelled, refusing marriage, and they inquired of themselves, in terror, where horror and disgust would lead them. They only perceived a future that would be horrible in pain, with a sinister and violent end.

Then, like two enemies bound together, and who were making violent efforts to release themselves from this forced embrace, they strained their muscles and nerves, stiffening their limbs without succeeding in releasing themselves. At last understanding that they would never be able to escape from their clasp, irritated by the cords cutting into their flesh, disgusted at their contact, feeling their discomfort increase at every moment, forgetful, and unable to bear their bonds a moment longer, they addressed outrageous reproaches to one another, in the hope of suffering loss, of dressing the wounds they inflicted on themselves, by cursing and deafening each other with their shouts and accusations.

A quarrel broke out every evening. It looked as though the murderers sought opportunities to become exasperated so as to relax their rigid nerves. They watched one another, sounded one another with glances, examined the wounds of one another, discovering the raw parts, and taking keen pleasure in causing each other to yell in pain. They lived in constant irritation, weary of themselves, unable to support a word, a gesture or a look, without suffering and frenzy. Both their beings were prepared for violence; the least display of impatience, the most ordinary contrariety increased immoderately in their disordered organism, and all at once, took the form of brutality. A mere nothing raised a storm that lasted until the morrow. A plate too warm, an open window, a denial, a simple observation, sufficed to drive them into regular fits of madness.

In the course of the discussion, they never failed to bring up the subject of the drowned man. From sentence to sentence they came to mutual reproaches about this drowning business at Saint-Ouen, casting the crime in the face of one another. They grew excited to the pitch of fury, until one felt like murdering the other. Then ensued atrocious scenes of choking, blows, abominable cries, shameless brutalities. As a rule, Therese and Laurent became exasperated, in this manner, after the evening meal. They shut themselves up in the dining-room, so that the sound of their despair should not be heard. There, they could devour one another at ease. At the end of this damp apartment, of this sort of vault, lighted by the yellow beams of the lamp, the tone of their voices took harrowing sharpness, amidst the silence and tranquillity of the atmosphere. And they did not cease until exhausted with fatigue; then only could they go and enjoy a few hours' rest. Their quarrels became, in a measure, necessary to them—a means of procuring a few hours' rest by stupefying their nerves.

Madame Raquin listened. She never ceased to be there, in her armchair, her hands dangling on her knees, her head straight, her face mute. She heard everything, and not a shudder ran through her lifeless frame. Her eyes rested on the murderers with the most acute fixedness. Her martyrdom must have been atrocious. She thus learned, detail by detail, all the events that had preceded and followed the murder of Camille. Little by little her ears became polluted with an account of the filth and crimes of those whom she had called her children.

These quarrels of the married couple placed her in possession of the most minute circumstances connected with the murder, and spread out, one by one, before her terrified mind, all the episodes of the horrible adventure. As she went deeper into this sanguinary filth, she pleaded in her mind for mercy, at times, she fancied she was touching the bottom of the infamy, and still she had to descend lower. Each night, she learnt some new detail. The frightful story continued to expand before her. It seemed like being lost in an interminable dream of horror. The first avowal had been brutal and crushing, but she suffered more from these repeated blows, from these small facts which the husband and wife allowed to escape them in their fits of anger, and which lit up the crime with sinister rays. Once a day, this mother heard the account of the murder of her son; and, each day this account became more horrifying, more replete with detail, and was shouted into her ears with greater cruelty and uproar.

On one occasion, Therese, taken aback with remorse, at the sight of this wan countenance, with great tears slowly coursing down its cheeks, pointed out her aunt to Laurent, beseeching him with a look to hold his tongue.

"Well, what of it? Leave me alone!" exclaimed the latter in a brutal tone, "you know very well that she cannot give us up. Am I more happy than she is? We have her cash, I have no need to constrain myself."

The quarrel continued, bitter and piercing, and Camille was killed over again. Neither Therese nor Laurent dared give way to the thoughts of pity that sometimes came over them, and shut the paralysed woman in her bedroom, when they quarrelled, so as to spare her the story of the crime. They were afraid of beating one another to death, if they failed to have this semi-corpse between them. Their pity yielded to cowardice. They imposed ineffable sufferings on Madame Raquin because they required her presence to protect them against their hallucinations.

All their disputes were alike, and led to the same accusations. As soon as one of them accused the other of having killed this man, there came a frightful shock.

One night, at dinner, Laurent who sought a pretext for becoming irritable, found that the water in the decanter was lukewarm. He declared that tepid water made him feel sick, and that he wanted it fresh.

"I was unable to procure any ice," Therese answered dryly.

"Very well, I will deprive myself of drinking," retorted Laurent.

"This water is excellent," said she.

"It is warm, and has a muddy taste," he answered. "It's like water from the river."

"Water from the river?" repeated Therese.

And she burst out sobbing. A juncture of ideas had just occurred in her mind.

"Why do you cry?" asked Laurent, who foresaw the answer, and turned pale.

"I cry," sobbed the young woman, "I cry because—you know why—Oh! Great God! Great God! It was you who killed him."

"You lie!" shouted the murderer vehemently, "confess that you lie. If I threw him into the Seine, it was you who urged me to commit the murder."

"I! I!" she exclaimed.

"Yes, you! Don't act the ignorant," he replied, "don't compel me to force you to tell the truth. I want you to confess your crime, to take your share in the murder. It will tranquillise and relieve me."

"But I did not drown Camille," she pleaded.

"Yes, you did, a thousand times yes!" he shouted. "Oh! You feign astonishment and want of memory. Wait a moment, I will recall your recollections."

Rising from table, he bent over the young woman, and with crimson countenance, yelled in her face:

"You were on the river bank, you remember, and I said to you in an undertone: 'I am going to pitch him into the water.' Then you agreed to it, you got into the boat. You see that we murdered him together."

"It is not true," she answered. "I was crazy, I don't know what I did, but I never wanted to kill him. You alone committed the crime."

These denials tortured Laurent. As he had said, the idea of having an accomplice relieved him. Had he dared, he would have attempted to prove to himself that all the horror of the murder fell upon Therese. He more than once felt inclined to beat the young woman, so as to make her confess that she was the more guilty of the two.

He began striding up and down, shouting and raving, followed by the piercing eyes of Madame Raquin.

"Ah! The wretch! The wretch!" he stammered in a choking voice, "she wants to drive me mad. Look, did you not come up to my room one evening, did you not intoxicate me with your caresses to persuade me to rid you of your husband? You told me, when I visited you here, that he displeased you, that he had the odour of a sickly child. Did I think of all this three years ago? Was I a rascal? I was leading the peaceful existence of an upright man, doing no harm to anybody. I would not have killed a fly."

"It was you who killed Camille," repeated Therese with such desperate obstinacy that she made Laurent lose his head.

"No, it was you, I say it was you," he retorted with a terrible burst of rage. "Look here, don't exasperate me, or if you do you'll suffer for it. What, you wretch, have you forgotten everything? You who maddened me with your caresses! Confess that it was all a calculation in your mind, that you hated Camille, and that you had wanted to kill him for a long time. No doubt you took me as a sweetheart, so as to drive me to put an end to him."

"It is not true," said she. "What you relate is monstrous. You have no right to reproach me with my weakness towards you. I can speak in regard to you, as you speak of me. Before I knew you, I was a good woman, who never wronged a soul. If I drove you mad, it was you made me madder still. Listen Laurent, don't let us quarrel. I have too much to reproach you with."

"What can you reproach me with?" he inquired.

"No, nothing," she answered. "You did not save me from myself, you took advantage of my surrender, you chose to spoil my life. I forgive you all that. But, in mercy, do not accuse me of killing Camille. Keep your crime for yourself. Do not seek to make me more terrified than I am already."

Laurent raised his hand to strike her in the face.

"Beat me, I prefer that," said she, "I shall suffer less."

And she advanced her head. But he restrained himself, and taking a chair, sat down beside her.

"Listen," he began in a voice that he endeavoured to render calm, "it is cowardly to refuse to take your share in the crime. You know perfectly well that as we did the deed together, you know you are as guilty as I am. Why do you want to make my load heavier, by saying you are innocent? If you were so, you would not have consented to marry me. Just recall what passed during the two years following the murder. Do you want a proof? If so I will go and relate everything to the Public Prosecutor, and you will see whether we are not both condemned."

They shuddered, and Therese resumed:

"Men may, perhaps, condemn me, but Camille knows very well that you did everything. He does not torment me at night as he does you."

"Camille leaves me in peace," said Laurent, pale and trembling, "it is you who see him before you in your nightmares. I have heard you shout out."

"Don't say that," angrily exclaimed the young woman. "I have never shouted out. I don't wish the spectre to appear. Oh! I understand, you want to drive it away from yourself. I am innocent, I am innocent!"

They looked at one another in terror, exhausted with fatigue, fearing they had evoked the corpse of the drowned man. Their quarrels invariably ended in this way; they protested their innocence, they sought to deceive themselves, so as to drive away their bad dreams. They made constant efforts, each in turn, to reject the responsibility of the crime, defending themselves as though they were before a judge and jury, and accusing one another.

The strangest part of this attitude was that they did not succeed in duping themselves by their oaths. Both had a perfect recollection of all the circumstances connected with the murder, and their eyes avowed what their lips denied.

Their falsehoods were puerile, their affirmations ridiculous. It was the wordy dispute of two wretches who lied for the sake of lying, without succeeding in concealing from themselves that they did so. Each took the part of accuser in turn, and although the prosecution they instituted against one another proved barren of result, they began it again every evening with cruel tenacity.

They were aware that they would prove nothing, that they would not succeed in effacing the past, and still they attempted this task, still they returned to the charge, spurred on by pain and terror, vanquished in advance by overwhelming reality. The sole advantage they derived from their disputes, consisted in producing a tempest of words and cries, and the riot occasioned in this manner momentarily deafened them.

And all the time their anger lasted, all the time they were accusing one another, the paralysed woman never ceased to gaze at them. Ardent joy sparkled in her eyes, when Laurent raised his broad hand above the head of Therese.

CHAPTER XXIX

Matters now took a different aspect. Therese, driven into a corner by fright, not knowing which way to turn for a consoling thought, began to weep aloud over the drowned man, in the presence of Laurent.

She abruptly became depressed, her overstrained nerves relaxed, her unfeeling and violent nature softened. She had already felt compassionate in the early days of her second marriage, and this feeling now returned, as a necessary and fatal reaction.

When the young woman had struggled with all her nervous energy against the spectre of Camille, when she had lived in sullen irritation for several months up in arms against her sufferings, seeking to get the better of them by efforts of will, she all at once experienced such extraordinary lassitude that she yielded vanquished. Then, having become a woman again, even a little girl, no longer feeling the strength to stiffen herself, to stand feverishly erect before her terror, she plunged into pity, into tears and regret, in the hope of finding some relief. She sought to reap advantage from her weakness of body and mind. Perhaps the drowned man, who had not given way to her irritation, would be more unbending to her tears.

Her remorse was all calculation. She thought that this would no doubt be the best way to appease and satisfy Camille. Like certain devotees, who fancy they will deceive the Almighty, and secure pardon by praying with their lips, and assuming the humble attitude of penitence, Therese displayed humility, striking her chest, finding words of repentance, without having anything at the bottom of her heart save fear and cowardice. Besides, she experienced a sort of physical pleasure in giving way in this manner, in feeling feeble and undone, in abandoning herself to grief without resistance.

She overwhelmed Madame Raquin with her tearful despair. The paralysed woman became of daily use to her. She served as a sort of praying-desk, as a piece of furniture in front of which Therese could fearlessly confess her faults and plead for forgiveness. As soon as she felt inclined to cry, to divert herself by sobbing, she knelt before the impotent old lady, and there, wailing and choking, performed to her alone a scene of remorse which weakened but relieved her.

"I am a wretch," she stammered, "I deserve no mercy. I deceived you, I drove your son to his death. Never will you forgive me. And yet, if you only knew how I am rent by remorse, if you only knew how I suffer, perhaps you would have pity. No, no pity for me. I should like to die here at your feet, overwhelmed by shame and grief."

She spoke in this manner for hours together, passing from despair to hope, condemning and then pardoning herself; she assumed the voice, brief and plaintive in turn, of a little sick girl; she flattened herself on the ground and drew herself up again, acting upon all the ideas of humility and pride, of repentance and revolt that entered her head. Sometimes even, forgetting she was on her knees before Madame Raquin, she continued her monologue as in a dream. When she had made herself thoroughly giddy with her own words, she rose staggering and dazed, to go down to the shop in a calmer frame of mind, no longer fearing to burst into sobs before her customers. When she again felt inclined for remorse, she ran upstairs and knelt at the feet of the impotent woman. This scene was repeated ten times a day.

Therese never reflected that her tears, and display of repentance must impose ineffable anguish on her aunt. The truth was that if she had desired to invent a torment to torture Madame Raquin, it would not have been possible to have found a more frightful one than the comedy of remorse she performed before her. The paralysed woman could see the egotism concealed beneath these effusions of grief. She suffered horribly from these long monologues which she was compelled to listen to at every instant, and which always brought the murder of Camille before her eyes. She could not pardon, she never departed from the implacable thought of vengeance that her impotency rendered more keen, and all day long she had to listen to pleas for pardon, and to humble and cowardly prayers.

She would have liked to give an answer; certain sentences of her niece brought crushing refusals to her lips, but she had to remain mute and allow Therese to plead her cause without once interrupting her. The impossibility of crying out and stopping her ears caused her inexpressible torture. The words of the young woman entered her mind, slow and plaintive, as an irritating ditty. At first, she fancied the murderers inflicted this kind of torture on her out of sheer diabolical cruelty. Her sole means of defence was to close her eyes, as soon as her niece knelt before her, then although she heard, she did not see her.

Therese, at last, had the impudence to kiss her aunt. One day, in a fit of repentance, she feigned she had perceived a gleam of mercy in the eyes of the paralysed woman; and she dragged herself along on her knees, she raised herself up, exclaiming in a distracted tone:

"You forgive me! You forgive me!"

Then she kissed the forehead and cheeks of the poor old creature, who was unable to throw her head backward so as to avoid the embrace. The cold skin on which Therese placed her lips, caused her violent disgust. She fancied this disgust, like the tears of remorse, would be an excellent remedy to appease her nerves; and she continued to kiss the impotent old woman daily, by way of penitence, and also to relieve herself.

"Oh! How good you are!" she sometimes exclaimed. "I can see my tears have touched you. Your eyes are full of pity. I am saved."

Then she smothered her with caresses, placing the head of the infirm old lady on her knees, kissing her hands, smiling at her happily, and attending to all her requirements with a display of passionate affection. After a time, she believed in the reality of this comedy, she imagined she had obtained the pardon of Madame Raquin, and spoke of nothing but the delight she experienced at having secured her pardon.

This was too much for the paralysed woman. It almost killed her. At the kisses of her niece, she again felt that sensation of bitter repugnance and rage which came over her, morning and night, when Laurent took her in his arms to lift her up, or lay her down. She was obliged to submit to the disgusting caresses of the wretch who had betrayed and killed her son. She could not even use her hand to wipe away the kisses that this woman left on her cheeks; and, for hours and hours together, she felt these kisses burning her.

She became the doll of the murderers of Camille, a doll that they dressed, that they turned to right and left, and that they made use of according to their requirements and whims. She remained inert in their hands, as if she had been a lay-figure, and yet she lived, and became excited and indignant at the least contact with Therese or Laurent.

What particularly exasperated her was the atrocious mockery of the young woman, who pretended she perceived expressions of mercy in her eyes, when she would have liked to have brought down fire from heaven on the head of the criminal. She frequently made supreme efforts to utter a cry of protestation, and loaded her looks with hatred. But Therese, who found it answered her purpose to repeat twenty times a day that she was pardoned, redoubled her caresses, and would see nothing. So the paralysed woman had to accept the thanks and effusions that her heart repelled. Henceforth, she lived in a state of bitter but powerless irritation, face to face with her yielding niece who displayed adorable acts of tenderness to recompense her for what she termed her heavenly goodness.

When Therese knelt before Madame Raquin, in the presence of her husband, he brutally brought her to her feet.

"No acting," said he. "Do I weep, do I prostrate myself? You do all this to trouble me."

The remorse of Therese caused him peculiar agitation. His suffering increased now that his accomplice dragged herself about him, with eyes red by weeping, and supplicating lips. The sight of this living example of regret redoubled his fright and added to his uneasiness. It was like an everlasting reproach wandering through the house. Then he feared that repentance would one day drive his wife to reveal everything. He would have preferred her to remain rigid and threatening, bitterly defending herself against his accusations. But she had changed her tactics. She now readily recognised the share she had taken in the crime. She even accused herself. She had become yielding and timid, and starting from this point implored redemption with ardent humility. This attitude irritated Laurent, and every evening the quarrels of the couple became more afflicting and sinister.

"Listen to me," said Therese to her husband, "we are very guilty. We must repent if we wish to enjoy tranquillity. Look at me. Since I have been weeping I am more peaceable. Imitate me. Let us say together that we are justly punished for having committed a horrible crime."

"Bah!" roughly answered Laurent, "you can say what you please. I know you are deucedly clever and hypocritical. Weep, if that diverts you. But I must beg you not to worry me with your tears."

"Ah!" said she, "you are bad. You reject remorse. You are cowardly. You acted as a traitor to Camille."

"Do you mean to say that I alone am guilty?" he inquired.

"No," she replied, "I do not say that. I am guilty, more guilty than you are. I ought to have saved my husband from your hands. Oh! I am aware of all the horror of my fault. But I have sought pardon, and I have succeeded, Laurent, whereas you continue to lead a disconsolate life. You have not even had the feeling to spare my poor aunt the sight of your vile anger. You have never even addressed a word of regret to her."

And she embraced Madame Raquin, who shut her eyes. She hovered round her, raising the pillow that propped up her head, and showing her all kinds of attention. Laurent was infuriated.

"Oh, leave her alone," he cried. "Can't you see that your services, and the very sight of you are odious to her. If she could lift her hand she would slap your face."

The slow and plaintive words of his wife, and her attitudes of resignation, gradually drove him into blinding fits of anger. He understood her tactics; she no longer wished to be at one with him, but to set herself apart wrapped in her regret, so as to escape the clasp of the drowned man. And, at moments, he said to himself that she had perhaps taken the right path, that tears might cure her of her terror, and he shuddered at the thought of having to suffer, and contend with fright alone.

He also would have liked to repent, or at least to have performed the comedy of repentance, to see what effect it would have. Unable to find the sobs and necessary words, he flung himself into violence again, stirring up Therese so as to irritate her and lead her back with him to furious madness. But the young woman took care to remain inert, to answer his cries of anger by tearful submission, and to meet his coarseness by a proportionate display of humility and repentance. Laurent was thus gradually driven to fury. To crown his irritation, Therese always ended with the panegyric of Camille so as to display the virtues of the victim.

"He was good," said she, "and we must have been very cruel to assail such a warm-hearted man who had never a bad thought."

"He was good, yes, I know," jeered Laurent. "You mean to say he was a fool. You must have forgotten! You pretended you were irritated at the slightest thing he said, that he could not open his mouth without letting out some stupidity."

"Don't jeer," said Therese. "It only remains for you to insult the man you murdered. You know nothing about the feelings of a woman, Laurent; Camille loved me and I loved him."

"You loved him! Ah! Really what a capital idea," exclaimed Laurent. "And no doubt it was because you loved your husband, that you took me as a sweetheart. I remember one day when we were together, that you told me Camille disgusted you, when you felt the end of your fingers enter his flesh as if it were soft clay. Oh! I know why you loved me. You required more vigorous arms than those of that poor devil."

"I loved him as a sister," answered Therese. "He was the son of my benefactress. He had all the delicate feelings of a feeble man. He showed himself noble and generous, serviceable and loving. And we killed him, good God! good God!"

She wept, and swooned away. Madame Raquin cast piercing glances at her, indignant to hear the praise of Camille sung by such a pair of lips. Laurent who was unable to do anything against this overflow of tears, walked to and fro with furious strides, searching in his head for some means to stifle the remorse of Therese.

All the good he heard said of his victim ended by causing him poignant anxiety. Now and again he let himself be caught by the heartrending accents of his wife. He really believed in the virtues of Camille, and his terror redoubled. But what tried his patience beyond measure was the comparison that the widow of the drowned man never failed to draw between her first and second husband, and which was all to the advantage of the former.

"Well! Yes," she cried, "he was better than you. I would sooner he were alive now, and you in his place underground."

Laurent first of all shrugged his shoulders.

"Say what you will," she continued, becoming animated, "although I perhaps failed to love him in his lifetime, yet I remember all his good qualities now, and do love him. Yes, I love him and hate you, do you hear? For you are an assassin."

"Will you hold your tongue?" yelled Laurent.

"And he is a victim," she went on, notwithstanding the threatening attitude of her husband, "an upright man killed by a rascal. Oh! I am not afraid of you. You know well enough that you are a miserable wretch, a brute of a man without a heart, and without a soul. How can you expect me to love you, now that you are reeking with the blood of Camille? Camille was full of tenderness for me, and I would kill you, do you hear, if that could bring him to life again, and give me back his love."

"Will you hold your tongue, you wretch?" shouted Laurent.

"Why should I hold my tongue?" she retorted. "I am speaking the truth. I would purchase forgiveness at the price of your blood. Ah! How I weep, and how I suffer! It is my own fault if a scoundrel, such as you, murdered my husband. I must go, one of these nights, and kiss the ground where he rests. That will be my final rapture."

Laurent, beside himself, rendered furious by the atrocious pictures that Therese spread out before his eyes, rushed upon her, and threw her down, menacing her with his uplifted fist.

"That's it," she cried, "strike me, kill me! Camille never once raised his hand to me, but you are a monster."

And Laurent, spurred on by what she said, shook her with rage, beat her, bruised her body with his clenched fists. In two instances he almost strangled her. Therese yielded to his blows. She experienced keen delight in being struck, delivering herself up, thrusting her body forward, provoking her husband in every way, so that he might half kill her again. This was another remedy for her suffering. She slept better at night when she had been thoroughly beaten in the evening. Madame Raquin enjoyed exquisite pleasure, when Laurent dragged her niece along the floor in this way, belabouring her with thumps and kicks.

The existence of the assassin had become terrible since the day when Therese conceived the infernal idea of feeling remorse and of mourning Camille aloud. From that moment the wretch lived everlastingly with his victim. At every hour, he had to listen to his wife praising and regretting her first husband. The least incident became a pretext: Camille did this, Camille did that, Camille had such and such qualities, Camille loved in such and such a way.

It was always Camille! Ever sad remarks bewailing his death. Therese had recourse to all her spitefulness to render this torture, which she inflicted on Laurent so as to shield her own self, as cruel as possible. She went into details, relating a thousand insignificant incidents connected with her youth, accompanied by sighs and expressions of regret, and in this manner, mingled the remembrance of the drowned man with every action of her daily life.

The corpse which already haunted the house, was introduced there openly. It sat on the chairs, took its place at table, extended itself on the bed, making use of the various articles of furniture, and of the objects lying about hither and thither. Laurent could touch nothing, not a fork, not a brush, without Therese making him feel that Camille had touched it before him.

The murderer being ceaselessly thrust, so to say, against the man he had killed, ended by experiencing a strange sensation that very nearly drove him out of his mind. By being so constantly compared to Camille, by making use of the different articles Camille had used, he imagined he was Camille himself, that he was identical with his victim. Then, with his brain fit to burst, he blew at his wife to make her hold her tongue, so as to no longer hear the words that drove him frantic. All their quarrels now ended in blows.

CHAPTER XXX

A time came when Madame Raquin, in order to escape the sufferings she endured, thought of starving herself to death. She had reached the end of her courage, she could no longer support the martyrdom that the presence of the two murderers imposed on her, she longed to find supreme relief in death. Each day her anguish grew more keen, when Therese embraced her, and when Laurent took her in his arms to carry her along like a child. She determined on freeing herself from these clasps and caresses that caused her such horrible disgust. As she had not sufficient life left within her to permit of her avenging her son, she preferred to be entirely dead, and to leave naught in the hands of the assassins but a corpse that could feel nothing, and with which they could do as they pleased.

For two days she refused all nourishment, employing her remaining strength to clench her teeth or to eject anything that Therese succeeded in introducing into her mouth. Therese was in despair. She was asking herself at the foot of which post she should go to weep and repent, when her aunt would be no longer there. She kept up an interminable discourse to prove to Madame Raquin that she should live. She wept, she even became angry, bursting into her former fits of rage, opening the jaw of the paralysed woman as you open that of an animal which resists. Madame Raquin held out, and an odious scene ensued.

Laurent remained absolutely neutral and indifferent. He was astonished at the efforts of Therese to prevent the impotent old woman committing suicide. Now that the presence of the old lady had become useless to them he desired her death. He would not have killed her, but as she wished to die, he did not see the use of depriving her of the means to do so.

"But, let her be!" he shouted to his wife. "It will be a good riddance. We shall, perhaps, be happier when she is no longer here."

This remark repeated several times in the hearing of Madame Raquin, caused her extraordinary emotion. She feared that the hope expressed by Laurent might be realised, and that after her death the couple would enjoy calm and happiness. And she said to herself that it would be cowardly to die, that she had no right to go away before she had seen the end of the sinister adventure. Then, only, could she descend into darkness, to say to Camille:

"You are avenged."

The idea of suicide became oppressive, when she all at once reflected that she would sink into the grave ignorant as to what had happened to the two murderers of her son. There, she would lie in the cold and silent earth, eternally tormented by uncertainty concerning the punishment of her tormentors. To thoroughly enjoy the slumber of death, she must be hushed to rest by the sweet delight of vengeance, she must carry away with her a dream of satisfied hatred, a dream that would last throughout eternity. So she took the food her niece presented to her, and consented to live on.

Apart from this, it was easy for her to perceive that the climax could not be far off. Each day the position of the married couple became more strained and unbearable. A crash that would smash everything was imminent. At every moment, Therese and Laurent started up face to face in a more threatening manner. It was no longer at nighttime, alone, that they suffered from their intimacy; entire days were passed amidst anxiety and harrowing shocks. It was one constant scene of pain and terror. They lived in a perfect pandemonium, fighting, rendering all they did and said bitter and cruel, seeking to fling one another to the bottom of the abyss which they felt beneath their feet, and falling into it together.

Ideas of separation had, indeed, occurred to both of them. Each had thought of flight, of seeking some repose far from this Arcade of the Pont Neuf where the damp and filth seemed adapted to their desolated life. But they dared not, they could not run away. It seemed impossible for them to avoid reviling each other, to avoid remaining there to suffer and cause pain. They proved obstinate in their hatred and cruelty. A sort of repulsion and attraction separated and kept them together at the same time. They behaved in the identical manner of two persons who, after quarrelling, wish to part, and who, nevertheless, continue returning to shout out fresh insults at one another.

Moreover, material obstacles stood in the way of flight. What were they to do with the impotent woman? What could be said to the Thursday evening guests? If they fled, these people would, perhaps, suspect something. At this thought, they imagined they were being pursued and dragged to the guillotine. So they remained where they were through cowardice, wretchedly dragging out their lives amidst the horror of their surroundings.

During the morning and afternoon, when Laurent was absent, Therese went from the dining-room to the shop in anxiety and trouble, at a loss to know what to do to fill up the void in her existence that daily became more pronounced. When not kneeling at the feet of Madame Raquin or receiving blows and insults from her husband, she had no occupation. As soon as she was seated alone in the shop, she became dejected, watching with a doltish expression, the people passing through the dirty, dark gallery. She felt ready to die of sadness in the middle of this gloomy vault, which had the odour of a cemetery, and ended by begging Suzanne to come and pass entire days with her, in the hope that the presence of this poor, gentle, pale creature might calm her.

Suzanne accepted her offer with delight; she continued to feel a sort of respectful friendship for Therese, and had long desired to come and work with her, while Olivier was at his office. Bringing her embroidery with her, she took the vacant chair of Madame Raquin behind the counter.

From that day Therese rather neglected her aunt. She went upstairs less frequently to weep on her knees and kiss the deathlike face of the invalid. She had something else to do. She made efforts to listen with interest to the dilatory gossip of Suzanne, who spoke of her home, and of the trivialities of her monotonous life. This relieved Therese of her own thoughts. Sometimes she caught herself paying attention to nonsense that brought a bitter smile to her face.

By degrees, she lost all her customers. Since her aunt had been confined to her armchair upstairs, she had let the shop go from bad to worse, abandoning the goods to dust and damp. A smell of mildew hung in the atmosphere, spiders came down from the ceiling, the floor was but rarely swept.

But what put the customers to flight was the strange way in which Therese sometimes welcomed them. When she happened to be upstairs, receiving blows from Laurent or agitated by a shock of terror, and the bell at the shop door tinkled imperiously, she had to go down, barely taking time to do up her hair or brush away the tears. On such occasions she served the persons awaiting her roughly; sometimes she even spared herself the trouble of serving, answering from the top of the staircase, that she no longer kept what was asked for. This kind of off-hand behaviour, was not calculated to retain custom.

The little work-girls of the quarter, who were used to the sweet amiability of Madame Raquin, were driven away by the harshness and wild looks of Therese. When the latter took Suzanne with her to keep her company, the defection became complete. To avoid being disturbed in their gossip, the two young woman managed to drive away the few remaining purchasers who visited the shop. Henceforth, the mercery business ceased to bring in a sou towards the household expenses, and it became necessary to encroach on the capital of forty thousand francs and more.

Sometimes, Therese absented herself the entire afternoon. No one knew where she went. Her reason for having Suzanne with her was no doubt partly for the purpose of securing company but also to mind the shop, while she was away. When she returned in the evening, worn out, her eyelids heavy with exhaustion, it was to find the little wife of Olivier still behind the counter, bowed down, with a vague smile on her lips, in the same attitude as she had left her five hours previously.

Therese had a bad fright about five months after her marriage to Laurent. She found out she was pregnant and detested the thought of having a child of Laurent's. She had the fear that she would give birth to a drowned body. She thought that she could feel inside herself a soft, decomposing corpse. No matter what, she had to rid herself of this child. She did not tell Laurent. One day she cruelly provoked him and turned her stomach towards him, hoping to receive a kick. He kicked her and she let him go on kicking her in the stomach until she thought she would die. The next day her wish was fulfilled and she had a miscarriage.

Laurent also led a frightful existence. The days seemed insupportably long; each brought the same anguish, the same heavy weariness which overwhelmed him at certain hours with crushing monotony and regularity. He dragged on his life, terrified every night by the recollections of the day, and the expectation of the morrow. He knew that henceforth, all his days would resemble one another, and bring him equal suffering. And he saw the weeks, months and years gloomily and implacably awaiting him, coming one after the other to fall upon him and gradually smother him.

When there is no hope in the future, the present appears atrociously bitter. Laurent no longer resisted, he became lumpish, abandoning himself to the nothingness that was already gaining possession of his being. Idleness was killing him. In the morning he went out, without knowing where to go, disgusted at the thought of doing what he had done on the previous day, and compelled, in spite of himself, to do it again. He went to his studio by habit, by mania.

This room, with its grey walls, whence he could see naught but a bare square of sky, filled him with mournful sadness. He grovelled on the divan heavy in thought and with pendent arms. He dared not touch a brush. He had made fresh attempts at painting, but only to find on each occasion, the head of Camille appear jeering on the canvas. So as not to go out of his mind, he ended by throwing his colour-box into a corner, and imposing the most absolute idleness on himself. This obligatory laziness weighed upon him terribly.

In the afternoon, he questioned himself in distress to find out what he should do. For half an hour, he remained on the pavement in the Rue Mazarine, thinking and hesitating as to how he could divert himself. He rejected the idea of returning to the studio, and invariably decided on going down the Rue Guenegaud, to walk along the quays. And, until evening, he went along, dazed and seized with sudden shudders whenever he looked at the Seine. Whether in his studio or in the streets, his dejection was the same. The following day he began again. He passed the morning on his divan, and dragged himself along the quays in the afternoon. This lasted for months, and might last for years.

Occasionally Laurent reflected that he had killed Camille so as to do nothing ever afterwards, and now that he did nothing, he was quite astonished to suffer so much. He would have liked to force himself to be happy. He proved to his own satisfaction, that he did wrong to suffer, that he had just attained supreme felicity, consisting in crossing his arms, and that he was an idiot not to enjoy this bliss in peace. But his reasoning exploded in the face of facts. He was constrained to confess, at the bottom of his heart, that this idleness rendered his anguish the more cruel, by leaving him every hour of his life to ponder on the despair and deepen its incurable bitterness. Laziness, that brutish existence which had been his dream, proved his punishment. At moments, he ardently hoped for some occupation to draw him from his thoughts. Then he lost all energy, relapsing beneath the weight of implacable fatality that bound his limbs so as to more surely crush him.

In truth, he only found some relief when beating Therese, at night. This brutality alone relieved him of his enervated anguish.

But his keenest suffering, both physical and moral, came from the bite Camille had given him in the neck. At certain moments, he imagined that this scar covered the whole of his body. If he came to forget the past, he all at once fancied he felt a burning puncture, that recalled the murder both to his frame and mind.

When under the influence of emotion, he could not stand before a looking-glass without noticing this phenomenon which he had so frequently remarked and which always terrified him; the blood flew to his neck, purpling the scar, which then began to gnaw the skin.

This sort of wound that lived upon him, which became active, flushed, and biting at the slightest trouble, frightened and tortured him. He ended by believing that the teeth of the drowned man had planted an insect there which was devouring him. The part of his neck where the scar appeared, seemed to him to no longer belong to his body; it was like foreign flesh that had been stuck in this place, a piece of poisoned meat that was rotting his own muscles.

In this manner, he carried the living and devouring recollection of his crime about with him everywhere. When he beat Therese, she endeavoured to scratch the spot, and sometimes dug her nails into it making him howl with pain. She generally pretended to sob, as soon as she caught sight of the bite, so as to make it more insufferable to Laurent. All her revenge for his brutality, consisted in martyrising him in connection with this bite.

While shaving, he had frequently been tempted to give himself a gash in the neck, so as to make the marks of the teeth of the drowned man disappear. When, standing before the mirror, he raised his chin and perceived the red spot beneath the white lather, he at once flew into a rage, and rapidly brought the razor to his neck, to cut right into the flesh. But the sensations of the cold steel against his skin always brought him to his senses, and caused him to feel so faint that he was obliged to seat himself, and wait until he had recovered sufficient courage to continue shaving.

He only issued from his torpor at night to fall into blind and puerile fits of anger. When tired of quarreling with Therese and beating her, he would kick the walls like a child, and look for something he could break. This relieved him.

He had a particular dislike for the tabby cat Francois who, as soon as he appeared, sought refuge on the knees of Madame Raquin. If Laurent had not yet killed the animal, it was because he dared not take hold of him. The cat looked at him with great round eyes that were diabolical in their fixedness. He wondered what these eyes which never left him, wanted; and he ended by having regular fits of terror, and imagining all sorts of ridiculous things.

When at table—at no matter what moment, in the middle of a quarrel or of a long silence—he happened, all at once, to look round, and perceive Francois examining him with a harsh, implacable stare, he turned pale and lost his head. He was on the point of saying to the cat:

"Heh! Why don't you speak? Tell me what it is you want with me."

When he could crush his paw or tail, he did so in affrighted joy, the mewing of the poor creature giving him vague terror, as though he heard a human cry of pain. Laurent, in fact, was afraid of Francois, particularly since the latter passed his time on the knees of the impotent old lady, as if in the centre of an impregnable fortress, whence he could with impunity set his eyes on his enemy. The murderer of Camille established a vague resemblance between this irritated animal and the paralysed woman, saying to himself that the cat, like Madame Raquin, must know about the crime and would denounce him, if he ever found a tongue.

At last, one night, Francois looked at Laurent so fixedly, that the latter, irritated to the last pitch, made up his mind to put an end to the annoyance. He threw the window of the dining-room wide open, and advancing to where the cat was seated, grasped him by the skin at the back of the neck. Madame Raquin understood, and two big tears rolled down her cheeks. The cat began to swear, and stiffen himself, endeavouring to turn round and bite the hand that grasped him. But Laurent held fast. He whirled the cat round two or three times in the air, and then sent him flying with all the strength of his arm, against the great dark wall opposite. Francois went flat against it, and breaking his spine, fell upon the glass roof of the arcade. All night the wretched beast dragged himself along the gutter mewing hoarsely, while Madame Raquin wept over him almost as much as she had done over Camille. Therese had an atrocious attack of hysterics, while the wailing of the cat sounded sinisterly, in the gloom below the windows.

Laurent soon had further cause for anxiety. He became alarmed at a certain change he observed in the attitude of his wife.

Therese became sombre and taciturn. She no longer lavished effusions of repentance and grateful kisses on Madame Raquin. In presence of the paralysed woman, she resumed her manner of frigid cruelty and egotistic indifference. It seemed as though she had tried remorse, and finding no relief had turned her attention to another remedy. Her sadness was no doubt due to her inability to calm her life.

She observed the impotent old woman with a kind of disdain, as a useless thing that could no longer even serve her for consolation. She now only bestowed on her the necessary attention to prevent her dying of hunger. From this moment she dragged herself about the house in silence and dejection. She multiplied her absences from the shop, going out as frequently as three and four times a week.

It was this change in her mode of life, that surprised and alarmed Laurent. He fancied that her remorse had taken another form, and was now displayed by this mournful weariness he noticed in her. This weariness seemed to him more alarming than the chattering despair she had overwhelmed him with previously. She no longer spoke, she no longer quarrelled with him, she seemed to consign everything to the depths of her being. He would rather have heard her exhausting her endurance than see her keep in this manner to herself. He feared that one day she would be choking with anguish, and to obtain relief, would go and relate everything to a priest or an examining magistrate.

Then these numerous absences of Therese had frightful significance in his eyes. He thought she went to find a confidant outside, that she was preparing her treason. On two occasions he tried to follow her, and lost her in the streets. He then prepared to watch her again. A fixed idea got into his head: Therese, driven to extremities by suffering, was about to make disclosures, and he must gag her, he must arrest her confession in her throat.

CHAPTER XXXI

One morning, Laurent, instead of going to his studio, took up a position at a wine-shop situated at one of the corners of the Rue Guenegaud, opposite the studio. From there, he began to examine the persons who issued from the passage on to the pavement of the Rue Mazarine. He was watching for Therese. The previous evening, the young woman had mentioned that she intended going out next day and probably would not be home until evening.

Laurent waited fully half an hour. He knew that his wife always went by the Rue Mazarine; nevertheless, at one moment, he remembered that she might escape him by taking the Rue de Seine, and he thought of returning to the arcade, and concealing himself in the corridor of the house. But he determined to retain his seat a little longer, and just as he was growing impatient he suddenly saw Therese come rapidly from the passage.

She wore a light gown, and, for the first time, he noticed that her attire appeared remarkably showy, like a street-walker. She twisted her body about on the pavement, staring provokingly at the men who came along, and raising her skirt, which she clutched in a bunch in her hand, much higher than any respectable woman would have done, in order to display her lace-up boots and stockings. As she went up the Rue Mazarine, Laurent followed her.

It was mild weather, and the young woman walked slowly, with her head thrown slightly backward and her hair streaming down her back. The men who had first of all stared her in the face, turned round to take a back view. She passed into the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine. Laurent was terrified. He knew that somewhere in this neighbourhood, was a Commissariat of Police, and he said to himself that there could no longer be any doubt as to the intentions of his wife, she was certainly about to denounce him. Then he made up his mind to rush after her, if she crossed the threshold of the commissariat, to implore her, to beat her if necessary, so as to compel her to hold her tongue. At a street corner she looked at a policeman who came along, and Laurent trembled with fright, lest she should stop and speak to him. In terror of being arrested on the spot if he showed himself, he hid in a doorway.

This excursion proved perfect agony. While his wife basked in the sun on the pavement, trailing her skirt with nonchalance and impudence, shameless and unconcerned, he followed behind her, pale and shuddering, repeating that it was all over, that he would be unable to save himself and would be guillotined. Each step he saw her take, seemed to him a step nearer punishment. Fright gave him a sort of blind conviction, and the slightest movement of the young woman added to his certainty. He followed her, he went where she went, as a man goes to the scaffold.

Suddenly on reaching the former Place Saint-Michel, Therese advanced towards a cafe that then formed the corner of the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince. There she seated herself in the centre of a group of women and students, at one of the tables on the pavement, and familiarly shook hands with all this little crowd. Then she called for absinthe.

She seemed quite at ease, chatting with a fair young man who no doubt had been waiting for her some time. Two girls came and leant over the table where she sat, addressing her affectionately in their husky voices. Around her, women were smoking cigarettes, men were embracing women in the open street, before the passers-by, who never even turned their heads. Low words and hoarse laughter reached Laurent, who remained motionless in a doorway on the opposite side of the street.

When Therese had finished her absinthe, she rose, and leaning on the arm of the fair young man, went down the Rue de la Harpe. Laurent followed them as far as the Rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts, where he noticed them enter a lodging-house. He remained in the middle of the street with his eyes on the front of the building. Presently his wife showed herself for an instant at an open window on the second floor, and he fancied he perceived the hands of the pale young man encircling her waist. Then, the window closed with a sharp clang.

Laurent understood. Without waiting a moment longer, he tranquilly took himself off reassured and happy.

"Bah!" said he to himself, as he went towards the quays. "It's better, after all, that she should have a sweetheart. That will occupy her mind, and prevent her thinking of injuring me. She's deucedly more clever than I am."

What astonished him, was that he had not been the first to think of plunging into vice, which might have driven away his terror. But his thoughts had never turned in that direction, and, moreover, he had not the least inclination for riotous living. The infidelity of his wife did not trouble him in the least. He felt no anger at the knowledge that she was in the arms of another man. On the contrary, he seemed to enjoy the idea. He began to think that he had been following the wife of a comrade, and laughed at the cunning trick the woman was playing her husband. Therese had become such a stranger to him, that he no longer felt her alive in his heart. He would have sold her, bound hand and foot, a hundred times over, to purchase calm for one hour.

As he sauntered along, he enjoyed the sudden, delightful reaction that had just brought him from terror to peace. He almost thanked his wife for having gone to a sweetheart, when he thought her on her way to a commissary of police. This adventure had come to an unforeseen end that agreeably surprised him. It distinctly showed him that he had done wrong to tremble, and that he, in his turn, should try vice, in order to see whether such a course would not relieve him by diverting his thoughts.

On returning to the shop in the evening, Laurent decided that he would ask his wife for a few thousand francs, and that he would resort to high-handed measures to obtain them. Reflection told him that vice would be an expensive thing, for a man. He patiently awaited Therese, who had not yet come in. When she arrived, he affected gentleness, and refrained from breathing a word about having followed her in the morning. She was slightly tipsy, and from her ill-adjusted garments, came that unpleasant odour of tobacco and spirits that is met with in public drinking places. Completely exhausted, and with cheeks as pale as death, she advanced at an unsteady gait and with a head quite heavy from the shameless fatigue of the day.

The dinner passed in silence. Therese ate nothing. At dessert Laurent placed his elbows on the table, and flatly asked her for 5,000 francs.

"No," she answered dryly. "If I were to give you a free hand, you'd bring us to beggary. Aren't you aware of our position? We are going as fast as ever we can to the dogs."

"That may be," he quietly resumed. "I don't care a fig, I intend to have money."

"No, a thousand times no!" she retorted. "You left your place, the mercery business is in a very bad way, and the revenue from my marriage portion is not sufficient to maintain us. Every day I encroach on the principal to feed you and give you the one hundred francs a month you wrung from me. You will not get anything beyond that, do you understand? So it's no use asking."

"Just reflect," he replied, "and don't be so silly as to refuse. I tell you I mean to have 5,000 francs, and I shall have them. You'll give them me, in spite of all."

This quiet determination irritated Therese and put the finishing touch to her intoxication.

"Ah! I know what it is," she cried, "you want to finish as you began. We have been keeping you for four years. You only came to us to eat and drink, and since then you've been at our charge. Monsieur does nothing, Monsieur has arranged so as to live at my expense with his arms folded one over the other. No, you shall have nothing, not a sou. Do you want me to tell you what you are? Well then, you are a———"

And she pronounced the word. Laurent began to laugh, shrugging his shoulders. He merely replied:

"You learn some pretty expressions in the company you keep now."

This was the only allusion he ventured to make to the love affairs of Therese. She quickly raised her head, and bitterly replied:

"Anyhow, I don't keep the company of murderers."

Laurent became very pale, and for a moment remained silent, with his eyes fixed on his wife; then, in a trembling voice, he resumed:

"Listen, my girl, don't let us get angry; there is no good in that neither for you nor me. I've lost all courage. We had better come to an understanding if we wish to avoid a misfortune. If I ask you for 5,000 francs it is because I want them; and I will even tell you what I intend to do with them, so as to ensure our tranquillity."

He gave her a peculiar smile, and continued:

"Come, reflect, let me have your last word."

"I have thoroughly made up my mind," answered the young woman, "and it is as I have told you. You shall not have a sou."

Her husband rose violently. She was afraid of being beaten; she crouched down, determined not to give way to blows. But Laurent did not even approach her, he confined himself to telling her in a frigid tone that he was tired of life, and was about to relate the story of the murder to the commissary of police of the quarter.

"You drive me to extremes," said he, "you make my life unbearable. I prefer to have done with it. We shall both be tried and condemned. And there will be an end to it all."

"Do you think you'll frighten me?" shouted his wife. "I am as weary as you are. I'll go to the commissary of police myself, if you don't. Ah! Indeed, I am quite ready to follow you to the scaffold, I'm not a coward like you. Come along, come along with me to the commissary."

She had risen, and was making her way to the staircase.

"That's it," stammered Laurent, "let's go together."

When they were down in the shop they looked at once another, anxious and alarmed. It seemed as though they were riveted to the ground. The few seconds they had taken to run downstairs had suffered to show them, as in a flash, all the consequences of a confession. They saw at the same moment, suddenly and distinctly: gendarmes, prison, assize-court and guillotine. This made them feel faint, and they were tempted to throw themselves on their knees, one before the other, to implore one another to remain, and reveal nothing. Fright and embarrassment kept them motionless and mute for two or three minutes. Therese was the first to make up her mind to speak and give way.

"After all," said she, "I am a great fool to quarrel with you about this money. You will succeed in getting hold of it and squandering it, one day or another. I may just as well give it you at once."

She did not seek to conceal her defeat any further. She seated herself at the counter, and signed a cheque for 5,000 francs, which Laurent was to present to her banker. There was no more question of the commissary of police that evening.

As soon as Laurent had the gold in his pocket, he began to lead a riotous life, drinking to excess, and frequenting women of ill-repute. He slept all day and stayed out all night, in search of violent emotions that would relieve him of reality. But he only succeeded in becoming more oppressed than before. When the company were shouting around him, he heard the great, terrible silence within him; when one of his ladyloves kissed him, when he drained his glass, he found naught at the bottom of his satiety, but heavy sadness.

He was no longer a man for lust and gluttony. His chilled being, as if inwardly rigid, became enervated at the kisses and feasts. Feeling disgusted beforehand, they failed to arouse his imagination or to excite his senses and stomach. He suffered a little more by forcing himself into a dissolute mode of life, and that was all. Then, when he returned home, when he saw Madame Raquin and Therese again, his weariness brought on frightful fits of terror. And he vowed he would leave the house no more, that he would put up with his suffering, so as to become accustomed to it, and be able to conquer it.

For a month Therese lived, like Laurent, on the pavement and in the cafes. She returned daily for a moment, in the evening to feed Madame Raquin and put her to bed, and then disappeared again until the morrow. She and her husband on one occasion were four days without setting eyes on each other. At last, she experienced profound disgust at the life she was leading, feeling that vice succeeded no better with her than the comedy of remorse.

In vain had she dragged through all the lodging-houses in the Latin Quarter, in vain had she led a low, riotous life. Her nerves were ruined. Debauchery ceased to give her a sufficiently violent shock to render her oblivious of the past. She resembled one of those drunkards whose scorched palates remain insensible to the most violent spirits. She had done with lust, and the society of her paramours only worried and wearied her. Then, she quitted them as useless.

She now fell a prey to despondent idleness which kept her at home, in a dirty petticoat, with hair uncombed, and face and hands unwashed. She neglected everything and lived in filth.

When the two murderers came together again face to face, in this manner, after having done their best to get away from each other, they understood that they would no longer have strength to struggle. Debauchery had rejected them, it had just cast them back to their anguish. Once more they were in the dark, damp lodging in the arcade; and, henceforth, were as if imprisoned there, for although they had often attempted to save themselves, never had they been able to sever the sanguinary bond attaching them. They did not even think of attempting a task they regarded as impossible. They found themselves so urged on, so overwhelmed, so securely fastened together by events, that they were conscious all resistance would be ridiculous. They resumed their life in common, but their hatred became furious rage.

The quarrels at night began again. But for that matter, the blows and cries lasted all day long. To hatred distrust was now added, and distrust put the finishing touch to their folly.

They were afraid of each other. The scene that had followed the demand for 5,000 francs, was repeated morning and night. They had the fixed idea that they wanted to give one another up. From that standpoint they did not depart. When either of them said a word, or made a gesture, the other imagined that he or she, as the case might be, intended to go to the commissary of police. Then, they either fought or implored one another to do nothing.

In their anger, they shouted out that they would run and reveal everything, and terrified each other to death. After this they shuddered, they humbled themselves, and promised with bitter tears to maintain silence. They suffered most horribly, but had not the courage to cure themselves by placing a red-hot iron on the wound. If they threatened one another to confess the crime, it was merely to strike terror into each other and drive away the thought, for they would never have had strength to speak and seek peace in punishment.

On more than twenty occasions, they went as far as the door of the commissariat of police, one following the other. Now it was Laurent who wanted to confess the murder, now Therese who ran to give herself up. But they met in the street, and always decided to wait, after an interchange of insults and ardent prayers.

Every fresh attack made them more suspicious and ferocious than before. From morning till night they were spying upon one another. Laurent barely set his foot outside the lodging in the arcade, and if, perchance, he did absent himself, Therese never failed to accompany him. Their suspicions, their fright lest either should confess, brought them together, united them in atrocious intimacy. Never, since their marriage, had they lived so tightly tied together, and never had they experienced such suffering. But, notwithstanding the anguish they imposed on themselves, they never took their eyes off one another. They preferred to endure the most excruciating pain, rather than separate for an hour.

If Therese went down to the shop, Laurent followed, afraid that she might talk to a customer; if Laurent stood in the doorway, observing the people passing through the arcade, Therese placed herself beside him to see that he did not speak to anyone. When the guests were assembled on Thursday evenings, the murderers addressed supplicating glances to each other, listening to one another in terror, one accomplice expecting the other to make some confession, and giving an involving interpretation to sentences only just commenced.

Such a state of warfare could not continue any longer.

Therese and Laurent had both reached the point of pondering on the advisability of extricating themselves from the consequences of their first crime, by committing a second. It became absolutely necessary that one of them should disappear so that the other might enjoy some repose. This reflection came to them both at the same time; both felt the urgent necessity for a separation, and both desired that it should be eternal. The murder that now occurred to their minds, seemed to them natural, fatal and forcibly brought about by the murder of Camille. They did not even turn the matter over in their heads but welcomed the idea as the only means of safety. Laurent determined he would kill Therese because she stood in his way, because she might ruin him by a word, and because she caused him unbearable suffering. Therese made up her mind that she would kill Laurent, for the same reasons.

The firm resolution to commit another murder somewhat calmed them. They formed their plans. But in that respect they acted with feverish excitement, and without any display of excessive prudence. They only thought vaguely of the probable consequences of a murder committed without flight and immunity being ensured. They felt the invincible necessity to kill one another, and yielded to this necessity like furious brutes. They would not have exposed themselves for their first crime, which they had so cleverly concealed, and yet they risked the guillotine, in committing a second, which they did not even attempt to hide.

Here was a contradiction in their conduct that they never so much as caught sight of. Both simply said to themselves that if they succeeded in fleeing, they would go and live abroad, taking all the cash with them. Therese, a fortnight or three weeks before, had drawn from the bank the few thousand francs that remained of her marriage portion, and kept them locked up in a drawer—a circumstance that had not escaped Laurent. The fate of Madame Raquin did not trouble them an instant.

A few weeks previously, Laurent had met one of his old college friends, now acting as dispenser to a famous chemist, who gave considerable attention to toxicology. This friend had shown him over the laboratory where he worked, pointing out to him the apparatus and the drugs.

One night, after he had made up his mind in regard to the murder, and as Therese was drinking a glass of sugar and water before him, Laurent remembered that he had seen in this laboratory a small stoneware flagon, containing prussic acid, and that the young dispenser had spoken to him of the terrible effects of this poison, which strikes the victim down with sudden death, leaving but few traces behind. And Laurent said to himself, that this was the poison he required. On the morrow, succeeding in escaping the vigilance of Therese, he paid his friend a visit, and while he had his back turned, stole the small stoneware flagon.

The same day, Therese took advantage of the absence of Laurent, to send the large kitchen knife, with which they were in the habit of breaking the loaf sugar, and which was very much notched, to be sharpened. When it came back, she hid it in a corner of the sideboard.

CHAPTER XXXII

The following Thursday, the evening party at the Raquins, as the guests continued to term the household of their hosts, was particularly merry. It was prolonged until half-past eleven, and as Grivet withdrew, he declared that he had never passed such a pleasant time.

Suzanne, who was not very well, never ceased talking to Therese of her pain and joy. Therese appeared to listen to her with great interest, her eyes fixed, her lips pinched, her head, at moments, bending forward; while her lowering eyelids cast a cloud over the whole of her face.

Laurent, for his part, gave uninterrupted attention to the tales of old Michaud and Olivier. These gentlemen never paused, and it was only with difficulty that Grivet succeeded in getting in a word edgeways between a couple of sentences of father and son. He had a certain respect for these two men whom he considered good talkers. On that particular evening, a gossip having taken the place of the usual game, he naively blurted out that the conversation of the former commissary of police amused him almost as much as dominoes.

During the four years, or thereabouts, that the Michauds and Grivet had been in the habit of passing the Thursday evenings at the Raquins', they had not once felt fatigued at these monotonous evenings that returned with enervating regularity. Never had they for an instant suspected the drama that was being performed in this house, so peaceful and harmonious when they entered it. Olivier, with the jest of a person connected with the police, was in the habit of remarking that the dining-room savoured of the honest man. Grivet, so as to have his say, had called the place the Temple of Peace.

Latterly, on two or three different occasions, Therese explained the bruises disfiguring her face, by telling the guests she had fallen down. But none of them, for that matter, would have recognised the marks of the fist of Laurent; they were convinced as to their hosts being a model pair, replete with sweetness and love.

The paralysed woman had not made any fresh attempt to reveal to them the infamy concealed behind the dreary tranquillity of the Thursday evenings. An eye-witness of the tortures of the murderers, and foreseeing the crisis which would burst out, one day or another, brought on by the fatal succession of events, she at length understood that there was no necessity for her intervention. And from that moment, she remained in the background allowing the consequences of the murder of Camille, which were to kill the assassins in their turn, to take their course. She only prayed heaven, to grant her sufficient life to enable her to be present at the violent catastrophe she foresaw; her only remaining desire was to feast her eyes on the supreme suffering that would undo Therese and Laurent.

On this particular evening, Grivet went and seated himself beside her, and talked for a long time, he, as usual, asking the questions and supplying the answers himself. But he failed to get even a glance from her. When half-past eleven struck, the guests quickly rose to their feet.

"We are so comfortable with you," said Grivet, "that no one ever thinks of leaving."

"The fact is," remarked Michaud by way of supporting the old clerk, "I never feel drowsy here, although I generally go to bed at nine o'clock."

Olivier thought this a capital opportunity for introducing his little joke.

"You see," said he, displaying his yellow teeth, "this apartment savours of honest people: that is why we are so comfortable here."

Grivet, annoyed at being forestalled, began to declaim with an emphatic gesture:

"This room is the Temple of Peace!"

In the meanwhile, Suzanne, who was putting on her hat, remarked to Therese:

"I will come to-morrow morning at nine o'clock."

"No," hastened to answer the young woman in a strange, troubled tone, "don't come until the afternoon I have an engagement in the morning."

She accompanied the guests into the arcade, and Laurent also went down with a lamp in his hand. As soon as the married couple were alone, both heaved a sigh of relief. They must have been devoured by secret impatience all the evening. Since the previous day they had become more sombre, more anxious in presence of one another. They avoided looking at each other, and returned in silence to the dining-room. Their hands gave slight convulsive twitches, and Laurent was obliged to place the lamp on the table, to avoid letting it fall.

Before putting Madame Raquin to bed they were in the habit of setting the dining-room in order, of preparing a glass of sugar and water for the night, of moving hither and thither about the invalid, until everything was ready.

When they got upstairs on this particular occasion, they sat down an instant with pale lips, and eyes gazing vaguely before them. Laurent was the first to break silence:

"Well! Aren't we going to bed?" he inquired, as if he had just started from a dream.

"Yes, yes, we are going to bed," answered Therese, shivering as though she felt a violent chill.

She rose and grasped the water decanter.

"Let it be," exclaimed her husband, in a voice that he endeavoured to render natural, "I will prepare the sugar and water. You attend to your aunt."

He took the decanter of water from the hands of his wife and poured out a glassful. Then, turning half round, he emptied the contents of the small stoneware flagon into the glass at the same time as he dropped a lump of sugar into it. In the meanwhile, Therese had bent down before the sideboard, and grasping the kitchen knife sought to slip it into one of the large pockets hanging from her waist.

At the same moment, a strange sensation which comes as a warning note of danger, made the married couple instinctively turn their heads. They looked at one another. Therese perceived the flagon in the hands of Laurent, and the latter caught sight of the flash of the blade in the folds of the skirt of his wife.

For a few seconds they examined each other, mute and frigid, the husband near the table, the wife stooping down before the sideboard. And they understood. Each of them turned icy cold, on perceiving that both had the same thought. And they were overcome with pity and horror at mutually reading the secret design of the other on their agitated countenances.

Madame Raquin, feeling the catastrophe near at hand, watched them with piercing, fixed eyes.

Therese and Laurent, all at once, burst into sobs. A supreme crisis undid them, cast them into the arms of one another, as weak as children. It seemed to them as if something tender and sweet had awakened in their breasts. They wept, without uttering a word, thinking of the vile life they had led, and would still lead, if they were cowardly enough to live.

Then, at the recollection of the past, they felt so fatigued and disgusted with themselves, that they experienced a huge desire for repose, for nothingness. They exchanged a final look, a look of thankfulness, in presence of the knife and glass of poison. Therese took the glass, half emptied it, and handed it to Laurent who drank off the remainder of the contents at one draught. The result was like lightning. The couple fell one atop of the other, struck down, finding consolation, at last, in death. The mouth of the young woman rested on the scar that the teeth of Camille had left on the neck of her husband.

The corpses lay all night, spread out contorted, on the dining-room floor, lit up by the yellow gleams from the lamp, which the shade cast upon them. And for nearly twelve hours, in fact until the following day at about noon, Madame Raquin, rigid and mute, contemplated them at her feet, overwhelming them with her heavy gaze, and unable to sufficiently gorge her eyes with the hideous sight.

AFTERWORD

The idea of the plot of "Therese Raquin," according to M. Paul Alexis, Zola's biographer, came from a novel called "La Venus de Gordes" contributed to the "Figaro" by Adolphe Belot and Ernest Daudet—the brother of Alphonse Daudet—in collaboration. In this story the authors dealt with the murder of a man by his wife and her paramour, followed by the trial of the murderers at the assizes. Zola, in noticing the book in the "Figaro," when it arrived for review, pointed out that a much more powerful story might be written on the same subject by invoking divine instead of human justice. For instance, showing the two murderers safe from earthly consequences, yet separated by the pool of blood between them, haunted by their crime, and detesting one another for the deed done together.

It then occurred to Zola to write the tale on these lines himself. Convinced that the idea was good, he elaborated it with the greatest care and all the skill at his command, the result being that he produced a volume which proved his first genuine success, and which is still considered by many to be his very best book.

EDWARD VIZETELLY

SURBITON, 1 December, 1901.

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of L'Assommoir, by Emile Zola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: L'Assommoir

Author: Emile Zola

Release Date: April 27, 2006 [EBook #8600]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK L'ASSOMMOIR ***

Produced by John Bickers; Dagny; David Widger

L'ASSOMMOIR

By Emile Zola

Contents

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER I.

Gervaise had waited up for Lantier until two in the morning. Then, shivering from having remained in a thin loose jacket, exposed to the fresh air at the window, she had thrown herself across the bed, drowsy, feverish, and her cheeks bathed in tears.

For a week past, on leaving the "Two-Headed Calf," where they took their meals, he had sent her home with the children and never reappeared himself till late at night, alleging that he had been in search of work. That evening, while watching for his return, she thought she had seen him enter the dancing-hall of the "Grand-Balcony," the ten blazing windows of which lighted up with the glare of a conflagration the dark expanse of the exterior Boulevards; and five or six paces behind him, she had caught sight of little Adele, a burnisher, who dined at the same restaurant, swinging her hands, as if she had just quitted his arm so as not to pass together under the dazzling light of the globes at the door.

When, towards five o'clock, Gervaise awoke, stiff and sore, she broke forth into sobs. Lantier had not returned. For the first time he had slept away from home. She remained seated on the edge of the bed, under the strip of faded chintz, which hung from the rod fastened to the ceiling by a piece of string. And slowly, with her eyes veiled by tears, she glanced round the wretched lodging, furnished with a walnut chest of drawers, minus one drawer, three rush-bottomed chairs, and a little greasy table, on which stood a broken water-jug. There had been added, for the children, an iron bedstead, which prevented any one getting to the chest of drawers, and filled two-thirds of the room. Gervaise's and Lantier's trunk, wide open, in one corner, displayed its emptiness, and a man's old hat right at the bottom almost buried beneath some dirty shirts and socks; whilst, against the walls, above the articles of furniture, hung a shawl full of holes, and a pair of trousers begrimed with mud, the last rags which the dealers in second-hand clothes declined to buy. In the centre of the mantel-piece, lying between two odd zinc candle-sticks, was a bundle of pink pawn-tickets. It was the best room of the hotel, the first floor room, looking on to the Boulevard.

The two children were sleeping side by side, with their heads on the same pillow. Claude, aged eight years, was breathing quietly, with his little hands thrown outside the coverlet; while Etienne, only four years old, was smiling, with one arm round his brother's neck! And bare-footed, without thinking to again put on the old shoes that had fallen on the floor, she resumed her position at the window, her eyes searching the pavements in the distance.

The hotel was situated on the Boulevard de la Chapelle, to the left of the Barriere Poissonniere. It was a building of two stories high, painted a red, of the color of wine dregs, up to the second floor, and with shutters all rotted by the rain. Over a lamp with starred panes of glass, one could manage to read, between the two windows, the words, "Hotel Boncoeur, kept by Marsoullier," painted in big yellow letters, several pieces of which the moldering of the plaster had carried away. The lamp preventing her seeing, Gervaise raised herself on tiptoe, still holding the handkerchief to her lips. She looked to the right, towards the Boulevard Rochechouart, where groups of butchers, in aprons smeared with blood, were hanging about in front of the slaughter-houses; and the fresh breeze wafted occasionally a stench of slaughtered beasts. Looking to the left, she scanned a long avenue that ended nearly in front of her, where the white mass of the Lariboisiere Hospital was then in course of construction. Slowly, from one end of the horizon to the other, she followed the octroi wall, behind which she sometimes heard, during night time, the shrieks of persons being murdered; and she searchingly looked into the remote angles, the dark corners, black with humidity and filth, fearing to discern there Lantier's body, stabbed to death.

She looked at the endless gray wall that surrounded the city with its belt of desolation. When she raised her eyes higher, she became aware of a bright burst of sunlight. The dull hum of the city's awakening already filled the air. Craning her neck to look at the Poissonniere gate, she remained for a time watching the constant stream of men, horses, and carts which flooded down from the heights of Montmartre and La Chapelle, pouring between the two squat octroi lodges. It was like a herd of plodding cattle, an endless throng widened by sudden stoppages into eddies that spilled off the sidewalks into the street, a steady procession of laborers on their way back to work with tools slung over their back and a loaf of bread under their arm. This human inundation kept pouring down into Paris to be constantly swallowed up. Gervaise leaned further out at the risk of falling when she thought she recognized Lantier among the throng. She pressed the handkerchief tighter against her mouth, as though to push back the pain within her.

The sound of a young and cheerful voice caused her to leave the window.

"So the old man isn't here, Madame Lantier?"

"Why, no, Monsieur Coupeau," she replied, trying to smile.

Coupeau, a zinc-worker who occupied a ten franc room on the top floor, having seen the door unlocked, had walked in as friends will do.

"You know," he continued, "I'm now working over there in the hospital. What beautiful May weather, isn't it? The air is rather sharp this morning."

And he looked at Gervaise's face, red with weeping. When he saw that the bed had not been slept in, he shook his head gently; then he went to the children's couch where they were sleeping, looking as rosy as cherubs, and, lowering his voice, he said,

"Come, the old man's not been home, has he? Don't worry yourself, Madame Lantier. He's very much occupied with politics. When they were voting for Eugene Sue the other day, he was acting almost crazy. He has very likely spent the night with some friends blackguarding crapulous Bonaparte."

"No, no," she murmured with an effort. "You don't think that. I know where Lantier is. You see, we have our little troubles like the rest of the world!"

Coupeau winked his eye, to indicate he was not a dupe of this falsehood; and he went off, after offering to fetch her milk, if she did not care to go out: she was a good and courageous woman, and might count upon him on any day of trouble.

As soon as he was gone, Gervaise again returned to the window. At the Barriere, the tramp of the drove still continued in the morning air: locksmiths in short blue blouses, masons in white jackets, house painters in overcoats over long smocks. From a distance the crowd looked like a chalky smear of neutral hue composed chiefly of faded blue and dingy gray. When one of the workers occasionally stopped to light his pipe the others kept plodding past him, without sparing a laugh or a word to a comrade. With cheeks gray as clay, their eyes were continually drawn toward Paris which was swallowing them one by one.

At both corners of the Rue des Poissonniers however, some of the men slackened their pace as they neared the doors of the two wine-dealers who were taking down their shutters; and, before entering, they stood on the edge of the pavement, looking sideways over Paris, with no strength in their arms and already inclined for a day of idleness. Inside various groups were already buying rounds of drinks, or just standing around, forgetting their troubles, crowding up the place, coughing, spitting, clearing their throats with sip after sip.

Gervaise was watching Pere Colombe's wineshop to the left of the street, where she thought she had seen Lantier, when a stout woman, bareheaded and wearing an apron called to her from the middle of the roadway:

"Hey, Madame Lantier, you're up very early!"

Gervaise leaned out. "Why! It's you, Madame Boche! Oh! I've got a lot of work to-day!"

"Yes, things don't do themselves, do they?"

The conversation continued between roadway and window. Madame Boche was concierge of the building where the "Two-Headed Calf" was on the ground floor. Gervaise had waited for Lantier more than once in the concierge's lodge, so as not to be alone at table with all the men who ate at the restaurant. Madame Boche was going to a tailor who was late in mending an overcoat for her husband. She mentioned one of her tenants who had come in with a woman the night before and kept everybody awake past three in the morning. She looked at Gervaise with intense curiosity.

"Is Monsieur Lantier, then, still in bed?" she asked abruptly.

"Yes, he's asleep," replied Gervaise, who could not avoid blushing.

Madame Boche saw the tears come into her eyes; and, satisfied no doubt, she turned to go, declaring men to be a cursed, lazy set. As she went off, she called back:

"It's this morning you go to the wash-house, isn't it? I've something to wash, too. I'll keep you a place next to me, and we can chat together." Then, as if moved with sudden pity, she added:

"My poor little thing, you had far better not remain there; you'll take harm. You look quite blue with cold."

Gervaise still obstinately remained at the window during two mortal hours, till eight o'clock. Now all the shops had opened. Only a few work men were still hurrying along.

The working girls now filled the boulevard: metal polishers, milliners, flower sellers, shivering in their thin clothing. In small groups they chattered gaily, laughing and glancing here and there. Occasionally there would be one girl by herself, thin, pale, serious-faced, picking her way along the city wall among the puddles and the filth.

After the working girls, the office clerks came past, breathing upon their chilled fingers and munching penny rolls. Some of them are gaunt young fellows in ill-fitting suits, their tired eyes still fogged from sleep. Others are older men, stooped and tottering, with faces pale and drawn from long hours of office work and glancing nervously at their watches for fear of arriving late.

In time the Boulevards settle into their usual morning quiet. Old folks come out to stroll in the sun. Tired young mothers in bedraggled skirts cuddle babies in their arms or sit on a bench to change diapers. Children run, squealing and laughing, pushing and shoving.

Then Gervaise felt herself choking, dizzy with anguish, all hopes gone; it seemed to her that everything was ended, even time itself, and that Lantier would return no more. Her eyes vacantly wandered from the old slaughter-house, foul with butchery and with stench, to the new white hospital which, through the yawning openings of its ranges of windows, disclosed the naked wards, where death was preparing to mow. In front of her on the other side of the octroi wall the bright heavens dazzled her, with the rising sun which rose higher and higher over the vast awaking city.

The young woman was seated on a chair, no longer crying, and with her hands abandoned on her lap, when Lantier quietly entered the room.

"It's you! It's you!" she cried, rising to throw herself upon his neck.

"Yes, it's me. What of it?" he replied. "You are not going to begin any of your nonsense, I hope!"

He had pushed her aside. Then, with a gesture of ill-humor he threw his black felt hat to the chest of drawers. He was a young fellow of twenty-six years of age, short and very dark, with a handsome figure, and slight moustaches which his hand was always mechanically twirling. He wore a workman's overalls and an old soiled overcoat, which he had belted tightly at the waist, and he spoke with a strong Provencal accent.

Gervaise, who had fallen back on her chair, gently complained, in short sentences: "I've not had a wink of sleep. I feared some harm had happened to you. Where have you been? Where did you spend the night? For heaven's sake! Don't do it again, or I shall go crazy. Tell me Auguste, where have you been?"

"Where I had business, of course," he returned shrugging his shoulders. "At eight o'clock, I was at La Glaciere, with my friend who is to start a hat factory. We sat talking late, so I preferred to sleep there. Now, you know, I don't like being spied upon, so just shut up!"

The young woman recommenced sobbing. The loud voices and the rough movements of Lantier, who upset the chairs, had awakened the children. They sat up in bed, half naked, disentangling their hair with their tiny hands, and, hearing their mother weep, they uttered terrible screams, crying also with their scarcely open eyes.

"Ah! there's the music!" shouted Lantier furiously. "I warn you, I'll take my hook! And it will be for good, this time. You won't shut up? Then, good morning! I'll return to the place I've just come from."

He had already taken his hat from off the chest of drawers. But Gervaise threw herself before him, stammering: "No, no!"

And she hushed the little ones' tears with her caresses, smoothed their hair, and soothed them with soft words. The children, suddenly quieted, laughing on their pillow, amused themselves by punching each other. The father however, without even taking off his boots, had thrown himself on the bed looking worn out, his face bearing signs of having been up all night. He did not go to sleep, he lay with his eyes wide open, looking round the room.

"It's a mess here!" he muttered. And after observing Gervaise a moment, he malignantly added: "Don't you even wash yourself now?"

Gervaise was twenty-two, tall and slim with fine features, but she was already beginning to show the strain of her hard life. She seemed to have aged ten years from the hours of agonized weeping. Lantier's mean remark made her mad.

"You're not fair," she said spiritedly. "You well know I do all I can. It's not my fault we find ourselves here. I would like to see you, with two children, in a room where there's not even a stove to heat some water. When we arrived in Paris, instead of squandering your money, you should have made a home for us at once, as you promised."

"Listen!" Lantier exploded. "You cracked the nut with me; it doesn't become you to sneer at it now!"

Apparently not listening, Gervaise went on with her own thought. "If we work hard we can get out of the hole we're in. Madame Fauconnier, the laundress on Rue Neuve, will start me on Monday. If you work with your friend from La Glaciere, in six months we will be doing well. We'll have enough for decent clothes and a place we can call our own. But we'll have to stick with it and work hard."

Lantier turned over towards the wall, looking greatly bored. Then Gervaise lost her temper.

"Yes, that's it, I know the love of work doesn't trouble you much. You're bursting with ambition, you want to be dressed like a gentleman. You don't think me nice enough, do you, now that you've made me pawn all my dresses? Listen, Auguste, I didn't intend to speak of it, I would have waited a bit longer, but I know where you spent the night; I saw you enter the 'Grand-Balcony' with that trollop Adele. Ah! you choose them well! She's a nice one, she is! She does well to put on the airs of a princess! She's been the ridicule of every man who frequents the restaurant."

At a bound Lantier sprang from the bed. His eyes had become as black as ink in his pale face. With this little man, rage blew like a tempest.

"Yes, yes, of every man who frequents the restaurant!" repeated the young woman. "Madame Boche intends to give them notice, she and her long stick of a sister, because they've always a string of men after them on the staircase."

Lantier raised his fists; then, resisting the desire of striking her, he seized hold of her by the arms, shook her violently and sent her sprawling upon the bed of the children, who recommenced crying. And he lay down again, mumbling, like a man resolving on something that he previously hesitated to do:

"You don't know what you've done, Gervaise. You've made a big mistake; you'll see."

For an instant the children continued sobbing. Their mother, who remained bending over the bed, held them both in her embrace, and kept repeating the same words in a monotonous tone of voice.

"Ah! if it weren't for you! My poor little ones! If it weren't for you! If it weren't for you!"

Stretched out quietly, his eyes raised to the faded strip of chintz, Lantier no longer listened, but seemed to be buried in a fixed idea. He remained thus for nearly an hour, without giving way to sleep, in spite of the fatigue which weighed his eyelids down.

He finally turned toward Gervaise, his face set hard in determination. She had gotten the children up and dressed and had almost finished cleaning the room. The room looked, as always, dark and depressing with its sooty black ceiling and paper peeling from the damp walls. The dilapidated furniture was always streaked and dirty despite frequent dustings. Gervaise, devouring her grief, trying to assume a look of indifference, hurried over her work.

Lantier watched as she tidied her hair in front of the small mirror hanging near the window. While she washed herself he looked at her bare arms and shoulders. He seemed to be making comparisons in his mind as his lips formed a grimace. Gervaise limped with her right leg, though it was scarcely noticeable except when she was tired. To-day, exhausted from remaining awake all night, she was supporting herself against the wall and dragging her leg.

Neither one spoke, they had nothing more to say. Lantier seemed to be waiting, while Gervaise kept busy and tried to keep her countenance expressionless. Finally, while she was making a bundle of the dirty clothes thrown in a corner, behind the trunk, he at length opened his lips and asked:

"What are you doing there? Where are you going?"

She did not answer at first. Then, when he furiously repeated his question, she made up her mind, and said:

"I suppose you can see for yourself. I'm going to wash all this. The children can't live in filth."

He let her pick up two or three handkerchiefs. And, after a fresh pause, he resumed: "Have you got any money?"

At these words she stood up and looked him full in the face, without leaving go of the children's dirty clothes, which she held in her hand.

"Money! And where do you think I can have stolen any? You know well enough that I got three francs the day before yesterday on my black skirt. We've lunched twice off it, and money goes quick at the pork-butcher's. No, you may be quite sure I've no money. I've four sous for the wash-house. I don't have an extra income like some women."

He let this allusion pass. He had moved off the bed, and was passing in review the few rags hanging about the room. He ended by taking up the pair of trousers and the shawl, and searching the drawers, he added two chemises and a woman's loose jacket to the parcel; then, he threw the whole bundle into Gervaise's arms, saying:

"Here, go and pop this."

"Don't you want me to pop the children as well?" asked she. "Eh! If they lent on children, it would be a fine riddance!"

She went to the pawn-place, however. When she returned at the end of half an hour, she laid a hundred sou piece on the mantel-shelf, and added the ticket to the others, between the two candlesticks.

"That's what they gave me," said she. "I wanted six francs, but I couldn't manage it. Oh! they'll never ruin themselves. And there's always such a crowd there!"

Lantier did not pick up the five franc piece directly. He would rather that she got change, so as to leave her some of it. But he decided to slip it into his waistcoat pocket, when he noticed a small piece of ham wrapped up in paper, and the remains of a loaf on the chest of drawers.

"I didn't dare go to the milkwoman's, because we owe her a week," explained Gervaise. "But I shall be back early; you can get some bread and some chops whilst I'm away, and then we'll have lunch. Bring also a bottle of wine."

He did not say no. Their quarrel seemed to be forgotten. The young woman was completing her bundle of dirty clothes. But when she went to take Lantier's shirts and socks from the bottom of the trunk, he called to her to leave them alone.

"Leave my things, d'ye hear? I don't want 'em touched!"

"What's it you don't want touched?" she asked, rising up. "I suppose you don't mean to put these filthy things on again, do you? They must be washed."

She studied his boyishly handsome face, now so rigid that it seemed nothing could ever soften it. He angrily grabbed his things from her and threw them back into the trunk, saying:

"Just obey me, for once! I tell you I won't have 'em touched!"

"But why?" she asked, turning pale, a terrible suspicion crossing her mind. "You don't need your shirts now, you're not going away. What can it matter to you if I take them?"

He hesitated for an instant, embarrassed by the piercing glance she fixed upon him. "Why—why—" stammered he, "because you go and tell everyone that you keep me, that you wash and mend. Well! It worries me, there! Attend to your own business and I'll attend to mine, washerwomen don't work for dogs."

She supplicated, she protested she had never complained; but he roughly closed the trunk and sat down upon it, saying, "No!" to her face. He could surely do as he liked with what belonged to him! Then, to escape from the inquiring looks she leveled at him, he went and laid down on the bed again, saying that he was sleepy, and requesting her not to make his head ache with any more of her row. This time indeed, he seemed to fall asleep. Gervaise, for a while, remained undecided. She was tempted to kick the bundle of dirty clothes on one side, and to sit down and sew. But Lantier's regular breathing ended by reassuring her. She took the ball of blue and the piece of soap remaining from her last washing, and going up to the little ones who were quietly playing with some old corks in front of the window, she kissed them, and said in a low voice:

"Be very good, don't make any noise; papa's asleep."

When she left the room, Claude's and Etienne's gentle laughter alone disturbed the great silence beneath the blackened ceiling. It was ten o'clock. A ray of sunshine entered by the half open window.

On the Boulevard, Gervaise turned to the left, and followed the Rue Neuve de la Goutte-d'Or. As she passed Madame Fauconnier's shop, she slightly bowed her head. The wash-house she was bound for was situated towards the middle of the street, at the part where the roadway commenced to ascend.

The rounded, gray contours of the three large zinc wash tanks, studded with rivets, rose above the flat-roofed building. Behind them was the drying room, a high second story, closed in on all sides by narrow-slatted lattices so that the air could circulate freely, and through which laundry could be seen hanging on brass wires. The steam engine's smokestack exhaled puffs of white smoke to the right of the water tanks.

Gervaise was used to puddles and did not bother to tuck her skirts up before making her way through the doorway, which was cluttered with jars of bleaching water. She was already acquainted with the mistress of the wash-house, a delicate little woman with red, inflamed eyes, who sat in a small glazed closet with account books in front of her, bars of soap on shelves, balls of blue in glass bowls, and pounds of soda done up in packets; and, as she passed, she asked for her beetle and her scouring-brush, which she had left to be taken care of the last time she had done her washing there. Then, after obtaining her number, she entered the wash-house.

It was an immense shed, with large clear windows, and a flat ceiling, showing the beams supported on cast-iron pillars. Pale rays of light passed through the hot steam, which remained suspended like a milky fog. Smoke arose from certain corners, spreading about and covering the recesses with a bluish veil. A heavy moisture hung around, impregnated with a soapy odor, a damp insipid smell, continuous though at moments overpowered by the more potent fumes of the chemicals. Along the washing-places, on either side of the central alley, were rows of women, with bare arms and necks, and skirts tucked up, showing colored stockings and heavy lace-up shoes. They were beating furiously, laughing, leaning back to call out a word in the midst of the din, or stooping over their tubs, all of them brutal, ungainly, foul of speech, and soaked as though by a shower, with their flesh red and reeking.

All around the women continuously flowed a river from hot-water buckets emptied with a sudden splash, cold-water faucets left dripping, soap suds spattering, and the dripping from rinsed laundry which was hung up. It splashed their feet and drained away across the sloping flagstones. The din of the shouting and the rhythmic beating was joined by the patter of steady dripping. It was slightly muffled by the moisture-soaked ceiling. Meanwhile, the steam engine could be heard as it puffed and snorted ceaselessly while cloaked in its white mist. The dancing vibration of its flywheel seemed to regulate the volume of the noisy turbulence.

Gervaise passed slowly along the alley, looking to the right and left, carrying her laundry bundle under one arm, with one hip thrust high and limping more than usual. She was jostled by several women in the hubbub.

"This way, my dear!" cried Madame Boche, in her loud voice. Then, when the young woman had joined her at the very end on the left, the concierge, who was furiously rubbing a dirty sock, began to talk incessantly, without leaving off her work. "Put your things there, I've kept your place. Oh, I sha'n't be long over what I've got. Boche scarcely dirties his things at all. And you, you won't be long either, will you? Your bundle's quite a little one. Before twelve o'clock we shall have finished, and we can go off to lunch. I used to send my things to a laundress in the Rue Poulet, but she destroyed everything with her chlorine and her brushes; so now I do the washing myself. It's so much saved; it only costs the soap. I say, you should have put those shirts to soak. Those little rascals of children, on my word! One would think their bodies were covered with soot."

Gervaise, having undone her bundle, was spreading out the little ones' shirts, and as Madame Boche advised her to take a pailful of lye, she answered, "Oh, no! warm water will do. I'm used to it." She had sorted her laundry with several colored pieces to one side. Then, after filling her tub with four pails of cold water from the tap behind her, she plunged her pile of whites into it.

"You're used to it?" repeated Madame Boche. "You were a washerwoman in your native place, weren't you, my dear?"

Gervaise, with her sleeves pushed back, displayed the graceful arms of a young blonde, as yet scarcely reddened at the elbows, and started scrubbing her laundry. She spread a shirt out on the narrow rubbing board which was water-bleached and eroded by years of use. She rubbed soap into the shirt, turned it over, and soaped the other side. Before replying to Madame Boche she grasped her beetle and began to pound away so that her shouted phrases were punctuated with loud and rhythmic thumps.

"Yes, yes, a washerwoman—When I was ten—That's twelve years ago—We used to go to the river—It smelt nicer there than it does here—You should have seen, there was a nook under the trees, with clear running water—You know, at Plassans—Don't you know Plassans?—It's near Marseilles."

"How you go at it!" exclaimed Madame Boche, amazed at the strength of her blows. "You could flatten out a piece of iron with your little lady-like arms."

The conversation continued in a very high volume. At times, the concierge, not catching what was said, was obliged to lean forward. All the linen was beaten, and with a will! Gervaise plunged it into the tub again, and then took it out once more, each article separately, to rub it over with soap a second time and brush it. With one hand she held the article firmly on the plank; with the other, which grasped the short couch-grass brush, she extracted from the linen a dirty lather, which fell in long drips. Then, in the slight noise caused by the brush, the two women drew together, and conversed in a more intimate way.

"No, we're not married," resumed Gervaise. "I don't hide it. Lantier isn't so nice for any one to care to be his wife. If it weren't for the children! I was fourteen and he was eighteen when we had our first one. It happened in the usual way, you know how it is. I wasn't happy at home. Old man Macquart would kick me in the tail whenever he felt like it, for no reason at all. I had to have some fun outside. We might have been married, but—I forget why—our parents wouldn't consent."

She shook her hands, which were growing red in the white suds. "The water's awfully hard in Paris."

Madame Boche was now washing only very slowly. She kept leaving off, making her work last as long as she could, so as to remain there, to listen to that story, which her curiosity had been hankering to know for a fortnight past. Her mouth was half open in the midst of her big, fat face; her eyes, which were almost at the top of her head, were gleaming. She was thinking, with the satisfaction of having guessed right.

"That's it, the little one gossips too much. There's been a row."

Then, she observed out loud, "He isn't nice, then?"

"Don't mention it!" replied Gervaise. "He used to behave very well in the country; but, since we've been in Paris, he's been unbearable. I must tell you that his mother died last year and left him some money—about seventeen hundred francs. He would come to Paris, so, as old Macquart was forever knocking me about without warning, I consented to come away with him. We made the journey with two children. He was to set me up as a laundress, and work himself at his trade of a hatter. We should have been very happy; but, you see, Lantier's ambitious and a spendthrift, a fellow who only thinks of amusing himself. In short, he's not worth much. On arriving, we went to the Hotel Montmartre, in the Rue Montmartre. And then there were dinners, and cabs, and the theatre; a watch for himself and a silk dress for me, for he's not unkind when he's got the money. You understand, he went in for everything, and so well that at the end of two months we were cleaned out. It was then that we came to live at the Hotel Boncoeur, and that this horrible life began."

She interrupted herself. A lump had suddenly risen in her throat, and she could scarcely restrain her tears. She had finished brushing the things.

"I must go and fetch my hot water," she murmured.

But Madame Boche, greatly disappointed at this break off in the disclosures, called to the wash-house boy, who was passing, "My little Charles, kindly get madame a pail of hot water; she's in a hurry."

The youth took the bucket and brought it back filled. Gervaise paid him; it was a sou the pailful. She poured the hot water into the tub, and soaped the things a last time with her hands, leaning over them in a mass of steam, which deposited small beads of grey vapor in her light hair.

"Here put some soda in, I've got some by me," said the concierge, obligingly.

And she emptied into Gervaise's tub what remained of a bag of soda which she had brought with her. She also offered her some of the chemical water, but the young woman declined it; it was only good for grease and wine stains.

"I think he's rather a loose fellow," resumed Madame Boche, returning to Lantier, but without naming him.

Gervaise, bent almost double, her hands all shriveled, and thrust in amongst the clothes, merely tossed her head.

"Yes, yes," continued the other, "I have noticed several little things—" But she suddenly interrupted herself, as Gervaise jumped up, with a pale face, and staring wildly at her. Then she exclaimed, "Oh, no! I don't know anything! He likes to laugh a bit, I think, that's all. For instance, you know the two girls who lodge at my place, Adele and Virginie. Well; he larks about with 'em, but he just flirts for sport."

The young woman standing before her, her face covered with perspiration, the water dripping from her arms, continued to stare at her with a fixed and penetrating look. Then the concierge got excited, giving herself a blow on the chest, and pledging her word of honor, she cried:

"I know nothing, I mean it when I say so!"

Then calming herself, she added in a gentle voice, as if speaking to a person on whom loud protestations would have no effect, "I think he has a frank look about the eyes. He'll marry you, my dear, I'm sure of it."

Gervaise wiped her forehead with her wet hand. Shaking her head again, she pulled another garment out of the water. Both of them kept silence for a moment. The wash-house was quieting down, for eleven o'clock had struck. Half of the washerwomen were perched on the edge of their tubs, eating sausages between slices of bread and drinking from open bottles of wine. Only housewives who had come to launder small bundles of family linen were hurrying to finish.

Occasional beetle blows could still be heard amid the subdued laughter and gossip half-choked by the greedy chewing of jawbones. The steam engine never stopped. Its vibrant, snorting voice seemed to fill the entire hall, though not one of the women even heard it. It was like the breathing of the wash-house, its hot breath collecting under the ceiling rafters in an eternal floating mist.

The heat was becoming intolerable. Through the tall windows on the left sunlight was streaming in, touching the steamy vapors with opalescent tints of soft pinks and grayish blues. Charles went from window to window, letting down the heavy canvas awnings. Then he crossed to the shady side to open the ventilators. He was applauded by cries and hand clapping and a rough sort of gaiety spread around. Soon even the last of the beetle-pounding stopped.

With full mouths, the washerwomen could only make gestures. It became so quiet that the grating sound of the fireman shoveling coal into the engine's firebox could be heard at regular intervals from far at the other end.

Gervaise was washing her colored things in the hot water thick with lather, which she had kept for the purpose. When she had finished, she drew a trestle towards her and hung across it all the different articles; the drippings from which made bluish puddles on the floor; and she commenced rinsing. Behind her, the cold water tap was set running into a vast tub fixed to the ground, and across which were two wooden bars whereon to lay the clothes. High up in the air were two other bars for the things to finish dripping on.

"We're almost finished, and not a bad job," said Madame Boche. "I'll wait and help you wring all that."

"Oh! it's not worth while; I'm much obliged though," replied the young woman, who was kneading with her hands and sousing the colored things in some clean water. "If I'd any sheets, it would be another thing."

But she had, however, to accept the concierge's assistance. They were wringing between them, one at each end, a woolen skirt of a washed-out chestnut color, from which dribbled a yellowish water, when Madame Boche exclaimed:

"Why, there's tall Virginie! What has she come here to wash, when all her wardrobe that isn't on her would go into a pocket handkerchief?"

Gervaise jerked her head up. Virginie was a girl of her own age, taller than she was, dark and pretty in spite of her face being rather long and narrow. She had on an old black dress with flounces, and a red ribbon round her neck; and her hair was done up carefully, the chignon being enclosed in a blue silk net. She stood an instant in the middle of the central alley, screwing up her eyes as though seeking someone; then, when she caught sight of Gervaise, she passed close to her, erect, insolent, and with a swinging gait, and took a place in the same row, five tubs away from her.

"There's a freak for you!" continued Madame Boche in a lower tone of voice. "She never does any laundry, not even a pair of cuffs. A seamstress who doesn't even sew on a loose button! She's just like her sister, the brass burnisher, that hussy Adele, who stays away from her job two days out of three. Nobody knows who their folks are or how they make a living. Though, if I wanted to talk . . . What on earth is she scrubbing there? A filthy petticoat. I'll wager it's seen some lovely sights, that petticoat!"

Madame Boche was evidently trying to make herself agreeable to Gervaise. The truth was she often took a cup of coffee with Adele and Virginia, when the girls had any money. Gervaise did not answer, but hurried over her work with feverish hands. She had just prepared her blue in a little tub that stood on three legs. She dipped in the linen things, and shook them an instant at the bottom of the colored water, the reflection of which had a pinky tinge; and after wringing them lightly, she spread them out on the wooden bars up above. During the time she was occupied with this work, she made a point of turning her back on Virginie. But she heard her chuckles; she could feel her sidelong glances. Virginie appeared only to have come there to provoke her. At one moment, Gervaise having turned around, they both stared into each other's faces.

"Leave her alone," whispered Madame Boche. "You're not going to pull each other's hair out, I hope. When I tell you there's nothing to it! It isn't her, anyhow!"

At this moment, as the young woman was hanging up the last article of clothing, there was a sound of laughter at the door of the wash-house.

"Here are two brats who want their mamma!" cried Charles.

All the women leant forward. Gervaise recognized Claude and Etienne. As soon as they caught sight of her, they ran to her through the puddles, the heels of their unlaced shoes resounding on the flagstones. Claude, the eldest, held his little brother by the hand. The women, as they passed them, uttered little exclamations of affection as they noticed their frightened though smiling faces. And they stood there, in front of their mother, without leaving go of each other's hands, and holding their fair heads erect.

"Has papa sent you?" asked Gervaise.

But as she stooped to tie the laces of Etienne's shoes, she saw the key of their room on one of Claude's fingers, with the brass number hanging from it.

"Why, you've brought the key!" she said, greatly surprised. "What's that for?"

The child, seeing the key which he had forgotten on his finger, appeared to recollect, and exclaimed in his clear voice:

"Papa's gone away."

"He's gone to buy the lunch, and told you to come here to fetch me?"

Claude looked at his brother, hesitated, no longer recollecting. Then he resumed all in a breath: "Papa's gone away. He jumped off the bed, he put all the things in the trunk, he carried the trunk down to a cab. He's gone away."

Gervaise, who was squatting down, slowly rose to her feet, her face ghastly pale. She put her hands to her cheeks and temples, as though she felt her head was breaking; and she could find only these words, which she repeated twenty times in the same tone of voice:

"Ah! good heavens!—ah! good heavens!—ah! good heavens!"

Madame Boche, however, also questioned the child, quite delighted at the chance of hearing the whole story.

"Come, little one, you must tell us just what happened. It was he who locked the door and who told you to bring the key, wasn't it?" And, lowering her voice, she whispered in Claude's ear: "Was there a lady in the cab?"

The child again got confused. Then he recommenced his story in a triumphant manner: "He jumped off the bed, he put all the things in the trunk. He's gone away."

Then, when Madame Boche let him go, he drew his brother in front of the tap, and they amused themselves by turning on the water. Gervaise was unable to cry. She was choking, leaning back against her tub, her face still buried in her hands. Brief shudders rocked her body and she wailed out long sighs while pressing her hands tighter against her eyes, as though abandoning herself to the blackness of desolation, a dark, deep pit into which she seemed to be falling.

"Come, my dear, pull yourself together!" murmured Madame Boche.

"If you only knew! If you only knew!" said she at length very faintly. "He sent me this morning to pawn my shawl and my chemises to pay for that cab."

And she burst out crying. The memory of the events of that morning and of her trip to the pawn-place tore from her the sobs that had been choking her throat. That abominable trip to the pawn-place was the thing that hurt most in all her sorrow and despair. Tears were streaming down her face but she didn't think of using her handkerchief.

"Be reasonable, do be quiet, everyone's looking at you," Madame Boche, who hovered round her, kept repeating. "How can you worry yourself so much on account of a man? You loved him, then, all the same, did you, my poor darling? A little while ago you were saying all sorts of things against him; and now you're crying for him, and almost breaking your heart. Dear me, how silly we all are!"

Then she became quite maternal.

"A pretty little woman like you! Can it be possible? One may tell you everything now, I suppose. Well! You recollect when I passed under your window, I already had my suspicions. Just fancy, last night, when Adele came home, I heard a man's footsteps with hers. So I thought I would see who it was. I looked up the staircase. The fellow was already on the second landing; but I certainly recognized Monsieur Lantier's overcoat. Boche, who was on the watch this morning, saw him tranquilly nod adieu. He was with Adele, you know. Virginie has a situation now, where she goes twice a week. Only it's highly imprudent all the same, for they've only one room and an alcove, and I can't very well say where Virginie managed to sleep."

She interrupted herself an instant, turned round, and then resumed, subduing her loud voice:

"She's laughing at seeing you cry, that heartless thing over there. I'd stake my life that her washing's all a pretence. She's packed off the other two, and she's come here so as to tell them how you take it."

Gervaise removed her hands from her face and looked. When she beheld Virginie in front of her, amidst three or four women, speaking low and staring at her, she was seized with a mad rage. Her arms in front of her, searching the ground, she stumbled forward a few paces. Trembling all over, she found a bucket full of water, grabbed it with both hands, and emptied it at Virginie.

"The virago!" yelled tall Virginie.

She had stepped back, and her boots alone got wet. The other women, who for some minutes past had all been greatly upset by Gervaise's tears, jostled each other in their anxiety to see the fight. Some, who were finishing their lunch, got on the tops of their tubs. Others hastened forward, their hands smothered with soap. A ring was formed.

"Ah! the virago!" repeated tall Virginie. "What's the matter with her? She's mad!"

Gervaise, standing on the defensive, her chin thrust out, her features convulsed, said nothing, not having yet acquired the Paris gift of street gab. The other continued:

"Get out! This girl's tired of wallowing about in the country; she wasn't twelve years old when the soldiers were at her. She even lost her leg serving her country. That leg's rotting off."

The lookers-on burst out laughing. Virginie, seeing her success, advanced a couple of steps, drawing herself up to her full height, and yelling louder than ever:

"Here! Come a bit nearer, just to see how I'll settle you! Don't you come annoying us here. Do I even know her, the hussy? If she'd wetted me, I'd have pretty soon shown her battle, as you'd have seen. Let her just say what I've ever done to her. Speak, you vixen; what's been done to you?"

"Don't talk so much," stammered Gervaise. "You know well enough. Some one saw my husband last night. And shut up, because if you don't I'll most certainly strangle you."

"Her husband! That's a good one! As if cripples like her had husbands! If he's left you it's not my fault. Surely you don't think I've stolen him, do you? He was much too good for you and you made him sick. Did you keep him on a leash? Has anyone here seen her husband? There's a reward."

The laughter burst forth again. Gervaise contented herself with continually murmuring in a low tone of voice:

"You know well enough, you know well enough. It's your sister. I'll strangle her—your sister."

"Yes, go and try it on with my sister," resumed Virginie sneeringly. "Ah! it's my sister! That's very likely. My sister looks a trifle different to you; but what's that to me? Can't one come and wash one's clothes in peace now? Just dry up, d'ye hear, because I've had enough of it!"

But it was she who returned to the attack, after giving five or six strokes with her beetle, intoxicated by the insults she had been giving utterance to, and worked up into a passion. She left off and recommenced again, speaking in this way three times:

"Well, yes! it's my sister. There now, does that satisfy you? They adore each other. You should just see them bill and coo! And he's left you with your children. Those pretty kids with scabs all over their faces! You got one of them from a gendarme, didn't you? And you let three others die because you didn't want to pay excess baggage on your journey. It's your Lantier who told us that. Ah! he's been telling some fine things; he'd had enough of you!"

"You dirty jade! You dirty jade! You dirty jade!" yelled Gervaise, beside herself, and again seized with a furious trembling. She turned round, looking once more about the ground; and only observing the little tub, she seized hold of it by the legs, and flung the whole of the bluing at Virginie's face.

"The beast! She's spoilt my dress!" cried the latter, whose shoulder was sopping wet and whose left hand was dripping blue. "Just wait, you wretch!"

In her turn she seized a bucket, and emptied it over Gervaise. Then a formidable battle began. They both ran along the rows of tubs, seized hold of the pails that were full, and returned to dash the contents at each other's heads. And each deluge was accompanied by a volley of words. Gervaise herself answered now:

"There, you scum! You got it that time. It'll help to cool you."

"Ah! the carrion! That's for your filth. Wash yourself for once in your life."

"Yes, yes, I'll wash the salt out of you, you cod!"

"Another one! Brush your teeth, fix yourself up for your post to-night at the corner of the Rue Belhomme."

They ended by having to refill the buckets at the water taps, continuing to insult each other the while. The initial bucketfuls were so poorly aimed as to scarcely reach their targets, but they soon began to splash each other in earnest. Virginie was the first to receive a bucketful in the face. The water ran down, soaking her back and front. She was still staggering when another caught her from the side, hitting her left ear and drenching her chignon which then came unwound into a limp, bedraggled string of hair.

Gervaise was hit first in the legs. One pail filled her shoes full of water and splashed up to her thighs. Two more wet her even higher. Soon both of them were soaked from top to bottom and it was impossible to count the hits. Their clothes were plastered to their bodies and they looked shrunken. Water was dripping everywhere as from umbrellas in a rainstorm.

"They look jolly funny!" said the hoarse voice of one of the women.

Everyone in the wash-house was highly amused. A good space was left to the combatants, as nobody cared to get splashed. Applause and jokes circulated in the midst of the sluice-like noise of the buckets emptied in rapid succession! On the floor the puddles were running one into another, and the two women were wading in them up to their ankles. Virginie, however, who had been meditating a treacherous move, suddenly seized hold of a pail of lye, which one of her neighbors had left there and threw it. The same cry arose from all. Everyone thought Gervaise was scalded; but only her left foot had been slightly touched. And, exasperated by the pain, she seized a bucket, without troubling herself to fill it this time, and threw it with all her might at the legs of Virginie, who fell to the ground. All the women spoke together.

"She's broken one of her limbs!"

"Well, the other tried to cook her!"

"She's right, after all, the blonde one, if her man's been taken from her!"

Madame Boche held up her arms to heaven, uttering all sorts of exclamations. She had prudently retreated out of the way between two tubs; and the children, Claude and Etienne, crying, choking, terrified, clung to her dress with the continuous cry of "Mamma! Mamma!" broken by their sobs. When she saw Virginie fall she hastened forward, and tried to pull Gervaise away by her skirt, repeating the while,

"Come now, go home! Be reasonable. On my word, it's quite upset me. Never was such a butchery seen before."

But she had to draw back and seek refuge again between the two tubs, with the children. Virginie had just flown at Gervaise's throat. She squeezed her round the neck, trying to strangle her. The latter freed herself with a violent jerk, and in her turn hung on to the other's hair, as though she was trying to pull her head off. The battle was silently resumed, without a cry, without an insult. They did not seize each other round the body, they attacked each other's faces with open hands and clawing fingers, pinching, scratching whatever they caught hold of. The tall, dark girl's red ribbon and blue silk hair net were torn off. The body of her dress, giving way at the neck, displayed a large portion of her shoulder; whilst the blonde, half stripped, a sleeve gone from her loose white jacket without her knowing how, had a rent in her underlinen, which exposed to view the naked line of her waist. Shreds of stuff flew in all directions. It was from Gervaise that the first blood was drawn, three long scratches from the mouth to the chin; and she sought to protect her eyes, shutting them at every grab the other made, for fear of having them torn out. No blood showed on Virginie as yet. Gervaise aimed at her ears, maddened at not being able to reach them. At length she succeeded in seizing hold of one of the earrings—an imitation pear in yellow glass—which she pulled out and slit the ear, and the blood flowed.

"They're killing each other! Separate them, the vixens!" exclaimed several voices.

The other women had drawn nearer. They formed themselves into two camps. Some were cheering the combatants on as the others were trembling and turning their heads away saying that it was making them sick. A large fight nearly broke out between the two camps as the women called each other names and brandished their fists threateningly. Three loud slaps rang out.

Madame Boche, meanwhile, was trying to discover the wash-house boy.

"Charles! Charles! Wherever has he got to?"

And she found him in the front rank, looking on with his arms folded. He was a big fellow, with an enormous neck. He was laughing and enjoying the sight of the skin which the two women displayed. The little blonde was as fat as a quail. It would be fun if her chemise burst open.

"Why," murmured he, blinking his eye, "she's got a strawberry birthmark under her arm."

"What! You're there!" cried Madame Boche, as she caught sight of him. "Just come and help us separate them. You can easily separate them, you can!"

"Oh, no! thank you, not if I know it," said he coolly. "To get my eye scratched like I did the other day, I suppose! I'm not here for that sort of thing; I have enough to do without that. Don't be afraid, a little bleeding does 'em good; it'll soften 'em."

The concierge then talked of fetching the police; but the mistress of the wash-house, the delicate young woman with the red, inflamed eyes, would not allow her to do this. She kept saying:

"No, no, I won't; it'll compromise my establishment."

The struggle on the ground continued. All on a sudden, Virginie raised herself up on her knees. She had just gotten hold of a beetle and held it on high. She had a rattle in her throat and in an altered voice, she exclaimed,

"Here's something that'll settle you! Get your dirty linen ready!"

Gervaise quickly thrust out her hand, and also seized a beetle, and held it up like a club; and she too spoke in a choking voice,

"Ah! you want to wash. Let me get hold of your skin that I may beat it into dish-cloths!"

For a moment they remained there, on their knees, menacing each other. Their hair all over their faces, their breasts heaving, muddy, swelling with rage, they watched one another, as they waited and took breath. Gervaise gave the first blow. Her beetle glided off Virginie's shoulder, and she at once threw herself on one side to avoid the latter's beetle, which grazed her hip. Then, warming to their work they struck at each other like washerwomen beating clothes, roughly, and in time. Whenever there was a hit, the sound was deadened, so that one might have thought it a blow in a tub full of water. The other women around them no longer laughed. Several had gone off saying that it quite upset them; those who remained stretched out their necks, their eyes lighted up with a gleam of cruelty, admiring the pluck displayed. Madame Boche had led Claude and Etienne away, and one could hear at the other end of the building the sound of their sobs, mingled with the sonorous shocks of the two beetles. But Gervaise suddenly yelled. Virginie had caught her a whack with all her might on her bare arm, just above the elbow. A large red mark appeared, the flesh at once began to swell. Then she threw herself upon Virginie, and everyone thought she was going to beat her to death.

"Enough! Enough!" was cried on all sides.

Her face bore such a terrible expression, that no one dared approach her. Her strength seemed to have increased tenfold. She seized Virginie round the waist, bent her down and pressed her face against the flagstones. Raising her beetle she commenced beating as she used to beat at Plassans, on the banks of the Viorne, when her mistress washed the clothes of the garrison. The wood seemed to yield to the flesh with a damp sound. At each whack a red weal marked the white skin.

"Oh, oh!" exclaimed the boy Charles, opening his eyes to their full extent and gloating over the sight.

Laughter again burst forth from the lookers-on, but soon the cry, "Enough! Enough!" recommenced. Gervaise heard not, neither did she tire. She examined her work, bent over it, anxious not to leave a dry place. She wanted to see the whole of that skin beaten, covered with contusions. And she talked, seized with a ferocious gaiety, recalling a washerwoman's song,

"Bang! Bang! Margot at her tub.
Bang! Bang! Beating rub-a-dub.
Bang! Bang! Tries to wash her heart.
Bang! Bang! Black with grief to part."

And then she resumed,

"That's for you, that's for your sister.
That's for Lantier.
When you next see them,
You can give them that.
Attention! I'm going to begin again.
That's for Lantier, that's for your sister.
That's for you.
Bang! Bang! Margot at her tub.
Bang! Bang! Beating rub-a-dub—"

The others were obliged to drag Virginie away from her. The tall, dark girl, her face bathed in tears and purple with shame, picked up her things and hastened away. She was vanquished. Gervaise slipped on the sleeve of her jacket again, and fastened up her petticoats. Her arm pained her a good deal, and she asked Madame Boche to place her bundle of clothes on her shoulder. The concierge referred to the battle, spoke of her emotions, and talked of examining the young woman's person, just to see.

"You may, perhaps, have something broken. I heard a tremendous blow."

But Gervaise wanted to go home. She made no reply to the pitying remarks and noisy ovation of the other women who surrounded her, erect in their aprons. When she was laden she gained the door, where the children awaited her.

"Two hours, that makes two sous," said the mistress of the wash-house, already back at her post in the glazed closet.

Why two sous? She no longer understood that she was asked to pay for her place there. Then she gave the two sous; and limping very much beneath the weight of the wet clothes on her shoulder, the water dripping from off her, her elbow black and blue, her cheek covered with blood, she went off, dragging Claude and Etienne with her bare arms, whilst they trotted along on either side of her, still trembling, and their faces besmeared with their tears.

Once she was gone, the wash-house resumed its roaring tumult. The washerwomen had eaten their bread and drunk their wine. Their faces were lit up and their spirits enlivened by the fight between Gervaise and Virginie.

The long lines of tubs were astir again with the fury of thrashing arms, of craggy profiles, of marionettes with bent backs and slumping shoulders that twisted and jerked violently as though on hinges. Conversations went on from one end to the other in loud voices. Laughter and coarse remarks crackled through the ceaseless gurgling of the water. Faucets were sputtering, buckets spilling, rivulets flowing underneath the rows of washboards. Throughout the huge shed rising wisps of steam reflected a reddish tint, pierced here and there by disks of sunlight, golden globes that had leaked through holes in the awnings. The air was stiflingly warm and odorous with soap.

Suddenly the hall was filled with a white mist. The huge copper lid of the lye-water kettle was rising mechanically along a notched shaft, and from the gaping copper hollow within its wall of bricks came whirling clouds of vapor. Meanwhile, at one side the drying machines were hard at work; within their cast-iron cylinders bundles of laundry were being wrung dry by the centrifugal force of the steam engine, which was still puffing, steaming, jolting the wash-house with the ceaseless labor of its iron limbs.

When Gervaise turned into the entry of the Hotel Boncoeur, her tears again mastered her. It was a dark, narrow passage, with a gutter for the dirty water running alongside the wall; and the stench which she again encountered there caused her to think of the fortnight she had passed in the place with Lantier—a fortnight of misery and quarrels, the recollection of which was now a bitter regret. It seemed to bring her abandonment home to her.

Upstairs the room was bare, in spite of the sunshine which entered through the open window. That blaze of light, that kind of dancing golden dust, exposed the lamentable condition of the blackened ceiling, and of the walls half denuded of paper, all the more. The only thing left hanging in the room was a woman's small neckerchief, twisted like a piece of string. The children's bedstead, drawn into the middle of the apartment, displayed the chest of drawers, the open drawers of which exposed their emptiness. Lantier had washed himself and had used up the last of the pomatum—two sous' worth of pomatum in a playing card; the greasy water from his hands filled the basin. And he had forgotten nothing. The corner which until then had been filled by the trunk seemed to Gervaise an immense empty space. Even the little mirror which hung on the window-fastening was gone. When she made this discovery, she had a presentiment. She looked on the mantel-piece. Lantier had taken away the pawn tickets; the pink bundle was no longer there, between the two odd zinc candlesticks.

She hung her laundry over the back of a chair and just stood there, gazing around at the furniture. She was so dulled and bewildered that she could no longer cry. She had only one sou left. Then, hearing Claude and Etienne laughing merrily by the window, their troubles already forgotten, she went to them and put her arms about them, losing herself for a moment in contemplation of that long gray avenue where, that very morning, she had watched the awakening of the working population, of the immense work-shop of Paris.

At this hour immense heat was rising from the pavement and from all the furnaces in the factories, setting alight a reflecting oven over the city and beyond the octroi wall. Out upon this very pavement, into this furnace blast, she had been tossed, alone with her little ones. As she glanced up and down the boulevard, she was seized with a dull dread that her life would be fixed there forever, between a slaughter-house and a hospital.

CHAPTER II.

Three weeks later, towards half-past eleven, one beautiful sunshiny day, Gervaise and Coupeau, the zinc-worker, were each partaking of a plum preserved in brandy, at "l'Assommoir" kept by Pere Colombe. Coupeau, who had been smoking a cigarette on the pavement, had prevailed on her to go inside as she returned from taking home a customer's washing; and her big square laundress's basket was on the floor beside her, behind the little zinc covered table.

Pere Colombe's l'Assommoir was at the corner of Rue des Poissonniers and Boulevard de Rochechouart. The sign, in tall blue letters stretching from one end to the other said: Distillery. Two dusty oleanders planted in half casks stood beside the doorway. A long bar with its tin measuring cups was on the left as you entered. The large room was decorated with casks painted a gay yellow, bright with varnish, and gleaming with copper taps and hoops.

On the shelves above the bar were liquor bottles, jars of fruit preserved in brandy, and flasks of all shapes. They completely covered the wall and were reflected in the mirror behind the bar as colorful spots of apple green, pale gold, and soft brown. The main feature of the establishment, however, was the distilling apparatus. It was at the rear, behind an oak railing in a glassed-in area. The customers could watch its functioning, long-necked still-pots, copper worms disappearing underground, a devil's kitchen alluring to drink-sodden work men in search of pleasant dreams.

L'Assommoir was nearly empty at the lunch hour. Pere Colombe, a heavy man of forty, was serving a ten year old girl who had asked him to place four sous' worth of brandy into her cup. A shaft of sunlight came through the entrance to warm the floor which was always damp from the smokers' spitting. From everything, the casks, the bar, the entire room, a liquorish odor arose, an alcoholic aroma which seemed to thicken and befuddle the dust motes dancing in the sunlight.

Coupeau was making another cigarette. He was very neat, in a short blue linen blouse and cap, and was laughing and showing his white teeth. With a projecting under jaw and a slightly snub nose, he had handsome chestnut eyes, and the face of a jolly dog and a thorough good fellow. His coarse curly hair stood erect. His skin still preserved the softness of his twenty-six years. Opposite to him, Gervaise, in a thin black woolen dress, and bareheaded, was finishing her plum which she held by the stalk between the tips of her fingers. They were close to the street, at the first of the four tables placed alongside the barrels facing the bar.

When the zinc-worker had lit his cigarette, he placed his elbows on the table, thrust his face forward, and for an instant looked without speaking at the young woman, whose pretty fair face had that day the milky transparency of china. Then, alluding to a matter known to themselves alone, and already discussed between them, he simply asked in a low voice:

"So it's to be 'no'? you say 'no'?"

"Oh! most decidedly 'no' Monsieur Coupeau," quietly replied Gervaise with a smile. "I hope you're not going to talk to me about that here. You know you promised me you would be reasonable. Had I known, I wouldn't have let you treat me."

Coupeau kept silence, looking at her intently with a boldness. She sat still, at ease and friendly. At the end of a brief silence she added:

"You can't really mean it. I'm an old woman; I've a big boy eight years old. Whatever could we two do together?"

"Why!" murmured Coupeau, blinking his eyes, "what the others do, of course, get married!"

She made a gesture of feeling annoyed. "Oh! do you think it's always pleasant? One can very well see you've never seen much of living. No, Monsieur Coupeau, I must think of serious things. Burdening oneself never leads to anything, you know! I've two mouths at home which are never tired of swallowing, I can tell you! How do you suppose I can bring up my little ones, if I only sit here talking indolently? And listen, besides that, my misfortune has been a famous lesson to me. You know I don't care a bit about men now. They won't catch me again for a long while."

She spoke with such cool objectivity that it was clear she had resolved this in her mind, turning it about thoroughly.

Coupeau was deeply moved and kept repeating: "I feel so sorry for you. It causes me a great deal of pain."

"Yes, I know that," resumed she, "and I am sorry, Monsieur Coupeau. But you mustn't take it to heart. If I had any idea of enjoying myself, mon Dieu!, I would certainly rather be with you than anyone else. You're a good boy and gentle. Only, where's the use, as I've no inclination to wed? I've been for the last fortnight, now, at Madame Fauconnier's. The children go to school. I've work, I'm contented. So the best is to remain as we are, isn't it?"

And she stooped down to take her basket.

"You're making me talk; they must be expecting me at the shop. You'll easily find someone else prettier than I, Monsieur Coupeau, and who won't have two boys to drag about with her."

He looked at the clock inserted in the frame-work of the mirror, and made her sit down again, exclaiming:

"Don't be in such a hurry! It's only eleven thirty-five. I've still twenty-five minutes. You don't have to be afraid that I shall do anything foolish; there's the table between us. So you detest me so much that you won't stay and have a little chat with me."

She put her basket down again, so as not to disoblige him; and they conversed like good friends. She had eaten her lunch before going out with the laundry. He had gulped down his soup and beef hurriedly to be able to wait for her. All the while she chatted amiably, Gervaise kept looking out the window at the activity on the street. It was now unusually crowded with the lunch time rush.

Everywhere were hurried steps, swinging arms, and pushing elbows. Some late comers, hungry and angry at being kept extra long at the job, rushed across the street into the bakery. They emerged with a loaf of bread and went three doors farther to the Two-Headed Calf to gobble down a six-sou meat dish.

Next door to the bakery was a grocer who sold fried potatoes and mussels cooked with parsley. A procession of girls went in to get hot potatoes wrapped in paper and cups of steaming mussels. Other pretty girls bought bunches of radishes. By leaning a bit, Gervaise could see into the sausage shop from which children issued, holding a fried chop, a sausage or a piece of hot blood pudding wrapped in greasy paper. The street was always slick with black mud, even in clear weather. A few laborers had already finished their lunch and were strolling aimlessly about, their open hands slapping their thighs, heavy from eating, slow and peaceful amid the hurrying crowd. A group formed in front of the door of l'Assommoir.

"Say, Bibi-the-Smoker," demanded a hoarse voice, "aren't you going to buy us a round of vitriol?"

Five laborers came in and stood by the bar.

"Ah! Here's that thief, Pere Colombe!" the voice continued. "We want the real old stuff, you know. And full sized glasses, too."

Pere Colombe served them as three more laborers entered. More blue smocks gathered on the street corner and some pushed their way into the establishment.

"You're foolish! You only think of the present," Gervaise was saying to Coupeau. "Sure, I loved him, but after the disgusting way in which he left me—"

They were talking of Lantier. Gervaise had not seen him again; she thought he was living with Virginie's sister at La Glaciere, in the house of that friend who was going to start a hat factory. She had no thought of running after him. She had been so distressed at first that she had thought of drowning herself in the river. But now that she had thought about it, everything seemed to be for the best. Lantier went through money so fast, that she probably never could have raised her children properly. Oh, she'd let him see his children, all right, if he bothered to come round. But as far as she was concerned, she didn't want him to touch her, not even with his finger tips.

She told all this to Coupeau just as if her plan of life was well settled. Meanwhile, Coupeau never forgot his desire to possess her. He made a jest of everything she said, turning it into ribaldry and asking some very direct questions about Lantier. But he proceeded so gaily and which such a smile that she never thought of being offended.

"So, you're the one who beat him," said he at length. "Oh! you're not kind. You just go around whipping people."

She interrupted him with a hearty laugh. It was true, though, she had whipped Virginie's tall carcass. She would have delighted in strangling someone on that day. She laughed louder than ever when Coupeau told her that Virginie, ashamed at having shown so much cowardice, had left the neighborhood. Her face, however, preserved an expression of childish gentleness as she put out her plump hands, insisting she wouldn't even harm a fly.

She began to tell Coupeau about her childhood at Plassans. She had never cared overmuch for men; they had always bored her. She was fourteen when she got involved with Lantier. She had thought it was nice because he said he was her husband and she had enjoyed playing a housewife. She was too soft-hearted and too weak. She always got passionately fond of people who caused her trouble later. When she loved a man, she wasn't thinking of having fun in the present; she was dreaming about being happy and living together forever.

And as Coupeau, with a chuckle, spoke of her two children, saying they hadn't come from under a bolster, she slapped his fingers; she added that she was, no doubt made on the model of other women; women thought of their home, slaved to keep the place clean and tidy, and went to bed too tired at night not to go to sleep at once. Besides, she resembled her mother, a stout laboring woman who died at her work and who had served as beast of burden to old Macquart for more than twenty years. Her mother's shoulders had been heavy enough to smash through doors, but that didn't prevent her from being soft-hearted and madly attracted to people. And if she limped a little, she no doubt owed that to the poor woman, whom old Macquart used to belabor with blows. Her mother had told her about the times when Macquart came home drunk and brutally bruised her. She had probably been born with her lame leg as a result of one of those times.

"Oh! it's scarcely anything, it's hardly perceptible," said Coupeau gallantly.

She shook her head; she knew well enough that it could be seen; at forty she would look broken in two. Then she added gently, with a slight laugh: "It's a funny fancy of yours to fall in love with a cripple."

With his elbows still on the table, he thrust his face closer to hers and began complimenting her in rather dubious language as though to intoxicate her with his words. But she kept shaking her head "no," and didn't allow herself to be tempted although she was flattered by the tone of his voice. While listening, she kept looking out the window, seeming to be fascinated by the interesting crowd of people passing.

The shops were now almost empty. The grocer removed his last panful of fried potatoes from the stove. The sausage man arranged the dishes scattered on his counter. Great bearded workmen were as playful as young boys, clumping along in their hobnailed boots. Other workmen were smoking, staring up into the sky and blinking their eyes. Factory bells began to ring in the distance, but the workers, in no hurry, relit their pipes. Later, after being tempted by one wineshop after another, they finally decided to return to their jobs, but were still dragging their feet.

Gervaise amused herself by watching three workmen, a tall fellow and two short ones who turned to look back every few yards; they ended by descending the street, and came straight to Pere Colombe's l'Assommoir.

"Ah, well," murmured she, "there're three fellows who don't seem inclined for work!"

"Why!" said Coupeau, "I know the tall one, it's My-Boots, a comrade of mine."

Pere Colombe's l'Assommoir was now full. You had to shout to be heard. Fists often pounded on the bar, causing the glasses to clink. Everyone was standing, hands crossed over belly or held behind back. The drinking groups crowded close to one another. Some groups, by the casks, had to wait a quarter of an hour before being able to order their drinks of Pere Colombe.

"Hallo! It's that aristocrat, Young Cassis!" cried My-Boots, bringing his hand down roughly on Coupeau's shoulder. "A fine gentleman, who smokes paper, and wears shirts! So we want to do the grand with our sweetheart; we stand her little treats!"

"Shut up! Don't bother me!" replied Coupeau, greatly annoyed.

But the other added, with a chuckle, "Right you are! We know what's what, my boy. Muffs are muffs, that's all!"

He turned his back after leering terribly as he looked at Gervaise. The latter drew back, feeling rather frightened. The smoke from the pipes, the strong odor of all those men, ascended in the air, already foul with the fumes of alcohol; and she felt a choking sensation in her throat, and coughed slightly.

"Oh, what a horrible thing it is to drink!" said she in a low voice.

And she related that formerly at Plassans she used to drink anisette with her mother. But on one occasion it nearly killed her, and that disgusted her with it; now, she could never touch any liqueurs.

"You see," added she, pointing to her glass, "I've eaten my plum; only I must leave the juice, because it would make me ill."

For himself, Coupeau couldn't understand how anyone could drink glass after glass of cheap brandy. A brandied plum occasionally could not hurt, but as for cheap brandy, absinthe and the other strong stuff, no, not for him, no matter how much his comrades teased him about it. He stayed out on the sidewalk when his friends went into low establishments. Coupeau's father had smashed his head open one day when he fell from the eaves of No. 25 on Rue Coquenard. He was drunk. This memory keep Coupeau's entire family from the drink. Every time Coupeau passed that spot, he thought he would rather lick up water from the gutter than accept a free drink in a bar. He would always say: "In our trade, you have to have steady legs."

Gervaise had taken up her basket again. She did not rise from her seat however, but held the basket on her knees, with a vacant look in her eyes and lost in thought, as though the young workman's words had awakened within her far-off thoughts of existence. And she said again, slowly, and without any apparent change of manner:

"Mon Dieu! I'm not ambitious; I don't ask for much. My desire is to work in peace, always to have bread to eat and a decent place to sleep in, you know; with a bed, a table, and two chairs, nothing more. If I can, I'd like to raise my children to be good citizens. Also, I'd like not to be beaten up, if I ever again live with a man. It's not my idea of amusement." She pondered, thinking if there was anything else she wanted, but there wasn't anything of importance. Then, after a moment she went on, "Yes, when one reaches the end, one might wish to die in one's bed. For myself, having trudged through life, I should like to die in my bed, in my own home."

And she rose from her seat. Coupeau, who cordially approved her wishes, was already standing up, anxious about the time. But they did not leave yet. Gervaise was curious enough to go to the far end of the room for a look at the big still behind the oak railing. It was chugging away in the little glassed-in courtyard. Coupeau explained its workings to her, pointing at the different parts of the machinery, showing her the trickling of the small stream of limpid alcohol. Not a single gay puff of steam was coming forth from the endless coils. The breathing could barely be heard. It sounded muffled as if from underground. It was like a sombre worker, performing dark deeds in the bright daylight, strong but silent.

My-Boots, accompanied by his two comrades, came to lean on the railing until they could get a place at the bar. He laughed, looking at the machine. Tonnerre de Dieu, that's clever. There's enough stuff in its big belly to last for weeks. He wouldn't mind if they just fixed the end of the tube in his mouth, so he could feel the fiery spirits flowing down to his heels like a river. It would be better than the tiny sips doled out by Pere Colombe! His two comrades laughed with him, saying that My-Boots was quite a guy after all.

The huge still continued to trickle forth its alcoholic sweat. Eventually it would invade the bar, flow out along the outer Boulevards, and inundate the immense expanse of Paris.

Gervaise stepped back, shivering. She tried to smile as she said:

"It's foolish, but that still and the liquor gives me the creeps."

Then, returning to the idea she nursed of a perfect happiness, she resumed: "Now, ain't I right? It's much the nicest isn't it—to have plenty of work, bread to eat, a home of one's own, and to be able to bring up one's children and to die in one's bed?"

"And never to be beaten," added Coupeau gaily. "But I would never beat you, if you would only try me, Madame Gervaise. You've no cause for fear. I don't drink and then I love you too much. Come, shall it be marriage? I'll get you divorced and make you my wife."

He was speaking low, whispering at the back of her neck while she made her way through the crowd of men with her basket held before her. She kept shaking her head "no." Yet she turned around to smile at him, apparently happy to know that he never drank. Yes, certainly, she would say "yes" to him, except she had already sworn to herself never to start up with another man. Eventually they reached the door and went out.

When they left, l'Assommoir was packed to the door, spilling its hubbub of rough voices and its heavy smell of vitriol into the street. My-Boots could be heard railing at Pere Colombe, calling him a scoundrel and accusing him of only half filling his glass. He didn't have to come in here. He'd never come back. He suggested to his comrades a place near the Barriere Saint-Denis where you drank good stuff straight.

"Ah," sighed Gervaise when they reached the sidewalk. "You can breathe out here. Good-bye, Monsieur Coupeau, and thank you. I must hurry now."

He seized her hand as she started along the boulevard, insisting, "Take a walk with me along Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. It's not much farther for you. I've got to see my sister before going back to work. We'll keep each other company."

In the end, Gervaise agreed and they walked beside each other along the Rue des Poissonniers, although she did not take his arm. He told her about his family. His mother, an old vest-maker, now had to do housekeeping because her eyesight was poor. Her birthday was the third of last month and she was sixty-two. He was the youngest. One of his sisters, a widow of thirty-six, worked in a flower shop and lived in the Batignolles section, on Rue des Moines. The other sister was thirty years old now. She had married a deadpan chainmaker named Lorilleux. That's where he was going now. They lived in a big tenement on the left side. He ate with them in the evenings; it saved a bit for all of them. But he had been invited out this evening and he was going to tell her not to expect him.

Gervaise, who was listening to him, suddenly interrupted him to ask, with a smile: "So you're called 'Young Cassis,' Monsieur Coupeau?"

"Oh!" replied he, "it's a nickname my mates have given me because I generally drink 'cassis' when they force me to accompany them to the wineshop. It's no worse to be called Young Cassis than My-Boots, is it?"

"Of course not. Young Cassis isn't an ugly name," observed the young woman.

And she questioned him about his work. He was still working there, behind the octroi wall at the new hospital. Oh! there was no want of work, he would not be finished there for a year at least. There were yards and yards of gutters!

"You know," said he, "I can see the Hotel Boncoeur when I'm up there. Yesterday you were at the window, and I waved my arms, but you didn't notice me."

They had already gone about a hundred paces along the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, when he stood still and raising his eyes, said:

"That's the house. I was born farther on, at No. 22. But this house is, all the same, a fine block of masonry! It's as big as a barrack inside!"

Gervaise looked up, examining the facade. On the street side, the tenement had five stories, each with fifteen windows, whose black shutters with their broken slats gave an air of desolation to the wide expanse of wall. Four shops occupied the ground floor. To the right of the entrance, a large, greasy hash house, and to the left, a coal dealer, a notions seller, and an umbrella merchant. The building appeared even larger than it was because it had on each side a small, low building which seemed to lean against it for support. This immense, squared-off building was outlined against the sky. Its unplastered side walls were as bare as prison walls, except for rows of roughly jutting stones which suggested jaws full of decayed teeth yawning vacantly.

Gervaise was gazing at the entrance with interest. The high, arched doorway rose to the second floor and opened onto a deep porch, at the end of which could be seen the pale daylight of a courtyard. This entranceway was paved like the street, and down the center flowed a streamlet of pink-stained water.

"Come in," said Coupeau, "no one will eat you."

Gervaise wanted to wait for him in the street. However, she could not resist going through the porch as far as the concierge's room on the right. And there, on the threshold, she raised her eyes. Inside, the building was six stories high, with four identical plain walls enclosing the broad central court. The drab walls were corroded by yellowish spots and streaked by drippings from the roof gutters. The walls went straight up to the eaves with no molding or ornament except the angles on the drain pipes at each floor. Here the sink drains added their stains. The glass window panes resembled murky water. Mattresses of checkered blue ticking were hanging out of several windows to air. Clothes lines stretched from other windows with family washing hanging to dry. On a third floor line was a baby's diaper, still implanted with filth. This crowded tenement was bursting at the seams, spilling out poverty and misery through every crevice.

Each of the four walls had, at ground level, a narrow entrance, plastered without a trace of woodwork. This opened into a vestibule containing a dirt-encrusted staircase which spiraled upward. They were each labeled with one of the first four letters of the alphabet painted on the wall.

Several large work-shops with weather-blackened skylights were scattered about the court. Near the concierge's room was the dyeing establishment responsible for the pink streamlet. Puddles of water infested the courtyard, along with wood shavings and coal cinders. Grass and weeds grew between the paving stones. The unforgiving sunlight seemed to cut the court into two parts. On the shady side was a dripping water tap with three small hens scratching for worms with their filth-smeared claws.

Gervaise slowly gazed about, lowering her glance from the sixth floor to the paving stones, then raising it again, surprised at the vastness, feeling as it were in the midst of a living organ, in the very heart of a city, and interested in the house, as though it were a giant before her.

"Is madame seeking for any one?" called out the inquisitive concierge, emerging from her room.

The young woman explained that she was waiting for a friend. She returned to the street; then as Coupeau did not come, she went back to the courtyard seized with the desire to take another look. She did not think the house ugly. Amongst the rags hanging from the windows she discovered various cheerful touches—a wall-flower blooming in a pot, a cage of chirruping canaries, shaving-glasses shining like stars in the depth of the shadow. A carpenter was singing in his work-shop, accompanied by the whining of his plane. The blacksmith's hammers were ringing rhythmically.

In contrast to the apparent wretched poverty, at nearly every open window appeared the begrimed faces of laughing children. Women with peaceful faces could be seen bent over their sewing. The rooms were empty of men who had gone back to work after lunch. The whole tenement was tranquil except for the sounds from the work-shops below which served as a sort of lullaby that went on, unceasingly, always the same.

The only thing she did not like was the courtyard's dampness. She would want rooms at the rear, on the sunny side. Gervaise took a few more steps into the courtyard, inhaling the characteristic odor of the slums, comprised of dust and rotten garbage. But the sharp odor of the waste water from the dye shop was strong, and Gervaise thought it smelled better here than at the Hotel Boncoeur. She chose a window for herself, the one at the far left with a small window box planted with scarlet runners.

"I'm afraid I've kept you waiting rather a long time," said Coupeau, whom she suddenly heard close beside her. "They always make an awful fuss whenever I don't dine with them, and it was worse than ever to-day as my sister had bought some veal."

And as Gervaise had slightly started with surprise, he continued glancing around in his turn:

"You were looking at the house. It's always all let from the top to the bottom. There are three hundred lodgers, I think. If I had any furniture, I would have secured a small room. One would be comfortable here, don't you think so?"

"Yes, one would be comfortable," murmured Gervaise. "In our street at Plassans there weren't near so many people. Look, that's pretty—that window up on the fifth floor, with the scarlet runners."

The zinc-worker's obstinate desire made him ask her once more whether she would or she wouldn't. They could rent a place here as soon as they found a bed. She hurried out the arched entranceway, asking him not to start that subject again. There was as much chance of this building collapsing as there was of her sleeping under the same blanket with him. Still, when Coupeau left her in front of Madame Fauconnier's shop, he was allowed to hold her hand for a moment.

For a month the young woman and the zinc-worker were the best of friends. He admired her courage, when he beheld her half killing herself with work, keeping her children tidy and clean, and yet finding time at night to do a little sewing. Often other women were hopelessly messy, forever nibbling or gadding about, but she wasn't like them at all. She was much too serious. Then she would laugh, and modestly defend herself. It was her misfortune that she had not always been good, having been with a man when only fourteen. Then too, she had often helped her mother empty a bottle of anisette. But she had learned a few things from experience. He was wrong to think of her as strong-willed; her will power was very weak. She had always let herself be pushed into things because she didn't want to hurt someone's feelings. Her one hope now was to live among decent people, for living among bad people was like being hit over the head. It cracks your skull. Whenever she thought of the future, she shivered. Everything she had seen in life so far, especially when a child, had given her lessons to remember.

Coupeau, however, chaffed her about her gloomy thoughts, and brought back all her courage by trying to pinch her hips. She pushed him away from her, and slapped his hands, whilst he called out laughingly that, for a weak woman, she was not a very easy capture. He, who always joked about everything did not trouble himself regarding the future. One day followed another, that was all. There would always be somewhere to sleep and a bite to eat. The neighborhood seemed decent enough to him, except for a gang of drunkards that ought to be cleaned out of the gutters.

Coupeau was not a bad sort of fellow. He sometimes had really sensible things to say. He was something of a dandy with his Parisian working man's gift for banter, a regular gift of gab, and besides, he was attractive.

They had ended by rendering each other all sorts of services at the Hotel Boncoeur. Coupeau fetched her milk, ran her errands, carried her bundles of clothes; often of an evening, as he got home first from work, he took the children for a walk on the exterior Boulevard. Gervaise, in return for his polite attentions, would go up into the narrow room at the top of the house where he slept, and see to his clothes, sewing buttons on his blue linen trousers, and mending his linen jackets. A great familiarity existed between them. She was never bored when he was around. The gay songs he sang amused her, and so did his continuous banter of jokes and jibes characteristic of the Paris streets, this being still new to her.

On Coupeau's side, this continual familiarity inflamed him more and more until it began to seriously bother him. He began to feel tense and uneasy. He continued with his foolish talk, never failing to ask her, "When will it be?" She understood what he meant and teased him. He would then come to visit her carrying his bedroom slippers, as if he were moving in. She joked about it and continued calmly without blushing at the allusions with which he was always surrounding her. She stood for anything from him as long as he didn't get rough. She only got angry once when he pulled a strand of her hair while trying to force a kiss from her.

Towards the end of June, Coupeau lost his liveliness. He became most peculiar. Gervaise, feeling uneasy at some of his glances, barricaded herself in at night. Then, after having sulked ever since the Sunday, he suddenly came on the Tuesday night about eleven o'clock and knocked at her room. She would not open to him; but his voice was so gentle and so trembling that she ended by removing the chest of drawers she had pushed against the door. When he entered, she thought he was ill; he looked so pale, his eyes were so red, and the veins on his face were all swollen. And he stood there, stuttering and shaking his head. No, no, he was not ill. He had been crying for two hours upstairs in his room; he wept like a child, biting his pillow so as not to be heard by the neighbors. For three nights past he had been unable to sleep. It could not go on like that.

"Listen, Madame Gervaise," said he, with a swelling in his throat and on the point of bursting out crying again; "we must end this, mustn't we? We'll go and get married. It's what I want. I've quite made up my mind."

Gervaise showed great surprise. She was very grave.

"Oh! Monsieur Coupeau," murmured she, "whatever are you thinking of? You know I've never asked you for that. I didn't care about it—that was all. Oh, no, no! it's serious now; think of what you're saying, I beg of you."

But he continued to shake his head with an air of unalterable resolution. He had already thought it all over. He had come down because he wanted to have a good night. She wasn't going to send him back to weep again he supposed! As soon as she said "yes," he would no longer bother her, and she could go quietly to bed. He only wanted to hear her say "yes." They could talk it over on the morrow.

"But I certainly can't say 'yes' just like that," resumed Gervaise. "I don't want you to be able to accuse me later on of having incited you to do a foolish thing. You shouldn't be so insistent, Monsieur Coupeau. You can't really be sure that you're in love with me. If you didn't see me for a week, it might fade away. Sometimes men get married and then there's day after day, stretching out into an entire lifetime, and they get pretty well bored by it all. Sit down there; I'm willing to talk it over at once."

Then until one in the morning, in the dark room and by the faint light of a smoky tallow candle which they forgot to snuff, they talked of their marriage, lowering their voices so as not to wake the two children, Claude and Etienne, who were sleeping, both heads on the same pillow. Gervaise kept pointing out the children to Coupeau, what a funny kind of dowry they were. She really shouldn't burden him with them. Besides, what would the neighbors say? She'd feel ashamed for him because everyone knew about the story of her life and her lover. They wouldn't think it decent if they saw them getting married barely two months later.

Coupeau replied by shrugging his shoulders. He didn't care about the neighbors! He never bothered about their affairs. So, there was Lantier before him, well, so what? What's so bad about that? She hadn't been constantly bringing men upstairs, as some women did, even rich ladies! The children would grow up, they'd raise them right. Never had he known before such a woman, such sound character, so good-hearted. Anyway, she could have been anything, a streetwalker, ugly, lazy and good-for-nothing, with a whole gang of dirty kids, and so what? He wanted her.

"Yes, I want you," he repeated, bringing his hand down on his knee with a continuos hammering. "You understand, I want you. There's nothing to be said to that, is there?"

Little by little, Gervaise gave way. Her emotions began to take control when faced with his encompassing desire. Still, with her hands in her lap and her face suffused with a soft sweetness, she hesitantly offered objections. From outside, through the half-open window, a lovely June night breathed in puffs of sultry air, disturbing the candle with its long wick gleaming red like a glowing coal. In the deep silence of the sleeping neighborhood the only sound was the infantile weeping of a drunkard lying in the middle of the street. Far away, in the back room of some restaurant, a violin was playing a dance tune for some late party.

Coupeau was silent. Then, knowing she had no more arguments, he smiled, took hold of her hands and pulled her toward him. She was in one of those moments of weakness she so greatly mistrusted, persuaded at last, too emotionally stirred to refuse anything or to hurt anyone's feelings. Coupeau didn't realize that she was giving way. He held her wrists so tightly as to almost crush them. Together they breathed a long sigh that to both of them meant a partial satisfaction of their desire.

"You'll say 'yes,' won't you," asked he.

"How you worry me!" she murmured. "You wish it? Well then, 'yes.' Ah! we're perhaps doing a very foolish thing."

He jumped up, and, seizing her round the waist, kissed her roughly on the face, at random. Then, as this caress caused a noise, he became anxious, and went softly and looked at Claude and Etienne.

"Hush, we must be careful," said he in a whisper, "and not wake the children. Good-bye till to-morrow."

And he went back to his room. Gervaise, all in a tremble, remained seated on the edge of her bed, without thinking of undressing herself for nearly an hour. She was touched; she felt that Coupeau was very honorable; for at one moment she had really thought it was all over, and that he would forget her. The drunkard below, under the window, was now hoarsely uttering the plaintive cry of some lost animal. The violin in the distance had left off its saucy tune and was now silent.

During the following days Coupeau sought to get Gervaise to call some evening on his sister in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or; but the young woman, who was very timid, showed a great dread of this visit to the Lorilleux. She knew that Coupeau had a lingering fear of that household, even though he certainly wasn't dependent on his sister, who wasn't even the oldest of the family. Mamma Coupeau would certainly give her consent at once, as she never refused her only son anything. The thing was that the Lorilleuxs were supposed to be earning ten francs a day or more and that gave them a certain authority. Coupeau would never dare to get married unless his wife was acceptable to them.

"I have spoken to them of you, they know our plans," explained he to Gervaise. "Come now! What a child you are! Let's call on them this evening. I've warned you, haven't I? You'll find my sister rather stiff. Lorilleux, too, isn't always very amiable. In reality they are greatly annoyed, because if I marry, I shall no longer take my meals with them, and it'll be an economy the less. But that doesn't matter, they won't turn you out. Do this for me, it's absolutely necessary."

These words only frightened Gervaise the more. One Saturday evening, however, she gave in. Coupeau came for her at half-past eight. She had dressed herself in a black dress, a crape shawl with yellow palms, and a white cap trimmed with a little cheap lace. During the six weeks she had been working, she had saved the seven francs for the shawl, and the two and a half francs for the cap; the dress was an old one cleaned and made up afresh.

"They're expecting you," said Coupeau to her, as they went round by the Rue des Poissonniers. "Oh! they're beginning to get used to the idea of my being married. They seem nice indeed, to-night. And you know if you've never seen gold chains made, it'll amuse you to watch them. They just happen to have a pressing order for Monday."

"They've got gold in their room?" asked Gervaise.

"I should think so; there's some on the walls, on the floor, in fact everywhere."

They had passed the arched doorway and crossed the courtyard. The Lorilleuxs lived on the sixth floor, staircase B. Coupeau laughingly told her to hold the hand-rail tight and not to leave go of it. She looked up, and blinked her eyes, as she perceived the tall hollow tower of the staircase, lighted by three gas jets, one on every second landing; the last one, right up at the top looked like a star twinkling in a black sky, whilst the other two cast long flashes of light, of fantastic shapes, among the interminable windings of the stairs.

"By Jove!" said the zinc-worker as he reached the first floor, smiling, "there's a strong smell of onion soup. Someone's having onion soup, I'm sure."

Staircase B, with its gray, dirty steps and hand-rail, its scratched walls and chipped plaster, was full of strong kitchen odors. Long corridors, echoing with noise, led away from each landing. Doors, painted yellow, gaped open, smeared black around the latch from dirty hands. A sink on each landing gave forth a fetid humidity, adding its stench to the sharp flavor of the cooking of onions. From the basement, all the way to the sixth floor, you could hear dishes clattering, saucepans being rinsed, pots being scraped and scoured.

On the first floor Gervaise saw a half-opened door with the word "Designer" written on it in large letters. Inside were two men sitting by a table, the dishes cleared away from its oilcloth cover, arguing furiously amid a cloud of pipe smoke. The second and third floors were quieter, and through cracks in the woodwork only such sounds filtered as the rhythm of a cradle rocking, the stifled crying of a child, a woman's voice sounding like the dull murmur of running water with no words distinct. Gervaise read the various signs on the doors giving the names of the occupants: "Madame Gaudron, wool-carder" and "Monsieur Madinier, cardboard boxes." There was a fight in progress on the fourth floor: a stomping of feet that shook the floor, furniture banged around, a racket of curses and blows; but this did not bother the neighbors opposite, who were playing cards with their door opened wide to admit more air.

When Gervaise reached the fifth floor, she had to stop to take a breath; she was not used to going up so high; that wall for ever turning, the glimpses she had of the lodgings following each other, made her head ache. Anyway, there was a family almost blocking the landing: the father washing the dishes over a small earthenware stove near the sink and the mother sitting with her back to the stair-rail and cleaning the baby before putting it to bed.

Coupeau kept urging Gervaise along, and they finally reached the sixth floor. He encouraged her with a smile; they had arrived! She had been hearing a voice all the way up from the bottom and she was gazing upward, wondering where it could be coming from, a voice so clear and piercing that it had dominated all the other sounds. It came from a little old woman in an attic room who sang while putting dresses on cheap dolls. When a tall girl came by with a pail of water and entered a nearby apartment, Gervaise saw a tumbled bed on which a man was sprawled, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. As the door closed behind her, Gervaise saw the hand-written card: "Mademoiselle Clemence, ironing."

Now that she had finally made it to the top, her legs weary and her breath short, Gervaise leaned over the railing to look down. Now it was the gaslight on the first floor which seemed a distant star at the bottom of a narrow well six stories deep. All the odors and all the murmurings of the immense variety of life within the tenement came up to her in one stifling breath that flushed her face as she hazarded a worried glance down into the gulf below.

"We're not there yet," said Coupeau. "Oh! It's quite a journey!"

He had gone down a long corridor on the left. He turned twice, the first time also to the left, the second time to the right. The corridor still continued branching off, narrowing between walls full of crevices, with plaster peeling off, and lighted at distant intervals by a slender gas-jet; and the doors all alike, succeeded each other the same as the doors of a prison or a convent, and nearly all open, continued to display homes of misery and work, which the hot June evening filled with a reddish mist. At length they reached a small passage in complete darkness.

"We're here," resumed the zinc-worker. "Be careful, keep to the wall; there are three steps."

And Gervaise carefully took another ten steps in the obscurity. She stumbled and then counted the three steps. But at the end of the passage Coupeau had opened a door, without knocking. A brilliant light spread over the tiled floor. They entered.

It was a narrow apartment, and seemed as if it were the continuation of the corridor. A faded woolen curtain, raised up just then by a string, divided the place in two. The first part contained a bedstead pushed beneath an angle of the attic ceiling, a cast-iron stove still warm from the cooking of the dinner, two chairs, a table and a wardrobe, the cornice of which had had to be sawn off to make it fit in between the door and the bedstead. The second part was fitted up as a work-shop; at the end, a narrow forge with its bellows; to the right, a vise fixed to the wall beneath some shelves on which pieces of old iron lay scattered; to the left near the window, a small workman's bench, encumbered with greasy and very dirty pliers, shears and microscopical saws, all very dirty and grimy.

"It's us!" cried Coupeau advancing as far as the woolen curtain.

But no one answered at first. Gervaise, deeply affected, moved especially by the thought that she was about to enter a place full of gold, stood behind the zinc-worker, stammering and venturing upon nods of her head by way of bowing. The brilliant light, a lamp burning on the bench, a brazier full of coals flaring in the forge, increased her confusion still more. She ended however, by distinguishing Madame Lorilleux—little, red-haired and tolerably strong, pulling with all the strength of her short arms, and with the assistance of a big pair of pincers, a thread of black metal which she passed through the holes of a draw-plate fixed to the vise. Seated in front of the bench, Lorilleux, quite as small of stature, but more slender in the shoulders, worked with the tips of his pliers, with the vivacity of a monkey, at a labor so minute, that it was impossible to follow it between his scraggy fingers. It was the husband who first raised his head—a head with scanty locks, the face of the yellow tinge of old wax, long, and with an ailing expression.

"Ah! it's you; well, well!" murmured he. "We're in a hurry you know. Don't come into the work-room, you'd be in our way. Stay in the bedroom."

And he resumed his minute task, his face again in the reflection of a glass globe full of green-colored water, through which the lamp shed a circle of bright light over his work.

"Take the chairs!" called out Madame Lorilleux in her turn. "It's that lady, isn't it? Very well, very well!"

She had rolled the wire and she carried it to the forge, and then, reviving the fire of the brazier with a large wooden fan, she proceeded to temper the wire before passing it through the last holes of the draw-plate.

Coupeau moved the chairs forward and seated Gervaise by the curtain. The room was so narrow that he could not sit beside her, so he sat behind her, leaning over her shoulder to explain the work in progress. Gervaise was intimidated by this strange reception and felt uneasy. She had a buzzing in her ears and couldn't hear clearly. She thought the wife looked older than her thirty years and not very neat with her hair in a pigtail dangling down the back of her loosely worn wrapper. The husband, who was only a year older, appeared already an old man with mean, thin lips, as he sat there working in his shirt sleeves with his bare feet thrust into down at the heel slippers. Gervaise was dismayed by the smallness of the shop, the grimy walls, the rustiness of the tools, and the black soot spread all over what looked like the odds and ends of a scrap-iron peddler's wares.

"And the gold?" asked Gervaise in a low voice.

Her anxious glances searched the corners and sought amongst all that filth for the resplendence she had dreamt of. But Coupeau burst out laughing.

"Gold?" said he; "why there's some; there's some more, and there's some at your feet!"

He pointed successively to the fine wire at which his sister was working, and to another roll of wire, similar to the ordinary iron wire, hanging against the wall close to the vise; then going down on all fours, he picked up, beneath the wooden screen which covered the tiled floor of the work-room, a piece of waste, a tiny fragment resembling the point of a rusty needle. But Gervaise protested; that couldn't be gold, that blackish piece of metal as ugly as iron! He had to bite into the piece and show her the gleaming notch made by his teeth. Then he continued his explanations: the employers provided the gold wire, already alloyed; the craftsmen first pulled it through the draw-plate to obtain the correct size, being careful to anneal it five or six times to keep it from breaking. It required a steady, strong hand, and plenty of practice. His sister would not let her husband touch the wire-drawing since he was subject to coughing spells. She had strong arms for it; he had seen her draw gold to the fineness of a hair.

Lorilleux, seized with a fit of coughing, almost doubled up on his stool. In the midst of the paroxysm, he spoke, and said in a choking voice, still without looking at Gervaise, as though he was merely mentioning the thing to himself:

"I'm making the herring-bone chain."

Coupeau urged Gervaise to get up. She might draw nearer and see. The chainmaker consented with a grunt. He wound the wire prepared by his wife round a mandrel, a very thin steel rod. Then he sawed gently, cutting the wire the whole length of the mandrel, each turn forming a link, which he soldered. The links were laid on a large piece of charcoal. He wetted them with a drop of borax, taken from the bottom of a broken glass beside him; and he made them red-hot at the lamp beneath the horizontal flame produced by the blow-pipe. Then, when he had soldered about a hundred links he returned once more to his minute work, propping his hands against the edge of the cheville, a small piece of board which the friction of his hands had polished. He bent each link almost double with the pliers, squeezed one end close, inserted it in the last link already in place and then, with the aid of a point opened out again the end he had squeezed; and he did this with a continuous regularity, the links joining each other so rapidly that the chain gradually grew beneath Gervaise's gaze, without her being able to follow, or well understand how it was done.

"That's the herring-bone chain," said Coupeau. "There's also the long link, the cable, the plain ring, and the spiral. But that's the herring-bone. Lorilleux only makes the herring-bone chain."

The latter chuckled with satisfaction. He exclaimed, as he continued squeezing the links, invisible between his black finger-nails.

"Listen to me, Young Cassis! I was making a calculation this morning. I commenced work when I was twelve years old, you know. Well! Can you guess how long a herring-bone chain I must have made up till to-day?"

He raised his pale face, and blinked his red eye-lids.

"Twenty-six thousand feet, do you hear? Two leagues! That's something! A herring-bone chain two leagues long! It's enough to twist round the necks of all the women of the neighborhood. And you know, it's still increasing. I hope to make it long enough to reach from Paris to Versailles."

Gervaise had returned to her seat, disenchanted and thinking everything very ugly. She smiled to be polite to the Lorilleuxs. The complete silence about her marriage bothered her. It was the sole reason for her having come. The Lorilleuxs were treating her as some stranger brought in by Coupeau. When a conversation finally did get started, it concerned the building's tenants. Madame Lorilleux asked her husband if he had heard the people on the fourth floor having a fight. They fought every day. The husband usually came home drunk and the wife had her faults too, yelling in the filthiest language. Then they spoke of the designer on the first floor, an uppity show-off with a mound of debts, always smoking, always arguing loudly with his friends. Monsieur Madinier's cardboard business was barely surviving. He had let two girl workers go yesterday. The business ate up all his money, leaving his children to run around in rags. And that Madame Gaudron was pregnant again; this was almost indecent at her age. The landlord was going to evict the Coquets on the fifth floor. They owed nine months' rent, and besides, they insisted on lighting their stove out on the landing. Last Saturday the old lady on the sixth floor, Mademoiselle Remanjou, had arrived just in time to save the Linguerlot child from being badly burned. Mademoiselle Clemence, one who took in ironing, well, she lived life as she pleased. She was so kind to animals though and had such a good heart that you couldn't say anything against her. It was a pity, a fine girl like her, the company she kept. She'd be walking the streets before long.

"Look, here's one," said Lorilleux to his wife, giving her the piece of chain he had been working on since his lunch. "You can trim it." And he added, with the persistence of a man who does not easily relinquish a joke: "Another four feet and a half. That brings me nearer to Versailles."

Madame Lorilleux, after tempering it again, trimmed it by passing it through the regulating draw-plate. Then she put it in a little copper saucepan with a long handle, full of lye-water, and placed it over the fire of the forge. Gervaise, again pushed forward by Coupeau, had to follow this last operation. When the chain was thoroughly cleansed, it appeared a dull red color. It was finished, and ready to be delivered.

"They're always delivered like that, in their rough state," the zinc-worker explained. "The polishers rub them afterwards with cloths."

Gervaise felt her courage failing her. The heat, more and more intense, was suffocating her. They kept the door shut, because Lorilleux caught cold from the least draught. Then as they still did not speak of the marriage, she wanted to go away and gently pulled Coupeau's jacket. He understood. Besides, he also was beginning to feel ill at ease and vexed at their affectation of silence.

"Well, we're off," said he. "We mustn't keep you from your work."

He moved about for a moment, waiting, hoping for a word or some allusion or other. At length he decided to broach the subject himself.

"I say, Lorilleux, we're counting on you to be my wife's witness."

The chainmaker pretended, with a chuckle, to be greatly surprised; whilst his wife, leaving her draw-plates, placed herself in the middle of the work-room.

"So it's serious then?" murmured he. "That confounded Young Cassis, one never knows whether he is joking or not."

"Ah! yes, madame's the person involved," said the wife in her turn, as she stared rudely at Gervaise. "Mon Dieu! We've no advice to give you, we haven't. It's a funny idea to go and get married, all the same. Anyhow, it's your own wish. When it doesn't succeed, one's only got oneself to blame, that's all. And it doesn't often succeed, not often, not often."

She uttered these last words slower and slower, and shaking her head, she looked from the young woman's face to her hands, and then to her feet as though she had wished to undress her and see the very pores of her skin. She must have found her better than she expected.

"My brother is perfectly free," she continued more stiffly. "No doubt the family might have wished—one always makes projects. But things take such funny turns. For myself, I don't want to have any unpleasantness. Had he brought us the lowest of the low, I should merely have said: 'Marry her and go to blazes!' He was not badly off though, here with us. He's fat enough; one can very well see he didn't fast much; and he always found his soup hot right on time. I say, Lorilleux, don't you think madame's like Therese—you know who I mean, that woman who used to live opposite, and who died of consumption?"

"Yes, there's a certain resemblance," replied the chainmaker.

"And you've got two children, madame? Now, I must admit I said to my brother: 'I can't understand how you can want to marry a woman who's got two children.' You mustn't be offended if I consult his interests; its only natural. You don't look strong either. Don't you think, Lorilleux, that madame doesn't look very strong?"

"No, no, she's not strong."

They did not mention her leg; but Gervaise understood by their side glances, and the curling of their lips, that they were alluding to it. She stood before them, wrapped in her thin shawl with the yellow palms, replying in monosyllables, as though in the presence of her judges. Coupeau, seeing she was suffering, ended by exclaiming:

"All that's nothing to do with it. What you are talking about isn't important. The wedding will take place on Saturday, July 29. I calculated by the almanac. Is it settled? Does it suit you?"

"Oh, it's all the same to us," said his sister. "There was no necessity to consult us. I shan't prevent Lorilleux being witness. I only want peace and quiet."

Gervaise, hanging her head, not knowing what to do with herself had put the toe of her boot through one of the openings in the wooden screen which covered the tiled floor of the work-room; then afraid of having disturbed something when she had withdrawn it, she stooped down and felt about with her hand. Lorilleux hastily brought the lamp, and he examined her fingers suspiciously.

"You must be careful," said he, "the tiny bits of gold stick to the shoes, and get carried away without one knowing it."

It was all to do with business. The employers didn't allow a single speck for waste. He showed her the rabbit's foot he used to brush off any flecks of gold left on the cheville and the leather he kept on his lap to catch any gold that fell. Twice weekly the shop was swept out carefully, the sweepings collected and burned and the ashes sifted. This recovered up to twenty-five or thirty francs' worth of gold a month.

Madame Lorilleux could not take her eyes from Gervaise's shoes.

"There's no reason to get angry," murmured she with an amiable smile. "But, perhaps madame would not mind looking at the soles of her shoes."

And Gervaise, turning very red, sat down again, and holding up her feet showed that there was nothing clinging to them. Coupeau had opened the door, exclaiming: "Good-night!" in an abrupt tone of voice. He called to her from the corridor. Then she in her turn went off, after stammering a few polite words: she hoped to see them again, and that they would all agree well together. Both of the Lorilleux had already gone back to their work at the far end of their dark hole of a work-room. Madame Lorilleux, her skin reflecting the red glow from the bed of coals, was drawing on another wire. Each effort swelling her neck and making the strained muscles stand out like taut cords. Her husband, hunched over beneath the greenish gleam of the globe was starting another length of chain, twisting each link with his pliers, pressing it on one side, inserting it into the next link above, opening it again with the pointed tool, continuously, mechanically, not wasting a motion, even to wipe the sweat from his face.

When Gervaise emerged from the corridor on to the landing, she could not help saying, with tears in her eyes:

"That doesn't promise much happiness."

Coupeau shook his head furiously. He would get even with Lorilleux for that evening. Had anyone ever seen such a miserly fellow? To think that they were going to walk off with two or three grains of his gold dust! All the fuss they made was from pure avarice. His sister thought perhaps that he would never marry, so as to enable her to economize four sous on her dinner every day. However, it would take place all the same on July 29. He did not care a hang for them!

Nevertheless, Gervaise still felt depressed. Tormented by a foolish fearfulness, she peered anxiously into every dark shadow along the stair-rail as she descended. It was dark and deserted at this hour, lit only by a single gas jet on the second floor. In the shadowy depths of the dark pit, it gave a spot of brightness, even with its flamed turned so low. It was now silent behind the closed doors; the weary laborers had gone to sleep after eating. However, there was a soft laugh from Mademoiselle Clemence's room and a ray of light shone through the keyhole of Mademoiselle Remanjou's door. She was still busy cutting out dresses for the dolls. Downstairs at Madame Gaudron's, a child was crying. The sinks on the landings smelled more offensive than ever in the midst of the darkness and stillness.

In the courtyard, Gervaise turned back for a last look at the tenement as Coupeau called out to the concierge. The building seemed to have grown larger under the moonless sky. The drip-drip of water from the faucet sounded loud in the quiet. Gervaise felt that the building was threatening to suffocate her and a chill went through her body. It was a childish fear and she smiled at it a moment later.

"Watch your step," warned Coupeau.

To get to the entrance, Gervaise had to jump over a wide puddle that had drained from the dye shop. The puddle was blue now, the deep blue of a summer sky. The reflections from the night light of the concierge sparkled in it like stars.

CHAPTER III.

Gervaise did not want to have a wedding-party! What was the use of spending money? Besides, she still felt somewhat ashamed; it seemed to her quite unnecessary to parade the marriage before the whole neighborhood. But Coupeau cried out at that. One could not be married without having a feed. He did not care a button for the people of the neighborhood! Nothing elaborate, just a short walk and a rabbit ragout in the first eating-house they fancied. No music with dessert. Just a glass or two and then back home.

The zinc-worker, chaffing and joking, at length got the young woman to consent by promising her that there should be no larks. He would keep his eye on the glasses, to prevent sunstrokes. Then he organized a sort of picnic at five francs a head, at the "Silver Windmill," kept by Auguste, on the Boulevard de la Chapelle. It was a small cafe with moderate charges and had a dancing place in the rear, beneath the three acacias in the courtyard. They would be very comfortable on the first floor. During the next ten days, he got hold of guests in the house where his sister lived in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or—Monsieur Madinier, Mademoiselle Remanjou, Madame Gaudron and her husband. He even ended by getting Gervaise to consent to the presence of two of his comrades—Bibi-the-Smoker and My-Boots. No doubt My-Boots was a boozer; but then he had such a fantastic appetite that he was always asked to join those sort of gatherings, just for the sight of the caterer's mug when he beheld that bottomless pit swallowing his twelve pounds of bread. The young woman on her side, promised to bring her employer Madame Fauconnier and the Boches, some very agreeable people. On counting, they found there would be fifteen to sit down to table, which was quite enough. When there are too many, they always wind up by quarrelling.

Coupeau however, had no money. Without wishing to show off, he intended to behave handsomely. He borrowed fifty francs of his employer. Out of that, he first of all purchased the wedding-ring—a twelve franc gold wedding-ring, which Lorilleux procured for him at the wholesale price of nine francs. He then bought himself a frock coat, a pair of trousers and a waistcoat at a tailor's in the Rue Myrrha, to whom he gave merely twenty-five francs on account; his patent leather shoes and his hat were still good enough. When he had put by the ten francs for his and Gervaise's share of the feast—the two children not being charged for—he had exactly six francs left—the price of a low mass at the altar of the poor. He had no liking for those black crows, the priests. It would gripe him to pay his last six francs to keep their whistles wet; however, a marriage without a mass wasn't a real marriage at all.

Going to the church himself, he bargained for a whole hour with a little old priest in a dirty cassock who was as sharp at dealing as a push-cart peddler. Coupeau felt like boxing his ears. For a joke, he asked the priest if he didn't have a second-hand mass that would do for a modest young couple. The priest, mumbling that God would take small pleasure in blessing their union, finally let his have his mass for five francs. Well after all, that meant twenty sous saved.

Gervaise also wanted to look decent. As soon as the marriage was settled, she made her arrangements, worked extra time in the evenings, and managed to put thirty francs on one side. She had a great longing for a little silk mantle marked thirteen francs in the Rue du Faubourg Poissonniere. She treated herself to it, and then bought for ten francs of the husband of a washerwoman who had died in Madame Fauconnier's house a blue woolen dress, which she altered to fit herself. With the seven francs remaining she procured a pair of cotton gloves, a rose for her cap, and some shoes for Claude, her eldest boy. Fortunately the youngsters' blouses were passable. She spent four nights cleaning everything, and mending the smallest holes in her stockings and chemise.

On Friday night, the eve of the great day, Gervaise and Coupeau had still a good deal of running about to do up till eleven o'clock, after returning home from work. Then before separating for the night they spent an hour together in the young woman's room, happy at being about to be released from their awkward position. In spite of the fact that they had originally resolved not to put themselves out to impress the neighbors, they had ended by taking it seriously and working themselves till they were weary. By the time they said "Good-night," they were almost asleep on their feet. They breathed a great sigh of relief now that everything was ready.

Coupeau's witnesses were to be Monsieur Madinier and Bibi-the-Smoker. They were counting on Lorilleux and Boche for Gervaise's witnesses. They were to go quietly to the mayor's office and the church, just the six of them, without a whole procession of people trailing behind them. The bridegroom's two sisters had even declared that they would stay home, their presence not being necessary. Coupeau's mother, however, had sobbed and wailed, threatening to go ahead of them and hide herself in some corner of the church, until they had promised to take her along. The meeting of the guests was set for one o'clock at the Silver Windmill. From there, they would go to Saint-Denis, going out by railroad and returning on foot along the highway in order to work up an appetite. The party promised to be quite all right.

Saturday morning, while getting dressed, Coupeau felt a qualm of uneasiness in view of the single franc in his pocket. He began to think that it was a matter of ordinary courtesy to offer a glass of wine and a slice of ham to the witnesses while awaiting dinner. Also, there might be unforeseen expenses. So, after taking Claude and Etienne to stay with Madame Boche, who was to bring them to the dinner later that afternoon, he hurried over to the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or to borrow ten francs from Lorilleux. Having to do that griped him immensely as he could guess the attitude his brother-in-law would take. The latter did grumble a bit, but ended by lending him two five-franc pieces. However, Coupeau overheard his sister muttering under her breath, "This is a fine beginning."

The ceremony at the mayor's was to take place at half-past ten. It was beautiful weather—a magnificent sun seemed to roast the streets. So as not to be stared at the bride and bridegroom, the old mother, and the four witnesses separated into two bands. Gervaise walked in front with Lorilleux, who gave her his arm; whilst Monsieur Madinier followed with mother Coupeau. Then, twenty steps behind on the opposite side of the way, came Coupeau, Boche, and Bibi-the-Smoker. These three were in black frock coats, walking erect and swinging their arms. Boche's trousers were bright yellow. Bibi-the-Smoker didn't have a waistcoat so he was buttoned up to the neck with only a bit of his cravat showing. The only one in a full dress suit was Monsieur Madinier and passers-by gazed at this well-dressed gentleman escorting the huge bulk of mother Coupeau in her green shawl and black bonnet with red ribbons.

Gervaise looked very gay and sweet in her dress of vivid blue and with her new silk mantle fitted tightly to her shoulders. She listened politely to the sneering remarks of Lorilleux, who seemed buried in the depths of the immense overcoat he was wearing. From time to time, Gervaise would turn her head a little to smile brightly at Coupeau, who was rather uncomfortable under the hot sun in his new clothes.

Though they walked very slowly, they arrived at the mayor's quite half an hour too soon. And as the mayor was late, their turn was not reached till close upon eleven o'clock. They sat down on some chairs and waited in a corner of the apartment, looking by turns at the high ceiling and bare walls, talking low, and over-politely pushing back their chairs each time that one of the attendants passed. Yet among themselves they called the mayor a sluggard, saying he must be visiting his blonde to get a massage for his gout, or that maybe he'd swallowed his official sash.

However, when the mayor did put in his appearance, they rose respectfully in his honor. They were asked to sit down again and they had to wait through three other marriages. The hall was crowded with the three bourgeois wedding parties: brides all in white, little girls with carefully curled hair, bridesmaids wearing wide sashes, an endless procession of ladies and gentlemen dressed in their best and looking very stylish.

When at length they were called, they almost missed being married altogether. Bibi-the-Smoker having disappeared. Boche discovered him outside smoking his pipe. Well! They were a nice lot inside there to humbug people about like that, just because one hadn't yellow kid gloves to shove under their noses! And the various formalities—the reading of the Code, the different questions to be put, the signing of all the documents—were all got through so rapidly that they looked at each other with an idea that they had been robbed of a good half of the ceremony. Gervaise, dizzy, her heart full, pressed her handkerchief to her lips. Mother Coupeau wept bitterly. All had signed the register, writing their names in big struggling letters with the exception of the bridegroom, who not being able to write, had put his cross. They each gave four sous for the poor. When an attendant handed Coupeau the marriage certificate, the latter, prompted by Gervaise who nudged his elbow, handed him another five sous.

It was a fair walk from the mayor's office in the town hall to the church. The men stopped along the way to have a beer. Mother Coupeau and Gervaise took cassis with water. Then they had to trudge along the long street where the sun glared straight down without the relief of shade.

When they arrived at the church they were hurried along and asked if they came so late in order to make a mockery of religion. A priest came forward, his face pale and resentful from having to delay his lunch. An altar boy in a soiled surplice ran before him.

The mass went very fast, with the priest turning, bowing his head, spreading out his arms, making all the ritual gestures in haste while casting sidelong glances at the group. Gervaise and Coupeau, before the altar, were embarrassed, not knowing when they should kneel or rise or seat themselves, expecting some indication from the attendant. The witnesses, not knowing what was proper, remained standing during the ceremony. Mother Coupeau was weeping again and shedding her tears into the missal she had borrowed from a neighbor.

Meanwhile, the noon chimes had sounded and the church began to fill with noise from the shuffling feet of sacristans and the clatter of chairs being put back in place. The high altar was apparently being prepared for some special ceremony.

Thus, in the depths of this obscure chapel, amid the floating dust, the surly priest placed his withered hands on the bared heads of Gervaise and Coupeau, blessing their union amid a hubbub like that of moving day. The wedding party signed another registry, this time in the sacristy, and then found themselves out in the bright sunlight before the church doors where they stood for a moment, breathless and confused from having been carried along at such a break-neck speed.

"Voila!" said Coupeau with an embarrassed laugh. "Well, it sure didn't take long. They shove it at you so; it's like being at the painless dentist's who doesn't give you time to cry out. Here you get a painless wedding!"

"Yes, it's a quick job," Lorilleux smirked. "In five minutes you're tied together for the rest of your life. You poor Young Cassis, you've had it."

The four witnesses whacked Coupeau on the shoulders as he arched his back against the friendly blows. Meanwhile Gervaise was hugging and kissing mother Coupeau, her eyes moist, a smile lighting her face. She replied reassuringly to the old woman's sobbing: "Don't worry, I'll do my best. I want so much to have a happy life. If it doesn't work out it won't be my fault. Anyhow, it's done now. It's up to us to get along together and do the best we can for each other."

After that they went straight to the Silver Windmill. Coupeau had taken his wife's arm. They walked quickly, laughing as though carried away, quite two hundred steps ahead of the others, without noticing the houses or the passers-by, or the vehicles. The deafening noises of the faubourg sounded like bells in their ears. When they reached the wineshop, Coupeau at once ordered two bottles of wine, some bread and some slices of ham, to be served in the little glazed closet on the ground floor, without plates or table cloth, simply to have a snack. Then, noticing that Boche and Bibi-the-Smoker seemed to be very hungry, he had a third bottle brought, as well as a slab of brie cheese. Mother Coupeau was not hungry, being too choked up to be able to eat. Gervaise found herself very thirsty, and drank several large glasses of water with a small amount of wine added.

"I'll settle for this," said Coupeau, going at once to the bar, where he paid four francs and five sous.

It was now one o'clock and the other guests began to arrive. Madame Fauconnier, a fat woman, still good looking, first put in an appearance; she wore a chintz dress with a flowery pattern, a pink tie and a cap over-trimmed with flowers. Next came Mademoiselle Remanjou, looking very thin in the eternal black dress which she seemed to keep on even when she went to bed; and the two Gaudrons—the husband, like some heavy animal and almost bursting his brown jacket at the slightest movement, the wife, an enormous woman, whose figure indicated evident signs of an approaching maternity and whose stiff violet colored skirt still more increased her rotundity. Coupeau explained that they were not to wait for My-Boots; his comrade would join the party on the Route de Saint-Denis.

"Well!" exclaimed Madame Lerat as she entered, "it'll pour in torrents soon! That'll be pleasant!"

And she called everyone to the door of the wineshop to see the clouds as black as ink which were rising rapidly to the south of Paris. Madame Lerat, eldest of the Coupeaus, was a tall, gaunt woman who talked through her nose. She was unattractively dressed in a puce-colored robe that hung loosely on her and had such long dangling fringes that they made her look like a skinny poodle coming out of the water. She brandished her umbrella like a club. After greeting Gervaise, she said, "You've no idea. The heat in the street is like a slap on the face. You'd think someone was throwing fire at you."

Everyone agreed that they knew the storm was coming. It was in the air. Monsieur Madinier said that he had seen it as they were coming out of the church. Lorilleux mentioned that his corns were aching and he hadn't been able to sleep since three in the morning. A storm was due. It had been much too hot for three days in a row.

"Well, maybe it will just be a little mist," Coupeau said several times, standing at the door and anxiously studying the sky. "Now we have to wait only for my sister. We'll start as soon as she arrives."

Madame Lorilleux was late. Madame Lerat had stopped by so they could come together, but found her only beginning to get dressed. The two sisters had argued. The widow whispered in her brother's ear, "I left her flat! She's in a dreadful mood. You'll see."

And the wedding party had to wait another quarter of an hour, walking about the wineshop, elbowed and jostled in the midst of the men who entered to drink a glass of wine at the bar. Now and again Boche, or Madame Fauconnier, or Bibi-the-Smoker left the others and went to the edge of the pavement, looking up at the sky. The storm was not passing over at all; a darkness was coming on and puffs of wind, sweeping along the ground, raised little clouds of white dust. At the first clap of thunder, Mademoiselle Remanjou made the sign of the cross. All the glances were anxiously directed to the clock over the looking-glass; it was twenty minutes to two.

"Here it goes!" cried Coupeau. "It's the angels who're weeping."

A gush of rain swept the pavement, along which some women flew, holding down their skirts with both hands. And it was in the midst of this first shower that Madame Lorilleux at length arrived, furious and out of breath, and struggling on the threshold with her umbrella that would not close.

"Did any one ever see such a thing?" she exclaimed. "It caught me just at the door. I felt inclined to go upstairs again and take my things off. I should have been wise had I done so. Ah! it's a pretty wedding! I said how it would be. I wanted to put it off till next Saturday; and it rains because they wouldn't listen to me! So much the better, so much the better! I wish the sky would burst!"

Coupeau tried to pacify her without success. He wouldn't have to pay for her dress if it was spoilt! She had on a black silk dress in which she was nearly choking, the bodice, too tight fitting, was almost bursting the button-holes, and was cutting her across the shoulders; while the skirt only allowed her to take very short steps in walking. However, the ladies present were all staring at her, quite overcome by her costume.

She appeared not to notice Gervaise, who was sitting beside mother Coupeau. She asked her husband for his handkerchief. Then she went into a corner and very carefully wiped off the raindrops that had fallen on her silk dress.

The shower had abruptly ceased. The darkness increased, it was almost like night—a livid night rent at times by large flashes of lightning. Bibi-the-Smoker said laughingly that it would certainly rain priests. Then the storm burst forth with extreme violence. For half an hour the rain came down in bucketsful, and the thunder rumbled unceasingly. The men standing up before the door contemplated the grey veil of the downpour, the swollen gutters, the splashes of water caused by the rain beating into the puddles. The women, feeling frightened, had sat down again, holding their hands before their eyes. They no longer conversed, they were too upset. A jest Boche made about the thunder, saying that St. Peter was sneezing up there, failed to raise a smile. But, when the thunder-claps became less frequent and gradually died away in the distance, the wedding guests began to get impatient, enraged against the storm, cursing and shaking their fists at the clouds. A fine and interminable rain now poured down from the sky which had become an ashy grey.

"It's past two o'clock," cried Madame Lorilleux. "We can't stop here for ever."

Mademoiselle Remanjou, having suggested going into the country all the same, even though they went no farther than the moat of the fortifications, the others scouted the idea: the roads would be in a nice state, one would not even be able to sit down on the grass; besides, it did not seem to be all over yet, there might perhaps be another downpour. Coupeau, who had been watching a workman, completely soaked, yet quietly walking along in the rain, murmured:

"If that animal My-Boots is waiting for us on the Route de Saint-Denis, he won't catch a sunstroke."

That made some of them laugh; but the general ill-humor increased. It was becoming ludicrous. They must decide on something unless they planned to sit there, staring at each other, until time for dinner. So for the next quarter of an hour, while the persistent rain continued, they tried to think of what to do. Bibi-the-Smoker suggested that they play cards. Boche slyly suggesting a most amusing game, the game of true confessions. Madame Gaudron thought of going to eat onion tarts on the Chaussee Clignancourt. Madame Lerat wanted to hear some stories. Gaudron said he wasn't a bit put out and thought they were quite well off where they were, out of the downpour. He suggested sitting down to dinner immediately.

There was a discussion after each proposal. Some said that this would put everybody to sleep or that that would make people think they were stupid. Lorilleux had to get his word in. He finally suggested a walk along the outer Boulevards to Pere Lachaise cemetery. They could visit the tomb of Heloise and Abelard. Madame Lorilleux exploded, no longer able to control herself. She was leaving, she was. Were they trying to make fun of her? She got all dressed up and came out in the rain. And for what? To be wasting time in a wineshop. No, she had had enough of this wedding party. She'd rather be in her own home. Coupeau and Lorilleux had to get between her and the door to keep her from leaving. She kept telling them, "Get out of my way! I am leaving, I tell you!"

Lorilleux finally succeeded in calming her down. Coupeau went over to Gervaise, who had been sitting quietly in a corner with mother Coupeau and Madame Fauconnier.

"You haven't suggested anything," he said to her.

"Oh! Whatever they want," she replied, laughing. "I don't mind. We can go out or stay here."

She seemed aglow with contentment. She had spoken to each guest as they arrived. She spoke sensibly, in her soft voice, not getting into any disagreements. During the downpour, she had sat with her eyes wide open, watching the lightning as though she could see the future in the sudden flashes.

Monsieur Madinier had up to this time not proposed anything. He was leaning against the bar, with the tails of his dress coat thrust apart, while he fully maintained the important air of an employer. He kept on expectorating, and rolled his big eyes about.

"Mon Dieu!" said he, "we might go to the Museum."

And he stroked his chin, as he blinkingly consulted the other members of the party.

"There are antiquities, pictures, paintings, a whole heap of things. It is very instructive. Perhaps you have never been there. Oh! it is quite worth seeing at least once in a while."

They looked at each other interrogatively. No, Gervaise had never been; Madame Fauconnier neither, nor Boche, nor the others. Coupeau thought he had been one Sunday, but he was not sure. They hesitated, however, when Madame Lorilleux, greatly impressed by Monsieur Madinier's importance, thought the suggestion a very worthy and respectable one. As they were wasting the day, and were all dressed up, they might as well go somewhere for their own instruction. Everyone approved. Then, as it still rained a little, they borrowed some umbrellas from the proprietor of the wineshop, old blue, green, and brown umbrellas, forgotten by different customers, and started off to the Museum.

The wedding party turned to the right, and descended into Paris along the Faubourg Saint-Denis. Coupeau and Gervaise again took the lead, almost running and keeping a good distance in front of the others. Monsieur Madinier now gave his arm to Madame Lorilleux, mother Coupeau having remained behind in the wineshop on account of her old legs. Then came Lorilleux and Madame Lerat, Boche and Madame Fauconnier, Bibi-the-Smoker and Mademoiselle Remanjou, and finally the two Gaudrons. They were twelve and made a pretty long procession on the pavement.

"I swear to you, we had nothing to do with it," Madame Lorilleux explained to Monsieur Madinier. "We don't even know how they met, or, we know only too well, but that's not for us to discuss. My husband even had to buy the wedding ring. We were scarcely out of bed this morning when he had to lend them ten francs. And, not a member of her family at her wedding, what kind of bride is that? She says she has a sister in Paris who works for a pork butcher. Why didn't she invite her?" She stopped to point at Gervaise, who was limping awkwardly because of the slope of the pavement. "Just look at her. Clump-clump."

"Clump-clump" ran through the wedding procession. Lorilleux laughed under his breath, and said they ought to call her that, but Madame Fauconnier stood up for Gervaise. They shouldn't make fun of her; she was neat as a pin and did a good job when there was washing to be done.

When the wedding procession came out of the Faubourg Saint-Denis, they had to cross the boulevard. The street had been transformed into a morass of sticky mud by the storm. It had started to pour again and they had opened the assorted umbrellas. The women picked their way carefully through the mud, holding their skirts high as the men held the sorry-looking umbrellas over their heads. The procession stretched out the width of the street.

"It's a masquerade!" yelled two street urchins.

People turned to stare. These couples parading across the boulevard added a splash of vivid color against the damp background. It was a parade of a strange medley of styles showing fancy used clothing such as constitute the luxury of the poor. The gentlemen's hats caused the most merriment, old hats preserved for years in dark and dusty cupboards, in a variety of comical forms: tall ones, flattened ones, sharply peaked ones, hats with extraordinary brims, curled back or flat, too narrow or too wide. Then at the very end, Madame Gaudron came along with her bright dress over her bulging belly and caused the smiles of the audience to grow even wider. The procession made no effort to hasten its progress. They were, in fact, rather pleased to attract so much attention and admiration.

"Look! Here comes the bride!" one of the urchins shouted, pointing to Madame Gaudron. "Oh! Isn't it too bad! She must have swallowed something!"

The entire wedding procession burst into laughter. Bibi-the-Smoker turned around and laughed. Madame Gaudron laughed the most of all. She wasn't ashamed as she thought more than one of the women watching had looked at her with envy.

They turned into the Rue de Clery. Then they took the Rue du Mail. On reaching the Place des Victoires, there was a halt. The bride's left shoe lace had come undone, and as she tied it up again at the foot of the statue of Louis XIV., the couples pressed behind her waiting, and joking about the bit of calf of her leg that she displayed. At length, after passing down the Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, they reached the Louvre.

Monsieur Madinier politely asked to be their cicerone. It was a big place, and they might lose themselves; besides, he knew the best parts, because he had often come there with an artist, a very intelligent fellow from whom a large dealer bought designs to put on his cardboard boxes. Down below, when the wedding party entered the Assyrian Museum, a slight shiver passed through it. The deuce! It was not at all warm there; the hall would have made a capital cellar. And the couples slowly advanced, their chins raised, their eyes blinking, between the gigantic stone figures, the black marble gods, dumb in their hieratic rigidity, and the monstrous beasts, half cats and half women, with death-like faces, attenuated noses, and swollen lips. They thought all these things very ugly. The stone carvings of the present day were a great deal better. An inscription in Phoenician characters amazed them. No one could possibly have ever read that scrawl. But Monsieur Madinier, already up on the first landing with Madame Lorilleux, called to them, shouting beneath the vaulted ceiling:

"Come along! They're nothing, all those things! The things to see are on the first floor!"

The severe barrenness of the staircase made them very grave. An attendant, superbly attired in a red waistcoat and a coat trimmed with gold lace, who seemed to be awaiting them on the landing, increased their emotion. It was with great respect, and treading as softly as possible, that they entered the French Gallery.

Then, without stopping, their eyes occupied with the gilding of the frames, they followed the string of little rooms, glancing at the passing pictures too numerous to be seen properly. It would have required an hour before each, if they had wanted to understand it. What a number of pictures! There was no end to them. They must be worth a mint of money. Right at the end, Monsieur Madinier suddenly ordered a halt opposite the "Raft of the Medusa" and he explained the subject to them. All deeply impressed and motionless, they uttered not a word. When they started off again, Boche expressed the general feeling, saying it was marvellous.

In the Apollo Gallery, the inlaid flooring especially astonished the party—a shining floor, as clear as a mirror, and which reflected the legs of the seats. Mademoiselle Remanjou kept her eyes closed, because she could not help thinking that she was walking on water. They called to Madame Gaudron to be careful how she trod on account of her condition. Monsieur Madinier wanted to show them the gilding and paintings of the ceiling; but it nearly broke their necks to look up above, and they could distinguish nothing. Then, before entering the Square Salon, he pointed to a window, saying:

"That's the balcony from which Charles IX. fired on the people."

He looked back to make sure the party was following. In the middle of the Salon Carre, he held up his hand. "There are only masterpieces here," he said, in a subdued voice, as though in church. They went all around the room. Gervaise wanted to know about "The Wedding at Cana." Coupeau paused to stare at the "Mona Lisa," saying that she reminded him of one of his aunts. Boche and Bibi-the-Smoker snickered at the nudes, pointing them out to each other and winking. The Gaudrons looked at the "Virgin" of Murillo, he with his mouth open, she with her hands folded on her belly.

When they had been all around the Salon, Monsieur Madinier wished them to go round it again, it was so worth while. He was very attentive to Madame Lorilleux, because of her silk dress; and each time that she questioned him he answered her gravely, with great assurance. She was curious about "Titian's Mistress" because the yellow hair resembled her own. He told her it was "La Belle Ferronniere," a mistress of Henry IV. about whom there had been a play at the Ambigu.

Then the wedding party invaded the long gallery occupied by the Italian and Flemish schools. More paintings, always paintings, saints, men and women, with faces which some of them could understand, landscapes that were all black, animals turned yellow, a medley of people and things, the great mixture of the colors of which was beginning to give them all violent headaches. Monsieur Madinier no longer talked as he slowly headed the procession, which followed him in good order, with stretched necks and upcast eyes. Centuries of art passed before their bewildered ignorance, the fine sharpness of the early masters, the splendors of the Venetians, the vigorous life, beautiful with light, of the Dutch painters. But what interested them most were the artists who were copying, with their easels planted amongst the people, painting away unrestrainedly, an old lady, mounted on a pair of high steps, working a big brush over the delicate sky of an immense painting, struck them as something most peculiar.

Slowly the word must have gone around that a wedding party was visiting the Louvre. Several painters came over with big smiles. Some visitors were so curious that they went to sit on benches ahead of the group in order to be comfortable while they watched them pass in review. Museum guards bit back comments. The wedding party was now quite weary and beginning to drag their feet.

Monsieur Madinier was reserving himself to give more effect to a surprise that he had in store. He went straight to the "Kermesse" of Rubens; but still he said nothing. He contented himself with directing the others' attention to the picture by a sprightly glance. The ladies uttered faint cries the moment they brought their noses close to the painting. Then, blushing deeply they turned away their heads. The men though kept them there, cracking jokes, and seeking for the coarser details.

"Just look!" exclaimed Boche, "it's worth the money. There's one spewing, and another, he's watering the dandelions; and that one—oh! that one. Ah, well! They're a nice clean lot, they are!"

"Let us be off," said Monsieur Madinier, delighted with his success. "There is nothing more to see here."

They retraced their steps, passing again through the Salon Carre and the Apollo Gallery. Madame Lerat and Mademoiselle Remanjou complained, declaring that their legs could scarcely bear them. But the cardboard box manufacturer wanted to show Lorilleux the old jewelry. It was close by in a little room which he could find with his eyes shut. However, he made a mistake and led the wedding party astray through seven or eight cold, deserted rooms, only ornamented with severe looking-glass cases, containing numberless broken pots and hideous little figures.

While looking for an exit they stumbled into the collection of drawings. It was immense. Through room after room they saw nothing interesting, just scribblings on paper that filled all the cases and covered the walls. They thought there was no end to these drawings.

Monsieur Madinier, losing his head, not willing to admit that he did not know his way, ascended a flight of stairs, making the wedding party mount to the next floor. This time they traversed the Naval Museum, among models of instruments and cannons, plans in relief, and vessels as tiny as playthings. After going a long way, and walking for a quarter of an hour, the party came upon another staircase; and, having descended this, found itself once more surrounded by the drawings. Then despair took possession of them as they wandered at random through long halls, following Monsieur Madinier, who was furious and mopping the sweat from his forehead. He accused the government of having moved the doors around. Museum guards and visitors looked on with astonishment as the procession, still in a column of couples, passed by. They passed again through the Salon Carre, the French Gallery and then along the cases where minor Eastern divinities slumbered peacefully. It seemed they would never find their way out. They were getting tired and made a lot of noise.

"Closing time! Closing time!" called out the attendants, in a loud tone of voice.

And the wedding party was nearly locked in. An attendant was obliged to place himself at the head of it, and conduct it to a door. Then in the courtyard of the Louvre, when it had recovered its umbrellas from the cloakroom, it breathed again. Monsieur Madinier regained his assurance. He had made a mistake in not turning to the left, now he recollected that the jewelry was to the left. The whole party pretended to be very pleased at having seen all they had.

Four o'clock was striking. There were still two hours to be employed before the dinner time, so it was decided they should take a stroll, just to occupy the interval. The ladies, who were very tired, would have preferred to sit down; but, as no one offered any refreshments, they started off, following the line of quays. There they encountered another shower and so sharp a one that in spite of the umbrellas, the ladies' dresses began to get wet. Madame Lorilleux, her heart sinking within her each time a drop fell upon her black silk, proposed that they should shelter themselves under the Pont-Royal; besides if the others did not accompany her, she threatened to go all by herself. And the procession marched under one of the arches of the bridge. They were very comfortable there. It was, most decidedly a capital idea! The ladies, spreading their handkerchiefs over the paving-stones, sat down with their knees wide apart, and pulled out the blades of grass that grew between the stones with both hands, whilst they watched the dark flowing water as though they were in the country. The men amused themselves with calling out very loud, so as to awaken the echoes of the arch. Boche and Bibi-the-Smoker shouted insults into the air at the top of their voices, one after the other. They laughed uproariously when the echo threw the insults back at them. When their throats were hoarse from shouting, they made a game of skipping flat stones on the surface of the Seine.

The shower had ceased but the whole party felt so comfortable that no one thought of moving away. The Seine was flowing by, an oily sheet carrying bottle corks, vegetable peelings, and other refuse that sometimes collected in temporary whirlpools moving along with the turbulent water. Endless traffic rumbled on the bridge overhead, the noisy bustle of Paris, of which they could glimpse only the rooftops to the left and right, as though they were in the bottom of a deep pit.

Mademoiselle Remanjou sighed; if the leaves had been out this would have reminded her of a bend of the Marne where she used to go with a young man. It still made her cry to think of him.

At last, Monsieur Madinier gave the signal for departure. They passed through the Tuileries gardens, in the midst of a little community of children, whose hoops and balls upset the good order of the couples. Then as the wedding party on arriving at the Place Vendome looked up at the column, Monsieur Madinier gallantly offered to treat the ladies to a view from the top. His suggestion was considered extremely amusing. Yes, yes, they would go up; it would give them something to laugh about for a long time. Besides, it would be full of interest for those persons who had never been higher than a cow pasture.

"Do you think Clump-clump will venture inside there with her leg all out of place?" murmured Madame Lorilleux.

"I'll go up with pleasure," said Madame Lerat, "but I won't have any men walking behind me."

And the whole party ascended. In the narrow space afforded by the spiral staircase, the twelve persons crawled up one after the other, stumbling against the worn steps, and clinging to the walls. Then, when the obscurity became complete, they almost split their sides with laughing. The ladies screamed when the gentlemen pinched their legs. But they were weren't stupid enough to say anything! The proper plan is to think that it is the mice nibbling at them. It wasn't very serious; the men knew when to stop.

Boche thought of a joke and everyone took it up. They called down to Madame Gaudron to ask her if she could squeeze her belly through. Just think! If she should get stuck there, she would completely block the passage, and how would they ever get out? They laughed so at the jokes about her belly that the column itself vibrated. Boche was now quite carried away and declared that they were growing old climbing up this chimney pipe. Was it ever coming to an end, or did it go right up to heaven? He tried to frighten the ladies by telling them the structure was shaking.

Coupeau, meanwhile, said nothing. He was behind Gervaise, with his arm around her waist, and felt that she was everything perfect to him. When they suddenly emerged again into the daylight, he was just in the act of kissing her on the cheek.

"Well! You're a nice couple; you don't stand on ceremony," said Madame Lorilleux with a scandalized air.

Bibi-the-Smoker pretended to be furious. He muttered between his teeth. "You made such a noise together! I wasn't even able to count the steps."

But Monsieur Madinier was already up on the platform, pointing out the different monuments. Neither Madame Fauconnier nor Mademoiselle Remanjou would on any consideration leave the staircase. The thought of the pavement below made their blood curdle, and they contented themselves with glancing out of the little door. Madame Lerat, who was bolder, went round the narrow terrace, keeping close to the bronze dome; but, mon Dieu, it gave one a rude emotion to think that one only had to slip off. The men were a little paler than usual as they stared down at the square below. You would think you were up in mid-air, detached from everything. No, it wasn't fun, it froze your very insides.

Monsieur Madinier told them to raise their eyes and look straight into the distance to avoid feeling dizzy. He went on pointing out the Invalides, the Pantheon, Notre Dame and the Montmartre hill. Madame Lorilleux asked if they could see the place where they were to have dinner, the Silver Windmill on the Boulevard de la Chapelle. For ten minutes they tried to see it, even arguing about it. Everyone had their own idea where it was.

"It wasn't worth while coming up here to bite each other's noses off," said Boche, angrily as he turned to descend the staircase.

The wedding party went down, unspeaking and sulky, awakening no other sound beyond that of shoes clanking on the stone steps. When it reached the bottom, Monsieur Madinier wished to pay; but Coupeau would not permit him, and hastened to place twenty-four sous into the keeper's hand, two sous for each person. So they returned by the Boulevards and the Faubourg du Poissonniers. Coupeau, however, considered that their outing could not end like that. He bundled them all into a wineshop where they took some vermouth.

The repast was ordered for six o'clock. At the Silver Windmill, they had been waiting for the wedding party for a good twenty minutes. Madame Boche, who had got a lady living in the same house to attend to her duties for the evening, was conversing with mother Coupeau in the first floor room, in front of the table, which was all laid out; and the two youngsters, Claude and Etienne, whom she had brought with her, were playing about beneath the table and amongst the chairs. When Gervaise, on entering caught sight of the little ones, whom she had not seen all the day, she took them on her knees, and caressed and kissed them.

"Have they been good?" asked she of Madame Boche. "I hope they haven't worried you too much."

And as the latter related the things the little rascals had done during the afternoon, and which would make one die with laughing, the mother again took them up and pressed them to her breast, seized with an overpowering outburst of maternal affection.

"It's not very pleasant for Coupeau, all the same," Madame Lorilleux was saying to the other ladies, at the end of the room.

Gervaise had kept her smiling peacefulness from the morning, but after the long walk she appeared almost sad at times as she watched her husband and the Lorilleuxs in a thoughtful way. She had the feeling that Coupeau was a little afraid of his sister. The evening before, he had been talking big, swearing he would put them in their places if they didn't behave. However, she could see that in their presence he was hanging on their words, worrying when he thought they might be displeased. This gave the young bride some cause for worry about the future.

They were now only waiting for My-Boots, who had not yet put in an appearance.

"Oh! blow him!" cried Coupeau, "let's begin. You'll see, he'll soon turn up, he's got a hollow nose, he can scent the grub from afar. I say he must be amusing himself, if he's still standing like a post on the Route de Saint-Denis!"

Then the wedding party, feeling very lively, sat down making a great noise with the chairs. Gervaise was between Lorilleux and Monsieur Madinier, and Coupeau between Madame Fauconnier and Madame Lorilleux. The other guests seated themselves where they liked, because it always ended with jealousies and quarrels, when one settled their places for them. Boche glided to a seat beside Madame Lerat. Bibi-the-Smoker had for neighbors Mademoiselle Remanjou and Madame Gaudron. As for Madame Boche and mother Coupeau, they were right at the end of the table, looking after the children, cutting up their meat and giving them something to drink, but not much wine.

"Does nobody say grace?" asked Boche, whilst the ladies arranged their skirts under the table-cloth, so as not to get them stained.

But Madame Lorilleux paid no attention to such pleasantries. The vermicelli soup, which was nearly cold, was gulped down very quickly, their lips making a hissing noise against the spoons. Two waiters served at table, dressed in little greasy jackets and not over-clean white aprons. By the four open windows overlooking the acacias of the courtyard there entered the clear light of the close of a stormy day, with the atmosphere purified thereby though without sufficiently cooling it. The light reflected from the humid corner of trees tinged the haze-filled room with green and made leaf shadows dance along the table-cloth, from which came a vague aroma of dampness and mildew.

Two large mirrors, one at each end of the room, seemed to stretch out the table. The heavy crockery with which it was set was beginning to turn yellow and the cutlery was scratched and grimed with grease. Each time a waiter came through the swinging doors from the kitchen a whiff of odorous burnt lard came with him.

"Don't all talk at once," said Boche, as everyone remained silent with his nose in his plate.

They were drinking the first glass of wine as their eyes followed two meat pies which the waiters were handing round when My-Boots entered the room.

"Well, you're a scurvy lot, you people!" said he. "I've been wearing my pins out for three hours waiting on that road, and a gendarme even came and asked me for my papers. It isn't right to play such dirty tricks on a friend! You might at least have sent me word by a commissionaire. Ah! no, you know, joking apart, it's too bad. And with all that, it rained so hard that I got my pickets full of water. Honor bright, you might still catch enough fish in 'em for a meal."

The others wriggled with laughter. That animal My-Boots was just a bit on; he had certainly already stowed away his two quarts of wine, merely to prevent his being bothered by all that frog's liquor with which the storm had deluged his limbs.

"Hallo! Count Leg-of-Mutton!" said Coupeau, "just go and sit yourself there, beside Madame Gaudron. You see you were expected."

Oh, he did not mind, he would soon catch the others up; and he asked for three helpings of soup, platefuls of vermicelli, in which he soaked enormous slices of bread. Then, when they had attacked the meat pies, he became the profound admiration of everyone at the table. How he stowed it away! The bewildered waiters helped each other to pass him bread, thin slices which he swallowed at a mouthful. He ended by losing his temper; he insisted on having a loaf placed on the table beside him. The landlord, very anxious, came for a moment and looked in at the door. The party, which was expecting him, again wriggled with laughter. It seemed to upset the caterer. What a rum card he was that My-Boots! One day he had eaten a dozen hard-boiled eggs and drank a dozen glasses of wine while the clock was striking twelve! There are not many who can do that. And Mademoiselle Remanjou, deeply moved, watched My-Boots chew whilst Monsieur Madinier, seeking for a word to express his almost respectful astonishment, declared that such a capacity was extraordinary.

There was a brief silence. A waiter had just placed on the table a ragout of rabbits in a vast dish as deep as a salad-bowl. Coupeau, who liked fun, started another joke.

"I say, waiter, that rabbit's from the housetops. It still mews."

And in fact, a faint mew perfectly imitated seemed to issue from the dish. It was Coupeau who did that with his throat, without opening his lips; a talent which at all parties, met with decided success, so much so that he never ordered a dinner abroad without having a rabbit ragout. After that he purred. The ladies pressed their napkins to their mouths to try and stop their laughter. Madame Fauconnier asked for a head, she only liked that part. Mademoiselle Remanjou had a weakness for the slices of bacon. And as Boche said he preferred the little onions when they were nicely broiled, Madame Lerat screwed up her lips, and murmured:

"I can understand that."

She was a dried up stick, living the cloistered life of a hard-working woman imprisoned within her daily routine, who had never had a man stick his nose into her room since the death of her husband; yet she had an obsession with double meanings and indecent allusions that were sometimes so far off the mark that only she understood them.

As Boche leaned toward her and, in a whisper, asked for an explanation, she resumed:

"Little onions, why of course. That's quite enough, I think."

The general conversation was becoming grave. Each one was talking of his trade. Monsieur Madinier raved about the cardboard business. There were some real artists. For an example, he mentioned Christmas gift boxes, of which he'd seen samples that were marvels of splendor.

Lorilleux sneered at this; he was extremely vain because of working with gold, feeling that it gave a sort of sheen to his fingers and his whole personality. "In olden times jewelers wore swords like gentlemen." He often cited the case of Bernard Palissy, even though he really knew nothing about him.

Coupeau told of a masterpiece of a weather vane made by one of his fellow workers which included a Greek column, a sheaf of wheat, a basket of fruit, and a flag, all beautifully worked out of nothing but strips of zinc shaped and soldered together.

Madame Lerat showed Bibi-the-Smoker how to make a rose by rolling the handle of her knife between her bony fingers.

All the while, their voices had been rising louder and louder, competing for attention. Shrill comments by Madame Fauconnier were heard. She complained about the girls who worked for her, especially a little apprentice who was nothing but a tart and had badly scorched some sheets the evening before.

"You may talk," Lorilleux cried, banging his fist down on the table, "but gold is gold."

And, in the midst of the silence caused by the statement of this fact, the only sound heard was Mademoiselle Remanjou's shrill voice continuing:

"Then I turn up the skirt and stitch it inside. I stick a pin in the head to keep the cap on, and that's all; and they are sold for thirteen sous a piece."

She was explaining how she dressed her dolls to My-Boots, whose jaws were working slowly like grindstones. He did not listen, though he kept nodding his head, but looked after the waiters to prevent them removing any of the dishes he had not cleaned out. They had now finished a veal stew with green beans. The roast was brought in, two scrawny chickens resting on a bed of water cress which was limp from the warming oven.

Outside, only the higher branches of the acacias were touched by the setting sun. Inside, the greenish reflected light was thickened by wisps of steam rising from the table, now messy with spilled wine and gravy and the debris of the dinner. Along the wall were dirty dishes and empty bottles which the waiters had piled there like a heap of refuse. It was so hot that the men took off their jackets and continued eating in their shirt sleeves.

"Madame Boche, please don't spread their butter so thick," said Gervaise, who spoke but little, and who was watching Claude and Etienne from a distance.

She got up from her seat, and went and talked for a minute while standing behind the little ones' chairs. Children did not reason; they would eat all day long without refusing a single thing; and then she herself helped them to some chicken, a little of the breast. But mother Coupeau said they might, just for once in a while, risk an attack of indigestion. Madame Boche, in a low voice accused Boche of caressing Madame Lerat's knees. Oh, he was a sly one, but he was getting a little too gay. She had certainly seen his hand disappear. If he did it again, drat him! She wouldn't hesitate throwing a pitcher of water over his head.

In the partial silence, Monsieur Madinier was talking politics. "Their law of May 31, is an abominable one. Now you must reside in a place for two years. Three millions of citizens are struck off the voting lists. I've been told that Bonaparte is, in reality, very much annoyed for he loves the people; he has given them proofs."

He was a republican; but he admired the prince on account of his uncle, a man the like of whom would never be seen again. Bibi-the-Smoker flew into a passion. He had worked at the Elysee; he had seen Bonaparte just as he saw My-Boots in front of him over there. Well that muff of a president was just like a jackass, that was all! It was said that he was going to travel about in the direction of Lyons; it would be a precious good riddance of bad rubbish if he fell into some hole and broke his neck. But, as the discussion was becoming too heated, Coupeau had to interfere.

"Ah, well! How simple you all are to quarrel about politics. Politics are all humbug! Do such things exist for us? Let there be any one as king, it won't prevent me earning my five francs a day, and eating and sleeping; isn't that so? No, it's too stupid to argue about!"

Lorilleux shook his head. He was born on the same day as the Count of Chambord, the 29th of September, 1820. He was greatly struck with this coincidence, indulging himself in a vague dream, in which he established a connection between the king's return to France and his own private fortunes. He never said exactly what he was expecting, but he led people to suppose that when that time arrived something extraordinarily agreeable would happen to him. So whenever he had a wish too great to be gratified, he would put it off to another time, when the king came back.

"Besides," observed he, "I saw the Count de Chambord one evening."

Every face was turned towards him.

"It's quite true. A stout man, in an overcoat, and with a good-natured air. I was at Pequignot's, one of my friends who deals in furniture in the Grand Rue de la Chapelle. The Count of Chambord had forgotten his umbrella there the day before; so he came in, and just simply said, like this: 'Will you please return me my umbrella?' Well, yes, it was him; Pequignot gave me his word of honor it was."

Not one of the guests suggested the smallest doubt. They had now arrived at dessert and the waiters were clearing the table with much clattering of dishes. Madame Lorilleux, who up to then had been very genteel, very much the lady, suddenly let fly with a curse. One of the waiters had spilled something wet down her neck while removing a dish. This time her silk dress would be stained for sure. Monsieur Madinier had to examine her back, but he swore there was nothing to be seen.

Two platters of cheese, two dishes of fruit, and a floating island pudding of frosted eggs in a deep salad-bowl had now been placed along the middle of the table. The pudding caused a moment of respectful attention even though the overdone egg whites had flattened on the yellow custard. It was unexpected and seemed very fancy.

My-Boots was still eating. He had asked for another loaf. He finished what there was of the cheese; and, as there was some cream left, he had the salad-bowl passed to him, into which he sliced some large pieces of bread as though for a soup.

"The gentleman is really remarkable," said Monsieur Madinier, again giving way to his admiration.

Then the men rose to get their pipes. They stood for a moment behind My-Boots, patting him on the back, and asking him if he was feeling better. Bibi-the-Smoker lifted him up in his chair; but tonnerre de Dieu! the animal had doubled in weight. Coupeau joked that My-Boots was only getting started, that now he was going to settle down and really eat for the rest of the night. The waiters were startled and quickly vanished from sight.

Boche, who had gone downstairs for a moment, came up to report the proprietor's reaction. He was standing behind his bar, pale as death. His wife, dreadfully upset, was wondering if any bakeries were still open. Even the cat seemed deep in despair. This was as funny as could be, really worth the price of the dinner. It was impossible to have a proper dinner party without My-Boots, the bottomless pit. The other men eyed him with a brooding jealousy as they puffed on their pipes. Indeed, to be able to eat so much, you had to be very solidly built!

"I wouldn't care to be obliged to support you," said Madame Gaudron. "Ah, no; you may take my word for that!"

"I say, little mother, no jokes," replied My-Boots, casting a side glance at his neighbor's rotund figure. "You've swallowed more than I have."

The others applauded, shouting "Bravo!"—it was well answered. It was now pitch dark outside, three gas-jets were flaring in the room, diffusing dim rays in the midst of the tobacco-smoke. The waiters, after serving the coffee and the brandy, had removed the last piles of dirty plates. Down below, beneath the three acacias, dancing had commenced, a cornet-a-piston and two fiddles playing very loud, and mingling in the warm night air with the rather hoarse laughter of women.

"We must have a punch!" cried My-Boots; "two quarts of brandy, lots of lemon, and a little sugar."

But Coupeau, seeing the anxious look on Gervaise's face in front of him, got up from the table, declaring that there should be no more drink. They had emptied twenty-five quarts, a quart and a half to each person, counting the children as grown-up people; that was already too much. They had had a feed together in good fellowship, and without ceremony, because they esteemed each other, and wished to celebrate the event of the day amongst themselves. Everything had been very nice; they had had lots of fun. It wouldn't do to get cockeyed drunk now, out of respect to the ladies. That was all he had to say, they had come together to toast a marriage and they had done so.

Coupeau delivered the little speech with convincing sincerity and punctuated each phrase by placing his hand on his heart. He won whole-hearted approval from Lorilleux and Monsieur Madinier; but the other four men, especially My-Boots, were already well lit and sneered. They declared in hoarse drunken voices that they were thirsty and wanted drinks.

"Those who're thirsty are thirsty, and those who aren't thirsty aren't thirsty," remarked My-Boots. "Therefore, we'll order the punch. No one need take offence. The aristocrats can drink sugar-and-water."

And as the zinc-worker commenced another sermon, the other, who had risen on his legs, gave himself a slap, exclaiming:

"Come, let's have no more of that, my boy! Waiter, two quarts of your aged stuff!"

So Coupeau said very well, only they would settle for the dinner at once. It would prevent any disputes. The well-behaved people did not want to pay for the drunkards; and it just happened that My-Boots, after searching in his pockets for a long time, could only produce three francs and seven sous. Well, why had they made him wait all that time on the Route de Saint-Denis? He could not let himself be drowned and so he had broken into his five-franc piece. It was the fault of the others, that was all! He ended by giving the three francs, keeping the seven sous for the morrow's tobacco. Coupeau, who was furious, would have knocked him over had not Gervaise, greatly frightened, pulled him by his coat, and begged him to keep cool. He decided to borrow the two francs of Lorilleux, who after refusing them, lent them on the sly, for his wife would never have consented to his doing so.

Monsieur Madinier went round with a plate. The spinster and the ladies who were alone—Madame Lerat, Madame Fauconnier, Mademoiselle Remanjou—discreetly placed their five-franc pieces in it first. Then the gentlemen went to the other end of the room, and made up the accounts. They were fifteen; it amounted therefore to seventy-five francs. When the seventy-five francs were in the plate, each man added five sous for the waiters. It took a quarter of an hour of laborious calculations before everything was settled to the general satisfaction.

But when Monsieur Madinier, who wished to deal direct with the landlord, had got him to step up, the whole party became lost in astonishment on hearing him say with a smile that there was still something due to him. There were some extras; and, as the word "extras" was greeted with angry exclamations, he entered into details:—Twenty-five quarts of wine, instead of twenty, the number agreed upon beforehand; the frosted eggs, which he had added, as the dessert was rather scanty; finally, a quarter of a bottle of rum, served with the coffee, in case any one preferred rum. Then a formidable quarrel ensued. Coupeau, who was appealed to, protested against everything; he had never mentioned twenty quarts; as for the frosted eggs, they were included in the dessert, so much the worse for the landlord if he choose to add them without being asked to do so. There remained the rum, a mere nothing, just a mode of increasing the bill by putting on the table spirits that no one thought anything about.

"It was on the tray with the coffee," he cried; "therefore it goes with the coffee. Go to the deuce! Take your money, and never again will we set foot in your den!"

"It's six francs more," repeated the landlord. "Pay me my six francs; and with all that I haven't counted the four loaves that gentleman ate!"

The whole party, pressing forward, surrounded him with furious gestures and a yelping of voices choking with rage. The women especially threw aside all reserve, and refused to add another centime. This was some wedding dinner! Mademoiselle Remanjou vowed she would never again attend such a party. Madame Fauconnier declared she had had a very disappointing meal; at home she could have had a finger-licking dish for only two francs. Madame Gaudron bitterly complained that she had been shoved down to the worst end of the table next to My-Boots who had ignored her. These parties never turned out well, one should be more careful whom one invites. Gervaise had taken refuge with mother Coupeau near one of the windows, feeling shamed as she realized that all these recriminations would fall back upon her.

Monsieur Madinier ended by going down with the landlord. One could hear them arguing below. Then, when half an hour had gone by the cardboard box manufacturer returned; he had settled the matter by giving three francs. But the party continued annoyed and exasperated, constantly returning to the question of the extras. And the uproar increased from an act of vigor on Madame Boche's part. She had kept an eye on Boche, and at length detected him squeezing Madame Lerat round the waist in a corner. Then, with all her strength, she flung a water pitcher, which smashed against the wall.

"One can easily see that your husband's a tailor, madame," said the tall widow, with a curl of the lip, full of a double meaning. "He's a petticoat specialist, even though I gave him some pretty hard kicks under the table."

The harmony of the evening was altogether upset. Everyone became more and more ill-tempered. Monsieur Madinier suggested some singing, but Bibi-the-Smoker, who had a fine voice, had disappeared some time before; and Mademoiselle Remanjou, who was leaning out of the window, caught sight of him under the acacias, swinging round a big girl who was bare-headed. The cornet-a-piston and two fiddles were playing "Le Marchand de Moutarde." The party now began to break up. My-Boots and the Gaudrons went down to the dance with Boche sneaking along after them. The twirling couples could be seen from the windows. The night was still as though exhausted from the heat of the day. A serious conversation started between Lorilleux and Monsieur Madinier. The ladies examined their dresses carefully to see if they had been stained.

Madame Lerat's fringe looked as though it had been dipped in the coffee. Madame Fauconnier's chintz dress was spotted with gravy. Mother Coupeau's green shawl, fallen from off a chair, was discovered in a corner, rolled up and trodden upon. But it was Madame Lorilleux especially who became more ill-tempered still. She had a stain on the back of her dress; it was useless for the others to declare that she had not—she felt it. And, by twisting herself about in front of a looking-glass, she ended by catching a glimpse of it.

"What did I say?" cried she. "It's gravy from the fowl. The waiter shall pay for the dress. I will bring an action against him. Ah! this is a fit ending to such a day. I should have done better to have stayed in bed. To begin with, I'm off. I've had enough of their wretched wedding!"

And she left the room in a rage, causing the staircase to shake beneath her heavy footsteps. Lorilleux ran after her. But all she would consent to was that she would wait five minutes on the pavement outside, if he wanted them to go off together. She ought to have left directly after the storm, as she wished to do. She would make Coupeau sorry for that day. Coupeau was dismayed when he heard how angry she was. Gervaise agreed to leave at once to avoid embarrassing him any more.

There was a flurry of quick good-night kisses. Monsieur Madinier was to escort mother Coupeau home. Madame Boche would take Claude and Etienne with her for the bridal night. The children were sound asleep on chairs, stuffed full from the dinner. Just as the bridal couple and Lorilleux were about to go out the door, a quarrel broke out near the dance floor between their group and another group. Boche and My-Boots were kissing a lady and wouldn't give her up to her escorts, two soldiers.

It was scarcely eleven o'clock. On the Boulevard de la Chapelle, and in the entire neighborhood of the Goutte-d'Or, the fortnight's pay, which fell due on that Saturday, produced an enormous drunken uproar. Madame Lorilleux was waiting beneath a gas-lamp about twenty paces from the Silver Windmill. She took her husband's arm, and walked on in front without looking round, at such a rate, that Gervaise and Coupeau got quite out of breath in trying to keep up with them. Now and again they stepped off the pavement to leave room for some drunkard who had fallen there. Lorilleux looked back, endeavoring to make things pleasant.

"We will see you as far as your door," said he.

But Madame Lorilleux, raising her voice, thought it a funny thing to spend one's wedding night in such a filthy hole as the Hotel Boncoeur. Ought they not to have put their marriage off, and have saved a few sous to buy some furniture, so as to have had a home of their own on the first night? Ah! they would be comfortable, right up under the roof, packed into a little closet, at ten francs a month, where there was not even the slightest air.

"I've given notice, we're not going to use the room up at the top of the house," timidly interposed Coupeau. "We are keeping Gervaise's room, which is larger."

Madame Lorilleux forgot herself. She turned abruptly round.

"That's worse than all!" cried she. "You're going to sleep in Clump-clump's room."

Gervaise became quite pale. This nickname, which she received full in the face for the first time, fell on her like a blow. And she fully understood it, too, her sister-in-law's exclamation: the Clump-clump's room was the room in which she had lived for a month with Lantier, where the shreds of her past life still hung about. Coupeau did not understand this, but merely felt hurt at the harsh nickname.

"You do wrong to christen others," he replied angrily. "You don't know perhaps, that in the neighborhood they call you Cow's-Tail, because of your hair. There, that doesn't please you, does it? Why should we not keep the room on the first floor? To-night the children won't sleep there, and we shall be very comfortable."

Madame Lorilleux added nothing further, but retired into her dignity, horribly annoyed at being called Cow's-Tail. To cheer up Gervaise, Coupeau squeezed her arm softly. He even succeeded in making her smile by whispering into her ear that they were setting up housekeeping with the grand sum of seven sous, three big two-sou pieces and one little sou, which he jingled in his pocket.

When they reached the Hotel Boncoeur, the two couples wished each other good-night, with an angry air; and as Coupeau pushed the two women into each other's arms, calling them a couple of ninnies, a drunken fellow, who seemed to want to go to the right, suddenly slipped to the left and came tumbling between them.

"Why, it's old Bazouge!" said Lorilleux. "He's had his fill to-day."

Gervaise, frightened, squeezed up against the door of the hotel. Old Bazouge, an undertaker's helper of some fifty years of age, had his black trousers all stained with mud, his black cape hooked on to his shoulder, and his black feather hat knocked in by some tumble he had taken.

"Don't be afraid, he's harmless," continued Lorilleux. "He's a neighbor of ours—the third room in the passage before us. He would find himself in a nice mess if his people were to see him like this!"

Old Bazouge, however, felt offended at the young woman's evident terror.

"Well, what!" hiccoughed he, "we ain't going to eat any one. I'm as good as another any day, my little woman. No doubt I've had a drop! When work's plentiful one must grease the wheels. It's not you, nor your friends, who would have carried down the stiff 'un of forty-seven stone whom I and a pal brought from the fourth floor to the pavement, and without smashing him too. I like jolly people."

But Gervaise retreated further into the doorway, seized with a longing to cry, which spoilt her day of sober-minded joy. She no longer thought of kissing her sister-in-law, she implored Coupeau to get rid of the drunkard. Then Bazouge, as he stumbled about, made a gesture of philosophical disdain.

"That won't prevent you passing though our hands, my little woman. You'll perhaps be glad to do so, one of these days. Yes, I know some women who'd be much obliged if we did carry them off."

And, as Lorilleux led him away, he turned around, and stuttered out a last sentence, between two hiccoughs.

"When you're dead—listen to this—when you're dead, it's for a long, long time."

CHAPTER IV.

Then followed four years of hard work. In the neighborhood, Gervaise and Coupeau had the reputation of being a happy couple, living in retirement without quarrels, and taking a short walk regularly every Sunday in the direction of St. Ouen. The wife worked twelve hours a day at Madame Fauconnier's, and still found means to keep their lodging as clean and bright as a new coined sou and to prepare the meals for all her little family, morning and evening. The husband never got drunk, brought his wages home every fortnight, and smoked a pipe at his window in the evening, to get a breath of fresh air before going to bed. They were frequently alluded to on account of their nice, pleasant ways; and as between them they earned close upon nine francs a day, it was reckoned that they were able to put by a good deal of money.

However, during their first months together they had to struggle hard to get by. Their wedding had left them owing two hundred francs. Also, they detested the Hotel Boncoeur as they didn't like the other occupants. Their dream was to have a home of their own with their own furniture. They were always figuring how much they would need and decided three hundred and fifty francs at least, in order to be able to buy little items that came up later.

They were in despair at ever being able to collect such a large sum when a lucky chance came their way. An old gentleman at Plassans offered to take the older boy, Claude, and send him to an academy down there. The old man, who loved art, had previously been much impressed by Claude's sketches. Claude had already begun to cost them quite a bit. Now, with only Etienne to support, they were able to accumulate the money in a little over seven months. One day they were finally able to buy their own furniture from a second-hand dealer on Rue Belhomme. Their hearts filled with happiness, they celebrated by walking home along the exterior Boulevards.

They had purchased a bed, a night table, a chest of drawers with a marble top, a wardrobe, a round table covered with oilcloth, and six chairs. All were of dark mahogany. They also bought blankets, linen, and kitchen utensils that were scarcely used. It meant settling down and giving themselves a status in life as property owners, as persons to be respected.

For two months past they had been busy seeking some new apartments. At first they wanted above everything to hire these in the big house of the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. But there was not a single room to let there; so that they had to relinquish their old dream. To tell the truth, Gervaise was rather glad in her heart; the neighborhood of the Lorilleux almost door to door, frightened her immensely. Then, they looked about elsewhere. Coupeau, very properly did not wish to be far from Madame Fauconnier's so that Gervaise could easily run home at any hour of the day. And at length they met with exactly what suited them, a large room with a small closet and a kitchen, in the Rue Neuve de la Goutte-d'Or, almost opposite the laundress's. This was in a small two-story building with a very steep staircase. There were two apartments on the second floor, one to the left, the other to the right, The ground floor was occupied by a man who rented out carriages, which filled the sheds in the large stable yard by the street.

Gervaise was delighted with this as it made her feel she was back in a country town. With no close neighbors there would be no gossip to worry about in this little corner. It reminded her of a small lane outside the ramparts of Plassans. She could even see her own window while ironing at the laundry by just tilting her head to the side.

They took possession of their new abode at the April quarter. Gervaise was then eight months advanced. But she showed great courage, saying with a laugh that the baby helped her as she worked; she felt its influence growing within her and giving her strength. Ah, well! She just laughed at Coupeau whenever he wanted her to lie down and rest herself! She would take to her bed when the labor pains came. That would be quite soon enough as with another mouth to feed, they would have to work harder than ever.

She made their new place bright and shiny before helping her husband install the furniture. She loved the furniture, polishing it and becoming almost heart-broken at the slightest scratch. Any time she knocked into the furniture while cleaning she would stop with a sudden shock as though she had hurt herself.

The chest of drawers was especially dear to her. She thought it handsome, sturdy and most respectable-looking. The dream that she hadn't dared to mention was to get a clock and put it right in the middle of the marble top. It would make a splendid effect. She probably would have bought one right away except for the expected baby.

The couple were thoroughly enchanted with their new home. Etienne's bed occupied the small closet, where there was still room to put another child's crib. The kitchen was a very tiny affair and as dark as night, but by leaving the door wide open, one could just manage to see; besides, Gervaise had not to cook meals for thirty people, all she wanted was room to make her soup. As for the large room, it was their pride. The first thing in the morning, they drew the curtains of the alcove, white calico curtains; and the room was thus transformed into a dining-room, with the table in the centre, and the wardrobe and chest of drawers facing each other.

They stopped up the chimney since it burned as much as fifteen sous of coal a day. A small cast-iron stove on the marble hearth gave them enough warmth on cold days for only seven sous. Coupeau had also done his best to decorate the walls. There was a large engraving showing a marshal of France on horseback with a baton in his hand. Family photographs were arranged in two rows on top of the chest of drawers on each side of an old holy-water basin in which they kept matches. Busts of Pascal and Beranger were on top of the wardrobe. It was really a handsome room.

"Guess how much we pay here?" Gervaise would ask of every visitor she had.

And whenever they guessed too high a sum, she triumphed and delighted at being so well suited for such a little money, cried:

"One hundred and fifty francs, not a sou more! Isn't it almost like having it for nothing!"

The street, Rue Neuve de la Goutte d'Or, played an important part in their contentment. Gervaise's whole life was there, as she traveled back and forth endlessly between her home and Madame Fauconnier's laundry. Coupeau now went down every evening and stood on the doorstep to smoke his pipe. The poorly-paved street rose steeply and had no sidewalks. Toward Rue de la Goutte d'Or there were some gloomy shops with dirty windows. There were shoemakers, coopers, a run-down grocery, and a bankrupt cafe whose closed shutters were covered with posters. In the opposite direction, toward Paris, four-story buildings blocked the sky. Their ground floor shops were all occupied by laundries with one exception—a green-painted store front typical of a small-town hair-dresser. Its shop windows were full of variously colored flasks. It lighted up this drab corner with the gay brightness of its copper bowls which were always shining.

The most pleasant part of the street was in between, where the buildings were fewer and lower, letting in more sunlight. The carriage sheds, the plant which manufactured soda water, and the wash-house opposite made a wide expanse of quietness. The muffled voices of the washerwomen and the rhythmic puffing of the steam engine seemed to deepen the almost religious silence. Open fields and narrow lanes vanishing between dark walls gave it the air of a country village. Coupeau, always amused by the infrequent pedestrians having to jump over the continuous streams of soapy water, said it reminded him of a country town where his uncle had taken him when he was five years old. Gervaise's greatest joy was a tree growing in the courtyard to the left of their window, an acacia that stretched out a single branch and yet, with its meager foliage, lent charm to the entire street.

It was on the last day of April that Gervaise was confined. The pains came on in the afternoon, towards four o'clock, as she was ironing a pair of curtains at Madame Fauconnier's. She would not go home at once, but remained there wriggling about on a chair, and continuing her ironing every time the pain allowed her to do so; the curtains were wanted quickly and she obstinately made a point of finishing them. Besides, perhaps after all it was only a colic; it would never do to be frightened by a bit of a stomach-ache. But as she was talking of starting on some shirts, she became quite pale. She was obliged to leave the work-shop, and cross the street doubled in two, holding on to the walls. One of the workwomen offered to accompany her; she declined, but begged her to go instead for the midwife, close by, in the Rue de la Charbonniere. This was only a false alarm; there was no need to make a fuss. She would be like that no doubt all through the night. It was not going to prevent her getting Coupeau's dinner ready as soon as she was indoors; then she might perhaps lie down on the bed a little, but without undressing. On the staircase she was seized with such a violent pain, that she was obliged to sit down on one of the stairs; and she pressed her two fists against her mouth to prevent herself from crying out, for she would have been ashamed to have been found there by any man, had one come up. The pain passed away; she was able to open her door, feeling relieved, and thinking that she had decidedly been mistaken. That evening she was going to make a stew with some neck chops. All went well while she peeled the potatoes. The chops were cooking in a saucepan when the pains returned. She mixed the gravy as she stamped about in front of the stove, almost blinded with her tears. If she was going to give birth, that was no reason why Coupeau should be kept without his dinner. At length the stew began to simmer on a fire covered with cinders. She went into the other room, and thought she would have time to lay the cloth at one end of the table. But she was obliged to put down the bottle of wine very quickly; she no longer had strength to reach the bed; she fell prostrate, and she had more pains on a mat on the floor. When the midwife arrived, a quarter of an hour later, she found mother and baby lying there on the floor.

The zinc-worker was still employed at the hospital. Gervaise would not have him disturbed. When he came home at seven o'clock, he found her in bed, well covered up, looking very pale on the pillow, and the child crying, swathed in a shawl at it's mother's feet.

"Ah, my poor wife!" said Coupeau, kissing Gervaise. "And I was joking only an hour ago, whilst you were crying with pain! I say, you don't make much fuss about it—the time to sneeze and it's all over."

She smiled faintly; then she murmured: "It's a girl."

"Right!" the zinc-worker replied, joking so as to enliven her, "I ordered a girl! Well, now I've got what I wanted! You do everything I wish!" And, taking the child up in his arms, he continued: "Let's have a look at you, miss! You've got a very black little mug. It'll get whiter, never fear. You must be good, never run about the streets, and grow up sensible like your papa and mamma."

Gervaise looked at her daughter very seriously, with wide open eyes, slowly overshadowed with sadness, for she would rather have had a boy. Boys can talk care of themselves and don't have to run such risks on the streets of Paris as girls do. The midwife took the infant from Coupeau. She forbade Gervaise to do any talking; it was bad enough there was so much noise around her.

Then the zinc-worker said that he must tell the news to mother Coupeau and the Lorilleuxs, but he was dying with hunger, he must first of all have his dinner. It was a great worry to the invalid to see him have to wait on himself, run to the kitchen for the stew, eat it out of a soup plate, and not be able to find the bread. In spite of being told not to do so, she bewailed her condition, and fidgeted about in her bed. It was stupid of her not to have managed to set the cloth, the pains had laid her on her back like a blow from a bludgeon. Her poor old man would not think it kind of her to be nursing herself up there whilst he was dining so badly. At least were the potatoes cooked enough? She no longer remembered whether she had put salt in them.

"Keep quiet!" cried the midwife.

"Ah! if only you could stop her from wearing herself out!" said Coupeau with his mouth full. "If you were not here, I'd bet she'd get up to cut my bread. Keep on your back, you big goose! You mustn't move about, otherwise it'll be a fortnight before you'll be able to stand on your legs. Your stew's very good. Madame will eat some with me, won't you, Madame?"

The midwife declined; but she was willing to accept a glass of wine, because it had upset her, said she to find the poor woman with the baby on the mat. Coupeau at length went off to tell the news to his relations. Half an hour later he returned with all of them, mother Coupeau, the Lorilleuxs, and Madame Lerat, whom he had met at the latter's.

"I've brought you the whole gang!" cried Coupeau. "It can't be helped! They wanted to see you. Don't open your mouth, it's forbidden. They'll stop here and look at you without ceremony, you know. As for me, I'm going to make them some coffee, and of the right sort!"

He disappeared into the kitchen. Mother Coupeau after kissing Gervaise, became amazed at the child's size. The two other women also kissed the invalid on her cheeks. And all three, standing before the bed, commented with divers exclamations on the details of the confinement—a most remarkable confinement, just like having a tooth pulled, nothing more.

Madame Lerat examined the baby all over, declared she was well formed, even added that she could grow up into an attractive woman. Noticing that the head had been squeezed into a point on top, she kneaded it gently despite the infant's cries, trying to round it a bit. Madame Lorilleux grabbed the baby from her; that could be enough to give the poor little thing all sorts of vicious tendencies, meddling with it like that while her skull was still soft. She then tried to figure out who the baby resembled. This almost led to a quarrel. Lorilleux, peering over the women's shoulders, insisted that the little girl didn't look the least bit like Coupeau. Well, maybe a little around the nose, nothing more. She was her mother all over again, with big eyes like hers. Certainly there were no eyes like that in the Coupeau family.

Coupeau, however, had failed to reappear. One could hear him in the kitchen struggling with the grate and the coffee-pot. Gervaise was worrying herself frightfully; it was not the proper thing for a man to make coffee; and she called and told him what to do, without listening to the midwife's energetic "hush!"

"Here we are!" said Coupeau, entering with the coffee-pot in his hand. "Didn't I just have a bother with it! It all went wrong on purpose! Now we'll drink out of glasses, won't we? Because you know, the cups are still at the shop."

They seated themselves around the table, and the zinc-worker insisted on pouring out the coffee himself. It smelt very strong, it was none of that weak stuff. When the midwife had sipped hers up, she went off; everything was going on nicely, she was not required. If the young woman did not pass a good night they were to send for her on the morrow. She was scarcely down the staircase, when Madame Lorilleux called her a glutton and a good-for-nothing. She put four lumps of sugar in her coffee, and charged fifteen francs for leaving you with your baby all by yourself. But Coupeau took her part; he would willingly fork out the fifteen francs. After all those sort of women spent their youth in studying, they were right to charge a good price.

It was then Lorilleux who got into a quarrel with Madame Lerat by maintaining that, in order to have a son, the head of the bed should be turned to the north. She shrugged her shoulders at such nonsense, offering another formula which consisted in hiding under the mattress, without letting your wife know, a handful of fresh nettles picked in bright sunlight.

The table had been pushed over close to the bed. Until ten o'clock Gervaise lay there, smiling although she was only half awake. She was becoming more and more weary, her head turned sideways on the pillow. She no longer had the energy to venture a remark or a gesture. It seemed to her that she was dead, a very sweet death, from the depths of which she was happy to observe the others still in the land of the living. The thin cries of her baby daughter rose above the hum of heavy voices that were discussing a recent murder on Rue du Bon Puits, at the other end of La Chapelle.

Then, as the visitors were thinking of leaving, they spoke of the christening. The Lorilleux had promised to be godfather and godmother; they looked very glum over the matter. However, if they had not been asked to stand they would have felt rather peculiar. Coupeau did not see any need for christening the little one; it certainly would not procure her an income of ten thousand francs, and besides she might catch a cold from it. The less one had to do with priests the better. But mother Coupeau called him a heathen. The Lorilleux, without going and eating consecrated bread in church, plumed themselves on their religious sentiments.

"It shall be next Sunday, if you like," said the chainmaker.

And Gervaise having consented by a nod, everyone kissed her and told her to take good care of herself. They also wished the baby good-bye. Each one went and leant over the little trembling body with smiles and loving words as though she were able to understand. They called her Nana, the pet name for Anna, which was her godmother's name.

"Good night, Nana. Come be a good girl, Nana."

When they had at length gone off, Coupeau drew his chair close up to the bed and finished his pipe, holding Gervaise's hand in his. He smoked slowly, deeply affected and uttering sentences between the puffs.

"Well, old woman, they've made your head ache, haven't they? You see I couldn't prevent them coming. After all, it shows their friendship. But we're better alone, aren't we? I wanted to be alone like this with you. It has seemed such a long evening to me! Poor little thing, she's had a lot to go through! Those shrimps, when they come out into the world, have no idea of the pain they cause. It must really almost be like being split in two. Where is does it hurt the most, that I may kiss it and make it well?"

He had carefully slid one of his big hands under her back, and now he drew her toward him, bending over to kiss her stomach through the covers, touched by a rough man's compassion for the suffering of a woman in childbirth. He inquired if he was hurting her. Gervaise felt very happy, and answered him that it didn't hurt any more at all. She was only worried about getting up as soon as possible, because there was no time to lie about now. He assured her that he'd be responsible for earning the money for the new little one. He would be a real bum if he abandoned her and the little rascal. The way he figured it, what really counted was bringing her up properly. Wasn't that so?

Coupeau did not sleep much that night. He covered up the fire in the stove. Every hour he had to get up to give the baby spoonfuls of lukewarm sugar and water. That did not prevent his going off to his work in the morning as usual. He even took advantage of his lunch-hour to make a declaration of the birth at the mayor's. During this time Madame Boche, who had been informed of the event, had hastened to go and pass the day with Gervaise. But the latter, after ten hours of sleep, bewailed her position, saying that she already felt pains all over her through having been so long in bed. She would become quite ill if they did not let her get up. In the evening, when Coupeau returned home, she told him all her worries; no doubt she had confidence in Madame Boche, only it put her beside herself to see a stranger installed in her room, opening the drawers, and touching her things.

On the morrow the concierge, on returning from some errand, found her up, dressed, sweeping and getting her husband's dinner ready; and it was impossible to persuade her to go to bed again. They were trying to make a fool of her perhaps! It was all very well for ladies to pretend to be unable to move. When one was not rich one had no time for that sort of thing. Three days after her confinement she was ironing petticoats at Madame Fauconnier's, banging her irons and all in a perspiration from the great heat of the stove.

On the Saturday evening, Madame Lorilleux brought her presents for her godchild—a cup that cost thirty-five sous, and a christening dress, plaited and trimmed with some cheap lace, which she had got for six francs, because it was slightly soiled. On the morrow, Lorilleux, as godfather, gave the mother six pounds of sugar. They certainly did things properly! At the baptism supper which took place at the Coupeaus that evening, they did not come empty-handed. Lorilleux carried a bottle of fine wine under each arm and his wife brought a large custard pie from a famous pastry shop on Chaussee Clignancourt. But the Lorilleuxs made sure that the entire neighborhood knew they had spent twenty francs. As soon as Gervaise learned of their gossiping, furious, she stopped giving them credit for generosity.

It was at the christening feast that the Coupeaus ended by becoming intimately acquainted with their neighbors on the opposite side of the landing. The other lodging in the little house was occupied by two persons, mother and son, the Goujets as they were called. Until then the two families had merely nodded to each other on the stairs and in the street, nothing more; the Coupeaus thought their neighbors seemed rather bearish. Then the mother, having carried up a pail of water for Gervaise on the morrow of her confinement, the latter had thought it the proper thing to invite them to the feast, more especially as she considered them very respectable people. And naturally, they there became well acquainted with each other.

The Goujets came from the Departement du Nord. The mother mended lace; the son, a blacksmith, worked at an iron bolt factory. They had lived in their lodging for five years. Behind the quiet peacefulness of their life, a long standing sorrow was hidden. Goujet the father, one day when furiously drunk at Lille, had beaten a comrade to death with an iron bar and had afterwards strangled himself in prison with his handkerchief. The widow and child, who had come to Paris after their misfortune, always felt the tragedy hanging over their heads, and atoned for it by a strict honesty and an unvarying gentleness and courage. They had a certain amount of pride in their attitude and regarded themselves as better than other people.

Madame Goujet, dressed in black as usual, her forehead framed in a nun's hood, had a pale, calm, matronly face, as if the whiteness of the lace and the delicate work of her fingers had cast a glow of serenity over her. Goujet was twenty-three years old, huge, magnificently built, with deep blue eyes and rosy cheeks, and the strength of Hercules. His comrades at the shop called him "Golden Mouth" because of his handsome blonde beard.

Gervaise at once felt a great friendship for these people. When she entered their home for the first time, she was amazed at the cleanliness of the lodging. There was no denying it, one might blow about the place without raising a grain of dust; and the tiled floor shone like a mirror. Madame Goujet made her enter her son's room, just to see it. It was pretty and white like the room of a young girl; an iron bedstead with muslin curtains, a table, a washstand, and a narrow bookcase hanging against the wall. Then there were pictures all over the place, figures cut out, colored engravings nailed up with four tacks, and portraits of all kinds of persons taken from the illustrated papers.

Madame Goujet said with a smile that her son was a big baby. He found that reading in the evening put him to sleep, so he amused himself looking at pictures. Gervaise spent an hour with her neighbor without noticing the passing of time. Madame Goujet had gone to sit by the window and work on her lace. Gervaise was fascinated by the hundreds of pins that held the lace, and she felt happy to be there, breathing in the good clean atmosphere of this home where such a delicate task enforced a sort of meditative silence.

The Goujets were worth visiting. They worked long hours, and placed more than a quarter of their fortnight's earnings in the savings-bank. In the neighborhood everyone nodded to them, everyone talked of their savings. Goujet never had a hole in his clothes, always went out in a clean short blue blouse, without a stain. He was very polite, and even a trifle timid, in spite of his broad shoulders. The washerwomen at the end of the street laughed to see him hold down his head when he passed them. He did not like their oaths, and thought it disgusting that women should be constantly uttering foul words. One day, however, he came home tipsy. Then Madame Goujet, for sole reproach, held his father's portrait before him, a daub of a painting hidden away at the bottom of a drawer; and, ever since that lesson, Goujet never drank more than was good for him, without however, any hatred of wine, for wine is necessary to the workman. On Sundays he walked out with his mother, who took hold of his arm. He would generally conduct her to Vincennes; at other times they would go to the theatre. His mother remained his passion. He still spoke to her as though he were a little child. Square-headed, his skin toughened by the wielding of the heavy hammer, he somewhat resembled the larger animals: dull of intellect, though good-natured all the same.

In the early days of their acquaintance, Gervaise embarrassed him immensely. Then in a few weeks he became accustomed to her. He watched for her that he might carry up her parcels, treated her as a sister, with an abrupt familiarity, and cut out pictures for her. One morning, however, having opened her door without knocking, he beheld her half undressed, washing her neck; and, for a week, he did not dare to look her in the face, so much so that he ended by making her blush herself.

Young Cassis, with the casual wit of a born Parisian, called Golden Mouth a dolt. It was all right not to get drunk all the time or chase women, but still, a man must be a man, or else he might as well wear skirts. Coupeau teased him in front of Gervaise, accusing him of making up to all the women in the neighborhood. Goujet vigorously defended himself against the charge.

But this didn't prevent the two workingmen from becoming best of friends. They went off to work together in the mornings and sometimes had a glass of beer together on the way home.

It eventually came about that Golden Mouth could render a service to Young Cassis, one of those favors that is remembered forever.

It was the second of December. The zinc-worker decided, just for the fun of it, to go into the city and watch the rioting. He didn't really care about the Republic, or Napoleon or anything like that, but he liked the smell of gunpowder and the sound of the rifles firing. He would have been arrested as a rioter if the blacksmith hadn't turned up at the barricade at just that moment and helped him escape. Goujet was very serious as they walked back up the Rue du Faubourg Poissonniere. He was interested in politics and believed in the Republic. But he had never fired a gun because the common people were getting tired of fighting battles for the middle classes who always seemed to get the benefit of them.

As they reached the top of the slope of the Rue du Faubourg Poissonniere, Goujet turned to look back at Paris and the mobs. After all, some day people would be sorry that they just stood by and did nothing. Coupeau laughed at this, saying you would be pretty stupid to risk your neck just to preserve the twenty-five francs a day for the lazybones in the Legislative Assembly. That evening the Coupeaus invited the Goujets to dinner. After desert Young Cassis and Golden Mouth kissed each other on the cheek. Their lives were joined till death.

For three years the existence of the two families went on, on either side of the landing, without an event. Gervaise was able to take care of her daughter and still work most of the week. She was now a skilled worker on fine laundry and earned up to three francs a day. She decided to put Etienne, now nearly eight, into a small boarding-school on Rue de Chartres for five francs a week. Despite the expenses for the two children, they were able to save twenty or thirty francs each month. Once they had six hundred francs saved, Gervaise often lay awake thinking of her ambitious dream: she wanted to rent a small shop, hire workers, and go into the laundry business herself. If this effort worked, they would have a steady income from savings in twenty years. They could retire and live in the country.

Yet she hesitated, saying she was looking for the right shop. She was giving herself time to think it over. Their savings were safe in the bank, and growing larger. So, in three years' time she had only fulfilled one of her dreams—she had bought a clock. But even this clock, made of rosewood with twined columns and a pendulum of gilded brass, was being paid for in installments of twenty-two sous each Monday for a year. She got upset if Coupeau tried to wind it; she liked to be the only one to lift off the glass dome. It was under the glass dome, behind the clock, that she hid her bank book. Sometimes, when she was dreaming of her shop, she would stare fixedly at the clock, lost in thought.

The Coupeaus went out nearly every Sunday with the Goujets. They were pleasant little excursions, sometimes to have some fried fish at Saint-Ouen, at others a rabbit at Vincennes, in the garden of some eating-house keeper without any grand display. The men drank sufficient to quench their thirst, and returned home as right as nine-pins, giving their arms to the ladies. In the evening before going to bed, the two families made up accounts and each paid half the expenses; and there was never the least quarrel about a sou more or less.

The Lorilleuxs became jealous of the Goujets. It seemed strange to them to see Young Cassis and Clump-clump going places all the time with strangers instead of their own relations. But, that's the way it was; some folks didn't care a bit about their family. Now that they had saved a few sous, they thought they were really somebody. Madame Lorilleux was much annoyed to see her brother getting away from her influence and begin to continually run down Gervaise to everyone. On the other hand, Madame Lerat took the young wife's side. Mother Coupeau tried to get along with everybody. She only wanted to be welcomed by all three of her children. Now that her eyesight was getting dimmer and dimmer she only had one regular house cleaning job but she was able to pick up some small jobs now and again.

On the day on which Nana was three years old, Coupeau, on returning home in the evening, found Gervaise quite upset. She refused to talk about it; there was nothing at all the matter with her, she said. But, as she had the table all wrong, standing still with the plates in her hands, absorbed in deep reflection, her husband insisted upon knowing what was the matter.

"Well, it is this," she ended by saying, "the little draper's shop in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, is to let. I saw it only an hour ago, when going to buy some cotton. It gave me quite a turn."

It was a very decent shop, and in that big house where they dreamed of living in former days. There was the shop, a back room, and two other rooms to the right and left; in short, just what they required. The rooms were rather small, but well placed. Only, she considered they wanted too much; the landlord talked of five hundred francs.

"So you've been over the place, and asked the price?" said Coupeau.

"Oh! you know, only out of curiosity!" replied she, affecting an air of indifference. "One looks about, and goes in wherever there's a bill up—that doesn't bind one to anything. But that shop is altogether too dear. Besides, it would perhaps be foolish of me to set up in business."

However, after dinner, she again referred to the draper's shop. She drew a plan of the place on the margin of a newspaper. And, little by little, she talked it over, measuring the corners, and arranging the rooms, as though she were going to move all her furniture in there on the morrow. Then Coupeau advised her to take it, seeing how she wanted to do so; she would certainly never find anything decent under five hundred francs; besides they might perhaps get a reduction. He knew only one objection to it and that was living in the same house as the Lorilleux, whom she could not bear.

Gervaise declared that she wasn't mad at anybody. So much did she want her own shop that she even spoke up for the Lorilleuxs, saying that they weren't mean at heart and that she would be able to get along just fine with them. When they went to bed, Coupeau fell asleep immediately, but she stayed awake, planning how she could arrange the new place even though she hadn't yet made up her mind completely.

On the morrow, when she was alone, she could not resist removing the glass cover from the clock, and taking a peep at the savings-bank book. To think that her shop was there, in those dirty pages, covered with ugly writing! Before going off to her work, she consulted Madame Goujet, who highly approved her project of setting up in business for herself; with a husband like hers, a good fellow who did not drink, she was certain of getting on, and of not having her earnings squandered. At the luncheon hour Gervaise even called on the Lorilleuxs to ask their advice; she did not wish to appear to be doing anything unknown to the family. Madame Lorilleux was struck all of a heap. What! Clump-clump was going in for a shop now! And her heart bursting with envy, she stammered, and tried to pretend to be pleased: no doubt the shop was a convenient one—Gervaise was right in taking it. However, when she had somewhat recovered, she and her husband talked of the dampness of the courtyard, of the poor light of the rooms on the ground floor. Oh! it was a good place for rheumatism. Yet, if she had made up her mind to take it, their observations, of course, would not make her alter her decision.

That evening Gervaise frankly owned with a laugh that she would have fallen ill if she had been prevented from having the shop. Nevertheless, before saying "it's done!" she wished to take Coupeau to see the place, and try and obtain a reduction in the rent.

"Very well, then, to-morrow, if you like," said her husband. "You can come and fetch me towards six o'clock at the house where I'm working, in the Rue de la Nation, and we'll call in at the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or on our way home."

Coupeau was then finishing the roofing of a new three-storied house. It so happened that on that day he was to fix the last sheets of zinc. As the roof was almost flat, he had set up his bench on it, a wide shutter supported on two trestles. A beautiful May sun was setting, giving a golden hue to the chimney-pots. And, right up at the top, against the clear sky, the workman was quietly cutting up his zinc with a big pair of shears, leaning over the bench, and looking like a tailor in his shop cutting out a pair of trousers. Close to the wall of the next house, his boy, a youngster of seventeen, thin and fair, was keeping the fire of the chafing dish blazing by the aid of an enormous pair of bellows, each puff of which raised a cloud of sparks.

"Hi! Zidore, put in the irons!" cried Coupeau.

The boy stuck the soldering irons into the midst of the charcoal, which looked a pale rose color in the daylight. Then he resumed blowing. Coupeau held the last sheet of zinc. It had to be placed at the edge of the roof, close to the gutter-pipe; there was an abrupt slant there, and the gaping void of the street opened beneath. The zinc-worker, just as though in his own home, wearing his list-shoes, advanced, dragging his feet, and whistling the air, "Oh! the little lambs." Arrived in front of the opening, he let himself down, and then, supporting himself with one knee against the masonry of a chimney-stack, remained half-way out over the pavement below. One of his legs dangled. When he leant back to call that young viper, Zidore, he held on to a corner of the masonry, on account of the street beneath him.

"You confounded dawdler! Give me the irons! It's no use looking up in the air, you skinny beggar! The larks won't tumble into your mouth already cooked!"

But Zidore did not hurry himself. He was interested in the neighboring roofs, and in a cloud of smoke which rose from the other side of Paris, close to Grenelle; it was very likely a fire. However, he came and laid down on his stomach, his head over the opening, and he passed the irons to Coupeau. Then the latter commenced to solder the sheet. He squatted, he stretched, always managing to balance himself, sometimes seated on one side, at other times standing on the tip of one foot, often only holding on by a finger. He had a confounded assurance, the devil's own cheek, familiar with danger, and braving it. It knew him. It was the street that was afraid, not he. As he kept his pipe in his mouth, he turned round every now and then to spit onto the pavement.

"Look, there's Madame Boche," he suddenly exclaimed and called down to her. "Hi! Madame Boche."

He had just caught sight of the concierge crossing the road. She raised her head and recognised him, and a conversation ensured between them. She hid her hands under her apron, her nose elevated in the air. He, standing up now, his left arm passed round a chimney-pot, leant over.

"Have you seen my wife?" asked he.

"No, I haven't," replied the concierge. "Is she around here?"

"She's coming to fetch me. And are they all well at home?"

"Why, yes, thanks; I'm the most ill, as you see. I'm going to the Chaussee Clignancourt to buy a small leg of mutton. The butcher near the Moulin-Rouge only charges sixteen sous."

They raised their voices, because a vehicle was passing. In the wide, deserted Rue de la Nation, their words, shouted out with all their might, had only caused a little old woman to come to her window; and this little old woman remained there leaning out, giving herself the treat of a grand emotion by watching that man on the roof over the way, as though she expected to see him fall, from one minute to another.

"Well! Good evening," cried Madame Boche. "I won't disturb you."

Coupeau turned round, and took back the iron that Zidore was holding for him. But just as the concierge was moving off, she caught sight of Gervaise on the other side of the way, holding Nana by the hand. She was already raising her head to tell the zinc-worker, when the young woman closed her mouth by an energetic gesture, and, in a low voice, so as not to be heard up there, she told her of her fear: she was afraid, by showing herself suddenly, of giving her husband a shock which might make him lose his balance. During the four years, she had only been once to fetch him at his work. That day was the second time. She could not witness it, her blood turned cold when she beheld her old man between heaven and earth, in places where even the sparrows would not venture.

"No doubt, it's not pleasant," murmured Madame Boche. "My husband's a tailor, so I have none of these terrors."

"If you only knew, in the early days," said Gervaise again, "I had frights from morning till night. I was always seeing him on a stretcher, with his head smashed. Now, I don't think of it so much. One gets used to everything. Bread must be earned. All the same, it's a precious dear loaf, for one risks one's bones more than is fair."

And she left off speaking, hiding Nana in her skirt, fearing a cry from the little one. Very pale, she looked up in spite of herself. At that moment Coupeau was soldering the extreme edge of the sheet close to the gutter; he slid down as far as possible, but without being able to reach the edge. Then, he risked himself with those slow movements peculiar to workmen. For an instant he was immediately over the pavement, no long holding on, all absorbed in his work; and, from below, one could see the little white flame of the solder frizzling up beneath the carefully wielded iron. Gervaise, speechless, her throat contracted with anguish, had clasped her hands together, and held them up in mechanical gesture of prayer. But she breathed freely as Coupeau got up and returned back along the roof, without hurrying himself, and taking the time to spit once more into the street.

"Ah! ah! so you've been playing the spy on me!" cried he, gaily, on beholding her. "She's been making a stupid of herself, eh, Madame Boche? She wouldn't call to me. Wait a bit, I shall have finished in ten minutes."

All that remained to do was to fix the top of the chimney—a mere nothing. The laundress and the concierge waited on the pavement, discussing the neighborhood, and giving an eye to Nana, to prevent her from dabbling in the gutter, where she wanted to look for little fishes; and the two women kept glancing up at the roof, smiling and nodding their heads, as though to imply that they were not losing patience. The old woman opposite had not left her window, had continued watching the man, and waiting.

"Whatever can she have to look at, that old she-goat?" said Madame Boche. "What a mug she has!"

One could hear the loud voice of the zinc-worker up above singing, "Ah! it's nice to gather strawberries!" Bending over his bench, he was now artistically cutting out his zinc. With his compasses he traced a line, and he detached a large fan-shaped piece with the aid of a pair of curved shears; then he lightly bent this fan with his hammer into the form of a pointed mushroom. Zidore was again blowing the charcoal in the chafing-dish. The sun was setting behind the house in a brilliant rosy light, which was gradually becoming paler, and turning to a delicate lilac. And, at this quiet hour of the day, right up against the sky, the silhouettes of the two workmen, looking inordinately large, with the dark line of the bench, and the strange profile of the bellows, stood out from the limpid back-ground of the atmosphere.

When the chimney-top was got into shape, Coupeau called out: "Zidore! The irons!"

But Zidore had disappeared. The zinc-worker swore, and looked about for him, even calling him through the open skylight of the loft. At length he discovered him on a neighboring roof, two houses off. The young rogue was taking a walk, exploring the environs, his fair scanty locks blowing in the breeze, his eyes blinking as they beheld the immensity of Paris.

"I say, lazy bones! Do you think you're having a day in the country?" asked Coupeau, in a rage. "You're like Monsieur Beranger, composing verses, perhaps! Will you give me those irons! Did any one ever see such a thing! Strolling about on the house-tops! Why not bring your sweetheart at once, and tell her of your love? Will you give me those irons? You confounded little shirker!"

He finished his soldering, and called to Gervaise: "There, it's done. I'm coming down."

The chimney-pot to which he had to fix the flue was in the middle of the roof. Gervaise, who was no longer uneasy, continued to smile as she followed his movements. Nana, amused all on a sudden by the view of her father, clapped her little hands. She had seated herself on the pavement to see the better up there.

"Papa! Papa!" called she with all her might. "Papa! Just look!"

The zinc-worker wished to lean forward, but his foot slipped. Then suddenly, stupidly, like a cat with its legs entangled, he rolled and descended the slight slope of the roof without being able to grab hold of anything.

"Mon Dieu," he cried in a choked voice.

And he fell. His body described a gentle curve, turned twice over on itself, and came smashing into the middle of the street with the dull thud of a bundle of clothes thrown from on high.

Gervaise, stupefied, her throat rent by one great cry, stood holding up her arms. Some passers-by hastened to the spot; a crowd soon formed. Madame Boche, utterly upset, her knees bending under her, took Nana in her arms, to hide her head and prevent her seeing. Meanwhile, the little old woman opposite quietly closed her window, as though satisfied.

Four men ended by carrying Coupeau into a chemist's, at the corner of the Rue des Poissonniers; and he remained there on a blanket, in the middle of the shop, whist they sent to the Lariboisiere Hospital for a stretcher. He was still breathing.

Gervaise, sobbing, was kneeling on the floor beside him, her face smudged with tears, stunned and unseeing. Her hands would reach to feel her husband's limbs with the utmost gentleness. Then she would draw back as she had been warned not to touch him. But a few seconds later she would touch him to assure herself that he was still warm, feeling somehow that she was helping him.

When the stretcher at length arrived, and they talked of starting for the hospital, she got up, saying violently:

"No, no, not to the hospital! We live in the Rue Neuve de la Goutte-d'Or."

It was useless for them to explain to her that the illness would cost her a great deal of money, if she took her husband home. She obstinately repeated:

"Rue Neuve de la Goutte-d'Or; I will show you the house. What can it matter to you? I've got money. He's my husband, isn't he? He's mine, and I want him at home."

And they had to take Coupeau to his own home. When the stretcher was carried through the crowd which was crushing up against the chemist's shop, the women of the neighborhood were excitedly talking of Gervaise. She limped, the dolt, but all the same she had some pluck. She would be sure to save her old man; whilst at the hospital the doctors let the patients die who were very bad, so as not to have the bother of trying to cure them. Madame Boche, after taking Nana home with her, returned, and gave her account of the accident, with interminable details, and still feeling agitated with the emotion she had passed through.

"I was going to buy a leg of mutton; I was there, I saw him fall," repeated she. "It was all through the little one; he turned to look at her, and bang! Ah! good heavens! I never want to see such a sight again. However, I must be off to get my leg of mutton."

For a week Coupeau was very bad. The family, the neighbors, everyone, expected to see him turn for the worse at any moment. The doctor—a very expensive doctor, who charged five francs for each visit—apprehended internal injuries, and these words filled everyone with fear. It was said in the neighborhood that the zinc-worker's heart had been injured by the shock. Gervaise alone, looking pale through her nights of watching, serious and resolute, shrugged her shoulders. Her old man's right leg was broken, everyone knew that; it would be set for him, and that was all. As for the rest, the injured heart, that was nothing. She knew how to restore a heart with ceaseless care. She was certain of getting him well and displayed magnificent faith. She stayed close by him and caressed him gently during the long bouts of fever without a moment of doubt. She was on her feet continuously for a whole week, completely absorbed by her determination to save him. She forgot the street outside, the entire city, and even her own children. On the ninth day, the doctor finally said that Coupeau would live. Gervaise collapsed into a chair, her body limp from fatigue. That night she consented to sleep for two hours with her head against the foot of the bed.

Coupeau's accident had created quite a commotion in the family. Mother Coupeau passed the nights with Gervaise; but as early as nine o'clock she fell asleep on a chair. Every evening, on returning from work, Madame Lerat went a long round out of her way to inquire how her brother was getting on. At first the Lorilleuxs had called two or three times a day, offering to sit up and watch, and even bringing an easy-chair for Gervaise. Then it was not long before there were disputes as to the proper way to nurse invalids. Madame Lorilleux said that she had saved enough people's lives to know how to go about it. She accused the young wife of pushing her aside, of driving her away from her own brother's bed. Certainly that Clump-clump ought to be concerned about Coupeau's getting well, for if she hadn't gone to Rue de la Nation to disturb him at his job, he would never had fallen. Only, the way she was taking care of him, she would certainly finish him.

When Gervaise saw that Coupeau was out of danger, she ceased guarding his bedside with so much jealous fierceness. Now, they could no longer kill him, and she let people approach without mistrust. The family invaded the room. The convalescence would be a very long one; the doctor had talked of four months. Then, during the long hours the zinc-worker slept, the Lorilleux talked of Gervaise as of a fool. She hadn't done any good by having her husband at home. At the hospital they would have cured him twice as quickly. Lorilleux would have liked to have been ill, to have caught no matter what, just to show her that he did not hesitate for a moment to go to Lariboisiere. Madame Lorilleux knew a lady who had just come from there. Well! She had had chicken to eat morning and night.

Again and again the two of them went over their estimate of how much four months of convalescence would cost; workdays lost, the doctor and the medicines, and afterward good wine and fresh meat. If the Coupeaus only used up their small savings, they would be very lucky indeed. They would probably have to do into debt. Well, that was to be expected and it was their business. They had no right to expect any help from the family, which couldn't afford the luxury of keeping an invalid at home. It was just Clump-clump's bad luck, wasn't it? Why couldn't she have done as others did and let her man be taken to hospital? This just showed how stuck up she was.

One evening Madame Lorilleux had the spitefulness to ask Gervaise suddenly:

"Well! And your shop, when are you going to take it?"

"Yes," chuckled Lorilleux, "the landlord's still waiting for you."

Gervaise was astonished. She had completely forgotten the shop; but she saw the wicked joy of those people, at the thought that she would no longer be able to take it, and she was bursting with anger. From that evening, in fact, they watched for every opportunity to twit her about her hopeless dream. When any one spoke of some impossible wish, they would say that it might be realized on the day that Gervaise started in business, in a beautiful shop opening onto the street. And behind her back they would laugh fit to split their sides. She did not like to think such an unkind thing, but, really, the Lorilleuxs now seemed to be very pleased at Coupeau's accident, as it prevented her setting up as a laundress in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or.

Then she also wished to laugh, and show them how willingly she parted with the money for the sake of curing her husband. Each time she took the savings-bank book from beneath the glass clock-tower in their presence, she would say gaily:

"I'm going out; I'm going to rent my shop."

She had not been willing to withdraw the money all at once. She took it out a hundred francs at a time, so as not to keep such a pile of gold and silver in her drawer; then, too, she vaguely hoped for some miracle, some sudden recovery, which would enable them not to part with the entire sum. At each journey to the savings-bank, on her return home, she added up on a piece of paper the money they had still left there. It was merely for the sake of order. Their bank account might be getting smaller all the time, yet she went on with her quiet smile and common-sense attitude, keeping the account straight. It was a consolation to be able to use this money for such a good purpose, to have had it when faced with their misfortune.

While Coupeau was bed-ridden the Goujets were very kind to Gervaise. Madame Goujet was always ready to assist. She never went to shop without stopping to ask Gervaise if there was anything she needed, sugar or butter or salt. She always brought over hot bouillon on the evenings she cooked pot au feu. Sometimes, when Gervaise seemed to have too much to do, Madame Goujet helped her do the dishes, or cleaned the kitchen herself. Goujet took her water pails every morning and filled them at the tap on Rue des Poissonniers, saving her two sous a day. After dinner, if no family came to visit, the Goujets would come over to visit with the Coupeaus.

Until ten o'clock, the blacksmith would smoke his pipe and watch Gervaise busy with her invalid. He would not speak ten words the entire evening. He was moved to pity by the sight of her pouring Coupeau's tea and medicine into a cup, or stirring the sugar in it very carefully so as to make no sound with the spoon. It stirred him deeply when she would lean over Coupeau and speak in her soft voice. Never before had he known such a fine woman. Her limp increased the credit due her for wearing herself out doing things for her husband all day long. She never sat down for ten minutes, not even to eat. She was always running to the chemist's. And then she would still keep the house clean, not even a speck of dust. She never complained, no matter how exhausted she became. Goujet developed a very deep affection for Gervaise in this atmosphere of unselfish devotion.

One day he said to the invalid, "Well, old man, now you're patched up again! I wasn't worried about you. Your wife works miracles."

Goujet was supposed to be getting married. His mother had found a suitable girl, a lace-mender like herself, whom she was urging him to marry. He had agreed so as not to hurt her feelings and the wedding had been set for early September. Money had long since been saved to set them up in housekeeping. However, when Gervaise referred to his coming marriage, he shook his head, saying, "Not every woman is like you, Madame Coupeau. If all women were like you, I'd marry ten of them."

At the end of two months, Coupeau was able to get up. He did not go far, only from the bed to the window, and even then Gervaise had to support him. There he would sit down in the easy-chair the Lorilleuxs had brought, with his right leg stretched out on a stool. This joker, who used to laugh at the people who slipped down on frosty days, felt greatly put out by his accident. He had no philosophy. He had spent those two months in bed, in cursing, and in worrying the people about him. It was not an existence, really, to pass one's life on one's back, with a pin all tied up and as stiff as a sausage. Ah, he certainly knew the ceiling by heart; there was a crack, at the corner of the alcove, that he could have drawn with his eyes shut. Then, when he was made comfortable in the easy-chair, it was another grievance. Would he be fixed there for long, just like a mummy?

Nobody ever passed along the street, so it was no fun to watch. Besides, it stank of bleach water all day. No, he was just growing old; he'd have given ten years of his life just to go see how the fortifications were getting along. He kept going on about his fate. It wasn't right, what had happened to him. A good worker like him, not a loafer or a drunkard, he could have understood in that case.

"Papa Coupeau," said he, "broke his neck one day that he'd been boozing. I can't say that it was deserved, but anyhow it was explainable. I had had nothing since my lunch, was perfectly quiet, and without a drop of liquor in my body; and yet I came to grief just because I wanted to turn round to smile at Nana! Don't you think that's too much? If there is a providence, it certainly arranges things in a very peculiar manner. I, for one, shall never believe in it."

And when at last he was able to use his legs, he retained a secret grudge against work. It was a handicraft full of misfortunes to pass one's days, like the cats, on the roofs of the houses. The employers were no fools! They sent you to your death—being far too cowardly to venture themselves on a ladder—and stopped at home in safety at their fire-sides without caring a hang for the poorer classes; and he got to the point of saying that everyone ought to fix the zinc himself on his own house. Mon Dieu! It was the only fair way to do it! If you don't want the rain to come in, do the work yourself. He regretted he hadn't learned another trade, something more pleasant, something less dangerous, maybe cabinetmaking. It was really his father's fault. Lots of fathers have the foolish habit of shoving their sons into their own line of work.

For another two months Coupeau hobbled about on crutches. He had first of all managed to get as far as the street, and smoke his pipe in front of the door. Then he had managed to reach the exterior Boulevard, dragging himself along in the sunshine, and remaining for hours on one of the seats. Gaiety returned to him; his infernal tongue got sharper in these long hours of idleness. And with the pleasure of living, he gained there a delight in doing nothing, an indolent feeling took possession of his limbs, and his muscles gradually glided into a very sweet slumber. It was the slow victory of laziness, which took advantage of his convalescence to obtain possession of his body and unnerve him with its tickling. He regained his health, as thorough a banterer as before, thinking life beautiful, and not seeing why it should not last for ever.

As soon as he could get about without the crutches, he made longer walks, often visiting construction jobs to see old comrades. He would stand with his arms folded, sneering and shaking his head, ridiculing the workers slaving at the job, stretching out his leg to show them what you got for wearing yourself out. Being able to stand about and mock others while they were working satisfied his spite against hard work. No doubt he'd have to go back to it, but he'd put it off as long as possible. He had a reason now to be lazy. Besides, it seemed good to him to loaf around like a bum!

On the afternoons when Coupeau felt dull, he would call on the Lorilleuxs. The latter would pity him immensely, and attract him with all sorts of amiable attentions. During the first years following his marriage, he had avoided them, thanks to Gervaise's influence. Now they regained their sway over him by twitting him about being afraid of his wife. He was no man, that was evident! The Lorilleuxs, however, showed great discretion, and were loud in their praise of the laundress's good qualities. Coupeau, without as yet coming to wrangling, swore to the latter that his sister adored her, and requested that she would behave more amiably to her. The first quarrel which the couple had occurred one evening on account of Etienne. The zinc-worker had passed the afternoon with the Lorilleuxs. On arriving home, as the dinner was not quite ready, and the children were whining for their soup, he suddenly turned upon Etienne, and boxed his ears soundly. And during an hour he did not cease to grumble; the brat was not his; he did not know why he allowed him to be in the place; he would end by turning him out into the street. Up till then he had tolerated the youngster without all that fuss. On the morrow he talked of his dignity. Three days after, he kept kicking the little fellow, morning and evening, so much so that the child, whenever he heard him coming, bolted into the Goujets' where the old lace-mender kept a corner of the table clear for him to do his lessons.

Gervaise had for some time past, returned to work. She no longer had the trouble of looking under the glass cover of the clock; all the savings were gone; and she had to work hard, work for four, for there were four to feed now. She alone maintained them. Whenever she heard people pitying her, she at once found excuses for Coupeau. Recollect! He had suffered so much; it was not surprising if his disposition had soured! But it would pass off when his health returned. And if any one hinted that Coupeau seemed all right again, that he could very well return to work, she protested: No, no; not yet! She did not want to see him take to his bed again. They would allow her to know best what the doctor said, perhaps! It was she who prevented him returning to work, telling him every morning to take his time and not to force himself. She even slipped twenty sou pieces into his waistcoat pocket. Coupeau accepted this as something perfectly natural. He was always complaining of aches and pains so that she would coddle him. At the end of six months he was still convalescing.

Now, whenever he went to watch others working, he was always ready to join his comrades in downing a shot. It wasn't so bad, after all. They had their fun, and they never stayed more than five minutes. That couldn't hurt anybody. Only a hypocrite would say he went in because he wanted a drink. No wonder they had laughed at him in the past. A glass of wine never hurt anybody. He only drank wine though, never brandy. Wine never made you sick, didn't get you drunk, and helped you to live longer. Soon though, several times, after a day of idleness in going from one building job to another, he came home half drunk. On those occasions Gervaise pretended to have a terrible headache and kept their door closed so that the Goujets wouldn't hear Coupeau's drunken babblings.

Little by little, the young woman lost her cheerfulness. Morning and evening she went to the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or to look at the shop, which was still to be let; and she would hide herself as though she were committing some childish prank unworthy of a grown-up person. This shop was beginning to turn her brain. At night-time, when the light was out she experienced the charm of some forbidden pleasure by thinking of it with her eyes open. She again made her calculations; two hundred and fifty francs for the rent, one hundred and fifty francs for utensils and moving, one hundred francs in hand to keep them going for a fortnight—in all five hundred francs at the very lowest figure. If she was not continually thinking of it aloud, it was for fear she should be suspected of regretting the savings swallowed up by Coupeau's illness. She often became quite pale, having almost allowed her desire to escape her and catching back her words, quite confused as though she had been thinking of something wicked. Now they would have to work for four or five years before they would succeed in saving such a sum. Her regret was at not being able to start in business at once; she would have earned all the home required, without counting on Coupeau, letting him take months to get into the way of work again; she would no longer have been uneasy, but certain of the future and free from the secret fears which sometimes seized her when he returned home very gay and singing, and relating some joke of that animal My-Boots, whom he had treated to a drink.

One evening, Gervaise being at home alone, Goujet entered, and did not hurry off again, according to his habit. He seated himself, and smoked as he watched her. He probably had something very serious to say; he thought it over, let it ripen without being able to put it into suitable words. At length, after a long silence, he appeared to make up his mind, and took his pipe out of his mouth to say all in a breath:

"Madame Gervaise, will you allow me to lend you some money?"

She was leaning over an open drawer, looking for some dish-cloths. She got up, her face very red. He must have seen her then, in the morning, standing in ecstacy before the shop for close upon ten minutes. He was smiling in an embarrassed way, as though he had made some insulting proposal. But she hastily refused. Never would she accept money from any one without knowing when she would be able to return it. Then also it was a question of too large an amount. And as he insisted, in a frightened manner, she ended by exclaiming:

"But your marriage? I certainly can't take the money you've been saving for your marriage!"

"Oh, don't let that bother you," he replied, turning red in his turn. "I'm not going to be married now. That was just an idea, you know. Really, I would much sooner lend you the money."

Then they both held down their heads. There was something very pleasant between them to which they did not give expression. And Gervaise accepted. Goujet had told his mother. They crossed the landing, and went to see her at once. The lace-mender was very grave, and looked rather sad as she bent her face over her tambour-frame. She would not thwart her son, but she no longer approved Gervaise's project; and she plainly told her why. Coupeau was going to the bad; Coupeau would swallow up her shop. She especially could not forgive the zinc-worker for having refused to learn to read during his convalescence. The blacksmith had offered to teach him, but the other had sent him to the right about, saying that learning made people get thin. This had almost caused a quarrel between the two workmen; each went his own way. Madame Goujet, however, seeing her big boy's beseeching glances, behaved very kindly to Gervaise. It was settled that they would lend their neighbors five hundred francs; the latter were to repay the amount by installments of twenty francs a month; it would last as long as it lasted.

"I say, the blacksmith's sweet on you," exclaimed Coupeau, laughing, when he heard what had taken place. "Oh, I'm quite easy; he's too big a muff. We'll pay him back his money. But, really, if he had to deal with some people, he'd find himself pretty well duped."

On the morrow the Coupeaus took the shop. All day long, Gervaise was running from Rue Neuve de la Goutte-d'Or. When the neighbors beheld her pass thus, nimble and delighted to the extent that she no longer limped, they said she must have undergone some operation.

CHAPTER V.

It so happened that the Boches had left the Rue des Poissonniers at the April quarter, and were now taking charge of the great house in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. It was a curious coincidence, all the same! One thing that worried Gervaise who had lived so quietly in her lodgings in the Rue Neuve, was the thought of again being under the subjection of some unpleasant person, with whom she would be continually quarrelling, either on account of water spilt in the passage or of a door shut too noisily at night-time. Concierges are such a disagreeable class! But it would be a pleasure to be with the Boches. They knew one another—they would always get on well together. It would be just like members of the same family.

On the day the Coupeaus went to sign their lease, Gervaise felt her heart swollen with pride as she passed through the high doorway. She was then at length going to live in that house as vast as a little town, with its interminable staircases, and passages as long and winding as streets. She was excited by everything: the gray walls with varicolored rugs hanging from windows to dry in the sun, the dingy courtyard with as many holes in its pavement as a public square, the hum of activity coming through the walls. She felt joy that she was at last about to realize her ambition. She also felt fear that she would fail and be crushed in the endless struggle against the poverty and starvation she could feel breathing down her neck. It seemed to her that she was doing something very bold, throwing herself into the midst of some machinery in motion, as she listened to the blacksmith's hammers and the cabinetmakers' planes, hammering and hissing in the depths of the work-shops on the ground floor. On that day the water flowing from the dyer's under the entrance porch was a very pale apple green. She smilingly stepped over it; to her the color was a pleasant omen.

The meeting with the landlord was to take place in the Boches' room. Monsieur Marescot, a wealthy cutler of the Rue de la Paix, had at one time turned a grindstone through the streets. He was now stated to be worth several millions. He was a man of fifty-five, large and big-boned. Even though he now wore a decoration in his button-hole, his huge hands were still those of a former workingman. It was his joy to carry off the scissors and knives of his tenants, to sharpen them himself, for the fun of it. He often stayed for hours with his concierges, closed up in the darkness of their lodges, going over the accounts. That's where he did all his business. He was now seated by Madame Boche's kitchen table, listening to her story of how the dressmaker on the third floor, staircase A, had used a filthy word in refusing to pay her rent. He had had to work precious hard once upon a time. But work was the high road to everything. And, after counting the two hundred and fifty francs for the first two quarters in advance, and dropping them into his capacious pocket, he related the story of his life, and showed his decoration.

Gervaise, however, felt rather ill at ease on account of the Boches' behavior. They pretended not to know her. They were most assiduous in their attentions to the landlord, bowing down before him, watching for his least words, and nodding their approval of them. Madame Boche suddenly ran out and dispersed a group of children who were paddling about in front of the cistern, the tap of which they had turned full on, causing the water to flow over the pavement; and when she returned, upright and severe in her skirts, crossing the courtyard and glancing slowly up at all the windows, as though to assure herself of the good behavior of the household, she pursed her lips in a way to show with what authority she was invested, now that she reigned over three hundred tenants. Boche again spoke of the dressmaker on the second floor; he advised that she should be turned out; he reckoned up the number of quarters she owed with the importance of a steward whose management might be compromised. Monsieur Marescot approved the suggestion of turning her out, but he wished to wait till the half quarter. It was hard to turn people out into the street, more especially as it did not put a sou into the landlord's pocket. And Gervaise asked herself with a shudder if she too would be turned out into the street the day that some misfortune rendered her unable to pay.

The concierge's lodge was as dismal as a cellar, black from smoke and crowded with dark furniture. All the sunlight fell upon the tailor's workbench by the window. An old frock coat that was being reworked lay on it. The Boches' only child, a four-year-old redhead named Pauline, was sitting on the floor, staring quietly at the veal simmering on the stove, delighted with the sharp odor of cooking that came from the frying pan.

Monsieur Marescot again held out his hand to the zinc-worker, when the latter spoke of the repairs, recalling to his mind a promise he had made to talk the matter over later on. But the landlord grew angry, he had never promised anything; besides, it was not usual to do any repairs to a shop. However, he consented to go over the place, followed by the Coupeaus and Boche. The little linen-draper had carried off all his shelves and counters; the empty shop displayed its blackened ceiling and its cracked wall, on which hung strips of an old yellow paper. In the sonorous emptiness of the place, there ensued a heated discussion. Monsieur Marescot exclaimed that it was the business of shopkeepers to embellish their shops, for a shopkeeper might wish to have gold put about everywhere, and he, the landlord, could not put out gold. Then he related that he had spent more than twenty thousand francs in fitting up his premises in the Rue de la Paix. Gervaise, with her woman's obstinacy, kept repeating an argument which she considered unanswerable. He would repaper a lodging, would he not? Then, why did he not treat the shop the same as a lodging? She did not ask him for anything else—only to whitewash the ceiling, and put some fresh paper on the walls.

Boche, all this while, remained dignified and impenetrable; he turned about and looked up in the air, without expressing an opinion. Coupeau winked at him in vain; he affected not to wish to take advantage of his great influence over the landlord. He ended, however, by making a slight grimace—a little smile accompanied by a nod of the head. Just then Monsieur Marescot, exasperated, and seemingly very unhappy, and clutching his fingers like a miser being despoiled of his gold, was giving way to Gervaise, promising to do the ceiling and repaper the shop on condition that she paid for half of the paper. And he hurried away declining to discuss anything further.

Now that Boche was alone with the Coupeaus, the concierge became quite talkative and slapped them on the shoulders. Well, well, see what they had gotten. Without his help, they would never have gotten the concessions. Didn't they notice how the landlord had looked to him out of the corner of his eye for advice and how he'd made up his mind suddenly when he saw Boche smile? He confessed to them confidentially that he was the real boss of the building. It was he who decided who got eviction notices and who could become tenants. He collected all the rents and kept them for a couple of weeks in his bureau drawer.

That evening the Coupeaus, to express their gratitude to the Boches, sent them two bottles of wine as a present.

The following Monday the workmen started doing up the shop. The purchasing of the paper turned out especially to be a very big affair. Gervaise wanted a grey paper with blue flowers, so as to enliven and brighten the walls. Boche offered to take her to the dealers, so that she might make her own selection. But the landlord had given him formal instructions not to go beyond the price of fifteen sous the piece. They were there an hour. The laundress kept looking in despair at a very pretty chintz pattern costing eighteen sous the piece, and thought all the other papers hideous. At length the concierge gave in; he would arrange the matter, and, if necessary, would make out there was a piece more used than was really the case. So, on her way home, Gervaise purchased some tarts for Pauline. She did not like being behindhand—one always gained by behaving nicely to her.

The shop was to be ready in four days. The workmen were there three weeks. At first it was arranged that they should merely wash the paint. But this paint, originally maroon, was so dirty and so sad-looking, that Gervaise allowed herself to be tempted to have the whole of the frontage painted a light blue with yellow moldings. Then the repairs seemed as though they would last for ever. Coupeau, as he was still not working, arrived early each morning to see how things were going. Boche left the overcoat or trousers on which he was working to come and supervise. Both of them would stand and watch with their hands behind their backs, puffing on their pipes.

The painters were very merry fellows who would often desert their work to stand in the middle of the shop and join the discussion, shaking their heads for hours, admiring the work already done. The ceiling had been whitewashed quickly, but the paint on the walls never seemed to dry in a hurry.

Around nine o'clock the painters would arrive with their paint pots which they stuck in a corner. They would look around and then disappear. Perhaps they went to eat breakfast. Sometimes Coupeau would take everyone for a drink—Boche, the two painters and any of Coupeau's friends who were nearby. This meant another afternoon wasted.

Gervaise's patience was thoroughly exhausted, when, suddenly, everything was finished in two days, the paint varnished, the paper hung, and the dirt all cleared away. The workmen had finished it off as though they were playing, whistling away on their ladders, and singing loud enough to deafen the whole neighborhood.

The moving in took place at once. During the first few days Gervaise felt as delighted as a child. Whenever she crossed the road on returning from some errand, she lingered to smile at her home. From a distance her shop appeared light and gay with its pale blue signboard, on which the word "Laundress" was painted in big yellow letters, amidst the dark row of the other frontages. In the window, closed in behind by little muslin curtains, and hung on either side with blue paper to show off the whiteness of the linen, some shirts were displayed, with some women's caps hanging above them on wires. She thought her shop looked pretty, being the same color as the heavens.

Inside there was more blue; the paper, in imitation of a Pompadour chintz, represented a trellis overgrown with morning-glories. A huge table, taking up two-thirds of the room, was her ironing-table. It was covered with thick blanketing and draped with a strip of cretonne patterned with blue flower sprays that hid the trestles beneath.

Gervaise was enchanted with her pretty establishment and would often seat herself on a stool and sigh with contentment, delighted with all the new equipment. Her first glance always went to the cast-iron stove where the irons were heated ten at a time, arranged over the heat on slanting rests. She would kneel down to look into the stove to make sure the apprentice had not put in too much coke.

The lodging at the back of the shop was quite decent. The Coupeaus slept in the first room, where they also did the cooking and took their meals; a door at the back opened on to the courtyard of the house. Nana's bed was in the right hand room, which was lighted by a little round window close to the ceiling. As for Etienne, he shared the left hand room with the dirty clothes, enormous bundles of which lay about on the floor. However, there was one disadvantage—the Coupeaus would not admit it at first—but the damp ran down the walls, and it was impossible to see clearly in the place after three o'clock in the afternoon.

In the neighborhood the new shop produced a great sensation. The Coupeaus were accused of going too fast, and making too much fuss. They had, in fact, spent the five hundred francs lent by the Goujets in fitting up the shop and in moving, without keeping sufficient to live upon for a fortnight, as they had intended doing. The morning that Gervaise took down her shutters for the first time, she had just six francs in her purse. But that did not worry her, customers began to arrive, and things seemed promising. A week later on the Saturday, before going to bed, she remained two hours making calculations on a piece of paper, and she awoke Coupeau to tell him, with a bright look on her face, that there were hundreds and thousands of francs to be made, if they were only careful.

"Ah, well!" said Madame Lorilleux all over the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, "my fool of a brother is seeing some funny things! All that was wanting was that Clump-clump should go about so haughty. It becomes her well, doesn't it?"

The Lorilleuxs had declared a feud to the death against Gervaise. To begin with, they had almost died of rage during the time while the repairs were being done to the shop. If they caught sight of the painters from a distance, they would walk on the other side of the way, and go up to their rooms with their teeth set. A blue shop for that "nobody," it was enough to discourage all honest, hard-working people! Besides, the second day after the shop opened the apprentice happened to throw out a bowl of starch just at the moment when Madame Lorilleux was passing. The zinc-worker's sister caused a great commotion in the street, accusing her sister-in-law of insulting her through her employees. This broke off all relations. Now they only exchanged terrible glares when they encountered each other.

"Yes, she leads a pretty life!" Madame Lorilleux kept saying. "We all know where the money came from that she paid for her wretched shop! She borrowed it from the blacksmith; and he springs from a nice family too! Didn't the father cut his own throat to save the guillotine the trouble of doing so? Anyhow, there was something disreputable of that sort!"

She bluntly accused Gervaise of flirting with Goujet. She lied—she pretended she had surprised them together one night on a seat on the exterior Boulevards. The thought of this liaison, of pleasures that her sister-in-law was no doubt enjoying, exasperated her still more, because of her own ugly woman's strict sense of propriety. Every day the same cry came from her heart to her lips.

"What does she have, that wretched cripple, for people to fall in love with her? Why doesn't any one want me?"

She busied herself in endless gossiping among the neighbors. She told them the whole story. The day the Coupeaus got married she turned up her nose at her. Oh, she had a keen nose, she could smell in advance how it would turn out. Then, Clump-clump pretended to be so sweet, what a hypocrite! She and her husband had only agreed to be Nana's godparents for the sake of her brother. What a bundle it had cost, that fancy christening. If Clump-clump were on her deathbed she wouldn't give her a glass of water, no matter how much she begged.

She didn't want anything to do with such a shameless baggage. Little Nana would always be welcome when she came up to see her godparents. The child couldn't be blamed for her mother's sins. But there was no use trying to tell Coupeau anything. Any real man in his situation would have beaten his wife and put a stop to it all. All they wanted was for him to insist on respect for his family. Mon Dieu! If she, Madame Lorilleux, had acted like that, Coupeau wouldn't be so complacent. He would have stabbed her for sure with his shears.

The Boches, however, who sternly disapproved of quarrels in their building, said that the Lorilleuxs were in the wrong. The Lorilleuxs were no doubt respectable persons, quiet, working the whole day long, and paying their rent regularly. But, really, jealousy had driven them mad. And they were mean enough to skin an egg, real misers. They were so stingy that they'd hide their bottle when any one came in, so as not to have to offer a glass of wine—not regular people at all.

Gervaise had brought over cassis and soda water one day to drink with the Boches. When Madame Lorilleux went by, she acted out spitting before the concierge's door. Well, after that when Madame Boches swept the corridors on Saturdays, she always left a pile of trash before the Lorilleuxs' door.

"It isn't to be wondered at!" Madame Lorilleux would exclaim, "Clump-clump's always stuffing them, the gluttons! Ah! they're all alike; but they had better not annoy me! I'll complain to the landlord. Only yesterday I saw that sly old Boche chasing after Madame Gaudron's skirts. Just fancy! A woman of that age, and who has half a dozen children, too; it's positively disgusting! If I catch them at anything of the sort again, I'll tell Madame Boche, and she'll give them both a hiding. It'll be something to laugh at."

Mother Coupeau continued to visit the two houses, agreeing with everybody and even managing to get asked oftener to dinner, by complaisantly listening one night to her daughter and the next night to her daughter-in-law.

However, Madame Lerat did not go to visit the Coupeaus because she had argued with Gervaise about a Zouave who had cut the nose of his mistress with a razor. She was on the side of the Zouave, saying it was evidence of a great passion, but without explaining further her thought. Then, she had made Madame Lorilleux even more angry by telling her that Clump-clump had called her "Cow Tail" in front of fifteen or twenty people. Yes, that's what the Boches and all the neighbors called her now, "Cow Tail."

Gervaise remained calm and cheerful among all these goings-on. She often stood by the door of her shop greeting friends who passed by with a nod and a smile. It was her pleasure to take a moment between batches of ironing to enjoy the street and take pride in her own stretch of sidewalk.

She felt that the Rue de la Goutte d'Or was hers, and the neighboring streets, and the whole neighborhood. As she stood there, with her blonde hair slightly damp from the heat of the shop, she would look left and right, taking in the people, the buildings, and the sky. To the left Rue de la Goutte d'Or was peaceful and almost empty, like a country town with women idling in their doorways. While, to the right, only a short distance away, Rue des Poissonniers had a noisy throng of people and vehicles.

The stretch of gutter before her own shop became very important in her mind. It was like a wide river which she longed to see neat and clean. It was a lively river, colored by the dye shop with the most fanciful of hues which contrasted with the black mud beside it.

Then there were the shops: a large grocery with a display of dried fruits protected by mesh nets; a shop selling work clothes which had white tunics and blue smocks hanging before it with arms that waved at the slightest breeze. Cats were purring on the counters of the fruit store and the tripe shop. Madame Vigouroux, the coal dealer next door, returned her greetings. She was a plump, short woman with bright eyes in a dark face who was always joking with the men while standing at her doorway. Her shop was decorated in imitation of a rustic chalet. The neighbors on the other side were a mother and daughter, the Cudorges. The umbrella sellers kept their door closed and never came out to visit.

Gervaise always looked across the road, too, through the wide carriage entrance of the windowless wall opposite her, at the blacksmith's forge. The courtyard was cluttered with vans and carts. Inscribed on the wall was the word "Blacksmith."

At the lower end of the wall between the small shops selling scrap iron and fried potatoes was a watchmaker. He wore a frock coat and was always very neat. His cuckoo clocks could be heard in chorus against the background noise of the street and the blacksmith's rhythmic clanging.

The neighborhood in general thought Gervaise very nice. There was, it is true, a good deal of scandal related regarding her; but everyone admired her large eyes, small mouth and beautiful white teeth. In short she was a pretty blonde, and had it not been for her crippled leg she might have ranked amongst the comeliest. She was now in her twenty-eighth year, and had grown considerably plumper. Her fine features were becoming puffy, and her gestures were assuming a pleasant indolence.

At times she occasionally seemed to forget herself on the edge of a chair, whilst she waited for her iron to heat, smiling vaguely and with an expression of greedy joy upon her face. She was becoming fond of good living, everybody said so; but that was not a very grave fault, but rather the contrary. When one earns sufficient to be able to buy good food, one would be foolish to eat potato parings. All the more so as she continued to work very hard, slaving to please her customers, sitting up late at night after the place was closed, whenever there was anything urgent.

She was lucky as all her neighbors said; everything prospered with her. She did the washing for all the house—M. Madinier, Mademoiselle Remanjou, the Boches. She even secured some of the customers of her old employer, Madame Fauconnier, Parisian ladies living in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere. As early as the third week she was obliged to engage two workwomen, Madame Putois and tall Clemence, the girl who used to live on the sixth floor; counting her apprentice, that little squint-eyed Augustine, who was as ugly as a beggar's behind, that made three persons in her employ. Others would certainly have lost their heads at such a piece of good fortune. It was excusable for her to slack a little on Monday after drudging all through the week. Besides, it was necessary to her. She would have had no courage left, and would have expected to see the shirts iron themselves, if she had not been able to dress up in some pretty thing.

Gervaise was always so amiable, meek as a lamb, sweet as sugar. There wasn't any one she disliked except Madame Lorilleux. While she was enjoying a good meal and coffee, she could be indulgent and forgive everybody saying: "We have to forgive each other—don't we?—unless we want to live like savages." Hadn't all her dreams come true? She remembered her old dream: to have a job, enough bread to eat and a corner in which to sleep, to bring up her children, not to be beaten, and to die in her own bed. She had everything she wanted now and more than she had ever expected. She laughed, thinking of delaying dying in her own bed as long as possible.

It was to Coupeau especially that Gervaise behaved nicely. Never an angry word, never a complaint behind her husband's back. The zinc-worker had at length resumed work; and as the job he was engaged on was at the other side of Paris, she gave him every morning forty sous for his luncheon, his glass of wine and his tobacco. Only, two days out of every six, Coupeau would stop on the way, spend the forty sous in drink with a friend, and return home to lunch, with some cock-and-bull story. Once even he did not take the trouble to go far; he treated himself, My-Boots and three others to a regular feast—snails, roast meat, and some sealed bottles of wine—at the "Capuchin," on the Barriere de la Chapelle. Then, as his forty sous were not sufficient, he had sent the waiter to his wife with the bill and the information that he was in pawn. She laughed and shrugged her shoulders. Where was the harm if her old man amused himself a bit? You must give men a long rein if you want to live peaceably at home. From one word to another, one soon arrived at blows. Mon Dieu! It was easy to understand. Coupeau still suffered from his leg; besides, he was led astray. He was obliged to do as the others did, or else he would be thought a cheap skate. And it was really a matter of no consequence. If he came home a bit elevated, he went to bed, and two hours afterwards he was all right again.

It was now the warm time of the year. One June afternoon, a Saturday when there was a lot of work to get through, Gervaise herself had piled the coke into the stove, around which ten irons were heating, whilst a rumbling sound issued from the chimney. At that hour the sun was shining full on the shop front, and the pavement reflected the heat waves, causing all sorts of quaint shadows to dance over the ceiling, and that blaze of light which assumed a bluish tinge from the color of the paper on the shelves and against the window, was almost blinding in the intensity with which it shone over the ironing-table, like a golden dust shaken among the fine linen. The atmosphere was stifling. The shop door was thrown wide open, but not a breath of air entered; the clothes which were hung up on brass wires to dry, steamed and became as stiff as shavings in less than three quarters of an hour. For some little while past an oppressive silence had reigned in that furnace-like heat, interrupted only by the smothered sound of the banging down of the irons on the thick blanket covered with calico.

"Ah, well!" said Gervaise, "it's enough to melt one! We might have to take off our chemises."

She was sitting on the floor, in front of a basin, starching some things. Her sleeves were rolled up and her camisole was slipping down her shoulders. Little curls of golden hair stuck were stuck to her skin by perspiration. She carefully dipped caps, shirt-fronts, entire petticoats, and the trimmings of women's drawers into the milky water. Then she rolled the things up and placed them at the bottom of a square basket, after dipping her hand in a pail and shaking it over the portions of the shirts and drawers which she had not starched.

"This basketful's for you, Madame Putois," she said. "Look sharp, now! It dries at once, and will want doing all over again in an hour."

Madame Putois, a thin little woman of forty-five, was ironing. Though she was buttoned up in an old chestnut-colored dress, there was not a drop of perspiration to be seen. She had not even taken her cap off, a black cap trimmed with green ribbons turned partly yellow. And she stood perfectly upright in front of the ironing-table, which was too high for her, sticking out her elbows, and moving her iron with the jerky evolutions of a puppet. On a sudden she exclaimed:

"Ah, no! Mademoiselle Clemence, you mustn't take your camisole off. You know I don't like such indecencies. Whilst you're about it, you'd better show everything. There's already three men over the way stopping to look."

Tall Clemence called her an old beast between her teeth. She was suffocating; she might certainly make herself comfortable; everyone was not gifted with a skin as dry as touchwood. Besides no one could see anything; and she held up her arms, whilst her opulent bosom almost ripped her chemise, and her shoulders were bursting through the straps. At the rate she was going, Clemence was not likely to have any marrow left in her bones long before she was thirty years old. Mornings after big parties she was unable to feel the ground she trod upon, and fell asleep over her work, whilst her head and her stomach seemed as though stuffed full of rags. But she was kept on all the same, for no other workwoman could iron a shirt with her style. Shirts were her specialty.

"This is mine, isn't it?" she declared, tapping her bosom. "And it doesn't bite; it hurts nobody!"

"Clemence, put your wrapper on again," said Gervaise. "Madame Putois is right, it isn't decent. People will begin to take my house for what it isn't."

So tall Clemence dressed herself again, grumbling the while. "Mon Dieu! There's prudery for you."

And she vented her rage on the apprentice, that squint-eyed Augustine who was ironing some stockings and handkerchiefs beside her. She jostled her and pushed her with her elbow; but Augustine who was of a surly disposition, and slyly spiteful in the way of an animal and a drudge, spat on the back of the other's dress just out of revenge, without being seen. Gervaise, during this incident, had commenced a cap belonging to Madame Boche, which she intended to take great pains with. She had prepared some boiled starch to make it look new again. She was gently passing a little iron rounded at both ends over the inside of the crown of the cap, when a bony-looking woman entered the shop, her face covered with red blotches and her skirts sopping wet. It was a washerwoman who employed three assistants at the wash-house in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or.

"You've come too soon, Madame Bijard!" cried Gervaise. "I told you to call this evening. I'm too busy to attend to you now!"

But as the washerwoman began lamenting and fearing that she would not be able to put all the things to soak that day, she consented to give her the dirty clothes at once. They went to fetch the bundles in the left hand room where Etienne slept, and returned with enormous armfuls which they piled up on the floor at the back of the shop. The sorting lasted a good half hour. Gervaise made heaps all round her, throwing the shirts in one, the chemises in another, the handkerchiefs, the socks, the dish-cloths in others. Whenever she came across anything belonging to a new customer, she marked it with a cross in red cotton thread so as to know it again. And from all this dirty linen which they were throwing about there issued an offensive odor in the warm atmosphere.

"Oh! La, la. What a stench!" said Clemence, holding her nose.

"Of course there is! If it were clean they wouldn't send it to us," quietly explained Gervaise. "It smells as one would expect it to, that's all! We said fourteen chemises, didn't we, Madame Bijard? Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—"

And she continued counting aloud. Used to this kind of thing she evinced no disgust. She thrust her bare pink arms deep into the piles of laundry: shirts yellow with grime, towels stiff from dirty dish water, socks threadbare and eaten away by sweat. The strong odor which slapped her in the face as she sorted the piles of clothes made her feel drowsy. She seemed to be intoxicating herself with this stench of humanity as she sat on the edge of a stool, bending far over, smiling vaguely, her eyes slightly misty. It was as if her laziness was started by a kind of smothering caused by the dirty clothes which poisoned the air in the shop. Just as she was shaking out a child's dirty diaper, Coupeau came in.

"By Jove!" he stuttered, "what a sun! It shines full on your head!"

The zinc-worker caught hold of the ironing-table to save himself from falling. It was the first time he had been so drunk. Until then he had sometimes come home slightly tipsy, but nothing more. This time, however, he had a black eye, just a friendly slap he had run up against in a playful moment. His curly hair, already streaked with grey, must have dusted a corner in some low wineshop, for a cobweb was hanging to one of his locks over the back of his neck. He was still as attractive as ever, though his features were rather drawn and aged, and his under jaw projected more; but he was always lively, as he would sometimes say, with a complexion to be envied by a duchess.

"I'll just explain it to you," he resumed, addressing Gervaise.

"It was Celery-Root, you know him, the bloke with a wooden leg. Well, as he was going back to his native place, he wanted to treat us. Oh! We were all right, if it hadn't been for that devil of a sun. In the street everybody looks shaky. Really, all the world's drunk!"

And as tall Clemence laughed at his thinking that the people in the street were drunk, he was himself seized with an intense fit of gaiety which almost strangled him.

"Look at them! The blessed tipplers! Aren't they funny?" he cried. "But it's not their fault. It's the sun that's causing it."

All the shop laughed, even Madame Putois, who did not like drunkards. That squint-eyed Augustine was cackling like a hen, suffocating with her mouth wide open. Gervaise, however, suspected Coupeau of not having come straight home, but of having passed an hour with the Lorilleuxs who were always filling his head with unpleasant ideas. When he swore he had not been near them she laughed also, full of indulgence and not even reproaching him with having wasted another day.

"Mon Dieu! What nonsense he does talk," she murmured. "How does he manage to say such stupid things?" Then in a maternal tone of voice she added, "Now go to bed, won't you? You see we're busy; you're in our way. That makes thirty-two handkerchiefs, Madame Bijard; and two more, thirty-four."

But Coupeau was not sleepy. He stood there wagging his body from side to side like the pendulum of a clock and chuckling in an obstinate and teasing manner. Gervaise, wanting to finish with Madame Bijard, called to Clemence to count the laundry while she made the list. Tall Clemence made a dirty remark about every item that she touched. She commented on the customers' misfortunes and their bedroom adventures. She had a wash-house joke for every rip or stain that passed through her hands. Augustine pretended that she didn't understand, but her ears were wide open. Madame Putois compressed her lips, thinking it a disgrace to say such things in front of Coupeau. It's not a man's business to have anything to do with dirty linen. It's just not done among decent people.

Gervaise, serious and her mind fully occupied with what she was about, did not seem to notice. As she wrote she gave a glance to each article as it passed before her, so as to recognize it; and she never made a mistake; she guessed the owner's name just by the look or the color. Those napkins belonged to the Goujets, that was evident; they had not been used to wipe out frying-pans. That pillow-case certainly came from the Boches on account of the pomatum with which Madame Boche always smeared her things. There was no need to put your nose close to the flannel vests of Monsieur Madinier; his skin was so oily that it clogged up his woolens.

She knew many peculiarities, the cleanliness of some, the ragged underclothes of neighborhood ladies who appeared on the streets in silk dresses; how many items each family soiled weekly; the way some people's garments were always torn at the same spot. Oh, she had many tales to tell. For instance, the chemises of Mademoiselle Remanjou provided material for endless comments: they wore out at the top first because the old maid had bony, sharp shoulders; and they were never really dirty, proving that you dry up by her age, like a stick of wood out of which it's hard to squeeze a drop of anything. It was thus that at every sorting of the dirty linen in the shop they undressed the whole neighborhood of the Goutte-d'Or.

"Oh, here's something luscious!" cried Clemence, opening another bundle.

Gervaise, suddenly seized with a great repugnance, drew back.

"Madame Gaudron's bundle?" said she. "I'll no longer wash for her, I'll find some excuse. No, I'm not more particular than another. I've handled some most disgusting linen in my time; but really, that lot I can't stomach. What can the woman do to get her things into such a state?"

And she requested Clemence to look sharp. But the girl continued her remarks, thrusting the clothes sullenly about her, with complaints on the soiled caps she waved like triumphal banners of filth. Meanwhile the heaps around Gervaise had grown higher. Still seated on the edge of the stool, she was now disappearing between the petticoats and chemises. In front of her were the sheets, the table cloths, a veritable mass of dirtiness.

She seemed even rosier and more languid than usual within this spreading sea of soiled laundry. She had regained her composure, forgetting Madame Gaudron's laundry, stirring the various piles of clothing to make sure there had been no mistake in sorting. Squint-eyed Augustine had just stuffed the stove so full of coke that its cast-iron sides were bright red. The sun was shining obliquely on the window; the shop was in a blaze. Then, Coupeau, whom the great heat intoxicated all the more, was seized with a sudden fit of tenderness. He advanced towards Gervaise with open arms and deeply moved.

"You're a good wife," he stammered. "I must kiss you."

But he caught his foot in the garments which barred the way and nearly fell.

"What a nuisance you are!" said Gervaise without getting angry. "Keep still, we're nearly done now."

No, he wanted to kiss her. He must do so because he loved her so much. Whilst he stuttered he tried to get round the heap of petticoats and stumbled against the pile of chemises; then as he obstinately persisted his feet caught together and he fell flat, his nose in the midst of the dish-cloths. Gervaise, beginning to lose her temper pushed him, saying that he was mixing all the things up. But Clemence and even Madame Putois maintained that she was wrong. It was very nice of him after all. He wanted to kiss her. She might very well let herself be kissed.

"You're lucky, you are, Madame Coupeau," said Madame Bijard, whose drunkard of a husband, a locksmith, was nearly beating her to death each evening when he came in. "If my old man was like that when he's had a drop, it would be a real pleasure!"

Gervaise had calmed down and was already regretting her hastiness. She helped Coupeau up on his legs again. Then she offered her cheek with a smile. But the zinc-worker, without caring a button for the other people being present, seized her bosom.

"It's not for the sake of saying so," he murmured; "but your dirty linen stinks tremendously! Still, I love you all the same, you know."

"Leave off, you're tickling me," cried she, laughing the louder. "What a great silly you are! How can you be so absurd?"

He had caught hold of her and would not let her go. She gradually abandoned herself to him, dizzy from the slight faintness caused by the heap of clothes and not minding Coupeau's foul-smelling breath. The long kiss they exchanged on each other's mouths in the midst of the filth of the laundress's trade was perhaps the first tumble in the slow downfall of their life together.

Madame Bijard had meanwhile been tying the laundry up into bundles and talking about her daughter, Eulalie, who at two was as smart as a grown woman. She could be left by herself; she never cried or played with matches. Finally Madame Bijard took the laundry away a bundle at a time, her face splotched with purple and her tall form bent under the weight.

"This heat is becoming unbearable, we're roasting," said Gervaise, wiping her face before returning to Madame Boche's cap.

They talked of boxing Augustine's ears when they saw that the stove was red-hot. The irons, also, were getting in the same condition. She must have the very devil in her body! One could not turn one's back a moment without her being up to some of her tricks. Now they would have to wait a quarter of an hour before they would be able to use their irons. Gervaise covered the fire with two shovelfuls of cinders. Then she thought to hang some sheets on the brass wires near the ceiling to serve as curtains to keep out the sunlight.

Things were now better in the shop. The temperature was still high, but you could imagine it was cooler. Footsteps could still be heard outside but you were free to make yourself comfortable. Clemence removed her camisole again. Coupeau still refused to go to bed, so they allowed him to stay, but he had to promise to be quiet in a corner, for they were very busy.

"Whatever has that vermin done with my little iron?" murmured Gervaise, speaking of Augustine.

They were for ever seeking the little iron, which they found in the most out-of-the-way places, where the apprentice, so they said, hid it out of spite. Gervaise could now finish Madame Boche's cap. First she roughly smoothed the lace, spreading it out with her hand, and then she straightened it up by light strokes of the iron. It had a very fancy border consisting of narrow puffs alternating with insertions of embroidery. She was working on it silently and conscientiously, ironing the puffs and insertions.

Silence prevailed for a time. Nothing was to be heard except the soft thud of irons on the ironing pad. On both sides of the huge rectangular table Gervaise, her two employees, and the apprentice were bending over, slaving at their tasks with rounded shoulders, their arms moving incessantly. Each had a flat brick blackened by hot irons near her. A soup plate filled with clean water was on the middle of the table with a moistening rag and a small brush soaking in it.

A bouquet of large white lilies bloomed in what had once been a brandied cherry jar. Its cluster of snowy flowers suggested a corner of a royal garden. Madame Putois had begun the basket that Gervaise had brought to her filled with towels, wrappers, cuffs and underdrawers. Augustine was dawdling with the stockings and washcloths, gazing into the air, seemingly fascinated by a large fly that was buzzing around. Clemence had done thirty-four men's shirts so far that day.

"Always wine, never spirits!" suddenly said the zinc-worker, who felt the necessity of making this declaration. "Spirits make me drunk, I'll have none of them."

Clemence took an iron from the stove with her leather holder in which a piece of sheet iron was inserted, and held it up to her cheek to see how hot it was. She rubbed it on her brick, wiped it on a piece of rag hanging from her waist-band and started on her thirty-fifth shirt, first of all ironing the shoulders and the sleeves.

"Bah! Monsieur Coupeau," said she after a minute or two, "a little glass of brandy isn't bad. It sets me going. Besides, the sooner you're merry, the jollier it is. Oh! I don't make any mistake; I know that I shan't make old bones."

"What a nuisance you are with your funeral ideas!" interrupted Madame Putois who did not like hearing people talk of anything sad.

Coupeau had arisen and was becoming angry thinking that he had been accused of drinking brandy. He swore on his own head and on the heads of his wife and child that there was not a drop of brandy in his veins. And he went up to Clemence and blew in her face so that she might smell his breath. Then he began to giggle because her bare shoulders were right under his nose. He thought maybe he could see more. Clemence, having folded over the back of the shirt and ironed it on both sides, was now working on the cuffs and collar. However, as he was shoving against her, he caused her to make a wrinkle, obliging her to reach for the brush soaking in the soup plate to smooth it out.

"Madame," said she, "do make him leave off bothering me."

"Leave her alone; it's stupid of you to go on like that," quietly observed Gervaise. "We're in a hurry, do you hear?"

They were in a hurry, well! What? It was not his fault. He was doing no harm. He was not touching, he was only looking. Was it no longer allowed to look at the beautiful things that God had made? All the same, she had precious fine arms, that artful Clemence! She might exhibit herself for two sous and nobody would have to regret his money. The girl allowed him to go on, laughing at these coarse compliments of a drunken man. And she soon commenced joking with him. He chuffed her about the shirts. So she was always doing shirts? Why yes, she practically lived in them. Mon Dieu! She knew them pretty well. Hundreds and hundreds of them had passed through her hands. Just about every man in the neighborhood was wearing her handiwork on his body. Her shoulders were shaking with laughter through all this, but she managed to continue ironing.

"That's the banter!" said she, laughing harder than ever.

That squint-eyed Augustine almost burst, the joke seemed to her so funny. The others bullied her. There was a brat for you who laughed at words she ought not to understand! Clemence handed her her iron; the apprentice finished up the irons on the stockings and the dish-cloths when they were not hot enough for the starched things. But she took hold of this one so clumsily that she made herself a cuff in the form of a long burn on the wrist. And she sobbed and accused Clemence of having burnt her on purpose. The latter who had gone to fetch a very hot iron for the shirt-front consoled her at once by threatening to iron her two ears if she did not leave off. Then she placed a piece of flannel under the front and slowly passed the iron over it giving the starch time to show up and dry. The shirt-front became as stiff and as shiny as cardboard.

"By golly!" swore Coupeau, who was treading behind her with the obstinacy of a drunkard.

He raised himself up with a shrill laugh that resembled a pulley in want of grease. Clemence, leaning heavily over the ironing-table, her wrists bent in, her elbows sticking out and wide apart was bending her neck in a last effort; and all her muscles swelled, her shoulders rose with the slow play of the muscles beating beneath the soft skin, her breasts heaved, wet with perspiration in the rosy shadow of the half open chemise. Then Coupeau thrust out his hands, trying to touch her bare flesh.

"Madame! Madame!" cried Clemence, "do make him leave off! I shall go away if it continues. I won't be intimated."

Gervaise glanced over just as her husband's hands began to explore inside the chemise.

"Really, Coupeau, you're too foolish," said she, with a vexed air, as though she were scolding a child who persisted in eating his jam without bread. "You must go to bed."

"Yes, go to bed, Monsieur Coupeau; it will be far better," exclaimed Madame Putois.

"Ah! Well," stuttered he, without ceasing to chuckle, "you're all precious particular! So one mustn't amuse oneself now? Women, I know how to handle them; I'll only kiss them, no more. One admires a lady, you know, and wants to show it. And, besides, when one displays one's goods, it's that one may make one's choice, isn't it? Why does the tall blonde show everything she's got? It's not decent."

And turning towards Clemence, he added: "You know, my lovely, you're wrong to be to very insolent. If it's because there are others here—"

But he was unable to continue. Gervaise very calmly seized hold of him with one hand, and placed the other on his mouth. He struggled, just by way of a joke, whilst she pushed him to the back of the shop, towards the bedroom. He got his mouth free and said that he was willing to go to bed, but that the tall blonde must come and warm his feet.

Then Gervaise could be heard taking off his shoes. She removed his clothes too, bullying him in a motherly way. He burst out laughing after she had removed his trousers and kicked about, pretending that she was tickling him. At last she tucked him in carefully like a child. Was he comfortable now? But he did not answer; he called to Clemence:

"I say, my lovely, I'm here, and waiting for you!"

When Gervaise went back into the shop, the squint-eyed Augustine was being properly chastised by Clemence because of a dirty iron that Madame Putois had used and which had caused her to soil a camisole. Clemence, in defending herself for not having cleaned her iron, blamed Augustine, swearing that it wasn't hers, in spite of the spot of burned starch still clinging to the bottom. The apprentice, outraged at the injustice, openly spat on the front of Clemence's dress, earning a slap for her boldness. Now, as Augustine went about cleaning the iron, she saved up her spit and each time she passed Clemence spat on her back and laughed to herself.

Gervaise continued with the lace of Madame Boche's cap. In the sudden calm which ensued, one could hear Coupeau's husky voice issuing from the depths of the bedroom. He was still jolly, and was laughing to himself as he uttered bits of phrases.

"How stupid she is, my wife! How stupid of her to put me to bed! Really, it's too absurd, in the middle of the day, when one isn't sleepy."

But, all on a sudden, he snored. Then Gervaise gave a sigh of relief, happy in knowing that he was at length quiet, and sleeping off his intoxication on two good mattresses. And she spoke out in the silence, in a slow and continuous voice, without taking her eyes off her work.

"You see, he hasn't his reason, one can't be angry. Were I to be harsh with him, it would be of no use. I prefer to agree with him and get him to bed; then, at least, it's over at once and I'm quiet. Besides, he isn't ill-natured, he loves me very much. You could see that just a moment ago when he was desperate to give me a kiss. That's quite nice of him. There are plenty of men, you know, who after drinking a bit don't come straight home but stay out chasing women. Oh, he may fool around with the women in the shop, but it doesn't lead to anything. Clemence, you mustn't feel insulted. You know how it is when a man's had too much to drink. He could do anything and not even remember it."

She spoke composedly, not at all angry, being quite used to Coupeau's sprees and not holding them against him. A silence settled down for a while when she stopped talking. There was a lot of work to get done. They figured they would have to keep at it until eleven, working as fast as they could. Now that they were undisturbed, all of them were pounding away. Bare arms were moving back and forth, showing glimpses of pink among the whiteness of the laundry.

More coke had been put into the stove and the sunlight slanted in between the sheets onto the stove. You could see the heat rising up through the rays of the sun. It became so stifling that Augustine ran out of spit and was forced to lick her lips. The room smelled of the heat and of the working women. The white lilies in the jar were beginning to fade, yet they still exuded a pure and strong perfume. Coupeau's heavy snores were heard like the regular ticking of a huge clock, setting the tempo for the heavy labor in the shop.

On the morrow of his carouses, the zinc-worker always had a headache, a splitting headache which kept him all day with his hair uncombed, his breath offensive, and his mouth all swollen and askew. He got up late on those days, not shaking the fleas off till about eight o'clock; and he would hang about the shop, unable to make up his mind to start off to his work. It was another day lost. In the morning he would complain that his legs bent like pieces of thread, and would call himself a great fool to guzzle to such an extent, as it broke one's constitution. Then, too, there were a lot of lazy bums who wouldn't let you go and you'd get to drinking more in spite of yourself. No, no, no more for him.

After lunch he would always begin to perk up and deny that he had been really drunk the night before. Maybe just a bit lit up. He was rock solid and able to drink anything he wanted without even blinking an eye.

When he had thoroughly badgered the workwomen, Gervaise would give him twenty sous to clear out. And off he would go to buy his tobacco at the "Little Civet," in the Rue des Poissonniers, where he generally took a plum in brandy whenever he met a friend. Then, he spent the rest of the twenty sous at old Francois's, at the corner of the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, where there was a famous wine, quite young, which tickled your gullet. This was an old-fashioned place with a low ceiling. There was a smoky room to one side where soup was served. He would stay there until evening drinking because there was an understanding that he didn't have to pay right away and they would never send the bill to his wife. Besides he was a jolly fellow, who would never do the least harm—a chap who loved a spree sure enough, and who colored his nose in his turn but in a nice manner, full of contempt for those pigs of men who have succumbed to alcohol, and whom one never sees sober! He always went home as gay and as gallant as a lark.

"Has your lover been?" he would sometimes ask Gervaise by way of teasing her. "One never sees him now; I must go and rout him out."

The lover was Goujet. He avoided, in fact, calling too often for fear of being in the way, and also of causing people to talk. Yet he frequently found a pretext, such as bringing the washing; and he would pass no end of time on the pavement in front of the shop. There was a corner right at the back in which he liked to sit, without moving for hours, and smoke his short pipe. Once every ten days, in the evening after his dinner, he would venture there and take up his favorite position. And he was no talker, his mouth almost seemed sewn up, as he sat with his eyes fixed on Gervaise, and only removed his pipe to laugh at everything she said. When they were working late on a Saturday he would stay on, and appeared to amuse himself more than if he had gone to a theatre.

Sometimes the women stayed in the shop ironing until three in the morning. A lamp hung from the ceiling and spread a brilliant light making the linen look like fresh snow. The apprentice would put up the shop shutters, but since these July nights were scorching hot, the door would be left open. The later the hour the more casual the women became with their clothes while trying to be comfortable. The lamplight flecked their rosy skin with gold specks, especially Gervaise who was so pleasantly rounded.

On these nights Goujet would be overcome by the heat from the stove and the odor of linen steaming under the hot irons. He would drift into a sort of giddiness, his thinking slowed and his eyes obsessed by these hurrying women as their naked arms moved back and forth, working far into the night to have the neighborhood's best clothes ready for Sunday.

Everything around the laundry was slumbering, settled into sleep for the night. Midnight rang, then one o'clock, then two o'clock. There were no vehicles or pedestrians. In the dark and deserted street, only their shop door let out any light. Once in a while, footsteps would be heard and a man would pass the shop. As he crossed the path of light he would stretch his neck to look in, startled by the sound of the thudding irons, and carry with him the quick glimpse of bare-shouldered laundresses immersed in a rosy mist.

Goujet, seeing that Gervaise did not know what to do with Etienne, and wishing to deliver him from Coupeau's kicks, had engaged him to go and blow the bellows at the factory where he worked. The profession of bolt-maker, if not one to be proud of on account of the dirt of the forge and of the monotony of constantly hammering on pieces of iron of a similar kind, was nevertheless a well paid one, at which ten and even twelve francs a day could be earned. The youngster, who was then twelve years old, would soon be able to go in for it, if the calling was to his liking. And Etienne had thus become another link between the laundress and the blacksmith. The latter would bring the child home and speak of his good conduct. Everyone laughingly said that Goujet was smitten with Gervaise. She knew it, and blushed like a young girl, the flush of modesty coloring her cheeks with the bright tints of an apple. The poor fellow, he was never any trouble! He never made a bold gesture or an indelicate remark. You didn't find many men like him. Gervaise didn't want to admit it, but she derived a great deal of pleasure from being adored like this. Whenever a problem arose she thought immediately of the blacksmith and was consoled. There was never any awkward tension when they were alone together. They just looked at each other and smiled happily with no need to talk. It was a very sensible kind of affection.

Towards the end of the summer, Nana quite upset the household. She was six years old and promised to be a thorough good-for-nothing. So as not to have her always under her feet her mother took her every morning to a little school in the Rue Polonceau kept by Mademoiselle Josse. She fastened her playfellows' dresses together behind, she filled the school-mistress's snuff-box with ashes, and invented other tricks much less decent which could not be mentioned. Twice Mademoiselle Josse expelled her and then took her back again so as not to lose the six francs a month. Directly lessons were over Nana avenged herself for having been kept in by making an infernal noise under the porch and in the courtyard where the ironers, whose ears could not stand the racket, sent her to play. There she would meet Pauline, the Boches' daughter, and Victor, the son of Gervaise's old employer—a big booby of ten who delighted in playing with very little girls. Madame Fauconnier who had not quarreled with the Coupeaus would herself send her son. In the house, too, there was an extraordinary swarm of brats, flights of children who rolled down the four staircases at all hours of the day and alighted on the pavement of the courtyard like troops of noisy pillaging sparrows. Madame Gaudron was responsible for nine of them, all with uncombed hair, runny noses, hand-me-down clothes, saggy stockings and ripped jackets. Another woman on the sixth floor had seven of them. This hoard that only got their faces washed when it rained were in all shapes and sizes, fat, thin, big and barely out of the cradle.

Nana reigned supreme over this host of urchins; she ordered about girls twice her own size, and only deigned to relinquish a little of her power in favor of Pauline and Victor, intimate confidants who enforced her commands. This precious chit was for ever wanting to play at being mamma, undressing the smallest ones to dress them again, insisting on examining the others all over, messing them about and exercising the capricious despotism of a grown-up person with a vicious disposition. Under her leadership they got up tricks for which they should have been well spanked. The troop paddled in the colored water from the dyer's and emerged from it with legs stained blue or red as high as the knees; then off it flew to the locksmith's where it purloined nails and filings and started off again to alight in the midst of the carpenter's shavings, enormous heaps of shavings, which delighted it immensely and in which it rolled head over heels exposing their behinds.

The courtyard was her kingdom. It echoed with the clatter of little shoes as they stampeded back and forth with piercing cries. On some days the courtyard was too small for them and the troop would dash down into the cellar, race up a staircase, run along a corridor, then dash up another staircase and follow another corridor for hours. They never got tired of their yelling and clambering.

"Aren't they abominable, those little toads?" cried Madame Boche. "Really, people can have but very little to do to have time get so many brats. And yet they complain of having no bread."

Boche said that children pushed up out of poverty like mushrooms out of manure. All day long his wife was screaming at them and chasing them with her broom. Finally she had to lock the door of the cellar when she learned from Pauline that Nana was playing doctor down there in the dark, viciously finding pleasure in applying remedies to the others by beating them with sticks.

Well, one afternoon there was a frightful scene. It was bound to have come sooner or later. Nana had thought of a very funny little game. She had stolen one of Madame Boche's wooden shoes from outside the concierge's room. She tied a string to it and began dragging it about like a cart. Victor on his side had had the idea to fill it with potato parings. Then a procession was formed. Nana came first dragging the wooden shoe. Pauline and Victor walked on her right and left. Then the entire crowd of urchins followed in order, the big ones first, the little ones next, jostling one another; a baby in long skirts about as tall as a boot with an old tattered bonnet cocked on one side of its head, brought up the rear. And the procession chanted something sad with plenty of ohs! and ahs! Nana had said that they were going to play at a funeral; the potato parings represented the body. When they had gone the round of the courtyard, they recommenced. They thought it immensely amusing.

"What can they be up to?" murmured Madame Boche, who emerged from her room to see, ever mistrustful and on the alert.

And when she understood: "But it's my shoe!" cried she furiously. "Ah, the rogues!"

She distributed some smacks, clouted Nana on both cheeks and administered a kick to Pauline, that great goose who allowed the others to steal her mother's shoe. It so happened that Gervaise was filling a bucket at the top. When she beheld Nana, her nose bleeding and choking with sobs, she almost sprang at the concierge's chignon. It was not right to hit a child as though it were an ox. One could have no heart, one must be the lowest of the low if one did so. Madame Boche naturally replied in a similar strain. When one had a beast of a girl like that one should keep her locked up. At length Boche himself appeared in the doorway to call his wife to come in and not to enter into so many explanations with a filthy thing like her. There was a regular quarrel.

As a matter of fact things had not gone on very pleasantly between the Boches and the Coupeaus for a month past. Gervaise, who was of a very generous nature, was continually bestowing wine, broth, oranges and slices of cake on the Boches. One night she had taken the remains of an endive and beetroot salad to the concierge's room, knowing that the latter would have done anything for such a treat. But on the morrow she became quite pale with rage on hearing Mademoiselle Remanjou relate how Madame Boche had thrown the salad away in the presence of several persons with an air of disgust and under the pretext that she, thank goodness, was not yet reduced to feeding on things which others had messed about. From that time Gervaise took no more presents to the Boches—nothing. Now the Boches seemed to think that Gervaise was stealing something which was rightfully theirs. Gervaise saw that she had made a mistake. If she hadn't catered to them so much in the beginning, they wouldn't have gotten into the habit of expecting it and might have remained on good terms with her.

Now the concierge began to spread slander about Gervaise. There was a great fuss with the landlord, Monsieur Marescot, at the October rental period, because Gervaise was a day late with the rent. Madame Boche accused her of eating up all her money in fancy dishes. Monsieur Marescot charged into the laundry demanding to be paid at once. He didn't even bother to remove his hat. The money was ready and was paid to him immediately. The Boches had now made up with the Lorilleuxs who now came and did their guzzling in the concierge's lodge. They assured each other that they never would have fallen out if it hadn't been for Clump-clump. She was enough to set mountains to fighting. Ah! the Boches knew her well now, they could understand how much the Lorilleuxs must suffer. And whenever she passed beneath the doorway they all affected to sneer at her.

One day, Gervaise went up to see the Lorilleuxs in spite of this. It was with respect to mother Coupeau who was then sixty-seven years old. Mother Coupeau's eyesight was almost completely gone. Her legs too were no longer what they used to be. She had been obliged to give up her last cleaning job and now threatened to die of hunger if assistance were not forthcoming. Gervaise thought it shameful that a woman of her age, having three children should be thus abandoned by heaven and earth. And as Coupeau refused to speak to the Lorilleuxs on the subject saying that she, Gervaise, could very well go and do so, the latter went up in a fit of indignation with which her heart was almost bursting.

When she reached their door she entered without knocking. Nothing had been changed since the night when the Lorilleuxs, at their first meeting had received her so ungraciously. The same strip of faded woolen stuff separated the room from the workshop, a lodging like a gun barrel, and which looked as though it had been built for an eel. Right at the back Lorilleux, leaning over his bench, was squeezing together one by one the links of a piece of chain, whilst Madame Lorilleux, standing in front of the vise was passing a gold wire through the draw-plate. In the broad daylight the little forge had a rosy reflection.

"Yes, it's I!" said Gervaise. "I daresay you're surprised to see me as we're at daggers drawn. But I've come neither for you nor myself you may be quite sure. It's for mother Coupeau that I've come. Yes, I have come to see if we're going to let her beg her bread from the charity of others."

"Ah, well, that's a fine way to burst in upon one!" murmured Madame Lorilleux. "One must have a rare cheek."

And she turned her back and resumed drawing her gold wire, affecting to ignore her sister-in-law's presence. But Lorilleux raised his pale face and cried:

"What's that you say?"

Then, as he had heard perfectly well, he continued:

"More back-bitings, eh? She's nice, mother Coupeau, to go and cry starvation everywhere! Yet only the day before yesterday she dined here. We do what we can. We haven't got all the gold of Peru. Only if she goes about gossiping with others she had better stay with them, for we don't like spies."

He took up the piece of chain and turned his back also, adding as though with regret:

"When everyone gives five francs a month, we'll give five francs."

Gervaise had calmed down and felt quite chilled by the wooden looking faces of the Lorilleux. She had never once set foot in their rooms without experiencing a certain uneasiness. With her eyes fixed on the floor, staring at the holes of the wooden grating through which the waste gold fell she now explained herself in a reasonable manner. Mother Coupeau had three children; if each one gave five francs it would only make fifteen francs, and really that was not enough, one could not live on it; they must at least triple the sum. But Lorilleux cried out. Where did she think he could steal fifteen francs a month? It was quite amusing, people thought he was rich simply because he had gold in his place. He began then to criticize mother Coupeau: she had to have her morning coffee, she took a sip of brandy now and then, she was as demanding as if she were rich. Mon Dieu! Sure, everyone liked the good things of life. But if you've never saved a sou, you had to do what other folks did and do without. Besides, mother Coupeau wasn't too old to work. She could see well enough when she was trying to pick a choice morsel from the platter. She was just an old spendthrift trying to get others to provide her with comforts. Even had he had the means, he would have considered it wrong to support any one in idleness.

Gervaise remained conciliatory, and peaceably argued against all this bad reasoning. She tried to soften the Lorilleuxs. But the husband ended by no longer answering her. The wife was now at the forge scouring a piece of chain in the little, long-handled brass saucepan full of lye-water. She still affectedly turned her back, as though a hundred leagues away. And Gervaise continued speaking, watching them pretending to be absorbed in their labor in the midst of the black dust of the workshop, their bodies distorted, their clothes patched and greasy, both become stupidly hardened like old tools in the pursuit of their narrow mechanical task. Then suddenly anger again got the better of her and she exclaimed:

"Very well, I'd rather it was so; keep your money! I'll give mother Coupeau a home, do you hear? I picked up a cat the other evening, so I can at least do the same for your mother. And she shall be in want of nothing; she shall have her coffee and her drop of brandy! Good heavens! what a vile family!"

At these words Madame Lorilleux turned round. She brandished the saucepan as though she was about to throw the lye-water in her sister-in-law's face. She stammered with rage:

"Be off, or I shall do you an injury! And don't count on the five francs because I won't give a radish! No, not a radish! Ah well, yes, five francs! Mother would be your servant and you would enjoy yourself with my five francs! If she goes to live with you, tell her this, she may croak, I won't even send her a glass of water. Now off you go! Clear out!"

"What a monster of a woman!" said Gervaise violently slamming the door.

On the morrow she brought mother Coupeau to live with her, putting her bed in the inner room where Nana slept. The moving did not take long, for all the furniture mother Coupeau had was her bed, an ancient walnut wardrobe which was put in the dirty-clothes room, a table, and two chairs. They sold the table and had the chairs recaned. From the very first the old lady took over the sweeping. She washed the dishes and made herself useful, happy to have settled her problem.

The Lorilleux were furious enough to explode, especially since Madame Lerat was now back on good terms with the Coupeaus. One day the two sisters, the flower-maker and the chainmaker came to blows about Gervaise because Madame Lerat dared to express approval of the way she was taking care of their mother. When she noticed how this upset the other, she went on to remark that Gervaise had magnificent eyes, eyes warm enough to set paper on fire. The two of them commenced slapping each other and swore they never would see each other again. Nowadays Madame Lerat often spent her evenings in the shop, laughing to herself at Clemence's spicy remarks.

Three years passed by. There were frequent quarrels and reconciliations. Gervaise did not care a straw for the Lorilleux, the Boches and all the others who were not of her way of thinking. If they did not like it, they could forget it. She earned what she wished, that was her principal concern. The people of the neighborhood had ended by greatly esteeming her, for one did not find many customers so kind as she was, paying punctually, never caviling or higgling. She bought her bread of Madame Coudeloup, in the Rue des Poissonniers; her meat of stout Charles, a butcher in the Rue Polonceau; her groceries at Lehongre's, in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, almost opposite her own shop. Francois, the wine merchant at the corner of the street, supplied her with wine in baskets of fifty bottles. Her neighbor Vigouroux, whose wife's hips must have been black and blue, the men pinched her so much, sold coke to her at the same price as the gas company. And, in all truth, her tradespeople served her faithfully, knowing that there was everything to gain by treating her well.

Besides, whenever she went out around the neighborhood, she was greeted everywhere. She felt quite at home. Sometimes she put off doing a laundry job just to enjoy being outdoors among her good friends. On days when she was too rushed to do her own cooking and had to go out to buy something already cooked, she would stop to gossip with her arms full of bowls. The neighbor she respected the most was still the watchmaker. Often she would cross the street to greet him in his tiny cupboard of a shop, taking pleasure in the gaiety of the little cuckoo clocks with their pendulums ticking away the hours in chorus.

CHAPTER VI.

One afternoon in the autumn Gervaise, who had been taking some washing home to a customer in the Rue des Portes-Blanches, found herself at the bottom of the Rue des Poissonniers just as the day was declining. It had rained in the morning, the weather was very mild and an odor rose from the greasy pavement; and the laundress, burdened with her big basket, was rather out of breath, slow of step, and inclined to take her ease as she ascended the street with the vague preoccupation of a longing increased by her weariness. She would have liked to have had something to eat. Then, on raising her eyes she beheld the name of the Rue Marcadet, and she suddenly had the idea of going to see Goujet at his forge. He had no end of times told her to look in any day she was curious to see how iron was wrought. Besides in the presence of other workmen she would ask for Etienne, and make believe that she had merely called for the youngster.

The factory was somewhere on this end of the Rue Marcadet, but she didn't know exactly where and street numbers were often lacking on those ramshackle buildings separated by vacant lots. She wouldn't have lived on this street for all the gold in the world. It was a wide street, but dirty, black with soot from factories, with holes in the pavement and deep ruts filled with stagnant water. On both sides were rows of sheds, workshops with beams and brickwork exposed so that they seemed unfinished, a messy collection of masonry. Beside them were dubious lodging houses and even more dubious taverns. All she could recall was that the bolt factory was next to a yard full of scrap iron and rags, a sort of open sewer spread over the ground, storing merchandise worth hundreds of thousands of francs, according to Goujet.

The street was filled with a noisy racket. Exhaust pipes on roofs puffed out violent jets of steam; an automatic sawmill added a rhythmic screeching; a button factory shook the ground with the rumbling of its machines. She was looking up toward the Montmartre height, hesitant, uncertain whether to continue, when a gust of wind blew down a mass of sooty smoke that covered the entire street. She closed her eyes and held her breath. At that moment she heard the sound of hammers in cadence. Without realizing it, she had arrived directly in front of the bolt factory which she now recognized by the vacant lot beside it full of piles of scrap iron and old rags.

She still hesitated, not knowing where to enter. A broken fence opened a passage which seemed to lead through the heaps of rubbish from some buildings recently pulled down. Two planks had been thrown across a large puddle of muddy water that barred the way. She ended by venturing along them, turned to the left and found herself lost in the depths of a strange forest of old carts, standing on end with their shafts in the air, and of hovels in ruins, the wood-work of which was still standing. Toward the back, stabbing through the half-light of sundown, a flame gleamed red. The clamor of the hammers had ceased. She was advancing carefully when a workman, his face blackened with coal-dust and wearing a goatee passed near her, casting a side-glance with his pale eyes.

"Sir," asked she, "it's here is it not that a boy named Etienne works? He's my son."

"Etienne, Etienne," repeated the workman in a hoarse voice as he twisted himself about. "Etienne; no I don't know him."

An alcoholic reek like that from old brandy casks issued from his mouth. Meeting a woman in this dark corner seemed to be giving the fellow ideas, and so Gervaise drew back saying:

"But yet it's here that Monsieur Goujet works, isn't it?"

"Ah! Goujet, yes!" said the workman; "I know Goujet! If you come for Goujet, go right to the end."

And turning round he called out at the top of his voice, which had a sound of cracked brass:

"I say Golden-Mug, here's a lady wants you!"

But a clanging of iron drowned the cry! Gervaise went to the end. She reached a door and stretching out her neck looked in. At first she could distinguish nothing. The forge had died down, but there was still a little glow which held back the advancing shadows from its corner. Great shadows seemed to float in the air. At times black shapes passed before the fire, shutting off this last bit of brightness, silhouettes of men so strangely magnified that their arms and legs were indistinct. Gervaise, not daring to venture in, called from the doorway in a faint voice:

"Monsieur Goujet! Monsieur Goujet!"

Suddenly all became lighted up. Beneath the puff of the bellows a jet of white flame had ascended and the whole interior of the shed could be seen, walled in by wooden planks, with openings roughly plastered over, and brick walls reinforcing the corners. Coal-ash had painted the whole expanse a sooty grey. Spider webs hung from the beams like rags hung up to dry, heavy with the accumulated dust of years. On shelves along the walls, or hanging from nails, or tossed into corners, she saw rusty iron, battered implements and huge tools. The white flame flared higher, like an explosion of dazzling sunlight revealing the trampled dirt underfoot, where the polished steel of four anvils fixed on blocks took on a reflection of silver sprinkled with gold.

Then Gervaise recognized Goujet in front of the forge by his beautiful yellow beard. Etienne was blowing the bellows. Two other workmen were there, but she only beheld Goujet and walked forward and stood before him.

"Why it's Madame Gervaise!" he exclaimed with a bright look on his face. "What a pleasant surprise."

But as his comrades appeared to be rather amused, he pushed Etienne towards his mother and resumed:

"You've come to see the youngster. He behaves himself well, he's beginning to get some strength in his wrists."

"Well!" she said, "it isn't easy to find your way here. I thought I was going to the end of the world."

After telling about her journey, she asked why no one in the shop knew Etienne's name. Goujet laughed and explained to her that everybody called him "Little Zouzou" because he had his hair cut short like that of a Zouave. While they were talking together Etienne stopped working the bellows and the flame of the forge dwindled to a rosy glow amid the gathering darkness. Touched by the presence of this smiling young woman, the blacksmith stood gazing at her.

Then, as neither continued speaking, he seemed to recollect and broke the silence:

"Excuse me, Madame Gervaise, I've something that has to be finished. You'll stay, won't you? You're not in anybody's way."

She remained. Etienne returned to the bellows. The forge was soon ablaze again with a cloud of sparks; the more so as the youngster, wanting to show his mother what he could do, was making the bellows blow a regular hurricane. Goujet, standing up watching a bar of iron heating, was waiting with the tongs in his hand. The bright glare illuminated him without a shadow—sleeves rolled back, shirt neck open, bare arms and chest. When the bar was at white heat he seized it with the tongs and cut it with a hammer on the anvil, in pieces of equal length, as though he had been gently breaking pieces of glass. Then he put the pieces back into the fire, from which he took them one by one to work them into shape. He was forging hexagonal rivets. He placed each piece in a tool-hole of the anvil, bent down the iron that was to form the head, flattened the six sides and threw the finished rivet still red-hot on to the black earth, where its bright light gradually died out; and this with a continuous hammering, wielding in his right hand a hammer weighing five pounds, completing a detail at every blow, turning and working the iron with such dexterity that he was able to talk to and look at those about him. The anvil had a silvery ring. Without a drop of perspiration, quite at his ease, he struck in a good-natured sort of a way, not appearing to exert himself more than on the evenings when he cut out pictures at home.

"Oh! these are little rivets of twenty millimetres," said he in reply to Gervaise's questions. "A fellow can do his three hundred a day. But it requires practice, for one's arm soon grows weary."

And when she asked him if his wrist did not feel stiff at the end of the day he laughed aloud. Did she think him a young lady? His wrist had had plenty of drudgery for fifteen years past; it was now as strong as the iron implements it had been so long in contact with. She was right though; a gentleman who had never forged a rivet or a bolt, and who would try to show off with his five pound hammer, would find himself precious stiff in the course of a couple of hours. It did not seem much, but a few years of it often did for some very strong fellows. During this conversation the other workmen were also hammering away all together. Their tall shadows danced about in the light, the red flashes of the iron that the fire traversed, the gloomy recesses, clouds of sparks darted out from beneath the hammers and shone like suns on a level with the anvils. And Gervaise, feeling happy and interested in the movement round the forge, did not think of leaving. She was going a long way round to get nearer to Etienne without having her hands burnt, when she saw the dirty and bearded workman, whom she had spoken to outside, enter.

"So you've found him, madame?" asked he in his drunken bantering way. "You know, Golden-Mug, it's I who told madame where to find you."

He was called Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, the brick of bricks, a dab hand at bolt forging, who wetted his iron every day with a pint and a half of brandy. He had gone out to have a drop, because he felt he wanted greasing to make him last till six o'clock. When he learnt that Little Zouzou's real name was Etienne, he thought it very funny; and he showed his black teeth as he laughed. Then he recognized Gervaise. Only the day before he had had a glass of wine with Coupeau. You could speak to Coupeau about Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst; he would at once say: "He's a jolly dog!" Ah! that joker Coupeau! He was one of the right sort; he stood treat oftener than his turn.

"I'm awfully glad to know you're his missus," added he.

"He deserves to have a pretty wife. Eh, Golden-Mug, madame is a fine woman, isn't she?"

He was becoming quite gallant, sidling up towards the laundress, who took hold of her basket and held it in front of her so as to keep him at a distance. Goujet, annoyed and seeing that his comrade was joking because of his friendship for Gervaise, called out to him:

"I say, lazybones, what about the forty millimetre bolts? Do you think you're equal to them now that you've got your gullet full, you confounded guzzler?"

The blacksmith was alluding to an order for big bolts which necessitated two beaters at the anvil.

"I'm ready to start at this moment, big baby!" replied Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst. "It sucks it's thumb and thinks itself a man. In spite of your size I'm equal to you!"

"Yes, that's it, at once. Look sharp and off we go!"

"Right you are, my boy!"

They taunted each other, stimulated by Gervaise's presence. Goujet placed the pieces of iron that had been cut beforehand in the fire, then he fixed a tool-hole of large bore on an anvil. His comrade had taken from against the wall two sledge-hammers weighing twenty pounds each, the two big sisters of the factory whom the workers called Fifine and Dedele. And he continued to brag, talking of a half-gross of rivets which he had forged for the Dunkirk lighthouse, regular jewels, things to be put in a museum, they were so daintily finished off. Hang it all, no! he did not fear competition; before meeting with another chap like him, you might search every factory in the capital. They were going to have a laugh; they would see what they would see.

"Madame will be judge," said he, turning towards the young woman.

"Enough chattering," cried Goujet. "Now then, Zouzou, show your muscle! It's not hot enough, my lad."

But Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, asked: "So we strike together?"

"Not a bit of it! each his own bolt, my friend!"

This statement operated as a damper, and Goujet's comrade, on hearing it, remained speechless, in spite of his boasting. Bolts of forty millimetres fashioned by one man had never before been seen; the more so as the bolts were to be round-headed, a work of great difficulty, a real masterpiece to achieve.

The three other workmen came over, leaving their jobs, to watch. A tall, lean one wagered a bottle of wine that Goujet would be beaten. Meanwhile the two blacksmiths had chosen their sledge hammers with eyes closed, because Fifine weighed a half pound more than Dedele. Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, had the good luck to put his hand on Dedele; Fifine fell to Golden-Mug.

While waiting for the iron to get hot enough, Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, again showing off, struck a pose before the anvil while casting side glances toward Gervaise. He planted himself solidly, tapping his feet impatiently like a man ready for a fight, throwing all his strength into practice swings with Dedele. Mon Dieu! He was good at this; he could have flattened the Vendome column like a pancake.

"Now then, off you go!" said Goujet, placing one of the pieces of iron, as thick as a girl's wrist, in the tool-hole.

Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, leant back, and swung Dedele round with both hands. Short and lean, with his goatee bristling, and with his wolf-like eyes glaring beneath his unkempt hair, he seemed to snap at each swing of the hammer, springing up from the ground as though carried away by the force he put into the blow. He was a fierce one, who fought with the iron, annoyed at finding it so hard, and he even gave a grunt whenever he thought he had planted a fierce stroke. Perhaps brandy did weaken other people's arms, but he needed brandy in his veins, instead of blood. The drop he had taken a little while before had made his carcass as warm as a boiler; he felt he had the power of a steam-engine within him. And the iron seemed to be afraid of him this time; he flattened it more easily than if it had been a quid of tobacco. And it was a sight to see how Dedele waltzed! She cut such capers, with her tootsies in the air, just like a little dancer at the Elysee Montmartre, who exhibits her fine underclothes; for it would never do to dawdle, iron is so deceitful, it cools at once, just to spite the hammer. With thirty blows, Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, had fashioned the head of his bolt. But he panted, his eyes were half out of his head, and got into a great rage as he felt his arms growing tired. Then, carried away by wrath, jumping about and yelling, he gave two more blows, just out of revenge for his trouble. When he took the bolt from the hole, it was deformed, its head being askew like a hunchback's.

"Come now! Isn't that quickly beaten into shape?" said he all the same, with his self-confidence, as he presented his work to Gervaise.

"I'm no judge, sir," replied the laundress, reservedly.

But she saw plainly enough the marks of Dedele's last two kicks on the bolt, and she was very pleased. She bit her lips so as not to laugh, for now Goujet had every chance of winning.

It was now Golden-Mug's turn. Before commencing, he gave the laundress a look full of confident tenderness. Then he did not hurry himself. He measured his distance, and swung the hammer from on high with all his might and at regular intervals. He had the classic style, accurate, evenly balanced, and supple. Fifine, in his hands, did not cut capers, like at a dance-hall, but made steady, certain progress; she rose and fell in cadence, like a lady of quality solemnly leading some ancient minuet.

There was no brandy in Golden-Mug's veins, only blood, throbbing powerfully even into Fifine and controlling the job. That stalwart fellow! What a magnificent man he was at work. The high flame of the forge shone full on his face. His whole face seemed golden indeed with his short hair curling over his forehead and his splendid yellow beard. His neck was as straight as a column and his immense chest was wide enough for a woman to sleep across it. His shoulders and sculptured arms seemed to have been copied from a giant's statue in some museum. You could see his muscles swelling, mountains of flesh rippling and hardening under the skin; his shoulders, his chest, his neck expanded; he seemed to shed light about him, becoming beautiful and all-powerful like a kindly god.

He had now swung Fifine twenty times, his eyes always fixed on the iron, drawing a deep breath with each blow, yet showing only two great drops of sweat trickling down from his temples. He counted: "Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three—" Calmly Fifine continued, like a noble lady dancing.

"What a show-off!" jeeringly murmured Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst.

Gervaise, standing opposite Goujet, looked at him with an affectionate smile. Mon Dieu! What fools men are! Here these two men were, pounding on their bolts to pay court to her. She understood it. They were battling with hammer blows, like two big red roosters vying for the favors of a little white hen. Sometimes the human heart has fantastic ways of expressing itself. This thundering of Dedele and Fifine upon the anvil was for her, this forge roaring and overflowing was for her. They were forging their love before her, battling over her.

To be honest, she rather enjoyed it. All women are happy to receive compliments. The mighty blows of Golden-Mug found echoes in her heart; they rang within her, a crystal-clear music in time with the throbbing of her pulse. She had the feeling that this hammering was driving something deep inside of her, something solid, something hard as the iron of the bolt.

She had no doubt Goujet would win. Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, was much too ugly in his dirty tunic, jumping around like a monkey that had escaped from a zoo. She waited, blushing red, happy that the heat could explain the blush.

Goujet was still counting.

"And twenty-eight!" cried he at length, laying the hammer on the ground. "It's finished; you can look."

The head of the bolt was clean, polished, and without a flaw, regular goldsmith's work, with the roundness of a marble cast in a mold. The other men looked at it and nodded their heads; there was no denying it was lovely enough to be worshipped. Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, tried indeed to chuff; but it was no use, and ended by returning to his anvil, with his nose put out of joint. Gervaise had squeezed up against Goujet, as though to get a better view. Etienne having let go the bellows, the forge was once more becoming enveloped in shadow, like a brilliant red sunset suddenly giving way to black night. And the blacksmith and the laundress experienced a sweet pleasure in feeling this gloom surround them in that shed black with soot and filings, and where an odor of old iron prevailed. They could not have thought themselves more alone in the Bois de Vincennes had they met there in the depths of some copse. He took her hand as though he had conquered her.

Outside, they scarcely exchanged a word. All he could find to say was that she might have taken Etienne away with her, had it not been that there was still another half-hour's work to get through. When she started away he called her back, wanting a few more minutes with her.

"Come along. You haven't seen all the place. It's quite interesting."

He led her to another shed where the owner was installing a new machine. She hesitated in the doorway, oppressed by an instinctive dread. The great hall was vibrating from the machines and black shadows filled the air. He reassured her with a smile, swearing that there was nothing to fear, only she should be careful not to let her skirts get caught in any of the gears. He went first and she followed into the deafening hubbub of whistling, amid clouds of steam peopled by human shadows moving busily.

The passages were very narrow and there were obstacles to step over, holes to avoid, passing carts to move back from. She couldn't distinguish anything clearly or hear what Goujet was saying.

Gervaise looked up and stopped to stare at the leather belts hanging from the roof in a gigantic spider web, each strip ceaselessly revolving. The steam engine that drove them was hidden behind a low brick wall so that the belts seemed to be moving by themselves. She stumbled and almost fell while looking up.

Goujet raised his voice with explanations. There were the tapping machines operated by women, which put threads on bolts and nuts. Their steel gears were shining with oil. She could follow the entire process. She nodded her head and smiled.

She was still a little tense, however, feeling uneasy at being so small among these rough metalworkers. She jumped back more than once, her blood suddenly chilled by the dull thud of a machine.

Goujet had stopped before one of the rivet machines. He stood there brooding, his head lowered, his gaze fixed. This machine forged forty millimetre rivets with the calm ease of a giant. Nothing could be simpler. The stoker took the iron shank from the furnace; the striker put it into the socket, where a continuous stream of water cooled it to prevent softening of the steel. The press descended and the bolt flew out onto the ground, its head as round as though cast in a mold. Every twelve hours this machine made hundreds of kilograms of bolts!

Goujet was not a mean person, but there were moments when he wanted to take Fifine and smash this machine to bits because he was angry to see that its arms were stronger than his own. He reasoned with himself, telling himself that human flesh cannot compete with steel. But he was still deeply hurt. The day would come when machinery would destroy the skilled worker. Their day's pay had already fallen from twelve francs to nine francs. There was talk of cutting it again. He stared at it, frowning, for three minutes without saying a word. His yellow beard seemed to bristle defiantly. Then, gradually an expression of resignation came over his face and he turned toward Gervaise who was clinging tightly to him and said with a sad smile:

"Well! That machine would certainly win a contest. But perhaps it will be for the good of mankind in the long run."

Gervaise didn't care a bit about the welfare of mankind. Smiling, she said to Goujet:

"I like yours better, because they show the hand of an artist."

Hearing this gave him great happiness because he had been afraid that she might be scornful of him after seeing the machines. Mon Dieu! He might be stronger than Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, but the machines were stronger yet. When Gervaise finally took her leave, Goujet was so happy that he almost crushed her with a hug.

The laundress went every Saturday to the Goujets to deliver their washing. They still lived in the little house in the Rue Neuve de la Goutte-d'Or. During the first year she had regularly repaid them twenty francs a month; so as not to jumble up the accounts, the washing-book was only made up at the end of each month, and then she added to the amount whatever sum was necessary to make the twenty francs, for the Goujets' washing rarely came to more than seven or eight francs during that time. She had therefore paid off nearly half the sum owing, when one quarter day, not knowing what to do, some of her customers not having kept their promises, she had been obliged to go to the Goujets and borrow from them sufficient for her rent. On two other occasions she had also applied to them for the money to pay her workwomen, so that the debt had increased again to four hundred and twenty-five francs. Now, she no longer gave a halfpenny; she worked off the amount solely by the washing. It was not that she worked less, or that her business was not so prosperous. But something was going wrong in her home; the money seemed to melt away, and she was glad when she was able to make both ends meet. Mon Dieu! What's the use of complaining as long as one gets by. She was putting on weight and this caused her to become a bit lazy. She no longer had the energy that she had in the past. Oh well, there was always something coming in.

Madame Goujet felt a motherly concern for Gervaise and sometimes reprimanded her. This wasn't due to the money owed but because she liked her and didn't want to see her get into difficulties. She never mentioned the debt. In short, she behaved with the utmost delicacy.

The morrow of Gervaise's visit to the forge happened to be the last Saturday of the month. When she reached the Goujets, where she made a point of going herself, her basket had so weighed on her arms that she was quite two minutes before she could get her breath. One would hardly believe how heavy clothes are, especially when there are sheets among them.

"Are you sure you've brought everything?" asked Madame Goujet.

She was very strict on that point. She insisted on having her washing brought home without a single article being kept back for the sake of order, as she said. She also required the laundress always to come on the day arranged and at the same hour; in that way there was no time wasted.

"Oh! yes, everything is here," replied Gervaise smiling. "You know I never leave anything behind."

"That's true," admitted Madame Goujet; "you've got into many bad habits but you're still free of that one."

And while the laundress emptied her basket, laying the linen on the bed, the old woman praised her; she never burnt the things nor tore them like so many others did, neither did she pull the buttons off with the iron; only she used too much blue and made the shirt-fronts too stiff with starch.

"Just look, it's like cardboard," continued she, making one crackle between her fingers. "My son does not complain, but it cuts his neck. To-morrow his neck will be all scratched when we return from Vincennes."

"No, don't say that!" exclaimed Gervaise, quite grieved. "To look nice, shirts must be rather stiff, otherwise it's as though one had a rag on one's body. You should just see what the gentlemen wear. I do all your things myself. The workwomen never touch them and I assure you I take great pains. I would, if necessary, do everything over a dozen times, because it's for you, you know."

She slightly blushed as she stammered out the last words. She was afraid of showing the great pleasure she took in ironing Goujet's shirts. She certainly had no wicked thoughts, but she was none the less a little bit ashamed.

"Oh! I'm not complaining of your work; I know it's perfection," said Madame Goujet. "For instance, you've done this cap splendidly, only you could bring out the embroidery like that. And the flutings are all so even. Oh! I recognize your hand at once. When you give even a dish-cloth to one of your workwomen I detect it at once. In future, use a little less starch, that's all! Goujet does not care to look like a stylish gentleman."

She had taken out her notebook and was crossing off the various items. Everything was in order. She noticed that Gervaise was charging six sous for each bonnet. She protested, but had to agree that it was in line with present prices. Men's shirts were five sous, women's underdrawers four sous, pillow-cases a sou and a half, and aprons one sou. No, the prices weren't high. Some laundresses charged a sou more for each item.

Gervaise was now calling out the soiled clothes, as she packed them in her basket, for Madame Goujet to list. Then she lingered on, embarrassed by a request which she wished to make.

"Madame Goujet," she said at length, "if it does not inconvenience you, I would like to take the money for the month's washing."

It so happened that that month was a very heavy one, the account they had made up together amounting to ten francs, seven sous. Madame Goujet looked at her a moment in a serious manner, then she replied:

"My child, it shall be as you wish. I will not refuse you the money as you are in need of it. Only it's scarcely the way to pay off your debt; I say that for your sake, you know. Really now, you should be careful."

Gervaise received the lecture with bowed head and stammering excuses. The ten francs were to make up the amount of a bill she had given her coke merchant. But on hearing the word "bill," Madame Goujet became severer still. She gave herself as an example; she had reduced her expenditure ever since Goujet's wages had been lowered from twelve to nine francs a day. When one was wanting in wisdom whilst young, one dies of hunger in one's old age. But she held back and didn't tell Gervaise that she gave her their laundry only in order to help her pay off the debt. Before that she had done all her own washing, and she would have to do it herself again if the laundry continued taking so much cash out of her pocket. Gervaise spoke her thanks and left quickly as soon as she had received the ten francs seven sous. Outside on the landing she was so relieved she wanted to dance. She was becoming used to the annoying, unpleasant difficulties caused by a shortage of money and preferred to remember not the embarrassment but the joy in escaping from them.

It was also on that Saturday that Gervaise met with a rather strange adventure as she descended the Goujets' staircase. She was obliged to stand up close against the stair-rail with her basket to make way for a tall bare-headed woman who was coming up, carrying in her hand a very fresh mackerel, with bloody gills, in a piece of paper. She recognized Virginie, the girl whose face she had slapped at the wash-house. They looked each other full in the face. Gervaise shut her eyes. She thought for a moment that she was going to be hit in the face with the fish. But no, Virginie even smiled slightly. Then, as her basket was blocking the staircase, the laundress wished to show how polite she, too, could be.

"I beg your pardon," she said.

"You are completely excused," replied the tall brunette.

And they remained conversing together on the stairs, reconciled at once without having ventured on a single allusion to the past. Virginie, then twenty-nine years old, had become a superb woman of strapping proportions, her face, however, looking rather long between her two plaits of jet black hair. She at once began to relate her history just to show off. She had a husband now; she had married in the spring an ex-journeyman cabinetmaker, who recently left the army, and who had applied to be admitted into the police, because a post of that kind is more to be depended upon and more respectable. She had been out to buy the mackerel for him.

"He adores mackerel," said she. "We must spoil them, those naughty men, mustn't we? But come up. You shall see our home. We are standing in a draught here."

After Gervaise had told of her own marriage and that she had formerly occupied the very apartment Virginie now had, Virginie urged her even more strongly to come up since it is always nice to visit a spot where one had been happy.

Virginie had lived for five years on the Left Bank at Gros-Caillou. That was where she had met her husband while he was still in the army. But she got tired of it, and wanted to come back to the Goutte-d'Or neighborhood where she knew everyone. She had only been living in the rooms opposite the Goujets for two weeks. Oh! everything was still a mess, but they were slowly getting it in order.

Then, still on the staircase, they finally told each other their names.

"Madame Coupeau."

"Madame Poisson."

And from that time forth, they called each other on every possible occasion Madame Poisson and Madame Coupeau, solely for the pleasure of being madame, they who in former days had been acquainted when occupying rather questionable positions. However, Gervaise felt rather mistrustful at heart. Perhaps the tall brunette had made it up the better to avenge herself for the beating at the wash-house by concocting some plan worthy of a spiteful hypocritical creature. Gervaise determined to be upon her guard. For the time being, as Virginie behaved so nicely, she would be nice also.

In the room upstairs, Poisson, the husband, a man of thirty-five, with a cadaverous-looking countenance and carroty moustaches and beard, was seated working at a table near the window. He was making little boxes. His only tools were a knife, a tiny saw the size of a nail file and a pot of glue. He was using wood from old cigar boxes, thin boards of unfinished mahogany upon which he executed fretwork and embellishments of extraordinary delicacy. All year long he worked at making the same size boxes, only varying them occasionally by inlay work, new designs for the cover, or putting compartments inside. He did not sell his work, he distributed it in presents to persons of his acquaintance. It was for his own amusement, a way of occupying his time while waiting for his appointment to the police force. It was all that remained with him from his former occupation of cabinetmaking.

Poisson rose from his seat and politely bowed to Gervaise, when his wife introduced her as an old friend. But he was no talker; he at once returned to his little saw. From time to time he merely glanced in the direction of the mackerel placed on the corner of the chest of drawers. Gervaise was very pleased to see her old lodging once more. She told them whereabouts her own furniture stood, and pointed out the place on the floor where Nana had been born. How strange it was to meet like this again, after so many years! They never dreamed of running into each other like this and even living in the same rooms.

Virginie added some further details. Her husband had inherited a little money from an aunt and he would probably set her up in a shop before long. Meanwhile she was still sewing. At length, at the end of a full half hour, the laundress took her leave. Poisson scarcely seemed to notice her departure. While seeing her to the door, Virginie promised to return the visit. And she would have Gervaise do her laundry. While Virginie was keeping her in further conversation on the landing, Gervaise had the feeling that she wanted to say something about Lantier and her sister Adele, and this notion upset her a bit. But not a word was uttered respecting those unpleasant things; they parted, wishing each other good-bye in a very amiable manner.

"Good-bye, Madame Coupeau."

"Good-bye, Madame Poisson."

That was the starting point of a great friendship. A week later, Virginie never passed Gervaise's shop without going in; and she remained there gossiping for hours together, to such an extent indeed that Poisson, filled with anxiety, fearing she had been run over, would come and seek her with his expressionless and death-like countenance. Now that she was seeing the dressmaker every day Gervaise became aware of a strange obsession. Every time Virginie began to talk Gervaise had the feeling Lantier was going to be mentioned. So she had Lantier on her mind throughout all of Virginie's visits. This was silly because, in fact, she didn't care a bit about Lantier or Adele at this time. She was quite certain that she had no curiosity as to what had happened to either of them. But this obsession got hold of her in spite of herself. Anyway, she didn't hold it against Virginie, it wasn't her fault, surely. She enjoyed being with her and looked forward to her visits.

Meanwhile winter had come, the Coupeaus' fourth winter in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. December and January were particularly cold. It froze hard as it well could. After New Year's day the snow remained three weeks without melting. It did not interfere with work, but the contrary, for winter is the best season for the ironers. It was very pleasant inside the shop! There was never any ice on the window-panes like there was at the grocer's and the hosier's opposite. The stove was always stuffed with coke and kept things as hot as a Turkish bath. With the laundry steaming overhead you could almost imagine it was summer. You were quite comfortable with the doors closed and so much warmth everywhere that you were tempted to doze off with your eyes open. Gervaise laughed and said it reminded her of summer in the country. The street traffic made no noise in the snow and you could hardly hear the pedestrians who passed by. Only children's voices were heard in the silence, especially the noisy band of urchins who had made a long slide in the gutter near the blacksmith's shop.

Gervaise would sometimes go over to the door, wipe the moisture from one of the panes with her hand, and look out to see what was happening to her neighborhood due to this extraordinary cold spell. Not one nose was being poked out of the adjacent shops. The entire neighborhood was muffled in snow. The only person she was able to exchange nods with was the coal-dealer next door, who still walked out bare-headed despite the severe freeze.

What was especially enjoyable in this awful weather was to have some nice hot coffee in the middle of the day. The workwomen had no cause for complaint. The mistress made it very strong and without a grain of chicory. It was quite different to Madame Fauconnier's coffee, which was like ditch-water. Only whenever mother Coupeau undertook to make it, it was always an interminable time before it was ready, because she would fall asleep over the kettle. On these occasions, when the workwomen had finished their lunch, they would do a little ironing whilst waiting for the coffee.

It so happened that on the morrow of Twelfth-day half-past twelve struck and still the coffee was not ready. It seemed to persist in declining to pass through the strainer. Mother Coupeau tapped against the pot with a tea-spoon; and one could hear the drops falling slowly, one by one, and without hurrying themselves any the more.

"Leave it alone," said tall Clemence; "you'll make it thick. To-day there'll be as much to eat as to drink."

Tall Clemence was working on a man's shirt, the plaits of which she separated with her finger-nail. She had caught a cold, her eyes were frightfully swollen and her chest was shaken with fits of coughing, which doubled her up beside the work-table. With all that she had not even a handkerchief round her neck and she was dressed in some cheap flimsy woolen stuff in which she shivered. Close by, Madame Putois, wrapped up in flannel muffled up to her ears, was ironing a petticoat which she turned round the skirt-board, the narrow end of which rested on the back of a chair; whilst a sheet laid on the floor prevented the petticoat from getting dirty as it trailed along the tiles. Gervaise alone occupied half the work-table with some embroidered muslin curtains, over which she passed her iron in a straight line with her arms stretched out to avoid making any creases. All on a sudden the coffee running through noisily caused her to raise her head. It was that squint-eyed Augustine who had just given it an outlet by thrusting a spoon through the strainer.

"Leave it alone!" cried Gervaise. "Whatever is the matter with you? It'll be like drinking mud now."

Mother Coupeau had placed five glasses on a corner of the work-table that was free. The women now left their work. The mistress always poured out the coffee herself after putting two lumps of sugar into each glass. It was the moment that they all looked forward to. On this occasion, as each one took her glass and squatted down on a little stool in front of the stove, the shop-door opened. Virginie entered, shivering all over.

"Ah, my children," said she, "it cuts you in two! I can no longer feel my ears. The cold is something awful!"

"Why, it's Madame Poisson!" exclaimed Gervaise. "Ah, well! You've come at the right time. You must have some coffee with us."

"On my word, I can't say no. One feels the frost in one's bones merely by crossing the street."

There was still some coffee left, luckily. Mother Coupeau went and fetched a sixth glass, and Gervaise let Virginie help herself to sugar out of politeness. The workwomen moved to give Virginie a small space close to the stove. Her nose was very red, she shivered a bit, pressing her hands which were stiff with cold around the glass to warm them. She had just come from the grocery story where you froze to death waiting for a quarter-pound of cheese and so she raved about the warmth of the shop. It felt so good on one's skin. After warming up, she stretched out her long legs and the six of them relaxed together, supping their coffee slowly, surround by all the work still to be done. Mother Coupeau and Virginie were the only ones on chairs, the others, on low benches, seemed to be sitting on the floor. Squint-eyed Augustine had pulled over a corner of the cloth below the skirt, stretching herself out on it.

No one spoke at first; all kept their noses in their glasses, enjoying their coffee.

"It's not bad, all the same," declared Clemence.

But she was seized with a fit of coughing, and almost choked. She leant her head against the wall to cough with more force.

"That's a bad cough you've got," said Virginie. "Wherever did you catch it?"

"One never knows!" replied Clemence, wiping her face with her sleeve. "It must have been the other night. There were two girls who were flaying each other outside the 'Grand-Balcony.' I wanted to see, so I stood there whilst the snow was falling. Ah, what a drubbing! It was enough to make one die with laughing. One had her nose almost pulled off; the blood streamed on the ground. When the other, a great long stick like me, saw the blood, she slipped away as quick as she could. And I coughed nearly all night. Besides that too, men are so stupid in bed, they don't let you have any covers over you half the time."

"Pretty conduct that," murmured Madame Putois. "You're killing yourself, my girl."

"And if it pleases me to kill myself! Life isn't so very amusing. Slaving all the blessed day long to earn fifty-five sous, cooking one's blood from morning to night in front of the stove; no, you know, I've had enough of it! All the same though, this cough won't do me the service of making me croak. It'll go off the same way it came."

A short silence ensued. The good-for-nothing Clemence, who led riots in low dancing establishments, and shrieked like a screech-owl at work, always saddened everyone with her thoughts of death. Gervaise knew her well, and so merely said:

"You're never very gay the morning after a night of high living."

The truth was that Gervaise did not like this talk about women fighting. Because of the flogging at the wash-house it annoyed her whenever anyone spoke before her and Virginie of kicks with wooden shoes and of slaps in the face. It so happened, too, that Virginie was looking at her and smiling.

"By the way," she said quietly, "yesterday I saw some hair-pulling. They almost tore each other to pieces."

"Who were they?" Madame Putois inquired.

"The midwife and her maid, you know, a little blonde. What a pest the girl is! She was yelling at her employer that she had got rid of a child for the fruit woman and that she was going to tell the police if she wasn't paid to keep quiet. So the midwife slapped her right in the face and then the little blonde jumped on her and started scratching her and pulling her hair, really—by the roots. The sausage-man had to grab her to put a stop to it."

The workwomen laughed. Then they all took a sip of coffee.

"Do you believe that she really got rid of a child?" Clemence asked.

"Oh, yes! The rumor was all round the neighborhood," Virginie answered. "I didn't see it myself, you understand, but it's part of the job. All midwives do it."

"Well!" exclaimed Madame Putois. "You have to be pretty stupid to put yourself in their hands. No thanks, you could be maimed for life. But there's a sure way to do it. Drink a glass of holy water every evening and make the sign of the cross three times over your stomach with your thumb. Then your troubles will be over."

Everyone thought mother Coupeau was asleep, but she shook her head in protest. She knew another way and it was infallible. You had to eat a hard-cooked egg every two hours, and put spinach leaves on your loins. Squint-eyed Augustine set up a hen-cackling when she heard this. They had forgotten about her. Gervaise lifted up the petticoat that was being ironed and found her rolling on the floor with laughter. She jerked her upright. What was she laughing about? Was it right for her to be eavesdropping when older people were talking, the little goose? Anyway it was time for her to deliver the laundry to a friend of Madame Lerat at Les Batignolles. So Gervaise hung a basket on her arm and pushed her toward the door. Augustine went off, sobbing and sniveling, dragging her feet in the snow.

Meanwhile mother Coupeau, Madame Putois and Clemence were discussing the effectiveness of hard-cooked eggs and spinach leaves. Then Virginie said softly:

"Mon Dieu! you have a fight, and then you make it up, if you have a generous heart." She leaned toward Gervaise with a smile and added, "Really, I don't hold any grudge against you for that business at the wash-house. You remember it, don't you?"

This was what Gervaise had been dreading. She guessed that the subject of Lantier and Adele would now come up.

Virginie had moved close to Gervaise so as not to be overheard by the others. Gervaise, lulled by the excessive heat, felt so limp that she couldn't even summon the willpower to change the subject. She foresaw what the tall brunette would say and her heart was stirred with an emotion which she didn't want to admit to herself.

"I hope I'm not hurting your feelings," Virginie continued. "Often I've had it on the tip of my tongue. But since we are now on the subject, word of honor, I don't have any grudge against you."

She stirred her remaining coffee and then took a small sip. Gervaise, with her heart in her throat, wondered if Virginie had really forgiven her as completely as she said, for she seemed to observe sparks in her dark eyes.

"You see," Virginie went on, "you had an excuse. They played a really rotten, dirty trick on you. To be fair about it, if it had been me, I'd have taken a knife to her."

She drank another small sip, then added rapidly without a pause:

"Anyway, it didn't bring them happiness, mon Dieu! Not a bit of it. They went to live over at La Glaciere, in a filthy street that was always muddy. I went two days later to have lunch with them. I can tell you, it was quite a trip by bus. Well, I found them already fighting. Really, as I came in they were boxing each other's ears. Fine pair of love birds! Adele isn't worth the rope to hang her. I say that even if she is my own sister. It would take too long to relate all the nasty tricks she played on me, and anyhow, it's between the two of us. As for Lantier—well, he's no good either. He'd beat the hide off you for anything, and with his fist closed too. They fought all the time. The police even came once."

Virginie went on about other fights. Oh, she knew of things that would make your hair stand up. Gervaise listened in silence, her face pale. It was nearly seven years since she had heard a word about Lantier. She hadn't realized what a strong curiosity she had as to what had become of the poor man, even though he had treated her badly. And she never would have believed that just the mention of his name could put such a glowing warmth in the pit of her stomach. She certainly had no reason to be jealous of Adele any more but she rejoiced to think of her body all bruised from the beatings. She could have listened to Virginie all night, but she didn't ask any questions, not wanting to appear much interested.

Virginie stopped to sip at her coffee. Gervaise, realizing that she was expected to say something, asked, with a pretence of indifference:

"Are they still living at La Glaciere?"

"No!" the other replied. "Didn't I tell you? They separated last week. One morning, Adele moved out and Lantier didn't chase after her."

"So they're separated!" Gervaise exclaimed.

"Who are you talking about?" Clemence asked, interrupting her conversation with mother Coupeau and Madame Putois.

"Nobody you know," said Virginie.

She was looking at Gervaise carefully and could see that she was upset. She moved still closer, maliciously finding pleasure in bringing up these old stories. Of a sudden she asked Gervaise what she would do if Lantier came round here. Men were really such strange creatures, he might decide to return to his first love. This caused Gervaise to sit up very straight and dignified. She was a married woman; she would send Lantier off immediately. There was no possibility of anything further between them, not even a handshake. She would not even want to look that man in the face.

"I know that Etienne is his son, and that's a relationship that remains," she said. "If Lantier wants to see his son, I'll send the boy to him because you can't stop a father from seeing his child. But as for myself, I don't want him to touch me even with the tip of his finger. That is all finished."

Desiring to break off this conversation, she seemed to awake with a start and called out to the women:

"You ladies! Do you think all these clothes are going to iron themselves? Get to work!"

The workwomen, slow from the heat and general laziness, didn't hurry themselves, but went right on talking, gossiping about other people they had known.

Gervaise shook herself and got to her feet. Couldn't earn money by sitting all day. She was the first to return to the ironing, but found that her curtains had been spotted by the coffee and she had to rub out the stains with a damp cloth. The other women were now stretching and getting ready to begin ironing.

Clemence had a terrible attack of coughing as soon as she moved. Finally she was able to return to the shirt she had been doing. Madame Putois began to work on the petticoat again.

"Well, good-bye," said Virginie. "I only came out for a quarter-pound of Swiss cheese. Poisson must think I've frozen to death on the way."

She had only just stepped outside when she turned back to say that Augustine was at the end of the street, sliding on the ice with some urchins. The squint-eyed imp rushed in all red-faced and out of breath with snow all in her hair. She didn't mind the scolding she received, merely saying that she hadn't been able to walk fast because of the ice and then some brats threw snow at her.

The afternoons were all the same these winter days. The laundry was the refuge for anyone in the neighborhood who was cold. There was an endless procession of gossiping women. Gervaise took pride in the comforting warmth of her shop and welcomed those who came in, "holding a salon," as the Lorilleuxs and the Boches remarked meanly.

Gervaise was always thoughtful and generous. Sometimes she even invited poor people in if she saw them shivering outside. A friendship sprang up with an elderly house-painter who was seventy. He lived in an attic room and was slowly dying of cold and hunger. His three sons had been killed in the war. He survived the best he could, but it had been two years since he had been able to hold a paint-brush in his hand. Whenever Gervaise saw Pere Bru walking outside, she would call him in and arrange a place for him close to the stove. Often she gave him some bread and cheese. Pere Bru's face was as wrinkled as a withered apple. He would sit there, with his stooping shoulders and his white beard, without saying a word, just listening to the coke sputtering in the stove. Maybe he was thinking of his fifty years of hard work on high ladders, his fifty years spent painting doors and whitewashing ceilings in every corner of Paris.

"Well, Pere Bru," Gervaise would say, "what are you thinking of now?"

"Nothing much. All sorts of things," he would answer quietly.

The workwomen tried to joke with him to cheer him up, saying he was worrying over his love affairs, but he scarcely listened to them before he fell back into his habitual attitude of meditative melancholy.

Virginie now frequently spoke to Gervaise of Lantier. She seemed to find amusement in filling her mind with ideas of her old lover just for the pleasure of embarrassing her by making suggestions. One day she related that she had met him; then, as the laundress took no notice, she said nothing further, and it was only on the morrow that she added he had spoken about her for a long time, and with a great show of affection. Gervaise was much upset by these reports whispered in her ear in a corner of the shop. The mention of Lantier's name always caused a worried sensation in the pit of her stomach. She certainly thought herself strong; she wished to lead the life of an industrious woman, because labor is the half of happiness. So she never considered Coupeau in this matter, having nothing to reproach herself with as regarded her husband, not even in her thoughts. But with a hesitating and suffering heart, she would think of the blacksmith. It seemed to her that the memory of Lantier—that slow possession which she was resuming—rendered her unfaithful to Goujet, to their unavowed love, sweet as friendship. She passed sad days whenever she felt herself guilty towards her good friend. She would have liked to have had no affection for anyone but him outside of her family. It was a feeling far above all carnal thoughts, for the signs of which upon her burning face Virginie was ever on the watch.

As soon as spring came Gervaise often went and sought refuge with Goujet. She could no longer sit musing on a chair without immediately thinking of her first lover; she pictured him leaving Adele, packing his clothes in the bottom of their old trunk, and returning to her in a cab. The days when she went out, she was seized with the most foolish fears in the street; she was ever thinking she heard Lantier's footsteps behind her. She did not dare turn round, but tremblingly fancied she felt his hands seizing her round the waist. He was, no doubt, spying upon her; he would appear before her some afternoon; and the bare idea threw her into a cold perspiration, because he would to a certainty kiss her on the ear, as he used to do in former days solely to tease her. It was this kiss which frightened her; it rendered her deaf beforehand; it filled her with a buzzing amidst which she could only distinguish the sound of her heart beating violently. So, as soon as these fears seized upon her, the forge was her only shelter; there, under Goujet's protection, she once more became easy and smiling, as his sonorous hammer drove away her disagreeable reflections.

What a happy time! The laundress took particular pains with the washing of her customer in the Rue des Portes-Blanches; she always took it home herself because that errand, every Friday, was a ready excuse for passing through the Rue Marcadet and looking in at the forge. The moment she turned the corner of the street she felt light and gay, as though in the midst of those plots of waste land surrounded by grey factories, she were out in the country; the roadway black with coal-dust, the plumage of steam over the roofs, amused her as much as a moss-covered path leading through masses of green foliage in a wood in the environs; and she loved the dull horizon, streaked by the tall factory-chimneys, the Montmartre heights, which hid the heavens from view, the chalky white houses pierced with the uniform openings of their windows. She would slacken her steps as she drew near, jumping over the pools of water, and finding a pleasure in traversing the deserted ins and outs of the yard full of old building materials. Right at the further end the forge shone with a brilliant light, even at mid-day. Her heart leapt with the dance of the hammers. When she entered, her face turned quite red, the little fair hairs at the nape of her neck flew about like those of a woman arriving at some lovers' meeting. Goujet was expecting her, his arms and chest bare, whilst he hammered harder on the anvil on those days so as to make himself heard at a distance. He divined her presence, and greeted her with a good silent laugh in his yellow beard. But she would not let him leave off his work; she begged him to take up his hammer again, because she loved him the more when he wielded it with his big arms swollen with muscles. She would go and give Etienne a gentle tap on the cheek, as he hung on to the bellows, and then remain for an hour watching the rivets.

The two did not exchange a dozen words. They could not have more completely satisfied their love if alone in a room with the door double-locked. The snickering of Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, did not bother them in the least, for they no longer even heard him. At the end of a quarter of an hour she would begin to feel slightly oppressed; the heat, the powerful smell, the ascending smoke, made her dizzy, whilst the dull thuds of the hammers shook her from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet. Then she desired nothing more; it was her pleasure. Had Goujet pressed her in his arms it would not have procured her so sweet an emotion. She drew close to him that she might feel the wind raised by his hammer beat upon her cheek, and become, as it were, a part of the blow he struck. When the sparks made her soft hands smart, she did not withdraw them; on the contrary, she enjoyed the rain of fire which stung her skin. He for certain, divined the happiness which she tasted there; he always kept the most difficult work for the Fridays, so as to pay his court to her with all his strength and all his skill; he no longer spared himself at the risk of splitting the anvils in two, as he panted and his loins vibrated with the joy he was procuring her. All one spring-time their love thus filled Goujet with the rumbling of a storm. It was an idyll amongst giant-like labor in the midst of the glare of the coal fire, and of the shaking of the shed, the cracking carcass of which was black with soot. All that beaten iron, kneaded like red wax, preserved the rough marks of their love. When on the Fridays the laundress parted from Golden-Mug, she slowly reascended the Rue des Poissonniers, contented and tired, her mind and her body alike tranquil.

Little by little, her fear of Lantier diminished; her good sense got the better of her. At that time she would still have led a happy life, had it not been for Coupeau, who was decidedly going to the bad. One day she just happened to be returning from the forge, when she fancied she recognized Coupeau inside Pere Colombe's l'Assommoir, in the act of treating himself to a round of vitriol in the company of My-Boots, Bibi-the-Smoker, and Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst. She passed quickly by, so as not to seem to be spying on them. But she glanced back; it was indeed Coupeau who was tossing his little glass of bad brandy down his throat with a gesture already familiar. He lied then; so he went in for brandy now! She returned home in despair; all her old dread of brandy took possession of her. She forgave the wine, because wine nourishes the workman; all kinds of spirit, on the contrary, were filth, poisons which destroyed in the workman the taste for bread. Ah! the government ought to prevent the manufacture of such horrid stuff!

On arriving at the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, she found the whole house upset. Her workwomen had left the shop, and were in the courtyard looking up above. She questioned Clemence.

"It's old Bijard who's giving his wife a hiding," replied the ironer. "He was in the doorway, as drunk as a trooper, watching for her return from the wash-house. He whacked her up the stairs, and now he's finishing her off up there in their room. Listen, can't you hear her shrieks?"

Gervaise hastened to the spot. She felt some friendship for her washer-woman, Madame Bijard, who was a very courageous woman. She had hoped to put a stop to what was going on. Upstairs, on the sixth floor the door of the room was wide open, some lodgers were shouting on the landing, whilst Madame Boche, standing in front of the door, was calling out:

"Will you leave off? I shall send for the police; do you hear?"

No one dared to venture inside the room, because it was known that Bijard was like a brute beast when he was drunk. As a matter of fact, he was scarcely ever sober. The rare days on which he worked, he placed a bottle of brandy beside his blacksmith's vise, gulping some of it down every half hour. He could not keep himself going any other way. He would have blazed away like a torch if anyone had placed a lighted match close to his mouth.

"But we mustn't let her be murdered!" said Gervaise, all in a tremble.

And she entered. The room, an attic, and very clean, was bare and cold, almost emptied by the drunken habits of the man, who took the very sheets from the bed to turn them into liquor. During the struggle the table had rolled away to the window, the two chairs, knocked over, had fallen with their legs in the air. In the middle of the room, on the tile floor, lay Madame Bijard, all bloody, her skirts, still soaked with the water of the wash-house, clinging to her thighs, her hair straggling in disorder. She was breathing heavily, with a rattle in her throat, as she muttered prolonged ohs! each time she received a blow from the heel of Bijard's boot. He had knocked her down with his fists, and now he stamped upon her.

"Ah, strumpet! Ah, strumpet! Ah strumpet!" grunted he in a choking voice, accompanying each blow with the word, taking a delight in repeating it, and striking all the harder the more he found his voice failing him.

Then when he could no longer speak, he madly continued to kick with a dull sound, rigid in his ragged blue blouse and overalls, his face turned purple beneath his dirty beard, and his bald forehead streaked with big red blotches. The neighbors on the landing related that he was beating her because she had refused him twenty sous that morning. Boche's voice was heard at the foot of the staircase. He was calling Madame Boche, saying:

"Come down; let them kill each other, it'll be so much scum the less."

Meanwhile, Pere Bru had followed Gervaise into the room. Between them they were trying to get him towards the door. But he turned round, speechless and foaming at the lips, and in his pale eyes the alcohol was blazing with a murderous glare. The laundress had her wrist injured; the old workman was knocked against the table. On the floor, Madame Bijard was breathing with greater difficulty, her mouth wide open, her eyes closed. Now Bijard kept missing her. He had madly returned to the attack, but blinded by rage, his blows fell on either side, and at times he almost fell when his kicks went into space. And during all this onslaught, Gervaise beheld in a corner of the room little Lalie, then four years old, watching her father murdering her mother. The child held in her arms, as though to protect her, her sister Henriette, only recently weaned. She was standing up, her head covered with a cotton cap, her face very pale and grave. Her large black eyes gazed with a fixedness full of thought and were without a tear.

When at length Bijard, running against a chair, stumbled onto the tiled floor, where they left him snoring, Pere Bru helped Gervaise to raise Madame Bijard. The latter was now sobbing bitterly; and Lalie, drawing near, watched her crying, being used to such sights and already resigned to them. As the laundress descended the stairs, in the silence of the now quieted house, she kept seeing before her that look of this child of four, as grave and courageous as that of a woman.

"Monsieur Coupeau is on the other side of the street," called out Clemence as soon as she caught sight of her. "He looks awfully drunk."

Coupeau was just then crossing the street. He almost smashed a pane of glass with his shoulder as he missed the door. He was in a state of complete drunkenness, with his teeth clinched and his nose inflamed. And Gervaise at once recognized the vitriol of l'Assommoir in the poisoned blood which paled his skin. She tried to joke and get him to bed, the same as on the days when the wine had made him merry; but he pushed her aside without opening his lips, and raised his fist in passing as he went to bed of his own accord. He made Gervaise think of the other—the drunkard who was snoring upstairs, tired out by the blows he had struck. A cold shiver passed over her. She thought of the men she knew—of her husband, of Goujet, of Lantier—her heart breaking, despairing of ever being happy.

CHAPTER VII.

Gervaise's saint's day fell on the 19th of June. On such occasions, the Coupeaus always made a grand display; they feasted till they were as round as balls, and their stomachs were filled for the rest of the week. There was a complete clear out of all the money they had. The moment there were a few sous in the house they went in gorging. They invented saints for those days which the almanac had not provided with any, just for the sake of giving themselves a pretext for gormandizing. Virginie highly commended Gervaise for stuffing herself with all sorts of savory dishes. When one has a husband who turns all he can lay hands on into drink, it's good to line one's stomach well, and not to let everything go off in liquids. Since the money would disappear anyway, surely it was better to pay it to the butcher. Gervaise used that excuse to justify overeating, saying it was Coupeau's fault if they could no longer save a sou. She had grown considerably fatter, and she limped more than before because her leg, now swollen with fat, seemed to be getting gradually shorter.

That year they talked about her saint's day a good month beforehand. They thought of dishes and smacked their lips in advance. All the shop had a confounded longing to junket. They wanted a merry-making of the right sort—something out of the ordinary and highly successful. One does not have so many opportunities for enjoyment. What most troubled the laundress was to decide whom to invite; she wished to have twelve persons at table, no more, no less. She, her husband, mother Coupeau, and Madame Lerat, already made four members of the family. She would also have the Goujets and the Poissons. Originally, she had decided not to invite her workwomen, Madame Putois and Clemence, so as not to make them too familiar; but as the projected feast was being constantly spoken of in their presence, and their mouths watered, she ended by telling them to come. Four and four, eight, and two are ten. Then, wishing particularly to have twelve, she became reconciled with the Lorilleuxs, who for some time past had been hovering around her; at least it was agreed that the Lorilleuxs should come to dinner, and that peace should be made with glasses in hand. You really shouldn't keep family quarrels going forever. When the Boches heard that a reconciliation was planned, they also sought to make up with Gervaise, and so they had to be invited to the dinner too. That would make fourteen, not counting the children. Never before had she given such a large dinner and the thought frightened and excited her at the same time.

The saint's day happened to fall on a Monday. It was a piece of luck. Gervaise counted on the Sunday afternoon to begin the cooking. On the Saturday, whilst the workwomen hurried with their work, there was a long discussion in the shop with the view of finally deciding upon what the feast should consist of. For three weeks past one thing alone had been chosen—a fat roast goose. There was a gluttonous look on every face whenever it was mentioned. The goose was even already bought. Mother Coupeau went and fetched it to let Clemence and Madame Putois feel its weight. And they uttered all kinds of exclamations; it looked such an enormous bird, with its rough skin all swelled out with yellow fat.

"Before that there will be the pot-au-feu," said Gervaise, "the soup and just a small piece of boiled beef, it's always good. Then we must have something in the way of a stew."

Tall Clemence suggested rabbit, but they were always having that, everyone was sick of it. Gervaise wanted something more distinguished. Madame Putois having spoken of stewed veal, they looked at one another with broad smiles. It was a real idea, nothing would make a better impression than a veal stew.

"And after that," resumed Gervaise, "we must have some other dish with a sauce."

Mother Coupeau proposed fish. But the others made a grimace, as they banged down their irons. None of them liked fish; it was not a bit satisfying; and besides that it was full of bones. Squint-eyed Augustine, having dared to observe that she liked skate, Clemence shut her mouth for her with a good sound clout. At length the mistress thought of stewed pig's back and potatoes, which restored the smiles to every countenance. Then Virginie entered like a puff of wind, with a strange look on her face.

"You've come just at the right time!" exclaimed Gervaise. "Mother Coupeau, do show her the bird."

And mother Coupeau went a second time and fetched the goose, which Virginie had to take in her hands. She uttered no end of exclamations. By Jove! It was heavy! But she soon laid it down on the work-table, between a petticoat and a bundle of shirts. Her thoughts were elsewhere. She dragged Gervaise into the back-room.

"I say, little one," murmured she rapidly, "I've come to warn you. You'll never guess who I just met at the corner of the street. Lantier, my dear! He's hovering about on the watch; so I hastened here at once. It frightened me on your account, you know."

The laundress turned quite pale. What could the wretched man want with her? Coming, too, like that, just in the midst of the preparations for the feast. She had never had any luck; she could not even be allowed to enjoy herself quietly. But Virginie replied that she was very foolish to put herself out about it like that. Why! If Lantier dared to follow her about, all she had to do was to call a policeman and have him locked up. In the month since her husband had been appointed a policeman, Virginie had assumed rather lordly manners and talked of arresting everybody. She began to raise her voice, saying that she wished some passer-by would pinch her bottom so that she could take the fresh fellow to the police station herself and turn him over to her husband. Gervaise signaled her to be quiet since the workwomen were listening and led the way back into the shop, reopening the discussion about the dinner.

"Now, don't we need a vegetable?"

"Why not peas with bacon?" said Virginie. "I like nothing better."

"Yes, peas with bacon." The others approved. Augustine was so enthusiastic that she jabbed the poker into the stove harder than ever.

By three o'clock on the morrow, Sunday, mother Coupeau had lighted their two stoves and also a third one of earthenware which they had borrowed from the Boches. At half-past three the pot-au-feu was boiling away in an enormous earthenware pot lent by the eating-house keeper next door, the family pot having been found too small. They had decided to cook the veal and the pig's back the night before, since both of those dishes are better when reheated. But the cream sauce for the veal would not be prepared until just before sitting down for the feast.

There was still plenty of work left for Monday: the soup, the peas with bacon, the roast goose. The inner room was lit by three fires. Butter was sizzling in the pans and emitting a sharp odor of burnt flour.

Mother Coupeau and Gervaise, with white aprons tied on, were bustling all around, cleaning parsley, dashing for salt and pepper, turning the meat. They had sent Coupeau away so as not to have him underfoot, but they still had plenty of people looking in throughout the afternoon. The luscious smells from the kitchen had spread through the entire building so that neighboring ladies came into the shop on various pretexts, very curious to see what was being cooked.

Virginie put in an appearance towards five o'clock. She had again seen Lantier; really, it was impossible to go down the street now without meeting him. Madame Boche also had just caught sight of him standing at the corner of the pavement with his head thrust forward in an uncommonly sly manner. Then Gervaise who had at that moment intended going for a sou's worth of burnt onions for the pot-au-feu, began to tremble from head to foot and did not dare leave the house; the more so, as the concierge and the dressmaker put her into a terrible fright by relating horrible stories of men waiting for women with knives and pistols hidden beneath their overcoats. Well, yes! one reads of such things every day in the newspapers. When one of those scoundrels gets his monkey up on discovering an old love leading a happy life he becomes capable of everything. Virginie obligingly offered to run and fetch the burnt onions. Women should always help one another, they could not let that little thing be murdered. When she returned she said that Lantier was no longer there; he had probably gone off on finding he was discovered. In spite of that thought, he was the subject of conversation around the saucepans until night-time. When Madame Boche advised her to inform Coupeau, Gervaise became really terrified, and implored her not to say a word about it. Oh, yes, wouldn't that be a nice situation! Her husband must have become suspicious already because for the last few days, at night, he would swear to himself and bang the wall with his fists. The mere thought that the two men might destroy each other because of her made her shudder. She knew that Coupeau was jealous enough to attack Lantier with his shears.

While the four of them had been deep in contemplating this drama, the saucepans on the banked coals of the stoves had been quietly simmering. When mother Coupeau lifted the lids, the veal and the pig's back were discreetly bubbling. The pot-au-feu was steadily steaming with snore-like sounds. Eventually each of them dipped a piece of bread into the soup to taste the bouillon.

At length Monday arrived. Now that Gervaise was going to have fourteen persons at table, she began to fear that she would not be able to find room for them all. She decided that they should dine in the shop; and the first thing in the morning she took measurements so as to settle which way she should place the table. After that they had to remove all the clothes and take the ironing-table to pieces; the top of this laid on to some shorter trestles was to be the dining-table. But just in the midst of all this moving a customer appeared and made a scene because she had been waiting for her washing ever since the Friday; they were humbugging her, she would have her things at once. Then Gervaise tried to excuse herself and lied boldly; it was not her fault, she was cleaning out her shop, the workmen would not be there till the morrow; and she pacified her customer and got rid of her by promising to busy herself with her things at the earliest possible moment. Then, as soon as the woman had left, she showed her temper. Really, if you listened to all your customers, you'd never have time to eat. You could work yourself to death like a dog on a leash! Well! No matter who came in to-day, even if they offered one hundred thousand francs, she wouldn't touch an iron on this Monday, because it was her turn to enjoy herself.

The entire morning was spent in completing the purchases. Three times Gervaise went out and returned laden like a mule. But just as she was going to order wine she noticed that she had not sufficient money left. She could easily have got it on credit; only she could not be without money in the house, on account of the thousand little expenses that one is liable to forget. And mother Coupeau and she had lamented together in the back-room as they reckoned that they required at least twenty francs. How could they obtain them, those four pieces of a hundred sous each? Mother Coupeau who had at one time done the charring for a little actress of the Theatre des Batignolles, was the first to suggest the pawn-shop. Gervaise laughed with relief. How stupid she was not to have thought of it! She quickly folded her black silk dress upon a towel which she then pinned together. Then she hid the bundle under mother Coupeau's apron, telling her to keep it very flat against her stomach, on account of the neighbors who had no need to know; and she went and watched at the door to see that the old woman was not followed. But the latter had only gone as far as the charcoal dealer's when she called her back.

"Mamma! Mamma!"

She made her return to the shop, and taking her wedding-ring off her finger said:

"Here, put this with it. We shall get all the more."

When mother Coupeau brought her twenty-five francs, she danced for joy. She would order an extra six bottles of wine, sealed wine to drink with the roast. The Lorilleuxs would be crushed.

For a fortnight past it had been the Coupeaus' dream to crush the Lorilleuxs. Was it not true that those sly ones, the man and his wife, a truly pretty couple, shut themselves up whenever they had anything nice to eat as though they had stolen it? Yes, they covered up the window with a blanket to hide the light and make believe that they were already asleep in bed. This stopped anyone from coming up, and so the Lorilleuxs could stuff everything down, just the two of them. They were even careful the next day not to throw the bones into the garbage so that no one would know what they had eaten. Madame Lorilleux would walk to the end of the street to toss them into a sewer opening. One morning Gervaise surprised her emptying a basket of oyster shells there. Oh, those penny-pinchers were never open-handed, and all their mean contrivances came from their desire to appear to be poor. Well, we'd show them, we'd prove to them what we weren't mean.

Gervaise would have laid her table in the street, had she been able to, just for the sake of inviting each passer-by. Money was not invented that it should be allowed to grow moldy, was it? It is pretty when it shines all new in the sunshine. She resembled them so little now, that on the days when she had twenty sous she arranged things to let people think that she had forty.

Mother Coupeau and Gervaise talked of the Lorilleuxs whilst they laid the cloth about three o'clock. They had hung some big curtains at the windows; but as it was very warm the door was left open and the whole street passed in front of the little table. The two women did not place a decanter, or a bottle, or a salt-cellar, without trying to arrange them in such a way as to annoy the Lorilleuxs. They had arranged their seats so as to give them a full view of the superbly laid cloth, and they had reserved the best crockery for them, well knowing that the porcelain plates would create a great effect.

"No, no, mamma," cried Gervaise; "don't give them those napkins! I've two damask ones."

"Ah, good!" murmured the old woman; "that'll break their hearts, that's certain."

And they smiled to each other as they stood up on either side of that big white table on which the fourteen knives and forks, placed all round, caused them to swell with pride. It had the appearance of the altar of some chapel in the middle of the shop.

"That's because they're so stingy themselves!" resumed Gervaise. "You know they lied last month when the woman went about everywhere saying that she had lost a piece of gold chain as she was taking the work home. The idea! There's no fear of her ever losing anything! It was simply a way of making themselves out very poor and of not giving you your five francs."

"As yet I've only seen my five francs twice," said mother Coupeau.

"I'll bet next month they'll concoct some other story. That explains why they cover their window up when they have a rabbit to eat. Don't you see? One would have the right to say to them: 'As you can afford a rabbit you can certainly give five francs to your mother!' Oh! they're just rotten! What would have become of you if I hadn't taken you to live with us?"

Mother Coupeau slowly shook her head. That day she was all against the Lorilleuxs, because of the great feast the Coupeaus were giving. She loved cooking, the little gossipings round the saucepans, the place turned topsy-turvy by the revels of saints' days. Besides she generally got on pretty well with Gervaise. On other days when they plagued one another as happens in all families, the old woman grumbled saying she was wretchedly unfortunate in thus being at her daughter-in-law's mercy. In point of fact she probably had some affection for Madame Lorilleux who after all was her daughter.

"Ah!" continued Gervaise, "you wouldn't be so fat, would you, if you were living with them? And no coffee, no snuff, no little luxuries of any sort! Tell me, would they have given you two mattresses to your bed?"

"No, that's very certain," replied mother Coupeau. "When they arrive I shall place myself so as to have a good view of the door to see the faces they'll make."

Thinking of the faces they would make gave them pleasure ahead of time. However, they couldn't remain standing there admiring the table. The Coupeaus had lunched very late on just a bite or two, because the stoves were already in use, and because they did not want to dirty any dishes needed for the evening. By four o'clock the two women were working very hard. The huge goose was being cooked on a spit. Squint-eyed Augustine was sitting on a low bench solemnly basting the goose with a long-handled spoon. Gervaise was busy with the peas with bacon. Mother Coupeau, kept spinning around, a bit confused, waiting for the right time to begin reheating the pork and the veal.

Towards five o'clock the guests began to arrive. First of all came the two workwomen, Clemence and Madame Putois, both in their Sunday best, the former in blue, the latter in black; Clemence carried a geranium, Madame Putois a heliotrope, and Gervaise, whose hands were just then smothered with flour, had to kiss each of them on both cheeks with her arms behind her back. Then following close upon their heels entered Virginie dressed like a lady in a printed muslin costume with a sash and a bonnet though she had only a few steps to come. She brought a pot of red carnations. She took the laundress in her big arms and squeezed her tight. At length Boche appeared with a pot of pansies and Madame Boche with a pot of mignonette; then came Madame Lerat with a balm-mint, the pot of which had dirtied her violet merino dress. All these people kissed each other and gathered together in the back-room in the midst of the three stoves and the roasting apparatus, which gave out a stifling heat. The noise from the saucepans drowned the voices. A dress catching in the Dutch oven caused quite an emotion. The smell of roast goose was so strong that it made their mouths water. And Gervaise was very pleasant, thanking everyone for their flowers without however letting that interfere with her preparing the thickening for the stewed veal at the bottom of a soup plate. She had placed the pots in the shop at one end of the table without removing the white paper that was round them. A sweet scent of flowers mingled with the odor of cooking.

"Do you want any assistance?" asked Virginie. "Just fancy, you've been three days preparing all this feast and it will be gobbled up in no time."

"Well, you know," replied Gervaise, "it wouldn't prepare itself. No, don't dirty your hands. You see everything's ready. There's only the soup to warm."

Then they all made themselves comfortable. The ladies laid their shawls and their caps on the bed and pinned up their skirts so as not to soil them. Boche sent his wife back to the concierge's lodge until time to eat and had cornered Clemence in a corner trying to find out if she was ticklish. She was gasping for breath, as the mere thought of being tickled sent shivers through her. So as not to bother the cooks, the other ladies had gone into the shop and were standing against the wall facing the table. They were talking through the door though, and as they could not hear very well, they were continually invading the back-room and crowding around Gervaise, who would forget what she was doing to answer them.

There were a few stories which brought sly laughter. When Virginie mentioned that she hadn't eaten for two days in order to have more room for today's feast, tall Clemence said that she had cleaned herself out that morning with an enema like the English do. Then Boche suggested a way of digesting the food quickly by squeezing oneself after each course, another English custom. After all, when you were invited to dinner, wasn't it polite to eat as much as you could? Veal and pork and goose are placed out for the cats to eat. The hostess didn't need to worry a bit, they were going to clean their plates so thoroughly that she wouldn't have to wash them.

All of them kept coming to smell the air above the saucepans and the roaster. The ladies began to act like young girls, scurrying from room to room and pushing each other.

Just as they were all jumping about and shouting by way of amusement, Goujet appeared. He was so timid he scarcely dared enter, but stood still, holding a tall white rose-tree in his arms, a magnificent plant with a stem that reached to his face and entangled the flowers in his beard. Gervaise ran to him, her cheeks burning from the heat of the stoves. But he did not know how to get rid of his pot; and when she had taken it from his hands he stammered, not daring to kiss her. It was she who was obliged to stand on tip-toe and place her cheek against his lips; he was so agitated that even then he kissed her roughly on the eye almost blinding her. They both stood trembling.

"Oh! Monsieur Goujet, it's too lovely!" said she, placing the rose-tree beside the other flowers which it overtopped with the whole of its tuft of foliage.

"Not at all, not at all!" repeated he, unable to say anything else.

Then, after sighing deeply, he slightly recovered himself and stated that she was not to expect his mother; she was suffering from an attack of sciatica. Gervaise was greatly grieved; she talked of putting a piece of the goose on one side as she particularly wished Madame Goujet to have a taste of the bird. No one else was expected. Coupeau was no doubt strolling about in the neighborhood with Poisson whom he had called for directly after his lunch; they would be home directly, they had promised to be back punctually at six. Then as the soup was almost ready, Gervaise called to Madame Lerat, saying that she thought it was time to go and fetch the Lorilleuxs. Madame Lerat became at once very grave; it was she who had conducted all the negotiations and who had settled how everything should pass between the two families. She put her cap and shawl on again and went upstairs very stiffly in her skirts, looking very stately. Down below the laundress continued to stir her vermicelli soup without saying a word. The guests suddenly became serious and solemnly waited.

It was Madame Lerat who appeared first. She had gone round by the street so as to give more pomp to the reconciliation. She held the shop-door wide open whilst Madame Lorilleux, wearing a silk dress, stopped at the threshold. All the guests had risen from their seats; Gervaise went forward and kissing her sister-in-law as had been agreed, said:

"Come in. It's all over, isn't it? We'll both be nice to each other."

And Madame Lorilleux replied:

"I shall be only too happy if we're so always."

When she had entered Lorilleux also stopped at the threshold and he likewise waited to be embraced before penetrating into the shop. Neither the one nor the other had brought a bouquet. They had decided not to do so as they thought it would look too much like giving way to Clump-Clump if they carried flowers with them the first time they set foot in her home. Gervaise called to Augustine to bring two bottles of wine. Then, filling some glasses on a corner of the table, she called everyone to her. And each took a glass and drank to the good friendship of the family. There was a pause whilst the guests were drinking, the ladies raising their elbows and emptying their glasses to the last drop.

"Nothing is better before soup," declared Boche, smacking his lips.

Mother Coupeau had placed herself opposite the door to see the faces the Lorilleuxs would make. She pulled Gervaise by the skirt and dragged her into the back-room. And as they both leant over the soup they conversed rapidly in a low voice.

"Huh! What a sight!" said the old woman. "You couldn't see them; but I was watching. When she caught sight of the table her face twisted around like that, the corners of her mouth almost touched her eyes; and as for him, it nearly choked him, he coughed and coughed. Now just look at them over there; they've no saliva left in their mouths, they're chewing their lips."

"It's quite painful to see people as jealous as that," murmured Gervaise.

Really the Lorilleuxs had a funny look about them. No one of course likes to be crushed; in families especially when the one succeeds, the others do not like it; that is only natural. Only one keeps it in, one does not make an exhibition of oneself. Well! The Lorilleuxs could not keep it in. It was more than a match for them. They squinted—their mouths were all on one side. In short it was so apparent that the other guests looked at them, and asked them if they were unwell. Never would they be able to stomach this table with its fourteen place-settings, its white linen table cloth, its slices of bread cut in advance, all in the style of a first-class restaurant. Mme. Lorilleux went around the table, surreptitiously fingering the table cloth, tortured by the thought that it was a new one.

"Everything's ready!" cried Gervaise as she reappeared with a smile, her arms bare and her little fair curls blowing over her temples.

"If the boss would only come," resumed the laundress, "we might begin."

"Ah, well!" said Madame Lorilleux, "the soup will be cold by then. Coupeau always forgets. You shouldn't have let him go off."

It was already half-past six. Everything was burning now; the goose would be overdone. Then Gervaise, feeling quite dejected, talked of sending someone to all the wineshops in the neighborhood to find Coupeau. And as Goujet offered to go, she decided to accompany him. Virginie, anxious about her husband went also. The three of them, bareheaded, quite blocked up the pavement. The blacksmith who wore his frock-coat, had Gervaise on his left arm and Virginie on his right; he was doing the two-handled basket as he said; and it seemed to them such a funny thing to say that they stopped, unable to move their legs for laughing. They looked at themselves in the pork-butcher's glass and laughed more than ever. Beside Goujet, all in black, the two women looked like two speckled hens—the dressmaker in her muslin costume, sprinkled with pink flowers, the laundress in her white cambric dress with blue spots, her wrists bare, and wearing round her neck a little grey silk scarf tied in a bow. People turned round to see them pass, looking so fresh and lively, dressed in their Sunday best on a week day and jostling the crowd which hung about the Rue des Poissonniers, on that warm June evening. But it was not a question of amusing themselves. They went straight to the door of each wineshop, looked in and sought amongst the people standing before the counter. Had that animal Coupeau gone to the Arc de Triomphe to get his dram? They had already done the upper part of the street, looking in at all the likely places; at the "Little Civet," renowned for its preserved plums; at old mother Baquet's, who sold Orleans wine at eight sous; at the "Butterfly," the coachmen's house of call, gentlemen who were not easy to please. But no Coupeau. Then as they were going down towards the Boulevard, Gervaise uttered a faint cry on passing the eating-house at the corner kept by Francois.

"What's the matter?" asked Goujet.

The laundress no longer laughed. She was very pale, and laboring under so great an emotion that she had almost fallen. Virginie understood it all as she caught a sight of Lantier seated at one of Francois's tables quietly dining. The two women dragged the blacksmith along.

"My ankle twisted," said Gervaise as soon as she was able to speak.

At length they discovered Coupeau and Poisson at the bottom of the street inside Pere Colombe's l'Assommoir. They were standing up in the midst of a number of men; Coupeau, in a grey blouse, was shouting with furious gestures and banging his fists down on the counter. Poisson, not on duty that day and buttoned up in an old brown coat, was listening to him in a dull sort of way and without uttering a word, bristling his carroty moustaches and beard the while. Goujet left the women on the edge of the pavement, and went and laid his hand on the zinc-worker's shoulder. But when the latter caught sight of Gervaise and Virginie outside he grew angry. Why was he badgered with such females as those? Petticoats had taken to tracking him about now! Well! He declined to stir, they could go and eat their beastly dinner all by themselves. To quiet him Goujet was obliged to accept a drop of something; and even then Coupeau took a fiendish delight in dawdling a good five minutes at the counter. When he at length came out he said to his wife:

"I don't like this. It's my business where I go. Do you understand?"

She did not answer. She was all in a tremble. She must have said something about Lantier to Virginie, for the latter pushed her husband and Goujet ahead, telling them to walk in front. The two women got on each side of Coupeau to keep him occupied and prevent him seeing Lantier. He wasn't really drunk, being more intoxicated from shouting than from drinking. Since they seemed to want to stay on the left side, to tease them, he crossed over to the other side of the street. Worried, they ran after him and tried to block his view of the door of Francois's. But Coupeau must have known that Lantier was there. Gervaise almost went out of her senses on hearing him grunt:

"Yes, my duck, there's a young fellow of our acquaintance inside there! You mustn't take me for a ninny. Don't let me catch you gallivanting about again with your side glances!"

And he made use of some very coarse expressions. It was not him that she had come to look for with her bare elbows and her mealy mouth; it was her old beau. Then he was suddenly seized with a mad rage against Lantier. Ah! the brigand! Ah! the filthy hound! One or the other of them would have to be left on the pavement, emptied of his guts like a rabbit. Lantier, however, did not appear to notice what was going on and continued slowly eating some veal and sorrel. A crowd began to form. Virginie led Coupeau away and he calmed down at once as soon as he had turned the corner of the street. All the same they returned to the shop far less lively than when they left it.

The guests were standing round the table with very long faces. The zinc-worker shook hands with them, showing himself off before the ladies. Gervaise, feeling rather depressed, spoke in a low voice as she directed them to their places. But she suddenly noticed that, as Madame Goujet had not come, a seat would remain empty—the one next to Madame Lorilleux.

"We are thirteen!" said she, deeply affected, seeing in that a fresh omen of the misfortune with which she had felt herself threatened for some time past.

The ladies already seated rose up looking anxious and annoyed. Madame Putois offered to retire because according to her it was not a matter to laugh about; besides she would not touch a thing, the food would do her no good. As to Boche, he chuckled. He would sooner be thirteen than fourteen; the portions would be larger, that was all.

"Wait!" resumed Gervaise. "I can manage it."

And going out on to the pavement she called Pere Bru who was just then crossing the roadway. The old workman entered, stooping and stiff and his face without expression.

"Seat yourself there, my good fellow," said the laundress. "You won't mind eating with us, will you?"

He simply nodded his head. He was willing; he did not mind.

"As well him as another," continued she, lowering her voice. "He doesn't often eat his fill. He will at least enjoy himself once more. We shall feel no remorse in stuffing ourselves now."

This touched Goujet so deeply that his eyes filled with tears. The others were also moved by compassion and said that it would bring them all good luck. However, Madame Lorilleux seemed unhappy at having the old man next to her. She cast glances of disgust at his work-roughened hands and his faded, patched smock, and drew away from him.

Pere Bru sat with his head bowed, waiting. He was bothered by the napkin that was on the plate before him. Finally he lifted it off and placed it gently on the edge of the table, not thinking to spread it over his knees.

Now at last Gervaise served the vermicelli soup; the guests were taking up their spoons when Virginie remarked that Coupeau had disappeared. He had perhaps returned to Pere Colombe's. This time the company got angry. So much the worse! One would not run after him; he could stay in the street if he was not hungry; and as the spoons touched the bottom of the plates, Coupeau reappeared with two pots of flowers, one under each arm, a stock and a balsam. They all clapped their hands. He gallantly placed the pots, one on the right, the other on the left of Gervaise's glass; then bending over and kissing her, he said:

"I had forgotten you, my lamb. But in spite of that, we love each other all the same, especially on such a day as this."

"Monsieur Coupeau's very nice this evening," murmured Clemence in Boche's ear. "He's just got what he required, sufficient to make him amiable."

The good behavior of the master of the house restored the gaiety of the proceedings, which at one moment had been compromised. Gervaise, once more at her ease, was all smiles again. The guests finished their soup. Then the bottles circulated and they drank their first glass of wine, just a drop pure, to wash down the vermicelli. One could hear the children quarrelling in the next room. There were Etienne, Pauline, Nana and little Victor Fauconnier. It had been decided to lay a table for the four of them, and they had been told to be very good. That squint-eyed Augustine who had to look after the stoves was to eat off her knees.

"Mamma! Mamma!" suddenly screamed Nana, "Augustine is dipping her bread in the Dutch oven!"

The laundress hastened there and caught the squint-eyed one in the act of burning her throat in her attempts to swallow without loss of time a slice of bread soaked in boiling goose fat. She boxed her ears when the young monkey called out that it was not true. When, after the boiled beef, the stewed veal appeared, served in a salad-bowl, as they did not have a dish large enough, the party greeted it with a laugh.

"It's becoming serious," declared Poisson, who seldom spoke.

It was half-past seven. They had closed the shop door, so as not to be spied upon by the whole neighborhood; the little clockmaker opposite especially was opening his eyes to their full size and seemed to take the pieces from their mouths with such a gluttonous look that it almost prevented them from eating. The curtains hung before the windows admitted a great white uniform light which bathed the entire table with its symmetrical arrangement of knives and forks and its pots of flowers enveloped in tall collars of white paper; and this pale fading light, this slowly approaching dusk, gave to the party somewhat of an air of distinction. Virginie looked round the closed apartment hung with muslin and with a happy criticism declared it to be very cozy. Whenever a cart passed in the street the glasses jingled together on the table cloth and the ladies were obliged to shout out as loud as the men. But there was not much conversation; they all behaved very respectably and were very attentive to each other. Coupeau alone wore a blouse, because as he said one need not stand on ceremony with friends and besides which the blouse was the workman's garb of honor. The ladies, laced up in their bodices, wore their hair in plaits greasy with pomatum in which the daylight was reflected; whilst the gentlemen, sitting at a distance from the table, swelled out their chests and kept their elbows wide apart for fear of staining their frock coats.

Ah! thunder! What a hole they were making in the stewed veal! If they spoke little, they were chewing in earnest. The salad-bowl was becoming emptier and emptier with a spoon stuck in the midst of the thick sauce—a good yellow sauce which quivered like a jelly. They fished pieces of veal out of it and seemed as though they would never come to the end; the salad-bowl journeyed from hand to hand and faces bent over it as forks picked out the mushrooms. The long loaves standing against the wall behind the guests appeared to melt away. Between the mouthfuls one could hear the sound of glasses being replaced on the table. The sauce was a trifle too salty. It required four bottles of wine to drown that blessed stewed veal, which went down like cream, but which afterwards lit up a regular conflagration in one's stomach. And before one had time to take a breath, the pig's back, in the middle of a deep dish surrounded by big round potatoes, arrived in the midst of a cloud of smoke. There was one general cry. By Jove! It was just the thing! Everyone liked it. They would do it justice; and they followed the dish with a side glance as they wiped their knives on their bread so as to be in readiness. Then as soon as they were helped they nudged one another and spoke with their mouths full. It was just like butter! Something sweet and solid which one could feel run through one's guts right down into one's boots. The potatoes were like sugar. It was not a bit salty; only, just on account of the potatoes, it required a wetting every few minutes. Four more bottles were placed on the table. The plates were wiped so clean that they also served for the green peas and bacon. Oh! vegetables were of no consequence. They playfully gulped them down in spoonfuls. The best part of the dish was the small pieces of bacon just nicely grilled and smelling like horse's hoof. Two bottles were sufficient for them.

"Mamma! Mamma!" called out Nana suddenly, "Augustine's putting her fingers in my plate!"

"Don't bother me! give her a slap!" replied Gervaise, in the act of stuffing herself with green peas.

At the children's table in the back-room, Nana was playing the role of lady of the house, sitting next to Victor and putting her brother Etienne beside Pauline so they could play house, pretending they were two married couples. Nana had served her guests very politely at first, but now she had given way to her passion for grilled bacon, trying to keep every piece for herself. While Augustine was prowling around the children's table, she would grab the bits of bacon under the pretext of dividing them amongst the children. Nana was so furious that she bit Augustine on the wrist.

"Ah! you know," murmured Augustine, "I'll tell your mother that after the veal you asked Victor to kiss you."

But all became quiet again as Gervaise and mother Coupeau came in to get the goose. The guests at the big table were leaning back in their chairs taking a breather. The men had unbuttoned their waistcoats, the ladies were wiping their faces with their napkins. The repast was, so to say, interrupted; only one or two persons, unable to keep their jaws still, continued to swallow large mouthfuls of bread, without even knowing that they were doing so. The others were waiting and allowing their food to settle while waiting for the main course. Night was slowly coming on; a dirty ashy grey light was gathering behind the curtains. When Augustine brought two lamps and placed one at each end of the table, the general disorder became apparent in the bright glare—the greasy forks and plates, the table cloth stained with wine and covered with crumbs. A strong stifling odor pervaded the room. Certain warm fumes, however, attracted all the noses in the direction of the kitchen.

"Can I help you?" cried Virginie.

She left her chair and passed into the inner room. All the women followed one by one. They surrounded the Dutch oven, and watched with profound interest as Gervaise and mother Coupeau tried to pull the bird out. Then a clamor arose, in the midst of which one could distinguish the shrill voices and the joyful leaps of the children. And there was a triumphal entry. Gervaise carried the goose, her arms stiff, and her perspiring face expanded in one broad silent laugh; the women walked behind her, laughing in the same way; whilst Nana, right at the end, raised herself up to see, her eyes open to their full extent. When the enormous golden goose, streaming with gravy, was on the table, they did not attack it at once. It was a wonder, a respectful wonderment, which for a moment left everyone speechless. They drew one another's attention to it with winks and nods of the head. Golly! What a bird!

"That one didn't get fat by licking the walls, I'll bet!" said Boche.

Then they entered into details respecting the bird. Gervaise gave the facts. It was the best she could get at the poulterer's in the Faubourg Poissonniers; it weighed twelve and a half pounds on the scales at the charcoal-dealer's; they had burnt nearly half a bushel of charcoal in cooking it, and it had given three bowls full of drippings.

Virginie interrupted her to boast of having seen it before it was cooked. "You could have eaten it just as it was," she said, "its skin was so fine, like the skin of a blonde." All the men laughed at this, smacking their lips. Lorilleux and Madame Lorilleux sniffed disdainfully, almost choking with rage to see such a goose on Clump-Clump's table.

"Well! We can't eat it whole," the laundress observed. "Who'll cut it up? No, no, not me! It's too big; I'm afraid of it."

Coupeau offered his services. Mon Dieu! it was very simple. You caught hold of the limbs, and pulled them off; the pieces were good all the same. But the others protested; they forcibly took possession of the large kitchen knife which the zinc-worker already held in his hand, saying that whenever he carved he made a regular graveyard of the platter. Finally, Madame Lerat suggested in a friendly tone:

"Listen, it should be Monsieur Poisson; yes, Monsieur Poisson."

But, as the others did not appear to understand, she added in a more flattering manner still:

"Why, yes, of course, it should be Monsieur Poisson, who's accustomed to the use of arms."

And she passed the kitchen knife to the policeman. All round the table they laughed with pleasure and approval. Poisson bowed his head with military stiffness, and moved the goose before him. When he thrust the knife into the goose, which cracked, Lorilleux was seized with an outburst of patriotism.

"Ah! if it was a Cossack!" he cried.

"Have you ever fought with Cossacks, Monsieur Poisson?" asked Madame Boche.

"No, but I have with Bedouins," replied the policeman, who was cutting off a wing. "There are no more Cossacks."

A great silence ensued. Necks were stretched out as every eye followed the knife. Poisson was preparing a surprise. Suddenly he gave a last cut; the hind-quarter of the bird came off and stood up on end, rump in the air, making a bishop's mitre. Then admiration burst forth. None were so agreeable in company as retired soldiers.

The policeman allowed several minutes for the company to admire the bishop's mitre and then finished cutting the slices and arranging them on the platter. The carving of the goose was now complete.

When the ladies complained that they were getting rather warm, Coupeau opened the door to the street and the gaiety continued against the background of cabs rattling down the street and pedestrians bustling along the pavement. The goose was attacked furiously by the rested jaws. Boche remarked that just having to wait and watch the goose being carved had been enough to make the veal and pork slide down to his ankles.

Then ensued a famous tuck-in; that is to say, not one of the party recollected ever having before run the risk of such a stomach-ache. Gervaise, looking enormous, her elbows on the table, ate great pieces of breast, without uttering a word, for fear of losing a mouthful, and merely felt slightly ashamed and annoyed at exhibiting herself thus, as gluttonous as a cat before Goujet. Goujet, however, was too busy stuffing himself to notice that she was all red with eating. Besides, in spite of her greediness, she remained so nice and good! She did not speak, but she troubled herself every minute to look after Pere Bru, and place some dainty bit on his plate. It was even touching to see this glutton take a piece of wing almost from her mouth to give it to the old fellow, who did not appear to be very particular, and who swallowed everything with bowed head, almost besotted from having gobbled so much after he had forgotten the taste of bread. The Lorilleuxs expended their rage on the roast goose; they ate enough to last them three days; they would have stowed away the dish, the table, the very shop, if they could have ruined Clump-Clump by doing so. All the ladies had wanted a piece of the breast, traditionally the ladies' portion. Madame Lerat, Madame Boche, Madame Putois, were all picking bones; whilst mother Coupeau, who adored the neck, was tearing off the flesh with her two last teeth. Virginie liked the skin when it was nicely browned, and the other guests gallantly passed their skin to her; so much so, that Poisson looked at his wife severely, and bade her stop, because she had had enough as it was. Once already, she had been a fortnight in bed, with her stomach swollen out, through having eaten too much roast goose. But Coupeau got angry and helped Virginie to the upper part of a leg, saying that, by Jove's thunder! if she did not pick it, she wasn't a proper woman. Had roast goose ever done harm to anybody? On the contrary, it cured all complaints of the spleen. One could eat it without bread, like dessert. He could go on swallowing it all night without being the least bit inconvenienced; and, just to show off, he stuffed a whole drum-stick into his mouth. Meanwhile, Clemence had got to the end of the rump, and was sucking it with her lips, whilst she wriggled with laughter on her chair because Boche was whispering all sorts of smutty things to her. Ah, by Jove! Yes, there was a dinner! When one's at it, one's at it, you know; and if one only has the chance now and then, one would be precious stupid not to stuff oneself up to one's ears. Really, one could see their sides puff out by degrees. They were cracking in their skins, the blessed gormandizers! With their mouths open, their chins besmeared with grease, they had such bloated red faces that one would have said they were bursting with prosperity.

As for the wine, well, that was flowing as freely around the table as water flows in the Seine. It was like a brook overflowing after a rainstorm when the soil is parched. Coupeau raised the bottle high when pouring to see the red jet foam in the glass. Whenever he emptied a bottle, he would turn it upside down and shake it. One more dead solder! In a corner of the laundry the pile of dead soldiers grew larger and larger, a veritable cemetery of bottles onto which other debris from the table was tossed.

Coupeau became indignant when Madame Putois asked for water. He took all the water pitchers from the table. Do respectable citizens ever drink water? Did she want to grow frogs in her stomach?

Many glasses were emptied at one gulp. You could hear the liquid gurgling its way down the throats like rainwater in a drainpipe after a storm. One might say it was raining wine. Mon Dieu! the juice of the grape was a remarkable invention. Surely the workingman couldn't get along without his wine. Papa Noah must have planted his grapevine for the benefit of zinc-workers, tailors and blacksmiths. It brightened you up and refreshed you after a hard day's work.

Coupeau was in a high mood. He proclaimed that all the ladies present were very cute, and jingled the three sous in his pocket as if they had been five-franc pieces.

Even Goujet, who was ordinarily very sober, had taken plenty of wine. Boche's eyes were narrowing, those of Lorilleux were paling, and Poisson was developing expressions of stern severity on his soldierly face. All the men were as drunk as lords and the ladies had reached a certain point also, feeling so warm that they had to loosen their clothes. Only Clemence carried this a bit too far.

Suddenly Gervaise recollected the six sealed bottles of wine. She had forgotten to put them on the table with the goose; she fetched them, and all the glasses were filled. Then Poisson rose, and holding his glass in the air, said:

"I drink to the health of the missus."

All of them stood up, making a great noise with their chairs as they moved. Holding out their arms, they clinked glasses in the midst of an immense uproar.

"Here's to this day fifty years hence!" cried Virginie.

"No, no," replied Gervaise, deeply moved and smiling; "I shall be too old. Ah! a day comes when one's glad to go."

Through the door, which was wide open, the neighborhood was looking on and taking part in the festivities. Passers-by stopped in the broad ray of light which shone over the pavement, and laughed heartily at seeing all these people stuffing away so jovially.

The aroma from the roasted goose brought joy to the whole street. The clerks on the sidewalk opposite thought they could almost taste the bird. Others came out frequently to stand in front of their shops, sniffing the air and licking their lips. The little jeweler was unable to work, dizzy from having counted so many bottles. He seemed to have lost his head among his merry little cuckoo clocks.

Yes, the neighbors were devoured with envy, as Coupeau said. But why should there be any secret made about the matter? The party, now fairly launched, was no longer ashamed of being seen at table; on the contrary, it felt flattered and excited at seeing the crowd gathered there, gaping with gluttony; it would have liked to have knocked out the shop-front and dragged the table into the road-way, and there to have enjoyed the dessert under the very nose of the public, and amidst the commotion of the thoroughfare. Nothing disgusting was to be seen in them, was there? Then there was no need to shut themselves in like selfish people. Coupeau, noticing the little clockmaker looked very thirsty, held up a bottle; and as the other nodded his head, he carried him the bottle and a glass. A fraternity was established in the street. They drank to anyone who passed. They called in any chaps who looked the right sort. The feast spread, extending from one to another, to the degree that the entire neighborhood of the Goutte-d'Or sniffed the grub, and held its stomach, amidst a rumpus worthy of the devil and all his demons. For some minutes, Madame Vigouroux, the charcoal-dealer, had been passing to and fro before the door.

"Hi! Madame Vigouroux! Madame Vigouroux!" yelled the party.

She entered with a broad grin on her face, which was washed for once, and so fat that the body of her dress was bursting. The men liked pinching her, because they might pinch her all over without ever encountering a bone. Boche made room for her beside him and reached slyly under the table to grab her knee. But she, being accustomed to that sort of thing, quietly tossed off a glass of wine, and related that all the neighbors were at their windows, and that some of the people of the house were beginning to get angry.

"Oh, that's our business," said Madame Boche. "We're the concierges, aren't we? Well, we're answerable for good order. Let them come and complain to us, we'll receive them in a way they don't expect."

In the back-room there had just been a furious fight between Nana and Augustine, on account of the Dutch oven, which both wanted to scrape out. For a quarter of an hour, the Dutch oven had rebounded over the tile floor with the noise of an old saucepan. Nana was now nursing little Victor, who had a goose-bone in his throat. She pushed her fingers under his chin, and made him swallow big lumps of sugar by way of a remedy. That did not prevent her keeping an eye on the big table. At every minute she came and asked for wine, bread, or meat, for Etienne and Pauline, she said.

"Here! Burst!" her mother would say to her. "Perhaps you'll leave us in peace now!"

The children were scarcely able to swallow any longer, but they continued to eat all the same, banging their forks down on the table to the tune of a canticle, in order to excite themselves.

In the midst of the noise, however, a conversation was going on between Pere Bru and mother Coupeau. The old fellow, who was ghastly pale in spite of the wine and the food, was talking of his sons who had died in the Crimea. Ah! if the lads had only lived, he would have had bread to eat every day. But mother Coupeau, speaking thickly, leant towards him and said:

"Ah! one has many worries with children! For instance, I appear to be happy here, don't I? Well! I cry more often than you think. No, don't wish you still had your children."

Pere Bru shook his head.

"I can't get work anywhere," murmured he. "I'm too old. When I enter a workshop the young fellows joke, and ask me if I polished Henri IV.'s boots. To-day it's all over; they won't have me anywhere. Last year I could still earn thirty sous a day painting a bridge. I had to lie on my back with the river flowing under me. I've had a bad cough ever since then. Now, I'm finished."

He looked at his poor stiff hands and added:

"It's easy to understand, I'm no longer good for anything. They're right; were I in their place I should do the same. You see, the misfortune is that I'm not dead. Yes, it's my fault. One should lie down and croak when one's no longer able to work."

"Really," said Lorilleux, who was listening, "I don't understand why the Government doesn't come to the aid of the invalids of labor. I was reading that in a newspaper the other day."

But Poisson thought it his duty to defend the Government.

"Workmen are not soldiers," declared he. "The Invalides is for soldiers. You must not ask for what is impossible."

Dessert was now served. In the centre of the table was a Savoy cake in the form of a temple, with a dome fluted with melon slices; and this dome was surmounted by an artificial rose, close to which was a silver paper butterfly, fluttering at the end of a wire. Two drops of gum in the centre of the flower imitated dew. Then, to the left, a piece of cream cheese floated in a deep dish; whilst in another dish to the right, were piled up some large crushed strawberries, with the juice running from them. However, there was still some salad left, some large coss lettuce leaves soaked with oil.

"Come, Madame Boche," said Gervaise, coaxingly, "a little more salad. I know how fond you are of it."

"No, no, thank you! I've already had as much as I can manage," replied the concierge.

The laundress turning towards Virginie, the latter put her finger in her mouth, as though to touch the food she had taken.

"Really, I'm full," murmured she. "There's no room left. I couldn't swallow a mouthful."

"Oh! but if you tried a little," resumed Gervaise with a smile. "One can always find a tiny corner empty. Once doesn't need to be hungry to be able to eat salad. You're surely not going to let this be wasted?"

"You can eat it to-morrow," said Madame Lerat; "it's nicer when its wilted."

The ladies sighed as they looked regretfully at the salad-bowl. Clemence related that she had one day eaten three bunches of watercresses at her lunch. Madame Putois could do more than that, she would take a coss lettuce and munch it up with some salt just as it was without separating the leaves. They could all have lived on salad, would have treated themselves to tubfuls. And, this conversation aiding, the ladies cleaned out the salad-bowl.

"I could go on all fours in a meadow," observed the concierge with her mouth full.

Then they chuckled together as they eyed the dessert. Dessert did not count. It came rather late but that did not matter; they would nurse it all the same. When you're that stuffed, you can't let yourself be stopped by strawberries and cake. There was no hurry. They had the entire night if they wished. So they piled their plates with strawberries and cream cheese. Meanwhile the men lit their pipes. They were drinking the ordinary wine while they smoked since the special wine had been finished. Now they insisted that Gervaise cut the Savoy cake. Poisson got up and took the rose from the cake and presented it in his most gallant manner to the hostess amidst applause from the other guests. She pinned it over her left breast, near the heart. The silver butterfly fluttered with her every movement.

"Well, look," exclaimed Lorilleux, who had just made a discovery, "it's your work-table that we're eating off! Ah, well! I daresay it's never seen so much work before!"

This malicious joke had a great success. Witty allusions came from all sides. Clemence could not swallow a spoonful of strawberries without saying that it was another shirt ironed; Madame Lerat pretended that the cream cheese smelt of starch; whilst Madame Lorilleux said between her teeth that it was capital fun to gobble up the money so quickly on the very boards on which one had had so much trouble to earn it. There was quite a tempest of shouts and laughter.

But suddenly a loud voice called for silence. It was Boche who, standing up in an affected and vulgar way, was commencing to sing "The Volcano of Love, or the Seductive Trooper."

A thunder of applause greeted the first verse. Yes, yes, they would sing songs! Everyone in turn. It was more amusing than anything else. And they all put their elbows on the table or leant back in their chairs, nodding their heads at the best parts and sipping their wine when they came to the choruses. That rogue Boche had a special gift for comic songs. He would almost make the water pitchers laugh when he imitated the raw recruit with his fingers apart and his hat on the back of his head. Directly after "The Volcano of Love," he burst out into "The Baroness de Follebiche," one of his greatest successes. When he reached the third verse he turned towards Clemence and almost murmured it in a slow and voluptuous tone of voice:

"The baroness had people there,
Her sisters four, oh! rare surprise;
And three were dark, and one was fair;
Between them, eight bewitching eyes."

Then the whole party, carried away, joined in the chorus. The men beat time with their heels, whilst the ladies did the same with their knives against their glasses. All of them singing at the top of their voices:

"By Jingo! who on earth will pay
A drink to the pa—to the pa—pa—?
By Jingo! who on earth will pay
A drink to the pa—to the pa—tro—o—l?"

The panes of glass of the shop-front resounded, the singers' great volume of breath agitated the muslin curtains. Whilst all this was going on, Virginie had already twice disappeared and each time, on returning, had leant towards Gervaise's ear to whisper a piece of information. When she returned the third time, in the midst of the uproar, she said to her:

"My dear, he's still at Francois's; he's pretending to read the newspaper. He's certainly meditating some evil design."

She was speaking of Lantier. It was him that she had been watching. At each fresh report Gervaise became more and more grave.

"Is he drunk?" asked she of Virginie.

"No," replied the tall brunette. "He looks as though he had merely had what he required. It's that especially which makes me anxious. Why does he remain there if he's had all he wanted? Mon Dieu! I hope nothing is going to happen!"

The laundress, greatly upset, begged her to leave off. A profound silence suddenly succeeded the clamor. Madame Putois had just risen and was about to sing "The Boarding of the Pirate." The guests, silent and thoughtful, watched her; even Poisson had laid his pipe down on the edge of the table the better to listen to her. She stood up to the full height of her little figure, with a fierce expression about her, though her face looked quite pale beneath her black cap; she thrust out her left fist with a satisfied pride as she thundered in a voice bigger than herself:

"If the pirate audacious
Should o'er the waves chase us,
The buccaneer slaughter,
Accord him no quarter.
To the guns every man,
And with rum fill each can!
While these pests of the seas
Dangle from the cross-trees."

That was something serious. By Jove! it gave one a fine idea of the real thing. Poisson, who had been on board ship nodded his head in approval of the description. One could see too that that song was in accordance with Madame Putois's own feeling. Coupeau then told how Madame Putois, one evening on Rue Poulet, had slapped the face of four men who sought to attack her virtue.

With the assistance of mother Coupeau, Gervaise was now serving the coffee, though some of the guests had not yet finished their Savoy cake. They would not let her sit down again, but shouted that it was her turn. With a pale face, and looking very ill at ease, she tried to excuse herself; she seemed so queer that someone inquired whether the goose had disagreed with her. She finally gave them "Oh! let me slumber!" in a sweet and feeble voice. When she reached the chorus with its wish for a sleep filled with beautiful dreams, her eyelids partly closed and her rapt gaze lost itself in the darkness of the street.

Poisson stood next and with an abrupt bow to the ladies, sang a drinking song: "The Wines of France." But his voice wasn't very musical and only the final verse, a patriotic one mentioning the tricolor flag, was a success. Then he raised his glass high, juggled it a moment, and poured the contents into his open mouth.

Then came a string of ballads; Madame Boche's barcarolle was all about Venice and the gondoliers; Madame Lorilleux sang of Seville and the Andalusians in her bolero; whilst Lorilleux went so far as to allude to the perfumes of Arabia, in reference to the loves of Fatima the dancer.

Golden horizons were opening up all around the heavily laden table. The men were smoking their pipes and the women unconsciously smiling with pleasure. All were dreaming they were far away.

Clemence began to sing softly "Let's Make a Nest" with a tremolo in her voice which pleased them greatly for it made them think of the open country, of songbirds, of dancing beneath an arbor, and of flowers. In short, it made them think of the Bois de Vincennes when they went there for a picnic.

But Virginie revived the joking with "My Little Drop of Brandy." She imitated a camp follower, with one hand on her hip, the elbow arched to indicate the little barrel; and with the other hand she poured out the brandy into space by turning her fist round. She did it so well that the party then begged mother Coupeau to sing "The Mouse." The old woman refused, vowing that she did not know that naughty song. Yet she started off with the remnants of her broken voice; and her wrinkled face with its lively little eyes underlined the allusions, the terrors of Mademoiselle Lise drawing her skirts around her at the sight of a mouse. All the table laughed; the women could not keep their countenances, and continued casting bright glances at their neighbors; it was not indecent after all, there were no coarse words in it. All during the song Boche was playing mouse up and down the legs of the lady coal-dealer. Things might have gotten a bit out of line if Goujet, in response to a glance from Gervaise, had not brought back the respectful silence with "The Farewell of Abdul-Kader," which he sang out loudly in his bass voice. The song rang out from his golden beard as if from a brass trumpet. All the hearts skipped a beat when he cried, "Ah, my noble comrade!" referring to the warrior's black mare. They burst into applause even before the end.

"Now, Pere Bru, it's your turn!" said mother Coupeau. "Sing your song. The old ones are the best any day!"

And everybody turned towards the old man, pressing him and encouraging him. He, in a state of torpor, with his immovable mask of tanned skin, looked at them without appearing to understand. They asked him if he knew the "Five Vowels." He held down his head; he could not recollect it; all the songs of the good old days were mixed up in his head. As they made up their minds to leave him alone, he seemed to remember, and began to stutter in a cavernous voice:

"Trou la la, trou la la,
Trou la, trou la, trou la la!"

His face assumed an animated expression, this chorus seemed to awake some far-off gaieties within him, enjoyed by himself alone, as he listened with a childish delight to his voice which became more and more hollow.

"Say there, my dear," Virginie came and whispered in Gervaise's ear, "I've just been there again, you know. It worried me. Well! Lantier has disappeared from Francois's."

"You didn't meet him outside?" asked the laundress.

"No, I walked quickly, not as if I was looking for him."

But Virginie raised her eyes, interrupted herself and heaved a smothered sigh.

"Ah! Mon Dieu! He's there, on the pavement opposite; he's looking this way."

Gervaise, quite beside herself, ventured to glance in the direction indicated. Some persons had collected in the street to hear the party sing. And Lantier was indeed there in the front row, listening and coolly looking on. It was rare cheek, everything considered. Gervaise felt a chill ascend from her legs to her heart, and she no longer dared to move, whilst old Bru continued:

"Trou la la, trou la la,
Trou la, trou la, trou la la!"

"Very good. Thank you, my ancient one, that's enough!" said Coupeau. "Do you know the whole of it? You shall sing it for us another day when we need something sad."

This raised a few laughs. The old fellow stopped short, glanced round the table with his pale eyes and resumed his look of a meditative animal. Coupeau called for more wine as the coffee was finished. Clemence was eating strawberries again. With the pause in singing, they began to talk about a woman who had been found hanging that morning in the building next door. It was Madame Lerat's turn, but she required to prepare herself. She dipped the corner of her napkin into a glass of water and applied it to her temples because she was too hot. Then, she asked for a thimbleful of brandy, drank it, and slowly wiped her lips.

"The 'Child of God,' shall it be?" she murmured, "the 'Child of God.'"

And, tall and masculine-looking, with her bony nose and her shoulders as square as a grenadier's she began:

"The lost child left by its mother alone
Is sure of a home in Heaven above,
God sees and protects it on earth from His throne,
The child that is lost is the child of God's love."

Her voice trembled at certain words, and dwelt on them in liquid notes; she looked out of the corner of her eyes to heaven, whilst her right hand swung before her chest or pressed against her heart with an impressive gesture. Then Gervaise, tortured by Lantier's presence, could not restrain her tears; it seemed to her that the song was relating her own suffering, that she was the lost child, abandoned by its mother, and whom God was going to take under his protection. Clemence was now very drunk and she burst into loud sobbing and placed her head down onto the table in an effort to smother her gasps. There was a hush vibrant with emotion.

The ladies had pulled out their handkerchiefs, and were drying their eyes, with their heads erect from pride. The men had bowed their heads and were staring straight before them, blinking back their tears. Poisson bit off the end of his pipe twice while gulping and gasping. Boche, with two large tears trickling down his face, wasn't even bothering to squeeze the coal-dealer's knee any longer. All these drunk revelers were as soft-hearted as lambs. Wasn't the wine almost coming out of their eyes? When the refrain began again, they all let themselves go, blubbering into their plates.

But Gervaise and Virginie could not, in spite of themselves, take their eyes off the pavement opposite. Madame Boche, in her turn, caught sight of Lantier and uttered a faint cry without ceasing to besmear her face with her tears. Then all three had very anxious faces as they exchanged involuntary signs. Mon Dieu! if Coupeau were to turn round, if Coupeau caught sight of the other! What a butchery! What carnage! And they went on to such an extent that the zinc-worker asked them:

"Whatever are you looking at?"

He leant forward and recognized Lantier.

"Damnation! It's too much," muttered he. "Ah! the dirty scoundrel—ah! the dirty scoundrel. No, it's too much, it must come to an end."

And as he rose from his seat muttering most atrocious threats, Gervaise, in a low voice, implored him to keep quiet.

"Listen to me, I implore you. Leave the knife alone. Remain where you are, don't do anything dreadful."

Virginie had to take the knife which he had picked up off the table from him. But she could not prevent him leaving the shop and going up to Lantier.

Those around the table saw nothing of this, so involved were they in weeping over the song as Madame Lerat sang the last verse. It sounded like a moaning wail of the wind and Madame Putois was so moved that she spilled her wine over the table. Gervaise remained frozen with fright, one hand tight against her lips to stifle her sobs. She expected at any moment to see one of the two men fall unconscious in the street.

As Coupeau rushed toward Lantier, he was so astonished by the fresh air that he staggered, and Lantier, with his hands in his pockets, merely took a step to the side. Now the two men were almost shouting at each other, Coupeau calling the other a lousy pig and threatening to make sausage of his guts. They were shouting loudly and angrily and waving their arms violently. Gervaise felt faint and as it continued for a while, she closed her eyes. Suddenly, she didn't hear any shouting and opened her eyes. The two men were chatting amiably together.

Madame Lerat's voice rose higher and higher, warbling another verse.

Gervaise exchanged a glance with Madame Boche and Virginie. Was it going to end amicably then? Coupeau and Lantier continued to converse on the edge of the pavement. They were still abusing each other, but in a friendly way. As people were staring at them, they ended by strolling leisurely side by side past the houses, turning round again every ten yards or so. A very animated conversation was now taking place. Suddenly Coupeau appeared to become angry again, whilst the other was refusing something and required to be pressed. And it was the zinc-worker who pushed Lantier along and who forced him to cross the street and enter the shop.

"I tell you, you're quite welcome!" shouted he. "You'll take a glass of wine. Men are men, you know. We ought to understand each other."

Madame Lerat was finishing the last chorus. The ladies were singing all together as they twisted their handkerchiefs.

"The child that is lost is the child of God's love."

The singer was greatly complimented and she resumed her seat affecting to be quite broken down. She asked for something to drink because she always put too much feeling into that song and she was constantly afraid of straining her vocal chords. Everyone at the table now had their eyes fixed on Lantier who, quietly seated beside Coupeau, was devouring the last piece of Savoy cake which he dipped in his glass of wine. With the exception of Virginie and Madame Boche none of the guests knew him. The Lorilleuxs certainly scented some underhand business, but not knowing what, they merely assumed their most conceited air. Goujet, who had noticed Gervaise's emotion, gave the newcomer a sour look. As an awkward pause ensued Coupeau simply said:

"A friend of mine."

And turning to his wife, added:

"Come, stir yourself! Perhaps there's still some hot coffee left."

Gervaise, feeling meek and stupid, looked at them one after the other. At first, when her husband pushed her old lover into the shop, she buried her head between her hands, the same as she instinctively did on stormy days at each clap of thunder. She could not believe it possible; the walls would fall in and crush them all. Then, when she saw the two sitting together peacefully, she suddenly accepted it as quite natural. A happy feeling of languor benumbed her, retained her all in a heap at the edge of the table, with the sole desire of not being bothered. Mon Dieu! what is the use of putting oneself out when others do not, and when things arrange themselves to the satisfaction of everybody? She got up to see if there was any coffee left.

In the back-room the children had fallen asleep. That squint-eyed Augustine had tyrannized over them all during the dessert, pilfering their strawberries and frightening them with the most abominable threats. Now she felt very ill, and was bent double upon a stool, not uttering a word, her face ghastly pale. Fat Pauline had let her head fall against Etienne's shoulder, and he himself was sleeping on the edge of the table. Nana was seated with Victor on the rug beside the bedstead, she had passed her arm round his neck and was drawing him towards her; and, succumbing to drowsiness and with her eyes shut, she kept repeating in a feeble voice:

"Oh! Mamma, I'm not well; oh! mamma, I'm not well."

"No wonder!" murmured Augustine, whose head was rolling about on her shoulders, "they're drunk; they've been singing like grown up persons."

Gervaise received another blow on beholding Etienne. She felt as though she would choke when she thought of the youngster's father being there in the other room, eating cake, and that he had not even expressed a desire to kiss the little fellow. She was on the point of rousing Etienne and of carrying him there in her arms. Then she again felt that the quiet way in which matters had been arranged was the best. It would not have been proper to have disturbed the harmony of the end of the dinner. She returned with the coffee-pot and poured out a glass of coffee for Lantier, who, by the way, did not appear to take any notice of her.

"Now, it's my turn," stuttered Coupeau, in a thick voice. "You've been keeping the best for the last. Well! I'll sing you 'That Piggish Child.'"

"Yes, yes, 'That Piggish Child,'" cried everyone.

The uproar was beginning again. Lantier was forgotten. The ladies prepared their glasses and their knives for accompanying the chorus. They laughed beforehand, as they looked at the zinc-worker, who steadied himself on his legs as he put on his most vulgar air. Mimicking the hoarse voice of an old woman, he sang:

"When out of bed each morn I hop,
I'm always precious queer;
I send him for a little drop
To the drinking-ken that's near.
A good half hour or more he'll stay,
And that makes me so riled,
He swigs it half upon his way:
What a piggish child!"

And the ladies, striking their glasses, repeated in chorus in the midst of a formidable gaiety:

"What a piggish child!
What a piggish child!"

Even the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or itself joined in now. The whole neighborhood was singing "What a piggish child!" The little clockmaker, the grocery clerks, the tripe woman and the fruit woman all knew the song and joined in the chorus. The entire street seemed to be getting drunk on the odors from the Coupeau party. In the reddish haze from the two lamps, the noise of the party was enough to shut out the rumbling of the last vehicles in the street. Two policemen rushed over, thinking there was a riot, but on recognizing Poisson, they saluted him smartly and went away between the darkened buildings.

Coupeau was now singing this verse:

"On Sundays at Petite Villette,
Whene'er the weather's fine,
We call on uncle, old Tinette,
Who's in the dustman line.
To feast upon some cherry stones
The young un's almost wild,
And rolls amongst the dust and bones,
What a piggish child!
What a piggish child!"

Then the house almost collapsed, such a yell ascended in the calm warm night air that the shouters applauded themselves, for it was useless their hoping to be able to bawl any louder.

Not one of the party could ever recollect exactly how the carouse terminated. It must have been very late, it's quite certain, for not a cat was to be seen in the street. Possibly too, they had all joined hands and danced round the table. But all was submerged in a yellow mist, in which red faces were jumping about, with mouths slit from ear to ear. They had probably treated themselves to something stronger than wine towards the end, and there was a vague suspicion that some one had played them the trick of putting salt into the glasses. The children must have undressed and put themselves to bed. On the morrow, Madame Boche boasted of having treated Boche to a couple of clouts in a corner, where he was conversing a great deal too close to the charcoal-dealer; but Boche, who recollected nothing, said she must have dreamt it. Everyone agreed that it wasn't very decent the way Clemence had carried on. She had ended by showing everything she had and then been so sick that she had completely ruined one of the muslin curtains. The men had at least the decency to go into the street; Lorilleux and Poisson, feeling their stomachs upset, had stumblingly glided as far as the pork-butcher's shop. It is easy to see when a person has been well brought up. For instance, the ladies, Madame Putois, Madame Lerat, and Virginie, indisposed by the heat, had simply gone into the back-room and taken their stays off; Virginie had even desired to lie on the bed for a minute, just to obviate any unpleasant effects. Thus the party had seemed to melt away, some disappearing behind the others, all accompanying one another, and being lost sight of in the surrounding darkness, to the accompaniment of a final uproar, a furious quarrel between the Lorilleuxs, and an obstinate and mournful "trou la la, trou la la," of old Bru's. Gervaise had an idea that Goujet had burst out sobbing when bidding her good-bye; Coupeau was still singing; and as for Lantier, he must have remained till the end. At one moment even, she could still feel a breath against her hair, but she was unable to say whether it came from Lantier or if it was the warm night air.

Since Madame Lerat didn't want to return to Les Batignolles at such a late hour, they took one of the mattresses off the bed and spread it for her in a corner of the shop, after pushing back the table. She slept right there amid all the dinner crumbs. All night long, while the Coupeaus were sleeping, a neighbor's cat took advantage of an open window and was crunching the bones of the goose with its sharp teeth, giving the bird its final resting place.

CHAPTER VIII

On the following Saturday Coupeau, who had not come home to dinner, brought Lantier with him towards ten o'clock. They had had some sheep's trotters at Chez Thomas at Montmartre.

"You mustn't scold, wife," said the zinc-worker. "We're sober, as you can see. Oh! there's no fear with him; he keeps one on the straight road."

And he related how they happened to meet in the Rue Rochechouart. After dinner Lantier had declined to have a drink at the "Black Ball," saying that when one was married to a pretty and worthy little woman, one ought not to go liquoring-up at all the wineshops. Gervaise smiled slightly as she listened. Oh! she was not thinking of scolding, she felt too much embarrassed for that. She had been expecting to see her former lover again some day ever since their dinner party; but at such an hour, when she was about to go to bed, the unexpected arrival of the two men had startled her. Her hands were quivering as she pinned back the hair which had slid down her neck.

"You know," resumed Coupeau, "as he was so polite as to decline a drink outside, you must treat us to one here. Ah! you certainly owe us that!"

The workwomen had left long ago. Mother Coupeau and Nana had just gone to bed. Gervaise, who had been just about to put up the shutters when they appeared, left the shop open and brought some glasses which she placed on a corner of the work-table with what was left of a bottle of brandy.

Lantier remained standing and avoided speaking directly to her. However, when she served him, he exclaimed:

"Only a thimbleful, madame, if you please."

Coupeau looked at them and then spoke his mind very plainly. They were not going to behave like a couple of geese he hoped! The past was past was it not? If people nursed grudges for nine and ten years together one would end by no longer seeing anybody. No, no, he carried his heart in his hand, he did! First of all, he knew who he had to deal with, a worthy woman and a worthy man—in short two friends! He felt easy; he knew he could depend upon them.

"Oh! that's certain, quite certain," repeated Gervaise, looking on the ground and scarcely understanding what she said.

"She is a sister now—nothing but a sister!" murmured Lantier in his turn.

"Mon Dieu! shake hands," cried Coupeau, "and let those who don't like it go to blazes! When one has proper feelings one is better off than millionaires. For myself I prefer friendship before everything because friendship is friendship and there's nothing to beat it."

He dealt himself heavy blows on the chest, and seemed so moved that they had to calm him. They all three silently clinked glasses, and drank their drop of brandy. Gervaise was then able to look at Lantier at her ease; for on the night of her saint's day, she had only seen him through a fog. He had grown more stout, his arms and legs seeming too heavy because of his small stature. His face was still handsome even though it was a little puffy now due to his life of idleness. He still took great pains with his narrow moustache. He looked about his actual age. He was wearing grey trousers, a heavy blue overcoat, and a round hat. He even had a watch with a silver chain on which a ring was hanging as a keepsake. He looked quite like a gentleman.

"I'm off," said he. "I live no end of a distance from here."

He was already on the pavement when the zinc-worker called him back to make him promise never to pass the door without looking in to wish them good day. Meanwhile Gervaise, who had quietly disappeared, returned pushing Etienne before her. The child, who was in his shirt-sleeves and half asleep, smiled as he rubbed his eyes. But when he beheld Lantier he stood trembling and embarrassed, and casting anxious glances in the direction of his mother and Coupeau.

"Don't you remember this gentleman?" asked the latter.

The child held down his head without replying. Then he made a slight sign which meant that he did remember the gentleman.

"Well! Then, don't stand there like a fool; go and kiss him."

Lantier gravely and quietly waited. When Etienne had made up his mind to approach him, he stooped down, presented both his cheeks, and then kissed the youngster on the forehead himself. At this the boy ventured to look at his father; but all on a sudden he burst out sobbing and scampered away like a mad creature with his clothes half falling off him, whilst Coupeau angrily called him a young savage.

"The emotion's too much for him," said Gervaise, pale and agitated herself.

"Oh! he's generally very gentle and nice," exclaimed Coupeau. "I've brought him up properly, as you'll see. He'll get used to you. He must learn to know people. We can't stay mad. We should have made up a long time ago for his sake. I'd rather have my head cut off than keep a father from seeing his own son."

Having thus delivered himself, he talked of finishing the bottle of brandy. All three clinked glasses again. Lantier showed no surprise, but remained perfectly calm. By way of repaying the zinc-worker's politeness he persisted in helping him put up the shutters before taking his departure. Then rubbing his hands together to get rid of the dust on them, he wished the couple good-night.

"Sleep well. I shall try and catch the last bus. I promise you I'll look in again soon."

After that evening Lantier frequently called at the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. He came when the zinc-worker was there, inquiring after his health the moment he passed the door and affecting to have solely called on his account. Then clean-shaven, his hair nicely combed and always wearing his overcoat, he would take a seat by the window and converse politely with the manners of an educated man. It was thus that the Coupeaus learnt little by little the details of his life. During the last eight years he had for a while managed a hat factory; and when they asked him why he had retired from it he merely alluded to the rascality of a partner, a fellow from his native place, a scoundrel who had squandered all the takings with women. His former position as an employer continued to affect his entire personality, like a title of nobility that he could not abandon. He was always talking of concluding a magnificent deal with some hatmakers who were going to set him up in business. While waiting for this he did nothing but stroll around all day like one of the idle rich. If anyone dared to mention a hat factory looking for workers, he smiled and said he was not interested in breaking his back working for others.

A smart fellow like Lantier, according to Coupeau, knew how to take care of himself. He always looked prosperous and it took money to look thus. He must have some deal going. One morning Coupeau had seen him having his shoes shined on the Boulevard Montmartre. Lantier was very talkative about others, but the truth was that he told lies about himself. He would not even say where he lived, only that he was staying with a friend and there was no use in coming to see him because he was never in.

It was now early November. Lantier would gallantly bring bunches of violets for Gervaise and the workwomen. He was now coming almost every day. He won the favor of Clemence and Madame Putois with his little attentions. At the end of the month they adored him. The Boches, whom he flattered by going to pay his respects in their concierge's lodge, went into ecstasies over his politeness.

As soon as the Lorilleuxs knew who he was, they howled at the impudence of Gervaise in bringing her former lover into her home. However, one day Lantier went to visit them and made such a good impression when he ordered a necklace for a lady of his acquaintance that they invited him to sit down. He stayed an hour and they were so charmed by his conversation that they wondered how a man of such distinction had ever lived with Clump-Clump. Soon Lantier's visits to the Coupeaus were accepted as perfectly natural; he was in the good graces of everyone along the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. Goujet was the only one who remained cold. If he happened to be there when Lantier arrived, he would leave at once as he didn't want to be obliged to be friendly to him.

In the midst, however, of all this extraordinary affection for Lantier, Gervaise lived in a state of great agitation for the first few weeks. She felt that burning sensation in the pit of her stomach which affected her on the day when Virginie first alluded to her past life. Her great fear was that she might find herself without strength, if he came upon her all alone one night and took it into his head to kiss her. She thought of him too much; she was for ever thinking of him. But she gradually became calmer on seeing him behave so well, never looking her in the face, never even touching her with the tips of his fingers when no one was watching. Then Virginie, who seemed to read within her, made her ashamed of all her wicked thoughts. Why did she tremble? Once could not hope to come across a nicer man. She certainly had nothing to fear now. And one day the tall brunette maneuvered in such a way as to get them both into a corner, and to turn the conversation to the subject of love. Lantier, choosing his words, declared in a grave voice that his heart was dead, that for the future he wished to consecrate his life solely for his son's happiness. Every evening he would kiss Etienne on the forehead, yet he was apt to forget him in teasing back and forth with Clemence. And he never mentioned Claude who was still in the south. Gervaise began to feel at ease. Lantier's actual presence overshadowed her memories, and seeing him all the time, she no longer dreamed about him. She even felt a certain repugnance at the thought of their former relationship. Yes, it was over. If he dared to approach her, she'd box his ears, or even better, she'd tell her husband. Once again her thoughts turned to Goujet and his affection for her.

One morning Clemence reported that the previous night, at about eleven o'clock, she had seen Monsieur Lantier with a woman. She told about it maliciously and in coarse terms to see how Gervaise would react. Yes, Monsieur Lantier was on the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette with a blonde and she followed them. They had gone into a shop where the worn-out and used-up woman had bought some shrimps. Then they went to the Rue de La Rochefoucauld. Monsieur Lantier had waited on the pavement in front of the house while his lady friend went in alone. Then she had beckoned to him from the window to join her.

No matter how Clemence went on with the story Gervaise went on peacefully ironing a white dress. Sometimes she smiled faintly. These southerners, she said, are all crazy about women; they have to have them no matter what, even if they come from a dung heap. When Lantier came in that evening, Gervaise was amused when Clemence teased him about the blonde. He seemed to feel flattered that he had been seen. Mon Dieu! she was just an old friend, he explained. He saw her from time to time. She was quite stylish. He mentioned some of her former lovers, among them a count, an important merchant and the son of a lawyer. He added that a bit of playing around didn't mean a thing, his heart was dead. In the end Clemence had to pay a price for her meanness. She certainly felt Lantier pinching her hard two or three times without seeming to do so. She was also jealous because she didn't reek of musk like that boulevard work-horse.

When spring came, Lantier, who was now quite one of the family, talked of living in the neighborhood, so as to be nearer his friends. He wanted a furnished room in a decent house. Madame Boche, and even Gervaise herself went searching about to find it for him. They explored the neighboring streets. But he was always too difficult to please; he required a big courtyard, a room on the ground floor; in fact, every luxury imaginable. And then every evening, at the Coupeaus', he seemed to measure the height of the ceilings, study the arrangement of the rooms, and covet a similar lodging. Oh, he would never have asked for anything better, he would willingly have made himself a hole in that warm, quiet corner. Then each time he wound up his inspection with these words:

"By Jove! you are comfortably situated here."

One evening, when he had dined there, and was making the same remark during the dessert, Coupeau, who now treated him most familiarly, suddenly exclaimed:

"You must stay here, old boy, if it suits you. It's easily arranged."

And he explained that the dirty-clothes room, cleaned out, would make a nice apartment. Etienne could sleep in the shop, on a mattress on the floor, that was all.

"No, no," said Lantier, "I cannot accept. It would inconvenience you too much. I know that it's willingly offered, but we should be too warm all jumbled up together. Besides, you know, each one likes his liberty. I should have to go through your room, and that wouldn't be exactly funny."

"Ah, the rogue!" resumed the zinc-worker, choking with laughter, banging his fist down on the table, "he's always thinking of something smutty! But, you joker, we're of an inventive turn of mind! There're two windows in the room, aren't there? Well, we'll knock one out and turn it into a door. Then, you understand you come in by way of the courtyard, and we can even stop up the other door, if we like. Thus you'll be in your home, and we in ours."

A pause ensued. At length the hatter murmured:

"Ah, yes, in that manner perhaps we might. And yet no, I should be too much in your way."

He avoided looking at Gervaise. But he was evidently waiting for a word from her before accepting. She was very much annoyed at her husband's idea; not that the thought of seeing Lantier living with them wounded her feelings, or made her particularly uneasy, but she was wondering where she would be able to keep the dirty clothes. Coupeau was going on about the advantages of the arrangement. Their rent, five hundred francs, had always been a bit steep. Their friend could pay twenty francs a month for a nicely furnished room and it would help them with the rent. He would be responsible for fixing up a big box under their bed that would be large enough to hold all the dirty clothes. Gervaise still hesitated. She looked toward mother Coupeau for guidance. Lantier had won over mother Coupeau months ago by bringing her gum drops for her cough.

"You would certainly not be in our way," Gervaise ended by saying. "We could so arrange things—"

"No, no, thanks," repeated the hatter. "You're too kind; it would be asking too much."

Coupeau could no longer restrain himself. Was he going to continue making objections when they told him it was freely offered? He would be obliging them. There, did he understand? Then in an excited tone of voice he yelled:

"Etienne! Etienne!"

The youngster had fallen asleep on the table. He raised his head with a start.

"Listen, tell him that you wish it. Yes, that gentleman there. Tell him as loud as you can: 'I wish it!'"

"I wish it!" stuttered Etienne, his voice thick with sleep.

Everyone laughed. But Lantier resumed his grave and impressive air. He squeezed Coupeau's hand across the table as he said:

"I accept. It's in all good fellowship on both sides, is it not? Yes, I accept for the child's sake."

The next day when the landlord, Monsieur Marescot, came to spend an hour with the Boches, Gervaise mentioned the matter to him. He refused angrily at first. Then, after a careful inspection of the premises, particularly gazing upward to verify that the upper floors would not be weakened, he finally granted permission on condition there would be no expense to him. He had the Coupeaus sign a paper saying they would restore everything to its original state on the expiration of the lease.

Coupeau brought in some friends of his that very evening—a mason, a carpenter and a painter. They would do this job in the evenings as a favor to him. Still, installing the door and cleaning up the room cost over one hundred francs, not counting the wine that kept the work going. Coupeau told his friends he'd pay them something later, out of the rent from his tenant.

Then the furniture for the room had to be sorted out. Gervaise left mother Coupeau's wardrobe where it was, and added a table and two chairs taken from her own room. She had to buy a washing-stand and a bed with mattress and bedclothes, costing one hundred and thirty francs, which she was to pay off at ten francs a month. Although Lantier's twenty francs would be used to pay off these debts for ten months, there would be a nice little profit later.

It was during the early days of June that the hatter moved in. The day before, Coupeau had offered to go with him and fetch his box, to save him the thirty sous for a cab. But the other became quite embarrassed, saying that the box was too heavy, as though he wished up to the last moment to hide the place where he lodged. He arrived in the afternoon towards three o'clock. Coupeau did not happen to be in. And Gervaise, standing at the shop door became quite pale on recognizing the box outside the cab. It was their old box, the one with which they had journeyed from Plassans, all scratched and broken now and held together by cords. She saw it return as she had often dreamt it would and it needed no great stretch of imagination to believe that the same cab, that cab in which that strumpet of a burnisher had played her such a foul trick, had brought the box back again. Meanwhile Boche was giving Lantier a helping hand. The laundress followed them in silence and feeling rather dazed. When they had deposited their burden in the middle of the room she said for the sake of saying something:

"Well! That's a good thing finished, isn't it?"

Then pulling herself together, seeing that Lantier, busy in undoing the cords was not even looking at her, she added:

"Monsieur Boche, you must have a drink."

And she went and fetched a quart of wine and some glasses.

Just then Poisson passed along the pavement in uniform. She signaled to him, winking her eye and smiling. The policeman understood perfectly. When he was on duty and anyone winked their eye to him it meant a glass of wine. He would even walk for hours up and down before the laundry waiting for a wink. Then so as not to be seen, he would pass through the courtyard and toss off the liquor in secret.

"Ah! ah!" said Lantier when he saw him enter, "it's you, Badingue."

He called him Badingue for a joke, just to show how little he cared for the Emperor. Poisson put up with it in his stiff way without one knowing whether it really annoyed him or not. Besides the two men, though separated by their political convictions, had become very good friends.

"You know that the Emperor was once a policeman in London," said Boche in his turn. "Yes, on my word! He used to take the drunken women to the station-house."

Gervaise had filled three glasses on the table. She would not drink herself, she felt too sick at heart, but she stood there longing to see what the box contained and watching Lantier remove the last cords. Before raising the lid Lantier took his glass and clinked it with the others.

"Good health."

"Same to you," replied Boche and Poisson.

The laundress filled the glasses again. The three men wiped their lips on the backs of their hands. And at last the hatter opened the box. It was full of a jumble of newspapers, books, old clothes and underlinen, in bundles. He took out successively a saucepan, a pair of boots, a bust of Ledru-Rollin with the nose broken, an embroidered shirt and a pair of working trousers. Gervaise could smell the odor of tobacco and that of a man whose linen wasn't too clean, one who took care only of the outside, of what people could see.

The old hat was no longer in the left corner. There was a pincushion she did not recognize, doubtless a present from some woman. She became calmer, but felt a vague sadness as she continued to watch the objects that appeared, wondering if they were from her time or from the time of others.

"I say, Badingue, do you know this?" resumed Lantier.

He thrust under his nose a little book printed at Brussels. "The Amours of Napoleon III." Illustrated with engravings. It related, among other anecdotes, how the Emperor had seduced a girl of thirteen, the daughter of a cook; and the picture represented Napoleon III., bare-legged, and also wearing the grand ribbon of the Legion of Honor, pursuing a little girl who was trying to escape his lust.

"Ah! that's it exactly!" exclaimed Boche, whose slyly ridiculous instincts felt flattered by the sight. "It always happens like that!"

Poisson was seized with consternation, and he could not find a word to say in the Emperor's defense. It was in a book, so he could not deny it. Then, Lantier, continuing to push the picture under his nose in a jeering way, he extended his arms and exclaimed:

"Well, so what?"

Lantier didn't reply, He busied himself arranging his books and newspapers on a shelf in the wardrobe. He seemed upset not to have a small bookshelf over his table, so Gervaise promised to get him one. He had "The History of Ten Years" by Louis Blanc (except for the first volume), Lamartine's "The Girondins" in installments, "The Mysteries of Paris" and "The Wandering Jew" by Eugene Sue, and a quantity of booklets on philosophic and humanitarian subjects picked up from used book dealers.

His newspapers were his prized possessions, a collection made over a number of years. Whenever he read an article in a cafe that seemed to him to agree with his own ideas, he would buy that newspaper and keep it. He had an enormous bundle of them, papers of every date and every title, piled up in no discernable order. He patted them and said to the other two:

"You see that? No one else can boast of having anything to match it. You can't imagine all that's in there. I mean, if they put into practice only half the ideas, it would clean up the social order overnight. That would be good medicine for your Emperor and all his stool pigeons."

The policeman's red mustache and beard began to bristle on his pale face and he interrupted:

"And the army, tell me, what are you going to do about that?"

Lantier flew into a passion. He banged his fists down on the newspapers as he yelled:

"I require the suppression of militarism, the fraternity of peoples. I require the abolition of privileges, of titles, and of monopolies. I require the equality of salaries, the division of benefits, the glorification of the protectorate. All liberties, do you hear? All of them! And divorce!"

"Yes, yes, divorce for morality!" insisted Boche.

Poisson had assumed a majestic air.

"Yet if I won't have your liberties, I'm free to refuse them," he answered.

Lantier was choking with passion.

"If you don't want them—if you don't want them—" he replied. "No, you're not free at all! If you don't want them, I'll send you off to Devil's Island. Yes, Devil's Island with your Emperor and all the rats of his crew."

They always quarreled thus every time they met. Gervaise, who did not like arguments, usually interfered. She roused herself from the torpor into which the sight of the box, full of the stale perfume of her past love, had plunged her, and she drew the three men's attention to the glasses.

"Ah! yes," said Lantier, becoming suddenly calm and taking his glass. "Good health!"

"Good health!" replied Boche and Poisson, clinking glasses with him.

Boche, however, was moving nervously about, troubled by an anxiety as he looked at the policeman out of the corner of his eye.

"All this between ourselves, eh, Monsieur Poisson?" murmured he at length. "We say and show you things to show off."

But Poisson did not let him finish. He placed his hand upon his heart, as though to explain that all remained buried there. He certainly did not go spying about on his friends. Coupeau arriving, they emptied a second quart. Then the policeman went off by way of the courtyard and resumed his stiff and measured tread along the pavement.

At the beginning of the new arrangement, the entire routine of the establishment was considerably upset. Lantier had his own separate room, with his own entrance and his own key. However, since they had decided not to close off the door between the rooms, he usually came and went through the shop. Besides, the dirty clothes were an inconvenience to Gervaise because her husband never made the case he had promised and she had to tuck the dirty laundry into any odd corner she could find. They usually ended up under the bed and this was not very pleasant on warm summer nights. She also found it a nuisance having to make up Etienne's bed every evening in the shop. When her employees worked late, the lad had to sleep in a chair until they finished.

Goujet had mentioned sending Etienne to Lille where a machinist he knew was looking for apprentices. As the boy was unhappy at home and eager to be out on his own, Gervaise seriously considered the proposal. Her only fear was that Lantier would refuse. Since he had come to live with them solely to be near his son, surely he wouldn't want to lose him only two weeks after he moved in. However he approved whole-heartedly when she timidly broached the matter to him. He said that young men needed to see a bit of the country. The morning that Etienne left Lantier made a speech to him, kissed him and ended by saying:

"Never forget that a workingman is not a slave, and that whoever is not a workingman is a lazy drone."

The household was now able to get into the new routine. Gervaise became accustomed to having dirty laundry lying all around. Lantier was forever talking of important business deals. Sometimes he went out, wearing fresh linen and neatly combed. He would stay out all night and on his return pretend that he was completely exhausted because he had been discussing very serious matters. Actually he was merely taking life easy. He usually slept until ten. In the afternoons he would take a walk if the weather was nice. If it was raining, he would sit in the shop reading his newspaper. This atmosphere suited him. He always felt at his ease with women and enjoyed listening to them.

Lantier first took his meals at Francois's, at the corner of the Rue des Poissonniers. But of the seven days in the week he dined with the Coupeaus on three or four; so much so that he ended by offering to board with them and to pay them fifteen francs every Saturday. From that time he scarcely ever left the house, but made himself completely at home there. Morning to night he was in the shop, even giving orders and attending to customers.

Lantier didn't like the wine from Francois's, so he persuaded Gervaise to buy her wine from Vigouroux, the coal-dealer. Then he decided that Coudeloup's bread was not baked to his satisfaction, so he sent Augustine to the Viennese bakery on the Faubourg Poissonniers for their bread. He changed from the grocer Lehongre but kept the butcher, fat Charles, because of his political opinions. After a month he wanted all the cooking done with olive oil. Clemence joked that with a Provencal like him you could never wash out the oil stains. He wanted his omelets fried on both sides, as hard as pancakes. He supervised mother Coupeau's cooking, wanting his steaks cooked like shoe leather and with garlic on everything. He got angry if she put herbs in the salad.

"They're just weeds and some of them might be poisonous," he declared. His favorite soup was made with over-boiled vermicelli. He would pour in half a bottle of olive oil. Only he and Gervaise could eat this soup, the others being too used to Parisian cooking.

Little by little Lantier also came to mixing himself up in the affairs of the family. As the Lorilleuxs always grumbled at having to part with the five francs for mother Coupeau, he explained that an action could be brought against them. They must think that they had a set of fools to deal with! It was ten francs a month which they ought to give! And he would go up himself for the ten francs so boldly and yet so amiably that the chainmaker never dared refuse them. Madame Lerat also gave two five-franc pieces now. Mother Coupeau could have kissed Lantier's hands. He was, moreover, the grand arbiter in all the quarrels between the old woman and Gervaise. Whenever the laundress, in a moment of impatience, behaved roughly to her mother-in-law and the latter went and cried on her bed, he hustled them about and made them kiss each other, asking them if they thought themselves amusing with their bad tempers.

And Nana, too; she was being brought up badly, according to his idea. In that he was right, for whenever the father spanked the child, the mother took her part, and if the mother, in her turn, boxed her ears, the father made a disturbance. Nana delighted at seeing her parents abuse each other, and knowing that she was forgiven beforehand, was up to all kinds of tricks. Her latest mania was to go and play in the blacksmith shop opposite; she would pass the entire day swinging on the shafts of the carts; she would hide with bands of urchins in the remotest corners of the gray courtyard, lighted up with the red glare of the forge; and suddenly she would reappear, running and shouting, unkempt and dirty and followed by the troop of urchins, as though a sudden clash of the hammers had frightened the ragamuffins away. Lantier alone could scold her; and yet she knew perfectly well how to get over him. This tricky little girl of ten would walk before him like a lady, swinging herself about and casting side glances at him, her eyes already full of vice. He had ended by undertaking her education: he taught her to dance and to talk patois.

A year passed thus. In the neighborhood it was thought that Lantier had a private income, for this was the only way to account for the Coupeaus' grand style of living. No doubt Gervaise continued to earn money; but now that she had to support two men in doing nothing, the shop certainly could not suffice; more especially as the shop no longer had so good a reputation, customers were leaving and the workwomen were tippling from morning till night. The truth was that Lantier paid nothing, neither for rent nor board. During the first months he had paid sums on account, then he had contented himself with speaking of a large amount he was going to receive, with which later on he would pay off everything in a lump sum. Gervaise no longer dared ask him for a centime. She had the bread, the wine, the meat, all on credit. The bills increased everywhere at the rate of three and four francs a day. She had not paid a sou to the furniture dealer nor to the three comrades, the mason, the carpenter and the painter. All these people commenced to grumble, and she was no longer greeted with the same politeness at the shops.

She was as though intoxicated by a mania for getting into debt; she tried to drown her thoughts, ordered the most expensive things, and gave full freedom to her gluttony now that she no longer paid for anything; she remained withal very honest at heart, dreaming of earning from morning to night hundreds of francs, though she did not exactly know how, to enable her to distribute handfuls of five-franc pieces to her tradespeople. In short, she was sinking, and as she sank lower and lower she talked of extending her business. Instead she went deeper into debt. Clemence left around the middle of the summer because there was no longer enough work for two women and she had not been paid in several weeks.

During this impending ruin, Coupeau and Lantier were, in effect, devouring the shop and growing fat on the ruin of the establishment. At table they would challenge each other to take more helpings and slap their rounded stomachs to make more room for dessert.

The great subject of conversation in the neighborhood was as to whether Lantier had really gone back to his old footing with Gervaise. On this point opinions were divided. According to the Lorilleuxs, Clump-Clump was doing everything she could to hook Lantier again, but he would no longer have anything to do with her because she was getting old and faded and he had plenty of younger girls that were prettier. On the other hand, according to the Boches, Gervaise had gone back to her former mate the very first night, just as soon as poor Coupeau had gone to sleep. The picture was not pretty, but there were a lot of worse things in life, so folks ended by accepting the threesome as altogether natural. In fact, they thought them rather nice since there were never any fights and the outward decencies remained. Certainly if you stuck your nose into some of the other neighborhood households you could smell far worse things. So what if they slept together like a nice little family. It never kept the neighbors awake. Besides, everyone was still very much impressed by Lantier's good manners. His charm helped greatly to keep tongues from wagging. Indeed, when the fruit dealer insisted to the tripe seller that there had been no intimacies, the latter appeared to feel that this was really too bad, because it made the Coupeaus less interesting.

Gervaise was quite at her ease in this matter, and not much troubled with these thoughts. Things reached the point that she was accused of being heartless. The family did not understand why she continued to bear a grudge against the hatter. Madame Lerat now came over every evening. She considered Lantier as utterly irresistible and said that most ladies would be happy to fall into his arms. Madame Boche declared that her own virtue would not be safe if she were ten years younger. There was a sort of silent conspiracy to push Gervaise into the arms of Lantier, as if all the women around her felt driven to satisfy their own longings by giving her a lover. Gervaise didn't understand this because she no longer found Lantier seductive. Certainly he had changed for the better. He had gotten a sort of education in the cafes and political meetings but she knew him well. She could pierce to the depths of his soul and she found things there that still gave her the shivers. Well, if the others found him so attractive, why didn't they try it themselves. In the end she suggested this one day to Virginie who seemed the most eager. Then, to excite Gervaise, Madame Lerat and Virginie told her of the love of Lantier and tall Clemence. Yes, she had not noticed anything herself; but as soon as she went out on an errand, the hatter would bring the workgirl into his room. Now people met them out together; he probably went to see her at her own place.

"Well," said the laundress, her voice trembling slightly, "what can it matter to me?"

She looked straight into Virginie's eyes. Did this woman still have it in for her?

Virginie replied with an air of innocence:

"It can't matter to you, of course. Only, you ought to advise him to break off with that girl, who is sure to cause him some unpleasantness."

The worst of it was that Lantier, feeling himself supported by public opinion, changed altogether in his behavior towards Gervaise. Now, whenever he shook hands with her, he held her fingers for a minute between his own. He tried her with his glance, fixing a bold look upon her, in which she clearly read that he wanted her. If he passed behind her, he dug his knees into her skirt, or breathed upon her neck. Yet he waited a while before being rough and openly declaring himself. But one evening, finding himself alone with her, he pushed her before him without a word, and viewed her all trembling against the wall at the back of the shop, and tried to kiss her. It so chanced that Goujet entered just at that moment. Then she struggled and escaped. And all three exchanged a few words, as though nothing had happened. Goujet, his face deadly pale, looked on the ground, fancying that he had disturbed them, and that she had merely struggled so as not to be kissed before a third party.

The next day Gervaise moved restlessly about the shop. She was miserable and unable to iron even a single handkerchief. She only wanted to see Goujet and explain to him how Lantier happened to have pinned her against the wall. But since Etienne had gone to Lille, she had hesitated to visit Goujet's forge where she felt she would be greeted by his fellow workers with secret laughter. This afternoon, however, she yielded to the impulse. She took an empty basket and went out under the pretext of going for the petticoats of her customer on Rue des Portes-Blanches. Then, when she reached Rue Marcadet, she walked very slowly in front of the bolt factory, hoping for a lucky meeting. Goujet must have been hoping to see her, too, for within five minutes he came out as if by chance.

"You have been on an errand," he said, smiling. "And now you are on your way home."

Actually Gervaise had her back toward Rue des Poissonniers. He only said that for something to say. They walked together up toward Montmartre, but without her taking his arm. They wanted to get a bit away from the factory so as not to seem to be having a rendezvous in front of it. They turned into a vacant lot between a sawmill and a button factory. It was like a small green meadow. There was even a goat tied to a stake.

"It's strange," remarked Gervaise. "You'd think you were in the country."

The went to sit under a dead tree. Gervaise placed the laundry basket by her feet.

"Yes," Gervaise said, "I had an errand to do, and so I came out."

She felt deeply ashamed and was afraid to try to explain. Yet she realized that they had come here to discuss it. It remained a troublesome burden.

Then, all in a rush, with tears in her eyes, she told him of the death that morning of Madame Bijard, her washerwoman. She had suffered horrible agonies.

"Her husband caused it by kicking her in the stomach," she said in a monotone. "He must have damaged her insides. Mon Dieu! She was in agony for three days with her stomach all swelled up. Plenty of scoundrels have been sent to the galleys for less than that, but the courts won't concern themselves with a wife-beater. Especially since the woman said she had hurt herself falling. She wanted to save him from the scaffold, but she screamed all night long before she died."

Goujet clenched his hands and remained silent.

"She weaned her youngest only two weeks ago, little Jules," Gervaise went on. "That's lucky for the baby, he won't have to suffer. Still, there's the child Lalie and she has two babies to look after. She isn't eight yet, but she's already sensible. Her father will beat her now even more than before."

Goujet gazed at her silently. Then, his lips trembling:

"You hurt me yesterday, yes, you hurt me badly."

Gervaise turned pale and clasped her hands as he continued.

"I thought it would happen. You should have told me, you should have trusted me enough to confess what was happening, so as not to leave me thinking that—"

Goujet could not finish the sentence. Gervaise stood up, realizing that he thought she had gone back with Lantier as the neighbors asserted. Stretching her arms toward him, she cried:

"No, no, I swear to you. He was pushing against me, trying to kiss me, but his face never even touched mine. It's true, and that was the first time he tried. Oh, I swear on my life, on the life of my children, oh, believe me!"

Goujet was shaking his head. Gervaise said slowly:

"Monsieur Goujet, you know me well. You know that I do not lie. On my word of honor, it never happened, and it never will, do you understand? Never! I'd be the lowest of the low if it ever happened, and I wouldn't deserve the friendship of an honest man like you."

She seemed so sincere that he took her hand and made her sit down again. He could breathe freely; his heart rejoiced. This was the first time he had ever held her hand like this. He pressed it in his own and they both sat quietly for a time.

"I know your mother doesn't like me," Gervaise said in a low voice. "Don't bother to deny it. We owe you so much money."

He squeezed her hand tightly. He didn't want to talk of money. Finally he said:

"I've been thinking of something for a long time. You are not happy where you are. My mother tells me things are getting worse for you. Well, then, we can go away together."

She didn't understand at first and stared at him, startled by this sudden declaration of a love that he had never mentioned.

Finally she asked:

"What do you mean?"

"We'll get away from here," he said, looking down at the ground. "We'll go live somewhere else, in Belgium, if you wish. With both of us working, we would soon be very comfortable."

Gervaise flushed. She thought she would have felt less shame if he had taken her in his arms and kissed her. Goujet was an odd fellow, proposing to elope, just the way it happens in novels. Well, she had seen plenty of workingmen making up to married women, but they never took them even as far as Saint-Denis.

"Ah, Monsieur Goujet," she murmured, not knowing what else to say.

"Don't you see?" he said. "There would only be the two of us. It annoys me having others around."

Having regained her self-possession, however, she refused his proposal.

"It's impossible, Monsieur Goujet. It would be very wrong. I'm a married woman and I have children. We'd soon regret it. I know you care for me, and I care for you also, too much to let you do anything foolish. It's much better to stay just as we are. We have respect for each other and that's a lot. It's been a comfort to me many times. When people in our situation stay on the straight, it is better in the end."

He nodded his head as he listened. He agreed with her and was unable to offer any arguments. Suddenly he pulled her into his arms and kissed her, crushing her. Then he let her go and said nothing more about their love. She wasn't angry. She felt they had earned that small moment of pleasure.

Goujet now didn't know what to do with his hands, so he went around picking dandelions and tossing them into her basket. This amused him and gradually soothed him. Gervaise was becoming relaxed and cheerful. When they finally left the vacant lot they walked side by side and talked of how much Etienne liked being at Lille. Her basket was full of yellow dandelions.

Gervaise, at heart, did not feel as courageous when with Lantier as she said. She was, indeed, perfectly resolved not to hear his flattery, even with the slightest interest; but she was afraid, if ever he should touch her, of her old cowardice, of that feebleness and gloominess into which she allowed herself to glide, just to please people. Lantier, however, did not avow his affection. He several times found himself alone with her and kept quiet. He seemed to think of marrying the tripe-seller, a woman of forty-five and very well preserved. Gervaise would talk of the tripe-seller in Goujet's presence, so as to set his mind at ease. She would say to Virginie and Madame Lerat, whenever they were ringing the hatter's praises, that he could very well do without her admiration, because all the women of the neighborhood were smitten with him.

Coupeau went braying about everywhere that Lantier was a friend and a true one. People might jabber about them; he knew what he knew and did not care a straw for their gossip, for he had respectability on his side. When they all three went out walking on Sundays, he made his wife and the hatter walk arm-in-arm before him, just by way of swaggering in the street; and he watched the people, quite prepared to administer a drubbing if anyone had ventured on the least joke. It was true that he regarded Lantier as a bit of a high flyer. He accused him of avoiding hard liquor and teased him because he could read and spoke like an educated man. Still, he accepted him as a regular comrade. They were ideally suited to each other and friendship between men is more substantial than love for a woman.

Coupeau and Lantier were forever going out junketing together. Lantier would now borrow money from Gervaise—ten francs, twenty francs at a time, whenever he smelt there was money in the house. Then on those days he would keep Coupeau away from his work, talk of some distant errand and take him with him. Then seated opposite to each other in the corner of some neighboring eating house, they would guzzle fancy dishes which one cannot get at home and wash them down with bottles of expensive wine. The zinc-worker would have preferred to booze in a less pretentious place, but he was impressed by the aristocratic tastes of Lantier, who would discover on the bill of fare dishes with the most extraordinary names.

It was hard to understand a man so hard to please. Maybe it was from being a southerner. Lantier didn't like anything too rich and argued about every dish, sending back meat that was too salty or too peppery. He hated drafts. If a door was left open, he complained loudly. At the same time, he was very stingy, only giving the waiter a tip of two sous for a meal of seven or eight francs. He was treated with respect in spite of that.

The pair were well known along the exterior boulevards, from Batignolles to Belleville. They would go to the Grand Rue des Batignolles to eat tripe cooked in the Caen style. At the foot of Montmartre they obtained the best oysters in the neighborhood at the "Town of Bar-le-Duc." When they ventured to the top of the height as far as the "Galette Windmill" they had a stewed rabbit. The "Lilacs," in the Rue des Martyrs, had a reputation for their calf's head, whilst the restaurant of the "Golden Lion" and the "Two Chestnut Trees," in the Chaussee Clignancourt, served them stewed kidneys which made them lick their lips. Usually they went toward Belleville where they had tables reserved for them at some places of such excellent repute that you could order anything with your eyes closed. These eating sprees were always surreptitious and the next day they would refer to them indirectly while playing with the potatoes served by Gervaise. Once Lantier brought a woman with him to the "Galette Windmill" and Coupeau left immediately after dessert.

One naturally cannot both guzzle and work; so that ever since the hatter was made one of the family, the zinc-worker, who was already pretty lazy, had got to the point of never touching a tool. When tired of doing nothing, he sometimes let himself be prevailed upon to take a job. Then his comrade would look him up and chaff him unmercifully when he found him hanging to his knotty cord like a smoked ham, and he would call to him to come down and have a glass of wine. And that settled it. The zinc-worker would send the job to blazes and commence a booze which lasted days and weeks. Oh, it was a famous booze—a general review of all the dram shops of the neighborhood, the intoxication of the morning slept off by midday and renewed in the evening; the goes of "vitriol" succeeded one another, becoming lost in the depths of the night, like the Venetian lanterns of an illumination, until the last candle disappeared with the last glass! That rogue of a hatter never kept on to the end. He let the other get elevated, then gave him the slip and returned home smiling in his pleasant way. He could drink a great deal without people noticing it. When one got to know him well one could only tell it by his half-closed eyes and his overbold behavior to women. The zinc-worker, on the contrary, became quite disgusting, and could no longer drink without putting himself into a beastly state.

Thus, towards the beginning of November, Coupeau went in for a booze which ended in a most dirty manner, both for himself and the others. The day before he had been offered a job. This time Lantier was full of fine sentiments; he lauded work, because work ennobles a man. In the morning he even rose before it was light, for he gravely wished to accompany his friend to the workshop, honoring in him the workman really worthy of the name. But when they arrived before the "Little Civet," which was just opening, they entered to have a plum in brandy, only one, merely to drink together to the firm observance of a good resolution. On a bench opposite the counter, and with his back against the wall, Bibi-the-Smoker was sitting smoking with a sulky look on his face.

"Hallo! Here's Bibi having a snooze," said Coupeau. "Are you down in the dumps, old bloke?"

"No, no," replied the comrade, stretching his arm. "It's the employers who disgust me. I sent mine to the right about yesterday. They're all toads and scoundrels."

Bibi-the-Smoker accepted a plum. He was, no doubt, waiting there on that bench for someone to stand him a drink. Lantier, however, took the part of the employers; they often had some very hard times, as he who had been in business himself well knew. The workers were a bad lot, forever getting drunk! They didn't take their work seriously. Sometimes they quit in the middle of a job and only returned when they needed something in their pockets. Then Lantier would switch his attack to the employers. They were nasty exploiters, regular cannibals. But he could sleep with a clear conscience as he had always acted as a friend to his employees. He didn't want to get rich the way others did.

"Let's be off, my boy," he said, speaking to Coupeau. "We must be going or we shall be late."

Bibi-the-Smoker followed them, swinging his arms. Outside the sun was scarcely rising, the pale daylight seemed dirtied by the muddy reflection of the pavement; it had rained the night before and it was very mild. The gas lamps had just been turned out; the Rue des Poissonniers, in which shreds of night rent by the houses still floated, was gradually filling with the dull tramp of the workmen descending towards Paris. Coupeau, with his zinc-worker's bag slung over his shoulder, walked along in the imposing manner of a fellow who feels in good form for a change. He turned round and asked:

"Bibi, do you want a job. The boss told me to bring a pal if I could."

"No thanks," answered Bibi-the-Smoker; "I'm purging myself. You should ask My-Boots. He was looking for something yesterday. Wait a minute. My-Boots is most likely in there."

And as they reached the bottom of the street they indeed caught sight of My-Boots inside Pere Colombe's. In spite of the early hour l'Assommoir was flaring, the shutters down, the gas lighted. Lantier stood at the door, telling Coupeau to make haste, because they had only ten minutes left.

"What! You're going to work for that rascal Bourguignon?" yelled My-Boots, when the zinc-worker had spoken to him. "You'll never catch me in his hutch again! No, I'd rather go till next year with my tongue hanging out of my mouth. But, old fellow, you won't stay three days, and it's I who tell you so."

"Really now, is it such a dirty hole?" asked Coupeau anxiously.

"Oh, it's about the dirtiest. You can't move there. The ape's for ever on your back. And such queer ways too—a missus who always says you're drunk, a shop where you mustn't spit. I sent them to the right about the first night, you know."

"Good; now I'm warned. I shan't stop there for ever. I'll just go this morning to see what it's like; but if the boss bothers me, I'll catch him up and plant him upon his missus, you know, bang together like two fillets of sole!"

Then Coupeau thanked his friend for the useful information and shook his hand. As he was about to leave, My-Boots cursed angrily. Was that lousy Bourguignon going to stop them from having a drink? Weren't they free any more? He could well wait another five minutes. Lantier came in to share in the round and they stood together at the counter. My-Boots, with his smock black with dirt and his cap flattened on his head had recently been proclaimed king of pigs and drunks after he had eaten a salad of live beetles and chewed a piece of a dead cat.

"Say there, old Borgia," he called to Pere Colombe, "give us some of your yellow stuff, first class mule's wine."

And when Pere Colombe, pale and quiet in his blue-knitted waistcoat, had filled the four glasses, these gentlemen tossed them off, so as not to let the liquor get flat.

"That does some good when it goes down," murmured Bibi-the-Smoker.

The comic My-Boots had a story to tell. He was so drunk on the Friday that his comrades had stuck his pipe in his mouth with a handful of plaster. Anyone else would have died of it; he merely strutted about and puffed out his chest.

"Do you gentlemen require anything more?" asked Pere Colombe in his oily voice.

"Yes, fill us up again," said Lantier. "It's my turn."

Now they were talking of women. Bibi-the-Smoker had taken his girl to an aunt's at Montrouge on the previous Sunday. Coupeau asked for the news of the "Indian Mail," a washerwoman of Chaillot who was known in the establishment. They were about to drink, when My-Boots loudly called to Goujet and Lorilleux who were passing by. They came just to the door, but would not enter. The blacksmith did not care to take anything. The chainmaker, pale and shivering, held in his pocket the gold chains he was going to deliver; and he coughed and asked them to excuse him, saying that the least drop of brandy would nearly make him split his sides.

"There are hypocrites for you!" grunted My-Boots. "I bet they have their drinks on the sly."

And when he had poked his nose in his glass he attacked Pere Colombe.

"Vile druggist, you've changed the bottle! You know it's no good your trying to palm your cheap stuff off on me."

The day had advanced; a doubtful sort of light lit up l'Assommoir, where the landlord was turning out the gas. Coupeau found excuses for his brother-in-law who could not stand drink, which after all was no crime. He even approved Goujet's behavior for it was a real blessing never to be thirsty. And as he talked of going off to his work Lantier, with his grand air of a gentleman, sharply gave him a lesson. One at least stood one's turn before sneaking off; one should not leave one's friends like a mean blackguard, even when going to do one's duty.

"Is he going to badger us much longer about his work?" cried My-Boots.

"So this is your turn, sir?" asked Pere Colombe of Coupeau.

The latter paid. But when it came to Bibi-the-Smoker's turn he whispered to the landlord who refused with a shake of the head. My-Boots understood, and again set to abusing the old Jew Colombe. What! A rascal like him dared to behave in that way to a comrade! Everywhere else one could get drink on tick! It was only in such low boozing-dens that one was insulted! The landlord remained calm, leaning his big fists on the edge of the counter. He politely said:

"Lend the gentleman some money—that will be far simpler."

"Mon Dieu! Yes, I'll lend him some," yelled My-Boots. "Here! Bibi, throw this money in his face, the limb of Satan!"

Then, excited and annoyed at seeing Coupeau with his bag slung over his shoulder, he continued speaking to the zinc-worker:

"You look like a wet-nurse. Drop your brat. It'll give you a hump-back."

Coupeau hesitated an instant; and then, quietly, as though he had only made up his mind after considerable reflection, he laid his bag on the ground saying:

"It's too late now. I'll go to Bourguignon's after lunch. I'll tell him that the missus was ill. Listen, Pere Colombe, I'll leave my tools under this seat and I'll call for them at twelve o'clock."

Lantier gave his blessing to this arrangement with an approving nod. Labor was necessary, yes, but when you're with good friends, courtesy comes first. Now the four had five hours of idleness before them. They were full of noisy merriment. Coupeau was especially relieved. They had another round and then went to a small bar that had a billiard table.

At first Lantier turned up his nose at this establishment because it was rather shabby. So much liquor had been spilled on the billiard table that the balls stuck to it. Once the game got started though, Lantier recovered his good humor and began to flaunt his extraordinary knack with a cue.

When lunch time came Coupeau had an idea. He stamped his feet and cried:

"We must go and fetch Salted-Mouth. I know where he's working. We'll take him to Mere Louis' to have some pettitoes."

The idea was greeted with acclamation. Yes, Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, was no doubt in want of some pettitoes. They started off. Coupeau took them to the bolt factory in the Rue Marcadet. As they arrived a good half hour before the time the workmen came out, the zinc-worker gave a youngster two sous to go in and tell Salted-Mouth that his wife was ill and wanted him at once. The blacksmith made his appearance, waddling in his walk, looking very calm, and scenting a tuck-out.

"Ah! you jokers!" said he, as soon as he caught sight of them hiding in a doorway. "I guessed it. Well, what are we going to eat?"

At mother Louis', whilst they sucked the little bones of the pettitoes, they again fell to abusing the employers. Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, related that they had a most pressing order to execute at the shop. Oh! the ape was pleasant for the time being. One could be late, and he would say nothing; he no doubt considered himself lucky when one turned up at all. At any rate, no boss would dare to throw Salted-Mouth out the door, because you couldn't find lads of his capacity any more. After the pettitoes they had an omelet. When each of them had emptied his bottle, Mere Louis brought out some Auvergne wine, thick enough to cut with a knife. The party was really warming up.

"What do you think is the ape's latest idea?" cried Salted-Mouth at dessert. "Why, he's been and put a bell up in his shed! A bell! That's good for slaves. Ah, well! It can ring to-day! They won't catch me again at the anvil! For five days past I've been sticking there; I may give myself a rest now. If he deducts anything, I'll send him to blazes."

"I," said Coupeau, with an air of importance, "I'm obliged to leave you; I'm off to work. Yes, I promised my wife. Amuse yourselves; my spirit you know remains with my pals."

The others chuffed him. But he seemed so decided that they all accompanied him when he talked of going to fetch his tools from Pere Colombe's. He took his bag from under the seat and laid it on the ground before him whilst they had a final drink. But at one o'clock the party was still standing drinks. Then Coupeau, with a bored gesture placed the tools back again under the seat. They were in his way; he could not get near the counter without stumbling against them. It was too absurd; he would go to Bourguignon's on the morrow. The other four, who were quarrelling about the question of salaries, were not at all surprised when the zinc-worker, without any explanation, proposed a little stroll on the Boulevard, just to stretch their legs. They didn't go very far. They seemed to have nothing to say to each other out in the fresh air. Without even consulting each other with so much as a nudge, they slowly and instinctively ascended the Rue des Poissonniers, where they went to Francois's and had a glass of wine out of the bottle. Lantier pushed his comrades inside the private room at the back; it was a narrow place with only one table in it, and was separated from the shop by a dull glazed partition. He liked to do his drinking in private rooms because it seemed more respectable. Didn't they like it here? It was as comfortable as being at home. You could even take a nap here without being embarrassed. He called for the newspaper, spread it out open before him, and looked through it, frowning the while. Coupeau and My-Boots had commenced a game of piquet. Two bottles of wine and five glasses were scattered about the table.

They emptied their glasses. Then Lantier read out loud:

"A frightful crime has just spread consternation throughout the Commune of Gaillon, Department of Seine-et-Marne. A son has killed his father with blows from a spade in order to rob him of thirty sous."

They all uttered a cry of horror. There was a fellow whom they would have taken great pleasure in seeing guillotined! No, the guillotine was not enough; he deserved to be cut into little pieces. The story of an infanticide equally aroused their indignation; but the hatter, highly moral, found excuses for the woman, putting all the wrong on the back of her husband; for after all, if some beast of a man had not put the wretched woman into the way of bleak poverty, she could not have drowned it in a water closet.

They were most delighted though by the exploit of a Marquis who, coming out of a dance hall at two in the morning, had defended himself against an attack by three blackguards on the Boulevard des Invalides. Without taking off his gloves, he had disposed of the first two villains by ramming his head into their stomachs, and then had marched the third one off to the police. What a man! Too bad he was a noble.

"Listen to this now," continued Lantier. "Here's some society news: 'A marriage is arranged between the eldest daughter of the Countess de Bretigny and the young Baron de Valancay, aide-de-camp to His Majesty. The wedding trousseau will contain more than three hundred thousand francs' worth of lace."

"What's that to us?" interrupted Bibi-the-Smoker. "We don't want to know the color of her mantle. The girl can have no end of lace; nevertheless she'll see the folly of loving."

As Lantier seemed about to continue his reading, Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, took the newspaper from him and sat upon it, saying:

"Ah! no, that's enough! This is all the paper is good for."

Meanwhile, My-Boots, who had been looking at his hand, triumphantly banged his fist down on the table. He scored ninety-three.

"I've got the Revolution!" he exulted.

"You're out of luck, comrade," the others told Coupeau.

They ordered two fresh bottles. The glasses were filled up again as fast as they were emptied, the booze increased. Towards five o'clock it began to get disgusting, so much so that Lantier kept very quiet, thinking of how to give the others the slip; brawling and throwing the wine about was no longer his style. Just then Coupeau stood up to make the drunkard's sign of the cross. Touching his head he pronounced Montpernasse, then Menilmonte as he brought his hand to his right shoulder, Bagnolet giving himself a blow in the chest, and wound up by saying stewed rabbit three times as he hit himself in the pit of the stomach. Then the hatter took advantage of the clamor which greeted the performance of this feat and quietly made for the door. His comrades did not even notice his departure. He had already had a pretty good dose. But once outside he shook himself and regained his self-possession; and he quietly made for the shop, where he told Gervaise that Coupeau was with some friends.

Two days passed by. The zinc-worker had not returned. He was reeling about the neighborhood, but no one knew exactly where. Several persons, however, stated that they had seen him at mother Baquet's, at the "Butterfly," and at the "Little Old Man with a Cough." Only some said that he was alone, whilst others affirmed that he was in the company of seven or eight drunkards like himself. Gervaise shrugged her shoulders in a resigned sort of way. Mon Dieu! She just had to get used to it. She never ran about after her old man; she even went out of her way if she caught sight of him inside a wineshop, so as to not anger him; and she waited at home till he returned, listening at night-time to hear if he was snoring outside the door. He would sleep on a rubbish heap, or on a seat, or in a piece of waste land, or across a gutter. On the morrow, after having only badly slept off his booze of the day before, he would start off again, knocking at the doors of all the consolation dealers, plunging afresh into a furious wandering, in the midst of nips of spirits, glasses of wine, losing his friends and then finding them again, going regular voyages from which he returned in a state of stupor, seeing the streets dance, the night fall and the day break, without any other thought than to drink and sleep off the effects wherever he happened to be. When in the latter state, the world was ended so far as he was concerned. On the second day, however, Gervaise went to Pere Colombe's l'Assommoir to find out something about him; he had been there another five times, they were unable to tell her anything more. All she could do was to take away his tools which he had left under a seat.

In the evening Lantier, seeing that the laundress seemed very worried, offered to take her to a music-hall, just by way of passing a pleasant hour or two. She refused at first, she was in no mood for laughing. Otherwise she would not have said, "no," for the hatter made the proposal in too straightforward a manner for her to feel any mistrust. He seemed to feel for her in quite a paternal way. Never before had Coupeau slept out two nights running. So that in spite of herself, she would go every ten minutes to the door, with her iron in her hand, and look up and down the street to see if her old man was coming.

It might be that Coupeau had broken a leg, or fallen under a wagon and been crushed and that might be good riddance to bad rubbish. She saw no reason for cherishing in her heart any affection for a filthy character like him, but it was irritating, all the same, to have to wonder every night whether he would come in or not. When it got dark, Lantier again suggested the music-hall, and this time she accepted. She decided it would be silly to deny herself a little pleasure when her husband had been out on the town for three days. If he wasn't coming in, then she might as well go out herself. Let the entire dump burn up if it felt like it. She might even put a torch to it herself. She was getting tired of the boring monotony of her present life.

They ate their dinner quickly. Then, when she went off at eight o'clock, arm-in-arm with the hatter, Gervaise told mother Coupeau and Nana to go to bed at once. The shop was shut and the shutters up. She left by the door opening into the courtyard and gave Madame Boche the key, asking her, if her pig of a husband came home, to have the kindness to put him to bed. The hatter was waiting for her under the big doorway, arrayed in his best and whistling a tune. She had on her silk dress. They walked slowly along the pavement, keeping close to each other, lighted up by the glare from the shop windows which showed them smiling and talking together in low voices.

The music-hall was in the Boulevard de Rochechouart. It had originally been a little cafe and had been enlarged by means of a kind of wooden shed erected in the courtyard. At the door a string of glass globes formed a luminous porch. Tall posters pasted on boards stood upon the ground, close to the gutter.

"Here we are," said Lantier. "To-night, first appearance of Mademoiselle Amanda, serio-comic."

Then he caught sight of Bibi-the-Smoker, who was also reading the poster. Bibi had a black eye; some punch he had run up against the day before.

"Well! Where's Coupeau?" inquired the hatter, looking about. "Have you, then, lost Coupeau?"

"Oh! long ago, since yesterday," replied the other. "There was a bit of a free-for-all on leaving mother Baquet's. I don't care for fisticuffs. We had a row, you know, with mother Baquet's pot-boy, because he wanted to make us pay for a quart twice over. Then I left. I went and had a bit of a snooze."

He was still yawning; he had slept eighteen hours at a stretch. He was, moreover, quite sobered, with a stupid look on his face, and his jacket smothered with fluff; for he had no doubt tumbled into bed with his clothes on.

"And you don't know where my husband is, sir?" asked the laundress.

"Well, no, not a bit. It was five o'clock when we left mother Baquet's. That's all I know about it. Perhaps he went down the street. Yes, I fancy now that I saw him go to the 'Butterfly' with a coachman. Oh! how stupid it is! Really, we deserve to be shot."

Lantier and Gervaise spent a very pleasant evening at the music-hall. At eleven o'clock when the place closed, they strolled home without hurrying themselves. The cold was quite sharp. People seemed to be in groups. Some of the girls were giggling in the darkness as their men pressed close to them. Lantier was humming one of Mademoiselle Amanda's songs. Gervaise, with her head spinning from too much drink, hummed the refrain with him. It had been very warm at the music-hall and the two drinks she had had, along with all the smoke, had upset her stomach a bit. She had been quite impressed with Mademoiselle Amanda. She wouldn't dare to appear in public wearing so little, but she had to admit that the lady had lovely skin.

"Everyone's asleep," said Gervaise, after ringing three times without the Boches opening the door.

At length the door opened, but inside the porch it was very dark, and when she knocked at the window of the concierge's room to ask for her key, the concierge, who was half asleep, pulled out some rigmarole which she could make nothing of at first. She eventually understood that Poisson, the policeman, had brought Coupeau home in a frightful state, and that the key was no doubt in the lock.

"The deuce!" murmured Lantier, when they had entered, "whatever has he been up to here? The stench is abominable."

There was indeed a most powerful stench. As Gervaise went to look for matches, she stepped into something messy. After she succeeded in lighting a candle, a pretty sight met their eyes. Coupeau appeared to have disgorged his very insides. The bed was splattered all over, so was the carpet, and even the bureau had splashes on its sides. Besides that, he had fallen from the bed where Poisson had probably thrown him, and was snoring on the floor in the midst of the filth like a pig wallowing in the mire, exhaling his foul breath through his open mouth. His grey hair was straggling into the puddle around his head.

"Oh! the pig! the pig!" repeated Gervaise, indignant and exasperated. "He's dirtied everything. No, a dog wouldn't have done that, even a dead dog is cleaner."

They both hesitated to move, not knowing where to place their feet. Coupeau had never before come home and put the bedroom into such a shocking state. This sight was a blow to whatever affection his wife still had for him. Previously she had been forgiving and not seriously offended, even when he had been blind drunk. But this made her sick; it was too much. She wouldn't have touched Coupeau for the world, and just the thought of this filthy bum touching her caused a repugnance such as she might have felt had she been required to sleep beside the corpse of someone who had died from a terrible disease.

"Oh, I must get into that bed," murmured she. "I can't go and sleep in the street. Oh! I'll crawl into it foot first."

She tried to step over the drunkard, but had to catch hold of a corner of the chest of drawers to save herself from slipping in the mess. Coupeau completely blocked the way to the bed. Then, Lantier, who laughed to himself on seeing that she certainly could not sleep on her own pillow that night, took hold of her hand, saying, in a low and angry voice:

"Gervaise, he is a pig."

She understood what he meant and pulled her hand free. She sighed to herself, and, in her bewilderment, addressed him familiarly, as in the old days.

"No, leave me alone, Auguste. Go to your own bed. I'll manage somehow to lie at the foot of the bed."

"Come, Gervaise, don't be foolish," resumed he. "It's too abominable; you can't remain here. Come with me. He won't hear us. What are you afraid of?"

"No," she replied firmly, shaking her head vigorously. Then, to show that she would remain where she was, she began to take off her clothes, throwing her silk dress over a chair. She was quickly in only her chemise and petticoat. Well, it was her own bed. She wanted to sleep in her own bed and made two more attempts to reach a clean corner of the bed.

Lantier, having no intention of giving up, whispered things to her.

What a predicament she was in, with a louse of a husband that prevented her from crawling under her own blankets and a low skunk behind her just waiting to take advantage of the situation to possess her again. She begged Lantier to be quiet. Turning toward the small room where Nana and mother Coupeau slept, she listened anxiously. She could hear only steady breathing.

"Leave me alone, Auguste," she repeated. "You'll wake them. Be sensible."

Lantier didn't answer, but just smiled at her. Then he began to kiss her on the ear just as in the old days.

Gervaise felt like sobbing. Her strength deserted her; she felt a great buzzing in her ears, a violent tremor passed through her. She advanced another step forward. And she was again obliged to draw back. It was not possible, the disgust was too great. She felt on the verge of vomiting herself. Coupeau, overpowered by intoxication, lying as comfortably as though on a bed of down, was sleeping off his booze, without life in his limbs, and with his mouth all on one side. The whole street might have entered and laughed at him, without a hair of his body moving.

"Well, I can't help it," she faltered. "It's his own fault. Mon Dieu! He's forcing me out of my own bed. I've no bed any longer. No, I can't help it. It's his own fault."

She was trembling so she scarcely knew what she was doing. While Lantier was urging her into his room, Nana's face appeared at one of the glass panes in the door of the little room. The young girl, pale from sleep, had awakened and gotten out of bed quietly. She stared at her father lying in his vomit. Then, she stood watching until her mother disappeared into Lantier's room. She watched with the intensity and the wide-open eyes of a vicious child aflame with curiosity.

CHAPTER IX

That winter mother Coupeau nearly went off in one of her coughing fits. Each December she could count on her asthma keeping her on her back for two and three weeks at a time. She was no longer fifteen, she would be seventy-three on Saint-Anthony's day. With that she was very rickety, getting a rattling in her throat for nothing at all, though she was plump and stout. The doctor said she would go off coughing, just time enough to say: "Good-night, the candle's out!"

When she was in her bed mother Coupeau became positively unbearable. It is true though that the little room in which she slept with Nana was not at all gay. There was barely room for two chairs between the beds. The wallpaper, a faded gray, hung loose in long strips. The small window near the ceiling let in only a dim light. It was like a cavern. At night, as she lay awake, she could listen to the breathing of the sleeping Nana as a sort of distraction; but in the day-time, as there was no one to keep her company from morning to night, she grumbled and cried and repeated to herself for hours together, as she rolled her head on the pillow:

"Good heavens! What a miserable creature I am! Good heavens! What a miserable creature I am! They'll leave me to die in prison, yes, in prison!"

As soon as anyone called, Virginie or Madame Boche, to ask after her health, she would not reply directly, but immediately started on her list of complaints: "Oh, I pay dearly for the food I eat here. I'd be much better off with strangers. I asked for a cup of tisane and they brought me an entire pot of hot water. It was a way of saying that I drank too much. I brought Nana up myself and she scurries away in her bare feet every morning and I never see her again all day. Then at night she sleeps so soundly that she never wakes up to ask me if I'm in pain. I'm just a nuisance to them. They're waiting for me to die. That will happen soon enough. I don't even have a son any more; that laundress has taken him from me. She'd beat me to death if she wasn't afraid of the law."

Gervaise was indeed rather hasty at times. The place was going to the dogs, everyone's temper was getting spoilt and they sent each other to the right about for the least word. Coupeau, one morning that he had a hangover, exclaimed: "The old thing's always saying she's going to die, and yet she never does!" The words struck mother Coupeau to the heart. They frequently complained of how much she cost them, observing that they would save a lot of money when she was gone.

When at her worst that winter, one afternoon, when Madame Lorilleux and Madame Lerat had met at her bedside, mother Coupeau winked her eye as a signal to them to lean over her. She could scarcely speak. She rather hissed than said in a low voice:

"It's becoming indecent. I heard them last night. Yes, Clump-clump and the hatter. And they were kicking up such a row together! Coupeau's too decent for her."

And she related in short sentences, coughing and choking between each, that her son had come home dead drunk the night before. Then, as she was not asleep, she was easily able to account for all the noises, of Clump-clump's bare feet tripping over the tiled floor, the hissing voice of the hatter calling her, the door between the two rooms gently closed, and the rest. It must have lasted till daylight. She could not tell the exact time, because, in spite of her efforts, she had ended by falling into a dose.

"What's most disgusting is that Nana might have heard everything," continued she. "She was indeed restless all the night, she who usually sleeps so sound. She tossed about and kept turning over as though there had been some lighted charcoal in her bed."

The other two women did not seem at all surprised.

"Of course!" murmured Madame Lorilleux, "it probably began the very first night. But as it pleases Coupeau, we've no business to interfere. All the same, it's not very respectable."

"As for me," declared Madame Lerat through clenched teeth, "if I'd been there, I'd have thrown a fright into them. I'd have shouted something, anything. A doctor's maid told me once that the doctor had told her that a surprise like that, at a certain moment, could strike a woman dead. If she had died right there, that would have been well, wouldn't it? She would have been punished right where she had sinned."

It wasn't long until the entire neighborhood knew that Gervaise visited Lantier's room every night. Madame Lorilleux was loudly indignant, calling her brother a poor fool whose wife had shamed him. And her poor mother, forced to live in the midst of such horrors. As a result, the neighbors blamed Gervaise. Yes, she must have led Lantier astray; you could see it in her eyes. In spite of the nasty gossip, Lantier was still liked because he was always so polite. He always had candy or flowers to give the ladies. Mon Dieu! Men shouldn't be expected to push away women who threw themselves at them. There was no excuse for Gervaise. She was a disgrace. The Lorilleuxs used to bring Nana up to their apartment in order to find out more details from her, their godchild. But Nana would put on her expression of innocent stupidity and lower her long silky eyelashes to hide the fire in her eyes as she replied.

In the midst of this general indignation, Gervaise lived quietly on, feeling tired out and half asleep. At first she considered herself very sinful and felt a disgust for herself. When she left Lantier's room she would wash her hands and scrub herself as if trying to get rid of an evil stain. If Coupeau then tried to joke with her, she would fly into a passion, and run and shiveringly dress herself in the farthest corner of the shop; neither would she allow Lantier near her soon after her husband had kissed her. She would have liked to have changed her skin as she changed men. But she gradually became accustomed to it. Soon it was too much trouble to scrub herself each time. Her thirst for happiness led her to enjoy as much as she could the difficult situation. She had always been disposed to make allowances for herself, so why not for others? She only wanted to avoid causing trouble. As long as the household went along as usual, there was nothing to complain about.

Then, after all, she could not be doing anything to make Coupeau stop drinking; matters were arranged so easily to the general satisfaction. One is generally punished if one does what is not right. His dissoluteness had gradually become a habit. Now it was as regular an affair as eating and drinking. Each time Coupeau came home drunk, she would go to Lantier's room. This was usually on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Sometimes on other nights, if Coupeau was snoring too loudly, she would leave in the middle of the night. It was not that she cared more for Lantier, but just that she slept better in his room.

Mother Coupeau never dared speak openly of it. But after a quarrel, when the laundress had bullied her, the old woman was not sparing in her allusions. She would say that she knew men who were precious fools and women who were precious hussies, and she would mutter words far more biting, with the sharpness of language pertaining to an old waistcoat-maker. The first time this had occurred Gervaise looked at her straight in the face without answering. Then, also avoiding going into details, she began to defend herself with reasons given in a general sort of way. When a woman had a drunkard for a husband, a pig who lived in filth, that woman was to be excused if she sought for cleanliness elsewhere. Once she pointed out that Lantier was just as much her husband as Coupeau was. Hadn't she known him since she was fourteen and didn't she have children by him?

Anyway, she'd like to see anyone make trouble for her. She wasn't the only one around the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. Madame Vigouroux, the coal-dealer had a merry dance from morning to night. Then there was the grocer's wife, Madame Lehongre with her brother-in-law. Mon Dieu! What a slob of a fellow. He wasn't worth touching with a shovel. Even the neat little clockmaker was said to have carried on with his own daughter, a streetwalker. Ah, the entire neighborhood. Oh, she knew plenty of dirt.

One day when mother Coupeau was more pointed than usual in her observations, Gervaise had replied to her, clinching her teeth:

"You're confined to your bed and you take advantage of it. Listen! You're wrong. You see that I behave nicely to you, for I've never thrown your past life into your teeth. Oh! I know all about it. No, don't cough. I've finished what I had to say. It's only to request you to mind your own business, that's all!"

The old woman almost choked. On the morrow, Goujet having called about his mother's washing when Gervaise happened to be out, mother Coupeau called him to her and kept him some time seated beside her bed. She knew all about the blacksmith's friendship, and had noticed that for some time past he had looked dismal and wretched, from a suspicion of the melancholy things that were taking place. So, for the sake of gossiping, and out of revenge for the quarrel of the day before, she bluntly told him the truth, weeping and complaining as though Gervaise's wicked behavior did her some special injury. When Goujet quitted the little room, he leant against the wall, almost stifling with grief. Then, when the laundress returned home, mother Coupeau called to her that Madame Goujet required her to go round with her clothes, ironed or not; and she was so animated that Gervaise, seeing something was wrong, guessed what had taken place and had a presentiment of the unpleasantness which awaited her.

Very pale, her limbs already trembling, she placed the things in a basket and started off. For years past she had not returned the Goujets a sou of their money. The debt still amounted to four hundred and twenty-five francs. She always spoke of her embarrassments and received the money for the washing. It filled her with shame, because she seemed to be taking advantage of the blacksmith's friendship to make a fool of him. Coupeau, who had now become less scrupulous, would chuckle and say that Goujet no doubt had fooled around with her a bit, and had so paid himself. But she, in spite of the relations she had fallen into with Coupeau, would indignantly ask her husband if he already wished to eat of that sort of bread. She would not allow anyone to say a word against Goujet in her presence; her affection for the blacksmith remained like a last shred of her honor. Thus, every time she took the washing home to those worthy people, she felt a spasm of her heart the moment she put a foot on their stairs.

"Ah! it's you, at last!" said Madame Goujet sharply, on opening the door to her. "When I'm in want of death, I'll send you to fetch him."

Gervaise entered, greatly embarrassed, not even daring to mutter an excuse. She was no longer punctual, never came at the time arranged, and would keep her customers waiting for days on end. Little by little she was giving way to a system of thorough disorder.

"For a week past I've been expecting you," continued the lace-mender. "And you tell falsehoods too; you send your apprentice to me with all sorts of stories; you are then busy with my things, you will deliver them the same evening, or else you've had an accident, the bundle's fallen into a pail of water. Whilst all this is going on, I waste my time, nothing turns up, and it worries me exceedingly. No, you're most unreasonable. Come, what have you in your basket? Is everything there now? Have you brought me the pair of sheets you've been keeping back for a month past, and the chemise which was missing the last time you brought home the washing?"

"Yes, yes," murmured Gervaise, "I have the chemise. Here it is."

But Madame Goujet cried out. That chemise was not hers, she would have nothing to do with it. Her things were changed now; it was too bad! Only the week before, there were two handkerchiefs which hadn't her mark on them. It was not to her taste to have clothes coming from no one knew where. Besides that, she liked to have her own things.

"And the sheets?" she resumed. "They're lost, aren't they? Well! Woman, you must see about them, for I insist upon having them to-morrow morning, do you hear?"

There was a silence which particularly bothered Gervaise when she noticed that the door to Goujet's room was open. If he was in there, it was most annoying that he should hear these just criticisms. She made no reply, meekly bowing her head, and placing the laundry on the bed as quickly as possible.

Matters became worse when Madame Goujet began to look over the things, one by one. She took hold of them and threw them down again saying:

"Ah! you don't get them up nearly so well as you used to do. One can't compliment you every day now. Yes, you've taken to mucking your work—doing it in a most slovenly way. Just look at this shirt-front, it's scorched, there's the mark of the iron on the plaits; and the buttons have all been torn off. I don't know how you manage it, but there's never a button left on anything. Oh! now, here's a petticoat body which I shall certainly not pay you for. Look there! The dirt's still on it, you've simply smoothed it over. So now the things are not even clean!"

She stopped whilst she counted the different articles. Then she exclaimed:

"What! This is all you've brought? There are two pairs of stockings, six towels, a table-cloth, and several dish-cloths short. You're regularly trifling with me, it seems! I sent word that you were to bring me everything, ironed or not. If your apprentice isn't here on the hour with the rest of the things, we shall fall out, Madame Coupeau, I warn you."

At this moment Goujet coughed in his room. Gervaise slightly started. Mon Dieu! How she was treated before him. And she remained standing in the middle of the rooms, embarrassed and confused and waiting for the dirty clothes; but after making up the account Madame Goujet had quietly returned to her seat near the window, and resumed the mending of a lace shawl.

"And the dirty things?" timidly inquired the laundress.

"No, thank you," replied the old woman, "there will be no laundry this week."

Gervaise turned pale. She was no longer to have the washing. Then she quite lost her head; she was obliged to sit down on a chair, for her legs were giving way under her. She did not attempt to vindicate herself. All that she would find to say was:

"Is Monsieur Goujet ill?"

Yes, he was not well. He had been obliged to come home instead of returning to the forge, and he had gone to lie down on his bed to get a rest. Madame Goujet talked gravely, wearing her black dress as usual and her white face framed in her nun-like coif. The pay at the forge had been cut again. It was now only seven francs a day because the machines did so much of the work. This forced her to save money every way she could. She would do her own washing from now on. It would naturally have been very helpful if the Coupeaus had been able to return her the money lent them by her son; but she was not going to set the lawyers on them, as they were unable to pay. As she was talking about the debt, Gervaise lowered her eyes in embarrassment.

"All the same," continued the lace-maker, "by pinching yourselves a little you could manage to pay it off. For really now, you live very well; and spend a great deal, I'm sure. If you were only to pay off ten francs a month—"

She was interrupted by the sound of Goujet's voice as he called:

"Mamma! Mamma!"

And when she returned to her seat, which was almost immediately, she changed the conversation. The blacksmith had doubtless begged her not to ask Gervaise for money; but in spite of herself she again spoke of the debt at the expiration of five minutes. Oh! She had foreseen long ago what was now happening. Coupeau was drinking all that the laundry business brought in and dragging his wife down with him. Her son would never have loaned the money if he had only listened to her. By now he would have been married, instead of miserably sad with only unhappiness to look forward to for the rest of his life. She grew quite stern and angry, even accusing Gervaise of having schemed with Coupeau to take advantage of her foolish son. Yes, some women were able to play the hypocrite for years, but eventually the truth came out.

"Mamma! Mamma!" again called Goujet, but louder this time.

She rose from her seat and when she returned she said, as she resumed her lace mending:

"Go in, he wishes to see you."

Gervaise, all in a tremble left the door open. This scene filled her with emotion because it was like an avowal of their affection before Madame Goujet. She again beheld the quiet little chamber, with its narrow iron bedstead, and papered all over with pictures, the whole looking like the room of some girl of fifteen. Goujet's big body was stretched on the bed. Mother Coupeau's disclosures and the things his mother had been saying seemed to have knocked all the life out of his limbs. His eyes were red and swollen, his beautiful yellow beard was still wet. In the first moment of rage he must have punched away at his pillow with his terrible fists, for the ticking was split and the feathers were coming out.

"Listen, mamma's wrong," said he to the laundress in a voice that was scarcely audible. "You owe me nothing. I won't have it mentioned again."

He had raised himself up and was looking at her. Big tears at once filled his eyes.

"Do you suffer, Monsieur Goujet?" murmured she. "What is the matter with you? Tell me!"

"Nothing, thanks. I tired myself with too much work yesterday. I will rest a bit."

Then, his heart breaking, he could not restrain himself and burst out:

"Mon Dieu! Ah! Mon Dieu! It was never to be—never. You swore it. And now it is—it is! Ah, it pains me too much, leave me!"

And with his hand he gently and imploringly motioned to her to go. She did not draw nearer to the bed. She went off as he requested her to, feeling stupid, unable to say anything to soothe him. When in the other room she took up her basket; but she did not go home. She stood there trying to find something to say. Madame Goujet continued her mending without raising her head. It was she who at length said:

"Well! Good-night; send me back my things and we will settle up afterwards."

"Yes, it will be best so—good-night," stammered Gervaise.

She took a last look around the neatly arranged room and thought as she shut the door that she seemed to be leaving some part of her better self behind. She plodded blindly back to the laundry, scarcely knowing where she was going.

When Gervaise arrived, she found mother Coupeau out of her bed, sitting on a chair by the stove. Gervaise was too tired to scold her. Her bones ached as though she had been beaten and she was thinking that her life was becoming too hard to bear. Surely a quick death was the only escape from the pain in her heart.

After this, Gervaise became indifferent to everything. With a vague gesture of her hand she would send everybody about their business. At each fresh worry she buried herself deeper in her only pleasure, which was to have her three meals a day. The shop might have collapsed. So long as she was not beneath it, she would have gone off willingly without a chemise to her back. And the little shop was collapsing, not suddenly, but little by little, morning and evening. One by one the customers got angry, and sent their washing elsewhere. Monsieur Madinier, Mademoiselle Remanjou, the Boches themselves had returned to Madame Fauconnier, where they could count on great punctuality. One ends by getting tired of asking for a pair of stockings for three weeks straight, and of putting on shirts with grease stains dating from the previous Sunday. Gervaise, without losing a bite, wished them a pleasant journey, and spoke her mind about them, saying that she was precious glad she would no longer have to poke her nose into their filth. The entire neighborhood could quit her; that would relieve her of the piles of stinking junk and give her less work to do.

Now her only customers were those who didn't pay regularly, the street-walkers, and women like Madame Gaudron, whose laundry smelled so bad that not one of the laundresses on the Rue Neuve would take it. She had to let Madame Putois go, leaving only her apprentice, squint-eyed Augustine, who seemed to grow more stupid as time passed. Frequently there was not even enough work for the two of them and they sat on stools all afternoon doing nothing.

Whilst idleness and poverty entered, dirtiness naturally entered also. One would never have recognised that beautiful blue shop, the color of heaven, which had once been Gervaise's pride. Its window-frames and panes, which were never washed, were covered from top to bottom with the splashes of the passing vehicles. On the brass rods in the windows were displayed three grey rags left by customers who had died in the hospital. And inside it was more pitiable still; the dampness of the clothes hung up at the ceiling to dry had loosed all the wallpaper; the Pompadour chintz hung in strips like cobwebs covered with dust; the big stove, broken and in holes from the rough use of the poker, looked in its corner like the stock in trade of a dealer in old iron; the work-table appeared as though it had been used by a regiment, covered as it was with wine and coffee stains, sticky with jam, greasy from spilled gravy.

Gervaise was so at ease among it all that she never even noticed the shop was getting filthy. She became used to it all, just as she got used to wearing torn skirts and no longer washing herself carefully. The disorder was like a warm nest.

Her own ease was her sole consideration; she did not care a pin for anything else. The debts, though still increasing, no longer troubled her. Her honesty gradually deserted her; whether she would be able to pay or not was altogether uncertain, and she preferred not to think about it. When her credit was stopped at one shop, she would open an account at some other shop close by. She was in debt all over the neighborhood, she owed money every few yards. To take merely the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, she no longer dared pass in front of the grocer's, nor the charcoal-dealer's, nor the greengrocer's; and this obliged her, whenever she required to be at the wash-house, to go round by the Rue des Poissonniers, which was quite ten minutes out of her way. The tradespeople came and treated her as a swindler. One evening the dealer from whom she had purchased Lantier's furniture made a scene in the street. Scenes like this upset her at the time, but were soon forgotten and never spoiled her appetite. What a nerve to bother her like that when she had no money to pay. They were all robbers anyway and it served them right to have to wait. Well, she'd have to go bankrupt, but she didn't intend to fret about it now.

Meanwhile mother Coupeau had recovered. For another year the household jogged along. During the summer months there was naturally a little more work—the white petticoats and the cambric dresses of the street-walkers of the exterior Boulevard. The catastrophe was slowly approaching; the home sank deeper into the mire every week; there were ups and downs, however—days when one had to rub one's stomach before the empty cupboard, and others when one ate veal enough to make one burst. Mother Coupeau was for ever being seen in the street, hiding bundles under her apron, and strolling in the direction of the pawn-place in the Rue Polonceau. She strutted along with the air of a devotee going to mass; for she did not dislike these errands; haggling about money amused her; this crying up of her wares like a second-hand dealer tickled the old woman's fancy for driving hard bargains. The clerks knew her well and called her "Mamma Four Francs," because she always demanded four francs when they offered three, on bundles no bigger than two sous' worth of butter.

At the start, Gervaise took advantage of good weeks to get things back from the pawn-shops, only to put them back again the next week. Later she let things go altogether, selling her pawn tickets for cash.

One thing alone gave Gervaise a pang—it was having to pawn her clock to pay an acceptance for twenty francs to a bailiff who came to seize her goods. Until then, she had sworn rather to die of hunger than to part with her clock. When mother Coupeau carried it away in a little bonnet-box, she sunk on to a chair, without a particle of strength left in her arms, her eyes full of tears, as though a fortune was being torn from her. But when mother Coupeau reappeared with twenty-five francs, the unexpected loan, the five francs profit consoled her; she at once sent the old woman out again for four sous' worth of brandy in a glass, just to toast the five-franc piece.

The two of them would often have a drop together, when they were on good terms with each other. Mother Coupeau was very successful at bringing back a full glass hidden in her apron pocket without spilling a drop. Well, the neighbors didn't need to know, did they. But the neighbors knew perfectly well. This turned the neighborhood even more against Gervaise. She was devouring everything; a few more mouthfuls and the place would be swept clean.

In the midst of this general demolishment, Coupeau continued to prosper. The confounded tippler was as well as well could be. The sour wine and the "vitriol" positively fattened him. He ate a great deal, and laughed at that stick Lorilleux, who accused drink of killing people, and answered him by slapping himself on the stomach, the skin of which was so stretched by the fat that it resembled the skin of a drum. He would play him a tune on it, the glutton's vespers, with rolls and beats loud enough to have made a quack's fortune. Lorilleux, annoyed at not having any fat himself, said that it was soft and unhealthy. Coupeau ignored him and went on drinking more and more, saying it was for his health's sake.

His hair was beginning to turn grey and his face to take on the drunkard's hue of purplish wine. He continued to act like a mischievous child. Well, it wasn't his concern if there was nothing about the place to eat. When he went for weeks without work he became even more difficult.

Still, he was always giving Lantier friendly slaps on the back. People swore he had no suspicion at all. Surely something terrible would happen if he ever found out. Madame Lerat shook her head at this. His sister said she had known of husbands who didn't mind at all.

Lantier wasn't wasting away either. He took great care of himself, measuring his stomach by the waist-board of his trousers, with the constant dread of having to loosen the buckle or draw it tighter; for he considered himself just right, and out of coquetry neither desired to grow fatter nor thinner. That made him hard to please in the matter of food, for he regarded every dish from the point of view of keeping his waist as it was. Even when there was not a sou in the house, he required eggs, cutlets, light and nourishing things. Since he was sharing the lady of the house, he considered himself to have a half interest in everything and would pocket any franc pieces he saw lying about. He kept Gervaise running here and there and seemed more at home than Coupeau. Nana was his favorite because he adored pretty little girls, but he paid less and less attention to Etienne, since boys, according to him, ought to know how to take care of themselves. If anyone came to see Coupeau while he was out, Lantier, in shirt sleeves and slippers, would come out of the back room with the bored expression of a husband who has been disturbed, saying he would answer for Coupeau as it was all the same.

Between these two gentlemen, Gervaise had nothing to laugh about. She had nothing to complain of as regards her health, thank goodness! She was growing too fat. But two men to coddle was often more than she could manage. Ah! Mon Dieu! one husband is already too much for a woman! The worst was that they got on very well together, the rogues. They never quarreled; they would chuckle in each other's faces, as they sat of an evening after dinner, their elbows on the table; they would rub up against one another all the live-long day, like cats which seek and cultivate their pleasure. The days when they came home in a rage, it was on her that they vented it. Go it! hammer away at the animal! She had a good back; it made them all the better friends when they yelled together. And it never did for her to give them tit-for-tat. In the beginning, whenever one of them yelled at her, she would appeal to the other, but this seldom worked. Coupeau had a foul mouth and called her horrible things. Lantier chose his insults carefully, but they often hurt her even more.

But one can get used to anything. Soon their nasty remarks and all the wrongs done her by these two men slid off her smooth skin like water off a duck's back. It was even easier to have them angry, because when they were in good moods they bothered her too much, never giving her time to get a bonnet ironed.

Yes, Coupeau and Lantier were wearing her out. The zinc-worker, sure enough, lacked education; but the hatter had too much, or at least he had education in the same way that dirty people have a white shirt, with uncleanliness underneath it. One night, she dreamt that she was on the edge of a wall; Coupeau was knocking her into it with a blow of his fist, whilst Lantier was tickling her in the ribs to make her fall quicker. Well! That resembled her life. It was no surprise if she was becoming slipshod. The neighbors weren't fair in blaming her for the frightful habits she had fallen into. Sometimes a cold shiver ran through her, but things could have been worse, so she tried to make the best of it. Once she had seen a play in which the wife detested her husband and poisoned him for the sake of her lover. Wasn't it more sensible for the three of them to live together in peace? In spite of her debts and poverty she thought she was quite happy and could live in peace if only Coupeau and Lantier would stop yelling at her so much.

Towards the autumn, unfortunately, things became worse. Lantier pretended he was getting thinner, and pulled a longer face over the matter every day. He grumbled at everything, sniffed at the dishes of potatoes—a mess he could not eat, he would say, without having the colic. The least jangling now turned to quarrels, in which they accused one another of being the cause of all their troubles, and it was a devil of a job to restore harmony before they all retired for the night.

Lantier sensed a crisis coming and it exasperated him to realise that this place was already so thoroughly cleaned out that he could see the day coming when he'd have to take his hat and seek elsewhere for his bed and board. He had become accustomed to this little paradise where he was nicely treated by everybody. He should have blamed himself for eating himself out of house and home, but instead he blamed the Coupeaus for letting themselves be ruined in less than two years. He thought Gervaise was too extravagant. What was going to happen to them now?

One evening in December they had no dinner at all. There was not a radish left. Lantier, who was very glum, went out early, wandering about in search of some other den where the smell of the kitchen would bring a smile to one's face. He would now remain for hours beside the stove wrapt in thought. Then, suddenly, he began to evince a great friendship for the Poissons. He no longer teased the policeman and even went so far as to concede that the Emperor might not be such a bad fellow after all. He seemed to especially admire Virginie. No doubt he was hoping to board with them. Virginie having acquainted him with her desire to set up in some sort of business, he agreed with everything she said, and declared that her idea was a most brilliant one. She was just the person for trade—tall, engaging and active. Oh! she would make as much as she liked. The capital had been available for some time, thanks to an inheritance from an aunt. Lantier told her of all the shopkeepers who were making fortunes. The time was right for it; you could sell anything these days. Virginie, however, hesitated; she was looking for a shop that was to be let, she did not wish to leave the neighborhood. Then Lantier would take her into corners and converse with her in an undertone for ten minutes at a time. He seemed to be urging her to do something in spite of herself; and she no longer said "no," but appeared to authorize him to act. It was as a secret between them, with winks and words rapidly exchanged, some mysterious understanding which betrayed itself even in their handshakings.

From this moment the hatter would covertly watch the Coupeaus whilst eating their dry bread, and becoming very talkative again, would deafen them with his continual jeremiads. All day long Gervaise moved in the midst of that poverty which he so obligingly spread out. Mon Dieu! he wasn't thinking of himself; he would go on starving with his friends as long as they liked. But look at it with common sense. They owed at least five hundred francs in the neighborhood. Besides which, they were two quarters rent behind with the rent, which meant another two hundred and fifty francs; the landlord, Monsieur Marescot, even spoke of having them evicted if they did not pay him by the first of January. Finally the pawn-place had absorbed everything, one could not have got together three francs' worth of odds and ends, the clearance had been so complete; the nails remained in the walls and that was all and perhaps there were two pounds of them at three sous the pound. Gervaise, thoroughly entangled in it all, her nerves quite upset by this calculation, would fly into a passion and bang her fists down upon the table or else she would end by bursting into tears like a fool. One night she exclaimed:

"I'll be off to-morrow! I prefer to put the key under the door and to sleep on the pavement rather than continue to live in such frights."

"It would be wiser," said Lantier slyly, "to get rid of the lease if you could find someone to take it. When you are both decided to give up the shop—"

She interrupted him more violently:

"At once, at once! Ah! it'll be a good riddance!"

Then the hatter became very practical. On giving up the lease one would no doubt get the new tenant to be responsible for the two overdue quarters. And he ventured to mention the Poissons, he reminded them that Virginie was looking for a shop; theirs would perhaps suit her. He remembered that he had heard her say she longed for one just like it. But when Virginie's name was mentioned the laundress suddenly regained her composure. We'll see how things go along. When you're angry you always talk of quitting, but it isn't so easy when you just stop to think about it.

During the following days it was in vain that Lantier harped upon the subject. Gervaise replied that she had seen herself worse off and had pulled through. How would she be better off when she no longer had her shop? That would not put bread into their mouths. She would, on the contrary, engage some fresh workwomen and work up a fresh connection.

Lantier made the mistake of mentioning Virginie again. This stirred Gervaise into furious obstinacy. No! Never! She had always had her suspicions of what was in Virginie's heart. Virginie only wanted to humiliate her. She would rather turn it over to the first woman to come in from the street than to that hypocrite who had been waiting for years to see her fail. Yes, Virginie still had in mind that fight in the wash-house. Well, she'd be wiser to forget about it, unless she wanted another one now.

In the face of this flow of angry retorts, Lantier began by attacking Gervaise. He called her stupid and stuck-up. He even went so far as to abuse Coupeau, accusing him of not knowing how to make his wife respect his friend. Then, realising that passion would compromise everything, he swore that he would never again interest himself in the affairs of other people, for one always got more kicks than thanks; and indeed he appeared to have given up all idea of talking them into parting with the lease, but he was really watching for a favorable opportunity of broaching the subject again and of bringing the laundress round to his views.

January had now arrived; the weather was wretched, both damp and cold. Mother Coupeau, who had coughed and choked all through December, was obliged to take to her bed after Twelfth-night. It was her annuity, which she expected every winter. This winter though, those around her said she'd never come out of her bedroom except feet first. Indeed, her gaspings sounded like a death rattle. She was still fat, but one eye was blind and one side of her face was twisted. The doctor made one call and didn't return again. They kept giving her tisanes and going to check on her every hour. She could no longer speak because her breathing was so difficult.

One Monday evening, Coupeau came home totally drunk. Ever since his mother was in danger, he had lived in a continual state of deep emotion. When he was in bed, snoring soundly, Gervaise walked about the place for a while. She was in the habit of watching over mother Coupeau during a part of the night. Nana had showed herself very brave, always sleeping beside the old woman, and saying that if she heard her dying, she would wake everyone. Since the invalid seemed to be sleeping peacefully this night, Gervaise finally yielded to the appeals of Lantier to come into his room for a little rest. They only kept a candle alight, standing on the ground behind the wardrobe. But towards three o'clock Gervaise abruptly jumped out of bed, shivering and oppressed with anguish. She thought she had felt a cold breath pass over her body. The morsel of candle had burnt out; she tied on her petticoats in the dark, all bewildered, and with feverish hands. It was not till she got into the little room, after knocking up against the furniture, that she was able to light a small lamp. In the midst of the oppressive silence of night, the zinc-worker's snores alone sounded as two grave notes. Nana, stretched on her back, was breathing gently between her pouting lips. And Gervaise, holding down the lamp which caused big shadows to dance about the room, cast the light on mother Coupeau's face, and beheld it all white, the head lying on the shoulder, the eyes wide open. Mother Coupeau was dead.

Gently, without uttering a cry, icy cold yet prudent, the laundress returned to Lantier's room. He had gone to sleep again. She bent over him and murmured:

"Listen, it's all over, she's dead."

Heavy with sleep, only half awake, he grunted at first:

"Leave me alone, get into bed. We can't do her any good if she's dead."

Then he raised himself on his elbow and asked:

"What's the time?"

"Three o'clock."

"Only three o'clock! Get into bed quick. You'll catch cold. When it's daylight, we'll see what's to be done."

But she did not listen to him, she dressed herself completely. Bundling himself in the blankets, Lantier muttered about how stubborn women were. What was the hurry to announce a death in the house? He was irritated at having his sleep spoiled by such gloomy matters.

Meanwhile, Gervaise had moved her things back into her own room. Then she felt free to sit down and cry, no longer fearful of being caught in Lantier's room. She had been fond of mother Coupeau and felt a deep sorrow at her loss. She sat, crying by herself, her sobs loud in the silence, but Coupeau never stirred. She had spoken to him and even shaken him and finally decided to let him sleep. He would be more of a nuisance if he woke up.

On returning to the body, she found Nana sitting up in bed rubbing her eyes. The child understood, and with her vicious urchin's curiosity, stretched out her neck to get a better view of her grandmother; she said nothing but she trembled slightly, surprised and satisfied in the presence of this death which she had been promising herself for two days past, like some nasty thing hidden away and forbidden to children; and her young cat-like eyes dilated before that white face all emaciated at the last gasp by the passion of life, she felt that tingling in her back which she felt behind the glass door when she crept there to spy on what was no concern of chits like her.

"Come, get up," said her mother in a low voice. "You can't remain here."

She regretfully slid out of bed, turning her head round and not taking her eyes off the corpse. Gervaise was much worried about her, not knowing where to put her till day-time. She was about to tell her to dress herself, when Lantier, in his trousers and slippers, rejoined her. He could not get to sleep again, and was rather ashamed of his behavior. Then everything was arranged.

"She can sleep in my bed," murmured he. "She'll have plenty of room."

Nana looked at her mother and Lantier with her big, clear eyes and put on her stupid air, the same as on New Year's day when anyone made her a present of a box of chocolate candy. And there was certainly no need for them to hurry her. She trotted off in her night-gown, her bare feet scarcely touching the tiled floor; she glided like a snake into the bed, which was still quite warm, and she lay stretched out and buried in it, her slim body scarcely raising the counterpane. Each time her mother entered the room she beheld her with her eyes sparkling in her motionless face—not sleeping, not moving, very red with excitement, and appearing to reflect on her own affairs.

Lantier assisted Gervaise in dressing mother Coupeau—and it was not an easy matter, for the body was heavy. One would never have thought that that old woman was so fat and so white. They put on her stockings, a white petticoat, a short linen jacket and a white cap—in short, the best of her linen. Coupeau continued snoring, a high note and a low one, the one sharp, the other flat. One could almost have imagined it to be church music accompanying the Good Friday ceremonies. When the corpse was dressed and properly laid out on the bed, Lantier poured himself out a glass of wine, for he felt quite upset. Gervaise searched the chest of drawers to find a little brass crucifix which she had brought from Plassans, but she recollected that mother Coupeau had, in all probability, sold it herself. They had lighted the stove, and they passed the rest of the night half asleep on chairs, finishing the bottle of wine that had been opened, worried and sulking, as though it was their own fault.

Towards seven o'clock, before daylight, Coupeau at length awoke. When he learnt his loss he at first stood still with dry eyes, stuttering and vaguely thinking that they were playing him some joke. Then he threw himself on the ground and went and knelt beside the corpse. His kissed it and wept like a child, with such a copious flow of tears that he quite wetted the sheet with wiping his cheeks. Gervaise had recommenced sobbing, deeply affected by her husband's grief, and the best of friends with him again. Yes, he was better at heart than she thought he was. Coupeau's despair mingled with a violent pain in his head. He passed his fingers through his hair. His mouth was dry, like on the morrow of a booze, and he was still a little drunk in spite of his ten hours of sleep. And, clenching his fist, he complained aloud. Mon Dieu! she was gone now, his poor mother, whom he loved so much! Ah! what a headache he had; it would settle him! It was like a wig of fire! And now they were tearing out his heart! No, it was not just of fate thus to set itself against one man!

"Come, cheer up, old fellow," said Lantier, raising him from the ground; "you must pull yourself together."

He poured him out a glass of wine, but Coupeau refused to drink.

"What's the matter with me? I've got copper in my throat. It's mamma. When I saw her I got a taste of copper in my mouth. Mamma! Mon Dieu! mamma, mamma!"

And he recommenced crying like a child. Then he drank the glass of wine, hoping to put out the flame searing his breast. Lantier soon left, using the excuse of informing the family and filing the necessary declaration at the town hall. Really though, he felt the need of fresh air, and so he took his time, smoking cigarettes and enjoying the morning air. When he left Madame Lerat's house, he went into a dairy place on Les Batignolles for a cup of hot coffee and remained there an hour, thinking things over.

Towards nine o'clock the family were all united in the shop, the shutters of which were kept up. Lorilleux did not cry. Moreover he had some pressing work to attend to, and he returned almost directly to his room, after having stalked about with a face put on for the occasion. Madame Lorilleux and Madame Lerat embraced the Coupeaus and wiped their eyes, from which a few tears were falling. But Madame Lorilleux, after giving a hasty glance round the death chamber, suddenly raised her voice to say that it was unheard of, that one never left a lighted lamp beside a corpse; there should be a candle, and Nana was sent to purchase a packet of tall ones. Ah, well! It made one long to die at Clump-clump's, she laid one out in such a fine fashion! What a fool, not even to know what to do with a corpse! Had she then never buried anyone in her life? Madame Lerat had to go to the neighbors and borrow a crucifix; she brought one back which was too big, a cross of black wood with a Christ in painted cardboard fastened to it, which covered the whole of mother Coupeau's chest, and seemed to crush her under its weight. Then they tried to obtain some holy water, but no one had any, and it was again Nana who was sent to the church to bring some back in a bottle. In practically no time the tiny room presented quite another appearance; on a little table a candle was burning beside a glass full of holy water into which a sprig of boxwood was dipped. Now, if anyone came, it would at least look decent. And they arranged the chairs in a circle in the shop for receiving people.

Lantier only returned at eleven o'clock. He had been to the undertaker's for information.

"The coffin is twelve francs," said he. "If you desire a mass, it will be ten francs more. Then there's the hearse, which is charged for according to the ornaments."

"Oh! it's quite unnecessary to be fancy," murmured Madame Lorilleux, raising her head in a surprised and anxious manner. "We can't bring mamma to life again, can we? One must do according to one's means."

"Of course, that's just what I think," resumed the hatter. "I merely asked the prices to guide you. Tell me what you desire; and after lunch I will give the orders."

They were talking in lowered voices. Only a dim light came into the room through the cracks in the shutters. The door to the little room stood half open, and from it came the deep silence of death. Children's laughter echoed in the courtyard. Suddenly they heard the voice of Nana, who had escaped from the Boches to whom she had been sent. She was giving commands in her shrill voice and the children were singing a song about a donkey.

Gervaise waited until it was quiet to say:

"We're not rich certainly; but all the same we wish to act decently. If mother Coupeau has left us nothing, it's no reason for pitching her into the ground like a dog. No; we must have a mass, and a hearse with a few ornaments."

"And who will pay for them?" violently inquired Madame Lorilleux. "Not we, who lost some money last week; and you either, as you're stumped. Ah! you ought, however, to see where it has led you, this trying to impress people!"

Coupeau, when consulted, mumbled something with a gesture of profound indifference, and then fell asleep again on his chair. Madame Lerat said that she would pay her share. She was of Gervaise's opinion, they should do things decently. Then the two of them fell to making calculations on a piece of paper: in all, it would amount to about ninety francs, because they decided, after a long discussion, to have a hearse ornamented with a narrow scallop.

"We're three," concluded the laundress. "We'll give thirty francs each. It won't ruin us."

But Madame Lorilleux broke out in a fury.

"Well! I refuse, yes, I refuse! It's not for the thirty francs. I'd give a hundred thousand, if I had them, and if it would bring mamma to life again. Only, I don't like vain people. You've got a shop, you only dream of showing off before the neighborhood. We don't fall in with it, we don't. We don't try to make ourselves out what we are not. Oh! you can manage it to please yourself. Put plumes on the hearse if it amuses you."

"No one asks you for anything," Gervaise ended by answering. "Even though I should have to sell myself, I'll not have anything to reproach myself with. I've fed mother Coupeau without your help, and I can certainly bury her without your help also. I already once before gave you a bit of my mind; I pick up stray cats, I'm not likely to leave your mother in the mire."

Then Madame Lorilleux burst into tears and Lantier had to prevent her from leaving. The argument became so noisy that Madame Lerat felt she had to go quietly into the little room and glance tearfully at her dead mother, as though fearing to find her awake and listening. Just at this moment the girls playing in the courtyard, led by Nana, began singing again.

"Mon Dieu! how those children grate on one's nerves with their singing!" said Gervaise, all upset and on the point of sobbing with impatience and sadness. Turning to the hatter, she said:

"Do please make them leave off, and send Nana back to the concierge's with a kick."

Madame Lerat and Madame Lorilleux went away to eat lunch, promising to return. The Coupeaus sat down to eat a bite without much appetite, feeling hesitant about even raising a fork. After lunch Lantier went to the undertaker's again with the ninety francs. Thirty had come from Madame Lerat and Gervaise had run, with her hair all loose, to borrow sixty francs from Goujet.

Several of the neighbors called in the afternoon, mainly out of curiosity. They went into the little room to make the sign of the cross and sprinkle some holy water with the boxwood sprig. Then they sat in the shop and talked endlessly about the departed. Mademoiselle Remanjou had noticed that her right eye was still open. Madame Gaudron maintained that she had a fine complexion for her age. Madame Fauconnier kept repeating that she had seen her having coffee only three days earlier.

Towards evening the Coupeaus were beginning to have had enough of it. It was too great an affliction for a family to have to keep a corpse so long a time. The government ought to have made a new law on the subject. All through another evening, another night, and another morning—no! it would never come to an end. When one no longer weeps, grief turns to irritation; is it not so? One would end by misbehaving oneself. Mother Coupeau, dumb and stiff in the depths of the narrow chamber, was spreading more and more over the lodging and becoming heavy enough to crush the people in it. And the family, in spite of itself, gradually fell into the ordinary mode of life, and lost some portion of its respect.

"You must have a mouthful with us," said Gervaise to Madame Lerat and Madame Lorilleux, when they returned. "We're too sad; we must keep together."

They laid the cloth on the work-table. Each one, on seeing the plates, thought of the feastings they had had on it. Lantier had returned. Lorilleux came down. A pastry-cook had just brought a meat pie, for the laundress was too upset to attend to any cooking. As they were taking their seats, Boche came to say that Monsieur Marescot asked to be admitted, and the landlord appeared, looking very grave, and wearing a broad decoration on his frock-coat. He bowed in silence and went straight to the little room, where he knelt down. All the family, leaving the table, stood up, greatly impressed. Monsieur Marescot, having finished his devotions, passed into the shop and said to the Coupeaus:

"I have come for the two quarters' rent that's overdue. Are you prepared to pay?"

"No, sir, not quite," stammered Gervaise, greatly put out at hearing this mentioned before the Lorilleuxs. "You see, with the misfortune which has fallen upon us—"

"No doubt, but everyone has their troubles," resumed the landlord, spreading out his immense fingers, which indicated the former workman. "I am very sorry, but I cannot wait any longer. If I am not paid by the morning after to-morrow, I shall be obliged to have you put out."

Gervaise, struck dumb, imploringly clasped her hands, her eyes full of tears. With an energetic shake of his big bony head, he gave her to understand that supplications were useless. Besides, the respect due to the dead forbade all discussion. He discreetly retired, walking backwards.

"A thousand pardons for having disturbed you," murmured he. "The morning after to-morrow; do not forget."

And as on withdrawing he again passed before the little room, he saluted the corpse a last time through the wide open door by devoutly bending his knee.

They began eating and gobbled the food down very quickly, so as not to seem to be enjoying it, only slowing down when they reached the dessert. Occasionally Gervaise or one of the sisters would get up, still holding her napkin, to look into the small room. They made plenty of strong coffee to keep them awake through the night. The Poissons arrived about eight and were invited for coffee.

Then Lantier, who had been watching Gervaise's face, seemed to seize an opportunity that he had been waiting for ever since the morning. In speaking of the indecency of landlords who entered houses of mourning to demand their money, he said:

"He's a Jesuit, the beast, with his air of officiating at a mass! But in your place, I'd just chuck up the shop altogether."

Gervaise, quite worn out and feeling weak and nervous, gave way and replied:

"Yes, I shall certainly not wait for the bailiffs. Ah! it's more than I can bear—more than I can bear."

The Lorilleuxs, delighted at the idea that Clump-clump would no longer have a shop, approved the plan immensely. One could hardly conceive the great cost a shop was. If she only earned three francs working for others she at least had no expenses; she did not risk losing large sums of money. They repeated this argument to Coupeau, urging him on; he drank a great deal and remained in a continuous fit of sensibility, weeping all day by himself in his plate. As the laundress seemed to be allowing herself to be convinced, Lantier looked at the Poissons and winked. And tall Virginie intervened, making herself most amiable.

"You know, we might arrange the matter between us. I would relieve you of the rest of the lease and settle your matter with the landlord. In short, you would not be worried nearly so much."

"No thanks," declared Gervaise, shaking herself as though she felt a shudder pass over her. "I'll work; I've got my two arms, thank heaven! to help me out of my difficulties."

"We can talk about it some other time," the hatter hastened to put in. "It's scarcely the thing to do so this evening. Some other time—in the morning for instance."

At this moment, Madame Lerat, who had gone into the little room, uttered a faint cry. She had had a fright because she had found the candle burnt out. They all busied themselves in lighting another; they shook their heads, saying that it was not a good sign when the light went out beside a corpse.

The wake commenced. Coupeau had gone to lie down, not to sleep, said he, but to think; and five minutes afterwards he was snoring. When they sent Nana off to sleep at the Boches' she cried; she had been looking forward ever since the morning to being nice and warm in her good friend Lantier's big bed. The Poissons stayed till midnight. Some hot wine had been made in a salad-bowl because the coffee affected the ladies' nerves too much. The conversation became tenderly effusive. Virginie talked of the country: she would like to be buried at the corner of a wood with wild flowers on her grave. Madame Lerat had already put by in her wardrobe the sheet for her shroud, and she kept it perfumed with a bunch of lavender; she wished always to have a nice smell under her nose when she would be eating the dandelions by the roots. Then, with no sort of transition, the policeman related that he had arrested a fine girl that morning who had been stealing from a pork-butcher's shop; on undressing her at the commissary of police's they had found ten sausages hanging round her body. And Madame Lorilleux having remarked, with a look of disgust, that she would not eat any of those sausages, the party burst into a gentle laugh. The wake became livelier, though not ceasing to preserve appearances.

But just as they were finishing the hot wine a peculiar noise, a dull trickling sound, issued from the little room. All raised their heads and looked at each other.

"It's nothing," said Lantier quietly, lowering his voice. "She's emptying."

The explanation caused the others to nod their heads in a reassured way, and they replaced their glasses on the table.

When the Poissons left for home, Lantier left also, saying he would sleep with a friend and leave his bed for the ladies in case they wanted to take turns napping. Lorilleux went upstairs to bed. Gervaise and the two sisters arranged themselves by the stove where they huddled together close to the warmth, talking quietly. Coupeau was still snoring.

Madame Lorilleux was complaining that she didn't have a black dress and asked Gervaise about the black skirt they had given mother Coupeau on her saint's day. Gervaise went to look for it. Madame Lorilleux then wanted some of the old linen and mentioned the bed, the wardrobe, and the two chairs as she looked around for other odds and ends. Madame Lerat had to serve as peace maker when a quarrel nearly broke out. She pointed out that as the Coupeaus had cared for their mother, they deserved to keep the few things she had left. Soon they were all dozing around the stove.

The night seemed terribly long to them. Now and again they shook themselves, drank some coffee and stretched their necks in the direction of the little room, where the candle, which was not to be snuffed, was burning with a dull red flame, flickering the more because of the black soot on the wick. Towards morning, they shivered, in spite of the great heat of the stove. Anguish, and the fatigue of having talked too much was stifling them, whilst their mouths were parched, and their eyes ached. Madame Lerat threw herself on Lantier's bed, and snored as loud as a man; whilst the other two, their heads falling forward, and almost touching their knees, slept before the fire. At daybreak, a shudder awoke them. Mother Coupeau's candle had again gone out; and as, in the obscurity, the dull trickling sound recommenced, Madame Lorilleux gave the explanation of it anew in a loud voice, so as to reassure herself:

"She's emptying," repeated she, lighting another candle.

The funeral was to take place at half-past ten. A nice morning to add to the night and the day before! Gervaise, though without a sou, said she would have given a hundred francs to anybody who would have come and taken mother Coupeau away three hours sooner. No, one may love people, but they are too great a weight when they are dead; and the more one has loved them, the sooner one would like to be rid of their bodies.

The morning of a funeral is, fortunately, full of diversions. One has all sorts of preparations to make. To begin with, they lunched. Then it happened to be old Bazouge, the undertaker's helper, who lived on the sixth floor, who brought the coffin and the sack of bran. He was never sober, the worthy fellow. At eight o'clock that day, he was still lively from the booze of the day before.

"This is for here, isn't it?" asked he.

And he laid down the coffin, which creaked like a new box. But as he was throwing the sack of bran on one side, he stood with a look of amazement in his eyes, his mouth opened wide, on beholding Gervaise before him.

"Beg pardon, excuse me. I've made a mistake," stammered he. "I was told it was for you."

He had already taken up the sack again, and the laundress was obliged to call to him:

"Leave it alone, it's for here."

"Ah! Mon Dieu! Now I understand!" resumed he, slapping his thigh. "It's for the old lady."

Gervaise had turned quite pale. Old Bazouge had brought the coffin for her. By way of apology, he tried to be gallant, and continued:

"I'm not to blame, am I? It was said yesterday that someone on the ground floor had passed away. Then I thought—you know, in our business, these things enter by one ear and go out by the other. All the same, my compliments to you. As late as possible, eh? That's best, though life isn't always amusing; ah! no, by no means."

As Gervaise listened to him, she draw back, afraid he would grab her and take her away in the box. She remembered the time before, when he had told her he knew of women who would thank him to come and get them. Well, she wasn't ready yet. Mon Dieu! The thought sent chills down her spine. Her life may have been bitter, but she wasn't ready to give it up yet. No, she would starve for years first.

"He's abominably drunk," murmured she, with an air of disgust mingled with dread. "They at least oughtn't to send us tipplers. We pay dear enough."

Then he became insolent, and jeered:

"See here, little woman, it's only put off until another time. I'm entirely at your service, remember! You've only to make me a sign. I'm the ladies' consoler. And don't spit on old Bazouge, because he's held in his arms finer ones than you, who let themselves be tucked in without a murmur, very pleased to continue their by-by in the dark."

"Hold your tongue, old Bazouge!" said Lorilleux severely, having hastened to the spot on hearing the noise, "such jokes are highly improper. If we complained about you, you would get the sack. Come, be off, as you've no respect for principles."

Bazouge moved away, but one could hear him stuttering as he dragged along the pavement:

"Well! What? Principles! There's no such thing as principles, there's no such thing as principles—there's only common decency!"

At length ten o'clock struck. The hearse was late. There were already several people in the shop, friends and neighbors—Monsieur Madinier, My-Boots, Madame Gaudron, Mademoiselle Remanjou; and every minute, a man's or a woman's head was thrust out of the gaping opening of the door between the closed shutters, to see if that creeping hearse was in sight. The family, all together in the back room, was shaking hands. Short pauses occurred interrupted by rapid whisperings, a tiresome and feverish waiting with sudden rushes of skirts—Madame Lorilleux who had forgotten her handkerchief, or else Madame Lerat who was trying to borrow a prayer-book. Everyone, on arriving, beheld the open coffin in the centre of the little room before the bed; and in spite of oneself, each stood covertly studying it, calculating that plump mother Coupeau would never fit into it. They all looked at each other with this thought in their eyes, though without communicating it. But there was a slight pushing at the front door. Monsieur Madinier, extending his arms, came and said in a low grave voice:

"Here they are!"

It was not the hearse though. Four helpers entered hastily in single file, with their red faces, their hands all lumpy like persons in the habit of moving heavy things, and their rusty black clothes worn and frayed from constant rubbing against coffins. Old Bazouge walked first, very drunk and very proper. As soon as he was at work he found his equilibrium. They did not utter a word, but slightly bowed their heads, already weighing mother Coupeau with a glance. And they did not dawdle; the poor old woman was packed in, in the time one takes to sneeze. A young fellow with a squint, the smallest of the men, poured the bran into the coffin and spread it out. The tall and thin one spread the winding sheet over the bran. Then, two at the feet and two at the head, all four took hold of the body and lifted it. Mother Coupeau was in the box, but it was a tight fit. She touched on every side.

The undertaker's helpers were now standing up and waiting; the little one with the squint took the coffin lid, by way of inviting the family to bid their last farewell, whilst Bazouge had filled his mouth with nails and was holding the hammer in readiness. Then Coupeau, his two sisters and Gervaise threw themselves on their knees and kissed the mamma who was going away, weeping bitterly, the hot tears falling on and streaming down the stiff face now cold as ice. There was a prolonged sound of sobbing. The lid was placed on, and old Bazouge knocked the nails in with the style of a packer, two blows for each; and they none of them could hear any longer their own weeping in that din, which resembled the noise of furniture being repaired. It was over. The time for starting had arrived.

"What a fuss to make at such a time!" said Madame Lorilleux to her husband as she caught sight of the hearse before the door.

The hearse was creating quite a revolution in the neighborhood. The tripe-seller called to the grocer's men, the little clockmaker came out on to the pavement, the neighbors leant out of their windows; and all these people talked about the scallop with its white cotton fringe. Ah! the Coupeaus would have done better to have paid their debts. But as the Lorilleuxs said, when one is proud it shows itself everywhere and in spite of everything.

"It's shameful!" Gervaise was saying at the same moment, speaking of the chainmaker and his wife. "To think that those skinflints have not even brought a bunch of violets for their mother!"

The Lorilleuxs, true enough, had come empty-handed. Madame Lerat had given a wreath of artificial flowers. And a wreath of immortelles and a bouquet bought by the Coupeaus were also placed on the coffin. The undertaker's helpers had to give a mighty heave to lift the coffin and carry it to the hearse. It was some time before the procession was formed. Coupeau and Lorilleux, in frock coats and with their hats in their hands, were chief mourners. The first, in his emotion which two glasses of white wine early in the morning had helped to sustain, clung to his brother-in-law's arm, with no strength in his legs, and a violent headache. Then followed the other men—Monsieur Madinier, very grave and all in black; My-Boots, wearing a great-coat over his blouse; Boche, whose yellow trousers produced the effect of a petard; Lantier, Gaudron, Bibi-the-Smoker, Poisson and others. The ladies came next—in the first row Madame Lorilleux, dragging the deceased's skirt, which she had altered; Madame Lerat, hiding under a shawl her hastily got-up mourning, a gown with lilac trimmings; and following them, Virginie, Madame Gaudron, Madame Fauconnier, Mademoiselle Remanjou and the rest. When the hearse started and slowly descended the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, amidst signs of the cross and heads bared, the four helpers took the lead, two in front, the two others on the right and left. Gervaise had remained behind to close the shop. She left Nana with Madame Boche and ran to rejoin the procession, whilst the child, firmly held by the concierge under the porch, watched with a deeply interested gaze her grandmother disappear at the end of the street in that beautiful carriage.

At the moment when Gervaise caught up with the procession, Goujet arrived from another direction. He nodded to her so sympathetically that she was reminded of how unhappy she was, and began to cry again as Goujet took his place with the men.

The ceremony at the church was soon got through. The mass dragged a little, though, because the priest was very old. My-Boots and Bibi-the-Smoker preferred to remain outside on account of the collection. Monsieur Madinier studied the priests all the while, and communicated his observations to Lantier. Those jokers, though so glib with their Latin, did not even know a word of what they were saying. They buried a person just in the same way that they would have baptized or married him, without the least feeling in their heart.

Happily, the cemetery was not far off, the little cemetery of La Chapelle, a bit of a garden which opened on to the Rue Marcadet. The procession arrived disbanded, with stampings of feet and everybody talking of his own affairs. The hard earth resounded, and many would have liked to have moved about to keep themselves warm. The gaping hole beside which the coffin was laid was already frozen over, and looked white and stony, like a plaster quarry; and the followers, grouped round little heaps of gravel, did not find it pleasant standing in such piercing cold, whilst looking at the hole likewise bored them. At length a priest in a surplice came out of a little cottage. He shivered, and one could see his steaming breath at each de profundis that he uttered. At the final sign of the cross he bolted off, without the least desire to go through the service again. The sexton took his shovel, but on account of the frost, he was only able to detach large lumps of earth, which beat a fine tune down below, a regular bombardment of the coffin, an enfilade of artillery sufficient to make one think the wood was splitting. One may be a cynic; nevertheless that sort of music soon upsets one's stomach. The weeping recommenced. They moved off, they even got outside, but they still heard the detonations. My-Boots, blowing on his fingers, uttered an observation aloud.

"Tonnerre de Dieu! poor mother Coupeau won't feel very warm!"

"Ladies and gentlemen," said the zinc-worker to the few friends who remained in the street with the family, "will you permit us to offer you some refreshments?"

He led the way to a wine shop in the Rue Marcadet, the "Arrival at the Cemetery." Gervaise, remaining outside, called Goujet, who was moving off, after again nodding to her. Why didn't he accept a glass of wine? He was in a hurry; he was going back to the workshop. Then they looked at each other a moment without speaking.

"I must ask your pardon for troubling you about the sixty francs," at length murmured the laundress. "I was half crazy, I thought of you—"

"Oh! don't mention it; you're fully forgiven," interrupted the blacksmith. "And you know, I am quite at your service if any misfortune should overtake you. But don't say anything to mamma, because she has her ideas, and I don't wish to cause her annoyance."

She gazed at him. He seemed to her such a good man, and sad-looking, and so handsome. She was on the verge of accepting his former proposal, to go away with him and find happiness together somewhere else. Then an evil thought came to her. It was the idea of borrowing the six months' back rent from him.

She trembled and resumed in a caressing tone of voice:

"We're still friends, aren't we?"

He shook his head as he answered:

"Yes, we'll always be friends. It's just that, you know, all is over between us."

And he went off with long strides, leaving Gervaise bewildered, listening to his last words which rang in her ears with the clang of a big bell. On entering the wine shop, she seemed to hear a hollow voice within her which said, "All is over, well! All is over; there is nothing more for me to do if all is over!" Sitting down, she swallowed a mouthful of bread and cheese, and emptied a glass full of wine which she found before her.

The wine shop was a single, long room with a low ceiling occupied by two large tables on which loaves of bread, large chunks of Brie cheese and bottles of wine were set out. They ate informally, without a tablecloth. Near the stove at the back the undertaker's helpers were finishing their lunch.

"Mon Dieu!" exclaimed Monsieur Madinier, "we each have our time. The old folks make room for the young ones. Your lodging will seem very empty to you now when you go home."

"Oh! my brother is going to give notice," said Madame Lorilleux quickly. "That shop's ruined."

They had been working upon Coupeau. Everyone was urging him to give up the lease. Madame Lerat herself, who had been on very good terms with Lantier and Virginie for some time past, and who was tickled with the idea that they were a trifle smitten with each other, talked of bankruptcy and prison, putting on the most terrified airs. And suddenly, the zinc-worker, already overdosed with liquor, flew into a passion, his emotion turned to fury.

"Listen," cried he, poking his nose in his wife's face; "I intend that you shall listen to me! Your confounded head will always have its own way. But, this time, I intend to have mine, I warn you!"

"Ah! well," said Lantier, "one never yet brought her to reason by fair words; it wants a mallet to drive it into her head."

For a time they both went on at her. Meanwhile, the Brie was quickly disappearing and the wine bottles were pouring like fountains. Gervaise began to weaken under this persistent pounding. She answered nothing, but hurried herself, her mouth ever full, as though she had been very hungry. When they got tired, she gently raised her head and said,

"That's enough, isn't it? I don't care a straw for the shop! I want no more of it. Do you understand? It can go to the deuce! All is over!"

Then they ordered some more bread and cheese and talked business. The Poissons took the rest of the lease and agreed to be answerable for the two quarters' rent overdue. Boche, moreover, pompously agreed to the arrangement in the landlord's name. He even then and there let a lodging to the Coupeaus—the vacant one on the sixth floor, in the same passage as the Lorilleuxs' apartment. As for Lantier, well! He would like to keep his room, if it did not inconvenience the Poissons. The policeman bowed; it did not inconvenience him at all; friends always get on together, in spite of any difference in their political ideas. And Lantier, without mixing himself up any more in the matter, like a man who has at length settled his little business, helped himself to an enormous slice of bread and cheese; he leant back in his chair and ate devoutly, his blood tingling beneath his skin, his whole body burning with a sly joy, and he blinked his eyes to peep first at Gervaise, and then at Virginie.

"Hi! Old Bazouge!" called Coupeau, "come and have a drink. We're not proud; we're all workers."

The four undertaker's helpers, who had started to leave, came back to raise glasses with the group. They thought that the lady had weighed quite a bit and they had certainly earned a glass of wine. Old Bazouge gazed steadily at Gervaise without saying a word. It made her feel uneasy though and she got up and left the men who were beginning to show signs of being drunk. Coupeau began to sob again, saying he was feeling very sad.

That evening when Gervaise found herself at home again, she remained in a stupefied state on a chair. It seemed to her that the rooms were immense and deserted. Really, it would be a good riddance. But it was certainly not only mother Coupeau that she had left at the bottom of the hole in the little garden of the Rue Marcadet. She missed too many things, most likely a part of her life, and her shop, and her pride of being an employer, and other feelings besides, which she had buried on that day. Yes, the walls were bare, and her heart also; it was a complete clear out, a tumble into the pit. And she felt too tired; she would pick herself up again later on if she could.

At ten o'clock, when undressing, Nana cried and stamped. She wanted to sleep in mother Coupeau's bed. Her mother tried to frighten her; but the child was too precocious. Corpses only filled her with a great curiosity; so that, for the sake of peace, she was allowed to lie down in mother Coupeau's place. She liked big beds, the chit; she spread herself out and rolled about. She slept uncommonly well that night in the warm and pleasant feather bed.

CHAPTER X

The Coupeaus' new lodging was on the sixth floor, staircase B. After passing Mademoiselle Remanjou's door, you took the corridor to the left, and then turned again further along. The first door was for the apartment of the Bijards. Almost opposite, in an airless corner under a small staircase leading to the roof, was where Pere Bru slept. Two doors further was Bazouge's room and the Coupeaus were opposite him, overlooking the court, with one room and a closet. There were only two more doors along the corridor before reaching that of the Lorilleuxs at the far end.

A room and a closet, no more. The Coupeaus perched there now. And the room was scarcely larger than one's hand. And they had to do everything in there—eat, sleep, and all the rest. Nana's bed just squeezed into the closet; she had to dress in her father and mother's room, and her door was kept open at night-time so that she should not be suffocated. There was so little space that Gervaise had left many things in the shop for the Poissons. A bed, a table, and four chairs completely filled their new apartment but she didn't have the courage to part with her old bureau and so it blocked off half the window. This made the room dark and gloomy, especially since one shutter was stuck shut. Gervaise was now so fat that there wasn't room for her in the limited window space and she had to lean sideways and crane her neck if she wanted to see the courtyard.

During the first few days, the laundress would continually sit down and cry. It seemed to her too hard, not being able to move about in her home, after having been used to so much room. She felt stifled; she remained at the window for hours, squeezed between the wall and the drawers and getting a stiff neck. It was only there that she could breathe freely. However, the courtyard inspired rather melancholy thoughts. Opposite her, on the sunny side, she would see that same window she had dreamed about long ago where the spring brought scarlet vines. Her own room was on the shady side where pots of mignonette died within a week. Oh, this wasn't at all the sort of life she had dreamed of. She had to wallow in filth instead of having flowers all about her.

On leaning out one day, Gervaise experienced a peculiar sensation: she fancied she beheld herself down below, near the concierge's room under the porch, her nose in the air, and examining the house for the first time; and this leap thirteen years backwards caused her heart to throb. The courtyard was a little dingier and the walls more stained, otherwise it hadn't changed much. But she herself felt terribly changed and worn. To begin with, she was no longer below, her face raised to heaven, feeling content and courageous and aspiring to a handsome lodging. She was right up under the roof, among the most wretched, in the dirtiest hole, the part that never received a ray of sunshine. And that explained her tears; she could scarcely feel enchanted with her fate.

However, when Gervaise had grown somewhat used to it, the early days of the little family in their new home did not pass off so badly. The winter was almost over, and the trifle of money received for the furniture sold to Virginie helped to make things comfortable. Then with the fine weather came a piece of luck, Coupeau was engaged to work in the country at Etampes; and he was there for nearly three months without once getting drunk, cured for a time by the fresh air. One has no idea what a quench it is to the tippler's thirst to leave Paris where the very streets are full of the fumes of wine and brandy. On his return he was as fresh as a rose, and he brought back in his pocket four hundred francs with which they paid the two overdue quarters' rent at the shop that the Poissons had become answerable for, and also the most pressing of their little debts in the neighborhood. Gervaise thus opened two or three streets through which she had not passed for a long time.

She had naturally become an ironer again. Madame Fauconnier was quite good-hearted if you flattered her a bit, and she was happy to take Gervaise back, even paying her the same three francs a day as her best worker. This was out of respect for her former status as an employer. The household seemed to be getting on well and Gervaise looked forward to the day when all the debts would be paid. Hard work and economy would solve all their money troubles. Unfortunately, she dreamed of this in the warm satisfaction of the large sum earned by her husband. Soon, she said that the good things never lasted and took things as they came.

What the Coupeaus most suffered from at that time was seeing the Poissons installing themselves at their former shop. They were not naturally of a particularly jealous disposition, but people aggravated them by purposely expressing amazement in their presence at the embellishments of their successors. The Boches and the Lorilleuxs especially, never tired. According to them, no one had ever seen so beautiful a shop. They were also continually mentioning the filthy state in which the Poissons had found the premises, saying that it had cost thirty francs for the cleaning alone.

After much deliberation, Virginie had decided to open a shop specializing in candies, chocolate, coffee and tea. Lantier had advised this, saying there was much money to be made from such delicacies. The shop was stylishly painted black with yellow stripes. Three carpenters worked for eight days on the interior, putting up shelves, display cases and counters. Poisson's small inheritance must have been almost completely used, but Virginie was ecstatic. The Lorilleuxs and the Boches made sure that Gervaise did not miss a single improvement and chuckled to themselves while watching her expression.

There was also a question of a man beneath all this. It was reported that Lantier had broken off with Gervaise. The neighborhood declared that it was quite right. In short, it gave a moral tone to the street. And all the honor of the separation was accorded to the crafty hatter on whom all the ladies continued to dote. Some said that she was still crazy about him and he had to slap her to make her leave him alone. Of course, no one told the actual truth. It was too simple and not interesting enough.

Actually Lantier climbed to the sixth floor to see her whenever he felt the impulse. Mademoiselle Remanjou had often seen him coming out of the Coupeaus' at odd hours.

The situation was even more complicated by neighborhood gossip linking Lantier and Virginie. The neighbors were a bit too hasty in this also; he had not even reached the stage of buttock-pinching with her. Still, the Lorilleuxs delighted in talking sympathetically to Gervaise about the affair between Lantier and Virginie. The Boches maintained they had never seen a more handsome couple. The odd thing in all this was that the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or seemed to have no objection to this new arrangement which everyone thought was progressing nicely. Those who had been so harsh to Gervaise were now quite lenient toward Virginie.

Gervaise had previously heard numerous reports about Lantier's affairs with all sorts of girls on the street and they had bothered her so little that she hadn't even felt enough resentment to break off the affair. However, this new intrigue with Virginie wasn't quite so easy to accept because she was sure that the two of them were just out to spite her. She hid her resentment though to avoid giving any satisfaction to her enemies. Mademoiselle Remanjou thought that Gervaise had words with Lantier over this because one afternoon she heard the sound of a slap. There was certainly a quarrel because Lantier stopped speaking to Gervaise for a couple of weeks, but then he was the first one to make up and things seemed to go along the same as before.

Coupeau found all this most amusing. The complacent husband who had been blind to his own situation laughed heartily at Poisson's predicament. Then Coupeau even teased Gervaise. Her lovers always dropped her. First the blacksmith and now the hatmaker. The trouble was that she got involved with undependable trades. She should take up with a mason, a good solid man. He said such things as if he were joking, but they upset Gervaise because his small grey eyes seemed to be boring right into her.

On evenings when Coupeau became bored being alone with his wife up in their tiny hole under the roof, he would go down for Lantier and invite him up. He thought their dump was too dreary without Lantier's company so he patched things up between Gervaise and Lantier whenever they had a falling out.

In the midst of all this Lantier put on the most consequential airs. He showed himself both paternal and dignified. On three successive occasions he had prevented a quarrel between the Coupeaus and the Poissons. The good understanding between the two families formed a part of his contentment. Thanks to the tender though firm glances with which he watched over Gervaise and Virginie, they always pretended to entertain a great friendship for each other. He reigned over both blonde and brunette with the tranquillity of a pasha, and fattened on his cunning. The rogue was still digesting the Coupeaus when he already began to devour the Poissons. Oh, it did not inconvenience him much! As soon as one shop was swallowed, he started on a second. It was only men of his sort who ever have any luck.

It was in June of that year that Nana was confirmed. She was then nearly thirteen years old, as tall as an asparagus shoot run to seed, and had a bold, impudent air about her. The year before she had been sent away from the catechism class on account of her bad behavior; and the priest had only allowed her to join it this time through fear of losing her altogether, and of casting one more heathen onto the street. Nana danced for joy as she thought of the white dress. The Lorilleuxs, being godfather and godmother, had promised to provide it, and took care to let everyone in the house know of their present. Madame Lerat was to give the veil and the cap, Virginie the purse, and Lantier the prayer-book; so that the Coupeaus looked forward to the ceremony without any great anxiety. Even the Poissons, wishing to give a house-warming, chose this occasion, no doubt on the hatter's advice. They invited the Coupeaus and the Boches, whose little girl was also going to be confirmed. They provided a leg of mutton and trimmings for the evening in question.

It so happened that on the evening before, Coupeau returned home in a most abominable condition, just as Nana was lost in admiration before the presents spread out on the top of the chest of drawers. The Paris atmosphere was getting the better of him again; and he fell foul of his wife and child with drunken arguments and disgusting language which no one should have uttered at such a time. Nana herself was beginning to get hold of some very bad expressions in the midst of the filthy conversations she was continually hearing. On the days when there was a row, she would often call her mother an old camel and a cow.

"Where's my food?" yelled the zinc-worker. "I want my soup, you couple of jades! There's females for you, always thinking of finery! I'll sit on the gee-gaws, you know, if I don't get my soup!"

"He's unbearable when he's drunk," murmured Gervaise, out of patience; and turning towards him, she exclaimed:

"It's warming up, don't bother us."

Nana was being modest, because she thought it nice on such a day. She continued to look at the presents on the chest of drawers, affectedly lowering her eyelids and pretending not to understand her father's naughty words. But the zinc-worker was an awful plague on the nights when he had had too much. Poking his face right against her neck, he said:

"I'll give you white dresses! So the finery tickles your fancy. They excite your imagination. Just you cut away from there, you ugly little brat! Move your hands about, bundle them all into a drawer!"

Nana, with bowed head, did not answer a word. She had taken up the little tulle cap and was asking her mother how much it cost. And as Coupeau thrust out his hand to seize hold of the cap, it was Gervaise who pushed him aside exclaiming:

"Do leave the child alone! She's very good, she's doing no harm."

Then the zinc-worker let out in real earnest.

"Ah! the viragos! The mother and daughter, they make the pair. It's a nice thing to go to church just to leer at the men. Dare to say it isn't true, little slattern! I'll dress you in a sack, just to disgust you, you and your priests. I don't want you to be taught anything worse than you know already. Mon Dieu! Just listen to me, both of you!"

At this Nana turned round in a fury, whilst Gervaise had to spread out her arms to protect the things which Coupeau talked of tearing. The child looked her father straight in the face; then, forgetting the modest bearing inculcated by her confessor, she said, clinching her teeth: "Pig!"

As soon as the zinc-worker had had his soup he went off to sleep. On the morrow he awoke in a very good humor. He still felt a little of the booze of the day before but only just sufficient to make him amiable. He assisted at the dressing of the child, deeply affected by the white dress and finding that a mere nothing gave the little vermin quite the look of a young lady.

The two families started off together for the church. Nana and Pauline walked first, their prayer-books in their hands and holding down their veils on account of the wind; they did not speak but were bursting with delight at seeing people come to their shop-doors, and they smiled primly and devoutly every time they heard anyone say as they passed that they looked very nice. Madame Boche and Madame Lorilleux lagged behind, because they were interchanging their ideas about Clump-clump, a gobble-all, whose daughter would never have been confirmed if the relations had not found everything for her; yes, everything, even a new chemise, out of respect for the holy altar. Madame Lorilleux was rather concerned about the dress, calling Nana a dirty thing every time the child got dust on her skirt by brushing against the store fronts.

At church Coupeau wept all the time. It was stupid but he could not help it. It affected him to see the priest holding out his arms and all the little girls, looking like angels, pass before him, clasping their hands; and the music of the organ stirred up his stomach and the pleasant smell of the incense forced him to sniff, the same as though someone had thrust a bouquet of flowers into his face. In short he saw everything cerulean, his heart was touched. Anyway, other sensitive souls around him were wetting their handkerchiefs. This was a beautiful day, the most beautiful of his life. After leaving the church, Coupeau went for a drink with Lorilleux, who had remained dry-eyed.

That evening the Poissons' house-warming was very lively. Friendship reigned without a hitch from one end of the feast to the other. When bad times arrive one thus comes in for some pleasant evenings, hours during which sworn enemies love each other. Lantier, with Gervaise on his left and Virginie on his right, was most amiable to both of them, lavishing little tender caresses like a cock who desires peace in his poultry-yard. But the queens of the feast were the two little ones, Nana and Pauline, who had been allowed to keep on their things; they sat bolt upright through fear of spilling anything on their white dresses and at every mouthful they were told to hold up their chins so as to swallow cleanly. Nana, greatly bored by all this fuss, ended by slobbering her wine over the body of her dress, so it was taken off and the stains were at once washed out in a glass of water.

Then at dessert the children's future careers were gravely discussed.

Madame Boche had decided that Pauline would enter a shop to learn how to punch designs on gold and silver. That paid five or six francs a day. Gervaise didn't know yet because Nana had never indicated any preference.

"In your place," said Madame Lerat, "I would bring Nana up as an artificial flower-maker. It is a pleasant and clean employment."

"Flower-makers?" muttered Lorilleux. "Every one of them might as well walk the streets."

"Well, what about me?" objected Madame Lerat, pursing her lips. "You're certainly not very polite. I assure you that I don't lie down for anyone who whistles."

Then all the rest joined together in hushing her. "Madame Lerat! Oh, Madame Lerat!" By side glances they reminded her of the two girls, fresh from communion, who were burying their noses in their glasses to keep from laughing out loud. The men had been very careful, for propriety's sake, to use only suitable language, but Madame Lerat refused to follow their example. She flattered herself on her command of language, as she had often been complimented on the way she could say anything before children, without any offence to decency.

"Just you listen, there are some very fine women among the flower-makers!" she insisted. "They're just like other women and they show good taste when they choose to commit a sin."

"Mon Dieu!" interrupted Gervaise, "I've no dislike for artificial flower-making. Only it must please Nana, that's all I care about; one should never thwart children on the question of a vocation. Come Nana, don't be stupid; tell me now, would you like to make flowers?"

The child was leaning over her plate gathering up the cake crumbs with her wet finger, which she afterwards sucked. She did not hurry herself. She grinned in her vicious way.

"Why yes, mamma, I should like to," she ended by declaring.

Then the matter was at once settled. Coupeau was quite willing that Madame Lerat should take the child with her on the morrow to the place where she worked in the Rue du Caire. And they all talked very gravely of the duties of life. Boche said that Nana and Pauline were women now that they had partaken of communion. Poisson added that for the future they ought to know how to cook, mend socks and look after a house. Something was even said of their marrying, and of the children they would some day have. The youngsters listened, laughing to themselves, elated by the thought of being women. What pleased them the most was when Lantier teased them, asking if they didn't already have little husbands. Nana eventually admitted that she cared a great deal for Victor Fauconnier, son of her mother's employer.

"Ah well," said Madame Lorilleux to the Boches, as they were all leaving, "she's our goddaughter, but as they're going to put her into artificial flower-making, we don't wish to have anything more to do with her. Just one more for the boulevards. She'll be leading them a merry chase before six months are over."

On going up to bed, the Coupeaus agreed that everything had passed off well and that the Poissons were not at all bad people. Gervaise even considered the shop was nicely got up. She was surprised to discover that it hadn't pained her at all to spend an evening there. While Nana was getting ready for bed she contemplated her white dress and asked her mother if the young lady on the third floor had had one like it when she was married last month.

This was their last happy day. Two years passed by, during which they sank deeper and deeper. The winters were especially hard for them. If they had bread to eat during the fine weather, the rain and cold came accompanied by famine, by drubbings before the empty cupboard, and by dinner-hours with nothing to eat in the little Siberia of their larder. Villainous December brought numbing freezing spells and the black misery of cold and dampness.

The first winter they occasionally had a fire, choosing to keep warm rather than to eat. But the second winter, the stove stood mute with its rust, adding a chill to the room, standing there like a cast-iron gravestone. And what took the life out of their limbs, what above all utterly crushed them was the rent. Oh! the January quarter, when there was not a radish in the house and old Boche came up with the bill! It was like a bitter storm, a regular tempest from the north. Monsieur Marescot then arrived the following Saturday, wrapped up in a good warm overcoat, his big hands hidden in woolen gloves; and he was for ever talking of turning them out, whilst the snow continued to fall outside, as though it were preparing a bed for them on the pavement with white sheets. To have paid the quarter's rent they would have sold their very flesh. It was the rent which emptied the larder and the stove.

No doubt the Coupeaus had only themselves to blame. Life may be a hard fight, but one always pulls through when one is orderly and economical—witness the Lorilleuxs, who paid their rent to the day, the money folded up in bits of dirty paper. But they, it is true, led a life of starved spiders, which would disgust one with hard work. Nana as yet earned nothing at flower-making; she even cost a good deal for her keep. At Madame Fauconnier's Gervaise was beginning to be looked down upon. She was no longer so expert. She bungled her work to such an extent that the mistress had reduced her wages to two francs a day, the price paid to the clumsiest bungler. But she was still proud, reminding everyone of her former status as boss of her own shop. When Madame Fauconnier hired Madame Putois, Gervaise was so annoyed at having to work beside her former employee that she stayed away for two weeks.

As for Coupeau, he did perhaps work, but in that case he certainly made a present of his labor to the Government, for since the time he returned from Etampes Gervaise had never seen the color of his money. She no longer looked in his hands when he came home on paydays. He arrived swinging his arms, his pockets empty, and often without his handkerchief; well, yes, he had lost his rag, or else some rascally comrade had sneaked it. At first he always fibbed; there was a donation to charity, or some money slipped through the hole in his pocket, or he paid off some imaginary debts. Later, he didn't even bother to make up anything. He had nothing left because it had all gone into his stomach.

Madame Boche suggested to Gervaise that she go to wait for him at the shop exit. This rarely worked though, because Coupeau's comrades would warn him and the money would disappear into his shoe or someone else's pocket.

Yes, it was their own fault if every season found them lower and lower. But that's the sort of thing one never tells oneself, especially when one is down in the mire. They accused their bad luck; they pretended that fate was against them. Their home had become a regular shambles where they wrangled the whole day long. However, they had not yet come to blows, with the exception of a few impulsive smacks, which somehow flew about at the height of their quarrels. The saddest part of the business was that they had opened the cage of affection; all their better feelings had taken flight, like so many canaries. The genial warmth of father, mother and child, when united together and wrapped up in each other, deserted them, and left them shivering, each in his or her own corner. All three—Coupeau, Gervaise and Nana—were always in the most abominable tempers, biting each other's noses off for nothing at all, their eyes full of hatred; and it seemed as though something had broken the mainspring of the family, the mechanism which, with happy people, causes hearts to beat in unison. Ah! it was certain Gervaise was no longer moved as she used to be when she saw Coupeau at the edge of a roof forty or fifty feet above the pavement. She would not have pushed him off herself, but if he had fallen accidentally, in truth it would have freed the earth of one who was of but little account. The days when they were more especially at enmity she would ask him why he didn't come back on a stretcher. She was awaiting it. It would be her good luck they were bringing back to her. What use was he—that drunkard? To make her weep, to devour all she possessed, to drive her to sin. Well! Men so useless as he should be thrown as quickly as possible into the hole and the polka of deliverance be danced over them. And when the mother said "Kill him!" the daughter responded "Knock him on the head!" Nana read all of the reports of accidents in the newspapers, and made reflections that were unnatural for a girl. Her father had such good luck an omnibus had knocked him down without even sobering him. Would the beggar never croak?

In the midst of her own poverty Gervaise suffered even more because other families around her were also starving to death. Their corner of the tenement housed the most wretched. There was not a family that ate every day.

Gervaise felt the most pity for Pere Bru in his cubbyhole under the staircase where he hibernated. Sometimes he stayed on his bed of straw without moving for days. Even hunger no longer drove him out since there was no use taking a walk when no one would invite him to dinner. Whenever he didn't show his face for several days, the neighbors would push open his door to see if his troubles were over. No, he was still alive, just barely. Even Death seemed to have neglected him. Whenever Gervaise had any bread she gave him the crusts. Even when she hated all men because of her husband, she still felt sincerely sorry for Pere Bru, the poor old man. They were letting him starve to death because he could no longer hold tools in his hand.

The laundress also suffered a great deal from the close neighborhood of Bazouge, the undertaker's helper. A simple partition, and a very thin one, separated the two rooms. He could not put his fingers down his throat without her hearing it. As soon as he came home of an evening she listened, in spite of herself, to everything he did. His black leather hat laid with a dull thud on the chest of drawers, like a shovelful of earth; the black cloak hung up and rustling against the walls like the wings of some night bird; all the black toggery flung into the middle of the room and filling it with the trappings of mourning. She heard him stamping about, felt anxious at the least movement, and was quite startled if he knocked against the furniture or rattled any of his crockery. This confounded drunkard was her preoccupation, filling her with a secret fear mingled with a desire to know. He, jolly, his belly full every day, his head all upside down, coughed, spat, sang "Mother Godichon," made use of many dirty expressions and fought with the four walls before finding his bedstead. And she remained quite pale, wondering what he could be doing in there. She imagined the most atrocious things. She got into her head that he must have brought a corpse home, and was stowing it away under his bedstead. Well! the newspapers had related something of the kind—an undertaker's helper who collected the coffins of little children at his home, so as to save himself trouble and to make only one journey to the cemetery.

For certain, directly Bazouge arrived, a smell of death seemed to permeate the partition. One might have thought oneself lodging against the Pere Lachaise cemetery, in the midst of the kingdom of moles. He was frightful, the animal, continually laughing all by himself, as though his profession enlivened him. Even when he had finished his rumpus and had laid himself on his back, he snored in a manner so extraordinary that it caused the laundress to hold her breath. For hours she listened attentively, with an idea that funerals were passing through her neighbor's room.

The worst was that, in spite of her terrors, something incited Gervaise to put her ear to the wall, the better to find out what was taking place. Bazouge had the same effect on her as handsome men have on good women: they would like to touch them. Well! if fear had not kept her back, Gervaise would have liked to have handled death, to see what it was like. She became so peculiar at times, holding her breath, listening attentively, expecting to unravel the secret through one of Bazouge's movements, that Coupeau would ask her with a chuckle if she had a fancy for that gravedigger next door. She got angry and talked of moving, the close proximity of this neighbor was so distasteful to her; and yet, in spite of herself, as soon as the old chap arrived, smelling like a cemetery, she became wrapped again in her reflections, with the excited and timorous air of a wife thinking of passing a knife through the marriage contract. Had he not twice offered to pack her up and carry her off with him to some place where the enjoyment of sleep is so great, that in a moment one forgets all one's wretchedness? Perhaps it was really very pleasant. Little by little the temptation to taste it became stronger. She would have liked to have tried it for a fortnight or a month. Oh! to sleep a month, especially in winter, the month when the rent became due, when the troubles of life were killing her! But it was not possible—one must sleep forever, if one commences to sleep for an hour; and the thought of this froze her, her desire for death departed before the eternal and stern friendship which the earth demanded.

However, one evening in January she knocked with both her fists against the partition. She had passed a frightful week, hustled by everyone, without a sou, and utterly discouraged. That evening she was not at all well, she shivered with fever, and seemed to see flames dancing about her. Then, instead of throwing herself out of the window, as she had at one moment thought of doing, she set to knocking and calling:

"Old Bazouge! Old Bazouge!"

The undertaker's helper was taking off his shoes and singing, "There were three lovely girls." He had probably had a good day, for he seemed even more maudlin than usual.

"Old Bazouge! Old Bazouge!" repeated Gervaise, raising her voice.

Did he not hear her then? She was ready to give herself at once; he might come and take her on his neck, and carry her off to the place where he carried his other women, the poor and the rich, whom he consoled. It pained her to hear his song, "There were three lovely girls," because she discerned in it the disdain of a man with too many sweethearts.

"What is it? what is it?" stuttered Bazouge; "who's unwell? We're coming, little woman!"

But the sound of this husky voice awoke Gervaise as though from a nightmare. And a feeling of horror ascended from her knees to her shoulders at the thought of seeing herself lugged along in the old fellow's arms, all stiff and her face as white as a china plate.

"Well! is there no one there now?" resumed Bazouge in silence. "Wait a bit, we're always ready to oblige the ladies."

"It's nothing, nothing," said the laundress at length in a choking voice. "I don't require anything, thanks."

She remained anxious, listening to old Bazouge grumbling himself to sleep, afraid to stir for fear he would think he heard her knocking again.

In her corner of misery, in the midst of her cares and the cares of others, Gervaise had, however, a beautiful example of courage in the home of her neighbors, the Bijards. Little Lalie, only eight years old and no larger than a sparrow, took care of the household as competently as a grown person. The job was not an easy one because she had two little tots, her brother Jules and her sister Henriette, aged three and five, to watch all day long while sweeping and cleaning.

Ever since Bijard had killed his wife with a kick in the stomach, Lalie had become the little mother of them all. Without saying a word, and of her own accord, she filled the place of one who had gone, to the extent that her brute of a father, no doubt to complete the resemblance, now belabored the daughter as he had formerly belabored the mother. Whenever he came home drunk, he required a woman to massacre. He did not even notice that Lalie was quite little; he would not have beaten some old trollop harder. Little Lalie, so thin it made you cry, took it all without a word of complaint in her beautiful, patient eyes. Never would she revolt. She bent her neck to protect her face and stifled her sobs so as not to alarm the neighbors. When her father got tired of kicking her, she would rest a bit until she got her strength back and then resume her work. It was part of her job, being beaten daily.

Gervaise entertained a great friendship for her little neighbor. She treated her as an equal, as a grown-up woman of experience. It must be said that Lalie had a pale and serious look, with the expression of an old girl. One might have thought her thirty on hearing her speak. She knew very well how to buy things, mend the clothes, attend to the home, and she spoke of the children as though she had already gone through two or thee nurseries in her time. It made people smile to hear her talk thus at eight years old; and then a lump would rise in their throats, and they would hurry away so as not to burst out crying. Gervaise drew the child towards her as much as she could, gave her all she could spare of food and old clothing. One day as she tried one of Nana's old dresses on her, she almost choked with anger on seeing her back covered with bruises, the skin off her elbow, which was still bleeding, and all her innocent flesh martyred and sticking to her bones. Well! Old Bazouge could get a box ready; she would not last long at that rate! But the child had begged the laundress not to say a word. She would not have her father bothered on her account. She took his part, affirming that he would not have been so wicked if it had not been for the drink. He was mad, he did not know what he did. Oh! she forgave him, because one ought to forgive madmen everything.

From that time Gervaise watched and prepared to interfere directly she heard Bijard coming up the stairs. But on most of the occasions she only caught some whack for her trouble. When she entered their room in the day-time, she often found Lalie tied to the foot of the iron bedstead; it was an idea of the locksmith's, before going out, to tie her legs and her body with some stout rope, without anyone being able to find out why—a mere whim of a brain diseased by drink, just for the sake, no doubt, of maintaining his tyranny over the child when he was no longer there. Lalie, as stiff as a stake, with pins and needles in her legs, remained whole days at the post. She once even passed a night there, Bijard having forgotten to come home. Whenever Gervaise, carried away by her indignation, talked of unfastening her, she implored her not to disturb the rope, because her father became furious if he did not find the knots tied the same way he had left them. Really, it wasn't so bad, it gave her a rest. She smiled as she said this though her legs were swollen and bruised. What upset her the most was that she couldn't do her work while tied to the bed. She could watch the children though, and even did some knitting, so as not to entirely waste the time.

The locksmith had thought of another little game too. He heated sous in the frying pan, then placed them on a corner of the mantle-piece; and he called Lalie, and told her to fetch a couple of pounds of bread. The child took up the sous unsuspectingly, uttered a cry and threw them on the ground, shaking her burnt hand. Then he flew into a fury. Who had saddled him with such a piece of carrion? She lost the money now! And he threatened to beat her to a jelly if she did not pick the sous up at once. When the child hesitated she received the first warning, a clout of such force that it made her see thirty-six candles. Speechless and with two big tears in the corners of her eyes, she would pick up the sous and go off, tossing them in the palm of her hand to cool them.

No, one could never imagine the ferocious ideas which may sprout from the depths of a drunkard's brain. One afternoon, for instance, Lalie having made everything tidy was playing with the children. The window was open, there was a draught, and the wind blowing along the passage gently shook the door.

"It's Monsieur Hardy," the child was saying. "Come in, Monsieur Hardy. Pray have the kindness to walk in."

And she curtsied before the door, she bowed to the wind. Henriette and Jules, behind her, also bowed, delighted with the game and splitting their sides with laughing, as though being tickled. She was quite rosy at seeing them so heartily amused and even found some pleasure in it on her own account, which generally only happened to her on the thirty-sixth day of each month.

"Good day, Monsieur Hardy. How do you do, Monsieur Hardy?"

But a rough hand pushed open the door, and Bijard entered. Then the scene changed. Henriette and Jules fell down flat against the wall; whilst Lalie, terrified, remained standing in the very middle of the curtsey. The locksmith held in his hand a big waggoner's whip, quite new, with a long white wooden handle, and a leather thong, terminating with a bit of whip-cord. He placed the whip in the corner against the bed and did not give the usual kick to the child who was already preparing herself by presenting her back. A chuckle exposed his blackened teeth and he was very lively, very drunk, his red face lighted up by some idea that amused him immensely.

"What's that?" said he. "You're playing the deuce, eh, you confounded young hussy! I could hear you dancing about from downstairs. Now then, come here! Nearer and full face. I don't want to sniff you from behind. Am I touching you that you tremble like a mass of giblets? Take my shoes off."

Lalie turned quite pale again and, amazed at not receiving her usual drubbing, took his shoes off. He had seated himself on the edge of the bed. He lay down with his clothes on and remained with his eyes open, watching the child move about the room. She busied herself with one thing and another, gradually becoming bewildered beneath his glance, her limbs overcome by such a fright that she ended by breaking a cup. Then, without getting off the bed, he took hold of the whip and showed it to her.

"See, little chickie, look at this. It's a present for you. Yes, it's another fifty sous you've cost me. With this plaything I shall no longer be obliged to run after you, and it'll be no use you getting into the corners. Will you have a try? Ah! you broke a cup! Now then, gee up! Dance away, make your curtsies to Monsieur Hardy!"

He did not even raise himself but lay sprawling on his back, his head buried in his pillow, making the big whip crack about the room with the noise of a postillion starting his horses. Then, lowering his arm he lashed Lalie in the middle of the body, encircling her with the whip and unwinding it again as though she were a top. She fell and tried to escape on her hands and knees; but lashing her again he jerked her to her feet.

"Gee up, gee up!" yelled he. "It's the donkey race! Eh, it'll be fine of a cold morning in winter. I can lie snug without getting cold or hurting my chilblains and catch the calves from a distance. In that corner there, a hit, you hussy! And in that other corner, a hit again! And in that one, another hit. Ah! if you crawl under the bed I'll whack you with the handle. Gee up, you jade! Gee up! Gee up!"

A slight foam came to his lips, his yellow eyes were starting from their black orbits. Lalie, maddened, howling, jumped to the four corners of the room, curled herself up on the floor and clung to the walls; but the lash at the end of the big whip caught her everywhere, cracking against her ears with the noise of fireworks, streaking her flesh with burning weals. A regular dance of the animal being taught its tricks. This poor kitten waltzed. It was a sight! Her heels in the air like little girls playing at skipping, and crying "Father!" She was all out of breath, rebounding like an india-rubber ball, letting herself be beaten, unable to see or any longer to seek a refuge. And her wolf of a father triumphed, calling her a virago, asking her if she had had enough and whether she understood sufficiently that she was in future to give up all hope of escaping from him.

But Gervaise suddenly entered the room, attracted by the child's howls. On beholding such a scene she was seized with a furious indignation.

"Ah! you brute of a man!" cried she. "Leave her alone, you brigand! I'll put the police on to you."

Bijard growled like an animal being disturbed, and stuttered:

"Mind your own business a bit, Limper. Perhaps you'd like me to put gloves on when I stir her up. It's merely to warm her, as you can plainly see—simply to show her that I've a long arm."

And he gave a final lash with the whip which caught Lalie across the face. The upper lip was cut, the blood flowed. Gervaise had seized a chair, and was about to fall on to the locksmith; but the child held her hands towards her imploringly, saying that it was nothing and that it was all over. She wiped away the blood with the corner of her apron and quieted the babies, who were sobbing bitterly, as though they had received all the blows.

Whenever Gervaise thought of Lalie, she felt she had no right to complain for herself. She wished she had as much patient courage as the little girl who was only eight years old and had to endure more than the rest of the women on their staircase put together. She had seen Lalie living on stale bread for months and growing thinner and weaker. Whenever she smuggled some remnants of meat to Lalie, it almost broke her heart to see the child weeping silently and nibbling it down only by little bits because her throat was so shrunken. Gervaise looked on Lalie as a model of suffering and forgiveness and tried to learn from her how to suffer in silence.

In the Coupeau household the vitriol of l'Assommoir was also commencing its ravages. Gervaise could see the day coming when her husband would get a whip like Bijard's to make her dance.

Yes, Coupeau was spinning an evil thread. The time was past when a drink would make him feel good. His unhealthy soft fat of earlier years had melted away and he was beginning to wither and turn a leaden grey. He seemed to have a greenish tint like a corpse putrefying in a pond. He no longer had a taste for food, not even the most beautifully prepared stew. His stomach would turn and his decayed teeth refuse to touch it. A pint a day was his daily ration, the only nourishment he could digest. When he awoke in the mornings he sat coughing and spitting up bile for at least a quarter of an hour. It never failed, you might as well have the basin ready. He was never steady on his pins till after his first glass of consolation, a real remedy, the fire of which cauterized his bowels; but during the day his strength returned. At first he would feel a tickling sensation, a sort of pins-and-needles in his hands and feet; and he would joke, relating that someone was having a lark with him, that he was sure his wife put horse-hair between the sheets. Then his legs would become heavy, the tickling sensation would end by turning into the most abominable cramps, which gripped his flesh as though in a vise. That though did not amuse him so much. He no longer laughed; he stopped suddenly on the pavement in a bewildered way with a ringing in his ears and his eyes blinded with sparks. Everything appeared to him to be yellow; the houses danced and he reeled about for three seconds with the fear of suddenly finding himself sprawling on the ground. At other times, while the sun was shining full on his back, he would shiver as though iced water had been poured down his shoulders. What bothered him the most was a slight trembling of both his hands; the right hand especially must have been guilty of some crime, it suffered from so many nightmares. Mon Dieu! was he then no longer a man? He was becoming an old woman! He furiously strained his muscles, he seized hold of his glass and bet that he would hold it perfectly steady as with a hand of marble; but in spite of his efforts the glass danced about, jumped to the right, jumped to the left with a hurried and regular trembling movement. Then in a fury he emptied it into his gullet, yelling that he would require dozens like it, and afterwards he undertook to carry a cask without so much as moving a finger. Gervaise, on the other hand, told him to give up drink if he wished to cease trembling, and he laughed at her, emptying quarts until he experienced the sensation again, flying into a rage and accusing the passing omnibuses of shaking up his liquor.

In the month of March Coupeau returned home one evening soaked through. He had come with My-Boots from Montrouge, where they had stuffed themselves full of eel soup, and he had received the full force of the shower all the way from the Barriere des Fourneaux to the Barriere Poissonniere, a good distance. During the night he was seized with a confounded fit of coughing. He was very flushed, suffering from a violent fever and panting like a broken bellows. When the Boches' doctor saw him in the morning and listened against his back he shook his head, and drew Gervaise aside to advise her to have her husband taken to the hospital. Coupeau was suffering from pneumonia.

Gervaise did not worry herself, you may be sure. At one time she would have been chopped into pieces before trusting her old man to the saw-bones. After the accident in the Rue de la Nation she had spent their savings in nursing him. But those beautiful sentiments don't last when men take to wallowing in the mire. No, no; she did not intend to make a fuss like that again. They might take him and never bring him back; she would thank them heartily. Yet, when the litter arrived and Coupeau was put into it like an article of furniture, she became all pale and bit her lips; and if she grumbled and still said it was a good job, her heart was no longer in her words. Had she but ten francs in her drawer she would not have let him go.

She accompanied him to the Lariboisiere Hospital, saw the nurses put him to bed at the end of a long hall, where the patients in a row, looking like corpses, raised themselves up and followed with their eyes the comrade who had just been brought in. It was a veritable death chamber. There was a suffocating, feverish odor and a chorus of coughing. The long hall gave the impression of a small cemetery with its double row of white beds looking like an aisle of marble tombs. When Coupeau remained motionless on his pillow, Gervaise left, having nothing to say, nor anything in her pocket that could comfort him.

Outside, she turned to look up at the monumental structure of the hospital and recalled the days when Coupeau was working there, putting on the zinc roof, perched up high and singing in the sun. He wasn't drinking in those days. She used to watch for him from her window in the Hotel Boncoeur and they would both wave their handkerchiefs in greeting. Now, instead of being on the roof like a cheerful sparrow, he was down below. He had built his own place in the hospital where he had come to die. Mon Dieu! It all seemed so far way now, that time of young love.

On the day after the morrow, when Gervaise called to obtain news of him, she found the bed empty. A Sister of Charity told her that they had been obliged to remove her husband to the Asylum of Sainte-Anne, because the day before he had suddenly gone wild. Oh! a total leave-taking of his senses; attempts to crack his skull against the wall; howls which prevented the other patients from sleeping. It all came from drink, it seemed. Gervaise went home very upset. Well, her husband had gone crazy. What would it be like if he came home? Nana insisted that they should leave him in the hospital because he might end by killing both of them.

Gervaise was not able to go to Sainte-Anne until Sunday. It was a tremendous journey. Fortunately, the omnibus from the Boulevard Rochechouart to La Glaciere passed close to the asylum. She went down the Rue de la Sante, buying two oranges on her way, so as not to arrive empty-handed. It was another monumental building, with grey courtyards, interminable corridors and a smell of rank medicaments, which did not exactly inspire liveliness. But when they had admitted her into a cell she was quite surprised to see Coupeau almost jolly. He was just then seated on the throne, a spotlessly clean wooden case, and they both laughed at her finding him in this position. Well, one knows what an invalid is. He squatted there like a pope with his cheek of earlier days. Oh! he was better, as he could do this.

"And the pneumonia?" inquired the laundress.

"Done for!" replied he. "They cured it in no time. I still cough a little, but that's all that is left of it."

Then at the moment of leaving the throne to get back into his bed, he joked once more. "It's lucky you have a strong nose and are not bothered."

They laughed louder than ever. At heart they felt joyful. It was by way of showing their contentment without a host of phrases that they thus joked together. One must have had to do with patients to know the pleasure one feels at seeing all their functions at work again.

When he was back in bed she gave him the two oranges and this filled him with emotion. He was becoming quite nice again ever since he had had nothing but tisane to drink. She ended by venturing to speak to him about his violent attack, surprised at hearing him reason like in the good old times.

"Ah, yes," said he, joking at his own expense; "I talked a precious lot of nonsense! Just fancy, I saw rats and ran about on all fours to put a grain of salt under their tails. And you, you called to me, men were trying to kill you. In short, all sorts of stupid things, ghosts in broad daylight. Oh! I remember it well, my noodle's still solid. Now it's over, I dream a bit when I'm asleep. I have nightmares, but everyone has nightmares."

Gervaise remained with him until the evening. When the house surgeon came, at the six o'clock inspection, he made him spread his hands; they hardly trembled at all, scarcely a quiver at the tips of the fingers. However, as night approached, Coupeau was little by little seized with uneasiness. He twice sat up in bed looking on the ground and in the dark corners of the room. Suddenly he thrust out an arm and appeared to crush some vermin against the wall.

"What is it?" asked Gervaise, frightened.

"The rats! The rats!" murmured he.

Then, after a pause, gliding into sleep, he tossed about, uttering disconnected phrases.

"Mon Dieu! they're tearing my skin!—Oh! the filthy beasts!—Keep steady! Hold your skirts right round you! beware of the dirty bloke behind you!—Mon Dieu! she's down and the scoundrels laugh!—Scoundrels! Blackguards! Brigands!"

He dealt blows into space, caught hold of his blanket and rolled it into a bundle against his chest, as though to protect the latter from the violence of the bearded men whom he beheld. Then, an attendant having hastened to the spot, Gervaise withdrew, quite frozen by the scene.

But when she returned a few days later, she found Coupeau completely cured. Even the nightmares had left him; he could sleep his ten hours right off as peacefully as a child and without stirring a limb. So his wife was allowed to take him away. The house surgeon gave him the usual good advice on leaving and advised him to follow it. If he recommenced drinking, he would again collapse and would end by dying. Yes, it solely depended upon himself. He had seen how jolly and healthy one could become when one did not get drunk. Well, he must continue at home the sensible life he had led at Sainte-Anne, fancy himself under lock and key and that dram-shops no longer existed.

"The gentleman's right," said Gervaise in the omnibus which was taking them back to the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or.

"Of course he's right," replied Coupeau.

Then, after thinking a minute, he resumed:

"Oh! you know, a little glass now and again can't kill a man; it helps the digestion."

And that very evening he swallowed a glass of bad spirit, just to keep his stomach in order. For eight days he was pretty reasonable. He was a great coward at heart; he had no desire to end his days in the Bicetre mad-house. But his passion got the better of him; the first little glass led him, in spite of himself, to a second, to a third and to a fourth, and at the end of a fortnight, he had got back to his old ration, a pint of vitriol a day. Gervaise, exasperated, could have beaten him. To think that she had been stupid enough to dream once more of leading a worthy life, just because she had seen him at the asylum in full possession of his good sense! Another joyful hour had flown, the last one no doubt! Oh! now, as nothing could reclaim him, not even the fear of his near death, she swore she would no longer put herself out; the home might be all at sixes and sevens, she did not care any longer; and she talked also of leaving him.

Then hell upon earth recommenced, a life sinking deeper into the mire, without a glimmer of hope for something better to follow. Nana, whenever her father clouted her, furiously asked why the brute was not at the hospital. She was awaiting the time when she would be earning money, she would say, to treat him to brandy and make him croak quicker. Gervaise, on her side, flew into a passion one day that Coupeau was regretting their marriage. Ah! she had brought him her saucy children; ah! she had got herself picked up from the pavement, wheedling him with rosy dreams! Mon Dieu! he had a rare cheek! So many words, so many lies. She hadn't wished to have anything to do with him, that was the truth. He had dragged himself at her feet to make her give way, whilst she was advising him to think well what he was about. And if it was all to come over again, he would hear how she would just say "no!" She would sooner have an arm cut off. Yes, she'd had a lover before him; but a woman who has had a lover, and who is a worker, is worth more than a sluggard of a man who sullies his honor and that of his family in all the dram-shops. That day, for the first time, the Coupeaus went in for a general brawl, and they whacked each other so hard that an old umbrella and the broom were broken.

Gervaise kept her word. She sank lower and lower; she missed going to her work oftener, spent whole days in gossiping, and became as soft as a rag whenever she had a task to perform. If a thing fell from her hands, it might remain on the floor; it was certainly not she who would have stooped to pick it up. She took her ease about everything, and never handled a broom except when the accumulation of filth almost brought her to the ground. The Lorilleuxs now made a point of holding something to their noses whenever they passed her room; the stench was poisonous, said they. Those hypocrites slyly lived at the end of the passage, out of the way of all these miseries which filled the corner of the house with whimpering, locking themselves in so as not to have to lend twenty sou pieces. Oh! kind-hearted folks, neighbors awfully obliging! Yes, you may be sure! One had only to knock and ask for a light or a pinch of salt or a jug of water, one was certain of getting the door banged in one's face. With all that they had vipers' tongues. They protested everywhere that they never occupied themselves with other people. This was true whenever it was a question of assisting a neighbor; but they did so from morning to night, directly they had a chance of pulling any one to pieces. With the door bolted and a rug hung up to cover the chinks and the key-hole, they would treat themselves to a spiteful gossip without leaving their gold wire for a moment.

The fall of Clump-clump in particular kept them purring like pet cats. Completely ruined! Not a sou remaining. They smiled gleefully at the small piece of bread she would bring back when she went shopping and kept count of the days when she had nothing at all to eat. And the clothes she wore now. Disgusting rags! That's what happened when one tried to live high.

Gervaise, who had an idea of the way in which they spoke of her, would take her shoes off, and place her ear against their door; but the rug over the door prevented her from hearing much. She was heartily sick of them; she continued to speak to them, to avoid remarks, though expecting nothing but unpleasantness from such nasty persons, but no longer having strength even to give them as much as they gave her, passed the insults off as a lot of nonsense. And besides she only wanted her own pleasure, to sit in a heap twirling her thumbs, and only moving when it was a question of amusing herself, nothing more.

One Saturday Coupeau had promised to take her to the circus. It was well worth while disturbing oneself to see ladies galloping along on horses and jumping through paper hoops. Coupeau had just finished a fortnight's work, he could well spare a couple of francs; and they had also arranged to dine out, just the two of them, Nana having to work very late that evening at her employer's because of some pressing order. But at seven o'clock there was no Coupeau; at eight o'clock it was still the same. Gervaise was furious. Her drunkard was certainly squandering his earnings with his comrades at the dram-shops of the neighborhood. She had washed a cap and had been slaving since the morning over the holes of an old dress, wishing to look decent. At last, towards nine o'clock, her stomach empty, her face purple with rage, she decided to go down and look for Coupeau.

"Is it your husband you want?" called Madame Boche, on catching sight of Gervaise looking very glum. "He's at Pere Colombe's. Boche has just been having some cherry brandy with him."

Gervaise uttered her thanks and stalked stiffly along the pavement with the determination of flying at Coupeau's eyes. A fine rain was falling which made the walk more unpleasant still. But when she reached l'Assommoir, the fear of receiving the drubbing herself if she badgered her old man suddenly calmed her and made her prudent. The shop was ablaze with the lighted gas, the flames of which were as brilliant as suns, and the bottles and jars illuminated the walls with their colored glass. She stood there an instant stretching her neck, her eyes close to the window, looking between two bottle placed there for show, watching Coupeau who was right at the back; he was sitting with some comrades at a little zinc table, all looking vague and blue in the tobacco smoke; and, as one could not hear them yelling, it created a funny effect to see them gesticulating with their chins thrust forward and their eyes starting out of their heads. Good heavens! Was it really possible that men could leave their wives and their homes to shut themselves up thus in a hole where they were choking?

The rain trickled down her neck; she drew herself up and went off to the exterior Boulevard, wrapped in thought and not daring to enter. Ah! well Coupeau would have welcomed her in a pleasant way, he who objected to be spied upon! Besides, it really scarcely seemed to her the proper place for a respectable woman. Twice she went back and stood before the shop window, her eyes again riveted to the glass, annoyed at still beholding those confounded drunkards out of the rain and yelling and drinking. The light of l'Assommoir was reflected in the puddles on the pavement, which simmered with little bubbles caused by the downpour. At length she thought she was too foolish, and pushing open the door, she walked straight up to the table where Coupeau was sitting. After all it was her husband she came for, was it not? And she was authorized in doing so, because he had promised to take her to the circus that evening. So much the worse! She had no desire to melt like a cake of soap out on the pavement.

"Hullo! It's you, old woman!" exclaimed the zinc-worker, half choking with a chuckle. "Ah! that's a good joke. Isn't it a good joke now?"

All the company laughed. Gervaise remained standing, feeling rather bewildered. Coupeau appeared to her to be in a pleasant humor, so she ventured to say:

"You remember, we've somewhere to go. We must hurry. We shall still be in time to see something."

"I can't get up, I'm glued, oh! without joking," resumed Coupeau, who continued laughing. "Try, just to satisfy yourself; pull my arm with all your strength; try it! harder than that, tug away, up with it! You see it's that louse Pere Colombe who's screwed me to his seat."

Gervaise had humored him at this game, and when she let go of his arm, the comrades thought the joke so good that they tumbled up against one another, braying and rubbing their shoulders like donkeys being groomed. The zinc-worker's mouth was so wide with laughter that you could see right down his throat.

"You great noodle!" said he at length, "you can surely sit down a minute. You're better here than splashing about outside. Well, yes; I didn't come home as I promised, I had business to attend to. Though you may pull a long face, it won't alter matters. Make room, you others."

"If madame would accept my knees she would find them softer than the seat," gallantly said My-Boots.

Gervaise, not wishing to attract attention, took a chair and sat down at a short distance from the table. She looked at what the men were drinking, some rotgut brandy which shone like gold in the glasses; a little of it had dropped upon the table and Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, dipped his finger in it whilst conversing and wrote a woman's name—"Eulalie"—in big letters. She noticed that Bibi-the-Smoker looked shockingly jaded and thinner than a hundred-weight of nails. My-Boot's nose was in full bloom, a regular purple Burgundy dahlia. They were all quite dirty, their beards stiff, their smocks ragged and stained, their hands grimy with dirt. Yet they were still quite polite.

Gervaise noticed a couple of men at the bar. They were so drunk that they were spilling the drink down their chins when they thought they were wetting their whistles. Fat Pere Colombe was calmly serving round after round.

The atmosphere was very warm, the smoke from the pipes ascended in the blinding glare of the gas, amidst which it rolled about like dust, drowning the customers in a gradually thickening mist; and from this cloud there issued a deafening and confused uproar, cracked voices, clinking of glasses, oaths and blows sounding like detonations. So Gervaise pulled a very wry face, for such a sight is not funny for a woman, especially when she is not used to it; she was stifling, with a smarting sensation in her eyes, and her head already feeling heavy from the alcoholic fumes exhaled by the whole place. Then she suddenly experienced the sensation of something more unpleasant still behind her back. She turned round and beheld the still, the machine which manufactured drunkards, working away beneath the glass roof of the narrow courtyard with the profound trepidation of its hellish cookery. Of an evening, the copper parts looked more mournful than ever, lit up only on their rounded surface with one big red glint; and the shadow of the apparatus on the wall at the back formed most abominable figures, bodies with tails, monsters opening their jaws as though to swallow everyone up.

"Listen, mother Talk-too-much, don't make any of your grimaces!" cried Coupeau. "To blazes, you know, with all wet blankets! What'll you drink?"

"Nothing, of course," replied the laundress. "I haven't dined yet."

"Well! that's all the more reason for having a glass; a drop of something sustains one."

But, as she still retained her glum expression, My-Boots again did the gallant.

"Madame probably likes sweet things," murmured he.

"I like men who don't get drunk," retorted she, getting angry. "Yes, I like a fellow who brings home his earnings, and who keeps his word when he makes a promise."

"Ah! so that's what upsets you?" said the zinc-worker, without ceasing to chuckle. "Yes, you want your share. Then, big goose, why do you refuse a drink? Take it, it's so much to the good."

She looked at him fixedly, in a grave manner, a wrinkle marking her forehead with a black line. And she slowly replied:

"Why, you're right, it's a good idea. That way, we can drink up the coin together."

Bibi-the-Smoker rose from his seat to fetch her a glass of anisette. She drew her chair up to the table. Whilst she was sipping her anisette, a recollection suddenly flashed across her mind, she remembered the plum she had taken with Coupeau, near the door, in the old days, when he was courting her. At that time, she used to leave the juice of fruits preserved in brandy. And now, here was she going back to liqueurs. Oh! she knew herself well, she had not two thimblefuls of will. One would only have had to have given her a walloping across the back to have made her regularly wallow in drink. The anisette even seemed to be very good, perhaps rather too sweet and slightly sickening. She went on sipping as she listened to Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, tell of his affair with fat Eulalie, a fish peddler and very shrewd at locating him. Even if his comrades tried to hide him, she could usually sniff him out when he was late. Just the night before she had slapped his face with a flounder to teach him not to neglect going to work. Bibi-the-Smoker and My-Boots nearly split their sides laughing. They slapped Gervaise on the shoulder and she began to laugh also, finding it amusing in spite of herself. They then advised her to follow Eulalie's example and bring an iron with her so as to press Coupeau's ears on the counters of the wineshops.

"Ah, well, no thanks," cried Coupeau as he turned upside down the glass his wife had emptied. "You pump it out pretty well. Just look, you fellows, she doesn't take long over it."

"Will madame take another?" asked Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst.

No, she had had enough. Yet she hesitated. The anisette had slightly bothered her stomach. She should have taken straight brandy to settle her digestion.

She cast side glances at the drunkard manufacturing machine behind her. That confounded pot, as round as the stomach of a tinker's fat wife, with its nose that was so long and twisted, sent a shiver down her back, a fear mingled with a desire. Yes, one might have thought it the metal pluck of some big wicked woman, of some witch who was discharging drop by drop the fire of her entrails. A fine source of poison, an operation which should have been hidden away in a cellar, it was so brazen and abominable! But all the same she would have liked to have poked her nose inside it, to have sniffed the odor, have tasted the filth, though the skin might have peeled off her burnt tongue like the rind off an orange.

"What's that you're drinking?" asked she slyly of the men, her eyes lighted up by the beautiful golden color of their glasses.

"That, old woman," answered Coupeau, "is Pere Colombe's camphor. Don't be silly now and we'll give you a taste."

And when they had brought her a glass of the vitriol, the rotgut, and her jaws had contracted at the first mouthful, the zinc-worker resumed, slapping his thighs:

"Ha! It tickles your gullet! Drink it off at one go. Each glassful cheats the doctor of six francs."

At the second glass Gervaise no longer felt the hunger which had been tormenting her. Now she had made it up with Coupeau, she no longer felt angry with him for not having kept his word. They would go to the circus some other day; it was not so funny to see jugglers galloping about on houses. There was no rain inside Pere Colombe's and if the money went in brandy, one at least had it in one's body; one drank it bright and shining like beautiful liquid gold. Ah! she was ready to send the whole world to blazes! Life was not so pleasant after all, besides it seemed some consolation to her to have her share in squandering the cash. As she was comfortable, why should she not remain? One might have a discharge of artillery; she did not care to budge once she had settled in a heap. She nursed herself in a pleasant warmth, her bodice sticking to her back, overcome by a feeling of comfort which benumbed her limbs. She laughed all to herself, her elbows on the table, a vacant look in her eyes, highly amused by two customers, a fat heavy fellow and a tiny shrimp, seated at a neighboring table, and kissing each other lovingly. Yes, she laughed at the things to see in l'Assommoir, at Pere Colombe's full moon face, a regular bladder of lard, at the customers smoking their short clay pipes, yelling and spitting, and at the big flames of gas which lighted up the looking-glasses and the bottles of liqueurs. The smell no longer bothered her, on the contrary it tickled her nose, and she thought it very pleasant. Her eyes slightly closed, whilst she breathed very slowly, without the least feeling of suffocation, tasting the enjoyment of the gentle slumber which was overcoming her. Then, after her third glass, she let her chin fall on her hands; she now only saw Coupeau and his comrades, and she remained nose to nose with them, quite close, her cheeks warmed by their breath, looking at their dirty beards as though she had been counting the hairs. My-Boots drooled, his pipe between his teeth, with the dumb and grave air of a dozing ox. Bibi-the-Smoker was telling a story—the manner in which he emptied a bottle at a draught, giving it such a kiss that one instantly saw its bottom. Meanwhile Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, had gone and fetched the wheel of fortune from the counter, and was playing with Coupeau for drinks.

"Two hundred! You're lucky; you get high numbers every time!"

The needle of the wheel grated, and the figure of Fortune, a big red woman placed under glass, turned round and round until it looked like a mere spot in the centre, similar to a wine stain.

"Three hundred and fifty! You must have been inside it, you confounded lascar! Ah! I shan't play any more!"

Gervaise amused herself with the wheel of fortune. She was feeling awfully thirsty, and calling My-Boots "my child." Behind her the machine for manufacturing drunkards continued working, with its murmur of an underground stream; and she despaired of ever stopping it, of exhausting it, filled with a sullen anger against it, feeling a longing to spring upon the big still as upon some animal, to kick it with her heels and stave in its belly. Then everything began to seem all mixed up. The machine seemed to be moving itself and she thought she was being grabbed by its copper claws, and that the underground stream was now flowing over her body.

Then the room danced round, the gas-jets seemed to shoot like stars. Gervaise was drunk. She heard a furious wrangle between Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, and that rascal Pere Colombe. There was a thief of a landlord who wanted one to pay for what one had not had! Yet one was not at a gangster's hang-out. Suddenly there was a scuffling, yells were heard and tables were upset. It was Pere Colombe who was turning the party out without the least hesitation, and in the twinkling of an eye. On the other side of the door they blackguarded him and called him a scoundrel. It still rained and blew icy cold. Gervaise lost Coupeau, found him and then lost him again. She wished to go home; she felt the shops to find her way. This sudden darkness surprised her immensely. At the corner of the Rue des Poissonniers, she sat down in the gutter thinking she was at the wash-house. The water which flowed along caused her head to swim, and made her very ill. At length she arrived, she passed stiffly before the concierge's room where she perfectly recognized the Lorilleuxs and the Poissons seated at the table having dinner, and who made grimaces of disgust on beholding her in that sorry state.

She never remembered how she had got up all those flights of stairs. Just as she was turning into the passage at the top, little Lalie, who heard her footsteps, hastened to meet her, opening her arms caressingly, and saying, with a smile:

"Madame Gervaise, papa has not returned. Just come and see my little children sleeping. Oh! they look so pretty!"

But on beholding the laundress' besotted face, she tremblingly drew back. She was acquainted with that brandy-laden breath, those pale eyes, that convulsed mouth. Then Gervaise stumbled past without uttering a word, whilst the child, standing on the threshold of her room, followed her with her dark eyes, grave and speechless.

CHAPTER XI

Nana was growing up and becoming wayward. At fifteen years old she had expanded like a calf, white-skinned and very fat; so plump, indeed, you might have called her a pincushion. Yes, such she was—fifteen years old, full of figure and no stays. A saucy magpie face, dipped in milk, a skin as soft as a peach skin, a funny nose, pink lips and eyes sparkling like tapers, which men would have liked to light their pipes at. Her pile of fair hair, the color of fresh oats, seemed to have scattered gold dust over her temples, freckle-like as it were, giving her brow a sunny crown. Ah! a pretty doll, as the Lorilleuxs say, a dirty nose that needed wiping, with fat shoulders, which were as fully rounded and as powerful as those of a full-grown woman. Nana no longer needed to stuff wads of paper into her bodice, her breasts were grown. She wished they were larger though, and dreamed of having breasts like a wet-nurse.

What made her particularly tempting was a nasty habit she had of protruding the tip of her tongue between her white teeth. No doubt on seeing herself in the looking-glasses she had thought she was pretty like this; and so, all day long, she poked her tongue out of her mouth, in view of improving her appearance.

"Hide your lying tongue!" cried her mother.

Coupeau would often get involved, pounding his fist, swearing and shouting:

"Make haste and draw that red rag inside again!"

Nana showed herself very coquettish. She did not always wash her feet, but she bought such tight boots that she suffered martyrdom in St. Crispin's prison; and if folks questioned her when she turned purple with pain, she answered that she had the stomach ache, so as to avoid confessing her coquetry. When bread was lacking at home it was difficult for her to trick herself out. But she accomplished miracles, brought ribbons back from the workshop and concocted toilettes—dirty dresses set off with bows and puffs. The summer was the season of her greatest triumphs. With a cambric dress which had cost her six francs she filled the whole neighborhood of the Goutte-d'Or with her fair beauty. Yes, she was known from the outer Boulevards to the Fortifications, and from the Chaussee de Clignancourt to the Grand Rue of La Chapelle. Folks called her "chickie," for she was really as tender and as fresh-looking as a chicken.

There was one dress which suited her perfectly, a white one with pink dots. It was very simple and without a frill. The skirt was rather short and revealed her ankles. The sleeves were deeply slashed and loose, showing her arms to the elbow. She pinned the neck back into a wide V as soon as she reached a dark corner of the staircase to avoid getting her ears boxed by her father for exposing the snowy whiteness of her throat and the golden shadow between her breasts. She also tied a pink ribbon round her blond hair.

Sundays she spent the entire day out with the crowds and loved it when the men eyed her hungrily as they passed. She waited all week long for these glances. She would get up early to dress herself and spend hours before the fragment of mirror that was hung over the bureau. Her mother would scold her because the entire building could see her through the window in her chemise as she mended her dress.

Ah! she looked cute like that said father Coupeau, sneering and jeering at her, a real Magdalene in despair! She might have turned "savage woman" at a fair, and have shown herself for a penny. Hide your meat, he used to say, and let me eat my bread! In fact, she was adorable, white and dainty under her overhanging golden fleece, losing temper to the point that her skin turned pink, not daring to answer her father, but cutting her thread with her teeth with a hasty, furious jerk, which shook her plump but youthful form.

Then immediately after breakfast she tripped down the stairs into the courtyard. The entire tenement seemed to be resting sleepily in the peacefulness of a Sunday afternoon. The workshops on the ground floor were closed. Gaping windows revealed tables in some apartments that were already set for dinner, awaiting families out working up an appetite by strolling along the fortifications.

Then, in the midst of the empty, echoing courtyard, Nana, Pauline and other big girls engaged in games of battledore and shuttlecock. They had grown up together and were now becoming queens of their building. Whenever a man crossed the court, flutelike laugher would arise, and then starched skirts would rustle like the passing of a gust of wind.

The games were only an excuse for them to make their escape. Suddenly stillness fell upon the tenement. The girls had glided out into the street and made for the outer Boulevards. Then, linked arm-in-arm across the full breadth of the pavement, they went off, the whole six of them, clad in light colors, with ribbons tied around their bare heads. With bright eyes darting stealthy glances through their partially closed eyelids, they took note of everything, and constantly threw back their necks to laugh, displaying the fleshy part of their chins. They would swing their hips, or group together tightly, or flaunt along with awkward grace, all for the purpose of calling attention to the fact that their forms were filling out.

Nana was in the centre with her pink dress all aglow in the sunlight. She gave her arm to Pauline, whose costume, yellow flowers on a white ground, glared in similar fashion, dotted as it were with little flames. As they were the tallest of the band, the most woman-like and most unblushing, they led the troop and drew themselves up with breasts well forward whenever they detected glances or heard complimentary remarks. The others extended right and left, puffing themselves out in order to attract attention. Nana and Pauline resorted to the complicated devices of experienced coquettes. If they ran till they were out of breath, it was in view of showing their white stockings and making the ribbons of their chignons wave in the breeze. When they stopped, pretending complete breathlessness, you would certainly spot someone they knew quite near, one of the young fellows of the neighborhood. This would make them dawdle along languidly, whispering and laughing among themselves, but keeping a sharp watch through their downcast eyelids.

They went on these strolls of a Sunday mainly for the sake of these chance meetings. Tall lads, wearing their Sunday best, would stop them, joking and trying to catch them round their waists. Pauline was forever running into one of Madame Gaudron's sons, a seventeen-year-old carpenter, who would treat her to fried potatoes. Nana could spot Victor Fauconnier, the laundress's son and they would exchange kisses in dark corners. It never went farther than that, but they told each other some tall tales.

Then when the sun set, the great delight of these young hussies was to stop and look at the mountebanks. Conjurors and strong men turned up and spread threadbare carpets on the soil of the avenue. Loungers collected and a circle formed whilst the mountebank in the centre tried his muscles under his faded tights. Nana and Pauline would stand for hours in the thickest part of the crowd. Their pretty, fresh frocks would get crushed between great-coats and dirty work smocks. In this atmosphere of wine and sweat they would laugh gaily, finding amusement in everything, blooming naturally like roses growing out of a dunghill. The only thing that vexed them was to meet their fathers, especially when the hatter had been drinking. So they watched and warned one another.

"Look, Nana," Pauline would suddenly cry out, "here comes father Coupeau!"

"Well, he's drunk too. Oh, dear," said Nana, greatly bothered. "I'm going to beat it, you know. I don't want him to give me a wallop. Hullo! How he stumbles! Good Lord, if he could only break his neck!"

At other times, when Coupeau came straight up to her without giving her time to run off, she crouched down, made herself small and muttered: "Just you hide me, you others. He's looking for me, and he promised he'd knock my head off if he caught me hanging about."

Then when the drunkard had passed them she drew herself up again, and all the others followed her with bursts of laughter. He'll find her—he will—he won't! It was a true game of hide and seek. One day, however, Boche had come after Pauline and caught her by both ears, and Coupeau had driven Nana home with kicks.

Nana was now a flower-maker and earned forty sous a day at Titreville's place in the Rue du Caire, where she had served as apprentice. The Coupeaus had kept her there so that she might remain under the eye of Madame Lerat, who had been forewoman in the workroom for ten years. Of a morning, when her mother looked at the cuckoo clock, off she went by herself, looking very pretty with her shoulders tightly confined in her old black dress, which was both too narrow and too short; and Madame Lerat had to note the hour of her arrival and tell it to Gervaise. She was allowed twenty minutes to go from the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or to the Rue du Caire, and it was enough, for these young hussies have the legs of racehorses. Sometimes she arrived exactly on time but so breathless and flushed that she must have covered most of the distance at a run after dawdling along the way. More often she was a few minutes late. Then she would fawn on her aunt all day, hoping to soften her and keep her from telling. Madame Lerat understood what it was to be young and would lie to the Coupeaus, but she also lectured Nana, stressing the dangers a young girl runs on the streets of Paris. Mon Dieu! she herself was followed often enough!

"Oh! I watch, you needn't fear," said the widow to the Coupeaus. "I will answer to you for her as I would for myself. And rather than let a blackguard squeeze her, why I'd step between them."

The workroom at Titreville's was a large apartment on the first floor, with a broad work-table standing on trestles in the centre. Round the four walls, the plaster of which was visible in parts where the dirty yellowish-grey paper was torn away, there were several stands covered with old cardboard boxes, parcels and discarded patterns under a thick coating of dust. The gas had left what appeared to be like a daub of soot on the ceiling. The two windows opened so wide that without leaving the work-table the girls could see the people walking past on the pavement over the way.

Madame Lerat arrived the first, in view of setting an example. Then for a quarter of an hour the door swayed to and fro, and all the workgirls scrambled in, perspiring with tumbled hair. One July morning Nana arrived the last, as very often happened. "Ah, me!" she said, "it won't be a pity when I have a carriage of my own." And without even taking off her hat, one which she was weary of patching up, she approached the window and leant out, looking to the right and the left to see what was going on in the street.

"What are you looking at?" asked Madame Lerat, suspiciously. "Did your father come with you?"

"No, you may be sure of that," answered Nana coolly. "I'm looking at nothing—I'm seeing how hot it is. It's enough to make anyone, having to run like that."

It was a stifling hot morning. The workgirls had drawn down the Venetian blinds, between which they could spy out into the street; and they had at last begun working on either side of the table, at the upper end of which sat Madame Lerat. They were eight in number, each with her pot of glue, pincers, tools and curling stand in front of her. On the work-table lay a mass of wire, reels, cotton wool, green and brown paper, leaves and petals cut out of silk, satin or velvet. In the centre, in the neck of a large decanter, one flower-girl had thrust a little penny nosegay which had been fading on her breast since the day before.

"Oh, I have some news," said a pretty brunette named Leonie as she leaned over her cushion to crimp some rose petals. "Poor Caroline is very unhappy about that fellow who used to wait for her every evening."

"Ah!" said Nana, who was cutting thin strips of green paper. "A man who cheats on her every day!"

Madame Lerat had to display severity over the muffled laughter. Then Leonie whispered suddenly:

"Quiet. The boss!"

It was indeed Madame Titreville who entered. The tall thin woman usually stayed down in the shop. The girls were quite in awe of her because she never joked with them. All the heads were now bent over the work in diligent silence. Madame Titreville slowly circled the work-table. She told one girl her work was sloppy and made her do the flower over. Then she stalked out as stiffly as she had come in.

The complaining and low laughter began again.

"Really, young ladies!" said Madame Lerat, trying to look more severe than ever. "You will force me to take measures."

The workgirls paid no attention to her. They were not afraid of her. She was too easy-going because she enjoyed being surrounded by these young girls whose zest for life sparkled in their eyes. She enjoyed taking them aside to hear their confidences about their lovers. She even told their fortunes with cards whenever a corner of the work-table was free. She was only offended by coarse expressions. As long as you avoided those you could say what you pleased.

To tell the truth, Nana perfected her education in nice style in the workroom! No doubt she was already inclined to go wrong. But this was the finishing stroke—associating with a lot of girls who were already worn out with misery and vice. They all hobnobbed and rotted together, just the story of the baskets of apples when there are rotten ones among them. They maintained a certain propriety in public, but the smut flowed freely when they got to whispering together in a corner.

For inexperienced girls like Nana, there was an undesirable atmosphere around the workshop, an air of cheap dance halls and unorthodox evenings brought in by some of the girls. The laziness of mornings after a gay night, the shadows under the eyes, the lounging, the hoarse voices, all spread an odor of dark perversion over the work-table which contrasted sharply with the brilliant fragility of the artificial flowers. Nana eagerly drank it all in and was dizzy with joy when she found herself beside a girl who had been around. She always wanted to sit next to big Lisa, who was said to be pregnant, and she kept glancing curiously at her neighbor as though expecting her to swell up suddenly.

"It's hot enough to make one stifle," Nana said, approaching a window as if to draw the blind farther down; but she leant forward and again looked out both to the right and left.

At the same moment Leonie, who was watching a man stationed at the foot of the pavement over the way, exclaimed, "What's that old fellow about? He's been spying here for the last quarter of an hour."

"Some tom cat," said Madame Lerat. "Nana, just come and sit down! I told you not to stand at the window."

Nana took up the stems of some violets she was rolling, and the whole workroom turned its attention to the man in question. He was a well-dressed individual wearing a frock coat and he looked about fifty years old. He had a pale face, very serous and dignified in expression, framed round with a well trimmed grey beard. He remained for an hour in front of a herbalist's shop with his eyes fixed on the Venetian blinds of the workroom. The flower-girls indulged in little bursts of laughter which died away amid the noise of the street, and while leaning forward, to all appearance busy with their work, they glanced askance so as not to lose sight of the gentleman.

"Ah!" remarked Leonie, "he wears glasses. He's a swell. He's waiting for Augustine, no doubt."

But Augustine, a tall, ugly, fair-haired girl, sourly answered that she did not like old men; whereupon Madame Lerat, jerking her head, answered with a smile full of underhand meaning:

"That is a great mistake on your part, my dear; the old ones are more affectionate."

At this moment Leonie's neighbor, a plump little body, whispered something in her ear and Leonie suddenly threw herself back on her chair, seized with a fit of noisy laughter, wriggling, looking at the gentleman and then laughing all the louder. "That's it. Oh! that's it," she stammered. "How dirty that Sophie is!"

"What did she say? What did she say?" asked the whole workroom, aglow with curiosity.

Leonie wiped the tears from her eyes without answering. When she became somewhat calmer, she began curling her flowers again and declared, "It can't be repeated."

The others insisted, but she shook her head, seized again with a gust of gaiety. Thereupon Augustine, her left-hand neighbor, besought her to whisper it to her; and finally Leonie consented to do so with her lips close to Augustine's ear. Augustine threw herself back and wriggled with convulsive laughter in her turn. Then she repeated the phrase to a girl next to her, and from ear to ear it traveled round the room amid exclamations and stifled laughter. When they were all of them acquainted with Sophie's disgusting remark they looked at one another and burst out laughing together although a little flushed and confused. Madame Lerat alone was not in the secret and she felt extremely vexed.

"That's very impolite behavior on your part, young ladies," said she. "It is not right to whisper when other people are present. Something indecent no doubt! Ah! that's becoming!"

She did not dare go so far as to ask them to pass Sophie's remark on to her although she burned to hear it. So she kept her eyes on her work, amusing herself by listening to the conversation. Now no one could make even an innocent remark without the others twisting it around and connecting it with the gentleman on the sidewalk. Madame Lerat herself once sent them into convulsions of laughter when she said, "Mademoiselle Lisa, my fire's gone out. Pass me yours."

"Oh! Madame Lerat's fire's out!" laughed the whole shop.

They refused to listen to any explanation, but maintained they were going to call in the gentleman outside to rekindle Madame Lerat's fire.

However, the gentleman over the way had gone off. The room grew calmer and the work was carried on in the sultry heat. When twelve o'clock struck—meal-time—they all shook themselves. Nana, who had hastened to the window again, volunteered to do the errands if they liked. And Leonie ordered two sous worth of shrimps, Augustine a screw of fried potatoes, Lisa a bunch of radishes, Sophie a sausage. Then as Nana was doing down the stairs, Madame Lerat, who found her partiality for the window that morning rather curious, overtook her with her long legs.

"Wait a bit," said she. "I'll go with you. I want to buy something too."

But in the passage below she perceived the gentleman, stuck there like a candle and exchanging glances with Nana. The girl flushed very red, whereupon her aunt at once caught her by the arm and made her trot over the pavement, whilst the individual followed behind. Ah! so the tom cat had come for Nana. Well, that was nice! At fifteen years and a half to have men trailing after her! Then Madame Lerat hastily began to question her. Mon Dieu! Nana didn't know; he had only been following her for five days, but she could not poke her nose out of doors without stumbling on men. She believed he was in business; yes, a manufacturer of bone buttons. Madame Lerat was greatly impressed. She turned round and glanced at the gentleman out of the corner of her eye.

"One can see he's got a deep purse," she muttered. "Listen to me, kitten; you must tell me everything. You have nothing more to fear now."

Whilst speaking they hastened from shop to shop—to the pork butcher's, the fruiterer's, the cook-shop; and the errands in greasy paper were piled up in their hands. Still they remained amiable, flouncing along and casting bright glances behind them with gusts of gay laughter. Madame Lerat herself was acting the young girl, on account of the button manufacturer who was still following them.

"He is very distinguished looking," she declared as they returned into the passage. "If he only has honorable views—"

Then, as they were going up the stairs she suddenly seemed to remember something. "By the way, tell me what the girls were whispering to each other—you know, what Sophie said?"

Nana did not make any ceremony. Only she caught Madame Lerat by the hand, and caused her to descend a couple of steps, for, really, it wouldn't do to say it aloud, not even on the stairs. When she whispered it to her, it was so obscene that Madame Lerat could only shake her head, opening her eyes wide, and pursing her lips. Well, at least her curiosity wasn't troubling her any longer.

From that day forth Madame Lerat regaled herself with her niece's first love adventure. She no longer left her, but accompanied her morning and evening, bringing her responsibility well to the fore. This somewhat annoyed Nana, but all the same she expanded with pride at seeing herself guarded like a treasure; and the talk she and her aunt indulged in in the street with the button manufacturer behind them flattered her, and rather quickened her desire for new flirtations. Oh! her aunt understood the feelings of the heart; she even compassionated the button manufacturer, this elderly gentleman, who looked so respectable, for, after all, sentimental feelings are more deeply rooted among people of a certain age. Still she watched. And, yes, he would have to pass over her body before stealing her niece.

One evening she approached the gentleman, and told him, as straight as a bullet, that his conduct was most improper. He bowed to her politely without answering, like an old satyr who was accustomed to hear parents tell him to go about his business. She really could not be cross with him, he was too well mannered.

Then came lectures on love, allusions to dirty blackguards of men, and all sorts of stories about hussies who had repented of flirtations, which left Nana in a state of pouting, with eyes gleaming brightly in her pale face.

One day, however, in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere the button manufacturer ventured to poke his nose between the aunt and the niece to whisper some things which ought not to have been said. Thereupon Madame Lerat was so frightened that she declared she no longer felt able to handle the matter and she told the whole business to her brother. Then came another row. There were some pretty rumpuses in the Coupeaus' room. To begin with, the zinc-worker gave Nana a hiding. What was that he learnt? The hussy was flirting with old men. All right. Only let her be caught philandering out of doors again, she'd be done for; he, her father, would cut off her head in a jiffy. Had the like ever been seen before! A dirty nose who thought of beggaring her family! Thereupon he shook her, declaring in God's name that she'd have to walk straight, for he'd watch her himself in future. He now looked her over every night when she came in, even going so far as to sniff at her and make her turn round before him.

One evening she got another hiding because he discovered a mark on her neck that he maintained was the mark of a kiss. Nana insisted it was a bruise that Leonie had given her when they were having a bit of a rough-house. Yet at other times her father would tease her, saying she was certainly a choice morsel for men. Nana began to display the sullen submissiveness of a trapped animal. She was raging inside.

"Why don't you leave her alone?" repeated Gervaise, who was more reasonable. "You will end by making her wish to do it by talking to her about it so much."

Ah! yes, indeed, she did wish to do it. She itched all over, longing to break loose and gad all the time, as father Coupeau said. He insisted so much on the subject that even an honest girl would have fired up. Even when he was abusing her, he taught her a few things she did not know as yet, which, to say the least was astonishing. Then, little by little she acquired some singular habits. One morning he noticed her rummaging in a paper bag and rubbing something on her face. It was rice powder, which she plastered on her delicate satin-like skin with perverse taste. He caught up the paper bag and rubbed it over her face violently enough to graze her skin and called her a miller's daughter. On another occasion she brought some ribbon home, to do up her old black hat which she was so ashamed of. He asked her in a furious voice where she had got those ribbons from. Had she earned them by lying on her back or had she bagged them somewhere? A hussy or a thief, and perhaps both by now?

More than once he found her with some pretty little doodad. She had found a little interlaced heart in the street on Rue d'Aboukir. Her father crushed the heart under his foot, driving her to the verge of throwing herself at him to ruin something of his. For two years she had been longing for one of those hearts, and now he had smashed it! This was too much, she was reaching the end of the line with him.

Coupeau was often in the wrong in the manner in which he tried to rule Nana. His injustice exasperated her. She at last left off attending the workshop and when the zinc-worker gave her a hiding, she declared she would not return to Titreville's again, for she was always placed next to Augustine, who must have swallowed her feet to have such a foul breath. Then Coupeau took her himself to the Rue du Caire and requested the mistress of the establishment to place her always next to Augustine, by way of punishment. Every morning for a fortnight he took the trouble to come down from the Barriere Poissonniere to escort Nana to the door of the flower shop. And he remained for five minutes on the footway, to make sure that she had gone in. But one morning while he was drinking a glass with a friend in a wineshop in the Rue Saint-Denis, he perceived the hussy darting down the street. For a fortnight she had been deceiving him; instead of going into the workroom, she climbed a story higher, and sat down on the stairs, waiting till he had gone off. When Coupeau began casting the blame on Madame Lerat, the latter flatly replied that she would not accept it. She had told her niece all she ought to tell her, to keep her on her guard against men, and it was not her fault if the girl still had a liking for the nasty beasts. Now, she washed her hands of the whole business; she swore she would not mix up in it, for she knew what she knew about scandalmongers in her own family, yes, certain persons who had the nerve to accuse her of going astray with Nana and finding an indecent pleasure in watching her take her first misstep. Then Coupeau found out from the proprietress that Nana was being corrupted by that little floozie Leonie, who had given up flower-making to go on the street. Nana was being tempted by the jingle of cash and the lure of adventure on the streets.

In the tenement in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, Nana's old fellow was talked about as a gentleman everyone was acquainted with. Oh! he remained very polite, even a little timid, but awfully obstinate and patient, following her ten paces behind like an obedient poodle. Sometimes, indeed, he ventured into the courtyard. One evening, Madame Gaudron met him on the second floor landing, and he glided down alongside the balusters with his nose lowered and looking as if on fire, but frightened. The Lorilleuxs threatened to move out if that wayward niece of theirs brought men trailing in after her. It was disgusting. The staircase was full of them. The Boches said that they felt sympathy for the old gentleman because he had fallen for a tramp. He was really a respectable businessman, they had seen his button factory on the Boulevard de la Villette. He would be an excellent catch for a decent girl.

For the first month Nana was greatly amused with her old flirt. You should have seen him always dogging her—a perfect great nuisance, who followed far behind, in the crowd, without seeming to do so. And his legs! Regular lucifers. No more moss on his pate, only four straight hairs falling on his neck, so that she was always tempted to ask him where his hairdresser lived. Ah! what an old gaffer, he was comical and no mistake, nothing to get excited over.

Then, on finding him always behind her, she no longer thought him so funny. She became afraid of him and would have called out if he had approached her. Often, when she stopped in front of a jeweler's shop, she heard him stammering something behind her. And what he said was true; she would have liked to have had a cross with a velvet neck-band, or a pair of coral earrings, so small you would have thought they were drops of blood.

More and more, as she plodded through the mire of the streets, getting splashed by passing vehicles and being dazzled by the magnificence of the window displays, she felt longings that tortured her like hunger pangs, yearnings for better clothes, for eating in restaurants, for going to the theatre, for a room of her own with nice furniture. Right at those moments, it never failed that her old gentleman would come up to whisper something in her ear. Oh, if only she wasn't afraid of him, how readily she would have taken up with him.

When the winter arrived, life became impossible at home. Nana had her hiding every night. When her father was tired of beating her, her mother smacked her to teach her how to behave. And there were free-for-alls; as soon as one of them began to beat her, the other took her part, so that all three of them ended by rolling on the floor in the midst of the broken crockery. And with all this, there were short rations and they shivered with cold. Whenever the girl bought anything pretty, a bow or a pair of buttons, her parents confiscated the purchase and drank what they could get for it. She had nothing of her own, excepting her allowance of blows, before coiling herself up between the rags of a sheet, where she shivered under her little black skirt, which she stretched out by way of a blanket. No, that cursed life could not continue; she was not going to leave her skin in it. Her father had long since ceased to count for her; when a father gets drunk like hers did, he isn't a father, but a dirty beast one longs to be rid of. And now, too, her mother was doing down the hill in her esteem. She drank as well. She liked to go and fetch her husband at Pere Colombe's, so as to be treated; and she willingly sat down, with none of the air of disgust that she had assumed on the first occasion, draining glasses indeed at one gulp, dragging her elbows over the table for hours and leaving the place with her eyes starting out of her head.

When Nana passed in front of l'Assommoir and saw her mother inside, with her nose in her glass, fuddled in the midst of the disputing men, she was seized with anger; for youth which has other dainty thoughts uppermost does not understand drink. On these evenings it was a pretty sight. Father drunk, mother drunk, a hell of a home that stunk with liquor, and where there was no bread. To tell the truth, a saint would not have stayed in the place. So much the worse if she flew the coop one of these days; her parents would have to say their mea culpa, and own that they had driven her out themselves.

One Saturday when Nana came home she found her father and her mother in a lamentable condition. Coupeau, who had fallen across the bed was snoring. Gervaise, crouching on a chair was swaying her head, with her eyes vaguely and threateningly staring into vacancy. She had forgotten to warm the dinner, the remains of a stew. A tallow dip which she neglected to snuff revealed the shameful misery of their hovel.

"It's you, shrimp?" stammered Gervaise. "Ah, well, your father will take care of you."

Nana did not answer, but remained pale, looking at the cold stove, the table on which no plates were laid, the lugubrious hovel which this pair of drunkards invested with the pale horror of their callousness. She did not take off her hat but walked round the room; then with her teeth tightly set, she opened the door and went out.

"You are doing down again?" asked her mother, who was unable even to turn her head.

"Yes; I've forgotten something. I shall come up again. Good evening."

And she did not return. On the morrow when the Coupeaus were sobered they fought together, reproaching each other with being the cause of Nana's flight. Ah! she was far away if she were running still! As children are told of sparrows, her parents might set a pinch of salt on her tail, and then perhaps they would catch her. It was a great blow, and crushed Gervaise, for despite the impairment of her faculties, she realized perfectly well that her daughter's misconduct lowered her still more; she was alone now, with no child to think about, able to let herself sink as low as she could fall. She drank steadily for three days. Coupeau prowled along the exterior Boulevards without seeing Nana and then came home to smoke his pipe peacefully. He was always back in time for his soup.

In this tenement, where girls flew off every month like canaries whose cages are left open, no one was astonished to hear of the Coupeaus' mishap. But the Lorilleuxs were triumphant. Ah! they had predicted that the girl would reward her parents in this fashion. It was deserved; all artificial flower-girls went that way. The Boches and the Poissons also sneered with an extraordinary display and outlay of grief. Lantier alone covertly defended Nana. Mon Dieu! said he, with his puritanical air, no doubt a girl who so left her home did offend her parents; but, with a gleam in the corner of his eyes, he added that, dash it! the girl was, after all, too pretty to lead such a life of misery at her age.

"Do you know," cried Madame Lorilleux, one day in the Boches' room, where the party were taking coffee; "well, as sure as daylight, Clump-clump sold her daughter. Yes she sold her, and I have proof of it! That old fellow, who was always on the stairs morning and night, went up to pay something on account. It stares one in the face. They were seen together at the Ambigu Theatre—the young wench and her old tom cat. Upon my word of honor, they're living together, it's quite plain."

They discussed the scandal thoroughly while finishing their coffee. Yes, it was quite possible. Soon most of the neighborhood accepted the conclusion that Gervaise had actually sold her daughter.

Gervaise now shuffled along in her slippers, without caring a rap for anyone. You might have called her a thief in the street, she wouldn't have turned round. For a month past she hadn't looked at Madame Fauconnier's; the latter had had to turn her out of the place to avoid disputes. In a few weeks' time she had successively entered the service of eight washerwomen; she only lasted two or three days in each place before she got the sack, so badly did she iron the things entrusted to her, careless and dirty, her mind failing to such a point that she quite forgot her own craft. At last realizing her own incapacity she abandoned ironing; and went out washing by the day at the wash-house in the Rue Neuve, where she still jogged on, floundering about in the water, fighting with filth, reduced to the roughest but simplest work, a bit lower on the down-hill slopes. The wash-house scarcely beautified her. A real mud-splashed dog when she came out of it, soaked and showing her blue skin. At the same time she grew stouter and stouter, despite her frequent dances before the empty sideboard, and her leg became so crooked that she could no longer walk beside anyone without the risk of knocking him over, so great indeed was her limp.

Naturally enough when a woman falls to this point all her pride leaves her. Gervaise had divested herself of all her old self-respect, coquetry and need of sentiment, propriety and politeness. You might have kicked her, no matter where, she did not feel kicks for she had become too fat and flabby. Lantier had altogether neglected her; he no longer escorted her or even bothered to give her a pinch now and again. She did not seem to notice this finish of a long liaison slowly spun out, and ending in mutual insolence. It was a chore the less for her. Even Lantier's intimacy with Virginie left her quite calm, so great was her indifference now for all that she had been so upset about in the past. She would even have held a candle for them now.

Everyone was aware that Virginie and Lantier were carrying on. It was much too convenient, especially with Poisson on duty every other night. Lantier had thought of himself when he advised Virginie to deal in dainties. He was too much of a Provincial not to adore sugared things; and in fact he would have lived off sugar candy, lozenges, pastilles, sugar plums and chocolate. Sugared almonds especially left a little froth on his lips so keenly did they tickle his palate. For a year he had been living only on sweetmeats. He opened the drawers and stuffed himself whenever Virginie asked him to mind the shop. Often, when he was talking in the presence of five or six other people, he would take the lid off a jar on the counter, dip his hand into it and begin to nibble at something sweet; the glass jar remained open and its contents diminished. People ceased paying attention to it, it was a mania of his so he had declared. Besides, he had devised a perpetual cold, an irritation of the throat, which he always talked of calming.

He still did not work, for he had more and more important schemes than ever in view. He was contriving a superb invention—the umbrella hat, a hat which transformed itself into an umbrella on your head as soon as a shower commenced to fall; and he promised Poisson half shares in the profit of it, and even borrowed twenty franc pieces of him to defray the cost of experiments. Meanwhile the shop melted away on his tongue. All the stock-in-trade followed suit down to the chocolate cigars and pipes in pink caramel. Whenever he was stuffed with sweetmeats and seized with a fit of tenderness, he paid himself with a last lick on the groceress in a corner, who found him all sugar with lips which tasted like burnt almonds. Such a delightful man to kiss! He was positively becoming all honey. The Boches said he merely had to dip a finger into his coffee to sweeten it.

Softened by this perpetual dessert, Lantier showed himself paternal towards Gervaise. He gave her advice and scolded her because she no longer liked to work. Indeed! A woman of her age ought to know how to turn herself round. And he accused her of having always been a glutton. Nevertheless, as one ought to hold out a helping hand, even to folks who don't deserve it, he tried to find her a little work. Thus he had prevailed upon Virginie to let Gervaise come once a week to scrub the shop and the rooms. That was the sort of thing she understood and on each occasion she earned her thirty sous. Gervaise arrived on the Saturday morning with a pail and a scrubbing brush, without seeming to suffer in the least at having to perform a dirty, humble duty, a charwoman's work in the dwelling-place where she had reigned as the beautiful fair-haired mistress. It was a last humiliation, the end of her pride.

One Saturday she had a hard job of it. It had rained for three days and the customers seemed to have brought all the mud of the neighborhood into the shop on the soles of their boots. Virginie was at the counter doing the grand, with her hair well combed, and wearing a little white collar and a pair of lace cuffs. Beside her, on the narrow seat covered with red oil-cloth, Lantier did the dandy, looking for the world as if he were at home, as if he were the real master of the place, and from time to time he carelessly dipped his hand into a jar of peppermint drops, just to nibble something sweet according to his habit.

"Look here, Madame Coupeau!" cried Virginie, who was watching the scrubbing with compressed lips, "you have left some dirt over there in the corner. Scrub that rather better please."

Gervaise obeyed. She returned to the corner and began to scrub again. She bent double on her knees in the midst of the dirty water, with her shoulders protruding, her arms stiff and purple with cold. Her old skirt, fairly soaked, stuck to her figure. And there on the floor she looked a dirty, ill-combed drab, the rents in her jacket showing her puffy form, her fat, flabby flesh which heaved, swayed and floundered about as she went about her work; and all the while she perspired to such a point that from her moist face big drops of sweat fell on to the floor.

"The more elbow grease one uses, the more it shines," said Lantier, sententiously, with his mouth full of peppermint drops.

Virginie, who sat back with the demeanor of a princess, her eyes partly open, was still watching the scrubbing, and indulging in remarks. "A little more on the right there. Take care of the wainscot. You know I was not very well pleased last Saturday. There were some stains left."

And both together, the hatter and the groceress assumed a more important air, as if they had been on a throne whilst Gervaise dragged herself through the black mud at their feet. Virginie must have enjoyed herself, for a yellowish flame darted from her cat's eyes, and she looked at Lantier with an insidious smile. At last she was revenged for that hiding she had received at the wash-house, and which she had never forgotten.

Whenever Gervaise ceased scrubbing, a sound of sawing could be heard from the back room. Through the open doorway, Poisson's profile stood out against the pale light of the courtyard. He was off duty that day and was profiting by his leisure time to indulge in his mania for making little boxes. He was seated at a table and was cutting out arabesques in a cigar box with extraordinary care.

"Say, Badingue!" cried Lantier, who had given him this surname again, out of friendship. "I shall want that box of yours as a present for a young lady."

Virginie gave him a pinch and he reached under the counter to run his fingers like a creeping mouse up her leg.

"Quite so," said the policeman. "I was working for you, Auguste, in view of presenting you with a token of friendship."

"Ah, if that's the case, I'll keep your little memento!" rejoined Lantier with a laugh. "I'll hang it round my neck with a ribbon."

Then suddenly, as if this thought brought another one to his memory, "By the way," he cried, "I met Nana last night."

This news caused Gervaise such emotion that she sunk down in the dirty water which covered the floor of the shop.

"Ah!" she muttered speechlessly.

"Yes; as I was going down the Rue des Martyrs, I caught sight of a girl who was on the arm of an old fellow in front of me, and I said to myself: I know that shape. I stepped faster and sure enough found myself face to face with Nana. There's no need to pity her, she looked very happy, with her pretty woolen dress on her back, a gold cross and an awfully pert expression."

"Ah!" repeated Gervaise in a husky voice.

Lantier, who had finished the pastilles, took some barley-sugar out of another jar.

"She's sneaky," he resumed. "She made a sign to me to follow her, with wonderful composure. Then she left her old fellow somewhere in a cafe—oh a wonderful chap, the old bloke, quite used up!—and she came and joined me under the doorway. A pretty little serpent, pretty, and doing the grand, and fawning on you like a little dog. Yes, she kissed me, and wanted to have news of everyone—I was very pleased to meet her."

"Ah!" said Gervaise for the third time. She drew herself together, and still waited. Hadn't her daughter had a word for her then? In the silence Poisson's saw could be heard again. Lantier, who felt gay, was sucking his barley-sugar, and smacking his lips.

"Well, if I saw her, I should go over to the other side of the street," interposed Virginie, who had just pinched the hatter again most ferociously. "It isn't because you are there, Madame Coupeau, but your daughter is rotten to the core. Why, every day Poisson arrests girls who are better than she is."

Gervaise said nothing, nor did she move; her eyes staring into space. She ended by jerking her head to and fro, as if in answer to her thoughts, whilst the hatter, with a gluttonous mien, muttered:

"Ah, a man wouldn't mind getting a bit of indigestion from that sort of rottenness. It's as tender as chicken."

But the grocer gave him such a terrible look that he had to pause and quiet her with some delicate attention. He watched the policeman, and perceiving that he had his nose lowered over his little box again, he profited of the opportunity to shove some barley-sugar into Virginie's mouth. Thereupon she laughed at him good-naturedly and turned all her anger against Gervaise.

"Just make haste, eh? The work doesn't do itself while you remain stuck there like a street post. Come, look alive, I don't want to flounder about in the water till night time."

And she added hatefully in a lower tone: "It isn't my fault if her daughter's gone and left her."

No doubt Gervaise did not hear. She had begun to scrub the floor again, with her back bent and dragging herself along with a frog-like motion. She still had to sweep the dirty water out into the gutter, and then do the final rinsing.

After a pause, Lantier, who felt bored, raised his voice again: "Do you know, Badingue," he cried, "I met your boss yesterday in the Rue de Rivoli. He looked awfully down in the mouth. He hasn't six months' life left in his body. Ah! after all, with the life he leads—"

He was talking about the Emperor. The policeman did not raise his eyes, but curtly answered: "If you were the Government you wouldn't be so fat."

"Oh, my dear fellow, if I were the Government," rejoined the hatter, suddenly affecting an air of gravity, "things would go on rather better, I give you my word for it. Thus, their foreign policy—why, for some time past it has been enough to make a fellow sweat. If I—I who speak to you—only knew a journalist to inspire him with my ideas."

He was growing animated, and as he had finished crunching his barley-sugar, he opened a drawer from which he took a number of jujubes, which he swallowed while gesticulating.

"It's quite simple. Before anything else, I should give Poland her independence again, and I should establish a great Scandinavian state to keep the Giant of the North at bay. Then I should make a republic out of all the little German states. As for England, she's scarcely to be feared; if she budged ever so little I should send a hundred thousand men to India. Add to that I should send the Sultan back to Mecca and the Pope to Jerusalem, belaboring their backs with the butt end of a rifle. Eh? Europe would soon be clean. Come, Badingue, just look here."

He paused to take five or six jujubes in his hand. "Why, it wouldn't take longer than to swallow these."

And he threw one jujube after another into his open mouth.

"The Emperor has another plan," said the policeman, after reflecting for a couple of minutes.

"Oh, forget it," rejoined the hatter. "We know what his plan is. All Europe is laughing at us. Every day the Tuileries footmen find your boss under the table between a couple of high society floozies."

Poisson rose to his feet. He came forward and placed his hand on his heart, saying: "You hurt me, Auguste. Discuss, but don't involve personalities."

Thereupon Virginie intervened, bidding them stop their row. She didn't care a fig for Europe. How could two men, who shared everything else, always be disputing about politics? For a minute they mumbled some indistinct words. Then the policeman, in view of showing that he harbored no spite, produced the cover of his little box, which he had just finished; it bore the inscription in marquetry: "To Auguste, a token of friendship." Lantier, feeling exceedingly flattered, lounged back and spread himself out so that he almost sat upon Virginie. And the husband viewed the scene with his face the color of an old wall and his bleared eyes fairly expressionless; but all the same, at moments the red hairs of his moustaches stood up on end of their own accord in a very singular fashion, which would have alarmed any man who was less sure of his business than the hatter.

This beast of a Lantier had the quiet cheek which pleases ladies. As Poisson turned his back he was seized with the idea of printing a kiss on Madame Poisson's left eye. As a rule he was stealthily prudent, but when he had been disputing about politics he risked everything, so as to show the wife his superiority. These gloating caresses, cheekily stolen behind the policeman's back, revenged him on the Empire which had turned France into a house of quarrels. Only on this occasion he had forgotten Gervaise's presence. She had just finished rinsing and wiping the shop, and she stood near the counter waiting for her thirty sous. However, the kiss on Virginie's eye left her perfectly calm, as being quite natural, and as part of a business she had no right to mix herself up in. Virginie seemed rather vexed. She threw the thirty sous on to the counter in front of Gervaise. The latter did not budge but stood there waiting, still palpitating with the effort she had made in scrubbing, and looking as soaked and as ugly as a dog fished out of the sewer.

"Then she didn't tell you anything?" she asked the hatter at last.

"Who?" he cried. "Ah, yes; you mean Nana. No, nothing else. What a tempting mouth she has, the little hussy! Real strawberry jam!"

Gervaise went off with her thirty sous in her hand. The holes in her shoes spat water forth like pumps; they were real musical shoes, and played a tune as they left moist traces of their broad soles along the pavement.

In the neighborhood the feminine tipplers of her own class now related that she drank to console herself for her daughter's misconduct. She herself, when she gulped down her dram of spirits on the counter, assumed a dramatic air, and tossed the liquor into her mouth, wishing it would "do" for her. And on the days when she came home boozed she stammered that it was all through grief. But honest folks shrugged their shoulders. They knew what that meant: ascribing the effects of the peppery fire of l'Assommoir to grief, indeed! At all events, she ought to have called it bottled grief. No doubt at the beginning she couldn't digest Nana's flight. All the honest feelings remaining in her revolted at the thought, and besides, as a rule a mother doesn't like to have to think that her daughter, at that very moment, perhaps, is being familiarly addressed by the first chance comer. But Gervaise was already too stultified with a sick head and a crushed heart, to think of the shame for long. With her it came and went. She remained sometimes for a week together without thinking of her daughter, and then suddenly a tender or an angry feeling seized hold of her, sometimes when she had her stomach empty, at others when it was full, a furious longing to catch Nana in some corner, where she would perhaps have kissed her or perhaps have beaten her, according to the fancy of the moment.

Whenever these thoughts came over her, Gervaise looked on all sides in the streets with the eyes of a detective. Ah! if she had only seen her little sinner, how quickly she would have brought her home again! The neighborhood was being turned topsy-turvy that year. The Boulevard Magenta and the Boulevard Ornano were being pierced; they were doing away with the old Barriere Poissonniere and cutting right through the outer Boulevard. The district could not be recognized. The whole of one side of the Rue des Poissonniers had been pulled down. From the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or a large clearing could now be seen, a dash of sunlight and open air; and in place of the gloomy buildings which had hidden the view in this direction there rose up on the Boulevard Ornano a perfect monument, a six-storied house, carved all over like a church, with clear windows, which, with their embroidered curtains, seemed symbolical of wealth. This white house, standing just in front of the street, illuminated it with a jet of light, as it were, and every day it caused discussions between Lantier and Poisson.

Gervaise had several times had tidings of Nana. There are always ready tongues anxious to pay you a sorry compliment. Yes, she had been told that the hussy had left her old gentleman, just like the inexperienced girl she was. She had gotten along famously with him, petted, adored, and free, too, if she had only known how to manage the situation. But youth is foolish, and she had no doubt gone off with some young rake, no one knew exactly where. What seemed certain was that one afternoon she had left her old fellow on the Place de la Bastille, just for half a minute, and he was still waiting for her to return. Other persons swore they had seen her since, dancing on her heels at the "Grand Hall of Folly," in the Rue de la Chapelle. Then it was that Gervaise took it into her head to frequent all the dancing places of the neighborhood. She did not pass in front of a public ball-room without going in. Coupeau accompanied her. At first they merely made the round of the room, looking at the drabs who were jumping about. But one evening, as they had some coin, they sat down and ordered a large bowl of hot wine in view of regaling themselves and waiting to see if Nana would turn up. At the end of a month or so they had practically forgotten her, but they frequented the halls for their own pleasure, liking to look at the dancers. They would remain for hours without exchanging a word, resting their elbows on the table, stultified amidst the quaking of the floor, and yet no doubt amusing themselves as they stared with pale eyes at the Barriere women in the stifling atmosphere and ruddy glow of the hall.

It happened one November evening that they went into the "Grand Hall of Folly" to warm themselves. Out of doors a sharp wind cut you across the face. But the hall was crammed. There was a thundering big swarm inside; people at all the tables, people in the middle, people up above, quite an amount of flesh. Yes, those who cared for tripes could enjoy themselves. When they had made the round twice without finding a vacant table, they decided to remain standing and wait till somebody went off. Coupeau was teetering on his legs, in a dirty blouse, with an old cloth cap which had lost its peak flattened down on his head. And as he blocked the way, he saw a scraggy young fellow who was wiping his coat-sleeve after elbowing him.

"Say!" cried Coupeau in a fury, as he took his pipe out of his black mouth. "Can't you apologize? And you play the disgusted one? Just because a fellow wears a blouse!"

The young man turned round and looked at the zinc-worker from head to foot.

"I'll just teach you, you scraggy young scamp," continued Coupeau, "that the blouse is the finest garment out; yes! the garment of work. I'll wipe you if you like with my fists. Did one ever hear of such a thing—a ne'er-do-well insulting a workman!"

Gervaise tried to calm him, but in vain. He drew himself up in his rags, in full view, and struck his blouse, roaring: "There's a man's chest under that!"

Thereupon the young man dived into the midst of the crowd, muttering: "What a dirty blackguard!"

Coupeau wanted to follow and catch him. He wasn't going to let himself be insulted by a fellow with a coat on. Probably it wasn't even paid for! Some second-hand toggery to impress a girl with, without having to fork out a centime. If he caught the chap again, he'd bring him down on his knees and make him bow to the blouse. But the crush was too great; there was no means of walking. He and Gervaise turned slowly round the dancers; there were three rows of sightseers packed close together, whose faces lighted up whenever any of the dancers showed off. As Coupeau and Gervaise were both short, they raised themselves up on tiptoe, trying to see something besides the chignons and hats that were bobbing about. The cracked brass instruments of the orchestra were furiously thundering a quadrille, a perfect tempest which made the hall shake; while the dancers, striking the floor with their feet, raised a cloud of dust which dimmed the brightness of the gas. The heat was unbearable.

"Look there," said Gervaise suddenly.

"Look at what?"

"Why, at that velvet hat over there."

They raised themselves up on tiptoe. On the left hand there was an old black velvet hat trimmed with ragged feathers bobbing about—regular hearse's plumes. It was dancing a devil of a dance, this hat—bouncing and whirling round, diving down and then springing up again. Coupeau and Gervaise lost sight of it as the people round about moved their heads, but then suddenly they saw it again, swaying farther off with such droll effrontery that folks laughed merely at the sight of this dancing hat, without knowing what was underneath it.

"Well?" asked Coupeau.

"Don't you recognize that head of hair?" muttered Gervaise in a stifled voice. "May my head be cut off if it isn't her."

With one shove the zinc-worker made his way through the crowd. Mon Dieu! yes, it was Nana! And in a nice pickle too! She had nothing on her back but an old silk dress, all stained and sticky from having wiped the tables of boozing dens, and with its flounces so torn that they fell in tatters round about. Not even a bit of a shawl over her shoulders. And to think that the hussy had had such an attentive, loving gentleman, and had yet fallen to this condition, merely for the sake of following some rascal who had beaten her, no doubt! Nevertheless she had remained fresh and insolent, with her hair as frizzy as a poodle's, and her mouth bright pink under that rascally hat of hers.

"Just wait a bit, I'll make her dance!" resumed Coupeau.

Naturally enough, Nana was not on her guard. You should have seen how she wriggled about! She twisted to the right and to the left, bending double as if she were going to break herself in two, and kicking her feet as high as her partner's face. A circle had formed about her and this excited her even more. She raised her skirts to her knees and really let herself go in a wild dance, whirling and turning, dropping to the floor in splits, and then jigging and bouncing.

Coupeau was trying to force his way through the dancers and was disrupting the quadrille.

"I tell you, it's my daughter!" he cried; "let me pass."

Nana was now dancing backwards, sweeping the floor with her flounces, rounding her figure and wriggling it, so as to look all the more tempting. She suddenly received a masterly blow just on the right cheek. She raised herself up and turned quite pale on recognizing her father and mother. Bad luck and no mistake.

"Turn him out!" howled the dancers.

But Coupeau, who had just recognized his daughter's cavalier as the scraggy young man in the coat, did not care a fig for what the people said.

"Yes, it's us," he roared. "Eh? You didn't expect it. So we catch you here, and with a whipper-snapper, too, who insulted me a little while ago!"

Gervaise, whose teeth were tight set, pushed him aside, exclaiming, "Shut up. There's no need of so much explanation."

And, stepping forward, she dealt Nana a couple of hearty cuffs. The first knocked the feathered hat on one side, and the second left a red mark on the girl's white cheek. Nana was too stupefied either to cry or resist. The orchestra continued playing, the crowd grew angry and repeated savagely, "Turn them out! Turn them out!"

"Come, make haste!" resumed Gervaise. "Just walk in front, and don't try to run off. You shall sleep in prison if you do."

The scraggy young man had prudently disappeared. Nana walked ahead, very stiff and still stupefied by her bad luck. Whenever she showed the lest unwillingness, a cuff from behind brought her back to the direction of the door. And thus they went out, all three of them, amid the jeers and banter of the spectators, whilst the orchestra finished playing the finale with such thunder that the trombones seemed to be spitting bullets.

The old life began again. After sleeping for twelve hours in her closet, Nana behaved very well for a week or so. She had patched herself a modest little dress, and wore a cap with the strings tied under her chignon. Seized indeed with remarkable fervor, she declared she would work at home, where one could earn what one liked without hearing any nasty work-room talk; and she procured some work and installed herself at a table, getting up at five o'clock in the morning on the first few days to roll her sprigs of violets. But when she had delivered a few gross, she stretched her arms and yawned over her work, with her hands cramped, for she had lost her knack of stem-rolling, and suffocated, shut up like this at home after allowing herself so much open air freedom during the last six months. Then the glue dried, the petals and the green paper got stained with grease, and the flower-dealer came three times in person to make a row and claim his spoiled materials.

Nana idled along, constantly getting a hiding from her father, and wrangling with her mother morning and night—quarrels in which the two women flung horrible words at each other's head. It couldn't last; the twelfth day she took herself off, with no more luggage than her modest dress on her back and her cap perched over one ear. The Lorilleuxs, who had pursed their lips on hearing of her return and repentance, nearly died of laughter now. Second performance, eclipse number two, all aboard for the train for Saint-Lazare, the prison-hospital for streetwalkers! No, it was really too comical. Nana took herself off in such an amusing style. Well, if the Coupeaus wanted to keep her in the future, they must shut her up in a cage.

In the presence of other people the Coupeaus pretended they were very glad to be rid of the girl, though in reality they were enraged. However, rage can't last forever, and soon they heard without even blinking that Nana was seen in the neighborhood. Gervaise, who accused her of doing it to enrage them, set herself above the scandal; she might meet her daughter on the street, she said; she wouldn't even dirty her hand to cuff her; yes, it was all over; she might have seen her lying in the gutter, dying on the pavement, and she would have passed by without even admitting that such a hussy was her own child.

Nana meanwhile was enlivening the dancing halls of the neighborhood. She was known from the "Ball of Queen Blanche" to the "Great Hall of Folly." When she entered the "Elysee-Montmartre," folks climbed onto the tables to see her do the "sniffling crawfish" during the pastourelle. As she had twice been turned out of the "Chateau Rouge" hall, she walked outside the door waiting for someone she knew to escort her inside. The "Black Ball" on the outer Boulevard and the "Grand Turk" in the Rue des Poissonniers, were respectable places where she only went when she had some fine dress on. Of all the jumping places of the neighborhood, however, those she most preferred were the "Hermitage Ball" in a damp courtyard and "Robert's Ball" in the Impasse du Cadran, two dirty little halls, lighted up with a half dozen oil lamps, and kept very informally, everyone pleased and everyone free, so much so that the men and their girls kissed each other at their ease, in the dances, without being disturbed. Nana had ups and downs, perfect transformations, now tricked out like a stylish woman and now all dirt. Ah! she had a fine life.

On several occasions the Coupeaus fancied they saw her in some shady dive. They turned their backs and decamped in another direction so as not to be obliged to recognize her. They didn't care to be laughed at by a whole dancing hall again for the sake of bringing such a dolt home. One night as they were going to bed, however, someone knocked at the door. It was Nana who matter-of-factly came to ask for a bed; and in what a state. Mon Dieu! her head was bare, her dress in tatters, and her boots full of holes—such a toilet as might have led the police to run her in, and take her off to the Depot. Naturally enough she received a hiding, and then she gluttonously fell on a crust of stale bread and went to sleep, worn out, with the last mouthful between her teeth.

Then this sort of life continued. As soon as she was somewhat recovered she would go off and not a sight or sound of her. Weeks or months would pass and she would suddenly appear with no explanation. The Coupeaus got used to these comings and goings. Well, as long as she didn't leave the door open. What could you expect?

There was only one thing that really bothered Gervaise. This was to see her daughter come home in a dress with a train and a hat covered with feathers. No, she couldn't stomach this display. Nana might indulge in riotous living if she chose, but when she came home to her mother's she ought to dress like a workgirl. The dresses with trains caused quite a sensation in the house; the Lorilleuxs sneered; Lantier, whose mouth sneered, turned the girl round to sniff at her delicious aroma; the Boches had forbidden Pauline to associate with this baggage in her frippery. And Gervaise was also angered by Nana's exhausted slumber, when after one of her adventures, she slept till noon, with her chignon undone and still full of hair pins, looking so white and breathing so feebly that she seemed to be dead. Her mother shook her five or six times in the course of the morning, threatening to throw a jugful of water over her. The sight of this handsome lazy girl, half naked and besotted with wine, exasperated her, as she saw her lying there. Sometimes Nana opened an eye, closed it again, and then stretched herself out all the more.

One day after reproaching her with the life she led and asking her if she had taken on an entire battalion of soldiers, Gervaise put her threat into execution to the extent of shaking her dripping hand over Nana's body. Quite infuriated, the girl pulled herself up in the sheet, and cried out:

"That's enough, mamma. It would be better not to talk of men. You did as you liked, and now I do the same!"

"What! What!" stammered the mother.

"Yes, I never spoke to you about it, for it didn't concern me; but you didn't used to be very fussy. I often saw you when we lived at the shop sneaking off as soon as papa started snoring. So just shut up; you shouldn't have set me the example."

Gervaise remained pale, with trembling hands, turning round without knowing what she was about, whilst Nana, flattened on her breast, embraced her pillow with both arms and subsided into the torpor of her leaden slumber.

Coupeau growled, no longer sane enough to think of launching out a whack. He was altogether losing his mind. And really there was no need to call him an unprincipled father, for liquor had deprived him of all consciousness of good and evil.

Now it was a settled thing. He wasn't sober once in six months; then he was laid up and had to go into the Sainte-Anne hospital; a pleasure trip for him. The Lorilleuxs said that the Duke of Bowel-Twister had gone to visit his estates. At the end of a few weeks he left the asylum, repaired and set together again, and then he began to pull himself to bits once more, till he was down on his back and needed another mending. In three years he went seven times to Sainte-Anne in this fashion. The neighborhood said that his cell was kept ready for him. But the worst of the matter was that this obstinate tippler demolished himself more and more each time so that from relapse to relapse one could foresee the final tumble, the last cracking of this shaky cask, all the hoops of which were breaking away, one after the other.

At the same time, he forgot to improve in appearance; a perfect ghost to look at! The poison was having terrible effects. By dint of imbibing alcohol, his body shrunk up like the embryos displayed in glass jars in chemical laboratories. When he approached a window you could see through his ribs, so skinny had he become. Those who knew his age, only forty years just gone, shuddered when he passed by, bent and unsteady, looking as old as the streets themselves. And the trembling of his hands increased, the right one danced to such an extent, that sometimes he had to take his glass between both fists to carry it to his lips. Oh! that cursed trembling! It was the only thing that worried his addled brains. You could hear him growling ferocious insults against those hands of his.

This last summer, during which Nana usually came home to spend her nights, after she had finished knocking about, was especially bad for Coupeau. His voice changed entirely as if liquor had set a new music in his throat. He became deaf in one ear. Then in a few days his sight grew dim, and he had to clutch hold of the stair railings to prevent himself from falling. As for his health, he had abominable headaches and dizziness. All on a sudden he was seized with acute pains in his arms and legs; he turned pale; was obliged to sit down, and remained on a chair witless for hours; indeed, after one such attack, his arm remained paralyzed for the whole day. He took to his bed several times; he rolled himself up and hid himself under the sheet, breathing hard and continuously like a suffering animal. Then the strange scenes of Sainte-Anne began again. Suspicious and nervous, worried with a burning fever, he rolled about in a mad rage, tearing his blouse and biting the furniture with his convulsed jaws; or else he sank into a great state of emotion, complaining like a child, sobbing and lamenting because nobody loved him. One night when Gervaise and Nana returned home together they were surprised not to find him in his bed. He had laid the bolster in his place. And when they discovered him, hiding between the bed and the wall, his teeth were chattering, and he related that some men had come to murder him. The two women were obliged to put him to bed again and quiet him like a child.

Coupeau knew only one remedy, to toss down a pint of spirits; a whack in his stomach, which set him on his feet again. This was how he doctored his gripes of a morning. His memory had left him long ago, his brain was empty; and he no sooner found himself on his feet than he poked fun at illness. He had never been ill. Yes, he had got to the point when a fellow kicks the bucket declaring that he's quite well. And his wits were going a-wool-gathering in other respects too. When Nana came home after gadding about for six weeks or so he seemed to fancy she had returned from doing some errand in the neighborhood. Often when she was hanging on an acquaintance's arm she met him and laughed at him without his recognizing her. In short, he no longer counted for anything; she might have sat down on him if she had been at a loss for a chair.

When the first frosts came Nana took herself off once more under the pretence of going to the fruiterer's to see if there were any baked pears. She scented winter and didn't care to let her teeth chatter in front of the fireless stove. The Coupeaus had called her no good because they had waited for the pears. No doubt she would come back again. The other winter she had stayed away three weeks to fetch her father two sous' worth of tobacco. But the months went by and the girl did not show herself. This time she must have indulged in a hard gallop. When June arrived she did not even turn up with the sunshine. Evidently it was all over, she had found a new meal ticket somewhere or other. One day when the Coupeaus were totally broke they sold Nana's iron bedstead for six francs, which they drank together at Saint-Ouen. The bedstead had been in their way.

One morning in July Virginie called to Gervaise, who was passing by, and asked her to lend a hand in washing up, for Lantier had entertained a couple of friends on the day before. And while Gervaise was cleaning up the plates and dishes, greasy with the traces of the spread, the hatter, who was still digesting in the shop, suddenly called out:

"Say, I saw Nana the other day."

Virginie, who was seated at the counter looking very careworn in front of the jars and drawers which were already three parts emptied, jerked her head furiously. She restrained herself so as not to say too much, but really it was angering her. Lantier was seeing Nana often. Oh! she was by no means sure of him; he was a man to do much worse than that, when a fancy for a woman came into his head. Madame Lerat, very intimate just then with Virginie, who confided in her, had that moment entered the shop, and hearing Lantier's remark, she pouted ridiculously, and asked:

"What do you mean, you saw her?"

"Oh, in the street here," answered the hatter, who felt highly flattered, and began to laugh and twirl his moustaches. "She was in a carriage and I was floundering on the pavement. Really it was so, I swear it! There's no use denying it, the young fellows of position who are on friendly terms with her are terribly lucky!"

His eyes had brightened and he turned towards Gervaise who was standing in the rear of the shop wiping a dish.

"Yes, she was in a carriage, and wore such a stylish dress! I didn't recognise her, she looked so much like a lady of the upper set, with her white teeth and her face as fresh as a flower. It was she who waved her glove to me. She has caught a count, I believe. Oh! she's launched for good. She can afford to do without any of us; she's head over heels in happiness, the little beggar! What a love of a little kitten! No, you've no idea what a little kitten she is!"

Gervaise was still wiping the same plate, although it had long since been clean and shiny. Virginie was reflecting, anxious about a couple of bills which fell due on the morrow and which she didn't know how to pay; whilst Lantier, stout and fat, perspiring the sugar he fed off, ventured his enthusiasm for well-dressed little hussies. The shop, which was already three parts eaten up, smelt of ruin. Yes, there were only a few more burnt almonds to nibble, a little more barley-sugar to suck, to clean the Poissons' business out. Suddenly, on the pavement over the way, he perceived the policeman, who was on duty, pass by all buttoned up with his sword dangling by his side. And this made him all the gayer. He compelled Virginie to look at her husband.

"Dear me," he muttered, "Badingue looks fine this morning! Just look, see how stiff he walks. He must have stuck a glass eye in his back to surprise people."

When Gervaise went back upstairs, she found Coupeau seated on the bed, in the torpid state induced by one of his attacks. He was looking at the window-panes with his dim expressionless eyes. She sat herself down on a chair, tired out, her hands hanging beside her dirty skirt; and for a quarter of an hour she remained in front of him without saying a word.

"I've had some news," she muttered at last. "Your daughter's been seen. Yes, your daughter's precious stylish and hasn't any more need of you. She's awfully happy, she is! Ah! Mon Dieu! I'd give a great deal to be in her place."

Coupeau was still staring at the window-pane. But suddenly he raised his ravaged face, and stammered with an idiotic laugh:

"Well, my little lamb, I'm not stopping you. You're not yet so bad looking when you wash yourself. As folks say, however old a pot may be, it ends by finding its lid. And, after all, I wouldn't care if it only buttered our bread."

CHAPTER XII

It must have been the Saturday after quarter day, something like the 12th or 13th of January—Gervaise didn't quite know. She was losing her wits, for it was centuries since she had had anything warm in her stomach. Ah! what an infernal week! A complete clear out. Two loaves of four pounds each on Tuesday, which had lasted till Thursday; then a dry crust found the night before, and finally not a crumb for thirty-six hours, a real dance before the cupboard! What did she know, by the way, what she felt on her back, was the frightful cold, a black cold, the sky as grimy as a frying-pan, thick with snow which obstinately refused to fall. When winter and hunger are both together in your guts, you may tighten your belt as much as you like, it hardly feeds you.

Perhaps Coupeau would bring back some money in the evening. He said that he was working. Anything is possible, isn't it? And Gervaise, although she had been caught many and many a time, had ended by relying on this coin. After all sorts of incidents, she herself couldn't find as much as a duster to wash in the whole neighborhood; and even an old lady, whose rooms she did, had just given her the sack, charging her with swilling her liqueurs. No one would engage her, she was washed up everywhere; and this secretly suited her, for she had fallen to that state of indifference when one prefers to croak rather than move one's fingers. At all events, if Coupeau brought his pay home they would have something warm to eat. And meanwhile, as it wasn't yet noon, she remained stretched on the mattress, for one doesn't feel so cold or so hungry when one is lying down.

The bed was nothing but a pile of straw in a corner. Bed and bedding had gone, piece by piece, to the second-hand dealers of the neighborhood. First she had ripped open the mattress to sell handfuls of wool at ten sous a pound. When the mattress was empty she got thirty sous for the sack so as to be able to have coffee. Everything else had followed. Well, wasn't the straw good enough for them?

Gervaise bent herself like a gun-trigger on the heap of straw, with her clothes on and her feet drawn up under her rag of a skirt, so as to keep them warm. And huddled up, with her eyes wide open, she turned some scarcely amusing ideas over in her mind that morning. Ah! no, they couldn't continue living without food. She no longer felt her hunger, only she had a leaden weight on her chest and her brain seemed empty. Certainly there was nothing gay to look at in the four corners of the hovel. A perfect kennel now, where greyhounds, who wear wrappers in the streets, would not even have lived in effigy. Her pale eyes stared at the bare walls. Everything had long since gone to "uncle's." All that remained were the chest of drawers, the table and a chair. Even the marble top of the chest of drawers and the drawers themselves, had evaporated in the same direction as the bedstead. A fire could not have cleaned them out more completely; the little knick-knacks had melted, beginning with the ticker, a twelve franc watch, down to the family photos, the frames of which had been bought by a woman keeping a second-hand store; a very obliging woman, by the way, to whom Gervaise carried a saucepan, an iron, a comb and who gave her five, three or two sous in exchange, according to the article; enough, at all events to go upstairs again with a bit of bread. But now there only remained a broken pair of candle snuffers, which the woman refused to give her even a sou for.

Oh! if she could only have sold the rubbish and refuse, the dust and the dirt, how speedily she would have opened shop, for the room was filthy to behold! She only saw cobwebs in the corners and although cobwebs are good for cuts, there are, so far, no merchants who buy them. Then turning her head, abandoning the idea of doing a bit of trade, Gervaise gathered herself together more closely on her straw, preferring to stare through the window at the snow-laden sky, at the dreary daylight, which froze the marrow in her bones.

What a lot of worry! Though, after all, what was the use of putting herself in such a state and puzzling her brains? If she had only been able to have a snooze. But her hole of a home wouldn't go out of her mind. Monsieur Marescot, the landlord had come in person the day before to tell them that he would turn them out into the street if the two quarters' rent now overdue were not paid during the ensuing week. Well, so he might, they certainly couldn't be worse off on the pavement! Fancy this ape, in his overcoat and his woolen gloves, coming upstairs to talk to them about rent, as if they had had a treasure hidden somewhere!

Just the same with that brute of a Coupeau, who couldn't come home now without beating her; she wished him in the same place as the landlord. She sent them all there, wishing to rid herself of everyone, and of life too. She was becoming a real storehouse for blows. Coupeau had a cudgel, which he called his ass's fan, and he fanned his old woman. You should just have seen him giving her abominable thrashings, which made her perspire all over. She was no better herself, for she bit and scratched him. Then they stamped about in the empty room and gave each other such drubbings as were likely to ease them of all taste for bread for good. But Gervaise ended by not caring a fig for these thwacks, not more than she did for anything else. Coupeau might celebrate Saint Monday for weeks altogether, go off on the spree for months at a time, come home mad with liquor, and seek to sharpen her as he said, she had grown accustomed to it, she thought him tiresome, but nothing more. It was on these occasions that she wished him somewhere else. Yes, somewhere, her beast of a man and the Lorilleuxs, the Boches, and the Poissons too; in fact, the whole neighborhood, which she had such contempt for. She sent all Paris there with a gesture of supreme carelessness, and was pleased to be able to revenge herself in this style.

One could get used to almost anything, but still, it is hard to break the habit of eating. That was the one thing that really annoyed Gervaise, the hunger that kept gnawing at her insides. Oh, those pleasant little snacks she used to have. Now she had fallen low enough to gobble anything she could find.

On special occasions, she would get waste scraps of meat from the butcher for four sous a pound. Blacked and dried out meat that couldn't find a purchaser. She would mix this with potatoes for a stew. On other occasions, when she had some wine, she treated herself to a sop, a true parrot's pottage. Two sous' worth of Italian cheese, bushels of white potatoes, quarts of dry beans, cooked in their own juice, these also were dainties she was not often able to indulge in now. She came down to leavings from low eating dens, where for a sou she had a pile of fish-bones, mixed with the parings of moldy roast meat. She fell even lower—she begged a charitable eating-house keeper to give her his customers' dry crusts, and she made herself a bread soup, letting the crusts simmer as long as possible on a neighbor's fire. On the days when she was really hungry, she searched about with the dogs, to see what might be lying outside the tradespeople's doors before the dustmen went by; and thus at times she came across rich men's food, rotten melons, stinking mackerel and chops, which she carefully inspected for fear of maggots.

Yes, she had come to this. The idea may be a repugnant one to delicate-minded folks, but if they hadn't chewed anything for three days running, we should hardly see them quarreling with their stomachs; they would go down on all fours and eat filth like other people. Ah! the death of the poor, the empty entrails, howling hunger, the animal appetite that leads one with chattering teeth to fill one's stomach with beastly refuse in this great Paris, so bright and golden! And to think that Gervaise used to fill her belly with fat goose! Now the thought of it brought tears to her eyes. One day, when Coupeau bagged two bread tickets from her to go and sell them and get some liquor, she nearly killed him with the blow of a shovel, so hungered and so enraged was she by this theft of a bit of bread.

However, after a long contemplation of the pale sky, she had fallen into a painful doze. She dreamt that the snow-laden sky was falling on her, so cruelly did the cold pinch. Suddenly she sprang to her feet, awakened with a start by a shudder of anguish. Mon Dieu! was she going to die? Shivering and haggard she perceived that it was still daylight. Wouldn't the night ever come? How long the time seems when the stomach is empty! Hers was waking up in its turn and beginning to torture her. Sinking down on the chair, with her head bent and her hands between her legs to warm them, she began to think what they would have for dinner as soon as Coupeau brought the money home: a loaf, a quart of wine and two platefuls of tripe in the Lyonnaise fashion. Three o'clock struck by father Bazouge's clock. Yes, it was only three o'clock. Then she began to cry. She would never have strength enough to wait until seven. Her body swayed backwards and forwards, she oscillated like a child nursing some sharp pain, bending herself double and crushing her stomach so as not to feel it. Ah! an accouchement is less painful than hunger! And unable to ease herself, seized with rage, she rose and stamped about, hoping to send her hunger to sleep by walking it to and fro like an infant. For half an hour or so, she knocked against the four corners of the empty room. Then, suddenly, she paused with a fixed stare. So much the worse! They might say what they liked; she would lick their feet if needs be, but she would go and ask the Lorilleuxs to lend her ten sous.

At winter time, up these stairs of the house, the paupers' stairs, there was a constant borrowing of ten sous and twenty sous, petty services which these hungry beggars rendered each other. Only they would rather have died than have applied to the Lorilleuxs, for they knew they were too tight-fisted. Thus Gervaise displayed remarkable courage in going to knock at their door. She felt so frightened in the passage that she experienced the sudden relief of people who ring a dentist's bell.

"Come in!" cried the chainmaker in a sour voice.

How warm and nice it was inside. The forge was blazing, its white flame lighting up the narrow workroom, whilst Madame Lorilleux set a coil of gold wire to heat. Lorilleux, in front of his worktable, was perspiring with the warmth as he soldered the links of a chain together. And it smelt nice. Some cabbage soup was simmering on the stove, exhaling a steam which turned Gervaise's heart topsy-turvy, and almost made her faint.

"Ah! it's you," growled Madame Lorilleux, without even asking her to sit down. "What do you want?"

Gervaise did not answer for a moment. She had recently been on fairly good terms with the Lorilleuxs, but she saw Boche sitting by the stove. He seemed very much at home, telling funny stories.

"What do you want?" repeated Lorilleux.

"You haven't seen Coupeau?" Gervaise finally stammered at last. "I thought he was here."

The chainmakers and the concierge sneered. No, for certain, they hadn't seen Coupeau. They didn't stand treat often enough to interest Coupeau. Gervaise made an effort and resumed, stuttering:

"It's because he promised to come home. Yes, he's to bring me some money. And as I have absolute need of something—"

Silence followed. Madame Lorilleux was roughly fanning the fire of the stove; Lorilleux had lowered his nose over the bit of chain between his fingers, while Boche continued laughing, puffing out his face till it looked like the full moon.

"If I only had ten sous," muttered Gervaise, in a low voice.

The silence persisted.

"Couldn't you lend me ten sous? Oh! I would return them to you this evening!"

Madame Lorilleux turned round and stared at her. Here was a wheedler trying to get round them. To-day she asked them for ten sous, to-morrow it would be for twenty, and there would be no reason to stop. No, indeed; it would be a warm day in winter if they lent her anything.

"But, my dear," cried Madame Lorilleux. "You know very well that we haven't any money! Look! There's the lining of my pocket. You can search us. If we could, it would be with a willing heart, of course."

"The heart's always there," growled Lorilleux. "Only when one can't, one can't."

Gervaise looked very humble and nodded her head approvingly. However, she did not take herself off. She squinted at the gold, at the gold tied together hanging on the walls, at the gold wire the wife was drawing out with all the strength of her little arms, at the gold links lying in a heap under the husband's knotty fingers. And she thought that the least bit of this ugly black metal would suffice to buy her a good dinner. The workroom was as dirty as ever, full of old iron, coal dust and sticky oil stains, half wiped away; but now, as Gervaise saw it, it seemed resplendent with treasure, like a money changer's shop. And so she ventured to repeat softly: "I would return them to you, return them without fail. Ten sous wouldn't inconvenience you."

Her heart was swelling with the effort she made not to own that she had had nothing to eat since the day before. Then she felt her legs give way. She was frightened that she might burst into tears, and she still stammered:

"It would be kind of you! You don't know. Yes, I'm reduced to that, good Lord—reduced to that!"

Thereupon the Lorilleuxs pursed their lips and exchanged covert glances. So Clump-clump was begging now! Well, the fall was complete. But they did not care for that kind of thing by any means. If they had known, they would have barricaded the door, for people should always be on their guard against beggars—folks who make their way into apartments under a pretext and carry precious objects away with them; and especially so in this place, as there was something worth while stealing. One might lay one's fingers no matter where, and carry off thirty or forty francs by merely closing the hands. They had felt suspicious several times already on noticing how strange Gervaise looked when she stuck herself in front of the gold. This time, however, they meant to watch her. And as she approached nearer, with her feet on the board, the chainmaker roughly called out, without giving any further answer to her question: "Look out, pest—take care; you'll be carrying some scraps of gold away on the soles of your shoes. One would think you had greased them on purpose to make the gold stick to them."

Gervaise slowly drew back. For a moment she leant against a rack, and seeing that Madame Lorilleux was looking at her hands, she opened them and showed them, saying softly, without the least anger, like a fallen women who accepts anything:

"I have taken nothing; you can look."

And then she went off, because the strong smell of the cabbage soup and the warmth of the workroom made her feel too ill.

Ah! the Lorilleuxs did not detain her. Good riddance; just see if they opened the door to her again. They had seen enough of her face. They didn't want other people's misery in their rooms, especially when that misery was so well deserved. They reveled in their selfish delight at being seated so cozily in a warm room, with a dainty soup cooking. Boche also stretched himself, puffing with his cheeks still more and more, so much, indeed, that his laugh really became indecent. They were all nicely revenged on Clump-clump, for her former manners, her blue shop, her spreads, and all the rest. It had all worked out just as it should, proving where a love of showing-off would get you.

"So that is the style now? Begging for ten sous," cried Madame Lorilleux as soon as Gervaise had gone. "Wait a bit; I'll lend her ten sous, and no mistake, to go and get drunk with."

Gervaise shuffled along the passage in her slippers, bending her back and feeling heavy. On reaching her door she did not open it—her room frightened her. It would be better to walk about, she would learn patience. As she passed by she stretched out her neck, peering into Pere Bru's kennel under the stairs. There, for instance, was another one who must have a fine appetite, for he had breakfasted and dined by heart during the last three days. However, he wasn't at home, there was only his hole, and Gervaise felt somewhat jealous, thinking that perhaps he had been invited somewhere. Then, as she reached the Bijards' she heard Lalie moaning, and, as the key was in the lock as usual, she opened the door and went in.

"What is the matter?" she asked.

The room was very clean. One could see that Lalie had carefully swept it, and arranged everything during the morning. Misery might blow into the room as much as it liked, carry off the chattels and spread all the dirt and refuse about. Lalie, however, came behind and tidied everything, imparting, at least, some appearance of comfort within. She might not be rich, but you realized that there was a housewife in the place. That afternoon her two little ones, Henriette and Jules, had found some old pictures which they were cutting out in a corner. But Gervaise was greatly surprised to see Lalie herself in bed, looking very pale, with the sheet drawn up to her chin. In bed, indeed, then she must be seriously ill!

"What is the matter with you?" inquired Gervaise, feeling anxious.

Lalie no longer groaned. She slowly raised her white eyelids, and tried to compel her lips to smile, although they were convulsed by a shudder.

"There's nothing the matter with me," she whispered very softly. "Really nothing at all."

Then, closing her eyes again, she added with an effort:

"I made myself too tired during the last few days, and so I'm doing the idle; I'm nursing myself, as you see."

But her childish face, streaked with livid stains, assumed such an expression of anguish that Gervaise, forgetting her own agony, joined her hands and fell on her knees near the bed. For the last month she had seen the girl clinging to the walls for support when she went about, bent double indeed, by a cough which seemed to presage a coffin. Now the poor child could not even cough. She had a hiccough and drops of blood oozed from the corners of her mouth.

"It's not my fault if I hardly feel strong," she murmured, as if relieved. "I've tired myself to-day, trying to put things to rights. It's pretty tidy, isn't it? And I wanted to clean the windows as well, but my legs failed me. How stupid! However, when one has finished one can go to bed."

She paused, then said, "Pray, see if my little ones are not cutting themselves with the scissors."

And then she relapsed into silence, trembling and listening to a heavy footfall which was approaching up the stairs. Suddenly father Bijard brutally opened the door. As usual he was far gone, and his eyes shone with the furious madness imparted by the vitriol he had swallowed. When he perceived Lalie in bed, he tapped on his thighs with a sneer, and took the whip from where it hung.

"Ah! by blazes, that's too much," he growled, "we'll soon have a laugh. So the cows lie down on their straw at noon now! Are you poking fun at me, you lazy beggar? Come, quick now, up you get!"

And he cracked the whip over the bed. But the child beggingly replied:

"Pray, papa, don't—don't strike me. I swear to you you will regret it. Don't strike!"

"Will you jump up?" he roared still louder, "or else I'll tickle your ribs! Jump up, you little hound!"

Then she softly said, "I can't—do you understand? I'm going to die."

Gervaise had sprung upon Bijard and torn the whip away from him. He stood bewildered in front of the bed. What was the dirty brat talking about? Do girls die so young without even having been ill? Some excuse to get sugar out of him no doubt. Ah! he'd make inquiries, and if she lied, let her look out!

"You will see, it's the truth," she continued. "As long as I could I avoided worrying you; but be kind now, and bid me good-bye, papa."

Bijard wriggled his nose as if he fancied she was deceiving him. And yet it was true she had a singular look, the serious mien of a grown up person. The breath of death which passed through the room in some measure sobered him. He gazed around like a man awakened from a long sleep, saw the room so tidy, the two children clean, playing and laughing. And then he sank on to a chair stammering, "Our little mother, our little mother."

Those were the only words he could find to say, and yet they were very tender ones to Lalie, who had never been much spoiled. She consoled her father. What especially worried her was to go off like this without having completely brought up the little ones. He would take care of them, would he not? With her dying breath she told him how they ought to be cared for and kept clean. But stultified, with the fumes of drink seizing hold of him again, he wagged his head, watching her with an uncertain stare as she was dying. All kind of things were touched in him, but he could find no more to say and he was too utterly burnt with liquor to shed a tear.

"Listen," resumed Lalie, after a pause. "We owe four francs and seven sous to the baker; you must pay that. Madame Gaudron borrowed an iron of ours, which you must get from her. I wasn't able to make any soup this evening, but there's some bread left and you can warm up the potatoes."

Till her last rattle, the poor kitten still remained the little mother. Surely she could never be replaced! She was dying because she had had, at her age, a true mother's reason, because her breast was too small and weak for so much maternity. And if her ferocious beast of a father lost his treasure, it was his own fault. After kicking the mother to death, hadn't he murdered the daughter as well? The two good angels would lie in the pauper's grave and all that could be in store for him was to kick the bucket like a dog in the gutter.

Gervaise restrained herself not to burst out sobbing. She extended her hands, desirous of easing the child, and as the shred of a sheet was falling, she wished to tack it up and arrange the bed. Then the dying girl's poor little body was seen. Ah! Mon Dieu! what misery! What woe! Stones would have wept. Lalie was bare, with only the remnants of a camisole on her shoulders by way of chemise; yes, bare, with the grievous, bleeding nudity of a martyr. She had no flesh left; her bones seemed to protrude through the skin. From her ribs to her thighs there extended a number of violet stripes—the marks of the whip forcibly imprinted on her. A livid bruise, moreover, encircled her left arm, as if the tender limb, scarcely larger than a lucifer, had been crushed in a vise. There was also an imperfectly closed wound on her right leg, left there by some ugly blow and which opened again and again of a morning, when she went about doing her errands. From head to foot, indeed, she was but one bruise! Oh! this murdering of childhood; those heavy hands crushing this lovely girl; how abominable that such weakness should have such a weighty cross to bear! Again did Gervaise crouch down, no longer thinking of tucking in the sheet, but overwhelmed by the pitiful sight of this martyrdom; and her trembling lips seemed to be seeking for words of prayer.

"Madame Coupeau," murmured the child, "I beg you—"

With her little arms she tried to draw up the sheet again, ashamed as it were for her father. Bijard, as stultified as ever, with his eyes on the corpse which was his own work, still wagged his head, but more slowly, like a worried animal might do.

When she had covered Lalie up again, Gervaise felt she could not remain there any longer. The dying girl was growing weaker and ceased speaking; all that was left to her was her gaze—the dark look she had had as a resigned and thoughtful child and which she now fixed on her two little ones who were still cutting out their pictures. The room was growing gloomy and Bijard was working off his liquor while the poor girl was in her death agonies. No, no, life was too abominable! How frightful it was! How frightful! And Gervaise took herself off, and went down the stairs, not knowing what she was doing, her head wandering and so full of disgust that she would willingly have thrown herself under the wheels of an omnibus to have finished with her own existence.

As she hastened on, growling against cursed fate, she suddenly found herself in front of the place where Coupeau pretended that he worked. Her legs had taken her there, and now her stomach began singing its song again, the complaint of hunger in ninety verses—a complaint she knew by heart. However, if she caught Coupeau as he left, she would be able to pounce upon the coin at once and buy some grub. A short hour's waiting at the utmost; she could surely stay that out, though she had sucked her thumbs since the day before.

She was at the corner of Rue de la Charbonniere and Rue de Chartres. A chill wind was blowing and the sky was an ugly leaden grey. The impending snow hung over the city but not a flake had fallen as yet. She tried stamping her feet to keep warm, but soon stopped as there was no use working up an appetite.

There was nothing amusing about. The few passers-by strode rapidly along, wrapped up in comforters; naturally enough one does not care to tarry when the cold is nipping at your heels. However, Gervaise perceived four or five women who were mounting guard like herself outside the door of the zinc-works; unfortunate creatures of course—wives watching for the pay to prevent it going to the dram-shop. There was a tall creature as bulky as a gendarme leaning against the wall, ready to spring on her husband as soon as he showed himself. A dark little woman with a delicate humble air was walking about on the other side of the way. Another one, a fat creature, had brought her two brats with her and was dragging them along, one on either hand, and both of them shivering and sobbing. And all these women, Gervaise like the others, passed and repassed, exchanging glances, but without speaking to one another. A pleasant meeting and no mistake. They didn't need to make friends to learn what number they lived at. They could all hang out the same sideboard, "Misery & Co." It seemed to make one feel even colder to see them walk about in silence, passing each other in this terrible January weather.

However, nobody as yet left the zinc-works. But presently one workman appeared, then two, and then three, but these were no doubt decent fellows who took their pay home regularly, for they jerked their heads significantly as they saw the shadows wandering up and down. The tall creature stuck closer than ever to the side of the door, and suddenly fell upon a pale little man who was prudently poking his head out. Oh! it was soon settled! She searched him and collared his coin. Caught, no more money, not even enough to pay for a dram! Then the little man, looking very vexed and cast down, followed his gendarme, weeping like a child. The workmen were still coming out; and as the fat mother with the two brats approached the door, a tall fellow, with a cunning look, who noticed her, went hastily inside again to warn her husband; and when the latter arrived he had stuffed a couple of cart wheels away, two beautiful new five franc pieces, one in each of his shoes. He took one of the brats on his arm, and went off telling a variety of lies to his old woman who was complaining. There were other workmen also, mournful-looking fellows, who carried in their clinched fists the pay for the three or five days' work they had done during a fortnight, who reproached themselves with their own laziness, and took drunkards' oaths. But the saddest thing of all was the grief of the dark little woman, with the humble, delicate look; her husband, a handsome fellow, took himself off under her very nose, and so brutally indeed that he almost knocked her down, and she went home alone, stumbling past the shops and weeping all the tears in her body.

At last the defile finished. Gervaise, who stood erect in the middle of the street, was still watching the door. The look-out seemed a bad one. A couple of workmen who were late appeared on the threshold, but there were still no signs of Coupeau. And when she asked the workmen if Coupeau wasn't coming, they answered her, being up to snuff, that he had gone off by the back-door with Lantimeche. Gervaise understood what this meant. Another of Coupeau's lies; she could whistle for him if she liked. Then shuffling along in her worn-out shoes, she went slowly down the Rue de la Charbonniere. Her dinner was going off in front of her, and she shuddered as she saw it running away in the yellow twilight. This time it was all over. Not a copper, not a hope, nothing but night and hunger. Ah! a fine night to kick the bucket, this dirty night which was falling over her shoulders!

She was walking heavily up the Rue des Poissonniers when she suddenly heard Coupeau's voice. Yes, he was there in the Little Civet, letting My-Boots treat him. That comical chap, My-Boots, had been cunning enough at the end of last summer to espouse in authentic fashion a lady who, although rather advanced in years, had still preserved considerable traces of beauty. She was a lady-of-the-evening of the Rue des Martyrs, none of your common street hussies. And you should have seen this fortunate mortal, living like a man of means, with his hands in his pockets, well clad and well fed. He could hardly be recognised, so fat had he grown. His comrades said that his wife had as much work as she liked among the gentlemen of her acquaintance. A wife like that and a country-house is all one can wish for to embellish one's life. And so Coupeau squinted admiringly at My-Boots. Why, the lucky dog even had a gold ring on his little finger!

Gervaise touched Coupeau on the shoulder just as he was coming out of the little Civet.

"Say, I'm waiting; I'm hungry! I've got an empty stomach which is all I ever get from you."

But he silenced her in a capital style, "You're hungry, eh? Well, eat your fist, and keep the other for to-morrow."

He considered it highly improper to do the dramatic in other people's presence. What, he hadn't worked, and yet the bakers kneaded bread all the same. Did she take him for a fool, to come and try to frighten him with her stories?

"Do you want me to turn thief?" she muttered, in a dull voice.

My-Boots stroked his chin in conciliatory fashion. "No, that's forbidden," said he. "But when a woman knows how to handle herself—"

And Coupeau interrupted him to call out "Bravo!" Yes, a woman always ought to know how to handle herself, but his wife had always been a helpless thing. It would be her fault if they died on the straw. Then he relapsed into his admiration for My-Boots. How awfully fine he looked! A regular landlord; with clean linen and swell shoes! They were no common stuff! His wife, at all events, knew how to keep the pot boiling!

The two men walked towards the outer Boulevard, and Gervaise followed them. After a pause, she resumed, talking behind Coupeau's back: "I'm hungry; you know, I relied on you. You must find me something to nibble."

He did not answer, and she repeated, in a tone of despairing agony: "Is that all I get from you?"

"Mon Dieu! I've no coin," he roared, turning round in a fury. "Just leave me alone, eh? Or else I'll hit you."

He was already raising his fist. She drew back, and seemed to make up her mind. "All right, I'll leave you. I guess I can find a man."

The zinc-worker laughed at this. He pretended to make a joke of the matter, and strengthened her purpose without seeming to do so. That was a fine idea of hers, and no mistake! In the evening, by gaslight, she might still hook a man. He recommended her to try the Capuchin restaurant where one could dine very pleasantly in a small private room. And, as she went off along the Boulevard, looking pale and furious he called out to her: "Listen, bring me back some dessert. I like cakes! And if your gentleman is well dressed, ask him for an old overcoat. I could use one."

With these words ringing in her ears, Gervaise walked softly away. But when she found herself alone in the midst of the crowd, she slackened her pace. She was quite resolute. Between thieving and the other, well she preferred the other; for at all events she wouldn't harm any one. No doubt it wasn't proper. But what was proper and what was improper was sorely muddled together in her brain. When you are dying of hunger, you don't philosophize, you eat whatever bread turns up. She had gone along as far as the Chaussee-Clignancourt. It seemed as if the night would never come. However, she followed the Boulevards like a lady who is taking a stroll before dinner. The neighborhood in which she felt so ashamed, so greatly was it being embellished, was now full of fresh air.

Lost in the crowd on the broad footway, walking past the little plane trees, Gervaise felt alone and abandoned. The vistas of the avenues seemed to empty her stomach all the more. And to think that among this flood of people there were many in easy circumstances, and yet not a Christian who could guess her position, and slip a ten sous piece into her hand! Yes, it was too great and too beautiful; her head swam and her legs tottered under this broad expanse of grey sky stretched over so vast a space. The twilight had the dirty-yellowish tinge of Parisian evenings, a tint that gives you a longing to die at once, so ugly does street life seem. The horizon was growing indistinct, assuming a mud-colored tinge as it were. Gervaise, who was already weary, met all the workpeople returning home. At this hour of the day the ladies in bonnets and the well-dressed gentlemen living in the new houses mingled with the people, with the files of men and women still pale from inhaling the tainted atmosphere of workshops and workrooms. From the Boulevard Magenta and the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere, came bands of people, rendered breathless by their uphill walk. As the omnivans and the cabs rolled by less noiselessly among the vans and trucks returning home empty at a gallop, an ever-increasing swarm of blouses and blue vests covered the pavement. Commissionaires returned with their crotchets on their backs. Two workmen took long strides side by side, talking to each other in loud voices, with any amount of gesticulation, but without looking at one another; others who were alone in overcoats and caps walked along the curbstones with lowered noses; others again came in parties of five or six, following each other, with pale eyes and their hands in their pockets and not exchanging a word. Some still had their pipes, which had gone out between their teeth. Four masons poked their white faces out of the windows of a cab which they had hired between them, and on the roof of which their mortar-troughs rocked to and fro. House-painters were swinging their pots; a zinc-worker was returning laden with a long ladder, with which he almost poked people's eyes out; whilst a belated plumber, with his box on his back, played the tune of "The Good King Dagobert" on his little trumpet. Ah! the sad music, a fitting accompaniment to the tread of the flock, the tread of the weary beasts of burden.

Suddenly on raising her eyes she noticed the old Hotel Boncoeur in front of her. After being an all-night cafe, which the police had closed down, the little house was now abandoned; the shutters were covered with posters, the lantern was broken, and the whole building was rotting and crumbling away from top to bottom, with its smudgy claret-colored paint, quite moldy. The stationer's and the tobacconist's were still there. In the rear, over some low buildings, you could see the leprous facades of several five-storied houses rearing their tumble-down outlines against the sky. The "Grand Balcony" dancing hall no longer existed; some sugar-cutting works, which hissed continually, had been installed in the hall with the ten flaming windows. And yet it was here, in this dirty den—the Hotel Boncoeur—that the whole cursed life had commenced. Gervaise remained looking at the window of the first floor, from which hung a broken shutter, and recalled to mind her youth with Lantier, their first rows and the ignoble way in which he had abandoned her. Never mind, she was young then, and it all seemed gay to her, seen from a distance. Only twenty years. Mon Dieu! and yet she had fallen to street-walking. Then the sight of the lodging house oppressed her and she walked up the Boulevard in the direction of Montmartre.

The night was gathering, but children were still playing on the heaps of sand between the benches. The march past continued, the workgirls went by, trotting along and hurrying to make up for the time they had lost in looking in at the shop windows; one tall girl, who had stopped, left her hand in that of a big fellow, who accompanied her to within three doors of her home; others as they parted from each other, made appointments for the night at the "Great Hall of Folly" or the "Black Ball." In the midst of the groups, piece-workmen went by, carrying their clothes folded under their arms. A chimney sweep, harnessed with leather braces, was drawing a cart along, and nearly got himself crushed by an omnibus. Among the crowd which was now growing scantier, there were several women running with bare heads; after lighting the fire, they had come downstairs again and were hastily making their purchases for dinner; they jostled the people they met, darted into the bakers' and the pork butchers', and went off again with all despatch, their provisions in their hands. There were little girls of eight years old, who had been sent out on errands, and who went along past the shops, pressing long loaves of four pounds' weight, as tall as they were themselves, against their chests, as if these loaves had been beautiful yellow dolls; at times these little ones forgot themselves for five minutes or so, in front of some pictures in a shop window, and rested their cheeks against the bread. Then the flow subsided, the groups became fewer and farther between, the working classes had gone home; and as the gas blazed now that the day's toil was over, idleness and amusement seemed to wake up.

Ah! yes; Gervaise had finished her day! She was wearier even than all this mob of toilers who had jostled her as they went by. She might lie down there and croak, for work would have nothing more to do with her, and she had toiled enough during her life to say: "Whose turn now? I've had enough." At present everyone was eating. It was really the end, the sun had blown out its candle, the night would be a long one. Mon Dieu! To stretch one's self at one's ease and never get up again; to think one had put one's tools by for good and that one could ruminate like a cow forever! That's what is good, after tiring one's self out for twenty years! And Gervaise, as hunger twisted her stomach, thought in spite of herself of the fete days, the spreads and the revelry of her life. Of one occasion especially, an awfully cold day, a mid-Lent Thursday. She had enjoyed herself wonderfully well. She was very pretty, fair-haired and fresh looking at that time. Her wash-house in the Rue Neuve had chosen her as queen in spite of her leg. And then they had had an outing on the boulevards in carts decked with greenery, in the midst of stylish people who ogled her. Real gentlemen put up their glasses as if she had been a true queen. In the evening there was a wonderful spread, and then they had danced till daylight. Queen; yes Queen! With a crown and a sash for twenty-four hours—twice round the clock! And now oppressed by hunger, she looked on the ground, as if she were seeking for the gutter in which she had let her fallen majesty tumble.

She raised her eyes again. She was in front of the slaughter-houses which were being pulled down; through the gaps in the facade one could see the dark, stinking courtyards, still damp with blood. And when she had gone down the Boulevard again, she also saw the Lariboisiere Hospital, with its long grey wall, above which she could distinguish the mournful, fan-like wings, pierced with windows at even distances. A door in the wall filled the neighborhood with dread; it was the door of the dead in solid oak, and without a crack, as stern and as silent as a tombstone. Then to escape her thoughts, she hurried further down till she reached the railway bridge. The high parapets of riveted sheet-iron hid the line from view; she could only distinguish a corner of the station standing out against the luminous horizon of Paris, with a vast roof black with coal-dust. Through the clear space she could hear the engines whistling and the cars being shunted, in token of colossal hidden activity. Then a train passed by, leaving Paris, with puffing breath and a growing rumble. And all she perceived of this train was a white plume, a sudden gust of steam which rose above the parapet and then evaporated. But the bridge had shaken, and she herself seemed impressed by this departure at full speed. She turned round as if to follow the invisible engine, the noise of which was dying away.

She caught a glimpse of open country through a gap between tall buildings. Oh, if only she could have taken a train and gone away, far away from this poverty and suffering. She might have started an entirely new life! Then she turned to look at the posters on the bridge sidings. One was on pretty blue paper and offered a fifty-franc reward for a lost dog. Someone must have really loved that dog!

Gervaise slowly resumed her walk. In the smoky fog which was falling, the gas lamps were being lighted up; and the long avenues, which had grown bleak and indistinct, suddenly showed themselves plainly again, sparkling to their full length and piercing through the night, even to the vague darkness of the horizon. A great gust swept by; the widened spaces were lighted up with girdles of little flames, shining under the far-stretching moonless sky. It was the hour when, from one end of the Boulevard to the other, the dram-shops and the dancing-halls flamed gayly as the first glasses were merrily drunk and the first dance began. It was the great fortnightly pay-day, and the pavement was crowded with jostling revelers on the spree. There was a breath of merrymaking in the air—deuced fine revelry, but not objectionable so far. Fellows were filling themselves in the eating-houses; through the lighted windows you could see people feeding, with their mouths full and laughing without taking the trouble to swallow first. Drunkards were already installed in the wineshops, squabbling and gesticulating. And there was a cursed noise on all sides, voices shouting amid the constant clatter of feet on the pavement.

"Say, are you coming to sip?" "Make haste, old man; I'll pay for a glass of bottled wine." "Here's Pauline! Shan't we just laugh!" The doors swung to and fro, letting a smell of wine and a sound of cornet playing escape into the open air. There was a gathering in front of Pere Colombe's l'Assommoir, which was lighted up like a cathedral for high mass. Mon Dieu! you would have said a real ceremony was going on, for several capital fellows, with rounded paunches and swollen cheeks, looking for all the world like professional choristers, were singing inside. They were celebrating Saint-Pay, of course—a very amiable saint, who no doubt keeps the cash box in Paradise. Only, on seeing how gaily the evening began, the retired petty tradesmen who had taken their wives out for a stroll wagged their heads, and repeated that there would be any number of drunken men in Paris that night. And the night stretched very dark, dead-like and icy, above this revelry, perforated only with lines of gas lamps extending to the four corners of heaven.

Gervaise stood in front of l'Assommoir, thinking that if she had had a couple of sous she could have gone inside and drunk a dram. No doubt a dram would have quieted her hunger. Ah! what a number of drams she had drunk in her time! Liquor seemed good stuff to her after all. And from outside she watched the drunk-making machine, realizing that her misfortune was due to it, and yet dreaming of finishing herself off with brandy on the day she had some coin. But a shudder passed through her hair as she saw it was now almost dark. Well, the night time was approaching. She must have some pluck and sell herself coaxingly if she didn't wish to kick the bucket in the midst of the general revelry. Looking at other people gorging themselves didn't precisely fill her own stomach. She slackened her pace again and looked around her. There was a darker shade under the trees. Few people passed along, only folks in a hurry, who swiftly crossed the Boulevards. And on the broad, dark, deserted footway, where the sound of the revelry died away, women were standing and waiting. They remained for long intervals motionless, patient and as stiff-looking as the scrubby little plane trees; then they slowly began to move, dragging their slippers over the frozen soil, taking ten steps or so and then waiting again, rooted as it were to the ground. There was one of them with a huge body and insect-like arms and legs, wearing a black silk rag, with a yellow scarf over her head; there was another one, tall and bony, who was bareheaded and wore a servant's apron; and others, too—old ones plastered up and young ones so dirty that a ragpicker would not have picked them up. However, Gervaise tried to learn what to do by imitating them; girlish-like emotion tightened her throat; she was hardly aware whether she felt ashamed or not; she seemed to be living in a horrible dream. For a quarter of an hour she remained standing erect. Men hurried by without even turning their heads. Then she moved about in her turn, and venturing to accost a man who was whistling with his hands in his pockets, she murmured, in a strangled voice:

"Sir, listen a moment—"

The man gave her a side glance and then went off, whistling all the louder.

Gervaise grew bolder, and, with her stomach empty, she became absorbed in this chase, fiercely rushing after her dinner, which was still running away. She walked about for a long while, without thinking of the flight of time or of the direction she took. Around her the dark, mute women went to and fro under the trees like wild beasts in a cage. They stepped out of the shade like apparitions, and passed under the light of a gas lamp with their pale masks fully apparent; then they grew vague again as they went off into the darkness, with a white strip of petticoat swinging to and fro. Men let themselves be stopped at times, talked jokingly, and then started off again laughing. Others would quietly follow a woman to her room, discreetly, ten paces behind. There was a deal of muttering, quarreling in an undertone and furious bargaining, which suddenly subsided into profound silence. And as far as Gervaise went she saw these women standing like sentinels in the night. They seemed to be placed along the whole length of the Boulevard. As soon as she met one she saw another twenty paces further on, and the file stretched out unceasingly. Entire Paris was guarded. She grew enraged on finding herself disdained, and changing her place, she now perambulated between the Chaussee de Clignancourt and the Grand Rue of La Chapelle. All were beggars.

"Sir, just listen."

But the men passed by. She started from the slaughter-houses, which stank of blood. She glanced on her way at the old Hotel Boncoeur, now closed. She passed in front of the Lariboisiere Hospital, and mechanically counted the number of windows that were illuminated with a pale quiet glimmer, like that of night-lights at the bedside of some agonizing sufferers. She crossed the railway bridge as the trains rushed by with a noisy rumble, rending the air in twain with their shrill whistling! Ah! how sad everything seemed at night-time! Then she turned on her heels again and filled her eyes with the sight of the same houses, doing this ten and twenty times without pausing, without resting for a minute on a bench. No; no one wanted her. Her shame seemed to be increased by this contempt. She went down towards the hospital again, and then returned towards the slaughter-houses. It was her last promenade—from the blood-stained courtyards, where animals were slaughtered, down to the pale hospital wards, where death stiffened the patients stretched between the sheets. It was between these two establishments that she had passed her life.

"Sir, just listen."

But suddenly she perceived her shadow on the ground. When she approached a gas-lamp it gradually became less vague, till it stood out at last in full force—an enormous shadow it was, positively grotesque, so portly had she become. Her stomach, breast and hips, all equally flabby jostled together as it were. She walked with such a limp that the shadow bobbed almost topsy-turvy at every step she took; it looked like a real Punch! Then as she left the street lamp behind her, the Punch grew taller, becoming in fact gigantic, filling the whole Boulevard, bobbing to and fro in such style that it seemed fated to smash its nose against the trees or the houses. Mon Dieu! how frightful she was! She had never realised her disfigurement so thoroughly. And she could not help looking at her shadow; indeed, she waited for the gas-lamps, still watching the Punch as it bobbed about. Ah! she had a pretty companion beside her! What a figure! It ought to attract the men at once! And at the thought of her unsightliness, she lowered her voice, and only just dared to stammer behind the passers-by:

"Sir, just listen."

It was now getting quite late. Matters were growing bad in the neighborhood. The eating-houses had closed and voices, gruff with drink, could be heard disputing in the wineshops. Revelry was turning to quarreling and fisticuffs. A big ragged chap roared out, "I'll knock yer to bits; just count yer bones." A large woman had quarreled with a fellow outside a dancing place, and was calling him "dirty blackguard" and "lousy bum," whilst he on his side just muttered under his breath. Drink seemed to have imparted a fierce desire to indulge in blows, and the passers-by, who were now less numerous, had pale contracted faces. There was a battle at last; one drunken fellow came down on his back with all four limbs raised in the air, whilst his comrade, thinking he had done for him, ran off with his heavy shoes clattering over the pavement. Groups of men sang dirty songs and then there would be long silences broken only by hiccoughs or the thud of a drunk falling down.

Gervaise still hobbled about, going up and down, with the idea of walking forever. At times, she felt drowsy and almost went to sleep, rocked, as it were, by her lame leg; then she looked round her with a start, and noticed she had walked a hundred yards unconsciously. Her feet were swelling in her ragged shoes. The last clear thought that occupied her mind was that her hussy of a daughter was perhaps eating oysters at that very moment. Then everything became cloudy; and, albeit, she remained with open eyes, it required too great an effort for her to think. The only sensation that remained to her, in her utter annihilation, was that it was frightfully cold, so sharply, mortally cold, she had never known the like before. Why, even dead people could not feel so cold in their graves. With an effort she raised her head, and something seemed to lash her face. It was the snow, which had at last decided to fall from the smoky sky—fine thick snow, which the breeze swept round and round. For three days it had been expected and what a splendid moment it chose to appear.

Woken up by the first gusts, Gervaise began to walk faster. Eager to get home, men were running along, with their shoulders already white. And as she suddenly saw one who, on the contrary, was coming slowly towards her under the trees, she approached him and again said: "Sir, just listen—"

The man has stopped. But he did not seem to have heard her. He held out his hand, and muttered in a low voice: "Charity, if you please!"

They looked at one another. Ah! Mon Dieu! They were reduced to this—Pere Bru begging, Madame Coupeau walking the streets! They remained stupefied in front of each other. They could join hands as equals now. The old workman had prowled about the whole evening, not daring to stop anyone, and the first person he accosted was as hungry as himself. Lord, was it not pitiful! To have toiled for fifty years and be obliged to beg! To have been one of the most prosperous laundresses in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or and to end beside the gutter! They still looked at one another. Then, without saying a word, they went off in different directions under the lashing snow.

It was a perfect tempest. On these heights, in the midst of this open space, the fine snow revolved round and round as if the wind came from the four corners of heaven. You could not see ten paces off, everything was confused in the midst of this flying dust. The surroundings had disappeared, the Boulevard seemed to be dead, as if the storm had stretched the silence of its white sheet over the hiccoughs of the last drunkards. Gervaise still went on, blinded, lost. She felt her way by touching the trees. As she advanced the gas-lamps shone out amidst the whiteness like torches. Then, suddenly, whenever she crossed an open space, these lights failed her; she was enveloped in the whirling snow, unable to distinguish anything to guide her. Below stretched the ground, vaguely white; grey walls surrounded her, and when she paused, hesitating and turning her head, she divined that behind this icy veil extended the immense avenue with interminable vistas of gas-lamps—the black and deserted Infinite of Paris asleep.

She was standing where the outer Boulevard meets the Boulevards Magenta and Ornano, thinking of lying down on the ground, when suddenly she heard a footfall. She began to run, but the snow blinded her, and the footsteps went off without her being able to tell whether it was to the right or to the left. At last, however, she perceived a man's broad shoulders, a dark form which was disappearing amid the snow. Oh! she wouldn't let this man get away. And she ran on all the faster, reached him, and caught him by the blouse: "Sir, sir, just listen."

The man turned round. It was Goujet.

So now she had accosted Golden-Beard. But what had she done on earth to be tortured like this by Providence? It was the crowning blow—to stumble against Goujet, and be seen by her blacksmith friend, pale and begging, like a common street walker. And it happened just under a gas-lamp; she could see her deformed shadow swaying on the snow like a real caricature. You would have said she was drunk. Mon Dieu! not to have a crust of bread, or a drop of wine in her body, and to be taken for a drunken women! It was her own fault, why did she booze? Goujet no doubt thought she had been drinking, and that she was up to some nasty pranks.

He looked at her while the snow scattered daisies over his beautiful yellow beard. Then as she lowered her head and stepped back he detained her.

"Come," said he.

And he walked on first. She followed him. They both crossed the silent district, gliding noiselessly along the walls. Poor Madame Goujet had died of rheumatism in the month of October. Goujet still resided in the little house in the Rue Neuve, living gloomily alone. On this occasion he was belated because he had sat up nursing a wounded comrade. When he had opened the door and lighted a lamp, he turned towards Gervaise, who had remained humbly on the threshold. Then, in a low voice, as if he were afraid his mother could still hear him, he exclaimed, "Come in."

The first room, Madame Goujet's, was piously preserved in the state she had left it. On a chair near the window lay the tambour by the side of the large arm-chair, which seemed to be waiting for the old lace-worker. The bed was made, and she could have stretched herself beneath the sheets if she had left the cemetery to come and spend the evening with her child. There was something solemn, a perfume of honesty and goodness about the room.

"Come in," repeated the blacksmith in a louder tone.

She went in, half frightened, like a disreputable woman gliding into a respectable place. He was quite pale, and trembled at the thought of ushering a woman like this into his dead mother's home. They crossed the room on tip-toe, as if they were ashamed to be heard. Then when he had pushed Gervaise into his own room he closed the door. Here he was at home. It was the narrow closet she was acquainted with; a schoolgirl's room, with the little iron bedstead hung with white curtains. On the walls the engravings cut out of illustrated newspapers had gathered and spread, and they now reached to the ceiling. The room looked so pure that Gervaise did not dare to advance, but retreated as far as she could from the lamp. Then without a word, in a transport as it were, he tried to seize hold of her and press her in his arms. But she felt faint and murmured: "Oh! Mon Dieu! Oh, mon Dieu!"

The fire in the stove, having been covered with coke-dust, was still alight, and the remains of a stew which Goujet had put to warm, thinking he should return to dinner, was smoking in front of the cinders. Gervaise, who felt her numbness leave her in the warmth of this room, would have gone down on all fours to eat out of the saucepan. Her hunger was stronger than her will; her stomach seemed rent in two; and she stooped down with a sigh. Goujet had realized the truth. He placed the stew on the table, cut some bread, and poured her out a glass of wine.

"Thank you! Thank you!" said she. "Oh, how kind you are! Thank you!"

She stammered; she could hardly articulate. When she caught hold of her fork she began to tremble so acutely that she let it fall again. The hunger that possessed her made her wag her head as if senile. She carried the food to her mouth with her fingers. As she stuffed the first potato into her mouth, she burst out sobbing. Big tears coursed down her cheeks and fell onto her bread. She still ate, gluttonously devouring this bread thus moistened by her tears, and breathing very hard all the while. Goujet compelled her to drink to prevent her from stifling, and her glass chinked, as it were, against her teeth.

"Will you have some more bread?" he asked in an undertone.

She cried, she said "no," she said "yes," she didn't know. Ah! how nice and yet how painful it is to eat when one is starving.

And standing in front of her, Goujet looked at her all the while; under the bright light cast by the lamp-shade he could see her well. How aged and altered she seemed! The heat was melting the snow on her hair and clothes, and she was dripping. Her poor wagging head was quite grey; there were any number of grey locks which the wind had disarranged. Her neck sank into her shoulders and she had become so fat and ugly you might have cried on noticing the change. He recollected their love, when she was quite rosy, working with her irons, and showing the child-like crease which set such a charming necklace round her throat. In those times he had watched her for hours, glad just to look at her. Later on she had come to the forge, and there they had enjoyed themselves whilst he beat the iron, and she stood by watching his hammer dance. How often at night, with his head buried in his pillow, had he dreamed of holding her in his arms.

Gervaise rose; she had finished. She remained for a moment with her head lowered, and ill at ease. Then, thinking she detected a gleam in his eyes, she raised her hand to her jacket and began to unfasten the first button. But Goujet had fallen on his knees, and taking hold of her hands, he exclaimed softly:

"I love you, Madame Gervaise; oh! I love you still, and in spite of everything, I swear it to you!"

"Don't say that, Monsieur Goujet!" she cried, maddened to see him like this at her feet. "No, don't say that; you grieve me too much."

And as he repeated that he could never love twice in his life, she became yet more despairing.

"No, no, I am too ashamed. For the love of God get up. It is my place to be on the ground."

He rose, he trembled all over and stammered: "Will you allow me to kiss you?"

Overcome with surprise and emotion she could not speak, but she assented with a nod of the head. After all she was his; he could do what he chose with her. But he merely kissed her.

"That suffices between us, Madame Gervaise," he muttered. "It sums up all our friendship, does it not?"

He had kissed her on the forehead, on a lock of her grey hair. He had not kissed anyone since his mother's death. His sweetheart Gervaise alone remained to him in life. And then, when he had kissed her with so much respect, he fell back across his bed with sobs rising in his throat. And Gervaise could not remain there any longer. It was too sad and too abominable to meet again under such circumstances when one loved. "I love you, Monsieur Goujet," she exclaimed. "I love you dearly, also. Oh! it isn't possible you still love me. Good-bye, good-bye; it would smother us both; it would be more than we could stand."

And she darted through Madame Goujet's room and found herself outside on the pavement again. When she recovered her senses she had rung at the door in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or and Boche was pulling the string. The house was quite dark, and in the black night the yawning, dilapidated porch looked like an open mouth. To think that she had been ambitious of having a corner in this barracks! Had her ears been stopped up then, that she had not heard the cursed music of despair which sounded behind the walls? Since she had set foot in the place she had begun to go down hill. Yes, it must bring bad luck to shut oneself up in these big workmen's houses; the cholera of misery was contagious there. That night everyone seemed to have kicked the bucket. She only heard the Boches snoring on the right-hand side, while Lantier and Virginie on the left were purring like a couple of cats who were not asleep, but have their eyes closed and feel warm. In the courtyard she fancied she was in a perfect cemetery; the snow paved the ground with white; the high frontages, livid grey in tint, rose up unlighted like ruined walls, and not a sigh could be heard. It seemed as if a whole village, stiffened with cold and hunger, were buried here. She had to step over a black gutter—water from the dye-works—which smoked and streaked the whiteness of the snow with its muddy course. It was the color of her thoughts. The beautiful light blue and light pink waters had long since flowed away.

Then, whilst ascending the six flights of stairs in the dark, she could not prevent herself from laughing; an ugly laugh which hurt her. She recalled her ideal of former days: to work quietly, always have bread to eat and a tidy house to sleep in, to bring up her children, not to be beaten and to die in her bed. No, really, it was comical how all that was becoming realized! She no longer worked, she no longer ate, she slept on filth, her husband frequented all sorts of wineshops, and her husband drubbed her at all hours of the day; all that was left for her to do was to die on the pavement, and it would not take long if on getting into her room, she could only pluck up courage to fling herself out of the window. Was it not enough to make one think that she had hoped to earn thirty thousand francs a year, and no end of respect? Ah! really, in this life it is no use being modest; one only gets sat upon. Not even pap and a nest, that is the common lot.

What increased her ugly laugh was the recollection of her grand hope of retiring into the country after twenty years passed in ironing. Well! she was on her way to the country. She was going to have her green corner in the Pere-Lachaise cemetery.

When she entered the passage she was like a mad-woman. Her poor head was whirling round. At heart her great grief was at having bid the blacksmith an eternal farewell. All was ended between them; they would never see each other more. Then, besides that, all her other thoughts of misfortune pressed upon her, and almost caused her head to split. As she passed she poked her nose in at the Bijards' and beheld Lalie dead, with a look of contentment on her face at having at last been laid out and slumbering forever. Ah, well! children were luckier than grown-up people. And, as a glimmer of light passed under old Bazouge's door, she walked boldly in, seized with a mania for going off on the same journey as the little one.

That old joker, Bazouge, had come home that night in an extraordinary state of gaiety. He had had such a booze that he was snoring on the ground in spite of the temperature, and that no doubt did not prevent him from dreaming something pleasant, for he seemed to be laughing from his stomach as he slept. The candle, which he had not put out, lighted up his old garments, his black cloak, which he had drawn over his knees as though it had been a blanket.

On beholding him Gervaise uttered such a deep wailing that he awoke.

"Mon Dieu! shut the door! It's so cold! Ah! it's you! What's the matter? What do you want?"

Then, Gervaise, stretching out her arms, no longer knowing what she stuttered, began passionately to implore him:

"Oh! take me away! I've had enough; I want to go off. You mustn't bear me any grudge. I didn't know. One never knows until one's ready. Oh, yes; one's glad to go one day! Take me away! Take me away and I shall thank you!"

She fell on her knees, all shaken with a desire which caused her to turn ghastly pale. Never before had she thus dragged herself at a man's feet. Old Bazouge's ugly mug, with his mouth all on one side and his hide begrimed with the dust of funerals, seemed to her as beautiful and resplendent as a sun. The old fellow, who was scarcely awake thought, however, that it was some sort of bad joke.

"Look here," murmured he, "no jokes!"

"Take me away," repeated Gervaise more ardently still. "You remember, I knocked one evening against the partition; then I said that it wasn't true, because I was still a fool. But see! Give me your hands. I'm no longer frightened. Take me away to by-by; you'll see how still I'll be. Oh! sleep, that's all I care for. Oh! I'll love you so much!"

Bazouge, ever gallant, thought that he ought not to be hasty with a lady who appeared to have taken such a fancy to him. She was falling to pieces, but all the same, what remained was very fine, especially when she was excited.

"What you say is very true," said he in a convinced manner. "I packed up three more to-day who would only have been too glad to have given me something for myself, could they but have got their hands to their pockets. But, little woman, it's not so easily settled as all that—"

"Take me away, take me away," continued Gervaise, "I want to die."

"Ah! but there's a little operation to be gone through beforehand—you know, glug!"

And he made a noise in his throat, as though swallowing his tongue. Then, thinking it a good joke, he chuckled.

Gervaise slowly rose to her feet. So he too could do nothing for her. She went to her room and threw herself on her straw, feeling stupid, and regretting she had eaten. Ah! no indeed, misery did not kill quickly enough.

CHAPTER XIII

That night Coupeau went on a spree. Next day, Gervaise received ten francs from her son Etienne, who was a mechanic on some railway. The youngster sent her a few francs from time to time, knowing that they were not very well off at home. She made some soup, and ate it all alone, for that scoundrel Coupeau did not return on the morrow. On Monday he was still absent, and on Tuesday also. The whole week went by. Ah, it would be good luck if some woman took him in.

On Sunday Gervaise received a printed document. It was to inform her that her husband was dying at the Sainte-Anne asylum.

Gervaise did not disturb herself. He knew the way; he could very well get home from the asylum by himself. They had cured him there so often that they could once more do him the sorry service of putting him on his pins again. Had she not heard that very morning that for the week before Coupeau had been seen as round as a ball, rolling about Belleville from one dram shop to another in the company of My-Boots. Exactly so; and it was My-Boots, too, who stood treat. He must have hooked his missus's stocking with all the savings gained at very hard work. It wasn't clean money they had used, but money that could infect them with any manner of vile diseases. Well, anyway, they hadn't thought to invite her for a drink. If you wanted to drink by yourself, you could croak by yourself.

However, on Monday, as Gervaise had a nice little meal planned for the evening, the remains of some beans and a pint of wine, she pretended to herself that a walk would give her an appetite. The letter from the asylum which she had left lying on the bureau bothered her. The snow had melted, the day was mild and grey and on the whole fine, with just a slight keenness in the air which was invigorating. She started at noon, for her walk was a long one. She had to cross Paris and her bad leg always slowed her. With that the streets were crowded; but the people amused her; she reached her destination very pleasantly. When she had given her name, she was told a most astounding story to the effect that Coupeau had been fished out of the Seine close to the Pont-Neuf. He had jumped over the parapet, under the impression that a bearded man was barring his way. A fine jump, was it not? And as for finding out how Coupeau got to be on the Pont-Neuf, that was a matter he could not even explain himself.

One of the keepers escorted Gervaise. She was ascending a staircase, when she heard howlings which made her shiver to her very bones.

"He's playing a nice music, isn't he?" observed the keeper.

"Who is?" asked she.

"Why, your old man! He's been yelling like that ever since the day before yesterday; and he dances, you'll just see."

Mon Dieu! what a sight! She stood as one transfixed. The cell was padded from the floor to the ceiling. On the floor there were two straw mats, one piled on top of the other; and in a corner were spread a mattress and a bolster, nothing more. Inside there Coupeau was dancing and yelling, his blouse in tatters and his limbs beating the air. He wore the mask of one about to die. What a breakdown! He bumped up against the window, then retired backwards, beating time with his arms and shaking his hands as though he were trying to wrench them off and fling them in somebody's face. One meets with buffoons in low dancing places who imitate the delirium tremens, only they imitate it badly. One must see this drunkard's dance if one wishes to know what it is like when gone through in earnest. The song also has its merits, a continuous yell worthy of carnival-time, a mouth wide open uttering the same hoarse trombone notes for hours together. Coupeau had the howl of a beast with a crushed paw. Strike up, music! Gentlemen, choose your partners!

"Mon Dieu! what is the matter with him? What is the matter with him?" repeated Gervaise, seized with fear.

A house surgeon, a big fair fellow with a rosy countenance, and wearing a white apron, was quietly sitting taking notes. The case was a curious one; the doctor did not leave the patient.

"Stay a while if you like," said he to the laundress; "but keep quiet. Try and speak to him, he will not recognise you."

Coupeau indeed did not even appear to see his wife. She had only had a bad view of him on entering, he was wriggling about so much. When she looked him full in the face, she stood aghast. Mon Dieu! was it possible he had a countenance like that, his eyes full of blood and his lips covered with scabs? She would certainly never have known him. To begin with, he was making too many grimaces, without saying why, his mouth suddenly out of all shape, his nose curled up, his cheeks drawn in, a perfect animal's muzzle. His skin was so hot the air steamed around him; and his hide was as though varnished, covered with a heavy sweat which trickled off him. In his mad dance, one could see all the same that he was not at his ease, his head was heavy and his limbs ached.

Gervaise drew near to the house surgeon, who was strumming a tune with the tips of his fingers on the back of his chair.

"Tell me, sir, it's serious then this time?"

The house surgeon nodded his head without answering.

"Isn't he jabbering to himself? Eh! don't you hear? What's it about?

"About things he sees," murmured the young man. "Keep quiet, let me listen."

Coupeau was speaking in a jerky voice. A glimmer of amusement lit up his eyes. He looked on the floor, to the right, to the left, and turned about as though he had been strolling in the Bois de Vincennes, conversing with himself.

"Ah! that's nice, that's grand! There're cottages, a regular fair. And some jolly fine music! What a Balthazar's feast! They're smashing the crockery in there. Awfully swell! Now it's being lit up; red balls in the air, and it jumps, and it flies! Oh! oh! what a lot of lanterns in the trees! It's confoundedly pleasant! There's water flowing everywhere, fountains, cascades, water which sings, oh! with the voice of a chorister. The cascades are grand!"

And he drew himself up, as though the better to hear the delicious song of the water; he sucked in forcibly, fancying he was drinking the fresh spray blown from the fountains. But, little by little, his face resumed an agonized expression. Then he crouched down and flew quicker than ever around the walls of the cell, uttering vague threats.

"More traps, all that! I thought as much. Silence, you set of swindlers! Yes, you're making a fool of me. It's for that that you're drinking and bawling inside there with your viragoes. I'll demolish you, you and your cottage! Damnation! Will you leave me in peace?"

He clinched his fists; then he uttered a hoarse cry, stooping as he ran. And he stuttered, his teeth chattering with fright.

"It's so that I may kill myself. No, I won't throw myself in! All that water means that I've no heart. No, I won't throw myself in!"

The cascades, which fled at his approach, advanced when he retired. And all of a sudden, he looked stupidly around him, mumbling, in a voice which was scarcely audible:

"It isn't possible, they set conjurers against me!"

"I'm off, sir. I've got to go. Good-night!" said Gervaise to the house surgeon. "It upsets me too much; I'll come again."

She was quite white. Coupeau was continuing his breakdown from the window to the mattress and from the mattress to the window, perspiring, toiling, always beating the same rhythm. Then she hurried away. But though she scrambled down the stairs, she still heard her husband's confounded jig until she reached the bottom. Ah! Mon Dieu! how pleasant it was out of doors, one could breathe there!

That evening everyone in the tenement was discussing Coupeau's strange malady. The Boches invited Gervaise to have a drink with them, even though they now considered Clump-clump beneath them, in order to hear all the details. Madame Lorilleux and Madame Poisson were there also. Boche told of a carpenter he had known who had been a drinker of absinthe. The man shed his clothes, went out in the street and danced the polka until he died. That rather struck the ladies as comic, even though it was very sad.

Gervaise got up in the middle of the room and did an imitation of Coupeau. Yes, that's just how it was. Can anyone feature a man doing that for hours on end? If they didn't believe they could go see for themselves.

On getting up the next morning, Gervaise promised herself she would not return to the Sainte-Anne again. What use would it be? She did not want to go off her head also. However, every ten minutes, she fell to musing and became absent-minded. It would be curious though, if he were still throwing his legs about. When twelve o'clock struck, she could no longer resist; she started off and did not notice how long the walk was, her brain was so full of her desire to go and the dread of what awaited her.

Oh! there was no need for her to ask for news. She heard Coupeau's song the moment she reached the foot of the staircase. Just the same tune, just the same dance. She might have thought herself going up again after having only been down for a minute. The attendant of the day before, who was carrying some jugs of tisane along the corridor, winked his eye as he met her, by way of being amiable.

"Still the same, then?" said she.

"Oh! still the same!" he replied without stopping.

She entered the room, but she remained near the door, because there were some people with Coupeau. The fair, rosy house surgeon was standing up, having given his chair to a bald old gentleman who was decorated and had a pointed face like a weasel. He was no doubt the head doctor, for his glance was as sharp and piercing as a gimlet. All the dealers in sudden death have a glance like that.

No, really, it was not a pretty sight; and Gervaise, all in a tremble, asked herself why she had returned. To think that the evening before they accused her at the Boches' of exaggerating the picture! Now she saw better how Coupeau set about it, his eyes wide open looking into space, and she would never forget it. She overheard a few words between the house surgeon and the head doctor. The former was giving some details of the night: her husband had talked and thrown himself about, that was what it amounted to. Then the bald-headed old gentleman, who was not very polite by the way, at length appeared to become aware of her presence; and when the house surgeon had informed him that she was the patient's wife, he began to question her in the harsh manner of a commissary of the police.

"Did this man's father drink?"

"Yes, sir; just a little like everyone. He killed himself by falling from a roof one day when he was tipsy."

"Did his mother drink?"

"Well! sir, like everyone else, you know; a drop here, a drop there. Oh! the family is very respectable! There was a brother who died very young in convulsions."

The doctor looked at her with his piercing eye. He resumed in his rough voice:

"And you, you drink too, don't you?"

Gervaise stammered, protested, and placed her hand upon her heart, as though to take her solemn oath.

"You drink! Take care; see where drink leads to. One day or other you will die thus."

Then she remained close to the wall. The doctor had turned his back to her. He squatted down, without troubling himself as to whether his overcoat trailed in the dust of the matting; for a long while he studied Coupeau's trembling, waiting for its reappearance, following it with his glance. That day the legs were going in their turn, the trembling had descended from the hands to the feet; a regular puppet with his strings being pulled, throwing his limbs about, whilst the trunk of his body remained as stiff as a piece of wood. The disease progressed little by little. It was like a musical box beneath the skin; it started off every three or four seconds and rolled along for an instant; then it stopped and then it started off again, just the same as the little shiver which shakes stray dogs in winter, when cold and standing in some doorway for protection. Already the middle of the body and the shoulders quivered like water on the point of boiling. It was a funny demolition all the same, going off wriggling like a girl being tickled.

Coupeau, meanwhile, was complaining in a hollow voice. He seemed to suffer a great deal more than the day before. His broken murmurs disclosed all sorts of ailments. Thousands of pins were pricking him. He felt something heavy all about his body; some cold, wet animal was crawling over his thighs and digging its fangs into his flesh. Then there were other animals sticking to his shoulders, tearing his back with their claws.

"I'm thirsty, oh! I'm thirsty!" groaned he continually.

The house surgeon handed him a little lemonade from a small shelf; Coupeau seized the mug in both hands and greedily took a mouthful, spilling half the liquid over himself; but he spat it out at once with furious disgust, exclaiming:

"Damnation! It's brandy!"

Then, on a sign from the doctor, the house surgeon tried to make him drink some water without leaving go of the bottle. This time he swallowed the mouthful, yelling as though he had swallowed fire.

"It's brandy; damnation! It's brandy!"

Since the night before, everything he had had to drink was brandy. It redoubled his thirst and he could no longer drink, because everything burnt him. They had brought him some broth, but they were evidently trying to poison him, for the broth smelt of vitriol. The bread was sour and moldy. There was nothing but poison around him. The cell stank of sulphur. He even accused persons of rubbing matches under his nose to infect him.

All on a sudden he exclaimed:

"Oh! the rats, there're the rats now!"

There were black balls that were changing into rats. These filthy animals got fatter and fatter, then they jumped onto the mattress and disappeared. There was also a monkey which came out of the wall, and went back into the wall, and which approached so near him each time, that he drew back through fear of having his nose bitten off. Suddenly there was another change, the walls were probably cutting capers, for he yelled out, choking with terror and rage:

"That's it, gee up! Shake me, I don't care! Gee up! Tumble down! Yes, ring the bells, you black crows! Play the organ to prevent my calling the police. They've put a bomb behind the wall, the lousy scoundrels! I can hear it, it snorts, they're going to blow us up! Fire! Damnation, fire! There's a cry of fire! There it blazes. Oh, it's getting lighter, lighter! All the sky's burning, red fires, green fires, yellow fires. Hi! Help! Fire!"

His cries became lost in a rattle. He now only mumbled disconnected words, foaming at the mouth, his chin wet with saliva. The doctor rubbed his nose with his finger, a movement no doubt habitual with him in the presence of serious cases. He turned to the house surgeon, and asked him in a low voice:

"And the temperature, still the hundred degrees, is it not?"

"Yes, sir."

The doctor pursed his lips. He continued there another two minutes, his eyes fixed on Coupeau. Then he shrugged his shoulders, adding:

"The same treatment, broth, milk, lemonade, and the potion of extract of quinine. Do not leave him, and call me if necessary."

He went out and Gervaise followed him, to ask him if there was any hope. But he walked so stiffly along the corridor, that she did not dare approach him. She stood rooted there a minute, hesitating whether to return and look at her husband. The time she had already passed had been far from pleasant. As she again heard him calling out that the lemonade smelt of brandy, she hurried away, having had enough of the performance. In the streets, the galloping of the horses and the noise of the vehicles made her fancy that all the inmates of Saint-Anne were at her heels. And that the doctor had threatened her! Really, she already thought she had the complaint.

In the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or the Boches and the others were naturally awaiting her. The moment she appeared they called her into the concierge's room. Well! was old Coupeau still in the land of the living? Mon Dieu! yes, he still lived. Boche seemed amazed and confounded; he had bet a bottle that old Coupeau would not last till the evening. What! He still lived! And they all exhibited their astonishment, and slapped their thighs. There was a fellow who lasted! Madame Lorilleux reckoned up the hours; thirty-six hours and twenty-four hours, sixty hours. Sacre Dieu! already sixty hours that he had been doing the jig and screaming! Such a feat of strength had never been seen before. But Boche, who was upset that he had lost the bet, questioned Gervaise with an air of doubt, asking her if she was quite sure he had not filed off behind her back. Oh! no, he had no desire to, he jumped about too much. Then Boche, still doubting, begged her to show them again a little how he was acting, just so they could see. Yes, yes, a little more! The request was general! The company told her she would be very kind if she would oblige, for just then two neighbors happened to be there who had not been present the day before, and who had come down purposely to see the performance. The concierge called to everybody to make room, they cleared the centre of the apartment, pushing one another with their elbows, and quivering with curiosity. Gervaise, however, hung down her head. Really, she was afraid it might upset her. Desirous though of showing that she did not refuse for the sake of being pressed, she tried two or three little leaps; but she became quite queer, and stopped; on her word of honor, she was not equal to it! There was a murmur of disappointment; it was a pity, she imitated it perfectly. However, she could not do it, it was no use insisting! And when Virginie left to return to her shop, they forgot all about old Coupeau and began to gossip about the Poissons and their home, a real mess now. The day before, the bailiffs had been; the policeman was about to lose his place; as for Lantier, he was now making up to the daughter of the restaurant keeper next door, a fine woman, who talked of setting up as a tripe-seller. Ah! it was amusing, everyone already beheld a tripe-seller occupying the shop; after the sweets should come something substantial. And that blind Poisson! How could a man whose profession required him to be so smart fail to see what was going on in his own home? They stopped talking suddenly when they noticed that Gervaise was off in a corner by herself imitating Coupeau. Her hands and feet were jerking. Yes, they couldn't ask for a better performance! Then Gervaise started as if waking from a dream and hurried away calling out good-night to everyone.

On the morrow, the Boches saw her start off at twelve, the same as on the two previous days. They wished her a pleasant afternoon. That day the corridor at Sainte-Anne positively shook with Coupeau's yells and kicks. She had not left the stairs when she heard him yelling:

"What a lot of bugs!—Come this way again that I may squash you!—Ah! they want to kill me! ah! the bugs!—I'm a bigger swell than the lot of you! Clear out, damnation! Clear out."

For a moment she stood panting before the door. Was he then fighting against an army? When she entered, the performance had increased and was embellished even more than on previous occasions. Coupeau was a raving madman, the same as one sees at the Charenton mad-house! He was throwing himself about in the center of the cell, slamming his fists everywhere, on himself, on the walls, on the floor, and stumbling about punching empty space. He wanted to open the window, and he hid himself, defended himself, called, answered, produced all this uproar without the least assistance, in the exasperated way of a man beset by a mob of people. Then Gervaise understood that he fancied he was on a roof, laying down sheets of zinc. He imitated the bellows with his mouth, he moved the iron about in the fire and knelt down so as to pass his thumb along the edges of the mat, thinking that he was soldering it. Yes, his handicraft returned to him at the moment of croaking; and if he yelled so loud, if he fought on his roof, it was because ugly scoundrels were preventing him doing his work properly. On all the neighboring roofs were villains mocking and tormenting him. Besides that, the jokers were letting troops of rats loose about his legs. Ah! the filthy beasts, he saw them always! Though he kept crushing them, bringing his foot down with all his strength, fresh hordes of them continued passing, until they quite covered the roof. And there were spiders there too! He roughly pressed his trousers against his thigh to squash some big spiders which had crept up his leg. Mon Dieu! he would never finish his day's work, they wanted to destroy him, his employer would send him to prison. Then, whilst making haste, he suddenly imagined he had a steam-engine in his stomach; with his mouth wide open, he puffed out the smoke, a dense smoke which filled the cell and found an outlet by the window; and, bending forward, still puffing, he looked outside of the cloud of smoke as it unrolled and ascended to the sky, where it hid the sun.

"Look!" cried he, "there's the band of the Chaussee Clignancourt, disguised as bears with drums, putting on a show."

He remained crouching before the window, as though he had been watching a procession in a street, from some rooftop.

"There's the cavalcade, lions and panthers making grimaces—there's brats dressed up as dogs and cats—there's tall Clemence, with her wig full of feathers. Ah! Mon Dieu! she's turning head over heels; she's showed everything—you'd better run, Duckie. Hey, the cops, leave her alone!—just you leave her alone—don't shoot! Don't shoot—"

His voice rose, hoarse and terrified and he stooped down quickly, saying that the police and the military were below, men who were aiming at him with rifles. In the wall he saw the barrel of a pistol emerging, pointed at his breast. They had dragged the girl away.

"Don't shoot! Mon Dieu! Don't shoot!"

Then, the buildings were tumbling down, he imitated the cracking of a whole neighborhood collapsing; and all disappeared, all flew off. But he had no time to take breath, other pictures passed with extraordinary rapidity. A furious desire to speak filled his mouth full of words which he uttered without any connection, and with a gurgling sound in his throat. He continued to raise his voice, louder and louder.

"Hallow, it's you? Good-day! No jokes! Don't make me nuzzle your hair."

And he passed his hand before his face, he blew to send the hairs away. The house surgeon questioned him.

"Who is it you see?"

"My wife, of course!"

He was looking at the wall, with his back to Gervaise. The latter had a rare fright, and she examined the wall, to see if she also could catch sight of herself there. He continued talking.

"Now, you know, none of your wheedling—I won't be tied down! You are pretty, you have got a fine dress. Where did you get the money for it, you cow? You've been at a party, camel! Wait a bit and I'll do for you! Ah! you're hiding your boy friend behind your skirts. Who is it? Stoop down that I may see. Damnation, it's him again!"

With a terrible leap, he went head first against the wall; but the padding softened the blow. One only heard his body rebounding onto the matting, where the shock had sent him.

"Who is it you see?" repeated the house surgeon.

"The hatter! The hatter!" yelled Coupeau.

And the house surgeon questioning Gervaise, the latter stuttered without being able to answer, for this scene stirred up within her all the worries of her life. The zinc-worker thrust out his fists.

"We'll settle this between us, my lad. It's full time I did for you! Ah, you coolly come, with that virago on your arm, to make a fool of me before everyone. Well! I'm going to throttle you—yes, yes, I! And without putting any gloves on either! I'll stop your swaggering. Take that! And that! And that!"

He hit about in the air viciously. Then a wild rage took possession of him. Having bumped against the wall in walking backwards, he thought he was being attacked from behind. He turned round, and fiercely hammered away at the padding. He sprang about, jumped from one corner to another, knocked his stomach, his back, his shoulder, rolled over, and picked himself up again. His bones seemed softened, his flesh had a sound like damp oakum. He accompanied this pretty game with atrocious threats, and wild and guttural cries. However the battle must have been going badly for him, for his breathing became quicker, his eyes were starting out of his head, and he seemed little by little to be seized with the cowardice of a child.

"Murder! Murder! Be off with you both. Oh! you brutes, they're laughing. There she is on her back, the virago! She must give in, it's settled. Ah! the brigand, he's murdering her! He's cutting off her leg with his knife. The other leg's on the ground, the stomach's in two, it's full of blood. Oh! Mon Dieu! Oh! Mon Dieu!"

And, covered with perspiration, his hair standing on end, looking a frightful object, he retired backwards, violently waving his arms, as though to send the abominable sight from him. He uttered two heart-rending wails, and fell flat on his back on the mattress, against which his heels had caught.

"He's dead, sir, he's dead!" said Gervaise, clasping her hands.

The house surgeon had drawn near, and was pulling Coupeau into the middle of the mattress. No, he was not dead. They had taken his shoes off. His bare feet hung off the end of the mattress and they were dancing all by themselves, one beside the other, in time, a little hurried and regular dance.

Just then the head doctor entered. He had brought two of his colleagues—one thin, the other fat, and both decorated like himself. All three stooped down without saying a word, and examined the man all over; then they rapidly conversed together in a low voice. They had uncovered Coupeau from his thighs to his shoulders, and by standing on tiptoe Gervaise could see the naked trunk spread out. Well! it was complete. The trembling had descended from the arms and ascended from the legs, and now the trunk itself was getting lively!

"He's sleeping," murmured the head doctor.

And he called the two others' attention to the man's countenance. Coupeau, his eyes closed, had little nervous twinges which drew up all his face. He was more hideous still, thus flattened out, with his jaw projecting, and his visage deformed like a corpse's that had suffered from nightmare; but the doctors, having caught sight of his feet, went and poked their noses over them, with an air of profound interest. The feet were still dancing. Though Coupeau slept the feet danced. Oh! their owner might snore, that did not concern them, they continued their little occupation without either hurrying or slackening. Regular mechanical feet, feet which took their pleasure wherever they found it.

Gervaise having seen the doctors place their hands on her old man, wished to feel him also. She approached gently and laid a hand on his shoulder, and she kept it there a minute. Mon Dieu! whatever was taking place inside? It danced down into the very depths of the flesh, the bones themselves must have been jumping. Quiverings, undulations, coming from afar, flowed like a river beneath the skin. When she pressed a little she felt she distinguished the suffering cries of the marrow. What a fearful thing, something was boring away like a mole! It must be the rotgut from l'Assommoir that was hacking away inside him. Well! his entire body had been soaked in it.

The doctors had gone away. At the end of an hour Gervaise, who had remained with the house surgeon, repeated in a low voice:

"He's dead, sir; he's dead!"

But the house surgeon, who was watching the feet, shook his head. The bare feet, projecting beyond the mattress, still danced on. They were not particularly clean and the nails were long. Several more hours passed. All on a sudden they stiffened and became motionless. Then the house surgeon turned towards Gervaise, saying:

"It's over now."

Death alone had been able to stop those feet.

When Gervaise got back to the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or she found at the Boches' a number of women who were cackling in excited tones. She thought they were awaiting her to have the latest news, the same as the other days.

"He's gone," said she, quietly, as she pushed open the door, looking tired out and dull.

But no one listened to her. The whole building was topsy-turvy. Oh! a most extraordinary story. Poisson had caught his wife with Lantier. Exact details were not known, because everyone had a different version. However, he had appeared just when they were not expecting him. Some further information was given, which the ladies repeated to one another as they pursed their lips. A sight like that had naturally brought Poisson out of his shell. He was a regular tiger. This man, who talked but little and who always seemed to walk with a stick up his back, had begun to roar and jump about. Then nothing more had been heard. Lantier had evidently explained things to the husband. Anyhow, it could not last much longer, and Boche announced that the girl of the restaurant was for certain going to take the shop for selling tripe. That rogue of a hatter adored tripe.

On seeing Madame Lorilleux and Madame Lerat arrive, Gervaise repeated, faintly:

"He's gone. Mon Dieu! Four days' dancing and yelling—"

Then the two sisters could not do otherwise than pull out their handkerchiefs. Their brother had had many faults, but after all he was their brother. Boche shrugged his shoulders and said, loud enough to be heard by everyone:

"Bah! It's a drunkard the less."

From that day, as Gervaise often got a bit befuddled, one of the amusements of the house was to see her imitate Coupeau. It was no longer necessary to press her; she gave the performance gratis, her hands and feet trembling as she uttered little involuntary shrieks. She must have caught this habit at Sainte-Anne from watching her husband too long.

Gervaise lasted in this state several months. She fell lower and lower still, submitting to the grossest outrages and dying of starvation a little every day. As soon as she had four sous she drank and pounded on the walls. She was employed on all the dirty errands of the neighborhood. Once they even bet her she wouldn't eat filth, but she did it in order to earn ten sous. Monsieur Marescot had decided to turn her out of her room on the sixth floor. But, as Pere Bru had just been found dead in his cubbyhole under the staircase, the landlord had allowed her to turn into it. Now she roosted there in the place of Pere Bru. It was inside there, on some straw, that her teeth chattered, whilst her stomach was empty and her bones were frozen. The earth would not have her apparently. She was becoming idiotic. She did not even think of making an end of herself by jumping out of the sixth floor window on to the pavement of the courtyard below. Death had to take her little by little, bit by bit, dragging her thus to the end through the accursed existence she had made for herself. It was never even exactly known what she did die of. There was some talk of a cold, but the truth was she died of privation and of the filth and hardship of her ruined life. Overeating and dissoluteness killed her, according to the Lorilleuxs. One morning, as there was a bad smell in the passage, it was remembered that she had not been seen for two days, and she was discovered already green in her hole.

It happened to be old Bazouge who came with the pauper's coffin under his arm to pack her up. He was again precious drunk that day, but a jolly fellow all the same, and as lively as a cricket. When he recognized the customer he had to deal with he uttered several philosophical reflections, whilst performing his little business.

"Everyone has to go. There's no occasion for jostling, there's room for everyone. And it's stupid being in a hurry that just slows you up. All I want to do is to please everybody. Some will, others won't. What's the result? Here's one who wouldn't, then she would. So she was made to wait. Anyhow, it's all right now, and faith! She's earned it! Merrily, just take it easy."

And when he took hold of Gervaise in his big, dirty hands, he was seized with emotion, and he gently raised this woman who had had so great a longing for his attentions. Then, as he laid her out with paternal care at the bottom of the coffin, he stuttered between two hiccoughs:

"You know—now listen—it's me, Bibi-the-Gay, called the ladies' consoler. There, you're happy now. Go by-by, my beauty!"

THE END

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dream, by Emile Zola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Dream

Author: Emile Zola

Translator: Eliza E. Chase

Release Date: April 27, 2006 [EBook #9499]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DREAM ***

Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; Roger Proctor; David Widger

THE DREAM

(LE REVE)

By Emile Zola

Translated by Eliza E. Chase

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER I

During the severe winter of 1860 the river Oise was frozen over and the plains of Lower Picardy were covered with deep snow. On Christmas Day, especially, a heavy squall from the north-east had almost buried the little city of Beaumont. The snow, which began to fall early in the morning, increased towards evening and accumulated during the night; in the upper town, in the Rue des Orfevres, at the end of which, as if enclosed therein, is the northern front of the cathedral transept, this was blown with great force by the wind against the portal of Saint Agnes, the old Romanesque portal, where traces of Early Gothic could be seen, contrasting its florid ornamentation with the bare simplicity of the transept gable.

The inhabitants still slept, wearied by the festive rejoicings of the previous day. The town-clock struck six. In the darkness, which was slightly lightened by the slow, persistent fall of flakes, a vague living form alone was visible: that of a little girl, nine years of age, who, having taken refuge under the archway of the portal, had passed the night there, shivering, and sheltering herself as well as possible. She wore a thin woollen dress, ragged from long use, her head was covered with a torn silk handkerchief, and on her bare feet were heavy shoes much too large for her. Without doubt she had only gone there after having well wandered through the town, for she had fallen down from sheer exhaustion. For her it was the end of the world; there was no longer anything to interest her. It was the last surrender; the hunger that gnaws, the cold which kills; and in her weakness, stifled by the heavy weight at her heart, she ceased to struggle, and nothing was left to her but the instinctive movement of preservation, the desire of changing place, of sinking still deeper into these old stones, whenever a sudden gust made the snow whirl about her.

Hour after hour passed. For a long time, between the divisions of this double door, she leaned her back against the abutting pier, on whose column was a statue of Saint Agnes, the martyr of but thirteen years of age, a little girl like herself, who carried a branch of palm, and at whose feet was a lamb. And in the tympanum, above the lintel, the whole legend of the Virgin Child betrothed to Jesus could be seen in high relief, set forth with a charming simplicity of faith. Her hair, which grew long and covered her like a garment when the Governor, whose son she had refused to marry, gave her up to the soldiers; the flames of the funeral pile, destined to destroy her, turning aside and burning her executioners as soon as they lighted the wood; the miracles performed by her relics; Constance, daughter of the Emperor, cured of leprosy; and the quaint story of one of her painted images, which, when the priest Paulinus offered it a very valuable emerald ring, held out its finger, then withdrew it, keeping the ring, which can be seen at this present day. At the top of the tympanum, in a halo of glory, Agnes is at last received into heaven, where her betrothed, Jesus, marries her, so young and so little, giving her the kiss of eternal happiness.

But when the wind rushed through the street, the snow was blown in the child's face, and the threshold was almost barred by the white masses; then she moved away to the side, against the virgins placed above the base of the arch. These are the companions of Agnes, the saints who served as her escort: three at her right—Dorothea, who was fed in prison by miraculous bread; Barbe, who lived in a tower; and Genevieve, whose heroism saved Paris: and three at her left—Agatha, whose breast was torn; Christina, who was put to torture by her father; and Cecilia, beloved by the angels. Above these were statues and statues; three close ranks mounting with the curves of the arches, decorating them with chaste triumphant figures, who, after the suffering and martyrdom of their earthly life, were welcomed by a host of winged cherubim, transported with ecstasy into the Celestial Kingdom.

There had been no shelter for the little waif for a long time, when at last the clock struck eight and daylight came. The snow, had she not trampled it down, would have come up to her shoulders. The old door behind her was covered with it, as if hung with ermine, and it looked as white as an altar, beneath the grey front of the church, so bare and smooth that not even a single flake had clung to it. The great saints, those of the sloping surface especially, were clothed in it, and were glistening in purity from their feet to their white beards. Still higher, in the scenes of the tympanum, the outlines of the little saints of the arches were designed most clearly on a dark background, and this magic sect continued until the final rapture at the marriage of Agnes, which the archangels appeared to be celebrating under a shower of white roses. Standing upon her pillar, with her white branch of palm and her white lamp, the Virgin Child had such purity in the lines of her body of immaculate snow, that the motionless stiffness of cold seemed to congeal around her the mystic transports of victorious youth. And at her feet the other child, so miserable, white with snow—she also grew so stiff and pale that it seemed as if she were turning to stone, and could scarcely be distinguished from the great images above her.

At last, in one of the long line of houses in which all seemed to be sleeping, the noise from the drawing up of a blind made her raise her eyes. It was at her right hand, in the second story of a house at the side of the Cathedral. A very handsome woman, a brunette about forty years of age, with a placid expression of serenity, was just looking out from there, and in spite of the terrible frost she kept her uncovered arm in the air for a moment, having seen the child move. Her calm face grew sad with pity and astonishment. Then, shivering, she hastily closed the window. She carried with her the rapid vision of a fair little creature with violet-coloured eyes under a head-covering of an old silk handkerchief. The face was oval, the neck long and slender as a lily, and the shoulders drooping; but she was blue from cold, her little hands and feet were half dead, and the only thing about her that still showed life was the slight vapour of her breath.

The child remained with her eyes upturned, looking at the house mechanically. It was a narrow one, two stories in height, very old, and evidently built towards the end of the fifteenth century. It was almost sealed to the side of the Cathedral, between two buttresses, like a wart which had pushed itself between the two toes of a Colossus. And thus supported on each side, it was admirably preserved, with its stone basement, its second story in wooden panels, ornamented with bricks, its roof, of which the framework advanced at least three feet beyond the gable, its turret for the projecting stairway at the left corner, where could still be seen in the little window the leaden setting of long ago. At times repairs had been made on account of its age. The tile-roofing dated from the reign of Louis XIV, for one easily recognised the work of that epoch; a dormer window pierced in the side of the turret, little wooden frames replacing everywhere those of the primitive panes; the three united openings of the second story had been reduced to two, that of the middle being closed up with bricks, thus giving to the front the symmetry of the other buildings on the street of a more recent date.

In the basement the changes were equally visible, an oaken door with mouldings having taken the place of the old one with iron trimmings that was under the stairway; and the great central arcade, of which the lower part, the sides, and the point had been plastered over, so as to leave only one rectangular opening, was now a species of large window, instead of the triple-pointed one which formerly came out on to the street.

Without thinking, the child still looked at this venerable dwelling of a master-builder, so well preserved, and as she read upon a little yellow plate nailed at the left of the door these words, "Hubert, chasuble maker," printed in black letters, she was again attracted by the sound of the opening of a shutter. This time it was the blind of the square window of the ground floor. A man in his turn looked out; his face was full, his nose aquiline, his forehead projecting, and his thick short hair already white, although he was scarcely yet five-and-forty. He, too, forgot the air for a moment as he examined her with a sad wrinkle on his great tender mouth. Then she saw him, as he remained standing behind the little greenish-looking panes. He turned, beckoned to someone, and his wife reappeared. How handsome she was! They both stood side by side, looking at her earnestly and sadly.

For four hundred years, the line of Huberts, embroiderers from father to son, had lived in this house. A noted maker of chasubles had built it under Louis XI, another had repaired it under Louis XIV, and the Hubert who now occupied it still embroidered church vestments, as his ancestors had always done. At twenty years of age he had fallen in love with a young girl of sixteen, Hubertine, and so deep was their affection for each other, that when her mother, widow of a magistrate, refused to give her consent to their union, they ran away together and were married. She was remarkably beautiful, and that was their whole romance, their joy, and their misfortune.

When, a year later, she went to the deathbed of her mother, the latter disinherited her and gave her her curse. So affected was she by the terrible scene, that her infant, born soon after, died, and since then it seemed as if, even in her coffin in the cemetery, the willful woman had never pardoned her daughter, for it was, alas! a childless household. After twenty-four years they still mourned the little one they had lost.

Disturbed by their looks, the stranger tried to hide herself behind the pillar of Saint Agnes. She was also annoyed by the movement which now commenced in the street, as the shops were being opened and people began to go out. The Rue des Orfevres, which terminates at the side front of the church, would be almost impassable, blocked in as it is on one side by the house of the Huberts, if the Rue du Soleil, a narrow lane, did not relieve it on the other side by running the whole length of the Cathedral to the great front on the Place du Cloitre. At this hour there were few passers, excepting one or two persons who were on their way to early service, and they looked with surprise at the poor little girl, whom they did not recognise as ever having seen at Beaumont. The slow, persistent fall of snow continued. The cold seemed to increase with the wan daylight, and in the dull thickness of the great white shroud which covered the town one heard, as if from a distance, the sound of voices. But timid, ashamed of her abandonment, as if it were a fault, the child drew still farther back, when suddenly she recognised before her Hubertine, who, having no servant, had gone out to buy bread.

"What are you doing there, little one? Who are you?"

She did not answer, but hid her face. Then she was no longer conscious of suffering; her whole being seemed to have faded away, as if her heart, turned to ice, had stopped beating. When the good lady turned away with a pitying look, she sank down upon her knees completely exhausted, and slipped listlessly into the snow, whose flakes quickly covered her.

And the woman, as she returned with her fresh rolls, seeing that she had fallen, again approached her.

"Look up, my child! You cannot remain here on this doorstep."

Then Hubert, who had also come out, and was standing near the threshold, took the bread from his wife, and said:

"Take her up and bring her into the house."

Hubertine did not reply, but, stooping, lifted her in her strong arms. And the child shrank back no longer, but was carried as if inanimate; her teeth closely set, her eyes shut, chilled through and through, and with the lightness of a little bird that had just fallen from its nest.

They went in. Hubert shut the door, while Hubertine, bearing her burden, passed through the front room, which served as a parlour, and where some embroidered bands were spread out for show before the great square window. Then she went into the kitchen, the old servants' hall, preserved almost intact, with its heavy beams, its flagstone floor mended in a dozen places, and its great fireplace with its stone mantelpiece. On shelves were the utensils, the pots, kettles, and saucepans, that dated back one or two centuries; and the dishes were of old stone, or earthenware, and of pewter. But on the middle of the hearth was a modern cooking-stove, a large cast-iron one, whose copper trimmings were wondrously bright. It was red from heat, and the water was bubbling away in its boiler. A large porringer, filled with coffee-and-milk, was on one corner of it.

"Oh! how much more comfortable it is here than outside," said Hubert, as he put the bread down on a heavy table of the style of Louis XIII, which was in the centre of the room. "Now, seat this poor little creature near the stove that she may be thawed out!"

Hubertine had already placed the child close to the fire, and they both looked at her as she slowly regained consciousness. As the snow that covered her clothes melted it fell in heavy drops. Through the holes of her great shoes they could see her little bruised feet, whilst the thin woollen dress designed the rigidity of her limbs and her poor body, worn by misery and pain. She had a long attack of nervous trembling, and then opened her frightened eyes with the start of an animal which suddenly awakes from sleep to find itself caught in a snare. Her face seemed to sink away under the silken rag which was tied under her chin. Her right arm appeared to be helpless, for she pressed it so closely to her breast.

"Do not be alarmed, for we will not hurt you. Where did you come from? Who are you?"

But the more she was spoken to the more frightened she became, turning her head as if someone were behind her who would beat her. She examined the kitchen furtively, the flaggings, the beams, and the shining utensils; then her glance passed through the irregular windows which were left in the ancient opening, and she saw the garden clear to the trees by the Bishop's house, whose white shadows towered above the wall at the end, while at the left, as if astonished at finding itself there, stretched along the whole length of the alley the Cathedral, with its Romanesque windows in the chapels of its apses. And again, from the heat of the stove which began to penetrate her, she had a long attack of shivering, after which she turned her eyes to the floor and remained quiet.

"Do you belong to Beaumont? Who is your father?"

She was so entirely silent that Hubert thought her throat must be too dry to allow her to speak.

Instead of questioning her he said: "We would do much better to give her a cup of coffee as hot as she can drink it."

That was so reasonable that Hubertine immediately handed her the cup she herself held. Whilst she cut two large slices of bread and buttered them, the child, still mistrustful, continued to shrink back; but her hunger was too great, and soon she ate and drank ravenously. That there need not be a restraint upon her, the husband and wife were silent, and were touched to tears on seeing her little hand tremble to such a degree that at times it was difficult for her to reach her mouth. She made use only of her left hand, for her right arm seemed to be fastened to her chest. When she had finished, she almost broke the cup, which she caught again by an awkward movement of her elbow.

"Have you hurt your arm badly?" Hubertine asked. "Do not be afraid, my dear, but show it to me."

But as she was about to touch it the child rose up hastily, trying to prevent her, and as in the struggle she moved her arm, a little pasteboard-covered book, which she had hidden under her dress, slipped through a large tear in her waist. She tried to take it, and when she saw her unknown hosts open and begin to read it, she clenched her fist in anger.

It was an official certificate, given by the Administration des Enfants Assistes in the Department of the Seine. On the first page, under a medallion containing a likeness of Saint Vincent de Paul, were the printed prescribed forms. For the family name, a simple black line filled the allotted space. Then for the Christian names were those of Angelique Marie; for the dates, born January 22, 1851, admitted the 23rd of the same month under the registered number of 1,634. So there was neither father nor mother; there were no papers; not even a statement of where she was born; nothing but this little book of official coldness, with its cover of pale red pasteboard. No relative in the world! and even her abandonment numbered and classed!

"Oh! then she is a foundling!" exclaimed Hubertine.

In a paroxysm of rage the child replied: "I am much better than all the others—yes—yes! I am better, better, better. I have never taken anything that did not belong to me, and yet they stole all I had. Give me back, now, that which you also have stolen from me!"

Such powerless passion, such pride to be above the others in goodness, so shook the body of the little girl, that the Huberts were startled. They no longer recognised the blonde creature, with violet eyes and graceful figure. Now her eyes were black, her face dark, and her neck seemed swollen by a rush of blood to it. Since she had become warm, she raised her head and hissed like a serpent that had been picked up on the snow.

"Are you then really so naughty?" asked Hubert gently. "If we wish to know all about you, it is because we wish to help you."

And looking over the shoulders of his wife he read as the latter turned the leaves of the little book. On the second page was the name of the nurse. "The child, Angelique Marie, had been given, on January 25, 1851, to the nurse, Francoise, sister of Mr. Hamelin, a farmer by profession, living in the parish of Soulanges, an arrondissement of Nevers. The aforesaid nurse had received on her departure the pay for the first month of her care, in addition to her clothing." Then there was a certificate of her baptism, signed by the chaplain of the Asylum for Abandoned Children; also that of the physician on the arrival and on the departure of the infant. The monthly accounts, paid in quarterly installments, filled farther on the columns of four pages, and each time there was the illegible signature of the receiver or collector.

"What! Nevers!" asked Hubertine. "You were brought up near Nevers?"

Angelique, red with anger that she could not prevent them from reading, had fallen into a sullen silence. But at last she opened her mouth to speak of her nurse.

"Ah! you may be sure that Maman Nini would have beaten you. She always took my part against others, she did, although sometimes she struck me herself. Ah! it is true I was not so unhappy over there, with the cattle and all!"

Her voice choked her and she continued, in broken, incoherent sentences, to speak of the meadow where she drove the great red cow, of the broad road where she played, of the cakes they cooked, and of a pet house-dog that had once bitten her.

Hubert interrupted her as he read aloud: "In case of illness, or of bad treatment, the superintendent is authorised to change the nurses of the children." Below it was written that the child Angelique Marie had been given on June 20 to the care of Theresa, wife of Louis Franchomme, both of them makers of artificial flowers in Paris.

"Ah! I understand," said Hubertine. "You were ill, and so they took you back to Paris."

But no, that was not the case, and the Huberts did not know the whole history until they had drawn it, little by little from Angelique. Louis Franchomme, who was a cousin of Maman Nini, went to pass a month in his native village when recovering from a fever. It was then that his wife, Theresa, became very fond of the child, and obtained permission to take her to Paris, where she could be taught the trade of making flowers. Three months later her husband died, and she herself, being delicate in health, was obliged to leave the city and to go to her brother's, the tanner Rabier, who was settled at Beaumont. She, alas! died in the early days of December, and confided to her sister-in-law the little girl, who since that time had been injured, beaten, and, in short, suffered martyrdom.

"The Rabiers?" said Hubert. "The Rabiers? Yes, yes! They are tanners on the banks of the Ligneul, in the lower town. The husband is lame, and the wife is a noted scold."

"They treated me as if I came from the gutter," continued Angelique, revolted and enraged in her mortified pride. "They said the river was the best place for me. After she had beaten me nearly to death, the woman would put something on the floor for me to eat, as if I were a cat, and many a time I went to bed suffering from hunger. Oh! I could have killed myself, at last!" She made a gesture of furious despair.

"Yesterday, Christmas morning, they had been drinking, and, to amuse themselves, they threatened to put out my eyes. Then, after a while, they began to fight with each other, and dealt such heavy blows that I thought they were dead, as they both fell on the floor of their room. For a long time I had determined to run away. But I was anxious to have my book. Maman Nini had often said, in showing it to me: 'Look, this is all that you own, and if you do not keep this you will not even have a name.' And I know that since the death of Maman Theresa they had hid it in one of the bureau drawers. So stepping over them as quietly as possible, while they were lying on the floor, I got the book, hid it under my dress-waist, pressing it against me with my arm. It seemed so large that I fancied everyone must see it, and that it would be taken from me. Oh! I ran, and ran, and ran, and when night came it was so dark! Oh! how cold I was under the poor shelter of that great door! Oh dear! I was so cold, it seemed as if I were dead. But never mind now, for I did not once let go of my book, and here it is." And with a sudden movement, as the Huberts closed it to give it back to her, she snatched it from them. Then, sitting down, she put her head on the table, sobbing deeply as she laid her cheek on the light red cover. Her pride seemed conquered by an intense humility. Her whole being appeared to be softened by the sight of these few leaves with their rumpled corners—her solitary possession, her one treasure, and the only tie which connected her with the life of this world. She could not relieve her heart of her great despair; her tears flowed continually, and under this complete surrender of herself she regained her delicate looks and became again a pretty child. Her slightly oval face was pure in its outlines, her violet eyes were made a little paler from emotion, and the curve of her neck and shoulders made her resemble a little virgin on a church window. At length she seized the hand of Hubertine, pressed it to her lips most caressingly, and kissed it passionately.

The Huberts were deeply touched, and could scarcely speak. They stammered: "Dear, dear child!"

She was not, then, in reality bad! Perhaps with affectionate care she could be corrected of this violence of temper which had so alarmed them.

In a tone of entreaty the poor child exclaimed: "Do not send me back to those dreadful people! Oh, do not send me back again!"

The husband and wife looked at each other for a few moments. In fact, since the autumn they had planned taking as an apprentice some young girl who would live with them, and thus bring a little brightness into their house, which seemed so dull without children. And their decision was soon made.

"Would you like it, my dear?" Hubert asked.

Hubertine replied quietly, in her calm voice: "I would indeed."

Immediately they occupied themselves with the necessary formalities. The husband went to the Justice of Peace of the northern district of Beaumont, who was cousin to his wife, the only relative with whom she had kept up an acquaintance, and told him all the facts of the case. He took charge of it, wrote to the Hospice of Abandoned Children—where, thanks to the registered number, Angelique was easily recognised—and obtained permission for her to remain as apprentice with the Huberts, who were well known for their honourable position.

The Sub-Inspector of the Hospice, on coming to verify the little book, signed the new contract as witness for Hubert, by which the latter promised to treat the child kindly, to keep her tidy, to send her to school and to church, and to give her a good bed to herself. On the other side, the Administration agreed to pay him all indemnities, and to give the child certain stipulated articles of clothing, as was their custom.

In ten days all was arranged. Angelique slept upstairs in a room under the roof, by the side of the garret, and the windows of which overlooked the garden. She had already taken her first lessons in embroidery. The first Sunday morning after she was in her new home, before going to mass, Hubertine opened before her the old chest in the working-room, where she kept the fine gold thread. She held up the little book, then, placing it in that back part of one of the drawers, said: "Look! I have put it here. I will not hide it, but leave it where you can take it if you ever wish to do so. It is best that you should see it, and remember where it is."

On entering the church that day, Angelique found herself again under the doorway of Saint Agnes. During the week there had been a partial thaw, then the cold weather had returned to so intense a degree that the snow which had half melted on the statues had congealed itself in large bunches or in icicles. Now, the figures seemed dressed in transparent robes of ice, with lace trimmings like spun glass. Dorothea was holding a torch, the liquid droppings of which fell upon her hands. Cecilia wore a silver crown, in which glistened the most brilliant of pearls. Agatha's nude chest was protected by a crystal armour. And the scenes in the tympanum, the little virgins in the arches, looked as if they had been there for centuries, behind the glass and jewels of the shrine of a saint. Agnes herself let trail behind her her court mantle, threaded with light and embroidered with stars. Her lamb had a fleece of diamonds, and her palm-branch had become the colour of heaven. The whole door was resplendent in the purity of intense cold.

Angelique recollected the night she had passed there under the protection of these saints. She raised her head and smiled upon them.

CHAPTER II

Beaumont is composed of two villages, completely separated and quite distinct one from the other—Beaumont-l'Eglise, on the hill with its old Cathedral of the twelfth century, its Bishop's Palace which dates only from the seventeenth century, its inhabitants, scarcely one thousand in number, who are crowded together in an almost stifling way in its narrow streets; and Beaumont-la-Ville, at the foot of the hill, on the banks of the Ligneul, an ancient suburb, which the success of its manufactories of lace and fine cambric has enriched and enlarged to such an extent that it has a population of nearly ten thousand persons, several public squares, and an elegant sub-prefecture built in the modern style. These two divisions, the northern district and the southern district, have thus no longer anything in common except in an administrative way. Although scarcely thirty leagues from Paris, where one can go by rail in two hours, Beaumont-l'Eglise seems to be still immured in its old ramparts, of which, however, only three gates remain. A stationary, peculiar class of people lead there a life similar to that which their ancestors had led from father to son during the past five hundred years.

The Cathedral explains everything, has given birth to and preserved everything. It is the mother, the queen, as it rises in all its majesty in the centre of, and above, the little collection of low houses, which, like shivering birds, are sheltered under her wings of stone. One lives there simply for it, and only by it. There is no movement of business activity, and the little tradesmen only sell the necessities of life, such as are absolutely required to feed, to clothe, and to maintain the church and its clergy; and if occasionally one meets some private individuals, they are merely the last representatives of a scattered crowd of worshippers. The church dominates all; each street is one of its veins; the town has no other breath than its own. On that account, this spirit of another age, this religious torpor from the past, makes the cloistered city which surrounds it redolent with a savoury perfume of peace and of faith.

And in all this mystic place, the house of the Huberts, where Angelique was to live in the future, was the one nearest to the Cathedral, and which clung to it as if in reality it were a part thereof. The permission to build there, between two of the great buttresses, must have been given by some vicar long ago, who was desirous of attaching to himself the ancestors of this line of embroiderers, as master chasuble-makers and furnishers for the Cathedral clergy. On the southern side, the narrow garden was barred by the colossal building; first, the circumference of the side chapels, whose windows overlooked the flower-beds, and then the slender, long nave, that the flying buttresses supported, and afterwards the high roof covered with the sheet lead.

The sun never penetrated to the lower part of this garden, where ivy and box alone grew luxuriantly; yet the eternal shadow there was very soft and pleasant as it fell from the gigantic brow of the apse—a religious shadow, sepulchral and pure, which had a good odour about it. In the greenish half-light of its calm freshness, the two towers let fall only the sound of their chimes. But the entire house kept the quivering therefrom, sealed as it was to these old stones, melted into them and supported by them. It trembled at the least of the ceremonies; at the High Mass, the rumbling of the organ, the voices of the choristers, even the oppressed sighs of the worshippers, murmured through each one of its rooms, lulled it as if with a holy breath from the Invisible, and at times through the half-cool walls seemed to come the vapours from the burning incense.

For five years Angelique lived and grew there, as if in a cloister, far away from the world. She only went out to attend the seven-o'clock Mass on Sunday mornings, as Hubertine had obtained permission for her to study at home, fearing that, if sent to school, she might not always have the best of associates. This old dwelling, so shut in, with its garden of a dead quiet, was her world. She occupied as her chamber a little whitewashed room under the roof; she went down in the morning to her breakfast in the kitchen, she went up again to the working-room in the second story to her embroidery. And these places, with the turning stone stairway of the turret, were the only corners in which she passed her time; for she never went into the Huberts' apartments, and only crossed the parlour on the first floor, and they were the two rooms which had been rejuvenated and modernised. In the parlour, the beams were plastered over, and the ceiling had been decorated with a palm-leaf cornice, accompanied by a rose centre; the wall-paper dated from the First Empire, as well as the white marble chimney-piece and the mahogany furniture, which consisted of a sofa and four armchairs covered with Utrecht velvet, a centre table, and a cabinet.

On the rare occasions when she went there, to add to the articles exposed for sale some new bands of embroidery, if she cast her eyes without, she saw through the window the same unchanging vista, the narrow street ending at the portal of Saint Agnes; a parishioner pushing open the little lower door, which shut itself without any noise, and the shops of the plate-worker and wax-candle-maker opposite, which appeared to be always empty, but where was a display of holy sacramental vessels, and long lines of great church tapers. And the cloistral calm of all Beaumont-l'Eglise—of the Rue Magloire, back of the Bishop's Palace, of the Grande Rue, where the Rue de Orfevres began, and of the Place du Cloitre, where rose up the two towers, was felt in the drowsy air, and seemed to fall gently with the pale daylight on the deserted pavement.

Hubertine had taken upon herself the charge of the education of Angelique. Moreover, she was very old-fashioned in her ideas, and maintained that a woman knew enough if she could read well, write correctly, and had studied thoroughly the first four rules of arithmetic. But even for this limited instruction she had constantly to contend with an unwillingness on the part of her pupil, who, instead of giving her attention to her books, preferred looking out of the windows, although the recreation was very limited, as she could see nothing but the garden from them. In reality, Angelique cared only for reading; notwithstanding in her dictations, chosen from some classic writer, she never succeeded in spelling a page correctly, yet her handwriting was exceedingly pretty, graceful, and bold, one of those irregular styles which were quite the fashion long ago. As for other studies, of geography and history and cyphering, she was almost completely ignorant of them. What good would knowledge ever do her? It was really useless, she thought. Later on, when it was time for her to be Confirmed, she learned her Catechism word for word, and with so fervent an ardour that she astonished everyone by the exactitude of her memory.

Notwithstanding their gentleness, during the first year the Huberts were often discouraged. Angelique, who promised to be skilful in embroidering, disconcerted them by sudden changes to inexplicable idleness after days of praiseworthy application. She was capricious, seemed to lose her strength, became greedy, would steal sugar to eat when alone, and her cheeks were flushed and her eyes looked wearied under their reddened lids. If reproved, she would reply with a flood of injurious words. Some days, when they wished to try to subdue her, her foolish pride at being interfered with would throw her into such serious attacks that she would strike her feet and her hands together, and seemed ready to tear her clothing, or to bite anyone who approached her. At such moments they drew away from her, for she was like a little monster ruled by the evil sprit within her.

Who could she be? Where did she come from? Almost always these abandoned children are the offspring of vice. Twice they had resolved to give her up and send her back to the Asylum, so discouraged were they and so deeply did they regret having taken her. But each time these frightful scenes, which almost made the house tremble, ended in the same deluge of tears, and the same excited expressions and acts of penitence, when the child would throw herself on the floor, begging them so earnestly to punish her that they were obliged to forgive her.

Little by little, Hubertine gained great authority over her. She was peculiarly adapted for such a task, with her kind heart, her gentle firmness, her common-sense and her uniform temper. She taught her the duty of obedience and the sin of pride and of passion. To obey was to live. We must obey God, our parents, and our superiors. There was a whole hierarchy of respect, outside of which existence was unrestrained and disorderly. So, after each fit of passion, that she might learn humility, some menial labour was imposed upon her as a penance, such as washing the cooking-utensils, or wiping up the kitchen floor; and, until it was finished, she would remain stooping over her work, enraged at first, but conquered at last.

With the little girl excess seemed to be a marked characteristic in everything, even in her caresses. Many times Hubertine had seen her kissing her hands with vehemence. She would often be in a fever of ecstasy before the little pictures of saints and of the Child Jesus, which she had collected; and one evening she was found in a half-fainting state, with her head upon the table, and her lips pressed to those of the images. When Hubertine confiscated them there was a terrible scene of tears and cries, as if she herself were being tortured. After that she was held very strictly, was made to obey, and her freaks were at once checked by keeping her busy at her work; as soon as her cheeks grew very red, her eyes dark, and she had nervous tremblings, everything was immediately made quiet about her.

Moreover, Hubertine had found an unexpected aid in the book given by the Society for the Protection of Abandoned Children. Every three months, when the collector signed it, Angelique was very low-spirited for the rest of the day. If by chance she saw it when she went to the drawer for a ball of gold thread, her heart seemed pierced with agony. And one day, when in a fit of uncontrollable fury, which nothing had been able to conquer, she turned over the contents of the drawer, she suddenly appeared as if thunderstruck before the red-covered book. Her sobs stifled her. She threw herself at the feet of the Huberts in great humility, stammering that they had made a mistake in giving her shelter, and that she was not worthy of all their kindness. From that time her anger was frequently restrained by the sight or the mention of the book.

In this way Angelique lived until she was twelve years of age and ready to be Confirmed. The calm life of the household, the little old-fashioned building sleeping under the shadow of the Cathedral, perfumed with incense, and penetrated with religious music, favoured the slow amelioration of this untutored nature, this wild flower, taken from no one knew where, and transplanted in the mystic soil of the narrow garden. Added to this was the regularity of her daily work and the utter ignorance of what was going on in the world, without even an echo from a sleepy quarter penetrating therein.

But, above all, the gentlest influence came from the great love of the Huberts for each other, which seemed to be enlarged by some unknown, incurable remorse. He passed the days in endeavouring to make his wife forget the injury he had done her in marrying her in spite of the opposition of her mother. He had realised at the death of their child that she half accused him of this punishment, and he wished to be forgiven. She had done so years ago, and now she idolised him. Sometimes he was not sure of it, and this doubt saddened his life. He wished they might have had another infant, and so feel assured that the obstinate mother had been softened after death, and had withdrawn her malediction. That, in fact, was their united desire—a child of pardon; and he worshipped his wife with a tender love, ardent and pure as that of a betrothed. If before the apprentice he did not even kiss her hand, he never entered their chamber, even after twenty years of marriage, without an emotion of gratitude for all the happiness that had been given him. This was their true home, this room with its tinted paintings, its blue wall-paper, its pretty hangings, and its walnut furniture. Never was an angry word uttered therein, and, as if from a sanctuary, a sentiment of tenderness went out from its occupants, and filled the house. It was thus for Angelique an atmosphere of affection and love, in which she grew and thrived.

An unexpected event finished the work of forming her character. As she was rummaging one morning in a corner of the working-room, she found on a shelf, among implements of embroidery which were no longer used, a very old copy of the "Golden Legend," by Jacques de Voragine. This French translation, dating from 1549, must have been bought in the long ago by some master-workman in church vestments, on account of the pictures, full of useful information upon the Saints. It was a great while since Angelique had given any attention to the little old carved images, showing such childlike faith, which had once delighted her. But now, as soon as she was allowed to go out and play in the garden, she took the book with her. It had been rebound in yellow calf, and was in a good condition. She slowly turned over some of the leaves, then looked at the title-page, in red and black, with the address of the bookseller: "a Paris, en la rue Neufre Nostre-Dame, a l'enseigne Saint Jehan Baptiste;" and decorated with medallions of the four Evangelists, framed at the bottom by the Adoration of the Three Magi, and at the top by the Triumph of Jesus Christ, and His resurrection. And then picture after picture followed; there were ornamented letters, large and small, engravings in the text and at the heading of the chapters; "The Annunciation," an immense angel inundating with rays of light a slight, delicate-looking Mary; "The Massacre of the Innocents," where a cruel Herod was seen surrounded by dead bodies of dear little children; "The Nativity," where Saint Joseph is holding a candle, the light of which falls upon the face of the Infant Jesus, Who sleeps in His mother's arms; Saint John the Almoner, giving to the poor; Saint Matthias, breaking an idol; Saint Nicholas as a bishop, having at his right hand a little bucket filled with babies. And then, a little farther on, came the female saints: Agnes, with her neck pierced by a sword; Christina, torn by pincers; Genevieve, followed by her lambs; Juliana, being whipped; Anastasia, burnt; Maria the Egyptian, repenting in the desert, Mary of Magdalene, carrying the vase of precious ointment; and others and still others followed. There was an increasing terror and a piety in each one of them, making it a history which weighs upon the heart and fills the eyes with tears.

But, little by little, Angelique was curious to know exactly what these engravings represented. The two columns of closely-printed text, the impression of which remained very black upon the papers yellowed by time, frightened her by the strange, almost barbaric look of the Gothic letters. Still, she accustomed herself to it, deciphered these characters, learned the abbreviations and the contractions, and soon knew how to explain the turning of the phrases and the old-fashioned words. At last she could read it easily, and was as enchanted as if she were penetrating a mystery, and she triumphed over each new difficulty that she conquered.

Under these laborious shades a whole world of light revealed itself. She entered, as it were, into a celestial splendour. For now the few classic books they owned, so cold and dry, existed no longer. The Legend alone interested her. She bent over it, with her forehead resting on her hands, studying it so intently, that she no longer lived in the real life, but, unconscious of time, she seemed to see, mounting from the depths of the unknown, the broad expansion of a dream.

How wonderful it all was! These saints and virgins! They are born predestined; solemn voices announce their coming, and their mothers have marvellous dreams about them. All are beautiful, strong, and victorious. Great lights surround them, and their countenances are resplendent. Dominic has a star on his forehead. They read the minds of men and repeat their thoughts aloud. They have the gift of prophecy, and their predictions are always realised. Their number is infinite. Among them are bishops and monks, virgins and fallen women, beggars and nobles of a royal race, unclothed hermits who live on roots, and old men who inhabit caverns with goats. Their history is always the same. They grow up for Christ, believe fervently in Him, refuse to sacrifice to false gods, are tortured, and die filled with glory. Emperors were at last weary of persecuting them. Andrew, after being attached to the cross, preached during two days to twenty thousand persons. Conversions were made in masses, forty thousand men being baptised at one time. When the multitudes were not converted by the miracles, they fled terrified. The saints were accused of sorcery; enigmas were proposed to them, which they solved at once; they were obliged to dispute questions with learned men, who remained speechless before them. As soon as they entered the temples of sacrifice the idols were overthrown with a breath, and were broken to pieces. A virgin tied her sash around the neck of a statue of Venus, which at once fell in powder. The earth trembled. The Temple of Diana was struck by lightning and destroyed; and the people revolting, civil wars ensued. Then often the executioners asked to be baptised; kings knelt at the feet of saints in rags who had devoted themselves to poverty. Sabina flees from the paternal roof. Paula abandons her five children. Mortifications of the flesh and fasts purify, not oil or water. Germanus covers his food with ashes. Bernard cares not to eat, but delights only in the taste of fresh water. Agatha keeps for three years a pebble in her mouth. Augustinus is in despair for the sin he has committed in turning to look after a dog who was running. Prosperity and health are despised, and joy begins with privations which kill the body. And it is thus that, subduing all things, they live at last in gardens where the flowers are stars, and where the leaves of the trees sing. They exterminate dragons, they raise and appease tempests, they seem in their ecstatic visions to be borne above the earth. Their wants are provided for while living, and after their death friends are advised by dreams to go and bury them. Extraordinary things happen to them, and adventures far more marvellous than those in a work of fiction. And when their tombs are opened after hundreds of years, sweet odours escape therefrom.

Then, opposite the saints, behold the evil spirits!

"They often fly about us like insects, and fill the air without number. The air is also full of demons, as the rays of the sun are full of atoms. It is even like powder." And the eternal contest begins. The saints are always victorious, and yet they are constantly obliged to renew the battle. The more the demons are driven away, the more they return. There were counted six thousand six hundred and sixty-six in the body of a woman whom Fortunatus delivered. They moved, they talked and cried, by the voice of the person possessed, whose body they shook as if by a tempest. At each corner of the highways an afflicted one is seen, and the first saint who passes contends with the evil spirits. They enter by the eyes, the ears, and by the mouth, and, after days of fearful struggling, they go out with loud groanings. Basilus, to save a young man, contends personally with the Evil One. Macarius was attacked when in a cemetery, and passed a whole night in defending himself. The angels, even at deathbeds, in order to secure the soul of the dying were obliged to beat the demons. At other times the contests are only of the intellect and the mind, but are equally remarkable. Satan, who prowls about, assumes many forms, sometimes disguising himself as a woman, and again, even as a saint. But, once overthrown, he appears in all his ugliness: "a black cat, larger than a dog, his huge eyes emitting flame, his tongue long, large, and bloody, his tail twisted and raised in the air, and his whole body disgusting to the last degree." He is the one thing that is hated, and the only preoccupation. People fear him, yet ridicule him. One is not even honest with him. In reality, notwithstanding the ferocious appearance of his furnaces, he is the eternal dupe. All the treaties he makes are forced from him by violence or cunning. Feeble women throw him down: Margaret crushes his head with her feet, and Juliana beats him with her chain. From all this a serenity disengages itself, a disdain of evil, since it is powerless, and a certainty of good, since virtue triumphs. It is only necessary to cross one's self, and the Devil can do no harm, but yells and disappears, while the infernal regions tremble.

Then, in this combat of legions of saints against Satan are developed the fearful sufferings from persecutions. The executioners expose to the flies the martyrs whose bodies are covered with honey; they make them walk with bare feet over broken glass or red-hot coals, put them in ditches with reptiles; chastise them with whips, whose thongs are weighted with leaden balls; nail them when alive in coffins, which they throw into the sea; hang them by their hair, and then set fire to them; moisten their wounds with quicklime, boiling pitch, or molten lead; make them sit on red-hot iron stools; burn their sides with torches; break their bones on wheels, and torture them in every conceivable way. And, with all this, physical pain counts for nothing; indeed, it seems to be desired. Moreover, a continual miracle protects them. John drinks poison but is unharmed. Sebastian smiles although pierced with arrows; sometimes they remain in the air at the right or left of the martyr, or, launched by the archer, they return upon himself and put out his eyes. Molten lead is swallowed as if it were ice-water. Lions prostrate themselves, and lick their hands as gently as lambs. The gridiron of Saint Lawrence is of an agreeable freshness to him. He cries, "Unhappy man, you have roasted one side, turn the other and then eat, for it is sufficiently cooked." Cecilia, placed in a boiling bath, is refreshed by it. Christina exhorts those who would torture her. Her father had her whipped by twelve men, who at last drop from fatigue; she is then attached to a wheel, under which a fire is kindled, and the flame, turning to one side, devours fifteen hundred persons. She is then thrown into the sea, but the angels support her; Jesus comes to baptise her in person, then gives her to the charge of Saint Michael, that he may conduct her back to the earth; after that she is placed for five days in a heated oven, where she suffers not, but sings constantly. Vincent, who was exposed to still greater tortures, feels them not. His limbs are broken, he is covered with red-hot irons, he is pricked with needles, he is placed on a brazier of live coals, and then taken back to prison, where his feet are nailed to a post. Yet he still lives, and his pains are changed into a sweetness of flowers, a great light fills his dungeon, and angels sing with him, giving him rest as if he were on a bed of roses. The sweet sound of singing, and the fresh odour of flowers spread without in the room, and when the guards saw the miracle they were converted to the faith, and when Dacian heard of it, he was greatly enraged, and said, "Do nothing more to him, for we are conquered." Such was the excitement among the persecutors, it could only end either by their conversion or by their death. Their hands are paralysed; they perish violently; they are choked by fish-bones; they are struck by lightning, and their chariots are broken. In the meanwhile, the cells of the martyrs are resplendent. Mary and the Apostles enter them at will, although the doors are bolted. Constant aid is given, apparitions descend from the skies, where angels are waiting, holding crowns of precious stones. Since death seems joyous, it is not feared, and their friends are glad when they succumb to it. On Mount Ararat ten thousand are crucified, and at Cologne eleven thousand virgins are massacred by the Huns. In the circuses they are devoured by wild beasts. Quirique, who, by the influence of the Holy Spirit, taught like a man, suffered martyrdom when but three years of age. Nursing-children reproved the executioners. The hope for celestial happiness deadened the physical senses and softened pain. Were they torn to pieces, or burnt, they minded it not. They never yielded, and they called for the sword, which alone could kill them. Eulalia, when at the stake, breathes the flame that she may die the more quickly. Her prayer is granted, and a white dove flies from her mouth and bears her soul to heaven.

Angelique marvelled greatly at all these accounts. So many abominations and such triumphant joy delighted her and carried her out of herself.

But other points in the Legend, of quite a different nature, also interested her; the animals, for instance, of which there were enough to fill an Ark of Noah. She liked the ravens and the eagles who fed the hermits.

Then what lovely stories there were about the lions. The serviceable one who found a resting-place in a field for Mary the Egyptian; the flaming lion who protected virgins or maidens in danger; and then the lion of Saint Jerome, to whose care an ass had been confided, and, when the animal was stolen, went in search of him and brought him back. There was also the penitent wolf, who had restored a little pig he had intended eating. Then there was Bernard, who excommunicates the flies, and they drop dead. Remi and Blaise feed birds at their table, bless them, and make them strong. Francis, "filled with a dove-like simplicity," preaches to them, and exhorts them to love God. A bird was on a branch of a fig-tree, and Francis, holding out his hand, beckoned to it, and soon it obeyed, and lighted on his hand. And he said to it, "Sing my sister, and praise the Lord." And immediately the bird began to sing, and did not go away until it was told to do so.

All this was a continual source of recreation to Angelique, and gave her the idea of calling to the swallows, and hoping they might come to her.

The good giant Christopher, who carried the Infant Christ on his shoulders, delighted her so much as to bring tears to her eyes.

She was very merry over the misadventures of a certain Governor with the three chambermaids of Anastasia, whom he hoped to have found in the kitchen, where he kissed the stove and the kettles, thinking he was embracing them. "He went out therefrom very black and ugly, and his clothes quite smutched. And when his servants, who were waiting, saw him in such a state, they thought he was the Devil. Then they beat him with birch-rods, and, running away, left him alone."

But that which convulsed her most with laughter, was the account of the blows given to the Evil One himself, especially when Juliana, having been tempted by him in her prison cell, administered such an extraordinary chastisement with her chain. "Then the Provost commanded that Juliana should be brought before him; and when she came into his presence, she was drawing the Devil after her, and he cried out, saying, 'My good lady Juliana, do not hurt me any more!' She led him in this way around the public square, and afterwards threw him into a deep ditch."

Often Angelique would repeat to the Huberts, as they were all at work together, legends far more interesting than any fairy-tale. She had read them over so often that she knew them by heart, and she told in a charming way the story of the Seven Sleepers, who, to escape persecution, walled themselves up in a cavern, and whose awakening greatly astonished the Emperor Theodosius. Then the Legend of Saint Clement with its endless adventures, so unexpected and touching, where the whole family, father, mother, and three sons, separated by terrible misfortunes, are finally re-united in the midst of the most beautiful miracles.

Her tears would flow at these recitals. She dreamed of them at night, she lived, as it were, only in this tragic and triumphant world of prodigy, in a supernatural country where all virtues are recompensed by all imaginable joys.

When Angelique partook of her first Communion, it seemed as if she were walking, like the saints, a little above the earth. She was a young Christian of the primitive Church; she gave herself into the hands of God, having learned from her book that she could not be saved without grace.

The Huberts were simple in their profession of faith. They went every Sunday to Mass, and to Communion on all great fete-days, and this was done with the tranquil humility of true belief, aided a little by tradition, as the chasubliers had from father to son always observed the Church ceremonies, particularly those at Easter.

Hubert himself had a tendency to imaginative fancies. He would at times stop his work and let fall his frame to listen to the child as she read or repeated the legends, and, carried away for the moment by her enthusiasm, it seemed as if his hair were blown about by the light breath of some invisible power. He was so in sympathy with Angelique, and associated her to such a degree with the youthful saints of the past, that he wept when he saw her in her white dress and veil. This day at church was like a dream, and they returned home quite exhausted. Hubertine was obliged to scold them both, for, with her excellent common-sense, she disliked exaggeration even in good things.

From that time she had to restrain the zeal of Angelique, especially in her tendency to what she thought was charity, and to which she wished to devote herself. Saint Francis had wedded poverty; Julien the Chaplain had called the poor his superiors; Gervasius and Protais had washed the feet of the most indigent, and Martin had divided his cloak with them. So she, following the example of Lucy, wished to sell everything that she might give. At first she disposed of all her little private possessions, then she began to pillage the house. But at last she gave without judgment and foolishly. One evening, two days after her Confirmation, being reprimanded for having thrown from the window several articles of underwear to a drunken woman, she had a terrible attack of anger like those when she was young; then, overcome by shame, she was really ill and forced to keep her bed for a couple of days.

CHAPTER III

In the meanwhile, weeks and months went by. Two years had passed. Angelique was now fourteen years of age and quite womanly. When she read the "Golden Legend," she would have a humming in her ears, the blood circulated quickly through the blue veins near her temples, and she felt a deep tenderness towards all these virgin saints.

Maidenhood is the sister of the angels, the union of all good, the overthrow of evil, the domain of faith. It gives grace, it is perfection, which has only need to show itself to conquer. The action of the Holy Spirit rendered Lucy so heavy that a thousand men and five pair of oxen could not drag her away from her home. An officer who tried to kiss Anastasia was struck blind. Under torture, the purity of the virgins is always powerful; from their exquisite white limbs, torn by instruments, milk flows instead of blood. Ten different times the story is told of the young convert who, to escape from her family, who wish her to marry against her will, assumes the garb of a monk, is accused of some misdeed, suffers punishment without indicating herself, and at last triumphs by announcing her name. Eugenia is in this way brought before a judge, whom she recognises as her father and reveals herself to him. Externally the combat of chastity recommences; always the thorns reappear. Thus the wisest saints shrink from being tempted. As the world is filled with snares, hermits flee to the desert, where they scourge themselves, throw themselves on the snow, or in beds of prickly herbs. A solitary monk covers his fingers with his mantle, that he may aid his mother in crossing a creek. A martyr bound to a stake, being tempted by a young girl, bites off his tongue with his teeth and spits it at her. All glorify the state of single blessedness. Alexis, very wealthy and in a high position, marries, but leaves his wife at the church-door. One weds only to die. Justina, in love with Cyprianus, converts him, and they walk together to their punishment. Cecilia, beloved by an angel, reveals the secret to Valerian on their wedding-day, and he, that he may see the spirit, consents to be baptised. He found in his room Cecilia talking with the angel, who held in his hand two wreaths of roses, and, giving one to Cecilia, and one to Valerian, he said, "Keep these crowns, like your hearts, pure and unspotted." In many cases it was proved that death was stronger than love, and couples were united only as a challenge to existence. It was said that even the Virgin Mary at times prevented betrothals from ending in a marriage. A nobleman, a relative of the King of Hungary, renounced his claims to a young girl of marvellous beauty on this account. "Suddenly our Blessed Lady appeared, and said to him: 'If I am indeed so beautiful as you have called me, why do you leave me for another?' And he became a most devout man for the rest of his life."

Among all this saintly company, Angelique had her preferences, and there were those whose experiences touched her to the heart, and helped her to correct her failings. Thus the learned Catherine, of high birth, enchanted her by her great scientific knowledge, when, only eighteen years of age, she was called by the Emperor Maximus to discuss certain questions with fifty rhetoricians and grammarians. She astonished and convinced them. "They were amazed and knew not what to say, but they remained quiet. And the Emperor blamed them for their weakness in allowing themselves to be so easily conquered by a young girl." The fifty professors then declared that they were converted. "And as soon as the tyrant heard that, he had so terrible a fit of anger, that he commanded they should all be burned to death in the public square." In her eyes Catherine was the invincible learned woman, as proud and dazzling in intellect as in beauty, just as she would have liked to be, that she might convert men, and be fed in prison by a dove, before having her head cut off. But Saint Elizabeth, the daughter of the King of Hungary, was for her a constant teacher and guide. Whenever she was inclined to yield to her violent temper, she thought of this model of gentleness and simplicity, who was at five years of age very devout, refusing to join her playmates in their sports, and sleeping on the ground, that, in abasing herself, she might all the better render homage to God. Later, she was the faithful, obedient wife of the Landgrave of Thuringia, always showing to her husband a smiling face, although she passed her nights in tears. When she became a widow she was driven from her estates, but was happy to lead the life of poverty. Her dress was so thin from use, that she wore a grey mantle, lengthened out by cloth of a different shade. The sleeves of her jacket had been torn, and were mended with a material of another colour. The king, her father, wishing her to come to him, sent for her by a Count. And when the Count saw her clothed in such a way and spinning, overcome with surprise and grief, he exclaimed: "Never before did one see the daughter of a Royal House in so miserable a garb, and never was one known to spin wool until now." So Christian and sincere was her humility, that she ate black bread with the poorest peasants, nursed them when ill, dressed their sores without repugnance, put on coarse garments like theirs, and followed them in the church processions with bare feet. She was once washing the porringers and the utensils of the kitchen, when the maids, seeing her so out of place, urged her to desist, but she replied, "Could I find another task more menial even than this, I would do it." Influenced by her example, Angelique, who was formerly angry when obliged to do any cleaning in the kitchen, now tried to invent some extremely disagreeable task when she felt nervous and in need of control.

But more than Catherine, more than Elizabeth, far nearer and dearer to her than all the other saints, was Agnes, the child-martyr; and her heart leaped with joy on refinding in the "Golden Legend" this virgin, clothed with her own hair, who had protected her under the Cathedral portal. What ardour of pure love, as she repelled the son of the Governor when he accosted her on her way from school! "Go—leave me, minister of death, commencement of sin, and child of treason!" How exquisitely she described her beloved! "I love the One whose Mother was a Virgin, and whose father was faithful to her, at whose beauty the sun and moon marvelled, and at whose touch the dead were made alive." And when Aspasien commanded that "her throat should be cut by the sword," she ascended into Paradise to be united to her "betrothed, whiter and purer than silver-gilt."

Always, when weary or disturbed, Angelique called upon and implored her, and it seemed as if peace came to her at once. She saw her constantly near her, and often she regretted having done or thought of things which would have displeased her.

One evening as she was kissing her hands, a habit which she still at times indulged in, she suddenly blushed and turned away, although she was quite alone, for it seemed as if the little saint must have seen her. Agnes was her guardian angel.

Thus, at fifteen Angelique was an adorable child. Certainly, neither the quiet, laborious life, nor the soothing shadows of the Cathedral, nor the legends of the beautiful saints, had made her an angel, a creature of absolute perfection. She was often angry, and certain weaknesses of character showed themselves, which had never been sufficiently guarded against; but she was always ashamed and penitent if she had done wrong, for she wished so much to be perfect. And she was so human, so full of life, so ignorant, and withal so pure in reality.

One day, on returning from a long excursion which the Huberts allowed her to take twice a year, on Pentecost Monday and on Assumption Day, she took home with her a sweetbriar bush, and then amused herself by replanting it in the narrow garden. She trimmed it and watered it well: it grew and sent out long branches, filled with odour. With her usual intensity, she watched it daily, but was unwilling to have it grafted, as she wished to see if, by some miracle, it could not be made to bear roses. She danced around it, she repeated constantly: "This bush is like me; it is like me!" And if one joked her upon her great wild-rose bush, she joined them in their laughter, although a little pale, and with tears almost ready to fall. Her violet-coloured eyes were softer than ever, her half-opened lips revealed little white teeth, and her oval face had a golden aureole from her light wavy hair. She had grown tall without being too slight; her neck and shoulders were exquisitely graceful; her chest was full, her waist flexible; and gay, healthy, of a rare beauty, she had an infinite charm, arising from the innocence and purity of her soul.

Every day the affection of the Huberts for her increased. They often talked together of their mutual wish to adopt her. Yet they took no active measures in that way, lest they might have cause to regret it. One morning, when the husband announced his final decision, his wife suddenly began to weep bitterly. To adopt a child? Was not that the same as giving up all hope of having one of their own? Yet it was useless for them to expect one now, after so many years of waiting, and she gave her consent, in reality delighted that she could call her her daughter. When Angelique was spoken to on the subject, she threw her arms around their necks, kissed them both, and was almost choked with tears of joy.

So it was agreed upon that she was always to remain with them in this house, which now seemed to be filled with her presence, rejuvenated by her youth, and penetrated by her laughter. But an unexpected obstacle was met with at the first step. The Justice of the Peace, Monsieur Grandsire, on being consulted, explained to them the radical impossibility of adoption, since by law the adopted must be "of age." Then, seeing their disappointment, he suggested the expedient of a legal guardianship: any individual over fifty years of age can attach himself to a minor of fifteen years or less by a legal claim, on becoming their official protector. The ages were all right, so they were delighted, and accepted. It was even arranged that they should afterwards confer the title of adoption upon their ward by way of their united last will and testament, as such a thing would be permitted by the Code. Monsieur Grandsire, furnished with the demand of the husband and the authorisation of the wife, then put himself in communication with the Director of Public Aid, the general guardian for all abandoned children, whose consent it was necessary to have. Great inquiries were made, and at last the necessary papers were placed in Paris, with a certain Justice of the Peace chosen for the purpose. And all was ready except the official report which constitutes the legality of guardianship, when the Huberts suddenly were taken with certain scruples.

Before receiving Angelique into their family, ought not they to ascertain if she had any relatives on her side? Was her mother still alive? Had they the right to dispose of the daughter without being absolutely sure that she had willingly been given up and deserted? Then, in reality, the unknown origin of the child, which had troubled them long ago, came back to them now and made them hesitate. They were so tormented by this anxiety that they could not sleep.

Without any more talk, Hubert unexpectedly announced that he was going to Paris. Such a journey seemed like a catastrophe in his calm existence. He explained the necessity of it to Angelique, by speaking of the guardianship. He hoped to arrange everything in twenty-four hours. But once in the city, days passed; obstacles arose on every side. He spent a week there, sent from one to another, really doing nothing, and quite discouraged. In the first place, he was received very coldly at the Office of Public Assistance. The rule of the Administration is that children shall not be told of their parents until they are of age. So for two mornings in succession he was sent away from the office. He persisted, however, explained the matter to three secretaries, made himself hoarse in talking to an under-officer, who wished to counsel him that he had not official papers. The Administration were quite ignorant. A nurse had left the child there, "Angelique Marie," without naming the mother. In despair he was about to return to Beaumont, when a new idea impelled him to return for the fourth time to the office, to see the book in which the arrival of the infant had been noted down, and in that way to have the address of the nurse. That proved quite an undertaking. But at last he succeeded, and found it was a Madame Foucart, and that in 1850 she lived on the Rue des Deux-Ecus.

Then he recommenced his hunting up and down. The end of the Rue des Deux-Ecus had been demolished, and no shopkeeper in the neighbourhood recollected ever having heard of Madame Foucart. He consulted the directory, but there was no such name. Looking at every sign as he walked along, he called on one after another, and at last, in this way, he had the good fortune to find an old woman, who exclaimed, in answer to his questions, "What! Do I know Madame Foucart? A most honourable person, but one who has had many misfortunes. She lives on the Rue de Censier, quite at the other end of Paris." He hastened there at once.

Warned by experience, he determined now to be diplomatic. But Madame Foucart, an enormous woman, would not allow him to ask questions in the good order he had arranged them before going there. As soon as he mentioned the two names of the child, she seemed to be eager to talk, and she related its whole history in a most spiteful way. "Ah! the child was alive! Very well; she might flatter herself that she had for a mother a most famous hussy. Yes, Madame Sidonie, as she was called since she became a widow, was a woman of a good family, having, it is said, a brother who was a minister, but that did not prevent her from being very bad." And she explained that she had made her acquaintance when she kept, on the Rue Saint-Honore, a little shop where they dealt in fruit and oil from Provence, she and her husband, when they came from Plassans, hoping to make their fortune in the city. The husband died and was buried, and soon after Madame Sidonie had a little daughter, which she sent at once to the hospital, and never after even inquired for her, as she was "a heartless woman, cold as a protest and brutal as a sheriff's aid." A fault can be pardoned, but not ingratitude! Was not it true that, obliged to leave her shop as she was so heavily in debt, she had been received and cared for by Madame Foucart? And when in her turn she herself had fallen into difficulties, she had never been able to obtain from Madame Sidonie, even the month's board she owed her, nor the fifteen francs she had once lent her. To-day the "hateful thing" lived on the Rue de Faubourg-Poissonniere, where she had a little apartment of three rooms. She pretended to be a cleaner and mender of lace, but she sold a good many other things. Ah! yes! such a mother as that it was best to know nothing about!

An hour later, Hubert was walking round the house where Madame Sidonie lived. He saw through the window a woman, thin, pale, coarse-looking, wearing an old black gown, stained and greased. Never could the heart of such a person be touched by the recollection of a daughter whom she had only seen on the day of its birth. He concluded it would be best not to repeat, even to his wife, many things that he had just learned. Still he hesitated. Once more he passed by the place, and looked again. Ought not he to go in, to introduce himself, and to ask the consent of the unnatural parent? As an honest man, it was for him to judge if he had the right of cutting the tie there and for ever. Brusquely he turned his back, hurried away, and returned that evening to Beaumont.

Hubertine had just learned that the proces-verbal at Monsieur Grandsire's, for the guardianship of the child, had been signed. And when Angelique threw herself into Hubert's arms, he saw clearly by the look of supplication in her eyes, that she had understood the true reason of his journey.

Then he said quietly: "My child, your mother is not living." Angelique wept, as she kissed him most affectionately. After this the subject was not referred to. She was their daughter.

At Whitsuntide, this year, the Huberts had taken Angelique with them to lunch at the ruins of the Chateau d'Hautecoeur, which overlooks the Ligneul, two leagues below Beaumont; and, after the day spent in running and laughing in the open air, the young girl still slept when, the next morning, the old house-clock struck eight.

Hubertine was obliged to go up and rap at her door.

"Ah, well! Little lazy child! We have already had our breakfast, and it is late."

Angelique dressed herself quickly and went down to the kitchen, where she took her rolls and coffee alone. Then, when she entered the workroom, where Hubert and his wife had just seated themselves, after having arranged their frames for embroidery, she said:

"Oh! how soundly I did sleep! I had quite forgotten that we had promised to finish this chasuble for next Sunday."

This workroom, the windows of which opened upon the garden, was a large apartment, preserved almost entirely in its original state. The two principal beams of the ceiling, and the three visible cross-beams of support, had not even been whitewashed, and they were blackened by smoke and worm-eaten, while, through the openings of the broken plaster, here and there, the laths of the inner joists could be seen. On one of the stone corbels, which supported the beams, was the date 1463, without doubt the date of the construction of the building. The chimney-piece, also in stone, broken and disjointed, had traces of its original elegance, with its slender uprights, its brackets, its frieze with a cornice, and its basket-shaped funnel terminating in a crown. On the frieze could be seen even now, as if softened by age, an ingenious attempt at sculpture, in the way of a likeness of Saint Clair, the patron of embroiderers. But this chimney was no longer used, and the fireplace had been turned into an open closet by putting shelves therein, on which were piles of designs and patterns. The room was now heated by a great bell-shaped cast-iron stove, the pipe of which, after going the whole length of the ceiling, entered an opening made expressly for it in the wall. The doors, already shaky, were of the time of Louis XIV. The original tiles of the floor were nearly all gone, and had been replaced, one by one, by those of a later style. It was nearly a hundred years since the yellow walls had been coloured, and at the top of the room they were almost of a greyish white, and, lower down, were scratched and spotted with saltpetre. Each year there was talk of repainting them, but nothing had yet been done, from a dislike of making any change.

Hubertine, busy at her work, raised her head as Angelique spoke and said:

"You know that if our work is done on Sunday, I have promised to give you a basket of pansies for your garden."

The young girl exclaimed gaily: "Oh, yes! that is true. Ah, well! I will do my best then! But where is my thimble? It seems as if all working implements take to themselves wings and fly away, if not in constant use."

She flipped the old doigtier of ivory on the second joint of her little finger, and took her place on the other side of the frame, opposite to the window.

Since the middle of the last century there had not been the slightest modification in the fittings and arrangements of the workroom. Fashions changed, the art of the embroiderer was transformed, but there was still seen fastened to the wall the chantlate, the great piece of wood where was placed one end of the frame or work, while the other end was supported by a moving trestle. In the corners were many ancient tools—a little machine called a "diligent," with its wheels and its long pins, to wind the gold thread on the reels without touching it; a hand spinning-wheel; a species of pulley to twist the threads which were attached to the wall; rollers of various sizes covered with silks and threads used in the crochet embroidery. Upon a shelf was spread out an old collection of punches for the spangles, and there was also to be seen a valuable relic, in the shape of the classic chandelier in hammered brass which belonged to some ancient master-workman. On the rings of a rack made of a nailed leather strap were hung awls, mallets, hammers, irons to cut the vellum, and roughing chisels of bogwood, which were used to smooth the threads as fast as they were employed. And yet again, at the foot of the heavy oaken table on which the cutting-out was done, was a great winder, whose two movable reels of wicker held the skeins. Long chains of spools of bright-coloured silks strung on cords were hung near that case of drawers. On the floor was a large basket filled with empty bobbins. A pair of great shears rested on the straw seat of one of the chairs, and a ball of cord had just fallen on the floor, half unwound.

"Oh! what lovely weather! What perfect weather!" continued Angelique. "It is a pleasure simply to live and to breathe."

And before stooping to apply herself to her work, she delayed another moment before the open window, through which entered all the beauty of a radiant May morning.

CHAPTER IV

The sun shone brightly on the roof of the Cathedral, a fresh odour of lilacs came up from the bushes in the garden of the Bishop. Angelique smiled, as she stood there, dazzled, and as if bathed in the springtide. Then, starting as if suddenly awakened from sleep, she said:

"Father, I have no more gold thread for my work."

Hubert, who had just finished pricking the tracing of the pattern of a cope, went to get a skein from the case of drawers, cut it, tapered off the two ends by scratching the gold which covered the silk, and he brought it to her rolled up in parchment.

"Is that all you need?"

"Yes, thanks."

With a quick glance she had assured herself that nothing more was wanting; the needles were supplied with the different golds, the red, the green, and the blue; there were spools of every shade of silk; the spangles were ready; and the twisted wires for the gold lace were in the crown of a hat which served as a box, with the long fine needles, the steel pincers, the thimbles, the scissors, and the ball of wax. All these were on the frame even, or on the material stretched therein, which was protected by a thick brown paper.

She had threaded a needle with the gold thread. But at the first stitch it broke, and she was obliged to thread it again, breaking off tiny bits of the gold, which she threw immediately into the pasteboard waste-basket which was near her.

"Now at last I am ready," she said, as she finished her first stitch.

Perfect silence followed. Hubert was preparing to stretch some material on another frame. He had placed the two heavy ends on the chantlate and the trestle directly opposite in such a way as to take lengthwise the red silk of the cope, the breadths of which Hubertine had just stitched together, and fitting the laths into the mortice of the beams, he fastened them with four little nails. Then, after smoothing the material many times from right to left, he finished stretching it and tacked on the nails. To assure himself that it was thoroughly tight and firm, he tapped on the cloth with his fingers and it sounded like a drum.

Angelique had become a most skilful worker, and the Huberts were astonished at her cleverness and taste. In addition to what they had taught her, she carried into all she did her personal enthusiasm, which gave life to flowers and faith to symbols. Under her hands, silk and gold seemed animated; the smaller ornaments were full of mystic meaning; she gave herself up to it entirely, with her imagination constantly active and her firm belief in the infinitude of the invisible world.

The Diocese of Beaumont had been so charmed with certain pieces of her embroidery, that a clergyman who was an archaeologist, and another who was an admirer of pictures, had come to see her, and were in raptures before her Virgins, which they compared to the simple gracious figures of the earliest masters. There was the same sincerity, the same sentiment of the beyond, as if encircled in the minutest perfection of detail. She had the real gift of design, a miraculous one indeed, which, without a teacher, with nothing but her evening studies by lamplight, enabled her often to correct her models, to deviate entirely from them, and to follow her own fancies, creating beautiful things with the point of her needle. So the Huberts, who had always insisted that a thorough knowledge of the science of drawing was necessary to make a good embroiderer, were obliged to yield before her, notwithstanding their long experience. And, little by little, they modestly withdrew into the background, becoming simply her aids, surrendering to her all the most elaborate work, the under part of which they prepared for her.

From one end of the year to the other, what brilliant and sacred marvels passed through her hands! She was always occupied with silks, satins, velvets, or cloths of gold or silver. She embroidered chasubles, stoles, maniples, copes, dalmatics, mitres, banners, and veils for the chalice and the pyx. But, above all, their orders for chasubles never failed, and they worked constantly at those vestments, with their five colours: the white, for Confessors and Virgins; the red, for Apostles and Martyrs; the black, for the days of fasting and for the dead; the violet, for the Innocents; and the green for fete-days. Gold was also often used in place of white or of green. The same symbols were always in the centre of the Cross: the monograms of Jesus and of the Virgin Mary, the triangle surrounded with rays, the lamb, the pelican, the dove, a chalice, a monstrance, and a bleeding heart pierced with thorns; while higher up and on the arms were designs, or flowers, all the ornamentation being in the ancient style, and all the flora in large blossoms, like anemones, tulips, peonies, pomegranates, or hortensias. No season passed in which she did not remake the grapes and thorns symbolic, putting silver on black, and gold on red. For the most costly vestments, she varied the pictures of the heads of saints, having, as a central design, the Annunciation, the Last Supper, or the Crucifixion. Sometimes the orfreys were worked on the original material itself; at others, she applied bands of silk or satin on brocades of gold cloth, or of velvet. And all this efflorescence of sacred splendour was created, little by little, by her deft fingers. At this moment the vestment on which Angelique was at work was a chasuble of white satin, the cross of which was made by a sheaf of golden lilies intertwined with bright roses, in various shades of silk. In the centre, in a wreath of little roses of dead gold, was the monogram of the Blessed Virgin, in red and green gold, with a great variety of ornaments.

For an hour, during which she skilfully finished the little roses, the silence had not been broken even by a single word. But her thread broke again, and she re-threaded her needle by feeling carefully under the frame, as only an adroit person can do. Then, as she raised her head, she again inhaled with satisfaction the pure, fresh air that came in from the garden.

"Ah!" she said softly, "how beautiful it was yesterday! The sunshine is always perfect."

Hubertine shook her head as she stopped to wax her thread.

"As for me, I am so wearied, it seems as if I had no arms, and it tires me to work. But that is not strange, for I so seldom go out, and am no longer young and strong, as you are at sixteen."

Angelique had reseated herself and resumed her work. She prepared the lilies by sewing bits of vellum on certain places that had been marked, so as to give them relief, but the flowers themselves were not to be made until later, for fear the gold be tarnished were the hands moved much over it.

Hubert, who, having finished arranging the material in its frame, was about drawing with pumice the pattern of the cope, joined in the conversation and said: "These first warm days of spring are sure to give me a terrible headache."

Angelique's eyes seemed to be vaguely lost in the rays which now fell upon one of the flying buttresses of the church, as she dreamily added: "Oh no, father, I do not think so. One day in the lively air, like yesterday, does me a world of good."

Having finished the little golden leaves, she began one of the large roses, near the lilies. Already she had threaded several needles with the silks required, and she embroidered in stitches varying in length, according to the natural position and movement of the petals, and notwithstanding the extreme delicacy and absorbing nature of this work, the recollections of the previous day, which she lived over again in thought and in silence, now came to her lips, and crowded so closely upon each other that she no longer tried to keep them back. So she talked of their setting out upon their expedition, of the beautiful fields they crossed, of their lunch over there in the ruins of Hautecoeur, upon the flagstones of a little room whose tumble-down walls towered far above the Ligneul, which rolled gently among the willows fifty yards below them.

She was enthusiastic over these crumbling ruins, and the scattered blocks of stone among the brambles, which showed how enormous the colossal structure must have been as, when first built, it commanded the two valleys. The donjon remained, nearly two hundred feet in height, discoloured, cracked, but nevertheless firm, upon its foundation pillars fifteen feet thick. Two of its towers had also resisted the attacks of Time—that of Charlemagne and that of David—united by a heavy wall almost intact. In the interior, the chapel, the court-room, and certain chambers were still easily recognised; and all this appeared to have been built by giants, for the steps of the stairways, the sills of the windows, and the branches on the terraces, were all on a scale far out of proportion for the generation of to-day. It was, in fact, quite a little fortified city. Five hundred men could have sustained there a siege of thirty months without suffering from want of ammunition or of provisions. For two centuries the bricks of the lowest story had been disjointed by the wild roses; lilacs and laburnums covered with blossoms the rubbish of the fallen ceilings; a plane-tree had even grown up in the fireplace of the guardroom. But when, at sunset, the outline of the donjon cast its long shadow over three leagues of cultivated ground, and the colossal Chateau seemed to be rebuilt in the evening mists, one still felt the great strength, and the old sovereignty, which had made of it so impregnable a fortress that even the kings of France trembled before it.

"And I am sure," continued Angelique, "that it is inhabited by the souls of the dead, who return at night. All kinds of noises are heard there; in every direction are monsters who look at you, and when I turned round as we were coming away, I saw great white figures fluttering above the wall. But, mother, you know all the history of the castle, do you not?"

Hubertine replied, as she smiled in an amused way: "Oh! as for ghosts, I have never seen any of them myself."

But in reality, she remembered perfectly the history, which she had read long ago, and to satisfy the eager questionings of the young girl, she was obliged to relate it over again.

The land belonged to the Bishopric of Rheims, since the days of Saint Remi, who had received it from Clovis.

An archbishop, Severin, in the early years of the tenth century, had erected at Hautecoeur a fortress to defend the country against the Normans, who were coming up the river Oise, into which the Ligneul flows.

In the following century a successor of Severin gave it in fief to Norbert, a younger son of the house of Normandy, in consideration of an annual quit-rent of sixty sous, and on the condition that the city of Beaumont and its church should remain free and unincumbered. It was in this way that Norbert I became the head of the Marquesses of Hautecoeur, whose famous line from that date became so well known in history. Herve IV, excommunicated twice for his robbery of ecclesiastical property, became a noted highwayman, who killed, on a certain occasion, with his own hands, thirty citizens, and his tower was razed to the ground by Louis le Gros, against whom he had dared to declare war. Raoul I, who went to the Crusades with Philip Augustus, perished before Saint Jean d'Acre, having been pierced through the heart by a lance. But the most illustrious of the race was John V, the Great, who, in 1225, rebuilt the fortress, finishing in less than five years this formidable Chateau of Hautecoeur, under whose shelter he, for a moment, dreamed of aspiring to the throne of France, and after having escaped from being killed in twenty battles, he at last died quietly in his bed, brother-in-law to the King of Scotland. Then came Felician III, who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem barefooted; Herve VII, who asserted his claims to the throne of Scotland; and still many others, noble and powerful in their day and generation, down to Jean IX, who, under Mazarin, had the grief of assisting at the dismantling of the castle. After a desperate siege, the vaults of the towers and of the donjon were blown up with powder, and the different constructions were set on fire; where Charles VI had been sent to rest, and to turn his attention from his vagaries, and where, nearly two hundred years later, Henri IV had passed a week as Gabrielle D'Estress. Thenceforth, all these royal souvenirs had passed into oblivion.

Angelique, without stopping the movement of her needle, listened eagerly, as if the vision of these past grandeurs rose up from her frame, in proportion as the rose grew there in its delicate life of colour. Her ignorance of general history enlarged facts, and she received them as if they were the basis of a marvellous legend. She trembled with delight, and, transported by her faith, it seemed as if the reconstructed Chateau mounted to the very gates of heaven, and the Hautecoeurs were cousins to the Virgin Mary.

When there was a pause in the recital she asked, "Is not our new Bishop Monseigneur d'Hautecoeur, a descendant of this noted family?"

Hubertine replied that Monseigneur must belong to the younger branch of the family, as the elder branch had been extinct for a very long time. It was, indeed, a most singular return, as for centuries the Marquesses of Hautecoeur and the clergy of Beaumont had been hostile to each other. Towards 1150 an abbot undertook to build a church, with no other resources than those of his Order; so his funds soon gave out, when the edifice was no higher than the arches of the side chapels, and they were obliged to cover the nave with a wooden roof. Eighty years passed, and Jean V came to rebuild the Chateau, when he gave three hundred thousand pounds, which, added to other sums, enabled the work on the church to be continued. The nave was finished, but the two towers and the great front were terminated much later, towards 1430, in the full fifteenth century. To recompense Jean V for his liberality, the clergy accorded to him, for himself and his descendants, the right of burial in a chapel of the apse, consecrated to St. George, and which, since that time, had been called the Chapel Hautecoeur. But these good terms were not of long duration. The freedom of Beaumont was put in constant peril by the Chateau, and there were continual hostilities on the questions of tribute and of precedence. One especially, the right of paying toll, which the nobles demanded for the navigation of the Ligneul, perpetuated the quarrels. Then it was that the great prosperity of the lower town began, with its manufacturing of fine linen and lace, and from this epoch the fortune of Beaumont increased daily, while that of Hautecoeur diminished, until the time when the castle was dismantled and the church triumphed. Louis XIV made of it a cathedral, a bishop's palace was built in the old enclosure of the monks, and, by a singular chain of circumstances, to-day a member of the family of Hautecoeur had returned as a bishop to command the clergy, who, always powerful, had conquered his ancestors, after a contest of four hundred years.

"But," said Angelique, "Monseigneur has been married, and has not he a son at least twenty years of age?"

Hubertine had taken up the shears to remodel one of the pieces of vellum.

"Yes," she replied, "the Abbot Cornille told me the whole story, and it is a very sad history. When but twenty years of age, Monseigneur was a captain under Charles X. In 1830, when only four-and-twenty, he resigned his position in the army, and it is said that from that time until he was forty years of age he led an adventurous life, travelling everywhere and having many strange experiences. At last, one evening, he met, at the house of a friend in the country, the daughter of the Count de Valencay, Mademoiselle Pauline, very wealthy, marvellously beautiful, and scarcely nineteen years of age, twenty-two years younger than himself. He fell violently in love with her, and, as she returned his affection, there was no reason why the marriage should not take place at once. He then bought the ruins of Hautecoeur for a mere song—ten thousand francs, I believe—with the intention of repairing the Chateau and installing his wife therein when all would be in order and in readiness to receive her. In the meanwhile they went to live on one of his family estates in Anjou, scarcely seeing any of their friends, and finding in their united happiness the days all too short. But, alas! at the end of a year Pauline had a son and died."

Hubert, who was still occupied with marking out his pattern, raised his head, showing a very pale face as he said in a low voice: "Oh! the unhappy man!"

"It was said that he himself almost died from his great grief," continued Hubertine. "At all events, a fortnight later he entered into Holy Orders, and soon became a priest. That was twenty years ago, and now he is a bishop. But I have also been told that during all this time he has refused to see his son, the child whose birth cost the life of its mother. He had placed him with an uncle of his wife's, an old abbot, not wishing even to hear of him, and trying to forget his existence. One day a picture of the boy was sent him, but in looking at it he found so strong a resemblance to his beloved dead that he fell on the floor unconscious and stiff, as if he had received a blow from a hammer. . . . Now age and prayer have helped to soften his deep grief, for yesterday the good Father Cornille told me that Monseigneur had just decided to send for his son to come to him."

Angelique, having finished her rose, so fresh and natural that perfume seemed to be exhaled from it, looked again through the window into the sunny garden, and, as if in a reverie, she said in a low voice: "The son of Monseigneur!"

Hubertine continued her story.

"It seems that the young man is handsome as a god, and his father wished him to be educated for the priesthood. But the old abbot would not consent to that, saying that the youth had not the slightest inclination in that direction. And then, to crown all, his wealth, it is said, is enormous. Two million pounds sterling! Yes, indeed! His mother left him a tenth of that sum, which was invested in land in Paris, where the increase in the price of real estate has been so great, that to-day it represents fifty millions of francs. In short, rich as a king!"

"Rich as a king, beautiful as a god!" repeated Angelique unconsciously, in her dreamy voice.

And with one hand she mechanically took from the frame a bobbin wound with gold thread, in order to make the open-work centre of one of the large lilies. After having loosened the end from the point of the reel, she fastened it with a double stitch of silk to the edge of the vellum which was to give a thickness to the embroidery. Then, continuing her work, she said again, without finishing her thought, which seemed lost in the vagueness of its desire, "Oh! as for me, what I would like, that which I would like above all else——"

The silence fell again, deep and profound, broken only by the dull sound of chanting which came from the church. Hubert arranged his design by repassing with a little brush all the perforated lines of the drawing, and thus the ornamentation of the cope appeared in white on the red silk. It was he who first resumed speaking.

"Ah! those ancient days were magnificent! Noblemen then wore costumes weighted with embroidery. At Lyons, material was sometimes sold for as much as six hundred francs an ell. One ought to read the by-laws and regulations of the Guild of Master Workmen, where it is laid down that 'The embroiderers of the King have always the right to summon, by armed force if necessary, the workmen of other masters.' . . . And then we had coats of arms, too! Azure, a fesso engrailed or, between three fleurs-de-lys of the same, two of them being near the top and the third in the point. Ah! it was indeed beautiful in the days of long ago!"

He stopped a moment, tapping the frame with his fingers to shake off the dust. Then he continued:

"At Beaumont they still have a legend about the Hautecoeurs, which my mother often related to me when I was a child. . . . A frightful plague ravaged the town, and half of the inhabitants had already fallen victims to it, when Jean V, he who had rebuilt the fortress, perceived that God had given him the power to contend against the scourge. Then he went on foot to the houses of the sick, fell on his knees, kissed them, and as soon as his lips had touched them, while he said, 'If God is willing, I wish it,' the sufferers were healed. And lo! that is why these words have remained the device of the Hautecoeurs, who all have since that day been able to cure the plague. . . . Ah! what a proud race of men! A noble dynasty! Monseigneur himself is called Jean XII, and the first name of his son must also be followed by a number, like that of a prince."

He stopped. Each one of his words lulled and prolonged the reverie of Angelique. She continued, in a half-singing tone: "Oh! what I wish for myself! That which I would like above all else——"

Holding the bobbin, without touching the thread, she twisted the gold by moving it from left to right alternately on the vellum, fastening it at each turn with a stitch in silk. Little by little the great golden lily blossomed out.

Soon she continued: "Yes, what I would like above all would be to marry a prince—a prince whom I had never seen; who would come towards sunset, just before the waning daylight, and would take me by the hand and lead me to his palace. And I should wish him to be very handsome, as well as very rich! Yes, the most beautiful and the wealthiest man that had ever been seen on the earth! He should have superb horses that I could hear neighing under my windows, and jewels which he would pour in streams into my lap, and gold that would fall from my hands in a deluge when I opened them. And what I wish still further is, that this prince of mine should love me to distraction, so that I might also love him desperately. We would then remain very young, very good, and very noble, for ever!"

Hubert, leaving his work, had approached her smilingly; whilst Hubertine, in a friendly way, shook her finger at the young girl.

"Oh, what a vain little creature! Ah! ambitious child, you are quite incorrigible. Now, you are quite beside yourself with your need of being a queen. At all events such a dream is much better than to steal sugar and to be impertinent. But really, you must not indulge in such fancies. It is the Evil One who prompts them, and it is pride that speaks, as well as passion."

Gay and candid, Angelique looked her in the face as she said: "But mother, mother mine, what are you saying? Is it, then, a sin to love that which is rich and beautiful? I love it because it is rich and beautiful, and so cheers my heart and soul. A beautiful object brightens everything that is near it, and helps one to live, as the sun does. You know very well that I am not selfish. Money? Oh! you would see what a good use I would make of it, if only I had it in abundance! I would rain it over the town; it should be scattered among the miserable. Think what a blessing it would be to have no more poverty! In the first place, as for you and my father, I would give you everything. You should be dressed in robes and garments of brocades, like the lords and ladies of the olden time."

Hubertine shrugged her shoulders and smiled. "It is ridiculous," she said. "But, my dear child, you must remember that you are poor, and that you have not a penny for your marriage-portion. How can you, then, for a moment dream of a prince? Are you, then, so desirous to marry a prince?"

"Why should not I wish to marry such a man?" And she looked quite amazed, as she continued: "Marry him? Of course I would do so. Since he would have plenty of money, what difference would it make if I had none? I should owe everything to him, and on that very account I should love him all the more deeply."

This victorious reasoning enchanted Hubert, who seemed carried above the earth by Angelique's enthusiasm. He would willingly have accompanied her on the wings of a cloud to the regions of fancy.

"She is right," he exclaimed.

But his wife glanced at him reprovingly. She became quite stern.

"My child, you will think differently later on, when you know life better."

"Life?—but I know it already."

"How is it possible for you to know it? You are too young; you are ignorant of evil. Yet evil exists and is very powerful."

"Evil—evil?"

Angelique repeated the word very slowly, as if to penetrate its meaning. And in her pure eyes was a look of innocent surprise. Evil? She knew all about it, for she had read of it in the "Golden Legend." Was not evil Satan himself? And had not she seen how, although he constantly reappeared, he was always overthrown? After every battle he remained crushed to earth, thoroughly conquered, and in a most pitiable state.

"Evil? Ah, mother mine, if you knew how little I fear it! It is only necessary once to conquer it and afterwards life is all happiness."

Hubertine appeared troubled and looked anxious.

"You will make me almost regret having brought you up in this house, alone with us two, and away from the world as it were. I am really afraid that some day we shall regret having kept you in such complete ignorance of the realities of life. What Paradise are you looking for? What is your idea of the world?"

A look of hope brightened the face of the young girl, while, bending forward, she still moved the bobbin back and forth with a continuous, even motion.

"You then really think, mother, that I am very foolish, do you not? This world is full of brave people. When one is honest and industrious, one is always rewarded. I know also that there are some bad people, but they do not count. We do not associate with them, and they are soon punished for their misdeeds. And then, you see, as for the world, it produces on me, from a distance, the effect of a great garden; yes, of an immense park, all filled with flowers and with sunshine. It is such a blessing to live, and life is so sweet that it cannot be bad."

She grew excited, as if intoxicated by the brightness of the silks and the gold threads she manipulated so well with her skilful fingers.

"Happiness is a very simple thing. We are happy, are we not? All three of us? And why? Simply because we love each other. Then, after all, it is no more difficult than that; it is only necessary to love and to be loved. So, you see, when the one I expect really comes, we shall recognise each other immediately. It is true I have not yet seen him, but I know exactly what he ought to be. He will enter here and will say: 'I have come in search of you.' And I shall reply: 'I expected you, and will go with you.' He will take me with him, and our future will be at once decided upon. He will go into a palace, where all the furniture will be of gold, encrusted in diamonds. Oh, it is all very simple!"

"You are crazy; so do not talk any more," interrupted Hubertine, coldly.

And seeing that the young girl was still excited, and ready to continue to indulge her fancies, she continued to reprove her.

"I beg you to say no more, for you absolutely make me tremble. Unhappy child! When we really marry you to some poor mortal you will be crushed, as you fall to earth from these heights of the imagination. Happiness, for the greater part of the world, consists in humility and obedience."

Angelique continued to smile with an almost obstinate tranquillity.

"I expect him, and he will come."

"But she is right," exclaimed Hubert, again carried away by her enthusiasm. "Why need you scold her? She is certainly pretty, and dainty enough for a king. Stranger things than that have happened, and who knows what may come?"

Sadly Hubertine looked at him with her calm eyes.

"Do not encourage her to do wrong, my dear. You know, better than anyone, what it costs to follow too much the impulses of one's heart."

He turned deadly pale, and great tears came to the edge of his eyelids. She immediately repented of having reproved him, and rose to offer him her hands. But gently disengaging himself, he said, stammeringly:

"No, no, my dear; I was wrong. Angelique, do you understand me? You must always listen to your mother. She alone is wise, and we are both of us very foolish. I am wrong; yes, I acknowledge it."

Too disturbed to sit down, leaving the cope upon which he had been working, he occupied himself in pasting a banner that was finished, although still in its frame. After having taken the pot of Flemish glue from the chest of drawers, he moistened with a brush the underside of the material, to make the embroidery firmer. His lips still trembled, and he remained quiet.

But if Angelique, in her obedience, was also still, she allowed her thoughts to follow their course, and her fancies mounted higher and still higher. She showed it in every feature—in her mouth, that ecstasy had half opened, as well as in her eyes, where the infinite depth of her visions seemed reflected. Now, this dream of a poor girl, she wove it into the golden embroidery. It was for this unknown hero that, little by little, there seemed to grow on the white satin the beautiful great lilies, and the roses, and the monogram of the Blessed Virgin. The stems of the lilies had all the gracious pointings of a jet of light, whilst the long slender leaves, made of spangles, each one being sewed on with gold twist, fell in a shower of stars. In the centre, the initials of Mary were like the dazzling of a relief in massive gold, a marvellous blending of lacework and of embossing, or goffering, which burnt like the glory of a tabernacle in the mystic fire of its rays. And the roses of delicately-coloured silks seemed real, and the whole chasuble was resplendent in its whiteness of satin, which appeared covered almost miraculously with its golden blossoms.

After a long silence, Angelique, whose cheeks were flushed by the blood which mounted into them from her excitement, raised her head, and, looking at Hubertine, said again, a little maliciously:

"I expect him, and he will come."

It was absurd for her thus to give loose reins to her imagination. But she was willful. She was convinced in her own mind that everything would come to pass, eventually, as she wished it might. Nothing could weaken her happy conviction.

"Mother," she added, "why do you not believe me, since I assure you it must be as I say?"

Hubertine shrugged her shoulders, and concluded the best thing for her to do was to tease her.

"But I thought, my child, that you never intended being married. Your saints, who seem to have turned your head, they led single lives. Rather than do otherwise they converted their lovers, ran away from their homes, and were put to death."

The young girl listened and was confused. But soon she laughed merrily. Her perfect health, and all her love of life, rang out in this sonorous gaiety. "The histories of the saints! But that was ages ago! Times have entirely changed since then. God having so completely triumphed, no longer demands that anyone should die for Him."

When reading the Legend, it was the marvels which fascinated her, not the contempt of the world and the desire for death. She added: "Most certainly I expect to be married; to love and to be loved, and thus be very happy."

"Be careful, my dear," said Hubertine, continuing to tease her. "You will make your guardian angel, Saint Agnes, weep. Do not you know that she refused the son of the Governor, and preferred to die, that she might be wedded to Jesus?"

The great clock of the belfry began to strike; numbers of sparrows flew down from an enormous ivy-plant which framed one of the windows of the apse. In the workroom, Hubert, still silent, had just hung up the banner, moist from the glue, that it might dry, on one of the great iron hooks fastened to the wall.

The sun in the course of the morning had lightened up different parts of the room, and now it shone brightly upon the old tools—the diligent, the wicker winder, and the brass chandelier—and as its rays fell upon the two workers, the frame at which they were seated seemed almost on fire, with its bands polished by use, and with the various objects placed upon it, the reels of gold cord, the spangles, and the bobbins of silk.

Then, in this soft, charming air of spring, Angelique looked at the beautiful symbolic lily she had just finished. Opening wide her ingenuous eyes, she replied, with an air of confiding happiness, to Hubertine's last remark in regard to the child-martyr, Saint Agnes:

"Ah, yes! But it was Jesus who wished it to be so."

CHAPTER V

Notwithstanding her thoroughly cheerful nature, Angelique liked solitude; and it was to her the greatest of recreations to be alone in her room, morning and evening. There she gave herself up to her thoughts; there she indulged to the full scope in her most joyous fancies. Sometimes even during the day, when she could go there for a moment, she was as happy as if, in full freedom, she had committed some childish prank.

The chamber was very large, taking in at least half of the upper story, the other half being the garret. It was whitewashed everywhere; not only the walls and the beams, but the joists, even to the visible copings of the mansard part of the roof; and in this bare whiteness, the old oaken furniture seemed almost as black as ebony. At the time of the decoration of the sleeping-room below, and the improvements made in the parlour, the ancient furniture, which had been bought at various epochs, had been carried upstairs. There was a great carved chest of the Renaissance period, a table and chairs which dated from the reign of Louis XIII, an enormous bedstead, style Louis XIV, and a very handsome wardrobe, Louis XV. In the middle of these venerable old things a white porcelain stove, and the little toilet-table, covered with a pretty oilcloth, seemed out of place and to mar the dull harmony. Curtained with an old-fashioned rose-coloured chintz, on which were bouquets of heather, so faded that the colour had become a scarcely perceptible pink, the enormous bedstead preserved above all the majesty of its great age.

But what pleased Angelique more than anything else was the little balcony on which the window opened. Of the two original windows, one of them, that at the left, had been closed by simply fastening it with nails, and the balcony, which formerly extended across the front of the building, was now only before the window at the right. As the lower beams were still strong, a new floor had been made, and above it an iron railing was firmly attached in place of the old worm-eaten wooden balustrade. This made a charming little corner, a quiet nook under the gable point, the leaden laths of which had been renewed at the beginning of the century. By bending over a little, the whole garden-front of the house could be seen in a very dilapidated state, with its sub-basement of little cut stones, its panels ornamented with imitation bricks, and its large bay window, which to-day had been made somewhat smaller. The roof of the great porch of the kitchen-door was covered with zinc. And above, the interduces of the top, which projected three feet or more, were strengthened by large, upright pieces of wood, the ends of which rested on the string-course of the first floor. All this gave to the balcony an appearance of being in a perfect vegetation of timber, as if in the midst of a forest of old wood, which was green with wallflowers and moss.

Since she occupied the chamber, Angelique had spent many hours there, leaning over the balustrade and simply looking. At first, directly under her was the garden, darkened by the eternal shade of the evergreen box-trees; in the corner nearest the church, a cluster of small lilac-bushes surrounded an old granite bench; while in the opposite corner, half hidden by a beautiful ivy which covered the whole wall at the end as if with a mantle, was a little door opening upon the Clos-Marie, a vast, uncultivated field. This Clos-Marie was the old orchard of the monks. A rivulet of purest spring-water crossed it, the Chevrotte, where the women who occupied the houses in the neighbourhood had the privilege of washing their linen; certain poor people sheltered themselves in the ruins of an old tumble-down mill; and no other persons inhabited this field, which was connected with the Rue Magloire simply by the narrow lane of the Guerdaches, which passed between the high walls of the Bishop's Palace and those of the Hotel Voincourt. In summer, the centenarian elms of the two parks barred with their green-leaved tops the straight, limited horizon which in the centre was cut off by the gigantic brow of the Cathedral. Thus shut in on all sides, the Clos-Marie slept in the quiet peace of its abandonment, overrun with weeds and wild grass, planted with poplars and willows sown by the wind. Among the great pebbles the Chevrotte leaped, singing as it went, and making a continuous music as if of crystal.

Angelique was never weary of this out-of-the-way nook. Yet for seven years she had seen there each morning only what she had looked at on the previous evening. The trees in the little park of the Hotel Voincourt, whose front was on the Grand Rue, were so tufted and bushy that it was only in the winter she could occasionally catch a glimpse of the daughter of the Countess, Mademoiselle Claire, a young girl of her own age.

In the garden of the Bishop was a still more dense thickness of branches, and she had often tried in vain to distinguish there the violet-coloured cassock of Monseigneur; and the old gate, with its Venetian slats above and at the sides, must have been fastened up for a very long time, for she never remembered to have seen it opened, not even for a gardener to pass through. Besides the washerwomen in the Clos, she always saw the same poor, ragged little children playing or sleeping in the grass.

The spring this year was unusually mild. She was just sixteen years of age, and until now she had been glad to welcome with her eyes alone the growing green again of the Clos-Marie under the April sunshine. The shooting out of the tender leaves, the transparency of the warm evenings, and all the reviving odours of the earth had simply amused her heretofore. But this year, at the first bud, her heart seemed to beat more quickly. As the grass grew higher and the wind brought to her all the strong perfumes of the fresh verdure, there was in her whole being an increasing agitation. Sudden inexplicable pain would at times seize her throat and almost choke her. One evening she threw herself, weeping, into Hubertine's arms, having no cause whatever for grief, but, on the contrary, overwhelmed with so great, unknown a happiness, that her heart was too full for restraint. In the night her dreams were delightful. Shadows seemed to pass before her, and she fell into such an ecstatic state that on awakening she did not dare to recall them, so confused was she by the angelic visions of bliss. Sometimes, in the middle of her great bed, she would rouse herself suddenly, her two hands joined and pressed against her breast as if a heavy burden were weighing her down and almost suffocating her. She would then jump up, rush across the room in her bare feet, and, opening the window wide, would stand there, trembling slightly, until at last the pure fresh air calmed her. She was continually surprised at this great change in herself, as if the knowledge of joys and griefs hitherto unknown had been revealed to her in the enchantment of dreams, and that her eyes had been opened to natural beauties which surrounded her.

What—was it really true that the unseen lilacs and laburnums of the Bishop's garden had so sweet an odour that she could no longer breathe it without a flush of colour mounting to her cheeks? Never before had she perceived this warmth of perfume which now touched her as if with a living breath.

And again, why had she never remarked in preceding years a great Japanese Paulownia in blossom, which looked like an immense violet bouquet as it appeared between two elm-trees in the garden of the Voincourts? This year, as soon as she looked at it, her eyes grew moist, so much was she affected by the delicate tints of the pale purple flowers. She also fancied that the Chevrotte had never chattered so gaily over the pebbles among the willows on its banks. The river certainly talked; she listened to its vague words, constantly repeated, which filled her heart with trouble. Was it, then, no longer the field of other days, that everything in it so astonished her and affected her senses in so unusual a way? Or, rather, was not she herself so changed that, for the first time, she appreciated the beauty of the coming into life of trees and plants?

But the Cathedral at her right, the enormous mass which obstructed the sky, surprised her yet more. Each morning she seemed to see it for the first time; she made constant discoveries in it, and was delighted to think that these old stones lived and had lived like herself. She did not reason at all on the subject, she had very little knowledge, but she gave herself up to the mystic flight of the giant, whose coming into existence had demanded three centuries of time, and where were placed one above the other the faith and the belief of generations. At the foundation, it was kneeling as if crushed by prayer, with the Romanesque chapels of the nave, and with the round arched windows, plain, unornamented, except by slender columns under the archivolts. Then it seemed to rise, lifting its face and hands towards heaven, with the pointed windows of its nave, built eighty years later; high, delicate windows, divided by mullions on which were broken bows and roses. Then again it sprung from the earth as if in ecstasy, erect, with the piers and flying buttresses of the choir finished and ornamented two centuries after in the fullest flamboyant Gothic, charged with its bell-turrets, spires, and pinnacles. A balustrade had been added, ornamented with trefoils, bordering the terrace on the chapels of the apse. Gargoyles at the foot of the flying buttresses carried off the water from the roofs. The top was also decorated with flowery emblems. The whole edifice seemed to burst into blossom in proportion as it approached the sky in a continual upward flight, as if, relieved at being delivered from the ancient sacerdotal terror, it was about to lose itself in the bosom of a God of pardon and of love. It seemed to have a physical sensation which permeated it, made it light and happy, like a sacred hymn it had just heard sung, very pure and holy, as it passed into the upper air.

Moreover, the Cathedral was alive. Hundreds of swallows had constructed their nests under the borders of trefoil, and even in the hollows of the bell-turrets and the pinnacles, and they were continually brushing their wings against the flying buttresses and the piers which they inhabited. There were also the wood-pigeons of the elms in the Bishop's garden, who held themselves up proudly on the borders of the terraces, going slowly, as if walking merely to show themselves off. Sometimes, half lost in the blue sky, looking scarcely larger than a fly, a crow alighted on the point of a spire to smooth its wings. The old stones themselves were animated by the quiet working of the roots of a whole flora of plants, the lichens and the grasses, which pushed themselves through the openings in the walls. On very stormy days the entire apse seemed to awake and to grumble under the noise of the rain as it beat against the leaden tiles of the roof, running off by the gutters of the cornices and rolling from story to story with the clamour of an overflowing torrent. Even the terrible winds of October and of March gave to it a soul, a double voice of anger and of supplication, as they whistled through its forests of gables and arcades of roseate ornaments and of little columns. The sun also filled it with life from the changing play of its rays; from the early morning, which rejuvenated it with a delicate gaiety, even to the evening, when, under the slightly lengthened-out shadows, it basked in the unknown.

And it had its interior existence. The ceremonies with which it was ever vibrating, the constant swinging of its bells, the music of the organ, and the chanting of the priests, all these were like the pulsation of its veins. There was always a living murmur in it: half-lost sounds, like the faint echo of a Low Mass; the rustling of the kneeling penitents, a slight, scarcely perceptible shivering, nothing but the devout ardour of a prayer said without words and with closed lips.

Now, as the days grew longer, Angelique passed more and more time in the morning and evening with her elbows on the balustrade of the balcony, side by side with her great friend, the Cathedral. She loved it the best at night, when she saw the enormous mass detach itself like a huge block on the starry skies. The form of the building was lost. It was with difficulty that she could even distinguish the flying buttresses, which were thrown like bridges into the empty space. It was, nevertheless, awake in the darkness, filled with a dream of seven centuries, made grand by the multitudes who had hoped or despaired before its altars. It was a continual watch, coming from the infinite of the past, going to the eternity of the future; the mysterious and terrifying wakefulness of a house where God Himself never sleeps. And in the dark, motionless, living mass, her looks were sure to seek the window of a chapel of the choir, on the level of the bushes of the Clos-Marie, the only one which was lighted up, and which seemed like an eye which was kept open all the night. Behind it, at the corner of a pillar, was an ever-burning altar-lamp. In fact, it was the same chapel which the abbots of old had given to Jean V d'Hautecoeur, and to his descendants, with the right of being buried there, in return for their liberality. Dedicated to Saint George, it had a stained-glass window of the twelfth century, on which was painted the legend of the saint. From the moment of the coming on of twilight, this historic representation came out from the shade, lighted up as if it were an apparition, and that was why Angelique was fascinated, and loved this particular point, as she gazed at it with her dreamy eyes.

The background of the window was blue and the edges red. Upon this sombre richness of colouring, the personages, whose flying draperies allowed their limbs to be seen, stood out in relief in clear light on the glass. Three scenes of the Legend, placed one above the other, filled the space quite to the upper arch. At the bottom, the daughter of the king, dressed in costly royal robes, on her way from the city to be eaten by the dreadful monster, meets Saint George near the pond, from which the head of the dragon already appears; and a streamer of silk bears these words: "Good Knight, do not run any danger for me, as you can neither help me nor deliver me, but will have to perish with me." Then in the middle the combat takes place, and the saint, on horseback, cuts the beast through and through. This is explained by the following words: "George wielded so well his lance that he wounded the enemy and threw him upon the earth." At last, at the top, the Princess is seen leading back into the city the conquered dragon: "George said, 'Tie your scarf around his neck, and do not be afraid of anything, oh beautiful maiden, for when you have done so he will follow you like a well-trained dog.'"

When the window was new it must have been surmounted in the middle of the arch by an ornamental design. But later, when the chapel belonged to the Hautecoeurs, they replaced the original work by their family coat of arms. And that was why, in the obscure nights, armorial bearings of a more recent date shown out above the painted legend. They were the old family arms of Hautecoeur, quartered with the well-known shield of Jerusalem; the latter being argent, a cross potencee, or, between four crosselettes of the same; and those of the family, azure, a castle, or, on it a shield, sable, charged with a human heart, argent, the whole between three fleurs-de-lys, or; the shield was supported on the dexter and sinister sides by two wyverns, or; and surmounted by the silver helmet with its blue feathers, embossed in gold, placed frontwise, and closed by eleven bars, which belongs only to Dukes, Marshals of France, titled Lords and heads of Sovereign Corporations. And for motto were these words: "Si Dieu volt, ie vueil."

Little by little, from having seen him piercing the monster with his lance, whilst the king's daughter raised her clasped hands in supplication, Angelique became enamoured of Saint George. He was her hero. At the distance where she was she could not well distinguish the figures, and she looked at them as if in the aggrandisement of a dream; the young girl was slight, was a blonde, and, in short, had a face not unlike her own, while the saint was frank and noble looking, with the beauty of an archangel. It was as if she herself had just been saved, and she could have kissed his hands with gratitude. And to this adventure, of which she dreamed confusedly, of a meeting on the border of a lake and of being rescued from a great danger by a young man more beautiful than the day, was added the recollection of her excursion to the Chateau of Hautecoeur, and a calling up to view of the feudal donjon, in its original state, peopled with the noble lords of olden times.

The arms glistened like the stars on summer nights; she knew them well, she read them easily, with their sonorous words, for she was so in the habit of embroidering heraldic symbols. There was Jean V, who stopped from door to door in the town ravaged by the plague, and went in to kiss the lips of the dying, and cured them by saying, "Si Dieu volt, ie vueil." And Felician III, who, forewarned that a severe illness prevented Philippe le Bel from going to Palestine, went there in his place, barefooted and holding a candle in his hand, and for that he had the right of quartering the arms of Jerusalem with his own. Other and yet other histories came to her mind, especially those of the ladies of Hautecoeur, the "happy dead," as they were called in the Legend. In that family the women die young, in the midst of some great happiness. Sometimes two or three generations would be spared, then suddenly Death would appear, smiling, as with gentle hands he carried away the daughter or the wife of a Hautecoeur, the oldest of them being scarcely twenty years of age, at the moment when they were at the height of earthly love and bliss. For instance, Laurette, daughter of Raoul I, on the evening of her betrothal to her cousin Richard, who lived in the castle, having seated herself at her window in the Tower of David, saw him at his window in the Tower of Charlemagne, and, thinking she heard him call her, as at that moment a ray of moonlight seemed to throw a bridge between them, she walked toward him. But when in the middle she made in her haste a false step and overpassed the ray, she fell, and was crushed at the foot of the tower. So since that day, each night when the moon is bright and clear, she can be seen walking in the air around the Chateau, which is bathed in white by the silent touch of her immense robe. Then Balbine, wife of Herve VII, thought for six months that her husband had been killed in the wars. But, unwilling to give up all hope, she watched for him daily from the top of the donjon, and when at last she saw him one morning on the highway, returning to his home, she ran down quickly to meet him, but was so overcome with joy, that she fell dead at the entrance of the castle. Even at this day, notwithstanding the ruins, as soon as twilight falls, it is said she still descends the steps, runs from story to story, glides through the corridors and the rooms, and passes like a phantom through the gaping windows which open into the desert void. All return. Isabeau, Gudule, Vonne, Austreberthe, all these "happy dead," loved by the stern messenger, who spared them from the vicissitudes of life by taking them suddenly when, in early youth, they thought only of happiness. On certain nights this white-robed band fill the house as if with a flight of doves. To their number had lately been added the mother of the son of Monseigneur, who was found lifeless on the floor by the cradle of her infant, where, although ill, she dragged herself to die, in the fullness of her delight at embracing him. These had haunted the imagination of Angelique; she spoke of them as if they were facts of recent occurrence, which might have happened the day before. She had read the names of Laurette and of Balbine on old memorial tablets let into the walls of the chapel. Then why should not she also die young and very happy, as they had? The armouries would glisten as now, the saint would come down from his place in the stained-glass window, and she would be carried away to heaven on the sweet breath of a kiss. Why not?

The "Golden Legend" had taught her this: Was not it true that the miracle is really the common law, and follows the natural course of events? It exists, is active, works with an extreme facility on every occasion, multiplies itself, spreads itself out, overflows even uselessly, as if for the pleasure of contradicting the self-evident rules of Nature. Its power seems to be on the same plane as that of the Creator. Albrigan, King of Edeese, writes to Jesus, who replies to him. Ignatius receives letters from the Blessed Virgin. In all places the Mother and the Son appear, disguise themselves, and talk with an air of smiling good-nature. When Stephen meets them they are very familiar with him. All the virgins are wed to Jesus, and the martyrs mount to heaven, where they are to be united to Mary. And as for the angels and saints, they are the ordinary companions of men. They come, they go, they pass through walls, they appear in dreams, they speak from the height of clouds, they assist at births and deaths, they support those who are tortured, they deliver those who are in prison, and they go on dangerous missions. Following in their footsteps is an inexhaustible efflorescence of prodigies. Sylvester binds the mouth of a dragon with a thread. The earth rises to make a seat for Hilary, whose companions wished to humiliate him. A precious stone falls into the chalice of Saint Loup. A tree crushes the enemies of Saint Martin; a dog lets loose a hare, and a great fire ceases to burn at his command. Mary the Egyptian walks upon the sea; honey-bees fly from the mouth of Ambrosius at his birth. Continually saints cure diseases of the eye, withered limbs, paralysis, leprosy, and especially the plague. There is no disease that resists the sign of the Cross. In a crowd, the suffering and the feeble are placed together, that they may be cured in a mass, as if by a thunderbolt. Death itself is conquered, and resurrections are so frequent that they become quite an everyday affair. And when the saints themselves are dead the wonders do not cease, but are redoubled, and are like perennial flowers which spring from their tombs. It is said that from the head and the feet of Nicholas flowed two fountains of oil which cured every ill. When the tomb of Saint Cecilia was opened an odour of roses came up from her coffin. That of Dorothea was filled with manna. All the bones of virgins and of martyrs performed marvels: they confounded liars, they forced robbers to give back their stolen goods, they granted the prayers of childless wives, they brought the dying back to life. Nothing was impossible for them; in fact the Invisible reigned, and the only law was the caprice of the supernatural. In the temples the sorcerers mix themselves up with the popular idea, and scythes cut the grass without being held, brass serpents move, and one hears bronze statues laugh and wolves sing. Immediately the saints reply and overwhelm them. The Host is changed into living food, sacred Christian images shed drops of blood, sticks set upright in the ground blossom into flower, springs of pure water appear in dry places, warm loaves of bread multiply themselves at the feet of the needy, a tree bows down before some holy person, and so on. Then, again, decapitated heads speak, broken chalices mend themselves, the rain turns aside from a church to submerge a neighbouring palace, the robes of hermits never wear out, but renew themselves at each season like the skin of a beast. In Armenia at one time the persecutors threw into the sea the leaden coffins of five martyrs, and the one containing the body of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle took the lead, and the four others accompanied it as a guard of honour. So, all together, in regular order, like a fine squadron, they floated slowly along, urged by the breeze, through the whole length of the sea, until they reached the shores of Sicily.

Angelique was a firm believer in miracles. In her ignorance she lived surrounded by wonders. The rising of the stars, or the opening of a violet; each fact was a surprise to her. It would have appeared to her simply ridiculous to have imagined the world so mechanical as to be governed by fixed laws. There were so many things far beyond her comprehension, she felt herself so weak and helpless in the midst of forces whose power it was impossible to measure, that she would not even have suspected they existed, had it not been for the great questioning breath which at times passed over her face. So, trusting, and as thoroughly Christian as if belonging to the primitive Church, spiritually fed by her readings from the "Golden Legend," she gave herself up entirely into the hands of God, with only the spot of original sin to be cleansed from her soul. She had no liberty of action or freedom of will; God alone could secure her salvation by giving her the gift of His grace. That grace had been already manifested by bringing her to the hospitable roof of the Huberts, where, under the shadow of the Cathedral, she could lead a life of submission, of purity, and of faith. She often heard within her soul the grumblings of heredity tendency to evil, and asked herself what would have become of her had she been left on her native soil. Without doubt she would have been bad; while here, in this blessed corner of the earth, she had grown up free from temptation, strong and healthy. Was it not grace that had given her this home, where she was surrounded by such charming histories she had so easily committed to memory, where she had learned such perfect faith in the present and hope in the future, and where the invisible and unknown, or the miracles of ages, seemed natural to her, and quite on a level with her daily life? It had armed her for all combats, as heretofore it had armed the martyrs. And she created an imaginary experience for herself almost unknowingly. It was, in fact, the inevitable result of a mind overcharged and excited by fables; it was increased by her ignorance of the life within and about her, as well as from her loneliness. She had not had many companions, so all desires went from her only to return to her.

Sometimes she was in such a peculiar state that she would put her hands over her face, as if doubting her own identity. Was she herself only an illusion, and would she suddenly disappear some day and vanish into nothingness? Who would tell her the truth?

One evening in the following May, on this same balcony where she had spent so much time in vague dreams, she suddenly broke into tears. She was not low-spirited in the least, but it seemed to her as if her anxiety arose from a vain expectation of a visit from someone. Yet who was there to come? It was very dark; the Clos-Marie marked itself out like a great black spot under the sky filled with stars, and she could but vaguely distinguish the heavy masses of the old elm-trees of the Bishop's garden, and of the park of the Hotel Voincourt. Alone the window of the chapel sent out a little light. If no one were to come, why did her heart beat so rapidly? It was nothing new, this feeling of waiting, or of hope, but it was dated from the long ago, from her early youth; it was like a desire, a looking forward for something which had grown with her growth, and ended in this feverish anxiety of her seventeen years. Nothing would have surprised her, as for weeks she had heard the sound of voices in this mysterious corner, peopled by her imagination. The "Golden Legend" had left there its supernatural world of saints and martyrs, and the miracle was all ready to appear there. She understood well that everything was animated, that the voices came from objects hitherto silent; that the leaves of the trees, the waters of the Chevrotte, and the stones of the Cathedral spoke to her. But what was it that all these whisperings from the Invisible wished to explain? What did these unknown forces above and around her wish to do with her as they floated in the air? She kept her eyes fixed upon the darkness, as if she were at an appointed meeting with she knew not whom, and she waited, still waited, until she was overcome with sleep, whilst it seemed to her as if some supernatural power were deciding her destiny, irrespective of her will or wish.

For four evenings Angelique was nervous, and wept a great deal in the darkness. She remained in her usual place and was patient. The atmosphere seemed to envelope her, and as it increased in density it oppressed her more and more, as if the horizon itself had become smaller and was shutting her in. Everything weighed upon her heart. Now there was a dull murmuring of voices in her brain; yet she was not able to hear them clearly, or to distinguish their meaning. It was as if Nature itself had taken possession of her, and the earth, with the vast heavens above it, had penetrated into her being. At the least sound her hands burned and her eyes tried to pierce the darkness. Was the wonderful event about to take place, the prodigy she awaited? No, there was nothing yet. It was probably merely the beating of the wings of a night bird. And she listened again, attentively, until she could distinguish the difference of sound between the leaves of the elms and the willows. At least twenty times she trembled violently when a little stone rolled in the rivulet, or a prowling animal jumped over the wall. She leaned forward; but there was nothing—still nothing.

At last, after some days, when at night a warmer darkness fell from the sky where no moon was visible, a change began. She felt it, but it was so slight, so almost imperceptible, she feared that she might have been mistaken in the little sound she heard, which seemed unlike the usual noises she knew so well. She held her breath, as the sound seemed very long in returning. At last it came again, louder than before, but equally confused. She would have said it came from a great distance, that it was a scarcely-defined step, and that the trembling of the air announced the approach of something out of sight and out of hearing. That which she was expecting came slowly from the invisible slight movement of what surrounded her. Little by little it disengaged itself from her dream, like a realisation of the vague longings of her youth. Was it the Saint George of the chapel window, who had come down from his place and was walking on the grass in silence towards her? Just then, by chance, the altar-light was dimmed, so that she could not distinguish the faintest outline of the figures on the painted glass, but all seemed like a blue cloud of vapoury mist. That was all she heard or learned at that time of the mystery.

But on the morrow, at the same hour, by a like obscurity, the noise increased and approached a little nearer. It was certainly the sound of steps, of real steps, which walked upon the earth. They would stop for a moment, then recommence here and there, moving up and down, without her being able to say precisely where they were. Perhaps they came from the garden of the Voincourts, where some night pedestrian was lingering under the trees. Or it might be, rather, that they were in the tufted masses of the great lilac-bushes of the park of the Bishop, whose strong perfume made her almost ill. She might do her best to try to penetrate the darkness, it was only by her hearing that she was forewarned of the coming events, aided a little by her sense of smell, as the perfume of the flowers was increased as if a breath were mingled with it. And so for several nights the steps resounded under the balcony, and she listened as they came nearer, until they reached the walls under her feet. There they stopped, and a long silence followed, until she seemed almost to lose consciousness in this slow embrace of something of which she was ignorant.

Not long after, she saw one evening the little crescent of the new moon appear among the stars. But it soon disappeared behind the brow of the Cathedral, like a bright, living eye that the lid re-covers. She followed it with regret, and at each nightfall she awaited its appearance, watched its growth, and was impatient for this torch which would ere long light up the invisible. In fact, little by little, the Clos-Marie came out from the obscurity, with the ruins of its old mill, its clusters of trees, and its rapid little river. And then, in the light, creation continued. That which came from a vision ended in being embodied. For at first she only perceived that a dim shadow was moving under the moonlight. What was it, then? A branch moved to and fro by the wind? Or was it a large bat in constant motion? There were moments when everything disappeared, and the field slept in so deathly a stillness that she thought her eyes had deceived her. Soon there was no longer any doubt possible, for a dark object had certainly just crossed the open space and had glided from one willow-tree to another. It appeared, then disappeared, without her being able exactly to define it.

One evening she thought she distinguished the dim outline of two shoulders, and at once she turned her eyes towards the chapel window. It had a greyish tint, as if empty, for the moon shining directly upon it had deadened the light within. At that moment she noticed that the living shadow grew larger, as it approached continually nearer and nearer, walking in the grass at the side of the church. In proportion as she realised it was a fact that someone was there, she was overcome by an indefinable sensation, a nervous feeling that one has on being looked at by mysterious unseen eyes.

Certainly someone was there under the trees who was regarding her fixedly. She had on her hands and face, as it were, a physical impression of those long, ardent, yet timid looks; but she did not withdraw herself from them, because she knew they were pure, and came from the enchanted world of which she had read in the "Golden Legend"; and, in the certainty of a promised happiness, her first anxiety was quickly changed into a delicious tranquillity.

One night, suddenly, on the ground whitened by the moon's rays, the shadow designed itself plainly and clearly. It was indeed that of a man whom she could not see, as he was hidden by the willows. As he did not move, she was able to look for a long time at his shadow.

From that moment Angelique had a secret. Her bare, whitewashed chamber was filled with it. She remained there for hours lying on her great bed—where she seemed lost, she was so little—her eyes closed, but not asleep, and seeing continually before her, in her waking dreams, this motionless shadow upon the earth. When she re-opened her eyes at dawn, her looks wandered from the enormous wardrobe to the odd carved chest, from the porcelain stove to the little toilet-table, as if surprised at not seeing there the mysterious silhouette, which she could have so easily and precisely traced from memory. In her sleep she had seen it gliding among the pale heather-blossoms on her curtains. In her dreams, as in her waking hours, her mind was filled with it. It was a companion shadow to her own. She had thus a double being, although she was alone with her fancies.

This secret she confided to no one, not even to Hubertine, to whom, until now, she had always told even her thoughts. When the latter, surprised at her gaiety, questioned her, she blushed deeply as she replied that the early spring had made her very happy. From morning to evening she hummed little snatches of song, like a bee intoxicated by the heat of the sun's rays. Never before had the chasubles she embroidered been so resplendent with silk and gold. The Huberts smiled as they watched her, thinking simply that this exuberance of spirits came from her state of perfect health. As the day waned she grew more excited, she sang at the rising of the moon, and as soon as the hour arrived she hurried to her balcony, and waited for the shadow to appear. During all the first quarters of the moon she found it exact at each rendezvous, erect and silent. But that was all. What was the cause of it? Why was it there? Was it, indeed, only a shadow? Was not it, perhaps, the saint who had left his window, or the angel who had formerly loved Saint Cecilia, and who had now come to love her in her turn? Although she was not vain, these thoughts made her proud, and were as sweet to her as an invisible caress. Then she grew impatient to know more, and her watching recommenced.

The moon, at its full, lighted up the Clos-Marie. When it was at its zenith, the trees, under the white rays which fell straight upon them in perpendicular lines, cast no more shadows, but were like running fountains of silent brightness. The whole garden was bathed and filled with a luminous wave as limpid as crystal, and the brilliancy of it was so penetrating that everything was clearly seen, even to the fine cutting of the willow-leaves. The slightest possible trembling of air seemed to wrinkle this lake of rays, sleeping in the universal peace among the grand elm-trees of the neighbouring garden and the gigantic brow of the Cathedral.

Two more evenings had passed like this, when, on the third night, as Angelique was leaning on her elbows and looking out, her heart seemed to receive a sudden shock. There, in the clear light, she saw him standing before her and looking at her. His shadow, like that of the trees, had disappeared under his feet, and he alone was there, distinctly seen. At this distance she saw—as if it were full day—that he was tall, slight, a blonde, and apparently about twenty years of age. He resembled either a Saint George or a superb picture of Christ, with his curly hair, his thin beard, his straight nose, rather large, and his proudly-smiling black eyes. And she recognised him perfectly; never had she seen another like him; it was he, her hero, and he was exactly as she expected to find him. The wonder was at last accomplished; the slow creation of the invisible had perfected itself in this living apparition, and he came out from the unknown, from the movement of things, from murmuring voices, from the action of the night, from all that had enveloped her, until she almost fainted into unconsciousness. She also saw him as if he were lifted above the earth, so supernatural appeared to be his coming, whilst the miraculous seemed to surround him on every side as it floated over the mysterious moon-lake. He had as his escort the entire people of the Legend—the saints whose staffs blossomed, the virgins whose wounds shed milk—and the stars seemed to pale before this white group of perfection.

Angelique continued to look at him. He raised his arms, and held them out, wide open. She was not at all afraid, but smiled sweetly.

CHAPTER VI

It was a great affair for the whole household when, every three months, Hubertine prepared the "lye" for the wash. A woman was hired to aid them, the Mother Gabet, as she was called, and for four days all embroidery was laid aside, while Angelique took her part in the unusual work, making of it a perfect amusement, as she soaped and rinsed the clothes in the clean water of the Chevrotte. The linen when taken from the ashes was wheeled to the Clos-Marie, through the little gate of communication in the garden. There the days were spent in the open air and the sunshine.

"I will do the washing this time, mother, for it is the greatest of delights to me."

And gaily laughing, with her sleeves drawn up above her elbows, flourishing the beetle, Angelique struck the clothes most heartily in the pleasure of such healthy exercise. It was hard work, but she thoroughly enjoyed it, and only stopped occasionally to say a few words or to show her shiny face covered with foam.

"Look, mother! This makes my arms strong. It does me a world of good."

The Chevrotte crossed the field diagonally, at first drowsily, then its stream became very rapid as it was thrown in great bubbles over a pebbly descent. It came from the garden of the Bishop, through a species of floodgate left at the foot of the wall, and at the other end it disappeared under an arched vault at the corner of the Hotel Voincourt, where it was swallowed up in the earth, to reappear two hundred yards farther on, as it passed along the whole length of the Rue Basse to the Ligneul, into which it emptied itself. Therefore it was very necessary to watch the linen constantly, for, run as fast as possible, every piece that was once let go was almost inevitably lost.

"Mother, wait, wait a little! I will put this heavy stone on the napkins. We shall then see if the river can carry them away. The little thief!"

She placed the stone firmly, then returned to draw another from the old, tumble-down mill, enchanted to move about and to fatigue herself; and, although she severely bruised her finger, she merely moistened it a little, saying, "Oh! that is nothing."

During the day the poor people who sheltered themselves in the ruins went out to ask for charity from the passers-by on the highways. So the Clos was quite deserted. It was a delicious, fresh solitude, with its clusters of pale-green willows, its high poplar-trees, and especially its verdure, its overflowing of deep-rooted wild herbs and grasses, so high that they came up to one's shoulders. A quivering silence came from the two neighbouring parks, whose great trees barred the horizon. After three o'clock in the afternoon the shadow of the Cathedral was lengthened out with a calm sweetness and a perfume of evaporated incense.

Angelique continued to beat the linen harder still, with all the force of her well-shaped white arms.

"Oh, mother dear! You can have no idea how hungry I shall be this evening! . . . Ah! you know that you have promised to give me a good strawberry-cake."

On the day of the rinsing, Angelique was quite alone. The mere Gabet, suffering from a sudden, severe attack of sciatica, had not been able to come as usual, and Hubertine was kept at home by other household cares.

Kneeling in her little box half filled with straw, the young girl took the pieces one by one, shook them for a long time in the swiftly-rolling stream, until the water was no longer dimmed, but had become as clear as crystal. She did not hurry at all, for since the morning she had been tormented by a great curiosity, having seen, to her astonishment, an old workman in a white blouse, who was putting up a light scaffolding before the window of the Chapel Hautecoeur. Could it be that they were about to repair the stained-glass panes? There was, it must be confessed, great need of doing so. Several pieces were wanting in the figure of Saint George, and in other places, where in the course of centuries panes that had been broken had been replaced by ordinary glass. Still, all this was irritating to her. She was so accustomed to the gaps of the saint who was piercing the dragon with his sword, and of the royal princess as she led the conquered beast along with her scarf, that she already mourned as if one had the intention of mutilating them. It was sacrilege to think of changing such old, venerable things. But when she returned to the field after her lunch, all her angry feelings passed away immediately; for a second workman was upon the staging, a young man this time, who also wore a white blouse. And she recognised him! It was he! Her hero!

Gaily, without any embarrassment, Angelique resumed her place on her knees on the straw of her box. Then, with her wrists bare, she put her hands in the deep, clear water, and recommenced shaking the linen back and forth.

Yes, it was he—tall, slight, a blonde, with his fine beard and his hair curled like that of a god, his complexion as fresh as when she had first seen him under the white shadow of the moonlight. Since it was he, there was nothing to be feared for the window; were he to touch it, he would only embellish it. And it was no disappointment to her whatever to find him in this blouse, a workman like herself, a painter on glass, no doubt. On the contrary, this fact made her smile, so absolutely certain was she of the eventual fulfillment of her dream of royal fortune. Now, it was simply an appearance, a beginning. What good would it do her to know who he was, from whence he came, or whither he was going? Some morning he would prove to be that which she expected him to be. A shower of gold would stream from the roof of the Cathedral, a triumphal march would break forth in the distant rumblings of the organ, and all would come true. She did not stay to ask herself how he could always be there, day and night. Yet it was evident either that he must live in one of the neighbouring houses, or he must pass by the lane des Guerdaches, which ran by the side of the Bishop's park to the Rue Magloire.

Then a charming hour passed by. She bent forward, she rinsed her linen, her face almost touching the fresh water; but each time she took a different piece she raised her head, and cast towards the church a look, in which from the agitation of her heart, was a little good-natured malice. And he, upon the scaffolding, with an air of being closely occupied in examining the state of the window, turned towards her, glancing at her sideways, and evidently much disturbed whenever she surprised him doing so. It was astonishing how quickly he blushed, how dark red his face became. At the slightest emotion, whether of anger or interest, all the blood in his veins seemed to mount to his face. He had flashing eyes, which showed will; yet he was so diffident, that, when he knew he was being criticised, he was embarrassed as a little child, did not seem to know what to do with his hands, and stammered out his orders to the old man who accompanied him.

As for Angelique, that which delighted her most, as she refreshed her arms in this turbulent water, was to picture him innocent like herself, ignorant of the world, and with an equally intense desire to have a taste of life. There was no need of his telling to others who he was, for had not invisible messengers and unseen lips made known to her that he was to be her own? She looked once more, just as he was turning his head; and so the minutes passed, and it was delicious.

Suddenly she saw that he jumped from the staging, then that he walked backwards quite a distance through the grass, as if to take a certain position from which he could examine the window more easily. But she could not help smiling, so evident was it that he simply wished to approach her. He had made a firm decision, like a man who risks everything, and now it was touching as well as comical to see that he remained standing a few steps from her, his back towards her, not daring to move, fearing that he had been too hasty in coming as far as he had done. For a moment she thought he would go back again to the chapel-window as he had come from it, without paying any attention to her. However, becoming desperate, at last he turned, and as at that moment she was glancing in his direction, their eyes met, and they remained gazing fixedly at each other. They were both deeply confused; they lost their self-possession, and might never have been able to regain it, had not a dramatic incident aroused them.

"Oh dear! Oh dear!" exclaimed the young girl, in distress.

In her excitement, a dressing-sacque, which she had been rinsing unconsciously, had just escaped her, and the stream was fast bearing it away. Yet another minute and it would disappear round the corner of the wall of the Voincourt park, under the arched vault through which the Chevrotte passed.

There were several seconds of anxious waiting. He saw at once what had happened, and rushed forward. But the current, leaping over the pebbles, carried this sacque, which seemed possessed, as it went along, much more rapidly than he. He stooped, thinking he had caught it, but took up only a handful of soapy foam. Twice he failed. The third time he almost fell. Then, quite vexed, with a brave look as if doing something at the peril of his life, he went into the water, and seized the garment just as it was about being drawn under the ground.

Angelique, who until now had followed the rescue anxiously, quite upset, as if threatened by a great misfortune, was so relieved that she had an intense desire to laugh. This feeling was partly nervous, it is true, but not entirely so. For was not this the adventure of which she had so often dreamed? This meeting on the border of a lake; the terrible danger from which she was to be saved by a young man, more beautiful than the day? Saint George, the tribune, the warrior! These were simply united in one, and he was this painter of stained glass, this young workman in his white blouse! When she saw him coming back, his feet wet through and through, as he held the dripping camisole awkwardly in his hand, realising the ridiculous side of the energy he had employed in saving it from the waves, she was obliged to bite her tongue to check the outburst of gaiety which seemed almost to choke her.

He forgot himself as he looked at her. She was like a most adorable child in this restrained mirth with which all her youth seemed to vibrate. Splashed with water, her arms almost chilled by the stream, she seemed to send forth from herself the purity and clearness of these living springs which rushed from the mossy woods. She was an impersonation of health, joy, and freshness, in the full sunlight. One could easily fancy that she might be a careful housekeeper and a queen withal as she was there, in her working dress, with her slender waist, her regal neck, her oval face, such as one reads of in fairy-tales. And he did not know how to give her back the linen, he found her exquisite, so perfect a representation of the beauty of the art he loved. It enraged him, in spite of himself, that he should have the air of an idiot, as he plainly saw the effort she made not to laugh. But he was forced to do something, so at last he gave her back the sacque.

Then Angelique realised that if she were to open her mouth and try to thank him, she would shout. Poor fellow! She sympathised with him and pitied him. But it was irresistible; she was happy, and needed to give expression to it; she must yield to the gaiety with which her heart overflowed. It was such lovely weather, and all life was so beautiful!

At last she thought she might speak, wishing simply to say: "Thank you, Monsieur."

But the wish to laugh had returned, and made her stammer, interrupting her at each word. It was a loud, cheery laugh, a sonorous outpouring of pearly notes, which sang sweetly to the crystalline accompaniment of the Chevrotte.

The young man was so disconcerted that he could find nothing to say. His usually pale face had become very red, the timid, childlike expression of his eyes had changed into a fiery one, like that of an eagle, and he moved away quickly. He disappeared with the old workman, and even then she continued to laugh as she bent over the water, again splashing herself as she shook the clothes hither and thither, rejoicing in the brightness of the happy day.

On the morrow he came an hour earlier. But at five o'clock in the morning the linen, which had been dripping all night, was spread out on the grass. There was a brisk wind, which was excellent for drying. But in order that the different articles need not be blown away, they were kept in place by putting little pebbles on their four corners. The whole wash was there, looking of a dazzling whiteness among the green herbage, having a strong odour of plants about it, and making the meadow as if it had suddenly blossomed out into a snowy covering of daisies.

When Angelique came to look at it after breakfast, she was distressed, for so strong had become the gusts of wind that all threatened to be carried away. Already a sheet had started, and several napkins had gone to fasten themselves to the branches of a willow. She fortunately caught them, but then the handkerchiefs began to fly. There was no one to help her; she was so frightened that she lost all her presence of mind. When she tried to spread out the sheet again, she had a regular battle, for she was quite lost in it, as it covered her with a great crackling sound.

Through all the noise of the wind she heard a voice saying, "Mademoiselle, do you wish me to help you?"

It was he, and immediately she cried to him, with no other thought than her pre-occupation as a good housewife:

"Of course I wish it. Come and help me, then. Take the end over there, nearest to you. Hold it firm!"

The sheet, which they stretched out with their strong arms, flapped backwards and forwards like a sail. At last they succeeded in putting it on the ground, and then placed upon it much heavier stones than before. And now that, quite conquered, it sank quietly down, neither of them thought of leaving their places, but remained on their knees at the opposite corners, separated by this great piece of pure white linen.

She smiled, but this time without malice. It was a silent message of thanks. He became by degrees a little bolder.

"My name is Felicien."

"And mine is Angelique."

"I am a painter on glass, and have been charged to repair the stained-glass window of the chapel here."

"I live over there with my father and mother, and I am an embroiderer of church vestments."

The wind, which continued to be strong under the clear blue sky, carried away their words, lashed them with its purifying breath in the midst of the warm sunshine in which they were bathed.

They spoke of things which they already knew, as if simply for the pleasure of talking.

"Is the window, then, to be replaced?"

"No! oh no! it will be so well repaired that the new part cannot be distinguished from the old. I love it quite as much as you do."

"Oh! it is indeed true that I love it! I have already embroidered a Saint George, but it was not so beautiful as this one."

"Oh, not so beautiful! How can you say that? I have seen it, if it is the Saint George on the chasuble which the Abbot Cornille wore last Sunday. It is a marvellous thing."

She blushed with pleasure, but quickly turned the conversation, as she exclaimed:

"Hurry and put another stone on the left corner of the sheet, or the wind will carry it away from us again."

He made all possible haste, weighed down the linen, which had been in great commotion, like the wings of a great wounded bird trying its best to fly away. Finding that this time it would probably keep its place, the two young people rose up, and now Angelique went through the narrow, green paths between the pieces of linen, glancing at each one, while he followed her with an equally busy look, as if preoccupied by the possible loss of a dish-towel or an apron. All this seemed quite natural to them both. So she continued to chatter away freely and artlessly, as she told of her daily life and explained her tastes.

"For my part, I always wish that everything should be in its place. In the morning I am always awakened at the same hour by the striking of the cuckoo-clock in the workroom; and whether it is scarcely daylight or not, I dress myself as quickly as possible; my shoes and stockings are here, my soap and all articles of toilette there—a true mania for order. Yet you may well believe that I was not born so! Oh no! On the contrary, I was the most careless person possible. Mother was obliged to repeat to me the same words over and over again, that I might not leave my things in every corner of the house, for I found it easier to scatter them about. And now, when I am at work from morning to evening, I can never do anything right if my chair is not in the same place, directly opposite the light, Fortunately, I am neither right nor left handed, but can use both hands equally well at embroidering, which is a great help to me, for it is not everyone who can do that. Then, I adore flowers, but I cannot keep a bouquet near me without having a terrible headache. Violets alone I can bear, and that is surprising. But their odour seems to calm me, and at the least indisposition I have only need to smell them and I am at once cured."

He was enraptured while listening to her prattle. He revelled in the beautiful ring of her voice, which had an extremely penetrating, prolonged charm; and he must have been peculiarly sensitive to this human music, for the caressing inflection on certain words moistened his eyelids.

Suddenly returning to her household cares she exclaimed:

"Oh, now the shirts will soon be dry!"

Then, in the unconscious and simple need of making herself known, she continued her confidences:

"For colouring, the white is always beautiful, is it not? I tire at times of blue, of red, and of all other shades; but white is a constant joy, of which I am never weary. There is nothing in it to trouble you; on the contrary, you would like to lose yourself in it. We had a white cat, with yellow spots, which I painted white. It did very well for a while, but it did not last long. Listen a minute. Mother does not know it, but I keep all the waste bits of white silk, and have a drawer full of them, for just nothing except the pleasure of looking at them, and smoothing them over from time to time. And I have another secret, but this is a very serious one! When I wake up, there is every morning near my bed a great, white object, which gently flies away."

He did not smile, but appeared firmly to believe her. Was not all she said, in her simple way, quite natural? A queen in the magnificence of her courtly surroundings could not have conquered him so quickly. She had, in the midst of this white linen on the green grass, a charming, grand air, happy and supreme, which touched him to the heart, with an ever-increasing power. He was completely subdued. She was everything to him from this moment. He would follow her to the last day of his life, in the worship of her light feet, her delicate hands, of her whole being, adorable and perfect as a dream. She continued to walk before him, with a short quick step, and he followed her closely, suffocated by a thought of the happiness he scarcely dared hope might come to him.

But another sudden gust of wind came up, and there was a perfect flight into the distance of cambric collars and cuffs, of neckerchiefs and chemisettes of muslin, which, as they disappeared, seemed like a flock of white birds knocked about by the tempest.

Angelique began to run.

"Oh dear! What shall I do? You will have to come again and help me. Oh dear!"

They both rushed forward. She caught a kerchief on the borders of the Chevrotte. He had already saved two chemisettes which he found in the midst of some high thistles. One by one the cuffs and the collars were retaken. But in the course of their running at full speed, the flying folds of her skirt had at several different times brushed against him, and each time his face became suddenly red, and his heart beat violently. In his turn, he touched her face accidentally, as she jumped to recover the last fichu, which he had carelessly let go of. She was startled and stood quietly, but breathing more quickly. She joked no longer; her laugh sounded less clear, and she was not tempted to ridicule this great awkward, but most attractive fellow. The feminine nature so recently awakened in her softened her almost to tears, and with the feeling of inexplicable tenderness, which overpowered her, was mingled a half-fear.

What was the matter with her that she was less gay, and that she was so overcome by this delicious pang? When he held out the kerchief to her, their hands, by chance, touched for a moment. They trembled, as they looked at each other inquiringly. Then she drew back quickly, and for several seconds seemed not to know what she should do under the extraordinary circumstances which had just occurred. At last she started. Gathering up all the smaller articles of linen in her arms, and leaving the rest, she turned towards her home.

Felicien then wished to speak . . . "Oh, I beg your pardon. . . . I pray you to——"

But the wind, which had greatly increased, cut off his words. In despair he looked at her as she flew along, as if carried away by the blast. She ran and ran, in and out, among the white sheets and tablecloths, under the oblique, pale golden rays of the sun. Already the shadow of the Cathedral seemed to envelop her, and she was on the point of entering her own garden by the little gate which separated it from the Clos, without having once glanced behind her. But on the threshold she turned quickly, as if seized with a kind impulse, not wishing that he should think she was angry, and confused, but smiling, she called out:

"Thank you. Thank you very much."

Did she wish to say that she was grateful to him for having helped her in recovering the linen? Or was it for something else? She disappeared, and the gate was shut after her.

And he remained alone in the middle of the field, under the great regular gusts, which continued to rage, although the sky was still clear and pure. The elms in the Bishop's garden rustled with a long, billowy sound, and a loud voice seemed to clamour through the terraces and the flying buttresses of the Cathedral. But he heard only the light flapping of a little morning cap, tied to a branch of a lilac bush, as if it were a bouquet, and which belonged to her.

From that date, each time that Angelique opened her window she saw Felicien over there in the Clos-Marie. He passed days in the field, having the chapel window as an excuse for doing so, on which, however, the work did not advance the least in the world. For hours he would forget himself behind a cluster of bushes, where, stretched out on the grass, he watched through the leaves. And it was the greatest of pleasures to smile at each other every morning and evening. She was so happy that she asked for nothing more. There would not be another general washing for three months, so, until then, the little garden-gate would seldom be open. But three months would pass very quickly, and if they could see each other daily, was not that bliss enough? What, indeed, could be more charming than to live in this way, thinking during the day of the evening look, and during the night of the glance of the early morrow? She existed only in the hope of that desired moment; its joy filled her life. Moreover, what good would there be in approaching each other and in talking together? Were they not constantly becoming better acquainted without meeting? Although at a distance, they understood each other perfectly; each penetrated into the other's innermost thoughts with the closest intimacy. At last, they became so filled one with the other that they could not close their eyes without seeing before them, with an astonishing clearness of detail, the image of their new friend; so, in reality, they were never separated.

It was a constant surprise to Angelique that she had unbosomed herself at once to Felicien. At their first meeting she had confided in him, had told him everything about her habits, her tastes, and the deepest secrets of her heart. He, more silent, was called Felicien, and that was all she knew. Perhaps it was quite right that it should be so; the woman giving everything, and the man holding himself back as a stranger. She had no premature curiosity. She continued to smile at the thought of things which would certainly be realised. So for her, that of which she was ignorant counted for nothing. The only important fact in her mind was the intimacy between them, which united them, little by little, apart from the world. She knew nothing about him, yet she was so well acquainted with his nature that she could read his thoughts in a simple look or smile. He, her hero, had come as she always said he would. She had at once recognised him, and they loved each other.

So they enjoyed most thoroughly this true possession from a distance. They were certainly encouraged by the new discoveries they made. She had long, slender hands, roughened a little at the ends of the fingers by her constant use of the needle, but he adored them. She noticed that his feet were small, and was proud of the fact. Everything about him flattered her; she was grateful to him for being so handsome; and she was overcome with joy the evening that she found his beard to be of a lighter shade than his hair, which fact gave a greater softness to his smile. He went away transported when, one morning, as she leaned over the balcony, he saw a little red spot on her pretty neck. Their hearts being thus laid open, new treasures were daily found. Certainly the proud and frank manner in which she opened her window showed that, even in her ignorance as a little embroiderer, she had the royal bearing of a princess. In the same way she knew that he was good, from seeing how lightly he walked over the herbs and the grass. Around them was a radiance of virtues and graces from the first hour of their meeting. Each interview had its special charm. It seemed to them as if their felicity in seeing each other could never be exhausted.

Nevertheless, Felicien soon showed certain signs of impatience, and he no longer remained for hours concealed behind a bush in the immobility of an absolute happiness. As soon as Angelique appeared at her window, he was restless, and tried to approach her as he glided from willow to willow. At length she was a little disturbed, fearing that someone might see him. One day there was almost a quarrel, for he came even to the wall of the house, so she was obliged to leave the balcony. It was a great shock to him that she should be offended, and he showed in the expression of his face so mute a prayer of submission that the next day she pardoned him, and opened her window at the usual hour.

But although expectation was delightful, it was not sufficient for him, and he began again. Now he seemed to be everywhere at once: he filled the Clos-Marie with his restlessness; he came out from behind every tree; he appeared above every bunch of brambles. Like the wood-pigeons of the great elms in the Bishop's garden, he seemed to have his habitation between two branches in the environs. The Chevrotte was an excuse for his passing entire days there, on its willowy banks, bending over the stream, in which he seemed to be watching the floating of the clouds.

One day she saw that he had climbed up on the ruins of the old mill, and was standing on the framework of a shed, looking happy to have thus approached her a little, in his regret at not being able to fly even so far as her shoulder.

Another day she stifled a slight scream as she saw him far above her, leaning on an ornamented balustrade of the Cathedral, on the roof of the chapels of the choir, which formed a terrace. In what way could he have reached this gallery, the door of which was always fastened, and whose key no one had a right to touch but the beadle? Then again, a little later on, how was it that she should find him up in the air among the flying buttresses of the nave and the pinnacles of the piers? From these heights he could look into every part of her chamber, as the swallows who, flying from point to point among the spires, saw everything that was therein, without her having the idea of hiding herself from them. But a human eye was different, and from that day she shut herself up more, and an ever-increasing trouble came to her at the thought that her privacy was being intruded upon, and that she was no longer alone in the atmosphere of adoration that surrounded her. If she were really not impatient, why was it that her heart beat so strongly, like the bell of the clock-tower on great festivals?

Three days passed without Angelique showing herself, so alarmed was she by the increasing boldness of Felicien. She vowed in her mind that she would never see him again, and wound herself up to such a degree of resentment, that she thought she hated him. But he had given her his feverishness. She could not keep still, and the slightest pretext was enough for an excuse to leave the chasuble upon which she was at work.

So, having heard that mere Gabet was ill in bed, in the most profound poverty, she went to see her every morning. Her room was on the Rue des Orfevres, only three doors away from the Huberts. She would take her tea, sugar, and soup, then, when necessary, go to buy her medicine at the druggist's on the Grand Rue. One day, as she returned with her hands full of the little phials, she started at seeing Felicien at the bedside of the old sick woman. He turned very red, and slipped away awkwardly, after leaving a charitable offering. The next day he came in as she was leaving, and she gave him her place, very much displeased. Did he really intend to prevent her from visiting the poor?

In fact, she had been taken with one of her fits of charity, which made her give all she owned that she might overwhelm those who had nothing. At the idea of suffering, her whole soul melted into a pitiful fraternity. She went often to the pere Mascart's, a blind paralytic on the Rue Basse, whom she was obliged to feed herself the broth she carried him; then to the Chouteaux, a man and his wife, each one over ninety years of age, who lived in a little hut on the Rue Magloire, which she had furnished for them with articles taken from the attic of her parents. Then there were others and others still whom she saw among the wretched populace of the quarter, and whom she helped to support from things that were about her, happy in being able to surprise them and to see them brighten up for a little while. But now, strange to say, wherever she went she encountered Felicien! Never before had she seen so much of him; she who had avoided going to her window for fear that he might be near. Her trouble increased, and at last she was very angry.

But the worst of all in this matter was that Angelique soon despaired of her charity. This young man spoilt all her pleasure of giving. In other days he might perhaps have been equally generous, but it was not among the same people, not her own particular poor, of that she was sure. And he must have watched her and followed her very closely to know them all and to take them so regularly one after the other.

Now, go when she might with a little basket of provisions to the Chouteaux, there was always money on the table. One day, when she went to pere Mascart, who was constantly complaining that he had no tobacco, she found him very rich, with a shining new louis d'or on his table. Strangest of all, once when visiting mere Gabet, the latter gave her a hundred franc note to change, and with it she was enabled to buy some high-priced medicines, of which the poor woman had long been in need, but which she never hoped to obtain, for where could she find money to pay for them?

Angelique herself could not distribute much money, as she had none. It was heart-breaking to her to realise her powerlessness, when he could so easily empty his purse. She was, of course, happy that such a windfall had come to the poor, but she felt as if she were greatly diminished in her former self-estimation. She no longer had the same happiness in giving, but was disturbed and sad that she had so little to distribute, while he had so much.

The young man, not understanding her feelings, thinking to conquer her esteem by an increase of gifts, redoubled his charity, and thus daily made hers seem less.

Was not it exasperating to run against this fellow everywhere; to see him give an ox wherever she offered an egg? In addition to all this, she was obliged to hear his praises sung by all the needy whom he visited: "a young man so good, so kind, and so well brought up." She was a mere nothing now. They talked only of him, spreading out his gifts as if to shame hers. Notwithstanding her firm determination to forget him, she could not refrain from questioning them about him. What had he left? What had he said? He was very handsome, was he not? Tender and diffident as a woman! Perhaps he might even have spoken of her! Ah, yes indeed! That was true, for he always talked of her. Then she was very angry; yes, she certainly hated him, for at last she realised that he weighed on her breast too heavily.

But matters could not continue in this way for ever, a change must take place; and one May evening, at a wondrously beautiful nightfall, it came. It was at the home of the Lemballeuse, the family who lived in the ruins of the mill. There were only women there; the old grandmother, seamed with wrinkles but still active, her daughter, and her grandchildren. Of the latter, Tiennette, the elder, was a large, wild-looking girl, twenty years of age, and her two little sisters, Rose and Jeanne, had already bold, fearless eyes, under their unkempt mops of red hair. They all begged during the day on the highway and along the moat, coming back at night, their feet worn out from fatigue in their old shoes fastened with bits of string. Indeed, that very evening Tiennette had been obliged to leave hers among the stones, and had returned wounded and with bleeding ankles. Seated before their door, in the midst of the high grass of the Clos-Marie, she drew out the thorns from her flesh, whilst her mother and the two children surrounded her and uttered lamentations.

Just then Angelique arrived, hiding under her apron the bread which she had brought them, as she did once every week. She had entered the field by the little garden-gate, which she had left open behind her, as she intended to go back as quickly as possible. But she stopped on seeing all the family in tears.

"What is the matter? Why are you in such distress?"

"Ah, my good lady!" whined the mother Lemballeuse, "do not you see in what a terrible state this great foolish girl has put herself? To-morrow she will not be able to walk, so that will be a whole day lost. She must have some shoes!"

Rose and Jeanne, with their eyes snapping from under their tangled hair, redoubled their sobs, as they cried out loudly—

"Yes, yes! She must have some shoes! She must have some shoes!"

Tiennette, half lifting up her thin, dark face, looked round furtively. Then, fiercely, without a word, she made one of her feet bleed still more, maddened over a long splinter which she had just drawn out by the aid of a pin, and which must have pained her intensely.

Angelique, quite touched by the scene, offered her the gift.

"See! Here at least is some bread."

"Oh, bread!" said the mother. "No doubt it is necessary to eat. But it is not with bread that she will be able to walk again, of that I am certain! And we were to go to the fair at Bligny, a fair where, every year, she makes at least two francs. Oh, good heavens! What will become of us if she cannot go there?"

Pity and embarrassment rendered Angelique mute. She had exactly five sous in her pocket. It surely was not with five sous that one could buy a pair of shoes, even at an auction sale. As it had often done before, her want of money now paralysed her. And that which exasperated her still more and made her lose her self-control was that at this moment, as she looked behind her, she saw Felicien, standing a few feet from her in the darkening shadow. Without doubt he had heard all that had been said; perhaps even he had been there for a great while, for he always appeared to her in this way when least expected without her ever knowing whence he came or whither he was going.

She thought to herself, "He will give the shoes."

Indeed, he had already come forward. The first stars were appearing in the pale sky. A sweet, gentle quiet seemed to fall down from on high, soothing to sleep the Clos-Marie, whose willows were lost in the dusk. The Cathedral itself was only a great black bar in the West.

"Yes, certainly, now he will offer to give the shoes."

And at this probability she was really quite discouraged. Was he always, then, to give everything? Could she never, even once, conquer him? Never! Her heart beat so rapidly that it pained her. She wished that she might be very rich, to show him that she, too, could make others happy.

But the Lemballeuse had seen the good gentleman. The mother had rushed forward; the two little sisters moaned as they held out their hands for alms, whilst the elder one, letting go of her wounded ankles, looked at the new-comer inquiringly with her wild eyes.

"Listen, my noisy children," said Felicien. Then, addressing the mother, he continued, "You may go to the Grand Rue, at the corner of the Rue Basse—"

Angelique had understood immediately, for the shoemaker had his shop there. She interrupted him quickly, and was so agitated that she stammered her words at random.

"But that is a useless thing to do! What would be the good of it? It is much more simple—"

Yet she could not find in her own mind the more simple thing she desired. What could she do? What could she invent, so to be before him in giving her charity? Never had it seemed to her possible she could detest him as she did now.

"You will say from me, that it is I who have sent you," continued Felicien. "You will ask—"

Again she interrupted him. The contest lasted a moment longer. She repeated in an anxious way:

"It is, indeed, much more simple; it is much easier—"

Suddenly she was calm. She seated herself upon a stone, thoughtfully examined her shoes, took them off, and then drew off her stockings, saying:

"Look! This is the best thing to do, after all! Why should you have any trouble about the matter?"

"Oh, my good young lady! God will reward you!" exclaimed the mother Lemballeuse, as she turned over the shoes and found they were not only excellent and strong, but almost new. "I will cut them a trifle on the top, to make them a little larger—Tiennette, why do you not thank her, stupid creature?"

Tiennette snatched from the hands of Rose and Jeanne the stockings they were coveting. She did not open her lips; she only gave one long, fixed, hard look.

But now Angelique realised that her feet were bare, and that Felicien saw them. She blushed deeply, and knew not what to do. She dared not move, for, were she to rise to get up, he would only see them all the more. Then, frightened, she rose quickly, and without realising what she was doing, began to run. In the grass her flying feet were very white and small. The darkness of the evening had increased, and the Clos-Marie was a lake of shadow between the great trees on one side and the Cathedral on the other. And on the ground the only visible light came from those same little feet, white and satiny as the wing of a dove.

Startled and afraid of the water, Angelique followed the bank of the Chevrotte, that she might cross it on a plank which served as a bridge. But Felicien had gone a shorter way through the brambles and brushwood. Until now he had always been overcome by his timidity, and he had turned redder than she as he saw her bare feet, pure and chaste as herself. Now, in the overflow of his ignorant youth, passionately fond of beauty and desirous for love, he was impatient to cry out and tell her of the feeling which had entirely taken possession of him since he had first seen her. But yet, when she brushed by him in her flight, he could only stammer, with a trembling voice, the acknowledgment so long delayed and which burnt his lips:

"I love you."

She stopped in surprise. For an instant she stood still, and, slightly trembling, looked at him. Her anger and the hate she thought she had for him all vanished at once, and melted into a most delicious sentiment of astonishment. What had he said, what was the word he had just pronounced, that she should be so overcome by it? She knew that he loved her; yet when he said so, the sound of it in her ear overwhelmed her with an inexplicable joy. It resounded so deeply through her whole being, that her fears came back and were enlarged. She never would dare reply to him; it was really more than she could bear; she was oppressed.

He, grown more bold, his heart touched and drawn nearer to hers by their united deeds of charity, repeated:

"I love you."

And she, fearing the lover, began to run. That was surely the only way to escape such a danger; yet it was also a happiness, it was all so strange. The Chevrotte was gaily singing, and she plunged into it like a startled fawn. Among its pebbles her feet still ran on, under the chill of icy water. The garden-gate was at last reached, it closed, and she disappeared.

CHAPTER VII

For two days Angelique was conscience-smitten. As soon as she was alone, she sobbed as if she had done something wrong. And this question, which she could not answer, came constantly to her mind: Had she sinned in listening to this young man? Was she lost, like the dreadful women in the Legend, who, having been tempted, had yielded to the Devil? Was life to-day as it was centuries ago? The words, so softly uttered, "I love you," still resounded with such a tumult in her ears, and she was confused, yet pleased by them to such a degree, that they must certainly have come from some terrible power hidden in the depth of the invisible. But she knew not—in fact, how could she have known anything in the ignorance and solitude in which she had grown up? Her anguish was redoubled by this mysterious and inexplicable struggle within her.

Had she sinned in making the acquaintance of Felicien, and then in keeping it a secret? She recalled to her mind, one by one, all the details of her daily experience during the past few weeks; she argued with her innocent scruples.

What was sin, in short? Was it simply to meet—to talk—and afterwards to tell a falsehood to one's parents? But that could not be the extent of the evil. Then why was she so oppressed? Why, if not guilty, did she suddenly seem to have become quite another person—as agitated as if a new soul had been given her? Perhaps it was sin that had made her so weak and uncomfortable. Her heart was full of vague, undefined longings—so strange a medley of words, and also of acts, in the future, that she was frightened by them, without in the least understanding them. The blood mounted to her face, and exquisitely coloured her cheeks, as she heard again the sweet, yet appalling words, "I love you"; and she reasoned no longer, but sobbed again, doubting evident facts, fearing the commission of a fault in the beyond—in that which had neither name nor form.

But that which especially distressed her now was that she had not made a confidante of Hubertine. Could she only have asked her what she wished to know, no doubt the latter with a word would have explained the whole mystery to her. Then it seemed to her as if the mere fact of speaking to someone of her trouble would have cured her. But the secret had become too weighty; to reveal it would be more than she could bear, for the shame would be too great. She became quite artful for the moment, affected an air of calmness, when in the depths of her soul a tempest was raging. If asked why she was so pre-occupied, she lifted her eyes with a look of surprise as she replied that she was thinking of something. Seated before the working-frame, her hands mechanically drawing the needle back and forth, very quiet to all outward appearance, she was, from morning till evening, distracted by one thought. To be loved! To be loved! And for herself, on her side, was she in love? This was still an obscure question, to which, in her inexperience, she found no answer. She repeated it so constantly that at last it made her giddy, the words lost all their usual meaning, and everything seemed to be in a whirl, which carried her away. With an effort she recovered herself, and realised that, with needle in hand, she was still embroidering with her accustomed application, although mechanically, as if in a half-dream. Perhaps these strange symptoms were a sign that she was about to have a severe illness. One evening she had such an attack of shivering when she went to bed that she thought she would never be able to recover from it. That idea was at the same time both cruel and sweet. She suffered from it as if it were too great a joy. Even the next day her heart beat as if it would break, and her ears were filled with a singing sound, like the ringing of a distant bell. What could it mean? Was she in love, or was she about to die? Thinking thus, she smiled sweetly at Hubertine, who, in the act of waxing her thread, was looking at her anxiously.

Moreover, Angelique had made a vow that she would never again see Felicien. She no longer ran the risk of meeting him among the brambles and wild grasses in the Clos-Marie, and she had even given up her daily visits to the poor. Her fear was intense lest, were they to find themselves face to face, something terrible might come to pass. In her resolution there was mingled, besides a feeling of penitence, a wish to punish herself for some fault she might unintentionally have committed. So, in her days of rigid humiliation, she condemned herself not even to glance once through the window, so sure was she of seeing on the banks of the Chevrotte the one whom she dreaded. But, after a while, being sorely tempted, she looked out, and if it chanced that he were not there, she was sad and low-spirited until the following day.

One morning, when Hubert was arranging a dalmatic, a ring at the door-bell obliged him to go downstairs. It must be a customer; no doubt an order for some article, as Hubertine and Angelique heard the hum of voices which came through the doorway at the head of the stairs, which remained open. Then they looked up in great astonishment; for steps were mounting, and the embroiderer was bringing someone with him to the workroom, a most unusual occurrence. And the young girl was quite overcome as she recognised Felicien. He was dressed simply, like a journeyman artist, whose hands are white. Since she no longer went to him he had come to her, after days of vain expectation and of anxious uncertainty, during which he had constantly said to himself that she did not yet love him, since she remained hidden from him.

"Look, my dear child, here is something which will be of particular interest to you," explained Hubert. "Monsieur wishes to give orders for an exceptional piece of work. And, upon my word, that we might talk of it at our ease, I preferred that he should come up here at once. This is my daughter, sir, to whom you must show your drawing."

Neither he nor Hubertine had the slightest suspicion that this was not the first time the young people had met. They approached them only from a sentiment of curiosity to see. But Felicien was, like Angelique, almost stifled with emotion and timidity. As he unrolled the design, his hands trembled, and he was obliged to speak very slowly to hide the change in his voice.

"It is to be a mitre for Monseigneur the Bishop. Yes, certain ladies in the city who wished to make him this present charged me with the drawing of the different parts, as well as with the superintendence of its execution. I am a painter of stained glass, but I also occupy myself a great deal with ancient art. You will see that I have simply reconstituted a Gothic mitre."

Angelique bent over the great sheet of parchment which he had spread before her, and started slightly as she exclaimed:

"Oh! it is Saint Agnes."

It was indeed the youthful martyr of but thirteen years of age; the naked virgin clothed with her hair, that had grown so long only her little hands and feet were seen from under it, just as she was upon the pillar at one of the doors of the cathedral; particularly, however, as one found her in the interior of the church, in an old wooden statue that formerly was painted, but was to-day a light fawn colour, all gilded by age. She occupied the entire front of the mitre, half floating, as she was carried towards heaven borne by the angels; which below her, stretched out into the distance, was a fine delicate landscape. The other sides and the lappets were enriched with lance-shaped ornaments of an exquisite style.

"These ladies," continued Felicien, "wish to make the present on the occasion of the Procession of the Miracle, and naturally I thought it my duty to choose Saint Agnes."

"The idea was a most excellent one," interposed Hubert.

And Hubertine added, in her turn:

"Monseigneur will be deeply gratified."

The so-called Procession of the Miracle, which takes place each year on July 28, dates from the time of Jean V d'Hautecoeur, who instituted it as a thanksgiving to God for the miraculous power He had given to him and to his race to save Beaumont from the plague. According to the legend, the Hautecoeurs are indebted for this remarkable gift to the intervention of Saint Agnes, of whom they were the greatest admirers; and since the most ancient time, it has been the custom on the anniversary of her fete to take down the old statue of the saint and carry it slowly in a solemn procession through the streets of the town, in the pious belief that she still continues to disperse and drive away all evils.

"Ah," at last murmured Angelique, her eyes on the design, "the Procession of the Miracle. But that will come in a few days, and we shall not have time enough to finish it."

The Huberts shook their heads. In truth, so delicate a piece of work required the most minute care and attention. Yet Hubertine turned towards her daughter as she said:

"I could help you, my dear. I might attend to the ornaments, and then you will only have the figure to do."

Angelique continued to closely examine the figure of the saint, and was deeply troubled. She said to herself, "No, no." She refused; she would not give herself the pleasure of accepting. It would be inexcusable on her part thus to be an accomplice in a plan, for it was evident that Felicien was keeping something back. She was perfectly sure that he was not poor, and that he wore a workman's dress simply as a disguise; and this affected simplicity, all this history, told only that he might approach her, put her on her guard, amused and happy though she was, in reality, transfiguring him, seeing in him the royal prince that he should be; so thoroughly did she live in the absolute certainty of the entire realisation of her dream, sooner or later.

"No," she repeated in a half-whisper, "we should not have the needed time."

And without lifting her eyes she continued, as if speaking to herself:

"For the saint, we could use neither the close embroidery nor the lace openwork. It would not be worthy of her. It should be an embroidery in gold, shaded by silk."

"Exactly," said Felicien. "That is what I had already thought of, for I knew that Mademoiselle had re-found the secret of making it. There is still quite a pretty little fragment of it at the sacristy."

Hubert was quite excited.

"Yes, yes! it was made in the fifteenth century, and the work was done by one of my far-off ancestresses. . . . Shaded gold! Ah, Monsieur, there was never anything equal to that in the whole world. But, unfortunately, it took too much time, it cost altogether too dear, and, in addition, only a real artist ever succeeded in it. Think of it; it is more than two hundred years since anyone has ever attempted such embroidery. And if my daughter refuses, you will be obliged to give it up entirely, for she is the only person who is qualified to undertake it. I do not know of anyone else who has the delicacy of fingers and the clearness of eye necessary for it."

Hubertine, who, since they had spoken of the style of the work, realised what a great undertaking it was, said, in a quiet, decided tone:

"It would be utterly impossible to do it in a fortnight. It would need the patience and skill of a fairy to accomplish it."

But Angelique, who had not ceased studying all the features of the beautiful martyr, had ended by making a discovery which delighted her beyond expression. Agnes resembled her. In designing from the old statue, Felicien certainly thought of her, and this idea—that she was in his mind, always present with him, that he saw her everywhere—softened her resolution to avoid him. At last she looked up; she noticed how eager he was, and his eyes glistened with so earnest a supplication that she was conquered. Still, with the intuitive half-malice, the love of tormenting, this natural science which comes to all young girls, even when they are entirely ignorant of life, she did not wish to have the appearance of yielding too readily.

"It is impossible," she repeated. "I could not do it for anyone."

Felicien was in despair. He was sure he understood the hidden meaning in her words. It was he whom she had refused, as well as the work. As he was about to go out of the room, he said to Hubert:

"As for the pay, you could have asked any price you wished. These ladies gave me leave to offer as much as three thousand francs."

The household of the Huberts was in no way a selfish one; yet so great a sum startled each member of it. The husband and wife looked at each other inquiringly. Was it not a pity to lose so advantageous an offer?

"Three thousand francs," repeated Angelique, with her gentle voice; "did you say three thousand francs, Monsieur?"

And she, to whom money was nothing, since she had never known its value, kept back a smile, a mocking smile, which scarcely drew the corners of her mouth, rejoicing that she need not seem to yield to the pleasure of seeing him, and glad to give him a false opinion of herself.

"Oh, Monsieur, if you can give three thousand francs for it, then I accept. I would not do it for everyone, but from the moment that one is willing to pay so well, why, that is different. If it is necessary, I can work on it at night, as well as during the day."

Hubert and Hubertine then objected, wishing to refuse in their turn, for fear the fatigue might be too great for her.

"No," she replied. "It is never wise to send away money that is brought to you. You can depend upon me, Monsieur. Your mitre will be ready the evening before the procession."

Felicien left the design and bade them good-day, for he was greatly disappointed, and he had no longer the courage to give any new explanations in regard to the work, as an excuse for stopping longer. What would he gain by doing so? It was certainly true that she did not like him, for she had pretended not to recognise him, and had treated him as she would any ordinary customer, whose money alone is good to take. At first he was angry, as he accused her of being mean-spirited and grasping. So much the better! It was ended between them, this unspoken romance, and he would never think of her again. Then, as he always did think of her, he at last excused her, for was she not dependent upon her work to live, and ought she not to gain her bread?

Two days later he was very unhappy, and he began to wander around the house, distressed that he could not see her. She no longer went out to walk. She did not even go to the balcony, or to the window, as before. He was forced to acknowledge that if she cared not for him, if in reality she was mercenary, in spite of all, his love for her increased daily, as one loves when only twenty years of age, without reasoning, following merely the drawing of one's heart, simply for the joy and the grief of loving.

One morning he caught a glimpse of her for a moment, and realised that he could not give her up. Now she was his chosen one and no other. Whatever she might be, bad or good, ugly or pretty, poor or rich, he would give up his life rather than not be able to claim her.

The third day his sufferings were so great that, notwithstanding all his wise resolves, he returned to the house of the embroiderers.

After having rung the bell, he was received as before, downstairs by Hubert, who, on account of the want of clearness in his explanations in regard to his visit, concluded the best thing to be done was to allow him to go upstairs again.

"My daughter, Monsieur, wishes to speak to you on certain points of the work that I do not quite understand."

Then Felicien stammered, "If it would not disturb Mademoiselle too much, I would like to see how far—These ladies advised me to personally superintend the work—that is, if by doing so I should not be in anyone's way."

Angelique's heart beat violently when she saw him come in. She almost choked, but, making a great effort, she controlled herself. The blood did not even mount her cheeks, and with an appearance of calm indifference, she replied:

"Oh, nothing ever disturbs me, Monsieur. I can work equally well before anyone. As the design is yours, it is quite natural that you should wish to follow the execution of it."

Quite discountenanced by this reception, Felicien would not have dared to have taken a seat, had not Hubertine welcomed him cordially, as she smiled in her sweet, quiet way at this excellent customer. Almost immediately she resumed her work, bending over the frame where she was embroidering on the sides of the mitre the Gothic ornaments in guipure, or open lacework.

On his side, Hubert had just taken down from the wall a banner which was finished, had been stiffened, and for two days past had been hung up to dry, and which now he wished to relax. No one spoke; the three workers kept at their tasks as if no other person had been in the room with them.

In the midst of this charming quiet, the young man little by little grew calmer. When the clock struck three, the shadow of the Cathedral was already very long, and a delicate half-light entered by the window, which was wide open. It was almost like the twilight hour, which commenced early in the afternoon for this little house, so fresh and green from all the verdure that was about it, as it stood by the side of the colossal church. A slight sound of steps was heard on the pavement outside; it was a school of young girls being taken to Confession.

In the workroom, the tools, the time-stained walls, everything which remained there immovable, seemed to sleep in the repose of the centuries, and from every corner came freshness and rest. A great square of white light, smooth and pure, fell upon the frame over which Hubertine and Angelique were bending, with their delicate profiles in the fawn-coloured reflection of the gold.

"Mademoiselle," began Felicien, feeling very awkward, as he realised that he must give some reason for his visit—"I wish to say, Mademoiselle, that for the hair it seems to me it would be better to employ gold rather than silk."

She raised her head, and the laughing expression of her eyes clearly signified that he need not have taken the trouble of coming if he had no other recommendation to make. And she looked down again as she replied, in a half-mocking tone:

"There is no doubt about that, Monsieur."

He was indeed ridiculous, for he remarked then for the first time that it was exactly what she was doing. Before her was the design he had made, but tinted with water-colours, touched up with gold, with all the delicacy of an old miniature, a little softened, like what one sees in some prayer books of the fifteenth century. And she copied this image with the patience and the skill of an artist working with a magnifying glass. After having reproduced it with rather heavy strokes upon the white silk, tightly stretched and lined with heavy linen, she covered this silk with threads of gold carried from the bottom to the top, fastened simply at the two ends, so that they were left free and close to each other. When using the same threads as a woof, she separated them with the point of her needle to find the design below. She followed this same drawing, recovered the gold threads with stitches of silk across, which she assorted according to the colours of the model. In the shaded parts the silk completely hid the gold; in the half-lights the stitches of silk were farther and farther apart, while the real lights were made by gold alone, entirely uncovered. It was thus the shaded gold, that most beautiful of all work, the foundation being modified by the silks, making a picture of mellow colours as if warmed from beneath by a glory and a mystic light.

"Oh!" suddenly said Hubert, who began to stretch out the banner by separating with his fingers the cords of the trellis, "the masterpiece of a woman who embroidered in the olden time was always in this difficult work. To become a member of the Corporation she had to make, as it is written in the statutes, a figure by itself in shaded gold, a sixth part as tall as if life-size. You would have been received, my Angelique."

Again there was an unbroken silence. Felicien watched her constantly, as she stooped forward, absorbed in her task, quite as if she were entirely alone. For the hair of the saint, contrary to the general rule, she had had the same idea as he; that was, to use no silk, but to re-cover gold with gold, and she kept ten needles at work with this brilliant thread of all shades, from the dark red of dying embers, to the pale, delicate yellow tint of the leaves of the forest trees in the autumn. Agnes was thus covered from her neck to her ankles with a stream of golden hair. It began at the back of her head, covered her body with a thick mantle, flowed in front of her from the shoulders in two waves which united under the chin, and fell down to her feet in one wavy sheet. It was, indeed, the miraculous hair, a fabulous fleece, with heavy twists and curls, a glorious, starry efflorescence, the warm and living robe of a saint, perfumed with its pure nudity.

That day Felicien could do nothing but watch Angelique as she embroidered the curls, following the exact direction of their rolling with her little pointed stitches, and he never wearied of seeing the hair grow and radiate under her magic needle. Its weight, and the great quivering with which it seemed to be unrolled at one turn, disturbed him.

Hubertine, occupied in sewing on spangles, hiding the thread with which each one was attached with a tiny round of gold twist, lifted up her head from time to time and gave him a calm motherly look, whenever she was obliged to throw into the waste-basket a spangle that was not well made.

Hubert, who had just taken away the side pieces of wood, that he might unstitch the banner from the frame, was about folding it up carefully. And at last, Felicien, whose embarrassment was greatly increased by this unbroken silence, realised that it was best for him to take leave, since as yet he had not been able to think of any of the suggestions which he had said he intended to make.

He rose, blushed, and stammered:

"I will return another day. I find that I have so badly succeeded in reproducing the charming design of the head of the saint that you may perhaps have need of some explanations from me."

Angelique looked him fully in the face with her sweet, great eyes.

"Oh, not at all. But come again, Monsieur. Do not hesitate to do so, if you are in the least anxious about the execution of the work."

He went away, happy from the permission given him, but chilled by the coldness of manner of the young girl. Yes, he realised that she did not now, and never would, love him. That being the case, what use was there in seeing her? Yet on the morrow, as well as on the following days, he did not fail to go to the little house on the Rue des Orfevres. The hours which he could not pass there were sad enough, tortured as he was by his uncertainties, distressed by his mental struggles. He was never calm, except when he was near her as she sat at her frame. Provided that she was by his side, it seemed to him that he could resign himself to the acceptance of the fact that he was disagreeable to her.

Every morning he arrived at an early hour, spoke of the work, then seated himself as if his presence there were absolutely necessary. Then he was in a state of enchantment simply to look at her, with her finely cut features, her motionless profile, which seemed bathed in the liquid golden tints of her hair; and he watched in ecstasy the skilful play of her flexible hands, as she moved them up and down in the midst of the needlefuls of gold or silk. She had become so habituated to his presence that she was quite at her ease, and treated him as a comrade. Nevertheless, he always felt that there was between them something unexpressed which grieved him to the heart, he knew not why. Occasionally she looked up, regarding him with an amused, half-mocking air, and with an inquiring, impatient expression in her face. Then, finding he was intensely embarrassed she at once became very cold and distant.

But Felicien had discovered one way in which he could rouse her, and he took advantage of it. It was this—to talk to her of her art, of the ancient masterpieces of embroidery he had seen, either preserved among the treasures of cathedrals, or copies of which were engraved in books. For instance, there were the superb copes: that of Charlemagne, in red silk, with the great eagles with unfurled wings; and the cope of Sion, which is decorated with a multitude of saintly figures. Then the dalmatic, which is said to be the most beautiful piece of embroidery in the whole world; the Imperial dalmatic, on which is celebrated the glory of Jesus Christ upon the earth and in heaven, the Transfiguration, and the Last Judgment, in which the different personages are embroidered in silks of various colours, and in silver and gold. Also, there is a wonderful tree of Jesse, an orfrey of silk upon satin, which is so perfect it seems as if it were detached from a window of the fifteenth century; Abraham at the foot, then David, Solomon, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and at the very top the Saviour.

Among the admirable chasubles he had seen, one in particular was touching in its simplicity. It represented Christ on the Cross, and the drops of blood from His side and His feet were made by little splashes of red silk on the cloth of gold, while in the foreground was Mary, tenderly supported by Saint John.

On another one, which is called the chasuble of Naintre, the Virgin is seated in majesty, with richly-wrought sandals on her feet, and holding the Infant Jesus on her knees. Others, and still others of marvelous workmanship were alluded to, venerable not only from their great age and the beautiful faith that they expressed, but from a richness unknown in our time, preserving the odour of the incense of tabernacles and the mystic light which seemed to come from the slightly-faded gold.

"Ah," sighed Angelique, "all those exquisite things are finished now. We can only find certain tones to remind us of their perfection."

With feverish hands and sparkling eyes she stopped working when Felicien related to her the history of the most noted men and women who were embroiderers in the olden time—Simonne de Gaules, Colin Jolye, and others whose names have come down to us through the ages. Then, after a few moments, she took up her needles again, and made them fly vigorously, as she appeared transfigured, and guarded on her face the traces of the delight her artist nature had received in listening to all these accounts. Never had she seemed to him more beautiful, so enthusiastic was she, so maidenly and so pure, seated there in the brighter surroundings of so many coloured silks, applying herself with unfailing exactitude to her work, into the slightest details of which she put her whole soul. When he had left off speaking he looked at her earnestly, until roused by the silence, she realised the excited state into which all these histories had thrown her, and became as embarrassed as if she had done something wrong.

"Oh, dear, look; all my silks are entangled again! Mother, please not to move about so much."

Hubertine, who had not stirred at all, was amused, but simply smiled without saying anything. At first she had been rather disturbed by the constant attentions of the young man, and had talked the matter over thoroughly with Hubert one evening in their room. But they could not help being drawn towards him, and as in every respect his appearance was good and his manners perfectly respectful, they concluded it was not necessary to object to interviews from which Angelique derived so much happiness. So matters were allowed to take their way, and she watched over the young people with a loving air of protection.

Moreover, she herself for many days had been oppressed by the lamenting caresses of her husband, who seemed never to weary of asking her if he had been forgiven. This month was the anniversary of the time when they had lost their child, and each year at this date they had the same regrets and the same longings; he, trembling at her feet, happy to realise that he was pardoned; she, loving and distressed, blaming herself for everything, and despairing that Fate had been inexorable to all their prayers. They spoke of all this to no one, were the same to outsiders in every way, but this increase of tenderness between them came from their room like a silent perfume, disengaged itself from their persons at the least movement, by each word, and by their way of looking at each other, when it seemed as if for the moment they almost exchanged souls. All this was like the grave accompaniment, the deep continuous bass, upon which sang in clear notes the two hearts of the young couple.

One week had passed, and the work on the mitre advanced. These daily meetings had assumed a great and sweet familiarity.

"The forehead should be very high, should it not? Without any trace of eyebrows?"

"Yes, very high, and not the slightest shade. Quite like an old miniature."

"Will you pass me the white silk?"

"Wait a minute, that I may thread it."

He helped her, and this union of work put them at their ease. It made the occupation of each day seem perfectly natural to them both, and without a word of love ever having been spoken, without their hands having once met by a voluntary touch, the bond between them grew stronger each hour, and they were henceforth eternally united one to the other. It was sufficient for them to have lived until now.

"Father, what are you doing that we no longer hear you?"

She turned and saw Hubert, who was occupied in winding a long spool, as his eyes were fixed abstractedly on his wife.

"I am preparing some gold thread for your mother."

And from the reel taken to his wife, from the mute thanks of Hubertine, from the constant little attentions her husband gave her, there was a warm, caressing breath which surrounded and enveloped Angelique and Felicien as they both bent again over the frame. The workroom itself, this ancient hall, as it might almost be called, with its old tools and its peace of other ages, was an unconscious accomplice in this work of union. It seemed so far away from the noise of the street, remote as if in dreamy depths, in this country of good, simple souls, where miracles reign, the easy realisation of all joys.

In five days the mitre was to be finished; and Angelique, now sure that it would be ready to be delivered, and that she would even have twenty-four hours to spare, took a long breath of satisfaction, and seemed suddenly astonished at finding Felicien so near her, with his elbows on the trestle. Had they really become such intimate friends? She no longer attempted to struggle against what she realised was his conquering power; her half-malicious smiles ceased at what he tried to keep back, and which she so well understood, in spite of his subterfuges. What was it, then, that had made her as if asleep, in her late restless waiting? And the eternal question returned, the question that she asked herself every evening when she went to her room. Did she love him? For hours, in the middle of her great bed, she had turned over again and again these words, seeking for meanings she could not find, and thinking she was too ignorant to explain them. But that night, all at once, she felt her heart was softened by some inexplicable happiness. She cried nervously, without reason, and hid her head in her pillow that no one might hear her.

Yes, now she loved him; she loved him enough to be willing to die for him. But why? But how? She could not tell, she never would know; simply from her whole heart came the cry that she did indeed love him. The light had come to her at last; this new, overpowering joy overwhelmed her like the most ardent rays of the sun.

For a long time her tears flowed, but not from sorrow. On the contrary, she was filled with an inexplicable confusion of happiness that was indefinable, regretting now, more deeply than ever, that she had not made a confidante of Hubertine. To-day her secret burdened her, and she made an earnest vow to herself that henceforth she would be as cold as an icicle towards Felicien, and would suffer everything rather than allow him to see her tenderness. He should never know it. To love him, merely to love him, without even acknowledging it, that was the punishment, the trial she must undergo to pardon her fault. It would be to her in reality a delicious suffering. She thought of the martyrs of whom she had read in the "Golden Legend," and it seemed to her that she was their sister in torturing herself in this way, and that her guardian angel, Agnes, would look at her henceforward with sadder, sweeter eyes than ever.

The following day Angelique finished the mitre. She had embroidered with split silk, light as gossamer, the little hands and feet, which were the only points of white, naked flesh that came out from the royal mantle of golden hair. She perfected the face with all the delicacy of the purest lily, wherein the gold seemed like the blood in the veins under the delicate, silken skin. And this face, radiant as the sun, was turned heavenward, as the youthful saint was borne upward by the angels toward the distant horizon of the blue plain.

When Felicien entered that day, he exclaimed with admiration:

"Oh! how exactly she looks like you."

It was an involuntary expression; an acknowledgment of the resemblance he had purposely put in the design. He realised the fact after he had spoken, and blushed deeply.

"That is indeed true, my little one; she has the same beautiful eyes that you have," said Hubert, who had come forward to examine the work.

Hubertine merely smiled now, having made a similar remark many days before, and she was surprised and grieved when she heard Angelique reply in a harsh, disagreeable tone of voice, like that she sometimes had in her fits of obstinacy years ago:

"My beautiful eyes! Why will you make fun of me in that way? I know as well as you do that I am very ugly."

Then, getting up, she shook out her dress, overacting her assumed character of a harsh, avaricious girl.

"Ah, at last! It is really finished! I am thankful, for it was too much of a task, too heavy a burden on my shoulders. Do you know, I would never undertake to make another one for the same price?"

Felicien listened to her in amazement. Could it be that after all she still cared only for money? Had he been mistaken when he thought at times she was so exquisitely tender, and so passionately devoted to her artistic work? Did she in reality wish for the pay her labour brought her? And was she so indifferent that she rejoiced at the completion of her task, wishing neither to see nor to hear of it again? For several days he had been discouraged as he sought in vain for some pretext of continuing, later on, visits that gave him such pleasure. But, alas! it was plain that she did not care for him in the least, and that she never would love him. His suffering was so great that he grew very pale and could scarcely speak.

"But, Mademoiselle, will you not make up the mitre?"

"No, mother can do it so much better than I can. I am too happy at the thought that I have nothing more to do with it."

"But do you not like the work which you do so well?"

"I? I do not like anything in the world."

Hubertine was obliged to speak to her sternly, and tell her to be quiet. She then begged Felicien to be so good as to pardon her nervous child, who was a little weary from her long-continued application. She added that the mitre would be at his disposal at an early hour on the following morning. It was the same as if she had asked him to go away, but he could not leave. He stood and looked around him in this old workroom, filled with shade and with peace, and it seemed to him as if he were being driven from Paradise. He had spent so many sweet hours there in the illusion of his brightest fancies, that it was like tearing his very heart-strings to think all this was at an end. What troubled him the worst was his inability to explain matters, and that he could only take with him such a fearful uncertainty. At last he said good-day, resolved to risk everything at the first opportunity rather than not to know the truth.

Scarcely had he closed the door when Hubert asked:

"What is the matter with you, my dear child? Are you ill?"

"No, indeed. It is simply that I am tired of having that young man here. I do not wish to see him again."

Then Hubertine added: "Very well; you will not see him again. But nothing should ever prevent one from being polite."

Angelique, making some trivial excuse, hurried up to her room as quickly as possible. Then she gave free course to her tears. Ah, how intensely happy she was, yet how she suffered! Her poor, dear beloved; he was sad enough when he found he must leave her! But she must not forget that she had made a vow to the saints, that although she loved him better than life, he should never know it.

CHAPTER VIII

On the evening of this same day, immediately after leaving the dinner-table, Angelique complained of not being at all well, and went up at once to her room. The agitation and excitement of the morning, her struggles against her true self, had quite exhausted her. She made haste to go to bed, and covering her head with the sheet, with a desperate feeling of disappearing for ever if she could, again the tears came to her relief.

The hours passed slowly, and soon it was night—a warm July night, the heavy, oppressive quiet of which entered through the window, which had been left wide open. In the dark heavens glistened a multitude of stars. It must have been nearly eleven o'clock, and the moon, already grown quite thin in its last quarter, would not rise until midnight.

And in the obscure chamber, Angelique still wept nervously a flow of inexhaustible tears, seemingly without reason, when a slight noise at her door caused her to lift up her head.

There was a short silence, when a voice called her tenderly.

"Angelique! Angelique! My darling child!"

She recognised the voice of Hubertine. Without doubt the latter, in her room with her husband, had just heard the distant sound of sobbing, and anxious, half-undressed, she had come upstairs to find out what was the matter with her daughter.

"Angelique, are you ill, my dear?"

Retaining her breath, the young girl made no answer. She did not wish to be unkind, but her one absorbing idea at this moment was of solitude. To be alone was the only possible alleviation of her trouble. A word of consolation, a caress, even from her mother, would have distressed her. She imagined that she saw her standing at the other side of the door, and from the delicacy of the rustling movement on the tiled floor she thought she must be barefooted. Two or three minutes passed, and she knew the kind watcher had not left her place, but that, stooping, and holding with her beautiful hands the clothing so carelessly thrown over her, she still listened at the keyhole.

Hubertine, hearing nothing more, not even a sigh, did not like to call again. She was very sure that she had heard sobs; but if the child had at last been able to sleep, what good would it do to awaken her? She waited, however, another moment, troubled by the thought of a grief which her daughter hid from her, confusedly imagining what it might be from the tender emotion with which her heart seemed filled from sympathy. At last she concluded to go down as she had come up, quietly, her hands being so familiar with every turning that she needed no candle, and leaving behind her no other sound than the soft, light touch of her bare feet.

Then, sitting up in bed, Angelique in her turn listened. So profound was the outward silence that she could clearly distinguish the slight pressure of the heel on the edge of each step of the stairway. At the foot, the door of the chamber was opened, then closed again; afterward, she heard a scarcely-distinct murmur, an affectionate, yet sad blending of voices in a half-whisper. No doubt it was what her father and mother were saying of her; the fears and the hopes they had in regard to her. For a long time that continued, although they must have put out their light and gone to bed.

Never before had any night sounds in this old house mounted in this way to her ears. Ordinarily, she slept the heavy, tranquil sleep of youth; she heard nothing whatever after placing her head upon her pillow; whilst now, in the wakefulness caused by the inner combat against an almost overpowering sentiment of affection which she was determined to conquer, it seemed to her as if the whole house were in unison with her, that it was also in love, and mourned like herself. Were not the Huberts, too, sad, as they stilled their tears and thought of the child they had lost long ago, whose place, alas! had never been filled? She knew nothing of this in reality, but she had a sensation in this warm night of the watch of her parents below her, and of the disappointment in their lives, which they could not forget, notwithstanding their great love for each other, which was always as fresh as when they were young.

Whilst she was seated in this way, listening in the house that trembled and sighed, Angelique lost all self-control, and again the tears rolled down her face, silently, but warm and living, as if they were her life's blood. One question above all others had troubled her since the early morning, and had grieved her deeply. Was she right in having sent away Felicien in despair, stabbed to the heart by her coldness, and with the thought that she did not love him? She knew that she did love him, yet she had willingly caused him to suffer, and now in her turn she was suffering intensely. Why should there be so much pain connected with love? Did the saints wish for tears? Could it be that Agnes, her guardian angel, was angry in the knowledge that she was happy? Now, for the first time, she was distracted by a doubt. Before this, whenever she thought of the hero she awaited, and who must come sooner or later, she had arranged everything much more satisfactorily. When the right time arrived he was to enter her very room, where she would immediately recognise and welcome him, when they would both go away together, to be united for evermore. But how different was the reality! He had come, and, instead of what she had foreseen, their meeting was most unsatisfactory; they were equally unhappy, and were eternally separated. To what purpose? Why had this result come to pass? Who had exacted from her so strange a vow, that, although he might be very dear to her, she was never to let him know it?

But, yet again, Angelique was especially grieved from the fear that she might have been bad and done some very wrong thing. Perhaps the original sin that was in her had manifested itself again as when she was a little girl! She thought over all her acts of pretended indifference: the mocking air with which she had received Felicien, and the malicious pleasure she took in giving him a false idea of herself. And the astonishment at what she had done, added to a cutting remorse for her cruelty, increased her distress. Now, her whole heart was filled with a deep infinite pity for the suffering she had caused him without really meaning to do so.

She saw him constantly before her, as he was when he left the house in the morning: the despairing expression of his face, his troubled eyes, his trembling lips; and in imagination she followed him through the streets, as he went home, pale, utterly desolate, and wounded to the heart's core by her. Where was he now? Perhaps at this hour he was really ill!

She wrung her hands in agony, distressed that she could not at once repair the evil she had done. Ah! how she revolted at the idea of having made another suffer, for she had always wished to be good, and to render those about her as happy as possible.

Twelve o'clock would ere long ring out from the old church-tower; the great elms of the garden of the Bishop's palace hid the moon, which was just appearing above the horizon, and the chamber was still dark. Then, letting her head fall back upon the pillow, Angelique dwelt no longer upon these disturbing questions, as she wished to go to sleep. But this she could not do; although she kept her eyes closed, her mind was still active; she thought of the flowers which every night during the last fortnight she had found when she went upstairs upon the balcony before her window. Each evening it was a lovely bouquet of violets, which Felicien had certainly thrown there from the Clos-Marie. She recollected having told him that flowers generally gave her a sick headache, whilst violets alone had the singular virtue of calming her, and so he had sent her quiet nights, a perfumed sleep refreshed by pleasant dreams. This evening she had placed the bouquet by her bedside. All at once she had the happy thought of taking it into her bed with her, putting it near her cheek, and, little by little, being soothed with its sweet breath. The purple blossoms did indeed do her good. Not that she slept, however; but she lay there with closed eyes, penetrated by the refreshing odour that came from his gift; happy to await events, in a repose and confident abandonment of her whole being.

But suddenly she started. It was past midnight. She opened her eyes, and was astonished to find her chamber filled with a clear bright light. Above the great elms the moon rose slowly, dimming the stars in the pale sky. Through the window she saw the apse of the cathedral, almost white, and it seemed to her as if it were the reflection of this whiteness which entered her room, like the light of the dawn, fresh and pure. The whitewashed walls and beams, all this blank nudity was increased by it, enlarged, and moved back as if it were unreal as a dream.

She still recognised, however, the old, dark, oaken furniture—the wardrobe, the chest and the chairs, with the shining edges of their elaborate carvings. The bedstead alone—this great square, royal couch—seemed new to her, as if she saw it for the first time, with its high columns supporting its canopy of old-fashioned, rose-tinted cretonne, now bathed with such a sheet of deep moonlight that she half thought she was on a cloud in the midst of the heavens, borne along by a flight of silent, invisible wings. For a moment she felt the full swinging of it; it did not seem at all strange or unnatural to her. But her sight soon grew accustomed to the reality; her bed was again in its usual corner, and she was in it, not moving her head, her eyes alone turning from side to side, as she lay in the midst of this lake of beaming rays, with the bouquet of violets upon her lips.

Why was it that she was thus in a state of waiting? Why could she not sleep? She was sure that she expected someone. That she had grown quite calm was a sign that her hero was about to appear. This consoling light, which put to flight the darkness of all bad dreams, announced his arrival. He was on his way, and the moon, whose brightness almost equalled that of the sun, was simply his forerunner. She must be ready to greet him.

The chamber was as if hung with white velvet now, so they could see each other well. Then she got up, dressed herself thoroughly, putting on a simple white gown of foulard, the same she had worn the day of their excursion to the ruins of Hautecoeur. She did not braid her hair, but let it hang over her shoulders. She put a pair of slippers upon her bare feet, and drawing an armchair in front of the window, seated herself, and waited in patience.

Angelique did not pretend to know how he would appear. Without doubt, he would not come up the stairs, and it might be that she would simply see him over the Clos-Marie, while she leaned from the balcony. Still, she kept her place on the threshold of the window, as it seemed to her useless to go and watch for him just yet. So vague was her idea of real life, so mystic was love, that she did not understand in her imaginative nature why he might not pass through the walls, like the saints in the legends. Why should not miracles come now, as in the olden days, for had not all this been ordained from the beginning?

Not for a moment did she think she was alone to receive him. No, indeed! She felt as if she were surrounded by the crowd of virgins who had always been near her, since her early youth. They entered on the rays of the moonlight, they came from the great dark trees with their blue-green tops in the Bishop's garden, from the most intricate corners of the entanglement of the stone front of the Cathedral. From all the familiar and beloved horizon of the Chevrotte, from the willows, the grasses, and bushes, the young girl heard the dreams which came back to her, the hopes, the desires, the visions, all that which she had put of herself into inanimate objects as she saw them daily, and which they now returned to her. Never had the voices of the Invisible unknown spoken so clearly. She listened to them as they came from afar, recognising particularly in this warm, beautiful night, so calm that there was not the slightest movement in the air, the delicate sound which she was wont to call the fluttering of the robe of Agnes, when her dear guardian angel came to her side. She laughed quietly to know that she was now by her, and waiting with the others who were near her.

Time passed, but it did not seem long to Angelique. She was quite conscious of what was passing around her. It appeared to her perfectly natural, and exactly as it had been foretold, when at last she saw Felicien striding over the balustrade of the balcony.

His tall figure came out in full relief before the background of the white sky; he did not approach the open window, but remained in its luminous shadow.

"Do not be afraid. It is I. I have come to see you."

She was not in the slightest way alarmed; she simply thought that he was exact to the hour of meeting, and said calmly:

"You mounted by the timber framework, did you not?"

"Yes, by the framework."

The idea of this way made her laugh, and he himself was amused by it. He had in fact pulled himself up by the pent-house shed; then, climbing along the principal rafters from there, whose ends were supported by the string-course of the first story, he had without difficulty reached the balcony.

"I was expecting you. Will you not come nearer me?"

Felicien, who had arrived in a state of anger, not knowing how he had dared to come, but with many wild ideas in his head, did not move, so surprised and delighted was he by this unexpected reception. As he had come at last, Angelique was now certain that the saints did not prohibit her from loving, for she heard them welcoming him with her by a laugh as delicate as a breath of the night. Where in the world had she ever found so ridiculous an idea as to think that Agnes would be angry with her! On the contrary, Agnes was radiant with a joy that she felt as it descended on her shoulders and enveloped her like a caress from two great wings. All those who had died for love showed great compassion for youthful troubles, and only returned to earth on summer nights, that, although invisible, they might watch those young hearts who were sorrowful from affection.

"But why do you not come to me? I was waiting for you."

Then, hesitatingly, Felicien approached. He had been so excited, so carried away by anger at her indifference, that he had said she should be made to love him, and that, were it necessary, he would carry her away even against her will. And lo! now finding her so gentle as he penetrated almost to the entrance of this chamber, so pure and white, he became subdued at once, and as gentle and submissive as a child.

He took three steps forward. But he was afraid, and not daring to go farther, he fell on his knees at the end of the balcony.

"Could you but know," he said, "the abominable tortures I have passed through. I have never imagined a worse suffering. Really, the only true grief is to think that you are not beloved by the person to whom you have given your affection. I would willingly give up all else; would consent to be poor, dying from hunger, or racked by pain; but I will not pass another day with this terrible doubt gnawing at my heart, of thinking that you do not love me. Be good, I pray you, and pity me."

She listened to him, silent, overcome with compassion, yet very happy withal.

"This morning you sent me away in such a dreadful manner! I had fancied to myself that you had changed your feelings towards me, and that, appreciating my affection, you liked me better. But, alas! I found you exactly as you had been on the first day, cold, indifferent, treating me as you would have done any other simple customer who passed, recalling me harshly to the commonplaces of life. On the stairway I staggered. Once outside, I ran, and was afraid I might scream aloud. Then, the moment I reached home, it seemed to me I should stifle were I to enter the house. So I rushed out into the fields, walking by chance first on one side of the road and then on another. Evening came, and I was still wandering up and down. But the torment of spirit moved faster than ever and devoured me. When one is hopelessly in love, it is impossible to escape from the pains accompanying one's affection. Listen!" he said, and he touched his breast; "it is here that you stabbed me, and the point of the knife still continues to penetrate deeper and deeper."

He gave a long sigh at the keen recollection of his torture.

"I found myself at last in a thicket, overcome by my distress, like a tree that has been drawn up by the roots. To me, the only thing that existed in life, in the future, was you. The thought that you might never be mine was more than I could bear. Already my feet were so weary that they would no longer support me. I felt that my hands were growing icy cold, and my head was filled with the strangest fancies. And that is why I am here. I do not know at all how I came, or where I found the necessary strength to bring me to you. You must try to forgive me; but had I been forced to do so, I would have broken open doors with my fists, I would have clambered up to this balcony in broad daylight, for my will was no longer under my control, and I was quite wild. Now, will you not pardon me?"

She was a little in the shadow, and he, on his knees in the full moonlight, could not see that she had grown very pale in her tender repentance, and was too touched by his story to be able to speak. He thought that she was still insensible to his pleadings, and he joined his hands together most beseechingly.

"All my interest in you commenced long ago. It was one night when I saw you for the first time, here at your window. You were only a vague, white shadow; I could scarcely distinguish one of your features, yet I saw you and imagined you just as you are in reality. But I was timid and afraid, so for several days I wandered about here, never daring to try to meet you in the open day. And, in addition, since this is a confession, I must tell you everything; you pleased me particularly in this half mystery; it would have disturbed me to have you come out from it, for my great happiness was to dream of you as if you were an apparition, or an unknown something to be worshipped from afar, without ever hoping to become acquainted with you. Later on, I knew who you were, for after all it is difficult to resist the temptation to know what may be the realisation of one's dream. It was then that my restlessness commenced. It has increased at each meeting. Do you recollect the first time that we spoke to each other in the field near by, on that forenoon when I was examining the painted window? Never in my life did I feel so awkward as then, and it was not strange that you ridiculed me so. Afterwards I frightened you, and realised that I continued to be very unfortunate in following you, even in the visits you made to the poor people. Already I ceased to be master of my own actions, and did things that astonished me beyond measure, and which, under usual circumstances, I would not have dared attempt. For instance, when I presented myself here with the order for a mitre, I was pushed forward by an involuntary force, as, personally, I dared not do it, knowing that I might make you angry. But at present I cannot regain my old self, I can only obey my impulses. I know that you do not like me, and yet, as you see, in spite of it all I have come back to you, that I may hear you tell me so. If you would but try to understand how miserable I am. Do not love me if it is not in your heart to do so. I must accept my fate. But at least allow me to love you. Be as cold as you please, be hateful if you will—I shall adore you whatever you may choose to be. I only ask to be able to see you, even without any hope; merely for the joy of living thus at your feet."

Felicien stopped, disheartened, losing all courage as he thought he would never find any way of touching her heart. And he did not see that Angelique smiled, half hidden as she was by the open window-sash. It was an invincible smile, that, little by little, spread over her whole face. Ah! the dear fellow! How simple and trusting he was as he outpoured the prayer of his heart, filled with new longings and love, in bowing before her, as before the highest ideal of all his youthful dreams.

To think that she had ever been so foolish as at first to try to avoid all meetings with him, and then, later on, had determined that although she could not help loving him, he should never know it! Such folly on her part was quite inexplicable. Since love is right, and is the fate of all, what good could be gained by making martyrs of them both?

A complete silence ensued, and in her enthusiastic, imaginative, nervous state, she heard, louder than ever, in the quiet of the warm night, the voices of the saints about her, who said love was never forbidden when it was so ardent and true as this. Behind her back a bright flash of light had suddenly appeared; scarcely a breath, but a delicate wave from the moon upon the chamber floor. An invisible finger, no doubt that of her guardian angel, was placed upon her mouth, as if to unseal her lips and relieve her from her vow. Henceforth she could freely unburden herself and tell the truth. All that which was powerful and tender in her surroundings now whispered to her words which seemed to come from the infinite unknown.

Then, at last, Angelique spoke.

"Ah! yes, I recollect—I recollect it all."

And Felicien was at once carried away with delight by the music of this voice, whose extreme charm was so great over him that his love seemed to increase simply from listening to it.

"Yes, I remember well when you came in the night. You were so far away those first evenings that the little sound you made in walking left me in quite an uncertain state. At last I realised perfectly that it was you who approached me, and a little later I recognised your shadow. At length, one evening you showed yourself boldly, on a beautiful, bright night like this, in the full white light of the moon. You came out so slowly from the inanimate objects near you, like a creation from all the mysteries that surrounded me, exactly as I had expected to see you for a long time, and punctual to the meeting.

"I have never forgotten the great desire to laugh, which I kept back, but which broke forth in spite of me, when you saved the linen that was being carried away by the Chevrotte. I recollect my anger when you robbed me of my poor people, by giving them so much money, and thus making me appear as a miser. I can still recall my fear on the evening when you forced me to run so fast through the grass with my bare feet. Oh, yes, I have not forgotten anything—not the slightest thing."

At this last sentence her voice, pure and crystalline, was a little broken by the thought of those magic words of the young man, the power of which she felt so deeply when he said, "I love you," and a deep blush passed over her face. And he—he listened to her with delight.

"It is indeed true that I did wrong to tease you. When one is ignorant, one is often so foolish. One does many things which seem necessary, simply from the fear of being found fault with if following the impulses of the heart. But my remorse for all this was deep, and my sufferings, in consequence, were as great as yours. Were I to try to explain all this to you, it would be quite impossible for me to do so. When you came to us with your drawing of Saint Agnes, oh! I could have cried out, 'Thank you, thank you!' I was perfectly enchanted to work for you, as I thought you would certainly make us a daily visit. And yet, think of it! I pretended to be indifferent, as if I had taken upon myself the task of doing all in my power to drive you from the house. Has one ever the need of being willfully unhappy? Whilst in reality I longed to welcome you and to receive you with open hands, there seemed to be in the depths of my nature another woman than myself, who revolted, who was afraid of and mistrusted you—whose delight it was to torture you with uncertainty, in the vague idea of setting up a quarrel, the cause of which, in a time long passed, had been quite forgotten. I am not always good; often in my soul things seem to creep up that I cannot explain or account for. The worst of it was that I dared to speak to you of money. Fancy it, then! Of money! I, who have never thought of it, who would accept chariots of it, only for the pleasure of making it rain down as I wished, among the needy! What a malicious amusement I gave myself in this calumniating my character. Will you ever forgive me?"

CHAPTER IX

Felicien was at her feet. Until now he had kept his place in the remote corner of the balcony. But in the intense happiness she gave him in thus unfolding the innermost secrets of her soul he had drawn himself on his knees towards her, as he approached the window. This great, illimitable joy was so unlooked for, that he yielded to it in all the infinitude of its hopes of the future.

He half whispered:

"Ah, dear soul, pure, kind, and beautiful, your wonderful goodness has cured me as with a breath! I know not now if I have ever suffered. And, in your turn, you will now have to pardon me, for I have an acknowledgment to make to you. I must tell you who I am."

He was troubled at the thought he could no longer disguise himself or his position, since she had confided so freely and entirely in him. It would be disloyal in the highest degree to do so. Yet he hesitated, lest he might, after all, lose her, were she to be anxious about the future when at last she knew the facts.

And she waited for him to speak again, a little malicious in spite of herself.

In a very low voice he continued:

"I have told a falsehood to your parents."

"Yes, I know it," she said as she smiled.

"No, you do not know it; you could not possibly know it, for all that happened too long ago. I only paint on glass for my own pleasure, and as a simple amusement; you really ought to be told of that."

Then, with a quick movement, she put her hand on his mouth, as if she wished to prevent this explanation.

"I do not care to hear any more. I have been expecting you. I knew that sooner or later you would come, and you have done so. That is all-sufficient."

They talked no longer for a while. That little hand over his lips seemed almost too great a happiness for him.

"When the right time comes, then I shall know all. Yet I assure you that I am ignorant of nothing connected with you, for everything had been revealed to me before our first meeting. You were to be, and can be, only the handsomest, the richest, and the most noble of men, the one above all others; for that has ever been my dream, and in the sure certainty of its full accomplishment I wait calmly. You are the chosen hero who it was ordained should come, and I am yours."

A second time she interrupted herself in the tremor of the words she pronounced. She did not appear to say them by herself alone; they came to her as if sent by the beautiful night from the great white heavens, from the old trees, and the aged stones sleeping outside and dreaming aloud the fancies of the young girl. From behind her voices also whispered them to her, the voices of her friends in the "Golden Legend," with whom she had peopled the air and the space around her. In this atmosphere she had ever lived—mysticism, in which she revelled until it seemed fact on one side, and the daily work of life on the other. Nothing seemed strange to her.

Now but one word remained to be said—that which would express all the long waiting, the slow creation of affection, the constantly increasing fever of restlessness. It escaped from her lips like a cry from a distance, from the white flight of a bird mounting upward in the light of the early dawn, in the pure whiteness of the chamber behind her.

"I love you."

Angelique, her two hands spread out, bent forward towards Felicien. And he recalled to himself the evening when she ran barefooted through the grass, making so adorable a picture that he pursued her in order to stammer in her ear these same words: "I love you." He knew that now she was simply replying to him with the same cry of affection, the eternal cry, which at last came from her freely-opened heart.

"Yes, I love you. I am yours. Lead the way, and I will follow you wherever it may be."

In this surrender of her soul she gave herself to him fully and entirely. It was the hereditary flame relighted within her—the pride and the passion she thought had been conquered, but which awoke at the wish of her beloved. He trembled before this innocence, so ardent and so ingenuous. He took her hands gently, and crossed them upon her breast. For a moment he looked at her, radiant with the intense happiness her confession had given him, unwilling to wound her delicacy in the slightest degree, and not thinking of yielding to the temptation of even kissing her hair.

"You love me, and you know that I love you! Ah! what bliss there is in such knowledge."

But they were suddenly drawn from their ecstatic state by a change about them. What did it all mean? They realised that now they were looking at each other under a great white light. It seemed to them as if the brightness of the moon had been increased, and was as resplendent as that of the sun. It was in reality the daybreak, a slight shade of which already tinged with purple the tops of the elm-trees in the neighbouring gardens. What? It could not be possible that the dawn had come? They were astonished by it, for they did not realise so long a time had passed since they began to talk together on the balcony. She had as yet told him nothing, and he had so many things he wished to say!

"Oh, stay one minute more, only one minute!" he exclaimed.

The daylight advanced still faster—the smiling morning, already warm, of what was to be a hot day in summer. One by one the stars were extinguished, and with them fled the wandering visions, and all the host of invisible friends seemed to mount upward and to glide away on the moon's rays.

Now, in the full, clear light, the room behind them had only its ordinary whiteness of walls and ceiling, and seemed quite empty with its old-fashioned furniture of dark oak. The velvet hangings were no longer there, and the bedstead had resumed its original shape, as it stood half hidden by the falling of one of its curtains.

"Do stay! Let me be near you only one minute more!"

Angelique, having risen, refused, and begged Felicien to leave immediately. Since the day had come, she had grown confused and anxious. The reality was now here. At her right hand, she seemed to hear a delicate movement of wings, whilst her hair was gently blown, although there was not the slightest breath of wind. Was it not Saint Agnes, who, having remained until the last, was now forced to leave, driven away by the sun?

"No, leave me, I beg of you. I am unwilling you should stay longer."

Then Felicien, obedient, withdrew.

To know that he was beloved was enough for him, and satisfied him. Still, before leaving the balcony, he turned, and looked at her again fixedly, as if he wished to carry away with him an indelible remembrance of her. They both smiled at each other as they stood thus, bathed with light, in this long caressing look.

At last he said:

"I love you."

And she gently replied:

"I love you."

That was all, and he had in a moment, with the agility of a bird, gone down the woodwork of the corner of the building, while she, remaining on the balcony, leaned on the balustrade and watched him, with her tender, beautiful eyes. She had taken the bouquet of violets and breathed the perfume to cool her feverishness. When, in crossing the Clos-Marie, he lifted his head, he saw that she was kissing the flowers.

Scarcely had Felicien disappeared behind the willows, when Angelique was disturbed by hearing below the opening of the house-door. Four o'clock had just struck, and no one was in the habit of getting up until two hours later. Her surprise increased when she recognised Hubertine, as it was always Hubert who went down the first. She saw her follow slowly the walks of the narrow garden, her arms hanging listlessly at her sides, as if, after a restless, sleepless night, a feeling of suffocating, a need of breathing the fresh air, had made her leave her room so early. And Hubertine was really very beautiful, with her clothes so hastily put on; and she seemed very weary—happy, but in the deepest grief.

The morning of the next day, on waking from a sound sleep of eight hours, one of those sweet, deep, refreshing sleeps that come after some great happiness, Angelique ran to her window. The sky was clear, the air pure, and the fine weather had returned after a heavy shower of the previous evening. Delighted, she called out joyously to Hubert, who was just opening the blinds below her:

"Father! Father! Do look at the beautiful sunlight. Oh, how glad I am, for the procession will be superb!"

Dressing herself as quickly as possible, she hurried to go downstairs. It was on that day, July 28, that the Procession of the Miracle would pass through the streets of the upper town. Every summer at this date it was also a festival for the embroiderers; all work was put aside, no needles were threaded, but the day was passed in ornamenting the house, after a traditional arrangement that had been transmitted from mother to daughter for four hundred years.

All the while that she was taking her coffee, Angelique talked of the hangings.

"Mother, we must look at them at once, to see if they are in good order."

"We have plenty of time before us, my dear," replied Hubertine, in her quiet way. "We shall not put them up until afternoon."

The decorations in question consisted of three large panels of the most admirable ancient embroidery, which the Huberts guarded with the greatest care as a sacred family relic, and which they brought out once a year on the occasion of the passing of this special procession.

The previous evening, according to a time-honoured custom, the Master of the Ceremonies, the good Abbe Cornille, had gone from door to door to notify the inhabitants of the route which would be taken by the bearers of the statue of Saint Agnes, accompanied by Monseigneur the Bishop, carrying the Holy Sacrament. For more than five centuries this route had been the same. The departure was made from the portal of Saint Agnes, then by the Rue des Orfevres to the Grand Rue, to the Rue Basse, and after having gone through the whole of the lower town, it returned by the Rue Magloire and the Place du Cloitre, to reappear again at the great front entrance of the Church. And the dwellers on all these streets, vying with each other in their zeal, decorated their windows, hung upon their walls their richest possessions in silks, satins, velvets, or tapestry, and strewed the pavements with flowers, particularly with the leaves of roses and carnations.

Angelique was very impatient until permission had been given her to take from the drawers, where they had been quietly resting for the past twelve months, the three pieces of embroidery.

"They are in perfect order, mother. Nothing has happened to them," she said, as she looked at them, enraptured.

She had with the greatest care removed the mass of silk paper that protected them from the dust, and they now appeared in all their beauty. The three were consecrated to Mary. The Blessed Virgin receiving the visit of the Angel of the Annunciation; the Virgin Mother at the foot of the Cross; and the Assumption of the Virgin. They were made in the fifteenth century, of brightly coloured silks wrought on a golden background, and were wonderfully well preserved. The family had always refused to sell them, although very large sums had been offered by different churches, and they were justly proud of their possessions.

"Mother, dear, may I not hang them up to-day?"

All these preparations required a great deal of time. Hubert was occupied the whole forenoon in cleaning the front of the old building. He fastened a broom to the end of a long stick, that he might dust all the wooden panels decorated with bricks, as far as the framework of the roof; then with a sponge he washed all the sub-basement of stone, and all the parts of the stairway tower that he could reach. When that was finished, the three superb pieces of embroidery were put in their places. Angelique attached them, by their rings, to venerable nails that were in the walls; the Annunciation below the window at the left, the Assumption below the window at the right, while for the Calvary, the nails for that were above the great window of the first story, and she was obliged to use a step-ladder that she might hang it there in its turn. She had already embellished the window with flowers, so that the ancient dwelling seemed to have gone back to the far-away time of its youth, with its embroideries of gold and of silk glistening in the beautiful sunshine of this festive day.

After the noon breakfast the activity increased in every direction, and the whole Rue des Orfevres was now in excitement. To avoid the great heat, the procession would not move until five o'clock, but after twelve the town began to be decorated. Opposite the Huberts', the silversmith dressed his shop with draperies of an exquisite light blue, bordered with a silver fringe; while the wax-chandler, who was next to him, made use of his window-curtains of red cotton, which looked more brilliant than ever in the broad light of day. At each house there were different colours; a prodigality of stuffs, everything that people owned, even to rugs of all descriptions, were blowing about in the weary air of this hot summer afternoon. The street now seemed clothed, sparkling, and almost trembling with gaiety, as if changed into a gallery of fete open to the sky. All its inhabitants were rushing to and fro, pushing against each other; speaking loud, as if in their own homes; some of them carrying their arms full of objects, others climbing, driving nails, and calling vociferously. In addition to all this was the reposoir, or altar, that was being prepared at the corner of the Grand Rue, the arrangements for which called for the services of all the women of the neighbourhood, who eagerly offered their vases and candlesticks.

Angelique ran down to carry the two candelabra, of the style of the Empire, which they had on the mantel-shelf of their parlour. She had not taken a moment's rest since the early morning, but had shown no signs of fatigue, being, on the contrary, supported and carried above herself by her great inward happiness. And as she came back from her errand, her hair blown all about her face by the wind, Hubert began to tease her as she seated herself to strip off the leaves of the roses, and to put them in a great basket.

"You could not do any more than you have done were it your wedding-day, my dear. Is it, then, that you are really to be married now?"

"But yes! oh, yes! Why not?" she answered gaily.

Hubertine smiled in her turn.

"While waiting, my daughter, since the house is so satisfactorily arranged, the best thing for us to do is to go upstairs and dress."

"In a minute, mother. Look at my full basket."

She had finished taking the leaves from the roses which she had reserved to throw before Monseigneur. The petals rained from her slender fingers; the basket was running over with its light, perfumed contents. Then, as she disappeared on the narrow stairway of the tower, she said, while laughing heartily:

"We will be quick. I will make myself beautiful as a star!"

The afternoon advanced. Now the feverish movement in Beaumont-l'Eglise was calmed; a peculiar air of expectation seemed to fill the streets, which were all ready, and where everyone spoke softly, in hushed, whispering voices. The heat had diminished, as the sun's rays grew oblique, and between the houses, so closely pressed the one against the others, there fell from the pale sky only a warm, fine shadow of a gentle, serene nature. The air of meditation was profound, as if the old town had become simply a continuation of the Cathedral; the only sound of carriages that could be heard came up from Beaumont-la-Ville, the new town on the banks of the Ligneul, where many of the factories were not closed, as the proprietors disdained taking part in this ancient religious ceremony.

Soon after four o'clock the great bell of the northern tower, the one whose swinging stirred the house of the Huberts, began to ring; and it was at that very moment that Hubertine and Angelique reappeared. The former had put on a dress of pale buff linen, trimmed with a simple thread lace, but her figure was so slight and youthful in its delicate roundness that she looked as if she were the sister of her adopted daughter. Angelique wore her dress of white foulard, with its soft ruchings at the neck and wrists, and nothing else; neither earrings nor bracelets, only her bare wrists and throat, soft in their satiny whiteness as they came out from the delicate material, light as the opening of a flower. An invisible comb, put in place hastily, scarcely held the curls of her golden hair, which was carelessly dressed. She was artless and proud, of a most touching simplicity, and, indeed, "beautiful as a star."

"Ah!" she said, "the bell! That is to show that Monseigneur has left his palace."

The bell continued to sound loud and clear in the great purity of the atmosphere. The Huberts installed themselves at the wide-opened window of the first story, the mother and daughter being in front, with their elbows resting on the bar of support, and the husband and father standing behind them. These were their accustomed places; they could not possibly have found better, as they would be the very first to see the procession as it came from the farther end of the church, without missing even a single candle of the marching-past.

"Where is my basket?" asked Angelique.

Hubert was obliged to take and pass to her the basket of rose-leaves, which she held between her arms, pressed against her breast.

"Oh, that bell!" she at last murmured; "it seems as if it would lull us to sleep!"

And still the waiting continued in the little vibrating house, sonorous with the musical movement; the street and the great square waited, subdued by this great trembling, whist the hangings on every side blew about more quietly in the air of the coming evening. The perfume of roses was very sweet.

Another half-hour passed. Then at the same moment the two halves of the portal of Saint Agnes were opened, and they perceived the very depths of the church, dark in reality, but dotted with little bright spots from the tapers. First the bearer of the Cross appeared, a sub-deacon in a tunic, accompanied by the acolytes, each one of whom held a lighted candle in his hand. Behind them hurried along the Master of the Ceremonies, the good Abbe Cornille, who after having assured himself that everything was in perfect order in the street, stopped under the porch, and assisted a moment at the passing out, in order to be sure that the places assigned to each section had been rightly taken. The various societies of laymen opened the march: the charitable associations, schools, by rank of seniority, and numerous public organisations. There were a great many children: little girls all in white, like brides, and little bareheaded boys, with curly hair, dressed in their best, like princes, already looking in every direction to find where their mothers were. A splendid fellow, nine years of age, walked by himself in the middle, clad like Saint John the Baptist, with a sheepskin over his thin, bare shoulders. Four little girls, covered with pink ribbons, bore a shield on which was a sheaf of ripe wheat. Then there were young girls grouped around a banner of the Blessed Virgin; ladies in black, who also had their special banner of crimson silk, on which was embroidered a portrait of Saint Joseph. There were other and still other banners, in velvet or in satin, balanced at the end of gilded batons. The brotherhoods of men were no less numerous; penitents of all colours, but especially the grey penitents in dark linen suits, wearing cowls, and whose emblems made a great sensation—a large cross, with a wheel, to which were attached the instruments of the Passion.

Angelique exclaimed with tenderness when the children came by:

"Oh, the blessed darlings! Do look at them all!"

One, no higher than a boot, scarcely three years of age, proudly tottered along on his little feet, and looked so comical that she plunged her hands into her basket and literally covered him with flowers. He quite disappeared under them for an instant; he had roses in his hair and on his shoulders. The exquisite little laughing shout he uttered was enjoyed on every side, and flowers rained down from all the windows as the cherub passed. In the humming silence of the street one could now only hear the deafened sound of the regular movement of feet in the procession, while flowers by the handful still continued to fall silently upon the pavement. Very soon there were heaps of them.

But now, reassured upon the good order of the laymen, the Abbe Cornille grew impatient and disturbed, inasmuch as the procession had been stationary for nearly two minutes, and he walked quickly towards the head of it, bowing and smiling at the Huberts as he passed.

"What has happened? What can prevent them from continuing?" said Angelique, all feverish from excitement, as if she were waiting for some expected happiness that was to come to her from the other end that was still in the church.

Hubertine answered her gently, as usual:

"There is no reason why they should run."

"There is some obstruction evidently; perhaps it is a reposoir that is still unfinished," Hubert added.

The young girls of the Society of the Blessed Virgin, the "daughters of Mary," as they are called, had already commenced singing a canticle, and their clear voices rose in the air, pure as crystal. Nearer and nearer the double ranks caught the movement and recommenced their march.

CHAPTER X

After the civilians, the clergy began to leave the church, the lower orders coming first. All, in surplices, covered their heads with their caps, under the porch; and each one held a large, lighted wax taper; those at the right in their right hand, and those at the left in their left hand, outside the rank, so there was a double row of flame, almost deadened by the brightness of the day. First were representatives from the great seminaries, the parishes, and then collegiate churches; then came the beneficed clergymen and clerks of the Cathedral, followed by the canons in white pluvials. In their midst were the choristers, in capes of red silk, who chanted the anthem in full voice, and to whom all the clergy replied in lower notes. The hymn, "Pange Lingua," was grandly given. The street was now filled with a rustling of muslin from the flying winged sleeves of the surplices, which seemed pierced all over with tiny stars of pale gold from the flames of the candles.

"Oh!" at last Angelique half sighed, "there is Saint Agnes!"

She smiled at the saint, borne by four clerks in white surplices, on a platform of white velvet heavily ornamented with lace. Each year it was like a new surprise to her, as she saw her guardian angel thus brought out from the shadows where she had been growing old for centuries, quite like another person under the brilliant sunshine, as if she were timid and blushing in her robe of long, golden hair. She was really so old, yet still very young, with her small hands, her little slender feet, her delicate, girlish face, blackened by time.

But Monseigneur was to follow her. Already the swinging of the censers could be heard coming from the depths of the church.

There was a slight murmuring of voices as Angelique repeated:

"Monseigneur, Monseigneur," and with her eyes still upon the saint who was going by, she recalled to mind at this moment the old histories. The noble Marquesses d'Hautecoeur delivering Beaumont from the plague, thanks to the intervention of Agnes, then Jean V and all those of his race coming to kneel before her image, to pay their devotions to the saint, and she seemed to see them all, the lords of the miracle, coming one by one like a line of princes.

A large space had been left empty. Then the chaplain charged with the care of the crozier advanced, holding it erect, the curved part being towards him. Afterward came two censer-bearers, who walked backwards and swung the censers gently from side to side, each one having near him an acolyte charged with the incense-box. There was a little difficulty before they succeeded in passing by one of the divisions of the door the great canopy of royal scarlet velvet, decorated with a heavy fringe of gold. But the delay was short, order was quickly re-established, and the designated officials took the supports in hand. Underneath, between his deacons of honour, Monseigneur walked, bareheaded, his shoulders covered with a white scarf, the two ends of which enveloped his hands, which bore the Holy Sacrament as high as possible, and without touching it.

Immediately the incense-bearers resumed their places, and the censers sent out in haste, fell back again in unison with the little silvery sound of their chains.

But Angelique started as she thought, where had she ever seen anyone who looked like Monseigneur? She certainly knew his face before, but had never been struck by it as to-day! All heads were bowed in solemn devotion. But she was so uneasy, she simply bent down and looked at him. He was tall, slight, and noble-looking; superb in his physical strength, notwithstanding his sixty years. His eyes were piercing as those of an eagle; his nose, a little prominent, only seemed to increase the sovereign authority of his face, which was somewhat softened by his white hair, that was thick and curly. She noticed the pallor of his complexion, and it seemed to her as if he suddenly flushed from some unknown reason. Perhaps, however, it was simply a reflection from the great golden-rayed sun which he carried in his covered hands, and which placed him in a radiance of mystic light.

Certainly, he to-day made her think of someone, but of whom? As soon as he left the church, Monseigneur had commenced a psalm, which he recited in a low voice, alternating the verses thereof with his deacons. And Angelique trembled when she saw him turn his eyes towards their window, for he seemed to her so severe, so haughty, and so cold, as if he were condemning the vanity of all earthly affection. He turned his face towards the three bands of ancient embroidery—Mary and the Angel, Mary at the foot of the Cross, Mary being borne to Heaven—and his face brightened. Then he lowered his eyes and fixed them upon her, but she was so disturbed she could not tell whether his glance was harsh or gentle; at all events it was only for a moment, for quickly regarding the Holy Sacrament, his expression was lost in the light which came from the great golden vessel. The censers still swung back and forth with a measured rhythm, while a little blue cloud mounted in the air.

But Angelique's heart now beat so rapidly she could scarcely keep still. Behind the canopy she had just seen a chaplain, his fingers covered with a scarf, who was carrying the mitre as devoutly as if it were a sacred object, Saint Agnes flying heavenward with the two angels, the work of her hands, and into each stitch of which she had put such deep love. Then, among the laymen who followed, in the midst of functionaries, of officers, of magistrates, she recognised Felicien in the front rank, slight and graceful, with his curly hair, his rather large but straight nose, and his black eyes, the expression of which was at the same time proud and gentle. She expected him; she was not at all surprised to find him transformed into a prince; her heart simply was overflowing with joy. To the anxious look which he gave her, as of imploring forgiveness for his falsehood, she replied by a lovely smile.

"But look!" exclaimed Hubertine, astonished at what she saw, "is not that the young man who came to our house about the mitre?"

She had also recognised him, and was much disturbed when, turning towards the young girl, she saw the latter transfigured, in ecstacy, avoiding a reply.

"Then he did not tell us the truth about himself? But why? Do you know the reason? Tell me, my dear, do you know who this young man is?"

Yes, perhaps in reality she did know. An inner voice answered all these questions. But she dared not speak; she was unwilling to ask herself anything. At the right time and at the proper place the truth would be made clear. She thought it was approaching, and felt an increase of pride of spirit, and of great love.

"But what is it? What has happened?" asked Hubert, as he bent forward and touched the shoulder of his wife.

He was never present at the moment of an occurrence, but always appeared to come from a reverie to the realisation of what passed about him. When the young man was pointed out to him, he did not recognise him at all.

"Is it he? I think not. No, you must be mistaken; it is not he."

Then Hubertine acknowledged that she was not quite sure. At all events, it was as well to talk no more about it, but she would inform herself later on. But the procession, which had stopped again in order that Monseigneur might incense the Holy Sacrament, which was placed among the verdure of a temporary altar at the corner of the street, was now about to move on again; and Angelique, whose hands seemed lost in the basket on her lap, suddenly, in her delight and confusion, made a quick movement, and carelessly threw out a great quantity of the perfumed petals. At that instant Felicien approached. The leaves fell like a little shower, and at last two of them fluttered, balanced themselves, then quietly settled down on his hair.

It was over. The canopy had disappeared round the corner of the Grand Rue, the end of the cortege went by, leaving the pavements deserted, hushed as if quieted by a dreamy faith, in the rather strong exhalation of crushed roses. Yet one could still hear in the distance, growing weaker and weaker by degrees, the silvery sound of the little chains of the swinging censers.

"Oh mother!" said Angelique, pleadingly, "do let us go into the church, so as to see them all as they come back."

Hubertine's first impulse was to refuse. But she, for her own part, was very anxious to ascertain what she could about Felicien, so she replied:

"Yes, after a while, if you really wish to do so."

But they must, of course, wait a little. Angelique, after going to her room for her hat, could not keep still. She returned every minute to the great window, which was still wide open. She looked to the end of the street inquiringly, then she lifted her eyes as if seeking something in space itself; and so nervous was she that she spoke aloud, as she mentally followed the procession step by step.

"Now they are going down the Rue Basse. Ah! see, they must be turning on the square before the Sous Prefecture. There is no end to all the long streets in Beaumont-la-Ville. What pleasure can they take in seeing Saint Agnes, I would like to know. All these petty tradesmen!"

Above them, in the heavens, was a delicately rose-tinted cloud, with a band of white and gold around it, and it seemed as if from it there came a devotional peace and a hush of religious expectation. In the immobility of the air one realised that all civil life was suspended, as if God had left His house, and everyone was awaiting His return before resuming their daily occupations. Opposite them the blue draperies of the silversmith, and the red curtains of the wax-chandler, still barred the interior of their shops and hid the contents from view. The streets seemed empty; there was no reverberation from one to the other, except that of the slow march of the clergy, whose progress could easily be realised from every corner of the town.

"Mother! mother! I assure you that now they are at the corner of the Rue Magloire. They will soon come up the hill."

She was mistaken, for it was only half-past six, and the procession never came back before a quarter-past seven. She should have known well, had she not been over-impatient, that the canopy must be only at the lower wharf of the Ligneul. But she was too excited to think.

"Oh! mother dear! do hurry, or we may not find any places."

"Come, make haste then, little one," at last Hubertine said, smiling in spite of herself. "We shall certainly be obliged to wait a great while, but never mind."

"As for me, I will remain at home," said Hubert. "I can take down and put away the embroidered panels, and then I will set the table for dinner."

The church seemed empty to them, as the Blessed Sacrament was no longer there. All the doors were wide open, like those of a house in complete disorder, where one is awaiting the return of the master. Very few persons came in; the great altar alone, a sarcophagus of severe Romanesque style, glittered as if burning at the end of the nave, covered as it was with stars from the flame of many candles; all the rest of the enormous building—the aisles, the chapels, and the arches—seemed filled with shadow under the coming-on of the evening darkness.

Slowly, in order to gain a little patience, Angelique and Hubertine walked round the edifice. Low down, it seemed as if crushed, thickset columns supported the semicircular arches of the side-aisles. They walked the whole length of the dark chapels, which were buried almost as if they were crypts. Then, when they crossed over, before the great entrance portal, under the triforium of the organ, they had a feeling of deliverance as they raised their eyes towards the high, Gothic windows of the nave, which shot up so gracefully above the heavy Romanesque coursed work. But they continued by the southern side-aisle, and the feeling of suffocation returned again. At the cross of the transept four enormous pillars made the four corners, and rose to a great height, then struck off to support the roof. There was still to be found a delicate purple-tinted light, the farewell of the day, through the rose windows of the side fronts. They had crossed the three steps which led to the choir, then they turned by the circumference of the apse, which was the very oldest part of the building, and seemed most sepulchral. They stopped one moment and leaned against the ancient grating, which entirely surrounded the choir, and which was most elaborately wrought, that they might look at the flaming altar, where each separate light was reflected in the old polished oak of the stalls, most marvellous stalls, covered with rare sculptures. So at last they came back to the point from which they started, lifting up their heads as if they breathed more freely from the heights of the nave, which the growing shades at night drove farther away, and enlarged the old walls, on which were faint remains of paintings and of gold.

"I know perfectly well that we are altogether too early," said Hubertine.

Angelique, without replying, said, as if to herself:

"How grand it is!"

It really seemed to her as if she had never known the church before, but that she had just seen it for the first time. Her eyes wandered over the motionless sea of chairs, then went to the depth of the chapels, where she could only imagine were tombs and old funereal stones, on account of the increased darkness therein. But she saw at last the Chapel Hautecoeur, where she recognised the window that had been repaired, with its Saint George, that now looked vague as a dream, in the dusk. She was unusually happy.

At last there was a gentle shaking through the whole building, and the great clock struck. Then the bell began to ring.

"Ah! now," she said, "look, for they are really coming up the Rue Magloire."

This time it was indeed so. A crowd invaded the church, the aisles were soon filled, and one realised that each minute the procession approached nearer and nearer. The noise increased with the pealing of the bells, with a certain rushing movement of air by the great entrance, the portal of which was wide open.

Angelique, leaning on Hubertine's shoulder, made herself as tall as possible by standing upon the points of her feet, as she looked towards this arched open space, the roundness of whose top was perfectly defined in the pale twilight of the Place du Cloitre. The first to appear was, of course, the bearer of the Cross, accompanied by his two acolytes with their candelabra; and behind them the Master of the Ceremonies hurried along—the good Abbe Cornille, who now seemed quite out of breath and overcome by fatigue. At the threshold of the door, the silhouette of each new arrival was thrown out for a second, clear and strong, then passed quickly away in the darkness of the interior. There were the laymen, the schools, the associations, the fraternities, whose banners, like sails, wavered for an instant, then suddenly vanished in the shade. One saw again the pale "daughters of Mary," who, as they entered, still sang with their voices like those of seraphim.

The Cathedral had room for all. The nave was slowly filled, the men being at the right and the women at the left. But night had come. The whole place outside was dotted with bright points, hundreds of moving lights, and soon it was the turn for the clergy, the tapers that were held outside the ranks making a double yellow cord as they passed through the door. The tapers seemed endless as they succeeded each other and multiplied themselves; the great seminary, the parishes, and the Cathedral; the choristers still singing the anthem, and the canons in their white pluvials. Then little by little the church became lighted up, seemed inhabited, illuminated, overpowered by hundreds of stars, like a summer sky.

Two chairs being unoccupied, Angelique stood upon one of them.

"Get down, my dear," whispered Hubertine, "for that is forbidden."

But she tranquilly remained there, and did not move.

"Why is it forbidden? I must see, at all events. Oh! how exquisite all this is!"

At last she prevailed upon her mother to get upon the other chair.

Now the whole Cathedral was glowing with a reddish yellow light. This billow of candles which crossed it illuminated the lower arches of the side-aisles, the depth of the chapels, and glittered upon the glass of some shrine or upon the gold of some tabernacle. The rays even penetrated into the apse, and the sepulchral crypts were brightened up by them. The choir was a mass of flame, with its altar on fire, its glistening stalls, and its old railing, whose ornamentation stood out boldly. And the flight of the nave was stronger marked than ever, with the heavy curved pillars below, supporting the round arches, while above, the numbers of little columns grew smaller and smaller as they burst forth among the broken arches of the ogives, like an inexpressible declaration of faith and love which seemed to come from the lights. In the centre, under the roof, along the ribs of the nave, there was a yellow cloud, a thick colour of wax, from the multitude of little tapers.

But now, above the sound of feet and the moving of chairs, one heard again the falling of the chains of the censers. Then the organ pealed forth majestically, a glorious burst of music that filled to overflowing the highest arches as if with the rumbling of thunder. It was at this instant that Monseigneur arrived on the Place du Cloitre. The statue of Saint Agnes had reached the apse, still borne by the surpliced clerks, and her face looked very calm under the light, as if she were more than happy to return to her dreams of four centuries. At last, preceded by the crosier, and followed by the mitre, Monseigneur entered with his deacons under the canopy, still having his two hands covered with a white scarf, and holding the Blessed Sacrament in the same position as at first. The canopy, which was borne down the central aisle, was stopped at the railing of the choir, and there, on account of a certain unavoidable confusion, the Bishop was for a moment made to approach the persons who formed his suite. Since Felicien had reappeared, Angelique had looked at him constantly. It so happened that on account of the pressure he was placed a little at the right of the canopy, and at that moment she saw very near together the white head of Monseigneur and the blonde head of the young man. That glance was a revelation; a sudden light came to her eyes; she joined her hands together as she said aloud:

"Oh! Monseigneur, the son of Monseigneur!"

Her secret escaped her. It was an involuntary cry, the certainty which revealed itself in this sudden fact of their resemblance. Perhaps, in the depths of her mind, she already knew it, but she would never have dared to have said so; whilst now it was self-evident, a fact of which there could be no denial. From everything around her, from her own soul, from inanimate objects, from past recollections, her cry seemed repeated.

Hubertine, quite overcome, said in a whisper, "This young man is the son of Monseigneur?"

Around these two the crowd had gradually accumulated. They were well known and were greatly admired; the mother still adorable in her simple toilette of linen, the daughter with the angelic grace of a cherubim, in her gown of white foulard, as light as a feather. They were so handsome and in such full view, as they stood upon their chairs, that from every direction eyes were turned towards them, and admiring glances given them.

"But yes, indeed, my good lady," said the mere Lemballeuse, who chanced to be in the group; "but yes, he is the son of Monseigneur. But how does it happen that you have not already heard of it? And not only that, but he is a wonderfully handsome young man, and so rich! Rich! Yes indeed, he could buy the whole town if he wished to do so. He has millions and millions!"

Hubertine turned very pale as she listened.

"You must have heard his history spoken of?" continued the beggar-woman. "His mother died soon after his birth, and it was on that account that Monseigneur concluded to become a clergyman. Now, however, after all these years, he sent for his son to join him. He is, in fact, Felicien VII d'Hautecoeur, with a title as if he were a real prince."

Then Hubertine was intensely grieved. But Angelique beamed with joy before the commencement of the realisation of her dream. She was not in the slightest degree astonished, for she had always known that he would be the richest, the noblest, and the handsomest of men. So her joy was intense and perfect, without the slightest anxiety for the future, or suspicion of any obstacle that could possibly come between them. In short, he would in his turn now make himself known, and would tell everything. As she had fancied, gold would stream down with the little flickering flames of the candles. The organs would send forth their most glorious music on the occasion of their betrothal. The line of the Hautecoeurs would continue royally from the beginning of the legend—Norbert I, Jean V, Felicien III, Jean XII, then the last, Felicien VII, who just turned towards her his noble face. He was the descendant of the cousins of the Virgin, the master, the superb son, showing himself in all his beauty at the side of his father.

Just then Felicien smiled sweetly at her, and she did not see the angry look of Monseigneur, who had remarked her standing on the chair, above the crowd, blushing in her pride and love.

"Oh, my poor dear child!" sighed Hubertine.

But the chaplain and the acolytes were ranged on the right and the left, and the first deacon having taken the Holy Sacrament from the hands of Monseigneur, he placed it on the altar. It was the final Benediction—the Tantum ergo sung loudly by the choristers, the incenses of the boxes burning in the censers, the strange, brusque silence during the prayer—and in the midst of the lighted church, overflowing with clergy and with people, under the high, springing arches, Monseigneur remounted to the altar, took again in his two hands the great golden sun, which he waved back and forth in the air three times, with a slow sign of the Cross.

CHAPTER XI

That same evening, on returning from church, Angelique thought to herself, "I shall see him again very soon, for he will certainly be in the Clos-Marie, and I will go there to meet him."

Without having exchanged a word with each other, they appeared to have silently arranged this interview. The family dined as usual in the kitchen, but it was eight o'clock before they were seated at the table. Hubert, quite excited by this day of recreation and of fete, was the only one who had anything to say. Hubertine, unusually quiet, scarcely replied to her husband, but kept her looks fixed upon the young girl, who ate heartily and with a good appetite, although she scarcely seemed to pay any attention to the food, or to know that she put her fork to her mouth, so absorbed was she by her fancies. And under this candid forehead, as under the crystal of the purest water, Hubertine read her thoughts clearly, and followed them as they formed themselves in her mind one by one.

At nine o'clock they were greatly surprised by a ringing of the door-bell. It proved to be the Abbe Cornille, who, notwithstanding his great fatigue, had come to tell them that Monseigneur the Bishop had greatly admired the three old panels of marvellous embroidery.

"Yes, indeed! And he spoke of them so enthusiastically to me that I was sure it would please you to know it."

Angelique, who had roused up on hearing the name of Monseigneur, fell back again into her reveries as soon as the conversation turned to the procession. Then after a few minutes she got up.

"But where are you going, dear?" asked Hubertine.

The question startled her, as if she herself knew not why she had left her seat.

"I am going upstairs, mother, for I am very tired."

In spite of this plausible excuse, Hubertine imagined the true reason that influenced her. It was the need of being by herself, the haste of communing alone with her great happiness.

When she held her in her arms pressed against her breast, she felt that she was trembling. She almost seemed to avoid her usual evening kiss. Looking anxiously in her face, Hubertine read in her eyes the feverish expectation connected with the hoped-for meeting. It was all so evident to her that she promised herself to keep a close watch.

"Be good, dear, and sleep well."

But already, after a hurried good-night to Hubert and to the Abbe Cornille, Angelique was halfway up the stairs, quite disturbed, as she realised that her secret had almost escaped her. Had her mother held her against her heart one second longer, she would have told her everything. When she had shut herself in her own room, and doubly locked her door, the light troubled her, and she blew out her candle. The moon, which rose later and later, had not yet appeared above the horizon, and the night was very dark. Without undressing, she seated herself before the open window, looked out into the deep shade, and waited patiently for the hours to pass. The minutes went by rapidly, as she was fully occupied with the one idea that as soon as the clock struck for midnight she would go down to find Felicien. As it would be the most natural thing in the world to do, she traced out her way, step by step, and every movement she would make with the most perfect composure.

It was not very late when she heard the Abbe Cornille take his leave. Soon after, the Huberts, in their turn, came upstairs. Then it seemed to her as if someone came out of their chamber, and with furtive steps moved cautiously as far as the foot of the stairway, then stopped, as if listening for a moment before returning. Then the house soon sank, as if in the quiet of a deep sleep.

When the great church clock struck twelve, Angelique left her seat. "Now I must go, for he is waiting for me." She unlocked the door, and, passing out, neglected closing it after her. Going down the first flight of stairs, she stopped as she approached the room of the Huberts, but heard nothing—nothing but the indefinable quivering of silence. Moreover, she was neither in a hurry, nor had she any fear, for being totally unconscious of any wrong intentions, she felt at perfect ease. It would have been quite impossible for her not to have gone down. An inward power directed and led her, and it all seemed so simple and right; she would have smiled at the idea of a hidden danger. Once in the lower rooms, she passed through the kitchen to go out into the garden, and again forgot to fasten the shutters. Then she walked rapidly towards the little gate of the Clos-Marie, which she also left wide open after her. Notwithstanding the obscurity and the dense shadows in the field, she did not hesitate an instant, but went direct to the little plank which served as a bridge to the Chevrotte, crossed it, guiding herself by feeling the way, as if in a familiar place, where every tree and bush were well known to her. Turning to the right, under a great willow-tree, she had only to put out her hands to have them earnestly grasped by Felicien, whom she knew would be there in waiting for her.

For a minute, without speaking, Angelique pressed Felicien's hands in hers. They could not see each other, for the sky was covered with a misty cloud of heat, and the pale moon which had just risen, had not yet lighted it up. At length she spoke in the darkness, her heart filled to overflowing with her great happiness:

"Oh, my dear seigneur, how I love you, and how grateful I am to you!"

She laughed aloud at the realisation of the fact that at last she knew him; she thanked him for being younger, more beautiful, and richer even than she had expected him to be. Her gaiety was charming; it was a cry of astonishment and of gratitude before this present of love, this fulfillment of her dreams.

"You are the king. You are my master; and lo! here am I, your slave. I belong to you henceforth, and my only regret is that I am of so little worth. But I am proud of being yours; it is sufficient for you to love me, and that I may be in my turn a queen. It was indeed well that I knew you were to come, and so waited for you; my heart is overflowing with joy since finding that you are so great, so far above me. Ah! my dear seigneur, how I thank you, and how I love you."

Gently he put his arm around her as he said:

"Come and see where I live."

He made her cross the Clos-Marie, among the wild grass and herbs, and then she understood for the first time in what way he had come every night into the field from the park of the Bishop's Palace. It was through an old gate, that had been unused for a long time, and which this evening he had left half open. Taking Angelique's hand, he led her in that way into the great garden of the Monseigneur.

The rising moon was half-hidden in the sky, under a veil of warm mist, and its rays fell down upon them with a white, mysterious light. There were no stars visible, but the whole vault of heaven was filled with a dim lustre, which quietly penetrated everything in this serene night. Slowly they walked along on the borders of the Chevrotte, which crossed the park; but it was no longer the rapid rivulet rushing over a pebbly descent—it was a quiet, languid brook, gliding along through clumps of trees. Under this mass of luminous vapour, between the bushes which seemed to bathe and float therein, it was like an Elysian stream which unfolded itself before them.

Angelique soon resumed her gay chattering.

"I am so proud and so happy to be here on your arm."

Felicien, touched by such artless, frank simplicity, listened with delight as she talked unrestrainedly, concealing nothing, but telling all her inmost thoughts, as she opened her heart to him. Why should she even think of keeping anything back? She had never harmed anyone, so she had only good things to say.

"Ah, my dear child, it is I who ought to be exceedingly grateful to you, inasmuch as you are willing to love me a little in so sweet a way. Tell me once more how much you love me. Tell me exactly what you thought when you found out at last who I really was."

But with a pretty, impatient movement she interrupted him.

"No, no; let us talk of you, only of you. Am I really of any consequence? At all events, what matters it who I am or what I think! For the moment you are the only one of importance."

And keeping as near him as possible, going more slowly along the sides of the enchanted river, she questioned him incessantly, wishing to learn everything about him, of his childhood, his youth, and the twenty years he had passed away from his father. "I already know that your mother died when you were an infant, and that you grew up under the care of an uncle who is a clergyman. I also know that Monseigneur refused to see you again."

Then Felicien answered, speaking in a very low tone, with a voice that seemed as if it came from the far-away past.

"Yes, my father idolised my mother, and it seemed to him as if I were guilty, since my birth had cost her her life. My uncle brought me up in entire ignorance of my family, harshly too, as if I had been a poor child confided to his care. I had no idea of my true position until very recently. It is scarcely two years, in fact, since it was revealed to me. But I was not at all surprised in hearing the truth; it seemed as if I had always half-realised that a great fortune belonged to me. All regular work wearied me; I was good for nothing except to run about the fields and amuse myself. At last I took a great fancy for the painted windows of our little church." Angelique interrupted him by laughing gaily, and he joined her in her mirth for a moment.

"I became a workman like yourself. I had fully decided to earn my living by painting on glass, and was studying for that purpose, when all this fortune poured down upon me. My father was intensely disappointed when my uncle wrote him that I was a good-for-nothing fellow, and that I would never consent to enter into the service of the Church. It had been his expressed wish that I should become a clergyman; perhaps he had an idea that in so doing I could atone for the death of my mother. He became, however, reconciled at last, and wished for me to be here and remain near him. Ah! how good it is to live, simply to live," he exclaimed. "Yes, to live, to love, and to be loved in return."

This trembling cry, which resounded in the clear night air, vibrated with the earnest feeling of his healthy youth. It was full of passion, of sympathy for his dead mother, and of the intense ardour he had thrown into this, his first love, born of mystery. It filled all his spirit, his beauty, his loyalty, his ignorance, and his earnest desire of life.

"Like you," he continued, "I was, indeed, expecting the unknown, and the evening when you first appeared at the window I also recognised you at once. Tell me all that you have ever thought, and what you were in the habit of doing in the days that have passed." But again she refused, saying gently:

"No; speak only of yourself. I am eager to know every petty incident of your life, so please keep nothing back. In that way I shall realise that you belong to me, and that I love you in the past as well as in the present."

She never would have been fatigued in listening to him as he talked of his life, but was in a state of joyous ecstasy in thus becoming thoroughly acquainted with him, adoring him like a little child at the feet of some saint. Neither of them wearied of repeating the same things: how much they loved each other and how dearly they were beloved in return. The same words returned constantly to their lips, but they always seemed new, as they assumed unforeseen, immeasurable depths of meaning. Their happiness increased as they thus made known the secrets of their hearts, and lingered over the music of the words that passed their lips. He confessed to her the charm her voice had always been to him, so much so that as soon as he heard it he became at once her devoted slave. She acknowledged the delicious fear she always had at seeing his pale face flush at the slightest anger or displeasure.

They had now left the misty banks of the Chevrotte, and arm-in-arm they entered under the shadows of the great elm-trees.

"Oh! this beautiful garden," whispered Angelique, happy to breathe in the freshness which fell from the trees. "For years I have wished to enter it; and now I am here with you—yes, I am here."

It did not occur to her to ask him where he was leading her, but she gave herself up to his guidance, under the darkness of these centenarian trees. The ground was soft under their feet; the archway of leaves above them was high, like the vaulted ceiling of a church. There was neither sound nor breath, only the beating of their own hearts.

At length he pushed open the door of a little pavilion, and said to her: "Go in; this is my home."

It was there that his father had seen fit to install him all by himself, in this distant corner of the park. On the first floor there was a hall, and one very large room, which was now lighted by a great lamp. Above was a complete little apartment.

"You can see for yourself," he continued smilingly, "that you are at the house of an artisan. This is my shop."

It was a working-room indeed; the caprice of a wealthy young man, who amused himself in his leisure hours by painting on glass. He had re-found the ancient methods of the thirteenth century, so that he could fancy himself as being one of the primitive glass-workers, producing masterpieces with the poor, unfinished means of the older time. An ancient table answered all his purposes. It was coated with moist, powdered chalk, upon which he drew his designs in red, and where he cut the panes with heated irons, disdaining the modern use of a diamond point. The muffle, a little furnace made after the fashion of an old model, was just now quite heated; the baking of some picture was going on, which was to be used in repairing another stained window in the Cathedral; and in cases on every side were glasses of all colours which he had ordered to be made expressly for him, in blue, yellow, green, and red, in many lighter tints, marbled, smoked, shaded, pearl-coloured, and black. But the walls of the room were hung with admirable stuffs, and the working materials disappeared in the midst of a marvellous luxury of furniture. In one corner, on an old tabernacle which served as a pedestal, a great gilded statue of the Blessed Virgin seemed to smile upon them.

"So you can work—you really can work," repeated Angelique with childish joy.

She was very much amused with the little furnace, and insisted upon it that he should explain to her everything connected with his labour. Why he contented himself with the examples of the old masters, who used glass coloured in the making, which he shaded simply with black; the reason he limited himself to little, distinct figures, to the gestures and draperies of which he gave a decided character; his ideas upon the art of the glass-workers, which in reality declined as soon as they began to design better, to paint, and to enamel it; and his final opinion that a stained-glass window should be simply a transparent mosaic, in which the brightest colours should be arranged in the most harmonious order, so as to make a delicate, shaded bouquet. But at this moment little did she care for the art in itself. These things had but one interest for her now—that they were connected with him, that they seemed to bring her nearer to him and to strengthen the tie between them.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, "how happy we shall be together. You will paint, while I embroider."

He had just retaken her hands, in the centre of this great room, in the luxury of which she was quite at her ease, as it seemed to be her natural surrounding, where her grace would be fully developed. Both of them remained silent for a moment. Then she was, as usual, the first to speak.

"Now everything is decided upon, is it not?"

"What?" he smilingly asked, "what do you mean?"

"Our marriage."

He hesitated an instant. His face, which had been very pale, flushed quickly. She was disturbed at such a change.

"Have I made you angry in any way?"

But he had already conquered himself, and pressed her hands tenderly, with a grasp that seemed to cover everything.

"Yes, it is decided upon, and it is sufficient for you to wish for a thing that it should be done, no matter how many obstacles may oppose it. Henceforward my one great desire in life will be to obey you."

Then her face beamed with perfect happiness and delight.

She did not have a single doubt. All seemed to her quite natural, to be so well-arranged that it could be finished on the morrow with the same ease as in many of the miracles of the "Golden Legend." The idea never occurred to her that there should be the slightest hindrance or the least delay. Since they really loved each other, why should they be any longer separated? It was the most simple thing in the world for two persons who loved each other to be married. She was so secure in her happiness that she was perfectly calm.

"Since it is agreed upon," she said jokingly, "give me your hand."

He took her little hand and kissed it, as he said:

"It is all arranged."

She then hastened to go away, in the fear of being surprised by the dawn, and also impatient to relieve her mind of her secret. He wished to accompany her.

"No, no," she replied. "We should not get back before daylight. I can easily find the way. Good-bye until to-morrow."

"Until to-morrow, then."

Felicien obeyed, and watched Angelique as she ran, first under the shady elms, then along the banks of the Chevrotte, which were now bathed in light. Soon she closed the gate of the park, then darted across the Clos-Marie, through the high grass. While on her way, she thought it would be impossible to wait until sunrise, but that she would rap at the door of the Huberts' room as soon as she reached home, that she might wake them up and tell them everything. She was in such an expansion of happiness, such a turmoil of sincerity, that she realised that she was incapable of keeping five minutes longer this great secret which had been hers for so long a time. She entered into their garden and closed the gate.

And there, near the Cathedral, Angelique saw Hubertine, who waited for her in the night, seated upon the stone bench, which was surrounded by a small cluster of lilac-bushes. Awakened, warned by some inexpressible feeling, she had gone upstairs, then down again, and on finding all the doors open, that of the chamber as well as that of the house, she had understood what had happened. So, uncertain what it was best to do, or where to go, in the fear lest she might aggravate matters, she sat down anxiously.

Angelique immediately ran to her, without embarrassment, kissed her repeatedly, her heart beating with joy as she laughed merrily at the thought that she had no longer need of hiding anything from her.

"Oh, mother mine, everything is arranged! We are to be married very soon, and I am so happy."

Before replying, Hubertine examined her closely. But her fears vanished instantly before the limpid eyes and the pure lips of this exquisite young girl. Yet she was deeply troubled, and great tears rolled down her cheeks.

"My poor, dear child," she whispered, as she had done the previous evening in church.

Astonished to see her in such a way, she who was always so equable, who never wept, Angelique exclaimed:

"But what is the matter, mother? It is, indeed, true that I have not done right, inasmuch as I have not made you my confidante. But you would pardon me if you knew how much I have suffered from it, and how keen my remorse has been. Since at first I did not speak, later on I did not dare to break the silence. Will you forgive me?"

She had seated herself near her mother, and had placed her arm caressingly around her waist. The old bench seemed almost hidden in this moss-covered corner of the Cathedral. Above their heads the lilacs made a little shade, while near them was the bush of eglantine which the young girl had set out in the hope that it might bear roses; but, having been neglected for some time, it simply vegetated, and had returned to its natural state.

"Mother, let me tell you everything now. Come, listen to me, please."

CHAPTER XII

Then, in a low tone, Angelique began her story. She related in a flow of inexhaustible words all that had happened, calling up the most minute details, growing more and more excited at the recollection of them. She omitted nothing, but searched her memory as if it were for a confession. She was not at all embarrassed, although her cheeks grew very red and her eyes sparkled with flashes of pride; yet she did not raise her voice, but continued to talk earnestly in a half-whisper.

At length Hubertine interrupted her, speaking also very low:

"Ah, my dear! Now you are too excited. You have indeed to correct yourself, for you are carried away by your feelings, as if by a great wind. Ah, my vain, my headstrong child, you are always the same little girl who refused to wash up the kitchen floor, and who kissed her own hands."

Angelique could not prevent herself from laughing.

"No, do not laugh. It may be that by-and-by you will not have tears enough to weep. My poor darling, this marriage can never take place."

Again her gaiety burst out in a long musical laugh.

"But mother, mother, what are you saying? Do you wish to punish me by teasing me? It is a very simple matter. This evening Felicien is to talk of it with his father. To-morrow he will come to arrange everything with you."

Could it be true that she believed all this? Hubertine was distressed, and knew not what to do. At last she concluded it was best to be pitiless and tell her; that it would be impossible for a little embroiderer without money and without name to marry Felicien d'Hautecoeur. A young man who was worth so many millions! The last descendant of one of the oldest families of France! No, that could never be.

But at each new obstacle Angelique tranquilly replied: "But why not?" It would be a real scandal, a marriage beyond all ordinary conditions of happiness. Did she hope, then, to contend against all the world? "But why not?" Monseigneur is called very strict and very haughty, proud of his name, and severe in his criticisms in regard to all marks of affection. Could she dare to expect to bend him?

"But why not?" And, unshakable in her faith, in her firm, ingenuous manner she said: "It is very odd, dear mother, that you should think people all so bad! Especially when I have just assured you that everything is well under way, and is sure to come out all right. Do you not recollect that only two months ago you scolded me, and ridiculed my plans? Yet I was right, and everything that I expected has come to pass."

"But, unhappy child, wait for the end!"

Hubertine now thought of the past, and was angry with herself, as she now reflected, more bitterly than ever before, that Angelique had been brought up in such ignorance. Again she predicted to her the hard lessons of the reality of life, and she would have liked to have explained to her some of the cruelties and abominations of the world, but, greatly embarrassed, she could not find the necessary words. What a grief it would be to her if some day she were forced to accuse herself of having brought about the unhappiness of this child, who had been kept alone as a recluse, and allowed to dwell in the continued falsehood of imagination and dreams!

"Listen to me, dearest. You certainly would not wish to marry this young man against the wish of us all, and without the consent of his father?"

Angelique had grown very serious. She looked her mother in the face, and in a serious tone replied:

"Why should I not do so? I love him, and he loves me."

With a pang of anguish, Hubertine took her again in her arms, clasped her tenderly, but convulsively, and looked at her earnestly, but without speaking. The pale moon had disappeared from sight behind the Cathedral, and the flying, misty clouds were now delicately coloured in the heavens by the approach of the dawn. They were both of them enveloped in this purity of the early morn, in the great fresh silence, which was alone disturbed by the little chirping of the just-awakening birds.

"But alas! my dear child, happiness is only found in obedience and in humility. For one little hour of passion, or of pride, we sometimes are obliged to suffer all our lives. If you wish to be contented on this earth, be submissive, be ready to renounce and give up everything."

But feeling that she was still rebellious under her embrace, that which she had never said to anyone, that which she still hesitated to speak of, almost involuntarily escaped from her lips:

"Listen to me once more, my dear child. You think that we are happy, do you not, your father and I. We should indeed be so had not our lives been embittered by a great vexation."

She lowered her voice still more, as she related with a trembling breath their history. The marriage without the consent of her mother, the death of their infant, and their vain desire to have another child, which was evidently the punishment of their fault. Still, they adored each other. They had lived by working, had wanted for nothing; but their regret for the child they had lost was so ever-present that they would have been wretchedly unhappy, would have quarrelled, and perhaps even have been separated, had it not been that her husband was so thoroughly good, while for herself she had always tried to be just and reasonable.

"Reflect, my daughter. Do not put any stumbling-block in your path which will make you suffer later on. Be humble, obey, check the impulse of your heart as much as possible."

Subdued at last, Angelique restrained her tears, but grew very pale as she listened, and interrupted her by saying:

"Mother, you pain me terribly. I love him, and I am sure that he loves me."

Then she allowed her tears to flow. She was quite overcome by all she had listened to, softened, and with an expression in her eyes as if deeply wounded by the glimpse given her of the probable truth of the case. Yet she could suffer, and would willingly die, if need be, for her love.

Then Hubertine decided to continue.

"I do not wish to pain you too deeply at once, yet it is absolutely necessary that you should know the whole truth. Last evening, after you had gone upstairs, I had quite a talk with the Abbe Cornille, and he explained to me why Monseigneur, after great hesitation, had at last decided to call his son to Beaumont. One of his greatest troubles was the impetuosity of the young man, the uncontrollable haste which he manifested to plunge into the excitement of life, without listening to the advice of his elders. After having with pain renounced all hope of making him a priest, his father found that he could not establish him in any occupation suitable to his rank and his fortune. He would never be anything but a headstrong fellow, restless, wandering, yielding to his artistic tastes when so inclined. He was alarmed at seeing in his son traits of character like those from which he himself had so cruelly suffered. At last, from fear that he might take some foolish step, and fall in love with someone beneath him in position, he wished to have him here, that he might be married at once."

"Very well," said Angelique, who did not yet understand.

"Such a marriage had been proposed even before his arrival, and all preliminaries were settled yesterday, so that the Abbe Cornille formally announced that in the autumn Felicien would wed Mademoiselle Claire de Voincourt. You know very well the Hotel de Voincourt there, close to the Bishop's Palace. The family are very intimate with Monseigneur. On both sides, nothing better could be hoped for, either in the way of name or of fortune. The Abbe himself highly approves of the union."

The young girl no longer listened to these reasons of the fitness of things. Suddenly an image appeared to come before her eyes—that of Claire. She saw her, as she had occasionally had a glimpse of her in the alleys of the Park during the winter, or as she had seen her on fete days in the Cathedral. A tall young lady, a brunette, very handsome, of a much more striking beauty than her own, and with a royal bearing and appearance. Notwithstanding her haughty air, she was said to be very good and kind.

"So he is to marry this elegant young lady, who is not only beautiful but very rich," she murmured.

Then, as if suddenly pierced by a sharp agony, she exclaimed:

"He uttered a falsehood! He did not tell me this!"

She recollected now the momentary hesitation of Felicien, the rush of blood which had coloured his cheeks when she spoke to him of their marriage. The shock was so great that she turned deadly pale, and her head fell heavily on her mother's shoulders.

"My darling, my dear darling! This is, indeed, a cruel thing; I know it well. But it would have been still worse had you waited. Take courage, then, and draw at once the knife from the wound. Repeat to yourself, whenever the thought of this young man comes to you, that never would Monseigneur, the terrible Jean XII, whose intractable pride, it appears, is still recollected by all the world, give his son, the last of his race, to a little embroiderer, found under a gateway and adopted by poor people like ourselves."

In her weakness, Angelique heard all this without making any objection. What was it she felt pass over her face? A cold breath coming from a distance, from far above the roofs of the houses, seemed to freeze her blood. Was it true that her mother was telling her of this misery of the world, this sad reality, in the same way that parents relate the story of the wolf to unreasonable children? She would never forget the shock and the grief of this first experience of a bitter disappointment. Yet, however, she already excused Felicien. He had told no falsehood; he simply had been silent. Were his father to wish him to marry this young girl, no doubt he would refuse to do so. But as yet he had not dared to rebel. As he had not said anything to her of the matter, perhaps it was because he had just made up his mind as to what it was best for him to do. Before this sudden vanishing away of her air-castles, pale and weak from the rude touch of the actual life, she still kept her faith, and trusted, in spite of all, in the future realisation of her dream. Eventually the fair promises for the future would come to pass, even although now her pride was crushed and she sank down into a state of humiliation and resignation.

"Mother, it is true I have done wrong, but I will never sin again. I promise you that I will be patient, and submit myself without a murmur of revolt to whatever Heaven wishes me to be."

It was true grace which spoke within her. The trial was great, but she was able to conquer, from the effects of the education she had received and the excellent example of the home life in which she had grown up. Why should she doubt the morrow, when until this present moment everyone near her had been so generous and so tender towards her? She prayed that she might be able to have the wisdom of Catherine, the meekness of Elizabeth, the chastity of Agnes; and re-comforted by the aid of the saints, she was sure that they alone would help her to triumph over every trouble. Was it not true that her old friends the Cathedral, the Clos-Marie, and the Chevrotte, the little fresh house of the Huberts, the Huberts themselves, all who loved her, would defend her, without her being obliged to do anything, except to be obedient and good?

"Then, dear child, you promise me that you will never act contrary to our wishes, and above all against those of Monseigneur?"

"Yes, mother, I promise."

"You also promise me not to see this young man again, and no longer to indulge in the foolish idea of marrying him?"

At this question her courage failed her. She almost felt the spirit of rebellion rise again within her, as she thought of the depth of her love. But in a moment she bowed her head and was definitely conquered.

"I promise to do nothing to bring about a meeting with him, and to take no steps towards our marriage."

Hubertine, touched to the heart, pressed the young girl most affectionately in her arms as she thanked her for her obedience. Oh! what a dreadful thing it was, when wishing to do good to the child she so tenderly loved, she was forced to make her suffer so intensely. She was exhausted, and rose up hastily, surprised that daylight had come. The little cry of the birds had increased in every direction, although as yet none were to be seen in flight. In the sky the clouds, delicate as gauze, seemed to float away in the limpid blueness of the atmosphere.

Then Angelique, whose look had mechanically fallen upon her wild rose-bush, at last noticed it with its puny leaves. She smiled sadly as she said:

"You were right, mother dear; it will never be in blossom."

At seven o'clock in the morning Angelique was at her work as usual. The days followed each other, and every forenoon found her seated before the chasuble she had left on the previous evening. Nothing appeared to be changed outwardly; she kept strictly her promise, shut herself up, and made no attempt whatever to see Felicien. This did not seem to depress her at all, but she kept her bright, youthful look, smiling sweetly at Hubertine when occasionally she saw her eyes fixed upon her as if astonished. However, in this enforced silence she thought only of him; he was always in her mind.

Her hope remained firm, and she was sure that in spite of all obstacles everything would come out all right in the end. In fact, it was this feeling of certainty that gave her such an air of courage, of haughty rectitude, and of justice.

Hubert from time to time scolded her.

"You are over-doing, my dear; you are really growing pale. I hope at least that you sleep well at night."

"Oh yes, father! Like a log! Never in my life did I feel better than now."

But Hubertine, becoming anxious in her turn, proposed that they should take a little vacation, and said:

"If you would like it, my child, we will shut up the house, and we will go, all three of us, to Paris for a while."

"Oh! mother mine, of what are you thinking? What would become of all our orders for work? You know I am never in better health than when closely occupied."

In reality, Angelique simply awaited a miracle, some manifestation of the Invisible which would give her to Felicien. In addition to the fact that she had promised to do nothing, what need was there of her striving, since in the beyond some unknown power was always working for her? So, in her voluntary inaction, while feigning indifference, she was continually on the watch, listening to the voices of all that quivered around her, and to the little familiar sounds of this circle in which she lived and which would assuredly help her. Something must eventually come from necessity. As she leaned over her embroidery-frame, not far from the open window, she lost not a trembling of the leaves, not a murmur of the Chevrotte. The slightest sighs from the Cathedral came to her, magnified tenfold by the eagerness of her attention; she even heard the slippers of the beadle as he walked round the altar when putting out the tapers. Again at her side she felt the light touch of mysterious wings; she knew that she was aided by the unknown, and at times she even turned suddenly, thinking that a phantom had whispered in her ear the way of gaining the hoped-for victory. But days passed and no change came.

At night, that she need not break her word, Angelique at first did not go out upon the balcony, for fear of being tempted to rejoin Felicien, were she to see him below her. She remained quietly waiting in her chamber. Then, as the leaves even scarcely stirred, but seemed to sleep, she ventured out, and began to question the dark shadows as before.

From whence would the miracle come? Without doubt, in the Bishop's garden would be seen a flaming hand, which would beckon to her to approach.

Or, perhaps, the sign would appear in the Cathedral, the great organs of which would peal forth, and would call her to the altar.

Nothing would have surprised her: neither the doves of the "Golden Legend" bringing the words of benediction, nor the intervention of saints, who would enter through the walls, to tell her that Monseigneur wished to see her. The only thing at which she wondered was the slowness of the working of the marvel. Like the day, the nights succeeded nights, yet nothing, nothing manifested itself.

At the close of the second week, that which astonished Angelique above all was that she had not seen Felicien. She, it was true, had pledged herself to take no steps towards meeting him, yet, without having said so to anyone, she thought he would do all in his power to find her. But the Clos-Marie remained deserted, and he no longer walked among the wild grasses therein. Not once during the past fortnight had she had a glimpse of him by day, or even seen his shadow in the evening. Still her faith remained unshaken; that he did not come was simply that he was occupied in making his preparations to rejoin her. However, as her surprise increased there was at length mingled with it a beginning of anxiety.

At last, one evening the dinner was sad at the embroiderer's, and as soon as it was over Hubert went out, under the pretext of having an important commission to attend to, so Hubertine remained alone with Angelique in the kitchen. She looked at her for a long time with moistened eyes, touched by such courage. During the past fortnight not one word had been exchanged between them in reference to those things with which their hearts were full, and she was deeply moved by the strength of character and loyalty her daughter displayed in thus keeping her promise. A sudden feeling of deep tenderness made her open her arms, and the young girl threw herself upon her breast, and in silence they clasped each other in a loving embrace.

Then, when Hubertine was able to speak, she said:

"Ah! my poor child, I have been impatient to be alone with you, for you must know that now all is at an end; yes, quite at an end."

Startled, Angelique rose quickly, exclaiming:

"What! Is Felicien dead?"

"No! oh no!"

"If he will never come again, it is only that he is dead."

So Hubertine was obliged to explain to her that the day after the procession she had been to see him, and had made him also promise that he would keep way from them until he had the full authorisation of Monseigneur to do otherwise. It was thus a definite leave-taking, for she knew a marriage would be utterly impossible. She had made him almost distracted as she explained to him how wrongly he had done in thus compromising a young, ignorant, confiding child, whom he would not be allowed to make his wife; and then he had assured her, that if he could not see her again, he would die from grief, rather than be disloyal.

That same evening he confessed everything to his father.

"You see, my dear," continued Hubertine, "you are so courageous that I can repeat to you all I know without hesitation. Oh! if you realised, my darling, how I pity you, and what admiration I have for you since I have found you so strong, so brave in keeping silent and in appearing gay when your heart was heavily burdened. But you will have need of even more firmness; yes, much more, my dear. This afternoon I have seen the Abbe Cornille, and he gives me no encouragement whatever. Monseigneur refuses to listen to the subject, so there is no more hope."

She expected a flood of fears, and she was astonished to see her daughter reseat herself tranquilly, although she had turned very pale. The old oaken table had been cleared, and a lamp lighted up this ancient servants' hall, the quiet of which was only disturbed by the humming of the boiler.

"Mother, dear, the end has not yet come. Tell me everything, I beg of you. Have I not a right to know all, since I am the one above all others most deeply interested in the matter?"

And she listened attentively to what Hubertine thought best to tell her of what she had learned from the Abbe, keeping back only certain details of the life which was as yet an unknown thing to this innocent child.

CHAPTER XIII

Since the return of his son to him Monseigneur's days had been full of trouble. After having banished him from his presence almost immediately upon the death of his wife, and remaining without seeing him for twenty years, lo! he had now come back to him in the plenitude and lustre of youth, the living portrait of the one he had so mourned, with the same delicate grace and beauty. This long exile, this resentment against a child whose life had cost that of the mother, was also an act of prudence. He realised it doubly now, and regretted that he had changed his determination of not seeing him again. Age, twenty years of prayer, his life as clergyman, had not subdued the unregenerate man within him. It was simply necessary that this son of his, this child of the wife he had so adored, should appear with his laughing blue eyes, to make the blood circulate so rapidly in his veins as if it would burst them, as he seemed to think that the dead had been brought to life again. He struck his breast, he sobbed bitterly in penitence, as he remembered that the joys of married life and the ties springing therefrom were prohibited to the priesthood. The good Abbe Cornille had spoken of all this to Hubertine in a low voice and with trembling lips. Mysterious sounds had been heard, and it was whispered that Monseigneur shut himself up after twilight, and passed nights of combat, of tears and of cries, the violence of which, although partly stifled by the hangings of his room, yet frightened the members of his household. He thought that he had forgotten; that he had conquered passion; but it reappeared with the violence of a tempest, reminding him of the terrible man he had been formerly—the bold adventurer, the descendant of brave, legendary chieftains. Each evening on his knees he flayed his skin with haircloth, he tried to banish the phantom of the regretted wife by calling from its coffin the skeleton which must now be there. But she constantly appeared before him, living, in the delicious freshness of youth, such as she was when very young he had first met her and loved her with the devoted affection of maturity. The torture then recommenced as keen and intense as on the day after her death: he mourned her, he longed for her with the same revolt against God Who had taken her from him; he was unable to calm himself until the break of day, when quite exhausted by contempt of himself and disgust of all the world. Oh! Divine love! When he went out of his room Monseigneur resumed his severe attitude, his expression was calm and haughty, and his face was only slightly pale. The morning when Felicien had made his confession he listened to him without interruption, controlling himself with so great an effort that not a fibre of his body quivered, and he looked earnestly at him, distressed beyond measure to see him, so young, so handsome, so eager, and so like himself in this folly of impetuous love. It was no longer with bitterness, but it was his absolute will, his hard duty to save his son from the ills which had caused him so much suffering, and he would destroy the passion in his child as he wished to kill it in himself. This romantic history ended by giving him great anxiety. Could it be true that a poor girl—a child without a name, a little embroiderer, first seen under a pale ray of moonlight, had been transfigured into a delicate Virgin of the Legends, and adored with a fervent love as if in a dream? At each new acknowledgment he thought his anger was increased, as his heart beat with such an inordinate emotion, and he redoubled his attempts at self-control, knowing not what cry might come to his lips. He had finished by replying with a single word, "Never!" Then Felicien threw himself on his knees before him, implored him, and pleaded his cause as well as that of Angelique, in the trembling of respect and of terror with which the sight of his father always filled him. Until then he had approached him only with fear. He besought him not to oppose his happiness, without even daring to lift his eyes towards his saintly personage. With a submissive voice he offered to go away, no matter where; to leave all his great fortune to the Church, and to take his wife so far from there that they would never be seen again. He only wished to love and to be loved, unknown. Monseigneur shook from trembling as he repeated severely the word, "Never!" He had pledged himself to the Voincourts, and he would never break his engagement with them. Then Felicien, quite discouraged, realising that he was very angry, went away, fearing lest the rush of blood, which empurpled his cheeks, might make him commit the sacrilege of an open revolt against paternal authority.

"My child," concluded Hubertine, "you can easily understand that you must no longer think of this young man, for you certainly would not wish to act in opposition to the wishes of Monseigneur. I knew that beforehand, but I preferred that the facts should speak for themselves, and that no obstacle should appear to come from me."

Angelique had listened to all this calmly, with her hands listlessly clasped in her lap. Scarcely had she even dropped her eyelids from time to time, as with fixed looks she saw the scene so vividly described—Felicien at the feet of Monseigneur, speaking of her in an overflow of tenderness. She did not answer immediately, but continued to think seriously, in the dead quiet of the kitchen, where even the little bubbling sound of the water in the boiler was no longer heard. She lowered her eyes and looked as her hands, which, under the lamplight, seemed as if made of beautiful ivory. Then, while the smile of perfect confidence came back to her lips, she said simply:

"If Monseigneur refuses, it is because he waits to know me."

That night Angelique slept but little. The idea that to see her would enable at once Monseigneur to decide in her favor haunted her. There was in it no personal, feminine vanity, but she was under the influence of a deep, intense love, and her true affection for Felicien was so evident, she was sure that when his father realised it he could not be so obstinate as to make them both unhappy. Many times she turned restlessly in her bed as she pictured what would happen. Before her closed eyes Monseigneur constantly passed in his violet-coloured robe. Perhaps it was, indeed, through him, and by him, that the expected miracle was to appear. The warm night was sleeping without, and she eagerly listened for the voices, trying to know what the trees, the Chevrotte, the Cathedral, her chamber itself, peopled with such friendly shadows, advised her to do. But there was only an indistinct humming, and nothing precise came to her. It seemed, however, as if mysterious whispers encouraged her to persevere. At last she grew impatient of these too slow certitudes, and as she fell asleep she surprised herself by saying:

"To-morrow I will speak to Monseigneur."

When she awoke, her proposed plan seemed not only quite natural but necessary. It was ingenuous and brave; born of a proud and great purity.

She knew that at five o'clock on every Saturday afternoon Monseigneur went to kneel in the Chapel Hautecoeur, where he liked to pray alone, giving himself up entirely to the past of his race and to himself, seeking a solitude which was respected by all connected with the Cathedral. As it fortunately happened, this was a Saturday. She quickly came to a decision. At the Bishop's Palace, not only would she be apt to find it difficult to be received, but, on the other hand, there were always so many people about she would be ill at ease; whilst it would be so simple to await him in the chapel, and to introduce herself to Monseigneur as soon as he appeared. That day she embroidered with her usual application and composure. Firm in her wish, sure of doing the right thing, she had no impatient fever of expectation. When it was four o'clock she spoke of going to see the mere Gabet, and went out, dressed as for an ordinary walk, wearing her little garden-hat tied carelessly under her chin. She turned to the left, and pushing open the linted, stuffed door of the portal of Saint Agnes, let it fall back heavily behind her.

The church was empty; alone, the confessional of Saint Joseph was still occupied by a penitent, the edge of whose black dress was just seen as one passed. Angelique, who had been perfectly self-possessed until now, began to tremble as she entered this sacred, cold solitude, where even the little sound of her steps seemed to echo terribly. Why was it that her heart grew so oppressed? She had thought she was quite strong, and the day had passed most peacefully—she was so sure of being right in her desire to be happy. But now that she was ignorant of what might happen she turned pale as if guilty, quite frightened at thinking that she was to see Monseigneur, and that in truth she had come there expressly to speak to him. She went quietly to the Chapel Hautecoeur, where she was obliged to remain leaning against the gate.

This chapel was one of the most sunken and dark of the old Romanesque apse. Like a cave hewn in a rock, straight and bare, with the simple lines of its low, vaulted ceiling, it had but one window, that of stained glass, on which was the Legend of St. George, and in whose panes the red and blue so predominated that they made a lilac-coloured light, as if it were twilight. The altar, in black and white marble, was unornamented, and the whole place, with its picture of the Crucifixion, and its two chandeliers, seemed like a tomb. The walls were covered with commemorative tablets, a collection from top to bottom of stones crumbling from age, on which the deeply-cut inscriptions could still be read.

Almost stifled, Angelique waited, motionless. A beadle passed, who did not even see her, so closely had she pressed herself against the interior of the iron railing. She still saw the dress of the penitent who was at the confessional near the entrance. Her eyes, gradually accustomed to the half-light, were mechanically fixed upon the inscriptions, the characters of which she ended by deciphering. Certain names struck her, calling back to her memory the legends of the Chateau d'Hautecoeur, of Jean V le Grand, of Raoul III, and of Herve VII.

She soon found two others, those of Laurette and of Balbine, which brought tears to her eyes, so nervous was she from trouble and anxiety—Laurette, who fell from a ray of moonlight, on her way to rejoin her betrothed, and Balbine, who died from sudden joy at the return of her husband, whom she thought had been killed in the war. They both of them came back at night and enveloped the Castle with their immense, flowing white robes. Had she not seen them herself the day of their visit to the ruins, as they floated, towards evening, above the towers in the rosy pallor of the dusk? Ah! how willingly she would die as they did, although but sixteen years of age, in the supreme happiness of the realisation of her dream!

A loud noise which reverberated under the arches made her tremble. It was the priest who came out from the confessional of Saint Joseph and shut the door after him. She was surprised at no longer seeing the penitent, who had already gone. And when in his turn the clergyman went out by way of the sacristy, she realised that she was absolutely alone in the vast solitude of the Cathedral. At the loud sound of the door of the confessional, as it creaked on its hinges, she thought that Monseigneur was coming. It was nearly half an hour since she had expected him, yet she did not realise it, for her excitement prevented her from taking any note of time.

Soon a new name drew her eyes towards the tablets—Felicien III, who went to Palestine, carrying a candle in his hand, to fulfil a vow of Philippe le Bel. And her heart beat with pride as she saw before her, mentally, the youthful Felicien VII, the descendant of all these worthies, the fair-haired nobleman whom she adored, and by whom she was so tenderly loved. She suddenly became filled with pride and fear. Was it possible that she herself was there, in the expectation of bringing about a prodigy? Opposite her there was a fresher plaque of marble, dating from the last century, the black letters upon which she could easily read. Norbert Louis Ogier, Marquis d'Hautecoeur, Prince of Mirande and of Rouvres, Count of Ferrieres, of Montegu and of Saint Marc, and also of Villemareuil, Chevalier of the four Royal Orders of Saint Esprit, Saint Michel, Notre Dame de Carmel and Saint Louis, Lieutenant in the Army of the King, Governor of Normandy, holding office as Captain-General of the Hunting, and Master of the Hounds. All these were the titles of Felicien's grandfather, and yet she had come, so simple, with her working-dress and her fingers worn by the needle, in hopes of marrying the grandson of this dead dignitary!

There was a slight sound, scarcely a rustling, on the flagstones. She turned and saw Monseigneur, and remained motionless at this silent approach without the pomp and surroundings she had vaguely expected. He entered into the chapel, tall, erect, and noble-looking, dressed in purple, with his pale face, his rather large nose, and his superb eyes, which still seemed youthful in their expression. At first he did not notice her against the black gate. Then, as he was about to kneel down, he saw her before him at his feet.

With trembling limbs, overcome by respect and fear, Angelique had fallen upon her knees. He seemed to her at this moment like the Eternal Father, terrible in aspect and absolute master of her destiny. But her heart was still courageous, and she spoke at once.

"Oh! Monseigneur, I have come——"

As for the Bishop, he had risen immediately. He had a vague recollection of her; the young girl, seen first at her window on the day of the procession, and re-found a little later standing on a chair in the church; this little embroiderer, with whom his son was so desperately in love. He uttered no word, he made no gesture. He waited, stern and stiff.

"Oh! Monseigneur, I have come on purpose that you may see me. You have, it is true, refused to accept me, but you do not know me. And now, here I am. Please look at me before you repel me again. I am the one who loves, and am also beloved, and that is all. Nothing beyond this affection. Nothing but a poor child, found at the door of this church. You see me at your feet, little, weak, and humble. If I trouble you it will be very easy for you to send me away. You have only to lift your little finger to crush me. But think of my tears! Were you to know how I have suffered, you would be compassionate. I wished, Monseigneur, to plead my cause in my turn. I love, and that is why I kneel before you, to tell you so. I am ignorant in many ways; I only know I love. All my strength and all my pride is centred in that fact. Is not that sufficient? It certainly makes one great and good to be able to say that one really loves."

She continued with sighs, and in broken phrases, to confess everything to him, in an unaffected outpouring of ardent feeling. It was a true affection that thus acknowledged itself. She dared to do so because she was innocent and pure. Little by little she raised her head.

"We love each other, Monseigneur. Without doubt he has already told you how all this came to pass. As for me, I have often asked myself the question without being able to reply to it. But we love each other, and if it is a crime to do so, pardon it, I beseech you, for it came from afar, from everything in short that surrounded us. When I realised that I loved him, it was already too late to prevent it. Now, is it possible to be angry on that account? You can keep him with you, make him marry some other person, but you cannot prevent him from giving me his heart. He will die without me, as I shall if obliged to part from him. When he is not by my side I feel that he is really near me, and that we will never be entirely separated, since we carry each other's life with us. I have only to close my eyes to re-see him when I wish, so firmly is his image impressed upon my soul. Our whole natures are thus closely united for life. And could you wish to draw us away from this union? Oh! Monseigneur, it is divine; do not try to prevent us loving each other!"

He looked at her in her simple working-dress, so fresh, so unpretending, and attractive. He listened to her as she repeated the canticle of their love in a voice that both fascinated and troubled him, and which grew stronger by degrees. But as her garden-hat fell upon her shoulders, her exquisite hair seemed to make a halo around her head of fine gold, and she appeared to him, indeed, like one of those legendary virgins of the old prayer-books, so frail was she, so primitive, so absorbed in her deep feeling of intense and pure affection.

"Be good, be merciful, Monseigneur. You are the master. Do allow us to be happy!"

She implored him, and finding that he remained unmoved, without speaking, she again bowed down her head.

Oh! this unhappy child at his feet; this odour of youth that came up from the sweet figure thus bent before him! There he saw, as it were again, the beautiful light locks he had so fondly caressed in the days gone by. She, whose memory still distressed him after twenty years of penitence, had the same fresh youthfulness, the same proud expression, and the same lily-like grace. She had re-appeared; it was she herself who now sobbed and besought him to be tender and merciful.

Tears had come to Angelique, yet she continued to outpour her heart.

"And, Monseigneur, it is not only that I love him, but I also love the nobility of his name, the lustre of his royal fortune. Yes, I know well that being nothing, that having nothing, it seems as if I were only desirous of his money. In a way, it is true it is also for his wealth that I wish to marry him. I tell you this because it is necessary that you should know me thoroughly. Ah! to become rich by him and with him, to owe all my happiness to him, to live in the sweetness and splendour of luxury, to be free in our loving home, and to have no more sorrow, no misery around us! That is my ideal! Since he has loved me I fancy myself dressed in heavy brocades, as ladies wore in olden days; I have on my arms and around my neck strings of pearls and precious stones; I have horses and carriages; groves in which I take long walks, followed by pages. Whenever I think of him my dream recommences, and I say to myself, 'This must all come to pass, for it perfects my desire to become a queen.' Is it, then, Monseigneur, a bad thing to love him more because he can gratify all my childish wishing by showering down miraculous floods of gold upon me as in fairy-tales?"

He saw then that she rose up proudly, with a charming, stately air of a true princess, in spite of her real simplicity. And she was always exactly like the fair maiden of other years, with the same flower-like delicacy, the same tender tears, clear as smiles. A species of intoxication came from her, the warm breath of which mounted to his face—the same shadow of a remembrance which made him at night throw himself on his devotional chair, sobbing so deeply that he disturbed the sacred silence of the Palace. Until three o'clock in the morning of this same day he had contended with himself again, and this long history of love, this story of passion, would only revive and excite his incurable wound. But behind his impassiveness nothing was seen, nothing betrayed his effort at self-control and his attempt to conquer the beating of his heart. Were he to lose his life's blood, drop by drop, no one should see it flow, and he now simply became paler, was silent and immovable.

At last this great persistent silence made Angelique desperate, and she redoubled her prayers.

"I put myself in your hands, Monseigneur. Do with me whatever you think best; but have pity when deciding my fate."

Still, as he continued silent, he terrified her, and seemed to grow taller than ever as he stood before her in his fearful majesty. The deserted Cathedral, whose aisles were already dark, with its high vaulted arches where the daylight seemed dying, made the agony of this silence still harder to bear. In the chapel, where the commemorative slabs could no longer be seen, there remained only the Bishop in his purple cassock, that now looked black, and his long white face, which alone seemed to have absorbed all the light. She saw his bright eyes fixed upon her with an ever-increasing depth of expression, and shrunk from them, wondering if it were possible that anger made them shine in so strange a way.

"Monseigneur, had I not come to-day, I should have eternally reproached myself for having brought about the unhappiness of us both from my want of courage. Tell me then, oh, tell me that I was right in doing so, and that you will give us your consent!"

What use would there be in discussing the matter with this child? He had already given his son the reasons for his refusal, and that was all-sufficient. That he had not yet spoken was only because he thought he had nothing to say. She, no doubt, understood him, and she seemed to wish to raise herself up that she might be able to kiss his hands. But he threw them behind him violently, and she was startled at seeing his white face become suddenly crimson, from a rush of blood to his head.

"Monseigneur! Monseigneur!"

At last he opened his lips, to say to her just one word, the same he had said to his son:

"Never!"

And without remaining to pray that day, as was his wont, he left the chapel, and with slow steps soon disappeared behind the pillars of the apse.

Falling on the flagstones, Angelique wept for a long time, sobbing deeply in the great peaceful silence of the empty church.

CHAPTER XIV

That same evening in the kitchen, after they left the dinner-table, Angelique confessed everything to Hubert, telling him of her interview with the Bishop, and of the latter's refusal. She was very pale, but not at all excited.

Hubert was quite overcome. What? Could it be possible that his dear child already suffered? That she also had been so deeply wounded in her affections? His eyes were filled with tears from his sympathy with her, as they were both of that excessively sensitive nature that at the least breath they were carried away by their imaginations.

"Ah! my poor darling, why did you not consult me? I would willingly have accompanied you, and perhaps I might have persuaded Monseigneur to yield to your prayers."

With a look Hubertine stopped him. He was really unreasonable. Was it not much better to seize this occasion to put an end at once to all ideas of a marriage which would be impossible? She took the young girl in her arms, and tenderly kissed her forehead.

"Then, now it is ended, my dear child; all ended?"

Angelique at first did not appear to understand what was said to her. Soon the words returned to her as if from a distance. She looked fixedly before her, seeming anxious to question the empty space, and at last she replied:

"Without doubt, mother."

Indeed, on the morrow she seated herself at the work-frame and embroidered as she was wont to do. She took up her usual routine of daily work, and did not appear to suffer. Moreover, no allusion was made to the past; she no longer looked from time to time out of the window into the garden, and gradually losing her paleness, the natural colour came back to her cheeks. The sacrifice appeared to have been accomplished.

Hubert himself thought it was so, and, convinced of the wisdom of Hubertine, did all in his power to keep Felicien at a distance. The latter, not daring to openly revolt against his father, grew feverishly impatient, to such a degree that he almost broke the promise he had made to wait quietly without trying to see Angelique again. He wrote to her, and the letters were intercepted. He even went to the house one morning, but it was Hubert alone who received him. Their explanatory conversation saddened them both to an equal degree, so much did the young man appear to suffer when the embroiderer told him of his daughter's calmness and her air of forgetfulness. He besought him to be loyal, and go to away, that he might not again throw the child into the fearful trouble of the last few weeks.

Felicien again pledged himself to be patient, but he violently refused to take back his word, for he was still hopeful that he might persuade his father in the end. He could wait; he would let affairs remain in their present state with the Voincourts, where he dined twice a week, doing so simply to avoid a direct act of open rebellion.

And as he left the house he besought Hubert to explain to Angelique why he had consented to the torment of not seeing her for the moment; he thought only of her, and the sole aim of everything he did was to gain her at last.

When her husband repeated this conversation to her, Hubertine grew very serious. Then, after a short silence, she asked:

"Shall you tell our daughter what he asked you to say to her?"

"I ought to do so."

She was again silent, but finally added:

"Act according to your conscience. But he is now under a delusion. He will eventually be obliged to yield to his father's wishes, and then our poor, dear little girl will die in consequence."

Hubert, overcome with grief, hesitated. But after contending with himself, he concluded to repeat nothing. Moreover, he became a little reassured each day when his wife called his attention to Angelique's tranquil appearance.

"You see well that the wound is healing. She is learning to forget."

But she did not forget; she also was simply waiting. All hope of human aid having died within her, she now had returned to the idea of some wonderful prodigy. There would surely be one, if God wished her to be happy. She had only to give herself up entirely into His hands; she believed that this new trial had been sent to her as a punishment for having attempted to force His will in intruding upon Monseigneur. Without true grace mankind was weak, and incapable of success. Her need of that grace made her humble, bringing to her as an only hope the aid of the Invisible; so that she gave up acting for herself, but left everything to the mysterious forces which surrounded her. Each evening at lamplight she recommenced her reading of the "Golden Legend," being as delighted with it as when she was a young child. She doubted none of the miracles related therein, being convinced that the power of the Unknown is without limit for the triumph of pure souls.

Just at this time the upholsterer of the Cathedral ordered of the Huberts a panel of the very richest embroidery for the throne of Monseigneur the Bishop. This panel, one yard and a half in width and three yards in length, was to be set in old carved wood, and on it were to be represented two angels of life-size, holding a crown, on which were to be the arms of the Hautecoeurs. It was necessary that the embroidery should be in bas-relief, a work which not only required great artistic knowledge, but also needed physical strength, to be well done. When proposed to the Huberts, they at first declined the offer, being not only fearful of fatiguing Angelique, but especially dreading that she would be saddened by the remembrances which would be brought to her mind as she wrought thread after thread during the several weeks. But she insisted upon accepting the command, and every morning applied herself to her task with an extraordinary energy. It seemed as if she found her happiness in tiring herself, and that she needed to be physically exhausted in order to be calm.

So in the old workroom life continued in the same regular way, as if their hearts had not even for a moment beaten more quickly than usual. Whilst Hubert occupied himself with arranging the frames, or drew the patterns, or stretched or relaxed the materials, Hubertine helped Angelique, both of them having their hands terribly tired and bruised when evening came. For the angels and the ornaments it had been necessary at the beginning to divide each subject into several parts, which were treated separately. In order to perfect the most salient points, Angelique first took spools of coarse unbleached thread, which she re-covered with the strong thread of Brittany in a contrary direction; and as the need came, making use of a heavy pair of shears, as well as of a roughing-chisel, she modelled these threads, shaped the drapery of the angels, and detached the details of the ornaments. In all this there was a real work of sculpture. At last, when the desired form was obtained, with the aid of Hubertine she threw on masses of gold thread, which she fastened down with little stitches of silk. Thus there was a bas-relief of gold, incomparably soft and bright, shining like a sun in the centre of this dark, smoky room. The old tools were arranged in the same lines as they had been for centuries—the punches, the awls, the mallets, and the hammers; on the work-frame the little donkey waste-basket and the tinsel, the thimbles and the needles, moved up and down as usual, while in the different corners, where they ended by growing rusty, the diligent, the hand spinning-wheel, and the reel for winding, seemed to sleep in the peaceful quiet which entered through the open window.

Days passed. Angelique broke many needles between morning and evening, so difficult was it to sew down the gold, through the thickness of the waxed threads. To have seen her, one would have said she was so thoroughly absorbed by her hard work that she could think of nothing else. At nine o'clock she was exhausted by fatigue, and, going to bed, she sank at once into a heavy, dreamless sleep. When her embroidery gave her mind a moment's leisure, she was astonished not to see Felicien. Although she took no step towards seeking him, it seemed to her that he ought to have tried every possible way to come to her. Yet she approved of his wisdom in acting as he did, and would have scolded him had he tried to hasten matters. No doubt he also looked for something supernatural to happen. It was this expectation upon which she now lived, thinking each night that it would certainly come on the morrow. Until now she had never rebelled. Still, at times she lifted up her head inquiringly, as if asking "What! Has nothing yet come to pass?" And then she pricked her finger so deeply that her hand bled, and she was obliged to take the pincers to draw the needle out. When her needle would break with a sharp little sound, as if of glass, she did not even make a movement of impatience.

Hubertine was very anxious on seeing her apply herself so desperately to her work, and as the time for the great washing had come again, she forced her to leave her panel of embroidery, that she might have four good days of active outdoor life in the broad sunlight. The mere Gabet, now free of her rheumatism, was able to help in the soaping and rinsing. It was a regular fete in the Clos-Marie, these last August days, in which the weather was splendid, the sky almost cloudless, while a delicious fragrance came up from the Chevrotte, the water of which as it passed under the willows was almost icy cold. The first day Angelique was very gay, as she beat the linen after plunging it in the stream; enjoying to the full the river, the elms, the old ruined mill, the wild herbs, and all those friendly surroundings, so filled with pleasant memories. Was it not there she had become acquainted with Felicien, who under the moonlight had at first seemed so mysterious a being, and who, later on, had been so adorably awkward the morning when he ran after the dressing-sacque that was being carried away by the current? As she rinsed each article, she could not refrain from glancing at the gateway of the Bishop's garden, which until recently had been nailed up. One evening she had passed through it on his arm, and who could tell but he might suddenly now open it and come to take her as she applied herself to her work in the midst of the frothy foam that at times almost covered her.

But the next day, as the mere Gabet brought the last barrow of linen, which she spread out on the grass with Angelique, she interrupted her interminable chattering upon the gossip of the neighbourhood to say maliciously:

"By the way, you know that Monseigneur is to marry his son?"

The young girl, who was just smoothing out a sheet, knelt down in the grass, her strength leaving her all at once, from the rudeness of the shock.

"Yes, everyone is talking of it. The son of Monseigneur will in the autumn marry Mademoiselle de Voincourt. It seems that everything was decided upon and arranged yesterday."

She remained on her knees, as a flood of confused ideas passed through her brain, and a strange humming was in her ears. She was not at all surprised at the news, and she realised it must be true. Her mother had already warned her, so she ought to have been prepared for it. She did not yet even doubt Felicien's love for her, as that was her faith and her strength. But at the present moment, that which weakened her so greatly and excited her to the very depths of her being was the thought that, trembling before the commands of his father, he could at last yield from weariness, and consent to wed one whom he did not love. Then he would be lost to her whom he really adored. Never had she thought such an act on his part possible; but now she saw him obliged by his filial duty and his sense of obedience to make them both unhappy for ever. Still motionless, her eyes fixed upon the little gate, she at last revolted against the facts, feeling as if she must go and shake the bars, force them open with her hands, run to Felicien, and, aiding him by her own courage, persuade him not to yield. She was surprised to hear herself reply to the mere Gabet, in the purely mechanical instinct of hiding her trouble:

"Ah! then he is to marry Mademoiselle Claire. She is not only very beautiful, but it is said she is also very good."

Certainly, as soon as the old woman went away, she must go and find him. She had waited long enough; she would break her promise of not seeing him as if it were a troublesome obstacle. What right had anyone to separate them in this way? Everything spoke to her of their affection—the Cathedral, the fresh water, and the old elm-trees under which they had been so happy. Since their affection had grown on this spot, it was there that she wished to find him again, to go with him arm-in-arm far away, so far that no one would ever see them.

"That is all," said at last the mere Gabet, as she hung the last napkins on a bush. "In two hours they will be dry. Good-night, mademoiselle, as you no longer have need of me."

Now, standing in the midst of this efflorescence of linen that shone on the green grass, Angelique thought of that other day, when, in the tempest of wind, among the flapping of the sheets and tablecloths, they unfolded so ingenuously the secrets of their lives to each other. Why had he discontinued his visits to her? Why had he not come to meet her during her healthy exercise of the past three days? But it would not be long before she would run to him, and when he had clasped her in his arms, he would know well that he was hers, and hers only. She would not even need to reproach him for his apparent weakness; it would be enough for her to show herself to make him realise that their happiness was in being together.

He would dare everything for her sake when once she had rejoined him.

An hour passed, and Angelique walked slowly between the pieces of linen, all white herself from the blinding reflection of the sun; and a confused sentiment awoke in her breast, which, growing stronger and stronger, prevented her from going over to the gate, as she had wished to do. She was frightened before this commencement of a struggle. What did it mean? She certainly could act according to her own will. Yet something new, inexplicable, thwarted her and changed the simplicity of her passion. It was such a simple thing to go to a beloved one; yet she could not possibly do so now, being kept back by a tormenting doubt. Also, since she had given her promise, perhaps it would be wrong to break it. In the evening, when the whole "wash" was dry, and Hubertine came to help her to take it to the house, she was still undecided what to do, and concluded to reflect upon it during the night. With her arms filled to overflowing with linen, white as snow, and smelling fresh and clean, she cast an anxious look towards the Clos-Marie, already bathed in the twilight, as if it were a friendly corner of Nature refusing to be her accomplice.

In the morning Angelique was greatly troubled when she awoke. Several other nights passed without her having come to any decision. She could not recover her ease of mind until she had the certainty that she was still beloved. Were her faith in that unshaken she would be perfectly at rest. If loved, she could bear anything. A fit of being charitable had again taken possession of her, so that she was touched by the slightest suffering, and her eyes were filled with tears ready to overflow at any moment. The old man Mascart made her give him tobacco, and the Chouarts drew from her everything they wished, even to preserved fruits. But the Lemballeuses also profited by her gifts, and Tiennette had been seen dancing at the fetes, dressed in one of "the good young lady's" gowns. And one day, as she was taking to the grandmother some chemises promised her the previous evening, she saw from a distance, in the midst of the poor family, Madame de Voincourt and her daughter Claire, accompanied by Felicien. The latter, no doubt, had taken them there. She did not show herself, but returned home at once, chilled to the heart. Two days later she saw the two again as they came out from the Chateau; then one morning the old man Mascart told her of a visit he had received from the handsome young gentleman and two ladies. Then she abandoned her poor people, who seemed no longer to have claims upon her, since Felicien had taken them and given them to his new friends. She gave up her walks for fear she might see them, and thus be so deeply wounded that her sufferings would be increased tenfold. She felt as if something were dying within her, as if, little by little, her very life was passing away.

One evening, after one of these meetings, when alone in her chamber, stifling from anguish, she uttered this cry:

"But he loves me no longer."

She saw before her, mentally, Claire de Voincourt, tall, beautiful, with her crown of black hair, and he was at her side, slight, proud, and handsome. Were they not really created for each other, of the same race, so well mated that one might think they were already married?

"He no longer loves me! Oh! he no longer loves me!"

This exclamation broke from her lips as if it were the ruin of all her hopes, and, her faith once shaken, everything gave way without her being able to examine the facts of the case or to regard them calmly. The previous evening she believed in something, but that had now passed by. A breath, coming from she knew not where, had been sufficient, and all at once by a single blow she had fallen into the greatest despair—that of thinking she was not beloved. He had indeed spoken wisely when he told her once that this was the only real grief, the one insupportable torture. Now her turn had come. Until then she had been resigned, she felt so strong and confident as she awaited the miracle. But her strength passed away with her faith; she was tormented by her distress like a child; her whole being seemed to be only an open wound. And a painful struggle commenced in her soul.

At first she called upon her pride to help her; she was too proud to care for him any more. She tried to deceive herself, she pretended to be free from all care, as she sang while embroidering the Hautecoeur coat of arms, upon which she was at work. But her heart was so full it almost stifled her, and she was ashamed to acknowledge to herself that she was weak enough to love him still in spite of all, and even to love him more than ever. For a week these armorial bearings, as they grew thread by thread under her fingers, filled her with a terrible sorrow. Quartered one and four, two and three, of Jerusalem and d'Hautecoeur; of Jerusalem, which is argent, a cross potence, or, between four cross-crosslets of the last; and d'Hautecoeur, azure, on a castle, or, a shield, sable, charged with a human heart, argent; the whole accompanied by three fleurs-de-lys, or, two at the top and one in the point. The enamels were made of twist, the metals of gold and silver thread. What misery it was to feel that her hands trembled, and to be obliged to lower her head to hide her eyes, that were blinded with tears, from all this brightness. She thought only of him; she adored him in the lustre of his legendary nobility. And when she embroidered the motto of the family, "Si Dieu veult, je veux," in black silk on a streamer of silver, she realised that she was his slave, and that never again could she reclaim him. Then tears prevented her from seeing, while mechanically she continued to make little stitches in her work.

After this it was indeed pitiable. Angelique loved in despair, fought against this hopeless affection, which she could not destroy. She still wished to go to Felicien, to reconquer him by throwing her arms around his neck; and thus the contest was daily renewed. Sometimes she thought she had gained control over her feelings, so great a silence appeared to have fallen within and around her. She seemed to see herself as if in a vision, a stranger in reality, very little, very cold, and kneeling like an obedient child in the humility of renunciation. Then it was no longer herself, but a sensible young girl, made so by her education and her home life. Soon a rush of blood mounted to her face, making her dizzy; her perfect health, the ardent feelings of her youth, seemed to gallop like runaway colts, and she resaw herself, proud and passionate, in all the reality of her unknown origin. Why, then, had she been so obedient? There was no true duty to consult, only free-will. Already she had planned her flight, and calculated the most favourable hour for forcing open the gate of the Bishop's garden. But already, also, the agony, the grave uneasiness, the torment of a doubt had come back to her. Were she to yield to evil she would suffer eternal remorse in consequence. Hours, most abominable hours, passed in this uncertainty as to what part she should take under this tempestuous wind, which constantly threw her from the revolt of her love to the horror of a fault. And she came out of the contest weakened by each victory over her heart.

One evening, as she was about leaving the house to go to join Felicien, she suddenly thought of her little book from the Society of Aid to Abandoned Children. She was so distressed to find that she no longer had strength to resist her pride. She took it from the depths of the chest of drawers, turned over its leaves, whispered to herself at each page the lowness of her birth, so eager was she in her need of humility. Father and mother unknown; no name; nothing but a date and a number; a complete neglect, like that of a wild plant that grows by the roadside! Then crowds of memories came to her: the rich pastures of the Mievre and the cows she had watched there; the flat route of Soulanges, where she had so often walked barefooted; and Maman Nini, who boxed her ears when she stole apples. Certain pages specially attracted her by their painful associations:—those which certified every three months to the visits of the under-inspector and of the physician, whose signatures were sometimes accompanied by observations or information, as, for instance, a severe illness, during which she had almost died; a claim from her nurse on the subject of a pair of shoes that had been burnt; and bad marks that had been given her for her uncontrollable temper. It was, in short, the journal of her misery. But one thing disturbed her above all others—the report in reference to the breaking of the necklace she had worn until she was six years of age. She recollected that she had instinctively hated it, this string of beads of bone, cut in the shape of little olives, strung on a silken cord, and fastened by a medallion of plaited silver, bearing the date of her entrance into the "Home" and her number. She considered it as a badge of slavery, and tried several times to break it with her little hands, without any fear as to the consequences of doing so. Then, when older, she complained that it choked her. For a year longer she was obliged to wear it. Great, indeed, was her joy when, in the presence of the mayor of the parish, the inspector's aid had cut the cord, replacing this sign of individuality by a formal description, in which allusion was made to her violet-coloured eyes and her fine golden hair. Yet she always seemed to feel around her neck this collar, as if she were an animal that was marked in order that she might be recognised if she went astray; it cut into her flesh and stifled her. When she came to that page on this day, her humility came back to her, she was frightened, and went up to her chamber, sobbing as if unworthy of being loved. At two other times this little book saved her. At last it lost its power, and could not help her in checking her rebellious thoughts.

Now, her greatest temptation came to her at night. Before going to bed, that her sleep might be calm, she imposed upon herself the task of resuming reading the Legends. But, resting her forehead on her hands, notwithstanding all her efforts she could understand nothing. The miracles stupefied her; she saw only a discoloured flight of phantoms. Then in her great bed, after a most intense prostration, she started suddenly from her sleep, in agony, in the midst of the darkness. She sat upright, distracted; then knelt among the half thrown-back clothes, as the perspiration started from her forehead, while she trembled from head to foot. Clasping her hands together, she stammered in prayer, "Oh! my God! Why have You forsaken me?"

Her great distress was to realise that she was alone in the obscurity at such moments. She had dreamed of Felicien, she was eager to dress herself and go to join him, before anyone could come to prevent her from fleeing. It was as if the Divine grace were leaving her, as if God ceased to protect her, and even the elements abandoned her. In despair, she called upon the unknown, she listened attentively, hoping for some sign from the Invisible. But there was no reply; the air seemed empty. There were no more whispering voices, no more mysterious rustlings. Everything seemed to be dead—the Clos-Marie, with the Chevrotte, the willows, the elm-trees in the Bishop's garden, and the Cathedral itself. Nothing remained of the dreams she had placed there; the white flight of her friends in passing away left behind them only their sepulchre. She was in agony at her powerlessness, disarmed, like a Christian of the Primitive Church overcome by original sin, as soon as the aid of the supernatural had departed. In the dull silence of this protected corner she heard this evil inheritance come back, howling triumphant over everything. If in ten minutes more no help came to her from figurative forces, if things around her did not rouse up and sustain her, she would certainly succumb and go to her ruin. "My God! My God! Why have You abandoned me?" Still kneeling on her bed, slight and delicate, it seemed to her as if she were dying.

Each time, until now, at the moment of her greatest distress she had been sustained by a certain freshness. It was the Eternal Grace which had pity upon her, and restored her illusions. She jumped out on to the floor with her bare feet, and ran eagerly to the window. Then at last she heard the voices rising again; invisible wings brushed against her hair, the people of the "Golden Legend" came out from the trees and the stones, and crowded around her. Her purity, her goodness, all that which resembled her in Nature, returned to her and saved her. Now she was no longer afraid, for she knew that she was watched over. Agnes had come back with the wandering, gentle virgins, and in the air she breathed was a sweet calmness, which, notwithstanding her intense sadness, strengthened her in her resolve to die rather than fail in her duty or break her promise. At last, quite exhausted, she crept back into her bed, falling asleep again with the fear of the morrow's trials, constantly tormented by the idea that she must succumb in the end, if her weakness thus increased each day.

In fact, a languor gained fearfully upon Angelique since she thought Felicien no longer loved her. She was deeply wounded and silent, uncomplaining; she seemed to be dying hourly. At first it showed itself by weariness. She would have an attack of want of breath, when she was forced to drop her thread, and for a moment remain with her eyes half closed, seeing nothing, although apparently looking straight before her. Then she left off eating, scarcely taking even a little milk; and she either hid her bread or gave it to the neighbours' chickens, that she need not make her parents anxious. A physician having been called, found no acute disease, but considering her life too solitary, simply recommended a great deal of exercise. It was like a gradual fading away of her whole being; a disappearing by slow degrees, an obliterating of her physique from its immaterial beauty. Her form floated like the swaying of two great wings; a strong light seemed to come from her thin face, where the soul was burning. She could now come down from her chamber only in tottering steps, as she supported herself by putting her two hands against the wall of the stairway. But as soon as she realised she was being looked at, she made a great effort, and even persisted in wishing to finish the panel of heavy embroidery for the Bishop's seat. Her little, slender hands had no more strength, and when she broke a needle she could not draw it from the work with the pincers.

One morning, when Hubert and Hubertine had been obliged to go out, and had left her alone at her work, the embroiderer, coming back first, had found her on the floor near the frame, where she had fallen from her chair after having fainted away. She had at last succumbed before her task, one of the great golden angels being still unfinished. Hubert took her in his arms, and tried to place her on her feet. But she fell back again, and did not recover consciousness.

"My darling! My darling! Speak to me! Have pity on me!"

At last she opened her eyes and looked at him in despair. Why had he wished her to come back to life! She would so gladly die!

"What is the matter with you, my dear child? Have you really deceived us? Do you still love him?"

She made no answer, but simply looked at him with intense sadness. Then he embraced her gently, took her in his arms, and carried her up to her room. Having placed her upon her bed, when he saw how white and frail she was he wept that he had had so cruel a task to perform as to keep away from her the one whom she so loved.

"But I would have given him to you, my dear! Why did you say nothing to me?"

She did not speak; her eyelids closed, and she appeared to fall asleep. He remained standing, his looks fixed upon the thin, lily-white countenance, his heart bleeding with pity. Then, as her breathing had become quiet, he went downstairs, as he heard his wife come in.

He explained everything to her in the working-room. Hubertine had just taken off her hat and gloves, and he at once told her of his having found the child on the floor in a dead faint, that she was now sleeping on her bed, overcome with weakness, and almost lifeless.

"We have really been greatly mistaken. She thinks constantly of this young man, and it is killing her by inches. Ah! if you knew what a shock it gave me, and the remorse which has made me almost distracted, since I have realised the truth of the case, and carried her upstairs in so pitiable a state. It is our fault. We have separated them by falsehoods, and I am not only ashamed, but so angry with myself it makes me ill. But what? Will you let her suffer so, without saying anything to save her?"

Still Hubertine was as silent as Angelique, and, pale from anxiety, looked at him calmly and soothingly. But he, always an excitable man, was now so overcome by what he had just seen that, forgetting his usual submission, he was almost beside himself, could not keep still, but threw his hands up and down in his feverish agitation.

"Very well, then! I will speak, and I will tell her that Felicien loves her, and that it is we who have had the cruelty to prevent him from returning, in deceiving him also. Now, every tear she sheds cuts me to the heart. Were she to die, I should consider myself as having been her murderer. I wish her to be happy. Yes! happy at any cost, no matter how, but by all possible means."

He had approached his wife, and he dared to cry out in the revolt of his tenderness, being doubly irritated by the sad silence she still maintained.

"Since they love each other, it is they alone who should be masters of the situation. There is surely nothing in the world greater than to love and be loved. Yes, happiness is always legitimate."

At length Hubertine, standing motionless, spoke slowly:

"You are willing, then, that he should take her from us, are you not? That he should marry her notwithstanding our opposition, and without the consent of his father? Would you advise them to do so? Do you think that they would be happy afterwards, and that love would suffice them?"

And without changing her manner she continued in the same heart-broken voice:

"On my way home I passed by the cemetery, and an undefinable hope made me enter there again. I knelt once more on the spot that is worn by our knees, and I prayed there for a long time."

Hubert had turned very pale, and a cold chill replaced the fever of a few moments before. Certainly he knew well the tomb of the unforgiving mother, where they had so often been in tears and in submission, as they accused themselves of their disobedience, and besought the dead to send them her pardon from the depths of the earth. They had remained there for hours, sure that if the grace they demanded were ever granted them they would be cognisant of it at once. That for which they pleaded, that for which they hoped, was for another infant, a child of pardon, the only sign which would assure them that at last they themselves had been forgiven. But all was in vain. The cold, hard mother was deaf to all their entreaties, and left them under the inexorable punishment of the death of their firstborn, whom she had taken and carried away, and whom she refused to restore to them.

"I prayed there for a long time," repeated Hubertine. "I listened eagerly to know if there would not be some slight movement."

Hubert questioned her with an anxious look.

"But there was nothing—no! no sound came up to me from the earth, and within me there was no feeling of relief. Ah! yes, it is useless to hope any longer. It is too late. We brought about our own unhappiness."

Then, trembling, he asked:

"Do you accuse me of it?"

"Yes, you are to blame, and I also did wrong in following you. We disobeyed in the beginning, and all our life has been spoiled in consequence of that one false step."

"But are you not happy?"

"No, I am not happy. A woman who has no child can never be happy. To love merely is not enough. That love must be crowned and blest."

He had fallen into a chair, faint and overcome, as tears came to his eyes. Never before had she reproached him for the ever-open wound which marred their lives, and she who always after having grieved him by an involuntary allusion to the past had quickly recovered herself and consoled him, this time let him suffer, looking at him as she stood near, but making no sign, taking no step towards him. He wept bitterly, exclaiming in the midst of his tears:

"Ah! the dear child upstairs—it is she you condemn. You are not willing that Felicien should marry her, as I married you, and that she should suffer as you have done."

She answered simply by a look: a clear, affectionate glance, in which he read the strength and simplicity of her heart.

"But you said yourself, my dear, that our sweet daughter would die of grief if matters were not changed. Do you, then, wish for her death?"

"Yes. Her death now would be preferable to an unhappy life."

He left his seat, and clasped her in his arms as they both sobbed bitterly. For some minutes they embraced each other. Then he conquered himself, and she in her turn was obliged to lean upon his shoulder, that he might comfort her and renew her courage. They were indeed distressed, but were firm in their decision to keep perfectly silent, and, if it were God's will that their child must die in consequence, they must accept it submissively, rather than advise her to do wrong.

From that day Angelique was obliged to keep in her room. Her weakness increased so rapidly and to such a degree that she could no longer go down to the workroom. Did she attempt to walk, her head became dizzy at once and her limbs bent under her. At first, by the aid of the furniture, she was able to get to the balcony. Later, she was obliged to content herself with going from her armchair to her bed. Even that distance seemed long to her, and she only tried it in the morning and evening, she was so exhausted.

However, she still worked, giving up the embroidery in bas-relief as being too difficult, and simply making use of coloured silks. She copied flowers after Nature, from a bunch of hydrangeas and hollyhocks, which, having no odour, she could keep in her room. The bouquet was in full bloom in a large vase, and often she would rest for several minutes as she looked at it with pleasure, for even the light silks were too heavy for her fingers. In two days she had made one flower, which was fresh and bright as it shone upon the satin; but this occupation was her life, and she would use her needle until her last breath. Softened by suffering, emaciated by the inner fever that was consuming her, she seemed now to be but a spirit, a pure and beautiful flame that would soon be extinguished.

Why was it necessary to struggle any longer if Felicien did not love her? Now she was dying with this conviction; not only had he no love for her to-day, but perhaps he had never really cared for her. So long as her strength lasted she had contended against her heart, her health, and her youth, all of which urged her to go and join him. But now that she was unable to move, she must resign herself and accept her fate.

One morning, as Hubert placed her in her easy chair, and put a cushion under her little, motionless feet, she said, with a smile:

"Ah! I am sure of being good now, and not trying to run away."

Hubert hastened to go downstairs, that she might not see his tears.

CHAPTER XV

It was impossible for Angelique to sleep that night. A nervous wakefulness kept her burning eyelids from closing, and her extreme weakness seemed greater than ever. The Huberts had gone to their room, and at last, when it was near midnight, so great a fear came over her that she would die if she were to remain longer in bed, she preferred to get up, notwithstanding the immense effort required to do so.

She was almost stifled. Putting on a dressing-gown and warm slippers, she crept along slowly as far as the window, which she opened wide. The winter was somewhat rainy, but of a mild dampness; so the air was pleasant to breathe. She sank back into her great armchair, after having turned up the wick of a lamp which was on a table near her, and which was always allowed to be kept burning during the entire night. There, by the side of the volume of the "Golden Legend," was the bouquet of hydrangeas and hollyhocks which she had begun to copy. That she might once more attach herself to the life which she realised was fast passing from her she had a sudden fancy to work, and drawing her frame forward, she made a few stitches with her trembling fingers. The red silk of the rose-tremiere seemed of a deeper hue than ever, in contrast with her white hands: it was almost as if it were the blood from her veins which was quietly flowing away drop by drop.

But she, who for two hours had turned in vain from side to side in the burning bedclothes, yielded almost immediately to sleep as soon as she was seated. Her head drooped a little toward her right shoulder, being supported by the back of her chair, and the silk remaining in her motionless hands, a looker-on would have thought she was still embroidering. White as snow, perfectly calm, she slept under the light of the lamp in the chamber, still and quiet as a tomb. The faded, rosy draperies of the great royal couch were paler than ever in their shady corner, and the gloom of the walls of the room was only relieved by the great chest of drawers, the wardrobe, and the chairs of old carved oak. Minutes passed; her slumber was deep and dreamless.

At last there was a slight sound, and Felicien suddenly appeared on the balcony, pale, trembling, and, like herself, looking very worn and thin, and his countenance distressed. When he saw her reclining in the easy chair, pitiable and yet so beautiful to look at, he rushed at once into the chamber, and his heart grew heavy with infinite grief as he went forward, and, falling on his knees before her, gazed at her with an expression of utter despair. Could it be that she was so hopelessly ill? Was it unhappiness that had caused her to be so weak, and to have wasted way to such a degree that she appeared to him light as air while she lay there, like a feather which the slightest breath would blow away? In her sleep, her suffering and her patient resignation were clearly seen. He in fact would have known her only by her lily-like grace, the delicate outlines of her neck, her drooping shoulders, and her oval face, transfigured like that of a youthful virgin mounting towards heaven. Her exquisite hair was now only a mass of light, and her pure soul shone under the soft transparency of her skin. She had all the ethereal beauty of the saints relieved from their bodies. He was both dazzled and distressed; the violent shock rendered him incapable of moving, and, with hands clasped, he remained silent. She did not awake as he continued to watch her.

A little air from the half-closed lips of Felicien must have passed across Angelique's face, as all at once she opened her great eyes. Yet she did not start, but in her turn looked at him with a smile, as if he were a vision. Yes, it was he! She recognised him well, although he was greatly changed. But she did not think she was awake, for she often saw him thus in her dreams, and her trouble was increased when, rousing from her sleep, she realised the truth.

He held his hands out towards her and spoke:

"My dearest, I love you. I was told that you were ill, and came to you immediately. Look at me! Here I am, and I love you."

She straightened herself up quickly. She shuddered, as with a mechanical movement she passed her fingers over her eyes.

"Doubt no longer, then. See me at your feet, and realise that I love you now, as I have ever done."

Then she exclaimed:

"Oh! is it you? I had given up expecting you, and yet you are here."

With her feeble, trembling hands, she had taken his, thus assuring herself that he was not a fanciful vision of her sleep.

He continued:

"You have always loved me, and I love you for ever. Yes, notwithstanding everything; and more deeply even than I should have ever thought it possible to do."

It was an unhoped-for excess of happiness, and in this first minute of absolute joy they forgot everything else in the world, giving themselves up to the delightful certainty of their mutual affection, and their ability to declare it. The sufferings of the past, the obstacles of the future, had disappeared as if by magic. They did not even think of asking how it was that they had thus come together. But there they were, mingling their tears of joy together as they embraced each other with the purest of feelings: he was overcome with pity that she was so worn by grief and illness that she seemed like a mere shadow in his arms. In the enchantment of her surprise she remained half-paralysed, trembling from exhaustion, radiant with spiritual beauty, as she lay back in her great easy chair, so physically weary that she could not raise herself without falling again, but intoxicated with this supreme contentment.

"Ah, dear Seigneur, my only remaining wish is gratified. I longed to see you before death came."

He lifted up his head, as with a despairing movement, and said:

"Do not speak of dying. It shall not be. I am here, and I love you."

She smiled angelically.

"I am not afraid to die now that you have assured me of your affection. The idea no longer terrifies me. I could easily fall asleep in this way, while leaning on your shoulders. Tell me once more that you love me."

"I love you as deeply to-day as I loved you yesterday, and as I will love you on the morrow. Do not doubt it for one moment, for it is for eternity! Oh, yes, we will love each other for ever and ever."

Angelique was enraptured, and with vague eyes looked directly before her, as if seeing something beyond the cold whiteness of the chamber. But evidently she aroused herself, as if just awaking from sleep. In the midst of this great felicity which had appeased her, she had now had time for reflection. The true facts of the case astonished her.

"You have loved me! Yet why did you not at once come to see me?"

"Your parents said that you cared for me no longer. I also nearly died when learning that. At last, I was determined to know the whole truth, and was sent away from the house, the door being absolutely closed against me, and I was forbidden to return."

"Then they shut the door in your face? Yet my mother told me that you did not love me, and I could but believe her, since having seen you several times with that young lady, Mademoiselle Claire, I thought naturally you were obeying your father."

"No. I was waiting. But it was cowardly on my part thus to tremble before him. My great mistake has been to allow the matter to go so far; for my duty was to have trusted only in you, to have insisted upon seeing you personally, and to have acted with you."

There was a short silence. Angelique sat erect for an instant, as if she had received a blow, and her expression grew cold and hard, and her forehead was cut by an angry wrinkle.

"So we have both of us been deceived. Falsehoods have been told in order to separate us from each other. Notwithstanding our mutual love, we have been tortured to such a degree that they have almost killed us both. Very well, then! It is abominable, and it frees us from the promises we made. We are now at liberty to act as we will."

An intense feeling of contempt so excited her that she stood up on her feet. She no longer realised that she was ill, but appeared to have regained her strength miraculously in the reawakening of all the passion and pride of her nature. To have thought her dream ended, and all at once to have re-found it in its full beauty and vitality, delighted her. To be able to say that they had done nothing unworthy of their love, but that it was other persons who had been the guilty ones, was a comfort. This growth of herself, this at last certain triumph, exalted her and threw her into a supreme rebellion.

She simply said:

"Come, let us go."

And she walked around the room, brave in the return of her energy and her will. She had already selected a mantle to throw over her shoulders. A lace scarf would be sufficient for her head.

Felicien uttered one cry of joy as she thus anticipated his desire. He had merely thought of this flight, but had not had the boldness to dare propose it; and how delightful indeed it would be to go away together, to disappear, and thus put an end to all cares, to overcome all obstacles. The sooner it was done the better, for then they would avoid having to contend with reflection or afterthought.

"Yes, darling, let us go immediately. I was coming to take you. I know where we can find a carriage. Before daylight we will be far away: so far that no one will ever be able to overtake us."

She opened her drawers, but closed them again violently, without taking anything therefrom, as her excitement increased. Could it be possible that she had suffered such torture for so many weeks! She had done everything in her power to drive him from her mind, to try to convince herself that he cared no more for her, until at last she thought she had succeeded in doing so. But it was of no use, and all this abominable work must be done over again. No! she could never have strength sufficient for that. Since they loved each other, the simplest thing in the world to do was to be married, and then no power on earth could separate them.

"Let me see. What ought I to take? Oh! how foolish I have been with all my childish scruples, when I think that others have lowered themselves so much as even to tell us falsehoods! Yes! even were I to have died, they would not have called you to me. But, tell me, must I take linen and dresses? See, here is a warmer gown. What strange ideas, what unnumbered obstacles, they put in my head. There was good on one side and evil on the other: things which one might do, and again that which one should never do; in short, such a complication of matters, it was enough to make one wild. They were all falsehoods: there was no truth in any of them. The only real happiness is to live to love the one who loves you, and to obey the promptings of the heart. You are the personification of fortune, of beauty, and of youth, my dear Seigneur; my only pleasure is in you. I give myself to you freely, and you may do with me what you wish."

She rejoiced in this breaking-out of all the hereditary tendencies of her nature, which she thought had died within her. Sounds of distant music excited her. She saw as it were their royal departure: this son of a prince carrying her away as in a fairy-tale, and making her queen of some imaginary realm; and she was ready to follow him with her arms clasped around his neck, her head upon his breast, with such a trembling from intense feeling that her whole body grew weak from happiness. To be alone together, just they two, to abandon themselves to the galloping of horses, to flee away, and to disappear in each other's arms. What perfect bliss it would be!

"Is it not better for me to take nothing? What good would it do in reality?"

He, partaking of her feverishness, was already at the door, as he replied:

"No, no! Take nothing whatever. Let us go at once."

"Yes, let us go. That is the best thing to do."

And she rejoined him. But she turned round, wishing to give a last look at the chamber. The lamp was burning with the same soft light, the bouquet of hydrangeas and hollyhocks was blooming as ever, and in her work-frame the unfinished rose, bright and natural as life, seemed to be waiting for her. But the room itself especially affected her. Never before had it seemed so white and pure to her; the walls, the bed, the air even, appeared as if filled with a clear, white breath.

Something within her wavered, and she was obliged to lean heavily against the back of a chair that was near her and not far from the door.

"What is the matter?" asked Felicien anxiously.

She did not reply, but breathed with great difficulty. Then, seized with a trembling, she could no longer bear her weight on her feet, but was forced to sit down.

"Do not be anxious; it is nothing. I only want to rest for a minute and then we will go."

They were silent. She continued to look round the room as if she had forgotten some valuable object there, but could not tell what it was. It was a regret, at first slight, but which rapidly increased and filled her heart by degrees, until it almost stifled her. She could no longer collect her thoughts. Was it this mass of whiteness that kept her back? She had always adored white, even to such a degree as to collect bits of silk and revel over them in secret.

"One moment, just one moment more, and we will go away, my dear Seigneur."

But she did not even make an effort to rise. Very anxious, he again knelt before her.

"Are you suffering, my dear? Cannot I do something to make you feel better? If you are shivering because you are cold, I will take your little feet in my hands, and will so warm them that they will grow strong and be able to run."

She shook her head as she replied:

"No, no, I am not cold. I could walk. But please wait a little, just a single minute."

He saw well that invisible chains seemed again to have taken possession of her limbs, and, little by little, were attaching themselves so strongly to her that very soon, perhaps, it would be quite impossible for him to draw her away. Yet, if he did not take her from there at once, if they did not flee together, he thought of the inevitable contest with his father on the morrow, of the distressing interview before which he had recoiled for weeks past. Then he became pressing, and besought her most ardently.

"Come, dear, the highways are not light at this hour; the carriage will bear us away in the darkness, and we will go on and on, cradled in each other's arms, sleeping as if warmly covered with down, not fearing the night's freshness; and when the day dawns we will continue our route in the sunshine, as we go still farther on, until we reach the country where people are always happy. No one will know us there; we will live by ourselves, lost in some great garden, having no other care than to love each other more deeply than ever at the coming of each new day. We shall find flowers as large as trees, fruits sweeter than honey. And we will live on nothing, for in the midst of this eternal spring, dear soul, we will live on our kisses."

She trembled under these burning words, with which he heated her face, and her whole being seemed to be fainting away at the representation of these promised joys.

"Oh! in a few minutes I will be ready; but wait a little longer."

"Then, if journeying fatigues us, we will come back here. We will rebuild the Chateau d'Hautecoeur, and we will pass the rest of our lives there. That is my ideal dream. If it is necessary, we will spend willingly all our fortune therein. Once more shall its donjon overlook from its height the two valleys. We will make our home in the Pavilion d'Honneur, between the Tower of David and the Tower of Charlemagne. The colossal edifice shall be restored as in the days of its primitive power: the galleries, the dwellings, the chapels, shall appear in the same barbaric luxury as before. And I shall wish for us to lead the life of olden times; you a princess and I a prince, surrounded by a large company of armed vassals and of pages. Our walls of fifteen feet of thickness will isolate us, and we shall be as our ancestors were, of whom it is written in the Legend. When the sun goes down behind the hills we will return from hunting, mounted on great white horses, greeted respectfully by the peasants as they kneel before us. The horn will resound in welcome, the drawbridge will be lowered for us. In the evening, kings will dine at our table. At night, our couch will be on a platform surmounted by a canopy like a throne. While we sleep peacefully in purple and gold, soft music will be played in the distance."

Quivering with pride and pleasure, she smiled now, but soon, overcome by the great suffering that again took possession of her, her lips assumed a mournful expression and the smile disappeared. As with a mechanical movement of her hands she drove away the tempting pictures he called forth, he redoubled his ardour, and wished to make her his by seizing her and carrying her away in his arms.

"Come, dear. Come with me. Let us go, and forget everything but our united happiness."

Disengaging herself brusquely, she escaped him, with an instinctive rebellion, and trying to stand up, this cry came at last from her:

"No, no! I cannot go. I no longer have the power to do so."

However, again lamenting her fate, still torn by the contest in her soul, hesitating and stammering, she again turned towards him imploringly.

"I beg you to be good and not hurry me too much, but wait awhile. I would so gladly obey you, in order to prove to you my love; I would like above all to go away on your arm to that beautiful far-away country, where we could live royally in the castle of your dreams. It seems to me an easy thing to do, so often have I myself planned our flight. Yet now, what shall I say to you? It appears to me quite an impossibility; it is as if a door had suddenly been walled up between us and prevented me from going out."

He wished to try to fascinate her again, but she quieted him with a movement of her hands.

"No; do not say anything more. It is very singular, but in proportion as you utter such sweet, such tender words, which ought to convince me, fear takes possession of me and chills me to the heart. My God! What is the matter with me? It is really that which you say which drives me from you. If you continue, I can no longer listen to you; you will be obliged to go away. Yet wait—wait a little longer!"

She walked very slowly about the room, anxiously seeking to resume her self-control, while he looked at her in despair.

"I thought to have loved you no longer; but it was certainly only a feeling of pique, since just now, as soon as I found you again at my feet, my heart beat rapidly, and my first impulse was to follow you as if I were your slave. Then, if I love you, why am I afraid of you? What is it that prevents me from leaving this room, as if invisible hands were holding me back by my whole body, and even by each hair of my head?"

She had stopped near her bed; then she went as far as the wardrobe, then to the different articles of furniture, one after the other. They all seemed united to her person by invisible ties. Especially the walls of the room, the grand whiteness of the mansard roof, enveloped her with a robe of purity, that she could leave behind her only with tears; and henceforth all this would be a part of her being; the spirit of her surroundings had entered into her. And she realised this fact stronger than ever when she found herself opposite her working-frame, which was resting at the side of the table under the lamplight. Her heart softened as she saw the half-made rose, which she would never finish were she to go away in this secret, criminal manner. The years of work were brought back to her mind: those quiet, happy years, during which life had been one long experience of peace and honesty, so that now she rebelled at the thought of committing a fault and of thus fleeing in the arms of her lover. Each day in this little, fresh house of the embroiderers, the active and pure life she had led there, away from all worldly temptations, had, as it were, made over all the blood in her veins.

Then Felicien, realising that in some inexplicable way Angelique was being reconquered and brought to her better self, felt the necessity of hastening their departure. He seized her hands and said:

"Come, dear. Time passes quickly. If we wait much longer it will be too late."

She looked at him an instant, and then in a flash realised her true position. Freeing herself from his grasp she exclaimed, resolutely and frankly:

"It is already too late. You can see for yourself that I am unable now to follow you. Once my nature was so proud and passionate that I could have thrown my two arms around your neck in order that you might carry me away all the more quickly. But now I am no longer the same person. I am so changed that I do not recognise myself. Yes, I realise now that it is this quiet corner where I have been brought up, and the education that has been given me, that has made me what I am at present. Do you then yourself hear nothing? Do you not know that everything in this chamber calls upon me to stay? And I do not rebel in the least against this demand, for my joy at last is to obey."

Without speaking, without attempting to discuss the question with her, he tried to take her hands again, and to lead her like an intractable child. Again she avoided him and turned slowly toward the window.

"No, I beseech you to leave me. It is not my hand that you wish for, it is my heart; and also that, of my own free will, I shall at once go away with you. But I tell you plainly that I do not wish to do so. A while ago I thought to have been as eager for flight as you are. But sure of my true self now, I know it was only the last rebellion, the agony of the old nature within me, that has just died. Little by little, without my knowledge, the good traits of my character have been drawn together and strongly united: humility, duty, and renunciation. So at each return of hereditary tendency to excess, the struggle has been less severe, and I have triumphed over temptation more easily. Now, at last, everything assures me that the supreme contest has just taken place; that henceforth it is finished for ever. I have conquered myself, and my nature is freed from the evil tendencies it had. Ah! dear Seigneur, I love you so much! Do not let us do the slightest thing to mar our happiness. To be happy it is always necessary to submit."

As he took another step towards her, she was at the threshold of the great window, which was now wide open on to the balcony. She had stopped him with a half-smile as she said:

"You would not like to force me to throw myself down from here. Listen, and understand me when I say to you that everything which surrounds me is on my side. I have already told you that for a long time objects themselves have spoken to me. I hear voices in all directions, and never have they been so distinct as at this moment. Hear! It is the whole Clos-Marie that encourages me not to spoil my life and yours by giving myself to you without the consent of your father. This singing voice is the Chevrotte, so clear and so fresh that it seems to have put within me a purity like crystal since I have lived so near it. This other voice, like that of a crowd, tender and deep, it is that of the entire earth—the grasses, the trees, all the peaceable life of this sacred corner which has so constantly worked for the good of my soul.

"And there are other voices which come from still farther away, from the elms of the garden of Monseigneur, and from this horizon of branches, the smallest of which interests itself in me, and wishes for me to be victorious.

"Then, again, this great, sovereign voice, it is that of my old friend, the Cathedral, who, eternally awake, both day and night, has taught me many important things. Each one of the stones in the immense building, the little columns in the windows, the bell-towers of its piers, the flying buttresses of its apse, all have a murmur which I can distinguish, a language which I understand. Listen to what they say: that hope remains even in death. When one is really humble, love alone remains and triumphs. And at last, look! The air itself is filled with the whisperings of spirits. See, here are my invisible companions, the virgins, who are ever near me and aid me. Listen, listen!"

Smiling, she had lifted up her hand with an air of the deepest attention, and her whole being was in ecstasy from the scattered breathings she heard. They were the virgins of the "Golden Legend" that her imagination called forth, as in her early childhood, and whose mystic flight came from the old book with its quaint pictures, that was placed on the little table. Agnes was first, clothed with her beautiful hair, having on her finger the ring of betrothal to the Priest Paulin. Then all the others came in turn. Barbara with her tower; Genevieve with her sheep; Cecilia with her viol; Agatha with her wounded breast; Elizabeth begging on the highways, and Catherine triumphing over the learned doctors. She did not forget the miracle that made Lucy so heavy that a thousand men and five yoke of oxen could not carry her away: nor the Governor who became blind as he tried to embrace Anastasia. Then others who seemed flying through the quiet night, still bearing marks of the wounds inflicted upon them by their cruel martyrdom, and from which rivers of milk were flowing instead of blood. Ah! to die from love like them, to die in the purity of youth at the first kiss of a beloved one!

Felicien had approached her.

"I am the one person who really lives, Angelique, and you cannot give me up for mere fancies."

"Dreams!—fancies!" she murmured.

"Yes; for if in reality these visions seem to surround you, it is simply that you yourself have created them all. Come, dear; no longer put a part of your life into objects about you, and they will be quiet."

She gave way to a burst of enthusiastic feeling.

"Oh no! Let them speak. Let them call out louder still! They are my strength; they give me the courage to resist you. It is a manifestation of the Eternal Grace, and never has it overpowered me so energetically as now. If it is but a dream, a dream which I have placed in my surroundings, and which comes back to me at will, what of it? It saves me, it carries me away spotless in the midst of dangers. Listen yourself. Yield, and obey like me. I no longer have even a wish to follow you."

In spite of her weakness, she made a great effort and stood up, resolute and firm.

"But you have been deceived," he said. "Even falsehood has been resorted to in order to separate us!"

"The faults of others will not excuse our own."

"Ah! You have withdrawn your heart from me, and you love me no longer."

"I love you. I oppose you only on account of our love and for our mutual happiness. Obtain the consent of your father; then come for me, and I will follow you no matter where."

"My father! You do not know him. God only could ever make him yield. Tell me, then, is this really to be the end of everything? If my father orders me to marry Claire de Voincourt, must I in that case obey him?"

At this last blow Angelique tottered. Was no torture to be spared her? She could not restrain this heartbroken cry:

"Oh! that is too much! My sufferings are greater than I can bear. I beseech you go away quickly and do not be so cruel. Why did you come at all? I was resigned. I had learned to accept the misfortune of being no longer loved by you. Yet the moment that I am reassured of your affection, all my martyrdom recommences; and how can you expect me to live now?"

Felicien, not aware of the depth of her despair, and thinking that she had yielded simply to a momentary feeling, repeated his question:

"If my father wishes me to marry her——"

She struggled heroically against her intense suffering; she succeeded in standing up, notwithstanding that her heart was crushed, and dragging herself slowly towards the table, as if to make room for him to pass her, she said:

"Marry her, for it is always necessary to obey."

In his turn he was now before the window, ready to take his departure, because she had sent him away from her.

"But it will make you die if I do so."

She had regained her calmness, and, smiling sadly, she replied:

"Oh! that work is nearly done already."

For one moment more he looked at her, so pale, so thin, so wan; light as a feather, to be carried away by the faintest breath. Then, with a brusque movement of furious resolution, he disappeared in the night.

When he was no longer there, Angelique, leaning against the back of her armchair, stretched her hands out in agony towards the darkness, and her frail body was shaken by heavy sobs, and cold perspiration came out upon her face and neck.

"My God!" This, then, was the end, and she would never see him again. All her weakness and pain had come back to her. Her exhausted limbs no longer supported her. It was with great difficulty that she could regain her bed, upon which she fell helpless, but calm in spirit from the assurance that she had done right.

The next morning they found her there, dying. The lamp had just gone out of itself, at the dawn of day, and everything in the chamber was of a triumphal whiteness.

CHAPTER XVI

Angelique was dying.

It was ten o'clock one cold morning towards the end of the winter, the air was sharp, and the clear heavens were brightened up by the beautiful sunshine. In her great royal bed, draped with its old, faded, rose-coloured chintz, she lay motionless, having been unconscious during the whole night. Stretched upon her back, her little ivory-like hands carelessly thrown upon the sheet, she no longer even opened her eyes, and her finely-cut profile looked more delicate than ever under the golden halo of her hair; in fact, anyone who had seen her would have thought her already dead, had it not been for the slight breathing movement of her lips.

The day before, Angelique, realising that she was very ill, had confessed, and partaken of the Communion. Towards three o'clock in the afternoon the good Abbe Cornille had brought to her the sacred Viaticum. Then in the evening, as the chill of death gradually crept over her, a great desire came to her to receive the Extreme Unction, that celestial remedy, instituted for the cure of both the soul and body. Before losing consciousness, her last words, scarcely murmured, were understood by Hubertine, as in hesitating sentences she expressed her wish for the holy oils. "Yes—oh yes!—as quickly—as possible—before it is too late."

But death advanced. They had waited until day, and the Abbe, having been notified, was about to come.

Everything was now ready to receive the clergyman. The Huberts had just finished arranging the room. Under the gay sunlight, which at this early morning hour struck fully upon the window-panes, it looked pure as the dawn in the nudity of its great white walls. The table had been covered with a fresh damask cloth. At the right and the left of the crucifix two large wax-tapers were burning in the silver candelabrum which had been brought up from the parlour, and there were also there the consecrated wafers, the asperges brush, an ewer of water with its basin and a napkin, and two plates of white porcelain, one of which was filled with long bits of cotton, and the other with little cornets of paper. The greenhouses of the lower town had been thoroughly searched, but the only inodorous flowers that had been found were the peonies—great white peonies, enormous tufts of which adorned the table, like a shimmering of white lace. And in the midst of this intense whiteness, Angelique, dying, with closed eyes, still breathed gently with a half-perceptible breath.

The doctor, who had made his first morning visit, had said that she could not live through the day. She might, indeed, pass away at any moment, without even having come to her senses at all. The Huberts, resolute and grave, waited in silent despair. Notwithstanding their grief and tears, it was evidently necessary that this should be the end. If they had ever wished for this death, preferring to lose their dear child rather than to have her rebellious, it was evident that God also wished it with them, and now, that in this last trying moment they were quite powerless, they could only submit themselves to the inevitable. They regretted nothing, although their sorrow seemed greater than they could bear. Since she, their darling, had been there, suffering from her long illness, they had taken the entire care of her day and night, refusing all aid offered them from outside. They were still there alone in this supreme hour, and they waited.

Hubert, scarcely knowing what he did, walked mechanically to the porcelain stove, the door of which he opened, for the gentle roaring of the flaming wood sounded to him like a plaintive moan; then there was a perfect silence. The peonies seemed even to turn paler in the soft heat of the room.

Hubertine, stronger than her husband, and still fully conscious of all she did, listened to the sounds of the Cathedral as they came to her from behind the walls. During the past moment the old stones had vibrated from the swinging of the bell of the great tower. It must certainly be the Abbe Cornille leaving the church with the sacred oils, she thought; so she went downstairs, that she might receive him at the door of the house.

Two minutes later, the narrow stairway of the little tower was filled with a great murmuring sound. Then in the warm chamber, Hubert, struck with astonishment, suddenly began to tremble, whilst a religious fear, mingled with a faint hope, made him fall upon his knees. Instead of the old clergyman whom they had expected, it was Monseigneur who entered. Yes! Monseigneur, in lace surplice, having the violet stole, and carrying the silver vessel in which was the oil for the sick, which he himself had blessed on Holy Thursday. His eagle-like eyes were fixed, as he looked straight before him; his beautiful pale face was really majestic under the thick, curly masses of his white hair. Behind him walked the Abbe Cornille, like a simple clerk, carrying in one hand a crucifix, and under the other a book of ritual service.

Standing for a moment upon the threshold, the bishop said in a deep, grave voice:

"Pax huic domui." ("Peace be to this house.")

"Et omnibus habitantibus in ea," replied the priest in a lower tone. ("And to all the inhabitants thereof.")

When they had entered, Hubertine, who had come up the stairs after them, she also trembling from surprise and emotion, went and knelt by the side of her husband. Both of them prostrated themselves most humbly, and prayed fervently from the depths of their souls.

A few hours after his last visit to Angelique, Felicien had had the terrible and dreaded explanation with his father. Early in the morning of that same day he had found open the doors, he had penetrated even into the Oratory, where the Bishop was still at prayer, after one of those nights of frightful struggling against the memories of the past, which would so constantly reappear before him. In the soul of this hitherto always respectful son, until now kept submissive by fear, rebellion against authority, so long a time stifled, suddenly broke forth, and the collision of these two men of the same blood, with natures equally prompt to violence, was intense. The old man had left his devotional chair, and with cheeks growing purple by degrees, he listened silently as he stood there in his proud obstinacy. The young man, with face equally inflamed, poured out everything that was in his heart, speaking in a voice that little by little grew louder and rebuking. He said that Angelique was not only ill, but dying. He told him that in a pressing moment of temptation, overcome by his deep affection, he had wished to take her away with him that they might flee together, and that she, with the submissive humility of a saint, and chaste as a lily, had refused to accompany him. Would it not be a most abominable murder to allow this obedient young girl to die, because she had been unwilling to accept him unless when offered to her by the hand of his father? She loved him so sincerely that she could die for him. In fact, she could have had him, with his name and his fortune, but she had said "No," and, triumphant over her feelings, she had struggled with herself in order to do her duty. Now, after such a proof of her goodness, could he permit her to suffer so much grief? Like her, he would be willing to give up everything, to die even, if it might be, and he realised that he was cowardly. He despised himself for not being at her side, that they might pass out of life together, by the same breath. Was it possible that anyone could be so cruel as to wish to torment them, that they should both have so sad a death, when one word, one simple word, would secure them such bliss? Ah! the pride of name, the glory of wealth, persistence in one's determination: all these were nothing in comparison to the fact that by the union of two hearts the eternal happiness of two human beings was assured. He joined his hands together, he twisted them feverishly, quite beside himself as he demanded his father's consent, still supplicating, already almost threatening. But the Bishop, with face deeply flushed by the mounting of his blood, with swollen lips, with flaming eyes, terrible in his unexpressed anger, at last opened his mouth, only to reply by this word of parental authority: "Never!"

Then Felicien, absolutely raving in his rebellion, lost all control over himself.

He spoke of his mother, he really threatened his father by the remembrance of the dead. It was she who had come back again in the shape of her son to vindicate and reclaim the right of affection. Could it be that his father had never loved her? Had he even rejoiced in her death, since he showed himself so harsh towards those who loved each other, and who wished to live? But he might well do all he could to become cold in the renunciations demanded by the Church; she would come back to haunt and to torture him, because he was willing to torture the child they had had, the living witness of their affection for each other. She would always be there, so long as their son lived. She wished to reappear in the children of their child for ever. And he was causing her to die over again, by refusing to her son the betrothed of his choice, the one through whom the race was to be continued. When a man had once been married to a woman, he should never think of wedding the Church. Face to face with his father, who, motionless, appeared in his fearful silence to grow taller and taller, he uttered unfilial, almost murderous words. Then, shocked at himself, he rushed away, shuddering at the extent to which passion had carried him.

When once more alone, Monseigneur, as if stabbed in the full breast by a sharp weapon, turned back upon himself and struggled deeply with his soul, as he knelt upon his prie-Dieu. A half-rattling sound came from his throat. Oh! these frightful heart contests, these invincible weaknesses of the flesh. This woman, and his beloved dead, who was constantly coming back to life, he adored her now, as he did the first evening when he kissed her white feet; and this son, he idolised him as belonging to her, as a part of her life, which she had left to him. And even the young girl, the little working girl whom he had repulsed, he loved her also with a tenderness like that of his son for her. Now his nights were inexpressibly agitated by all three. Without his having been willing to acknowledge it, had she then touched him so deeply as he saw her in the great Cathedral, this little embroiderer, with her golden hair, her fresh pure neck, in all the perfume of her youth? He saw her again; she passed before him, so delicate, so pure in her victorious submission. No remorse could have come to him with a step more certain or more conquering. He might reject her with a loud voice. He knew well that henceforth she held him strongly by the heart with her humble hands that bore the signs of work. Whilst Felicien was so violently beseeching him, he seemed to see them both behind the blonde head of the petitioner—these two idolised women, the one for whom his son prayed, and the one who had died for her child. They were there in all their physical beauty, in all their loving devotion, and he could not tell where he had found strength to resist, so entirely did his whole being go out towards them. Overcome, sobbing, not knowing how he could again become calm, he demanded from Heaven the courage to tear out his heart, since this heart belonged no longer to God alone.

Until evening Monseigneur continued at prayer. When he at last reappeared he was white as wax, distressed, anxious, but still resolute. He could do nothing more, but he repeated to his son the terrible word—"Never!" It was God alone who had the right to relieve him from his promise; and God, although implored, gave him no sign of change. It was necessary to suffer.

Some days had passed. Felicien constantly wandered round the little house, wild with grief, eager for news. Each time that he saw anyone come out he almost fainted from fear. Thus it happened that on the morning when Hubertine ran to the church to ask for the sacred oils, he learned that Angelique could not live through the day. The Abbe Cornille was not at the Sacristy, and he rushed about the town to find him, still having a last hope that through the intervention of the good man some Divine aid might come. Then, as he brought back with him the sought-for clergyman, his hope left him, and he had a frightful attack of doubt and anger. What should he do? In what way could he force Heaven to come to his assistance? He went away, hastened to the Bishop's palace, the doors of which he again forced open, and before his incoherent words his father was for a moment frightened. At last he understood. Angelique was dying! She awaited the Extreme Unction, and now God alone could save her. The young man had only come to cry out all his agony, to break all relations with this cruel, unnatural father, and to accuse him to his face of willingly allowing this death. But Monseigneur listened to him without anger: upright and very serious, his eyes suddenly brightened with a strange clearness, as if an inner voice had spoken to him. Motioning to his son to lead the way, he followed him, simply saying at last:

"If God wishes it, I also wish it."

Felicien trembled so that he could scarcely move. His father consented, freed from his personal vow, to submit himself to the goodwill of the hoped-for miracle. Henceforth they, as individuals, counted for nothing. God must act for himself. Tears blinded him. Whilst in the Sacristy Monseigneur took the sacred oils from the hands of the Abbe Cornille. He accompanied them, almost staggering; he did not dare to enter into the chamber, but fell upon his knees at the threshold of the door, which was open wide.

The voice of the Bishop was firm, as he said:

"Pax huic domui."

"Et omnibus habitantibus in ea," the priest replied.

Monseigneur had just placed on the white table, between the two wax-candles, the sacred oils, making in the air the sign of the cross, with the silver vase. Then he took from the hands of the Abbe the crucifix, and approached the sufferer that he might make her kiss it. But Angelique was still unconscious: her eyes were closed, her mouth shut, her hands rigid, and looking like the little stiff figures of stone placed upon tombs. He examined her for a moment, and, seeing by the slight movement of her chest that she was not dead, he placed upon her lips the crucifix. He waited. His face preserved the majesty of a minister of penitence, and no signs of emotion were visible when he realised that not even a quivering had passed over the exquisite profile of the young girl, nor in her beautiful hair. She still lived, however, and that was sufficient for the redemption of her sins.

The Abbe then gave to Monseigneur the vessel of holy water and the asperges brush, and while he held open before him the ritual book, he threw the holy water upon the dying girl, as he read the Latin words, Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor. ("Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.")

The drops sprang forth in every direction, and the whole bed was refreshed by them as if sprinkled with dew. It rained upon her hands and upon her cheeks; but one by one the drops rolled away as if from insensible marble. At last the Bishop turned towards the assistants and sprinkled them in their turn. Hubert and Hubertine, kneeling side by side, in the full union of their perfect faith, bent humbly under the shower of this benediction. Then Monseigneur blessed also the chamber, the furniture, the white walls in all their bare purity, and as he passed near the door he found himself before his son, who had fallen down on the threshold, and was sobbing violently, having covered his face with his burning hands. With a slow movement, he raised three times the asperges brush, and he purified him with a gentle rain. This holy water, spread everywhere, was intended at first to drive away all evil spirits, who were flying by crowds, although invisible. Just at this moment a pale ray of the winter sun passed over the bed, and a multitude of atoms, light specks of dust, seemed to be living therein. They were innumerable as they came down from an angle of the window, as if to bathe with their warmth the cold hands of the dying.

Going again towards the table, Monseigneur repeated the prayer, "Exaudi nos." ("Give ear to us.")

He made no haste. It was true that death was there, hovering near the old, faded chintz curtains, but he knew that it was patient, and that it would wait. And although in her state of utter prostration the child could not hear him, he addressed her as he asked her:

"Is there nothing upon your conscience which distresses you? Confess all your doubts and fears, my daughter; relieve your mind."

She was still in the same position, and she was always silent. When, in vain, he had given time for a reply, he commenced the exhortation with the same full voice, without appearing to notice that none of his words reached her ear.

"Collect your thoughts, meditate, demand from the depths of your soul pardon from God. The Sacrament will purify you, and will strengthen you anew. Your eyes will become clear, your ears chaste, your nostrils fresh, your mouth pure, your hands innocent."

With eyes fixed upon her, he continued reading to the end all that was necessary for him to say; while she scarcely breathed, nor did one of her closed eyelids move. Then he said:

"Recite the Creed."

And having waited awhile, he repeated it himself:

"Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem." ("I believe in one God, the Father Almighty.")

"Amen," replied the Abbe Cornille.

All this time the heavy sobbing of Felicien was heard, as upon the landing-place he wept in the enervation of hope. Hubert and Hubertine still prayed fervently, with the same anxious waiting and desire, as if they had felt descend upon them all the invisible powers of the Unknown. A change now came in the service, from the murmur of half-spoken prayers. Then the litanies of the ritual were unfolded, the invocation to all the Saints, the flight of the Kyrie Eleison, calling Heaven to the aid of miserable humanity, mounting each time with great outbursts, like the fume of incense.

Then the voices suddenly fell, and there was a deep silence. Monseigneur washed his fingers in the few drops of water that the Abbe poured out from the ewer. At length he took the vessel of sacred oil, opened the cover thereof, and placed himself before the bed. It was the solemn approach of the Sacrament of this last religious ceremony, by the efficacy of which are effaced all mortal or venial sins not pardoned, which rest in the soul after having received the other sacraments, old remains of forgotten sins, sins committed unwittingly, sins of languor which prevented one from being firmly re-established in the grace of God. The pure white chamber seemed to be like the individuals collected therein, motionless, and in a state of surprise and expectation. Where could all these sins be found? They must certainly come from outside in this great band of sun's rays, filled with dancing specks of dust, which appeared to bring germs of life even to this great royal couch, so white and cold from the coming of death to a pure young maiden.

Monseigneur meditated a moment, fixing his looks again upon Angelique, assuring himself that the slight breath had not ceased, struggling against all human emotion, as he saw how thin she was, with the beauty of an archangel, already immaterial. His voice retained the authority of a divine disinterestedness, and his thumb did not tremble when he dipped it into the sacred oils as he commenced the unctions on the five parts of the body where dwell the senses: the five windows by which evil enters into the soul.

First upon the eyes, upon the closed eyelids, the right and then the left; and slowly, lightly, he traced with his thumb the sign of the Cross.

"Per istam sanctam unctionem, et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per visum deliquisti." ("By this holy anointing and His gracious mercy, the Lord forgive whatever sins thou hast committed through seeing.")[*]

[*] This formula is repeated with reference to the other
senses—hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

And the sins of the sight were redeemed; lascivious looks, immodest curiosity, the pride of spectacles, unwholesome readings, tears shed for guilty troubles.

And she, dear child, knew no other book than the "Golden Legend," no other horizon than the apse of the Cathedral, which hid from view all the rest of the world. She had wept only in the struggle of obedience and the renunciation of passion.

The Abbe Cornille wiped both her eyes with a bit of cotton, which he afterwards put into one of the little cornets of paper.

Then Monseigneur anointed the ears, with their lobes as delicate and transparent as pearl, first the right ear, afterwards the left, scarcely moistened with the sign of the cross.

"Per istam sanctam unctionem, et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per auditum deliquisti."

So all the abominations of hearing were atoned for: all the words and music which corrupt, the slanders, the calumnies, the blasphemies, the sinful propositions listened to with complacency, the falsehoods of love which aided the forgetfulness of duty, the profane songs which excited the senses, the violins of the orchestra which, as it were, wept voluptuously under the brilliant lights.

She in her isolated life, like that of a cloistered nun—she had never even heard the free gossip of the neighbours, or the oath of a carman as he whips his horses. The only music that had ever entered her ears was that of the sacred hymns, the rumblings of the organs, the confused murmurings of prayers, with which at times vibrated all this fresh little house, so close to the side of the great church.

The Abbe, after having dried the ears with cotton, put that bit also into one of the white cornets.

Monseigneur now passed to the nostrils, the right and then the left, like two petals of a white rose, which he purified by touching them with the sacred oil and making on them the sign of the cross.

"Per istam sanctam unctionem, et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per odoratum deliquisti."

And the sense of smell returned to its primitive innocence, cleansed from all stain: not only from the carnal disgrace of perfumes, from the seduction of flowers with breath too sweet, from the scattered fragrances of the air which put the soul to sleep; but yet again from the faults of the interior sense, the bad examples given to others, and the contagious pestilence of scandal. Erect and pure, she had at last become a lily among the lilies, a great lily whose perfume fortified the weak and delighted the strong. In fact, she was so truly delicate that she could never endure the powerful odour of carnations, the musk of lilacs, the feverish sweetness of hyacinths, and was only at ease with the scentless blossoms, like the marguerites and the periwinkles.

Once more the Abbe, with the cotton, dried the anointed parts, and slipped the little tuft into another of the cornets.

Then Monseigneur, descending to the closed mouth, through which the faint breath was now scarcely perceptible, made upon the lower lip the sign of the cross.

"Per istam sanctam unctionem, et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per gustum deliquisti."

This time it was the pardon for the base gratifications of taste, greediness, too great a desire for wine, or for sweets; but especially the forgiveness for sins of the tongue, that universally guilty member, the provoker, the poisoner, the inventor of quarrels, the inciter to wars, which makes one utter words of error and falsehood which at length obscure even the heavens. Yet her whole mouth was only a chalice of innocence. She had never had the vice of gluttony, for she had taught herself, like Elizabeth, to eat whatever was set before her, without paying great attention to her food. And if it were true that she lived in error, it was the fault of her dream which had placed her there, the hope of a beyond, the consolation of what was invisible, and all the world of enchantment which her ignorance had created and which had made of her a saint.

The Abbe having dried the lips, folded the bit of cotton in the fourth white cornet.

At last Monseigneur anointed first the right and then the left palms of the two little ivory-like hands, lying open upon the sheet, and cleansed them from their sins with the sign of the cross.

"Per istam sanctam unctionem, et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per tactum deliquisti."

And the whole body was purified, being washed from its last spots—those of the touch the most repugnant of all. Pilfering, fighting, murder, without counting other sins of the breast, the body, and the feet, which were also redeemed by this unction. All which burns in the flesh, our anger, our desires, our unruled passions, the snares and pitfalls into which we run, and all forbidden joys by which we are tempted. Since she had been there, dying from her victory over herself, she had conquered her few failings, her pride and her passion, as if she had inherited original sin simply for the glory of triumphing over it. She knew not, even, that she had had other wishes, that love had drawn her towards disobedience, so armed was she with the breastplate of ignorance of evil, so pure and white was her soul.

The Abbe wiped the little motionless hands, and putting the last puff of cotton in the remaining cornet, he threw the five papers into the fire at the back of the stove.

The ceremony was finished. Monseigneur washed his fingers before saying the final prayer. He had now only to again exhort the dying, in placing in her hand the symbolic taper, to drive away the demons, and to show that she had just recovered her baptismal innocence. But she remained rigid, her eyes closed, her mouth shut as if dead. The holy oils had purified her body, the signs of the cross had left their traces on the five windows of the soul, without making the slightest wave of colour, or of life, mount to her cheeks.

Although implored and hoped for, the prodigy did not appear, and the room was silent and anxious. Hubert and Hubertine, still kneeling side by side, no longer prayed, but, with their eyes fixed upon their darling, gazed so earnestly that they both seemed motionless for ever, like the figures of the donataires who await the Resurrection in a corner of an old painted glass window. Felicien had drawn himself up on his knees and was now at the door, having ceased from sobbing, as with head erect he also might see if God would always remain deaf to their prayers. Was it then a mere lure? Would not this holy Sacrament bring her back to life?

For the last time Monseigneur approached the bed, followed by the Abbe Cornille, who held, already lighted, the wax-taper which was to be placed in the hand of the young girl. And the Bishop, not willing to acknowledge the state of unconsciousness in which she remained, determining to go even to the end of the rite, that God might have time in which to work, pronounced the formula:—

"Accipe lampadem ardentem, custodi unctionem tuam, ut cum Dominus ad judicandum venerit, possis occurrere ei cum omnibus sanctis et vivas in saecula saeculorum." ("Receive this light, and keep the unction thou hast received, that when the Lord shall come to judgment thou mayest meet Him with all His saints, and live with Him for ever and ever.")

"Amen," replied the Abbe.

But when they endeavoured to open Angelique's hand and to press it round the taper, the hand, powerless, as if already dead, escaped them and fell back upon her breast.

Then, little by little, Monseigneur yielded to a great nervous trembling. It was the emotion which, for a long time restrained, now broke out within him, carrying away with it the last rigidity of priesthood. He dearly loved her, this child, from the day when she had come to sob at his feet, so innocent, and showing so plainly the pure freshness of her youth. Since then, in his nights of distress, he had contended chiefly against her, to defend himself from the overwhelming tenderness with which she inspired him. At this moment she was worthy of pity, with this pallor of death, with an ethereal beauty which showed, however, so deep a suffering that he could not look at her without his heart being secretly overwhelmed with distress.

He could no longer control himself. His eyelids were swollen by the great tears which at last rolled down his cheeks. She must not die in this way: he was conquered by her touching charms even in death, and all his paternal feelings went out towards her.

Then Monseigneur, recalling to mind the numerous miracles of his race, the power which had been given them by Heaven to heal, thought that doubtless God awaited his consent as a father. He invoked Saint Agnes, before whom all his ancestors had offered up their devotions, and as Jean V d'Hautecoeur prayed at the bedside of those smitten by the plague and kissed them, so now he prayed and kissed Angelique upon her lips.

"If God wishes, I also wish it."

Immediately Angelique opened her eyelids. She looked at the Bishop without surprise as she awoke from her long trance, and, her lips still warm from the kiss, smiled upon him. These things were not strange to her, for they certainly must have been realised sooner or later, and it might be that she was coming out of one dream only to have another still; but it seemed to her perfectly natural that Monseigneur should have come to betroth her to Felicien, since the hour for that ceremony had arrived. In a few minutes, unaided, she sat up in the middle of her great royal bed.

The Bishop, radiant, showing by his expression his clear appreciation of the remarkable prodigy, repeated the formula:—

"Accipe lampadem ardentem, custodi unctionem tuam, ut cum Dominus ad judicandum venerit, possis occurrere ei cum omnibus sanctis et vivas in saecula saeculorum."

"Amen," replied the Abbe.

Angelique had taken the lighted taper, and held it up with a firm hand. Life had come back to her, like the flame of the candle, which was burning clear and bright, driving away the spirits of the night.

A great cry resounded through the room. Felicien was standing up, as if raised by the power of the miracle, while the Huberts, overwhelmed by the same feeling, remained upon their knees, with wonder-stricken eyes, with delighted countenances, before that which they had seen. The bed had appeared to them enveloped with a brilliant light; white masses seemed still to be mounting up on the rays of the sunlight, and the great walls, the whole room in fact, kept a white lustre, as that of snow.

In the midst of all, Angelique, like a refreshed lily, replaced upon its branch, appeared in the clear light. Her fine golden hair was like a halo of glory around her head, her violet-coloured eyes shone divinely, and her pure face beamed with a living splendour.

Felicien, seeing that she was saved, touched by the Divine grace that Heaven had vouchsafed them, approached her, and knelt by the side of the bed.

"Ah! dear soul, you recognise us now, and you will live. I am yours. My father wishes it to be so, since God has desired it."

She bowed her head, smiling sweetly as she said, "Oh! I knew it must be so, and waited for it. All that I have foreseen will come to pass."

Monseigneur, who had regained his usual proud serenity, placed the crucifix once more on her lips, and this time she kissed it as a submissive servant. Then, with a full movement of his hands, through the room, above the heads of all present, the Bishop gave the final benediction, while the Huberts and the Abbe Cornille wept.

Felicien had taken one of the little hands of Angelique, while in the other little hand the taper of innocence burned bright and clear.

CHAPTER XVII

The marriage was fixed for the early part of March. But Angelique remained very feeble, notwithstanding the joy which radiated from her whole person. She had wished after the first week of her convalescence to go down to the workroom, persisting in her determination to finish the panel of embroidery in bas-relief which was to be used for the Bishop's chair.

"It would be," she said cheerfully, "her last, best piece of work; and besides, no one ever leaves," she added, "an order only half-completed."

Then exhausted by the effort, she was again forced to keep her chamber. She lived there, happy and smiling, without regaining the full health of former times, always white and immaterial as the sacred sacramental oils; going and coming with a gentle step like that of a vision, and after having occasionally made the exertion of walking as far as from her table to the window, finding herself obliged to rest quietly for hours and give herself up to her sweet thoughts. At length they deferred the wedding-day, thinking it better to wait for her complete recovery, which must certainly come if she were well nursed and cared for.

Every afternoon Felicien went up to see her. Hubert and Hubertine were there, and they passed together most delightful hours, during which they continually made and re-made the same bright projects. Seated in her great chair she laughed gaily, seemed trembling with life and vivacity, as she was the first to talk of the days which would be so well filled when together they could take long journeys; and of all the unknown joys that would come to them after they had restored the old Chateau d'Hautecoeur. Anyone, to have seen her then, would have considered her saved and regaining her strength in the backward spring, the air of which, growing warmer and warmer daily, entered by the open window. In fact, she never fell back into the deep gravities of her dreams, except when she was entirely alone and was not afraid of being seen. In the night, voices still appeared to be near her: then it seemed as if the earth were calling to her; and at last the truth was clearly revealed to her, so that she fully understood that the miracle was being continued only for the realisation of her dream. Was she not already dead, having simply the appearance of living, thanks to the respite which had been granted her from Divine Grace? This idea soothed her with deep gentleness in her hours of solitude, and she did not feel a moment's regret at the thought of being called away from life in the midst of her happiness, so certain was she of always realising to its fullest extent her anticipated joy. The cheerfulness she had hitherto shown became simply a little more serious; she abandoned herself to it quietly, forgetting her physical weakness as she indulged in the pure delights of fancy. It was only when she heard the Huberts open the door, or when Felicien came to see her, that she was able to sit upright, to bring her thoughts back to her surroundings, and to appear as if she were regaining her health, laughing pleasantly while she talked of their years of happy housekeeping far away, in the days to come.

Towards the end of March Angelique grew very restless and much weaker. Twice, when by herself, she had long fainting fits. One morning she fell at the foot of her bed, just as Hubert was bringing her up a cup of milk; by a great effort of will she conquered herself, and, that she might deceive him, she remained on the floor and smiled, as she pretended to be looking for a needle that had been dropped. The following day she was gayer than usual, and proposed hastening the marriage, suggesting that at all events it should not be put off any later than the middle of April. All the others exclaimed at this idea, asking if it would not be advisable to wait awhile, since she was still so delicate. There was no need of being in such a hurry. She, however, seemed feverishly nervous, and insisted that the ceremony should take place immediately—yes, as soon as possible. Hubertine, surprised at the request, having a suspicion as to the true motive of this eagerness, looked at her earnestly for a moment, and turned very pale as she realised how slight was the cold breath which still attached her daughter to life. The dear invalid had already grown calm, in her tender need of consoling others and keeping them under an illusion, although she knew personally that her case was hopeless. Hubert and Felicien, in continual adoration before their idol, had neither seen nor felt anything unusual. Then Angelique, exerting herself almost supernaturally, rose up, and was more charming than ever, as she slowly moved back and forth with the light step of former days. She continued to speak of her wish, saying if it were granted she would be so happy, and that after the wedding she would certainly be cured. Moreover, the question should be left to Monseigneur; he alone should decide it. That same evening, when the Bishop was there, she explained her desire to him, fixing her eyes on his, regarding him steadily and beseechingly, and speaking in her sweet, earnest voice, under which there was hidden an ardent supplication, unexpressed in words. Monseigneur realised it, and understood the truth, and he appointed a day in the middle of April for the ceremony.

Then they lived in great commotion from the necessary bustle attendant upon the preparations for the marriage. Notwithstanding his official position as guardian, Hubert was obliged to ask permission, or rather the consent of the Director of Public Assistance, who always represented the family council, Angelique not yet being of age; and Monsieur Grandsire, the Justice of the Peace, was charged with all legal details, in order to avoid as much as possible the painful side of the position to the young girl and to Felicien. But the dear child, realising that something was being kept back, asked one day to have her little book brought up to her, wishing to put it herself into the hands of her betrothed. She was now, and would henceforth remain, in a state of such sincere humility that she wished him to know thoroughly from what a low position he had drawn her, to elevate her to the glory of his well-honoured name and his great fortune. These were her parchments, her titles to nobility; her position was explained by this official document, this entry on the calendar where there was only a date followed by a number. She turned over all the leaves once more, then gave it to him without being confused, happy in thinking that in herself she was nothing, but that she owed everything to him. So deeply touched was he by this act, that he knelt down, kissed her hands while tears came to his eyes, as if it were she who had made him the one gift, the royal gift of her heart.

For two weeks the preparations occupied all Beaumont, both the upper and the lower town being in a state of great excitement therefrom. It was said that twenty working-girls were engaged day and night upon the trousseau. The wedding-dress alone required three persons to make it, and there was to be a corbeille, or present from the bridegroom, to the value of a million of francs: a fluttering of laces, of velvets, of silks and satins, a flood of precious stones—diamonds worthy a Queen. But that which excited the people more than all else was the great amount given in charity, the bride having wished to distribute to the poor as much as she had received herself. So another million was showered down upon the country in a rain of gold. At length she was able to gratify all her old longings of benevolence, all the prodigalities of her most exaggerated dreams, as with open hands she let fall upon the wretched and needy a stream of riches, an overflow of comforts. In her little, white, bare chamber, confined to her old armchair, she laughed with delight when the Abbe Cornille brought to her the list of the distributions he had made. "Give more! Give more!" she cried, as it seemed to her as if not enough were done. She would, in reality, have liked to have seen the Pere Mascart seated for ever at a table before a princely banquet; the Chouteaux living in palatial luxury; the mere Gabet cured of her rheumatism, and by the aid of money to have renewed her youth. As for the Lemballeuse, the mother and daughters, she absolutely wished to load them with silk dresses and jewellery. The hail of golden pieces redoubled over the town as in fairy-tales, far beyond the daily necessities, as if merely for the beauty and joy of seeing the triumphal golden glory, thrown from full hands, falling into the street and glittering in the great sunlight of charity.

At last, on the eve of the happy day, everything was in readiness. Felicien had bought a large house on the Rue Magloire, at the back of the Bishop's palace, which had been fitted up and furnished most luxuriously. There were great rooms hung with admirable tapestries, filled with the most beautiful articles imaginable; a salon in old, rare pieces of hand embroidery; a boudoir in blue, soft as the early morning sky; and a sleeping-room, which was particularly attractive: a perfect little corner of white silk and lace—nothing, in short, but white, airy, and light—an exquisite shimmering of purity. But Angelique had constantly refused to go to see all these wonderful things, although a carriage was always ready to convey her there. She listened to the recital of that which had been done with an enchanted smile, but she gave no orders, and did not appear to wish to occupy herself with any of the arrangements. "No, no," she said, for all these things seemed so far away in the unknown of that vast world of which she was as yet totally ignorant. Since those who loved her had prepared for her so tenderly this happiness, she desired to partake thereof, and to enter therein like a princess coming from some chimerical country, who approaches the real kingdom where she is to reign for ever. In the same way she preferred to know nothing, except by hearsay, of the corbeille, which also was waiting for her—a superb gift from her betrothed, the wedding outfit of fine linen, embroidered with her cipher as marchioness, the full-dress costumes tastefully trimmed, the old family jewels valuable as the richest treasures of a cathedral, and the modern jewels in their marvellous yet delicate mountings, precious stones of every kind, and diamonds of the purest water. It was sufficient to her that her dream had come to pass, and that this good future awaited her in her new home, radiant in the reality of the new life that was opening before her. The only thing she saw was her wedding-dress, which was brought to her on the marriage morning.

That day, when she awoke, Angelique, still alone, had in her great bed a moment of intense exhaustion, and feared that she would not be able to get up at all. She attempted to do so, but her knees bent under her; and in contrast to the brave serenity she had shown for weeks past, a fearful anguish, the last, perhaps, took utter possession of her. Then, as in a few minutes Hubertine came into the room, looking unusually happy, she was surprised to find that she could really walk, for she certainly did not do so from her own strength, but aid came to her from the Invisible, and friendly hands sustained and carried her. They dressed her; she no longer seemed to weigh anything, but was so slight and frail that her mother was astonished, and laughingly begged her not to move any more if she did not wish to fly quite away. During all the time of preparing her toilette, the little fresh house of the Huberts, so close to the side of the Cathedral, trembled under the great breath of the Giant, of that which already was humming therein, of the preparations for the ceremony, the nervous activity of the clergy, and especially the ringing of the bells, a continuous peal of joy, with which the old stones were vibrating.

In the upper town, for over an hour there had been a glorious chiming of bells, as on the greatest holy days. The sun had risen in all its beauty, and on this limpid April morning a flood of spring rays seemed living with the sonorous peals which had called together all the inhabitants of the place. The whole of Beaumont was in a state of rejoicing on account of the marriage of this little embroiderer, to whom their hearts were so deeply attached, and they were touched by the fact of her royal good fortune. This bright sunlight, which penetrated all the streets, was like the golden rain, the gifts of fairy-tales, rolling out from her delicate hands. Under this joyful light, the multitude crowded in masses towards the Cathedral, filling the side-aisles of the church, and coming out on to the Place du Cloitre. There the great front of the building rose up, like a huge bouquet of stone, in full blossom, of the most ornamental Gothic, above the severe Romanesque of the foundation. In the tower the bells still rung, and the whole facade seemed to be like a glorification of these nuptials, expressive of the flight of this poor girl through all the wonders of the miracle, as it darted up and flamed, with its open lace-work ornamentations, the lily-like efflorescence of its little columns, its balustrades, and its arches, the niches of saints surmounted with canopies, the gable ends hollowed out in trefoil points, adorned with crossettes and flowers, immense rose-windows opening out in the mystic radiation of their mullions.

At ten o'clock the organs pealed. Angelique and Felicien were there, walking with slow steps towards the high altar, between the closely-pressed ranks of the crowd. A breath of sincere, touching admiration came from every side. He, deeply moved, passed along proud and serious, with his blonde beauty of a young god appearing slighter than ever from his closely-fitting black dress-coat. But she, above all, struck the hearts of the spectators, so exquisite was she, so divinely beautiful with a mystic, spiritual charm. Her dress was of white watered silk, simply covered with rare old Mechlin lace, which was held by pearls, a whole setting of them designing the ruches of the waist and the ruffles of the skirt. A veil of old English point was fastened to her head by a triple crown of pearls, and falling to her feet, quite covered her. That was all—not a flower, not a jewel, nothing but this slight vision, this delicate, trembling cloud, which seemed to have placed her sweet little face between two white wings, like that of the Virgin of the painted glass window, with her violet eyes and her golden hair.

Two armchairs, covered with crimson velvet, had been placed for Felicien and Angelique before the altar; and directly behind them, while the organs increased their phrases of welcome, Hubert and Hubertine knelt on the low benches which were destined for the family. The day before an intense joy had come to them, from the effects of which they had not yet recovered, and they were incapable of expressing their deep, heartfelt thanks for their own happiness, which was so closely connected with that of their daughter. Hubertine, having gone once more to the cemetery, saddened by the thought of their loneliness, and the little house, which would seem so empty after the departure of the dearly-beloved child, had prayed to her mother for a long time; when suddenly she felt within her an inexplicable relief and gladness, which convinced her that at last her petition had been granted. From the depths of the earth, after more than twenty years, the obstinate mother had forgiven them, and sent them the child of pardon so ardently desired and longed for. Was this the recompense of their charity towards the poor forlorn little creature whom they had found one snowy day at the Cathedral entrance, and who to-day was to wed a prince with all the show and pomp of the greatest ceremony? They remained on their knees, without praying in formulated words, enraptured with gratitude, their whole souls overflowing with an excess of infinite thanksgiving. And on the other side of the nave, seated on his high, official throne, Monseigneur was also one of the family group. He seemed filled with the majesty of the God whom he represented; he was resplendent in the glory of his sacred vestments, and the expression of his countenance was that of a proud serenity, as if he were entirely freed from all worldly passions. Above his head, on the panel of wonderful embroidery, were two angels supporting the brilliant coat of arms of Hautecoeur.

Then the solemn service began. All the clergy connected with the cathedral were present to do honour to their Bishop, and priests had come from the different parishes to assist them. Among the crowd of white surplices which seemed to overflow the grating, shone the golden capes of the choristers, and the red robes of the singing-boys. The almost eternal night of the side-aisles, crushed down by the weight of the heavy Romanesque chapels, was this morning slightly brightened by the limpid April sunlight, which struck the painted glass of the windows so that they seemed to be a burning of gems, a sacred bursting into blossom of luminous flowers. But the background of the nave particularly blazed with a swarming of wax-tapers, tapers as innumerable as the stars of evening in a summer sky. In the centre, the high altar seemed on fire from them, a true "burning bush," symbolic of the flame that consumes souls; and there were also candles in large candelabra and in chandeliers, while before the plighted couple, two enormous lustres with round branches looked like two suns. About them was a garden of masses of green plants and of living blossoms, where were in flower great tufts of white azaleas, of white camellias, and of lilacs. Away to the back of the apse sparkled bits of gold and silver, half-seen skirts of velvet and of silk, a distant dazzling of the tabernacle among the sombre surroundings of green verdure. Above all this burning the nave sprang out, and the four enormous pillars of the transept mounted upward to support the arched vaulting, in the trembling movement of these myriads of little flames, which almost seemed to pale at times in the full daylight which entered by the high Gothic windows.

Angelique had wished to be married by the good Abbe Cornille, and when she saw him come forward in his surplice, and with the white stole, followed by two clerks, she smiled. This was at last the triumphant realisation of her dream—she was wedding fortune, beauty, and power far beyond her wildest hopes. The church itself was singing by the organs, radiant with its wax-tapers, and alive with the crowd of believers and priests, whom she knew to be around her on every side. Never had the old building been more brilliant or filled with a more regal pomp, enlarged as it were in its holy, sacred luxury, by an expansion of happiness. Angelique smiled again in the full knowledge that death was at her heart, celebrating its victory over her, in the midst of this glorious joy. In entering the Cathedral she had glanced at the Chapel d'Hautecoeur, where slept Laurette and Balbine, the "Happy Dead," who passed away when very young, in the full happiness of their love. At this last hour she was indeed perfect. Victorious over herself, reclaimed, renewed, having no longer any feeling of passion or of pride at her triumph, resigned at the knowledge that her life was fast leaving her, in this beautiful Hosanna of her great friend, the blessed old church. When she fell upon her knees, it was as a most humble, most submissive servant, entirely free from the stain of original sin; and in her renunciation she was thoroughly content.

The Abbe Cornille, having mounted to the altar, had just come down again. In a loud voice he made the exhortation; he cited as an example the marriage which Jesus had contracted with the Church; he spoke of the future, of days to come when they would live and govern themselves in the true faith; of children whom they must bring up as Christians; and then, once more, in face of this hope, Angelique again smiled sweetly, while Felicien trembled at the idea of all this happiness, which he believed to be assured. Then came the consecrated demands of the ritual, the replies which united them together for their entire existence, the decisive "Yes"—which she pronounced in a voice filled with emotion from the depths of her heart, and which he said in a much louder tone, and with a tender earnestness. The irrevocable step was taken, the clergyman had placed their right hands together, one clasping the other, as he repeated the prescribed formula: "I unite you in matrimony, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Ghost." But there were still rings to be blessed, the symbols of inviolable fidelity, and of the eternity of the union, which is lasting. In the silver basin, above the rings of gold, the priest shook back and forth the asperges brush, and making the sign of the Cross over each one, said, "Bless, O Lord, this ring."

Then he presented them to the young couple, to testify to them that the Church sanctified their union; that for the husband henceforth his heart was sealed, and no other woman could ever enter therein; and the husband was to place the ring upon his wife's finger in order to show her, in his turn, that henceforth he alone among all men existed for her. This was the strict union, without end, the sign of her dependence upon him, which would recall to her constantly the vows she had made; it was also the promise of a long series of years, to be passed together, as if by this little circle of gold they were attached to each other even to the grave.

And while the priest, after the final prayers, exhorted them once more, Angelique wore always the sweet expression of renunciation; she, the pure soul, who knew the truth.

Then, as the Abbe Cornille withdrew, accompanied by his clerks, the organs again burst forth with peals of joy. Monseigneur, motionless until now, bent towards the young couple with an expression of great mildness in his eagle-like eyes. Still on their knees, the Huberts lifted their heads, blinded by their tears of joy. And the enormous depths of the organs' peals rolled and lost themselves by degrees in a hail of little sharp notes, which were swept away under the high arches, like the morning song of the lark. There was a long waving movement, a half-hushed sound amongst the reverential crowd, who filled to overflowing even the side-aisles and the nave. The church, decorated with flowers, glittering with the taper lights, seemed beaming with joy from the Sacrament.

Then there were nearly two hours more of solemn pomp; the Mass being sung and the incense being burnt.

The officiating clergyman had appeared, dressed in his white chasuble, accompanied by the director of the ceremonies, two censer-bearers carrying the censer and the vase of incense, and two acolytes bearing the great golden candlesticks, in which were lighted tapers.

The presence of Monseigneur complicated the rites, the salutations, and the kisses. Every moment there were bowings, or bendings of the knee, which kept the wings of the surplices in constant motion. In the old stalls, with their backs of carved wood, the whole chapter of canons rose; and then again, at other times it was as if a breath from heaven prostrated at once the clergy, by whom the whole apse was filled. The officiating priest chanted at the altar. When he had finished, he went to one side, and took his seat while the choir in its turn for a long time continued the solemn phrases of the services in the fine, clear notes of the young choristers, light and delicate as the flutes of archangels. Among these voices was a very beautiful one, unusually pure and crystalline, that of a young girl, and most delicious to hear. It was said to be that of Mademoiselle Claire de Voincourt, who had wished and obtained permission to sing at this marriage, which had been so wonderfully secured by a miracle. The organ which accompanied her appeared to sigh in a softened manner, with the peaceful calm of a soul at ease and perfectly happy.

There were occasionally short spells of silence. Then the music burst out again with formidable rollings, while the master of the ceremonies summoned the acolytes with their chandeliers, and conducted the censer-bearers to the officiating clergyman, who blessed the incenses in the vases. Now there was constantly heard the movements of the censer, with the silvery sound of the little chains as they swung back and forth in the clear light. There was in the air a bluish, sweet-scented cloud, as they incensed the Bishop, the clergy, the altar, the Gospel, each person and each thing in its turn, even the close crowd of people, making the three movements, to the right, to the left, and in front, to mark the Cross.

In the meantime Angelique and Felicien, on their knees, listened devoutly to the Mass, which is significant of the mysterious consummation of the marriage of Jesus and the Church. There had been given into the hands of each a lighted candle, symbol of the purity preserved since their baptism. After the Lord's Prayer they had remained under the veil, which is a sign of submission, of bashfulness, and of modesty; and during this time the priest, standing at the right-hand side of the altar, read the prescribed prayers. They still held the lighted tapers, which serve also as a sign of remembrance of death, even in the joy of a happy marriage. And now it was finished, the offering was made, the officiating clergyman went away, accompanied by the director of the ceremonies, the incense-bearers, and the acolytes, after having prayed God to bless the newly-wedded couple, in order that they might live to see and multiply their children, even to the third and fourth generation.

At this moment the entire Cathedral seemed living and exulting with joy. The March Triumphal was being played upon the organs with such thunder-like peals that they made the old edifice fairly tremble. The entire crowd of people now rose, quite excited, and straining themselves to see everything; women even mounted on the chairs, and there were closely-pressed rows of heads as far back as the dark chapels of the outer side-aisles. In this vast multitude every face was smiling, every heart beat with sympathetic joy. In this final adieu the thousands of tapers appeared to burn still higher, stretching out their flames like tongues of fire, vacillating under the vaulted arches. A last Hosanna from the clergy rose up through the flowers and the verdure in the midst of the luxury of the ornaments and the sacred vessels. But suddenly the great portal under the organs was opened wide, and the sombre walls of the church were marked as if by great sheets of daylight. It was the clear April morning, the living sun of the spring-tide, the Place du Cloitre, which was now seen with its tidy-looking, white houses; and there another crowd, still more numerous, awaited the coming of the bride and bridegroom, with a more impatient eagerness, which already showed itself by gestures and acclamations. The candles had grown paler, and the noises of the street were drowned in the music of the organs.

With a slow step, between the double hedge of the worshippers, Angelique and Felicien turned towards the entrance-door. After the triumphant carrying out of her dream, she was now about to enter into the reality of life. This porch of broad sunlight opened into the world of which as yet she was entirely ignorant. She retarded her steps as she looked earnestly at the rows of houses, at the tumultuous crowd, at all which greeted and acclaimed her. Her weakness was so intense that her husband was obliged to almost carry her. However, she was still able to look pleased, as she thought of the princely house, filled with jewels and with queenly toilettes, where the nuptial chamber awaited her, all decorated with white silk and lace. Almost suffocated, she was obliged to stop when halfway down the aisle; then she had sufficient strength to take a few steps more. She glanced at her wedding ring, so recently placed upon her finger, and smiled at this sign of eternal union. Then, on the threshold of the great door, at the top of the steps which went down into the Place du Cloitre, she tottered. Had she not really arrived at the summit of her happiness? Was not it there that the joy of her life, being perfected, was to end? With a last effort she raised herself as much as possible, that she might put her lips upon the lips of Felicien. And in that kiss of love she passed away for ever.

But her death was without sadness. Monseigneur, with his habitual movement of pastoral benediction, aided this pure soul to free itself from the frail body. He had regained his calmness, and had once more found in the fulfillment of his sacred calling the desired-for peace.

The Huberts, unconscious of what had taken place, were still kneeling, grateful for the pardon at last granted them, and feeling as if re-entering into existence. For them, as well as for their beloved daughter, the dream was accomplished. All the Cathedral and the whole town were en fete. The organs sounded louder than ever; the bells pealed joyously; the multitude waited to greet the loving couple on the threshold of the mystic church under the glorious spring sunlight.

It was indeed a beautiful death. Angelique, happy and pure, carried away suddenly at the moment of the realisation of her fondest dream, taken into the heavenly life from the dark Romanesque chapels with the flamboyant, Gothic-vaulted ceiling, from among the gilded decorations and paintings of ancient times, in the full Paradise of Golden Legends. What more could she have asked for?

Felicien held in his arms simply a soft and tender form, from which life had departed; this bridal robe of lace and pearls seemed like the light wings of a bird, still warm to the touch. For a long time he had well known that he could claim but a shadow. The exquisite vision that came from the Invisible had returned to the Invisible.

It was merely a semblance, which effaced itself; the vanishing of an illusion.

Everything is only a dream.

And so, at the moment of supreme earthly happiness, Angelique had disappeared in the slight breath of a loving kiss.

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle,
Death of Olivier Becaille, by Emile Zola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille

Author: Emile Zola

Release Date: May 3, 2006 [EBook #1069]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NANA AND OTHERS ***

Produced by Donald Lainson and David Widger

FOUR SHORT STORIES

By Emile Zola

Contents

NANA

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

THE MILLER'S DAUGHTER

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CAPTAIN BURLE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

THE DEATH OF OLIVIER BECAILLE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

NANA

by

Emile Zola

CHAPTER I

At nine o'clock in the evening the body of the house at the Theatres des Varietes was still all but empty. A few individuals, it is true, were sitting quietly waiting in the balcony and stalls, but these were lost, as it were, among the ranges of seats whose coverings of cardinal velvet loomed in the subdued light of the dimly burning luster. A shadow enveloped the great red splash of the curtain, and not a sound came from the stage, the unlit footlights, the scattered desks of the orchestra. It was only high overhead in the third gallery, round the domed ceiling where nude females and children flew in heavens which had turned green in the gaslight, that calls and laughter were audible above a continuous hubbub of voices, and heads in women's and workmen's caps were ranged, row above row, under the wide-vaulted bays with their gilt-surrounding adornments. Every few seconds an attendant would make her appearance, bustling along with tickets in her hand and piloting in front of her a gentleman and a lady, who took their seats, he in his evening dress, she sitting slim and undulant beside him while her eyes wandered slowly round the house.

Two young men appeared in the stalls; they kept standing and looked about them.

"Didn't I say so, Hector?" cried the elder of the two, a tall fellow with little black mustaches. "We're too early! You might quite well have allowed me to finish my cigar."

An attendant was passing.

"Oh, Monsieur Fauchery," she said familiarly, "it won't begin for half an hour yet!"

"Then why do they advertise for nine o'clock?" muttered Hector, whose long thin face assumed an expression of vexation. "Only this morning Clarisse, who's in the piece, swore that they'd begin at nine o'clock punctually."

For a moment they remained silent and, looking upward, scanned the shadowy boxes. But the green paper with which these were hung rendered them more shadowy still. Down below, under the dress circle, the lower boxes were buried in utter night. In those on the second tier there was only one stout lady, who was stranded, as it were, on the velvet-covered balustrade in front of her. On the right hand and on the left, between lofty pilasters, the stage boxes, bedraped with long-fringed scalloped hangings, remained untenanted. The house with its white and gold, relieved by soft green tones, lay only half disclosed to view, as though full of a fine dust shed from the little jets of flame in the great glass luster.

"Did you get your stage box for Lucy?" asked Hector.

"Yes," replied his companion, "but I had some trouble to get it. Oh, there's no danger of Lucy coming too early!"

He stifled a slight yawn; then after a pause:

"You're in luck's way, you are, since you haven't been at a first night before. The Blonde Venus will be the event of the year. People have been talking about it for six months. Oh, such music, my dear boy! Such a sly dog, Bordenave! He knows his business and has kept this for the exhibition season." Hector was religiously attentive. He asked a question.

"And Nana, the new star who's going to play Venus, d'you know her?"

"There you are; you're beginning again!" cried Fauchery, casting up his arms. "Ever since this morning people have been dreeing me with Nana. I've met more than twenty people, and it's Nana here and Nana there! What do I know? Am I acquainted with all the light ladies in Paris? Nana is an invention of Bordenave's! It must be a fine one!"

He calmed himself, but the emptiness of the house, the dim light of the luster, the churchlike sense of self-absorption which the place inspired, full as it was of whispering voices and the sound of doors banging—all these got on his nerves.

"No, by Jove," he said all of a sudden, "one's hair turns gray here. I—I'm going out. Perhaps we shall find Bordenave downstairs. He'll give us information about things."

Downstairs in the great marble-paved entrance hall, where the box office was, the public were beginning to show themselves. Through the three open gates might have been observed, passing in, the ardent life of the boulevards, which were all astir and aflare under the fine April night. The sound of carriage wheels kept stopping suddenly; carriage doors were noisily shut again, and people began entering in small groups, taking their stand before the ticket bureau and climbing the double flight of stairs at the end of the hall, up which the women loitered with swaying hips. Under the crude gaslight, round the pale, naked walls of the entrance hall, which with its scanty First Empire decorations suggested the peristyle of a toy temple, there was a flaring display of lofty yellow posters bearing the name of "Nana" in great black letters. Gentlemen, who seemed to be glued to the entry, were reading them; others, standing about, were engaged in talk, barring the doors of the house in so doing, while hard by the box office a thickset man with an extensive, close-shaven visage was giving rough answers to such as pressed to engage seats.

"There's Bordenave," said Fauchery as he came down the stairs. But the manager had already seen him.

"Ah, ah! You're a nice fellow!" he shouted at him from a distance. "That's the way you give me a notice, is it? Why, I opened my Figaro this morning—never a word!"

"Wait a bit," replied Fauchery. "I certainly must make the acquaintance of your Nana before talking about her. Besides, I've made no promises."

Then to put an end to the discussion, he introduced his cousin, M. Hector de la Faloise, a young man who had come to finish his education in Paris. The manager took the young man's measure at a glance. But Hector returned his scrutiny with deep interest. This, then, was that Bordenave, that showman of the sex who treated women like a convict overseer, that clever fellow who was always at full steam over some advertising dodge, that shouting, spitting, thigh-slapping fellow, that cynic with the soul of a policeman! Hector was under the impression that he ought to discover some amiable observation for the occasion.

"Your theater—" he began in dulcet tones.

Bordenave interrupted him with a savage phrase, as becomes a man who dotes on frank situations.

"Call it my brothel!"

At this Fauchery laughed approvingly, while La Faloise stopped with his pretty speech strangled in his throat, feeling very much shocked and striving to appear as though he enjoyed the phrase. The manager had dashed off to shake hands with a dramatic critic whose column had considerable influence. When he returned La Faloise was recovering. He was afraid of being treated as a provincial if he showed himself too much nonplused.

"I have been told," he began again, longing positively to find something to say, "that Nana has a delicious voice."

"Nana?" cried the manager, shrugging his shoulders. "The voice of a squirt!"

The young man made haste to add:

"Besides being a first-rate comedian!"

"She? Why she's a lump! She has no notion what to do with her hands and feet."

La Faloise blushed a little. He had lost his bearings. He stammered:

"I wouldn't have missed this first representation tonight for the world. I was aware that your theater—"

"Call it my brothel," Bordenave again interpolated with the frigid obstinacy of a man convinced.

Meanwhile Fauchery, with extreme calmness, was looking at the women as they came in. He went to his cousin's rescue when he saw him all at sea and doubtful whether to laugh or to be angry.

"Do be pleasant to Bordenave—call his theater what he wishes you to, since it amuses him. And you, my dear fellow, don't keep us waiting about for nothing. If your Nana neither sings nor acts you'll find you've made a blunder, that's all. It's what I'm afraid of, if the truth be told."

"A blunder! A blunder!" shouted the manager, and his face grew purple. "Must a woman know how to act and sing? Oh, my chicken, you're too STOOPID. Nana has other good points, by heaven!—something which is as good as all the other things put together. I've smelled it out; it's deuced pronounced with her, or I've got the scent of an idiot. You'll see, you'll see! She's only got to come on, and all the house will be gaping at her."

He had held up his big hands which were trembling under the influence of his eager enthusiasm, and now, having relieved his feelings, he lowered his voice and grumbled to himself:

"Yes, she'll go far! Oh yes, s'elp me, she'll go far! A skin—oh, what a skin she's got!"

Then as Fauchery began questioning him he consented to enter into a detailed explanation, couched in phraseology so crude that Hector de la Faloise felt slightly disgusted. He had been thick with Nana, and he was anxious to start her on the stage. Well, just about that time he was in search of a Venus. He—he never let a woman encumber him for any length of time; he preferred to let the public enjoy the benefit of her forthwith. But there was a deuce of a row going on in his shop, which had been turned topsy-turvy by that big damsel's advent. Rose Mignon, his star, a comic actress of much subtlety and an adorable singer, was daily threatening to leave him in the lurch, for she was furious and guessed the presence of a rival. And as for the bill, good God! What a noise there had been about it all! It had ended by his deciding to print the names of the two actresses in the same-sized type. But it wouldn't do to bother him. Whenever any of his little women, as he called them—Simonne or Clarisse, for instance—wouldn't go the way he wanted her to he just up with his foot and caught her one in the rear. Otherwise life was impossible. Oh yes, he sold 'em; HE knew what they fetched, the wenches!

"Tut!" he cried, breaking off short. "Mignon and Steiner. Always together. You know, Steiner's getting sick of Rose; that's why the husband dogs his steps now for fear of his slipping away."

On the pavement outside, the row of gas jets flaring on the cornice of the theater cast a patch of brilliant light. Two small trees, violently green, stood sharply out against it, and a column gleamed in such vivid illumination that one could read the notices thereon at a distance, as though in broad daylight, while the dense night of the boulevard beyond was dotted with lights above the vague outline of an ever-moving crowd. Many men did not enter the theater at once but stayed outside to talk while finishing their cigars under the rays of the line of gas jets, which shed a sallow pallor on their faces and silhouetted their short black shadows on the asphalt. Mignon, a very tall, very broad fellow, with the square-shaped head of a strong man at a fair, was forcing a passage through the midst of the groups and dragging on his arm the banker Steiner, an exceedingly small man with a corporation already in evidence and a round face framed in a setting of beard which was already growing gray.

"Well," said Bordenave to the banker, "you met her yesterday in my office."

"Ah! It was she, was it?" ejaculated Steiner. "I suspected as much. Only I was coming out as she was going in, and I scarcely caught a glimpse of her."

Mignon was listening with half-closed eyelids and nervously twisting a great diamond ring round his finger. He had quite understood that Nana was in question. Then as Bordenave was drawing a portrait of his new star, which lit a flame in the eyes of the banker, he ended by joining in the conversation.

"Oh, let her alone, my dear fellow; she's a low lot! The public will show her the door in quick time. Steiner, my laddie, you know that my wife is waiting for you in her box."

He wanted to take possession of him again. But Steiner would not quit Bordenave. In front of them a stream of people was crowding and crushing against the ticket office, and there was a din of voices, in the midst of which the name of Nana sounded with all the melodious vivacity of its two syllables. The men who stood planted in front of the notices kept spelling it out loudly; others, in an interrogative tone, uttered it as they passed; while the women, at once restless and smiling, repeated it softly with an air of surprise. Nobody knew Nana. Whence had Nana fallen? And stories and jokes, whispered from ear to ear, went the round of the crowd. The name was a caress in itself; it was a pet name, the very familiarity of which suited every lip. Merely through enunciating it thus, the throng worked itself into a state of gaiety and became highly good natured. A fever of curiosity urged it forward, that kind of Parisian curiosity which is as violent as an access of positive unreason. Everybody wanted to see Nana. A lady had the flounce of her dress torn off; a man lost his hat.

"Oh, you're asking me too many questions about it!" cried Bordenave, whom a score of men were besieging with their queries. "You're going to see her, and I'm off; they want me."

He disappeared, enchanted at having fired his public. Mignon shrugged his shoulders, reminding Steiner that Rose was awaiting him in order to show him the costume she was about to wear in the first act.

"By Jove! There's Lucy out there, getting down from her carriage," said La Faloise to Fauchery.

It was, in fact, Lucy Stewart, a plain little woman, some forty years old, with a disproportionately long neck, a thin, drawn face, a heavy mouth, but withal of such brightness, such graciousness of manner, that she was really very charming. She was bringing with her Caroline Hequet and her mother—Caroline a woman of a cold type of beauty, the mother a person of a most worthy demeanor, who looked as if she were stuffed with straw.

"You're coming with us? I've kept a place for you," she said to Fauchery. "Oh, decidedly not! To see nothing!" he made answer. "I've a stall; I prefer being in the stalls."

Lucy grew nettled. Did he not dare show himself in her company? Then, suddenly restraining herself and skipping to another topic:

"Why haven't you told me that you knew Nana?"

"Nana! I've never set eyes on her."

"Honor bright? I've been told that you've been to bed with her."

But Mignon, coming in front of them, his finger to his lips, made them a sign to be silent. And when Lucy questioned him he pointed out a young man who was passing and murmured:

"Nana's fancy man."

Everybody looked at him. He was a pretty fellow. Fauchery recognized him; it was Daguenet, a young man who had run through three hundred thousand francs in the pursuit of women and who now was dabbling in stocks, in order from time to time to treat them to bouquets and dinners. Lucy made the discovery that he had fine eyes.

"Ah, there's Blanche!" she cried. "It's she who told me that you had been to bed with Nana."

Blanche de Sivry, a great fair girl, whose good-looking face showed signs of growing fat, made her appearance in the company of a spare, sedulously well-groomed and extremely distinguished man.

"The Count Xavier de Vandeuvres," Fauchery whispered in his companion's ear.

The count and the journalist shook hands, while Blanche and Lucy entered into a brisk, mutual explanation. One of them in blue, the other in rose-pink, they stood blocking the way with their deeply flounced skirts, and Nana's name kept repeating itself so shrilly in their conversation that people began to listen to them. The Count de Vandeuvres carried Blanche off. But by this time Nana's name was echoing more loudly than ever round the four walls of the entrance hall amid yearnings sharpened by delay. Why didn't the play begin? The men pulled out their watches; late-comers sprang from their conveyances before these had fairly drawn up; the groups left the sidewalk, where the passers-by were crossing the now-vacant space of gaslit pavement, craning their necks, as they did so, in order to get a peep into the theater. A street boy came up whistling and planted himself before a notice at the door, then cried out, "Woa, Nana!" in the voice of a tipsy man and hied on his way with a rolling gait and a shuffling of his old boots. A laugh had arisen at this. Gentlemen of unimpeachable appearance repeated: "Nana, woa, Nana!" People were crushing; a dispute arose at the ticket office, and there was a growing clamor caused by the hum of voices calling on Nana, demanding Nana in one of those accesses of silly facetiousness and sheer animalism which pass over mobs.

But above all the din the bell that precedes the rise of the curtain became audible. "They've rung; they've rung!" The rumor reached the boulevard, and thereupon followed a stampede, everyone wanting to pass in, while the servants of the theater increased their forces. Mignon, with an anxious air, at last got hold of Steiner again, the latter not having been to see Rose's costume. At the very first tinkle of the bell La Faloise had cloven a way through the crowd, pulling Fauchery with him, so as not to miss the opening scene. But all this eagerness on the part of the public irritated Lucy Stewart. What brutes were these people to be pushing women like that! She stayed in the rear of them all with Caroline Hequet and her mother. The entrance hall was now empty, while beyond it was still heard the long-drawn rumble of the boulevard.

"As though they were always funny, those pieces of theirs!" Lucy kept repeating as she climbed the stair.

In the house Fauchery and La Faloise, in front of their stalls, were gazing about them anew. By this time the house was resplendent. High jets of gas illumined the great glass chandelier with a rustling of yellow and rosy flames, which rained down a stream of brilliant light from dome to floor. The cardinal velvets of the seats were shot with hues of lake, while all the gilding shone again, the soft green decorations chastening its effect beneath the too-decided paintings of the ceiling. The footlights were turned up and with a vivid flood of brilliance lit up the curtain, the heavy purple drapery of which had all the richness befitting a palace in a fairy tale and contrasted with the meanness of the proscenium, where cracks showed the plaster under the gilding. The place was already warm. At their music stands the orchestra were tuning their instruments amid a delicate trilling of flutes, a stifled tooting of horns, a singing of violin notes, which floated forth amid the increasing uproar of voices. All the spectators were talking, jostling, settling themselves in a general assault upon seats; and the hustling rush in the side passages was now so violent that every door into the house was laboriously admitting the inexhaustible flood of people. There were signals, rustlings of fabrics, a continual march past of skirts and head dresses, accentuated by the black hue of a dress coat or a surtout. Notwithstanding this, the rows of seats were little by little getting filled up, while here and there a light toilet stood out from its surroundings, a head with a delicate profile bent forward under its chignon, where flashed the lightning of a jewel. In one of the boxes the tip of a bare shoulder glimmered like snowy silk. Other ladies, sitting at ease, languidly fanned themselves, following with their gaze the pushing movements of the crowd, while young gentlemen, standing up in the stalls, their waistcoats cut very low, gardenias in their buttonholes, pointed their opera glasses with gloved finger tips.

It was now that the two cousins began searching for the faces of those they knew. Mignon and Steiner were together in a lower box, sitting side by side with their arms leaning for support on the velvet balustrade. Blanche de Sivry seemed to be in sole possession of a stage box on the level of the stalls. But La Faloise examined Daguenet before anyone else, he being in occupation of a stall two rows in front of his own. Close to him, a very young man, seventeen years old at the outside, some truant from college, it may be, was straining wide a pair of fine eyes such as a cherub might have owned. Fauchery smiled when he looked at him.

"Who is that lady in the balcony?" La Faloise asked suddenly. "The lady with a young girl in blue beside her."

He pointed out a large woman who was excessively tight-laced, a woman who had been a blonde and had now become white and yellow of tint, her broad face, reddened with paint, looking puffy under a rain of little childish curls.

"It's Gaga," was Fauchery's simple reply, and as this name seemed to astound his cousin, he added:

"You don't know Gaga? She was the delight of the early years of Louis Philippe. Nowadays she drags her daughter about with her wherever she goes."

La Faloise never once glanced at the young girl. The sight of Gaga moved him; his eyes did not leave her again. He still found her very good looking but he dared not say so.

Meanwhile the conductor lifted his violin bow and the orchestra attacked the overture. People still kept coming in; the stir and noise were on the increase. Among that public, peculiar to first nights and never subject to change, there were little subsections composed of intimate friends, who smilingly forgathered again. Old first-nighters, hat on head, seemed familiar and quite at ease and kept exchanging salutations. All Paris was there, the Paris of literature, of finance and of pleasure. There were many journalists, several authors, a number of stock-exchange people and more courtesans than honest women. It was a singularly mixed world, composed, as it was, of all the talents and tarnished by all the vices, a world where the same fatigue and the same fever played over every face. Fauchery, whom his cousin was questioning, showed him the boxes devoted to the newspapers and to the clubs and then named the dramatic critics—a lean, dried-up individual with thin, spiteful lips and, chief of all, a big fellow with a good-natured expression, lolling on the shoulder of his neighbor, a young miss over whom he brooded with tender and paternal eyes.

But he interrupted himself on seeing La Faloise in the act of bowing to some persons who occupied the box opposite. He appeared surprised.

"What?" he queried. "You know the Count Muffat de Beuville?"

"Oh, for a long time back," replied Hector. "The Muffats had a property near us. I often go to their house. The count's with his wife and his father-in-law, the Marquis de Chouard."

And with some vanity—for he was happy in his cousin's astonishment—he entered into particulars. The marquis was a councilor of state; the count had recently been appointed chamberlain to the empress. Fauchery, who had caught up his opera glass, looked at the countess, a plump brunette with a white skin and fine dark eyes.

"You shall present me to them between the acts," he ended by saying. "I have already met the count, but I should like to go to them on their Tuesdays."

Energetic cries of "Hush" came from the upper galleries. The overture had begun, but people were still coming in. Late arrivals were obliging whole rows of spectators to rise; the doors of boxes were banging; loud voices were heard disputing in the passages. And there was no cessation of the sound of many conversations, a sound similar to the loud twittering of talkative sparrows at close of day. All was in confusion; the house was a medley of heads and arms which moved to and fro, their owners seating themselves or trying to make themselves comfortable or, on the other hand, excitedly endeavoring to remain standing so as to take a final look round. The cry of "Sit down, sit down!" came fiercely from the obscure depths of the pit. A shiver of expectation traversed the house: at last people were going to make the acquaintance of this famous Nana with whom Paris had been occupying itself for a whole week!

Little by little, however, the buzz of talk dwindled softly down among occasional fresh outbursts of rough speech. And amid this swooning murmur, these perishing sighs of sound, the orchestra struck up the small, lively notes of a waltz with a vagabond rhythm bubbling with roguish laughter. The public were titillated; they were already on the grin. But the gang of clappers in the foremost rows of the pit applauded furiously. The curtain rose.

"By George!" exclaimed La Faloise, still talking away. "There's a man with Lucy."

He was looking at the stage box on the second tier to his right, the front of which Caroline and Lucy were occupying. At the back of this box were observable the worthy countenance of Caroline's mother and the side face of a tall young man with a noble head of light hair and an irreproachable getup.

"Do look!" La Faloise again insisted. "There's a man there."

Fauchery decided to level his opera glass at the stage box. But he turned round again directly.

"Oh, it's Labordette," he muttered in a careless voice, as though that gentle man's presence ought to strike all the world as though both natural and immaterial.

Behind the cousins people shouted "Silence!" They had to cease talking. A motionless fit now seized the house, and great stretches of heads, all erect and attentive, sloped away from stalls to topmost gallery. The first act of the Blonde Venus took place in Olympus, a pasteboard Olympus, with clouds in the wings and the throne of Jupiter on the right of the stage. First of all Iris and Ganymede, aided by a troupe of celestial attendants, sang a chorus while they arranged the seats of the gods for the council. Once again the prearranged applause of the clappers alone burst forth; the public, a little out of their depth, sat waiting. Nevertheless, La Faloise had clapped Clarisse Besnus, one of Bordenave's little women, who played Iris in a soft blue dress with a great scarf of the seven colors of the rainbow looped round her waist.

"You know, she draws up her chemise to put that on," he said to Fauchery, loud enough to be heard by those around him. "We tried the trick this morning. It was all up under her arms and round the small of her back."

But a slight rustling movement ran through the house; Rose Mignon had just come on the stage as Diana. Now though she had neither the face nor the figure for the part, being thin and dark and of the adorable type of ugliness peculiar to a Parisian street child, she nonetheless appeared charming and as though she were a satire on the personage she represented. Her song at her entrance on the stage was full of lines quaint enough to make you cry with laughter and of complaints about Mars, who was getting ready to desert her for the companionship of Venus. She sang it with a chaste reserve so full of sprightly suggestiveness that the public warmed amain. The husband and Steiner, sitting side by side, were laughing complaisantly, and the whole house broke out in a roar when Prulliere, that great favorite, appeared as a general, a masquerade Mars, decked with an enormous plume and dragging along a sword, the hilt of which reached to his shoulder. As for him, he had had enough of Diana; she had been a great deal too coy with him, he averred. Thereupon Diana promised to keep a sharp eye on him and to be revenged. The duet ended with a comic yodel which Prulliere delivered very amusingly with the yell of an angry tomcat. He had about him all the entertaining fatuity of a young leading gentleman whose love affairs prosper, and he rolled around the most swaggering glances, which excited shrill feminine laughter in the boxes.

Then the public cooled again, for the ensuing scenes were found tiresome. Old Bosc, an imbecile Jupiter with head crushed beneath the weight of an immense crown, only just succeeded in raising a smile among his audience when he had a domestic altercation with Juno on the subject of the cook's accounts. The march past of the gods, Neptune, Pluto, Minerva and the rest, was well-nigh spoiling everything. People grew impatient; there was a restless, slowly growing murmur; the audience ceased to take an interest in the performance and looked round at the house. Lucy began laughing with Labordette; the Count de Vandeuvres was craning his neck in conversation behind Blanche's sturdy shoulders, while Fauchery, out of the corners of his eyes, took stock of the Muffats, of whom the count appeared very serious, as though he had not understood the allusions, and the countess smiled vaguely, her eyes lost in reverie. But on a sudden, in this uncomfortable state of things, the applause of the clapping contingent rattled out with the regularity of platoon firing. People turned toward the stage. Was it Nana at last? This Nana made one wait with a vengeance.

It was a deputation of mortals whom Ganymede and Iris had introduced, respectable middle-class persons, deceived husbands, all of them, and they came before the master of the gods to proffer a complaint against Venus, who was assuredly inflaming their good ladies with an excess of ardor. The chorus, in quaint, dolorous tones, broken by silences full of pantomimic admissions, caused great amusement. A neat phrase went the round of the house: "The cuckolds' chorus, the cuckolds' chorus," and it "caught on," for there was an encore. The singers' heads were droll; their faces were discovered to be in keeping with the phrase, especially that of a fat man which was as round as the moon. Meanwhile Vulcan arrived in a towering rage, demanding back his wife who had slipped away three days ago. The chorus resumed their plaint, calling on Vulcan, the god of the cuckolds. Vulcan's part was played by Fontan, a comic actor of talent, at once vulgar and original, and he had a role of the wildest whimsicality and was got up as a village blacksmith, fiery red wig, bare arms tattooed with arrow-pierced hearts and all the rest of it. A woman's voice cried in a very high key, "Oh, isn't he ugly?" and all the ladies laughed and applauded.

Then followed a scene which seemed interminable. Jupiter in the course of it seemed never to be going to finish assembling the Council of Gods in order to submit thereto the deceived husband's requests. And still no Nana! Was the management keeping Nana for the fall of the curtain then? So long a period of expectancy had ended by annoying the public. Their murmurings began again.

"It's going badly," said Mignon radiantly to Steiner. "She'll get a pretty reception; you'll see!"

At that very moment the clouds at the back of the stage were cloven apart and Venus appeared. Exceedingly tall, exceedingly strong, for her eighteen years, Nana, in her goddess's white tunic and with her light hair simply flowing unfastened over her shoulders, came down to the footlights with a quiet certainty of movement and a laugh of greeting for the public and struck up her grand ditty:

"When Venus roams at eventide."

From the second verse onward people looked at each other all over the house. Was this some jest, some wager on Bordenave's part? Never had a more tuneless voice been heard or one managed with less art. Her manager judged of her excellently; she certainly sang like a squirt. Nay, more, she didn't even know how to deport herself on the stage: she thrust her arms in front of her while she swayed her whole body to and fro in a manner which struck the audience as unbecoming and disagreeable. Cries of "Oh, oh!" were already rising in the pit and the cheap places. There was a sound of whistling, too, when a voice in the stalls, suggestive of a molting cockerel, cried out with great conviction:

"That's very smart!"

All the house looked round. It was the cherub, the truant from the boarding-school, who sat with his fine eyes very wide open and his fair face glowing very hotly at sight of Nana. When he saw everybody turning toward him he grew extremely red at the thought of having thus unconsciously spoken aloud. Daguenet, his neighbor, smilingly examined him; the public laughed, as though disarmed and no longer anxious to hiss; while the young gentlemen in white gloves, fascinated in their turn by Nana's gracious contours, lolled back in their seats and applauded.

"That's it! Well done! Bravo!"

Nana, in the meantime, seeing the house laughing, began to laugh herself. The gaiety of all redoubled itself. She was an amusing creature, all the same, was that fine girl! Her laughter made a love of a little dimple appear in her chin. She stood there waiting, not bored in the least, familiar with her audience, falling into step with them at once, as though she herself were admitting with a wink that she had not two farthings' worth of talent but that it did not matter at all, that, in fact, she had other good points. And then after having made a sign to the conductor which plainly signified, "Go ahead, old boy!" she began her second verse:

"'Tis Venus who at midnight passes—"

Still the same acidulated voice, only that now it tickled the public in the right quarter so deftly that momentarily it caused them to give a little shiver of pleasure. Nana still smiled her smile: it lit up her little red mouth and shone in her great eyes, which were of the clearest blue. When she came to certain rather lively verses a delicate sense of enjoyment made her tilt her nose, the rosy nostrils of which lifted and fell, while a bright flush suffused her cheeks. She still swung herself up and down, for she only knew how to do that. And the trick was no longer voted ugly; on the contrary, the men raised their opera glasses. When she came to the end of a verse her voice completely failed her, and she was well aware that she never would get through with it. Thereupon, rather than fret herself, she kicked up her leg, which forthwith was roundly outlined under her diaphanous tunic, bent sharply backward, so that her bosom was thrown upward and forward, and stretched her arms out. Applause burst forth on all sides. In the twinkling of an eye she had turned on her heel and was going up the stage, presenting the nape of her neck to the spectators' gaze, a neck where the red-gold hair showed like some animal's fell. Then the plaudits became frantic.

The close of the act was not so exciting. Vulcan wanted to slap Venus. The gods held a consultation and decided to go and hold an inquiry on earth before granting the deceived husband satisfaction. It was then that Diana surprised a tender conversation between Venus and Mars and vowed that she would not take her eyes off them during the whole of the voyage. There was also a scene where Love, played by a little twelve-year-old chit, answered every question put to her with "Yes, Mamma! No, Mamma!" in a winy-piny tone, her fingers in her nose. At last Jupiter, with the severity of a master who is growing cross, shut Love up in a dark closet, bidding her conjugate the verb "I love" twenty times. The finale was more appreciated: it was a chorus which both troupe and orchestra performed with great brilliancy. But the curtain once down, the clappers tried in vain to obtain a call, while the whole house was already up and making for the doors.

The crowd trampled and jostled, jammed, as it were, between the rows of seats, and in so doing exchanged expressions. One phrase only went round:

"It's idiotic." A critic was saying that it would be one's duty to do a pretty bit of slashing. The piece, however, mattered very little, for people were talking about Nana before everything else. Fauchery and La Faloise, being among the earliest to emerge, met Steiner and Mignon in the passage outside the stalls. In this gaslit gut of a place, which was as narrow and circumscribed as a gallery in a mine, one was well-nigh suffocated. They stopped a moment at the foot of the stairs on the right of the house, protected by the final curve of the balusters. The audience from the cheap places were coming down the steps with a continuous tramp of heavy boots; a stream of black dress coats was passing, while an attendant was making every possible effort to protect a chair, on which she had piled up coats and cloaks, from the onward pushing of the crowd.

"Surely I know her," cried Steiner, the moment he perceived Fauchery. "I'm certain I've seen her somewhere—at the casino, I imagine, and she got herself taken up there—she was so drunk."

"As for me," said the journalist, "I don't quite know where it was. I am like you; I certainly have come across her."

He lowered his voice and asked, laughing:

"At the Tricons', perhaps."

"Egad, it was in a dirty place," Mignon declared. He seemed exasperated. "It's disgusting that the public give such a reception to the first trollop that comes by. There'll soon be no more decent women on the stage. Yes, I shall end by forbidding Rose to play."

Fauchery could not restrain a smile. Meanwhile the downward shuffle of the heavy shoes on the steps did not cease, and a little man in a workman's cap was heard crying in a drawling voice:

"Oh my, she ain't no wopper! There's some pickings there!"

In the passage two young men, delicately curled and formally resplendent in turndown collars and the rest, were disputing together. One of them was repeating the words, "Beastly, beastly!" without stating any reasons; the other was replying with the words, "Stunning, stunning!" as though he, too, disdained all argument.

La Faloise declared her to be quite the thing; only he ventured to opine that she would be better still if she were to cultivate her voice. Steiner, who was no longer listening, seemed to awake with a start. Whatever happens, one must wait, he thought. Perhaps everything will be spoiled in the following acts. The public had shown complaisance, but it was certainly not yet taken by storm. Mignon swore that the piece would never finish, and when Fauchery and La Faloise left them in order to go up to the foyer he took Steiner's arm and, leaning hard against his shoulder, whispered in his ear:

"You're going to see my wife's costume for the second act, old fellow. It IS just blackguardly."

Upstairs in the foyer three glass chandeliers burned with a brilliant light. The two cousins hesitated an instant before entering, for the widely opened glazed doors afforded a view right through the gallery—a view of a surging sea of heads, which two currents, as it were, kept in a continuous eddying movement. But they entered after all. Five or six groups of men, talking very loudly and gesticulating, were obstinately discussing the play amid these violent interruptions; others were filing round, their heels, as they turned, sounding sharply on the waxed floor. To right and left, between columns of variegated imitation marble, women were sitting on benches covered with red velvet and viewing the passing movement of the crowd with an air of fatigue as though the heat had rendered them languid. In the lofty mirrors behind them one saw the reflection of their chignons. At the end of the room, in front of the bar, a man with a huge corporation was drinking a glass of fruit syrup.

But Fauchery, in order to breathe more freely, had gone to the balcony. La Faloise, who was studying the photographs of actresses hung in frames alternating with the mirrors between the columns, ended by following him. They had extinguished the line of gas jets on the facade of the theater, and it was dark and very cool on the balcony, which seemed to them unoccupied. Solitary and enveloped in shadow, a young man was standing, leaning his arms on the stone balustrade, in the recess to the right. He was smoking a cigarette, of which the burning end shone redly. Fauchery recognized Daguenet. They shook hands warmly.

"What are you after there, my dear fellow?" asked the journalist. "You're hiding yourself in holes and crannies—you, a man who never leaves the stalls on a first night!"

"But I'm smoking, you see," replied Daguenet.

Then Fauchery, to put him out of countenance:

"Well, well! What's your opinion of the new actress? She's being roughly handled enough in the passages."

"Bah!" muttered Daguenet. "They're people whom she'll have had nothing to do with!"

That was the sum of his criticism of Nana's talent. La Faloise leaned forward and looked down at the boulevard. Over against them the windows of a hotel and of a club were brightly lit up, while on the pavement below a dark mass of customers occupied the tables of the Cafe de Madrid. Despite the lateness of the hour the crowd were still crushing and being crushed; people were advancing with shortened step; a throng was constantly emerging from the Passage Jouffroy; individuals stood waiting five or six minutes before they could cross the roadway, to such a distance did the string of carriages extend.

"What a moving mass! And what a noise!" La Faloise kept reiterating, for Paris still astonished him.

The bell rang for some time; the foyer emptied. There was a hurrying of people in the passages. The curtain was already up when whole bands of spectators re-entered the house amid the irritated expressions of those who were once more in their places. Everyone took his seat again with an animated look and renewed attention. La Faloise directed his first glance in Gaga's direction, but he was dumfounded at seeing by her side the tall fair man who but recently had been in Lucy's stage box.

"What IS that man's name?" he asked.

Fauchery failed to observe him.

"Ah yes, it's Labordette," he said at last with the same careless movement. The scenery of the second act came as a surprise. It represented a suburban Shrove Tuesday dance at the Boule Noire. Masqueraders were trolling a catch, the chorus of which was accompanied with a tapping of their heels. This 'Arryish departure, which nobody had in the least expected, caused so much amusement that the house encored the catch. And it was to this entertainment that the divine band, let astray by Iris, who falsely bragged that he knew the Earth well, were now come in order to proceed with their inquiry. They had put on disguises so as to preserve their incognito. Jupiter came on the stage as King Dagobert, with his breeches inside out and a huge tin crown on his head. Phoebus appeared as the Postillion of Lonjumeau and Minerva as a Norman nursemaid. Loud bursts of merriment greeted Mars, who wore an outrageous uniform, suggestive of an Alpine admiral. But the shouts of laughter became uproarious when Neptune came in view, clad in a blouse, a high, bulging workman's cap on his head, lovelocks glued to his temples. Shuffling along in slippers, he cried in a thick brogue.

"Well, I'm blessed! When ye're a masher it'll never do not to let 'em love yer!"

There were some shouts of "Oh! Oh!" while the ladies held their fans one degree higher. Lucy in her stage box laughed so obstreperously that Caroline Hequet silenced her with a tap of her fan.

From that moment forth the piece was saved—nay, more, promised a great success. This carnival of the gods, this dragging in the mud of their Olympus, this mock at a whole religion, a whole world of poetry, appeared in the light of a royal entertainment. The fever of irreverence gained the literary first-night world: legend was trampled underfoot; ancient images were shattered. Jupiter's make-up was capital. Mars was a success. Royalty became a farce and the army a thing of folly. When Jupiter, grown suddenly amorous of a little laundress, began to knock off a mad cancan, Simonne, who was playing the part of the laundress, launched a kick at the master of the immortals' nose and addressed him so drolly as "My big daddy!" that an immoderate fit of laughter shook the whole house. While they were dancing Phoebus treated Minerva to salad bowls of negus, and Neptune sat in state among seven or eight women who regaled him with cakes. Allusions were eagerly caught; indecent meanings were attached to them; harmless phrases were diverted from their proper significations in the light of exclamations issuing from the stalls. For a long time past the theatrical public had not wallowed in folly more irreverent. It rested them.

Nevertheless, the action of the piece advanced amid these fooleries. Vulcan, as an elegant young man clad, down to his gloves, entirely in yellow and with an eyeglass stuck in his eye, was forever running after Venus, who at last made her appearance as a fishwife, a kerchief on her head and her bosom, covered with big gold trinkets, in great evidence. Nana was so white and plump and looked so natural in a part demanding wide hips and a voluptuous mouth that she straightway won the whole house. On her account Rose Mignon was forgotten, though she was made up as a delicious baby, with a wicker-work burlet on her head and a short muslin frock and had just sighed forth Diana's plaints in a sweetly pretty voice. The other one, the big wench who slapped her thighs and clucked like a hen, shed round her an odor of life, a sovereign feminine charm, with which the public grew intoxicated. From the second act onward everything was permitted her. She might hold herself awkwardly; she might fail to sing some note in tune; she might forget her words—it mattered not: she had only to turn and laugh to raise shouts of applause. When she gave her famous kick from the hip the stalls were fired, and a glow of passion rose upward, upward, from gallery to gallery, till it reached the gods. It was a triumph, too, when she led the dance. She was at home in that: hand on hip, she enthroned Venus in the gutter by the pavement side. And the music seemed made for her plebeian voice—shrill, piping music, with reminiscences of Saint-Cloud Fair, wheezings of clarinets and playful trills on the part of the little flutes.

Two numbers were again encored. The opening waltz, that waltz with the naughty rhythmic beat, had returned and swept the gods with it. Juno, as a peasant woman, caught Jupiter and his little laundress cleverly and boxed his ears. Diana, surprising Venus in the act of making an assignation with Mars, made haste to indicate hour and place to Vulcan, who cried, "I've hit on a plan!" The rest of the act did not seem very clear. The inquiry ended in a final galop after which Jupiter, breathless, streaming with perspiration and minus his crown, declared that the little women of Earth were delicious and that the men were all to blame.

The curtain was falling, when certain voices, rising above the storm of bravos, cried uproariously:

"All! All!"

Thereupon the curtain rose again; the artistes reappeared hand in hand. In the middle of the line Nana and Rose Mignon stood side by side, bowing and curtsying. The audience applauded; the clappers shouted acclamations. Then little by little the house emptied.

"I must go and pay my respects to the Countess Muffat," said La Faloise. "Exactly so; you'll present me," replied Fauchery; "we'll go down afterward."

But it was not easy to get to the first-tier boxes. In the passage at the top of the stairs there was a crush. In order to get forward at all among the various groups you had to make yourself small and to slide along, using your elbows in so doing. Leaning under a copper lamp, where a jet of gas was burning, the bulky critic was sitting in judgment on the piece in presence of an attentive circle. People in passing mentioned his name to each other in muttered tones. He had laughed the whole act through—that was the rumor going the round of the passages—nevertheless, he was now very severe and spoke of taste and morals. Farther off the thin-lipped critic was brimming over with a benevolence which had an unpleasant aftertaste, as of milk turned sour.

Fauchery glanced along, scrutinizing the boxes through the round openings in each door. But the Count de Vandeuvres stopped him with a question, and when he was informed that the two cousins were going to pay their respects to the Muffats, he pointed out to them box seven, from which he had just emerged. Then bending down and whispering in the journalist's ear:

"Tell me, my dear fellow," he said, "this Nana—surely she's the girl we saw one evening at the corner of the Rue de Provence?"

"By Jove, you're right!" cried Fauchery. "I was saying that I had come across her!"

La Faloise presented his cousin to Count Muffat de Beuville, who appeared very frigid. But on hearing the name Fauchery the countess raised her head and with a certain reserve complimented the paragraphist on his articles in the Figaro. Leaning on the velvet-covered support in front of her, she turned half round with a pretty movement of the shoulders. They talked for a short time, and the Universal Exhibition was mentioned.

"It will be very fine," said the count, whose square-cut, regular-featured face retained a certain gravity.

"I visited the Champ de Mars today and returned thence truly astonished."

"They say that things won't be ready in time," La Faloise ventured to remark. "There's infinite confusion there—"

But the count interrupted him in his severe voice:

"Things will be ready. The emperor desires it."

Fauchery gaily recounted how one day, when he had gone down thither in search of a subject for an article, he had come near spending all his time in the aquarium, which was then in course of construction. The countess smiled. Now and again she glanced down at the body of the house, raising an arm which a white glove covered to the elbow and fanning herself with languid hand. The house dozed, almost deserted. Some gentlemen in the stalls had opened out newspapers, and ladies received visits quite comfortably, as though they were at their own homes. Only a well-bred whispering was audible under the great chandelier, the light of which was softened in the fine cloud of dust raised by the confused movements of the interval. At the different entrances men were crowding in order to talk to ladies who remained seated. They stood there motionless for a few seconds, craning forward somewhat and displaying the great white bosoms of their shirt fronts.

"We count on you next Tuesday," said the countess to La Faloise, and she invited Fauchery, who bowed.

Not a word was said of the play; Nana's name was not once mentioned. The count was so glacially dignified that he might have been supposed to be taking part at a sitting of the legislature. In order to explain their presence that evening he remarked simply that his father-in-law was fond of the theater. The door of the box must have remained open, for the Marquis de Chouard, who had gone out in order to leave his seat to the visitors, was back again. He was straightening up his tall, old figure. His face looked soft and white under a broad-brimmed hat, and with his restless eyes he followed the movements of the women who passed.

The moment the countess had given her invitation Fauchery took his leave, feeling that to talk about the play would not be quite the thing. La Faloise was the last to quit the box. He had just noticed the fair-haired Labordette, comfortably installed in the Count de Vandeuvres's stage box and chatting at very close quarters with Blanche de Sivry.

"Gad," he said after rejoining his cousin, "that Labordette knows all the girls then! He's with Blanche now."

"Doubtless he knows them all," replied Fauchery quietly. "What d'you want to be taken for, my friend?"

The passage was somewhat cleared of people, and Fauchery was just about to go downstairs when Lucy Stewart called him. She was quite at the other end of the corridor, at the door of her stage box. They were getting cooked in there, she said, and she took up the whole corridor in company with Caroline Hequet and her mother, all three nibbling burnt almonds. A box opener was chatting maternally with them. Lucy fell out with the journalist. He was a pretty fellow; to be sure! He went up to see other women and didn't even come and ask if they were thirsty! Then, changing the subject:

"You know, dear boy, I think Nana very nice."

She wanted him to stay in the stage box for the last act, but he made his escape, promising to catch them at the door afterward. Downstairs in front of the theater Fauchery and La Faloise lit cigarettes. A great gathering blocked the sidewalk, a stream of men who had come down from the theater steps and were inhaling the fresh night air in the boulevards, where the roar and battle had diminished.

Meanwhile Mignon had drawn Steiner away to the Cafe des Varietes. Seeing Nana's success, he had set to work to talk enthusiastically about her, all the while observing the banker out of the corners of his eyes. He knew him well; twice he had helped him to deceive Rose and then, the caprice being over, had brought him back to her, faithful and repentant. In the cafe the too numerous crowd of customers were squeezing themselves round the marble-topped tables. Several were standing up, drinking in a great hurry. The tall mirrors reflected this thronging world of heads to infinity and magnified the narrow room beyond measure with its three chandeliers, its moleskin-covered seats and its winding staircase draped with red. Steiner went and seated himself at a table in the first saloon, which opened full on the boulevard, its doors having been removed rather early for the time of year. As Fauchery and La Faloise were passing the banker stopped them.

"Come and take a bock with us, eh?" they said.

But he was too preoccupied by an idea; he wanted to have a bouquet thrown to Nana. At last he called a waiter belonging to the cafe, whom he familiarly addressed as Auguste. Mignon, who was listening, looked at him so sharply that he lost countenance and stammered out:

"Two bouquets, Auguste, and deliver them to the attendant. A bouquet for each of these ladies! Happy thought, eh?"

At the other end of the saloon, her shoulders resting against the frame of a mirror, a girl, some eighteen years of age at the outside, was leaning motionless in front of her empty glass as though she had been benumbed by long and fruitless waiting. Under the natural curls of her beautiful gray-gold hair a virginal face looked out at you with velvety eyes, which were at once soft and candid.

She wore a dress of faded green silk and a round hat which blows had dinted. The cool air of the night made her look very pale.

"Egad, there's Satin," murmured Fauchery when his eye lit upon her.

La Faloise questioned him. Oh dear, yes, she was a streetwalker—she didn't count. But she was such a scandalous sort that people amused themselves by making her talk. And the journalist, raising his voice:

"What are you doing there, Satin?"

"I'm bogging," replied Satin quietly without changing position.

The four men were charmed and fell a-laughing. Mignon assured them that there was no need to hurry; it would take twenty minutes to set up the scenery for the third act. But the two cousins, having drunk their beer, wanted to go up into the theater again; the cold was making itself felt. Then Mignon remained alone with Steiner, put his elbows on the table and spoke to him at close quarters.

"It's an understood thing, eh? We are to go to her house, and I'm to introduce you. You know the thing's quite between ourselves—my wife needn't know."

Once more in their places, Fauchery and La Faloise noticed a pretty, quietly dressed woman in the second tier of boxes. She was with a serious-looking gentleman, a chief clerk at the office of the Ministry of the Interior, whom La Faloise knew, having met him at the Muffats'. As to Fauchery, he was under the impression that her name was Madame Robert, a lady of honorable repute who had a lover, only one, and that always a person of respectability.

But they had to turn round, for Daguenet was smiling at them. Now that Nana had had a success he no longer hid himself: indeed, he had just been scoring triumphs in the passages. By his side was the young truant schoolboy, who had not quitted his seat, so stupefying was the state of admiration into which Nana had plunged him. That was it, he thought; that was the woman! And he blushed as he thought so and dragged his gloves on and off mechanically. Then since his neighbor had spoken of Nana, he ventured to question him.

"Will you pardon me for asking you, sir, but that lady who is acting—do you know her?"

"Yes, I do a little," murmured Daguenet with some surprise and hesitation.

"Then you know her address?"

The question, addressed as it was to him, came so abruptly that he felt inclined to respond with a box on the ear.

"No," he said in a dry tone of voice.

And with that he turned his back. The fair lad knew that he had just been guilty of some breach of good manners. He blushed more hotly than ever and looked scared.

The traditional three knocks were given, and among the returning throng, attendants, laden with pelisses and overcoats, bustled about at a great rate in order to put away people's things. The clappers applauded the scenery, which represented a grotto on Mount Etna, hollowed out in a silver mine and with sides glittering like new money. In the background Vulcan's forge glowed like a setting star. Diana, since the second act, had come to a good understanding with the god, who was to pretend that he was on a journey, so as to leave the way clear for Venus and Mars. Then scarcely was Diana alone than Venus made her appearance. A shiver of delight ran round the house. Nana was nude. With quiet audacity she appeared in her nakedness, certain of the sovereign power of her flesh. Some gauze enveloped her, but her rounded shoulders, her Amazonian bosom, her wide hips, which swayed to and fro voluptuously, her whole body, in fact, could be divined, nay discerned, in all its foamlike whiteness of tint beneath the slight fabric she wore. It was Venus rising from the waves with no veil save her tresses. And when Nana lifted her arms the golden hairs in her armpits were observable in the glare of the footlights. There was no applause. Nobody laughed any more. The men strained forward with serious faces, sharp features, mouths irritated and parched. A wind seemed to have passed, a soft, soft wind, laden with a secret menace. Suddenly in the bouncing child the woman stood discovered, a woman full of restless suggestion, who brought with her the delirium of sex and opened the gates of the unknown world of desire. Nana was smiling still, but her smile was now bitter, as of a devourer of men.

"By God," said Fauchery quite simply to La Faloise.

Mars in the meantime, with his plume of feathers, came hurrying to the trysting place and found himself between the two goddesses. Then ensued a passage which Prulliere played with great delicacy. Petted by Diana, who wanted to make a final attack upon his feelings before delivering him up to Vulcan, wheedled by Venus, whom the presence of her rival excited, he gave himself up to these tender delights with the beatified expression of a man in clover. Finally a grand trio brought the scene to a close, and it was then that an attendant appeared in Lucy Stewart's box and threw on the stage two immense bouquets of white lilacs. There was applause; Nana and Rose Mignon bowed, while Prulliere picked up the bouquets. Many of the occupants of the stalls turned smilingly toward the ground-floor occupied by Steiner and Mignon. The banker, his face blood-red, was suffering from little convulsive twitchings of the chin, as though he had a stoppage in his throat.

What followed took the house by storm completely. Diana had gone off in a rage, and directly afterward, Venus, sitting on a moss-clad seat, called Mars to her. Never yet had a more glowing scene of seduction been ventured on. Nana, her arms round Prulliere's neck, was drawing him toward her when Fontan, with comically furious mimicry and an exaggerated imitation of the face of an outraged husband who surprises his wife in FLAGRANTE DELICTO, appeared at the back of the grotto. He was holding the famous net with iron meshes. For an instant he poised and swung it, as a fisherman does when he is going to make a cast, and by an ingenious twist Venus and Mars were caught in the snare; the net wrapped itself round them and held them motionless in the attitude of happy lovers.

A murmur of applause swelled and swelled like a growing sigh. There was some hand clapping, and every opera glass was fixed on Venus. Little by little Nana had taken possession of the public, and now every man was her slave.

A wave of lust had flowed from her as from an excited animal, and its influence had spread and spread and spread till the whole house was possessed by it. At that moment her slightest movement blew the flame of desire: with her little finger she ruled men's flesh. Backs were arched and quivered as though unseen violin bows had been drawn across their muscles; upon men's shoulders appeared fugitive hairs, which flew in air, blown by warm and wandering breaths, breathed one knew not from what feminine mouth. In front of him Fauchery saw the truant schoolboy half lifted from his seat by passion. Curiosity led him to look at the Count de Vandeuvres—he was extremely pale, and his lips looked pinched—at fat Steiner, whose face was purple to the verge of apoplexy; at Labordette, ogling away with the highly astonished air of a horse dealer admiring a perfectly shaped mare; at Daguenet, whose ears were blood-red and twitching with enjoyment. Then a sudden idea made him glance behind, and he marveled at what he saw in the Muffats' box. Behind the countess, who was white and serious as usual, the count was sitting straight upright, with mouth agape and face mottled with red, while close by him, in the shadow, the restless eyes of the Marquis de Chouard had become catlike phosphorescent, full of golden sparkles. The house was suffocating; people's very hair grew heavy on their perspiring heads. For three hours back the breath of the multitude had filled and heated the atmosphere with a scent of crowded humanity. Under the swaying glare of the gas the dust clouds in mid-air had grown constantly denser as they hung motionless beneath the chandelier. The whole house seemed to be oscillating, to be lapsing toward dizziness in its fatigue and excitement, full, as it was, of those drowsy midnight desires which flutter in the recesses of the bed of passion. And Nana, in front of this languorous public, these fifteen hundred human beings thronged and smothered in the exhaustion and nervous exasperation which belong to the close of a spectacle, Nana still triumphed by right of her marble flesh and that sexual nature of hers, which was strong enough to destroy the whole crowd of her adorers and yet sustain no injury.

The piece drew to a close. In answer to Vulcan's triumphant summons all the Olympians defiled before the lovers with ohs and ahs of stupefaction and gaiety. Jupiter said, "I think it is light conduct on your part, my son, to summon us to see such a sight as this." Then a reaction took place in favor of Venus. The chorus of cuckolds was again ushered in by Iris and besought the master of the gods not to give effect to its petition, for since women had lived at home, domestic life was becoming impossible for the men: the latter preferred being deceived and happy. That was the moral of the play. Then Venus was set at liberty, and Vulcan obtained a partial divorce from her. Mars was reconciled with Diana, and Jove, for the sake of domestic peace, packed his little laundress off into a constellation. And finally they extricated Love from his black hole, where instead of conjugating the verb AMO he had been busy in the manufacture of "dollies." The curtain fell on an apotheosis, wherein the cuckolds' chorus knelt and sang a hymn of gratitude to Venus, who stood there with smiling lips, her stature enhanced by her sovereign nudity.

The audience, already on their feet, were making for the exits. The authors were mentioned, and amid a thunder of applause there were two calls before the curtain. The shout of "Nana! Nana!" rang wildly forth. Then no sooner was the house empty than it grew dark: the footlights went out; the chandelier was turned down; long strips of gray canvas slipped from the stage boxes and swathed the gilt ornamentation of the galleries, and the house, lately so full of heat and noise, lapsed suddenly into a heavy sleep, while a musty, dusty odor began to pervade it. In the front of her box stood the Countess Muffat. Very erect and closely wrapped up in her furs, she stared at the gathering shadows and waited for the crowd to pass away.

In the passages the people were jostling the attendants, who hardly knew what to do among the tumbled heaps of outdoor raiment. Fauchery and La Faloise had hurried in order to see the crowd pass out. All along the entrance hall men formed a living hedge, while down the double staircase came slowly and in regular, complete formation two interminable throngs of human beings. Steiner, in tow of Mignon, had left the house among the foremost. The Count de Vandeuvres took his departure with Blanche de Sivry on his arm. For a moment or two Gaga and her daughter seemed doubtful how to proceed, but Labordette made haste to go and fetch them a conveyance, the door whereof he gallantly shut after them. Nobody saw Daguenet go by. As the truant schoolboy, registering a mental vow to wait at the stage door, was running with burning cheeks toward the Passage des Panoramas, of which he found the gate closed, Satin, standing on the edge of the pavement, moved forward and brushed him with her skirts, but he in his despair gave her a savage refusal and vanished amid the crowd, tears of impotent desire in his eyes. Members of the audience were lighting their cigars and walking off, humming:

When Venus roams at eventide.

Satin had gone back in front of the Cafe des Varietes, where Auguste let her eat the sugar that remained over from the customers' orders. A stout man, who came out in a very heated condition, finally carried her off in the shadow of the boulevard, which was now gradually going to sleep.

Still people kept coming downstairs. La Faloise was waiting for Clarisse; Fauchery had promised to catch up Lucy Stewart with Caroline Hequet and her mother. They came; they took up a whole corner of the entrance hall and were laughing very loudly when the Muffats passed by them with an icy expression. Bordenave had just then opened a little door and, peeping out, had obtained from Fauchery the formal promise of an article. He was dripping with perspiration, his face blazed, as though he were drunk with success.

"You're good for two hundred nights," La Faloise said to him with civility. "The whole of Paris will visit your theater."

But Bordenave grew annoyed and, indicating with a jerk of his chin the public who filled the entrance hall—a herd of men with parched lips and ardent eyes, still burning with the enjoyment of Nana—he cried out violently:

"Say 'my brothel,' you obstinate devil!"

CHAPTER II

At ten o'clock the next morning Nana was still asleep. She occupied the second floor of a large new house in the Boulevard Haussmann, the landlord of which let flats to single ladies in order by their means to dry the paint. A rich merchant from Moscow, who had come to pass a winter in Paris, had installed her there after paying six months' rent in advance. The rooms were too big for her and had never been completely furnished. The vulgar sumptuosity of gilded consoles and gilded chairs formed a crude contrast therein to the bric-a-brac of a secondhand furniture shop—to mahogany round tables, that is to say, and zinc candelabras, which sought to imitate Florentine bronze. All of which smacked of the courtesan too early deserted by her first serious protector and fallen back on shabby lovers, of a precarious first appearance of a bad start, handicapped by refusals of credit and threats of eviction.

Nana was sleeping on her face, hugging in her bare arms a pillow in which she was burying cheeks grown pale in sleep. The bedroom and the dressing room were the only two apartments which had been properly furnished by a neighboring upholsterer. A ray of light, gliding in under a curtain, rendered visible rosewood furniture and hangings and chairbacks of figured damask with a pattern of big blue flowers on a gray ground. But in the soft atmosphere of that slumbering chamber Nana suddenly awoke with a start, as though surprised to find an empty place at her side. She looked at the other pillow lying next to hers; there was the dint of a human head among its flounces: it was still warm. And groping with one hand, she pressed the knob of an electric bell by her bed's head.

"He's gone then?" she asked the maid who presented herself.

"Yes, madame, Monsieur Paul went away not ten minutes back. As Madame was tired, he did not wish to wake her. But he ordered me to tell Madame that he would come tomorrow."

As she spoke Zoe, the lady's maid, opened the outer shutter. A flood of daylight entered. Zoe, a dark brunette with hair in little plaits, had a long canine face, at once livid and full of seams, a snub nose, thick lips and two black eyes in continual movement.

"Tomorrow, tomorrow," repeated Nana, who was not yet wide awake, "is tomorrow the day?"

"Yes, madame, Monsieur Paul has always come on the Wednesday."

"No, now I remember," said the young woman, sitting up. "It's all changed. I wanted to tell him so this morning. He would run against the nigger! We should have a nice to-do!"

"Madame did not warn me; I couldn't be aware of it," murmured Zoe. "When Madame changes her days she will do well to tell me so that I may know. Then the old miser is no longer due on the Tuesday?"

Between themselves they were wont thus gravely to nickname as "old miser" and "nigger" their two paying visitors, one of whom was a tradesman of economical tendencies from the Faubourg Saint-Denis, while the other was a Walachian, a mock count, whose money, paid always at the most irregular intervals, never looked as though it had been honestly come by. Daguenet had made Nana give him the days subsequent to the old miser's visits, and as the trader had to be at home by eight o'clock in the morning, the young man would watch for his departure from Zoes kitchen and would take his place, which was still quite warm, till ten o'clock. Then he, too, would go about his business. Nana and he were wont to think it a very comfortable arrangement.

"So much the worse," said Nana; "I'll write to him this afternoon. And if he doesn't receive my letter, then tomorrow you will stop him coming in."

In the meantime Zoe was walking softly about the room. She spoke of yesterday's great hit. Madame had shown such talent; she sang so well! Ah! Madame need not fret at all now!

Nana, her elbow dug into her pillow, only tossed her head in reply. Her nightdress had slipped down on her shoulders, and her hair, unfastened and entangled, flowed over them in masses.

"Without doubt," she murmured, becoming thoughtful; "but what's to be done to gain time? I'm going to have all sorts of bothers today. Now let's see, has the porter come upstairs yet this morning?"

Then both the women talked together seriously. Nana owed three quarters' rent; the landlord was talking of seizing the furniture. Then, too, there was a perfect downpour of creditors; there was a livery-stable man, a needlewoman, a ladies' tailor, a charcoal dealer and others besides, who came every day and settled themselves on a bench in the little hall. The charcoal dealer especially was a dreadful fellow—he shouted on the staircase. But Nana's greatest cause of distress was her little Louis, a child she had given birth to when she was sixteen and now left in charge of a nurse in a village in the neighborhood of Rambouillet. This woman was clamoring for the sum of three hundred francs before she would consent to give the little Louis back to her. Nana, since her last visit to the child, had been seized with a fit of maternal love and was desperate at the thought that she could not realize a project, which had now become a hobby with her. This was to pay off the nurse and to place the little man with his aunt, Mme Lerat, at the Batignolles, whither she could go and see him as often as she liked.

Meanwhile the lady's maid kept hinting that her mistress ought to have confided her necessities to the old miser.

"To be sure, I told him everything," cried Nana, "and he told me in answer that he had too many big liabilities. He won't go beyond his thousand francs a month. The nigger's beggared just at present; I expect he's lost at play. As to that poor Mimi, he stands in great need of a loan himself; a fall in stocks has cleaned him out—he can't even bring me flowers now."

She was speaking of Daguenet. In the self-abandonment of her awakening she had no secrets from Zoe, and the latter, inured to such confidences, received them with respectful sympathy. Since Madame condescended to speak to her of her affairs she would permit herself to say what she thought. Besides, she was very fond of Madame; she had left Mme Blanche for the express purpose of taking service with her, and heaven knew Mme Blanche was straining every nerve to have her again! Situations weren't lacking; she was pretty well known, but she would have stayed with Madame even in narrow circumstances, because she believed in Madame's future. And she concluded by stating her advice with precision. When one was young one often did silly things. But this time it was one's duty to look alive, for the men only thought of having their fun. Oh dear, yes! Things would right themselves. Madame had only to say one word in order to quiet her creditors and find the money she stood in need of.

"All that doesn't help me to three hundred francs," Nana kept repeating as she plunged her fingers into the vagrant convolutions of her back hair. "I must have three hundred francs today, at once! It's stupid not to know anyone who'll give you three hundred francs."

She racked her brains. She would have sent Mme Lerat, whom she was expecting that very morning, to Rambouillet. The counteraction of her sudden fancy spoiled for her the triumph of last night. Among all those men who had cheered her, to think that there wasn't one to bring her fifteen louis! And then one couldn't accept money in that way! Dear heaven, how unfortunate she was! And she kept harking back again to the subject of her baby—he had blue eyes like a cherub's; he could lisp "Mamma" in such a funny voice that you were ready to die of laughing!

But at this moment the electric bell at the outer door was heard to ring with its quick and tremulous vibration. Zoe returned, murmuring with a confidential air:

"It's a woman."

She had seen this woman a score of times, only she made believe never to recognize her and to be quite ignorant of the nature of her relations with ladies in difficulties.

"She has told me her name—Madame Tricon."

"The Tricon," cried Nana. "Dear me! That's true. I'd forgotten her. Show her in."

Zoe ushered in a tall old lady who wore ringlets and looked like a countess who haunts lawyers' offices. Then she effaced herself, disappearing noiselessly with the lithe, serpentine movement wherewith she was wont to withdraw from a room on the arrival of a gentleman. However, she might have stayed. The Tricon did not even sit down. Only a brief exchange of words took place.

"I have someone for you today. Do you care about it?"

"Yes. How much?"

"Twenty louis."

"At what o'clock?"

"At three. It's settled then?"

"It's settled."

Straightway the Tricon talked of the state of the weather. It was dry weather, pleasant for walking. She had still four or five persons to see. And she took her departure after consulting a small memorandum book. When she was once more alone Nana appeared comforted. A slight shiver agitated her shoulders, and she wrapped herself softly up again in her warm bedclothes with the lazy movements of a cat who is susceptible to cold. Little by little her eyes closed, and she lay smiling at the thought of dressing Louiset prettily on the following day, while in the slumber into which she once more sank last night's long, feverish dream of endlessly rolling applause returned like a sustained accompaniment to music and gently soothed her lassitude.

At eleven o'clock, when Zoe showed Mme Lerat into the room, Nana was still asleep. But she woke at the noise and cried out at once:

"It's you. You'll go to Rambouillet today?"

"That's what I've come for," said the aunt. "There's a train at twenty past twelve. I've got time to catch it."

"No, I shall only have the money by and by," replied the young woman, stretching herself and throwing out her bosom. "You'll have lunch, and then we'll see."

Zoe brought a dressing jacket.

"The hairdresser's here, madame," she murmured.

But Nana did not wish to go into the dressing room. And she herself cried out:

"Come in, Francis."

A well-dressed man pushed open the door and bowed. Just at that moment Nana was getting out of bed, her bare legs in full view. But she did not hurry and stretched her hands out so as to let Zoe draw on the sleeves of the dressing jacket. Francis, on his part, was quite at his ease and without turning away waited with a sober expression on his face.

"Perhaps Madame has not seen the papers. There's a very nice article in the Figaro."

He had brought the journal. Mme Lerat put on her spectacles and read the article aloud, standing in front of the window as she did so. She had the build of a policeman, and she drew herself up to her full height, while her nostrils seemed to compress themselves whenever she uttered a gallant epithet. It was a notice by Fauchery, written just after the performance, and it consisted of a couple of very glowing columns, full of witty sarcasm about the artist and of broad admiration for the woman.

"Excellent!" Francis kept repeating.

Nana laughed good-humoredly at his chaffing her about her voice! He was a nice fellow, was that Fauchery, and she would repay him for his charming style of writing. Mme Lerat, after having reread the notice, roundly declared that the men all had the devil in their shanks, and she refused to explain her self further, being fully satisfied with a brisk allusion of which she alone knew the meaning. Francis finished turning up and fastening Nana's hair. He bowed and said:

"I'll keep my eye on the evening papers. At half-past five as usual, eh?"

"Bring me a pot of pomade and a pound of burnt almonds from Boissier's," Nana cried to him across the drawing room just as he was shutting the door after him.

Then the two women, once more alone, recollected that they had not embraced, and they planted big kisses on each other's cheeks. The notice warmed their hearts. Nana, who up till now had been half asleep, was again seized with the fever of her triumph. Dear, dear, 'twas Rose Mignon that would be spending a pleasant morning! Her aunt having been unwilling to go to the theater because, as she averred, sudden emotions ruined her stomach, Nana set herself to describe the events of the evening and grew intoxicated at her own recital, as though all Paris had been shaken to the ground by the applause. Then suddenly interrupting herself, she asked with a laugh if one would ever have imagined it all when she used to go traipsing about the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. Mme Lerat shook her head. No, no, one never could have foreseen it! And she began talking in her turn, assuming a serious air as she did so and calling Nana "daughter." Wasn't she a second mother to her since the first had gone to rejoin Papa and Grandmamma? Nana was greatly softened and on the verge of tears. But Mme Lerat declared that the past was the past—oh yes, to be sure, a dirty past with things in it which it was as well not to stir up every day. She had left off seeing her niece for a long time because among the family she was accused of ruining herself along with the little thing. Good God, as though that were possible! She didn't ask for confidences; she believed that Nana had always lived decently, and now it was enough for her to have found her again in a fine position and to observe her kind feelings toward her son. Virtue and hard work were still the only things worth anything in this world.

"Who is the baby's father?" she said, interrupting herself, her eyes lit up with an expression of acute curiosity.

Nana was taken by surprise and hesitated a moment.

"A gentleman," she replied.

"There now!" rejoined the aunt. "They declared that you had him by a stonemason who was in the habit of beating you. Indeed, you shall tell me all about it someday; you know I'm discreet! Tut, tut, I'll look after him as though he were a prince's son."

She had retired from business as a florist and was living on her savings, which she had got together sou by sou, till now they brought her in an income of six hundred francs a year. Nana promised to rent some pretty little lodgings for her and to give her a hundred francs a month besides. At the mention of this sum the aunt forgot herself and shrieked to her niece, bidding her squeeze their throats, since she had them in her grasp. She was meaning the men, of course. Then they both embraced again, but in the midst of her rejoicing Nana's face, as she led the talk back to the subject of Louiset, seemed to be overshadowed by a sudden recollection.

"Isn't it a bore I've got to go out at three o'clock?" she muttered. "It IS a nuisance!"

Just then Zoe came in to say that lunch was on the table. They went into the dining room, where an old lady was already seated at table. She had not taken her hat off, and she wore a dark dress of an indecisive color midway between puce and goose dripping. Nana did not seem surprised at sight of her. She simply asked her why she hadn't come into the bedroom.

"I heard voices," replied the old lady. "I thought you had company."

Mme Maloir, a respectable-looking and mannerly woman, was Nana's old friend, chaperon and companion. Mme Lerat's presence seemed to fidget her at first. Afterward, when she became aware that it was Nana's aunt, she looked at her with a sweet expression and a die-away smile. In the meantime Nana, who averred that she was as hungry as a wolf, threw herself on the radishes and gobbled them up without bread. Mme Lerat had become ceremonious; she refused the radishes as provocative of phlegm. By and by when Zoe had brought in the cutlets Nana just chipped the meat and contented herself with sucking the bones. Now and again she scrutinized her old friend's hat out of the corners of her eyes.

"It's the new hat I gave you?" she ended by saying.

"Yes, I made it up," murmured Mme Maloir, her mouth full of meat.

The hat was smart to distraction. In front it was greatly exaggerated, and it was adorned with a lofty feather. Mme Maloir had a mania for doing up all her hats afresh; she alone knew what really became her, and with a few stitches she could manufacture a toque out of the most elegant headgear. Nana, who had bought her this very hat in order not to be ashamed of her when in her company out of doors, was very near being vexed.

"Push it up, at any rate," she cried.

"No, thank you," replied the old lady with dignity. "It doesn't get in my way; I can eat very comfortably as it is."

After the cutlets came cauliflowers and the remains of a cold chicken. But at the arrival of each successive dish Nana made a little face, hesitated, sniffed and left her plateful untouched. She finished her lunch with the help of preserve.

Dessert took a long time. Zoe did not remove the cloth before serving the coffee. Indeed, the ladies simply pushed back their plates before taking it. They talked continually of yesterday's charming evening. Nana kept rolling cigarettes, which she smoked, swinging up and down on her backward-tilted chair. And as Zoe had remained behind and was lounging idly against the sideboard, it came about that the company were favored with her history. She said she was the daughter of a midwife at Bercy who had failed in business. First of all she had taken service with a dentist and after that with an insurance agent, but neither place suited her, and she thereupon enumerated, not without a certain amount of pride, the names of the ladies with whom she had served as lady's maid. Zoe spoke of these ladies as one who had had the making of their fortunes. It was very certain that without her more than one would have had some queer tales to tell. Thus one day, when Mme Blanche was with M. Octave, in came the old gentleman. What did Zoe do? She made believe to tumble as she crossed the drawing room; the old boy rushed up to her assistance, flew to the kitchen to fetch her a glass of water, and M. Octave slipped away.

"Oh, she's a good girl, you bet!" said Nana, who was listening to her with tender interest and a sort of submissive admiration.

"Now I've had my troubles," began Mme Lerat. And edging up to Mme Maloir, she imparted to her certain confidential confessions. Both ladies took lumps of sugar dipped in cognac and sucked them. But Mme Maloir was wont to listen to other people's secrets without even confessing anything concerning herself. People said that she lived on a mysterious allowance in a room whither no one ever penetrated.

All of a sudden Nana grew excited.

"Don't play with the knives, Aunt. You know it gives me a turn!"

Without thinking about it Mme Lerat had crossed two knives on the table in front of her. Notwithstanding this, the young woman defended herself from the charge of superstition. Thus, if the salt were upset, it meant nothing, even on a Friday; but when it came to knives, that was too much of a good thing; that had never proved fallacious. There could be no doubt that something unpleasant was going to happen to her. She yawned, and then with an air, of profound boredom:

"Two o'clock already. I must go out. What a nuisance!"

The two old ladies looked at one another. The three women shook their heads without speaking. To be sure, life was not always amusing. Nana had tilted her chair back anew and lit a cigarette, while the others sat pursing up their lips discreetly, thinking deeply philosophic thoughts.

"While waiting for you to return we'll play a game of bezique," said Mme Maloir after a short silence. "Does Madame play bezique?"

Certainly Mme Lerat played it, and that to perfection. It was no good troubling Zoe, who had vanished—a corner of the table would do quite well. And they pushed back the tablecloth over the dirty plates. But as Mme Maloir was herself going to take the cards out of a drawer in the sideboard, Nana remarked that before she sat down to her game it would be very nice of her if she would write her a letter. It bored Nana to write letters; besides, she was not sure of her spelling, while her old friend could turn out the most feeling epistles. She ran to fetch some good note paper in her bedroom. An inkstand consisting of a bottle of ink worth about three sous stood untidily on one of the pieces of furniture, with a pen deep in rust beside it. The letter was for Daguenet. Mme Maloir herself wrote in her bold English hand, "My darling little man," and then she told him not to come tomorrow because "that could not be" but hastened to add that "she was with him in thought at every moment of the day, whether she were near or far away."

"And I end with 'a thousand kisses,'" she murmured.

Mme Lerat had shown her approval of each phrase with an emphatic nod. Her eyes were sparkling; she loved to find herself in the midst of love affairs. Nay, she was seized with a desire to add some words of her own and, assuming a tender look and cooing like a dove, she suggested:

"A thousand kisses on thy beautiful eyes."

"That's the thing: 'a thousand kisses on thy beautiful eyes'!" Nana repeated, while the two old ladies assumed a beatified expression.

Zoe was rung for and told to take the letter down to a commissionaire. She had just been talking with the theater messenger, who had brought her mistress the day's playbill and rehearsal arrangements, which he had forgotten in the morning. Nana had this individual ushered in and got him to take the latter to Daguenet on his return. Then she put questions to him. Oh yes! M. Bordenave was very pleased; people had already taken seats for a week to come; Madame had no idea of the number of people who had been asking her address since morning. When the man had taken his departure Nana announced that at most she would only be out half an hour. If there were any visitors Zoe would make them wait. As she spoke the electric bell sounded. It was a creditor in the shape of the man of whom she jobbed her carriages. He had settled himself on the bench in the anteroom, and the fellow was free to twiddle his thumbs till night—there wasn't the least hurry now.

"Come, buck up!" said Nana, still torpid with laziness and yawning and stretching afresh. "I ought to be there now!"

Yet she did not budge but kept watching the play of her aunt, who had just announced four aces. Chin on hand, she grew quite engrossed in it but gave a violent start on hearing three o'clock strike.

"Good God!" she cried roughly.

Then Mme Maloir, who was counting the tricks she had won with her tens and aces, said cheeringly to her in her soft voice:

"It would be better, dearie, to give up your expedition at once."

"No, be quick about it," said Mme Lerat, shuffling the cards. "I shall take the half-past four o'clock train if you're back here with the money before four o'clock."

"Oh, there'll be no time lost," she murmured.

Ten minutes after Zoe helped her on with a dress and a hat. It didn't matter much if she were badly turned out. Just as she was about to go downstairs there was a new ring at the bell. This time it was the charcoal dealer. Very well, he might keep the livery-stable keeper company—it would amuse the fellows. Only, as she dreaded a scene, she crossed the kitchen and made her escape by the back stairs. She often went that way and in return had only to lift up her flounces.

"When one is a good mother anything's excusable," said Mme Maloir sententiously when left alone with Mme Lerat.

"Four kings," replied this lady, whom the play greatly excited.

And they both plunged into an interminable game.

The table had not been cleared. The smell of lunch and the cigarette smoke filled the room with an ambient, steamy vapor. The two ladies had again set to work dipping lumps of sugar in brandy and sucking the same. For twenty minutes at least they played and sucked simultaneously when, the electric bell having rung a third time, Zoe bustled into the room and roughly disturbed them, just as if they had been her own friends.

"Look here, that's another ring. You can't stay where you are. If many folks call I must have the whole flat. Now off you go, off you go!"

Mme Maloir was for finishing the game, but Zoe looked as if she was going to pounce down on the cards, and so she decided to carry them off without in any way altering their positions, while Mme Lerat undertook the removal of the brandy bottle, the glasses and the sugar. Then they both scudded to the kitchen, where they installed themselves at the table in an empty space between the dishcloths, which were spread out to dry, and the bowl still full of dishwater.

"We said it was three hundred and forty. It's your turn."

"I play hearts."

When Zoe returned she found them once again absorbed. After a silence, as Mme Lerat was shuffling, Mme Maloir asked who it was.

"Oh, nobody to speak of," replied the servant carelessly; "a slip of a lad! I wanted to send him away again, but he's such a pretty boy with never a hair on his chin and blue eyes and a girl's face! So I told him to wait after all. He's got an enormous bouquet in his hand, which he never once consented to put down. One would like to catch him one—a brat like that who ought to be at school still!"

Mme Lerat went to fetch a water bottle to mix herself some brandy and water, the lumps of sugar having rendered her thirsty. Zoe muttered something to the effect that she really didn't mind if she drank something too. Her mouth, she averred, was as bitter as gall.

"So you put him—?" continued Mme Maloir.

"Oh yes, I put him in the closet at the end of the room, the little unfurnished one. There's only one of my lady's trunks there and a table. It's there I stow the lubbers."

And she was putting plenty of sugar in her grog when the electric bell made her jump. Oh, drat it all! Wouldn't they let her have a drink in peace? If they were to have a peal of bells things promised well. Nevertheless, she ran off to open the door. Returning presently, she saw Mme Maloir questioning her with a glance.

"It's nothing," she said, "only a bouquet."

All three refreshed themselves, nodding to each other in token of salutation. Then while Zoe was at length busy clearing the table, bringing the plates out one by one and putting them in the sink, two other rings followed close upon one another. But they weren't serious, for while keeping the kitchen informed of what was going on she twice repeated her disdainful expression:

"Nothing, only a bouquet."

Notwithstanding which, the old ladies laughed between two of their tricks when they heard her describe the looks of the creditors in the anteroom after the flowers had arrived. Madame would find her bouquets on her toilet table. What a pity it was they cost such a lot and that you could only get ten sous for them! Oh dear, yes, plenty of money was wasted!

"For my part," said Mme Maloir, "I should be quite content if every day of my life I got what the men in Paris had spent on flowers for the women."

"Now, you know, you're not hard to please," murmured Mme Lerat. "Why, one would have only just enough to buy thread with. Four queens, my dear."

It was ten minutes to four. Zoe was astonished, could not understand why her mistress was out so long. Ordinarily when Madame found herself obliged to go out in the afternoons she got it over in double-quick time. But Mme Maloir declared that one didn't always manage things as one wished. Truly, life was beset with obstacles, averred Mme Lerat. The best course was to wait. If her niece was long in coming it was because her occupations detained her; wasn't it so? Besides, they weren't overworked—it was comfortable in the kitchen. And as hearts were out, Mme Lerat threw down diamonds.

The bell began again, and when Zoe reappeared she was burning with excitement.

"My children, it's fat Steiner!" she said in the doorway, lowering her voice as she spoke. "I've put HIM in the little sitting room."

Thereupon Mme Maloir spoke about the banker to Mme Lerat, who knew no such gentleman. Was he getting ready to give Rose Mignon the go-by? Zoe shook her head; she knew a thing or two. But once more she had to go and open the door.

"Here's bothers!" she murmured when she came back. "It's the nigger! 'Twasn't any good telling him that my lady's gone out, and so he's settled himself in the bedroom. We only expected him this evening."

At a quarter past four Nana was not in yet. What could she be after? It was silly of her! Two other bouquets were brought round, and Zoe, growing bored looked to see if there were any coffee left. Yes, the ladies would willingly finish off the coffee; it would waken them up. Sitting hunched up on their chairs, they were beginning to fall asleep through dint of constantly taking their cards between their fingers with the accustomed movement. The half-hour sounded. Something must decidedly have happened to Madame. And they began whispering to each other.

Suddenly Mme Maloir forgot herself and in a ringing voice announced: "I've the five hundred! Trumps, Major Quint!"

"Oh, do be quiet!" said Zoe angrily. "What will all those gentlemen think?" And in the silence which ensued and amid the whispered muttering of the two old women at strife over their game, the sound of rapid footsteps ascended from the back stairs. It was Nana at last. Before she had opened the door her breathlessness became audible. She bounced abruptly in, looking very red in the face. Her skirt, the string of which must have been broken, was trailing over the stairs, and her flounces had just been dipped in a puddle of something unpleasant which had oozed out on the landing of the first floor, where the servant girl was a regular slut.

"Here you are! It's lucky!" said Mme Lerat, pursing up her lips, for she was still vexed at Mme Maloir's "five hundred." "You may flatter yourself at the way you keep folks waiting."

"Madame isn't reasonable; indeed, she isn't!" added Zoe.

Nana was already harassed, and these reproaches exasperated her. Was that the way people received her after the worry she had gone through?

"Will you blooming well leave me alone, eh?" she cried.

"Hush, ma'am, there are people in there," said the maid.

Then in lower tones the young Woman stuttered breathlessly:

"D'you suppose I've been having a good time? Why, there was no end to it. I should have liked to see you there! I was boiling with rage! I felt inclined to smack somebody. And never a cab to come home in! Luckily it's only a step from here, but never mind that; I did just run home."

"You have the money?" asked the aunt.

"Dear, dear! That question!" rejoined Nana.

She had sat herself down on a chair close up against the stove, for her legs had failed her after so much running, and without stopping to take breath she drew from behind her stays an envelope in which there were four hundred-franc notes. They were visible through a large rent she had torn with savage fingers in order to be sure of the contents. The three women round about her stared fixedly at the envelope, a big, crumpled, dirty receptacle, as it lay clasped in her small gloved hands.

It was too late now—Mme Lerat would not go to Rambouillet till tomorrow, and Nana entered into long explanations.

"There's company waiting for you," the lady's maid repeated.

But Nana grew excited again. The company might wait: she'd go to them all in good time when she'd finished. And as her aunt began putting her hand out for the money:

"Ah no! Not all of it," she said. "Three hundred francs for the nurse, fifty for your journey and expenses, that's three hundred and fifty. Fifty francs I keep."

The big difficulty was how to find change. There were not ten francs in the house. But they did not even address themselves to Mme Maloir who, never having more than a six-sou omnibus fair upon her, was listening in quite a disinterested manner. At length Zoe went out of the room, remarking that she would go and look in her box, and she brought back a hundred francs in hundred-sou pieces. They were counted out on a corner of the table, and Mme Lerat took her departure at once after having promised to bring Louiset back with her the following day.

"You say there's company there?" continued Nana, still sitting on the chair and resting herself.

"Yes, madame, three people."

And Zoe mentioned the banker first. Nana made a face. Did that man Steiner think she was going to let herself be bored because he had thrown her a bouquet yesterday evening?

"Besides, I've had enough of it," she declared. "I shan't receive today. Go and say you don't expect me now."

"Madame will think the matter over; Madame will receive Monsieur Steiner," murmured Zoe gravely, without budging from her place. She was annoyed to see her mistress on the verge of committing another foolish mistake.

Then she mentioned the Walachian, who ought by now to find time hanging heavy on his hands in the bedroom. Whereupon Nana grew furious and more obstinate than ever. No, she would see nobody, nobody! Who'd sent her such a blooming leech of a man?

"Chuck 'em all out! I—I'm going to play a game of bezique with Madame Maloir. I prefer doing that."

The bell interrupted her remarks. That was the last straw. Another of the beggars yet! She forbade Zoe to go and open the door, but the latter had left the kitchen without listening to her, and when she reappeared she brought back a couple of cards and said authoritatively:

"I told them that Madame was receiving visitors. The gentlemen are in the drawing room."

Nana had sprung up, raging, but the names of the Marquis de Chouard and of Count Muffat de Beuville, which were inscribed on the cards, calmed her down. For a moment or two she remained silent.

"Who are they?" she asked at last. "You know them?"

"I know the old fellow," replied Zoe, discreetly pursing up her lips.

And her mistress continuing to question her with her eyes, she added simply:

"I've seen him somewhere."

This remark seemed to decide the young woman. Regretfully she left the kitchen, that asylum of steaming warmth, where you could talk and take your ease amid the pleasant fumes of the coffeepot which was being kept warm over a handful of glowing embers. She left Mme Maloir behind her. That lady was now busy reading her fortune by the cards; she had never yet taken her hat off, but now in order to be more at her ease she undid the strings and threw them back over her shoulders.

In the dressing room, where Zoe rapidly helped her on with a tea gown, Nana revenged herself for the way in which they were all boring her by muttering quiet curses upon the male sex. These big words caused the lady's maid not a little distress, for she saw with pain that her mistress was not rising superior to her origin as quickly as she could have desired. She even made bold to beg Madame to calm herself.

"You bet," was Nana's crude answer; "they're swine; they glory in that sort of thing."

Nevertheless, she assumed her princesslike manner, as she was wont to call it. But just when she was turning to go into the drawing room Zoe held her back and herself introduced the Marquis de Chouard and the Count Muffat into the dressing room. It was much better so.

"I regret having kept you waiting, gentlemen," said the young woman with studied politeness.

The two men bowed and seated themselves. A blind of embroidered tulle kept the little room in twilight. It was the most elegant chamber in the flat, for it was hung with some light-colored fabric and contained a cheval glass framed in inlaid wood, a lounge chair and some others with arms and blue satin upholsteries. On the toilet table the bouquets—roses, lilacs and hyacinths—appeared like a very ruin of flowers. Their perfume was strong and penetrating, while through the dampish air of the place, which was full of the spoiled exhalations of the washstand, came occasional whiffs of a more pungent scent, the scent of some grains or dry patchouli ground to fine powder at the bottom of a cup. And as she gathered herself together and drew up her dressing jacket, which had been ill fastened, Nana had all the appearance of having been surprised at her toilet: her skin was still damp; she smiled and looked quite startled amid her frills and laces.

"Madame, you will pardon our insistence," said the Count Muffat gravely. "We come on a quest. Monsieur and I are members of the Benevolent Organization of the district."

The Marquis de Chouard hastened gallantly to add:

"When we learned that a great artiste lived in this house we promised ourselves that we would put the claims of our poor people before her in a very special manner. Talent is never without a heart."

Nana pretended to be modest. She answered them with little assenting movements of her head, making rapid reflections at the same time. It must be the old man that had brought the other one: he had such wicked eyes. And yet the other was not to be trusted either: the veins near his temples were so queerly puffed up. He might quite well have come by himself. Ah, now that she thought of it, it was this way: the porter had given them her name, and they had egged one another on, each with his own ends in view.

"Most certainly, gentlemen, you were quite right to come up," she said with a very good grace.

But the electric bell made her tremble again. Another call, and that Zoe always opening the door! She went on:

"One is only too happy to be able to give."

At bottom she was flattered.

"Ah, madame," rejoined the marquis, "if only you knew about it! there's such misery! Our district has more than three thousand poor people in it, and yet it's one of the richest. You cannot picture to yourself anything like the present distress—children with no bread, women ill, utterly without assistance, perishing of the cold!"

"The poor souls!" cried Nana, very much moved.

Such was her feeling of compassion that tears flooded her fine eyes. No longer studying deportment, she leaned forward with a quick movement, and under her open dressing jacket her neck became visible, while the bent position of her knees served to outline the rounded contour of the thigh under the thin fabric of her skirt. A little flush of blood appeared in the marquis's cadaverous cheeks. Count Muffat, who was on the point of speaking, lowered his eyes. The air of that little room was too hot: it had the close, heavy warmth of a greenhouse. The roses were withering, and intoxicating odors floated up from the patchouli in the cup.

"One would like to be very rich on occasions like this," added Nana. "Well, well, we each do what we can. Believe me, gentlemen, if I had known—"

She was on the point of being guilty of a silly speech, so melted was she at heart. But she did not end her sentence and for a moment was worried at not being able to remember where she had put her fifty francs on changing her dress. But she recollected at last: they must be on the corner of her toilet table under an inverted pomatum pot. As she was in the act of rising the bell sounded for quite a long time. Capital! Another of them still! It would never end. The count and the marquis had both risen, too, and the ears of the latter seemed to be pricked up and, as it were, pointing toward the door; doubtless he knew that kind of ring. Muffat looked at him; then they averted their gaze mutually. They felt awkward and once more assumed their frigid bearing, the one looking square-set and solid with his thick head of hair, the other drawing back his lean shoulders, over which fell his fringe of thin white locks.

"My faith," said Nana, bringing the ten big silver pieces and quite determined to laugh about it, "I am going to entrust you with this, gentlemen. It is for the poor."

And the adorable little dimple in her chin became apparent. She assumed her favorite pose, her amiable baby expression, as she held the pile of five-franc pieces on her open palm and offered it to the men, as though she were saying to them, "Now then, who wants some?" The count was the sharper of the two. He took fifty francs but left one piece behind and, in order to gain possession of it, had to pick it off the young woman's very skin, a moist, supple skin, the touch of which sent a thrill through him. She was thoroughly merry and did not cease laughing.

"Come, gentlemen," she continued. "Another time I hope to give more."

The gentlemen no longer had any pretext for staying, and they bowed and went toward the door. But just as they were about to go out the bell rang anew. The marquis could not conceal a faint smile, while a frown made the count look more grave than before. Nana detained them some seconds so as to give Zoe time to find yet another corner for the newcomers. She did not relish meetings at her house. Only this time the whole place must be packed! She was therefore much relieved when she saw the drawing room empty and asked herself whether Zoe had really stuffed them into the cupboards.

"Au revoir, gentlemen," she said, pausing on the threshold of the drawing room.

It was as though she lapped them in her laughing smile and clear, unclouded glance. The Count Muffat bowed slightly. Despite his great social experience he felt that he had lost his equilibrium. He needed air; he was overcome with the dizzy feeling engendered in that dressing room with a scent of flowers, with a feminine essence which choked him. And behind his back, the Marquis de Chouard, who was sure that he could not be seen, made so bold as to wink at Nana, his whole face suddenly altering its expression as he did so, and his tongue nigh lolling from his mouth.

When the young woman re-entered the little room, where Zoe was awaiting her with letters and visiting cards, she cried out, laughing more heartily than ever:

"There are a pair of beggars for you! Why, they've got away with my fifty francs!"

She wasn't vexed. It struck her as a joke that MEN should have got money out of her. All the same, they were swine, for she hadn't a sou left. But at sight of the cards and the letters her bad temper returned. As to the letters, why, she said "pass" to them. They were from fellows who, after applauding her last night, were now making their declarations. And as to the callers, they might go about their business!

Zoe had stowed them all over the place, and she called attention to the great capabilities of the flat, every room in which opened on the corridor. That wasn't the case at Mme Blanche's, where people had all to go through the drawing room. Oh yes, Mme Blanche had had plenty of bothers over it!

"You will send them all away," continued Nana in pursuance of her idea. "Begin with the nigger."

"Oh, as to him, madame, I gave him his marching orders a while ago," said Zoe with a grin. "He only wanted to tell Madame that he couldn't come to-night."

There was vast joy at this announcement, and Nana clapped her hands. He wasn't coming, what good luck! She would be free then! And she emitted sighs of relief, as though she had been let off the most abominable of tortures. Her first thought was for Daguenet. Poor duck, why, she had just written to tell him to wait till Thursday! Quick, quick, Mme Maloir should write a second letter! But Zoe announced that Mme Maloir had slipped away unnoticed, according to her wont. Whereupon Nana, after talking of sending someone to him, began to hesitate. She was very tired. A long night's sleep—oh, it would be so jolly! The thought of such a treat overcame her at last. For once in a way she could allow herself that!

"I shall go to bed when I come back from the theater," she murmured greedily, "and you won't wake me before noon."

Then raising her voice:

"Now then, gee up! Shove the others downstairs!"

Zoe did not move. She would never have dreamed of giving her mistress overt advice, only now she made shift to give Madame the benefit of her experience when Madame seemed to be running her hot head against a wall.

"Monsieur Steiner as well?" she queried curtly.

"Why, certainly!" replied Nana. "Before all the rest."

The maid still waited, in order to give her mistress time for reflection. Would not Madame be proud to get such a rich gentleman away from her rival Rose Mignon—a man, moreover, who was known in all the theaters?

"Now make haste, my dear," rejoined Nana, who perfectly understood the situation, "and tell him he pesters me."

But suddenly there was a reversion of feeling. Tomorrow she might want him. Whereupon she laughed, winked once or twice and with a naughty little gesture cried out:

"After all's said and done, if I want him the best way even now is to kick him out of doors."

Zoe seemed much impressed. Struck with a sudden admiration, she gazed at her mistress and then went and chucked Steiner out of doors without further deliberation.

Meanwhile Nana waited patiently for a second or two in order to give her time to sweep the place out, as she phrased it. No one would ever have expected such a siege! She craned her head into the drawing room and found it empty. The dining room was empty too. But as she continued her visitation in a calmer frame of mind, feeling certain that nobody remained behind, she opened the door of a closet and came suddenly upon a very young man. He was sitting on the top of a trunk, holding a huge bouquet on his knees and looking exceedingly quiet and extremely well behaved.

"Goodness gracious me!" she cried. "There's one of 'em in there even now!" The very young man had jumped down at sight of her and was blushing as red as a poppy. He did not know what to do with his bouquet, which he kept shifting from one hand to the other, while his looks betrayed the extreme of emotion. His youth, his embarrassment and the funny figure he cut in his struggles with his flowers melted Nana's heart, and she burst into a pretty peal of laughter. Well, now, the very children were coming, were they? Men were arriving in long clothes. So she gave up all airs and graces, became familiar and maternal, tapped her leg and asked for fun:

"You want me to wipe your nose; do you, baby?"

"Yes," replied the lad in a low, supplicating tone.

This answer made her merrier than ever. He was seventeen years old, he said. His name was Georges Hugon. He was at the Varietes last night and now he had come to see her.

"These flowers are for me?"

"Yes."

"Then give 'em to me, booby!"

But as she took the bouquet from him he sprang upon her hands and kissed them with all the gluttonous eagerness peculiar to his charming time of life. She had to beat him to make him let go. There was a dreadful little dribbling customer for you! But as she scolded him she flushed rosy-red and began smiling. And with that she sent him about his business, telling him that he might call again. He staggered away; he could not find the doors.

Nana went back into her dressing room, where Francis made his appearance almost simultaneously in order to dress her hair for the evening. Seated in front of her mirror and bending her head beneath the hairdresser's nimble hands, she stayed silently meditative. Presently, however, Zoe entered, remarking:

"There's one of them, madame, who refuses to go."

"Very well, he must be left alone," she answered quietly.

"If that comes to that they still keep arriving."

"Bah! Tell 'em to wait. When they begin to feel too hungry they'll be off." Her humor had changed, and she was now delighted to make people wait about for nothing. A happy thought struck her as very amusing; she escaped from beneath Francis' hands and ran and bolted the doors. They might now crowd in there as much as they liked; they would probably refrain from making a hole through the wall. Zoe could come in and out through the little doorway leading to the kitchen. However, the electric bell rang more lustily than ever. Every five minutes a clear, lively little ting-ting recurred as regularly as if it had been produced by some well-adjusted piece of mechanism. And Nana counted these rings to while the time away withal. But suddenly she remembered something.

"I say, where are my burnt almonds?"

Francis, too, was forgetting about the burnt almonds. But now he drew a paper bag from one of the pockets of his frock coat and presented it to her with the discreet gesture of a man who is offering a lady a present. Nevertheless, whenever his accounts came to be settled, he always put the burnt almonds down on his bill. Nana put the bag between her knees and set to work munching her sweetmeats, turning her head from time to time under the hairdresser's gently compelling touch.

"The deuce," she murmured after a silence, "there's a troop for you!"

Thrice, in quick succession, the bell had sounded. Its summonses became fast and furious. There were modest tintinnabulations which seemed to stutter and tremble like a first avowal; there were bold rings which vibrated under some rough touch and hasty rings which sounded through the house with shivering rapidity. It was a regular peal, as Zoe said, a peal loud enough to upset the neighborhood, seeing that a whole mob of men were jabbing at the ivory button, one after the other. That old joker Bordenave had really been far too lavish with her address. Why, the whole of yesterday's house was coming!

"By the by, Francis, have you five louis?" said Nana.

He drew back, looked carefully at her headdress and then quietly remarked:

"Five louis, that's according!"

"Ah, you know if you want securities . . ." she continued.

And without finishing her sentence, she indicated the adjoining rooms with a sweeping gesture. Francis lent the five louis. Zoe, during each momentary respite, kept coming in to get Madame's things ready. Soon she came to dress her while the hairdresser lingered with the intention of giving some finishing touches to the headdress. But the bell kept continually disturbing the lady's maid, who left Madame with her stays half laced and only one shoe on. Despite her long experience, the maid was losing her head. After bringing every nook and corner into requisition and putting men pretty well everywhere, she had been driven to stow them away in threes and fours, which was a course of procedure entirely opposed to her principles. So much the worse for them if they ate each other up! It would afford more room! And Nana, sheltering behind her carefully bolted door, began laughing at them, declaring that she could hear them pant. They ought to be looking lovely in there with their tongues hanging out like a lot of bowwows sitting round on their behinds. Yesterday's success was not yet over, and this pack of men had followed up her scent.

"Provided they don't break anything," she murmured.

She began to feel some anxiety, for she fancied she felt their hot breath coming through chinks in the door. But Zoe ushered Labordette in, and the young woman gave a little shout of relief. He was anxious to tell her about an account he had settled for her at the justice of peace's court. But she did not attend and said:

"I'll take you along with me. We'll have dinner together, and afterward you shall escort me to the Varietes. I don't go on before half-past nine."

Good old Labordette, how lucky it was he had come! He was a fellow who never asked for any favors. He was only the friend of the women, whose little bits of business he arranged for them. Thus on his way in he had dismissed the creditors in the anteroom. Indeed, those good folks really didn't want to be paid. On the contrary, if they HAD been pressing for payment it was only for the sake of complimenting Madame and of personally renewing their offers of service after her grand success of yesterday.

"Let's be off, let's be off," said Nana, who was dressed by now.

But at that moment Zoe came in again, shouting:

"I refuse to open the door any more. They're waiting in a crowd all down the stairs."

A crowd all down the stairs! Francis himself, despite the English stolidity of manner which he was wont to affect, began laughing as he put up his combs. Nana, who had already taken Labordette's arm, pushed him into the kitchen and effected her escape. At last she was delivered from the men and felt happily conscious that she might now enjoy his society anywhere without fear of stupid interruptions.

"You shall see me back to my door," she said as they went down the kitchen stairs. "I shall feel safe, in that case. Just fancy, I want to sleep a whole night quite by myself—yes, a whole night! It's sort of infatuation, dear boy!"

CHAPTER III

The countess Sabine, as it had become customary to call Mme Muffat de Beuville in order to distinguish her from the count's mother, who had died the year before, was wont to receive every Tuesday in her house in the Rue Miromesnil at the corner of the Rue de Pentievre. It was a great square building, and the Muffats had lived in it for a hundred years or more. On the side of the street its frontage seemed to slumber, so lofty was it and dark, so sad and convent-like, with its great outer shutters, which were nearly always closed. And at the back in a little dark garden some trees had grown up and were straining toward the sunlight with such long slender branches that their tips were visible above the roof.

This particular Tuesday, toward ten o'clock in the evening, there were scarcely a dozen people in the drawing room. When she was only expecting intimate friends the countess opened neither the little drawing room nor the dining room. One felt more at home on such occasions and chatted round the fire. The drawing room was very large and very lofty; its four windows looked out upon the garden, from which, on this rainy evening of the close of April, issued a sensation of damp despite the great logs burning on the hearth. The sun never shone down into the room; in the daytime it was dimly lit up by a faint greenish light, but at night, when the lamps and the chandelier were burning, it looked merely a serious old chamber with its massive mahogany First Empire furniture, its hangings and chair coverings of yellow velvet, stamped with a large design. Entering it, one was in an atmosphere of cold dignity, of ancient manners, of a vanished age, the air of which seemed devotional.

Opposite the armchair, however, in which the count's mother had died—a square armchair of formal design and inhospitable padding, which stood by the hearthside—the Countess Sabine was seated in a deep and cozy lounge, the red silk upholsteries of which were soft as eider down. It was the only piece of modern furniture there, a fanciful item introduced amid the prevailing severity and clashing with it.

"So we shall have the shah of Persia," the young woman was saying.

They were talking of the crowned heads who were coming to Paris for the exhibition. Several ladies had formed a circle round the hearth, and Mme du Joncquoy, whose brother, a diplomat, had just fulfilled a mission in the East, was giving some details about the court of Nazr-ed-Din.

"Are you out of sorts, my dear?" asked Mme Chantereau, the wife of an ironmaster, seeing the countess shivering slightly and growing pale as she did so.

"Oh no, not at all," replied the latter, smiling. "I felt a little cold. This drawing room takes so long to warm."

And with that she raised her melancholy eyes and scanned the walls from floor to ceiling. Her daughter Estelle, a slight, insignificant-looking girl of sixteen, the thankless period of life, quitted the large footstool on which she was sitting and silently came and propped up one of the logs which had rolled from its place. But Mme de Chezelles, a convent friend of Sabine's and her junior by five years, exclaimed:

"Dear me, I would gladly be possessed of a drawing room such as yours! At any rate, you are able to receive visitors. They only build boxes nowadays. Oh, if I were in your place!"

She ran giddily on and with lively gestures explained how she would alter the hangings, the seats—everything, in fact. Then she would give balls to which all Paris should run. Behind her seat her husband, a magistrate, stood listening with serious air. It was rumored that she deceived him quite openly, but people pardoned her offense and received her just the same, because, they said, "she's not answerable for her actions."

"Oh that Leonide!" the Countess Sabine contented herself by murmuring, smiling her faint smile the while.

With a languid movement she eked out the thought that was in her. After having lived there seventeen years she certainly would not alter her drawing room now. It would henceforth remain just such as her mother-in-law had wished to preserve it during her lifetime. Then returning to the subject of conversation:

"I have been assured," she said, "that we shall also have the king of Prussia and the emperor of Russia."

"Yes, some very fine fetes are promised," said Mme du Joncquoy.

The banker Steiner, not long since introduced into this circle by Leonide de Chezelles, who was acquainted with the whole of Parisian society, was sitting chatting on a sofa between two of the windows. He was questioning a deputy, from whom he was endeavoring with much adroitness to elicit news about a movement on the stock exchange of which he had his suspicions, while the Count Muffat, standing in front of them, was silently listening to their talk, looking, as he did so, even grayer than was his wont.

Four or five young men formed another group near the door round the Count Xavier de Vandeuvres, who in a low tone was telling them an anecdote. It was doubtless a very risky one, for they were choking with laughter. Companionless in the center of the room, a stout man, a chief clerk at the Ministry of the Interior, sat heavily in an armchair, dozing with his eyes open. But when one of the young men appeared to doubt the truth of the anecdote Vandeuvres raised his voice.

"You are too much of a skeptic, Foucarmont; you'll spoil all your pleasures that way."

And he returned to the ladies with a laugh. Last scion of a great family, of feminine manners and witty tongue, he was at that time running through a fortune with a rage of life and appetite which nothing could appease. His racing stable, which was one of the best known in Paris, cost him a fabulous amount of money; his betting losses at the Imperial Club amounted monthly to an alarming number of pounds, while taking one year with another, his mistresses would be always devouring now a farm, now some acres of arable land or forest, which amounted, in fact, to quite a respectable slice of his vast estates in Picardy.

"I advise you to call other people skeptics! Why, you don't believe a thing yourself," said Leonide, making shift to find him a little space in which to sit down at her side.

"It's you who spoil your own pleasures."

"Exactly," he replied. "I wish to make others benefit by my experience."

But the company imposed silence on him: he was scandalizing M. Venot. And, the ladies having changed their positions, a little old man of sixty, with bad teeth and a subtle smile, became visible in the depths of an easy chair. There he sat as comfortably as in his own house, listening to everybody's remarks and making none himself. With a slight gesture he announced himself by no means scandalized. Vandeuvres once more assumed his dignified bearing and added gravely:

"Monsieur Venot is fully aware that I believe what it is one's duty to believe."

It was an act of faith, and even Leonide appeared satisfied. The young men at the end of the room no longer laughed; the company were old fogies, and amusement was not to be found there. A cold breath of wind had passed over them, and amid the ensuing silence Steiner's nasal voice became audible. The deputy's discreet answers were at last driving him to desperation. For a second or two the Countess Sabine looked at the fire; then she resumed the conversation.

"I saw the king of Prussia at Baden-Baden last year. He's still full of vigor for his age."

"Count Bismarck is to accompany him," said Mme du Joncquoy. "Do you know the count? I lunched with him at my brother's ages ago, when he was representative of Prussia in Paris. There's a man now whose latest successes I cannot in the least understand."

"But why?" asked Mme Chantereau.

"Good gracious, how am I to explain? He doesn't please me. His appearance is boorish and underbred. Besides, so far as I am concerned, I find him stupid."

With that the whole room spoke of Count Bismarck, and opinions differed considerably. Vandeuvres knew him and assured the company that he was great in his cups and at play. But when the discussion was at its height the door was opened, and Hector de la Falois made his appearance. Fauchery, who followed in his wake, approached the countess and, bowing:

"Madame," he said, "I have not forgotten your extremely kind invitation."

She smiled and made a pretty little speech. The journalist, after bowing to the count, stood for some moments in the middle of the drawing room. He only recognized Steiner and accordingly looked rather out of his element. But Vandeuvres turned and came and shook hands with him. And forthwith, in his delight at the meeting and with a sudden desire to be confidential, Fauchery buttonholed him and said in a low voice:

"It's tomorrow. Are you going?"

"Egad, yes."

"At midnight, at her house.

"I know, I know. I'm going with Blanche."

He wanted to escape and return to the ladies in order to urge yet another reason in M. de Bismarck's favor. But Fauchery detained him.

"You never will guess whom she has charged me to invite."

And with a slight nod he indicated Count Muffat, who was just then discussing a knotty point in the budget with Steiner and the deputy.

"It's impossible," said Vandeuvres, stupefaction and merriment in his tones. "My word on it! I had to swear that I would bring him to her. Indeed, that's one of my reasons for coming here."

Both laughed silently, and Vandeuvres, hurriedly rejoining the circle of ladies, cried out:

"I declare that on the contrary Monsieur de Bismarck is exceedingly witty. For instance, one evening he said a charmingly epigrammatic thing in my presence."

La Faloise meanwhile had heard the few rapid sentences thus whisperingly interchanged, and he gazed at Fauchery in hopes of an explanation which was not vouchsafed him. Of whom were they talking, and what were they going to do at midnight tomorrow? He did not leave his cousin's side again. The latter had gone and seated himself. He was especially interested by the Countess Sabine. Her name had often been mentioned in his presence, and he knew that, having been married at the age of seventeen, she must now be thirty-four and that since her marriage she had passed a cloistered existence with her husband and her mother-in-law. In society some spoke of her as a woman of religious chastity, while others pitied her and recalled to memory her charming bursts of laughter and the burning glances of her great eyes in the days prior to her imprisonment in this old town house. Fauchery scrutinized her and yet hesitated. One of his friends, a captain who had recently died in Mexico, had, on the very eve of his departure, made him one of those gross postprandial confessions, of which even the most prudent among men are occasionally guilty. But of this he only retained a vague recollection; they had dined not wisely but too well that evening, and when he saw the countess, in her black dress and with her quiet smile, seated in that Old World drawing room, he certainly had his doubts. A lamp which had been placed behind her threw into clear relief her dark, delicate, plump side face, wherein a certain heaviness in the contours of the mouth alone indicated a species of imperious sensuality.

"What do they want with their Bismarck?" muttered La Faloise, whose constant pretense it was to be bored in good society. "One's ready to kick the bucket here. A pretty idea of yours it was to want to come!"

Fauchery questioned him abruptly.

"Now tell me, does the countess admit someone to her embraces?"

"Oh dear, no, no! My dear fellow!" he stammered, manifestly taken aback and quite forgetting his pose. "Where d'you think we are?"

After which he was conscious of a want of up-to-dateness in this outburst of indignation and, throwing himself back on a great sofa, he added:

"Gad! I say no! But I don't know much about it. There's a little chap out there, Foucarmont they call him, who's to be met with everywhere and at every turn. One's seen faster men than that, though, you bet. However, it doesn't concern me, and indeed, all I know is that if the countess indulges in high jinks she's still pretty sly about it, for the thing never gets about—nobody talks."

Then although Fauchery did not take the trouble to question him, he told him all he knew about the Muffats. Amid the conversation of the ladies, which still continued in front of the hearth, they both spoke in subdued tones, and, seeing them there with their white cravats and gloves, one might have supposed them to be discussing in chosen phraseology some really serious topic. Old Mme Muffat then, whom La Faloise had been well acquainted with, was an insufferable old lady, always hand in glove with the priests. She had the grand manner, besides, and an authoritative way of comporting herself, which bent everybody to her will. As to Muffat, he was an old man's child; his father, a general, had been created count by Napoleon I, and naturally he had found himself in favor after the second of December. He hadn't much gaiety of manner either, but he passed for a very honest man of straightforward intentions and understanding. Add to these a code of old aristocratic ideas and such a lofty conception of his duties at court, of his dignities and of his virtues, that he behaved like a god on wheels. It was the Mamma Muffat who had given him this precious education with its daily visits to the confessional, its complete absence of escapades and of all that is meant by youth. He was a practicing Christian and had attacks of faith of such fiery violence that they might be likened to accesses of burning fever. Finally, in order to add a last touch to the picture, La Faloise whispered something in his cousin's ear.

"You don't say so!" said the latter.

"On my word of honor, they swore it was true! He was still like that when he married."

Fauchery chuckled as he looked at the count, whose face, with its fringe of whiskers and absence of mustaches, seemed to have grown squarer and harder now that he was busy quoting figures to the writhing, struggling Steiner.

"My word, he's got a phiz for it!" murmured Fauchery. "A pretty present he made his wife! Poor little thing, how he must have bored her! She knows nothing about anything, I'll wager!"

Just then the Countess Sabine was saying something to him. But he did not hear her, so amusing and extraordinary did he esteem the Muffats' case. She repeated the question.

"Monsieur Fauchery, have you not published a sketch of Monsieur de Bismarck? You spoke with him once?"

He got up briskly and approached the circle of ladies, endeavoring to collect himself and soon with perfect ease of manner finding an answer:

"Dear me, madame, I assure you I wrote that 'portrait' with the help of biographies which had been published in Germany. I have never seen Monsieur de Bismarck."

He remained beside the countess and, while talking with her, continued his meditations. She did not look her age; one would have set her down as being twenty-eight at most, for her eyes, above all, which were filled with the dark blue shadow of her long eyelashes, retained the glowing light of youth. Bred in a divided family, so that she used to spend one month with the Marquis de Chouard, another with the marquise, she had been married very young, urged on, doubtless, by her father, whom she embarrassed after her mother's death. A terrible man was the marquis, a man about whom strange tales were beginning to be told, and that despite his lofty piety! Fauchery asked if he should have the honor of meeting him. Certainly her father was coming, but only very late; he had so much work on hand! The journalist thought he knew where the old gentleman passed his evenings and looked grave. But a mole, which he noticed close to her mouth on the countess's left cheek, surprised him. Nana had precisely the same mole. It was curious. Tiny hairs curled up on it, only they were golden in Nana's case, black as jet in this. Ah well, never mind! This woman enjoyed nobody's embraces.

"I have always felt a wish to know Queen Augusta," she said. "They say she is so good, so devout. Do you think she will accompany the king?"

"It is not thought that she will, madame," he replied.

She had no lovers: the thing was only too apparent. One had only to look at her there by the side of that daughter of hers, sitting so insignificant and constrained on her footstool. That sepulchral drawing room of hers, which exhaled odors suggestive of being in a church, spoke as plainly as words could of the iron hand, the austere mode of existence, that weighed her down. There was nothing suggestive of her own personality in that ancient abode, black with the damps of years. It was Muffat who made himself felt there, who dominated his surroundings with his devotional training, his penances and his fasts. But the sight of the little old gentleman with the black teeth and subtle smile whom he suddenly discovered in his armchair behind the group of ladies afforded him a yet more decisive argument. He knew the personage. It was Theophile Venot, a retired lawyer who had made a specialty of church cases. He had left off practice with a handsome fortune and was now leading a sufficiently mysterious existence, for he was received everywhere, treated with great deference and even somewhat feared, as though he had been the representative of a mighty force, an occult power, which was felt to be at his back. Nevertheless, his behavior was very humble. He was churchwarden at the Madeleine Church and had simply accepted the post of deputy mayor at the town house of the Ninth Arrondissement in order, as he said, to have something to do in his leisure time. Deuce take it, the countess was well guarded; there was nothing to be done in that quarter.

"You're right, it's enough to make one kick the bucket here," said Fauchery to his cousin when he had made good his escape from the circle of ladies. "We'll hook it!"

But Steiner, deserted at last by the Count Muffat and the deputy, came up in a fury. Drops of perspiration stood on his forehead, and he grumbled huskily:

"Gad! Let 'em tell me nothing, if nothing they want to tell me. I shall find people who will talk."

Then he pushed the journalist into a corner and, altering his tone, said in accents of victory:

"It's tomorrow, eh? I'm of the party, my bully!"

"Indeed!" muttered Fauchery with some astonishment.

"You didn't know about it. Oh, I had lots of bother to find her at home. Besides, Mignon never would leave me alone."

"But they're to be there, are the Mignons."

"Yes, she told me so. In fact, she did receive my visit, and she invited me. Midnight punctually, after the play."

The banker was beaming. He winked and added with a peculiar emphasis on the words:

"You've worked it, eh?"

"Eh, what?" said Fauchery, pretending not to understand him. "She wanted to thank me for my article, so she came and called on me."

"Yes, yes. You fellows are fortunate. You get rewarded. By the by, who pays the piper tomorrow?"

The journalist made a slight outward movement with his arms, as though he would intimate that no one had ever been able to find out. But Vandeuvres called to Steiner, who knew M. de Bismarck. Mme du Joncquoy had almost convinced herself of the truth of her suppositions; she concluded with these words:

"He gave me an unpleasant impression. I think his face is evil. But I am quite willing to believe that he has a deal of wit. It would account for his successes."

"Without doubt," said the banker with a faint smile. He was a Jew from Frankfort.

Meanwhile La Faloise at last made bold to question his cousin. He followed him up and got inside his guard:

"There's supper at a woman's tomorrow evening? With which of them, eh? With which of them?"

Fauchery motioned to him that they were overheard and must respect the conventions here. The door had just been opened anew, and an old lady had come in, followed by a young man in whom the journalist recognized the truant schoolboy, perpetrator of the famous and as yet unforgotten "tres chic" of the Blonde Venus first night. This lady's arrival caused a stir among the company. The Countess Sabine had risen briskly from her seat in order to go and greet her, and she had taken both her hands in hers and addressed her as her "dear Madame Hugon." Seeing that his cousin viewed this little episode with some curiosity, La Faloise sought to arouse his interest and in a few brief phrases explained the position. Mme Hugon, widow of a notary, lived in retirement at Les Fondettes, an old estate of her family's in the neighborhood of Orleans, but she also kept up a small establishment in Paris in a house belonging to her in the Rue de Richelieu and was now passing some weeks there in order to settle her youngest son, who was reading the law and in his "first year." In old times she had been a dear friend of the Marquise de Chouard and had assisted at the birth of the countess, who, prior to her marriage, used to stay at her house for months at a time and even now was quite familiarly treated by her.

"I have brought Georges to see you," said Mme Hugon to Sabine. "He's grown, I trust."

The young man with his clear eyes and the fair curls which suggested a girl dressed up as a boy bowed easily to the countess and reminded her of a bout of battledore and shuttlecock they had had together two years ago at Les Fondettes.

"Philippe is not in Paris?" asked Count Muffat.

"Dear me, no!" replied the old lady. "He is always in garrison at Bourges." She had seated herself and began talking with considerable pride of her eldest son, a great big fellow who, after enlisting in a fit of waywardness, had of late very rapidly attained the rank of lieutenant. All the ladies behaved to her with respectful sympathy, and conversation was resumed in a tone at once more amiable and more refined. Fauchery, at sight of that respectable Mme Hugon, that motherly face lit up with such a kindly smile beneath its broad tresses of white hair, thought how foolish he had been to suspect the Countess Sabine even for an instant.

Nevertheless, the big chair with the red silk upholsteries in which the countess sat had attracted his attention. Its style struck him as crude, not to say fantastically suggestive, in that dim old drawing room. Certainly it was not the count who had inveigled thither that nest of voluptuous idleness. One might have described it as an experiment, marking the birth of an appetite and of an enjoyment. Then he forgot where he was, fell into brown study and in thought even harked back to that vague confidential announcement imparted to him one evening in the dining room of a restaurant. Impelled by a sort of sensuous curiosity, he had always wanted an introduction into the Muffats' circle, and now that his friend was in Mexico through all eternity, who could tell what might happen? "We shall see," he thought. It was a folly, doubtless, but the idea kept tormenting him; he felt himself drawn on and his animal nature aroused. The big chair had a rumpled look—its nether cushions had been tumbled, a fact which now amused him.

"Well, shall we be off?" asked La Faloise, mentally vowing that once outside he would find out the name of the woman with whom people were going to sup.

"All in good time," replied Fauchery.

But he was no longer in any hurry and excused himself on the score of the invitation he had been commissioned to give and had as yet not found a convenient opportunity to mention. The ladies were chatting about an assumption of the veil, a very touching ceremony by which the whole of Parisian society had for the last three days been greatly moved. It was the eldest daughter of the Baronne de Fougeray, who, under stress of an irresistible vocation, had just entered the Carmelite Convent. Mme Chantereau, a distant cousin of the Fougerays, told how the baroness had been obliged to take to her bed the day after the ceremony, so overdone was she with weeping.

"I had a very good place," declared Leonide. "I found it interesting."

Nevertheless, Mme Hugon pitied the poor mother. How sad to lose a daughter in such a way!

"I am accused of being overreligious," she said in her quiet, frank manner, "but that does not prevent me thinking the children very cruel who obstinately commit such suicide."

"Yes, it's a terrible thing," murmured the countess, shivering a little, as became a chilly person, and huddling herself anew in the depths of her big chair in front of the fire.

Then the ladies fell into a discussion. But their voices were discreetly attuned, while light trills of laughter now and again interrupted the gravity of their talk. The two lamps on the chimney piece, which had shades of rose-colored lace, cast a feeble light over them while on scattered pieces of furniture there burned but three other lamps, so that the great drawing room remained in soft shadow.

Steiner was getting bored. He was describing to Fauchery an escapade of that little Mme de Chezelles, whom he simply referred to as Leonide. "A blackguard woman," he said, lowering his voice behind the ladies' armchairs. Fauchery looked at her as she sat quaintly perched, in her voluminous ball dress of pale blue satin, on the corner of her armchair. She looked as slight and impudent as a boy, and he ended by feeling astonished at seeing her there. People comported themselves better at Caroline Hequet's, whose mother had arranged her house on serious principles. Here was a perfect subject for an article. What a strange world was this world of Paris! The most rigid circles found themselves invaded. Evidently that silent Theophile Venot, who contented himself by smiling and showing his ugly teeth, must have been a legacy from the late countess. So, too, must have been such ladies of mature age as Mme Chantereau and Mme du Joncquoy, besides four or five old gentlemen who sat motionless in corners. The Count Muffat attracted to the house a series of functionaries, distinguished by the immaculate personal appearance which was at that time required of the men at the Tuileries. Among others there was the chief clerk, who still sat solitary in the middle of the room with his closely shorn cheeks, his vacant glance and his coat so tight of fit that he could scarce venture to move. Almost all the young men and certain individuals with distinguished, aristocratic manners were the Marquis de Chouard's contribution to the circle, he having kept touch with the Legitimist party after making his peace with the empire on his entrance into the Council of State. There remained Leonide de Chezelles and Steiner, an ugly little knot against which Mme Hugon's elderly and amiable serenity stood out in strange contrast. And Fauchery, having sketched out his article, named this last group "Countess Sabine's little clique."

"On another occasion," continued Steiner in still lower tones, "Leonide got her tenor down to Montauban. She was living in the Chateau de Beaurecueil, two leagues farther off, and she used to come in daily in a carriage and pair in order to visit him at the Lion d'Or, where he had put up. The carriage used to wait at the door, and Leonide would stay for hours in the house, while a crowd gathered round and looked at the horses."

There was a pause in the talk, and some solemn moments passed silently by in the lofty room. Two young men were whispering, but they ceased in their turn, and the hushed step of Count Muffat was alone audible as he crossed the floor. The lamps seemed to have paled; the fire was going out; a stern shadow fell athwart the old friends of the house where they sat in the chairs they had occupied there for forty years back. It was as though in a momentary pause of conversation the invited guests had become suddenly aware that the count's mother, in all her glacial stateliness, had returned among them.

But the Countess Sabine had once more resumed:

"Well, at last the news of it got about. The young man was likely to die, and that would explain the poor child's adoption of the religious life. Besides, they say that Monsieur de Fougeray would never have given his consent to the marriage."

"They say heaps of other things too," cried Leonide giddily.

She fell a-laughing; she refused to talk. Sabine was won over by this gaiety and put her handkerchief up to her lips. And in the vast and solemn room their laughter sounded a note which struck Fauchery strangely, the note of delicate glass breaking. Assuredly here was the first beginning of the "little rift." Everyone began talking again. Mme du Joncquoy demurred; Mme Chantereau knew for certain that a marriage had been projected but that matters had gone no further; the men even ventured to give their opinions. For some minutes the conversation was a babel of opinions, in which the divers elements of the circle, whether Bonapartist or Legitimist or merely worldly and skeptical, appeared to jostle one another simultaneously. Estelle had rung to order wood to be put on the fire; the footman turned up the lamps; the room seemed to wake from sleep. Fauchery began smiling, as though once more at his ease.

"Egad, they become the brides of God when they couldn't be their cousin's," said Vandeuvres between his teeth.

The subject bored him, and he had rejoined Fauchery.

"My dear fellow, have you ever seen a woman who was really loved become a nun?"

He did not wait for an answer, for he had had enough of the topic, and in a hushed voice:

"Tell me," he said, "how many of us will there be tomorrow? There'll be the Mignons, Steiner, yourself, Blanche and I; who else?"

"Caroline, I believe, and Simonne and Gaga without doubt. One never knows exactly, does one? On such occasions one expects the party will number twenty, and you're really thirty."

Vandeuvres, who was looking at the ladies, passed abruptly to another subject:

"She must have been very nice-looking, that Du Joncquoy woman, some fifteen years ago. Poor Estelle has grown lankier than ever. What a nice lath to put into a bed!"

But interrupting himself, he returned to the subject of tomorrow's supper.

"What's so tiresome of those shows is that it's always the same set of women. One wants a novelty. Do try and invent a new girl. By Jove, happy thought! I'll go and beseech that stout man to bring the woman he was trotting about the other evening at the Varietes."

He referred to the chief clerk, sound asleep in the middle of the drawing room. Fauchery, afar off, amused himself by following this delicate negotiation. Vandeuvres had sat himself down by the stout man, who still looked very sedate. For some moments they both appeared to be discussing with much propriety the question before the house, which was, "How can one discover the exact state of feeling that urges a young girl to enter into the religious life?" Then the count returned with the remark:

"It's impossible. He swears she's straight. She'd refuse, and yet I would have wagered that I once saw her at Laure's."

"Eh, what? You go to Laure's?" murmured Fauchery with a chuckle. "You venture your reputation in places like that? I was under the impression that it was only we poor devils of outsiders who—"

"Ah, dear boy, one ought to see every side of life."

Then they sneered and with sparkling eyes they compared notes about the table d'hote in the Rue des Martyrs, where big Laure Piedefer ran a dinner at three francs a head for little women in difficulties. A nice hole, where all the little women used to kiss Laure on the lips! And as the Countess Sabine, who had overheard a stray word or two, turned toward them, they started back, rubbing shoulders in excited merriment. They had not noticed that Georges Hugon was close by and that he was listening to them, blushing so hotly the while that a rosy flush had spread from his ears to his girlish throat. The infant was full of shame and of ecstasy. From the moment his mother had turned him loose in the room he had been hovering in the wake of Mme de Chezelles, the only woman present who struck him as being the thing. But after all is said and done, Nana licked her to fits!

"Yesterday evening," Mme Hugon was saying, "Georges took me to the play. Yes, we went to the Varietes, where I certainly had not set foot for the last ten years. That child adores music. As to me, I wasn't in the least amused, but he was so happy! They put extraordinary pieces on the stage nowadays. Besides, music delights me very little, I confess."

"What! You don't love music, madame?" cried Mme du Joncquoy, lifting her eyes to heaven. "Is it possible there should be people who don't love music?"

The exclamation of surprise was general. No one had dropped a single word concerning the performance at the Varietes, at which the good Mme Hugon had not understood any of the allusions. The ladies knew the piece but said nothing about it, and with that they plunged into the realm of sentiment and began discussing the masters in a tone of refined and ecstatical admiration. Mme du Joncquoy was not fond of any of them save Weber, while Mme Chantereau stood up for the Italians. The ladies' voices had turned soft and languishing, and in front of the hearth one might have fancied one's self listening in meditative, religious retirement to the faint, discreet music of a little chapel.

"Now let's see," murmured Vandeuvres, bringing Fauchery back into the middle of the drawing room, "notwithstanding it all, we must invent a woman for tomorrow. Shall we ask Steiner about it?"

"Oh, when Steiner's got hold of a woman," said the journalist, "it's because Paris has done with her."

Vandeuvres, however, was searching about on every side.

"Wait a bit," he continued, "the other day I met Foucarmont with a charming blonde. I'll go and tell him to bring her."

And he called to Foucarmont. They exchanged a few words rapidly. There must have been some sort of complication, for both of them, moving carefully forward and stepping over the dresses of the ladies, went off in quest of another young man with whom they continued the discussion in the embrasure of a window. Fauchery was left to himself and had just decided to proceed to the hearth, where Mme du Joncquoy was announcing that she never heard Weber played without at the same time seeing lakes, forests and sunrises over landscapes steeped in dew, when a hand touched his shoulder and a voice behind him remarked:

"It's not civil of you."

"What d'you mean?" he asked, turning round and recognizing La Faloise.

"Why, about that supper tomorrow. You might easily have got me invited."

Fauchery was at length about to state his reasons when Vandeuvres came back to tell him:

"It appears it isn't a girl of Foucarmont's. It's that man's flame out there. She won't be able to come. What a piece of bad luck! But all the same I've pressed Foucarmont into the service, and he's going to try to get Louise from the Palais-Royal."

"Is it not true, Monsieur de Vandeuvres," asked Mme Chantereau, raising her voice, "that Wagner's music was hissed last Sunday?"

"Oh, frightfully, madame," he made answer, coming forward with his usual exquisite politeness.

Then, as they did not detain him, he moved off and continued whispering in the journalist's ear:

"I'm going to press some more of them. These young fellows must know some little ladies."

With that he was observed to accost men and to engage them in conversation in his usual amiable and smiling way in every corner of the drawing room. He mixed with the various groups, said something confidently to everyone and walked away again with a sly wink and a secret signal or two. It looked as though he were giving out a watchword in that easy way of his. The news went round; the place of meeting was announced, while the ladies' sentimental dissertations on music served to conceal the small, feverish rumor of these recruiting operations.

"No, do not speak of your Germans," Mme Chantereau was saying. "Song is gaiety; song is light. Have you heard Patti in the Barber of Seville?"

"She was delicious!" murmured Leonide, who strummed none but operatic airs on her piano.

Meanwhile the Countess Sabine had rung. When on Tuesdays the number of visitors was small, tea was handed round the drawing room itself. While directing a footman to clear a round table the countess followed the Count de Vandeuvres with her eyes. She still smiled that vague smile which slightly disclosed her white teeth, and as the count passed she questioned him.

"What ARE you plotting, Monsieur de Vandeuvres?"

"What am I plotting, madame?" he answered quietly. "Nothing at all."

"Really! I saw you so busy. Pray, wait, you shall make yourself useful!"

She placed an album in his hands and asked him to put it on the piano. But he found means to inform Fauchery in a low whisper that they would have Tatan Nene, the most finely developed girl that winter, and Maria Blond, the same who had just made her first appearance at the Folies-Dramatiques. Meanwhile La Faloise stopped him at every step in hopes of receiving an invitation. He ended by offering himself, and Vandeuvres engaged him in the plot at once; only he made him promise to bring Clarisse with him, and when La Faloise pretended to scruple about certain points he quieted him by the remark:

"Since I invite you that's enough!"

Nevertheless, La Faloise would have much liked to know the name of the hostess. But the countess had recalled Vandeuvres and was questioning him as to the manner in which the English made tea. He often betook himself to England, where his horses ran. Then as though he had been inwardly following up quite a laborious train of thought during his remarks, he broke in with the question:

"And the marquis, by the by? Are we not to see him?"

"Oh, certainly you will! My father made me a formal promise that he would come," replied the countess. "But I'm beginning to be anxious. His duties will have kept him."

Vandeuvres smiled a discreet smile. He, too, seemed to have his doubts as to the exact nature of the Marquis de Chouard's duties. Indeed, he had been thinking of a pretty woman whom the marquis occasionally took into the country with him. Perhaps they could get her too.

In the meantime Fauchery decided that the moment had come in which to risk giving Count Muff his invitation. The evening, in fact, was drawing to a close.

"Are you serious?" asked Vandeuvres, who thought a joke was intended.

"Extremely serious. If I don't execute my commission she'll tear my eyes out. It's a case of landing her fish, you know."

"Well then, I'll help you, dear boy."

Eleven o'clock struck. Assisted by her daughter, the countess was pouring out the tea, and as hardly any guests save intimate friends had come, the cups and the platefuls of little cakes were being circulated without ceremony. Even the ladies did not leave their armchairs in front of the fire and sat sipping their tea and nibbling cakes which they held between their finger tips. From music the talk had declined to purveyors. Boissier was the only person for sweetmeats and Catherine for ices. Mme Chantereau, however, was all for Latinville. Speech grew more and more indolent, and a sense of lassitude was lulling the room to sleep. Steiner had once more set himself secretly to undermine the deputy, whom he held in a state of blockade in the corner of a settee. M. Venot, whose teeth must have been ruined by sweet things, was eating little dry cakes, one after the other, with a small nibbling sound suggestive of a mouse, while the chief clerk, his nose in a teacup, seemed never to be going to finish its contents. As to the countess, she went in a leisurely way from one guest to another, never pressing them, indeed, only pausing a second or two before the gentlemen whom she viewed with an air of dumb interrogation before she smiled and passed on. The great fire had flushed all her face, and she looked as if she were the sister of her daughter, who appeared so withered and ungainly at her side. When she drew near Fauchery, who was chatting with her husband and Vandeuvres, she noticed that they grew suddenly silent; accordingly she did not stop but handed the cup of tea she was offering to Georges Hugon beyond them.

"It's a lady who desires your company at supper," the journalist gaily continued, addressing Count Muffat.

The last-named, whose face had worn its gray look all the evening, seemed very much surprised. What lady was it?

"Oh, Nana!" said Vandeuvres, by way of forcing the invitation.

The count became more grave than before. His eyelids trembled just perceptibly, while a look of discomfort, such as headache produces, hovered for a moment athwart his forehead.

"But I'm not acquainted with that lady," he murmured.

"Come, come, you went to her house," remarked Vandeuvres.

"What d'you say? I went to her house? Oh yes, the other day, in behalf of the Benevolent Organization. I had forgotten about it. But, no matter, I am not acquainted with her, and I cannot accept."

He had adopted an icy expression in order to make them understand that this jest did not appear to him to be in good taste. A man of his position did not sit down at tables of such women as that. Vandeuvres protested: it was to be a supper party of dramatic and artistic people, and talent excused everything. But without listening further to the arguments urged by Fauchery, who spoke of a dinner where the Prince of Scots, the son of a queen, had sat down beside an ex-music-hall singer, the count only emphasized his refusal. In so doing, he allowed himself, despite his great politeness, to be guilty of an irritated gesture.

Georges and La Faloise, standing in front of each other drinking their tea, had overheard the two or three phrases exchanged in their immediate neighborhood.

"Jove, it's at Nana's then," murmured La Faloise. "I might have expected as much!"

Georges said nothing, but he was all aflame. His fair hair was in disorder; his blue eyes shone like tapers, so fiercely had the vice, which for some days past had surrounded him, inflamed and stirred his blood. At last he was going to plunge into all that he had dreamed of!

"I don't know the address," La Faloise resumed.

"She lives on a third floor in the Boulevard Haussmann, between the Rue de l'Arcade and the Rue Pesquier," said Georges all in a breath.

And when the other looked at him in much astonishment, he added, turning very red and fit to sink into the ground with embarrassment and conceit:

"I'm of the party. She invited me this morning."

But there was a great stir in the drawing room, and Vandeuvres and Fauchery could not continue pressing the count. The Marquis de Chouard had just come in, and everyone was anxious to greet him. He had moved painfully forward, his legs failing under him, and he now stood in the middle of the room with pallid face and eyes blinking, as though he had just come out of some dark alley and were blinded by the brightness of the lamps.

"I scarcely hoped to see you tonight, Father," said the countess. "I should have been anxious till the morning."

He looked at her without answering, as a man might who fails to understand. His nose, which loomed immense on his shorn face, looked like a swollen pimple, while his lower lip hung down. Seeing him such a wreck, Mme Hugon, full of kind compassion, said pitying things to him.

"You work too hard. You ought to rest yourself. At our age we ought to leave work to the young people."

"Work! Ah yes, to be sure, work!" he stammered at last. "Always plenty of work."

He began to pull himself together, straightening up his bent figure and passing his hand, as was his wont, over his scant gray hair, of which a few locks strayed behind his ears.

"At what are you working as late as this?" asked Mme du Joncquoy. "I thought you were at the financial minister's reception?"

But the countess intervened with:

"My father had to study the question of a projected law."

"Yes, a projected law," he said; "exactly so, a projected law. I shut myself up for that reason. It refers to work in factories, and I was anxious for a proper observance of the Lord's day of rest. It is really shameful that the government is unwilling to act with vigor in the matter. Churches are growing empty; we are running headlong to ruin."

Vandeuvres had exchanged glances with Fauchery. They both happened to be behind the marquis, and they were scanning him suspiciously. When Vandeuvres found an opportunity to take him aside and to speak to him about the good-looking creature he was in the habit of taking down into the country, the old man affected extreme surprise. Perhaps someone had seen him with the Baroness Decker, at whose house at Viroflay he sometimes spent a day or so. Vandeuvres's sole vengeance was an abrupt question:

"Tell me, where have you been straying to? Your elbow is covered with cobwebs and plaster."

"My elbow," he muttered, slightly disturbed. "Yes indeed, it's true. A speck or two, I must have come in for them on my way down from my office."

Several people were taking their departure. It was close on midnight. Two footmen were noiselessly removing the empty cups and the plates with cakes. In front of the hearth the ladies had re-formed and, at the same time, narrowed their circle and were chatting more carelessly than before in the languid atmosphere peculiar to the close of a party. The very room was going to sleep, and slowly creeping shadows were cast by its walls. It was then Fauchery spoke of departure. Yet he once more forgot his intention at sight of the Countess Sabine. She was resting from her cares as hostess, and as she sat in her wonted seat, silent, her eyes fixed on a log which was turning into embers, her face appeared so white and so impassable that doubt again possessed him. In the glow of the fire the small black hairs on the mole at the corner of her lip became white. It was Nana's very mole, down to the color of the hair. He could not refrain from whispering something about it in Vandeuvres's ear. Gad, it was true; the other had never noticed it before. And both men continued this comparison of Nana and the countess. They discovered a vague resemblance about the chin and the mouth, but the eyes were not at all alike. Then, too, Nana had a good-natured expression, while with the countess it was hard to decide—she might have been a cat, sleeping with claws withdrawn and paws stirred by a scarce-perceptible nervous quiver.

"All the same, one could have her," declared Fauchery.

Vandeuvres stripped her at a glance.

"Yes, one could, all the same," he said. "But I think nothing of the thighs, you know. Will you bet she has no thighs?"

He stopped, for Fauchery touched him briskly on the arm and showed him Estelle, sitting close to them on her footstool. They had raised their voices without noticing her, and she must have overheard them. Nevertheless, she continued sitting there stiff and motionless, not a hair having lifted on her thin neck, which was that of a girl who has shot up all too quickly. Thereupon they retired three or four paces, and Vandeuvres vowed that the countess was a very honest woman. Just then voices were raised in front of the hearth. Mme du Joncquoy was saying:

"I was willing to grant you that Monsieur de Bismarck was perhaps a witty man. Only, if you go as far as to talk of genius—"

The ladies had come round again to their earliest topic of conversation.

"What the deuce! Still Monsieur de Bismarck!" muttered Fauchery. "This time I make my escape for good and all."

"Wait a bit," said Vandeuvres, "we must have a definite no from the count."

The Count Muffat was talking to his father-in-law and a certain serious-looking gentleman. Vandeuvres drew him away and renewed the invitation, backing it up with the information that he was to be at the supper himself. A man might go anywhere; no one could think of suspecting evil where at most there could only be curiosity. The count listened to these arguments with downcast eyes and expressionless face. Vandeuvres felt him to be hesitating when the Marquis de Chouard approached with a look of interrogation. And when the latter was informed of the question in hand and Fauchery had invited him in his turn, he looked at his son-in-law furtively. There ensued an embarrassed silence, but both men encouraged one another and would doubtless have ended by accepting had not Count Muffat perceived M. Venot's gaze fixed upon him. The little old man was no longer smiling; his face was cadaverous, his eyes bright and keen as steel.

"No," replied the count directly, in so decisive a tone that further insistence became impossible.

Then the marquis refused with even greater severity of expression. He talked morality. The aristocratic classes ought to set a good example. Fauchery smiled and shook hands with Vandeuvres. He did not wait for him and took his departure immediately, for he was due at his newspaper office.

"At Nana's at midnight, eh?"

La Faloise retired too. Steiner had made his bow to the countess. Other men followed them, and the same phrase went round—"At midnight, at Nana's"—as they went to get their overcoats in the anteroom. Georges, who could not leave without his mother, had stationed himself at the door, where he gave the exact address. "Third floor, door on your left." Yet before going out Fauchery gave a final glance. Vandeuvres had again resumed his position among the ladies and was laughing with Leonide de Chezelles. Count Muffat and the Marquis de Chouard were joining in the conversation, while the good Mme Hugon was falling asleep open-eyed. Lost among the petticoats, M. Venot was his own small self again and smiled as of old. Twelve struck slowly in the great solemn room.

"What—what do you mean?" Mme du Joncquoy resumed. "You imagine that Monsieur de Bismarck will make war on us and beat us! Oh, that's unbearable!"

Indeed, they were laughing round Mme Chantereau, who had just repeated an assertion she had heard made in Alsace, where her husband owned a foundry.

"We have the emperor, fortunately," said Count Muffat in his grave, official way.

It was the last phrase Fauchery was able to catch. He closed the door after casting one more glance in the direction of the Countess Sabine. She was talking sedately with the chief clerk and seemed to be interested in that stout individual's conversation. Assuredly he must have been deceiving himself. There was no "little rift" there at all. It was a pity.

"You're not coming down then?" La Faloise shouted up to him from the entrance hall.

And out on the pavement, as they separated, they once more repeated:

"Tomorrow, at Nana's."

CHAPTER IV

Since morning Zoe had delivered up the flat to a managing man who had come from Brebant's with a staff of helpers and waiters. Brebant was to supply everything, from the supper, the plates and dishes, the glass, the linen, the flowers, down to the seats and footstools. Nana could not have mustered a dozen napkins out of all her cupboards, and not having had time to get a proper outfit after her new start in life and scorning to go to the restaurant, she had decided to make the restaurant come to her. It struck her as being more the thing. She wanted to celebrate her great success as an actress with a supper which should set people talking. As her dining room was too small, the manager had arranged the table in the drawing room, a table with twenty-five covers, placed somewhat close together.

"Is everything ready?" asked Nana when she returned at midnight.

"Oh! I don't know," replied Zoe roughly, looking beside herself with worry. "The Lord be thanked, I don't bother about anything. They're making a fearful mess in the kitchen and all over the flat! I've had to fight my battles too. The other two came again. My eye! I did just chuck 'em out!"

She referred, of course, to her employer's old admirers, the tradesman and the Walachian, to whom Nana, sure of her future and longing to shed her skin, as she phrased it, had decided to give the go-by.

"There are a couple of leeches for you!" she muttered.

"If they come back threaten to go to the police."

Then she called Daguenet and Georges, who had remained behind in the anteroom, where they were hanging up their overcoats. They had both met at the stage door in the Passage des Panoramas, and she had brought them home with her in a cab. As there was nobody there yet, she shouted to them to come into the dressing room while Zoe was touching up her toilet. Hurriedly and without changing her dress she had her hair done up and stuck white roses in her chignon and at her bosom. The little room was littered with the drawing-room furniture, which the workmen had been compelled to roll in there, and it was full of a motley assemblage of round tables, sofas and armchairs, with their legs in air for the most part. Nana was quite ready when her dress caught on a castor and tore upward. At this she swore furiously; such things only happened to her! Ragingly she took off her dress, a very simple affair of white foulard, of so thin and supple a texture that it clung about her like a long shift. But she put it on again directly, for she could not find another to her taste, and with tears in her eyes declared that she was dressed like a ragpicker. Daguenet and Georges had to patch up the rent with pins, while Zoe once more arranged her hair. All three hurried round her, especially the boy, who knelt on the floor with his hands among her skirts. And at last she calmed down again when Daguenet assured her it could not be later than a quarter past twelve, seeing that by dint of scamping her words and skipping her lines she had effectually shortened the third act of the Blonde Venus.

"The play's still far too good for that crowd of idiots," she said. "Did you see? There were thousands there tonight. Zoe, my girl, you will wait in here. Don't go to bed, I shall want you. By gum, it is time they came. Here's company!"

She ran off while Georges stayed where he was with the skirts of his coat brushing the floor. He blushed, seeing Daguenet looking at him. Notwithstanding which, they had conceived a tender regard the one for the other. They rearranged the bows of their cravats in front of the big dressing glass and gave each other a mutual dose of the clothesbrush, for they were all white from their close contact with Nana.

"One would think it was sugar," murmured Georges, giggling like a greedy little child.

A footman hired for the evening was ushering the guests into the small drawing room, a narrow slip of a place in which only four armchairs had been left in order the better to pack in the company. From the large drawing room beyond came a sound as of the moving of plates and silver, while a clear and brilliant ray of light shone from under the door. At her entrance Nana found Clarisse Besnus, whom La Faloise had brought, already installed in one of the armchairs.

"Dear me, you're the first of 'em!" said Nana, who, now that she was successful, treated her familiarly.

"Oh, it's his doing," replied Clarisse. "He's always afraid of not getting anywhere in time. If I'd taken him at his word I shouldn't have waited to take off my paint and my wig."

The young man, who now saw Nana for the first time, bowed, paid her a compliment and spoke of his cousin, hiding his agitation behind an exaggeration of politeness. But Nana, neither listening to him nor recognizing his face, shook hands with him and then went briskly toward Rose Mignon, with whom she at once assumed a most distinguished manner.

"Ah, how nice of you, my dear madame! I was so anxious to have you here!"

"It's I who am charmed, I assure you," said Rose with equal amiability.

"Pray, sit down. Do you require anything?"

"Thank you, no! Ah yes, I've left my fan in my pelisse, Steiner; just look in the right-hand pocket."

Steiner and Mignon had come in behind Rose. The banker turned back and reappeared with the fan while Mignon embraced Nana fraternally and forced Rose to do so also. Did they not all belong to the same family in the theatrical world? Then he winked as though to encourage Steiner, but the latter was disconcerted by Rose's clear gaze and contented himself by kissing Nana's hand.

Just then the Count de Vandeuvres made his appearance with Blanche de Sivry. There was an interchange of profound bows, and Nana with the utmost ceremony conducted Blanche to an armchair. Meanwhile Vandeuvres told them laughingly that Fauchery was engaged in a dispute at the foot of the stairs because the porter had refused to allow Lucy Stewart's carriage to come in at the gate. They could hear Lucy telling the porter he was a dirty blackguard in the anteroom. But when the footman had opened the door she came forward with her laughing grace of manner, announced her name herself, took both Nana's hands in hers and told her that she had liked her from the very first and considered her talent splendid. Nana, puffed up by her novel role of hostess, thanked her and was veritably confused. Nevertheless, from the moment of Fauchery's arrival she appeared preoccupied, and directly she could get near him she asked him in a low voice:

"Will he come?"

"No, he did not want to," was the journalist's abrupt reply, for he was taken by surprise, though he had got ready some sort of tale to explain Count Muffat's refusal.

Seeing the young woman's sudden pallor, he became conscious of his folly and tried to retract his words.

"He was unable to; he is taking the countess to the ball at the Ministry of the Interior tonight."

"All right," murmured Nana, who suspected him of ill will, "you'll pay me out for that, my pippin."

She turned on her heel, and so did he; they were angry. Just then Mignon was pushing Steiner up against Nana, and when Fauchery had left her he said to her in a low voice and with the good-natured cynicism of a comrade in arms who wishes his friends to be happy:

"He's dying of it, you know, only he's afraid of my wife. Won't you protect him?"

Nana did not appear to understand. She smiled and looked at Rose, the husband and the banker and finally said to the latter:

"Monsieur Steiner, you will sit next to me."

With that there came from the anteroom a sound of laughter and whispering and a burst of merry, chattering voices, which sounded as if a runaway convent were on the premises. And Labordette appeared, towing five women in his rear, his boarding school, as Lucy Stewart cruelly phrased it. There was Gaga, majestic in a blue velvet dress which was too tight for her, and Caroline Hequet, clad as usual in ribbed black silk, trimmed with Chantilly lace. Lea de Horn came next, terribly dressed up, as her wont was, and after her the big Tatan Nene, a good-humored fair girl with the bosom of a wet nurse, at which people laughed, and finally little Maria Blond, a young damsel of fifteen, as thin and vicious as a street child, yet on the high road to success, owing to her recent first appearance at the Folies. Labordette had brought the whole collection in a single fly, and they were still laughing at the way they had been squeezed with Maria Blond on her knees. But on entering the room they pursed up their lips, and all grew very conventional as they shook hands and exchanged salutations. Gaga even affected the infantile and lisped through excess of genteel deportment. Tatan Nene alone transgressed. They had been telling her as they came along that six absolutely naked Negroes would serve up Nana's supper, and she now grew anxious about them and asked to see them. Labordette called her a goose and besought her to be silent.

"And Bordenave?" asked Fauchery.

"Oh, you may imagine how miserable I am," cried Nana; "he won't be able to join us."

"Yes," said Rose Mignon, "his foot caught in a trap door, and he's got a fearful sprain. If only you could hear him swearing, with his leg tied up and laid out on a chair!"

Thereupon everybody mourned over Bordenave's absence. No one ever gave a good supper without Bordenave. Ah well, they would try and do without him, and they were already talking about other matters when a burly voice was heard:

"What, eh, what? Is that the way they're going to write my obituary notice?"

There was a shout, and all heads were turned round, for it was indeed Bordenave. Huge and fiery-faced, he was standing with his stiff leg in the doorway, leaning for support on Simonne Cabiroche's shoulder. Simonne was for the time being his mistress. This little creature had had a certain amount of education and could play the piano and talk English. She was a blonde on a tiny, pretty scale and so delicately formed that she seemed to bend under Bordenave's rude weight. Yet she was smilingly submissive withal. He postured there for some moments, for he felt that together they formed a tableau.

"One can't help liking ye, eh?" he continued. "Zounds, I was afraid I should get bored, and I said to myself, 'Here goes.'"

But he interrupted himself with an oath.

"Oh, damn!"

Simonne had taken a step too quickly forward, and his foot had just felt his full weight. He gave her a rough push, but she, still smiling away and ducking her pretty head as some animal might that is afraid of a beating, held him up with all the strength a little plump blonde can command. Amid all these exclamations there was a rush to his assistance. Nana and Rose Mignon rolled up an armchair, into which Bordenave let himself sink, while the other women slid a second one under his leg. And with that all the actresses present kissed him as a matter of course. He kept grumbling and gasping.

"Oh, damn! Oh, damn! Ah well, the stomach's unhurt, you'll see."

Other guests had arrived by this time, and motion became impossible in the room. The noise of clinking plates and silver had ceased, and now a dispute was heard going on in the big drawing room, where the voice of the manager grumbled angrily. Nana was growing impatient, for she expected no more invited guests and wondered why they did not bring in supper. She had just sent Georges to find out what was going on when, to her great surprise, she noticed the arrival of more guests, both male and female. She did not know them in the least. Whereupon with some embarrassment she questioned Bordenave, Mignon and Labordette about them. They did not know them any more than she did, but when she turned to the Count de Vandeuvres he seemed suddenly to recollect himself. They were the young men he had pressed into her service at Count Muffat's. Nana thanked him. That was capital, capital! Only they would all be terribly crowded, and she begged Labordette to go and have seven more covers set. Scarcely had he left the room than the footman ushered in three newcomers. Nay, this time the thing was becoming ridiculous; one certainly could never take them all in. Nana was beginning to grow angry and in her haughtiest manner announced that such conduct was scarcely in good taste. But seeing two more arrive, she began laughing; it was really too funny. So much the worse. People would have to fit in anyhow! The company were all on their feet save Gaga and Rose and Bordenave, who alone took up two armchairs. There was a buzz of voices, people talking in low tones and stifling slight yawns the while.

"Now what d'you say, my lass," asked Bordenave, "to our sitting down at table as if nothing had happened? We are all here, don't you think?"

"Oh yes, we're all here, I promise you!" she answered laughingly.

She looked round her but grew suddenly serious, as though she were surprised at not finding someone. Doubtless there was a guest missing whom she did not mention. It was a case of waiting. But a minute or two later the company noticed in their midst a tall gentleman with a fine face and a beautiful white beard. The most astonishing thing about it was that nobody had seen him come in; indeed, he must have slipped into the little drawing room through the bedroom door, which had remained ajar. Silence reigned, broken only by a sound of whispering. The Count de Vandeuvres certainly knew who the gentleman was, for they both exchanged a discreet handgrip, but to the questions which the women asked him he replied by a smile only. Thereupon Caroline Hequet wagered in a low voice that it was an English lord who was on the eve of returning to London to be married. She knew him quite well—she had had him. And this account of the matter went the round of the ladies present, Maria Blond alone asserting that, for her part, she recognized a German ambassador. She could prove it, because he often passed the night with one of her friends. Among the men his measure was taken in a few rapid phrases. A real swell, to judge by his looks! Perhaps he would pay for the supper! Most likely. It looked like it. Bah! Provided only the supper was a good one! In the end the company remained undecided. Nay, they were already beginning to forget the old white-bearded gentleman when the manager opened the door of the large drawing room.

"Supper is on the table, madame."

Nana had already accepted Steiner's proffered arm without noticing a movement on the part of the old gentleman, who started to walk behind her in solitary state. Thus the march past could not be organized, and men and women entered anyhow, joking with homely good humor over this absence of ceremony. A long table stretched from one end to the other of the great room, which had been entirely cleared of furniture, and this same table was not long enough, for the plates thereon were touching one another. Four candelabra, with ten candles apiece, lit up the supper, and of these one was gorgeous in silver plate with sheaves of flowers to right and left of it. Everything was luxurious after the restaurant fashion; the china was ornamented with a gold line and lacked the customary monogram; the silver had become worn and tarnished through dint of continual washings; the glass was of the kind that you can complete an odd set of in any cheap emporium.

The scene suggested a premature housewarming in an establishment newly smiled on by fortune and as yet lacking the necessary conveniences. There was no central luster, and the candelabra, whose tall tapers had scarcely burned up properly, cast a pale yellow light among the dishes and stands on which fruit, cakes and preserves alternated symmetrically.

"You sit where you like, you know," said Nana. "It's more amusing that way."

She remained standing midway down the side of the table. The old gentleman whom nobody knew had placed himself on her right, while she kept Steiner on her left hand. Some guests were already sitting down when the sound of oaths came from the little drawing room. It was Bordenave. The company had forgotten him, and he was having all the trouble in the world to raise himself out of his two armchairs, for he was howling amain and calling for that cat of a Simonne, who had slipped off with the rest. The women ran in to him, full of pity for his woes, and Bordenave appeared, supported, nay, almost carried, by Caroline, Clarisse, Tatan Nene and Maria Blond. And there was much to-do over his installation at the table.

"In the middle, facing Nana!" was the cry. "Bordenave in the middle! He'll be our president!"

Thereupon the ladies seated him in the middle. But he needed a second chair for his leg, and two girls lifted it up and stretched it carefully out. It wouldn't matter; he would eat sideways.

"God blast it all!" he grumbled. "We're squashed all the same! Ah, my kittens, Papa recommends himself to your tender care!"

He had Rose Mignon on his right and Lucy Stewart on his left hand, and they promised to take good care of him. Everybody was now getting settled. Count de Vandeuvres placed himself between Lucy and Clarisse; Fauchery between Rose Mignon and Caroline Hequet. On the other side of the table Hector de la Faloise had rushed to get next Gaga, and that despite the calls of Clarisse opposite, while Mignon, who never deserted Steiner, was only separated from him by Blanche and had Tatan Nene on his left. Then came Labordette and, finally, at the two ends of the table were irregular crowding groups of young men and of women, such as Simonne, Lea de Horn and Maria Blond. It was in this region that Daguenet and Georges forgathered more warmly than ever while smilingly gazing at Nana.

Nevertheless, two people remained standing, and there was much joking about it. The men offered seats on their knees. Clarisse, who could not move her elbows, told Vandeuvres that she counted on him to feed her. And then that Bordenave did just take up space with his chairs! There was a final effort, and at last everybody was seated, but, as Mignon loudly remarked, they were confoundedly like herrings in a barrel.

"Thick asparagus soup a la comtesse, clear soup a la Deslignac," murmured the waiters, carrying about platefuls in rear of the guests.

Bordenave was loudly recommending the thick soup when a shout arose, followed by protests and indignant exclamations. The door had just opened, and three late arrivals, a woman and two men, had just come in. Oh dear, no! There was no space for them! Nana, however, without leaving her chair, began screwing up her eyes in the effort to find out whether she knew them. The woman was Louise Violaine, but she had never seen the men before.

"This gentleman, my dear," said Vandeuvres, "is a friend of mine, a naval officer, Monsieur de Foucarmont by name. I invited him."

Foucarmont bowed and seemed very much at ease, for he added:

"And I took leave to bring one of my friends with me."

"Oh, it's quite right, quite right!" said Nana. "Sit down, pray. Let's see, you—Clarisse—push up a little. You're a good deal spread out down there. That's it—where there's a will—"

They crowded more tightly than ever, and Foucarmont and Louise were given a little stretch of table, but the friend had to sit at some distance from his plate and ate his supper through dint of making a long arm between his neighbors' shoulders. The waiters took away the soup plates and circulated rissoles of young rabbit with truffles and "niokys" and powdered cheese. Bordenave agitated the whole table with the announcement that at one moment he had had the idea of bringing with him Prulliere, Fontan and old Bosc. At this Nana looked sedate and remarked dryly that she would have given them a pretty reception. Had she wanted colleagues, she would certainly have undertaken to ask them herself. No, no, she wouldn't have third-rate play actors. Old Bosc was always drunk; Prulliere was fond of spitting too much, and as to Fontan, he made himself unbearable in society with his loud voice and his stupid doings. Then, you know, third-rate play actors were always out of place when they found themselves in the society of gentlemen such as those around her.

"Yes, yes, it's true," Mignon declared.

All round the table the gentlemen in question looked unimpeachable in the extreme, what with their evening dress and their pale features, the natural distinction of which was still further refined by fatigue. The old gentleman was as deliberate in his movements and wore as subtle a smile as though he were presiding over a diplomatic congress, and Vandeuvres, with his exquisite politeness toward the ladies next to him, seemed to be at one of the Countess Muffat's receptions. That very morning Nana had been remarking to her aunt that in the matter of men one could not have done better—they were all either wellborn or wealthy, in fact, quite the thing. And as to the ladies, they were behaving admirably. Some of them, such as Blanche, Lea and Louise, had come in low dresses, but Gaga's only was perhaps a little too low, the more so because at her age she would have done well not to show her neck at all. Now that the company were finally settled the laughter and the light jests began to fail. Georges was under the impression that he had assisted at merrier dinner parties among the good folks of Orleans. There was scarcely any conversation. The men, not being mutually acquainted, stared at one another, while the women sat quite quiet, and it was this which especially surprised Georges. He thought them all smugs—he had been under the impression that everybody would begin kissing at once.

The third course, consisting of a Rhine carp a la Chambord and a saddle of venison a l'anglaise, was being served when Blanche remarked aloud:

"Lucy, my dear, I met your Ollivier on Sunday. How he's grown!"

"Dear me, yes! He's eighteen," replied Lucy. "It doesn't make me feel any younger. He went back to his school yesterday."

Her son Ollivier, whom she was wont to speak of with pride, was a pupil at the Ecole de Marine. Then ensued a conversation about the young people, during which all the ladies waxed very tender. Nana described her own great happiness. Her baby, the little Louis, she said, was now at the house of her aunt, who brought him round to her every morning at eleven o'clock, when she would take him into her bed, where he played with her griffon dog Lulu. It was enough to make one die of laughing to see them both burying themselves under the clothes at the bottom of the bed. The company had no idea how cunning Louiset had already become.

"Oh, yesterday I did just pass a day!" said Rose Mignon in her turn. "Just imagine, I went to fetch Charles and Henry at their boarding school, and I had positively to take them to the theater at night. They jumped; they clapped their little hands: 'We shall see Mamma act! We shall see Mamma act!' Oh, it was a to-do!"

Mignon smiled complaisantly, his eyes moist with paternal tenderness.

"And at the play itself," he continued, "they were so funny! They behaved as seriously as grown men, devoured Rose with their eyes and asked me why Mamma had her legs bare like that."

The whole table began laughing, and Mignon looked radiant, for his pride as a father was flattered. He adored his children and had but one object in life, which was to increase their fortunes by administering the money gained by Rose at the theater and elsewhere with the businesslike severity of a faithful steward. When as first fiddle in the music hall where she used to sing he had married her, they had been passionately fond of one another. Now they were good friends. There was an understanding between them: she labored hard to the full extent of her talent and of her beauty; he had given up his violin in order the better to watch over her successes as an actress and as a woman. One could not have found a more homely and united household anywhere!

"What age is your eldest?" asked Vandeuvres.

"Henry's nine," replied Mignon, "but such a big chap for his years!"

Then he chaffed Steiner, who was not fond of children, and with quiet audacity informed him that were he a father, he would make a less stupid hash of his fortune. While talking he watched the banker over Blanche's shoulders to see if it was coming off with Nana. But for some minutes Rose and Fauchery, who were talking very near him, had been getting on his nerves. Was Rose going to waste time over such a folly as that? In that sort of case, by Jove, he blocked the way. And diamond on finger and with his fine hands in great evidence, he finished discussing a fillet of venison.

Elsewhere the conversation about children continued. La Faloise, rendered very restless by the immediate proximity of Gaga, asked news of her daughter, whom he had had the pleasure of noticing in her company at the Varietes. Lili was quite well, but she was still such a tomboy! He was astonished to learn that Lili was entering on her nineteenth year. Gaga became even more imposing in his eyes, and when he endeavored to find out why she had not brought Lili with her:

"Oh no, no, never!" she said stiffly. "Not three months ago she positively insisted on leaving her boarding school. I was thinking of marrying her off at once, but she loves me so that I had to take her home—oh, so much against my will!"

Her blue eyelids with their blackened lashes blinked and wavered while she spoke of the business of settling her young lady. If at her time of life she hadn't laid by a sou but was still always working to minister to men's pleasures, especially those very young men, whose grandmother she might well be, it was truly because she considered a good match of far greater importance than mere savings. And with that she leaned over La Faloise, who reddened under the huge, naked, plastered shoulder with which she well-nigh crushed him.

"You know," she murmured, "if she fails it won't be my fault. But they're so strange when they're young!"

There was a considerable bustle round the table, and the waiters became very active. After the third course the entrees had made their appearance; they consisted of pullets a la marechale, fillets of sole with shallot sauce and escalopes of Strasbourg pate. The manager, who till then had been having Meursault served, now offered Chambertin and Leoville. Amid the slight hubbub which the change of plates involved Georges, who was growing momentarily more astonished, asked Daguenet if all the ladies present were similarly provided with children, and the other, who was amused by this question, gave him some further details. Lucy Stewart was the daughter of a man of English origin who greased the wheels of the trains at the Gare du Nord; she was thirty-nine years old and had the face of a horse but was adorable withal and, though consumptive, never died. In fact, she was the smartest woman there and represented three princes and a duke. Caroline Hequet, born at Bordeaux, daughter of a little clerk long since dead of shame, was lucky enough to be possessed of a mother with a head on her shoulders, who, after having cursed her, had made it up again at the end of a year of reflection, being minded, at any rate, to save a fortune for her daughter. The latter was twenty-five years old and very passionless and was held to be one of the finest women it is possible to enjoy. Her price never varied. The mother, a model of orderliness, kept the accounts and noted down receipts and expenditures with severe precision. She managed the whole household from some small lodging two stories above her daughter's, where, moreover, she had established a workroom for dressmaking and plain sewing. As to Blanche de Sivry, whose real name was Jacqueline Bandu, she hailed from a village near Amiens. Magnificent in person, stupid and untruthful in character, she gave herself out as the granddaughter of a general and never owned to her thirty-two summers. The Russians had a great taste for her, owing to her embonpoint. Then Daguenet added a rapid word or two about the rest. There was Clarisse Besnus, whom a lady had brought up from Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer in the capacity of maid while the lady's husband had started her in quite another line. There was Simonne Cabiroche, the daughter of a furniture dealer in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, who had been educated in a large boarding school with a view to becoming a governess. Finally there were Maria Blond and Louise Violaine and Lea de Horn, who had all shot up to woman's estate on the pavements of Paris, not to mention Tatan Nene, who had herded cows in Champagne till she was twenty.

Georges listened and looked at these ladies, feeling dizzy and excited by the coarse recital thus crudely whispered in his ear, while behind his chair the waiters kept repeating in respectful tones:

"Pullets a la marechale; fillets of sole with ravigote sauce."

"My dear fellow," said Daguenet, giving him the benefit of his experience, "don't take any fish; it'll do you no good at this time of night. And be content with Leoville: it's less treacherous."

A heavy warmth floated upward from the candelabras, from the dishes which were being handed round, from the whole table where thirty-eight human beings were suffocating. And the waiters forgot themselves and ran when crossing the carpet, so that it was spotted with grease. Nevertheless, the supper grew scarce any merrier. The ladies trifled with their meat, left half of it uneaten. Tatan Nene alone partook gluttonously of every dish. At that advanced hour of the night hunger was of the nervous order only, a mere whimsical craving born of an exasperated stomach.

At Nana's side the old gentleman refused every dish offered him; he had only taken a spoonful of soup, and he now sat in front of his empty plate, gazing silently about. There was some subdued yawning, and occasionally eyelids closed and faces became haggard and white. It was unutterably slow, as it always was, according to Vandeuvres's dictum. This sort of supper should be served anyhow if it was to be funny, he opined. Otherwise when elegantly and conventionally done you might as well feed in good society, where you were not more bored than here. Had it not been for Bordenave, who was still bawling away, everybody would have fallen asleep. That rum old buffer Bordenave, with his leg duly stretched on its chair, was letting his neighbors, Lucy and Rose, wait on him as though he were a sultan. They were entirely taken up with him, and they helped him and pampered him and watched over his glass and his plate, and yet that did not prevent his complaining.

"Who's going to cut up my meat for me? I can't; the table's a league away."

Every few seconds Simonne rose and took up a position behind his back in order to cut his meat and his bread. All the women took a great interest in the things he ate. The waiters were recalled, and he was stuffed to suffocation. Simonne having wiped his mouth for him while Rose and Lucy were changing his plate, her act struck him as very pretty and, deigning at length to show contentment:

"There, there, my daughter," he said, "that's as it should be. Women are made for that!"

There was a slight reawakening, and conversation became general as they finished discussing some orange sherbet. The hot roast was a fillet with truffles, and the cold roast a galantine of guinea fowl in jelly. Nana, annoyed by the want of go displayed by her guests, had begun talking with the greatest distinctness.

"You know the Prince of Scots has already had a stage box reserved so as to see the Blonde Venus when he comes to visit the exhibition."

"I very much hope that all the princes will come and see it," declared Bordenave with his mouth full.

"They are expecting the shah of Persia next Sunday," said Lucy Stewart. Whereupon Rose Mignon spoke of the shah's diamonds. He wore a tunic entirely covered with gems; it was a marvel, a flaming star; it represented millions. And the ladies, with pale faces and eyes glittering with covetousness, craned forward and ran over the names of the other kings, the other emperors, who were shortly expected. All of them were dreaming of some royal caprice, some night to be paid for by a fortune.

"Now tell me, dear boy," Caroline Hequet asked Vandeuvres, leaning forward as she did so, "how old's the emperor of Russia?"

"Oh, he's 'present time,'" replied the count, laughing. "Nothing to be done in that quarter, I warn you."

Nana made pretense of being hurt. The witticism appeared somewhat too stinging, and there was a murmur of protest. But Blanche gave a description of the king of Italy, whom she had once seen at Milan. He was scarcely good looking, and yet that did not prevent him enjoying all the women. She was put out somewhat when Fauchery assured her that Victor Emmanuel could not come to the exhibition. Louise Violaine and Lea favored the emperor of Austria, and all of a sudden little Maria Blond was heard saying:

"What an old stick the king of Prussia is! I was at Baden last year, and one was always meeting him about with Count Bismarck."

"Dear me, Bismarck!" Simonne interrupted. "I knew him once, I did. A charming man."

"That's what I was saying yesterday," cried Vandeuvres, "but nobody would believe me."

And just as at Countess Sabine's, there ensued a long discussion about Bismarck. Vandeuvres repeated the same phrases, and for a moment or two one was again in the Muffats' drawing room, the only difference being that the ladies were changed. Then, just as last night, they passed on to a discussion on music, after which, Foucarmont having let slip some mention of the assumption of the veil of which Paris was still talking, Nana grew quite interested and insisted on details about Mlle de Fougeray. Oh, the poor child, fancy her burying herself alive like that! Ah well, when it was a question of vocation! All round the table the women expressed themselves much touched, and Georges, wearied at hearing these things a second time discussed, was beginning to ask Daguenet about Nana's ways in private life, when the conversation veered fatefully back to Count Bismarck. Tatan Nene bent toward Labordette to ask him privily who this Bismarck might be, for she did not know him. Whereupon Labordette, in cold blood, told her some portentous anecdotes. This Bismarck, he said, was in the habit of eating raw meat and when he met a woman near his den would carry her off thither on his back; at forty years of age he had already had as many as thirty-two children that way.

"Thirty-two children at forty!" cried Tatan Nene, stupefied and yet convinced. "He must be jolly well worn out for his age."

There was a burst of merriment, and it dawned on her that she was being made game of.

"You sillies! How am I to know if you're joking?"

Gaga, meanwhile, had stopped at the exhibition. Like all these ladies, she was delightedly preparing for the fray. A good season, provincials and foreigners rushing into Paris! In the long run, perhaps, after the close of the exhibition she would, if her business had flourished, be able to retire to a little house at Jouvisy, which she had long had her eye on.

"What's to be done?" she said to La Faloise. "One never gets what one wants! Oh, if only one were still really loved!"

Gaga behaved meltingly because she had felt the young man's knee gently placed against her own. He was blushing hotly and lisping as elegantly as ever. She weighed him at a glance. Not a very heavy little gentleman, to be sure, but then she wasn't hard to please. La Faloise obtained her address.

"Just look there," murmured Vandeuvres to Clarisse. "I think Gaga's doing you out of your Hector."

"A good riddance, so far as I'm concerned," replied the actress. "That fellow's an idiot. I've already chucked him downstairs three times. You know, I'm disgusted when dirty little boys run after old women."

She broke off and with a little gesture indicated Blanche, who from the commencement of dinner had remained in a most uncomfortable attitude, sitting up very markedly, with the intention of displaying her shoulders to the old distinguished-looking gentleman three seats beyond her.

"You're being left too," she resumed.

Vandeuvres smiled his thin smile and made a little movement to signify he did not care. Assuredly 'twas not he who would ever have prevented poor, dear Blanche scoring a success. He was more interested by the spectacle which Steiner was presenting to the table at large. The banker was noted for his sudden flames. That terrible German Jew who brewed money, whose hands forged millions, was wont to turn imbecile whenever he became enamored of a woman. He wanted them all too! Not one could make her appearance on the stage but he bought her, however expensive she might be. Vast sums were quoted. Twice had his furious appetite for courtesans ruined him. The courtesans, as Vandeuvres used to say, avenged public morality by emptying his moneybags. A big operation in the saltworks of the Landes had rendered him powerful on 'change, and so for six weeks past the Mignons had been getting a pretty slice out of those same saltworks. But people were beginning to lay wagers that the Mignons would not finish their slice, for Nana was showing her white teeth. Once again Steiner was in the toils, and so deeply this time that as he sat by Nana's side he seemed stunned; he ate without appetite; his lip hung down; his face was mottled. She had only to name a figure. Nevertheless, she did not hurry but continued playing with him, breathing her merry laughter into his hairy ear and enjoying the little convulsive movements which kept traversing his heavy face. There would always be time enough to patch all that up if that ninny of a Count Muffat were really to treat her as Joseph did Potiphar's wife.

"Leoville or Chambertin?" murmured a waiter, who came craning forward between Nana and Steiner just as the latter was addressing her in a low voice.

"Eh, what?" he stammered, losing his head. "Whatever you like—I don't care."

Vandeuvres gently nudged Lucy Stewart, who had a very spiteful tongue and a very fierce invention when once she was set going. That evening Mignon was driving her to exasperation.

"He would gladly be bottleholder, you know," she remarked to the count. "He's in hopes of repeating what he did with little Jonquier. You remember: Jonquier was Rose's man, but he was sweet on big Laure. Now Mignon procured Laure for Jonquier and then came back arm in arm with him to Rose, as if he were a husband who had been allowed a little peccadillo. But this time the thing's going to fail. Nana doesn't give up the men who are lent her."

"What ails Mignon that he should be looking at his wife in that severe way?" asked Vandeuvres.

He leaned forward and saw Rose growing exceedingly amorous toward Fauchery. This was the explanation of his neighbor's wrath. He resumed laughingly:

"The devil, are you jealous?"

"Jealous!" said Lucy in a fury. "Good gracious, if Rose is wanting Leon I give him up willingly—for what he's worth! That's to say, for a bouquet a week and the rest to match! Look here, my dear boy, these theatrical trollops are all made the same way. Why, Rose cried with rage when she read Leon's article on Nana; I know she did. So now, you understand, she must have an article, too, and she's gaining it. As for me, I'm going to chuck Leon downstairs—you'll see!"

She paused to say "Leoville" to the waiter standing behind her with his two bottles and then resumed in lowered tones:

"I don't want to shout; it isn't my style. But she's a cocky slut all the same. If I were in her husband's place I should lead her a lovely dance. Oh, she won't be very happy over it. She doesn't know my Fauchery: a dirty gent he is, too, palling up with women like that so as to get on in the world. Oh, a nice lot they are!"

Vandeuvres did his best to calm her down, but Bordenave, deserted by Rose and by Lucy, grew angry and cried out that they were letting Papa perish of hunger and thirst. This produced a fortunate diversion. Yet the supper was flagging; no one was eating now, though platefuls of cepes a' l'italienne and pineapple fritters a la Pompadour were being mangled. The champagne, however, which had been drunk ever since the soup course, was beginning little by little to warm the guests into a state of nervous exaltation. They ended by paying less attention to decorum than before. The women began leaning on their elbows amid the disordered table arrangements, while the men, in order to breathe more easily, pushed their chairs back, and soon the black coats appeared buried between the light-colored bodices, and bare shoulders, half turned toward the table, began to gleam as soft as silk. It was too hot, and the glare of the candles above the table grew ever yellower and duller. Now and again, when a women bent forward, the back of her neck glowed golden under a rain of curls, and the glitter of a diamond clasp lit up a lofty chignon. There was a touch of fire in the passing jests, in the laughing eyes, in the sudden gleam of white teeth, in the reflection of the candelabra on the surface of a glass of champagne. The company joked at the tops of their voices, gesticulated, asked questions which no one answered and called to one another across the whole length of the room. But the loudest din was made by the waiters; they fancied themselves at home in the corridors of their parent restaurant; they jostled one another and served the ices and the dessert to an accompaniment of guttural exclamations.

"My children," shouted Bordenave, "you know we're playing tomorrow. Be careful! Not too much champagne!"

"As far as I'm concerned," said Foucarmont, "I've drunk every imaginable kind of wine in all the four quarters of the globe. Extraordinary liquors some of 'em, containing alcohol enough to kill a corpse! Well, and what d'you think? Why, it never hurt me a bit. I can't make myself drunk. I've tried and I can't."

He was very pale, very calm and collected, and he lolled back in his chair, drinking without cessation.

"Never mind that," murmured Louise Violaine. "Leave off; you've had enough. It would be a funny business if I had to look after you the rest of the night."

Such was her state of exaltation that Lucy Stewart's cheeks were assuming a red, consumptive flush, while Rose Mignon with moist eyelids was growing excessively melting. Tatan Nene, greatly astonished at the thought that she had overeaten herself, was laughing vaguely over her own stupidity. The others, such as Blanche, Caroline, Simonne and Maria, were all talking at once and telling each other about their private affairs—about a dispute with a coachman, a projected picnic and innumerable complex stories of lovers stolen or restored. Meanwhile a young man near Georges, having evinced a desire to kiss Lea de Horn, received a sharp rap, accompanied by a "Look here, you, let me go!" which was spoken in a tone of fine indignation; and Georges, who was now very tipsy and greatly excited by the sight of Nana, hesitated about carrying out a project which he had been gravely maturing. He had been planning, indeed, to get under the table on all fours and to go and crouch at Nana's feet like a little dog. Nobody would have seen him, and he would have stayed there in the quietest way. But when at Lea's urgent request Daguenet had told the young man to sit still, Georges all at once felt grievously chagrined, as though the reproof had just been leveled at him. Oh, it was all silly and slow, and there was nothing worth living for! Daguenet, nevertheless, began chaffing and obliged him to swallow a big glassful of water, asking him at the same time what he would do if he were to find himself alone with a woman, seeing that three glasses of champagne were able to bowl him over.

"Why, in Havana," resumed Foucarmont, "they make a spirit with a certain wild berry; you think you're swallowing fire! Well now, one evening I drank more than a liter of it, and it didn't hurt me one bit. Better than that, another time when we were on the coast of Coromandel some savages gave us I don't know what sort of a mixture of pepper and vitriol, and that didn't hurt me one bit. I can't make myself drunk."

For some moments past La Faloise's face opposite had excited his displeasure. He began sneering and giving vent to disagreeable witticisms. La Faloise, whose brain was in a whirl, was behaving very restlessly and squeezing up against Gaga. But at length he became the victim of anxiety; somebody had just taken his handkerchief, and with drunken obstinacy he demanded it back again, asked his neighbors about it, stooped down in order to look under the chairs and the guests' feet. And when Gaga did her best to quiet him:

"It's a nuisance," he murmured, "my initials and my coronet are worked in the corner. They may compromise me."

"I say, Monsieur Falamoise, Lamafoise, Mafaloise!" shouted Foucarmont, who thought it exceedingly witty thus to disfigure the young man's name ad infinitum.

But La Faloise grew wroth and talked with a stutter about his ancestry. He threatened to send a water bottle at Foucarmont's head, and Count de Vandeuvres had to interfere in order to assure him that Foucarmont was a great joker. Indeed, everybody was laughing. This did for the already flurried young man, who was very glad to resume his seat and to begin eating with childlike submissiveness when in a loud voice his cousin ordered him to feed. Gaga had taken him back to her ample side; only from time to time he cast sly and anxious glances at the guests, for he ceased not to search for his handkerchief.

Then Foucarmont, being now in his witty vein, attacked Labordette right at the other end of the table. Louise Violaine strove to make him hold his tongue, for, she said, "when he goes nagging at other people like that it always ends in mischief for me." He had discovered a witticism which consisted in addressing Labordette as "Madame," and it must have amused him greatly, for he kept on repeating it while Labordette tranquilly shrugged his shoulders and as constantly replied:

"Pray hold your tongue, my dear fellow; it's stupid."

But as Foucarmont failed to desist and even became insulting without his neighbors knowing why, he left off answering him and appealed to Count Vandeuvres.

"Make your friend hold his tongue, monsieur. I don't wish to become angry."

Foucarmont had twice fought duels, and he was in consequence most politely treated and admitted into every circle. But there was now a general uprising against him. The table grew merry at his sallies, for they thought him very witty, but that was no reason why the evening should be spoiled. Vandeuvres, whose subtle countenance was darkening visibly, insisted on his restoring Labordette his sex. The other men—Mignon, Steiner and Bordenave—who were by this time much exalted, also intervened with shouts which drowned his voice. Only the old gentleman sitting forgotten next to Nana retained his stately demeanor and, still smiling in his tired, silent way, watched with lackluster eyes the untoward finish of the dessert.

"What do you say to our taking coffee in here, duckie?" said Bordenave. "We're very comfortable."

Nana did not give an immediate reply. Since the beginning of supper she had seemed no longer in her own house. All this company had overwhelmed and bewildered her with their shouts to the waiters, the loudness of their voices and the way in which they put themselves at their ease, just as though they were in a restaurant. Forgetting her role of hostess, she busied herself exclusively with bulky Steiner, who was verging on apoplexy beside her. She was listening to his proposals and continually refusing them with shakes of the head and that temptress's laughter which is peculiar to a voluptuous blonde. The champagne she had been drinking had flushed her a rosy-red; her lips were moist; her eyes sparkled, and the banker's offers rose with every kittenish movement of her shoulders, with every little voluptuous lift and fall of her throat, which occurred when she turned her head. Close by her ear he kept espying a sweet little satiny corner which drove him crazy. Occasionally Nana was interrupted, and then, remembering her guests, she would try and be as pleased as possible in order to show that she knew how to receive. Toward the end of the supper she was very tipsy. It made her miserable to think of it, but champagne had a way of intoxicating her almost directly! Then an exasperating notion struck her. In behaving thus improperly at her table, these ladies were showing themselves anxious to do her an ugly turn. Oh yes, she could see it all distinctly. Lucy had given Foucarmont a wink in order to egg him on against Labordette, while Rose, Caroline and the others were doing all they could to stir up the men. Now there was such a din you couldn't hear your neighbor speak, and so the story would get about that you might allow yourself every kind of liberty when you supped at Nana's. Very well then! They should see! She might be tipsy, if you like, but she was still the smartest and most ladylike woman there.

"Do tell them to serve the coffee here, duckie," resumed Bordenave. "I prefer it here because of my leg."

But Nana had sprung savagely to her feet after whispering into the astonished ears of Steiner and the old gentleman:

"It's quite right; it'll teach me to go and invite a dirty lot like that."

Then she pointed to the door of the dining room and added at the top of her voice:

"If you want coffee it's there, you know."

The company left the table and crowded toward the dining room without noticing Nana's indignant outburst. And soon no one was left in the drawing room save Bordenave, who advanced cautiously, supporting himself against the wall and cursing away at the confounded women who chucked Papa the moment they were chock-full. The waiters behind him were already busy removing the plates and dishes in obedience to the loudly voiced orders of the manager. They rushed to and fro, jostled one another, caused the whole table to vanish, as a pantomime property might at the sound of the chief scene-shifter's whistle. The ladies and gentlemen were to return to the drawing room after drinking their coffee.

"By gum, it's less hot here," said Gaga with a slight shiver as she entered the dining room.

The window here had remained open. Two lamps illuminated the table, where coffee and liqueurs were set out. There were no chairs, and the guests drank their coffee standing, while the hubbub the waiters were making in the next room grew louder and louder. Nana had disappeared, but nobody fretted about her absence. They did without her excellently well, and everybody helped himself and rummaged in the drawers of the sideboard in search of teaspoons, which were lacking. Several groups were formed; people separated during supper rejoined each other, and there was an interchange of glances, of meaning laughter and of phrases which summed up recent situations.

"Ought not Monsieur Fauchery to come and lunch with us one of these days, Auguste?" said Rose Mignon.

Mignon, who was toying with his watch chain, eyed the journalist for a second or two with his severe glance. Rose was out of her senses. As became a good manager, he would put a stop to such spendthrift courses. In return for a notice, well and good, but afterward, decidedly not. Nevertheless, as he was fully aware of his wife's wrongheadedness and as he made it a rule to wink paternally at a folly now and again, when such was necessary, he answered amiably enough:

"Certainly, I shall be most happy. Pray come tomorrow, Monsieur Fauchery."

Lucy Stewart heard this invitation given while she was talking with Steiner and Blanche and, raising her voice, she remarked to the banker:

"It's a mania they've all of them got. One of them even went so far as to steal my dog. Now, dear boy, am I to blame if you chuck her?"

Rose turned round. She was very pale and gazed fixedly at Steiner as she sipped her coffee. And then all the concentrated anger she felt at his abandonment of her flamed out in her eyes. She saw more clearly than Mignon; it was stupid in him to have wished to begin the Jonquier ruse a second time—those dodgers never succeeded twice running. Well, so much the worse for him! She would have Fauchery! She had been getting enamored of him since the beginning of supper, and if Mignon was not pleased it would teach him greater wisdom!

"You are not going to fight?" said Vandeuvres, coming over to Lucy Stewart.

"No, don't be afraid of that! Only she must mind and keep quiet, or I let the cat out of the bag!"

Then signing imperiously to Fauchery:

"I've got your slippers at home, my little man. I'll get them taken to your porter's lodge for you tomorrow."

He wanted to joke about it, but she swept off, looking like a queen. Clarisse, who had propped herself against a wall in order to drink a quiet glass of kirsch, was seen to shrug her shoulders. A pleasant business for a man! Wasn't it true that the moment two women were together in the presence of their lovers their first idea was to do one another out of them? It was a law of nature! As to herself, why, in heaven's name, if she had wanted to she would have torn out Gaga's eyes on Hector's account! But la, she despised him! Then as La Faloise passed by, she contented herself by remarking to him:

"Listen, my friend, you like 'em well advanced, you do! You don't want 'em ripe; you want 'em mildewed!"

La Faloise seemed much annoyed and not a little anxious. Seeing Clarisse making game of him, he grew suspicious of her.

"No humbug, I say," he muttered. "You've taken my handkerchief. Well then, give it back!"

"He's dreeing us with that handkerchief of his!" she cried. "Why, you ass, why should I have taken it from you?"

"Why should you?" he said suspiciously. "Why, that you may send it to my people and compromise me."

In the meantime Foucarmont was diligently attacking the liqueurs. He continued to gaze sneeringly at Labordette, who was drinking his coffee in the midst of the ladies. And occasionally he gave vent to fragmentary assertions, as thus: "He's the son of a horse dealer; some say the illegitimate child of a countess. Never a penny of income, yet always got twenty-five louis in his pocket! Footboy to the ladies of the town! A big lubber, who never goes with any of 'em! Never, never, never!" he repeated, growing furious. "No, by Jove! I must box his ears."

He drained a glass of chartreuse. The chartreuse had not the slightest effect upon him; it didn't affect him "even to that extent," and he clicked his thumbnail against the edge of his teeth. But suddenly, just as he was advancing upon Labordette, he grew ashy white and fell down in a heap in front of the sideboard. He was dead drunk. Louise Violaine was beside herself. She had been quite right to prophesy that matters would end badly, and now she would have her work cut out for the remainder of the night. Gaga reassured her. She examined the officer with the eye of a woman of experience and declared that there was nothing much the matter and that the gentleman would sleep like that for at least a dozen or fifteen hours without any serious consequences. Foucarmont was carried off.

"Well, where's Nana gone to?" asked Vandeuvres.

Yes, she had certainly flown away somewhere on leaving the table. The company suddenly recollected her, and everybody asked for her. Steiner, who for some seconds had been uneasy on her account, asked Vandeuvres about the old gentleman, for he, too, had disappeared. But the count reassured him—he had just brought the old gentleman back. He was a stranger, whose name it was useless to mention. Suffice it to say that he was a very rich man who was quite pleased to pay for suppers! Then as Nana was once more being forgotten, Vandeuvres saw Daguenet looking out of an open door and beckoning to him. And in the bedroom he found the mistress of the house sitting up, white-lipped and rigid, while Daguenet and Georges stood gazing at her with an alarmed expression.

"What IS the matter with you?" he asked in some surprise.

She neither answered nor turned her head, and he repeated his question.

"Why, this is what's the matter with me," she cried out at length; "I won't let them make bloody sport of me!"

Thereupon she gave vent to any expression that occurred to her. Yes, oh yes, SHE wasn't a ninny—she could see clearly enough. They had been making devilish light of her during supper and saying all sorts of frightful things to show that they thought nothing of her! A pack of sluts who weren't fit to black her boots! Catch her bothering herself again just to be badgered for it after! She really didn't know what kept her from chucking all that dirty lot out of the house! And with this, rage choked her and her voice broke down in sobs.

"Come, come, my lass, you're drunk," said Vandeuvres, growing familiar. "You must be reasonable."

No, she would give her refusal now; she would stay where she was.

"I am drunk—it's quite likely! But I want people to respect me!"

For a quarter of an hour past Daguenet and Georges had been vainly beseeching her to return to the drawing room. She was obstinate, however; her guests might do what they liked; she despised them too much to come back among them.

No, she never would, never. They might tear her in pieces before she would leave her room!

"I ought to have had my suspicions," she resumed.

"It's that cat of a Rose who's got the plot up! I'm certain Rose'll have stopped that respectable woman coming whom I was expecting tonight."

She referred to Mme Robert. Vandeuvres gave her his word of honor that Mme Robert had given a spontaneous refusal. He listened and he argued with much gravity, for he was well accustomed to similar scenes and knew how women in such a state ought to be treated. But the moment he tried to take hold of her hands in order to lift her up from her chair and draw her away with him she struggled free of his clasp, and her wrath redoubled. Now, just look at that! They would never get her to believe that Fauchery had not put the Count Muffat off coming! A regular snake was that Fauchery, an envious sort, a fellow capable of growing mad against a woman and of destroying her whole happiness. For she knew this—the count had become madly devoted to her! She could have had him!

"Him, my dear, never!" cried Vandeuvres, forgetting himself and laughing loud.

"Why not?" she asked, looking serious and slightly sobered.

"Because he's thoroughly in the hands of the priests, and if he were only to touch you with the tips of his fingers he would go and confess it the day after. Now listen to a bit of good advice. Don't let the other man escape you!"

She was silent and thoughtful for a moment or two. Then she got up and went and bathed her eyes. Yet when they wanted to take her into the dining room she still shouted "No!" furiously. Vandeuvres left the bedroom, smiling and without further pressing her, and the moment he was gone she had an access of melting tenderness, threw herself into Daguenet's arms and cried out:

"Ah, my sweetie, there's only you in the world. I love you! YES, I love you from the bottom of my heart! Oh, it would be too nice if we could always live together. My God! How unfortunate women are!"

Then her eye fell upon Georges, who, seeing them kiss, was growing very red, and she kissed him too. Sweetie could not be jealous of a baby! She wanted Paul and Georges always to agree, because it would be so nice for them all three to stay like that, knowing all the time that they loved one another very much. But an extraordinary noise disturbed them: someone was snoring in the room. Whereupon after some searching they perceived Bordenave, who, since taking his coffee, must have comfortably installed himself there. He was sleeping on two chairs, his head propped on the edge of the bed and his leg stretched out in front. Nana thought him so funny with his open mouth and his nose moving with each successive snore that she was shaken with a mad fit of laughter. She left the room, followed by Daguenet and Georges, crossed the dining room, entered the drawing room, her merriment increasing at every step.

"Oh, my dear, you've no idea!" she cried, almost throwing herself into Rose's arms. "Come and see it."

All the women had to follow her. She took their hands coaxingly and drew them along with her willy-nilly, accompanying her action with so frank an outburst of mirth that they all of them began laughing on trust. The band vanished and returned after standing breathlessly for a second or two round Bordenave's lordly, outstretched form. And then there was a burst of laughter, and when one of them told the rest to be quiet Bordenave's distant snorings became audible.

It was close on four o'clock. In the dining room a card table had just been set out, at which Vandeuvres, Steiner, Mignon and Labordette had taken their seats. Behind them Lucy and Caroline stood making bets, while Blanche, nodding with sleep and dissatisfied about her night, kept asking Vandeuvres at intervals of five minutes if they weren't going soon. In the drawing room there was an attempt at dancing. Daguenet was at the piano or "chest of drawers," as Nana called it. She did not want a "thumper," for Mimi would play as many waltzes and polkas as the company desired. But the dance was languishing, and the ladies were chatting drowsily together in the corners of sofas. Suddenly, however, there was an outburst of noise. A band of eleven young men had arrived and were laughing loudly in the anteroom and crowding to the drawing room. They had just come from the ball at the Ministry of the Interior and were in evening dress and wore various unknown orders. Nana was annoyed at this riotous entry, called to the waiters who still remained in the kitchen and ordered them to throw these individuals out of doors. She vowed that she had never seen any of them before. Fauchery, Labordette, Daguenet and the rest of the men had all come forward in order to enforce respectful behavior toward their hostess. Big words flew about; arms were outstretched, and for some seconds a general exchange of fisticuffs was imminent. Notwithstanding this, however, a little sickly looking light-haired man kept insistently repeating:

"Come, come, Nana, you saw us the other evening at Peters' in the great red saloon! Pray remember, you invited us."

The other evening at Peters'? She did not remember it all. To begin with, what evening?

And when the little light-haired man had mentioned the day, which was Wednesday, she distinctly remembered having supped at Peters' on the Wednesday, but she had given no invitation to anyone; she was almost sure of that.

"However, suppose you HAVE invited them, my good girl," murmured Labordette, who was beginning to have his doubts. "Perhaps you were a little elevated."

Then Nana fell a-laughing. It was quite possible; she really didn't know. So then, since these gentlemen were on the spot, they had her leave to come in. Everything was quietly arranged; several of the newcomers found friends in the drawing room, and the scene ended in handshakings. The little sickly looking light-haired man bore one of the greatest names in France. Furthermore, the eleven announced that others were to follow them, and, in fact, the door opened every few moments, and men in white gloves and official garb presented themselves. They were still coming from the ball at the Ministry. Fauchery jestingly inquired whether the minister was not coming, too, but Nana answered in a huff that the minister went to the houses of people she didn't care a pin for. What she did not say was that she was possessed with a hope of seeing Count Muffat enter her room among all that stream of people. He might quite have reconsidered his decision, and so while talking to Rose she kept a sharp eye on the door.

Five o'clock struck. The dancing had ceased, and the cardplayers alone persisted in their game. Labordette had vacated his seat, and the women had returned into the drawing room. The air there was heavy with the somnolence which accompanies a long vigil, and the lamps cast a wavering light while their burned-out wicks glowed red within their globes. The ladies had reached that vaguely melancholy hour when they felt it necessary to tell each other their histories. Blanche de Sivry spoke of her grandfather, the general, while Clarisse invented a romantic story about a duke seducing her at her uncle's house, whither he used to come for the boar hunting. Both women, looking different ways, kept shrugging their shoulders and asking themselves how the deuce the other could tell such whoppers! As to Lucy Stewart, she quietly confessed to her origin and of her own accord spoke of her childhood and of the days when her father, the wheel greaser at the Northern Railway Terminus, used to treat her to an apple puff on Sundays.

"Oh, I must tell you about it!" cried the little Maria Blond abruptly. "Opposite to me there lives a gentleman, a Russian, an awfully rich man! Well, just fancy, yesterday I received a basket of fruit—oh, it just was a basket! Enormous peaches, grapes as big as that, simply wonderful for the time of year! And in the middle of them six thousand-franc notes! It was the Russian's doing. Of course I sent the whole thing back again, but I must say my heart ached a little—when I thought of the fruit!"

The ladies looked at one another and pursed up their lips. At her age little Maria Blond had a pretty cheek! Besides, to think that such things should happen to trollops like her! Infinite was their contempt for her among themselves. It was Lucy of whom they were particularly jealous, for they were beside themselves at the thought of her three princes. Since Lucy had begun taking a daily morning ride in the Bois they all had become Amazons, as though a mania possessed them.

Day was about to dawn, and Nana turned her eyes away from the door, for she was relinquishing all hope. The company were bored to distraction. Rose Mignon had refused to sing the "Slipper" and sat huddled up on a sofa, chatting in a low voice with Fauchery and waiting for Mignon, who had by now won some fifty louis from Vandeuvres. A fat gentleman with a decoration and a serious cast of countenance had certainly given a recitation in Alsatian accents of "Abraham's Sacrifice," a piece in which the Almighty says, "By My blasted Name" when He swears, and Isaac always answers with a "Yes, Papa!" Nobody, however, understood what it was all about, and the piece had been voted stupid. People were at their wits' end how to make merry and to finish the night with fitting hilarity. For a moment or two Labordette conceived the idea of denouncing different women in a whisper to La Faloise, who still went prowling round each individual lady, looking to see if she were hiding his handkerchief in her bosom. Soon, as there were still some bottles of champagne on the sideboard, the young men again fell to drinking. They shouted to one another; they stirred each other up, but a dreary species of intoxication, which was stupid enough to drive one to despair, began to overcome the company beyond hope of recovery. Then the little fair-haired fellow, the man who bore one of the greatest names in France and had reached his wit's end and was desperate at the thought that he could not hit upon something really funny, conceived a brilliant notion: he snatched up his bottle of champagne and poured its contents into the piano. His allies were convulsed with laughter.

"La now! Why's he putting champagne into the piano?" asked Tatan Nene in great astonishment as she caught sight of him.

"What, my lass, you don't know why he's doing that?" replied Labordette solemnly. "There's nothing so good as champagne for pianos. It gives 'em tone."

"Ah," murmured Tatan Nene with conviction.

And when the rest began laughing at her she grew angry. How should she know? They were always confusing her.

Decidedly the evening was becoming a big failure. The night threatened to end in the unloveliest way. In a corner by themselves Maria Blond and Lea de Horn had begun squabbling at close quarters, the former accusing the latter of consorting with people of insufficient wealth. They were getting vastly abusive over it, their chief stumbling block being the good looks of the men in question. Lucy, who was plain, got them to hold their tongues. Good looks were nothing, according to her; good figures were what was wanted. Farther off, on a sofa, an attache had slipped his arm round Simonne's waist and was trying to kiss her neck, but Simonne, sullen and thoroughly out of sorts, pushed him away at every fresh attempt with cries of "You're pestering me!" and sound slaps of the fan across his face. For the matter of that, not one of the ladies allowed herself to be touched. Did people take them for light women? Gaga, in the meantime, had once more caught La Faloise and had almost hoisted him upon her knees while Clarisse was disappearing from view between two gentlemen, shaking with nervous laughter as women will when they are tickled. Round about the piano they were still busy with their little game, for they were suffering from a fit of stupid imbecility, which caused each man to jostle his fellow in his frantic desire to empty his bottle into the instrument. It was a simple process and a charming one.

"Now then, old boy, drink a glass! Devil take it, he's a thirsty piano! Hi! 'Tenshun! Here's another bottle! You mustn't lose a drop!"

Nana's back was turned, and she did not see them. Emphatically she was now falling back on the bulky Steiner, who was seated next to her. So much the worse! It was all on account of that Muffat, who had refused what was offered him. Sitting there in her white foulard dress, which was as light and full of folds as a shift, sitting there with drooped eyelids and cheeks pale with the touch of intoxication from which she was suffering, she offered herself to him with that quiet expression which is peculiar to a good-natured courtesan. The roses in her hair and at her throat had lost their leaves, and their stalks alone remained. Presently Steiner withdrew his hand quickly from the folds of her skirt, where he had come in contact with the pins that Georges had stuck there. Some drops of blood appeared on his fingers, and one fell on Nana's dress and stained it.

"Now the bargain's struck," said Nana gravely.

The day was breaking apace. An uncertain glimmer of light, fraught with a poignant melancholy, came stealing through the windows. And with that the guests began to take their departure. It was a most sour and uncomfortable retreat. Caroline Hequet, annoyed at the loss of her night, announced that it was high time to be off unless you were anxious to assist at some pretty scenes. Rose pouted as if her womanly character had been compromised. It was always so with these girls; they didn't know how to behave and were guilty of disgusting conduct when they made their first appearance in society! And Mignon having cleaned Vandeuvres out completely, the family took their departure. They did not trouble about Steiner but renewed their invitation for tomorrow to Fauchery. Lucy thereupon refused the journalist's escort home and sent him back shrilly to his "strolling actress." At this Rose turned round immediately and hissed out a "Dirty sow" by way of answer. But Mignon, who in feminine quarrels was always paternal, for his experience was a long one and rendered him superior to them, had already pushed her out of the house, telling her at the same time to have done. Lucy came downstairs in solitary state behind them. After which Gaga had to carry off La Faloise, ill, sobbing like a child, calling after Clarisse, who had long since gone off with her two gentlemen. Simonne, too, had vanished. Indeed, none remained save Tatan, Lea and Maria, whom Labordette complaisantly took under his charge.

"Oh, but I don't the least bit want to go to bed!" said Nana. "One ought to find something to do."

She looked at the sky through the windowpanes. It was a livid sky, and sooty clouds were scudding across it. It was six o'clock in the morning. Over the way, on the opposite side of the Boulevard Haussmann, the glistening roofs of the still-slumbering houses were sharply outlined against the twilight sky while along the deserted roadway a gang of street sweepers passed with a clatter of wooden shoes. As she viewed Paris thus grimly awakening, she was overcome by tender, girlish feelings, by a yearning for the country, for idyllic scenes, for things soft and white.

"Now guess what you're to do," she said, coming back to Steiner. "You're going to take me to the Bois de Boulogne, and we'll drink milk there."

She clapped her hands in childish glee. Without waiting for the banker's reply—he naturally consented, though he was really rather bored and inclined to think of other things—she ran off to throw a pelisse over her shoulders. In the drawing room there was now no one with Steiner save the band of young men. These had by this time dropped the very dregs of their glasses into the piano and were talking of going, when one of their number ran in triumphantly. He held in his hands a last remaining bottle, which he had brought back with him from the pantry.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute!" he shouted. "Here's a bottle of chartreuse; that'll pick him up! And now, my young friends, let's hook it. We're blooming idiots."

In the dressing room Nana was compelled to wake up Zoe, who had dozed off on a chair. The gas was still alight, and Zoe shivered as she helped her mistress on with her hat and pelisse.

"Well, it's over; I've done what you wanted me to," said Nana, speaking familiarly to the maid in a sudden burst of expansive confidence and much relieved at the thought that she had at last made her election. "You were quite right; the banker's as good as another."

The maid was cross, for she was still heavy with sleep. She grumbled something to the effect that Madame ought to have come to a decision the first evening. Then following her into the bedroom, she asked what she was going to do with "those two," meaning Bordenave, who was snoring away as usual, and Georges, who had slipped in slyly, buried his head in a pillow and, finally falling asleep there, was now breathing as lightly and regularly as a cherub. Nana in reply told her that she was to let them sleep on. But seeing Daguenet come into the room, she again grew tender. He had been watching her from the kitchen and was looking very wretched.

"Come, my sweetie, be reasonable," she said, taking him in her arms and kissing him with all sorts of little wheedling caresses. "Nothing's changed; you know that it's sweetie whom I always adore! Eh, dear? I had to do it. Why, I swear to you we shall have even nicer times now. Come tomorrow, and we'll arrange about hours. Now be quick, kiss and hug me as you love me. Oh, tighter, tighter than that!"

And she escaped and rejoined Steiner, feeling happy and once more possessed with the idea of drinking milk. In the empty room the Count de Vandeuvres was left alone with the "decorated" man who had recited "Abraham's Sacrifice." Both seemed glued to the card table; they had lost count of their whereabouts and never once noticed the broad light of day without, while Blanche had made bold to put her feet up on a sofa in order to try and get a little sleep.

"Oh, Blanche is with them!" cried Nana. "We are going to drink milk, dear. Do come; you'll find Vandeuvres here when we return."

Blanche got up lazily. This time the banker's fiery face grew white with annoyance at the idea of having to take that big wench with him too. She was certain to bore him. But the two women had already got him by the arms and were reiterating:

"We want them to milk the cow before our eyes, you know."

CHAPTER V

At the Varietes they were giving the thirty-fourth performance of the Blonde Venus. The first act had just finished, and in the greenroom Simonne, dressed as the little laundress, was standing in front of a console table, surmounted by a looking glass and situated between the two corner doors which opened obliquely on the end of the dressing-room passage. No one was with her, and she was scrutinizing her face and rubbing her finger up and down below her eyes with a view to putting the finishing touches to her make-up. The gas jets on either side of the mirror flooded her with warm, crude light.

"Has he arrived?" asked Prulliere, entering the room in his Alpine admiral's costume, which was set off by a big sword, enormous top boots and a vast tuft of plumes.

"Who d'you mean?" said Simonne, taking no notice of him and laughing into the mirror in order to see how her lips looked.

"The prince."

"I don't know; I've just come down. Oh, he's certainly due here tonight; he comes every time!"

Prulliere had drawn near the hearth opposite the console table, where a coke fire was blazing and two more gas jets were flaring brightly. He lifted his eyes and looked at the clock and the barometer on his right hand and on his left. They had gilded sphinxes by way of adornment in the style of the First Empire. Then he stretched himself out in a huge armchair with ears, the green velvet of which had been so worn by four generations of comedians that it looked yellow in places, and there he stayed, with moveless limbs and vacant eyes, in that weary and resigned attitude peculiar to actors who are used to long waits before their turn for going on the stage.

Old Bosc, too, had just made his appearance. He came in dragging one foot behind the other and coughing. He was wrapped in an old box coat, part of which had slipped from his shoulder in such a way as to uncover the gold-laced cloak of King Dagobert. He put his crown on the piano and for a moment or two stood moodily stamping his feet. His hands were trembling slightly with the first beginnings of alcoholism, but he looked a sterling old fellow for all that, and a long white beard lent that fiery tippler's face of his a truly venerable appearance. Then in the silence of the room, while the shower of hail was whipping the panes of the great window that looked out on the courtyard, he shook himself disgustedly.

"What filthy weather!" he growled.

Simonne and Prulliere did not move. Four or five pictures—a landscape, a portrait of the actor Vernet—hung yellowing in the hot glare of the gas, and a bust of Potier, one of the bygone glories of the Varietes, stood gazing vacant-eyed from its pedestal. But just then there was a burst of voices outside. It was Fontan, dressed for the second act. He was a young dandy, and his habiliments, even to his gloves, were entirely yellow.

"Now say you don't know!" he shouted, gesticulating. "Today's my patron saint's day!"

"What?" asked Simonne, coming up smilingly, as though attracted by the huge nose and the vast, comic mouth of the man. "D'you answer to the name of Achille?"

"Exactly so! And I'm going to get 'em to tell Madame Bron to send up champagne after the second act."

For some seconds a bell had been ringing in the distance. The long-drawn sound grew fainter, then louder, and when the bell ceased a shout ran up the stair and down it till it was lost along the passages. "All on the stage for the second act! All on the stage for the second act!" The sound drew near, and a little pale-faced man passed by the greenroom doors, outside each of which he yelled at the top of his shrill voice, "On the stage for the second act!"

"The deuce, it's champagne!" said Prulliere without appearing to hear the din. "You're prospering!"

"If I were you I should have it in from the cafe," old Bosc slowly announced. He was sitting on a bench covered with green velvet, with his head against the wall.

But Simonne said that it was one's duty to consider Mme Bron's small perquisites. She clapped her hands excitedly and devoured Fontan with her gaze while his long goatlike visage kept up a continuous twitching of eyes and nose and mouth.

"Oh, that Fontan!" she murmured. "There's no one like him, no one like him!"

The two greenroom doors stood wide open to the corridor leading to the wings. And along the yellow wall, which was brightly lit up by a gas lamp out of view, passed a string of rapidly moving shadows—men in costume, women with shawls over their scant attire, in a word, the whole of the characters in the second act, who would shortly make their appearance as masqeuraders in the ball at the Boule Noire. And at the end of the corridor became audible a shuffling of feet as these people clattered down the five wooden steps which led to the stage. As the big Clarisse went running by Simonne called to her, but she said she would be back directly. And, indeed, she reappeared almost at once, shivering in the thin tunic and scarf which she wore as Iris.

"God bless me!" she said. "It isn't warm, and I've left my furs in my dressing room!"

Then as she stood toasting her legs in their warm rose-colored tights in front of the fireplace she resumed:

"The prince has arrived."

"Oh!" cried the rest with the utmost curiosity.

"Yes, that's why I ran down: I wanted to see. He's in the first stage box to the right, the same he was in on Thursday. It's the third time he's been this week, eh? That's Nana; well, she's in luck's way! I was willing to wager he wouldn't come again."

Simonne opened her lips to speak, but her remarks were drowned by a fresh shout which arose close to the greenroom. In the passage the callboy was yelling at the top of his shrill voice, "They've knocked!"

"Three times!" said Simonne when she was again able to speak. "It's getting exciting. You know, he won't go to her place; he takes her to his. And it seems that he has to pay for it too!"

"Egad! It's a case of when one 'has to go out,'" muttered Prulliere wickedly, and he got up to have a last look at the mirror as became a handsome fellow whom the boxes adored.

"They've knocked! They've knocked!" the callboy kept repeating in tones that died gradually away in the distance as he passed through the various stories and corridors.

Fontan thereupon, knowing how it had all gone off on the first occasion the prince and Nana met, told the two women the whole story while they in their turn crowded against him and laughed at the tops of their voices whenever he stooped to whisper certain details in their ears. Old Bosc had never budged an inch—he was totally indifferent. That sort of thing no longer interested him now. He was stroking a great tortoise-shell cat which was lying curled up on the bench. He did so quite beautifully and ended by taking her in his arms with the tender good nature becoming a worn-out monarch. The cat arched its back and then, after a prolonged sniff at the big white beard, the gluey odor of which doubtless disgusted her, she turned and, curling herself up, went to sleep again on the bench beside him. Bosc remained grave and absorbed.

"That's all right, but if I were you I should drink the champagne at the restaurant—its better there," he said, suddenly addressing Fontan when he had finished his recital.

"The curtain's up!" cried the callboy in cracked and long-drawn accents "The curtain's up! The curtain's up!"

The shout sounded for some moments, during which there had been a noise of rapid footsteps. Through the suddenly opened door of the passage came a burst of music and a far-off murmur of voices, and then the door shut to again and you could hear its dull thud as it wedged itself into position once more.

A heavy, peaceful, atmosphere again pervaded the greenroom, as though the place were situated a hundred leagues from the house where crowds were applauding. Simonne and Clarisse were still on the topic of Nana. There was a girl who never hurried herself! Why, yesterday she had again come on too late! But there was a silence, for a tall damsel had just craned her head in at the door and, seeing that she had made a mistake, had departed to the other end of the passage. It was Satin. Wearing a hat and a small veil for the nonce she was affecting the manner of a lady about to pay a call.

"A pretty trollop!" muttered Prulliere, who had been coming across her for a year past at the Cafe des Varietes. And at this Simonne told them how Nana had recognized in Satin an old schoolmate, had taken a vast fancy to her and was now plaguing Bordenave to let her make a first appearance on the stage.

"How d'ye do?" said Fontan, shaking hands with Mignon and Fauchery, who now came into the room.

Old Bosc himself gave them the tips of his fingers while the two women kissed Mignon.

"A good house this evening?" queried Fauchery.

"Oh, a splendid one!" replied Prulliere. "You should see 'em gaping."

"I say, my little dears," remarked Mignon, "it must be your turn!"

Oh, all in good time! They were only at the fourth scene as yet, but Bosc got up in obedience to instinct, as became a rattling old actor who felt that his cue was coming. At that very moment the callboy was opening the door.

"Monsieur Bosc!" he called. "Mademoiselle Simonne!"

Simonne flung a fur-lined pelisse briskly over her shoulders and went out. Bosc, without hurrying at all, went and got his crown, which he settled on his brow with a rap. Then dragging himself unsteadily along in his greatcoat, he took his departure, grumbling and looking as annoyed as a man who has been rudely disturbed.

"You were very amiable in your last notice," continued Fontan, addressing Fauchery. "Only why do you say that comedians are vain?"

"Yes, my little man, why d'you say that?" shouted Mignon, bringing down his huge hands on the journalist's slender shoulders with such force as almost to double him up.

Prulliere and Clarisse refrained from laughing aloud. For some time past the whole company had been deriving amusement from a comedy which was going on in the wings. Mignon, rendered frantic by his wife's caprice and annoyed at the thought that this man Fauchery brought nothing but a certain doubtful notoriety to his household, had conceived the idea of revenging himself on the journalist by overwhelming him with tokens of friendship. Every evening, therefore, when he met him behind scenes he would shower friendly slaps on his back and shoulders, as though fairly carried away by an outburst of tenderness, and Fauchery, who was a frail, small man in comparison with such a giant, was fain to take the raps with a strained smile in order not to quarrel with Rose's husband.

"Aha, my buck, you've insulted Fontan," resumed Mignon, who was doing his best to force the joke. "Stand on guard! One—two—got him right in the middle of his chest!"

He lunged and struck the young man with such force that the latter grew very pale and could not speak for some seconds. With a wink Clarisse showed the others where Rose Mignon was standing on the threshold of the greenroom. Rose had witnessed the scene, and she marched straight up to the journalist, as though she had failed to notice her husband and, standing on tiptoe, bare-armed and in baby costume, she held her face up to him with a caressing, infantine pout.

"Good evening, baby," said Fauchery, kissing her familiarly.

Thus he indemnified himself. Mignon, however, did not seem to have observed this kiss, for everybody kissed his wife at the theater. But he laughed and gave the journalist a keen little look. The latter would assurely have to pay for Rose's bravado.

In the passage the tightly shutting door opened and closed again, and a tempest of applause was blown as far as the greenroom. Simonne came in after her scene.

"Oh, Father Bosc HAS just scored!" she cried. "The prince was writhing with laughter and applauded with the rest as though he had been paid to. I say, do you know the big man sitting beside the prince in the stage box? A handsome man, with a very sedate expression and splendid whiskers!"

"It's Count Muffat," replied Fauchery. "I know that the prince, when he was at the empress's the day before yesterday, invited him to dinner for tonight. He'll have corrupted him afterward!"

"So that's Count Muffat! We know his father-in-law, eh, Auguste?" said Rose, addressing her remark to Mignon. "You know the Marquis de Chouard, at whose place I went to sing? Well, he's in the house too. I noticed him at the back of a box. There's an old boy for you!"

Prulliere, who had just put on his huge plume of feathers, turned round and called her.

"Hi, Rose! Let's go now!"

She ran after him, leaving her sentence unfinished. At that moment Mme Bron, the portress of the theater, passed by the door with an immense bouquet in her arms. Simonne asked cheerfully if it was for her, but the porter woman did not vouchsafe an answer and only pointed her chin toward Nana's dressing room at the end of the passage. Oh, that Nana! They were loading her with flowers! Then when Mme Bron returned she handed a letter to Clarisse, who allowed a smothered oath to escape her. That beggar La Faloise again! There was a fellow who wouldn't let her alone! And when she learned the gentleman in question was waiting for her at the porter's lodge she shrieked:

"Tell him I'm coming down after this act. I'm going to catch him one on the face."

Fontan had rushed forward, shouting:

"Madame Bron, just listen. Please listen, Madame Bron. I want you to send up six bottles of champagne between the acts."

But the callboy had again made his appearance. He was out of breath, and in a singsong voice he called out:

"All to go on the stage! It's your turn, Monsieur Fontan. Make haste, make haste!"

"Yes, yes, I'm going, Father Barillot," replied Fontan in a flurry.

And he ran after Mme Bron and continued:

"You understand, eh? Six bottles of champagne in the greenroom between the acts. It's my patron saint's day, and I'm standing the racket."

Simonne and Clarisse had gone off with a great rustling of skirts. Everybody was swallowed up in the distance, and when the passage door had banged with its usual hollow sound a fresh hail shower was heard beating against the windows in the now-silent greenroom. Barillot, a small, pale-faced ancient, who for thirty years had been a servant in the theater, had advanced familiarly toward Mignon and had presented his open snuffbox to him. This proffer of a pinch and its acceptance allowed him a minute's rest in his interminable career up and down stairs and along the dressing-room passage. He certainly had still to look up Mme Nana, as he called her, but she was one of those who followed her own sweet will and didn't care a pin for penalties. Why, if she chose to be too late she was too late! But he stopped short and murmured in great surprise:

"Well, I never! She's ready; here she is! She must know that the prince is here."

Indeed, Nana appeared in the corridor. She was dressed as a fish hag: her arms and face were plastered with white paint, and she had a couple of red dabs under her eyes. Without entering the greenroom she contented herself by nodding to Mignon and Fauchery.

"How do? You're all right?"

Only Mignon shook her outstretched hand, and she hied royally on her way, followed by her dresser, who almost trod on her heels while stooping to adjust the folds of her skirt. In the rear of the dresser came Satin, closing the procession and trying to look quite the lady, though she was already bored to death.

"And Steiner?" asked Mignon sharply.

"Monsieur Steiner has gone away to the Loiret," said Barillot, preparing to return to the neighborhood of the stage. "I expect he's gone to buy a country place in those parts."

"Ah yes, I know, Nana's country place."

Mignon had grown suddenly serious. Oh, that Steiner! He had promised Rose a fine house in the old days! Well, well, it wouldn't do to grow angry with anybody. Here was a position that would have to be won again. From fireplace to console table Mignon paced, sunk in thought yet still unconquered by circumstances. There was no one in the greenroom now save Fauchery and himself. The journalist was tired and had flung himself back into the recesses of the big armchair. There he stayed with half-closed eyes and as quiet as quiet could be, while the other glanced down at him as he passed. When they were alone Mignon scorned to slap him at every turn. What good would it have done, since nobody would have enjoyed the spectacle? He was far too disinterested to be personally entertained by the farcical scenes in which he figured as a bantering husband. Glad of this short-lived respite, Fauchery stretched his feet out languidly toward the fire and let his upturned eyes wander from the barometer to the clock. In the course of his march Mignon planted himself in front of Potier's bust, looked at it without seeming to see it and then turned back to the window, outside which yawned the darkling gulf of the courtyard. The rain had ceased, and there was now a deep silence in the room, which the fierce heat of the coke fire and the flare of the gas jets rendered still more oppressive. Not a sound came from the wings: the staircase and the passages were deadly still.

That choking sensation of quiet, which behind the scenes immediately precedes the end of an act, had begun to pervade the empty greenroom. Indeed, the place seemed to be drowsing off through very breathlessness amid that faint murmur which the stage gives forth when the whole troupe are raising the deafening uproar of some grand finale.

"Oh, the cows!" Bordenave suddenly shouted in his hoarse voice.

He had only just come up, and he was already howling complaints about two chorus girls who had nearly fallen flat on the stage because they were playing the fool together. When his eye lit on Mignon and Fauchery he called them; he wanted to show them something. The prince had just notified a desire to compliment Nana in her dressing room during the next interval. But as he was leading them into the wings the stage manager passed.

"Just you find those hags Fernande and Maria!" cried Bordenave savagely.

Then calming down and endeavoring to assume the dignified expression worn by "heavy fathers," he wiped his face with his pocket handkerchief and added:

"I am now going to receive His Highness."

The curtain fell amid a long-drawn salvo of applause. Then across the twilight stage, which was no longer lit up by the footlights, there followed a disorderly retreat. Actors and supers and chorus made haste to get back to their dressing rooms while the sceneshifters rapidly changed the scenery. Simonne and Clarisse, however, had remained "at the top," talking together in whispers. On the stage, in an interval between their lines, they had just settled a little matter. Clarisse, after viewing the thing in every light, found she preferred not to see La Faloise, who could never decide to leave her for Gaga, and so Simonne was simply to go and explain that a woman ought not to be palled up to in that fashion! At last she agreed to undertake the mission.

Then Simonne, in her theatrical laundress's attire but with furs over her shoulders, ran down the greasy steps of the narrow, winding stairs which led between damp walls to the porter's lodge. This lodge, situated between the actors' staircase and that of the management, was shut in to right and left by large glass partitions and resembled a huge transparent lantern in which two gas jets were flaring.

There was a set of pigeonholes in the place in which were piled letters and newspapers, while on the table various bouquets lay awaiting their recipients in close proximity to neglected heaps of dirty plates and to an old pair of stays, the eyelets of which the portress was busy mending. And in the middle of this untidy, ill-kept storeroom sat four fashionable, white-gloved society men. They occupied as many ancient straw-bottomed chairs and, with an expression at once patient and submissive, kept sharply turning their heads in Mme Bron's direction every time she came down from the theater overhead, for on such occasions she was the bearer of replies. Indeed, she had but now handed a note to a young man who had hurried out to open it beneath the gaslight in the vestibule, where he had grown slightly pale on reading the classic phrase—how often had others read it in that very place!—"Impossible tonight, my dearie! I'm booked!" La Faloise sat on one of these chairs at the back of the room, between the table and the stove. He seemed bent on passing the evening there, and yet he was not quite happy. Indeed, he kept tucking up his long legs in his endeavors to escape from a whole litter of black kittens who were gamboling wildly round them while the mother cat sat bolt upright, staring at him with yellow eyes.

"Ah, it's you, Mademoiselle Simonne! What can I do for you?" asked the portress.

Simonne begged her to send La Faloise out to her. But Mme Bron was unable to comply with her wishes all at once. Under the stairs in a sort of deep cupboard she kept a little bar, whither the supers were wont to descend for drinks between the acts, and seeing that just at that moment there were five or six tall lubbers there who, still dressed as Boule Noire masqueraders, were dying of thirst and in a great hurry, she lost her head a bit. A gas jet was flaring in the cupboard, within which it was possible to descry a tin-covered table and some shelves garnished with half-emptied bottles. Whenever the door of this coalhole was opened a violent whiff of alcohol mingled with the scent of stale cooking in the lodge, as well as with the penetrating scent of the flowers upon the table.

"Well now," continued the portress when she had served the supers, "is it the little dark chap out there you want?"

"No, no; don't be silly!" said Simonne. "It's the lanky one by the side of the stove. Your cat's sniffing at his trouser legs!"

And with that she carried La Faloise off into the lobby, while the other gentlemen once more resigned themselves to their fate and to semisuffocation and the masqueraders drank on the stairs and indulged in rough horseplay and guttural drunken jests.

On the stage above Bordenave was wild with the sceneshifters, who seemed never to have done changing scenes. They appeared to be acting of set purpose—the prince would certainly have some set piece or other tumbling on his head.

"Up with it! Up with it!" shouted the foreman.

At length the canvas at the back of the stage was raised into position, and the stage was clear. Mignon, who had kept his eye on Fauchery, seized this opportunity in order to start his pummeling matches again. He hugged him in his long arms and cried:

"Oh, take care! That mast just missed crushing you!"

And he carried him off and shook him before setting him down again. In view of the sceneshifters' exaggerated mirth, Fauchery grew white. His lips trembled, and he was ready to flare up in anger while Mignon, shamming good nature, was clapping him on the shoulder with such affectionate violence as nearly to pulverize him.

"I value your health, I do!" he kept repeating. "Egad! I should be in a pretty pickle if anything serious happened to you!"

But just then a whisper ran through their midst: "The prince! The prince!" And everybody turned and looked at the little door which opened out of the main body of the house. At first nothing was visible save Bordenave's round back and beefy neck, which bobbed down and arched up in a series of obsequious obeisances. Then the prince made his appearance. Largely and strongly built, light of beard and rosy of hue, he was not lacking in the kind of distinction peculiar to a sturdy man of pleasure, the square contours of whose limbs are clearly defined by the irreproachable cut of a frock coat. Behind him walked Count Muffat and the Marquis de Chouard, but this particular corner of the theater being dark, the group were lost to view amid huge moving shadows.

In order fittingly to address the son of a queen, who would someday occupy a throne, Bordenave had assumed the tone of a man exhibiting a bear in the street. In a voice tremulous with false emotion he kept repeating:

"If His Highness will have the goodness to follow me—would His Highness deign to come this way? His Highness will take care!"

The prince did not hurry in the least. On the contrary, he was greatly interested and kept pausing in order to look at the sceneshifters' maneuvers. A batten had just been lowered, and the group of gaslights high up among its iron crossbars illuminated the stage with a wide beam of light. Muffat, who had never yet been behind scenes at a theater, was even more astonished than the rest. An uneasy feeling of mingled fear and vague repugnance took possession of him. He looked up into the heights above him, where more battens, the gas jets on which were burning low, gleamed like galaxies of little bluish stars amid a chaos of iron rods, connecting lines of all sizes, hanging stages and canvases spread out in space, like huge cloths hung out to dry.

"Lower away!" shouted the foreman unexpectedly.

And the prince himself had to warn the count, for a canvas was descending. They were setting the scenery for the third act, which was the grotto on Mount Etna. Men were busy planting masts in the sockets, while others went and took frames which were leaning against the walls of the stage and proceeded to lash them with strong cords to the poles already in position. At the back of the stage, with a view to producing the bright rays thrown by Vulcan's glowing forge, a stand had been fixed by a limelight man, who was now lighting various burners under red glasses. The scene was one of confusion, verging to all appearances on absolute chaos, but every little move had been prearranged. Nay, amid all the scurry the whistle blower even took a few turns, stepping short as he did so, in order to rest his legs.

"His Highness overwhelms me," said Bordenave, still bowing low. "The theater is not large, but we do what we can. Now if His Highness deigns to follow me—"

Count Muffat was already making for the dressing-room passage. The really sharp downward slope of the stage had surprised him disagreeably, and he owed no small part of his present anxiety to a feeling that its boards were moving under his feet. Through the open sockets gas was descried burning in the "dock." Human voices and blasts of air, as from a vault, came up thence, and, looking down into the depths of gloom, one became aware of a whole subterranean existence. But just as the count was going up the stage a small incident occurred to stop him. Two little women, dressed for the third act, were chatting by the peephole in the curtain. One of them, straining forward and widening the hole with her fingers in order the better to observe things, was scanning the house beyond.

"I see him," said she sharply. "Oh, what a mug!"

Horrified, Bordenave had much ado not to give her a kick. But the prince smiled and looked pleased and excited by the remark. He gazed warmly at the little woman who did not care a button for His Highness, and she, on her part, laughed unblushingly. Bordenave, however, persuaded the prince to follow him. Muffat was beginning to perspire; he had taken his hat off. What inconvenienced him most was the stuffy, dense, overheated air of the place with its strong, haunting smell, a smell peculiar to this part of a theater, and, as such, compact of the reek of gas, of the glue used in the manufacture of the scenery, of dirty dark nooks and corners and of questionably clean chorus girls. In the passage the air was still more suffocating, and one seemed to breathe a poisoned atmosphere, which was occasionally relieved by the acid scents of toilet waters and the perfumes of various soaps emanating from the dressing rooms. The count lifted his eyes as he passed and glanced up the staircase, for he was well-nigh startled by the keen flood of light and warmth which flowed down upon his back and shoulders. High up above him there was a clicking of ewers and basins, a sound of laughter and of people calling to one another, a banging of doors, which in their continual opening and shutting allowed an odor of womankind to escape—a musky scent of oils and essences mingling with the natural pungency exhaled from human tresses. He did not stop. Nay, he hastened his walk: he almost ran, his skin tingling with the breath of that fiery approach to a world he knew nothing of.

"A theater's a curious sight, eh?" said the Marquis de Chouard with the enchanted expression of a man who once more finds himself amid familiar surroundings.

But Bordenave had at length reached Nana's dressing room at the end of the passage. He quietly turned the door handle; then, cringing again:

"If His Highness will have the goodness to enter—"

They heard the cry of a startled woman and caught sight of Nana as, stripped to the waist, she slipped behind a curtain while her dresser, who had been in the act of drying her, stood, towel in air, before them.

"Oh, it IS silly to come in that way!" cried Nana from her hiding place. "Don't come in; you see you mustn't come in!"

Bordenave did not seem to relish this sudden flight.

"Do stay where you were, my dear. Why, it doesn't matter," he said. "It's His Highness. Come, come, don't be childish."

And when she still refused to make her appearance—for she was startled as yet, though she had begun to laugh—he added in peevish, paternal tones:

"Good heavens, these gentlemen know perfectly well what a woman looks like. They won't eat you."

"I'm not so sure of that," said the prince wittily.

With that the whole company began laughing in an exaggerated manner in order to pay him proper court.

"An exquisitely witty speech—an altogether Parisian speech," as Bordenave remarked.

Nana vouchsafed no further reply, but the curtain began moving. Doubtless she was making up her mind. Then Count Muffat, with glowing cheeks, began to take stock of the dressing room. It was a square room with a very low ceiling, and it was entirely hung with a light-colored Havana stuff. A curtain of the same material depended from a copper rod and formed a sort of recess at the end of the room, while two large windows opened on the courtyard of the theater and were faced, at a distance of three yards at most, by a leprous-looking wall against which the panes cast squares of yellow light amid the surrounding darkness. A large dressing glass faced a white marble toilet table, which was garnished with a disorderly array of flasks and glass boxes containing oils, essences and powders. The count went up to the dressing glass and discovered that he was looking very flushed and had small drops of perspiration on his forehead. He dropped his eyes and came and took up a position in front of the toilet table, where the basin, full of soapy water, the small, scattered, ivory toilet utensils and the damp sponges, appeared for some moments to absorb his attention. The feeling of dizziness which he had experienced when he first visited Nana in the Boulevard Haussmann once more overcame him. He felt the thick carpet soften under foot, and the gasjets burning by the dressing table and by the glass seemed to shoot whistling flames about his temples. For one moment, being afraid of fainting away under the influence of those feminine odors which he now re-encountered, intensified by the heat under the low-pitched ceiling, he sat down on the edge of a softly padded divan between the two windows. But he got up again almost directly and, returning to the dressing table, seemed to gaze with vacant eyes into space, for he was thinking of a bouquet of tuberoses which had once faded in his bedroom and had nearly killed him in their death. When tuberoses are turning brown they have a human smell.

"Make haste!" Bordenave whispered, putting his head in behind the curtain.

The prince, however, was listening complaisantly to the Marquis de Chouard, who had taken up a hare's-foot on the dressing table and had begun explaining the way grease paint is put on. In a corner of the room Satin, with her pure, virginal face, was scanning the gentlemen keenly, while the dresser, Mme Jules by name, was getting ready Venus' tights and tunic. Mme Jules was a woman of no age. She had the parchment skin and changeless features peculiar to old maids whom no one ever knew in their younger years. She had indeed shriveled up in the burning atmosphere of the dressing rooms and amid the most famous thighs and bosoms in all Paris. She wore everlastingly a faded black dress, and on her flat and sexless chest a perfect forest of pins clustered above the spot where her heart should have been.

"I beg your pardon, gentlemen," said Nana, drawing aside the curtain, "but you took me by surprise."

They all turned round. She had not clothed herself at all, had, in fact, only buttoned on a little pair of linen stays which half revealed her bosom. When the gentlemen had put her to flight she had scarcely begun undressing and was rapidly taking off her fishwife's costume. Through the opening in her drawers behind a corner of her shift was even now visible. There she stood, bare-armed, bare-shouldered, bare-breasted, in all the adorable glory of her youth and plump, fair beauty, but she still held the curtain with one hand, as though ready to draw it to again upon the slightest provocation.

"Yes, you took me by surprise! I never shall dare—" she stammered in pretty, mock confusion, while rosy blushes crossed her neck and shoulders and smiles of embarrassment played about her lips.

"Oh, don't apologize," cried Bordenave, "since these gentlemen approve of your good looks!"

But she still tried the hesitating, innocent, girlish game, and, shivering as though someone were tickling her, she continued:

"His Highness does me too great an honor. I beg His Highness will excuse my receiving him thus—"

"It is I who am importunate," said the prince, "but, madame, I could not resist the desire of complimenting you."

Thereupon, in order to reach her dressing table, she walked very quietly and just as she was through the midst of the gentlemen, who made way for her to pass.

She had strongly marked hips, which filled her drawers out roundly, while with swelling bosom she still continued bowing and smiling her delicate little smile. Suddenly she seemed to recognize Count Muffat, and she extended her hand to him as an old friend. Then she scolded him for not having come to her supper party. His Highness deigned to chaff Muffat about this, and the latter stammered and thrilled again at the thought that for one second he had held in his own feverish clasp a little fresh and perfumed hand. The count had dined excellently at the prince's, who, indeed, was a heroic eater and drinker. Both of them were even a little intoxicated, but they behaved very creditably. To hide the commotion within him Muffat could only remark about the heat.

"Good heavens, how hot it is here!" he said. "How do you manage to live in such a temperature, madame?"

And conversation was about to ensue on this topic when noisy voices were heard at the dressing-room door. Bordenave drew back the slide over a grated peephole of the kind used in convents. Fontan was outside with Prulliere and Bosc, and all three had bottles under their arms and their hands full of glasses. He began knocking and shouting out that it was his patron saint's day and that he was standing champagne round. Nana consulted the prince with a glance. Eh! Oh dear, yes! His Highness did not want to be in anyone's way; he would be only too happy! But without waiting for permission Fontan came in, repeating in baby accents:

"Me not a cad, me pay for champagne!"

Then all of a sudden he became aware of the prince's presence of which he had been totally ignorant. He stopped short and, assuming an air of farcical solemnity, announced:

"King Dagobert is in the corridor and is desirous of drinking the health of His Royal Highness."

The prince having made answer with a smile, Fontan's sally was voted charming. But the dressing room was too small to accommodate everybody, and it became necessary to crowd up anyhow, Satin and Mme Jules standing back against the curtain at the end and the men clustering closely round the half-naked Nana. The three actors still had on the costumes they had been wearing in the second act, and while Prulliere took off his Alpine admiral's cocked hat, the huge plume of which would have knocked the ceiling, Bosc, in his purple cloak and tinware crown, steadied himself on his tipsy old legs and greeted the prince as became a monarch receiving the son of a powerful neighbor. The glasses were filled, and the company began clinking them together.

"I drink to Your Highness!" said ancient Bosc royally.

"To the army!" added Prulliere.

"To Venus!" cried Fontan.

The prince complaisantly poised his glass, waited quietly, bowed thrice and murmured:

"Madame! Admiral! Your Majesty!"

Then he drank it off. Count Muffat and the Marquis de Chouard had followed his example. There was no more jesting now—the company were at court. Actual life was prolonged in the life of the theater, and a sort of solemn farce was enacted under the hot flare of the gas. Nana, quite forgetting that she was in her drawers and that a corner of her shift stuck out behind, became the great lady, the queen of love, in act to open her most private palace chambers to state dignitaries. In every sentence she used the words "Royal Highness" and, bowing with the utmost conviction, treated the masqueraders, Bosc and Prulliere, as if the one were a sovereign and the other his attendant minister. And no one dreamed of smiling at this strange contrast, this real prince, this heir to a throne, drinking a petty actor's champagne and taking his ease amid a carnival of gods, a masquerade of royalty, in the society of dressers and courtesans, shabby players and showmen of venal beauty. Bordenave was simply ravished by the dramatic aspects of the scene and began dreaming of the receipts which would have accrued had His Highness only consented thus to appear in the second act of the Blonde Venus.

"I say, shall we have our little women down?" he cried, becoming familiar.

Nana would not hear of it. But notwithstanding this, she was giving way herself. Fontan attracted her with his comic make-up. She brushed against him and, eying him as a woman in the family way might do when she fancies some unpleasant kind of food, she suddenly became extremely familiar:

"Now then, fill up again, ye great brute!"

Fontan charged the glasses afresh, and the company drank, repeating the same toasts.

"To His Highness!"

"To the army!"

"To Venus!"

But with that Nana made a sign and obtained silence. She raised her glass and cried:

"No, no! To Fontan! It's Fontan's day; to Fontan! To Fontan!"

Then they clinked glasses a third time and drank Fontan with all the honors. The prince, who had noticed the young woman devouring the actor with her eyes, saluted him with a "Monsieur Fontan, I drink to your success!" This he said with his customary courtesy.

But meanwhile the tail of his highness's frock coat was sweeping the marble of the dressing table. The place, indeed, was like an alcove or narrow bathroom, full as it was of the steam of hot water and sponges and of the strong scent of essences which mingled with the tartish, intoxicating fumes of the champagne. The prince and Count Muffat, between whom Nana was wedged, had to lift up their hands so as not to brush against her hips or her breast with every little movement. And there stood Mme Jules, waiting, cool and rigid as ever, while Satin, marveling in the depths of her vicious soul to see a prince and two gentlemen in black coats going after a naked woman in the society of dressed-up actors, secretly concluded that fashionable people were not so very particular after all.

But Father Barillot's tinkling bell approached along the passage. At the door of the dressing room he stood amazed when he caught sight of the three actors still clad in the costumes which they had worn in the second act.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen," he stammered, "do please make haste. They've just rung the bell in the public foyer."

"Bah, the public will have to wait!" said Bordenave placidly.

However, as the bottles were now empty, the comedians went upstairs to dress after yet another interchange of civilities. Bosc, having dipped his beard in the champagne, had taken it off, and under his venerable disguise the drunkard had suddenly reappeared. His was the haggard, empurpled face of the old actor who has taken to drink. At the foot of the stairs he was heard remarking to Fontan in his boozy voice:

"I pulverized him, eh?"

He was alluding to the prince.

In Nana's dressing room none now remained save His Highness, the count and the marquis. Bordenave had withdrawn with Barillot, whom he advised not to knock without first letting Madame know.

"You will excuse me, gentlemen?" asked Nana, again setting to work to make up her arms and face, of which she was now particularly careful, owing to her nude appearance in the third act.

The prince seated himself by the Marquis de Chouard on the divan, and Count Muffat alone remained standing. In that suffocating heat the two glasses of champagne they had drunk had increased their intoxication. Satin, when she saw the gentlemen thus closeting themselves with her friend, had deemed it discreet to vanish behind the curtain, where she sat waiting on a trunk, much annoyed at being compelled to remain motionless, while Mme Jules came and went quietly without word or look.

"You sang your numbers marvelously," said the prince.

And with that they began a conversation, but their sentences were short and their pauses frequent. Nana, indeed, was not always able to reply. After rubbing cold cream over her arms and face with the palm of her hand she laid on the grease paint with the corner of a towel. For one second only she ceased looking in the glass and smilingly stole a glance at the prince.

"His Highness is spoiling me," she murmured without putting down the grease paint.

Her task was a complicated one, and the Marquis de Chouard followed it with an expression of devout enjoyment. He spoke in his turn.

"Could not the band accompany you more softly?" he said. "It drowns your voice, and that's an unpardonable crime."

This time Nana did not turn round. She had taken up the hare's-foot and was lightly manipulating it. All her attention was concentrated on this action, and she bent forward over her toilet table so very far that the white round contour of her drawers and the little patch of chemise stood out with the unwonted tension. But she was anxious to prove that she appreciated the old man's compliment and therefore made a little swinging movement with her hips.

Silence reigned. Mme Jules had noticed a tear in the right leg of her drawers. She took a pin from over her heart and for a second or so knelt on the ground, busily at work about Nana's leg, while the young woman, without seeming to notice her presence, applied the rice powder, taking extreme pains as she did so, to avoid putting any on the upper part of her cheeks. But when the prince remarked that if she were to come and sing in London all England would want to applaud her, she laughed amiably and turned round for a moment with her left cheek looking very white amid a perfect cloud of powder. Then she became suddenly serious, for she had come to the operation of rouging. And with her face once more close to the mirror, she dipped her finger in a jar and began applying the rouge below her eyes and gently spreading it back toward her temples. The gentlemen maintained a respectful silence.

Count Muffat, indeed, had not yet opened his lips. He was thinking perforce of his own youth. The bedroom of his childish days had been quite cold, and later, when he had reached the age of sixteen and would give his mother a good-night kiss every evening, he used to carry the icy feeling of the embrace into the world of dreams. One day in passing a half-open door he had caught sight of a maidservant washing herself, and that was the solitary recollection which had in any way troubled his peace of mind from the days of puberty till the time of marriage. Afterward he had found his wife strictly obedient to her conjugal duties but had himself felt a species of religious dislike to them. He had grown to man's estate and was now aging, in ignorance of the flesh, in the humble observance of rigid devotional practices and in obedience to a rule of life full of precepts and moral laws. And now suddenly he was dropped down in this actress's dressing room in the presence of this undraped courtesan.

He, who had never seen the Countess Muffat putting on her garters, was witnessing, amid that wild disarray of jars and basins and that strong, sweet perfume, the intimate details of a woman's toilet. His whole being was in turmoil; he was terrified by the stealthy, all-pervading influence which for some time past Nana's presence had been exercising over him, and he recalled to mind the pious accounts of diabolic possession which had amused his early years. He was a believer in the devil, and, in a confused kind of way, Nana was he, with her laughter and her bosom and her hips, which seemed swollen with many vices. But he promised himself that he would be strong—nay, he would know how to defend himself.

"Well then, it's agreed," said the prince, lounging quite comfortably on the divan. "You will come to London next year, and we shall receive you so cordially that you will never return to France again. Ah, my dear Count, you don't value your pretty women enough. We shall take them all from you!"

"That won't make much odds to him," murmured the Marquis de Chouard wickedly, for he occasionally said a risky thing among friends. "The count is virtue itself."

Hearing his virtue mentioned, Nana looked at him so comically that Muffat felt a keen twinge of annoyance. But directly afterward he was surprised and angry with himself. Why, in the presence of this courtesan, should the idea of being virtuous embarrass him? He could have struck her. But in attempting to take up a brush Nana had just let it drop on the ground, and as she stooped to pick it up he rushed forward. Their breath mingled for one moment, and the loosened tresses of Venus flowed over his hands. But remorse mingled with his enjoyment, a kind of enjoyment, moreover, peculiar to good Catholics, whom the fear of hell torments in the midst of their sin.

At this moment Father Barillot's voice was heard outside the door.

"May I give the knocks, madame? The house is growing impatient."

"All in good time," answered Nana quietly.

She had dipped her paint brush in a pot of kohl, and with the point of her nose close to the glass and her left eye closed she passed it delicately along between her eyelashes. Muffat stood behind her, looking on. He saw her reflection in the mirror, with her rounded shoulders and her bosom half hidden by a rosy shadow. And despite all his endeavors he could not turn away his gaze from that face so merry with dimples and so worn with desire, which the closed eye rendered more seductive. When she shut her right eye and passed the brush along it he understood that he belonged to her.

"They are stamping their feet, madame," the callboy once more cried. "They'll end by smashing the seats. May I give the knocks?"

"Oh, bother!" said Nana impatiently. "Knock away; I don't care! If I'm not ready, well, they'll have to wait for me!"

She grew calm again and, turning to the gentlemen, added with a smile:

"It's true: we've only got a minute left for our talk."

Her face and arms were now finished, and with her fingers she put two large dabs of carmine on her lips. Count Muffat felt more excited than ever. He was ravished by the perverse transformation wrought by powders and paints and filled by a lawless yearning for those young painted charms, for the too-red mouth and the too-white face and the exaggerated eyes, ringed round with black and burning and dying for very love. Meanwhile Nana went behind the curtain for a second or two in order to take off her drawers and slip on Venus' tights. After which, with tranquil immodesty, she came out and undid her little linen stays and held out her arms to Mme Jules, who drew the short-sleeved tunic over them.

"Make haste; they're growing angry!" she muttered.

The prince with half-closed eyes marked the swelling lines of her bosom with an air of connoisseurship, while the Marquis de Chouard wagged his head involuntarily. Muffat gazed at the carpet in order not to see any more. At length Venus, with only her gauze veil over her shoulders, was ready to go on the stage. Mme Jules, with vacant, unconcerned eyes and an expression suggestive of a little elderly wooden doll, still kept circling round her. With brisk movements she took pins out of the inexhaustible pincushion over her heart and pinned up Venus' tunic, but as she ran over all those plump nude charms with her shriveled hands, nothing was suggested to her. She was as one whom her sex does not concern.

"There!" said the young woman, taking a final look at herself in the mirror.

Bordenave was back again. He was anxious and said the third act had begun.

"Very well! I'm coming," replied Nana. "Here's a pretty fuss! Why, it's usually I that waits for the others."

The gentlemen left the dressing room, but they did not say good-by, for the prince had expressed a desire to assist behind the scenes at the performance of the third act. Left alone, Nana seemed greatly surprised and looked round her in all directions.

"Where can she be?" she queried.

She was searching for Satin. When she had found her again, waiting on her trunk behind the curtain, Satin quietly replied:

"Certainly I didn't want to be in your way with all those men there!"

And she added further that she was going now. But Nana held her back. What a silly girl she was! Now that Bordenave had agreed to take her on! Why, the bargain was to be struck after the play was over! Satin hesitated. There were too many bothers; she was out of her element! Nevertheless, she stayed.

As the prince was coming down the little wooden staircase a strange sound of smothered oaths and stamping, scuffling feet became audible on the other side of the theater. The actors waiting for their cues were being scared by quite a serious episode. For some seconds past Mignon had been renewing his jokes and smothering Fauchery with caresses. He had at last invented a little game of a novel kind and had begun flicking the other's nose in order, as he phrased it, to keep the flies off him. This kind of game naturally diverted the actors to any extent.

But success had suddenly thrown Mignon off his balance. He had launched forth into extravagant courses and had given the journalist a box on the ear, an actual, a vigorous, box on the ear. This time he had gone too far: in the presence of so many spectators it was impossible for Fauchery to pocket such a blow with laughing equanimity. Whereupon the two men had desisted from their farce, had sprung at one another's throats, their faces livid with hate, and were now rolling over and over behind a set of side lights, pounding away at each other as though they weren't breakable.

"Monsieur Bordenave, Monsieur Bordenave!" said the stage manager, coming up in a terrible flutter.

Bordenave made his excuses to the prince and followed him. When he recognized Fauchery and Mignon in the men on the floor he gave vent to an expression of annoyance. They had chosen a nice time, certainly, with His Highness on the other side of the scenery and all that houseful of people who might have overheard the row! To make matters worse, Rose Mignon arrived out of breath at the very moment she was due on the stage. Vulcan, indeed, was giving her the cue, but Rose stood rooted to the ground, marveling at sight of her husband and her lover as they lay wallowing at her feet, strangling one another, kicking, tearing their hair out and whitening their coats with dust. They barred the way. A sceneshifter had even stopped Fauchery's hat just when the devilish thing was going to bound onto the stage in the middle of the struggle. Meanwhile Vulcan, who had been gagging away to amuse the audience, gave Rose her cue a second time. But she stood motionless, still gazing at the two men.

"Oh, don't look at THEM!" Bordenave furiously whispered to her. "Go on the stage; go on, do! It's no business of yours! Why, you're missing your cue!"

And with a push from the manager, Rose stepped over the prostrate bodies and found herself in the flare of the footlights and in the presence of the audience. She had quite failed to understand why they were fighting on the floor behind her. Trembling from head to foot and with a humming in her ears, she came down to the footlights, Diana's sweet, amorous smile on her lips, and attacked the opening lines of her duet with so feeling a voice that the public gave her a veritable ovation.

Behind the scenery she could hear the dull thuds caused by the two men. They had rolled down to the wings, but fortunately the music covered the noise made by their feet as they kicked against them.

"By God!" yelled Bordenave in exasperation when at last he had succeeded in separating them. "Why couldn't you fight at home? You know as well as I do that I don't like this sort of thing. You, Mignon, you'll do me the pleasure of staying over here on the prompt side, and you, Fauchery, if you leave the O.P. side I'll chuck you out of the theater. You understand, eh? Prompt side and O.P. side or I forbid Rose to bring you here at all."

When he returned to the prince's presence the latter asked what was the matter.

"Oh, nothing at all," he murmured quietly.

Nana was standing wrapped in furs, talking to these gentlemen while awaiting her cue. As Count Muffat was coming up in order to peep between two of the wings at the stage, he understood from a sign made him by the stage manager that he was to step softly. Drowsy warmth was streaming down from the flies, and in the wings, which were lit by vivid patches of light, only a few people remained, talking in low voices or making off on tiptoe. The gasman was at his post amid an intricate arrangement of cocks; a fireman, leaning against the side lights, was craning forward, trying to catch a glimpse of things, while on his seat, high up, the curtain man was watching with resigned expression, careless of the play, constantly on the alert for the bell to ring him to his duty among the ropes. And amid the close air and the shuffling of feet and the sound of whispering, the voices of the actors on the stage sounded strange, deadened, surprisingly discordant. Farther off again, above the confused noises of the band, a vast breathing sound was audible. It was the breath of the house, which sometimes swelled up till it burst in vague rumors, in laughter, in applause. Though invisible, the presence of the public could be felt, even in the silences.

"There's something open," said Nana sharply, and with that she tightened the folds of her fur cloak. "Do look, Barillot. I bet they've just opened a window. Why, one might catch one's death of cold here!"

Barillot swore that he had closed every window himself but suggested that possibly there were broken panes about. The actors were always complaining of drafts. Through the heavy warmth of that gaslit region blasts of cold air were constantly passing—it was a regular influenza trap, as Fontan phrased it.

"I should like to see YOU in a low-cut dress," continued Nana, growing annoyed.

"Hush!" murmured Bordenave.

On the stage Rose rendered a phrase in her duet so cleverly that the stalls burst into universal applause. Nana was silent at this, and her face grew grave. Meanwhile the count was venturing down a passage when Barillot stopped him and said he would make a discovery there. Indeed, he obtained an oblique back view of the scenery and of the wings which had been strengthened, as it were, by a thick layer of old posters. Then he caught sight of a corner of the stage, of the Etna cave hollowed out in a silver mine and of Vulcan's forge in the background. Battens, lowered from above, lit up a sparkling substance which had been laid on with large dabs of the brush. Side lights with red glasses and blue were so placed as to produce the appearance of a fiery brazier, while on the floor of the stage, in the far background, long lines of gaslight had been laid down in order to throw a wall of dark rocks into sharp relief. Hard by on a gentle, "practicable" incline, amid little points of light resembling the illumination lamps scattered about in the grass on the night of a public holiday, old Mme Drouard, who played Juno, was sitting dazed and sleepy, waiting for her cue.

Presently there was a commotion, for Simonne, while listening to a story Clarisse was telling her, cried out:

"My! It's the Tricon!"

It was indeed the Tricon, wearing the same old curls and looking as like a litigious great lady as ever.

When she saw Nana she went straight up to her.

"No," said the latter after some rapid phrases had been exchanged, "not now." The old lady looked grave. Just then Prulliere passed by and shook hands with her, while two little chorus girls stood gazing at her with looks of deep emotion. For a moment she seemed to hesitate. Then she beckoned to Simonne, and the rapid exchange of sentences began again.

"Yes," said Simonne at last. "In half an hour."

But as she was going upstairs again to her dressing room, Mme Bron, who was once more going the rounds with letters, presented one to her. Bordenave lowered his voice and furiously reproached the portress for having allowed the Tricon to come in. That woman! And on such an evening of all others! It made him so angry because His Highness was there! Mme Bron, who had been thirty years in the theater, replied quite sourly. How was she to know? she asked. The Tricon did business with all the ladies—M. le Directeur had met her a score of times without making remarks. And while Bordenave was muttering oaths the Tricon stood quietly by, scrutinizing the prince as became a woman who weighs a man at a glance. A smile lit up her yellow face. Presently she paced slowly off through the crowd of deeply deferential little women.

"Immediately, eh?" she queried, turning round again to Simonne.

Simonne seemed much worried. The letter was from a young man to whom she had engaged herself for that evening. She gave Mme Bron a scribbled note in which were the words, "Impossible tonight, darling—I'm booked." But she was still apprehensive; the young man might possibly wait for her in spite of everything. As she was not playing in the third act, she had a mind to be off at once and accordingly begged Clarisse to go and see if the man were there. Clarisse was only due on the stage toward the end of the act, and so she went downstairs while Simonne ran up for a minute to their common dressing room.

In Mme Bron's drinking bar downstairs a super, who was charged with the part of Pluto, was drinking in solitude amid the folds of a great red robe diapered with golden flames. The little business plied by the good portress must have been progressing finely, for the cellarlike hole under the stairs was wet with emptied heeltaps and water. Clarisse picked up the tunic of Iris, which was dragging over the greasy steps behind her, but she halted prudently at the turn in the stairs and was content simply to crane forward and peer into the lodge. She certainly had been quick to scent things out! Just fancy! That idiot La Faloise was still there, sitting on the same old chair between the table and the stove! He had made pretense of sneaking off in front of Simonne and had returned after her departure. For the matter of that, the lodge was still full of gentlemen who sat there gloved, elegant, submissive and patient as ever. They were all waiting and viewing each other gravely as they waited. On the table there were now only some dirty plates, Mme Bron having recently distributed the last of the bouquets. A single fallen rose was withering on the floor in the neighborhood of the black cat, who had lain down and curled herself up while the kittens ran wild races and danced fierce gallops among the gentlemen's legs. Clarisse was momentarily inclined to turn La Faloise out. The idiot wasn't fond of animals, and that put the finishing touch to him! He was busy drawing in his legs because the cat was there, and he didn't want to touch her.

"He'll nip you; take care!" said Pluto, who was a joker, as he went upstairs, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

After that Clarisse gave up the idea of hauling La Faloise over the coals. She had seen Mme Bron giving the letter to Simonne's young man, and he had gone out to read it under the gas light in the lobby. "Impossible tonight, darling—I'm booked." And with that he had peaceably departed, as one who was doubtless used to the formula. He, at any rate, knew how to conduct himself! Not so the others, the fellows who sat there doggedly on Mme Bron's battered straw-bottomed chairs under the great glazed lantern, where the heat was enough to roast you and there was an unpleasant odor. What a lot of men it must have held! Clarisse went upstairs again in disgust, crossed over behind scenes and nimbly mounted three flights of steps which led to the dressing rooms, in order to bring Simonne her reply.

Downstairs the prince had withdrawn from the rest and stood talking to Nana. He never left her; he stood brooding over her through half-shut eyelids. Nana did not look at him but, smiling, nodded yes. Suddenly, however, Count Muffat obeyed an overmastering impulse, and leaving Bordenave, who was explaining to him the working of the rollers and windlasses, he came up in order to interrupt their confabulations. Nana lifted her eyes and smiled at him as she smiled at His Highness. But she kept her ears open notwithstanding, for she was waiting for her cue.

"The third act is the shortest, I believe," the prince began saying, for the count's presence embarrassed him.

She did not answer; her whole expression altered; she was suddenly intent on her business. With a rapid movement of the shoulders she had let her furs slip from her, and Mme Jules, standing behind, had caught them in her arms. And then after passing her two hands to her hair as though to make it fast, she went on the stage in all her nudity.

"Hush, hush!" whispered Bordenave.

The count and the prince had been taken by surprise. There was profound silence, and then a deep sigh and the far-off murmur of a multitude became audible. Every evening when Venus entered in her godlike nakedness the same effect was produced. Then Muffat was seized with a desire to see; he put his eye to the peephole. Above and beyond the glowing arc formed by the footlights the dark body of the house seemed full of ruddy vapor, and against this neutral-tinted background, where row upon row of faces struck a pale, uncertain note, Nana stood forth white and vast, so that the boxes from the balcony to the flies were blotted from view. He saw her from behind, noted her swelling hips, her outstretched arms, while down on the floor, on the same level as her feet, the prompter's head—an old man's head with a humble, honest face—stood on the edge of the stage, looking as though it had been severed from the body. At certain points in her opening number an undulating movement seemed to run from her neck to her waist and to die out in the trailing border of her tunic. When amid a tempest of applause she had sung her last note she bowed, and the gauze floated forth round about her limbs, and her hair swept over her waist as she bent sharply backward. And seeing her thus, as with bending form and with exaggerated hips she came backing toward the count's peephole, he stood upright again, and his face was very white. The stage had disappeared, and he now saw only the reverse side of the scenery with its display of old posters pasted up in every direction. On the practicable slope, among the lines of gas jets, the whole of Olympus had rejoined the dozing Mme Drouard. They were waiting for the close of the act. Bosc and Fontan sat on the floor with their knees drawn up to their chins, and Prulliere stretched himself and yawned before going on. Everybody was worn out; their eyes were red, and they were longing to go home to sleep.

Just then Fauchery, who had been prowling about on the O.P. side ever since Bordenave had forbidden him the other, came and buttonholed the count in order to keep himself in countenance and offered at the same time to show him the dressing rooms. An increasing sense of languor had left Muffat without any power of resistance, and after looking round for the Marquis de Chouard, who had disappeared, he ended by following the journalist. He experienced a mingled feeling of relief and anxiety as he left the wings whence he had been listening to Nana's songs.

Fauchery had already preceded him up the staircase, which was closed on the first and second floors by low-paneled doors. It was one of those stairways which you find in miserable tenements. Count Muffat had seen many such during his rounds as member of the Benevolent Organization. It was bare and dilapidated: there was a wash of yellow paint on its walls; its steps had been worn by the incessant passage of feet, and its iron balustrade had grown smooth under the friction of many hands. On a level with the floor on every stairhead there was a low window which resembled a deep, square venthole, while in lanterns fastened to the walls flaring gas jets crudely illuminated the surrounding squalor and gave out a glowing heat which, as it mounted up the narrow stairwell, grew ever more intense.

When he reached the foot of the stairs the count once more felt the hot breath upon his neck and shoulders. As of old it was laden with the odor of women, wafted amid floods of light and sound from the dressing rooms above, and now with every upward step he took the musky scent of powders and the tart perfume of toilet vinegars heated and bewildered him more and more. On the first floor two corridors ran backward, branching sharply off and presenting a set of doors to view which were painted yellow and numbered with great white numerals in such a way as to suggest a hotel with a bad reputation. The tiles on the floor had been many of them unbedded, and the old house being in a state of subsidence, they stuck up like hummocks. The count dashed recklessly forward, glanced through a half-open door and saw a very dirty room which resembled a barber's shop in a poor part of the town. In was furnished with two chairs, a mirror and a small table containing a drawer which had been blackened by the grease from brushes and combs. A great perspiring fellow with smoking shoulders was changing his linen there, while in a similar room next door a woman was drawing on her gloves preparatory to departure. Her hair was damp and out of curl, as though she had just had a bath. But Fauchery began calling the count, and the latter was rushing up without delay when a furious "damn!" burst from the corridor on the right. Mathilde, a little drab of a miss, had just broken her washhand basin, the soapy water from which was flowing out to the stairhead. A dressing room door banged noisily. Two women in their stays skipped across the passage, and another, with the hem of her shift in her mouth, appeared and immediately vanished from view. Then followed a sound of laughter, a dispute, the snatch of a song which was suddenly broken off short. All along the passage naked gleams, sudden visions of white skin and wan underlinen were observable through chinks in doorways. Two girls were making very merry, showing each other their birthmarks. One of them, a very young girl, almost a child, had drawn her skirts up over her knees in order to sew up a rent in her drawers, and the dressers, catching sight of the two men, drew some curtains half to for decency's sake. The wild stampede which follows the end of a play had already begun, the grand removal of white paint and rouge, the reassumption amid clouds of rice powder of ordinary attire. The strange animal scent came in whiffs of redoubled intensity through the lines of banging doors. On the third story Muffat abandoned himself to the feeling of intoxication which was overpowering him. For the chorus girls' dressing room was there, and you saw a crowd of twenty women and a wild display of soaps and flasks of lavender water. The place resembled the common room in a slum lodging house. As he passed by he heard fierce sounds of washing behind a closed door and a perfect storm raging in a washhand basin. And as he was mounting up to the topmost story of all, curiosity led him to risk one more little peep through an open loophole. The room was empty, and under the flare of the gas a solitary chamber pot stood forgotten among a heap of petticoats trailing on the floor. This room afforded him his ultimate impression. Upstairs on the fourth floor he was well-nigh suffocated. All the scents, all the blasts of heat, had found their goal there. The yellow ceiling looked as if it had been baked, and a lamp burned amid fumes of russet-colored fog. For some seconds he leaned upon the iron balustrade which felt warm and damp and well-nigh human to the touch. And he shut his eyes and drew a long breath and drank in the sexual atmosphere of the place. Hitherto he had been utterly ignorant of it, but now it beat full in his face.

"Do come here," shouted Fauchery, who had vanished some moments ago. "You're being asked for."

At the end of the corridor was the dressing room belonging to Clarisse and Simonne. It was a long, ill-built room under the roof with a garret ceiling and sloping walls. The light penetrated to it from two deep-set openings high up in the wall, but at that hour of the night the dressing room was lit by flaring gas. It was papered with a paper at seven sous a roll with a pattern of roses twining over green trelliswork. Two boards, placed near one another and covered with oilcloth, did duty for dressing tables. They were black with spilled water, and underneath them was a fine medley of dinted zinc jugs, slop pails and coarse yellow earthenware crocks. There was an array of fancy articles in the room—a battered, soiled and well-worn array of chipped basins, of toothless combs, of all those manifold untidy trifles which, in their hurry and carelessness, two women will leave scattered about when they undress and wash together amid purely temporary surroundings, the dirty aspect of which has ceased to concern them.

"Do come here," Fauchery repeated with the good-humored familiarity which men adopt among their fallen sisters. "Clarisse is wanting to kiss you."

Muffat entered the room at last. But what was his surprise when he found the Marquis de Chouard snugly enscounced on a chair between the two dressing tables! The marquis had withdrawn thither some time ago. He was spreading his feet apart because a pail was leaking and letting a whitish flood spread over the floor. He was visibly much at his ease, as became a man who knew all the snug corners, and had grown quite merry in the close dressing room, where people might have been bathing, and amid those quietly immodest feminine surroundings which the uncleanness of the little place rendered at once natural and poignant.

"D'you go with the old boy?" Simonne asked Clarisse in a whisper.

"Rather!" replied the latter aloud.

The dresser, a very ugly and extremely familiar young girl, who was helping Simonne into her coat, positively writhed with laughter. The three pushed each other and babbled little phrases which redoubled their merriment.

"Come, Clarisse, kiss the gentleman," said Fauchery. "You know, he's got the rhino."

And turning to the count:

"You'll see, she's very nice! She's going to kiss you!"

But Clarisse was disgusted by the men. She spoke in violent terms of the dirty lot waiting at the porter's lodge down below. Besides, she was in a hurry to go downstairs again; they were making her miss her last scene. Then as Fauchery blocked up the doorway, she gave Muffat a couple of kisses on the whiskers, remarking as she did so:

"It's not for you, at any rate! It's for that nuisance Fauchery!"

And with that she darted off, and the count remained much embarrassed in his father-in-law's presence. The blood had rushed to his face. In Nana's dressing room, amid all the luxury of hangings and mirrors, he had not experienced the sharp physical sensation which the shameful wretchedness of that sorry garret excited within him, redolent as it was of these two girls' self-abandonment. Meanwhile the marquis had hurried in the rear of Simonne, who was making off at the top of her pace, and he kept whispering in her ear while she shook her head in token of refusal. Fauchery followed them, laughing. And with that the count found himself alone with the dresser, who was washing out the basins. Accordingly he took his departure, too, his legs almost failing under him. Once more he put up flights of half-dressed women and caused doors to bang as he advanced. But amid the disorderly, disbanded troops of girls to be found on each of the four stories, he was only distinctly aware of a cat, a great tortoise-shell cat, which went gliding upstairs through the ovenlike place where the air was poisoned with musk, rubbing its back against the banisters and keeping its tail exceedingly erect.

"Yes, to be sure!" said a woman hoarsely. "I thought they'd keep us back tonight! What a nuisance they are with their calls!"

The end had come; the curtain had just fallen. There was a veritable stampede on the staircase—its walls rang with exclamations, and everyone was in a savage hurry to dress and be off. As Count Muffat came down the last step or two he saw Nana and the prince passing slowly along the passage. The young woman halted and lowered her voice as she said with a smile:

"All right then—by and by!"

The prince returned to the stage, where Bordenave was awaiting him. And left alone with Nana, Muffat gave way to an impulse of anger and desire. He ran up behind her and, as she was on the point of entering her dressing room, imprinted a rough kiss on her neck among little golden hairs curling low down between her shoulders. It was as though he had returned the kiss that had been given him upstairs. Nana was in a fury; she lifted her hand, but when she recognized the count she smiled.

"Oh, you frightened me," she said simply.

And her smile was adorable in its embarrassment and submissiveness, as though she had despaired of this kiss and were happy to have received it. But she could do nothing for him either that evening or the day after. It was a case of waiting. Nay, even if it had been in her power she would still have let herself be desired. Her glance said as much. At length she continued:

"I'm a landowner, you know. Yes, I'm buying a country house near Orleans, in a part of the world to which you sometimes betake yourself. Baby told me you did—little Georges Hugon, I mean. You know him? So come and see me down there."

The count was a shy man, and the thought of his roughness had frightened him; he was ashamed of what he had done and he bowed ceremoniously, promising at the same time to take advantage of her invitation. Then he walked off as one who dreams.

He was rejoining the prince when, passing in front of the foyer, he heard Satin screaming out:

"Oh, the dirty old thing! Just you bloody well leave me alone!"

It was the Marquis de Chouard who was tumbling down over Satin. The girl had decidedly had enough of the fashionable world! Nana had certainly introduced her to Bordenave, but the necessity of standing with sealed lips for fear of allowing some awkward phrase to escape her had been too much for her feelings, and now she was anxious to regain her freedom, the more so as she had run against an old flame of hers in the wings. This was the super, to whom the task of impersonating Pluto had been entrusted, a pastry cook, who had already treated her to a whole week of love and flagellation. She was waiting for him, much irritated at the things the marquis was saying to her, as though she were one of those theatrical ladies! And so at last she assumed a highly respectable expression and jerked out this phrase:

"My husband's coming! You'll see."

Meanwhile the worn-looking artistes were dropping off one after the other in their outdoor coats. Groups of men and women were coming down the little winding staircase, and the outlines of battered hats and worn-out shawls were visible in the shadows. They looked colorless and unlovely, as became poor play actors who have got rid of their paint. On the stage, where the side lights and battens were being extinguished, the prince was listening to an anecdote Bordenave was telling him. He was waiting for Nana, and when at length she made her appearance the stage was dark, and the fireman on duty was finishing his round, lantern in hand. Bordenave, in order to save His Highness going about by the Passage des Panoramas, had made them open the corridor which led from the porter's lodge to the entrance hall of the theater. Along this narrow alley little women were racing pell-mell, for they were delighted to escape from the men who were waiting for them in the other passage. They went jostling and elbowing along, casting apprehensive glances behind them and only breathing freely when they got outside. Fontan, Bosc and Prulliere, on the other hand, retired at a leisurely pace, joking at the figure cut by the serious, paying admirers who were striding up and down the Galerie des Varietes at a time when the little dears were escaping along the boulevard with the men of their hearts. But Clarisse was especially sly. She had her suspicions about La Faloise, and, as a matter of fact, he was still in his place in the lodge among the gentlemen obstinately waiting on Mme Bron's chairs. They all stretched forward, and with that she passed brazenly by in the wake of a friend. The gentlemen were blinking in bewilderment over the wild whirl of petticoats eddying at the foot of the narrow stairs. It made them desperate to think they had waited so long, only to see them all flying away like this without being able to recognize a single one. The litter of little black cats were sleeping on the oilcloth, nestled against their mother's belly, and the latter was stretching her paws out in a state of beatitude while the big tortoise-shell cat sat at the other end of the table, her tail stretched out behind her and her yellow eyes solemnly following the flight of the women.

"If His Highness will be good enough to come this way," said Bordenave at the bottom of the stairs, and he pointed to the passage.

Some chorus girls were still crowding along it. The prince began following Nana while Muffat and the marquis walked behind.

It was a long, narrow passage lying between the theater and the house next door, a kind of contracted by-lane which had been covered with a sloping glass roof. Damp oozed from the walls, and the footfall sounded as hollow on the tiled floor as in an underground vault. It was crowded with the kind of rubbish usually found in a garret. There was a workbench on which the porter was wont to plane such parts of the scenery as required it, besides a pile of wooden barriers which at night were placed at the doors of the theater for the purpose of regulating the incoming stream of people. Nana had to pick up her dress as she passed a hydrant which, through having been carelessly turned off, was flooding the tiles underfoot. In the entrance hall the company bowed and said good-by. And when Bordenave was alone he summed up his opinion of the prince in a shrug of eminently philosophic disdain.

"He's a bit of a duffer all the same," he said to Fauchery without entering on further explanations, and with that Rose Mignon carried the journalist off with her husband in order to effect a reconciliation between them at home.

Muffat was left alone on the sidewalk. His Highness had handed Nana quietly into his carriage, and the marquis had slipped off after Satin and her super. In his excitement he was content to follow this vicious pair in vague hopes of some stray favor being granted him. Then with brain on fire Muffat decided to walk home. The struggle within him had wholly ceased. The ideas and beliefs of the last forty years were being drowned in a flood of new life. While he was passing along the boulevards the roll of the last carriages deafened him with the name of Nana; the gaslights set nude limbs dancing before his eyes—the nude limbs, the lithe arms, the white shoulders, of Nana. And he felt that he was hers utterly: he would have abjured everything, sold everything, to possess her for a single hour that very night. Youth, a lustful puberty of early manhood, was stirring within him at last, flaming up suddenly in the chaste heart of the Catholic and amid the dignified traditions of middle age.

CHAPTER VI

Count Muffat, accompanied by his wife and daughter, had arrived overnight at Les Fondettes, where Mme Hugon, who was staying there with only her son Georges, had invited them to come and spend a week. The house, which had been built at the end of the eighteenth century, stood in the middle of a huge square enclosure. It was perfectly unadorned, but the garden possessed magnificent shady trees and a chain of tanks fed by running spring water. It stood at the side of the road which leads from Orleans to Paris and with its rich verdure and high-embowered trees broke the monotony of that flat countryside, where fields stretched to the horizon's verge.

At eleven o'clock, when the second lunch bell had called the whole household together, Mme Hugon, smiling in her kindly maternal way, gave Sabine two great kisses, one on each cheek, and said as she did so:

"You know it's my custom in the country. Oh, seeing you here makes me feel twenty years younger. Did you sleep well in your old room?"

Then without waiting for her reply she turned to Estelle:

"And this little one, has she had a nap too? Give me a kiss, my child."

They had taken their seats in the vast dining room, the windows of which looked out on the park. But they only occupied one end of the long table, where they sat somewhat crowded together for company's sake. Sabine, in high good spirits, dwelt on various childish memories which had been stirred up within her—memories of months passed at Les Fondettes, of long walks, of a tumble into one of the tanks on a summer evening, of an old romance of chivalry discovered by her on the top of a cupboard and read during the winter before fires made of vine branches. And Georges, who had not seen the countess for some months, thought there was something curious about her. Her face seemed changed, somehow, while, on the other hand, that stick of an Estelle seemed more insignificant and dumb and awkward than ever.

While such simple fare as cutlets and boiled eggs was being discussed by the company, Mme Hugon, as became a good housekeeper, launched out into complaints. The butchers, she said, were becoming impossible. She bought everything at Orleans, and yet they never brought her the pieces she asked for. Yet, alas, if her guests had nothing worth eating it was their own fault: they had come too late in the season.

"There's no sense in it," she said. "I've been expecting you since June, and now we're half through September. You see, it doesn't look pretty."

And with a movement she pointed to the trees on the grass outside, the leaves of which were beginning to turn yellow. The day was covered, and the distance was hidden by a bluish haze which was fraught with a sweet and melancholy peacefulness.

"Oh, I'm expecting company," she continued. "We shall be gayer then! The first to come will be two gentlemen whom Georges has invited—Monsieur Fauchery and Monsieur Daguenet; you know them, do you not? Then we shall have Monsieur de Vandeuvres, who has promised me a visit these five years past. This time, perhaps, he'll make up his mind!"

"Oh, well and good!" said the countess, laughing. "If we only can get Monsieur de Vandeuvres! But he's too much engaged."

"And Philippe?" queried Muffat.

"Philippe has asked for a furlough," replied the old lady, "but without doubt you won't be at Les Fondettes any longer when he arrives."

The coffee was served. Paris was now the subject of conversation, and Steiner's name was mentioned, at which Mme Hugon gave a little cry.

"Let me see," she said; "Monsieur Steiner is that stout man I met at your house one evening. He's a banker, is he not? Now there's a detestable man for you! Why, he's gone and bought an actress an estate about a league from here, over Gumieres way, beyond the Choue. The whole countryside's scandalized. Did you know about that, my friend?"

"I knew nothing about it," replied Muffat. "Ah, then, Steiner's bought a country place in the neighborhood!"

Hearing his mother broach the subject, Georges looked into his coffee cup, but in his astonishment at the count's answer he glanced up at him and stared. Why was he lying so glibly? The count, on his side, noticed the young fellow's movement and gave him a suspicious glance. Mme Hugon continued to go into details: the country place was called La Mignotte. In order to get there one had to go up the bank of the Choue as far as Gumieres in order to cross the bridge; otherwise one got one's feet wet and ran the risk of a ducking.

"And what is the actress's name?" asked the countess.

"Oh, I wasn't told," murmured the old lady. "Georges, you were there the morning the gardener spoke to us about it."

Georges appeared to rack his brains. Muffat waited, twirling a teaspoon between his fingers. Then the countess addressed her husband:

"Isn't Monsieur Steiner with that singer at the Varietes, that Nana?"

"Nana, that's the name! A horrible woman!" cried Mme Hugon with growing annoyance. "And they are expecting her at La Mignotte. I've heard all about it from the gardener. Didn't the gardener say they were expecting her this evening, Georges?"

The count gave a little start of astonishment, but Georges replied with much vivacity:

"Oh, Mother, the gardener spoke without knowing anything about it. Directly afterward the coachman said just the opposite. Nobody's expected at La Mignotte before the day after tomorrow."

He tried hard to assume a natural expression while he slyly watched the effect of his remarks on the count. The latter was twirling his spoon again as though reassured. The countess, her eyes fixed dreamily on the blue distances of the park, seemed to have lost all interest in the conversation. The shadow of a smile on her lips, she seemed to be following up a secret thought which had been suddenly awakened within her. Estelle, on the other hand, sitting stiffly on her chair, had heard all that had been said about Nana, but her white, virginal face had not betrayed a trace of emotion.

"Dear me, dear me! I've got no right to grow angry," murmured Mme Hugon after a pause, and with a return to her old good humor she added:

"Everybody's got a right to live. If we meet this said lady on the road we shall not bow to her—that's all!"

And as they got up from table she once more gently upbraided the Countess Sabine for having been so long in coming to her that year. But the countess defended herself and threw the blame of the delays upon her husband's shoulders. Twice on the eve of departure, when all the trunks were locked, he counterordered their journey on the plea of urgent business. Then he had suddenly decided to start just when the trip seemed shelved. Thereupon the old lady told them how Georges in the same way had twice announced his arrival without arriving and had finally cropped up at Les Fondettes the day before yesterday, when she was no longer expecting him. They had come down into the garden, and the two men, walking beside the ladies, were listening to them in consequential silence.

"Never mind," said Mme Hugon, kissing her son's sunny locks, "Zizi is a very good boy to come and bury himself in the country with his mother. He's a dear Zizi not to forget me!"

In the afternoon she expressed some anxiety, for Georges, directly after leaving the table, had complained of a heavy feeling in his head and now seemed in for an atrocious sick headache. Toward four o'clock he said he would go upstairs to bed: it was the only remedy. After sleeping till tomorrow morning he would be perfectly himself again. His mother was bent on putting him to bed herself, but as she left the room he ran and locked the door, explaining that he was shutting himself in so that no one should come and disturb him. Then caressingly he shouted, "Good night till tomorrow, little Mother!" and promised to take a nap. But he did not go to bed again and with flushed cheeks and bright eyes noiselessly put on his clothes. Then he sat on a chair and waited. When the dinner bell rang he listened for Count Muffat, who was on his way to the dining room, and ten minutes later, when he was certain that no one would see him, he slipped from the window to the ground with the assistance of a rain pipe. His bedroom was situated on the first floor and looked out upon the rear of the house. He threw himself among some bushes and got out of the park and then galloped across the fields with empty stomach and heart beating with excitement. Night was closing in, and a small fine rain was beginning to fall.

It was the very evening that Nana was due at La Mignotte. Ever since in the preceding May Steiner had bought her this country place she had from time to time been so filled with the desire of taking possession that she had wept hot tears about, but on each of these occasions Bordenave had refused to give her even the shortest leave and had deferred her holiday till September on the plea that he did not intend putting an understudy in her place, even for one evening, now that the exhibition was on. Toward the close of August he spoke of October. Nana was furious and declared that she would be at La Mignotte in the middle of September. Nay, in order to dare Bordenave, she even invited a crowd of guests in his very presence. One afternoon in her rooms, as Muffat, whose advances she still adroitly resisted, was beseeching her with tremulous emotion to yield to his entreaties, she at length promised to be kind, but not in Paris, and to him, too, she named the middle of September. Then on the twelfth she was seized by a desire to be off forthwith with Zoe as her sole companion. It might be that Bordenave had got wind of her intentions and was about to discover some means of detaining her. She was delighted at the notion of putting him in a fix, and she sent him a doctor's certificate. When once the idea had entered her head of being the first to get to La Mignotte and of living there two days without anybody knowing anything about it, she rushed Zoe through the operation of packing and finally pushed her into a cab, where in a sudden burst of extreme contrition she kissed her and begged her pardon. It was only when they got to the station refreshment room that she thought of writing Steiner of her movements. She begged him to wait till the day after tomorrow before rejoining her if he wanted to find her quite bright and fresh. And then, suddenly conceiving another project, she wrote a second letter, in which she besought her aunt to bring little Louis to her at once. It would do Baby so much good! And how happy they would be together in the shade of the trees! In the railway carriage between Paris and Orleans she spoke of nothing else; her eyes were full of tears; she had an unexpected attack of maternal tenderness and mingled together flowers, birds and child in her every sentence.

La Mignotte was more than three leagues away from the station, and Nana lost a good hour over the hire of a carriage, a huge, dilapidated calash, which rumbled slowly along to an accompaniment of rattling old iron. She had at once taken possession of the coachman, a little taciturn old man whom she overwhelmed with questions. Had he often passed by La Mignotte? It was behind this hill then? There ought to be lots of trees there, eh? And the house could one see it at a distance? The little old man answered with a succession of grunts. Down in the calash Nana was almost dancing with impatience, while Zoe, in her annoyance at having left Paris in such a hurry, sat stiffly sulking beside her. The horse suddenly stopped short, and the young woman thought they had reached their destination. She put her head out of the carriage door and asked:

"Are we there, eh?"

By way of answer the driver whipped up his horse, which was in the act of painfully climbing a hill. Nana gazed ecstatically at the vast plain beneath the gray sky where great clouds were banked up.

"Oh, do look, Zoe! There's greenery! Now, is that all wheat? Good lord, how pretty it is!"

"One can quite see that Madame doesn't come from the country," was the servant's prim and tardy rejoinder. "As for me, I knew the country only too well when I was with my dentist. He had a house at Bougival. No, it's cold, too, this evening. It's damp in these parts."

They were driving under the shadow of a wood, and Nana sniffed up the scent of the leaves as a young dog might. All of a sudden at a turn of the road she caught sight of the corner of a house among the trees. Perhaps it was there! And with that she began a conversation with the driver, who continued shaking his head by way of saying no. Then as they drove down the other side of the hill he contented himself by holding out his whip and muttering, "'Tis down there."

She got up and stretched herself almost bodily out of the carriage door.

"Where is it? Where is it?" she cried with pale cheeks, but as yet she saw nothing.

At last she caught sight of a bit of wall. And then followed a succession of little cries and jumps, the ecstatic behavior of a woman overcome by a new and vivid sensation.

"I see it! I see it, Zoe! Look out at the other side. Oh, there's a terrace with brick ornaments on the roof! And there's a hothouse down there! But the place is immense. Oh, how happy I am! Do look, Zoe! Now, do look!"

The carriage had by this time pulled up before the park gates. A side door was opened, and the gardener, a tall, dry fellow, made his appearance, cap in hand. Nana made an effort to regain her dignity, for the driver seemed now to be suppressing a laugh behind his dry, speechless lips. She refrained from setting off at a run and listened to the gardener, who was a very talkative fellow. He begged Madame to excuse the disorder in which she found everything, seeing that he had only received Madame's letter that very morning. But despite all his efforts, she flew off at a tangent and walked so quickly that Zoe could scarcely follow her. At the end of the avenue she paused for a moment in order to take the house in at a glance. It was a great pavilion-like building in the Italian manner, and it was flanked by a smaller construction, which a rich Englishman, after two years' residence in Naples, had caused to be erected and had forthwith become disgusted with.

"I'll take Madame over the house," said the gardener.

But she had outrun him entirely, and she shouted back that he was not to put himself out and that she would go over the house by herself. She preferred doing that, she said. And without removing her hat she dashed into the different rooms, calling to Zoe as she did so, shouting her impressions from one end of each corridor to the other and filling the empty house, which for long months had been uninhabited, with exclamations and bursts of laughter. In the first place, there was the hall. It was a little damp, but that didn't matter; one wasn't going to sleep in it. Then came the drawing room, quite the thing, the drawing room, with its windows opening on the lawn. Only the red upholsteries there were hideous; she would alter all that. As to the dining room-well, it was a lovely dining room, eh? What big blowouts you might give in Paris if you had a dining room as large as that! As she was going upstairs to the first floor it occurred to her that she had not seen the kitchen, and she went down again and indulged in ecstatic exclamations. Zoe ought to admire the beautiful dimensions of the sink and the width of the hearth, where you might have roasted a sheep! When she had gone upstairs again her bedroom especially enchanted her. It had been hung with delicate rose-colored Louis XVI cretonne by an Orleans upholsterer. Dear me, yes! One ought to sleep jolly sound in such a room as that; why, it was a real best bedroom! Then came four or five guest chambers and then some splendid garrets, which would be extremely convenient for trunks and boxes. Zoe looked very gruff and cast a frigid glance into each of the rooms as she lingered in Madame's wake. She saw Nana disappearing up the steep garret ladder and said, "Thanks, I haven't the least wish to break my legs." But the sound of a voice reached her from far away; indeed, it seemed to come whistling down a chimney.

"Zoe, Zoe, where are you? Come up, do! You've no idea! It's like fairyland!"

Zoe went up, grumbling. On the roof she found her mistress leaning against the brickwork balustrade and gazing at the valley which spread out into the silence. The horizon was immeasurably wide, but it was now covered by masses of gray vapor, and a fierce wind was driving fine rain before it. Nana had to hold her hat on with both hands to keep it from being blown away while her petticoats streamed out behind her, flapping like a flag.

"Not if I know it!" said Zoe, drawing her head in at once. "Madame will be blown away. What beastly weather!"

Madame did not hear what she said. With her head over the balustrade she was gazing at the grounds beneath. They consisted of seven or eight acres of land enclosed within a wall. Then the view of the kitchen garden entirely engrossed her attention. She darted back, jostling the lady's maid at the top of the stairs and bursting out:

"It's full of cabbages! Oh, such woppers! And lettuces and sorrel and onions and everything! Come along, make haste!"

The rain was falling more heavily now, and she opened her white silk sunshade and ran down the garden walks.

"Madame will catch cold," cried Zoe, who had stayed quietly behind under the awning over the garden door.

But Madame wanted to see things, and at each new discovery there was a burst of wonderment.

"Zoe, here's spinach! Do come. Oh, look at the artichokes! They are funny. So they grow in the ground, do they? Now, what can that be? I don't know it. Do come, Zoe, perhaps you know."

The lady's maid never budged an inch. Madame must really be raving mad. For now the rain was coming down in torrents, and the little white silk sunshade was already dark with it. Nor did it shelter Madame, whose skirts were wringing wet. But that didn't put her out in the smallest degree, and in the pouring rain she visited the kitchen garden and the orchard, stopping in front of every fruit tree and bending over every bed of vegetables. Then she ran and looked down the well and lifted up a frame to see what was underneath it and was lost in the contemplation of a huge pumpkin. She wanted to go along every single garden walk and to take immediate possession of all the things she had been wont to dream of in the old days, when she was a slipshod work-girl on the Paris pavements. The rain redoubled, but she never heeded it and was only miserable at the thought that the daylight was fading. She could not see clearly now and touched things with her fingers to find out what they were. Suddenly in the twilight she caught sight of a bed of strawberries, and all that was childish in her awoke.

"Strawberries! Strawberries! There are some here; I can feel them. A plate, Zoe! Come and pick strawberries."

And dropping her sunshade, Nana crouched down in the mire under the full force of the downpour. With drenched hands she began gathering the fruit among the leaves. But Zoe in the meantime brought no plate, and when the young woman rose to her feet again she was frightened. She thought she had seen a shadow close to her.

"It's some beast!" she screamed.

But she stood rooted to the path in utter amazement. It was a man, and she recognized him.

"Gracious me, it's Baby! What ARE you doing there, baby?"

"'Gad, I've come—that's all!" replied Georges.

Her head swam.

"You knew I'd come through the gardener telling you? Oh, that poor child! Why, he's soaking!"

"Oh, I'll explain that to you! The rain caught me on my way here, and then, as I didn't wish to go upstream as far as Gumieres, I crossed the Choue and fell into a blessed hole."

Nana forgot the strawberries forthwith. She was trembling and full of pity. That poor dear Zizi in a hole full of water! And she drew him with her in the direction of the house and spoke of making up a roaring fire.

"You know," he murmured, stopping her among the shadows, "I was in hiding because I was afraid of being scolded, like in Paris, when I come and see you and you're not expecting me."

She made no reply but burst out laughing and gave him a kiss on the forehead. Up till today she had always treated him like a naughty urchin, never taking his declarations seriously and amusing herself at his expense as though he were a little man of no consequence whatever. There was much ado to install him in the house. She absolutely insisted on the fire being lit in her bedroom, as being the most comfortable place for his reception. Georges had not surprised Zoe, who was used to all kinds of encounters, but the gardener, who brought the wood upstairs, was greatly nonplused at sight of this dripping gentleman to whom he was certain he had not opened the front door. He was, however, dismissed, as he was no longer wanted.

A lamp lit up the room, and the fire burned with a great bright flame.

"He'll never get dry, and he'll catch cold," said Nana, seeing Georges beginning to shiver.

And there were no men's trousers in her house! She was on the point of calling the gardener back when an idea struck her. Zoe, who was unpacking the trunks in the dressing room, brought her mistress a change of underwear, consisting of a shift and some petticoats with a dressing jacket.

"Oh, that's first rate!" cried the young woman. "Zizi can put 'em all on. You're not angry with me, eh? When your clothes are dry you can put them on again, and then off with you, as fast as fast can be, so as not to have a scolding from your mamma. Make haste! I'm going to change my things, too, in the dressing room."

Ten minutes afterward, when she reappeared in a tea gown, she clasped her hands in a perfect ecstasy.

"Oh, the darling! How sweet he looks dressed like a little woman!"

He had simply slipped on a long nightgown with an insertion front, a pair of worked drawers and the dressing jacket, which was a long cambric garment trimmed with lace. Thus attired and with his delicate young arms showing and his bright damp hair falling almost to his shoulders, he looked just like a girl.

"Why, he's as slim as I am!" said Nana, putting her arm round his waist. "Zoe, just come here and see how it suits him. It's made for him, eh? All except the bodice part, which is too large. He hasn't got as much as I have, poor, dear Zizi!"

"Oh, to be sure, I'm a bit wanting there," murmured Georges with a smile.

All three grew very merry about it. Nana had set to work buttoning the dressing jacket from top to bottom so as to make him quite decent. Then she turned him round as though he were a doll, gave him little thumps, made the skirt stand well out behind. After which she asked him questions. Was he comfortable? Did he feel warm? Zounds, yes, he was comfortable! Nothing fitted more closely and warmly than a woman's shift; had he been able, he would always have worn one. He moved round and about therein, delighted with the fine linen and the soft touch of that unmanly garment, in the folds of which he thought he discovered some of Nana's own warm life.

Meanwhile Zoe had taken the soaked clothes down to the kitchen in order to dry them as quickly as possible in front of a vine-branch fire. Then Georges, as he lounged in an easy chair, ventured to make a confession.

"I say, are you going to feed this evening? I'm dying of hunger. I haven't dined."

Nana was vexed. The great silly thing to go sloping off from Mamma's with an empty stomach, just to chuck himself into a hole full of water! But she was as hungry as a hunter too. They certainly must feed! Only they would have to eat what they could get. Whereupon a round table was rolled up in front of the fire, and the queerest of dinners was improvised thereon. Zoe ran down to the gardener's, he having cooked a mess of cabbage soup in case Madame should not dine at Orleans before her arrival. Madame, indeed, had forgotten to tell him what he was to get ready in the letter she had sent him. Fortunately the cellar was well furnished. Accordingly they had cabbage soup, followed by a piece of bacon. Then Nana rummaged in her handbag and found quite a heap of provisions which she had taken the precaution of stuffing into it. There was a Strasbourg pate, for instance, and a bag of sweet-meats and some oranges. So they both ate away like ogres and, while they satisfied their healthy young appetites, treated one another with easy good fellowship. Nana kept calling Georges "dear old girl," a form of address which struck her as at once tender and familiar. At dessert, in order not to give Zoe any more trouble, they used the same spoon turn and turn about while demolishing a pot of preserves they had discovered at the top of a cupboard.

"Oh, you dear old girl!" said Nana, pushing back the round table. "I haven't made such a good dinner these ten years past!"

Yet it was growing late, and she wanted to send her boy off for fear he should be suspected of all sorts of things. But he kept declaring that he had plenty of time to spare. For the matter of that, his clothes were not drying well, and Zoe averred that it would take an hour longer at least, and as she was dropping with sleep after the fatigues of the journey, they sent her off to bed. After which they were alone in the silent house.

It was a very charming evening. The fire was dying out amid glowing embers, and in the great blue room, where Zoe had made up the bed before going upstairs, the air felt a little oppressive. Nana, overcome by the heavy warmth, got up to open the window for a few minutes, and as she did so she uttered a little cry.

"Great heavens, how beautiful it is! Look, dear old girl!"

Georges had come up, and as though the window bar had not been sufficiently wide, he put his arm round Nana's waist and rested his head against her shoulder. The weather had undergone a brisk change: the skies were clearing, and a full moon lit up the country with its golden disk of light. A sovereign quiet reigned over the valley. It seemed wider and larger as it opened on the immense distances of the plain, where the trees loomed like little shadowy islands amid a shining and waveless lake. And Nana grew tenderhearted, felt herself a child again. Most surely she had dreamed of nights like this at an epoch which she could not recall. Since leaving the train every object of sensation—the wide countryside, the green things with their pungent scents, the house, the vegetables—had stirred her to such a degree that now it seemed to her as if she had left Paris twenty years ago. Yesterday's existence was far, far away, and she was full of sensations of which she had no previous experience. Georges, meanwhile, was giving her neck little coaxing kisses, and this again added to her sweet unrest. With hesitating hand she pushed him from her, as though he were a child whose affectionate advances were fatiguing, and once more she told him that he ought to take his departure. He did not gainsay her. All in good time—he would go all in good time!

But a bird raised its song and again was silent. It was a robin in an elder tree below the window.

"Wait one moment," whispered Georges; "the lamp's frightening him. I'll put it out."

And when he came back and took her waist again he added:

"We'll relight it in a minute."

Then as she listened to the robin and the boy pressed against her side, Nana remembered. Ah yes, it was in novels that she had got to know all this! In other days she would have given her heart to have a full moon and robins and a lad dying of love for her. Great God, she could have cried, so good and charming did it all seem to her! Beyond a doubt she had been born to live honestly! So she pushed Georges away again, and he grew yet bolder.

"No, let me be. I don't care about it. It would be very wicked at your age. Now listen—I'll always be your mamma."

A sudden feeling of shame overcame her. She was blushing exceedingly, and yet not a soul could see her. The room behind them was full of black night while the country stretched before them in silence and lifeless solitude. Never had she known such a sense of shame before. Little by little she felt her power of resistance ebbing away, and that despite her embarrassed efforts to the contrary. That disguise of his, that woman's shift and that dressing jacket set her laughing again. It was as though a girl friend were teasing her.

"Oh, it's not right; it's not right!" she stammered after a last effort.

And with that, in face of the lovely night, she sank like a young virgin into the arms of this mere child. The house slept.

Next morning at Les Fondettes, when the bell rang for lunch, the dining-room table was no longer too big for the company. Fauchery and Daguenet had been driven up together in one carriage, and after them another had arrived with the Count de Vandeuvres, who had followed by the next train. Georges was the last to come downstairs. He was looking a little pale, and his eyes were sunken, but in answer to questions he said that he was much better, though he was still somewhat shaken by the violence of the attack. Mme Hugon looked into his eyes with an anxious smile and adjusted his hair which had been carelessly combed that morning, but he drew back as though embarrassed by this tender little action. During the meal she chaffed Vandeuvres very pleasantly and declared that she had expected him for five years past.

"Well, here you are at last! How have you managed it?"

Vandeuvres took her remarks with equal pleasantry. He told her that he had lost a fabulous sum of money at the club yesterday and thereupon had come away with the intention of ending up in the country.

"'Pon my word, yes, if only you can find me an heiress in these rustic parts! There must be delightful women hereabouts."

The old lady rendered equal thanks to Daguenet and Fauchery for having been so good as to accept her son's invitation, and then to her great and joyful surprise she saw the Marquis de Chouard enter the room. A third carriage had brought him.

"Dear me, you've made this your trysting place today!" she cried. "You've passed word round! But what's happening? For years I've never succeeded in bringing you all together, and now you all drop in at once. Oh, I certainly don't complain."

Another place was laid. Fauchery found himself next the Countess Sabine, whose liveliness and gaiety surprised him when he remembered her drooping, languid state in the austere Rue Miromesnil drawing room. Daguenet, on the other hand, who was seated on Estelle's left, seemed slightly put out by his propinquity to that tall, silent girl. The angularity of her elbows was disagreeable to him. Muffat and Chouard had exchanged a sly glance while Vandeuvres continued joking about his coming marriage.

"Talking of ladies," Mme Hugon ended by saying, "I have a new neighbor whom you probably know."

And she mentioned Nana. Vandeuvres affected the liveliest astonishment.

"Well, that is strange! Nana's property near here!"

Fauchery and Daguenet indulged in a similar demonstration while the Marquis de Chouard discussed the breast of a chicken without appearing to comprehend their meaning. Not one of the men had smiled.

"Certainly," continued the old lady, "and the person in question arrived at La Mignotte yesterday evening, as I was saying she would. I got my information from the gardener this morning."

At these words the gentlemen could not conceal their very real surprise. They all looked up. Eh? What? Nana had come down! But they were only expecting her next day; they were privately under the impression that they would arrive before her! Georges alone sat looking at his glass with drooped eyelids and a tired expression. Ever since the beginning of lunch he had seemed to be sleeping with open eyes and a vague smile on his lips.

"Are you still in pain, my Zizi?" asked his mother, who had been gazing at him throughout the meal.

He started and blushed as he said that he was very well now, but the worn-out insatiate expression of a girl who has danced too much did not fade from his face.

"What's the matter with your neck?" resumed Mme Hugon in an alarmed tone. "It's all red."

He was embarrassed and stammered. He did not know—he had nothing the matter with his neck. Then drawing his shirt collar up:

"Ah yes, some insect stung me there!"

The Marquis de Chouard had cast a sidelong glance at the little red place. Muffat, too, looked at Georges. The company was finishing lunch and planning various excursions. Fauchery was growing increasingly excited with the Countess Sabine's laughter. As he was passing her a dish of fruit their hands touched, and for one second she looked at him with eyes so full of dark meaning that he once more thought of the secret which had been communicated to him one evening after an uproarious dinner. Then, too, she was no longer the same woman. Something was more pronounced than of old, and her gray foulard gown which fitted loosely over her shoulders added a touch of license to her delicate, high-strung elegance.

When they rose from the table Daguenet remained behind with Fauchery in order to impart to him the following crude witticism about Estelle: "A nice broomstick that to shove into a man's hands!" Nevertheless, he grew serious when the journalist told him the amount she was worth in the way of dowry.

"Four hundred thousand francs."

"And the mother?" queried Fauchery. "She's all right, eh?"

"Oh, SHE'LL work the oracle! But it's no go, my dear man!"

"Bah! How are we to know? We must wait and see."

It was impossible to go out that day, for the rain was still falling in heavy showers. Georges had made haste to disappear from the scene and had double-locked his door. These gentlemen avoided mutual explanations, though they were none of them deceived as to the reasons which had brought them together. Vandeuvres, who had had a very bad time at play, had really conceived the notion of lying fallow for a season, and he was counting on Nana's presence in the neighborhood as a safeguard against excessive boredom. Fauchery had taken advantage of the holidays granted him by Rose, who just then was extremely busy. He was thinking of discussing a second notice with Nana, in case country air should render them reciprocally affectionate. Daguenet, who had been just a little sulky with her since Steiner had come upon the scene, was dreaming of resuming the old connection or at least of snatching some delightful opportunities if occasion offered. As to the Marquis de Chouard, he was watching for times and seasons. But among all those men who were busy following in the tracks of Venus—a Venus with the rouge scarce washed from her cheeks—Muffat was at once the most ardent and the most tortured by the novel sensations of desire and fear and anger warring in his anguished members. A formal promise had been made him; Nana was awaiting him. Why then had she taken her departure two days sooner than was expected?

He resolved to betake himself to La Mignotte after dinner that same evening. At night as the count was leaving the park Georges fled forth after him. He left him to follow the road to Gumieres, crossed the Choue, rushed into Nana's presence, breathless, furious and with tears in his eyes. Ah yes, he understood everything! That old fellow now on his way to her was coming to keep an appointment! Nana was dumfounded by this ebullition of jealousy, and, greatly moved by the way things were turning out, she took him in her arms and comforted him to the best of her ability. Oh no, he was quite beside the mark; she was expecting no one. If the gentleman came it would not be her fault. What a great ninny that Zizi was to be taking on so about nothing at all! By her child's soul she swore she loved nobody except her own Georges. And with that she kissed him and wiped away his tears.

"Now just listen! You'll see that it's all for your sake," she went on when he had grown somewhat calmer. "Steiner has arrived—he's up above there now. You know, duckie, I can't turn HIM out of doors."

"Yes, I know; I'm not talking of HIM," whispered the boy.

"Very well then, I've stuck him into the room at the end. I said I was out of sorts. He's unpacking his trunk. Since nobody's seen you, be quick and run up and hide in my room and wait for me."

Georges sprang at her and threw his arms round her neck. It was true after all! She loved him a little! So they would put the lamp out as they did yesterday and be in the dark till daytime! Then as the front-door bell sounded he quietly slipped away. Upstairs in the bedroom he at once took off his shoes so as not to make any noise and straightway crouched down behind a curtain and waited soberly.

Nana welcomed Count Muffat, who, though still shaken with passion, was now somewhat embarrassed. She had pledged her word to him and would even have liked to keep it since he struck her as a serious, practicable lover. But truly, who could have foreseen all that happened yesterday? There was the voyage and the house she had never set eyes on before and the arrival of the drenched little lover! How sweet it had all seemed to her, and how delightful it would be to continue in it! So much the worse for the gentleman! For three months past she had been keeping him dangling after her while she affected conventionality in order the further to inflame him. Well, well! He would have to continue dangling, and if he didn't like that he could go! She would sooner have thrown up everything than have played false to Georges.

The count had seated himself with all the ceremonious politeness becoming a country caller. Only his hands were trembling slightly. Lust, which Nana's skillful tactics daily exasperated, had at last wrought terrible havoc in that sanguine, uncontaminated nature. The grave man, the chamberlain who was wont to tread the state apartments at the Tuileries with slow and dignified step, was now nightly driven to plunge his teeth into his bolster, while with sobs of exasperation he pictured to himself a sensual shape which never changed. But this time he was determined to make an end of the torture. Coming along the highroad in the deep quiet of the gloaming, he had meditated a fierce course of action. And the moment he had finished his opening remarks he tried to take hold of Nana with both hands.

"No, no! Take care!" she said simply. She was not vexed; nay, she even smiled.

He caught her again, clenching his teeth as he did so. Then as she struggled to get free he coarsely and crudely reminded her that he had come to stay the night. Though much embarrassed at this, Nana did not cease to smile. She took his hands and spoke very familiarly in order to soften her refusal.

"Come now, darling, do be quiet! Honor bright, I can't: Steiner's upstairs."

But he was beside himself. Never yet had she seen a man in such a state. She grew frightened and put her hand over his mouth in order to stifle his cries. Then in lowered tones she besought him to be quiet and to let her alone. Steiner was coming downstairs. Things were getting stupid, to be sure! When Steiner entered the room he heard Nana remarking:

"I adore the country."

She was lounging comfortably back in her deep easy chair, and she turned round and interrupted herself.

"It's Monsieur le Comte Muffat, darling. He saw a light here while he was strolling past, and he came in to bid us welcome."

The two men clasped hands. Muffat, with his face in shadow, stood silent for a moment or two. Steiner seemed sulky. Then they chatted about Paris: business there was at a standstill; abominable things had been happening on 'change. When a quarter of an hour had elapsed Muffat took his departure, and, as the young woman was seeing him to the door, he tried without success to make an assignation for the following night. Steiner went up to bed almost directly afterward, grumbling, as he did so, at the everlasting little ailments that seemed to afflict the genus courtesan. The two old boys had been packed off at last! When she was able to rejoin him Nana found Georges still hiding exemplarily behind the curtain. The room was dark. He pulled her down onto the floor as she sat near him, and together they began playfully rolling on the ground, stopping now and again and smothering their laughter with kisses whenever they struck their bare feet against some piece of furniture. Far away, on the road to Gumieres, Count Muffat walked slowly home and, hat in hand, bathed his burning forehead in the freshness and silence of the night.

During the days that followed Nana found life adorable. In the lad's arms she was once more a girl of fifteen, and under the caressing influence of this renewed childhood love's white flower once more blossomed forth in a nature which had grown hackneyed and disgusted in the service of the other sex. She would experience sudden fits of shame, sudden vivid emotions, which left her trembling. She wanted to laugh and to cry, and she was beset by nervous, maidenly feelings, mingled with warm desires that made her blush again. Never yet had she felt anything comparable to this. The country filled her with tender thoughts. As a little girl she had long wished to dwell in a meadow, tending a goat, because one day on the talus of the fortifications she had seen a goat bleating at the end of its tether. Now this estate, this stretch of land belonging to her, simply swelled her heart to bursting, so utterly had her old ambition been surpassed. Once again she tasted the novel sensations experienced by chits of girls, and at night when she went upstairs, dizzy with her day in the open air and intoxicated by the scent of green leaves, and rejoined her Zizi behind the curtain, she fancied herself a schoolgirl enjoying a holiday escapade. It was an amour, she thought, with a young cousin to whom she was going to be married. And so she trembled at the slightest noise and dread lest parents should hear her, while making the delicious experiments and suffering the voluptuous terrors attendant on a girl's first slip from the path of virtue.

Nana in those days was subject to the fancies a sentimental girl will indulge in. She would gaze at the moon for hours. One night she had a mind to go down into the garden with Georges when all the household was asleep. When there they strolled under the trees, their arms round each other's waists, and finally went and laid down in the grass, where the dew soaked them through and through. On another occasion, after a long silence up in the bedroom, she fell sobbing on the lad's neck, declaring in broken accents that she was afraid of dying. She would often croon a favorite ballad of Mme Lerat's, which was full of flowers and birds. The song would melt her to tears, and she would break off in order to clasp Georges in a passionate embrace and to extract from him vows of undying affection. In short she was extremely silly, as she herself would admit when they both became jolly good fellows again and sat up smoking cigarettes on the edge of the bed, dangling their bare legs over it the while and tapping their heels against its wooden side.

But what utterly melted the young woman's heart was Louiset's arrival. She had an access of maternal affection which was as violent as a mad fit. She would carry off her boy into the sunshine outside to watch him kicking about; she would dress him like a little prince and roll with him in the grass. The moment he arrived she decided that he was to sleep near her, in the room next hers, where Mme Lerat, whom the country greatly affected, used to begin snoring the moment her head touched the pillow. Louiset did not hurt Zizi's position in the least. On the contrary, Nana said that she had now two children, and she treated them with the same wayward tenderness. At night, more than ten times running, she would leave Zizi to go and see if Louiset were breathing properly, but on her return she would re-embrace her Zizi and lavish on him the caresses that had been destined for the child. She played at being Mamma while he wickedly enjoyed being dandled in the arms of the great wench and allowed himself to be rocked to and fro like a baby that is being sent to sleep. It was all so delightful, and Nana was so charmed with her present existence, that she seriously proposed to him never to leave the country. They would send all the other people away, and he, she and the child would live alone. And with that they would make a thousand plans till daybreak and never once hear Mme Lerat as she snored vigorously after the fatigues of a day spent in picking country flowers.

This charming existence lasted nearly a week. Count Muffat used to come every evening and go away again with disordered face and burning hands. One evening he was not even received, as Steiner had been obliged to run up to Paris. He was told that Madame was not well. Nana grew daily more disgusted at the notion of deceiving Georges. He was such an innocent lad, and he had such faith in her! She would have looked on herself as the lowest of the low had she played him false. Besides, it would have sickened her to do so! Zoe, who took her part in this affair in mute disdain, believed that Madame was growing senseless.

On the sixth day a band of visitors suddenly blundered into Nana's idyl. She had, indeed, invited a whole swarm of people under the belief that none of them would come. And so one fine afternoon she was vastly astonished and annoyed to see an omnibus full of people pulling up outside the gate of La Mignotte.

"It's us!" cried Mignon, getting down first from the conveyance and extracting then his sons Henri and Charles.

Labordette thereupon appeared and began handing out an interminable file of ladies—Lucy Stewart, Caroline Hequet, Tatan Nene, Maria Blond. Nana was in hopes that they would end there, when La Faloise sprang from the step in order to receive Gaga and her daughter Amelie in his trembling arms. That brought the number up to eleven people. Their installation proved a laborious undertaking. There were five spare rooms at La Mignotte, one of which was already occupied by Mme Lerat and Louiset. The largest was devoted to the Gaga and La Faloise establishment, and it was decided that Amelie should sleep on a truckle bed in the dressing room at the side. Mignon and his two sons had the third room. Labordette the fourth. There thus remained one room which was transformed into a dormitory with four beds in it for Lucy, Caroline, Tatan and Maria. As to Steiner, he would sleep on the divan in the drawing room. At the end of an hour, when everyone was duly settled, Nana, who had begun by being furious, grew enchanted at the thought of playing hostess on a grand scale. The ladies complimented her on La Mignotte. "It's a stunning property, my dear!" And then, too, they brought her quite a whiff of Parisian air, and talking all together with bursts of laughter and exclamation and emphatic little gestures, they gave her all the petty gossip of the week just past. By the by, and how about Bordenave? What had he said about her prank? Oh, nothing much! After bawling about having her brought back by the police, he had simply put somebody else in her place at night. Little Violaine was the understudy, and she had even obtained a very pretty success as the Blonde Venus. Which piece of news made Nana rather serious.

It was only four o'clock in the afternoon, and there was some talk of taking a stroll around.

"Oh, I haven't told you," said Nana, "I was just off to get up potatoes when you arrived."

Thereupon they all wanted to go and dig potatoes without even changing their dresses first. It was quite a party. The gardener and two helpers were already in the potato field at the end of the grounds. The ladies knelt down and began fumbling in the mold with their beringed fingers, shouting gaily whenever they discovered a potato of exceptional size. It struck them as so amusing! But Tatan Nene was in a state of triumph! So many were the potatoes she had gathered in her youth that she forgot herself entirely and gave the others much good advice, treating them like geese the while. The gentlemen toiled less strenuously. Mignon looked every inch the good citizen and father and made his stay in the country an occasion for completing his boys' education. Indeed, he spoke to them of Parmentier!

Dinner that evening was wildly hilarious. The company ate ravenously. Nana, in a state of great elevation, had a warm disagreement with her butler, an individual who had been in service at the bishop's palace in Orleans. The ladies smoked over their coffee. An earsplitting noise of merrymaking issued from the open windows and died out far away under the serene evening sky while peasants, belated in the lanes, turned and looked at the flaring rooms.

"It's most tiresome that you're going back the day after tomorrow," said Nana. "But never mind, we'll get up an excursion all the same!"

They decided to go on the morrow, Sunday, and visit the ruins of the old Abbey of Chamont, which were some seven kilometers distant. Five carriages would come out from Orleans, take up the company after lunch and bring them back to dinner at La Mignotte at about seven. It would be delightful.

That evening, as his wont was, Count Muffat mounted the hill to ring at the outer gate. But the brightly lit windows and the shouts of laughter astonished him. When, however, he recognized Mignon's voice, he understood it all and went off, raging at this new obstacle, driven to extremities, bent on some violent act. Georges passed through a little door of which he had the key, slipped along the staircase walls and went quietly up into Nana's room. Only he had to wait for her till past midnight. She appeared at last in a high state of intoxication and more maternal even than on the previous nights. Whenever she had drunk anything she became so amorous as to be absurd. Accordingly she now insisted on his accompanying her to the Abbey of Chamont. But he stood out against this; he was afraid of being seen. If he were to be seen driving with her there would be an atrocious scandal. But she burst into tears and evinced the noisy despair of a slighted woman. And he thereupon consoled her and formally promised to be one of the party.

"So you do love me very much," she blurted out. "Say you love me very much. Oh, my darling old bear, if I were to die would you feel it very much? Confess!"

At Les Fondettes the near neighborhood of Nana had utterly disorganized the party. Every morning during lunch good Mme Hugon returned to the subject despite herself, told her guests the news the gardener had brought her and gave evidence of the absorbing curiosity with which notorious courtesans are able to inspire even the worthiest old ladies. Tolerant though she was, she was revolted and maddened by a vague presentiment of coming ill, which frightened her in the evenings as thoroughly as if a wild beast had escaped from a menagerie and were known to be lurking in the countryside.

She began trying to pick a little quarrel with her guests, whom she each and all accused of prowling round La Mignotte. Count Vandeuvres had been seen laughing on the highroad with a golden-haired lady, but he defended himself against the accusation; he denied that it was Nana, the fact being that Lucy had been with him and had told him how she had just turned her third prince out of doors. The Marquis de Chouard used also to go out every day, but his excuse was doctor's orders. Toward Daguenet and Fauchery Mme Hugon behaved unjustly too. The former especially never left Les Fondettes, for he had given up the idea of renewing the old connection and was busy paying the most respectful attentions to Estelle. Fauchery also stayed with the Muffat ladies. On one occasion only he had met Mignon with an armful of flowers, putting his sons through a course of botanical instruction in a by-path. The two men had shaken hands and given each other the news about Rose. She was perfectly well and happy; they had both received a letter from her that morning in which she besought them to profit by the fresh country air for some days longer. Among all her guests the old lady spared only Count Muffat and Georges. The count, who said he had serious business in Orleans, could certainly not be running after the bad woman, and as to Georges, the poor child was at last causing her grave anxiety, seeing that every evening he was seized with atrocious sick headaches which kept him to his bed in broad daylight.

Meanwhile Fauchery had become the Countess Sabine's faithful attendant in the absence during each afternoon of Count Muffat. Whenever they went to the end of the park he carried her campstool and her sunshade. Besides, he amused her with the original witticisms peculiar to a second-rate journalist, and in so doing he prompted her to one of those sudden intimacies which are allowable in the country. She had apparently consented to it from the first, for she had grown quite a girl again in the society of a young man whose noisy humor seemed unlikely to compromise her. But now and again, when for a second or two they found themselves alone behind the shrubs, their eyes would meet; they would pause amid their laughter, grow suddenly serious and view one another darkly, as though they had fathomed and divined their inmost hearts.

On Friday a fresh place had to be laid at lunch time. M. Theophile Venot, whom Mme Hugon remembered to have invited at the Muffats' last winter, had just arrived. He sat stooping humbly forward and behaved with much good nature, as became a man of no account, nor did he seem to notice the anxious deference with which he was treated. When he had succeeded in getting the company to forget his presence he sat nibbling small lumps of sugar during dessert, looking sharply up at Daguenet as the latter handed Estelle strawberries and listening to Fauchery, who was making the countess very merry over one of his anecdotes. Whenever anyone looked at HIM he smiled in his quiet way. When the guests rose from table he took the count's arm and drew him into the park. He was known to have exercised great influence over the latter ever since the death of his mother. Indeed, singular stories were told about the kind of dominion which the ex-lawyer enjoyed in that household. Fauchery, whom his arrival doubtless embarrassed, began explaining to Georges and Daguenet the origin of the man's wealth. It was a big lawsuit with the management of which the Jesuits had entrusted him in days gone by. In his opinion the worthy man was a terrible fellow despite his gentle, plump face and at this time of day had his finger in all the intrigues of the priesthood. The two young men had begun joking at this, for they thought the little old gentleman had an idiotic expression. The idea of an unknown Venot, a gigantic Venot, acting for the whole body of the clergy, struck them in the light of a comical invention. But they were silenced when, still leaning on the old man's arm, Count Muffat reappeared with blanched cheeks and eyes reddened as if by recent weeping.

"I bet they've been chatting about hell," muttered Fauchery in a bantering tone.

The Countess Sabine overheard the remark. She turned her head slowly, and their eyes met in that long gaze with which they were accustomed to sound one another prudently before venturing once for all.

After the breakfast it was the guests' custom to betake themselves to a little flower garden on a terrace overlooking the plain. This Sunday afternoon was exquisitely mild. There had been signs of rain toward ten in the morning, but the sky, without ceasing to be covered, had, as it were, melted into milky fog, which now hung like a cloud of luminous dust in the golden sunlight. Soon Mme Hugon proposed that they should step down through a little doorway below the terrace and take a walk on foot in the direction of Gumieres and as far as the Choue. She was fond of walking and, considering her threescore years, was very active. Besides, all her guests declared that there was no need to drive. So in a somewhat straggling order they reached the wooden bridge over the river. Fauchery and Daguenet headed the column with the Muffat ladies and were followed by the count and the marquis, walking on either side of Mme Hugon, while Vandeuvres, looking fashionable and out of his element on the highroad, marched in the rear, smoking a cigar. M. Venot, now slackening, now hastening his pace, passed smilingly from group to group, as though bent on losing no scrap of conversation.

"To think of poor dear Georges at Orleans!" said Mme Hugon. "He was anxious to consult old Doctor Tavernier, who never goes out now, on the subject of his sick headaches. Yes, you were not up, as he went off before seven o'clock. But it'll be a change for him all the same."

She broke off, exclaiming:

"Why, what's making them stop on the bridge?"

The fact was the ladies and Fauchery and Daguenet were standing stock-still on the crown of the bridge. They seemed to be hesitating as though some obstacle or other rendered them uneasy and yet the way lay clear before them.

"Go on!" cried the count.

They never moved and seemed to be watching the approach of something which the rest had not yet observed. Indeed the road wound considerably and was bordered by a thick screen of poplar trees. Nevertheless, a dull sound began to grow momentarily louder, and soon there was a noise of wheels, mingled with shouts of laughter and the cracking of whips. Then suddenly five carriages came into view, driving one behind the other. They were crowded to bursting, and bright with a galaxy of white, blue and pink costumes.

"What is it?" said Mme Hugon in some surprise.

Then her instinct told her, and she felt indignant at such an untoward invasion of her road.

"Oh, that woman!" she murmured. "Walk on, pray walk on. Don't appear to notice."

But it was too late. The five carriages which were taking Nana and her circle to the ruins of Chamont rolled on to the narrow wooden bridge. Fauchery, Daguenet and the Muffat ladies were forced to step backward, while Mme Hugon and the others had also to stop in Indian file along the roadside. It was a superb ride past! The laughter in the carriages had ceased, and faces were turned with an expression of curiosity. The rival parties took stock of each other amid a silence broken only by the measured trot of the horses. In the first carriage Maria Blond and Tatan Nene were lolling backward like a pair of duchesses, their skirts swelling forth over the wheels, and as they passed they cast disdainful glances at the honest women who were walking afoot. Then came Gaga, filling up a whole seat and half smothering La Faloise beside her so that little but his small anxious face was visible. Next followed Caroline Hequet with Labordette, Lucy Stewart with Mignon and his boys and at the close of all Nana in a victoria with Steiner and on a bracket seat in front of her that poor, darling Zizi, with his knees jammed against her own.

"It's the last of them, isn't it?" the countess placidly asked Fauchery, pretending at the same time not to recognize Nana.

The wheel of the victoria came near grazing her, but she did not step back. The two women had exchanged a deeply significant glance. It was, in fact, one of those momentary scrutinies which are at once complete and definite. As to the men, they behaved unexceptionably. Fauchery and Daguenet looked icy and recognized no one. The marquis, more nervous than they and afraid of some farcical ebullition on the part of the ladies, had plucked a blade of grass and was rolling it between his fingers. Only Vandeuvres, who had stayed somewhat apart from the rest of the company, winked imperceptibly at Lucy, who smiled at him as she passed.

"Be careful!" M. Venot had whispered as he stood behind Count Muffat.

The latter in extreme agitation gazed after this illusive vision of Nana while his wife turned slowly round and scrutinized him. Then he cast his eyes on the ground as though to escape the sound of galloping hoofs which were sweeping away both his senses and his heart. He could have cried aloud in his agony, for, seeing Georges among Nana's skirts, he understood it all now. A mere child! He was brokenhearted at the thought that she should have preferred a mere child to him! Steiner was his equal, but that child!

Mme Hugon, in the meantime, had not at once recognized Georges. Crossing the bridge, he was fain to jump into the river, but Nana's knees restrained him. Then white as a sheet and icy cold, he sat rigidly up in his place and looked at no one. It was just possible no one would notice him.

"Oh, my God!" said the old lady suddenly. "Georges is with her!"

The carriages had passed quite through the uncomfortable crowd of people who recognized and yet gave no sign of recognition. The short critical encounter seemed to have been going on for ages. And now the wheels whirled away the carriageloads of girls more gaily than ever. Toward the fair open country they went, amid the buffetings of the fresh air of heaven. Bright-colored fabrics fluttered in the wind, and the merry laughter burst forth anew as the voyagers began jesting and glancing back at the respectable folks halting with looks of annoyance at the roadside. Turning round, Nana could see the walking party hesitating and then returning the way they had come without crossing the bridge. Mme Hugon was leaning silently on Count Muffat's arm, and so sad was her look that no one dared comfort her.

"I say, did you see Fauchery, dear?" Nana shouted to Lucy, who was leaning out of the carriage in front. "What a brute he was! He shall pay out for that. And Paul, too, a fellow I've been so kind to! Not a sign! They're polite, I'm sure."

And with that she gave Steiner a terrible dressing, he having ventured to suggest that the gentlemen's attitude had been quite as it should be. So then they weren't even worth a bow? The first blackguard that came by might insult them? Thanks! He was the right sort, too, he was! It couldn't be better! One ought always to bow to a woman.

"Who's the tall one?" asked Lucy at random, shouting through the noise of the wheels.

"It's the Countess Muffat," answered Steiner.

"There now! I suspected as much," said Nana. "Now, my dear fellow, it's all very well her being a countess, for she's no better than she should be. Yes, yes, she's no better that she should be. You know, I've got an eye for such things, I have! And now I know your countess as well as if I had been at the making of her! I'll bet you that she's the mistress of that viper Fauchery! I tell you, she's his mistress! Between women you guess that sort of thing at once!"

Steiner shrugged his shoulders. Since the previous day his irritation had been hourly increasing. He had received letters which necessitated his leaving the following morning, added to which he did not much appreciate coming down to the country in order to sleep on the drawing-room divan.

"And this poor baby boy!" Nana continued, melting suddenly at sight of Georges's pale face as he still sat rigid and breathless in front of her.

"D'you think Mamma recognized me?" he stammered at last.

"Oh, most surely she did! Why, she cried out! But it's my fault. He didn't want to come with us; I forced him to. Now listen, Zizi, would you like me to write to your mamma? She looks such a kind, decent sort of lady! I'll tell her that I never saw you before and that it was Steiner who brought you with him for the first time today."

"No, no, don't write," said Georges in great anxiety. "I'll explain it all myself. Besides, if they bother me about it I shan't go home again."

But he continued plunged in thought, racking his brains for excuses against his return home in the evening. The five carriages were rolling through a flat country along an interminable straight road bordered by fine trees. The country was bathed in a silvery-gray atmosphere. The ladies still continued shouting remarks from carriage to carriage behind the backs of the drivers, who chuckled over their extraordinary fares. Occasionally one of them would rise to her feet to look at the landscape and, supporting herself on her neighbor's shoulder, would grow extremely excited till a sudden jolt brought her down to the seat again. Caroline Hequet in the meantime was having a warm discussion with Labordette. Both of them were agreed that Nana would be selling her country house before three months were out, and Caroline was urging Labordette to buy it back for her for as little as it was likely to fetch. In front of them La Faloise, who was very amorous and could not get at Gaga's apoplectic neck, was imprinting kisses on her spine through her dress, the strained fabric of which was nigh splitting, while Amelie, perching stiffly on the bracket seat, was bidding them be quiet, for she was horrified to be sitting idly by, watching her mother being kissed. In the next carriage Mignon, in order to astonish Lucy, was making his sons recite a fable by La Fontaine. Henri was prodigious at this exercise; he could spout you one without pause or hesitation. But Maria Blond, at the head of the procession, was beginning to feel extremely bored. She was tired of hoaxing that blockhead of a Tatan Nene with a story to the effect that the Parisian dairywomen were wont to fabricate eggs with a mixture of paste and saffron. The distance was too great: were they never going to get to their destination? And the question was transmitted from carriage to carriage and finally reached Nana, who, after questioning her driver, got up and shouted:

"We've not got a quarter of an hour more to go. You see that church behind the trees down there?"

Then she continued:

"Do you know, it appears the owner of the Chateau de Chamont is an old lady of Napoleon's time? Oh, SHE was a merry one! At least, so Joseph told me, and he heard it from the servants at the bishop's palace. There's no one like it nowadays, and for the matter of that, she's become goody-goody."

"What's her name?" asked Lucy.

"Madame d'Anglars."

"Irma d'Anglars—I knew her!" cried Gaga.

Admiring exclamations burst from the line of carriages and were borne down the wind as the horses quickened their trot. Heads were stretched out in Gaga's direction; Maria Blond and Tatan Nene turned round and knelt on the seat while they leaned over the carriage hood, and the air was full of questions and cutting remarks, tempered by a certain obscure admiration. Gaga had known her! The idea filled them all with respect for that far-off past.

"Dear me, I was young then," continued Gaga. "But never mind, I remember it all. I saw her pass. They said she was disgusting in her own house, but, driving in her carriage, she WAS just smart! And the stunning tales about her! Dirty doings and money flung about like one o'clock! I don't wonder at all that she's got a fine place. Why, she used to clean out a man's pockets as soon as look at him. Irma d'Anglars still in the land of the living! Why, my little pets, she must be near ninety."

At this the ladies became suddenly serious. Ninety years old! The deuce, there wasn't one of them, as Lucy loudly declared, who would live to that age. They were all done for. Besides, Nana said she didn't want to make old bones; it wouldn't be amusing. They were drawing near their destination, and the conversation was interrupted by the cracking of whips as the drivers put their horses to their best paces. Yet amid all the noise Lucy continued talking and, suddenly changing the subject, urged Nana to come to town with them all to-morrow. The exhibition was soon to close, and the ladies must really return to Paris, where the season was surpassing their expectations. But Nana was obstinate. She loathed Paris; she wouldn't set foot there yet!

"Eh, darling, we'll stay?" she said, giving Georges's knees a squeeze, as though Steiner were of no account.

The carriages had pulled up abruptly, and in some surprise the company got out on some waste ground at the bottom of a small hill. With his whip one of the drivers had to point them out the ruins of the old Abbey of Chamont where they lay hidden among trees. It was a great sell! The ladies voted them silly. Why, they were only a heap of old stones with briers growing over them and part of a tumble-down tower. It really wasn't worth coming a couple of leagues to see that! Then the driver pointed out to them the countryseat, the park of which stretched away from the abbey, and he advised them to take a little path and follow the walls surrounding it. They would thus make the tour of the place while the carriages would go and await them in the village square. It was a delightful walk, and the company agreed to the proposition.

"Lord love me, Irma knows how to take care of herself!" said Gaga, halting before a gate at the corner of the park wall abutting on the highroad.

All of them stood silently gazing at the enormous bush which stopped up the gateway. Then following the little path, they skirted the park wall, looking up from time to time to admire the trees, whose lofty branches stretched out over them and formed a dense vault of greenery. After three minutes or so they found themselves in front of a second gate. Through this a wide lawn was visible, over which two venerable oaks cast dark masses of shadow. Three minutes farther on yet another gate afforded them an extensive view of a great avenue, a perfect corridor of shadow, at the end of which a bright spot of sunlight gleamed like a star. They stood in silent, wondering admiration, and then little by little exclamations burst from their lips. They had been trying hard to joke about it all with a touch of envy at heart, but this decidedly and immeasurably impressed them. What a genius that Irma was! A sight like this gave you a rattling notion of the woman! The trees stretched away and away, and there were endlessly recurrent patches of ivy along the wall with glimpses of lofty roofs and screens of poplars interspersed with dense masses of elms and aspens. Was there no end to it then? The ladies would have liked to catch sight of the mansion house, for they were weary of circling on and on, weary of seeing nothing but leafy recesses through every opening they came to. They took the rails of the gate in their hands and pressed their faces against the ironwork. And thus excluded and isolated, a feeling of respect began to overcome them as they thought of the castle lost to view in surrounding immensity. Soon, being quite unused to walking, they grew tired. And the wall did not leave off; at every turn of the small deserted path the same range of gray stones stretched ahead of them. Some of them began to despair of ever getting to the end of it and began talking of returning. But the more their long walk fatigued them, the more respectful they became, for at each successive step they were increasingly impressed by the tranquil, lordly dignity of the domain.

"It's getting silly, this is!" said Caroline Hequet, grinding her teeth.

Nana silenced her with a shrug. For some moments past she had been rather pale and extremely serious and had not spoken a single word. Suddenly the path gave a final turn; the wall ended, and as they came out on the village square the mansion house stood before them on the farther side of its grand outer court. All stopped to admire the proud sweep of the wide steps, the twenty frontage windows, the arrangement of the three wings, which were built of brick framed by courses of stone. Henri IV had erewhile inhabited this historic mansion, and his room, with its great bed hung with Genoa velvet, was still preserved there. Breathless with admiration, Nana gave a little childish sigh.

"Great God!" she whispered very quietly to herself.

But the party were deeply moved when Gaga suddenly announced that Irma herself was standing yonder in front of the church. She recognized her perfectly. She was as upright as of old, the hoary campaigner, and that despite her age, and she still had those eyes which flashed when she moved in that proud way of hers! Vespers were just over, and for a second or two Madame stood in the church porch. She was dressed in a dark brown silk and looked very simple and very tall, her venerable face reminding one of some old marquise who had survived the horrors of the Great Revolution. In her right hand a huge Book of Hours shone in the sunlight, and very slowly she crossed the square, followed some fifteen paces off by a footman in livery. The church was emptying, and all the inhabitants of Chamont bowed before her with extreme respect. An old man even kissed her hand, and a woman wanted to fall on her knees. Truly this was a potent queen, full of years and honors. She mounted her flight of steps and vanished from view.

"That's what one attains to when one has methodical habits!" said Mignon with an air of conviction, looking at his sons and improving the occasion.

Then everybody said his say. Labordette thought her extraordinarily well preserved. Maria Blond let slip a foul expression and vexed Lucy, who declared that one ought to honor gray hairs. All the women, to sum up, agreed that she was a perfect marvel. Then the company got into their conveyances again. From Chamont all the way to La Mignotte Nana remained silent. She had twice turned round to look back at the house, and now, lulled by the sound of the wheels, she forgot that Steiner was at her side and that Georges was in front of her. A vision had come up out of the twilight, and the great lady seemed still to be sweeping by with all the majesty of a potent queen, full of years and of honors.

That evening Georges re-entered Les Fondettes in time for dinner. Nana, who had grown increasingly absent-minded and singular in point of manner, had sent him to ask his mamma's forgiveness. It was his plain duty, she remarked severely, growing suddenly solicitous for the decencies of family life. She even made him swear not to return for the night; she was tired, and in showing proper obedience he was doing no more than his duty. Much bored by this moral discourse, Georges appeared in his mother's presence with heavy heart and downcast head.

Fortunately for him his brother Philippe, a great merry devil of a military man, had arrived during the day, a fact which greatly curtailed the scene he was dreading. Mme Hugon was content to look at him with eyes full of tears while Philippe, who had been put in possession of the facts, threatened to go and drag him home by the scruff of the neck if ever he went back into that woman's society. Somewhat comforted, Georges began slyly planning how to make his escape toward two o'clock next day in order to arrange about future meetings with Nana.

Nevertheless, at dinnertime the house party at Les Fondettes seemed not a little embarrassed. Vandeuvres had given notice of departure, for he was anxious to take Lucy back to Paris with him. He was amused at the idea of carrying off this girl whom he had known for ten years yet never desired. The Marquis de Chouard bent over his plate and meditated on Gaga's young lady. He could well remember dandling Lili on his knee. What a way children had of shooting up! This little thing was becoming extremely plump! But Count Muffat especially was silent and absorbed. His cheeks glowed, and he had given Georges one long look. Dinner over, he went upstairs, intending to shut himself in his bedroom, his pretext being a slight feverish attack. M. Venot had rushed after him, and upstairs in the bedroom a scene ensued. The count threw himself upon the bed and strove to stifle a fit of nervous sobbing in the folds of the pillow while M. Venot, in a soft voice, called him brother and advised him to implore heaven for mercy. But he heard nothing: there was a rattle in his throat. Suddenly he sprang off the bed and stammered:

"I am going there. I can't resist any longer."

"Very well," said the old man, "I go with you."

As they left the house two shadows were vanishing into the dark depths of a garden walk, for every evening now Fauchery and the Countess Sabine left Daguenet to help Estelle make tea. Once on the highroad the count walked so rapidly that his companion had to run in order to follow him. Though utterly out of breath, the latter never ceased showering on him the most conclusive arguments against the temptations of the flesh. But the other never opened his mouth as he hurried away into the night. Arrived in front of La Mignotte, he said simply:

"I can't resist any longer. Go!"

"God's will be done then!" muttered M. Venot. "He uses every method to assure His final triumph. Your sin will become His weapon."

At La Mignotte there was much wrangling during the evening meal. Nana had found a letter from Bordenave awaiting her, in which he advised rest, just as though he were anxious to be rid of her. Little Violaine, he said, was being encored twice nightly. But when Mignon continued urging her to come away with them on the morrow Nana grew exasperated and declared that she did not intend taking advice from anybody. In other ways, too, her behavior at table was ridiculously stuck up. Mme Lerat having made some sharp little speech or other, she loudly announced that, God willing, she wasn't going to let anyone—no, not even her own aunt—make improper remarks in her presence. After which she dreed her guests with honorable sentiments. She seemed to be suffering from a fit of stupid right-mindedness, and she treated them all to projects of religious education for Louiset and to a complete scheme of regeneration for herself. When the company began laughing she gave vent to profound opinions, nodding her head like a grocer's wife who knows what she is saying. Nothing but order could lead to fortune! And so far as she was concerned, she had no wish to die like a beggar! She set the ladies' teeth on edge. They burst out in protest. Could anyone have been converting Nana? No, it was impossible! But she sat quite still and with absent looks once more plunged into dreamland, where the vision of an extremely wealthy and greatly courted Nana rose up before her.

The household were going upstairs to bed when Muffat put in an appearance. It was Labordette who caught sight of him in the garden. He understood it all at once and did him a service, for he got Steiner out of the way and, taking his hand, led him along the dark corridor as far as Nana's bedroom. In affairs of this kind Labordette was wont to display the most perfect tact and cleverness. Indeed, he seemed delighted to be making other people happy. Nana showed no surprise; she was only somewhat annoyed by the excessive heat of Muffat's pursuit. Life was a serious affair, was it not? Love was too silly: it led to nothing. Besides, she had her scruples in view of Zizi's tender age. Indeed, she had scarcely behaved quite fairly toward him. Dear me, yes, she was choosing the proper course again in taking up with an old fellow.

"Zoe," she said to the lady's maid, who was enchanted at the thought of leaving the country, "pack the trunks when you get up tomorrow. We are going back to Paris."

And she went to bed with Muffat but experienced no pleasure.

CHAPTER VII

One December evening three months afterward Count Muffat was strolling in the Passage des Panoramas. The evening was very mild, and owing to a passing shower, the passage had just become crowded with people. There was a perfect mob of them, and they thronged slowly and laboriously along between the shops on either side. Under the windows, white with reflected light, the pavement was violently illuminated. A perfect stream of brilliancy emanated from white globes, red lanterns, blue transparencies, lines of gas jets, gigantic watches and fans, outlined in flame and burning in the open. And the motley displays in the shops, the gold ornaments of the jeweler's, the glass ornaments of the confectioner's, the light-colored silks of the modiste's, seemed to shine again in the crude light of the reflectors behind the clear plate-glass windows, while among the bright-colored, disorderly array of shop signs a huge purple glove loomed in the distance like a bleeding hand which had been severed from an arm and fastened to a yellow cuff.

Count Muffat had slowly returned as far as the boulevard. He glanced out at the roadway and then came sauntering back along the shopwindows. The damp and heated atmosphere filled the narrow passage with a slight luminous mist. Along the flagstones, which had been wet by the drip-drop of umbrellas, the footsteps of the crowd rang continually, but there was no sound of voices. Passers-by elbowed him at every turn and cast inquiring looks at his silent face, which the gaslight rendered pale. And to escape these curious manifestations the count posted himself in front of a stationer's, where with profound attention contemplated an array of paperweights in the form of glass bowls containing floating landscapes and flowers.

He was conscious of nothing: he was thinking of Nana. Why had she lied to him again? That morning she had written and told him not to trouble about her in the evening, her excuse being that Louiset was ill and that she was going to pass the night at her aunt's in order to nurse him. But he had felt suspicious and had called at her house, where he learned from the porter that Madame had just gone off to her theater. He was astonished at this, for she was not playing in the new piece. Why then should she have told him this falsehood, and what could she be doing at the Varietes that evening? Hustled by a passer-by, the count unconsciously left the paperweights and found himself in front of a glass case full of toys, where he grew absorbed over an array of pocketbooks and cigar cases, all of which had the same blue swallow stamped on one corner. Nana was most certainly not the same woman! In the early days after his return from the country she used to drive him wild with delight, as with pussycat caresses she kissed him all round his face and whiskers and vowed that he was her own dear pet and the only little man she adored. He was no longer afraid of Georges, whom his mother kept down at Les Fondettes. There was only fat Steiner to reckon with, and he believed he was really ousting him, but he did not dare provoke an explanation on his score. He knew he was once more in an extraordinary financial scrape and on the verge of being declared bankrupt on 'change, so much so that he was clinging fiercely to the shareholders in the Landes Salt Pits and striving to sweat a final subscription out of them. Whenever he met him at Nana's she would explain reasonably enough that she did not wish to turn him out of doors like a dog after all he had spent on her. Besides, for the last three months he had been living in such a whirl of sensual excitement that, beyond the need of possessing her, he had felt no very distinct impressions. His was a tardy awakening of the fleshly instinct, a childish greed of enjoyment, which left no room for either vanity or jealousy. Only one definite feeling could affect him now, and that was Nana's decreasing kindness. She no longer kissed him on the beard! It made him anxious, and as became a man quite ignorant of womankind, he began asking himself what possible cause of offense he could have given her. Besides, he was under the impression that he was satisfying all her desires. And so he harked back again and again to the letter he had received that morning with its tissue of falsehoods, invented for the extremely simple purpose of passing an evening at her own theater. The crowd had pushed him forward again, and he had crossed the passage and was puzzling his brain in front of the entrance to a restaurant, his eyes fixed on some plucked larks and on a huge salmon laid out inside the window.

At length he seemed to tear himself away from this spectacle. He shook himself, looked up and noticed that it was close on nine o'clock. Nana would soon be coming out, and he would make her tell the truth. And with that he walked on and recalled to memory the evenings he once passed in that region in the days when he used to meet her at the door of the theater.

He knew all the shops, and in the gas-laden air he recognized their different scents, such, for instance, as the strong savor of Russia leather, the perfume of vanilla emanating from a chocolate dealer's basement, the savor of musk blown in whiffs from the open doors of the perfumers. But he did not dare linger under the gaze of the pale shopwomen, who looked placidly at him as though they knew him by sight. For one instant he seemed to be studying the line of little round windows above the shops, as though he had never noticed them before among the medley of signs. Then once again he went up to the boulevard and stood still a minute or two. A fine rain was now falling, and the cold feel of it on his hands calmed him. He thought of his wife who was staying in a country house near Macon, where her friend Mme de Chezelles had been ailing a good deal since the autumn. The carriages in the roadway were rolling through a stream of mud. The country, he thought, must be detestable in such vile weather. But suddenly he became anxious and re-entered the hot, close passage down which he strode among the strolling people. A thought struck him: if Nana were suspicious of his presence there she would be off along the Galerie Montmartre.

After that the count kept a sharp lookout at the very door of the theater, though he did not like this passage end, where he was afraid of being recognized. It was at the corner between the Galerie des Varietes and the Galerie Saint-Marc, an equivocal corner full of obscure little shops. Of these last one was a shoemaker's, where customers never seemed to enter. Then there were two or three upholsterers', deep in dust, and a smoky, sleepy reading room and library, the shaded lamps in which cast a green and slumberous light all the evening through. There was never anyone in this corner save well-dressed, patient gentlemen, who prowled about the wreckage peculiar to a stage door, where drunken sceneshifters and ragged chorus girls congregate. In front of the theater a single gas jet in a ground-glass globe lit up the doorway. For a moment or two Muffat thought of questioning Mme Bron; then he grew afraid lest Nana should get wind of his presence and escape by way of the boulevard. So he went on the march again and determined to wait till he was turned out at the closing of the gates, an event which had happened on two previous occasions. The thought of returning home to his solitary bed simply wrung his heart with anguish. Every time that golden-haired girls and men in dirty linen came out and stared at him he returned to his post in front of the reading room, where, looking in between two advertisements posted on a windowpane, he was always greeted by the same sight. It was a little old man, sitting stiff and solitary at the vast table and holding a green newspaper in his green hands under the green light of one of the lamps. But shortly before ten o'clock another gentleman, a tall, good-looking, fair man with well-fitting gloves, was also walking up and down in front of the stage door. Thereupon at each successive turn the pair treated each other to a suspicious sidelong glance. The count walked to the corner of the two galleries, which was adorned with a high mirror, and when he saw himself therein, looking grave and elegant, he was both ashamed and nervous.

Ten o'clock struck, and suddenly it occurred to Muffat that it would be very easy to find out whether Nana were in her dressing room or not. He went up the three steps, crossed the little yellow-painted lobby and slipped into the court by a door which simply shut with a latch. At that hour of the night the narrow, damp well of a court, with its pestiferous water closets, its fountain, its back view of the kitchen stove and the collection of plants with which the portress used to litter the place, was drenched in dark mist; but the two walls, rising pierced with windows on either hand, were flaming with light, since the property room and the firemen's office were situated on the ground floor, with the managerial bureau on the left, and on the right and upstairs the dressing rooms of the company. The mouths of furnaces seemed to be opening on the outer darkness from top to bottom of this well. The count had at once marked the light in the windows of the dressing room on the first floor, and as a man who is comforted and happy, he forgot where he was and stood gazing upward amid the foul mud and faint decaying smell peculiar to the premises of this antiquated Parisian building. Big drops were dripping from a broken waterspout, and a ray of gaslight slipped from Mme Bron's window and cast a yellow glare over a patch of moss-clad pavement, over the base of a wall which had been rotted by water from a sink, over a whole cornerful of nameless filth amid which old pails and broken crocks lay in fine confusion round a spindling tree growing mildewed in its pot. A window fastening creaked, and the count fled.

Nana was certainly going to come down. He returned to his post in front of the reading room; among its slumbering shadows, which seemed only broken by the glimmer of a night light, the little old man still sat motionless, his side face sharply outlined against his newspaper. Then Muffat walked again and this time took a more prolonged turn and, crossing the large gallery, followed the Galerie des Varietes as far as that of Feydeau. The last mentioned was cold and deserted and buried in melancholy shadow. He returned from it, passed by the theater, turned the corner of the Galerie Saint-Marc and ventured as far as the Galerie Montmartre, where a sugar-chopping machine in front of a grocer's interested him awhile. But when he was taking his third turn he was seized with such dread lest Nana should escape behind his back that he lost all self-respect. Thereupon he stationed himself beside the fair gentleman in front of the very theater. Both exchanged a glance of fraternal humility with which was mingled a touch of distrust, for it was possible they might yet turn out to be rivals. Some sceneshifters who came out smoking their pipes between the acts brushed rudely against them, but neither one nor the other ventured to complain. Three big wenches with untidy hair and dirty gowns appeared on the doorstep. They were munching apples and spitting out the cores, but the two men bowed their heads and patiently braved their impudent looks and rough speeches, though they were hustled and, as it were, soiled by these trollops, who amused themselves by pushing each other down upon them.

At that very moment Nana descended the three steps. She grew very pale when she noticed Muffat.

"Oh, it's you!" she stammered.

The sniggering extra ladies were quite frightened when they recognized her, and they formed in line and stood up, looking as stiff and serious as servants whom their mistress has caught behaving badly. The tall fair gentleman had moved away; he was at once reassured and sad at heart.

"Well, give me your arm," Nana continued impatiently.

They walked quietly off. The count had been getting ready to question her and now found nothing to say.

It was she who in rapid tones told a story to the effect that she had been at her aunt's as late as eight o'clock, when, seeing Louiset very much better, she had conceived the idea of going down to the theater for a few minutes.

"On some important business?" he queried.

"Yes, a new piece," she replied after some slight hesitation. "They wanted my advice."

He knew that she was not speaking the truth, but the warm touch of her arm as it leaned firmly on his own, left him powerless. He felt neither anger nor rancor after his long, long wait; his one thought was to keep her where she was now that he had got hold of her. Tomorrow, and not before, he would try and find out what she had come to her dressing room after. But Nana still appeared to hesitate; she was manifestly a prey to the sort of secret anguish that besets people when they are trying to regain lost ground and to initiate a plan of action. Accordingly, as they turned the corner of the Galerie des Varietes, she stopped in front of the show in a fan seller's window.

"I say, that's pretty," she whispered; "I mean that mother-of-pearl mount with the feathers."

Then, indifferently:

"So you're seeing me home?"

"Of course," he said, with some surprise, "since your child's better."

She was sorry she had told him that story. Perhaps Louiset was passing through another crisis! She talked of returning to the Batignolles. But when he offered to accompany her she did not insist on going. For a second or two she was possessed with the kind of white-hot fury which a woman experiences when she feels herself entrapped and must, nevertheless, behave prettily. But in the end she grew resigned and determined to gain time. If only she could get rid of the count toward midnight everything would happen as she wished.

"Yes, it's true; you're a bachelor tonight," she murmured. "Your wife doesn't return till tomorrow, eh?"

"Yes," replied Muffat. It embarrassed him somewhat to hear her talking familiarly about the countess.

But she pressed him further, asking at what time the train was due and wanting to know whether he were going to the station to meet her. She had begun to walk more slowly than ever, as though the shops interested her very much.

"Now do look!" she said, pausing anew before a jeweler's window, "what a funny bracelet!"

She adored the Passage des Panoramas. The tinsel of the ARTICLE DE PARIS, the false jewelry, the gilded zinc, the cardboard made to look like leather, had been the passion of her early youth. It remained, and when she passed the shop-windows she could not tear herself away from them. It was the same with her today as when she was a ragged, slouching child who fell into reveries in front of the chocolate maker's sweet-stuff shows or stood listening to a musical box in a neighboring shop or fell into supreme ecstasies over cheap, vulgarly designed knickknacks, such as nutshell workboxes, ragpickers' baskets for holding toothpicks, Vendome columns and Luxor obelisks on which thermometers were mounted. But that evening she was too much agitated and looked at things without seeing them. When all was said and done, it bored her to think she was not free. An obscure revolt raged within her, and amid it all she felt a wild desire to do something foolish. It was a great thing gained, forsooth, to be mistress of men of position! She had been devouring the prince's substance and Steiner's, too, with her childish caprices, and yet she had no notion where her money went. Even at this time of day her flat in the Boulevard Haussmann was not entirely furnished. The drawing room alone was finished, and with its red satin upholsteries and excess of ornamentation and furniture it struck a decidedly false note. Her creditors, moreover, would now take to tormenting her more than ever before whenever she had no money on hand, a fact which caused her constant surprise, seeing that she was wont to quote her self as a model of economy. For a month past that thief Steiner had been scarcely able to pay up his thousand francs on the occasions when she threatened to kick him out of doors in case he failed to bring them. As to Muffat, he was an idiot: he had no notion as to what it was usual to give, and she could not, therefore, grow angry with him on the score of miserliness. Oh, how gladly she would have turned all these folks off had she not repeated to herself a score of times daily a whole string of economical maxims!

One ought to be sensible, Zoe kept saying every morning, and Nana herself was constantly haunted by the queenly vision seen at Chamont. It had now become an almost religious memory with her, and through dint of being ceaselessly recalled it grew even more grandiose. And for these reasons, though trembling with repressed indignation, she now hung submissively on the count's arm as they went from window to window among the fast-diminishing crowd. The pavement was drying outside, and a cool wind blew along the gallery, swept the close hot air up beneath the glass that imprisoned it and shook the colored lanterns and the lines of gas jets and the giant fan which was flaring away like a set piece in an illumination. At the door of the restaurant a waiter was putting out the gas, while the motionless attendants in the empty, glaring shops looked as though they had dropped off to sleep with their eyes open.

"Oh, what a duck!" continued Nana, retracing her steps as far as the last of the shops in order to go into ecstasies over a porcelain greyhound standing with raised forepaw in front of a nest hidden among roses.

At length they quitted the passage, but she refused the offer of a cab. It was very pleasant out she said; besides, they were in no hurry, and it would be charming to return home on foot. When they were in front of the Cafe Anglais she had a sudden longing to eat oysters. Indeed, she said that owing to Louiset's illness she had tasted nothing since morning. Muffat dared not oppose her. Yet as he did not in those days wish to be seen about with her he asked for a private supper room and hurried to it along the corridors. She followed him with the air of a woman familiar with the house, and they were on the point of entering a private room, the door of which a waiter held open, when from a neighboring saloon, whence issued a perfect tempest of shouts and laughter, a man rapidly emerged. It was Daguenet.

"By Jove, it's Nana!" he cried.

The count had briskly disappeared into the private room, leaving the door ajar behind him. But Daguenet winked behind his round shoulders and added in chaffing tones:

"The deuce, but you're doing nicely! You catch 'em in the Tuileries nowadays!"

Nana smiled and laid a finger on her lips to beg him to be silent. She could see he was very much exalted, and yet she was glad to have met him, for she still felt tenderly toward him, and that despite the nasty way he had cut her when in the company of fashionable ladies.

"What are you doing now?" she asked amicably.

"Becoming respectable. Yes indeed, I'm thinking of getting married."

She shrugged her shoulders with a pitying air. But he jokingly continued to the effect that to be only just gaining enough on 'change to buy ladies bouquets could scarcely be called an income, provided you wanted to look respectable too! His three hundred thousand francs had only lasted him eighteen months! He wanted to be practical, and he was going to marry a girl with a huge dowry and end off as a PREFET, like his father before him! Nana still smiled incredulously. She nodded in the direction of the saloon: "Who are you with in there?"

"Oh, a whole gang," he said, forgetting all about his projects under the influence of returning intoxication. "Just think! Lea is telling us about her trip in Egypt. Oh, it's screaming! There's a bathing story—"

And he told the story while Nana lingered complaisantly. They had ended by leaning up against the wall in the corridor, facing one another. Gas jets were flaring under the low ceiling, and a vague smell of cookery hung about the folds of the hangings. Now and again, in order to hear each other's voices when the din in the saloon became louder than ever, they had to lean well forward. Every few seconds, however, a waiter with an armful of dishes found his passage barred and disturbed them. But they did not cease their talk for that; on the contrary, they stood close up to the walls and, amid the uproar of the supper party and the jostlings of the waiters, chatted as quietly as if they were by their own firesides.

"Just look at that," whispered the young man, pointing to the door of the private room through which Muffat had vanished.

Both looked. The door was quivering slightly; a breath of air seemed to be disturbing it, and at last, very, very slowly and without the least sound, it was shut to. They exchanged a silent chuckle. The count must be looking charmingly happy all alone in there!

"By the by," she asked, "have you read Fauchery's article about me?"

"Yes, 'The Golden Fly,'" replied Daguenet; "I didn't mention it to you as I was afraid of paining you."

"Paining me—why? His article's a very long one."

She was flattered to think that the Figaro should concern itself about her person. But failing the explanations of her hairdresser Francis, who had brought her the paper, she would not have understood that it was she who was in question. Daguenet scrutinized her slyly, sneering in his chaffing way. Well, well, since she was pleased, everybody else ought to be.

"By your leave!" shouted a waiter, holding a dish of iced cheese in both hands as he separated them.

Nana had stepped toward the little saloon where Muffat was waiting.

"Well, good-by!" continued Daguenet. "Go and find your cuckold again."

But she halted afresh.

"Why d'you call him cuckold?"

"Because he is a cuckold, by Jove!"

She came and leaned against the wall again; she was profoundly interested.

"Ah!" she said simply.

"What, d'you mean to say you didn't know that? Why, my dear girl, his wife's Fauchery's mistress. It probably began in the country. Some time ago, when I was coming here, Fauchery left me, and I suspect he's got an assignation with her at his place tonight. They've made up a story about a journey, I fancy."

Overcome with surprise, Nana remained voiceless.

"I suspected it," she said at last, slapping her leg. "I guessed it by merely looking at her on the highroad that day. To think of its being possible for an honest woman to deceive her husband, and with that blackguard Fauchery too! He'll teach her some pretty things!"

"Oh, it isn't her trial trip," muttered Daguenet wickedly. "Perhaps she knows as much about it as he does."

At this Nana gave vent to an indignant exclamation.

"Indeed she does! What a nice world! It's too foul!"

"By your leave!" shouted a waiter, laden with bottles, as he separated them.

Daguenet drew her forward again and held her hand for a second or two. He adopted his crystalline tone of voice, the voice with notes as sweet as those of a harmonica, which had gained him his success among the ladies of Nana's type.

"Good-by, darling! You know I love you always."

She disengaged her hand from his, and while a thunder of shouts and bravos, which made the door in the saloon tremble again, almost drowned her words she smilingly remarked:

"It's over between us, stupid! But that doesn't matter. Do come up one of these days, and we'll have a chat."

Then she became serious again and in the outraged tones of a respectable woman:

"So he's a cuckold, is he?" she cried. "Well, that IS a nuisance, dear boy. They've always sickened me, cuckolds have."

When at length she went into the private room she noticed that Muffat was sitting resignedly on a narrow divan with pale face and twitching hands. He did not reproach her at all, and she, greatly moved, was divided between feelings of pity and of contempt. The poor man! To think of his being so unworthily cheated by a vile wife! She had a good mind to throw her arms round his neck and comfort him. But it was only fair all the same! He was a fool with women, and this would teach him a lesson! Nevertheless, pity overcame her. She did not get rid of him as she had determined to do after the oysters had been discussed. They scarcely stayed a quarter of an hour in the Cafe Anglais, and together they went into the house in the Boulevard Haussmann. It was then eleven. Before midnight she would have easily have discovered some means of getting rid of him kindly.

In the anteroom, however, she took the precaution of giving Zoe an order. "You'll look out for him, and you'll tell him not to make a noise if the other man's still with me."

"But where shall I put him, madame?"

"Keep him in the kitchen. It's more safe."

In the room inside Muffat was already taking off his overcoat. A big fire was burning on the hearth. It was the same room as of old, with its rosewood furniture and its hangings and chair coverings of figured damask with the large blue flowers on a gray background. On two occasions Nana had thought of having it redone, the first in black velvet, the second in white satin with bows, but directly Steiner consented she demanded the money that these changes would cost simply with a view to pillaging him. She had, indeed, only indulged in a tiger skin rug for the hearth and a cut-glass hanging lamp.

"I'm not sleepy; I'm not going to bed," she said the moment they were shut in together.

The count obeyed her submissively, as became a man no longer afraid of being seen. His one care now was to avoid vexing her.

"As you will," he murmured.

Nevertheless, he took his boots off, too, before seating himself in front of the fire. One of Nana's pleasures consisted in undressing herself in front of the mirror on her wardrobe door, which reflected her whole height. She would let everything slip off her in turn and then would stand perfectly naked and gaze and gaze in complete oblivion of all around her. Passion for her own body, ecstasy over her satin skin and the supple contours of her shape, would keep her serious, attentive and absorbed in the love of herself. The hairdresser frequently found her standing thus and would enter without her once turning to look at him. Muffat used to grow angry then, but he only succeeded in astonishing her. What was coming over the man? She was doing it to please herself, not other people.

That particular evening she wanted to have a better view of herself, and she lit the six candles attached to the frame of the mirror. But while letting her shift slip down she paused. She had been preoccupied for some moments past, and a question was on her lips.

"You haven't read the Figaro article, have you? The paper's on the table." Daguenet's laugh had recurred to her recollections, and she was harassed by a doubt. If that Fauchery had slandered her she would be revenged.

"They say that it's about me," she continued, affecting indifference. "What's your notion, eh, darling?"

And letting go her shift and waiting till Muffat should have done reading, she stood naked. Muffat was reading slowly Fauchery's article entitled "The Golden Fly," describing the life of a harlot descended from four or five generations of drunkards and tainted in her blood by a cumulative inheritance of misery and drink, which in her case has taken the form of a nervous exaggeration of the sexual instinct. She has shot up to womanhood in the slums and on the pavements of Paris, and tall, handsome and as superbly grown as a dunghill plant, she avenges the beggars and outcasts of whom she is the ultimate product. With her the rottenness that is allowed to ferment among the populace is carried upward and rots the aristocracy. She becomes a blind power of nature, a leaven of destruction, and unwittingly she corrupts and disorganizes all Paris, churning it between her snow-white thighs as milk is monthly churned by housewives. And it was at the end of this article that the comparison with a fly occurred, a fly of sunny hue which has flown up out of the dung, a fly which sucks in death on the carrion tolerated by the roadside and then buzzing, dancing and glittering like a precious stone enters the windows of palaces and poisons the men within by merely settling on them in her flight.

Muffat lifted his head; his eyes stared fixedly; he gazed at the fire.

"Well?" asked Nana.

But he did not answer. It seemed as though he wanted to read the article again. A cold, shivering feeling was creeping from his scalp to his shoulders. This article had been written anyhow. The phrases were wildly extravagant; the unexpected epigrams and quaint collocations of words went beyond all bounds. Yet notwithstanding this, he was struck by what he had read, for it had rudely awakened within him much that for months past he had not cared to think about.

He looked up. Nana had grown absorbed in her ecstatic self-contemplation. She was bending her neck and was looking attentively in the mirror at a little brown mark above her right haunch. She was touching it with the tip of her finger and by dint of bending backward was making it stand out more clearly than ever. Situated where it was, it doubtless struck her as both quaint and pretty. After that she studied other parts of her body with an amused expression and much of the vicious curiosity of a child. The sight of herself always astonished her, and she would look as surprised and ecstatic as a young girl who has discovered her puberty. Slowly, slowly, she spread out her arms in order to give full value to her figure, which suggested the torso of a plump Venus. She bent herself this way and that and examined herself before and behind, stooping to look at the side view of her bosom and at the sweeping contours of her thighs. And she ended with a strange amusement which consisted of swinging to right and left, her knees apart and her body swaying from the waist with the perpetual jogging, twitching movements peculiar to an oriental dancer in the danse du ventre.

Muffat sat looking at her. She frightened him. The newspaper had dropped from his hand. For a moment he saw her as she was, and he despised himself. Yes, it was just that; she had corrupted his life; he already felt himself tainted to his very marrow by impurities hitherto undreamed of. Everything was now destined to rot within him, and in the twinkling of an eye he understood what this evil entailed. He saw the ruin brought about by this kind of "leaven"—himself poisoned, his family destroyed, a bit of the social fabric cracking and crumbling. And unable to take his eyes from the sight, he sat looking fixedly at her, striving to inspire himself with loathing for her nakedness.

Nana no longer moved. With an arm behind her neck, one hand clasped in the other, and her elbows far apart, she was throwing back her head so that he could see a foreshortened reflection of her half-closed eyes, her parted lips, her face clothed with amorous laughter. Her masses of yellow hair were unknotted behind, and they covered her back with the fell of a lioness.

Bending back thus, she displayed her solid Amazonian waist and firm bosom, where strong muscles moved under the satin texture of the skin. A delicate line, to which the shoulder and the thigh added their slight undulations, ran from one of her elbows to her foot, and Muffat's eyes followed this tender profile and marked how the outlines of the fair flesh vanished in golden gleams and how its rounded contours shone like silk in the candlelight. He thought of his old dread of Woman, of the Beast of the Scriptures, at once lewd and wild. Nana was all covered with fine hair; a russet made her body velvety, while the Beast was apparent in the almost equine development of her flanks, in the fleshy exuberances and deep hollows of her body, which lent her sex the mystery and suggestiveness lurking in their shadows. She was, indeed, that Golden Creature, blind as brute force, whose very odor ruined the world. Muffat gazed and gazed as a man possessed, till at last, when he had shut his eyes in order to escape it, the Brute reappeared in the darkness of the brain, larger, more terrible, more suggestive in its attitude. Now, he understood, it would remain before his eyes, in his very flesh, forever.

But Nana was gathering herself together. A little thrill of tenderness seemed to have traversed her members. Her eyes were moist; she tried, as it were, to make herself small, as though she could feel herself better thus. Then she threw her head and bosom back and, melting, as it were, in one great bodily caress, she rubbed her cheeks coaxingly, first against one shoulder, then against the other. Her lustful mouth breathed desire over her limbs. She put out her lips, kissed herself long in the neighborhood of her armpit and laughed at the other Nana who also was kissing herself in the mirror.

Then Muffat gave a long sigh. This solitary pleasure exasperated him. Suddenly all his resolutions were swept away as though by a mighty wind. In a fit of brutal passion he caught Nana to his breast and threw her down on the carpet.

"Leave me alone!" she cried. "You're hurting me!"

He was conscious of his undoing; he recognized in her stupidity, vileness and falsehood, and he longed to possess her, poisoned though she was.

"Oh, you're a fool!" she said savagely when he let her get up.

Nevertheless, she grew calm. He would go now. She slipped on a nightgown trimmed with lace and came and sat down on the floor in front of the fire. It was her favorite position. When she again questioned him about Fauchery's article Muffat replied vaguely, for he wanted to avoid a scene. Besides, she declared that she had found a weak spot in Fauchery. And with that she relapsed into a long silence and reflected on how to dismiss the count. She would have liked to do it in an agreeable way, for she was still a good-natured wench, and it bored her to cause others pain, especially in the present instance where the man was a cuckold. The mere thought of his being that had ended by rousing her sympathies!

"So you expect your wife tomorrow morning?" she said at last.

Muffat had stretched himself in an armchair. He looked drowsy, and his limbs were tired. He gave a sign of assent. Nana sat gazing seriously at him with a dull tumult in her brain. Propped on one leg, among her slightly rumpled laces she was holding one of her bare feet between her hands and was turning it mechanically about and about.

"Have you been married long?" she asked.

"Nineteen years," replied the count

"Ah! And is your wife amiable? Do you get on comfortably together?"

He was silent. Then with some embarrassment:

"You know I've begged you never to talk of those matters."

"Dear me, why's that?" she cried, beginning to grow vexed directly. "I'm sure I won't eat your wife if I DO talk about her. Dear boy, why, every woman's worth—"

But she stopped for fear of saying too much. She contented herself by assuming a superior expression, since she considered herself extremely kind. The poor fellow, he needed delicate handling! Besides, she had been struck by a laughable notion, and she smiled as she looked him carefully over.

"I say," she continued, "I haven't told you the story about you that Fauchery's circulating. There's a viper, if you like! I don't bear him any ill will, because his article may be all right, but he's a regular viper all the same."

And laughing more gaily than ever, she let go her foot and, crawling along the floor, came and propped herself against the count's knees.

"Now just fancy, he swears you were still like a babe when you married your wife. You were still like that, eh? Is it true, eh?"

Her eyes pressed for an answer, and she raised her hands to his shoulders and began shaking him in order to extract the desired confession.

"Without doubt," he at last made answer gravely.

Thereupon she again sank down at his feet. She was shaking with uproarious laughter, and she stuttered and dealt him little slaps.

"No, it's too funny! There's no one like you; you're a marvel. But, my poor pet, you must just have been stupid! When a man doesn't know—oh, it is so comical! Good heavens, I should have liked to have seen you! And it came off well, did it? Now tell me something about it! Oh, do, do tell me!"

She overwhelmed him with questions, forgetting nothing and requiring the veriest details. And she laughed such sudden merry peals which doubled her up with mirth, and her chemise slipped and got turned down to such an extent, and her skin looked so golden in the light of the big fire, that little by little the count described to her his bridal night. He no longer felt at all awkward. He himself began to be amused at last as he spoke. Only he kept choosing his phrases, for he still had a certain sense of modesty. The young woman, now thoroughly interested, asked him about the countess. According to his account, she had a marvelous figure but was a regular iceberg for all that.

"Oh, get along with you!" he muttered indolently. "You have no cause to be jealous."

Nana had ceased laughing, and she now resumed her former position and, with her back to the fire, brought her knees up under her chin with her clasped hands. Then in a serious tone she declared:

"It doesn't pay, dear boy, to look like a ninny with one's wife the first night."

"Why?" queried the astonished count.

"Because," she replied slowly, assuming a doctorial expression.

And with that she looked as if she were delivering a lecture and shook her head at him. In the end, however, she condescended to explain herself more lucidly.

"Well, look here! I know how it all happens. Yes, dearie, women don't like a man to be foolish. They don't say anything because there's such a thing as modesty, you know, but you may be sure they think about it for a jolly long time to come. And sooner or later, when a man's been an ignoramus, they go and make other arrangements. That's it, my pet."

He did not seem to understand. Whereupon she grew more definite still. She became maternal and taught him his lesson out of sheer goodness of heart, as a friend might do. Since she had discovered him to be a cuckold the information had weighed on her spirits; she was madly anxious to discuss his position with him.

"Good heavens! I'm talking of things that don't concern me. I've said what I have because everybody ought to be happy. We're having a chat, eh? Well then, you're to answer me as straight as you can."

But she stopped to change her position, for she was burning herself. "It's jolly hot, eh? My back's roasted. Wait a second. I'll cook my tummy a bit. That's what's good for the aches!"

And when she had turned round with her breast to the fire and her feet tucked under her:

"Let me see," she said; "you don't sleep with your wife any longer?"

"No, I swear to you I don't," said Muffat, dreading a scene.

"And you believe she's really a stick?"

He bowed his head in the affirmative.

"And that's why you love me? Answer me! I shan't be angry."

He repeated the same movement.

"Very well then," she concluded. "I suspected as much! Oh, the poor pet. Do you know my aunt Lerat? When she comes get her to tell you the story about the fruiterer who lives opposite her. Just fancy that man—Damn it, how hot this fire is! I must turn round. I'm going to roast my left side now." And as she presented her side to the blaze a droll idea struck her, and like a good-tempered thing, she made fun of herself for she was delighted to see that she was looking so plump and pink in the light of the coal fire.

"I look like a goose, eh? Yes, that's it! I'm a goose on the spit, and I'm turning, turning and cooking in my own juice, eh?"

And she was once more indulging in a merry fit of laughter when a sound of voices and slamming doors became audible. Muffat was surprised, and he questioned her with a look. She grew serious, and an anxious expression came over her face. It must be Zoe's cat, a cursed beast that broke everything. It was half-past twelve o'clock. How long was she going to bother herself in her cuckold's behalf? Now that the other man had come she ought to get him out of the way, and that quickly.

"What were you saying?" asked the count complaisantly, for he was charmed to see her so kind to him.

But in her desire to be rid of him she suddenly changed her mood, became brutal and did not take care what she was saying.

"Oh yes! The fruiterer and his wife. Well, my dear fellow, they never once touched one another! Not the least bit! She was very keen on it, you understand, but he, the ninny, didn't know it. He was so green that he thought her a stick, and so he went elsewhere and took up with streetwalkers, who treated him to all sorts of nastiness, while she, on her part, made up for it beautifully with fellows who were a lot slyer than her greenhorn of a husband. And things always turn out that way through people not understanding one another. I know it, I do!"

Muffat was growing pale. At last he was beginning to understand her allusions, and he wanted to make her keep silence. But she was in full swing.

"No, hold your tongue, will you? If you weren't brutes you would be as nice with your wives as you are with us, and if your wives weren't geese they would take as much pains to keep you as we do to get you. That's the way to behave. Yes, my duck, you can put that in your pipe and smoke it."

"Do not talk of honest women," he said in a hard voice. "You do not know them."

At that Nana rose to her knees.

"I don't know them! Why, they aren't even clean, your honest women aren't! They aren't even clean! I defy you to find me one who would dare show herself as I am doing. Oh, you make me laugh with your honest women. Don't drive me to it; don't oblige me to tell you things I may regret afterward."

The count, by way of answer, mumbled something insulting. Nana became quite pale in her turn. For some seconds she looked at him without speaking. Then in her decisive way:

"What would you do if your wife were deceiving you?"

He made a threatening gesture.

"Well, and if I were to?"

"Oh, you," he muttered with a shrug of his shoulders.

Nana was certainly not spiteful. Since the beginning of the conversation she had been strongly tempted to throw his cuckold's reputation in his teeth, but she had resisted. She would have liked to confess him quietly on the subject, but he had begun to exasperate her at last. The matter ought to stop now.

"Well, then, my dearie," she continued, "I don't know what you're getting at with me. For two hours past you've been worrying my life out. Now do just go and find your wife, for she's at it with Fauchery. Yes, it's quite correct; they're in the Rue Taitbout, at the corner of the Rue de Provence. You see, I'm giving you the address."

Then triumphantly, as she saw Muffat stagger to his feet like an ox under the hammer:

"If honest women must meddle in our affairs and take our sweethearts from us—Oh, you bet they're a nice lot, those honest women!"

But she was unable to proceed. With a terrible push he had cast her full length on the floor and, lifting his heel, he seemed on the point of crushing in her head in order to silence her. For the twinkling of an eye she felt sickening dread. Blinded with rage, he had begun beating about the room like a maniac. Then his choking silence and the struggle with which he was shaken melted her to tears. She felt a mortal regret and, rolling herself up in front of the fire so as to roast her right side, she undertook the task of comforting him.

"I take my oath, darling, I thought you knew it all. Otherwise I shouldn't have spoken; you may be sure. But perhaps it isn't true. I don't say anything for certain. I've been told it, and people are talking about it, but what does that prove? Oh, get along! You're very silly to grow riled about it. If I were a man I shouldn't care a rush for the women! All the women are alike, you see, high or low; they're all rowdy and the rest of it."

In a fit of self-abnegation she was severe on womankind, for she wished thus to lessen the cruelty of her blow. But he did not listen to her or hear what she said. With fumbling movements he had put on his boots and his overcoat. For a moment longer he raved round, and then in a final outburst, finding himself near the door, he rushed from the room. Nana was very much annoyed.

"Well, well! A prosperous trip to you!" she continued aloud, though she was now alone. "He's polite, too, that fellow is, when he's spoken to! And I had to defend myself at that! Well, I was the first to get back my temper and I made plenty of excuses, I'm thinking! Besides, he had been getting on my nerves!"

Nevertheless, she was not happy and sat scratching her legs with both hands. Then she took high ground:

"Tut, tut, it isn't my fault if he is a cuckold!"

And toasted on every side and as hot as a roast bird, she went and buried herself under the bedclothes after ringing for Zoe to usher in the other man, who was waiting in the kitchen.

Once outside, Muffat began walking at a furious pace. A fresh shower had just fallen, and he kept slipping on the greasy pavement. When he looked mechanically up into the sky he saw ragged, soot-colored clouds scudding in front of the moon. At this hour of the night passers-by were becoming few and far between in the Boulevard Haussmann. He skirted the enclosures round the opera house in his search for darkness, and as he went along he kept mumbling inconsequent phrases. That girl had been lying. She had invented her story out of sheer stupidity and cruelty. He ought to have crushed her head when he had it under his heel. After all was said and done, the business was too shameful. Never would he see her; never would he touch her again, or if he did he would be miserably weak. And with that he breathed hard, as though he were free once more. Oh, that naked, cruel monster, roasting away like any goose and slavering over everything that he had respected for forty years back. The moon had come out, and the empty street was bathed in white light. He felt afraid, and he burst into a great fit of sobbing, for he had grown suddenly hopeless and maddened as though he had sunk into a fathomless void.

"My God!" he stuttered out. "It's finished! There's nothing left now!"

Along the boulevards belated people were hurrying. He tried hard to be calm, and as the story told him by that courtesan kept recurring to his burning consciousness, he wanted to reason the matter out. The countess was coming up from Mme de Chezelles's country house tomorrow morning. Yet nothing, in fact, could have prevented her from returning to Paris the night before and passing it with that man. He now began recalling to mind certain details of their stay at Les Fondettes. One evening, for instance, he had surprised Sabine in the shade of some trees, when she was so much agitated as to be unable to answer his questions. The man had been present; why should she not be with him now? The more he thought about it the more possible the whole story became, and he ended by thinking it natural and even inevitable. While he was in his shirt sleeves in the house of a harlot his wife was undressing in her lover's room. Nothing could be simpler or more logical! Reasoning in this way, he forced himself to keep cool. He felt as if there were a great downward movement in the direction of fleshly madness, a movement which, as it grew, was overcoming the whole world round about him. Warm images pursued him in imagination. A naked Nana suddenly evoked a naked Sabine. At this vision, which seemed to bring them together in shameless relationship and under the influence of the same lusts, he literally stumbled, and in the road a cab nearly ran over him. Some women who had come out of a cafe jostled him amid loud laughter. Then a fit of weeping once more overcame him, despite all his efforts to the contrary, and, not wishing to shed tears in the presence of others, he plunged into a dark and empty street. It was the Rue Rossini, and along its silent length he wept like a child.

"It's over with us," he said in hollow tones. "There's nothing left us now, nothing left us now!"

He wept so violently that he had to lean up against a door as he buried his face in his wet hands. A noise of footsteps drove him away. He felt a shame and a fear which made him fly before people's faces with the restless step of a bird of darkness. When passers-by met him on the pavement he did his best to look and walk in a leisurely way, for he fancied they were reading his secret in the very swing of his shoulders. He had followed the Rue de la Grange Bateliere as far as the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, where the brilliant lamplight surprised him, and he retraced his steps. For nearly an hour he traversed the district thus, choosing always the darkest corners. Doubtless there was some goal whither his steps were patiently, instinctively, leading him through a labyrinth of endless turnings. At length he lifted his eyes up it a street corner. He had reached his destination, the point where the Rue Taitbout and the Rue de la Provence met. He had taken an hour amid his painful mental sufferings to arrive at a place he could have reached in five minutes. One morning a month ago he remembered going up to Fauchery's rooms to thank him for a notice of a ball at the Tuileries, in which the journalist had mentioned him. The flat was between the ground floor and the first story and had a row of small square windows which were half hidden by the colossal signboard belonging to a shop. The last window on the left was bisected by a brilliant band of lamplight coming from between the half-closed curtains. And he remained absorbed and expectant, with his gaze fixed on this shining streak.

The moon had disappeared in an inky sky, whence an icy drizzle was falling. Two o'clock struck at the Trinite. The Rue de Provence and the Rue Taitbout lay in shadow, bestarred at intervals by bright splashes of light from the gas lamps, which in the distance were merged in yellow mist. Muffat did not move from where he was standing. That was the room. He remembered it now: it had hangings of red "andrinople," and a Louis XIII bed stood at one end of it. The lamp must be standing on the chimney piece to the right. Without doubt they had gone to bed, for no shadows passed across the window, and the bright streak gleamed as motionless as the light of a night lamp. With his eyes still uplifted he began forming a plan; he would ring the bell, go upstairs despite the porter's remonstrances, break the doors in with a push of his shoulder and fall upon them in the very bed without giving them time to unlace their arms. For one moment the thought that he had no weapon upon him gave him pause, but directly afterward he decided to throttle them. He returned to the consideration of his project, and he perfected it while waiting for some sign, some indication, which should bring certainty with it.

Had a woman's shadow only shown itself at that moment he would have rung. But the thought that perhaps he was deceiving himself froze him. How could he be certain? Doubts began to return. His wife could not be with that man. It was monstrous and impossible. Nevertheless, he stayed where he was and was gradually overcome by a species of torpor which merged into sheer feebleness while he waited long, and the fixity of his gaze induced hallucinations.

A shower was falling. Two policemen were approaching, and he was forced to leave the doorway where he had taken shelter. When these were lost to view in the Rue de Provence he returned to his post, wet and shivering. The luminous streak still traversed the window, and this time he was going away for good when a shadow crossed it. It moved so quickly that he thought he had deceived himself. But first one and then another black thing followed quickly after it, and there was a regular commotion in the room. Riveted anew to the pavement, he experienced an intolerable burning sensation in his inside as he waited to find out the meaning of it all. Outlines of arms and legs flitted after one another, and an enormous hand traveled about with the silhouette of a water jug. He distinguished nothing clearly, but he thought he recognized a woman's headdress. And he disputed the point with himself; it might well have been Sabine's hair, only the neck did not seem sufficiently slim. At that hour of the night he had lost the power of recognition and of action. In this terrible agony of uncertainty his inside caused him such acute suffering that he pressed against the door in order to calm himself, shivering like a man in rags, as he did so. Then seeing that despite everything he could not turn his eyes away from the window, his anger changed into a fit of moralizing. He fancied himself a deputy; he was haranguing an assembly, loudly denouncing debauchery, prophesying national ruin. And he reconstructed Fauchery's article on the poisoned fly, and he came before the house and declared that morals such as these, which could only be paralleled in the days of the later Roman Empire, rendered society an impossibility; that did him good. But the shadows had meanwhile disappeared. Doubtless they had gone to bed again, and, still watching, he continued waiting where he was.

Three o'clock struck, then four, but he could not take his departure. When showers fell he buried himself in a corner of the doorway, his legs splashed with wet. Nobody passed by now, and occasionally his eyes would close, as though scorched by the streak of light, which he kept watching obstinately, fixedly, with idiotic persistence. On two subsequent occasions the shadows flitted about, repeating the same gestures and agitating the silhouette of the same gigantic jug, and twice quiet was re-established, and the night lamp again glowed discreetly out. These shadows only increased his uncertainty. Then, too, a sudden idea soothed his brain while it postponed the decisive moment. After all, he had only to wait for the woman when she left the house. He could quite easily recognize Sabine. Nothing could be simpler, and there would be no scandal, and he would be sure of things one way or the other. It was only necessary to stay where he was. Among all the confused feelings which had been agitating him he now merely felt a dull need of certain knowledge. But sheer weariness and vacancy began lulling him to sleep under his doorway, and by way of distraction he tried to reckon up how long he would have to wait. Sabine was to be at the station toward nine o'clock; that meant about four hours and a half more. He was very patient; he would even have been content not to move again, and he found a certain charm in fancying that his night vigil would last through eternity.

Suddenly the streak of light was gone. This extremely simple event was to him an unforeseen catastrophe, at once troublesome and disagreeable. Evidently they had just put the lamp out and were going to sleep. It was reasonable enough at that hour, but he was irritated thereat, for now the darkened window ceased to interest him. He watched it for a quarter of an hour longer and then grew tired and, leaving the doorway, took a turn upon the pavement. Until five o'clock he walked to and fro, looking upward from time to time. The window seemed a dead thing, and now and then he asked himself if he had not dreamed that shadows had been dancing up there behind the panes. An intolerable sense of fatigue weighed him down, a dull, heavy feeling, under the influence of which he forgot what he was waiting for at that particular street corner. He kept stumbling on the pavement and starting into wakefulness with the icy shudder of a man who does not know where he is. Nothing seemed to justify the painful anxiety he was inflicting on himself. Since those people were asleep—well then, let them sleep! What good could it do mixing in their affairs? It was very dark; no one would ever know anything about this night's doings. And with that every sentiment within him, down to curiosity itself, took flight before the longing to have done with it all and to find relief somewhere. The cold was increasing, and the street was becoming insufferable. Twice he walked away and slowly returned, dragging one foot behind the other, only to walk farther away next time. It was all over; nothing was left him now, and so he went down the whole length of the boulevard and did not return.

His was a melancholy progress through the streets. He walked slowly, never changing his pace and simply keeping along the walls of the houses.

His boot heels re-echoed, and he saw nothing but his shadow moving at his side. As he neared each successive gaslight it grew taller and immediately afterward diminished. But this lulled him and occupied him mechanically. He never knew afterward where he had been; it seemed as if he had dragged himself round and round in a circle for hours. One reminiscence only was very distinctly retained by him. Without his being able to explain how it came about he found himself with his face pressed close against the gate at the end of the Passage des Panoramas and his two hands grasping the bars. He did not shake them but, his whole heart swelling with emotion, he simply tried to look into the passage. But he could make nothing out clearly, for shadows flooded the whole length of the deserted gallery, and the wind, blowing hard down the Rue Saint-Marc, puffed in his face with the damp breath of a cellar. For a time he tried doggedly to see into the place, and then, awakening from his dream, he was filled with astonishment and asked himself what he could possibly be seeking for at that hour and in that position, for he had pressed against the railings so fiercely that they had left their mark on his face. Then he went on tramp once more. He was hopeless, and his heart was full of infinite sorrow, for he felt, amid all those shadows, that he was evermore betrayed and alone.

Day broke at last. It was the murky dawn that follows winter nights and looks so melancholy from muddy Paris pavements. Muffat had returned into the wide streets, which were then in course of construction on either side of the new opera house. Soaked by the rain and cut up by cart wheels, the chalky soil had become a lake of liquid mire. But he never looked to see where he was stepping and walked on and on, slipping and regaining his footing as he went. The awakening of Paris, with its gangs of sweepers and early workmen trooping to their destinations, added to his troubles as day brightened. People stared at him in surprise as he went by with scared look and soaked hat and muddy clothes. For a long while he sought refuge against palings and among scaffoldings, his desolate brain haunted by the single remaining thought that he was very miserable.

Then he thought of God. The sudden idea of divine help, of superhuman consolation, surprised him, as though it were something unforeseen and extraordinary. The image of M. Venot was evoked thereby, and he saw his little plump face and ruined teeth. Assuredly M. Venot, whom for months he had been avoiding and thereby rendering miserable, would be delighted were he to go and knock at his door and fall weeping into his arms. In the old days God had been always so merciful toward him. At the least sorrow, the slightest obstacle on the path of life, he had been wont to enter a church, where, kneeling down, he would humble his littleness in the presence of Omnipotence. And he had been used to go forth thence, fortified by prayer, fully prepared to give up the good things of this world, possessed by the single yearning for eternal salvation. But at present he only practiced by fits and starts, when the terror of hell came upon him. All kinds of weak inclinations had overcome him, and the thought of Nana disturbed his devotions. And now the thought of God astonished him. Why had he not thought of God before, in the hour of that terrible agony when his feeble humanity was breaking up in ruin?

Meanwhile with slow and painful steps he sought for a church. But he had lost his bearings; the early hour had changed the face of the streets. Soon, however, as he turned the corner of the Rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin, he noticed a tower looming vaguely in the fog at the end of the Trinite Church. The white statues overlooking the bare garden seemed like so many chilly Venuses among the yellow foliage of a park. Under the porch he stood and panted a little, for the ascent of the wide steps had tired him. Then he went in. The church was very cold, for its heating apparatus had been fireless since the previous evening, and its lofty, vaulted aisles were full of a fine damp vapor which had come filtering through the windows. The aisles were deep in shadow; not a soul was in the church, and the only sound audible amid the unlovely darkness was that made by the old shoes of some verger or other who was dragging himself about in sulky semiwakefulness. Muffat, however, after knocking forlornly against an untidy collection of chairs, sank on his knees with bursting heart and propped himself against the rails in front of a little chapel close by a font. He clasped his hands and began searching within himself for suitable prayers, while his whole being yearned toward a transport. But only his lips kept stammering empty words; his heart and brain were far away, and with them he returned to the outer world and began his long, unresting march through the streets, as though lashed forward by implacable necessity. And he kept repeating, "O my God, come to my assistance! O my God, abandon not Thy creature, who delivers himself up to Thy justice! O my God, I adore Thee: Thou wilt not leave me to perish under the buffetings of mine enemies!" Nothing answered: the shadows and the cold weighed upon him, and the noise of the old shoes continued in the distance and prevented him praying. Nothing, indeed, save that tiresome noise was audible in the deserted church, where the matutinal sweeping was unknown before the early masses had somewhat warmed the air of the place. After that he rose to his feet with the help of a chair, his knees cracking under him as he did so. God was not yet there. And why should he weep in M. Venot's arms? The man could do nothing.

And then mechanically he returned to Nana's house. Outside he slipped, and he felt the tears welling to his eyes again, but he was not angry with his lot—he was only feeble and ill. Yes, he was too tired; the rain had wet him too much; he was nipped with cold, but the idea of going back to his great dark house in the Rue Miromesnil froze his heart. The house door at Nana's was not open as yet, and he had to wait till the porter made his appearance. He smiled as he went upstairs, for he already felt penetrated by the soft warmth of that cozy retreat, where he would be able to stretch his limbs and go to sleep.

When Zoe opened the door to him she gave a start of most uneasy astonishment. Madame had been taken ill with an atrocious sick headache, and she hadn't closed her eyes all night. Still, she could quite go and see whether Madame had gone to sleep for good. And with that she slipped into the bedroom while he sank back into one of the armchairs in the drawing room. But almost at that very moment Nana appeared. She had jumped out of bed and had scarce had time to slip on a petticoat. Her feet were bare, her hair in wild disorder, her nightgown all crumpled.

"What! You here again?" she cried with a red flush on her cheeks.

Up she rushed, stung by sudden indignation, in order herself to thrust him out of doors. But when she saw him in such sorry plight—nay, so utterly done for—she felt infinite pity.

"Well, you are a pretty sight, my dear fellow!" she continued more gently. "But what's the matter? You've spotted them, eh? And it's given you the hump?"

He did not answer; he looked like a broken-down animal. Nevertheless, she came to the conclusion that he still lacked proofs, and to hearten him up the said:

"You see now? I was on the wrong tack. Your wife's an honest woman, on my word of honor! And now, my little friend, you must go home to bed. You want it badly."

He did not stir.

"Now then, be off! I can't keep you here. But perhaps you won't presume to stay at such a time as this?"

"Yes, let's go to bed," he stammered.

She repressed a violent gesture, for her patience was deserting her. Was the man going crazy?

"Come, be off!" she repeated.

"No."

But she flared up in exasperation, in utter rebellion.

"It's sickening! Don't you understand I'm jolly tired of your company? Go and find your wife, who's making a cuckold of you. Yes, she's making a cuckold of you. I say so—yes, I do now. There, you've got the sack! Will you leave me or will you not?"

Muffat's eyes filled with tears. He clasped his hands together.

"Oh, let's go to bed!"

At this Nana suddenly lost all control over herself and was choked by nervous sobs. She was being taken advantage of when all was said and done! What had these stories to do with her? She certainly had used all manner of delicate methods in order to teach him his lesson gently. And now he was for making her pay the damages! No, thank you! She was kindhearted, but not to that extent.

"The devil, but I've had enough of this!" she swore, bringing her fist down on the furniture. "Yes, yes, I wanted to be faithful—it was all I could do to be that! Yet if I spoke the word I could be rich tomorrow, my dear fellow!"

He looked up in surprise. Never once had he thought of the monetary question. If she only expressed a desire he would realize it at once; his whole fortune was at her service.

"No, it's too late now," she replied furiously. "I like men who give without being asked. No, if you were to offer me a million for a single interview I should say no! It's over between us; I've got other fish to fry there! So be off or I shan't answer for the consequences. I shall do something dreadful!"

She advanced threateningly toward him, and while she was raving, as became a good courtesan who, though driven to desperation, was yet firmly convinced of her rights and her superiority over tiresome, honest folks, the door opened suddenly and Steiner presented himself. That proved the finishing touch. She shrieked aloud:

"Well, I never. Here's the other one!"

Bewildered by her piercing outcry, Steiner stopped short. Muffat's unexpected presence annoyed him, for he feared an explanation and had been doing his best to avoid it these three months past. With blinking eyes he stood first on one leg, then on the other, looking embarrassed the while and avoiding the count's gaze. He was out of breath, and as became a man who had rushed across Paris with good news, only to find himself involved in unforeseen trouble, his face was flushed and distorted.

"Que veux-tu, toi?" asked Nana roughly, using the second person singular in open mockery of the count.

"What—what do I—" he stammered. "I've got it for you—you know what."

"Eh?"

He hesitated. The day before yesterday she had given him to understand that if he could not find her a thousand francs to pay a bill with she would not receive him any more. For two days he had been loafing about the town in quest of the money and had at last made the sum up that very morning.

"The thousand francs!" he ended by declaring as he drew an envelope from his pocket.

Nana had not remembered.

"The thousand francs!" she cried. "D'you think I'm begging alms? Now look here, that's what I value your thousand francs at!"

And snatching the envelope, she threw it full in his face. As became a prudent Hebrew, he picked it up slowly and painfully and then looked at the young woman with a dull expression of face. Muffat and he exchanged a despairing glance, while she put her arms akimbo in order to shout more loudly than before.

"Come now, will you soon have done insulting me? I'm glad you've come, too, dear boy, because now you see the clearance'll be quite complete. Now then, gee up! Out you go!"

Then as they did not hurry in the least, for they were paralyzed:

"D'you mean to say I'm acting like a fool, eh? It's likely enough! But you've bored me too much! And, hang it all, I've had enough of swelldom! If I die of what I'm doing—well, it's my fancy!"

They sought to calm her; they begged her to listen to reason.

"Now then, once, twice, thrice! Won't you go? Very well! Look there! I've got company."

And with a brisk movement she flung wide the bedroom door. Whereupon in the middle of the tumbled bed the two men caught sight of Fontan. He had not expected to be shown off in this situation; nevertheless, he took things very easily, for he was used to sudden surprises on the stage. Indeed, after the first shock he even hit upon a grimace calculated to tide him honorably over his difficulty; he "turned rabbit," as he phrased it, and stuck out his lips and wrinkled up his nose, so as completely to transform the lower half of his face. His base, satyrlike head seemed to exude incontinence. It was this man Fontan then whom Nana had been to fetch at the Varieties every day for a week past, for she was smitten with that fierce sort of passion which the grimacing ugliness of a low comedian is wont to inspire in the genus courtesan.

"There!" she said, pointing him out with tragic gesture.

Muffat, who hitherto had pocketed everything, rebelled at this affront.

"Bitch!" he stammered.

But Nana, who was once more in the bedroom, came back in order to have the last word.

"How am I a bitch? What about your wife?"

And she was off and, slamming the door with a bang, she noisily pushed to the bolt. Left alone, the two men gazed at one another in silence. Zoe had just come into the room, but she did not drive them out. Nay, she spoke to them in the most sensible manner. As became a woman with a head on her shoulders, she decided that Madame's conduct was rather too much of a good thing. But she defended her, nonetheless: this union with the play actor couldn't last; the madness must be allowed to pass off! The two men retired without uttering a sound. On the pavement outside they shook hands silently, as though swayed by a mutual sense of fraternity. Then they turned their backs on one another and went crawling off in opposite directions.

When at last Muffat entered his town house in the Rue Miromesnil his wife was just arriving. The two met on the great staircase, whose walls exhaled an icy chill. They lifted up their eyes and beheld one another. The count still wore his muddy clothes, and his pale, bewildered face betrayed the prodigal returning from his debauch. The countess looked as though she were utterly fagged out by a night in the train. She was dropping with sleep, but her hair had been brushed anyhow, and her eyes were deeply sunken.

CHAPTER VIII

We are in a little set of lodgings on the fourth floor in the Rue Veron at Montmartre. Nana and Fontan have invited a few friends to cut their Twelfth-Night cake with them. They are giving their housewarming, though they have been only three days settled.

They had no fixed intention of keeping house together, but the whole thing had come about suddenly in the first glow of the honeymoon. After her grand blowup, when she had turned the count and the banker so vigorously out of doors, Nana felt the world crumbling about her feet. She estimated the situation at a glance; the creditors would swoop down on her anteroom, would mix themselves up with her love affairs and threaten to sell her little all unless she continued to act sensibly. Then, too, there would be no end of disputes and carking anxieties if she attempted to save her furniture from their clutches. And so she preferred giving up everything. Besides, the flat in the Boulevard Haussmann was plaguing her to death. It was so stupid with its great gilded rooms! In her access of tenderness for Fontan she began dreaming of a pretty little bright chamber. Indeed, she returned to the old ideals of the florist days, when her highest ambition was to have a rosewood cupboard with a plate-glass door and a bed hung with blue "reps." In the course of two days she sold what she could smuggle out of the house in the way of knickknacks and jewelry and then disappeared, taking with her ten thousand francs and never even warning the porter's wife. It was a plunge into the dark, a merry spree; never a trace was left behind. In this way she would prevent the men from coming dangling after her. Fontain was very nice. He did not say no to anything but just let her do as she liked. Nay, he even displayed an admirable spirit of comradeship. He had, on his part, nearly seven thousand francs, and despite the fact that people accused him of stinginess, he consented to add them to the young woman's ten thousand. The sum struck them as a solid foundation on which to begin housekeeping. And so they started away, drawing from their common hoard, in order to hire and furnish the two rooms in the Rue Veron, and sharing everything together like old friends. In the early days it was really delicious.

On Twelfth Night Mme Lerat and Louiset were the first to arrive. As Fontan had not yet come home, the old lady ventured to give expression to her fears, for she trembled to see her niece renouncing the chance of wealth.

"Oh, Aunt, I love him so dearly!" cried Nana, pressing her hands to her heart with the prettiest of gestures.

This phrase produced an extraordinary effect on Mme Lerat, and tears came into her eyes.

"That's true," she said with an air of conviction. "Love before all things!"

And with that she went into raptures over the prettiness of the rooms. Nana took her to see the bedroom, the parlor and the very kitchen. Gracious goodness, it wasn't a vast place, but then, they had painted it afresh and put up new wallpapers. Besides, the sun shone merrily into it during the daytime.

Thereupon Mme Lerat detained the young woman in the bedroom, while Louiset installed himself behind the charwoman in the kitchen in order to watch a chicken being roasted. If, said Mme Lerat, she permitted herself to say what was in her mind, it was because Zoe had just been at her house. Zoe had stayed courageously in the breach because she was devoted to her mistress. Madame would pay her later on; she was in no anxiety about that! And amid the breakup of the Boulevard Haussmann establishment it was she who showed the creditors a bold front; it was she who conducted a dignified retreat, saving what she could from the wreck and telling everyone that her mistress was traveling. She never once gave them her address. Nay, through fear of being followed, she even deprived herself of the pleasure of calling on Madame. Nevertheless, that same morning she had run round to Mme Lerat's because matters were taking a new turn. The evening before creditors in the persons of the upholsterer, the charcoal merchant and the laundress had put in an appearance and had offered to give Madame an extension of time. Nay, they had even proposed to advance Madame a very considerable amount if only Madame would return to her flat and conduct herself like a sensible person. The aunt repeated Zoe's words. Without doubt there was a gentleman behind it all.

"I'll never consent!" declared Nana in great disgust. "Ah, they're a pretty lot those tradesmen! Do they think I'm to be sold so that they can get their bills paid? Why, look here, I'd rather die of hunger than deceive Fontan."

"That's what I said," averred Mme Lerat. "'My niece,' I said, 'is too noble-hearted!'"

Nana, however, was much vexed to learn that La Mignotte was being sold and that Labordette was buying it for Caroline Hequet at an absurdly low price. It made her angry with that clique. Oh, they were a regular cheap lot, in spite of their airs and graces! Yes, by Jove, she was worth more than the whole lot of them!

"They can have their little joke out," she concluded, "but money will never give them true happiness! Besides, you know, Aunt, I don't even know now whether all that set are alive or not. I'm much too happy."

At that very moment Mme Maloir entered, wearing one of those hats of which she alone understood the shape. It was delightful meeting again. Mme Maloir explained that magnificence frightened her and that NOW, from time to time, she would come back for her game of bezique. A second visit was paid to the different rooms in the lodgings, and in the kitchen Nana talked of economy in the presence of the charwoman, who was basting the fowl, and said that a servant would have cost too much and that she was herself desirous of looking after things. Louiset was gazing beatifically at the roasting process.

But presently there was a loud outburst of voices. Fontan had come in with Bosc and Prulliere, and the company could now sit down to table. The soup had been already served when Nana for the third time showed off the lodgings.

"Ah, dear children, how comfortable you are here!" Bosc kept repeating, simply for the sake of pleasing the chums who were standing the dinner. At bottom the subject of the "nook," as he called it, nowise touched him.

In the bedroom he harped still more vigorously on the amiable note. Ordinarily he was wont to treat women like cattle, and the idea of a man bothering himself about one of the dirty brutes excited within him the only angry feelings of which, in his comprehensive, drunken disdain of the universe, he was still capable.

"Ah, ah, the villains," he continued with a wink, "they've done this on the sly. Well, you were certainly right. It will be charming, and, by heaven, we'll come and see you!"

But when Louiset arrived on the scene astride upon a broomstick, Prulliere chuckled spitefully and remarked:

"Well, I never! You've got a baby already?"

This struck everybody as very droll, and Mme Lerat and Mme Maloir shook with laughter. Nana, far from being vexed, laughed tenderly and said that unfortunately this was not the case. She would very much have liked it, both for the little one's sake and for her own, but perhaps one would arrive all the same. Fontan, in his role of honest citizen, took Louiset in his arms and began playing with him and lisping.

"Never mind! It loves its daddy! Call me 'Papa,' you little blackguard!"

"Papa, Papa!" stammered the child.

The company overwhelmed him with caresses, but Bosc was bored and talked of sitting down to table. That was the only serious business in life. Nana asked her guests' permission to put Louiset's chair next her own. The dinner was very merry, but Bosc suffered from the near neighborhood of the child, from whom he had to defend his plate. Mme Lerat bored him too. She was in a melting mood and kept whispering to him all sorts of mysterious things about gentlemen of the first fashion who were still running after Nana. Twice he had to push away her knee, for she was positively invading him in her gushing, tearful mood. Prulliere behaved with great incivility toward Mme Maloir and did not once help her to anything. He was entirely taken up with Nana and looked annoyed at seeing her with Fontan. Besides, the turtle doves were kissing so excessively as to be becoming positive bores. Contrary to all known rules, they had elected to sit side by side.

"Devil take it! Why don't you eat? You've got plenty of time ahead of you!" Bosc kept repeating with his mouth full. "Wait till we are gone!"

But Nana could not restrain herself. She was in a perfect ecstasy of love. Her face was as full of blushes as an innocent young girl's, and her looks and her laughter seemed to overflow with tenderness. Gazing on Fontan, she overwhelmed him with pet names—"my doggie, my old bear, my kitten"—and whenever he passed her the water or the salt she bent forward and kissed him at random on lips, eyes, nose or ear. Then if she met with reproof she would return to the attack with the cleverest maneuvers and with infinite submissiveness and the supple cunning of a beaten cat would catch hold of his hand when no one was looking, in order to kiss it again. It seemed she must be touching something belonging to him. As to Fontan, he gave himself airs and let himself be adored with the utmost condescension. His great nose sniffed with entirely sensual content; his goat face, with its quaint, monstrous ugliness, positively glowed in the sunlight of devoted adoration lavished upon him by that superb woman who was so fair and so plump of limb. Occasionally he gave a kiss in return, as became a man who is having all the enjoyment and is yet willing to behave prettily.

"Well, you're growing maddening!" cried Prulliere. "Get away from her, you fellow there!"

And he dismissed Fontan and changed covers, in order to take his place at Nana's side. The company shouted and applauded at this and gave vent to some stiffish epigrammatic witticisms. Fontan counterfeited despair and assumed the quaint expression of Vulcan crying for Venus. Straightway Prulliere became very gallant, but Nana, whose foot he was groping for under the table, caught him a slap to make him keep quiet. No, no, she was certainly not going to become his mistress. A month ago she had begun to take a fancy to him because of his good looks, but now she detested him. If he pinched her again under pretense of picking up her napkin, she would throw her glass in his face!

Nevertheless, the evening passed off well. The company had naturally begun talking about the Varietes. Wasn't that cad of a Bordenave going to go off the hooks after all? His nasty diseases kept reappearing and causing him such suffering that you couldn't come within six yards of him nowadays. The day before during rehearsal he had been incessantly yelling at Simonne. There was a fellow whom the theatrical people wouldn't shed many tears over. Nana announced that if he were to ask her to take another part she would jolly well send him to the rightabout. Moreover, she began talking of leaving the stage; the theater was not to compare with her home. Fontan, who was not in the present piece or in that which was then being rehearsed, also talked big about the joy of being entirely at liberty and of passing his evenings with his feet on the fender in the society of his little pet. And at this the rest exclaimed delightedly, treating their entertainers as lucky people and pretending to envy their felicity.

The Twelfth-Night cake had been cut and handed round. The bean had fallen to the lot of Mme Lerat, who popped it into Bosc's glass. Whereupon there were shouts of "The king drinks! The king drinks!" Nana took advantage of this outburst of merriment and went and put her arms round Fontan's neck again, kissing him and whispering in his ear. But Prulliere, laughing angrily, as became a pretty man, declared that they were not playing the game. Louiset, meanwhile, slept soundly on two chairs. It was nearing one o'clock when the company separated, shouting au revoir as they went downstairs.

For three weeks the existence of the pair of lovers was really charming. Nana fancied she was returning to those early days when her first silk dress had caused her infinite delight. She went out little and affected a life of solitude and simplicity. One morning early, when she had gone down to buy fish IN PROPRIA PERSONA in La Rouchefoucauld Market, she was vastly surprised to meet her old hair dresser Francis face to face. His getup was as scrupulously careful as ever: he wore the finest linen, and his frock coat was beyond reproach; in fact, Nana felt ashamed that he should see her in the street with a dressing jacket and disordered hair and down-at-heel shoes. But he had the tact, if possible, to intensify his politeness toward her. He did not permit himself a single inquiry and affected to believe that Madame was at present on her travels. Ah, but Madame had rendered many persons unhappy when she decided to travel! All the world had suffered loss. The young woman, however, ended by asking him questions, for a sudden fit of curiosity had made her forget her previous embarrassment. Seeing that the crowd was jostling them, she pushed him into a doorway and, still holding her little basket in one hand, stood chatting in front of him. What were people saying about her high jinks? Good heavens! The ladies to whom he went said this and that and all sorts of things. In fact, she had made a great noise and was enjoying a real boom: And Steiner? M. Steiner was in a very bad way, would make an ugly finish if he couldn't hit on some new commercial operation. And Daguenet? Oh, HE was getting on swimmingly. M. Daguenet was settling down. Nana, under the exciting influence of various recollections, was just opening her mouth with a view to a further examination when she felt it would be awkward to utter Muffat's name. Thereupon Francis smiled and spoke instead of her. As to Monsieur le Comte, it was all a great pity, so sad had been his sufferings since Madame's departure.

He had been like a soul in pain—you might have met him wherever Madame was likely to be found. At last M. Mignon had come across him and had taken him home to his own place. This piece of news caused Nana to laugh a good deal. But her laughter was not of the easiest kind.

"Ah, he's with Rose now," she said. "Well then, you must know, Francis, I've done with him! Oh, the canting thing! It's learned some pretty habits—can't even go fasting for a week now! And to think that he used to swear he wouldn't have any woman after me!"

She was raging inwardly.

"My leavings, if you please!" she continued. "A pretty Johnnie for Rose to go and treat herself to! Oh, I understand it all now: she wanted to have her revenge because I got that brute of a Steiner away from her. Ain't it sly to get a man to come to her when I've chucked him out of doors?"

"M. Mignon doesn't tell that tale," said the hairdresser. "According to his account, it was Monsieur le Comte who chucked you out. Yes, and in a pretty disgusting way too—with a kick on the bottom!"

Nana became suddenly very pale.

"Eh, what?" she cried. "With a kick on my bottom? He's going too far, he is! Look here, my little friend, it was I who threw him downstairs, the cuckold, for he is a cuckold, I must inform you. His countess is making him one with every man she meets—yes, even with that good-for-nothing of a Fauchery. And that Mignon, who goes loafing about the pavement in behalf of his harridan of a wife, whom nobody wants because she's so lean! What a foul lot! What a foul lot!"

She was choking, and she paused for breath

"Oh, that's what they say, is it? Very well, my little Francis, I'll go and look 'em up, I will. Shall you and I go to them at once? Yes, I'll go, and we'll see whether they will have the cheek to go telling about kicks on the bottom. Kick's! I never took one from anybody! And nobody's ever going to strike me—d'ye see?—for I'd smash the man who laid a finger on me!"

Nevertheless, the storm subsided at last. After all, they might jolly well what they liked! She looked upon them as so much filth underfoot! It would have soiled her to bother about people like that. She had a conscience of her own, she had! And Francis, seeing her thus giving herself away, what with her housewife's costume and all, became familiar and, at parting, made so bold as to give her some good advice. It was wrong of her to be sacrificing everything for the sake of an infatuation; such infatuations ruined existence. She listened to him with bowed head while he spoke to her with a pained expression, as became a connoisseur who could not bear to see so fine a girl making such a hash of things.

"Well, that's my affair," she said at last "Thanks all the same, dear boy." She shook his hand, which despite his perfect dress was always a little greasy, and then went off to buy her fish. During the day that story about the kick on the bottom occupied her thoughts. She even spoke about it to Fontan and again posed as a sturdy woman who was not going to stand the slightest flick from anybody. Fontan, as became a philosophic spirit, declared that all men of fashion were beasts whom it was one's duty to despise. And from that moment forth Nana was full of very real disdain.

That same evening they went to the Bouffes-Parisiens Theatre to see a little woman of Fontan's acquaintance make her debut in a part of some ten lines. It was close on one o'clock when they once more trudged up the heights of Montmartre. They had purchased a cake, a "mocha," in the Rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin, and they ate it in bed, seeing that the night was not warm and it was not worth while lighting a fire. Sitting up side by side, with the bedclothes pulled up in front and the pillows piled up behind, they supped and talked about the little woman. Nana thought her plain and lacking in style. Fontan, lying on his stomach, passed up the pieces of cake which had been put between the candle and the matches on the edge of the night table. But they ended by quarreling.

"Oh, just to think of it!" cried Nana. "She's got eyes like gimlet holes, and her hair's the color of tow."

"Hold your tongue, do!" said Fontan. "She has a superb head of hair and such fire in her looks! It's lovely the way you women always tear each other to pieces!"

He looked annoyed.

"Come now, we've had enough of it!" he said at last in savage tones. "You know I don't like being bored. Let's go to sleep, or things'll take a nasty turn."

And he blew out the candle, but Nana was furious and went on talking. She was not going to be spoken to in that voice; she was accustomed to being treated with respect! As he did not vouchsafe any further answer, she was silenced, but she could not go to sleep and lay tossing to and fro.

"Great God, have you done moving about?" cried he suddenly, giving a brisk jump upward.

"It isn't my fault if there are crumbs in the bed," she said curtly.

In fact, there were crumbs in the bed. She felt them down to her middle; she was everywhere devoured by them. One single crumb was scorching her and making her scratch herself till she bled. Besides, when one eats a cake isn't it usual to shake out the bedclothes afterward? Fontan, white with rage, had relit the candle, and they both got up and, barefooted and in their night dresses, they turned down the clothes and swept up the crumbs on the sheet with their hands. Fontan went to bed again, shivering, and told her to go to the devil when she advised him to wipe the soles of his feet carefully. And in the end she came back to her old position, but scarce had she stretched herself out than she danced again. There were fresh crumbs in the bed!

"By Jove, it was sure to happen!" she cried. "You've brought them back again under your feet. I can't go on like this! No, I tell you, I can't go on like this!"

And with that she was on the point of stepping over him in order to jump out of bed again, when Fontan in his longing for sleep grew desperate and dealt her a ringing box on the ear. The blow was so smart that Nana suddenly found herself lying down again with her head on the pillow.

She lay half stunned.

"Oh!" she ejaculated simply, sighing a child's big sigh.

For a second or two he threatened her with a second slap, asking her at the same time if she meant to move again. Then he put out the light, settled himself squarely on his back and in a trice was snoring. But she buried her face in the pillow and began sobbing quietly to herself. It was cowardly of him to take advantage of his superior strength! She had experienced very real terror all the same, so terrible had that quaint mask of Fontan's become. And her anger began dwindling down as though the blow had calmed her. She began to feel respect toward him and accordingly squeezed herself against the wall in order to leave him as much room as possible. She even ended by going to sleep, her cheek tingling, her eyes full of tears and feeling so deliciously depressed and wearied and submissive that she no longer noticed the crumbs. When she woke up in the morning she was holding Fontain in her naked arms and pressing him tightly against her breast. He would never begin it again, eh? Never again? She loved him too dearly. Why, it was even nice to be beaten if he struck the blow!

After that night a new life began. For a mere trifle—a yes, a no—Fontan would deal her a blow. She grew accustomed to it and pocketed everything. Sometimes she shed tears and threatened him, but he would pin her up against the wall and talk of strangling her, which had the effect of rendering her extremely obedient. As often as not, she sank down on a chair and sobbed for five minutes on end. But afterward she would forget all about it, grow very merry, fill the little lodgings with the sound of song and laughter and the rapid rustle of skirts. The worst of it was that Fontan was now in the habit of disappearing for the whole day and never returning home before midnight, for he was going to cafes and meeting his old friends again. Nana bore with everything. She was tremulous and caressing, her only fear being that she might never see him again if she reproached him. But on certain days, when she had neither Mme Maloir nor her aunt and Louiset with her, she grew mortally dull. Thus one Sunday, when she was bargaining for some pigeons at La Rochefoucauld Market, she was delighted to meet Satin, who, in her turn, was busy purchasing a bunch of radishes. Since the evening when the prince had drunk Fontan's champagne they had lost sight of one another.

"What? It's you! D'you live in our parts?" said Satin, astounded at seeing her in the street at that hour of the morning and in slippers too. "Oh, my poor, dear girl, you're really ruined then!"

Nana knitted her brows as a sign that she was to hold her tongue, for they were surrounded by other women who wore dressing gowns and were without linen, while their disheveled tresses were white with fluff. In the morning, when the man picked up overnight had been newly dismissed, all the courtesans of the quarter were wont to come marketing here, their eyes heavy with sleep, their feet in old down-at-heel shoes and themselves full of the weariness and ill humor entailed by a night of boredom. From the four converging streets they came down into the market, looking still rather young in some cases and very pale and charming in their utter unconstraint; in others, hideous and old with bloated faces and peeling skin. The latter did not the least mind being seen thus outside working hours, and not one of them deigned to smile when the passers-by on the sidewalk turned round to look at them. Indeed, they were all very full of business and wore a disdainful expression, as became good housewives for whom men had ceased to exist. Just as Satin, for instance, was paying for her bunch of radishes a young man, who might have been a shop-boy going late to his work, threw her a passing greeting:

"Good morning, duckie."

She straightened herself up at once and with the dignified manner becoming an offended queen remarked:

"What's up with that swine there?"

Then she fancied she recognized him. Three days ago toward midnight, as the was coming back alone from the boulevards, she had talked to him at the corner of the Rue Labruyere for nearly half an hour, with a view to persuading him to come home with her. But this recollection only angered her the more.

"Fancy they're brutes enough to shout things to you in broad daylight!" she continued. "When one's out on business one ought to be respectfully treated, eh?"

Nana had ended by buying her pigeons, although she certainly had her doubts of their freshness. After which Satin wanted to show her where she lived in the Rue Rochefoucauld close by. And the moment they were alone Nana told her of her passion for Fontan. Arrived in front of the house, the girl stopped with her bundle of radishes under her arm and listened eagerly to a final detail which the other imparted to her. Nana fibbed away and vowed that it was she who had turned Count Muffat out of doors with a perfect hail of kicks on the posterior.

"Oh how smart!" Satin repeated. "How very smart! Kicks, eh? And he never said a word, did he? What a blooming coward! I wish I'd been there to see his ugly mug! My dear girl, you were quite right. A pin for the coin! When I'M on with a mash I starve for it! You'll come and see me, eh? You promise? It's the left-hand door. Knock three knocks, for there's a whole heap of damned squints about."

After that whenever Nana grew too weary of life she went down and saw Satin. She was always sure of finding her, for the girl never went out before six in the evening. Satin occupied a couple of rooms which a chemist had furnished for her in order to save her from the clutches of the police, but in little more than a twelvemonth she had broken the furniture, knocked in the chairs, dirtied the curtains, and that in a manner so furiously filthy and untidy that the lodgings seemed as though inhabited by a pack of mad cats. On the mornings when she grew disgusted with herself and thought about cleaning up a bit, chair rails and strips of curtain would come off in her hands during her struggle with superincumbent dirt. On such days the place was fouler than ever, and it was impossible to enter it, owing to the things which had fallen down across the doorway. At length she ended by leaving her house severely alone. When the lamp was lit the cupboard with plate-glass doors, the clock and what remained of the curtains still served to impose on the men. Besides, for six months past her landlord had been threatening to evict her. Well then, for whom should she be keeping the furniture nice? For him more than anyone else, perhaps! And so whenever she got up in a merry mood she would shout "Gee up!" and give the sides of the cupboard and the chest of drawers such a tremendous kick that they cracked again.

Nana nearly always found her in bed. Even on the days when Satin went out to do her marketing she felt so tired on her return upstairs that she flung herself down on the bed and went to sleep again. During the day she dragged herself about and dozed off on chairs. Indeed, she did not emerge from this languid condition till the evening drew on and the gas was lit outside. Nana felt very comfortable at Satin's, sitting doing nothing on the untidy bed, while basins stood about on the floor at her feet and petticoats which had been bemired last night hung over the backs of armchairs and stained them with mud. They had long gossips together and were endlessly confidential, while Satin lay on her stomach in her nightgown, waving her legs above her head and smoking cigarettes as she listened. Sometimes on such afternoons as they had troubles to retail they treated themselves to absinthe in order, as they termed it, "to forget." Satin did not go downstairs or put on a petticoat but simply went and leaned over the banisters and shouted her order to the portress's little girl, a chit of ten, who when she brought up the absinthe in a glass would look furtively at the lady's bare legs. Every conversation led up to one subject—the beastliness of the men. Nana was overpowering on the subject of Fontan. She could not say a dozen words without lapsing into endless repetitions of his sayings and his doings. But Satin, like a good-natured girl, would listen unwearyingly to everlasting accounts of how Nana had watched for him at the window, how they had fallen out over a burnt dish of hash and how they had made it up in bed after hours of silent sulking. In her desire to be always talking about these things Nana had got to tell of every slap that he dealt her. Last week he had given her a swollen eye; nay, the night before he had given her such a box on the ear as to throw her across the night table, and all because he could not find his slippers. And the other woman did not evince any astonishment but blew out cigarette smoke and only paused a moment to remark that, for her part, she always ducked under, which sent the gentleman pretty nearly sprawling. Both of them settled down with a will to these anecdotes about blows; they grew supremely happy and excited over these same idiotic doings about which they told one another a hundred times or more, while they gave themselves up to the soft and pleasing sense of weariness which was sure to follow the drubbings they talked of. It was the delight of rediscussing Fontan's blows and of explaining his works and his ways, down to the very manner in which he took off his boots, which brought Nana back daily to Satin's place. The latter, moreover, used to end by growing sympathetic in her turn and would cite even more violent cases, as, for instance, that of a pastry cook who had left her for dead on the floor. Yet she loved him, in spite of it all! Then came the days on which Nana cried and declared that things could not go on as they were doing. Satin would escort her back to her own door and would linger an hour out in the street to see that he did not murder her. And the next day the two women would rejoice over the reconciliation the whole afternoon through. Yet though they did not say so, they preferred the days when threshings were, so to speak, in the air, for then their comfortable indignation was all the stronger.

They became inseparable. Yet Satin never went to Nana's, Fontan having announced that he would have no trollops in his house. They used to go out together, and thus it was that Satin one day took her friend to see another woman. This woman turned out to be that very Mme Robert who had interested Nana and inspired her with a certain respect ever since she had refused to come to her supper. Mme Robert lived in the Rue Mosnier, a silent, new street in the Quartier de l'Europe, where there were no shops, and the handsome houses with their small, limited flats were peopled by ladies. It was five o'clock, and along the silent pavements in the quiet, aristocratic shelter of the tall white houses were drawn up the broughams of stock-exchange people and merchants, while men walked hastily about, looking up at the windows, where women in dressing jackets seemed to be awaiting them. At first Nana refused to go up, remarking with some constraint that she had not the pleasure of the lady's acquaintance. But Satin would take no refusal. She was only desirous of paying a civil call, for Mme Robert, whom she had met in a restaurant the day before, had made herself extremely agreeable and had got her to promise to come and see her. And at last Nana consented. At the top of the stairs a little drowsy maid informed them that Madame had not come home yet, but she ushered them into the drawing room notwithstanding and left them there.

"The deuce, it's a smart show!" whispered Satin. It was a stiff, middle-class room, hung with dark-colored fabrics, and suggested the conventional taste of a Parisian shopkeeper who has retired on his fortune. Nana was struck and did her best to make merry about it. But Satin showed annoyance and spoke up for Mme Robert's strict adherence to the proprieties. She was always to be met in the society of elderly, grave-looking men, on whose arms she leaned. At present she had a retired chocolate seller in tow, a serious soul. Whenever he came to see her he was so charmed by the solid, handsome way in which the house was arranged that he had himself announced and addressed its mistress as "dear child."

"Look, here she is!" continued Satin, pointing to a photograph which stood in front of the clock. Nana scrutinized the portrait for a second or so. It represented a very dark brunette with a longish face and lips pursed up in a discreet smile. "A thoroughly fashionable lady," one might have said of the likeness, "but one who is rather more reserved than the rest."

"It's strange," murmured Nana at length, "but I've certainly seen that face somewhere. Where, I don't remember. But it can't have been in a pretty place—oh no, I'm sure it wasn't in a pretty place."

And turning toward her friend, she added, "So she's made you promise to come and see her? What does she want with you?"

"What does she want with me? 'Gad! To talk, I expect—to be with me a bit. It's her politeness."

Nana looked steadily at Satin. "Tut, tut," she said softly. After all, it didn't matter to her! Yet seeing that the lady was keeping them waiting, she declared that she would not stay longer, and accordingly they both took their departure.

The next day Fontan informed Nana that he was not coming home to dinner, and she went down early to find Satin with a view to treating her at a restaurant. The choice of the restaurant involved infinite debate. Satin proposed various brewery bars, which Nana thought detestable, and at last persuaded her to dine at Laure's. This was a table d'hote in the Rue des Martyrs, where the dinner cost three francs.

Tired of waiting for the dinner hour and not knowing what to do out in the street, the pair went up to Laure's twenty minutes too early. The three dining rooms there were still empty, and they sat down at a table in the very saloon where Laure Piedefer was enthroned on a high bench behind a bar. This Laure was a lady of some fifty summers, whose swelling contours were tightly laced by belts and corsets. Women kept entering in quick procession, and each, in passing, craned upward so as to overtop the saucers raised on the counter and kissed Laure on the mouth with tender familiarity, while the monstrous creature tried, with tears in her eyes, to divide her attentions among them in such a way as to make no one jealous. On the other hand, the servant who waited on the ladies was a tall, lean woman. She seemed wasted with disease, and her eyes were ringed with dark lines and glowed with somber fire. Very rapidly the three saloons filled up. There were some hundred customers, and they had seated themselves wherever they could find vacant places. The majority were nearing the age of forty: their flesh was puffy and so bloated by vice as almost to hide the outlines of their flaccid mouths. But amid all these gross bosoms and figures some slim, pretty girls were observable. These still wore a modest expression despite their impudent gestures, for they were only beginners in their art, who had started life in the ballrooms of the slums and had been brought to Laure's by some customer or other. Here the tribe of bloated women, excited by the sweet scent of their youth, jostled one another and, while treating them to dainties, formed a perfect court round them, much as old amorous bachelors might have done. As to the men, they were not numerous. There were ten or fifteen of them at the outside, and if we except four tall fellows who had come to see the sight and were cracking jokes and taking things easy, they behaved humbly enough amid this whelming flood of petticoats.

"I say, their stew's very good, ain't it?" said Satin.

Nana nodded with much satisfaction. It was the old substantial dinner you get in a country hotel and consisted of vol-au-vent a la financiere, fowl boiled in rice, beans with a sauce and vanilla creams, iced and flavored with burnt sugar. The ladies made an especial onslaught on the boiled fowl and rice: their stays seemed about to burst; they wiped their lips with slow, luxurious movements. At first Nana had been afraid of meeting old friends who might have asked her silly questions, but she grew calm at last, for she recognized no one she knew among that extremely motley throng, where faded dresses and lamentable hats contrasted strangely with handsome costumes, the wearers of which fraternized in vice with their shabbier neighbors. She was momentarily interested, however, at the sight of a young man with short curly hair and insolent face who kept a whole tableful of vastly fat women breathlessly attentive to his slightest caprice. But when the young man began to laugh his bosom swelled.

"Good lack, it's a woman!"

She let a little cry escape as she spoke, and Satin, who was stuffing herself with boiled fowl, lifted up her head and whispered:

"Oh yes! I know her. A smart lot, eh? They do just fight for her."

Nana pouted disgustingly. She could not understand the thing as yet. Nevertheless, she remarked in her sensible tone that there was no disputing about tastes or colors, for you never could tell what you yourself might one day have a liking for. So she ate her cream with an air of philosophy, though she was perfectly well aware that Satin with her great blue virginal eyes was throwing the neighboring tables into a state of great excitement. There was one woman in particular, a powerful, fair-haired person who sat close to her and made herself extremely agreeable. She seemed all aglow with affection and pushed toward the girl so eagerly that Nana was on the point of interfering.

But at that very moment a woman who was entering the room gave her a shock of surprise. Indeed, she had recognized Mme Robert. The latter, looking, as was her wont, like a pretty brown mouse, nodded familiarly to the tall, lean serving maid and came and leaned upon Laure's counter. Then both women exchanged a long kiss. Nana thought such an attention on the part of a woman so distinguished looking very amusing, the more so because Mme Robert had quite altered her usual modest expression. On the contrary, her eye roved about the saloon as she kept up a whispered conversation. Laure had resumed her seat and once more settled herself down with all the majesty of an old image of Vice, whose face has been worn and polished by the kisses of the faithful. Above the range of loaded plates she sat enthroned in all the opulence which a hotelkeeper enjoys after forty years of activity, and as she sat there she swayed her bloated following of large women, in comparison with the biggest of whom she seemed monstrous.

But Mme Robert had caught sight of Satin, and leaving Laure, she ran up and behaved charmingly, telling her how much she regretted not having been at home the day before. When Satin, however, who was ravished at this treatment, insisted on finding room for her at the table, she vowed she had already dined. She had simply come up to look about her. As she stood talking behind her new friend's chair she leaned lightly on her shoulders and in a smiling, coaxing manner remarked:

"Now when shall I see you? If you were free—"

Nana unluckily failed to hear more. The conversation vexed her, and she was dying to tell this honest lady a few home truths. But the sight of a troop of new arrivals paralyzed her. It was composed of smart, fashionably dressed women who were wearing their diamonds. Under the influence of perverse impulse they had made up a party to come to Laure's—whom, by the by, they all treated with great familiarity—to eat the three-franc dinner while flashing their jewels of great price in the jealous and astonished eyes of poor, bedraggled prostitutes. The moment they entered, talking and laughing in their shrill, clear tones and seeming to bring sunshine with them from the outside world, Nana turned her head rapidly away. Much to her annoyance she had recognized Lucy Stewart and Maria Blond among them, and for nearly five minutes, during which the ladies chatted with Laure before passing into the saloon beyond, she kept her head down and seemed deeply occupied in rolling bread pills on the cloth in front of her. But when at length she was able to look round, what was her astonishment to observe the chair next to hers vacant! Satin had vanished.

"Gracious, where can she be?" she loudly ejaculated.

The sturdy, fair woman who had been overwhelming Satin with civil attentions laughed ill-temperedly, and when Nana, whom the laugh irritated, looked threatening she remarked in a soft, drawling way:

"It's certainly not me that's done you this turn; it's the other one!"

Thereupon Nana understood that they would most likely make game of her and so said nothing more. She even kept her seat for some moments, as she did not wish to show how angry she felt. She could hear Lucy Stewart laughing at the end of the next saloon, where she was treating a whole table of little women who had come from the public balls at Montmartre and La Chapelle. It was very hot; the servant was carrying away piles of dirty plates with a strong scent of boiled fowl and rice, while the four gentlemen had ended by regaling quite half a dozen couples with capital wine in the hope of making them tipsy and hearing some pretty stiffish things. What at present most exasperated Nana was the thought of paying for Satin's dinner. There was a wench for you, who allowed herself to be amused and then made off with never a thank-you in company with the first petticoat that came by! Without doubt it was only a matter of three francs, but she felt it was hard lines all the same—her way of doing it was too disgusting. Nevertheless, she paid up, throwing the six francs at Laure, whom at the moment she despised more than the mud in the street. In the Rue des Martyrs Nana felt her bitterness increasing. She was certainly not going to run after Satin! It was a nice filthy business for one to be poking one's nose into! But her evening was spoiled, and she walked slowly up again toward Montmartre, raging against Mme Robert in particular. Gracious goodness, that woman had a fine cheek to go playing the lady—yes, the lady in the dustbin! She now felt sure she had met her at the Papillon, a wretched public-house ball in the Rue des Poissonniers, where men conquered her scruples for thirty sous. And to think a thing like that got hold of important functionaries with her modest looks! And to think she refused suppers to which one did her the honor of inviting her because, forsooth, she was playing the virtuous game! Oh yes, she'd get virtued! It was always those conceited prudes who went the most fearful lengths in low corners nobody knew anything about.

Revolving these matters, Nana at length reached her home in the Rue Veron and was taken aback on observing a light in the window. Fontan had come home in a sulk, for he, too, had been deserted by the friend who had been dining with him. He listened coldly to her explanations while she trembled lest he should strike her. It scared her to find him at home, seeing that she had not expected him before one in the morning, and she told him a fib and confessed that she had certainly spent six francs, but in Mme Maloir's society. He was not ruffled, however, and he handed her a letter which, though addressed to her, he had quietly opened. It was a letter from Georges, who was still a prisoner at Les Fondettes and comforted himself weekly with the composition of glowing pages. Nana loved to be written to, especially when the letters were full of grand, loverlike expressions with a sprinkling of vows. She used to read them to everybody. Fontan was familiar with the style employed by Georges and appreciated it. But that evening she was so afraid of a scene that she affected complete indifference, skimming through the letter with a sulky expression and flinging it aside as soon as read. Fontan had begun beating a tattoo on a windowpane; the thought of going to bed so early bored him, and yet he did not know how to employ his evening. He turned briskly round:

"Suppose we answer that young vagabond at once," he said.

It was the custom for him to write the letters in reply. He was wont to vie with the other in point of style. Then, too, he used to be delighted when Nana, grown enthusiastic after the letter had been read over aloud, would kiss him with the announcement that nobody but he could "say things like that." Thus their latent affections would be stirred, and they would end with mutual adoration.

"As you will," she replied. "I'll make tea, and we'll go to bed after."

Thereupon Fontan installed himself at the table on which pen, ink and paper were at the same time grandly displayed. He curved his arm; he drew a long face.

"My heart's own," he began aloud.

And for more than an hour he applied himself to his task, polishing here, weighing a phrase there, while he sat with his head between his hands and laughed inwardly whenever he hit upon a peculiarly tender expression. Nana had already consumed two cups of tea in silence, when at last he read out the letter in the level voice and with the two or three emphatic gestures peculiar to such performances on the stage. It was five pages long, and he spoke therein of "the delicious hours passed at La Mignotte, those hours of which the memory lingered like subtle perfume." He vowed "eternal fidelity to that springtide of love" and ended by declaring that his sole wish was to "recommence that happy time if, indeed, happiness can recommence."

"I say that out of politeness, y'know," he explained. "The moment it becomes laughable—eh, what! I think she's felt it, she has!"

He glowed with triumph. But Nana was unskillful; she still suspected an outbreak and now was mistaken enough not to fling her arms round his neck in a burst of admiration. She thought the letter a respectable performance, nothing more. Thereupon he was much annoyed. If his letter did not please her she might write another! And so instead of bursting out in loverlike speeches and exchanging kisses, as their wont was, they sat coldly facing one another at the table. Nevertheless, she poured him out a cup of tea.

"Here's a filthy mess," he cried after dipping his lips in the mixture. "You've put salt in it, you have!"

Nana was unlucky enough to shrug her shoulders, and at that he grew furious.

"Aha! Things are taking a wrong turn tonight!"

And with that the quarrel began. It was only ten by the clock, and this was a way of killing time. So he lashed himself into a rage and threw in Nana's teeth a whole string of insults and all kinds of accusations which followed one another so closely that she had no time to defend herself. She was dirty; she was stupid; she had knocked about in all sorts of low places! After that he waxed frantic over the money question. Did he spend six francs when he dined out? No, somebody was treating him to a dinner; otherwise he would have eaten his ordinary meal at home. And to think of spending them on that old procuress of a Maloir, a jade he would chuck out of the house tomorrow! Yes, by jingo, they would get into a nice mess if he and she were to go throwing six francs out of the window every day!

"Now to begin with, I want your accounts," he shouted. "Let's see; hand over the money! Now where do we stand?"

All his sordid avaricious instincts came to the surface. Nana was cowed and scared, and she made haste to fetch their remaining cash out of the desk and to bring it him. Up to that time the key had lain on this common treasury, from which they had drawn as freely as they wished.

"How's this?" he said when he had counted up the money. "There are scarcely seven thousand francs remaining out of seventeen thousand, and we've only been together three months. The thing's impossible."

He rushed forward, gave the desk a savage shake and brought the drawer forward in order to ransack it in the light of the lamp. But it actually contained only six thousand eight hundred and odd francs. Thereupon the tempest burst forth.

"Ten thousand francs in three months!" he yelled. "By God! What have you done with it all? Eh? Answer! It all goes to your jade of an aunt, eh? Or you're keeping men; that's plain! Will you answer?"

"Oh well, if you must get in a rage!" said Nana. "Why, the calculation's easily made! You haven't allowed for the furniture; besides, I've had to buy linen. Money goes quickly when one's settling in a new place."

But while requiring explanations he refused to listen to them.

"Yes, it goes a deal too quickly!" he rejoined more calmly. "And look here, little girl, I've had enough of this mutual housekeeping. You know those seven thousand francs are mine. Yes, and as I've got 'em, I shall keep 'em! Hang it, the moment you become wasteful I get anxious not to be ruined. To each man his own."

And he pocketed the money in a lordly way while Nana gazed at him, dumfounded. He continued speaking complaisantly:

"You must understand I'm not such a fool as to keep aunts and likewise children who don't belong to me. You were pleased to spend your own money—well, that's your affair! But my money—no, that's sacred! When in the future you cook a leg of mutton I'll pay for half of it. We'll settle up tonight—there!"

Straightway Nana rebelled. She could not help shouting:

"Come, I say, it's you who've run through my ten thousand francs. It's a dirty trick, I tell you!"

But he did not stop to discuss matters further, for he dealt her a random box on the ear across the table, remarking as he did so:

"Let's have that again!"

She let him have it again despite his blow. Whereupon he fell upon her and kicked and cuffed her heartily. Soon he had reduced her to such a state that she ended, as her wont was, by undressing and going to bed in a flood of tears.

He was out of breath and was going to bed, in his turn, when he noticed the letter he had written to Georges lying on the table. Whereupon he folded it up carefully and, turning toward the bed, remarked in threatening accents:

"It's very well written, and I'm going to post it myself because I don't like women's fancies. Now don't go moaning any more; it puts my teeth on edge."

Nana, who was crying and gasping, thereupon held her breath. When he was in bed she choked with emotion and threw herself upon his breast with a wild burst of sobs. Their scuffles always ended thus, for she trembled at the thought of losing him and, like a coward, wanted always to feel that he belonged entirely to her, despite everything. Twice he pushed her magnificently away, but the warm embrace of this woman who was begging for mercy with great, tearful eyes, as some faithful brute might do, finally aroused desire. And he became royally condescending without, however, lowering his dignity before any of her advances. In fact, he let himself be caressed and taken by force, as became a man whose forgiveness is worth the trouble of winning. Then he was seized with anxiety, fearing that Nana was playing a part with a view to regaining possession of the treasury key. The light had been extinguished when he felt it necessary to reaffirm his will and pleasure.

"You must know, my girl, that this is really very serious and that I keep the money."

Nana, who was falling asleep with her arms round his neck, uttered a sublime sentiment.

"Yes, you need fear nothing! I'll work for both of us!"

But from that evening onward their life in common became more and more difficult. From one week's end to the other the noise of slaps filled the air and resembled the ticking of a clock by which they regulated their existence. Through dint of being much beaten Nana became as pliable as fine linen; her skin grew delicate and pink and white and so soft to the touch and clear to the view that she may be said to have grown more good looking than ever. Prulliere, moreover, began running after her like a madman, coming in when Fontan was away and pushing her into corners in order to snatch an embrace. But she used to struggle out of his grasp, full of indignation and blushing with shame. It disgusted her to think of him wanting to deceive a friend. Prulliere would thereupon begin sneering with a wrathful expression. Why, she was growing jolly stupid nowadays! How could she take up with such an ape? For, indeed, Fontan was a regular ape with that great swingeing nose of his. Oh, he had an ugly mug! Besides, the man knocked her about too!

"It's possible I like him as he is," she one day made answer in the quiet voice peculiar to a woman who confesses to an abominable taste.

Bosc contented himself by dining with them as often as possible. He shrugged his shoulders behind Prulliere's back—a pretty fellow, to be sure, but a frivolous! Bosc had on more than one occasion assisted at domestic scenes, and at dessert, when Fontan slapped Nana, he went on chewing solemnly, for the thing struck him as being quite in the course of nature. In order to give some return for his dinner he used always to go into ecstasies over their happiness. He declared himself a philosopher who had given up everything, glory included. At times Prulliere and Fontan lolled back in their chairs, losing count of time in front of the empty table, while with theatrical gestures and intonation they discussed their former successes till two in the morning. But he would sit by, lost in thought, finishing the brandy bottle in silence and only occasionally emitting a little contemptuous sniff. Where was Talma's tradition? Nowhere. Very well, let them leave him jolly well alone! It was too stupid to go on as they were doing!

One evening he found Nana in tears. She took off her dressing jacket in order to show him her back and her arms, which were black and blue. He looked at her skin without being tempted to abuse the opportunity, as that ass of a Prulliere would have been. Then, sententiously:

"My dear girl, where there are women there are sure to be ructions. It was Napoleon who said that, I think. Wash yourself with salt water. Salt water's the very thing for those little knocks. Tut, tut, you'll get others as bad, but don't complain so long as no bones are broken. I'm inviting myself to dinner, you know; I've spotted a leg of mutton."

But Mme Lerat had less philosophy. Every time Nana showed her a fresh bruise on the white skin she screamed aloud. They were killing her niece; things couldn't go on as they were doing. As a matter of fact, Fontan had turned Mme Lerat out of doors and had declared that he would not have her at his house in the future, and ever since that day, when he returned home and she happened to be there, she had to make off through the kitchen, which was a horrible humiliation to her. Accordingly she never ceased inveighing against that brutal individual. She especially blamed his ill breeding, pursing up her lips, as she did so, like a highly respectable lady whom nobody could possibly remonstrate with on the subject of good manners.

"Oh, you notice it at once," she used to tell Nana; "he hasn't the barest notion of the very smallest proprieties. His mother must have been common! Don't deny it—the thing's obvious! I don't speak on my own account, though a person of my years has a right to respectful treatment, but YOU—how do YOU manage to put up with his bad manners? For though I don't want to flatter myself, I've always taught you how to behave, and among our own people you always enjoyed the best possible advice. We were all very well bred in our family, weren't we now?"

Nana used never to protest but would listen with bowed head.

"Then, too," continued the aunt, "you've only known perfect gentlemen hitherto. We were talking of that very topic with Zoe at my place yesterday evening. She can't understand it any more than I can. 'How is it,' she said, 'that Madame, who used to have that perfect gentleman, Monsieur le Comte, at her beck and call'—for between you and me, it seems you drove him silly—'how is it that Madame lets herself be made into mincemeat by that clown of a fellow?' I remarked at the time that you might put up with the beatings but that I would never have allowed him to be lacking in proper respect. In fact, there isn't a word to be said for him. I wouldn't have his portrait in my room even! And you ruin yourself for such a bird as that; yes, you ruin yourself, my darling; you toil and you moil, when there are so many others and such rich men, too, some of them even connected with the government! Ah well, it's not I who ought to be telling you this, of course! But all the same, when next he tries any of his dirty tricks on I should cut him short with a 'Monsieur, what d'you take me for?' You know how to say it in that grand way of yours! It would downright cripple him."

Thereupon Nana burst into sobs and stammered out:

"Oh, Aunt, I love him!"

The fact of the matter was that Mme Lerat was beginning to feel anxious at the painful way her niece doled out the sparse, occasional francs destined to pay for little Louis's board and lodging. Doubtless she was willing to make sacrifices and to keep the child by her whatever might happen while waiting for more prosperous times, but the thought that Fontan was preventing her and the brat and its mother from swimming in a sea of gold made her so savage that she was ready to deny the very existence of true love. Accordingly she ended up with the following severe remarks:

"Now listen, some fine day when he's taken the skin off your back, you'll come and knock at my door, and I'll open it to you."

Soon money began to engross Nana's whole attention. Fontan had caused the seven thousand francs to vanish away. Without doubt they were quite safe; indeed, she would never have dared ask him questions about them, for she was wont to be blushingly diffident with that bird, as Mme Lerat called him. She trembled lest he should think her capable of quarreling with him about halfpence. He had certainly promised to subscribe toward their common household expenses, and in the early days he had given out three francs every morning. But he was as exacting as a boarder; he wanted everything for his three francs—butter, meat, early fruit and early vegetables—and if she ventured to make an observation, if she hinted that you could not have everything in the market for three francs, he flew into a temper and treated her as a useless, wasteful woman, a confounded donkey whom the tradespeople were robbing. Moreover, he was always ready to threaten that he would take lodgings somewhere else. At the end of a month on certain mornings he had forgotten to deposit the three francs on the chest of drawers, and she had ventured to ask for them in a timid, roundabout way. Whereupon there had been such bitter disputes and he had seized every pretext to render her life so miserable that she had found it best no longer to count upon him. Whenever, however, he had omitted to leave behind the three one-franc pieces and found a dinner awaiting him all the same, he grew as merry as a sandboy, kissed Nana gallantly and waltzed with the chairs. And she was so charmed by this conduct that she at length got to hope that nothing would be found on the chest of drawers, despite the difficulty she experienced in making both ends meet. One day she even returned him his three francs, telling him a tale to the effect that she still had yesterday's money. As he had given her nothing then, he hesitated for some moments, as though he dreaded a lecture. But she gazed at him with her loving eyes and hugged him in such utter self-surrender that he pocketed the money again with that little convulsive twitch or the fingers peculiar to a miser when he regains possession of that which has been well-nigh lost. From that day forth he never troubled himself about money again or inquired whence it came. But when there were potatoes on the table he looked intoxicated with delight and would laugh and smack his lips before her turkeys and legs of mutton, though of course this did not prevent his dealing Nana sundry sharp smacks, as though to keep his hand in amid all his happiness.

Nana had indeed found means to provide for all needs, and the place on certain days overflowed with good things. Twice a week, regularly, Bosc had indigestion. One evening as Mme Lerat was withdrawing from the scene in high dudgeon because she had noticed a copious dinner she was not destined to eat in process of preparation, she could not prevent herself asking brutally who paid for it all. Nana was taken by surprise; she grew foolish and began crying.

"Ah, that's a pretty business," said the aunt, who had divined her meaning.

Nana had resigned herself to it for the sake of enjoying peace in her own home. Then, too, the Tricon was to blame. She had come across her in the Rue de Laval one fine day when Fontan had gone out raging about a dish of cod. She had accordingly consented to the proposals made her by the Tricon, who happened just then to be in difficulty. As Fontan never came in before six o'clock, she made arrangements for her afternoons and used to bring back forty francs, sixty francs, sometimes more. She might have made it a matter of ten and fifteen louis had she been able to maintain her former position, but as matters stood she was very glad thus to earn enough to keep the pot boiling. At night she used to forget all her sorrows when Bosc sat there bursting with dinner and Fontan leaned on his elbows and with an expression of lofty superiority becoming a man who is loved for his own sake allowed her to kiss him on the eyelids.

In due course Nana's very adoration of her darling, her dear old duck, which was all the more passionately blind, seeing that now she paid for everything, plunged her back into the muddiest depths of her calling. She roamed the streets and loitered on the pavement in quest of a five-franc piece, just as when she was a slipshod baggage years ago. One Sunday at La Rochefoucauld Market she had made her peace with Satin after having flown at her with furious reproaches about Mme Robert. But Satin had been content to answer that when one didn't like a thing there was no reason why one should want to disgust others with it. And Nana, who was by way of being wide-minded, had accepted the philosophic view that you never can tell where your tastes will lead you and had forgiven her. Her curiosity was even excited, and she began questioning her about obscure vices and was astounded to be adding to her information at her time of life and with her knowledge. She burst out laughing and gave vent to various expressions of surprise. It struck her as so queer, and yet she was a little shocked by it, for she was really quite the philistine outside the pale of her own habits. So she went back to Laure's and fed there when Fontan was dining out. She derived much amusement from the stories and the amours and the jealousies which inflamed the female customers without hindering their appetites in the slightest degree. Nevertheless, she still was not quite in it, as she herself phrased it. The vast Laure, meltingly maternal as ever, used often to invite her to pass a day or two at her Asnieries Villa, a country house containing seven spare bedrooms. But she used to refuse; she was afraid. Satin, however, swore she was mistaken about it, that gentlemen from Paris swung you in swings and played tonneau with you, and so she promised to come at some future time when it would be possible for her to leave town.

At that time Nana was much tormented by circumstances and not at all festively inclined. She needed money, and when the Tricon did not want her, which too often happened, she had no notion where to bestow her charms. Then began a series of wild descents upon the Parisian pavement, plunges into the baser sort of vice, whose votaries prowl in muddy bystreets under the restless flicker of gas lamps. Nana went back to the public-house balls in the suburbs, where she had kicked up her heels in the early ill-shod days. She revisited the dark corners on the outer boulevards, where when she was fifteen years old men used to hug her while her father was looking for her in order to give her a hiding. Both the women would speed along, visiting all the ballrooms and restaurants in a quarter and climbing innumerable staircases which were wet with spittle and spilled beer, or they would stroll quietly about, going up streets and planting themselves in front of carriage gates. Satin, who had served her apprenticeship in the Quartier Latin, used to take Nana to Bullier's and the public houses in the Boulevard Saint-Michel. But the vacations were drawing on, and the Quarter looked too starved. Eventually they always returned to the principal boulevards, for it was there they ran the best chance of getting what they wanted. From the heights of Montmartre to the observatory plateau they scoured the whole town in the way we have been describing. They were out on rainy evenings, when their boots got worn down, and on hot evenings, when their linen clung to their skins. There were long periods of waiting and endless periods of walking; there were jostlings and disputes and the nameless, brutal caresses of the stray passer-by who was taken by them to some miserable furnished room and came swearing down the greasy stairs afterward.

The summer was drawing to a close, a stormy summer of burning nights. The pair used to start out together after dinner, toward nine o'clock. On the pavements of the Rue Notre Dame de la Lorette two long files of women scudded along with tucked-up skirts and bent heads, keeping close to the shops but never once glancing at the displays in the shopwindows as they hurried busily down toward the boulevards. This was the hungry exodus from the Quartier Breda which took place nightly when the street lamps had just been lit. Nana and Satin used to skirt the church and then march off along the Rue le Peletier. When they were some hundred yards from the Cafe Riche and had fairly reached their scene of operations they would shake out the skirts of their dresses, which up till that moment they had been holding carefully up, and begin sweeping the pavements, regardless of dust. With much swaying of the hips they strolled delicately along, slackening their pace when they crossed the bright light thrown from one of the great cafes. With shoulders thrown back, shrill and noisy laughter and many backward glances at the men who turned to look at them, they marched about and were completely in their element. In the shadow of night their artificially whitened faces, their rouged lips and their darkened eyelids became as charming and suggestive as if the inmates of a make-believe trumpery oriental bazaar had been sent forth into the open street. Till eleven at night they sauntered gaily along among the rudely jostling crowds, contenting themselves with an occasional "dirty ass!" hurled after the clumsy people whose boot heels had torn a flounce or two from their dresses. Little familiar salutations would pass between them and the cafe waiters, and at times they would stop and chat in front of a small table and accept of drinks, which they consumed with much deliberation, as became people not sorry to sit down for a bit while waiting for the theaters to empty. But as night advanced, if they had not made one or two trips in the direction of the Rue la Rochefoucauld, they became abject strumpets, and their hunt for men grew more ferocious than ever. Beneath the trees in the darkening and fast-emptying boulevards fierce bargainings took place, accompanied by oaths and blows. Respectable family parties—fathers, mothers and daughters—who were used to such scenes, would pass quietly by the while without quickening their pace. Afterward, when they had walked from the opera to the GYMNASE some half-score times and in the deepening night men were rapidly dropping off homeward for good and all, Nana and Satin kept to the sidewalk in the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre. There up till two o'clock in the morning restaurants, bars and ham-and-beef shops were brightly lit up, while a noisy mob of women hung obstinately round the doors of the cafes. This suburb was the only corner of night Paris which was still alight and still alive, the only market still open to nocturnal bargains. These last were openly struck between group and group and from one end of the street to the other, just as in the wide and open corridor of a disorderly house. On such evenings as the pair came home without having had any success they used to wrangle together. The Rue Notre Dame de la Lorette stretched dark and deserted in front of them. Here and there the crawling shadow of a woman was discernible, for the Quarter was going home and going home late, and poor creatures, exasperated at a night of fruitless loitering, were unwilling to give up the chase and would still stand, disputing in hoarse voices with any strayed reveler they could catch at the corner of the Rue Breda or the Rue Fontaine.

Nevertheless, some windfalls came in their way now and then in the shape of louis picked up in the society of elegant gentlemen, who slipped their decorations into their pockets as they went upstairs with them. Satin had an especially keen scent for these. On rainy evenings, when the dripping city exhaled an unpleasant odor suggestive of a great untidy bed, she knew that the soft weather and the fetid reek of the town's holes and corners were sure to send the men mad. And so she watched the best dressed among them, for she knew by their pale eyes what their state was. On such nights it was as though a fit of fleshly madness were passing over Paris. The girl was rather nervous certainly, for the most modish gentlemen were always the most obscene. All the varnish would crack off a man, and the brute beast would show itself, exacting, monstrous in lust, a past master in corruption. But besides being nervous, that trollop of a Satin was lacking in respect. She would blurt out awful things in front of dignified gentlemen in carriages and assure them that their coachmen were better bred than they because they behaved respectfully toward the women and did not half kill them with their diabolical tricks and suggestions. The way in which smart people sprawled head over heels into all the cesspools of vice still caused Nana some surprise, for she had a few prejudices remaining, though Satin was rapidly destroying them.

"Well then," she used to say when talking seriously about the matter, "there's no such thing as virtue left, is there?"

From one end of the social ladder to the other everybody was on the loose! Good gracious! Some nice things ought to be going on in Paris between nine o'clock in the evening and three in the morning! And with that she began making very merry and declaring that if one could only have looked into every room one would have seen some funny sights—the little people going it head over ears and a good lot of swells, too, playing the swine rather harder than the rest. Oh, she was finishing her education!

One evening when she came to call for Satin she recognized the Marquis de Chouard. He was coming downstairs with quaking legs; his face was ashen white, and he leaned heavily on the banisters. She pretended to be blowing her nose. Upstairs she found Satin amid indescribable filth. No household work had been done for a week; her bed was disgusting, and ewers and basins were standing about in all directions. Nana expressed surprise at her knowing the marquis. Oh yes, she knew him! He had jolly well bored her confectioner and her when they were together. At present he used to come back now and then, but he nearly bothered her life out, going sniffing into all the dirty corners—yes, even into her slippers!

"Yes, dear girl, my slippers! Oh, he's the dirtiest old beast, always wanting one to do things!"

The sincerity of these low debauches rendered Nana especially uneasy. Seeing the courtesans around her slowly dying of it every day, she recalled to mind the comedy of pleasure she had taken part in when she was in the heyday of success. Moreover, Satin inspired her with an awful fear of the police. She was full of anecdotes about them. Formerly she had been the mistress of a plain-clothes man, had consented to this in order to be left in peace, and on two occasions he had prevented her from being put "on the lists." But at present she was in a great fright, for if she were to be nabbed again there was a clear case against her. You had only to listen to her! For the sake of perquisites the police used to take up as many women as possible. They laid hold of everybody and quieted you with a slap if you shouted, for they were sure of being defended in their actions and rewarded, even when they had taken a virtuous girl among the rest. In the summer they would swoop upon the boulevard in parties of twelve or fifteen, surround a whole long reach of sidewalk and fish up as many as thirty women in an evening. Satin, however, knew the likely places, and the moment she saw a plain-clothes man heaving in sight she took to her heels, while the long lines of women on the pavements scattered in consternation and fled through the surrounding crowd. The dread of the law and of the magistracy was such that certain women would stand as though paralyzed in the doorways of the cafes while the raid was sweeping the avenue without. But Satin was even more afraid of being denounced, for her pastry cook had proved blackguard enough to threaten to sell her when she had left him. Yes, that was a fake by which men lived on their mistresses! Then, too, there were the dirty women who delivered you up out of sheer treachery if you were prettier than they! Nana listened to these recitals and felt her terrors growing upon her. She had always trembled before the law, that unknown power, that form of revenge practiced by men able and willing to crush her in the certain absence of all defenders. Saint-Lazare she pictured as a grave, a dark hole, in which they buried live women after they had cut off their hair. She admitted that it was only necessary to leave Fontan and seek powerful protectors. But as matters stood it was in vain that Satin talked to her of certain lists of women's names, which it was the duty of the plainclothes men to consult, and of certain photographs accompanying the lists, the originals of which were on no account to be touched. The reassurance did not make her tremble the less, and she still saw herself hustled and dragged along and finally subjected to the official medical inspection. The thought of the official armchair filled her with shame and anguish, for had she not bade it defiance a score of times?

Now it so happened that one evening toward the close of September, as she was walking with Satin in the Boulevard Poissonniere, the latter suddenly began tearing along at a terrible pace. And when Nana asked her what she meant thereby:

"It's the plain-clothes men!" whispered Satin. "Off with you! Off with you!" A wild stampede took place amid the surging crowd. Skirts streamed out behind and were torn. There were blows and shrieks. A woman fell down. The crowd of bystanders stood hilariously watching this rough police raid while the plain-clothes men rapidly narrowed their circle. Meanwhile Nana had lost Satin. Her legs were failing her, and she would have been taken up for a certainty had not a man caught her by the arm and led her away in front of the angry police. It was Prulliere, and he had just recognized her. Without saying a word he turned down the Rue Rougemont with her. It was just then quite deserted, and she was able to regain breath there, but at first her faintness and exhaustion were such that he had to support her. She did not even thank him.

"Look here," he said, "you must recover a bit. Come up to my rooms."

He lodged in the Rue Bergere close by. But she straightened herself up at once.

"No, I don't want to."

Thereupon he waxed coarse and rejoined:

"Why don't you want to, eh? Why, everybody visits my rooms."

"Because I don't."

In her opinion that explained everything. She was too fond of Fontan to betray him with one of his friends. The other people ceased to count the moment there was no pleasure in the business, and necessity compelled her to it. In view of her idiotic obstinacy Prulliere, as became a pretty fellow whose vanity had been wounded, did a cowardly thing.

"Very well, do as you like!" he cried. "Only I don't side with you, my dear. You must get out of the scrape by yourself."

And with that he left her. Terrors got hold of her again, and scurrying past shops and turning white whenever a man drew nigh, she fetched an immense compass before reaching Montmartre.

On the morrow, while still suffering from the shock of last night's terrors, Nana went to her aunt's and at the foot of a small empty street in the Batignolles found herself face to face with Labordette. At first they both appeared embarrassed, for with his usual complaisance he was busy on a secret errand. Nevertheless, he was the first to regain his self-possession and to announce himself fortunate in meeting her. Yes, certainly, everybody was still wondering at Nana's total eclipse. People were asking for her, and old friends were pining. And with that he grew quite paternal and ended by sermonizing.

"Frankly speaking, between you and me, my dear, the thing's getting stupid. One can understand a mash, but to go to that extent, to be trampled on like that and to get nothing but knocks! Are you playing up for the 'Virtue Prizes' then?"

She listened to him with an embarrassed expression. But when he told her about Rose, who was triumphantly enjoying her conquest of Count Muffat, a flame came into her eyes.

"Oh, if I wanted to—" she muttered.

As became an obliging friend, he at once offered to act as intercessor. But she refused his help, and he thereupon attacked her in an opposite quarter.

He informed her that Bordenave was busy mounting a play of Fauchery's containing a splendid part for her.

"What, a play with a part!" she cried in amazement. "But he's in it and he's told me nothing about it!"

She did not mention Fontan by name. However, she grew calm again directly and declared that she would never go on the stage again. Labordette doubtless remained unconvinced, for he continued with smiling insistence.

"You know, you need fear nothing with me. I get your Muffat ready for you, and you go on the stage again, and I bring him to you like a little dog!"

"No!" she cried decisively.

And she left him. Her heroic conduct made her tenderly pitiful toward herself. No blackguard of a man would ever have sacrificed himself like that without trumpeting the fact abroad. Nevertheless, she was struck by one thing: Labordette had given her exactly the same advice as Francis had given her. That evening when Fontan came home she questioned him about Fauchery's piece. The former had been back at the Varietes for two months past. Why then had he not told her about the part?

"What part?" he said in his ill-humored tone. "The grand lady's part, maybe? The deuce, you believe you've got talent then! Why, such a part would utterly do for you, my girl! You're meant for comic business—there's no denying it!"

She was dreadfully wounded. All that evening he kept chaffing her, calling her Mlle Mars. But the harder he hit the more bravely she suffered, for she derived a certain bitter satisfaction from this heroic devotion of hers, which rendered her very great and very loving in her own eyes. Ever since she had gone with other men in order to supply his wants her love for him had increased, and the fatigues and disgusts encountered outside only added to the flame. He was fast becoming a sort of pet vice for which she paid, a necessity of existence it was impossible to do without, seeing that blows only stimulated her desires. He, on his part, seeing what a good tame thing she had become, ended by abusing his privileges. She was getting on his nerves, and he began to conceive so fierce a loathing for her that he forgot to keep count of his real interests. When Bosc made his customary remarks to him he cried out in exasperation, for which there was no apparent cause, that he had had enough of her and of her good dinners and that he would shortly chuck her out of doors if only for the sake of making another woman a present of his seven thousand francs. Indeed, that was how their liaison ended.

One evening Nana came in toward eleven o'clock and found the door bolted. She tapped once—there was no answer; twice—still no answer. Meanwhile she saw light under the door, and Fontan inside did not trouble to move. She rapped again unwearyingly; she called him and began to get annoyed. At length Fontan's voice became audible; he spoke slowly and rather unctuously and uttered but this one word.

"MERDE!"

She beat on the door with her fists.

"MERDE!"

She banged hard enough to smash in the woodwork.

"MERDE!"

And for upward of a quarter of an hour the same foul expression buffeted her, answering like a jeering echo to every blow wherewith she shook the door. At length, seeing that she was not growing tired, he opened sharply, planted himself on the threshold, folded his arms and said in the same cold, brutal voice:

"By God, have you done yet? What d'you want? Are you going to let us sleep in peace, eh? You can quite see I've got company tonight."

He was certainly not alone, for Nana perceived the little woman from the Bouffes with the untidy tow hair and the gimlet-hole eyes, standing enjoying herself in her shift among the furniture she had paid for. But Fontan stepped out on the landing. He looked terrible, and he spread out and crooked his great fingers as if they were pincers.

"Hook it or I'll strangle you!"

Whereupon Nana burst into a nervous fit of sobbing. She was frightened and she made off. This time it was she that was being kicked out of doors. And in her fury the thought of Muffat suddenly occurred to her. Ah, to be sure, Fontan, of all men, ought never to have done her such a turn!

When she was out in the street her first thought was to go and sleep with Satin, provided the girl had no one with her. She met her in front of her house, for she, too, had been turned out of doors by her landlord. He had just had a padlock affixed to her door—quite illegally, of course, seeing that she had her own furniture. She swore and talked of having him up before the commissary of police. In the meantime, as midnight was striking, they had to begin thinking of finding a bed. And Satin, deeming it unwise to let the plain-clothes men into her secrets, ended by taking Nana to a woman who kept a little hotel in the Rue de Laval. Here they were assigned a narrow room on the first floor, the window of which opened on the courtyard. Satin remarked:

"I should gladly have gone to Mme Robert's. There's always a corner there for me. But with you it's out of the question. She's getting absurdly jealous; she beat me the other night."

When they had shut themselves in, Nana, who had not yet relieved her feelings, burst into tears and again and again recounted Fontan's dirty behavior. Satin listened complaisantly, comforted her, grew even more angry than she in denunciation of the male sex.

"Oh, the pigs, the pigs! Look here, we'll have nothing more to do with them!"

Then she helped Nana to undress with all the small, busy attentions, becoming a humble little friend. She kept saying coaxingly:

"Let's go to bed as fast as we can, pet. We shall be better off there! Oh, how silly you are to get crusty about things! I tell you, they're dirty brutes. Don't think any more about 'em. I—I love you very much. Don't cry, and oblige your own little darling girl."

And once in bed, she forthwith took Nana in her arms and soothed and comforted her. She refused to hear Fontan's name mentioned again, and each time it recurred to her friend's lips she stopped it with a kiss. Her lips pouted in pretty indignation; her hair lay loose about her, and her face glowed with tenderness and childlike beauty. Little by little her soft embrace compelled Nana to dry her tears. She was touched and replied to Satin's caresses. When two o'clock struck the candle was still burning, and a sound of soft, smothered laughter and lovers' talk was audible in the room.

But suddenly a loud noise came up from the lower floors of the hotel, and Satin, with next to nothing on, got up and listened intently.

"The police!" she said, growing very pale.

"Oh, blast our bad luck! We're bloody well done for!"

Often had she told stories about the raids on hotel made by the plainclothes men. But that particular night neither of them had suspected anything when they took shelter in the Rue de Laval. At the sound of the word "police" Nana lost her head. She jumped out of bed and ran across the room with the scared look of a madwoman about to jump out of the window. Luckily, however, the little courtyard was roofed with glass, which was covered with an iron-wire grating at the level of the girls' bedroom. At sight of this she ceased to hesitate; she stepped over the window prop, and with her chemise flying and her legs bared to the night air she vanished in the gloom.

"Stop! Stop!" said Satin in a great fright. "You'll kill yourself."

Then as they began hammering at the door, she shut the window like a good-natured girl and threw her friend's clothes down into a cupboard. She was already resigned to her fate and comforted herself with the thought that, after all, if she were to be put on the official list she would no longer be so "beastly frightened" as of yore. So she pretended to be heavy with sleep. She yawned; she palavered and ended by opening the door to a tall, burly fellow with an unkempt beard, who said to her:

"Show your hands! You've got no needle pricks on them: you don't work. Now then, dress!"

"But I'm not a dressmaker; I'm a burnisher," Satin brazenly declared.

Nevertheless, she dressed with much docility, knowing that argument was out of the question. Cries were ringing through the hotel; a girl was clinging to doorposts and refusing to budge an inch. Another girl, in bed with a lover, who was answering for her legality, was acting the honest woman who had been grossly insulted and spoke of bringing an action against the prefect of police. For close on an hour there was a noise of heavy shoes on the stairs, of fists hammering on doors, of shrill disputes terminating in sobs, of petticoats rustling along the walls, of all the sounds, in fact, attendant on the sudden awakening and scared departure of a flock of women as they were roughly packed off by three plain-clothes men, headed by a little oily-mannered, fair-haired commissary of police. After they had gone the hotel relapsed into deep silence.

Nobody had betrayed her; Nana was saved. Shivering and half dead with fear, she came groping back into the room. Her bare feet were cut and bleeding, for they had been torn by the grating. For a long while she remained sitting on the edge of the bed, listening and listening. Toward morning, however, she went to sleep again, and at eight o'clock, when she woke up, she escaped from the hotel and ran to her aunt's. When Mme Lerat, who happened just then to be drinking her morning coffee with Zoe, beheld her bedraggled plight and haggard face, she took note of the hour and at once understood the state of the case.

"It's come to it, eh?" she cried. "I certainly told you that he would take the skin off your back one of these days. Well, well, come in; you'll always find a kind welcome here."

Zoe had risen from her chair and was muttering with respectful familiarity:

"Madame is restored to us at last. I was waiting for Madame."

But Mme Lerat insisted on Nana's going and kissing Louiset at once, because, she said, the child took delight in his mother's nice ways. Louiset, a sickly child with poor blood, was still asleep, and when Nana bent over his white, scrofulous face, the memory of all she had undergone during the last few months brought a choking lump into her throat.

"Oh, my poor little one, my poor little one!" she gasped, bursting into a final fit of sobbing.

CHAPTER IX

The Petite Duchesse was being rehearsed at the Varietes. The first act had just been carefully gone through, and the second was about to begin. Seated in old armchairs in front of the stage, Fauchery and Bordenave were discussing various points while the prompter, Father Cossard, a little humpbacked man perched on a straw-bottomed chair, was turning over the pages of the manuscript, a pencil between his lips.

"Well, what are they waiting for?" cried Bordenave on a sudden, tapping the floor savagely with his heavy cane. "Barillot, why don't they begin?"

"It's Monsieur Bosc that has disappeared," replied Barillot, who was acting as second stage manager.'

Then there arose a tempest, and everybody shouted for Bosc while Bordenave swore.

"Always the same thing, by God! It's all very well ringing for 'em: they're always where they've no business to be. And then they grumble when they're kept till after four o'clock."

But Bosc just then came in with supreme tranquillity.

"Eh? What? What do they want me for? Oh, it's my turn! You ought to have said so. All right! Simonne gives the cue: 'Here are the guests,' and I come in. Which way must I come in?"

"Through the door, of course," cried Fauchery in great exasperation.

"Yes, but where is the door?"

At this Bordenave fell upon Barillot and once more set to work swearing and hammering the boards with his cane.

"By God! I said a chair was to be put there to stand for the door, and every day we have to get it done again. Barillot! Where's Barillot? Another of 'em! Why, they're all going!"

Nevertheless, Barillot came and planted the chair down in person, mutely weathering the storm as he did so. And the rehearsal began again. Simonne, in her hat and furs, began moving about like a maidservant busy arranging furniture. She paused to say:

"I'm not warm, you know, so I keep my hands in my muff."

Then changing her voice, she greeted Bosc with a little cry:

"La, it's Monsieur le Comte. You're the first to come, Monsieur le Comte, and Madame will be delighted."

Bosc had muddy trousers and a huge yellow overcoat, round the collar of which a tremendous comforter was wound. On his head he wore an old hat, and he kept his hands in his pockets. He did not act but dragged himself along, remarking in a hollow voice:

"Don't disturb your mistress, Isabelle; I want to take her by surprise."

The rehearsal took its course. Bordenave knitted his brows. He had slipped down low in his armchair and was listening with an air of fatigue. Fauchery was nervous and kept shifting about in his seat. Every few minutes he itched with the desire to interrupt, but he restrained himself. He heard a whispering in the dark and empty house behind him.

"Is she there?" he asked, leaning over toward Bordenave.

The latter nodded affirmatively. Before accepting the part of Geraldine, which he was offering her, Nana had been anxious to see the piece, for she hesitated to play a courtesan's part a second time. She, in fact, aspired to an honest woman's part. Accordingly she was hiding in the shadows of a corner box in company with Labordette, who was managing matters for her with Bordenave. Fauchery glanced in her direction and then once more set himself to follow the rehearsal.

Only the front of the stage was lit up. A flaring gas burner on a support, which was fed by a pipe from the footlights, burned in front of a reflector and cast its full brightness over the immediate foreground. It looked like a big yellow eye glaring through the surrounding semiobscurity, where it flamed in a doubtful, melancholy way. Cossard was holding up his manuscript against the slender stem of this arrangement. He wanted to see more clearly, and in the flood of light his hump was sharply outlined. As to Bordenave and Fauchery, they were already drowned in shadow. It was only in the heart of this enormous structure, on a few square yards of stage, that a faint glow suggested the light cast by some lantern nailed up in a railway station. It made the actors look like eccentric phantoms and set their shadows dancing after them. The remainder of the stage was full of mist and suggested a house in process of being pulled down, a church nave in utter ruin. It was littered with ladders, with set pieces and with scenery, of which the faded painting suggested heaped-up rubbish. Hanging high in air, the scenes had the appearance of great ragged clouts suspended from the rafters of some vast old-clothes shop, while above these again a ray of bright sunlight fell from a window and clove the shadow round the flies with a bar of gold.

Meanwhile actors were chatting at the back of the stage while awaiting their cues. Little by little they had raised their voices.

"Confound it, will you be silent?" howled Bordenave, raging up and down in his chair. "I can't hear a word. Go outside if you want to talk; WE are at work. Barillot, if there's any more talking I clap on fines all round!"

They were silent for a second or two. They were sitting in a little group on a bench and some rustic chairs in the corner of a scenic garden, which was standing ready to be put in position as it would be used in the opening act the same evening. In the middle of this group Fontan and Prulliere were listening to Rose Mignon, to whom the manager of the Folies-Dramatique Theatre had been making magnificent offers. But a voice was heard shouting:

"The duchess! Saint-Firmin! The duchess and Saint-Firmin are wanted!"

Only when the call was repeated did Prulliere remember that he was Saint-Firmin! Rose, who was playing the Duchess Helene, was already waiting to go on with him while old Bosc slowly returned to his seat, dragging one foot after the other over the sonorous and deserted boards. Clarisse offered him a place on the bench beside her.

"What's he bawling like that for?" she said in allusion to Bordenave. "Things will be getting rosy soon! A piece can't be put on nowadays without its getting on his nerves."

Bosc shrugged his shoulders; he was above such storms. Fontan whispered:

"He's afraid of a fiasco. The piece strikes me as idiotic."

Then he turned to Clarisse and again referred to what Rose had been telling them:

"D'you believe in the offers of the Folies people, eh? Three hundred francs an evening for a hundred nights! Why not a country house into the bargain? If his wife were to be given three hundred francs Mignon would chuck my friend Bordenave and do it jolly sharp too!"

Clarisse was a believer in the three hundred francs. That man Fontan was always picking holes in his friends' successes! Just then Simonne interrupted her. She was shivering with cold. Indeed, they were all buttoned up to the ears and had comforters on, and they looked up at the ray of sunlight which shone brightly above them but did not penetrate the cold gloom of the theater. In the streets outside there was a frost under a November sky.

"And there's no fire in the greenroom!" said Simonne. "It's disgusting; he IS just becoming a skinflint! I want to be off; I don't want to get seedy."

"Silence, I say!" Bordenave once more thundered.

Then for a minute or so a confused murmur alone was audible as the actors went on repeating their parts. There was scarcely any appropriate action, and they spoke in even tones so as not to tire themselves. Nevertheless, when they did emphasize a particular shade of meaning they cast a glance at the house, which lay before them like a yawning gulf. It was suffused with vague, ambient shadow, which resembled the fine dust floating pent in some high, windowless loft. The deserted house, whose sole illumination was the twilight radiance of the stage, seemed to slumber in melancholy and mysterious effacement. Near the ceiling dense night smothered the frescoes, while from the several tiers of stage boxes on either hand huge widths of gray canvas stretched down to protect the neighboring hangings. In fact, there was no end to these coverings; bands of canvas had been thrown over the velvet-covered ledges in front of the various galleries which they shrouded thickly. Their pale hue stained the surrounding shadows, and of the general decorations of the house only the dark recesses of the boxes were distinguishable. These served to outline the framework of the several stories, where the seats were so many stains of red velvet turned black. The chandelier had been let down as far as it would go, and it so filled the region of the stalls with its pendants as to suggest a flitting and to set one thinking that the public had started on a journey from which they would never return.

Just about then Rose, as the little duchess who has been misled into the society of a courtesan, came to the footlights, lifted up her hands and pouted adorably at the dark and empty theater, which was as sad as a house of mourning.

"Good heavens, what queer people!" she said, emphasizing the phrase and confident that it would have its effect.

Far back in the corner box in which she was hiding Nana sat enveloped in a great shawl. She was listening to the play and devouring Rose with her eyes. Turning toward Labordette, she asked him in a low tone:

"You are sure he'll come?"

"Quite sure. Without doubt he'll come with Mignon, so as to have an excuse for coming. As soon as he makes his appearance you'll go up into Mathilde's dressing room, and I'll bring him to you there."

They were talking of Count Muffat. Labordette had arranged this interview with him on neutral ground. He had had a serious talk with Bordenave, whose affairs had been gravely damaged by two successive failures. Accordingly Bordenave had hastened to lend him his theater and to offer Nana a part, for he was anxious to win the count's favor and hoped to be able to borrow from him.

"And this part of Geraldine, what d'you thing of it?" continued Labordette.

But Nana sat motionless and vouchsafed no reply. After the first act, in which the author showed how the Duc de Beaurivage played his wife false with the blonde Geraldine, a comic-opera celebrity, the second act witnessed the Duchess Helene's arrival at the house of the actress on the occasion of a masked ball being given by the latter. The duchess has come to find out by what magical process ladies of that sort conquer and retain their husbands' affections. A cousin, the handsome Oscar de Saint-Firmin, introduces her and hopes to be able to debauch her. And her first lesson causes her great surprise, for she hears Geraldine swearing like a hodman at the duke, who suffers with most ecstatic submissiveness. The episode causes her to cry out, "Dear me, if that's the way one ought to talk to the men!" Geraldine had scarce any other scene in the act save this one. As to the duchess, she is very soon punished for her curiosity, for an old buck, the Baron de Tardiveau, takes her for a courtesan and becomes very gallant, while on her other side Beaurivage sits on a lounging chair and makes his peace with Geraldine by dint of kisses and caresses. As this last lady's part had not yet been assigned to anyone, Father Cossard had got up to read it, and he was now figuring away in Bosc's arms and emphasizing it despite himself. At this point, while the rehearsal was dragging monotonously on, Fauchery suddenly jumped from his chair. He had restrained himself up to that moment, but now his nerves got the better of him.

"That's not it!" he cried.

The actors paused awkwardly enough while Fontan sneered and asked in his most contemptuous voice:

"Eh? What's not it? Who's not doing it right?"

"Nobody is! You're quite wrong, quite wrong!" continued Fauchery, and, gesticulating wildly, he came striding over the stage and began himself to act the scene.

"Now look here, you Fontan, do please comprehend the way Tardiveau gets packed off. You must lean forward like this in order to catch hold of the duchess. And then you, Rose, must change your position like that but not too soon—only when you hear the kiss."

He broke off and in the heat of explanation shouted to Cossard:

"Geraldine, give the kiss! Loudly, so that it may be heard!"

Father Cossard turned toward Bosc and smacked his lips vigorously.

"Good! That's the kiss," said Fauchery triumphantly. "Once more; let's have it once more. Now you see, Rose, I've had time to move, and then I give a little cry—so: 'Oh, she's given him a kiss.' But before I do that, Tardiveau must go up the stage. D'you hear, Fontan? You go up. Come, let's try it again, all together."

The actors continued the scene again, but Fontan played his part with such an ill grace that they made no sort of progress. Twice Fauchery had to repeat his explanation, each time acting it out with more warmth than before. The actors listened to him with melancholy faces, gazed momentarily at one another, as though he had asked them to walk on their heads, and then awkwardly essayed the passage, only to pull up short directly afterward, looking as stiff as puppets whose strings have just been snapped.

"No, it beats me; I can't understand it," said Fontan at length, speaking in the insolent manner peculiar to him.

Bordenave had never once opened his lips. He had slipped quite down in his armchair, so that only the top of his hat was now visible in the doubtful flicker of the gaslight on the stand. His cane had fallen from his grasp and lay slantwise across his waistcoat. Indeed, he seemed to be asleep. But suddenly he sat bolt upright.

"It's idiotic, my boy," he announced quietly to Fauchery.

"What d'you mean, idiotic?" cried the author, growing very pale. "It's you that are the idiot, my dear boy!"

Bordenave began to get angry at once. He repeated the word "idiotic" and, seeking a more forcible expression, hit upon "imbecile" and "damned foolish." The public would hiss, and the act would never be finished! And when Fauchery, without, indeed, being very deeply wounded by these big phrases, which always recurred when a new piece was being put on, grew savage and called the other a brute, Bordenave went beyond all bounds, brandished his cane in the air, snorted like a bull and shouted:

"Good God! Why the hell can't you shut up? We've lost a quarter of an hour over this folly. Yes, folly! There's no sense in it. And it's so simple, after all's said and done! You, Fontan, mustn't move. You, Rose, must make your little movement, just that, no more; d'ye see? And then you come down. Now then, let's get it done this journey. Give the kiss, Cossard."

Then ensued confusion. The scene went no better than before. Bordenave, in his turn, showed them how to act it about as gracefully as an elephant might have done, while Fauchery sneered and shrugged pityingly. After that Fontan put his word in, and even Bosc made so bold as to give advice. Rose, thoroughly tired out, had ended by sitting down on the chair which indicated the door. No one knew where they had got to, and by way of finish to it all Simonne made a premature entry, under the impression that her cue had been given her, and arrived amid the confusion. This so enraged Bordenave that he whirled his stick round in a terrific manner and caught her a sounding thwack to the rearward. At rehearsal he used frequently to drub his former mistress. Simonne ran away, and this furious outcry followed her:

"Take that, and, by God, if I'm annoyed again I shut the whole shop up at once!"

Fauchery pushed his hat down over his forehead and pretended to be going to leave the theater. But he stopped at the top of the stage and came down again when he saw Bordenave perspiringly resuming his seat. Then he, too, took up his old position in the other armchair. For some seconds they sat motionless side by side while oppressive silence reigned in the shadowy house. The actors waited for nearly two minutes. They were all heavy with exhaustion and felt as though they had performed an overwhelming task.

"Well, let's go on," said Bordenave at last. He spoke in his usual voice and was perfectly calm.

"Yes, let's go on," Fauchery repeated. "We'll arrange the scene tomorrow."

And with that they dragged on again and rehearsed their parts with as much listlessness and as fine an indifference as ever. During the dispute between manager and author Fontan and the rest had been taking things very comfortably on the rustic bench and seats at the back of the stage, where they had been chuckling, grumbling and saying fiercely cutting things. But when Simonne came back, still smarting from her blow and choking with sobs, they grew melodramatic and declared that had they been in her place they would have strangled the swine. She began wiping her eyes and nodding approval. It was all over between them, she said. She was leaving him, especially as Steiner had offered to give her a grand start in life only the day before. Clarisse was much astonished at this, for the banker was quite ruined, but Prulliere began laughing and reminded them of the neat manner in which that confounded Israelite had puffed himself alongside of Rose in order to get his Landes saltworks afloat on 'change. Just at that time he was airing a new project, namely, a tunnel under the Bosporus. Simonne listened with the greatest interest to this fresh piece of information.

As to Clarisse, she had been raging for a week past. Just fancy, that beast La Faloise, whom she had succeeded in chucking into Gaga's venerable embrace, was coming into the fortune of a very rich uncle! It was just her luck; she had always been destined to make things cozy for other people. Then, too, that pig Bordenave had once more given her a mere scrap of a part, a paltry fifty lines, just as if she could not have played Geraldine! She was yearning for that role and hoping that Nana would refuse it.

"Well, and what about me?" said Prulliere with much bitterness. "I haven't got more than two hundred lines. I wanted to give the part up. It's too bad to make me play that fellow Saint-Firmin; why, it's a regular failure! And then what a style it's written in, my dears! It'll fall dead flat, you may be sure."

But just then Simonne, who had been chatting with Father Barillot, came back breathless and announced:

"By the by, talking of Nana, she's in the house."

"Where, where?" asked Clarisse briskly, getting up to look for her.

The news spread at once, and everyone craned forward. The rehearsal was, as it were, momentarily interrupted. But Bordenave emerged from his quiescent condition, shouting:

"What's up, eh? Finish the act, I say. And be quiet out there; it's unbearable!"

Nana was still following the piece from the corner box. Twice Labordette showed an inclination to chat, but she grew impatient and nudged him to make him keep silent. The second act was drawing to a close, when two shadows loomed at the back of the theater. They were creeping softly down, avoiding all noise, and Nana recognized Mignon and Count Muffat. They came forward and silently shook hands with Bordenave.

"Ah, there they are," she murmured with a sigh of relief.

Rose Mignon delivered the last sentences of the act. Thereupon Bordenave said that it was necessary to go through the second again before beginning the third. With that he left off attending to the rehearsal and greeted the count with looks of exaggerated politeness, while Fauchery pretended to be entirely engrossed with his actors, who now grouped themselves round him. Mignon stood whistling carelessly, with his hands behind his back and his eyes fixed complacently on his wife, who seemed rather nervous.

"Well, shall we go upstairs?" Labordette asked Nana. "I'll install you in the dressing room and come down again and fetch him."

Nana forthwith left the corner box. She had to grope her way along the passage outside the stalls, but Bordenave guessed where she was as she passed along in the dark and caught her up at the end of the corridor passing behind the scenes, a narrow tunnel where the gas burned day and night. Here, in order to bluff her into a bargain, he plunged into a discussion of the courtesan's part.

"What a part it is, eh? What a wicked little part! It's made for you. Come and rehearse tomorrow."

Nana was frigid. She wanted to know what the third act was like.

"Oh, it's superb, the third act is! The duchess plays the courtesan in her own house and this disgusts Beaurivage and makes him amend his way. Then there's an awfully funny QUID PRO QUO, when Tardiveau arrives and is under the impression that he's at an opera dancer's house."

"And what does Geraldine do in it all?" interrupted Nana.

"Geraldine?" repeated Bordenave in some embarrassment. "She has a scene—not a very long one, but a great success. It's made for you, I assure you! Will you sign?"

She looked steadily at him and at length made answer:

"We'll see about that all in good time."

And she rejoined Labordette, who was waiting for her on the stairs. Everybody in the theater had recognized her, and there was now much whispering, especially between Prulliere, who was scandalized at her return, and Clarisse who was very desirous of the part. As to Fontan, he looked coldly on, pretending unconcern, for he did not think it becoming to round on a woman he had loved. Deep down in his heart, though, his old love had turned to hate, and he nursed the fiercest rancor against her in return for the constant devotion, the personal beauty, the life in common, of which his perverse and monstrous tastes had made him tire.

In the meantime, when Labordette reappeared and went up to the count, Rose Mignon, whose suspicions Nana's presence had excited, understood it all forthwith. Muffat was bothering her to death, but she was beside herself at the thought of being left like this. She broke the silence which she usually maintained on such subjects in her husband's society and said bluntly:

"You see what's going on? My word, if she tries the Steiner trick on again I'll tear her eyes out!"

Tranquilly and haughtily Mignon shrugged his shoulders, as became a man from whom nothing could be hidden.

"Do be quiet," he muttered. "Do me the favor of being quiet, won't you?"

He knew what to rely on now. He had drained his Muffat dry, and he knew that at a sign from Nana he was ready to lie down and be a carpet under her feet. There is no fighting against passions such as that. Accordingly, as he knew what men were, he thought of nothing but how to turn the situation to the best possible account.

It would be necessary to wait on the course of events. And he waited on them.

"Rose, it's your turn!" shouted Bordenave. "The second act's being begun again."

"Off with you then," continued Mignon, "and let me arrange matters."

Then he began bantering, despite all his troubles, and was pleased to congratulate Fauchery on his piece. A very strong piece! Only why was his great lady so chaste? It wasn't natural! With that he sneered and asked who had sat for the portrait of the Duke of Beaurivage, Geraldine's wornout roue. Fauchery smiled; he was far from annoyed. But Bordenave glanced in Muffat's direction and looked vexed, and Mignon was struck at this and became serious again.

"Let's begin, for God's sake!" yelled the manager. "Now then, Barillot! Eh? What? Isn't Bosc there? Is he bloody well making game of me now?"

Bosc, however, made his appearance quietly enough, and the rehearsal began again just as Labordette was taking the count away with him. The latter was tremulous at the thought of seeing Nana once more. After the rupture had taken place between them there had been a great void in his life. He was idle and fancied himself about to suffer through the sudden change his habits had undergone, and accordingly he had let them take him to see Rose. Besides, his brain had been in such a whirl that he had striven to forget everything and had strenuously kept from seeking out Nana while avoiding an explanation with the countess. He thought, indeed, that he owed his dignity such a measure of forgetfulness. But mysterious forces were at work within, and Nana began slowly to reconquer him. First came thoughts of her, then fleshly cravings and finally a new set of exclusive, tender, well-nigh paternal feelings.

The abominable events attendant on their last interview were gradually effacing themselves. He no longer saw Fontan; he no longer heard the stinging taunt about his wife's adultery with which Nana cast him out of doors. These things were as words whose memory vanished. Yet deep down in his heart there was a poignant smart which wrung him with such increasing pain that it nigh choked him. Childish ideas would occur to him; he imagined that she would never have betrayed him if he had really loved her, and he blamed himself for this. His anguish was becoming unbearable; he was really very wretched. His was the pain of an old wound rather than the blind, present desire which puts up with everything for the sake of immediate possession. He felt a jealous passion for the woman and was haunted by longings for her and her alone, her hair, her mouth, her body. When he remembered the sound of her voice a shiver ran through him; he longed for her as a miser might have done, with refinements of desire beggaring description. He was, in fact, so dolorously possessed by his passion that when Labordette had begun to broach the subject of an assignation he had thrown himself into his arms in obedience to irresistible impulse. Directly afterward he had, of course, been ashamed of an act of self-abandonment which could not but seem very ridiculous in a man of his position; but Labordette was one who knew when to see and when not to see things, and he gave a further proof of his tact when he left the count at the foot of the stairs and without effort let slip only these simple words:

"The right-hand passage on the second floor. The door's not shut."

Muffat was alone in that silent corner of the house. As he passed before the players' waiting room, he had peeped through the open doors and noticed the utter dilapidation of the vast chamber, which looked shamefully stained and worn in broad daylight. But what surprised him most as he emerged from the darkness and confusion of the stage was the pure, clear light and deep quiet at present pervading the lofty staircase, which one evening when he had seen it before had been bathed in gas fumes and loud with the footsteps of women scampering over the different floors. He felt that the dressing rooms were empty, the corridors deserted; not a soul was there; not a sound broke the stillness, while through the square windows on the level of the stairs the pale November sunlight filtered and cast yellow patches of light, full of dancing dust, amid the dead, peaceful air which seemed to descend from the regions above.

He was glad of this calm and the silence, and he went slowly up, trying to regain breath as he went, for his heart was thumping, and he was afraid lest he might behave childishly and give way to sighs and tears. Accordingly on the first-floor landing he leaned up against a wall—for he was sure of not being observed—and pressed his handkerchief to his mouth and gazed at the warped steps, the iron balustrade bright with the friction of many hands, the scraped paint on the walls—all the squalor, in fact, which that house of tolerance so crudely displayed at the pale afternoon hour when courtesans are asleep. When he reached the second floor he had to step over a big yellow cat which was lying curled up on a step. With half-closed eyes this cat was keeping solitary watch over the house, where the close and now frozen odors which the women nightly left behind them had rendered him somnolent.

In the right-hand corridor the door of the dressing room had, indeed, not been closed entirely. Nana was waiting. That little Mathilde, a drab of a young girl, kept her dressing room in a filthy state. Chipped jugs stood about anyhow; the dressing table was greasy, and there was a chair covered with red stains, which looked as if someone had bled over the straw. The paper pasted on walls and ceiling was splashed from top to bottom with spots of soapy water and this smelled so disagreeably of lavender scent turned sour that Nana opened the window and for some moments stayed leaning on the sill, breathing the fresh air and craning forward to catch sight of Mme Bron underneath. She could hear her broom wildly at work on the mildewed pantiles of the narrow court which was buried in shadow. A canary, whose cage hung on a shutter, was trilling away piercingly. The sound of carriages in the boulevard and neighboring streets was no longer audible, and the quiet and the wide expanse of sleeping sunlight suggested the country. Looking farther afield, her eye fell on the small buildings and glass roofs of the galleries in the passage and, beyond these, on the tall houses in the Rue Vivienne, the backs of which rose silent and apparently deserted over against her. There was a succession of terrace roofs close by, and on one of these a photographer had perched a big cagelike construction of blue glass. It was all very gay, and Nana was becoming absorbed in contemplation, when it struck her someone had knocked at the door.

She turned round and shouted:

"Come in!"

At sight of the count she shut the window, for it was not warm, and there was no need for the eavesdropping Mme Bron to listen. The pair gazed at one another gravely. Then as the count still kept standing stiffly in front of her, looking ready to choke with emotion, she burst out laughing and said:

"Well! So you're here again, you silly big beast!"

The tumult going on within him was so great that he seemed a man frozen to ice. He addressed Nana as "madame" and esteemed himself happy to see her again. Thereupon she became more familiar than ever in order to bounce matters through.

"Don't do it in the dignified way! You wanted to see me, didn't you? But you didn't intend us to stand looking at one another like a couple of chinaware dogs. We've both been in the wrong—Oh, I certainly forgive you!"

And herewith they agreed not to talk of that affair again, Muffat nodding his assent as Nana spoke. He was calmer now but as yet could find nothing to say, though a thousand things rose tumultuously to his lips. Surprised at his apparent coldness, she began acting a part with much vigor.

"Come," she continued with a faint smile, "you're a sensible man! Now that we've made our peace let's shake hands and be good friends in future."

"What? Good friends?" he murmured in sudden anxiety.

"Yes; it's idiotic, perhaps, but I should like you to think well of me. We've had our little explanation out, and if we meet again we shan't, at any rate look like a pair of boobies."

He tried to interrupt her with a movement of the hand.

"Let me finish! There's not a man, you understand, able to accuse me of doing him a blackguardly turn; well, and it struck me as horrid to begin in your case. We all have our sense of honor, dear boy."

"But that's not my meaning!" he shouted violently. "Sit down—listen to me!" And as though he were afraid of seeing her take her departure, he pushed her down on the solitary chair in the room. Then he paced about in growing agitation. The little dressing room was airless and full of sunlight, and no sound from the outside world disturbed its pleasant, peaceful, dampish atmosphere. In the pauses of conversation the shrillings of the canary were alone audible and suggested the distant piping of a flute.

"Listen," he said, planting himself in front of her, "I've come to possess myself of you again. Yes, I want to begin again. You know that well; then why do you talk to me as you do? Answer me; tell me you consent."

Her head was bent, and she was scratching the blood-red straw of the seat underneath her. Seeing him so anxious, she did not hurry to answer. But at last she lifted up her face. It had assumed a grave expression, and into the beautiful eyes she had succeeded in infusing a look of sadness.

"Oh, it's impossible, little man. Never, never, will I live with you again."

"Why?" he stuttered, and his face seemed contracted in unspeakable suffering.

"Why? Hang it all, because—It's impossible; that's about it. I don't want to."

He looked ardently at her for some seconds longer. Then his legs curved under him and he fell on the floor. In a bored voice she added this simple advice:

"Ah, don't be a baby!"

But he was one already. Dropping at her feet, he had put his arms round her waist and was hugging her closely, pressing his face hard against her knees. When he felt her thus—when he once more divined the presence of her velvety limbs beneath the thin fabric of her dress—he was suddenly convulsed and trembled, as it were, with fever, while madly, savagely, he pressed his face against her knees as though he had been anxious to force through her flesh. The old chair creaked, and beneath the low ceiling, where the air was pungent with stale perfumes, smothered sobs of desire were audible.

"Well, and after?" Nana began saying, letting him do as he would. "All this doesn't help you a bit, seeing that the thing's impossible. Good God, what a child you are!"

His energy subsided, but he still stayed on the floor, nor did he relax his hold of her as he said in a broken voice:

"Do at least listen to what I came to offer you. I've already seen a town house close to the Parc Monceau—I would gladly realize your smallest wish. In order to have you all to myself, I would give my whole fortune. Yes, that would be my only condition, that I should have you all to myself! Do you understand? And if you were to consent to be mine only, oh, then I should want you to be the loveliest, the richest, woman on earth. I should give you carriages and diamonds and dresses!"

At each successive offer Nana shook her head proudly. Then seeing that he still continued them, that he even spoke of settling money on her—for he was at loss what to lay at her feet—she apparently lost patience.

"Come, come, have you done bargaining with me? I'm a good sort, and I don't mind giving in to you for a minute or two, as your feelings are making you so ill, but I've had enough of it now, haven't I? So let me get up. You're tiring me."

She extricated herself from his clasp, and once on her feet:

"No, no, no!" she said. "I don't want to!"

With that he gathered himself up painfully and feebly dropped into a chair, in which he leaned back with his face in his hands. Nana began pacing up and down in her turn. For a second or two she looked at the stained wallpaper, the greasy toilet table, the whole dirty little room as it basked in the pale sunlight. Then she paused in front of the count and spoke with quiet directness.

"It's strange how rich men fancy they can have everything for their money. Well, and if I don't want to consent—what then? I don't care a pin for your presents! You might give me Paris, and yet I should say no! Always no! Look here, it's scarcely clean in this room, yet I should think it very nice if I wanted to live in it with you. But one's fit to kick the bucket in your palaces if one isn't in love. Ah, as to money, my poor pet, I can lay my hands on that if I want to, but I tell you, I trample on it; I spit on it!"

And with that she assumed a disgusted expression. Then she became sentimental and added in a melancholy tone:

"I know of something worth more than money. Oh, if only someone were to give me what I long for!"

He slowly lifted his head, and there was a gleam of hope in his eyes.

"Oh, you can't give it me," she continued; "it doesn't depend on you, and that's the reason I'm talking to you about it. Yes, we're having a chat, so I may as well mention to you that I should like to play the part of the respectable woman in that show of theirs."

"What respectable woman?" he muttered in astonishment.

"Why, their Duchess Helene! If they think I'm going to play Geraldine, a part with nothing in it, a scene and nothing besides—if they think that! Besides, that isn't the reason. The fact is I've had enough of courtesans. Why, there's no end to 'em! They'll be fancying I've got 'em on the brain; to be sure they will! Besides, when all's said and done, it's annoying, for I can quite see they seem to think me uneducated. Well, my boy, they're jolly well in the dark about it, I can tell you! When I want to be a perfect lady, why then I am a swell, and no mistake! Just look at this."

And she withdrew as far as the window and then came swelling back with the mincing gait and circumspect air of a portly hen that fears to dirty her claws. As to Muffat, he followed her movements with eyes still wet with tears. He was stupefied by this sudden transition from anguish to comedy. She walked about for a moment or two in order the more thoroughly to show off her paces, and as she walked she smiled subtlely, closed her eyes demurely and managed her skirts with great dexterity. Then she posted herself in front of him again.

"I guess I've hit it, eh?"

"Oh, thoroughly," he stammered with a broken voice and a troubled expression.

"I tell you I've got hold of the honest woman! I've tried at my own place. Nobody's got my little knack of looking like a duchess who don't care a damn for the men. Did you notice it when I passed in front of you? Why, the thing's in my blood! Besides, I want to play the part of an honest woman. I dream about it day and night—I'm miserable about it. I must have the part, d'you hear?"

And with that she grew serious, speaking in a hard voice and looking deeply moved, for she was really tortured by her stupid, tiresome wish. Muffat, still smarting from her late refusals, sat on without appearing to grasp her meaning. There was a silence during which the very flies abstained from buzzing through the quiet, empty place.

"Now, look here," she resumed bluntly, "you're to get them to give me the part."

He was dumfounded, and with a despairing gesture:

"Oh, it's impossible! You yourself were saying just now that it didn't depend on me."

She interrupted him with a shrug of the shoulders.

"You'll just go down, and you'll tell Bordenave you want the part. Now don't be such a silly! Bordenave wants money—well, you'll lend him some, since you can afford to make ducks and drakes of it."

And as he still struggled to refuse her, she grew angry.

"Very well, I understand; you're afraid of making Rose angry. I didn't mention the woman when you were crying down on the floor—I should have had too much to say about it all. Yes, to be sure, when one has sworn to love a woman forever one doesn't usually take up with the first creature that comes by directly after. Oh, that's where the shoe pinches, I remember! Well, dear boy, there's nothing very savory in the Mignon's leavings! Oughtn't you to have broken it off with that dirty lot before coming and squirming on my knees?"

He protested vaguely and at last was able to get out a phrase.

"Oh, I don't care a jot for Rose; I'll give her up at once."

Nana seemed satisfied on this point. She continued:

"Well then, what's bothering you? Bordenave's master here. You'll tell me there's Fauchery after Bordenave—"

She had sunk her voice, for she was coming to the delicate part of the matter. Muffat sat silent, his eyes fixed on the ground. He had remained voluntarily ignorant of Fauchery's assiduous attentions to the countess, and time had lulled his suspicions and set him hoping that he had been deceiving himself during that fearful night passed in a doorway of the Rue Taitbout. But he still felt a dull, angry repugnance to the man.

"Well, what then? Fauchery isn't the devil!" Nana repeated, feeling her way cautiously and trying to find out how matters stood between husband and lover. "One can get over his soft side. I promise you, he's a good sort at bottom! So it's a bargain, eh? You'll tell him that it's for my sake?"

The idea of taking such a step disgusted the count.

"No, no! Never!" he cried.

She paused, and this sentence was on the verge of utterance:

"Fauchery can refuse you nothing."

But she felt that by way of argument it was rather too much of a good thing. So she only smiled a queer smile which spoke as plainly as words. Muffat had raised his eyes to her and now once more lowered them, looking pale and full of embarrassment.

"Ah, you're not good natured," she muttered at last.

"I cannot," he said with a voice and a look of the utmost anguish. "I'll do whatever you like, but not that, dear love! Oh, I beg you not to insist on that!"

Thereupon she wasted no more time in discussion but took his head between her small hands, pushed it back a little, bent down and glued her mouth to his in a long, long kiss. He shivered violently; he trembled beneath her touch; his eyes were closed, and he was beside himself. She lifted him to his feet.

"Go," said she simply.

He walked off, making toward the door. But as he passed out she took him in her arms again, became meek and coaxing, lifted her face to his and rubbed her cheek against his waistcoat, much as a cat might have done.

"Where's the fine house?" she whispered in laughing embarrassment, like a little girl who returns to the pleasant things she has previously refused.

"In the Avenue de Villiers."

"And there are carriages there?"

"Yes."

"Lace? Diamonds?"

"Yes."

"Oh, how good you are, my old pet! You know it was all jealousy just now! And this time I solemnly promise you it won't be like the first, for now you understand what's due to a woman. You give all, don't you? Well then, I don't want anybody but you! Why, look here, there's some more for you! There and there AND there!"

When she had pushed him from the room after firing his blood with a rain of kisses on hands and on face, she panted awhile. Good heavens, what an unpleasant smell there was in that slut Mathilde's dressing room! It was warm, if you will, with the tranquil warmth peculiar to rooms in the south when the winter sun shines into them, but really, it smelled far too strong of stale lavender water, not to mention other less cleanly things! She opened the window and, again leaning on the window sill, began watching the glass roof of the passage below in order to kill time.

Muffat went staggering downstairs. His head was swimming. What should he say? How should he broach the matter which, moreover, did not concern him? He heard sounds of quarreling as he reached the stage. The second act was being finished, and Prulliere was beside himself with wrath, owing to an attempt on Fauchery's part to cut short one of his speeches.

"Cut it all out then," he was shouting. "I should prefer that! Just fancy, I haven't two hundred lines, and they're still cutting me down. No, by Jove, I've had enough of it; I give the part up."

He took a little crumpled manuscript book out of his pocket and fingered its leaves feverishly, as though he were just about to throw it on Cossard's lap. His pale face was convulsed by outraged vanity; his lips were drawn and thin, his eyes flamed; he was quite unable to conceal the struggle that was going on inside him. To think that he, Prulliere, the idol of the public, should play a part of only two hundred lines!

"Why not make me bring in letters on a tray?" he continued bitterly.

"Come, come, Prulliere, behave decently," said Bordenave, who was anxious to treat him tenderly because of his influence over the boxes. "Don't begin making a fuss. We'll find some points. Eh, Fauchery, you'll add some points? In the third act it would even be possible to lengthen a scene out."

"Well then, I want the last speech of all," the comedian declared. "I certainly deserve to have it."

Fauchery's silence seemed to give consent, and Prulliere, still greatly agitated and discontented despite everything, put his part back into his pocket. Bosc and Fontan had appeared profoundly indifferent during the course of this explanation. Let each man fight for his own hand, they reflected; the present dispute had nothing to do with them; they had no interest therein! All the actors clustered round Fauchery and began questioning him and fishing for praise, while Mignon listened to the last of Prulliere's complaints without, however, losing sight of Count Muffat, whose return he had been on the watch for.

Entering in the half-light, the count had paused at the back of the stage, for he hesitated to interrupt the quarrel. But Bordenave caught sight of him and ran forward.

"Aren't they a pretty lot?" he muttered. "You can have no idea what I've got to undergo with that lot, Monsieur le Comte. Each man's vainer than his neighbor, and they're wretched players all the same, a scabby lot, always mixed up in some dirty business or other! Oh, they'd be delighted if I were to come to smash. But I beg pardon—I'm getting beside myself."

He ceased speaking, and silence reigned while Muffat sought how to broach his announcement gently. But he failed and, in order to get out of his difficulty the more quickly, ended by an abrupt announcement:

"Nana wants the duchess's part."

Bordenave gave a start and shouted:

"Come now, it's sheer madness!"

Then looking at the count and finding him so pale and so shaken, he was calm at once.

"Devil take it!" he said simply.

And with that there ensued a fresh silence. At bottom he didn't care a pin about it. That great thing Nana playing the duchess might possibly prove amusing! Besides, now that this had happened he had Muffat well in his grasp. Accordingly he was not long in coming to a decision, and so he turned round and called out:

"Fauchery!"

The count had been on the point of stopping him. But Fauchery did not hear him, for he had been pinned against the curtain by Fontan and was being compelled to listen patiently to the comedian's reading of the part of Tardiveau. Fontan imagined Tardiveau to be a native of Marseilles with a dialect, and he imitated the dialect. He was repeating whole speeches. Was that right? Was this the thing? Apparently he was only submitting ideas to Fauchery of which he was himself uncertain, but as the author seemed cold and raised various objections, he grew angry at once.

Oh, very well, the moment the spirit of the part escaped him it would be better for all concerned that he shouldn't act it at all!

"Fauchery!" shouted Bordenave once more.

Thereupon the young man ran off, delighted to escape from the actor, who was wounded not a little by his prompt retreat.

"Don't let's stay here," continued Bordenave. "Come this way, gentlemen."

In order to escape from curious listeners he led them into the property room behind the scenes, while Mignon watched their disappearance in some surprise. They went down a few steps and entered a square room, whose two windows opened upon the courtyard. A faint light stole through the dirty panes and hung wanly under the low ceiling. In pigeonholes and shelves, which filled the whole place up, lay a collection of the most varied kind of bric-a-brac. Indeed, it suggested an old-clothes shop in the Rue de Lappe in process of selling off, so indescribable was the hotchpotch of plates, gilt pasteboard cups, old red umbrellas, Italian jars, clocks in all styles, platters and inkpots, firearms and squirts, which lay chipped and broken and in unrecognizable heaps under a layer of dust an inch deep. An unendurable odor of old iron, rags and damp cardboard emanated from the various piles, where the debris of forgotten dramas had been collecting for half a century.

"Come in," Bordenave repeated. "We shall be alone, at any rate."

The count was extremely embarrassed, and he contrived to let the manager risk his proposal for him. Fauchery was astonished.

"Eh? What?" he asked.

"Just this," said Bordenave finally. "An idea has occurred to us. Now whatever you do, don't jump! It's most serious. What do you think of Nana for the duchess's part?"

The author was bewildered; then he burst out with:

"Ah no, no! You're joking, aren't you? People would laugh far too much."

"Well, and it's a point gained already if they do laugh! Just reflect, my dear boy. The idea pleases Monsieur le Comte very much."

In order to keep himself in countenance Muffat had just picked out of the dust on a neighboring shelf an object which he did not seem to recognize. It was an eggcup, and its stem had been mended with plaster. He kept hold of it unconsciously and came forward, muttering:

"Yes, yes, it would be capital."

Fauchery turned toward him with a brisk, impatient gesture. The count had nothing to do with his piece, and he said decisively:

"Never! Let Nana play the courtesan as much as she likes, but a lady—No, by Jove!"

"You are mistaken, I assure you," rejoined the count, growing bolder. "This very minute she has been playing the part of a pure woman for my benefit."

"Where?" queried Fauchery with growing surprise.

"Upstairs in a dressing room. Yes, she has, indeed, and with such distinction! She's got a way of glancing at you as she goes by you—something like this, you know!"

And eggcup in hand, he endeavored to imitate Nana, quite forgetting his dignity in his frantic desire to convince the others. Fauchery gazed at him in a state of stupefaction. He understood it all now, and his anger had ceased. The count felt that he was looking at him mockingly and pityingly, and he paused with a slight blush on his face.

"Egad, it's quite possible!" muttered the author complaisantly. "Perhaps she would do very well, only the part's been assigned. We can't take it away from Rose."

"Oh, if that's all the trouble," said Bordenave, "I'll undertake to arrange matters."

But presently, seeing them both against him and guessing that Bordenave had some secret interest at stake, the young man thought to avoid aquiescence by redoubling the violence of his refusal. The consultation was on the verge of being broken up.

"Oh, dear! No, no! Even if the part were unassigned I should never give it her! There, is that plain? Do let me alone; I have no wish to ruin my play!"

He lapsed into silent embarrassment. Bordenave, deeming himself DE TROP, went away, but the count remained with bowed head. He raised it with an effort and said in a breaking voice:

"Supposing, my dear fellow, I were to ask this of you as a favor?"

"I cannot, I cannot," Fauchery kept repeating as he writhed to get free.

Muffat's voice became harder.

"I pray and beseech you for it! I want it!"

And with that he fixed his eyes on him. The young man read menaces in that darkling gaze and suddenly gave way with a splutter of confused phrases:

"Do what you like—I don't care a pin about it. Yes, yes, you're abusing your power, but you'll see, you'll see!"

At this the embarrassment of both increased. Fauchery was leaning up against a set of shelves and was tapping nervously on the ground with his foot. Muffat seemed busy examining the eggcup, which he was still turning round and about.

"It's an eggcup," Bordenave obligingly came and remarked.

"Yes, to be sure! It's an eggeup," the count repeated.

"Excuse me, you're covered with dust," continued the manager, putting the thing back on a shelf. "If one had to dust every day there'd be no end to it, you understand. But it's hardly clean here—a filthy mess, eh? Yet you may believe me or not when I tell you there's money in it. Now look, just look at all that!"

He walked Muffat round in front of the pigeonholes and shelves and in the greenish light which filtered through the courtyard, told him the names of different properties, for he was anxious to interest him in his marine-stores inventory, as he jocosely termed it.

Presently, when they had returned into Fauchery's neighborhood, he said carelessly enough:

"Listen, since we're all of one mind, we'll finish the matter at once. Here's Mignon, just when he's wanted."

For some little time past Mignon had been prowling in the adjoining passage, and the very moment Bordenave began talking of a modification of their agreement he burst into wrathful protest. It was infamous—they wanted to spoil his wife's career—he'd go to law about it! Bordenave, meanwhile, was extremely calm and full of reasons. He did not think the part worthy of Rose, and he preferred to reserve her for an operetta, which was to be put on after the Petite Duchesse. But when her husband still continued shouting he suddenly offered to cancel their arrangement in view of the offers which the Folies-Dramatiques had been making the singer. At this Mignon was momentarily put out, so without denying the truth of these offers he loudly professed a vast disdain for money. His wife, he said, had been engaged to play the Duchess Helene, and she would play the part even if he, Mignon, were to be ruined over it. His dignity, his honor, were at stake! Starting from this basis, the discussion grew interminable. The manager, however, always returned to the following argument: since the Folies had offered Rose three hundred francs a night during a hundred performances, and since she only made a hundred and fifty with him, she would be the gainer by fifteen thousand francs the moment he let her depart. The husband, on his part, did not desert the artist's position. What would people say if they saw his wife deprived of her part? Why, that she was not equal to it; that it had been deemed necessary to find a substitute for her! And this would do great harm to Rose's reputation as an artist; nay, it would diminish it. Oh no, no! Glory before gain! Then without a word of warning he pointed out a possible arrangement: Rose, according to the terms of her agreement, was pledged to pay a forfeit of ten thousand francs in case she gave up the part. Very well then, let them give her ten thousand francs, and she would go to the Folies-Dramatiques. Bordenave was utterly dumfounded while Mignon, who had never once taken his eyes off the count, tranquilly awaited results.

"Then everything can be settled," murmured Muffat in tones of relief; "we can come to an understanding."

"The deuce, no! That would be too stupid!" cried Bordenave, mastered by his commercial instincts. "Ten thousand francs to let Rose go! Why, people would make game of me!"

But the count, with a multiplicity of nods, bade him accept. He hesitated, and at last with much grumbling and infinite regret over the ten thousand francs which, by the by, were not destined to come out of his own pocket he bluntly continued:

"After all, I consent. At any rate, I shall have you off my hands."

For a quarter of an hour past Fontan had been listening in the courtyard. Such had been his curiosity that he had come down and posted himself there, but the moment he understood the state of the case he went upstairs again and enjoyed the treat of telling Rose. Dear me! They were just haggling in her behalf! He dinned his words into her ears; she ran off to the property room. They were silent as she entered. She looked at the four men. Muffat hung his head; Fauchery answered her questioning glance with a despairing shrug of the shoulders; as to Mignon, he was busy discussing the terms of the agreement with Bordenave.

"What's up?" she demanded curtly.

"Nothing," said her husband. "Bordenave here is giving ten thousand francs in order to get you to give up your part."

She grew tremulous with anger and very pale, and she clenched her little fists. For some moments she stared at him, her whole nature in revolt. Ordinarily in matters of business she was wont to trust everything obediently to her husband, leaving him to sign agreements with managers and lovers. Now she could but cry:

"Oh, come, you're too base for anything!"

The words fell like a lash. Then she sped away, and Mignon, in utter astonishment, ran after her. What next? Was she going mad? He began explaining to her in low tones that ten thousand francs from one party and fifteen thousand from the other came to twenty-five thousand. A splendid deal! Muffat was getting rid of her in every sense of the word; it was a pretty trick to have plucked him of this last feather! But Rose in her anger vouchsafed no answer. Whereupon Mignon in disdain left her to her feminine spite and, turning to Bordenave, who was once more on the stage with Fauchery and Muffat, said:

"We'll sign tomorrow morning. Have the money in readiness."

At this moment Nana, to whom Labordette had brought the news, came down to the stage in triumph. She was quite the honest woman now and wore a most distinguished expression in order to overwhelm her friends and prove to the idiots that when she chose she could give them all points in the matter of smartness. But she nearly got into trouble, for at the sight of her Rose darted forward, choking with rage and stuttering:

"Yes, you, I'll pay you out! Things can't go on like this; d'you understand?" Nana forgot herself in face of this brisk attack and was going to put her arms akimbo and give her what for. But she controlled herself and, looking like a marquise who is afraid of treading on an orange peel, fluted in still more silvery tones.

"Eh, what?" said she. "You're mad, my dear!"

And with that she continued in her graceful affectation while Rose took her departure, followed by Mignon, who now refused to recognize her. Clarisse was enraptured, having just obtained the part of Geraldine from Bordenave. Fauchery, on the other hand, was gloomy; he shifted from one foot to the other; he could not decide whether to leave the theater or no. His piece was bedeviled, and he was seeking how best to save it. But Nana came up, took him by both hands and, drawing him toward her, asked whether he thought her so very atrocious after all. She wasn't going to eat his play—not she! Then she made him laugh and gave him to understand that he would be foolish to be angry with her, in view of his relationship to the Muffats. If, she said, her memory failed her she would take her lines from the prompter. The house, too, would be packed in such a way as to ensure applause. Besides, he was mistaken about her, and he would soon see how she would rattle through her part. By and by it was arranged that the author should make a few changes in the role of the duchess so as to extend that of Prulliere. The last-named personage was enraptured. Indeed, amid all the joy which Nana now quite naturally diffused, Fontan alone remained unmoved. In the middle of the yellow lamplight, against which the sharp outline of his goatlike profile shone out with great distinctness, he stood showing off his figure and affecting the pose of one who has been cruelly abandoned. Nana went quietly up and shook hands with him.

"How are you getting on?"

"Oh, pretty fairly. And how are you?"

"Very well, thank you."

That was all. They seemed to have only parted at the doors of the theater the day before. Meanwhile the players were waiting about, but Bordenave said that the third act would not be rehearsed. And so it chanced that old Bosc went grumbling away at the proper time, whereas usually the company were needlessly detained and lost whole afternoons in consequence. Everyone went off. Down on the pavement they were blinded by the broad daylight and stood blinking their eyes in a dazed sort of way, as became people who had passed three hours squabbling with tight-strung nerves in the depths of a cellar. The count, with racked limbs and vacant brain, got into a conveyance with Nana, while Labordette took Fauchery off and comforted him.

A month later the first night of the Petite Duchesse proved supremely disastrous to Nana. She was atrociously bad and displayed such pretentions toward high comedy that the public grew mirthful. They did not hiss—they were too amused. From a stage box Rose Mignon kept greeting her rival's successive entrances with a shrill laugh, which set the whole house off. It was the beginning of her revenge. Accordingly, when at night Nana, greatly chagrined, found herself alone with Muffat, she said furiously:

"What a conspiracy, eh? It's all owing to jealousy. Oh, if they only knew how I despise 'em! What do I want them for nowadays? Look here! I'll bet a hundred louis that I'll bring all those who made fun today and make 'em lick the ground at my feet! Yes, I'll fine-lady your Paris for you, I will!"

CHAPTER X

Thereupon Nana became a smart woman, mistress of all that is foolish and filthy in man, marquise in the ranks of her calling. It was a sudden but decisive start, a plunge into the garish day of gallant notoriety and mad expenditure and that daredevil wastefulness peculiar to beauty. She at once became queen among the most expensive of her kind. Her photographs were displayed in shopwindows, and she was mentioned in the papers. When she drove in her carriage along the boulevards the people would turn and tell one another who that was with all the unction of a nation saluting its sovereign, while the object of their adoration lolled easily back in her diaphanous dresses and smiled gaily under the rain of little golden curls which ran riot above the blue of her made-up eyes and the red of her painted lips. And the wonder of wonders was that the great creature, who was so awkward on the stage, so very absurd the moment she sought to act the chaste woman, was able without effort to assume the role of an enchantress in the outer world. Her movements were lithe as a serpent's, and the studied and yet seemingly involuntary carelessness with which she dressed was really exquisite in its elegance. There was a nervous distinction in all she did which suggested a wellborn Persian cat; she was an aristocrat in vice and proudly and rebelliously trampled upon a prostrate Paris like a sovereign whom none dare disobey. She set the fashion, and great ladies imitated her.

Nana's fine house was situated at the corner of the Rue Cardinet, in the Avenue de Villiers. The avenue was part of the luxurious quarter at that time springing up in the vague district which had once been the Plaine Monceau. The house had been built by a young painter, who was intoxicated by a first success, and had been perforce resold almost as soon as it was habitable. It was in the palatial Renaissance manner and had fantastic interior arrangements which consisted of modern conveniences framed in a setting of somewhat artificial originality. Count Muffat had bought the house ready furnished and full of hosts of beautiful objects—lovely Eastern hangings, old credences, huge chairs of the Louis XIII epoch. And thus Nana had come into artistic surroundings of the choicest kind and of the most extravagantly various dates. But since the studio, which occupied the central portion of the house, could not be of any use to her, she had upset existing arrangements, establishing a small drawing room on the first floor, next to her bedroom and dressing room, and leaving a conservatory, a large drawing room and a dining room to look after themselves underneath. She astonished the architect with her ideas, for, as became a Parisian workgirl who understands the elegancies of life by instinct, she had suddenly developed a very pretty taste for every species of luxurious refinement. Indeed, she did not spoil her house overmuch; nay, she even added to the richness of the furniture, save here and there, where certain traces of tender foolishness and vulgar magnificence betrayed the ex-flower seller who had been wont to dream in front of shopwindows in the arcades.

A carpet was spread on the steps beneath the great awning over the front door in the court, and the moment you entered the hall you were greeted by a perfume as of violets and a soft, warm atmosphere which thick hangings helped to produce. A window, whose yellow-and rose-colored panes suggested the warm pallor of human flesh, gave light to the wide staircase, at the foot of which a Negro in carved wood held out a silver tray full of visiting cards and four white marble women, with bosoms displayed, raised lamps in their uplifted hands. Bronzes and Chinese vases full of flowers, divans covered with old Persian rugs, armchairs upholstered in old tapestry, furnished the entrance hall, adorned the stairheads and gave the first-floor landing the appearance of an anteroom. Here men's overcoats and hats were always in evidence, and there were thick hangings which deadened every sound. It seemed a place apart: on entering it you might have fancied yourself in a chapel, whose very air was thrilling with devotion, whose very silence and seclusion were fraught with mystery.

Nana only opened the large and somewhat too-sumptuous Louis XVI drawing room on those gala nights when she received society from the Tuileries or strangers of distinction. Ordinarily she only came downstairs at mealtimes, and she would feel rather lost on such days as she lunched by herself in the lofty dining room with its Gobelin tapestry and its monumental sideboard, adorned with old porcelain and marvelous pieces of ancient plate. She used to go upstairs again as quickly as possible, for her home was on the first floor, in the three rooms, the bed, dressing and small drawing room above described. Twice already she had done the bedchamber up anew: on the first occasion in mauve satin, on the second in blue silk under lace. But she had not been satisfied with this; it had struck her as "nohowish," and she was still unsuccessfully seeking for new colors and designs. On the elaborately upholstered bed, which was as low as a sofa, there were twenty thousand francs' worth of POINT DE VENISE lace. The furniture was lacquered blue and white under designs in silver filigree, and everywhere lay such numbers of white bearskins that they hid the carpet. This was a luxurious caprice on Nana's part, she having never been able to break herself of the habit of sitting on the floor to take her stockings off. Next door to the bedroom the little saloon was full of an amusing medley of exquisitely artistic objects. Against the hangings of pale rose-colored silk—a faded Turkish rose color, embroidered with gold thread—a whole world of them stood sharply outlined. They were from every land and in every possible style. There were Italian cabinets, Spanish and Portuguese coffers, models of Chinese pagodas, a Japanese screen of precious workmanship, besides china, bronzes, embroidered silks, hangings of the finest needlework. Armchairs wide as beds and sofas deep as alcoves suggested voluptuous idleness and the somnolent life of the seraglio. The prevailing tone of the room was old gold blended with green and red, and nothing it contained too forcibly indicated the presence of the courtesan save the luxuriousness of the seats. Only two "biscuit" statuettes, a woman in her shift, hunting for fleas, and another with nothing at all on, walking on her hands and waving her feet in the air, sufficed to sully the room with a note of stupid originality.

Through a door, which was nearly always ajar, the dressing room was visible. It was all in marble and glass with a white bath, silver jugs and basins and crystal and ivory appointments. A drawn curtain filled the place with a clear twilight which seemed to slumber in the warm scent of violets, that suggestive perfume peculiar to Nana wherewith the whole house, from the roof to the very courtyard, was penetrated.

The furnishing of the house was a most important undertaking. Nana certainly had Zoe with her, that girl so devoted to her fortunes. For months she had been tranquilly awaiting this abrupt, new departure, as became a woman who was certain of her powers of prescience, and now she was triumphant; she was mistress of the house and was putting by a round sum while serving Madame as honestly as possible. But a solitary lady's maid was no longer sufficient. A butler, a coachman, a porter and a cook were wanted. Besides, it was necessary to fill the stables. It was then that Labordette made himself most useful. He undertook to perform all sorts of errands which bored the count; he made a comfortable job of the purchase of horses; he visited the coachbuilders; he guided the young woman in her choice of things. She was to be met with at the shops, leaning on his arm. Labordette even got in the servants—Charles, a great, tall coachman, who had been in service with the Duc de Corbreuse; Julien, a little, smiling, much-becurled butler, and a married couple, of whom the wife Victorine became cook while the husband Francois was taken on as porter and footman. The last mentioned in powder and breeches wore Nana's livery, which was a sky-blue one adorned with silver lace, and he received visitors in the hall. The whole thing was princely in the correctness of its style.

At the end of two months the house was set going. The cost had been more than three hundred thousand francs. There were eight horses in the stables, and five carriages in the coach houses, and of these five one was a landau with silver embellishments, which for the moment occupied the attention of all Paris. And amid this great wealth Nana began settling down and making her nest. After the third representation of the Petite Duchesse she had quitted the theater, leaving Bordenave to struggle on against a bankruptcy which, despite the count's money, was imminent. Nevertheless, she was still bitter about her failure. It added to that other bitterness, the lesson Fontan had given her, a shameful lesson for which she held all men responsible. Accordingly she now declared herself very firm and quite proof against sudden infatuations, but thoughts of vengeance took no hold of her volatile brain. What did maintain a hold on it in the hours when she was not indignant was an ever-wakeful lust of expenditure, added to a natural contempt for the man who paid and to a perpetual passion for consumption and waste, which took pride in the ruin of her lovers.

At starting Nana put the count on a proper footing and clearly mapped out the conditions of their relationship. The count gave twelve thousand francs monthly, presents excepted, and demanded nothing in return save absolute fidelity. She swore fidelity but insisted also on being treated with the utmost consideration, on enjoying complete liberty as mistress of the house and on having her every wish respected. For instance, she was to receive her friends every day, and he was to come only at stated times. In a word, he was to repose a blind confidence in her in everything. And when he was seized with jealous anxiety and hesitated to grant what she wanted, she stood on her dignity and threatened to give him back all he had given or even swore by little Louiset to perform what she promised. This was to suffice him. There was no love where mutual esteem was wanting. At the end of the first month Muffat respected her.

But she desired and obtained still more. Soon she began to influence him, as became a good-natured courtesan. When he came to her in a moody condition she cheered him up, confessed him and then gave him good advice. Little by little she interested herself in the annoyances of his home life, in his wife, in his daughter, in his love affairs and financial difficulties; she was very sensible, very fair and right-minded. On one occasion only did she let anger get the better of her, and that was when he confided to her that doubtless Daguenet was going to ask for his daughter Estelle in marriage. When the count began making himself notorious Daguenet had thought it a wise move to break off with Nana. He had treated her like a base hussy and had sworn to snatch his future father-in-law out of the creature's clutches. In return Nana abused her old Mimi in a charming fashion. He was a renegade who had devoured his fortune in the company of vile women; he had no moral sense. True, he did not let them pay him money, but he profited by that of others and only repaid them at rare intervals with a bouquet or a dinner. And when the count seemed inclined to find excuses for these failings she bluntly informed him that Daguenet had enjoyed her favors, and she added disgusting particulars. Muffat had grown ashen-pale. There was no question of the young man now. This would teach him to be lacking in gratitude!

Meanwhile the house had not been entirely furnished, when one evening after she had lavished the most energetic promises of fidelity on Muffat Nana kept the Count Xavier de Vandeuvres for the night. For the last fortnight he had been paying her assiduous court, visiting her and sending presents of flowers, and now she gave way not so much out of sudden infatuation as to prove that she was a free woman. The idea of gain followed later when, the day after, Vandeuvres helped her to pay a bill which she did not wish to mention to the other man. From Vandeuvres she would certainly derive from eight to ten thousand francs a month, and this would prove very useful as pocket money. In those days he was finishing the last of his fortune in an access of burning, feverish folly. His horses and Lucy had devoured three of his farms, and at one gulp Nana was going to swallow his last chateau, near Amiens. He seemed in a hurry to sweep everything away, down to the ruins of the old tower built by a Vandeuvres under Philip Augustus. He was mad for ruin and thought it a great thing to leave the last golden bezants of his coat of arms in the grasp of this courtesan, whom the world of Paris desired. He, too, accepted Nana's conditions, leaving her entire freedom of action and claiming her caresses only on certain days. He was not even naively impassioned enough to require her to make vows. Muffat suspected nothing. As to Vandeuvres, he knew things would take place for a certainty, but he never made the least allusion to them and pretended total ignorance, while his lips wore the subtle smile of the skeptical man of pleasure who does not seek the impossible, provided he can have his day and that Paris is aware of it.

From that time forth Nana's house was really properly appointed. The staff of servants was complete in the stable, in the kitchen and in my lady's chamber. Zoe organized everything and passed successfully through the most unforeseen difficulties. The household moved as easily as the scenery in a theater and was regulated like a grand administrative concern. Indeed, it worked with such precision that during the early months there were no jars and no derangements. Madame, however, pained Zoe extremely with her imprudent acts, her sudden fits of unwisdom, her mad bravado. Still the lady's maid grew gradually lenient, for she had noticed that she made increased profits in seasons of wanton waste when Madame had committed a folly which must be made up for. It was then that the presents began raining on her, and she fished up many a louis out of the troubled waters.

One morning when Muffat had not yet left the bedroom Zoe ushered a gentleman into the dressing room, where Nana was changing her underwear. He was trembling violently.

"Good gracious! It's Zizi!" said the young woman in great astonishment.

It was, indeed, Georges. But when he saw her in her shift, with her golden hair over her bare shoulders, he threw his arms round her neck and round her waist and kissed her in all directions. She began struggling to get free, for she was frightened, and in smothered tones she stammered:

"Do leave off! He's there! Oh, it's silly of you! And you, Zoe, are you out of your senses? Take him away and keep him downstairs; I'll try and come down."

Zoe had to push him in front of her. When Nana was able to rejoin them in the drawing room downstairs she scolded them both, and Zoe pursed up her lips and took her departure with a vexed expression, remarking that she had only been anxious to give Madame a pleasure. Georges was so glad to see Nana again and gazed at her with such delight that his fine eyes began filling with tears. The miserable days were over now; his mother believed him to have grown reasonable and had allowed him to leave Les Fondettes. Accordingly, the moment he had reached the terminus, he had got a conveyance in order the more quickly to come and kiss his sweet darling. He spoke of living at her side in future, as he used to do down in the country when he waited for her, barefooted, in the bedroom at La Mignotte. And as he told her about himself, he let his fingers creep forward, for he longed to touch her after that cruel year of separation. Then he got possession of her hands, felt about the wide sleeves of her dressing jacket, traveled up as far as her shoulders.

"You still love your baby?" he asked in his child voice.

"Oh, I certainly love him!" answered Nana, briskly getting out of his clutches. "But you come popping in without warning. You know, my little man, I'm not my own mistress; you must be good!"

Georges, when he got out of his cab, had been so dizzy with the feeling that his long desire was at last about to be satisfied that he had not even noticed what sort of house he was entering. But now he became conscious of a change in the things around him. He examined the sumptuous dining room with its lofty decorated ceiling, its Gobelin hangings, its buffet blazing with plate.

"Yes, yes!" he remarked sadly.

And with that she made him understand that he was never to come in the mornings but between four and six in the afternoon, if he cared to. That was her reception time. Then as he looked at her with suppliant, questioning eyes and craved no boon at all, she, in her turn, kissed him on the forehead in the most amiable way.

"Be very good," she whispered. "I'll do all I can."

But the truth was that this remark now meant nothing. She thought Georges very nice and would have liked him as a companion, but as nothing else. Nevertheless, when he arrived daily at four o'clock he seemed so wretched that she was often fain to be as compliant as of old and would hide him in cupboards and constantly allow him to pick up the crumbs from Beauty's table. He hardly ever left the house now and became as much one of its inmates as the little dog Bijou. Together they nestled among Mistress's skirts and enjoyed a little of her at a time, even when she was with another man, while doles of sugar and stray caresses not seldom fell to their share in her hours of loneliness and boredom.

Doubtless Mme Hugon found out that the lad had again returned to that wicked woman's arms, for she hurried up to Paris and came and sought aid from her other son, the Lieutenant Philippe, who was then in garrison at Vincennes. Georges, who was hiding from his elder brother, was seized with despairing apprehension, for he feared the latter might adopt violent tactics, and as his tenderness for Nana was so nervously expansive that he could not keep anything from her, he soon began talking of nothing but his big brother, a great, strong fellow, who was capable of all kinds of things.

"You know," he explained, "Mamma won't come to you while she can send my brother. Oh, she'll certainly send Philippe to fetch me."

The first time he said this Nana was deeply wounded. She said frigidly:

"Gracious me, I should like to see him come! For all that he's a lieutenant in the army, Francois will chuck him out in double-quick time!"

Soon, as the lad kept returning to the subject of his brother, she ended by taking a certain interest in Philippe, and in a week's time she knew him from head to foot—knew him as very tall and very strong and merry and somewhat rough. She learned intimate details, too, and found out that he had hair on his arms and a birthmark on his shoulder. So thoroughly did she learn her lesson that one day, when she was full of the image of the man who was to be turned out of doors by her orders, she cried out:

"I say, Zizi, your brother's not coming. He's a base deserter!"

The next day, when Georges and Nana were alone together, Francois came upstairs to ask whether Madame would receive Lieutenant Philippe Hugon. Georges grew extremely white and murmured:

"I suspected it; Mamma was talking about it this morning."

And he besought the young woman to send down word that she could not see visitors. But she was already on her feet and seemed all aflame as she said:

"Why should I not see him? He would think me afraid. Dear me, we'll have a good laugh! Just leave the gentleman in the drawing room for a quarter of an hour, Francois; afterward bring him up to me."

She did not sit down again but began pacing feverishly to and fro between the fireplace and a Venetian mirror hanging above an Italian chest. And each time she reached the latter she glanced at the glass and tried the effect of a smile, while Georges sat nervously on a sofa, trembling at the thought of the coming scene. As she walked up and down she kept jerking out such little phrases as:

"It will calm the fellow down if he has to wait a quarter of an hour. Besides, if he thinks he's calling on a tottie the drawing room will stun him! Yes, yes, have a good look at everything, my fine fellow! It isn't imitation, and it'll teach you to respect the lady who owns it. Respect's what men need to feel! The quarter of an hour's gone by, eh? No? Only ten minutes? Oh, we've got plenty of time."

She did not stay where she was, however. At the end of the quarter of an hour she sent Georges away after making him solemnly promise not to listen at the door, as such conduct would scarcely look proper in case the servants saw him. As he went into her bedroom Zizi ventured in a choking sort of way to remark:

"It's my brother, you know—"

"Don't you fear," she said with much dignity; "if he's polite I'll be polite."

Francois ushered in Philippe Hugon, who wore morning dress. Georges began crossing on tiptoe on the other side of the room, for he was anxious to obey the young woman. But the sound of voices retained him, and he hesitated in such anguish of mind that his knees gave way under him. He began imagining that a dread catastrophe would befall, that blows would be struck, that something abominable would happen, which would make Nana everlastingly odious to him. And so he could not withstand the temptation to come back and put his ear against the door. He heard very ill, for the thick portieres deadened every sound, but he managed to catch certain words spoken by Philippe, stern phrases in which such terms as "mere child," "family," "honor," were distinctly audible. He was so anxious about his darling's possible answers that his heart beat violently and filled his head with a confused, buzzing noise. She was sure to give vent to a "Dirty blackguard!" or to a "Leave me bloody well alone! I'm in my own house!" But nothing happened—not a breath came from her direction. Nana seemed dead in there! Soon even his brother's voice grew gentler, and he could not make it out at all, when a strange murmuring sound finally stupefied him. Nana was sobbing! For a moment or two he was the prey of contending feelings and knew not whether to run away or to fall upon Philippe. But just then Zoe came into the room, and he withdrew from the door, ashamed at being thus surprised.

She began quietly to put some linen away in a cupboard while he stood mute and motionless, pressing his forehead against a windowpane. He was tortured by uncertainty. After a short silence the woman asked:

"It's your brother that's with Madame?"

"Yes," replied the lad in a choking voice.

There was a fresh silence.

"And it makes you anxious, doesn't it, Monsieur Georges?"

"Yes," he rejoined in the same painful, suffering tone.

Zoe was in no hurry. She folded up some lace and said slowly:

"You're wrong; Madame will manage it all."

And then the conversation ended; they said not another word. Still she did not leave the room. A long quarter of an hour passed, and she turned round again without seeming to notice the look of exasperation overspreading the lad's face, which was already white with the effects of uncertainty and constraint. He was casting sidelong glances in the direction of the drawing room.

Maybe Nana was still crying. The other must have grown savage and have dealt her blows. Thus when Zoe finally took her departure he ran to the door and once more pressed his ear against it. He was thunderstruck; his head swam, for he heard a brisk outburst of gaiety, tender, whispering voices and the smothered giggles of a woman who is being tickled. Besides, almost directly afterward, Nana conducted Philippe to the head of the stairs, and there was an exchange of cordial and familiar phrases.

When Georges again ventured into the drawing room the young woman was standing before the mirror, looking at herself.

"Well?" he asked in utter bewilderment.

"Well, what?" she said without turning round. Then negligently:

"What did you mean? He's very nice, is your brother!"

"So it's all right, is it?"

"Oh, certainly it's all right! Goodness me, what's come over you? One would have thought we were going to fight!"

Georges still failed to understand.

"I thought I heard—that is, you didn't cry?" he stammered out.

"Me cry!" she exclaimed, looking fixedly at him. "Why, you're dreaming! What makes you think I cried?"

Thereupon the lad was treated to a distressing scene for having disobeyed and played Paul Pry behind the door. She sulked, and he returned with coaxing submissiveness to the old subject, for he wished to know all about it.

"And my brother then?"

"Your brother saw where he was at once. You know, I might have been a tottie, in which case his interference would have been accounted for by your age and the family honor! Oh yes, I understand those kinds of feelings! But a single glance was enough for him, and he behaved like a well-bred man at once. So don't be anxious any longer. It's all over—he's gone to quiet your mamma!"

And she went on laughingly:

"For that matter, you'll see your brother here. I've invited him, and he's going to return."

"Oh, he's going to return," said the lad, growing white. He added nothing, and they ceased talking of Philippe. She began dressing to go out, and he watched her with his great, sad eyes. Doubtless he was very glad that matters had got settled, for he would have preferred death to a rupture of their connection, but deep down in his heart there was a silent anguish, a profound sense of pain, which he had no experience of and dared not talk about. How Philippe quieted their mother's fears he never knew, but three days later she returned to Les Fondettes, apparently satisfied. On the evening of her return, at Nana's house, he trembled when Francois announced the lieutenant, but the latter jested gaily and treated him like a young rascal, whose escapade he had favored as something not likely to have any consequences. The lad's heart was sore within him; he scarcely dared move and blushed girlishly at the least word that was spoken to him. He had not lived much in Philippe's society; he was ten years his junior, and he feared him as he would a father, from whom stories about women are concealed. Accordingly he experienced an uneasy sense of shame when he saw him so free in Nana's company and heard him laugh uproariously, as became a man who was plunging into a life of pleasure with the gusto born of magnificent health. Nevertheless, when his brother shortly began to present himself every day, Georges ended by getting somewhat used to it all. Nana was radiant.

This, her latest installation, had been involving all the riotous waste attendant on the life of gallantry, and now her housewarming was being defiantly celebrated in a grand mansion positively overflowing with males and with furniture.

One afternoon when the Hugons were there Count Muffat arrived out of hours. But when Zoe told him that Madame was with friends he refused to come in and took his departure discreetly, as became a gallant gentleman. When he made his appearance again in the evening Nana received him with the frigid indignation of a grossly affronted woman.

"Sir," she said, "I have given you no cause why you should insult me. You must understand this: when I am at home to visitors, I beg you to make your appearance just like other people."

The count simply gaped in astonishment. "But, my dear—" he endeavored to explain.

"Perhaps it was because I had visitors! Yes, there were men here, but what d'you suppose I was doing with those men? You only advertise a woman's affairs when you act the discreet lover, and I don't want to be advertised; I don't!"

He obtained his pardon with difficulty, but at bottom he was enchanted. It was with scenes such as these that she kept him in unquestioning and docile submission. She had long since succeeded in imposing Georges on him as a young vagabond who, she declared, amused her. She made him dine with Philippe, and the count behaved with great amiability. When they rose from table he took the young man on one side and asked news of his mother. From that time forth the young Hugons, Vandeuvres and Muffat were openly about the house and shook hands as guests and intimates might have done. It was a more convenient arrangement than the previous one. Muffat alone still abstained discreetly from too-frequent visits, thus adhering to the ceremonious policy of an ordinary strange caller. At night when Nana was sitting on her bearskins drawing off her stockings, he would talk amicably about the other three gentlemen and lay especial stress on Philippe, who was loyalty itself.

"It's very true; they're nice," Nana would say as she lingered on the floor to change her shift. "Only, you know, they see what I am. One word about it and I should chuck 'em all out of doors for you!"

Nevertheless, despite her luxurious life and her group of courtiers, Nana was nearly bored to death. She had men for every minute of the night, and money overflowed even among the brushes and combs in the drawers of her dressing table. But all this had ceased to satisfy her; she felt that there was a void somewhere or other, an empty place provocative of yawns. Her life dragged on, devoid of occupation, and successive days only brought back the same monotonous hours. Tomorrow had ceased to be; she lived like a bird: sure of her food and ready to perch and roost on any branch which she came to. This certainty of food and drink left her lolling effortless for whole days, lulled her to sleep in conventual idleness and submission as though she were the prisoner of her trade. Never going out except to drive, she was losing her walking powers. She reverted to low childish tastes, would kiss Bijou from morning to night and kill time with stupid pleasures while waiting for the man whose caresses she tolerated with an appearance of complaisant lassitude. Amid this species of self-abandonment she now took no thought about anything save her personal beauty; her sole care was to look after herself, to wash and to perfume her limbs, as became one who was proud of being able to undress at any moment and in face of anybody without having to blush for her imperfections.

At ten in the morning Nana would get up. Bijou, the Scotch griffon dog, used to lick her face and wake her, and then would ensue a game of play lasting some five minutes, during which the dog would race about over her arms and legs and cause Count Muffat much distress. Bijou was the first little male he had ever been jealous of. It was not at all proper, he thought, that an animal should go poking its nose under the bedclothes like that! After this Nana would proceed to her dressing room, where she took a bath. Toward eleven o'clock Francois would come and do up her hair before beginning the elaborate manipulations of the afternoon.

At breakfast, as she hated feeding alone, she nearly always had Mme Maloir at table with her. This lady would arrive from unknown regions in the morning, wearing her extravagantly quaint hats, and would return at night to that mysterious existence of hers, about which no one ever troubled. But the hardest to bear were the two or three hours between lunch and the toilet. On ordinary occasions she proposed a game of bezique to her old friend; on others she would read the Figaro, in which the theatrical echoes and the fashionable news interested her. Sometimes she even opened a book, for she fancied herself in literary matters. Her toilet kept her till close on five o'clock, and then only she would wake from her daylong drowse and drive out or receive a whole mob of men at her own house. She would often dine abroad and always go to bed very late, only to rise again on the morrow with the same languor as before and to begin another day, differing in nothing from its predecessor.

The great distraction was to go to the Batignolles and see her little Louis at her aunt's. For a fortnight at a time she forgot all about him, and then would follow an access of maternal love, and she would hurry off on foot with all the modesty and tenderness becoming a good mother. On such occasions she would be the bearer of snuff for her aunt and of oranges and biscuits for the child, the kind of presents one takes to a hospital. Or again she would drive up in her landau on her return from the Bois, decked in costumes, the resplendence of which greatly excited the dwellers in the solitary street. Since her niece's magnificent elevation Mme Lerat had been puffed up with vanity. She rarely presented herself in the Avenue de Villiers, for she was pleased to remark that it wasn't her place to do so, but she enjoyed triumphs in her own street. She was delighted when the young woman arrived in dresses that had cost four or five thousand francs and would be occupied during the whole of the next day in showing off her presents and in citing prices which quite stupefied the neighbors. As often as not, Nana kept Sunday free for the sake of "her family," and on such occasions, if Muffat invited her, she would refuse with the smile of a good little shopwoman. It was impossible, she would answer; she was dining at her aunt's; she was going to see Baby. Moreover, that poor little man Louiset was always ill. He was almost three years old, growing quite a great boy! But he had had an eczema on the back of his neck, and now concretions were forming in his ears, which pointed, it was feared, to decay of the bones of the skull. When she saw how pale he looked, with his spoiled blood and his flabby flesh all out in yellow patches, she would become serious, but her principal feeling would be one of astonishment. What could be the matter with the little love that he should grow so weakly? She, his mother, was so strong and well!

On the days when her child did not engross attention Nana would again sink back into the noisy monotony of her existence, with its drives in the Bois, first nights at the theater, dinners and suppers at the Maison-d'Or or the Cafe Anglais, not to mention all the places of public resort, all the spectacles to which crowds rushed—Mabille, the reviews, the races. But whatever happened she still felt that stupid, idle void, which caused her, as it were, to suffer internal cramps. Despite the incessant infatuations that possessed her heart, she would stretch out her arms with a gesture of immense weariness the moment she was left alone. Solitude rendered her low spirited at once, for it brought her face to face with the emptiness and boredom within her. Extremely gay by nature and profession, she became dismal in solitude and would sum up her life in the following ejaculation, which recurred incessantly between her yawns:

"Oh, how the men bother me!"

One afternoon as she was returning home from a concert, Nana, on the sidewalk in the Rue Montmartre, noticed a woman trotting along in down-at-the-heel boots, dirty petticoats and a hat utterly ruined by the rain. She recognized her suddenly.

"Stop, Charles!" she shouted to the coachman and began calling: "Satin, Satin!"

Passers-by turned their heads; the whole street stared. Satin had drawn near and was still further soiling herself against the carriage wheels.

"Do get in, my dear girl," said Nana tranquilly, disdaining the onlookers.

And with that she picked her up and carried her off, though she was in disgusting contrast to her light blue landau and her dress of pearl-gray silk trimmed with Chantilly, while the street smiled at the coachman's loftily dignified demeanor.

From that day forth Nana had a passion to occupy her thoughts. Satin became her vicious foible. Washed and dressed and duly installed in the house in the Avenue de Villiers, during three days the girl talked of Saint-Lazare and the annoyances the sisters had caused her and how those dirty police people had put her down on the official list. Nana grew indignant and comforted her and vowed she would get her name taken off, even though she herself should have to go and find out the minister of the interior. Meanwhile there was no sort of hurry: nobody would come and search for her at Nana's—that was certain. And thereupon the two women began to pass tender afternoons together, making numberless endearing little speeches and mingling their kisses with laughter. The same little sport, which the arrival of the plainclothes men had interrupted in the Rue de Laval, was beginning again in a jocular sort of spirit. One fine evening, however, it became serious, and Nana, who had been so disgusted at Laure's, now understood what it meant. She was upset and enraged by it, the more so because Satin disappeared on the morning of the fourth day. No one had seen her go out. She had, indeed, slipped away in her new dress, seized by a longing for air, full of sentimental regret for her old street existence.

That day there was such a terrible storm in the house that all the servants hung their heads in sheepish silence. Nana had come near beating Francois for not throwing himself across the door through which Satin escaped. She did her best, however, to control herself, and talked of Satin as a dirty swine. Oh, it would teach her to pick filthy things like that out of the gutter!

When Madame shut herself up in her room in the afternoon Zoe heard her sobbing. In the evening she suddenly asked for her carriage and had herself driven to Laure's. It had occurred to her that she would find Satin at the table d'hote in the Rue des Martyrs. She was not going there for the sake of seeing her again but in order to catch her one in the face! As a matter of fact Satin was dining at a little table with Mme Robert. Seeing Nana, she began to laugh, but the former, though wounded to the quick, did not make a scene. On the contrary, she was very sweet and very compliant. She paid for champagne made five or six tablefuls tipsy and then carried off Satin when Mme Robert was in the closets. Not till they were in the carriage did she make a mordant attack on her, threatening to kill her if she did it again.

After that day the same little business began again continually. On twenty different occasions Nana, tragically furious, as only a jilted woman can be ran off in pursuit of this sluttish creature, whose flights were prompted by the boredom she suffered amid the comforts of her new home. Nana began to talk of boxing Mme Robert's ears; one day she even meditated a duel; there was one woman too many, she said.

In these latter times, whenever she dined at Laure's, she donned her diamonds and occasionally brought with her Louise Violaine, Maria Blond and Tatan Nene, all of them ablaze with finery; and while the sordid feast was progressing in the three saloons and the yellow gaslight flared overhead, these four resplendent ladies would demean themselves with a vengeance, for it was their delight to dazzle the little local courtesans and to carry them off when dinner was over. On days such as these Laure, sleek and tight-laced as ever would kiss everyone with an air of expanded maternity. Yet notwithstanding all these circumstances Satin's blue eyes and pure virginal face remained as calm as heretofore; torn, beaten and pestered by the two women, she would simply remark that it was a funny business, and they would have done far better to make it up at once. It did no good to slap her; she couldn't cut herself in two, however much she wanted to be nice to everybody. It was Nana who finally carried her off in triumph, so assiduously had she loaded Satin with kindnesses and presents. In order to be revenged, however, Mme Robert wrote abominable, anonymous letters to her rival's lovers.

For some time past Count Muffat had appeared suspicious, and one morning, with considerable show of feeling, he laid before Nana an anonymous letter, where in the very first sentences she read that she was accused of deceiving the count with Vandeuvres and the young Hugons.

"It's false! It's false!" she loudly exclaimed in accents of extraordinary candor.

"You swear?" asked Muffat, already willing to be comforted.

"I'll swear by whatever you like—yes, by the head of my child!"

But the letter was long. Soon her connection with Satin was described in the broadest and most ignoble terms. When she had done reading she smiled.

"Now I know who it comes from," she remarked simply.

And as Muffat wanted her denial to the charges therein contained, she resumed quietly enough:

"That's a matter which doesn't concern you, dear old pet. How can it hurt you?"

She did not deny anything. He used some horrified expressions. Thereupon she shrugged her shoulders. Where had he been all this time? Why, it was done everywhere! And she mentioned her friends and swore that fashionable ladies went in for it. In fact, to hear her speak, nothing could be commoner or more natural. But a lie was a lie, and so a moment ago he had seen how angry she grew in the matter of Vandeuvres and the young Hugons! Oh, if that had been true he would have been justified in throttling her! But what was the good of lying to him about a matter of no consequence? And with that she repeated her previous expression:

"Come now, how can it hurt you?"

Then as the scene still continued, she closed it with a rough speech:

"Besides, dear boy, if the thing doesn't suit you it's very simple: the house door's open! There now, you must take me as you find me!"

He hung his head, for the young woman's vows of fidelity made him happy at bottom. She, however, now knew her power over him and ceased to consider his feelings. And from that time forth Satin was openly installed in the house on the same footing as the gentlemen. Vandeuvres had not needed anonymous letters in order to understand how matters stood, and accordingly he joked and tried to pick jealous quarrels with Satin. Philippe and Georges, on their parts, treated her like a jolly good fellow, shaking hands with her and cracking the riskiest jokes imaginable.

Nana had an adventure one evening when this slut of a girl had given her the go-by and she had gone to dine in the Rue des Martyrs without being able to catch her. While she was dining by herself Daguenet had appeared on the scene, for although he had reformed, he still occasionally dropped in under the influence of his old vicious inclinations. He hoped of course that no one would meet him in these black recesses, dedicated to the town's lowest depravity. Accordingly even Nana's presence seemed to embarrass him at the outset. But he was not the man to run away and, coming forward with a smile, he asked if Madame would be so kind as to allow him to dine at her table. Noticing his jocular tone, Nana assumed her magnificently frigid demeanor and icily replied:

"Sit down where you please, sir. We are in a public place."

Thus begun, the conversation proved amusing. But at dessert Nana, bored and burning for a triumph, put her elbows on the table and began in the old familiar way:

"Well, what about your marriage, my lad? Is it getting on all right?"

"Not much," Daguenet averred.

As a matter of fact, just when he was about to venture on his request at the Muffats', he had met with such a cold reception from the count that he had prudently refrained. The business struck him as a failure. Nana fixed her clear eyes on him; she was sitting, leaning her chin on her hand, and there was an ironical curve about her lips.

"Oh yes! I'm a baggage," she resumed slowly. "Oh yes, the future father-in-law will have to be dragged from between my claws! Dear me, dear me, for a fellow with NOUS, you're jolly stupid! What! D'you mean to say you're going to tell your tales to a man who adores me and tells me everything? Now just listen: you shall marry if I wish it, my little man!"

For a minute or two he had felt the truth of this, and now he began scheming out a method of submission. Nevertheless, he still talked jokingly, not wishing the matter to grow serious, and after he had put on his gloves he demanded the hand of Mlle Estelle de Beuville in the strict regulation manner. Nana ended by laughing, as though she had been tickled. Oh, that Mimi! It was impossible to bear him a grudge! Daguenet's great successes with ladies of her class were due to the sweetness of his voice, a voice of such musical purity and pliancy as to have won him among courtesans the sobriquet of "Velvet-Mouth." Every woman would give way to him when he lulled her with his sonorous caresses. He knew this power and rocked Nana to sleep with endless words, telling her all kinds of idiotic anecdotes. When they left the table d'hote she was blushing rosy-red; she trembled as she hung on his arm; he had reconquered her. As it was very fine, she sent her carriage away and walked with him as far as his own place, where she went upstairs with him naturally enough. Two hours later, as she was dressing again, she said:

"So you hold to this marriage of yours, Mimi?"

"Egad," he muttered, "it's the best thing I could possibly do after all! You know I'm stony broke."

She summoned him to button her boots, and after a pause:

"Good heavens! I've no objection. I'll shove you on! She's as dry as a lath, is that little thing, but since it suits your game—oh, I'm agreeable: I'll run the thing through for you."

Then with bosom still uncovered, she began laughing:

"Only what will you give me?"

He had caught her in his arms and was kissing her on the shoulders in a perfect access of gratitude while she quivered with excitement and struggled merrily and threw herself backward in her efforts to be free.

"Oh, I know," she cried, excited by the contest. "Listen to what I want in the way of commission. On your wedding day you shall make me a present of your innocence. Before your wife, d'you understand?"

"That's it! That's it!" he said, laughing even louder than Nana.

The bargain amused them—they thought the whole business very good, indeed.

Now as it happened, there was a dinner at Nana's next day. For the matter of that, it was the customary Thursday dinner, and Muffat, Vandeuvres, the young Hugons and Satin were present. The count arrived early. He stood in need of eighty thousand francs wherewith to free the young woman from two or three debts and to give her a set of sapphires she was dying to possess. As he had already seriously lessened his capital, he was in search of a lender, for he did not dare to sell another property. With the advice of Nana herself he had addressed himself to Labordette, but the latter, deeming it too heavy an undertaking, had mentioned it to the hairdresser Francis, who willingly busied himself in such affairs in order to oblige his lady clients. The count put himself into the hands of these gentlemen but expressed a formal desire not to appear in the matter, and they both undertook to keep in hand the bill for a hundred thousand francs which he was to sign, excusing themselves at the same time for charging a matter of twenty thousand francs interest and loudly denouncing the blackguard usurers to whom, they declared, it had been necessary to have recourse. When Muffat had himself announced, Francis was putting the last touches to Nana's coiffure. Labordette also was sitting familiarly in the dressing room, as became a friend of no consequence. Seeing the count, he discreetly placed a thick bundle of bank notes among the powders and pomades, and the bill was signed on the marble-topped dressing table. Nana was anxious to keep Labordette to dinner, but he declined—he was taking a rich foreigner about Paris. Muffat, however, led him aside and begged him to go to Becker, the jeweler, and bring him back thence the set of sapphires, which he wanted to present the young woman by way of surprise that very evening. Labordette willingly undertook the commission, and half an hour later Julien handed the jewel case mysteriously to the count.

During dinnertime Nana was nervous. The sight of the eighty thousand francs had excited her. To think all that money was to go to tradespeople! It was a disgusting thought. After soup had been served she grew sentimental, and in the splendid dining room, glittering with plate and glass, she talked of the bliss of poverty. The men were in evening dress, Nana in a gown of white embroidered satin, while Satin made a more modest appearance in black silk with a simple gold heart at her throat, which was a present from her kind friend. Julien and Francois waited behind the guests and were assisted in this by Zoe. All three looked most dignified.

"It's certain I had far greater fun when I hadn't a cent!" Nana repeated.

She had placed Muffat on her right hand and Vandeuvres on her left, but she scarcely looked at them, so taken up was she with Satin, who sat in state between Philippe and Georges on the opposite side of the table.

"Eh, duckie?" she kept saying at every turn. "How we did use to laugh in those days when we went to Mother Josse's school in the Rue Polonceau!"

When the roast was being served the two women plunged into a world of reminiscences. They used to have regular chattering fits of this kind when a sudden desire to stir the muddy depths of their childhood would possess them. These fits always occurred when men were present: it was as though they had given way to a burning desire to treat them to the dunghill on which they had grown to woman's estate. The gentlemen paled visibly and looked embarrassed. The young Hugons did their best to laugh, while Vandeuvres nervously toyed with his beard and Muffat redoubled his gravity.

"You remember Victor?" said Nana. "There was a wicked little fellow for you! Why, he used to take the little girls into cellars!"

"I remember him perfectly," replied Satin. "I recollect the big courtyard at your place very well. There was a portress there with a broom!"

"Mother Boche—she's dead."

"And I can still picture your shop. Your mother was a great fatty. One evening when we were playing your father came in drunk. Oh, so drunk!"

At this point Vandeuvres tried to intercept the ladies' reminiscences and to effect a diversion,

"I say, my dear, I should be very glad to have some more truffles. They're simply perfect. Yesterday I had some at the house of the Duc de Corbreuse, which did not come up to them at all."

"The truffles, Julien!" said Nana roughly.

Then returning to the subject:

"By Jove, yes, Dad hadn't any sense! And then what a smash there was! You should have seen it—down, down, down we went, starving away all the time. I can tell you I've had to bear pretty well everything and it's a miracle I didn't kick the bucket over it, like Daddy and Mamma."

This time Muffat, who was playing with his knife in a state of infinite exasperation, made so bold as to intervene.

"What you're telling us isn't very cheerful."

"Eh, what? Not cheerful!" she cried with a withering glance. "I believe you; it isn't cheerful! Somebody had to earn a living for us dear boy. Oh yes, you know, I'm the right sort; I don't mince matters. Mamma was a laundress; Daddy used to get drunk, and he died of it! There! If it doesn't suit you—if you're ashamed of my family—"

They all protested. What was she after now? They had every sort of respect for her family! But she went on:

"If you're ashamed of my family you'll please leave me, because I'm not one of those women who deny their father and mother. You must take me and them together, d'you understand?"

They took her as required; they accepted the dad, the mamma, the past; in fact, whatever she chose. With their eyes fixed on the tablecloth, the four now sat shrinking and insignificant while Nana, in a transport of omnipotence, trampled on them in the old muddy boots worn long since in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or. She was determined not to lay down the cudgels just yet. It was all very fine to bring her fortunes, to build her palaces; she would never leave off regretting the time when she munched apples! Oh, what bosh that stupid thing money was! It was made for the tradespeople! Finally her outburst ended in a sentimentally expressed desire for a simple, openhearted existence, to be passed in an atmosphere of universal benevolence.

When she got to this point she noticed Julien waiting idly by.

"Well, what's the matter? Hand the champagne then!" she said. "Why d'you stand staring at me like a goose?"

During this scene the servants had never once smiled. They apparently heard nothing, and the more their mistress let herself down, the more majestic they became. Julien set to work to pour out the champagne and did so without mishap, but Francois, who was handing round the fruit, was so unfortunate as to tilt the fruit dish too low, and the apples, the pears and the grapes rolled on the table.

"You bloody clumsy lot!" cried Nana.

The footman was mistaken enough to try and explain that the fruit had not been firmly piled up. Zoe had disarranged it by taking out some oranges.

"Then it's Zoe that's the goose!" said Nana.

"Madame—" murmured the lady's maid in an injured tone.

Straightway Madame rose to her feet, and in a sharp voice and with royally authoritative gesture:

"We've had enough of this, haven't we? Leave the room, all of you! We don't want you any longer!"

This summary procedure calmed her down, and she was forthwith all sweetness and amiability. The dessert proved charming, and the gentlemen grew quite merry waiting on themselves. But Satin, having peeled a pear, came and ate it behind her darling, leaning on her shoulder the while and whispering sundry little remarks in her ear, at which they both laughed very loudly. By and by she wanted to share her last piece of pear with Nana and presented it to her between her teeth. Whereupon there was a great nibbling of lips, and the pear was finished amid kisses. At this there was a burst of comic protest from the gentlemen, Philippe shouting to them to take it easy and Vandeuvres asking if one ought to leave the room. Georges, meanwhile, had come and put his arm round Satin's waist and had brought her back to her seat.

"How silly of you!" said Nana. "You're making her blush, the poor, darling duck. Never mind, dear girl, let them chaff. It's our own little private affair."

And turning to Muffat, who was watching them with his serious expression:

"Isn't it, my friend?"

"Yes, certainly," he murmured with a slow nod of approval.

He no longer protested now. And so amid that company of gentlemen with the great names and the old, upright traditions, the two women sat face to face, exchanging tender glances, conquering, reigning, in tranquil defiance of the laws of sex, in open contempt for the male portion of the community. The gentlemen burst into applause.

The company went upstairs to take coffee in the little drawing room, where a couple of lamps cast a soft glow over the rosy hangings and the lacquer and old gold of the knickknacks. At that hour of the evening the light played discreetly over coffers, bronzes and china, lighting up silver or ivory inlaid work, bringing into view the polished contours of a carved stick and gleaming over a panel with glossy silky reflections. The fire, which had been burning since the afternoon, was dying out in glowing embers. It was very warm—the air behind the curtains and hangings was languid with warmth. The room was full of Nana's intimate existence: a pair of gloves, a fallen handkerchief, an open book, lay scattered about, and their owner seemed present in careless attire with that well-known odor of violets and that species of untidiness which became her in her character of good-natured courtesan and had such a charming effect among all those rich surroundings. The very armchairs, which were as wide as beds, and the sofas, which were as deep as alcoves, invited to slumber oblivious of the flight of time and to tender whispers in shadowy corners.

Satin went and lolled back in the depths of a sofa near the fireplace. She had lit a cigarette, but Vandeuvres began amusing himself by pretending to be ferociously jealous. Nay, he even threatened to send her his seconds if she still persisted in keeping Nana from her duty. Philippe and Georges joined him and teased her and badgered her so mercilessly that at last she shouted out:

"Darling! Darling! Do make 'em keep quiet! They're still after me!"

"Now then, let her be," said Nana seriously. "I won't have her tormented; you know that quite well. And you, my pet, why d'you always go mixing yourself up with them when they've got so little sense?"

Satin, blushing all over and putting out her tongue, went into the dressing room, through the widely open door of which you caught a glimpse of pale marbles gleaming in the milky light of a gas flame in a globe of rough glass. After that Nana talked to the four men as charmingly as hostess could. During the day she had read a novel which was at that time making a good deal of noise. It was the history of a courtesan, and Nana was very indignant, declaring the whole thing to be untrue and expressing angry dislike to that kind of monstrous literature which pretends to paint from nature. "Just as though one could describe everything," she said. Just as though a novel ought not to be written so that the reader may while away an hour pleasantly! In the matter of books and of plays Nana had very decided opinions: she wanted tender and noble productions, things that would set her dreaming and would elevate her soul. Then allusion being made in the course of conversation to the troubles agitating Paris, the incendiary articles in the papers, the incipient popular disturbances which followed the calls to arms nightly raised at public meetings, she waxed wroth with the Republicans. What on earth did those dirty people who never washed really want? Were folks not happy? Had not the emperor done everything for the people? A nice filthy lot of people! She knew 'em; she could talk about 'em, and, quite forgetting the respect which at dinner she had just been insisting should be paid to her humble circle in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or, she began blackguarding her own class with all the terror and disgust peculiar to a woman who had risen successfully above it. That very afternoon she had read in the Figaro an account of the proceedings at a public meeting which had verged on the comic. Owing to the slang words that had been used and to the piggish behavior of a drunken man who had got himself chucked, she was laughing at those proceedings still.

"Oh, those drunkards!" she said with a disgusted air. "No, look you here, their republic would be a great misfortune for everybody! Oh, may God preserve us the emperor as long as possible!"

"God will hear your prayer, my dear," Muffat replied gravely. "To be sure, the emperor stands firm."

He liked her to express such excellent views. Both, indeed, understood one another in political matters. Vandeuvres and Philippe Hugon likewise indulged in endless jokes against the "cads," the quarrelsome set who scuttled off the moment they clapped eyes on a bayonet. But Georges that evening remained pale and somber.

"What can be the matter with that baby?" asked Nana, noticing his troubled appearance.

"With me? Nothing—I am listening," he muttered.

But he was really suffering. On rising from table he had heard Philippe joking with the young woman, and now it was Philippe, and not himself, who sat beside her. His heart, he knew not why, swelled to bursting. He could not bear to see them so close together; such vile thoughts oppressed him that shame mingled with his anguish. He who laughed at Satin, who had accepted Steiner and Muffat and all the rest, felt outraged and murderous at the thought that Philippe might someday touch that woman.

"Here, take Bijou," she said to comfort him, and she passed him the little dog which had gone to sleep on her dress.

And with that Georges grew happy again, for with the beast still warm from her lap in his arms, he held, as it were, part of her.

Allusion had been made to a considerable loss which Vandeuvres had last night sustained at the Imperial Club. Muffat, who did not play, expressed great astonishment, but Vandeuvres smilingly alluded to his imminent ruin, about which Paris was already talking. The kind of death you chose did not much matter, he averred; the great thing was to die handsomely. For some time past Nana had noticed that he was nervous and had a sharp downward droop of the mouth and a fitful gleam in the depths of his clear eyes. But he retained his haughty aristocratic manner and the delicate elegance of his impoverished race, and as yet these strange manifestations were only, so to speak, momentary fits of vertigo overcoming a brain already sapped by play and by debauchery. One night as he lay beside her he had frightened her with a dreadful story. He had told her he contemplated shutting himself up in his stable and setting fire to himself and his horses at such time as he should have devoured all his substance. His only hope at that period was a horse, Lusignan by name, which he was training for the Prix de Paris. He was living on this horse, which was the sole stay of his shaken credit, and whenever Nana grew exacting he would put her off till June and to the probability of Lusignan's winning.

"Bah! He may very likely lose," she said merrily, "since he's going to clear them all out at the races."

By way of reply he contented himself by smiling a thin, mysterious smile. Then carelessly:

"By the by, I've taken the liberty of giving your name to my outsider, the filly. Nana, Nana—that sounds well. You're not vexed?"

"Vexed, why?" she said in a state of inward ecstasy.

The conversation continued, and same mention was made of an execution shortly to take place. The young woman said she was burning to go to it when Satin appeared at the dressing-room door and called her in tones of entreaty. She got up at once and left the gentlemen lolling lazily about, while they finished their cigars and discussed the grave question as to how far a murderer subject to chronic alcoholism is responsible for his act. In the dressing room Zoe sat helpless on a chair, crying her heart out, while Satin vainly endeavored to console her.

"What's the matter?" said Nana in surprise.

"Oh, darling, do speak to her!" said Satin. "I've been trying to make her listen to reason for the last twenty minutes. She's crying because you called her a goose."

"Yes, madame, it's very hard—very hard," stuttered Zoe, choked by a fresh fit of sobbing.

This sad sight melted the young woman's heart at once. She spoke kindly, and when the other woman still refused to grow calm she sank down in front of her and took her round the waist with truly cordial familiarity:

"But, you silly, I said 'goose' just as I might have said anything else. How shall I explain? I was in a passion—it was wrong of me; now calm down."

"I who love Madame so," stuttered Zoe; "after all I've done for Madame."

Thereupon Nana kissed the lady's maid and, wishing to show her she wasn't vexed, gave her a dress she had worn three times. Their quarrels always ended up in the giving of presents! Zoe plugged her handkerchief into her eyes. She carried the dress off over her arm and added before leaving that they were very sad in the kitchen and that Julien and Francois had been unable to eat, so entirely had Madame's anger taken away their appetites. Thereupon Madame sent them a louis as a pledge of reconciliation. She suffered too much if people around her were sorrowful.

Nana was returning to the drawing room, happy in the thought that she had patched up a disagreement which was rendering her quietly apprehensive of the morrow, when Satin came and whispered vehemently in her ear. She was full of complaint, threatened to be off if those men still went on teasing her and kept insisting that her darling should turn them all out of doors for that night, at any rate. It would be a lesson to them. And then it would be so nice to be alone, both of them! Nana, with a return of anxiety, declared it to be impossible. Thereupon the other shouted at her like a violent child and tried hard to overrule her.

"I wish it, d'you see? Send 'em away or I'm off!"

And she went back into the drawing room, stretched herself out in the recesses of a divan, which stood in the background near the window, and lay waiting, silent and deathlike, with her great eyes fixed upon Nana.

The gentlemen were deciding against the new criminological theories. Granted that lovely invention of irresponsibility in certain pathological cases, and criminals ceased to exist and sick people alone remained. The young woman, expressing approval with an occasional nod, was busy considering how best to dismiss the count. The others would soon be going, but he would assuredly prove obstinate. In fact, when Philippe got up to withdraw, Georges followed him at once—he seemed only anxious not to leave his brother behind. Vandeuvres lingered some minutes longer, feeling his way, as it were, and waiting to find out if, by any chance, some important business would oblige Muffat to cede him his place. Soon, however, when he saw the count deliberately taking up his quarters for the night, he desisted from his purpose and said good-by, as became a man of tact. But on his way to the door, he noticed Satin staring fixedly at Nana, as usual. Doubtless he understood what this meant, for he seemed amused and came and shook hands with her.

"We're not angry, eh?" he whispered. "Pray pardon me. You're the nicer attraction of the two, on my honor!"

Satin deigned no reply. Nor did she take her eyes off Nana and the count, who were now alone. Muffat, ceasing to be ceremonious, had come to sit beside the young woman. He took her fingers and began kissing them. Whereupon Nana, seeking to change the current of his thoughts, asked him if his daughter Estelle were better. The previous night he had been complaining of the child's melancholy behavior—he could not even spend a day happily at his own house, with his wife always out and his daughter icily silent.

In family matters of this kind Nana was always full of good advice, and when Muffat abandoned all his usual self-control under the influence of mental and physical relaxation and once more launched out into his former plaints, she remembered the promise she had made.

"Suppose you were to marry her?" she said. And with that she ventured to talk of Daguenet. At the mere mention of the name the count was filled with disgust. "Never," he said after what she had told him!

She pretended great surprise and then burst out laughing and put her arm round his neck.

"Oh, the jealous man! To think of it! Just argue it out a little. Why, they slandered me to you—I was furious. At present I should be ever so sorry if—"

But over Muffat's shoulder she met Satin's gaze. And she left him anxiously and in a grave voice continued:

"This marriage must come off, my friend; I don't want to prevent your daughter's happiness. The young man's most charming; you could not possibly find a better sort."

And she launched into extraordinary praise of Daguenet. The count had again taken her hands; he no longer refused now; he would see about it, he said, they would talk the matter over. By and by, when he spoke of going to bed, she sank her voice and excused herself. It was impossible; she was not well. If he loved her at all he would not insist! Nevertheless, he was obstinate; he refused to go away, and she was beginning to give in when she met Satin's eyes once more. Then she grew inflexible. No, the thing was out of the question! The count, deeply moved and with a look of suffering, had risen and was going in quest of his hat. But in the doorway he remembered the set of sapphires; he could feel the case in his pocket. He had been wanting to hide it at the bottom of the bed so that when she entered it before him she should feel it against her legs. Since dinnertime he had been meditating this little surprise like a schoolboy, and now, in trouble and anguish of heart at being thus dismissed, he gave her the case without further ceremony.

"What is it?" she queried. "Sapphires? Dear me! Oh yes, it's that set. How sweet you are! But I say, my darling, d'you believe it's the same one? In the shopwindow it made a much greater show."

That was all the thanks he got, and she let him go away. He noticed Satin stretched out silent and expectant, and with that he gazed at both women and without further insistence submitted to his fate and went downstairs. The hall door had not yet closed when Satin caught Nana round the waist and danced and sang. Then she ran to the window.

"Oh, just look at the figure he cuts down in the street!" The two women leaned upon the wrought-iron window rail in the shadow of the curtains. One o'clock struck. The Avenue de Villiers was deserted, and its double file of gas lamps stretched away into the darkness of the damp March night through which great gusts of wind kept sweeping, laden with rain. There were vague stretches of land on either side of the road which looked like gulfs of shadow, while scaffoldings round mansions in process of construction loomed upward under the dark sky. They laughed uncontrollably as they watched Muffat's rounded back and glistening shadow disappearing along the wet sidewalk into the glacial, desolate plains of new Paris. But Nana silenced Satin.

"Take care; there are the police!"

Thereupon they smothered their laughter and gazed in secret fear at two dark figures walking with measured tread on the opposite side of the avenue. Amid all her luxurious surroundings, amid all the royal splendors of the woman whom all must obey, Nana still stood in horror of the police and did not like to hear them mentioned any oftener than death. She felt distinctly unwell when a policeman looked up at her house. One never knew what such people might do! They might easily take them for loose women if they heard them laughing at that hour of the night. Satin, with a little shudder, had squeezed herself up against Nana. Nevertheless, the pair stayed where they were and were soon interested in the approach of a lantern, the light of which danced over the puddles in the road. It was an old ragpicker woman who was busy raking in the gutters. Satin recognized her.

"Dear me," she exclaimed, "it's Queen Pomare with her wickerwork shawl!"

And while a gust of wind lashed the fine rain in their faces she told her beloved the story of Queen Pomare. Oh, she had been a splendid girl once upon a time: all Paris had talked of her beauty. And such devilish go and such cheek! Why, she led the men about like dogs, and great people stood blubbering on her stairs! Now she was in the habit of getting tipsy, and the women round about would make her drink absinthe for the sake of a laugh, after which the street boys would throw stones at her and chase her. In fact, it was a regular smashup; the queen had tumbled into the mud! Nana listened, feeling cold all over.

"You shall see," added Satin.

She whistled a man's whistle, and the ragpicker, who was then below the window, lifted her head and showed herself by the yellow flare of her lantern. Framed among rags, a perfect bundle of them, a face looked out from under a tattered kerchief—a blue, seamed face with a toothless, cavernous mouth and fiery bruises where the eyes should be. And Nana, seeing the frightful old woman, the wanton drowned in drink, had a sudden fit of recollection and saw far back amid the shadows of consciousness the vision of Chamont—Irma d'Anglars, the old harlot crowned with years and honors, ascending the steps in front of her chateau amid abjectly reverential villagers. Then as Satin whistled again, making game of the old hag, who could not see her:

"Do leave off; there are the police!" she murmured in changed tones. "In with us, quick, my pet!"

The measured steps were returning, and they shut the window. Turning round again, shivering, and with the damp of night on her hair, Nana was momentarily astounded at sight of her drawing room. It seemed as though she had forgotten it and were entering an unknown chamber. So warm, so full of perfume, was the air she encountered that she experienced a sense of delighted surprise. The heaped-up wealth of the place, the Old World furniture, the fabrics of silk and gold, the ivory, the bronzes, were slumbering in the rosy light of the lamps, while from the whole of the silent house a rich feeling of great luxury ascended, the luxury of the solemn reception rooms, of the comfortable, ample dining room, of the vast retired staircase, with their soft carpets and seats. Her individuality, with its longing for domination and enjoyment and its desire to possess everything that she might destroy everything, was suddenly increased. Never before had she felt so profoundly the puissance of her sex. She gazed slowly round and remarked with an expression of grave philosophy:

"Ah well, all the same, one's jolly well right to profit by things when one's young!"

But now Satin was rolling on the bearskins in the bedroom and calling her.

"Oh, do come! Do come!"

Nana undressed in the dressing room, and in order to be quicker about it she took her thick fell of blonde hair in both hands and began shaking it above the silver wash hand basin, while a downward hail of long hairpins rang a little chime on the shining metal.

CHAPTER XI

One Sunday the race for the Grand Prix de Paris was being run in the Bois de Boulogne beneath skies rendered sultry by the first heats of June. The sun that morning had risen amid a mist of dun-colored dust, but toward eleven o'clock, just when the carriages were reaching the Longchamps course, a southerly wind had swept away the clouds; long streamers of gray vapor were disappearing across the sky, and gaps showing an intense blue beyond were spreading from one end of the horizon to the other. In the bright bursts of sunlight which alternated with the clouds the whole scene shone again, from the field which was gradually filling with a crowd of carriages, horsemen and pedestrians, to the still-vacant course, where the judge's box stood, together with the posts and the masts for signaling numbers, and thence on to the five symmetrical stands of brickwork and timber, rising gallery upon gallery in the middle of the weighing enclosure opposite. Beyond these, bathed in the light of noon, lay the vast level plain, bordered with little trees and shut in to the westward by the wooded heights of Saint-Cloud and the Suresnes, which, in their turn, were dominated by the severe outlines of Mont-Valerien.

Nana, as excited as if the Grand Prix were going to make her fortune, wanted to take up a position by the railing next the winning post. She had arrived very early—she was, in fact, one of the first to come—in a landau adorned with silver and drawn, a la Daumont, by four splendid white horses. This landau was a present from Count Muffat. When she had made her appearance at the entrance to the field with two postilions jogging blithely on the near horses and two footmen perching motionless behind the carriage, the people had rushed to look as though a queen were passing. She sported the blue and white colors of the Vandeuvres stable, and her dress was remarkable. It consisted of a little blue silk bodice and tunic, which fitted closely to the body and bulged out enormously behind her waist, thereby bringing her lower limbs into bold relief in such a manner as to be extremely noticeable in that epoch of voluminous skirts. Then there was a white satin dress with white satin sleeves and a sash worn crosswise over the shoulders, the whole ornamented with silver guipure which shone in the sun. In addition to this, in order to be still more like a jockey, she had stuck a blue toque with a white feather jauntily upon her chignon, the fair tresses from which flowed down beyond her shoulders and resembled an enormous russet pigtail.

Twelve struck. The public would have to wait more than three hours for the Grand Prix to be run. When the landau had drawn up beside the barriers Nana settled herself comfortably down as though she were in her own house. A whim had prompted her to bring Bijou and Louiset with her, and the dog crouched among her skirts, shivering with cold despite the heat of the day, while amid a bedizenment of ribbons and laces the child's poor little face looked waxen and dumb and white in the open air. Meanwhile the young woman, without troubling about the people near her, talked at the top of her voice with Georges and Philippe Hugon, who were seated opposite on the front seat among such a mountain of bouquets of white roses and blue myosotis that they were buried up to their shoulders.

"Well then," she was saying, "as he bored me to death, I showed him the door. And now it's two days that he's been sulking."

She was talking of Muffat, but she took care not to confess to the young men the real reason for this first quarrel, which was that one evening he had found a man's hat in her bedroom. She had indeed brought home a passer-by out of sheer ennui—a silly infatuation.

"You have no idea how funny he is," she continued, growing merry over the particulars she was giving. "He's a regular bigot at bottom, so he says his prayers every evening. Yes, he does. He's under the impression I notice nothing because I go to bed first so as not to be in his way, but I watch him out of the corner of my eye. Oh, he jaws away, and then he crosses himself when he turns round to step over me and get to the inside of the bed."

"Jove, it's sly," muttered Philippe. "That's what happens before, but afterward, what then?"

She laughed merrily.

"Yes, just so, before and after! When I'm going to sleep I hear him jawing away again. But the biggest bore of all is that we can't argue about anything now without his growing 'pi.' I've always been religious. Yes, chaff as much as you like; that won't prevent me believing what I do believe! Only he's too much of a nuisance: he blubbers; he talks about remorse. The day before yesterday, for instance, he had a regular fit of it after our usual row, and I wasn't the least bit reassured when all was over."

But she broke off, crying out:

"Just look at the Mignons arriving. Dear me, they've brought the children! Oh, how those little chaps are dressed up!"

The Mignons were in a landau of severe hue; there was something substantially luxurious about their turnout, suggesting rich retired tradespeople. Rose was in a gray silk gown trimmed with red knots and with puffs; she was smiling happily at the joyous behavior of Henri and Charles, who sat on the front seat, looking awkward in their ill-fitting collegians' tunics. But when the landau had drawn up by the rails and she perceived Nana sitting in triumph among her bouquets, with her four horses and her liveries, she pursed up her lips, sat bolt upright and turned her head away. Mignon, on the other hand, looking the picture of freshness and gaiety, waved her a salutation. He made it a matter of principle to keep out of feminine disagreements.

"By the by," Nana resumed, "d'you know a little old man who's very clean and neat and has bad teeth—a Monsieur Venot? He came to see me this morning."

"Monsieur Venot?" said Georges in great astonishment. "It's impossible! Why, the man's a Jesuit!"

"Precisely; I spotted that. Oh, you have no idea what our conversation was like! It was just funny! He spoke to me about the count, about his divided house, and begged me to restore a family its happiness. He was very polite and very smiling for the matter of that. Then I answered to the effect that I wanted nothing better, and I undertook to reconcile the count and his wife. You know it's not humbug. I should be delighted to see them all happy again, the poor things! Besides, it would be a relief to me for there are days—yes, there are days—when he bores me to death."

The weariness of the last months escaped her in this heartfelt outburst. Moreover, the count appeared to be in big money difficulties; he was anxious and it seemed likely that the bill which Labordette had put his name to would not be met.

"Dear me, the countess is down yonder," said Georges, letting his gaze wander over the stands.

"Where, where?" cried Nana. "What eyes that baby's got! Hold my sunshade, Philippe."

But with a quick forward dart Georges had outstripped his brother. It enchanted him to be holding the blue silk sunshade with its silver fringe. Nana was scanning the scene through a huge pair of field glasses.

"Ah yes! I see her," she said at length. "In the right-hand stand, near a pillar, eh? She's in mauve, and her daughter in white by her side. Dear me, there's Daguenet going to bow to them."

Thereupon Philippe talked of Daguenet's approaching marriage with that lath of an Estelle. It was a settled matter—the banns were being published. At first the countess had opposed it, but the count, they said, had insisted. Nana smiled.

"I know, I know," she murmured. "So much the better for Paul. He's a nice boy—he deserves it."

And leaning toward Louiset:

"You're enjoying yourself, eh? What a grave face!"

The child never smiled. With a very old expression he was gazing at all those crowds, as though the sight of them filled him with melancholy reflections. Bijou, chased from the skirts of the young woman who was moving about a great deal, had come to nestle, shivering, against the little fellow.

Meanwhile the field was filling up. Carriages, a compact, interminable file of them, were continually arriving through the Porte de la Cascade. There were big omnibuses such as the Pauline, which had started from the Boulevard des Italiens, freighted with its fifty passengers, and was now going to draw up to the right of the stands. Then there were dogcarts, victorias, landaus, all superbly well turned out, mingled with lamentable cabs which jolted along behind sorry old hacks, and four-in-hands, sending along their four horses, and mail coaches, where the masters sat on the seats above and left the servants to take care of the hampers of champagne inside, and "spiders," the immense wheels of which were a flash of glittering steel, and light tandems, which looked as delicately formed as the works of a clock and slipped along amid a peal of little bells. Every few seconds an equestrian rode by, and a swarm of people on foot rushed in a scared way among the carriages. On the green the far-off rolling sound which issued from the avenues in the Bois died out suddenly in dull rustlings, and now nothing was audible save the hubbub of the ever-increasing crowds and cries and calls and the crackings of whips in the open. When the sun, amid bursts of wind, reappeared at the edge of a cloud, a long ray of golden light ran across the field, lit up the harness and the varnished coach panels and touched the ladies' dresses with fire, while amid the dusty radiance the coachmen, high up on their boxes, flamed beside their great whips.

Labordette was getting out of an open carriage where Gaga, Clarisse and Blanche de Sivry had kept a place for him. As he was hurrying to cross the course and enter the weighing enclosure Nana got Georges to call him. Then when he came up:

"What's the betting on me?" she asked laughingly.

She referred to the filly Nana, the Nana who had let herself be shamefully beaten in the race for the Prix de Diane and had not even been placed in April and May last when she ran for the Prix des Cars and the Grande Poule des Produits, both of which had been gained by Lusignan, the other horse in the Vandeuvres stable. Lusignan had all at once become prime favorite, and since yesterday he had been currently taken at two to one.

"Always fifty to one against," replied Labordette.

"The deuce! I'm not worth much," rejoined Nana, amused by the jest. "I don't back myself then; no, by jingo! I don't put a single louis on myself."

Labordette went off again in a great hurry, but she recalled him. She wanted some advice. Since he kept in touch with the world of trainers and jockeys he had special information about various stables. His prognostications had come true a score of times already, and people called him the "King of Tipsters."

"Let's see, what horses ought I to choose?" said the young woman. "What's the betting on the Englishman?"

"Spirit? Three to one against. Valerio II, the same. As to the others, they're laying twenty-five to one against Cosinus, forty to one against Hazard, thirty to one against Bourn, thirty-five to one against Pichenette, ten to one against Frangipane."

"No, I don't bet on the Englishman, I don't. I'm a patriot. Perhaps Valerio II would do, eh? The Duc de Corbreuse was beaming a little while ago. Well, no, after all! Fifty louis on Lusignan; what do you say to that?"

Labordette looked at her with a singular expression. She leaned forward and asked him questions in a low voice, for she was aware that Vandeuvres commissioned him to arrange matters with the bookmakers so as to be able to bet the more easily. Supposing him to have got to know something, he might quite well tell it her. But without entering into explanations Labordette persuaded her to trust to his sagacity. He would put on her fifty louis for her as he might think best, and she would not repent of his arrangement.

"All the horses you like!" she cried gaily, letting him take his departure, "but no Nana; she's a jade!"

There was a burst of uproarious laughter in the carriage. The young men thought her sally very amusing, while Louiset in his ignorance lifted his pale eyes to his mother's face, for her loud exclamations surprised him. However, there was no escape for Labordette as yet. Rose Mignon had made a sign to him and was now giving him her commands while he wrote figures in a notebook. Then Clarisse and Gaga called him back in order to change their bets, for they had heard things said in the crowd, and now they didn't want to have anything more to do with Valerio II and were choosing Lusignan. He wrote down their wishes with an impassible expression and at length managed to escape. He could be seen disappearing between two of the stands on the other side of the course.

Carriages were still arriving. They were by this time drawn up five rows deep, and a dense mass of them spread along the barriers, checkered by the light coats of white horses. Beyond them other carriages stood about in comparative isolation, looking as though they had stuck fast in the grass. Wheels and harness were here, there and everywhere, according as the conveyances to which they belonged were side by side, at an angle, across and across or head to head. Over such spaces of turf as still remained unoccupied cavaliers kept trotting, and black groups of pedestrians moved continually. The scene resembled the field where a fair is being held, and above it all, amid the confused motley of the crowd, the drinking booths raised their gray canvas roofs which gleamed white in the sunshine. But a veritable tumult, a mob, an eddy of hats, surged round the several bookmakers, who stood in open carriages gesticulating like itinerant dentists while their odds were pasted up on tall boards beside them.

"All the same, it's stupid not to know on what horse one's betting," Nana was remarking. "I really must risk some louis in person."

She had stood up to select a bookmaker with a decent expression of face but forgot what she wanted on perceiving a perfect crowd of her acquaintance. Besides the Mignons, besides Gaga, Clarisse and Blanche, there were present, to the right and left, behind and in the middle of the mass of carriages now hemming in her landau, the following ladies: Tatan Nene and Maria Blond in a victoria, Caroline Hequet with her mother and two gentlemen in an open carriage, Louise Violaine quite alone, driving a little basket chaise decked with orange and green ribbons, the colors of the Mechain stables, and finally, Lea de Horn on the lofty seat of a mail coach, where a band of young men were making a great din. Farther off, in a HUIT RESSORTS of aristocratic appearance, Lucy Stewart, in a very simple black silk dress, sat, looking distinguished beside a tall young man in the uniform of a naval cadet. But what most astounded Nana was the arrival of Simonne in a tandem which Steiner was driving, while a footman sat motionless, with folded arms, behind them. She looked dazzling in white satin striped with yellow and was covered with diamonds from waist to hat. The banker, on his part, was handling a tremendous whip and sending along his two horses, which were harnessed tandemwise, the leader being a little warm-colored chestnut with a mouselike trot, the shaft horse a big brown bay, a stepper, with a fine action.

"Deuce take it!" said Nana. "So that thief Steiner has cleared the Bourse again, has he? I say, isn't Simonne a swell! It's too much of a good thing; he'll get into the clutches of the law!"

Nevertheless, she exchanged greetings at a distance. Indeed, she kept waving her hand and smiling, turning round and forgetting no one in her desire to be seen by everybody. At the same time she continued chatting.

"It's her son Lucy's got in tow! He's charming in his uniform. That's why she's looking so grand, of course! You know she's afraid of him and that she passes herself off as an actress. Poor young man, I pity him all the same! He seems quite unsuspicious."

"Bah," muttered Philippe, laughing, "she'll be able to find him an heiress in the country when she likes."

Nana was silent, for she had just noticed the Tricon amid the thick of the carriages. Having arrived in a cab, whence she could not see anything, the Tricon had quietly mounted the coach box. And there, straightening up her tall figure, with her noble face enshrined in its long curls, she dominated the crowd as though enthroned amid her feminine subjects. All the latter smiled discreetly at her while she, in her superiority, pretended not to know them. She wasn't there for business purposes: she was watching the races for the love of the thing, as became a frantic gambler with a passion for horseflesh.

"Dear me, there's that idiot La Faloise!" said Georges suddenly.

It was a surprise to them all. Nana did not recognize her La Faloise, for since he had come into his inheritance he had grown extraordinarily up to date. He wore a low collar and was clad in a cloth of delicate hue which fitted close to his meager shoulders. His hair was in little bandeaux, and he affected a weary kind of swagger, a soft tone of voice and slang words and phrases which he did not take the trouble to finish.

"But he's quite the thing!" declared Nana in perfect enchantment.

Gaga and Clarisse had called La Faloise and were throwing themselves at him in their efforts to regain his allegiance, but he left them immediately, rolling off in a chaffing, disdainful manner. Nana dazzled him. He rushed up to her and stood on the carriage step, and when she twitted him about Gaga he murmured:

"Oh dear, no! We've seen the last of the old lot! Mustn't play her off on me any more. And then, you know, it's you now, Juliet mine!"

He had put his hand to his heart. Nana laughed a good deal at this exceedingly sudden out-of-door declaration. She continued:

"I say, that's not what I'm after. You're making me forget that I want to lay wagers. Georges, you see that bookmaker down there, a great red-faced man with curly hair? He's got a dirty blackguard expression which I like. You're to go and choose—Oh, I say, what can one choose?"

"I'm not a patriotic soul—oh dear, no!" La Faloise blurted out. "I'm all for the Englishman. It will be ripping if the Englishman gains! The French may go to Jericho!"

Nana was scandalized. Presently the merits of the several horses began to be discussed, and La Faloise, wishing to be thought very much in the swim, spoke of them all as sorry jades. Frangipane, Baron Verdier's horse, was by The Truth out of Lenore. A big bay horse he was, who would certainly have stood a chance if they hadn't let him get foundered during training. As to Valerio II from the Corbreuse stable, he wasn't ready yet; he'd had the colic in April. Oh yes, they were keeping that dark, but he was sure of it, on his honor! In the end he advised Nana to choose Hazard, the most defective of the lot, a horse nobody would have anything to do with. Hazard, by jingo—such superb lines and such an action! That horse was going to astonish the people.

"No," said Nana, "I'm going to put ten louis on Lusignan and five on Boum."

La Faloise burst forth at once:

"But, my dear girl, Boum's all rot! Don't choose him! Gasc himself is chucking up backing his own horse. And your Lusignan—never! Why, it's all humbug! By Lamb and Princess—just think! By Lamb and Princess—no, by Jove! All too short in the legs!"

He was choking. Philippe pointed out that, notwithstanding this, Lusignan had won the Prix des Cars and the Grande Poule des Produits. But the other ran on again. What did that prove? Nothing at all. On the contrary, one ought to distrust him. And besides, Gresham rode Lusignan; well then, let them jolly well dry up! Gresham had bad luck; he would never get to the post.

And from one end of the field to the other the discussion raging in Nana's landau seemed to spread and increase. Voices were raised in a scream; the passion for gambling filled the air, set faces glowing and arms waving excitedly, while the bookmakers, perched on their conveyances, shouted odds and jotted down amounts right furiously. Yet these were only the small fry of the betting world; the big bets were made in the weighing enclosure. Here, then, raged the keen contest of people with light purses who risked their five-franc pieces and displayed infinite covetousness for the sake of a possible gain of a few louis. In a word, the battle would be between Spirit and Lusignan. Englishmen, plainly recognizable as such, were strolling about among the various groups. They were quite at home; their faces were fiery with excitement; they were afready triumphant. Bramah, a horse belonging to Lord Reading, had gained the Grand Prix the previous year, and this had been a defeat over which hearts were still bleeding. This year it would be terrible if France were beaten anew. Accordingly all the ladies were wild with national pride. The Vandeuvres stable became the rampart of their honor, and Lusignan was pushed and defended and applauded exceedingly. Gaga, Blanche, Caroline and the rest betted on Lusignan. Lucy Stewart abstained from this on account of her son, but it was bruited abroad that Rose Mignon had commissioned Labordette to risk two hundred louis for her. The Tricon, as she sat alone next her driver, waited till the last moment. Very cool, indeed, amid all these disputes, very far above the ever-increasing uproar in which horses' names kept recurring and lively Parisian phrases mingled with guttural English exclamations, she sat listening and taking notes majestically.

"And Nana?" said Georges. "Does no one want her?"

Indeed, nobody was asking for the filly; she was not even being mentioned. The outsider of the Vandeuvres's stud was swamped by Lusignan's popularity. But La Faloise flung his arms up, crying:

"I've an inspiration. I'll bet a louis on Nana."

"Bravo! I bet a couple," said Georges.

"And I three," added Philippe.

And they mounted up and up, bidding against one another good-humoredly and naming prices as though they had been haggling over Nana at an auction. La Faloise said he would cover her with gold. Besides, everybody was to be made to back her; they would go and pick up backers. But as the three young men were darting off to propagandize, Nana shouted after them:

"You know I don't want to have anything to do with her; I don't for the world! Georges, ten louis on Lusignan and five on Valerio II."

Meanwhile they had started fairly off, and she watched them gaily as they slipped between wheels, ducked under horses' heads and scoured the whole field. The moment they recognized anyone in a carriage they rushed up and urged Nana's claims. And there were great bursts of laughter among the crowd when sometimes they turned back, triumphantly signaling amounts with their fingers, while the young woman stood and waved her sunshade. Nevertheless, they made poor enough work of it. Some men let themselves be persuaded; Steiner, for instance, ventured three louis, for the sight of Nana stirred him. But the women refused point-blank. "Thanks," they said; "to lose for a certainty!" Besides, they were in no hurry to work for the benefit of a dirty wench who was overwhelming them all with her four white horses, her postilions and her outrageous assumption of side. Gaga and Clarisse looked exceedingly prim and asked La Faloise whether he was jolly well making fun of them. When Georges boldly presented himself before the Mignons' carriage Rose turned her head away in the most marked manner and did not answer him. One must be a pretty foul sort to let one's name be given to a horse! Mignon, on the contrary, followed the young man's movements with a look of amusement and declared that the women always brought luck.

"Well?" queried Nana when the young men returned after a prolonged visit to the bookmakers.

"The odds are forty to one against you," said La Faloise.

"What's that? Forty to one!" she cried, astounded. "They were fifty to one against me. What's happened?"

Labordette had just then reappeared. The course was being cleared, and the pealing of a bell announced the first race. Amid the expectant murmur of the bystanders she questioned him about this sudden rise in her value. But he replied evasively; doubtless a demand for her had arisen. She had to content herself with this explanation. Moreover, Labordette announced with a preoccupied expression that Vandeuvres was coming if he could get away.

The race was ending unnoticed; people were all waiting for the Grand Prix to be run—when a storm burst over the Hippodrome. For some minutes past the sun had disappeared, and a wan twilight had darkened over the multitude. Then the wind rose, and there ensued a sudden deluge. Huge drops, perfect sheets of water, fell. There was a momentary confusion, and people shouted and joked and swore, while those on foot scampered madly off to find refuge under the canvas of the drinking booths. In the carriages the women did their best to shelter themselves, grasping their sunshades with both hands, while the bewildered footmen ran to the hoods. But the shower was already nearly over, and the sun began shining brilliantly through escaping clouds of fine rain. A blue cleft opened in the stormy mass, which was blown off over the Bois, and the skies seemed to smile again and to set the women laughing in a reassured manner, while amid the snorting of horses and the disarray and agitation of the drenched multitude that was shaking itself dry a broad flush of golden light lit up the field, still dripping and glittering with crystal drops.

"Oh, that poor, dear Louiset!" said Nana. "Are you very drenched, my darling?"

The little thing silently allowed his hands to be wiped. The young woman had taken out her handkerchief. Then she dabbed it over Bijou, who was trembling more violently than ever. It would not matter in the least; there were a few drops on the white satin of her dress, but she didn't care a pin for them. The bouquets, refreshed by the rain, glowed like snow, and she smelled one ecstatically, drenching her lips in it as though it were wet with dew.

Meanwhile the burst of rain had suddenly filled the stands. Nana looked at them through her field glasses. At that distance you could only distinguish a compact, confused mass of people, heaped up, as it were, on the ascending ranges of steps, a dark background relieved by light dots which were human faces. The sunlight filtered in through openings near the roof at each end of the stand and detached and illumined portions of the seated multitude, where the ladies' dresses seemed to lose their distinguishing colors. But Nana was especially amused by the ladies whom the shower had driven from the rows of chairs ranged on the sand at the base of the stands. As courtesans were absolutely forbidden to enter the enclosure, she began making exceedingly bitter remarks about all the fashionable women therein assembled. She thought them fearfully dressed up, and such guys!

There was a rumor that the empress was entering the little central stand, a pavilion built like a chalet, with a wide balcony furnished with red armchairs.

"Why, there he is!" said Georges. "I didn't think he was on duty this week."

The stiff and solemn form of the Count Muffat had appeared behind the empress. Thereupon the young men jested and were sorry that Satin wasn't there to go and dig him in the ribs. But Nana's field glass focused the head of the Prince of Scots in the imperial stand.

"Gracious, it's Charles!" she cried.

She thought him stouter than formerly. In eighteen months he had broadened, and with that she entered into particulars. Oh yes, he was a big, solidly built fellow!

All round her in the ladies' carriages they were whispering that the count had given her up. It was quite a long story. Since he had been making himself noticeable, the Tuileries had grown scandalized at the chamberlain's conduct. Whereupon, in order to retain his position, he had recently broken it off with Nana. La Faloise bluntly reported this account of matters to the young woman and, addressing her as his Juliet, again offered himself. But she laughed merrily and remarked:

"It's idiotic! You won't know him; I've only to say, 'Come here,' for him to chuck up everything."

For some seconds past she had been examining the Countess Sabine and Estelle. Daguenet was still at their side. Fauchery had just arrived and was disturbing the people round him in his desire to make his bow to them. He, too, stayed smilingly beside them. After that Nana pointed with disdainful action at the stands and continued:

"Then, you know, those people don't fetch me any longer now! I know 'em too well. You should see 'em behind scenes. No more honor! It's all up with honor! Filth belowstairs, filth abovestairs, filth everywhere. That's why I won't be bothered about 'em!"

And with a comprehensive gesture she took in everybody, from the grooms leading the horses on to the course to the sovereign lady busy chatting with with Charles, a prince and a dirty fellow to boot.

"Bravo, Nana! Awfully smart, Nana!" cried La Faloise enthusiastically.

The tolling of a bell was lost in the wind; the races continued. The Prix d'Ispahan had just been run for and Berlingot, a horse belonging to the Mechain stable, had won. Nana recalled Labordette in order to obtain news of the hundred louis, but he burst out laughing and refused to let her know the horses he had chosen for her, so as not to disturb the luck, as he phrased it. Her money was well placed; she would see that all in good time. And when she confessed her bets to him and told him how she had put ten louis on Lusignan and five on Valerio II, he shrugged his shoulders, as who should say that women did stupid things whatever happened. His action surprised her; she was quite at sea.

Just then the field grew more animated than before. Open-air lunches were arranged in the interval before the Grand Prix. There was much eating and more drinking in all directions, on the grass, on the high seats of the four-in-hands and mail coaches, in the victorias, the broughams, the landaus. There was a universal spread of cold viands and a fine disorderly display of champagne baskets which footmen kept handing down out of the coach boots. Corks came out with feeble pops, which the wind drowned. There was an interchange of jests, and the sound of breaking glasses imparted a note of discord to the high-strung gaiety of the scene. Gaga and Clarisse, together with Blanche, were making a serious repast, for they were eating sandwiches on the carriage rug with which they had been covering their knees. Louise Violaine had got down from her basket carriage and had joined Caroline Hequet. On the turf at their feet some gentlemen had instituted a drinking bar, whither Tatan, Maria, Simonne and the rest came to refresh themselves, while high in air and close at hand bottles were being emptied on Lea de Horn's mail coach, and, with infinite bravado and gesticulation, a whole band were making themselves tipsy in the sunshine, above the heads of the crowd. Soon, however, there was an especially large crowd by Nana's landau. She had risen to her feet and had set herself to pour out glasses of champagne for the men who came to pay her their respects. Francois, one of the footmen, was passing up the bottles while La Faloise, trying hard to imitate a coster's accents, kept pattering away:

"'Ere y're, given away, given away! There's some for everybody!"

"Do be still, dear boy," Nana ended by saying. "We look like a set of tumblers."

She thought him very droll and was greatly entertained. At one moment she conceived the idea of sending Georges with a glass of champagne to Rose Mignon, who was affecting temperance. Henri and Charles were bored to distraction; they would have been glad of some champagne, the poor little fellows. But Georges drank the glassful, for he feared an argument. Then Nana remembered Louiset, who was sitting forgotten behind her. Maybe he was thirsty, and she forced him to take a drop or two of wine, which made him cough dreadfully.

"'Ere y'are, 'ere y'are, gemmen!" La Faloise reiterated. "It don't cost two sous; it don't cost one. We give it away."

But Nana broke in with an exclamation:

"Gracious, there's Bordenave down there! Call him. Oh, run, please, please do!"

It was indeed Bordenave. He was strolling about with his hands behind his back, wearing a hat that looked rusty in the sunlight and a greasy frock coat that was glossy at the seams. It was Bordenave shattered by bankruptcy, yet furious despite all reverses, a Bordenave who flaunted his misery among all the fine folks with the hardihood becoming a man ever ready to take Dame Fortune by storm.

"The deuce, how smart we are!" he said when Nana extended her hand to him like the good-natured wench she was.

Presently, after emptying a glass of champagne, he gave vent to the following profoundly regretful phrase:

"Ah, if only I were a woman! But, by God, that's nothing! Would you like to go on the stage again? I've a notion: I'll hire the Gaite, and we'll gobble up Paris between us. You certainly owe it me, eh?"

And he lingered, grumbling, beside her, though glad to see her again; for, he said, that confounded Nana was balm to his feelings. Yes, it was balm to them merely to exist in her presence! She was his daughter; she was blood of his blood!

The circle increased, for now La Faloise was filling glasses, and Georges and Philippe were picking up friends. A stealthy impulse was gradually bringing in the whole field. Nana would fling everyone a laughing smile or an amusing phrase. The groups of tipplers were drawing near, and all the champagne scattered over the place was moving in her direction. Soon there was only one noisy crowd, and that was round her landau, where she queened it among outstretched glasses, her yellow hair floating on the breeze and her snowy face bathed in the sunshine. Then by way of a finishing touch and to make the other women, who were mad at her triumph, simply perish of envy, she lifted a brimming glass on high and assumed her old pose as Venus Victrix.

But somebody touched her shoulder, and she was surprised, on turning round, to see Mignon on the seat. She vanished from view an instant and sat herself down beside him, for he had come to communicate a matter of importance. Mignon had everywhere declared that it was ridiculous of his wife to bear Nana a grudge; he thought her attitude stupid and useless.

"Look here, my dear," he whispered. "Be careful: don't madden Rose too much. You understand, I think it best to warn you. Yes, she's got a weapon in store, and as she's never forgiven you the Petite Duchesse business—"

"A weapon," said Nana; "what's that blooming well got to do with me?"

"Just listen: it's a letter she must have found in Fauchery's pocket, a letter written to that screw Fauchery by the Countess Muffat. And, by Jove, it's clear the whole story's in it. Well then, Rose wants to send the letter to the count so as to be revenged on him and on you."

"What the deuce has that got to do with me?" Nana repeated. "It's a funny business. So the whole story about Fauchery's in it! Very well, so much the better; the woman has been exasperating me! We shall have a good laugh!"

"No, I don't wish it," Mignon briskly rejoined. "There'll be a pretty scandal! Besides, we've got nothing to gain."

He paused, fearing lest he should say too much, while she loudly averred that she was most certainly not going to get a chaste woman into trouble.

But when he still insisted on his refusal she looked steadily at him. Doubtless he was afraid of seeing Fauchery again introduced into his family in case he broke with the countess. While avenging her own wrongs, Rose was anxious for that to happen, since she still felt a kindness toward the journalist. And Nana waxed meditative and thought of M. Venot's call, and a plan began to take shape in her brain, while Mignon was doing his best to talk her over.

"Let's suppose that Rose sends the letter, eh? There's food for scandal: you're mixed up in the business, and people say you're the cause of it all. Then to begin with, the count separates from his wife."

"Why should he?" she said. "On the contrary—"

She broke off, in her turn. There was no need for her to think aloud. So in order to be rid of Mignon she looked as though she entered into his view of the case, and when he advised her to give Rose some proof of her submission—to pay her a short visit on the racecourse, for instance, where everybody would see her—she replied that she would see about it, that she would think the matter over.

A commotion caused her to stand up again. On the course the horses were coming in amid a sudden blast of wind. The prize given by the city of Paris had just been run for, and Cornemuse had gained it. Now the Grand Prix was about to be run, and the fever of the crowd increased, and they were tortured by anxiety and stamped and swayed as though they wanted to make the minutes fly faster. At this ultimate moment the betting world was surprised and startled by the continued shortening of the odds against Nana, the outsider of the Vandeuvres stables. Gentlemen kept returning every few moments with a new quotation: the betting was thirty to one against Nana; it was twenty-five to one against Nana, then twenty to one, then fifteen to one. No one could understand it. A filly beaten on all the racecourses! A filly which that same morning no single sportsman would take at fifty to one against! What did this sudden madness betoken? Some laughed at it and spoke of the pretty doing awaiting the duffers who were being taken in by the joke. Others looked serious and uneasy and sniffed out something ugly under it all. Perhaps there was a "deal" in the offing. Allusion was made to well-known stories about the robberies which are winked at on racecourses, but on this occasion the great name of Vandeuvres put a stop to all such accusations, and the skeptics in the end prevailed when they prophesied that Nana would come in last of all.

"Who's riding Nana?" queried La Faloise.

Just then the real Nana reappeared, whereat the gentlemen lent his question an indecent meaning and burst into an uproarious fit of laughter. Nana bowed.

"Price is up," she replied.

And with that the discussion began again. Price was an English celebrity. Why had Vandeuvres got this jockey to come over, seeing that Gresham ordinarily rode Nana? Besides, they were astonished to see him confiding Lusignan to this man Gresham, who, according to La Faloise, never got a place. But all these remarks were swallowed up in jokes, contradictions and an extraordinarily noisy confusion of opinions. In order to kill time the company once more set themselves to drain bottles of champagne. Presently a whisper ran round, and the different groups opened outward. It was Vandeuvres. Nana affected vexation.

"Dear me, you're a nice fellow to come at this time of day! Why, I'm burning to see the enclosure."

"Well, come along then," he said; "there's still time. You'll take a stroll round with me. I just happen to have a permit for a lady about me."

And he led her off on his arm while she enjoyed the jealous glances with which Lucy, Caroline and the others followed her. The young Hugons and La Faloise remained in the landau behind her retreating figure and continued to do the honors of her champagne. She shouted to them that she would return immediately.

But Vandeuvres caught sight of Labordette and called him, and there was an interchange of brief sentences.

"You've scraped everything up?"

"Yes."

"To what amount?"

"Fifteen hundred louis—pretty well all over the place."

As Nana was visibly listening, and that with much curiosity, they held their tongues. Vandeuvres was very nervous, and he had those same clear eyes, shot with little flames, which so frightened her the night he spoke of burning himself and his horses together. As they crossed over the course she spoke low and familiarly.

"I say, do explain this to me. Why are the odds on your filly changing?"

He trembled, and this sentence escaped him:

"Ah, they're talking, are they? What a set those betting men are! When I've got the favorite they all throw themselves upon him, and there's no chance for me. After that, when an outsider's asked for, they give tongue and yell as though they were being skinned."

"You ought to tell me what's going to happen—I've made my bets," she rejoined. "Has Nana a chance?"

A sudden, unreasonable burst of anger overpowered him.

"Won't you deuced well let me be, eh? Every horse has a chance. The odds are shortening because, by Jove, people have taken the horse. Who, I don't know. I should prefer leaving you if you must needs badger me with your idiotic questions."

Such a tone was not germane either to his temperament or his habits, and Nana was rather surprised than wounded. Besides, he was ashamed of himself directly afterward, and when she begged him in a dry voice to behave politely he apologized. For some time past he had suffered from such sudden changes of temper. No one in the Paris of pleasure or of society was ignorant of the fact that he was playing his last trump card today. If his horses did not win, if, moreover, they lost him the considerable sums wagered upon them, it would mean utter disaster and collapse for him, and the bulwark of his credit and the lofty appearance which, though undermined, he still kept up, would come ruining noisily down. Moreover, no one was ignorant of the fact that Nana was the devouring siren who had finished him off, who had been the last to attack his crumbling fortunes and to sweep up what remained of them. Stories were told of wild whims and fancies, of gold scattered to the four winds, of a visit to Baden-Baden, where she had not left him enough to pay the hotel bill, of a handful of diamonds cast on the fire during an evening of drunkenness in order to see whether they would burn like coal. Little by little her great limbs and her coarse, plebeian way of laughing had gained complete mastery over this elegant, degenerate son of an ancient race. At that time he was risking his all, for he had been so utterly overpowered by his taste for ordure and stupidity as to have even lost the vigor of his skepticism. A week before Nana had made him promise her a chateau on the Norman coast between Havre and Trouville, and now he was staking the very foundations of his honor on the fulfillment of his word. Only she was getting on his nerves, and he could have beaten her, so stupid did he feel her to be.

The man at the gate, not daring to stop the woman hanging on the count's arm, had allowed them to enter the enclosure. Nana, greatly puffed up at the thought that at last she was setting foot on the forbidden ground, put on her best behavior and walked slowly by the ladies seated at the foot of the stands. On ten rows of chairs the toilets were densely massed, and in the blithe open air their bright colors mingled harmoniously. Chairs were scattered about, and as people met one another friendly circles were formed, just as though the company had been sitting under the trees in a public garden. Children had been allowed to go free and were running from group to group, while over head the stands rose tier above crowded tier and the light-colored dresses therein faded into the delicate shadows of the timberwork. Nana stared at all these ladies. She stared steadily and markedly at the Countess Sabine. After which, as she was passing in front of the imperial stand, the sight of Muffat, looming in all his official stiffness by the side of the empress, made her very merry.

"Oh, how silly he looks!" she said at the top of her voice to Vandeuvres. She was anxious to pay everything a visit. This small parklike region, with its green lawns and groups of trees, rather charmed her than otherwise. A vendor of ices had set up a large buffet near the entrance gates, and beneath a rustic thatched roof a dense throng of people were shouting and gesticulating. This was the ring. Close by were some empty stalls, and Nana was disappointed at discovering only a gendarme's horse there. Then there was the paddock, a small course some hundred meters in circumference, where a stable help was walking about Valerio II in his horsecloths. And, oh, what a lot of men on the graveled sidewalks, all of them with their tickets forming an orange-colored patch in their bottonholes! And what a continual parade of people in the open galleries of the grandstands! The scene interested her for a moment or two, but truly, it was not worth while getting the spleen because they didn't admit you inside here.

Daguenet and Fauchery passed by and bowed to her. She made them a sign, and they had to come up. Thereupon she made hay of the weighing-in enclosure. But she broke off abruptly:

"Dear me, there's the Marquis de Chouard! How old he's growing! That old man's killing himself! Is he still as mad about it as ever?"

Thereupon Daguenet described the old man's last brilliant stroke. The story dated from the day before yesterday, and no one knew it as yet. After dangling about for months he had bought her daughter Amelie from Gaga for thirty thousand francs, they said.

"Good gracious! That's a nice business!" cried Nana in disgust. "Go in for the regular thing, please! But now that I come to think of it, that must be Lili down there on the grass with a lady in a brougham. I recognized the face. The old boy will have brought her out."

Vandeuvres was not listening; he was impatient and longed to get rid of her. But Fauchery having remarked at parting that if she had not seen the bookmakers she had seen nothing, the count was obliged to take her to them in spite of his obvious repugnance. And she was perfectly happy at once; that truly was a curious sight, she said!

Amid lawns bordered by young horse-chestnut trees there was a round open enclosure, where, forming a vast circle under the shadow of the tender green leaves, a dense line of bookmakers was waiting for betting men, as though they had been hucksters at a fair. In order to overtop and command the surrounding crowd they had taken up positions on wooden benches, and they were advertising their prices on the trees beside them. They had an ever-vigilant glance, and they booked wagers in answer to a single sign, a mere wink, so rapidly that certain curious onlookers watched them openmouthed, without being able to understand it all. Confusion reigned; prices were shouted, and any unexpected change in a quotation was received with something like tumult. Occasionally scouts entered the place at a run and redoubled the uproar as they stopped at the entrance to the rotunda and, at the tops of their voices, announced departures and arrivals. In this place, where the gambling fever was pulsing in the sunshine, such announcements were sure to raise a prolonged muttering sound.

"They ARE funny!" murmured Nana, greatly entertained.

"Their features look as if they had been put on the wrong way. Just you see that big fellow there; I shouldn't care to meet him all alone in the middle of a wood."

But Vandeuvres pointed her out a bookmaker, once a shopman in a fancy repository, who had made three million francs in two years. He was slight of build, delicate and fair, and people all round him treated him with great respect. They smiled when they addressed him, while others took up positions close by in order to catch a glimpse of him.

They were at length leaving the ring when Vandeuvres nodded slightly to another bookmaker, who thereupon ventured to call him. It was one of his former coachmen, an enormous fellow with the shoulders of an ox and a high color. Now that he was trying his fortunes at race meetings on the strength of some mysteriously obtained capital, the count was doing his utmost to push him, confiding to him his secret bets and treating him on all occasions as a servant to whom one shows one's true character. Yet despite this protection, the man had in rapid succession lost very heavy sums, and today he, too, was playing his last card. There was blood in his eyes; he looked fit to drop with apoplexy.

"Well, Marechal," queried the count in the lowest of voices, "to what amount have you laid odds?"

"To five thousand louis, Monsieur le Comte," replied the bookmaker, likewise lowering his voice. "A pretty job, eh? I'll confess to you that I've increased the odds; I've made it three to one."

Vandeuvres looked very much put out.

"No, no, I don't want you to do that. Put it at two to one again directly. I shan't tell you any more, Marechal."

"Oh, how can it hurt, Monsieur le Comte, at this time o' day?" rejoined the other with the humble smile befitting an accomplice. "I had to attract the people so as to lay your two thousand louis."

At this Vandeuvres silenced him. But as he was going off Marechal remembered something and was sorry he had not questioned him about the shortening of the odds on the filly. It would be a nice business for him if the filly stood a chance, seeing that he had just laid fifty to one about her in two hundreds.

Nana, though she did not understand a word of what the count was whispering, dared not, however, ask for new explanations. He seemed more nervous than before and abruptly handed her over to Labordette, whom they came upon in front of the weighing-in room.

"You'll take her back," he said. "I've got something on hand. Au revoir!"

And he entered the room, which was narrow and low-pitched and half filled with a great pair of scales. It was like a waiting room in a suburban station, and Nana was again hugely disillusioned, for she had been picturing to herself something on a very vast scale, a monumental machine, in fact, for weighing horses. Dear me, they only weighed the jockeys! Then it wasn't worth while making such a fuss with their weighing! In the scale a jockey with an idiotic expression was waiting, harness on knee, till a stout man in a frock coat should have done verifying his weight. At the door a stable help was holding a horse, Cosinus, round which a silent and deeply interested throng was clustering.

The course was about to be cleared. Labordette hurried Nana but retraced his steps in order to show her a little man talking with Vandeuvres at some distance from the rest.

"Dear me, there's Price!" he said.

"Ah yes, the man who's mounting me," she murmured laughingly.

And she declared him to be exquisitely ugly. All jockeys struck her as looking idiotic, doubtless, she said, because they were prevented from growing bigger. This particular jockey was a man of forty, and with his long, thin, deeply furrowed, hard, dead countenance, he looked like an old shriveled-up child. His body was knotty and so reduced in size that his blue jacket with its white sleeves looked as if it had been thrown over a lay figure.

"No," she resumed as she walked away, "he would never make me very happy, you know."

A mob of people were still crowding the course, the turf of which had been wet and trampled on till it had grown black. In front of the two telegraphs, which hung very high up on their cast-iron pillars, the crowd were jostling together with upturned faces, uproariously greeting the numbers of the different horses as an electric wire in connection with the weighing room made them appear. Gentlemen were pointing at programs: Pichenette had been scratched by his owner, and this caused some noise. However, Nana did not do more than cross over the course on Labordette's arm. The bell hanging on the flagstaff was ringing persistently to warn people to leave the course.

"Ah, my little dears," she said as she got up into her landau again, "their enclosure's all humbug!"

She was welcomed with acclamation; people around her clapped their hands.

"Bravo, Nana! Nana's ours again!"

What idiots they were, to be sure! Did they think she was the sort to cut old friends? She had come back just at the auspicious moment. Now then, 'tenshun! The race was beginning! And the champagne was accordingly forgotten, and everyone left off drinking.

But Nana was astonished to find Gaga in her carriage, sitting with Bijou and Louiset on her knees. Gaga had indeed decided on this course of action in order to be near La Faloise, but she told Nana that she had been anxious to kiss Baby. She adored children.

"By the by, what about Lili?" asked Nana. "That's certainly she over there in that old fellow's brougham. They've just told me something very nice!"

Gaga had adopted a lachrymose expression.

"My dear, it's made me ill," she said dolorously. "Yesterday I had to keep my bed, I cried so, and today I didn't think I should be able to come. You know what my opinions were, don't you? I didn't desire that kind of thing at all. I had her educated in a convent with a view to a good marriage. And then to think of the strict advice she had and the constant watching! Well, my dear, it was she who wished it. We had such a scene—tears—disagreeable speeches! It even got to such a point that I caught her a box on the ear. She was too much bored by existence, she said; she wanted to get out of it. By and by, when she began to say, ''Tisn't you, after all, who've got the right to prevent me,' I said to her: 'you're a miserable wretch; you're bringing dishonor upon us. Begone!' And it was done. I consented to arrange about it. But my last hope's blooming well blasted, and, oh, I used to dream about such nice things!"

The noise of a quarrel caused them to rise. It was Georges in the act of defending Vandeuvres against certain vague rumors which were circulating among the various groups.

"Why should you say that he's laying off his own horse?" the young man was exclaiming. "Yesterday in the Salon des Courses he took the odds on Lusignan for a thousand louis."

"Yes, I was there," said Philippe in affirmation of this. "And he didn't put a single louis on Nana. If the betting's ten to one against Nana he's got nothing to win there. It's absurd to imagine people are so calculating. Where would his interest come in?"

Labordette was listening with a quiet expression. Shrugging his shoulders, he said:

"Oh, leave them alone; they must have their say. The count has again laid at least as much as five hundred louis on Lusignan, and if he's wanted Nana to run to a hundred louis it's because an owner ought always to look as if he believes in his horses."

"Oh, bosh! What the deuce does that matter to us?" shouted La Faloise with a wave of his arms. "Spirit's going to win! Down with France—bravo, England!"

A long shiver ran through the crowd, while a fresh peal from the bell announced the arrival of the horses upon the racecourse. At this Nana got up and stood on one of the seats of her carriage so as to obtain a better view, and in so doing she trampled the bouquets of roses and myosotis underfoot. With a sweeping glance she took in the wide, vast horizon. At this last feverish moment the course was empty and closed by gray barriers, between the posts of which stood a line of policemen. The strip of grass which lay muddy in front of her grew brighter as it stretched away and turned into a tender green carpet in the distance. In the middle landscape, as she lowered her eyes, she saw the field swarming with vast numbers of people, some on tiptoe, others perched on carriages, and all heaving and jostling in sudden passionate excitement.

Horses were neighing; tent canvases flapped, while equestrians urged their hacks forward amid a crowd of pedestrians rushing to get places along the barriers. When Nana turned in the direction of the stands on the other side the faces seemed diminished, and the dense masses of heads were only a confused and motley array, filling gangways, steps and terraces and looming in deep, dark, serried lines against the sky. And beyond these again she over looked the plain surrounding the course. Behind the ivy-clad mill to the right, meadows, dotted over with great patches of umbrageous wood, stretched away into the distance, while opposite to her, as far as the Seine flowing at the foot of a hill, the avenues of the park intersected one another, filled at that moment with long, motionless files of waiting carriages; and in the direction of Boulogne, on the left, the landscape widened anew and opened out toward the blue distances of Meudon through an avenue of paulownias, whose rosy, leafless tops were one stain of brilliant lake color. People were still arriving, and a long procession of human ants kept coming along the narrow ribbon of road which crossed the distance, while very far away, on the Paris side, the nonpaying public, herding like sheep among the wood, loomed in a moving line of little dark spots under the trees on the skirts of the Bois.

Suddenly a cheering influence warmed the hundred thousand souls who covered this part of the plain like insects swarming madly under the vast expanse of heaven. The sun, which had been hidden for about a quarter of an hour, made his appearance again and shone out amid a perfect sea of light. And everything flamed afresh: the women's sunshades turned into countless golden targets above the heads of the crowd. The sun was applauded, saluted with bursts of laughter. And people stretched their arms out as though to brush apart the clouds.

Meanwhile a solitary police officer advanced down the middle of the deserted racecourse, while higher up, on the left, a man appeared with a red flag in his hand.

"It's the starter, the Baron de Mauriac," said Labordette in reply to a question from Nana. All round the young woman exclamations were bursting from the men who were pressing to her very carriage step. They kept up a disconnected conversation, jerking out phrases under the immediate influence of passing impressions. Indeed, Philippe and Georges, Bordenave and La Faloise, could not be quiet.

"Don't shove! Let me see! Ah, the judge is getting into his box. D'you say it's Monsieur de Souvigny? You must have good eyesight—eh?—to be able to tell what half a head is out of a fakement like that! Do hold your tongue—the banner's going up. Here they are—'tenshun! Cosinus is the first!"

A red and yellow banner was flapping in mid-air at the top of a mast. The horses came on the course one by one; they were led by stableboys, and the jockeys were sitting idle-handed in the saddles, the sunlight making them look like bright dabs of color. After Cosinus appeared Hazard and Boum. Presently a murmur of approval greeted Spirit, a magnificent big brown bay, the harsh citron color and black of whose jockey were cheerlessly Britannic. Valerio II scored a success as he came in; he was small and very lively, and his colors were soft green bordered with pink. The two Vandeuvres horses were slow to make their appearance, but at last, in Frangipane's rear, the blue and white showed themselves. But Lusignan, a very dark bay of irreproachable shape, was almost forgotten amid the astonishment caused by Nana. People had not seen her looking like this before, for now the sudden sunlight was dyeing the chestnut filly the brilliant color of a girl's red-gold hair. She was shining in the light like a new gold coin; her chest was deep; her head and neck tapered lightly from the delicate, high-strung line of her long back.

"Gracious, she's got my hair!" cried Nana in an ecstasy. "You bet you know I'm proud of it!"

The men clambered up on the landau, and Bordenave narrowly escaped putting his foot on Louiset, whom his mother had forgotten. He took him up with an outburst of paternal grumbling and hoisted him on his shoulder, muttering at the same time:

"The poor little brat, he must be in it too! Wait a bit, I'll show you Mamma. Eh? Look at Mummy out there."

And as Bijou was scratching his legs, he took charge of him, too, while Nana, rejoicing in the brute that bore her name, glanced round at the other women to see how they took it. They were all raging madly. Just then on the summit of her cab the Tricon, who had not moved till that moment, began waving her hand and giving her bookmaker her orders above the heads of the crowd. Her instinct had at last prompted her; she was backing Nana.

La Faloise meanwhile was making an insufferable noise. He was getting wild over Frangipane.

"I've an inspiration," he kept shouting. "Just look at Frangipane. What an action, eh? I back Frangipane at eight to one. Who'll take me?"

"Do keep quiet now," said Labordette at last. "You'll be sorry for it if you do."

"Frangipane's a screw," Philippe declared. "He's been utterly blown upon already. You'll see the canter."

The horses had gone up to the right, and they now started for the preliminary canter, passing in loose order before the stands. Thereupon there was a passionate fresh burst of talk, and people all spoke at once.

"Lusignan's too long in the back, but he's very fit. Not a cent, I tell you, on Valerio II; he's nervous—gallops with his head up—it's a bad sign. Jove! Burne's riding Spirit. I tell you, he's got no shoulders. A well-made shoulder—that's the whole secret. No, decidedly, Spirit's too quiet. Now listen, Nana, I saw her after the Grande Poule des Produits, and she was dripping and draggled, and her sides were trembling like one o'clock. I lay twenty louis she isn't placed! Oh, shut up! He's boring us with his Frangipane. There's no time to make a bet now; there, they're off!"

Almost in tears, La Faloise was struggling to find a bookmaker. He had to be reasoned with. Everyone craned forward, but the first go-off was bad, the starter, who looked in the distance like a slim dash of blackness, not having lowered his flag. The horses came back to their places after galloping a moment or two. There were two more false starts. At length the starter got the horses together and sent them away with such address as to elicit shouts of applause.

"Splendid! No, it was mere chance! Never mind—it's done it!"

The outcries were smothered by the anxiety which tortured every breast. The betting stopped now, and the game was being played on the vast course itself. Silence reigned at the outset, as though everyone were holding his breath. White faces and trembling forms were stretched forward in all directions. At first Hazard and Cosinus made the running at the head of the rest; Valerio II followed close by, and the field came on in a confused mass behind. When they passed in front of the stands, thundering over the ground in their course like a sudden stormwind, the mass was already some fourteen lengths in extent. Frangipane was last, and Nana was slightly behind Lusignan and Spirit.

"Egad!" muttered Labordette, "how the Englishman is pulling it off out there!"

The whole carriageload again burst out with phrases and exclamations. Everyone rose on tiptoe and followed the bright splashes of color which were the jockeys as they rushed through the sunlight.

At the rise Valerio II took the lead, while Cosinus and Hazard lost ground, and Lusignan and Spirit were running neck and neck with Nana still behind them.

"By jingo, the Englishman's gained! It's palpable!" said Bordenave. "Lusignan's in difficulties, and Valerio II can't stay."

"Well, it will be a pretty biz if the Englishman wins!" cried Philippe in an access of patriotic grief.

A feeling of anguish was beginning to choke all that crowded multitude. Another defeat! And with that a strange ardent prayer, which was almost religious, went up for Lusignan, while people heaped abuse on Spirit and his dismal mute of a jockey. Among the crowd scattered over the grass the wind of excitement put up whole groups of people and set their boot soles flashing in air as they ran. Horsemen crossed the green at a furious gallop. And Nana, who was slowly revolving on her own axis, saw beneath her a surging waste of beasts and men, a sea of heads swayed and stirred all round the course by the whirlwind of the race, which clove the horizon with the bright lightning flash of the jockeys. She had been following their movement from behind while the cruppers sped away and the legs seemed to grow longer as they raced and then diminished till they looked slender as strands of hair. Now the horses were running at the end of the course, and she caught a side view of them looking minute and delicate of outline against the green distances of the Bois. Then suddenly they vanished behind a great clump of trees growing in the middle of the Hippodrome.

"Don't talk about it!" cried Georges, who was still full of hope. "It isn't over yet. The Englishman's touched."

But La Faloise was again seized with contempt for his country and grew positively outrageous in his applause of Spirit. Bravo! That was right! France needed it! Spirit first and Frangipane second—that would be a nasty one for his native land! He exasperated Labordette, who threatened seriously to throw him off the carriage.

"Let's see how many minutes they'll be about it," said Bordenave peaceably, for though holding up Louiset, he had taken out his watch.

One after the other the horses reappeared from behind the clump of trees. There was stupefaction; a long murmur arose among the crowd. Valerio II was still leading, but Spirit was gaining on him, and behind him Lusignan had slackened while another horse was taking his place. People could not make this out all at once; they were confused about the colors. Then there was a burst of exclamations.

"But it's Nana! Nana? Get along! I tell you Lusignan hasn't budged. Dear me, yes, it's Nana. You can certainly recognize her by her golden color. D'you see her now? She's blazing away. Bravo, Nana! What a ripper she is! Bah, it doesn't matter a bit: she's making the running for Lusignan!"

For some seconds this was everybody's opinion. But little by little the filly kept gaining and gaining, spurting hard all the while. Thereupon a vast wave of feeling passed over the crowd, and the tail of horses in the rear ceased to interest. A supreme struggle was beginning between Spirit, Nana, Lusignan and Valerio II. They were pointed out; people estimated what ground they had gained or lost in disconnected, gasping phrases. And Nana, who had mounted up on the coach box, as though some power had lifted her thither, stood white and trembling and so deeply moved as not to be able to speak. At her side Labordette smiled as of old.

"The Englishman's in trouble, eh?" said Philippe joyously. "He's going badly."

"In any case, it's all up with Lusignan," shouted La Faloise. "Valerio II is coming forward. Look, there they are all four together."

The same phrase was in every mouth.

"What a rush, my dears! By God, what a rush!"

The squad of horses was now passing in front of them like a flash of lightning. Their approach was perceptible—the breath of it was as a distant muttering which increased at every second. The whole crowd had thrown themselves impetuously against the barriers, and a deep clamor issued from innumerable chests before the advance of the horses and drew nearer and nearer like the sound of a foaming tide. It was the last fierce outburst of colossal partisanship; a hundred thousand spectators were possessed by a single passion, burning with the same gambler's lust, as they gazed after the beasts, whose galloping feet were sweeping millions with them. The crowd pushed and crushed—fists were clenched; people gaped, openmouthed; every man was fighting for himself; every man with voice and gesture was madly speeding the horse of his choice. And the cry of all this multitude, a wild beast's cry despite the garb of civilization, grew ever more distinct:

"Here they come! Here they come! Here they come!"

But Nana was still gaining ground, and now Valerio II was distanced, and she was heading the race, with Spirit two or three necks behind. The rolling thunder of voices had increased. They were coming in; a storm of oaths greeted them from the landau.

"Gee up, Lusignan, you great coward! The Englishman's stunning! Do it again, old boy; do it again! Oh, that Valerio! It's sickening! Oh, the carcass! My ten louis damned well lost! Nana's the only one! Bravo, Nana! Bravo!"

And without being aware of it Nana, upon her seat, had begun jerking her hips and waist as though she were racing herself. She kept striking her side—she fancied it was a help to the filly. With each stroke she sighed with fatigue and said in low, anguished tones:

"Go it, go it!"

Then a splendid sight was witnessed. Price, rising in his stirrups and brandishing his whip, flogged Nana with an arm of iron. The old shriveled-up child with his long, hard, dead face seemed to breath flame. And in a fit of furious audacity and triumphant will he put his heart into the filly, held her up, lifted her forward, drenched in foam, with eyes of blood. The whole rush of horses passed with a roar of thunder: it took away people's breaths; it swept the air with it while the judge sat frigidly waiting, his eye adjusted to its task. Then there was an immense re-echoing burst of acclamation. With a supreme effort Price had just flung Nana past the post, thus beating Spirit by a head.

There was an uproar as of a rising tide. "Nana! Nana! Nana!" The cry rolled up and swelled with the violence of a tempest, till little by little it filled the distance, the depths of the Bois as far as Mont Valerien, the meadows of Longchamps and the Plaine de Boulogne. In all parts of the field the wildest enthusiasm declared itself. "Vive Nana! Vive la France! Down with England!" The women waved their sunshades; men leaped and spun round, vociferating as they did so, while others with shouts of nervous laughter threw their hats in the air. And from the other side of the course the enclosure made answer; the people on the stands were stirred, though nothing was distinctly visible save a tremulous motion of the air, as though an invisible flame were burning in a brazier above the living mass of gesticulating arms and little wildly moving faces, where the eyes and gaping mouths looked like black dots. The noise did not cease but swelled up and recommenced in the recesses of faraway avenues and among the people encamped under the trees, till it spread on and on and attained its climax in the imperial stand, where the empress herself had applauded. "Nana! Nana! Nana!" The cry rose heavenward in the glorious sunlight, whose golden rain beat fiercely on the dizzy heads of the multitude.

Then Nana, looming large on the seat of her landau, fancied that it was she whom they were applauding. For a moment or two she had stood devoid of motion, stupefied by her triumph, gazing at the course as it was invaded by so dense a flood of people that the turf became invisible beneath the sea of black hats. By and by, when this crowd had become somewhat less disorderly and a lane had been formed as far as the exit and Nana was again applauded as she went off with Price hanging lifelessly and vacantly over her neck, she smacked her thigh energetically, lost all self-possession, triumphed in crude phrases:

"Oh, by God, it's me; it's me. Oh, by God, what luck!"

And, scarce knowing how to give expression to her overwhelming joy, she hugged and kissed Louiset, whom she now discovered high in the air on Bordenave's shoulder.

"Three minutes and fourteen seconds," said the latter as he put his watch back in his pocket.

Nana kept hearing her name; the whole plain was echoing it back to her. Her people were applauding her while she towered above them in the sunlight, in the splendor of her starry hair and white-and-sky-blue dress. Labordette, as he made off, had just announced to her a gain of two thousand louis, for he had put her fifty on Nana at forty to one. But the money stirred her less than this unforeseen victory, the fame of which made her queen of Paris. All the other ladies were losers. With a raging movement Rose Mignon had snapped her sunshade, and Caroline Hequet and Clarisse and Simonne—nay, Lucy Stewart herself, despite the presence of her son—were swearing low in their exasperation at that great wench's luck, while the Tricon, who had made the sign of the cross at both start and finish, straightened up her tall form above them, went into an ecstasy over her intuition and damned Nana admiringly as became an experienced matron.

Meanwhile round the landau the crush of men increased. The band of Nana's immediate followers had made a fierce uproar, and now Georges, choking with emotion, continued shouting all by himself in breaking tones. As the champagne had given out, Philippe, taking the footmen with him, had run to the wine bars. Nana's court was growing and growing, and her present triumph caused many loiterers to join her. Indeed, that movement which had made her carriage a center of attraction to the whole field was now ending in an apotheosis, and Queen Venus was enthroned amid suddenly maddened subjects. Bordenave, behind her, was muttering oaths, for he yearned to her as a father. Steiner himself had been reconquered—he had deserted Simonne and had hoisted himself upon one of Nana's carriage steps. When the champagne had arrived, when she lifted her brimming glass, such applause burst forth, and "Nana! Nana! Nana!" was so loudly repeated that the crowd looked round in astonishment for the filly, nor could any tell whether it was the horse or the woman that filled all hearts.

While this was going on Mignon came hastening up in defiance of Rose's terrible frown. That confounded girl simply maddened him, and he wanted to kiss her. Then after imprinting a paternal salute on both her cheeks:

"What bothers me," he said, "is that now Rose is certainly going to send the letter. She's raging, too, fearfully."

"So much the better! It'll do my business for me!" Nana let slip.

But noting his utter astonishment, she hastily continued:

"No, no, what am I saying? Indeed, I don't rightly know what I'm saying now! I'm drunk."

And drunk, indeed, drunk with joy, drunk with sunshine, she still raised her glass on high and applauded herself.

"To Nana! To Nana!" she cried amid a redoubled uproar of laughter and bravoes, which little by little overspread the whole Hippodrome.

The races were ending, and the Prix Vaublanc was run for. Carriages began driving off one by one. Meanwhile, amid much disputing, the name of Vandeuvres was again mentioned. It was quite evident now: for two years past Vandeuvres had been preparing his final stroke and had accordingly told Gresham to hold Nana in, while he had only brought Lusignan forward in order to make play for the filly. The losers were vexed; the winners shrugged their shoulders. After all, wasn't the thing permissible? An owner was free to run his stud in his own way. Many others had done as he had! In fact, the majority thought Vandeuvres had displayed great skill in raking in all he could get about Nana through the agency of friends, a course of action which explained the sudden shortening of the odds. People spoke of his having laid two thousand louis on the horse, which, supposing the odds to be thirty to one against, gave him twelve hundred thousand francs, an amount so vast as to inspire respect and to excuse everything.

But other rumors of a very serious nature were being whispered about: they issued in the first instance from the enclosure, and the men who returned thence were full of exact particulars. Voices were raised; an atrocious scandal began to be openly canvassed. That poor fellow Vandeuvres was done for; he had spoiled his splendid hit with a piece of flat stupidity, an idiotic robbery, for he had commissioned Marechal, a shady bookmaker, to lay two thousand louis on his account against Lusignan, in order thereby to get back his thousand and odd openly wagered louis. It was a miserable business, and it proved to be the last rift necessary to the utter breakup of his fortune. The bookmaker being thus warned that the favorite would not win, had realized some sixty thousand francs over the horse. Only Labordette, for lack of exact and detailed instructions, had just then gone to him to put two hundred louis on Nana, which the bookmaker, in his ignorance of the stroke actually intended, was still quoting at fifty to one against. Cleared of one hundred thousand francs over the filly and a loser to the tune of forty thousand, Marechal, who felt the world crumbling under his feet, had suddenly divined the situation when he saw the count and Labordette talking together in front of the enclosure just after the race was over. Furious, as became an ex-coachman of the count's, and brutally frank as only a cheated man can be, he had just made a frightful scene in public, had told the whole story in atrocious terms and had thrown everyone into angry excitement. It was further stated that the stewards were about to meet.

Nana, whom Philippe and Georges were whisperingly putting in possession of the facts, gave vent to a series of reflections and yet ceased not to laugh and drink. After all, it was quite likely; she remembered such things, and then that Marechal had a dirty, hangdog look. Nevertheless, she was still rather doubtful when Labordette appeared. He was very white.

"Well?" she asked in a low voice.

"Bloody well smashed up!" he replied simply.

And he shrugged his shoulders. That Vandeuvres was a mere child! She made a bored little gesture.

That evening at the Bal Mabille Nana obtained a colossal success. When toward ten o'clock she made her appearance, the uproar was afready formidable. That classic night of madness had brought together all that was young and pleasure loving, and now this smart world was wallowing in the coarseness and imbecility of the servants' hall. There was a fierce crush under the festoons of gas lamps, and men in evening coats and women in outrageous low-necked old toilets, which they did not mind soiling, were howling and surging to and fro under the maddening influence of a vast drunken fit. At a distance of thirty paces the brass instruments of the orchestra were inaudible. Nobody was dancing. Stupid witticisms, repeated no one knew why, were going the round of the various groups. People were straining after wit without succeeding in being funny. Seven women, imprisoned in the cloakroom, were crying to be set free. A shallot had been found, put up to auction and knocked down at two louis. Just then Nana arrived, still wearing her blue-and-white racecourse costume, and amid a thunder of applause the shallot was presented to her. People caught hold of her in her own despite, and three gentlemen bore her triumphantly into the garden, across ruined grassplots and ravaged masses of greenery. As the bandstand presented an obstacle to her advance, it was taken by storm, and chairs and music stands were smashed. A paternal police organized the disorder.

It was only on Tuesday that Nana recovered from the excitements of victory. That morning she was chatting with Mme Lerat, the old lady having come in to bring her news of Louiset, whom the open air had upset. A long story, which was occupying the attention of all Paris, interested her beyond measure. Vandeuvres, after being warned off all racecourses and posted at the Cercle Imperial on the very evening after the disaster, had set fire to his stable on the morrow and had burned himself and his horses to death.

"He certainly told me he was going to," the young woman kept saying. "That man was a regular maniac! Oh, how they did frighten me when they told me about it yesterday evening! You see, he might easily have murdered me some fine night. And besides, oughtn't he to have given me a hint about his horse? I should at any rate have made my fortune! He said to Labordette that if I knew about the matter I would immediately inform my hairdresser and a whole lot of other men. How polite, eh? Oh dear, no, I certainly can't grieve much for him."

After some reflection she had grown very angry. Just then Labordette came in; he had seen about her bets and was now the bearer of some forty thousand francs. This only added to her bad temper, for she ought to have gained a million. Labordette, who during the whole of this episode had been pretending entire innocence, abandoned Vandeuvres in decisive terms. Those old families, he opined, were worn out and apt to make a stupid ending.

"Oh dear no!" said Nana. "It isn't stupid to burn oneself in one's stable as he did. For my part, I think he made a dashing finish; but, oh, you know, I'm not defending that story about him and Marechal. It's too silly. Just to think that Blanche has had the cheek to want to lay the blame of it on me! I said to her: 'Did I tell him to steal?' Don't you think one can ask a man for money without urging him to commit crime? If he had said to me, 'I've got nothing left,' I should have said to him, 'All right, let's part.' And the matter wouldn't have gone further."

"Just so," said the aunt gravely "When men are obstinate about a thing, so much the worse for them!"

"But as to the merry little finish up, oh, that was awfully smart!" continued Nana. "It appears to have been terrible enough to give you the shudders! He sent everybody away and boxed himself up in the place with a lot of petroleum. And it blazed! You should have seen it! Just think, a great big affair, almost all made of wood and stuffed with hay and straw! The flames simply towered up, and the finest part of the business was that the horses didn't want to be roasted. They could be heard plunging, throwing themselves against the doors, crying aloud just like human beings. Yes, people haven't got rid of the horror of it yet."

Labordette let a low, incredulous whistle escape him. For his part, he did not believe in the death of Vandeuvres. Somebody had sworn he had seen him escaping through a window. He had set fire to his stable in a fit of aberration, but when it had begun to grow too warm it must have sobered him. A man so besotted about the women and so utterly worn out could not possibly die so pluckily.

Nana listened in her disillusionment and could only remark:

"Oh, the poor wretch, it was so beautiful!"

CHAPTER XII

Toward one in the morning, in the great bed of the Venice point draperies, Nana and the count lay still awake. He had returned to her that evening after a three days sulking fit. The room, which was dimly illumined by a lamp, seemed to slumber amid a warm, damp odor of love, while the furniture, with its white lacquer and silver incrustations, loomed vague and wan through the gloom. A curtain had been drawn to, so that the bed lay flooded with shadow. A sigh became audible; then a kiss broke the silence, and Nana, slipping off the coverlet, sat for a moment or two, barelegged, on the edge of the bed. The count let his head fall back on the pillow and remained in darkness.

"Dearest, you believe in the good God, don't you?" she queried after some moments' reflection. Her face was serious; she had been overcome by pious terrors on quitting her lover's arms.

Since morning, indeed, she had been complaining of feeling uncomfortable, and all her stupid notions, as she phrased it, notions about death and hell, were secretly torturing her. From time to time she had nights such as these, during which childish fears and atrocious fancies would thrill her with waking nightmares. She continued:

"I say, d'you think I shall go to heaven?"

And with that she shivered, while the count, in his surprise at her putting such singular questions at such a moment, felt his old religious remorse returning upon him. Then with her chemise slipping from her shoulders and her hair unpinned, she again threw herself upon his breast, sobbing and clinging to him as she did so.

"I'm afraid of dying! I'm afraid of dying!" He had all the trouble in the world to disengage himself. Indeed, he was himself afraid of giving in to the sudden madness of this woman clinging to his body in her dread of the Invisible. Such dread is contagious, and he reasoned with her. Her conduct was perfect—she had only to conduct herself well in order one day to merit pardon. But she shook her head. Doubtless she was doing no one any harm; nay, she was even in the constant habit of wearing a medal of the Virgin, which she showed to him as it hung by a red thread between her breasts. Only it had been foreordained that all unmarried women who held conversation with men would go to hell. Scraps of her catechism recurred to her remembrance. Ah, if one only knew for certain, but, alas, one was sure of nothing; nobody ever brought back any information, and then, truly, it would be stupid to bother oneself about things if the priests were talking foolishness all the time. Nevertheless, she religiously kissed her medal, which was still warm from contact with her skin, as though by way of charm against death, the idea of which filled her with icy horror. Muffat was obliged to accompany her into the dressing room, for she shook at the idea of being alone there for one moment, even though she had left the door open. When he had lain down again she still roamed about the room, visiting its several corners and starting and shivering at the slightest noise. A mirror stopped her, and as of old she lapsed into obvious contemplation of her nakedness. But the sight of her breast, her waist and her thighs only doubled her terror, and she ended by feeling with both hands very slowly over the bones of her face.

"You're ugly when you're dead," she said in deliberate tones.

And she pressed her cheeks, enlarging her eyes and pushing down her jaw, in order to see how she would look. Thus disfigured, she turned toward the count.

"Do look! My head'll be quite small, it will!"

At this he grew vexed.

"You're mad; come to bed!"

He fancied he saw her in a grave, emaciated by a century of sleep, and he joined his hands and stammered a prayer. It was some time ago that the religious sense had reconquered him, and now his daily access of faith had again assumed the apoplectic intensity which was wont to leave him well-nigh stunned. The joints of his fingers used to crack, and he would repeat without cease these words only: "My God, my God, my God!" It was the cry of his impotence, the cry of that sin against which, though his damnation was certain, he felt powerless to strive. When Nana returned she found him hidden beneath the bedclothes; he was haggard; he had dug his nails into his bosom, and his eyes stared upward as though in search of heaven. And with that she started to weep again. Then they both embraced, and their teeth chattered they knew not why, as the same imbecile obsession over-mastered them. They had already passed a similar night, but on this occasion the thing was utterly idiotic, as Nana declared when she ceased to be frightened. She suspected something, and this caused her to question the count in a prudent sort of way. It might be that Rose Mignon had sent the famous letter! But that was not the case; it was sheer fright, nothing more, for he was still ignorant whether he was a cuckold or no.

Two days later, after a fresh disappearance, Muffat presented himself in the morning, a time of day at which he never came. He was livid; his eyes were red and his whole man still shaken by a great internal struggle. But Zoe, being scared herself, did not notice his troubled state. She had run to meet him and now began crying:

"Oh, monsieur, do come in! Madame nearly died yesterday evening!"

And when he asked for particulars:

"Something it's impossible to believe has happened—a miscarriage, monsieur."

Nana had been in the family way for the past three months. For long she had simply thought herself out of sorts, and Dr Boutarel had himself been in doubt. But when afterward he made her a decisive announcement, she felt so bored thereby that she did all she possibly could to disguise her condition. Her nervous terrors, her dark humors, sprang to some extent from this unfortunate state of things, the secret of which she kept very shamefacedly, as became a courtesan mother who is obliged to conceal her plight. The thing struck her as a ridiculous accident, which made her appear small in her own eyes and would, had it been known, have led people to chaff her.

"A poor joke, eh?" she said. "Bad luck, too, certainly."

She was necessarily very sharp set when she thought her last hour had come. There was no end to her surprise, too; her sexual economy seemed to her to have got out of order; it produced children then even when one did not want them and when one employed it for quite other purposes! Nature drove her to exasperation; this appearance of serious motherhood in a career of pleasure, this gift of life amid all the deaths she was spreading around, exasperated her. Why could one not dispose of oneself as fancy dictated, without all this fuss? And whence had this brat come? She could not even suggest a father. Ah, dear heaven, the man who made him would have a splendid notion had he kept him in his own hands, for nobody asked for him; he was in everybody's way, and he would certainly not have much happiness in life!

Meanwhile Zoe described the catastrophe.

"Madame was seized with colic toward four o'clock. When she didn't come back out of the dressing room I went in and found her lying stretched on the floor in a faint. Yes, monsieur, on the floor in a pool of blood, as though she had been murdered. Then I understood, you see. I was furious; Madame might quite well have confided her trouble to me. As it happened, Monsieur Georges was there, and he helped me to lift her up, and directly a miscarriage was mentioned he felt ill in his turn! Oh, it's true I've had the hump since yesterday!"

In fact, the house seemed utterly upset. All the servants were galloping upstairs, downstairs and through the rooms. Georges had passed the night on an armchair in the drawing room. It was he who had announced the news to Madame's friends at that hour of the evening when Madame was in the habit of receiving. He had still been very pale, and he had told his story very feelingly, and as though stupefied. Steiner, La Faloise, Philippe and others, besides, had presented themselves, and at the end of the lad's first phrase they burst into exclamations. The thing was impossible! It must be a farce! After which they grew serious and gazed with an embarrassed expression at her bedroom door. They shook their heads; it was no laughing matter.

Till midnight a dozen gentlemen had stood talking in low voices in front of the fireplace. All were friends; all were deeply exercised by the same idea of paternity. They seemed to be mutually excusing themselves, and they looked as confused as if they had done something clumsy. Eventually, however, they put a bold face on the matter. It had nothing to do with them: the fault was hers! What a stunner that Nana was, eh? One would never have believed her capable of such a fake! And with that they departed one by one, walking on tiptoe, as though in a chamber of death where you cannot laugh.

"Come up all the same, monsieur," said Zoe to Muffat. "Madame is much better and will see you. We are expecting the doctor, who promised to come back this morning."

The lady's maid had persuaded Georges to go back home to sleep, and upstairs in the drawing room only Satin remained. She lay stretched on a divan, smoking a cigarette and scanning the ceiling. Amid the household scare which had followed the accident she had been white with rage, had shrugged her shoulders violently and had made ferocious remarks. Accordingly, when Zoe was passing in front of her and telling Monsieur that poor, dear Madame had suffered a great deal:

"That's right; it'll teach him!" said Satin curtly.

They turned round in surprise, but she had not moved a muscle; her eyes were still turned toward the ceiling, and her cigarette was still wedged tightly between her lips.

"Dear me, you're charming, you are!" said Zoe.

But Satin sat up, looked savagely at the count and once more hurled her remark at him.

"That's right; it'll teach him!"

And she lay down again and blew forth a thin jet of smoke, as though she had no interest in present events and were resolved not to meddle in any of them. No, it was all too silly!

Zoe, however, introduced Muffat into the bedroom, where a scent of ether lingered amid warm, heavy silence, scarce broken by the dull roll of occasional carriages in the Avenue de Villiers. Nana, looking very white on her pillow, was lying awake with wide-open, meditative eyes. She smiled when she saw the count but did not move.

"Ah, dear pet!" she slowly murmured. "I really thought I should never see you again."

Then as he leaned forward to kiss her on the hair, she grew tender toward him and spoke frankly about the child, as though he were its father.

"I never dared tell you; I felt so happy about it! Oh, I used to dream about it; I should have liked to be worthy of you! And now there's nothing left. Ah well, perhaps that's best. I don't want to bring a stumbling block into your life."

Astounded by this story of paternity, he began stammering vague phrases. He had taken a chair and had sat down by the bed, leaning one arm on the coverlet. Then the young woman noticed his wild expression, the blood reddening his eyes, the fever that set his lips aquiver.

"What's the matter then?" she asked. "You're ill too."

"No," he answered with extreme difficulty.

She gazed at him with a profound expression. Then she signed to Zoe to retire, for the latter was lingering round arranging the medicine bottles. And when they were alone she drew him down to her and again asked:

"What's the matter with you, darling? The tears are ready to burst from your eyes—I can see that quite well. Well now, speak out; you've come to tell me something."

"No, no, I swear I haven't," he blurted out. But he was choking with suffering, and this sickroom, into which he had suddenly entered unawares, so worked on his feelings that he burst out sobbing and buried his face in the bedclothes to smother the violence of his grief. Nana understood. Rose Mignon had most assuredly decided to send the letter. She let him weep for some moments, and he was shaken by convulsions so fierce that the bed trembled under her. At length in accents of motherly compassion she queried:

"You've had bothers at your home?"

He nodded affirmatively. She paused anew, and then very low:

"Then you know all?"

He nodded assent. And a heavy silence fell over the chamber of suffering. The night before, on his return from a party given by the empress, he had received the letter Sabine had written her lover. After an atrocious night passed in the meditation of vengeance he had gone out in the morning in order to resist a longing which prompted him to kill his wife. Outside, under a sudden, sweet influence of a fine June morning, he had lost the thread of his thoughts and had come to Nana's, as he always came at terrible moments in his life. There only he gave way to his misery, for he felt a cowardly joy at the thought that she would console him.

"Now look here, be calm!" the young woman continued, becoming at the same time extremely kind. "I've known it a long time, but it was certainly not I that would have opened your eyes. You remember you had your doubts last year, but then things arranged themselves, owing to my prudence. In fact, you wanted proofs. The deuce, you've got one today, and I know it's hard lines. Nevertheless, you must look at the matter quietly: you're not dishonored because it's happened."

He had left off weeping. A sense of shame restrained him from saying what he wanted to, although he had long ago slipped into the most intimate confessions about his household. She had to encourage him. Dear me, she was a woman; she could understand everything. When in a dull voice he exclaimed:

"You're ill. What's the good of tiring you? It was stupid of me to have come. I'm going—"

"No," she answered briskly enough. "Stay! Perhaps I shall be able to give you some good advice. Only don't make me talk too much; the medical man's forbidden it."

He had ended by rising, and he was now walking up and down the room. Then she questioned him:

"Now what are you going to do?

"I'm going to box the man's ears—by heavens, yes!"

She pursed up her lips disapprovingly.

"That's not very wise. And about your wife?"

"I shall go to law; I've proofs."

"Not at all wise, my dear boy. It's stupid even. You know I shall never let you do that!"

And in her feeble voice she showed him decisively how useless and scandalous a duel and a trial would be. He would be a nine days' newspaper sensation; his whole existence would be at stake, his peace of mind, his high situation at court, the honor of his name, and all for what? That he might have the laughers against him.

"What will it matter?" he cried. "I shall have had my revenge."

"My pet," she said, "in a business of that kind one never has one's revenge if one doesn't take it directly."

He paused and stammered. He was certainly no poltroon, but he felt that she was right. An uneasy feeling was growing momentarily stronger within him, a poor, shameful feeling which softened his anger now that it was at its hottest. Moreover, in her frank desire to tell him everything, she dealt him a fresh blow.

"And d'you want to know what's annoying you, dearest? Why, that you are deceiving your wife yourself. You don't sleep away from home for nothing, eh? Your wife must have her suspicions. Well then, how can you blame her? She'll tell you that you've set her the example, and that'll shut you up. There, now, that's why you're stamping about here instead of being at home murdering both of 'em."

Muffat had again sunk down on the chair; he was overwhelmed by these home thrusts. She broke off and took breath, and then in a low voice:

"Oh, I'm a wreck! Do help me sit up a bit. I keep slipping down, and my head's too low."

When he had helped her she sighed and felt more comfortable. And with that she harked back to the subject. What a pretty sight a divorce suit would be! Couldn't he imagine the advocate of the countess amusing Paris with his remarks about Nana? Everything would have come out—her fiasco at the Varietes, her house, her manner of life. Oh dear, no! She had no wish for all that amount of advertising. Some dirty women might, perhaps, have driven him to it for the sake of getting a thundering big advertisement, but she—she desired his happiness before all else. She had drawn him down toward her and, after passing her arm around his neck, was nursing his head close to hers on the edge of the pillow. And with that she whispered softly:

"Listen, my pet, you shall make it up with your wife."

But he rebelled at this. It could never be! His heart was nigh breaking at the thought; it was too shameful. Nevertheless, she kept tenderly insisting.

"You shall make it up with your wife. Come, come, you don't want to hear all the world saying that I've tempted you away from your home? I should have too vile a reputation! What would people think of me? Only swear that you'll always love me, because the moment you go with another woman—"

Tears choked her utterance, and he intervened with kisses and said:

"You're beside yourself; it's impossible!"

"Yes, yes," she rejoined, "you must. But I'll be reasonable. After all, she's your wife, and it isn't as if you were to play me false with the firstcomer."

And she continued in this strain, giving him the most excellent advice. She even spoke of God, and the count thought he was listening to M. Venot, when that old gentleman endeavored to sermonize him out of the grasp of sin. Nana, however, did not speak of breaking it off entirely: she preached indulgent good nature and suggested that, as became a dear, nice old fellow, he should divide his attentions between his wife and his mistress, so that they would all enjoy a quiet life, devoid of any kind of annoyance, something, in fact, in the nature of a happy slumber amid the inevitable miseries of existence. Their life would be nowise changed: he would still be the little man of her heart. Only he would come to her a bit less often and would give the countess the nights not passed with her. She had got to the end of her strength and left off, speaking under her breath:

"After that I shall feel I've done a good action, and you'll love me all the more."

Silence reigned. She had closed her eyes and lay wan upon her pillow. The count was patiently listening to her, not wishing her to tire herself. A whole minute went by before she reopened her eyes and murmured:

"Besides, how about the money? Where would you get the money from if you must grow angry and go to law? Labordette came for the bill yesterday. As for me, I'm out of everything; I have nothing to put on now."

Then she shut her eyes again and looked like one dead. A shadow of deep anguish had passed over Muffat's brow. Under the present stroke he had since yesterday forgotten the money troubles from which he knew not how to escape. Despite formal promises to the contrary, the bill for a hundred thousand francs had been put in circulation after being once renewed, and Labordette, pretending to be very miserable about it, threw all the blame on Francis, declaring that he would never again mix himself up in such a matter with an uneducated man. It was necessary to pay, for the count would never have allowed his signature to be protested. Then in addition to Nana's novel demands, his home expenses were extraordinarily confused. On their return from Les Fondettes the countess had suddenly manifested a taste for luxury, a longing for worldly pleasures, which was devouring their fortune. Her ruinous caprices began to be talked about. Their whole household management was altered, and five hundred thousand francs were squandered in utterly transforming the old house in the Rue Miromesnil. Then there were extravagantly magnificent gowns and large sums disappeared, squandered or perhaps given away, without her ever dreaming of accounting for them. Twice Muffat ventured to mention this, for he was anxious to know how the money went, but on these occasions she had smiled and gazed at him with so singular an expression that he dared not interrogate her further for fear of a too-unmistakable answer. If he were taking Daguenet as son-in-law as a gift from Nana it was chiefly with the hope of being able to reduce Estelle's dower to two hundred thousand francs and of then being free to make any arrangements he chose about the remainder with a young man who was still rejoicing in this unexpected match.

Nevertheless, for the last week, under the immediate necessity of finding Labordette's hundred thousand francs, Muffat had been able to hit on but one expedient, from which he recoiled. This was that he should sell the Bordes, a magnificent property valued at half a million, which an uncle had recently left the countess. However, her signature was necessary, and she herself, according to the terms of the deed, could not alienate the property without the count's authorization. The day before he had indeed resolved to talk to his wife about this signature. And now everything was ruined; at such a moment he would never accept of such a compromise. This reflection added bitterness to the frightful disgrace of the adultery. He fully understood what Nana was asking for, since in that ever-growing self-abandonment which prompted him to put her in possession of all his secrets, he had complained to her of his position and had confided to her the tiresome difficulty he was in with regard to the signature of the countess.

Nana, however, did not seem to insist. She did not open her eyes again, and, seeing her so pale, he grew frightened and made her inhale a little ether. She gave a sigh and without mentioning Daguenet asked him some questions.

"When is the marriage?"

"We sign the contract on Tuesday, in five days' time," he replied.

Then still keeping her eyelids closed, as though she were speaking from the darkness and silence of her brain:

"Well then, pet, see to what you've got to do. As far as I'm concerned, I want everybody to be happy and comfortable."

He took her hand and soothed her. Yes, he would see about it; the important thing now was for her to rest. And the revolt within him ceased, for this warm and slumberous sickroom, with its all-pervading scent of ether, had ended by lulling him into a mere longing for happiness and peace. All his manhood, erewhile maddened by wrong, had departed out of him in the neighborhood of that warm bed and that suffering woman, whom he was nursing under the influence of her feverish heat and of remembered delights. He leaned over her and pressed her in a close embrace, while despite her unmoved features her lips wore a delicate, victorious smile. But Dr Boutarel made his appearance.

"Well, and how's this dear child?" he said familiarly to Muffat, whom he treated as her husband. "The deuce, but we've made her talk!"

The doctor was a good-looking man and still young. He had a superb practice among the gay world, and being very merry by nature and ready to laugh and joke in the friendliest way with the demimonde ladies with whom, however, he never went farther, he charged very high fees and got them paid with the greatest punctuality. Moreover, he would put himself out to visit them on the most trivial occasions, and Nana, who was always trembling at the fear of death, would send and fetch him two or three times a week and would anxiously confide to him little infantile ills which he would cure to an accompaniment of amusing gossip and harebrained anecdotes. The ladies all adored him. But this time the little ill was serious.

Muffat withdrew, deeply moved. Seeing his poor Nana so very weak, his sole feeling was now one of tenderness. As he was leaving the room she motioned him back and gave him her forehead to kiss. In a low voice and with a playfully threatening look she said:

"You know what I've allowed you to do. Go back to your wife, or it's all over and I shall grow angry!"

The Countess Sabine had been anxious that her daughter's wedding contract should be signed on a Tuesday in order that the renovated house, where the paint was still scarcely dry, might be reopened with a grand entertainment. Five hundred invitations had been issued to people in all kinds of sets. On the morning of the great day the upholsterers were still nailing up hangings, and toward nine at night, just when the lusters were going to be lit, the architect, accompanied by the eager and interested countess, was given his final orders.

It was one of those spring festivities which have a delicate charm of their own. Owing to the warmth of the June nights, it had become possible to open the two doors of the great drawing room and to extend the dancing floor to the sanded paths of the garden. When the first guests arrived and were welcomed at the door by the count and the countess they were positively dazzled. One had only to recall to mind the drawing room of the past, through which flitted the icy, ghostly presence of the Countess Muffat, that antique room full of an atmosphere of religious austerity with its massive First Empire mahogany furniture, its yellow velvet hangings, its moldy ceiling through which the damp had soaked. Now from the very threshold of the entrance hall mosaics set off with gold were glittering under the lights of lofty candelabras, while the marble staircase unfurled, as it were, a delicately chiseled balustrade. Then, too, the drawing room looked splendid; it was hung with Genoa velvet, and a huge decorative design by Boucher covered the ceiling, a design for which the architect had paid a hundred thousand francs at the sale of the Chateau de Dampierre. The lusters and the crystal ornaments lit up a luxurious display of mirrors and precious furniture. It seemed as though Sabine's long chair, that solitary red silk chair, whose soft contours were so marked in the old days, had grown and spread till it filled the whole great house with voluptuous idleness and a sense of tense enjoyment not less fierce and hot than a fire which has been long in burning up.

People were already dancing. The band, which had been located in the garden, in front of one of the open windows, was playing a waltz, the supple rhythm of which came softly into the house through the intervening night air. And the garden seemed to spread away and away, bathed in transparent shadow and lit by Venetian lamps, while in a purple tent pitched on the edge of a lawn a table for refreshments had been established. The waltz, which was none other than the quaint, vulgar one in the Blonde Venus, with its laughing, blackguard lilt, penetrated the old hotel with sonorous waves of sound and sent a feverish thrill along its walls. It was as though some fleshly wind had come up out of the common street and were sweeping the relics of a vanished epoch out of the proud old dwelling, bearing away the Muffats' past, the age of honor and religious faith which had long slumbered beneath the lofty ceilings.

Meanwhile near the hearth, in their accustomed places, the old friends of the count's mother were taking refuge. They felt out of their element—they were dazzled and they formed a little group amid the slowly invading mob. Mme du Joncquoy, unable to recognize the various rooms, had come in through the dining saloon. Mme Chantereau was gazing with a stupefied expression at the garden, which struck her as immense. Presently there was a sound of low voices, and the corner gave vent to all sorts of bitter reflections.

"I declare," murmured Mme Chantereau, "just fancy if the countess were to return to life. Why, can you not imagine her coming in among all these crowds of people! And then there's all this gilding and this uproar! It's scandalous!"

"Sabine's out of her senses," replied Mme du Joncquoy. "Did you see her at the door? Look, you can catch sight of her here; she's wearing all her diamonds."

For a moment or two they stood up in order to take a distant view of the count and countess. Sabine was in a white dress trimmed with marvelous English point lace. She was triumphant in beauty; she looked young and gay, and there was a touch of intoxication in her continual smile. Beside her stood Muffat, looking aged and a little pale, but he, too, was smiling in his calm and worthy fashion.

"And just to think that he was once master," continued Mme Chantereau, "and that not a single rout seat would have come in without his permission! Ah well, she's changed all that; it's her house now. D'you remember when she did not want to do her drawing room up again? She's done up the entire house."

But the ladies grew silent, for Mme de Chezelles was entering the room, followed by a band of young men. She was going into ecstasies and marking her approval with a succession of little exclamations.

"Oh, it's delicious, exquisite! What taste!" And she shouted back to her followers:

"Didn't I say so? There's nothing equal to these old places when one takes them in hand. They become dazzling! It's quite in the grand seventeenth-century style. Well, NOW she can receive."

The two old ladies had again sat down and with lowered tones began talking about the marriage, which was causing astonishment to a good many people. Estelle had just passed by them. She was in a pink silk gown and was as pale, flat, silent and virginal as ever. She had accepted Daguenet very quietly and now evinced neither joy nor sadness, for she was still as cold and white as on those winter evenings when she used to put logs on the fire. This whole fete given in her honor, these lights and flowers and tunes, left her quite unmoved.

"An adventurer," Mme du Joncquoy was saying. "For my part, I've never seen him."

"Take care, here he is," whispered Mme Chantereau.

Daguenet, who had caught sight of Mme Hugon and her sons, had eagerly offered her his arm. He laughed and was effusively affectionate toward her, as though she had had a hand in his sudden good fortune.

"Thank you," she said, sitting down near the fireplace. "You see, it's my old corner."

"You know him?" queried Mme du Joncquoy, when Daguenet had gone. "Certainly I do—a charming young man. Georges is very fond of him. Oh, they're a most respected family."

And the good lady defended him against the mute hostility which was apparent to her. His father, held in high esteem by Louis Philippe, had been a PREFET up to the time of his death. The son had been a little dissipated, perhaps; they said he was ruined, but in any case, one of his uncles, who was a great landowner, was bound to leave him his fortune. The ladies, however, shook their heads, while Mme Hugon, herself somewhat embarrassed, kept harking back to the extreme respectability of his family. She was very much fatigued and complained of her feet. For some months she had been occupying her house in the Rue Richelieu, having, as she said, a whole lot of things on hand. A look of sorrow overshadowed her smiling, motherly face.

"Never mind," Mme Chantereau concluded. "Estelle could have aimed at something much better."

There was a flourish. A quadrille was about to begin, and the crowd flowed back to the sides of the drawing room in order to leave the floor clear. Bright dresses flitted by and mingled together amid the dark evening coats, while the intense light set jewels flashing and white plumes quivering and lilacs and roses gleaming and flowering amid the sea of many heads. It was already very warm, and a penetrating perfume was exhaled from light tulles and crumpled silks and satins, from which bare shoulders glimmered white, while the orchestra played its lively airs. Through open doors ranges of seated ladies were visible in the background of adjoining rooms; they flashed a discreet smile; their eyes glowed, and they made pretty mouths as the breath of their fans caressed their faces. And guests still kept arriving, and a footman announced their names while gentlemen advanced slowly amid the surrounding groups, striving to find places for ladies, who hung with difficulty on their arms, and stretching forward in quest of some far-off vacant armchair. The house kept filling, and crinolined skirts got jammed together with a little rustling sound. There were corners where an amalgam of laces, bunches and puffs would completely bar the way, while all the other ladies stood waiting, politely resigned and imperturbably graceful, as became people who were made to take part in these dazzling crushes. Meanwhile across the garden couples, who had been glad to escape from the close air of the great drawing room, were wandering away under the roseate gleam of the Venetian lamps, and shadowy dresses kept flitting along the edge of the lawn, as though in rhythmic time to the music of the quadrille, which sounded sweet and distant behind the trees.

Steiner had just met with Foucarmont and La Faloise, who were drinking a glass of champagne in front of the buffet.

"It's beastly smart," said La Faloise as he took a survey of the purple tent, which was supported by gilded lances. "You might fancy yourself at the Gingerbread Fair. That's it—the Gingerbread Fair!"

In these days he continually affected a bantering tone, posing as the young man who has abused every mortal thing and now finds nothing worth taking seriously.

"How surprised poor Vandeuvres would be if he were to come back," murmured Foucarmont. "You remember how he simply nearly died of boredom in front of the fire in there. Egad, it was no laughing matter."

"Vandeuvres—oh, let him be. He's a gone coon!" La Faloise disdainfully rejoined. "He jolly well choused himself, he did, if he thought he could make us sit up with his roast-meat story! Not a soul mentions it now. Blotted out, done for, buried—that's what's the matter with Vandeuvres! Here's to the next man!"

Then as Steiner shook hands with him:

"You know Nana's just arrived. Oh, my boys, it was a state entry. It was too brilliant for anything! First of all she kissed the countess. Then when the children came up she gave them her blessing and said to Daguenet, 'Listen, Paul, if you go running after the girls you'll have to answer for it to me.' What, d'you mean to say you didn't see that? Oh, it WAS smart. A success, if you like!"

The other two listened to him, openmouthed, and at last burst out laughing. He was enchanted and thought himself in his best vein.

"You thought it had really happened, eh? Confound it, since Nana's made the match! Anyway, she's one of the family."

The young Hugons were passing, and Philippe silenced him. And with that they chatted about the marriage from the male point of view. Georges was vexed with La Faloise for telling an anecdote. Certainly Nana had fubbed off on Muffat one of her old flames as son-in-law; only it was not true that she had been to bed with Daguenet as lately as yesterday. Foucarmont made bold to shrug his shoulders. Could anyone ever tell when Nana was in bed with anyone? But Georges grew excited and answered with an "I can tell, sir!" which set them all laughing. In a word, as Steiner put it, it was all a very funny kettle of fish!

The buffet was gradually invaded by the crowd, and, still keeping together, they vacated their positions there. La Faloise stared brazenly at the women as though he believed himself to be Mabille. At the end of a garden walk the little band was surprised to find M. Venot busily conferring with Daguenet, and with that they indulged in some facile pleasantries which made them very merry. He was confessing him, giving him advice about the bridal night! Presently they returned in front of one of the drawing-room doors, within which a polka was sending the couples whirling to and fro till they seemed to leave a wake behind them among the crowd of men who remained standing about. In the slight puffs of air which came from outside the tapers flared up brilliantly, and when a dress floated by in time to the rat-tat of the measure, a little gust of wind cooled the sparkling heat which streamed down from the lusters.

"Egad, they're not cold in there!" muttered La Faloise.

They blinked after emerging from the mysterious shadows of the garden. Then they pointed out to one another the Marquis de Chouard where he stood apart, his tall figure towering over the bare shoulders which surrounded him. His face was pale and very stern, and beneath its crown of scant white hair it wore an expression of lofty dignity. Scandalized by Count Muffat's conduct, he had publicly broken off all intercourse with him and was by way of never again setting foot in the house. If he had consented to put in an appearance that evening it was because his granddaughter had begged him to. But he disapproved of her marriage and had inveighed indignantly against the way in which the government classes were being disorganized by the shameful compromises engendered by modern debauchery.

"Ah, it's the end of all things," Mme du Joncquoy whispered in Mme Chantereau's ear as she sat near the fireplace. "That bad woman has bewitched the unfortunate man. And to think we once knew him such a true believer, such a noblehearted gentleman!"

"It appears he is ruining himself," continued Mme Chantereau. "My husband has had a bill of his in his hands. At present he's living in that house in the Avenue de Villiers; all Paris is talking about it. Good heavens! I don't make excuses for Sabine, but you must admit that he gives her infinite cause of complaint, and, dear me, if she throws money out of the window, too—"

"She does not only throw money," interrupted the other. "In fact, between them, there's no knowing where they'll stop; they'll end in the mire, my dear."

But just then a soft voice interrupted them. It was M. Venot, and he had come and seated himself behind them, as though anxious to disappear from view. Bending forward, he murmured:

"Why despair? God manifests Himself when all seems lost."

He was assisting peacefully at the downfall of the house which he erewhile governed. Since his stay at Les Fondettes he had been allowing the madness to increase, for he was very clearly aware of his own powerlessness. He had, indeed, accepted the whole position—the count's wild passion for Nana, Fauchery's presence, even Estelle's marriage with Daguenet. What did these things matter? He even became more supple and mysterious, for he nursed a hope of being able to gain the same mastery over the young as over the disunited couple, and he knew that great disorders lead to great conversions. Providence would have its opportunity.

"Our friend," he continued in a low voice, "is always animated by the best religious sentiments. He has given me the sweetest proofs of this."

"Well," said Mme du Joncquoy, "he ought first to have made it up with his wife."

"Doubtless. At this moment I have hopes that the reconciliation will be shortly effected."

Whereupon the two old ladies questioned him.

But he grew very humble again. "Heaven," he said, "must be left to act." His whole desire in bringing the count and the countess together again was to avoid a public scandal, for religion tolerated many faults when the proprieties were respected.

"In fact," resumed Mme du Joncquoy, "you ought to have prevented this union with an adventurer."

The little old gentleman assumed an expression of profound astonishment. "You deceive yourself. Monsieur Daguenet is a young man of the greatest merit. I am acquainted with his thoughts; he is anxious to live down the errors of his youth. Estelle will bring him back to the path of virtue, be sure of that."

"Oh, Estelle!" Mme Chantereau murmured disdainfully. "I believe the dear young thing to be incapable of willing anything; she is so insignificant!"

This opinion caused M. Venot to smile. However, he went into no explanations about the young bride and, shutting his eyes, as though to avoid seeming to take any further interest in the matter, he once more lost himself in his corner behind the petticoats. Mme Hugon, though weary and absent-minded, had caught some phrases of the conversation, and she now intervened and summed up in her tolerant way by remarking to the Marquis de Chouard, who just then bowed to her:

"These ladies are too severe. Existence is so bitter for every one of us! Ought we not to forgive others much, my friend, if we wish to merit forgiveness ourselves?"

For some seconds the marquis appeared embarrassed, for he was afraid of allusions. But the good lady wore so sad a smile that he recovered almost at once and remarked:

"No, there is no forgiveness for certain faults. It is by reason of this kind of accommodating spirit that a society sinks into the abyss of ruin."

The ball had grown still more animated. A fresh quadrille was imparting a slight swaying motion to the drawing-room floor, as though the old dwelling had been shaken by the impulse of the dance. Now and again amid the wan confusion of heads a woman's face with shining eyes and parted lips stood sharply out as it was whirled away by the dance, the light of the lusters gleaming on the white skin. Mme du Joncquoy declared that the present proceedings were senseless. It was madness to crowd five hundred people into a room which would scarcely contain two hundred. In fact, why not sign the wedding contract on the Place du Carrousel? This was the outcome of the new code of manners, said Mme Chantereau. In old times these solemnities took place in the bosom of the family, but today one must have a mob of people; the whole street must be allowed to enter quite freely, and there must be a great crush, or else the evening seems a chilly affair. People now advertised their luxury and introduced the mere foam on the wave of Parisian society into their houses, and accordingly it was only too natural if illicit proceedings such as they had been discussing afterward polluted the hearth. The ladies complained that they could not recognize more than fifty people. Where did all this crowd spring from? Young girls with low necks were making a great display of their shoulders. A woman had a golden dagger stuck in her chignon, while a bodice thickly embroidered with jet beads clothed her in what looked like a coat of mail. People's eyes kept following another lady smilingly, so singularly marked were her clinging skirts. All the luxuriant splendor of the departing winter was there—the overtolerant world of pleasure, the scratch gathering a hostess can get together after a first introduction, the sort of society, in fact, in which great names and great shames jostle together in the same fierce quest of enjoyment. The heat was increasing, and amid the overcrowded rooms the quadrille unrolled the cadenced symmetry of its figures.

"Very smart—the countess!" La Faloise continued at the garden door. "She's ten years younger than her daughter. By the by, Foucarmont, you must decide on a point. Vandeuvres once bet that she had no thighs."

This affectation of cynicism bored the other gentlemen, and Foucarmont contented himself by saying:

"Ask your cousin, dear boy. Here he is."

"Jove, it's a happy thought!" cried La Faloise. "I bet ten louis she has thighs."

Fauchery did indeed come up. As became a constant inmate of the house, he had gone round by the dining room in order to avoid the crowded doors. Rose had taken him up again at the beginning of the winter, and he was now dividing himself between the singer and the countess, but he was extremely fatigued and did not know how to get rid of one of them. Sabine flattered his vanity, but Rose amused him more than she. Besides, the passion Rose felt was a real one: her tenderness for him was marked by a conjugal fidelity which drove Mignon to despair.

"Listen, we want some information," said La Faloise as he squeezed his cousin's arm. "You see that lady in white silk?"

Ever since his inheritance had given him a kind of insolent dash of manner he had affected to chaff Fauchery, for he had an old grudge to satisfy and wanted to be revenged for much bygone raillery, dating from the days when he was just fresh from his native province.

"Yes, that lady with the lace."

The journalist stood on tiptoe, for as yet he did not understand.

"The countess?" he said at last.

"Exactly, my good friend. I've bet ten louis—now, has she thighs?"

And he fell a-laughing, for he was delighted to have succeeded in snubbing a fellow who had once come heavily down on him for asking whether the countess slept with anyone. But Fauchery, without showing the very slightest astonishment, looked fixedly at him.

"Get along, you idiot!" he said finally as he shrugged his shoulders.

Then he shook hands with the other gentlemen, while La Faloise, in his discomfiture, felt rather uncertain whether he had said something funny. The men chatted. Since the races the banker and Foucarmont had formed part of the set in the Avenue de Villiers. Nana was going on much better, and every evening the count came and asked how she did. Meanwhile Fauchery, though he listened, seemed preoccupied, for during a quarrel that morning Rose had roundly confessed to the sending of the letter. Oh yes, he might present himself at his great lady's house; he would be well received! After long hesitation he had come despite everything—out of sheer courage. But La Faloise's imbecile pleasantry had upset him in spite of his apparent tranquillity.

"What's the matter?" asked Philippe. "You seem in trouble."

"I do? Not at all. I've been working: that's why I came so late."

Then coldly, in one of those heroic moods which, although unnoticed, are wont to solve the vulgar tragedies of existence:

"All the same, I haven't made my bow to our hosts. One must be civil."

He even ventured on a joke, for he turned to La Faloise and said:

"Eh, you idiot?"

And with that he pushed his way through the crowd. The valet's full voice was no longer shouting out names, but close to the door the count and countess were still talking, for they were detained by ladies coming in. At length he joined them, while the gentlemen who were still on the garden steps stood on tiptoe so as to watch the scene. Nana, they thought, must have been chattering.

"The count hasn't noticed him," muttered Georges. "Look out! He's turning round; there, it's done!"

The band had again taken up the waltz in the Blonde Venus. Fauchery had begun by bowing to the countess, who was still smiling in ecstatic serenity. After which he had stood motionless a moment, waiting very calmly behind the count's back. That evening the count's deportment was one of lofty gravity: he held his head high, as became the official and the great dignitary. And when at last he lowered his gaze in the direction of the journalist he seemed still further to emphasize the majesty of his attitude. For some seconds the two men looked at one another. It was Fauchery who first stretched out his hand. Muffat gave him his. Their hands remained clasped, and the Countess Sabine with downcast eyes stood smiling before them, while the waltz continually beat out its mocking, vagabond rhythm.

"But the thing's going on wheels!" said Steiner.

"Are their hands glued together?" asked Foucarmont, surprised at this prolonged clasp. A memory he could not forget brought a faint glow to Fanchery's pale cheeks, and in his mind's eye he saw the property room bathed in greenish twilight and filled with dusty bric-a-brac. And Muffat was there, eggcup in hand, making a clever use of his suspicions. At this moment Muffat was no longer suspicious, and the last vestige of his dignity was crumbling in ruin. Fauchery's fears were assuaged, and when he saw the frank gaiety of the countess he was seized with a desire to laugh. The thing struck him as comic.

"Aha, here she is at last!" cried La Faloise, who did not abandon a jest when he thought it a good one. "D'you see Nana coming in over there?"

"Hold your tongue, do, you idiot!" muttered Philippe.

"But I tell you, it is Nana! They're playing her waltz for her, by Jove! She's making her entry. And she takes part in the reconciliation, the devil she does! What? You don't see her? She's squeezing all three of 'em to her heart—my cousin Fauchery, my lady cousin and her husband, and she's calling 'em her dear kitties. Oh, those family scenes give me a turn!"

Estelle had come up, and Fauchery complimented her while she stood stiffly up in her rose-colored dress, gazing at him with the astonished look of a silent child and constantly glancing aside at her father and mother. Daguenet, too, exchanged a hearty shake of the hand with the journalist. Together they made up a smiling group, while M. Venot came gliding in behind them. He gloated over them with a beatified expression and seemed to envelop them in his pious sweetness, for he rejoiced in these last instances of self-abandonment which were preparing the means of grace.

But the waltz still beat out its swinging, laughing, voluptuous measure; it was like a shrill continuation of the life of pleasure which was beating against the old house like a rising tide. The band blew louder trills from their little flutes; their violins sent forth more swooning notes. Beneath the Genoa velvet hangings, the gilding and the paintings, the lusters exhaled a living heat and a great glow of sunlight, while the crowd of guests, multiplied in the surrounding mirrors, seemed to grow and increase as the murmur of many voices rose ever louder. The couples who whirled round the drawing room, arm about waist, amid the smiles of the seated ladies, still further accentuated the quaking of the floors. In the garden a dull, fiery glow fell from the Venetian lanterns and threw a distant reflection of flame over the dark shadows moving in search of a breath of air about the walks at its farther end. And this trembling of walls and this red glow of light seemed to betoken a great ultimate conflagration in which the fabric of an ancient honor was cracking and burning on every side. The shy early beginnings of gaiety, of which Fauchery one April evening had heard the vocal expression in the sound of breaking glass, had little by little grown bolder, wilder, till they had burst forth in this festival. Now the rift was growing; it was crannying the house and announcing approaching downfall. Among drunkards in the slums it is black misery, an empty cupboard, which put an end to ruined families; it is the madness of drink which empties the wretched beds. Here the waltz tune was sounding the knell of an old race amid the suddenly ignited ruins of accumulated wealth, while Nana, although unseen, stretched her lithe limbs above the dancers' heads and sent corruption through their caste, drenching the hot air with the ferment of her exhalations and the vagabond lilt of the music.

On the evening after the celebration of the church marriage Count Muffat made his appearance in his wife's bedroom, where he had not entered for the last two years. At first, in her great surprise, the countess drew back from him. But she was still smiling the intoxicated smile which she now always wore. He began stammering in extreme embarrassment; whereupon she gave him a short moral lecture. However, neither of them risked a decisive explanation. It was religion, they pretended, which required this process of mutual forgiveness, and they agreed by a tacit understanding to retain their freedom. Before going to bed, seeing that the countess still appeared to hesitate, they had a business conversation, and the count was the first to speak of selling the Bordes. She consented at once. They both stood in great want of money, and they would share and share alike. This completed the reconciliation, and Muffat, remorseful though he was, felt veritably relieved.

That very day, as Nana was dozing toward two in the afternoon, Zoe made so bold as to knock at her bedroom door. The curtains were drawn to, and a hot breath of wind kept blowing through a window into the fresh twilight stillness within. During these last days the young woman had been getting up and about again, but she was still somewhat weak. She opened her eyes and asked:

"Who is it?"

Zoe was about to reply, but Daguenet pushed by her and announced himself in person. Nana forthwith propped herself up on her pillow and, dismissing the lady's maid:

"What! Is that you?" she cried. "On the day of your marriage? What can be the matter?"

Taken aback by the darkness, he stood still in the middle of the room. However, he grew used to it and came forward at last. He was in evening dress and wore a white cravat and gloves.

"Yes, to be sure, it's me!" he said. "You don't remember?"

No, she remembered nothing, and in his chaffing way he had to offer himself frankly to her.

"Come now, here's your commission. I've brought you the handsel of my innocence!"

And with that, as he was now by the bedside, she caught him in her bare arms and shook with merry laughter and almost cried, she thought it so pretty of him.

"Oh, that Mimi, how funny he is! He's thought of it after all! And to think I didn't remember it any longer! So you've slipped off; you're just out of church. Yes, certainly, you've got a scent of incense about you. But kiss me, kiss me! Oh, harder than that, Mimi dear! Bah! Perhaps it's for the last time."

In the dim room, where a vague odor of ether still lingered, their tender laughter died away suddenly. The heavy, warm breeze swelled the window curtains, and children's voices were audible in the avenue without. Then the lateness of the hour tore them asunder and set them joking again. Daguenet took his departure with his wife directly after the breakfast.

CHAPTER XIII

Toward the end of September Count Muffat, who was to dine at Nana's that evening, came at nightfall to inform her of a summons to the Tuileries. The lamps in the house had not been lit yet, and the servants were laughing uproariously in the kitchen regions as he softly mounted the stairs, where the tall windows gleamed in warm shadow. The door of the drawing room up-stairs opened noiselessly. A faint pink glow was dying out on the ceiling of the room, and the red hangings, the deep divans, the lacquered furniture, with their medley of embroidered fabrics and bronzes and china, were already sleeping under a slowly creeping flood of shadows, which drowned nooks and corners and blotted out the gleam of ivory and the glint of gold. And there in the darkness, on the white surface of a wide, outspread petticoat, which alone remained clearly visible, he saw Nana lying stretched in the arms of Georges. Denial in any shape or form was impossible. He gave a choking cry and stood gaping at them.

Nana had bounded up, and now she pushed him into the bedroom in order to give the lad time to escape.

"Come in," she murmured with reeling senses, "I'll explain."

She was exasperated at being thus surprised. Never before had she given way like this in her own house, in her own drawing room, when the doors were open. It was a long story: Georges and she had had a disagreement; he had been mad with jealousy of Philippe, and he had sobbed so bitterly on her bosom that she had yielded to him, not knowing how else to calm him and really very full of pity for him at heart. And on this solitary occasion, when she had been stupid enough to forget herself thus with a little rascal who could not even now bring her bouquets of violets, so short did his mother keep him—on this solitary occasion the count turned up and came straight down on them. 'Gad, she had very bad luck! That was what one got if one was a good-natured wench!

Meanwhile in the bedroom, into which she had pushed Muffat, the darkness was complete. Whereupon after some groping she rang furiously and asked for a lamp. It was Julien's fault too! If there had been a lamp in the drawing room the whole affair would not have happened. It was the stupid nightfall which had got the better of her heart.

"I beseech you to be reasonable, my pet," she said when Zoe had brought in the lights.

The count, with his hands on his knees, was sitting gazing at the floor. He was stupefied by what he had just seen. He did not cry out in anger. He only trembled, as though overtaken by some horror which was freezing him. This dumb misery touched the young woman, and she tried to comfort him.

"Well, yes, I've done wrong. It's very bad what I did. You see I'm sorry for my fault. It makes me grieve very much because it annoys you. Come now, be nice, too, and forgive me."

She had crouched down at his feet and was striving to catch his eye with a look of tender submission. She was fain to know whether he was very vexed with her. Presently, as he gave a long sigh and seemed to recover himself, she grew more coaxing and with grave kindness of manner added a final reason:

"You see, dearie, you must try and understand how it is: I can't refuse it to my poor friends."

The count consented to give way and only insisted that Georges should be dismissed once for all. But all his illusions had vanished, and he no longer believed in her sworn fidelity. Next day Nana would deceive him anew, and he only remained her miserable possessor in obedience to a cowardly necessity and to terror at the thought of living without her.

This was the epoch in her existence when Nana flared upon Paris with redoubled splendor. She loomed larger than heretofore on the horizon of vice and swayed the town with her impudently flaunted splendor and that contempt of money which made her openly squander fortunes. Her house had become a sort of glowing smithy, where her continual desires were the flames and the slightest breath from her lips changed gold into fine ashes, which the wind hourly swept away. Never had eye beheld such a rage of expenditure. The great house seemed to have been built over a gulf in which men—their worldly possessions, their fortunes, their very names—were swallowed up without leaving even a handful of dust behind them. This courtesan, who had the tastes of a parrot and gobbled up radishes and burnt almonds and pecked at the meat upon her plate, had monthly table bills amounting to five thousand francs. The wildest waste went on in the kitchen: the place, metaphorically speaking was one great river which stove in cask upon cask of wine and swept great bills with it, swollen by three or four successive manipulators. Victorine and Francois reigned supreme in the kitchen, whither they invited friends. In addition to these there was quite a little tribe of cousins, who were cockered up in their homes with cold meats and strong soup. Julien made the trades-people give him commissions, and the glaziers never put up a pane of glass at a cost of a franc and a half but he had a franc put down to himself. Charles devoured the horses' oats and doubled the amount of their provender, reselling at the back door what came in at the carriage gate, while amid the general pillage, the sack of the town after the storm, Zoe, by dint of cleverness, succeeded in saving appearances and covering the thefts of all in order the better to slur over and make good her own. But the household waste was worse than the household dishonesty. Yesterday's food was thrown into the gutter, and the collection of provisions in the house was such that the servants grew disgusted with it. The glass was all sticky with sugar, and the gas burners flared and flared till the rooms seemed ready to explode. Then, too, there were instances of negligence and mischief and sheer accident—of everything, in fact, which can hasten the ruin of a house devoured by so many mouths. Upstairs in Madame's quarters destruction raged more fiercely still. Dresses, which cost ten thousand francs and had been twice worn, were sold by Zoe; jewels vanished as though they had crumbled deep down in their drawers; stupid purchases were made; every novelty of the day was brought and left to lie forgotten in some corner the morning after or swept up by ragpickers in the street. She could not see any very expensive object without wanting to possess it, and so she constantly surrounded herself with the wrecks of bouquets and costly knickknacks and was the happier the more her passing fancy cost. Nothing remained intact in her hands; she broke everything, and this object withered, and that grew dirty in the clasp of her lithe white fingers. A perfect heap of nameless debris, of twisted shreds and muddy rags, followed her and marked her passage. Then amid this utter squandering of pocket money cropped up a question about the big bills and their settlement. Twenty thousand francs were due to the modiste, thirty thousand to the linen draper, twelve thousand to the bootmaker. Her stable devoured fifty thousand for her, and in six months she ran up a bill of a hundred and twenty thousand francs at her ladies' tailor. Though she had not enlarged her scheme of expenditure, which Labordette reckoned at four hundred thousand francs on an average, she ran up that same year to a million. She was herself stupefied by the amount and was unable to tell whither such a sum could have gone. Heaps upon heaps of men, barrowfuls of gold, failed to stop up the hole, which, amid this ruinous luxury, continually gaped under the floor of her house.

Meanwhile Nana had cherished her latest caprice. Once more exercised by the notion that her room needed redoing, she fancied she had hit on something at last. The room should be done in velvet of the color of tea roses, with silver buttons and golden cords, tassels and fringes, and the hangings should be caught up to the ceiling after the manner of a tent. This arrangement ought to be both rich and tender, she thought, and would form a splendid background to her blonde vermeil-tinted skin. However, the bedroom was only designed to serve as a setting to the bed, which was to be a dazzling affair, a prodigy. Nana meditated a bed such as had never before existed; it was to be a throne, an altar, whither Paris was to come in order to adore her sovereign nudity. It was to be all in gold and silver beaten work—it should suggest a great piece of jewelry with its golden roses climbing on a trelliswork of silver. On the headboard a band of Loves should peep forth laughing from amid the flowers, as though they were watching the voluptuous dalliance within the shadow of the bed curtains. Nana had applied to Labordette who had brought two goldsmiths to see her. They were already busy with the designs. The bed would cost fifty thousand francs, and Muffat was to give it her as a New Year's present.

What most astonished the young woman was that she was endlessly short of money amid a river of gold, the tide of which almost enveloped her. On certain days she was at her wit's end for want of ridiculously small sums—sums of only a few louis. She was driven to borrow from Zoe, or she scraped up cash as well as she could on her own account. But before resignedly adopting extreme measures she tried her friends and in a joking sort of way got the men to give her all they had about them, even down to their coppers. For the last three months she had been emptying Philippe's pockets especially, and now on days of passionate enjoyment he never came away but he left his purse behind him. Soon she grew bolder and asked him for loans of two hundred francs, three hundred francs—never more than that—wherewith to pay the interest of bills or to stave off outrageous debts. And Philippe, who in July had been appointed paymaster to his regiment, would bring the money the day after, apologizing at the same time for not being rich, seeing that good Mamma Hugon now treated her sons with singular financial severity. At the close of three months these little oft-renewed loans mounted up to a sum of ten thousand francs. The captain still laughed his hearty-sounding laugh, but he was growing visibly thinner, and sometimes he seemed absent-minded, and a shade of suffering would pass over his face. But one look from Nana's eyes would transfigure him in a sort of sensual ecstasy. She had a very coaxing way with him and would intoxicate him with furtive kisses and yield herself to him in sudden fits of self-abandonment, which tied him to her apron strings the moment he was able to escape from his military duties.

One evening, Nana having announced that her name, too, was Therese and that her fete day was the fifteenth of October, the gentlemen all sent her presents. Captain Philippe brought his himself; it was an old comfit dish in Dresden china, and it had a gold mount. He found her alone in her dressing room. She had just emerged from the bath, had nothing on save a great red-and-white flannel bathing wrap and was very busy examining her presents, which were ranged on a table. She had already broken a rock-crystal flask in her attempts to unstopper it.

"Oh, you're too nice!" she said. "What is it? Let's have a peep! What a baby you are to spend your pennies in little fakements like that!"

She scolded him, seeing that he was not rich, but at heart she was delighted to see him spending his whole substance for her. Indeed, this was the only proof of love which had power to touch her. Meanwhile she was fiddling away at the comfit dish, opening it and shutting it in her desire to see how it was made.

"Take care," he murmured, "it's brittle."

But she shrugged her shoulders. Did he think her as clumsy as a street porter? And all of a sudden the hinge came off between her fingers and the lid fell and was broken. She was stupefied and remained gazing at the fragments as she cried:

"Oh, it's smashed!"

Then she burst out laughing. The fragments lying on the floor tickled her fancy. Her merriment was of the nervous kind, the stupid, spiteful laughter of a child who delights in destruction. Philippe had a little fit of disgust, for the wretched girl did not know what anguish this curio had cost him. Seeing him thoroughly upset, she tried to contain herself.

"Gracious me, it isn't my fault! It was cracked; those old things barely hold together. Besides, it was the cover! Didn't you see the bound it gave?"

And she once more burst into uproarious mirth.

But though he made an effort to the contrary, tears appeared in the young man's eyes, and with that she flung her arms tenderly round his neck.

"How silly you are! You know I love you all the same. If one never broke anything the tradesmen would never sell anything. All that sort of thing's made to be broken. Now look at this fan; it's only held together with glue!"

She had snatched up a fan and was dragging at the blades so that the silk was torn in two. This seemed to excite her, and in order to show that she scorned the other presents, the moment she had ruined his she treated herself to a general massacre, rapping each successive object and proving clearly that not one was solid in that she had broken them all. There was a lurid glow in her vacant eyes, and her lips, slightly drawn back, displayed her white teeth. Soon, when everything was in fragments, she laughed cheerily again and with flushed cheeks beat on the table with the flat of her hands, lisping like a naughty little girl:

"All over! Got no more! Got no more!"

Then Philippe was overcome by the same mad excitement, and, pushing her down, he merrily kissed her bosom. She abandoned herself to him and clung to his shoulders with such gleeful energy that she could not remember having enjoyed herself so much for an age past. Without letting go of him she said caressingly:

"I say, dearie, you ought certainly to bring me ten louis tomorrow. It's a bore, but there's the baker's bill worrying me awfully."

He had grown pale. Then imprinting a final kiss on her forehead, he said simply:

"I'll try."

Silence reigned. She was dressing, and he stood pressing his forehead against the windowpanes. A minute passed, and he returned to her and deliberately continued:

"Nana, you ought to marry me."

This notion straightway so tickled the young woman that she was unable to finish tying on her petticoats.

"My poor pet, you're ill! D'you offer me your hand because I ask you for ten louis? No, never! I'm too fond of you. Good gracious, what a silly question!"

And as Zoe entered in order to put her boots on, they ceased talking of the matter. The lady's maid at once espied the presents lying broken in pieces on the table. She asked if she should put these things away, and, Madame having bidden her get rid of them, she carried the whole collection off in the folds of her dress. In the kitchen a sorting-out process began, and Madame's debris were shared among the servants.

That day Georges had slipped into the house despite Nana's orders to the contrary. Francois had certainly seen him pass, but the servants had now got to laugh among themselves at their good lady's embarrassing situations. He had just slipped as far as the little drawing room when his brother's voice stopped him, and, as one powerless to tear himself from the door, he overheard everything that went on within, the kisses, the offer of marriage. A feeling of horror froze him, and he went away in a state bordering on imbecility, feeling as though there were a great void in his brain. It was only in his own room above his mother's flat in the Rue Richelieu that his heart broke in a storm of furious sobs. This time there could be no doubt about the state of things; a horrible picture of Nana in Philippe's arms kept rising before his mind's eye. It struck him in the light of an incest. When he fancied himself calm again the remembrance of it all would return, and in fresh access of raging jealousy he would throw himself on the bed, biting the coverlet, shouting infamous accusations which maddened him the more. Thus the day passed. In order to stay shut up in his room he spoke of having a sick headache. But the night proved more terrible still; a murder fever shook him amid continual nightmares. Had his brother lived in the house, he would have gone and killed him with the stab of a knife. When day returned he tried to reason things out. It was he who ought to die, and he determined to throw himself out of the window when an omnibus was passing. Nevertheless, he went out toward ten o'clock and traversed Paris, wandered up and down on the bridges and at the last moment felt an unconquerable desire to see Nana once more. With one word, perhaps, she would save him. And three o'clock was striking when he entered the house in the Avenue de Villiers.

Toward noon a frightful piece of news had simply crushed Mme Hugon. Philippe had been in prison since the evening of the previous day, accused of having stolen twelve thousand francs from the chest of his regiment. For the last three months he had been withdrawing small sums therefrom in the hope of being able to repay them, while he had covered the deficit with false money. Thanks to the negligence of the administrative committee, this fraud had been constantly successful. The old lady, humbled utterly by her child's crime, had at once cried out in anger against Nana. She knew Philippe's connection with her, and her melancholy had been the result of this miserable state of things which kept her in Paris in constant dread of some final catastrophe. But she had never looked forward to such shame as this, and now she blamed herself for refusing him money, as though such refusal had made her accessory to his act. She sank down on an armchair; her legs were seized with paralysis, and she felt herself to be useless, incapable of action and destined to stay where she was till she died. But the sudden thought of Georges comforted her. Georges was still left her; he would be able to act, perhaps to save them. Thereupon, without seeking aid of anyone else—for she wished to keep these matters shrouded in the bosom of her family—she dragged herself up to the next story, her mind possessed by the idea that she still had someone to love about her. But upstairs she found an empty room. The porter told her that M. Georges had gone out at an early hour. The room was haunted by the ghost of yet another calamity; the bed with its gnawed bedclothes bore witness to someone's anguish, and a chair which lay amid a heap of clothes on the ground looked like something dead. Georges must be at that woman's house, and so with dry eyes and feet that had regained their strength Mme Hugon went downstairs. She wanted her sons; she was starting to reclaim them.

Since morning Nana had been much worried. First of all it was the baker, who at nine o'clock had turned up, bill in hand. It was a wretched story. He had supplied her with bread to the amount of a hundred and thirty-three francs, and despite her royal housekeeping she could not pay it. In his irritation at being put off he had presented himself a score of times since the day he had refused further credit, and the servants were now espousing his cause. Francois kept saying that Madame would never pay him unless he made a fine scene; Charles talked of going upstairs, too, in order to get an old unpaid straw bill settled, while Victorine advised them to wait till some gentleman was with her, when they would get the money out of her by suddenly asking for it in the middle of conversation. The kitchen was in a savage mood: the tradesmen were all kept posted in the course events were taking, and there were gossiping consultations, lasting three or four hours on a stretch, during which Madame was stripped, plucked and talked over with the wrathful eagerness peculiar to an idle, overprosperous servants' hall. Julien, the house steward, alone pretended to defend his mistress. She was quite the thing, whatever they might say! And when the others accused him of sleeping with her he laughed fatuously, thereby driving the cook to distraction, for she would have liked to be a man in order to "spit on such women's backsides," so utterly would they have disgusted her. Francois, without informing Madame of it, had wickedly posted the baker in the hall, and when she came downstairs at lunch time she found herself face to face with him. Taking the bill, she told him to return toward three o'clock, whereupon, with many foul expressions, he departed, vowing that he would have things properly settled and get his money by hook or by crook.

Nana made a very bad lunch, for the scene had annoyed her. Next time the man would have to be definitely got rid of. A dozen times she had put his money aside for him, but it had as constantly melted away, sometimes in the purchase of flowers, at others in the shape of a subscription got up for the benefit of an old gendarme. Besides, she was counting on Philippe and was astonished not to see him make his appearance with his two hundred francs. It was regular bad luck, seeing that the day before yesterday she had again given Satin an outfit, a perfect trousseau this time, some twelve hundred francs' worth of dresses and linen, and now she had not a louis remaining.

Toward two o'clock, when Nana was beginning to be anxious, Labordette presented himself. He brought with him the designs for the bed, and this caused a diversion, a joyful interlude which made the young woman forget all her troubles. She clapped her hands and danced about. After which, her heart bursting wish curiosity, she leaned over a table in the drawing room and examined the designs, which Labordette proceeded to explain to her.

"You see," he said, "this is the body of the bed. In the middle here there's a bunch of roses in full bloom, and then comes a garland of buds and flowers. The leaves are to be in yellow and the roses in red-gold. And here's the grand design for the bed's head; Cupids dancing in a ring on a silver trelliswork."

But Nana interrupted him, for she was beside herself with ecstasy.

"Oh, how funny that little one is, that one in the corner, with his behind in the air! Isn't he now? And what a sly laugh! They've all got such dirty, wicked eyes! You know, dear boy, I shall never dare play any silly tricks before THEM!"

Her pride was flattered beyond measure. The goldsmiths had declared that no queen anywhere slept in such a bed. However, a difficulty presented itself. Labordette showed her two designs for the footboard, one of which reproduced the pattern on the sides, while the other, a subject by itself, represented Night wrapped in her veil and discovered by a faun in all her splendid nudity. He added that if she chose this last subject the goldsmiths intended making Night in her own likeness. This idea, the taste of which was rather risky, made her grow white with pleasure, and she pictured herself as a silver statuette, symbolic of the warm, voluptuous delights of darkness.

"Of course you will only sit for the head and shoulders," said Labordette.

She looked quietly at him.

"Why? The moment a work of art's in question I don't mind the sculptor that takes my likeness a blooming bit!"

Of course it must be understood that she was choosing the subject. But at this he interposed.

"Wait a moment; it's six thousand francs extra."

"It's all the same to me, by Jove!" she cried, bursting into a laugh. "Hasn't my little rough got the rhino?"

Nowadays among her intimates she always spoke thus of Count Muffat, and the gentlemen had ceased to inquire after him otherwise.

"Did you see your little rough last night?" they used to say.

"Dear me, I expected to find the little rough here!"

It was a simple familiarity enough, which, nevertheless, she did not as yet venture on in his presence.

Labordette began rolling up the designs as he gave the final explanations. The goldsmiths, he said, were undertaking to deliver the bed in two months' time, toward the twenty-fifth of December, and next week a sculptor would come to make a model for the Night. As she accompanied him to the door Nana remembered the baker and briskly inquired:

"By the by, you wouldn't be having ten louis about you?"

Labordette made it a solemn rule, which stood him in good stead, never to lend women money. He used always to make the same reply.

"No, my girl, I'm short. But would you like me to go to your little rough?"

She refused; it was useless. Two days before she had succeeded in getting five thousand francs out of the count. However, she soon regretted her discreet conduct, for the moment Labordette had gone the baker reappeared, though it was barely half-past two, and with many loud oaths roughly settled himself on a bench in the hall. The young woman listened to him from the first floor. She was pale, and it caused her especial pain to hear the servants' secret rejoicings swelling up louder and louder till they even reached her ears. Down in the kitchen they were dying of laughter. The coachman was staring across from the other side of the court; Francois was crossing the hall without any apparent reason. Then he hurried off to report progress, after sneering knowingly at the baker. They didn't care a damn for Madame; the walls were echoing to their laughter, and she felt that she was deserted on all hands and despised by the servants' hall, the inmates of which were watching her every movement and liberally bespattering her with the filthiest of chaff. Thereupon she abandoned the intention of borrowing the hundred and thirty-three francs from Zoe; she already owed the maid money, and she was too proud to risk a refusal now. Such a burst of feeling stirred her that she went back into her room, loudly remarking:

"Come, come, my girl, don't count on anyone but yourself. Your body's your own property, and it's better to make use of it than to let yourself be insulted."

And without even summoning Zoe she dressed herself with feverish haste in order to run round to the Tricon's. In hours of great embarrassment this was her last resource. Much sought after and constantly solicited by the old lady, she would refuse or resign herself according to her needs, and on these increasingly frequent occasions when both ends would not meet in her royally conducted establishment, she was sure to find twenty-five louis awaiting her at the other's house. She used to betake herself to the Tricon's with the ease born of use, just as the poor go to the pawnshop.

But as she left her own chamber Nana came suddenly upon Georges standing in the middle of the drawing room. Not noticing his waxen pallor and the somber fire in his wide eyes, she gave a sigh of relief.

"Ah, you've come from your brother."

"No," said the lad, growing yet paler.

At this she gave a despairing shrug. What did he want? Why was he barring her way? She was in a hurry—yes, she was. Then returning to where he stood:

"You've no money, have you?"

"No."

"That's true. How silly of me! Never a stiver; not even their omnibus fares Mamma doesn't wish it! Oh, what a set of men!"

And she escaped. But he held her back; he wanted to speak to her. She was fairly under way and again declared she had no time, but he stopped her with a word.

"Listen, I know you're going to marry my brother."

Gracious! The thing was too funny! And she let herself down into a chair in order to laugh at her ease.

"Yes," continued the lad, "and I don't wish it. It's I you're going to marry. That's why I've come."

"Eh, what? You too?" she cried. "Why, it's a family disease, is it? No, never! What a fancy, to be sure! Have I ever asked you to do anything so nasty? Neither one nor t'other of you! No, never!"

The lad's face brightened. Perhaps he had been deceiving himself! He continued:

"Then swear to me that you don't go to bed with my brother."

"Oh, you're beginning to bore me now!" said Nana, who had risen with renewed impatience. "It's amusing for a little while, but when I tell you I'm in a hurry—I go to bed with your brother if it pleases me. Are you keeping me—are you paymaster here that you insist on my making a report? Yes, I go to bed with your brother."

He had caught hold of her arm and squeezed it hard enough to break it as he stuttered:

"Don't say that! Don't say that!"

With a slight blow she disengaged herself from his grasp.

"He's maltreating me now! Here's a young ruffian for you! My chicken, you'll leave this jolly sharp. I used to keep you about out of niceness. Yes, I did! You may stare! Did you think I was going to be your mamma till I died? I've got better things to do than to bring up brats."

He listened to her stark with anguish, yet in utter submission. Her every word cut him to the heart so sharply that he felt he should die. She did not so much as notice his suffering and continued delightedly to revenge herself on him for the annoyance of the morning.

"It's like your brother; he's another pretty Johnny, he is! He promised me two hundred francs. Oh, dear me; yes, I can wait for 'em. It isn't his money I care for! I've not got enough to pay for hair oil. Yes, he's leaving me in a jolly fix! Look here, d'you want to know how matters stand? Here goes then: it's all owing to your brother that I'm going out to earn twenty-five louis with another man."

At these words his head spun, and he barred her egress. He cried; he besought her not to go, clasping his hands together and blurting out:

"Oh no! Oh no!"

"I want to, I do," she said. "Have you the money?"

No, he had not got the money. He would have given his life to have the money! Never before had he felt so miserable, so useless, so very childish. All his wretched being was shaken with weeping and gave proof of such heavy suffering that at last she noticed it and grew kind. She pushed him away softly.

"Come, my pet, let me pass; I must. Be reasonable. You're a baby boy, and it was very nice for a week, but nowadays I must look after my own affairs. Just think it over a bit. Now your brother's a man; what I'm saying doesn't apply to him. Oh, please do me a favor; it's no good telling him all this. He needn't know where I'm going. I always let out too much when I'm in a rage."

She began laughing. Then taking him in her arms and kissing him on the forehead:

"Good-by, baby," she said; "it's over, quite over between us; d'you understand? And now I'm off!"

And she left him, and he stood in the middle of the drawing room. Her last words rang like the knell of a tocsin in his ears: "It's over, quite over!" And he thought the ground was opening beneath his feet. There was a void in his brain from which the man awaiting Nana had disappeared. Philippe alone remained there in the young woman's bare embrace forever and ever. She did not deny it: she loved him, since she wanted to spare him the pain of her infidelity. It was over, quite over. He breathed heavily and gazed round the room, suffocating beneath a crushing weight. Memories kept recurring to him one after the other—memories of merry nights at La Mignotte, of amorous hours during which he had fancied himself her child, of pleasures stolen in this very room. And now these things would never, never recur! He was too small; he had not grown up quickly enough; Philippe was supplanting him because he was a bearded man. So then this was the end; he could not go on living. His vicious passion had become transformed into an infinite tenderness, a sensual adoration, in which his whole being was merged. Then, too, how was he to forget it all if his brother remained—his brother, blood of his blood, a second self, whose enjoyment drove him mad with jealousy? It was the end of all things; he wanted to die.

All the doors remained open, as the servants noisily scattered over the house after seeing Madame make her exit on foot. Downstairs on the bench in the hall the baker was laughing with Charles and Francois. Zoe came running across the drawing room and seemed surprised at sight of Georges. She asked him if he were waiting for Madame. Yes, he was waiting for her; he had for-gotten to give her an answer to a question. And when he was alone he set to work and searched. Finding nothing else to suit his purpose, he took up in the dressing room a pair of very sharply pointed scissors with which Nana had a mania for ceaselessly trimming herself, either by polishing her skin or cutting off little hairs. Then for a whole hour he waited patiently, his hand in his pocket and his fingers tightly clasped round the scissors.

"Here's Madame," said Zoe, returning. She must have espied her through the bedroom window.

There was a sound of people racing through the house, and laughter died away and doors were shut. Georges heard Nana paying the baker and speaking in the curtest way. Then she came upstairs.

"What, you're here still!" she said as she noticed him. "Aha! We're going to grow angry, my good man!"

He followed her as she walked toward her bedroom.

"Nana, will you marry me?"

She shrugged her shoulders. It was too stupid; she refused to answer any more and conceived the idea of slamming the door in his face.

"Nana, will you marry me?"

She slammed the door. He opened it with one hand while he brought the other and the scissors out of his pocket. And with one great stab he simply buried them in his breast.

Nana, meanwhile, had felt conscious that something dreadful would happen, and she had turned round. When she saw him stab himself she was seized with indignation.

"Oh, what a fool he is! What a fool! And with my scissors! Will you leave off, you naughty little rogue? Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"

She was scared. Sinking on his knees, the boy had just given himself a second stab, which sent him down at full length on the carpet. He blocked the threshold of the bedroom. With that Nana lost her head utterly and screamed with all her might, for she dared not step over his body, which shut her in and prevented her from running to seek assistance.

"Zoe! Zoe! Come at once. Make him leave off. It's getting stupid—a child like that! He's killing himself now! And in my place too! Did you ever see the like of it?"

He was frightening her. He was all white, and his eyes were shut. There was scarcely any bleeding—only a little blood, a tiny stain which was oozing down into his waistcoat. She was making up her mind to step over the body when an apparition sent her starting back. An old lady was advancing through the drawing-room door, which remained wide open opposite. And in her terror she recognized Mme Hugon but could not explain her presence. Still wearing her gloves and hat, Nana kept edging backward, and her terror grew so great that she sought to defend herself, and in a shaky voice:

"Madame," she cried, "it isn't I; I swear to you it isn't. He wanted to marry me, and I said no, and he's killed himself!"

Slowly Mme Hugon drew near—she was in black, and her face showed pale under her white hair. In the carriage, as she drove thither, the thought of Georges had vanished and that of Philippe's misdoing had again taken complete possession of her. It might be that this woman could afford explanations to the judges which would touch them, and so she conceived the project of begging her to bear witness in her son's favor. Downstairs the doors of the house stood open, but as she mounted to the first floor her sick feet failed her, and she was hesitating as to which way to go when suddenly horror-stricken cries directed her. Then upstairs she found a man lying on the floor with bloodstained shirt. It was Georges—it was her other child.

Nana, in idiotic tones, kept saying:

"He wanted to marry me, and I said no, and he's killed himself."

Uttering no cry, Mme Hugon stooped down. Yes, it was the other one; it was Georges. The one was brought to dishonor, the other murdered! It caused her no surprise, for her whole life was ruined. Kneeling on the carpet, utterly forgetting where she was, noticing no one else, she gazed fixedly at her boy's face and listened with her hand on his heart. Then she gave a feeble sigh—she had felt the heart beating. And with that she lifted her head and scrutinized the room and the woman and seemed to remember. A fire glowed forth in her vacant eyes, and she looked so great and terrible in her silence that Nana trembled as she continued to defend herself above the body that divided them.

"I swear it, madame! If his brother were here he could explain it to you."

"His brother has robbed—he is in prison," said the mother in a hard voice.

Nana felt a choking sensation. Why, what was the reason of it all? The other had turned thief now! They were mad in that family! She ceased struggling in self-defense; she seemed no longer mistress in her own house and allowed Mme Hugon to give what orders she liked. The servants had at last hurried up, and the old lady insisted on their carrying the fainting Georges down to her carriage. She preferred killing him rather than letting him remain in that house. With an air of stupefaction Nana watched the retreating servants as they supported poor, dear Zizi by his legs and shoulders. The mother walked behind them in a state of collapse; she supported herself against the furniture; she felt as if all she held dear had vanished in the void. On the landing a sob escaped her; she turned and twice ejaculated:

"Oh, but you've done us infinite harm! You've done us infinite harm!"

That was all. In her stupefaction Nana had sat down; she still wore her gloves and her hat. The house once more lapsed into heavy silence; the carriage had driven away, and she sat motionless, not knowing what to do next, her head swimming after all she had gone through. A quarter of an hour later Count Muffat found her thus, but at sight of him she relieved her feelings in an overflowing current of talk. She told him all about the sad incident, repeated the same details twenty times over, picked up the bloodstained scissors in order to imitate Zizi's gesture when he stabbed himself. And above all she nursed the idea of proving her own innocence.

"Look you here, dearie, is it my fault? If you were the judge would you condemn me? I certainly didn't tell Philippe to meddle with the till any more than I urged that wretched boy to kill himself. I've been most unfortunate throughout it all. They come and do stupid things in my place; they make me miserable; they treat me like a hussy."

And she burst into tears. A fit of nervous expansiveness rendered her soft and doleful, and her immense distress melted her utterly.

"And you, too, look as if you weren't satisfied. Now do just ask Zoe if I'm at all mixed up in it. Zoe, do speak: explain to Monsieur—"

The lady's maid, having brought a towel and a basin of water out of the dressing room, had for some moments past been rubbing the carpet in order to remove the bloodstains before they dried.

"Oh, monsieur," she declared, "Madame is utterly miserable!"

Muffat was still stupefied; the tragedy had frozen him, and his imagination was full of the mother weeping for her sons. He knew her greatness of heart and pictured her in her widow's weeds, withering solitarily away at Les Fondettes. But Nana grew ever more despondent, for now the memory of Zizi lying stretched on the floor, with a red hole in his shirt, almost drove her senseless.

"He used to be such a darling, so sweet and caressing. Oh, you know, my pet—I'm sorry if it vexes you—I loved that baby! I can't help saying so; the words must out. Besides, now it ought not to hurt you at all. He's gone. You've got what you wanted; you're quite certain never to surprise us again."

And this last reflection tortured her with such regret that he ended by turning comforter. Well, well, he said, she ought to be brave; she was quite right; it wasn't her fault! But she checked her lamentations of her own accord in order to say:

"Listen, you must run round and bring me news of him. At once! I wish it!"

He took his hat and went to get news of Georges. When he returned after some three quarters of an hour he saw Nana leaning anxiously out of a window, and he shouted up to her from the pavement that the lad was not dead and that they even hoped to bring him through. At this she immediately exchanged grief for excess of joy and began to sing and dance and vote existence delightful. Zoe, meanwhile, was still dissatisfied with her washing. She kept looking at the stain, and every time she passed it she repeated:

"You know it's not gone yet, madame."

As a matter of fact, the pale red stain kept reappearing on one of the white roses in the carpet pattern. It was as though, on the very threshold of the room, a splash of blood were barring the doorway.

"Bah!" said the joyous Nana. "That'll be rubbed out under people's feet."

After the following day Count Muffat had likewise forgotten the incident. For a moment or two, when in the cab which drove him to the Rue Richelieu, he had busily sworn never to return to that woman's house. Heaven was warning him; the misfortunes of Philippe and Georges were, he opined, prophetic of his proper ruin. But neither the sight of Mme Hugon in tears nor that of the boy burning with fever had been strong enough to make him keep his vow, and the short-lived horror of the situation had only left behind it a sense of secret delight at the thought that he was now well quit of a rival, the charm of whose youth had always exasperated him. His passion had by this time grown exclusive; it was, indeed, the passion of a man who has had no youth. He loved Nana as one who yearned to be her sole possessor, to listen to her, to touch her, to be breathed on by her. His was now a supersensual tenderness, verging on pure sentiment; it was an anxious affection and as such was jealous of the past and apt at times to dream of a day of redemption and pardon received, when both should kneel before God the Father. Every day religion kept regaining its influence over him. He again became a practicing Christian; he confessed himself and communicated, while a ceaseless struggle raged within him, and remorse redoubled the joys of sin and of repentance. Afterward, when his director gave him leave to spend his passion, he had made a habit of this daily perdition and would redeem the same by ecstasies of faith, which were full of pious humility. Very naively he offered heaven, by way of expiatory anguish, the abominable torment from which he was suffering. This torment grew and increased, and he would climb his Calvary with the deep and solemn feelings of a believer, though steeped in a harlot's fierce sensuality. That which made his agony most poignant was this woman's continued faithlessness. He could not share her with others, nor did he understand her imbecile caprices. Undying, unchanging love was what he wished for. However, she had sworn, and he paid her as having done so. But he felt that she was untruthful, incapable of common fidelity, apt to yield to friends, to stray passers-by, like a good-natured animal, born to live minus a shift.

One morning when he saw Foucarmont emerging from her bedroom at an unusual hour, he made a scene about it. But in her weariness of his jealousy she grew angry directly. On several occasions ere that she had behaved rather prettily. Thus the evening when he surprised her with Georges she was the first to regain her temper and to confess herself in the wrong. She had loaded him with caresses and dosed him with soft speeches in order to make him swallow the business. But he had ended by boring her to death with his obstinate refusals to understand the feminine nature, and now she was brutal.

"Very well, yes! I've slept with Foucarmont. What then? That's flattened you out a bit, my little rough, hasn't it?"

It was the first time she had thrown "my little rough" in his teeth. The frank directness of her avowal took his breath away, and when he began clenching his fists she marched up to him and looked him full in the face.

"We've had enough of this, eh? If it doesn't suit you you'll do me the pleasure of leaving the house. I don't want you to go yelling in my place. Just you get it into your noodle that I mean to be quite free. When a man pleases me I go to bed with him. Yes, I do—that's my way! And you must make up your mind directly. Yes or no! If it's no, out you may walk!"

She had gone and opened the door, but he did not leave. That was her way now of binding him more closely to her. For no reason whatever, at the slightest approach to a quarrel she would tell him he might stop or go as he liked, and she would accompany her permission with a flood of odious reflections. She said she could always find better than he; she had only too many from whom to choose; men in any quantity could be picked up in the street, and men a good deal smarter, too, whose blood boiled in their veins. At this he would hang his head and wait for those gentler moods when she wanted money. She would then become affectionate, and he would forget it all, one night of tender dalliance making up for the tortures of a whole week. His reconciliation with his wife had rendered his home unbearable. Fauchery, having again fallen under Rose's dominion, the countess was running madly after other loves. She was entering on the forties, that restless, feverish time in the life of women, and ever hysterically nervous, she now filled her mansion with the maddening whirl of her fashionable life. Estelle, since her marriage, had seen nothing of her father; the undeveloped, insignificant girl had suddenly become a woman of iron will, so imperious withal that Daguenet trembled in her presence. In these days he accompanied her to mass: he was converted, and he raged against his father-in-law for ruining them with a courtesan. M. Venot alone still remained kindly inclined toward the count, for he was biding his time. He had even succeeded in getting into Nana's immediate circle. In fact, he frequented both houses, where you encountered his continual smile behind doors. So Muffat, wretched at home, driven out by ennui and shame, still preferred to live in the Avenue de Villiers, even though he was abused there.

Soon there was but one question between Nana and the count, and that was "money." One day after having formally promised her ten thousand francs he had dared keep his appointment empty handed. For two days past she had been surfeiting him with love, and such a breach of faith, such a waste of caresses, made her ragingly abusive. She was white with fury.

"So you've not got the money, eh? Then go back where you came from, my little rough, and look sharp about it! There's a bloody fool for you! He wanted to kiss me again! Mark my words—no money, no nothing!"

He explained matters; he would be sure to have the money the day after tomorrow. But she interrupted him violently:

"And my bills! They'll sell me up while Monsieur's playing the fool. Now then, look at yourself. D'ye think I love you for your figure? A man with a mug like yours has to pay the women who are kind enough to put up with him. By God, if you don't bring me that ten thousand francs tonight you shan't even have the tip of my little finger to suck. I mean it! I shall send you back to your wife!"

At night he brought the ten thousand francs. Nana put up her lips, and he took a long kiss which consoled him for the whole day of anguish. What annoyed the young woman was to have him continually tied to her apron strings. She complained to M. Venot, begging him to take her little rough off to the countess. Was their reconciliation good for nothing then? She was sorry she had mixed herself up in it, since despite everything he was always at her heels. On the days when, out of anger, she forgot her own interest, she swore to play him such a dirty trick that he would never again be able to set foot in her place. But when she slapped her leg and yelled at him she might quite as well have spat in his face too: he would still have stayed and even thanked her. Then the rows about money matters kept continually recurring. She demanded money savagely; she rowed him over wretched little amounts; she was odiously stingy with every minute of her time; she kept fiercely informing him that she slept with him for his money, not for any other reasons, and that she did not enjoy it a bit, that, in fact, she loved another and was awfully unfortunate in needing an idiot of his sort! They did not even want him at court now, and there was some talk of requiring him to send in his resignation. The empress had said, "He is too disgusting." It was true enough. So Nana repeated the phrase by way of closure to all their quarrels.

"Look here! You disgust me!"

Nowadays she no longer minded her ps and qs; she had regained the most perfect freedom.

Every day she did her round of the lake, beginning acquaintanceships which ended elsewhere. Here was the happy hunting ground par excellence, where courtesans of the first water spread their nets in open daylight and flaunted themselves amid the tolerating smiles and brilliant luxury of Paris. Duchesses pointed her out to one another with a passing look—rich shopkeepers' wives copied the fashion of her hats. Sometimes her landau, in its haste to get by, stopped a file of puissant turnouts, wherein sat plutocrats able to buy up all Europe or Cabinet ministers with plump fingers tight-pressed to the throat of France. She belonged to this Bois society, occupied a prominent place in it, was known in every capital and asked about by every foreigner. The splendors of this crowd were enhanced by the madness of her profligacy as though it were the very crown, the darling passion, of the nation. Then there were unions of a night, continual passages of desire, which she lost count of the morning after, and these sent her touring through the grand restaurants and on fine days, as often as not, to "Madrid." The staffs of all the embassies visited her, and she, Lucy Stewart, Caroline Hequet and Maria Blond would dine in the society of gentlemen who murdered the French language and paid to be amused, engaging them by the evening with orders to be funny and yet proving so blase and so worn out that they never even touched them. This the ladies called "going on a spree," and they would return home happy at having been despised and would finish the night in the arms of the lovers of their choice.

When she did not actually throw the men at his head Count Muffat pretended not to know about all this. However, he suffered not a little from the lesser indignities of their daily life. The mansion in the Avenue de Villiers was becoming a hell, a house full of mad people, in which every hour of the day wild disorders led to hateful complications. Nana even fought with her servants. One moment she would be very nice with Charles, the coachman. When she stopped at a restaurant she would send him out beer by the waiter and would talk with him from the inside of her carriage when he slanged the cabbies at a block in the traffic, for then he struck her as funny and cheered her up. Then the next moment she called him a fool for no earthly reason. She was always squabbling over the straw, the bran or the oats; in spite of her love for animals she thought her horses ate too much. Accordingly one day when she was settling up she accused the man of robbing her. At this Charles got in a rage and called her a whore right out; his horses, he said, were distinctly better than she was, for they did not sleep with everybody. She answered him in the same strain, and the count had to separate them and give the coachman the sack. This was the beginning of a rebellion among the servants. When her diamonds had been stolen Victorine and Francois left. Julien himself disappeared, and the tale ran that the master had given him a big bribe and had begged him to go, because he slept with the mistress. Every week there were new faces in the servants' hall. Never was there such a mess; the house was like a passage down which the scum of the registry offices galloped, destroying everything in their path. Zoe alone kept her place; she always looked clean, and her only anxiety was how to organize this riot until she had got enough together to set up on her own account in fulfillment of a plan she had been hatching for some time past.

These, again, were only the anxieties he could own to. The count put up with the stupidity of Mme Maloir, playing bezique with her in spite of her musty smell. He put up with Mme Lerat and her encumbrances, with Louiset and the mournful complaints peculiar to a child who is being eaten up with the rottenness inherited from some unknown father. But he spent hours worse than these. One evening he had heard Nana angrily telling her maid that a man pretending to be rich had just swindled her—a handsome man calling himself an American and owning gold mines in his own country, a beast who had gone off while she was asleep without giving her a copper and had even taken a packet of cigarette papers with him. The count had turned very pale and had gone downstairs again on tiptoe so as not to hear more. But later he had to hear all. Nana, having been smitten with a baritone in a music hall and having been thrown over by him, wanted to commit suicide during a fit of sentimental melancholia. She swallowed a glass of water in which she had soaked a box of matches. This made her terribly sick but did not kill her. The count had to nurse her and to listen to the whole story of her passion, her tearful protests and her oaths never to take to any man again. In her contempt for those swine, as she called them, she could not, however, keep her heart free, for she always had some sweetheart round her, and her exhausted body inclined to incomprehensible fancies and perverse tastes. As Zoe designedly relaxed her efforts the service of the house had got to such a pitch that Muffat did not dare to push open a door, to pull a curtain or to unclose a cupboard. The bells did not ring; men lounged about everywhere and at every moment knocked up against one another. He had now to cough before entering a room, having almost caught the girl hanging round Francis' neck one evening that he had just gone out of the dressing room for two minutes to tell the coachman to put the horses to, while her hairdresser was finishing her hair. She gave herself up suddenly behind his back; she took her pleasure in every corner, quickly, with the first man she met. Whether she was in her chemise or in full dress did not matter. She would come back to the count red all over, happy at having cheated him. As for him, he was plagued to death; it was an abominable infliction!

In his jealous anguish the unhappy man was comparatively at peace when he left Nana and Satin alone together. He would have willingly urged her on to this vice, to keep the men off her. But all was spoiled in this direction too. Nana deceived Satin as she deceived the count, going mad over some monstrous fancy or other and picking up girls at the street corners. Coming back in her carriage, she would suddenly be taken with a little slut that she saw on the pavement; her senses would be captivated, her imagination excited. She would take the little slut in with her, pay her and send her away again. Then, disguised as a man, she would go to infamous houses and look on at scenes of debauch to while away hours of boredom. And Satin, angry at being thrown over every moment, would turn the house topsy-turvy with the most awful scenes. She had at last acquired a complete ascendancy over Nana, who now respected her. Muffat even thought of an alliance between them. When he dared not say anything he let Satin loose. Twice she had compelled her darling to take up with him again, while he showed himself obliging and effaced himself in her favor at the least sign. But this good understanding lasted no time, for Satin, too, was a little cracked. On certain days she would very nearly go mad and would smash everything, wearing herself out in tempest of love and anger, but pretty all the time. Zoe must have excited her, for the maid took her into corners as if she wanted to tell her about her great design of which she as yet spoke to no one.

At times, however, Count Muffat was still singularly revolted. He who had tolerated Satin for months, who had at last shut his eyes to the unknown herd of men that scampered so quickly through Nana's bedroom, became terribly enraged at being deceived by one of his own set or even by an acquaintance. When she confessed her relations with Foucarmont he suffered so acutely, he thought the treachery of the young man so base, that he wished to insult him and fight a duel. As he did not know where to find seconds for such an affair, he went to Labordette. The latter, astonished, could not help laughing.

"A duel about Nana? But, my dear sir, all Paris would be laughing at you. Men do not fight for Nana; it would be ridiculous."

The count grew very pale and made a violent gesture.

"Then I shall slap his face in the open street."

For an hour Labordette had to argue with him. A blow would make the affair odious; that evening everyone would know the real reason of the meeting; it would be in all the papers. And Labordette always finished with the same expression:

"It is impossible; it would be ridiculous."

Each time Muffat heard these words they seemed sharp and keen as a stab. He could not even fight for the woman he loved; people would have burst out laughing. Never before had he felt more bitterly the misery of his love, the contrast between his heavy heart and the absurdity of this life of pleasure in which it was now lost. This was his last rebellion; he allowed Labordette to convince him, and he was present afterward at the procession of his friends, who lived there as if at home.

Nana in a few months finished them up greedily, one after the other. The growing needs entailed by her luxurious way of life only added fuel to her desires, and she finished a man up at one mouthful. First she had Foucarmont, who did not last a fortnight. He was thinking of leaving the navy, having saved about thirty thousand francs in his ten years of service, which he wished to invest in the United States. His instincts, which were prudential, even miserly, were conquered; he gave her everything, even his signature to notes of hand, which pledged his future. When Nana had done with him he was penniless. But then she proved very kind; she advised him to return to his ship. What was the good of getting angry? Since he had no money their relations were no longer possible. He ought to understand that and to be reasonable. A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to rot on the ground by himself.

Then Nana took up with Steiner without disgust but without love. She called him a dirty Jew; she seemed to be paying back an old grudge, of which she had no distinct recollection. He was fat; he was stupid, and she got him down and took two bites at a time in order the quicker to do for this Prussian. As for him, he had thrown Simonne over. His Bosphorous scheme was getting shaky, and Nana hastened the downfall by wild expenses. For a month he struggled on, doing miracles of finance. He filled Europe with posters, advertisements and prospectuses of a colossal scheme and obtained money from the most distant climes. All these savings, the pounds of speculators and the pence of the poor, were swallowed up in the Avenue de Villiers. Again he was partner in an ironworks in Alsace, where in a small provincial town workmen, blackened with coal dust and soaked with sweat, day and night strained their sinews and heard their bones crack to satisfy Nana's pleasures. Like a huge fire she devoured all the fruits of stock-exchange swindling and the profits of labor. This time she did for Steiner; she brought him to the ground, sucked him dry to the core, left him so cleaned out that he was unable to invent a new roguery. When his bank failed he stammered and trembled at the idea of prosecution. His bankruptcy had just been published, and the simple mention of money flurried him and threw him into a childish embarrassment. And this was he who had played with millions. One evening at Nana's he began to cry and asked her for a loan of a hundred francs wherewith to pay his maidservant. And Nana, much affected and amused at the end of this terrible old man who had squeezed Paris for twenty years, brought it to him and said:

"I say, I'm giving it you because it seems so funny! But listen to me, my boy, you are too old for me to keep. You must find something else to do."

Then Nana started on La Faloise at once. He had for some time been longing for the honor of being ruined by her in order to put the finishing stroke on his smartness. He needed a woman to launch him properly; it was the one thing still lacking. In two months all Paris would be talking of him, and he would see his name in the papers. Six weeks were enough. His inheritance was in landed estate, houses, fields, woods and farms. He had to sell all, one after the other, as quickly as he could. At every mouthful Nana swallowed an acre. The foliage trembling in the sunshine, the wide fields of ripe grain, the vineyards so golden in September, the tall grass in which the cows stood knee-deep, all passed through her hands as if engulfed by an abyss. Even fishing rights, a stone quarry and three mills disappeared. Nana passed over them like an invading army or one of those swarms of locusts whose flight scours a whole province. The ground was burned up where her little foot had rested. Farm by farm, field by field, she ate up the man's patrimony very prettily and quite inattentively, just as she would have eaten a box of sweet-meats flung into her lap between mealtimes. There was no harm in it all; they were only sweets! But at last one evening there only remained a single little wood. She swallowed it up disdainfully, as it was hardly worth the trouble opening one's mouth for. La Faloise laughed idiotically and sucked the top of his stick. His debts were crushing him; he was not worth a hundred francs a year, and he saw that he would be compelled to go back into the country and live with his maniacal uncle. But that did not matter; he had achieved smartness; the Figaro had printed his name twice. And with his meager neck sticking up between the turndown points of his collar and his figure squeezed into all too short a coat, he would swagger about, uttering his parrotlike exclamations and affecting a solemn listlessness suggestive of an emotionless marionette. He so annoyed Nana that she ended by beating him.

Meanwhile Fauchery had returned, his cousin having brought him. Poor Fauchery had now set up housekeeping. After having thrown over the countess he had fallen into Rose's hands, and she treated him as a lawful wife would have done. Mignon was simply Madame's major-domo. Installed as master of the house, the journalist lied to Rose and took all sorts of precautions when he deceived her. He was as scrupulous as a good husband, for he really wanted to settle down at last. Nana's triumph consisted in possessing and in ruining a newspaper that he had started with a friend's capital. She did not proclaim her triumph; on the contrary, she delighted in treating him as a man who had to be circumspect, and when she spoke of Rose it was as "poor Rose." The newspaper kept her in flowers for two months. She took all the provincial subscriptions; in fact, she took everything, from the column of news and gossip down to the dramatic notes. Then the editorial staff having been turned topsy-turvy and the management completely disorganized, she satisfied a fanciful caprice and had a winter garden constructed in a corner of her house: that carried off all the type. But then it was no joke after all! When in his delight at the whole business Mignon came to see if he could not saddle Fauchery on her altogether, she asked him if he took her for a fool. A penniless fellow living by his articles and his plays—not if she knew it! That sort of foolishness might be all very well for a clever woman like her poor, dear Rose! She grew distrustful: she feared some treachery on Mignon's part, for he was quite capable of preaching to his wife, and so she gave Fauchery his CONGE as he now only paid her in fame.

But she always recollected him kindly. They had both enjoyed themselves so much at the expense of that fool of a La Faloise! They would never have thought of seeing each other again if the delight of fooling such a perfect idiot had not egged them on! It seemed an awfully good joke to kiss each other under his very nose. They cut a regular dash with his coin; they would send him off full speed to the other end of Paris in order to be alone and then when he came back, they would crack jokes and make allusions he could not understand. One day, urged by the journalist, she bet that she would smack his face, and that she did the very same evening and went on to harder blows, for she thought it a good joke and was glad of the opportunity of showing how cowardly men were. She called him her "slapjack" and would tell him to come and have his smack! The smacks made her hands red, for as yet she was not up to the trick. La Faloise laughed in his idiotic, languid way, though his eyes were full of tears. He was delighted at such familiarity; he thought it simply stunning.

One night when he had received sundry cuffs and was greatly excited:

"Now, d'you know," he said, "you ought to marry me. We should be as jolly as grigs together, eh?"

This was no empty suggestion. Seized with a desire to astonish Paris, he had been slyly projecting this marriage. "Nana's husband! Wouldn't that sound smart, eh?" Rather a stunning apotheosis that! But Nana gave him a fine snubbing.

"Me marry you! Lovely! If such an idea had been tormenting me I should have found a husband a long time ago! And he'd have been a man worth twenty of you, my pippin! I've had a heap of proposals. Why, look here, just reckon 'em up with me: Philippe, Georges, Foucarmont, Steiner—that makes four, without counting the others you don't know. It's a chorus they all sing. I can't be nice, but they forthwith begin yelling, 'Will you marry me? Will you marry me?'"

She lashed herself up and then burst out in fine indignation:

"Oh dear, no! I don't want to! D'you think I'm built that way? Just look at me a bit! Why, I shouldn't be Nana any longer if I fastened a man on behind! And, besides, it's too foul!"

And she spat and hiccuped with disgust, as though she had seen all the dirt in the world spread out beneath her.

One evening La Faloise vanished, and a week later it became known that he was in the country with an uncle whose mania was botany. He was pasting his specimens for him and stood a chance of marrying a very plain, pious cousin. Nana shed no tears for him. She simply said to the count:

"Eh, little rough, another rival less! You're chortling today. But he was becoming serious! He wanted to marry me."

He waxed pale, and she flung her arms round his neck and hung there, laughing, while she emphasized every little cruel speech with a caress.

"You can't marry Nana! Isn't that what's fetching you, eh? When they're all bothering me with their marriages you're raging in your corner. It isn't possible; you must wait till your wife kicks the bucket. Oh, if she were only to do that, how you'd come rushing round! How you'd fling yourself on the ground and make your offer with all the grand accompaniments—sighs and tears and vows! Wouldn't it be nice, darling, eh?"

Her voice had become soft, and she was chaffing him in a ferociously wheedling manner. He was deeply moved and began blushing as he paid her back her kisses. Then she cried:

"By God, to think I should have guessed! He's thought about it; he's waiting for his wife to go off the hooks! Well, well, that's the finishing touch! Why, he's even a bigger rascal than the others!"

Muffat had resigned himself to "the others." Nowadays he was trusting to the last relics of his personal dignity in order to remain "Monsieur" among the servants and intimates of the house, the man, in fact, who because he gave most was the official lover. And his passion grew fiercer. He kept his position because he paid for it, buying even smiles at a high price. He was even robbed and he never got his money's worth, but a disease seemed to be gnawing his vitals from which he could not prevent himself suffering. Whenever he entered Nana's bedroom he was simply content to open the windows for a second or two in order to get rid of the odors the others left behind them, the essential smells of fair-haired men and dark, the smoke of cigars, of which the pungency choked him. This bedroom was becoming a veritable thoroughfare, so continually were boots wiped on its threshold. Yet never a man among them was stopped by the bloodstain barring the door. Zoe was still preoccupied by this stain; it was a simple mania with her, for she was a clean girl, and it horrified her to see it always there. Despite everything her eyes would wander in its direction, and she now never entered Madame's room without remarking:

"It's strange that don't go. All the same, plenty of folk come in this way."

Nana kept receiving the best news from Georges, who was by that time already convalescent in his mother's keeping at Les Fondettes, and she used always to make the same reply.

"Oh, hang it, time's all that's wanted. It's apt to grow paler as feet cross it."

As a matter of fact, each of the gentlemen, whether Foucarmont, Steiner, La Faloise or Fauchery, had borne away some of it on their bootsoles. And Muffat, whom the bloodstain preoccupied as much as it did Zoe, kept studying it in his own despite, as though in its gradual rosy disappearance he would read the number of men that passed. He secretly dreaded it and always stepped over it out of a vivid fear of crushing some live thing, some naked limb lying on the floor.

But in the bedroom within he would grow dizzy and intoxicated and would forget everything—the mob of men which constantly crossed it, the sign of mourning which barred its door. Outside, in the open air of the street, he would weep occasionally out of sheer shame and disgust and would vow never to enter the room again. And the moment the portiere had closed behind him he was under the old influence once more and felt his whole being melting in the damp warm air of the place, felt his flesh penetrated by a perfume, felt himself overborne by a voluptuous yearning for self-annihilation. Pious and habituated to ecstatic experiences in sumptuous chapels, he there re-encountered precisely the same mystical sensations as when he knelt under some painted window and gave way to the intoxication of organ music and incense. Woman swayed him as jealously and despotically as the God of wrath, terrifying him, granting him moments of delight, which were like spasms in their keenness, in return for hours filled with frightful, tormenting visions of hell and eternal tortures. In Nana's presence, as in church, the same stammering accents were his, the same prayers and the same fits of despair—nay, the same paroxysms of humility peculiar to an accursed creature who is crushed down in the mire from whence he has sprung. His fleshly desires, his spiritual needs, were confounded together and seemed to spring from the obscure depths of his being and to bear but one blossom on the tree of his existence. He abandoned himself to the power of love and of faith, those twin levers which move the world. And despite all the struggles of his reason this bedroom of Nana's always filled him with madness, and he would sink shuddering under the almighty dominion of sex, just as he would swoon before the vast unknown of heaven.

Then when she felt how humble he was Nana grew tyrannously triumphant. The rage for debasing things was inborn in her. It did not suffice her to destroy them; she must soil them too. Her delicate hands left abominable traces and themselves decomposed whatever they had broken. And he in his imbecile condition lent himself to this sort of sport, for he was possessed by vaguely remembered stories of saints who were devoured by vermin and in turn devoured their own excrements. When once she had him fast in her room and the doors were shut, she treated herself to a man's infamy. At first they joked together, and she would deal him light blows and impose quaint tasks on him, making him lisp like a child and repeat tags of sentences.

"Say as I do: 'tonfound it! Ickle man damn vell don't tare about it!"

He would prove so docile as to reproduce her very accent.

"'Tonfound it! Ickle man damn vell don't tare about it!"

Or again she would play bear, walking on all fours on her rugs when she had only her chemise on and turning round with a growl as though she wanted to eat him. She would even nibble his calves for the fun of the thing. Then, getting up again:

"It's your turn now; try it a bit. I bet you don't play bear like me."

It was still charming enough. As bear she amused him with her white skin and her fell of ruddy hair. He used to laugh and go down on all fours, too, and growl and bite her calves, while she ran from him with an affectation of terror.

"Are we beasts, eh?" she would end by saying. "You've no notion how ugly you are, my pet! Just think if they were to see you like that at the Tuileries!"

But ere long these little games were spoiled. It was not cruelty in her case, for she was still a good-natured girl; it was as though a passing wind of madness were blowing ever more strongly in the shut-up bedroom. A storm of lust disordered their brains, plunged them into the delirious imaginations of the flesh. The old pious terrors of their sleepless nights were now transforming themselves into a thirst for bestiality, a furious longing to walk on all fours, to growl and to bite. One day when he was playing bear she pushed him so roughly that he fell against a piece of furniture, and when she saw the lump on his forehead she burst into involuntary laughter. After that her experiments on La Faloise having whetted her appetite, she treated him like an animal, threshing him and chasing him to an accompaniment of kicks.

"Gee up! Gee up! You're a horse. Hoi! Gee up! Won't you hurry up, you dirty screw?"

At other times he was a dog. She would throw her scented handkerchief to the far end of the room, and he had to run and pick it up with his teeth, dragging himself along on hands and knees.

"Fetch it, Caesar! Look here, I'll give you what for if you don't look sharp! Well done, Caesar! Good dog! Nice old fellow! Now behave pretty!"

And he loved his abasement and delighted in being a brute beast. He longed to sink still further and would cry:

"Hit harder. On, on! I'm wild! Hit away!"

She was seized with a whim and insisted on his coming to her one night clad in his magnificent chamberlain's costume. Then how she did laugh and make fun of him when she had him there in all his glory, with the sword and the cocked hat and the white breeches and the full-bottomed coat of red cloth laced with gold and the symbolic key hanging on its left-hand skirt. This key made her especially merry and urged her to a wildly fanciful and extremely filthy discussion of it. Laughing without cease and carried away by her irreverence for pomp and by the joy of debasing him in the official dignity of his costume, she shook him, pinched him, shouted, "Oh, get along with ye, Chamberlain!" and ended by an accompaniment of swinging kicks behind. Oh, those kicks! How heartily she rained them on the Tuileries and the majesty of the imperial court, throning on high above an abject and trembling people. That's what she thought of society! That was her revenge! It was an affair of unconscious hereditary spite; it had come to her in her blood. Then when once the chamberlain was undressed and his coat lay spread on the ground she shrieked, "Jump!" And he jumped. She shrieked, "Spit!" And he spat. With a shriek she bade him walk on the gold, on the eagles, on the decorations, and he walked on them. Hi tiddly hi ti! Nothing was left; everything was going to pieces. She smashed a chamberlain just as she smashed a flask or a comfit box, and she made filth of him, reduced him to a heap of mud at a street corner.

Meanwhile the goldsmiths had failed to keep their promise, and the bed was not delivered till one day about the middle of January. Muffat was just then in Normandy, whither he had gone to sell a last stray shred of property, but Nana demanded four thousand francs forthwith. He was not due in Paris till the day after tomorrow, but when his business was once finished he hastened his return and without even paying a flying visit in the Rue Miromesnil came direct to the Avenue de Villiers. Ten o'clock was striking. As he had a key of a little door opening on the Rue Cardinet, he went up unhindered. In the drawing room upstairs Zoe, who was polishing the bronzes, stood dumfounded at sight of him, and not knowing how to stop him, she began with much circumlocution, informing him that M. Venot, looking utterly beside himself, had been searching for him since yesterday and that he had already come twice to beg her to send Monsieur to his house if Monsieur arrived at Madame's before going home. Muffat listened to her without in the least understanding the meaning of her recital; then he noticed her agitation and was seized by a sudden fit of jealousy of which he no longer believed himself capable. He threw himself against the bedroom door, for he heard the sound of laughter within. The door gave; its two flaps flew asunder, while Zoe withdrew, shrugging her shoulders. So much the worse for Madame! As Madame was bidding good-by to her wits, she might arrange matters for herself.

And on the threshold Muffat uttered a cry at the sight that was presented to his view.

"My God! My God!"

The renovated bedroom was resplendent in all its royal luxury. Silver buttons gleamed like bright stars on the tea-rose velvet of the hangings. These last were of that pink flesh tint which the skies assume on fine evenings, when Venus lights her fires on the horizon against the clear background of fading daylight. The golden cords and tassels hanging in corners and the gold lace-work surrounding the panels were like little flames of ruddy strands of loosened hair, and they half covered the wide nakedness of the room while they emphasized its pale, voluptuous tone. Then over against him there was the gold and silver bed, which shone in all the fresh splendor of its chiseled workmanship, a throne this of sufficient extent for Nana to display the outstretched glory of her naked limbs, an altar of Byzantine sumptuousness, worthy of the almighty puissance of Nana's sex, which at this very hour lay nudely displayed there in the religious immodesty befitting an idol of all men's worship. And close by, beneath the snowy reflections of her bosom and amid the triumph of the goddess, lay wallowing a shameful, decrepit thing, a comic and lamentable ruin, the Marquis de Chouard in his nightshirt.

The count had clasped his hands together and, shaken by a paroxysmal shuddering, he kept crying:

"My God! My God!"

It was for the Marquis de Chouard, then, that the golden roses flourished on the side panels, those bunches of golden roses blooming among the golden leaves; it was for him that the Cupids leaned forth with amorous, roguish laughter from their tumbling ring on the silver trelliswork. And it was for him that the faun at his feet discovered the nymph sleeping, tired with dalliance, the figure of Night copied down to the exaggerated thighs—which caused her to be recognizable of all—from Nana's renowned nudity. Cast there like the rag of something human which has been spoiled and dissolved by sixty years of debauchery, he suggested the charnelhouse amid the glory of the woman's dazzling contours. Seeing the door open, he had risen up, smitten with sudden terror as became an infirm old man. This last night of passion had rendered him imbecile; he was entering on his second childhood; and, his speech failing him, he remained in an attitude of flight, half-paralyzed, stammering, shivering, his nightshirt half up his skeleton shape, and one leg outside the clothes, a livid leg, covered with gray hair. Despite her vexation Nana could not keep from laughing.

"Do lie down! Stuff yourself into the bed," she said, pulling him back and burying him under the coverlet, as though he were some filthy thing she could not show anyone.

Then she sprang up to shut the door again. She was decidedly never lucky with her little rough. He was always coming when least wanted. And why had he gone to fetch money in Normandy? The old man had brought her the four thousand francs, and she had let him have his will of her. She pushed back the two flaps of the door and shouted:

"So much the worse for you! It's your fault. Is that the way to come into a room? I've had enough of this sort of thing. Ta ta!"

Muffat remained standing before the closed door, thunderstruck by what he had just seen. His shuddering fit increased. It mounted from his feet to his heart and brain. Then like a tree shaken by a mighty wind, he swayed to and fro and dropped on his knees, all his muscles giving way under him. And with hands despairingly outstretched he stammered:

"This is more than I can bear, my God! More than I can bear!"

He had accepted every situation but he could do so no longer. He had come to the end of his strength and was plunged in the dark void where man and his reason are together overthrown. In an extravagant access of faith he raised his hands ever higher and higher, searching for heaven, calling on God.

"Oh no, I do not desire it! Oh, come to me, my God! Succor me; nay, let me die sooner! Oh no, not that man, my God! It is over; take me, carry me away, that I may not see, that I may not feel any longer! Oh, I belong to you, my God! Our Father which art in heaven—"

And burning with faith, he continued his supplication, and an ardent prayer escaped from his lips. But someone touched him on the shoulder. He lifted his eyes; it was M. Venot. He was surprised to find him praying before that closed door. Then as though God Himself had responded to his appeal, the count flung his arms round the little old gentleman's neck. At last he could weep, and he burst out sobbing and repeated:

"My brother, my brother."

All his suffering humanity found comfort in that cry. He drenched M. Venot's face with tears; he kissed him, uttering fragmentary ejaculations.

"Oh, my brother, how I am suffering! You only are left me, my brother. Take me away forever—oh, for mercy's sake, take me away!"

Then M. Venot pressed him to his bosom and called him "brother" also. But he had a fresh blow in store for him. Since yesterday he had been searching for him in order to inform him that the Countess Sabine, in a supreme fit of moral aberration, had but now taken flight with the manager of one of the departments in a large, fancy emporium. It was a fearful scandal, and all Paris was already talking about it. Seeing him under the influence of such religious exaltation, Venot felt the opportunity to be favorable and at once told him of the meanly tragic shipwreck of his house. The count was not touched thereby. His wife had gone? That meant nothing to him; they would see what would happen later on. And again he was seized with anguish, and gazing with a look of terror at the door, the walls, the ceiling, he continued pouring forth his single supplication:

"Take me away! I cannot bear it any longer! Take me away!"

M. Venot took him away as though he had been a child. From that day forth Muffat belonged to him entirely; he again became strictly attentive to the duties of religion; his life was utterly blasted. He had resigned his position as chamberlain out of respect for the outraged modesty of the Tuileries, and soon Estelle, his daughter, brought an action against him for the recovery of a sum of sixty thousand francs, a legacy left her by an aunt to which she ought to have succeeded at the time of her marriage. Ruined and living narrowly on the remains of his great fortune, he let himself be gradually devoured by the countess, who ate up the husks Nana had rejected. Sabine was indeed ruined by the example of promiscuity set her by her husband's intercourse with the wanton. She was prone to every excess and proved the ultimate ruin and destruction of his very hearth. After sundry adventures she had returned home, and he had taken her back in a spirit of Christian resignation and forgiveness. She haunted him as his living disgrace, but he grew more and more indifferent and at last ceased suffering from these distresses. Heaven took him out of his wife's hands in order to restore him to the arms of God, and so the voluptuous pleasures he had enjoyed with Nana were prolonged in religious ecstasies, accompanied by the old stammering utterances, the old prayers and despairs, the old fits of humility which befit an accursed creature who is crushed beneath the mire whence he sprang. In the recesses of churches, his knees chilled by the pavement, he would once more experience the delights of the past, and his muscles would twitch, and his brain would whirl deliciously, and the satisfaction of the obscure necessities of his existence would be the same as of old.

On the evening of the final rupture Mignon presented himself at the house in the Avenue de Villiers. He was growing accustomed to Fauchery and was beginning at last to find the presence of his wife's husband infinitely advantageous to him. He would leave all the little household cares to the journalist and would trust him in the active superintendence of all their affairs. Nay, he devoted the money gained by his dramatic successes to the daily expenditure of the family, and as, on his part, Fauchery behaved sensibly, avoiding ridiculous jealousy and proving not less pliant than Mignon himself whenever Rose found her opportunity, the mutual understanding between the two men constantly improved. In fact, they were happy in a partnership which was so fertile in all kinds of amenities, and they settled down side by side and adopted a family arrangement which no longer proved a stumbling block. The whole thing was conducted according to rule; it suited admirably, and each man vied with the other in his efforts for the common happiness. That very evening Mignon had come by Fauchery's advice to see if he could not steal Nana's lady's maid from her, the journalist having formed a high opinion of the woman's extraordinary intelligence. Rose was in despair; for a month past she had been falling into the hands of inexperienced girls who were causing her continual embarrassment. When Zoe received him at the door he forthwith pushed her into the dining room. But at his opening sentence she smiled. The thing was impossible, she said, for she was leaving Madame and establishing herself on her own account. And she added with an expression of discreet vanity that she was daily receiving offers, that the ladies were fighting for her and that Mme Blanche would give a pile of gold to have her back.

Zoe was taking the Tricon's establishment. It was an old project and had been long brooded over. It was her ambition to make her fortune thereby, and she was investing all her savings in it. She was full of great ideas and meditated increasing the business and hiring a house and combining all the delights within its walls. It was with this in view that she had tried to entice Satin, a little pig at that moment dying in hospital, so terribly had she done for herself.

Mignon still insisted with his offer and spoke of the risks run in the commercial life, but Zoe, without entering into explanations about the exact nature of her establishment, smiled a pinched smile, as though she had just put a sweetmeat in her mouth, and was content to remark:

"Oh, luxuries always pay. You see, I've been with others quite long enough, and now I want others to be with me."

And a fierce look set her lip curling. At last she would be "Madame," and for the sake of earning a few louis all those women whose slops she had emptied during the last fifteen years would prostrate themselves before her.

Mignon wished to be announced, and Zoe left him for a moment after remarking that Madame had passed a miserable day. He had only been at the house once before, and he did not know it at all. The dining room with its Gobelin tapestry, its sideboard and its plate filled him with astonishment. He opened the doors familiarly and visited the drawing room and the winter garden, returning thence into the hall. This overwhelming luxury, this gilded furniture, these silks and velvets, gradually filled him with such a feeling of admiration that it set his heart beating. When Zoe came down to fetch him she offered to show him the other rooms, the dressing room, that is to say, and the bedroom. In the latter Mignon's feelings overcame him; he was carried away by them; they filled him with tender enthusiasm.

That damned Nana was simply stupefying him, and yet he thought he knew a thing or two. Amid the downfall of the house and the servants' wild, wasteful race to destruction, massed-up riches still filled every gaping hole and overtopped every ruined wall. And Mignon, as he viewed this lordly monument of wealth, began recalling to mind the various great works he had seen. Near Marseilles they had shown him an aqueduct, the stone arches of which bestrode an abyss, a Cyclopean work which cost millions of money and ten years of intense labor. At Cherbourg he had seen the new harbor with its enormous works, where hundreds of men sweated in the sun while cranes filled the sea with huge squares of rock and built up a wall where a workman now and again remained crushed into bloody pulp. But all that now struck him as insignificant. Nana excited him far more. Viewing the fruit of her labors, he once more experienced the feelings of respect that had overcome him one festal evening in a sugar refiner's chateau. This chateau had been erected for the refiner, and its palatial proportions and royal splendor had been paid for by a single material—sugar. It was with something quite different, with a little laughable folly, a little delicate nudity—it was with this shameful trifle, which is so powerful as to move the universe, that she alone, without workmen, without the inventions of engineers, had shaken Paris to its foundations and had built up a fortune on the bodies of dead men.

"Oh, by God, what an implement!"

Mignon let the words escape him in his ecstasy, for he felt a return of personal gratitude.

Nana had gradually lapsed into a most mournful condition. To begin with, the meeting of the marquis and the count had given her a severe fit of feverish nervousness, which verged at times on laughter. Then the thought of this old man going away half dead in a cab and of her poor rough, whom she would never set eyes on again now that she had driven him so wild, brought on what looked like the beginnings of melancholia. After that she grew vexed to hear about Satin's illness. The girl had disappeared about a fortnight ago and was now ready to die at Lariboisiere, to such a damnable state had Mme Robert reduced her. When she ordered the horses to be put to in order that she might have a last sight of this vile little wretch Zoe had just quietly given her a week's notice. The announcement drove her to desperation at once! It seemed to her she was losing a member of her own family. Great heavens! What was to become of her when left alone? And she besought Zoe to stay, and the latter, much flattered by Madame's despair, ended by kissing her to show that she was not going away in anger. No, she had positively to go: the heart could have no voice in matters of business.

But that day was one of annoyances. Nana was thoroughly disgusted and gave up the idea of going out. She was dragging herself wearily about the little drawing room when Labordette came up to tell her of a splendid chance of buying magnificent lace and in the course of his remarks casually let slip the information that Georges was dead. The announcement froze her.

"Zizi dead!" she cried.

And involuntarily her eyes sought the pink stain on the carpet, but it had vanished at last; passing footsteps had worn it away. Meanwhile Labordette entered into particulars. It was not exactly known how he died. Some spoke of a wound reopening, others of suicide. The lad had plunged, they said, into a tank at Les Fondettes. Nana kept repeating:

"Dead! Dead!"

She had been choking with grief since morning, and now she burst out sobbing and thus sought relief. Hers was an infinite sorrow: it overwhelmed her with its depth and immensity. Labordette wanted to comfort her as touching Georges, but she silenced him with a gesture and blurted out:

"It isn't only he; it's everything, everything. I'm very wretched. Oh yes, I know! They'll again be saying I'm a hussy. To think of the mother mourning down there and of the poor man who was groaning in front of my door this morning and of all the other people that are now ruined after running through all they had with me! That's it; punish Nana; punish the beastly thing! Oh, I've got a broad back! I can hear them as if I were actually there! 'That dirty wench who lies with everybody and cleans out some and drives others to death and causes a whole heap of people pain!'"

She was obliged to pause, for tears choked her utterance, and in her anguish she flung herself athwart a divan and buried her face in a cushion. The miseries she felt to be around her, miseries of which she was the cause, overwhelmed her with a warm, continuous stream of self-pitying tears, and her voice failed as she uttered a little girl's broken plaint:

"Oh, I'm wretched! Oh, I'm wretched! I can't go on like this: it's choking me. It's too hard to be misunderstood and to see them all siding against you because they're stronger. However, when you've got nothing to reproach yourself with and your conscious is clear, why, then I say, 'I won't have it! I won't have it!'"

In her anger she began rebeling against circumstances, and getting up, she dried her eyes, and walked about in much agitation.

"I won't have it! They can say what they like, but it's not my fault! Am I a bad lot, eh? I give away all I've got; I wouldn't crush a fly! It's they who are bad! Yes, it's they! I never wanted to be horrid to them. And they came dangling after me, and today they're kicking the bucket and begging and going to ruin on purpose."

Then she paused in front of Labordette and tapped his shoulders.

"Look here," she said, "you were there all along; now speak the truth: did I urge them on? Weren't there always a dozen of 'em squabbling who could invent the dirtiest trick? They used to disgust me, they did! I did all I knew not to copy them: I was afraid to. Look here, I'll give you a single instance: they all wanted to marry me! A pretty notion, eh? Yes, dear boy, I could have been countess or baroness a dozen times over and more, if I'd consented. Well now, I refused because I was reasonable. Oh yes, I saved 'em some crimes and other foul acts! They'd have stolen, murdered, killed father and mother. I had only to say one word, and I didn't say it. You see what I've got for it today. There's Daguenet, for instance; I married that chap off! I made a position for the beggarly fellow after keeping him gratis for weeks! And I met him yesterday, and he looks the other way! Oh, get along, you swine! I'm less dirty than you!"

She had begun pacing about again, and now she brought her fist violently down on a round table.

"By God it isn't fair! Society's all wrong. They come down on the women when it's the men who want you to do things. Yes, I can tell you this now: when I used to go with them—see? I didn't enjoy it; no, I didn't enjoy it one bit. It bored me, on my honor. Well then, I ask you whether I've got anything to do with it! Yes, they bored me to death! If it hadn't been for them and what they made of me, dear boy, I should be in a convent saying my prayers to the good God, for I've always had my share of religion. Dash it, after all, if they have dropped their money and their lives over it, what do I care? It's their fault. I've had nothing to do with it!"

"Certainly not," said Labordette with conviction.

Zoe ushered in Mignon, and Nana received him smilingly. She had cried a good deal, but it was all over now. Still glowing with enthusiasm, he complimented her on her installation, but she let him see that she had had enough of her mansion and that now she had other projects and would sell everything up one of these days. Then as he excused himself for calling on the ground that he had come about a benefit performance in aid of old Bose, who was tied to his armchair by paralysis, she expressed extreme pity and took two boxes. Meanwhile Zoe announced that the carriage was waiting for Madame, and she asked for her hat and as she tied the strings told them about poor, dear Satin's mishap, adding:

"I'm going to the hospital. Nobody ever loved me as she did. Oh, they're quite right when they accuse the men of heartlessness! Who knows? Perhaps I shan't see her alive. Never mind, I shall ask to see her: I want to give her a kiss."

Labordette and Mignon smiled, and as Nana was no longer melancholy she smiled too. Those two fellows didn't count; they could enter into her feelings. And they both stood and admired her in silent abstraction while she finished buttoning her gloves. She alone kept her feet amid the heaped-up riches of her mansion, while a whole generation of men lay stricken down before her. Like those antique monsters whose redoubtable domains were covered with skeletons, she rested her feet on human skulls. She was ringed round with catastrophes. There was the furious immolation of Vandeuvres; the melancholy state of Foucarmont, who was lost in the China seas; the smashup of Steiner, who now had to live like an honest man; the satisfied idiocy of La Faloise, and the tragic shipwreck of the Muffats. Finally there was the white corpse of Georges, over which Philippe was now watching, for he had come out of prison but yesterday. She had finished her labor of ruin and death. The fly that had flown up from the ordure of the slums, bringing with it the leaven of social rottenness, had poisoned all these men by merely alighting on them. It was well done—it was just. She had avenged the beggars and the wastrels from whose caste she issued. And while, metaphorically speaking, her sex rose in a halo of glory and beamed over prostrate victims like a mounting sun shining brightly over a field of carnage, the actual woman remained as unconscious as a splendid animal, and in her ignorance of her mission was the good-natured courtesan to the last. She was still big; she was still plump; her health was excellent, her spirits capital. But this went for nothing now, for her house struck her as ridiculous. It was too small; it was full of furniture which got in her way. It was a wretched business, and the long and the short of the matter was she would have to make a fresh start. In fact, she was meditating something much better, and so she went off to kiss Satin for the last time. She was in all her finery and looked clean and solid and as brand new as if she had never seen service before.

CHAPTER XIV

Nana suddenly disappeared. It was a fresh plunge, an escapade, a flight into barbarous regions. Before her departure she had treated herself to a new sensation: she had held a sale and had made a clean sweep of everything—house, furniture, jewelry, nay, even dresses and linen. Prices were cited—the five days' sale produced more than six hundred thousand francs. For the last time Paris had seen her in a fairy piece. It was called Melusine, and it played at the Theatre de la Gaite, which the penniless Bordenave had taken out of sheer audacity. Here she again found herself in company with Prulliere and Fontan. Her part was simply spectacular, but it was the great attraction of the piece, consisting, as it did, of three POSES PLASTIQUES, each of which represented the same dumb and puissant fairy. Then one fine morning amid his grand success, when Bordenave, who was mad after advertisement, kept firing the Parisian imagination with colossal posters, it became known that she must have started for Cairo the previous day. She had simply had a few words with her manager. Something had been said which did not please her; the whole thing was the caprice of a woman who is too rich to let herself be annoyed. Besides, she had indulged an old infatuation, for she had long meditated visiting the Turks.

Months passed—she began to be forgotten. When her name was mentioned among the ladies and gentlemen, the strangest stories were told, and everybody gave the most contradictory and at the same time prodigious information. She had made a conquest of the viceroy; she was reigning, in the recesses of a palace, over two hundred slaves whose heads she now and then cut off for the sake of a little amusement. No, not at all! She had ruined herself with a great big nigger! A filthy passion this, which had left her wallowing without a chemise to her back in the crapulous debauchery of Cairo. A fortnight later much astonishment was produced when someone swore to having met her in Russia. A legend began to be formed: she was the mistress of a prince, and her diamonds were mentioned. All the women were soon acquainted with them from the current descriptions, but nobody could cite the precise source of all this information. There were finger rings, earrings, bracelets, a REVIERE of phenomenal width, a queenly diadem surmounted by a central brilliant the size of one's thumb. In the retirement of those faraway countries she began to gleam forth as mysteriously as a gem-laden idol. People now mentioned her without laughing, for they were full of meditative respect for this fortune acquired among the barbarians.

One evening in July toward eight o'clock, Lucy, while getting out of her carriage in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, noticed Caroline Hequet, who had come out on foot to order something at a neighboring tradesman's. Lucy called her and at once burst out with:

"Have you dined? Are you disengaged? Oh, then come with me, my dear. Nana's back."

The other got in at once, and Lucy continued:

"And you know, my dear, she may be dead while we're gossiping."

"Dead! What an idea!" cried Caroline in stupefaction. "And where is she? And what's it of?"

"At the Grand Hotel, of smallpox. Oh, it's a long story!"

Lucy had bidden her coachman drive fast, and while the horses trotted rapidly along the Rue Royale and the boulevards, she told what had happened to Nana in jerky, breathless sentences.

"You can't imagine it. Nana plumps down out of Russia. I don't know why—some dispute with her prince. She leaves her traps at the station; she lands at her aunt's—you remember the old thing. Well, and then she finds her baby dying of smallpox. The baby dies next day, and she has a row with the aunt about some money she ought to have sent, of which the other one has never seen a sou. Seems the child died of that: in fact, it was neglected and badly cared for. Very well; Nana slopes, goes to a hotel, then meets Mignon just as she was thinking of her traps. She has all sorts of queer feelings, shivers, wants to be sick, and Mignon takes her back to her place and promises to look after her affairs. Isn't it odd, eh? Doesn't it all happen pat? But this is the best part of the story: Rose finds out about Nana's illness and gets indignant at the idea of her being alone in furnished apartments. So she rushes off, crying, to look after her. You remember how they used to detest one another—like regular furies! Well then, my dear, Rose has had Nana transported to the Grand Hotel, so that she should, at any rate, die in a smart place, and now she's already passed three nights there and is free to die of it after. It's Labordette who told me all about it. Accordingly I wanted to see for myself—"

"Yes, yes," interrupted Caroline in great excitement "We'll go up to her."

They had arrived at their destination. On the boulevard the coachman had had to rein in his horses amid a block of carriages and people on foot. During the day the Corps Legislatif had voted for war, and now a crowd was streaming down all the streets, flowing along all the pavements, invading the middle of the roadway. Beyond the Madeleine the sun had set behind a blood-red cloud, which cast a reflection as of a great fire and set the lofty windows flaming. Twilight was falling, and the hour was oppressively melancholy, for now the avenues were darkening away into the distance but were not as yet dotted over by the bright sparks of the gas lamps. And among the marching crowds distant voices swelled and grew ever louder, and eyes gleamed from pale faces, while a great spreading wind of anguish and stupor set every head whirling.

"Here's Mignon," said Lucy. "He'll give us news."

Mignon was standing under the vast porch of the Grand Hotel. He looked nervous and was gazing at the crowd. After Lucy's first few questions he grew impatient and cried out:

"How should I know? These last two days I haven't been able to tear Rose away from up there. It's getting stupid, when all's said, for her to be risking her life like that! She'll be charming if she gets over it, with holes in her face! It'll suit us to a tee!"

The idea that Rose might lose her beauty was exasperating him. He was giving up Nana in the most downright fashion, and he could not in the least understand these stupid feminine devotions. But Fauchery was crossing the boulevard, and he, too, came up anxiously and asked for news. The two men egged each other on. They addressed one another familiarly in these days.

"Always the same business, my sonny," declared Mignon. "You ought to go upstairs; you would force her to follow you."

"Come now, you're kind, you are!" said the journalist. "Why don't you go upstairs yourself?"

Then as Lucy began asking for Nana's number, they besought her to make Rose come down; otherwise they would end by getting angry.

Nevertheless, Lucy and Caroline did not go up at once. They had caught sight of Fontan strolling about with his hands in his pockets and greatly amused by the quaint expressions of the mob. When he became aware that Nana was lying ill upstairs he affected sentiment and remarked:

"The poor girl! I'll go and shake her by the hand. What's the matter with her, eh?"

"Smallpox," replied Mignon.

The actor had already taken a step or two in the direction of the court, but he came back and simply murmured with a shiver:

"Oh, damn it!"

The smallpox was no joke. Fontan had been near having it when he was five years old, while Mignon gave them an account of one of his nieces who had died of it. As to Fauchery, he could speak of it from personal experience, for he still bore marks of it in the shape of three little lumps at the base of his nose, which he showed them. And when Mignon again egged him on to the ascent, on the pretext that you never had it twice, he violently combated this theory and with infinite abuse of the doctors instanced various cases. But Lucy and Caroline interrupted them, for the growing multitude filled them with astonishment.

"Just look! Just look what a lot of people!" The night was deepening, and in the distance the gas lamps were being lit one by one. Meanwhile interested spectators became visible at windows, while under the trees the human flood grew every minute more dense, till it ran in one enormous stream from the Madeleine to the Bastille. Carriages rolled slowly along. A roaring sound went up from this compact and as yet inarticulate mass. Each member of it had come out, impelled by the desire to form a crowd, and was now trampling along, steeping himself in the pervading fever. But a great movement caused the mob to flow asunder. Among the jostling, scattering groups a band of men in workmen's caps and white blouses had come in sight, uttering a rhythmical cry which suggested the beat of hammers upon an anvil.

"To Ber-lin! To Ber-lin! To Ber-lin!" And the crowd stared in gloomy distrust yet felt themselves already possessed and inspired by heroic imaginings, as though a military band were passing.

"Oh yes, go and get your throats cut!" muttered Mignon, overcome by an access of philosophy.

But Fontan thought it very fine, indeed, and spoke of enlisting. When the enemy was on the frontier all citizens ought to rise up in defense of the fatherland! And with that he assumed an attitude suggestive of Bonaparte at Austerlitz.

"Look here, are you coming up with us?" Lucy asked him.

"Oh dear, no! To catch something horrid?" he said.

On a bench in front of the Grand Hotel a man sat hiding his face in a handkerchief. On arriving Fauchery had indicated him to Mignon with a wink of the eye. Well, he was still there; yes, he was always there. And the journalist detained the two women also in order to point him out to them. When the man lifted his head they recognized him; an exclamation escaped them. It was the Count Muffat, and he was giving an upward glance at one of the windows.

"You know, he's been waiting there since this morning," Mignon informed them. "I saw him at six o'clock, and he hasn't moved since. Directly Labordette spoke about it he came there with his handkerchief up to his face. Every half-hour he comes dragging himself to where we're standing to ask if the person upstairs is doing better, and then he goes back and sits down. Hang it, that room isn't healthy! It's all very well being fond of people, but one doesn't want to kick the bucket."

The count sat with uplifted eyes and did not seem conscious of what was going on around him. Doubtless he was ignorant of the declaration of war, and he neither felt nor saw the crowd.

"Look, here he comes!" said Fauchery. "Now you'll see."

The count had, in fact, quitted his bench and was entering the lofty porch. But the porter, who was getting to know his face at last, did not give him time to put his question. He said sharply:

"She's dead, monsieur, this very minute."

Nana dead! It was a blow to them all. Without a word Muffat had gone back to the bench, his face still buried in his handkerchief. The others burst into exclamations, but they were cut short, for a fresh band passed by, howling, "A BERLIN! A BERLIN! A BERLIN!" Nana dead! Hang it, and such a fine girl too! Mignon sighed and looked relieved, for at last Rose would come down. A chill fell on the company. Fontan, meditating a tragic role, had assumed a look of woe and was drawing down the corners of his mouth and rolling his eyes askance, while Fauchery chewed his cigar nervously, for despite his cheap journalistic chaff he was really touched. Nevertheless, the two women continued to give vent to their feelings of surprise. The last time Lucy had seen her was at the Gaite; Blanche, too, had seen her in Melusine. Oh, how stunning it was, my dear, when she appeared in the depths of the crystal grot! The gentlemen remembered the occasion perfectly. Fontan had played the Prince Cocorico. And their memories once stirred up, they launched into interminable particulars. How ripping she looked with that rich coloring of hers in the crystal grot! Didn't she, now? She didn't say a word: the authors had even deprived her of a line or two, because it was superfluous. No, never a word! It was grander that way, and she drove her public wild by simply showing herself. You wouldn't find another body like hers! Such shoulders as she had, and such legs and such a figure! Strange that she should be dead! You know, above her tights she had nothing on but a golden girdle which hardly concealed her behind and in front. All round her the grotto, which was entirely of glass, shone like day. Cascades of diamonds were flowing down; strings of brilliant pearls glistened among the stalactites in the vault overhead, and amid the transparent atmosphere and flowing fountain water, which was crossed by a wide ray of electric light, she gleamed like the sun with that flamelike skin and hair of hers. Paris would always picture her thus—would see her shining high up among crystal glass like the good God Himself. No, it was too stupid to let herself die under such conditions! She must be looking pretty by this time in that room up there!

"And what a lot of pleasures bloody well wasted!" said Mignon in melancholy tones, as became a man who did not like to see good and useful things lost.

He sounded Lucy and Caroline in order to find out if they were going up after all. Of course they were going up; their curiosity had increased. Just then Blanche arrived, out of breath and much exasperated at the way the crowds were blocking the pavement, and when she heard the news there was a fresh outburst of exclamations, and with a great rustling of skirts the ladies moved toward the staircase. Mignon followed them, crying out:

"Tell Rose that I'm waiting for her. She'll come at once, eh?"

"They do not exactly know whether the contagion is to be feared at the beginning or near the end," Fontan was explaining to Fauchery. "A medical I know was assuring me that the hours immediately following death are particularly dangerous. There are miasmatic exhalations then. Ah, but I do regret this sudden ending; I should have been so glad to shake hands with her for the last time.

"What good would it do you now?" said the journalist.

"Yes, what good?" the two others repeated.

The crowd was still on the increase. In the bright light thrown from shop-windows and beneath the wavering glare of the gas two living streams were distinguishable as they flowed along the pavement, innumerable hats apparently drifting on their surface. At that hour the popular fever was gaining ground rapidly, and people were flinging themselves in the wake of the bands of men in blouses. A constant forward movement seemed to sweep the roadway, and the cry kept recurring; obstinately, abruptly, there rang from thousands of throats:

"A BERLIN! A BERLIN! A BERLIN!"

The room on the fourth floor upstairs cost twelve francs a day, since Rose had wanted something decent and yet not luxurious, for sumptuousness is not necessary when one is suffering. Hung with Louis XIII cretonne, which was adorned with a pattern of large flowers, the room was furnished with the mahogany commonly found in hotels. On the floor there was a red carpet variegated with black foliage. Heavy silence reigned save for an occasional whispering sound caused by voices in the corridor.

"I assure you we're lost. The waiter told us to turn to the right. What a barrack of a house!"

"Wait a bit; we must have a look. Room number 401; room number 401!"

"Oh, it's this way: 405, 403. We ought to be there. Ah, at last, 401! This way! Hush now, hush!"

The voices were silent. Then there was a slight coughing and a moment or so of mental preparation. Then the door opened slowly, and Lucy entered, followed by Caroline and Blanche. But they stopped directly; there were already five women in the room; Gaga was lying back in the solitary armchair, which was a red velvet Voltaire. In front of the fireplace Simonne and Clarisse were now standing talking to Lea de Horn, who was seated, while by the bed, to the left of the door, Rose Mignon, perched on the edge of a chest, sat gazing fixedly at the body where it lay hidden in the shadow of the curtains. All the others had their hats and gloves on and looked as if they were paying a call: she alone sat there with bare hands and untidy hair and cheeks rendered pale by three nights of watching. She felt stupid in the face of this sudden death, and her eyes were swollen with weeping. A shaded lamp standing on the corner of the chest of drawers threw a bright flood of light over Gaga.

"What a sad misfortune, is it not?" whispered Lucy as she shook hands with Rose. "We wanted to bid her good-by."

And she turned round and tried to catch sight of her, but the lamp was too far off, and she did not dare bring it nearer. On the bed lay stretched a gray mass, but only the ruddy chignon was distinguishable and a pale blotch which might be the face. Lucy added:

"I never saw her since that time at the Gaite, when she was at the end of the grotto."

At this Rose awoke from her stupor and smiled as she said:

"Ah, she's changed; she's changed."

Then she once more lapsed into contemplation and neither moved nor spoke. Perhaps they would be able to look at her presently! And with that the three women joined the others in front of the fireplace. Simonne and Clarisse were discussing the dead woman's diamonds in low tones. Well, did they really exist—those diamonds? Nobody had seen them; it must be a bit of humbug. But Lea de Horn knew someone who knew all about them. Oh, they were monster stones! Besides, they weren't all; she had brought back lots of other precious property from Russia—embroidered stuffs, for instance, valuable knickknacks, a gold dinner service, nay, even furniture. "Yes, my dear, fifty-two boxes, enormous cases some of them, three truckloads of them!" They were all lying at the station. "Wasn't it hard lines, eh?—to die without even having time to unpack one's traps?" Then she had a lot of tin, besides—something like a million! Lucy asked who was going to inherit it all. Oh, distant relations—the aunt, without doubt! It would be a pretty surprise for that old body. She knew nothing about it yet, for the sick woman had obstinately refused to let them warn her, for she still owed her a grudge over her little boy's death. Thereupon they were all moved to pity about the little boy, and they remembered seeing him at the races. Oh, it was a wretchedly sickly baby; it looked so old and so sad. In fact, it was one of those poor brats who never asked to be born!

"He's happier under the ground," said Blanche.

"Bah, and so's she!" added Caroline. "Life isn't so funny!"

In that gloomy room melancholy ideas began to take possession of their imaginations. They felt frightened. It was silly to stand talking so long, but a longing to see her kept them rooted to the spot. It was very hot—the lamp glass threw a round, moonlike patch of light upon the ceiling, but the rest of the room was drowned in steamy darkness. Under the bed a deep plate full of phenol exhaled an insipid smell. And every few moments tiny gusts of wind swelled the window curtains. The window opened on the boulevard, whence rose a dull roaring sound.

"Did she suffer much?" asked Lucy, who was absorbed in contemplation of the clock, the design of which represented the three Graces as nude young women, smiling like opera dancers.

Gaga seemed to wake up.

"My word, yes! I was present when she died. I promise you it was not at all pleasant to see. Why, she was taken with a shuddering fit—"

But she was unable to proceed with her explanation, for a cry arose outside:

"A BERLIN! A BERLIN! A BERLIN!"

And Lucy, who felt suffocated, flung wide the window and leaned upon the sill. It was pleasant there; the air came fresh from the starry sky. Opposite her the windows were all aglow with light, and the gas sent dancing reflections over the gilt lettering of the shop signs.

Beneath these, again, a most amusing scene presented itself. The streams of people were discernible rolling torrentwise along the sidewalks and in the roadway, where there was a confused procession of carriages. Everywhere there were vast moving shadows in which lanterns and lampposts gleamed like sparks. But the band which now came roaring by carried torches, and a red glow streamed down from the direction of the Madeleine, crossed the mob like a trail of fire and spread out over the heads in the distance like a vivid reflection of a burning house. Lucy called Blanche and Caroline, forgetting where she was and shouting:

"Do come! You get a capital view from this window!"

They all three leaned out, greatly interested. The trees got in their way, and occasionally the torches disappeared under the foliage. They tried to catch a glimpse of the men of their own party below, but a protruding balcony hid the door, and they could only make out Count Muffat, who looked like a dark parcel thrown down on the bench where he sat. He was still burying his face in his handkerchief. A carriage had stopped in front, and yet another woman hurried up, in whom Lucy recognized Maria Blond. She was not alone; a stout man got down after her.

"It's that thief of a Steiner," said Caroline. "How is it they haven't sent him back to Cologne yet? I want to see how he looks when he comes in."

They turned round, but when after the lapse of ten minutes Maria Blond appeared, she was alone. She had twice mistaken the staircase. And when Lucy, in some astonishment, questioned her:

"What, he?" she said. "My dear, don't you go fancying that he'll come upstairs! It's a great wonder he's escorted me as far as the door. There are nearly a dozen of them smoking cigars."

As a matter of fact, all the gentlemen were meeting downstairs. They had come strolling thither in order to have a look at the boulevards, and they hailed one another and commented loudly on that poor girl's death. Then they began discussing politics and strategy. Bordenave, Daguenet, Labordette, Prulliere and others, besides, had swollen the group, and now they were all listening to Fontan, who was explaining his plan for taking Berlin within a week.

Meanwhile Maria Blond was touched as she stood by the bedside and murmured, as the others had done before her:

"Poor pet! The last time I saw her was in the grotto at the Gaite."

"Ah, she's changed; she's changed!" Rose Mignon repeated with a smile of gloomiest dejection.

Two more women arrived. These were Tatan Nene and Louise Violaine. They had been wandering about the Grand Hotel for twenty minutes past, bandied from waiter to waiter, and had ascended and descended more than thirty flights of stairs amid a perfect stampede of travelers who were hurrying to leave Paris amid the panic caused by the war and the excitement on the boulevards. Accordingly they just dropped down on chairs when they came in, for they were too tired to think about the dead. At that moment a loud noise came from the room next door, where people were pushing trunks about and striking against furniture to an accompaniment of strident, outlandish syllables. It was a young Austrian couple, and Gaga told how during her agony the neighbors had played a game of catch as catch can and how, as only an unused door divided the two rooms, they had heard them laughing and kissing when one or the other was caught.

"Come, it's time we were off," said Clarisse. "We shan't bring her to life again. Are you coming, Simonne?"

They all looked at the bed out of the corners of their eyes, but they did not budge an inch. Nevertheless, they began getting ready and gave their skirts various little pats. Lucy was again leaning out of window. She was alone now, and a sorrowful feeling began little by little to overpower her, as though an intense wave of melancholy had mounted up from the howling mob. Torches still kept passing, shaking out clouds of sparks, and far away in the distance the various bands stretched into the shadows, surging unquietly to and fro like flocks being driven to the slaughterhouse at night. A dizzy feeling emanated from these confused masses as the human flood rolled them along—a dizzy feeling, a sense of terror and all the pity of the massacres to come. The people were going wild; their voices broke; they were drunk with a fever of excitement which sent them rushing toward the unknown "out there" beyond the dark wall of the horizon.

"A BERLIN! A BERLIN! A BERLIN!"

Lucy turned round. She leaned her back against the window, and her face was very pale.

"Good God! What's to become of us?"

The ladies shook their heads. They were serious and very anxious about the turn events were taking.

"For my part," said Caroline Hequet in her decisive way, "I start for London the day after tomorrow. Mamma's already over there getting a house ready for me. I'm certainly not going to let myself be massacred in Paris."

Her mother, as became a prudent woman, had invested all her daughters' money in foreign lands. One never knows how a war may end! But Maria Blond grew vexed at this. She was a patriot and spoke of following the army.

"There's a coward for you! Yes, if they wanted me I should put on man's clothes just to have a good shot at those pigs of Prussians! And if we all die after? What of that? Our wretched skins aren't so valuable!"

Blanche de Sivry was exasperated.

"Please don't speak ill of the Prussians! They are just like other men, and they're not always running after the women, like your Frenchmen. They've just expelled the little Prussian who was with me. He was an awfully rich fellow and so gentle: he couldn't have hurt a soul. It's disgraceful; I'm ruined by it. And, you know, you mustn't say a word or I go and find him out in Germany!"

After that, while the two were at loggerheads, Gaga began murmuring in dolorous tones:

"It's all over with me; my luck's always bad. It's only a week ago that I finished paying for my little house at Juvisy. Ah, God knows what trouble it cost me! I had to go to Lili for help! And now here's the war declared, and the Prussians'll come and they'll burn everything. How am I to begin again at my time of life, I should like to know?"

"Bah!" said Clarisse. "I don't care a damn about it. I shall always find what I want."

"Certainly you will," added Simonne. "It'll be a joke. Perhaps, after all, it'll be good biz."

And her smile hinted what she thought. Tatan Nene and Louise Violaine were of her opinion. The former told them that she had enjoyed the most roaring jolly good times with soldiers. Oh, they were good fellows and would have done any mortal thing for the girls. But as the ladies had raised their voices unduly Rose Mignon, still sitting on the chest by the bed, silenced them with a softly whispered "Hush!" They stood quite still at this and glanced obliquely toward the dead woman, as though this request for silence had emanated from the very shadows of the curtains. In the heavy, peaceful stillness which ensued, a void, deathly stillness which made them conscious of the stiff dead body lying stretched close by them, the cries of the mob burst forth:

"A BERLIN! A BERLIN! A BERLIN!"

But soon they forgot. Lea de Horn, who had a political salon where former ministers of Louis Philippe were wont to indulge in delicate epigrams, shrugged her shoulders and continued the conversation in a low tone:

"What a mistake this war is! What a bloodthirsty piece of stupidity!"

At this Lucy forthwith took up the cudgels for the empire. She had been the mistress of a prince of the imperial house, and its defense became a point of family honor with her.

"Do leave them alone, my dear. We couldn't let ourselves be further insulted! Why, this war concerns the honor of France. Oh, you know I don't say that because of the prince. He WAS just mean! Just imagine, at night when he was going to bed he hid his gold in his boots, and when we played at bezique he used beans, because one day I pounced down on the stakes for fun. But that doesn't prevent my being fair. The emperor was right."

Lea shook her head with an air of superiority, as became a woman who was repeating the opinions of important personages. Then raising her voice:

"This is the end of all things. They're out of their minds at the Tuileries. France ought to have driven them out yesterday. Don't you see?"

They all violently interrupted her. What was up with her? Was she mad about the emperor? Were people not happy? Was business doing badly? Paris would never enjoy itself so thoroughly again.

Gaga was beside herself; she woke up and was very indignant.

"Be quiet! It's idiotic! You don't know what you're saying. I—I've seen Louis Philippe's reign: it was full of beggars and misers, my dear. And then came '48! Oh, it was a pretty disgusting business was their republic! After February I was simply dying of starvation—yes, I, Gaga. Oh, if only you'd been through it all you would go down on your knees before the emperor, for he's been a father to us; yes, a father to us."

She had to be soothed but continued with pious fervor:

"O my God, do Thy best to give the emperor the victory. Preserve the empire to us!"

They all repeated this aspiration, and Blanche confessed that she burned candles for the emperor. Caroline had been smitten by him and for two whole months had walked where he was likely to pass but had failed to attract his attention. And with that the others burst forth into furious denunciations of the Republicans and talked of exterminating them on the frontiers so that Napoleon III, after having beaten the enemy, might reign peacefully amid universal enjoyment.

"That dirty Bismarck—there's another cad for you!" Maria Blond remarked.

"To think that I should have known him!" cried Simonne. "If only I could have foreseen, I'm the one that would have put some poison in his glass."

But Blanche, on whose heart the expulsion of her Prussian still weighed, ventured to defend Bismarck. Perhaps he wasn't such a bad sort. To every man his trade!

"You know," she added, "he adores women."

"What the hell has that got to do with us?" said Clarisse. "We don't want to cuddle him, eh?"

"There's always too many men of that sort!" declared Louise Violaine gravely. "It's better to do without 'em than to mix oneself up with such monsters!"

And the discussion continued, and they stripped Bismarck, and, in her Bonapartist zeal, each of them gave him a sounding kick, while Tatan Nene kept saying:

"Bismarck! Why, they've simply driven me crazy with the chap! Oh, I hate him! I didn't know that there Bismarck! One can't know everybody."

"Never mind," said Lea de Horn by way of conclusion, "that Bismarck will give us a jolly good threshing."

But she could not continue. The ladies were all down on her at once. Eh, what? A threshing? It was Bismarck they were going to escort home with blows from the butt ends of their muskets. What was this bad Frenchwoman going to say next?

"Hush," whispered Rose, for so much noise hurt her.

The cold influence of the corpse once more overcame them, and they all paused together. They were embarrassed; the dead woman was before them again; a dull thread of coming ill possessed them. On the boulevard the cry was passing, hoarse and wild:

"A BERLIN! A BERLIN! A BERLIN!"

Presently, when they were making up their minds to go, a voice was heard calling from the passage:

"Rose! Rose!"

Gaga opened the door in astonishment and disappeared for a moment. When she returned:

"My dear," she said, "it's Fauchery. He's out there at the end of the corridor. He won't come any further, and he's beside himself because you still stay near that body."

Mignon had at last succeeded in urging the journalist upstairs. Lucy, who was still at the window, leaned out and caught sight of the gentlemen out on the pavement. They were looking up, making energetic signals to her. Mignon was shaking his fists in exasperation, and Steiner, Fontan, Bordenave and the rest were stretching out their arms with looks of anxious reproach, while Daguenet simply stood smoking a cigar with his hands behind his back, so as not to compromise himself.

"It's true, dear," said Lucy, leaving the window open; "I promised to make you come down. They're all calling us now."

Rose slowly and painfully left the chest.

"I'm coming down; I'm coming down," she whispered. "It's very certain she no longer needs me. They're going to send in a Sister of Mercy."

And she turned round, searching for her hat and shawl. Mechanically she filled a basin of water on the toilet table and while washing her hands and face continued:

"I don't know! It's been a great blow to me. We used scarcely to be nice to one another. Ah well! You see I'm quite silly over it now. Oh! I've got all sorts of strange ideas—I want to die myself—I feel the end of the world's coming. Yes, I need air."

The corpse was beginning to poison the atmosphere of the room. And after long heedlessness there ensued a panic.

"Let's be off; let's be off, my little pets!" Gaga kept saying. "It isn't wholesome here."

They went briskly out, casting a last glance at the bed as they passed it. But while Lucy, Blanche and Caroline still remained behind, Rose gave a final look round, for she wanted to leave the room in order. She drew a curtain across the window, and then it occurred to her that the lamp was not the proper thing and that a taper should take its place. So she lit one of the copper candelabra on the chimney piece and placed it on the night table beside the corpse. A brilliant light suddenly illumined the dead woman's face. The women were horror-struck. They shuddered and escaped.

"Ah, she's changed; she's changed!" murmured Rose Mignon, who was the last to remain.

She went away; she shut the door. Nana was left alone with upturned face in the light cast by the candle. She was fruit of the charnel house, a heap of matter and blood, a shovelful of corrupted flesh thrown down on the pillow. The pustules had invaded the whole of the face, so that each touched its neighbor. Fading and sunken, they had assumed the grayish hue of mud; and on that formless pulp, where the features had ceased to be traceable, they already resembled some decaying damp from the grave. One eye, the left eye, had completely foundered among bubbling purulence, and the other, which remained half open, looked like a deep, black, ruinous hole. The nose was still suppurating. Quite a reddish crush was peeling from one of the cheeks and invading the mouth, which it distorted into a horrible grin. And over this loathsome and grotesque mask of death the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downward in rippling gold. Venus was rotting. It seemed as though the poison she had assimilated in the gutters and on the carrion tolerated by the roadside, the leaven with which she had poisoned a whole people, had but now remounted to her face and turned it to corruption.

The room was empty. A great despairing breath came up from the boulevard and swelled the curtain.

"A BERLIN! A BERLIN! A BERLIN!"

THE MILLER'S DAUGHTER

CHAPTER I

THE BETROTHAL

Pere Merlier's mill, one beautiful summer evening, was arranged for a grand fete. In the courtyard were three tables, placed end to end, which awaited the guests. Everyone knew that Francoise, Merlier's daughter, was that night to be betrothed to Dominique, a young man who was accused of idleness but whom the fair sex for three leagues around gazed at with sparkling eyes, such a fine appearance had he.

Pere Merlier's mill was pleasing to look upon. It stood exactly in the center of Rocreuse, where the highway made an elbow. The village had but one street, with two rows of huts, a row on each side of the road; but at the elbow meadows spread out, and huge trees which lined the banks of the Morelle covered the extremity of the valley with lordly shade. There was not, in all Lorraine, a corner of nature more adorable. To the right and to the left thick woods, centenarian forests, towered up from gentle slopes, filling the horizon with a sea of verdure, while toward the south the plain stretched away, of marvelous fertility, displaying as far as the eye could reach patches of ground divided by green hedges. But what constituted the special charm of Rocreuse was the coolness of that cut of verdure in the most sultry days of July and August. The Morelle descended from the forests of Gagny and seemed to have gathered the cold from the foliage beneath which it flowed for leagues; it brought with it the murmuring sounds, the icy and concentrated shade of the woods. And it was not the sole source of coolness: all sorts of flowing streams gurgled through the forest; at each step springs bubbled up; one felt, on following the narrow pathways, that there must exist subterranean lakes which pierced through beneath the moss and availed themselves of the smallest crevices at the feet of trees or between the rocks to burst forth in crystalline fountains. The whispering voices of these brooks were so numerous and so loud that they drowned the song of the bullfinches. It was like some enchanted park with cascades falling from every portion.

Below the meadows were damp. Gigantic chestnut trees cast dark shadows. On the borders of the meadows long hedges of poplars exhibited in lines their rustling branches. Two avenues of enormous plane trees stretched across the fields toward the ancient Chateau de Gagny, then a mass of ruins. In this constantly watered district the grass grew to an extraordinary height. It resembled a garden between two wooded hills, a natural garden, of which the meadows were the lawns, the giant trees marking the colossal flower beds. When the sun's rays at noon poured straight downward the shadows assumed a bluish tint; scorched grass slept in the heat, while an icy shiver passed beneath the foliage.

And there it was that Pere Merlier's mill enlivened with its ticktack a corner of wild verdure. The structure, built of plaster and planks, seemed as old as the world. It dipped partially in the Morelle, which rounded at that point into a transparent basin. A sluice had been made, and the water fell from a height of several meters upon the mill wheel, which cracked as it turned, with the asthmatic cough of a faithful servant grown old in the house. When Pere Merlier was advised to change it he shook his head, saying that a new wheel would be lazier and would not so well understand the work, and he mended the old one with whatever he could put his hands on: cask staves, rusty iron, zinc and lead. The wheel appeared gayer than ever for it, with its profile grown odd, all plumed with grass and moss. When the water beat upon it with its silvery flood it was covered with pearls; its strange carcass wore a sparkling attire of necklaces of mother-of-pearl.

The part of the mill which dipped in the Morelle had the air of a barbaric arch stranded there. A full half of the structure was built on piles. The water flowed beneath the floor, and deep places were there, renowned throughout the district for the enormous eels and crayfish caught in them. Below the fall the basin was as clear as a mirror, and when the wheel did not cover it with foam schools of huge fish could be seen swimming with the slowness of a squadron. Broken steps led down to the river near a stake to which a boat was moored. A wooden gallery passed above the wheel. Windows opened, pierced irregularly. It was a pell-mell of corners, of little walls, of constructions added too late, of beams and of roofs, which gave the mill the aspect of an old, dismantled citadel. But ivy had grown; all sorts of clinging plants stopped the too-wide chinks and threw a green cloak over the ancient building. The young ladies who passed by sketched Pere Merlier's mill in their albums.

On the side facing the highway the structure was more solid. A stone gateway opened upon the wide courtyard, which was bordered to the right and to the left by sheds and stables. Beside a well an immense elm covered half the courtyard with its shadow. In the background the building displayed the four windows of its second story, surmounted by a pigeon house. Pere Merlier's sole vanity was to have this front plastered every ten years. It had just received a new coating and dazzled the village when the sun shone on it at noon.

For twenty years Pere Merlier had been mayor of Rocreuse. He was esteemed for the fortune he had acquired. His wealth was estimated at something like eighty thousand francs, amassed sou by sou. When he married Madeleine Guillard, who brought him the mill as her dowry, he possessed only his two arms. But Madeleine never repented of her choice, so briskly did he manage the business. Now his wife was dead, and he remained a widower with his daughter Francoise. Certainly he might have rested, allowed the mill wheel to slumber in the moss, but that would have been too dull for him, and in his eyes the building would have seemed dead. He toiled on for pleasure.

Pere Merlier was a tall old man with a long, still face, who never laughed but who possessed, notwithstanding, a very gay heart. He had been chosen mayor because of his money and also on account of the imposing air he could assume during a marriage ceremony.

Francoise Merlier was just eighteen. She did not pass for one of the handsome girls of the district, as she was not robust. Up to her fifteenth year she had been even ugly.

The Rocreuse people had not been able to understand why the daughter of Pere and Mere Merlier, both of whom had always enjoyed excellent health, grew ill and with an air of regret. But at fifteen, though yet delicate, her little face became one of the prettiest in the world. She had black hair, black eyes, and was as rosy as a peach; her lips constantly wore a smile; there were dimples in her cheeks, and her fair forehead seemed crowned with sunlight. Although not considered robust in the district, she was far from thin; the idea was simply that she could not lift a sack of grain, but she would become plump as she grew older—she would eventually be as round and dainty as a quail. Her father's long periods of silence had made her thoughtful very young. If she smiled constantly it was to please others. By nature she was serious.

Of course all the young men of the district paid court to her, more on account of her ecus than her pretty ways. At last she made a choice which scandalized the community.

On the opposite bank of the Morelle lived a tall youth named Dominique Penquer. He did not belong to Rocreuse. Ten years before he had arrived from Belgium as the heir of his uncle, who had left him a small property upon the very border of the forest of Gagny, just opposite the mill, a few gunshots distant. He had come to sell this property, he said, and return home. But the district charmed him, it appeared, for he did not quit it. He was seen cultivating his little field, gathering a few vegetables upon which he subsisted. He fished and hunted; many times the forest guards nearly caught him and were on the point of drawing up proces-verbaux against him. This free existence, the resources of which the peasants could not clearly discover, at length gave him a bad reputation. He was vaguely styled a poacher. At any rate, he was lazy, for he was often found asleep on the grass when he should have been at work. The hut he inhabited beneath the last trees on the edge of the forest did not seem at all like the dwelling of an honest young fellow. If he had had dealings with the wolves of the ruins of Gagny the old women would not have been the least bit surprised. Nevertheless, the young girls sometimes risked defending him, for this doubtful man was superb; supple and tall as a poplar, he had a very white skin, with flaxen hair and beard which gleamed like gold in the sun.

One fine morning Francoise declared to Pere Merlier that she loved Dominique and would never wed any other man.

It may well be imagined what a blow this was to Pere Merlier. He said nothing, according to his custom, but his face grew thoughtful and his internal gaiety no longer sparkled in his eyes. He looked gruff for a week. Francoise also was exceedingly grave. What tormented Pere Merlier was to find out how this rogue of a poacher had managed to fascinate his daughter. Dominique had never visited the mill. The miller watched and saw the gallant on the other side of the Morelle, stretched out upon the grass and feigning to be asleep. Francoise could see him from her chamber window. Everything was plain: they had fallen in love by casting sheep's eyes at each other over the mill wheel.

Another week went by. Francoise became more and more grave. Pere Merlier still said nothing. Then one evening he himself silently brought in Dominique. Francoise at that moment was setting the table. She did not seem astonished; she contented herself with putting on an additional plate, knife and fork, but the little dimples were again seen in her cheeks, and her smile reappeared. That morning Pere Merlier had sought out Dominique in his hut on the border of the wood.

There the two men had talked for three hours with doors and windows closed. What was the purport of their conversation no one ever knew. Certain it was, however, that Pere Merlier, on taking his departure, already called Dominique his son-in-law. Without doubt the old man had found the youth he had gone to seek a worthy youth in the lazy fellow who stretched himself out upon the grass to make the girls fall in love with him.

All Rocreuse clamored. The women at the doors had plenty to say on the subject of the folly of Pere Merlier, who had thus introduced a reprobate into his house. The miller let people talk on. Perhaps he remembered his own marriage. He was without a sou when he wedded Madeleine and her mill; this, however, had not prevented him from making a good husband. Besides, Dominique cut short the gossip by going so vigorously to work that all the district was amazed. The miller's assistant had just been drawn to serve as a soldier, and Dominique would not suffer another to be engaged. He carried the sacks, drove the cart, fought with the old mill wheel when it refused to turn, and all this with such good will that people came to see him out of curiosity. Pere Merlier had his silent laugh. He was excessively proud of having formed a correct estimate of this youth. There is nothing like love to give courage to young folks. Amid all these heavy labors Francoise and Dominique adored each other. They did not indulge in lovers' talks, but there was a smiling gentleness in their glances.

Up to that time Pere Merlier had not spoken a single word on the subject of marriage, and they respected this silence, awaiting the old man's will. Finally one day toward the middle of July he caused three tables to be placed in the courtyard, beneath the great elm, and invited his friends of Rocreuse to come in the evening and drink a glass of wine with him.

When the courtyard was full and all had their glasses in their hands, Pere Merlier raised his very high and said:

"I have the pleasure to announce to you that Francoise will wed this young fellow here in a month, on Saint Louis's Day."

Then they drank noisily. Everybody smiled. But Pere Merlier, again lifting his voice, exclaimed:

"Dominique, embrace your fiancee. It is your right."

They embraced, blushing to the tips of their ears, while all the guests laughed joyously. It was a genuine fete. They emptied a small cask of wine. Then when all were gone but intimate friends the conversation was carried on without noise. The night had fallen, a starry and cloudless night. Dominique and Francoise, seated side by side on a bench, said nothing.

An old peasant spoke of the war the emperor had declared against Prussia. All the village lads had already departed. On the preceding day troops had again passed through the place. There was going to be hard fighting.

"Bah!" said Pere Merlier with the selfishness of a happy man. "Dominique is a foreigner; he will not go to the war. And if the Prussians come here he will be on hand to defend his wife!"

The idea that the Prussians might come there seemed a good joke. They were going to receive a sound whipping, and the affair would soon be over.

"I have afready seen them; I have already seen them," repeated the old peasant in a hollow voice.

There was silence. Then they drank again. Francoise and Dominique had heard nothing; they had gently taken each other by the hand behind the bench, so that nobody could see them, and it seemed so delightful that they remained where they were, their eyes plunged into the depths of the shadows.

What a warm and superb night it was! The village slumbered on both edges of the white highway in infantile quietude. From time to time was heard the crowing of some chanticleer aroused too soon. From the huge wood near by came long breaths, which passed over the roofs like caresses. The meadows, with their dark shadows, assumed a mysterious and dreamy majesty, while all the springs, all the flowing waters which gurgled in the darkness, seemed to be the cool and rhythmical respiration of the sleeping country. Occasionally the ancient mill wheel, lost in a doze, appeared to dream like those old watchdogs that bark while snoring; it cracked; it talked to itself, rocked by the fall of the Morelle, the surface of which gave forth the musical and continuous sound of an organ pipe. Never had more profound peace descended upon a happier corner of nature.

CHAPTER II

THE ATTACK ON THE MILL

A month later, on the day preceding that of Saint Louis, Rocreuse was in a state of terror. The Prussians had beaten the emperor and were advancing by forced marches toward the village. For a week past people who hurried along the highway had been announcing them thus: "They are at Lormiere—they are at Novelles!" And on hearing that they were drawing near so rapidly, Rocreuse every morning expected to see them descend from the wood of Gagny. They did not come, however, and that increased the fright. They would surely fall upon the village during the night and slaughter everybody.

That morning, a little before sunrise, there was an alarm. The inhabitants were awakened by the loud tramp of men on the highway. The women were already on their knees, making the sign of the cross, when some of the people, peering cautiously through the partially opened windows, recognized the red pantaloons. It was a French detachment. The captain immediately asked for the mayor of the district and remained at the mill after having talked with Pere Merlier.

The sun rose gaily that morning. It would be hot at noon. Over the wood floated a golden brightness, while in the distance white vapors arose from the meadows. The neat and pretty village awoke amid the fresh air, and the country, with its river and its springs, had the moist sweetness of a bouquet. But that beautiful day caused nobody to smile. The captain was seen to take a turn around the mill, examine the neighboring houses, pass to the other side of the Morelle and from there study the district with a field glass; Pere Merlier, who accompanied him, seemed to be giving him explanations. Then the captain posted soldiers behind the walls, behind the trees and in the ditches. The main body of the detachment encamped in the courtyard of the mill. Was there going to be a battle? When Pere Merlier returned he was questioned. He nodded his head without speaking. Yes, there was going to be a battle!

Francoise and Dominique were in the courtyard; they looked at him. At last he took his pipe from his mouth and said:

"Ah, my poor young ones, you cannot get married tomorrow!"

Dominique, his lips pressed together, with an angry frown on his forehead, at times raised himself on tiptoe and fixed his eyes upon the wood of Gagny, as if he wished to see the Prussians arrive. Francoise, very pale and serious, came and went, furnishing the soldiers with what they needed. The troops were making soup in a corner of the courtyard; they joked while waiting for it to get ready.

The captain was delighted. He had visited the chambers and the huge hall of the mill which looked out upon the river. Now, seated beside the well, he was conversing with Pere Merlier.

"Your mill is a real fortress," he said. "We can hold it without difficulty until evening. The bandits are late. They ought to be here."

The miller was grave. He saw his mill burning like a torch, but he uttered no complaint, thinking such a course useless. He merely said:

"You had better hide the boat behind the wheel; there is a place there just fit for that purpose. Perhaps it will be useful to have the boat."

The captain gave the requisite order. This officer was a handsome man of forty; he was tall and had an amiable countenance. The sight of Francoise and Dominique seemed to please him. He contemplated them as if he had forgotten the coming struggle. He followed Francoise with his eyes, and his look told plainly that he thought her charming. Then turning toward Dominique, he asked suddenly:

"Why are you not in the army, my good fellow?"

"I am a foreigner," answered the young man.

The captain evidently did not attach much weight to this reason. He winked his eye and smiled. Francoise was more agreeable company than a cannon. On seeing him smile, Dominique added:

"I am a foreigner, but I can put a ball in an apple at five hundred meters. There is my hunting gun behind you."

"You may have use for it," responded the captain dryly.

Francoise had approached, somewhat agitated. Without heeding the strangers present Dominique took and grasped in his the two hands she extended to him, as if to put herself under his protection. The captain smiled again but said not a word. He remained seated, his sword across his knees and his eyes plunged into space, lost in a reverie.

It was already ten o'clock. The heat had become very great. A heavy silence prevailed. In the courtyard, in the shadows of the sheds, the soldiers had begun to eat their soup. Not a sound came from the village; all its inhabitants had barricaded the doors and windows of their houses. A dog, alone upon the highway, howled. From the neighboring forests and meadows, swooning in the heat, came a prolonged and distant voice made up of all the scattered breaths. A cuckoo sang. Then the silence grew more intense.

Suddenly in that slumbering air a shot was heard. The captain leaped briskly to his feet; the soldiers left their plates of soup, yet half full. In a few seconds everybody was at the post of duty; from bottom to top the mill was occupied. Meanwhile the captain, who had gone out upon the road, had discovered nothing; to the right and to the left the highway stretched out, empty and white. A second shot was heard, and still nothing visible, not even a shadow. But as he was returning the captain perceived in the direction of Gagny, between two trees, a light puff of smoke whirling away like thistledown. The wood was calm and peaceful.

"The bandits have thrown themselves into the forest," he muttered. "They know we are here."

Then the firing continued, growing more and more vigorous, between the French soldiers posted around the mill and the Prussians hidden behind the trees. The balls whistled above the Morelle without damaging either side. The fusillade was irregular, the shots coming from every bush, and still only the little puffs of smoke, tossed gently by the breeze, were seen. This lasted nearly two hours. The officer hummed a tune with an air of indifference. Francoise and Dominique, who had remained in the courtyard, raised themselves on tiptoe and looked over a low wall. They were particularly interested in a little soldier posted on the shore of the Morelle, behind the remains of an old bateau; he stretched himself out flat on the ground, watched, fired and then glided into a ditch a trifle farther back to reload his gun; and his movements were so droll, so tricky and so supple, that they smiled as they looked at him. He must have perceived the head of a Prussian, for he arose quickly and brought his weapon to his shoulder, but before he could fire he uttered a cry, fell and rolled into the ditch, where for an instant his legs twitched convulsively like the claws of a chicken just killed. The little soldier had received a ball full in the breast. He was the first man slain. Instinctively Francoise seized Dominique's hand and clasped it with a nervous contraction.

"Move away," said the captain. "You are within range of the balls."

At that moment a sharp little thud was heard in the old elm, and a fragment of a branch came whirling down. But the two young folks did not stir; they were nailed to the spot by anxiety to see what was going on. On the edge of the wood a Prussian had suddenly come out from behind a tree as from a theater stage entrance, beating the air with his hands and falling backward. Nothing further moved; the two corpses seemed asleep in the broad sunlight; not a living soul was seen in the scorching country. Even the crack of the fusillade had ceased. The Morelle alone whispered in its clear tones.

Pere Merlier looked at the captain with an air of surprise, as if to ask him if the struggle was over.

"They are getting ready for something worse," muttered the officer. "Don't trust appearances. Move away from there."

He had not finished speaking when there was a terrible discharge of musketry. The great elm was riddled, and a host of leaves shot into the air. The Prussians had happily fired too high. Dominique dragged, almost carried, Francoise away, while Pere Merlier followed them, shouting:

"Go down into the cellar; the walls are solid!"

But they did not heed him; they entered the huge hall where ten soldiers were waiting in silence, watching through the chinks in the closed window shutters. The captain was alone in the courtyard, crouching behind the little wall, while the furious discharges continued. Without, the soldiers he had posted gave ground only foot by foot. However, they re-entered one by one, crawling, when the enemy had dislodged them from their hiding places. Their orders were to gain time and not show themselves, that the Prussians might remain in ignorance as to what force was before them. Another hour went by. As a sergeant arrived, saying that but two or three more men remained without, the captain glanced at his watch, muttering:

"Half-past two o'clock. We must hold the position four hours longer."

He caused the great gate of the courtyard to be closed, and every preparation was made for an energetic resistance. As the Prussians were on the opposite side of the Morelle, an immediate assault was not to be feared. There was a bridge two kilometers away, but they evidently were not aware of its existence, and it was hardly likely that they would attempt to ford the river. The officer, therefore, simply ordered the highway to be watched. Every effort would be made in the direction of the country.

Again the fusillade had ceased. The mill seemed dead beneath the glowing sun. Not a shutter was open; no sound came from the interior. At length, little by little, the Prussians showed themselves at the edge of the forest of Gagny. They stretched their necks and grew bold. In the mill several soldiers had already raised their guns to their shoulders, but the captain cried:

"No, no; wait. Let them come nearer."

They were exceedingly prudent, gazing at the mill with a suspicious air. The silent and somber old structure with its curtains of ivy filled them with uneasiness. Nevertheless, they advanced. When fifty of them were in the opposite meadow the officer uttered the single word:

"Fire!"

A crash was heard; isolated shots followed. Francoise, all of a tremble, had mechanically put her hands to her ears. Dominique, behind the soldiers, looked on; when the smoke had somewhat lifted he saw three Prussians stretched upon their backs in the center of the meadow. The others had thrown themselves behind the willows and poplars. Then the siege began.

For more than an hour the mill was riddled with balls. They dashed against the old walls like hail. When they struck the stones they were heard to flatten and fall into the water. They buried themselves in the wood with a hollow sound. Occasionally a sharp crack announced that the mill wheel had been hit. The soldiers in the interior were careful of their shots; they fired only when they could take aim. From time to time the captain consulted his watch. As a ball broke a shutter and plowed into the ceiling he said to himself:

"Four o'clock. We shall never be able to hold out!"

Little by little the terrible fusillade weakened the old mill. A shutter fell into the water, pierced like a bit of lace, and it was necessary to replace it with a mattress. Pere Merlier constantly exposed himself to ascertain the extent of the damage done to his poor wheel, the cracking of which made his heart ache. All would be over with it this time; never could he repair it. Dominique had implored Francoise to withdraw, but she refused to leave him; she was seated behind a huge oaken clothespress, which protected her. A ball, however, struck the clothespress, the sides of which gave forth a hollow sound. Then Dominique placed himself in front of Francoise. He had not yet fired a shot; he held his gun in his hand but was unable to approach the windows, which were altogether occupied by the soldiers. At each discharge the floor shook.

"Attention! Attention!" suddenly cried the captain.

He had just seen a great dark mass emerge from the wood. Immediately a formidable platoon fire opened. It was like a waterspout passing over the mill. Another shutter was shattered, and through the gaping opening of the window the balls entered. Two soldiers rolled upon the floor. One of them lay like a stone; they pushed the body against the wall because it was in the way. The other twisted in agony, begging his comrades to finish him, but they paid no attention to him. The balls entered in a constant stream; each man took care of himself and strove to find a loophole through which to return the fire. A third soldier was hit; he uttered not a word; he fell on the edge of a table, with eyes fixed and haggard. Opposite these dead men Francoise, stricken with horror, had mechanically pushed away her chair to sit on the floor against the wall; she thought she would take up less room there and not be in so much danger. Meanwhile the soldiers had collected all the mattresses of the household and partially stopped up the windows with them. The hall was filled with wrecks, with broken weapons and demolished furniture.

"Five o'clock," said the captain. "Keep up your courige! They are about to try to cross the river!"

At that moment Francoise uttered a cry. A ball which had ricocheted had grazed her forehead. Several drops of blood appeared. Dominique stared at her; then, approaching the window, he fired his first shot. Once started, he did not stop. He loaded and fired without heeding what was passing around him, but from time to time he glanced at Francoise. He was very deliberate and aimed with care. The Prussians, keeping beside the poplars, attempted the passage of the Morelle, as the captain had predicted, but as soon as a man strove to cross he fell, shot in the head by Dominique. The captain, who had his eyes on the young man, was amazed. He complimented him, saying that he should be glad to have many such skillful marksmen. Dominique did not hear him. A ball cut his shoulder; another wounded his arm, but he continued to fire.

There were two more dead men. The mangled mattresses no longer stopped the windows. The last discharge seemed as if it would have carried away the mill. The position had ceased to be tenable. Nevertheless, the captain said firmly:

"Hold your ground for half an hour more!"

Now he counted the minutes. He had promised his chiefs to hold the enemy in check there until evening, and he would not give an inch before the hour he had fixed on for the retreat. He preserved his amiable air and smiled upon Francoise to reassure her. He had picked up the gun of a dead soldier and himself was firing.

Only four soldiers remained in the hall. The Prussians appeared in a body on the other side of the Morelle, and it was clear that they intended speedily to cross the river. A few minutes more elapsed. The stubborn captain would not order the retreat. Just then a sergeant hastened to him and said:

"They are upon the highway; they will take us in the rear!"

The Prussians must have found the bridge. The captain pulled out his watch and looked at it.

"Five minutes longer," he said. "They cannot get here before that time!"

Then at six o'clock exactly he at last consented to lead his men out through a little door which opened into a lane. From there they threw themselves into a ditch; they gained the forest of Sauval. Before taking his departure the captain bowed very politely to Pere Merlier and made his excuses, adding:

"Amuse them! We will return!"

Dominique was now alone in the hall. He was still firing, hearing nothing, understanding nothing. He felt only the need of defending Francoise. He had not the least suspicion in the world that the soldiers had retreated. He aimed and killed his man at every shot. Suddenly there was a loud noise. The Prussians had entered the courtyard from behind. Dominique fired a last; shot, and they fell upon him while his gun was yet smoking.

Four men held him. Others vociferated around him in a frightful language. They were ready to slaughter him on the spot. Francoise, with a supplicating look, had cast herself before him. But an officer entered and ordered the prisoner to be delivered up to him. After exchanging a few words in German with the soldiers he turned toward Dominique and said to him roughly in very good French:

"You will be shot in two hours!"

CHAPTER III

THE FLIGHT

It was a settled rule of the German staff that every Frenchman, not belonging to the regular army, taken with arms in his hands should be shot. The militia companies themselves were not recognized as belligerents. By thus making terrible examples of the peasants who defended their homes, the Germans hoped to prevent the levy en masse, which they feared.

The officer, a tall, lean man of fifty, briefly questioned Dominique. Although he spoke remarkably pure French he had a stiffness altogether Prussian.

"Do you belong to this district?" he asked.

"No; I am a Belgian," answered the young man.

"Why then did you take up arms? The fighting did not concern you!"

Dominique made no reply. At that moment the officer saw Francoise who was standing by, very pale, listening; upon her white forehead her slight wound had put a red bar. He looked at the young folks, one after the other, seemed to understand matters and contented himself with adding:

"You do not deny having fired, do you?"

"I fired as often as I could!" responded Dominique tranquilly.

This confession was useless, for he was black with powder, covered with sweat and stained with a few drops of blood which had flowed from the scratch on his shoulder.

"Very well," said the officer. "You will be shot in two hours!"

Francoise did not cry out. She clasped her hands and raised them with a gesture of mute despair. The officer noticed this gesture. Two soldiers had taken Dominique to a neighboring apartment, where they were to keep watch over him. The young girl had fallen upon a chair, totally overcome; she could not weep; she was suffocating. The officer had continued to examine her. At last he spoke to her.

"Is that young man your brother?" he demanded.

She shook her head negatively. The German stood stiffly on his feet with out a smile. Then after a short silence he again asked:

"Has he lived long in the district?"

She nodded affirmatively.

"In that case, he ought to be thoroughly acquainted with the neighboring forests."

This time she spoke.

"He is thoroughly acquainted with them, monsieur," she said, looking at him with considerable surprise.

He said nothing further to her but turned upon his heel, demanding that the mayor of the village should be brought to him. But Francoise had arisen with a slight blush on her countenance; thinking that she had seized the aim of the officer's questions, she had recovered hope. She herself ran to find her father.

Pere Merlier, as soon as the firing had ceased, had quickly descended to the wooden gallery to examine his wheel. He adored his daughter; he had a solid friendship for Dominique, his future son-in-law, but his wheel also held a large place in his heart. Since the two young ones, as he called them, had come safe and sound out of the fight, he thought of his other tenderness, which had suffered greatly. Bent over the huge wooden carcass, he was studying its wounds with a sad air. Five buckets were shattered to pieces; the central framework was riddled. He thrust his fingers in the bullet holes to measure their depth; he thought how he could repair all these injuries. Francoise found him already stopping up the clefts with rubbish and moss.

"Father," she said, "you are wanted."

And she wept at last as she told him what she had just heard. Pere Merlier tossed his head. People were not shot in such a summary fashion. The matter must be looked after. He re-entered the mill with his silent and tranquil air. When the officer demanded of him provisions for his men he replied that the inhabitants of Rocreuse were not accustomed to be treated roughly and that nothing would be obtained from them if violence were employed. He would see to everything but on condition that he was not interfered with. The officer at first seemed irritated by his calm tone; then he gave way before the old man's short and clear words. He even called him back and asked him:

"What is the name of that wood opposite?"

"The forest of Sauval."

"What is its extent?"

The miller looked at him fixedly.

"I do not know," he answered.

And he went away. An hour later the contribution of war in provisions and money, demanded by the officer, was in the courtyard of the mill. Night came on. Francoise watched with anxiety the movements of the soldiers. She hung about the room in which Dominique was imprisoned. Toward seven o'clock she experienced a poignant emotion. She saw the officer enter the prisoner's apartment and for a quarter of an hour heard their voices in loud conversation. For an instant the officer reappeared upon the threshold to give an order in German, which she did not understand, but when twelve men ranged themselves in the courtyard, their guns on their shoulders, she trembled and felt as if about to faint. All then was over: the execution was going to take place. The twelve men stood there ten minutes, Dominique's voice continuing to be raised in a tone of violent refusal. Finally the officer came out, saying, as he roughly shut the door:

"Very well; reflect. I give you until tomorrow morning."

And with a gesture he ordered the twelve men to break ranks. Francoise was stupefied. Pere Merlier, who had been smoking his pipe and looking at the platoon simply with an air of curiosity, took her by the arm with paternal gentleness. He led her to her chamber.

"Be calm," he said, "and try to sleep. Tomorrow, when it is light, we will see what can be done."

As he withdrew he prudently locked her in. It was his opinion that women were good for nothing and that they spoiled everything when they took a hand in a serious affair. But Francoise did not retire. She sat for a long while upon the side of her bed, listening to the noises of the house. The German soldiers encamped in the courtyard sang and laughed; they must have been eating and drinking until eleven o'clock, for the racket did not cease an instant. In the mill itself heavy footsteps resounded from time to time, without doubt those of the sentinels who were being relieved. But she was interested most by the sounds she could distinguish in the apartment beneath her chamber. Many times she stretched herself out at full length and put her ear to the floor. That apartment was the one in which Dominique was confined. He must have been walking back and forth from the window to the wall, for she long heard the regular cadence of his steps. Then deep silence ensued; he had doubtless seated himself. Finally every noise ceased and all was as if asleep. When slumber appeared to her to have settled on the house she opened her window as gently as possible and leaned her elbows on the sill.

Without, the night had a warm serenity. The slender crescent of the moon, which was sinking behind the forest of Sauval, lit up the country with the glimmer of a night lamp. The lengthened shadows of the tall trees barred the meadows with black, while the grass in uncovered spots assumed the softness of greenish velvet. But Francoise did not pause to admire the mysterious charms of the night. She examined the country, searching for the sentinels whom the Germans had posted obliquely. She clearly saw their shadows extending like the rounds of a ladder along the Morelle. Only one was before the mill, on the other shore of the river, beside a willow, the branches of which dipped in the water. Francoise saw him plainly. He was a tall man and was standing motionless, his face turned toward the sky with the dreamy air of a shepherd.

When she had carefully inspected the locality she again seated herself on her bed. She remained there an hour, deeply absorbed. Then she listened once more: there was not a sound in the mill. She returned to the window and glanced out, but doubtless one of the horns of the moon, which was still visible behind the trees, made her uneasy, for she resumed her waiting attitude. At last she thought the proper time had come. The night was as black as jet; she could no longer see the sentinel opposite; the country spread out like a pool of ink. She strained her ear for an instant and made her decision. Passing near the window was an iron ladder, the bars fastened to the wall, which mounted from the wheel to the garret and formerly enabled the millers to reach certain machinery; afterward the mechanism had been altered, and for a long while the ladder had been hidden under the thick ivy which covered that side of the mill.

Francoise bravely climbed out of her window and grasped one of the bars of the ladder. She began to descend. Her skirts embarrassed her greatly. Suddenly a stone was detached from the wall and fell into the Morelle with a loud splash. She stopped with an icy shiver of fear. Then she realized that the waterfall with its continuous roar would drown every noise she might make, and she descended more courageously, feeling the ivy with her foot, assuring herself that the rounds were firm. When she was at the height of the chamber which served as Dominique's prison she paused. An unforeseen difficulty nearly caused her to lose all her courage: the window of the chamber was not directly below that of her apartment. She hung off from the ladder, but when she stretched out her arm her hand encountered only the wall. Must she, then, ascend without pushing her plan to completion? Her arms were fatigued; the murmur of the Morelle beneath her commenced to make her dizzy. Then she tore from the wall little fragments of plaster and threw them against Dominique's window. He did not hear; he was doubtless asleep. She crumbled more plaster from the wall, scraping the skin off her fingers. She was utterly exhausted; she felt herself falling backward, when Dominique at last softly opened the window.

"It is I!" she murmured. "Catch me quickly; I'm falling!"

It was the first time that she had addressed him familiarly. Leaning out, he seized her and drew her into the chamber. There she gave vent to a flood of tears, stifling her sobs that she might not be heard. Then by a supreme effort she calmed herself.

"Are you guarded?" she asked in a low voice.

Dominique, still stupefied at seeing her thus, nodded his head affirmatively, pointing to the door. On the other side they heard someone snoring; the sentinel, yielding to sleep, had thrown himself on the floor against the door, arguing that by disposing himself thus the prisoner could not escape.

"You must fly," resumed Francoise excitedly. "I have come to beg you to do so and to bid you farewell."

But he did not seem to hear her. He repeated:

"What? Is it you; is it you? Oh, what fear you caused me! You might have killed yourself!"

He seized her hands; he kissed them.

"How I love you, Francoise!" he murmured. "You are as courageous as good. I had only one dread: that I should die without seeing you again. But you are here, and now they can shoot me. When I have passed a quarter of an hour with you I shall be ready."

Little by little he had drawn her to him, and she leaned her head upon his shoulder. The danger made them dearer to each other. They forgot everything in that warm clasp.

"Ah, Francoise," resumed Dominique in a caressing voice, "this is Saint Louis's Day, the day, so long awaited, of our marriage. Nothing has been able to separate us, since we are both here alone, faithful to the appointment. Is not this our wedding morning?"

"Yes, yes," she repeated, "it is our wedding morning."

They tremblingly exchanged a kiss. But all at once she disengaged herself from Dominique's arms; she remembered the terrible reality.

"You must fly; you must fly," she whispered. "There is not a minute to be lost!"

And as he stretched out his arms in the darkness to clasp her again, she said tenderly:

"Oh, I implore you to listen to me! If you die I shall die also! In an hour it will be light. I want you to go at once."

Then rapidly she explained her plan. The iron ladder descended to the mill wheel; there he could climb down the buckets and get into the boat which was hidden away in a nook. Afterward it would be easy for him to reach the other bank of the river and escape.

"But what of the sentinels?" he asked.

"There is only one, opposite, at the foot of the first willow."

"What if he should see me and attempt to give an alarm?"

Francoise shivered. She placed in his hand a knife she had brought with her. There was a brief silence.

"What is to become of your father and yourself?" resumed Dominique. "No, I cannot fly! When I am gone those soldiers will, perhaps, massacre you both! You do not know them. They offered me my life if I would consent to guide them through the forest of Sauval. When they discover my escape they will be capable of anything!"

The young girl did not stop to argue. She said simply in reply to all the reasons he advanced:

"Out of love for me, fly! If you love me, Dominique, do not remain here another moment!"

Then she promised to climb back to her chamber. No one would know that she had helped him. She finally threw her arms around him to convince him with an embrace, with a burst of extraordinary love. He was vanquished. He asked but one more question:

"Can you swear to me that your father knows what you have done and that he advises me to fly?"

"My father sent me!" answered Francoise boldly.

She told a falsehood. At that moment she had only one immense need: to know that he was safe, to escape from the abominable thought that the sun would be the signal for his death. When he was far away every misfortune might fall upon her; that would seem delightful to her from the moment he was secure. The selfishness of her tenderness desired that he should live before everything.

"Very well," said Dominique; "I will do what you wish."

They said nothing more. Dominique reopened the window. But suddenly a sound froze them. The door was shaken, and they thought that it was about to be opened. Evidently a patrol had heard their voices. Standing locked in each other's arms, they waited in unspeakable anguish. The door was shaken a second time, but it did not open. They uttered low sighs of relief; they comprehended that the soldier who was asleep against the door must have turned over. In fact, silence succeeded; the snoring was resumed.

Dominique exacted that Francoise should ascend to her chamber before he departed. He clasped her in his arms and bade her a mute adieu. Then he aided her to seize the ladder and clung to it in his turn. But he refused to descend a single round until convinced that she was in her apartment. When Francoise had entered her window she let fall in a voice as light as a breath:

"Au revoir, my love!"

She leaned her elbows on the sill and strove to follow Dominique with her eyes. The night was yet very dark. She searched for the sentinel but could not see him; the willow alone made a pale stain in the midst of the gloom. For an instant she heard the sound produced by Dominique's body in passing along the ivy. Then the wheel cracked, and there was a slight agitation in the water which told her that the young man had found the boat. A moment afterward she distinguished the somber silhouette of the bateau on the gray surface of the Morelle. Terrible anguish seized upon her. Each instant she thought she heard the sentinel's cry of alarm; the smallest sounds scattered through the gloom seemed to her the hurried tread of soldiers, the clatter of weapons, the charging of guns. Nevertheless, the seconds elapsed and the country maintained its profound peace. Dominique must have reached the other side of the river. Francoise saw nothing more. The silence was majestic. She heard a shuffling of feet, a hoarse cry and the hollow fall of a body. Afterward the silence grew deeper. Then as if she had felt Death pass by, she stood, chilled through and through, staring into the thick night.

CHAPTER IV

A TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE

At dawn a clamor of voices shook the mill. Pere Merlier opened the door of Francoise's chamber. She went down into the courtyard, pale and very calm. But there she could not repress a shiver as she saw the corpse of a Prussian soldier stretched out on a cloak beside the well.

Around the body troops gesticulated, uttering cries of fury. Many of them shook their fists at the village. Meanwhile the officer had summoned Pere Merlier as the mayor of the commune.

"Look!" he said to him in a voice almost choking with anger. "There lies one of our men who was found assassinated upon the bank of the river. We must make a terrible example, and I count on you to aid us in discovering the murderer."

"As you choose," answered the miller with his usual stoicism, "but you will find it no easy task."

The officer stooped and drew aside a part of the cloak which hid the face of the dead man. Then appeared a horrible wound. The sentinel had been struck in the throat, and the weapon had remained in the cut. It was a kitchen knife with a black handle.

"Examine that knife," said the officer to Pere Merlier; "perhaps it will help us in our search."

The old man gave a start but recovered control of himself immediately. He replied without moving a muscle of his face:

"Everybody in the district has similar knives. Doubtless your man was weary of fighting and put an end to his own life. It looks like it!"

"Mind what you say!" cried the officer furiously. "I do not know what prevents me from setting fire to the four corners of the village!"

Happily in his rage he did not notice the deep trouble pictured on Francoise's countenance. She had been forced to sit down on a stone bench near the well. Despite herself her eyes were fixed upon the corpse stretched our on the ground almost at her feet. It was that of a tall and handsome man who resembled Dominique, with flaxen hair and blue eyes. This resemblance made her heart ache. She thought that perhaps the dead soldier had left behind him in Germany a sweetheart who would weep her eyes out for him. She recognized her knife in the throat of the murdered man. She had killed him.

The officer was talking of striking Rocreuse with terrible measures, when soldiers came running to him. Dominique's escape had just been discovered. It caused an extreme agitation. The officer went to the apartment in which the prisoner had been confined, looked out of the window which had remained open, understood everything and returned, exasperated.

Pere Merlier seemed greatly vexed by Dominique's flight.

"The imbecile!" he muttered. "He has ruined all!"

Francoise heard him and was overcome with anguish. But the miller did not suspect her of complicity in the affair. He tossed his head, saying to her in an undertone:

"We are in a nice scrape!"

"It was that wretch who assassinated the soldier! I am sure of it!" cried the officer. "He has undoubtedly reached the forest. But he must be found for us or the village shall pay for him!"

Turning to the miller, he said:

"See here, you ought to know where he is hidden!"

Pere Merlier laughed silently, pointing to the wide stretch of wooden hills.

"Do you expect to find a man in there?" he said.

"Oh, there must be nooks there with which you are acquainted. I will give you ten men. You must guide them."

"As you please. But it will take a week to search all the wood in the vicinity."

The old man's tranquillity enraged the officer. In fact, the latter comprehended the asburdity of this search. At that moment he saw Francoise, pale and trembling, on the bench. The anxious attitude of the young girl struck him. He was silent for an instant, during which he in turn examined the miller and his daughter.

At length he demanded roughly of the old man:

"Is not that fellow your child's lover?"

Pere Merlier grew livid and seemed about to hurl himself upon the officer to strangle him. He stiffened himself but made no answer. Francoise buried her face in her hands.

"Yes, that's it!" continued the Prussian. "And you or your daughter helped him to escape! One of you is his accomplice! For the last time, will you give him up to us?"

The miller uttered not a word. He turned away and looked into space with an air of indifference, as if the officer had not addressed him. This brought the latter's rage to a head.

"Very well!" he shouted. "You shall be shot in his place!"

And he again ordered out the platoon of execution. Pere Merlier remained as stoical as ever. He hardly even shrugged his shoulders; all this drama appeared to him in bad taste. Without doubt he did not believe that they would shoot a man so lightly. But when the platoon drew up before him he said gravely:

"So it is serious, is it? Go on with your bloody work then! If you must have a victim I will do as well as another!"

But Francoise started up, terrified, stammering:

"In pity, monsieur, do no harm to my father! Kill me in his stead! I aided Dominique to fly! I alone am guilty!"

"Hush, my child!" cried Pere Merlier. "Why do you tell an untruth? She passed the night locked in her chamber, monsieur. She tells a falsehood, I assure you!"

"No, I do not tell a falsehood!" resumed the young girl ardently. "I climbed out of my window and went down the iron ladder; I urged Dominique to fly. This is the truth, the whole truth!"

The old man became very pale. He saw clearly in her eyes that she did not lie, and her story terrified him. Ah, these children with their hearts, how they spoil everything! Then he grew angry and exclaimed:

"She is mad; do not heed her. She tells you stupid tales. Come, finish your work!"

She still protested. She knelt, clasping her hands. The officer tranquilly watched this dolorous struggle.

"MON DIEU!" he said at last. "I take your father because I have not the other. Find the fugitive and the old man shall be set at liberty!"

She gazed at him with staring eyes, astonished at the atrocity of the proposition.

"How horrible!" she murmured. "Where do you think I can find Dominique at this hour? He has departed; I know no more about him."

"Come, make your choice—him or your father."

"Oh, MON DIEU! How can I choose? If I knew where Dominique was I could not choose! You are cutting my heart. I would rather die at once. Yes, it would be the sooner over. Kill me, I implore you, kill me!"

This scene of despair and tears finally made the officer impatient. He cried out:

"Enough! I will be merciful. I consent to give you two hours. If in that time your lover is not here your father will be shot in his place!"

He caused Pere Merlier to be taken to the chamber which had served as Dominique's prison. The old man demanded tobacco and began to smoke. Upon his impassible face not the slightest emotion was visible. But when alone, as he smoked, he shed two big tears which ran slowly down his cheeks. His poor, dear child, how she was suffering!

Francoise remained in the middle of the courtyard. Prussian soldiers passed, laughing. Some of them spoke to her, uttered jokes she could not understand. She stared at the door through which her father had disappeared. With a slow movement she put her hand to her forehead, as if to prevent it from bursting.

The officer turned upon his heel, saying:

"You have two hours. Try to utilize them."

She had two hours. This phrase buzzed in her ears. Then mechanically she quitted the courtyard; she walked straight ahead. Where should she go?—what should she do? She did not even try to make a decision because she well understood the inutility of her efforts. However, she wished to see Dominique. They could have an understanding together; they might, perhaps, find an expedient. And amid the confusion of her thoughts she went down to the shore of the Morelle, which she crossed below the sluice at a spot where there were huge stones. Her feet led her beneath the first willow, in the corner of the meadow. As she stooped she saw a pool of blood which made her turn pale. It was there the murder had been committed. She followed the track of Dominique in the trodden grass; he must have run, for she perceived a line of long footprints stretching across the meadow. Then farther on she lost these traces. But in a neighboring field she thought she found them again. The new trail conducted her to the edge of the forest, where every indication was effaced.

Francoise, nevertheless, plunged beneath the trees. It solaced her to be alone. She sat down for an instant, but at the thought that time was passing she leaped to her feet. How long had it been since she left the mill? Five minutes?—half an hour? She had lost all conception of time. Perhaps Dominique had concealed himself in a copse she knew of, where they had one afternoon eaten filberts together. She hastened to the copse, searched it. Only a blackbird flew away, uttering its soft, sad note. Then she thought he might have taken refuge in a hollow of the rocks, where it had sometimes been his custom to lie in wait for game, but the hollow of the rocks was empty. What good was it to hunt for him? She would never find him, but little by little the desire to discover him took entire possession of her, and she hastened her steps. The idea that he might have climbed a tree suddenly occurred to her. She advanced with uplifted eyes, and that he might be made aware of her presence she called him every fifteen or twenty steps. Cuckoos answered; a breath of wind which passed through the branches made her believe that he was there and was descending. Once she even imagined she saw him; she stopped, almost choked, and wished to fly. What was she to say to him? Had she come to take him back to be shot? Oh no, she would not tell him what had happened. She would cry out to him to escape, not to remain in the neighborhood. Then the thought that her father was waiting for her gave her a sharp pain. She fell upon the turf, weeping, crying aloud:

"MON DIEU! MON DIEU! Why am I here?"

She was mad to have come. And as if seized with fear, she ran; she sought to leave the forest. Three times she deceived herself; she thought she never again would find the mill, when she entered a meadow just opposite Rocreuse. As soon as she saw the village she paused. Was she going to return alone? She was still hesitating when a voice softly called:

"Francoise! Francoise!"

And she saw Dominique, who had raised his head above the edge of a ditch. Just God! She had found him! Did heaven wish his death? She restrained a cry; she let herself glide into the ditch.

"Are you searching for me?" asked the young man.

"Yes," she answered, her brain in a whirl, not knowing what she said.

"What has happened?"

She lowered her eyes, stammered:

"Nothing. I was uneasy; I wanted to see you."

Then, reassured, he explained to her that he had resolved not to go away. He was doubtful about the safety of herself and her father. Those Prussian wretches were fully capable of taking vengeance upon women and old men. But everything was getting on well. He added with a laugh:

"Our wedding will take place in a week—I am sure of it."

Then as she remained overwhelmed, he grew grave again and said:

"But what ails you? You are concealing something from me!"

"No; I swear it to you. I am out of breath from running."

He embraced her, saying that it was imprudent for them to be talking, and he wished to climb out of the ditch to return to the forest. She restrained him. She trembled.

"Listen," she said: "it would, perhaps, be wise for you to remain where you are. No one is searching for you; you have nothing to fear."

"Francoise, you are concealing something from me," he repeated.

Again she swore that she was hiding nothing. She had simply wished to know that he was near her. And she stammered forth still further reasons. She seemed so strange to him that he now could not be induced to flee. Besides, he had faith in the return of the French. Troops had been seen in the direction of Sauval.

"Ah, let them hurry; let them get here as soon as possible," she murmured fervently.

At that moment eleven o'clock sounded from the belfry of Rocreuse. The strokes were clear and distinct. She arose with a terrified look; two hours had passed since she quitted the mill.

"Hear me," she said rapidly: "if we have need of you I will wave my handkerchief from my chamber window."

And she departed on a run, while Dominique, very uneasy, stretched himself out upon the edge of the ditch to watch the mill. As she was about to enter Rocreuse, Francoise met an old beggar, Pere Bontemps, who knew everybody in the district. He bowed to her; he had just seen the miller in the midst of the Prussians; then, making the sign of the cross and muttering broken words, he went on his way.

"The two hours have passed," said the officer when Francoise appeared.

Pere Merlier was there, seated upon the bench beside the well. He was smoking. The young girl again begged, wept, sank on her knees. She wished to gain time. The hope of seeing the French return had increased in her, and while lamenting she thought she heard in the distance, the measured tramp of an army. Oh, if they would come, if they would deliver them all?

"Listen, monsieur," she said: "an hour, another hour; you can grant us another hour!"

But the officer remained inflexible. He even ordered two men to seize her and take her away, that they might quietly proceed with the execution of the old man. Then a frightful struggle took place in Francoise's heart. She could not allow her father to be thus assassinated. No, no; she would die rather with Dominique. She was running toward her chamber when Dominique himself entered the courtyard.

The officer and the soldiers uttered a shout of triumph. But the young man, calmly, with a somewhat severe look, went up to Francoise, as if she had been the only person present.

"You did wrong," he said. "Why did you not bring me back? It remained for Pere Bontemps to tell me everything. But I am here!"

CHAPTER V

THE RETURN OF THE FRENCH

It was three o'clock in the afternoon. Great black clouds, the trail of some neighboring storm, had slowly filled the sky. The yellow heavens, the brass covered uniforms, had changed the valley of Rocreuse, so gay in the sunlight, into a den of cutthroats full of sinister gloom. The Prussian officer had contented himself with causing Dominique to be imprisoned without announcing what fate he reserved for him. Since noon Francoise had been torn by terrible anguish. Despite her father's entreaties she would not quit the courtyard. She was awaiting the French. But the hours sped on; night was approaching, and she suffered the more as all the time gained did not seem to be likely to change the frightful denouement.

About three o'clock the Prussians made their preparations for departure. For an instant past the officer had, as on the previous day, shut himself up with Dominique. Francoise realized that the young man's life was in balance. She clasped her hands; she prayed. Pere Merlier, beside her, maintained silence and the rigid attitude of an old peasant who does not struggle against fate.

"Oh, MON DIEU! Oh, MON DIEU!" murmured Francoise. "They are going to kill him!"

The miller drew her to him and took her on his knees as if she had been a child.

At that moment the officer came out, while behind him two men brought Dominique.

"Never! Never!" cried the latter. "I am ready to die!"

"Think well," resumed the officer. "The service you refuse me another will render us. I am generous: I offer you your life. I want you simply to guide us through the forest to Montredon. There must be pathways leading there."

Dominique was silent.

"So you persist in your infatuation, do you?"

"Kill me and end all this!" replied the young man.

Francoise, her hands clasped, supplicated him from afar. She had forgotten everything; she would have advised him to commit an act of cowardice. But Pere Merlier seized her hands that the Prussians might not see her wild gestures.

"He is right," he whispered: "it is better to die!"

The platoon of execution was there. The officer awaited a sign of weakness on Dominique's part. He still expected to conquer him. No one spoke. In the distance violent crashes of thunder were heard. Oppressive heat weighed upon the country. But suddenly, amid the silence, a cry broke forth:

"The French! The French!"

Yes, the French were at hand. Upon the Sauval highway, at the edge of the wood, the line of red pantaloons could be distinguished. In the mill there was an extraordinary agitation. The Prussian soldiers ran hither and thither with guttural exclamations. Not a shot had yet been fired.

"The French! The French!" cried Francoise, clapping her hands.

She was wild with joy. She escaped from her father's grasp; she laughed and tossed her arms in the air. At last they had come and come in time, since Dominique was still alive!

A terrible platoon fire, which burst upon her ears like a clap of thunder, caused her to turn. The officer muttered between his teeth:

"Before everything, let us settle this affair!"

And with his own hand pushing Dominique against the wall of a shed he ordered his men to fire. When Francoise looked Dominique lay upon the ground with blood streaming from his neck and shoulders.

She did not weep; she stood stupefied. Her eyes grew fixed, and she sat down under the shed, a few paces from the body. She stared at it, wringing her hands. The Prussians had seized Pere Merlier as a hostage.

It was a stirring combat. The officer had rapidly posted his men, comprehending that he could not beat a retreat without being cut to pieces. Hence he would fight to the last. Now the Prussians defended the mill, and the French attacked it. The fusillade began with unusual violence. For half an hour it did not cease. Then a hollow sound was heard, and a ball broke a main branch of the old elm. The French had cannon. A battery, stationed just above the ditch in which Dominique had hidden himself, swept the wide street of Rocreuse. The struggle could not last long.

Ah, the poor mill! Balls pierced it in every part. Half of the roof was carried away. Two walls were battered down. But it was on the side of the Morelle that the destruction was most lamentable. The ivy, torn from the tottering edifice, hung like rags; the river was encumbered with wrecks of all kinds, and through a breach was visible Francoise's chamber with its bed, the white curtains of which were carefully closed. Shot followed shot; the old wheel received two balls and gave vent to an agonizing groan; the buckets were borne off by the current; the framework was crushed. The soul of the gay mill had left it!

Then the French began the assault. There was a furious fight with swords and bayonets. Beneath the rust-colored sky the valley was choked with the dead. The broad meadows had a wild look with their tall, isolated trees and their hedges of poplars which stained them with shade. To the right and to the left the forests were like the walls of an ancient ampitheater which enclosed the fighting gladiators, while the springs, the fountains and the flowing brooks seemed to sob amid the panic of the country.

Beneath the shed Francoise still sat near Dominique's body; she had not moved. Pere Merlier had received a slight wound. The Prussians were exterminated, but the ruined mill was on fire in a dozen places. The French rushed into the courtyard, headed by their captain. It was his first success of the war. His face beamed with triumph. He waved his sword, shouting:

"Victory! Victory!"

On seeing the wounded miller, who was endeavoring to comfort Francoise, and noticing the body of Dominique, his joyous look changed to one of sadness. Then he knelt beside the young man and, tearing open his blouse, put his hand to his heart.

"Thank God!" he cried. "It is yet beating! Send for the surgeon!"

At the captain's words Francoise leaped to her feet.

"There is hope!" she cried. "Oh, tell me there is hope!"

At that moment the surgeon appeared. He made a hasty examination and said:

"The young man is severely hurt, but life is not extinct; he can be saved!" By the surgeon's orders Dominique was transported to a neighboring cottage, where he was placed in bed. His wounds were dressed; restoratives were administered, and he soon recovered consciousness. When he opened his eyes he saw Francoise sitting beside him and through the open window caught sight of Pere Merlier talking with the French captain. He passed his hand over his forehead with a bewildered air and said:

"They did not kill me after all!"

"No," replied Francoise. "The French came, and their surgeon saved you."

Pere Merlier turned and said through the window:

"No talking yet, my young ones!"

In due time Dominique was entirely restored, and when peace again blessed the land he wedded his beloved Francoise.

The mill was rebuilt, and Pere Merlier had a new wheel upon which to bestow whatever tenderness was not engrossed by his daughter and her husband.

CAPTAIN BURLE

CHAPTER I

THE SWINDLE

It was nine o'clock. The little town of Vauchamp, dark and silent, had just retired to bed amid a chilly November rain. In the Rue des Recollets, one of the narrowest and most deserted streets of the district of Saint-Jean, a single window was still alight on the third floor of an old house, from whose damaged gutters torrents of water were falling into the street. Mme Burle was sitting up before a meager fire of vine stocks, while her little grandson Charles pored over his lessons by the pale light of a lamp.

The apartment, rented at one hundred and sixty francs per annum, consisted of four large rooms which it was absolutely impossible to keep warm during the winter. Mme Burle slept in the largest chamber, her son Captain and Quartermaster Burle occupying a somewhat smaller one overlooking the street, while little Charles had his iron cot at the farther end of a spacious drawing room with mildewed hangings, which was never used. The few pieces of furniture belonging to the captain and his mother, furniture of the massive style of the First Empire, dented and worn by continuous transit from one garrison town to another, almost disappeared from view beneath the lofty ceilings whence darkness fell. The flooring of red-colored tiles was cold and hard to the feet; before the chairs there were merely a few threadbare little rugs of poverty-stricken aspect, and athwart this desert all the winds of heaven blew through the disjointed doors and windows.

Near the fireplace sat Mme Burle, leaning back in her old yellow velvet armchair and watching the last vine branch smoke, with that stolid, blank stare of the aged who live within themselves. She would sit thus for whole days together, with her tall figure, her long stern face and her thin lips that never smiled. The widow of a colonel who had died just as he was on the point of becoming a general, the mother of a captain whom she had followed even in his campaigns, she had acquired a military stiffness of bearing and formed for herself a code of honor, duty and patriotism which kept her rigid, desiccated, as it were, by the stern application of discipline. She seldom, if ever, complained. When her son had become a widower after five years of married life she had undertaken the education of little Charles as a matter of course, performing her duties with the severity of a sergeant drilling recruits. She watched over the child, never tolerating the slightest waywardness or irregularity, but compelling him to sit up till midnight when his exercises were not finished, and sitting up herself until he had completed them. Under such implacable despotism Charles, whose constitution was delicate, grew up pale and thin, with beautiful eyes, inordinately large and clear, shining in his white, pinched face.

During the long hours of silence Mme Burle dwelt continuously upon one and the same idea: she had been disappointed in her son. This thought sufficed to occupy her mind, and under its influence she would live her whole life over again, from the birth of her son, whom she had pictured rising amid glory to the highest rank, till she came down to mean and narrow garrison life, the dull, monotonous existence of nowadays, that stranding in the post of a quartermaster, from which Burle would never rise and in which he seemed to sink more and more heavily. And yet his first efforts had filled her with pride, and she had hoped to see her dreams realized. Burle had only just left Saint-Cyr when he distinguished himself at the battle of Solferino, where he had captured a whole battery of the enemy's artillery with merely a handful of men. For this feat he had won the cross; the papers had recorded his heroism, and he had become known as one of the bravest soldiers in the army. But gradually the hero had grown stout, embedded in flesh, timorous, lazy and satisfied. In 1870, still a captain, he had been made a prisoner in the first encounter, and he returned from Germany quite furious, swearing that he would never be caught fighting again, for it was too absurd. Being prevented from leaving the army, as he was incapable of embracing any other profession, he applied for and obtained the position of captain quartermaster, "a kennel," as he called it, "in which he would be left to kick the bucket in peace." That day Mme Burle experienced a great internal disruption. She felt that it was all over, and she ever afterward preserved a rigid attitude with tightened lips.

A blast of wind shook the Rue des Recollets and drove the rain angrily against the windowpanes. The old lady lifted her eyes from the smoking vine roots now dying out, to make sure that Charles was not falling asleep over his Latin exercise. This lad, twelve years of age, had become the old lady's supreme hope, the one human being in whom she centered her obstinate yearning for glory. At first she had hated him with all the loathing she had felt for his mother, a weak and pretty young lacemaker whom the captain had been foolish enough to marry when he found out that she would not listen to his passionate addresses on any other condition. Later on, when the mother had died and the father had begun to wallow in vice, Mme Burle dreamed again in presence of that little ailing child whom she found it so hard to rear. She wanted to see him robust, so that he might grow into the hero that Burle had declined to be, and for all her cold ruggedness she watched him anxiously, feeling his limbs and instilling courage into his soul. By degrees, blinded by her passionate desires, she imagined that she had at last found the man of the family. The boy, whose temperament was of a gentle, dreamy character, had a physical horror of soldiering, but as he lived in mortal dread of his grandmother and was extremely shy and submissive, he would echo all she said and resignedly express his intention of entering the army when he grew up.

Mme Burle observed that the exercise was not progressing. In fact, little Charles, overcome by the deafening noise of the storm, was dozing, albeit his pen was between his fingers and his eyes were staring at the paper. The old lady at once struck the edge of the table with her bony hand; whereupon the lad started, opened his dictionary and hurriedly began to turn over the leaves. Then, still preserving silence, his grandmother drew the vine roots together on the hearth and unsuccessfully attempted to rekindle the fire.

At the time when she had still believed in her son she had sacrificed her small income, which he had squandered in pursuits she dared not investigate. Even now he drained the household; all its resources went to the streets, and it was through him that she lived in penury, with empty rooms and cold kitchen. She never spoke to him of all those things, for with her sense of discipline he remained the master. Only at times she shuddered at the sudden fear that Burle might someday commit some foolish misdeed which would prevent Charles from entering the army.

She was rising up to fetch a fresh piece of wood in the kitchen when a fearful hurricane fell upon the house, making the doors rattle, tearing off a shutter and whirling the water in the broken gutters like a spout against the window. In the midst of the uproar a ring at the bell startled the old lady. Who could it be at such an hour and in such weather? Burle never returned till after midnight, if he came home at all. However, she went to the door. An officer stood before her, dripping with rain and swearing savagely.

"Hell and thunder!" he growled. "What cursed weather!"

It was Major Laguitte, a brave old soldier who had served under Colonel Burle during Mme Burle's palmy days. He had started in life as a drummer boy and, thanks to his courage rather than his intellect, had attained to the command of a battalion, when a painful infirmity—the contraction of the muscles of one of his thighs, due to a wound—obliged him to accept the post of major. He was slightly lame, but it would have been imprudent to tell him so, as he refused to own it.

"What, you, Major?" said Mme Burle with growing astonishment.

"Yes, thunder," grumbled Laguitte, "and I must be confoundedly fond of you to roam the streets on such a night as this. One would think twice before sending even a parson out."

He shook himself, and little rivulets fell from his huge boots onto the floor. Then he looked round him.

"I particularly want to see Burle. Is the lazy beggar already in bed?"

"No, he is not in yet," said the old woman in her harsh voice.

The major looked furious, and, raising his voice, he shouted: "What, not at home? But in that case they hoaxed me at the cafe, Melanie's establishment, you know. I went there, and a maid grinned at me, saying that the captain had gone home to bed. Curse the girl! I suspected as much and felt like pulling her ears!"

After this outburst he became somewhat calmer, stamping about the room in an undecided way, withal seeming greatly disturbed. Mme Burle looked at him attentively.

"Is it the captain personally whom you want to see?" she said at last.

"Yes," he answered.

"Can I not tell him what you have to say?"

"No."

She did not insist but remained standing without taking her eyes off the major, who did not seem able to make up his mind to leave. Finally in a fresh burst of rage he exclaimed with an oath: "It can't be helped. As I am here you may as well know—after all, it is, perhaps, best."

He sat down before the chimney piece, stretching out his muddy boots as if a bright fire had been burning. Mme Burle was about to resume her own seat when she remarked that Charles, overcome by fatigue, had dropped his head between the open pages of his dictionary. The arrival of the major had at first interested him, but, seeing that he remained unnoticed, he had been unable to struggle against his sleepiness. His grandmother turned toward the table to slap his frail little hands, whitening in the lamplight, when Laguitte stopped her.

"No—no!" he said. "Let the poor little man sleep. I haven't got anything funny to say. There's no need for him to hear me."

The old lady sat down in her armchair; deep silence reigned, and they looked at one another.

"Well, yes," said the major at last, punctuating his words with an angry motion of his chin, "he has been and done it; that hound Burle has been and done it!"

Not a muscle of Mme Burle's face moved, but she became livid, and her figure stiffened. Then the major continued: "I had my doubts. I had intended mentioning the subject to you. Burle was spending too much money, and he had an idiotic look which I did not fancy. Thunder and lightning! What a fool a man must be to behave so filthily!"

Then he thumped his knee furiously with his clenched fist and seemed to choke with indignation. The old woman put the straightforward question:

"He has stolen?"

"You can't have an idea of it. You see, I never examined his accounts; I approved and signed them. You know how those things are managed. However, just before the inspection—as the colonel is a crotchety old maniac—I said to Burle: 'I say, old man, look to your accounts; I am answerable, you know,' and then I felt perfectly secure. Well, about a month ago, as he seemed queer and some nasty stories were circulating, I peered a little closer into the books and pottered over the entries. I thought everything looked straight and very well kept—"

At this point he stopped, convulsed by such a fit of rage that he had to relieve himself by a volley of appalling oaths. Finally he resumed: "It isn't the swindle that angers me; it is his disgusting behavior to me. He has gammoned me, Madame Burle. By God! Does he take me for an old fool?"

"So he stole?" the mother again questioned.

"This evening," continued the major more quietly, "I had just finished my dinner when Gagneux came in—you know Gagneux, the butcher at the corner of the Place aux Herbes? Another dirty beast who got the meat contract and makes our men eat all the diseased cow flesh in the neighborhood! Well, I received him like a dog, and then he let it all out—blurted out the whole thing, and a pretty mess it is! It appears that Burle only paid him in driblets and had got himself into a muddle—a confusion of figures which the devil himself couldn't disentangle. In short, Burle owes the butcher two thousand francs, and Gagneux threatens that he'll inform the colonel if he is not paid. To make matters worse, Burle, just to blind me, handed me every week a forged receipt which he had squarely signed with Gagneux's name. To think he did that to me, his old friend! Ah, curse him!"

With increasing profanity the major rose to his feet, shook his fist at the ceiling and then fell back in his chair. Mme Burle again repeated: "He has stolen. It was inevitable."

Then without a word of judgment or condemnation she added simply: "Two thousand francs—we have not got them. There are barely thirty francs in the house."

"I expected as much," said Laguitte. "And do you know where all the money goes? Why, Melanie gets it—yes, Melanie, a creature who has turned Burle into a perfect fool. Ah, those women! Those fiendish women! I always said they would do for him! I cannot conceive what he is made of! He is only five years younger than I am, and yet he is as mad as ever. What a woman hunter he is!"

Another long silence followed. Outside the rain was increasing in violence, and throughout the sleepy little town one could hear the crashing of slates and chimney pots as they were dashed by the blast onto the pavements of the streets.

"Come," suddenly said the major, rising, "my stopping here won't mend matters. I have warned you—and now I'm off."

"What is to be done? To whom can we apply?" muttered the old woman drearily.

"Don't give way—we must consider. If I only had the two thousand francs—but you know that I am not rich."

The major stopped short in confusion. This old bachelor, wifeless and childless, spent his pay in drink and gambled away at ecarte whatever money his cognac and absinthe left in his pocket. Despite that, however, he was scrupulously honest from a sense of discipline.

"Never mind," he added as he reached the threshold. "I'll begin by stirring him up. I shall move heaven and earth! What! Burle, Colonel Burle's son, condemned for theft! That cannot be! I would sooner burn down the town. Now, thunder and lightning, don't worry; it is far more annoying for me than for you."

He shook the old lady's hand roughly and vanished into the shadows of the staircase, while she held the lamp aloft to light the way. When she returned and replaced the lamp on the table she stood for a moment motionless in front of Charles, who was still asleep with his face lying on the dictionary. His pale cheeks and long fair hair made him look like a girl, and she gazed at him dreamily, a shade of tenderness passing over her harsh countenance. But it was only a passing emotion; her features regained their look of cold, obstinate determination, and, giving the youngster a sharp rap on his little hand, she said:

"Charles—your lessons."

The boy awoke, dazed and shivering, and again rapidly turned over the leaves. At the same moment Major Laguitte, slamming the house door behind him, received on his head a quantity of water falling from the gutters above, whereupon he began to swear in so loud a voice that he could be heard above the storm. And after that no sound broke upon the pelting downpour save the slight rustle of the boy's pen traveling over the paper. Mme Burle had resumed her seat near the chimney piece, still rigid, with her eyes fixed on the dead embers, preserving, indeed, her habitual attitude and absorbed in her one idea.

CHAPTER II

THE CAFE

The Cafe de Paris, kept by Melanie Cartier, a widow, was situated on the Place du Palais, a large irregular square planted with meager, dusty elm trees. The place was so well known in Vauchamp that it was customary to say, "Are you coming to Melanie's?" At the farther end of the first room, which was a spacious one, there was another called "the divan," a narrow apartment having sham leather benches placed against the walls, while at each corner there stood a marble-topped table. The widow, deserting her seat in the front room, where she left her little servant Phrosine, spent her evenings in the inner apartment, ministering to a few customers, the usual frequenters of the place, those who were currently styled "the gentlemen of the divan." When a man belonged to that set it was as if he had a label on his back; he was spoken of with smiles of mingled contempt and envy.

Mme Cartier had become a widow when she was five and twenty. Her husband, a wheelwright, who on the death of an uncle had amazed Vauchamp by taking the Cafe de Paris, had one fine day brought her back with him from Montpellier, where he was wont to repair twice a year to purchase liqueurs. As he was stocking his establishment he selected, together with divers beverages, a woman of the sort he wanted—of an engaging aspect and apt to stimulate the trade of the house. It was never known where he had picked her up, but he married her after trying her in the cafe during six months or so. Opinions were divided in Vauchamp as to her merits, some folks declaring that she was superb, while others asserted that she looked like a drum-major. She was a tall woman with large features and coarse hair falling low over her forehead. However, everyone agreed that she knew very well how to fool the sterner sex. She had fine eyes and was wont to fix them with a bold stare on the gentlemen of the divan, who colored and became like wax in her hands. She also had the reputation of possessing a wonderfully fine figure, and southerners appreciate a statuesque style of beauty.

Cartier had died in a singular way. Rumor hinted at a conjugal quarrel, a kick, producing some internal tumor. Whatever may have been the truth, Melanie found herself encumbered with the cafe, which was far from doing a prosperous business. Her husband had wasted his uncle's inheritance in drinking his own absinthe and wearing out the cloth of his own billiard table. For a while it was believed that the widow would have to sell out, but she liked the life and the establishment just as it was. If she could secure a few customers the bigger room might remain deserted. So she limited herself to repapering the divan in white and gold and recovering the benches. She began by entertaining a chemist. Then a vermicelli maker, a lawyer and a retired magistrate put in an appearance; and thus it was that the cafe remained open, although the waiter did not receive twenty orders a day. No objections were raised by the authorities, as appearances were kept up; and, indeed, it was not deemed advisable to interfere, for some respectable folks might have been worried.

Of an evening five or six well-to-do citizens would enter the front room and play at dominoes there. Although Cartier was dead and the Cafe de Paris had got a queer name, they saw nothing and kept up their old habits. In course of time, the waiter having nothing to do, Melanie dismissed him and made Phrosine light the solitary gas burner in the corner where the domino players congregated. Occasionally a party of young men, attracted by the gossip that circulated through the town, would come in, wildly excited and laughing loudly and awkwardly. But they were received there with icy dignity. As a rule they did not even see the widow, and even if she happened to be present she treated them with withering disdain, so that they withdrew, stammering and confused. Melanie was too astute to indulge in any compromising whims. While the front room remained obscure, save in the corner where the few townsfolk rattled their dominoes, she personally waited on the gentlemen of the divan, showing herself amiable without being free, merely venturing in moments of familiarity to lean on the shoulder of one or another of them, the better to watch a skillfully played game of ecarte.

One evening the gentlemen of the divan, who had ended by tolerating each other's presence, experienced a disagreeable surprise on finding Captain Burle at home there. He had casually entered the cafe that same morning to get a glass of vermouth, so it seemed, and he had found Melanie there. They had conversed, and in the evening when he returned Phrosine immediately showed him to the inner room.

Two days later Burle reigned there supreme; still he had not frightened the chemist, the vermicelli maker, the lawyer or the retired magistrate away. The captain, who was short and dumpy, worshiped tall, plump women. In his regiment he had been nicknamed "Petticoat Burle" on account of his constant philandering. Whenever the officers, and even the privates, met some monstrous-looking creature, some giantess puffed out with fat, whether she were in velvet or in rags, they would invariably exclaim, "There goes one to Petticoat Burle's taste!" Thus Melanie, with her opulent presence, quite conquered him. He was lost—quite wrecked. In less than a fortnight he had fallen to vacuous imbecility. With much the expression of a whipped hound in the tiny sunken eyes which lighted up his bloated face, he was incessantly watching the widow in mute adoration before her masculine features and stubby hair. For fear that he might be dismissed, he put up with the presence of the other gentlemen of the divan and spent his pay in the place down to the last copper. A sergeant reviewed the situation in one sentence: "Petticoat Burle is done for; he's a buried man!"

It was nearly ten o'clock when Major Laguitte furiously flung the door of the cafe open. For a moment those inside could see the deluged square transformed into a dark sea of liquid mud, bubbling under the terrible downpour. The major, now soaked to the skin and leaving a stream behind him, strode up to the small counter where Phrosine was reading a novel.

"You little wretch," he yelled, "you have dared to gammon an officer; you deserve—"

And then he lifted his hand as if to deal a blow such as would have felled an ox. The little maid shrank back, terrified, while the amazed domino players looked, openmouthed. However, the major did not linger there—he pushed the divan door open and appeared before Melanie and Burle just as the widow was playfully making the captain sip his grog in small spoonfuls, as if she were feeding a pet canary. Only the ex-magistrate and the chemist had come that evening, and they had retired early in a melancholy frame of mind. Then Melanie, being in want of three hundred francs for the morrow, had taken advantage of the opportunity to cajole the captain.

"Come." she said, "open your mouth; ain't it nice, you greedy piggy-wiggy?"

Burle, flushing scarlet, with glazed eyes and sunken figure, was sucking the spoon with an air of intense enjoyment.

"Good heavens!" roared the major from the threshold. "You now play tricks on me, do you? I'm sent to the roundabout and told that you never came here, and yet all the while here you are, addling your silly brains."

Burle shuddered, pushing the grog away, while Melanie stepped angrily in front of him as if to shield him with her portly figure, but Laguitte looked at her with that quiet, resolute expression well known to women who are familiar with bodily chastisement.

"Leave us," he said curtly.

She hesitated for the space of a second. She almost felt the gust of the expected blow, and then, white with rage, she joined Phrosine in the outer room.

When the two men were alone Major Laguitte walked up to Burle, looked at him and, slightly stooping, yelled into his face these two words: "You pig!"

The captain, quite dazed, endeavored to retort, but he had not time to do so.

"Silence!" resumed the major. "You have bamboozled a friend. You palmed off on me a lot of forged receipts which might have sent both of us to the gallows. Do you call that proper behavior? Is that the sort of trick to play a friend of thirty years' standing?"

Burle, who had fallen back in his chair, was livid; his limbs shook as if with ague. Meanwhile the major, striding up and down and striking the tables wildly with his fists, continued: "So you have become a thief like the veriest scribbling cur of a clerk, and all for the sake of that creature here! If at least you had stolen for your mother's sake it would have been honorable! But, curse it, to play tricks and bring the money into this shanty is what I cannot understand! Tell me—what are you made of at your age to go to the dogs as you are going all for the sake of a creature like a grenadier!"

"YOU gamble—" stammered the captain.

"Yes, I do—curse it!" thundered the major, lashed into still greater fury by this remark. "And I am a pitiful rogue to do so, because it swallows up all my pay and doesn't redound to the honor of the French army. However, I don't steal. Kill yourself, if it pleases you; starve your mother and the boy, but respect the regimental cashbox and don't drag your friends down with you."

He stopped. Burle was sitting there with fixed eyes and a stupid air. Nothing was heard for a moment save the clatter of the major's heels.

"And not a single copper," he continued aggressively. "Can you picture yourself between two gendarmes, eh?"

He then grew a little calmer, caught hold of Burle's wrists and forced him to rise.

"Come!" he said gruffly. "Something must be done at once, for I cannot go to bed with this affair on my mind—I have an idea."

In the front room Melanie and Phrosine were talking eagerly in low voices. When the widow saw the two men leaving the divan she moved toward Burle and said coaxingly: "What, are you going already, Captain?"

"Yes, he's going," brutally answered Laguitte, "and I don't intend to let him set foot here again."

The little maid felt frightened and pulled her mistress back by the skirt of her dress; in doing so she imprudently murmured the word "drunkard" and thereby brought down the slap which the major's hand had been itching to deal for some time past. Both women having stooped, however, the blow only fell on Phrosine's back hair, flattening her cap and breaking her comb. The domino players were indignant.

"Let's cut it," shouted Laguitte, and he pushed Burle on the pavement. "If I remained I should smash everyone in the place."

To cross the square they had to wade up to their ankles in mud. The rain, driven by the wind, poured off their faces. The captain walked on in silence, while the major kept on reproaching him with his cowardice and its disastrous consequences. Wasn't it sweet weather for tramping the streets? If he hadn't been such an idiot they would both be warmly tucked in bed instead of paddling about in the mud. Then he spoke of Gagneux—a scoundrel whose diseased meat had on three separate occasions made the whole regiment ill. In a week, however, the contract would come to an end, and the fiend himself would not get it renewed.

"It rests with me," the major grumbled. "I can select whomsoever I choose, and I'd rather cut off my right arm than put that poisoner in the way of earning another copper."

Just then he slipped into a gutter and, half choked by a string of oaths, he gasped:

"You understand—I am going to rout up Gagneux. You must stop outside while I go in. I must know what the rascal is up to and if he'll dare to carry out his threat of informing the colonel tomorrow. A butcher—curse him! The idea of compromising oneself with a butcher! Ah, you aren't over-proud, and I shall never forgive you for all this."

They had now reached the Place aux Herbes. Gagneux's house was quite dark, but Laguitte knocked so loudly that he was eventually admitted. Burle remained alone in the dense obscurity and did not even attempt to seek any shelter. He stood at a corner of the market under the pelting rain, his head filled with a loud buzzing noise which prevented him from thinking. He did not feel impatient, for he was unconscious of the flight of time. He stood there looking at the house, which, with its closed door and windows, seemed quite lifeless. When at the end of an hour the major came out again it appeared to the captain as if he had only just gone in.

Laguitte was so grimly mute that Burle did not venture to question him. For a moment they sought each other, groping about in the dark; then they resumed their walk through the somber streets, where the water rolled as in the bed of a torrent. They moved on in silence side by side, the major being so abstracted that he even forgot to swear. However, as they again crossed the Place du Palais, at the sight of the Cafe de Paris, which was still lit up, he dropped his hand on Burle's shoulder and said, "If you ever re-enter that hole I—"

"No fear!" answered the captain without letting his friend finish his sentence.

Then he stretched out his hand.

"No, no," said Laguitte, "I'll see you home; I'll at least make sure that you'll sleep in your bed tonight."

They went on, and as they ascended the Rue des Recollets they slackened their pace. When the captain's door was reached and Burle had taken out his latchkey he ventured to ask:

"Well?"

"Well," answered the major gruffly, "I am as dirty a rogue as you are. Yes! I have done a scurrilous thing. The fiend take you! Our soldiers will eat carrion for three months longer."

Then he explained that Gagneux, the disgusting Gagneux, had a horribly level head and that he had persuaded him—the major—to strike a bargain. He would refrain from informing the colonel, and he would even make a present of the two thousand francs and replace the forged receipts by genuine ones, on condition that the major bound himself to renew the meat contract. It was a settled thing.

"Ah," continued Laguitte, "calculate what profits the brute must make out of the meat to part with such a sum as two thousand francs."

Burle, choking with emotion, grasped his old friend's hands, stammering confused words of thanks. The vileness of the action committed for his sake brought tears into his eyes.

"I never did such a thing before," growled Laguitte, "but I was driven to it. Curse it, to think that I haven't those two thousand francs in my drawer! It is enough to make one hate cards. It is my own fault. I am not worth much; only, mark my words, don't begin again, for, curse it—I shan't."

The captain embraced him, and when he had entered the house the major stood a moment before the closed door to make certain that he had gone upstairs to bed. Then as midnight was striking and the rain was still belaboring the dark town, he slowly turned homeward. The thought of his men almost broke his heart, and, stopping short, he said aloud in a voice full of compassion:

"Poor devils! what a lot of cow beef they'll have to swallow for those two thousand francs!"

CHAPTER III

AGAIN?

The regiment was altogether nonplused: Petticoat Burle had quarreled with Melanie. When a week had elapsed it became a proved and undeniable fact; the captain no longer set foot inside the Cafe de Paris, where the chemist, it was averred, once more reigned in his stead, to the profound sorrow of the retired magistrate. An even more incredible statement was that Captain Burle led the life of a recluse in the Rue des Recollets. He was becoming a reformed character; he spent his evenings at his own fireside, hearing little Charles repeat his lessons. His mother, who had never breathed a word to him of his manipulations with Gagneux, maintained her old severity of demeanor as she sat opposite to him in her armchair, but her looks seemed to imply that she believed him reclaimed.

A fortnight later Major Laguitte came one evening to invite himself to dinner. He felt some awkwardness at the prospect of meeting Burle again, not on his own account but because he dreaded awakening painful memories. However, as the captain was mending his ways he wished to shake hands and break a crust with him. He thought this would please his old friend.

When Laguitte arrived Burle was in his room, so it was the old lady who received the major. The latter, after announcing that he had come to have a plate of soup with them, added, lowering his voice:

"Well, how goes it?"

"It is all right," answered the old lady.

"Nothing queer?"

"Absolutely nothing. Never away—in bed at nine—and looking quite happy."

"Ah, confound it," replied the major, "I knew very well he only wanted a shaking. He has some heart left, the dog!"

When Burle appeared he almost crushed the major's hands in his grasp, and standing before the fire, waiting for the dinner, they conversed peacefully, honestly, together, extolling the charms of home life. The captain vowed he wouldn't exchange his home for a kingdom and declared that when he had removed his braces, put on his slippers and settled himself in his armchair, no king was fit to hold a candle to him. The major assented and examined him. At all events his virtuous conduct had not made him any thinner; he still looked bloated; his eyes were bleared, and his mouth was heavy. He seemed to be half asleep as he repeated mechanically: "Home life! There's nothing like home life, nothing in the world!"

"No doubt," said the major; "still, one mustn't exaggerate—take a little exercise and come to the cafe now and then."

"To the cafe, why?" asked Burle. "Do I lack anything here? No, no, I remain at home."

When Charles had laid his books aside Laguitte was surprised to see a maid come in to lay the cloth.

"So you keep a servant now," he remarked to Mme Burle.

"I had to get one," she answered with a sigh. "My legs are not what they used to be, and the household was going to rack and ruin. Fortunately Cabrol let me have his daughter. You know old Cabrol, who sweeps the market? He did not know what to do with Rose—I am teaching her how to work."

Just then the girl left the room.

"How old is she?" asked the major.

"Barely seventeen. She is stupid and dirty, but I only give her ten francs a month, and she eats nothing but soup."

When Rose returned with an armful of plates Laguitte, though he did not care about women, began to scrutinize her and was amazed at seeing so ugly a creature. She was very short, very dark and slightly deformed, with a face like an ape's: a flat nose, a huge mouth and narrow greenish eyes. Her broad back and long arms gave her an appearance of great strength.

"What a snout!" said Laguitte, laughing, when the maid had again left the room to fetch the cruets.

"Never mind," said Burle carelessly, "she is very obliging and does all one asks her. She suits us well enough as a scullion."

The dinner was very pleasant. It consisted of boiled beef and mutton hash. Charles was encouraged to relate some stories of his school, and Mme Burle repeatedly asked him the same question: "Don't you want to be a soldier?" A faint smile hovered over the child's wan lips as he answered with the frightened obedience of a trained dog, "Oh yes, Grandmother." Captain Burle, with his elbows on the table, was masticating slowly with an absent-minded expression. The big room was getting warmer; the single lamp placed on the table left the corners in vague gloom. There was a certain amount of heavy comfort, the familiar intimacy of penurious people who do not change their plates at every course but become joyously excited at the unexpected appearance of a bowl of whipped egg cream at the close of the meal.

Rose, whose heavy tread shook the floor as she paced round the table, had not yet opened her mouth. At last she stopped behind the captain's chair and asked in a gruff voice: "Cheese, sir?"

Burle started. "What, eh? Oh yes—cheese. Hold the plate tight."

He cut a piece of Gruyere, the girl watching him the while with her narrow eyes. Laguitte laughed; Rose's unparalleled ugliness amused him immensely. He whispered in the captain's ear, "She is ripping! There never was such a nose and such a mouth! You ought to send her to the colonel's someday as a curiosity. It would amuse him to see her."

More and more struck by this phenomenal ugliness, the major felt a paternal desire to examine the girl more closely.

"Come here," he said, "I want some cheese too."

She brought the plate, and Laguitte, sticking the knife in the Gruyere, stared at her, grinning the while because he discovered that she had one nostril broader than the other. Rose gravely allowed herself to be looked at, waiting till the gentleman had done laughing.

She removed the cloth and disappeared. Burle immediately went to sleep in the chimney corner while the major and Mme Burle began to chat. Charles had returned to his exercises. Quietude fell from the loft ceiling; the quietude of a middle-class household gathered in concord around their fireside. At nine o'clock Burle woke up, yawned and announced that he was going off to bed; he apologized but declared that he could not keep his eyes open. Half an hour later, when the major took his leave, Mme Burle vainly called for Rose to light him downstairs; the girl must have gone up to her room; she was, indeed, a regular hen, snoring the round of the clock without waking.

"No need to disturb anybody," said Laguitte on the landing; "my legs are not much better than yours, but if I get hold of the banisters I shan't break any bones. Now, my dear lady, I leave you happy; your troubles are ended at last. I watched Burle closely, and I'll take my oath that he's guileless as a child. Dash it—after all, it was high time for Petticoat Burle to reform; he was going downhill fast."

The major went away fully satisfied with the house and its inmates; the walls were of glass and could harbor no equivocal conduct. What particularly delighted him in his friend's return to virtue was that it absolved him from the obligation of verifying the accounts. Nothing was more distasteful to him than the inspection of a number of ledgers, and as long as Burle kept steady, he—Laguitte—could smoke his pipe in peace and sign the books in all confidence. However, he continued to keep one eye open for a little while longer and found the receipts genuine, the entries correct, the columns admirably balanced. A month later he contented himself with glancing at the receipts and running his eye over the totals. Then one morning, without the slightest suspicion of there being anything wrong, simply because he had lit a second pipe and had nothing to do, he carelessly added up a row of figures and fancied that he detected an error of thirteen francs. The balance seemed perfectly correct, and yet he was not mistaken; the total outlay was thirteen francs more than the various sums for which receipts were furnished. It looked queer, but he said nothing to Burle, just making up his mind to examine the next accounts closely. On the following week he detected a fresh error of nineteen francs, and then, suddenly becoming alarmed, he shut himself up with the books and spent a wretched morning poring over them, perspiring, swearing and feeling as if his very skull were bursting with the figures. At every page he discovered thefts of a few francs—the most miserable petty thefts—ten, eight, eleven francs, latterly, three and four; and, indeed, there was one column showing that Burle had pilfered just one franc and a half. For two months, however, he had been steadily robbing the cashbox, and by comparing dates the major found to his disgust that the famous lesson respecting Gagneux had only kept him straight for one week! This last discovery infuriated Laguitte, who struck the books with his clenched fists, yelling through a shower of oaths:

"This is more abominable still! At least there was some pluck about those forged receipts of Gagneux. But this time he is as contemptible as a cook charging twopence extra for her cabbages. Powers of hell! To pilfer a franc and a half and clap it in his pocket! Hasn't the brute got any pride then? Couldn't he run away with the safe or play the fool with actresses?"

The pitiful meanness of these pilferings revolted the major, and, moreover, he was enraged at having been duped a second time, deceived by the simple, stupid dodge of falsified additions. He rose at last and paced his office for a whole hour, growling aloud.

"This gives me his measure. Even if I were to thresh him to a jelly every morning he would still drop a couple of coins into his pocket every afternoon. But where can he spend it all? He is never seen abroad; he goes to bed at nine, and everything looks so clean and proper over there. Can the brute have vices that nobody knows of?"

He returned to the desk, added up the subtracted money and found a total of five hundred and forty-five francs. Where was this deficiency to come from? The inspection was close at hand, and if the crotchety colonel should take it into his head to examine a single page, the murder would be out and Burle would be done for.

This idea froze the major, who left off cursing, picturing Mme Burle erect and despairing, and at the same time he felt his heart swell with personal grief and shame.

"Well," he muttered, "I must first of all look into the rogue's business; I will act afterward."

As he walked over to Burle's office he caught sight of a skirt vanishing through the doorway. Fancying that he had a clue to the mystery, he slipped up quietly and listened and speedily recognized Melanie's shrill voice. She was complaining of the gentlemen of the divan. She had signed a promissory note which she was unable to meet; the bailiffs were in the house, and all her goods would be sold. The captain, however, barely replied to her. He alleged that he had no money, whereupon she burst into tears and began to coax him. But her blandishments were apparently ineffectual, for Burle's husky voice could be heard repeating, "Impossible! Impossible!" And finally the widow withdrew in a towering passion. The major, amazed at the turn affairs were taking, waited a few moments longer before entering the office, where Burle had remained alone. He found him very calm, and despite his furious inclination to call him names he also remained calm, determined to begin by finding out the exact truth.

The office certainly did not look like a swindler's den. A cane-seated chair, covered with an honest leather cushion, stood before the captain's desk, and in a corner there was the locked safe. Summer was coming on, and the song of a canary sounded through the open window. The apartment was very neat and tidy, redolent of old papers, and altogether its appearance inspired one with confidence.

"Wasn't it Melanie who was leaving here as I came along?" asked Laguitte.

Burle shrugged his shoulders.

"Yes," he mumbled. "She has been dunning me for two hundred francs, but she can't screw ten out of me—not even tenpence."

"Indeed!" said the major, just to try him. "I heard that you had made up with her."

"I? Certainly not. I have done with the likes of her for good."

Laguitte went away, feeling greatly perplexed. Where had the five hundred and forty-five francs gone? Had the idiot taken to drinking or gambling? He decided to pay Burle a surprise visit that very evening at his own house, and maybe by questioning his mother he might learn something. However, during the afternoon his leg became very painful; latterly he had been feeling in ill-health, and he had to use a stick so as not to limp too outrageously. This stick grieved him sorely, and he declared with angry despair that he was now no better than a pensioner. However, toward the evening, making a strong effort, he pulled himself out of his armchair and, leaning heavily on his stick, dragged himself through the darkness to the Rue des Recollets, which he reached about nine o'clock. The street door was still unlocked, and on going up he stood panting on the third landing, when he heard voices on the upper floor. One of these voices was Burle's, so he fancied, and out of curiosity he ascended another flight of stairs. Then at the end of a passage on the left he saw a ray of light coming from a door which stood ajar. As the creaking of his boots resounded, this door was sharply closed, and he found himself in the dark.

"Some cook going to bed!" he muttered angrily. "I'm a fool."

All the same he groped his way as gently as possible to the door and listened. Two people were talking in the room, and he stood aghast, for it was Burle and that fright Rose! Then he listened, and the conversation he heard left him no doubt of the awful truth. For a moment he lifted his stick as if to beat down the door. Then he shuddered and, staggering back, leaned against the wall. His legs were trembling under him, while in the darkness of the staircase he brandished his stick as if it had been a saber.

What was to be done? After his first moment of passion there had come thoughts of the poor old lady below. And these made him hesitate. It was all over with the captain now; when a man sank as low as that he was hardly worth the few shovelfuls of earth that are thrown over carrion to prevent them from polluting the atmosphere. Whatever might be said of Burle, however much one might try to shame him, he would assuredly begin the next day. Ah, heavens, to think of it! The money! The honor of the army! The name of Burle, that respected name, dragged through the mire! By all that was holy this could and should not be!

Presently the major softened. If he had only possessed five hundred and forty-five francs! But he had not got such an amount. On the previous day he had drunk too much cognac, just like a mere sub, and had lost shockingly at cards. It served him right—he ought to have known better! And if he was so lame he richly deserved it too; by rights, in fact, his leg ought to be much worse.

At last he crept downstairs and rang at the bell of Mme Burle's flat. Five minutes elapsed, and then the old lady appeared.

"I beg your pardon for keeping you waiting," she said; "I thought that dormouse Rose was still about. I must go and shake her."

But the major detained her.

"Where is Burle?" he asked.

"Oh, he has been snoring since nine o'clock. Would you like to knock at his door?"

"No, no, I only wanted to have a chat with you."

In the parlor Charles sat at his usual place, having just finished his exercises. He looked terrified, and his poor little white hands were tremulous. In point of fact, his grandmother, before sending him to bed, was wont to read some martial stories aloud so as to develop the latent family heroism in his bosom. That night she had selected the episode of the Vengeur, the man-of-war freighted with dying heroes and sinking into the sea. The child, while listening, had become almost hysterical, and his head was racked as with some ghastly nightmare.

Mme Burle asked the major to let her finish the perusal. "Long live the republic!" She solemnly closed the volume. Charles was as white as a sheet.

"You see," said the old lady, "the duty of every French soldier is to die for his country."

"Yes, Grandmother."

Then the lad kissed her on the forehead and, shivering with fear, went to bed in his big room, where the faintest creak of the paneling threw him into a cold sweat.

The major had listened with a grave face. Yes, by heavens! Honor was honor, and he would never permit that wretched Burle to disgrace the old woman and the boy! As the lad was so devoted to the military profession, it was necessary that he should be able to enter Saint-Cyr with his head erect.

When Mme Burle took up the lamp to show the major out, she passed the door of the captain's room, and stopped short, surprised to see the key outside, which was a most unusual occurrence.

"Do go in," she said to Laguitte; "it is bad for him to sleep so much."

And before he could interpose she had opened the door and stood transfixed on finding the room empty. Laguitte turned crimson and looked so foolish that she suddenly understood everything, enlightened by the sudden recollection of several little incidents to which she had previously attached no importance.

"You knew it—you knew it!" she stammered. "Why was I not told? Oh, my God, to think of it! Ah, he has been stealing again—I feel it!"

She remained erect, white and rigid. Then she added in a harsh voice:

"Look you—I wish he were dead!"

Laguitte caught hold of both her hands, which for a moment he kept tightly clasped in his own. Then he left her hurriedly, for he felt a lump rising in his throat and tears coming to his eyes. Ah, by all the powers, this time his mind was quite made up.

CHAPTER IV

INSPECTION

The regimental inspection was to take place at the end of the month. The major had ten days before him. On the very next morning, however, he crawled, limping, as far as the Cafe de Paris, where he ordered some beer. Melanie grew pale when she saw him enter, and it was with a lively recollection of a certain slap that Phrosine hastened to serve him. The major seemed very calm, however; he called for a second chair to rest his bad leg upon and drank his beer quietly like any other thirsty man. He had sat there for about an hour when he saw two officers crossing the Place du Palais—Morandot, who commanded one of the battalions of the regiment, and Captain Doucet. Thereupon he excitedly waved his cane and shouted: "Come in and have a glass of beer with me!"

The officers dared not refuse, but when the maid had brought the beer Morandot said to the major: "So you patronize this place now?"

"Yes—the beer is good."

Captain Doucet winked and asked archly: "Do you belong to the divan, Major?"

Laguitte chuckled but did not answer. Then the others began to chaff him about Melanie, and he took their remarks good-naturedly, simply shrugging his shoulders. The widow was undoubtedly a fine woman, however much people might talk. Some of those who disparaged her would, in reality, be only too pleased to win her good graces. Then turning to the little counter and assuming an engaging air, he shouted:

"Three more glasses, madame."

Melanie was so taken aback that she rose and brought the beer herself. The major detained her at the table and forgot himself so far as to softly pat the hand which she had carelessly placed on the back of a chair. Used as she was to alternate brutality and flattery, she immediately became confident, believing in a sudden whim of gallantry on the part of the "old wreck," as she was wont to style the major when talking with Phrosine. Doucet and Morandot looked at each other in surprise. Was the major actually stepping into Petticoat Burle's shoes? The regiment would be convulsed if that were the case.

Suddenly, however, Laguitte, who kept his eye on the square, gave a start.

"Hallo, there's Burle!" he exclaimed.

"Yes, it is his time," explained Phrosine. "The captain passes every afternoon on his way from the office."

In spite of his lameness the major had risen to his feet, pushing aside the chairs as he called out: "Burle! I say—come along and have a glass."

The captain, quite aghast and unable to understand why Laguitte was at the widow's, advanced mechanically. He was so perplexed that he again hesitated at the door.

"Another glass of beer," ordered the major, and then turning to Burle, he added, "What's the matter with you? Come in. Are you afraid of being eaten alive?"

The captain took a seat, and an awkward pause followed. Melanie, who brought the beer with trembling hands, dreaded some scene which might result in the closing of her establishment. The major's gallantry made her uneasy, and she endeavored to slip away, but he invited her to drink with them, and before she could refuse he had ordered Phrosine to bring a liqueur glass of anisette, doing so with as much coolness as if he had been master of the house. Melanie was thus compelled to sit down between the captain and Laguitte, who exclaimed aggressively: "I WILL have ladies respected. We are French officers! Let us drink Madame's health!"

Burle, with his eyes fixed on his glass, smiled in an embarrassed way. The two officers, shocked at the proceedings, had already tried to get off. Fortunately the cafe was deserted, save that the domino players were having their afternoon game. At every fresh oath which came from the major they glanced around, scandalized by such an unusual accession of customers and ready to threaten Melanie that they would leave her for the Cafe de la Gare if the soldiery was going to invade her place like flies that buzzed about, attracted by the stickiness of the tables which Phrosine scoured only on Saturdays. She was now reclining behind the counter, already reading a novel again.

"How's this—you are not drinking with Madame?" roughly said the major to Burle. "Be civil at least!"

Then as Doucet and Morandot were again preparing to leave, he stopped them.

"Why can't you wait? We'll go together. It is only this brute who never knows how to behave himself."

The two officers looked surprised at the major's sudden bad temper. Melanie attempted to restore peace and with a light laugh placed her hands on the arms of both men. However, Laguitte disengaged himself.

"No," he roared, "leave me alone. Why does he refuse to chink glasses with you? I shall not allow you to be insulted—do you hear? I am quite sick of him."

Burle, paling under the insult, turned slightly and said to Morandot, "What does this mean? He calls me in here to insult me. Is he drunk?"

With a wild oath the major rose on his trembling legs and struck the captain's cheek with his open hand. Melanie dived and thus escaped one half of the smack. An appalling uproar ensued. Phrosine screamed behind the counter as if she herself had received the blow; the domino players also entrenched themselves behind their table in fear lest the soldiers should draw their swords and massacre them. However, Doucet and Morandot pinioned the captain to prevent him from springing at the major's throat and forcibly let him to the door. When they got him outside they succeeded in quieting him a little by repeating that Laguitte was quite in the wrong. They would lay the affair before the colonel, having witnessed it, and the colonel would give his decision. As soon as they had got Burle away they returned to the cafe where they found Laguitte in reality greatly disturbed, with tears in his eyes but affecting stolid indifference and slowly finishing his beer.

"Listen, Major," began Morandot, "that was very wrong on your part. The captain is your inferior in rank, and you know that he won't be allowed to fight you."

"That remains to be seen," answered the major.

"But how has he offended you? He never uttered a word. Two old comrades too; it is absurd."

The major made a vague gesture. "No matter. He annoyed me."

He could never be made to say anything else. Nothing more as to his motive was ever known. All the same, the scandal was a terrible one. The regiment was inclined to believe that Melanie, incensed by the captain's defection, had contrived to entrap the major, telling him some abominable stories and prevailing upon him to insult and strike Burle publicly. Who would have thought it of that old fogy Laguitte, who professed to be a woman hater? they said. So he, too, had been caught at last. Despite the general indignation against Melanie, this adventure made her very conspicuous, and her establishment soon drove a flourishing business.

On the following day the colonel summoned the major and the captain into his presence. He censured them sternly, accusing them of disgracing their uniform by frequenting unseemly haunts. What resolution had they come to, he asked, as he could not authorize them to fight? This same question had occupied the whole regiment for the last twenty-four hours. Apologies were unacceptable on account of the blow, but as Laguitte was almost unable to stand, it was hoped that, should the colonel insist upon it, some reconciliation might be patched up.

"Come," said the colonel, "will you accept me as arbitrator?"

"I beg your pardon, Colonel," interrupted the major; "I have brought you my resignation. Here it is. That settles everything. Please name the day for the duel."

Burle looked at Laguitte in amazement, and the colonel thought it his duty to protest.

"This is a most serious step, Major," he began. "Two years more and you would be entitled to your full pension."

But again did Laguitte cut him short, saying gruffly, "That is my own affair."

"Oh, certainly! Well, I will send in your resignation, and as soon as it is accepted I will fix a day for the duel."

The unexpected turn that events had taken startled the regiment. What possessed that lunatic major to persist in cutting the throat of his old comrade Burle? The officers again discussed Melanie; they even began to dream of her. There must surely be something wonderful about her since she had completely fascinated two such tough old veterans and brought them to a deadly feud. Morandot, having met Laguitte, did not disguise his concern. If he—the major—was not killed, what would he live upon? He had no fortune, and the pension to which his cross of the Legion of Honor entitled him, with the half of a full regimental pension which he would obtain on resigning, would barely find him in bread. While Morandot was thus speaking Laguitte simply stared before him with his round eyes, persevering in the dumb obstinacy born of his narrow mind; and when his companion tried to question him regarding his hatred for Burle, he simply made the same vague gesture as before and once again repeated:

"He annoyed me; so much the worse."

Every morning at mess and at the canteen the first words were: "Has the acceptance of the major's resignation arrived?" The duel was impatiently expected and ardently discussed. The majority believed that Laguitte would be run through the body in three seconds, for it was madness for a man to fight with a paralyzed leg which did not even allow him to stand upright. A few, however, shook their heads. Laguitte had never been a marvel of intellect, that was true; for the last twenty years, indeed, he had been held up as an example of stupidity, but there had been a time when he was known as the best fencer of the regiment, and although he had begun as a drummer he had won his epaulets as the commander of a battalion by the sanguine bravery of a man who is quite unconscious of danger. On the other hand, Burle fenced indifferently and passed for a poltroon. However, they would soon know what to think.

Meanwhile the excitement became more and more intense as the acceptance of Laguitte's resignation was so long in coming. The major was unmistakably the most anxious and upset of everybody. A week had passed by, and the general inspection would commence two days later. Nothing, however, had come as yet. He shuddered at the thought that he had, perhaps, struck his old friend and sent in his resignation all in vain, without delaying the exposure for a single minute. He had in reality reasoned thus: If he himself were killed he would not have the worry of witnessing the scandal, and if he killed Burle, as he expected to do, the affair would undoubtedly be hushed up. Thus he would save the honor of the army, and the little chap would be able to get in at Saint-Cyr. Ah, why wouldn't those wretched scribblers at the War Office hurry up a bit? The major could not keep still but was forever wandering about before the post office, stopping the estafettes and questioning the colonel's orderly to find out if the acceptance had arrived. He lost his sleep and, careless as to people's remarks, he leaned more and more heavily on his stick, hobbling about with no attempt to steady his gait.

On the day before that fixed for the inspection he was, as usual, on his way to the colonel's quarters when he paused, startled, to see Mme Burle (who was taking Charles to school) a few paces ahead of him. He had not met her since the scene at the Cafe de Paris, for she had remained in seclusion at home. Unmanned at thus meeting her, he stepped down to leave the whole sidewalk free. Neither he nor the old lady bowed, and the little boy lifted his large inquisitive eyes in mute surprise. Mme Burle, cold and erect, brushed past the major without the least sign of emotion or recognition. When she had passed he looked after her with an expression of stupefied compassion.

"Confound it, I am no longer a man," he growled, dashing away a tear.

When he arrived at the colonel's quarters a captain in attendance greeted him with the words: "It's all right at last. The papers have come."

"Ah!" murmured Laguitte, growing very pale.

And again he beheld the old lady walking on, relentlessly rigid and holding the little boy's hand. What! He had longed so eagerly for those papers for eight days past, and now when the scraps had come he felt his brain on fire and his heart lacerated.

The duel took place on the morrow, in the barrack yard behind a low wall. The air was keen, the sun shining brightly. Laguitte had almost to be carried to the ground; one of his seconds supported him on one side, while on the other he leaned heavily, on his stick. Burle looked half asleep; his face was puffy with unhealthy fat, as if he had spent a night of debauchery. Not a word was spoken. They were all anxious to have it over.

Captain Doucet crossed the swords of the two adversaries and then drew back, saying: "Set to, gentlemen."

Burle was the first to attack; he wanted to test Laguitte's strength and ascertain what he had to expect. For the last ten days the encounter had seemed to him a ghastly nightmare which he could not fathom. At times a hideous suspicion assailed him, but he put it aside with terror, for it meant death, and he refused to believe that a friend could play him such a trick, even to set things right. Besides, Laguitte's leg reasssured him; he would prick the major on the shoulder, and then all would be over.

During well-nigh a couple of minutes the swords clashed, and then the captain lunged, but the major, recovering his old suppleness of wrist, parried in a masterly style, and if he had returned the attack Burle would have been pierced through. The captain now fell back; he was livid, for he felt that he was at the mercy of the man who had just spared him. At last he understood that this was an execution.

Laguitte, squarely poised on his infirm legs and seemingly turned to stone, stood waiting. The two men looked at each other fixedly. In Burle's blurred eyes there arose a supplication—a prayer for pardon. He knew why he was going to die, and like a child he promised not to transgress again. But the major's eyes remained implacable; honor had spoken, and he silenced his emotion and his pity.

"Let it end," he muttered between his teeth.

Then it was he who attacked. Like a flash of lightning his sword flamed, flying from right to left, and then with a resistless thrust it pierced the breast of the captain, who fell like a log without even a groan.

Laguitte had released his hold upon his sword and stood gazing at that poor old rascal Burle, who was stretched upon his back with his fat stomach bulging out.

"Oh, my God! My God!" repeated the major furiously and despairingly, and then he began to swear.

They led him away, and, both his legs failing him, he had to be supported on either side, for he could not even use his stick.

Two months later the ex-major was crawling slowly along in the sunlight down a lonely street of Vauchamp, when he again found himself face to face with Mme Burle and little Charles. They were both in deep mourning. He tried to avoid them, but he now only walked with difficulty, and they advanced straight upon him without hurrying or slackening their steps. Charles still had the same gentle, girlish, frightened face, and Mme Burle retained her stern, rigid demeanor, looking even harsher than ever.

As Laguitte shrank into the corner of a doorway to leave the whole street to them, she abruptly stopped in front of him and stretched out her hand. He hesitated and then took it and pressed it, but he trembled so violently that he made the old lady's arm shake. They exchanged glances in silence.

"Charles," said the boy's grandmother at last, "shake hands with the major." The boy obeyed without understanding. The major, who was very pale, barely ventured to touch the child's frail fingers; then, feeling that he ought to speak, he stammered out: "You still intend to send him to Saint-Cyr?"

"Of course, when he is old enough," answered Mme Burle.

But during the following week Charles was carried off by typhoid fever. One evening his grandmother had again read him the story of the Vengeur to make him bold, and in the night he had become delirious. The poor little fellow died of fright.

THE DEATH OF OLIVIER BECAILLE

CHAPTER I

MY PASSING

It was on a Saturday, at six in the morning, that I died after a three days' illness. My wife was searching a trunk for some linen, and when she rose and turned she saw me rigid, with open eyes and silent pulses. She ran to me, fancying that I had fainted, touched my hands and bent over me. Then she suddenly grew alarmed, burst into tears and stammered:

"My God, my God! He is dead!"

I heard everything, but the sounds seemed to come from a great distance. My left eye still detected a faint glimmer, a whitish light in which all objects melted, but my right eye was quite bereft of sight. It was the coma of my whole being, as if a thunderbolt had struck me. My will was annihilated; not a fiber of flesh obeyed my bidding. And yet amid the impotency of my inert limbs my thoughts subsisted, sluggish and lazy, still perfectly clear.

My poor Marguerite was crying; she had dropped on her knees beside the bed, repeating in heart-rending tones:

"He is dead! My God, he is dead!"

Was this strange state of torpor, this immobility of the flesh, really death, although the functions of the intellect were not arrested? Was my soul only lingering for a brief space before it soared away forever? From my childhood upward I had been subject to hysterical attacks, and twice in early youth I had nearly succumbed to nervous fevers. By degrees all those who surrounded me had got accustomed to consider me an invalid and to see me sickly. So much so that I myself had forbidden my wife to call in a doctor when I had taken to my bed on the day of our arrival at the cheap lodginghouse of the Rue Dauphine in Paris. A little rest would soon set me right again; it was only the fatigue of the journey which had caused my intolerable weariness. And yet I was conscious of having felt singularly uneasy. We had left our province somewhat abruptly; we were very poor and had barely enough money to support ourselves till I drew my first month's salary in the office where I had obtained a situation. And now a sudden seizure was carrying me off!

Was it really death? I had pictured to myself a darker night, a deeper silence. As a little child I had already felt afraid to die. Being weak and compassionately petted by everyone, I had concluded that I had not long to live, that I should soon be buried, and the thought of the cold earth filled me with a dread I could not master—a dread which haunted me day and night. As I grew older the same terror pursued me. Sometimes, after long hours spent in reasoning with myself, I thought that I had conquered my fear. I reflected, "After all, what does it matter? One dies and all is over. It is the common fate; nothing could be better or easier."

I then prided myself on being able to look death boldly in the face, but suddenly a shiver froze my blood, and my dizzy anguish returned, as if a giant hand had swung me over a dark abyss. It was some vision of the earth returning and setting reason at naught. How often at night did I start up in bed, not knowing what cold breath had swept over my slumbers but clasping my despairing hands and moaning, "Must I die?" In those moments an icy horror would stop my pulses while an appalling vision of dissolution rose before me. It was with difficulty that I could get to sleep again. Indeed, sleep alarmed me; it so closely resembled death. If I closed my eyes they might never open again—I might slumber on forever.

I cannot tell if others have endured the same torture; I only know that my own life was made a torment by it. Death ever rose between me and all I loved; I can remember how the thought of it poisoned the happiest moments I spent with Marguerite. During the first months of our married life, when she lay sleeping by my side and I dreamed of a fair future for her and with her, the foreboding of some fatal separation dashed my hopes aside and embittered my delights. Perhaps we should be parted on the morrow—nay, perhaps in an hour's time. Then utter discouragement assailed me; I wondered what the bliss of being united availed me if it were to end in so cruel a disruption.

My morbid imagination reveled in scenes of mourning. I speculated as to who would be the first to depart, Marguerite or I. Either alternative caused me harrowing grief, and tears rose to my eyes at the thought of our shattered lives. At the happiest periods of my existence I often became a prey to grim dejection such as nobody could understand but which was caused by the thought of impending nihility. When I was most successful I was to general wonder most depressed. The fatal question, "What avails it?" rang like a knell in my ears. But the sharpest sting of this torment was that it came with a secret sense of shame, which rendered me unable to confide my thoughts to another. Husband and wife lying side by side in the darkened room may quiver with the same shudder and yet remain mute, for people do not mention death any more than they pronounce certain obscene words. Fear makes it nameless.

I was musing thus while my dear Marguerite knelt sobbing at my feet. It grieved me sorely to be unable to comfort her by telling her that I suffered no pain. If death were merely the annihilation of the flesh it had been foolish of me to harbor so much dread. I experienced a selfish kind of restfulness in which all my cares were forgotten. My memory had become extraordinarily vivid. My whole life passed before me rapidly like a play in which I no longer acted a part; it was a curious and enjoyable sensation—I seemed to hear a far-off voice relating my own history.

I saw in particular a certain spot in the country near Guerande, on the way to Piriac. The road turns sharply, and some scattered pine trees carelessly dot a rocky slope. When I was seven years old I used to pass through those pines with my father as far as a crumbling old house, where Marguerite's parents gave me pancakes. They were salt gatherers and earned a scanty livelihood by working the adjacent salt marshes. Then I remembered the school at Nantes, where I had grown up, leading a monotonous life within its ancient walls and yearning for the broad horizon of Guerande and the salt marshes stretching to the limitless sea widening under the sky.

Next came a blank—my father was dead. I entered the hospital as clerk to the managing board and led a dreary life with one solitary diversion: my Sunday visits to the old house on Piriac road. The saltworks were doing badly; poverty reigned in the land, and Marguerite's parents were nearly penniless. Marguerite, when merely a child, had been fond of me because I trundled her about in a wheelbarrow, but on the morning when I asked her in marriage she shrank from me with a frightened gesture, and I realized that she thought me hideous. Her parents, however, consented at once; they looked upon my offer as a godsend, and the daughter submissively acquiesced. When she became accustomed to the idea of marrying me she did not seem to dislike it so much. On our wedding day at Guerande the rain fell in torrents, and when we got home my bride had to take off her dress, which was soaked through, and sit in her petticoats.

That was all the youth I ever had. We did not remain long in our province. One day I found my wife in tears. She was miserable; life was so dull; she wanted to get away. Six months later I had saved a little money by taking in extra work after office hours, and through the influence of a friend of my father's I obtained a petty appointment in Paris. I started off to settle there with the dear little woman so that she might cry no more. During the night, which we spent in the third-class railway carriage, the seats being very hard, I took her in my arms in order that she might sleep.

That was the past, and now I had just died on the narrow couch of a Paris lodginghouse, and my wife was crouching on the floor, crying bitterly. The white light before my left eye was growing dim, but I remembered the room perfectly. On the left there was a chest of drawers, on the right a mantelpiece surmounted by a damaged clock without a pendulum, the hands of which marked ten minutes past ten. The window overlooked the Rue Dauphine, a long, dark street. All Paris seemed to pass below, and the noise was so great that the window shook.

We knew nobody in the city; we had hurried our departure, but I was not expected at the office till the following Monday. Since I had taken to my bed I had wondered at my imprisonment in this narrow room into which we had tumbled after a railway journey of fifteen hours, followed by a hurried, confusing transit through the noisy streets. My wife had nursed me with smiling tenderness, but I knew that she was anxious. She would walk to the window, glance out and return to the bedside, looking very pale and startled by the sight of the busy thoroughfare, the aspect of the vast city of which she did not know a single stone and which deafened her with its continuous roar. What would happen to her if I never woke up again—alone, friendless and unknowing as she was?

Marguerite had caught hold of one of my hands which lay passive on the coverlet, and, covering it with kisses, she repeated wildly: "Olivier, answer me. Oh, my God, he is dead, dead!"

So death was not complete annihilation. I could hear and think. I had been uselessly alarmed all those years. I had not dropped into utter vacancy as I had anticipated. I could not picture the disappearance of my being, the suppression of all that I had been, without the possibility of renewed existence. I had been wont to shudder whenever in any book or newspaper I came across a date of a hundred years hence. A date at which I should no longer be alive, a future which I should never see, filled me with unspeakable uneasiness. Was I not the whole world, and would not the universe crumble away when I was no more?

To dream of life had been a cherished vision, but this could not possibly be death. I should assuredly awake presently. Yes, in a few moments I would lean over, take Marguerite in my arms and dry her tears. I would rest a little while longer before going to my office, and then a new life would begin, brighter than the last. However, I did not feel impatient; the commotion had been too strong. It was wrong of Marguerite to give way like that when I had not even the strength to turn my head on the pillow and smile at her. The next time that she moaned out, "He is dead! Dead!" I would embrace her and murmur softly so as not to startle her: "No, my darling, I was only asleep. You see, I am alive, and I love you."

CHAPTER II

FUNERAL PREPARATIONS

Marguerite's cries had attracted attention, for all at once the door was opened and a voice exclaimed: "What is the matter, neighbor? Is he worse?"

I recognized the voice; it was that of an elderly woman, Mme Gabin, who occupied a room on the same floor. She had been most obliging since our arrival and had evidently become interested in our concerns. On her own side she had lost no time in telling us her history. A stern landlord had sold her furniture during the previous winter to pay himself his rent, and since then she had resided at the lodginghouse in the Rue Dauphine with her daughter Dede, a child of ten. They both cut and pinked lamp shades, and between them they earned at the utmost only two francs a day.

"Heavens! Is it all over?" cried Mme Gabin, looking at me.

I realized that she was drawing nearer. She examined me, touched me and, turning to Marguerite, murmured compassionately: "Poor girl! Poor girl!"

My wife, wearied out, was sobbing like a child. Mme Gabin lifted her, placed her in a dilapidated armchair near the fireplace and proceeded to comfort her.

"Indeed, you'll do yourself harm if you go on like this, my dear. It's no reason because your husband is gone that you should kill yourself with weeping. Sure enough, when I lost Gabin I was just like you. I remained three days without swallowing a morsel of food. But that didn't help me—on the contrary, it pulled me down. Come, for the Lord's sake, be sensible!"

By degrees Marguerite grew calmer; she was exhausted, and it was only at intervals that she gave way to a fresh flow of tears. Meanwhile the old woman had taken possession of the room with a sort of rough authority.

"Don't worry yourself," she said as she bustled about. "Neighbors must help each other. Luckily Dede has just gone to take the work home. Ah, I see your trunks are not yet all unpacked, but I suppose there is some linen in the chest of drawers, isn't there?"

I heard her pull a drawer open; she must have taken out a napkin which she spread on the little table at the bedside. She then struck a match, which made me think that she was lighting one of the candles on the mantelpiece and placing it near me as a religious rite. I could follow her movements in the room and divine all her actions.

"Poor gentleman," she muttered. "Luckily I heard you sobbing, poor dear!" Suddenly the vague light which my left eye had detected vanished. Mme Gabin had just closed my eyelids, but I had not felt her finger on my face. When I understood this I felt chilled.

The door had opened again, and Dede, the child of ten, now rushed in, calling out in her shrill voice: "Mother, Mother! Ah, I knew you would be here! Look here, there's the money—three francs and four sous. I took back three dozen lamp shades."

"Hush, hush! Hold your tongue," vainly repeated the mother, who, as the little girl chattered on, must have pointed to the bed, for I guessed that the child felt perplexed and was backing toward the door.

"Is the gentleman asleep?" she whispered.

"Yes, yes—go and play," said Mme Gabin.

But the child did not go. She was, no doubt, staring at me with widely opened eyes, startled and vaguely comprehending. Suddenly she seemed convulsed with terror and ran out, upsetting a chair.

"He is dead, Mother; he is dead!" she gasped.

Profound silence followed. Marguerite, lying back in the armchair, had left off crying. Mme Gabin was still rummaging about the room and talking under her breath.

"Children know everything nowadays. Look at that girl. Heaven knows how carefully she's brought up! When I send her on an errand or take the shades back I calculate the time to a minute so that she can't loiter about, but for all that she learns everything. She saw at a glance what had happened here—and yet I never showed her but one corpse, that of her uncle Francois, and she was then only four years old. Ah well, there are no children left—it can't be helped."

She paused and without any transition passed to another subject.

"I say, dearie, we must think of the formalities—there's the declaration at the municipal offices to be made and the seeing about the funeral. You are not in a fit state to attend to business. What do you say if I look in at Monsieur Simoneau's to find out if he's at home?"

Marguerite did not reply. It seemed to me that I watched her from afar and at times changed into a subtle flame hovering above the room, while a stranger lay heavy and unconscious on my bed. I wished that Marguerite had declined the assistance of Simoneau. I had seen him three or four times during my brief illness, for he occupied a room close to ours and had been civil and neighborly. Mme Gabin had told us that he was merely making a short stay in Paris, having come to collect some old debts due to his father, who had settled in the country and recently died. He was a tall, strong, handsome young man, and I hated him, perhaps on account of his healthy appearance. On the previous evening he had come in to make inquiries, and I had much disliked seeing him at Marguerite's side; she had looked so fair and pretty, and he had gazed so intently into her face when she smilingly thanked him for his kindness.

"Ah, here is Monsieur Simoneau," said Mme Gabin, introducing him.

He gently pushed the door ajar, and as soon as Marguerite saw him enter she burst into a flood of tears. The presence of a friend, of the only person she knew in Paris besides the old woman, recalled her bereavement. I could not see the young man, but in the darkness that encompassed me I conjured up his appearance. I pictured him distinctly, grave and sad at finding poor Marguerite in such distress. How lovely she must have looked with her golden hair unbound, her pale face and her dear little baby hands burning with fever!

"I am at your disposal, madame," he said softly. "Pray allow me to manage everything."

She only answered him with broken words, but as the young man was leaving, accompanied by Mme Gabin, I heard the latter mention money. These things were always expensive, she said, and she feared that the poor little body hadn't a farthing—anyhow, he might ask her. But Simoneau silenced the old woman; he did not want to have the widow worried; he was going to the municipal office and to the undertaker's.

When silence reigned once more I wondered if my nightmare would last much longer. I was certainly alive, for I was conscious of passing incidents, and I began to realize my condition. I must have fallen into one of those cataleptic states that I had read of. As a child I had suffered from syncopes which had lasted several hours, but surely my heart would beat anew, my blood circulate and my muscles relax. Yes, I should wake up and comfort Marguerite, and, reasoning thus, I tried to be patient.

Time passed. Mme Gabin had brought in some breakfast, but Marguerite refused to taste any food. Later on the afternoon waned. Through the open window I heard the rising clamor of the Rue Dauphine. By and by a slight ringing of the brass candlestick on the marble-topped table made me think that a fresh candle had been lighted. At last Simoneau returned.

"Well?" whispered the old woman.

"It is all settled," he answered; "the funeral is ordered for tomorrow at eleven. There is nothing for you to do, and you needn't talk of these things before the poor lady."

Nevertheless, Mme Gabin remarked: "The doctor of the dead hasn't come yet."

Simoneau took a seat beside Marguerite and after a few words of encouragement remained silent. The funeral was to take place at eleven! Those words rang in my brain like a passing bell. And the doctor coming—the doctor of the dead, as Mme Gabin had called him. HE could not possibly fail to find out that I was only in a state of lethargy; he would do whatever might be necessary to rouse me, so I longed for his arrival with feverish anxiety.

The day was drawing to a close. Mme Gabin, anxious to waste no time, had brought in her lamp shades and summoned Dede without asking Marguerite's permission. "To tell the truth," she observed, "I do not like to leave children too long alone."

"Come in, I say," she whispered to the little girl; "come in, and don't be frightened. Only don't look toward the bed or you'll catch it."

She thought it decorous to forbid Dede to look at me, but I was convinced that the child was furtively glancing at the corner where I lay, for every now and then I heard her mother rap her knuckles and repeat angrily: "Get on with your work or you shall leave the room, and the gentleman will come during the night and pull you by the feet."

The mother and daughter had sat down at our table. I could plainly hear the click of their scissors as they clipped the lamp shades, which no doubt required very delicate manipulation, for they did not work rapidly. I counted the shades one by one as they were laid aside, while my anxiety grew more and more intense.

The clicking of the scissors was the only noise in the room, so I concluded that Marguerite had been overcome by fatigue and was dozing. Twice Simoneau rose, and the torturing thought flashed through me that he might be taking advantage of her slumbers to touch her hair with his lips. I hardly knew the man and yet felt sure that he loved my wife. At last little Dede began to giggle, and her laugh exasperated me.

"Why are you sniggering, you idiot?" asked her mother. "Do you want to be turned out on the landing? Come, out with it; what makes you laugh so?"

The child stammered: she had not laughed; she had only coughed, but I felt certain she had seen Simoneau bending over Marguerite and had felt amused.

The lamp had been lit when a knock was heard at the door.

"It must be the doctor at last," said the old woman.

It was the doctor; he did not apologize for coming so late, for he had no doubt ascended many flights of stairs during the day. The room being but imperfectly lighted by the lamp, he inquired: "Is the body here?"

"Yes, it is," answered Simoneau.

Marguerite had risen, trembling violently. Mme Gabin dismissed Dede, saying it was useless that a child should be present, and then she tried to lead my wife to the window, to spare her the sight of what was about to take place.

The doctor quickly approached the bed. I guessed that he was bored, tired and impatient. Had he touched my wrist? Had he placed his hand on my heart? I could not tell, but I fancied that he had only carelessly bent over me.

"Shall I bring the lamp so that you may see better?" asked Simoneau obligingly.

"No it is not necessary," quietly answered the doctor.

Not necessary! That man held my life in his hands, and he did not think it worth while to proceed to a careful examination! I was not dead! I wanted to cry out that I was not dead!

"At what o'clock did he die?" asked the doctor.

"At six this morning," volunteered Simoneau.

A feeling of frenzy and rebellion rose within me, bound as I was in seemingly iron chains. Oh, for the power of uttering one word, of moving a single limb!

"This close weather is unhealthy," resumed the doctor; "nothing is more trying than these early spring days."

And then he moved away. It was like my life departing. Screams, sobs and insults were choking me, struggling in my convulsed throat, in which even my breath was arrested. The wretch! Turned into a mere machine by professional habits, he only came to a deathbed to accomplish a perfunctory formality; he knew nothing; his science was a lie, since he could not at a glance distinguish life from death—and now he was going—going!

"Good night, sir," said Simoneau.

There came a moment's silence; the doctor was probably bowing to Marguerite, who had turned while Mme Gabin was fastening the window. He left the room, and I heard his footsteps descending the stairs.

It was all over; I was condemned. My last hope had vanished with that man. If I did not wake before eleven on the morrow I should be buried alive. The horror of that thought was so great that I lost all consciousness of my surroundings—'twas something like a fainting fit in death. The last sound I heard was the clicking of the scissors handled by Mme Gabin and Dede. The funeral vigil had begun; nobody spoke.

Marguerite had refused to retire to rest in the neighbor's room. She remained reclining in her armchair, with her beautiful face pale, her eyes closed and her long lashes wet with tears, while before her in the gloom Simoneau sat silently watching her.

CHAPTER III

THE PROCESSION

I cannot describe my agony during the morning of the following day. I remember it as a hideous dream in which my impressions were so ghastly and so confused that I could not formulate them. The persistent yearning for a sudden awakening increased my torture, and as the hour for the funeral drew nearer my anguish became more poignant still.

It was only at daybreak that I had recovered a fuller consciousness of what was going on around me. The creaking of hinges startled me out of my stupor. Mme Gabin had just opened the window. It must have been about seven o'clock, for I heard the cries of hawkers in the street, the shrill voice of a girl offering groundsel and the hoarse voice of a man shouting "Carrots!" The clamorous awakening of Paris pacified me at first. I could not believe that I should be laid under the sod in the midst of so much life; and, besides, a sudden thought helped to calm me. It had just occurred to me that I had witnessed a case similar to my own when I was employed at the hospital of Guerande. A man had been sleeping twenty-eight hours, the doctors hesitating in presence of his apparent lifelessness, when suddenly he had sat up in bed and was almost at once able to rise. I myself had already been asleep for some twenty-five hours; if I awoke at ten I should still be in time.

I endeavored to ascertain who was in the room and what was going on there. Dede must have been playing on the landing, for once when the door opened I heard her shrill childish laughter outside. Simoneau must have retired, for nothing indicated his presence. Mme Gabin's slipshod tread was still audible over the floor. At last she spoke.

"Come, my dear," she said. "It is wrong of you not to take it while it is hot. It would cheer you up."

She was addressing Marguerite, and a slow trickling sound as of something filtering indicated that she had been making some coffee.

"I don't mind owning," she continued, "that I needed it. At my age sitting up IS trying. The night seems so dreary when there is a misfortune in the house. DO have a cup of coffee, my dear—just a drop."

She persuaded Marguerite to taste it.

"Isn't it nice and hot?" she continued, "and doesn't it set one up? Ah, you'll be wanting all your strength presently for what you've got to go through today. Now if you were sensible you'd step into my room and just wait there."

"No, I want to stay here," said Marguerite resolutely.

Her voice, which I had not heard since the previous evening, touched me strangely. It was changed, broken as by tears. To feel my dear wife near me was a last consolation. I knew that her eyes were fastened on me and that she was weeping with all the anguish of her heart.

The minutes flew by. An inexplicable noise sounded from beyond the door. It seemed as if some people were bringing a bulky piece of furniture upstairs and knocking against the walls as they did so. Suddenly I understood, as I heard Marguerite begin to sob; it was the coffin.

"You are too early," said Mme Gabin crossly. "Put it behind the bed."

What o'clock was it? Nine, perhaps. So the coffin had come. Amid the opaque night around me I could see it plainly, quite new, with roughly planed boards. Heavens! Was this the end then? Was I to be borne off in that box which I realized was lying at my feet?

However, I had one supreme joy. Marguerite, in spite of her weakness, insisted upon discharging all the last offices. Assisted by the old woman, she dressed me with all the tenderness of a wife and a sister. Once more I felt myself in her arms as she clothed me in various garments. She paused at times, overcome by grief; she clasped me convulsively, and her tears rained on my face. Oh, how I longed to return her embrace and cry, "I live!" And yet I was lying there powerless, motionless, inert!

"You are foolish," suddenly said Mme Gabin; "it is all wasted."

"Never mind," answered Marguerite, sobbing. "I want him to wear his very best things."

I understood that she was dressing me in the clothes I had worn on my wedding day. I had kept them carefully for great occasions. When she had finished she fell back exhausted in the armchair.

Simoneau now spoke; he had probably just entered the room.

"They are below," he whispered.

"Well, it ain't any too soon," answered Mme Gabin, also lowering her voice. "Tell them to come up and get it over."

"But I dread the despair of the poor little wife."

The old woman seemed to reflect and presently resumed: "Listen to me, Monsieur Simoneau. You must take her off to my room. I wouldn't have her stop here. It is for her own good. When she is out of the way we'll get it done in a jiffy."

These words pierced my heart, and my anguish was intense when I realized that a struggle was actually taking place. Simoneau had walked up to Marguerite, imploring her to leave the room.

"Do, for pity's sake, come with me!" he pleaded. "Spare yourself useless pain."

"No, no!" she cried. "I will remain till the last minute. Remember that I have only him in the world, and when he is gone I shall be all alone!"

From the bedside Mme Gabin was prompting the young man.

"Don't parley—take hold of her, carry her off in your arms."

Was Simoneau about to lay his hands on Marguerite and bear her away? She screamed. I wildly endeavored to rise, but the springs of my limbs were broken. I remained rigid, unable to lift my eyelids to see what was going on. The struggle continued, and my wife clung to the furniture, repeating, "Oh, don't, don't! Have mercy! Let me go! I will not—"

He must have lifted her in his stalwart arms, for I heard her moaning like a child. He bore her away; her sobs were lost in the distance, and I fancied I saw them both—he, tall and strong, pressing her to his breast; she, fainting, powerless and conquered, following him wherever he listed.

"Drat it all! What a to-do!" muttered Mme Gabin. "Now for the tug of war, as the coast is clear at last."

In my jealous madness I looked upon this incident as a monstrous outrage. I had not been able to see Marguerite for twenty-four hours, but at least I had still heard her voice. Now even this was denied me; she had been torn away; a man had eloped with her even before I was laid under the sod. He was alone with her on the other side of the wall, comforting her—embracing her, perhaps!

But the door opened once more, and heavy footsteps shook the floor.

"Quick, make haste," repeated Mme Gabin. "Get it done before the lady comes back."

She was speaking to some strangers, who merely answered her with uncouth grunts.

"You understand," she went on, "I am not a relation; I'm only a neighbor. I have no interest in the matter. It is out of pure good nature that I have mixed myself up in their affairs. And I ain't overcheerful, I can tell you. Yes, yes, I sat up the whole blessed night—it was pretty cold, too, about four o'clock. That's a fact. Well, I have always been a fool—I'm too soft-hearted."

The coffin had been dragged into the center of the room. As I had not awakened I was condemned. All clearness departed from my ideas; everything seemed to revolve in a black haze, and I experienced such utter lassitude that it seemed almost a relief to leave off hoping.

"They haven't spared the material," said one of the undertaker's men in a gruff voice. "The box is too long."

"He'll have all the more room," said the other, laughing.

I was not heavy, and they chuckled over it since they had three flights of stairs to descend. As they were seizing me by the shoulders and feet I heard Mme Gabin fly into a violent passion.

"You cursed little brat," she screamed, "what do you mean by poking your nose where you're not wanted? Look here, I'll teach you to spy and pry."

Dede had slipped her tousled head through the doorway to see how the gentleman was being put into the box. Two ringing slaps resounded, however, by an explosion of sobs. And as soon as the mother returned she began to gossip about her daughter for the benefit of the two men who were settling me in the coffin.

"She is only ten, you know. She is not a bad girl, but she is frightfully inquisitive. I do not beat her often; only I WILL be obeyed."

"Oh," said one of the men, "all kids are alike. Whenever there is a corpse lying about they always want to see it."

I was commodiously stretched out, and I might have thought myself still in bed, had it not been that my left arm felt a trifle cramped from being squeezed against a board. The men had been right. I was pretty comfortable inside on account of my diminutive stature.

"Stop!" suddenly exclaimed Mme Gabin. "I promised his wife to put a pillow under his head."

The men, who were in a hurry, stuffed in the pillow roughly. One of them, who had mislaid his hammer, began to swear. He had left the tool below and went to fetch it, dropping the lid, and when two sharp blows of the hammer drove in the first nail, a shock ran through my being—I had ceased to live. The nails then entered in rapid succession with a rhythmical cadence. It was as if some packers had been closing a case of dried fruit with easy dexterity. After that such sounds as reached me were deadened and strangely prolonged, as if the deal coffin had been changed into a huge musical box. The last words spoken in the room of the Rue Dauphine—at least the last ones that I heard distinctly—were uttered by Mme Gabin.

"Mind the staircase," she said; "the banister of the second flight isn't safe, so be careful."

While I was being carried down I experienced a sensation similar to that of pitching as when one is on board a ship in a rough sea. However, from that moment my impressions became more and more vague. I remember that the only distinct thought that still possessed me was an imbecile, impulsive curiosity as to the road by which I should be taken to the cemetery. I was not acquainted with a single street of Paris, and I was ignorant of the position of the large burial grounds (though of course I had occasionally heard their names), and yet every effort of my mind was directed toward ascertaining whether we were turning to the right or to the left. Meanwhile the jolting of the hearse over the paving stones, the rumbling of passing vehicles, the steps of the foot passengers, all created a confused clamor, intensified by the acoustical properties of the coffin.

At first I followed our course pretty closely; then came a halt. I was again lifted and carried about, and I concluded that we were in church, but when the funeral procession once more moved onward I lost all consciousness of the road we took. A ringing of bells informed me that we were passing another church, and then the softer and easier progress of the wheels indicated that we were skirting a garden or park. I was like a victim being taken to the gallows, awaiting in stupor a deathblow that never came.

At last they stopped and pulled me out of the hearse. The business proceeded rapidly. The noises had ceased; I knew that I was in a deserted space amid avenues of trees and with the broad sky over my head. No doubt a few persons followed the bier, some of the inhabitants of the lodginghouse, perhaps—Simoneau and others, for instance—for faint whisperings reached my ear. Then I heard a psalm chanted and some Latin words mumbled by a priest, and afterward I suddenly felt myself sinking, while the ropes rubbing against the edges of the coffin elicited lugubrious sounds, as if a bow were being drawn across the strings of a cracked violoncello. It was the end. On the left side of my head I felt a violent shock like that produced by the bursting of a bomb, with another under my feet and a third more violent still on my chest. So forcible, indeed, was this last one that I thought the lid was cleft atwain. I fainted from it.

CHAPTER IV

THE NAIL

It is impossible for me to say how long my swoon lasted. Eternity is not of longer duration than one second spent in nihility. I was no more. It was slowly and confusedly that I regained some degree of consciousness. I was still asleep, but I began to dream; a nightmare started into shape amid the blackness of my horizon, a nightmare compounded of a strange fancy which in other days had haunted my morbid imagination whenever with my propensity for dwelling upon hideous thoughts I had conjured up catastrophes.

Thus I dreamed that my wife was expecting me somewhere—at Guerande, I believe—and that I was going to join her by rail. As we passed through a tunnel a deafening roll thundered over our head, and a sudden subsidence blocked up both issues of the tunnel, leaving our train intact in the center. We were walled up by blocks of rock in the heart of a mountain. Then a long and fearful agony commenced. No assistance could possibly reach us; even with powerful engines and incessant labor it would take a month to clear the tunnel. We were prisoners there with no outlet, and so our death was only a question of time.

My fancy had often dwelt on that hideous drama and had constantly varied the details and touches. My actors were men, women and children; their number increased to hundreds, and they were ever furnishing me with new incidents. There were some provisions in the train, but these were soon exhausted, and the hungry passengers, if they did not actually devour human flesh, at least fought furiously over the last piece of bread. Sometimes an aged man was driven back with blows and slowly perished; a mother struggled like a she-wolf to keep three or four mouthfuls for her child. In my own compartment a bride and bridegroom were dying, clasped in each other's arms in mute despair.

The line was free along the whole length of the train, and people came and went, prowling round the carriages like beasts of prey in search of carrion. All classes were mingled together. A millionaire, a high functionary, it was said, wept on a workman's shoulder. The lamps had been extinguished from the first, and the engine fire was nearly out. To pass from one carriage to another it was necessary to grope about, and thus, too, one slowly reached the engine, recognizable by its enormous barrel, its cold, motionless flanks, its useless strength, its grim silence, in the overwhelming night. Nothing could be more appalling than this train entombed alive with its passengers perishing one by one.

I gloated over the ghastliness of each detail; howls resounded through the vault; somebody whom one could not see, whose vicinity was not even suspected, would suddenly drop upon another's shoulder. But what affected me most of all was the cold and the want of air. I have never felt so chilled; a mantle of snow seemed to enwrap me; heavy moisture rained upon my skull; I was gasping; the rocky vault seemed to crush my chest; the whole mountain was seemingly weighing upon me.

Suddenly a cry of deliverance sounded. For some time past we fancied that we could hear a dull sound, and we tried to hope that men were at work and that help was coming, but it came not thus. One of the passengers, however, had discovered an air shaft in the tunnel, and, crowding round, we all saw this shaft, above which we could discern a blue patch about the size of a wafer. That blue patch filled us with rapture, for it was the sky. We stretched ourselves and stood on tiptoes to breathe more freely. Then we distinguished some black specks moving about, specks that must surely be workmen about to deliver us. A furious clamor arose. The cry "Saved! Saved!" burst from every mouth, while trembling arms were uplifted toward the tiny azure patch above.

That roar of voices aroused me. Where was I? In the tunnel, of course. I was lying at full length; hard walls were pressing against my ribs. Then I attempted to rise and struck my head roughly. Was it the rock closing in on all sides? The blue speck had vanished—aye, the sky had disappeared and I was still suffocating, shivering, with chattering teeth.

All at once I remembered. Intense horror raised my hair on end. I felt the hideous truth freeze me from head to foot like ice. I had shaken off the long coma which for many hours had stricken me with corpselike rigidity. Yes, I could move; my hands could feel the boards of my coffin; my lips parted; words came to me, and instinctively I called out Marguerite's name. It was a scream I raised. In that deal box my voice took so hoarse and weird a sound that it terrified me. Oh, my God, was this thing true? I was able to walk, speak, cry out that I was living, and yet my voice could not be heard; I was entombed under the earth.

I made a desperate effort to remain calm and reflect. Was there no means of getting out? Then my dream began afresh in my troubled brain. The fanciful air shaft with the blue bit of sky overhead was mingled with the real grave in which I was lying. I stared at the darkness with widely opened eyes; perhaps I might discover a hole, a slit, a glimmer of light, but only sparks of fire flitted through that night, with rays that broadened and then faded away. I was in a somber abyss again. With returning lucidity I struggled against these fatal visions. Indeed, I should need all my reason if I meant to try to save myself.

The most immediate peril lay in an increasing sense of suffocation. If I had been able to live so long without air it was owing to suspended animation, which had changed all the normal conditions of my existence, but now that my heart beat and my lungs breathed I should die, asphyxiated, if I did not promptly liberate myself. I also suffered from cold and dreaded lest I should succumb to the mortal numbness of those who fall asleep in the snow, never to wake again. Still, while unceasingly realizing the necessity of remaining calm, I felt maddening blasts sweep through my brain, and to quiet my senses I exhorted myself to patience, trying to remember the circumstances of my burial. Probably the ground had been bought for five years, and this would be against my chances of self-deliverance, for I remembered having noticed at Nantes that in the trenches of the common graves one end of the last lowered coffins protruded into the next open cavity, in which case I should only have had to break through one plank. But if I were in a separate hole, filled up above me with earth, the obstacles would prove too great. Had I not been told that the dead were buried six feet deep in Paris? How was I to get through the enormous mass of soil above me? Even if I succeeded in slitting the lid of my bier open the mold would drift in like fine sand and fill my mouth and eyes. That would be death again, a ghastly death, like drowning in mud.

However, I began to feel the planks carefully. The coffin was roomy, and I found that I was able to move my arms with tolerable ease. On both sides the roughly planed boards were stout and resistive. I slipped my arm onto my chest to raise it over my head. There I discovered in the top plank a knot in the wood which yielded slightly at my pressure. Working laboriously, I finally succeeded in driving out this knot, and on passing my finger through the hole I found that the earth was wet and clayey. But that availed me little. I even regretted having removed the knot, vaguely dreading the irruption of the mold. A second experiment occupied me for a while. I tapped all over the coffin to ascertain if perhaps there were any vacuum outside. But the sound was everywhere the same. At last, as I was slightly kicking the foot of the coffin, I fancied that it gave out a clearer echoing noise, but that might merely be produced by the sonority of the wood.

At any rate, I began to press against the boards with my arms and my closed fists. In the same way, too, I used my knees, my back and my feet without eliciting even a creak from the wood. I strained with all my strength, indeed, with so desperate an effort of my whole frame, that my bruised bones seemed breaking. But nothing moved, and I became insane.

Until that moment I had held delirium at bay. I had mastered the intoxicating rage which was mounting to my head like the fumes of alcohol; I had silenced my screams, for I feared that if I again cried out aloud I should be undone. But now I yelled; I shouted; unearthly howls which I could not repress came from my relaxed throat. I called for help in a voice that I did not recognize, growing wilder with each fresh appeal and crying out that I would not die. I also tore at the wood with my nails; I writhed with the contortions of a caged wolf. I do not know how long this fit of madness lasted, but I can still feel the relentless hardness of the box that imprisoned me; I can still hear the storm of shrieks and sobs with which I filled it; a remaining glimmer of reason made me try to stop, but I could not do so.

Great exhaustion followed. I lay waiting for death in a state of somnolent pain. The coffin was like stone, which no effort could break, and the conviction that I was powerless left me unnerved, without courage to make any fresh attempts. Another suffering—hunger—was presently added to cold and want of air. The torture soon became intolerable. With my finger I tried to pull small pinches of earth through the hole of the dislodged knot, and I swallowed them eagerly, only increasing my torment. Tempted by my flesh, I bit my arms and sucked my skin with a fiendish desire to drive my teeth in, but I was afraid of drawing blood.

Then I ardently longed for death. All my life long I had trembled at the thought of dissolution, but I had come to yearn for it, to crave for an everlasting night that could never be dark enough. How childish it had been of me to dread the long, dreamless sleep, the eternity of silence and gloom! Death was kind, for in suppressing life it put an end to suffering. Oh, to sleep like the stones, to be no more!

With groping hands I still continued feeling the wood, and suddenly I pricked my left thumb. That slight pain roused me from my growing numbness. I felt again and found a nail—a nail which the undertaker's men had driven in crookedly and which had not caught in the lower wood. It was long and very sharp; the head was secured to the lid, but it moved. Henceforth I had but one idea—to possess myself of that nail—and I slipped my right hand across my body and began to shake it. I made but little progress, however; it was a difficult job, for my hands soon tired, and I had to use them alternately. The left one, too, was of little use on account of the nail's awkward position.

While I was obstinately persevering a plan dawned on my mind. That nail meant salvation, and I must have it. But should I get it in time? Hunger was torturing me; my brain was swimming; my limbs were losing their strength; my mind was becoming confused. I had sucked the drops that trickled from my punctured finger, and suddenly I bit my arm and drank my own blood! Thereupon, spurred on by pain, revived by the tepid, acrid liquor that moistened my lips, I tore desperately at the nail and at last I wrenched it off!

I then believed in success. My plan was a simple one; I pushed the point of the nail into the lid, dragging it along as far as I could in a straight line and working it so as to make a slit in the wood. My fingers stiffened, but I doggedly persevered, and when I fancied that I had sufficiently cut into the board I turned on my stomach and, lifting myself on my knees and elbows thrust the whole strength of my back against the lid. But although it creaked it did not yield; the notched line was not deep enough. I had to resume my old position—which I only managed to do with infinite trouble—and work afresh. At last after another supreme effort the lid was cleft from end to end.

I was not saved as yet, but my heart beat with renewed hope. I had ceased pushing and remained motionless, lest a sudden fall of earth should bury me. I intended to use the lid as a screen and, thus protected, to open a sort of shaft in the clayey soil. Unfortunately I was assailed by unexpected difficulties. Some heavy clods of earth weighed upon the boards and made them unmanageable; I foresaw that I should never reach the surface in that way, for the mass of soil was already bending my spine and crushing my face.

Once more I stopped, affrighted; then suddenly, while I was stretching my legs, trying to find something firm against which I might rest my feet, I felt the end board of the coffin yielding. I at once gave a desperate kick with my heels in the faint hope that there might be a freshly dug grave in that direction.

It was so. My feet abruptly forced their way into space. An open grave was there; I had only a slight partition of earth to displace, and soon I rolled into the cavity. I was saved!

I remained for a time lying on my back in the open grave, with my eyes raised to heaven. It was dark; the stars were shining in a sky of velvety blueness. Now and then the rising breeze wafted a springlike freshness, a perfume of foliage, upon me. I was saved! I could breathe; I felt warm, and I wept and I stammered, with my arms prayerfully extended toward the starry sky. O God, how sweet seemed life!

CHAPTER V

MY RESURRECTION

My first impulse was to find the custodian of the cemetery and ask him to have me conducted home, but various thoughts that came to me restrained me from following that course. My return would create general alarm; why should I hurry now that I was master of the situation? I felt my limbs; I had only an insignificant wound on my left arm, where I had bitten myself, and a slight feverishness lent me unhoped-for strength. I should no doubt be able to walk unaided.

Still I lingered; all sorts of dim visions confused my mind. I had felt beside me in the open grave some sextons' tools which had been left there, and I conceived a sudden desire to repair the damage I had done, to close up the hole through which I had crept, so as to conceal all traces of my resurrection. I do not believe that I had any positive motive in doing so. I only deemed it useless to proclaim my adventure aloud, feeling ashamed to find myself alive when the whole world thought me dead. In half an hour every trace of my escape was obliterated, and then I climbed out of the hole.

The night was splendid, and deep silence reigned in the cemetery; the black trees threw motionless shadows over the white tombs. When I endeavored to ascertain my bearings I noticed that one half of the sky was ruddy, as if lit by a huge conflagration; Paris lay in that direction, and I moved toward it, following a long avenue amid the darkness of the branches.

However, after I had gone some fifty yards I was compelled to stop, feeling faint and weary. I then sat down on a stone bench and for the first time looked at myself. I was fully attired with the exception that I had no hat. I blessed my beloved Marguerite for the pious thought which had prompted her to dress me in my best clothes—those which I had worn at our wedding. That remembrance of my wife brought me to my feet again. I longed to see her without delay.

At the farther end of the avenue I had taken a wall arrested my progress. However, I climbed to the top of a monument, reached the summit of the wall and then dropped over the other side. Although roughly shaken by the fall, I managed to walk for a few minutes along a broad deserted street skirting the cemetery. I had no notion as to where I might be, but with the reiteration of monomania I kept saying to myself that I was going toward Paris and that I should find the Rue Dauphine somehow or other. Several people passed me but, seized with sudden distrust, I would not stop them and ask my way. I have since realized that I was then in a burning fever and already nearly delirious. Finally, just as I reached a large thoroughfare, I became giddy and fell heavily upon the pavement.

Here there is a blank in my life. For three whole weeks I remained unconscious. When I awoke at last I found myself in a strange room. A man who was nursing me told me quietly that he had picked me up one morning on the Boulevard Montparnasse and had brought me to his house. He was an old doctor who had given up practicing.

When I attempted to thank him he sharply answered that my case had seemed a curious one and that he had wished to study it. Moreover, during the first days of my convalescence he would not allow me to ask a single question, and later on he never put one to me. For eight days longer I remained in bed, feeling very weak and not even trying to remember, for memory was a weariness and a pain. I felt half ashamed and half afraid. As soon as I could leave the house I would go and find out whatever I wanted to know. Possibly in the delirium of fever a name had escaped me; however, the doctor never alluded to anything I may have said. His charity was not only generous; it was discreet.

The summer had come at last, and one warm June morning I was permitted to take a short walk. The sun was shining with that joyous brightness which imparts renewed youth to the streets of old Paris. I went along slowly, questioning the passers-by at every crossing I came to and asking the way to Rue Dauphine. When I reached the street I had some difficulty in recognizing the lodginghouse where we had alighted on our arrival in the capital. A childish terror made me hesitate. If I appeared suddenly before Marguerite the shock might kill her. It might be wiser to begin by revealing myself to our neighbor Mme Gabin; still I shrank from taking a third party into confidence. I seemed unable to arrive at a resolution, and yet in my innermost heart I felt a great void, like that left by some sacrifice long since consummated.

The building looked quite yellow in the sunshine. I had just recognized it by a shabby eating house on the ground floor, where we had ordered our meals, having them sent up to us. Then I raised my eyes to the last window of the third floor on the left-hand side, and as I looked at it a young woman with tumbled hair, wearing a loose dressing gown, appeared and leaned her elbows on the sill. A young man followed and printed a kiss upon her neck. It was not Marguerite. Still I felt no surprise. It seemed to me that I had dreamed all this with other things, too, which I was to learn presently.

For a moment I remained in the street, uncertain whether I had better go upstairs and question the lovers, who were still laughing in the sunshine. However, I decided to enter the little restaurant below. When I started on my walk the old doctor had placed a five-franc piece in my hand. No doubt I was changed beyond recognition, for my beard had grown during the brain fever, and my face was wrinkled and haggard. As I took a seat at a small table I saw Mme Gabin come in carrying a cup; she wished to buy a penny-worth of coffee. Standing in front of the counter, she began to gossip with the landlady of the establishment.

"Well," asked the latter, "so the poor little woman of the third floor has made up her mind at last, eh?"

"How could she help herself?" answered Mme Gabin. "It was the very best thing for her to do. Monsieur Simoneau showed her so much kindness. You see, he had finished his business in Paris to his satisfaction, for he has inherited a pot of money. Well, he offered to take her away with him to his own part of the country and place her with an aunt of his, who wants a housekeeper and companion."

The landlady laughed archly. I buried my face in a newspaper which I picked off the table. My lips were white and my hands shook.

"It will end in a marriage, of course," resumed Mme Gabin. "The little widow mourned for her husband very properly, and the young man was extremely well behaved. Well, they left last night—and, after all, they were free to please themselves."

Just then the side door of the restaurant, communicating with the passage of the house, opened, and Dede appeared.

"Mother, ain't you coming?" she cried. "I'm waiting, you know; do be quick."

"Presently," said the mother testily. "Don't bother."

The girl stood listening to the two women with the precocious shrewdness of a child born and reared amid the streets of Paris.

"When all is said and done," explained Mme Gabin, "the dear departed did not come up to Monsieur Simoneau. I didn't fancy him overmuch; he was a puny sort of a man, a poor, fretful fellow, and he hadn't a penny to bless himself with. No, candidly, he wasn't the kind of husband for a young and healthy wife, whereas Monsieur Simoneau is rich, you know, and as strong as a Turk."

"Oh yes!" interrupted Dede. "I saw him once when he was washing—his door was open. His arms are so hairy!"

"Get along with you," screamed the old woman, shoving the girl out of the restaurant. "You are always poking your nose where it has no business to be."

Then she concluded with these words: "Look here, to my mind the other one did quite right to take himself off. It was fine luck for the little woman!"

When I found myself in the street again I walked along slowly with trembling limbs. And yet I was not suffering much; I think I smiled once at my shadow in the sun. It was quite true. I WAS very puny. It had been a queer notion of mine to marry Marguerite. I recalled her weariness at Guerande, her impatience, her dull, monotonous life. The dear creature had been very good to me, but I had never been a real lover; she had mourned for me as a sister for her brother, not otherwise. Why should I again disturb her life? A dead man is not jealous.

When I lifted my eyelids I saw the garden of the Luxembourg before me. I entered it and took a seat in the sun, dreaming with a sense of infinite restfulness. The thought of Marguerite stirred me softly. I pictured her in the provinces, beloved, petted and very happy. She had grown handsomer, and she was the mother of three boys and two girls. It was all right. I had behaved like an honest man in dying, and I would not commit the cruel folly of coming to life again.

Since then I have traveled a good deal. I have been a little everywhere. I am an ordinary man who has toiled and eaten like anybody else. Death no longer frightens me, but it does not seem to care for me now that I have no motive in living, and I sometimes fear that I have been forgotten upon earth.

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Doctor Pascal, by Emile Zola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Doctor Pascal

Author: Emile Zola

Translator: Mary J. Serrano

Release Date: May 29, 2009 [EBook #10720]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOCTOR PASCAL ***

Produced by David Widger, Dagny, and John Bickers

DOCTOR PASCAL

By Emile Zola

Translated By Mary J. Serrano

Contents

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

I.

In the heat of the glowing July afternoon, the room, with blinds carefully closed, was full of a great calm. From the three windows, through the cracks of the old wooden shutters, came only a few scattered sunbeams which, in the midst of the obscurity, made a soft brightness that bathed surrounding objects in a diffused and tender light. It was cool here in comparison with the overpowering heat that was felt outside, under the fierce rays of the sun that blazed upon the front of the house.

Standing before the press which faced the windows, Dr. Pascal was looking for a paper that he had come in search of. With doors wide open, this immense press of carved oak, adorned with strong and handsome mountings of metal, dating from the last century, displayed within its capacious depths an extraordinary collection of papers and manuscripts of all sorts, piled up in confusion and filling every shelf to overflowing. For more than thirty years the doctor had thrown into it every page he wrote, from brief notes to the complete texts of his great works on heredity. Thus it was that his searches here were not always easy. He rummaged patiently among the papers, and when he at last found the one he was looking for, he smiled.

For an instant longer he remained near the bookcase, reading the note by a golden sunbeam that came to him from the middle window. He himself, in this dawnlike light, appeared, with his snow-white hair and beard, strong and vigorous; although he was near sixty, his color was so fresh, his features were so finely cut, his eyes were still so clear, and he had so youthful an air that one might have taken him, in his close-fitting, maroon velvet jacket, for a young man with powdered hair.

"Here, Clotilde," he said at last, "you will copy this note. Ramond would never be able to decipher my diabolical writing."

And he crossed the room and laid the paper beside the young girl, who stood working at a high desk in the embrasure of the window to the right.

"Very well, master," she answered.

She did not even turn round, so engrossed was her attention with the pastel which she was at the moment rapidly sketching in with broad strokes of the crayon. Near her in a vase bloomed a stalk of hollyhocks of a singular shade of violet, striped with yellow. But the profile of her small round head, with its short, fair hair, was clearly distinguishable; an exquisite and serious profile, the straight forehead contracted in a frown of attention, the eyes of an azure blue, the nose delicately molded, the chin firm. Her bent neck, especially, of a milky whiteness, looked adorably youthful under the gold of the clustering curls. In her long black blouse she seemed very tall, with her slight figure, slender throat, and flexible form, the flexible slenderness of the divine figures of the Renaissance. In spite of her twenty-five years, she still retained a childlike air and looked hardly eighteen.

"And," resumed the doctor, "you will arrange the press a little. Nothing can be found there any longer."

"Very well, master," she repeated, without raising her head; "presently."

Pascal had turned round to seat himself at his desk, at the other end of the room, before the window to the left. It was a plain black wooden table, and was littered also with papers and pamphlets of all sorts. And silence again reigned in the peaceful semi-obscurity, contrasting with the overpowering glare outside. The vast apartment, a dozen meters long and six wide, had, in addition to the press, only two bookcases, filled with books. Antique chairs of various kinds stood around in disorder, while for sole adornment, along the walls, hung with an old salon Empire paper of a rose pattern, were nailed pastels of flowers of strange coloring dimly visible. The woodwork of three folding-doors, the door opening on the hall and two others at opposite ends of the apartment, the one leading to the doctor's room, the other to that of the young girl, as well as the cornice of the smoke-darkened ceiling, dated from the time of Louis XV.

An hour passed without a sound, without a breath. Then Pascal, who, as a diversion from his work, had opened a newspaper—Le Temps—which had lain forgotten on the table, uttered a slight exclamation:

"Why! your father has been appointed editor of the Epoque, the prosperous republican journal which has the publishing of the papers of the Tuileries."

This news must have been unexpected by him, for he laughed frankly, at once pleased and saddened, and in an undertone he continued:

"My word! If things had been invented, they could not have been finer. Life is a strange thing. This is a very interesting article."

Clotilde made no answer, as if her thoughts were a hundred leagues away from what her uncle was saying. And he did not speak again, but taking his scissors after he had read the article, he cut it out and pasted it on a sheet of paper, on which he made some marginal notes in his large, irregular handwriting. Then he went back to the press to classify this new document in it. But he was obliged to take a chair, the shelf being so high that he could not reach it notwithstanding his tall stature.

On this high shelf a whole series of enormous bundles of papers were arranged in order, methodically classified. Here were papers of all sorts: sheets of manuscript, documents on stamped paper, articles cut out of newspapers, arranged in envelopes of strong blue paper, each of which bore on the outside a name written in large characters. One felt that these documents were tenderly kept in view, taken out continually, and carefully replaced; for of the whole press, this corner was the only one kept in order.

When Pascal, mounted on the chair, had found the package he was looking for, one of the bulkiest of the envelopes, on which was written the name "Saccard," he added to it the new document, and then replaced the whole under its corresponding alphabetical letter. A moment later he had forgotten the subject, and was complacently straightening a pile of papers that were falling down. And when he at last jumped down off the chair, he said:

"When you are arranging the press, Clotilde, don't touch the packages at the top; do you hear?"

"Very well, master," she responded, for the third time, docilely.

He laughed again, with the gaiety that was natural to him.

"That is forbidden."

"I know it, master."

And he closed the press with a vigorous turn of the key, which he then threw into a drawer of his writing table. The young girl was sufficiently acquainted with his researches to keep his manuscripts in some degree of order; and he gladly employed her as his secretary; he made her copy his notes when some confrere and friend, like Dr. Ramond asked him to send him some document. But she was not a savante; he simply forbade her to read what he deemed it useless that she should know.

At last, perceiving her so completely absorbed in her work, his attention was aroused.

"What is the matter with you, that you don't open your lips?" he said. "Are you so taken up with the copying of those flowers that you can't speak?"

This was another of the labors which he often intrusted to her—to make drawings, aquarelles, and pastels, which he afterward used in his works as plates. Thus, for the past five years he had been making some curious experiments on a collection of hollyhocks; he had obtained a whole series of new colorings by artificial fecundations. She made these sorts of copies with extraordinary minuteness, an exactitude of design and of coloring so extreme that he marveled unceasingly at the conscientiousness of her work, and he often told her that she had a "good, round, strong, clear little headpiece."

But, this time, when he approached her to look over her shoulder, he uttered a cry of comic fury.

"There you are at your nonsense! Now you are off in the clouds again! Will you do me the favor to tear that up at once?"

She straightened herself, her cheeks flushed, her eyes aglow with the delight she took in her work, her slender fingers stained with the red and blue crayon that she had crushed.

"Oh, master!"

And in this "master," so tender, so caressingly submissive, this term of complete abandonment by which she called him, in order to avoid using the words godfather or uncle, which she thought silly, there was, for the first time, a passionate accent of revolt, the revindication of a being recovering possession of and asserting itself.

For nearly two hours she had been zealously striving to produce an exact and faithful copy of the hollyhocks, and she had just thrown on another sheet a whole bunch of imaginary flowers, of dream-flowers, extravagant and superb. She had, at times, these abrupt shiftings, a need of breaking away in wild fancies in the midst of the most precise of reproductions. She satisfied it at once, falling always into this extraordinary efflorescence of such spirit and fancy that it never repeated itself; creating roses, with bleeding hearts, weeping tears of sulphur, lilies like crystal urns, flowers without any known form, even, spreading out starry rays, with corollas floating like clouds. To-day, on a groundwork dashed in with a few bold strokes of black crayon, it was a rain of pale stars, a whole shower of infinitely soft petals; while, in a corner, an unknown bloom, a bud, chastely veiled, was opening.

"Another to nail there!" resumed the doctor, pointing to the wall, on which there was already a row of strangely curious pastels. "But what may that represent, I ask you?"

She remained very grave, drawing back a step, the better to contemplate her work.

"I know nothing about it; it is beautiful."

At this moment appeared Martine, the only servant, become the real mistress of the house, after nearly thirty years of service with the doctor. Although she had passed her sixtieth year, she, too, still retained a youthful air as she went about, silent and active, in her eternal black gown and white cap that gave her the look of a nun, with her small, white, calm face, and lusterless eyes, the light in which seemed to have been extinguished.

Without speaking, she went and sat down on the floor before an easy-chair, through a rent in the old covering of which the hair was escaping, and drawing from her pocket a needle and a skein of worsted, she set to work to mend it. For three days past she had been waiting for an hour's time to do this piece of mending, which haunted her.

"While you are about it, Martine," said Pascal jestingly, taking between both his hands the mutinous head of Clotilde, "sew me fast, too, this little noodle, which sometimes wanders off into the clouds."

Martine raised her pale eyes, and looked at her master with her habitual air of adoration?

"Why does monsieur say that?"

"Because, my good girl, in very truth, I believe it is you who have stuffed this good little round, clear, strong headpiece full of notions of the other world, with all your devoutness."

The two women exchanged a glance of intelligence.

"Oh, monsieur! religion has never done any harm to any one. And when people have not the same ideas, it is certainly better not to talk about them."

An embarrassed silence followed; this was the one difference of opinion which, at times, brought about disagreements among these three united beings who led so restricted a life. Martine was only twenty-nine, a year older than the doctor, when she entered his house, at the time when he made his debut as a physician at Plassans, in a bright little house of the new town. And thirteen years later, when Saccard, a brother of Pascal, sent him his daughter Clotilde, aged seven, after his wife's death and at the moment when he was about to marry again, it was she who brought up the child, taking it to church, and communicating to it a little of the devout flame with which she had always burned; while the doctor, who had a broad mind, left them to their joy of believing, for he did not feel that he had the right to interdict to any one the happiness of faith; he contented himself later on with watching over the young girl's education and giving her clear and sound ideas about everything. For thirteen years, during which the three had lived this retired life at La Souleiade, a small property situated in the outskirts of the town, a quarter of an hour's walk from St. Saturnin, the cathedral, his life had flowed happily along, occupied in secret great works, a little troubled, however, by an ever increasing uneasiness—the collision, more and more violent, every day, between their beliefs.

Pascal took a few turns gloomily up and down the room. Then, like a man who did not mince his words, he said:

"See, my dear, all this phantasmagoria of mystery has turned your pretty head. Your good God had no need of you; I should have kept you for myself alone; and you would have been all the better for it."

But Clotilde, trembling with excitement, her clear eyes fixed boldly upon his, held her ground.

"It is you, master, who would be all the better, if you did not shut yourself up in your eyes of flesh. That is another thing, why do you not wish to see?"

And Martine came to her assistance, in her own style.

"Indeed, it is true, monsieur, that you, who are a saint, as I say everywhere, should accompany us to church. Assuredly, God will save you. But at the bare idea that you should not go straight to paradise, I tremble all over."

He paused, for he had before him, in open revolt, those two whom he had been accustomed to see submissive at his feet, with the tenderness of women won over by his gaiety and his goodness. Already he opened his mouth, and was going to answer roughly, when the uselessness of the discussion became apparent to him.

"There! Let us have peace. I would do better to go and work. And above all, let no one interrupt me!"

With hasty steps he gained his chamber, where he had installed a sort of laboratory, and shut himself up in it. The prohibition to enter it was formal. It was here that he gave himself up to special preparations, of which he spoke to no one. Almost immediately the slow and regular sound of a pestle grinding in a mortar was heard.

"Come," said Clotilde, smiling, "there he is, at his devil's cookery, as grandmother says."

And she tranquilly resumed her copying of the hollyhocks. She completed the drawing with mathematical precision, she found the exact tone of the violet petals, striped with yellow, even to the most delicate discoloration of the shades.

"Ah!" murmured Martine, after a moment, again seated on the ground, and occupied in mending the chair, "what a misfortune for a good man like that to lose his soul wilfully. For there is no denying it; I have known him now for thirty years, and in all that time he has never so much as spoken an unkind word to any one. A real heart of gold, who would take the bit from his own mouth. And handsome, too, and always well, and always gay, a real blessing! It is a murder that he does not wish to make his peace with the good God. We will force him to do it, mademoiselle, will we not?"

Clotilde, surprised at hearing her speak so long at one time on the subject, gave her word with a grave air.

"Certainly, Martine, it is a promise. We will force him."

Silence reigned again, broken a moment afterward by the ringing of the bell attached to the street door below. It had been attached to the door so that they might have notice when any one entered the house, too vast for the three persons who inhabited it. The servant appeared surprised, and grumbled a few words under her breath. Who could have come in such heat as this? She rose, opened the door, and went and leaned over the balustrade; then she returned, saying:

"It is Mme. Felicite."

Old Mme. Rougon entered briskly. In spite of her eighty years, she had mounted the stairs with the activity of a young girl; she was still the brown, lean, shrill grasshopper of old. Dressed elegantly now in black silk, she might still be taken, seen from behind, thanks to the slenderness of her figure, for some coquette, or some ambitious woman following her favorite pursuit. Seen in front, her eyes still lighted up her withered visage with their fires, and she smiled with an engaging smile when she so desired.

"What! is it you, grandmother?" cried Clotilde, going to meet her. "Why, this sun is enough to bake one."

Felicite, kissing her on the forehead, laughed, saying:

"Oh, the sun is my friend!"

Then, moving with short, quick steps, she crossed the room, and turned the fastening of one of the shutters.

"Open the shutters a little! It is too gloomy to live in the dark in this way. At my house I let the sun come in."

Through the opening a jet of hot light, a flood of dancing sparks entered. And under the sky, of the violet blue of a conflagration, the parched plain could be seen, stretching away in the distance, as if asleep or dead in the overpowering, furnace-like heat, while to the right, above the pink roofs, rose the belfry of St. Saturnin, a gilded tower with arises that, in the blinding light, looked like whitened bones.

"Yes," continued Felicite, "I think of going shortly to the Tulettes, and I wished to know if Charles were here, to take him with me. He is not here—I see that—I will take him another day."

But while she gave this pretext for her visit, her ferret-like eyes were making the tour of the apartment. Besides, she did not insist, speaking immediately afterward of her son Pascal, on hearing the rhythmical noise of the pestle, which had not ceased in the adjoining chamber.

"Ah! he is still at his devil's cookery! Don't disturb him, I have nothing to say to him."

Martine, who had resumed her work on the chair, shook her head, as if to say that she had no mind to disturb her master, and there was silence again, while Clotilde wiped her fingers, stained with crayon, on a cloth, and Felicite began to walk about the room with short steps, looking around inquisitively.

Old Mme. Rougon would soon be two years a widow. Her husband who had grown so corpulent that he could no longer move, had succumbed to an attack of indigestion on the 3d of September, 1870, on the night of the day on which he had learned of the catastrophe of Sedan. The ruin of the government of which he flattered himself with being one of the founders, seemed to have crushed him. Thus, Felicite affected to occupy herself no longer with politics, living, thenceforward, like a dethroned queen, the only surviving power of a vanished world. No one was unaware that the Rougons, in 1851, had saved Plassans from anarchy, by causing the coup d'etat of the 2d of December to triumph there, and that, a few years later, they had won it again from the legitimist and republican candidates, to give it to a Bonapartist deputy. Up to the time of the war, the Empire had continued all-powerful in the town, so popular that it had obtained there at the plebiscite an overwhelming majority. But since the disasters the town had become republican, the quarter St. Marc had returned to its secret royalist intrigues, while the old quarter and the new town had sent to the chamber a liberal representative, slightly tinged with Orleanism, and ready to take sides with the republic, if it should triumph. And, therefore, it was that Felicite, like the intelligent woman she was, had withdrawn her attention from politics, and consented to be nothing more than the dethroned queen of a fallen government.

But this was still an exalted position, surrounded by a melancholy poetry. For sixteen years she had reigned. The tradition of her two salons, the yellow salon, in which the coup d'etat had matured, and the green salon, later the neutral ground on which the conquest of Plassans was completed, embellished itself with the reflection of the vanished past, and was for her a glorious history. And besides, she was very rich. Then, too, she had shown herself dignified in her fall, never uttering a regret or a complaint, parading, with her eighty years, so long a succession of fierce appetites, of abominable maneuvers, of inordinate gratifications, that she became august through them. Her only happiness, now, was to enjoy in peace her large fortune and her past royalty, and she had but one passion left—to defend her past, to extend its fame, suppressing everything that might tarnish it later. Her pride, which lived on the double exploit of which the inhabitants still spoke, watched with jealous care, resolved to leave in existence only creditable documents, those traditions which caused her to be saluted like a fallen queen when she walked through the town.

She went to the door of the chamber and listened to the persistent noise of the pestle, which did not cease. Then, with an anxious brow, she returned to Clotilde.

"Good Heavens! What is he making? You know that he is doing himself the greatest harm with his new drug. I was told, the other day, that he came near killing one of his patients."

"Oh, grandmother!" cried the young girl.

But she was now launched.

"Yes, exactly. The good wives say many other things, besides! Why, go question them, in the faubourg! They will tell you that he grinds dead men's bones in infants' blood."

This time, while even Martine protested, Clotilde, wounded in her affection, grew angry.

"Oh, grandmother, do not repeat such abominations! Master has so great a heart that he thinks only of making every one happy!"

Then, when she saw that they were both angry, Felicite, comprehending that she had gone too far, resumed her coaxing manner.

"But, my kitten, it is not I who say those frightful things. I repeat to you the stupid reports they spread, so that you may comprehend that Pascal is wrong to pay no heed to public opinion. He thinks he has found a new remedy—nothing could be better! and I will even admit that he will be able to cure everybody, as he hopes. Only, why affect these mysterious ways; why not speak of the matter openly; why, above all, try it only on the rabble of the old quarter and of the country, instead of, attempting among the well-to-do people of the town, striking cures which would do him honor? No, my child, you see your uncle has never been able to act like other people."

She had assumed a grieved tone, lowering her voice, to display the secret wound of her heart.

"God be thanked! it is not men of worth who are wanting in our family; my other sons have given me satisfaction enough. Is it not so? Your Uncle Eugene rose high enough, minister for twelve years, almost emperor! And your father himself handled many a million, and had a part in many a one of the great works which have made Paris a new city. Not to speak at all of your brother, Maxime, so rich, so distinguished, nor of your cousin, Octave Mouret, one of the kings of the new commerce, nor of our dear Abbe Mouret, who is a saint! Well, then, why does Pascal, who might have followed in the footsteps of them all, persist in living in his hole, like an eccentric old fool?"

And as the young girl was again going to protest, she closed her mouth, with a caressing gesture of her hand.

"No, no, let me finish. I know very well that Pascal is not a fool, that he has written remarkable works, that his communications to the Academy of Medicine have even won for him a reputation among savants. But what does that count for, compared to what I have dreamed of for him? Yes, all the best practice of the town, a large fortune, the decoration—honors, in short, and a position worthy of the family. My word! I used to say to him when he was a child: 'But where do you come from? You are not one of us!' As for me, I have sacrificed everything for the family; I would let myself be hacked to pieces, that the family might always be great and glorious!"

She straightened her small figure, she seemed to grow tall with the one passion that had formed the joy and pride of her life. But as she resumed her walk, she was startled by suddenly perceiving on the floor the copy of the Temps, which the doctor had thrown there, after cutting out the article, to add it to the Saccard papers, and the light from the open window, falling full upon the sheet, enlightened her, no doubt, for she suddenly stopped walking, and threw herself into a chair, as if she at last knew what she had come to learn.

"Your father has been appointed editor of the Epoque," she said abruptly.

"Yes," answered Clotilde tranquilly, "master told me so; it was in the paper."

With an anxious and attentive expression, Felicite looked at her, for this appointment of Saccard, this rallying to the republic, was something of vast significance. After the fall of the empire he had dared return to France, notwithstanding his condemnation as director of the Banque Universelle, the colossal fall of which had preceded that of the government. New influences, some incredible intrigue must have placed him on his feet again, for not only had he received his pardon, but he was once more in a position to undertake affairs of considerable importance, launched into journalism, having his share again of all the good things going. And the recollection came to her of the quarrels of other days between him and his brother Eugene Rougon, whom he had so often compromised, and whom, by an ironical turn of events, he was perhaps going to protect, now that the former minister of the Empire was only a simple deputy, resigned to the single role of standing by his fallen master with the obstinacy with which his mother stood by her family. She still obeyed docilely the orders of her eldest son, the genius, fallen though he was; but Saccard, whatever he might do, had also a part in her heart, from his indomitable determination to succeed, and she was also proud of Maxime, Clotilde's brother, who had taken up his quarters again, after the war, in his mansion in the Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, where he was consuming the fortune left him by his wife, Louise de Mareuil, become prudent, with the wisdom of a man struck in a vital part, and trying to cheat the paralysis which threatened him.

"Editor of the Epoque," she repeated; "it is really the position of a minister which your father has won. And I forgot to tell you, I have written again to your brother, to persuade him to come and see us. That would divert him, it would do him good. Then, there is that child, that poor Charles—"

She did not continue. This was another of the wounds from which her pride bled; a son whom Maxime had had when seventeen by a servant, and who now, at the age of fifteen, weak of intellect, a half-idiot, lived at Plassans, going from the house of one to that of another, a burden to all.

She remained silent a moment longer, waiting for some remark from Clotilde, some transition by which she might come to the subject she wished to touch upon. When she saw that the young girl, occupied in arranging the papers on her desk, was no longer listening, she came to a sudden decision, after casting a glance at Martine, who continued mending the chair, as if she were deaf and dumb.

"Your uncle cut the article out of the Temps, then?"

Clotilde smiled calmly.

"Yes, master put it away among his papers. Ah! how many notes he buries in there! Births, deaths, the smallest event in life, everything goes in there. And the genealogical tree is there also, our famous genealogical tree, which he keeps up to date!"

The eyes of old Mme. Rougon flamed. She looked fixedly at the young girl.

"You know them, those papers?"

"Oh, no, grandmother; master has never spoken to me of them; and he has forbidden me to touch them."

But she did not believe her.

"Come! you have them under your hands, you must have read them."

Very simple, with her calm rectitude, Clotilde answered, smilingly again.

"No, when master forbids me to do anything, it is because he has his reasons, and I do not do it."

"Well, my child," cried Felicite vehemently, dominated by her passion, "you, whom Pascal loves tenderly, and whom he would listen to, perhaps, you ought to entreat him to burn all that, for if he should chance to die, and those frightful things which he has in there were to be found, we should all be dishonored!"

Ah, those abominable papers! she saw them at night, in her nightmares, revealing in letters of fire, the true histories, the physiological blemishes of the family, all that wrong side of her glory which she would have wished to bury forever with the ancestors already dead! She knew how it was that the doctor had conceived the idea of collecting these documents at the beginning of his great studies on heredity; how he had found himself led to take his own family as an example, struck by the typical cases which he saw in it, and which helped to support laws discovered by him. Was it not a perfectly natural field of observation, close at hand and with which he was thoroughly familiar? And with the fine, careless justness of the scientist, he had been accumulating for the last thirty years the most private data, collecting and classifying everything, raising this genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquarts, of which the voluminous papers, crammed full of proofs, were only the commentary.

"Ah, yes," continued Mme. Rougon hotly, "to the fire, to the fire with all those papers that would tarnish our name!"

And as the servant rose to leave the room, seeing the turn the conversation was taking, she stopped her by a quick gesture.

"No, no, Martine; stay! You are not in the way, since you are now one of the family."

Then, in a hissing voice:

"A collection of falsehoods, of gossip, all the lies that our enemies, enraged by our triumph, hurled against us in former days! Think a little of that, my child. Against all of us, against your father, against your mother, against your brother, all those horrors!"

"But how do you know they are horrors, grandmother?"

She was disconcerted for a moment.

"Oh, well; I suspect it! Where is the family that has not had misfortunes which might be injuriously interpreted? Thus, the mother of us all, that dear and venerable Aunt Dide, your great-grandmother, has she not been for the past twenty-one years in the madhouse at the Tulettes? If God has granted her the grace of allowing her to live to the age of one hundred and four years, he has also cruelly afflicted her in depriving her of her reason. Certainly, there is no shame in that; only, what exasperates me—what must not be—is that they should say afterward that we are all mad. And, then, regarding your grand-uncle Macquart, too, deplorable rumors have been spread. Macquart had his faults in past days, I do not seek to defend him. But to-day, is he not living very reputably on his little property at the Tulettes, two steps away from our unhappy mother, over whom he watches like a good son? And listen! one last example. Your brother, Maxime, committed a great fault when he had by a servant that poor little Charles, and it is certain, besides, that the unhappy child is of unsound mind. No matter. Will it please you if they tell you that your nephew is degenerate; that he reproduces from four generations back, his great-great-grandmother the dear woman to whom we sometimes take him, and with whom he likes so much to be? No! there is no longer any family possible, if people begin to lay bare everything—the nerves of this one, the muscles of that. It is enough to disgust one with living!"

Clotilde, standing in her long black blouse, had listened to her grandmother attentively. She had grown very serious; her arms hung by her sides, her eyes were fixed upon the ground. There was silence for a moment; then she said slowly:

"It is science, grandmother."

"Science!" cried Felicite, trotting about again. "A fine thing, their science, that goes against all that is most sacred in the world! When they shall have demolished everything they will have advanced greatly! They kill respect, they kill the family, they kill the good God!"

"Oh! don't say that, madame!" interrupted Martine, in a grieved voice, her narrow devoutness wounded. "Do not say that M. Pascal kills the good God!"

"Yes, my poor girl, he kills him. And look you, it is a crime, from the religious point of view, to let one's self be damned in that way. You do not love him, on my word of honor! No, you do not love him, you two who have the happiness of believing, since you do nothing to bring him back to the right path. Ah! if I were in your place, I would split that press open with a hatchet. I would make a famous bonfire with all the insults to the good God which it contains!"

She had planted herself before the immense press and was measuring it with her fiery glance, as if to take it by assault, to sack it, to destroy it, in spite of the withered and fragile thinness of her eighty years. Then, with a gesture of ironical disdain:

"If, even with his science, he could know everything!"

Clotilde remained for a moment absorbed in thought, her gaze lost in vacancy. Then she said in an undertone, as if speaking to herself:

"It is true, he cannot know everything. There is always something else below. That is what irritates me; that is what makes us quarrel: for I cannot, like him, put the mystery aside. I am troubled by it, so much so that I suffer cruelly. Below, what wills and acts in the shuddering darkness, all the unknown forces—"

Her voice had gradually become lower and now dropped to an indistinct murmur.

Then Martine, whose face for a moment past had worn a somber expression, interrupted in her turn:

"If it was true, however, mademoiselle, that monsieur would be damned on account of those villainous papers, tell me, ought we to let it happen? For my part, look you, if he were to tell me to throw myself down from the terrace, I would shut my eyes and throw myself, because I know that he is always right. But for his salvation! Oh! if I could, I would work for that, in spite of him. In every way, yes! I would force him; it is too cruel to me to think that he will not be in heaven with us."

"You are quite right, my girl," said Felicite approvingly. "You, at least, love your master in an intelligent fashion."

Between the two, Clotilde still seemed irresolute. In her, belief did not bend to the strict rule of dogma; the religious sentiment did not materialize in the hope of a paradise, of a place of delights, where she was to meet her own again. It was in her simply a need of a beyond, a certainty that the vast world does not stop short at sensation, that there is a whole unknown world, besides, which must be taken into account. But her grandmother, who was so old, this servant, who was so devoted, shook her in her uneasy affection for her uncle. Did they not love him better, in a more enlightened and more upright fashion, they who desired him to be without a stain, freed from his manias as a scientist, pure enough to be among the elect? Phrases of devotional books recurred to her; the continual battle waged against the spirit of evil; the glory of conversions effected after a violent struggle. What if she set herself to this holy task; what if, after all, in spite of himself, she should be able to save him! And an exaltation gradually gained her spirit, naturally inclined to adventurous enterprises.

"Certainly," she said at last, "I should be very happy if he would not persist in his notion of heaping up all those scraps of paper, and if he would come to church with us."

Seeing her about to yield, Mme. Rougon cried out that it was necessary to act, and Martine herself added the weight of all her real authority. They both approached the young girl, and began to instruct her, lowering their voices as if they were engaged in a conspiracy, whence was to result a miraculous benefit, a divine joy with which the whole house would be perfumed. What a triumph if they reconciled the doctor with God! and what sweetness, afterward, to live altogether in the celestial communion of the same faith!

"Well, then, what must I do?" asked Clotilde, vanquished, won over.

But at this moment the doctor's pestle was heard in the silence, with its continued rhythm. And the victorious Felicite, who was about to speak, turned her head uneasily, and looked for a moment at the door of the adjoining chamber. Then, in an undertone, she said:

"Do you know where the key of the press is?"

Clotilde answered only with an artless gesture, that expressed all her repugnance to betray her master in this way.

"What a child you are! I swear to you that I will take nothing; I will not even disturb anything. Only as we are alone and as Pascal never reappears before dinner, we might assure ourselves of what there is in there, might we not? Oh! nothing but a glance, on my word of honor."

The young girl stood motionless, unwilling, still, to give her consent.

"And then, it may be that I am mistaken; no doubt there are none of those bad things there that I have told you of."

This was decisive; she ran to take the key from the drawer, and she herself opened wide the press.

"There, grandmother, the papers are up there."

Martine had gone, without a word, to station herself at the door of the doctor's chamber, her ear on the alert, listening to the pestle, while Felicite, as if riveted to the spot by emotion, regarded the papers. At last, there they were, those terrible documents, the nightmare that had poisoned her life! She saw them, she was going to touch them, to carry them away! And she reached up, straining her little legs, in the eagerness of her desire.

"It is too high, my kitten," she said. "Help me; give them to me!"

"Oh! not that, grandmother! Take a chair!"

Felicite took a chair, and mounted slowly upon it. But she was still too short. By an extraordinary effort she raised herself, lengthening her stature until she was able to touch the envelopes of strong blue paper with the tips of her fingers; and her fingers traveled over them, contracting nervously, scratching like claws. Suddenly there was a crash—it was a geological specimen, a fragment of marble that had been on a lower shelf, and that she had just thrown down.

Instantly the pestle stopped, and Martine said in a stifled voice:

"Take care; here he comes!"

But Felicite, grown desperate, did not hear, did not let go her hold when Pascal entered hastily. He had supposed that some accident had happened, that some one had fallen, and he stood stupefied at what he saw—his mother on the chair, her arm still in the air, while Martine had withdrawn to one side, and Clotilde, very pale, stood waiting, without turning her head. When he comprehended the scene, he himself became as white as a sheet. A terrible anger arose within him.

Old Mme. Rougon, however, troubled herself in no wise. When she saw that the opportunity was lost, she descended from the chair, without making any illusion whatever to the task at which he had surprised her.

"Oh, it is you! I do not wish to disturb you. I came to embrace Clotilde. But here I have been talking for nearly two hours, and I must run away at once. They will be expecting me at home; they won't know what has become of me at this hour. Good-by until Sunday."

She went away quite at her ease, after smiling at her son, who stood before her silent and respectful. It was an attitude that he had long since adopted, to avoid an explanation which he felt must be cruel, and which he had always feared. He knew her, he was willing to pardon her everything, in his broad tolerance as a scientist, who made allowance for heredity, environment, and circumstances. And, then, was she not his mother? That ought to have sufficed, for, in spite of the frightful blows which his researches inflicted upon the family, he preserved a great affection for those belonging to him.

When his mother was no longer there, his anger burst forth, and fell upon Clotilde. He had turned his eyes away from Martine, and fixed them on the young girl, who did not turn hers away, however, with a courage which accepted the responsibility of her act.

"You! you!" he said at last.

He seized her arm, and pressed it until she cried. But she continued to look him full in the face, without quailing before him, with the indomitable will of her individuality, of her selfhood. She was beautiful and provoking, with her tall, slender figure, robed in its black blouse; and her exquisite, youthful fairness, her straight forehead, her finely cut nose, her firm chin, took on something of a warlike charm in her rebellion.

"You, whom I have made, you who are my pupil, my friend, my other mind, to whom I have given a part of my heart and of my brain! Ah, yes! I should have kept you entirely for myself, and not have allowed your stupid good God to take the best part of you!"

"Oh, monsieur, you blaspheme!" cried Martine, who had approached him, in order to draw upon herself a part of his anger.

But he did not even see her. Only Clotilde existed for him. And he was as if transfigured, stirred up by so great a passion that his handsome face, crowned by his white hair, framed by his white beard, flamed with youthful passion, with an immense tenderness that had been wounded and exasperated.

"You, you!" he repeated in a trembling voice.

"Yes, I! Why then, master, should I not love you better than you love me? And why, if I believe you to be in peril, should I not try to save you? You are greatly concerned about what I think; you would like well to make me think as you do!"

She had never before defied him in this way.

"But you are a little girl; you know nothing!"

"No, I am a soul, and you know no more about souls than I do!"

He released her arm, and waved his hand vaguely toward heaven, and then a great silence fell—a silence full of grave meaning, of the uselessness of the discussion which he did not wish to enter upon. Thrusting her aside rudely, he crossed over to the middle window and opened the blinds, for the sun was declining, and the room was growing dark. Then he returned.

But she, feeling a need of air and space, went to the open window. The burning rain of sparks had ceased, and there fell now, from on high, only the last shiver of the overheated and paling sky; and from the still burning earth ascended warm odors, with the freer respiration of evening. At the foot of the terrace was the railroad, with the outlying dependencies of the station, of which the buildings were to be seen in the distance; then, crossing the vast arid plain, a line of trees marked the course of the Viorne, beyond which rose the hills of Sainte-Marthe, red fields planted with olive trees, supported on terraces by walls of uncemented stones and crowned by somber pine woods—broad amphitheaters, bare and desolate, corroded by the heats of summer, of the color of old baked brick, which this fringe of dark verdure, standing out against the background of the sky, bordered above. To the left opened the gorges of the Seille, great yellow stones that had broken away from the soil, and lay in the midst of blood-colored fields, dominated by an immense band of rocks like the wall of a gigantic fortress; while to the right, at the very entrance to the valley through which flowed the Viorne, rose, one above another, the discolored pink-tiled roofs of the town of Plassans, the compact and confused mass of an old town, pierced by the tops of ancient elms, and dominated by the high tower of St. Saturnin, solitary and serene at this hour in the limpid gold of sunset.

"Ah, my God!" said Clotilde slowly, "one must be arrogant, indeed, to imagine that one can take everything in one's hand and know everything!"

Pascal had just mounted on the chair to assure himself that not one of his packages was missing. Then he took up the fragment of marble, and replaced it on the shelf, and when he had again locked the press with a vigorous turn of the hand, he put the key into his pocket.

"Yes," he replied; "try not to know everything, and above all, try not to bewilder your brain about what we do not know, what we shall doubtless never know!"

Martine again approached Clotilde, to lend her her support, to show her that they both had a common cause. And now the doctor perceived her, also, and felt that they were both united in the same desire for conquest. After years of secret attempts, it was at last open war; the savant saw his household turn against his opinions, and menace them with destruction. There is no worse torture than to have treason in one's own home, around one; to be trapped, dispossessed, crushed, by those whom you love, and who love you!

Suddenly this frightful idea presented itself to him.

"And yet both of you love me!" he cried.

He saw their eyes grow dim with tears; he was filled with an infinite sadness, on this tranquil close of a beautiful day. All his gaiety, all his kindness of heart, which came from his intense love of life, were shaken by it.

"Ah, my dear! and you, my poor girl," he said, "you are doing this for my happiness, are you not? But, alas, how unhappy we are going to be!"

II.

On the following morning Clotilde was awake at six o'clock. She had gone to bed angry with Pascal; they were at variance with each other. And her first feeling was one of uneasiness, of secret distress, an instant need of making her peace, so that she might no longer have upon her heart the heavy weight that lay there now.

Springing quickly out of bed, she went and half opened the shutters of both windows. The sun, already high, sent his light across the chamber in two golden bars. Into this drowsy room that exhaled a sweet odor of youth, the bright morning brought with it fresh, cheerful air; but the young girl went back and sat down on the edge of the bed in a thoughtful attitude, clad only in her scant nightdress, which made her look still more slender, with her long tapering limbs, her strong, slender body, with its round throat, round neck, round and supple arms; and her adorable neck and throat, of a milky whiteness, had the exquisite softness and smoothness of white satin. For a long time, at the ungraceful age between twelve and eighteen, she had looked awkwardly tall, climbing trees like a boy. Then, from the ungainly hoyden had been evolved this charming, delicate and lovely creature.

With absent gaze she sat looking at the walls of the chamber. Although La Souleiade dated from the last century, it must have been refurnished under the First Empire, for it was hung with an old-fashioned printed calico, with a pattern representing busts of the Sphinx, and garlands of oak leaves. Originally of a bright red, this calico had faded to a pink—an undecided pink, inclining to orange. The curtains of the two windows and of the bed were still in existence, but it had been necessary to clean them, and this had made them still paler. And this faded purple, this dawnlike tint, so delicately soft, was in truth exquisite. As for the bed, covered with the same stuff, it had come down from so remote an antiquity that it had been replaced by another bed found in an adjoining room; another Empire bed, low and very broad, of massive mahogany, ornamented with brasses, its four square pillars adorned also with busts of the Sphinx, like those on the wall. The rest of the furniture matched, however—a press, with whole doors and pillars; a chest of drawers with a marble top, surrounded by a railing; a tall and massive cheval-glass, a large lounge with straight feet, and seats with straight, lyre-shaped backs. But a coverlet made of an old Louis XV. silk skirt brightened the majestic bed, that occupied the middle of the wall fronting the windows; a heap of cushions made the lounge soft; and there were, besides, two etageres and a table also covered with old flowered silk, at the further end of the room.

Clotilde at last put on her stockings and slipped on a morning gown of white pique, and thrusting the tips of her feet into her gray canvas slippers, she ran into her dressing-room, a back room looking out on the rear of the house. She had had it hung plainly with an ecru drill with blue stripes, and it contained only furniture of varnished pine—the toilette table, two presses, and two chairs. It revealed, however, a natural and delicate coquetry which was very feminine. This had grown with her at the same time with her beauty. Headstrong and boyish though she still was at times, she had become a submissive and affectionate woman, desiring to be loved, above everything. The truth was that she had grown up in freedom, without having learned anything more than to read and write, having acquired by herself, later, while assisting her uncle, a vast fund of information. But there had been no plan settled upon between them. He had not wished to make her a prodigy; she had merely conceived a passion for natural history, which revealed to her the mysteries of life. And she had kept her innocence unsullied like a fruit which no hand has touched, thanks, no doubt, to her unconscious and religious waiting for the coming of love—that profound feminine feeling which made her reserve the gift of her whole being for the man whom she should love.

She pushed back her hair and bathed her face; then, yielding to her impatience, she again softly opened the door of her chamber and ventured to cross the vast workroom, noiselessly and on tiptoe. The shutters were still closed, but she could see clearly enough not to stumble against the furniture. When she was at the other end before the door of the doctor's room, she bent forward, holding her breath. Was he already up? What could he be doing? She heard him plainly, walking about with short steps, dressing himself, no doubt. She never entered this chamber in which he chose to hide certain labors; and which thus remained closed, like a tabernacle. One fear had taken possession of her; that of being discovered here by him if he should open the door; and the agitation produced by the struggle between her rebellious pride and a desire to show her submission caused her to grow hot and cold by turns, with sensations until now unknown to her. For an instant her desire for reconciliation was so strong that she was on the point of knocking. Then, as footsteps approached, she ran precipitately away.

Until eight o'clock Clotilde was agitated by an ever-increasing impatience. At every instant she looked at the clock on the mantelpiece of her room; an Empire clock of gilded bronze, representing Love leaning against a pillar, contemplating Time asleep.

Eight was the hour at which she generally descended to the dining-room to breakfast with the doctor. And while waiting she made a careful toilette, arranged her hair, and put on another morning gown of white muslin with red spots. Then, having still a quarter of an hour on her hands, she satisfied an old desire and sat down to sew a piece of narrow lace, an imitation of Chantilly, on her working blouse, that black blouse which she had begun to find too boyish, not feminine enough. But on the stroke of eight she laid down her work, and went downstairs quickly.

"You are going to breakfast entirely alone," said Martine tranquilly to her, when she entered the dining-room.

"How is that?"

"Yes, the doctor called me, and I passed him in his egg through the half-open door. There he is again, at his mortar and his filter. We won't see him now before noon."

Clotilde turned pale with disappointment. She drank her milk standing, took her roll in her hand, and followed the servant into the kitchen. There were on the ground floor, besides this kitchen and the dining-room, only an uninhabited room in which the potatoes were stored, and which had formerly been used as an office by the doctor, when he received his patients in his house—the desk and the armchair had years ago been taken up to his chamber—and another small room, which opened into the kitchen; the old servant's room, scrupulously clean, and furnished with a walnut chest of drawers and a bed like a nun's with white hangings.

"Do you think he has begun to make his liquor again?" asked Clotilde.

"Well, it can be only that. You know that he thinks of neither eating nor drinking when that takes possession of him!"

Then all the young girl's vexation was exhaled in a low plaint:

"Ah, my God! my God!"

And while Martine went to make up her room, she took an umbrella from the hall stand and went disconsolately to eat her roll in the garden, not knowing now how she should occupy her time until midday.

It was now almost seventeen years since Dr. Pascal, having resolved to leave his little house in the new town, had bought La Souleiade for twenty thousand francs, in order to live there in seclusion, and also to give more space and more happiness to the little girl sent him by his brother Saccard from Paris. This Souleiade, situated outside the town gates on a plateau dominating the plain, was part of a large estate whose once vast grounds were reduced to less than two hectares in consequence of successive sales, without counting that the construction of the railroad had taken away the last arable fields. The house itself had been half destroyed by a conflagration and only one of the two buildings remained—a quadrangular wing "of four walls," as they say in Provence, with five front windows and roofed with large pink tiles. And the doctor, who had bought it completely furnished, had contented himself with repairing it and finishing the boundary walls, so as to be undisturbed in his house.

Generally Clotilde loved this solitude passionately; this narrow kingdom which she could go over in ten minutes, and which still retained remnants of its past grandeur. But this morning she brought there something like a nervous disquietude. She walked for a few moments along the terrace, at the two extremities of which stood two secular cypresses like two enormous funeral tapers, which could be seen three leagues off. The slope then descended to the railroad, walls of uncemented stones supporting the red earth, in which the last vines were dead; and on these giant steps grew only rows of olive and almond trees, with sickly foliage. The heat was already overpowering; she saw the little lizards running about on the disjointed flags, among the hairy tufts of caper bushes.

Then, as if irritated by the vast horizon, she crossed the orchard and the kitchen garden, which Martine still persisted in cultivating in spite of her age, calling in a man only twice a week for the heavier labors; and she ascended to a little pine wood on the right, all that remained of the superb pines which had formerly covered the plateau; but, here, too, she was ill at ease; the pine needles crackled under her feet, a resinous, stifling odor descended from the branches. And walking along the boundary wall past the entrance gate, which opened on the road to Les Fenouilleres, three hundred meters from the first houses of Plassans, she emerged at last on the threshing-yard; an immense yard, fifteen meters in radius, which would of itself have sufficed to prove the former importance of the domain. Ah! this antique area, paved with small round stones, as in the days of the Romans; this species of vast esplanade, covered with short dry grass of the color of gold as with a thick woolen carpet; how joyously she had played there in other days, running about, rolling on the grass, lying for hours on her back, watching the stars coming out one by one in the depths of the illimitable sky!

She opened her umbrella again, and crossed the yard with slower steps. Now she was on the left of the terrace. She had made the tour of the estate, so that she had returned by the back of the house, through the clump of enormous plane trees that on this side cast a thick shade. This was the side on which opened the two windows of the doctor's room. And she raised her eyes to them, for she had approached only in the sudden hope of at last seeing him. But the windows remained closed, and she was wounded by this as by an unkindness to herself. Then only did she perceive that she still held in her hand her roll, which she had forgotten to eat; and she plunged among the trees, biting it impatiently with her fine young teeth.

It was a delicious retreat, this old quincunx of plane trees, another remnant of the past splendor of La Souleiade. Under these giant trees, with their monstrous trunks, there was only a dim light, a greenish light, exquisitely cool, even on the hottest days of summer. Formerly a French garden had been laid out here, of which only the box borders remained; bushes which had habituated themselves to the shade, no doubt, for they grew vigorously, as tall as trees. And the charm of this shady nook was a fountain, a simple leaden pipe fixed in the shaft of a column; whence flowed perpetually, even in the greatest drought, a thread of water as thick as the little finger, which supplied a large mossy basin, the greenish stones of which were cleaned only once in three or four years. When all the wells of the neighborhood were dry, La Souleiade still kept its spring, of which the great plane trees were assuredly the secular children. Night and day for centuries past this slender thread of water, unvarying and continuous, had sung the same pure song with crystal sound.

Clotilde, after wandering awhile among the bushes of box, which reached to her shoulder, went back to the house for a piece of embroidery, and returning with it, sat down at a stone table beside the fountain. Some garden chairs had been placed around it, and they often took coffee here. And after this she affected not to look up again from her work, as if she was completely absorbed in it. Now and then, while seeming to look between the trunks of trees toward the sultry distance, toward the yard, on which the sun blazed fiercely and which glowed like a brazier, she stole a glance from under her long lashes up to the doctor's windows. Nothing appeared, not a shadow. And a feeling of sadness, of resentment, arose within her at this neglect, this contempt in which he seemed to hold her after their quarrel of the day before. She who had got up with so great a desire to make peace at once! He was in no hurry, however; he did not love her then, since he could be satisfied to live at variance with her. And gradually a feeling of gloom took possession of her, her rebellious thoughts returned, and she resolved anew to yield in nothing.

At eleven o'clock, before setting her breakfast on the fire, Martine came to her for a moment, the eternal stocking in her hand which she was always knitting even while walking, when she was not occupied in the affairs of the house.

"Do you know that he is still shut up there like a wolf in his hole, at his villainous cookery?"

Clotilde shrugged her shoulders, without lifting her eyes from her embroidery.

"And then, mademoiselle, if you only knew what they say! Mme. Felicite was right yesterday when she said that it was really enough to make one blush. They threw it in my face that he had killed old Boutin, that poor old man, you know, who had the falling sickness and who died on the road. To believe those women of the faubourg, every one into whom he injects his remedy gets the true cholera from it, without counting that they accuse him of having taken the devil into partnership."

A short silence followed. Then, as the young girl became more gloomy than before, the servant resumed, moving her fingers still more rapidly:

"As for me, I know nothing about the matter, but what he is making there enrages me. And you, mademoiselle, do you approve of that cookery?"

At last Clotilde raised her head quickly, yielding to the flood of passion that swept over her.

"Listen; I wish to know no more about it than you do, but I think that he is on a very dangerous path. He no longer loves us."

"Oh, yes, mademoiselle; he loves us."

"No, no; not as we love him. If he loved us, he would be here with us, instead of endangering his soul and his happiness and ours, up there, in his desire to save everybody."

And the two women looked at each other for a moment with eyes burning with affection, in their jealous anger. Then they resumed their work in silence, enveloped in shadow.

Above, in his room, Dr. Pascal was working with the serenity of perfect joy. He had practised his profession for only about a dozen years, from his return to Paris up to the time when he had retired to La Souleiade. Satisfied with the hundred and odd thousand francs which he had earned and which he had invested prudently, he devoted himself almost exclusively to his favorite studies, retaining only a practise among friends, never refusing to go to the bedside of a patient but never sending in his account. When he was paid he threw the money into a drawer in his writing desk, regarding this as pocket-money for his experiments and caprices, apart from his income which sufficed for his wants. And he laughed at the bad reputation for eccentricity which his way of life had gained him; he was happy only when in the midst of his researches on the subjects for which he had a passion. It was matter for surprise to many that this scientist, whose intellectual gifts had been spoiled by a too lively imagination, should have remained at Plassans, this out-of-the-way town where it seemed as if every requirement for his studies must be wanting. But he explained very well the advantages which he had discovered here; in the first place, an utterly peaceful retreat in which he might live the secluded life he desired; then, an unsuspected field for continuous research in the light of the facts of heredity, which was his passion, in this little town where he knew every family and where he could follow the phenomena kept most secret, through two or three generations. And then he was near the seashore; he went there almost every summer, to study the swarming life that is born and propagates itself in the depths of the vast waters. And there was finally, at the hospital in Plassans, a dissecting room to which he was almost the only visitor; a large, bright, quiet room, in which for more than twenty years every unclaimed body had passed under his scalpel. A modest man besides, of a timidity that had long since become shyness, it had been sufficient for him to maintain a correspondence with his old professors and his new friends, concerning the very remarkable papers which he from time to time sent to the Academy of Medicine. He was altogether wanting in militant ambition.

Ah, this heredity! what a subject of endless meditation it was for him! The strangest, the most wonderful part of it all, was it not that the resemblance between parents and children should not be perfect, mathematically exact? He had in the beginning made a genealogical tree of his family, logically traced, in which the influences from generation to generation were distributed equally—the father's part and the mother's part. But the living reality contradicted the theory almost at every point. Heredity, instead of being resemblance, was an effort toward resemblance thwarted by circumstances and environment. And he had arrived at what he called the hypothesis of the abortion of cells. Life is only motion, and heredity being a communicated motion, it happened that the cells in their multiplication from one another jostled one another, pressed one another, made room for themselves, putting forth, each one, the hereditary effort; so that if during this struggle the weaker cells succumbed, considerable disturbances took place, with the final result of organs totally different. Did not variation, the constant invention of nature, which clashed with his theories, come from this? Did not he himself differ from his parents only in consequence of similar accidents, or even as the effect of larvated heredity, in which he had for a time believed? For every genealogical tree has roots which extend as far back into humanity as the first man; one cannot proceed from a single ancestor; one may always resemble a still older, unknown ancestor. He doubted atavism, however; it seemed to him, in spite of a remarkable example taken from his own family, that resemblance at the end of two or three generations must disappear by reason of accidents, of interferences, of a thousand possible combinations. There was then a perpetual becoming, a constant transformation in this communicated effort, this transmitted power, this shock which breathes into matter the breath of life, and which is life itself. And a multiplicity of questions presented themselves to him. Was there a physical and intellectual progress through the ages? Did the brain grow with the growth of the sciences with which it occupied itself? Might one hope, in time, for a larger sum of reason and of happiness? Then there were special problems; one among others, the mystery of which had for a long time irritated him, that of sex; would science never be able to predict, or at least to explain the sex of the embryo being? He had written a very curious paper crammed full of facts on this subject, but which left it in the end in the complete ignorance in which the most exhaustive researches had left it. Doubtless the question of heredity fascinated him as it did only because it remained obscure, vast, and unfathomable, like all the infant sciences where imagination holds sway. Finally, a long study which he had made on the heredity of phthisis revived in him the wavering faith of the healer, arousing in him the noble and wild hope of regenerating humanity.

In short, Dr. Pascal had only one belief—the belief in life. Life was the only divine manifestation. Life was God, the grand motor, the soul of the universe. And life had no other instrument than heredity; heredity made the world; so that if its laws could be known and directed, the world could be made to one's will. In him, to whom sickness, suffering, and death had been a familiar sight, the militant pity of the physician awoke. Ah! to have no more sickness, no more suffering, as little death as possible! His dream ended in this thought—that universal happiness, the future community of perfection and of felicity, could be hastened by intervention, by giving health to all. When all should be healthy, strong, and intelligent, there would be only a superior race, infinitely wise and happy. In India, was not a Brahmin developed from a Soudra in seven generations, thus raising, experimentally, the lowest of beings to the highest type of humanity? And as in his study of consumption he had arrived at the conclusion that it was not hereditary, but that every child of a consumptive carried within him a degenerate soil in which consumption developed with extraordinary facility at the slightest contagion, he had come to think only of invigorating this soil impoverished by heredity; to give it the strength to resist the parasites, or rather the destructive leaven, which he had suspected to exist in the organism, long before the microbe theory. To give strength—the whole problem was there; and to give strength was also to give will, to enlarge the brain by fortifying the other organs.

About this time the doctor, reading an old medical book of the fifteenth century, was greatly struck by a method of treating disease called signature. To cure a diseased organ, it was only necessary to take from a sheep or an ox the corresponding organ in sound condition, boil it, and give the soup to the patient to drink. The theory was to cure like by like, and in diseases of the liver, especially, the old work stated that the cures were numberless. This set the doctor's vivid imagination working. Why not make the trial? If he wished to regenerate those enfeebled by hereditary influences, he had only to give them the normal and healthy nerve substance. The method of the soup, however, seemed to him childish, and he invented in its stead that of grinding in a mortar the brain of a sheep, moistening it with distilled water, and then decanting and filtering the liquor thus obtained. He tried this liquor then mixed with Malaga wine, on his patients, without obtaining any appreciable result. Suddenly, as he was beginning to grow discouraged, he had an inspiration one day, when he was giving a lady suffering from hepatic colics an injection of morphine with the little syringe of Pravaz. What if he were to try hypodermic injections with his liquor? And as soon as he returned home he tried the experiment on himself, making an injection in his side, which he repeated night and morning. The first doses, of a gram only, were without effect. But having doubled, and then tripled the dose, he was enchanted, one morning on getting up, to find that his limbs had all the vigor of twenty. He went on increasing the dose up to five grams, and then his respiration became deeper, and above all he worked with a clearness of mind, an ease, which he had not known for years. A great flood of happiness, of joy in living, inundated his being. From this time, after he had had a syringe made at Paris capable of containing five grams, he was surprised at the happy results which he obtained with his patients, whom he had on their feet again in a few days, full of energy and activity, as if endowed with new life. His method was still tentative and rude, and he divined in it all sorts of dangers, and especially, that of inducing embolism, if the liquor was not perfectly pure. Then he suspected that the strength of his patients came in part from the fever his treatment produced in them. But he was only a pioneer; the method would improve later. Was it not already a miracle to make the ataxic walk, to bring consumptives back to life, as it were; even to give hours of lucidity to the insane? And at the thought of this discovery of the alchemy of the twentieth century, an immense hope opened up before him; he believed he had discovered the universal panacea, the elixir of life, which was to combat human debility, the one real cause of every ill; a veritable scientific Fountain of Youth, which, in giving vigor, health, and will would create an altogether new and superior humanity.

This particular morning in his chamber, a room with a northern aspect and somewhat dark owing to the vicinity of the plane trees, furnished simply with an iron bedstead, a mahogany writing desk, and a large writing table, on which were a mortar and a microscope, he was completing with infinite care the preparation of a vial of his liquor. Since the day before, after pounding the nerve substance of a sheep in distilled water, he had been decanting and filtering it. And he had at last obtained a small bottle of a turbid, opaline liquid, irised by bluish gleams, which he regarded for a long time in the light as if he held in his hand the regenerating blood and symbol of the world.

But a few light knocks at the door and an urgent voice drew him from his dream.

"Why, what is the matter, monsieur? It is a quarter-past twelve; don't you intend to come to breakfast?"

For downstairs breakfast had been waiting for some time past in the large, cool dining-room. The blinds were closed, with the exception of one which had just been half opened. It was a cheerful room, with pearl gray panels relieved by blue mouldings. The table, the sideboard, and the chairs must have formed part of the set of Empire furniture in the bedrooms; and the old mahogany, of a deep red, stood out in strong relief against the light background. A hanging lamp of polished brass, always shining, gleamed like a sun; while on the four walls bloomed four large bouquets in pastel, of gillyflowers, carnations, hyacinths, and roses.

Joyous, radiant, Dr. Pascal entered.

"Ah, the deuce! I had forgotten! I wanted to finish. Look at this, quite fresh, and perfectly pure this time; something to work miracles with!"

And he showed the vial, which he had brought down in his enthusiasm. But his eye fell on Clotilde standing erect and silent, with a serious air. The secret vexation caused by waiting had brought back all her hostility, and she, who had burned to throw herself on his neck in the morning, remained motionless as if chilled and repelled by him.

"Good!" he resumed, without losing anything of his gaiety, "we are still at odds, it seems. That is something very ugly. So you don't admire my sorcerer's liquor, which resuscitates the dead?"

He seated himself at the table, and the young girl, sitting down opposite him, was obliged at last to answer:

"You know well, master, that I admire everything belonging to you. Only, my most ardent desire is that others also should admire you. And there is the death of poor old Boutin—"

"Oh!" he cried, without letting her finish, "an epileptic, who succumbed to a congestive attack! See! since you are in a bad humor, let us talk no more about that—you would grieve me, and that would spoil my day."

There were soft boiled eggs, cutlets, and cream. Silence reigned for a few moments, during which in spite of her ill-humor she ate heartily, with a good appetite which she had not the coquetry to conceal. Then he resumed, laughing:

"What reassures me is to see that your stomach is in good order. Martine, hand mademoiselle the bread."

The servant waited on them as she was accustomed to do, watching them eat, with her quiet air of familiarity.

Sometimes she even chatted with them.

"Monsieur," she said, when she had cut the bread, "the butcher has brought his bill. Is he to be paid?"

He looked up at her in surprise.

"Why do you ask me that?" he said. "Do you not always pay him without consulting me?"

It was, in effect, Martine who kept the purse. The amount deposited with M. Grandguillot, notary at Plassans, produced a round sum of six thousand francs income. Every three months the fifteen hundred francs were remitted to the servant, and she disposed of them to the best interests of the house; bought and paid for everything with the strictest economy, for she was of so saving a disposition that they bantered her about it continually. Clotilde, who spent very little, had never thought of asking a separate purse for herself. As for the doctor, he took what he required for his experiments and his pocket money from the three or four thousand francs which he still earned every year, and which he kept lying in the drawer of his writing desk; so that there was quite a little treasure there in gold and bank bills, of which he never knew the exact amount.

"Undoubtedly, monsieur, I pay, when it is I who have bought the things; but this time the bill is so large on account of the brains which the butcher has furnished you—"

The doctor interrupted her brusquely:

"Ah, come! so you, too, are going to set yourself against me, are you? No, no; both of you—that would be too much! Yesterday you pained me greatly, and I was angry. But this must cease. I will not have the house turned into a hell. Two women against me, and they the only ones who love me at all? Do you know, I would sooner quit the house at once!"

He did not speak angrily, he even smiled; but the disquietude of his heart was perceptible in the trembling of his voice. And he added with his indulgent, cheerful air:

"If you are afraid for the end of the month, my girl, tell the butcher to send my bill apart. And don't fear; you are not going to be asked for any of your money to settle it with; your sous may lie sleeping."

This was an allusion to Martine's little personal fortune. In thirty years, with four hundred francs wages she had earned twelve thousand francs, from which she had taken only what was strictly necessary for her wants; and increased, almost trebled, by the interest, her savings amounted now to thirty thousand francs, which through a caprice, a desire to have her money apart, she had not chosen to place with M. Grandguillot. They were elsewhere, safely invested in the funds.

"Sous that lie sleeping are honest sous," she said gravely. "But monsieur is right; I will tell the butcher to send a bill apart, as all the brains are for monsieur's cookery and not for mine."

This explanation brought a smile to the face of Clotilde, who was always amused by the jests about Martine's avarice; and the breakfast ended more cheerfully. The doctor desired to take the coffee under the plane trees, saying that he felt the need of air after being shut up all the morning. The coffee was served then on the stone table beside the fountain; and how pleasant it was there in the shade, listening to the cool murmur of the water, while around, the pine wood, the court, the whole place, were glowing in the early afternoon sun.

The doctor had complacently brought with him the vial of nerve substance, which he looked at as it stood on the table.

"So, then, mademoiselle," he resumed, with an air of brusque pleasantry, "you do not believe in my elixir of resurrection, and you believe in miracles!"

"Master," responded Clotilde, "I believe that we do not know everything."

He made a gesture of impatience.

"But we must know everything. Understand then, obstinate little girl, that not a single deviation from the invariable laws which govern the universe has ever been scientifically proved. Up to this day there has been no proof of the existence of any intelligence other than the human. I defy you to find any real will, any reasoning force, outside of life. And everything is there; there is in the world no other will than this force which impels everything to life, to a life ever broader and higher."

He rose with a wave of the hand, animated by so firm a faith that she regarded him in surprise, noticing how youthful he looked in spite of his white hair.

"Do you wish me to repeat my 'Credo' for you, since you accuse me of not wanting yours? I believe that the future of humanity is in the progress of reason through science. I believe that the pursuit of truth, through science, is the divine ideal which man should propose to himself. I believe that all is illusion and vanity outside the treasure of truths slowly accumulated, and which will never again be lost. I believe that the sum of these truths, always increasing, will at last confer on man incalculable power and peace, if not happiness. Yes, I believe in the final triumph of life."

And with a broader sweep of the hand that took in the vast horizon, as if calling on these burning plains in which fermented the saps of all existences to bear him witness, he added:

"But the continual miracle, my child, is life. Only open your eyes, and look."

She shook her head.

"It is in vain that I open my eyes; I cannot see everything. It is you, master, who are blind, since you do not wish to admit that there is beyond an unknown realm which you will never enter. Oh, I know you are too intelligent to be ignorant of that! Only you do not wish to take it into account; you put the unknown aside, because it would embarrass you in your researches. It is in vain that you tell me to put aside the mysterious; to start from the known for the conquest of the unknown. I cannot; the mysterious at once calls me back and disturbs me."

He listened to her, smiling, glad to see her become animated, while he smoothed her fair curls with his hand.

"Yes, yes, I know you are like the rest; you do not wish to live without illusions and without lies. Well, there, there; we understand each other still, even so. Keep well; that is the half of wisdom and of happiness."

Then, changing the conversation:

"Come, you will accompany me, notwithstanding, and help me in my round of miracles. This is Thursday, my visiting day. When the heat shall have abated a little, we will go out together."

She refused at first, in order not to seem to yield; but she at last consented, seeing the pain she gave him. She was accustomed to accompany him on his round of visits. They remained for some time longer under the plane trees, until the doctor went upstairs to dress. When he came down again, correctly attired in a close-fitting coat and wearing a broad-brimmed silk hat, he spoke of harnessing Bonhomme, the horse that for a quarter of a century had taken him on his visits through the streets and the environs of Plassans. But the poor old beast was growing blind, and through gratitude for his past services and affection for himself they now rarely disturbed him. On this afternoon he was very drowsy, his gaze wandered, his legs were stiff with rheumatism. So that the doctor and the young girl, when they went to the stable to see him, gave him a hearty kiss on either side of his nose, telling him to rest on a bundle of fresh hay which the servant had brought. And they decided to walk.

Clotilde, keeping on her spotted white muslin, merely tied on over her curls a large straw hat adorned with a bunch of lilacs; and she looked charming, with her large eyes and her complexion of milk-and-roses under the shadow of its broad brim. When she went out thus on Pascal's arm, she tall, slender, and youthful, he radiant, his face illuminated, so to say, by the whiteness of his beard, with a vigor that made him still lift her across the rivulets, people smiled as they passed, and turned around to look at them again, they seemed so innocent and so happy. On this day, as they left the road to Les Fenouilleres to enter Plassans, a group of gossips stopped short in their talk. It reminded one of one of those ancient kings one sees in pictures; one of those powerful and gentle kings who never grew old, resting his hand on the shoulder of a girl beautiful as the day, whose docile and dazzling youth lends him its support.

They were turning into the Cours Sauvair to gain the Rue de la Banne, when a tall, dark young man of about thirty stopped them.

"Ah, master, you have forgotten me. I am still waiting for your notes on consumption."

It was Dr. Ramond, a young physician, who had settled two years before at Plassans, where he was building up a fine practise. With a superb head, in the brilliant prime of a gracious manhood, he was adored by the women, but he had fortunately a great deal of good sense and a great deal of prudence.

"Why, Ramond, good day! Not at all, my dear friend; I have not forgotten you. It is this little girl, to whom I gave the notes yesterday to copy, and who has not touched them yet."

The two young people shook hands with an air of cordial intimacy.

"Good day, Mlle. Clotilde."

"Good day, M. Ramond."

During a gastric fever, happily mild, which the young girl had had the preceding year, Dr. Pascal had lost his head to the extent of distrusting his own skill, and he had asked his young colleague to assist him—to reassure him. Thus it was that an intimacy, a sort of comradeship, had sprung up among the three.

"You shall have your notes to-morrow, I promise you," she said, smiling.

Ramond walked on with them, however, until they reached the end of the Rue de la Banne, at the entrance of the old quarter whither they were going. And there was in the manner in which he leaned, smiling, toward Clotilde, the revelation of a secret love that had grown slowly, awaiting patiently the hour fixed for the most reasonable of denouements. Besides, he listened with deference to Dr. Pascal, whose works he admired greatly.

"And it just happens, my dear friend, that I am going to Guiraude's, that woman, you know, whose husband, a tanner, died of consumption five years ago. She has two children living—Sophie, a girl now going on sixteen, whom I fortunately succeeded in having sent four years before her father's death to a neighboring village, to one of her aunts; and a son, Valentin, who has just completed his twenty-first year, and whom his mother insisted on keeping with her through a blind affection, notwithstanding that I warned her of the dreadful results that might ensue. Well, see if I am right in asserting that consumption is not hereditary, but only that consumptive parents transmit to their children a degenerate soil, in which the disease develops at the slightest contagion. Now, Valentin, who lived in daily contact with his father, is consumptive, while Sophie, who grew up in the open air, has superb health."

He added with a triumphant smile:

"But that will not prevent me, perhaps, from saving Valentin, for he is visibly improved, and is growing fat since I have used my injections with him. Ah, Ramond, you will come to them yet; you will come to my injections!"

The young physician shook hands with both of them, saying:

"I don't say no. You know that I am always with you."

When they were alone they quickened their steps and were soon in the Rue Canquoin, one of the narrowest and darkest streets of the old quarter. Hot as was the sun, there reigned here the semi-obscurity and the coolness of a cave. Here it was, on a ground floor, that Guiraude lived with her son Valentin. She opened the door herself. She was a thin, wasted-looking woman, who was herself affected with a slow decomposition of the blood. From morning till night she crushed almonds with the end of an ox-bone on a large paving stone, which she held between her knees. This work was their only means of living, the son having been obliged to give up all labor. She smiled, however, to-day on seeing the doctor, for Valentin had just eaten a cutlet with a good appetite, a thing which he had not done for months. Valentin, a sickly-looking young man, with scanty hair and beard and prominent cheek bones, on each of which was a bright red spot, while the rest of his face was of a waxen hue, rose quickly to show how much more sprightly he felt! And Clotilde was touched by the reception given to Pascal as a saviour, the awaited Messiah. These poor people pressed his hands—they would like to have kissed his feet; looking at him with eyes shining with gratitude. True, the disease was not yet cured: perhaps this was only the effect of the stimulus, perhaps what he felt was only the excitement of fever. But was it not something to gain time? He gave him another injection while Clotilde, standing before the window, turned her back to them; and when they were leaving she saw him lay twenty francs upon the table. This often happened to him, to pay his patients instead of being paid by them.

He made three other visits in the old quarter, and then went to see a lady in the new town. When they found themselves in the street again, he said:

"Do you know that, if you were a courageous girl, we should walk to Seguiranne, to see Sophie at her aunt's. That would give me pleasure."

The distance was scarcely three kilometers; that would be only a pleasant walk in this delightful weather. And she agreed gaily, not sulky now, but pressing close to him, happy to hang on his arm. It was five o'clock. The setting sun spread over the fields a great sheet of gold. But as soon as they left Plassans they were obliged to cross the corner of the vast, arid plain, which extended to the right of the Viorne. The new canal, whose irrigating waters were soon to transform the face of the country parched with thirst, did not yet water this quarter, and red fields and yellow fields stretched away into the distance under the melancholy and blighting glare of the sun, planted only with puny almond trees and dwarf olives, constantly cut down and pruned, whose branches twisted and writhed in attitudes of suffering and revolt. In the distance, on the bare hillsides, were to be seen only like pale patches the country houses, flanked by the regulation cypress. The vast, barren expanse, however, with broad belts of desolate fields of hard and distinct coloring, had classic lines of a severe grandeur. And on the road the dust lay twenty centimeters thick, a dust like snow, that the slightest breath of wind raised in broad, flying clouds, and that covered with white powder the fig trees and the brambles on either side.

Clotilde, who amused herself like a child, listening to this dust crackling under her little feet, wished to hold her parasol over Pascal.

"You have the sun in your eyes. Lean a little this way."

But at last he took possession of the parasol, to hold it himself.

"It is you who do not hold it right; and then it tires you. Besides, we are almost there now."

In the parched plain they could already perceive an island of verdure, an enormous clump of trees. This was La Seguiranne, the farm on which Sophie had grown up in the house of her Aunt Dieudonne, the wife of the cross old man. Wherever there was a spring, wherever there was a rivulet, this ardent soil broke out in rich vegetation; and then there were walks bordered by trees, whose luxuriant foliage afforded a delightful coolness and shade. Plane trees, chestnut trees, and young elms grew vigorously. They entered an avenue of magnificent green oaks.

As they approached the farm, a girl who was making hay in the meadow dropped her fork and ran toward them. It was Sophie, who had recognized the doctor and the young lady, as she called Clotilde. She adored them, but she stood looking at them in confusion, unable to express the glad greeting with which her heart overflowed. She resembled her brother Valentin; she had his small stature, his prominent cheek bones, his pale hair; but in the country, far from the contagion of the paternal environment, she had, it seemed, gained flesh; acquired with her robust limbs a firm step; her cheeks had filled out, her hair had grown luxuriant. And she had fine eyes, which shone with health and gratitude. Her Aunt Dieudonne, who was making hay with her, had come toward them also, crying from afar jestingly, with something of Provencal rudeness:

"Ah, M. Pascal, we have no need of you here! There is no one sick!"

The doctor, who had simply come in search of this fine spectacle of health, answered in the same tone:

"I hope so, indeed. But that does not prevent this little girl here from owing you and me a fine taper!"

"Well, that is the pure truth! And she knows it, M. Pascal. There is not a day that she does not say that but for you she would be at this time like her brother Valentin."

"Bah! We will save him, too. He is getting better, Valentin is. I have just been to see him."

Sophie seized the doctor's hands; large tears stood in her eyes, and she could only stammer:

"Oh, M. Pascal!"

How they loved him! And Clotilde felt her affection for him increase, seeing the affection of all these people for him. They remained chatting there for a few moments longer, in the salubrious shade of the green oaks. Then they took the road back to Plassans, having still another visit to make.

This was to a tavern, that stood at the crossing of two roads and was white with the flying dust. A steam mill had recently been established opposite, utilizing the old buildings of Le Paradou, an estate dating from the last century, and Lafouasse, the tavern keeper, still carried on his little business, thanks to the workmen at the mill and to the peasants who brought their corn to it. He had still for customers on Sundays the few inhabitants of Les Artauds, a neighboring hamlet. But misfortune had struck him; for the last three years he had been dragging himself about groaning with rheumatism, in which the doctor had finally recognized the beginning of ataxia. But he had obstinately refused to take a servant, persisting in waiting on his customers himself, holding on by the furniture. So that once more firm on his feet, after a dozen punctures, he already proclaimed his cure everywhere.

He chanced to be just then at his door, and looked strong and vigorous, with his tall figure, fiery face, and fiery red hair.

"I was waiting for you, M. Pascal. Do you know that I have been able to bottle two casks of wine without being tired!"

Clotilde remained outside, sitting on a stone bench; while Pascal entered the room to give Lafouasse the injection. She could hear them speaking, and the latter, who in spite of his stoutness was very cowardly in regard to pain, complained that the puncture hurt, adding, however, that after all a little suffering was a small price to pay for good health. Then he declared he would be offended if the doctor did not take a glass of something. The young lady would not affront him by refusing to take some syrup. He carried a table outside, and there was nothing for it but they must touch glasses with him.

"To your health, M. Pascal, and to the health of all the poor devils to whom you give back a relish for their victuals!"

Clotilde thought with a smile of the gossip of which Martine had spoken to her, of Father Boutin, whom they accused the doctor of having killed. He did not kill all his patients, then; his remedy worked real miracles, since he brought back to life the consumptive and the ataxic. And her faith in her master returned with the warm affection for him which welled up in her heart. When they left Lafouasse, she was once more completely his; he could do what he willed with her.

But a few moments before, sitting on the stone bench looking at the steam mill, a confused story had recurred to her mind; was it not here in these smoke-blackened buildings, to-day white with flour, that a drama of love had once been enacted? And the story came back to her; details given by Martine; allusions made by the doctor himself; the whole tragic love adventure of her cousin the Abbe Serge Mouret, then rector of Les Artauds, with an adorable young girl of a wild and passionate nature who lived at Le Paradou.

Returning by the same road Clotilde stopped, and pointing to the vast, melancholy expanse of stubble fields, cultivated plains, and fallow land, said:

"Master, was there not once there a large garden? Did you not tell me some story about it?"

"Yes, yes; Le Paradou, an immense garden—woods, meadows, orchards, parterres, fountains, and brooks that flowed into the Viorne. A garden abandoned for an age; the garden of the Sleeping Beauty, returned to Nature's rule. And as you see they have cut down the woods, and cleared and leveled the ground, to divide it into lots, and sell it by auction. The springs themselves have dried up. There is nothing there now but that fever-breeding marsh. Ah, when I pass by here, it makes my heart ache!"

She ventured to question him further:

"But was it not in Le Paradou that my cousin Serge and your great friend Albine fell in love with each other?"

He had forgotten her presence. He went on talking, his gaze fixed on space, lost in recollections of the past.

"Albine, my God! I can see her now, in the sunny garden, like a great, fragrant bouquet, her head thrown back, her bosom swelling with joy, happy in her flowers, with wild flowers braided among her blond tresses, fastened at her throat, on her corsage, around her slender, bare brown arms. And I can see her again, after she had asphyxiated herself; dead in the midst of her flowers; very white, sleeping with folded hands, and a smile on her lips, on her couch of hyacinths and tuberoses. Dead for love; and how passionately Albine and Serge loved each other, in the great garden their tempter, in the bosom of Nature their accomplice! And what a flood of life swept away all false bonds, and what a triumph of life!"

Clotilde, she too troubled by this passionate flow of murmured words, gazed at him intently. She had never ventured to speak to him of another story that she had heard—the story of the one love of his life—a love which he had cherished in secret for a lady now dead. It was said that he had attended her for a long time without ever so much as venturing to kiss the tips of her fingers. Up to the present, up to near sixty, study and his natural timidity had made him shun women. But, notwithstanding, one felt that he was reserved for some great passion, with his feelings still fresh and ardent, in spite of his white hair.

"And the girl that died, the girl they mourned," she resumed, her voice trembling, her cheeks scarlet, without knowing why. "Serge did not love her, then, since he let her die?"

Pascal started as though awakening from a dream, seeing her beside him in her youthful beauty, with her large, clear eyes shining under the shadow of her broad-brimmed hat. Something had happened; the same breath of life had passed through them both; they did not take each other's arms again. They walked side by side.

"Ah, my dear, the world would be too beautiful, if men did not spoil it all! Albine is dead, and Serge is now rector of St. Eutrope, where he lives with his sister Desiree, a worthy creature who has the good fortune to be half an idiot. He is a holy man; I have never said the contrary. One may be an assassin and serve God."

And he went on speaking of the hard things of life, of the blackness and execrableness of humanity, without losing his gentle smile. He loved life; and the continuous work of life was a continual joy to him in spite of all the evil, all the misery, that it might contain. It mattered not how dreadful life might appear, it must be great and good, since it was lived with so tenacious a will, for the purpose no doubt of this will itself, and of the great work which it unconsciously accomplished. True, he was a scientist, a clear-sighted man; he did not believe in any idyllic humanity living in a world of perpetual peace; he saw, on the contrary, its woes and its vices; he had laid them bare; he had examined them; he had catalogued them for thirty years past, but his passion for life, his admiration for the forces of life, sufficed to produce in him a perpetual gaiety, whence seemed to flow naturally his love for others, a fraternal compassion, a sympathy, which were felt under the roughness of the anatomist and under the affected impersonality of his studies.

"Bah!" he ended, taking a last glance at the vast, melancholy plains. "Le Paradou is no more. They have sacked it, defiled it, destroyed it; but what does that matter! Vines will be planted, corn will spring up, a whole growth of new crops; and people will still fall in love in vintages and harvests yet to come. Life is eternal; it is a perpetual renewal of birth and growth."

He took her arm again and they returned to the town thus, arm in arm like good friends, while the glow of the sunset was slowly fading away in a tranquil sea of violets and roses. And seeing them both pass again, the ancient king, powerful and gentle, leaning against the shoulder of a charming and docile girl, supported by her youth, the women of the faubourg, sitting at their doors, looked after them with a smile of tender emotion.

At La Souleiade Martine was watching for them. She waved her hand to them from afar. What! Were they not going to dine to-day? Then, when they were near, she said:

"Ah! you will have to wait a little while. I did not venture to put on my leg of mutton yet."

They remained outside to enjoy the charm of the closing day. The pine grove, wrapped in shadow, exhaled a balsamic resinous odor, and from the yard, still heated, in which a last red gleam was dying away, a chillness arose. It was like an assuagement, a sigh of relief, a resting of surrounding Nature, of the puny almond trees, the twisted olives, under the paling sky, cloudless and serene; while at the back of the house the clump of plane trees was a mass of black and impenetrable shadows, where the fountain was heard singing its eternal crystal song.

"Look!" said the doctor, "M. Bellombre has already dined, and he is taking the air."

He pointed to a bench, on which a tall, thin old man of seventy was sitting, with a long face, furrowed with wrinkles, and large, staring eyes, and very correctly attired in a close-fitting coat and cravat.

"He is a wise man," murmured Clotilde. "He is happy."

"He!" cried Pascal. "I should hope not!"

He hated no one, and M. Bellombre, the old college professor, now retired, and living in his little house without any other company than that of a gardener who was deaf and dumb and older than himself, was the only person who had the power to exasperate him.

"A fellow who has been afraid of life; think of that! afraid of life! Yes, a hard and avaricious egotist! If he banished woman from his existence, it was only through fear of having to pay for her shoes. And he has known only the children of others, who have made him suffer—hence his hatred of the child—that flesh made to be flogged. The fear of life, the fear of burdens and of duties, of annoyances and of catastrophes! The fear of life, which makes us through dread of its sufferings refuse its joys. Ah! I tell you, this cowardliness enrages me; I cannot forgive it. We must live—live a complete life—live all our life. Better even suffering, suffering only, than such renunciation—the death of all there is in us that is living and human!"

M. Bellombre had risen, and was walking along one of the walks with slow, tranquil steps. Then, Clotilde, who had been watching him in silence, at last said:

"There is, however, the joy of renunciation. To renounce, not to live; to keep one's self for the spiritual, has not this always been the great happiness of the saints?"

"If they had not lived," cried Pascal, "they could not now be saints. Let suffering come, and I will bless it, for it is perhaps the only great happiness!"

But he felt that she rebelled against this; that he was going to lose her again. At the bottom of our anxiety about the beyond is the secret fear and hatred of life. So that he hastily assumed again his pleasant smile, so affectionate and conciliating.

"No, no! Enough for to-day; let us dispute no more; let us love each other dearly. And see! Martine is calling us, let us go in to dinner."

III.

For a month this unpleasant state of affairs continued, every day growing worse, and Clotilde suffered especially at seeing that Pascal now locked up everything. He had no longer the same tranquil confidence in her as before, and this wounded her so deeply that, if she had at any time found the press open, she would have thrown the papers into the fire as her grandmother Felicite had urged her to do. And the disagreements began again, so that they often remained without speaking to each other for two days together.

One morning, after one of these misunderstandings which had lasted since the day before, Martine said as she was serving the breakfast:

"Just now as I was crossing the Place de la Sous-Prefecture, I saw a stranger whom I thought I recognized going into Mme. Felicite's house. Yes, mademoiselle, I should not be surprised if it were your brother."

On the impulse of the moment, Pascal and Clotilde spoke.

"Your brother! Did your grandmother expect him, then?"

"No, I don't think so, though she has been expecting him at any time for the past six months, I know that she wrote to him again a week ago."

They questioned Martine.

"Indeed, monsieur, I cannot say; since I last saw M. Maxime four years ago, when he stayed two hours with us on his way to Italy, he may perhaps have changed greatly—I thought, however, that I recognized his back."

The conversation continued, Clotilde seeming to be glad of this event, which broke at last the oppressive silence between them, and Pascal ended:

"Well, if it is he, he will come to see us."

It was indeed Maxime. He had yielded, after months of refusal, to the urgent solicitations of old Mme. Rougon, who had still in this quarter an open family wound to heal. The trouble was an old one, and it grew worse every day.

Fifteen years before, when he was seventeen, Maxime had had a child by a servant whom he had seduced. His father Saccard, and his stepmother Renee—the latter vexed more especially at his unworthy choice—had acted in the matter with indulgence. The servant, Justine Megot, belonged to one of the neighboring villages, and was a fair-haired girl, also seventeen, gentle and docile; and they had sent her back to Plassans, with an allowance of twelve hundred francs a year, to bring up little Charles. Three years later she had married there a harness-maker of the faubourg, Frederic Thomas by name, a good workman and a sensible fellow, who was tempted by the allowance. For the rest her conduct was now most exemplary, she had grown fat, and she appeared to be cured of a cough that had threatened a hereditary malady due to the alcoholic propensities of a long line of progenitors. And two other children born of her marriage, a boy who was now ten and a girl who was seven, both plump and rosy, enjoyed perfect health; so that she would have been the most respected and the happiest of women, if it had not been for the trouble which Charles caused in the household. Thomas, notwithstanding the allowance, execrated this son of another man and gave him no peace, which made the mother suffer in secret, being an uncomplaining and submissive wife. So that, although she adored him, she would willingly have given him up to his father's family.

Charles, at fifteen, seemed scarcely twelve, and he had the infantine intelligence of a child of five, resembling in an extraordinary degree his great-great-grandmother, Aunt Dide, the madwoman at the Tulettes. He had the slender and delicate grace of one of those bloodless little kings with whom a race ends, crowned with their long, fair locks, light as spun silk. His large, clear eyes were expressionless, and on his disquieting beauty lay the shadow of death. And he had neither brain nor heart—he was nothing but a vicious little dog, who rubbed himself against people to be fondled. His great-grandmother Felicite, won by this beauty, in which she affected to recognize her blood, had at first put him in a boarding school, taking charge of him, but he had been expelled from it at the end of six months for misconduct. Three times she had changed his boarding school, and each time he had been expelled in disgrace. Then, as he neither would nor could learn anything, and as his health was declining rapidly, they kept him at home, sending him from one to another of the family. Dr. Pascal, moved to pity, had tried to cure him, and had abandoned the hopeless task only after he had kept him with him for nearly a year, fearing the companionship for Clotilde. And now, when Charles was not at his mother's, where he scarcely ever lived at present, he was to be found at the house of Felicite, or that of some other relative, prettily dressed, laden with toys, living like the effeminate little dauphin of an ancient and fallen race.

Old Mme. Rougon, however, suffered because of this bastard, and she had planned to get him away from the gossiping tongues of Plassans, by persuading Maxime to take him and keep him with him in Paris. It would still be an ugly story of the fallen family. But Maxime had for a long time turned a deaf ear to her solicitations, in the fear which continually haunted him of spoiling his life. After the war, enriched by the death of his wife, he had come back to live prudently on his fortune in his mansion on the avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, tormented by the hereditary malady of which he was to die young, having gained from his precocious debauchery a salutary fear of pleasure, resolved above all to shun emotions and responsibilities, so that he might last as long as possible. Acute pains in the limbs, rheumatic he thought them, had been alarming him for some time past; he saw himself in fancy already an invalid tied down to an easy-chair; and his father's sudden return to France, the fresh activity which Saccard was putting forth, completed his disquietude. He knew well this devourer of millions; he trembled at finding him again bustling about him with his good-humored, malicious laugh. He felt that he was being watched, and he had the conviction that he would be cut up and devoured if he should be for a single day at his mercy, rendered helpless by the pains which were invading his limbs. And so great a fear of solitude had taken possession of him that he had now yielded to the idea of seeing his son again. If he found the boy gentle, intelligent, and healthy, why should he not take him to live with him? He would thus have a companion, an heir, who would protect him against the machinations of his father. Gradually he came to see himself, in his selfish forethought, loved, petted, and protected; yet for all that he might not have risked such a journey, if his physician had not just at that time sent him to the waters of St. Gervais. Thus, having to go only a few leagues out of his way, he had dropped in unexpectedly that morning on old Mme. Rougon, firmly resolved to take the train again in the evening, after having questioned her and seen the boy.

At two o'clock Pascal and Clotilde were still beside the fountain under the plane trees where they had taken their coffee, when Felicite arrived with Maxime.

"My dear, here's a surprise! I have brought you your brother."

Startled, the young girl had risen, seeing this thin and sallow stranger, whom she scarcely recognized. Since their parting in 1854 she had seen him only twice, once at Paris and again at Plassans. Yet his image, refined, elegant, and vivacious, had remained engraven on her mind; his face had grown hollow, his hair was streaked with silver threads. But notwithstanding, she found in him still, with his delicately handsome head, a languid grace, like that of a girl, even in his premature decrepitude.

"How well you look!" he said simply, as he embraced his sister.

"But," she responded, "to be well one must live in the sunshine. Ah, how happy it makes me to see you again!"

Pascal, with the eye of the physician, had examined his nephew critically. He embraced him in his turn.

"Goodday, my boy. And she is right, mind you; one can be well only out in the sunshine—like the trees."

Felicite had gone hastily to the house. She returned, crying:

"Charles is not here, then?"

"No," said Clotilde. "We went to see him yesterday. Uncle Macquart has taken him, and he is to remain for a few days at the Tulettes."

Felicite was in despair. She had come only in the certainty of finding the boy at Pascal's. What was to be done now? The doctor, with his tranquil air, proposed to write to Uncle Macquart, who would bring him back in the morning. But when he learned that Maxime wished positively to go away again by the nine o'clock train, without remaining over night, another idea occurred to him. He would send to the livery stable for a landau, and all four would go to see Charles at Uncle Macquart's. It would even be a delightful drive. It was not quite three leagues from Plassans to the Tulettes—an hour to go, and an hour to return, and they would still have almost two hours to remain there, if they wished to be back by seven. Martine would get dinner, and Maxime would have time enough to dine and catch his train.

But Felicite objected, visibly disquieted by this visit to Macquart.

"Oh, no, indeed! If you think I am going down there in this frightful weather, you are mistaken. It is much simpler to send some one to bring Charles to us."

Pascal shook his head. Charles was not always to be brought back when one wished. He was a boy without reason, who sometimes, if the whim seized him, would gallop off like an untamed animal. And old Mme. Rougon, overruled and furious at having been unable to make any preparation, was at last obliged to yield, in the necessity in which she found herself of leaving the matter to chance.

"Well, be it as you wish, then! Good Heavens, how unfortunately things have turned out!"

Martine hurried away to order the landau, and before three o'clock had struck the horses were on the Nice road, descending the declivity which slopes down to the bridge over the Viorne. Then they turned to the left, and followed the wooded banks of the river for about two miles. After this the road entered the gorges of the Seille, a narrow pass between two giant walls of rock scorched by the ardent rays of the summer sun. Pine trees pushed their way through the clefts; clumps of trees, scarcely thicker at the roots than tufts of grass, fringed the crests and hung over the abyss. It was a chaos; a blasted landscape, a mouth of hell, with its wild turns, its droppings of blood-colored earth sliding down from every cut, its desolate solitude invaded only by the eagles' flight.

Felicite did not open her lips; her brain was at work, and she seemed completely absorbed in her thoughts. The atmosphere was oppressive, the sun sent his burning rays from behind a veil of great livid clouds. Pascal was almost the only one who talked, in his passionate love for this scorched land—a love which he endeavored to make his nephew share. But it was in vain that he uttered enthusiastic exclamations, in vain that he called his attention to the persistence of the olives, the fig trees, and the thorn bushes in pushing through the rock; the life of the rock itself, that colossal and puissant frame of the earth, from which they could almost fancy they heard a sound of breathing arise. Maxime remained cold, filled with a secret anguish in presence of those blocks of savage majesty, whose mass seemed to crush him. And he preferred to turn his eyes toward his sister, who was seated in front of him. He was becoming more and more charmed with her. She looked so healthy and so happy, with her pretty round head, with its straight, well-molded forehead. Now and then their glances met, and she gave him an affectionate smile which consoled him.

But the wildness of the gorge was beginning to soften, the two walls of rock to grow lower; they passed between two peaceful hills, with gentle slopes covered with thyme and lavender. It was the desert still, there were still bare spaces, green or violet hued, from which the faintest breeze brought a pungent perfume.

Then abruptly, after a last turn they descended to the valley of the Tulettes, which was refreshed by springs. In the distance stretched meadows dotted by large trees. The village was seated midway on the slope, among olive trees, and the country house of Uncle Macquart stood a little apart on the left, full in view. The landau turned into the road which led to the insane asylum, whose white walls they could see before them in the distance.

Felicite's silence had grown somber, for she was not fond of exhibiting Uncle Macquart. Another whom the family would be well rid of the day when he should take his departure. For the credit of every one he ought to have been sleeping long ago under the sod. But he persisted in living, he carried his eighty-three years well, like an old drunkard saturated with liquor, whom the alcohol seemed to preserve. At Plassans he had left a terrible reputation as a do-nothing and a scoundrel, and the old men whispered the execrable story of the corpses that lay between him and the Rougons, an act of treachery in the troublous days of December, 1851, an ambuscade in which he had left comrades with their bellies ripped open, lying on the bloody pavement. Later, when he had returned to France, he had preferred to the good place of which he had obtained the promise this little domain of the Tulettes, which Felicite had bought for him. And he had lived comfortably here ever since; he had no longer any other ambition than that of enlarging it, looking out once more for the good chances, and he had even found the means of obtaining a field which he had long coveted, by making himself useful to his sister-in-law at the time when the latter again reconquered Plassans from the legitimists—another frightful story that was whispered also, of a madman secretly let loose from the asylum, running in the night to avenge himself, setting fire to his house in which four persons were burned. But these were old stories and Macquart, settled down now, was no longer the redoubtable scoundrel who had made all the family tremble. He led a perfectly correct life; he was a wily diplomat, and he had retained nothing of his air of jeering at the world but his bantering smile.

"Uncle is at home," said Pascal, as they approached the house.

This was one of those Provencal structures of a single story, with discolored tiles and four walls washed with a bright yellow. Before the facade extended a narrow terrace shaded by ancient mulberry trees, whose thick, gnarled branches drooped down, forming an arbor. It was here that Uncle Macquart smoked his pipe in the cool shade, in summer. And on hearing the sound of the carriage, he came and stood at the edge of the terrace, straightening his tall form neatly clad in blue cloth, his head covered with the eternal fur cap which he wore from one year's end to the other.

As soon as he recognized his visitors, he called out with a sneer:

"Oh, here come some fine company! How kind of you; you are out for an airing."

But the presence of Maxime puzzled him. Who was he? Whom had he come to see? They mentioned his name to him, and he immediately cut short the explanations they were adding, to enable him to straighten out the tangled skein of relationship.

"The father of Charles—I know, I know! The son of my nephew Saccard, pardi! the one who made a fine marriage, and whose wife died—"

He stared at Maxime, seeming happy to find him already wrinkled at thirty-two, with his hair and beard sprinkled with snow.

"Ah, well!" he added, "we are all growing old. But I, at least, have no great reason to complain. I am solid."

And he planted himself firmly on his legs with his air of ferocious mockery, while his fiery red face seemed to flame and burn. For a long time past ordinary brandy had seemed to him like pure water; only spirits of 36 degrees tickled his blunted palate; and he took such draughts of it that he was full of it—his flesh saturated with it—like a sponge. He perspired alcohol. At the slightest breath whenever he spoke, he exhaled from his mouth a vapor of alcohol.

"Yes, truly; you are solid, uncle!" said Pascal, amazed. "And you have done nothing to make you so; you have good reason to ridicule us. Only there is one thing I am afraid of, look you, that some day in lighting your pipe, you may set yourself on fire—like a bowl of punch."

Macquart, flattered, gave a sneering laugh.

"Have your jest, have your jest, my boy! A glass of cognac is worth more than all your filthy drugs. And you will all touch glasses with me, hey? So that it may be said truly that your uncle is a credit to you all. As for me, I laugh at evil tongues. I have corn and olive trees, I have almond trees and vines and land, like any bourgeois. In summer I smoke my pipe under the shade of my mulberry trees; in winter I go to smoke it against my wall, there in the sunshine. One has no need to blush for an uncle like that, hey? Clotilde, I have syrup, if you would like some. And you, Felicite, my dear, I know that you prefer anisette. There is everything here, I tell you, there is everything here!"

He waved his arm as if to take possession of the comforts he enjoyed, now that from an old sinner he had become a hermit, while Felicite, whom he had disturbed a moment before by the enumeration of his riches, did not take her eyes from his face, waiting to interrupt him.

"Thank you, Macquart, we will take nothing; we are in a hurry. Where is Charles?"

"Charles? Very good, presently! I understand, papa has come to see his boy. But that is not going to prevent you taking a glass."

And as they positively refused he became offended, and said, with his malicious laugh:

"Charles is not here; he is at the asylum with the old woman."

Then, taking Maxime to the end of the terrace, he pointed out to him the great white buildings, whose inner gardens resembled prison yards.

"Look, nephew, you see those three trees in front of you? Well, beyond the one to the left, there is a fountain in a court. Follow the ground floor, and the fifth window to the right is Aunt Dide's. And that is where the boy is. Yes, I took him there a little while ago."

This was an indulgence of the directors. In the twenty years that she had been in the asylum the old woman had not given a moment's uneasiness to her keeper. Very quiet, very gentle, she passed the days motionless in her easy-chair, looking straight before her; and as the boy liked to be with her, and as she herself seemed to take an interest in him, they shut their eyes to this infraction of the rules and left him there sometimes for two or three hours at a time, busily occupied in cutting out pictures.

But this new disappointment put the finishing stroke to Felicite's ill-humor; she grew angry when Macquart proposed that all five should go in a body in search of the boy.

"What an idea! Go you alone, and come back quickly. We have no time to lose."

Her suppressed rage seemed to amuse Uncle Macquart, and perceiving how disagreeable his proposition was to her, he insisted, with his sneering laugh:

"But, my children, we should at the same time have an opportunity of seeing the old mother; the mother of us all. There is no use in talking; you know that we are all descended from her, and it would hardly be polite not to go wish her a good-day, when my grandnephew, who has come from such a distance, has perhaps never before had a good look at her. I'll not disown her, may the devil take me if I do. To be sure she is mad, but all the same, old mothers who have passed their hundredth year are not often to be seen, and she well deserves that we should show ourselves a little kind to her."

There was silence for a moment. A little shiver had run through every one. And it was Clotilde, silent until now, who first declared in a voice full of feeling:

"You are right, uncle; we will all go."

Felicite herself was obliged to consent. They re-entered the landau, Macquart taking the seat beside the coachman. A feeling of disquietude had given a sallow look to Maxime's worn face; and during the short drive he questioned Pascal concerning Charles with an air of paternal interest, which concealed a growing anxiety. The doctor constrained by his mother's imperious glances, softened the truth. Well, the boy's health was certainly not very robust; it was on that account, indeed, that they were glad to leave him for weeks together in the country with his uncle: but he had no definite disease. Pascal did not add that he had for a moment cherished the dream of giving him a brain and muscles by treating him with his hypodermic injections of nerve substance, but that he had always been met by the same difficulty; the slightest puncture brought on a hemorrhage which it was found necessary to stop by compresses; there was a laxness of the tissues, due to degeneracy; a bloody dew which exuded from the skin; he had especially, bleedings at the nose so sudden and so violent that they did not dare to leave him alone, fearing lest all the blood in his veins should flow out. And the doctor ended by saying that although the boy's intelligence had been sluggish, he still hoped that it would develop in an environment of quicker mental activity.

They arrived at the asylum and Macquart, who had been listening to the doctor, descended from his seat, saying:

"He is a gentle little fellow, a very gentle little fellow! And then, he is so beautiful—an angel!"

Maxime, who was still pale, and who shivered in spite of the stifling heat, put no more questions. He looked at the vast buildings of the asylum, the wings of the various quarters separated by gardens, the men's quarters from those of the women, those of the harmless insane from those of the violent insane. A scrupulous cleanliness reigned everywhere, a gloomy silence—broken from time to time by footsteps and the noise of keys. Old Macquart knew all the keepers. Besides, the doors were always to open to Dr. Pascal, who had been authorized to attend certain of the inmates. They followed a passage and entered a court; it was here—one of the chambers on the ground floor, a room covered with a light carpet, furnished with a bed, a press, a table, an armchair, and two chairs. The nurse, who had orders never to quit her charge, happened just now to be absent, and the only occupants of the room were the madwoman, sitting rigid in her armchair at one side of the table, and the boy, sitting on a chair on the opposite side, absorbed in cutting out his pictures.

"Go in, go in!" Macquart repeated. "Oh, there is no danger, she is very gentle!"

The grandmother, Adelaide Fouque, whom her grandchildren, a whole swarm of descendants, called by the pet name of Aunt Dide, did not even turn her head at the noise. In her youth hysterical troubles had unbalanced her mind. Of an ardent and passionate nature and subject to nervous attacks, she had yet reached the great age of eighty-three when a dreadful grief, a terrible moral shock, destroyed her reason. At that time, twenty-one years before, her mind had ceased to act; it had become suddenly weakened without the possibility of recovery. And now, at the age of 104 years, she lived here as if forgotten by the world, a quiet madwoman with an ossified brain, with whom insanity might remain stationary for an indefinite length of time without causing death. Old age had come, however, and had gradually atrophied her muscles. Her flesh was as if eaten away by age. The skin only remained on her bones, so that she had to be carried from her chair to her bed, for it had become impossible for her to walk or even to move. And yet she held herself erect against the back of her chair, a yellow, dried-up skeleton—like an ancient tree of which the bark only remains—with only her eyes still living in her thin, long visage, in which the wrinkles had been, so to say, worn away. She was looking fixedly at Charles.

Clotilde approached her a little tremblingly.

"Aunt Dide, it is we; we have come to see you. Don't you know me, then? Your little girl who comes sometimes to kiss you."

But the madwoman did not seem to hear. Her eyes remained fixed upon the boy, who was finishing cutting out a picture—a purple king in a golden mantle.

"Come, mamma," said Macquart, "don't pretend to be stupid. You may very well look at us. Here is a gentleman, a grandson of yours, who has come from Paris expressly to see you."

At this voice Aunt Dide at last turned her head. Her clear, expressionless eyes wandered slowly from one to another, then rested again on Charles with the same fixed look as before.

They all shivered, and no one spoke again.

"Since the terrible shock she received," explained Pascal in a low voice, "she has been that way; all intelligence, all memory seem extinguished in her. For the most part she is silent; at times she pours forth a flood of stammering and indistinct words. She laughs and cries without cause, she is a thing that nothing affects. And yet I should not venture to say that the darkness of her mind is complete, that no memories remain stored up in its depths. Ah! the poor old mother, how I pity her, if the light has not yet been finally extinguished. What can her thoughts have been for the last twenty-one years, if she still remembers?"

With a gesture he put this dreadful past which he knew from him. He saw her again young, a tall, pale, slender girl with frightened eyes, a widow, after fifteen months of married life with Rougon, the clumsy gardener whom she had chosen for a husband, throwing herself immediately afterwards into the arms of the smuggler Macquart, whom she loved with a wolfish love, and whom she did not even marry. She had lived thus for fifteen years, with her three children, one the child of her marriage, the other two illegitimate, a capricious and tumultuous existence, disappearing for weeks at a time, and returning all bruised, her arms black and blue. Then Macquart had been killed, shot down like a dog by a gendarme; and the first shock had paralyzed her, so that even then she retained nothing living but her water-clear eyes in her livid face; and she shut herself up from the world in the hut which her lover had left her, leading there for forty years the dead existence of a nun, broken by terrible nervous attacks. But the other shock was to finish her, to overthrow her reason, and Pascal recalled the atrocious scene, for he had witnessed it—a poor child whom the grandmother had taken to live with her, her grandson Silvere, the victim of family hatred and strife, whose head another gendarme shattered with a pistol shot, at the suppression of the insurrectionary movement of 1851. She was always to be bespattered with blood.

Felicite, meanwhile, had approached Charles, who was so engrossed with his pictures that all these people did not disturb him.

"My darling, this gentleman is your father. Kiss him," she said.

And then they all occupied themselves with Charles. He was very prettily dressed in a jacket and short trousers of black velvet, braided with gold cord. Pale as a lily, he resembled in truth one of those king's sons whose pictures he was cutting out, with his large, light eyes and his shower of fair curls. But what especially struck the attention at this moment was his resemblance to Aunt Dide; this resemblance which had overleaped three generations, which had passed from this withered centenarian's countenance, from these dead features wasted by life, to this delicate child's face that was also as if worn, aged, and wasted, through the wear of the race. Fronting each other, the imbecile child of a deathlike beauty seemed the last of the race of which she, forgotten by the world, was the ancestress.

Maxime bent over to press a kiss on the boy's forehead; and a chill struck to his heart—this very beauty disquieted him; his uneasiness grew in this chamber of madness, whence, it seemed to him, breathed a secret horror come from the far-off past.

"How beautiful you are, my pet! Don't you love me a little?"

Charles looked at him without comprehending, and went back to his play.

But all were chilled. Without the set expression of her countenance changing Aunt Dide wept, a flood of tears rolled from her living eyes over her dead cheeks. Her gaze fixed immovably upon the boy, she wept slowly, endlessly. A great thing had happened.

And now an extraordinary emotion took possession of Pascal. He caught Clotilde by the arm and pressed it hard, trying to make her understand. Before his eyes appeared the whole line, the legitimate branch and the bastard branch, which had sprung from this trunk already vitiated by neurosis. Five generations were there present—the Rougons and the Macquarts, Adelaide Fouque at the root, then the scoundrelly old uncle, then himself, then Clotilde and Maxime, and lastly, Charles. Felicite occupied the place of her dead husband. There was no link wanting; the chain of heredity, logical and implacable, was unbroken. And what a world was evoked from the depths of the tragic cabin which breathed this horror that came from the far-off past in such appalling shape that every one, notwithstanding the oppressive heat, shivered.

"What is it, master?" whispered Clotilde, trembling.

"No, no, nothing!" murmured the doctor. "I will tell you later."

Macquart, who alone continued to sneer, scolded the old mother. What an idea was hers, to receive people with tears when they put themselves out to come and make her a visit. It was scarcely polite. And then he turned to Maxime and Charles.

"Well, nephew, you have seen your boy at last. Is it not true that he is pretty, and that he is a credit to you, after all?"

Felicite hastened to interfere. Greatly dissatisfied with the turn which affairs were taking, she was now anxious only to get away.

"He is certainly a handsome boy, and less backward than people think. Just see how skilful he is with his hands. And you will see when you have brightened him up in Paris, in a different way from what we have been able to do at Plassans, eh?"

"No doubt," murmured Maxime. "I do not say no; I will think about it."

He seemed embarrassed for a moment, and then added:

"You know I came only to see him. I cannot take him with me now as I am to spend a month at St. Gervais. But as soon as I return to Paris I will think of it, I will write to you."

Then, taking out his watch, he cried:

"The devil! Half-past five. You know that I would not miss the nine o'clock train for anything in the world."

"Yes, yes, let us go," said Felicite brusquely. "We have nothing more to do here."

Macquart, whom his sister-in-law's anger seemed still to divert, endeavored to delay them with all sorts of stories. He told of the days when Aunt Dide talked, and he affirmed that he had found her one morning singing a romance of her youth. And then he had no need of the carriage, he would take the boy back on foot, since they left him to him.

"Kiss your papa, my boy, for you know now that you see him, but you don't know whether you shall ever see him again or not."

With the same surprised and indifferent movement Charles raised his head, and Maxime, troubled, pressed another kiss on his forehead.

"Be very good and very pretty, my pet. And love me a little."

"Come, come, we have no time to lose," repeated Felicite.

But the keeper here re-entered the room. She was a stout, vigorous girl, attached especially to the service of the madwoman. She carried her to and from her bed, night and morning; she fed her and took care of her like a child. And she at once entered into conversation with Dr. Pascal, who questioned her. One of the doctor's most cherished dreams was to cure the mad by his treatment of hypodermic injections. Since in their case it was the brain that was in danger, why should not hypodermic injections of nerve substance give them strength and will, repairing the breaches made in the organ? So that for a moment he had dreamed of trying the treatment with the old mother; then he began to have scruples, he felt a sort of awe, without counting that madness at that age was total, irreparable ruin. So that he had chosen another subject—a hatter named Sarteur, who had been for a year past in the asylum, to which he had come himself to beg them to shut him up to prevent him from committing a crime. In his paroxysms, so strong an impulse to kill seized him that he would have thrown himself upon the first passer-by. He was of small stature, very dark, with a retreating forehead, an aquiline face with a large nose and a very short chin, and his left cheek was noticeably larger than his right. And the doctor had obtained miraculous results with this victim of emotional insanity, who for a month past had had no attack. The nurse, indeed being questioned, answered that Sarteur had become quiet and was growing better every day.

"Do you hear, Clotilde?" cried Pascal, enchanted. "I have not the time to see him this evening, but I will come again to-morrow. It is my visiting day. Ah, if I only dared; if she were young still—"

His eyes turned toward Aunt Dide. But Clotilde, whom his enthusiasm made smile, said gently:

"No, no, master, you cannot make life anew. There, come. We are the last."

It was true; the others had already gone. Macquart, on the threshold, followed Felicite and Maxime with his mocking glance as they went away. Aunt Dide, the forgotten one, sat motionless, appalling in her leanness, her eyes again fixed upon Charles with his white, worn face framed in his royal locks.

The drive back was full of constraint. In the heat which exhaled from the earth, the landau rolled on heavily to the measured trot of the horses. The stormy sky took on an ashen, copper-colored hue in the deepening twilight. At first a few indifferent words were exchanged; but from the moment in which they entered the gorges of the Seille all conversation ceased, as if they felt oppressed by the menacing walls of giant rock that seemed closing in upon them. Was not this the end of the earth, and were they not going to roll into the unknown, over the edge of some abyss? An eagle soared by, uttering a shrill cry.

Willows appeared again, and the carriage was rolling lightly along the bank of the Viorne, when Felicite began without transition, as if she were resuming a conversation already commenced.

"You have no refusal to fear from the mother. She loves Charles dearly, but she is a very sensible woman, and she understands perfectly that it is to the boy's advantage that you should take him with you. And I must tell you, too, that the poor boy is not very happy with her, since, naturally, the husband prefers his own son and daughter. For you ought to know everything."

And she went on in this strain, hoping, no doubt, to persuade Maxime and draw a formal promise from him. She talked until they reached Plassans. Then, suddenly, as the landau rolled over the pavement of the faubourg, she said:

"But look! there is his mother. That stout blond at the door there."

At the threshold of a harness-maker's shop hung round with horse trappings and halters, Justine sat, knitting a stocking, taking the air, while the little girl and boy were playing on the ground at her feet. And behind them in the shadow of the shop was to be seen Thomas, a stout, dark man, occupied in repairing a saddle.

Maxime leaned forward without emotion, simply curious. He was greatly surprised at sight of this robust woman of thirty-two, with so sensible and so commonplace an air, in whom there was not a trace of the wild little girl with whom he had been in love when both of the same age were entering their seventeenth year. Perhaps a pang shot through his heart to see her plump and tranquil and blooming, while he was ill and already aged.

"I should never have recognized her," he said.

And the landau, still rolling on, turned into the Rue de Rome. Justine had disappeared; this vision of the past—a past so different from the present—had sunk into the shadowy twilight, with Thomas, the children, and the shop.

At La Souleiade the table was set; Martine had an eel from the Viorne, a sauted rabbit, and a leg of mutton. Seven o'clock was striking, and they had plenty of time to dine quietly.

"Don't be uneasy," said Dr. Pascal to his nephew. "We will accompany you to the station; it is not ten minutes' walk from here. As you left your trunk, you have nothing to do but to get your ticket and jump on board the train."

Then, meeting Clotilde in the vestibule, where she was hanging up her hat and her umbrella, he said to her in an undertone:

"Do you know that I am uneasy about your brother?"

"Why so?"

"I have observed him attentively. I don't like the way in which he walks; and have you noticed what an anxious look he has at times? That has never deceived me. In short, your brother is threatened with ataxia."

"Ataxia!" she repeated turning very pale.

A cruel image rose before her, that of a neighbor, a man still young, whom for the past ten years she had seen driven about in a little carriage by a servant. Was not this infirmity the worst of all ills, the ax stroke that separates a living being from social and active life?

"But," she murmured, "he complains only of rheumatism."

Pascal shrugged his shoulders; and putting a finger to his lip he went into the dining-room, where Felicite and Maxime were seated.

The dinner was very friendly. The sudden disquietude which had sprung up in Clotilde's heart made her still more affectionate to her brother, who sat beside her. She attended to his wants gayly, forcing him to take the most delicate morsels. Twice she called back Martine, who was passing the dishes too quickly. And Maxime was more and more enchanted by this sister, who was so good, so healthy, so sensible, whose charm enveloped him like a caress. So greatly was he captivated by her that gradually a project, vague at first, took definite shape within him. Since little Charles, his son, terrified him so greatly with his deathlike beauty, his royal air of sickly imbecility, why should he not take his sister Clotilde to live with him? The idea of having a woman in his house alarmed him, indeed, for he was afraid of all women, having had too much experience of them in his youth; but this one seemed to him truly maternal. And then, too, a good woman in his house would make a change in it, which would be a desirable thing. He would at least be left no longer at the mercy of his father, whom he suspected of desiring his death so that he might get possession of his money at once. His hatred and terror of his father decided him.

"Don't you think of marrying, then?" he asked, wishing to try the ground.

The young girl laughed.

"Oh, there is no hurry," she answered.

Then, suddenly, looking at Pascal, who had raised his head, she added:

"How can I tell? Oh, I shall never marry."

But Felicite protested. When she saw her so attached to the doctor, she often wished for a marriage that would separate her from him, that would leave her son alone in a deserted home, where she herself might become all powerful, mistress of everything. Therefore she appealed to him. Was it not true that a woman ought to marry, that it was against nature to remain an old maid?

And he gravely assented, without taking his eyes from Clotilde's face.

"Yes, yes, she must marry. She is too sensible not to marry."

"Bah!" interrupted Maxime, "would it be really sensible in her to marry? In order to be unhappy, perhaps; there are so many ill-assorted marriages!"

And coming to a resolution, he added:

"Don't you know what you ought to do? Well, you ought to come and live with me in Paris. I have thought the matter over. The idea of taking charge of a child in my state of health terrifies me. Am I not a child myself, an invalid who needs to be taken care of? You will take care of me; you will be with me, if I should end by losing the use of my limbs."

There was a sound of tears in his voice, so great a pity did he feel for himself. He saw himself, in fancy, sick; he saw his sister at his bedside, like a Sister of Charity; if she consented to remain unmarried he would willingly leave her his fortune, so that his father might not have it. The dread which he had of solitude, the need in which he should perhaps stand of having a sick-nurse, made him very pathetic.

"It would be very kind on your part, and you should have no cause to repent it."

Martine, who was serving the mutton, stopped short in surprise; and the proposition caused the same surprise at the table. Felicite was the first to approve, feeling that the girl's departure would further her plans. She looked at Clotilde, who was still silent and stunned, as it were; while Dr. Pascal waited with a pale face.

"Oh, brother, brother," stammered the young girl, unable at first to think of anything else to say.

Then her grandmother cried:

"Is that all you have to say? Why, the proposition your brother has just made you is a very advantageous one. If he is afraid of taking Charles now, why, you can go with him, and later on you can send for the child. Come, come, that can be very well arranged. Your brother makes an appeal to your heart. Is it not true, Pascal, that she owes him a favorable answer?"

The doctor, by an effort, recovered his self-possession. The chill that had seized him made itself felt, however, in the slowness with which he spoke.

"The offer, in effect, is very kind. Clotilde, as I said before, is very sensible and she will accept it, if it is right that she should do so."

The young girl, greatly agitated, rebelled at this.

"Do you wish to send me away, then, master? Maxime is very good, and I thank him from the bottom of my heart. But to leave everything, my God! To leave all that love me, all that I have loved until now!"

She made a despairing gesture, indicating the place and the people, taking in all La Souleiade.

"But," responded Pascal, looking at her fixedly, "what if Maxime should need you, what if you had a duty to fulfil toward him?"

Her eyes grew moist, and she remained for a moment trembling and desperate; for she alone understood. The cruel vision again arose before her—Maxime, helpless, driven, about in a little carriage by a servant, like the neighbor whom she used to pity. Had she indeed any duty toward a brother who for fifteen years had been a stranger to her? Did not her duty lie where her heart was? Nevertheless, her distress of mind continued; she still suffered in the struggle.

"Listen, Maxime," she said at last, "give me also time to reflect. I will see. Be assured that I am very grateful to you. And if you should one day really have need of me, well, I should no doubt decide to go."

This was all they could make her promise. Felicite, with her usual vehemence, exhausted all her efforts in vain, while the doctor now affected to say that she had given her word. Martine brought a cream, without thinking of hiding her joy. To take away mademoiselle! what an idea, in order that monsieur might die of grief at finding himself all alone. And the dinner was delayed, too, by this unexpected incident. They were still at the dessert when half-past eight struck.

Then Maxime grew restless, tapped the floor with his foot, and declared that he must go.

At the station, whither they all accompanied him he kissed his sister a last time, saying:

"Remember!"

"Don't be afraid," declared Felicite, "we are here to remind her of her promise."

The doctor smiled, and all three, as soon as the train was in motion, waved their handkerchiefs.

On this day, after accompanying the grandmother to her door, Dr. Pascal and Clotilde returned peacefully to La Souleiade, and spent a delightful evening there. The constraint of the past few weeks, the secret antagonism which had separated them, seemed to have vanished. Never had it seemed so sweet to them to feel so united, inseparable. Doubtless it was only this first pang of uneasiness suffered by their affection, this threatened separation, the postponement of which delighted them. It was for them like a return to health after an illness, a new hope of life. They remained for long time in the warm night, under the plane trees, listening to the crystal murmur of the fountain. And they did not even speak, so profoundly did they enjoy the happiness of being together.

IV.

Ten days later the household had fallen back into its former state of unhappiness. Pascal and Clotilde remained entire afternoons without exchanging a word; and there were continual outbursts of ill-humor. Even Martine was constantly out of temper. The home of these three had again become a hell.

Then suddenly the condition of affairs was still further aggravated. A Capuchin monk of great sanctity, such as often pass through the towns of the South, came to Plassans to conduct a mission. The pulpit of St. Saturnin resounded with his bursts of eloquence. He was a sort of apostle, a popular and fiery orator, a florid speaker, much given to the use of metaphors. And he preached on the nothingness of modern science with an extraordinary mystical exaltation, denying the reality of this world, and disclosing the unknown, the mysteries of the Beyond. All the devout women of the town were full of excitement about his preaching.

On the very first evening on which Clotilde, accompanied by Martine, attended the sermon, Pascal noticed her feverish excitement when she returned. On the following day her excitement increased, and she returned home later, having remained to pray for an hour in a dark corner of a chapel. From this time she was never absent from the services, returning languid, and with the luminous eyes of a seer; and the Capuchin's burning words haunted her; certain of his images stirred her to ecstasy. She grew irritable, and she seemed to have conceived a feeling of anger and contempt for every one and everything around her.

Pascal, filled with uneasiness, determined to have an explanation with Martine. He came down early one morning as she was sweeping the dining-room.

"You know that I leave you and Clotilde free to go to church, if that pleases you," he said. "I do not believe in oppressing any one's conscience. But I do not wish that you should make her sick."

The servant, without stopping in her work, said in a low voice:

"Perhaps the sick people are those who don't think that they are sick."

She said this with such an air of conviction that he smiled.

"Yes," he returned; "I am the sick soul whose conversion you pray for; while both of you are in possession of health and of perfect wisdom. Martine, if you continue to torment me and to torment yourselves, as you are doing, I shall grow angry."

He spoke in so furious and so harsh a voice that the servant stopped suddenly in her sweeping, and looked him full in the face. An infinite tenderness, an immense desolation passed over the face of the old maid cloistered in his service. And tears filled her eyes and she hurried out of the room stammering:

"Ah, monsieur, you do not love us."

Then Pascal, filled with an overwhelming sadness, gave up the contest. His remorse increased for having shown so much tolerance, for not having exercised his authority as master, in directing Clotilde's education and bringing up. In his belief that trees grew straight if they were not interfered with, he had allowed her to grow up in her own way, after teaching her merely to read and write. It was without any preconceived plan, while aiding him in making his researches and correcting his manuscripts, and simply by the force of circumstances, that she had read everything and acquired a fondness for the natural sciences. How bitterly he now regretted his indifference! What a powerful impulse he might have given to this clear mind, so eager for knowledge, instead of allowing it to go astray, and waste itself in that desire for the Beyond, which Grandmother Felicite and the good Martine favored. While he had occupied himself with facts, endeavoring to keep from going beyond the phenomenon, and succeeding in doing so, through his scientific discipline, he had seen her give all her thoughts to the unknown, the mysterious. It was with her an obsession, an instinctive curiosity which amounted to torture when she could not satisfy it. There was in her a longing which nothing could appease, an irresistible call toward the unattainable, the unknowable. Even when she was a child, and still more, later, when she grew up, she went straight to the why and the how of things, she demanded ultimate causes. If he showed her a flower, she asked why this flower produced a seed, why this seed would germinate. Then, it would be the mystery of birth and death, and the unknown forces, and God, and all things. In half a dozen questions she would drive him into a corner, obliging him each time to acknowledge his fatal ignorance; and when he no longer knew what to answer her, when he would get rid of her with a gesture of comic fury, she would give a gay laugh of triumph, and go to lose herself again in her dreams, in the limitless vision of all that we do not know, and all that we may believe. Often she astounded him by her explanations. Her mind, nourished on science, started from proved truths, but with such an impetus that she bounded at once straight into the heaven of the legends. All sorts of mediators passed there, angels and saints and supernatural inspirations, modifying matter, endowing it with life; or, again, it was only one single force, the soul of the world, working to fuse things and beings in a final kiss of love in fifty centuries more. She had calculated the number of them, she said.

For the rest, Pascal had never before seen her so excited. For the past week, during which she had attended the Capuchin's mission in the cathedral, she had spent the days visibly in the expectation of the sermon of the evening; and she went to hear it with the rapt exaltation of a girl who is going to her first rendezvous of love. Then, on the following day, everything about her declared her detachment from the exterior life, from her accustomed existence, as if the visible world, the necessary actions of every moment, were but a snare and a folly. She retired within herself in the vision of what was not. Thus she had almost completely given up her habitual occupations, abandoning herself to a sort of unconquerable indolence, remaining for hours at a time with her hands in her lap, her gaze lost in vacancy, rapt in the contemplation of some far-off vision. Now she, who had been so active, so early a riser, rose late, appearing barely in time for the second breakfast, and it could not have been at her toilet that she spent these long hours, for she forgot her feminine coquetry, and would come down with her hair scarcely combed, negligently attired in a gown buttoned awry, but even thus adorable, thanks to her triumphant youth. The morning walks through La Souleiade that she had been so fond of, the races from the top to the bottom of the terraces planted with olive and almond trees, the visits to the pine grove balmy with the odor of resin, the long sun baths in the hot threshing yard, she indulged in no more; she preferred to remain shut up in her darkened room, from which not a movement was to be heard. Then, in the afternoon, in the work room, she would drag herself about languidly from chair to chair, doing nothing, tired and disgusted with everything that had formerly interested her.

Pascal was obliged to renounce her assistance; a paper which he gave her to copy remained three days untouched on her desk. She no longer classified anything; she would not have stooped down to pick up a paper from the floor. More than all, she abandoned the pastels, copies of flowers from nature that she had been making, to serve as plates to a work on artificial fecundations. Some large red mallows, of a new and singular coloring, faded in their vase before she had finished copying them. And yet for a whole afternoon she worked enthusiastically at a fantastic design of dream flowers, an extraordinary efflorescence blooming in the light of a miraculous sun, a burst of golden spike-shaped rays in the center of large purple corollas, resembling open hearts, whence shot, for pistils, a shower of stars, myriads of worlds streaming into the sky, like a milky way.

"Ah, my poor girl," said the doctor to her on this day, "how can you lose your time in such conceits! And I waiting for the copy of those mallows that you have left to die there. And you will make yourself ill. There is no health, nor beauty, even, possible outside reality."

Often now she did not answer, intrenching herself behind her fierce convictions, not wishing to dispute. But doubtless he had this time touched her beliefs to the quick.

"There is no reality," she answered sharply.

The doctor, amused by this bold philosophy from this big child, laughed.

"Yes, I know," he said; "our senses are fallible. We know this world only through our senses, consequently it is possible that the world does not exist. Let us open the door to madness, then; let us accept as possible the most absurd chimeras, let us live in the realm of nightmare, outside of laws and facts. For do you not see that there is no longer any law if you suppress nature, and that the only thing that gives life any interest is to believe in life, to love it, and to put all the forces of our intelligence to the better understanding of it?"

She made a gesture of mingled indifference and bravado, and the conversation dropped. Now she was laying large strokes of blue crayon on the pastel, bringing out its flaming splendor in strong relief on the background of a clear summer night.

But two days later, in consequence of a fresh discussion, matters went still further amiss. In the evening, on leaving the table, Pascal went up to the study to write, while she remained out of doors, sitting on the terrace. Hours passed by, and he was surprised and uneasy, when midnight struck, that he had not yet heard her return to her room. She would have had to pass through the study, and he was very certain that she had not passed unnoticed by him. Going downstairs, he found that Martine was asleep; the vestibule door was not locked, and Clotilde must have remained outside, oblivious of the flight of time. This often happened to her on these warm nights, but she had never before remained out so late.

The doctor's uneasiness increased when he perceived on the terrace the chair, now vacant, in which the young girl had been sitting. He had expected to find her asleep in it. Since she was not there, why had she not come in. Where could she have gone at such an hour? The night was beautiful: a September night, still warm, with a wide sky whose dark, velvety expanse was studded with stars; and from the depths of this moonless sky the stars shone so large and bright that they lighted the earth with a pale, mysterious radiance. He leaned over the balustrade of the terrace, and examined the slope and the stone steps which led down to the railroad; but there was not a movement. He saw nothing but the round motionless tops of the little olive trees. The idea then occurred to him that she must certainly be under the plane trees beside the fountain, whose murmuring waters made perpetual coolness around. He hurried there, and found himself enveloped in such thick darkness that he, who knew every tree, was obliged to walk with outstretched hands to avoid stumbling. Then he groped his way through the dark pine grove, still without meeting any one. And at last he called in a muffled voice:

"Clotilde! Clotilde!"

The darkness remained silent and impenetrable.

"Clotilde! Clotilde!" he cried again, in a louder voice. Not a sound, not a breath. The very echoes seemed asleep. His cry was drowned in the infinitely soft lake of blue shadows. And then he called her with all the force of his lungs. He returned to the plane trees. He went back to the pine grove, beside himself with fright, scouring the entire domain. Then, suddenly, he found himself in the threshing yard.

At this cool and tranquil hour, the immense yard, the vast circular paved court, slept too. It was so many years since grain had been threshed here that grass had sprung up among the stones, quickly scorched a russet brown by the sun, resembling the long threads of a woolen carpet. And, under the tufts of this feeble vegetation, the ancient pavement did not cool during the whole summer, smoking from sunset, exhaling in the night the heat stored up from so many sultry noons.

The yard stretched around, bare and deserted, in the cooling atmosphere, under the infinite calm of the sky, and Pascal was crossing it to hurry to the orchard, when he almost fell over a form that he had not before observed, extended at full length upon the ground. He uttered a frightened cry.

"What! Are you here?"

Clotilde did not deign even to answer. She was lying on her back, her hands clasped under the back of her neck, her face turned toward the sky; and in her pale countenance, only her large shining eyes were visible.

"And here I have been tormenting myself and calling you for an hour past! Did you not hear me shouting?"

She at last unclosed her lips.

"Yes."

"Then that is very senseless! Why did you not answer me?"

But she fell back into her former silence, refusing all explanation, and with a stubborn brow kept her gaze fixed steadily on the sky.

"There, come in and go to bed, naughty child. You will tell me to-morrow."

She did not stir, however; he begged her ten times over to go into the house, but she would not move. He ended by sitting down beside her on the short grass, through which penetrated the warmth of the pavement beneath.

"But you cannot sleep out of doors. At least answer me. What are you doing here?"

"I am looking."

And from her large eyes, fixed and motionless, her gaze seemed to mount up among the stars. She seemed wholly absorbed in the contemplation of the pure starry depths of the summer sky.

"Ah, master!" she continued, in a low monotone; "how narrow and limited is all that you know compared to what there is surely up there. Yes, if I did not answer you it was because I was thinking of you, and I was filled with grief. You must not think me bad."

In her voice there was a thrill of such tenderness that it moved him profoundly. He stretched himself on the grass beside her, so that their elbows touched, and they went on talking.

"I greatly fear, my dear, that your griefs are not rational. It gives you pain to think of me. Why so?"

"Oh, because of things that I should find it hard to explain to you; I am not a savante. You have taught me much, however, and I have learned more myself, being with you. Besides, they are things that I feel. Perhaps I might try to tell them to you, as we are all alone here, and the night is so beautiful."

Her full heart overflowed, after hours of meditation, in the peaceful confidence of the beautiful night. He did not speak, fearing to disturb her, but awaited her confidences in silence.

"When I was a little girl and you used to talk to me about science, it seemed to me that you were speaking to me of God, your words burned so with faith and hope. Nothing seemed impossible to you. With science you were going to penetrate the secret of the world, and make the perfect happiness of humanity a reality. According to you, we were progressing with giant strides. Each day brought its discovery, its certainty. Ten, fifty, a hundred years more, perhaps, and the heavens would open and we should see truth face to face. Well, the years pass, and nothing opens, and truth recedes."

"You are an impatient girl," he answered simply. "If ten centuries more be necessary we must only wait for them to pass."

"It is true. I cannot wait. I need to know; I need to be happy at once, and to know everything at once, and to be perfectly and forever happy. Oh, that is what makes me suffer, not to be able to reach at a bound complete knowledge, not to be able to rest in perfect felicity, freed from scruples and doubts. Is it living to advance with tortoiselike pace in the darkness, not to be able to enjoy an hour's tranquillity, without trembling at the thought of the coming anguish? No, no! All knowledge and all happiness in a single day? Science has promised them to us, and if she does not give them to us, then she fails in her engagements."

Then he, too, began to grow heated.

"But what you are saying is folly, little girl. Science is not revelation. It marches at its human pace, its very effort is its glory. And then it is not true that science has promised happiness."

She interrupted him hastily.

"How, not true! Open your books up there, then. You know that I have read them. Do they not overflow with promises? To read them one would think we were marching on to the conquest of earth and heaven. They demolish everything, and they swear to replace everything—and that by pure reason, with stability and wisdom. Doubtless I am like the children. When I am promised anything I wish that it shall be given me at once. My imagination sets to work, and the object must be very beautiful to satisfy me. But it would have been easy not to have promised anything. And above all, at this hour, in view of my eager and painful longing, it would be very ill done to tell me that nothing has been promised me."

He made a gesture, a simple gesture of protestation and impatience, in the serene and silent night.

"In any case," she continued, "science has swept away all our past beliefs. The earth is bare, the heavens are empty, and what do you wish that I should become, even if you acquit science of having inspired the hopes I have conceived? For I cannot live without belief and without happiness. On what solid ground shall I build my house when science shall have demolished the old world, and while she is waiting to construct the new? All the ancient city has fallen to pieces in this catastrophe of examination and analysis; and all that remains of it is a mad population vainly seeking a shelter among its ruins, while anxiously looking for a solid and permanent refuge where they may begin life anew. You must not be surprised, then, at our discouragement and our impatience. We can wait no longer. Since tardy science has failed in her promises, we prefer to fall back on the old beliefs, which for centuries have sufficed for the happiness of the world."

"Ah! that is just it," he responded in a low voice; "we are just at the turning point, at the end of the century, fatigued and exhausted with the appalling accumulation of knowledge which it has set moving. And it is the eternal need for falsehood, the eternal need for illusion which distracts humanity, and throws it back upon the delusive charm of the unknown. Since we can never know all, what is the use of trying to know more than we know already? Since the truth, when we have attained it, does not confer immediate and certain happiness, why not be satisfied with ignorance, the darkened cradle in which humanity slept the deep sleep of infancy? Yes, this is the aggressive return of the mysterious, it is the reaction against a century of experimental research. And this had to be; desertions were to be expected, since every need could not be satisfied at once. But this is only a halt; the onward march will continue, up there, beyond our view, in the illimitable fields of space."

For a moment they remained silent, still motionless on their backs, their gaze lost among the myriads of worlds shining in the dark sky. A falling star shot across the constellation of Cassiopeia, like a flaming arrow. And the luminous universe above turned slowly on its axis, in solemn splendor, while from the dark earth around them arose only a faint breath, like the soft, warm breath of a sleeping woman.

"Tell me," he said, in his good-natured voice, "did your Capuchin turn your head this evening, then?"

"Yes," she answered frankly; "he says from the pulpit things that disturb me. He preaches against everything you have taught me, and it is as if the knowledge which I owe to you, transformed into a poison, were consuming me. My God! What is going to become of me?"

"My poor child! It is terrible that you should torture yourself in this way! And yet I had been quite tranquil about you, for you have a well-balanced mind—you have a good, little, round, clear, solid headpiece, as I have often told you. You will soon calm down. But what confusion in the brains of others, at the end of the century, if you, who are so sane, are troubled! Have you not faith, then?"

She answered only by a heavy sigh.

"Assuredly, viewed from the standpoint of happiness, faith is a strong staff for the traveler to lean upon, and the march becomes easy and tranquil when one is fortunate enough to possess it."

"Oh, I no longer know whether I believe or not!" she cried. "There are days when I believe, and there are other days when I side with you and with your books. It is you who have disturbed me; it is through you I suffer. And perhaps all my suffering springs from this, from my revolt against you whom I love. No, no! tell me nothing; do not tell me that I shall soon calm down. At this moment that would only irritate me still more. I know well that you deny the supernatural. The mysterious for you is only the inexplicable. Even you concede that we shall never know all; and therefore you consider that the only interest life can have is the continual conquest over the unknown, the eternal effort to know more. Ah, I know too much already to believe. You have already succeeded but too well in shaking my faith, and there are times when it seems to me that this will kill me."

He took her hand that lay on the still warm grass, and pressed it hard.

"No, no; it is life that frightens you, little girl. And how right you are in saying that happiness consists in continual effort. For from this time forward tranquil ignorance is impossible. There is no halt to be looked for, no tranquillity in renunciation and wilful blindness. We must go on, go on in any case with life, which goes on always. Everything that is proposed, a return to the past, to dead religions, patched up religions arranged to suit new wants, is a snare. Learn to know life, then; to love it, live it as it ought to be lived—that is the only wisdom."

But she shook off his hand angrily. And her voice trembled with vexation.

"Life is horrible. How do you wish me to live it tranquil and happy? It is a terrible light that your science throws upon the world. Your analysis opens up all the wounds of humanity to display their horror. You tell everything; you speak too plainly; you leave us nothing but disgust for people and for things, without any possible consolation."

He interrupted her with a cry of ardent conviction.

"We tell everything. Ah, yes; in order to know everything and to remedy everything!"

Her anger rose, and she sat erect.

"If even equality and justice existed in your nature—but you acknowledge it yourself, life is for the strongest, the weak infallibly perishes because he is weak—there are no two beings equal, either in health, in beauty, or intelligence; everything is left to haphazard meeting, to the chance of selection. And everything falls into ruin, when grand and sacred justice ceases to exist."

"It is true," he said, in an undertone, as if speaking to himself, "there is no such thing as equality. No society based upon it could continue to exist. For centuries, men thought to remedy evil by character. But that idea is being exploded, and now they propose justice. Is nature just? I think her logical, rather. Logic is perhaps a natural and higher justice, going straight to the sum of the common labor, to the grand final labor."

"Then it is justice," she cried, "that crushes the individual for the happiness of the race, that destroys an enfeebled species to fatten the victorious species. No, no; that is crime. There is in that only foulness and murder. He was right this evening in the church. The earth is corrupt, science only serves to show its rottenness. It is on high that we must all seek a refuge. Oh, master, I entreat you, let me save myself, let me save you!"

She burst into tears, and the sound of her sobs rose despairingly on the stillness of the night. He tried in vain to soothe her, her voice dominated his.

"Listen to me, master. You know that I love you, for you are everything to me. And it is you who are the cause of all my suffering. I can scarcely endure it when I think that we are not in accord, that we should be separated forever if we were both to die to-morrow. Why will you not believe?"

He still tried to reason with her.

"Come, don't be foolish, my dear—"

But she threw herself on her knees, she seized him by the hands, she clung to him with a feverish force. And she sobbed louder and louder, in such a clamor of despair that the dark fields afar off were startled by it.

"Listen to me, he said it in the church. You must change your life and do penance; you must burn everything belonging to your past errors—your books, your papers, your manuscripts. Make this sacrifice, master, I entreat it of you on my knees. And you will see the delightful existence we shall lead together."

At last he rebelled.

"No, this is too much. Be silent!"

"If you listen to me, master, you will do what I wish. I assure you that I am horribly unhappy, even in loving you as I love you. There is something wanting in our affection. So far it has been profound but unavailing, and I have an irresistible longing to fill it, oh, with all that is divine and eternal. What can be wanting to us but God? Kneel down and pray with me!"

With an abrupt movement he released himself, angry in his turn.

"Be silent; you are talking nonsense. I have left you free, leave me free."

"Master, master! it is our happiness that I desire! I will take you far, far away. We will go to some solitude to live there in God!"

"Be silent! No, never!"

Then they remained for a moment confronting each other, mute and menacing. Around them stretched La Souleiade in the deep silence of the night, with the light shadows of its olive trees, the darkness of its pine and plane trees, in which the saddened voice of the fountain was singing, and above their heads it seemed as if the spacious sky, studded with stars, shuddered and grew pale, although the dawn was still far off.

Clotilde raised her arm as if to point to this infinite, shuddering sky; but with a quick gesture Pascal seized her hand and drew it down toward the earth in his. And no word further was spoken; they were beside themselves with rage and hate. The quarrel was fierce and bitter.

She drew her hand away abruptly, and sprang backward, like some proud, untamable animal, rearing; then she rushed quickly through the darkness toward the house. He heard the patter of her little boots on the stones of the yard, deadened afterward by the sand of the walk. He, on his side, already grieved and uneasy, called her back in urgent tones. But she ran on without answering, without hearing. Alarmed, and with a heavy heart, he hurried after her, and rounded the clump of plane trees just in time to see her rush into the house like a whirlwind. He darted in after her, ran up the stairs, and struck against the door of her room, which she violently bolted. And here he stopped and grew calm, by a strong effort resisting the desire to cry out, to call her again, to break in the door so as to see her once more, to convince her, to have her all to himself. For a moment he remained motionless, chilled by the deathlike silence of the room, from which not the faintest sound issued. Doubtless she had thrown herself on the bed, and was stifling her cries and her sobs in the pillow. He determined at last to go downstairs again and close the hall door, and then he returned softly and listened, waiting for some sound of moaning. And day was breaking when he went disconsolately to bed, choking back his tears.

Thenceforward it was war without mercy. Pascal felt himself spied upon, trapped, menaced. He was no longer master of his house; he had no longer any home. The enemy was always there, forcing him to be constantly on his guard, to lock up everything. One after the other, two vials of nerve-substance which he had compounded were found in fragments, and he was obliged to barricade himself in his room, where he could be heard pounding for days together, without showing himself even at mealtime. He no longer took Clotilde with him on his visiting days, because she discouraged his patients by her attitude of aggressive incredulity. But from the moment he left the house, the doctor had only one desire—to return to it quickly, for he trembled lest he should find his locks forced, and his drawers rifled on his return. He no longer employed the young girl to classify and copy his notes, for several of them had disappeared, as if they had been carried away by the wind. He did not even venture to employ her to correct his proofs, having ascertained that she had cut out of an article an entire passage, the sentiment of which offended her Catholic belief. And thus she remained idle, prowling about the rooms, and having an abundance of time to watch for an occasion which would put in her possession the key of the large press. This was her dream, the plan which she revolved in her mind during her long silence, while her eyes shone and her hands burned with fever—to have the key, to open the press, to take and burn everything in an auto da fe which would be pleasing to God. A few pages of manuscript, forgotten by him on a corner of the table, while he went to wash his hands and put on his coat, had disappeared, leaving behind only a little heap of ashes in the fireplace. He could no longer leave a scrap of paper about. He carried away everything; he hid everything. One evening, when he had remained late with a patient, as he was returning home in the dusk a wild terror seized him at the faubourg, at sight of a thick black smoke rising up in clouds that darkened the heavens. Was it not La Souleiade that was burning down, set on fire by the bonfire made with his papers? He ran toward the house, and was reassured only on seeing in a neighboring field a fire of roots burning slowly.

But how terrible are the tortures of the scientist who feels himself menaced in this way in the labors of his intellect! The discoveries which he has made, the writings which he has counted upon leaving behind him, these are his pride, they are creatures of his blood—his children—and whoever destroys, whoever burns them, burns a part of himself. Especially, in this perpetual lying in wait for the creatures of his brain, was Pascal tortured by the thought that the enemy was in his house, installed in his very heart, and that he loved her in spite of everything, this creature whom he had made what she was. He was left disarmed, without possible defense; not wishing to act, and having no other resources than to watch with vigilance. On all sides the investment was closing around him. He fancied he felt the little pilfering hands stealing into his pockets. He had no longer any tranquillity, even with the doors closed, for he feared that he was being robbed through the crevices.

"But, unhappy child," he cried one day, "I love but you in the world, and you are killing me! And yet you love me, too; you act in this way because you love me, and it is abominable. It would be better to have done with it all at once, and throw ourselves into the river with a stone tied around our necks."

She did not answer, but her dauntless eyes said ardently that she would willingly die on the instant, if it were with him.

"And if I should suddenly die to-night, what would happen to-morrow? You would empty the press, you would empty the drawers, you would make a great heap of all my works and burn them! You would, would you not? Do you know that that would be a real murder, as much as if you assassinated some one? And what abominable cowardice, to kill the thoughts!"

"No," she said at last, in a low voice; "to kill evil, to prevent it from spreading and springing up again!"

All their explanations only served to kindle anew their anger. And they had terrible ones. And one evening, when old Mme. Rougon had chanced in on one of these quarrels, she remained alone with Pascal, after Clotilde had fled to hide herself in her room. There was silence for a moment. In spite of the heartbroken air which she had assumed, a wicked joy shone in the depths of her sparkling eyes.

"But your unhappy house is a hell!" she cried at last.

The doctor avoided an answer by a gesture. He had always felt that his mother backed the young girl, inflaming her religious faith, utilizing this ferment of revolt to bring trouble into his house. He was not deceived. He knew perfectly well that the two women had seen each other during the day, and that he owed to this meeting, to a skilful embittering of Clotilde's mind, the frightful scene at which he still trembled. Doubtless his mother had come to learn what mischief had been wrought, and to see if the denouement was not at last at hand.

"Things cannot go on in this way," she resumed. "Why do you not separate since you can no longer agree. You ought to send her to her brother Maxime. He wrote to me not long since asking her again."

He straightened himself, pale and determined.

"To part angry with each other? Ah, no, no! that would be an eternal remorse, an incurable wound. If she must one day go away, I wish that we may be able to love each other at a distance. But why go away? Neither of us complains of the other."

Felicite felt that she had been too hasty. Therefore she assumed her hypocritical, conciliating air.

"Of course, if it pleases you both to quarrel, no one has anything to say in the matter. Only, my poor friend, permit me, in that case, to say that I think Clotilde is not altogether in the wrong. You force me to confess that I saw her a little while ago; yes, it is better that you should know, notwithstanding my promise to be silent. Well, she is not happy; she makes a great many complaints, and you may imagine that I scolded her and preached complete submission to her. But that does not prevent me from being unable to understand you myself, and from thinking that you do everything you can to make yourself unhappy."

She sat down in a corner of the room, and obliged him to sit down with her, seeming delighted to have him here alone, at her mercy. She had already, more than once before, tried to force him to an explanation in this way, but he had always avoided it. Although she had tortured him for years past, and he knew her thoroughly, he yet remained a deferential son, he had sworn never to abandon this stubbornly respectful attitude. Thus, the moment she touched certain subjects, he took refuge in absolute silence.

"Come," she continued; "I can understand that you should not wish to yield to Clotilde; but to me? How if I were to entreat you to make me the sacrifice of all those abominable papers which are there in the press! Consider for an instant if you should die suddenly, and those papers should fall into strange hands. We should all be disgraced. You would not wish that, would you? What is your object, then? Why do you persist in so dangerous a game? Promise me that you will burn them."

He remained silent for a time, but at last he answered:

"Mother, I have already begged of you never to speak on that subject. I cannot do what you ask."

"But at least," she cried, "give me a reason. Any one would think our family was as indifferent to you as that drove of oxen passing below there. Yet you belong to it. Oh, I know you do all you can not to belong to it! I myself am sometimes astonished at you. I ask myself where you can have come from. But for all that, it is very wicked of you to run this risk, without stopping to think of the grief you are causing to me, your mother. It is simply wicked."

He grew still paler, and yielding for an instant to his desire to defend himself, in spite of his determination to keep silent, he said:

"You are hard; you are wrong. I have always believed in the necessity, the absolute efficacy of truth. It is true that I tell the truth about others and about myself, and it is because I believe firmly that in telling the truth I do the only good possible. In the first place, those papers are not intended for the public; they are only personal notes which it would be painful to me to part with. And then, I know well that you would not burn only them—all my other works would also be thrown into the fire. Would they not? And that is what I do not wish; do you understand? Never, while I live, shall a line of my writing be destroyed here."

But he already regretted having said so much, for he saw that she was urging him, leading him on to the cruel explanation she desired.

"Then finish, and tell me what it is that you reproach us with. Yes, me, for instance; what do you reproach me with? Not with having brought you up with so much difficulty. Ah, fortune was slow to win! If we enjoy a little happiness now, we have earned it hard. Since you have seen everything, and since you put down everything in your papers, you can testify with truth that the family has rendered greater services to others than it has ever received. On two occasions, but for us, Plassans would have been in a fine pickle. And it is perfectly natural that we should have reaped only ingratitude and envy, to the extent that even to-day the whole town would be enchanted with a scandal that should bespatter us with mud. You cannot wish that, and I am sure that you will do justice to the dignity of my attitude since the fall of the Empire, and the misfortunes from which France will no doubt never recover."

"Let France rest, mother," he said, speaking again, for she had touched the spot where she knew he was most sensitive. "France is tenacious of life, and I think she is going to astonish the world by the rapidity of her convalescence. True, she has many elements of corruption. I have not sought to hide them, I have rather, perhaps, exposed them to view. But you greatly misunderstand me if you imagine that I believe in her final dissolution, because I point out her wounds and her lesions. I believe in the life which ceaselessly eliminates hurtful substances, which makes new flesh to fill the holes eaten away by gangrene, which infallibly advances toward health, toward constant renovation, amid impurities and death."

He was growing excited, and he was conscious of it, and making an angry gesture, he spoke no more. His mother had recourse to tears, a few little tears which came with difficulty, and which were quickly dried. And the fears which saddened her old age returned to her, and she entreated him to make his peace with God, if only out of regard for the family. Had she not given an example of courage ever since the downfall of the Empire? Did not all Plassans, the quarter of St. Marc, the old quarter and the new town, render homage to the noble attitude she maintained in her fall? All she asked was to be helped; she demanded from all her children an effort like her own. Thus she cited the example of Eugene, the great man who had fallen from so lofty a height, and who resigned himself to being a simple deputy, defending until his latest breath the fallen government from which he had derived his glory. She was also full of eulogies of Aristide, who had never lost hope, who had reconquered, under the new government, an exalted position, in spite of the terrible and unjust catastrophe which had for a moment buried him under the ruins of the Union Universelle. And would he, Pascal, hold himself aloof, would he do nothing that she might die in peace, in the joy of the final triumph of the Rougons, he who was so intelligent, so affectionate, so good? He would go to mass, would he not, next Sunday? and he would burn all those vile papers, only to think of which made her ill. She entreated, commanded, threatened. But he no longer answered her, calm and invincible in his attitude of perfect deference. He wished to have no discussion. He knew her too well either to hope to convince her or to venture to discuss the past with her.

"Why!" she cried, when she saw that he was not to be moved, "you do not belong to us. I have always said so. You are a disgrace to us."

He bent his head and said:

"Mother, when you reflect you will forgive me."

On this day Felicite was beside herself with rage when she went away; and when she met Martine at the door of the house, in front of the plane trees, she unburdened her mind to her, without knowing that Pascal, who had just gone into his room, heard all. She gave vent to her resentment, vowing, in spite of everything, that she would in the end succeed in obtaining possession of the papers and destroying them, since he did not wish to make the sacrifice. But what turned the doctor cold was the manner in which Martine, in a subdued voice, soothed her. She was evidently her accomplice. She repeated that it was necessary to wait; not to do anything hastily; that mademoiselle and she had taken a vow to get the better of monsieur, by not leaving him an hour's peace. They had sworn it. They would reconcile him with the good God, because it was not possible that an upright man like monsieur should remain without religion. And the voices of the two women became lower and lower, until they finally sank to a whisper, an indistinct murmur of gossiping and plotting, of which he caught only a word here and there; orders given, measures to be taken, an invasion of his personal liberty. When his mother at last departed, with her light step and slender, youthful figure, he saw that she went away very well satisfied.

Then came a moment of weakness, of utter despair. Pascal dropped into a chair, and asked himself what was the use of struggling, since the only beings he loved allied themselves against him. Martine, who would have thrown herself into the fire at a word from him, betraying him in this way for his good! And Clotilde leagued with this servant, plotting with her against him in holes and corners, seeking her aid to set traps for him! Now he was indeed alone; he had around him only traitresses, who poisoned the very air he breathed. But these two still loved him. He might perhaps have succeeded in softening them, but when he knew that his mother urged them on, he understood their fierce persistence, and he gave up the hope of winning them back. With the timidity of a man who had spent his life in study, aloof from women, notwithstanding his secret passion, the thought that they were there to oppose him, to attempt to bend him to their will, overwhelmed him. He felt that some one of them was always behind him. Even when he shut himself up in his room, he fancied that they were on the other side of the wall; and he was constantly haunted by the idea that they would rob him of his thought, if they could perceive it in his brain, before he should have formulated it.

This was assuredly the period in his life in which Dr. Pascal was most unhappy. To live constantly on the defensive, as he was obliged to do, crushed him, and it seemed to him as if the ground on which his house stood was no longer his, as if it was receding from beneath his feet. He now regretted keenly that he had not married, and that he had no children. Had not he himself been afraid of life? And had he not been well punished for his selfishness? This regret for not having children now never left him. His eyes now filled with tears whenever he met on the road bright-eyed little girls who smiled at him. True, Clotilde was there, but his affection for her was of a different kind—crossed at present by storms—not a calm, infinitely sweet affection, like that for a child with which he might have soothed his lacerated heart. And then, no doubt what he desired in his isolation, feeling that his days were drawing to an end, was above all, continuance; in a child he would survive, he would live forever. The more he suffered, the greater the consolation he would have found in bequeathing this suffering, in the faith which he still had in life. He considered himself indemnified for the physiological defects of his family. But even the thought that heredity sometimes passes over a generation, and that the disorders of his ancestors might reappear in a child of his did not deter him; and this unknown child, in spite of the old corrupt stock, in spite of the long succession of execrable relations, he desired ardently at certain times: as one desires unexpected gain, rare happiness, the stroke of fortune which is to console and enrich forever. In the shock which his other affections had received, his heart bled because it was too late.

One sultry night toward the end of September, Pascal found himself unable to sleep. He opened one of the windows of his room; the sky was dark, some storm must be passing in the distance, for there was a continuous rumbling of thunder. He could distinguish vaguely the dark mass of the plane trees, which occasional flashes of lightning detached, in a dull green, from the darkness. His soul was full of anguish; he lived over again the last unhappy days, days of fresh quarrels, of torture caused by acts of treachery, by suspicions, which grew stronger every day, when a sudden recollection made him start. In his fear of being robbed, he had finally adopted the plan of carrying the key of the large press in his pocket. But this afternoon, oppressed by the heat, he had taken off his jacket, and he remembered having seen Clotilde hang it up on a nail in the study. A sudden pang of terror shot through him, sharp and cold as a steel point; if she had felt the key in the pocket she had stolen it. He hastened to search the jacket which he had a little before thrown upon a chair; the key was not here. At this very moment he was being robbed; he had the clear conviction of it. Two o'clock struck. He did not again dress himself, but, remaining in his trousers only, with his bare feet thrust into slippers, his chest bare under his unfastened nightshirt, he hastily pushed open the door, and rushed into the workroom, his candle in his hand.

"Ah! I knew it," he cried. "Thief! Assassin!"

It was true; Clotilde was there, undressed like himself, her bare feet covered by canvas slippers, her legs bare, her arms bare, her shoulders bare, clad only in her chemise and a short skirt. Through caution, she had not brought a candle. She had contented herself with opening one of the window shutters, and the continual lightning flashes of the storm which was passing southward in the dark sky, sufficed her, bathing everything in a livid phosphorescence. The old press, with its broad sides, was wide open. Already she had emptied the top shelf, taking down the papers in armfuls, and throwing them on the long table in the middle of the room, where they lay in a confused heap. And with feverish haste, fearing lest she should not have the time to burn them, she was making them up into bundles, intending to hide them, and send them afterward to her grandmother, when the sudden flare of the candle, lighting up the room, caused her to stop short in an attitude of surprise and resistance.

"You rob me; you assassinate me!" repeated Pascal furiously.

She still held one of the bundles in her bare arms. He wished to take it away from her, but she pressed it to her with all her strength, obstinately resolved upon her work of destruction, without showing confusion or repentance, like a combatant who has right upon his side. Then, madly, blindly, he threw himself upon her, and they struggled together. He clutched her bare flesh so that he hurt her.

"Kill me!" she gasped. "Kill me, or I shall destroy everything!"

He held her close to him, with so rough a grasp that she could scarcely breathe, crying:

"When a child steals, it is punished!"

A few drops of blood appeared and trickled down her rounded shoulder, where an abrasion had cut the delicate satin skin. And, on the instant, seeing her so breathless, so divine, in her virginal slender height, with her tapering limbs, her supple arms, her slim body with its slender, firm throat, he released her. By a last effort he tore the package from her.

"And you shall help me to put them all up there again, by Heaven! Come here: begin by arranging them on the table. Obey me, do you hear?"

"Yes, master!"

She approached, and helped him to arrange the papers, subjugated, crushed by this masculine grasp, which had entered into her flesh, as it were. The candle which flared up in the heavy night air, lighted them; and the distant rolling of the thunder still continued, the window facing the storm seeming on fire.

V.

For an instant Pascal looked at the papers, the heap of which seemed enormous, lying thus in disorder on the long table that stood in the middle of the room. In the confusion several of the blue paper envelopes had burst open, and their contents had fallen out—letters, newspaper clippings, documents on stamped paper, and manuscript notes.

He was already mechanically beginning to seek out the names written on the envelopes in large characters, to classify the packages again, when, with an abrupt gesture, he emerged from the somber meditation into which he had fallen. And turning to Clotilde who stood waiting, pale, silent, and erect, he said:

"Listen to me; I have always forbidden you to read these papers, and I know that you have obeyed me. Yes, I had scruples of delicacy. It is not that you are an ignorant girl, like so many others, for I have allowed you to learn everything concerning man and woman, which is assuredly bad only for bad natures. But to what end disclose to you too early these terrible truths of human life? I have therefore spared you the history of our family, which is the history of every family, of all humanity; a great deal of evil and a great deal of good."

He paused as if to confirm himself in his resolution and then resumed quite calmly and with supreme energy:

"You are twenty-five years old; you ought to know. And then the life we are leading is no longer possible. You live and you make me live in a constant nightmare, with your ecstatic dreams. I prefer to show you the reality, however execrable it may be. Perhaps the blow which it will inflict upon you will make of you the woman you ought to be. We will classify these papers again together, and read them, and learn from them a terrible lesson of life!"

Then, as she still continued motionless, he resumed:

"Come, we must be able to see well. Light those other two candles there."

He was seized by a desire for light, a flood of light; he would have desired the blinding light of the sun; and thinking that the light of the three candles was not sufficient, he went into his room for a pair of three-branched candelabra which were there. The nine candles were blazing, yet neither of them, in their disorder—he with his chest bare, she with her left shoulder stained with blood, her throat and arms bare—saw the other. It was past two o'clock, but neither of them had any consciousness of the hour; they were going to spend the night in this eager desire for knowledge, without feeling the need of sleep, outside time and space. The mutterings of the storm, which, through the open window, they could see gathering, grew louder and louder.

Clotilde had never before seen in Pascal's eyes the feverish light which burned in them now. He had been overworking himself for some time past, and his mental sufferings made him at times abrupt, in spite of his good-natured complacency. But it seemed as if an infinite tenderness, trembling with fraternal pity, awoke within him, now that he was about to plunge into the painful truths of existence; and it was something emanating from himself, something very great and very good which was to render innocuous the terrible avalanche of facts which was impending. He was determined that he would reveal everything, since it was necessary that he should do so in order to remedy everything. Was not this an unanswerable, a final argument for evolution, the story of these beings who were so near to them? Such was life, and it must be lived. Doubtless she would emerge from it like the steel tempered by the fire, full of tolerance and courage.

"They are setting you against me," he resumed; "they are making you commit abominable acts, and I wish to restore your conscience to you. When you know, you will judge and you will act. Come here, and read with me."

She obeyed. But these papers, about which her grandmother had spoken so angrily, frightened her a little; while a curiosity that grew with every moment awoke within her. And then, dominated though she was by the virile authority which had just constrained and subjugated her, she did not yet yield. But might she not listen to him, read with him? Did she not retain the right to refuse or to give herself afterward? He spoke at last.

"Will you come?"

"Yes, master, I will."

He showed her first the genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquarts. He did not usually lock it in the press, but kept it in the desk in his room, from which he had taken it when he went there for the candelabra. For more than twenty years past he had kept it up to date, inscribing the births, deaths, marriages, and other important events that had taken place in the family, making brief notes in each case, in accordance with his theory of heredity.

It was a large sheet of paper, yellow with age, with folds cut by wear, on which was drawn boldly a symbolical tree, whose branches spread and subdivided into five rows of broad leaves; and each leaf bore a name, and contained, in minute handwriting, a biography, a hereditary case.

A scientist's joy took possession of the doctor at sight of this labor of twenty years, in which the laws of heredity established by him were so clearly and so completely applied.

"Look, child! You know enough about the matter, you have copied enough of my notes to understand. Is it not beautiful? A document so complete, so conclusive, in which there is not a gap? It is like an experiment made in the laboratory, a problem stated and solved on the blackboard. You see below, the trunk, the common stock, Aunt Dide; then the three branches issuing from it, the legitimate branch, Pierre Rougon, and the two illegitimate branches, Ursule Macquart and Antoine Macquart; then, new branches arise, and ramify, on one side, Maxime, Clotilde, and Victor, the three children of Saccard, and Angelique, the daughter of Sidonie Rougon; on the other, Pauline, the daughter of Lisa Macquart, and Claude, Jacques, Etienne, and Anna, the four children of Gervaise, her sister; there, at the extremity, is Jean, their brother, and here in the middle, you see what I call the knot, the legitimate issue and the illegitimate issue, uniting in Marthe Rougon and her cousin Francois Mouret, to give rise to three new branches, Octave, Serge, and Desiree Mouret; while there is also the issue of Ursule and the hatter Mouret; Silvere, whose tragic death you know; Helene and her daughter Jean; finally, at the top are the latest offshoots, our poor Charles, your brother Maxime's son, and two other children, who are dead, Jacques Louis, the son of Claude Lantier, and Louiset, the son of Anna Coupeau. In all five generations, a human tree which, for five springs already, five springtides of humanity, has sent forth shoots, at the impulse of the sap of eternal life."

He became more and more animated, pointing out each case on the sheet of old yellow paper, as if it were an anatomical chart.

"And as I have already said, everything is here. You see in direct heredity, the differentiations, that of the mother, Silvere, Lisa, Desiree, Jacques, Louiset, yourself; that of the father, Sidonie, Francois, Gervaise, Octave, Jacques, Louis. Then there are the three cases of crossing: by conjugation, Ursule, Aristide, Anna, Victor; by dissemination, Maxime, Serge, Etienne; by fusion, Antoine, Eugene, Claude. I even noted a fourth case, a very remarkable one, an even cross, Pierre and Pauline; and varieties are established, the differentiation of the mother, for example, often accords with the physical resemblance of the father; or, it is the contrary which takes place, so that, in the crossing, the physical and mental predominance remains with one parent or the other, according to circumstances. Then here is indirect heredity, that of the collateral branches. I have but one well established example of this, the striking personal resemblance of Octave Mouret to his uncle Eugene Rougon. I have also but one example of transmission by influence, Anna, the daughter of Gervaise and Coupeau, who bore a striking resemblance, especially in her childhood, to Lantier, her mother's first lover. But what I am very rich in is in examples of reversion to the original stock—the three finest cases, Marthe, Jeanne, and Charles, resembling Aunt Dide; the resemblance thus passing over one, two, and three generations. This is certainly exceptional, for I scarcely believe in atavism; it seems to me that the new elements brought by the partners, accidents, and the infinite variety of crossings must rapidly efface particular characteristics, so as to bring back the individual to the general type. And there remains variation—Helene, Jean, Angelique. This is the combination, the chemical mixture in which the physical and mental characteristics of the parents are blended, without any of their traits seeming to reappear in the new being."

There was silence for a moment. Clotilde had listened to him with profound attention, wishing to understand. And he remained absorbed in thought, his eyes still fixed on the tree, in the desire to judge his work impartially. He then continued in a low tone, as if speaking to himself:

"Yes, that is as scientific as possible. I have placed there only the members of the family, and I had to give an equal part to the partners, to the fathers and mothers come from outside, whose blood has mingled with ours, and therefore modified it. I had indeed made a mathematically exact tree, the father and the mother bequeathing themselves, by halves, to the child, from generation to generation, so that in Charles, for example, Aunt Dide's part would have been only a twelfth—which would be absurd, since the physical resemblance is there complete. I have therefore thought it sufficient to indicate the elements come from elsewhere, taking into account marriages and the new factor which each introduced. Ah! these sciences that are yet in their infancy, in which hypothesis speaks stammeringly, and imagination rules, these are the domain of the poet as much as of the scientist. Poets go as pioneers in the advance guard, and they often discover new countries, suggesting solutions. There is there a borderland which belongs to them, between the conquered, the definitive truth, and the unknown, whence the truth of to-morrow will be torn. What an immense fresco there is to be painted, what a stupendous human tragedy, what a comedy there is to be written with heredity, which is the very genesis of families, of societies, and of the world!"

His eyes fixed on vacancy, he remained for a time lost in thought. Then, with an abrupt movement, he came back to the envelopes and, pushing the tree aside, said:

"We will take it up again presently; for, in order that you may understand now, it is necessary that events should pass in review before you, and that you should see in action all these actors ticketed here, each one summed up in a brief note. I will call for the envelopes, you will hand them to me one by one, and I will show you the papers in each, and tell you their contents, before putting it away again up there on the shelf. I will not follow the alphabetical order, but the order of events themselves. I have long wished to make this classification. Come, look for the names on the envelopes; Aunt Dide first."

At this moment the edge of the storm which lighted up the sky caught La Souleiade slantingly, and burst over the house in a deluge of rain. But they did not even close the window. They heard neither the peals of thunder nor the ceaseless beating of the rain upon the roof. She handed him the envelope bearing the name of Aunt Dide in large characters; and he took from it papers of all sorts, notes taken by him long ago, which he proceeded to read.

"Hand me Pierre Rougon. Hand me Ursule Macquart. Hand me Antoine Macquart."

Silently she obeyed him, her heart oppressed by a dreadful anguish at all she was hearing. And the envelopes were passed on, displayed their contents, and were piled up again in the press.

First was the foundress of the family, Adelaide Fouque, the tall, crazy girl, the first nervous lesion giving rise to the legitimate branch, Pierre Rougon, and to the two illegitimate branches, Ursule and Antoine Macquart, all that bourgeois and sanguinary tragedy, with the coup d'etat of December, 1854, for a background, the Rougons, Pierre and Felicite, preserving order at Plassans, bespattering with the blood of Silvere their rising fortunes, while Adelaide, grown old, the miserable Aunt Dide, was shut up in the Tulettes, like a specter of expiation and of waiting.

Then like a pack of hounds, the appetites were let loose. The supreme appetite of power in Eugene Rougon, the great man, the disdainful genius of the family, free from base interests, loving power for its own sake, conquering Paris in old boots with the adventurers of the coming Empire, rising from the legislative body to the senate, passing from the presidency of the council of state to the portfolio of minister; made by his party, a hungry crowd of followers, who at the same time supported and devoured him; conquered for an instant by a woman, the beautiful Clorinde, with whom he had been imbecile enough to fall in love, but having so strong a will, and burning with so vehement a desire to rule, that he won back power by giving the lie to his whole life, marching to his triumphal sovereignty of vice emperor.

With Aristide Saccard, appetite ran to low pleasures, the whole hot quarry of money, luxury, women—a devouring hunger which left him homeless, at the time when millions were changing hands, when the whirlwind of wild speculation was blowing through the city, tearing down everywhere to construct anew, when princely fortunes were made, squandered, and remade in six months; a greed of gold whose ever increasing fury carried him away, causing him, almost before the body of his wife Angele was cold in death, to sell his name, in order to have the first indispensable thousand francs, by marrying Renee. And it was Saccard, too, who, a few years later, put in motion the immense money-press of the Banque Universelle. Saccard, the never vanquished; Saccard, grown more powerful, risen to be the clever and daring grand financier, comprehending the fierce and civilizing role that money plays, fighting, winning, and losing battles on the Bourse, like Napoleon at Austerlitz and Waterloo; engulfing in disaster a world of miserable people; sending forth into the unknown realms of crime his natural son Victor, who disappeared, fleeing through the dark night, while he himself, under the impassable protection of unjust nature, was loved by the adorable Mme. Caroline, no doubt in recompense of all the evil he had done.

Here a tall, spotless lily had bloomed in this compost, Sidonie Rougon, the sycophant of her brother, the go-between in a hundred suspicious affairs, giving birth to the pure and divine Angelique, the little embroiderer with fairylike fingers who worked into the gold of the chasubles the dream of her Prince Charming, so happy among her companions the saints, so little made for the hard realities of life, that she obtained the grace of dying of love, on the day of her marriage, at the first kiss of Felicien de Hautecoeur, in the triumphant peal of bells ringing for her splendid nuptials.

The union of the two branches, the legitimate and the illegitimate, took place then, Marthe Rougon espousing her cousin Francois Mouret, a peaceful household slowly disunited, ending in the direst catastrophes—a sad and gentle woman taken, made use of, and crushed in the vast machine of war erected for the conquest of a city; her three children torn from her, she herself leaving her heart in the rude grasp of the Abbe Faujas. And the Rougons saved Plassans a second time, while she was dying in the glare of the conflagration in which her husband was being consumed, mad with long pent-up rage and the desire for revenge.

Of the three children, Octave Mouret was the audacious conqueror, the clear intellect, resolved to demand from the women the sovereignty of Paris, fallen at his debut into the midst of a corrupt bourgeois society, acquiring there a terrible sentimental education, passing from the capricious refusal of one woman to the unresisting abandonment of another, remaining, fortunately, active, laborious, and combative, gradually emerging, and improved even, from the low plotting, the ceaseless ferment of a rotten society that could be heard already cracking to its foundations. And Octave Mouret, victorious, revolutionized commerce; swallowed up the cautious little shops that carried on business in the old-fashioned way; established in the midst of feverish Paris the colossal palace of temptation, blazing with lights, overflowing with velvets, silks, and laces; won fortunes exploiting woman; lived in smiling scorn of woman until the day when a little girl, the avenger of her sex, the innocent and wise Denise, vanquished him and held him captive at her feet, groaning with anguish, until she did him the favor, she who was so poor, to marry him in the midst of the apotheosis of his Louvre, under the golden shower of his receipts.

There remained the two other children, Serge Mouret and Desiree Mouret, the latter innocent and healthy, like some happy young animal; the former refined and mystical, who was thrown into the priesthood by a nervous malady hereditary in his family, and who lived again the story of Adam, in the Eden of Le Paradou. He was born again to love Albine, and to lose her, in the bosom of sublime nature, their accomplice; to be recovered, afterward by the Church, to war eternally with life, striving to kill his manhood, throwing on the body of the dead Albine the handful of earth, as officiating priest, at the very time when Desiree, the sister and friend of animals, was rejoicing in the midst of the swarming life of her poultry yard.

Further on there opened a calm glimpse of gentle and tragic life, Helene Mouret living peacefully with her little girl, Jeanne, on the heights of Passy, overlooking Paris, the bottomless, boundless human sea, in face of which was unrolled this page of love: the sudden passion of Helene for a stranger, a physician, brought one night by chance to the bedside of her daughter; the morbid jealousy of Jeanne—the instinctive jealousy of a loving girl—disputing her mother with love, her mother already so wasted by her unhappy passion that the daughter died because of her fault; terrible price of one hour of desire in the entire cold and discreet life of a woman, poor dead child, lying alone in the silent cemetery, in face of eternal Paris.

With Lisa Macquart began the illegitimate branch; appearing fresh and strong in her, as she displayed her portly, prosperous figure, sitting at the door of her pork shop in a light colored apron, watching the central market, where the hunger of a people muttered, the age-long battle of the Fat and the Lean, the lean Florent, her brother-in-law, execrated, and set upon by the fat fishwomen and the fat shopwomen, and whom even the fat pork-seller herself, honest, but unforgiving, caused to be arrested as a republican who had broken his ban, convinced that she was laboring for the good digestion of all honest people.

From this mother sprang the sanest, the most human of girls, Pauline Quenu, the well-balanced, the reasonable, the virgin; who, knowing everything, accepted the joy of living in so ardent a love for others that, in spite of the revolt of her youthful heart, she resigned to her friend her cousin and betrothed, Lazare, and afterward saved the child of the disunited household, becoming its true mother; always triumphant, always gay, notwithstanding her sacrificed and ruined life, in her monotonous solitude, facing the great sea, in the midst of a little world of sufferers groaning with pain, but who did not wish to die.

Then came Gervaise Macquart with her four children: bandy-legged, pretty, and industrious Gervaise, whom her lover Lantier turned into the street in the faubourg, where she met the zinc worker Coupeau, the skilful, steady workman whom she married, and with whom she lived so happily at first, having three women working in her laundry, but afterward sinking with her husband, as was inevitable, to the degradation of her surroundings. He, gradually conquered by alcohol, brought by it to madness and death; she herself perverted, become a slattern, her moral ruin completed by the return of Lantier, living in the tranquil ignominy of a household of three, thenceforward the wretched victim of want, her accomplice, to which she at last succumbed, dying one night of starvation.

Her eldest son, Claude, had the unhappy genius of a great painter struck with madness, the impotent madness of feeling within him the masterpiece to which his fingers refused to give shape; a giant wrestler always defeated, a crucified martyr to his work, adoring woman, sacrificing his wife Christine, so loving and for a time so beloved, to the increate, divine woman of his visions, but whom his pencil was unable to delineate in her nude perfection, possessed by a devouring passion for producing, an insatiable longing to create, a longing so torturing when it could not be satisfied, that he ended it by hanging himself.

Jacques brought crime, the hereditary taint being transmuted in him into an instinctive appetite for blood, the young and fresh blood from the gashed throat of a woman, the first comer, the passer-by in the street: a horrible malady against which he struggled, but which took possession of him again in the course of his amour with the submissive and sensual Severine, whom a tragic story of assassination caused to live in constant terror, and whom he stabbed one evening in an excess of frenzy, maddened by the sight of her white throat. Then this savage human beast rushed among the trains filing past swiftly, and mounted the snorting engine of which he was the engineer, the beloved engine which was one day to crush him to atoms, and then, left without a guide, to rush furiously off into space braving unknown disasters.

Etienne, in his turn driven out, arrived in the black country on a freezing night in March, descended into the voracious pit, fell in love with the melancholy Catherine, of whom a ruffian robbed him; lived with the miners their gloomy life of misery and base promiscuousness, until one day when hunger, prompting rebellion, sent across the barren plain a howling mob of wretches who demanded bread, tearing down and burning as they went, under the menace of the guns of the band that went off of themselves, a terrible convulsion announcing the end of the world. The avenging blood of the Maheus was to rise up later; of Alzire dead of starvation, Maheu killed by a bullet, Zacharie killed by an explosion of fire-damp, Catherine under the ground. La Maheude alone survived to weep her dead, descending again into the mine to earn her thirty sons, while Etienne, the beaten chief of the band, haunted by the dread of future demands, went away on a warm April morning, listening to the secret growth of the new world whose germination was soon to dazzle the earth.

Nana then became the avenger; the girl born among the social filth of the faubourgs; the golden fly sprung from the rottenness below, that was tolerated and concealed, carrying in the fluttering of its wings the ferment of destruction, rising and contaminating the aristocracy, poisoning men only by alighting upon them, in the palaces through whose windows it entered; the unconscious instrument of ruin and death—fierce flame of Vandeuvres, the melancholy fate of Foucarmont, lost in the Chinese waters, the disaster of Steiner, reduced to live as an honest man, the imbecility of La Faloise and the tragic ruin of the Muffats, and the white corpse of Georges, watched by Philippe, come out of prison the day before, when the air of the epoch was so contaminated that she herself was infected, and died of malignant smallpox, caught at the death-bed of her son Louiset, while Paris passed beneath her windows, intoxicated, possessed by the frenzy of war, rushing to general ruin.

Lastly comes Jean Macquart, the workman and soldier become again a peasant, fighting with the hard earth, which exacts that every grain of corn shall be purchased with a drop of sweat, fighting, above all, with the country people, whom covetousness and the long and difficult battle with the soil cause to burn with the desire, incessantly stimulated, of possession. Witness the Fouans, grown old, parting with their fields as if they were parting with their flesh; the Buteaus in their eager greed committing parricide, to hasten the inheritance of a field of lucern; the stubborn Francoise dying from the stroke of a scythe, without speaking, rather than that a sod should go out of the family—all this drama of simple natures governed by instinct, scarcely emerged from primitive barbarism—all this human filth on the great earth, which alone remains immortal, the mother from whom they issue and to whom they return again, she whom they love even to crime, who continually remakes life, for its unknown end, even with the misery and the abomination of the beings she nourishes. And it was Jean, too, who, become a widower and having enlisted again at the first rumor of war, brought the inexhaustible reserve, the stock of eternal rejuvenation which the earth keeps; Jean, the humblest, the staunchest soldier at the final downfall, swept along in the terrible and fatal storm which, from the frontier to Sedan, in sweeping away the Empire, threatened to sweep away the country; always wise, circumspect, firm in his hope, loving with fraternal affection his comrade Maurice, the demented child of the people, the holocaust doomed to expiation, weeping tears of blood when inexorable destiny chose himself to hew off this rotten limb, and after all had ended—the continual defeats, the frightful civil war, the lost provinces, the thousands of millions of francs to pay—taking up the march again, notwithstanding, returning to the land which awaited him, to the great and difficult task of making a new France.

Pascal paused; Clotilde had handed him all the packages, one by one, and he had gone over them all, laid bare the contents of all, classified them anew, and placed them again on the top shelf of the press. He was out of breath, exhausted by his swift course through all this humanity, while, without voice, without movement, the young girl, stunned by this overflowing torrent of life, waited still, incapable of thought or judgment. The rain still beat furiously upon the dark fields. The lightning had just struck a tree in the neighborhood, that had split with a terrible crash. The candles flared up in the wind that came in from the open window.

"Ah!" he resumed, pointing to the papers again, "there is a world in itself, a society, a civilization, the whole of life is there, with its manifestations, good and bad, in the heat and labor of the forge which shapes everything. Yes, our family of itself would suffice as an example to science, which will perhaps one day establish with mathematical exactness the laws governing the diseases of the blood and nerves that show themselves in a race, after a first organic lesion, and that determine, according to environment, the sentiments, desires, and passions of each individual of that race, all the human, natural and instinctive manifestations which take the names of virtues and vices. And it is also a historical document, it relates the story of the Second Empire, from the coup d'etat to Sedan; for our family spring from the people, they spread themselves through the whole of contemporary society, invaded every place, impelled by their unbridled appetites, by that impulse, essentially modern, that eager desire that urges the lower classes to enjoyment, in their ascent through the social strata. We started, as I have said, from Plassans, and here we are now arrived once more at Plassans."

He paused again, and then resumed in a low, dreamy voice:

"What an appalling mass stirred up! how many passions, how many joys, how many sufferings crammed into this colossal heap of facts! There is pure history: the Empire founded in blood, at first pleasure-loving and despotic, conquering rebellious cities, then gliding to a slow disintegration, dissolving in blood—in such a sea of blood that the entire nation came near being swamped in it. There are social studies: wholesale and retail trade, prostitution, crime, land, money, the bourgeoisie, the people—that people who rot in the sewer of the faubourgs, who rebel in the great industrial centers, all that ever-increasing growth of mighty socialism, big with the new century. There are simple human studies: domestic pages, love stories, the struggle of minds and hearts against unjust nature, the destruction of those who cry out under their too difficult task, the cry of virtue immolating itself, victorious over pain, There are fancies, flights of the imagination beyond the real: vast gardens always in bloom, cathedrals with slender, exquisitely wrought spires, marvelous tales come down from paradise, ideal affections remounting to heaven in a kiss. There is everything: the good and the bad, the vulgar and the sublime, flowers, mud, blood, laughter, the torrent of life itself, bearing humanity endlessly on!"

He took up again the genealogical tree which had remained neglected on the table, spread it out and began to go over it once more with his finger, enumerating now the members of the family who were still living: Eugene Rougon, a fallen majesty, who remained in the Chamber, the witness, the impassible defender of the old world swept away at the downfall of the Empire. Aristide Saccard, who, after having changed his principles, had fallen upon his feet a republican, the editor of a great journal, on the way to make new millions, while his natural son Victor, who had never reappeared, was living still in the shade, since he was not in the galleys, cast forth by the world into the future, into the unknown, like a human beast foaming with the hereditary virus, who must communicate his malady with every bite he gives. Sidonie Rougon, who had for a time disappeared, weary of disreputable affairs, had lately retired to a sort of religious house, where she was living in monastic austerity, the treasurer of the Marriage Fund, for aiding in the marriage of girls who were mothers. Octave Mouret, proprietor of the great establishment Au Bonheur des Dames, whose colossal fortune still continued increasing, had had, toward the end of the winter, a third child by his wife Denise Baudu, whom he adored, although his mind was beginning to be deranged again. The Abbe Mouret, cure at St. Eutrope, in the heart of a marshy gorge, lived there in great retirement, and very modestly, with his sister Desiree, refusing all advancement from his bishop, and waiting for death like a holy man, rejecting all medicines, although he was already suffering from consumption in its first stage. Helene Mouret was living very happily in seclusion with her second husband, M. Rambaud, on the little estate which they owned near Marseilles, on the seashore; she had had no child by her second husband. Pauline Quenu was still at Bonneville at the other extremity of France, in face of the vast ocean, alone with little Paul, since the death of Uncle Chanteau, having resolved never to marry, in order to devote herself entirely to the son of her cousin Lazare, who had become a widower and had gone to America to make a fortune. Etienne Lantier, returning to Paris after the strike at Montsou, had compromised himself later in the insurrection of the Commune, whose principles he had defended with ardor; he had been condemned to death, but his sentence being commuted was transported and was now at Noumea. It was even said that he had married immediately on his arrival there, and that he had had a child, the sex of which, however, was not known with certainty. Finally, Jean Macquart, who had received his discharge after the Bloody Week, had settled at Valqueyras, near Plassans, where he had had the good fortune to marry a healthy girl, Melanie Vial, the daughter of a well-to-do peasant, whose lands he farmed, and his wife had borne him a son in May.

"Yes, it is true," he resumed, in a low voice; "races degenerate. There is here a veritable exhaustion, rapid deterioration, as if our family, in their fury of enjoyment, in the gluttonous satisfaction of their appetites, had consumed themselves too quickly. Louiset, dead in infancy; Jacques Louis, a half imbecile, carried off by a nervous disease; Victor returned to the savage state, wandering about in who knows what dark places; our poor Charles, so beautiful and so frail; these are the latest branches of the tree, the last pale offshoots into which the puissant sap of the larger branches seems to have been unable to mount. The worm was in the trunk, it has ascended into the fruit, and is devouring it. But one must never despair; families are a continual growth. They go back beyond the common ancestor, into the unfathomable strata of the races that have lived, to the first being; and they will put forth new shoots without end, they will spread and ramify to infinity, through future ages. Look at our tree; it counts only five generations. It has not so much importance as a blade of grass, even, in the human forest, vast and dark, of which the peoples are the great secular oaks. Think only of the immense roots which spread through the soil; think of the continual putting forth of new leaves above, which mingle with other leaves of the ever-rolling sea of treetops, at the fructifying, eternal breath of life. Well, hope lies there, in the daily reconstruction of the race by the new blood which comes from without. Each marriage brings other elements, good or bad, of which the effect is, however, to prevent certain and progressive regeneration. Breaches are repaired, faults effaced, an equilibrium is inevitably re-established at the end of a few generations, and it is the average man that always results; vague humanity, obstinately pursuing its mysterious labor, marching toward its unknown end."

He paused, and heaved a deep sigh.

"Ah! our family, what is it going to become; in what being will it finally end?"

He continued, not now taking into account the survivors whom he had just named; having classified these, he knew what they were capable of, but he was full of keen curiosity regarding the children who were still infants. He had written to a confrere in Noumea for precise information regarding the wife whom Etienne had lately married there, and the child which she had had, but he had heard nothing, and he feared greatly that on that side the tree would remain incomplete. He was more fully furnished with documents regarding the two children of Octave Mouret, with whom he continued to correspond; the little girl was growing up puny and delicate, while the little boy, who strongly resembled his mother, had developed superbly, and was perfectly healthy. His strongest hope, besides these, was in Jean's children, the eldest of whom was a magnificent boy, full of the youthful vigor of the races that go back to the soil to regenerate themselves. Pascal occasionally went to Valqueyras, and he returned happy from that fertile spot, where the father, quiet and rational, was always at his plow, the mother cheerful and simple, with her vigorous frame, capable of bearing a world. Who knew what sound branch was to spring from that side? Perhaps the wise and puissant of the future were to germinate there. The worst of it, for the beauty of his tree, was that all these little boys and girls were still so young that he could not classify them. And his voice grew tender as he spoke of this hope of the future, these fair-haired children, in the unavowed regret for his celibacy.

Still contemplating the tree spread out before him, he cried:

"And yet it is complete, it is decisive. Look! I repeat to you that all hereditary cases are to be found there. To establish my theory, I had only to base it on the collection of these facts. And indeed, the marvelous thing is that there you can put your finger on the cause why creatures born of the same stock can appear radically different, although they are only logical modifications of common ancestors. The trunk explains the branches, and these explain the leaves. In your father Saccard and your Uncle Eugene Rougon, so different in their temperaments and their lives, it is the same impulse which made the inordinate appetites of the one and the towering ambition of the other. Angelique, that pure lily, is born from the disreputable Sidonie, in the rapture which makes mystics or lovers, according to the environment. The three children of the Mourets are born of the same breath which makes of the clever Octave the dry goods merchant, a millionaire; of the devout Serge, a poor country priest; of the imbecile Desiree, a beautiful and happy girl. But the example is still more striking in the children of Gervaise; the neurosis passes down, and Nana sells herself; Etienne is a rebel; Jacques, a murderer; Claude, a genius; while Pauline, their cousin german, near by, is victorious virtue—virtue which struggles and immolates itself. It is heredity, life itself which makes imbeciles, madmen, criminals and great men. Cells abort, others take their place, and we have a scoundrel or a madman instead of a man of genius, or simply an honest man. And humanity rolls on, bearing everything on its tide."

Then in a new shifting of his thought, growing still more animated, he continued:

"And animals—the beast that suffers and that loves, which is the rough sketch, as it were, of man—all the animals our brothers, that live our life, yes, I would have put them in the ark, I would give them a place among our family, show them continually mingling with us, completing our existence. I have known cats whose presence was the mysterious charm of the household; dogs that were adored, whose death was mourned, and left in the heart an inconsolable grief. I have known goats, cows, and asses of very great importance, and whose personality played such a part that their history ought to be written. And there is our Bonhomme, our poor old horse, that has served us for a quarter of a century. Do you not think that he has mingled his life with ours, and that henceforth he is one of the family? We have modified him, as he has influenced us a little; we shall end by being made in the same image, and this is so true that now, when I see him, half blind, with wandering gaze, his legs stiff with rheumatism, I kiss him on both cheeks as if he were a poor old relation who had fallen to my charge. Ah, animals, all creeping and crawling things, all creatures that lament, below man, how large a place in our sympathies it would be necessary to give them in a history of life!"

This was a last cry in which Pascal gave utterance to his passionate tenderness for all created beings. He had gradually become more and more excited, and had so come to make this confession of his faith in the continuous and victorious work of animated nature. And Clotilde, who thus far had not spoken, pale from the catastrophe in which her plans had ended, at last opened her lips to ask:

"Well, master, and what am I here?"

She placed one of her slender fingers on the leaf of the tree on which she saw her name written. He had always passed this leaf by. She insisted.

"Yes, I; what am I? Why have you not read me my envelope?"

For a moment he remained silent, as if surprised at the question.

"Why? For no reason. It is true, I have nothing to conceal from you. You see what is written here? 'Clotilde, born in 1847. Selection of the mother. Reversional heredity, with moral and physical predominance of the maternal grandfather.' Nothing can be clearer. Your mother has predominated in you; you have her fine intelligence, and you have also something of her coquetry, at times of her indolence and of her submissiveness. Yes, you are very feminine, like her. Without your being aware of it, I would say that you love to be loved. Besides, your mother was a great novel reader, an imaginative being who loved to spend whole days dreaming over a book; she doted on nursery tales, had her fortune told by cards, consulted clairvoyants; and I have always thought that your concern about spiritual matters, your anxiety about the unknown, came from that source. But what completed your character by giving you a dual nature, was the influence of your grandfather, Commandant Sicardot. I knew him; he was not a genius, but he had at least a great deal of uprightness and energy. Frankly, if it were not for him, I do not believe that you would be worth much, for the other influences are hardly good. He has given you the best part of your nature, combativeness, pride, and frankness."

She had listened to him with attention. She nodded slightly, to signify that it was indeed so, that she was not offended, although her lips trembled visibly at these new details regarding her people and her mother.

"Well," she resumed, "and you, master?"

This time he did not hesitate.

"Oh, I!" he cried, "what is the use of speaking of me? I do not belong to the family. You see what is written here. 'Pascal, born in 1813. Individual variation. Combination in which the physical and moral characters of the parents are blended, without any of their traits seeming to appear in the new being.' My mother has told me often enough that I did not belong to it, that in truth she did not know where I could have come from."

Those words came from him like a cry of relief, of involuntary joy.

"And the people make no mistake in the matter. Have you ever heard me called Pascal Rougon in the town? No; people always say simply Dr. Pascal. It is because I stand apart. And it may not be very affectionate to feel so, but I am delighted at it, for there are in truth inheritances too heavy to bear. It is of no use that I love them all. My heart beats none the less joyously when I feel myself another being, different from them, without any community with them. Not to be of them, my God! not to be of them! It is a breath of pure air; it is what gives me the courage to have them all here, to put them, in all their nakedness, in their envelopes, and still to find the courage to live!"

He stopped, and there was silence for a time. The rain had ceased, the storm was passing away, the thunderclaps sounded more and more distant, while from the refreshed fields, still dark, there came in through the open window a delicious odor of moist earth. In the calm air the candles were burning out with a tall, tranquil flame.

"Ah!" said Clotilde simply, with a gesture of discouragement, "what are we to become finally?"

She had declared it to herself one night, in the threshing yard; life was horrible, how could one live peaceful and happy? It was a terrible light that science threw on the world. Analysis searched every wound of humanity, in order to expose its horror. And now he had spoken still more bluntly; he had increased the disgust which she had for persons and things, pitilessly dissecting her family. The muddy torrent had rolled on before her for nearly three hours, and she had heard the most dreadful revelations, the harsh and terrible truth about her people, her people who were so dear to her, whom it was her duty to love; her father grown powerful through pecuniary crimes; her brother dissolute; her grandmother unscrupulous, covered with the blood of the just; the others almost all tainted, drunkards, ruffians, murderers, the monstrous blossoming of the human tree.

The blow had been so rude that she could not yet recover from it, stunned as she was by the revelation of her whole family history, made to her in this way at a stroke. And yet the lesson was rendered innocuous, so to say, by something great and good, a breath of profound humanity which had borne her through it. Nothing bad had come to her from it. She felt herself beaten by a sharp sea wind, the storm wind which strengthens and expands the lungs. He had revealed everything, speaking freely even of his mother, without judging her, continuing to preserve toward her his deferential attitude, as a scientist who does not judge events. To tell everything in order to know everything, in order to remedy everything, was not this the cry which he had uttered on that beautiful summer night?

And by the very excess of what he had just revealed to her, she remained shaken, blinded by this too strong light, but understanding him at last, and confessing to herself that he was attempting in this an immense work. In spite of everything, it was a cry of health, of hope in the future. He spoke as a benefactor who, since heredity made the world, wished to fix its laws, in order to control it, and to make a new and happy world. Was there then only mud in this overflowing stream, whose sluices he had opened? How much gold had passed, mingled with the grass and the flowers on its borders? Hundreds of beings were still flying swiftly before her, and she was haunted by good and charming faces, delicate girlish profiles, by the serene beauty of women. All passion bled there, hearts swelled with every tender rapture. They were numerous, the Jeannes, the Angeliques, the Paulines, the Marthes, the Gervaises, the Helenes. They and others, even those who were least good, even terrible men, the worst of the band, showed a brotherhood with humanity.

And it was precisely this breath which she had felt pass, this broad current of sympathy, that he had introduced naturally into his exact scientific lesson. He did not seem to be moved; he preserved the impersonal and correct attitude of the demonstrator, but within him what tender suffering, what a fever of devotion, what a giving up of his whole being to the happiness of others? His entire work, constructed with such mathematical precision, was steeped in this fraternal suffering, even in its most cruel ironies. Had he not just spoken of the animals, like an elder brother of the wretched living beings that suffer? Suffering exasperated him; his wrath was because of his too lofty dream, and he had become harsh only in his hatred of the factitious and the transitory; dreaming of working, not for the polite society of a time, but for all humanity in the gravest hours of its history. Perhaps, even, it was this revolt against the vulgarity of the time which had made him throw himself, in bold defiance, into theories and their application. And the work remained human, overflowing as it was with an infinite pity for beings and things.

Besides, was it not life? There is no absolute evil. Most often a virtue presents itself side by side with a defect. No man is bad to every one, each man makes the happiness of some one; so that, when one does not view things from a single standpoint only, one recognizes in the end the utility of every human being. Those who believe in God should say to themselves that if their God does not strike the wicked dead, it is because he sees his work in its totality, and that he cannot descend to the individual. Labor ends to begin anew; the living, as a whole, continue, in spite of everything, admirable in their courage and their industry; and love of life prevails over all.

This giant labor of men, this obstinacy in living, is their excuse, is redemption. And then, from a great height the eye saw only this continual struggle, and a great deal of good, in spite of everything, even though there might be a great deal of evil. One shared the general indulgence, one pardoned, one had only an infinite pity and an ardent charity. The haven was surely there, waiting those who have lost faith in dogmas, who wish to understand the meaning of their lives, in the midst of the apparent iniquity of the world. One must live for the effort of living, for the stone to be carried to the distant and unknown work, and the only possible peace in the world is in the joy of making this effort.

Another hour passed; the entire night had flown by in this terrible lesson of life, without either Pascal or Clotilde being conscious of where they were, or of the flight of time. And he, overworked for some time past, and worn out by the life of suspicion and sadness which he had been leading, started nervously, as if he had suddenly awakened.

"Come, you know all; do you feel your heart strong, tempered by the truth, full of pardon and of hope? Are you with me?"

But, still stunned by the frightful moral shock which she had received, she too, started, bewildered. Her old beliefs had been so completely overthrown, so many new ideas were awakening within her, that she did not dare to question herself, in order to find an answer. She felt herself seized and carried away by the omnipotence of truth. She endured it without being convinced.

"Master," she stammered, "master—"

And they remained for a moment face to face, looking at each other. Day was breaking, a dawn of exquisite purity, far off in the vast, clear sky, washed by the storm. Not a cloud now stained the pale azure tinged with rose color. All the cheerful sounds of awakening life in the rain-drenched fields came in through the window, while the candles, burned down to the socket, paled in the growing light.

"Answer; are you with me, altogether with me?"

For a moment he thought she was going to throw herself on his neck and burst into tears. A sudden impulse seemed to impel her. But they saw each other in their semi-nudity. She, who had not noticed it before, was now conscious that she was only half dressed, that her arms were bare, her shoulders bare, covered only by the scattered locks of her unbound hair, and on her right shoulder, near the armpit, on lowering her eyes, she perceived again the few drops of blood of the bruise which he had given her, when he had grasped her roughly, in struggling to master her. Then an extraordinary confusion took possession of her, a certainty that she was going to be vanquished, as if by this grasp he had become her master, and forever. This sensation was prolonged; she was seized and drawn on, without the consent of her will, by an irresistible impulse to submit.

Abruptly Clotilde straightened herself, struggling with herself, wishing to reflect and to recover herself. She pressed her bare arms against her naked throat. All the blood in her body rushed to her skin in a rosy blush of shame. Then, in her divine and slender grace, she turned to flee.

"Master, master, let me go—I will see—"

With the swiftness of alarmed maidenhood, she took refuge in her chamber, as she had done once before. He heard her lock the door hastily, with a double turn of the key. He remained alone, and he asked himself suddenly, seized by infinite discouragement and sadness, if he had done right in speaking, if the truth would germinate in this dear and adored creature, and bear one day a harvest of happiness.

VI.

The days wore on. October began with magnificent weather—a sultry autumn in which the fervid heat of summer was prolonged, with a cloudless sky. Then the weather changed, fierce winds began to blow, and a last storm channeled gullies in the hillsides. And to the melancholy household at La Souleiade the approach of winter seemed to have brought an infinite sadness.

It was a new hell. There were no more violent quarrels between Pascal and Clotilde. The doors were no longer slammed. Voices raised in dispute no longer obliged Martine to go continually upstairs to listen outside the door. They scarcely spoke to each other now; and not a single word had been exchanged between them regarding the midnight scene, although weeks had passed since it had taken place. He, through an inexplicable scruple, a strange delicacy of which he was not himself conscious, did not wish to renew the conversation, and to demand the answer which he expected—a promise of faith in him and of submission. She, after the great moral shock which had completely transformed her, still reflected, hesitated, struggled, fighting against herself, putting off her decision in order not to surrender, in her instinctive rebelliousness. And the misunderstanding continued, in the midst of the mournful silence of the miserable house, where there was no longer any happiness.

During all this time Pascal suffered terribly, without making any complaint. He had sunk into a dull distrust, imagining that he was still being watched, and that if they seemed to leave him at peace it was only in order to concoct in secret the darkest plots. His uneasiness increased, even, and he expected every day some catastrophe to happen—the earth suddenly to open and swallow up his papers, La Souleiade itself to be razed to the ground, carried away bodily, scattered to the winds.

The persecution against his thought, against his moral and intellectual life, in thus hiding itself, and so rendering him helpless to defend himself, became so intolerable to him that he went to bed every night in a fever. He would often start and turn round suddenly, thinking he was going to surprise the enemy behind him engaged in some piece of treachery, to find nothing there but the shadow of his own fears. At other times, seized by some suspicion, he would remain on the watch for hours together, hidden, behind his blinds, or lying in wait in a passage; but not a soul stirred, he heard nothing but the violent beating of his heart. His fears kept him in a state of constant agitation; he never went to bed at night without visiting every room; he no longer slept, or, if he did, he would waken with a start at the slightest noise, ready to defend himself.

And what still further aggravated Pascal's sufferings was the constant, the ever more bitter thought that the wound was inflicted upon him by the only creature he loved in the world, the adored Clotilde, whom for twenty years he had seen grow in beauty and in grace, whose life had hitherto bloomed like a beautiful flower, perfuming his. She, great God! for whom his heart was full of affection, whom he had never analyzed, she, who had become his joy, his courage, his hope, in whose young life he lived over again. When she passed by, with her delicate neck, so round, so fresh, he was invigorated, bathed in health and joy, as at the coming of spring.

His whole life, besides, explained this invasion, this subjugation of his being by the young girl who had entered into his heart while she was still a little child, and who, as she grew up, had gradually taken possession of the whole place. Since he had settled at Plassans, he had led a blest existence, wrapped up in his books, far from women. The only passion he was ever known to have had, was his love for the lady who had died, whose finger tips he had never kissed. He had not lived; he had within him a reserve of youthfulness, of vigor, whose surging flood now clamored rebelliously at the menace of approaching age. He would have become attached to an animal, a stray dog that he had chanced to pick up in the street, and that had licked his hand. And it was this child whom he loved, all at once become an adorable woman, who now distracted him, who tortured him by her hostility.

Pascal, so gay, so kind, now became insupportably gloomy and harsh. He grew angry at the slightest word; he would push aside the astonished Martine, who would look up at him with the submissive eyes of a beaten animal. From morning till night he went about the gloomy house, carrying his misery about with him, with so forbidding a countenance that no one ventured to speak to him.

He never took Clotilde with him now on his visits, but went alone. And thus it was that he returned home one afternoon, his mind distracted because of an accident which had happened; having on his conscience, as a physician, the death of a man.

He had gone to give a hypodermic injection to Lafouasse, the tavern keeper, whose ataxia had within a short time made such rapid progress that he regarded him as doomed. But, notwithstanding, Pascal still fought obstinately against the disease, continuing the treatment, and as ill luck would have it, on this day the little syringe had caught up at the bottom of the vial an impure particle, which had escaped the filter. Immediately a drop of blood appeared; to complete his misfortune, he had punctured a vein. He was at once alarmed, seeing the tavern keeper turn pale and gasp for breath, while large drops of cold perspiration broke out upon his face. Then he understood; death came as if by a stroke of lightning, the lips turning blue, the face black. It was an embolism; he had nothing to blame but the insufficiency of his preparations, his still rude method. No doubt Lafouasse had been doomed. He could not, perhaps, have lived six months longer, and that in the midst of atrocious sufferings, but the brutal fact of this terrible death was none the less there, and what despairing regret, what rage against impotent and murderous science, and what a shock to his faith! He returned home, livid, and did not make his appearance again until the following day, after having remained sixteen hours shut up in his room, lying in a semi-stupor on the bed, across which he had thrown himself, dressed as he was.

On the afternoon of this day Clotilde, who was sitting beside him in the study, sewing, ventured to break the oppressive silence. She looked up, and saw him turning over the leaves of a book wearily, searching for some information which he was unable to find.

"Master, are you ill? Why do you not tell me, if you are. I would take care of you."

He kept his eyes bent upon the book, and muttered:

"What does it matter to you whether I am ill or not? I need no one to take care of me."

She resumed, in a conciliating voice:

"If you have troubles, and can tell them to me, it would perhaps be a relief to you to do so. Yesterday you came in looking so sad. You must not allow yourself to be cast down in that way. I have spent a very anxious night. I came to your door three times to listen, tormented by the idea that you were suffering."

Gently as she spoke, her words were like the cut of a whip. In his weak and nervous condition a sudden access of rage made him push away the book and rise up trembling.

"So you spy upon me, then. I cannot even retire to my room without people coming to glue their ears to the walls. Yes, you listen even to the beatings of my heart. You watch for my death, to pillage and burn everything here."

His voice rose and all his unjust suffering vented itself in complaints and threats.

"I forbid you to occupy yourself about me. Is there nothing else that you have to say to me? Have you reflected? Can you put your hand in mine loyally, and say to me that we are in accord?"

She did not answer. She only continued to look at him with her large clear eyes, frankly declaring that she would not surrender yet, while he, exasperated more and more by this attitude, lost all self-control.

"Go away, go away," he stammered, pointing to the door. "I do not wish you to remain near me. I do not wish to have enemies near me. I do not wish you to remain near me to drive me mad!"

She rose, very pale, and went at once out of the room, without looking behind, carrying her work with her.

During the month which followed, Pascal took refuge in furious and incessant work. He now remained obstinately, for whole days at a time, alone in the study, sometimes passing even the nights there, going over old documents, to revise all his works on heredity. It seemed as if a sort of frenzy had seized him to assure himself of the legitimacy of his hopes, to force science to give him the certainty that humanity could be remade—made a higher, a healthy humanity. He no longer left the house, he abandoned his patients even, and lived among his papers, without air or exercise. And after a month of this overwork, which exhausted him without appeasing his domestic torments, he fell into such a state of nervous exhaustion that illness, for some time latent, declared itself at last with alarming violence.

Pascal, when he rose in the morning, felt worn out with fatigue, wearier and less refreshed than he had been on going to bed the night before. He constantly had pains all over his body; his limbs failed him, after five minutes' walk; the slightest exertion tired him; the least movement caused him intense pain. At times the floor seemed suddenly to sway beneath his feet. He had a constant buzzing in his ears, flashes of light dazzled his eyes. He took a loathing for wine, he had no longer any appetite, and his digestion was seriously impaired. Then, in the midst of the apathy of his constantly increasing idleness he would have sudden fits of aimless activity. The equilibrium was destroyed, he had at times outbreaks of nervous irritability, without any cause. The slightest emotion brought tears to his eyes. Finally, he would shut himself up in his room, and give way to paroxysms of despair so violent that he would sob for hours at a time, without any immediate cause of grief, overwhelmed simply by the immense sadness of things.

In the early part of December Pascal had a severe attack of neuralgia. Violent pains in the bones of the skull made him feel at times as if his head must split. Old Mme. Rougon, who had been informed of his illness, came to inquire after her son. But she went straight to the kitchen, wishing to have a talk with Martine first. The latter, with a heart-broken and terrified air, said to her that monsieur must certainly be going mad; and she told her of his singular behavior, the continual tramping about in his room, the locking of all the drawers, the rounds which he made from the top to the bottom of the house, until two o'clock in the morning. Tears filled her eyes and she at last hazarded the opinion that monsieur must be possessed with a devil, and that it would be well to notify the cure of St. Saturnin.

"So good a man," she said, "a man for whom one would let one's self be cut in pieces! How unfortunate it is that one cannot get him to go to church, for that would certainly cure him at once."

Clotilde, who had heard her grandmother's voice, entered at this moment. She, too, wandered through the empty rooms, spending most of her time in the deserted apartment on the ground floor. She did not speak, however, but only listened with her thoughtful and expectant air.

"Ah, goodday! It is you, my dear. Martine tells me that Pascal is possessed with a devil. That is indeed my opinion also; only the devil is called pride. He thinks that he knows everything. He is Pope and Emperor in one, and naturally it exasperates him when people don't agree with him."

She shrugged her shoulders with supreme disdain.

"As for me, all that would only make me laugh if it were not so sad. A fellow who knows nothing about anything; who has always been wrapped up in his books; who has not lived. Put him in a drawing-room, and he would know as little how to act as a new-born babe. And as for women, he does not even know what they are."

Forgetting to whom she was speaking, a young girl and a servant, she lowered her voice, and said confidentially:

"Well, one pays for being too sensible, too. Neither a wife nor a sweetheart nor anything. That is what has finally turned his brain."

Clotilde did not move. She only lowered her eyelids slowly over her large thoughtful eyes; then she raised them again, maintaining her impenetrable countenance, unwilling, unable, perhaps, to give expression to what was passing within her. This was no doubt all still confused, a complete evolution, a great change which was taking place, and which she herself did not clearly understand.

"He is upstairs, is he not?" resumed Felicite. "I have come to see him, for this must end; it is too stupid."

And she went upstairs, while Martine returned to her saucepans, and Clotilde went to wander again through the empty house.

Upstairs in the study Pascal sat seemingly in a stupor, his face bent over a large open book. He could no longer read, the words danced before his eyes, conveying no meaning to his mind. But he persisted, for it was death to him to lose his faculty for work, hitherto so powerful. His mother at once began to scold him, snatching the book from him, and flinging it upon a distant table, crying that when one was sick one should take care of one's self. He rose with a quick, angry movement, about to order her away as he had ordered Clotilde. Then, by a last effort of the will, he became again deferential.

"Mother, you know that I have never wished to dispute with you. Leave me, I beg of you."

She did not heed him, but began instead to take him to task about his continual distrust. It was he himself who had given himself a fever, always fancying that he was surrounded by enemies who were setting traps for him, and watching him to rob him. Was there any common sense in imagining that people were persecuting him in that way? And then she accused him of allowing his head to be turned by his discovery, his famous remedy for curing every disease. That was as much as to think himself equal to the good God; which only made it all the more cruel when he found out how mistaken he was. And she mentioned Lafouasse, the man whom he had killed—naturally, she could understand that that had not been very pleasant for him; indeed there was cause enough in it to make him take to his bed.

Pascal, still controlling himself, very pale and with eyes cast on the ground, contented himself with repeating:

"Mother, leave me, I beg of you."

"No, I won't leave you," she cried with the impetuosity which was natural to her, and which her great age had in no wise diminished. "I have come precisely to stir you up a little, to rid you of this fever which is consuming you. No, this cannot continue. I don't wish that we should again become the talk of the whole town on your account. I wish you to take care of yourself."

He shrugged his shoulders, and said in a low voice, as if speaking to himself, with an uneasy look, half of conviction, half of doubt:

"I am not ill."

But Felicite, beside herself, burst out, gesticulating violently:

"Not ill! not ill! Truly, there is no one like a physician for not being able to see himself. Why, my poor boy, every one that comes near you is shocked by your appearance. You are becoming insane through pride and fear!"

This time Pascal raised his head quickly, and looked her straight in the eyes, while she continued:

"This is what I had to tell you, since it seems that no one else would undertake the task. You are old enough to know what you ought to do. You should make an effort to shake off all this; you should think of something else; you should not let a fixed idea take possession of you, especially when you belong to a family like ours. You know it; have sense, and take care of yourself."

He grew paler than before, looking fixedly at her still, as if he were sounding her, to know what there was of her in him. And he contented himself with answering:

"You are right, mother. I thank you."

When he was again alone, he dropped into his seat before the table, and tried once more to read his book. But he could not succeed, any more than before, in fixing his attention sufficiently to understand the words, whose letters mingled confusedly together before his eyes. And his mother's words buzzed in his ears; a vague terror, which had some time before sprung up within him, grew and took shape, haunting him now as an immediate and clearly defined danger. He who two months before had boasted triumphantly of not belonging to the family, was he about to receive the most terrible of contradictions? Ah, this egotistic joy, this intense joy of not belonging to it, was it to give place to the terrible anguish of being struck in his turn? Was he to have the humiliation of seeing the taint revive in him? Was he to be dragged down to the horror of feeling himself in the clutches of the monster of heredity? The sublime idea, the lofty certitude which he had of abolishing suffering, of strengthening man's will, of making a new and a higher humanity, a healthy humanity, was assuredly only the beginning of the monomania of vanity. And in his bitter complaint of being watched, in his desire to watch the enemies who, he thought, were obstinately bent on his destruction, were easily to be recognized the symptoms of the monomania of suspicion. So then all the diseases of the race were to end in this terrible case—madness within a brief space, then general paralysis, and a dreadful death.

From this day forth Pascal was as if possessed. The state of nervous exhaustion into which overwork and anxiety had thrown him left him an unresisting prey to this haunting fear of madness and death. All the morbid sensations which he felt, his excessive fatigue on rising, the buzzing in his ears, the flashes of light before his eyes, even his attacks of indigestion and his paroxysms of tears, were so many infallible symptoms of the near insanity with which he believed himself threatened. He had completely lost, in his own case, the keen power of diagnosis of the observant physician, and if he still continued to reason about it, it was only to confound and pervert symptoms, under the influence of the moral and physical depression into which he had fallen. He was no longer master of himself; he was mad, so to say, to convince himself hour by hour that he must become so.

All the days of this pale December were spent by him in going deeper and deeper into his malady. Every morning he tried to escape from the haunting subject, but he invariably ended by shutting himself in the study to take up again, in spite of himself, the tangled skein of the day before.

The long study which he had made of heredity, his important researches, his works, completed the poisoning of his peace, furnishing him with ever renewed causes of disquietude. To the question which he put to himself continually as to his own hereditary case, the documents were there to answer it by all possible combinations. They were so numerous that he lost himself among them now. If he had deceived himself, if he could not set himself apart, as a remarkable case of variation, should he place himself under the head of reversional heredity, passing over one, two, or even three generations? Or was his case rather a manifestation of larvated heredity, which would bring anew proof to the support of his theory of the germ plasm, or was it simply a singular case of hereditary resemblance, the sudden apparition of some unknown ancestor at the very decline of life?

From this moment he never rested, giving himself up completely to the investigation of his case, searching his notes, rereading his books. And he studied himself, watching the least of his sensations, to deduce from them the facts on which he might judge himself. On the days when his mind was most sluggish, or when he thought he experienced particular phenomena of vision, he inclined to a predominance of the original nervous lesion; while, if he felt that his limbs were affected, his feet heavy and painful, he imagined he was suffering the indirect influence of some ancestor come from outside. Everything became confused, until at last he could recognize himself no longer, in the midst of the imaginary troubles which agitated his disturbed organism. And every evening the conclusion was the same, the same knell sounded in his brain—heredity, appalling heredity, the fear of becoming mad.

In the early part of January Clotilde was an involuntary spectator of a scene which wrung her heart. She was sitting before one of the windows of the study, reading, concealed by the high back of her chair, when she saw Pascal, who had been shut up in his room since the day before, entering. He held open before his eyes with both hands a sheet of yellow paper, in which she recognized the genealogical tree. He was so completely absorbed, his gaze was so fixed, that she might have come forward without his observing her. He spread the tree upon the table, continuing to look at it for a long time, with the terrified expression of interrogation which had become habitual to him, which gradually changed to one of supplication, the tears coursing down his cheeks.

Why, great God! would not the tree answer him, and tell him what ancestor he resembled, in order that he might inscribe his case on his own leaf, beside the others? If he was to become mad, why did not the tree tell him so clearly, which would have calmed him, for he believed that his suffering came only from his uncertainty? Tears clouded his vision, yet still he looked, he exhausted himself in this longing to know, in which his reason must finally give way.

Clotilde hastily concealed herself as she saw him walk over to the press, which he opened wide. He seized the envelopes, threw them on the table, and searched among them feverishly. It was the scene of the terrible night of the storm that was beginning over again, the gallop of nightmares, the procession of phantoms, rising at his call from this heap of old papers. As they passed by, he addressed to each of them a question, an ardent prayer, demanding the origin of his malady, hoping for a word, a whisper which should set his doubts at rest. First, it was only an indistinct murmur, then came words and fragments of phrases.

"Is it you—is it you—is it you—oh, old mother, the mother of us all—who are to give me your madness? Is it you, inebriate uncle, old scoundrel of an uncle, whose drunkenness I am to pay for? Is it you, ataxic nephew, or you, mystic nephew, or yet you, idiot niece, who are to reveal to me the truth, showing me one of the forms of the lesion from which I suffer? Or is it rather you, second cousin, who hanged yourself; or you, second cousin, who committed murder; or you, second cousin, who died of rottenness, whose tragic ends announce to me mine—death in a cell, the horrible decomposition of being?"

And the gallop continued, they rose and passed by with the speed of the wind. The papers became animate, incarnate, they jostled one another, they trampled on one another, in a wild rush of suffering humanity.

"Ah, who will tell me, who will tell me, who will tell me?—Is it he who died mad? he who was carried off by phthisis? he who was killed by paralysis? she whose constitutional feebleness caused her to die in early youth?—Whose is the poison of which I am to die? What is it, hysteria, alcoholism, tuberculosis, scrofula? And what is it going to make of me, an ataxic or a madman? A madman. Who was it said a madman? They all say it—a madman, a madman, a madman!"

Sobs choked Pascal. He let his dejected head fall among the papers, he wept endlessly, shaken by shuddering sobs. And Clotilde, seized by a sort of awe, feeling the presence of the fate which rules over races, left the room softly, holding her breath; for she knew that it would mortify him exceedingly if he knew that she had been present.

Long periods of prostration followed. January was very cold. But the sky remained wonderfully clear, a brilliant sun shone in the limpid blue; and at La Souleiade, the windows of the study facing south formed a sort of hothouse, preserving there a delightfully mild temperature. They did not even light a fire, for the room was always filled with a flood of sunshine, in which the flies that had survived the winter flew about lazily. The only sound to be heard was the buzzing of their wings. It was a close and drowsy warmth, like a breath of spring that had lingered in the old house baked by the heat of summer.

Pascal, still gloomy, dragged through the days there, and it was there, too, that he overheard one day the closing words of a conversation which aggravated his suffering. As he never left his room now before breakfast, Clotilde had received Dr. Ramond this morning in the study, and they were talking there together in an undertone, sitting beside each other in the bright sunshine.

It was the third visit which Ramond had made during the last week. Personal reasons, the necessity, especially, of establishing definitely his position as a physician at Plassans, made it expedient for him not to defer his marriage much longer: and he wished to obtain from Clotilde a decisive answer. On each of his former visits the presence of a third person had prevented him from speaking. As he desired to receive her answer from herself directly he had resolved to declare himself to her in a frank conversation. Their intimate friendship, and the discretion and good sense of both, justified him in taking this step. And he ended, smiling, looking into her eyes:

"I assure you, Clotilde, that it is the most reasonable of denouements. You know that I have loved you for a long time. I have a profound affection and esteem for you. That alone might perhaps not be sufficient, but, in addition, we understand each other perfectly, and we should be very happy together, I am convinced of it."

She did not cast down her eyes; she, too, looked at him frankly, with a friendly smile. He was, in truth, very handsome, in his vigorous young manhood.

"Why do you not marry Mlle. Leveque, the lawyer's daughter?" she asked. "She is prettier and richer than I am, and I know that she would gladly accept you. My dear friend, I fear that you are committing a folly in choosing me."

He did not grow impatient, seeming still convinced of the wisdom of his determination.

"But I do not love Mlle. Leveque, and I do love you. Besides, I have considered everything, and I repeat that I know very well what I am about. Say yes; you can take no better course."

Then she grew very serious, and a shadow passed over her face, the shadow of those reflections, of those almost unconscious inward struggles, which kept her silent for days at a time. She did not see clearly yet, she still struggled against herself, and she wished to wait.

"Well, my friend, since you are really serious, do not ask me to give you an answer to-day; grant me a few weeks longer. Master is indeed very ill. I am greatly troubled about him; and you would not like to owe my consent to a hasty impulse. I assure you, for my part, that I have a great deal of affection for you, but it would be wrong to decide at this moment; the house is too unhappy. It is agreed, is it not? I will not make you wait long."

And to change the conversation she added:

"Yes, I am uneasy about master. I wished to see you, in order to tell you so. The other day I surprised him weeping violently, and I am certain the fear of becoming mad haunts him. The day before yesterday, when you were talking to him, I saw that you were examining him. Tell me frankly, what do you think of his condition? Is he in any danger?"

"Not the slightest!" exclaimed Dr. Ramond. "His system is a little out of order, that is all. How can a man of his ability, who has made so close a study of nervous diseases, deceive himself to such an extent? It is discouraging, indeed, if the clearest and most vigorous minds can go so far astray. In his case his own discovery of hypodermic injections would be excellent. Why does he not use them with himself?"

And as the young girl replied, with a despairing gesture, that he would not listen to her, that he would not even allow her to speak to him now, Ramond said:

"Well, then, I will speak to him."

It was at this moment that Pascal came out of his room, attracted by the sound of voices. But on seeing them both so close to each other, so animated, so youthful, and so handsome in the sunshine—clothed with sunshine, as it were—he stood still in the doorway. He looked fixedly at them, and his pale face altered.

Ramond had a moment before taken Clotilde's hand, and he was holding it in his.

"It is a promise, is it not? I should like the marriage to take place this summer. You know how much I love you, and I shall eagerly await your answer."

"Very well," she answered. "Before a month all will be settled."

A sudden giddiness made Pascal stagger. Here now was this boy, his friend, his pupil, who had introduced himself into his house to rob him of his treasure! He ought to have expected this denouement, yet the sudden news of a possible marriage surprised him, overwhelmed him like an unforeseen catastrophe that had forever ruined his life. This girl whom he had fashioned, whom he had believed his own, she would leave him, then, without regret, she would leave him to die alone in his solitude. Only the day before she had made him suffer so intensely that he had asked himself whether he should not part from her and send her to her brother, who was always writing for her. For an instant he had even decided on this separation, for the good of both. Yet to find her here suddenly, with this man, to hear her promise to give him an answer, to think that she would marry, that she would soon leave him, this stabbed him to the heart.

At the sound of his heavy step as he came forward, the two young people turned round in some embarrassment.

"Why, master, we were just talking about you," said Ramond gaily. "Yes, to be frank with you, we were conspiring. Come, why do you not take care of yourself? There is nothing serious the matter with you; you would be on your feet again in a fortnight if you did."

Pascal, who had dropped into a chair, continued to look at them. He had still the power to control himself, and his countenance gave no evidence of the wound which he had just received. He would assuredly die of it, and no one would suspect the malady which had carried him off. But it was a relief to him to be able to give vent to his feelings, and he declared violently that he would not take even so much as a glass of tisane.

"Take care of myself!" he cried; "what for? Is it not all over with my old carcass?"

Ramond insisted, with a good-tempered smile.

"You are sounder than any of us. This is a trifling disturbance, and you know that you have the remedy in your own hands. Use your hypodermic injection."

Pascal did not allow him to finish. This filled the measure of his rage. He angrily asked if they wished him to kill himself, as he had killed Lafouasse. His injections! A pretty invention, of which he had good reason to be proud. He abjured medicine, and he swore that he would never again go near a patient. When people were no longer good for anything they ought to die; that would be the best thing for everybody. And that was what he was going to try to do, so as to have done with it all.

"Bah! bah!" said Ramond at last, resolving to take his leave, through fear of exciting him still further; "I will leave you with Clotilde; I am not at all uneasy, Clotilde will take care of you."

But Pascal had on this morning received the final blow. He took to his bed toward evening, and remained for two whole days without opening the door of his room. It was in vain that Clotilde, at last becoming alarmed, knocked loudly at the door. There was no answer. Martine went in her turn and begged monsieur, through the keyhole, at least to tell her if he needed anything. A deathlike silence reigned; the room seemed to be empty.

Then, on the morning of the third day, as the young girl by chance turned the knob, the door yielded; perhaps it had been unlocked for hours. And she might enter freely this room in which she had never set foot: a large room, rendered cold by its northern exposure, in which she saw a small iron bed without curtains, a shower bath in a corner, a long black wooden table, a few chairs, and on the table, on the floor, along the walls, an array of chemical apparatus, mortars, furnaces, machines, instrument cases. Pascal, up and dressed, was sitting on the edge of his bed, in trying to arrange which he had exhausted himself.

"Don't you want me to nurse you, then?" she asked with anxious tenderness, without venturing to advance into the room.

"Oh, you can come in," he said with a dejected gesture. "I won't beat you. I have not the strength to do that now."

And from this day on he tolerated her about him, and allowed her to wait on him. But he had caprices still. He would not let her enter the room when he was in bed, possessed by a sort of morbid shame; then he made her send him Martine. But he seldom remained in bed, dragging himself about from chair to chair, in his utter inability to do any kind of work. His malady continued to grow worse, until at last he was reduced to utter despair, tortured by sick headaches, and without the strength, as he said, to put one foot before the other, convinced every morning that he would spend the night at the Tulettes, a raving maniac. He grew thin; his face, under its crown of white hair—which he still cared for through a last remnant of vanity—acquired a look of suffering, of tragic beauty. And although he allowed himself to be waited on, he refused roughly all remedies, in the distrust of medicine into which he had fallen.

Clotilde now devoted herself to him entirely. She gave up everything else; at first she attended low mass, then she left off going to church altogether. In her impatience for some certain happiness, she felt as if she were taking a step toward that end by thus devoting all her moments to the service of a beloved being whom she wished to see once more well and happy. She made a complete sacrifice of herself, she sought to find happiness in the happiness of another; and all this unconsciously, solely at the impulse of her woman's heart, in the midst of the crisis through which she was still passing, and which was modifying her character profoundly, without her knowledge. She remained silent regarding the disagreement which separated them. The idea did not again occur to her to throw herself on his neck, crying that she was his, that he might return to life, since she gave herself to him. In her thoughts she grieved to see him suffer; she was only an affectionate girl, who took care of him, as any female relative would have done. And her attentions were very pure, very delicate, occupying her life so completely that her days now passed swiftly, exempt from tormenting thoughts of the Beyond, filled with the one wish of curing him.

But where she had a hard battle to fight was in prevailing upon him to use his hypodermic injections upon himself. He flew into a passion, disowned his discovery, and called himself an imbecile. She too cried out. It was she now who had faith in science, who grew indignant at seeing him doubt his own genius. He resisted for a long time; then yielding to the empire which she had acquired over him, he consented, simply to avoid the affectionate dispute which she renewed with him every morning. From the very first he experienced great relief from the injections, although he refused to acknowledge it. His mind became clearer, and he gradually gained strength. Then she was exultant, filled with enthusiastic pride in him. She vaunted his treatment, and became indignant because he did not admire himself, as an example of the miracles which he was able to work. He smiled; he was now beginning to see clearly into his own condition. Ramond had spoken truly, his illness had been nothing but nervous exhaustion. Perhaps he would get over it after all.

"Ah, it is you who are curing me, little girl," he would say, not wishing to confess his hopes. "Medicines, you see, act according to the hand that gives them."

The convalescence was slow, lasting through the whole of February. The weather remained clear and cold; there was not a single day in which the study was not flooded with warm, pale sunshine. There were hours of relapse, however, hours of the blackest melancholy, in which all the patient's terrors returned; when his guardian, disconsolate, was obliged to sit at the other end of the room, in order not to irritate him still more. He despaired anew of his recovery. He became again bitter and aggressively ironical.

It was on one of those bad days that Pascal, approaching a window, saw his neighbor, M. Bellombre, the retired professor, making the round of his garden to see if his fruit trees were well covered with blossoms. The sight of the old man, so neat and so erect, with the fine placidity of the egoist, on whom illness had apparently never laid hold, suddenly put Pascal beside himself.

"Ah!" he growled, "there is one who will never overwork himself, who will never endanger his health by worrying!"

And he launched forth into an ironical eulogy on selfishness. To be alone in the world, not to have a friend, to have neither wife nor child, what happiness! That hard-hearted miser, who for forty years had had only other people's children to cuff, who lived aloof from the world, without even a dog, with a deaf and dumb gardener older than himself, was he not an example of the greatest happiness possible on earth? Without a responsibility, without a duty, without an anxiety, other than that of taking care of his dear health! He was a wise man, he would live a hundred years.

"Ah, the fear of life! that is cowardice which is truly the best wisdom. To think that I should ever have regretted not having a child of my own! Has any one a right to bring miserable creatures into the world? Bad heredity should be ended, life should be ended. The only honest man is that old coward there!"

M. Bellombre continued peacefully making the round of his pear trees in the March sunshine. He did not risk a too hasty movement; he economized his fresh old age. If he met a stone in his path, he pushed it aside with the end of his cane, and then walked tranquilly on.

"Look at him! Is he not well preserved; is he not handsome? Have not all the blessings of heaven been showered down upon him? He is the happiest man I know."

Clotilde, who had listened in silence, suffered from the irony of Pascal, the full bitterness of which she divined. She, who usually took M. Bellombre's part, felt a protest rise up within her. Tears came to her eyes, and she answered simply in a low voice:

"Yes; but he is not loved."

These words put a sudden end to the painful scene. Pascal, as if he had received an electric shock, turned and looked at her. A sudden rush of tenderness brought tears to his eyes also, and he left the room to keep from weeping.

The days wore on in the midst of these alternations of good and bad hours. He recovered his strength but slowly, and what put him in despair was that whenever he attempted to work he was seized by a profuse perspiration. If he had persisted, he would assuredly have fainted. So long as he did not work he felt that his convalescence was making little progress. He began to take an interest again, however, in his accustomed investigations. He read over again the last pages that he had written, and, with this reawakening of the scientist in him, his former anxieties returned. At one time he fell into a state of such depression, that the house and all it contained ceased to exist for him. He might have been robbed, everything he possessed might have been taken and destroyed, without his even being conscious of the disaster. Now he became again watchful, from time to time he would feel his pocket, to assure himself that the key of the press was there.

But one morning when he had overslept himself, and did not leave his room until eleven o'clock, he saw Clotilde in the study, quietly occupied in copying with great exactness in pastel a branch of flowering almond. She looked up, smiling; and taking a key that was lying beside her on the desk, she offered it to him, saying:

"Here, master."

Surprised, not yet comprehending, he looked at the object which she held toward him.

"What is that?" he asked.

"It is the key of the press, which you must have dropped from your pocket yesterday, and which I picked up here this morning."

Pascal took it with extraordinary emotion. He looked at it, and then at Clotilde. Was it ended, then? She would persecute him no more. She was no longer eager to rob everything, to burn everything. And seeing her still smiling, she also looking moved, an immense joy filled his heart.

He caught her in his arms, crying:

"Ah, little girl, if we might only not be too unhappy!"

Then he opened a drawer of his table and threw the key into it, as he used to do formerly.

From this time on he gained strength, and his convalescence progressed more rapidly. Relapses were still possible, for he was still very weak. But he was able to write, and this made the days less heavy. The sun, too, shone more brightly, the study being so warm at times that it became necessary to half close the shutters. He refused to see visitors, barely tolerated Martine, and had his mother told that he was sleeping, when she came at long intervals to inquire for him. He was happy only in this delightful solitude, nursed by the rebel, the enemy of yesterday, the docile pupil of to-day. They would often sit together in silence for a long time, without feeling any constraint. They meditated, or lost themselves in infinitely sweet reveries.

One day, however, Pascal seemed very grave. He was now convinced that his illness had resulted from purely accidental causes, and that heredity had had no part in it. But this filled him none the less with humility.

"My God!" he murmured, "how insignificant we are! I who thought myself so strong, who was so proud of my sane reason! And here have I barely escaped being made insane by a little trouble and overwork!"

He was silent, and sank again into thought. After a time his eyes brightened, he had conquered himself. And in a moment of reason and courage, he came to a resolution.

"If I am getting better," he said, "it is especially for your sake that I am glad."

Clotilde, not understanding, looked up and said:

"How is that?"

"Yes, on account of your marriage. Now you will be able to fix the day."

She still seemed surprised.

"Ah, true—my marriage!"

"Shall we decide at once upon the second week in June?"

"Yes, the second week in June; that will do very well."

They spoke no more; she fixed her eyes again on the piece of sewing on which she was engaged, while he, motionless, and with a grave face, sat looking into space.

VII.

On this day, on arriving at La Souleiade, old Mme. Rougon perceived Martine in the kitchen garden, engaged in planting leeks; and, as she sometimes did, she went over to the servant to have a chat with her, and find out from her how things were going on, before entering the house.

For some time past she had been in despair about what she called Clotilde's desertion. She felt truly that she would now never obtain the documents through her. The girl was behaving disgracefully, she was siding with Pascal, after all she had done for her; and she was becoming perverted to such a degree that for a month past she had not been seen in Church. Thus she returned to her first idea, to get Clotilde away and win her son over when, left alone, he should be weakened by solitude. Since she had not been able to persuade the girl to go live with her brother, she eagerly desired the marriage. She would like to throw her into Dr. Ramond's arms to-morrow, in her impatience at so many delays. And she had come this afternoon with a feverish desire to hurry on matters.

"Good-day, Martine. How is every one here?"

The servant, kneeling down, her hands full of clay, lifted up her pale face, protected against the sun by a handkerchief tied over her cap.

"As usual, madame, pretty well."

They went on talking, Felicite treating her as a confidante, as a devoted daughter, one of the family, to whom she could tell everything. She began by questioning her; she wished to know if Dr. Ramond had come that morning. He had come, but they had talked only about indifferent matters. This put her in despair, for she had seen the doctor on the previous day, and he had unbosomed himself to her, chagrined at not having yet received a decisive answer, and eager now to obtain at least Clotilde's promise. Things could not go on in this way, the young girl must be compelled to engage herself to him.

"He has too much delicacy," she cried. "I have told him so. I knew very well that this morning, even, he would not venture to demand a positive answer. And I have come to interfere in the matter. We shall see if I cannot oblige her to come to a decision."

Then, more calmly:

"My son is on his feet now; he does not need her."

Martine, who was again stooping over the bed, planting her leeks, straightened herself quickly.

"Ah, that for sure!"

And a flush passed over her face, worn by thirty years of service. For a wound bled within her; for some time past the master scarcely tolerated her about him. During the whole time of his illness he had kept her at a distance, accepting her services less and less every day, and finally closing altogether to her the door of his room and of the workroom. She had a vague consciousness of what was taking place, an instinctive jealousy tortured her, in her adoration of the master, whose chattel she had been satisfied to be for so many years.

"For sure, we have no need of mademoiselle. I am quite able to take care of monsieur."

Then she, who was so discreet, spoke of her labors in the garden, saying that she made time to cultivate the vegetables, so as to save a few days' wages of a man. True, the house was large, but when one was not afraid of work, one could manage to do all there was to be done. And then, when mademoiselle should have left them, that would be always one less to wait upon. And her eyes brightened unconsciously at the thought of the great solitude, of the happy peace in which they should live after this departure.

"It would give me pain," she said, lowering her voice, "for it would certainly give monsieur a great deal. I would never have believed that I could be brought to wish for such a separation. Only, madame, I agree with you that it is necessary, for I am greatly afraid that mademoiselle will end by going to ruin here, and that there will be another soul lost to the good God. Ah, it is very sad; my heart is so heavy about it sometimes that it is ready to burst."

"They are both upstairs, are they not?" said Felicite. "I will go up and see them, and I will undertake to oblige them to end the matter."

An hour later, when she came down again, she found Martine still on her knees on the soft earth, finishing her planting. Upstairs, from her first words, when she said that she had been talking with Dr. Ramond, and that he had shown himself anxious to know his fate quickly, she saw that Dr. Pascal approved—he looked grave, he nodded his head as if to say that this wish seemed to him very natural. Clotilde, herself, ceasing to smile, seemed to listen to him with deference. But she manifested some surprise. Why did they press her? Master had fixed the marriage for the second week in June; she had, then, two full months before her. Very soon she would speak about it with Ramond. Marriage was so serious a matter that they might very well give her time to reflect, and let her wait until the last moment to engage herself. And she said all this with her air of good sense, like a person resolved on coming to a decision. And Felicite was obliged to content herself with the evident desire that both had that matters should have the most reasonable conclusion.

"Indeed I believe that it is settled," ended Felicite. "He seems to place no obstacle in the way, and she seems only to wish not to act hastily, like a girl who desires to examine her heart closely, before engaging herself for life. I will give her a week more for reflection."

Martine, sitting on her heels, was looking fixedly on the ground with a clouded face.

"Yes, yes," she murmured, in a low voice, "mademoiselle has been reflecting a great deal of late. I am always meeting her in some corner. You speak to her, and she does not answer you. That is the way people are when they are breeding a disease, or when they have a secret on their mind. There is something going on; she is no longer the same, no longer the same."

And she took the dibble again and planted a leek, in her rage for work; while old Mme. Rougon went away, somewhat tranquillized; certain, she said, that the marriage would take place.

Pascal, in effect, seemed to accept Clotilde's marriage as a thing settled, inevitable. He had not spoken with her about it again, the rare allusions which they made to it between themselves, in their hourly conversations, left them undisturbed; and it was simply as if the two months which they still had to live together were to be without end, an eternity stretching beyond their view.

She, especially, would look at him smiling, putting off to a future day troubles and decisions with a pretty vague gesture, as if to leave everything to beneficent life. He, now well and gaining strength daily, grew melancholy only when he returned to the solitude of his chamber at night, after she had retired. He shuddered and turned cold at the thought that a time would come when he would be always alone. Was it the beginning of old age that made him shiver in this way? He seemed to see it stretching before him, like a shadowy region in which he already began to feel all his energy melting away. And then the regret of having neither wife nor child filled him with rebelliousness, and wrung his heart with intolerable anguish.

Ah, why had he not lived! There were times when he cursed science, accusing it of having taken from him the best part of his manhood. He had let himself be devoured by work; work had consumed his brain, consumed his heart, consumed his flesh. All this solitary, passionate labor had produced only books, blackened paper, that would be scattered to the winds, whose cold leaves chilled his hands as he turned them over. And no living woman's breast to lean upon, no child's warm locks to kiss! He had lived the cold, solitary life of a selfish scientist, and he would die in cold solitude. Was he indeed going to die thus? Would he never taste the happiness enjoyed by even the common porters, by the carters who cracked their whips, passing by under his windows? But he must hasten, if he would; soon, no doubt, it would be too late. All his unemployed youth, all his pent-up desires, surged tumultuously through his veins. He swore that he would yet love, that he would live a new life, that he would drain the cup of every passion that he had not yet tasted, before he should be an old man. He would knock at the doors, he would stop the passers-by, he would scour the fields and town.

On the following day, when he had taken his shower bath and left his room, all his fever was calmed, the burning pictures had faded away, and he fell back into his natural timidity. Then, on the next night, the fear of solitude drove sleep away as before, his blood kindled again, and the same despair, the same rebelliousness, the same longing not to die without having known family joys returned. He suffered a great deal in this crisis.

During these feverish nights, with eyes wide open in the darkness, he dreamed always, over and over again the same dream. A girl would come along the road, a girl of twenty, marvelously beautiful; and she would enter and kneel down before him in an attitude of submissive adoration, and he would marry her. She was one of those pilgrims of love such as we find in ancient story, who have followed a star to come and restore health and strength to some aged king, powerful and covered with glory. He was the aged king, and she adored him, she wrought the miracle, with her twenty years, of bestowing on him a part of her youth. In her love he recovered his courage and his faith in life.

Ah, youth! he hungered fiercely for it. In his declining days this passionate longing for youth was like a revolt against approaching age, a desperate desire to turn back, to be young again, to begin life over again. And in this longing to begin life over again, there was not only regret for the vanished joys of youth, the inestimable treasure of dead hours, to which memory lent its charm; there was also the determined will to enjoy, now, his health and strength, to lose nothing of the joy of loving! Ah, youth! how eagerly he would taste of its every pleasure, how eagerly he would drain every cup, before his teeth should fall out, before his limbs should grow feeble, before the blood should be chilled in his veins. A pang pierced his heart when he remembered himself, a slender youth of twenty, running and leaping agilely, vigorous and hardy as a young oak, his teeth glistening, his hair black and luxuriant. How he would cherish them, these gifts scorned before, if a miracle could restore them to him!

And youthful womanhood, a young girl who might chance to pass by, disturbed him, causing him profound emotion. This was often even altogether apart from the individual: the image, merely, of youth, the perfume and the dazzling freshness which emanated from it, bright eyes, healthy lips, blooming cheeks, a delicate neck, above all, rounded and satin-smooth, shaded on the back with down; and youthful womanhood always presented itself to him tall and slight, divinely slender in its chaste nudeness. His eyes, gazing into vacancy, followed the vision, his heart was steeped in infinite longing. There was nothing good or desirable but youth; it was the flower of the world, the only beauty, the only joy, the only true good, with health, which nature could bestow on man. Ah, to begin life over again, to be young again, to clasp in his embrace youthful womanhood!

Pascal and Clotilde, now that the fine April days had come, covering the fruit trees with blossoms, resumed their morning walks in La Souleiade. It was the first time that he had gone out since his illness, and she led him to the threshing yard, along the paths in the pine wood, and back again to the terrace crossed by the two bars of shadows thrown by the secular cypresses. The sun had already warmed the old flagstones there, and the wide horizon stretched out under a dazzling sky.

One morning when Clotilde had been running, she returned to the house in such exuberant spirits and so full of pleasant excitement that she went up to the workroom without taking off either her garden hat or the lace scarf which she had tied around her neck.

"Oh," she said, "I am so warm! And how stupid I am, not to have taken off my things downstairs. I will go down again at once."

She had thrown the scarf on a chair on entering.

But her feverish fingers became impatient when she tried to untie the strings of her large straw hat.

"There, now! I have fastened the knot. I cannot undo it, and you must come to my assistance."

Pascal, happy and excited too by the pleasure of the walk, rejoiced to see her so beautiful and so merry. He went over and stood in front of her.

"Wait; hold up your chin. Oh, if you keep moving like that, how do you suppose I can do it?"

She laughed aloud. He could see the laughter swelling her throat, like a wave of sound. His fingers became entangled under her chin, that delicious part of the throat whose warm satin he involuntarily touched. She had on a gown cut sloping in the neck, and through the opening he inhaled all the living perfume of the woman, the pure fragrance of her youth, warmed by the sunshine. All at once a vertigo seized him and he thought he was going to faint.

"No, no! I cannot do it," he said, "unless you keep still!"

The blood throbbed in his temples, and his fingers trembled, while she leaned further back, unconsciously offering the temptation of her fresh girlish beauty. It was the vision of royal youth, the bright eyes, the healthy lips, the blooming cheeks, above all, the delicate neck, satin-smooth and round, shaded on the back by down. And she seemed to him so delicately graceful, with her slender throat, in her divine bloom!

"There, it is done!" she cried.

Without knowing how, he had untied the strings. The room whirled round, and then he saw her again, bareheaded now, with her starlike face, shaking back her golden curls laughingly. Then he was seized with a fear that he would catch her in his arms and press mad kisses on her bare neck, and arms, and throat. And he fled from the room, taking with him the hat, which he had kept in his hand, saying:

"I will hang it in the hall. Wait for me; I want to speak to Martine."

Once downstairs, he hurried to the abandoned room and locked himself into it, trembling lest she should become uneasy and come down here to seek him. He looked wild and haggard, as if he had just committed a crime. He spoke aloud, and he trembled as he gave utterance for the first time to the cry that he had always loved her madly, passionately. Yes, ever since she had grown into womanhood he had adored her. And he saw her clearly before him, as if a curtain had been suddenly torn aside, as she was when, from an awkward girl, she became a charming and lovely creature, with her long tapering limbs, her strong slender body, with its round throat, round neck, and round and supple arms. And it was monstrous, but it was true—he hungered for all this with a devouring hunger, for this youth, this fresh, blooming, fragrant flesh.

Then Pascal, dropping into a rickety chair, hid his face in his hands, as if to shut out the light of day, and burst into great sobs. Good God! what was to become of him? A girl whom his brother had confided to him, whom he had brought up like a good father, and who was now—this temptress of twenty-five—a woman in her supreme omnipotence! He felt himself more defenseless, weaker than a child.

And above this physical desire, he loved her also with an immense tenderness, enamored of her moral and intellectual being, of her right-mindedness, of her fine intelligence, so fearless and so clear. Even their discord, the disquietude about spiritual things by which she was tortured, made her only all the more precious to him, as if she were a being different from himself, in whom he found a little of the infinity of things. She pleased him in her rebellions, when she held her ground against him,—she was his companion and pupil; he saw her such as he had made her, with her great heart, her passionate frankness, her triumphant reason. And she was always present with him; he did not believe that he could exist where she was not; he had need of her breath; of the flutter of her skirts near him; of her thoughtfulness and affection, by which he felt himself constantly surrounded; of her looks; of her smile; of her whole daily woman's life, which she had given him, which she would not have the cruelty to take back from him again. At the thought that she was going away, that she would not be always here, it seemed to him as if the heavens were about to fall and crush him; as if the end of all things had come; as if he were about to be plunged in icy darkness. She alone existed in the world, she alone was lofty and virtuous, intelligent and beautiful, with a miraculous beauty. Why, then, since he adored her and since he was her master, did he not go upstairs and take her in his arms and kiss her like an idol? They were both free, she was ignorant of nothing, she was a woman in age. This would be happiness.

Pascal, who had ceased to weep, rose, and would have walked to the door. But suddenly he dropped again into his chair, bursting into a fresh passion of sobs. No, no, it was abominable, it could not be! He felt on his head the frost of his white hair; and he had a horror of his age, of his fifty-nine years, when he thought of her twenty-five years. His former chill fear again took possession of him, the certainty that she had subjugated him, that he would be powerless against the daily temptation. And he saw her giving him the strings of her hat to untie; compelling him to lean over her to make some correction in her work; and he saw himself, too, blind, mad, devouring her neck with ardent kisses. His indignation against himself at this was so great that he arose, now courageously, and had the strength to go upstairs to the workroom, determined to conquer himself.

Upstairs Clotilde had tranquilly resumed her drawing. She did not even look around at his entrance, but contented herself with saying:

"How long you have been! I was beginning to think that Martine must have made a mistake of at least ten sous in her accounts."

This customary jest about the servant's miserliness made him laugh. And he went and sat down quietly at his table. They did not speak again until breakfast time. A great sweetness bathed him and calmed him, now that he was near her. He ventured to look at her, and he was touched by her delicate profile, by her serious, womanly air of application. Had he been the prey of a nightmare, downstairs, then? Would he be able to conquer himself so easily?

"Ah!" he cried, when Martine called them, "how hungry I am! You shall see how I am going to make new muscle!"

She went over to him, and took him by the arm, saying:

"That's right, master; you must be gay and strong!"

But that night, when he was in his own room, the agony began again. At the thought of losing her he was obliged to bury his face in the pillow to stifle his cries. He pictured her to himself in the arms of another, and all the tortures of jealousy racked his soul. Never could he find the courage to consent to such a sacrifice. All sorts of plans clasped together in his seething brain; he would turn her from the marriage, and keep her with him, without ever allowing her to suspect his passion; he would take her away, and they would go from city to city, occupying their minds with endless studies, in order to keep up their companionship as master and pupil; or even, if it should be necessary, he would send her to her brother to nurse him, he would lose her forever rather than give her to a husband. And at each of these resolutions he felt his heart, torn asunder, cry out with anguish in the imperious need of possessing her entirely. He was no longer satisfied with her presence, he wished to keep her for himself, with himself, as she appeared to him in her radiant beauty, in the darkness of his chamber, with her unbound hair falling around her.

His arms clasped the empty air, and he sprang out of bed, staggering like a drunken man; and it was only in the darkness and silence of the workroom that he awoke from this sudden fit of madness. Where, then, was he going, great God? To knock at the door of this sleeping child? to break it in, perhaps, with a blow of his shoulder? The soft, pure respiration, which he fancied he heard like a sacred wind in the midst of the profound silence, struck him on the face and turned him back. And he returned to his room and threw himself on his bed, in a passion of shame and wild despair.

On the following day when he arose, Pascal, worn out by want of sleep, had come to a decision. He took his daily shower bath, and he felt himself stronger and saner. The resolution to which he had come was to compel Clotilde to give her word. When she should have formally promised to marry Ramond, it seemed to him that this final solution would calm him, would forbid his indulging in any false hopes. This would be a barrier the more, an insurmountable barrier between her and him. He would be from that moment armed against his desire, and if he still suffered, it would be suffering only, without the horrible fear of becoming a dishonorable man.

On this morning, when he told the young girl that she ought to delay no longer, that she owed a decisive answer to the worthy fellow who had been awaiting it so long, she seemed at first astonished. She looked straight into his eyes, but he had sufficient command over himself not to show confusion; he insisted merely, with a slightly grieved air, as if it distressed him to have to say these things to her. Finally, she smiled faintly and turned her head aside, saying:

"Then, master, you wish me to leave you?"

"My dear," he answered evasively, "I assure you that this is becoming ridiculous. Ramond will have the right to be angry."

She went over to her desk, to arrange some papers which were on it. Then, after a moment's silence, she said:

"It is odd; now you are siding with grandmother and Martine. They, too, are persecuting me to end this matter. I thought I had a few days more. But, in truth, if you all three urge me—"

She did not finish, and he did not press her to explain herself more clearly.

"When do you wish me to tell Ramond to come, then?"

"Why, he may come whenever he wishes; it does not displease me to see him. But don't trouble yourself. I will let him know that we will expect him one of these afternoons."

On the following day the same scene began over again. Clotilde had taken no step yet, and Pascal was now angry. He suffered martyrdom; he had crises of anguish and rebelliousness when she was not present to calm him by her smiling freshness. And he insisted, in emphatic language, that she should behave seriously and not trifle any longer with an honorable man who loved her.

"The devil! Since the thing is decided, let us be done with it. I warn you that I will send word to Ramond, and that he will be here to-morrow at three o'clock."

She listened in silence, her eyes fixed on the ground. Neither seemed to wish to touch upon the question as to whether the marriage had really been decided on or not, and they took the standpoint that there had been a previous decision, which was irrevocable. When she looked up again he trembled, for he felt a breath pass by; he thought she was on the point of saying that she had questioned herself, and that she refused this marriage. What would he have done, what would have become of him, good God! Already he was filled with an immense joy and a wild terror. But she looked at him with the discreet and affectionate smile which never now left her lips, and she answered with a submissive air:

"As you please, master. Send him word to be here to-morrow at three o'clock."

Pascal spent so dreadful a night that he rose late, saying, as an excuse, that he had one of his old headaches. He found relief only under the icy deluge of the shower bath. At ten o'clock he left the house, saying he would go himself to see Ramond; but he had another object in going out—he had seen at a show in Plassans a corsage of old point d'Alencon; a marvel of beauty which lay there awaiting some lover's generous folly, and the thought had come to him in the midst of the tortures of the night, to make a present of it to Clotilde, to adorn her wedding gown. This bitter idea of himself adorning her, of making her beautiful and fair for the gift of herself, touched his heart, exhausted by sacrifice. She knew the corsage, she had admired it with him one day wonderingly, wishing for it only to place it on the shoulders of the Virgin at St. Saturnin, an antique Virgin adored by the faithful. The shopkeeper gave it to him in a little box which he could conceal, and which he hid, on his return to the house, in the bottom of his writing-desk.

At three o'clock Dr. Ramond presented himself, and he found Pascal and Clotilde in the parlor, where they had been awaiting him with secret excitement and a somewhat forced gaiety, avoiding any further allusion to his visit. They received him smilingly with exaggerated cordiality.

"Why, you are perfectly well again, master!" said the young man. "You never looked so strong."

Pascal shook his head.

"Oh, oh, strong, perhaps! only the heart is no longer here."

This involuntary avowal made Clotilde start, and she looked from one to the other, as if, by the force of circumstances, she compared them with each other—Ramond, with his smiling and superb face—the face of the handsome physician adored by the women—his luxuriant black hair and beard, in all the splendor of his young manhood; and Pascal, with his white hair and his white beard. This fleece of snow, still so abundant, retained the tragic beauty of the six months of torture that he had just passed through. His sorrowful face had aged a little, only his eyes remained still youthful; brown eyes, brilliant and limpid. But at this moment all his features expressed so much gentleness, such exalted goodness, that Clotilde ended by letting her gaze rest upon him with profound tenderness. There was silence for a moment and each heart thrilled.

"Well, my children," resumed Pascal heroically, "I think you have something to say to each other. I have something to do, too, downstairs. I will come up again presently."

And he left the room, smiling back at them.

And soon as they were alone, Clotilde went frankly straight over to Ramond, with both hands outstretched. Taking his hands in hers, she held them as she spoke.

"Listen, my dear friend; I am going to give you a great grief. You must not be too angry with me, for I assure you that I have a very profound friendship for you."

He understood at once, and he turned very pale.

"Clotilde give me no answer now, I beg of you; take more time, if you wish to reflect further."

"It is useless, my dear friend, my decision is made."

She looked at him with her fine, loyal look. She had not released his hands, in order that he might know that she was not excited, and that she was his friend. And it was he who resumed, in a low voice:

"Then you say no?"

"I say no, and I assure you that it pains me greatly to say it. Ask me nothing; you will no doubt know later on."

He sat down, crushed by the emotion which he repressed like a strong and self-contained man, whose mental balance the greatest sufferings cannot disturb. Never before had any grief agitated him like this. He remained mute, while she, standing, continued:

"And above all, my friend, do not believe that I have played the coquette with you. If I have allowed you to hope, if I have made you wait so long for my answer, it was because I did not in very truth see clearly myself. You cannot imagine through what a crisis I have just passed—a veritable tempest of emotions, surrounded by darkness from out of which I have but just found my way."

He spoke at last.

"Since it is your wish, I will ask you nothing. Besides, it is sufficient for you to answer one question. You do not love me, Clotilde?"

She did not hesitate, but said gravely, with an emotion which softened the frankness of her answer:

"It is true, I do not love you; I have only a very sincere affection for you."

He rose, and stopped by a gesture the kind words which she would have added.

"It is ended; let us never speak of it again. I wished you to be happy. Do not grieve for me. At this moment I feel as if the house had just fallen about me in ruins. But I must only extricate myself as best I can."

A wave of color passed over his pale face, he gasped for air, he crossed over to the window, then he walked back with a heavy step, seeking to recover his self-possession. He drew a long breath. In the painful silence which had fallen they heard Pascal coming upstairs noisily, to announce his return.

"I entreat you," murmured Clotilde hurriedly, "to say nothing to master. He does not know my decision, and I wish to break it to him myself, for he was bent upon this marriage."

Pascal stood still in the doorway. He was trembling and breathless, as if he had come upstairs too quickly. He still found strength to smile at them, saying:

"Well, children, have you come to an understanding?"

"Yes, undoubtedly," responded Ramond, as agitated as himself.

"Then it is all settled?"

"Quite," said Clotilde, who had been seized by a faintness.

Pascal walked over to his work-table, supporting himself by the furniture, and dropped into the chair beside it.

"Ah, ah! you see the legs are not so strong after all. It is this old carcass of a body. But the heart is strong. And I am very happy, my children, your happiness will make me well again."

But when Ramond, after a few minutes' further conversation, had gone away, he seemed troubled at finding himself alone with the young girl, and he again asked her:

"It is settled, quite settled; you swear it to me?"

"Entirely settled."

After this he did not speak again. He nodded his head, as if to repeat that he was delighted; that nothing could be better; that at last they were all going to live in peace. He closed his eyes, feigning to drop asleep, as he sometimes did in the afternoon. But his heart beat violently, and his closely shut eyelids held back the tears.

That evening, at about ten o'clock, when Clotilde went downstairs for a moment to give an order to Martine before she should have gone to bed, Pascal profited by the opportunity of being left alone, to go and lay the little box containing the lace corsage on the young girl's bed. She came upstairs again, wished him the accustomed good-night, and he had been for at least twenty minutes in his own room, and was already in his shirt sleeves, when a burst of gaiety sounded outside his door. A little hand tapped, and a fresh voice cried, laughing:

"Come, come and look!"

He opened the door, unable to resist this appeal of youth, conquered by his joy.

"Oh, come, come and see what a beautiful little bird has put on my bed!"

And she drew him to her room, taking no refusal. She had lighted the two candles in it, and the antique, pleasant chamber, with its hangings of faded rose color, seemed transformed into a chapel; and on the bed, like a sacred cloth offered to the adoration of the faithful, she had spread the corsage of old point d'Alencon.

"You would not believe it! Imagine, I did not see the box at first. I set things in order a little, as I do every evening. I undressed, and it was only when I was getting into bed that I noticed your present. Ah, what a surprise! I was overwhelmed by it! I felt that I could never wait for the morning, and I put on a skirt and ran to look for you."

It was not until then that he perceived that she was only half dressed, as on the night of the storm, when he had surprised her stealing his papers. And she seemed divine, with her tall, girlish form, her tapering limbs, her supple arms, her slender body, with its small, firm throat.

She took his hands and pressed them caressingly in her little ones.

"How good you are; how I thank you! Such a marvel of beauty, so lovely a present for me, who am nobody! And you remember that I had admired it, this antique relic of art. I said to you that only the Virgin of St. Saturnin was worthy of wearing it on her shoulders. I am so happy! oh, so happy! For it is true, I love beautiful things; I love them so passionately that at times I wish for impossibilities, gowns woven of sunbeams, impalpable veils made of the blue of heaven. How beautiful I am going to look! how beautiful I am going to look!"

Radiant in her ecstatic gratitude, she drew close to him, still looking at the corsage, and compelling him to admire it with her. Then a sudden curiosity seized her.

"But why did you make me this royal present?"

Ever since she had come to seek him in her joyful excitement, Pascal had been walking in a dream. He was moved to tears by this affectionate gratitude; he stood there, not feeling the terror which he had dreaded, but seeming, on the contrary, to be filled with joy, as at the approach of a great and miraculous happiness. This chamber, which he never entered, had the religious sweetness of holy places that satisfy all longings for the unattainable.

His countenance, however, expressed surprise. And he answered:

"Why, this present, my dear, is for your wedding gown."

She, in her turn, looked for a moment surprised as if she had not understood him. Then, with the sweet and singular smile which she had worn of late she said gayly:

"Ah, true, my marriage!"

Then she grew serious again, and said:

"Then you want to get rid of me? It was in order to have me here no longer that you were so bent upon marrying me. Do you still think me your enemy, then?"

He felt his tortures return, and he looked away from her, wishing to retain his courage.

"My enemy, yes. Are you not so? We have suffered so much through each other these last days. It is better in truth that we should separate. And then I do not know what your thoughts are; you have never given me the answer I have been waiting for."

She tried in vain to catch his glance, which he still kept turned away. She began to talk of the terrible night on which they had gone together through the papers. It was true, in the shock which her whole being had suffered, she had not yet told him whether she was with him or against him. He had a right to demand an answer.

She again took his hands in hers, and forced him to look at her.

"And it is because I am your enemy that you are sending me away? I am not your enemy. I am your servant, your chattel, your property. Do you hear? I am with you and for you, for you alone!"

His face grew radiant; an intense joy shone within his eyes.

"Yes, I will wear this lace. It is for my wedding day, for I wish to be beautiful, very beautiful for you. But do you not understand me, then? You are my master; it is you I love."

"No, no! be silent; you will make me mad! You are betrothed to another. You have given your word. All this madness is happily impossible."

"The other! I have compared him with you, and I have chosen you. I have dismissed him. He has gone away, and he will never return. There are only we two now, and it is you I love, and you love me. I know it, and I give myself to you."

He trembled violently. He had ceased to struggle, vanquished by the longing of eternal love.

The spacious chamber, with its antique furniture, warmed by youth, was as if filled with light. There was no longer either fear or suffering; they were free. She gave herself to him knowingly, willingly, and he accepted the supreme gift like a priceless treasure which the strength of his love had won. Suddenly she murmured in his ear, in a caressing voice, lingering tenderly on the words:

"Master, oh, master, master!"

And this word, which she used formerly as a matter of habit, at this hour acquired a profound significance, lengthening out and prolonging itself, as if it expressed the gift of her whole being. She uttered it with grateful fervor, like a woman who accepts, and who surrenders herself. Was not the mystic vanquished, the real acknowledged, life glorified with love at last confessed and shared.

"Master, master, this comes from far back. I must tell you; I must make my confession. It is true that I went to church in order to be happy. But I could not believe. I wished to understand too much; my reason rebelled against their dogmas; their paradise appeared to me an incredible puerility. But I believed that the world does not stop at sensation; that there is a whole unknown world, which must be taken into account; and this, master, I believe still. It is the idea of the Beyond, which not even happiness, found at last upon your neck, will efface. But this longing for happiness, this longing to be happy at once, to have some certainty—how I have suffered from it. If I went to church, it was because I missed something, and I went there to seek it. My anguish consisted in this irresistible need to satisfy my longing. You remember what you used to call my eternal thirst for illusion and falsehood. One night, in the threshing yard, under the great starry sky, do you remember? I burst out against your science, I was indignant because of the ruins with which it strews the earth, I turned my eyes away from the dreadful wounds which it exposes. And I wished, master, to take you to a solitude where we might both live in God, far from the world, forgotten by it. Ah, what torture, to long, to struggle, and not to be satisfied!"

Softly, without speaking, he kissed her on both eyes.

"Then, master, do you remember again, there was the great moral shock on the night of the storm, when you gave me that terrible lesson of life, emptying out your envelopes before me. You had said to me already: 'Know life, love it, live it as it ought to be lived.' But what a vast, what a frightful flood, rolling ever onward toward a human sea, swelling it unceasingly for the unknown future! And, master, the silent work within me began then. There was born, in my heart and in my flesh, the bitter strength of the real. At first I was as if crushed, the blow was so rude. I could not recover myself. I kept silent, because I did not know clearly what to say. Then, gradually, the evolution was effected. I still had struggles, I still rebelled against confessing my defeat. But every day after this the truth grew clearer within me, I knew well that you were my master, and that there was no happiness for me outside of you, of your science and your goodness. You were life itself, broad and tolerant life; saying all, accepting all, solely through the love of energy and effort, believing in the work of the world, placing the meaning of destiny in the labor which we all accomplish with love, in our desperate eagerness to live, to love, to live anew, to live always, in spite of all the abominations and miseries of life. Oh, to live, to live! This is the great task, the work that always goes on, and that will doubtless one day be completed!"

Silent still, he smiled radiantly, and kissed her on the mouth.

"And, master, though I have always loved you, even from my earliest youth, it was, I believe, on that terrible night that you marked me for, and made me your own. You remember how you crushed me in your grasp. It left a bruise, and a few drops of blood on my shoulder. Then your being entered, as it were into mine. We struggled; you were the stronger, and from that time I have felt the need of a support. At first I thought myself humiliated; then I saw that it was but an infinitely sweet submission. I always felt your power within me. A gesture of your hand in the distance thrilled me as though it had touched me. I would have wished that you had seized me again in your grasp, that you had crushed me in it, until my being had mingled with yours forever. And I was not blind; I knew well that your wish was the same as mine, that the violence which had made me yours had made you mine; that you struggled with yourself not to seize me and hold me as I passed by you. To nurse you when you were ill was some slight satisfaction. From that time, light began to break upon me, and I at last understood. I went no more to church, I began to be happy near you, you had become certainty and happiness. Do you remember that I cried to you, in the threshing yard, that something was wanting in our affection. There was a void in it which I longed to fill. What could be wanting to us unless it were God? And it was God—love, and life."

VIII.

Then came a period of idyllic happiness. Clotilde was the spring, the tardy rejuvenation that came to Pascal in his declining years. She came, bringing to him, with her love, sunshine and flowers. Their rapture lifted them above the earth; and all this youth she bestowed on him after his thirty years of toil, when he was already weary and worn probing the frightful wounds of humanity. He revived in the light of her great shining eyes, in the fragrance of her pure breath. He had faith again in life, in health, in strength, in the eternal renewal of nature.

On the morning after her avowal it was ten o'clock before Clotilde left her room. In the middle of the workroom she suddenly came upon Martine and, in her radiant happiness, with a burst of joy that carried everything before it, she rushed toward her, crying:

"Martine, I am not going away! Master and I—we love each other."

The old servant staggered under the blow. Her poor worn face, nunlike under its white cap and with its look of renunciation, grew white in the keenness of her anguish. Without a word, she turned and fled for refuge to her kitchen, where, leaning her elbows on her chopping-table, and burying her face in her clasped hands, she burst into a passion of sobs.

Clotilde, grieved and uneasy, followed her. And she tried to comprehend and to console her.

"Come, come, how foolish you are! What possesses you? Master and I will love you all the same; we will always keep you with us. You are not going to be unhappy because we love each other. On the contrary, the house is going to be gay now from morning till night."

But Martine only sobbed all the more desperately.

"Answer me, at least. Tell me why you are angry and why you cry. Does it not please you then to know that master is so happy, so happy! See, I will call master and he will make you answer."

At this threat the old servant suddenly rose and rushed into her own room, which opened out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind her. In vain the young girl called and knocked until she was tired; she could obtain no answer. At last Pascal, attracted by the noise, came downstairs, saying:

"Why, what is the matter?"

"Oh, it is that obstinate Martine! Only fancy, she began to cry when she knew that we loved each other. And she has barricaded herself in there, and she will not stir."

She did not stir, in fact. Pascal, in his turn, called and knocked. He scolded; he entreated. Then, one after the other, they began all over again. Still there was no answer. A deathlike silence reigned in the little room. And he pictured it to himself, this little room, religiously clean, with its walnut bureau, and its monastic bed furnished with white hangings. No doubt the servant had thrown herself across this bed, in which she had slept alone all her woman's life, and was burying her face in the bolster to stifle her sobs.

"Ah, so much the worse for her?" said Clotilde at last, in the egotism of her joy, "let her sulk!"

Then throwing her arms around Pascal, and raising to his her charming face, still glowing with the ardor of self-surrender, she said:

"Master, I will be your servant to-day."

He kissed her on the eyes with grateful emotion; and she at once set about preparing the breakfast, turning the kitchen upside down. She had put on an enormous white apron, and she looked charming, with her sleeves rolled up, showing her delicate arms, as if for some great undertaking. There chanced to be some cutlets in the kitchen which she cooked to a turn. She added some scrambled eggs, and she even succeeded in frying some potatoes. And they had a delicious breakfast, twenty times interrupted by her getting up in her eager zeal, to run for the bread, the water, a forgotten fork. If he had allowed her, she would have waited upon him on her knees. Ah! to be alone, to be only they two in this large friendly house, and to be free to laugh and to love each other in peace.

They spent the whole afternoon in sweeping and putting things in order. He insisted upon helping her. It was a play; they amused themselves like two merry children. From time to time, however, they went back to knock at Martine's door to remonstrate with her. Come, this was foolish, she was not going to let herself starve! Was there ever seen such a mule, when no one had said or done anything to her! But only the echo of their knocks came back mournfully from the silent room. Not the slightest sound, not a breath responded. Night fell, and they were obliged to make the dinner also, which they ate, sitting beside each other, from the same plate. Before going to bed, they made a last attempt, threatening to break open the door, but their ears, glued to the wood, could not catch the slightest sound. And on the following day, when they went downstairs and found the door still hermetically closed, they began to be seriously uneasy. For twenty-four hours the servant had given no sign of life.

Then, on returning to the kitchen after a moment's absence, Clotilde and Pascal were stupefied to see Martine sitting at her table, picking some sorrel for the breakfast. She had silently resumed her place as servant.

"But what was the matter with you?" cried Clotilde. "Will you speak now?"

She lifted up her sad face, stained by tears. It was very calm, however, and it expressed now only the resigned melancholy of old age. She looked at the young girl with an air of infinite reproach; then she bent her head again without speaking.

"Are you angry with us, then?"

And as she still remained silent, Pascal interposed:

"Are you angry with us, my good Martine?"

Then the old servant looked up at him with her former look of adoration, as if she loved him sufficiently to endure all and to remain in spite of all. At last she spoke.

"No, I am angry with no one. The master is free. It is all right, if he is satisfied."

A new life began from this time. Clotilde, who in spite of her twenty-five years had still remained childlike, now, under the influence of love, suddenly bloomed into exquisite womanhood. Since her heart had awakened, the serious and intelligent boy that she had looked like, with her round head covered with its short curls, had given place to an adorable woman, altogether womanly, submissive and tender, loving to be loved. Her great charm, notwithstanding her learning picked up at random from her reading and her work, was her virginal naivete, as if her unconscious awaiting of love had made her reserve the gift of her whole being to be utterly absorbed in the man whom she should love. No doubt she had given her love as much through gratitude and admiration as through tenderness; happy to make him happy; experiencing a profound joy in being no longer only a little girl to be petted, but something of his very own which he adored, a precious possession, a thing of grace and joy, which he worshiped on bended knees. She still had the religious submissiveness of the former devotee, in the hands of a master mature and strong, from whom she derived consolation and support, retaining, above and beyond affection, the sacred awe of the believer in the spiritual which she still was. But more than all, this woman, so intoxicated with love, was a delightful personification of health and gaiety; eating with a hearty appetite; having something of the valor of her grandfather the soldier; filling the house with her swift and graceful movements, with the bloom of her satin skin, the slender grace of her neck, of all her young form, divinely fresh.

And Pascal, too, had grown handsome again under the influence of love, with the serene beauty of a man who had retained his vigor, notwithstanding his white hairs. His countenance had no longer the sorrowful expression which it had worn during the months of grief and suffering through which he had lately passed; his eyes, youthful still, had recovered their brightness, his features their smiling grace; while his white hair and beard grew thicker, in a leonine abundance which lent him a youthful air. He had kept himself, in his solitary life as a passionate worker, so free from vice and dissipation that he found now within him a reserve of life and vigor eager to expend itself at last. There awoke within him new energy, a youthful impetuosity that broke forth in gestures and exclamations, in a continual need of expansion, of living. Everything wore a new and enchanting aspect to him; the smallest glimpse of sky moved him to wonder; the perfume of a simple flower threw him into an ecstasy; an everyday expression of affection, worn by use, touched him to tears, as if it had sprung fresh from the heart and had not been hackneyed by millions of lips. Clotilde's "I love you," was an infinite caress, whose celestial sweetness no human being had ever before known. And with health and beauty he recovered also his gaiety, that tranquil gaiety which had formerly been inspired by his love of life, and which now threw sunshine over his love, over everything that made life worth living.

They two, blooming youth and vigorous maturity, so healthy, so gay, so happy, made a radiant couple. For a whole month they remained in seclusion, not once leaving La Souleiade. The place where both now liked to be was the spacious workroom, so intimately associated with their habits and their past affection. They would spend whole days there, scarcely working at all, however. The large carved oak press remained with closed doors; so, too, did the bookcases. Books and papers lay undisturbed upon the tables. Like a young married couple they were absorbed in their one passion, oblivious of their former occupations, oblivious of life. The hours seemed all too short to enjoy the charm of being together, often seated in the same large antique easy-chair, happy in the depths of this solitude in which they secluded themselves, in the tranquillity of this lofty room, in this domain which was altogether theirs, without luxury and without order, full of familiar objects, brightened from morning till night by the returning gaiety of the April sunshine. When, seized with remorse, he would talk about working, she would link her supple arms through his and laughingly hold him prisoner, so that he should not make himself ill again with overwork. And downstairs, they loved, too, the dining-room, so gay with its light panels relieved by blue bands, its antique mahogany furniture, its large flower pastels, its brass hanging lamp, always shining. They ate in it with a hearty appetite and they left it, after each meal, only to go upstairs again to their dear solitude.

Then when the house seemed too small, they had the garden, all La Souleiade. Spring advanced with the advancing sun, and at the end of April the roses were beginning to bloom. And what a joy was this domain, walled around, where nothing from the outside world could trouble them! Hours flew by unnoted, as they sat on the terrace facing the vast horizon and the shady banks of the Viorne, and the slopes of Sainte-Marthe, from the rocky bars of the Seille to the valley of Plassans in the dusty distance. There was no shade on the terrace but that of the two secular cypresses planted at its two extremities, like two enormous green tapers, which could be seen three leagues away. At times they descended the slope for the pleasure of ascending the giant steps, and climbing the low walls of uncemented stones which supported the plantations, to see if the stunted olive trees and the puny almonds were budding. More often there were delightful walks under the delicate needles of the pine wood, steeped in sunshine and exhaling a strong odor of resin; endless walks along the wall of inclosure, from behind which the only sound they could hear was, at rare intervals, the grating noise of some cart jolting along the narrow road to Les Fenouilleres; and they spent delightful hours in the old threshing yard, where they could see the whole horizon, and where they loved to stretch themselves, tenderly remembering their former tears, when, loving each other unconsciously to themselves, they had quarreled under the stars. But their favorite retreat, where they always ended by losing themselves, was the quincunx of tall plane trees, whose branches, now of a tender green, looked like lacework. Below, the enormous box trees, the old borders of the French garden, of which now scarcely a trace remained, formed a sort of labyrinth of which they could never find the end. And the slender stream of the fountain, with its eternal crystalline murmur, seemed to sing within their hearts. They would sit hand in hand beside the mossy basin, while the twilight fell around them, their forms gradually fading into the shadow of the trees, while the water which they could no longer see, sang its flutelike song.

Up to the middle of May Pascal and Clotilde secluded themselves in this way, without even crossing the threshold of their retreat. One morning he disappeared and returned an hour later, bringing her a pair of diamond earrings which he had hurried out to buy, remembering this was her birthday. She adored jewels, and the gift astonished and delighted her. From this time not a week passed in which he did not go out once or twice in this way to bring her back some present. The slightest excuse was sufficient for him—a fete, a wish, a simple pleasure. He brought her rings, bracelets, a necklace, a slender diadem. He would take out the other jewels and please himself by putting them all upon her in the midst of their laughter. She was like an idol, seated on her chair, covered with gold,—a band of gold on her hair, gold on her bare arms and on her bare throat, all shining with gold and precious stones. Her woman's vanity was delightfully gratified by this. She allowed herself to be adored thus, to be adored on bended knees, like a divinity, knowing well that this was only an exalted form of love. She began at last to scold a little, however; to make prudent remonstrances; for, in truth, it was an absurdity to bring her all these gifts which she must afterward shut up in a drawer, without ever wearing them, as she went nowhere.

They were forgotten after the hour of joy and gratitude which they gave her in their novelty was over. But he would not listen to her, carried away by a veritable mania for giving; unable, from the moment the idea of giving her an article took possession of him, to resist the desire of buying it. It was a munificence of the heart; an imperious desire to prove to her that he thought of her always; a pride in seeing her the most magnificent, the happiest, the most envied of women; a generosity more profound even, which impelled him to despoil himself of everything, of his money, of his life. And then, what a delight, when he saw he had given her a real pleasure, and she threw herself on his neck, blushing, thanking him with kisses. After the jewels, it was gowns, articles of dress, toilet articles. Her room was littered, the drawers were filled to overflowing.

One morning she could not help getting angry. He had brought her another ring.

"Why, I never wear them! And if I did, my fingers would be covered to the tips. Be reasonable, I beg of you."

"Then I have not given you pleasure?" he said with confusion.

She threw her arms about his neck, and assured him with tears in her eyes that she was very happy. He was so good to her! He was so unwearied in his devotion to her! And when, later in the morning, he ventured to speak of making some changes in her room, of covering the walls with tapestry, of putting down a carpet, she again remonstrated.

"Oh! no, no! I beg of you. Do not touch my old room, so full of memories, where I have grown up, where I told you I loved you. I should no longer feel myself at home in it."

Downstairs, Martine's obstinate silence condemned still more strongly these excessive and useless expenses. She had adopted a less familiar attitude, as if, in the new situation, she had fallen from her role of housekeeper and friend to her former station of servant. Toward Clotilde, especially, she changed, treating her like a young lady, like a mistress to whom she was less affectionate but more obedient than formerly. Two or three times, however, she had appeared in the morning with her face discolored and her eyes sunken with weeping, answering evasively when questioned, saying that nothing was the matter, that she had taken cold. And she never made any remark about the gifts with which the drawers were filled. She did not even seem to see them, arranging them without a word either of praise or dispraise. But her whole nature rebelled against this extravagant generosity, of which she could never have conceived the possibility. She protested in her own fashion; exaggerating her economy and reducing still further the expenses of the housekeeping, which she now conducted on so narrow a scale that she retrenched even in the smallest expenses. For instance, she took only two-thirds of the milk which she had been in the habit of taking, and she served sweet dishes only on Sundays. Pascal and Clotilde, without venturing to complain, laughed between themselves at this parsimony, repeating the jests which had amused them for ten years past, saying that after dressing the vegetables she strained them in the colander, in order to save the butter for future use.

But this quarter she insisted upon rendering an account. She was in the habit of going every three months to Master Grandguillot, the notary, to receive the fifteen hundred francs income, of which she disposed afterward according to her judgment, entering the expenses in a book which the doctor had years ago ceased to verify. She brought it to him now and insisted upon his looking over it. He excused himself, saying that it was all right.

"The thing is, monsieur," she said, "that this time I have been able to put some money aside. Yes, three hundred francs. Here they are."

He looked at her in amazement. Generally she just made both ends meet. By what miracle of stinginess had she been able to save such a sum?

"Ah! my poor Martine," he said at last, laughing, "that is the reason, then, that we have been eating so many potatoes of late. You are a pearl of economy, but indeed you must treat us a little better in the future."

This discreet reproach wounded her so profoundly that she allowed herself at last to say:

"Well, monsieur, when there is so much extravagance on the one hand, it is well to be prudent on the other."

He understood the allusion, but instead of being angry, he was amused by the lesson.

"Ah, ah! it is you who are examining my accounts! But you know very well, Martine, that I, too, have my savings laid by."

He alluded to the money which he still received occasionally from his patients, and which he threw into a drawer of his writing-desk. For more than sixteen years past he had put into this drawer every year about four thousand francs, which would have amounted to a little fortune if he had not taken from it, from day to day, without counting them, considerable sums for his experiments and his whims. All the money for the presents came out of this drawer, which he now opened continually. He thought that it would never be empty; he had been so accustomed to take from it whatever he required that it had never occurred to him to fear that he would ever come to the bottom of it.

"One may very well have a little enjoyment out of one's savings," he said gayly. "Since it is you who go to the notary's, Martine, you are not ignorant that I have my income apart."

Then she said, with the colorless voice of the miser who is haunted by the dread of an impending disaster:

"And what would you do if you hadn't it?"

Pascal looked at her in astonishment, and contented himself with answering with a shrug, for the possibility of such a misfortune had never even entered his mind. He fancied that avarice was turning her brain, and he laughed over the incident that evening with Clotilde.

In Plassans, too, the presents were the cause of endless gossip. The rumor of what was going on at La Souleiade, this strange and sudden passion, had spread, no one could tell how, by that force of expansion which sustains curiosity, always on the alert in small towns. The servant certainly had not spoken, but her air was perhaps sufficient; words perhaps had dropped from her involuntarily; the lovers might have been watched over the walls. And then came the buying of the presents, confirming the reports and exaggerating them. When the doctor, in the early morning, scoured the streets and visited the jeweler's and the dressmaker's, eyes spied him from the windows, his smallest purchases were watched, all the town knew in the evening that he had given her a silk bonnet, a bracelet set with sapphires. And all this was turned into a scandal. This uncle in love with his niece, committing a young man's follies for her, adorning her like a holy Virgin. The most extraordinary stories began to circulate, and people pointed to La Souleiade as they passed by.

But old Mme. Rougon was, of all persons, the most bitterly indignant. She had ceased going to her son's house when she learned that Clotilde's marriage with Dr. Ramond had been broken off. They had made sport of her. They did nothing to please her, and she wished to show how deep her displeasure was. Then a full month after the rupture, during which she had understood nothing of the pitying looks, the discreet condolences, the vague smiles which met her everywhere, she learned everything with a suddenness that stunned her. She, who, at the time of Pascal's illness, in her mortification at the idea of again becoming the talk of the town through that ugly story, had raised such a storm! It was far worse this time; the height of scandal, a love affair for people to regale themselves with. The Rougon legend was again in peril; her unhappy son was decidedly doing his best to find some way to destroy the family glory won with so much difficulty. So that in her anger she, who had made herself the guardian of this glory, resolving to purify the legend by every means in her power, put on her hat one morning and hurried to La Souleiade with the youthful vivacity of her eighty years.

Pascal, whom the rupture with his mother enchanted, was fortunately not at home, having gone out an hour before to look for a silver buckle which he had thought of for a belt. And Felicite fell upon Clotilde as the latter was finishing her toilet, her arms bare, her hair loose, looking as fresh and smiling as a rose.

The first shock was rude. The old lady unburdened her mind, grew indignant, spoke of the scandal they were giving. Suddenly her anger vanished. She looked at the young girl, and she thought her adorable. In her heart she was not surprised at what was going on. She laughed at it, all she desired was that it should end in a correct fashion, so as to silence evil tongues. And she cried with a conciliating air:

"Get married then! Why do you not get married?"

Clotilde remained silent for a moment, surprised. She had not thought of marriage. Then she smiled again.

"No doubt we will get married, grandmother. But later on, there is no hurry."

Old Mme. Rougon went away, obliged to be satisfied with this vague promise.

It was at this time that Pascal and Clotilde ceased to seclude themselves. Not through any spirit of bravado, not because they wished to answer ugly rumors by making a display of their happiness, but as a natural amplification of their joy; their love had slowly acquired the need of expansion and of space, at first beyond the house, then beyond the garden, into the town, as far as the whole vast horizon. It filled everything; it took in the whole world.

The doctor then tranquilly resumed his visits, and he took the young girl with him. They walked together along the promenades, along the streets, she on his arm, in a light gown, with flowers in her hat, he buttoned up in his coat with his broad-brimmed hat. He was all white; she all blond. They walked with their heads high, erect and smiling, radiating such happiness that they seemed to walk in a halo. At first the excitement was extraordinary. The shopkeepers came and stood at their doors, the women leaned out of the windows, the passers-by stopped to look after them. People whispered and laughed and pointed to them. Then they were so handsome; he superb and triumphant, she so youthful, so submissive, and so proud, that an involuntary indulgence gradually gained on every one. People could not help defending them and loving them, and they ended by smiling on them in a delightful contagion of tenderness. A charm emanated from them which brought back all hearts to them. The new town, with its bourgeois population of functionaries and townspeople who had grown wealthy, was the last conquest. But the Quartier St. Marc, in spite of its austerity, showed itself at once kind and discreetly tolerant when they walked along its deserted grass-worn sidewalks, beside the antique houses, now closed and silent, which exhaled the evaporated perfume of the loves of other days. But it was the old quarter, more especially, that promptly received them with cordiality, this quarter of which the common people, instinctively touched, felt the grace of the legend, the profound myth of the couple, the beautiful young girl supporting the royal and rejuvenated master. The doctor was adored here for his goodness, and his companion quickly became popular, and was greeted with tokens of admiration and approval as soon as she appeared. They, meantime, if they had seemed ignorant of the former hostility, now divined easily the forgiveness and the indulgent tenderness which surrounded them, and this made them more beautiful; their happiness charmed the entire town.

One afternoon, as Pascal and Clotilde turned the corner of the Rue de la Banne, they perceived Dr. Ramond on the opposite side of the street. It had chanced that they had learned the day before that he had asked and had obtained the hand of Mlle. Leveque, the advocate's daughter. It was certainly the most sensible course he could have taken, for his business interests made it advisable that he should marry, and the young girl, who was very pretty and very rich, loved him. He, too, would certainly love her in time. Therefore Clotilde joyfully smiled her congratulations to him as a sincere friend. Pascal saluted him with an affectionate gesture. For a moment Ramond, a little moved by the meeting, stood perplexed. His first impulse seemed to have been to cross over to them. But a feeling of delicacy must have prevented him, the thought that it would be brutal to interrupt their dream, to break in upon this solitude a deux, in which they moved, even amid the elbowings of the street. And he contented himself with a friendly salutation, a smile in which he forgave them their happiness. This was very pleasant for all three.

At this time Clotilde amused herself for several days by painting a large pastel representing the tender scene of old King David and Abishag, the young Shunammite. It was a dream picture, one of those fantastic compositions into which her other self, her romantic self, put her love of the mysterious. Against a background of flowers thrown on the canvas, flowers that looked like a shower of stars, of barbaric richness, the old king stood facing the spectator, his hand resting on the bare shoulder of Abishag. He was attired sumptuously in a robe heavy with precious stones, that fell in straight folds, and he wore the royal fillet on his snowy locks. But she was more sumptuous still, with only the lilylike satin of her skin, her tall, slender figure, her round, slender throat, her supple arms, divinely graceful. He reigned over, he leaned, as a powerful and beloved master, on this subject, chosen from among all others, so proud of having been chosen, so rejoiced to give to her king the rejuvenating gift of her youth. All her pure and triumphant beauty expressed the serenity of her submission, the tranquillity with which she gave herself, before the assembled people, in the full light of day. And he was very great and she was very fair, and there radiated from both a starry radiance.

Up to the last moment Clotilde had left the faces of the two figures vaguely outlined in a sort of mist. Pascal, standing behind her, jested with her to hide his emotion, for he fancied he divined her intention. And it was as he thought; she finished the faces with a few strokes of the crayon—old King David was he, and she was Abishag, the Shunammite. But they were enveloped in a dreamlike brightness, it was themselves deified; the one with hair all white, the other with hair all blond, covering them like an imperial mantle, with features lengthened by ecstasy, exalted to the bliss of angels, with the glance and the smile of immortal youth.

"Ah, dear!" he cried, "you have made us too beautiful; you have wandered off again to dreamland—yes, as in the days, do you remember, when I used to scold you for putting there all the fantastic flowers of the Unknown?"

And he pointed to the walls, on which bloomed the fantastic parterre of the old pastels, flowers not of the earth, grown in the soil of paradise.

But she protested gayly.

"Too beautiful? We could not be too beautiful! I assure you it is thus that I picture us to myself, thus that I see us; and thus it is that we are. There! see if it is not the pure reality."

She took the old fifteenth century Bible which was beside her, and showed him the simple wood engraving.

"You see it is exactly the same."

He smiled gently at this tranquil and extraordinary affirmation.

"Oh, you laugh, you look only at the details of the picture. It is the spirit which it is necessary to penetrate. And look at the other engravings, it is the same theme in all—Abraham and Hagar, Ruth and Boaz. And you see they are all handsome and happy."

Then they ceased to laugh, leaning over the old Bible whose pages she turned with her white fingers, he standing behind her, his white beard mingling with her blond, youthful tresses.

Suddenly he whispered to her softly:

"But you, so young, do you never regret that you have chosen me—me, who am so old, as old as the world?"

She gave a start of surprise, and turning round looked at him.

"You old! No, you are young, younger than I!"

And she laughed so joyously that he, too, could not help smiling. But he insisted a little tremulously:

"You do not answer me. Do you not sometimes desire a younger lover, you who are so youthful?"

She put up her lips and kissed him, saying in a low voice:

"I have but one desire, to be loved—loved as you love me, above and beyond everything."

The day on which Martine saw the pastel nailed to the wall, she looked at it a moment in silence, then she made the sign of the cross, but whether it was because she had seen God or the devil, no one could say. A few days before Easter she had asked Clotilde if she would not accompany her to church, and the latter having made a sign in the negative, she departed for an instant from the deferential silence which she now habitually maintained. Of all the new things which astonished her in the house, what most astonished her was the sudden irreligiousness of her young mistress. So she allowed herself to resume her former tone of remonstrance, and to scold her as she used to do when she was a little girl and refused to say her prayers. "Had she no longer the fear of the Lord before her, then? Did she no longer tremble at the idea of going to hell, to burn there forever?"

Clotilde could not suppress a smile.

"Oh, hell! you know that it has never troubled me a great deal. But you are mistaken if you think I am no longer religious. If I have left off going to church it is because I perform my devotions elsewhere, that is all."

Martine looked at her, open-mouthed, not comprehending her. It was all over; mademoiselle was indeed lost. And she never again asked her to accompany her to St. Saturnin. But her own devotion increased until it at last became a mania. She was no longer to be met, as before, with the eternal stocking in her hand which she knitted even when walking, when not occupied in her household duties. Whenever she had a moment to spare, she ran to church and remained there, repeating endless prayers. One day when old Mme. Rougon, always on the alert, found her behind a pillar, an hour after she had seen her there before, Martine excused herself, blushing like a servant who had been caught idling, saying:

"I was praying for monsieur."

Meanwhile Pascal and Clotilde enlarged still more their domain, taking longer and longer walks every day, extending them now outside the town into the open country. One afternoon, as they were going to La Seguiranne, they were deeply moved, passing by the melancholy fields where the enchanted gardens of Le Paradou had formerly extended. The vision of Albine rose before them. Pascal saw her again blooming like the spring, in the rejuvenation which this living flower had brought him too, feeling the pressure of this pure arm against his heart. Never could he have believed, he who had already thought himself very old when he used to enter this garden to give a smile to the little fairy within, that she would have been dead for years when life, the good mother, should bestow upon him the gift of so fresh a spring, sweetening his declining years. And Clotilde, having felt the vision rise before them, lifted up her face to his in a renewed longing for tenderness. She was Albine, the eternal lover. He kissed her on the lips, and though no word had been uttered, the level fields sown with corn and oats, where Le Paradou had once rolled its billows of luxuriant verdure, thrilled in sympathy.

Pascal and Clotilde were now walking along the dusty road, through the bare and arid country. They loved this sun-scorched land, these fields thinly planted with puny almond trees and dwarf olives, these stretches of bare hills dotted with country houses, that showed on them like pale patches accentuated by the dark bars of the secular cypresses. It was like an antique landscape, one of those classic landscapes represented in the paintings of the old schools, with harsh coloring and well balanced and majestic lines. All the ardent sunshine of successive summers that had parched this land flowed through their veins, and lent them a new beauty and animation, as they walked under the sky forever blue, glowing with the clear flame of eternal love. She, protected from the sun by her straw hat, bloomed and luxuriated in this bath of light like a tropical flower, while he, in his renewed youth, felt the burning sap of the soil ascend into his veins in a flood of virile joy.

This walk to La Seguiranne had been an idea of the doctor's, who had learned through Aunt Dieudonne of the approaching marriage of Sophie to a young miller of the neighborhood; and he desired to see if every one was well and happy in this retired corner. All at once they were refreshed by a delightful coolness as they entered the avenue of tall green oaks. On either side the springs, the mothers of these giant shade trees, flowed on in their eternal course. And when they reached the house of the shrew they came, as chance would have it, upon the two lovers, Sophie and her miller, kissing each other beside the well; for the girl's aunt had just gone down to the lavatory behind the willows of the Viorne. Confused, the couple stood in blushing silence. But the doctor and his companion laughed indulgently, and the lovers, reassured, told them that the marriage was set for St. John's Day, which was a long way off, to be sure, but which would come all the same. Sophie, saved from the hereditary malady, had improved in health and beauty, and was growing as strong as one of the trees that stood with their feet in the moist grass beside the springs, and their heads bare to the sunshine. Ah, the vast, glowing sky, what life it breathed into all created things! She had but one grief, and tears came to her eyes when she spoke of her brother Valentin, who perhaps would not live through the week. She had had news of him the day before; he was past hope. And the doctor was obliged to prevaricate a little to console her, for he himself expected hourly the inevitable termination. When he and his companion left La Seguiranne they returned slowly to Plassans, touched by this happy, healthy love saddened by the chill of death.

In the old quarter a woman whom Pascal was attending informed him that Valentin had just died. Two of the neighbors were obliged to take away La Guiraude, who, half-crazed, clung, shrieking, to her son's body. The doctor entered the house, leaving Clotilde outside. At last, they again took their way to La Souleiade in silence. Since Pascal had resumed his visits he seemed to make them only through professional duty; he no longer became enthusiastic about the miracles wrought by his treatment. But as far as Valentin's death was concerned, he was surprised that it had not occurred before; he was convinced that he had prolonged the patient's life for at least a year. In spite of the extraordinary results which he had obtained at first, he knew well that death was the inevitable end. That he had held it in check for months ought then to have consoled him and soothed his remorse, still unassuaged, for having involuntarily caused the death of Lafouasse, a few weeks sooner than it would otherwise have occurred. But this did not seem to be the case, and his brow was knitted in a frown as they returned to their beloved solitude. But there a new emotion awaited him; sitting under the plane trees, whither Martine had sent him, he saw Sarteur, the hatter, the inmate of the Tulettes whom he had been so long treating by his hypodermic injections, and the experiment so zealously continued seemed to have succeeded. The injections of nerve substance had evidently given strength to his will, since the madman was here, having left the asylum that morning, declaring that he no longer had any attacks, that he was entirely cured of the homicidal mania that impelled him to throw himself upon any passer-by to strangle him. The doctor looked at him as he spoke. He was a small dark man, with a retreating forehead and aquiline features, with one cheek perceptibly larger than the other. He was perfectly quiet and rational, and filled with so lively a gratitude that he kissed his saviour's hands. The doctor could not help being greatly affected by all this, and he dismissed the man kindly, advising him to return to his life of labor, which was the best hygiene, physical and moral. Then he recovered his calmness and sat down to table, talking gaily of other matters.

Clotilde looked at him with astonishment and even with a little indignation.

"What is the matter, master?" she said. "You are no longer satisfied with yourself."

"Oh, with myself I am never satisfied!" he answered jestingly. "And with medicine, you know—it is according to the day."

It was on this night that they had their first quarrel. She was angry with him because he no longer had any pride in his profession. She returned to her complaint of the afternoon, reproaching him for not taking more credit to himself for the cure of Sarteur, and even for the prolongation of Valentin's life. It was she who now had a passion for his fame. She reminded him of his cures; had he not cured himself? Could he deny the efficacy of his treatment? A thrill ran through him as he recalled the great dream which he had once cherished—to combat debility, the sole cause of disease; to cure suffering humanity; to make a higher, and healthy humanity; to hasten the coming of happiness, the future kingdom of perfection and felicity, by intervening and giving health to all! And he possessed the liquor of life, the universal panacea which opened up this immense hope!

Pascal was silent for a moment. Then he murmured:

"It is true. I cured myself, I have cured others, and I still think that my injections are efficacious in many cases. I do not deny medicine. Remorse for a deplorable accident, like that of Lafouasse, does not render me unjust. Besides, work has been my passion, it is in work that I have up to this time spent my energies; it was in wishing to prove to myself the possibility of making decrepit humanity one day strong and intelligent that I came near dying lately. Yes, a dream, a beautiful dream!"

"No, no! a reality, the reality of your genius, master."

Then, lowering his voice almost to a whisper, he breathed this confession:

"Listen, I am going to say to you what I would say to no one else in the world, what I would not say to myself aloud. To correct nature, to interfere, in order to modify it and thwart it in its purpose, is this a laudable task? To cure the individual, to retard his death, for his personal pleasure, to prolong his existence, doubtless to the injury of the species, is not this to defeat the aims of nature? And have we the right to desire a stronger, a healthier humanity, modeled after our idea of health and strength? What have we to do in the matter? Why should we interfere in this work of life, neither the means nor the end of which are known to us? Perhaps everything is as it ought to be. Perhaps we should risk killing love, genius, life itself. Remember, I make the confession to you alone; but doubt has taken possession of me, I tremble at the thought of my twentieth century alchemy. I have come to believe that it is greater and wiser to allow evolution to take its course."

He paused; then he added so softly that she could scarcely hear him:

"Do you know that instead of nerve-substance I often use only water with my patients. You no longer hear me grinding for days at a time. I told you that I had some of the liquor in reserve. Water soothes them, this is no doubt simply a mechanical effect. Ah! to soothe, to prevent suffering—that indeed I still desire! It is perhaps my greatest weakness, but I cannot bear to see any one suffer. Suffering puts me beside myself, it seems a monstrous and useless cruelty of nature. I practise now only to prevent suffering."

"Then, master," she asked, in the same indistinct murmur, "if you no longer desire to cure, do you still think everything must be told? For the frightful necessity of displaying the wounds of humanity had no other excuse than the hope of curing them."

"Yes, yes, it is necessary to know, in every case, and to conceal nothing; to tell everything regarding things and individuals. Happiness is no longer possible in ignorance; certainty alone makes life tranquil. When people know more they will doubtless accept everything. Do you not comprehend that to desire to cure everything, to regenerate everything is a false ambition inspired by our egotism, a revolt against life, which we declare to be bad, because we judge it from the point of view of self-interest? I know that I am more tranquil, that my intellect has broadened and deepened ever since I have held evolution in respect. It is my love of life which triumphs, even to the extent of not questioning its purpose, to the extent of confiding absolutely in it, of losing myself in it, without wishing to remake it according to my own conception of good and evil. Life alone is sovereign, life alone knows its aim and its end. I can only try to know it in order to live it as it should be lived. And this I have understood only since I have possessed your love. Before I possessed it I sought the truth elsewhere, I struggled with the fixed idea of saving the world. You have come, and life is full; the world is saved every hour by love, by the immense and incessant labor of all that live and love throughout space. Impeccable life, omnipotent life, immortal life!"

They continued to talk together in low tones for some time longer, planning an idyllic life, a calm and healthful existence in the country. It was in this simple prescription of an invigorating environment that the experiments of the physician ended. He exclaimed against cities. People could be well and happy only in the country, in the sunshine, on the condition of renouncing money, ambition, even the proud excesses of intellectual labor. They should do nothing but live and love, cultivate the soil, and bring up their children.

IX.

Dr. Pascal then resumed his professional visits in the town and the surrounding country. And he was generally accompanied by Clotilde, who went with him into the houses of the poor, where she, too, brought health and cheerfulness.

But, as he had one night confessed to her in secret, his visits were now only visits of relief and consolation. If he had before practised with repugnance it was because he had felt how vain was medical science. Empiricism disheartened him. From the moment that medicine ceased to be an experimental science and became an art, he was filled with disquiet at the thought of the infinite variety of diseases and of their remedies, according to the constitution of the patient. Treatment changed with every new hypothesis; how many people, then, must the methods now abandoned have killed! The perspicacity of the physician became everything, the healer was only a happily endowed diviner, himself groping in the dark and effecting cures through his fortunate endowment. And this explained why he had given up his patients almost altogether, after a dozen years of practise, to devote himself entirely to study. Then, when his great labors on heredity had restored to him for a time the hope of intervening and curing disease by his hypodermic injections, he had become again enthusiastic, until the day when his faith in life, after having impelled him, to aid its action in this way, by restoring the vital forces, became still broader and gave him the higher conviction that life was self-sufficing, that it was the only giver of health and strength, in spite of everything. And he continued to visit, with his tranquil smile, only those of his patients who clamored for him loudly, and who found themselves miraculously relieved when he injected into them only pure water.

Clotilde now sometimes allowed herself to jest about these hypodermic injections. She was still at heart, however, a fervent worshiper of his skill; and she said jestingly that if he performed miracles as he did it was because he had in himself the godlike power to do so. Then he would reply jestingly, attributing to her the efficacy of their common visits, saying that he cured no one now when she was absent, that it was she who brought the breath of life, the unknown and necessary force from the Beyond. So that the rich people, the bourgeois, whose houses she did not enter, continued to groan without his being able to relieve them. And this affectionate dispute diverted them; they set out each time as if for new discoveries, they exchanged glances of kindly intelligence with the sick. Ah, this wretched suffering which revolted them, and which was now all they went to combat; how happy they were when they thought it vanquished! They were divinely recompensed when they saw the cold sweats disappear, the moaning lips become stilled, the deathlike faces recover animation. It was assuredly the love which they brought to this humble, suffering humanity that produced the alleviation.

"To die is nothing; that is in the natural order of things," Pascal would often say. "But why suffer? It is cruel and unnecessary!"

One afternoon the doctor was going with the young girl to the little village of Sainte-Marthe to see a patient, and at the station, for they were going by train, so as to spare Bonhomme, they had a reencounter. The train which they were waiting for was from the Tulettes. Sainte-Marthe was the first station in the opposite direction, going to Marseilles. When the train arrived, they hurried on board and, opening the door of a compartment which they thought empty, they saw old Mme. Rougon about to leave it. She did not speak to them, but passing them by, sprang down quickly in spite of her age, and walked away with a stiff and haughty air.

"It is the 1st of July," said Clotilde when the train had started. "Grandmother is returning from the Tulettes, after making her monthly visit to Aunt Dide. Did you see the glance she cast at me?"

Pascal was at heart glad of the quarrel with his mother, which freed him from the continual annoyance of her visits.

"Bah!" he said simply, "when people cannot agree it is better for them not to see each other."

But the young girl remained troubled and thoughtful. After a few moments she said in an undertone:

"I thought her changed—looking paler. And did you notice? she who is usually so carefully dressed had only one glove on—a yellow glove, on the right hand. I don't know why it was, but she made me feel sick at heart."

Pascal, who was also disturbed, made a vague gesture. His mother would no doubt grow old at last, like everybody else. But she was very active, very full of fire still. She was thinking, he said, of bequeathing her fortune to the town of Plassans, to build a house of refuge, which should bear the name of Rougon. Both had recovered their gaiety when he cried suddenly:

"Why, it is to-morrow that you and I are to go to the Tulettes to see our patients. And you know that I promised to take Charles to Uncle Macquart's."

Felicite was in fact returning from the Tulettes, where she went regularly on the first of every month to inquire after Aunt Dide. For many years past she had taken a keen interest in the madwoman's health, amazed to see her lasting so long, and furious with her for persisting in living so far beyond the common term of life, until she had become a very prodigy of longevity. What a relief, the fine morning on which they should put under ground this troublesome witness of the past, this specter of expiation and of waiting, who brought living before her the abominations of the family! When so many others had been taken she, who was demented and who had only a spark of life left in her eyes, seemed forgotten. On this day she had found her as usual, skeleton-like, stiff and erect in her armchair. As the keeper said, there was now no reason why she should ever die. She was a hundred and five years old.

When she left the asylum Felicite was furious. She thought of Uncle Macquart. Another who troubled her, who persisted in living with exasperating obstinacy! Although he was only eighty-four years old, three years older than herself, she thought him ridiculously aged, past the allotted term of life. And a man who led so dissipated a life, who had gone to bed dead drunk every night for the last sixty years! The good and the sober were taken away; he flourished in spite of everything, blooming with health and gaiety. In days past, just after he had settled at the Tulettes, she had made him presents of wines, liqueurs and brandy, in the unavowed hope of ridding the family of a fellow who was really disreputable, and from whom they had nothing to expect but annoyance and shame. But she had soon perceived that all this liquor served, on the contrary, to keep up his health and spirits and his sarcastic humor, and she had left off making him presents, seeing that he throve on what she had hoped would prove a poison to him. She had cherished a deadly hatred toward him since then. She would have killed him if she had dared, every time she saw him, standing firmly on his drunken legs, and laughing at her to her face, knowing well that she was watching for his death, and triumphant because he did not give her the pleasure of burying with him all the old dirty linen of the family, the blood and mud of the two conquests of Plassans.

"You see, Felicite," he would often say to her with his air of wicked mockery, "I am here to take care of the old mother, and the day on which we both make up our minds to die it would be through compliment to you—yes, simply to spare you the trouble of running to see us so good-naturedly, in this way, every month."

Generally she did not now give herself the disappointment of going to Macquart's, but inquired for him at the asylum. But on this occasion, having learned there that he was passing through an extraordinary attack of drunkenness, not having drawn a sober breath for a fortnight, and so intoxicated that he was probably unable to leave the house, she was seized with the curiosity to learn for herself what his condition really was. And as she was going back to the station, she went out of her way in order to stop at Macquart's house.

The day was superb—a warm and brilliant summer day. On either side of the path which she had taken, she saw the fields that she had given him in former days—all this fertile land, the price of his secrecy and his good behavior. Before her appeared the house, with its pink tiles and its bright yellow walls, looking gay in the sunshine. Under the ancient mulberry trees on the terrace she enjoyed the delightful coolness and the beautiful view. What a pleasant and safe retreat, what a happy solitude was this for an old man to end in joy and peace a long and well-spent life!

But she did not see him, she did not hear him. The silence was profound. The only sound to be heard was the humming of the bees circling around the tall marshmallows. And on the terrace there was nothing to be seen but a little yellow dog, stretched at full length on the bare ground, seeking the coolness of the shade. He raised his head growling, about to bark, but, recognizing the visitor, he lay down again quietly.

Then, in this peaceful and sunny solitude she was seized with a strange chill, and she called:

"Macquart! Macquart!"

The door of the house under the mulberry trees stood wide open. But she did not dare to go in; this empty house with its wide open door gave her a vague uneasiness. And she called again:

"Macquart! Macquart!"

Not a sound, not a breath. Profound silence reigned again, but the humming of the bees circling around the tall marshmallows sounded louder than before.

At last Felicite, ashamed of her fears, summoned courage to enter. The door on the left of the hall, opening into the kitchen, where Uncle Macquart generally sat, was closed. She pushed it open, but she could distinguish nothing at first, as the blinds had been closed, probably in order to shut out the heat. Her first sensation was one of choking, caused by an overpowering odor of alcohol which filled the room; every article of furniture seemed to exude this odor, the whole house was impregnated with it. At last, when her eyes had become accustomed to the semi-obscurity, she perceived Macquart. He was seated at the table, on which were a glass and a bottle of spirits of thirty-six degrees, completely empty. Settled in his chair, he was sleeping profoundly, dead drunk. This spectacle revived her anger and contempt.

"Come, Macquart," she cried, "is it not vile and senseless to put one's self in such a state! Wake up, I say, this is shameful!"

His sleep was so profound that she could not even hear him breathing. In vain she raised her voice, and slapped him smartly on the hands.

"Macquart! Macquart! Macquart! Ah, faugh! You are disgusting, my dear!"

Then she left him, troubling herself no further about him, and walked around the room, evidently seeking something. Coming down the dusky road from the asylum she had been seized with a consuming thirst, and she wished to get a glass of water. Her gloves embarrassed her, and she took them off and put them on a corner of the table. Then she succeeded in finding the jug, and she washed a glass and filled it to the brim, and was about to empty it when she saw an extraordinary sight—a sight which agitated her so greatly that she set the glass down again beside her gloves, without drinking.

By degrees she had begun to see objects more clearly in the room, which was lighted dimly by a few stray sunbeams that filtered through the cracks of the old shutters. She now saw Uncle Macquart distinctly, neatly dressed in a blue cloth suit, as usual, and on his head the eternal fur cap which he wore from one year's end to the other. He had grown stout during the last five or six years, and he looked like a veritable mountain of flesh overlaid with rolls of fat. And she noticed that he must have fallen asleep while smoking, for his pipe—a short black pipe—had fallen into his lap. Then she stood still, stupefied with amazement—the burning tobacco had been scattered in the fall, and the cloth of the trousers had caught fire, and through a hole in the stuff, as large already as a hundred-sous piece, she saw the bare thigh, whence issued a little blue flame.

At first Felicite had thought that it was linen—the drawers or the shirt—that was burning. But soon doubt was no longer possible, she saw distinctly the bare flesh and the little blue flame issuing from it, lightly dancing, like a flame wandering over the surface of a vessel of lighted alcohol. It was as yet scarcely higher than the flame of a night light, pale and soft, and so unstable that the slightest breath of air caused it to change its place. But it increased and spread rapidly, and the skin cracked and the fat began to melt.

An involuntary cry escaped from Felicite's throat.

"Macquart! Macquart!"

But still he did not stir. His insensibility must have been complete; intoxication must have produced a sort of coma, in which there was an absolute paralysis of sensation, for he was living, his breast could be seen rising and falling, in slow and even respiration.

"Macquart! Macquart!"

Now the fat was running through the cracks of the skin, feeding the flame, which was invading the abdomen. And Felicite comprehended vaguely that Uncle Macquart was burning before her like a sponge soaked with brandy. He had, indeed, been saturated with it for years past, and of the strongest and most inflammable kind. He would no doubt soon be blazing from head to foot, like a bowl of punch.

Then she ceased to try to awaken him, since he was sleeping so soundly. For a full minute she had the courage to look at him, awe-stricken, but gradually coming to a determination. Her hands, however, began to tremble, with a little shiver which she could not control. She was choking, and taking up the glass of water again with both hands, she emptied it at a draught. And she was going away on tiptoe, when she remembered her gloves. She went back, groped for them anxiously on the table and, as she thought, picked them both up. Then she left the room, closing the door behind her carefully, and as gently as if she were afraid of disturbing some one.

When she found herself once more on the terrace, in the cheerful sunshine and the pure air, in face of the vast horizon bathed in light, she heaved a sigh of relief. The country was deserted; no one could have seen her entering or leaving the house. Only the yellow dog was still stretched there, and he did not even deign to look up. And she went away with her quick, short step, her youthful figure lightly swaying. A hundred steps away, an irresistible impulse compelled her to turn round to give a last look at the house, so tranquil and so cheerful on the hillside, in the declining light of the beautiful day.

Only when she was in the train and went to put on her gloves did she perceive that one of them was missing. But she supposed that it had fallen on the platform at the station as she was getting into the car. She believed herself to be quite calm, but she remained with one hand gloved and one hand bare, which, with her, could only be the result of great agitation.

On the following day Pascal and Clotilde took the three o'clock train to go to the Tulettes. The mother of Charles, the harness-maker's wife, had brought the boy to them, as they had offered to take him to Uncle Macquart's, where he was to remain for the rest of the week. Fresh quarrels had disturbed the peace of the household, the husband having resolved to tolerate no longer in his house another man's child, that do-nothing, imbecile prince's son. As it was Grandmother Rougon who had dressed him, he was, indeed, dressed on this day, again, in black velvet trimmed with gold braid, like a young lord, a page of former times going to court. And during the quarter of an hour which the journey lasted, Clotilde amused herself in the compartment, in which they were alone, by taking off his cap and smoothing his beautiful blond locks, his royal hair that fell in curls over his shoulders. She had a ring on her finger, and as she passed her hand over his neck she was startled to perceive that her caress had left behind it a trace of blood. One could not touch the boy's skin without the red dew exuding from it; the tissues had become so lax through extreme degeneration that the slightest scratch brought on a hemorrhage. The doctor became at once uneasy, and asked him if he still bled at the nose as frequently as formerly. Charles hardly knew what to answer; first saying no, then, recollecting himself, he said that he had bled a great deal the other day. He seemed, indeed, weaker; he grew more childish as he grew older; his intelligence, which had never developed, had become clouded. This tall boy of fifteen, so beautiful, so girlish-looking, with the color of a flower that had grown in the shade, did not look ten.

At the Tulettes Pascal decided that they would first take the boy to Uncle Macquart's. They ascended the steep road. In the distance the little house looked gay in the sunshine, as it had looked on the day before, with its yellow walls and its green mulberry trees extending their twisted branches and covering the terrace with a thick, leafy roof. A delightful sense of peace pervaded this solitary spot, this sage's retreat, where the only sound to be heard was the humming of the bees, circling round the tall marshmallows.

"Ah, that rascal of an uncle!" said Pascal, smiling, "how I envy him!"

But he was surprised not to have already seen him standing at the edge of the terrace. And as Charles had run off dragging Clotilde with him to see the rabbits, as he said, the doctor continued the ascent alone, and was astonished when he reached the top to see no one. The blinds were closed, the hill door yawned wide open. Only the yellow dog was at the threshold, his legs stiff, his hair bristling, howling with a low and continuous moan. When he saw the visitor, whom he no doubt recognized, approaching, he stopped howling for an instant and went and stood further off, then he began again to whine softly.

Pascal, filled with apprehension, could not keep back the uneasy cry that rose to his lips:

"Macquart! Macquart!"

No one answered; a deathlike silence reigned over the house, with its door yawning wide open, like the mouth of a cavern. The dog continued to howl.

Then Pascal grew impatient, and cried more loudly.

"Macquart! Macquart!"

There was not a stir; the bees hummed, the sky looked down serenely on the peaceful scene. Then he hesitated no longer. Perhaps Macquart was asleep. But the instant he pushed open the door of the kitchen on the left of the hall, a horrible odor escaped from it, an odor of burned flesh and bones. When he entered the room he could hardly breathe, so filled was it by a thick vapor, a stagnant and nauseous cloud, which choked and blinded him. The sunbeams that filtered through the cracks made only a dim light. He hurried to the fireplace, thinking that perhaps there had been a fire, but the fireplace was empty, and the articles of furniture around appeared to be uninjured. Bewildered, and feeling himself growing faint in the poisoned atmosphere, he ran to the window and threw the shutters wide open. A flood of light entered.

Then the scene presented to the doctor's view filled him with amazement. Everything was in its place; the glass and the empty bottle of spirits were on the table; only the chair in which Uncle Macquart must have been sitting bore traces of fire, the front legs were blackened and the straw was partially consumed. What had become of Macquart? Where could he have disappeared? In front of the chair, on the brick floor, which was saturated with grease, there was a little heap of ashes, beside which lay the pipe—a black pipe, which had not even broken in falling. All of Uncle Macquart was there, in this handful of fine ashes; and he was in the red cloud, also, which floated through the open window; in the layer of soot which carpeted the entire kitchen; the horrible grease of burnt flesh, enveloping everything, sticky and foul to the touch.

It was the finest case of spontaneous combustion physician had ever seen. The doctor had, indeed, read in medical papers of surprising cases, among others that of a shoemaker's wife, a drunken woman who had fallen asleep over her foot warmer, and of whom they had found only a hand and foot. He had, until now, put little faith in these cases, unwilling to admit, like the ancients, that a body impregnated with alcohol could disengage an unknown gas, capable of taking fire spontaneously and consuming the flesh and the bones. But he denied the truth of them no longer; besides, everything became clear to him as he reconstructed the scene—the coma of drunkenness producing absolute insensibility; the pipe falling on the clothes, which had taken fire; the flesh, saturated with liquor, burning and cracking; the fat melting, part of it running over the ground and part of it aiding the combustion, and all, at last—muscles, organs, and bones—consumed in a general blaze. Uncle Macquart was all there, with his blue cloth suit, and his fur cap, which he wore from one year's end to the other. Doubtless, as soon as he had begun to burn like a bonfire he had fallen forward, which would account for the chair being only blackened; and nothing of him was left, not a bone, not a tooth, not a nail, nothing but this little heap of gray dust which the draught of air from the door threatened at every moment to sweep away.

Clotilde had meanwhile entered, Charles remaining outside, his attention attracted by the continued howling of the dog.

"Good Heavens, what a smell!" she cried. "What is the matter?"

When Pascal explained to her the extraordinary catastrophe that had taken place, she shuddered. She took up the bottle to examine it, but she put it down again with horror, feeling it moist and sticky with Uncle Macquart's flesh. Nothing could be touched, the smallest objects were coated, as it were, with this yellowish grease which stuck to the hands.

A shudder of mingled awe and disgust passed through her, and she burst into tears, faltering:

"What a sad death! What a horrible death!"

Pascal had recovered from his first shock, and he was almost smiling.

"Why horrible? He was eighty-four years old; he did not suffer. As for me, I think it a superb death for that old rascal of an uncle, who, it may be now said, did not lead a very exemplary life. You remember his envelope; he had some very terrible and vile things upon his conscience, which did not prevent him, however, from settling down later and growing old, surrounded by every comfort, like an old humbug, receiving the recompense of virtues which he did not possess. And here he lies like the prince of drunkards, burning up of himself, consumed on the burning funeral pile of his own body!"

And the doctor waved his hand in admiration.

"Just think of it. To be drunk to the point of not feeling that one is on fire; to set one's self aflame, like a bonfire on St. John's day; to disappear in smoke to the last bone. Think of Uncle Macquart starting on his journey through space; first diffused through the four corners of the room, dissolved in air and floating about, bathing all that belonged to him; then escaping in a cloud of dust through the window, when I opened it for him, soaring up into the sky, filling the horizon. Why, that is an admirable death! To disappear, to leave nothing of himself behind but a little heap of ashes and a pipe beside it!"

And he picked up the pipe to keep it, as he said, as a relic of Uncle Macquart; while Clotilde, who thought she perceived a touch of bitter mockery in his eulogistic rhapsody, shuddered anew with horror and disgust. But suddenly she perceived something under the table—part of the remains, perhaps.

"Look at that fragment there."

He stooped down and picked up with surprise a woman's glove, a yellow glove.

"Why!" she cried, "it is grandmother's glove; the glove that was missing last evening."

They looked at each other; by a common impulse the same explanation rose to their lips, Felicite was certainly there yesterday; and a sudden conviction forced itself on the doctor's mind—the conviction that his mother had seen Uncle Macquart burning and that she had not quenched him. Various indications pointed to this—the state of complete coolness in which he found the room, the number of hours which he calculated to have been necessary for the combustion of the body. He saw clearly the same thought dawning in the terrified eyes of his companion. But as it seemed impossible that they should ever know the truth, he fabricated aloud the simplest explanation:

"No doubt your grandmother came in yesterday on her way back from the asylum, to say good day to Uncle Macquart, before he had begun drinking."

"Let us go away! let us go away!" cried Clotilde. "I am stifling here; I cannot remain here!"

Pascal, too, wished to go and give information of the death. He went out after her, shut up the house, and put the key in his pocket. Outside, they heard the little yellow dog still howling. He had taken refuge between Charles' legs, and the boy amused himself pushing him with his foot and listening to him whining, without comprehending.

The doctor went at once to the house of M. Maurin, the notary at the Tulettes, who was also mayor of the commune. A widower for ten years past, and living with his daughter, who was a childless widow, he had maintained neighborly relations with old Macquart, and had occasionally kept little Charles with him for several days at a time, his daughter having become interested in the boy who was so handsome and so much to be pitied. M. Maurin, horrified at the news, went at once with the doctor to draw up a statement of the accident, and promised to make out the death certificate in due form. As for religious ceremonies, funeral obsequies, they seemed scarcely possible. When they entered the kitchen the draught from the door scattered the ashes about, and when they piously attempted to collect them again they succeeded only in gathering together the scrapings of the flags, a collection of accumulated dirt, in which there could be but little of Uncle Macquart. What, then, could they bury? It was better to give up the idea. So they gave it up. Besides, Uncle Macquart had been hardly a devout Catholic, and the family contented themselves with causing masses to be said later on for the repose of his soul.

The notary, meantime, had immediately declared that there existed a will, which had been deposited with him, and he asked Pascal to meet him at his house on the next day but one for the reading; for he thought he might tell the doctor at once that Uncle Macquart had chosen him as his executor. And he ended by offering, like a kindhearted man, to keep Charles with him until then, comprehending how greatly the boy, who was so unwelcome at his mother's, would be in the way in the midst of all these occurrences. Charles seemed enchanted, and he remained at the Tulettes.

It was not until very late, until seven o'clock, that Clotilde and Pascal were able to take the train to return to Plassans, after the doctor had at last visited the two patients whom he had to see. But when they returned together to the notary's on the day appointed for the meeting, they had the disagreeable surprise of finding old Mme. Rougon installed there. She had naturally learned of Macquart's death, and had hurried there on the following day, full of excitement, and making a great show of grief; and she had just made her appearance again to-day, having heard the famous testament spoken of. The reading of the will, however, was a simple matter, unmarked by any incident. Macquart had left all the fortune that he could dispose of for the purpose of erecting a superb marble monument to himself, with two angels with folded wings, weeping. It was his own idea, a reminiscence of a similar tomb which he had seen abroad—in Germany, perhaps—when he was a soldier. And he had charged his nephew Pascal to superintend the erection of the monument, as he was the only one of the family, he said, who had any taste.

During the reading of the will Clotilde had remained in the notary's garden, sitting on a bench under the shade of an ancient chestnut tree. When Pascal and Felicite again appeared, there was a moment of great embarrassment, for they had not spoken to one another for some months past. The old lady, however, affected to be perfectly at her ease, making no allusion whatever to the new situation, and giving it to be understood that they might very well meet and appear united before the world, without for that reason entering into an explanation or becoming reconciled. But she committed the mistake of laying too much stress on the great grief which Macquart's death had caused her. Pascal, who suspected the overflowing joy, the unbounded delight which it gave her to think that this family ulcer was to be at last healed, that this abominable uncle was at last out of the way, became gradually possessed by an impatience, an indignation, which he could not control. His eyes fastened themselves involuntarily on his mother's gloves, which were black.

Just then she was expressing her grief in lowered tones:

"But how imprudent it was, at his age, to persist in living alone—like a wolf in his lair! If he had only had a servant in the house with him!"

Then the doctor, hardly conscious of what he was saying, terrified at hearing himself say the words, but impelled by an irresistible force, said:

"But, mother, since you were there, why did you not quench him?"

Old Mme. Rougon turned frightfully pale. How could her son have known? She looked at him for an instant in open-mouthed amazement; while Clotilde grew as pale as she, in the certainty of the crime, which was now evident. It was an avowal, this terrified silence which had fallen between the mother, the son, and the granddaughter—the shuddering silence in which families bury their domestic tragedies. The doctor, in despair at having spoken, he who avoided so carefully all disagreeable and useless explanations, was trying desperately to retract his words, when a new catastrophe extricated him from his terrible embarrassment.

Felicite desired to take Charles away with her, in order not to trespass on the notary's kind hospitality; and as the latter had sent the boy after breakfast to spend an hour or two with Aunt Dide, he had sent the maid servant to the asylum with orders to bring him back immediately. It was at this juncture that the servant, whom they were waiting for in the garden, made her appearance, covered with perspiration, out of breath, and greatly excited, crying from a distance:

"My God! My God! come quickly. Master Charles is bathed in blood."

Filled with consternation, all three set off for the asylum. This day chanced to be one of Aunt Dide's good days; very calm and gentle she sat erect in the armchair in which she had spent the hours, the long hours for twenty-two years past, looking straight before her into vacancy. She seemed to have grown still thinner, all the flesh had disappeared, her limbs were now only bones covered with parchment-like skin; and her keeper, the stout fair-haired girl, carried her, fed her, took her up and laid her down as if she had been a bundle. The ancestress, the forgotten one, tall, bony, ghastly, remained motionless, her eyes, only seeming to have life, her eyes shining clear as spring water in her thin withered face. But on this morning, again a sudden rush of tears had streamed down her cheeks, and she had begun to stammer words without any connection; which seemed to prove that in the midst of her senile exhaustion and the incurable torpor of madness, the slow induration of the brain and the limbs was not yet complete; there still were memories stored away, gleams of intelligence still were possible. Then her face had resumed its vacant expression. She seemed indifferent to every one and everything, laughing, sometimes, at an accident, at a fall, but most often seeing nothing and hearing nothing, gazing fixedly into vacancy.

When Charles had been brought to her the keeper had immediately installed him before the little table, in front of his great-great-grandmother. The girl kept a package of pictures for him—soldiers, captains, kings clad in purple and gold, and she gave them to him with a pair of scissors, saying:

"There, amuse yourself quietly, and behave well. You see that to-day grandmother is very good. You must be good, too."

The boy raised his eyes to the madwoman's face, and both looked at each other. At this moment the resemblance between them was extraordinary. Their eyes, especially, their vacant and limpid eyes, seemed to lose themselves in one another, to be identical. Then it was the physiognomy, the whole face, the worn features of the centenarian, that passed over three generations to this delicate child's face, it, too, worn already, as it were, and aged by the wear of the race. Neither smiled, they regarded each other intently, with an air of grave imbecility.

"Well!" continued the keeper, who had acquired the habit of talking to herself to cheer herself when with her mad charge, "you cannot deny each other. The same hand made you both. You are the very spit-down of each other. Come, laugh a bit, amuse yourselves, since you like to be together."

But to fix his attention for any length of time fatigued Charles, and he was the first to lower his eyes; he seemed to be interested in his pictures, while Aunt Dide, who had an astonishing power of fixing her attention, as if she had been turned into stone, continued to look at him fixedly, without even winking an eyelid.

The keeper busied herself for a few moments in the little sunny room, made gay by its light, blue-flowered paper. She made the bed which she had been airing, she arranged the linen on the shelves of the press. But she generally profited by the presence of the boy to take a little relaxation. She had orders never to leave her charge alone, and now that he was here she ventured to trust her with him.

"Listen to me well," she went on, "I have to go out for a little, and if she stirs, if she should need me, ring for me, call me at once; do you hear? You understand, you are a big enough boy to be able to call one."

He had looked up again, and made a sign that he had understood and that he would call her. And when he found himself alone with Aunt Dide he returned to his pictures quietly. This lasted for a quarter of an hour amid the profound silence of the asylum, broken only at intervals by some prison sound—a stealthy step, the jingling of a bunch of keys, and occasionally a loud cry, immediately silenced. But the boy must have been tired by the excessive heat of the day, for sleep gradually stole over him. Soon his head, fair as a lily, drooped, and as if weighed down by the too heavy casque of his royal locks, he let it sink gently on the pictures and fell asleep, with his cheek resting on the gold and purple kings. The lashes of his closed eyelids cast a shadow on his delicate skin, with its small blue veins, through which life pulsed feebly. He was beautiful as an angel, but with the indefinable corruption of a whole race spread over his countenance. And Aunt Dide looked at him with her vacant stare in which there was neither pleasure nor pain, the stare of eternity contemplating things earthly.

At the end of a few moments, however, an expression of interest seemed to dawn in the clear eyes. Something had just happened, a drop of blood was forming on the edge of the left nostril of the boy. This drop fell and another formed and followed it. It was the blood, the dew of blood, exuding this time, without a scratch, without a bruise, which issued and flowed of itself in the laxity of the degenerate tissues. The drops became a slender thread which flowed over the gold of the pictures. A little pool covered them, and made its way to a corner of the table; then the drops began again, splashing dully one by one upon the floor. And he still slept, with the divinely calm look of a cherub, not even conscious of the life that was escaping from him; and the madwoman continued to look at him, with an air of increasing interest, but without terror, amused, rather, her attention engaged by this, as by the flight of the big flies, which her gaze often followed for hours.

Several minutes more passed, the slender thread had grown larger, the drops followed one another more rapidly, falling on the floor with a monotonous and persistent drip. And Charles, at one moment, stirred, opened his eyes, and perceived that he was covered with blood. But he was not frightened; he was accustomed to this bloody spring, which issued from him at the slightest cause. He merely gave a sigh of weariness. Instinct, however, must have warned him, for he moaned more loudly than before, and called confusedly in stammering accents:

"Mamma! mamma!"

His weakness was no doubt already excessive, for an irresistible stupor once more took possession of him, his head dropped, his eyes closed, and he seemed to fall asleep again, continuing his plaint, as if in a dream, moaning in fainter and fainter accents:

"Mamma! mamma!"

Now the pictures were inundated; the black velvet jacket and trousers, braided with gold, were stained with long streaks of blood, and the little red stream began again to flow persistently from his left nostril, without stopping, crossed the red pool on the table and fell upon the ground, where it at last formed a veritable lake. A loud cry from the madwoman, a terrified call would have sufficed. But she did not cry, she did not call; motionless, rigid, emaciated, sitting there forgotten of the world, she gazed with the fixed look of the ancestress who sees the destinies of her race being accomplished. She sat there as if dried up, bound; her limbs and her tongue tied by her hundred years, her brain ossified by madness, incapable of willing or of acting. And yet the sight of the little red stream began to stir some feeling in her. A tremor passed over her deathlike countenance, a flush mounted to her cheeks. Finally, a last plaint roused her completely:

"Mamma! mamma!"

Then it was evident that a terrible struggle was taking place in Aunt Dide. She carried her skeleton-like hand to her forehead as if she felt her brain bursting. Her mouth was wide open, but no sound issued from it; the dreadful tumult that had arisen within her had no doubt paralyzed her tongue. She tried to rise, to run, but she had no longer any muscles; she remained fastened to her seat. All her poor body trembled in the superhuman effort which she was making to cry for help, without being able to break the bonds of old age and madness which held her prisoner. Her face was distorted with terror; memory gradually awakening, she must have comprehended everything.

And it was a slow and gentle agony, of which the spectacle lasted for several minutes more. Charles, silent now, as if he had again fallen asleep, was losing the last drops of blood that had remained in his veins, which were emptying themselves softly. His lily-like whiteness increased until it became a deathlike pallor. His lips lost their rosy color, became a pale pink, then white. And, as he was about to expire, he opened his large eyes and fixed them on his great-great-grandmother, who watched the light dying in them. All the waxen face was already dead, the eyes only were still living. They still kept their limpidity, their brightness. All at once they became vacant, the light in them was extinguished. This was the end—the death of the eyes, and Charles had died, without a struggle, exhausted, like a fountain from which all the water has run out. Life no longer pulsed through the veins of his delicate skin, there was now only the shadow of its wings on his white face. But he remained divinely beautiful, his face lying in blood, surrounded by his royal blond locks, like one of those little bloodless dauphins who, unable to bear the execrable heritage of their race, die of decrepitude and imbecility at sixteen.

The boy exhaled his latest breath as Dr. Pascal entered the room, followed by Felicite and Clotilde. And when he saw the quantity of blood that inundated the floor, he cried:

"Ah, my God! it is as I feared, a hemorrhage from the nose! The poor darling, no one was with him, and it is all over!"

But all three were struck with terror at the extraordinary spectacle that now met their gaze. Aunt Dide, who seemed to have grown taller, in the superhuman effort she was making, had almost succeeded in raising herself up, and her eyes, fixed on the dead boy, so fair and so gentle, and on the red sea of blood, beginning to congeal, that was lying around him, kindled with a thought, after a long sleep of twenty-two years. This final lesion of madness, this irremediable darkness of the mind, was evidently not so complete but that some memory of the past, lying hidden there, might awaken suddenly under the terrible blow which had struck her. And the ancestress, the forgotten one, lived again, emerged from her oblivion, rigid and wasted, like a specter of terror and grief.

For an instant she remained panting. Then with a shudder, which made her teeth chatter, she stammered a single phrase:

"The gendarme! the gendarme!"

Pascal and Felicite and Clotilde understood. They looked at one another involuntarily, turning very pale. The whole dreadful history of the old mother—of the mother of them all—rose before them, the ardent love of her youth, the long suffering of her mature age. Already two moral shocks had shaken her terribly—the first, when she was in her ardent prime, when a gendarme shot down her lover Macquart, the smuggler, like a dog; the second, years ago, when another gendarme shattered with a pistol shot the skull of her grandson Silvere, the insurgent, the victim of the hatred and the sanguinary strife of the family. Blood had always bespattered her. And a third moral shock finished her; blood bespattered her again, the impoverished blood of her race, which she had just beheld flowing slowly, and which lay upon the ground, while the fair royal child, his veins and his heart empty, slept.

Three times—face to face with her past life, her life red with passion and suffering, haunted by the image of expiation—she stammered:

"The gendarme! the gendarme! the gendarme!"

Then she sank back into her armchair. They thought she was dead, killed by the shock.

But the keeper at this moment at last appeared, endeavoring to excuse herself, fearing that she would be dismissed. When, aided by her, Dr. Pascal had placed Aunt Dide on the bed, he found that the old mother was still alive. She was not to die until the following day, at the age of one hundred and five years, three months, and seven days, of congestion of the brain, caused by the last shock she had received.

Pascal, turning to his mother, said:

"She will not live twenty-four hours; to-morrow she will be dead. Ah! Uncle Macquart, then she, and this poor boy, one after another. How much misery and grief!"

He paused and added in a lower tone:

"The family is thinning out; the old trees fall and the young die standing."

Felicite must have thought this another allusion. She was sincerely shocked by the tragic death of little Charles. But, notwithstanding, above the horror which she felt there arose a sense of immense relief. Next week, when they should have ceased to weep, what a rest to be able to say to herself that all this abomination of the Tulettes was at an end, that the family might at last rise, and shine in history!

Then she remembered that she had not answered the involuntary accusation made against her by her son at the notary's; and she spoke again of Macquart, through bravado:

"You see now that servants are of no use. There was one here, and yet she prevented nothing; it would have been useless for Uncle Macquart to have had one to take care of him; he would be in ashes now, all the same."

She sighed, and then continued in a broken voice:

"Well, well, neither our own fate nor that of others is in our hands; things happen as they will. These are great blows that have fallen upon us. We must only trust to God for the preservation and the prosperity of our family."

Dr. Pascal bowed with his habitual air of deference and said:

"You are right, mother."

Clotilde knelt down. Her former fervent Catholic faith had revived in this chamber of blood, of madness, and of death. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and with clasped hands she was praying fervently for the dear ones who were no more. She prayed that God would grant that their sufferings might indeed be ended, their faults pardoned, and that they might live again in another life, a life of unending happiness. And she prayed with the utmost fervor, in her terror of a hell, which after this miserable life would make suffering eternal.

From this day Pascal and Clotilde went to visit their sick side by side, filled with greater pity than ever. Perhaps, with Pascal, the feeling of his powerlessness against inevitable disease was even stronger than before. The only wisdom was to let nature take its course, to eliminate dangerous elements, and to labor only in the supreme work of giving health and strength. But the suffering and the death of those who are dear to us awaken in us a hatred of disease, an irresistible desire to combat and to vanquish it. And the doctor never tasted so great a joy as when he succeeded, with his hypodermic injections, in soothing a paroxysm of pain, in seeing the groaning patient grow tranquil and fall asleep. Clotilde, in return, adored him, proud of their love, as if it were a consolation which they carried, like the viaticum, to the poor.

X.

Martine one morning obtained from Dr. Pascal, as she did every three months, his receipt for fifteen hundred francs, to take it to the notary Grandguillot, to get from him what she called their "income." The doctor seemed surprised that the payment should have fallen due again so soon; he had never been so indifferent as he was now about money matters, leaving to Martine the care of settling everything. And he and Clotilde were under the plane trees, absorbed in the joy that filled their life, lulled by the ceaseless song of the fountain, when the servant returned with a frightened face, and in a state of extraordinary agitation. She was so breathless with excitement that for a moment she could not speak.

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" she cried at last. "M. Grandguillot has gone away!"

Pascal did not at first comprehend.

"Well, my girl, there is no hurry," he said; "you can go back another day."

"No, no! He has gone away; don't you hear? He has gone away forever—"

And as the waters rush forth in the bursting of a dam, her emotion vented itself in a torrent of words.

"I reached the street, and I saw from a distance a crowd gathered before the door. A chill ran through me; I felt that some misfortune had happened. The door closed, and not a blind open, as if there was somebody dead in the house. They told me when I got there that he had run away; that he had not left a sou behind him; that many families would be ruined."

She laid the receipt on the stone table.

"There! There is your paper! It is all over with us, we have not a sou left, we are going to die of starvation!" And she sobbed aloud in the anguish of her miserly heart, distracted by this loss of a fortune, and trembling at the prospect of impending want.

Clotilde sat stunned and speechless, her eyes fixed on Pascal, whose predominating feeling at first seemed to be one of incredulity. He endeavored to calm Martine. Why! why! it would not do to give up in this way. If all she knew of the affair was what she had heard from the people in the street, it might be only gossip, after all, which always exaggerates everything. M. Grandguillot a fugitive; M. Grandguillot a thief; that was monstrous, impossible! A man of such probity, a house liked and respected by all Plassans for more than a century past. Why people thought money safer there than in the Bank of France.

"Consider, Martine, this would not have come all of a sudden, like a thunderclap; there would have been some rumors of it beforehand. The deuce! an old reputation does not fall to pieces in that way, in a night."

At this she made a gesture of despair.

"Ah, monsieur, that is what most afflicts me, because, you see, it throws some of the responsibility on me. For weeks past I have been hearing stories on all sides. As for you two, naturally you hear nothing; you don't even know whether you are alive or dead."

Neither Pascal nor Clotilde could refrain from smiling; for it was indeed true that their love lifted them so far above the earth that none of the common sounds of existence reached them.

"But the stories I heard were so ugly that I didn't like to worry you with them. I thought they were lies."

She was silent for a moment, and then added that while some people merely accused M. Grandguillot of having speculated on the Bourse, there were others who accused him of still worse practises. And she burst into fresh sobs.

"My God! My God! what is going to become of us? We are all going to die of starvation!"

Shaken, then, moved by seeing Clotilde's eyes, too, filled with tears, Pascal made an effort to remember, to see clearly into the past. Years ago, when he had been practising in Plassans, he had deposited at different times, with M. Grandguillot, the twenty thousand francs on the interest of which he had lived comfortably for the past sixteen years, and on each occasion the notary had given him a receipt for the sum deposited. This would no doubt enable him to establish his position as a personal creditor. Then a vague recollection awoke in his memory; he remembered, without being able to fix the date, that at the request of the notary, and in consequence of certain representations made by him, which Pascal had forgotten, he had given the lawyer a power of attorney for the purpose of investing the whole or a part of his money, in mortgages, and he was even certain that in this power the name of the attorney had been left in blank. But he was ignorant as to whether this document had ever been used or not; he had never taken the trouble to inquire how his money had been invested. A fresh pang of miserly anguish made Martine cry out:

"Ah, monsieur, you are well punished for your sin. Was that a way to abandon one's money? For my part, I know almost to a sou how my account stands every quarter; I have every figure and every document at my fingers' ends."

In the midst of her distress an unconscious smile broke over her face, lighting it all up. Her long cherished passion had been gratified; her four hundred francs wages, saved almost intact, put out at interest for thirty years, at last amounted to the enormous sum of twenty thousand francs. And this treasure was put away in a safe place which no one knew. She beamed with delight at the recollection, and she said no more.

"But who says that our money is lost?" cried Pascal.

"M. Grandguillot had a private fortune; he has not taken away with him his house and his lands, I suppose. They will look into the affair; they will make an investigation. I cannot make up my mind to believe him a common thief. The only trouble is the delay: a liquidation drags on so long."

He spoke in this way in order to reassure Clotilde, whose growing anxiety he observed. She looked at him, and she looked around her at La Souleiade; her only care his happiness; her most ardent desire to live here always, as she had lived in the past, to love him always in this beloved solitude. And he, wishing to tranquilize her, recovered his fine indifference; never having lived for money, he did not imagine that one could suffer from the want of it.

"But I have some money!" he cried, at last. "What does Martine mean by saying that we have not a sou left, and that we are going to die of starvation!"

And he rose gaily, and made them both follow him saying:

"Come, come, I am going to show you some money. And I will give some of it to Martine that she may make us a good dinner this evening."

Upstairs in his room he triumphantly opened his desk before them. It was in a drawer of this desk that for years past he had thrown the money which his later patients had brought him of their own accord, for he had never sent them an account. Nor had he ever known the exact amount of his little treasure, of the gold and bank bills mingled together in confusion, from which he took the sums he required for his pocket money, his experiments, his presents, and his alms. During the last few months he had made frequent visits to his desk, making deep inroads into its contents. But he had been so accustomed to find there the sums he required, after years of economy during which he had spent scarcely anything, that he had come to believe his savings inexhaustible.

He gave a satisfied laugh, then, as he opened the drawer, crying:

"Now you shall see! Now you shall see!"

And he was confounded, when, after searching among the heap of notes and bills, he succeeded in collecting only a sum of 615 francs—two notes of 100 francs each, 400 francs in gold, and 15 francs in change. He shook out the papers, he felt in every corner of the drawer, crying:

"But it cannot be! There was always money here before, there was a heap of money here a few days ago. It must have been all those old bills that misled me. I assure you that last week I saw a great deal of money. I had it in my hand."

He spoke with such amusing good faith, his childlike surprise was so sincere, that Clotilde could not keep from smiling. Ah, the poor master, what a wretched business man he was! Then, as she observed Martine's look of anguish, her utter despair at sight of this insignificant sum, which was now all there was for the maintenance of all three, she was seized with a feeling of despair; her eyes filled with tears, and she murmured:

"My God, it is for me that you have spent everything; if we have nothing now, if we are ruined, it is I who am the cause of it!"

Pascal had already forgotten the money he had taken for the presents. Evidently that was where it had gone. The explanation tranquilized him. And as she began to speak in her grief of returning everything to the dealers, he grew angry.

"Give back what I have given you! You would give a piece of my heart with it, then! No, I would rather die of hunger, I tell you!"

Then his confidence already restored, seeing a future of unlimited possibilities opening out before him, he said:

"Besides, we are not going to die of hunger to-night, are we, Martine? There is enough here to keep us for a long time."

Martine shook her head. She would undertake to manage with it for two months, for two and a half, perhaps, if people had sense, but not longer. Formerly the drawer was replenished; there was always some money coming in; but now that monsieur had given up his patients, they had absolutely no income. They must not count on any help from outside, then. And she ended by saying:

"Give me the two one-hundred-franc bills. I'll try and make them last for a month. Then we shall see. But be very prudent; don't touch the four hundred francs in gold; lock the drawer and don't open it again."

"Oh, as to that," cried the doctor, "you may make your mind easy. I would rather cut off my right hand."

And thus it was settled. Martine was to have entire control of this last purse; and they might trust to her economy, they were sure that she would save the centimes. As for Clotilde, who had never had a private purse, she would not even feel the want of money. Pascal only would suffer from no longer having his inexhaustible treasure to draw upon, but he had given his promise to allow the servant to buy everything.

"There! That is a good piece of work!" he said, relieved, as happy as if he had just settled some important affair which would assure them a living for a long time to come.

A week passed during which nothing seemed to have changed at La Souleiade. In the midst of their tender raptures neither Pascal nor Clotilde thought any more of the want which was impending. And one morning during the absence of the latter, who had gone with Martine to market, the doctor received a visit which filled him at first with a sort of terror. It was from the woman who had sold him the beautiful corsage of old point d'Alencon, his first present to Clotilde. He felt himself so weak against a possible temptation that he trembled. Even before the woman had uttered a word he had already begun to defend himself—no, no, he neither could nor would buy anything. And with outstretched hands he prevented her from taking anything out of her little bag, declaring to himself that he would look at nothing. The dealer, however, a fat, amiable woman, smiled, certain of victory. In an insinuating voice she began to tell him a long story of how a lady, whom she was not at liberty to name, one of the most distinguished ladies in Plassans, who had suddenly met with a reverse of fortune, had been obliged to part with one of her jewels; and she then enlarged on the splendid chance—a piece of jewelry that had cost twelve hundred francs, and she was willing to let it go for five hundred. She opened her bag slowly, in spite of the terrified and ever-louder protestations of the doctor, and took from it a slender gold necklace set simply with seven pearls in front; but the pearls were of wonderful brilliancy—flawless, and perfect in shape. The ornament was simple, chaste, and of exquisite delicacy. And instantly he saw in fancy the necklace on Clotilde's beautiful neck, as its natural adornment. Any other jewel would have been a useless ornament, these pearls would be the fitting symbol of her youth. And he took the necklace in his trembling fingers, experiencing a mortal anguish at the idea of returning it. He defended himself still, however; he declared that he had not five hundred francs, while the dealer continued, in her smooth voice, to push the advantage she had gained. After another quarter an hour, when she thought she had him secure, she suddenly offered him the necklace for three hundred francs, and he yielded; his mania for giving, his desire to please his idol, to adorn her, conquered. When he went to the desk to take the fifteen gold pieces to count them out to the dealer, he felt convinced that the notary's affairs would be arranged, and that they would soon have plenty of money.

When Pascal found himself once more alone, with the ornament in his pocket, he was seized with a childish delight, and he planned his little surprise, while waiting, excited and impatient, for Clotilde's return. The moment she made her appearance his heart began to beat violently. She was very warm, for an August sun was blazing in the sky, and she laid aside her things quickly, pleased with her walk, telling him, laughing, of the good bargain Martine had made—two pigeons for eighteen sous. While she was speaking he pretended to notice something on her neck.

"Why, what have you on your neck? Let me see."

He had the necklace in his hand, and he succeeded in putting it around her neck, while feigning to pass his fingers over it, to assure himself that there was nothing there. But she resisted, saying gaily:

"Don't! There is nothing on my neck. Here, what are you doing? What have you in your hand that is tickling me?"

He caught hold of her, and drew her before the long mirror, in which she had a full view of herself. On her neck the slender chain showed like a thread of gold, and the seven pearls, like seven milky stars, shone with soft luster against her satin skin. She looked charmingly childlike. Suddenly she gave a delighted laugh, like the cooing of a dove swelling out its throat proudly.

"Oh, master, master, how good you are! Do you think of nothing but me, then? How happy you make me!"

And the joy which shone in her eyes, the joy of the woman and the lover, happy to be beautiful and to be adored, recompensed him divinely for his folly.

She drew back her head, radiant, and held up her mouth to him. He bent over and kissed her.

"Are you happy?"

"Oh, yes, master, happy, happy! Pearls are so sweet, so pure! And these are so becoming to me!"

For an instant longer she admired herself in the glass, innocently vain of her fair flower-like skin, under the nacre drops of the pearls. Then, yielding to a desire to show herself, hearing the servant moving about outside, she ran out, crying:

"Martine, Martine! See what master has just given me! Say, am I not beautiful!"

But all at once, seeing the old maid's severe face, that had suddenly turned an ashen hue, she became confused, and all her pleasure was spoiled. Perhaps she had a consciousness of the jealous pang which her brilliant youth caused this poor creature, worn out in the dumb resignation of her servitude, in adoration of her master. This, however, was only a momentary feeling, unconscious in the one, hardly suspected by the other, and what remained was the evident disapprobation of the economical servant, condemning the present with her sidelong glance.

Clotilde was seized with a little chill.

"Only," she murmured, "master has rummaged his desk again. Pearls are very dear, are they not?"

Pascal, embarrassed, too, protested volubly, telling them of the splendid opportunity presented by the dealer's visit. An incredibly good stroke of business—it was impossible to avoid buying the necklace.

"How much?" asked the young girl with real anxiety.

"Three hundred francs."

Martine, who had not yet opened her lips, but who looked terrible in her silence, could not restrain a cry.

"Good God! enough to live upon for six weeks, and we have not bread!"

Large tears welled from Clotilde's eyes. She would have torn the necklace from her neck if Pascal had not prevented her. She wished to give it to him on the instant, and she faltered in heart-broken tones:

"It is true, Martine is right. Master is mad, and I am mad, too, to keep this for an instant, in the situation in which we are. It would burn my flesh. Let me take it back, I beg of you."

Never would he consent to this, he said. Now his eyes, too, were moist, he joined in their grief, crying that he was incorrigible, that they ought to have taken all the money away from him. And running to the desk he took the hundred francs that were left, and forced Martine to take them, saying:

"I tell you that I will not keep another sou. I should spend this, too. Take it, Martine; you are the only one of us who has any sense. You will make the money last, I am very certain, until our affairs are settled. And you, dear, keep that; do not grieve me."

Nothing more was said about this incident. But Clotilde kept the necklace, wearing it under her gown; and there was a sort of delightful mystery in feeling on her neck, unknown to every one, this simple, pretty ornament. Sometimes, when they were alone, she would smile at Pascal and draw the pearls from her dress quickly, and show them to him without a word; and as quickly she would replace them again on her warm neck, filled with delightful emotion. It was their fond folly which she thus recalled to him, with a confused gratitude, a vivid and radiant joy—a joy which nevermore left her.

A straitened existence, sweet in spite of everything, now began for them. Martine made an exact inventory of the resources of the house, and it was not reassuring. The provision of potatoes only promised to be of any importance. As ill luck would have it, the jar of oil was almost out, and the last cask of wine was also nearly empty. La Souleiade, having neither vines nor olive trees, produced only a few vegetables and some fruits—pears, not yet ripe, and trellis grapes, which were to be their only delicacies. And meat and bread had to be bought every day. So that from the first day the servant put Pascal and Clotilde on rations, suppressing the former sweets, creams, and pastry, and reducing the food to the quantity barely necessary to sustain life. She resumed all her former authority, treating them like children who were not to be consulted, even with regard to their wishes or their tastes. It was she who arranged the menus, who knew better than themselves what they wanted; but all this like a mother, surrounding them with unceasing care, performing the miracle of enabling them to live still with comfort on their scanty resources; occasionally severe with them, for their own good, as one is severe with a child when it refuses to eat its food. And it seemed as if this maternal care, this last immolation, the illusory peace with which she surrounded their love, gave her, too, a little happiness, and drew her out of the dumb despair into which she had fallen. Since she had thus watched over them she had begun to look like her old self, with her little white face, the face of a nun vowed to chastity; her calm ash-colored eyes, which expressed the resignation of her thirty years of servitude. When, after the eternal potatoes and the little cutlet at four sous, undistinguishable among the vegetables, she was able, on certain days, without compromising her budget, to give them pancakes, she was triumphant, she laughed to see them laugh.

Pascal and Clotilde thought everything she did was right, which did not prevent them, however, from jesting about her when she was not present. The old jests about her avarice were repeated over and over again. They said that she counted the grains of pepper, so many grains for each dish, in her passion for economy. When the potatoes had too little oil, when the cutlets were reduced to a mouthful, they would exchange a quick glance, stifling their laughter in their napkins, until she had left the room. Everything was a source of amusement to them, and they laughed innocently at their misery.

At the end of the first month Pascal thought of Martine's wages. Usually she took her forty francs herself from the common purse which she kept.

"My poor girl," he said to her one evening, "what are you going to do for your wages, now that we have no more money?"

She remained for a moment with her eyes fixed on the ground, with an air of consternation, then she said:

"Well, monsieur, I must only wait."

But he saw that she had not said all that was in her mind, that she had thought of some arrangement which she did not know how to propose to him, so he encouraged her.

"Well, then, if monsieur would consent to it, I should like monsieur to sign me a paper."

"How, a paper?"

"Yes, a paper, in which monsieur should say, every month, that he owes me forty francs."

Pascal at once made out the paper for her, and this made her quite happy. She put it away as carefully as if it had been real money. This evidently tranquilized her. But the paper became a new subject of wondering amusement to the doctor and his companion. In what did the extraordinary power consist which money has on certain natures? This old maid, who would serve him on bended knees, who adored him above everything, to the extent of having devoted to him her whole life, to ask for this silly guarantee, this scrap of paper which was of no value, if he should be unable to pay her.

So far neither Pascal nor Clotilde had any great merit in preserving their serenity in misfortune, for they did not feel it. They lived high above it, in the rich and happy realm of their love. At table they did not know what they were eating; they might fancy they were partaking of a princely banquet, served on silver dishes. They were unconscious of the increasing destitution around them, of the hunger of the servant who lived upon the crumbs from their table; and they walked through the empty house as through a palace hung with silk and filled with riches. This was undoubtedly the happiest period of their love. The workroom had pleasant memories of the past, and they spent whole days there, wrapped luxuriously in the joy of having lived so long in it together. Then, out of doors, in every corner of La Souleiade, royal summer had set up his blue tent, dazzling with gold. In the morning, in the embalsamed walks on the pine grove; at noon under the dark shadow of the plane trees, lulled by the murmur of the fountain; in the evening on the cool terrace, or in the still warm threshing yard bathed in the faint blue radiance of the first stars, they lived with rapture their straitened life, their only ambition to live always together, indifferent to all else. The earth was theirs, with all its riches, its pomps, and its dominions, since they loved each other.

Toward the end of August however, matters grew bad again. At times they had rude awakenings, in the midst of this life without ties, without duties, without work; this life which was so sweet, but which it would be impossible, hurtful, they knew, to lead always. One evening Martine told them that she had only fifty francs left, and that they would have difficulty in managing for two weeks longer, even giving up wine. In addition to this the news was very serious; the notary Grandguillot was beyond a doubt insolvent, so that not even the personal creditors would receive anything. In the beginning they had relied on the house and the two farms which the fugitive notary had left perforce behind him, but it was now certain that this property was in his wife's name and, while he was enjoying in Switzerland, as it was said, the beauty of the mountains, she lived on one of the farms, which she cultivated quietly, away from the annoyances of the liquidation. In short, it was infamous—a hundred families ruined; left without bread. An assignee had indeed been appointed, but he had served only to confirm the disaster, since not a centime of assets had been discovered. And Pascal, with his usual indifference, neglected even to go and see him to speak to him about his own case, thinking that he already knew all that there was to be known about it, and that it was useless to stir up this ugly business, since there was neither honor nor profit to be derived from it.

Then, indeed, the future looked threatening at La Souleiade. Black want stared them in the face. And Clotilde, who, in reality, had a great deal of good sense, was the first to take alarm. She maintained her cheerfulness while Pascal was present, but, more prescient than he, in her womanly tenderness, she fell into a state of absolute terror if he left her for an instant, asking herself what was to become of him at his age with so heavy a burden upon his shoulders. For several days she cherished in secret a project—to work and earn money, a great deal of money, with her pastels. People had so often praised her extraordinary and original talent that, taking Martine into her confidence, she sent her one fine morning to offer some of her fantastic bouquets to the color dealer of the Cours Sauvaire, who was a relation, it was said, of a Parisian artist. It was with the express condition that nothing was to be exhibited in Plassans, that everything was to be sent to a distance. But the result was disastrous; the merchant was frightened by the strangeness of the design, and by the fantastic boldness of the execution, and he declared that they would never sell. This threw her into despair; great tears welled her eyes. Of what use was she? It was a grief and a humiliation to be good for nothing. And the servant was obliged to console her, saying that no doubt all women were not born for work; that some grew like the flowers in the gardens, for the sake of their fragrance; while others were the wheat of the fields that is ground up and used for food.

Martine, meantime, cherished another project; it was to urge the doctor to resume his practise. At last she mentioned it to Clotilde, who at once pointed out to her the difficulty, the impossibility almost, of such an attempt. She and Pascal had been talking about his doing so only the day before. He, too, was anxious, and had thought of work as the only chance of salvation. The idea of opening an office again was naturally the first that had presented itself to him. But he had been for so long a time the physician of the poor! How could he venture now to ask payment when it was so many years since he had left off doing so? Besides, was it not too late, at his age, to recommence a career? not to speak of the absurd rumors that had been circulating about him, the name which they had given him of a crack-brained genius. He would not find a single patient now, it would be a useless cruelty to force him to make an attempt which would assuredly result only in a lacerated heart and empty hands. Clotilde, on the contrary, had used all her influence to turn him from the idea. Martine comprehended the reasonableness of these objections, and she too declared that he must be prevented from running the risk of so great a chagrin. But while she was speaking a new idea occurred to her, as she suddenly remembered an old register, which she had met with in a press, and in which she had in former times entered the doctor's visits. For a long time it was she who had kept the accounts. There were so many patients who had never paid that a list of them filled three of the large pages of the register. Why, then, now that they had fallen into misfortune, should they not ask from these people the money which they justly owed? It might be done without saying anything to monsieur, who had never been willing to appeal to the law. And this time Clotilde approved of her idea. It was a perfect conspiracy. Clotilde consulted the register, and made out the bills, and the servant presented them. But nowhere did she receive a sou; they told her at every door that they would look over the account; that they would stop in and see the doctor himself. Ten days passed, no one came, and there were now only six francs in the house, barely enough to live upon for two or three days longer.

Martine, when she returned with empty hands on the following day from a new application to an old patient, took Clotilde aside and told her that she had just been talking with Mme. Felicite at the corner of the Rue de la Banne. The latter had undoubtedly been watching for her. She had not again set foot in La Souleiade. Not even the misfortune which had befallen her son—the sudden loss of his money, of which the whole town was talking—had brought her to him; she still continued stern and indignant. But she waited in trembling excitement, she maintained her attitude as an offended mother only in the certainty that she would at last have Pascal at her feet, shrewdly calculating that he would sooner or later be compelled to appeal to her for assistance. When he had not a sou left, when he knocked at her door, then she would dictate her terms; he should marry Clotilde, or, better still, she would demand the departure of the latter. But the days passed, and he did not come. And this was why she had stopped Martine, assuming a pitying air, asking what news there was, and seeming to be surprised that they had not had recourse to her purse, while giving it to be understood that her dignity forbade her to take the first step.

"You should speak to monsieur, and persuade him," ended the servant. And indeed, why should he not appeal to his mother? That would be entirely natural.

"Oh! never would I undertake such a commission," cried Clotilde. "Master would be angry, and with reason. I truly believe he would die of starvation before he would eat grandmother's bread."

But on the evening of the second day after this, at dinner, as Martine was putting on the table a piece of boiled beef left over from the day before, she gave them notice.

"I have no more money, monsieur, and to-morrow there will be only potatoes, without oil or butter. It is three weeks now that you have had only water to drink; now you will have to do without meat."

They were still cheerful, they could still jest.

"Have you salt, my good girl?"

"Oh, that; yes, monsieur, there is still a little left."

"Well, potatoes and salt are very good when one is hungry."

That night, however, Pascal noticed that Clotilde was feverish; this was the hour in which they exchanged confidences, and she ventured to tell him of her anxiety on his account, on her own, on that of the whole house. What was going to become of them when all their resources should be exhausted? For a moment she thought of speaking to him of his mother. But she was afraid, and she contented herself with confessing to him what she and Martine had done—the old register examined, the bills made out and sent, the money asked everywhere in vain. In other circumstances he would have been greatly annoyed and very angry at this confession; offended that they should have acted without his knowledge, and contrary to the attitude he had maintained during his whole professional life. He remained for a long tine silent, strongly agitated, and this would have sufficed to prove how great must be his secret anguish at times, under his apparent indifference to poverty. Then he forgave Clotilde, clasping her wildly to his breast, and finally he said that she had done right, that they could not continue to live much longer as they were living, in a destitution which increased every day. Then they fell into silence, each trying to think of a means of procuring the money necessary for their daily wants, each suffering keenly; she, desperate at the thought of the tortures that awaited him; he unable to accustom himself to the idea of seeing her wanting bread. Was their happiness forever ended, then? Was poverty going to blight their spring with its chill breath?

At breakfast, on the following day, they ate only fruit. The doctor was very silent during the morning, a prey to a visible struggle. And it was not until three o'clock that he took a resolution.

"Come, we must stir ourselves," he said to his companion. "I do not wish you to fast this evening again; so put on your hat, we will go out together."

She looked at him, waiting for an explanation.

"Yes, since they owe us money, and have refused to give it to you, I will see whether they will also refuse to give it to me."

His hands trembled; the thought of demanding payment in this way, after so many years, evidently made him suffer terribly; but he forced a smile, he affected to be very brave. And she, who knew from the trembling of his voice the extent of his sacrifice, had tears in her eyes.

"No, no, master; don't go if it makes you suffer so much. Martine can go again."

But the servant, who was present, approved highly of monsieur's intention.

"And why should not monsieur go? There's no shame in asking what is owed to one, is there? Every one should have his own; for my part, I think it quite right that monsieur should show at last that he is a man."

Then, as before, in their hours of happiness, old King David, as Pascal jestingly called himself, left the house, leaning on Abishag's arm. Neither of them was yet in rags; he still wore his tightly buttoned overcoat; she had on her pretty linen gown with red spots, but doubtless the consciousness of their poverty lowered them in their own estimation, making them feel that they were now only two poor people who occupied a very insignificant place in the world, for they walked along by the houses, shunning observation. The sunny streets were almost deserted. A few curious glances embarrassed them. They did not hasten their steps, however; only their hearts were oppressed at the thought of the visits they were about to make.

Pascal resolved to begin with an old magistrate whom he had treated for an affection of the liver. He entered the house, leaving Clotilde sitting on the bench in the Cours Sauvaire. But he was greatly relieved when the magistrate, anticipating his demand, told him that he did not receive his rents until October, and that he would pay him then. At the house of an old lady of seventy, a paralytic, the rebuff was of a different kind. She was offended because her account had been sent to her through a servant who had been impolite; so that he hastened to offer her his excuses, giving her all the time she desired. Then he climbed up three flights of stairs to the apartment of a clerk in the tax collector's office, whom he found still ill, and so poor that he did not even venture to make his demand. Then followed a mercer, a lawyer's wife, an oil merchant, a baker—all well-to-do people; and all turned him away, some with excuses, others by denying him admittance; a few even pretended not to know what he meant. There remained the Marquise de Valqueyras, the sole representative of a very ancient family, a widow with a girl of ten, who was very rich, and whose avarice was notorious. He had left her for the last, for he was greatly afraid of her. Finally he knocked at the door of her ancient mansion, at the foot of the Cours Sauvaire, a massive structure of the time of Mazarin. He remained so long in the house that Clotilde, who was walking under the trees, at last became uneasy.

When he finally made his appearance, at the end of a full half hour, she said jestingly, greatly relieved:

"Why, what was the matter? Had she no money?"

But here, too, he had been unsuccessful; she complained that her tenants did not pay her.

"Imagine," he continued, in explanation of his long absence, "the little girl is ill. I am afraid that it is the beginning of a gastric fever. So she wished me to see the child, and I examined her."

A smile which she could not suppress came to Clotilde's lips.

"And you prescribed for her?"

"Of course; could I do otherwise?"

She took his arm again, deeply affected, and he felt her press it against her heart. For a time they walked on aimlessly. It was all over; they had knocked at every debtor's door, and nothing now remained for them to do but to return home with empty hands. But this Pascal refused to do, determined that Clotilde should have something more than the potatoes and water which awaited them. When they ascended the Cours Sauvaire, they turned to the left, to the new town; drifting now whither cruel fate led them.

"Listen," said Pascal at last; "I have an idea. If I were to speak to Ramond he would willingly lend us a thousand francs, which we could return to him when our affairs are arranged."

She did not answer at once. Ramond, whom she had rejected, who was now married and settled in a house in the new town, in a fair way to become the fashionable physician of the place, and to make a fortune! She knew, indeed, that he had a magnanimous soul and a kind heart. If he had not visited them again it had been undoubtedly through delicacy. Whenever they chanced to meet, he saluted them with so admiring an air, he seemed so pleased to see their happiness.

"Would that be disagreeable to you?" asked Pascal ingenuously. For his part, he would have thrown open to the young physician his house, his purse, and his heart.

"No, no," she answered quickly. "There has never been anything between us but affection and frankness. I think I gave him a great deal of pain, but he has forgiven me. You are right; we have no other friend. It is to Ramond that we must apply."

Ill luck pursued them, however. Ramond was absent from home, attending a consultation at Marseilles, and he would not be back until the following evening. And it young Mme. Ramond, an old friend of Clotilde's, some three years her junior, who received them. She seemed a little embarrassed, but she was very amiable, notwithstanding. But the doctor, naturally, did not prefer his request, and contented himself with saying, in explanation of his visit, that he had missed Ramond. When they were in the street again, Pascal and Clotilde felt themselves once more abandoned and alone. Where now should they turn? What new effort should they make? And they walked on again aimlessly.

"I did not tell you, master," Clotilde at last ventured to murmur, "but it seems that Martine met grandmother the other day. Yes, grandmother has been uneasy about us. She asked Martine why we did not go to her, if we were in want. And see, here is her house."

They were in fact, in the Rue de la Banne. They could see the corner of the Place de la Sous-Prefecture. But he at once silenced her.

"Never, do you hear! Nor shall you go either. You say that because it grieves you to see me in this poverty. My heart, too, is heavy, to think that you also are in want, that you also suffer. But it is better to suffer than to do a thing that would leave one an eternal remorse. I will not. I cannot."

They emerged from the Rue de la Banne, and entered the old quarter.

"I would a thousand times rather apply to a stranger. Perhaps we still have friends, even if they are only among the poor."

And resolved to beg, David continued his walk, leaning on the arm of Abishag; the old mendicant king went from door to door, leaning on the shoulder of the loving subject whose youth was now his only support. It was almost six o'clock; the heat had abated; the narrow streets were filling with people; and in this populous quarter where they were loved, they were everywhere greeted with smiles. Something of pity was mingled with the admiration they awakened, for every one knew of their ruin. But they seemed of a nobler beauty than before, he all white, she all blond, pressing close to each other in their misfortune. They seemed more united, more one with each other than ever; holding their heads erect, proud of their glorious love, though touched by misfortune; he shaken, while she, with a courageous heart, sustained him. And in spite of the poverty that had so suddenly overtaken them they walked without shame, very poor and very great, with the sorrowful smile under which they concealed the desolation of their souls. Workmen in dirty blouses passed them by, who had more money in their pockets than they. No one ventured to offer them the sou which is not refused to those who are hungry. At the Rue Canoquin they stopped at the house of Gulraude. She had died the week before. Two other attempts which they made failed. They were reduced now to consider where they could borrow ten francs. They had been walking about the town for three hours, but they could not resolve to go home empty-handed.

Ah, this Plassans, with its Cours Sauvaire, its Rue de Rome, and its Rue de la Banne, dividing it into three quarters; this Plassans; with its windows always closed, this sun-baked town, dead in appearance, but which concealed under this sleeping surface a whole nocturnal life of the clubhouse and the gaming table. They walked through it three times more with slackened pace, on this clear, calm close of a glowing August day. In the yard of the coach office a few old stage-coaches, which still plied between the town and the mountain villages, were standing unharnessed; and under the thick shade of the plane trees at the doors of the cafes, the customers, who were to be seen from seven o'clock in the morning, looked after them smiling. In the new town, too, the servants came and stood at the doors of the wealthy houses; they met with less sympathy here than in the deserted streets of the Quartier St. Marc, whose antique houses maintained a friendly silence. They returned to the heart of the old quarter where they were most liked; they went as far as St. Saturnin, the cathedral, whose apse was shaded by the garden of the chapter, a sweet and peaceful solitude, from which a beggar drove them by himself asking an alms from them. They were building rapidly in the neighborhood of the railway station; a new quarter was growing up there, and they bent their steps in that direction. Then they returned a last time to the Place de la Sous-Prefecture, with a sudden reawakening of hope, thinking that they might meet some one who would offer them money. But they were followed only by the indulgent smile of the town, at seeing them so united and so beautiful. Only one woman had tears in her eyes, foreseeing, perhaps, the sufferings that awaited them. The stones of the Viorne, the little sharp paving stones, wounded their feet. And they had at last to return to La Souleiade, without having succeeded in obtaining anything, the old mendicant king and his submissive subject; Abishag, in the flower of her youth, leading back David, old and despoiled of his wealth, and weary from having walked the streets in vain.

It was eight o'clock, and Martine, who was waiting for them, comprehended that she would have no cooking to do this evening. She pretended that she had dined, and as she looked ill Pascal sent her at once to bed.

"We do not need you," said Clotilde. "As the potatoes are on the fire we can take them up very well ourselves."

The servant, who was feverish and out of humor, yielded. She muttered some indistinct words—when people had eaten up everything what was the use of sitting down to table? Then, before shutting herself into her room, she added:

"Monsieur, there is no more hay for Bonhomme. I thought he was looking badly a little while ago; monsieur ought to go and see him."

Pascal and Clotilde, filled with uneasiness, went to the stable. The old horse was, in fact, lying on the straw in the somnolence of expiring old age. They had not taken him out for six months past, for his legs, stiff with rheumatism, refused to support him, and he had become completely blind. No one could understand why the doctor kept the old beast. Even Martine had at last said that he ought to be slaughtered, if only through pity. But Pascal and Clotilde cried out at this, as much excited as if it had been proposed to them to put an end to some aged relative who was not dying fast enough. No, no, he had served them for more than a quarter of a century; he should die comfortably with them, like the worthy fellow he had always been. And to-night the doctor did not scorn to examine him, as if he had never attended any other patients than animals. He lifted up his hoofs, looked at his gums, and listened to the beating of his heart.

"No, there is nothing the matter with him," he said at last. "It is simply old age. Ah, my poor old fellow, I think, indeed, we shall never again travel the roads together."

The idea that there was no more hay distressed Clotilde. But Pascal reassured her—an animal of that age, that no longer moved about, needed so little. She stooped down and took a few handfuls of grass from a heap which the servant had left there, and both were rejoiced when Bonhomme deigned, solely and simply through friendship, as it seemed, to eat the grass out of her hand.

"Oh," she said, laughing, "so you still have an appetite! You cannot be very sick, then; you must not try to work upon our feelings. Good night, and sleep well."

And they left him to his slumbers after having each given him, as usual, a hearty kiss on either side of his nose.

Night fell, and an idea occurred to them, in order not to remain downstairs in the empty house—to close up everything and eat their dinner upstairs. Clotilde quickly took up the dish of potatoes, the salt-cellar, and a fine decanter of water; while Pascal took charge of a basket of grapes, the first which they had yet gathered from an early vine at the foot of the terrace. They closed the door, and laid the cloth on a little table, putting the potatoes in the middle between the salt-cellar and the decanter, and the basket of grapes on a chair beside them. And it was a wonderful feast, which reminded them of the delicious breakfast they had made on the morning on which Martine had obstinately shut herself up in her room, and refused to answer them. They experienced the same delight as then at being alone, at waiting upon themselves, at eating from the same plate, sitting close beside each other. This evening, which they had anticipated with so much dread, had in store for them the most delightful hours of their existence. As soon as they found themselves at home in the large friendly room, as far removed from the town which they had just been scouring as if they had been a hundred leagues away from it, all uneasiness and all sadness vanished—even to the recollection of the wretched afternoon wasted in useless wanderings. They were once more indifferent to all that was not their affection; they no longer remembered that they had lost their fortune; that they might have to hunt up a friend on the morrow in order to be able to dine in the evening. Why torture themselves with fears of coming want, when all they required to enjoy the greatest possible happiness was to be together?

But Pascal felt a sudden terror.

"My God! and we dreaded this evening so greatly! Is it wise to be happy in this way? Who knows what to-morrow may have in store for us?"

But she put her little hand over his mouth; she desired that he should have one more evening of perfect happiness.

"No, no; to-morrow we shall love each other as we love each other to-day. Love me with all your strength, as I love you."

And never had they eaten with more relish. She displayed the appetite of a healthy young girl with a good digestion; she ate the potatoes with a hearty appetite, laughing, thinking them delicious, better than the most vaunted delicacies. He, too, recovered the appetite of his youthful days. They drank with delight deep draughts of pure water. Then the grapes for dessert filled them with admiration; these grapes so fresh, this blood of the earth which the sun had touched with gold. They ate to excess; they became drunk on water and fruit, and more than all on gaiety. They did not remember ever before to have enjoyed such a feast together; even the famous breakfast they had made, with its luxuries of cutlets and bread and wine, had not given them this intoxication, this joy in living, when to be together was happiness enough, changing the china to dishes of gold, and the miserable food to celestial fare such as not even the gods enjoyed.

It was now quite dark, but they did not light the lamp. Through the wide open windows they could see the vast summer sky. The night breeze entered, still warm and laden with a faint odor of lavender. The moon had just risen above the horizon, large and round, flooding the room with a silvery light, in which they saw each other as in a dream light infinitely bright and sweet.

XI.

But on the following day their disquietude all returned. They were now obliged to go in debt. Martine obtained on credit bread, wine, and a little meat, much to her shame, be it said, forced as she was to maneuver and tell lies, for no one was ignorant of the ruin that had overtaken the house. The doctor had indeed thought of mortgaging La Souleiade, but only as a last resource. All he now possessed was this property, which was worth twenty thousand francs, but for which he would perhaps not get fifteen thousand, if he should sell it; and when these should be spent black want would be before them, the street, without even a stone of their own on which to lay their heads. Clotilde therefore begged Pascal to wait and not to take any irrevocable step so long as things were not utterly desperate.

Three or four days passed. It was the beginning of September, and the weather unfortunately changed; terrible storms ravaged the entire country; a part of the garden wall was blown down, and as Pascal was unable to rebuild it, the yawning breach remained. Already they were beginning to be rude at the baker's. And one morning the old servant came home with the meat from the butcher's in tears, saying that he had given her the refuse. A few days more and they would be unable to obtain anything on credit. It had become absolutely necessary to consider how they should find the money for their small daily expenses.

One Monday morning, the beginning of another week of torture, Clotilde was very restless. A struggle seemed to be going on within her, and it was only when she saw Pascal refuse at breakfast his share of a piece of beef which had been left over from the day before that she at last came to a decision. Then with a calm and resolute air, she went out after breakfast with Martine, after quietly putting into the basket of the latter a little package—some articles of dress which she was giving her, she said.

When she returned two hours later she was very pale. But her large eyes, so clear and frank, were shining. She went up to the doctor at once and made her confession.

"I must ask your forgiveness, master, for I have just been disobeying you, and I know that I am going to pain you greatly."

"Why, what have you been doing?" he asked uneasily, not understanding what she meant.

Slowly, without removing her eyes from him, she drew from her pocket an envelope, from which she took some bank-notes. A sudden intuition enlightened him, and he cried:

"Ah, my God! the jewels, the presents I gave you!"

And he, who was usually so good-tempered and gentle, was convulsed with grief and anger. He seized her hands in his, crushing with almost brutal force the fingers which held the notes.

"My God! what have you done, unhappy girl? It is my heart that you have sold, both our hearts, that had entered into those jewels, which you have given with them for money! The jewels which I gave you, the souvenirs of our divinest hours, your property, yours only, how can you wish me to take them back, to turn them to my profit? Can it be possible—have you thought of the anguish that this would give me?"

"And you, master," she answered gently, "do you think that I could consent to our remaining in the unhappy situation in which we are, in want of everything, while I had these rings and necklaces and earrings laid away in the bottom of a drawer? Why, my whole being would rise in protest. I should think myself a miser, a selfish wretch, if I had kept them any longer. And, although it was a grief for me to part with them—ah, yes, I confess it, so great a grief that I could hardly find the courage to do it—I am certain that I have only done what I ought to have done as an obedient and loving woman."

And as he still grasped her hands, tears came to her eyes, and she added in the same gentle voice and with a faint smile:

"Don't press so hard; you hurt me."

Then repentant and deeply moved, Pascal, too, wept.

"I am a brute to get angry in this way. You acted rightly; you could not do otherwise. But forgive me; it was hard for me to see you despoil yourself. Give me your hands, your poor hands, and let me kiss away the marks of my stupid violence."

He took her hands again in his tenderly; he covered them with kisses; he thought them inestimably precious, so delicate and bare, thus stripped of their rings. Consoled now, and joyous, she told him of her escapade—how she had taken Martine into her confidence, and how both had gone to the dealer who had sold him the corsage of point d'Alencon, and how after interminable examining and bargaining the woman had given six thousand francs for all the jewels. Again he repressed a gesture of despair—six thousand francs! when the jewels had cost him more than three times that amount—twenty thousand francs at the very least.

"Listen," he said to her at last; "I will take this money, since, in the goodness of your heart, you have brought it to me. But it is clearly understood that it is yours. I swear to you that I will, for the future, be more miserly than Martine herself. I will give her only the few sous that are absolutely necessary for our maintenance, and you will find in the desk all that may be left of this sum, if I should never be able to complete it and give it back to you entire."

He clasped her in an embrace that still trembled with emotion. Presently, lowering his voice to a whisper, he said:

"And did you sell everything, absolutely everything?"

Without speaking, she disengaged herself a little from his embrace, and put her fingers to her throat, with her pretty gesture, smiling and blushing. Finally, she drew out the slender chain on which shone the seven pearls, like milky stars. Then she put it back again out of sight.

He, too, blushed, and a great joy filled his heart. He embraced her passionately.

"Ah!" he cried, "how good you are, and how I love you!"

But from this time forth the recollection of the jewels which had been sold rested like a weight upon his heart; and he could not look at the money in his desk without pain. He was haunted by the thought of approaching want, inevitable want, and by a still more bitter thought—the thought of his age, of his sixty years which rendered him useless, incapable of earning a comfortable living for a wife; he had been suddenly and rudely awakened from his illusory dream of eternal love to the disquieting reality. He had fallen unexpectedly into poverty, and he felt himself very old—this terrified him and filled him with a sort of remorse, of desperate rage against himself, as if he had been guilty of a crime. And this embittered his every hour; if through momentary forgetfulness he permitted himself to indulge in a little gaiety his distress soon returned with greater poignancy than ever, bringing with it a sudden and inexplicable sadness. He did not dare to question himself, and his dissatisfaction with himself and his suffering increased every day.

Then a frightful revelation came to him. One morning, when he was alone, he received a letter bearing the Plassans postmark, the superscription on which he examined with surprise, not recognizing the writing. This letter was not signed; and after reading a few lines he made an angry movement as if to tear it up and throw it away; but he sat down trembling instead, and read it to the end. The style was perfectly courteous; the long phrases rolled on, measured and carefully worded, like diplomatic phrases, whose only aim is to convince. It was demonstrated to him with a superabundance of arguments that the scandal of La Souleiade had lasted too long already. If passion, up to a certain point, explained the fault, yet a man of his age and in his situation was rendering himself contemptible by persisting in wrecking the happiness of the young relative whose trustfulness he abused. No one was ignorant of the ascendency which he had acquired over her; it was admitted that she gloried in sacrificing herself for him; but ought he not, on his side, to comprehend that it was impossible that she should love an old man, that what she felt was merely pity and gratitude, and that it was high time to deliver her from this senile love, which would finally leave her with a dishonored name! Since he could not even assure her a small fortune, the writer hoped he would act like an honorable man, and have the strength to separate from her, through consideration for her happiness, if it were not yet too late. And the letter concluded with the reflection that evil conduct was always punished in the end.

From the first sentence Pascal felt that this anonymous letter came from his mother. Old Mme. Rougon must have dictated it; he could hear in it the very inflections of her voice. But after having begun the letter angry and indignant, he finished it pale and trembling, seized by the shiver which now passed through him continually and without apparent cause. The letter was right, it enlightened him cruelly regarding the source of his mental distress, showing him that it was remorse for keeping Clotilde with him, old and poor as he was. He got up and walked over to a mirror, before which he stood for a long time, his eyes gradually filling with tears of despair at sight of his wrinkles and his white beard. The feeling of terror which arose within him, the mortal chill which invaded his heart, was caused by the thought that separation had become necessary, inevitable. He repelled the thought, he felt that he would never have the strength for a separation, but it still returned; he would never now pass a single day without being assailed by it, without being torn by the struggle between his love and his reason until the terrible day when he should become resigned, his strength and his tears exhausted. In his present weakness, he trembled merely at the thought of one day having this courage. And all was indeed over, the irrevocable had begun; he was filled with fear for Clotilde, so young and so beautiful, and all there was left him now was the duty of saving her from himself.

Then, haunted by every word, by every phrase of the letter, he tortured himself at first by trying to persuade himself that she did not love him, that all she felt for him was pity and gratitude. It would make the rupture more easy to him, he thought, if he were once convinced that she sacrificed herself, and that in keeping her with him longer he was only gratifying his monstrous selfishness. But it was in vain that he studied her, that he subjected her to proofs, she remained as tender and devoted as ever, making the dreaded decision still more difficult. Then he pondered over all the causes that vaguely, but ceaselessly urged their separation. The life which they had been leading for months past, this life without ties or duties, without work of any sort, was not good. He thought no longer of himself, he considered himself good for nothing now but to go away and bury himself out of sight in some remote corner; but for her was it not an injurious life, a life which would deteriorate her character and weaken her will? And suddenly he saw himself in fancy dying, leaving her alone to perish of hunger in the streets. No, no! this would be a crime; he could not, for the sake of the happiness of his few remaining days, bequeath to her this heritage of shame and misery.

One morning Clotilde went for a walk in the neighborhood, from which she returned greatly agitated, pale and trembling, and as soon as she was upstairs in the workroom, she almost fainted in Pascal's arms, faltering:

"Oh, my God! oh, my God! those women!"

Terrified, he pressed her with questions.

"Come, tell me! What has happened?"

A flush mounted to her face. She flung her arms around his neck and hid her head on his shoulder.

"It was those women! Reaching a shady spot, I was closing my parasol, and I had the misfortune to throw down a child. And they all rose against me, crying out such things, oh, such things—things that I cannot repeat, that I could not understand!"

She burst into sobs. He was livid; he could find nothing to say to her; he kissed her wildly, weeping like herself. He pictured to himself the whole scene; he saw her pursued, hooted at, reviled. Presently he faltered:

"It is my fault, it is through me you suffer. Listen, we will go away from here, far, far away, where we shall not be known, where you will be honored, where you will be happy."

But seeing him weep, she recovered her calmness by a violent effort. And drying her tears, she said:

"Ah! I have behaved like a coward in telling you all this. After promising myself that I would say nothing of it to you. But when I found myself at home again, my anguish was so great that it all came out. But you see now it is all over, don't grieve about it. I love you."

She smiled, and putting her arms about him she kissed him in her turn, trying to soothe his despair.

"I love you. I love you so dearly that it will console me for everything. There is only you in the world, what matters anything that is not you? You are so good; you make me so happy!"

But he continued to weep, and she, too, began to weep again, and there was a moment of infinite sadness, of anguish, in which they mingled their kisses and their tears.

Pascal, when she left him alone for an instant, thought himself a wretch. He could no longer be the cause of misfortune to this child, whom he adored. And on the evening of the same day an event took place which brought about the solution hitherto sought in vain, with the fear of finding it. After dinner Martine beckoned him aside, and gave him a letter, with all sorts of precautions, saying:

"I met Mme. Felicite, and she charged me to give you this letter, monsieur, and she told me to tell you that she would have brought it to you herself, only that regard for her reputation prevented her from returning here. She begs you to send her back M. Maxime's letter, letting her know mademoiselle's answer."

It was, in fact, a letter from Maxime, and Mme. Felicite, glad to have received it, used it as a new means of conquering her son, after having waited in vain for misery to deliver him up to her, repentant and imploring. As neither Pascal nor Clotilde had come to demand aid or succor from her, she had once more changed her plan, returning to her old idea of separating them; and, this time, the opportunity seemed to her decisive. Maxime's letter was a pressing one; he urged his grandmother to plead his cause with his sister. Ataxia had declared itself; he was able to walk now only leaning on his servant's arm. His solitude terrified him, and he urgently entreated his sister to come to him. He wished to have her with him as a rampart against his father's abominable designs; as a sweet and upright woman after all, who would take care of him. The letter gave it to be understood that if she conducted herself well toward him she would have no reason to repent it; and ended by reminding the young girl of the promise she had made him, at the time of his visit to Plassans, to come to him, if the day ever arrived when he really needed her.

Pascal turned cold. He read the four pages over again. Here an opportunity to separate presented itself, acceptable to him and advantageous for Clotilde, so easy and so natural that they ought to accept it at once; yet, in spite of all his reasoning he felt so weak, so irresolute still that his limbs trembled under him, and he was obliged to sit down for a moment. But he wished to be heroic, and controlling himself, he called to his companion.

"Here!" he said, "read this letter which your grandmother has sent me."

Clotilde read the letter attentively to the end without a word, without a sign. Then she said simply:

"Well, you are going to answer it, are you not? I refuse."

He was obliged to exercise a strong effort of self-control to avoid uttering a great cry of joy, as he pressed her to his heart. As if it were another person who spoke, he heard himself saying quietly:

"You refuse—impossible! You must reflect. Let us wait till to-morrow to give an answer; and let us talk it over, shall we?"

Surprised, she cried excitedly:

"Part from each other! and why? And would you really consent to it? What folly! we love each other, and you would have me leave you and go away where no one cares for me! How could you think of such a thing? It would be stupid."

He avoided touching on this side of the question, and hastened to speak of promises made—of duty.

"Remember, my dear, how greatly affected you were when I told you that Maxime was in danger. And think of him now, struck down by disease, helpless and alone, calling you to his side. Can you abandon him in that situation? You have a duty to fulfil toward him."

"A duty?" she cried. "Have I any duties toward a brother who has never occupied himself with me? My only duty is where my heart is."

"But you have promised. I have promised for you. I have said that you were rational, and you are not going to belie my words."

"Rational? It is you who are not rational. It is not rational to separate when to do so would make us both die of grief."

And with an angry gesture she closed the discussion, saying:

"Besides, what is the use of talking about it? There is nothing simpler; it is only necessary to say a single word. Answer me. Are you tired of me? Do you wish to send me away?"

He uttered a cry.

"Send you away! I! Great God!"

"Then it is all settled. If you do not send me away I shall remain."

She laughed now, and, running to her desk, wrote in red pencil across her brother's letter two words—"I refuse;" then she called Martine and insisted upon her taking the letter back at once. Pascal was radiant; a wave of happiness so intense inundated his being that he let her have her way. The joy of keeping her with him deprived him even of his power of reasoning.

But that very night, what remorse did he not feel for having been so cowardly! He had again yielded to his longing for happiness. A deathlike sweat broke out upon him when he saw her in imagination far away; himself alone, without her, without that caressing and subtle essence that pervaded the atmosphere when she was near; her breath, her brightness, her courageous rectitude, and the dear presence, physical and mental, which had now become as necessary to his life as the light of day itself. She must leave him, and he must find the strength to die of it. He despised himself for his want of courage, he judged the situation with terrible clear-sightedness. All was ended. An honorable existence and a fortune awaited her with her brother; he could not carry his senile selfishness so far as to keep her any longer in the misery in which he was, to be scorned and despised. And fainting at the thought of all he was losing, he swore to himself that he would be strong, that he would not accept the sacrifice of this child, that he would restore her to happiness and to life, in her own despite.

And now the struggle of self-abnegation began. Some days passed; he had demonstrated to her so clearly the rudeness of her "I refuse," on Maxime's letter, that she had written a long letter to her grandmother, explaining to her the reasons for her refusal. But still she would not leave La Souleiade. As Pascal had grown extremely parsimonious, in his desire to trench as little as possible on the money obtained by the sale of the jewels, she surpassed herself, eating her dry bread with merry laughter. One morning he surprised her giving lessons of economy to Martine. Twenty times a day she would look at him intently and then throw herself on his neck and cover his face with kisses, to combat the dreadful idea of a separation, which she saw always in his eyes. Then she had another argument. One evening after dinner he was seized with a palpitation of the heart, and almost fainted. This surprised him; he had never suffered from the heart, and he believed it to be simply a return of his old nervous trouble. Since his great happiness he had felt less strong, with an odd sensation, as if some delicate hidden spring had snapped within him. Greatly alarmed, she hurried to his assistance. Well! now he would no doubt never speak again of her going away. When one loved people, and they were ill, one stayed with them to take care of them.

The struggle thus became a daily, an hourly one. It was a continual assault made by affection, by devotion, by self-abnegation, in the one desire for another's happiness. But while her kindness and tenderness made the thought of her departure only the more cruel for Pascal, he felt every day more and more strongly the necessity for it. His resolution was now taken. But he remained at bay, trembling and hesitating as to the means of persuading her. He pictured to himself her despair, her tears; what should he do? how should he tell her? how could they bring themselves to give each other a last embrace, never to see each other again? And the days passed, and he could think of nothing, and he began once more to accuse himself of cowardice.

Sometimes she would say jestingly, with a touch of affectionate malice:

"Master, you are too kind-hearted not to keep me."

But this vexed him; he grew excited, and with gloomy despair answered:

"No, no! don't talk of my kindness. If I were really kind you would have been long ago with your brother, leading an easy and honorable life, with a bright and tranquil future before you, instead of obstinately remaining here, despised, poor, and without any prospect, to be the sad companion of an old fool like me! No, I am nothing but a coward and a dishonorable man!"

She hastily stopped him. And it was in truth his kindness of heart, above all, that bled, that immense kindness of heart which sprang from his love of life, which he diffused over persons and things, in his continual care for the happiness of every one and everything. To be kind, was not this to love her, to make her happy, at the price of his own happiness? This was the kindness which it was necessary for him to exercise, and which he felt that he would one day exercise, heroic and decisive. But like the wretch who has resolved upon suicide, he waited for the opportunity, the hour, and the means, to carry out his design. Early one morning, on going into the workroom, Clotilde was surprised to see Dr. Pascal seated at his table. It was many weeks since he had either opened a book or touched a pen.

"Why! you are working?" she said.

Without raising his head he answered absently:

"Yes; this is the genealogical tree that I had not even brought up to date."

She stood behind him for a few moments, looking at him writing. He was completing the notices of Aunt Dide, of Uncle Macquart, and of little Charles, writing the dates of their death. Then, as he did not stir, seeming not to know that she was there, waiting for the kisses and the smiles of other mornings, she walked idly over to the window and back again.

"So you are in earnest," she said, "you are really working?"

"Certainly; you see I ought to have noted down these deaths last month. And I have a heap of work waiting there for me."

She looked at him fixedly, with that steady inquiring gaze with which she sought to read his thoughts.

"Very well, let us work. If you have papers to examine, or notes to copy, give them to me."

And from this day forth he affected to give himself up entirely to work. Besides, it was one of his theories that absolute rest was unprofitable, that it should never be prescribed, even to the overworked. As the fish lives in the water, so a man lives only in the external medium which surrounds him, the sensations which he receives from it transforming themselves in him into impulses, thoughts, and acts; so that if there were absolute rest, if he continued to receive sensations without giving them out again, digested and transformed, an engorgement would result, a malaise, an inevitable loss of equilibrium. For himself he had always found work to be the best regulator of his existence. Even on the mornings when he felt ill, if he set to work he recovered his equipoise. He never felt better than when he was engaged on some long work, methodically planned out beforehand, so many pages to so many hours every morning, and he compared this work to a balancing-pole, which enabled him to maintain his equilibrium in the midst of daily miseries, weaknesses, and mistakes. So that he attributed entirely to the idleness in which he had been living for some weeks past, the palpitation which at times made him feel as if he were going to suffocate. If he wished to recover his health he had only to take up again his great work.

And Pascal spent hours developing and explaining these theories to Clotilde, with a feverish and exaggerated enthusiasm. He seemed to be once more possessed by the love of knowledge and study in which, up to the time of his sudden passion for her, he had spent his life exclusively. He repeated to her that he could not leave his work unfinished, that he had still a great deal to do, if he desired to leave a lasting monument behind him. His anxiety about the envelopes seemed to have taken possession of him again; he opened the large press twenty times a day, taking them down from the upper shelf and enriching them by new notes. His ideas on heredity were already undergoing a transformation; he would have liked to review the whole, to recast the whole, to deduce from the family history, natural and social, a vast synthesis, a resume, in broad strokes, of all humanity. Then, besides, he reviewed his method of treatment by hypodermic injections, with the purpose of amplifying it—a confused vision of a new therapeutics; a vague and remote theory based on his convictions and his personal experience of the beneficent dynamic influence of work.

Now every morning, when he seated himself at his table, he would lament:

"I shall not live long enough; life is too short."

He seemed to feel that he must not lose another hour. And one morning he looked up abruptly and said to his companion, who was copying a manuscript at his side:

"Listen well, Clotilde. If I should die—"

"What an idea!" she protested, terrified.

"If I should die," he resumed, "listen to me well—close all the doors immediately. You are to keep the envelopes, you, you only. And when you have collected all my other manuscripts, send them to Ramond. These are my last wishes, do you hear?"

But she refused to listen to him.

"No, no!" she cried hastily, "you talk nonsense!"

"Clotilde, swear to me that you will keep the envelopes, and that you will send all my other papers to Ramond."

At last, now very serious, and her eyes filled with tears, she gave him the promise he desired. He caught her in his arms, he, too, deeply moved, and lavished caresses upon her, as if his heart had all at once reopened to her. Presently he recovered his calmness, and spoke of his fears. Since he had been trying to work they seemed to have returned. He kept constant watch upon the press, pretending to have observed Martine prowling about it. Might they not work upon the fanaticism of this girl, and urge her to a bad action, persuading her that she was securing her master's eternal welfare? He had suffered so much from suspicion! In the dread of approaching solitude his former tortures returned—the tortures of the scientist, who is menaced and persecuted by his own, at his own fireside, in his very flesh, in the work of his brain.

One evening, when he was again discussing this subject with Clotilde, he said unthinkingly:

"You know that when you are no longer here—"

She turned very pale and, as he stopped with a start, she cried:

"Oh, master, master, you have not given up that dreadful idea, then? I can see in your eyes that you are hiding something from me, that you have a thought which you no longer share with me. But if I go away and you should die, who will be here then to protect your work?"

Thinking that she had become reconciled, to the idea of her departure, he had the strength to answer gaily:

"Do you suppose that I would allow myself to die without seeing you once more. I will write to you, of course. You must come back to close my eyes."

Now she burst out sobbing, and sank into a chair.

"My God! Can it be! You wish that to-morrow we should be together no longer, we who have never been separated!"

From this day forth Pascal seemed more engrossed than ever in his work. He would sit for four or five hours at a time, whole mornings and afternoons, without once raising his head. He overacted his zeal. He would allow no one to disturb him, by so much as a word. And when Clotilde would leave the room on tiptoe to give an order downstairs or to go on some errand, he would assure himself by a furtive glance that she was gone, and then let his head drop on the table, with an air of profound dejection. It was a painful relief from the extraordinary effort which he compelled himself to make when she was present; to remain at his table, instead of going over and taking her in his arms and covering her face with sweet kisses. Ah, work! how ardently he called on it as his only refuge from torturing thoughts. But for the most part he was unable to work; he was obliged to feign attention, keeping his eyes fixed upon the page, his sorrowful eyes that grew dim with tears, while his mind, confused, distracted, filled always with one image, suffered the pangs of death. Was he then doomed to see work fail now its effect, he who had always considered it of sovereign power, the creator and ruler of the world? Must he then throw away his pen, renounce action, and do nothing in future but exist? And tears would flow down his white beard; and if he heard Clotilde coming upstairs again he would seize his pen quickly, in order that she might find him as she had left him, buried seemingly in profound meditation, when his mind was now only an aching void.

It was now the middle of September; two weeks that had seemed interminable had passed in this distressing condition of things, without bringing any solution, when one morning Clotilde was greatly surprised by seeing her grandmother, Felicite, enter. Pascal had met his mother the day before in the Rue de la Banne, and, impatient to consummate the sacrifice, and not finding in himself the strength to make the rupture, he had confided in her, in spite of his repugnance, and begged her to come on the following day. As it happened, she had just received another letter from Maxime, a despairing and imploring letter.

She began by explaining her presence.

"Yes, it is I, my dear, and you can understand that only very weighty reasons could have induced me to set my foot here again. But, indeed, you are getting crazy; I cannot allow you to ruin your life in this way, without making a last effort to open your eyes."

She then read Maxime's letter in a tearful voice. He was nailed to an armchair. It seemed he was suffering from a form of ataxia, rapid in its progress and very painful. Therefore he requested a decided answer from his sister, hoping still that she would come, and trembling at the thought of being compelled to seek another nurse. This was what he would be obliged to do, however, if they abandoned him in his sad condition. And when she had finished reading the letter she hinted that it would be a great pity to let Maxime's fortune pass into the hands of strangers; but, above all, she spoke of duty; of the assistance one owed to a relation, she, too, affecting to believe that a formal promise had been given.

"Come, my dear, call upon your memory. You told him that if he should ever need you, you would go to him; I can hear you saying it now. Was it not so, my son?"

Pascal, his face pale, his head slightly bent, had kept silence since his mother's entrance, leaving her to act. He answered only by an affirmative nod.

Then Felicite went over all the arguments that he himself had employed to persuade Clotilde—the dreadful scandal, to which insult was now added; impending want, so hard for them both; the impossibility of continuing the life they were leading. What future could they hope for, now that they had been overtaken by poverty? It was stupid and cruel to persist longer in her obstinate refusal.

Clotilde, standing erect and with an impenetrable countenance, remained silent, refusing even to discuss the question. But as her grandmother tormented her to give an answer, she said at last:

"Once more, I have no duty whatever toward my brother; my duty is here. He can dispose of his fortune as he chooses; I want none of it. When we are too poor, master shall send away Martine and keep me as his servant."

Old Mme. Rougon wagged her chin.

"Before being his servant it would be better if you had begun by being his wife. Why have you not got married? It would have been simpler and more proper."

And Felicite reminded her how she had come one day to urge this marriage, in order to put an end to gossip, and how the young girl had seemed greatly surprised, saying that neither she nor the doctor had thought of it, but that, notwithstanding, they would get married later on, if necessary, for there was no hurry.

"Get married; I am quite willing!" cried Clotilde. "You are right, grandmother."

And turning to Pascal:

"You have told me a hundred times that you would do whatever I wished. Marry me; do you hear? I will be your wife, and I will stay here. A wife does not leave her husband."

But he answered only by a gesture, as if he feared that his voice would betray him, and that he should accept, in a cry of gratitude, the eternal bond which she had proposed to him. His gesture might signify a hesitation, a refusal. What was the good of this marriage in extremis, when everything was falling to pieces?

"Those are very fine sentiments, no doubt," returned Felicite. "You have settled it all in your own little head. But marriage will not give you an income; and, meantime, you are a great expense to him; you are the heaviest of his burdens."

The effect which these words had upon Clotilde was extraordinary. She turned violently to Pascal, her cheeks crimson, her eyes filled with tears.

"Master, master! is what grandmother has just said true? Has it come to this, that you regret the money I cost you here?"

Pascal grew still paler; he remained motionless, in an attitude of utter dejection. But in a far-away voice, as if he were talking to himself, he murmured:

"I have so much work to do! I should like to go over my envelopes, my manuscripts, my notes, and complete the work of my life. If I were alone perhaps I might be able to arrange everything. I would sell La Souleiade, oh! for a crust of bread, for it is not worth much. I should shut myself and my papers in a little room. I should work from morning till night, and I should try not to be too unhappy."

But he avoided her glance; and, agitated as she was, these painful and stammering utterances were not calculated to satisfy her. She grew every moment more and more terrified, for she felt that the irrevocable word was about to be spoken.

"Look at me, master, look me in the face. And I conjure you, be brave, choose between your work and me, since you say, it seems, that you send me away that you may work the better."

The moment for the heroic falsehood had come. He lifted his head and looked her bravely in the face, and with the smile of a dying man who desires death, recovering his voice of divine goodness, he said:

"How excited you get! Can you not do your duty quietly, like everybody else? I have a great deal of work to do, and I need to be alone; and you, dear, you ought to go to your brother. Go then, everything is ended."

There was a terrible silence for the space of a few seconds. She looked at him earnestly, hoping that he would change his mind. Was he really speaking the truth? was he not sacrificing himself in order that she might be happy? For a moment she had an intuition that this was the case, as if some subtle breath, emanating from him, had warned her of it.

"And you are sending me away forever? You will not permit me to come back to-morrow?"

But he held out bravely; with another smile he seemed to answer that when one went away like this it was not to come back again on the following day. She was now completely bewildered; she knew not what to think. It might be possible that he had chosen work sincerely; that the man of science had gained the victory over the lover. She grew still paler, and she waited a little longer, in the terrible silence; then, slowly, with her air of tender and absolute submission, she said:

"Very well, master, I will go away whenever you wish, and I will not return until you send for me."

The die was cast. The irrevocable was accomplished. Each felt that neither would attempt to recall the decision that had been made; and, from this instant, every minute that passed would bring nearer the separation.

Felicite, surprised at not being obliged to say more, at once desired to fix the time for Clotilde's departure. She applauded herself for her tenacity; she thought she had gained the victory by main force. It was now Friday, and it was settled that Clotilde should leave on the following Sunday. A despatch was even sent to Maxime.

For the past three days the mistral had been blowing. But on this evening its fury was redoubled, and Martine declared, in accordance with the popular belief, that it would last for three days longer. The winds at the end of September, in the valley of the Viorne, are terrible. So that the servant took care to go into every room in the house to assure herself that the shutters were securely fastened. When the mistral blew it caught La Souleiade slantingly, above the roofs of the houses of Plassans, on the little plateau on which the house was built. And now it raged and beat against the house, shaking it from garret to cellar, day and night, without a moment's cessation. The tiles were blown off, the fastenings of the windows were torn away, while the wind, entering the crevices, moaned and sobbed wildly through the house; and the doors, if they were left open for a moment, through forgetfulness, slammed to with a noise like the report of a cannon. They might have fancied they were sustaining a siege, so great were the noise and the discomfort.

It was in this melancholy house shaken by the storm that Pascal, on the following day, helped Clotilde to make her preparations for her departure. Old Mme. Rougon was not to return until Sunday, to say good-by. When Martine was informed of the approaching separation, she stood still in dumb amazement, and a flash, quickly extinguished, lighted her eyes; and as they sent her out of the room, saying that they would not require her assistance in packing the trunks, she returned to the kitchen and busied herself in her usual occupations, seeming to ignore the catastrophe which was about to revolutionize their household of three. But at Pascal's slightest call she would run so promptly and with such alacrity, her face so bright and so cheerful, in her zeal to serve him, that she seemed like a young girl. Pascal did not leave Clotilde for a moment, helping her, desiring to assure himself that she was taking with her everything she could need. Two large trunks stood open in the middle of the disordered room; bundles and articles of clothing lay about everywhere; twenty times the drawers and the presses had been visited. And in this work, this anxiety to forget nothing, the painful sinking of the heart which they both felt was in some measure lessened. They forgot for an instant—he watching carefully to see that no space was lost, utilizing the hat-case for the smaller articles of clothing, slipping boxes in between the folds of the linen; while she, taking down the gowns, folded them on the bed, waiting to put them last in the top tray. Then, when a little tired they stood up and found themselves again face to face, they would smile at each other at first; then choke back the sudden tears that started at the recollection of the impending and inevitable misfortune. But though their hearts bled they remained firm. Good God! was it then true that they were to be no longer together? And then they heard the wind, the terrible wind, which threatened to blow down the house.

How many times during this last day did they not go over to the window, attracted by the storm, wishing that it would sweep away the world. During these squalls the sun did not cease to shine, the sky remained constantly blue, but a livid blue, windswept and dusty, and the sun was a yellow sun, pale and cold. They saw in the distance the vast white clouds rising from the roads, the trees bending before the blast, looking as if they were flying all in the same direction, at the same rate of speed; the whole country parched and exhausted by the unvarying violence of the wind that blew ceaselessly, with a roar like thunder. Branches were snapped and whirled out of sight; roofs were lifted up and carried so far away that they were never afterward found. Why could not the mistral take them all up together and carry them off to some unknown land, where they might be happy? The trunks were almost packed when Pascal went to open one of the shutters that the wind had blown to, but so fierce a gust swept in through the half open window that Clotilde had to go to his assistance. Leaning with all their weight, they were able at last to turn the catch. The articles of clothing in the room were blown about, and they gathered up in fragments a little hand mirror which had fallen from a chair. Was this a sign of approaching death, as the women of the faubourg said?

In the evening, after a mournful dinner in the bright dining-room, with its great bouquets of flowers, Pascal said he would retire early. Clotilde was to leave on the following morning by the ten o'clock train, and he feared for her the long journey—twenty hours of railway traveling. But when he had retired he was unable to sleep. At first he thought it was the wind that kept him awake. The sleeping house was full of cries, voices of entreaty and voices of anger, mingled together, accompanied by endless sobbing. Twice he got up and went to listen at Clotilde's door, but he heard nothing. He went downstairs to close a door that banged persistently, like misfortune knocking at the walls. Gusts blew through the dark rooms, and he went to bed again, shivering and haunted by lugubrious visions.

At six o'clock Martine, fancying she heard her master knocking for her on the floor of his room, went upstairs. She entered the room with the alert and excited expression which she had worn for the past two days; but she stood still, astonished and uneasy, when she saw him lying, half-dressed, across his bed, haggard, biting the pillow to stifle his sobs. He got out of bed and tried to finish dressing himself, but a fresh attack seized him, and, his head giddy and his heart palpitating to suffocation, recovering from a momentary faintness, he faltered in agonized tones:

"No, no, I cannot; I suffer too much. I would rather die, die now—"

He recognized Martine, and abandoning himself to his grief, his strength totally gone, he made his confession to her:

"My poor girl, I suffer too much, my heart is breaking. She is taking away my heart with her, she is taking away my whole being. I cannot live without her. I almost died last night. I would be glad to die before her departure, not to have the anguish of seeing her go away. Oh, my God! she is going away, and I shall have her no longer, and I shall be left alone, alone, alone!"

The servant, who had gone upstairs so gaily, turned as pale as wax, and a hard and bitter look came into her face. For a moment she watched him clutching the bedclothes convulsively, uttering hoarse cries of despair, his face pressed against the coverlet. Then, by a violent effort, she seemed to make up her mind.

"But, monsieur, there is no sense in making trouble for yourself in this way. It is ridiculous. Since that is how it is, and you cannot do without mademoiselle, I shall go and tell her what a state you have let yourself get into."

At these words he got up hastily, staggering still, and, leaning for support on the back of a chair, he cried:

"I positively forbid you to do so, Martine!"

"A likely thing that I should listen to you, seeing you like that! To find you some other time half dead, crying your eyes out! No, no! I shall go to mademoiselle and tell her the truth, and compel her to remain with us."

But he caught her angrily by the arm and held her fast.

"I command you to keep quiet, do you hear? Or you shall go with her! Why did you come in? It was this wind that made me ill. That concerns no one."

Then, yielding to a good-natured impulse, with his usual kindness of heart, he smiled.

"My poor girl, see how you vex me? Let me act as I ought, for the happiness of others. And not another word; you would pain me greatly."

Martine's eyes, too, filled with tears. It was just in time that they made peace, for Clotilde entered almost immediately. She had risen early, eager to see Pascal, hoping doubtless, up to the last moment, that he would keep her. Her own eyelids were heavy from want of sleep, and she looked at him steadily as she entered, with her inquiring air. But he was still so discomposed that she began to grow uneasy.

"No, indeed, I assure you, I would even have slept well but for the mistral. I was just telling you so, Martine, was I not?"

The servant confirmed his words by an affirmative nod. And Clotilde, too, submitted, saying nothing of the night of anguish and mental conflict she had spent while he, on his side, had been suffering the pangs of death. Both of the women now docilely obeyed and aided him, in his heroic self-abnegation.

"What," he continued, opening his desk, "I have something here for you. There! there are seven hundred francs in that envelope."

And in spite of her exclamations and protestations he persisted in rendering her an account. Of the six thousand francs obtained by the sale of the jewels two hundred only had been spent, and he had kept one hundred to last till the end of the month, with the strict economy, the penuriousness, which he now displayed. Afterward he would no doubt sell La Souleiade, he would work, he would be able to extricate himself from his difficulties. But he would not touch the five thousand francs which remained, for they were her property, her own, and she would find them again in the drawer.

"Master, master, you are giving me a great deal of pain—"

"I wish it," he interrupted, "and it is you who are trying to break my heart. Come, it is half-past seven, I will go and cord your trunks since they are locked."

When Martine and Clotilde were alone and face to face they looked at each other for a moment in silence. Ever since the commencement of the new situation, they had been fully conscious of their secret antagonism, the open triumph of the young mistress, the half concealed jealousy of the old servant about her adored master. Now it seemed that the victory remained with the servant. But in this final moment their common emotion drew them together.

"Martine, you must not let him eat like a poor man. You promise me that he shall have wine and meat every day?"

"Have no fear, mademoiselle."

"And the five thousand francs lying there, you know belong to him. You are not going to let yourselves starve to death, I suppose, with those there. I want you to treat him very well."

"I tell you that I will make it my business to do so, mademoiselle, and that monsieur shall want for nothing."

There was a moment's silence. They were still regarding each other.

"And watch him, to see that he does not overwork himself. I am going away very uneasy; he has not been well for some time past. Take good care of him."

"Make your mind easy, mademoiselle, I will take care of him."

"Well, I give him into your charge. He will have only you now; and it is some consolation to me to know that you love him dearly. Love him with all your strength. Love him for us both."

"Yes, mademoiselle, as much as I can."

Tears came into their eyes; Clotilde spoke again.

"Will you embrace me, Martine?"

"Oh, mademoiselle, very gladly."

They were in each other's arms when Pascal reentered the room. He pretended not to see them, doubtless afraid of giving way to his emotion. In an unnaturally loud voice he spoke of the final preparations for Clotilde's departure, like a man who had a great deal on his hands and was afraid that the train might be missed. He had corded the trunks, a man had taken them away in a little wagon, and they would find them at the station. But it was only eight o'clock, and they had still two long hours before them. Two hours of mortal anguish, spent in unoccupied and weary waiting, during which they tasted a hundred times over the bitterness of parting. The breakfast took hardly a quarter of an hour. Then they got up, to sit down again. Their eyes never left the clock. The minutes seemed long as those of a death watch, throughout the mournful house.

"How the wind blows!" said Clotilde, as a sudden gust made all the doors creak.

Pascal went over to the window and watched the wild flight of the storm-blown trees.

"It has increased since morning," he said. "Presently I must see to the roof, for some of the tiles have been blown away."

Already they had ceased to be one household. They listened in silence to the furious wind, sweeping everything before it, carrying with it their life.

Finally Pascal looked for a last time at the clock, and said simply:

"It is time, Clotilde."

She rose from the chair on which she had been sitting. She had for an instant forgotten that she was going away, and all at once the dreadful reality came back to her. Once more she looked at him, but he did not open his arms to keep her. It was over; her hope was dead. And from this moment her face was like that of one struck with death.

At first they exchanged the usual commonplaces.

"You will write to me, will you not?"

"Certainly, and you must let me hear from you as often as possible."

"Above all, if you should fall ill, send for me at once."

"I promise you that I will do so. But there is no danger. I am very strong."

Then, when the moment came in which she was to leave this dear house, Clotilde looked around with unsteady gaze; then she threw herself on Pascal's breast, she held him for an instant in her arms, faltering:

"I wish to embrace you here, I wish to thank you. Master, it is you who have made me what I am. As you have often told me, you have corrected my heredity. What should I have become amid the surroundings in which Maxime has grown up? Yes, if I am worth anything, it is to you alone I owe it, you, who transplanted me into this abode of kindness and affection, where you have brought me up worthy of you. Now, after having taken me and overwhelmed me with benefits, you send me away. Be it as you will, you are my master, and I will obey you. I love you, in spite of all, and I shall always love you."

He pressed her to his heart, answering:

"I desire only your good, I am completing my work."

When they reached the station, Clotilde vowed to herself that she would one day come back. Old Mme. Rougon was there, very gay and very brisk, in spite of her eighty-and-odd years. She was triumphant now; she thought she would have her son Pascal at her mercy. When she saw them both stupefied with grief she took charge of everything; got the ticket, registered the baggage, and installed the traveler in a compartment in which there were only ladies. Then she spoke for a long time about Maxime, giving instructions and asking to be kept informed of everything. But the train did not start; there were still five cruel minutes during which they remained face to face, without speaking to each other. Then came the end, there were embraces, a great noise of wheels, and waving of handkerchiefs.

Suddenly Pascal became aware that he was standing alone upon the platform, while the train was disappearing around a bend in the road. Then, without listening to his mother, he ran furiously up the slope, sprang up the stone steps like a young man, and found himself in three minutes on the terrace of La Souleiade. The mistral was raging there—a fierce squall which bent the secular cypresses like straws. In the colorless sky the sun seemed weary of the violence of the wind, which for six days had been sweeping over its face. And like the wind-blown trees Pascal stood firm, his garments flapping like banners, his beard and hair blown about and lashed by the storm. His breath caught by the wind, his hands pressed upon his heart to quiet its throbbing, he saw the train flying in the distance across the bare plain, a little train which the mistral seemed to sweep before it like a dry branch.

XII.

From the day following Clotilde's departure, Pascal shut himself up in the great empty house. He did not leave it again, ceasing entirely the rare professional visits which he had still continued to make, living there with doors and windows closed, in absolute silence and solitude. Martine had received formal orders to admit no one under any pretext whatever.

"But your mother, monsieur, Mme. Felicite?"

"My mother, less than any one else; I have my reasons. Tell her that I am working, that I require to concentrate my thoughts, and that I request her to excuse me."

Three times in succession old Mme. Rougon had presented herself. She would storm at the hall door. He would hear her voice rising in anger as she tried in vain to force her way in. Then the noise would be stilled, and there would be only a whisper of complaint and plotting between her and the servant. But not once did he yield, not once did he lean over the banisters and call to her to come up.

One day Martine ventured to say to him:

"It is very hard, all the same, monsieur, to refuse admittance to one's mother. The more so, as Mme. Felicite comes with good intentions, for she knows the straits that monsieur is in, and she insists only in order to offer her services."

"Money!" he cried, exasperated. "I want no money, do you hear? And from her less than anybody. I will work, I will earn my own living; why should I not?"

The question of money, however, began to grow pressing. He obstinately refused to take another sou from the five thousand francs locked up in the desk. Now that he was alone, he was completely indifferent to material things; he would have been satisfied to live on bread and water; and every time the servant asked him for money to buy wine, meat, or sweets, he shrugged his shoulders—what was the use? there remained a crust from the day before, was not that sufficient? But in her affection for her master, whom she felt to be suffering, the old servant was heart-broken at this miserliness which exceeded her own; this utter destitution to which he abandoned himself and the whole house. The workmen of the faubourgs lived better. Thus it was that for a whole day a terrible conflict went on within her. Her doglike love struggled with her love for her money, amassed sou by sou, hidden away, "making more," as she said. She would rather have parted with a piece of her flesh. So long as her master had not suffered alone the idea of touching her treasure had not even occurred to her. And she displayed extraordinary heroism the morning when, driven to extremity, seeing her stove cold and the larder empty, she disappeared for an hour and then returned with provisions and the change of a hundred-franc note.

Pascal, who just then chanced to come downstairs, asked her in astonishment where the money had come from, furious already, and prepared to throw it all into the street, imagining she had applied to his mother.

"Why, no; why, no, monsieur!" she stammered, "it is not that at all."

And she told him the story that she had prepared.

"Imagine, M. Grandguillot's affairs are going to be settled—or at least I think so. It occurred to me this morning to go to the assignee's to inquire, and he told me that you would undoubtedly recover something, and that I might have a hundred francs now. Yes, he was even satisfied with a receipt from me. He knows me, and you can make it all right afterward."

Pascal seemed scarcely surprised. She had calculated correctly that he would not go out to verify her account. She was relieved, however, to see with what easy indifference he accepted her story.

"Ah, so much the better!" he said. "You see now that one must never despair. That will give me time to settle my affairs."

His "affairs" was the sale of La Souleiade, about which he had been thinking vaguely. But what a grief to leave this house in which Clotilde had grown up, where they had lived together for nearly eighteen years! He had taken two or three weeks already to reflect over the matter. Now that he had the hope of getting back a little of the money he had lost through the notary's failure, he ceased to think any more about it. He relapsed into his former indifference, eating whatever Martine served him, not even noticing the comforts with which she once more surrounded him, in humble adoration, heart-broken at giving her money, but very happy to support him now, without his suspecting that his sustenance came from her.

But Pascal rewarded her very ill. Afterward he would be sorry, and regret his outbursts. But in the state of feverish desperation in which he lived this did not prevent him from again flying into a passion with her, at the slightest cause of dissatisfaction. One evening, after he had been listening to his mother talking for an interminable time with her in the kitchen, he cried in sudden fury:

"Martine, I do not wish her to enter La Souleiade again, do you hear? If you ever let her into the house again I will turn you out!"

She listened to him in surprise. Never, during the thirty-two years in which she had been in his service, had he threatened to dismiss her in this way. Big tears came to her eyes.

"Oh, monsieur! you would not have the courage to do it! And I would not go. I would lie down across the threshold first."

He already regretted his anger, and he said more gently:

"The thing is that I know perfectly well what is going on. She comes to indoctrinate you, to put you against me, is it not so? Yes, she is watching my papers; she wishes to steal and destroy everything up there in the press. I know her; when she wants anything, she never gives up until she gets it. Well, you can tell her that I am on my guard; that while I am alive she shall never even come near the press. And the key is here in my pocket."

In effect, all his former terror—the terror of the scientist who feels himself surrounded by secret enemies, had returned. Ever since he had been living alone in the deserted house he had had a feeling of returning danger, of being constantly watched in secret. The circle had narrowed, and if he showed such anger at these attempts at invasion, if he repulsed his mother's assaults, it was because he did not deceive himself as to her real plans, and he was afraid that he might yield. If she were there she would gradually take possession of him, until she had subjugated him completely. Therefore his former tortures returned, and he passed the days watching; he shut up the house himself in the evening, and he would often rise during the night, to assure himself that the locks were not being forced. What he feared was that the servant, won over by his mother, and believing she was securing his eternal welfare, would open the door to Mme. Felicite. In fancy he saw the papers blazing in the fireplace; he kept constant guard over them, seized again by a morbid love, a torturing affection for this icy heap of papers, these cold pages of manuscript, to which he had sacrificed the love of woman, and which he tried to love sufficiently to be able to forget everything else for them.

Pascal, now that Clotilde was no longer there, threw himself eagerly into work, trying to submerge himself in it, to lose himself in it. If he secluded himself, if he did not set foot even in the garden, if he had had the strength, one day when Martine came up to announce Dr. Ramond, to answer that he would not receive him, he had, in this bitter desire for solitude, no other aim than to kill thought by incessant labor. That poor Ramond, how gladly he would have embraced him! for he divined clearly the delicacy of feeling that had made him hasten to console his old master. But why lose an hour? Why risk emotions and tears which would leave him so weak? From daylight he was at his table, he spent at it his mornings and his afternoons, extended often into the evening after the lamp was lighted, and far into the night. He wished to put his old project into execution—to revise his whole theory of heredity, employing the documents furnished by his own family to establish the laws according to which, in a certain group of human beings, life is distributed and conducted with mathematical precision from one to another, taking into account the environment—a vast bible, the genesis of families, of societies, of all humanity. He hoped that the vastness of such a plan, the effort necessary to develop so colossal an idea, would take complete possession of him, restoring to him his health, his faith, his pride in the supreme joy of the accomplished work. But it was in vain that he threw himself passionately, persistently, without reserve, into his work; he succeeded only in fatiguing his body and his mind, without even being able to fix his thoughts or to put his heart into his work, every day sicker and more despairing. Had work, then, finally lost its power? He whose life had been spent in work, who had regarded it as the sole motor, the benefactor, and the consoler, must he then conclude that to love and to be loved is beyond all else in the world? Occasionally he would have great thoughts, he continued to sketch out his new theory of the equilibrium of forces, demonstrating that what man receives in sensation he should return in action. How natural, full, and happy would life be if it could be lived entire, performing its functions like a well-ordered machine, giving back in power what was consumed in fuel, maintaining itself in vigor and in beauty by the simultaneous and logical play of all its organs. He believed physical and intellectual labor, feeling and reasoning should be in equal proportions, and never excessive, for excess meant disturbance of the equilibrium and, consequently, disease. Yes, yes, to begin life over again and to know how to live it, to dig the earth, to study man, to love woman, to attain to human perfection, the future city of universal happiness, through the harmonious working of the entire being, what a beautiful legacy for a philosophical physician to leave behind him would this be! And this dream of the future, this theory, confusedly perceived, filled him with bitterness at the thought that now his life was a force wasted and lost.

At the very bottom of his grief Pascal had the dominating feeling that for him life was ended. Regret for Clotilde, sorrow at having her no longer beside him, the certainty that he would never see her again, filled him with overwhelming grief. Work had lost its power, and he would sometimes let his head drop on the page he was writing, and weep for hours together, unable to summon courage to take up the pen again. His passion for work, his days of voluntary fatigue, led to terrible nights, nights of feverish sleeplessness, in which he would stuff the bedclothes into his mouth to keep from crying out Clotilde's name. She was everywhere in this mournful house in which he secluded himself. He saw her again, walking through the rooms, sitting on the chairs, standing behind the doors. Downstairs, in the dining-room, he could not sit at table, without seeing her opposite him. In the workroom upstairs she was still his constant companion, for she, too, had lived so long secluded in it that her image seemed reflected from everything; he felt her constantly beside him, he could fancy he saw her standing before her desk, straight and slender—her delicate face bent over a pastel. And if he did not leave the house to escape from the dear and torturing memory it was because he had the certainty that he should find her everywhere in the garden, too: dreaming on the terrace; walking with slow steps through the alleys in the pine grove; sitting under the shade of the plane trees; lulled by the eternal song of the fountain; lying in the threshing yard at twilight, her gaze fixed on space, waiting for the stars to come out. But above all, there existed for him a sacred sanctuary which he could not enter without trembling—the chamber where she had confessed her love. He kept the key of it; he had not moved a single object from its place since the sorrowful morning of her departure; and a skirt which she had forgotten lay still upon her armchair. He opened his arms wildly to clasp her shade floating in the soft half light of the room, with its closed shutters and its walls hung with the old faded pink calico, of a dawnlike tint.

In the midst of his unremitting toil Pascal had another melancholy pleasure—Clotilde's letters. She wrote to him regularly twice a week, long letters of eight or ten pages, in which she described to him all her daily life. She did not seem to lead a very happy life in Paris. Maxime, who did not now leave his sick chair, evidently tortured her with the exactions of a spoiled child and an invalid. She spoke as if she lived in complete retirement, always waiting on him, so that she could not even go over to the window to look out on the avenue, along which rolled the fashionable stream of the promenaders of the Bois; and from certain of her expressions it could be divined that her brother, after having entreated her so urgently to go to him, suspected her already, and had begun to regard her with hatred and distrust, as he did every one who approached him, in his continual fear of being made use of and robbed. He did not give her the keys, treating her like a servant to whom he found it difficult to accustom himself. Twice she had seen her father, who was, as always, very gay, and overwhelmed with business; he had been converted to the Republic, and was at the height of political and financial success. Saccard had even taken her aside, to sympathize with her, saying that poor Maxime was really insupportable, and that she would be truly courageous if she consented to be made his victim. As she could not do everything, he had even had the kindness to send her, on the following day, the niece of his hairdresser, a fair-haired, innocent-looking girl of eighteen, named Rose, who was assisting her now to take care of the invalid. But Clotilde made no complaint; she affected, on the contrary, to be perfectly tranquil, contented, and resigned to everything. Her letters were full of courage, showing neither anger nor sorrow at the cruel separation, making no desperate appeal to Pascal's affection to recall her. But between the lines, he could perceive that she trembled with rebellious anger, that her whole being yearned for him, that she was ready to commit the folly of returning to him immediately, at his lightest word.

And this was the one word that Pascal would not write. Everything would be arranged in time. Maxime would become accustomed to his sister; the sacrifice must be completed now that it had been begun. A single line written by him in a moment of weakness, and all the advantage of the effort he had made would be lost, and their misery would begin again. Never had Pascal had greater need of courage than when he was answering Clotilde's letters. At night, burning with fever, he would toss about, calling on her wildly; then he would get up and write to her to come back at once. But when day came, and he had exhausted himself with weeping, his fever abated, and his answer was always very short, almost cold. He studied every sentence, beginning the letter over again when he thought he had forgotten himself. But what a torture, these dreadful letters, so short, so icy, in which he went against his heart, solely in order to wean her from him gradually, to take upon himself all the blame, and to make her believe that she could forget him, since he forgot her. They left him covered with perspiration, and as exhausted as if he had just performed some great act of heroism.

One morning toward the end of October, a month after Clotilde's departure, Pascal had a sudden attack of suffocation. He had had, several times already, slight attacks, which he attributed to overwork. But this time the symptoms were so plain that he could not mistake them—a sharp pain in the region of the heart, extending over the whole chest and along the left arm, and a dreadful sensation of oppression and distress, while cold perspiration broke out upon him. It was an attack of angina pectoris. It lasted hardly more than a minute, and he was at first more surprised than frightened. With that blindness which physicians often show where their own health is concerned, he never suspected that his heart might be affected.

As he was recovering his breath Martine came up to say that Dr. Ramond was downstairs, and again begged the doctor to see him. And Pascal, yielding perhaps to an unconscious desire to know the truth, cried:

"Well, let him come up, since he insists upon it. I will be glad to see him."

The two men embraced each other, and no other allusion was made to the absent one, to her whose departure had left the house empty, than an energetic and sad hand clasp.

"You don't know why I have come?" cried Ramond immediately. "It is about a question of money. Yes, my father-in-law, M. Leveque, the advocate, whom you know, spoke to me yesterday again about the funds which you had with the notary Grandguillot. And he advises you strongly to take some action in the matter, for some persons have succeeded, he says, in recovering something."

"Yes, I know that that business is being settled," said Pascal. "Martine has already got two hundred francs out of it, I believe."

"Martine?" said Ramond, looking greatly surprised, "how could she do that without your intervention? However, will you authorize my father-in-law to undertake your case? He will see the assignee, and sift the whole affair, since you have neither the time nor the inclination to attend to it."

"Certainly, I authorize M. Leveque to do so, and tell him that I thank him a thousand times."

Then this matter being settled, the young man, remarking the doctor's pallor, and questioning him as to its cause, Pascal answered with a smile:

"Imagine, my friend, I have just had an attack of angina pectoris. Oh, it is not imagination, all the symptoms were there. And stay! since you are here you shall sound me."

At first Ramond refused, affecting to turn the consultation into a jest. Could a raw recruit like him venture to pronounce judgment on his general? But he examined him, notwithstanding, seeing that his face looked drawn and pained, with a singular look of fright in the eyes. He ended by auscultating him carefully, keeping his ear pressed closely to his chest for a considerable time. Several minutes passed in profound silence.

"Well?" asked Pascal, when the young physician stood up.

The latter did not answer at once. He felt the doctor's eyes looking straight into his; and as the question had been put to him with quiet courage, he answered in the same way:

"Well, it is true, I think there is some sclerosis."

"Ah! it was kind of you not to attempt to deceive me," returned the doctor, smiling. "I feared for an instant that you would tell me an untruth, and that would have hurt me."

Ramond, listening again, said in an undertone:

"Yes, the beat is strong, the first sound is dull, while the second, on the contrary, is sharp. It is evident that the apex has descended and is turned toward the armpit. There is some sclerosis, at least it is very probable. One may live twenty years with that," he ended, straightening himself.

"No doubt, sometimes," said Pascal. "At least, unless one chances to die of a sudden attack."

They talked for some time longer, discussed a remarkable case of sclerosis of the heart, which they had seen at the hospital at Plassans. And when the young physician went away, he said that he would return as soon as he should have news of the Grandguillot liquidation.

But when he was alone Pascal felt that he was lost. Everything was now explained: his palpitations for some weeks past, his attacks of vertigo and suffocation; above all that weakness of the organ, of his poor heart, overtasked by feeling and by work, that sense of intense fatigue and impending death, regarding which he could no longer deceive himself. It was not as yet fear that he experienced, however. His first thought was that he, too, would have to pay for his heredity, that sclerosis was the species of degeneration which was to be his share of the physiological misery, the inevitable inheritance bequeathed him by his terrible ancestry. In others the neurosis, the original lesion, had turned to vice or virtue, genius, crime, drunkenness, sanctity; others again had died of consumption, of epilepsy, of ataxia; he had lived in his feelings and he would die of an affection of the heart. And he trembled no longer, he rebelled no longer against this manifest heredity, fated and inevitable, no doubt. On the contrary, a feeling of humility took possession of him; the idea that all revolt against natural laws is bad, that wisdom does not consist in holding one's self apart, but in resigning one's self to be only a member of the whole great body. Why, then, was he so unwilling to belong to his family that it filled him with triumph, that his heart beat with joy, when he believed himself different from them, without any community with them? Nothing could be less philosophical. Only monsters grew apart. And to belong to his family seemed to him in the end as good and as fine as to belong to any other family, for did not all families, in the main, resemble one another, was not humanity everywhere identical with the same amount of good and evil? He came at last, humbly and gently, even in the face of impending suffering and death, to accept everything life had to give him.

From this time Pascal lived with the thought that he might die at any moment. And this helped to perfect his character, to elevate him to a complete forgetfulness of self. He did not cease to work, but he had never understood so well how much effort must seek its reward in itself, the work being always transitory, and remaining of necessity incomplete. One evening at dinner Martine informed him that Sarteur, the journeyman hatter, the former inmate of the asylum at the Tulettes, had just hanged himself. All the evening he thought of this strange case, of this man whom he had believed he had cured of homicidal mania by his treatment of hypodermic injections, and who, seized by a fresh attack, had evidently had sufficient lucidity to hang himself, instead of springing at the throat of some passer-by. He again saw him, so gentle, so reasonable, kissing his hands, while he was advising him to return to his life of healthful labor. What then was this destructive and transforming force, the desire to murder, changing to suicide, death performing its task in spite of everything? With the death of this man his last vestige of pride as a healer disappeared; and each day when he returned to his work he felt as if he were only a learner, spelling out his task, constantly seeking the truth, which as constantly receded from him, assuming ever more formidable proportions.

But in the midst of his resignation one thought still troubled him—what would become of Bonhomme, his old horse, if he himself should die before him? The poor brute, completely blind and his limbs paralyzed, did not now leave his litter. When his master went to see him, however, he turned his head, he could feel the two hearty kisses which were pressed on his nose. All the neighbors shrugged their shoulders and joked about this old relation whom the doctor would not allow to be slaughtered. Was he then to be the first to go, with the thought that the knacker would be called in on the following day. But one morning, when he entered the stable, Bonhomme did not hear him, did not raise his head. He was dead; he lay there, with a peaceful expression, as if relieved that death had come to him so gently. His master knelt beside him and kissed him again and bade him farewell, while two big tears rolled down his cheeks.

It was on this day that Pascal saw his neighbor, M. Bellombre, for the last time. Going over to the window he perceived him in his garden, in the pale sunshine of early November, taking his accustomed walk; and the sight of the old professor, living so completely happy in his solitude, filled him at first with astonishment. He could never have imagined such a thing possible, as that a man of sixty-nine should live thus, without wife or child, or even a dog, deriving his selfish happiness from the joy of living outside of life. Then he recalled his fits of anger against this man, his sarcasms about his fear of life, the catastrophes which he had wished might happen to him, the hope that punishment would come to him, in the shape of some housekeeper, or some female relation dropping down on him unexpectedly. But no, he was still as fresh as ever, and Pascal was sure that for a long time to come he would continue to grow old like this, hard, avaricious, useless, and happy. And yet he no longer execrated him; he could even have found it in his heart to pity him, so ridiculous and miserable did he think him for not being loved. Pascal, who suffered the pangs of death because he was alone! He whose heart was breaking because he was too full of others. Rather suffering, suffering only, than this selfishness, this death of all there is in us of living and human!

In the night which followed Pascal had another attack of angina pectoris. It lasted for five minutes, and he thought that he would suffocate without having the strength to call Martine. Then when he recovered his breath, he did not disturb himself, preferring to speak to no one of this aggravation of his malady; but he had the certainty that it was all over with him, that he might not perhaps live a month longer. His first thought was Clotilde. Should he then never see her again? and so sharp a pang seized him that he believed another attack was coming on. Why should he not write to her to come to him? He had received a letter from her the day before; he would answer it this morning. Then the thought of the envelopes occurred to him. If he should die suddenly, his mother would be the mistress and she would destroy them; and not only the envelopes, but his manuscripts, all his papers, thirty years of his intelligence and his labor. Thus the crime which he had so greatly dreaded would be consummated, the crime of which the fear alone, during his nights of fever, had made him get up out of bed trembling, his ear on the stretch, listening to hear if they were forcing open the press. The perspiration broke out upon him, he saw himself dispossessed, outraged, the ashes of his work thrown to the four winds. And when his thoughts reverted to Clotilde, he told himself that everything would be satisfactorily arranged, that he had only to call her back—she would be here, she would close his eyes, she would defend his memory. And he sat down to write at once to her, so that the letter might go by the morning mail.

But when Pascal was seated before the white paper, with the pen between his fingers, a growing doubt, a feeling of dissatisfaction with himself, took possession of him. Was not this idea of his papers, this fine project of providing a guardian for them and saving them, a suggestion of his weakness, an excuse which he gave himself to bring back Clotilde, and see her again? Selfishness was at the bottom of it. He was thinking of himself, not of her. He saw her returning to this poor house, condemned to nurse a sick old man; and he saw her, above all, in her grief, in her awful agony, when he should terrify her some day by dropping down dead at her side. No, no! this was the dreadful moment which he must spare her, those days of cruel adieus and want afterward, a sad legacy which he could not leave her without thinking himself a criminal. Her tranquillity, her happiness only, were of any consequence, the rest did not matter. He would die in his hole, then, abandoned, happy to think her happy, to spare her the cruel blow of his death. As for saving his manuscripts he would perhaps find a means of doing so, he would try to have the strength to part from them and give them to Ramond. But even if all his papers were to perish, this was less of a sacrifice than to resign himself not to see her again, and he accepted it, and he was willing that nothing of him should survive, not even his thoughts, provided only that nothing of him should henceforth trouble her dear existence.

Pascal accordingly proceeded to write one of his usual answers, which, by a great effort, he purposely made colorless and almost cold. Clotilde, in her last letter, without complaining of Maxime, had given it to be understood that her brother had lost his interest in her, preferring the society of Rose, the niece of Saccard's hairdresser, the fair-haired young girl with the innocent look. And he suspected strongly some maneuver of the father: a cunning plan to obtain possession of the inheritance of the sick man, whose vices, so precocious formerly, gained new force as his last hour approached. But in spite of his uneasiness he gave Clotilde very good advice, telling her that she must make allowance for Maxime's sufferings, that he had undoubtedly a great deal of affection and gratitude for her, in short that it was her duty to devote herself to him to the end. When he signed the letter tears dimmed his sight. It was his death warrant—a death like that of an old and solitary brute, a death without a kiss, without the touch of a friendly hand—that he was signing. Never again would he embrace her. Then doubts assailed him; was he doing right in leaving her amid such evil surroundings, where he felt that she was in continual contact with every species of wickedness?

The postman brought the letters and newspapers to La Souleiade every morning at about nine o'clock; and Pascal, when he wrote to Clotilde, was accustomed to watch for him, to give him his letter, so as to be certain that his correspondence was not intercepted. But on this morning, when he went downstairs to give him the letter he had just written, he was surprised to receive one from him from Clotilde, although it was not the usual day for her letters. He allowed his own to go, however. Then he went upstairs, resumed his seat at his table, and tore open the envelope.

The letter was short, but its contents filled Pascal with a great joy.

But the sound of footsteps made him control himself. He turned round and saw Martine, who was saying:

"Dr. Ramond is downstairs."

"Ah! let him come up, let him come up," he said.

It was another piece of good fortune that had come to him. Ramond cried gaily from the door:

"Victory, master! I have brought you your money—not all, but a good sum."

And he told the story—an unexpected piece of good luck which his father-in-law, M. Leveque, had brought to light. The receipts for the hundred and twenty thousand francs, which constituted Pascal the personal creditor of Grandguillot, were valueless, since the latter was insolvent. Salvation was to come from the power of attorney which the doctor had sent him years before, at his request, that he might invest all or part of his money in mortgages. As the name of the proxy was in blank in the document, the notary, as is sometimes done, had made use of the name of one of his clerks, and eighty thousand francs, which had been invested in good mortgages, had thus been recovered through the agency of a worthy man who was not in the secrets of his employer. If Pascal had taken action in the matter, if he had gone to the public prosecutor's office and the chamber of notaries, he would have disentangled the matter long before. However, he had recovered a sure income of four thousand francs.

He seized the young man's hands and pressed them, smiling, his eyes still moist with tears.

"Ah! my friend, if you knew how happy I am! This letter of Clotilde's has brought me a great happiness. Yes, I was going to send for her; but the thought of my poverty, of the privations she would have to endure here, spoiled for me the joy of her return. And now fortune has come back, at least enough to set up my little establishment again!"

In the expansion of his feelings he held out the letter to Ramond, and forced him to read it. Then when the young man gave it back to him, smiling, comprehending the doctor's emotion, and profoundly touched by it, yielding to an overpowering need of affection, he caught him in his arms, like a comrade, a brother. The two men kissed each other vigorously on either cheek.

"Come, since good fortune has sent you, I am going to ask another service from you. You know I distrust every one around me, even my old housekeeper. Will you take my despatch to the telegraph office!"

He sat down again at the table, and wrote simply, "I await you; start to-night."

"Let me see," he said, "to-day is the 6th of November, is it not? It is now near ten o'clock; she will have my despatch at noon. That will give her time enough to pack her trunks and to take the eight o'clock express this evening, which will bring her to Marseilles in time for breakfast. But as there is no train which connects with it, she cannot be here until to-morrow, the 7th, at five o'clock."

After folding the despatch he rose:

"My God, at five o'clock to-morrow! How long to wait still! What shall I do with myself until then?"

Then a sudden recollection filled him with anxiety, and he became grave.

"Ramond, my comrade, will you give me a great proof of your friendship by being perfectly frank with me?"

"How so, master?"

"Ah, you understand me very well. The other day you examined me. Do you think I can live another year?"

He fixed his eyes on the young man as he spoke, compelling him to look at him. Ramond evaded a direct answer, however, with a jest—was it really a physician who put such a question?

"Let us be serious, Ramond, I beg of you."

Then Ramond answered in all sincerity that, in his opinion, the doctor might very justly entertain the hope of living another year. He gave his reasons—the comparatively slight progress which the sclerosis had made, and the absolute soundness of the other organs. Of course they must make allowance for what they did not and could not know, for a sudden accident was always possible. And the two men discussed the case as if they been in consultation at the bedside of a patient, weighing the pros and cons, each stating his views and prognosticating a fatal termination, in accordance with the symptoms as defined by the best authorities.

Pascal, as if it were some one else who was in question, had recovered all his composure and his heroic self-forgetfulness.

"Yes," he murmured at last, "you are right; a year of life is still possible. Ah, my friend, how I wish I might live two years; a mad wish, no doubt, an eternity of joy. And yet, two years, that would not be impossible. I had a very curious case once, a wheelwright of the faubourg, who lived for four years, giving the lie to all my prognostications. Two years, two years, I will live two years! I must live two years!"

Ramond sat with bent head, without answering. He was beginning to be uneasy, fearing that he had shown himself too optimistic; and the doctor's joy disquieted and grieved him, as if this very exaltation, this disturbance of a once strong brain, warned him of a secret and imminent danger.

"Did you not wish to send that despatch at once?" he said.

"Yes, yes, go quickly, my good Ramond, and come back again to see us the day after to-morrow. She will be here then, and I want you to come and embrace us."

The day was long, and the following morning, at about four o'clock, shortly after Pascal had fallen asleep, after a happy vigil filled with hopes and dreams, he was wakened by a dreadful attack. He felt as if an enormous weight, as if the whole house, had fallen down upon his chest, so that the thorax, flattened down, touched the back. He could not breathe; the pain reached the shoulders, then the neck, and paralyzed the left arm. But he was perfectly conscious; he had the feeling that his heart was about to stop, that life was about to leave him, in the dreadful oppression, like that of a vise, which was suffocating him. Before the attack reached its height he had the strength to rise and to knock on the floor with a stick for Martine. Then he fell back on his bed, unable to speak or to move, and covered with a cold sweat.

Martine, fortunately, in the profound silence of the empty house, heard the knock. She dressed herself, wrapped a shawl about her, and went upstairs, carrying her candle. The darkness was still profound; dawn was about to break. And when she perceived her master, whose eyes alone seemed living, looking at her with locked jaws, speechless, his face distorted by pain, she was awed and terrified, and she could only rush toward the bed crying:

"My God! My God! what is the matter, monsieur? Answer me, monsieur, you frighten me!"

For a full minute Pascal struggled in vain to recover his breath. Then, the viselike pressure on his chest relaxing slowly, he murmured in a faint voice:

"The five thousand francs in the desk are Clotilde's. Tell her that the affair of the notary is settled, that she will recover from it enough to live upon."

Then Martine, who had listened to him in open-mouthed wonder, confessed the falsehood she had told him, ignorant of the good news that had been brought by Ramond.

"Monsieur, you must forgive me; I told you an untruth. But it would be wrong to deceive you longer. When I saw you alone and so unhappy, I took some of my own money."

"My poor girl, you did that!"

"Oh, I had some hope that monsieur would return it to me one day."

By this time the attack had passed off, and he was able to turn his head and look at her. He was amazed and moved. What was passing in the heart of this avaricious old maid, who for thirty years had been saving up her treasure painfully, who had never taken a sou from it, either for herself or for any one else? He did not yet comprehend, but he wished to show himself kind and grateful.

"You are a good woman, Martine. All that will be returned to you. I truly think I am going to die—"

She did not allow him to finish, her whole being rose up in rebellious protest.

"Die; you, monsieur! Die before me! I do not wish it. I will not let you die!"

She threw herself on her knees beside the bed; she caught him wildly in her arms, feeling him, to see if he suffered, holding him as if she thought that death would not dare to take him from her.

"You must tell me what is the matter with you. I will take care of you. I will save you. If it were necessary to give my life for you, I would give it, monsieur. I will sit up day and night with you. I am strong still; I will be stronger than the disease, you shall see. To die! to die! oh, no, it cannot be! The good God cannot wish so great an injustice. I have prayed so much in my life that he ought to listen to me a little now, and he will grant my prayer, monsieur; he will save you."

Pascal looked at her, listened to her, and a sudden light broke in upon his mind. She loved him, this miserable woman; she had always loved him. He thought of her thirty years of blind devotion, her mute adoration, when she had waited upon him, on her knees, as it were, when she was young; her secret jealousy of Clotilde later; what she must have secretly suffered all that time! And she was here on her knees now again, beside his deathbed; her hair gray; her eyes the color of ashes in her pale nun-like face, dulled by her solitary life. And he felt that she was unconscious of it all; that she did not even know with what sort of love she loved him, loving him only for the happiness of loving him: of being with him, and of waiting on him.

Tears rose to Pascal's eyes; a dolorous pity and an infinite human tenderness flowed from his poor, half-broken heart.

"My poor girl," he said, "you are the best of girls. Come, embrace me, as you love me, with all your strength."

She, too, sobbed. She let her gray head, her face worn by her long servitude, fall on her master's breast. Wildly she kissed him, putting all her life into the kiss.

"There, let us not give way to emotion, for you see we can do nothing; this will be the end, just the same. If you wish me to love you, obey me. Now that I am better, that I can breathe easier, do me the favor to run to Dr. Ramond's. Waken him and bring him back with you."

She was leaving the room when he called to her, seized by a sudden fear.

"And remember, I forbid you to go to inform my mother."

She turned back, embarrassed, and in a voice of entreaty, said:

"Oh, monsieur, Mme. Felicite has made me promise so often—"

But he was inflexible. All his life he had treated his mother with deference, and he thought he had acquired the right to defend himself against her in the hour of his death. He would not let the servant go until she had promised him that she would be silent. Then he smiled once more.

"Go quickly. Oh, you will see me again; it will not be yet."

Day broke at last, the melancholy dawn of the pale November day. Pascal had had the shutters opened, and when he was left alone he watched the brightening dawn, doubtless that of his last day of life. It had rained the night before, and the mild sun was still veiled by clouds. From the plane trees came the morning carols of the birds, while far away in the sleeping country a locomotive whistled with a prolonged moan. And he was alone; alone in the great melancholy house, whose emptiness he felt around him, whose silence he heard. The light slowly increased, and he watched the patches it made on the window-panes broadening and brightening. Then the candle paled in the growing light, and the whole room became visible. And with the dawn, as he had anticipated, came relief. The sight of the familiar objects around him brought him consolation.

But Pascal, although the attack had passed away, still suffered horribly. A sharp pain remained in the hollow of his chest, and his left arm, benumbed, hung from his shoulder like lead. In his long waiting for the help that Martine had gone to bring, he had reflected on the suffering which made the flesh cry out. And he found that he was resigned; he no longer felt the rebelliousness which the mere sight of physical pain had formerly awakened in him. It had exasperated him, as if it had been a monstrous and useless cruelty of nature. In his doubts as a physician, he had attended his patients only to combat it, and to relieve it. If he ended by accepting it, now that he himself suffered its horrible torture, was it that he had risen one degree higher in his faith of life, to that serene height whence life appeared altogether good, even with the fatal condition of suffering attached to it; suffering which is perhaps its spring? Yes, to live all of life, to live it and to suffer it all without rebellion, without believing that it is made better by being made painless, this presented itself clearly to his dying eyes, as the greatest courage and the greatest wisdom. And to cheat pain while he waited, he reviewed his latest theories; he dreamed of a means of utilizing suffering by transforming it into action, into work. If it be true that man feels pain more acutely according as he rises in the scale of civilization, it is also certain that he becomes stronger through it, better armed against it, more capable of resisting it. The organ, the brain which works, develops and grows stronger, provided the equilibrium between the sensations which it receives and the work which it gives back be not broken. Might not one hope, then, for a humanity in which the amount of work accomplished would so exactly equal the sum of sensations received, that suffering would be utilized and, as it were, abolished?

The sun had risen, and Pascal was confusedly revolving these distant hopes in his mind, in the drowsiness produced by his disease, when he felt a new attack coming on. He had a moment of cruel anxiety—was this the end? Was he going to die alone? But at this instant hurried footsteps mounted the stairs, and a moment later Ramond entered, followed by Martine. And the patient had time to say before the attack began:

"Quick! quick! a hypodermic injection of pure water."

Unfortunately the doctor had to look for the little syringe and then to prepare everything. This occupied some minutes, and the attack was terrible. He followed its progress with anxiety—the face becoming distorted, the lips growing livid. Then when he had given the injection, he observed that the phenomena, for a moment stationary, slowly diminished in intensity. Once more the catastrophe was averted.

As soon as he recovered his breath Pascal, glancing at the clock, said in his calm, faint voice:

"My friend, it is seven o'clock—in twelve hours, at seven o'clock to-night, I shall be dead."

And as the young man was about to protest, to argue the question, "No," he resumed, "do not try to deceive me. You have witnessed the attack. You know what it means as well as I do. Everything will now proceed with mathematical exactness; and, hour by hour, I could describe to you the phases of the disease."

He stopped, gasped for breath, and then added:

"And then, all is well; I am content. Clotilde will be here at five; all I ask is to see her and to die in her arms."

A few moments later, however, he experienced a sensible improvement. The effect of the injection seemed truly miraculous; and he was able to sit up in bed, his back resting against the pillows. He spoke clearly, and with more ease, and never had the lucidity of his mind appeared greater.

"You know, master," said, Ramond, "that I will not leave you. I have told my wife, and we will spend the day together; and, whatever you may say to the contrary, I am very confident that it will not be the last. You will let me make myself at home, here, will you not?"

Pascal smiled, and gave orders to Martine to go and prepare breakfast for Ramond, saying that if they needed her they would call her. And the two men remained alone, conversing with friendly intimacy; the one with his white hair and long white beard, lying down, discoursing like a sage, the other sitting at his bedside, listening with the respect of a disciple.

"In truth," murmured the master, as if he were speaking to himself, "the effect of those injections is extraordinary."

Then in a stronger voice, he said almost gaily:

"My friend Ramond, it may not be a very great present that I am giving you, but I am going to leave you my manuscripts. Yes, Clotilde has orders to send them to you when I shall be no more. Look through them, and you will perhaps find among them things that are not so very bad. If you get a good idea from them some day—well, that will be so much the better for the world."

And then he made his scientific testament. He was clearly conscious that he had been himself only a solitary pioneer, a precursor, planning theories which he tried to put in practise, but which failed because of the imperfection of his method. He recalled his enthusiasm when he believed he had discovered, in his injections of nerve substance, the universal panacea, then his disappointments, his fits of despair, the shocking death of Lafouasse, consumption carrying off Valentin in spite of all his efforts, madness again conquering Sarteur and causing him to hang himself. So that he would depart full of doubt, having no longer the confidence necessary to the physician, and so enamored of life that he had ended by putting all his faith in it, certain that it must draw from itself alone its health and strength. But he did not wish to close up the future; he was glad, on the contrary, to bequeath his hypotheses to the younger generation. Every twenty years theories changed; established truths only, on which science continued to build, remained unshaken. Even if he had only the merit of giving to science a momentary hypothesis, his work would not be lost, for progress consisted assuredly in the effort, in the onward march of the intellect.

And then who could say that he had died in vain, troubled and weary, his hopes concerning the injections unrealized—other workers would come, young, ardent, confident, who would take up the idea, elucidate it, expand it. And perhaps a new epoch, a new world would date from this.

"Ah, my dear Ramond," he continued, "if one could only live life over again. Yes, I would take up my idea again, for I have been struck lately by the singular efficacy of injections even of pure water. It is not the liquid, then, that matters, but simply the mechanical action. During the last month I have written a great deal on that subject. You will find some curious notes and observations there. In short, I should be inclined to put all my faith in work, to place health in the harmonious working of all the organs, a sort of dynamic therapeutics, if I may venture to use the expression."

He had gradually grown excited, forgetting his approaching death in his ardent curiosity about life. And he sketched, with broad strokes, his last theory. Man was surrounded by a medium—nature—which irritated by perpetual contact the sensitive extremities of the nerves. Hence the action, not only of the senses, but of the entire surface of the body, external and internal. For it was these sensations which, reverberating in the brain, in the marrow, and in the nervous centers, were there converted into tonicity, movements, and thoughts; and he was convinced that health consisted in the natural progress of this work, in receiving sensations, and in giving them back in thoughts and in actions, the human machine being thus fed by the regular play of the organs. Work thus became the great law, the regulator of the living universe. Hence it became necessary if the equilibrium were broken, if the external excitations ceased to be sufficient, for therapeutics to create artificial excitations, in order to reestablish the tonicity which is the state of perfect health. And he dreamed of a whole new system of treatment—suggestion, the all-powerful authority of the physician, for the senses; electricity, friction, massage for the skin and for the tendons; diet for the stomach; air cures on high plateaus for the lungs, and, finally, transfusion, injections of distilled water, for the circulatory system. It was the undeniable and purely mechanical action of these latter that had put him on the track; all he did now was to extend the hypothesis, impelled by his generalizing spirit; he saw the world saved anew in this perfect equilibrium, as much work given as sensation received, the balance of the world restored by unceasing labor.

Here he burst into a frank laugh.

"There! I have started off again. I, who was firmly convinced that the only wisdom was not to interfere, to let nature take its course. Ah, what an incorrigible old fool I am!"

Ramond caught his hands in an outburst of admiration and affection.

"Master, master! it is of enthusiasm, of folly like yours that genius is made. Have no fear, I have listened to you, I will endeavor to be worthy of the heritage you leave; and I think, with you, that perhaps the great future lies entirely there."

In the sad and quiet room Pascal began to speak again, with the courageous tranquillity of a dying philosopher giving his last lesson. He now reviewed his personal observations; he said that he had often cured himself by work, regular and methodical work, not carried to excess. Eleven o'clock struck; he urged Ramond to take his breakfast, and he continued the conversation, soaring to lofty and distant heights, while Martine served the meal. The sun had at last burst through the morning mists, a sun still half-veiled in clouds, and mild, whose golden light warmed the room. Presently, after taking a few sips of milk, Pascal remained silent.

At this moment the young physician was eating a pear.

"Are you in pain again?" he asked.

"No, no; finish."

But he could not deceive Ramond. It was an attack, and a terrible one. The suffocation came with the swiftness of a thunderbolt, and he fell back on the pillow, his face already blue. He clutched at the bedclothes to support himself, to raise the dreadful weight which oppressed his chest. Terrified, livid, he kept his wide open eyes fixed upon the clock, with a dreadful expression of despair and grief; and for ten minutes it seemed as if every moment must be his last.

Ramond had immediately given him a hypodermic injection. The relief was slow to come, the efficacy less than before.

When Pascal revived, large tears stood in his eyes. He did not speak now, he wept. Presently, looking at the clock with his darkening vision, he said:

"My friend, I shall die at four o'clock; I shall not see her."

And as his young colleague, in order to divert his thoughts, declared, in spite of appearances, that the end was not so near, Pascal, again becoming enthusiastic, wished to give him a last lesson, based on direct observation. He had, as it happened, attended several cases similar to his own, and he remembered especially to have dissected at the hospital the heart of a poor old man affected with sclerosis.

"I can see it—my heart. It is the color of a dead leaf; its fibers are brittle, wasted, one would say, although it has augmented slightly in volume. The inflammatory process has hardened it; it would be difficult to cut—"

He continued in a lower voice. A little before, he had felt his heart growing weaker, its contractions becoming feebler and slower. Instead of the normal jet of blood there now issued from the aorta only a red froth. Back of it all the veins were engorged with black blood; the suffocation increased, according as the lift and force pump, the regulator of the whole machine, moved more slowly. And after the injection he had been able to follow in spite of his suffering the gradual reviving of the organ as the stimulus set it beating again, removing the black venous blood, and sending life into it anew, with the red arterial blood. But the attack would return as soon as the mechanical effect of the injection should cease. He could predict it almost within a few minutes. Thanks to the injections he would have three attacks more. The third would carry him off; he would die at four o'clock.

Then, while his voice grew gradually weaker, in a last outburst of enthusiasm, he apostrophized the courage of the heart, that persistent life maker, working ceaselessly, even during sleep, when the other organs rested.

"Ah, brave heart! how heroically you struggle! What faithful, what generous muscles, never wearied! You have loved too much, you have beat too fast in the past months, and that is why you are breaking now, brave heart, who do not wish to die, and who strive rebelliously to beat still!"

But now the first of the attacks which had been announced came on. Pascal came out of this panting, haggard, his speech sibilant and painful. Low moans escaped him, in spite of his courage. Good God! would this torture never end? And yet his most ardent desire was to prolong his agony, to live long enough to embrace Clotilde a last time. If he might only be deceiving himself, as Ramond persisted in declaring. If he might only live until five o'clock. His eyes again turned to the clock, they never now left the hands, every minute seeming an eternity. They marked three o'clock. Then half-past three. Ah, God! only two hours of life, two hours more of life. The sun was already sinking toward the horizon; a great calm descended from the pale winter sky, and he heard at intervals the whistles of the distant locomotives crossing the bare plain. The train that was passing now was the one going to the Tulettes; the other, the one coming from Marseilles, would it never arrive, then!

At twenty minutes to four Pascal signed to Ramond to approach. He could no longer speak loud enough to be heard.

"You see, in order that I might live until six o'clock, the pulse should be stronger. I have still some hope, however, but the second movement is almost imperceptible, the heart will soon cease to beat."

And in faint, despairing accents he called on Clotilde again and again. The immeasurable grief which he felt at not being able to see her again broke forth in this faltering and agonized appeal. Then his anxiety about his manuscripts returned, an ardent entreaty shone in his eyes, until at last he found the strength to falter again:

"Do not leave me; the key is under my pillow; tell Clotilde to take it; she has my directions."

At ten minutes to four another hypodermic injection was given, but without effect. And just as four o'clock was striking, the second attack declared itself. Suddenly, after a fit of suffocation, he threw himself out of bed; he desired to rise, to walk, in a last revival of his strength. A need of space, of light, of air, urged him toward the skies. Then there came to him an irresistible appeal from life, his whole life, from the adjoining workroom, where he had spent his days. And he went there, staggering, suffocating, bending to the left side, supporting himself by the furniture.

Dr. Ramond precipitated himself quickly toward him to stop him, crying:

"Master, master! lie down again, I entreat you!"

But Pascal paid no heed to him, obstinately determined to die on his feet. The desire to live, the heroic idea of work, alone survived in him, carrying him onward bodily. He faltered hoarsely:

"No, no—out there, out there—"

His friend was obliged to support him, and he walked thus, stumbling and haggard, to the end of the workroom, and dropped into his chair beside his table, on which an unfinished page still lay among a confusion of papers and books.

Here he gasped for breath and his eyes closed. After a moment he opened them again, while his hands groped about, seeking his work, no doubt. They encountered the genealogical tree in the midst of other papers scattered about. Only two days before he had corrected some dates in it. He recognized it, and drawing it toward him, spread it out.

"Master, master! you will kill yourself!" cried Ramond, overcome with pity and admiration at this extraordinary spectacle.

Pascal did not listen, did not hear. He felt a pencil under his fingers. He took it and bent over the tree, as if his dying eyes no longer saw. The name of Maxime arrested his attention, and he wrote: "Died of ataxia in 1873," in the certainty that his nephew would not live through the year. Then Clotilde's name, beside it, struck him and he completed the note thus: "Has a son, by her Uncle Pascal, in 1874." But it was his own name that he sought wearily and confusedly. When he at last found it his hand grew firmer, and he finished his note, in upright and bold characters: "Died of heart disease, November 7, 1873." This was the supreme effort, the rattle in his throat increased, everything was fading into nothingness, when he perceived the blank leaf above Clotilde's name. His vision grew dark, his fingers could no longer hold the pencil, but he was still able to add, in unsteady letters, into which passed the tortured tenderness, the wild disorder of his poor heart: "The unknown child, to be born in 1874. What will it be?" Then he swooned, and Martine and Ramond with difficulty carried him back to bed.

The third attack came on about four o'clock. In this last access of suffocation Pascal's countenance expressed excruciating suffering. Death was to be very painful; he must endure to the end his martyrdom, as a man and a scientist. His wandering gaze still seemed to seek the clock, to ascertain the hour. And Ramond, seeing his lips move, bent down and placed his ear to the mouth of the dying man. The latter, in effect, was stammering some vague words, so faint that they scarcely rose above a breath:

"Four o'clock—the heart is stopping; no more red blood in the aorta—the valve relaxes and bursts."

A dreadful spasm shook him; his breathing grew fainter.

"Its progress is too rapid. Do not leave me; the key is under the pillow—Clotilde, Clotilde—"

At the foot of the bed Martine was kneeling, choked with sobs. She saw well that monsieur was dying. She had not dared to go for a priest notwithstanding her great desire to do so; and she was herself reciting the prayers for the dying; she prayed ardently that God would pardon monsieur, and that monsieur might go straight to Paradise.

Pascal was dying. His face was quite blue. After a few seconds of immobility, he tried to breathe: he put out his lips, opened his poor mouth, like a little bird opening its beak to get a last mouthful of air. And he was dead.

XIII.

It was not until after breakfast, at about one o'clock, that Clotilde received the despatch. On this day it had chanced that she had quarreled with her brother Maxime, who, taking advantage of his privileges as an invalid, had tormented her more and more every day by his unreasonable caprices and his outbursts of ill temper. In short, her visit to him had not proved a success. He found that she was too simple and too serious to cheer him; and he had preferred, of late, the society of Rose, the fair-haired young girl, with the innocent look, who amused him. So that when his sister told him that their uncle had sent for her, and that she was going away, he gave his approval at once, and although he asked her to return as soon as she should have settled her affairs at home, he did so only with the desire of showing himself amiable, and he did not press the invitation.

Clotilde spent the afternoon in packing her trunks. In the feverish excitement of so sudden a decision she had thought of nothing but the joy of her return. But after the hurry of dinner was over, after she had said good-by to her brother, after the interminable drive in a hackney coach along the avenue of the Bois de Boulogne to the Lyons railway station, when she found herself in the ladies' compartment, starting on the long journey on a cold and rainy November night, already rolling away from Paris, her excitement began to abate, and reflections forced their way into her mind and began to trouble her. Why this brief and urgent despatch: "I await you; start this evening." Doubtless it was the answer to her letter; but she knew how greatly Pascal had desired that she should remain in Paris, where he thought she was happy, and she was astonished at his hasty summons. She had not expected a despatch, but a letter, arranging for her return a few weeks later. There must be something else, then; perhaps he was ill and felt a desire, a longing to see her again at once. And from this time forward this fear seized her with the force of a presentiment, and grew stronger and stronger, until it soon took complete possession of her.

All night long the rain beat furiously against the windows of the train while they were crossing the plains of Burgundy, and did not cease until they reached Macon. When they had passed Lyons the day broke. Clotilde had Pascal's letters with her, and she had waited impatiently for the daylight that she might read again carefully these letters, the writing of which had seemed changed to her. And noticing the unsteady characters, the breaks in the words, she felt a chill at her heart. He was ill, very ill—she had become certain of this now, by a divination in which there was less of reasoning than of subtle prescience. And the rest of the journey seemed terribly long, for her anguish increased in proportion as she approached its termination. And worse than all, arriving at Marseilles at half-past twelve, there was no train for Plassans until twenty minutes past three. Three long hours of waiting! She breakfasted at the buffet in the railway station, eating hurriedly, as if she was afraid of missing this train; then she dragged herself into the dusty garden, going from bench to bench in the pale, mild sunshine, among omnibuses and hackney coaches. At last she was once more in the train, which stopped at every little way station. When they were approaching Plassans she put her head out of the window eagerly, longing to see the town again after her short absence of two months. It seemed to her as if she had been away for twenty years, and that everything must be changed. When the train was leaving the little station of Sainte-Marthe her emotion reached its height when, leaning out, she saw in the distance La Souleiade with the two secular cypresses on the terrace, which could be seen three leagues off.

It was five o'clock, and twilight was already falling. The train stopped, and Clotilde descended. But it was a surprise and a keen grief to her not to see Pascal waiting for her on the platform. She had been saying to herself since they had left Lyons: "If I do not see him at once, on the arrival of the train, it will be because he is ill." He might be in the waiting-room, however, or with a carriage outside. She hurried forward, but she saw no one but Father Durieu, a driver whom the doctor was in the habit of employing. She questioned him eagerly. The old man, a taciturn Provencal, was in no haste to answer. His wagon was there, and he asked her for the checks for her luggage, wishing to see about the trunks before anything else. In a trembling voice she repeated her question:

"Is everybody well, Father Durieu?"

"Yes, mademoiselle."

And she was obliged to put question after question to him before she succeeded in eliciting the information that it was Martine who had told him, at about six o'clock the day before, to be at the station with his wagon, in time to meet the train. He had not seen the doctor, no one had seen him, for two months past. It might very well be since he was not here that he had been obliged to take to his bed, for there was a report in the town that he was not very well.

"Wait until I get the luggage, mademoiselle," he ended, "there is room for you on the seat."

"No, Father Durieu, it would be too long to wait. I will walk."

She ascended the slope rapidly. Her heart was so tightened that she could scarcely breathe. The sun had sunk behind the hills of Sainte-Marthe, and a fine mist was falling from the chill gray November sky, and as she took the road to Les Fenouilleres she caught another glimpse of La Souleiade, which struck a chill to her heart—the front of the house, with all its shutters closed, and wearing a look of abandonment and desolation in the melancholy twilight.

But Clotilde received the final and terrible blow when she saw Ramond standing at the hall door, apparently waiting for her. He had indeed been watching for her, and had come downstairs to break the dreadful news gently to her. She arrived out of breath; she had crossed the quincunx of plane trees near the fountain to shorten the way, and on seeing the young man there instead of Pascal, whom she had in spite of everything expected to see, she had a presentiment of overwhelming ruin, of irreparable misfortune. Ramond was pale and agitated, notwithstanding the effort he made to control his feelings. At the first moment he could not find a word to say, but waited to be questioned. Clotilde, who was herself suffocating, said nothing. And they entered the house thus; he led her to the dining-room, where they remained for a few seconds, face to face, in mute anguish.

"He is ill, is he not?" she at last faltered.

"Yes," he said, "he is ill."

"I knew it at once when I saw you," she replied. "I knew when he was not here that he must be ill. He is very ill, is he not?" she persisted.

As he did not answer but grew still paler, she looked at him fixedly. And on the instant she saw the shadow of death upon him; on his hands that still trembled, that had assisted the dying man; on his sad face; in his troubled eyes, which still retained the reflection of the death agony; in the neglected and disordered appearance of the physician who, for twelve hours, had maintained an unavailing struggle against death.

She gave a loud cry:

"He is dead!"

She tottered, and fell fainting into the arms of Ramond, who with a great sob pressed her in a brotherly embrace. And thus they wept on each other's neck.

When he had seated her in a chair, and she was able to speak, he said:

"It was I who took the despatch you received to the telegraph office yesterday, at half-past ten o'clock. He was so happy, so full of hope! He was forming plans for the future—a year, two years of life. And this morning, at four o'clock, he had the first attack, and he sent for me. He saw at once that he was doomed, but he expected to last until six o'clock, to live long enough to see you again. But the disease progressed too rapidly. He described its progress to me, minute by minute, like a professor in the dissecting room. He died with your name upon his lips, calm, but full of anguish, like a hero."

Clotilde listened, her eyes drowned in tears which flowed endlessly. Every word of the relation of this piteous and stoical death penetrated her heart and stamped itself there. She reconstructed every hour of the dreadful day. She followed to its close its grand and mournful drama. She would live it over in her thoughts forever.

But her despairing grief overflowed when Martine, who had entered the room a moment before, said in a harsh voice:

"Ah, mademoiselle has good reason to cry! for if monsieur is dead, mademoiselle is to blame for it."

The old servant stood apart, near the door of her kitchen, in such a passion of angry grief, because they had taken her master from her, because they had killed him, that she did not even try to find a word of welcome or consolation for this child whom she had brought up. And without calculating the consequences of her indiscretion, the grief or the joy which she might cause, she relieved herself by telling all she knew.

"Yes, if monsieur has died, it is because mademoiselle went away."

From the depths of her overpowering grief Clotilde protested. She had expected to see Martine weeping with her, like Ramond, and she was surprised to feel that she was an enemy.

"Why, it was he who would not let me stay, who insisted upon my going away," she said.

"Oh, well! mademoiselle must have been willing to go or she would have been more clear-sighted. The night before your departure I found monsieur half-suffocated with grief; and when I wished to inform mademoiselle, he himself prevented me; he had such courage. Then I could see it all, after mademoiselle had gone. Every night it was the same thing over again, and he could hardly keep from writing to you to come back. In short, he died of it, that is the pure truth."

A great light broke in on Clotilde's mind, making her at the same time very happy and very wretched. Good God! what she had suspected for a moment, was then true. Afterward she had been convinced, seeing Pascal's angry persistence, that he was speaking the truth; that between her and work he had chosen work sincerely, like a man of science with whom love of work has gained the victory over the love of woman. And yet he had not spoken the truth; he had carried his devotion, his self-forgetfulness to the point of immolating himself to what he believed to be her happiness. And the misery of things willed that he should have been mistaken, that he should have thus consummated the unhappiness of both.

Clotilde again protested wildly:

"But how could I have known? I obeyed; I put all my love in my obedience."

"Ah," cried Martine again, "it seems to me that I should have guessed."

Ramond interposed gently. He took Clotilde's hands once more in his, and explained to her that grief might indeed have hastened the fatal issue, but that the master had unhappily been doomed for some time past. The affection of the heart from which he had suffered must have been of long standing—a great deal of overwork, a certain part of heredity, and, finally, his late absorbing love, and the poor heart had broken.

"Let us go upstairs," said Clotilde simply. "I wish to see him."

Upstairs in the death-chamber the blinds were closed, shutting out even the melancholy twilight. On a little table at the foot of the bed burned two tapers in two candlesticks. And they cast a pale yellow light on Pascal's form extended on the bed, the feet close together, the hands folded on the breast. The eyes had been piously closed. The face, of a bluish hue still, but already looking calm and peaceful, framed by the flowing white hair and beard, seemed asleep. He had been dead scarcely an hour and a half, yet already infinite serenity, eternal silence, eternal repose, had begun.

Seeing him thus, at the thought that he no longer heard her, that he no longer saw her, that she was alone now, that she was to kiss him for the last time, and then lose him forever, Clotilde, in an outburst of grief, threw herself upon the bed, and in broken accents of passionate tenderness cried:

"Oh, master, master, master—"

She pressed her lips to the dead man's forehead, and, feeling it still warm with life, she had a momentary illusion: she fancied that he felt this last caress, so cruelly awaited. Did he not smile in his immobility, happy at last, and able to die, now that he felt her here beside him? Then, overcome by the dreadful reality, she burst again into wild sobs.

Martine entered, bringing a lamp, which she placed on a corner of the chimney-piece, and she heard Ramond, who was watching Clotilde, disquieted at seeing her passionate grief, say:

"I shall take you away from the room if you give way like this. Consider that you have some one else to think of now."

The servant had been surprised at certain words which she had overheard by chance during the day. Suddenly she understood, and she turned paler even than before, and on her way out of the room, she stopped at the door to hear more.

"The key of the press is under his pillow," said Ramond, lowering his voice; "he told me repeatedly to tell you so. You know what you have to do?"

Clotilde made an effort to remember and to answer.

"What I have to do? About the papers, is it not? Yes, yes, I remember; I am to keep the envelopes and to give you the other manuscripts. Have no fear, I am quite calm, I will be very reasonable. But I will not leave him; I will spend the night here very quietly, I promise you."

She was so unhappy, she seemed so resolved to watch by him, to remain with him, until he should be taken away, that the young physician allowed her to have her way.

"Well, I will leave you now. They will be expecting me at home. Then there are all sorts of formalities to be gone through—to give notice at the mayor's office, the funeral, of which I wish to spare you the details. Trouble yourself about nothing. Everything will be arranged to-morrow when I return."

He embraced her once more and then went away. And it was only then that Martine left the room, behind him, and locking the hall door she ran out into the darkness.

Clotilde was now alone in the chamber; and all around and about her, in the unbroken silence, she felt the emptiness of the house. Clotilde was alone with the dead Pascal. She placed a chair at the head of the bed and sat there motionless, alone. On arriving, she had merely removed her hat: now, perceiving that she still had on her gloves, she took them off also. But she kept on her traveling dress, crumpled and dusty, after twenty hours of railway travel. No doubt Father Durieu had brought the trunks long ago, and left them downstairs. But it did not occur to her, nor had she the strength to wash herself and change her clothes, but remained sitting, overwhelmed with grief, on the chair into which she had dropped. One regret, a great remorse, filled her to the exclusion of all else. Why had she obeyed him? Why had she consented to leave him? If she had remained she had the ardent conviction that he would not have died. She would have lavished so much love, so many caresses upon him, that she would have cured him. If one was anxious to keep a beloved being from dying one should remain with him and, if necessary, give one's heart's blood to keep him alive. It was her own fault if she had lost him, if she could not now with a caress awaken him from his eternal sleep. And she thought herself imbecile not to have understood; cowardly, not to have devoted herself to him; culpable, and to be forever punished for having gone away when plain common sense, in default of feeling, ought to have kept her here, bound, as a submissive and affectionate subject, to the task of watching over her king.

The silence had become so complete, so profound, that Clotilde lifted her eyes for a moment from Pascal's face to look around the room. She saw only vague shadows—the two tapers threw two yellow patches on the high ceiling. At this moment she remembered the letters he had written to her, so short, so cold; and she comprehended his heroic sacrifice, the torture it had been to him to silence his heart, desiring to immolate himself to the end. What strength must he not have required for the accomplishment of the plan of happiness, sublime and disastrous, which he had formed for her. He had resolved to pass out of her life in order to save her from his old age and his poverty; he wished her to be rich and free, to enjoy her youth, far away from him; this indeed was utter self-effacement, complete absorption in the love of another. And she felt a profound gratitude, a sweet solace in the thought, mingled with a sort of angry bitterness against evil fortune. Then, suddenly, the happy years of her childhood and her long youth spent beside him who had always been so kind and so good-humored, rose before her—how he had gradually won her affection, how she had felt that she was his, after the quarrels which had separated them for a time, and with what a transport of joy she had at last given herself to him.

Seven o'clock struck. Clotilde started as the clear tones broke the profound silence. Who was it that had spoken? Then she remembered, and she looked at the clock. And when the last sound of the seven strokes, each of which had fallen like a knell upon her heart, had died away, she turned her eyes again on the motionless face of Pascal, and once more she abandoned herself to her grief.

It was in the midst of this ever-increasing prostration that Clotilde, a few minutes later, heard a sudden sound of sobbing. Some one had rushed into the room; she looked round and saw her Grandmother Felicite. But she did not stir, she did not speak, so benumbed was she with grief. Martine, anticipating the orders which Clotilde would undoubtedly have given her, had hurried to old Mme. Rougon's, to give her the dreadful news; and the latter, dazed at first by the suddenness of the catastrophe, and afterward greatly agitated, had hurried to the house, overflowing with noisy grief. She burst into tears at sight of her son, and then embraced Clotilde, who returned her kiss, as in a dream. And from this instant the latter, without emerging from the overwhelming grief in which she isolated herself, felt that she was no longer alone, hearing a continual stir and bustle going on around her. It was Felicite crying, coming in and going out on tiptoe, setting things in order, spying about, whispering, dropping into a chair, to get up again a moment afterward, after saying that she was going to die in it. At nine o'clock she made a last effort to persuade her granddaughter to eat something. Twice already she had lectured her in a low voice; she came now again to whisper to her:

"Clotilde, my dear, I assure you you are wrong. You must keep up your strength or you will never be able to hold out."

But the young woman, with a shake of her head, again refused.

"Come, you breakfasted at the buffet at Marseilles, I suppose, but you have eaten nothing since. Is that reasonable? I do not wish you to fall ill also. Martine has some broth. I have told her to make a light soup and to roast a chicken. Go down and eat a mouthful, only a mouthful, and I will remain here."

With the same patient gesture Clotilde again refused. At last she faltered:

"Do not ask me, grandmother, I entreat you. I could not; it would choke me."

She did not speak again, falling back into her former state of apathy. She did not sleep, however, her wide open eyes were fixed persistently on Pascal's face. For hours she sat there, motionless, erect, rigid, as if her spirit were far away with the dead. At ten o'clock she heard a noise; it was Martine bringing up the lamp. Toward eleven Felicite, who was sitting watching in an armchair, seemed to grow restless, got up and went out of the room, and came back again. From this forth there was a continual coming and going as of impatient footsteps prowling around the young woman, who was still awake, her large eyes fixed motionless on Pascal. Twelve o'clock struck, and one persistent thought alone pierced her weary brain, like a nail, and prevented sleep—why had she obeyed him? If she had remained she would have revived him with her youth, and he would not have died. And it was not until a little before one that she felt this thought, too, grow confused and lose itself in a nightmare. And she fell into a heavy sleep, worn out with grief and fatigue.

When Martine had announced to Mme. Rougon the unexpected death of her son Pascal, in the shock which she received there was as much of anger as of grief. What! her dying son had not wished to see her; he had made this servant swear not to inform her of his illness! This thought sent the blood coursing swiftly through her veins, as if the struggle between them, which had lasted during his whole life, was to be continued beyond the grave. Then, when after hastily dressing herself she had hurried to La Souleiade, the thought of the terrible envelopes, of all the manuscripts piled up in the press, had filled her with trembling rage. Now that Uncle Macquart and Aunt Dide were dead, she no longer feared what she called the abomination of the Tulettes; and even poor little Charles, in dying, had carried with him one of the most humiliating of the blots on the family. There remained only the envelopes, the abominable envelopes, to menace the glorious Rougon legend which she had spent her whole life in creating, which was the sole thought of her old age, the work to the triumph of which she had persistently devoted the last efforts of her wily and active brain. For long years she had watched these envelopes, never wearying, beginning the struggle over again, when he had thought her beaten, always alert and persistent. Ah! if she could only succeed in obtaining possession of them and destroying them! It would be the execrable past destroyed, effaced; it would be the glory of her family, so hardly won, at last freed from all fear, at last shining untarnished, imposing its lie upon history. And she saw herself traversing the three quarters of Plassans, saluted by every one, bearing herself as proudly as a queen, mourning nobly for the fallen Empire. So that when Martine informed her that Clotilde had come, she quickened her steps as she approached La Souleiade, spurred by the fear of arriving too late.

But as soon as she was installed in the house, Felicite at once regained her composure. There was no hurry, they had the whole night before them. She wished, however, to win over Martine without delay, and she knew well how to influence this simple creature, bound up in the doctrines of a narrow religion. Going down to the kitchen, then, to see the chicken roasting, she began by affecting to be heartbroken at the thought of her son dying without having made his peace with the Church. She questioned the servant, pressing her for particulars. But the latter shook her head disconsolately—no, no priest had come, monsieur had not even made the sign of the cross. She, only, had knelt down to say the prayers for the dying, which certainly could not be enough for the salvation of a soul. And yet with what fervor she had prayed to the good God that monsieur might go straight to Paradise!

With her eyes fixed on the chicken turning on the spit, before a bright fire, Felicite resumed in a lower voice, with an absorbed air:

"Ah, my poor girl, what will most prevent him from going to Paradise are the abominable papers which the unhappy man has left behind him up there in the press. I cannot understand why it is that lightning from heaven has not struck those papers before this and reduced them to ashes. If they are allowed to leave this house it will be ruin and disgrace and eternal perdition!"

Martine listened, very pale.

"Then madame thinks it would be a good work to destroy them, a work that would assure the repose of monsieur's soul?"

"Great God! Do I believe it! Why, if I had those dreadful papers in my hands, I would throw every one of them into the fire. Oh, you would not need then to put on any more sticks; with the manuscripts upstairs alone you would have fuel enough to roast three chickens like that."

The servant took a long spoon and began to baste the fowl. She, too, seemed now to reflect.

"Only we haven't got them. I even overheard some words on the subject, which I may repeat to madame. It was when mademoiselle went upstairs. Dr. Raymond spoke to her about the papers, asking her if she remembered some orders which she had received, before she went away, no doubt; and she answered that she remembered, that she was to keep the envelopes and to give him all the other manuscripts."

Felicite trembled; she could not restrain a terrified movement. Already she saw the papers slipping out of her reach; and it was not the envelopes only which she desired, but all the manuscripts, all that unknown, suspicious, and secret work, from which nothing but scandal could come, according to the obtuse and excitable mind of the proud old bourgeoise.

"But we must act!" she cried, "act immediately, this very night! To-morrow it may be too late."

"I know where the key of the press is," answered Martine in a low voice. "The doctor told mademoiselle."

Felicite immediately pricked up her ears.

"The key; where is it?"

"Under the pillow, under monsieur's head."

In spite of the bright blaze of the fire of vine branches the air seemed to grow suddenly chill, and the two old women were silent. The only sound to be heard was the drip of the chicken juice falling into the pan.

But after Mme. Rougon had eaten a hasty and solitary dinner she went upstairs again with Martine. Without another word being spoken they understood each other, it was decided that they would use all possible means to obtain possession of the papers before daybreak. The simplest was to take the key from under the pillow. Clotilde would no doubt at last fall asleep—she seemed too exhausted not to succumb to fatigue. All they had to do was to wait. They set themselves to watch, then, going back and forth on tiptoe between the study and the bedroom, waiting for the moment when the young woman's large motionless eyes should close in sleep. One of them would go to see, while the other waited impatiently in the study, where a lamp burned dully on the table. This was repeated every fifteen minutes until midnight. The fathomless eyes, full of gloom and of an immense despair, did not close. A little before midnight Felicite installed herself in an armchair at the foot of the bed, resolved not to leave the spot until her granddaughter should have fallen asleep. From this forth she did not take her eyes off Clotilde, and it filled her with a sort of fear to remark that the girl scarcely moved her eyelids, looking with that inconsolable fixity which defies sleep. Then she herself began to feel sleep stealing over her. Exasperated, trembling with nervous impatience, she could remain where she was no longer. And she went to rejoin the servant, who was watching in the study.

"It is useless; she will not sleep," she said in a stifled and trembling voice. "We must find some other way."

It had indeed occurred to her to break open the press.

But the old oaken boards were strong, the old iron held firmly. How could they break the lock—not to speak of the noise they would make and which would certainly be heard in the adjoining room?

She stood before the thick doors, however, and felt them with her fingers, seeking some weak spot.

"If I only had an instrument," she said.

Martine, less eager, interrupted her, objecting: "Oh, no, no, madame! We might be surprised! Wait, I will go again and see if mademoiselle is asleep now."

She went to the bedroom on tiptoe and returned immediately, saying:

"Yes, she is asleep. Her eyes are closed, and she does not stir."

Then both went to look at her, holding their breath and walking with the utmost caution, so that the boards might not creak. Clotilde had indeed just fallen asleep: and her stupor seemed so profound that the two old women grew bold. They feared, however, that they might touch and waken her, for her chair stood close beside the bed. And then, to put one's hand under a dead man's pillow to rob him was a terrible and sacrilegious act, the thought of which filled them with terror. Might it not disturb his repose? Might he not move at the shock? The thought made them turn pale.

Felicite had advanced with outstretched hand, but she drew back, stammering:

"I am too short. You try, Martine."

The servant in her turn approached the bed. But she was seized with such a fit of trembling that she was obliged to retreat lest she should fall.

"No, no, I cannot!" she said. "It seems to me that monsieur is going to open his eyes."

And trembling and awe-struck they remained an instant longer in the lugubrious chamber full of the silence and the majesty of death, facing Pascal, motionless forever, and Clotilde, overwhelmed by the grief of her widowhood. Perhaps they saw, glorifying that mute head, guarding its work with all its weight, the nobility of a life spent in honorable labor. The flame of the tapers burned palely. A sacred awe filled the air, driving them from the chamber.

Felicite, who was so brave, who had never in her life flinched from anything, not even from bloodshed, fled as if she was pursued, saying:

"Come, come, Martine, we will find some other way; we will go look for an instrument."

In the study they drew a breath of relief. Felicite looked in vain among the papers on Pascal's work-table for the genealogical tree, which she knew was usually there. She would so gladly have begun her work of destruction with this. It was there, but in her feverish excitement she did not perceive it.

Her desire drew her back again to the press, and she stood before it, measuring it and examining it with eager and covetous look. In spite of her short stature, in spite of her eighty-odd years, she displayed an activity and an energy that were truly extraordinary.

"Ah!" she repeated, "if I only had an instrument!"

And she again sought the crevice in the colossus, the crack into which she might introduce her fingers, to break it open. She imagined plans of assault, she thought of using force, and then she fell back on stratagem, on some piece of treachery which would open to her the doors, merely by breathing upon them.

Suddenly her glance kindled; she had discovered the means.

"Tell me, Martine; there is a hook fastening one of the doors, is there not?"

"Yes, madame; it catches in a ring above the middle shelf. See, it is about the height of this molding."

Felicite made a triumphant gesture.

"Have you a gimlet—a large gimlet? Give me a gimlet!"

Martine went down into her kitchen and brought back the tool that had been asked.

"In that way, you see, we shall make no noise," resumed the old woman, setting herself to her task.

With a strength which one would not have suspected in her little hands, withered by age, she inserted the gimlet, and made a hole at the height indicated by the servant. But it was too low; she felt the point, after a time, entering the shelf. A second attempt brought the instrument in direct contact with the iron hook. This time the hole was too near. And she multiplied the holes to right and left, until finally she succeeded in pushing the hook out of the ring. The bolt of the lock slipped, and both doors opened.

"At last!" cried Felicite, beside herself.

Then she remained motionless for a moment, her ear turned uneasily toward the bedroom, fearing that she had wakened Clotilde. But silence reigned throughout the dark and sleeping house. There came from the bedroom only the august peace of death; she heard nothing but the clear vibration of the clock; Clotilde fell asleep near one. And the press yawned wide open, displaying the papers with which it overflowed, heaped up on its three shelves. Then she threw herself upon it, and the work of destruction began, in the midst of the sacred obscurity of the infinite repose of this funereal vigil.

"At last!" she repeated, in a low voice, "after thirty years of waiting. Let us hurry—let us hurry. Martine, help me!"

She had already drawn forward the high chair of the desk, and mounted on it at a bound, to take down, first of all, the papers on the top shelf, for she remembered that the envelopes were there. But she was surprised not to see the thick blue paper wrappers; there was nothing there but bulky manuscripts, the doctor's completed but unpublished works, works of inestimable value, all his researches, all his discoveries, the monument of his future fame, which he had left in Ramond's charge. Doubtless, some days before his death, thinking that only the envelopes were in danger, and that no one in the world would be so daring as to destroy his other works, he had begun to classify and arrange the papers anew, and removed the envelopes out of sight.

"Ah, so much the worse!" murmured Felicite; "let us begin anywhere; there are so many of them that if we wish to get through we must hurry. While I am up here, let us clear these away forever. Here, catch Martine!"

And she emptied the shelf, throwing the manuscripts, one by one, into the arms of the servant, who laid them on the table with as little noise as possible. Soon the whole heap was on it, and Felicite sprang down from the chair.

"To the fire! to the fire! We shall lay our hands on the others, and too, by and by, on those I am looking for. These can go into it, meantime. It will be a good riddance, at any rate, a fine clearance, yes, indeed! To the fire, to the fire with them all, even to the smallest scrap of paper, even to the most illegible scrawl, if we wish to be certain of destroying the contamination of evil."

She herself, fanatical and fierce, in her hatred of the truth, in her eagerness to destroy the testimony of science, tore off the first page of one of the manuscripts, lighted it at the lamp, and then threw this burning brand into the great fireplace, in which there had not been a fire for perhaps twenty years, and she fed the fire, continuing to throw on it the rest of the manuscript, piece by piece. The servant, as determined as herself, came to her assistance, taking another enormous notebook, which she tore up leaf by leaf. From this forth the fire did not cease to burn, filling the wide fireplace with a bright blaze, with tongues of flame that seemed to die away from time to time, only to burn up more brightly than ever when fresh fuel fed them. The fire grew larger, the heap of ashes rose higher and higher—a thick bed of blackened leaves among which ran millions of sparks. But it was a long, a never-ending task; for when several pages were thrown on at a time, they would not burn; it was necessary to move them and turn them over with the tongs; the best way was to stir them up and then wait until they were in a blaze, before adding more. The women soon grew skilful at their task, and the work progressed at a rapid rate.

In her haste to get a fresh armful of papers Felicite stumbled against a chair.

"Oh, madame, take care," said Martine. "Some one might come!"

"Come? who should come? Clotilde? She is too sound asleep, poor girl. And even if any one should come, once it is finished, I don't care; I won't hide myself, you may be sure; I shall leave the empty press standing wide open; I shall say aloud that it is I who have purified the house. When there is not a line of writing left, ah, good heavens! I shall laugh at everything else!"

For almost two hours the fireplace blazed. They went back to the press and emptied the two other shelves, and now there remained only the bottom, which was heaped with a confusion of papers. Little by little, intoxicated by the heat of the bonfire, out of breath and perspiring, they gave themselves up to the savage joy of destruction. They stooped down, they blackened their hands, pushing in the partially consumed fragments, with gestures so violent, so feverishly excited, that their gray locks fell in disorder over their shoulders. It was like a dance of witches, feeding a hellish fire for some abominable act—the martyrdom of a saint, the burning of written thought in the public square; a whole world of truth and hope destroyed. And the blaze of this fire, which at moments made the flame of the lamp grow pale, lighted up the vast apartment, and made the gigantic shadows of the two women dance upon the ceiling.

But as she was emptying the bottom of the press, after having burned, handful by handful, the papers with which it had been filled, Felicite uttered a stifled cry of triumph.

"Ah, here they are! To the fire! to the fire!"

She had at last come upon the envelopes. Far back, behind the rampart formed by the notes, the doctor had hidden the blue paper wrappers. And then began a mad work of havoc, a fury of destruction; the envelopes were gathered up in handfuls and thrown into the flames, filling the fireplace with a roar like that of a conflagration.

"They are burning, they are burning! They are burning at last! Here is another, Martine, here is another. Ah, what a fire, what a glorious fire!"

But the servant was becoming uneasy.

"Take care, madame, you are going to set the house on fire. Don't you hear that roar?"

"Ah! what does that matter? Let it all burn. They are burning, they are burning; what a fine sight! Three more, two more, and, see, now the last is burning!"

She laughed with delight, beside herself, terrible to see, when some fragment of lighted soot fell down. The roar was becoming more and more fierce; the chimney, which was never swept, had caught fire. This seemed to excite her still more, while the servant, losing her head, began to scream and run about the room.

Clotilde slept beside the dead Pascal, in the supreme calm of the bedroom, unbroken save by the light vibration of the clock striking the hours. The tapers burned with a tall, still flame, the air was motionless. And yet, in the midst of her heavy, dreamless sleep, she heard, as in a nightmare, a tumult, an ever-increasing rush and roar. And when she opened her eyes she could not at first understand. Where was she? Why this enormous weight that crushed her heart? She came back to reality with a start of terror—she saw Pascal, she heard Martine's cries in the adjoining room, and she rushed out, in alarm, to learn their cause.

But at the threshold Clotilde took in the whole scene with cruel distinctness—the press wide open and completely empty; Martine maddened by her fear of fire; Felicite radiant, pushing into the flames with her foot the last fragments of the envelopes. Smoke and flying soot filled the study, where the roaring of the fire sounded like the hoarse gasping of a murdered man—the fierce roar which she had just heard in her sleep.

And the cry which sprang from her lips was the same cry that Pascal himself had uttered on the night of the storm, when he surprised her in the act of stealing his papers.

"Thieves! assassins!"

She precipitated herself toward the fireplace, and, in spite of the dreadful roaring of the flames, in spite of the falling pieces of soot, at the risk of setting her hair on fire, and of burning her hands, she gathered up the leaves which remained yet unconsumed and bravely extinguished them, pressing them against her. But all this was very little, only some debris; not a complete page remained, not even a few fragments of the colossal labor, of the vast and patient work of a lifetime, which the fire had destroyed there in two hours. And with growing anger, in a burst of furious indignation, she cried:

"You are thieves, assassins! It is a wicked murder which you have just committed. You have profaned death, you have slain the mind, you have slain genius."

Old Mme. Rougon did not quail. She advanced, on the contrary, feeling no remorse, her head erect, defending the sentence of destruction pronounced and executed by her.

"It is to me you are speaking, to your grandmother. Is there nothing, then, that you respect? I have done what I ought to have done, what you yourself wished to do with us before."

"Before, you had made me mad; but since then I have lived, I have loved, I have understood, and it is life that I defend. Even if it be terrible and cruel, the truth ought to be respected. Besides, it was a sacred legacy bequeathed to my protection, the last thoughts of a dead man, all that remained of a great mind, and which I should have obliged every one to respect. Yes, you are my grandmother; I am well aware of it, and it is as if you had just burned your son!"

"Burn Pascal because I have burned his papers!" cried Felicite. "Do you not know that I would have burned the town to save the honor of our family!"

She continued to advance, belligerent and victorious; and Clotilde, who had laid on the table the blackened fragments rescued by her from the burning flames, protected them with her body, fearing that her grandmother would throw them back again into the fire. She regarded the two women scornfully; she did not even trouble herself about the fire in the fireplace, which fortunately went out of itself, while Martine extinguished with the shovel the burning soot and the last flames of the smoldering ashes.

"You know very well, however," continued the old woman, whose little figure seemed to grow taller, "that I have had only one ambition, one passion in life—to see our family rich and powerful. I have fought, I have watched all my life, I have lived as long as I have done, only to put down ugly stories and to leave our name a glorious one. Yes, I have never despaired; I have never laid down my arms; I have been continually on the alert, ready to profit by the slightest circumstance. And all I desired to do I have done, because I have known how to wait."

And she waved her hand toward the empty press and the fireplace, where the last sparks were dying out.

"Now it is ended, our honor is safe; those abominable papers will no longer accuse us, and I shall leave behind me nothing to be feared. The Rougons have triumphed."

Clotilde, in a frenzy of grief, raised her arm, as if to drive her out of the room. But she left it of her own accord, and went down to the kitchen to wash her blackened hands and to fasten up her hair. The servant was about to follow her when, turning her head, she saw her young mistress' gesture, and she returned.

"Oh! as for me, mademoiselle, I will go away the day after to-morrow, when monsieur shall be in the cemetery."

There was a moment's silence.

"But I am not sending you away, Martine. I know well that it is not you who are most to blame. You have lived in this house for thirty years. Remain, remain with me."

The old maid shook her gray head, looking very pale and tired.

"No, I have served monsieur; I will serve no one after monsieur."

"But I!"

"You, no!"

Clotilde looked embarrassed, hesitated a moment, and remained silent. But Martine understood; she too seemed to reflect for an instant, and then she said distinctly:

"I know what you would say, but—no!"

And she went on to settle her account, arranging the affair like a practical woman who knew the value of money.

"Since I have the means, I will go and live quietly on my income somewhere. As for you, mademoiselle, I can leave you, for you are not poor. M. Ramond will explain to you to-morrow how an income of four thousand francs was saved for you out of the money at the notary's. Meantime, here is the key of the desk, where you will find the five thousand francs which monsieur left there. Oh? I know that there will be no trouble between us. Monsieur did not pay me for the last three months; I have papers from him which prove it. In addition, I advanced lately almost two hundred francs out of my own pocket, without his knowing where the money came from. It is all written down; I am not at all uneasy; mademoiselle will not wrong me by a centime. The day after to-morrow, when monsieur is no longer here, I will go away."

Then she went down to the kitchen, and Clotilde, in spite of the fanaticism of this woman, which had made her take part in a crime, felt inexpressibly sad at this desertion. When she was gathering up the fragments of the papers, however, before returning to the bedroom, she had a thrill of joy, on suddenly seeing the genealogical tree, which the two women had not perceived, lying unharmed on the table. It was the only entire document saved from the wreck. She took it and locked it, with the half-consumed fragments, in the bureau in the bedroom.

But when she found herself again in this august chamber a great emotion took possession of her. What supreme calm, what immortal peace, reigned here, beside the savage destruction that had filled the adjoining room with smoke and ashes. A sacred serenity pervaded the obscurity; the two tapers burned with a pure, still, unwavering flame. Then she saw that Pascal's face, framed in his flowing white hair and beard, had become very white. He slept with the light falling upon him, surrounded by a halo, supremely beautiful. She bent down, kissed him again, felt on her lips the cold of the marble face, with its closed eyelids, dreaming its dream of eternity. Her grief at not being able to save the work which he had left to her care was so overpowering that she fell on her knees and burst into a passion of sobs. Genius had been violated; it seemed to her as if the world was about to be destroyed in this savage destruction of a whole life of labor.

XIV.

In the study Clotilde was buttoning her dress, holding her child, whom she had been nursing, still in her lap. It was after lunch, about three o'clock on a hot sunny day at the end of August, and through the crevices of the carefully closed shutters only a few scattered sunbeams entered, piercing the drowsy and warm obscurity of the vast apartment. The rest and peace of the Sunday seemed to enter and diffuse itself in the room with the last sounds of the distant vesper bell. Profound silence reigned in the empty house in which the mother and child were to remain alone until dinner time, the servant having asked permission to go see a cousin in the faubourg.

For an instant Clotilde looked at her child, now a big boy of three months. She had been wearing mourning for Pascal for almost ten months—a long and simple black gown, in which she looked divinely beautiful, with her tall, slender figure and her sad, youthful face surrounded by its aureole of fair hair. And although she could not smile, it filled her with sweet emotion to see the beautiful child, so plump and rosy, with his mouth still wet with milk, whose gaze had been arrested by the sunbeam full of dancing motes. His eyes were fixed wonderingly on the golden brightness, the dazzling miracle of light. Then sleep came over him, and he let his little, round, bare head, covered thinly with fair hair, fall back on his mother's arm.

Clotilde rose softly and laid him in the cradle, which stood beside the table. She remained leaning over him for an instant to assure herself that he was asleep; then she let down the curtain in the already darkened room. Then she busied herself with supple and noiseless movements, walking with so light a step that she scarcely touched the floor, in putting away some linen which was on the table. Twice she crossed the room in search of a little missing sock. She was very silent, very gentle, and very active. And now, in the solitude of the house, she fell into a reverie and all the past year arose before her.

First, after the dreadful shock of the funeral, came the departure of Martine, who had obstinately kept to her determination of going away at once, not even remaining for the customary week, bringing to replace her the young cousin of a baker in the neighborhood—a stout brunette, who fortunately proved very neat and faithful. Martine herself lived at Sainte-Marthe, in a retired corner, so penuriously that she must be still saving even out of her small income. She was not known to have any heir. Who, then, would profit by this miserliness? In ten months she had not once set foot in La Souleiade—monsieur was not there, and she had not even the desire to see monsieur's son.

Then in Clotilde's reverie rose the figure of her grandmother Felicite. The latter came to see her from time to time with the condescension of a powerful relation who is liberal-minded enough to pardon all faults when they have been cruelly expiated. She would come unexpectedly, kiss the child, moralize, and give advice, and the young mother had adopted toward her the respectful attitude which Pascal had always maintained. Felicite was now wholly absorbed in her triumph. She was at last about to realize a plan that she had long cherished and maturely deliberated, which would perpetuate by an imperishable monument the untarnished glory of the family. The plan was to devote her fortune, which had become considerable, to the construction and endowment of an asylum for the aged, to be called Rougon Asylum. She had already bought the ground, a part of the old mall outside the town, near the railway station; and precisely on this Sunday, at five o'clock, when the heat should have abated a little, the first stone was to be laid, a really solemn ceremony, to be honored by the presence of all the authorities, and of which she was to be the acknowledged queen, before a vast concourse of people.

Clotilde felt, besides, some gratitude toward her grandmother, who had shown perfect disinterestedness on the occasion of the opening of Pascal's will. The latter had constituted the young woman his sole legatee; and the mother, who had a right to a fourth part, after declaring her intention to respect her son's wishes, had simply renounced her right to the succession. She wished, indeed, to disinherit all her family, bequeathing to them glory only, by employing her large fortune in the erection of this asylum, which was to carry down to future ages the revered and glorious name of the Rougons; and after having, for more than half a century, so eagerly striven to acquire money, she now disdained it, moved by a higher and purer ambition. And Clotilde, thanks to this liberality, had no uneasiness regarding the future—the four thousand francs income would be sufficient for her and her child. She would bring him up to be a man. She had sunk the five thousand francs that she had found in the desk in an annuity for him; and she owned, besides, La Souleiade, which everybody advised her to sell. True, it cost but little to keep it up, but what a sad and solitary life she would lead in that great deserted house, much too large for her, where she would be lost. Thus far, however, she had not been able to make up her mind to leave it. Perhaps she would never be able to do so.

Ah, this La Souleiade! all her love, all her life, all her memories were centered in it. It seemed to her at times as if Pascal were living here still, for she had changed nothing of their former manner of living. The furniture remained in the same places, the hours were the same, the habits the same. The only change she had made was to lock his room, into which only she went, as into a sanctuary, to weep when she felt her heart too heavy. And although indeed she felt very lonely, very lost, at each meal in the bright dining-room downstairs, in fancy she heard there the echoes of their laughter, she recalled the healthy appetite of her youth; when they two had eaten and drank so gaily, rejoicing in their existence. And the garden, too, the whole place was bound up with the most intimate fibers of her being, for she could not take a step in it that their united images did not appear before her—on the terrace; in the slender shadow of the great secular cypresses, where they had so often contemplated the valley of the Viorne, closed in by the ridges of the Seille and the parched hills of Sainte-Marthe; the stone steps among the puny olive and almond trees, which they had so often challenged each other to run up in a trial of speed, like boys just let loose from school; and there was the pine grove, too, the warm, embalsamed shade, where the needles crackled under their feet; the vast threshing yard, carpeted with soft grass, where they could see the whole sky at night, when the stars were coming out; and above all there were the giant plane trees, whose delightful shade they had enjoyed every day in summer, listening to the soothing song of the fountain, the crystal clear song which it had sung for centuries. Even to the old stones of the house, even to the earth of the grounds, there was not an atom at La Souleiade in which she did not feel a little of their blood warmly throbbing, with which she did not feel a little of their life diffused and mingled.

But she preferred to spend her days in the workroom, and here it was that she lived over again her best hours. There was nothing new in it but the cradle. The doctor's table was in its place before the window to the left—she could fancy him coming in and sitting down at it, for his chair had not even been moved. On the long table in the center, among the old heap of books and papers, there was nothing new but the cheerful note of the little baby linen, which she was looking over. The bookcases displayed the same rows of volumes; the large oaken press seemed to guard within its sides the same treasure, securely shut in. Under the smoky ceiling the room was still redolent of work, with its confusion of chairs, the pleasant disorder of this common workroom, filled with the caprices of the girl and the researches of the scientist. But what most moved her to-day was the sight of her old pastels hanging against the wall, the copies which she had made of living flowers, scrupulously exact copies, and of dream flowers of an imaginary world, whither her wild fancy sometimes carried her.

Clotilde had just finished arranging the little garments on the table when, lifting her eyes, she perceived before her the pastel of old King David, with his hand resting on the shoulder of Abishag the young Shunammite. And she, who now never smiled, felt her face flush with a thrill of tender and pleasing emotion. How they had loved each other, how they had dreamed of an eternity of love the day on which she had amused herself painting this proud and loving allegory! The old king, sumptuously clad in a robe hanging in straight folds, heavy with precious stones, wore the royal bandeau on his snowy locks; but she was more sumptuous still, with only her tall slender figure, her delicate round throat, and her supple arms, divinely graceful. Now he was gone, he was sleeping under the ground, while she, her pure and triumphant beauty concealed by her black robes, had only her child to express the love she had given him before the assembled people, in the full light of day.

Then Clotilde sat down beside the cradle. The slender sunbeams lengthened, crossing the room from end to end, the heat of the warm afternoon grew oppressive in the drowsy obscurity made by the closed shutters, and the silence of the house seemed more profound than before. She set apart some little waists, she sewed on some tapes with slow-moving needle, and gradually she fell into a reverie in the warm deep peacefulness of the room, in the midst of the glowing heat outside. Her thoughts first turned to her pastels, the exact copies and the fantastic dream flowers; she said to herself now that all her dual nature was to be found in that passion for truth, which had at times kept her a whole day before a flower in order to copy it with exactness, and in her need of the spiritual, which at other times took her outside the real, and carried her in wild dreams to the paradise of flowers such as had never grown on earth. She had always been thus. She felt that she was in reality the same to-day as she had been yesterday, in the midst of the flow of new life which ceaselessly transformed her. And then she thought of Pascal, full of gratitude that he had made her what she was. In days past when, a little girl, he had removed her from her execrable surroundings and taken her home with him, he had undoubtedly followed the impulses of his good heart, but he had also undoubtedly desired to try an experiment with her, to see how she would grow up in the different environment, in an atmosphere of truthfulness and affection. This had always been an idea of his. It was an old theory of his which he would have liked to test on a large scale: culture through environment, complete regeneration even, the improvement, the salvation of the individual, physically as well as morally. She owed to him undoubtedly the best part of her nature; she guessed how fanciful and violent she might have become, while he had made her only enthusiastic and courageous.

In this retrospection she was clearly conscious of the gradual change that had taken place within her. Pascal had corrected her heredity, and she lived over again the slow evolution, the struggle between the fantastic and the real in her. It had begun with her outbursts of anger as a child, a ferment of rebellion, a want of mental balance that had caused her to indulge in most hurtful reveries. Then came her fits of extreme devotion, the need of illusion and falsehood, of immediate happiness in the thought that the inequalities and injustices of this wicked world would he compensated by the eternal joys of a future paradise. This was the epoch of her struggles with Pascal, of the torture which she had caused him, planning to destroy the work of his genius. And at this point her nature had changed; she had acknowledged him for her master. He had conquered her by the terrible lesson of life which he had given her on the night of the storm. Then, environment had acted upon her, evolution had proceeded rapidly, and she had ended by becoming a well-balanced and rational woman, willing to live life as it ought to be lived, satisfied with doing her work in the hope that the sum of the common labor would one day free the world from evil and pain. She had loved, she was a mother now, and she understood.

Suddenly she remembered the night which they had spent in the threshing yard. She could still hear her lamentation under the stars—the cruelty of nature, the inefficacy of science, the wickedness of humanity, and the need she felt of losing herself in God, in the Unknown. Happiness consisted in self-renunciation. Then she heard him repeat his creed—the progress of reason through science, truths acquired slowly and forever the only possible good, the belief that the sum of these truths, always augmenting, would finally confer upon man incalculable power and peace, if not happiness. All was summed up in his ardent faith in life. As he expressed it, it was necessary to march with life, which marched always. No halt was to be expected, no peace in immobility and renunciation, no consolation in turning back. One must keep a steadfast soul, the only ambition to perform one's work, modestly looking for no other reward of life than to have lived it bravely, accomplishing the task which it imposes. Evil was only an accident not yet explained, humanity appearing from a great height like an immense wheel in action, working ceaselessly for the future. Why should the workman who disappeared, having finished his day's work, abuse the work because he could neither see nor know its end? Even if it were to have no end why should he not enjoy the delight of action, the exhilarating air of the march, the sweetness of sleep after the fatigue of a long and busy day? The children would carry on the task of the parents; they were born and cherished only for this, for the task of life which is transmitted to them, which they in their turn will transmit to others. All that remained, then, was to be courageously resigned to the grand common labor, without the rebellion of the ego, which demands personal happiness, perfect and complete.

She questioned herself, and she found that she did not experience that anguish which had filled her formerly at the thought of what was to follow death. This anxiety about the Beyond no longer haunted her until it became a torture. Formerly she would have liked to wrest by force from heaven the secrets of destiny. It had been a source of infinite grief to her not to know why she existed. Why are we born? What do we come on earth to do? What is the meaning of this execrable existence, without equality, without justice, which seemed to her like a fevered dream? Now her terror was calmed; she could think of these things courageously. Perhaps it was her child, the continuation of herself, which now concealed from her the horror of her end. But her regular life contributed also to this, the thought that it was necessary to live for the effort of living, and that the only peace possible in this world was in the joy of the accomplishment of this effort. She repeated to herself a remark of the doctor, who would often say when he saw a peasant returning home with a contented look after his day's work: "There is a man whom anxiety about the Beyond will not prevent from sleeping." He meant to say that this anxiety troubles and perverts only excitable and idle brains. If all performed their healthful task, all would sleep peacefully at night. She herself had felt the beneficent power of work in the midst of her sufferings and her grief. Since he had taught her to employ every one of her hours; since she had been a mother, especially, occupied constantly with her child, she no longer felt a chill of horror when she thought of the Unknown. She put aside without an effort disquieting reveries; and if she still felt an occasional fear, if some of her daily griefs made her sick at heart, she found comfort and unfailing strength in the thought that her child was this day a day older, that he would be another day older on the morrow, that day by day, page by page, his work of life was being accomplished. This consoled her delightfully for all her miseries. She had a duty, an object, and she felt in her happy serenity that she was doing surely what she had been sent here to do.

Yet, even at this very moment she knew that the mystic was not entirely dead within her. In the midst of the profound silence she heard a slight noise, and she raised her head. Who was the divine mediator that had passed? Perhaps the beloved dead for whom she mourned, and whose presence near her she fancied she could divine. There must always be in her something of the childlike believer she had always been, curious about the Unknown, having an instinctive longing for the mysterious. She accounted to herself for this longing, she even explained it scientifically. However far science may extend the limits of human knowledge, there is undoubtedly a point which it cannot pass; and it was here precisely that Pascal placed the only interest in life—in the effort which we ceaselessly make to know more—there was only one reasonable meaning in life, this continual conquest of the unknown. Therefore, she admitted the existence of undiscovered forces surrounding the world, an immense and obscure domain, ten times larger than the domain already won, an infinite and unexplored realm through which future humanity would endlessly ascend. Here, indeed, was a field vast enough for the imagination to lose itself in. In her hours of reverie she satisfied in it the imperious need which man seems to have for the spiritual, a need of escaping from the visible world, of interrogating the Unknown, of satisfying in it the dream of absolute justice and of future happiness. All that remained of her former torture, her last mystic transports, were there appeased. She satisfied there that hunger for consoling illusions which suffering humanity must satisfy in order to live. But in her all was happily balanced. At this crisis, in an epoch overburdened with science, disquieted at the ruins it has made, and seized with fright in the face of the new century, wildly desiring to stop and to return to the past, Clotilde kept the happy mean; in her the passion for truth was broadened by her eagerness to penetrate the Unknown. If sectarian scientists shut out the horizon to keep strictly to the phenomenon, it was permitted to her, a good, simple creature, to reserve the part that she did not know, that she would never know. And if Pascal's creed was the logical deduction from the whole work, the eternal question of the Beyond, which she still continued to put to heaven, reopened the door of the infinite to humanity marching ever onward. Since we must always learn, while resigning ourselves never to know all, was it not to will action, life itself, to reserve the Unknown—an eternal doubt and an eternal hope?

Another sound, as of a wing passing, the light touch of a kiss upon her hair, this time made her smile. He was surely here; and her whole being went out toward him, in the great flood of tenderness with which her heart overflowed. How kind and cheerful he was, and what a love for others underlay his passionate love of life! Perhaps he, too, had been only a dreamer, for he had dreamed the most beautiful of dreams, the final belief in a better world, when science should have bestowed incalculable power upon man—to accept everything, to turn everything to our happiness, to know everything and to foresee everything, to make nature our servant, to live in the tranquillity of intelligence satisfied. Meantime faith in life, voluntary and regular labor, would suffice for health. Evil was only the unexplained side of things; suffering would one day be assuredly utilized. And regarding from above the enormous labor of the world, seeing the sum total of humanity, good and bad—admirable, in spite of everything, for their courage and their industry—she now regarded all mankind as united in a common brotherhood, she now felt only boundless indulgence, an infinite pity, and an ardent charity. Love, like the sun, bathes the earth, and goodness is the great river at which all hearts drink.

Clotilde had been plying her needle for two hours, with the same regular movement, while her thoughts wandered away in the profound silence. But the tapes were sewed on the little waists, she had even marked some new wrappers, which she had bought the day before. And, her sewing finished, she rose to put the linen away. Outside the sun was declining, and only slender and oblique sunbeams entered through the crevices of the shutters. She could not see clearly, and she opened one of the shutters, then she forgot herself for a moment, at the sight of the vast horizon suddenly unrolled before her. The intense heat had abated, a delicious breeze was blowing, and the sky was of a cloudless blue. To the left could be distinguished even the smallest clumps of pines, among the blood-colored ravines of the rocks of the Seille, while to the right, beyond the hills of Sainte-Marthe, the valley of the Viorne stretched away in the golden dust of the setting sun. She looked for a moment at the tower of St. Saturnin, all golden also, dominating the rose-colored town; and she was about to leave the window when she saw a sight that drew her back and kept her there, leaning on her elbow for a long time still.

Beyond the railroad a multitude of people were crowded together on the old mall. Clotilde at once remembered the ceremony. She knew that her Grandmother Felicite was going to lay the first stone of the Rougon Asylum, the triumphant monument destined to carry down to future ages the glory of the family. Vast preparations had been going on for a week past. There was talk of a silver hod and trowel, which the old lady was to use herself, determined to figure to triumph, with her eighty-two years. What swelled her heart with regal pride was that on this occasion she made the conquest of Plassans for the third time, for she compelled the whole town, all the three quarters, to range themselves around her, to form an escort for her, and to applaud her as a benefactress. For, of course, there had to be present lady patronesses, chosen from among the noblest ladies of the Quartier St. Marc; a delegation from the societies of working-women of the old quarter, and, finally, the most distinguished residents of the new town, advocates, notaries, physicians, without counting the common people, a stream of people dressed in their Sunday clothes, crowding there eagerly, as to a festival. And in the midst of this supreme triumph she was perhaps most proud—she, one of the queens of the Second Empire, the widow who mourned with so much dignity the fallen government—in having conquered the young republic itself, obliging it, in the person of the sub-prefect, to come and salute her and thank her. At first there had been question only of a discourse of the mayor; but it was known with certainty, since the previous day, that the sub-prefect also would speak. From so great a distance Clotilde could distinguish only a moving crowd of black coats and light dresses, under the scorching sun. Then there was a distant sound of music, the music of the amateur band of the town, the sonorous strains of whose brass instruments were borne to her at intervals on the breeze.

She left the window and went and opened the large oaken press to put away in it the linen that had remained on the table. It was in this press, formerly so full of the doctor's manuscripts, and now empty, that she kept the baby's wardrobe. It yawned open, vast, seemingly bottomless, and on the large bare shelves there was nothing but the baby linen, the little waists, the little caps, the little socks, all the fine clothing, the down of the bird still in the nest. Where so many thoughts had been stored up, where a man's unremitting labor for thirty years had accumulated in an overflowing heap of papers, there was now only a baby's clothing, only the first garments which would protect it for an hour, as it were, and which very soon it could no longer use. The vastness of the antique press seemed brightened and all refreshed by them.

When Clotilde had arranged the wrappers and the waists upon a shelf, she perceived a large envelope containing the fragments of the documents which she had placed there after she had rescued them from the fire. And she remembered a request which Dr. Ramond had come only the day before to make her—that she would see if there remained among this debris any fragment of importance having a scientific interest. He was inconsolable for the loss of the precious manuscripts which the master had bequeathed to him. Immediately after the doctor's death he had made an attempt to write from memory his last talk, that summary of vast theories expounded by the dying man with so heroic a serenity; but he could recall only parts of it. He would have needed complete notes, observations made from day to day, the results obtained, and the laws formulated. The loss was irreparable, the task was to be begun over again, and he lamented having only indications; he said that it would be at least twenty years before science could make up the loss, and take up and utilize the ideas of the solitary pioneer whose labors a wicked and imbecile catastrophe had destroyed.

The genealogical tree, the only document that had remained intact, was attached to the envelope, and Clotilde carried the whole to the table beside the cradle. After she had taken out the fragments, one by one, she found, what she had been already almost certain of, that not a single entire page of manuscript remained, not a single complete note having any meaning. There were only fragments of documents, scraps of half-burned and blackened paper, without sequence or connection. But as she examined them, these incomplete phrases, these words half consumed by fire, assumed for her an interest which no one else could have understood. She remembered the night of the storm, and the phrases completed themselves, the beginning of a word evoked before her persons and histories. Thus her eye fell on Maxime's name, and she reviewed the life of this brother who had remained a stranger to her, and whose death, two months before, had left her almost indifferent. Then, a half-burned scrap containing her father's name gave her an uneasy feeling, for she believed that her father had obtained possession of the fortune and the house on the avenue of Bois de Boulogne through the good offices of his hairdresser's niece, the innocent Rose, repaid, no doubt, by a generous percentage. Then she met with other names, that of her uncle Eugene, the former vice emperor, now dead, the cure of Saint-Eutrope, who, she had been told yesterday, was dying of consumption. And each fragment became animated in this way; the execrable family lived again in these scraps, these black ashes, where were now only disconnected words.

Then Clotilde had the curiosity to unfold the genealogical tree and spread it out upon the table. A strong emotion gained on her; she was deeply affected by these relics; and when she read once more the notes added in pencil by Pascal, a few moments before his death, tears rose to her eyes. With what courage he had written down the date of his death! And what despairing regret for life one divined in the trembling words announcing the birth of the child! The tree ascended, spread out its branches, unfolded its leaves, and she remained for a long time contemplating it, saying to herself that all the work of the master was to be found here in the classified records of this family tree. She could still hear certain of his words commenting on each hereditary case, she recalled his lessons. But the children, above all, interested her; she read again and again the notes on the leaves which bore their names. The doctor's colleague in Noumea, to whom he had written for information about the child born of the marriage of the convict Etienne, had at last made up his mind to answer; but the only information he gave was in regard to the sex—it was a girl, he said, and she seemed to be healthy. Octave Mouret had come near losing his daughter, who had always been very frail, while his little boy continued to enjoy superb health. But the chosen abode of vigorous health and of extraordinary fecundity was still the house of Jean, at Valqueyras, whose wife had had two children in three years and was about to have a third. The nestlings throve in the sunshine, in the heart of a fertile country, while the father sang as he guided his plow, and the mother at home cleverly made the soup and kept the children in order. There was enough new vitality and industry there to make another family, a whole race. Clotilde fancied at this moment that she could hear Pascal's cry: "Ah, our family! what is it going to be, in what kind of being will it end?" And she fell again into a reverie, looking at the tree sending its latest branches into the future. Who could tell whence the healthy branch would spring? Perhaps the great and good man so long awaited was germinating there.

A slight cry drew Clotilde from her reflections. The muslin curtain of the cradle seemed to become animate. It was the child who had wakened up and was moving about and calling to her. She at once took him out of the cradle and held him up gaily, that he might bathe in the golden light of the setting sun. But he was insensible to the beauty of the closing day; his little vacant eyes, still full of sleep, turned away from the vast sky, while he opened wide his rosy and ever hungry mouth, like a bird opening its beak. And he cried so loud, he had wakened up so ravenous, that she decided to nurse him again. Besides, it was his hour; it would soon be three hours since she had last nursed him.

Clotilde sat down again beside the table. She took him on her lap, but he was not very good, crying louder and louder, growing more and more impatient; and she looked at him with a smile while she unfastened her dress, showing her round, slender throat. Already the child knew, and raising himself he felt with his lips for the breast. When she placed it in his mouth he gave a little grunt of satisfaction; he threw himself upon her with the fine, voracious appetite of a young gentleman who was determined to live. At first he had clutched the breast with his little free hand, as if to show that it was his, to defend it and to guard it. Then, in the joy of the warm stream that filled his throat he raised his little arm straight up, like a flag. And Clotilde kept her unconscious smile, seeing him so healthy, so rosy, and so plump, thriving so well on the nourishment he drew from her. During the first few weeks she had suffered from a fissure, and even now her breast was sensitive; but she smiled, notwithstanding, with that peaceful look which mothers wear, happy in giving their milk as they would give their blood.

When she had unfastened her dress, showing her bare throat and breast, in the solitude and silence of the study, another of her mysteries, one of her sweetest and most hidden secrets, was revealed at the same time—the slender necklace with the seven pearls, the seven fine, milky stars which the master had put around her neck on a day of misery, in his mania for giving. Since it had been there no one else had seen it. It seemed as if she guarded it with as much modesty as if it were a part of her flesh, so simple, so pure, so childlike. And all the time the child was nursing she alone looked at it in a dreamy reverie, moved by the tender memory of the kisses whose warm perfume it still seemed to keep.

A burst of distant music seemed to surprise Clotilde. She turned her head and looked across the fields gilded by the oblique rays of the sun. Ah, yes! the ceremony, the laying of the corner stone yonder! Then she turned her eyes again on the child, and she gave herself up to the delight of seeing him with so fine an appetite. She had drawn forward a little bench, to raise one of her knees, resting her foot upon it, and she leaned one shoulder against the table, beside the tree and the blackened fragments of the envelopes. Her thoughts wandered away in an infinitely sweet reverie, while she felt the best part of herself, the pure milk, flowing softly, making more and more her own the dear being she had borne. The child had come, the redeemer, perhaps. The bells rang, the three wise men had set out, followed by the people, by rejoicing nature, smiling on the infant in its swaddling clothes. She, the mother, while he drank life in long draughts, was dreaming already of his future. What would he be when she should have made him tall and strong, giving herself to him entirely? A scientist, perhaps, who would reveal to the world something of the eternal truth; or a great captain, who would confer glory on his country; or, still better, one of those shepherds of the people who appease the passions and bring about the reign of justice. She saw him, in fancy, beautiful, good and powerful. Hers was the dream of every mother—the conviction that she had brought the expected Messiah into the world; and there was in this hope, in this obstinate belief, which every mother has in the certain triumph of her child, the hope which itself makes life, the belief which gives humanity the ever renewed strength to live still.

What would the child be? She looked at him, trying to discover whom he resembled. He had certainly his father's brow and eyes, there was something noble and strong in the breadth of the head. She saw a resemblance to herself, too, in his fine mouth and his delicate chin. Then, with secret uneasiness, she sought a resemblance to the others, the terrible ancestors, all those whose names were there inscribed on the tree, unfolding its growth of hereditary leaves. Was it this one, or this, or yet this other, whom he would resemble? She grew calm, however, she could not but hope, her heart swelled with eternal hope. The faith in life which the master had implanted in her kept her brave and steadfast. What did misery, suffering and wickedness matter! Health was in universal labor, in the effort made, in the power which fecundates and which produces. The work was good when the child blessed love. Then hope bloomed anew, in spite of the open wounds, the dark picture of human shame. It was life perpetuated, tried anew, life which we can never weary of believing good, since we live it so eagerly, with all its injustice and suffering.

Clotilde had glanced involuntarily at the ancestral tree spread out beside her. Yes, the menace was there—so many crimes, so much filth, side by side with so many tears, and so much patient goodness; so extraordinary a mixture of the best and the most vile, a humanity in little, with all its defects and all its struggles. It was a question whether it would not be better that a thunderbolt should come and destroy all this corrupt and miserable ant-hill. And after so many terrible Rougons, so many vile Macquarts, still another had been born. Life did not fear to create another of them, in the brave defiance of its eternity. It continued its work, propagated itself according to its laws, indifferent to theories, marching on in its endless labor. Even at the risk of making monsters, it must of necessity create, since, in spite of all it creates, it never wearies of creating in the hope, no doubt, that the healthy and the good will one day come. Life, life, which flows like a torrent, which continues its work, beginning it over and over again, without pause, to the unknown end! life in which we bathe, life with its infinity of contrary currents, always in motion, and vast as a boundless sea!

A transport of maternal fervor thrilled Clotilde's heart, and she smiled, seeing the little voracious mouth drinking her life. It was a prayer, an invocation, to the unknown child, as to the unknown God! To the child of the future, to the genius, perhaps, that was to be, to the Messiah that the coming century awaited, who would deliver the people from their doubt and their suffering! Since the nation was to be regenerated, had he not come for this work? He would make the experiment anew, he would raise up walls, give certainty to those who were in doubt, he would build the city of justice, where the sole law of labor would insure happiness. In troublous times prophets were to be expected—at least let him not be the Antichrist, the destroyer, the beast foretold in the Apocalypse—who would purge the earth of its wickedness, when this should become too great. And life would go on in spite of everything, only it would be necessary to wait for other myriads of years before the other unknown child, the benefactor, should appear.

But the child had drained her right breast, and, as he was growing angry, Clotilde turned him round and gave him the left. Then she began to smile, feeling the caress of his greedy little lips. At all events she herself was hope. A mother nursing, was she not the image of the world continued and saved? She bent over, she looked into his limpid eyes, which opened joyously, eager for the light. What did the child say to her that she felt her heart beat more quickly under the breast which he was draining? To what cause would he give his blood when he should be a man, strong with all the milk which he would have drunk? Perhaps he said nothing to her, perhaps he already deceived her, and yet she was so happy, so full of perfect confidence in him.

Again there was a distant burst of music. This must be the apotheosis, the moment when Grandmother Felicite, with her silver trowel, laid the first stone of the monument to the glory of the Rougons. The vast blue sky, gladdened by the Sunday festivities, rejoiced. And in the warm silence, in the solitary peace of the workroom, Clotilde smiled at the child, who was still nursing, his little arm held straight up in the air, like a signal flag of life.

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Abbe Mouret's Transgression, by Emile Zola

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Title: Abbe Mouret's Transgression
La Faute De L'abbe Mouret

Author: Emile Zola

Editor: Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Release Date: May 29, 2009 [EBook #14200]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ABBE MOURET'S TRANSGRESSION ***

Produced by Dagny; and David Widger

ABBE MOURET'S TRANSGRESSION

By Emile Zola

Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Contents

INTRODUCTION

ABBE MOURET'S TRANSGRESSION

BOOK I

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

BOOK II

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

BOOK III

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

INTRODUCTION

'LA FAUTE DE L'ABBE MOURET' was, with respect to the date of publication, the fourth volume of M. Zola's 'Rougon-Macquart' series; but in the amended and final scheme of that great literary undertaking, it occupies the ninth place. It proceeds from the sixth volume of the series, 'The Conquest of Plassans;' which is followed by the two works that deal with the career of Octave Mouret, Abbe Serge Mouret's elder brother. In 'The Conquest of Plassans,' Serge and his half-witted sister, Desiree, are seen in childhood at their home in Plassans, which is wrecked by the doings of a certain Abbe Faujas and his relatives. Serge Mouret grows up, is called by an instinctive vocation to the priesthood, and becomes parish priest of Les Artaud, a well-nigh pagan hamlet in one of those bare, burning stretches of country with which Provence abounds. And here it is that 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret' opens in the old ruinous church, perched upon a hillock in full view of the squalid village, the arid fields, and the great belts of rock which shut in the landscape all around.

There are two elements in this remarkable story, which, from the standpoint of literary style, has never been excelled by anything that M. Zola has since written; and one may glance at it therefore from two points of view. Taking it under its sociological and religious aspect, it will be found to be an indirect indictment of the celibacy of the priesthood; that celibacy, contrary to Nature's fundamental law, which assuredly has largely influenced the destinies of the Roman Catholic Church. To that celibacy, and to all the evils that have sprang from it, may be ascribed much of the irreligion current in France to-day. The periodical reports on criminality issued by the French Ministers of Justice since the foundation of the Republic in 1871, supply materials for a most formidable indictment of that vow of perpetual chastity which Rome exacts from her clergy. Nowadays it is undoubtedly too late for Rome to go back upon that vow and thereby transform the whole of her sacerdotal organisation; but, perhaps, had she done so in past times, before the spirit of inquiry and free examination came into being, she might have assured herself many more centuries of supremacy than have fallen to her lot. But she has ever sought to dissociate the law of the Divinity from the law of Nature, as though indeed the latter were but the invention of the Fiend.

Abbe Mouret, M. Zola's hero, finds himself placed between the law of the Divinity and the law of Nature: and the struggle waged within him by those two forces is a terrible one. That which training has implanted in his mind proves the stronger, and, so far as the canons of the Church can warrant it, he saves his soul. But the problem is not quite frankly put by M. Zola; for if Abbe Mouret transgresses he does so unwittingly, at a time when he is unconscious of his priesthood and has no memory of any vow. When the truth flashes upon him he is horrified with himself, and forthwith returns to the Church. A further struggle between the contending forces then certainly ensues, and ends in the final victory of the Church. But it must at least be said that in the lapses which occur in real life among the Roman priesthood, the circumstances are altogether different from those which M. Zola has selected for his story.

The truth is that in 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret,' betwixt lifelike glimpses of French rural life, the author transports us to a realm of poesy and imagination. This is, indeed, so true that he has introduced into his work all the ideas on which he had based an early unfinished poem called 'Genesis.' He carries us to an enchanted garden, the Paradou—a name which one need hardly say is Provencal for Paradise*—and there Serge Mouret, on recovering from brain fever, becomes, as it were, a new Adam by the side of a new Eve, the fair and winsome Albine. All this part of the book, then, is poetry in prose. The author has remembered the ties which link Rousseau to the realistic school of fiction, and, as in the pages of Jean-Jacques, trees, springs, mountains, rocks, and flowers become animated beings and claim their place in the world's mechanism. One may indeed go back far beyond Rousseau, even to Lucretius himself; for more than once we are irresistibly reminded of Lucretian scenes, above which through M. Zola's pages there seems to hover the pronouncement of Sophocles:

No ordinance of man shall override
The settled laws of Nature and of God;
Not written these in pages of a book,
Nor were they framed to-day, nor yesterday;
We know not whence they are; but this we know,
That they from all eternity have been,
And shall to all eternity endure.

* There is a village called Paradou in Provence, between
Les Baux and Arles.

And if we pass to the young pair whose duo of love is sung amidst the varied voices of creation, we are irresistibly reminded of the Paul and Virginia of St. Pierre, and the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus. Beside them, in their marvellous garden, lingers a memory too of Manon and Des Grieux, with a suggestion of Lauzun and a glimpse of the art of Fragonard. All combine, all contribute—from the great classics to the eighteenth century petits maitres—to build up a story of love's rise in the human breast in answer to Nature's promptings.

M. Zola wrote 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret' one summer under the trees of his garden, mindful the while of gardens that he had known in childhood: the flowery expanse which had stretched before his grandmother's home at Pont-au-Beraud and the wild estate of Galice, between Roquefavour and Aix-en-Provence, through which he had roamed as a lad with friends then boys like himself: Professor Baille and Cezanne, the painter. And into his description of the wondrous Paradou he has put all his remembrance of the gardens and woods of Provence, where many a plant and flower thrive with a luxuriance unknown to England. True, in order to refresh his memory and avoid mistakes, he consulted various horticultural manuals whilst he was writing; of which circumstance captious critics have readily laid hold, to proclaim that the description of the Paradou is a mere florist's catalogue.

But it is nothing of the kind. The florist who might dare to offer such a catalogue to the public would be speedily assailed by all the horticultural journalists of England and all the customers of villadom. For M. Zola avails himself of a poet's license to crowd marvel upon marvel, to exaggerate nature's forces, to transform the tiniest blooms into giant examples of efflorescence, and to mingle even the seasons one with the other. But all this was premeditated; there was a picture before his mind's eye, and that picture he sought to trace with his pen, regardless of all possible objections. It is the poet's privilege to do this and even to be admired for it. It would be easy for some leaned botanist, some expert zoologist, to demolish Milton from the standpoint of their respective sciences, but it would be absurd to do so. We ask of the poet the flowers of his imagination, and the further he carries us from the sordid realities, the limited possibilities of life, the more are we grateful to him.

And M. Zola's Paradou is a flight of fancy, even as its mistress, the fair, loving, guileless Albine, whose smiles and whose tears alike go to our hearts, is the daughter of imagination. She is a flower—the very flower of life's youth—in the midst of all the blossoms of her garden. She unfolds to life and to love even as they unfold; she loves rapturously even as they do under the sun and the azure; and she dies with them when the sun's caress is gone and the chill of winter has fallen. At the thought of her, one instinctively remembers Malherbe's 'Ode A Du Perrier:'

She to this earth belonged, where beauty fast
To direst fate is borne:
A rose, she lasted, as the roses last,
Only for one brief morn.

French painters have made subjects of many episodes in M. Zola's works, but none has been more popular with them than Albine's pathetic, perfumed death amidst the flowers. I know several paintings of great merit which that touching incident has inspired.

Albine, if more or less unreal, a phantasm, the spirit as it were of Nature incarnate in womanhood, is none the less the most delightful of M. Zola's heroines. She smiles at us like the vision of perfect beauty and perfect love which rises before us when our hearts are yet young and full of illusions. She is the ideal, the very quintessence of woman.

In Serge Mouret, her lover, we find a man who, in more than one respect, recalls M. Zola's later hero, the Abbe Froment of 'Lourdes' and 'Rome.' He has the same loving, yearning nature; he is born—absolutely like Abbe Froment—of an unbelieving father and a mother of mystical mind. But unlike Froment he cannot shake off the shackles of his priesthood. Reborn to life after his dangerous illness, he relapses into the religion of death, the religion which regards life as impurity, which denies Nature's laws, and so often wrecks human existence, as if indeed that had been the Divine purpose in setting man upon earth. His struggles suggest various passages in 'Lourdes' and 'Rome.' In fact, in writing those works, M. Zola must have had his earlier creation in mind. There are passages in 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret' culled from the writings of the Spanish Jesuit Fathers and the 'Imitation' of Thomas a Kempis that recur almost word for word in the Trilogy of the Three Cities. Some might regard this as evidence of the limitation of M. Zola's powers, but I think differently. I consider that he has in both instances designedly taken the same type of priest in order to show how he may live under varied circumstances; for in the earlier instance he has led him to one goal, and in the later one to another. And the passages of prayer, entreaty, and spiritual conflict simply recur because they are germane, even necessary, to the subject in both cases.

Of the minor characters that figure in 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret' the chief thing to be said is that they are lifelike. If Serge is almost wholly spiritual, if Albine is the daughter of poesy, they, the others, are of the earth earthy. As a result of their appearance on the scene, there are some powerful contrasting passages in the book. Archangias, the coarse and brutal Christian Brother who serves as a foil to Abbe Mouret; La Teuse, the priest's garrulous old housekeeper; Desiree, his 'innocent' sister, a grown woman with the mind of a child and an almost crazy affection for every kind of bird and beast, are all admirably portrayed. Old Bambousse, though one sees but little of him, stands out as a genuine type of the hard-headed French peasant, who invariably places pecuniary considerations before all others. And Fortune and Rosalie, Vincent and Catherine, and their companions, are equally true to nature. It need hardly be said that there is many a village in France similar to Les Artaud. That hamlet's shameless, purely animal life has in no wise been over-pictured by M. Zola. Those who might doubt him need not go as far as Provence to find such communities. Many Norman hamlets are every whit as bad, and, in Normandy, conditions are aggravated by a marked predilection for the bottle, which, as French social-scientists have been pointing out for some years now, is fast hastening the degenerescence of the peasantry, both morally and physically.

With reference to the English version of 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret' herewith presented, I may just say that I have subjected it to considerable revision and have retranslated all the more important passages myself.

MERTON, SURREY. E. A. V.

ABBE MOURET'S TRANSGRESSION

BOOK I

I

As La Teuse entered the church she rested her broom and feather-brush against the altar. She was late, as she had that day began her half-yearly wash. Limping more than ever in her haste and hustling the benches, she went down the church to ring the Angelus. The bare, worn bell-rope dangled from the ceiling near the confessional, and ended in a big knot greasy from handling. Again and again, with regular jumps, she hung herself upon it; and then let her whole bulky figure go with it, whirling in her petticoats, her cap awry, and her blood rushing to her broad face.

Having set her cap straight with a little pat, she came back breathless to give a hasty sweep before the altar. Every day the dust persistently settled between the disjoined boards of the platform. Her broom rummaged among the corners with an angry rumble. Then she lifted the altar cover and was sorely vexed to find that the large upper cloth, already darned in a score of places, was again worn through in the very middle, so as to show the under cloth, which in its turn was so worn and so transparent that one could see the consecrated stone, embedded in the painted wood of the altar. La Teuse dusted the linen, yellow from long usage, and plied her feather-brush along the shelf against which she set the liturgical altar-cards. Then, climbing upon a chair, she removed the yellow cotton covers from the crucifix and two of the candlesticks. The brass of the latter was tarnished.

'Dear me!' she muttered, 'they really want a clean! I must give them a polish up!'

Then hopping on one leg, swaying and stumping heavily enough to drive in the flagstones, she hastened to the sacristy for the Missal, which she placed unopened on the lectern on the Epistle side, with its edges turned towards the middle of the altar. And afterwards she lighted the two candles. As she went off with her broom, she gave a glance round her to make sure that the abode of the Divinity had been put in proper order. All was still, save that the bell-rope near the confessional still swung between roof and floor with a sinuous sweep.

Abbe Mouret had just come down to the sacristy, a small and chilly apartment, which a passage separated from his dining-room.

'Good morning, Monsieur le Cure,' said La Teuse, laying her broom aside. 'Oh! you have been lazy this morning! Do you know it's a quarter past six?' And without allowing the smiling young priest sufficient time to reply, she added 'I've a scolding to give you. There's another hole in the cloth again. There's no sense in it. We have only one other, and I've been ruining my eyes over it these three days in trying to mend it. You will leave our poor Lord quite bare, if you go on like this.'

Abbe Mouret was still smiling. 'Jesus does not need so much linen, my good Teuse,' he cheerfully replied. 'He is always warm, always royally received by those who love Him well.'

Then stepping towards a small tap, he asked: 'Is my sister up yet? I have not seen her.'

'Oh, Mademoiselle Desiree has been down a long time,' answered the servant, who was kneeling before an old kitchen sideboard in which the sacred vestments were kept. 'She is already with her fowls and rabbits. She was expecting some chicks to be hatched yesterday, and it didn't come off. So you can guess her excitement.' Then the worthy woman broke off to inquire: 'The gold chasuble, eh?'

The priest, who had washed his hands and stood reverently murmuring a prayer, nodded affirmatively. The parish possessed only three chasubles: a violet one, a black one, and one in cloth-of-gold. The last had to be used on the days when white, red, or green was prescribed by the ritual, and it was therefore an all important garment. La Teuse lifted it reverently from the shelf covered with blue paper, on which she laid it after each service; and having placed it on the sideboard, she cautiously removed the fine cloths which protected its embroidery. A golden lamb slumbered on a golden cross, surrounded by broad rays of gold. The gold tissue, frayed at the folds, broke out in little slender tufts; the embossed ornaments were getting tarnished and worn. There was perpetual anxiety, fluttering concern, at seeing it thus go off spangle by spangle. The priest had to wear it almost every day. And how on earth could it be replaced—how would they be able to buy the three chasubles whose place it took, when the last gold threads should be worn out?

Upon the chasuble La Teuse next laid out the stole, the maniple, the girdle, alb and amice. But her tongue still wagged while she crossed the stole with the maniple, and wreathed the girdle so as to trace the venerated initial of Mary's holy name.

'That girdle is not up to much now,' she muttered; 'you will have to make up your mind to get another, your reverence. It wouldn't be very hard; I could plait you one myself if I only had some hemp.'

Abbe Mouret made no answer. He was dressing the chalice at a small table. A large old silver-gilt chalice it was with a bronze base, which he had just taken from the bottom of a deal cupboard, in which the sacred vessels and linen, the Holy Oils, the Missals, candlesticks, and crosses were kept. Across the cup he laid a clean purificator, and on this set the silver-gilt paten, with the host in it, which he covered with a small lawn pall. As he was hiding the chalice by gathering together the folds in the veil of cloth of gold matching the chasuble, La Teuse exclaimed:

'Stop, there's no corporal in the burse. Last night I took all the dirty purificators, palls, and corporals to wash them—separately, of course—not with the house-wash. By-the-bye, your reverence, I didn't tell you: I have just started the house-wash. A fine fat one it will be! Better than the last.'

Then while the priest slipped a corporal into the burse and laid the latter on the veil, she went on quickly:

'By-the-bye, I forgot! that gadabout Vincent hasn't come. Do you wish me to serve your mass, your reverence?'

The young priest eyed her sternly.

'Well, it isn't a sin,' she continued, with her genial smile. 'I did serve a mass once, in Monsieur Caffin's time. I serve it better, too, than ragamuffins who laugh like heathens at seeing a fly buzzing about the church. True I may wear a cap, I may be sixty years old, and as round as a tub, but I have more respect for our Lord than those imps of boys whom I caught only the other day playing at leap-frog behind the altar.'

The priest was still looking at her and shaking his head.

'What a hole this village is!' she grumbled. 'Not a hundred and fifty people in it! There are days, like to-day, when you wouldn't find a living soul in Les Artaud. Even the babies in swaddling clothes are gone to the vineyards! And goodness knows what they do among such vines—vines that grow under the pebbles and look as dry as thistles! A perfect wilderness, three miles from any highway! Unless an angel comes down to serve your mass, your reverence, you've only got me to help you, on my honour! or one of Mademoiselle Desiree's rabbits, no offence to your reverence!'

Just at that moment, however, Vincent, the Brichets' younger son, gently opened the door of the sacristy. His shock of red hair and his little, glistening, grey eyes exasperated La Teuse.

'Oh! the wretch!' she cried. 'I'll bet he's just been up to some mischief! Come on, you scamp, since his reverence is afraid I might dirty our Lord!'

On seeing the lad, Abbe Mouret had taken up the amice. He kissed the cross embroidered in the centre of it, and for a second laid the cloth upon his head; then lowering it over the collar-band of his cassock, he crossed it and fastened the tapes, the right one over the left. He next donned the alb, the symbol of purity, beginning with the right sleeve. Vincent stooped and turned around him, adjusting the alb, in order that it should fall evenly all round him to a couple of inches from the ground. Then he presented the girdle to the priest, who fastened it tightly round his loins, as a reminder of the bonds wherewith the Saviour was bound in His Passion.

La Teuse remained standing there, feeling jealous and hurt and struggling to keep silence; but so great was the itching of her tongue, that she soon broke out once more: 'Brother Archangias has been here. He won't have a single child at school to-day. He went off again like a whirlwind to pull the brats' ears in the vineyards. You had better see him. I believe he has got something to say to you.'

Abbe Mouret silenced her with a wave of the hand. Then he repeated the usual prayers while he took the maniple—which he kissed before slipping it over his left forearm, as a symbol of the practice of good works—and while crossing on his breast the stole, the symbol of his dignity and power. La Teuse had to help Vincent in the work of adjusting the chasuble, which she fastened together with slender tapes, so that it might not slip off behind.

'Holy Virgin! I had forgotten the cruets!' she stammered, rushing to the cupboard. 'Come, look sharp, lad!'

Thereupon Vincent filled the cruets, phials of coarse glass, while she hastened to take a clean finger-cloth from a drawer. Abbe Mouret, holding the chalice by its stem with his left hand, the fingers of his right resting meanwhile on the burse, then bowed profoundly, but without removing his biretta, to a black wooden crucifix, which hung over the side-board. The lad bowed too, and, bearing the cruets covered with the finger-cloth, led the way out of the sacristy, followed by the priest, who walked on with downcast eyes, absorbed in deep and prayerful meditation.

II

The empty church was quite white that May morning. The bell-rope near the confessional hung motionless once more. The little bracket light, with its stained glass shade, burned like a crimson splotch against the wall on the right of the tabernacle. Vincent, having set the cruets on the credence, came back and knelt just below the altar step on the left, while the priest, after rendering homage to the Holy Sacrament by a genuflexion, went up to the altar and there spread out the corporal, on the centre of which he placed the chalice. Then, having opened the Missal, he came down again. Another bend of the knee followed, and, after crossing himself and uttering aloud the formula, 'In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,' he raised his joined hands to his breast, and entered on the great divine drama, with his countenance blanched by faith and love.

'Introibo ad altare Dei.'

'Ad Deum qui loetificat juventutem meam,' gabbled Vincent, who, squatting on his heels, mumbled the responses of the antiphon and the psalm, while watching La Teuse as she roved about the church.

The old servant was gazing at one of the candles with a troubled look. Her anxiety seemed to increase while the priest, bowing down with hands joined again, recited the Confiteor. She stood still, in her turn struck her breast, her head bowed, but still keeping a watchful eye on the taper. For another minute the priest's grave voice and the server's stammers alternated:

'Dominus vobiscum.'

'Et cum spiritu tuo.'

Then the priest, spreading out his hands and afterwards again joining them, said with devout compunction: 'Oremus' (Let us pray).

La Teuse could now stand it no longer, but stepped behind the altar, reached the guttering candle, and trimmed it with the points of her scissors. Two large blobs of wax had already been wasted. When she came back again putting the benches straight on her way, and making sure that there was holy-water in the fonts, the priest, whose hands were resting on the edge of the altar-cloth, was praying in subdued tones. And at last he kissed the altar.

Behind him, the little church still looked wan in the pale light of early morn. The sun, as yet, was only level with the tiled roof. The Kyrie Eleisons rang quiveringly through that sort of whitewashed stable with flat ceiling and bedaubed beams. On either side three lofty windows of plain glass, most of them cracked or smashed, let in a raw light of chalky crudeness.

The free air poured in as it listed, emphasising the naked poverty of the God of that forlorn village. At the far end of the church, above the big door which was never opened and the threshold of which was green with weeds, a boarded gallery—reached by a common miller's ladder—stretched from wall to wall. Dire were its creakings on festival days beneath the weight of wooden shoes. Near the ladder stood the confessional, with warped panels, painted a lemon yellow. Facing it, beside the little door, stood the font—a former holy-water stoup resting on a stonework pedestal. To the right and to the left, halfway down the church, two narrow altars stood against the wall, surrounded by wooden balustrades. On the left-hand one, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, was a large gilded plaster statue of the Mother of God, wearing a regal gold crown upon her chestnut hair; while on her left arm sat the Divine Child, nude and smiling, whose little hand raised the star-spangled orb of the universe. The Virgin's feet were poised on clouds, and beneath them peeped the heads of winged cherubs. Then the right-hand altar, used for the masses for the dead, was surmounted by a crucifix of painted papier-mache—a pendant, as it were, to the Virgin's effigy. The figure of Christ, as large as a child of ten years old, showed Him in all the horror of His death-throes, with head thrown back, ribs projecting, abdomen hollowed in, and limbs distorted and splashed with blood. There was a pulpit, too—a square box reached by a five-step block—near a clock with running weights, in a walnut case, whose thuds shook the whole church like the beatings of some huge heart concealed, it might be, under the stone flags. All along the nave the fourteen Stations of the Cross, fourteen coarsely coloured prints in narrow black frames, bespeckled the staring whiteness of the walls with the yellow, blue, and scarlet of scenes from the Passion.

'Deo Gratias,' stuttered out Vincent at the end of the Epistle.

The mystery of love, the immolation of the Holy Victim, was about to begin. The server took the Missal and bore it to the left, or Gospel-side, of the altar, taking care not to touch the pages of the book. Each time he passed before the tabernacle he made a genuflexion slantwise, which threw him all askew. Returning to the right-hand side once more, he stood upright with crossed arms during the reading of the Gospel. The priest, after making the sign of the cross upon the Missal, next crossed himself: first upon his forehead—to declare that he would never blush for the divine word; then on his mouth—to show his unchanging readiness to confess his faith; and finally on his heart—to mark that it belonged to God alone.

'Dominus vobiscum,' said he, turning round and facing the cold white church.

'Et cum spirits tuo,' answered Vincent, who once more was on his knees.

The Offertory having been recited, the priest uncovered the chalice. For a moment he held before his breast the paten containing the host, which he offered up to God, for himself, for those present, and for all the faithful, living and dead. Then, slipping it on to the edge of the corporal without touching it with his fingers, he took up the chalice and carefully wiped it with the purificator. Vincent had in the meanwhile fetched the cruets from the credence table, and now presented them in turn, first the wine and then the water. The priest then offered up on behalf of the whole world the half-filled chalice, which he next replaced upon the corporal and covered with the pall. Then once again he prayed, and returned to the side of the altar where the server let a little water dribble over his thumbs and forefingers to purify him from the slightest sinful stain. When he had dried his hands on the finger-cloth, La Teuse—who stood there waiting—emptied the cruet-salver into a zinc pail at the corner of the altar.

'Orate, fratres,' resumed the priest aloud as he faced the empty benches, extending and reclasping his hands in a gesture of appeal to all men of good-will. And turning again towards the altar, he continued his prayer in a lower tone, while Vincent began to mutter a long Latin sentence in which he eventually got lost. Now it was that the yellow sunbeams began to dart through the windows; called, as it were, by the priest, the sun itself had come to mass, throwing golden sheets of light upon the left-hand wall, the confessional, the Virgin's altar, and the big clock.

A gentle creak came from the confessional; the Mother of God, in a halo, in the dazzlement of her golden crown and mantle smiled tenderly with tinted lips upon the infant Jesus; and the heated clock throbbed out the time with quickening strokes. It seemed as if the sun peopled the benches with the dusty motes that danced in his beams, as if the little church, that whitened stable, were filled with a glowing throng. Without, were heard the sounds that told of the happy waking of the countryside, the blades of grass sighed out content, the damp leaves dried themselves in the warmth, the birds pruned their feathers and took a first flit round. And indeed the countryside itself seemed to enter with the sun; for beside one of the windows a large rowan tree shot up, thrusting some of its branches through the shattered panes and stretching out leafy buds as if to take a peep within; while through the fissures of the great door the weeds on the threshold threatened to encroach upon the nave. Amid all this quickening life, the big Christ, still in shadow, alone displayed signs of death, the sufferings of ochre-daubed and lake-bespattered flesh. A sparrow raised himself up for a moment at the edge of a hole, took a glance, then flew away; but only to reappear almost immediately when with noiseless wing he dropped between the benches before the Virgin's altar. A second sparrow followed; and soon from all the boughs of the rowan tree came others that calmly hopped about the flags.

'Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth,' said the priest in a low tone, whilst slightly stooping.

Vincent rang the little bell thrice; and the sparrows, scared by the sudden tinkling, flew off with such a mighty buzz of wings that La Teuse, who had just gone back into the sacristy, came out again, grumbling; 'The little rascals! they will mess everything. I'll bet that Mademoiselle Desiree has been here again to scatter bread-crumbs for them.'

The dread moment was at hand. The body and the blood of a God were about to descend upon the altar. The priest kissed the altar-cloth, clasped his hands, and multiplied signs of the cross over host and chalice. The prayers of the canon of the mass now fell from his lips in a very ecstasy of humility and gratitude. His attitude, his gestures, the inflections of his voice, all expressed his consciousness of his littleness, his emotion at being selected for so great a task. Vincent came and knelt beside him, lightly lifted the chasuble with his left hand, the bell ready in his right; and the priest, his elbows resting on the edge of the altar, holding the host with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands, pronounced over it the words of consecration: Hoc est enim corpus meum. Then having bowed the knee before it, he raised it slowly as high as his hands could reach, following it upwards with his eyes, while the kneeling server rang the bell thrice. Then he consecrated the wine—Hic est enim calix—leaning once more upon his elbows, bowing, raising the cup aloft, his right hand round the stem, his left holding its base, and his eyes following it aloft. Again the server rang the bell three times. The great mystery of the Redemption had once more been repeated, once more had the adorable Blood flowed forth.

'Just you wait a bit,' growled La Teuse, as she tried to scare away the sparrows with outstretched fist.

But the sparrows were now fearless. They had come back even while the bell was ringing, and, unabashed, were fluttering about the benches. The repeated tinklings even roused them into liveliness, and they answered back with little chirps which crossed amid the Latin words of prayer, like the rippling laughs of free urchins. The sun warmed their plumage, the sweet poverty of the church captivated them. They felt at home there, as in some barn whose shutters had been left open, and screeched, fought, and squabbled over the crumbs they found upon the floor. One flew to perch himself on the smiling Virgin's golden veil; another, whose daring put the old servant in a towering rage, made a hasty reconnaissance of La Teuse's skirts. And at the altar, the priest, with every faculty absorbed, his eyes fixed upon the sacred host, his thumbs and forefingers joined, did not even hear this invasion of the warm May morning, this rising flood of sunlight, greenery and birds, which overflowed even to the foot of the Calvary where doomed nature was wrestling in the death-throes.

'Per omnia soecula soeculorum,' he said.

'Amen,' answered Vincent.

The Pater ended, the priest, holding the host over the chalice, broke it in the centre. Detaching a particle from one of the halves, he dropped it into the precious blood, to symbolise the intimate union into which he was about to enter with God. He said the Agnus Dei aloud, softly recited the three prescribed prayers, and made his act of unworthiness, and then with his elbows resting on the altar, and with the paten beneath his chin, he partook of both portions of the host at once. After a fervent meditation, with his hands clasped before his face, he took the paten and gathered from the corporal the sacred particles of the host that had fallen, and dropped them into the chalice. One particle which had adhered to his thumb he removed with his forefinger. And, crossing himself, chalice in hand, with the paten once again below his chin, he drank all the precious blood in three draughts, never taking his lips from the cup's rim, but imbibing the divine Sacrifice to the last drop.

Vincent had risen to fetch the cruets from the credence table. But suddenly the door of the passage leading to the parsonage flew open and swung back against the wall, to admit a handsome child-like girl of twenty-two, who carried something hidden in her apron.

'Thirteen of them,' she called out. 'All the eggs were good.' And she opened out her apron and revealed a brood of little shivering chicks, with sprouting down and beady black eyes. 'Do just look,' said she; 'aren't they sweet little pets, the darlings! Oh, look at the little white one climbing on the others' backs! and the spotted one already flapping his tiny wings! The eggs were a splendid lot; not one of them unfertile.'

La Teuse, who was helping to serve the mass in spite of all prohibitions, and was at that very moment handing the cruets to Vincent for the ablutions, thereupon turned round and loudly exclaimed: 'Do be quiet, Mademoiselle Desiree! Don't you see we haven't finished yet?'

Through the open doorway now came the strong smell of a farmyard, blowing like some generative ferment into the church amidst the warm sunlight that was creeping over the altar. Desiree stood there for a moment delighted with the little ones she carried, watching Vincent pour, and her brother drink, the purifying wine, in order that nought of the sacred elements should be left within his mouth. And she stood there still when he came back to the side of the altar, holding the chalice in both hands, so that Vincent might pour over his forefingers and thumbs the wine and water of ablution, which he likewise drank. But when the mother hen ran up clucking with alarm to seek her little ones, and threatened to force her way into the church, Desiree went off, talking maternally to her chicks, while the priest, after pressing the purificator to his lips, wiped first the rim and next the interior of the chalice.

Then came the end, the act of thanksgiving to God. For the last time the server removed the Missal, and brought it back to the right-hand side. The priest replaced the purificator, paten, and pall upon the chalice; once more pinched the two large folds of the veil together, and laid upon it the burse containing the corporal. His whole being was now one act of ardent thanksgiving. He besought from Heaven the forgiveness of his sins, the grace of a holy life, and the reward of everlasting life. He remained as if overwhelmed by this miracle of love, the ever-recurring immolation, which sustained him day by day with the blood and flesh of his Savior.

Having read the final prayers, he turned and said: 'Ite, missa est.'

'Deo gratias,' answered Vincent.

And having turned back to kiss the altar, the priest faced round anew, his left hand just below his breast, his right outstretched whilst blessing the church, which the gladsome sunbeams and noisy sparrows filled.

'Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus.'

'Amen,' said the server, as he crossed himself.

The sun had risen higher, and the sparrows were growing bolder. While the priest read from the left-hand altar-card the passage of the Gospel of St. John, announcing the eternity of the Word, the sunrays set the altar ablaze, whitened the panels of imitation marble, and dimmed the flame of the two candles, whose short wicks were now merely two dull spots. The victorious orb enveloped with his glory the crucifix, the candlesticks, the chasuble, the veil of the chalice—all the gold work that paled beneath his beams. And when at last the priest, after taking the chalice in his hands and making a genuflexion, covered his head and turned from the altar to follow the server, laden with the cruets and finger-cloth, to the sacristy, the planet remained sole master of the church. Its rays in turn now rested on the altar-cloth, irradiating the tabernacle-door with splendour, and celebrating the fertile powers of May. Warmth rose from the stone flags. The daubed walls, the tall Virgin, the huge Christ, too, all seemed to quiver as with shooting sap, as if death had been conquered by the earth's eternal youth.

III

Le Teuse hastily put out the candles, but lingered to make one last attempt to drive away the sparrows, and so when she returned to the sacristy with the Missal she no longer found Abbe Mouret there. Having washed his hands and put away the sacred vessels and vestments, he was now standing in the dining room, breakfasting off a cup of milk.

'You really ought to prevent your sister from scattering bread in the church,' said La Teuse on coming in. 'It was last winter she hit upon that pretty prank. She said the sparrows were cold, and that God might well give them some food. You see, she'll end by making us sleep with all her fowls and rabbits.'

'We should be all the warmer,' pleasantly replied the young priest. 'You are always grumbling, La Teuse. Do let our poor Desiree pet her animals. She has no other pleasure, poor innocent!'

The servant took her stand in the centre of the room.

'I do believe you yourself wouldn't mind a bit if the magpies actually built their nests in the church. You never can see anything, everything seems just what it ought to be to you. Your sister is precious lucky in having had you to take charge of her when you left the seminary. No father, no mother. I should like to know who would let her mess about as she does in a farmyard.'

Then softening, she added in a gentler tone: 'To be sure, it would be a pity to cross her. She hasn't a touch of malice in her. She's like a child of ten, although she's one of the finest grown girls in the neighbourhood. And I have to put her to bed, as you know, every night, and send her to sleep with stories, just like a little child.'

Abbe Mouret had remained standing, finishing the cup of milk he held between his fingers, which were slightly reddened by the chill atmosphere of the dining-room—a large room with painted grey walls, a floor of square tiles, and having no furniture beyond a table and a few chairs. La Teuse picked up a napkin which she had laid at a corner of the table in readiness for breakfast.

'It isn't much linen you dirty,' she muttered. 'One would think you could never sit down, that you are always just about to start off. Ah! if you had known Monsieur Caffin, the poor dead priest whose place you have taken! What a man he was for comfort! Why, he couldn't have digested his food, if he had eaten standing. A Norman he was, from Canteleu, like myself. I don't thank him, I tell you, for having brought me to such a wild-beast country as this. When first we came, O, Lord! how bored we were! But the poor priest had had some uncomfortable tales going about him at home.... Why, sir, didn't you sweeten your milk, then? Aren't those the two lumps of sugar?'

The priest put down his cup.

'Yes, I must have forgotten, I believe,' he said.

La Teuse stared at him and shrugged her shoulders. She folded up inside the napkin a slice of stale home-made bread which had also been left untouched on the table. Then just as the priest was about to go out, she ran after him and knelt down at his feet, exclaiming: 'Stop, your shoe-laces are not even fastened. I cannot imagine how your feet can stand those peasant shoes, you're such a little, tender man and look as if you had been preciously spoilt! Ah, the bishop must have known a deal about you, to go and give you the poorest living in the department.'

'But it was I who chose Les Artaud,' said the priest, breaking into another smile. 'You are very bad-tempered this morning, La Teuse. Are we not happy here? We have got all we want, and our life is as peaceful as if in paradise.'

She then restrained herself and laughed in her turn, saying: 'You are a holy man, Monsieur le Cure. But come and see what a splendid wash I have got. That will be better than squabbling with one another.'

The priest was obliged to follow, for she might prevent him going out at all if he did not compliment her on her washing. As he left the dining-room he stumbled over a heap of rubbish in the passage.

'What is this?' he asked.

Oh, nothing,' said La Teuse in her grimest tone. 'It's only the parsonage coming down. However, you are quite content, you've got all you want. Good heavens! there are holes and to spare. Just look at that ceiling, now. Isn't it cracked all over? If we don't get buried alive one of these days, we shall owe a precious big taper to our guardian angel. However, if it suits you—It's like the church. Those broken panes ought to have been replaced these two years. In winter our Lord gets frozen with the cold. Besides, it would keep out those rascally sparrows. I shall paste paper over the holes. You see if I don't.'

'A capital idea,' murmured the priest, 'they might very well be pasted over. As to the walls, they are stouter than we think. In my room, the floor has only given way slightly in front of the window. The house will see us all buried.'

On reaching the little open shed near the kitchen, in order to please La Teuse he went into ecstasies over the washing; he even had to dip his fingers into it and feel it. This so pleased the old woman that her attentions became quite motherly. She no longer scolded, but ran to fetch a clothes-brush, saying: 'You surely are not going out with yesterday's mud on your cassock! If you had left it out on the banister, it would be clean now—it's still a good one. But do lift it up well when you cross any field. The thistles tear everything.'

While speaking she kept turning him round like a child, shaking him from head to foot with her energetic brushing.

'There, there, that will do,' he said, escaping from her at last. 'Take care of Desiree, won't you? I will tell her I am going out.'

But at this minute a fresh clear voice called to him: 'Serge! Serge!'

Desiree came flying up, her cheeks ruddy with glee, her head bare, her black locks twisted tightly upon her neck, and her hands and arms smothered up to the elbows with manure. She had been cleaning out her poultry house. When she caught sight of her brother just about to go out with his breviary under his arm, she laughed aloud, and kissed him on his mouth, with her arms thrown back behind her to avoid soiling him.

'No, no,' she hurriedly exclaimed, 'I should dirty you. Oh! I am having such fun! You must see the animals when you come back.'

Thereupon she fled away again. Abbe Mouret then said that he would be back about eleven for luncheon, and as he started, La Teuse, who had followed him to the doorstep, shouted after him her last injunctions.

'Don't forget to see Brother Archangias. And look in also at the Brichets'; the wife came again yesterday about that wedding. Just listen, Monsieur le Cure! I met their Rosalie. She'd ask nothing better than to marry big Fortune. Have a talk with old Bambousse; perhaps he will listen to you now. And don't come back at twelve o'clock, like the other day. Come, say you'll be back at eleven, won't you?'

But the priest turned round no more. So she went in again, growling between her teeth:

'When does he ever listen to me? Barely twenty-six years old and does just as he likes. To be sure, he's an old man of sixty for holiness; but then he has never known life; he knows nothing, it's no trouble to him to be as good as a cherub!'

IV

When Abbe Mouret had got beyond all hearing of La Teuse he stopped, thankful to be alone at last. The church was built on a hillock, which sloped down gently to the village. With its large gaping windows and bright red tiles, it stretched out like a deserted sheep-cote. The priest turned round and glanced at the parsonage, a greyish building springing from the very side of the church; but as if fearful that he might again be overtaken by the interminable chatter that had been buzzing in his ears ever since morning, he turned up to the right again, and only felt safe when he at last stood before the great doorway, where he could not be seen from the parsonage. The front of the church, quite bare and worn by the sunshine and rain of years, was crowned by a narrow open stone belfry, in which a small bell showed its black silhouette, whilst its rope disappeared through the tiles. Six broken steps, on one side half buried in the earth, led up to the lofty arched door, now cracked, smothered with dust and rust and cobwebs, and so frailly hung upon its outwrenched hinges that it seemed as if the first slight puff would secure free entrance to the winds of heaven. Abbe Mouret, who had an affection for this dilapidated door, leaned against one of its leaves as he stood upon the steps. Thence he could survey the whole country round at a glance. And shading his eyes with his hands he scanned the horizon.

In the month of May exuberant vegetation burst forth from that stony soil. Gigantic lavenders, juniper bushes, patches of rank herbage swarmed over the church threshold, and scattered clumps of dark greenery even to the very tiles. It seemed as if the first throb of shooting sap in the tough matted underwood might well topple the church over. At that early hour, amid all the travail of nature's growth, there was a hum of vivifying warmth, and the very rocks quivered as with a long and silent effort. But the Abbe failed to comprehend the ardour of nature's painful labour; he simply thought that the steps were tottering, and thereupon leant against the other side of the door.

The countryside stretched away for a distance of six miles, bounded by a wall of tawny hills speckled with black pine-woods. It was a fearful landscape of arid wastes and rocky spurs rending the soil. The few patches of arable ground were like scattered pools of blood, red fields with rows of lean almond trees, grey-topped olive trees and long lines of vines, streaking the soil with their brown stems. It was as if some huge conflagration had swept by there, scattering the ashes of forests over the hill-tops, consuming all the grass of the meadow lands, and leaving its glare and furnace-like heat behind in the hollows. Only here and there was the softer note of a pale green patch of growing corn. The landscape generally was wild, lacking even a threadlet of water, dying of thirst, and flying away in clouds of dust at the least breath of wind. But at the farthest point where the crumbling hills on the horizon had left a breach one espied some distant fresh moist greenery, a stretch of the neighbouring valley fertilised by the Viorne, a river flowing down from the gorges of the Seille.

The priest lowered his dazzled glance upon the village, whose few scattered houses straggled away below the church—wretched hovels they were of rubble and boards strewn along a narrow path without sign of streets. There were about thirty of them altogether, some squatting amidst muck-heaps, and black with woeful want; others roomier and more cheerful-looking with their roofs of pinkish tiles. Strips of garden, victoriously planted amidst stony soil, displayed plots of vegetables enclosed by quickset hedges. At this hour Les Artaud was empty, not a woman was at the windows, not a child was wallowing in the dust; parties of fowls alone went to and fro, ferreting among the straw, seeking food up to the very thresholds of the houses, whose open doors gaped in the sunlight. A big black dog seated on his haunches at the entrance to the village seemed to be mounting guard over it.

Languor slowly stole over Abbe Mouret. The rising sun steeped him in such warmth that he leant back against the church door pervaded by a feeling of happy restfulness. His thoughts were dwelling on that hamlet of Les Artaud, which had sprung up there among the stones like one of the knotty growths of the valley. All its inhabitants were related, all bore the same name, so that from their very cradle they were distinguished among themselves by nicknames. An Artaud, their ancestor, had come hither and settled like a pariah in this waste. His family had grown with all the wild vitality of the herbage that sucked life from the rocky boulders. It had at last become a tribe, a rural community, in which cousin-ships were lost in the mists of centuries. They intermarried with shameless promiscuity. Not an instance could be cited of any Artaud taking himself a wife from any neighbouring village; only some of the girls occasionally went elsewhere. The others were born and died fixed to that spot, leisurely increasing and multiplying on their dunghills with the irreflectiveness of trees, and with no definite notion of the world that lay beyond the tawny rocks, in whose midst they vegetated. And yet there were already rich and poor among them; fowls having at times disappeared, the fowl-houses were now closed at night with stout padlocks; moreover one Artaud had killed another Artaud one evening behind the mill. These folk, begirt by that belt of desolate hills, were truly a people apart—a race sprung from the soil, a miniature replica of mankind, three hundred souls all told, beginning the centuries yet once again.

Over the priest the sombre shadows of seminary life still hovered. For years he had never seen the sun. He perceived it not even now, his eyes closed and gazing inwards on his soul, and with no feeling for perishable nature, fated to damnation, save contempt. For a long time in his hours of devout thought he had dreamt of some hermit's desert, of some mountain hole, where no living thing—neither being, plant, nor water—should distract him from the contemplation of God. It was an impulse springing from the purest love, from a loathing of all physical sensation. There, dying to self, and with his back turned to the light of day, he would have waited till he should cease to be, till nothing should remain of him but the sovereign whiteness of the soul. To him heaven seemed all white, with a luminous whiteness as if lilies there snowed down upon one, as if every form of purity, innocence, and chastity there blazed. But his confessor reproved him whenever he related his longings for solitude, his cravings for an existence of Godlike purity; and recalled him to the struggles of the Church, the necessary duties of the priesthood. Later on, after his ordination, the young priest had come to Les Artaud at his own request, there hoping to realise his dream of human annihilation. In that desolate spot, on that barren soil, he might shut his ears to all worldly sounds, and live the dreamy life of a saint. For some months past, in truth, his existence had been wholly undisturbed, rarely had any thrill of the village-life disturbed him; and even the sun's heat scarcely brought him any glow of feeling as he walked the paths, his whole being wrapped in heaven, heedless of the unceasing travail of life amidst which he moved.

The big black dog watching over Les Artaud had determined to come up to Abbe Mouret, and now sat upon its haunches at the priest's feet; but the unconscious man remained absorbed amidst the sweetness of the morning. On the previous evening he had begun the exercises of the Rosary, and to the intercession of the Virgin with her Divine Son he attributed the great joy which filled his soul. How despicable appeared all the good things of the earth! How thankfully he recognised his poverty! When he entered into holy orders, after losing on the same day both his father and his mother through a tragedy the fearful details of which were even now unknown to him,* he had relinquished all his share of their property to an elder brother. His only remaining link with the world was his sister; he had undertaken the care of her, stirred by a kind of religious affection for her feeble intelligence. The dear innocent was so childish, such a very little girl, that she recalled to him the poor in spirit to whom the Gospel promises the kingdom of heaven. Of late, however, she had somewhat disturbed him; she was growing too lusty, too full of health and life. But his discomfort was yet of the slightest. His days were spent in that inner life he had created for himself, for which he had relinquished all else. He closed the portals of his senses, and sought to free himself from all bodily needs, so that he might be but a soul enrapt in contemplation. To him nature offered only snares and abominations; he gloried in maltreating her, in despising her, in releasing himself from his human slime. And as the just man must be a fool according to the world, he considered himself an exile on this earth; his thoughts were solely fixed upon the favours of Heaven, incapable as he was of understanding how an eternity of bliss could be weighed against a few hours of perishable enjoyment. His reason duped him and his senses lied; and if he advanced in virtue it was particularly by humility and obedience. His wish was to be the last of all, one subject to all, in order that the divine dew might fall upon his heart as upon arid sand; he considered himself overwhelmed with reproach and with confusion, unworthy of ever being saved from sin. He no longer belonged to himself—blind, deaf, dead to the world as he was. He was God's thing. And from the depth of the abjectness to which he sought to plunge, Hosannahs suddenly bore him aloft, above the happy and the mighty into the splendour of never-ending bliss.

* This forms the subject of M. Zola's novel, The Conquest of
Plassans. ED.

Thus, at Les Artaud, Abbe Mouret had once more experienced, each time he read the 'Imitation,' the raptures of the cloistered life which he had longed for at one time so ardently. As yet he had not had to fight any battle. From the moment that he knelt down, he became perfect, absolutely oblivious of the flesh, unresisting, undisturbed, as if overpowered by the Divine grace. Such ecstasy at God's approach is well known to some young priests: it is a blissful moment when all is hushed, and the only desire is but a boundless craving for purity. From no human creature had he sought his consolations. He who believes a certain thing to be all in all cannot be troubled: and he did believe that God was all in all, and that humility, obedience, and chastity were everything. He could remember having heard temptation spoken of as an abominable torture that tries the holiest. But he would only smile: God had never left him. He bore his faith about him thus like a breast-plate protecting him from the slightest breath of evil. He could recall how he had hidden himself and wept for very love; he knew not whom he loved, but he wept for love, for love of some one afar off. The recollection never failed to move him. Later on he had decided on becoming a priest in order to satisfy that craving for a superhuman affection which was his sole torment. He could not see where greater love could be. In that state of life he satisfied his being, his inherited predisposition, his youthful dreams, his first virile desires. If temptation must come, he awaited it with the calmness of the seminarist ignorant of the world. He felt that his manhood had been killed in him: it gladdened him to feel himself a creature set apart, unsexed, turned from the usual paths of life, and, as became a lamb of the Lord, marked with the tonsure.

V

While the priest pondered the sun was heating the big church-door. Gilded flies buzzed round a large flower that was blooming between two of the church-door steps. Abbe Mouret, feeling slightly dazed, was at last about to move away, when the big black dog sprang, barking violently, towards the iron gate of the little graveyard on the left of the church. At the same time a harsh voice called out: 'Ah! you young rascal! So you stop away from school, and I find you in the graveyard! Oh, don't say no: I have been watching you this quarter of an hour.'

As the priest stepped forward he saw Vincent, whom a Brother of the Christian Schools was clutching tightly by the ear. The lad was suspended, as it were, over a ravine skirting the graveyard, at the bottom of which flowed the Mascle, a mountain torrent whose crystal waters plunged into the Viorne, six miles away.

'Brother Archangias!' softly called the priest, as if to appease the fearful man.

The Brother, however, did not release the boy's ear.

'Oh, it's you, Monsieur le Cure?' he growled. 'Just fancy, this rascal is always poking his nose into the graveyard. I don't know what he can be up to here. I ought to let go of him and let him smash his skull down there. It would be what he deserves.'

The lad remained dumb, with his cunning eyes tight shut as he clung to the bushes.

'Take care, Brother Archangias,' continued the priest, 'he might slip.'

And he himself helped Vincent to scramble up again.

'Come, my young friend, what were you doing there?' he asked. 'You must not go playing in graveyards.'

The lad had opened his eyes, and crept away, fearfully, from the Brother, to place himself under the priest's protection.

'I'll tell you,' he said in a low voice, as he raised his bushy head. 'There is a tomtit's nest in the brambles there, under that rock. For over ten days I've been watching it, and now the little ones are hatched, so I came this morning after serving your mass.'

'A tomtit's nest!' exclaimed Brother Archangias. 'Wait a bit! wait a bit!'

Thereupon he stepped aside, picked a clod of earth off a grave and flung it into the brambles. But he missed the nest. Another clod, however, more skilfully thrown upset the frail cradle, and precipitated the fledglings into the torrent below.

'Now, perhaps,' he continued, clapping his hands to shake off the earth that soiled them, 'you won't come roaming here any more, like a heathen; the dead will pull your feet at night if you go walking over them again.'

Vincent, who had laughed at seeing the nest dive into the stream, looked round him and shrugged his shoulders like one of strong mind.

'Oh, I'm not afraid,' he said. 'Dead folk don't stir.'

The graveyard, in truth, was not a place to inspire fear. It was a barren piece of ground whose narrow paths were smothered by rank weeds. Here and there the soil was bossy with mounds. A single tombstone, that of Abbe Caffin, brand-new and upright, could be perceived in the centre of the ground. Save this, all around there were only broken fragments of crosses, withered tufts of box, and old slabs split and moss-eaten. There were not two burials a year. Death seemed to make no dwelling in that waste spot, whither La Teuse came every evening to fill her apron with grass for Desiree's rabbits. A gigantic cypress tree, standing near the gate, alone cast shadow upon the desert field. This cypress, a landmark visible for nine miles around, was known to the whole countryside as the Solitaire.

'It's full of lizards,' added Vincent, looking at the cracks of the church-wall. 'One could have a fine lark—'

But he sprang out with a bound on seeing the Brother lift his foot. The latter proceeded to call the priest's attention to the dilapidated state of the gate, which was not only eaten up with rust, but had one hinge off, and the lock broken.

'It ought to be repaired,' said he.

Abbe Mouret smiled, but made no reply. Addressing Vincent, who was romping with the dog: 'I say, my boy,' he asked, 'do you know where old Bambousse is at work this morning?'

The lad glanced towards the horizon. 'He must be at his Olivettes field now,' he answered, pointing towards the left. 'But Voriau will show your reverence the way. He's sure to know where his master is.' And he clapped his hands and called: 'Hie! Voriau! hie!'

The big black dog paused a moment, wagging his tail, and seeking to read the urchin's eyes. Then, barking joyfully, he set off down the slope to the village. Abbe Mouret and Brother Archangias followed him, chatting. A hundred yards further Vincent surreptitiously bolted, and again glided up towards the church, keeping a watchful eye upon them, and ready to dart behind a bush if they should look round. With adder-like suppleness, he once more glided into the graveyard, that paradise full of lizards, nests, and flowers.

Meantime, while Voriau led the way before them along the dusty road, Brother Archangias was angrily saying to the priest: 'Let be! Monsieur le Cure, they're spawn of damnation, those toads are! They ought to have their backs broken, to make them pleasing to God. They grow up in irreligion, like their fathers. Fifteen years have I been here, and not one Christian have I been able to turn out. The minute they quit my hands, good-bye! They think of nothing but their land, their vines, their olive-trees. Not one ever sets foot in church. Brute beasts they are, struggling with their stony fields! Guide them with the stick, Monsieur le Cure, yes, the stick!'

Then, after drawing breath, he added with a terrific wave of his hands:

'Those Artauds, look you, are like the brambles over-running these rocks. One stem has been enough to poison the whole district. They cling on, they multiply, they live in spite of everything. Nothing short of fire from heaven, as at Gomorrha, will clear it all away.'

'We should never despair of sinners,' said Abbe Mouret, all inward peacefulness, as he leisurely walked on.

'But these are the devil's own,' broke in the Brother still more violently. 'I've been a peasant, too. Up to eighteen I dug the earth; and later on, when I was at the Training College, I had to sweep, pare vegetables, do all the heavy work. It's not their toilsome labour I find fault with. On the contrary, for God prefers the lowly. But the Artauds live like beasts! They are like their dogs, they never attend mass, and make a mock of the commandments of God and of the Church. They think of nothing but their plots of lands, so sweet they are on them!'

Voriau, his tail wagging, kept stopping and moving on again as soon as he saw that they still followed him.

'There certainly are some grievous things going on,' said Abbe Mouret. 'My predecessor, Abbe Caffin—'

'A poor specimen,' interrupted the Brother. 'He came here to us from Normandy owing to some disreputable affair. Once here, his sole thought was good living; he let everything go to rack and ruin.'

'Oh, no, Abbe Caffin certainly did what he could; but I must own that his efforts were all but barren in results. My own are mostly fruitless.'

Brother Archangias shrugged his shoulders. He walked on for a minute in silence, swaying his tall bony frame, which looked as if it had been roughly fashioned with a hatchet. The sun beat down upon his neck, shadowing his hard, sword-edged peasant's face.

'Listen to me, Monsieur le Cure,' he said at last. 'I am too much beneath you to lecture you; but still, I am almost double your age, I know this part, and therefore I feel justified in telling you that you will gain nothing by gentleness. The catechism, understand, is enough. God has no mercy on the wicked. He burns them. Stick to that.'

Then, as Abbe Mouret, whose head remained bowed, did not open his mouth, he went on: 'Religion is leaving the country districts because it is made over indulgent. It was respected when it spoke out like an unforgiving mistress. I really don't know what they can teach you now in the seminaries. The new priests weep like children with their parishioners. God no longer seems the same. I dare say, Monsieur le Cure, that you don't even know your catechism by heart now?'

But the priest, wounded by the imperiousness with which the Brother so roughly sought to dominate him, looked up and dryly rejoined:

'That will do, your zeal is very praiseworthy. But haven't you something to tell me? You came to the parsonage this morning, did you not?'

Thereupon Brother Archangias plumply answered: 'I had to tell you just what I have told you. The Artauds live like pigs. Only yesterday I learned that Rosalie, old Bambousse's eldest daughter, is in the family way. It happens with all of them before they get married. And they simply laugh at reproaches, as you know.'

'Yes,' murmured Abbe Mouret, 'it is a great scandal. I am just on my way to see old Bambousse to speak to him about it; it is desirable that they should be married as soon as possible. The child's father, it seems, is Fortune, the Brichets' eldest son. Unfortunately the Brichets are poor.'

'That Rosalie, now,' continued the Brother, 'is just eighteen. Not four years since I still had her under me at school, and she was already a gadabout. I have now got her sister Catherine, a chit of eleven, who seems likely to become even worse than her elder. One comes across her in every corner with that little scamp, Vincent. It's no good, you may pull their ears till they bleed, the woman always crops up in them. They carry perdition about with them and are only fit to be thrown on a muck-heap. What a splendid riddance if all girls were strangled at their birth!'

His loathing, his hatred of woman made him swear like a carter. Abbe Mouret, who had been listening to him with unmoved countenance, smiled at last at his rabid utterances. He called Voriau, who had strayed into a field close by.

'There, look there!' cried Brother Archangias, pointing to a group of children playing at the bottom of a ravine, 'there are my young devils, who play the truant under pretence of going to help their parents among the vines! You may be certain that jade of a Catherine is among them.... There, didn't I tell you! Till to-night, Monsieur le Cure. Oh, just you wait, you rascals!'

Off he went at a run, his dirty neckband flying over his shoulder, and his big greasy cassock tearing up the thistles. Abbe Mouret watched him swoop down into the midst of the children, who scattered like frightened sparrows. But he succeeded in seizing Catherine and one boy by the ears and led them back towards the village, clutching them tightly with his big hairy fingers, and overwhelming them with abuse.

The priest walked on again. Brother Archangias sometimes aroused strange scruples in his mind. With his vulgarity and coarseness the Brother seemed to him the true man of God, free from earthly ties, submissive in all to Heaven's will, humble, blunt, ready to shower abuse upon sin. He, the priest, would then feel despair at his inability to rid himself more completely of his body; he regretted that he was not ugly, unclean, covered with vermin like some of the saints. Whenever the Brother had wounded him by some words of excessive coarseness, or by some over-hasty churlishness, he would blame himself for his refinement, his innate shrinking, as if these were really faults. Ought he not to be dead to all the weaknesses of this world? And this time also he smiled sadly as he thought how near he had been to losing his temper at the Brother's roughly put lesson. It was pride, it seemed to him, seeking to work his perdition by making him despise the lowly. However, in spite of himself, he felt relieved at being alone again, at being able to walk on gently, reading his breviary, free at last from the grating voice that had disturbed his dream of heavenly love.

VI

The road wound on between fallen rocks, among which the peasants had succeeded here and there in reclaiming six or seven yards of chalky soil, planted with old olive trees. Under the priest's feet the dust in the deep ruts crackled lightly like snow. At times, as he felt a warmer puff upon his face, he would raise his eyes from his book, as if to seek whence came this soft caress; but his gaze was vacant, straying without perception over the glowing horizon, over the twisted outlines of that passion-breathing landscape as it stretched out in the sun before him, dry, barren, despairing of the fertilisation for which it longed. And he would lower his hat over his forehead to protect himself against the warm breeze and tranquilly resume his reading, his cassock raising behind him a cloudlet of dust which rolled along the surface of the road.

'Good morning, Monsieur le Cure,' a passing peasant said to him.

Sounds of digging alongside the cultivated strips of ground again roused him from his abstraction. He turned his head and perceived big knotty-limbed old men greeting him from among the vines. The Artauds were eagerly satisfying their passion for the soil, in the sun's full blaze. Sweating brows appeared from behind the bushes, heaving chests were slowly raised, the whole scene was one of ardent fructification, through which he moved with the calm step born of ignorance. No discomfort came to him from the great travail of love that permeated that splendid morning.

'Steady! Voriau, you mustn't eat people!' some one gaily shouted in a powerful voice by way of silencing the dog's loud barks.

Abbe Mouret looked up.

'Oh! it's you. Fortune?' he said, approaching the edge of the field in which the young peasant was at work. 'I was just on my way to speak to you.'

Fortune was of the same age as the priest: a bigly built, bold-looking young fellow, with skin already hardened. He was clearing a small plot of stony heath.

'What about, Monsieur le Cure?' he asked.

'About Rosalie and you,' replied the priest.

Fortune began to laugh. Perhaps he thought it droll that a priest should interest himself in such a matter.

'Well,' he muttered, 'I'm not to blame in it nor she either. So much the worse if old Bambousse refuses to let me have her. You saw yourself how his dog was trying to bite me just now; he sets him on me.'

Then, as Abbe Mouret was about to continue, old Artaud, called Brichet, whom he had not previously perceived, emerged from the shadow of a bush behind which he and his wife were eating. He was a little man, withered by age, with a cringing face.

'Your reverence must have been told a pack of lies,' he exclaimed. 'The youngster is quite ready to marry Rosalie. What's happened isn't anybody's fault. It has happened to others who got on all right just the same. The matter doesn't rest with us. You ought to speak to Bambousse. He's the one who looks down on us because he's got money.'

'Yes, we are very poor,' whined his wife, a tall lachrymose woman, who also rose to her feet. 'We've only this scrap of ground where the very devil seems to have been hailing stones. Not a bite of bread from it, even. Without you, your reverence, life would be impossible.'

Brichet's wife was the one solitary devotee of the village. Whenever she had been to communion, she would hang about the parsonage, well knowing that La Teuse always kept a couple of loaves for her from her last baking. At times she was even able to carry off a rabbit or a fowl given her by Desiree.

'There's no end to the scandals,' continued the priest. 'The marriage must take place without delay.'

'Oh! at once! as soon as the others are agreeable,' said the old woman, alarmed about her periodical presents. 'What do you say, Brichet? we are not such bad Christians as to go against his reverence?'

Fortune sniggered.

'Oh, I'm quite ready,' he said, 'and so is Rosalie. I saw her yesterday at the back of the mill. We haven't quarrelled. We stopped there to have a bit of a laugh.'

But Abbe Mouret interrupted him: 'Very well, I am now going to speak to Bambousse. He is over there, at Les Olivettes, I believe.'

The priest was going off when the mother asked him what had become of her younger son Vincent, who had left in the early morning to serve mass. There was a lad now who badly needed his reverence's admonitions. And she walked by the priest's side for another hundred yards, bemoaning her poverty, the failure of the potato crop, the frost which had nipped the olive trees, the hot weather which threatened to scorch up the scanty corn. Then, as she left him, she solemnly declared that her son Fortune always said his prayers, both morning and evening.

Voriau now ran on in front, and suddenly, at a turn in the road, he bolted across the fields. The priest then struck into a small path leading up a low hill. He was now at Les Olivettes, the most fertile spot in the neighbourhood, where the mayor of the commune, Artaud, otherwise Bambousse, owned several fields of corn, olive plantations, and vines. The dog was now romping round the skirts of a tall brunette, who burst into a loud laugh as she caught sight of the priest.

'Is your father here, Rosalie?' the latter asked.

'Yes, just across there,' she said, pointing with her hand and still smiling.

Leaving the part of the field she had been weeding, she walked on before him with the vigorous springiness of a hard-working woman, her head unshielded from the sun, her neck all sunburnt, her hair black and coarse like a horse's mane. Her green-stained hands exhaled the odour of the weeds she had been pulling up.

'Father,' she called out, 'here's Monsieur le Cure asking for you.'

And there she remained, bold, unblushing, with a sly smile still hovering over her features. Bambousse, a stout, sweating, round-faced man, left his work and gaily came towards the priest.

'I'd take my oath you are going to speak to me about the repairs of the church,' he exclaimed, as he clapped his earthy hands. 'Well, then, Monsieur le Cure, I can only say no, it's impossible. The commune hasn't got the coin. If the Lord provides plaster and tiles, we'll provide the workmen.'

At this jest of his the unbelieving peasant burst into a loud guffaw, slapped his thighs, coughed, and almost choked himself.

'It was not for the church I came,' replied the Abbe Mouret. 'I wanted to speak to you about your daughter Rosalie.'

'Rosalie? What has she done to you, then?' inquired Bambousse, his eyes blinking.

The girl was boldly staring at the young priest, scrutinising his white hands and slender, feminine neck, as if trying to make him redden. He, however, bluntly and with unruffled countenance, as if speaking of something quite indifferent, continued:

'You know what I mean, Bambousse. She must get married.'

'Oh, that's it, is it?' muttered the old man, with a bantering look. 'Many thanks for the message. The Brichets sent you, didn't they? Mother Brichet goes to mass, and so you give her a helping hand to marry her son—it's all very fine. But, I've got nothing to do with that. It doesn't suit me. That's all.'

Thereupon the astonished priest represented to him that the scandal must be stopped, and that he ought to forgive Fortune, as the latter was willing to make reparation for his transgression, and that, lastly, his daughter's reputation demanded a speedy marriage.

'Ta, ta, ta,' replied Bambousse, what a lot of words! I shall keep my daughter, please understand it. All that's got nothing to do with me. That Fortune is a beggarly pauper, without a brass farthing. What an easy job, if one could marry a girl like that! At that rate we should have all the young things marrying off morning and night. Thank Heaven! I'm not worried about Rosalie: everybody knows what has happened; but it makes no difference. She can marry any one she chooses in the neighbourhood.'

'But the child?' interrupted the priest.

'The child indeed! There'll be time enough to think of that when it's born.'

Rosalie, perceiving the turn the priest's application was taking, now thought it proper to ram her fists into her eyes and whimper. And she even let herself fall upon the ground.

'Shut up, will you, you hussy!' howled her father in a rage. And he proceeded to revile her in the coarsest terms, which made her laugh silently behind her clenched fists.

'You won't shut up? won't you? Just wait a minute then, you jade!' continued old Bambousse. And thereupon he picked up a clod of earth and flung it at her. It burst upon her knot of hair, crumbling down her neck and smothering her in dust. Dizzy from the blow, she bounded to her feet and fled, sheltering her head between her hands. But Bambousse had time to fling two more clods at her, and if the first only grazed her left shoulder, the next caught her full on the base of the spine, with such force that she fell upon her knees.

'Bambousse!' cried the priest, as he wrenched from the peasant's hand a number of stones which he had just picked up.

'Let be, Monsieur le Cure,' said the other. 'It was only soft earth. I ought to have thrown these stones at her. It's easy to see that you don't know girls. Hard as nails, all of them. I might duck that one in the well, I might break all her bones with a cudgel, and she'd still be just the same. But I've got my eye on her, and if I catch her!... Ah! well, they are all like that.'

He was already comforted. He took a good pull at a big flat bottle of wine, encased in wicker-work, which lay warming on the hot ground. And breaking once more into a laugh, he said: 'If I only had a glass, Monsieur le Cure, I would offer you some with pleasure.'

'So then,' again asked the priest, 'this marriage?'

'No, it can't be; I should get laughed at. Rosalie is a stout wench. She's worth a man to me. I shall have to hire a lad the day she goes off.... We can have another talk about it after the vintage. Besides, I don't want to be robbed. Give and take, say I. That's fair. What do you think?'

Nevertheless for another long half-hour did the priest remain there preaching to Bambousse, speaking to him of God, and plying him with all the reasons suited to the circumstances. But the old man had resumed his work; he shrugged his shoulders, jested, and grew more and more obstinate. At last, he broke out: 'But if you asked me for a sack of corn, you would give me money, wouldn't you? So why do you want me to let my daughter go for nothing?'

Much discomfited, Abbe Mouret left him. As he went down the path he saw Rosalie rolling about under an olive tree with Voriau, who was licking her face. With her arms whirling, she kept on repeating: 'You tickle me, you big stupid. Leave off!'

When she perceived the priest, she made an attempt at a blush, settled her clothes, and once more raised her fists to her eyes. He, on his part, sought to console her by promising to attempt some fresh efforts with her father, adding that, in the meantime, she should do nothing to aggravate her sin. And then, as she impudently smiled at him, he pictured hell, where wicked women burn in torment. And afterwards he left her, his duty done, his soul once more full of the serenity which enabled him to pass undisturbed athwart the corruptions of the world.

VII

The morning was becoming terribly hot. In that huge rocky amphitheatre the sun kindled a furnace-like glare from the moment when the first fine weather began. By the planet's height in the sky Abbe Mouret now perceived that he had only just time to return home if he wished to get there by eleven o'clock and escape a scolding from La Teuse. Having finished reading his breviary and made his application to Bambousse, he swiftly retraced his steps, gazing as he went at his church, now a grey spot in the distance, and at the black rigid silhouette which the big cypress-tree, the Solitaire, set against the blue sky. Amidst the drowsiness fostered by the heat, he thought of how richly that evening he might decorate the Lady chapel for the devotions of the month of Mary. Before him the road offered a carpet of dust, soft to the tread and of dazzling whiteness.

At the Croix-Verte, as the Abbe was about to cross the highway leading from Plassans to La Palud, a gig coming down the hill compelled him to step behind a heap of stones. Then, as he crossed the open space, a voice called to him: 'Hallo, Serge, my boy!'

The gig had pulled up and from it a man leant over. The priest recognised him—he was an uncle of his, Doctor Pascal Rougon, or Monsieur Pascal, as the poor folk of Plassans, whom he attended for nothing, briefly styled him. Although barely over fifty, he was already snowy white, with a big beard and abundant hair, amidst which his handsome regular features took an expression of shrewdness and benevolence.*

* See M. Zola's novels, Dr. Pascal and The Fortune of the
Rougons.—ED.

'So you potter about in the dust at this hour of the day?' he said gaily, as he stooped to grasp the Abbe's hands. 'You're not afraid of sunstroke?'

'No more than you are, uncle,' answered the priest, laughing.

'Oh, I have the hood of my trap to shield me. Besides, sick folks won't wait. People die at all times, my boy.' And he went on to relate that he was now on his way to old Jeanbernat, the steward of the Paradou, who had had an apoplectic stroke the night before. A neighbour, a peasant on his way to Plassans market, had summoned him.

'He must be dead by this time,' the doctor continued. 'However, we must make sure.... Those old demons are jolly tough, you know.'

He was already raising his whip, when Abbe Mouret stopped him.

'Stay! what o'clock do you make it, uncle?'

'A quarter to eleven.'

The Abbe hesitated; he already seemed to hear La Teuse's terrible voice bawling in his ears that his luncheon was getting cold. But he plucked up courage and added swiftly: 'I'll go with you, uncle. The unhappy man may wish to reconcile himself to God in his last hour.'

Doctor Pascal could not restrain a laugh.

'What, Jeanbernat!' he said; 'ah, well! if ever you convert him! Never mind, come all the same. The sight of you is enough to cure him.'

The priest got in. The doctor, apparently regretting his jest, displayed an affectionate warmth of manner, whilst from time to time clucking his tongue by way of encouraging his horse. And out of the corner of his eye he inquisitively observed his nephew with the keenness of a scientist bent on taking notes. In short kindly sentences he inquired about his life, his habits, and the peaceful happiness he enjoyed at Les Artaud. And at each satisfactory reply he murmured, as if to himself in a tone of reassurance: 'Come, so much the better; that's just as it should be!'

He displayed peculiar anxiety about the young priest's state of health. And Serge, greatly surprised, assured him that he was in splendid trim, and had neither fits of giddiness or of nausea, nor headaches whatsoever.

'Capital, capital,' reiterated his uncle Pascal. 'In spring, you see, the blood is active. But you are sound enough. By-the-bye, I saw your brother Octave at Marseilles last month. He is off to Paris, where he will get a fine berth in a high-class business. The young beggar, a nice life he leads.'

'What life?' innocently inquired the priest.

To avoid replying the doctor chirruped to his horse, and then went on: 'Briefly, everybody is well—your aunt Felicite, your uncle Rougon, and the others. Still, that does not hinder our needing your prayers. You are the saint of the family, my lad; I rely upon you to save the whole lot.'

He laughed, but in such a friendly, good-humoured way that Serge himself began to indulge in jocularity.

'You see,' continued Pascal, 'there are some among the lot whom it won't be easy to lead to Paradise. Some nice confessions you'd hear if all came in turn. For my part, I can do without their confessions; I watch them from a distance; I have got their records at home among my botanical specimens and medical notes. Some day I shall be able to draw up a wondrously interesting diagram. We shall see; we shall see!'

He was forgetting himself, carried away by his enthusiasm for science. A glance at his nephew's cassock pulled him up short.

'As for you, you're a parson,' he muttered; 'you did well; a parson's a very happy man. The calling absorbs you, eh? And so you've taken to the good path. Well! you would never have been satisfied otherwise. Your relatives, starting like you, have done a deal of evil, and still they are unsatisfied. It's all logically perfect, my lad. A priest completes the family. Besides, it was inevitable. Our blood was bound to run to that. So much the better for you; you have had the most luck.' Correcting himself, however, with a strange smile, he added: 'No, it's your sister Desiree who has had the best luck of all.'

He whistled, whipped up his horse, and changed the conversation. The gig, after climbing a somewhat steep slope, was threading its way through desolate ravines; at last it reached a tableland, where the hollow road skirted an interminable and lofty wall. Les Artaud had disappeared; they found themselves in the heart of a desert.

'We are getting near, are we not?' asked the priest.

'This is the Paradou,' replied the doctor, pointing to the wall. 'Haven't you been this way before, then? We are not three miles from Les Artaud. A splendid property it must have been, this Paradou. The park wall this side alone is quite a mile and a half long. But for over a hundred years it's all been running wild.'

'There are some fine trees,' observed the Abbe, as he looked up in astonishment at the luxuriant mass of foliage which jutted over.

'Yes, that part is very fertile. In fact, the park is a regular forest amidst the bare rocks which surround it. The Mascle, too, rises there; I have heard four or five springs mentioned, I fancy.'

In short sentences, interspersed with irrelevant digressions, he then related the story of the Paradou, according to the current legend of the countryside. In the time of Louis XV., a great lord had erected a magnificent palace there, with vast gardens, fountains, trickling streams, and statues—a miniature Versailles hidden away among the stones, under the full blaze of the southern sun. But he had there spent but one season with a lady of bewitching beauty, who doubtless died there, as none had ever seen her leave. Next year the mansion was destroyed by fire, the park doors were nailed up, the very loopholes of the walls were filled with mould; and thus, since that remote time, not a glance had penetrated that vast enclosure which covered the whole of one of the plateaux of the Garrigue hills.

'There can be no lack of nettles there,' laughingly said Abbe Mouret. 'Don't you find that the whole wall reeks of damp, uncle?'

A pause followed, and he asked:

'And whom does the Paradou belong to now?'

'Why, nobody knows,' the doctor answered. 'The owner did come here once, some twenty years ago. But he was so scared by the sight of this adders' nest that he has never turned up since. The real master is the caretaker, that old oddity, Jeanbernat, who has managed to find quarters in a lodge where the stones still hang together. There it is, see—that grey building yonder, with its windows all smothered in ivy.'

The gig passed by a lordly iron gate, ruddy with rust, and lined inside with a layer of boards. The wide dry throats were black with brambles. A hundred yards further on was the lodge inhabited by Jeanbernat. It stood within the park, which it overlooked. But the old keeper had apparently blocked up that side of his dwelling, and had cleared a little garden by the road. And there he lived, facing southwards, with his back turned upon the Paradou, as if unaware of the immensity of verdure that stretched away behind him.

The young priest jumped down, looking inquisitively around him and questioning the doctor, who was hurriedly fastening the horse to a ring fixed in the wall.

'And the old man lives all alone in this out-of-the-way hole?' he asked.

'Yes, quite alone,' replied his uncle, adding, however, the next minute: 'Well, he has with him a niece whom he had to take in, a queer girl, a regular savage. But we must make haste. The whole place looks death-like.'

VIII

The house with its shutters closed seemed wrapped in slumber as it stood there in the midday sun, amidst the hum of the big flies that swarmed all up the ivy to the roof tiles. The sunlit ruin was steeped in happy quietude. When the doctor had opened the gate of the narrow garden, which was enclosed by a lofty quickset hedge, there, in the shadow cast by a wall, they found Jeanbernat, tall and erect, and calmly smoking his pipe, as in the deep silence he watched his vegetables grow.

'What, are you up then, you humbug?' exclaimed the astonished doctor.

'So you were coming to bury me, were you?' growled the old man harshly. 'I don't want anybody. I bled myself.'

He stopped short as he caught sight of the priest, and assumed so threatening an expression that the doctor hastened to intervene.

'This is my nephew,' he said; 'the new Cure of Les Artaud—a good fellow, too. Devil take it, we haven't been bowling over the roads at this hour of the day to eat you, Jeanbernat.'

The old man calmed down a little.

'I don't want any shavelings here,' he grumbled. 'They're enough to make one croak. Mind, doctor, no priests, and no physics when I go off, or we shall quarrel. Let him come in, however, as he is your nephew.'

Abbe Mouret, struck dumb with amazement, could not speak a word. He stood there in the middle of the path scanning that strange solitaire, with scorched, brick-tinted face, and limbs all withered and twisted like a bundle of ropes, who seemed to bear the burden of his eighty years with a scornful contempt for life. When the doctor attempted to feel his pulse, his ill-humour broke out afresh.

'Do leave me in peace! I bled myself with my knife, I tell you. It's all over, now. Who was the fool of a peasant who disturbed you? The doctor here, and the priest as well, why not the mutes too! Well, it can't be helped, people will be fools. It won't prevent us from having a drink, eh?'

He fetched a bottle and three glasses, and stood them on an old table which he brought out into the shade. Then, having filled the glasses to the brim, he insisted on clinking them. His anger had given place to jeering cheerfulness.

'It won't poison you, Monsieur le Cure,' he said. 'A glass of good wine isn't a sin. Upon my word, however, this is the first time I ever clinked a glass with a cassock, but no offence to you. That poor Abbe Caffin, your predecessor, refused to argue with me. He was afraid.'

Jeanbernat gave vent to a hearty laugh, and then went on: 'Just fancy, he had pledged himself that he would prove to me that God exists. So, whenever I met him, I defied him to do it; and he sloped off crestfallen, I can tell you.'

'What, God does not exist!' cried Abbe Mouret, roused from his silence.

'Oh! just as you please,' mockingly replied Jeanbernat. 'We'll begin together all over again, if it's any pleasure to you. But I warn you that I'm a tough hand at it. There are some thousands of books in one of the rooms upstairs, which were rescued from the fire at the Paradou: all the philosophers of the eighteenth century, a whole heap of old books on religion. I've learned some fine things from them. I've been reading them these twenty years. Marry! you'll find you've got some one who can talk, Monsieur le Cure.'

He had risen, slowly waving his hand towards the surrounding horizon, to the earth and to the sky, and repeating solemnly: 'There's nothing, nothing, nothing. When the sun is snuffed out, all will be at an end.'

Doctor Pascal nudged Abbe Mouret with his elbow. With blinking eyes he was curiously observing the old man and nodding approvingly in order to induce him to talk. 'So you are a materialist, Jeanbernat?' he said.

'Oh, I am only a poor man,' replied the old fellow, relighting his pipe. 'When Count de Corbiere, whose foster-brother I was, died from a fall from his horse, his children sent me here to look after this park of the Sleeping Beauty, in order to get rid of me. I was sixty years old then, and I thought I was about done. But death forgot me; and I had to make myself a burrow. If one lives all alone, look you, one gets to see things in rather a queer fashion. The trees are no longer trees, the earth puts on the ways of a living being, the stones seem to tell you tales. A parcel of rubbish, eh? But I know some secrets that would fairly stagger you. Besides, what do you think there is to do in this devilish desert? I read the old books; it was more amusing than shooting. The Count, who used to curse like a heathen, was always saying to me: "Jeanbernat, my boy, I fully expect to meet you again in the hot place, so that you will be able to serve me there as you have up here."'

Once more he waved his hand to the horizon and added: 'You hear, nothing; there's nothing. It's all foolery.'

Dr. Pascal began to laugh.

'A pleasant piece of foolery, at any rate,' he said. 'Jeanbernat, you are a deceiver. I suspect you are in love, in spite of your affectation of being blase. You were speaking very tenderly of the trees and stones just now.'

'Oh, no, I assure you,' murmured the old man, 'I have done with that. At one time, it's true, when I first knew you and used to go herborising with you, I was stupid enough to love all sorts of things I came across in that huge liar, the country. Fortunately, the old volumes have killed all that. I only wish my garden was smaller; I don't go out into the road twice a year. You see that bench? That's where I spend all my time, just watching my lettuces grow.'

'And what about your rounds in the park?' broke in the doctor.

'In the park!' repeated Jeanbernat, with a look of profound surprise. 'Why, it's more than twelve years since I set foot in it! What do you suppose I could do inside that cemetery? It's too big. It's stupid, what with those endless trees and moss everywhere and broken statues, and holes in which one might break one's neck at every step. The last time I went in there, it was so dark under the trees, there was such a stink of wild flowers, and such queer breezes blew along the paths, that I felt almost afraid. So I have shut myself up to prevent the park coming in here. A patch of sunlight, three feet of lettuce before me, and a big hedge shutting out all the view, why, that's more than enough for happiness. Nothing, that's what I'd like, nothing at all, something so tiny that nothing from outside could come to disturb me. Seven feet of earth, if you like, just to be able to croak on my back.'

He struck the table with his fist, and suddenly raised his voice to call out to Abbe Mouret: 'Come, just another glass, your reverence. The old gentleman isn't at the bottom of the bottle, you know.'

The priest felt ill at ease. To lead back to God that singular old man, whose reason seemed to him to be strangely disordered, appeared a task beyond his powers. He now remembered certain bits of gossip he had heard from La Teuse about the Philosopher, as the peasants of Les Artaud dubbed Jeanbernat. Scraps of scandalous stories vaguely floated in his memory. He rose, making a sign to the doctor that he wished to leave this house, where he seemed to inhale an odour of damnation. But, in spite of his covert fears, a strange feeling of curiosity made him linger. He simply walked to the end of the garden, throwing a searching glance into the vestibule, as if to see beyond it, behind the walls. All he could perceive, however, through the gaping doorway, was the black staircase. So he came back again, and sought for some hole, some glimpse of that sea of foliage which he knew was near by the mighty murmur that broke upon the house, like the sound of waves.

'And is the little one well?' asked the doctor, taking up his hat.

'Pretty well,' answered Jeanbernat. 'She's never here. She often disappears all day long—still, she may be in the upstair rooms.'

He raised his head and called: 'Albine! Albine!' Then with a shrug of his shoulders, he added: 'Yes, my word, she is a nice hussy.... Well, till next time, Monsieur le Cure. I'm always at your disposal.'

Abbe Mouret, however, had no time to accept the Philosopher's challenge. A door suddenly opened at the end of the vestibule; a dazzling breach was made in the black darkness of the wall, and through the breach came a vision of a virgin forest, a great depth of woodland, beneath a flood of sunbeams. In that sudden blaze of light the priest distinctly perceived certain far-away things: a large yellow flower in the middle of a lawn, a sheet of water falling from a lofty rock, a colossal tree filled with a swarm of birds; and all this steeped, lost, blazing in such a tangle of greenery, such riotous luxuriance of vegetation, that the whole horizon seemed one great burst of shooting foliage. The door banged to, and everything vanished.

'Ah! the jade!' cried Jeanbernat, 'she was in the Paradou again!'

Albine was now laughing on the threshold of the vestibule. She wore an orange-coloured skirt, with a large red kerchief fastened round her waist, thus looking like some gipsy in holiday garb. And she went on laughing, her head thrown back, her bosom swelling with mirth, delighted with her flowers, wild flowers which she had plaited into her fair hair, fastened to her neck, her bodice, and her bare slender golden arms. She seemed like a huge nosegay, exhaling a powerful perfume.

'Ay, you are a beauty!' growled the old man. 'You smell of weeds enough to poison one—would any one think she was sixteen, that doll?'

Albine remained unabashed, however, and laughed still more heartily. Doctor Pascal, who was her great friend, let her kiss him.

'So you are not frightened in the Paradou?' he asked.

'Frightened? What of?' she said, her eyes wide open with astonishment. 'The walls are too high, no one can get in. There's only myself. It is my garden, all my very own. A fine big one, too. I haven't found out where it ends yet.'

'And the animals?' interrupted the doctor.

'The animals? Oh! they don't hurt; they all know me well.'

'But it is very dark under the trees?'

'Course! there's shade: if there were none, the sun would burn my face up. It is very pleasant in the shade among the leaves.'

She flitted about, filling the little garden with the rustling sweep of her skirts, and scattering round the pungent odour of wild flowers which clung to her. She had smiled at Abbe Mouret without trace of shyness, without heed of the astonished look with which he observed her. The priest had stepped aside. That fair-haired maid, with long oval face, glowing with life, seemed to him to be the weird mysterious offspring of the forest of which he had caught a glimpse in a sheet of sunlight.

'I say, I have got some blackbird nestlings; would you like them?' Albine asked the doctor.

'No, thanks,' he answered, laughing. 'You should give them to the Cure's sister; she is very fond of pets. Good day, Jeanbernat.'

Albine, however, had fastened on the priest.

'You are the vicar of Les Artaud, aren't you? You have a sister? I'll go and see her. Only you must not speak to me about God. My uncle will not have it.'

'You bother us, be off,' exclaimed Jeanbernat, shrugging his shoulders. Then bounding away like a goat, dropping a shower of flowers behind her, she disappeared. The slam of a door was heard, and from behind the house came bursts of laughter, which died away in the distance like the scampering rush of some mad animal let loose among the grass.

'You'll see, she will end by sleeping in the Paradou,' muttered the old man with indifference.

And as he saw his visitors off, he added: 'If you should find me dead one of these fine days, doctor, just do me the favour of pitching me into the muck-pit there, behind my lettuces. Good evening, gentlemen.'

He let the wooden gate which closed the hedge fall to again, and the house assumed once more its aspect of happy peacefulness in the noonday sunlight, amidst the buzzing of the big flies that swarmed all up the ivy even to the roof tiles.

IX

The gig once more rolled along the road skirting the Paradou's interminable wall. Abbe Mouret, still silent, scanned with upturned eyes the huge boughs which stretched over that wall, like the arms of giants hidden there. All sorts of sounds came from the park: rustling of wings, quivering of leaves, furtive bounds at which branches snapped, mighty sighs that bowed the young shoots—a vast breath of life sweeping over the crests of a nation of trees. At times, as he heard a birdlike note that seemed like a human laugh, the priest turned his head, as if he felt uneasy.

'A queer girl!' said his uncle as he eased the reins a little. 'She was nine years old when she took up her quarters with that old heathen. Some brother of his had ruined himself, though in what I can't remember. The little one was at school somewhere when her father killed himself. She was even quite a little lady, up to reading, embroidery, chattering, and strumming on the piano. And such a coquette too! I saw her arrive with open-worked stockings, embroidered skirts, frills, cuffs, a heap of finery. Ah, well! the finery didn't last long!'

He laughed. A big stone nearly upset the gig.

'It will be lucky if I don't leave a wheel in this cursed road!' he muttered. 'Hold on, my boy.'

The wall still stretched beside them: the priest still listened.

'As you may well imagine,' continued the doctor, 'the Paradou, what with its sun, its stones, and its thistles, would wreck a whole outfit every day. Three or four mouthfuls, that's all it made of all the little one's beautiful dresses. She used to come back naked. Now she dresses like a savage. To-day she was rather presentable; but sometimes she has scarcely anything on beyond her shoes and chemise. Did you hear her? The Paradou is hers. The very day after she came she took possession of it. She lives in it; jumps out of the window when Jeanbernat locks the door, bolts off in spite of all, goes nobody knows whither, buries herself in some invisible burrows known only to herself. She must have a fine time in that wilderness.'

'Hark, uncle!' interrupted Abbe Mouret. 'Isn't that some animal running behind the wall?'

Uncle Pascal listened.

'No,' he said after a minute's silence, 'it is the rattle of the trap on the stones. No, the child doesn't play the piano now. I believe she has even forgotten how to read. Just picture to yourself a young lady gone back to a state of primevalness, turned out to play on a desert island. My word, if ever you get to know of a girl who needs proper bringing up, I advise you not to entrust her to Jeanbernat. He has a most primitive way of letting nature alone. When I ventured to speak to him about Albine he answered me that he must not prevent trees from growing as they pleased. He says he is for the normal development of temperaments.... All the same, they are very interesting, both of them. I never come this way without paying them a visit.'

The gig was now emerging from the hollowed road. At this point the wall of the Paradou turned and wound along the crest of the hills as far as one could see. As Abbe Mouret turned to take a last look at that grey-hued barrier, whose impenetrable austerity had at last begun to annoy him, a rustling of shaken boughs was heard and a clump of young birch trees seemed to bow in greeting from above the wall.

'I knew some animal was running behind,' said the priest.

But, although nobody could be seen, though nothing was visible in the air above save the birches rocking more and more violently, they heard a clear, laughing voice call out: 'Good-bye, doctor! good-bye, Monsieur le Cure! I am kissing the tree, and the tree is sending you my kisses.'

'Why! it is Albine,' exclaimed Doctor Pascal. 'She must have followed the trap at a run. Jumping over bushes is mere play to her, the little elf!'

And he in his turn shouted out:

'Good-bye, my pet! How tall you must be to bow like that.'

The laughter grew louder, the birches bowed still lower, scattering their leaves around even on the hood of the gig.

'I am as tall as the trees; all the leaves that fall are kisses,' replied the voice now mellowed by distance, so musical, so merged into the rippling whispers of the park, that the young priest was thrilled.

The road grew better. On coming down the slope Les Artaud reappeared in the midst of the scorched plain. When the gig reached the turning to the village, Abbe Mouret would not let his uncle drive him back to the vicarage. He jumped down, saying:

'No, thanks, I prefer to walk: it will do me good.'

'Well, just as you like,' at last answered the doctor. And with a clasp of the hand, he added: 'Well, if you only had such parishioners as that old brute Jeanbernat, you wouldn't often be disturbed. However, you yourself wanted to come. And mind you keep well. At the slightest ache, night or day, send for me. You know I attend all the family gratis.... There, good-bye, my boy.'

X

Abbe Mouret felt more at ease when he found himself again alone, walking along the dusty road. The stony fields brought him back to his dream of austerity, of an inner life spent in a desert. From the trees all along the sunken road disturbing moisture had fallen on his neck, which now the burning sun was drying. The sight of the lean almond trees, the scanty corn crops, the weak vines, on either side of the way, soothed him, delivered him from the perturbation into which the lusty atmosphere of the Paradou had thrown him. Amid the blinding glare that flowed from heaven over the bare land, Jeanbernat's blasphemies no longer cast even a shadow. A thrill of pleasure ran through the priest as he raised his head and caught sight of the solitaire's motionless bar-like silhouette and the pink patch of tiles on the church.

But, as he walked on, fresh anxiety beset the Abbe. La Teuse would give him a fine reception; for his luncheon must have been waiting nearly two hours for him. He pictured her terrible face, the flood of words with which she would greet him, the angry clatter of kitchen ware which he would hear the whole afternoon. When he had got through Les Artaud, his fear became so lively that he hesitated, full of trepidation, and wondered if it would not be better to go round and reach the parsonage by way of the church. But, while he deliberated, La Teuse herself appeared on the doorstep of the parsonage, her cap all awry, and her hands on her hips. With drooping head he had perforce to climb the slope under her storm-laden gaze, which he could feel weighing upon his shoulders.

'I believe I am rather late, my good Teuse,' he stammered, as he turned the path's last bend.

La Teuse waited till he stood quite close before her. She then gave him a furious glance, and, without a word, turned and stalked before him into the dining-room, banging her big heels upon the floor-tiles and so rigid with ire that she hardly limped at all.

'I have had so many things to do,' began the priest, scared by this dumb reception. 'I have been running about all the morning.'

But she cut him short with another look, so fixed, so full of anger, that he felt his legs give way under him. He sat down, and began to eat. She waited on him in the sharp, mechanical manner of an automaton, all but breaking the plates with the violence with which she set them down. The silence became so awful that, choking with emotion, he was unable to swallow his third mouthful.

'My sister has had her luncheon?' he asked. 'Quite right of her. Luncheon should always be served whenever I am kept out.'

No answer came. La Teuse stood there waiting to remove his plate as soon as he should have emptied it. Thereupon, feeling that he could not possibly eat with those implacable eyes crushing him, he pushed his plate away. This angry gesture acted on La Teuse like a whip stroke, rousing her from her obstinate stiffness. She fairly jumped.

'Ah! that's how it is!' she exclaimed. 'There you are again, losing your temper! Very well, I am off; you can pay my fare, so that I may go back home. I have had enough of Les Artaud, and your church, and everything else!'

She took off her apron with trembling hands.

'You must have seen that I didn't wish to say anything to you. A nice life, indeed! Only mountebanks do such things, Monsieur le Cure! This is eleven o'clock, ain't it! Aren't you ashamed of sitting at table when it's almost two o'clock? It's not like a Christian, no, it is not like a Christian!'

And, taking her stand before him, she went on: 'Well, where do you come from? whom have you seen? what business can have kept you? If only you were a child you would have the whip. It isn't the place for a priest to be, on the roads in the blazing sun like a tramp without a roof to put over his head. A fine state you are in, with your shoes all white and your cassock smothered in dust! Who will brush your cassock for you? Who will buy you another one? Speak out, will you; tell me what you have been doing! My word! if everybody didn't know you, they would end by thinking queer things about you. And shall I tell you? Why, I won't say but what you may have been up to something wrong. When folks lunch at such hours they are capable of anything!'

Abbe Mouret let the storm blow over him. At the old servant's wrathful words he experienced a kind of relief.

'Come, my good Teuse,' he said, 'you will first put your apron on again.'

'No, no,' she cried, 'it's all over, I am going.'

But he got up and, laughing, tied her apron round her waist. She struggled against him and stuttered: 'I tell you no! You are a wheedler. I can see through your game, I see you want to come it over me with your honeyed words. Where did you go? We'll see afterwards.'

He gaily sat down to table again like a man who has gained a victory.

'First, I must be allowed to eat. I am dying with hunger,' said he.

'No doubt,' she murmured, her pity moved. 'Is there any common sense in it? Would you like me to fry you a couple of eggs? It would not take long. Well, if you have enough. But everything is cold! And I had taken such pains with your aubergines! Nice they are now! They look like old shoe-leather. Luckily you haven't got a tender tooth like poor Monsieur Caffin. Yes, you have some good points, I don't deny it.'

Thus chattering, she waited on him with all a mother's care. After he had finished she ran to the kitchen to see if the coffee was still warm. She frisked about and limped most outrageously in her delight at having made things up with him. As a rule Abbe Mouret fought shy of coffee, which always upset his nervous system; but on this occasion, to ratify the conclusion of peace, he took the cup she brought him. And as he lingered at table she sat down opposite him and repeated gently, like a woman tortured by curiosity:

'Where have you been, Monsieur le Cure?'

'Well,' he answered with a smile, 'I have seen the Brichets, I have spoken to Bambousse.'

Thereupon he had to relate to her what the Brichets had said, what Bambousse had decided, and how they looked, and where they were at work. When he repeated to her the answer of Rosalie's father, 'Of course!' she exclaimed, 'if the child should die her mishap would go for nothing.' And clasping her hands with a look of envious admiration she added, 'How you must have chattered, your reverence! More than half the day spent to obtain such a fine result! You took it easy coming home? It must have been very hot on the road?'

The Abbe, who by this time had risen, made no answer. He had been on the point of speaking about the Paradou, and asking for some information concerning it. But a fear of being flooded with eager questions, and a kind of vague unavowed shame, made him keep silence respecting his visit to Jeanbernat. He cut all further questions short by asking:

'Where is my sister? I don't hear her.'

'Come along, sir,' said La Teuse, beginning to laugh, and raising her finger to her lips.

They went into the next room, a country drawing-room, hung with faded wall-paper showing large grey flowers, and furnished with four armchairs and a sofa, covered with horse-hair. On the sofa now slept Desiree, stretched out at full length, with her head resting on her clenched hands. The pronounced curve of her bosom was raised somewhat by her upstretched arms, bare to the elbows. She was breathing somewhat heavily, her red lips parted, and thus showing her teeth.

'Lord! isn't she sleeping sound!' whispered La Teuse. 'She didn't even hear you pitching into me just now. Well, she must be precious tired. Just fancy, she was cleaning up her yard till nearly noon. And when she had eaten something, she came and dropped down there like a shot. She has not stirred since.'

For a moment the priest gazed lovingly at her. 'We must let her have as much rest as she wants,' he said.

'Of course. Isn't it a pity she's such an innocent? Just look at those big arms! Whenever I dress her I always think what a fine woman she would have made. Ay, she would have brought you some splendid nephews, sir. Don't you think she is like that stone lady in Plassans corn-market?'

She spoke thus of a Cybele stretched upon sheaves of wheat, the work of one of Puget's pupils, which was carved on the frontal of the market building. Without replying, however, Abbe Mouret gently pushed her out of the room, and begged her to make as little noise as possible. Till evening, therefore, perfect silence settled on the parsonage. La Teuse finished her washing in the shed. The priest, seated at the bottom of the little garden, his breviary fallen on his lap, remained absorbed in pious thoughts, while all around him rosy petals rained from the blossoming peach-trees.

XI

About six o'clock there came a sudden wakening. A noise of doors opening and closing, accompanied by bursts of laughter, shook the whole house. Desiree appeared, her hair all down and her arms still half bare.

'Serge! Serge!' she called.

And catching sight of her brother in the garden, she ran up to him and sat down for a minute on the ground at his feet, begging him to follow her:

'Do come and see the animals! You haven't seen the animals yet, have you? If you only knew how beautiful they are now!'

She had to beg very hard, for the yard rather scared him. But when he saw tears in Desiree's eyes, he yielded. She threw herself on his neck in a sudden puppy-like burst of glee, laughing more than ever, without attempting to dry her cheeks.

'Oh! how nice you are!' she stammered, as she dragged him off. 'You shall see the hens, the rabbits, the pigeons, and my ducks which have got fresh water, and my goat, whose room is as clean as mine now. I have three geese and two turkeys, you know. Come quick. You shall see all.'

Desiree was then twenty-two years old. Reared in the country by her nurse, a peasant woman of Saint-Eutrope, she had grown up anyhow. Her brain void of all serious thoughts, she had thriven on the fat soil and open air of the country, developing physically but never mentally, growing into a lovely animal—white, with rosy blood and firm skin. She was not unlike a high-bred donkey endowed with the power of laughter. Although she dabbled about from morning till night, her delicate hands and feet, the supple outlines of her hips, the bourgeois refinement of her maiden form remained unimpaired; so that she was in truth a creature apart—neither lady nor peasant—but a girl nourished by the soil, with the broad shoulders and narrow brow of a youthful goddess.

Doubtless it was by reason of her weak intellect that she was drawn towards animals. She was never happy save with them; she understood their language far better than that of mankind, and looked after them with motherly affection. Her reasoning powers were deficient, but in lieu thereof she had an instinct which put her on a footing of intelligence with them. At their very first cry of pain she knew what ailed them; she would choose dainties upon which they would pounce greedily. A single gesture from her quelled their squabbles. She seemed to know their good or their evil character at a glance; and related such long tales about the tiniest chick, with such an abundance and minuteness of detail, as to astound those to whom one chicken was exactly like any other. Her farmyard had thus become a country, as it were, over which she reigned; a country complex in its organisation, disturbed by rebellions, peopled by the most diverse creatures whose records were known to her alone. So accurate was her instinct that she detected the unfertile eggs in a sitting, and foretold the number of a litter of rabbits.

When, at sixteen, Desiree became a young woman, she retained all her wonted health; and rapidly developed, with round, free-swaying bust, broad hips like those of an antique statue, the full growth indeed of a vigorous animal. One might have thought that she had sprung from the rich soil of her poultry-yard, that she absorbed the sap with her sturdy legs, which were as firm as young trees. And nought disturbed her amidst all this plenitude. She found continuous satisfaction in being surrounded by birds and animals which ever increased and multiplied, their fruitfulness filling her with delight. Nothing could have been healthier. She innocently feasted on the odour and warmth of life, knowing no depraved curiosity, but retaining all the tranquillity of a beautiful animal, simply happy at seeing her little world thus multiply, feeling as if she thereby became a mother, the common natural mother of one and all.

Since she had been living at Les Artaud, she had spent her days in complete beatitude. At last she was satisfying the dream of her life, the only desire which had worried her amidst her weak-minded puerility. She had a poultry-yard, a nook all to herself, where she could breed animals to her heart's content. And she almost lived there, building rabbit-hutches with her own hands, digging out a pond for the ducks, knocking in nails, fetching straw, allowing no one to assist her. All that La Teuse had to do was to wash her afterwards. The poultry-yard was situated behind the cemetery; and Desiree often had to jump the wall, and run hither and thither among the graves after some fowl whom curiosity had led astray. Right at the end was a shed giving accommodation to the fowls and the rabbits; to the right was a little stable for the goat. Moreover, all the animals lived together; the rabbits ran about with the fowls, the nanny-goat would take a footbath in the midst of the ducks; the geese, the turkeys, the guinea-fowls, and the pigeons all fraternised in the company of three cats. Whenever Desiree appeared at the wooden fence which prevented her charges from making their way into the church, a deafening uproar greeted her.

'Eh! can't you hear them?' she said to her brother, as they reached the dining-room door.

But, when she had admitted him and closed the gate behind them, she was assailed so violently that she almost disappeared. The ducks and the geese, opening and shutting their beaks, tugged at her skirts; the greedy hens sprang up and pecked her hands; the rabbits squatted on her feet and then bounded up to her knees; whilst the three cats leapt upon her shoulders, and the goat bleated in its stable at being unable to reach her.

'Leave me alone, do! all you creatures!' she cried with a hearty sonorous laugh, feeling tickled by all the feathers, claws, and beaks and paws rubbing against her.

However, she did not attempt to free herself. As she often said, she would have let herself be devoured; it seemed so sweet to feel all this life cling to her and encompass her with the warmth of eider-down. At last only one cat persisted in remaining on her back.

'It's Moumou,' she said. 'His paws are like velvet.' Then, calling her brother's attention to the yard, she proudly added: 'See, how clean it is!'

The yard had indeed been swept out, washed, and raked over. But the disturbed water and the forked-up litter exhaled so fetid and powerful an odour that Abbe Mouret half choked. The dung was heaped against the graveyard wall in a huge smoking mound.

'What a pile, eh?' continued Desiree, leading her brother into the pungent vapour, 'I put it all there myself, nobody helped me. Go on, it isn't dirty. It cleans. Look at my arms.'

As she spoke she held out her arms, which she had merely dipped into a pail of water—regal arms they were, superbly rounded, blooming like full white roses amidst the manure.

'Yes, yes,' gently said the priest, 'you have worked hard. It's very nice now.'

Then he turned towards the wicket, but she stopped him.

'Do wait a bit. You shall see them all. You have no idea—' And so saying, she dragged him to the rabbit house under the shed.

'There are young ones in all the hutches,' she said, clapping her hands in glee.

Then at great length she proceeded to explain to him all about the litters. He had to crouch down and come close to the wire netting, whilst she gave him minute details. The mother does, with big restless ears, eyed him askance, panting and motionless with fear. Then, in one hutch, he saw a hairy cavity wherein crawled a living heap, an indistinct dusky mass heaving like a single body. Close by some young ones, with enormous heads, ventured to the edge of the hole. A little farther were yet stronger ones, who looked like young rats, ferreting and leaping about with their raised rumps showing their white scuts. Others, white ones with pale ruby eyes, and black ones with jet eyes, galloped round their hutches with playful grace. Now a scare would make them bolt off swiftly, revealing at every leap their slender reddened paws. Next they would squat down all in a heap, so closely packed that their heads could no longer be seen.

'It is you they are frightened at,' Desiree kept on saying. 'They know me well.'

She called them and drew some bread-crust from her pocket. The little rabbits then became more confident, and, with puckered noses, kept sidling up, and rearing against the netting one by one. She kept them like that for a minute to show her brother the rosy down upon their bellies, and then gave her crust to the boldest one. Upon this the whole of them flocked up, sliding forward and squeezing one another, but never quarreling. At one moment three little ones were all nibbling the same piece of crust, but others darted away, turning to the wall so as to eat in peace, while their mothers in the rear remained snuffing distrustfully and refused the crusts.

'Oh! the greedy little things!' exclaimed Desiree. 'They would eat like that till to-morrow morning! At night, even, you can bear them crunching the leaves they have overlooked in the day-time.'

The priest had risen as if to depart, but she never wearied of smiling on her dear little ones.

'You see the big one there, that's all white, with black ears—Well! he dotes on poppies. He is very clever at picking them out from the other weeds. The other day he got the colic. So I took him and kept him warm in my pocket. Since then he has been quite frisky.'

She poked her fingers through the wire netting and stroked the rabbits' backs.

'Wouldn't you say it was satin?' she continued. 'They are dressed like princes. And ain't they coquettish! Look, there's one who is always cleaning himself. He wears the fur off his paws.... If only you knew how funny they are! I say nothing, but I see all their little games. That grey one looking at us, for instance, used to hate a little doe, which I had to put somewhere else. There were terrible scenes between them. It would take too long to tell you all, but the last time he gave her a drubbing, when I came up in a rage, what do you think I saw? Why that rascal huddled up at the back there as if he was just at his last gasp. He wanted to make me believe that it was he who had to complain of her.'

Then Desiree paused to apostrophise the rabbit. 'Yes, you may listen to me; you're a rogue!' And turning towards her brother, 'He understands all I say,' she added softly, with a wink.

But Abbe Mouret could stand it no longer. He was perturbed by the heat that emanated from the litters, the life that crawled under the hair plucked from the does' bellies, exhaling powerful emanations. On the other hand, Desiree, as if slowly intoxicated, was growing brighter and pinker.

'But there's nothing to take you away!' she cried; 'you always seem anxious to go off. You must see my little chicks! They were born last night.'

She took some rice and threw a handful before her. The hen gravely drew near, clucking to the little band of chickens that followed her chirping and scampering as if in bewilderment. When they were fairly in the middle of the scattered rice the hen eagerly pecked at it, and threw down the grains she cracked, while her little ones hastily began to feed. All the charm of infancy was theirs. Half-naked as it were, with round heads, eyes sparkling like steel needles, beaks so queerly set, and down so quaintly ruffled up, they looked like penny toys. Desiree laughed with enjoyment at sight of them.

'What little loves they are!' she stammered.

She took up two of them, one in each hand, and smothered them with eager kisses. And then the priest had to inspect them all over, while she coolly said to him:

'It isn't easy to tell the cocks. But I never make a mistake. This one is a hen, and this one is a hen too.'

Then she set them on the ground again. Other hens were now coming up to eat the rice. A large ruddy cock with flaming plumage followed them, lifting his large feet with majestic caution.

'Alexander is getting splendid,' said the Abbe, to please his sister.

Alexander was the cock's name. He looked up at the young girl with his fiery eye, his head turned round, his tail outspread, and then installed himself close by her skirts.

'He is very fond of me,' she said. 'Only I can touch him. He is a good bird. There are fourteen hens, and never do I find a bad egg in the nests. Do I, Alexander?'

She stooped; the bird did not fly from her caress. A rush of blood seemed to set his comb aflame; flapping his wings, and stretching out his neck, he burst into a long crow which rang out like a blast from a brazen throat. Four times did he repeat his crow while all the cocks of Les Artaud answered in the distance. Desiree was greatly amused by her brother's startled looks.

'He deafens one, eh?' she said. 'He has a splendid voice. But he's not vicious, I assure you, though the hens are—You remember the big speckled one, that used to lay yellow eggs? Well, the day before yesterday she hurt her foot. When the others saw the blood they went quite mad. They all followed her, pecking at her and drinking her blood, so that by the evening they had eaten up her foot. I found her with her head behind a stone, like an idiot, saying nothing, and letting herself be devoured.'

The remembrance of the fowls' voracity made her laugh. She calmly related other cruelties of theirs: young chickens devoured, of which she had only found the necks and wings, and a litter of kittens eaten up in the stable in a few hours.

'You might give them a human being,' she continued, 'they'd finish him. And aren't they tough livers! They get on with a broken limb even. They may have wounds, big holes in their bodies, and still they'll gobble their victuals. That's what I like them for; their flesh grows again in two days; they are always as warm as if they had a store of sunshine under their feathers. When I want to give them a treat, I cut them up some raw meat. And worms too! Wait, you'll see how they love them.'

She ran to the dungheap, and unhesitatingly picked up a worm she found there. The fowls darted at her hands; but to amuse herself with the sight of their greediness she held the worm high above them. At last she opened her fingers, and forthwith the fowls hustled one another and pounced upon the worm. One of them fled with it in her beak, pursued by the others; it was thus taken, snatched away, and retaken many times until one hen, with a mighty gulp, swallowed it altogether. At that they all stopped short with heads thrown back, and eyes on the alert for another worm. Desiree called them by their names, and talked pettingly to them; while Abbe Mouret retreated a few steps from this display of voracious life.

'No, I am not at all comfortable,' he said to his sister, when she tried to make him feel the weight of a fowl she was fattening. 'It always makes me uneasy to touch live animals.'

He tried to smile, but Desiree taxed him with cowardice.

'Ah well, what about my ducks, and geese, and turkeys?' said she. 'What would you do if you had all those to look after? Ducks are dirty, if you like. Do you hear them shaking their bills in the water? And when they dive, you can only see their tails sticking straight up like ninepins. Geese and turkeys, too, are not easy to manage. Isn't it fun to see them walking along with their long necks, some quite white and others quite black? They look like ladies and gentlemen. And I wouldn't advise you to trust your finger to them. They would swallow it at a gulp. But my fingers, they only kiss—see!'

Her words were cut short by a joyous bleat from the goat, which had at last forced the door of the stable open. Two bounds and the animal was close to her, bending its forelegs, and affectionately rubbing its horns against her. To the priest, with its pointed beard and obliquely set eyes, it seemed to wear a diabolical grin. But Desiree caught it round the neck, kissed its head, played and ran with it, and talked about how she liked to drink its milk. She often did so, she said, when she was thirsty in the stable.

'See, it has plenty of milk,' she added, pointing to the animal's udder.

The priest lowered his eyes. He could remember having once seen in the cloister of Saint-Saturnin at Plassans a horrible stone gargoyle, representing a goat and a monk; and ever since he had always looked on goats as dissolute creatures of hell. His sister had only been allowed to get one after weeks of begging. For his part, whenever he came to the yard, he shunned all contact with the animal's long silky coat, and carefully guarded his cassock from the touch of its horns.

'All right, I'll let you go now,' said Desiree, becoming aware of his growing discomfort. 'But you must just let me show you something else first. Promise not to scold me, won't you? I have not said anything to you about it, because you wouldn't have allowed it.... But if you only knew how pleased I am!'

As she spoke she put on an entreating expression, clasped her hands, and laid her head upon her brother's shoulder.

'Another piece of folly, no doubt,' he murmured, unable to refrain from smiling.

'You won't mind, will you?' she continued, her eyes glistening with delight. 'You won't be angry?—He is so pretty!'

Thereupon she ran to open the low door under the shed, and forthwith a little pig bounded into the middle of the yard.

'Oh! isn't he a cherub?' she exclaimed with a look of profound rapture as she saw him leap out.

The little pig was indeed charming, quite pink, his snout washed clean by the greasy slops placed before him, though incessant routing in his trough had left a ring of dirt about his eyes. He trotted about, hustled the fowls, rushing to gobble up whatever was thrown them, and upsetting the little yard with his sudden turns and twists. His ears flapped over his eyes, his snout went snorting over the ground, and with his slender feet he resembled a toy animal on wheels. From behind, his tail looked like a bit of string that served to hang him up by.

'I won't have this beast here!' exclaimed the priest, terribly put out.

'Oh, Serge, dear old Serge,' begged Desiree again, 'don't be so unkind. See, what a harmless little thing he is! I'll wash him, I'll keep him very clean. La Teuse went and had him given her for me. We can't send him back now. See, he is looking at you; he wants to smell you. Don't be afraid, he won't eat you.'

But she broke off, seized with irresistible laughter. The little pig had blundered in a dazed fashion between the goat's legs, and tripped her up. And he was now madly careering round, squeaking, rolling, scaring all the denizens of the poultry-yard. To quiet him Desiree had to get him an earthen pan full of dish-water. In this he wallowed up to his ears, splashing and grunting, while quick quivers of delight coursed over his rosy skin. And now his uncurled tail hung limply down.

The stirring of this foul water put a crowning touch to Abbe Mouret's disgust. Ever since he had been there, he had choked more and more; his hands and chest and face were afire, and he felt quite giddy. The odour of the fowls and rabbits, the goat, and the pig, all mingled in one pestilential stench. The atmosphere, laden with the ferments of life, was too heavy for his maiden shoulders. And it seemed to him that Desiree had grown taller, expanding at the hips, waving huge arms, sweeping the ground with her skirts, and stirring up all that powerful odour which overpowered him. He had only just time to open the wicket. His feet clung to the stone flags still dank with manure, in such wise that it seemed as if he were held there by some clasp of the soil. And suddenly, despite himself, there came back to him a memory of the Paradou, with its huge trees, its black shadows, its penetrating perfumes.

'There, you are quite red now,' Desiree said to him as she joined him outside the wicket. 'Aren't you pleased to have seen everything? Do you hear the noise they are making?'

On seeing her depart, the birds and animals had thrown themselves against the trellis work emitting piteous cries. The little pig, especially, gave vent to prolonged whines that suggested the sharpening of a saw. Desiree, however, curtsied to them and kissed her finger-tips to them, laughing at seeing them all huddled together there, like so many lovers of hers. Then, hugging her brother, as she accompanied him to the garden, she whispered into his ear with a blush: 'I should so like a cow.'

He looked at her, with a ready gesture of disapproval.

'No, no, not now,' she hurriedly went on. 'We'll talk about it again later on—— But there would be room in the stable. A lovely white cow with red spots. You'd soon see what nice milk we should have. A goat becomes too little in the end. And when the cow has a calf!'

At the mere thought of this she skipped and clapped her hands with glee; and to the priest she seemed to have brought the poultry-yard away with her in her skirts. So he left her at the end of the garden, sitting in the sunlight on the ground before a hive, whence the bees buzzed like golden berries round her neck, along her bare arms and in her hair, without thought of stinging her.

XII

Brother Archangias dined at the parsonage every Thursday. As a rule he came early so as to talk over parish matters. It was he who, for the last three months, had kept the Abbe informed of all the affairs of the valley. That Thursday, while waiting till La Teuse should call them, they strolled about in front of the church. The priest, on relating his interview with Bambousse, was surprised to find that the Brother thought the peasant's reply quite natural.

'The man's right,' said the Ignorantin.* 'You don't give away chattels like that. Rosalie is no great bargain, but it's always hard to see your own daughter throw herself away on a pauper.'

* A popular name in France for a Christian Brother.—ED.

'Still,' rejoined Abbe Mouret, 'a marriage is the only way of stopping the scandal.'

The Brother shrugged his big shoulders and laughed aggravatingly. 'Do you think you'll cure the neighbourhood with that marriage?' he exclaimed. 'Before another two years Catherine will be following her sister's example. They all go the same way, and as they end by marrying, they snap their fingers at every one. These Artauds flourish in it all, as on a congenial dungheap. There is only one possible remedy, as I have told you before: wring all the girls' necks if you don't want the country to be poisoned. No husbands, Monsieur le Cure, but a good thick stick!'

Then calming down a bit, he added: 'Let every one do with their own as they think best.'

He went on to speak about fixing the hours for the catechism classes; but Abbe Mouret replied in an absent-minded way, his eyes dwelling on the village at his feet in the setting sun. The peasants were wending their way homewards, silently and slowly, with the dragging steps of wearied oxen returning to their sheds. Before the tumble-down houses stood women calling to one another, carrying on bawling conversations from door to door, while bands of children filled the roadway with the riot of their big clumsy shoes, grovelling and rolling and pushing each other about. A bestial odour ascended from that heap of tottering houses, and the priest once more fancied himself in Desiree's poultry-yard, where life ever increased and multiplied. Here, too, was the same incessant travail, which so disturbed him. Since morning his mind had been running on that episode of Rosalie and Fortune, and now his thoughts returned to it, to the foul features of existence, the incessant, fated task of Nature, which sowed men broadcast like grains of wheat. The Artauds were a herd penned in between four ranges of hills, increasing, multiplying, spreading more and more thickly over the land with each successive generation.

'See,' cried Brother Archangias, interrupting his discourse to point to a tall girl who was letting her sweetheart snatch a kiss, 'there is another hussy over there!'

He shook his long black arms at the couple and made them flee. In the distance, over the crimson fields and the peeling rocks, the sun was dying in one last flare. Night gradually came on. The warm fragrance of the lavender became cooler on the wings of the light evening breeze which now arose. From time to time a deep sigh fell on the ear as if that fearful land, consumed by ardent passions, had at length grown calm under the soft grey rain of twilight. Abbe Mouret, hat in hand, delighted with the coolness, once more felt quietude descend upon him.

'Monsieur le Cure! Brother Archangias!' cried La Teuse. 'Come quick! The soup is on the table.'

It was cabbage soup, and its odoriferous steam filled the parsonage dining-room. The Brother seated himself and fell to, slowly emptying the huge plate that La Teuse had put down before him. He was a big eater, and clucked his tongue as each mouthful descended audibly into his stomach. Keeping his eyes on his spoon, he did not speak a word.

'Isn't my soup good, then, Monsieur le Cure?' the old servant asked the priest. 'You are only fiddling with your plate.'

'I am not a bit hungry, my good Teuse,' Serge replied, smiling.

'Well! how can one wonder at it when you go on as you do! But you would have been hungry, if you hadn't lunched at past two o'clock.'

Brother Archangias, tilting into his spoon the last few drops of soup remaining in his plate, said gravely: 'You should be regular in your meals, Monsieur le Cure.'

At this moment Desiree, who also had finished her soup, sedately and in silence, rose and followed La Teuse to the kitchen. The Brother, then left alone with Abbe Mouret, cut himself some long strips of bread, which he ate while waiting for the next dish.

'So you made a long round to-day?' he asked the priest. But before the other could reply a noise of footsteps, exclamations, and ringing laughter, arose at the end of the passage, in the direction of the yard. A short altercation apparently took place. A flute-like voice which disturbed the Abbe rose in vexed and hurried accents, which finally died away in a burst of glee.

'What can it be?' said Serge, rising from his chair.

But Desiree bounded in again, carrying something hidden in her gathered-up skirt. And she burst out excitedly: 'Isn't she queer? She wouldn't come in at all. I caught hold of her dress; but she is awfully strong; she soon got away from me.'

'Whom on earth is she talking about?' asked La Teuse, running in from the kitchen with a dish of potatoes, across which lay a piece of bacon.

The girl sat down, and with the greatest caution drew from her skirt a blackbird's nest in which three wee fledglings were slumbering. She laid it on her plate. The moment the little birds felt the light, they stretched out their feeble necks and opened their crimson beaks to ask for food. Desiree clapped her hands, enchanted, seized with strange emotion at the sight of these hitherto unknown creatures.

'It's that Paradou girl!' exclaimed the Abbe suddenly, remembering everything.

La Teuse had gone to the window. 'So it is,' she said. 'I might have known that grasshopper's voice—— Oh! the gipsy! Look, she's stopped there to spy on us.'

Abbe Mouret drew near. He, too, thought that he could see Albine's orange-coloured skirt behind a juniper bush. But Brother Archangias, in a towering passion, raised himself on tiptoe behind him, and, stretching out his fist and wagging his churlish head, thundered forth: 'May the devil take you, you brigand's daughter! I will drag you right round the church by your hair if ever I catch you coming and casting your evil spells here!'

A peal of laughter, fresh as the breath of night, rang out from the path, followed by light hasty footsteps and the swish of a dress rustling through the grass like an adder. Abbe Mouret, standing at the window, saw something golden glide through the pine trees like a moonbeam. The breeze, wafted in from the open country, was now laden with that penetrating perfume of verdure, that scent of wildflowers, which Albine had scattered from her bare arms, unfettered bosom, and streaming tresses at the Paradou.

'An accursed soul! a child of perdition!' growled Brother Archangias, as he reseated himself at the dinner table. He fell greedily upon his bacon, and swallowed his potatoes whole instead of bread. La Teuse, however, could not persuade Desiree to finish her dinner. That big baby was lost in ecstasy over the nestlings, asking questions, wanting to know what food they ate, if they laid eggs, and how the cockbirds could be known.

The old servant, however, was troubled by a suspicion, and taking her stand on her sound leg, she looked the young cure in the face.

'So you know the Paradou people?' she said.

Thereupon he simply told the truth, relating the visit he had paid to old Jeanbernat. La Teuse exchanged scandalised glances with Brother Archangias. At first she answered nothing, but went round and round the table, limping frantically and stamping hard enough with her heels to split the flooring.

'You might have spoken to me of those people these three months past,' said the priest at last. 'I should have known at any rate what sort of people I was going to call upon.'

La Teuse stopped short as if her legs had just broken.

'Don't tell falsehoods, Monsieur le Cure,' she stuttered, 'don't tell them; you will only make your sin still worse. How dare you say I haven't spoken to you of the Philosopher, that heathen who is the scandal of the whole neighbourhood? The truth is, you never listen to me when I talk. It all goes in at one ear and out at the other. Ah, if you did listen to me, you'd spare yourself a good deal of trouble!'

'I, too, have spoken to you about those abominations,' affirmed the Brother.

Abbe Mouret lightly shrugged his shoulders. 'Well, I didn't remember it,' he said. It was only when I found myself at the Paradou that I fancied I recollected certain tales. Besides, I should have gone to that unhappy man all the same as I thought him in danger of death.'

Brother Archangias, his mouth full, struck the table violently with his knife, and roared: 'Jeanbernat is a dog; he ought to die like a dog.' Then seeing the priest about to protest he cut him short: 'No, no, for him there is no God, no penitence, no mercy. It would be better to throw the host to the pigs than carry it to that scoundrel.'

Then he helped himself to more potatoes, and with his elbows on the table, his chin in his plate, began chewing furiously. La Teuse, her lips pinched, quite white with anger, contented herself with saying dryly: 'Let it be, his reverence will have his own way. He has secrets from us now.'

Silence reigned. For a moment one only heard the working of Brother Archangias's jaws, and the extraordinary rumbling of his gullet. Desiree, with her bare arms round the nest in her plate, smiled to the little ones, talking to them slowly and softly in a chirruping of her own which they seemed to understand.

'People say what they have done when they have nothing to hide,' suddenly cried La Teuse.

And then silence reigned again. What exasperated the old servant was the mystery the priest seemed to make about his visit to the Paradou. She deemed herself a woman who had been shamefully deceived. Her curiosity smarted. She again walked round the table, not looking at the Abbe, not addressing anybody, but comforting herself with soliloquy.

'That's it; that's why we have lunch so late! We go gadding about till two o'clock in the afternoon. We go into such disreputable houses that we don't even dare to tell what we've done. And then we tell lies, we deceive everybody.'

'But nobody,' gently interrupted Abbe Mouret, who was forcing himself to eat a little more, so as to prevent La Teuse from getting crosser than ever, 'nobody asked me if I had been to the Paradou. I have not had to tell any lies.'

La Teuse, however, went on as if she had never heard him.

'Yes, we go ruining our cassock in the dust, we come home rigged up like a thief. And if some kind person takes an interest in us, and questions us for our own good, we push her about and treat her like a good-for-nothing woman, whom we can't trust. We hide things like a slyboots, we'd rather die than breathe a word; we're not even considerate enough to enliven our home by relating what we've seen.'

She turned to the priest, and looked him full in the face.

'Yes, you take that to yourself. You are a close one, you're a bad man!'

Thereupon she fell to crying and the Abbe had to soothe her.

'Monsieur Caffin used to tell me everything,' she moaned out.

However, she soon grew calmer. Brother Archangias was finishing a big piece of cheese, apparently quite unruffled by the scene. In his opinion Abbe Mouret really needed being kept straight, and La Teuse was right in making him feel the reins. Having drunk a last glassful of the weak wine, the Brother threw himself back in his chair to digest his meal.

'Well now,' finally asked the old servant, 'what did you see at the Paradou? Tell us, at any rate.'

Abbe Mouret smiled and related in a few words how strangely Jeanbernat had received him. La Teuse, after overwhelming him with questions, broke out into indignant exclamations, while Brother Archangias clenched his fists and brandished them aloft.

'May Heaven crush him!' said he, 'and burn both him and his witch!'

In his turn the Abbe then endeavoured to elicit some fresh particulars about the people at the Paradou, and listened intently to the Brother's monstrous narrative.

'Yes, that little she-devil came and sat down in the school. It's a long time ago now, she might then have been about ten. Of course, I let her come; I thought her uncle was sending her to prepare for her first communion. But for two months she utterly revolutionised the whole class. She made herself worshipped, the minx! She knew all sorts of games, and invented all sorts of finery with leaves and shreds of rags. And how quick and clever she was, too, like all those children of hell! She was the top one at catechism. But one fine morning the old man burst in just in the middle of our lessons. He was going to smash everything, and shouted that the priests had taken his child from him. We had to get the rural policeman to turn him out. As to the little one, she bolted. I could see her through the window, in a field opposite, laughing at her uncle's frenzy. She had been coming to school for the last two months without his even suspecting it. He had regularly scoured the country after her.'

'She's never taken her first communion,' exclaimed La Teuse below her breath with a slight shudder.

'No, never,' rejoined Brother Archangias. 'She must be sixteen now. She's growing up like a brute beast. I have seen her running on all fours in a thicket near La Palud.'

'On all fours,' muttered the servant, turning towards the window with superstitious anxiety.

Abbe Mouret attempted to express some doubt, but the Brother burst out: 'Yes, on all fours! And she jumped like a wild cat. If I had only had a gun I could have put a bullet in her. We kill creatures that are far more pleasing to God than she is. Besides, every one knows she comes caterwauling every night round Les Artaud. She howls like a beast. If ever a man should fall into her clutches, she wouldn't leave him a scrap of skin on his bones, I know.'

The Brother's hatred of womankind was boiling over. He banged the table with his fist, and poured forth all his wonted abuse.

'The devil's in them. They reek of the devil! And that's what bewitches fools.'

The priest nodded approvingly. Brother Archangias's outrageous violence and La Teuse's loquacious tyranny were like castigation with thongs, which it often rejoiced him to find lashing his shoulders. He took a pious delight in sinking into abasement beneath their coarse speech. He seemed to see the peace of heaven behind contempt of the world and degradation of his whole being. It was delicious to inflict mortification upon his body, to drag his susceptible nature through a gutter.

'There is nought but filth,' he muttered as he folded up his napkin.

La Teuse began to clear the table and wished to remove the plate on which Desiree had laid the blackbird's nest. You are not going to bed here, I suppose, mademoiselle,' she said. 'Do leave those nasty things.'

Desiree, however, defended her plate. She covered the nest with her bare arms, no longer gay, but cross at being disturbed.

'I hope those birds are not going to be kept,' exclaimed Brother Archangias. 'It would bring bad luck. You must wring their necks.'

And he already stretched out his big hands; but the girl rose and stepped back quivering, hugging the nest to her bosom. She stared fixedly at the Brother, her lips curling upwards, like those of a wolf about to bite.

'Don't touch the little things,' she stammered. 'You are ugly.'

With such singular contempt did she emphasise that last word that Abbe Mouret started as if the Brother's ugliness had just struck him for the first time. The latter contented himself with growling. He had always felt a covert hatred for Desiree, whose lusty physical development offended him. When she had left the room, still walking backwards, and never taking her eyes from him, he shrugged his shoulders and muttered between his teeth some coarse abuse which no one heard.

'She had better go to bed,' said La Teuse. 'She would only bore us by-and-by in church.'

'Has any one come yet?' asked Abbe Mouret.

'Oh, the girls have been outside a long time with armfuls of boughs. I am just going to light the lamps. We can begin whenever you like.'

A few seconds later she could be heard swearing in the sacristy because the matches were damp. Brother Archangias, who remained alone with the priest, sourly inquired: 'For the month of Mary, eh?'

'Yes,' replied Abbe Mouret. 'The last few days the girls about here were hard at work and couldn't come as usual to decorate the Lady Chapel. So the ceremony was postponed till to-night.'

'A nice custom,' muttered the Brother. 'When I see them all putting up their boughs I feel inclined to knock them down and make them confess their misdeeds before touching the altar. It's a shame to allow women to rustle their dresses so near the holy relics.'

The Abbe made an apologetic gesture. He had only been at Les Artaud a little while, he must follow the customs.

'Whenever you like, Monsieur le Cure, we're ready!' now called out La Teuse.

But Brother Archangias detained him a minute. 'I am off,' he said. 'Religion isn't a prostitute that it should be decorated with flowers and laces.'

He walked slowly to the door. Then once more he stopped, and lifting one of his hairy fingers added: 'Beware of your devotion to the Virgin.'

XIII

On entering the church Abbe Mouret found nine or ten big girls awaiting him with boughs of ivy, laurel, and rosemary. Few garden flowers grew on the rocks of Les Artaud, so the custom was to decorate the Lady altar with a greenery which might last throughout the month of May. Thereto La Teuse would add a few wallflowers whose stems were thrust into old decanters.

'Will you let me do it, Monsieur le Cure?' she asked. 'You are not used to it—— Come, stand there in front of the altar. You can tell me if the decorations please you.'

He consented, and it was she who really directed the arrangements. Having climbed upon a pair of steps she bullied the girls as they came up to her in turn with their leafy contributions.

'Not so fast, now! You must give me time to fix the boughs. We can't have all these bundles coming down on his reverence's head—— Come on, Babet, it's your turn. What's the good of staring at me like that with your big eyes? Fine rosemary yours is, my word! as yellow as a thistle. You next, La Rousse. Ah, well, that is splendid laurel! You got that out of your field at Croix-Verte, I know.'

The big girls laid their branches on the altar, which they kissed; and there they lingered for a while, handing up the greenery to La Teuse. The sly look of devotion they had assumed on stepping on to the altar steps was quickly set aside, and soon they were laughing, digging each other with their knees, swaying their hips against the altar's edge, and thrusting their bosoms against the tabernacle itself. Over them the tall Virgin in gilded plaster bent her tinted face, and smiled with her rosy lips upon the naked Jesus she bore upon her left arm.

'That's it, Lisa!' cried La Teuse; 'why don't you sit on the altar while you're about it? Just pull your petticoats straight, will you? Aren't you ashamed of behaving like that?—If any one of you lolls about I'll lay her boughs across her face.—Can't you hand me the things quietly?'

Then turning round, she asked:

'Do you like it, sir? Do you think it will do?'

She had converted the space behind the Virgin's statue into a verdant niche, whence leafy sprays projected on either side, forming a bower, and drooping over in front like palm leaves. The priest expressed his approval, but ventured to remark: 'I think there ought to be a cluster of more delicate foliage up above.'

'No doubt,' grumbled La Teuse. 'But they only bring me laurel and rosemary—I should like to know who has brought an olive branch. Not one, you bet! They are afraid of losing a single olive, the heathens!'

At this, however, Catherine came up laden with an enormous olive bough which completely hid her.

'Oh, you've got some, you minx!' continued the old servant.

'Of course,' one of the other girls exclaimed, 'she stole it. I saw Vincent breaking it off while she kept a look-out.'

But Catherine flew into a rage and swore it was not true. She turned, and thrusting her auburn head through the greenery, which she still tightly held, she started lying with marvellous assurance, inventing quite a long story to prove that the olive bough was really hers.

'Besides,' she added, 'all the trees belong to the Blessed Virgin.'

Abbe Mouret was about to intervene, but La Teuse sharply inquired if they wanted to make game of her and keep her arms up there all night. At last she proceeded to fasten the olive bough firmly, while Catherine, holding on to the steps behind her, mimicked the clumsy manner in which she turned her huge person about with the help of her sound leg. Even the priest could not forbear to smile.

'There,' said La Teuse, as she came down and stood beside him to get a good view of her work, 'there's the top done. Now we will put some clumps between the candlesticks, unless you would prefer a garland all along the altar shelf.'

The priest decided in favour of some big clumps.

'Very good; come on, then,' continued the old servant, once more clambering up the steps. 'We can't go to bed here. Just kiss the altar, will you, Miette? Do you fancy you are in your stable? Monsieur le Cure, do just see what they are up to over there! I can hear them laughing like lunatics.'

On raising one of the two lamps the dark end of the church was lit up and three of the girls were discovered romping about under the gallery; one of them had stumbled and pitched head foremost into the holy water stoup, which mishap had so tickled the others that they were rolling on the ground to laugh at their ease. They all came back, however, looking at the priest sheepishly, with lowered eyelids, but with their hands swinging against their hips as if a scolding rather pleased them than otherwise.

However, the measure of La Teuse's wrath was filled when she suddenly perceived Rosalie coming up to the altar like the others with a bundle of boughs in her arms.

'Get down, will you?' she cried to her. 'You are a cool one, and no mistake, my lass!—Hurry up, off you go with your bundle.'

'What for, I'd like to know?' said Rosalie boldly. 'You can't say I have stolen it.'

The other girls drew closer, feigning innocence and exchanging sparkling glances.

'Clear out,' repeated La Teuse, 'you have no business here, do you hear?'

Then, quite losing her scanty patience, she gave vent to a very coarse epithet, which provoked a titter of delight among the peasant girls.

'Well, what next?' said Rosalie. 'Mind your own business. Is it any concern of yours?'

Then she burst into a fit of sobbing and threw down her boughs, but let the Abbe lead her aside and give her a severe lecture. He had already tried to silence La Teuse; for he was beginning to feel uneasy amidst the big shameless hussies who filled the church with their armfuls of foliage. They were pushing right up to the altar step, enclosing him with a belt of woodland, wafting in his face a rank perfume of aromatic shoots.

'Let us make haste, be quick!' he exclaimed, clapping his hands lightly.

'Goodness knows I would rather be in my bed,' grumbled La Teuse. 'It's not so easy as you think to fasten all these bits of stuff.'

Finally, however, she succeeded in setting some lofty plumes of foliage between the candlesticks. Next she folded the steps, which were laid behind the high altar by Catherine. And then she only had to arrange two clumps of greenery at the sides of the altar table. The last boughs sufficed for this, and indeed there were some left which the girls strewed over the sanctuary floor up to the wooden rails. The Lady altar now looked like a grove, a shrubbery with a verdant lawn before it.

At present La Teuse was willing to make way for Abbe Mouret, who ascended the altar steps, and, again lightly clapping his hands, exclaimed: 'Young ladies, to-morrow we will continue the devotions of the month of Mary. Those who may be unable to come ought at least to say their Rosary at home.'

He knelt, and the peasant girls, with a mighty rustle of skirts, sank down and settled themselves on their heels. They followed his prayer with a confused muttering, through which burst here and there a giggle. One of them, on being pinched from behind, burst into a scream, which she attempted to stifle with a sudden fit of coughing; and this so diverted the others that for a moment after the Amen they remained writhing with merriment, their noses close to the stone flags.

La Teuse dismissed them; while the priest, after crossing himself, remained absorbed before the altar, no longer hearing what went on behind him.

'Come, now, clear out,' muttered the old woman. 'You're a pack of good-for-nothings, who can't even respect God. It's shameful, it's unheard of, for girls to roll about on the floor in church like beasts in a meadow—— What are you doing there, La Rousse? If I see you pinching any one, you'll have to deal with me! Oh, yes, you may put out your tongue at me; I'll tell his reverence about it. Out you get; out you get, you minxes!'

She drove them slowly towards the door, while running and bobbling round them frantically. And she had succeeded, as she thought, in getting every one of them outside, when she caught sight of Catherine and Vincent calmly installed in the confessional, where they were eating something with an air of great enjoyment. She drove them away; and as she popped her head outside the church, before closing the door, she espied Rosalie throwing her arm over the shoulder of Fortune, who had been waiting for her. The pair of them vanished in the darkness amid a faint sound of kisses.

'To think that such creatures dare to come to our Lady's altar!' La Teuse stuttered as she shot the bolts. 'The others are no better, I am sure. If they came to-night with their boughs, it was only for a bit of fun and to get kissed by the lads on going off! Not one of them will put herself out of the way to-morrow; his reverence will have to say his Aves by himself—— We shall only see the jades who have got assignations.'

Thus soliloquising, she thrust the chairs back into their places, and looked round to see if anything suspicious was lying about before going off to bed. In the confessional she picked up a handful of apple-parings, which she threw behind the high altar. And she also found a bit of ribbon torn from some cap, and a lock of black hair, which she made up into a small parcel, with the view of opening an inquiry into the matter. With these exceptions the church seemed to her tidy. There was oil enough for the night in the bracket-lamp of the sanctuary, and as to the flags of the choir, they could do without washing till Saturday.

'It's nearly ten o'clock, Monsieur le Cure,' she said, drawing near the priest, who was still on his knees. 'You might as well come up now.'

He made no answer, but only bowed his head.

'All right, I know what that means,' continued La Teuse. 'In another hour he will still be on the stones there, giving himself a stomach-ache. I'm off, as I shall only bore him. All the same, I can't see much sense in it, eating one's lunch when others are at dinner, and going to bed when the fowls get up!—— I worry you, don't I, your reverence? Good-night. You're not at all reasonable!'

She made ready to go, but suddenly came back to put out one of the two lamps, muttering the while that such late prayers spelt ruination in oil. Then, at last, she did go off, after passing her sleeve brushwise over the cloth of the high altar, which seemed to her grey with dust. Abbe Mouret, his eyes uplifted, his arms tightly clasped against his breast, then remained alone.

XIV

With only one lamp burning amid the verdure on the altar of the Virgin, huge floating shadows filled the church at either end. From the pulpit a sheet of gloom projected to the rafters of the ceiling. The confessional looked quite black under the gallery, showing strange outlines suggestive of a ruined sentry-box. All the light, softened and tinted as it were by the green foliage, rested slumberingly upon the tall gilded Virgin, who seemed to descend with queenly mien, borne upon the cloud round which gambolled the winged cherubim. At sight of that round lamp gleaming amid the boughs one might have thought the pallid moon was rising on the verge of a wood, casting its light upon a regal apparition, a princess of heaven, crowned and clothed with gold, who with her nude and Divine Infant had come to stroll in the mysterious woodland avenues. Between the leaves, along the lofty plumes of greenery, within the large ogival arbour, and even along the branches strewing the flagstones, star-like beams glided drowsily, like the milky rain of light that filters through the bushes on moonlit nights. Vague sounds and creakings came from the dusky ends of the church; the large clock on the left of the chancel throbbed slowly, with the heavy breathing of a machine asleep. And the radiant vision, the Mother with slender bands of chestnut hair, as if reassured by the nocturnal quiet of the nave, came lower and lower, scarce bending the blades of grass in the clearings beneath the gentle flight of her cloudy chariot.

Abbe Mouret gazed at her. This was the hour when he most loved the church. He forgot the woeful figure on the cross, the Victim bedaubed with carmine and ochre, who gasped out His life behind him, in the chapel of the Dead. His thoughts were no longer distracted by the garish light from the windows, by the gayness of morning coming in with the sun, by the irruption of outdoor life—the sparrows and the boughs invading the nave through the shattered panes. At that hour of night Nature was dead; shadows hung the whitewashed walls with crape; a chill fell upon his shoulders like a salutary penance-shirt. He could now wholly surrender himself to the supremest love, without fear of any flickering ray of light, any caressing breeze or scent, any buzzing of an insect's wing disturbing him amidst the delight of loving. Never had his morning mass afforded him the superhuman joys of his nightly prayers.

With quivering lips Abbe Mouret now gazed at the tall Virgin. He could see her coming towards him from the depths of her green bower in ever-increasing splendour. No longer did a flood of moonlight seem to float across the tree-tops. She seemed to him clothed with the sun; she advanced majestically, glorious, colossal, and so all-powerful that he was tempted at times to cast himself face downwards to shun the flaming splendour of that gate opening into heaven. Then, amidst the adoration of his whole being, which stayed his words upon his lips, he remembered Brother Archangias's final rebuke, as he might have remembered words of blasphemy. The Brother often reproved him for his devotion to the Virgin, which he declared was veritable robbery of devotion due to God. In the Brother's opinion it enervated the soul, put religion into petticoats, created and fostered a state of sentimentalism quite unworthy of the strong. He bore the Virgin a grudge for her womanhood, her beauty, her maternity; he was ever on his guard against her, possessed by a covert fear of feeling tempted by her gracious mien, of succumbing to her seductive sweetness. 'She will lead you far!' he had cried one day to the young priest, for in her he saw the commencement of human passion. From contemplating her one might glide to delight in lovely chestnut hair, in large bright eyes, and the mystery of garments falling from neck to toes. His was the blunt rebellion of a saint who roughly parted the Mother from the Son, asking as He did: 'Woman, what have we in common, thou and I?'

But Abbe Mouret thrust away such thoughts, prostrated himself, endeavoured to forget the Brother's harsh attacks. His rapture in the immaculate purity of Mary alone raised him from the depths of lowliness in which he sought to bury himself. Whenever, alone before the tall golden Virgin, he so deceived himself as to imagine that he could see her bending down for him to kiss her braided locks, he once more became very young, very good, very strong, very just, full of tenderness.

Abbe Mouret's devotion to the Virgin dated from his early youth. Already when he was quite a child, somewhat shy and fond of shrinking into corners, he took pleasure in the thought that a lovely lady was watching over him: that two blue eyes, so sweet, ever followed him with their smile. When he felt at night a breath of air glide across his hair, he would often say that the Virgin had come to kiss him. He had grown up beneath this womanly caress, in an atmosphere full of the rustle of divine robes. From the age of seven he had satisfied the cravings of his affection by expending all the pence he received as pocket money in the purchase of pious picture-cards, which he jealously concealed that he alone might feast on them. But never was he tempted by the pictures of Jesus and the Lamb, of Christ on the Cross, of God the Father, with a mighty beard, stooping over a bank of clouds; his preference was always for the winning portraits of Mary, with her tiny smiling mouth and delicate outstretched hands. By degrees he had made quite a collection of them all—of Mary between a lily and a distaff, Mary carrying her child as if she were his elder sister, Mary crowned with roses, and Mary crowned with stars. For him they formed a family of lovely young maidens, alike in their attractiveness, in the grace, kindliness, and sweetness of their countenances, so youthful beneath their veils, that although they bore the name of 'Mother of God,' he had felt no awe of them as he had often felt for grown-up persons.

They seemed to him of his own age, little girls such as he wished to meet with, little girls of heaven such as the little boys who die when seven years old have for eternal playmates in some nook of Paradise. But even at this early age he was self-contained; and full of the exquisite bashfulness of adolescence he grew up without betraying the secret of his religious love. Mary grew up with him, being invariably a year or two older than himself, as should always be the case with one's chiefest friend. When he was eighteen, she was twenty; she no longer kissed his forehead at night time, but stood a little further from him with folded arms, chastely smiling, ravishingly sweet. And he—he only named her now in a whisper, feeling as if he would faint each time the well-loved name passed his lips in prayer. No more did he dream of childish games within the garden of heaven, but of continual contemplation before that white figure, whose perfect purity he feared to sully with his breath. Even from his own mother did he conceal the fervour of his love for Mary.

Then, a few years later, at the seminary, his beautiful affection for her, seemingly so just, so natural, was disturbed by inward qualms. Was the cult of Mary necessary for salvation? Was he not robbing God by giving Mary a part, the greater part, of his love, his thoughts, his heart, his entire being? Perplexing questions were these, provoking an inward struggle which increased his passion, riveted his bonds. For he dived into all the subtleties of his affection, found unknown joys in discussing the lawfulness of his feelings. The books treating of devotion to the Virgin brought him excuses, joyful raptures, a wealth of arguments which he repeated with prayerful fervour. From them he learned how, in Mary, to be the slave of Jesus. He went to Jesus through Mary. He cited all kinds of proofs, he discriminated, he drew inferences. Mary, whom Jesus had obeyed on earth, should be obeyed by all mankind; Mary still retained her maternal power in heaven, where she was the great dispenser of God's treasures, the only one who could beseech Him, the only one who allotted the heavenly thrones; and thus Mary, a mere creature before God, but raised up to Him, became the human link between heaven and earth, the intermediary of every grace, of every mercy; and his conclusion always was that she should be loved above all else in God himself. Another time he was attracted by more complicated theological curiosities: the marriage of the celestial spouse, the Holy Ghost sealing the Vase of Election, making of the Virgin Mary an everlasting miracle, offering her inviolable purity to the devotion of mankind. She was the Virgin overcoming all heresies, the irreconcilable foe of Satan, the new Eve of whom it had been foretold that she should crush the Serpent's head, the august Gate of Grace, by which the Saviour had already entered once and through which He would come again at the Last Day—a vague prophecy, allotting a yet larger future role to Mary, which threw Serge into a dreamy imagining of some immense expansion of divine love.

This entry of woman into the jealous, cruel heaven depicted by the Old Testament, this figure of whiteness set at the feet of the awesome Trinity, appeared to him the very grace itself of religion, the one consolation for all the dread inspired by things of faith, the one refuge when he found himself lost amidst the mysteries of dogma. And when he had thus proved to himself, point by point, that she was the way to Jesus—easy, short, perfect, and certain—he surrendered himself anew to her, wholly and without remorse: he strove to be her true devotee, dead to self and steeped in submission.

It was an hour of divine voluptuousness! The books treating of devotion to the Virgin burned his hands. They spoke to him in a language of love, warm, fragrant as incense. Mary no longer seemed a young maiden veiled in white, standing with crossed arms, a foot or two away from his pillow. She came surrounded by splendour, even as John saw her, clothed with the sun, crowned with twelve stars, and having the moon beneath her feet. She perfumed him with her fragrance, inflamed him with longing for heaven, ravished him even with the ardent glow of the planets flaming on her brow. He threw himself before her and called himself her slave. No word could have been sweeter than that word of slave, which he repeated, which he relished yet more and more as it trembled on his stammering tongue, whilst casting himself at her feet—to become her thing, her mite, the dust lightly scattered by the waving of her azure robe. With David he exclaimed: 'Mary is made for me,' and with the Evangelist he added: 'I have taken her for my all.' He called her his 'beloved mistress,' for words failed him, and he fell into the prattle of child or lover, his breath breaking with intensity of passion. She was the Blessed among women, the Queen of Heaven glorified by the nine Choirs of Angels, the Mother of Predilection, the Treasure of the Lord. All the vivid imagery of her cult unrolled itself before him comparing to her an earthly paradise of virgin soil, with beds of flowering virtues, green meadows of hope, impregnable towers of strength, and smiling dwellings of confidence. Again she was a fountain sealed by the Holy Ghost, a shrine and dwelling-place of the Holy Trinity, the Throne of God, the City of God, the Altar of God, the Temple of God, and the World of God. And he walked in that garden, in its shade, its sunlight, beneath its enchanting greenery; he sighed after the water of that Fountain; he dwelt within Mary's beauteous precincts—resting, hiding, heedlessly straying there, drinking in the milk of infinite love that fell drop by drop from her virginal bosom.

Every morning, on rising at the seminary, he greeted Mary with a hundred bows, his face turned towards the strip of sky visible from his window. And at night in like fashion he bade her farewell with his eyes fixed upon the stars. Often, when he thus gazed out on fine bright nights, when Venus gleamed golden and dreamy through the warm atmosphere, he forgot himself, and then, like a soft song, would fall from his lips the Ave maris Stella, that tender hymn which set before his eyes a distant azure land, and a tranquil sea, scarce wrinkled by a caressing quiver, and illuminated by a smiling star, a very sun in size. He recited, too, the Salve Regina, the Regina Coeli, the O gloriosa Domina, all the prayers and all the canticles. He would read the Office of the Virgin, the holy books written in her honour, the little Psalter of St. Bonaventura, with such devout tenderness, that he could not turn the leaves for tears. He fasted and mortified himself, that he might offer up to her his bruised and wounded flesh. Ever since the age of ten he had worn her livery—the holy scapular, the twofold image of Mary sewn on squares of cloth, whose warmth upon his chest and back thrilled him with delight. Later on, he also took to wearing the little chain in token of his loving slavery. But his greatest act of love was ever the Angelic Salutation, the Ave Maria, his heart's perfect prayer. 'Hail, Mary——' and he saw her advancing towards him, full of grace, blessed amongst women; and he cast his heart at her feet for her to tread on it in sweetness. He multiplied and repeated that salutation in a hundred different ways, ever seeking some more efficacious one. He would say twelve Aves to commemorate the crown of twelve stars that encircled Mary's brow; he would say fourteen in remembrance of her fourteen joys; at another time he would recite seven decades of them in honour of the years she lived on earth. For hours the beads of his Rosary would glide between his fingers. Then, again, on certain days of mystical assignation he would launch into the endless muttering of the Rosary.

When, alone in his cell, with time to give to his love, he knelt upon the floor, the whole of Mary's garden with its lofty flowers of chastity blossomed around him. Between his fingers glided the Rosary's wreath of Aves, intersected by Paters, like a garland of white roses mingled with the lilies of the Annunciation, the blood-hued flowers of Calvary, and the stars of the Coronation. He would slowly tread those fragrant paths, pausing at each of the fifteen dizains of Aves, and dwelling on its corresponding mystery; he was beside himself with joy, or grief, or triumph, according as the mystery belonged to one or other of the three series—the joyful, the sorrowful, or the glorious. What an incomparable legend it was, the history of Mary, a complete human life, with all its smiles and tears and triumph, which he lived over again from end to end in a single moment! And first he entered into joy with the five glad Mysteries, steeped in the serene calm of dawn. First the Archangel's salutation, the fertilising ray gliding down from heaven, fraught with the spotless union's adorable ecstasy; then the visit to Elizabeth on a bright hope-laden morn, when the fruit of Mary's womb for the first time stirred and thrilled her with the shock at which mothers blench; then the birth in a stable at Bethlehem, and the long string of shepherds coming to pay homage to her Divine Maternity; then the new-born babe carried into the Temple on the arms of his mother who smiled, still weary, but already happy at offering her child to God's justice, to Simeon's embrace, to the desires of the world; and lastly, Jesus at a later age revealing Himself before the doctors, in whose midst He is found by His anxious mother, now proud and comforted.

But, after that tender radiant dawn, it seemed to Serge as if the sky were suddenly overcast. His feet now trod on brambles, the beads of the Rosary pricked his fingers; he cowered beneath the horror of the five Sorrowful Mysteries: Mary, agonising in her Son in the garden of Olives, suffering with Him from the scourging, feeling on her own brow the wounds made by the crown of thorns, bearing the fearful weight of His Cross, and dying at his feet on Calvary. Those inevitable sufferings, that harrowing martyrdom of the queen he worshipped, and for whom he would have shed his blood like Jesus, roused in him a feeling of shuddering repulsion which ten years' practice of the same prayers and the same devotions had failed to weaken. But as the beads flowed on, light suddenly burst upon the darkness of the Crucifixion, and the resplendent glory of the five last Mysteries shone forth in all the brightness of a cloudless sun. Mary was transfigured, and sang the hallelujah of the Resurrection, the victory over Death and the eternity of life. With outstretched hands, and dazed with admiration, she beheld the triumph of her Son ascending into heaven on golden clouds, fringed with purple. She gathered the Apostles round her, and, as on the day of her conception, participated in the glow of the Spirit of Love, descending now in tongues of fire. She, too, was carried up to heaven by a flight of angels, borne aloft on their white wings like a spotless ark, and tenderly set down amid the splendour of the heavenly thrones; and there, in her supreme glory, amidst a splendour so dazzling that the light of the sun was quenched, God crowned her with the stars of the firmament. Impassioned love has but one word. In reciting a hundred and fifty Aves Serge had not once repeated himself. The monotonous murmur, the ever recurring words, akin to the 'I love you' of lovers, assumed each time a deeper and deeper meaning; and he lingered over it all, expressed everything with the aid of the one solitary Latin sentence, and learned to know Mary through and through, until, as the last bead of his Rosary slipped from his hand, his heart grew faint with the thought of parting from her.

Many a night had the young man spent in this way. Daybreak had found him still murmuring his prayers. It was the moon, he would say to cheat himself, that was making the stars wane. His superiors had to reprove him for those vigils, which left him languid and pale as if he had been losing blood. On the wall of his cell had long hung a coloured engraving of the Sacred Heart of Mary, an engraving which showed the Virgin smiling placidly, throwing open her bodice, and revealing a crimson fissure, wherein glowed her heart, pierced with a sword, and crowned with white roses. That sword tormented him beyond measure, brought him an intolerable horror of suffering in woman, the very thought of which scattered his pious submissiveness to the winds. He erased the weapon, and left only the crowned and flaming heart which seemed to be half torn from that exquisite flesh, as if tendered as an offering to himself. And it was then he felt beloved: Mary was giving him her heart, her living heart, even as it throbbed in her bosom, dripping with her rosy blood.

In all this there was no longer the imagery of devout passion, but a material entity, a prodigy of affection which impelled him, when he was praying before the engraving, to open out his hands in order that he might reverently receive the heart that leaped from that immaculate bosom. He could see it, hear it beat; he was loved, that heart was beating for himself! His whole being quickened with rapture; he would fain have kissed that heart, have melted in it, have lain beside it within the depths of that open breast. Mary's love for him was an active one; she desired him to be near her, to be wholly hers in the eternity to come; her love was efficacious, too, she was ever solicitous for him, watching over him everywhere, guarding him from the slightest breach of his fidelity. She loved him tenderly, more than the whole of womankind together, with a love as azure, as deep, as boundless as the sky itself. Where could he ever find so delightful a mistress? What earthly caress could be compared to the air in which he moved, the breath of Mary? What mundane union or enjoyment could be weighed against that everlasting flower of desire which grew unceasingly, and yet was never over-blown? At this thought the Magnificat would exhale from his mouth, like a cloud of incense. He sang the joyful song of Mary, her thrill of joy at the approach of her Divine Spouse. He glorified the Lord who overthrew the mighty from their thrones, and who sent Mary to him, poor destitute child that he was, dying of love on the cold tiled floor of his cell.

And when he had given all up to Mary—his body, his soul, his earthly goods, and spiritual chattels—when he stood before her stripped, bare, with all his prayers exhausted, there welled from his burning lips the Virgin's litanies, with their reiterated, persistent, impassioned appeals for heavenly succour. He fancied himself climbing a flight of pious yearnings, which he ascended step by step at each bound of his heart. First he called her 'Holy.' Next he called her 'Mother,' most pure, most chaste, amiable, and admirable. And with fresh ardour he six times proclaimed her maidenhood; his lips cooled and freshened each time that he pronounced that name of 'Virgin,' which he coupled with power, goodness, and fidelity. And as his heart drew him higher up the ladder of light, a strange voice from his veins spoke within him, bursting into dazzling flowers of speech. He yearned to melt away in fragrance, to be spread around in light, to expire in a sigh of music. As he named her 'Mirror of Justice,' 'Seat of Wisdom,' and 'Source of Joy,' he could behold himself pale with ecstasy in that mirror, kneeling on the warmth of the divine seat, quaffing intoxication in mighty draughts from the holy Source.

Again he would transform her, throwing off all restraint in his frantic love, so as to attain to a yet closer union with her. She became a 'Vessel of Honour,' chosen of God, a 'Bosom of Election,' wherein he desired to pour his being, and slumber for ever.* She was the 'Mystical Rose'—a great flower which bloomed in Paradise, with petals formed of the angels clustering round their queen, a flower so fresh, so fragrant, that he could inhale its perfume from the depths of his unworthiness with a joyful dilation of his sides which stretched them to bursting. She became changed into a 'House of Gold,' a 'Tower of David,' and a 'Tower of Ivory,' of inestimable richness, of a whiteness that swans might envy, and of lofty, massive, rounded form, which he would fain have encircled with his outstretched arms as with a girdle of submissiveness. She stood on the distant skyline as the 'Gate of Heaven,' a glimpse of which he caught behind her shoulders when a puff of wind threw back the folds of her veil. She rose in splendour from behind the mountain in the waning hour of night, like the 'Morning Star' to help all travellers astray, like the very dawn of Love. And when he had ascended to this height—scant of breath, yet still unsatiated—he could only further glorify her with the title of 'Queen,' with which he nine times hailed her, as with nine parting salutations from the censer of his soul. His canticle died joyfully away in those last ejaculations of triumph: 'Queen of virgins, Queen of all saints. Queen conceived without sin!' She, ever before him, shone in splendour; and he, on the topmost step, only reached by Mary's intimates, remained there yet another moment, swooning amidst the subtle atmosphere around him; still too far away to kiss the edge of her azure robe, already feeling that he was about to fall, but ever possessed by a desire to ascend again and again, and seek that superhuman felicity.

* Curiously enough I find no trace of 'Bosom of Election' in the
Litany of the Blessed Virgin as printed in English Catholic
works.—ED.

How many times had not the Litany of the Virgin, recited in common in the seminary chapel, left the young man with broken limbs and void head, as if from some great fall! And since his departure from the seminary, Abbe Mouret had grown to love the Virgin still more. He gave to her that impassioned cult which to Brother Archangias savoured of heresy. In his opinion it was she who would save the Church by some matchless prodigy whose near appearance would entrance the world. She was the only miracle of our impious age—the blue-robed lady that showed herself to little shepherdesses, the whiteness that gleamed at night between two clouds, her veil trailing over the low thatched roofs of peasant homes. When Brother Archangias coarsely asked him if he had ever espied her, he simply smiled and tightened his lips as if to keep his secret. Truth to say, he saw her every night. She no longer seemed a playful sister or a lovely pious maiden; she wore a bridal robe, with white flowers in her hair; and from beneath her drooping eyelids fell moist glances of hopeful promise that set his cheeks aglow. He could feel that she was coming, that she was promising to delay no longer; that she said to him, 'Here I am, receive me!' Thrice a day when the Angelus rang out—at break of dawn, in the fulness of midday, and at the gentle fall of twilight—he bared his head and said an Ave with a glance around him as if to ascertain whether the bell were not at last announcing Mary's coming. He was five-and-twenty. He awaited her.

During the month of May the young priest's expectation was fraught with joyful hope. To La Teuse's grumblings he no longer paid the slightest attention. If he remained so late praying in the church, it was because he entertained the mad idea that the great golden Virgin would at last come down from her pedestal. And yet he stood in awe of that Virgin, so like a princess in her mien. He did not love all the Virgins alike, and this one inspired him with supreme respect. She was, indeed, the Mother of God, she showed the fertile development of form, the majestic countenance, the strong arms of the Divine Spouse bearing Jesus. He pictured her thus, standing in the midst of the heavenly court, the train of her royal mantle trailing among the stars; so far above him, and of such exceeding might, that he would be shattered into dust should she deign to cast her eyes upon him. She was the Virgin of his days of weakness, the austere Virgin who restored his inward peace by an awesome glimpse of Paradise.

That night Abbe Mouret remained for over an hour on his knees in the empty church. With folded hands and eyes fixed on the golden Virgin rising planet-like amid the verdure, he sought the drowsiness of ecstasy, the appeasement of the strange discomfort he had felt that day. But he failed to find the semi-somnolence of prayer with the delightful ease he knew so well. However glorious and pure Mary might reveal herself, her motherhood, the maturity of her charms, and the bare infant she bore upon her arm, disquieted him. It seemed as if in heaven itself there were a repetition of the exuberant life, through which he had been moving since the morning. Like the vines of the stony slopes, like the trees of the Paradou, like the human troop of Artauds, Mary suggested the blossoming, the begetting of life. Prayer came but slowly to his lips; fancies made his mind wander. He perceived things he had never seen before—the gentle wave of her chestnut hair, the rounded swell of her rosy throat. She had to assume a sterner air and overwhelm him with the splendour of her sovereign power to bring him back to the unfinished sentences of his broken prayer. At last the sight of her golden crown, her golden mantle, all the golden sheen which made of her a mighty princess, reduced him once more to slavish submission, and his prayer again flowed evenly, and his mind became wrapped in worship.

In this ecstatic trance, half asleep, half awake, he remained till eleven o'clock, heedless of his aching knees, fancying himself suspended in mid air, rocked to and fro like a child, and yielding to restful slumber, though conscious of some unknown weight that oppressed his heart. Meanwhile the church around him filled with shadows, the lamp grew dim, and the lofty sprays of leafage darkened the tall Virgin's varnished face.

When the clock, about to strike, gave out a rending whine, a shudder passed through Abbe Mouret. He had not hitherto felt the chill of the church upon his shoulders, but now he was shivering from head to foot. As he crossed himself a memory swiftly flashed through the stupor of his wakening—the chattering of his teeth recalled to him the nights he had spent on the floor of his cell before the Sacred Heart of Mary, when his whole frame would quiver with fever. He rose up painfully, displeased with himself. As a rule, he would leave the altar untroubled in his flesh and with Mary's sweet breath still fresh upon his brow. That night, however, as he took the lamp to go up to his room he felt as if his throbbing temples were bursting. His prayer had not profited him; after a transient alleviation he still experienced the burning glow which had been rising in his heart and brain since morning. When he reached the sacristy door, he turned and mechanically raised the lamp to take a last look at the tall Virgin. But she was now shrouded in the deep shadows falling from the rafters, buried in the foliage around her whence only the golden cross upon her crown emerged.

XV

Abbe Mouret's bedroom, which occupied a corner of the vicarage, was a spacious one, having two large square windows; one of which opened above Desiree's farmyard, whilst the other overlooked the village, the valley beyond, the belt of hills, the whole landscape. The yellow-curtained bed, the walnut chest of drawers, and the three straw-bottomed chairs seemed lost below that lofty ceiling with whitewashed joists. A faint tartness, the somewhat musty odour of old country houses, ascended from the tiled and ruddled floor that glistened like a mirror. On the chest of drawers a tall statuette of the Immaculate Conception rose greyly between some porcelain vases which La Teuse had filled with white lilac.

Abbe Mouret set his lamp on the edge of the chest of drawers before the Virgin. He felt so unwell that he determined to light the vine-stem fire which was laid in readiness. He stood there, tongs in hand, watching the kindling wood, his face illuminated by the flame. The house beneath slumbered in unbroken stillness. The silence filled his ears with a hum, which grew into a sound of whispering voices. Slowly and irresistibly these voices mastered him and increased the feeling of anxiety which had almost choked him several times that day. What could be the cause of such mental anguish? What could be the strange trouble which had slowly grown within him and had now become so unbearable? He had not fallen into sin. It seemed as if but yesterday he had left the seminary with all his ardent faith, and so fortified against the world that he moved among men beholding God alone. And, suddenly, he fancied himself in his cell at five o'clock in the morning, the hour for rising. The deacon on duty passed his door, striking it with his stick, and repeating the regulation summons—

'Benedicamus Domino!'

'Deo gratias!' he answered half asleep, with his eyes still swollen with slumber.

And he jumped out upon his strip of carpet, washed himself, made his bed, swept his room, and refilled his little pitcher. He enjoyed this petty domestic work while the morning air sent a thrilling shiver throughout his frame. He could hear the sparrows in the plane-trees of the court-yard, rising at the same time as himself with a deafening noise of wings and notes—their way of saying their prayers, thought he. Then he went down to the meditation room, and stayed there on his knees for half an hour after prayers, to con that reflection of St. Ignatius: 'What profit be it to a man to gain the whole world if he lose his soul?' A subject, this, fertile in good resolutions, which impelled him to renounce all earthly goods, and dwell on that fond dream of a desert life, beneath the solitary wealth and luxury of a vast blue sky. When ten minutes had passed, his bruised knees became so painful that his whole being slowly swooned into ecstasy, in which he pictured himself as a mighty conqueror, the master of an immense empire, flinging down his crown, breaking his sceptre, trampling under foot unheard-of wealth, chests of gold, floods of jewels, and rich stuffs embroidered with precious stones, before going to bury himself in some Thebais, clothed in rough drugget that rasped his back. Mass, however, snatched him from these heated fancies, upon which he looked back as upon some beautiful reality which might have been his lot in ancient times; and then, his communion made, he chanted the psalm for the day unconscious of any other voice than his own, which rang out with crystal purity, flying upward till it reached the very ear of the Lord.

When he returned to his room he ascended the stairs step by step, as advised by St. Bonaventura and St. Thomas Aquinas. His gait was slow, his mien grave; he kept his head bowed as he walked along, finding ineffable delight in complying with the most trifling regulations. Next came breakfast. It was pleasant in the refectory to see the hunks of bread and the glasses of white wine, set out in rows. He had a good appetite, and was of a joyous mood. He would say, for instance, that the wine was truly Christian—a daring allusion to the water which the bursar was taxed with putting in the bottles. Still his gravity at once returned to him on going in to lectures. He took notes on his knees, while the professor, resting his hands on the edge of his desk, talked away in familiar Latin, interspersed with an occasional word in French, when he was at fault for a better. A discussion would then follow in which the students argued in a strange jargon, with never a smile upon their faces. Then, at ten o'clock, there came twenty minutes' reading of Holy Writ. He fetched the Sacred Book, a volume richly bound and gilt-edged. Having kissed it with especial reverence, he read it out bare-headed, bowing every time he came upon the name of Jesus, Mary, or Joseph. And with the arrival of the second meditation he was ready to endure for love of God another and even longer spell of kneeling than the first. He avoided resting on his heels for a second even. He delighted in that examination of conscience which lasted for three-quarters of an hour. He racked his memory for sins, and at times even fancied himself damned for forgetting to kiss the pictures on his scapular the night before, or for having gone to sleep upon his left side—abominable faults which he would have willingly redeemed by wearing out his knees till night; and yet happy faults, in that they kept him busy, for without them he would have no occupation for his unspotted heart, steeped in a life of purity.

He would return to the refectory, as if relieved of some great crime. The seminarists on duty, wearing blue linen aprons, and having their cassock sleeves tucked up, brought in the vermicelli soup, the boiled beef cut into little squares, and the helps of roast mutton and French beans. Then followed a terrific rattling of jaws, a gluttonous silence, a desperate plying of forks, only broken by envious greedy glances at the horseshoe table, where the heads of the seminary ate more delicate meats and drank ruddier wines. And all the while above the hubbub some strong-lunged peasant's son, with a thick voice and utter disregard for punctuation, would hem and haw over the perusal of some letters from missionaries, some episcopal pastoral, or some article from a religious paper. To this he listened as he ate. Those polemical fragments, those narratives of distant travels, surprised, nay, even frightened him, with their revelations of bustling, boundless fields of action, of which he had never dreamt, beyond the seminary walls. Eating was still in progress when the wooden clapper announced the recreation hour. The recreation-ground was a sandy yard, in which stood eight plane-trees, which in summer cast cool shadows around. On the south side rose a wall, seventeen feet high, and bristling with broken glass, above which all that one saw of Plassans was the steeple of St. Mark, rising like a stony needle against the blue sky. To and fro he slowly paced the court with a row of fellow-students; and each time he faced the wall he eyed that spire which to him represented the whole town, the whole earth spread beneath the scudding clouds. Noisy groups waxed hot in disputation round the plane-trees; friends would pair off in the corners under the spying glance of some director concealed behind his window-blind. Tennis and skittle matches would be quickly organised to the great discomfort of quiet loto players who lounged on the ground before their cardboard squares, which some bowl or ball would suddenly smother with sand. But when the bell sounded the noise ceased, a flight of sparrows rose from the plane-trees, and the breathless students betook themselves to their lesson in plain-chant with folded arms and hanging heads. And thus Serge's day closed in peacefulness; he returned to his work; then, at four o'clock, he partook of his afternoon snack, and renewed his everlasting walk in sight of St. Mark's spire. Supper was marked by the same rattling of jaws and the same droning perusal as the midday meal. And when it was over Serge repaired to the chapel to attend prayers, and finally betook himself to bed at a quarter past eight, after first sprinkling his pallet with holy water to ward off all evil dreams.

How many delightful days like these had he not spent in that ancient convent of old Plassans, where abode the aroma of centuries of piety! For five years had the days followed one another, flowing on with the unvarying murmur of limpid water. In this present hour he recalled a thousand little incidents which moved him. He remembered going with his mother to purchase his first outfit, his two cassocks, his two waist sashes, his half-dozen bands, his eight pairs of socks, his surplice, and his three-cornered hat. And how his heart had beaten that mild October evening when the seminary door had first closed behind him! He had gone thither at twenty, after his school years, seized with a yearning to believe and love. The very next day he had forgotten all, as if he had fallen into a long sleep in that big silent house. He once more saw the narrow cell in which he had lived through his two years as student of philosophy—a little hutch with only a bed, a table, and a chair, divided from the other cells by badly fitted partitions, in a vast hall containing about fifty similar little dens. And he again saw the cell he had dwelt in three years longer while in the theology class—a larger one, with an armchair, a dressing-table, and a bookcase—a happy room full of the dreams which his faith had evoked. Down those endless passages, up those stairs of stone, in all sorts of nooks, sudden inspirations, unexpected aid had come to him. From the lofty ceilings fell the voices of guardian angels. There was not a flagstone in the halls, not an ashlar of the walls, not a bough of the plane-trees, but it spoke to him of the delights of his contemplative life, his lispings of tenderness, his gradual initiation, the favours vouchsafed him in return for self-bestowal, all that happiness of divine first love.

On such and such a day, on awaking, he had beheld a bright flood of light which had steeped him in joy. On such and such an evening as he closed the door of his cell he had felt warm hands clasping his neck so lovingly that he had lost consciousness, and had afterwards found himself on the floor weeping and choked by sobs. Again, at other times, especially in the little archway leading to the chapel, he had surrendered himself to supple arms which raised him from the ground. All heaven had then been concerned in him, had moved round him, and imparted to his slightest actions a peculiar sense, an astonishing perfume, which seemed to cling faintly to his clothes, to his very skin. And again, he remembered the Thursday walks. They started at two o'clock for some verdant nook about three miles from Plassans. Often they sought a meadow on the banks of the Viorne, where the gnarled willows steeped their leaves in the stream. But he saw nothing—neither the big yellow flowers in the meadow, nor the swallows sipping as they flew by, with wings lightly touching the surface of the little river. Till six o'clock, seated in groups beneath the willows, his comrades and himself recited the Office of the Virgin in common, or read in pairs the 'Little Hours,' the book of prayers recommended to young seminarists, but not enjoined on them.

Abbe Mouret smiled as he stirred the burning embers of his vine-stock fire. In all that past he only found great purity and perfect obedience. He had been a lily whose sweet scent had charmed his masters. He could not recall a single bad action. He had never taken advantage of the absolute freedom of those walks, when the two prefects in charge would go off to have a chat with a parish priest in the neighbourhood, or to have a smoke behind a hedge, or to drink beer with a friend. Never had he hidden a novel under his mattress, nor a bottle of anisette in a cupboard. For a long time, even, he had had no suspicion of the sinfulness around him—of the wings of chicken and the cakes smuggled into the seminary in Lent, of the guilty letters brought in by servers, of the abominable conversations carried on in whispers in certain corners of the courtyard. He had wept hot tears when he first perceived that few among his fellows loved God for His own sake. There were peasants' sons there who had taken orders simply through their terror of conscription, sluggards who dreamed of a career of idleness, and ambitious youths already agitated by a vision of the staff and the mitre. And when he found the world's wickedness reappearing at the altar's very foot, he had withdrawn still further into himself, giving himself still more to God, to console Him for being forsaken.

He did recollect, however, that he had crossed his legs one day in class, and that, when the professor reproved him for it, his face had become fiery red, as if he had committed some abominable action. He was one of the best students, never arguing, but learning his texts by heart. He established the existence and eternity of God by proofs drawn from Holy Writ, the opinions of the fathers of the Church, the universal consensus of all mankind. This kind of reasoning filled him with an unshakeable certainty. During his first year of philosophy, he had worked at his logic so earnestly that his professor had checked him, remarking that the most learned were not the holiest. In his second year, therefore, he had carried out his study of metaphysics as a regulation task, constituting but a small fraction of his daily duties. He felt a growing contempt for science; he wished to remain ignorant, in order to preserve the humility of his faith. Later on, he only followed the course of Rohrbacher's 'Ecclesiastical History' from submission; he ventured as far as Gousset's arguments, and Bouvier's 'Theological Course,' without daring to take up Bellarmin, Liguori, Suarez, or St. Thomas Aquinas. Holy Writ alone impassioned him. Therein he found all desirable knowledge, a tale of infinite love which should be sufficient instruction for all men of good-will. He simply adopted the dicta of his teachers, casting on them the care of inquiry, needing nought of such rubbish to know how to love, and accusing books of stealing away the time which should be devoted to prayer. He even succeeded in forgetting his years of college life. He no longer knew anything, but was simplicity itself, a child brought back to the lispings of his catechism.

Such was the manner in which he had ascended step by step to the priesthood. And here his recollections thronged more quickly on him, softer, still warm with heavenly joy. Each year he had drawn nearer to God. His vacations had been spent in holy fashion at an uncle's, in confessions every day and communions twice a week. He would lay fasts upon himself, hide rock-salt inside his trunk, and kneel on it with bared knees for hours together. At recreation time he remained in chapel, or went up to the room of one of the directors, who told him pious and extraordinary stories. Then, as the fast of the Holy Trinity drew nigh, he was rewarded beyond all measure, overwhelmed by the stirring emotion which pervades all seminaries on the eve of ordinations. This was the great festival of all, when the sky opened to allow the elect to rise another step nearer unto God. For a fortnight in advance he imposed a bread and water diet on himself. He closed his window blinds so that he might not see the daylight at all, and he prostrated himself in the gloom to implore Jesus to accept his sacrifice. During the last four days he suffered torturing pangs, terrible scruples, which would force him from his bed in the middle of the night to knock at the door of some strange priest giving the Retreat—some barefooted Carmelite, or often a converted Protestant respecting whom some wonderful story was current. To him he would make at great length a general confession of his whole life in a voice choking with sobs. Absolution alone quieted him, refreshed him, as if he had enjoyed a bath of grace.

On the morning of the great day he felt wholly white; and so vividly was he conscious of his whiteness that he seemed to himself to shed light around him. The seminary bell rang out in clear notes, while all the scents of June—the perfume of blossoming stocks, of mignonette and of heliotropes—came over the lofty courtyard wall. In the chapel relatives were waiting in their best attire, so deeply moved that the women sobbed behind their veils. Next came the procession—the deacons about to receive their priesthood in golden chasubles, the sub-deacons in dalmatics, those in minor orders and the tonsured with their surplices floating on their shoulders and their black birettas in their hands. The organ rolled diffusing the flutelike notes of a canticle of joy. At the altar, the bishop officiated, staff in hand, assisted by two canons. All the Chapter were there, the priests of all the parishes thronged thick amid a dazzling wealth of apparel, a flaring of gold beneath a broad ray of sunlight falling from a window in the nave. The epistle over, the ordination began.

At this very hour Abbe Mouret could remember the chill of the scissors when he was marked with the tonsure at the beginning of his first year of theology. It had made him shudder slightly. But the tonsure had then been very small, hardly larger than a penny. Later, with each fresh order conferred on him, it had grown and grown until it crowned him with a white spot as large as a big Host. The organ's hum grew softer, and the censers swung with a silvery tinkling of their slender chains, releasing a cloudlet of white smoke, which unrolled in lacelike folds. He could see himself, a tonsured youth in a surplice, led to the altar by the master of ceremonies; there he knelt and bowed his head down low, while the bishop with golden scissors snipped off three locks—one over his forehead, and the other two near his ears. Yet another twelvemonth, and he could again see himself in the chapel amid the incense, receiving the four minor orders. Led by an archdeacon, he went to the main doorway, closed the door with a bang, and opened it again, to show that to him was entrusted the care of churches; next he rang a small bell with his right hand, in token that it was his duty to call the faithful to the divine offices; then he returned to the altar, where fresh privileges were conferred upon him by the bishop—those of singing the lessons, of blessing the bread, of catechising children, of exorcising evil spirits, of serving the deacons, of lighting and extinguishing the candles of the altars.

Next came back the memory of the ensuing ordination, more solemn and more dread, amid the same organ strains which sounded now like God's own thunder: this time he wore a sub-deacon's dalmatic upon his shoulders, he bound himself for ever by the vow of chastity, he trembled in every pore, despite his faith, at the terrible Accedite from the bishop, which put to flight two of his companions, blanching by his side. His new duties were to serve the priest at the altar, to prepare the cruets, sing the epistle, wipe the chalice, and carry the cross in processions. And, at last, he passed once more, and for the last time, into the chapel, in the radiance of a June sun: but this time he walked at the very head of the procession, with alb girdled about his waist, with stole crossed over his breast, and chasuble falling from his neck. All but fainting from emotion, he could perceive the pallid face of the bishop giving him the priesthood, the fulness of the ministry, by the threefold laying of his hands. And after taking the oath of ecclesiastical obedience, he felt himself uplifted from the stone flags, when the prelate in a full voice repeated the Latin words: 'Accipe Spiritum Sanctum.... Quorum remiseris peccata, remittuntur eis, et quorum retinueris, retenta sunt.'—'Receive the Holy Ghost.... Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained.'

XVI

This evocation of the deep joys of his youth had given Abbe Mouret a touch of feverishness. He no longer felt the cold. He put down the tongs and walked towards the bedstead as if about to go to bed, but turned back and pressed his forehead to a window-pane, looking out into the night with sightless eyes. Could he be ill? Why did he feel such languor in all his limbs, why did his blood burn in every vein? On two occasions, while at the seminary, he had experienced similar attacks—a sort of physical discomfort which made him most unhappy; one day, indeed, he had gone to bed in raving delirium. Then he bethought himself of a young girl possessed by evil spirits, whom Brother Archangias asserted he had cured with a simple sign of the cross, one day when she fell down before him. This reminded him of the spiritual exorcisms which one of his teachers had formerly recommended to him: prayer, a general confession, frequent communion, the choosing of a wise confessor who should have great authority on his mind. And then, without any transition, with a suddenness which astonished himself, he saw in the depths of his memory the round face of one of his old friends, a peasant, who had been a choir boy at eight years old, and whose expenses at the seminary were defrayed by a lady who watched over him. He was always laughing, he rejoiced beforehand at the anticipated emoluments of his career; twelve hundred francs of stipend, a vicarage at the end of a garden, presents, invitations to dinners, little profits from weddings, and baptismal and burial fees. That young fellow must indeed be happy in his parish.

The feeling of melancholy regret evoked by this recollection surprised Abbe Mouret extremely. Was he not happy, too? Until that day he had regretted nothing, wished for nothing, envied nothing. Even as he searched himself at that very moment he failed to find any cause for bitterness. He believed himself the same as in the early days of his deaconship, when the obligatory perusal of his breviary at certain stated hours had filled his days with continuous prayer. No doubts had tormented him; he had prostrated himself before the mysteries he could not understand; he had sacrificed his reason, which he despised, with the greatest ease. When he left the seminary, he had rejoiced at finding himself a stranger among his fellowmen, no longer walking like them, carrying his head differently, possessed of the gestures, words, and opinions of a being apart. He had felt emasculated, nearer to the angels, cleansed of sexuality. It had almost made him proud to belong no longer to his species, to have been brought up for God and carefully purged of all human grossness by a jealously watchful training. Again, it had seemed to him as if for years he had been dwelling in holy oil, prepared with all due rites, which had steeped his flesh in beatification. His limbs, his brain, had lost material substance to gain in soulfulness, impregnated with a subtle vapour which, at times, intoxicated him and dizzied him as if the earth had suddenly failed beneath his feet. He displayed the fears, the unwittingness, the open candour of a cloistered maiden. He sometimes remarked with a smile that he was prolonging his childhood, under the impression that he was still quite little, retaining the same sensations, the same ideas, the same opinions as in the past. At six years old, for instance, he had known as much of God as he knew at twenty-five; in prayer the inflexions of his voice were still the same, and he yet took a childish pleasure in folding his hands quite correctly. The world too seemed to him the same as he had seen in former days when his mother led him by the hand. He had been born a priest, and a priest he had grown up. Whenever he displayed before La Teuse some particularly gross ignorance of life, she would stare him in the face, astounded, and remark with a strange smile that 'he was Mademoiselle Desiree's brother all over.'

In all his existence he could only recall one shock of shame. It had happened during his last six months at the seminary, between his deaconship and priesthood. He had been ordered to read the work of Abbe Craisson, the superior of the great seminary at Valence: 'De rebus Veneris ad usum confessariorum.' And he had risen from this book terrified and choking with sobs. That learned casuistry, dealing so fully with the abominations of mankind, descending to the most monstrous examples of vice, violated, as it were, all his virginity of body and mind. He felt himself for ever befouled. Yet every time he heard confessions he inevitably recurred to that catechism of shame. And though the obscurities of dogma, the duties of his ministry, and the death of all free will within him left him calm and happy at being nought but the child of God, he retained, in spite of himself, a carnal taint of the horrors he must needs stir up; he was conscious of an ineffaceable stain, deep down somewhere in his being, which might some day grow larger and cover him with mud.

The moon was rising behind the Garrigue hills. Abbe Mouret, still more and more feverish, opened the window and leaned out upon his elbows, that he might feel upon his face the coolness of the night. He could no longer remember at what time exactly this illness had come upon him. He recollected, however, that in the morning, while saying mass, he had been quite calm and restful. It must have been later, perhaps during his long walk in the sun, or while he shivered under the trees of the Paradou, or while stifling in Desiree's poultry-yard. And then he lived through the day again.

Before him stretched the vast plain, more direful still beneath the pallid light of the oblique moonbeams. The olive and almond trees showed like grey spots amid the chaos of rocks spreading to the sombre row of hills on the horizon. There were big splotches of gloom, bumpy ridges, blood-hued earthy pools in which red stars seemed to contemplate one another, patches of chalky light, suggestive of women's garments cast off and disclosing shadowy forms which slumbered in the hollow folds of ground. At night that glowing landscape weltered there strangely, passionately, slumbering with uncovered bosom, and outspread twisted limbs, whilst heaving mighty sighs, and exhaling the strong aroma of a sweating sleeper. It was as if some mighty Cybele had fallen there beneath the moon, intoxicated with the embraces of the sun. Far away, Abbe Mouret's eyes followed the path to Les Olivettes, a narrow pale ribbon stretching along like a wavy stay-lace. He could hear Brother Archangias whipping the truant schoolgirls, and spitting in the faces of their elder sisters. He could see Rosalie slyly laughing in her hands while old Bambousse hurled clods of earth after her and smote her on her hips. Then, too, he thought, he had still been well, his neck barely heated by the lovely morning sunshine. He had felt but a quivering behind him, that confused hum of life, which he had faintly heard since morning when the sun, in the midst of his mass, had entered the church by the shattered windows. Never, then, had the country disturbed him, as it did at this hour of night, with its giant bosom, its yielding shadows, its gleams of ambery skin, its lavish goddess-like nudity, scarce hidden by the silvery gauze of moonlight.

The young priest lowered his eyes, and gazed upon the village of Les Artaud. It had sunk into the heavy slumber of weariness, the soundness of peasants' sleep. Not a light: the battered hovels showed like dusky mounds intersected by the white stripes of cross lanes which the moonbeams swept. Even the dogs were surely snoring on the thresholds of the closed doors. Had the Artauds poisoned the air of the parsonage with some abominable plague? Behind him gathered and swept the gust whose approach filled him with so much anguish. Now he could detect a sound like the tramping of a flock, a whiff of dusty air, which reached him laden with the emanations of beasts. Again came back his thoughts of a handful of men beginning the centuries over again, springing up between those naked rocks like thistles sown by the winds. In his childhood nothing had amazed and frightened him more than those myriads of insects which gushed forth when he raised certain damp stones. The Artauds disturbed him even in their slumber; he could recognise their breath in the air he inhaled. He would have liked to have had the rocks alone below his window. The hamlet was not dead enough; the thatched roofs bulged like bosoms; through the gaping cracks in the doors came low faint sounds which spoke of all the swarming life within. Nausea came upon him. Yet he had often faced it all without feeling any other need than that of refreshing himself in prayer.

His brow perspiring, he proceeded to open the other window, as if to seek cooler air. Below him, to his left, lay the graveyard with the Solitaire erect like a bar, unstirred by the faintest breeze. From the empty field arose an odour like that of a newly mown meadow. The grey wall of the church, that wall full of lizards and planted with wall-flowers, gleamed coldly in the moonlight, and the panes of one of the windows glistened like plates of steel. The sleeping church could now have no other life within it than the extra-human life of the Divinity embodied in the Host enclosed in the tabernacle. He thought of the bracket lamp's yellow glow peeping out of the gloom, and was tempted to go down once more to try to ease his ailing head amid those deep shadows. But a strange feeling of terror held him back; he suddenly fancied, while his eyes were fixed upon the moonlit panes, that he saw the church illumined by a furnace-like glare, the blaze of a festival of hell, in which whirled the Month of May, the plants, the animals, and the girls of Les Artaud, who wildly encircled trees with their bare arms. Then, as he leaned over, he saw beneath him Desiree's poultry-yard, black and steaming. He could not clearly distinguish the rabbit-hutches, the fowls' roosting-places, or the ducks' house. The place was all one big mass heaped up in stench, still exhaling in its sleep a pestiferous odour. From under the stable-door came the acrid smell of the nanny-goat; while the little pig, stretched upon his back, snorted near an empty porringer. And suddenly with his brazen throat Alexander, the big yellow cock, raised a crow, which awoke in the distance impassioned calls from all the cocks of the village.

Then all at once Abbe Mouret remembered: The fever had struck him in Desiree's farmyard, while he was looking at the hens still warm from laying, the rabbit-does plucking the down from under them. And now the feeling that some one was breathing on his neck became so distinct that he turned at last to see who was behind him. And then he recalled Albine bounding out of the Paradou, and the door slamming upon the vision of an enchanted garden; he recalled the girl racing alongside the interminable wall, following the gig at a run, and throwing birch leaves to the breeze as kisses; he recalled her, again, in the twilight, laughing at the oaths of Brother Archangias, her skirts skimming over the path like a cloudlet of dust bowled along by the evening breeze. She was sixteen; how strange she looked, with her rather elongated face! she savoured of the open air, of the grass, of mother earth. And so accurate was his recollection of her that he could once more see a scratch upon one of her supple wrists, a rosy scar on her white skin. Why did she laugh like that when she looked at him with her blue eyes? He was engulfed in her laugh as in a sonorous wave which resounded and pressed close to him on every side; he inhaled it, he felt it vibrate within him. Yes, all his evil came from that laugh of hers which he had quaffed.

Standing in the middle of the room, with both windows open, he remained shivering, seized with a fright which made him hide his face in his hands. So this was the ending of the whole day; this evocation of a fair girl, with a somewhat long face and eyes of blue. And the whole day came in through the open windows. In the distance—the glow of those red lands, the ardent passion of the big rocks, of the olive-trees springing up amid the stones, of the vines twisting their arms by the roadside. Nearer—the steam of human sweat borne in upon the air from Les Artaud, the musty odour of the cemetery, the fragrance of incense from the church, tainted by the scent of greasy-haired wenches. And there was also the steaming muck-heap, the fumes of the poultry-yard, the oppressing ferment of animal germs. And all these vapours poured in at once, in one asphyxiating gust, so offensive, so violent, as to choke him. He tried to close his senses, to subdue and annihilate them. But Albine reappeared before him like a tall flower that had sprung and grown beautiful in that soil. She was the natural blossom of that corruption, delicate in the sunshine, her white shoulders expanding in youthfulness, her whole being so fraught with the gladness of life, that she leaped from her stem and darted upon his mouth, scenting him with her long ripple of laughter.

A cry burst from the priest. He had felt a burning touch upon his lips. A stream as of fire coursed through his veins. And then, in search of refuge, he threw himself on his knees before the statuette of the Immaculate Conception, exclaiming, with folded hands:

'Holy Virgin of Virgins, pray for me!'

XVII

The Immaculate Conception, set on the walnut chest of drawers, was smiling softly, with her slender lips, marked by a dash of carmine. Her form was small and wholly white. Her long white veil, falling from head to foot, had but an imperceptible thread of gold around its edge. Her gown, draped in long straight folds over a sexless figure, was fastened around her flexible neck. Not a single lock of her chestnut hair peeped forth. Her countenance was rosy, with clear eyes upturned to heaven: her hands were clasped—rosy, childlike hands, whose finger-tips appeared beneath the folds of her veil, above the azure scarf which seemed to girdle her waist with two streaming ends of the firmament. Of all her womanly charms not one was bared, except her feet, adorable feet which trod the mystical eglantine. And from those nude feet sprang golden roses, like the natural efflorescence of her twofold purity of flesh.

'Virgin most faithful, pray for me,' the priest despairingly pleaded.

This Virgin had never distressed him. She was not a mother yet; she did not offer Jesus to him, her figure did not yet present the rounded outlines of maternity. She was not the Queen of Heaven descending, crowned with gold and clothed in gold like a princess of the earth, borne in triumph by a flight of cherubim. She had never assumed an awesome mien; had never spoken to him with the austere severity of an all-powerful mistress, the very sight of whom must bow all foreheads to the dust. He could dare to look on her and love her, without fear of being moved by the gentle wave of her chestnut hair; her bare feet alone excited his affection, those feet of love which blossomed like a garden of chastity in too miraculous a manner for him to seek to cover them with kisses. She scented his room with lily-like fragrance. She was indeed the silver lily planted in a golden vase, she was precious, eternal, impeccable purity. Within the white veil, so closely drawn round her, there could be nothing human—only a virgin flame, burning with ever even glow. At night when he went to bed, in the morning when he woke, he could see her there, still and ever wearing that same ecstatic smile.

'Mother most pure, Mother most chaste, Mother ever-virgin, pray for me!' he stammered in his fear, pressing close to the Virgin's feet, as if he could hear Albine's sonorous footfalls behind him. 'You are my refuge, the source of my joy, the seat of my wisdom, the tower of ivory in which I have shut up my purity. I place myself in your spotless hands, I beseech you to take me, to cover me with a corner of your veil, to hide me beneath your innocence, behind the hallowed rampart of your garment—so that no fleshly breath may reach me. I need you, I die without you, I shall feel for ever parted from you, if you do not bear me away in your helpful arms, far hence into the glowing whiteness wherein you dwell. O Mary, conceived without sin, annihilate me in the depths of the immaculate snow that falls from your every limb. You are the miracle of eternal chastity. Your race has sprung from a very beam of grace, like some wondrous tree unsown by any germ. Your son, Jesus, was born of the breath of God; you yourself were born without defilement of your mother's womb, and I would believe that this virginity goes back thus from age to age in endless unwittingness of flesh. Oh! to live, to grow up outside the pale of the senses! Oh! to perpetuate life solely by the contact of a celestial kiss!'

This despairing appeal, this cry of purified longing, calmed the young priest's fears. The Virgin—wholly white, with eyes turned heavenward, appeared to smile more tenderly with her thin red lips. And in a softened voice he went on:

'I should like to be a child once more. I should like to be always a child, walking in the shadow of your gown. When I was quite little, I clasped my hands when I uttered the name of Mary. My cradle was white, my body was white, my every thought was white. I could see you distinctly, I could hear you calling me, I went towards you in the light of a smile over scattered rose-petals. And nought else did I feel or think, I lived but just enough to be a flower at your feet. No one should grow up. You would have around you none but fair young heads, a crowd of children who would love you with pure hands, unsullied lips, tender limbs, stainless as if fresh from a bath of milk. To kiss a child's cheek is to kiss its soul. A child alone can say your name without befouling it. In later years our lips grow tainted and reek of our passions. Even I, who love you so much, and have given myself to you, I dare not at all times call on you, for I would not let you come in contact with the impurities of my manhood. I have prayed and chastised my flesh, I have slept in your keeping, and lived in chastity; and yet I weep to see that I am not yet dead enough to this world to be your betrothed. O Mary! adorable Virgin, why can I not be only five years old—why could I not remain the child who pressed his lips to your pictures? I would take you to my heart, I would lay you by my side, I would clasp and kiss you like a friend—like a girl of my own age. Your close hanging garments, your childish veil, your blue scarf—all that youthfulness which makes you like an elder sister would be mine. I would not try to kiss your locks, for hair is a naked thing which should not be seen; but I would kiss your bare feet, one after the other, for nights and nights together, until my lips should have shred the petals of those golden roses, those mystical roses of our veins.'

He stopped, waiting for the Virgin to look down upon him and touch his forehead with the edges of her veil. But she remained enwrapped in muslin to her neck and finger-nails and ankles, so slim, so etherealised, that she already seemed to be above earth, to be wholly heaven's own.

'Well, then,' he went on more wildly still, 'grant that I become a child again, O kindly Virgin! Virgin most powerful. Grant that I may be only five years old. Rid me of my senses, rid me of my manhood. Let a miracle sweep away all the man that has grown up within me. You reign in heaven, nothing is easier to you than to change me, to rid me of all my strength so that evermore I may be unable to raise my little finger without your leave. I wish never more to feel either nerve, or muscle, or the beating of my heart. I long to be simply a thing—a white stone at your feet, on which you will leave but a perfume; a stone that will not move from where you cast it, but will remain earless and eyeless, content to lie beneath your heel, unable to think of foulness! Oh! then what bliss for me! I shall reach without an effort and at a bound my dream of perfection. I shall at last proclaim myself your true priest. I shall become what all my studies, my prayers, my five years of initiation have been unable to make me. Yes, I reject life; I say that the death of mankind is better than abomination. Everything is stained; everywhere is love tainted. Earth is steeped in impurity, whose slightest drops yield growths of shame. But that I may be perfect, O Queen of angels, hearken to my prayer, and grant it! Make me one of those angels that have only two great wings behind their cheeks; I shall then no longer have a body, no longer have any limbs; I will fly to you if you call me. I shall be but a mouth to sing your praises, a pair of spotless wings to cradle you in your journeys through the heavens. O death! death! Virgin, most venerable, grant me the death of all! I will love you for the death of my body, the death of all that lives and multiplies. I will consummate with you the sole marriage that my heart desires. I will ascend, ever higher and higher, till I have reached the brasier in which you shine in splendour. There one beholds a mighty planet, an immense white rose, whose every petal glows like a moon, a silver throne whence you beam with such a blaze of innocence that heaven itself is all illumined by the gleam of your veil alone. All that is white, the early dawns, the snow on inaccessible peaks, the lilies barely opening, the water of hidden, unknown springs, the milky sap of the plants untouched by the sun, the smiles of maidens, the souls of children dead in their cradles—all rains upon your white feet. And I will rise to your mouth like a subtle flame; I will enter into you by your parted lips, and the bridal will be fulfilled, while the archangels are thrilled by our joyfulness. Oh, to be maiden, to love in maidenhood, to preserve amid the sweetest kisses one's maiden whiteness! To possess all love, stretched on the wings of swans, in a sky of purity, in the arms of a mistress of light, whose caresses are but raptures of the soul! Oh, there lies the perfection, the super-human dream, the yearning which shatters my very bones, the joy which bears me up to heaven! O Mary, Vessel of Election, rid me of all that is human in me, so that you may fearlessly surrender to me the treasure of your maidenhood!'

And then Abbe Mouret, felled by fever, his teeth chattering, swooned away on the floor.

BOOK II

I

Through calico curtains, carefully drawn across the two large windows, a pale white light like that of breaking day filtered into the room. It was a lofty and spacious room, fitted up with old Louis XV. furniture, the woodwork painted white, the upholstery showing a pattern of red flowers on a leafy ground. On the piers above the doors on either side of the alcove were faded paintings still displaying the rosy flesh of flying Cupids, whose games it was now impossible to follow. The wainscoting with oval panels, the folding doors, the rounded ceiling (once sky-blue and framed with scrolls, medallions, and bows of flesh-coloured ribbons), had all faded to the softest grey. Opposite the windows the large alcove opened beneath banks of clouds which plaster Cupids drew aside, leaning over, and peeping saucily towards the bed. And like the windows, the alcove was curtained with coarsely hemmed calico, whose simplicity seemed strange in this room where lingered a perfume of whilom luxury and voluptuousness.

Seated near a pier table, on which a little kettle bubbled over a spirit-lamp, Albine intently watched the alcove curtains. She was gowned in white, her hair gathered up in an old lace kerchief, her hands drooping wearily, as she kept watch with the serious mien of youthful womanhood. A faint breathing, like that of a slumbering child, could be heard in the deep silence. But she grew restless after a few minutes, and could not restrain herself from stepping lightly towards the alcove and raising one of the curtains. On the edge of the big bed lay Serge, apparently asleep, with his head resting on his bent arm. During his illness his hair had lengthened, and his beard had grown. He looked very white, with sunken eyes and pallid lips.

Moved by the sight Albine was about to let the curtain fall again. But Serge faintly murmured, 'I am not asleep.'

He lay perfectly still with his head on his arm, without stirring even a finger, as if overwhelmed by delightful weariness. His eyes had slowly opened, and his breath blew lightly on one of his hands, raising the golden down on his fair skin.

'I heard you,' he murmured again. 'You were walking very gently.'*

* From this point in the original Serge and Albine thee and thou
one another; but although this tutoiement has some bearing on
the development of the story, it was impossible to preserve it
in an English translation.—ED.

His voice enchanted her. She went up to his bed and crouched beside it to bring her face on a level with his own. 'How are you?' she asked, and then continued: 'Oh! you are well now. Do you know, I used to cry the whole way home when I came back from over yonder with bad news of you. They told me you were delirious, and that if your dreadful fever did spare your life, it would destroy your reason. Oh, didn't I kiss your uncle Pascal when he brought you here to recruit your health!'

Then she tucked in his bed-clothes like a young mother.

'Those burnt-up rocks over yonder, you see, were no good to you. You need trees, and coolness, and quiet. The doctor hasn't even told a soul that he was hiding you away here. That's a secret between himself and those who love you. He thought you were lost. Nobody will ever disturb you, you may be sure of that! Uncle Jeanbernat is smoking his pipe by his lettuce bed. The others will get news of you on the sly. Even the doctor isn't coming back any more. I am to be your doctor now. You don't want any more physic, it seems. What you now want is to be loved; do you see?'

He did not seem to hear her, his brain as yet was void. His eyes, although his head remained motionless, wandered inquiringly round the room, and it struck her that he was wondering where he might be.

'This is my room,' she said. 'I have given it to you. Isn't it a pretty one? I took the finest pieces of furniture out of the lumber attic, and then I made those calico curtains to prevent the daylight from dazzling me. And you're not putting me out a bit. I shall sleep on the second floor. There are three or four empty rooms there.'

Still he looked anxious.

'You're alone?' he asked.

'Yes; why do you ask that?'

He made no answer, but muttered wearily: 'I have been dreaming, I am always dreaming. I hear bells ringing, and they tire me.'

And after a pause he went on: 'Go and shut the door, bolt it; I want you to be alone, quite alone.'

When she came back, bringing a chair with her, and sat down by his pillow, he looked as gleeful as a child, and kept on saying: 'Nobody can come in now. I shall not hear those bells any more. When you are talking to me, it rests me.'

'Would you like something to drink?' she asked.

He made a sign that he was not thirsty. He looked at Albine's hands as if so astonished, so delighted to see them, that with a smile she laid one on the edge of his pillow. Then he let his head glide down, and rested his cheek against that small, cool hand, saying, with a light laugh: 'Ah! it's as soft as silk. It is just as if it were sending a cool breeze through my hair. Don't take it away, please.'

Then came another long spell of silence. They gazed on one another with loving kindliness—Albine calmly scanning herself in the convalescent's eyes, Serge apparently listening to some faint whisper from the small, cool hand.

'Your hand is so nice,' he said once more. 'You can't fancy what good it does me. It seems to steal inside me, and take away all the pain in my limbs. It's as if I were being soothed all over, relieved, cured.'

He gently rubbed his cheek against it, with growing animation, as if he were at last coming back to life.

'You won't give me anything nasty to drink, will you? You won't worry me with all sorts of physic? Your hand is quite enough for me. I have come here for you to put it there under my head.'

'Dear Serge,' said Albine softly, 'how you must have suffered.'

'Suffered! yes, yes; but it's a long time ago. I slept badly, I had such frightful dreams. If I could, I would tell you all about it.'

He closed his eyes for a moment and strove hard to remember.

'I can see nothing but darkness,' he stammered. 'It is very odd, I have just come back from a long journey. I don't even know now where I started from. I had fever, I know, a fever that raced through my veins like a wild beast. That was it—now I remember. The whole time I had a nightmare, in which I seemed to be crawling along an endless underground passage; and every now and then I had an attack of intolerable pain, and then the passage would be suddenly walled up. A shower of stones fell from overhead, the side walls closed in, and there I stuck, panting, mad to get on; and then I bored into the obstacle and battered away with feet and fists, and skull, despairing of ever being able to get through the ever increasing mound of rubbish. At other times, I only had to touch it with my finger and it vanished: I could then walk freely along the widened gallery, weary only from the pangs of my attack.'

Albine tried to lay a hand upon his lips.

'No,' said he, 'it doesn't tire me to talk. I can whisper to you here, you see. I feel as if I were thinking and you could hear me. The queerest point about that underground journey of mine was that I hadn't the faintest idea of turning back again; I got obstinate, although I had the thought before me that it would take me thousands of years to clear away a single heap of wreckage. It seemed a fated task, which I had to fulfil under pain of the greatest misfortunes. So, with my knees all bruised, and my forehead bumping against the hard rock, I set myself to work with all my might, so that I might get to the end as quickly as possible. The end? What was it?... Ah! I do not know, I do not know.'

He closed his eyes and pondered dreamily. Then, with a careless pout, he again sank upon Albine's hand and said laughing: 'How silly of me! I am a child.'

But the girl, to ascertain if he were wholly hers, questioned him and led him back to the confused recollections he had tried to summon up. He could remember nothing, however; he was truly in a happy state of childhood. He fancied that he had been born the day before.

'Oh! I am not strong enough yet,' he said. 'My furthest recollection is of a bed which burned me all over, my head rolled about on a pillow like a pan of live coals, and my feet wore away with perpetual rubbing against each other. I was very bad, I know. It seemed as if I were having my body changed, as if I were being taken all to pieces, and put together again like some broken machine.'

He laughed at this simile, and continued: 'I shall be all new again. My illness has given me a fine cleaning. But what was it you were asking me? No, nobody was there. I was suffering all by myself at the bottom of a black hole. Nobody, nobody. And beyond that, nothing—I can see nothing.... Let me be your child, will you? You shall teach me to walk. I can see nothing else but you now. I care for nothing but you.... I can't remember, I tell you. I came, you took me, and that is all.'

And restfully, pettingly, he said once more: 'How warm your hand is now! it is as nice as the sun. Don't let us talk any more. It makes me hot.'

A quivering silence fell from the blue ceiling of the large room. The spirit lamp had just gone out, and from the kettle came a finer and finer thread of steam. Albine and Serge, their heads side by side upon the pillow, gazed at the large calico curtains drawn across the windows. Serge's eyes, especially, were attracted to them as to the very source of light, in which he sought to steep himself, as in diluted sunshine fitted to his weakness. He could tell that the sun lay behind that yellower gleam upon one corner of the curtain, and that sufficed to make him feel himself again. Meanwhile a far-off rustle of leaves came upon his listening ear, and against the right-hand window the clean-cut greenish shadow of a lofty bough brought him disturbing thoughts of the forest which he could feel to be near him.

'Would you like me to open the curtains?' asked Albine, misunderstanding his steady gaze.

'No, no,' he hastily replied.

'It's a fine day; you would see the sunlight and the trees.'

'No, please don't.... I don't want to see anything outside. That bough there tires me with its waving and its rising, as if it was alive. Leave your hand here, I will go to sleep. All is white now. It's so nice.'

And then he calmly fell asleep, while Albine watched beside him and breathed upon his face to make his slumber cool.

II

The fine weather broke up on the morrow, and it rained heavily. Serge's fever returned, and he spent a day of suffering, with his eyes despairingly fixed upon the curtains through which the light now fell dim and ashy grey as in a cellar. He could no longer see a trace of sunshine, and he looked in vain for the shadow that had scared him, the shadow of that lofty bough which had disappeared amid the mist and the pouring rain, and seemed to have carried away with it the whole forest. Towards evening he became slightly delirious and cried out to Albine that the sun was dead, that he could hear all the sky, all the country bewailing the death of the sun. She had to soothe him like a child, promising him the sun, telling him that it would come back again, that she would give it to him. But he also grieved for the plants. The seeds, he said, must be suffering underground, waiting for the return of light; they had nightmares, they also dreamed that they were crawling along an underground passage, hindered by mounds of ruins, struggling madly to reach the sunshine. And he began to weep and sob out in low tones that winter was a disease of the earth, and that he should die with the earth, unless the springtide healed them both.

For three days more the weather was truly frightful. The downpour burst over the trees with the awful clamour of an overflowing river. Gusts of wind rolled by and beat against the windows with the violence of enormous waves. Serge had insisted on Albine closing the shutters. By lamplight he was no longer troubled by the gloom of the pallid curtains, he no longer felt the greyness of the sky glide in through the smallest chinks, and flow up to him like a cloud of dust intent on burying him. However, increasing apathy crept upon him as he lay there with shrunken arms and pallid features; his weakness augmented as the earth grew more ailing. At times, when the clouds were inky black, when the bending trees cracked, and the grass lay limp beneath the downpour like the hair of a drowned woman, he all but ceased to breathe, and seemed to be passing away, shattered by the hurricane. But at the first gleam of light, at the tiniest speck of blue between two clouds, he breathed once more and drank in the soothing calm of the drying leaves, the whitening paths, the fields quaffing their last draught of water. Albine now also longed for the sun; twenty times a day would she go to the window on the landing to scan the sky, delighted at the smallest scrap of white that she espied, but perturbed when she perceived any dusky, copper-tinted, hail-laden masses, and ever dreading lest some sable cloud should kill her dear patient. She talked of sending for Doctor Pascal, but Serge would not have it.

'To-morrow there will be sunlight on the curtains,' he said, 'and then I shall be well again.'

One evening when his condition was most alarming, Albine again gave him her hand to rest his cheek upon. But when she saw that it brought him no relief she wept to find herself powerless. Since he had fallen into the lethargy of winter she had felt too weak to drag him unaided from the nightmare in which he was struggling. She needed the assistance of spring. She herself was fading away, her arms grew cold, her breath scant; she no longer knew how to breathe life into him. For hours together she would roam about the spacious dismal room, and as she passed before the mirror and saw herself darkening in it, she thought she had become hideous.

One morning, however, as she raised his pillows, not daring to try again the broken spell of her hands, she fancied that she once more caught the first day's smile on Serge's lips.

'Open the shutters,' he said faintly.

She thought him still delirious, for only an hour previously she had seen but a gloomy sky on looking out from the landing.

'Hush, go to sleep,' she answered sadly; 'I have promised to wake you at the very first ray—— Sleep on, there's no sun out yet.'

'Yes, I can feel it, its light is there.... Open the shutters.'

III

And there, indeed, the sunlight was. When Albine had opened the shutters, behind the large curtains, the genial yellow glow once more warmed a patch of the white calico. But that which impelled Serge to sit up in bed was the sight of the shadowy bough, the branch that for him heralded the return of life. All the resuscitated earth, with its wealth of greenery, its waters, and its belts of hills, was in that greenish blur that quivered with the faintest breath of air. It no longer disturbed him; he greedily watched it rocking, and hungered for the fortified powers of the vivifying sap which to him it symbolised. Albine, happy once more, exclaimed, as she supported him in her arms: 'Ah! my dear Serge, the winter is over. Now we are saved.'

He lay down again, his eyes already brighter, and his voice clearer. 'To-morrow I shall be very strong,' he said. 'You shall draw back the curtains. I want to see everything.'

But on the morrow he was seized with childish fear. He would not hear of the windows being opened wide. 'By-and-by,' he muttered, 'later on.' He was fearful, he dreaded the first beam of light that would flash upon his eyes. Evening came on, and still he had been unable to make up his mind to look upon the sun. He remained thus all day long, his face turned towards the curtains, watching on their transparent tissue the pallor of morn, the glow of noon, the violet tint of twilight, all the hues, all the emotions of the sky. There were pictured even the quiverings of the warm air at the light stroke of a bird's wing, even the delight of earth's odours throbbing in a sunbeam. Behind that veil, behind that softened phantasm of the mighty life without, he could hear the rise of spring. He even felt stifled at times when in spite of the curtains' barrier the rush of the earth's new blood came upon him too strongly.

The following morning he was still asleep when Albine, to hasten his recovery, cried out to him:

'Serge! Serge! here's the sun!'

She swiftly drew back the curtains and threw the windows wide open. He raised himself and knelt upon his bed, oppressed, swooning, his hands tightly pressed against his breast to keep his heart from breaking. Before him stretched the broad sky, all blue, a boundless blue; and in it he washed away his sufferings, surrendering himself to it, and drinking from it sweetness and purity and youth. The bough whose shadow he had noted jutted across the window and alone set against the azure sea its vigorous growth of green; but even this was too much for his sickly fastidiousness; it seemed to him that the very swallows flying past besmeared the purity of the azure. He was being born anew. He raised little involuntary cries, as he felt himself flooded with light, assailed by waves of warm air, while a whirling, whelming torrent of life flowed within him. As last with outstretched hands he sank back upon his pillow in a swoon of joy.

What a happy, delicious day that was! The sun came in from the right, far away from the alcove. Throughout the morning Serge watched it creeping onward. He could see it coming towards him, yellow as gold, perching here and there on the old furniture, frolicking in corners, at times gliding along the ground like a strip of ribbon. It was a slow deliberate march, the approach of a fond mistress stretching her golden limbs, drawing nigh to the alcove with rhythmic motion, with voluptuous lingering, which roused intense desire. At length, towards two o'clock, the sheet of sunlight left the last armchair, climbed along the coverlet, and spread over the bed like loosened locks of hair. To its glowing fondling Serge surrendered his wasted hands: with his eyes half-closed, he could feel fiery kisses thrilling each of his fingers; he lay in a bath of light, in the embrace of a glowing orb. And when Albine leaned over smiling, 'Let me be,' he stammered, his eyes now shut; 'don't hold me so tightly. How do you manage to hold me like this in your arms?'

But the sun crept down the bed again and slowly retreated to the left; and as Serge watched it bend once more and settle on chair after chair, he bitterly regretted that he had not kept it to his breast. Albine still sat upon the side of the bed, and the pair of them, an arm round each other's neck, watched the slow paling of the sky. At times a mighty thrill seemed to make it blanch. Serge's languid eyes now wandered over it more freely and detected in it exquisite tints of which he had never dreamed. It was not all blue, but rosy blue, lilac blue, tawny blue, living flesh, vast and spotless nudity heaving like a woman's bosom in the breeze. At every glance into space he found a fresh surprise—unknown nooks, coy smiles, bewitching rounded outlines, gauzy veils which were cast over the mighty, glorious forms of goddesses in the depths of peeping paradises. And with his limbs lightened by suffering he winged his way amid that shimmering silk, that stainless down of azure. The sun sank lower and lower, the blue melted into purest gold, the sky's living flesh gleamed fairer still, and then was slowly steeped in all the hues of gloom. Not a cloud—nought but gradual disappearance, a disrobing which left behind it but a gleam of modesty on the horizon. And at last the broad sky slumbered.

'Oh, the dear baby!' exclaimed Albine, as she looked at Serge, who had fallen asleep upon her neck at the same time as the heavens.

She laid him down in bed and shut the windows. Next morning, however, they were opened at break of day. Serge could no longer live without the sunlight. His strength was growing, he was becoming accustomed to the gusts of air which sent the alcove curtains flying. Even the azure, the everlasting azure, began to pall upon him. He grew weary of being white and swanlike, of ever swimming on heaven's limpid lake. He came to wish for a pack of black clouds, some crumbling of the skies, that would break upon the monotony of all that purity. And as his health returned, he hungered for keener sensations. He now spent hours in gazing at the verdant bough: he would have liked to see it grow, expand, and throw out its branches to his very bed. It no longer satisfied him, but only roused desires, speaking to him as it did of all the trees whose deep-sounding call he could hear although their crests were hidden from his sight. An endless whispering of leaves, a chattering as of running water, a fluttering as of wings, all blended in one mighty, long-drawn, quivering voice, resounded in his ears.

'When you are able to get up,' said Albine, 'you shall sit at the window. You will see the lovely garden!'

He closed his eyes and murmured gently:

'Oh! I can see it, I hear it; I know where the trees are, where the water runs, where the violets grow.'

And then he added: 'But I can't see it clearly, I see it without any light. I must be very strong before I shall be able to get as far as the window.'

At times when Albine thought him asleep, she would vanish for hours. And on coming in again, she would find him burning with impatience, his eyes gleaming with curiosity.

'Where have you been?' he would call to her, taking hold of her arms, and feeling her skirts, her bodice, and her cheeks. 'You smell of all sorts of nice things. Ah! you have been walking on the grass?'

At this she would laugh and show him her shoes wet with dew.

'You have been in the garden! you have been in the garden!' he then exclaimed delightedly. 'I knew it. When you came in you seemed like a large flower. You have brought the whole garden in your skirt.'

He would keep her by him, inhaling her like a nosegay. Sometimes she came back with briars, leaves, or bits of wood entangled in her clothes. These he would remove and hide under his pillow like relics. One day she brought him a bunch of roses. At the sight of them he was so affected that he wept. He kissed them and went to sleep with them in his arms. But when they faded, he felt so keenly grieved that he forbade Albine to gather any more. He preferred her, said he, for she was as fresh and as balmy; and she never faded, her hands, her hair, her cheeks were always fragrant. At last he himself would send her into the garden, telling her not to come back before an hour.

'In that way,' he said, 'I shall get sunlight, fresh air, and roses till to-morrow.'

Often, when he saw her coming in out of breath, he would cross-examine her. Which path had she taken? Had she wandered among the trees, or had she gone round the meadow side? Had she seen any nests? Had she sat down behind a bush of sweetbriar, or under an oak, or in the shade of a clump of poplars? But when she answered him and tried to describe the garden to him, he would put his hand to her lips.

'No, no,' he said gently. 'It is wrong of me. I don't want to know. I would rather see it myself.'

Then he would relapse into his favourite dream of all the greenery which he could feel only a step away. For several days he lived on that dream alone. At first, he said, he had perceived the garden much more distinctly. As he gained strength, the surging blood that warmed his veins seemed to blur his dreamy imaginings. His uncertainties multiplied. He could no longer tell whether the trees were on the right, whether the water flowed at the bottom of the garden, or whether some great rocks were not piled below his windows. He talked softly of all this to himself. On the slightest indication he would rear wondrous plans, which the song of a bird, the creaking of a bough, the scent of a flower, would suddenly make him modify, impelling him to plant a thicket of lilac in one spot, and in another to place flower-beds where formerly there had been a lawn. Every hour he designed some new garden, much to the amusement of Albine, who, whenever she surprised him at it, would exclaim with a burst of laughter: 'That's not it, I assure you. You can't have any idea of it. It's more beautiful than all the beautiful things you ever saw. So don't go racking your head about it. The garden's mine, and I will give it to you. Be easy, it won't run away.'

Serge, who had already been so afraid of the light, felt considerable trepidation when he found himself strong enough to go and rest his elbows on the window-sill. Every evening he once more repeated, 'To-morrow,' and 'To-morrow.' He would turn away in his bed with a shudder when Albine came in, and would cry out that she smelt of hawthorn, that she had scratched her hands in burrowing a hole through a hedge to bring him all its odour. One morning, however, she suddenly took him up in her arms, and almost carrying him to the window, held him there and forced him to look out and see.

'What a coward you are!' she exclaimed with her fine ringing laugh.

And waving one hand all round the landscape, she repeated with an air of triumph, full of tender promise: 'The Paradou! The Paradou!'

Serge looked out upon it, speechless.

IV

A sea of verdure, in front, to right, to left, everywhere. A sea rolling its surging billows of leaves as far as the horizon, unhindered by house, or screen of wall, or dusty road. A desert, virgin, hallowed sea, displaying its wild sweetness in the innocence of solitude. The sun alone came thither, weltering in the meadows in a sheet of gold, threading the paths with the frolicsome scamper of its beams, letting its fine-spun, flaming locks droop through the trees, sipping from the springs with amber lips that thrilled the water. Beneath that flaming dust the vast garden ran riot like some delighted beast let loose at the world's very end, far from everything and free from everything. So prodigal was the luxuriance of foliage, so overflowing the tide of herbage, that from end to end it all seemed hidden, flooded, submerged. Nought could be seen but slopes of green, stems springing up like fountains, billowy masses, woodland curtains closely drawn, mantles of creepers trailing over the ground, and flights of giant boughs swooping down upon every side.

Amidst that tremendous luxuriance of vegetation even lengthy scrutiny could barely make out the bygone plan of the Paradou. In the foreground, in a sort of immense amphitheatre, must have lain the flower garden, whose fountains were now sunken and dry, its stone balustrades shattered, its flight of steps all warped, and its statues overthrown, patches of their whiteness gleaming amidst the dusky stretches of turf. Farther back, behind the blue line of a sheet of water, stretched a maze of fruit-trees; farther still rose towering woodland, its dusky, violet depths streaked with bands of light. It was a forest which had regained virginity, an endless stretch of tree-tops rising one above the other, tinged with yellowish green and pale green and vivid green, according to the variety of the species.

On the right, the forest scaled some hills, dotting them with little clumps of pine-trees, and dying away in straggling brushwood, while a huge barrier of barren rock, heaped together like the fallen wreckage of a mountain, shut out all view beyond. Flaming growths there cleaved the rugged soil, monstrous plants lay motionless in the heat, like drowsing reptiles; a silvery streak, a foamy splash that glistened in the distance like a cloud of pearls, revealed the presence of a waterfall, the source of those tranquil streams that lazily skirted the flower-garden. Lastly, on the left the river flowed through a vast stretch of meadowland, where it parted into four streamlets which winded fitfully beneath the rushes, between the willows, behind the taller trees. And far away into the distance grassy patches prolonged the lowland freshness, forming a landscape steeped in bluish haze, where a gleam of daylight slowly melted into the verdant blue of sunset. The Paradou—its flower-garden, forest, rocks, streams, and meadows—filled the whole breadth of sky.

'The Paradou!' stammered Serge, stretching out his arms as if to clasp the entire garden to his breast.

He tottered, and Albine had to seat him in an armchair. There he sat for two whole hours intently gazing, without opening his lips, his chin resting on his hands. At times his eyelids fluttered and a flush rose to his cheeks. Slowly he looked, profoundly amazed. It was all too vast, too complex, too overpowering.

'I cannot see, I cannot understand,' he cried, stretching out his hands to Albine with a gesture of uttermost weariness.

The girl came and leant over the back of his armchair. Taking his head between her hands, she compelled him to look again, and softly said:

'It's all our own. Nobody will ever come in. When you are well again, we will go for walks there. We shall have room enough for walking all our lives. We'll go wherever you like. Where would you like to go?'

He smiled.

'Oh! not far,' he murmured. 'The first day only two steps or so beyond the door. I should surely fall—— See, I'll go over there, under that tree close to the window.'

But she resumed: 'Would you like to go into the flower-garden, the parterre? You shall see the roses—they have over-run everything, even the old paths are all covered with them. Or would you like the orchard better? I can only crawl into it on my hands and knees, the boughs are so bowed down with fruit. But we'll go even farther if you feel strong enough. We'll go as far as the forest, right into the depths of shade, far, far away; so far that we'll sleep out there when night steals over us. Or else, some morning, we can climb up yonder to the summit of those rocks. You'll see the plants which make me quake; you'll see the springs, such a shower of water! What fun it will be to feel the spray all over our faces!... But if you prefer to walk along the hedges, beside a brook, we must go round by the meadows. It is so nice under the willows in the evening, at sunset. One can lie down on the grass and watch the little green frogs hopping about on the rushes.'

'No, no,' said Serge, 'you weary me, I don't want to go so far.... I will only go a couple of steps, that will be more than enough.'

'Even I,' she still continued, 'even I have not yet been able to go everywhere. There are many nooks I don't know. I have walked and walked in it for years, and still I feel sure there are unknown spots around, places where the shade must be cooler and the turf softer. Listen, I have always fancied there must be one especially in which I should like to live for ever. I know it's somewhere; I must have passed it by, or perhaps it's hidden so far away that I have never even got as far, with all my rambles. But we'll look for it together, Serge, won't we? and live there.'

'No, no, be quiet,' stammered the young man. 'I don't understand what you are saying. You're killing me.'

For a moment she let him sob in her arms. It troubled and grieved her that she could find no words to soothe him.

'Isn't the Paradou as beautiful, then, as you fancied it?' she asked at last.

He raised his face and answered:

'I don't know. It was quite little, and now it is ever growing bigger and bigger—— Take me away, hide me.'

She led him back to bed, soothing him like a child, lulling him with a fib.

'There, there! it's not true, there is no garden. It was only a story that I told you. Go, sleep in peace.'

V

Every day in this wise she made him sit at the window during the cool hours of morning. He would now attempt to take a few steps, leaning the while on the furniture. A rosy tint appeared upon his cheeks, and his hands began to lose their waxy transparency. But, while he thus regained health, his senses remained in a state of stupor which reduced him to the vegetative life of some poor creature born only the day before. Indeed, he was nothing but a plant; his sole perception was that of the air which floated round him. He lacked the blood necessary for the efforts of life, and remained, as it were, clinging to the soil, imbibing all the sap he could. It was like a slow hatching in the warm egg of springtide. Albine, remembering certain remarks of Doctor Pascal, felt terrified at seeing him remain in this state, 'innocent,' dull-witted like a little boy. She had heard it said that certain maladies left insanity behind them. And she spent hours in gazing at him and trying her utmost, as mothers do, to make him smile. But as yet he had not laughed. When she passed her hand across his eyes, he never saw, he never followed the shadow. Even when she spoke to him, he barely turned his head in the direction whence the sound came. She had but one consolation: he thrived splendidly, he was quite a handsome child.

For another whole week she lavished the tenderest care on him. She patiently waited for him to grow. And as she marked various symptoms of awakening perception, her fears subsided and she began to think that time might make a man of him. When she touched him now he started slightly. Another time, one night, he broke into a feeble laugh. On the morrow, when she had seated him at the window, she went down into the garden, and ran about in it, calling to him the while. She vanished under the trees, flitted across the sunny patches, and came back breathless and clapping her hands. At first his wavering eyes failed to perceive her. But as she started off again, perpetually playing at hide-and-seek, reappearing behind every other bush, he was at last able to follow the white gleam of her skirt; and when she suddenly came forward and stood with upraised face below his window, he stretched out his arms and seemed anxious to go down to her. But she came upstairs again, and embraced him proudly: 'Ah! you saw me, you saw me!' she cried. 'You would like to come into the garden with me, would you not?—— If you only knew how wretched you have made me these last few days, with your stupid ways, never seeing me or hearing me!'

He listened to her, but apparently with some slight sensation of pain that made him bend his neck in a shrinking way.

'You are better now, however,' she went on. 'Well enough to come down whenever you like—— Why don't you say anything? Have you lost your tongue? Oh, what a baby! Why, I shall have to teach him how to talk!'

And thereupon she really did amuse herself by telling him the names of the things he touched. He could only stammer, reiterating the syllables, and failing to utter a single word plainly. However, she began to walk him about the room, holding him up and leading him from the bed to the window—quite a long journey. Two or three times he almost fell on the way, at which she laughed. One day he fairly sat down on the floor, and she had all the trouble in the world to get him up on his feet again. Then she made him undertake the round of the room, letting him rest by the way on the sofa and the chairs—a tour round a little world which took up a good hour. At last he was able to venture on a few steps alone. She would stand before him with outstretched hands, and move backwards, calling him, so that he should cross the room in search of her supporting arms. If he sulked and refused to walk, she would take the comb from her hair and hold it out to him like a toy. Then he would come to her and sit still in a corner for hours, playing with her comb, and gently scratching his hands with its teeth.

At last one morning she found him up. He had already succeeded in opening one of the shutters, and was attempting to walk about without leaning on the furniture.

'Good gracious, we are active this morning!' she exclaimed gleefully. 'Why, he will be jumping out of the window to-morrow if he has his own way—— So you are quite strong now, eh?'

Serge's answer was a childish laugh. His limbs were regaining the strength of adolescence, but more perceptive sensations remained unroused. He spent whole afternoons in gazing out on the Paradou, pouting like a child that sees nought but whiteness and hears but the vibration of sounds. He still retained the ignorance of urchinhood—his sense of touch as yet so innocent that he failed to tell Albine's gown from the covers of the old armchairs. His eyes still stared wonderingly; his movements still displayed the wavering hesitation of limbs which scarce knew how to reach their goal; his state was one of incipient, purely instinctive existence into which entered no knowledge of surroundings. The man was not yet born within him.

'That's right, you'll act the silly, will you?' muttered Albine. 'We'll see.'

She took off her comb, and held it out to him.

'Will you have my comb?' she said. 'Come and fetch it.'

When she had got him out of the room, by retreating before him all the way, she put her arm round his waist and helped him down each stair, amusing him while she put her comb back, even tickling his neck with a lock of her hair, so that he remained unaware that he was going downstairs. But when he was in the hall, he became frightened at the darkness of the passage.

'Just look!' she cried, throwing the door wide open.

It was like a sudden dawn, a curtain of shadow snatched aside, revealing the joyousness of early day. The park spread out before them verdantly limpid, freshly cool and deep as a spring. Serge, entranced, lingered upon the threshold, with a hesitating desire to feel that luminous lake with his foot.

'One would think you were afraid of wetting yourself,' said Albine. 'Don't be frightened, the ground is safe enough.'

He had ventured to take one step, and was astonished at encountering the soft resistance of the gravel. The first touch of the soil gave him a shock; life seemed to rebound within him and to set him for a moment erect, with expanding frame, while he drew long breaths.

'Come now, be brave,' insisted Albine. 'You know you promised me to take five steps. We'll go as far as the mulberry tree there under the window—— There you can rest.'

It took him a quarter of an hour to make those five steps. After each effort he stopped as if he had been obliged to tear up roots that held him to the ground.

The girl, pushing him along, said with a laugh: 'You look just like a walking tree.'

Having placed him with his back leaning against the mulberry tree, in the rain of sunlight falling from its boughs, she bounded off and left him, calling out to him that he must not stir. Serge, standing there with drooping hands, slowly turned his head towards the park. Terrestrial childhood met his gaze. The pale greenery was steeped in the very milk of youth, flooded with golden brightness. The trees were still in infancy, the flowers were as tender-fleshed as babes, the streams were blue with the artless blue of lovely infantile eyes. Beneath every leaf was some token of a delightful awakening.

Serge had fixed his eyes upon a yellow breach which a wide path made in front of him amidst a dense mass of foliage. At the very end, eastward, some meadows, steeped in gold, looked like the luminous field upon which the sun would descend, and he waited for the morn to take that path and flow towards him. He could feel it coming in a warm breeze, so faint at first that it barely brushed across his skin, but rising little by little, and growing ever brisker till he was thrilled all over. He could also taste it coming with a more and more pronounced savour, bringing the healthful acridity of the open air, holding to his lips a feast of sugary aromatics, sour fruits, and milky shoots. Further, he could smell it coming with the perfumes which it culled upon its way—the scent of earth, the scent of the shady woods, the scent of the warm plants, the scent of living animals, a whole posy of scents, powerful enough to bring on dizziness. He could likewise hear it coming with the rapid flight of a bird skimming over the grass, waking the whole garden from silence, giving voice to all it touched, and filling his ears with the music of things and beings. Finally, he could see it coming from the end of the path, from the meadows steeped in gold—yes, he could see that rosy air, so bright that it lighted the way it took with a gleaming smile, no bigger in the distance than a spot of daylight, but in a few swift bounds transformed into the very splendour of the sun. And the morn flowed up and beat against the mulberry tree against which Serge was leaning. And he himself resuscitated amidst the childhood of the morn.

'Serge! Serge!' cried Albine, lost to sight behind the high shrubs of the flower garden. 'Don't be afraid, I am here.'

But Serge no longer felt frightened. He was being born anew in the sunshine, in that pure bath of light which streamed upon him. He was being born anew at five-and-twenty, his senses hurriedly unclosing, enraptured with the mighty sky, the joyful earth, the prodigy of loveliness spread out around him. This garden, which he knew not only the day before, now afforded him boundless delight. Everything filled him with ecstasy, even the blades of grass, the pebbles in the paths, the invisible puffs of air that flitted over his cheeks. His whole body entered into possession of this stretch of nature; he embraced it with his limbs, he drank it in with his lips, he inhaled it with his nostrils, he carried it in his ears and hid it in the depths of his eyes. It was his own. The roses of the flower garden, the lofty boughs of the forest, the resounding rocks of the waterfall, the meadows which the sun planted with blades of light, were his. Then he closed his eyes and slowly reopened them that he might enjoy the dazzle of a second wakening.

'The birds have eaten all the strawberries,' said Albine disconsolately, as she ran up to him. 'See, I have only been able to find these two!'

But she stopped short a few steps away, heart-struck and gazing at Serge with rapturous astonishment. 'How handsome you are!' she cried.

She drew a little nearer; then stood there, absorbed in her contemplation, and murmuring: 'I had never, never seen you before.'

He had certainly grown taller. Clothed in a loose garment, he stood erect, still somewhat slender, with finely moulded limbs, square chest, and rounded shoulders. His head, slightly thrown back, was poised upon a flexible and snowy neck, rimmed with brown behind. Health and strength and power were on his face. He did not smile, his expression was that of repose, with grave and tender mouth, firm cheeks, large nose, and grey, clear, commanding eyes. The long locks that thickly covered his head fell upon his shoulders in jetty curls; while a slender growth of hair, through which gleamed his white skin, curled upon his upper lip and chin.

'Oh! how handsome, how handsome you are!' lingeringly repeated Albine, crouching at his feet and gazing up at him with loving eyes. 'But why are you sulking with me? Why don't you speak to me?'

Still he stood there and made no answer. His eyes were far away; he never even saw that child at his feet. He spoke to himself in the sunlight, and said: 'How good the light is!'

That utterance sounded like a vibration of the sunlight itself. It fell amid the silence in the faintest of whispers like a musical sigh, a quiver of warmth and of life. For several days Albine had never heard his voice, and now, like himself, it had altered. It seemed to her to course through the park more sweetly than the melody of birds, more imperiously than the wind that bends the boughs. It reigned, it ruled. The whole garden heard it, though it had been but a faint and passing breath, and the whole garden was thrilled with the joyousness it brought.

'Speak to me,' implored Albine. 'You have never spoken to me like that. When you were upstairs in your room, when you were not dumb, you talked the silly prattle of a child. How is it I no longer know your voice? Just now I thought it had come down from the trees, that it reached me from every part of the garden, that it was one of those deep sighs that used to worry me at night before you came. Listen, everything is keeping silence to hear you speak again.'

But still he failed to recognise her presence. Tenderer grew her tones. 'No, don't speak if it tires you. Sit down beside me, and we will remain here on the grass till the sun wanes. And look, I have found two strawberries. Such trouble I had too! The birds eat up everything. One's for you, both if you like; or we can halve them, and taste each of them. You'll thank me, and then I shall hear you.'

But he would not sit down, he refused the strawberries, which Albine pettishly threw away. She did not open her lips again. She would rather have seen him ill, as in those earlier days when she had given him her hand for a pillow, and had felt him coming back to life beneath the cooling breath she blew upon his face. She cursed the returning health which now made him stand in the light like a young unheeding god. Would he be ever thus then, with never a glance for her? Would he never be further healed, and at last see her and love her? And she dreamed of once again being his healer, of accomplishing by the sole power of her little hands the cure of the second childhood in which he remained. She could clearly see that there was no spark in the depths of his grey eyes, that his was but a pallid beauty like that of the statues which had fallen among the nettles of the flower-garden. She rose and clasped him, breathing on his neck to rouse him. But that morning Serge never even felt the breath that lifted his silky beard. The sun got low, it was time to go indoors. On reaching his room, Albine burst into tears.

From that morning forward the invalid took a short walk in the garden every day. He went past the mulberry tree, as far as the edge of the terrace, where a wide flight of broken steps descended to the flowery parterre. He grew accustomed to the open air, each bath of sunlight brought him fresh vigour. A young chestnut tree, which had sprung from some fallen nut between two stones of the balustrade, burst the resin of its buds, and unfolded its leafy fans with far less vigour than he progressed. One day, indeed, he even attempted to descend the steps, but in this his strength failed him, and he sat down among the dane-wort which had grown up between the cracks in the stone flags. Below, to the left, he could see a small wood of roses. It was thither that he dreamt of going.

'Wait a little longer,' said Albine. 'The scent of the roses is too strong for you yet. I have never been able to sit long under the rose-trees without feeling exhausted, light-headed, with a longing to cry. Don't be afraid, I will some day lead you to the rose-trees, and I shall surely weep among them, for you make me very sad.'

VI

One morning she at last succeeded in helping him to the foot of the steps, trampling down the grass before him with her feet, and clearing a way for him through the briars, whose supple arms barred the last few yards. Then they slowly entered the wood of roses. It was indeed a very wood, with thickets of tall standard roses throwing out leafy clumps as big as trees, and enormous rose bushes impenetrable as copses of young oaks. Here, formerly, there had been a most marvellous collection of plants. But since the flower garden had been left in abandonment, everything had run wild, and a virgin forest had arisen, a forest of roses over-running the paths, crowded with wild offshoots, so mingled, so blended, that roses of every scent and hue seemed to blossom on the same stem. Creeping roses formed mossy carpets on the ground, while climbing roses clung to others like greedy ivy plants, and ascended in spindles of verdure, letting a shower of their loosened petals fall at the lightest breeze. Natural paths coursed through the wood—narrow footways, broad avenues, enchanting covered walks in which one strolled in the shade and scent. These led to glades and clearings, under bowers of small red roses, and between walls hung with tiny yellow ones. Some sunny nooks gleamed like green silken stuff embroidered with bright patterns; other shadier corners offered the seclusion of alcoves and an aroma of love, the balmy warmth, as it were, of a posy languishing on a woman's bosom. The rose bushes had whispering voices too. And the rose bushes were full of songbirds' nests.

'We must take care not to lose ourselves,' said Albine, as she entered the wood. 'I did lose myself once, and the sun had set before I was able to free myself from the rose bushes which caught me by the skirt at every step.'

They had barely walked a few minutes, however, before Serge, worn out with fatigue, wished to sit down. He stretched himself upon the ground, and fell into deep slumber. Albine sat musing by his side. They were on the edge of a glade, near a narrow path which stretched away through the wood, streaked with flashes of sunlight, and, through a small round blue gap at its far end, revealed the sky. Other little paths led from the clearing into leafy recesses. The glade was formed of tall rose bushes rising one above the other with such a wealth of branches, such a tangle of thorny shoots, that big patches of foliage were caught aloft, and hung there tent-like, stretching out from bush to bush. Through the tiny apertures in the patches of leaves, which were suggestive of fine lace, the light filtered like impalpable sunny dust. And from the vaulted roof hung stray branches, chandeliers, as it were, thick clusters suspended from green thread-like stems, armfuls of flowers that reached to the ground, athwart some rent in the leafy ceiling, which trailed around like a tattered curtain.

Albine meanwhile was gazing at Serge asleep. She had never seen him so utterly prostrated in body as now, his hands lying open on the turf, his face deathly. So dead indeed he was to her that she thought she could kiss his face without his even feeling it. And sadly, absently, she busied her hands with shredding all the roses within her reach. Above her head drooped an enormous cluster which brushed against her hair, set roses on her twisted locks, her ears, her neck, and even threw a mantle of the fragrant flowers across her shoulders. Higher up, under her fingers, other roses rained down with large and tender petals exquisitely formed, which in hue suggested the faintly flushing purity of a maiden's bosom. Like a living snowfall these roses already hid her feet in the grass. And they climbed her knees, covered her skirt, and smothered her to her waist; while three stray petals, which had fluttered on to her bodice, just above her bosom, there looked like three glimpses of her bewitching skin.

'Oh! the lazy fellow!' she murmured, feeling bored and picking up two handfuls of roses, which she flung in Serge's face to wake him.

He did not stir, however, but still lay there with the roses on his eyes and mouth. This made Albine laugh. She stooped down, and with her whole heart kissed both his eyes and his mouth, blowing as she kissed to drive the rose petals away; but they remained upon his lips, and she broke into still louder laughter, intensely amused at this flowery caressing.

Serge slowly raised himself. He gazed at her with amazement, as if startled at finding her there.

'Who are you? where do you come from? what are you doing here beside me?' he asked her. And still she smiled, transported with delight at marking this awakening of his senses. Then he seemed to remember something, and continued with a gesture of happy confidence:

'I know, you are my love, flesh of my flesh, you are waiting for me that we may be one for ever. I was dreaming of you. You were in my breast, and I gave you my blood, my muscles, my bones. I felt no pain. You took half my heart so tenderly that I experienced keen inward delight at thus dividing myself. I sought all that was best and most beautiful within me to give it to you. You might have carried off everything, and still I should have thanked you. And I woke when you went out of me. You left through my eyes and mouth; ay, I felt it. You were all warm, all fragrant, so sweet that it was the thrill from you that has made me awake.'

Albine listened to his words with ecstasy. At last he saw her; at last his birth was accomplished, his cure begun. With outstretched hands she begged him to go on.

'How have I managed to live without you?' he murmured. 'No, I did not live, I was like a slumbering animal. And now you are mine! and you are no one but myself! Listen, you must never leave me; for you are my very breath, and in leaving me you would rob me of my life. We will remain within ourselves. You will be mine even as I shall be yours. Should I ever forsake you, may I be accursed, may my body wither like a useless and noxious weed!'

He caught hold of her hands, and exclaimed in a voice quivering with admiration: 'How beautiful you are!'

In the falling dust of sunshine Albine's skin looked milky white, scarce gilded here and there by the sunny sheen. The shower of roses around and on her steeped her in pinkness.

Her fair hair, loosely held together by her comb, decked her head as with a setting planet whose last bright sparks shone upon the nape of her neck. She wore a white gown; her arms, her throat, her stainless skin bloomed unabashed as a flower, musky with a goodly fragrance. Her figure was slender, not too tall, but supple as a snake's, with softly rounded, voluptuously expanding outlines, in which the freshness of childhood mingled with womanhood's nascent charms. Her oval face, with its narrow brow and rather full mouth, beamed with the tender living light of her blue eyes. And yet she was grave, too, her cheeks unruffled, her chin plump—as naturally lovely as are the trees.

'And how I love you!' said Serge, drawing her to himself.

They were wholly one another's now, clasped in each other's arms! They did not kiss, but held each other round the waist, cheek to cheek, united, dumb, delighted with their oneness. Around them bloomed the roses with a mad, amorous blossoming, full of crimson and rosy and white laughter. The living, opening flowers seemed to bare their very bosoms. Yellow roses were there showing the golden skin of barbarian maidens: straw-coloured roses, lemon-coloured roses, sun-coloured roses—every shade of the necks which are ambered by glowing skies. Then there was skin of softer hue: among the tea roses, bewitchingly moist and cool, one caught glimpses of modest, bashful charms, with skin as fine as silk tinged faintly with a blue network of veins. Farther on all the smiling life of the rose expanded: there was the blush white rose, barely tinged with a dash of carmine, snowy as the foot of a maid dabbling in a spring; there was the silvery pink, more subdued than even the glow with which a youthful arm irradiates a wide sleeve; there was the clear, fresh rose, in which blood seemed to gleam under satin as in the bare shoulders of a woman bathed in light; and there was the bright pink rose with its buds like the nipples of virgin bosoms, and its opening flowers that suggested parted lips, exhaling warm and perfumed breath. And the climbing roses, the tall cluster roses with their showers of white flowers, clothed all these others with the lacework of their bunches, the innocence of their flimsy muslin; while, here and there, roses dark as the lees of wine, sanguineous, almost black, showed amidst the bridal purity like passion's wounds. Verily, it was like a bridal—the bridal of the fragrant wood, the virginity of May led to the fertility of July and August; the first unknowing kiss culled like a nosegay on the wedding morn. Even in the grass, moss roses, clad in close-fitting garments of green wool, seemed to be awaiting the advent of love. Flowers rambled all along the sun-streaked path, faces peeped out everywhere to court the passing breezes. Bright were the smiles under the spreading tent of the glade. Not a flower that bloomed the same: the roses differed in the fashion of their wooing. Some, shy and blushing, would show but a glimpse of bud, while others, panting and wide open, seemed consumed with infatuation for their persons. There were pert, gay little things that filed off, cockade in cap; there were huge ones, bursting with sensuous charms, like portly, fattened-up sultanas; there were impudent hussies, too, in coquettish disarray, on whose petals the white traces of the powder-puff could be espied; there were virtuous maids who had donned low-necked garb like demure bourgeoises; and aristocratic ladies, graceful and original, who contrived attractive deshabilles. And the cup-like roses offered their perfume as in precious crystal; the drooping, urn-shaped roses let it drip drop by drop; the round, cabbage-like roses exhaled it with the even breath of slumbering flowers; while the budding roses tightly locked their petals and only sent forth as yet the faint sigh of maidenhood.

'I love you, I love you,' softly repeated Serge.

Albine, too, was a large rose, a pallid rose that had opened since the morning. Her feet were white, her arms were rosy pink, her neck was fair of skin, her throat bewitchingly veined, pale and exquisite. She was fragrant, she proffered lips which offered as in a coral cup a perfume that was yet faint and cool. Serge inhaled that perfume, and pressed her to his breast. Albine laughed.

The ring of that laugh, which sounded like a bird's rhythmic notes, enraptured Serge.

'What, that lovely song is yours?' he said. 'It is the sweetest I ever heard. You are indeed my joy.'

Then she laughed yet more sonorously, pouring forth rippling scales of high-pitched, flute-like notes that melted into deeper ones. It was an endless laugh, a long-drawn cooing, then a burst of triumphant music celebrating the delight of awakening love. And everything—the roses, the fragrant wood, the whole of the Paradou—laughed in that laugh of woman just born to beauty and to love. Till now the vast garden had lacked one charm—a winning voice which should prove the living mirth of the trees, the streams, and the sunlight. Now the vast garden was endowed with that charm of laughter.

'How old are you?' asked Albine, when her song had ended in a faint expiring note.

'Nearly twenty-six,' Serge answered.

She was amazed. What! he was twenty-six! He, too, was astonished at having made that answer so glibly, for it seemed to him that he had not yet lived a day—an hour.

'And how old are you?' he asked in his turn.

'Oh, I am sixteen.'

Then she broke into laughter again, quivering from head to foot, repeating and singing her age. She laughed at her sixteen years with a fine-drawn laugh that flowed on with rhythmic trilling like a streamlet. Serge scanned her closely, amazed at the laughing life that transfigured her face. He scarcely knew her now with those dimples in her cheeks, those bow-shaped lips between which peeped the rosy moistness of her mouth, and those eyes blue like bits of sky kindling with the rising of the sun. As she threw back her head, she sent a glow of warmth through him.

He put out his hand, and fumbled mechanically behind her neck.

'What do you want?' she asked. And suddenly remembering, she exclaimed: 'My comb! my comb! that's it.'

She gave him her comb, and let fall her heavy tresses. A cloth of gold suddenly unrolled and clothed her to her hips. Some locks which flowed down upon her breast gave, as it were a finishing touch to her regal raiment. At the sight of that sudden blaze, Serge uttered an exclamation; he kissed each lock, and burned his lips amidst that sunset-like refulgence.

But Albine now relieved herself of her long silence, and chatted and questioned unceasingly.

'Oh, how wretched you made me! You no longer took any notice of me, and day after day I found myself useless and powerless, worried out of my wits like a good-for-nothing.... And yet the first few days I had done you good. You saw me and spoke to me.... Do you remember when you were lying down, and went to sleep on my shoulder, and murmured that I did you good?'

'No!' said Serge, 'no, I don't remember it. I had never seen you before. I have only just seen you for the first time—lovely, radiant, never to be forgotten.'

She clapped her hands impatiently, exclaiming: 'And my comb? You must remember how I used to give you my comb to keep you quiet when you were a little child? Why, you were looking for it just now.'

'No, I don't remember. Your hair is like fine silk. I have never kissed your hair before.'

At this, with some vexation, she recounted certain particulars of his convalescence in the room with the blue ceiling. But he only laughed at her, and at last closed her lips with his hand, saying with anxious weariness: 'No, be quiet, I don't know; I don't want to know any more.... I have only just woke up, and found you there, covered with roses. That is enough.'

And he drew her once more towards him and held her there, dreaming aloud, and murmuring: 'Perhaps I have lived before. It must have been a long, long time ago.... I loved you in a painful dream. You had the same blue eyes, the same rather long face, the same youthful mien. But your hair was carefully hidden under a linen cloth, and I never dared to remove that cloth, because your locks seemed to me fearsome and would have made me die. But to-day your hair is the very sweetness of yourself. It preserves your scent, and when I kiss it, when I bury my face in it like this, I drink in your very life.'

He kept on passing the long curls through his hands, and pressing them to his lips, as if to squeeze from them all Albine's blood. And after an interval of silence, he continued: 'It's strange, before one's birth, one dreams of being born.... I was buried somewhere. I was very cold. I could hear all the life of the world outside buzzing above me. But I shut my ears despairingly, for I was used to my gloomy den, and enjoyed some fearful delights in it, so that I never sought to free myself from all the earth weighing upon my chest. Where could I have been then? Who was it gave me light?'

He struggled to remember, while Albine now waited in fear and trembling lest he should really do so. Smiling, she took a handful of her hair and wound it round the young man's neck, thus fastening him to herself. This playful act roused him from his musings.

'You're right,' he said, 'I am yours, what does the rest matter? It was you, was it not, who drew me out of the earth? I must have been under this garden. What I heard were your steps rattling the little pebbles in the path. You were looking for me, you brought down upon my head the songs of the birds, the scent of the pinks, the warmth of the sun. I fancied that you would find me at last. I waited a long time for you. But I never expected that you would give yourself to me without your veil, with your hair undone—the terrible hair which has become so soft.'

He sat her on his lap, placing his face beside hers.

'Do not let us talk any more. We are alone for ever. We love each other.'

And thus in all innocence they lingered in each other's arms; for a long, long time did they remain there forgetfully. The sun rose higher; and the dust of light fell hotter from the lofty boughs. The yellow and white and crimson roses were now only a ray of their delight, a sign of their smiles to one another. They had certainly caused buds to open around them. The roses crowned their heads and threw garlands about their waists. And the scent of the roses became so penetrating, so strong with amorous emotion, that it seemed to be the scent of their own breath.

At last Serge put up Albine's hair. He raised it in handfuls with delightful awkwardness, and stuck her comb askew in the enormous knot that he had heaped upon her head. And as it happened she looked bewitching thus. Then, rising from the ground, he held out his hands to her, and supported her waist as she got up. They still smiled without speaking a word, and slowly they went down the path.

VII

Albine and Serge entered the flower garden. She was watching him with tender anxiety, fearing lest he should overtire himself; but he reassured her with a light laugh. He felt strong enough indeed to carry her whithersoever she listed. When he found himself once more in the full sunlight, he drew a sigh of content. At last he lived; he was no longer a plant subject to the terrible sufferings of winter. And how he was moved with loving gratitude! Had it been within his power, he would have spared Albine's tiny feet even the roughness of the paths; he dreamed of carrying her, clinging round his neck, like a child lulled to sleep by her mother. He already watched over her with a guardian's watchful care, thrusting aside the stones and brambles, jealous lest the breeze should waft a fleeting kiss upon those darling locks which were his alone. She on her side nestled against his shoulder and serenely yielded to his guidance.

Thus Albine and Serge strolled on together in the sunlight for the first time. A balmy fragrance floated in their wake, the very path on which the sun had unrolled a golden carpet thrilled with delight under their feet. Between the tall flowering shrubs they passed like a vision of such wondrous charm that the distant paths seemed to entreat their presence and hail them with a murmur of admiration, even as crowds hail long-expected sovereigns. They formed one sole, supremely lovely being. Albine's snowy skin was but the whiteness of Serge's browner skin. And slowly they passed along clothed with sunlight—nay, they were themselves the sun—worshipped by the low bending flowers.

A tide of emotion now stirred the Paradou to its depths. The old flower garden escorted them—that vast field bearing a century's untrammelled growth, that nook of Paradise sown by the breeze with the choicest flowers. The blissful peace of the Paradou, slumbering in the broad sunlight, prevented the degeneration of species. It could boast of a temperature ever equable, and a soil which every plant had long enriched to thrive therein in the silence of its vigour. Its vegetation was mighty, magnificent, luxuriantly untended, full of erratic growths decked with monstrous blossoming, unknown to the spade and watering-pot of gardeners. Nature left to herself, free to grow as she listed, in the depths of that solitude protected by natural shelters, threw restraint aside more heartily at each return of spring, indulged in mighty gambols, delighted in offering herself at all seasons strange nosegays not meant for any hand to pluck. A rabid fury seemed to impel her to overthrow whatever the effort of man had created; she rebelliously cast a straggling multitude of flowers over the paths, attacked the rockeries with an ever-rising tide of moss, and knotted round the necks of marble statues the flexible cords of creepers with which she threw them down; she shattered the stonework of the fountains, steps, and terraces with shrubs which burst through them; she slowly, creepingly, spread over the smallest cultivated plots, moulding them to her fancy, and planting on them, as ensign of rebellion, some wayside spore, some lowly weed which she transformed into a gigantic growth of verdure. In days gone by the parterre, tended by a master passionately fond of flowers, had displayed in its trim beds and borders a wondrous wealth of choice blossoms. And the same plants could still be found; but perpetuated, grown into such numberless families, and scampering in such mad fashion throughout the whole garden, that the place was now all helter-skelter riot to its very walls, a very den of debauchery, where intoxicated nature had hiccups of verbena and pinks.

Though to outward seeming Albine had yielded her weaker self to the guidance of Serge, to whose shoulder she clung, it was she who really led him. She took him first to the grotto. Deep within a clump of poplars and willows gaped a cavern, formed by rugged bits of rocks which had fallen over a basin where tiny rills of water trickled between the stones. The grotto was completely lost to sight beneath the onslaught of vegetation. Below, row upon row of hollyhocks seemed to bar all entrance with a trellis-work of red, yellow, mauve, and white-hued flowers, whose stems were hidden among colossal bronze-green nettles, which calmly exuded blistering poison. Above them was a mighty swarm of creepers which leaped aloft in a few bounds; jasmines starred with balmy flowers; wistarias with delicate lacelike leaves; dense ivy, dentated and resembling varnished metal; lithe honeysuckle, laden with pale coral sprays; amorous clematideae, reaching out arms all tufted with white aigrettes. And among them twined yet slenderer plants, binding them more and more closely together, weaving them into a fragrant woof. Nasturtium, bare and green of skin, showed open mouths of ruddy gold; scarlet runners, tough as whipcord, kindled here and there a fire of gleaming sparks; convolvuli opened their heart-shaped leaves, and with thousands of little bells rang a silent peal of exquisite colours; sweetpeas, like swarms of settling butterflies, folded tawny or rosy wings, ready to be borne yet farther away by the first breeze. It was all a wealth of leafy locks, sprinkled with a shower of flowers, straying away in wild dishevelment, and suggesting the head of some giantess thrown back in a spasm of passion, with a streaming of magnificent hair, which spread into a pool of perfume.

'I have never dared to venture into all that darkness,' Albine whispered to Serge.

He urged her on, carried her over the nettles; and as a great boulder barred the way into the grotto, he held her up for a moment in his arms so that she might be able to peer through the opening that yawned at a few feet from the ground.

'A marble woman,' she whispered, 'has fallen full length into the stream. The water has eaten her face away.'

Then he, too, in his turn wanted to look, and pulled himself up. A cold breeze played upon his cheeks. In the pale light that glided through the hole, he saw the marble woman lying amidst the reeds and the duckweed. She was naked to the waist. She must have been drowning there for the last hundred years. Some grief had probably flung her into that spring where she was slowly committing suicide. The clear water which flowed over her had worn her face into a smooth expanse of marble, a mere white surface without a feature; but her breasts, raised out of the water by what appeared an effort of her neck, were still perfect and lifelike, throbbing even yet with the joys of some old delight.

'She isn't dead yet,' said Serge, getting down again. 'One day we will come and get her out of there.'

But Albine shuddered and led him away. They passed out again into the sunlight and the rank luxuriance of beds and borders. They wandered through a field of flowers capriciously, at random. Their feet trod a carpet of lovely dwarf plants, which had once neatly fringed the walks, and now spread about in wild profusion. In succession they passed ankle-deep through the spotted silk of soft rose catchflies, through the tufted satin of feathered pinks, and the blue velvet of forget-me-nots, studded with melancholy little eyes. Further on they forced their way through giant mignonette, which rose to their knees like a bath of perfume; then they turned through a patch of lilies of the valley in order that they might spare an expanse of violets, so delicate-looking that they feared to hurt them. But soon they found themselves surrounded on all sides by violets, and so with wary, gentle steps they passed over their fresh fragrance inhaling the very breath of springtide. Beyond the violets, a mass of lobelias spread out like green wool gemmed with pale mauve. The softly shaded stars of globularia, the blue cups of nemophila, the yellow crosses of saponaria, the white and purple ones of sweet rocket, wove patches of rich tapestry, stretching onward and onward, a fabric of royal luxury, so that the young couple might enjoy the delights of that first walk together without fatigue. But the violets ever reappeared; real seas of violets that rolled all round them, shedding the sweetest perfumes beneath their feet and wafting in their wake the breath of their leaf-hidden flowerets.

Albine and Serge quite lost themselves. Thousands of loftier plants towered up in hedges around them, enclosing narrow paths which they found it delightful to thread. These paths twisted and turned, wandered maze-like through dense thickets. There were ageratums with sky-blue tufts of bloom; woodruffs with soft musky perfume; brazen-throated mimuluses, blotched with bright vermilion; lofty phloxes, crimson and violet, throwing up distaffs of flowers for the breezes to spin; red flax with sprays as fine as hair; chrysanthemums like full golden moons, casting short faint rays, white and violet and rose, around them. The young couple surmounted all the obstacles that lay in their path and continued their way betwixt the walls of verdure. To the right of them sprang up the slim fraxinella, the centranthus draped with snowy blossoms, and the greyish hounds-tongue, in each of whose tiny flowercups gleamed a dewdrop. To their left was a long row of columbines of every variety; white ones, pale rose ones, and some of deep violet hues, almost black, that seemed to be in mourning, the blossoms that drooped from their lofty, branching stems being plaited and goffered like crape. Then, as they advanced further on, the character of the hedges changed. Giant larkspurs thrust up their flower-rods, between the dentated foliage of which gaped the mouths of tawny snapdragons, while the schizanthus reared its scanty leaves and fluttering blooms, that looked like butterflies' wings of sulphur hue splashed with soft lake. The blue bells of campanulae swayed aloft, some of them even over the tall asphodels, whose golden stems served as their steeples. In one corner was a giant fennel that reminded one of a lace-dressed lady spreading out a sunshade of sea-green satin. Then the pair suddenly found their way blocked. It was impossible to advance any further; a mass of flowers, a huge sheaf of plants stopped all progress. Down below, a mass of brank-ursine formed as it were a pedestal, from the midst of which sprang scarlet geum, rhodanthe with stiff petals, and clarkia with great white carved crosses, that looked like the insignia of some barbarous order. Higher up still, bloomed the rosy viscaria, the yellow leptosiphon, the white colinsia, and the lagurus, whose dusty green bloom contrasted with the glowing colours around it. Towering over all these growths scarlet foxgloves and blue lupins, rising in slender columns, formed a sort of oriental rotunda gleaming vividly with crimson and azure; while at the very summit, like a surmounting dome of dusky copper, were the ruddy leaves of a colossal castor-bean.

As Serge reached out his hands to try to force a passage, Albine stopped him and begged him not to injure the flowers. 'You will break the stems and crush the leaves,' she said. 'Ever since I have been here, I have always taken care to hurt none of them. Come, and I will show you the pansies.'

She made him turn and led him from the narrow paths to the centre of the parterre, where, once upon a time, great basins had been hollowed out. But these had now fallen into ruin, and were nothing but gigantic jardinieres, fringed with stained and cracked marble. In one of the largest of them, the wind had sown a wonderful basketful of pansies. The velvety blooms seemed almost like living faces, with bands of violet hair, yellow eyes, paler tinted mouths, and chins of a delicate flesh colour.

When I was younger they used to make me quite afraid,' murmured Albine. 'Look at them. Wouldn't you think that they were thousands of little faces looking up at you from the ground? And they turn, too, all in the same direction. They might be a lot of buried dolls thrusting their heads out of the ground.'

She led him still further on. They went the round of all the other basins. In the next one a number of amaranthuses had sprung up, raising monstrous crests which Albine had always shrunk from touching, such was their resemblance to big bleeding caterpillars. Balsams of all colours, now straw-coloured, now the hue of peach-blossom, now blush-white, now grey like flax, filled another basin where their seed pods split with little snaps. Then in the midst of a ruined fountain, there flourished a colony of splendid carnations. White ones hung over the moss-covered rims, and flaked ones thrust a bright medley of blossom between the chinks of the marble; while from the mouth of the lion, whence formerly the water-jets had spurted, a huge crimson clove now shot out so vigorously that the decrepit beast seemed to be spouting blood. Near by, the principal piece of ornamental water, a lake, on whose surface swans had glided, had now become a thicket of lilacs, beneath whose shade stocks and verbenas and day-lilies screened their delicate tints, and dozed away, all redolent of perfume.

'But we haven't seen half the flowers yet,' said Albine, proudly. 'Over yonder there are such huge ones that I can quite bury myself amongst them like a partridge in a corn-field.'

They went thither. They tripped down some broad steps, from whose fallen urns still flickered the violet fires of the iris. All down the steps streamed gilliflowers, like liquid gold. The sides were flanked with thistles, that shot up like candelabra, of green bronze, twisted and curved into the semblance of birds' heads, with all the fantastic elegance of Chinese incense-burners. Between the broken balustrades drooped tresses of stonecrop, light greenish locks, spotted as with mouldiness. Then at the foot of the steps another parterre spread out, dotted over with box-trees that were vigorous as oaks; box-trees which had once been carefully pruned and clipped into balls and pyramids and octagonal columns, but which were now revelling in unrestrained freedom of untidiness, breaking out into ragged masses of greenery, through which blue patches of sky were visible.

And Albine led Serge straight on to a spot that seemed to be the graveyard of the flower-garden. There the scabious mourned, and processions of poppies stretched out in line, with deathly odour, unfolding heavy blooms of feverish brilliance. Sad anemones clustered in weary throngs, pallid as if infected by some epidemic. Thick-set daturas spread out purplish horns, from which insects, weary of life, sucked fatal poison. Marigolds buried with choking foliage their writhing starry flowers, that already reeked of putrefaction. And there were other melancholy flowers also: fleshy ranunculi with rusty tints, hyacinths and tuberoses that exhaled asphyxia and died from their own perfume. But the cinerarias were most conspicuous, crowding thickly in half-mourning robes of violet and white. In the middle of this gloomy spot a mutilated marble Cupid still remained standing, smiling beneath the lichens which overspread his youthful nakedness, while the arm with which he had once held his bow lay low amongst the nettles.

Then Albine and Serge passed on through a rank growth of peonies, reaching to their waists. The white flowers fell to pieces as they passed, with a rain of snowy petals which was as refreshing to their hands as the heavy drops of a thunder shower. And the red ones grinned with apoplectical faces which perturbed them. Next they passed through a field of fuchsias, forming dense, vigorous shrubs that delighted them with their countless bells. Then they went on through fields of purple veronicas and others of geraniums, blazing with all the fiery tints of a brasier, which the wind seemed to be ever fanning into fresh heat. And they forced their way through a jungle of gladioli, tall as reeds, which threw up spikes of flowers that gleamed in the full daylight with all the brilliance of burning torches. They lost themselves too in a forest of sunflowers, with stalks as thick as Albine's wrist, a forest darkened by rough leaves large enough to form an infant's bed, and peopled with giant starry faces that shone like so many suns. And thence they passed into another forest, a forest of rhododendrons so teeming with blossom that the branches and leaves were completely hidden, and nothing but huge nosegays, masses of soft calyces, could be seen as far as the eye could reach.

'Come along; we have not got to the end yet,' cried Albine. 'Let us push on.'

But Serge stopped. They were now in the midst of an old ruined colonnade. Some of the columns offered inviting seats as they lay prostrate amongst primroses and periwinkles. Further away, among the columns that still remained upright, other flowers were growing in profusion. There were expanses of tulips showing brilliant streaks like painted china; expanses of calceolarias dotted with crimson and gold; expanses of zinnias like great daisies; expanses of petunias with petals like soft cambric through which rosy flesh tints gleamed; and other fields, with flowers they could not recognise spreading in carpets beneath the sun, in a motley brilliance that was softened by the green of their leaves.

'We shall never be able to see it all,' said Serge, smiling and waving his hand. 'It would be very nice to sit down here, amongst all this perfume.'

Near them there was a large patch of heliotropes, whose vanilla-like breath permeated the air with velvety softness. They sat down upon one of the fallen columns, in the midst of a cluster of magnificent lilies which had shot up there. They had been walking for more than an hour. They had wandered on through the flowers from the roses to the lilies. These offered them a calm, quiet haven after their lovers' ramble amid the perfumed solicitations of luscious honeysuckle, musky violets, verbenas that breathed out the warm scent of kisses, and tuberoses that panted with voluptuous passion. The lilies, with their tall slim stems, shot up round them like a white pavilion and sheltered them with snowy cups, gleaming only with the gold of their slender pistils. And there they rested, like betrothed children in a tower of purity; an impregnable ivory tower, where all their love was yet perfect innocence.

Albine and Serge lingered amongst the lilies till evening. They felt so happy there, and seemed to break out into a new life. Serge felt the last trace of fever leave his hands, while Albine grew quite white, with a milky whiteness untinted by any rosy hue. They were unconscious that their arms and necks and shoulders were bare, and their straying unconfined hair in nowise troubled them. They laughed merrily one at the other, with frank open laughter. The expression of their eyes retained the limpid calmness of clear spring water. When they quitted the lilies, their feelings were but those of children ten years old; it seemed to them that they had just met each other in that garden so that they might be friends for ever and amuse themselves with perpetual play. And as they returned through the parterre, the very flowers bore themselves discreetly, as though they were glad to see their childishness, and would do nothing that might corrupt them. The forests of peonies, the masses of carnations, the carpets of forget-me-nots, the curtains of clematis now steeped in the atmosphere of evening, slumbering in childlike purity akin to their own, no longer spread suggestions of voluptuousness around them. The pansies looked up at them with their little candid faces, like playfellows; and the languid mignonette, as Albine's white skirt brushed by it, seemed full of compassion, and held its breath lest it should fan their love prematurely into life.

VIII

At dawn the next day it was Serge who called Albine. She slept in a room on the upper floor. He looked up at her window and saw her throw open the shutters just as she had sprung out of bed. They laughed merrily as their eyes met.

'You must not go out to-day,' said Albine, when she came down. 'We must stay indoors and rest. To-morrow I will take you a long, long way off, to a spot where we can have a very jolly time.'

'But sha'n't we grow tired of stopping here?' muttered Serge.

'Oh, dear no! I will tell you stories.'

They passed a delightful day. The windows were thrown wide open, and all the beauty of the Paradou came in and rejoiced with them in the room. Serge now really took possession of that delightful room, where he imagined he had been born. He insisted upon seeing everything, and upon having everything explained to him. The plaster Cupids who sported round the alcove amused him so much that he mounted upon a chair to tie Albine's sash round the neck of the smallest of them, a little bit of a man who was turning somersaults with his head downward. Albine clapped her hands, and said that he looked like a cockchafer fastened by a string. Then, as though seized by an access of pity, she said, 'No, no, unfasten him. It prevents him from flying.'

But it was the Cupids painted over the doors that more particularly attracted Serge's attention. He fidgeted at not being able to make out what they were playing at, for the paintings had grown very dim. Helped by Albine, he dragged a table to the wall, and when they both had climbed upon it, Albine began to explain things to him.

'Look, now, those are throwing flowers. Under the flowers you can only see some bare legs. It seems to me that when first I came here I could make out a lady reposing there. But she has been gone for a long time now.'

They examined all the panels in turn; but they had faded to such a degree that little more could be distinguished than the knees and elbows of infants. The details which had doubtless delighted the eyes of those whose old-time passion seemed to linger round the alcove, had so completely disappeared under the influence of the fresh air, that the room, like the park, seemed restored to pristine virginity beneath the serene glory of the sun.

'Oh! they are only some little boys playing,' said Serge, as he descended from the table. 'Do you know how to play at "hot cockles"?'

There was no game that Albine did not know how to play at. But, for 'hot cockles,' at least three players are necessary, and that made them laugh. Serge protested, however, that they got on too well together ever to desire a third there, and they vowed that they would always remain by themselves.

'We are quite alone here; one cannot hear a sound,' said the young man, lolling on the couch. 'And all the furniture has such a pleasant old-time smell. The place is as snug as a nest. We ought to be very happy in this room.'

The girl shook her head gravely.

'If I had been at all timid,' she murmured, 'I should have been very much frightened at first.... That is one of the stories I want to tell you. The people in the neighbourhood told it to me. Perhaps it isn't true, but it will amuse us, at any rate.'

Then she came and sat down by Serge's side.

'It is years and years since it all happened. The Paradou belonged to a rich lord, who came and shut himself up in it with a very beautiful lady. The gates of the mansion were kept so tightly closed, and the garden walls were built so very high, that no one ever caught sight even of the lady's skirts.'

'Ah! I know,' Serge interrupted; 'the lady was never seen again.'

Then, as Albine looked at him in surprise, somewhat annoyed to find that he knew her story already, he added in a low voice, apparently a little astonished himself: 'You told me the story before, you know.'

She declared that she had never done so; but all at once she seemed to change her mind, and allowed herself to be convinced. However, that did not prevent her from finishing her tale in these words: 'When the lord went away his hair was quite white. He had all the gates barricaded up, so that no one might get inside and disturb the lady. It was in this room that she died.'

'In this room!' cried Serge. 'You never told me that! Are you quite sure that it was really in this room she died?'

Albine seemed put out. She repeated to him what every one in the neighbourhood knew. The lord had built the pavilion for the reception of this unknown lady, who looked like a princess. The servants employed at the mansion afterwards declared that he spent all his days and nights there. Often, too, they saw him in one of the walks, guiding the tiny feet of the mysterious lady towards the densest coppices. But for all the world they would never have ventured to spy upon the pair, who sometimes scoured the park for weeks together.

'And it was here she died?' repeated Serge, who felt touched with sorrow. 'And you have taken her room; you use her furniture, and you sleep in her bed.'

Albine smiled.

'Ah! well, you know, I am not timid. Besides, it is so long since it all happened. You said what a delightful room it was.'

Then they both dropped into silence, and glanced, for a moment, towards the alcove, the lofty ceiling, and the corners, steeped in grey gloom. The faded furniture seemed to speak of long past love. A gentle sigh, as of resignation, passed through the room.

'No, indeed,' murmured Serge, 'one could not feel afraid here. It is too peaceful.'

But Albine came closer to him and said: 'There is something else that only a few people know, and that is that the lord and the lady discovered in the garden a certain spot where perfect happiness was to be found, and where they afterwards spent all their time. I have been told that by a very good authority. It is a cool, shady spot, hidden away in the midst of an impenetrable jungle, and it is so marvellously beautiful that anyone who reaches it forgets all else in the world. The poor lady must have been buried there.'

'Is it anywhere about the parterre?' asked Serge curiously.

'Ah! I cannot tell, I cannot tell,' said the young girl with an expression of discouragement. 'I know nothing about it. I have searched everywhere, but I have never been able to find the least sign of that lovely clearing. It is not amongst the roses, nor the lilies, nor the violets.'

'Perhaps it is hidden somewhere away amongst those mournful-looking flowers, where you showed me the figure of a boy standing with his arm broken off.'

'No, no, indeed.'

'Perhaps, then, it is in that grotto, near that clear stream, where the great marble woman, without a face, is lying.'

'No, no.'

Albine seemed to reflect for a moment. Then, as though speaking to herself, she went on: 'As soon as ever I came here, I began to hunt for it. I spent whole days in the Paradou, and ferreted about in all the out-of-the-way green corners, to have the pleasure of sitting for an hour in that happy spot. What mornings have I not wasted in groping under the brambles and peeping into the most distant nooks of the park! Oh! I should have known it at once, that enchanting retreat, with the mighty tree that must shelter it with a canopy of foliage, with its carpet of soft silky turf, and its walls of tangled greenery, which the very birds themselves cannot penetrate.

She raised her voice, and threw one of her arms round Serge's neck, as she continued: 'Tell me, now; shall we search for it together? We shall surely find it. You, who are strong, will push aside the heavy branches, while I crawl underneath and search the brakes. When I grow weary, you can carry me; you can help me to cross the streams; and if we happen to lose ourselves, you can climb the trees and try to discover our way again. Ah! and how delightful it will be for us to sit, side by side, beneath the green canopy in the centre of the clearing! I have been told that in one minute one may there live the whole of life. Tell me, my dear Serge, shall we set off to-morrow and scour the park, from bush to bush, until we have found what we want?'

Serge shrugged his shoulders, and smiled. 'What would be the use?' he said. 'Is it not pleasant in the parterre? Don't you think we ought to remain among the flowers, instead of seeking a greater happiness that lies so far away?'

'It is there that the dead lady lies buried,' murmured Albine, falling back into her reverie. 'It was the joy of being there that killed her. The tree casts a shade, whose charm is deathly.... I would willingly die so. We would clasp one another there, and we would die, and none would ever find us again.'

'Don't talk like that,' interrupted Serge. 'You make me feel so unhappy. I would rather that we should live in the bright sunlight, far away from that fatal shade. Your words distress me, as though they urged us to some irreparable misfortune. It must be forbidden to sit beneath a tree whose shade can thus affect one.'

'Yes,' Albine gravely declared, 'it is forbidden. All the folks of the countryside have told me that it is forbidden.'

Then silence fell. Serge rose from the couch where he had been lolling, and laughed, and pretended that he did not care about stories. The sun was setting, however, before Albine would consent to go into the garden for even a few minutes. She led Serge to the left, along the enclosing wall, to a spot strewn with fragments of stone, and woodwork, and ironwork, bristling too with briars and brambles. It was the site of the old mansion, still black with traces of the fire which had destroyed the building. Underneath the briars lay rotting timbers and fire-split masonry. The spot was like a little ravined, hillocky wilderness of sterile rocks, draped with rude vegetation, clinging creepers that twined and twisted through every crevice like green serpents. The young folks amused themselves by wandering across this chaos, groping about in the holes, turning over the debris, trying to reconstruct something of the past out of the ruins before them. They did not confess their curiosity as they chased one another through the midst of fallen floorings and overturned partitions; but they were indeed, all the time, secretly pondering over the legend of those ruins, and of that lady, lovelier than day, whose silken skirt had rustled down those steps, where now lizards alone were idly crawling.

Serge ended by climbing the highest of the ruinous masses; and, looking round at the park which unfolded its vast expanse of greenery, he sought the grey form of the pavilion through the trees. Albine was standing silent by his side, serious once more.

'The pavilion is yonder, to the right,' she said at last, without waiting for Serge to ask her. 'It is the only one of the buildings that is left. You can see it quite plainly at the end of that grove of lime-trees.'

They fell into silence again; and then Albine, as though pursuing aloud the reflections which were passing through their minds, exclaimed: 'When he went to see her, he must have gone down yonder path, then past those big chestnut trees, and then under the limes. It wouldn't take him a quarter of an hour.'

Serge made no reply. But as they went home, they took the path which Albine had pointed out, past the chestnuts and under the limes. It was a path that love had consecrated. And as they walked over the grass, they seemed to be seeking footmarks, or a fallen knot of ribbon, or a whiff of ancient perfume—something that would clearly satisfy them that they were really travelling along the path that led to the joy of union.

'Wait out here,' said Albine, when they once more stood before the pavilion; 'don't come up for three minutes.'

Then she ran off merrily, and shut herself up in the room with the blue ceiling. And when she had let Serge knock at the door twice, she softly set it ajar, and received him with an old-fashioned courtesy.

'Good morrow, my dear lord,' she said as she embraced him.

This amused them extremely. They played at being lovers with childish glee. In stammering accents they would have revived the passion which had once throbbed and died there. But it was like a first effort at learning a lesson. They knew not how to kiss each other's lips, but sought each other's cheeks, and ended by dancing around each other, with shrieks of laughter, from ignorance of any other way of showing the pleasure they experienced from their mutual love.

IX

The next morning Albine was anxious to start at sunrise upon the grand expedition which she had planned the night before. She tapped her feet gleefully on the ground, and declared that they would not come back before nightfall.

'Where are you going to take me?' asked Serge.

'You will see, you will see.'

But he caught her by the hands and looked her very earnestly in the face. 'You must not be foolish, you know. I won't have you hunting for that glade of yours, or for the tree, or for the grassy couch where one droops and dies. You know that it is forbidden.'

She blushed slightly, protesting that she had no such idea in her head. Then she added: 'But if we should come across them, just by chance, you know, and without really seeking them, you wouldn't mind sitting down, would you? Else you must love me very little.'

They set off, going straight through the parterre without stopping to watch the awakening of the flowers which were all dripping after their dewy bath. The morning had a rosy hue, the smile of a beautiful child, just opening its eyes on its snowy pillow.

'Where are you taking me?' repeated Serge.

But Albine only laughed and would not answer. Then, on reaching the stream which ran through the garden at the end of the flower-beds, she halted in great distress. The water was swollen with the late rains.

'We shall never be able to get across,' she murmured. 'I can generally manage it by taking off my shoes and stockings, but, to-day, the water would reach to our waists.'

They walked for a moment or two along the bank to find some fordable point; but the girl said it was hopeless; she knew the stream quite well. Once there had been a bridge across, but it had fallen in, and had strewn the river bed with great blocks of stone, between which the water rushed along in foaming eddies.

'Get on to my back, then,' said Serge.

'No, no; I'd rather not. If you were to slip, we should both of us get a famous wetting. You don't know how treacherous those stones are.'

'Get on to my back,' repeated Serge.

She was tempted to do so. She stepped back for a spring, and then jumped up, like a boy; but she felt that Serge was tottering; and crying out that she was not safely seated, she got down again. However, after two more attempts, she managed to settle herself securely on Serge's back.

'When you are quite ready,' said the young man, laughing, 'we will start. Now, hold on tightly. We are off.'

And, with three light strides, he crossed the stream, scarcely wetting even his toes. Midway, however, Albine thought that he was slipping. She broke out into a little scream, and hugged him tightly round his neck. But he sprang forward, and carried her at a gallop over the fine sand on the other side.

'Gee up!' she cried, quite calm again, and delighted with this novel game.

He ran along with her for some distance, she clucking her tongue, and guiding him to right or left by some locks of his hair.

'Here—here we are,' she said at last, tapping him gently on the cheeks.

Then she jumped to the ground; while he, hot and perspiring, leaned against a tree to draw breath. Albine thereupon began to scold him, and threatened that she would not nurse him if he made himself ill again.

'Stuff!' he cried, 'it's done me good. When I have grown quite strong again, I will carry you about all day. But where are you taking me?'

'Here,' she said, as she seated herself beneath a huge pear-tree.

They were in the old orchard of the park. A hawthorn hedge, a real wall of greenery with here and there a gap, separated it from everything else. There was quite a forest of fruit trees, which no pruning knife had touched for a century past. Some of the trees had been strangely warped and twisted by the storms which had raged over them; while others, bossed all over with huge knots and full of deep holes, seemed only to hold on to the soil with their bark. The high branches, bent each year by weight of fruit, stretched out like big rackets; and each tree helped to keep its fellows erect. The trunks were like twisted pillars supporting a roof of greenery; and sometimes narrow cloisters, sometimes light halls were formed, while now and again the verdure swept almost to the ground and left scarcely room to pass. Round each colossus a crowd of wild and self-sown saplings had grown up, thicket-like with the entanglement of their young shoots. In the greenish light which filtered like tinted water through the foliage, in the deep silence of the mossy soil, one only heard the dull thud of the fruit as it was culled by the wind.

And there were patriarchal apricot trees that bore their great age quite bravely. Though decayed on one side, where they showed a perfect scaffolding of dead wood, they were so youthful, so full of life, that, on the other, young shoots were ever bursting through their rough bark. There were cherry trees, that formed complete towns with houses of several stories, that threw out staircases and floors of branches, big enough for half a score of families. Then there were the apple trees, with their limbs twisted like old cripples, with bark gnarled and knotted, and all stained with lichen-growth. There were also smooth pear trees, that shot up mast-like with long slender spars. And there were rosy-blossomed peach-trees that won a place amid this teeming growth as pretty maids do amidst a human crowd by dint of bright smiles and gentle persistence. Some had been formerly trained as espaliers, but they had broken down the low walls which had once supported them, and now spread abroad in wild confusion, freed from the trammels of trellis work, broken fragments of which still adhered to some of their branches. They grew just as they listed, and resembled well-bred trees, once neat and prim, which, having gone astray, now flaunted but vestiges of whilom respectability. And from tree to tree, and from bough to bough, vine branches hung in confusion. They rose like wild laughter, twined for an instant round some lofty knot, then started off again with yet more sonorous mirth, splotching all the foliage with the merry ebriety of their tendrils. Their pale sun-gilt green set a glow of bacchanalianism about the weather-worn heads of the old orchard giants.

Then towards the left were trees less thickly planted. Thin-foliaged almonds allowed the sun's rays to pass and ripen the pumpkins, which looked like moons that had fallen to the earth. Near the edge of a stream which flowed through the orchard there also grew various kinds of melons, some rough with knotty warts, some smooth and shining, as oval as the eggs of ostriches. At every step, too, progress was barred by currant bushes, showing limpid bunches of fruit, rubies in one and all of which there sparkled liquid sunlight. And hedges of raspberry canes shot up like wild brambles, while the ground was but a carpet of strawberry plants, teeming with ripe berries which exhaled a slight odour of vanilla.

But the enchanted corner of the orchard was still further to the left, near a tier of rocks which there began to soar upwards. There you found yourself in a veritable land of fire, in a natural hot-house, on which the sun fell freely. At first, you had to make your way through huge, ungainly fig trees, which stretched out grey branches like arms weary of lying still, and whose villose leather-like foliage was so dense that in order to pass one constantly had to snap off twigs that had sprouted from the old wood. Next you passed on through groves of strawberry trees with verdure like that of giant box-plants, and with scarlet berries which suggested maize plants decked out with crimson ribbon. Then there came a jungle of nettle-trees, medlars and jujube trees, which pomegranates skirted with never-fading verdure. The fruit of the latter, big as a child's fist, was scarcely set as yet; and the purple blossoms, fluttering at the ends of the branches, looked like the palpitating wings of the humming birds, which do not even bend the shoots on which they perch. Lastly, there was a forest of orange and lemon trees growing vigorously in the open air. Their straight trunks stood like rows of brown columns, while their shiny leaves showed brightly against the blue of the sky, and cast upon the ground a network of light and shadow, figuring the palms of some Indian fabric. Here there was shade beside which that of the European orchard seemed colourless, insipid; the warm joy of sunlight, softened into flying gold-dust; the glad certainty of evergreen foliage; the penetrating perfume of blossom, and the more subdued fragrance of fruit; all helping to fill the body with the soft languor of tropical lands.

'And now let us breakfast,' cried Albine, clapping her hands. 'It must be at least nine o'clock, and I am very hungry.'

She had risen from the ground. Serge confessed that he, too, would find some food acceptable.

'You goose!' she said, 'you didn't understand, then, that I brought you here to breakfast. We sha'n't die of hunger here. We can help ourselves to all there is.'

They went along under the trees, pushing aside the branches and making their way to the thickest of the fruit. Albine, who went first, turned, and in her flute-like voice asked her companion: 'What do you like best? Pears, apricots, cherries, or currants? I warn you that the pears are still green; but they are very nice all the same.'

Serge decided upon having cherries, and Albine agreed it would be as well to start with them; but when she saw him foolishly beginning to scramble up the first cherry tree he found, she made him go on for another ten minutes through a frightful entanglement of branches. The cherries on this tree, she said, were small and good for nothing; those on that were sour; those on another would not be ripe for at least a week. She knew all the trees.

'Stop, climb this one,' she said at last, as she stopped at the foot of a tree, so heavily laden with fruit that clusters of it hung down to the ground, like strings of coral beads.

Serge settled himself comfortably between two branches and began his breakfast. He no longer paid attention to Albine. He imagined she was in another tree, a few yards away, when, happening to cast his eyes towards the ground, he saw her calmly lying on her back beneath him. She had thrown herself there, and, without troubling herself to use her hands, was plucking with her teeth the cherries which dangled over her mouth.

When she saw she was discovered, she broke out into a peal of laughter, and twisted about on the grass like a fish taken from the water. And finally, crawling along on her elbows, she gradually made the circuit of the tree, snapping up the plumpest cherries as she went along.

'They tickle me so,' she cried. 'See, there's a beauty just fallen on my neck. They are so deliciously fresh and juicy. They get into my ears, my eyes, my nose, everywhere. They are much sweeter down here than up there.'

'Ah!' said Serge, laughing, 'you say that because you daren't climb up.'

She remained for a moment silent with indignation. 'Daren't!—I!—' she stammered.

Then, having gathered up her skirts, she tightly grasped the tree and pulled herself up the trunk with a single effort of her strong wrists. And afterwards she stepped lightly along the branches, scarcely using her hands to steady herself. She had all the agile nimbleness of a squirrel, and made her way onward, maintaining her equilibrium only by the swaying poise of her body. When she was quite aloft at the end of a frail branch, which shook dangerously beneath her weight, she cried; 'Now you see whether I daren't climb.'

'Come down at once,' implored Serge, full of alarm for her. 'I beg of you to come down. You will be injuring yourself.'

But she, enjoying her triumph, began to mount still higher. She crawled along to the extreme end of a branch, grasping its leaves in her hands to maintain her hold.

'The branch will break!' cried Serge, thoroughly frightened.

'Let it break,' she answered, with a laugh; 'it will save me the trouble of getting down.'

And the branch did break, but only slowly, with such deliberation that, as it gradually settled towards the ground, it let Albine slip down in very gentle fashion. She did not appear in the least degree frightened; but gave herself a shake, and said: 'That was really nice. It was quite like being in a carriage.'

Serge had jumped down from the tree to catch her in his arms. As he stood there, quite pale from fright, she laughed at him. 'One tumbles down from trees every day,' she exclaimed, 'but there is never any harm done. Look more cheerful, you great stupid! Stay, just wet your finger and rub it upon my neck. I have scratched it.'

Serge wetted his finger and touched her neck with it.

'There, I am all right again now,' she cried, as she bounded off. 'Let us play at hide and seek, shall we?'

She was the first to hide. She disappeared, and presently from the depths of the greenery, which she alone knew, and where Serge could not possibly find her, she called, 'Cuckoo, cuckoo.' But this game of hide and seek did not put a stop to the onslaught upon the fruit trees. Breakfasting went on in all the nooks and corners where the two big children sought each other. Albine, while gliding beneath the branches, would stretch out her hand to pluck a green pear or fill her skirt with apricots. Then in some of her lurking-places she would come upon such rich discoveries as would make her careless of the game, content to sit upon the ground and remain eating. Once, however, she lost sound of Serge's movements. So, in her turn, she set about seeking him; and she was surprised, almost vexed, when she discovered him under a plum-tree, of whose existence she herself had been ignorant, and whose ripe fruit had a delicious musky perfume. She soundly rated him. Did he want to eat everything himself, that he hadn't called to her to come? He pretended to know nothing about the trees, but he evidently had a very keen scent to be able to find all the good things. She was especially indignant with the poor tree itself—a stupid tree which no one had known of, and which must have sprung up in the night on purpose to put people out. As she stood there pouting, refusing to pluck a single plum, it occurred to Serge to shake the tree violently. And then a shower, a regular hail, of plums came down. Albine, standing in the midst of the downfall, received plums on her arms, plums on her neck, plums on the very tip of her nose. At this she could no longer restrain her laughter; she stood in the midst of the deluge, crying 'More! more!' amused as she was by the round bullet-like fruit which fell around her as she squatted there, with hands and mouth open, and eyes closed.

It was a morning of childish play, of wild gambols in the Paradou. Albine and Serge spent hours, scampering up and down, shouting and sporting with each other, their thoughts still all innocence. And in what a delicious spot they found themselves! Depths of greenery, with undiscoverable hiding-places; paths, along whose windings it was never possible to be serious, such greedy laughter fell from the very hedges. In this happy orchard, there was such a playful straggling of bushes, such fresh and appetising shade, such a wealth of old trees laden like kindly grandfathers with sweet dainties. Even in the depths of the recesses green with moss, beneath the broken trunks which compelled them to creep the one behind the other, in the narrow leafy alleys, the young folks never succumbed to the perilous reveries of silence. No trouble touched them in that happy wood.

And when they had grown weary of the apricot-trees and the plum-trees and the cherry-trees, they ran beneath the slender almond-trees; eating green almonds, scarcely yet as big as peas, hunting for strawberries in the grassy carpet, and regretting that the melons were not already ripe. Albine finished by running as fast as she could go, pursued by Serge, who was unable to overtake her. She rushed amongst the fig-trees, leaping over their heavy branches, and pulling off the leaves to throw them behind her in her companion's face. In a few strides she had cleared the clumps of arbutus, whose red berries she tasted on her way; and it was in the jungle of nettle-trees, medlars, and jujube-trees that Serge lost her. At first he thought she was hiding behind a pomegranate; but found that he had mistaken two clustering blossoms for the rosy roundness of her wrists. Then he scoured the plantation of orange-trees, rejoicing in their beauty and perfume, and thinking that he must have reached the abode of the fairies of the sun. In the midst of them he caught sight of Albine, who, not believing him so near her, was peering inquisitively into the green depths.

'What are you looking for?' he cried. 'You know very well that is forbidden.'

She sprang up hastily, and slightly blushed for the first time that day. Then sitting down by the side of Serge, she told him of the fine times there would be when the oranges should be ripe. The wood would then be all golden, all bright with those round stars, dotting with yellow sparks the arching green.

When at last they really set off homeward she halted at every wild-growing fruit tree, and filled her pockets with sour pears and bitter plums, saying that they world be good to eat on their way. They would prove a hundred times more enjoyable than anything they had tasted before. Serge was obliged to swallow some of them, in spite of the grimaces he made at each bite. And eventually they found themselves indoors again, tired out but feeling very happy.

X

A week later there was another expedition to the park. They had planned to extend their rambles beyond the orchard, striking out to the left through the meadows watered by the four streams. They would travel several miles over the thick grass, and they might live on fish, if they happened to lose themselves.

'I will take my knife,' said Albine, holding up a broad-bladed peasant's knife.

She crammed all kinds of things into her pockets, string, bread, matches, a small bottle of wine, some rags, a comb, and some needles. Serge took a rug, but by the time they had passed the lime-trees and reached the ruins of the chateau, he found it such an encumbrance that he hid it beneath a piece of fallen wall.

The sun was hotter than before, Albine had delayed their departure by her extensive preparations. Thus in the heat of the morning they stepped along side by side, almost quietly. They actually managed to take twenty paces at a time without pushing one another or laughing. They began to talk.

'I never can wake up,' began Albine. 'I slept so soundly last night. Did you?'

'Yes, indeed, very soundly,' replied Serge.

'What does it mean when you dream of a bird that talks to you?' the girl resumed.

'I don't know. What did your bird say to you?'

'Oh, I have forgotten. But it said all kinds of things, and many of them sounded very comical. Stop, look at that big poppy over there. You sha'n't get it, you sha'n't get it!'

And then she sprang forward; but Serge, thanks to his long legs, outstripped her and plucked the poppy, which he waved about victoriously. She stood there with lips compressed, saying nothing, but feeling a strong inclination to cry. Serge threw down the flower. Nothing else occurred to him. Then, to make his peace with her, he asked: 'Would you like me to carry you as I did the other day?'

'No, no.'

She pouted a little, but she had not gone another thirty steps, when she turned round smiling. A bramble had caught hold of her dress.

'I thought it was you who were treading on my dress purposely. It won't let me go. Come and unfasten me.'

When she was released, they walked on again, side by side, very quietly. Albine pretended that it was much more amusing to stroll along in this fashion, like steady grown-up folks. They had just reached the meadows. Far away, in front of them, stretched grassy expanses scarce broken here and there by the tender foliage of willows. The grass looked soft and downy, like velvet. It was a deep green, subsiding in the distance into lighter tints, and on the horizon assuming a bright yellow glow beneath the flaring sun. The clumps of willows right over yonder seemed like pure gold, bathed in the tremulous brilliance of the sunshine. Dancing dust tipped the blades of grass with quivering light, and as the gentle breezes swept over the free expanse, moire-like reflections appeared on the caressed and quivering herbage. In the nearer fields a multitude of little white daisies, now in swarms, now straggling, and now in groups, like holiday makers at some public rejoicing, brightly peopled the dark grass. Buttercups showed themselves, gay like little brass bells which the touch of a fly's wing would set tinkling. Here and there big lonely poppies raised fiery cups, and others, gathered together further away, spread out like vats purple with lees of wine. Big cornflowers balanced aloft their light blue caps which looked as if they would fly away at every breath of air. Then under foot there were patches of woolly feather-grass and fragrant meadow-sweet, sheets of fescue, dog's-tail, creeping-bent, and meadow grass. Sainfoin reared its long fine filaments; clover unfurled its clear green leaves, plantains brandished forests of spears, lucerne spread out in soft beds of green satin broidered with purple flowers. And all these were seen, to right, to left, in front, everywhere, rolling over the level soil, showing like the mossy surface of a stagnant sea, asleep beneath the sky which ever seemed to expand. Here and there, in the vast expanse, the vegetation was of a limpid blue, as though it reflected the colour of the heavens.

Albine and Serge stepped along over the meadow-lands, with the grass reaching to their knees. It was like wading through a pool. Now and then, indeed, they found themselves caught by a current in which a stream of bending stalks seemed to flow away between their legs. Then there were placid-looking, slumbering lakes, basins of short grass, which scarcely reached their ankles. As they walked along together, their joy found expression not in wild gambols, as in the orchard a week before, but rather in loitering, with their feet caught among the supple arms of the herbage, tasting as it were the caresses of a pure stream which calmed the exuberance of their youth. Albine turned aside and slipped into a lofty patch of vegetation which reached to her chin. Only her head appeared. For a moment or two she stood there in silence. Then she called to Serge: 'Come here, it is just like a bath. It is as if one had green water all over one.'

Then she gave a jump and scampered off without waiting for him, and they both walked along the margin of the first stream which barred their onward course. It was a shallow tranquil brook between banks of wild cress. It flowed on so placidly and gently that its surface reflected like a mirror the smallest reed that grew beside it. Albine and Serge followed this stream, whose onward motion was slower than their own, for a long time before they came across a tree that flung a long shadow upon the idle waters. As far as their eyes could reach they saw the bare brook stretch out and slumber in the sunlight like a blue serpent half uncoiled. At last they reached a clump of three willows. Two had their roots in the stream; the third was set a little backward. Their trunks, rotten and crumbling with age, were crowned with the bright foliage of youth. The shadow they cast was so slight as scarcely to be perceptible upon the sunlit bank. Yet here the water, which, both above and below, was so unruffled, showed a transient quiver, a rippling of its surface, as though it were surprised to find even this light veil cast over it. Between the three willows the meadow-land sloped down to the stream, and some crimson poppies had sprung up in the crevices of the decaying old trunks. The foliage of the willows looked like a tent of greenery fixed upon three stakes by the water's edge, beside a rolling prairie.

'This is the place,' cried Albine, 'this is the place;' and she glided beneath the willows.

Serge sat down by her side, his feet almost in the water. He glanced round him, and murmured: 'You know everything, you know all the best spots. One might almost think this was an island, ten feet square, right in the middle of the sea.'

'Yes, indeed, we are quite at home,' she replied, as she gleefully drummed the grass with her fists. 'It is altogether our own, and we are going to do everything ourselves.' Then, as if struck by a brilliant idea, she sprang towards him, and, with her face close to his, asked him joyously: 'Will you be my husband? I will be your wife.'

He was delighted at the notion, and replied that he would gladly be her husband, laughing even more loudly than she had done herself. Then Albine suddenly became grave, and assumed the anxious air of a housewife.

'You know,' she said, 'that it is I who will have to give the orders. We will have breakfast as soon as you have laid the table.'

She gave him her orders in an imperious fashion. He had to stow all the various articles which she extracted from her pockets into a hole in one of the willows, which bole she called the cupboard. The rags supplied the household linen, while the comb represented the toilette necessaries. The needles and string were to be used for mending the explorers' clothes. Provision for the inner man consisted of the little bottle of wine and a few crusts which she had saved from yesterday. She had, to be sure, some matches, by the aid of which she intended to cook the fish they were going to catch.

When Serge had finished laying the table, the bottle of wine in the centre, and three crusts grouped round it, he hazarded the observation that the fare seemed to be scanty. But Albine shrugged her shoulders with feminine superiority. And wading into the water, she said in a severe tone, 'I will catch the fish; you can watch me.'

For half an hour she strenuously exerted herself in trying to catch some of the little fishes with her hands. She had gathered up her petticoats and fastened them together with a piece of string. And she advanced quietly into the water, taking the greatest care not to disturb it. When she was quite close to some tiny fish, that lay lurking between a couple of pebbles, she thrust down her bare arm, made a wild grasp, and brought her hand up again with nothing in it but sand and gravel. Serge then broke out into noisy laughter which brought her back to the bank, indignant. She told him that he had no business to laugh at her.

'But,' he ended by asking, 'how are we going to cook your fish when you have caught it? There is no wood about.'

That put the finishing touch to her discouragement. However, the fish in that stream didn't seem to be good for much; so she came out of the water and ran through the long grass to get her feet dry.

'See,' she suddenly exclaimed, 'here is some pimpernel. It is very nice. Now we shall have a feast.'

Serge was ordered to gather a quantity of the pimpernel and place it on the table. They ate it with their crusts. Albine declared that it was much better than nuts. She assumed the position of mistress of the establishment, and cut Serge's bread for him, for she would not trust him with the knife. At last she made him store away in the 'cupboard' the few drops of wine that remained at the bottom of the bottle. He was also ordered to sweep the grass. Then Albine lay down at full length.

'We are going to sleep now, you know. You must lie down by my side.'

He did as he was ordered. They lay there stiffly staring into the air, and saying that they were asleep, and that it was very nice. After a while, however, they drew slightly away from one another, averting their heads as if they felt some discomfort. And at last breaking the silence which had fallen between them, Serge exclaimed: 'I love you very much.'

It was love such as it is without any sensual feeling; that instinctive love which wakens in the bosom of a little man ten years old at the sight of some white-robed baby-girl. The meadow-lands, spreading around them all open and free, dissipated the slight fear each felt of the other. They knew that they lay there, seen of all the herbage, that the blue sky looked down upon them through the light foliage of the willows, and the thought was pleasant to them. The willow canopy over their heads was a mere open screen. The shade it cast was so imperceptible that it wafted to them none of the languor that some dim coppice might have done. From the far-off horizon came a healthy breeze fraught with all the freshness of the grassy sea, swelling here and there into waves of flowers; while, at their feet, the stream, childlike as they were, flowed idly along with a gentle babbling that sounded to them like the laughter of a companion. Ah! happy solitude, so tranquil and placid, immensity wherein the little patch of grass serving as their couch took the semblance of an infant's cradle.

'There, that's enough; said Albine, getting up; 'we've rested long enough.'

Serge seemed a little surprised at this speedy termination of their sleep. He stretched out his arm and caught hold of Albine, as though to draw her near him again; and when she, laughing, dropped upon her knees he grasped her elbows and gazed up at her. He knew not to what impulse he was yielding. But when she had freed herself, and again had risen to her feet, he buried his face amongst the grass where she had lain, and which still retained the warmth of her body.

'Yes,' he said at last, 'it is time to get up,' and then he rose from the ground.

They scoured the meadow-lands until evening began to fall. They went on and on, inspecting their garden. Albine walked in front, sniffing like a young dog, and saying nothing, but she was ever in search of the happy glade, although where they found themselves there were none of the big trees of which her thoughts were full. Serge meanwhile indulged in all kinds of clumsy gallantry. He rushed forward so hastily to thrust the tall herbage aside, that he nearly tripped her up; and he almost tore her arm from her body as he tried to assist her over the brooks. Their joy was great when they came to the three other streams. The first flowed over a bed of pebbles, between two rows of willows, so closely planted that they had to grope between the branches with the risk of falling into some deep part of the water. It only rose to Serge's knees, however, and having caught Albine in his arms he carried her to the opposite bank, to save her from a wetting. The next stream flowed black with shade beneath a lofty canopy of foliage, passing languidly onward with the gentle rustling and rippling of the satin train of some lady, dreamily sauntering through the woodland depths. It was a deep, cold, and rather dangerous-looking stream, but a fallen tree that stretched from bank to bank served them as a bridge. They crossed over, bestriding the tree with dangling feet, at first amusing themselves by stirring the water which looked like a mirror of burnished steel, but then suddenly hastening, frightened by the strange eyes which opened in the depths of the sleepy current at the slightest splash. But it was the last stream which delayed them the most. It was sportive like themselves, it flowed more slowly at certain bends, whence it started off again with merry ripples, past piles of big stones, into the shelter of some clump of trees, and grew calmer once more. It exhibited every humour as it sped along over soft sand or rocky boulders, over sparkling pebbles or greasy clay, where leaping frogs made yellow puddles. Albine and Serge dabbled about in delight, and even walked homewards through the stream in preference to remaining on the bank. At every little island that divided the current they landed. They conquered the savage spot or rested beneath the lofty canes and reeds, which seemed to grow there expressly as shelter for shipwrecked adventurers. Thus they made a delightful progress, amused by the changing scenery of the banks, enlivened by the merry humour of the living current.

But when they were about to leave the river, Serge realised that Albine was still seeking something along the banks, on the island, even among the plants that slept on the surface of the water. He was obliged to go and pull her from the midst of a patch of water-lilies whose broad leaves set collerettes around her limbs. He said nothing, but shook his finger at her. And at last they went home, walking along, arm in arm, like young people after a day's outing. They looked at each other, and thought one another handsomer and stronger than before, and of a certainty their laughter had a different ring from that with which it had sounded in the morning.

XI

'Are we never going out again?' asked Serge some days later.

And when he saw Albine shrug her shoulders with a weary air, he added, in a teasing kind of way, 'You have got tired of looking for your tree, then?'

They joked about the tree all day and made fun of it. It didn't exist. It was only a nursery-story. Yet they both spoke of it with a slight feeling of awe. And on the morrow they settled that they would go to the far end of the park and pay a visit to the great forest-trees which Serge had not yet seen. Albine refused to take anything along with them. They breakfasted before starting and did not set off till late. The heat of the sun, which was then great, brought them a feeling of languor, and they sauntered along gently, side by side, seeking every patch of sheltering shade. They lingered neither in the garden nor the orchard, through which they had to pass. When they gained the shady coolness beneath the big trees, they dropped into a still slower pace; and, without a word, but with a deep sigh, as though it were welcome relief to escape from the glare of day, they pushed on into the forest's depths. And when they had nothing but cool green leaves about them, when no glimpse of the sunlit expanse was afforded by any gap in the foliage, they looked at each other and smiled, with a feeling of vague uneasiness.

'How nice it is here!' murmured Serge.

Albine simply nodded her head. A choking sensation in her throat prevented her from speaking. Their arms were not passed as usual round each other's waist, but swung loosely by their sides. They walked along without touching each other, and with their heads inclined towards the ground.

But Serge suddenly stopped short on seeing tears trickle down Albine's cheeks and mingle with the smile that played around her lips.

'What is the matter with you?' he exclaimed; 'are you in pain? Have you hurt yourself?'

'No, don't you see I'm smiling? I don't know how it is, but the scent of all these trees forces tears into my eyes.' She glanced at him, and then resumed: 'Why, you're crying too! You see you can't help it.'

'Yes,' he murmured, 'all this deep shade affects one. It seems so peaceful, so mournful here that one feels a little sad. But you must tell me, you know, if anything makes you really unhappy. I have not done anything to annoy you, have I? you are not vexed with me?'

She assured him that she was not. She was quite happy, she said.

'Then why are you not enjoying yourself more? Shall we have a race?'

'Oh! no, we can't race,' she said, disdainfully, with a pout. And when he went on to suggest other amusements, such as bird-nesting or gathering strawberries or violets, she replied a little impatiently: 'We are too big for that sort of thing. It is childish to be always playing. Doesn't it please you better to walk on quietly by my side?'

She stepped along so prettily, that it was, indeed, a pleasure to hear the pit-pat of her little boots on the hard soil of the path. Never before had he paid attention to the rhythmic motion of her figure, the sweep of her skirts that followed her with serpentine motion. It was happiness never to be exhausted, to see her thus walking sedately by his side, for he was ever discovering some new charm in the lissom suppleness of her limbs.

'You are right,' he said, 'this is really the best. I would walk by your side to the end of the world, if you wished it.'

A little further on, however, he asked her if she were not tired, and hinted that he would not be sorry to have a rest himself.

'We might sit down for a few minutes,' he suggested in a stammering voice.

'No,' she replied, 'I don't want to.'

'But we might lie down, you know, as we did in the meadows the other day. We should be quite comfortable.'

'No, no; I don't want to.'

And she suddenly sprang aside, as if scared by the masculine arms outstretched towards her. Serge called her a big stupid, and tried to catch her. But at the light touch of his fingers she cried out with such an expression of pain that he drew back, trembling.

'I have hurt you?' he said.

She did not reply for a moment, surprised, herself, at her cry of fear, and already smiling at her own alarm.

'No; leave me, don't worry me;' and she added in a grave tone, though she tried to feign jocularity: 'you know that I have my tree to look for.'

Then Serge began to laugh, and offered to help her in her search. He conducted himself very gently in order that he might not again alarm her, for he saw that she was even yet trembling, though she had resumed her slow walk beside him. What they were contemplating was forbidden, and could bring them no luck; and he, like her, felt a delightful awe, which thrilled him at each repeated sigh of the forest trees. The perfume of the foliage, the soft green light which filtered through the leaves, the soughing silence of the undergrowth, filled them with tremulous excitement, as though the next turn of the path might lead them to some perilous happiness.

And for hours they walked on under the cool trees. They retained their reserved attitude towards each other, and scarcely exchanged a word, though they never left each other's side, but went together through the darkest greenery of the forest. At first their way lay through a jungle of saplings with trunks no thicker than a child's wrist. They had to push them aside, and open a path for themselves through the tender shoots which threw a wavy lacework of foliage before their eyes. The saplings closed up again behind them, leaving no trace of their passage, and they struggled on and on at random, ignorant of where they might be, and leaving nothing behind them to mark their progress, save a momentary waving of shaken boughs. Albine, weary of being unable to see more than three steps in front of her, was delighted when they at last found themselves free of this jungle, whose end they had long tried to discover. They had now reached a little clearing, whence several narrow paths, fringed with green hedges, struck out in various directions, twisting hither and thither, intersecting one another, bending and stretching in the most capricious fashion. Albine and Serge rose on tip-toes to peep over the hedges; but they were in no haste, and would willingly have stayed where they were, lost in the mazy windings, without ever getting anywhere, if they had not seen before them the proud lines of the lofty forest trees. They passed at last beneath their shade, solemnly and with a touch of sacred awe, as when one enters some vaulted cathedral. The straight lichen-stained trunks of the mighty trees, of a dingy grey, like discoloured stone, towered loftily, line by line, like a far-reaching infinity of columns. Naves opened far away, with lower, narrower aisles; naves strangely bold in their proportions, whose supporting pillars were very slender, richly caned, so finely chiselled that everywhere they allowed a glimpse of the blue heavens. A religious silence reigned beneath the giant arches, the ground below lay hard as stone in its austere nakedness; not a blade of green was there, nought but a ruddy dust of dead leaves. And Serge and Albine listened to their ringing footsteps as they went on, thrilled by the majestic solitude of this temple.

Here, indeed, if anywhere, must be the much-sought tree, beneath whose shade perfect happiness had made its home. They felt that it was nigh, such was the delight which stole through them amidst the dimness of those mighty arches. The trees seemed to be creatures of kindliness, full of strength and silence and happy restfulness. They looked at them one by one, and they loved them all; and they awaited from their majestic tranquillity some revelation whereby they themselves might grow, expand into the bliss of strong and perfect life. The maples, the ashes, the hornbeams, the cornels, formed a nation of giants, a multitude full of proud gentleness, who lived in peace, knowing that the fall of any one of them would have sufficed to wreck a whole corner of the forest. The elms displayed colossal bodies and limbs full of sap, scarce veiled by light clusters of little leaves. The birches and the alders, delicate as sylphs, swayed their slim figures in the breeze to which they surrendered the foliage that streamed around them like the locks of goddesses already half metamorphosed into trees. The planes shot up regularly with glossy tattooed bark, whence scaly fragments fell. Down a gentle slope descended the larches, resembling a band of barbarians, draped in sayons of woven greenery. But the oaks were the monarchs of all—the mighty oaks, whose sturdy trunks thrust out conquering arms that barred the sun's approach from all around them; Titan-like trees, oft lightning-struck, thrown back in postures like those of unconquered wrestlers, with scattered limbs that alone gave birth to a whole forest.

Could the tree which Serge and Albine sought be one of those colossal oaks? or was it one of those lovely planes, or one of those pale, maidenly birches, or one of those creaking elms? Albine and Serge still plodded on, unable to tell, completely lost amongst the crowding trees. For a moment they thought they had found the object of their quest in the midst of a group of walnut trees from whose thick foliage fell so cold a shadow that they shivered beneath it. Further on they felt another thrill of emotion as they came upon a little wood of chestnut trees, green with moss and thrusting out big strange-shaped branches, on which one might have built an aerial village. But further still Albine caught sight of a clearing, whither they both ran hastily. Here, in the midst of a carpet of fine turf, a locust tree had set a very toppling of greenery, a foliaged Babel, whose ruins were covered with the strangest vegetation. Stones, sucked up from the ground by the mounting sap, still remained adhering to the trunk. High branches bent down to earth again, and, taking root, surrounded the parent tree with lofty arches, a nation of new trunks which ever increased and multiplied. Upon the bark, seared with bleeding wounds, were ripening fruit-pods; the mere effort of bearing fruit strained the old monster's skin until it split. The young folks walked slowly round it, passing under the arched branches which formed as it were the streets of a city, and stared at the gaping cracks of the naked roots. Then they went off, for they had not felt there the supernatural happiness they sought.

'Where are we?' asked Serge.

Albine did not know. She had never before come to this part of the park. They were now in a grove of cytisus and acacias, from whose clustering blossoms fell a soft, almost sugary perfume. 'We are quite lost,' she laughed. 'I don't know these trees at all.'

'But the garden must come to an end somewhere,' said Serge. 'When we get to the end, you will know where you are, won't you?'

'No,' she answered, waving her hands afar.

They fell into silence; never yet had the vastness of the park filled them with such pleasure. They joyed at knowing that they were alone in so far-spreading a domain that even they themselves could not reach its limits.

'Well, we are lost,' said Serge, gaily; then humbly drawing near her he inquired: 'You are not afraid, are you?'

'Oh! no. There's no one except you and me in the garden. What could I be afraid of? The walls are very high. We can't see them, but they guard us, you know.'

Serge was now quite close to her, and he murmured, 'But a little time ago you were afraid of me.'

She looked him straight in the face, perfectly calm, without the least faltering in her glance. 'You hurt me,' she replied, 'but you are different now. Why should I be afraid of you?'

'Then you will let me hold you like this. We will go back under the trees.'

'Yes, you may put your arm around me, it makes me feel happy. And we'll walk slowly, eh? so that we may not find our way again too soon.'

He had passed his arm round her waist, and it was thus that they sauntered back to the shade of the great forest trees, under whose arching vaults they slowly went, with love awakening within them. Albine said that she felt a little tired, and rested her head on Serge's shoulder. The fabulous tree was now forgotten. They only sought to draw their faces nearer together that they might smile in one another's eyes. And it was the trees, the maples, the elms, the oaks, with their soft green shade, that whisperingly suggested to them the first words of love.

'I love you!' said Serge, while his breath stirred the golden hair that clustered round Albine's temples. He tried to think of other words, but he could only repeat, 'I love you! I love you!'

Albine listened with a delightful smile upon her face. The music of her heart was in accord with his.

'I love you! I love you!' she sighed, with all the sweetness of her soft young voice.

Then, lifting up her blue eyes, in which the light of love was dawning, she asked, 'How do you love me?'

Serge reflected for a moment. The forest was wrapped in solemn quietude, the lofty naves quivered only with the soft footsteps of the young pair.

'I love you beyond everything,' he answered. 'You are more beautiful than all else that I see when I open my window in the morning. When I look at you, I want nothing more. If I could have you only, I should be perfectly happy.'

She lowered her eyes, and swayed her head as if accompanying a strain of music. 'I love you,' he went on. 'I know nothing about you. I know not who you are, nor whence you came. You are neither my mother nor my sister; and yet I love you to a point that I have given you my whole heart and kept nought of it for others. Listen, I love those cheeks of yours, so soft and satiny; I love your mouth with its rose-sweet breath; I love your eyes, in which I see my own love reflected; I love even your eyelashes, even those little veins which blue the whiteness of your temples. Ah! yes, I love you, I love you, Albine.'

'And I love you, too,' she answered. 'You are strong, and tall, and handsome. I love you, Serge.'

For a moment or two they remained silent, enraptured. It seemed to them that soft, flute-like music went before them, that their own words came from some dulcet orchestra which they could not see. Shorter and shorter became their steps as they leaned one towards the other, ever threading their way amidst the mighty trees. Afar off through the long vista of the colonnades were glimpses of waning sunlight, showing like a procession of white-robed maidens entering church for a betrothal ceremony amid the low strains of an organ.

'And why do you love me?' asked Albine again.

He only smiled, and did not answer her immediately; then he said, 'I love you because you came to me. That expresses all.... Now we are together and we love one another. It seems to me that I could not go on living if I did not love you. You are the very breath of my life.'

He bent his head, speaking almost as though he were in a dream.

'One does not know all that at first. It grows up in one as one's heart grows. One has to grow, one has to get strong.... Do you remember how we loved one another though we didn't speak of it? One is childish and silly at first. Then, one fine day, it all becomes clear, and bursts out. You see, we have nothing to trouble about; we love one another because our love and our life are one.'

Albine's head was cast back, her eyes were tightly closed, and she scarce drew her breath. Serge's caressing words enraptured her: 'Do you really, really love me?' she murmured, without opening her eyes.

Serge remained silent, sorely troubled that he could find nothing further to say to prove to her the force of his love. His eyes wandered over her rosy face, which lay upon his shoulder with the restfulness of sleep. Her eyelids were soft as silk. Her moist lips were curved into a bewitching smile, her brow was pure white, with just a rim of gold below her hair. He would have liked to give his whole being with the word which seemed to be upon his tongue but which he could not utter. Again he bent over her, and seemed to consider on what sweet spot of that fair face he should whisper the supreme syllables. But he said nothing, he only breathed a little sigh. Then he kissed Albine's lips.

'Albine, I love you!'

'I love you, Serge!'

Then they stopped short, thrilled, quivering with that first love kiss. She had opened her eyes quite widely. He was standing with his lips protruding slightly towards hers. They looked at each other without a blush. They felt they were under the influence of some sovereign power. It was like the realisation of a long dreamt-of meeting, in which they beheld themselves grown, made one for the other, for ever joined. For a moment they remained wondering, raising their eyes to the solemn vault of greenery above them, questioning the tranquil nation of trees as if seeking an echo of their kiss. But, beneath the serene complacence of the forest, they yielded to prolonged, ringing lovers' gaiety, full of all the tenderness now born.

'Tell me how long you have loved me. Tell me everything. Did you love me that day when you lay sleeping upon my hand? Did you love me when I fell out of the cherry tree, and you stood beneath it, stretching out your arms to catch me, and looking so pale? Did you love me when you took hold of me round the waist in the meadows to help me over the streams?'

'Hush, let me speak. I have always loved you. And you, did you love me; did you?'

Until the evening closed round them they lived upon that one word 'love,' in which they ever seemed to find some new sweetness. They brought it into every sentence, ejaculated it inconsequentially, merely for the pleasure they found in pronouncing it. Serge, however, did not think of pressing a second kiss to Albine's lips. The perfume of the first sufficed them in their purity. They had found their way again, or rather had stumbled upon it, for they had paid no attention to the paths they took. As they left the forest, twilight had fallen, and the moon was rising, round and yellow, between the black foliage. It was a delightful walk home through the park, with that discreet luminary peering at them through the gaps in the big trees. Albine said that the moon was surely following them. The night was balmy, warm too with stars. Far away a long murmur rose from the forest trees, and Serge listened, thinking: 'They are talking of us.'

When they reached the parterre, they passed through an atmosphere of sweetest perfumes; the perfume of flowers at night, which is richer, more caressing than by day, and seems like the very breath of slumber.

'Good night, Serge.'

'Good night, Albine.'

They clasped each other by the hand on the landing of the first floor, without entering the room where they usually wished each other good night. They did not kiss. But Serge, when he was alone, remained seated on the edge of his bed, listening to Albine's every movement in the room above. He was weary with happiness, a happiness that benumbed his limbs.

XII

For the next few days Albine and Serge experienced a feeling of embarrassment. They avoided all allusion to their walk beneath the trees. They had not again kissed each other, or repeated their confession of love. It was not any feeling of shame which had sealed their lips, but rather a fear of in any way spoiling their happiness. When they were apart, they lived upon the dear recollection of love's awakening, plunged into it, passed once more through the happy hours which they had spent, with their arms around each other's waist, and their faces close together. It all ended by throwing them both into a feverish state. They looked at each other with heavy eyes, and talked, in a melancholy mood, of things that did not interest them in the least. Then, after a long interval of silence, Serge would say to Albine in a tone full of anxiety: 'You are ill?'

But she shook her head as she answered, 'No, no. It is you who are not well; your hands are burning.'

The thought of the park filled them with vague uneasiness which they could not understand. They felt that danger lurked for them in some by-path, and would seize them and do them hurt. They never spoke about these disquieting thoughts, but certain timid glances revealed to them the mutual anguish which held them apart as though they were foes. One morning, however, Albine ventured, after much hesitation, to say to Serge: 'It is wrong of you to keep always indoors. You will fall ill again.'

Serge laughed in rather an embarrassed way. 'Bah!' he muttered, 'we have been everywhere, we know all the garden by heart.'

But Albine shook her head, and in a whisper replied, 'No, no, we don't know the rocks, we have never been to the springs. It was there that I warmed myself last winter. There are some nooks where the stones seem to be actually alive.'

The next morning, without having said another word on the subject, they set out together. They climbed up to the left behind the grotto where the marble woman lay slumbering; and as they set foot on the lowest stones, Serge remarked: 'We must see everything. Perhaps we shall feel quieter afterwards.'

The day was very hot, there was thunder in the air. They had not ventured to clasp each other's waist; but stepped along, one behind the other, glowing beneath the sunlight. Albine took advantage of a widening of the path to let Serge go on in front; for the warmth of his breath upon her neck troubled her. All around them the rocks arose in broad tiers, storeys of huge flags, bristling with coarse vegetation. They first came upon golden gorse, clumps of sage, thyme, lavender, and other balsamic plants, with sour-berried juniper trees and bitter rosemary, whose strong scent made them dizzy. Here and there the path was hemmed in by holly, that grew in quaint forms like cunningly wrought metal work, gratings of blackened bronze, wrought iron, and polished copper, elaborately ornamented, covered with prickly rosaces. And before reaching the springs, they had to pass through a pine-wood. Its shadow seemed to weigh upon their shoulders like lead. The dry needles crackled beneath their feet, throwing up a light resinous dust which burned their lips.

'Your garden doesn't make itself very agreeable just here,' said Serge, turning towards Albine.

They smiled at each other. They were now near the edge of the springs. The sight of the clear waters brought them relief. Yet these springs did not hide beneath a covering of verdure, like those that bubble up on the plains and set thick foliage growing around them that they may slumber idly in the shade. They shot up in the full light of day from a cavity in the rock, without a blade of grass near by to tinge the clear water with green. Steeped in the sunshine they looked silvery. In their depths the sun beat against the sand in a breathing living dust of light. And they darted out of their basin like arms of purest white, they rebounded like nude infants at play, and then suddenly leapt down in a waterfall whose curve suggested a woman's breast.

'Dip your hands in,' cried Albine; 'the water is icy cold at the bottom.'

They were indeed able to refresh their hot hands. They threw water over their faces too, and lingered there amidst the spray which rose up from the streaming springs.

'Look,' cried Albine; 'look, there is the garden, and there are the meadows and the forest.'

For a moment they looked at the Paradou spread out beneath their feet.

'And you see,' she added, 'there isn't the least sign of any wall. The whole country belongs to us, right up to the sky.'

By this time, almost unawares, they had slipped their arms round each other's waist. The coolness of the springs had soothed their feverish disquietude. But just as they were going away, Albine seemed to recall something and led Serge back again, saying:

'Down there, below the rocks, a long time ago, I once saw the wall.'

'But there is nothing to be seen,' replied Serge, turning a little pale.

'Yes, yes; it must be behind that avenue of chestnut trees on the other side of those bushes.'

Then, on feeling Serge's arm tremble, she added: 'But perhaps I am mistaken.... Yet I seem to remember that I suddenly came upon it as I left the avenue. It stopped my way, and was so high that I felt a little afraid. And a few steps farther on, I came upon another surprise. There was a huge hole in it, through which I could see the whole country outside.'

Serge looked at her with entreaty in his eyes. She gave a little shrug of her shoulders to reassure him, and went on: 'But I stopped the hole up; I have told you that we are quite alone, and we are. I stopped it up at once. I had my knife with me, and I cut down some brambles and rolled up some big stones. I would defy even a sparrow to force its way through. If you like, we will go and look at it one of these days, and then you will be satisfied.'

But he shook his head. Then they went away together, still holding each other by the waist; but they had grown anxious once more. Serge gazed down askance at Albine's face, and she felt perturbed beneath his glance. They would have liked to go down again at once, and thus escape the uneasiness of a longer walk. But, in spite of themselves, as though impelled by some stronger power, they skirted a rocky cliff and reached a table-land, where once more they found the intoxication of the full sunlight. They no longer inhaled the soft languid perfumes of aromatic plants, the musky scent of thyme, and the incense of lavender. Now they were treading a foul-smelling growth under foot; wormwood with bitter, penetrating smell; rue that reeked like putrid flesh; and hot valerian, clammy with aphrodisiacal exudations. Mandragoras, hemlocks, hellebores, dwales, poured forth their odours, and made their heads swim till they reeled and tottered one against the other.

'Shall I hold you up?' Serge asked Albine, as he felt her leaning heavily upon him.

He was already pressing her in his arms, but she struggled out of his grasp, and drew a long breath.

'No; you stifle me,' she said. 'Leave me alone. I don't know what is the matter with me. The ground seems to give way under my feet. It is there I feel the pain.'

She took hold of his hand and laid it upon her breast. Then Serge turned quite pale. He was even more overcome than she. And both had tears in their eyes as they saw each other thus ill and troubled, unable to think of a remedy for the evil which had fallen upon them. Were they going to die here of that mysterious, suffocating faintness?

'Come and sit down in the shade,' said Serge. 'It is these plants which are poisoning us with their noxious odours.'

He led her gently along by her finger-tips, for she shivered and trembled when he but touched her wrist. It was beneath a fine cedar, whose level roof-like branches spread nearly a dozen yards around, that she seated herself. Behind grew various quaint conifers; cypresses, with soft flat foliage that looked like heavy lace; spruce firs, erect and solemn, like ancient druidical pillars, still black with the blood of sacrificed victims; yews, whose dark robes were fringed with silver; evergreen trees of all kinds, with thick-set foliage, dark leathery verdure, splashed here and there with yellow and red. There was a weird-looking araucaria that stood out strangely with large regular arms resembling reptiles grafted one on the other, and bristling with imbricated leaves that suggested the scales of an excited serpent. In this heavy shade, the warm air lulled one to voluptuous drowsiness. The atmosphere slept, breathless; and a perfume of Eastern love, the perfume that came from the painted lips of the Shunamite, was exhaled by the odorous trees.

'Are you not going to sit down?' said Albine.

And she slipped a little aside to make room for him; but Serge stepped back and remained standing. Then, as she renewed her request, he dropped upon his knees, a little distance away, and said, softly: 'No, I am more feverish even than you are; I should make you hot. If I wasn't afraid of hurting you, I would take you in my arms, and clasp you so tightly that we should no longer feel any pain.'

He dragged himself nearer to her on his knees.

'Oh! to have you in my arms! In the night I awake from dreams in which I see you near me; but, alas! you are ever far away. There seems to be some wall built up between us which I can never beat down. And yet I am now quite strong again; I could catch you up in my arms and swing you over my shoulder, and carry you off as though you belonged to me.'

He had let himself sink upon his elbows, in an attitude of deep adoration. And he breathed a kiss upon the hem of Albine's skirt. But at this the girl sprang up, as though it was she herself that had received the kiss. She hid her brow with her hands, perturbed, quivering, and stammering forth: 'Don't! don't! I beg of you. Let us go on.'

She did not hurry away, but let Serge follow her as she walked slowly on, stumbling against the roots of the plants, and with her hands still clasped round her head, as though to check the excitement that thrilled her. When they came out of the little wood, they took a few steps over ledges of rocks, on which a whole nation of ardent fleshy plants was squatting. It was like a crawling, writhing assemblage of hideous nameless monsters such as people a nightmare; monsters akin to spiders, caterpillars, and wood-lice, grown to gigantic proportions, some with bare glaucous skins, others tufted with filthy matted hairs, whilst many had sickly limbs—dwarf legs, and shrivelled, palsied arms—sprawling around them. And some displayed horrid dropsical bellies; some had spines bossy with hideous humps, and others looked like dislocated skeletons. Mamillaria threw up living pustules, a crawling swarm of greenish tortoises, bristling hideously with long hairs that were stiffer than iron. The echinocacti, which showed more flesh, suggested nests of young writhing, knotted vipers. The echinopses were mere excrescent red-haired growths that made one think of huge insects rolled into balls. The prickly-pears spread out fleshy leaves spotted with ruddy spikes that resembled swarms of microscopic bees. The gasterias sprawled about like big shepherd-spiders turned over on their backs, with long-speckled and striated legs. The cacti of the cereus family showed a horrid vegetation, huge polyps, the diseases of an overheated soil, the maladies of poisoned sap. But the aloes, languidly unfolding their hearts, were particularly numerous and conspicuous. Among them one found every possible tint of green, pale green and vivid, yellowish green and greyish, browny green, dashed with a ruddy tone, and deep green, fringed with pale gold. And the shapes of their leaves were as varied as their tints. Some were broad and heart-shaped, others were long and narrow like sword-blades; some bristled with spikey thorns, while yet others looked as though they had been cunningly hemmed at the edges. There were giant ones, in lonely majesty, with flower stalks that towered up aloft like poles wreathed with rosy coral; and there were tiny ones clustering thickly together on one and the same stem, and throwing forth on all sides leaves that gleamed and quivered like adders' tongues.

'Let us go back to the shade,' begged Serge. 'You can sit down there as you did just now, and I will lie at your feet and talk to you.'

Where they stood the sun rays fell like torrential rain. It was as if the triumphant orb seized upon the shadowless ground, and strained it to his blazing breast. Albine grew faint, staggered, and turned to Serge for support.

But the moment they felt each other's touch, they fell together without even a word. It was as though the very rock beneath them had opened, as though they were ever going down and down. Their hands sought each other caressingly, embracingly, but such keen anguish did they experience that they suddenly tore themselves apart, and fled, each in a different direction. Serge did not cease running till he had reached the pavilion, and had thrown himself upon his bed, his brain on fire, and despair in his heart. Albine did not return till nightfall, after hours of weeping in a corner of the garden. It was the first time that they had not returned home together, tired after their long wanderings. For three days they kept apart, feeling terribly unhappy.

XIII

Yet now the park was entirely their own. They had taken sovereign possession of it. There was not a corner of it that was not theirs to use as they willed. For them alone the thickets of roses put forth their blossoms, and the parterre exhaled its soft perfume, which lulled them to sleep as they lay at night with their windows open. The orchard provided them with food, filling Albine's skirts with fruits, and spread over them the shade of its perfumed boughs, under which it was so pleasant to breakfast in the early morning. Away in the meadows the grass and the streams were all theirs; the grass, which extended their kingdom to such boundless distance, spreading an endless silky carpet before them; and the streams, which were the best of their joys, emblematic of their own purity and innocence, ever offering them coolness and freshness in which they delighted to bathe their youth. The forest, too, was entirely theirs, from the mighty oaks, which ten men could not have spanned, to the slim birches which a child might have snapped; the forest, with all its trees, all its shade, all its avenues and clearings, its cavities of greenery, of which the very birds themselves were ignorant; the forest which they used as they listed, as if it were a giant canopy, beneath which they might shelter from the noontide heat their new-born love. They reigned everywhere, even among the rocks and the springs, even over that gruesome stretch of ground that teemed with such hideous growth, and which had seemed to sink and give way beneath their feet, but which they loved yet even more than the soft grassy couches of the garden, for the strange thrill of passion they had felt there.

Thus, now, in front of them, behind them, to the right of them and to the left, all was theirs. They had gained possession of the whole domain, and they walked through a friendly expanse which knew them, and smiled kindly greetings to them as they passed, devoting itself to their pleasure, like a faithful and submissive servitor. The sky, with its vast canopy of blue overhead, was also theirs to enjoy. The park walls could not enclose it, their eyes could ever revel in its beauty, and it entered into the joy of their life, at daytime with its triumphal sun, at night with its golden rain of stars. At every moment of the day it delighted them afresh, its expression ever varying. In the early morning it was pale as a maiden just risen from her slumber; at noon, it was flushed, radiant as with a longing for fruitfulness, and in the evening it became languid and breathless, as after keen enjoyment. Its countenance was constantly changing. Particularly in the evenings, at the hour of parting, did it delight them. The sun, hastening towards the horizon, ever found a fresh smile. Sometimes he disappeared in the midst of serene calmness, unflecked by a single cloud, sinking gradually beneath a golden sea. At other times he threw out crimson glories, tore his vaporous robe to shreds, and set amidst wavy flames that streaked the skies like the tails of gigantic comets, whose radiant heads lit up the crests of the forest trees. Then, again, extinguishing his rays one by one, he would softly sink to rest on shores of ruddy sand, far-reaching banks of blushing coral; and then, some other night, he would glide away demurely behind a heavy cloud that figured the grey hangings of some alcove, through which the eye could only detect a spark like that of a night-light. Or else he would rush to his couch in a tumult of passion, rolled round with white forms which gradually crimsoned beneath his fiery embraces, and finally disappeared with him below the horizon in a confused chaos of gleaming, struggling limbs.

It was only the plants which had not made their submission. Albine and Serge passed like monarchs through the kingdom of animals, who rendered them humble and loyal obeisance. When they crossed the parterre, flights of butterflies arose to delight their eyes, to fan them with quivering wings, and to follow in their train like living sunbeams or flying blossoms. In the orchard, they were greeted by the birds that banqueted in the fruit-trees. The sparrows, the chaffinches, the golden orioles, the bullfinches, showed them the ripest fruit scarred by their hungry beaks; and while they sat astride the branches and breakfasted, birds twittered and sported round them like children at play, and even purloined the fruit beneath their very feet. Albine found even more amusement in the meadows, where she caught the little green frogs with eyes of gold, that lay squatting amongst the reeds, absorbed in contemplation; while Serge, with a piece of straw, poked the crickets out of their hiding-places, or tickled the grasshoppers to make them sing. He picked up insects of all colours, blue ones, red ones, yellow ones, and set them creeping upon his sleeve, where they gleamed and glittered like buttons of sapphire and ruby and topaz.

Then there was all the mysterious life of the streams; the grey-backed fishes that threaded the dim waters, the eels whose presence was betrayed by a slight quivering of the water-plants, the young fry, which dispersed like blackish sand at the slightest sound, the long-legged flies and the water-beetles that ruffled into circling silvery ripples the stagnant surface of the pools; all that silent teeming life which drew them to the water and impelled them to dabble and stand in it, so that they might feel those millions of existences ever and ever gliding past their limbs. At other times, when the day was hot and languid, they would betake themselves beneath the voiceful shade of the forest and listen to the serenades of their musicians, the clear fluting of the nightingales, the silvery bugle-notes of the tomtits, and the far-off accompaniment of the cuckoos. They gazed with delight upon the swift flight of the pheasants, whose plumes gleamed like sudden sun rays amidst the branches, and with a smile they stayed their steps to let a troop of young roebucks bound past, or else a couple of grave stags that slackened their pace to look at them. Again, on other days they would climb up amongst the rocks, when the sun was blazing in the heavens, and find a pleasure in watching the swarms of grasshoppers which at the sound of their footsteps arose with a great crepitation of wings from the beds of thyme. The snakes that lay uncoiled beneath the parched bushes, or the lizards that sprawled over the red-hot stones, watched them with friendly eyes.

Of all the life that thus teemed round them in the park, Albine and Serge had only become really conscious since the day when a kiss had awakened them to life themselves. Now it deafened them at times, and spoke to them in a language which they did not understand. It was that life—all the voices of the animal creation, all the perfumes and soft shadows of the flowers and trees—which perturbed them to such a point as to make them angry with one another. And yet throughout the whole park they found nothing but loving familiarity. Every plant and every creature was their friend. All the Paradou was one great caress.

Before they had come thither, the sun had for a whole century reigned over it in lonely majesty. The garden, then, had known no other master; it had beheld him, every morning, scaling the boundary wall with his slanting rays, at noontide it had seen him pour his vertical heat upon the panting soil; and at evening it had seen him go off, on the other side, with a kiss of farewell upon its foliage. And so the garden had no shyness; it welcomed Albine and Serge, as it had so long welcomed the sun, as pleasant companions, with whom one puts on no ceremony. The animals, the trees, the streams, the rocks, all continued in an unrestrained state of nature, speaking aloud, living openly, without a secret, displaying the innocent shamelessness, the hearty tenderness of the world's first days. Serge and Albine, however, suffered from these voluptuous surroundings, and at times felt minded to curse the garden. On the afternoon when Albine had wept so bitterly after their saunter amongst the rocks, she had called out to the Paradou, whose intensity of life and passion filled her with distress:

'If you really be our friend, why, why do you make us so wretched?'

XIV

The next morning Serge barricaded himself in his room. The perfume from the garden irritated him. He drew the calico curtains closely across the window to shut out the sight of the park. Perhaps he thought he might recover all his old serenity and calm if he shut himself off from that greenery, whose shade sent such passionate thrills quivering through him.

During the long hours they spent together, Albine and he never now spoke of the rocks or the streams, the trees or the sky. The Paradou might no longer have been in existence. They strove to forget it. And yet they were all the time conscious of its presence on the other side of those slight curtains. Scented breezes forced their way in through the interstices of the window frame, the many voices of nature made the panes resound. All the life of the park laughed, chattered, and whispered in ambush beneath their window. As it reached them their cheeks would pale and they would raise their voices, seeking some occupation which might prevent them from hearing it.

'Have you noticed,' said Serge one morning during these uneasy intervals, 'there is a painting of a woman over the door there? She is like you.'

He laughed noisily as he finished speaking. They both turned to the paintings and dragged the table once more alongside the wall, with a nervous desire to occupy themselves.

'Oh! no,' murmured Albine. 'She is much fatter than I am. But one can't see her very well; her position is so queer.'

They relapsed into silence. From the decayed, faded painting a scene, which they had never before noticed, now showed forth. It was as if the picture had taken shape and substance again beneath the influence of the summer heat. You could sea a nymph with arms thrown back and pliant figure on a bed of flowers which had been strewn for her by young cupids, who, sickle in hand, ever added fresh blossoms to her rosy couch. And nearer, you could also see a cloven-hoofed faun who had surprised her thus. But Albine repeated, 'No, she is not like me, she is very plain.'

Serge said nothing. He looked at the girl and then at Albine, as though he were comparing them one with the other. Albine pulled up one of her sleeves, as if to show that her arm was whiter than that of the pictured girl. Then they subsided into silence again, and gazed at the painting; and for a moment Albine's large blue eyes turned to Serge's grey ones, which were glowing.

'You have got all the room painted again, then?' she cried, as she sprang from the table. 'These people look as though they were all coming to life again.'

They began to laugh, but there was a nervous ring about their merriment as they glanced at the nude and frisking cupids which started to life again on all the panels. They no longer took those survivals of voluptuous eighteenth century art to represent mere children at play. They were disturbed by the sight of them, and as Albine felt Serge's hot breath on her neck she started and left his side to seat herself on the sofa. 'They frighten me,' she murmured. 'The men are like robbers, and the women, with their dying eyes, look like people who are being murdered.'

Serge sat down in a chair, a little distance away, and began to talk of other matters. But they remained uneasy. They seemed to think that all those painted figures were gazing at them. It was as if the trooping cupids were springing out of the panelling, casting the flowers they held around them, and threatening to bind them together with the blue ribbons which already enchained two lovers in one corner of the ceiling. And the whole story of the nymph and her faun lover, from his first peep at her to his triumph among the flowers, seemed to burst into warm life. Were all those lovers, all those impudent shameless cupids about to step down from their panels and crowd around them? They already seemed to hear their panting sighs, and to feel their breath filling the spacious room with the perfume of voluptuousness.

'It's quite suffocating, isn't it?' sighed Albine. 'In spite of every airing I have given it, the room has always seemed close to me!

'The other night,' said Serge, 'I was awakened by such a penetrating perfume, that I called out to you, thinking you had come into the room. It was just like the soft warmth of your hair when you have decked it with heliotropes.... In the earlier times it seemed to be wafted to me from a distance, it was like the lingering memory of a perfume; but now I can't sleep for it, and it is so strong and penetrating that it quite stupefies me. The alcove grows so hot, too, at night that I shall be obliged to lie on the couch.'

Albine laid her fingers on her lips, and whispered, 'It is the dead girl—she who once lived here.'

They sniffed the odorous air with forced gaiety, but in reality feeling very troubled. Certainly never before had the room exhaled such a disquieting aroma. The very walls seemed to be still echoing the faint rustling of perfumed skirts; and the floor had retained the fragrance of satin slippers dropped by the bedside, and near the head of the bed itself Serge thought he could trace the imprint of a little hand, which had left behind it a clinging scent of violets. Over all the furniture the phantom presence of the dead girl still lingered fragrantly.

'See, this is the armchair where she used to sit,' cried Albine; 'there is the scent of her shoulders at the back of it yet.'

She sat down in it herself, and bade Serge drop upon his knees and kiss her hand.

'You remember the day when I first let you in and said, "Good morrow, my dear lord!" But that wasn't all, was it? He kissed her hands when the door was closed. There they are, my hands. They are yours.'

Then they tried to resume their old frolics in order that they might forget the Paradou, whose joyous murmur they heard ever rising outside, and that they might no longer think of the pictures nor yield to the languor-breathing influence of the room. Albine put on an affected manner, leant back in her chair, and finally laughed at the foolish figure which Serge made at her feet.

'You stupid!' she said, 'take me round the waist, and say pretty things to me, since you are supposed to be in love with me. Don't you know how to make love then?'

But as soon as she felt him clasp her with eager impetuosity, she began to struggle, and freed herself from his embrace.

'No, no; leave me alone. I can't bear it. I feel as though I were choking in this room.'

From that day forward they felt the same kind of fear for the room as they already felt for the garden. Their one remaining harbour of refuge was now a place to be shunned and dreaded, a spot where they could no longer find themselves together without watching each other furtively. Albine now scarcely ventured to enter it, but remained near the threshold, with the door wide open behind her so as to afford her an immediate retreat. Serge lived there in solitude, a prey to sickening restlessness, half-stifling, lying on the couch and vainly trying to close his ears to the sighs of the soughing park and his nostrils to the haunting fragrance of the old furniture. At night he dreamt wild passionate dreams, which left him in the morning nervous and disquieted. He believed that he was falling ill again, that he would never recover plenitude of health. For days and days he remained there in silence, with dark rings round his sleepy eyes, only starting into wakefulness when Albine came to visit him. They would remain face to face, gazing at one another sadly, and uttering but a few soft words, which seemed to choke them. Albine's eyes were even darker than Serge's, and were filled with an imploring gaze.

Then, after a week had gone by, Albine's visit never lasted more than a few minutes. She seemed to shun him. When she came to the room, she appeared thoughtful, remained standing, and hurried off as soon as possible. When he questioned her about this change in her demeanour towards him, and reproached her for no longer being friendly, she turned her head away and avoided replying. He never could get her to tell him how she spent the mornings that she passed alone. She would only shake her head, and talk about being very idle. If he pressed her more closely, she bounded out of the room, just wishing him a hasty good-night as she disappeared through the doorway. He often noticed, however, that she had been crying. He observed, too, in her expression the phases of a hope that was never fulfilled, the perpetual struggling of a desire eager to be satisfied. Sometimes she seemed quite overwhelmed with melancholy, dragging herself about with an air of utter discouragement, like one who no longer had any pleasure in living. At other times she laughed lightly, her face shone with an expression of triumphant hope, of which, however, she would not yet speak, and her feet could not remain still, so eager was she to dart away to what seemed to her some last certainty. But on the following day, she would sink again into desperation, to soar afresh on the morrow on the pinions of renewed hope. One thing which she could not conceal from Serge was that she suffered from extreme lassitude. Even during the few moments they spent together she could not prevent her head from nodding, or keep herself from dozing off.

Serge, recognising that she was unwilling to reply, had ceased to question her; and, when she now entered his room, he contented himself with casting an anxious glance at her, fearful lest some evening she should no longer have strength enough to come to him. Where could she thus reduce herself to such exhaustion? What perpetual struggle was it that brought about those alternations of joy and despair? One morning he started at the sound of a light footfall beneath his window. It could not be a roe venturing abroad in that manner. Moreover he could recognise that light footfall. Albine was wandering about the Paradou without him. It was from the Paradou that she returned to him with all those hopes and fears and inward wrestlings, all that lassitude which was killing her. And he could well guess what she was seeking out there, alone in the woody depths, with all the silent obstinacy of a woman who has vowed to effect her purpose. After that he used to listen for her steps. He dared not draw aside the curtain and watch her as she hurried along through the trees; but he experienced strange, almost painful emotion, in listening to ascertain what direction she took, whether she turned to right or to left, whether she went straight on through the flower-beds, and how far her ramble extended. Amidst all the noisy life of the Paradou, amidst the soughing chorus of the trees, the rustling of the streams, and the ceaseless songs of the birds, he could distinguish the gentle pit-pat of her shoes so plainly that he could have told whether she was stepping over the gravel near the rivers, the crumbling mould of the forest, or the bare ledges of the rocks. In time he even learned to tell, from the sound of her nervous footfall, whether she came back hopeful or depressed. As soon as he heard her step on the staircase, he hurried from the window, and he never let her know that he had thus followed her from afar in her wanderings. But she must have guessed it, for with a glance she always afterwards told him where she had been.

'Stay indoors, and don't go out,' he begged her, with clasped hands, one morning when he saw her still unrecovered from the fatigue of the previous day. 'You drive me to despair.'

But she hastened away in irritation. The garden, now that it rang with Albine's footfalls, seemed to have a more depressing influence than ever upon Serge. The pit-pat of her feet was yet another voice that called him; an imperious voice that echoed ever more and more loudly within him. He closed his ears and tried to shut out the sound, but the distant footsteps still echoed to him in the throbbings of his heart. And when she came back, in the evening, it was the whole park that came back with her, with the memories of their walks together, and of the slow dawn of their love, in the midst of conniving nature. She seemed to have grown taller and graver, mellowed, matured by her solitary rambles. There was nothing left in her of the frolicsome child, and his teeth would suddenly set at times when he looked at her and beheld her so desirable.

One day, about noon, Serge heard Albine returning in hot haste. He had restrained himself from listening for her steps when she went away. Usually, she did not return till late, and he was amazed at her impetuosity as she sped along, forcing her way through the branches that barred her path. As she passed beneath his window, he heard her laugh; and as she mounted the stairway, she panted so heavily that he almost thought he could feel her hot breath streaming against his face. She threw the door wide open, and cried out: 'I have found it!'

Then she sat down and repeated softly, breathlessly: 'I have found it! I have found it!'

Serge, distracted, laid his fingers on her lips, and stammered: 'Don't tell me anything, I beg you. I want to know nothing of it. It will kill me, if you speak.'

Then she sank into silence with gleaming eyes and lips tightly pressed lest the words she kept back should spring out in spite of her. And she stayed in the room till evening, trying to meet Serge's glance, and imparting to him, each time that their eyes met, something of that which she had discovered. Her whole face beamed with radiance, she exhaled a delicious odour, she was full of life; and Serge felt that she permeated him through all his senses. Despairingly did he struggle against this gradual invasion of his being.

On the morrow she returned to his room as soon as she was up.

'Aren't you going out?' he asked, conscious that he would be vanquished should she remain there.

'No,' she said; she wasn't going out any more. As by degrees she recovered from her fatigue he felt her becoming stronger, more triumphant. She would soon be able to take him by the hand and drag him to that spot, whose charm her silence proclaimed so loudly. That day, however, she did not speak; she contented herself with keeping him seated on a cushion at her feet. It was not till the next morning that she ventured to say: 'Why do you shut yourself up here? It is so pleasant under the trees.'

He rose from her feet, and stretched out his arms entreatingly. But she laughed at him.

'Well, well, then, we won't go out, since you would rather not.... But this room has such a strange scent, and we should be much more comfortable in the garden. It is very wrong of you to have taken such a dislike to it.'

He had again settled himself at her feet in silence, his eyelids lowered, his features quivering with passionate emotion.

'We won't go out,' she repeated, 'so don't worry. But do you really prefer these pictures to the grass and flowers in the park? Do you remember all we saw together? It is these paintings which make us feel so unhappy. They are a nuisance, always looking and watching us as they do.'

As Serge gradually leant more closely against her, she passed her arm round his neck and laid his head upon her lap, while murmuring in yet a lower tone: 'There is a little corner there I know, where we might be so very happy. Nothing would trouble us there; the fresh air would cool your feverishness.'

Then she stopped, as she felt him quivering. She was afraid lest she might again revive his old fears. But she gradually conquered him merely by the caressing gaze of her blue eyes. His eyelids were now raised, and he rested there quietly, wholly hers, his tremor past.

'Ah! if you only knew!' she softly breathed; and seeing that he continued to smile, she went on boldly: 'It is all a lie; it is not forbidden. You are a man now and ought not to be afraid. If we went there, and any danger threatened me, you would protect me, you would defend me, would you not? You could carry me off on your back, couldn't you? I am never the least afraid when I have you with me. Look how strong your arms have grown. What is there for any one with such strong arms as yours to be afraid of?'

She caressed him beguilingly as she spoke, stroking his hair and neck and shoulders with her hand.

'No, it is not forbidden,' she resumed. 'That is only a story for stupids, and was invented, long ago, by some one who didn't want to be disturbed in the most charming spot in the whole garden. As soon as you sat down on that grassy carpet, you would be happy and well again. Listen, then, come with me.'

He shook his head but without any sign of vexation, as though indeed he liked thus being teased. Then after a short silence, grieved to see her pouting, and longing for a renewal of her caresses, he opened his lips and asked: 'Where is it?'

She did not answer him immediately. Her eyes seemed to be wandering far away: 'It is over yonder,' she murmured at last. 'I cannot explain to you clearly. One has to go down the long avenue, and then to turn to the left, and then again to the left. We must have passed it at least a score of times. You might look for it for ever without finding it, if I didn't go with you to show you. I could find my way to it quite straight, though I could never explain it to you.'

'And who took you there?'

'I don't know. That morning the trees and plants seemed to drive me there. The long branches pushed me on, the grass bent down before me invitingly, the paths seemed to open expressly for me to take them. And I believe the animals themselves helped to lead me there, for I saw a stag trotting on before me as though he wanted me to follow; while a company of bullfinches flitted on from tree to tree, and warned me with their cries whenever I was about to take a wrong direction.'

'And is it very beautiful?'

Again she did not reply. Deep ecstasy filled her eyes; at last, when she was able to speak again, she said: 'Ah! so beautiful, that I could never tell you of it. I was so charmed that I was conscious only of some supreme joy, which I could not name, falling from the leaves and slumbering amid the grass. And I ran back here to take you along with me that I might not be without you.'

Then she clasped her arms round his neck again, and entreated him passionately, her lips almost pressed to his own.

'Oh! you will come!' she stammered; 'you must come; you will make me so miserable if you don't. You can't want me to be miserable.... And even if you knew that you would die there, even if that shade should be fatal to both of us, would you hesitate or cast a regretful look behind? We should remain there, at the foot of the tree, and sleep on quietly for ever, in one anther's arms. Ah! would it not be bliss indeed?'

'Yes, yes!' he stammered, transported by her passionate entreaties.

'But we shall not die,' she continued, raising her voice, and laughing with the laugh which proclaims woman's victory; 'we shall live to love each other. It is a tree of life, a tree whose shadow will make us stronger, more perfect, more complete. You will see that all will now go happily. Some blessed joy will assuredly descend on us from heaven! Will you come?'

His face paled, and his eyelids quivered, as though too powerful a light were suddenly beating against them.

'Will you come? will you come?' she cried again, yet more passionately, and already half rising to her feet.

He sprang up and followed her, at first with tottering steps and then with his arm thrown round her waist, as if he could endure no separation from her. He went where she went, carried along in the warm fragrance that streamed from her hair. And as he thus remained slightly in the rear, she turned upon him a face so radiant with love, such tempting lips and eyes, which so imperiously bade him follow, that he would have gone with her anywhere, trusting and unquestioning, like a dog.

XV

They went down and out into the garden without the smile fading from Serge's face. All that he saw of the greenery around him was such as was reflected in the clear depths of Albine's eyes. As they approached, the garden smiled and smiled again, a murmur of content sped from leaf to leaf and from bough to bough to the furthest depths of the avenues. For days and days the garden must have been hoping and expecting to see them thus, clinging to one another, making their peace again with the trees and searching for their lost love on the grassy banks. A solemn warning breath sighed through the branches; the afternoon sky was drowsy with heat; the plants raised their bowing heads to watch them pass.

'Listen,' whispered Albine. 'They drop into silence as we come near them; but over yonder they are expecting us, they are telling each other the way they must lead us.... I told you we should have no trouble about the paths, the trees themselves will direct us with their spreading arms.'

The whole park did, indeed, appear to be impelling them gently onward. In their rear it seemed as if a barrier of brush-wood had bristled up to prevent them from retracing their steps; while, in front of them, the grassy lawns spread out so invitingly, that they glided along the soft slopes, without thought of choosing their way.

'And the birds are coming with us, too,' said Albine. 'It is the tomtits this time. Don't you see them? They are skimming over the hedges, and they stop at each turning to see that we don't lose our way.' Then she added: 'All the living things of the park are with us. Can't you hear them? There is a deep rustling close behind us. It is the birds in the trees, the insects in the grass, the roebucks and the stags in the coppices, and even the little fishes splashing the quiet water with their beating fins. Don't turn round, or you will frighten them. Ah! I am sure we have a rare train behind us.'

They still walked on, unfatigued. Albine spoke only to charm Serge with the music of her voice, while Serge obeyed the slightest pressure of her hand. They knew not what they passed, but they were certain that they were going straight towards their goal. And as they went along, the garden became gradually graver, more discreet; the soughing of the branches died away, the streams hushed their plashing waters, the birds, the beasts, and the insects fell into silence. All around them reigned solemn stillness.

Then Albine and Serge instinctively raised their heads. In front of them they beheld a colossal mass of foliage; and, as they hesitated for a moment, a roe, after gazing at them with its sweet soft eyes, bounded into the thickets.

'It is there,' said Albine.

She led the way, her face again turned towards Serge, whom she drew with her, and they disappeared amid the quivering leaves, and all grew quiet again. They were entering into delicious peace.

In the centre there stood a tree covered with so dense a foliage that one could not recognise its species. It was of giant girth, with a trunk that seemed to breathe like a living breast, and far-reaching boughs that stretched like protecting arms around it. It towered up there beautiful, strong, virile, and fruitful. It was the king of the garden, the father of the forest, the pride of the plants, the beloved of the sun, whose earliest and latest beams smiled daily on its crest. From its green vault poured all the joys of creation: fragrance of flowers, music of birds, gleams of golden light, wakeful freshness of dawn, slumbrous warmth of evening twilight. So strong was the sap that it burst through the very bark, bathing the tree with the powers of fruitfulness, making it the symbol of earth's virility. Its presence sufficed to give the clearing an enchanting charm. The other trees built up around it an impenetrable wall, which isolated it as in a sanctuary of silence and twilight. There was but greenery there, not a scrap of sky, not a glimpse of horizon; nothing but a swelling rotunda, draped with green silkiness of leaves, adorned below with mossy velvet. And one entered, as into the liquid crystal of a source, a greenish limpidity, a sheet of silver reposing beneath reflected reeds. Colours, perfumes, sounds, quivers, all were vague, indeterminate, transparent, steeped in a felicity amidst which everything seemed to faint away. Languorous warmth, the glimmer of a summer's night, as it fades on the bare shoulder of some fair girl, a scarce perceptible murmur of love sinking into silence, lingered beneath the motionless branches, unstirred by the slightest zephyr. It was hymeneal solitude, a chamber where Nature lay hidden in the embraces of the sun.

Albine and Serge stood there in an ecstasy of joy. As soon as the tree had received them beneath its shade, they felt eased of all the anxious disquiet which had so long distressed them. The fears which had made them avoid each other, the fierce wrestling of spirit which had torn and wounded them, without consciousness on their part of what they were really contending against, vanished, and left them in perfect peace. Absolute confidence, supreme serenity, now pervaded them, they yielded unhesitatingly to the joy of being together in that lonely nook, so completely hidden from the outside world. They had surrendered themselves to the garden, they awaited in all calmness the behests of that tree of life. It enveloped them in such ecstasy of love that the whole clearing seemed to disappear from before their eyes, and to leave them wrapped in an atmosphere of perfume.

'The air is like ripe fruit,' murmured Albine.

And Serge whispered in his turn: 'The grass seems so full of life and motion, that I could almost think I was treading on your dress.'

It was a kind of religious feeling which made them lower their voices. No sentiment of curiosity impelled them to raise their heads and scan the tree. The consciousness of its majesty weighed heavily upon them. With a glance Albine asked whether she had overrated the enchantment of the greenery, and Serge answered her with two tears that trickled down his cheeks. The joy that filled them at being there could not be expressed in words.

'Come,' she whispered in his ear, in a voice that was softer than a sigh.

And she glided on in front of him, and seated herself at the very foot of the tree. Then, with a fond smile, she stretched out her hands to him; while he, standing before her, grasped them in his own with a responsive smile. Then she drew him slowly towards her and he sank down by her side.

'Ah! do you remember,' he said, 'that wall which seemed to have grown up between us? Now there is nothing to keep us apart—you are not unhappy now?'

'No, no,' she answered; 'very happy.'

For a moment they relapsed into silence whilst soft emotion stole over them. Then Serge, caressing Albine, exclaimed: 'Your face is mine; your eyes, your mouth, your cheeks are mine. Your arms are mine, from your shoulders to the tips of your nails. You are wholly mine.' And as he spoke he kissed her lips, her eyes, her cheeks. He kissed her arms, with quick short kisses, from her fingers to her shoulders. He poured upon her a rain of kisses hot as a summer shower, deluging her cheeks, her forehead, her lips, and her neck.

'But if you are mine, I am yours,' said he; 'yours for ever; for I now well know that you are my queen, my sovereign, whom I must worship on bended knee. I am here only to obey you, to lie at your feet, to anticipate your wishes, to shelter you with my arms, to drive away whatever might trouble your tranquillity. And you are my life's goal. Since I first awoke in this garden, you have ever been before me; I have grown up that I might be yours. Ever, as my end, my reward, have I gazed upon your grace. You passed in the sunshine with the sheen of your golden hair; you were a promise that I should some day know all the mysteries and necessities of creation, of this earth, of these trees, these waters, these skies, whose last secret is yet unrevealed. I belong to you; I am your slave; I will listen to you and obey you, with my lips upon your feet.'

He said this, bowed to the ground, adoring Woman. And Albine, full of pride, allowed herself to be adored. She yielded her hands, her cheeks, her lips, to Serge's rapturous kisses. She felt herself indeed a queen as she saw him, who was so strong, bending so humbly before her. She had conquered him, and held him there at her mercy. With a single word she could dispose of him. And that which helped her to recognise her omnipotence was that she heard the whole garden rejoicing at her triumph, with gradually swelling paeans of approval.

'Ah! if we could fly off together, if we could but die even, in one another's arms,' faltered Serge, scarce able to articulate. But Albine had strength enough to raise her finger as though to bid him listen.

It was the garden that had planned and willed it all. For weeks and weeks it had been favouring and encouraging their passion, and at last, on that supreme day, it had lured them to that spot, and now it became the Tempter whose every voice spoke of love. From the flower-beds, amid the fragrance of the languid blossoms, was wafted a soft sighing, which told of the weddings of the roses, the love-joys of the violets; and never before had the heliotropes sent forth so voluptuous a perfume. Mingled with the soft air which arose from the orchard were all the exhalations of ripe fruit, the vanilla of apricots, the musk of oranges, all the luscious aroma of fruitfulness. From the meadows came fuller notes, the million sighs of the sun-kissed grass, the multitudinous love-plaints of legions of living things, here and there softened by the refreshing caresses of the rivulets, on whose banks the very willows palpitated with desire. And the forest proclaimed the mighty passion of the oaks. Through the high branches sounded solemn music, organ strains like the nuptial marches of the ashes and the birches, the hornbeams and the planes, while from the bushes and the young coppices arose noisy mirth like that of youthful lovers chasing one another over banks and into hollows amid much crackling and snapping of branches. From afar, too, the faint breeze wafted the sounds of the rocks splitting in their passion beneath the burning heat, while near them the spiky plants loved in a tragic fashion of their own, unrefreshed by the neighbouring springs, which themselves glowed with the love of the passionate sun.

'What do they say?' asked Serge, half swooning, as Albine pressed him to her bosom. The voices of the Paradou were growing yet more distinct. The animals, in their turn, joined in the universal song of nature. The grasshoppers grew faint with the passion of their chants; the butterflies scattered kisses with their beating wings. The amorous sparrows flew to their mates; the rivers rippled over the loves of the fishes; whilst in the depths of the forest the nightingales sent forth pearly, voluptuous notes, and the stags bellowed their love aloud. Reptiles and insects, every species of invisible life, every atom of matter, the earth itself joined in the great chorus. It was the chorus of love and of nature—the chorus of the whole wide world; and in the very sky the clouds were radiant with rapture, as to those two children Love revealed the Eternity of Life.

XVI

Albine and Serge smiled at one another.

'I love you, Albine,' said Serge.

'Serge, I love you,' Albine answered.

And never before had those syllables 'I love you' had for them so supreme a meaning. They expressed everything. Joy pervaded those young lovers, who had attained to the fulness of life. They felt that they were now on a footing of equality with the forces of the world; and with their happiness mingled the placid conviction that they had obeyed the universal law. And Serge seemed to have awakened to life, lion-like, to rule the whole far expanse under the free heavens. His feet planted themselves more firmly on the ground, his chest expanded, there was pride and confidence in his gait and demeanour. He took Albine by the hands, she was trembling, and he was obliged to support her.

'Don't be afraid,' he said; 'you are she whom I love.'

It was Albine now who had become the submissive one. She drooped her head upon his shoulder, glancing up at him with anxious scrutiny. Would he never bear her spite for that hour of adoration in which he had called himself her slave? But he smiled, and stroked her hair, while she said to him: 'Let me stay like this, in your arms, for I cannot walk without you. I will make myself so small and light, that you will scarcely know I am there.' Then becoming very serious she added, 'You must always love me; and I will be very obedient and do whatever you wish. I will yield to you in all things if you but love me.'

Serge felt more powerful and virile on seeing her so humble. 'Why are you trembling so?' he asked her; 'I can have no cause to reproach you.'

But she did not answer him, she gazed almost sadly upon the tree and the foliage and the grass around them.

'Foolish child!' he said, laughing; 'are you afraid that I shall be angry with you for your love? We have loved as we were meant to love. Let me kiss you.'

But, dropping her eyelids so that she might not see the tree, she said, in a low whisper, 'Take me away!'

Serge led her thence, pacing slowly and giving one last glance at the spot which love had hallowed. The shadows in the clearing were growing darker, and a gentle quiver coursed through the foliage. When they emerged from the wood and caught sight of the sun, still shining brightly in the horizon, they felt easier. Everything around Serge now seemed to bend down before him and pay homage to his love. The garden was now nothing but an appanage of Albine's beauty, and seemed to have grown larger and fairer amid the love-kisses of its rulers.

But Albine's joy was still tinged with disquietude. She would suddenly pause amid her laughter and listen anxiously.

'What is the matter?' asked Serge.

'Nothing,' she replied, casting furtive glances behind her.

They did not know in what out-of-the-way corner of the park they were. To lose themselves in their capricious wanderings only served to amuse them as a rule; but that day they experienced anxious embarrassment. By degrees they quickened their pace, plunging more and more deeply into a labyrinth of bushes.

'Don't you hear?' asked Albine, nervously, as she suddenly stopped short, almost breathless.

Serge listened, a prey, in his turn, to the anxiety which the girl could no longer conceal.

'All the coppice seems full of voices,' she continued. 'It sounds as though there were people deriding us. Listen! Wasn't that a laugh that sounded from that tree? And over yonder did not the grass murmur something as my dress brushed against it?'

'No, no,' he said, anxious to reassure her, 'the garden loves us; and, if it said anything, it would not be to vex or annoy us. Don't you remember all the sweet words which sounded through the leaves? You are nervous and fancy things.'

But she shook her head and faltered: 'I know very well that the garden is our friend.... So it must be some one who has broken into it. I am certain I hear some one. I am trembling all over. Oh! take me away and hide me somewhere, I beseech you.'

Then they went on again, scanning every tree and bush, and imagining that they could see faces peering at them from behind every trunk. Albine was certain, she said, that there were steps pursuing them in the distance. 'Let us hide ourselves,' she begged.

She had turned quite scarlet. It was new-born modesty, a sense of shame which had laid hold of her like a fever, mantling over the snowy whiteness of her skin, which never previously had known that flush. Serge was alarmed at seeing her thus crimson, her face full of distress, her eyes brimming with tears. He tried to clasp her in his arms again and to soothe her with a caress; but she slipped away from him, and, with a despairing gesture, made sign that they were not alone. And her blushes grew deeper as her eyes fell upon her bare arms. She shuddered when her loose hanging hair stirred against her neck and shoulders. The slightest touch of a waving bough or a passing insect, the softest breath of air, now made her tremble as if some invisible hand were grasping at her.

'Calm yourself,' begged Serge, 'there is no one. You are as crimson as though you had a fever. Let us rest here for a moment. Do; I beg you.'

She had no fever at all, she said, but she wanted to get back as quickly as possible, so that no one might laugh at her. And, ever increasing her pace, she plucked handfuls of leaves and tendrils from the hedges, which she entwined about her. She fastened a branch of mulberry over her hair, twisted bindweed round her arms, and tied it to her wrists, and circled her neck with such long sprays of laurustinus, that her bosom was hidden as by a veil of leaves.

And that shame of hers proved contagious. Serge, who first had jested, asking her if she were going to a ball, glanced at himself, and likewise felt alarmed and ashamed, to a point that he also wound foliage about his person.

Meantime, they could discover no way out of the labyrinth of bushes, but all at once, at the end of the path, they found themselves face to face with an obstacle, a tall, grey, grave mass of stone. It was the wall of the Paradou.

'Come away! come away!' cried Albine.

And she sought to drag him thence; but they had not taken another twenty steps before they again came upon the wall. They then skirted it at a ran, panic-stricken. It stretched along, gloomy and stern, without a break in its surface. But suddenly, at a point where it fringed a meadow, it seemed to fall away. A great breach gaped in it, like a huge window of light opening on to the neighbouring valley. It must have been the very hole that Albine had one day spoken of, which she said she had blocked up with brambles and stones. But the brambles now lay scattered around like severed bits of rope, the stones had been thrown some distance away, and the breach itself seemed to have been enlarged by some furious hand.

XVII

'Ah! I felt sure of it,' cried Albine, in accents of supreme despair. 'I begged you to take me away—Serge, I beseech you, don't look through it.'

But Serge, in spite of himself, stood rooted to the ground, on the threshold of the breach through which he gazed. Down below, in the depths of the valley, the setting sun cast a sheet of gold upon the village of Les Artaud, which showed vision-like amidst the twilight in which the neighbouring fields were already steeped. One could plainly distinguish the houses that straggled along the high road; the little yards with their dunghills, and the narrow gardens planted with vegetables. Higher up, the tall cypress in the graveyard reared its dusky silhouette, and the red tiles on the church glowed brazier-like, the dark bell looking down on them like a human face, while the old parsonage at the side threw its doors and windows open to the evening air.

'For pity's sake,' sobbed Albine, 'don't look out, Serge. Remember that you promised you would always love me. Ah! will you ever love me enough, now? Stay, let me cover your eyes with my hands. You know it was my hands that cured you. You won't push me away.'

But he put her from him gently. Then, while she fell down and clung to his legs, he passed his hands across his face, as though he were wiping from his brow and eyes some last lingering traces of sleep. It was yonder, then, that lay the unknown world, the strange land of which he had never dreamed without vague fear. Where had he seen that country? From what dream was he awakening, that he felt such keen anguish swelling up in his breast till it almost choked him? The village was breaking out into life at the close of the day's work. The men were coming home from the fields with weary gait, their jackets thrown over their shoulders; the women, standing by their doors, were beckoning to them to hasten on; while the children, in noisy bands, chased the fowls about and pelted them with stones. In the churchyard a couple of scapegraces, a lad and a girl, were creeping along under the shelter of the wall in order to escape notice. Swarms of sparrows were retiring to roost beneath the eaves of the church; and, on the steps of the parsonage, a blue calico skirt had just appeared, of such spreading dimensions as to quite block the doorway.

'Oh! he is looking out! he is looking out!' sobbed Albine. 'Listen to me. It was only just now that you promised to obey me. I beg of you to turn round and to look upon the garden. Haven't you been very happy in the garden? It was the garden which gave me to you. Think of the happy days it has in store for us, what lasting bliss and enjoyment. Instead of which it will be death that will force its way through that hole, if you don't quickly flee and take me with you. See, all those people yonder will come and thrust themselves between us. We were so quite alone, so secluded, so well guarded by the trees! Oh! the garden is our love! Look on the garden, I beg it of you on my knees!'

But Serge was quivering. He had began to recollect. The past was re-awakening. He could distinctly hear the stir of the village life. Those peasants, those women and children, he knew them. There was the mayor, Bambousse, returning from Les Olivettes, calculating how much the approaching vintage would yield him; there were the Brichets, the husband crawling along, and the wife moaning with misery. There was Rosalie flirting with big Fortune behind a wall. He recognised also the pair in the churchyard, that mischievous Vincent and that bold hussy Catherine, who were catching big grasshoppers amongst the tombstones. Yes, and they had Voriau, the black dog, with them, helping them and ferreting about in the dry grass, and sniffing at every crack in the old stones. Under the eaves of the church the sparrows were twittering and bickering before going to roost. The boldest of them flew down and entered the church through the broken windows, and, as Serge followed them with his eyes, he recollected all the noise they had formerly made below the pulpit and on the step by the altar rails, where crumbs were always put for them. And that was La Teuse yonder, on the parsonage doorstep, looking fatter than ever in her blue calico dress. She was turning her head to smile at Desiree, who was coming up from the yard, laughing noisily. Then they both vanished indoors, and Serge, distracted with all these revived memories, stretched out his arms.

'It is all over now,' faltered Albine, as she sank down amongst the broken brambles. 'You will never love me enough again.'

She wept, while Serge stood rooted by the breach, straining his ears to catch the slightest sound that might be wafted from the village, waiting, as it were, for some voice that might fully awaken him. The bell in the church-tower had begun to sway, and slowly through the quiet evening air the three chimes of the Angelus floated up to the Paradou. It was a soft and silvery summons. The bell now seemed to be alive.

'O God!' cried Serge, falling on his knees, quite overcome by the emotion which the soft notes of the bell had excited in him.

He bent down towards the ground, and he felt the three peals of the Angelus pass over his neck and echo through his heart. The voice of the bell seemed to grow louder. It was raised again sternly, pitilessly, for a few moments which seemed to him to be years. It summoned up before him all his old life, his pious childhood, his happy days at the seminary, and his first Masses in that burning valley of Les Artaud, where he had dreamt of a solitary, saintly life. He had always heard it speaking to him as it was doing now. He recognised every inflection of that sacred voice, which had so constantly fallen upon his ears, like the grave and gentle voice of a mother. Why had he so long ceased to hear it? In former times it had promised him the coming of Mary. Had Mary come then and taken him and carried him off into those happy green fastnesses, which the sound of the bell could not reach? He would never have lapsed into forgetfulness if the bell had not ceased to ring. And as he bent his head still lower towards the earth, the contact of his beard with his hands made him start. He could not recognise his own self with that long silky beard. He twisted it and fumbled about in his hair seeking for the bare circle of the tonsure, but a heavy growth of curls now covered his whole head from his brow to the nape of his neck.

'Ah! you were right,' he said, casting a look of despair at Albine. 'It was forbidden. We have sinned, and we have merited some terrible punishment.... But I, indeed, I tried to reassure you, I did not hear the threats which sounded in your ears through the branches.'

Albine tried to clasp him in her arms again as she sobbed out, 'Get up, and let us escape together. Perhaps even yet there is time for us to love each other.'

'No, no; I haven't the strength. I should stumble and fall over the smallest pebble in the path. Listen to me. I am afraid of myself. I know not what man dwells in me. I have murdered myself, and my hands are red with blood. If you took me away, you would never see aught in my eyes save tears.'

She kissed his wet eyes, as she answered passionately, 'No matter! Do you love me?'

He was too terrified to answer her. A heavy step set the pebbles rolling on the other side of the wall. A growl of anger seemed to draw nigh. Albine had not been mistaken. Some one was, indeed, there, disturbing the woodland quiet with jealous inquisition. Then both Albine and Serge, as if overwhelmed with shame, sought to bide themselves behind a bush. But Brother Archangias, standing in front of the breach, could already see them.

The Brother remained for a moment silent, clenching his fists and looking at Albine clinging round Serge's neck, with the disgust of a man who has espied some filth by the roadside.

'I suspected it,' he mumbled between his teeth. 'It was virtually certain that they had hidden him here.'

Then he took a few steps, and cried out: 'I see you. It is an abomination. Are you a brute beast to go coursing through the woods with that female? She has led you far astray, has she not? She has besmeared you with filth, and now you are hairy like a goat.... Pluck a branch from the trees wherewith to smite her on the back.'

Again Albine whispered in an ardent, prayerful voice: 'Do you love me? Do you love me?'

But Serge, with bowed head, kept silence, though he did not yet drive her from him.

'Fortunately, I have found you,' continued Brother Archangias. 'I discovered this hole.... You have disobeyed God, and have slain your own peace. Henceforward, for ever, temptation will gnaw you with its fiery tooth, and you will no longer have ignorance of evil to help you to fight it. It was that creature who tempted you to your fall, was it not? Do you not see the serpent's tail writhing amongst her hair? The mere sight of her shoulders is sufficient to make one vomit with disgust.... Leave her. Touch her not, for she is the beginning of hell. In the name of God, come forth from that garden.'

'Do you love me? Oh! do you love me?' reiterated Albine.

But Serge hastily drew away from her as though her bare arms and shoulders really scorched him.

'In the name of God! In the name of God!' cried the Brother, in a voice of thunder.

Serge unresistingly stepped towards the breach. As soon as Brother Archangias, with rough violence, had dragged him out of the Paradou, Albine, who had fallen half fainting to the ground, with hands wildly stretched towards the love which was deserting her, rose up again, choking with sobs. And she fled, vanished into the midst of the trees, whose trunks she lashed with her streaming hair.

BOOK III

I

When Abbe Mouret had said the Pater, he bowed to the altar, and went to the Epistle side. Then he came down, and made the sign of the cross over big Fortune and Rosalie, who were kneeling, side by side, before the altar-rails.

'Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.'

'Amen,' responded Vincent, who was serving the mass, and glancing curiously at his big brother out of the corner of his eye.

Fortune and Rosalie bent their heads, affected by some slight emotion, although they had nudged each other with their elbows when they knelt down, by way of making one another laugh. But Vincent went to get the basin and the sprinkler. Fortune placed the ring in the basin, a thick ring of solid silver. When the priest had blessed it, sprinkling it crosswise, he returned it to Fortune, who slipped it upon Rosalie's finger. Her hand was still discoloured with grass-stains, which soap had not been able to remove.

'In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,' Abbe Mouret murmured again, giving them a final benediction.

'Amen,' responded Vincent.

It was early morning. The sun was not yet shining through the big windows of the church. Outside one could hear the noisy twittering of the sparrows in the branches of the service tree, whose foliage shot through the broken panes. La Teuse, who had not previously had time to clean the church, was now dusting the altar, craning up on her sound leg to wipe the feet of the ochre and lake-bedaubed Christ, and arranging the chairs as quietly as possible; all the while bowing and crossing herself, and following the service, but not omitting a single sweep of her feather broom. Quite alone, at the foot of the pulpit, was mother Brichet, praying in a very demonstrative fashion. She kept on her knees, and repeated the prayers in so loud a whisper that it seemed as if a swarm of bluebottles had taken possession of the nave.

At the other end of the church near the confessional, Catherine held an infant in swaddling clothes. As it began to cry, she turned her back upon the altar, and tossed it up, and amused it with the bell-rope, which dangled just over its nose.

'Dominus vobiscum,' said the priest, turning round, and spreading out his hands.

'Et cum spiritu tuo,' responded Vincent.

At that moment three big girls came into the church. They were too shy to go far up, though they jostled one another to get a better view of what was going on. They were three friends of Rosalie, who had dropped in for a minute or two on their way to the fields, curious as they were to hear what his reverence would say to the bride and bridegroom. They had big scissors hanging at their waists. At last they hid themselves behind the font, where they pinched each other and twisted themselves about, while trying to choke their bursts of laughter with their clenched fists.

'Well,' whispered La Rousse, a finely built girl, with copper-coloured skin and hair, 'there won't be any scrimmage to get out of church when it's all over.'

'Oh! old Bambousse is quite right,' murmured Lisa, a short dark girl, with gleaming eyes; 'when one has vines, one looks after them. Since his reverence so particularly desired to marry Rosalie, he can very well do it all alone.'

The other girl, Babet, who was humpbacked, tittered. 'There's mother Brichet,' she said; 'she is always here. She prays for the whole family. Listen, do you hear how she's buzzing? All that will mean something in her pocket. She knows very well what she is about, I can tell you.'

'She is playing the organ for them,' retorted La Rousse.

At this all three burst into a laugh. La Teuse, in the distance, threatened them with her broom. At the altar, Abbe Mouret was taking the sacrament. As he went from the Epistle side towards Vincent, so that the water of ablution might be poured upon his thumb and fore-finger, Lisa said more softly: 'It's nearly over. He will begin to talk to them directly.'

'Yes,' said La Rousse, 'and so big Fortune will still be able to go to his work, and Rosalie won't lose her day's pay at the vintage. It is very convenient to be married so early in the morning. He looks very sheepish, that big Fortune.'

'Of course,' murmured Babet. 'It tires him, keeping so long on his knees. You may be sure that he has never knelt so long since his first communion.'

But the girls' attention was suddenly distracted by the baby which Catherine was dangling in her arms. It wanted to get hold of the bell-rope, and was quite blue with rage, frantically stretching out its little hands and almost choking itself with crying.

'Ah! so the youngster is there,' said La Rousse.

The baby now burst into still louder wailing, and struggled like a little Imp.

'Turn it over on its stomach, and let it suck,' said Babet to Catherine.

Catherine lifted up her head, and began to laugh, with the shamelessness of a little minx. 'It's not at all amusing,' she said, giving the baby a shake. 'Be quiet, will you, little pig! My sister plumped it down on my knees.'

'Naturally,' said Babet, mischievously. 'You could scarcely have expected her to give the brat to Monsieur le Cure to nurse.'

At this sally, La Rousse almost fell over in a fit of laughter. She leaned against the wall, holding her sides with her hands. Lisa threw herself against her, and attempted to soothe her by pinching her back and shoulders; while Babet laughed with a hunchback's laugh, which grated on the ear like the sound of a saw.

'If it hadn't been for the little one,' she continued, 'Monsieur le Cure would have lost all use for his holy water. Old Bambousse had made up his mind to marry Rosalie to young Laurent, of Figuieres.'

However, the girls' merriment and their chatter now came to an end, for they saw La Teuse limping furiously towards them. At this the three big hussies felt alarmed, stepped back, and subsided into sedateness.

'You worthless things!' hissed La Teuse. 'You come to talk a lot of filth here, do you? Aren't you ashamed of yourself, La Rousse? You ought to be there, on your knees, before the altar, like Rosalie. I will throw you outside if you stir again. Do you hear?'

La Rousse's copper cheeks were tinged with a rising blush, and Babet glanced at her and tittered.

'And you,' continued La Teuse, turning towards Catherine, 'just you leave that baby alone. You are pinching it on purpose to make it scream. Don't tell me you are not. Give it to me.'

She took the child, hushed it in her arms for a moment, and then laid it upon a chair, where it went to sleep, peacefully like a cherub. The church then subsided into solemn quietness, disturbed only by the chattering of the sparrows on the rowan tree outside. At the altar, Vincent had carried the missal to the right again, and Abbe Mouret had just folded the corporal and slipped it within the burse. He was now saying the concluding prayers with a solemn earnestness, which neither the screams of the baby nor the giggling of the three girls had been able to disturb. He seemed to hear nothing of them, but to be wholly absorbed in the prayers which he was offering up to Heaven for the happiness of the pair whose union he had just blessed. The sky that morning was grey with a hazy heat, which veiled the sun. Through the broken windows a russet vapour streamed into the church, betokening a stormy day. Along the walls the gaudily coloured pictures of the Stations of the Cross displayed their red, blue, and yellow patches; at the bottom of the nave the dry woodwork of the gallery creaked and strained; and under the doorway the tall grass by the steps thrust ripening straw, all alive with little brown grasshoppers. The clock, in its wooden case, made a whirring noise, as though it were some consumptive trying to clear his throat, and then huskily struck half-past six.

'Ite, missa est,' said the priest, turning round to the congregation.

'Deo gratias,' responded Vincent.

Then, having kissed the altar, Abbe Mouret once more turned round, and murmured over the bent heads of the newly married pair the final benediction: 'Deus Abraham, Deus Isaac, et Deus Jacob vobiscum sit'—his voice dying away into a gentle whisper.

'Now, he's going to address them,' said Babet to her friends.

'He is very pale,' observed Lisa. 'He isn't a bit like Monsieur Caffin, whose fat face always seemed to be on the laugh. My little sister Rose says that she daren't tell him anything when she goes to confess.'

'All the same,' murmured La Rousse, 'he's not ugly. His illness has aged him a little, but it seems to suit him. He has bigger eyes, and lines at the corners of his mouth which make him look like a man. Before he had the fever, he was too much like a girl.'

'I believe he's got some great trouble,' said Babet. 'He looks as though he were pining away. His face is deadly pale, but how his eyes glitter! When he drops his eyelids, it is just as though he were doing it to extinguish the fire in his eyes.'

La Teuse again shook her broom at them. 'Hush!' she hissed out, so energetically that it seemed as if a blast of wind had burst into the church.

Meantime Abbe Mouret had collected himself, and he began, in a rather low voice:

'My dear brother, my dear sister, you are joined together in Jesus. The institution of marriage symbolises the sacred union between Jesus and His Church. It is a bond which nothing can break; which God wills shall be eternal, so that man may not sever those whom Heaven has joined. In making you flesh of each other's flesh, and bone of each other's bone, God teaches you that it is your duty to walk side by side through life, a faithful couple, along the paths which He, in His omnipotence, appoints for you. And you must love each other with God-like love. The slightest ill-feeling between you will be disobedience to the Creator, Who has joined you together as a single body. Remain, then, for ever united, after the likeness of the Church, which Jesus has espoused, in giving to us all His body and blood.'

Big Fortune and Rosalie sat listening, with their noses peaked up inquisitively.

'What does he say?' asked Lisa, who was a little deaf.

'Oh! he says what they all say,' answered La Rousse. 'He has a glib tongue, like all the priests have.'

Abbe Mouret went on with his address, his eyes wandering over the heads of the newly wedded couple towards a shadowy corner of the church. And by degrees his voice became more flexible, and he put emotion into the words he spoke, words which he had formerly learned by heart from a manual intended for the use of young priests. He had turned slightly towards Rosalie, and whenever his memory failed him, he added sentences of his own:

'My dear sister, submit yourself to your husband, as the Church submits itself to Jesus. Remember that you must leave everything to follow him, like a faithful handmaiden. You must give up father and mother, you must cleave only to your husband, and you must obey him that you may obey God also. And your yoke will be a yoke of love and peace. Be his comfort, his happiness, the perfume of his days of strength, the support of his days of weakness. Let him find you, as a grace, ever by his side. Let him have but to reach out his hand to find yours grasping it. It is thus that you will step along together, never losing your way, and that you will meet with happiness in the carrying out of the divine laws. Oh! my dear sister, my dear daughter, your humility will hear sweet fruit; it will give birth to all the domestic virtues, to the joys of the hearth, and the prosperity that attends a God-fearing family. Have for your husband the love of Rachel, the wisdom of Rebecca, the constant fidelity of Sarah. Tell yourself that a pure life is the source of all happiness. Pray to God each morning that He may give you strength to live as a woman who respects her responsibilities and duties; for the punishment you would otherwise incur is terrible: you would lose your love. Oh! to live loveless, to tear flesh from flesh, to belong no more to the one who is half of your very self, to live on in pain and agony, bereft of the one you have loved! In vain would you stretch out your arms to him; he would turn away from you. You would yearn for happiness, but you would find in your heart nothing but shame and bitterness. Hear me, my daughter, it is in your own conduct, in your obedience, in your purity, in your love, that God has established the strength of your union.'

As Abbe Mouret spoke these words, there was a burst of laughter at the other end of the church. The baby had just woke up on the chair where La Teuse had laid it. But it was no longer in a bad temper. Having kicked itself free of its swaddling clothes, it was laughing merrily, and shaking its rosy little feet in the air. It was the sight of these little feet that made it laugh.

Rosalie, who was beginning to find the priest's address rather tedious, turned her head to smile at the child. But, when she saw it kicking about on the chair, she grew alarmed, and cast an angry look at Catherine.

'Oh! you can look at me as much as you like,' said Catherine. 'I'm not going to take it any more. It would only begin to cry again.'

And she turned aside to ferret in an ant-hole at a corner of one of the stone flags under the gallery.

'Monsieur Caffin didn't talk so long,' now remarked La Rousse. 'When he married Miette, he just gave her two taps on the cheek and told her to be good.'

My dear brother,' resumed Abbe Mouret, turning towards big Fortune, 'it is God who, to-day, gives you a companion, for He does not wish that man should live alone. But, if He ordains that she shall be your servant, He demands from you that you shall be to her a master full of gentleness and love. You will love her, because she is part of your own flesh, of your own blood, and your own bone. You will protect her, because God has given you strong arms only that you may stretch them over her head in the hour of danger. Remember that she is entrusted to you, and that you cannot abuse her submission and weakness without sin. Oh! my dear brother, what proud happiness should be yours! Henceforth, you will no longer live in the selfish egotism of solitude. At all hours you will have a lovable duty before you. There is nothing better than to love, unless it be to protect those whom we love. Your heart will expand; your manly strength will increase a hundredfold. Oh! to be a support and stay, to have a love given into your keeping, to see a being sink her existence in yours and say, "Take me and do with me what you will! I trust myself wholly to you!" And may you be accursed if you ever abandon her! It would be a cowardly desertion which God would assuredly punish. From the moment she gives herself to you, she becomes yours for ever. Carry her rather in your arms, and set her not upon the ground until it be certain that she will be there in safety. Give up everything, my dear brother—'

But here the Abbe's voice faltered, and only an indistinct murmur came from his lips. He had quite closed his eyes, his face was deathly white, and his voice betokened such deep distress that big Fortune himself shed tears without knowing why.

'He hasn't recovered yet,' said Lisa. 'It is wrong of him to fatigue himself. See, there's Fortune crying!'

'Men are softer-hearted than women,' murmured Babet.

'He spoke very well, all the same,' remarked La Rousse. 'Those priests think of a lot of things that wouldn't occur to anybody else.'

'Hush!' cried La Teuse, who was already making ready to extinguish the candles.

But Abbe Mouret still stammered on, trying to utter a few more sentences. 'It is for this reason, my dear brother, my dear sister, that you must live in the Catholic Faith, which alone can ensure the peace of your hearth. Your families have taught you to love God, to pray to Him every morning and evening, to look only for the gifts of His mercy—'

He was unable to finish. He turned round, took the chalice off the altar, and retired, with bowed head, into the vestry, preceded by Vincent, who almost let the cruets and napkin fall, in trying to see what Catherine might be doing at the end of the church.

'Oh! the heartless creature!' said Rosalie, who left her husband to go and take her baby in her arms. The child laughed. She kissed it, and rearranged its swaddling clothes, while threatening Catherine with her fist. 'If it had fallen,' she cried out, 'I would have boxed your ears for you, nicely.'

Big Fortune now came slouching along. The three girls stepped towards him, with compressed lips.

'See how proud he is,' murmured Babet to the others. 'He is sure of inheriting old Bambousse's money now. I used to see him creeping along every night under the little wall with Rosalie.'

Then they giggled, and big Fortune, standing there in front of them, laughed even louder than they did. He pinched La Rousse, and let Lisa jeer at him. He was a sturdy young blood, and cared nothing for anybody. The priest's address had annoyed him.

'Hallo! mother, come on!' he called in his loud voice. But mother Brichet was begging at the vestry door. She stood there, tearful and wizen, before La Teuse, who was slipping some eggs into the pocket of her apron. Fortune didn't seem to feel the least sense of shame. He just winked and remarked: 'She is a knowing old card, my mother is. But then the Cure likes to see people at mass.'

Meanwhile, Rosalie had grown calm again. Before leaving the church, she asked Fortune if he had begged the priest to come and bless their room, according to the custom of the country. So Fortune ran off to the vestry, striding heavily through the church, as if it were a field. He soon reappeared, shouting that his reverence would come. La Teuse, who was scandalised at the noise made by all these people, who seemed to think themselves in a public street, gently clapped her hands, and pushed them towards the door.

'It is all over,' said she; 'go away and get to your work.'

She thought they had all gone, when her eye caught sight of Catherine, whom Vincent had joined. They were bending anxiously over the ants' nest. Catherine was poking a long straw into the hole so roughly, that a swarm of frightened ants had rushed out upon the floor. Vincent declared, however, that she must get her straw right to the bottom if she wished to find the queen.

'Ah! you young imps!' cried La Teuse, 'what are you after there? Can't you leave the poor little things alone? That is Mademoiselle Desiree's ants' nest. She would be nicely pleased if she saw you!'

At this the children promptly took to their heels.

II

Abbe Mouret, now wearing his cassock but still bareheaded, had come back to kneel at the foot of the altar. In the grey light that streamed through the window, his tonsure showed like a large livid spot amidst his hair; and a slight quiver, as if from cold, sped down his neck. With his hands tightly clasped he was praying earnestly, so absorbed in his devotions that he did not hear the heavy footsteps of La Teuse, who hovered around without daring to disturb him. She seemed to be grieved at seeing him bowed down there on his knees. For a moment, she thought that he was in tears, and thereupon she went behind the altar to watch him. Since his return, she had never liked to leave him in the church alone, for one evening she had found him lying in a dead faint upon the flagstones, with icy lips and clenched teeth, like a corpse.

'Come in, mademoiselle!' she said to Desiree, who was peeping through the vestry-doorway. 'He is still here, and he will lay himself up. You know you are the only person that he will listen to.'

'It is breakfast-time,' she replied softly, 'and I am very hungry.'

Then she gently sidled up to the priest, passed an arm round his neck, and kissed him.

'Good morning, brother,' she said. 'Do you want to make me die of hunger this morning?'

The face he turned upon her was so intensely sad, that she kissed him again on both his cheeks. He was emerging from agony. Then, on recognising her, he tried to put her from him, but she kept hold of one of his hands and would not release it. She would scarcely allow him to cross himself, but insisted upon leading him away.

'Come! Come! for I am very hungry. You must be hungry too.'

La Teuse had laid out the breakfast beneath two big mulberry trees, whose spreading branches formed a sheltering roof at the bottom of the little garden. The sun, which had at last succeeded in dissipating the stormy-looking vapours of early morning, was warming the beds of vegetables, while the mulberry-trees cast a broad shadow over the rickety table, on which were laid two cups of milk and some thick slices of bread.

'You see how nice it looks,' said Desiree, delighted at breakfasting in the fresh air.

She was already cutting some of the bread into strips, which she ate with eager appetite. And as she saw La Teuse still standing in front of them, she said, 'Why don't you eat something?'

'I shall, presently,' the old servant answered. 'My soup is warming.'

Then, after a moment's silence, looking with admiration at the girl's big bites, she said to the priest: 'It is quite a pleasure to see her. Doesn't she make you feel hungry, Monsieur le Cure? You should force yourself.'

Abbe Mouret smiled as he glanced at his sister. 'Yes, yes,' he murmured; 'she gets on famously, she grows fatter every day.'

'That's because I eat,' said Desiree. 'If you would eat you would get fat, too. Are you ill again? You look very melancholy. I don't want to have it all over again, you know. I was so very lonely when they took you away to cure you.'

'She is right,' said La Teuse. 'You don't behave reasonably, Monsieur le Cure. You can't expect to be strong, living, as you do, on two or three crumbs a day, as though you were a bird. You don't make blood; and that's why you are so pale. Don't you feel ashamed of keeping as thin as a lath when we are so fat; we who are only women? People will begin to think that we gobble up everything and leave you nothing but the empty plates.'

Then both La Teuse and Desiree, brimful of health and strength, scolded him affectionately. His eyes seemed very large and bright, but empty, expressionless. He was still gently smiling.

'I am not ill,' he said; 'I have nearly finished my milk.' He had swallowed two mouthfuls of it, but had not touched the bread.

'The animals, now,' said Desiree, thoughtfully, 'seem to get on much more comfortably than we do. The fowls never have headaches, have they? The rabbits grow as fat as ever one wants them to be. And you never saw my pig looking sad.'

Then, turning towards her brother, she went on with an air of rapture:

'I have named it Matthew, because it is so like that fat man who brings the letters. It is growing so big and strong. It is very unkind of you to refuse to come and look at it as you always do. You will come to see it some day, won't you?'

While she was thus talking she had laid hold of her brother's share of bread, and was eating away at it. She had already finished one piece, and was beginning the second, when La Teuse became aware of what she was doing.

'That doesn't belong to you, that bread! You are actually stealing his food from him now!'

'Let her have it,' said Abbe Mouret, gently. 'I shouldn't have touched it myself. Eat it all, my dear, eat it all.'

For a moment Desiree fell into confusion, with her eyes fixed upon the bread, whilst she struggled to check her rising tears. Then she began to laugh, and finished the slice.

'My cow,' said she, continuing her remarks, 'is never as sad as you are. You were not here when uncle Pascal gave her to me, on the promise that I would be a good girl, or you would have seen how pleased she was when I kissed her for the first time.'

She paused to listen. A cock crowed in the yard, and a great uproar followed, with flapping of wings and cackling, grunting, and hoarse cries as if the whole yard were in a state of commotion.

'Ah! you know,' resumed Desiree, clapping her hands, 'she must be in calf now. I took her to the bull at Beage, three leagues from here. There are very few bulls hereabouts, you know.'

La Teuse shrugged her shoulders, and glanced at the priest with an expression of annoyance.

'It would be much better, mademoiselle,' said she, 'if you were to go and quiet your fowls. They all seem to be murdering one another.'

Indeed, the uproar in the yard had now become so great that the girl was already hurrying off with a great rustling of her petticoats, when the priest called her back. 'The milk, my dear; you have not finished the milk.'

He held out his cup to her, which he had scarcely touched. And she came back and drank the milk without the slightest scruple, in spite of La Teuse's angry look. Then she again set off for the poultry-yard, where they soon heard her reducing the fowls to peace and order. She had, perhaps, sat down in the midst of them, for she could be heard gently humming as though she were trying to lull them to sleep.

III

'Now my soup is too hot!' grumbled La Teuse, as she returned from the kitchen with a basin, from which a wooden spoon was projecting.

She placed herself just in front of Abbe Mouret, and began to eat very cautiously from the edge of the spoon. She wanted to enliven the Abbe and to draw him out of his melancholy moodiness. Ever since he had returned from the Paradou, he had declared himself well again, and had never complained. Often, indeed, he smiled in so soft and sweet a fashion, that his fever seemed to have increased his saintliness, at least so thought the villagers. But, at intervals, he had fits of gloomy silence, and appeared to be suffering torture which he strove to bear uncomplainingly. It was a mute agony which bore down upon him, and, for hours at a time, left him stupefied, a prey to a frightful inward struggle, the violence of which could only be guessed by the sweat of anguish that streamed down his face.

At such times La Teuse refused to leave him, and overwhelmed him with a torrent of gossip, until he had gradually recovered tranquillity by crushing the rebellion of his blood. On that particular morning, the old servant foresaw a more grievous attack than usual, and poured forth an amazing flood of talk, while continuing her wary manoeuvres with the spoon, which threatened to burn her tongue.

'Well, well,' said she, 'one has to live among a lot of wild beasts to see such goings-on. Would any one ever think in a decent village of being married by candlelight? It shows what a poor sort these Artauds are. When I was in Normandy, I used to see weddings that threw every one into commotion for a couple of leagues round. They would feast for three whole days. The priest would be there, and the mayor, too; and at the marriage of one of my cousins, all the firemen came as well. And didn't they have a fine time of it! But to make a priest get up before sunrise and marry people before even the chickens have left their roost, why, there's no sense in it! If I had been your reverence, I should have refused to do it. You haven't had your proper sleep, and you may have caught cold in the church. It is that which has upset you. Besides which it would be better to marry brute beasts than that Rosalie and her ugly lout. That brat of theirs dirtied one of the chairs.—But you ought to tell me when you feel poorly, and I could make you something warm.—Eh! Monsieur le Cure, speak to me!'

He answered, in a feeble voice, that he was quite well, and only needed a little fresh air. He had just leant against one of the mulberry-trees, and was breathing rather quickly, as if faint.

'Oh! all right,' went on La Teuse, 'do just as you like. Go on marrying people when you haven't the strength for it, and when you know very well that it's bound to upset you. I knew how it would be; I told you so yesterday. And if you took my advice, you wouldn't stay where you are. The smell of the yard is bad for you. It is frightful just now. I can't imagine what Mademoiselle Desiree can be stirring about there. She's singing away, and doesn't seem to mind it at all. Ah! that reminds me of something I want to tell you. You know that I did all I could to keep her from taking the cow to Beage; but she's like you, obstinate, and will go her own way. Fortunately, however, for her, she's none the worse for it. She delights to be amongst the animals and their young ones. But come now, your reverence, do be reasonable. Let me take you to your room. You must lie down and rest a little. What, you don't want to! Well, then, so much the worse for you, if you suffer! Besides, it's absurd to keep one's worries locked up in one's heart till they stifle one.'

Then, in her indignation, she hastily swallowed a big spoonful of soup at the risk of burning her throat. She rattled the handle of the spoon against the bowl, muttering and grumbling to herself.

'There never was such a man,' said she. 'He would die rather than say a word. But it's all very well for him to keep silent. I know quite enough, and it doesn't require much cleverness to guess the rest. Well! well! let him keep it to himself. I dare say it is better.'

La Teuse was jealous. Dr. Pascal had had a tremendous fight with her in order to get her patient away at the time when he had come to the conclusion that the young priest's case would be quite hopeless if he should remain at the parsonage. He had then explained to her that the sound of the bell would aggravate and intensify Serge's fever, that the religious pictures and statuettes scattered about his room would fill his brain with hallucinations, and that entirely new surroundings were necessary if he was to be restored to health and strength and peacefulness of mind. She, however, had vigorously shaken her head, and declared that her 'dear child' would nowhere find a better nurse than herself. Still, she had ended by yielding. She had even resigned herself to seeing him go to the Paradou, though protesting against this selection of the doctor's, which astonished her. But she retained a strong feeling of hatred for the Paradou; and she was hurt by the silence which Abbe Mouret maintained as to the time he had spent there. She had frequently laid all sorts of unsuccessful traps to induce him to talk of it. That morning, exasperated by his ghastly pallor, and his obstinacy in suffering in silence, she ended by waving her spoon about and crying:

'You should go back yonder again, Monsieur le Cure, if you were so happy there—I dare say there is some one there who would nurse you better than I do.'

It was the first time she had ventured upon a direct allusion to her suspicions. The blow was so painful to the priest that he could not check a slight cry, as he raised his grief-racked countenance. At this La Teuse's kindly heart was filled with regret.

'Ah!' she murmured, 'it is all the fault of your uncle Pascal. I told him what it would be. But those clever men cling so obstinately to their own ideas. Some of them would kill you, just for the sake of rummaging in your body afterwards—It made me so angry that I would never speak of it to any one. Yes, Monsieur le Cure, you have me to thank that nobody knew where you were; I was so angry about it. I thought it abominable! When Abbe Guyot, from Saint-Eutrope, who took your place during your absence, came to say mass here on Sundays, I told him all sorts of stories. I said you had gone to Switzerland. I don't even know where Switzerland is.—Well! well! I surely don't want to say anything to pain you, but it was certainly over yonder that you got your trouble. Very finely they've cured you indeed! It would have been very much better if they had left you with me. I shouldn't have thought of trying to turn your head.'

Abbe Mouret, whose brow was again lowered, made no attempt to interrupt her. La Teuse had seated herself upon the ground a few yards away from him, in order if possible to catch his eye. And she went on again in her motherly way, delighted at his seeming complacency in listening to her.

'You would never let me tell you about Abbe Caffin. As soon as I began to speak of him, you always made me stop. Well, well; Abbe Caffin had had his troubles in my part of the world, at Canteleu. And yet he was a very holy man, with an irreproachable character. But, you see, he was a man of very delicate taste, and liked soft pretty things. Well, there was a young party who was always prowling round him, the daughter of a miller, whom her parents had sent to a boarding-school. Well, to put it shortly, what was likely to happen did happen. When the story got about, all the neighbourhood was very indignant with the Abbe. But he managed to escape to Rouen, and poured out his grief to the Archbishop there. Then he was sent here. The poor man was punished quite enough by being made to live in this hole of a place. I heard of the girl afterwards. She had married a cattle-dealer, and was very happy.'

La Teuse, delighted at having been allowed to tell her story, interpreted the priest's silence as an encouragement to continue her gossiping. So she drew a little nearer to him and said:

'He was very friendly with me, was good Monsieur Caffin, and often spoke to me of his sin. It won't keep him out of heaven, I'm sure. He can rest quite peacefully out there under the turf, for he never harmed any one. For my part, I can't understand why people should get so angry with a priest when such a thing unhappily befalls him. Of course it's wrong, and likely to anger God; but then one can confess and repent, and get absolution. Isn't it so, your reverence, that when one truly repents, one is saved in spite of one's sins?'

Abbe Mouret slowly raised his head. By a supreme effort he had overcome his agony, and though his face was still very pale, he exclaimed in a firm voice, 'One should never sin; never! never!'

'Ah! sir,' cried the old servant, 'you are too proud and reserved. It is not a nice thing, that pride of yours.—If I were in your place, I would not harden myself like that. I would talk of what was troubling me, and not try to rend my heart in pieces. You should reconcile yourself to the separation gradually. The worry wears off little by little. But, instead of that, you won't even allow people's names to be uttered. You forbid them to be mentioned. It is as though they were dead. Since you came back, I have not dared to tell you the least bit of news. Well, well, I am going to speak now, and I shall tell you all I know; because I see quite well that it is all this silence that is preying upon your heart.'

He looked at her sternly, and lifted his finger to silence her.

'Yes, yes,' she went on, 'I get news from over yonder, very often indeed, and I am going to tell it to you. To begin with, there is some one there who is no happier than you are.'

'Silence! Silence!' said Abbe Mouret, summoning all his strength to rise and move away.

But La Teuse also rose and barred his way with her bulky figure. She was angry, and cried out:

'There, you see, you want to be off already! But you are going to listen to me. You know quite well that I am not over fond of the people yonder, don't you? If I talk to you about them, it is for your own good. Some people say that I am jealous. Well, one day I mean to take you over there. You would be with me, and you wouldn't be afraid of any harm happening. Will you go?'

He motioned her away from him with his hands, and his face was calm again as he said:

'I desire nothing. I wish to know nothing. There is high mass to-morrow. You must see that the altar is made ready.'

Then, as he walked away, he added, smiling:

'Don't be uneasy, my good Teuse. I am stronger than you imagine. I shall be able to cure myself without any one's assistance.'

With these words he went off, bearing himself sturdily, with his head erect, for he had vanquished his feelings. His cassock rustled very gently against the borders of thyme. La Teuse, who for a moment had remained rooted to the spot where she was standing, sulkily picked up her basin and wooden spoon. Then, shrugging her big shoulders again and again, she mumbled between her teeth:

'That's all bravado of his. He imagines that he is differently made from other men, just because he is a priest. Well, as a matter of fact, he is very firm and determined. I have known some who wouldn't have had to be wheedled so long. And he is quite capable of crushing his heart, just as one might crush a flea. It must be the Almighty who gives him his strength.'

As she returned to the kitchen she saw Abbe Mouret standing by the gate of the farmyard. Desiree had stopped him there to make him feel a capon which she had been fattening for some weeks past. He told her pleasantly that it was very heavy, and the big child chuckled with glee.

'Ah! well,' said La Teuse in a fury, 'that bird has got to crush its heart too. But then it can't help itself.'

IV

Abbe Mouret spent his days at the parsonage. He shunned the long walks which he had been wont to take before his illness. The scorched soil of Les Artaud, the ardent heat of that valley where the vines could never even grow straight, distressed him. On two occasions, in the morning, he had attempted to go out and read his breviary as he strolled along the road; but he had not gone beyond the village. He had returned home, overcome by the perfumes, the heat, the breadth of the landscape. It was only in the evening, in the cool twilight air, that he ventured to saunter a little in front of the church, on the terrace which led to the graveyard. In the afternoons, to fill up his time, and satisfy his craving for some kind of occupation, he had imposed upon himself the task of pasting paper over the broken panes of the church windows, This had kept him for a week mounted on a ladder, arranging his paper panes with great exactness, and laying on the paste with the most scrupulous care in order to avoid any mess.

La Teuse stood at the foot of the ladder and watched him. And Desiree urged that he must not fill up all the windows, or else the sparrows would no longer be able to get through. To please her, the priest left a pane or two in each window unfilled. Then, having completed these repairs, he was seized with the ambition of decorating the church, without summoning to his aid either mason or carpenter or painter. He would do it all himself. This sort of handiwork would amuse him, he said, and help to bring back his strength. Uncle Pascal encouraged him every time he called at the parsonage, assuring him that such exercise and fatigue were better than all the drugs in the world. And so Abbe Mouret began to stop up the holes in the walls with plaster, to drive fresh nails into the disjoined altars, and to crush and mix paints, in order that he might put a new coating on the pulpit and confessional-box. It was quite an event in the district, and folks talked of it for a couple of leagues round. Peasants would come and stand gazing, with their hands behind their backs, at his reverence's work. The Abbe himself, with a blue apron tied round his waist, and his hands all soiled with his labour, became absorbed in it, and used it as an excuse for no longer going out. He spent his days in the midst of his repairs, and was more tranquil than he had been before; almost cheerful, indeed, as he forgot the outer world, the trees and the sunshine and the warm breezes, which had formerly disturbed him so much.

'Monsieur le Cure is free to do as he pleases, since the parish hasn't got to find the money,' said old Bambousse, who came round every evening to see how the work was progressing.

Abbe Mouret spent all his savings on it. Some of his decorations, indeed, were so awkward that they would have excited many people's smiles. The replastering of the stonework soon tired him: so he contented himself with patching up the church walls all round to a height of some six feet from the ground. La Teuse mixed the plaster. When she talked of repairing the parsonage as well, for she was continually fearing that it would topple down on their heads, he told her that he did not think he could manage it, that a regular workman would be necessary; a reply which led to a terrible quarrel between them. La Teuse said it was quite ridiculous to go on ornamenting the church, where nobody slept, while their bedrooms were in such a crazy condition, for she was quite sure they would all be found, one morning, crushed to death by the fallen ceilings.

'I shall end by bringing my bed here, and placing it behind the altar,' she grumbled. 'I feel quite terrified sometimes at night.'

However, when the plaster was all used up, she said no more about repairing the parsonage. The painting which the priest executed quite delighted her. It was the chief charm of the improvements. The Abbe, who had repaired the woodwork everywhere with bits of boards, took particular pleasure in spreading his big brush, dipped in bright yellow paint, over all this woodwork. The gentle, up-and-down motion of the brush lulled him, left him thoughtless for hours whilst he gazed on the oily streaks of paint. When everything was quite yellow, the pulpit, the confessional-box, the altar rails, even the clock-case itself, he ventured to try his hand at imitation marble work by way of touching up the high altar. Then, growing bolder, he painted it all over. Glistening with white and yellow and blue, it was pronounced superb. People who had not been to mass for fifty years streamed into the church to see it.

And now the paint was dry. All that remained for Abbe Mouret to do was to edge the panels with brown beading. So, that afternoon, he set to work at it, wishing to get it done by evening; for on the following day, as he had reminded La Teuse, there would be high mass. She was there ready to arrange the altar. She had already placed on the credence the candlesticks and the silver cross, the porcelain vases filled with artificial roses, and the laced cloth which was only used on great festivals. The beading, however, proved so difficult of execution, that it was not completed till late in the evening. It was growing quite dark as the Abbe finished his last panel.

'It will be really too beautiful,' said a rough voice from amidst the greyish gloom of twilight which was filling the church.

La Teuse, who had knelt down to get a better view of the Abbe's brush as it glided along his rule, started with alarm.

'Ah! it's Brother Archangias,' she said, turning round. 'You came in by the sacristy then? You gave me quite a turn. Your voice seemed to sound from under the floor.'

Abbe Mouret had resumed his work, after greeting the Brother with a slight nod. The Brother remained standing there in silence, with his fat hands clasped in front of his cassock. Then, shrugging his shoulders, as he observed with what scrupulous care the priest sought to make his beading perfectly straight, he repeated:

'It will be really too beautiful.'

La Teuse, who knelt near by in ecstasy, started again.

'Dear me!' she said, 'I had quite forgotten you were there. You really ought to cough before you speak. You have a voice that comes on one so suddenly that one might think it was a voice from the grave.'

She rose up and drew back a little the better to admire the Abbe's work.

'Why too beautiful?' she asked. 'Nothing can be too beautiful when it is done for the Almighty. If his reverence had only had some gold, he would have done it with gold, I'm sure.'

When the priest had finished, she hastened to change the altar-cloth, taking the greatest care not to smudge the beading. Then she arranged the cross, the candlesticks, and the vases symmetrically. Abbe Mouret had gone to lean against the wooden screen which separated the choir from the nave, by the side of Brother Archangias. Not a word passed between them. Their eyes were fixed upon the silver crucifix, which, in the increasing gloom, still cast some glimmer of light on the feet and the left side and the right temple of the big Christ. When La Teuse had finished, she came down towards them, triumphantly.

'Doesn't it look lovely?' she asked. 'Just you see what a crowd there will be at mass to-morrow! Those heathens will only come to God's house when they think He is well-to-do. Now, Monsieur le Cure, we must do as much for the Blessed Virgin's altar.'

'Waste of money!' growled Brother Archangias.

But La Teuse flew into a tantrum; and, as Abbe Mouret remained silent, she led them both before the altar of the Virgin, pushing them and dragging them by their cassocks.

'Just look at it,' said she; 'it is too shabby for anything, now that the high altar is so smart. It looks as though it had never been painted at all. However much I may rub it of a morning, the dust sticks to it. It is quite black; it is filthy. Do you know what people will say about you, your reverence? They will say that you care nothing for the Blessed Virgin; that's what they'll say.'

'Well, what of it?' queried Brother Archangias.

La Teuse looked at him, half suffocated by indignation.

'What of it? It would be sinful, of course,' she muttered. 'This altar is like a neglected tomb in a graveyard. If it were not for me, the spiders would spin their webs across it, and moss would soon grow over it. From time to time, when I can spare a bunch of flowers, I give it to the Virgin. All the flowers in our garden used to be for her once.'

She had mounted the altar steps, and she took up two withered bunches of flowers, which had been left there, forgotten.

'See! it is just as it is in the graveyards,' she said, throwing the flowers at Abbe Mouret's feet.

He picked them up, without replying. It was quite dark now, and Brother Archangias stumbled about amongst the chairs and nearly fell. He growled and muttered some angry words, in which the names of Jesus and Mary recurred. When La Teuse, who had gone for a lamp, returned into the church, she asked the priest:

'So I can put the brushes and pots away in the attic, then?'

'Yes,' he answered. 'I have finished. We will see about the rest later on.'

She walked away in front of them, carrying all the things with her, and keeping silence, lest she should say too much. And as Abbe Mouret had kept the withered bunches of flowers in his hand, Brother Archangias said to him, as they passed the farmyard: 'Throw those things away.'

The Abbe took a few steps more, with downcast head; and then over the palings he flung the flowers upon a manure-heap.

V

The Brother, who had already had his own meal, seated himself astride a chair, while the priest dined. Since Serge's return to Les Artaud, the Brother had thus spent most of his evenings at the parsonage; but never before had he imposed his presence upon the other in so rough a fashion. He stamped on the tiled floor with his heavy boots, his voice thundered and he smote the furniture, whilst he related how he had whipped some of his pupils that morning, or expounded his moral principles in terms as stern, as uncompromising as bludgeon-blows. Then feeling bored, he suggested that he and La Teuse should have a game at cards. They had endless bouts of 'Beggar-my-neighbour' together, that being the only game which La Teuse had ever been able to learn. Abbe Mouret would smilingly glance at the first few cards flung on the table and would then gradually sink into reverie, remaining for hours forgetful of his self-restraint, oblivious of his surroundings, beneath the suspicious glances of Brother Archangias.

That evening La Teuse felt so cross that she had talked of going to bed as soon as the cloth was removed. The Brother, however, wanted his game of cards. So he caught hold of her shoulders and sat her down, so roughly that the chair creaked beneath her. And forthwith he began to shuffle the cards. Desiree, who hated him, had gone off carrying her dessert, which she generally took upstairs with her every evening to eat in bed.

'I want the red cards,' said La Teuse.

Then the struggle began. The old woman at first won some of the Brother's best cards. But before long two aces fell together on the table.

'Here's a battle!' she cried, wild with excitement.

She threw down a nine, which rather alarmed her, but as the Brother, in his turn, only put down a seven, she picked up the cards with a triumphant air. At the end of half an hour, however, she had only gained two aces, so that the chances remained fairly equal. And a quarter of an hour later she lost an ace. The knaves and kings and queens were perpetually coming and going as the battle furiously progressed.

'It's a splendid game, eh?' said Brother Archangias, turning towards Abbe Mouret.

But when he saw him sitting there, so absorbed in his reverie, with such a gentle smile playing unconsciously round his lips, he roughly raised his voice:

'Why, Monsieur le Cure, you are not paying any attention to us! It isn't polite of you. We are only playing on your account. We were trying to amuse you. Come and watch the game. It would do you more good than dozing and dreaming away there. Where were you just now?'

The priest started. He said nothing, but with quivering eyelids tried to force himself to look at the game. The play went on vigorously. La Teuse won her ace back, and then lost it again. On some evenings they would fight in this way over the aces for quite four hours, and often they would go off to bed, angry at having failed to bring the contest to a decisive issue.

'But, dear me! I've only just remembered it!' suddenly cried La Teuse, who greatly feared that she was going to be beaten. 'His reverence has to go out to-night. He promised Fortune and Rosalie that he would go to bless their room, according to the custom. Make haste, Monsieur le Cure! The Brother will go with you.'

Abbe Mouret had already risen from his chair, and was looking for his hat. But Brother Archangias, still holding his cards, flew into a tantrum: 'Oh! don't bother about it,' said he. 'What does it want to be blessed for that pigsty of theirs? It is a custom that you should do away with. I can't see any sense in it. Stay here and let us finish the game. That is much the best thing to do.'

'No,' said the priest, 'I promised to go. Those good people might feel hurt if I didn't. You stay here and play your game out while you are waiting for me.'

La Teuse glanced uneasily at Brother Archangias.

'Well, yes, I will stay here,' cried the Brother. 'It is really too absurd.'

But before Abbe Mouret could open the door, he flung his cards on the table and rose to follow him. Then half turning back he called to La Teuse:

'I should have won. Leave the cards as they are, and we will play the game out to-morrow.'

'Oh! they are all mixed now,' answered the old servant, who had lost no time in shuffling them together. 'Did you suppose that I was going to put your hand away under a glass case? And, besides, I might very well have won, for I still had an ace left.'

A few strides brought Brother Archangias up with Abbe Mouret, who was walking down the narrow path that led to the village. The Brother had undertaken the task of keeping watch over the Abbe's movements. He incessantly played the spy upon him, accompanying him everywhere, or, if he could not go in person, sending some school urchin to follow him. With that terrible laugh of his, he was wont to remark that he was 'God's gendarme.'

And, in truth, the Abbe seemed like a culprit ever guarded by the black shadow of the Brother's cassock; a culprit to be treated distrustfully, since in his weakness he might well lapse into fresh crime were he left free from surveillance for a single moment. Thus he was watched and guarded with all the spiteful eagerness that some jealous old maid might have displayed, the overreaching zeal of a gaoler who might carry precautions so far as to exclude even such rays of light as might creep through the chinks of the prison-house. Brother Archangias was always on the watch to keep out the sunlight, to prevent even a whiff of air from entering, to shut up his prison so completely that nothing from outside could gain access to it. He noted the Abbe's slightest fits of weakness, and by his glance divined his tender thoughts, which with a word he pitilessly crushed, as though they were poisonous vermin. The priest's intervals of silence, his smiles, the paling of his brow, the faint quivering of his limbs, were all noted by the Brother. But he never spoke openly of the transgression. His presence alone was a sufficient reproach. The manner in which he uttered certain words imparted to them all the sting of a whip stroke. With a mere gesture he expressed his utter disgust for the priest's sin. Like one of those betrayed husbands who enjoy torturing their wives with cruel allusions, he contented himself with recalling the scene at the Paradou, in an indirect fashion, by some word or phrase which sufficed to annihilate the Abbe, whenever the latter's flesh rebelled.

It was nearly ten o'clock and most of the villagers of Les Artaud had retired to rest. But from a brightly lighted house at the far end, near the mill, there still came sounds of merriment. While keeping the best rooms for his own use, old Bambousse had given a corner of his house to his daughter and son-in-law. They were all assembled there, drinking a last glass, while waiting for the priest.

'They are drunk,' growled Brother Archangias. 'Don't you hear the row they are making?'

Abbe Mouret made no reply. It was a lovely night and all looked bluish in the moonlight, which lent to the distant part of the valley the aspect of a sleeping lake. The priest slackened his pace that he might the more fully enjoy the charm of that soft radiance, and now and then he even stopped as he came upon some expanse of light, experiencing the delightful quiver which the proximity of fresh water brings one on a hot day. But the Brother continued striding along, grumbling and calling him.

'Come along; come along! It isn't good to loiter out of doors at this time of night. You would be much better in bed.'

All at once, however, just as they were entering the village, Archangias himself stopped short in the middle of the road. He was looking towards the heights, where the white lines of the roads vanished amidst black patches of pine-woods, and he growled to himself, like a dog that scents danger.

'Who can be coming down so late?' he muttered.

But the priest, who neither saw nor heard anything, was now, in his turn, anxious to press on.

'Stay! stay! there he is,' eagerly added Brother Archangias. 'He has just turned the corner. See! he is in the moonlight now. One can see him plainly. It is a tall man, with a stick.'

Then, after a moment's silence, he resumed, in a voice husky with fury: 'It is he, that beggar! I felt sure it was!'

Thereupon, the new-comer having now reached the bottom of the hill, Abbe Mouret saw that it was Jeanbernat. In spite of his eighty years, the old man set his feet down with such force, that his heavy, nailed boots sent sparks flying from the flints on the road. And he walked along as upright as an oak, without the aid of his stick, which he carried across his shoulder like a musket.

'Ah! the villain!' stammered the Brother, still standing motionless. 'May the fiend light all the blazes of hell under his feet!'

The priest, who felt greatly disturbed, and despaired of inducing his companion to come on, turned round to continue his journey, hoping that, by a quick walk to the Bambousses' house, he might yet manage to avoid Jeanbernat. But he had not taken five strides before he heard the bantering voice of the old man close behind him.

'Hie! Cure! wait for me. Are you afraid of me?'

And as Abbe Mouret stopped, he came up and continued: 'Ah! those cassocks of yours are tiresome things, aren't they? They prevent your getting along too quickly. It's such a fine clear night, too, that one can recognise you by your gown a long way off. When I was right at the top of the hill, I said to myself, "Surely that is the little priest down yonder." Oh! yes, I still have very good eyes.... Well, so you never come to see us now?'

'I have had so much to do,' murmured the priest, who had turned very pale.

'Well, well, every one's free to please himself. If I've mentioned the matter, it's only because I want you to know that I don't bear you any grudge for being a priest. We wouldn't even talk about your religion, it's all one and the same to me. But the little one thinks that it's I who prevents your coming. I said to her, "The priest is an idiot," and I think so, indeed. Did I try to eat you during your illness? Why, I didn't even go upstairs to see you. Every one's free, you know.'

He spoke on in the most unconcerned manner, pretending that he did not notice the presence of Brother Archangias; but as the latter suddenly broke into an angry grunt, he added, 'Why, Cure, so you bring your pig out with you?'

'Take care, you bandit!' hissed the Brother, clenching his fists.

Jeanbernat, whose stick was still raised, then pretended to recognise him.

'Hands off!' he cried. 'Ah! it's you, you soul-saver! I ought to have known you by your smell. We have a little account to settle together, remember. I have sworn to cut off your ears in the middle of your school. It will amuse the children you are poisoning.'

The Brother fell back before the raised staff, a flood of abuse rising to his lips; but he began to stammer and went on disjointedly:

'I will set the gendarmes after you, scoundrel! You spat on the church; I saw you. You give the plague to the poor people who merely pass your door. At Saint-Eutrope you made a girl die by forcing her to chew a consecrated wafer which you had stolen. At Beage you went and dug up the bodies of little dead children and carried them away on your back. You are an old sorcerer! Everybody knows it, you scoundrel! You are the disgrace of the district. Whoever strangles you will gain heaven for the deed.'

The old man listened with a sneer, twirling the while his staff between his fingers. And between the Brother's successive insults he ejaculated in an undertone:

'Go on, go on; relieve yourself, you viper. I'll break your back for you by-and-by.'

Abbe Mouret tried to interfere, but Brother Archangias pushed him away, exclaiming: 'You are led by him yourself! Didn't he make you trample upon the cross? Deny it, if you dare!' Then again, turning to Jeanbernat, he yelled: 'Ah! Satan, you must have chuckled and no mistake when you held a priest in your grasp! May Heaven curse those who abetted you in that sacrilege! What was it you did, at night, while he slept? You came and moistened his tonsure with your saliva, eh? so that his hair might grow more quickly. And then you breathed upon his chin and his cheeks that his beard might grow a hand's breadth in a single night. And you rubbed all your philters into his body, and breathed into his mouth the lasciviousness of a dog. You turned him into a brute-beast, Satan.'

'He's idiotic,' said Jeanbernat, resting his stick on his shoulder. 'He quite bores me.'

The Brother, however, growing bolder, thrust his fists under the old man's nose.

'And that drab of yours!' he cried, 'you can't deny that you set her on to damn the priest.'

Then he suddenly sprang backwards, with a shriek, for the old man, swinging his stick with all his strength, had just broken it over his back. Retreating yet a little further, Archangias picked from a heap of stones beside the road a piece of flint twice the size of a man's fist, and threw it at Jeanbernat. It would surely have split the other's forehead open if he had not bent down. He, however, now likewise crossed over to a heap of stones, sheltered himself behind it, and provided himself with missiles; and from one heap to the other a terrible combat began, with a perfect hail of flints. The moon now shone very brightly, and their dark shadows fell distinctly on the ground.

'Yes, yes, you set that hussy on to ruin him!' repeated the Brother, wild with rage. 'Ah! you are astonished that I know all about it! You hope for some monstrous result from it all. Every morning you make the thirteen signs of hell over that minx of yours! You would like her to become the mother of Antichrist. You long for Antichrist, you villain! But may this stone blind you!'

'And may this one bung your mouth up!' retorted Jeanbernat, who was now quite calm again. 'Is he cracked, the silly fellow, with all those stories of his?... Shall I have to break your head for you, before I can get on my way? Is it your catechism that has turned your brain?'

'Catechism, indeed! Do you know what catechism is taught to accursed ones like you? Ah! I will show you how to make the sign of the cross.—This stone is for the Father, and this for the Son, and this for the Holy Ghost. Ah! you are still standing. Wait a bit, wait a bit. Amen!' Then he threw a handful of small pebbles like a volley of grape-shot. Jeanbernat, who was struck upon the shoulder, dropped the stones he was holding, and quietly stepped forwards, while Brother Archangias picked two fresh handfuls from the heap, blurting out:

I am going to exterminate you. It is God who wills it. God is acting through my arm.'

'Will you be quiet!' said the old man, grasping him by the nape of the neck.

Then came a short struggle amidst the dust of the road, all bluish with moonlight. The Brother, finding himself the weaker of the two, tried to bite. But Jeanbernat's sinewy limbs were like coils of rope which pinioned him so tightly that he could almost feel them cutting into his flesh. He panted and ceased to struggle, meditating some act of treachery.

The old man, having got the other under him, scoffingly exclaimed: 'I have a good mind to break one of your arms. You see that it isn't you who are the stronger, but that it is I who am exterminating you.... Now I'm going to cut your ears off. You have tried my endurance too far.'

Jeanbernat calmly drew his knife from his pocket. But Abbe Mouret, who had several times attempted to part the combatants, now raised such strenuous opposition to the old man's design that he consented to defer the operation till another time.

'You are acting foolishly, Cure,' said he. 'It would do this scoundrel good to be well bled; but, since it seems to displease you, I'll wait a little longer; I shall be meeting him again in some quiet corner.'

And as the Brother broke out into a growl, Jeanbernat cried threateningly: 'If you don't keep still I will cut your ears off at once!'

'But you are sitting on his chest,' said the priest, 'get up and let him breathe.'

'No, no; he would begin his tomfoolery again. I will give him his liberty when I go away, but not before.... Well, I was telling you, Cure, when this good-for-nothing interrupted us, that you would be very welcome yonder. The little one is mistress, you know; I don't attempt to interfere with her any more than I do with my salad-plants. There are only fools like this croaker here who see any harm in it. Where did you see anything wrong, scoundrel? It was yourself who imagined it, villain that you are!'

And thereupon he gave the Brother another shaking. 'Let him get up,' begged Abbe Mouret.

'By-and-by. The little one has not been well for a long time. I did not notice anything myself, but she told me; and now I am on my way to tell your uncle Pascal, at Plassans. I like the night for walking; it is quiet, and, as a rule, one isn't delayed by meeting people.... Yes, yes, the little one is quite ailing.'

The priest could not find a word to say. He staggered, and his head sank.

'It made her so happy to look after you,' continued the old man. 'While I smoked my pipe I used to hear her laugh. That was quite sufficient for me. Girls are like the hawthorns; when they break out into blossom, they do all they can. Well, now, you will come, if your heart prompts you to it. I am sure it would please the little one. Good night, Cure.'

He got up slowly, keeping a firm grasp of the Brother's wrists, to guard against any treacherous attack. Then he proceeded on his way, with swinging strides, without once turning his head. The Brother silently crept to the heap of stones, and waited till the old man was some distance off. Then, with both hands, and with mad violence, he again began flinging stones, but they fell harmlessly upon the dusty road. Jeanbernat did not condescend to notice them, but went his way, upright like a tree, through the clear night.

'The accursed one!—Satan carries him on!' shrieked Brother Archangias, as he hurled his last stone. 'An old scoundrel, that the least touch ought to upset! But he is baked in hell's fire. I smelt his claws.'

The Brother stamped with impotent rage on the scattered flints. Then he suddenly attacked Abbe Mouret. 'It was all your fault,' he cried; 'you ought to have helped me, and, between us, we could have strangled him.'

Meantime, at the other end of the village, the uproar in the Bambousses' house had become greater than ever. The rhythmic tapping of glasses on a table could be distinctly heard. The priest resumed his walk without raising his head, making his way towards the flood of bright light that streamed out of the window like the flare of a fire of vine-cuttings. The Brother followed him gloomily; his cassock soiled with dust, and one of his cheeks bleeding from a stone-cut. And, after a short interval of silence, he asked, in his harsh voice: 'Shall you go?'

Then as Abbe Mouret did not answer, he went on: 'Take care! You are lapsing into sin again. It was sufficient for that man to pass by to send a thrill through your whole body. I saw you by the light of the moon looking as pale as a girl. Take care! take care! Do you hear me? Another time God will not pardon you—you will sink into the lowest abyss! Ah! wretched piece of clay that you are, filth is mastering you!'

Thereupon, the priest at last raised his head. Big tears were streaming from his eyes, and it was in gentle heartbroken accents that he spoke: 'Why do you speak to me like that?—You are always with me, and you know my ceaseless struggles. Do not doubt me, leave me strength to master myself.'

Those simple words, bathed with silent tears, fell on the night air with such an expression of superhuman suffering, that even Brother Archangias, in spite of all his harshness, felt touched. He made no reply, but shook his dusty cassock, and wiped his bleeding cheek. When they reached the Bambousses' house, he refused to go inside. He seated himself, a few yards away, on the body of an overturned cart, where he waited for the Abbe with dog-like patience.

'Ah! here is Monsieur le Cure!' cried all the company of Bambousses and Brichets as Serge entered.

They filled their glasses once more. Abbe Mouret was compelled to take one, too. There had been no regular wedding-feast; but, in the evening, after dinner, a ten-gallon 'Dame Jane' had been placed upon the table, and they were making it their business to empty it before going to bed. There were ten of them, and old Bambousse was already with one hand tilting over the jar whence only a thread of red liquor now flowed. Rosalie, in a very sportive frame of mind, was dipping her baby's chin into her glass, while big Fortune showed off his strength by lifting up the chairs with his teeth. All the company passed into the bedroom. Custom required that the priest should there drink the glass of wine which had been poured out for him. It brought good luck, and prevented quarrels in the household. In Monsieur Coffin's time, it had always been a very merry ceremony, for the old priest loved a joke. He had even gained a reputation for the skilful way in which he could drain his glass, without leaving a single drop at the bottom of it; and the Artaud women pretended that every drop undrunk meant a year's less love for the newly married pair. But with Abbe Mouret they dare not joke so freely. However, he drank his wine at one gulp, which seemed to greatly please old Bambousse. Mother Brichet looked at the bottom of the glass and saw but a drop or two of the liquid remaining there. Then, after a few jokes, they all returned to the living room, where Vincent and Catherine had remained by themselves. Vincent, standing upon a chair, was clasping the huge jar in his arms, and draining the last drops of wine into Catherine's open mouth.

'We are much obliged to you, Monsieur le Cure,' said old Bambousse, as he escorted the priest to the door. 'Well, they're married now, so I suppose you are satisfied. And they are not likely to complain, I'm sure.... Good night, sleep well, your reverence.'

Brother Archangias had slowly risen from his seat on the old cart.

'May the devil pile hot coals over them, and roast them!' he murmured.

Then without again opening his lips he accompanied Abbe Mouret to the parsonage. And he waited outside till the door was closed. Even then he did not go off without twice looking round to make sure that the Abbe was not coming out again. As for the priest, when he reached his bedroom, he threw himself in his clothes upon his bed, clasping his hands to his ears, and pressing his face to the pillow, in order that he might shut out all sound and sight. And thus stilling his senses he fell into death-like slumber.

VI

The next day was Sunday. As the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross fell on a high mass day, Abbe Mouret desired to celebrate the festival with especial solemnity. He was now full of extraordinary devotion for the Cross, and had replaced the image of the Immaculate Conception in his bedroom by a large crucifix of black wood, before which he spent long hours in worship. To exalt the Cross, to plant it before him, above all else, in a halo of glory, as the one object of his life, gave him the strength he needed to suffer and to struggle. He sometimes dreamed of hanging there himself, in Jesus's place, his head crowned with thorns, nails driven through his hands and feet, and his side rent by spears. What a coward he must be to complain of an imaginary wound, when God bled there from His whole body, and yet preserved on His lips the blessed smile of the Redemption! And however unworthy it might be, he offered up his wound as a sacrifice, ended by falling into ecstasy, and believing that blood did really stream from his brow and side and limbs. Those were hours of relief, for he fancied that all the impurity within him flowed forth from his wounds. And he then usually drew himself up with the heroism of a martyr, and longed to be called upon to suffer the most frightful tortures, in order that he might bear them without a quiver of the flesh.

At early dawn that day he knelt before the crucifix, and grace came upon him abundantly as dew. He made no effort, he simply fell upon his knees, to receive it in his heart, to be permeated with it to the marrow of his bones in sweetest and most refreshing fulness. On the previous day he had prayed for grace in agony, and it had not come. At times it long remained deaf to his entreaties, and then, when he simply clasped his hands, in quite childlike fashion, it flowed down to succour him. It came upon him that morning like a benediction, bringing perfect serenity, absolute trusting faith. He forgot his anguish of the previous days, and surrendered himself wholly to the triumphant joy of the Cross. He seemed to be cased in such impenetrable armour that the world's most deadly blows would glide off from it harmlessly. When he came down from his bedroom, he stepped along with an air of serenity and victory. La Teuse was astonished, and went to find Desiree, that he might kiss her; and both of them clapped their hands, and said that they had not seen him looking so well for the last six months.

But it was in the church, at high mass, that the priest felt that he had really recovered divine grace. It was a long time since he had approached the altar with such loving emotion; and he had to make a great effort to restrain himself from weeping whilst he remained with his lips pressed to the altar-cloth. It was a solemn high mass. The local rural guard, an uncle of Rosalie, chanted in a deep bass voice which rumbled through the low nave like a hoarse organ. Vincent, robed in a surplice much too large for him, which had formerly belonged to Abbe Caffin, carried an old silver censer, and was vastly amused by the tinkling of its chains; he swung it to a great height, so as to produce copious clouds of smoke, and glanced behind him every now and then to see if he had succeeded in making any one cough. The church was almost full, for everybody wanted to see his reverence's painting. Peasant women laughed with pleasure because the place smelt so nice, while the men, standing under the gallery, jerked their heads approvingly at each deeper and deeper note that came from the rural guard. Filtering through the paper window panes the full morning sun lighted up the brightly painted walls, on which the women's caps cast shadows resembling huge butterflies. The artificial flowers, with which the altar was decorated, almost seemed to possess the moist freshness of natural ones newly gathered; and when the priest turned round to bless the congregation, he felt even stronger emotion than before, as he saw his church so clean, so full, and so steeped in music and incense and light.

After the offertory, however, a buzzing murmur sped through the peasant women. Vincent inquisitively turned his head, and in doing so, almost let the charcoal in his censer fall upon the priest's chasuble. And, wishing to excuse himself, as he saw the Abbe looking at him with an expression of reproof, he murmured: 'It is your reverence's uncle, who has just come in.'

At the end of the church, standing beside one of the slender wooden pillars that supported the gallery, Abbe Mouret then perceived Doctor Pascal. The doctor was not wearing his usual cheerful and slightly scoffing expression. Hat in hand, he stood there looking very grave, and followed the service with evident impatience. The sight of the priest at the altar, his solemn demeanour, his slow gestures, and the perfect serenity of his countenance, appeared to gradually increase his irritation. He could not stay there till the end of the mass, but left the church, and walked up and down beside his horse and gig, which he had secured to one of the parsonage shutters.

'Will that nephew of mine never have finished censing himself?' he asked of La Teuse, who was just coming out of the vestry.

'It is all over,' she replied. 'Won't you come into the drawing-room? His reverence is unrobing. He knows you are here.'

'Well, unless he were blind, he couldn't very well help it,' growled the doctor, as he followed La Teuse into the cold-looking, stiffly furnished chamber, which she pompously called the drawing-room. Here for a few minutes he paced up and down. The gloomy coldness of his surroundings seemed to increase his irritation. As he strode about, flourishing a stick he carried, he kept on striking the well-worn chair-seats of horsehair which sounded hard and dead as stone. Then, tired of walking, he took his stand in front of the mantelpiece, in the centre of which a gaudily painted image of Saint Joseph occupied the place of a clock.

'Ah! here he comes at last,' he said, as he heard the door opening. And stepping towards the Abbe he went on: 'Do you know that you made me listen to half a mass? It is a very long time since that happened to me. But I was bent on seeing you to-day. I have something to say to you.'

Then he stopped, and looked at the priest with an expression of surprise. Silence fell. 'You at all events are quite well,' he resumed, in a different voice.

'Yes, I am very much better than I was,' replied Abbe Mouret, with a smile. 'I did not expect you before Thursday. Sunday isn't your day for coming. Is there something you want to tell me?'

Uncle Pascal did not give an immediate answer. He went on looking at the Abbe. The latter was still fresh from the influence of the church and the mass. His hair was fragrant with the perfume of the incense, and in his eyes shone all the joy of the Cross. His uncle jogged his head, as he noticed that expression of triumphant peace.

'I have come from the Paradou,' he said, abruptly. 'Jeanbernat came to fetch me there. I have seen Albine, and she disquiets me. She needs much careful treatment.'

He kept his eyes fixed upon the priest as he spoke, but he did not detect so much as a quiver of Serge's eyelids.

'She took great care of you, you know,' he added, more roughly. 'Without her, my boy, you might now be in one of the cells at Les Tulettes, with a strait waistcoat on.... Well, I promised that you would go to see her. I will take you with me. It will be a farewell meeting. She is anxious to go away.'

'I can do nothing more than pray for the person of whom you speak,' said Abbe Mouret, softly.

And as the doctor, losing his temper, brought his stick down heavily upon the couch, he added calmly, but in a firm voice:

'I am a priest, and can only help with prayers.'

'Ah, well! Yes, you are right,' said Uncle Pascal, dropping down into an armchair, 'it is I who am an old fool. Yes, I wept like a child, as I came here alone in my gig. That is what comes of living amongst books. One learns a lot from them, but one makes a fool of oneself in the world. How could I guess that it would all turn out so badly?'

He rose from his chair and began to walk about again, looking exceedingly troubled.

'But yes, but yes, I ought to have guessed. It was all quite natural. Though with one in your position, it was bound to be abominable! You are not as other men. But listen to me, I assure you that otherwise you would never have recovered. It was she alone, with the atmosphere she set round you, who saved you from madness. There is no need for me to tell you what a state you were in. It is one of my most wonderful cures. But I can't take any pride, any pleasure in it, for now the poor girl is dying of it!'

Abbe Mouret remained there erect, perfectly calm, his face reflecting all the quiet serenity of a martyr whom nothing that man might do could disturb.

'God will take mercy upon her,' he said.

'God! God!' muttered the doctor below his breath. 'Ah! He would do better not to interfere. We might manage matters if we were left to ourselves.' Then, raising his voice, he added: 'I thought I had considered everything carefully, that is the most wonderful part of it. Oh! what a fool I was! You would stay there, I thought, for a month to recover your strength. The shade of the trees, the cheerful chatter of the girl, all the youthfulness about you would quickly bring you round. And then you, on your side, it seemed to me, would do something to reclaim the poor child from her wild ways; you would civilise her, and, between us, we should turn her into a young lady, for whom we should, by-and-by, find a suitable husband. It seemed such a perfect scheme. And then how was I to guess that old philosophising Jeanbernat would never stir an inch from his lettuce-beds? Well! well! I myself never left my own laboratory. I had such pressing work there.... And it is all my fault! Ah! I am a stupid bungler!'

He was choking, and wished to go off. And he began to look about him for his hat, though, all the while, he had it on his head.

'Good-bye!' he stammered; 'I am going. So you won't come? Do, now—for my sake! You see how miserable, how upset I am. I swear to you that she shall go away immediately afterwards. That is all settled. My gig is here; you might be back in an hour. Come, do come, I beg you.'

The priest made a sweeping gesture; such a gesture as the doctor had seen him make before the altar.

'No,' he said, 'I cannot.'

Then, as he accompanied his uncle out of the room, he added:

'Tell her to fall on her knees and pray to God. God will hear her as He heard me, and He will comfort her as He has comforted me. There is no other means of salvation.'

The doctor looked him full in the face, and shrugged his shoulders.

'Good-bye, then,' he repeated. 'You are quite well now, and have no further need of me.'

But, as he was unfastening his horse, Desiree, who had heard his voice, came running up. She was extremely attached to her uncle. When she had been younger he had been wont to listen to her childish prattle for hours without showing the least sign of weariness. And, even now, he did his best to spoil her, and manifested the greatest interest in her farmyard, often spending a whole afternoon with her amongst her fowls and ducks, and smiling at her with his bright eyes. He seemed to consider her superior to other girls. And so she now flung herself round his neck, in an impulse of affection, and cried:

'Aren't you going to stay and have some lunch with us?'

But having kissed her, he said he could not remain, and unfastened her arms from his neck with a somewhat pettish air. She laughed however, and again clasped her arms round him.

'Oh! but you must,' she persisted. 'I have some eggs that have only just been laid. I have been looking in the nests, and there are fourteen eggs this morning. And, if you will stay, we can have a fowl, the white one, that is always quarrelling with the others. When you were here on Thursday, you know, it pecked the big spotted hen's eye out.'

But her uncle persisted in his refusal. He was irritated to find that he could not unfasten the knot in which he had tied his reins. And then she began to skip round him, clapping her hands and repeating in a sing-song voice: 'Yes! yes! you'll stay, and we will eat it up, we'll eat it up!'

Her uncle could no longer resist her blandishments; he raised his head and smiled at her. She seemed so full of life and health and sincerity; her gaiety was as frank and natural as the sheet of sunlight which was gilding her bare arms.

'You big silly!' he said; and clasping her by the wrists as she continued skipping gleefully about him, he went on: 'No, dear; not to-day. I have to go to see a poor girl who is ill. But I will come some other morning. I promise you faithfully.'

'When? when?' she persisted. 'On Thursday? The cow is in calf, you know, and she hasn't seemed at all well these last two days. You are a doctor, and you ought to be able to give her something to do her good.'

Abbe Mouret, who had calmly remained there, could not restrain a slight laugh.

The doctor gaily got into his gig and exclaimed: 'All right, my dear, I will attend to your cow. Come and let me kiss you. Ah! how nice and healthy you are! And you are worth more than all the others put together. Ah! if every one was like my big silly, this earth would be too beautiful!'

He set his horse off with a cluck of his tongue, and continued talking to himself as the gig rattled down the hill.

'Yes, yes! there should be nothing but animals. Ah! if they were mere animals, how happy and gay and strong they would all be! It has gone well with the girl, who is as happy as her cow; but it has gone badly with the lad, who is in torture beneath his cassock. A drop too much blood, a little too much nerve, and one's whole life is wrecked! ... They are true Rougons and true Macquarts those children there! The tail-end of the stock—its final degeneracy.'

Then, urging on his horse, he drove at a trot up the hill that led to the Paradou.

VII

Sunday was a busy day for Abbe Mouret. He had to think of vespers, which he generally said to empty seats, for even mother Brichet did not carry her piety so far as to go back to church in the afternoon. Then, at four o'clock, Brother Archangias brought the little rogues from his school to repeat their catechism to his reverence. This lesson sometimes lasted until late. When the children showed themselves quite intractable, La Teuse was summoned to frighten them with her broom.

On that particular Sunday, about four o'clock, Desiree found herself quite alone in the parsonage. As she felt a little bored, she went to gather some food for her rabbits in the churchyard, where there were some magnificent poppies, of which rabbits are extremely fond. Dragging herself about on her knees between the grave-stones, she gathered apronfuls of juicy verdure on which her pets fell greedily.

'Oh! what lovely plantains!' she muttered, stooping before Abbe Caffin's tombstone, and delighted with the discovery she had made.

There were, indeed, some magnificent plantains spreading out their broad leaves beside the stone. Desiree had just finished filling her apron with them when she fancied she heard a strange noise behind her. A rustling of branches and a rolling of small pebbles came from the ravine which skirted one side of the graveyard, and at the bottom of which flowed the Mascle, a stream which descended from the high lands of the Paradou. But the ascent here was so rough, so impracticable, that Desiree imagined that the noise could only have been made by some lost dog or straying goat. She stepped quickly to the edge, and, as she looked over, she was amazed to see amidst the brambles a girl who was climbing up the rocks with extraordinary agility.

'I will give you a hand,' she said. 'You might easily break your neck there.'

The girl, directly she saw she was discovered, started back, as though she would rather go down again, but after a moment's hesitation she ventured to take the hand that was held out to her.

'Oh! I know who you are,' said Desiree, with a beaming smile, and letting her apron fall that she might grasp the girl by the waist. 'You once gave me some blackbirds, but they all died, poor little dears. I was so sorry about it.—Wait a bit, I know your name, I have heard it before. La Teuse often mentions it when Serge isn't there; but she told me that I was not to repeat it. Wait a moment, I shall remember it directly!'

She tried to recall the name, and grew quite grave in the attempt. Then, having succeeded in remembering it, she became gay again, and seemingly found great pleasure in dwelling upon its musical sound.

'Albine! Albine!—— What a sweet name it is! At first I used to think you must be a tomtit, because I once had a tomtit with a name very like yours, though I don't remember exactly what it was.'

Albine did not smile. Her face was very pale, and there was a feverish gleam in her eyes. A few drops of blood trickled from her hands. When she had recovered her breath, she hastily exclaimed:

No! no! leave it alone. You will only stain your handkerchief. It is nothing but a scratch. I didn't want to come by the road, as I should have been seen—so I preferred coming along the bed of the torrent—— Is Serge there?'

Desiree did not feel at all shocked at hearing the girl pronounce her brother's name thus familiarly and with an expression of subdued passion. She simply replied that he was in the church hearing the children say their catechism.

'You must not speak at all loudly,' she added, raising her finger to her lips. 'Serge forbade me to talk loudly when he is catechising the children, and we shall get into trouble if we don't keep quiet. Let us go into the stable—shall we? We can talk better there.'

'I want to see Serge,' said Albine, simply.

Desiree cast a hasty glance at the church, and then whispered, 'Yes, yes; Serge will be finely caught. Come with me. We will hide ourselves, and keep quite quiet. We shall have some fine fun!'

She had picked up the herbage which had fallen from her apron, and quitting the graveyard she stole back to the parsonage, telling Albine to hide herself behind her and make herself as little as possible. As they stealthily glided through the farmyard, they caught sight of La Teuse, who was crossing over to the vestry, but she did not appear to notice them.

'There! There!' said Desiree, quite delighted, as they stowed themselves away in the stable; 'keep quiet, and no one will know that we are here. There is some straw there for you to lie down upon.'

Albine seated herself on a truss of straw.

'And Serge?' she asked, persisting in her one fixed idea.

'Listen! You can hear his voice. When he claps his hands, it will be all over, and the children will go away—Listen! he is telling them a tale.'

They could indeed just hear Abbe Mouret's voice, which was wafted to them through the vestry doorway which La Teuse had doubtless left open. It came to them like a solemn murmur, in which they could distinguish the name of Jesus thrice repeated. Albine trembled. She sprang up as though to hasten to that beloved voice whose caressing accents she knew so well, but all sound of it suddenly died away, shut off by the closing of the door. Then she sat down again, to wait, her hands tightly clasped, and her clear eyes gleaming with the intensity of her thoughts. Desiree, who was lying at her feet, gazed up at her with innocent admiration.

'How beautiful you are!' she whispered. 'You are like an image that Serge used to have in his bedroom. It was quite white like you are, with great curls floating about the neck; and the heart was quite bare and uncovered, just in the place where I can feel yours beating—— But you are not listening to me. You are looking quite sad. Let us play at something? Will you?'

Then she stopped short, holding her breath and saying between her teeth: 'Ah! the wretches! they will get us caught!' She still had her apron full of herbage with her, and her pets were taking it by assault. A troop of fowls had surrounded her, clucking and calling each other, and pecking at the hanging green stuff. The goat pushed its head slyly under her arm, and began to eat the longer leaves. Even the cow, which was tethered to the wall, strained at its cord and poked out its nose, kissing her with its warm breath.

'Oh! you thieves!' cried Desiree. 'But this is for the rabbits, not for you! Leave me alone, won't you! You, there, will get your ears boxed, if you don't go away! And you too will have your tail pulled if I catch you at it again. The wretches! they will be eating my hands soon!'

She drove the goat off, dispersed the fowls with her feet, and tapped the cow's nose with her fists. But the creatures just shook themselves, and then came back more greedily than ever, surrounding her, jumping on her, and tearing open her apron. At this she whispered to Albine, as though she were afraid the animals might hear her.

'Aren't they amusing, the dears? Watch them eat.'

Albine looked on with a grave expression.

'Now, now, be good,' resumed Desiree; 'you shall all have some, but you must wait your turns. Now, big Lisa, you first. Eh! how fond you are of plantain, aren't you?'

Big Lisa was the cow. She slowly munched a handful of the juicy leaves which had grown beside Abbe Caffin's tomb. A thread of saliva hung down from her mouth, and her great brown eyes shone with quiet enjoyment.

'There! now it's your turn,' continued Desiree, turning towards the goat. 'You are fond of poppies, I know; and you like the flowers best, don't you? The buds that shine in your teeth like red-hot butterflies! See, here are some splendid ones; they came from the left-hand corner, where there was a burial last year.'

As she spoke, she gave the goat a bunch of scarlet flowers, which the animal ate from her hand. When there was nothing left in her grasp but the stalks, she pushed these between its teeth. Behind her, in the meanwhile, the fowls were desperately pecking away at her petticoats. She threw them some wild chicory and dandelions which she had gathered amongst the old slabs that were ranged alongside the church walls. It was particularly over the dandelions that the fowls quarrelled, so voraciously indeed, with such scratchings and flapping of wings, that the other fowls in the yard heard them. And then came a general invasion. The big yellow cock, Alexander, was the first to appear; having seized a dandelion and torn it in halves, without attempting to eat it, he called to the hens who were still outside to come and peck. Then a white hen strutted in, then a black one, and then a whole crowd of hens, who hustled one another, and trod on one another's tails, and ended by forming a wild flood of feathers. Behind the fowls came the pigeons, and the ducks, and the geese, and, last of all, the turkeys. Desiree laughed at seeing herself thus surrounded by this noisy, squabbling mob.

'This is what always happens,' said she, 'every time that I bring any green stuff from the graveyard. They nearly kill each other to get at it; they must find it very nice.'

Then she made a fight to keep a few handfuls of the leaves from the greedy beaks which rose all round her, saying that something must really be saved for the rabbits. She would surely get angry with them if they went on like that, and give them nothing but dry bread in future. However, she was obliged to give way. The geese tugged at her apron so violently that she was almost pulled down upon her knees; the ducks gobbled away at her ankles; two of the pigeons flew upon her head, and some of the fowls fluttered about her shoulders. It was the ferocity of creatures who smell flesh: the fat plantains, the crimson poppies, the milky dandelions, in which remained some of the life of the dead. Desiree laughed loudly, and felt that she was on the point of slipping down, and letting go of her last two handfuls, when the fowls were panic-stricken by a terrible grunting.

'Ah! it's you, my fatty,' she exclaimed, quite delighted; 'eat them up, and set me at liberty.'

The pig waddled in; he was no longer the little pig of former days—pink as a newly painted toy, with a tiny little tail, like a bit of string; but a fat wobbling creature, fit to be killed, with a belly as round as a monk's, and a back all bristling with rough hairs, that reeked of fatness. His stomach had grown quite yellow from his habit of sleeping on the manure heap. Waddling along on his shaky feet, he charged with lowered snout at the scared fowls, and so left Desiree at liberty to escape, and take the rabbits the few scraps of green stuff which she had so strenuously defended. When she came back, all was peace again. The stupid, ecstatic-looking geese were lazily swaying their long necks about, the ducks and turkeys were waddling in ungainly fashion alongside the wall; the fowls were quietly clucking and peaking at invisible grains on the hard ground of the stable; while the pig, the goat, and the big cow, were drowsily blinking their eyes, as though they were falling asleep. Outside it had just begun to rain.

'Ah! well, there's a shower coming on!' cried Desiree, throwing herself down on the straw. 'You had better stay where you are, my dears, if you don't want to get soaked.'

Then she turned to Albine and added: 'How stupid they all look, don't they? They only wake up just to eat!'

Albine still remained silent. The merry laughter of that buxom girl as she struggled amidst those greedy necks and gluttonous beaks, which tickled and kissed her, and seemed bent on devouring her very flesh, had rendered the unhappy daughter of the Paradou yet paler than she had been before. So much gaiety, so much vitality, so much boisterous health made her despair. She strained her feverish arms to her desolate bosom, which desertion had parched.

'And Serge?' she asked again, in the same clear, stubborn voice.

'Hush!' said Desiree. 'I heard him just now. He hasn't finished yet—— We have been making a pretty disturbance; La Teuse must surely have grown deaf this afternoon—— Let us keep quiet now. I like to hear the rain fall.'

The shower beat in at the open doorway, casting big drops upon the threshold. The restless fowls, after venturing out for a moment, had quickly retreated to the far end of the stable; where, indeed, with the exception of three ducks who remained quietly walking in the rain, all the pets had now taken refuge, clustering round the girl's skirts. It was growing very warm amongst the straw. Desiree pulled two big trusses together, made a bed of them, and lay down at full length. She felt extremely comfortable there.

'It is so nice,' she murmured. 'Come and lie down like me. It is so springy and soft, all this straw; and it tickles one so funnily in the neck. Do you roll about in the straw at home? There is nothing I am fonder of—— Sometimes I tickle the soles of my feet with it. That is very funny, too——'

But at that moment, the big yellow cock, who had been gravely stalking towards her, jumped upon her breast.

'Get away with you, Alexander! get away!' she cried. 'What a tiresome creature he is! The idea of his perching himself on me—— You are too rough, sir, and you scratch me with your claws. Do you hear me? I don't want you to go away, but you must be good, and mustn't peck at my hair.'

Then she troubled herself no further about him. The cock still maintained his position, every now and then glancing inquisitively at the girl's chin with his gleaming eye. The other birds all began to cluster round her. After rolling amongst the straw, she was now lying lazily on her back with her arms stretched out.

'Ah! how pleasant it is,' she said; 'but then it makes me feel so sleepy. Straw always makes one drowsy, doesn't it? Serge doesn't like it. Perhaps you don't either. What do you like? Tell me, so that I may know.'

She was gradually dozing off. For a moment she opened her eyes widely, as though she were looking for something, and then her eyelids fell with a tranquil smile of content. She seemed to be asleep, but after a few minutes she opened her eyes again, and said:

'The cow is going to have a calf—— That will be so nice, and will please me more than anything.'

Then she sank into deep slumber. The fowls had ended by perching on her body; she was buried beneath a wave of living plumage. Hens were brooding over her feet; geese stretched their soft downy necks over her legs. The pig lay against her left side, while on the right, the goat poked its bearded head under her arm. The pigeons were roosting and nestling all over her, on her hands, her waist, and her shoulders. And there she lay asleep, in all her rosy freshness, caressed by the cow's warm breath, while the big cock still squatted just below her bosom with gleaming comb and quivering wings.

Outside, the rain was falling less heavily. A sunbeam, escaping from beneath a cloud, gilded the fine drops of water. Albine, who had remained perfectly still, watched the slumber of Desiree, that big, plump girl who found her great delight in rolling about in the straw. She wished that she, too, could slumber away so peacefully, and feel such pleasure, because a few straws had tickled her neck. And she felt jealous of those strong arms, that firm bosom, all that vitality, all that purely animal development which made the other like a tranquil easy-minded sister of the big red and white cow.

However, the rain had now quite ceased. The three cats of the parsonage filed out into the yard one after the other, keeping close to the wall, and taking the greatest precautions to avoid wetting their paws. They peeped into the stable, and then stalked up to the sleeping girl, and lay down, purring, close by her. Moumou, the big black cat, curled itself up close to her cheek, and gently licked her chin.

'And Serge?' murmured Albine, quite mechanically.

What was it that kept them apart? Who was it that prevented them from being happy together? Why might she not love him, and why might she not be loved, freely and in the broad sunlight, as the trees lived and loved? She knew not, but she felt that she had been forsaken, and had received a mortal wound. Yet she was possessed by a stubborn, determined longing, a very necessity, indeed, of once more clasping her love in her arms, of concealing him somewhere, that he might be hers in all felicity. She rose to her feet. The vestry door had just been opened again. A clapping of hands sounded, followed by the uproar of a swarm of children clattering in wooden shoes over the stone flags. The catechising was over. Then Albine gently glided out of the stable, where she had been waiting for an hour amidst the reeking warmth that emanated from Desiree's pets.

As she quietly slipped through the passage that led to the vestry, she caught sight of La Teuse, who was going to her kitchen, and who fortunately did not turn her head. Certain, now, of not being seen and stopped, Albine softly pushed the door which was before her, keeping hold of it in order that it might make no noise as it closed again.

And she found herself in the church.

VIII

At first she could see nobody. Outside, the rain had again begun to fall in fine close drops. The church looked very grey and gloomy. She passed behind the high altar, and walked on towards the pulpit. In the middle of the nave, there were only a number of empty benches, left there in disorder by the urchins of the catechism class. Amidst all this void came a low tic-tac from the swaying pendulum. She went down the church to knock at the confessional-box, which she saw standing at the other end. But, just as she passed the Chapel of the Dead, she caught sight of Abbe Mouret prostrated before the great bleeding Christ. He did not stir; he must have thought that it was only La Teuse putting the seats in order behind him.

But Albine laid her hand upon his shoulder.

'Serge,' she said, 'I have come for you.'

The priest raised his head with a start. His face was very pale. He remained on his knees and crossed himself, while his lips still quivered with the words of his prayer.

'I have been waiting for you,' she continued. 'Every morning and every evening I looked to see if you were not coming. I have counted the days till I could keep the reckoning no longer. Ah! for weeks and weeks—— Then, when I grew sure that you were not coming, I set out myself, and came here. I said to myself: "I will fetch him away with me." Give me your hand and let us go.'

She stretched out her hands, as though to help him to rise. But he only crossed himself, afresh. He still continued his prayers as he looked at her. He had succeeded in calming the first quiver of his flesh. From the Divine grace which had been streaming around him since the early morning, like a celestial bath, he derived a superhuman strength.

'It is not right for you to be here,' he said, gravely. 'Go away. You are aggravating your sufferings.'

'I suffer no longer,' she said, with a smile. 'I am well again; I am cured, now that I see you once more—— Listen! I made myself out worse than I really was, to induce them to go and fetch you. I am quite willing to confess it now. And that promise of going away, of leaving the neighbourhood, you didn't suppose I should have kept it, did you? No, indeed, unless I had carried you away with me on my shoulders. The others don't know it, but you must know that I cannot now live anywhere but at your side.'

She grew quite cheerful again, and drew close to the priest with the caressing ways of a child of nature, never noticing his cold and rigid demeanour. And she became impatient, clapped her hands, and exclaimed:

'Come, Serge; make up your mind and come. We are only losing time. There is no necessity to think so much about it. It is quite simple; I am going to take you with me. If you don't want any one to see you, we will go along by the Mascle. It is not very easy walking, but I managed it all by myself; and, when we are together, we can help each other. You know the way, don't you? We cross the churchyard, we descend to the torrent, and then we shall only have to follow its course right up to the garden. And one is quite at home down there. Nobody can see us, there is nothing but brambles and big round stones. The bed of the stream is nearly dry. As I came along, I thought: "By-and-by, when he is with me, we will walk along gently together and kiss one another." Come, Serge, be quick; I am waiting for you.'

The priest no longer appeared to hear her. He had betaken himself to his prayers again, and was asking Heaven to grant him the courage of the saints. Before entering upon the supreme struggle, he was arming himself with the flaming sword of faith. For a moment he had feared he was wavering. He had required all a martyr's courage and endurance to remain firmly kneeling there on the flagstones, while Albine was calling him: his heart had leapt out towards her, all his blood had surged passionately through his veins, filling him with an intense yearning to clasp her in his arms and kiss her hair. Her mere breath had awakened all the memory of their love; the vast garden, their saunters beneath the trees, and all the joy of their companionship.

But Divine grace was poured down upon him more abundantly, and the torturing strife, during which all his blood seemed to quit his veins, lasted but a moment. Nothing human then remained within him. He had become wholly God's.

Albine, however, again touched him on the shoulder. She was growing uneasy and angry.

'Why do you not speak to me?' she asked. 'You can't refuse; you will come with me? Remember that I shall die if you refuse. But no! you can't; it is impossible. We lived together once; it was vowed that we should never separate. Twenty times, at least, did you give yourself to me. You bade me take you wholly, your limbs, your breath, your very life itself. I did not dream it all. There is nothing of you that you have not given to me; not a hair in your head which is not mine. Your hands are mine. For days and days have I held them clasped in mine. Your face, your lips, your eyes, your brow, all, all are mine, and I have lavished my love upon them. Do you hear me, Serge?'

She stood erect before him, full of proud assertion, with outstretched arms. And, in a louder voice, she repeated:

'Do you hear me, Serge? You belong to me.'

Then Abbe Mouret slowly rose to his feet. He leant against the altar, and replied:

'No. You are mistaken. I belong to God.'

He was full of serenity. His shorn face seemed like that of some stone saint, whom no impulse of the flesh can disturb. His cassock fell around him in straight folds like a black winding-sheet, concealing all the outlines of his body. Albine dropped back at the sight of that sombre phantom of her former love. She missed his freely flowing beard, his freely flowing curls. And in the midst of his shorn locks she saw the pallid circle of his tonsure, which disquieted her as if it had been some mysterious evil, some malignant sore which had grown there, and would eat away all memory of the happy days they had spent together. She could recognise neither his hands, once so warm with caresses, nor his lissom neck, once so sonorous with laughter; nor his agile feet, which had carried her into the recesses of the woodlands. Could this, indeed, be the strong youth with whom she had lived one whole season—the youth with soft down gleaming on his bare breast, with skin browned by the sun's rays, with every limb full of vibrating life? At this present hour he seemed fleshless; his hair had fallen away from him, and all his virility had withered within that womanish gown, which left him sexless.

'Oh! you frighten me,' she murmured. 'Did you think then that I was dead, that you put on mourning? Take off that black thing; put on a blouse. You can tuck up the sleeves, and we will catch crayfishes again. Your arms used to be as white as mine.'

She laid her hand on his cassock, as though to tear it off him; but he repulsed her with a gesture, without touching her. He looked at her now and strengthened himself against temptation by never allowing his eyes to leave her. She seemed to him to have grown taller. She was no longer the playful damsel adorned with bunches of wild-flowers, and casting to the winds gay, gipsy laughter, nor was she the amorosa in white skirts, gracefully bending her slender form as she sauntered lingeringly beside the hedges. Now, there was a velvety bloom upon her lips; her hips were gracefully rounded; her bosom was in full bloom. She had become a woman, with a long oval face that seemed expressive of fruitfulness. Life slumbered within her. And her cheeks glowed with luscious maturity.

The priest, bathed in the voluptuous atmosphere that seemed to emanate from all that feminine ripeness, took a bitter pleasure in defying the caresses of her coral lips, the tempting smile of her eyes, the witching charm of her bosom, and all the intoxication which seemed to pour from her at every movement. He even carried his temerity so far as to search with his gaze for the spots that he had once so hotly kissed, the corners of her eyes and lips, her narrow temples, soft as satin, and the ambery nape of her neck, which was like velvet. And never, even in her embrace, had he tasted such felicity as he now felt in martyring himself, by boldly looking in the face the love that he refused. At last, fearing lest he might there yield to some new allurement of the flesh, he dropped his eyes, and said, very gently:

'I cannot hear you here. Let us go out, if you, indeed, persist in adding to the pain of both of us. Our presence in this place is a scandal. We are in God's house.'

'God!' cried Albine, excitedly, suddenly becoming a child of nature once more. 'God! Who is He? I know nothing of your God! I want to know nothing of Him if He has stolen you away from me, who have never harmed Him. My uncle Jeanbernat was right then when he said that your God was only an invention to frighten people, and make them weep! You are lying; you love me no longer, and that God of yours does not exist.'

'You are in His house now,' said Abbe Mouret, sternly. 'You blaspheme. With a breath He might turn you into dust.'

She laughed with proud disdain, and raised her hands as if to defy Heaven.

'Ah! then,' said she, 'you prefer your God to me. You think He is stronger than I am, and you imagine that He will love you better than I did. Oh! but you are a child, a foolish child. Come, leave all this folly. We will return to the garden together, and love each other, and be happy and free. That, that is life!'

This time she succeeded in throwing an arm round his waist, and she tried to drag him away. But he, quivering all over, freed himself from her embrace, and again took his stand against the altar.

'Go away!' he faltered. 'If you still love me, go away.... O Lord, pardon her, and pardon me too, for thus defiling this Thy house. Should I go with her beyond the door, I might, perhaps, follow her. Here, in Thy presence, I am strong. Suffer that I may remain here, to protect Thee from insult.'

Albine remained silent for a moment. Then, in a calm voice, she said:

'Well, let us stay here, then. I wish to speak to you. You cannot, surely, be cruel. You will understand me. You will not let me go away alone. Oh! do not begin to excuse yourself. I will not lay my hands upon you again, since it distresses you. I am quite calm now as you can see. We will talk quietly, as we used to do in the old days when we lost our way, and did not hurry to find it again, that we might have the more time to talk together.'

She smiled at that memory, and continued:

'I don't know about these things myself. My uncle Jeanbernat used to forbid me to go to church. "Silly girl," he'd say to me, "why do you want to go to a stuffy building when you have got a garden to run about in?" I grew up quite happy and contented. I used to look in the birds' nests without even taking the eggs. I did not even pluck the flowers, for fear of hurting the plants; and you know that I could never torture an insect. Why, then, should God be angry with me?'

'You should learn to know Him, pray to Him, and render Him the constant worship which is His due,' answered the priest.

'Ah! it would please you if I did, would it not?' she said. 'You would forgive me, and love me again? Well, I will do all that you wish me. Tell me about God, and I will believe in Him, and worship Him. All that you tell me shall be a truth to which I will listen on my knees. Have I ever had a thought that was not your own? We will begin our long walks again; and you shall teach me, and make of me whatever you will. Say "yes," I beg of you.'

Abbe Mouret pointed to his cassock.

'I cannot,' he simply said. 'I am a priest.'

'A priest!' she repeated after him, the smile dying out of her eyes. 'My uncle says that priests have neither wife, nor sister, nor mother. So that is true, then. But why did you ever come? It was you who took me for your sister, for your wife. Were you then lying?'

The priest raised his pale face, moist with the sweat of agony. 'I have sinned,' he murmured.

'When I saw you so free,' the girl went on, 'I thought that you were no longer a priest. I believed that all that was over, that you would always remain there with me, and for my sake.—— And now, what would you have me do, if you rob me of my whole life?'

'What I do,' he answered; 'kneel down, suffer on your knees, and never rise until God pardons you.'

'Are you a coward, then?' she exclaimed, her anger roused once more, her lips curving scornfully.

He staggered, and kept silence. Agony held him by the throat; but he proved stronger than pain. He held his head erect, and a smile almost played about his trembling lips. Albine for a moment defied him with her fixed glance; then, carried away by a fresh burst of passion, she exclaimed:

'Well, answer me. Accuse me! Say it was I who came to tempt you! That will be the climax! Speak, and say what you can for yourself. Strike me if you like. I should prefer your blows to that corpse-like stiffness you put on. Is there no blood left in your veins? Have you no spirit? Don't you hear me calling you a coward? Yes, indeed, you are a coward. You should never have loved me, since you may not be a man. Is it that black robe of yours which holds you back? Tear it off! When you are naked, perhaps you will remember yourself again.'

The priest slowly repeated his former words:

'I have sinned. I had no excuse for my sin. I do penitence for my sin without hope of pardon. If I tore off my cassock, I should tear away my very flesh, for I have given myself wholly to God, soul and body. I am a priest.'

'And I! what is to become of me?' cried Albine.

He looked unflinchingly at her.

'May your sufferings be reckoned against me as so many crimes! May I be eternally punished for the desertion in which I am forced to leave you! That will be only just. All unworthy though I be, I pray for you each night.'

She shrugged her shoulders with an air of great discouragement. Her anger was subsiding. She almost felt inclined to pity him.

'You are mad,' she murmured. 'Keep your prayers. It is you yourself that I want. But you will never understand me. There were so many things I wanted to tell you! Yet you stand there and irritate me with your chatter of another world. Come, let us try to talk sensibly. Let us wait for a moment till we are calmer. You cannot dismiss me in this way, I cannot leave you here. It is because you are here that you are so corpse-like, so cold that I dare not touch you. We won't talk any more just now. We will wait a little.'

She ceased speaking, and took a few steps, examining the little church. The rain was still gently pattering against the windows; and the cold damp light seemed to moisten the walls. Not a sound came from outside save the monotonous plashing of the rain. The sparrows were doubtless crouching for shelter under the tiles, and the rowan-tree's deserted branches showed but indistinctly in the veiling, drenching downpour. Five o'clock struck, grated out, stroke by stroke, from the wheezy chest of the old clock; and then the silence fell again, seeming to grow yet deeper, dimmer, and more despairing. The priest's painting work, as yet scarcely dry, gave to the high altar and the wainscoting an appearance of gloomy cleanliness, like that of some convent chapel where the sun never shines. Grievous anguish seemed to fill the nave, splashed with the blood that flowed from the limbs of the huge Christ; while, along the walls, the fourteen scenes of the Passion displayed their awful story in red and yellow daubs, reeking with horror. It was life that was suffering the last agonies there, amidst that deathlike quiver of the atmosphere, upon those altars which resembled tombs, in that bare vault which looked like a sepulchre. The surroundings all spoke of slaughter and gloom, terror and anguish and nothingness. A faint scent of incense still lingered there, like the last expiring breath of some dead girl, who had been hurriedly stifled beneath the flagstones.

'Ah,' said Albine at last, 'how sweet it used to be in the sunshine! Don't you remember? One morning we walked past a hedge of tall rose bushes, to the left of the flower-garden. I recollect the very colour of the grass; it was almost blue, shot with green. When we reached the end of the hedge we turned and walked back again, so sweet was the perfume of the sunny air. And we did nothing else, that morning; we took just twenty paces forward and then twenty paces back. It was so sweet a spot you would not leave it. The bees buzzed all around; and there was a tomtit that never left us, but skipped along by our side from branch to branch. You whispered to me, "How delightful is life!" Ah! life! it was the green grass, the trees, the running waters, the sky, and the sun, amongst which we seemed all fair and golden.'

She mused for another moment and then continued: 'Life 'twas the Paradou. How vast it used to seem to us! Never were we able to find the end of it. The sea of foliage rolled freely with rustling waves as far as the eye could reach. And all that glorious blue overhead! we were free to grow, and soar, and roam, like the clouds without meeting more obstacles than they. The very air was ours!'

She stopped and pointed to the low walls of the church.

'But, here, you are in a grave. You cannot stretch out your hand without hurting it against the stones. The roof hides the sky from you and blots out the sun. It is all so small and confined that your limbs grow stiff and cramped as though you were buried alive.'

'No,' answered the priest. 'The church is wide as the world.'

But she waved her hands towards the crosses, and the dying Christ, and the pictures of the Passion.

'And you live in the very midst of death. The grass, the trees, the springs, the sun, the sky, all are in the death throes around you.'

'No, no; all revives, all grows purified and reascends to the source of light.'

He had now drawn himself quite erect, with flashing eyes. And feeling that he was now invincible, so permeated with faith as to disdain temptation, he quitted the altar, took Albine's hand, and led her, as though she had been his sister, to the ghastly pictures of the Stations of the Cross.

'See,' he said, 'this is what God suffered! Jesus is cruelly scourged. Look! His shoulders are naked; His flesh is torn; His blood flows down His back.... And Jesus is crowned with thorns. Tears of blood trickle down His gashed brow. On His temple is a jagged wound.... Again Jesus is insulted by the soldiers. His murderers have scoffingly thrown a purple robe around His shoulders, and they spit upon His face and strike Him, and press the thorny crown deep into His flesh.'

Albine turned away her head, that she might not see the crudely painted pictures, in which the ochreous flesh of Christ had been plentifully bedaubed with carmine wounds. The purple robe round His shoulders seemed like a shred of His skin torn away.

'Why suffer? why die?' she said. 'O Serge, if you would only remember!... You told me, that morning, that you were tired. But I knew that you were only pretending, for the air was quite cool and we had only been walking for a quarter of an hour. But you wanted to sit down that you might hold me in your arms. Right down in the orchard, by the edge of a stream, there was a cherry tree—you remember it, don't you?—which you never could pass without wishing to kiss my hands. And your kisses ran all up my arms and shoulders to my lips. Cherry time was over, and so you devoured my lips.... It used to make us feel so sad to see the flowers fading, and one day, when you found a dead bird in the grass, you turned quite pale, and caught me to your breast, as if to forbid the earth to take me.'

But the priest drew her towards the other Stations of the Cross.

'Hush! hush!' he cried, 'look here, and here! Bow down in grief and pity—— Jesus falls beneath the weight of His cross. The ascent of Calvary is very tiring. He has dropped down on His knees. But He does not stay to wipe even the sweat from His brow, He rises up again and continues His journey.... And again Jesus falls beneath the weight of His cross. At each step He staggers. This time He has fallen on His side, so heavily that for a moment He lies there quite breathless. His lacerated hands have relaxed their hold upon the cross. His bruised and aching feet leave blood-stained prints behind them. Agonising weariness overwhelms Him, for He carries upon His shoulders the sins of the whole world.'

Albine gazed at the pictured Jesus, lying in a blue shirt prostrate beneath the cross, the blackness of which bedimmed the gold of His aureole. Then, with her glance wandering far away, she said:

'Oh! those meadow-paths! Have you no memory left, Serge? Have you forgotten those soft grassy walks through the meadows, amidst very seas of greenery? On the afternoon I am telling you of, we had only meant to stay out of doors an hour; but we went wandering on and were still wandering when the stars came out above us. Ah! how velvety it was, that endless carpet, soft as finest silk! It was just like a green sea whose gentle waters lapped us round. And well we knew whither those beguiling paths that led nowhere, were taking us! They were taking us to our love, to the joy of living together, to the certainty of happiness.'

With his hands trembling with anguish, Abbe Mouret pointed to the remaining pictures.

'Jesus,' he stammered, 'Jesus is nailed to the cross. The nails are hammered through His outspread hands. A single nail suffices for his feet, whose bones split asunder. He, Himself, while His flesh quivers with pain, fixes His eyes upon heaven and smiles.... Jesus is crucified between two thieves. The weight of His body terribly aggravates His wounds. From His brow, from His limbs, does a bloody sweat stream down. The two thieves insult Him, the passers-by mock at Him, the soldiers cast lots for His raiment. And the shadowy darkness grows deeper and the sun hides himself.... Jesus dies upon the cross. He utters a piercing cry and gives up the ghost. Oh! most terrible of deaths! The veil of the temple is rent in twain from top to bottom. The earth quakes, the stones are broken, and the very graves open.'

The priest had fallen on his knees, his voice choked by sobs, his eyes fixed upon the three crosses of Calvary, where writhed the gaunt pallid bodies of the crucified. Albine placed herself in front of the paintings in order that he might no longer see them.

'One evening,' she said, 'I lay through the long gloaming with my head upon your lap. It was in the forest, at the end of that great avenue of chestnut-trees, through which the setting sun shot a parting ray. Ah! what a caressing farewell He bade us! He lingered awhile by our feet with a kindly smile, as if saying "Till to-morrow." The sky slowly grew paler. I told you merrily that it was taking off its blue gown, and donning its gold-flowered robe of black to go out for the evening. And it was not night that fell, but a soft dimness, a veil of love and mystery, reminding us of those dusky paths, where the foliage arches overhead, one of those paths in which one hides for a moment with the certainty of finding the joyousness of daylight at the other end.

'That evening the calm clearness of the twilight gave promise of a splendid morrow. When I saw that it did not grow dark as quickly as you wished, I pretended to fall asleep. I may confess it to you now, but I was not really sleeping while you kissed me on the eyes. I felt your kisses and tried to keep from laughing. And then, when the darkness really came, it was like one long caress. The trees slept no more than I did. At night, don't you remember, the flowers always breathed a stronger perfume.'

Then, as he still remained on his knees, while tears streamed down his face, she caught him by the wrists, and pulled him to his feet, resuming passionately:

'Oh! if you knew you would bid me carry you off; you would fasten your arms about my neck, lest I should go away without you.... Yesterday I had a longing to see the garden once more. It seems larger, deeper, more unfathomable than ever. I discovered there new scents, so sweetly aromatic that they brought tears into my eyes. In the avenues I found a rain of sunbeams that thrilled me with desire. The roses spoke to me of you. The bullfinches were amazed at seeing me alone. All the garden broke out into sighs. Oh! come! Never has the grass spread itself out more softly. I have marked with a flower the hidden nook whither I long to take you. It is a nest of greenery in the midst of a tangle of brushwood. And there one can hear all the teeming life of the garden, of the trees and the streams and the sky. The earth's very breathing will softly lull us to rest there. Oh! come! come! and let us love one another amidst that universal loving!'

But he pushed her from him. He had returned to the Chapel of the Dead and stood in front of the painted papier-mache Christ, big as a ten-year-old boy, that writhed in such horridly realistic agony. There were real iron nails driven into the figure's limbs, and the wounds gaped in the torn and bleeding flesh.

'O Jesus, Who hast died for us!' cried the priest, 'convince her of our nothingness! Tell her that we are but dust, rottenness, and damnation! Ah! suffer that I may hide my head in a hair-cloth and rest it against Thy feet and stay there, motionless, until I rot away in death. The earth will no longer exist for me. The sun will no longer shine. I shall see nothing more, feel nothing, hear nothing. Nought of all this wretched world will come to turn my soul from its adoration of Thee.'

He was gradually becoming more and more excited, and he stepped towards Albine with upraised hands.

'You said rightly. It is Death that is present here; Death that is before my eyes; Death that delivers and saves one from all rottenness. Hear me! I renounce, I deny life, I wholly refuse it, I spit upon it. Those flowers of yours stink; your sun dazzles and blinds; your grass makes lepers of those that lie upon it; your garden is but a charnel-place where all rots and putrefies. The earth reeks with abomination. You lie when you talk of love and light and gladsome life in the depths of your palace of greenery. There is nought but darkness there. Those trees of yours exhale a poison which transforms men into beasts; your thickets are charged with the venom of vipers; your streams carry pestilence in their blue waters. If I could snatch away from that world of nature, which you extol, its kirtle of sunshine and its girdle of greenery, you would see it hideous like a very fury, a skeleton, rotting away with disease and vice.

'And even if you spoke the truth, even if your hands were really filled with pleasures, even if you should carry me to a couch of roses and offer me the dreams of Paradise, I would defend myself yet the more desperately from your embraces. There is war between us; war eternal and implacable. See! the church is very small; it is poverty-stricken; it is ugly; its confessional-box and pulpit are made of common deal, its font is merely of plaster, its altars are formed of four boards which I have painted myself. But what of that? It is yet vaster than your garden, greater than the valley, greater, even, than the whole earth. It is an impregnable fortress which nothing can ever break down. The winds, the sun, the forests, the ocean, all that is, may combine to assault it; yet it will stand erect and unshaken for ever!

'Yes, let all the jungles tower aloft and assail the walls with their thorny arms, let all the legions of insects swarm out of their holes in the ground and gnaw at the walls; the church, ruinous though it may seem, will never fall before the invasion of life. It is Death, Death the inexpugnable!... And do you know what will one day happen? The tiny church will grow and spread to such a colossal size, and will cast around such a mighty shadow, that all that nature, you speak of, will give up the ghost. Ah! Death, the Death of everything, with the skies gaping to receive our souls, above the curse-stricken ruins of the world!'

As he shouted those last words, he pushed Albine forcibly towards the door. She, extremely pale, retreated step by step. When he had finished in a gasping voice she very gravely answered:

'It is all over, then? You drive me away? Yet, I am your wife. It is you who made me so. And God, since He permitted it, cannot punish us to such a point as this.'

She was now on the threshold, and she added:

'Listen! Every day, at sunset, I go to the end of the garden, to the spot where the wall has fallen in. I shall wait for you there.'

And then she disappeared. The vestry door fell back with a sound like a deep sigh.

IX

The church was perfectly silent, except for the murmuring sound of the rain, which was falling heavily once more. In that sudden change to quietude the priest's anger subsided, and he even felt moved. It was with his face streaming with tears, his frame shaken by sobs, that he went back to throw himself on his knees before the great crucifix. A torrent of ardent thanksgiving burst from his lips.

'Thanks be to Thee, O God, for the help which Thou hast graciously bestowed upon me. Without Thy grace I should have hearkened unto the promptings of my flesh, and should have miserably returned to my sin. It was Thy grace that girded my loins as with armour for battle; Thy grace was indeed my armour, my courage, the support of my soul, that kept me erect, beyond weakness. Oh! my God, Thou wert in me; it was Thy voice that spoke in me, for I no longer felt the cowardice of the flesh, I could have cut asunder my very heart-strings. And now, O God, I offer Thee my bleeding heart. It no longer belongs to any creature of this world; it is Thine alone. To give it to Thee I have wrenched it from all worldly affection. But think not, O God, that I take any pride to myself for this victory. I know that without Thee I am nothing; and I humbly cast myself at Thy feet.'

He sank down upon the altar steps, unable to utter another word, while his breath panted incense-like from his parted lips. The divine grace bathed him in ineffable ecstasy. He sought Jesus in the recesses of his being, in that sanctuary of love which he was ever preparing for His worthy reception. And Jesus was now present there. The Abbe knew it by the sweet influences which permeated him. And thereupon he joined with Jesus in that spiritual converse which at times bore him away from earth to companionship with God. He sighed out the verse from the 'Song of Solomon,' 'My beloved is mine, and I am his; He feedeth his flock among the lilies, until the day be cool, and the shadows flee away.' He pondered over the words of the 'Imitation:' 'It is a great art to know how to talk with Jesus, and it requires much prudence to keep Him near one.' And then, with adorable condescension, Jesus came down to him, and spoke with him for hours of his needs, his happiness, and his hopes. Their confidences were not less affectionate and touching than those of two friends, who meet after long separation and quietly retire to converse on the bank of some lonely stream; for during those hours of divine condescension Jesus deigned to be his friend, his best, most faithful friend, one who never forsook him, and who in return for a little love gave him all the treasures of eternal life. That day the priest was eager to prolong the sweet converse, and indeed, when six o'clock sounded through the quiet church, he was still listening to the words which echoed through his soul.

On his side there was unreserved confession, unimpeded by the restraints of language, natural effusion of the heart which spoke even more quickly than the mind. Abbe Mouret told everything to Jesus, as to a God who had come down in all the intimacy of the most loving tenderness, and who would listen to everything. He confessed that he still loved Albine; and he was surprised that he had been able to speak sternly to her and drive her away, without his whole being breaking out into revolt. He marvelled at it, and smiled as though it were some wonderful miracle performed by another. And Jesus told him that he must not be astonished, and that the greatest saints were often but unconscious instruments in the hands of God. Then the Abbe gave expression to a doubt. Had he not lost merit in seeking refuge in the Cross and even in the Passion of his Saviour? Had he not shown that he possessed as yet but little courage, since he had not dared to fight unaided? But Jesus evinced kindly tolerance, and answered that man's weakness was God's continual care, and that He especially loved those suffering souls, to whose assistance He went, like a friend to the bedside of a sick companion.

But was it a sin to love Albine, a sin for which he, Serge, would be damned? No; if his love was clean of all fleshly taint, and added another hope to his desire for eternal life. But, then, how was he to love her? In silence; without speaking a word to her, without taking a step towards her; simply allowing his pure affection to breathe forth, like a sweet perfume, pleasing unto heaven. And Jesus smiled with increasing kindliness, drawing nearer as if to encourage confession, in such wise that the priest grew bolder and began to recapitulate Albine's charms. She had hair that was fair and golden as an angel's; she was very white, with big soft eyes, like those of the aureoled saints. Jesus seemed to listen to this in silence, though a smile still played upon His face. And the priest continued: She had grown much taller. She was now like a queen, with rounded form and splendid shoulders. Oh! to clasp her waist, were it only for a second, and to feel her shoulders drawn close by his embrace! But the smile on the divine countenance then paled and died away, as a star sinks and falls beneath the horizon. Abbe Mouret now spoke all alone. Ah! had he not shown himself too hard-hearted? Why had he driven her away without one single word of affection, since Heaven allowed him to love her?

'I do love her! I do love her!' he cried aloud, in a distracted voice, that rang through the church.

He thought he saw her still standing there. She was stretching out her arms to him; she was beautiful enough to make him break all his vows. He threw himself upon her bosom without thought of the reverence due to his surroundings, he clasped her and rained kisses upon her face. It was before her that he now knelt, imploring her mercy, and beseeching her to forgive him his unkindness. He told her that, at times a voice which was not his own spoke through his lips. Could he himself ever have treated her harshly? It was the strange voice that had repulsed her. It could not, surely, be he himself, for he would have been unable to touch a hair of her head without loving emotion. And yet he had driven her away. The church was really empty! Whither should he hasten to find her again, to bring her back, and wipe her tears away with kisses? The rain was streaming down more violently than ever. The roads must be rivers of mud. He pictured her to himself lashed by the downpour, tottering alongside the ditches, her clothes soaked and clinging to her skin. No! no! it could not have been himself; it was that other voice, the jealous voice that had so cruelly sought to slay his love.

'O Jesus!' he cried in desperation, 'be merciful and give her back to me!'

But his Lord was no longer there. Then Abbe Mouret, awaking with a start, turned horribly pale. He understood it all. He had not known how to keep Jesus with him. He had lost his friend, and had been left defenceless against the powers of evil. Instead of that inward light, which had shone so brightly within him as he received his God, he now found utter darkness, a foul vapour that irritated his senses. Jesus had withdrawn His grace on leaving him; and he, who since early morning had been so strong with heaven-sent help, now felt utterly miserable, forsaken, weak and helpless as an infant. How frightful was his fall! How galling its bitterness! To have straggled so heroically, to have remained unshaken, invincible, implacable, while the temptress actually stood before him, with all her warm life, her swelling bosom and superb shoulders, her perfume of love and passion; and then to fall so shamefully, to throb with desire, when she had disappeared, leaving behind her but the echo of her skirts, and the fragrance diffused from her white neck! Now, these mere recollections sufficed to make her all powerful, her influence permeated the church.

'Jesus! Jesus!' cried the priest, once more, 'return, come back to me; speak to me once again!'

But Jesus remained deaf to his cry. For a moment Abbe Mouret raised his arms to heaven in desperate entreaty. His shoulders cracked and strained beneath the wild violence of his supplications. But soon his hands fell down again in discouragement. Heaven preserved that hopeless silence which suppliants at times encounter. Then he once more sat down on the altar steps, heart-crushed and with ashen face, pressing his elbows to his sides, as though he were trying to reduce his flesh to the smallest proportions possible.

'My God! Thou deserted me!' he murmured. 'Nevertheless, Thy will be done!'

He spoke not another word, but sat there, panting breathlessly, like a hunted beast that cowers motionless in fear of the hounds. Ever since his sin, he had thus seemed to be the sport of the divine grace. It denied itself to his most ardent prayers; it poured down upon him, unexpectedly and refreshingly, when he had lost all hope of winning it for long years to come.

At first he had been inclined to rebel against this dispensation of Heaven, complaining like a betrayed lover, and demanding the immediate return of that consoling grace, whose kiss made him so strong. But afterwards, after unavailing outbursts of anger, he had learned to understand that humility profited him most and could alone enable him to endure the withdrawal of the divine assistance. Then, for hours and for days, he would humble himself and wait for comfort which came not. In vain he cast himself unreservedly into the hands of God, annihilated himself before the Divinity, wearied himself with the incessant repetition of prayers. He could not perceive God's presence with him; and his flesh, breaking free from all restraint, rose up in rebellious desire. It was a slow agony of temptation, in which the weapons of faith fell, one by one, from his faltering hands, in which he lay inert in the clutch of passion, in which he beheld with horror his own ignominy, without having the courage to raise his little finger to free himself from the thraldom of sin.

Such was now his life. He had felt sin's attacks in every form. Not a day passed that he was not tried. Sin assumed a thousand guises, assailed him through his eyes and ears, flew boldly at his throat, leaped treacherously upon his shoulders, or stole torturingly into his bones. His transgression was ever present, he almost always beheld Albine dazzling as the sunshine, lighting up the greenery of the Paradou. He only ceased to see her in those rare moments when the divine grace deigned to close his eyes with its cool caresses. And he strove to hide his sufferings as one hides those of some disgraceful disease. He wrapped himself in the endless silence, which no one knew how to make him break, filling the parsonage with his martyrdom and resignation, and exasperating La Teuse, who, at times, when his back was turned, would shake her fist at heaven.

This time he was alone now, and need take no care to hide his torment. Sin had just struck him such an overwhelming blow, that he had not strength left to move from the altar steps, where he had fallen. He remained there, sighing, and groaning, parched with agony, incapable of a single tear. And he thought of the calm unruffled life that had once been his. Ah! the perfect peace, the full confidence of his first days at Les Artaud! The path of salvation had seemed so straight and easy then! He had smiled at the very mention of temptation. He had lived in the midst of wickedness, without knowledge of it, without fear of it, certain of being able to withstand it. He had been a model priest, so pure and chaste, so inexperienced and innocent in God's sight, that God had led him by the hand like a little child.

But now, all that childlike innocence was dead, God visited him in the morning, and forthwith tried him. A state of temptation became his life on earth. Now that full manhood and sin had come upon him, he entered into the everlasting struggle. Could it be that God really loved him more now than before? The great saints have all left fragments of their torn flesh upon the thorns of the way of sorrow. He tried to gather some consolation from this circumstance. At each laceration of his flesh, each racking of his bones, he tried to assure himself of some exceeding great reward. And then, no infliction that Heaven might now cast upon him could be too heavy. He even looked back with scorn on his former serenity, his easy fervour, which had set him on his knees with mere girlish enthusiasm, and left him unconscious even of the bruising of the hard stones. He strove also to discover pleasure in pain, in plunging into it, annihilating himself in it. But, even while he poured out thanks to God, his teeth chattered with growing terror, and the voice of his rebellious blood cried out to him that this was all falsehood, and that the only happiness worth desiring was in Albine's arms, amongst the flowers of the Paradou.

Yet he had put aside Mary for Jesus, sacrificing his heart that he might subdue his flesh, and hoping to implant some virility in his faith. Mary disquieted him too much, with her smoothly braided hair, her outstretched hands, and her womanly smile. He could never kneel before her without dropping his eyes, for fear of catching sight of the hem of her dress. Then, too, he accused her of having treated him too tenderly in former times. She had kept him sheltered so long within the folds of her robe, that he had let himself slip from her arms to those of a human creature without being conscious even of the change of his affection. He thought of all the roughness of Brother Archangias, of his refusal to worship Mary, of the distrustful glances with which he had seemed to watch her. He himself despaired of ever rising to such a height of roughness, and so he simply left her, hiding her images and deserting her altar. Yet she remained in his heart, like some love which, though unavowed, is ever present. Sin, with sacrilege whose very horror made him shudder, made use of her to tempt him.

Whenever he still invoked her, as he did at times of irrepressible emotion, it was Albine who showed herself beneath the white veil, with the blue scarf knotted round her waist and the golden roses blooming on her bare feet. All the representations of the Virgin, the Virgin with the royal mantle of cloth-of-gold, the Virgin crowned with stars, the Virgin visited by the Angel of the Annunciation, the peaceful Virgin poised between a lily and a distaff, all brought him some memory of Albine, her smiling eyes or her delicately curved mouth or her softly rounded cheeks.

Thereupon, by a supreme effort, he drove the female element from his worship, and sought refuge in Jesus, though even His gentle mildness sometimes proved a source of disquietude to him. What he needed was a jealous God, an implacable God, the Jehovah of the Old Testament, girded with thunder and manifesting Himself only to chastise the terrified world. He had done with the saints and the angels and the Divine Mother; he bowed down before God Himself alone, the omnipotent Master, who demanded from him his every breath. And he felt the hand of this God laid heavily upon him, holding him helpless at His mercy through space and time, like a guilty atom. Ah! to be nothing, to be damned, to dream of hell, to wrestle vainly against hideous temptations, all that was surely good.

From Jesus he took but the cross. He was seized with that passion for the cross which has made so many lips press themselves again and again to the crucifix till they were worn away with kissing. He took up the cross and followed Jesus. He sought to make it heavier, the mightiest of burdens; it was great joy to him to fall beneath its weight, to drag it on his knees, his back half broken. In it he beheld the only source of strength for the soul, of joy for the mind, of the consummation of virtue and the perfection of holiness. In it lay all that was good; all ended in death upon it. To suffer and to die, those words ever sounded in his ears, as the end and goal of mortal wisdom. And, when he had fastened himself to the cross, he enjoyed the boundless consolation of God's love. It was no longer, now, upon Mary that he lavished filial tenderness or lover's passion. He loved for love's mere sake, with an absolute abstract love. He loved God with a love that lifted him out of himself, out of all else, and wrapped him round with a dazzling radiance of glory. He was like a torch that burns away with blazing light. And death seemed to him to be only a great impulse of love.

But what had he omitted to do that he was thus so sorely tried? With his hand he wiped away the perspiration that streamed down his brow, and reflected that, that very morning, he had made his usual self-examination without finding any great guilt within him. Was he not leading a life of great austerity and mortification of the flesh? Did he not love God solely and blindly? Ah! how he would have blessed His Holy Name had He only restored him his peace, deeming him now sufficiently punished for his transgression! But, perhaps, that sin of his could never be expiated. And then, in spite of himself, his mind reverted to Albine and the Paradou, and all their memories.

At first he tried to make excuses for himself. He had fallen, one evening, senseless upon the tiled floor of his bedroom, stricken with brain fever. For three weeks he had remained unconscious. His blood surged furiously through his veins and raged within him like a torrent that had burst its banks. His whole body, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, was so scoured and renewed and wrought afresh by the mighty labouring of his ailment, that in his delirium he had sometimes thought he could hear the very hammer blows of workmen that nailed his bones together again. Then, one morning, he had awakened, feeling like a new being. He was born a second time, freed of all that his five-and-twenty years of life had successively implanted in him. His childish piety, his education at the seminary, the faith of his early priesthood, had all vanished, had been carried off, and their place was bare and empty. In truth, it could be hell alone that had thus prepared him for the reception of evil, disarming him of all his former weapons, and reducing his body to languor and softness, through which sin might readily enter.

He, perfectly unconscious of it all, unknowingly surrendered himself to the gradual approach of evil. When he had reopened his eyes in the Paradou, he had felt himself an infant once more, with no memory of the past, no knowledge of his priesthood. He experienced a gentle pleasure, a glad feeling of surprise at thus beginning life afresh, as though it were all new and strange to him and would be delightful to learn. Oh! the sweet apprenticeship, the charming observations, the delicious discoveries! That Paradou was a vast abode of felicity; and hell, in placing him there, had known full well that he would be defenceless. Never, in his first youth, had he known such enjoyment in growing. That first youth of his, when he now thought of it, seemed quite black and gloomy, graceless, wan and inactive, as if it had been spent far away from the sunlight.

But at the Paradou, how joyfully had he hailed the sun! How admiringly had he gazed at the first tree, at the first flower, at the tiniest insect he had seen, at the most insignificant pebble he had picked up! The very stones charmed him. The horizon was a source of never-ending amazement. One clear morning, the memory of which still filled his eyes, bringing back a perfume of jasmine, a lark's clear song, he had been so affected by emotion that he felt all power desert his limbs. He had long found pleasure in learning the sensations of life. And, ah! the morning when Albine had been born beside him amidst the roses! As he thought of it, an ecstatic smile broke out upon his face. She rose up like a star that was necessary to the very sun's existence. She illumined everything, she made everything clear. She made his life complete.

Then in fancy he once again walked with her through the Paradou. He remembered the little curls that waved behind her neck as she ran on before him. She exhaled delicious scent, and the touch of her warm swaying skirts seemed like a caress. And when she clasped him with her supple curving arms, he half expected to see her, so slight and slender she was, twine herself around him. It was she who went foremost. She led him through winding paths, where they loitered, that their walk might last the longer. It was she who instilled into him love for nature; and it was by watching the loves of the plants that he had learned to love her, with a love that was long, indeed, in bursting into life, but whose sweetness had been theirs at last. Beneath the shade of the giant tree they had reached their journey's goal. Oh! to clasp her once again—yet once again!

A low groan suddenly came from the priest. He hastily sprang up and then flung himself down again. Temptation had just assailed him afresh. Into what paths were his recollections leading him? Did he not know, only too well, that Satan avails himself of every wile to insinuate his serpent-head into the soul, even when it is absorbed in self-examination? No! no! he had no excuse. His illness had in no wise authorised him to sin. He should have set strict guard upon himself, and have sought God anew upon recovering from his fever. And what a frightful proof he now had of his vileness: he was not even able to make calm confession of his sin. Would he never be able to silence his nature? He wildly thought of scooping his brains out of his skull that he might be able to think no more, and of opening his veins that his blood might no longer torment him. For a moment he buried his face within his hands, shuddering as though the beasts that he felt prowling around him might infect him with the hot breath of temptation.

But his thoughts strayed on in spite of himself, and his blood throbbed wildly in his very heart. Though he held his clenched fists to his eyes, he still saw Albine, dazzling like a sun. Every effort that he made to press the vision from his sight only made her shine out before him with increased brilliancy. Was God, then, utterly forsaking him, that he could find no refuge from temptation? And, in spite of all his efforts to control his thoughts, he espied every tiny blade of grass that thrust itself up by Albine's skirts; he saw a little thistle-flower fastened in her hair, against which he remembered that he had pricked his lips. Even the perfumed atmosphere of the Paradou floated round him, and well-remembered sounds came back, the repeated call of a bird, then an interval of hushed silence, then a sigh floating through the trees.

Why did not Heaven at once strike him dead with its lightning? That would have been less cruel. It was with a voluptuous pang, like the pangs which assail the damned, that he recalled his transgression. He shuddered when he again heard in his heart the abominable words that he had spoken at Albine's feet. Their echoes were now accusing him before the throne of God. He had acknowledged Woman as his sovereign. He had yielded to her as a slave, kissing her feet, longing to be the water she drank and the bread she ate. He began to understand now why he could no longer recover self-control. God had given him over to Woman. But he would chastise her, scourge her, break her very limbs to force her to let him go! It was she who was the slave; she, the creature of impurity, to whom the Church should have denied a soul. Then he braced himself, and shook his fists at the vision of Albine; but his fists opened and his hands glided along her shoulders in a loving caress, while his lips, just now breathing out anger and insult, pressed themselves to her hair, stammering forth words of adoration.

Abbe Mouret opened his eyes again. The burning apparition of Albine vanished. It was sudden and unexpected solace. He was able to weep. Tears flowed slowly and refreshingly down his cheeks, and he drew a long breath, still fearing to move, lest the Evil One should again grip him by the neck, for he yet thought that he heard the snarl of a beast behind him. And then he found such pleasure in the cessation of his sufferings that his one thought was to prolong the enjoyment of it.

Outside the rain had ceased falling. The sun was setting in a vast crimson glow, which spread across the windows like curtains of rose-coloured satin. The church was quite warm and bright in the parting breath of the sinking luminary. The priest thanked God for the respite He had been pleased to vouchsafe to him. A broad ray of light, like a beam of gold-dust, streamed through the nave and illumined the far end of the building, the clock, the pulpit, and the high altar. Perhaps the Divine grace was returning to him from heaven along that radiant path. He watched with interest the atoms that came and went with prodigious speed through the ray, like a swarm of busy messengers ever hastening with news from the sun to the earth. A thousand lighted candles would not have filled the church with such splendour. Curtains of cloth-of-gold seemed to hang behind the high altar; treasures of the goldsmith's art covered all the ledges; candle-holders arose in dazzling sheaves; censers glowed full of burning gems; sacred vases gleamed like fiery comets; and around all there seemed to be a rain of luminous flowers amidst waving lacework—beds, bouquets, and garlands of roses, from whose expanding petals dropped showers of stars.

Never had Abbe Mouret desired such magnificence for his poor church. He smiled, and dreamt of how he might retain all that splendour there, and then arrange it most effectively. He would have preferred to see the curtains of cloth-of-gold hung rather higher; the vases, too, needed more careful arrangement; and he thought that the bouquets of flowers might be tied up more neatly, and the garlands be more regularly shaped. Yet how wondrously magnificent it all was! He was the pontiff of a church of gold. Bishops, princes, princesses, arrayed in royal mantles, multitudes of believers, bending to the ground, were coming to visit it, encamping in the valley, waiting for weeks at the door until they should be able to enter. They kissed his feet, for even his feet had turned to gold, and worked miracles. The bath of gold mounted to his knees. A golden heart was beating within his golden breast, with so clear a musical pulsation that the waiting crowds could hear it from outside. Then a feeling of overweening pride seized upon him. He was an idol. The golden beam mounted still higher, the high altar was all ablaze with glory, and the priest grew certain that the Divine grace must be returning to him, such was his inward satisfaction. The fierce snarl behind him had now grown gentle and coaxing, and he only felt on his shoulder a soft velvety pressure, as though some giant cat were lightly caressing him.

He still pursued his reverie. Never before had he seen things under such a favourable light. Everything seemed quite easy to him now that he once more felt full of strength. Since Albine was waiting for him, he would go and join her. It was only natural. On the previous morning he had married Fortune and Rosalie. The Church did not forbid marriages. He saw that young couple again as they knelt before him, smiling and nudging each other while his hands were held over them in benediction. Then, in the evening, they had shown him their room. Each word that he had spoken to them echoed loudly in his ear. He had told Fortune that God had sent him a companion, because He did not wish man to live alone; and he had told Rosalie that she must cleave to her husband, never leaving him, but always acting as his obedient helpmate. But he had said these things also for Albine and himself. Was she not his companion, his obedient helpmate, whom God had sent to him that his manhood might not wither up in solitude? Besides, they had been joined the one to the other. He felt surprised that he had not understood and recognised it at once; that he had not gone away with her, as his duty plainly required that he should have done. But he had quite made up his mind now; he would certainly join her in the morning. He could be with her in half an hour. He would go through the village, and take the road up the hill; it was much the shortest way. He could do what he pleased; he was the master, and no one would presume to say anything to him. If any one looked at him, a wave of his hand would force them to bend their heads. He would live with Albine. He would call her his wife. They would be very happy together.

The golden stream mounted still higher, and played amongst his fingers. Again did he seem to be immersed in a bath of gold. He would take the altar-vases away to ornament his house, he would keep up a fine establishment, he would pay his servants with fragments of chalices which he could easily break with his fingers. He would hang his bridal-bed with the cloth-of-gold that draped the altar; and he would give his wife for jewels the golden hearts and chaplets and crosses that hung from the necks of the Virgin and the saints. The church itself, if another storey were added to it, would supply them with a palace. God would have no objection to make since He had allowed them to love each other. And, besides, was it not he who was now God, with the people kissing his golden miracle-working feet?

Abbe Mouret rose. He made that sweeping gesture of Jeanbernat's, that wide gesture of negation, that took in everything as far as the horizon.

'There is nothing, nothing, nothing!' he said. 'God does not exist.'

A mighty shudder seemed to sweep through the church. The terrified priest turned deadly pale and listened. Who had spoken? Who was it that had blasphemed? Suddenly the velvety caress, whose gentle pressure he had felt upon his shoulder, turned fierce and savage: sharp talons seemed to be rending his flesh, and once more he felt his blood streaming forth. Yet he remained on his feet, struggling against the sudden attack. He cursed and reviled the triumphant sin that sniggered and grinned round his temples, whilst all the hammers of the Evil One battered at them. Why had he not been on his guard against Satan's wiles? Did he not know full well that it was his habit to glide up softly with gentle paws that he might drive them like blades into the very vitals of his victim?

His anger increased as he thought how he had been entrapped, like a mere child. Was he destined, then, to be ever hurled to the ground, with sin crouching victoriously on his breast? This time he had actually denied his God. It was all one fatal descent. His transgression had destroyed his faith, and then dogma had tottered. One single doubt of the flesh, pleading abomination, sufficed to sweep heaven away. The divine ordinances irritated one; the divine mysteries made one smile. Then came other temptations and allurements; gold, power, unrestrained liberty, an irresistible longing for enjoyment, culminating in luxuriousness, sprawling on a bed of wealth and pride. And then God was robbed. His vessels were broken to adorn woman's impurity. Ah! well, then, he was damned. Nothing could make any difference to him now. Sin might speak aloud. It was useless to struggle further. The monsters who had hovered about his neck were battening on his vitals now. He yielded to them with hideous satisfaction. He shook his fists at the church. No; he believed no longer in the divinity of Christ; he believed no longer in the Holy Trinity; he believed in naught but himself, and his muscles and the appetites of his body. He wanted to live. He felt the necessity of being a man. Oh! to speed along through the open air, to be lusty and strong, to owe obedience to no jealous master, to fell one's enemies with stones, to carry off the fair maidens that passed upon one's shoulders. He would break out from that living tomb where cruel hands had thrust him. He would awaken his manhood, which had only been slumbering. And might he die of shame if he should find that it were really dead! And might the Divinity be accursed if, by the touch of His finger, He had made him different from the rest of mankind.

The priest stood erect, his mind all dazed and scared. He fancied that, at this fresh outburst of blasphemy, the church was falling down upon him. The sunlight, which had poured over the high altar, had gradually spread and mounted the walls like ruddy fire. Flames soared and licked the rafters, then died away in a sanguineous, ember-like glow. And all at once the church became quite black. It was as though the fires of the setting sun had burst the roof asunder, pierced the walls, thrown open wide breaches on every side to some exterior foe. The gloomy framework seemed to shake beneath some violent assault. Night was coming on quickly.

Then, in the far distance, the priest heard a gentle murmur rising from the valley of Les Artaud. The time had been when he had not understood the impassioned language of those burning lands, where writhed but knotted vine-stocks, withered almond-trees, and decrepit olives sprawling with crippled limbs. Protected by his ignorance, he had passed undisturbed through all that world of passion. But, to-day, his ear detected the slightest sigh of the leaves that lay panting in the heat. Afar off, on the edge of the horizon, the hills, still hot with the sinking luminary's farewell, seemed to set themselves in motion with the tramp of an army on the march. Nearer at hand, the scattered rocks, the stones along the road, all the pebbles in the valley, throbbed and rolled as if possessed by a craving for motion. Then the tracts of ruddy soil, the few fields that had been reduced to cultivation, seemed to heave and growl like rivers that had burst their banks, bearing along in a blood-like flood the engenderings of seeds, the births of roots, the embraces of plants. Soon everything was in motion. The vine-branches appeared to crawl along like huge insects; the parched corn and the dry grass formed into dense, lance-waving battalions; the trees stretched out their boughs like wrestlers making ready for a contest; the fallen leaves skipped forward; the very dust on the road rolled on. It was a moving multitude reinforced by fresh recruits at every step; a legion, the sound of whose coming went on in front of it; an outburst of passionate life, sweeping everything along in a mighty whirlwind of fruitfulness. And all at once the assault began. From the limits of the horizon, the whole countryside, the hills and stones and fields and trees, rushed upon the church. At the first shock, the building quivered and cracked. The walls were pierced and the tiles on the roof were thrown down. But the great Christ, although shaken, did not fall.

A short respite followed. Outside, the voices sounded more angrily, and the priest could now distinguish human ones amongst them. The Artauds, those bastards who sprang up out of the rocky soil with the persistence of brambles, were now in their turn blowing a blast that reeked of teeming life. They had planted everywhere forests of humanity that swallowed up all around them. They came up to the church, they shattered the door with a push, and threatened to block up the very nave with the invading scions of their race. Behind them came the beasts; the oxen that tried to batter down the walls with their horns, the flocks of asses, goats, and sheep, that dashed against the ruined church like living waves, while swarms of wood-lice and crickets attacked the foundations and reduced them to dust with their sawlike teeth. Yet again, on the other side, there was Desiree's poultry-yard, where the dunghill reeked with suffocating fumes. Here the big cock, Alexander, sounded the assault, and the hens loosened the stones with their beaks, and the rabbits burrowed under the very altars; whilst the pig, too fat to stir, grunted and waited till all the sacred ornaments should be reduced to warm ashes in which he might wallow at his ease.

A great roar ascended, and a second assault was delivered. The villagers, the animals, all that overflowing sea of life assailed the church with such impetuosity that the rafters bent and curved. This time a part of the walls tottered and fell down, the ceiling shook, the woodwork of the windows was carried away, and the grey mist of the evening streamed in through the frightful gaping breaches. The great Christ now only clung to His cross by the nail that pierced His left hand.

A mighty shout hailed the downfall of the block of wall. Yet the church still stood there firmly, in spite of the injuries it had received. It offered a stern, silent, unflinching resistance, clutching desperately to the tiniest stones of its foundations. It seemed as though, to keep itself from falling, it required only the support of its slenderest pillar, which, by some miracle of equilibration, held up the gaping roof. Then Abbe Mouret beheld the rude plants of the plateau, the dreadful-looking growths that had become hard as iron amidst the arid rocks, that were knotted like snakes and bossy with muscles, set themselves to work. The rust-hued lichens gnawed away at the rough plasterwork like fiery leprosy. Then the thyme-plants thrust their roots between the bricks like so many iron wedges. The lavenders insinuated hooked fingers into the loosened stonework, and by slow persistent efforts tore the blocks asunder. The junipers, the rosemaries, the prickly holly bushes, climbed higher and battered the walls with irresistible blows; and even the grass, the grass whose dry blades slipped beneath the great door, stiffened itself into steel-like spears and made its way down the nave, where it forced up the flagstones with powerful levers. It was a victorious revolt, it was revolutionary nature constructing barricades out of the overturned altars, and wrecking the church which had for centuries cast too deep a shadow over it. The other combatants had fallen back, and let the plants, the thyme and the lavender and the lichens, complete the overthrow of the building with their ceaseless little blows, their constant gnawing, which proved more destructive than the heavier onslaught of the stronger assailants.

Then, suddenly, the end came. The rowan-tree, whose topmost branches had already forced their way through the broken windows under the vaulted roof, rushed in violently with its formidable stream of greenery. It planted itself in the centre of the nave and grew there monstrously. Its trunk expanded till its girth became so colossal that it seemed as though it would burst the church asunder like a girdle spanning it too closely. Its branches shot out in knotted arms, each one of which broke down a piece of the wall or thrust off a strip of the roof, and they went on multiplying without cessation, each branch ramifying, till a fresh tree sprang out of each single knot, with such impetuosity of growth that the ruins of the church, pierced through and through like a sieve, flew into fragments, scattering a fine dust to the four quarters of the heavens.

Now the giant tree seemed to reach the stars; its forest of branches was a forest of legs, arms, and breasts full of sap; the long locks of women streamed down from it; men's heads burst out from the bark; and up aloft pairs of lovers, lying languid by the edges of their nests, filled the air with the music of their delights.

A final blast of the storm which had broken over the church swept away the dust of its remains: the pulpit and the confessional-box, which had been ground into powder, the lacerated holy pictures, the shattered sacred vessels, all the litter at which the legion of sparrows that had once dwelt amongst the tiles was eagerly pecking. The great Christ, torn from the cross, hung for a moment from one of the streaming women's curls, and then was whirled away into the black darkness, in the depths of which it sank with a loud crash. The Tree of Life had pierced the heavens; it overtopped the stars.

Abbe Mouret was filled with the mad joy of an accursed spirit at the sight before him. The church was vanquished; God no longer had a house. And thenceforward God could no longer trouble him. He was free to rejoin Albine, since it was she who triumphed. He laughed at himself for having declared, an hour previously, that the church would swallow up the whole earth with its shadow. The earth, indeed, had avenged itself by consuming the church. The mad laughter into which he broke had the effect of suddenly awakening him from his hallucination. He gazed stupidly round the nave, which the evening shadows were slowly darkening. Through the windows he could see patches of star-spangled sky; and he was about to stretch out his arms to feel the walls, when he heard Desiree calling to him from the vestry-passage:

'Serge! Serge! Are you there? Why don't you answer? I have been looking for you for this last half-hour.'

She came in; she was holding a lighted lamp; and the priest then saw that the church was still standing. He could no longer understand anything, but remained in a horrible state of doubt betwixt the unconquerable church, springing up again from its ashes, and Albine, the all-powerful, who could shake the very throne of God by a single breath.

X

Desiree came up to him, full of merry chatter.

'Are you there? Are you there?' she cried. 'Why are you playing at hide-and-seek? I called out to you at the top of my voice at least a dozen times. I thought you must have gone out.'

She pried into all the gloomy corners with an inquisitive glance, and even stepped up to the confessional-box, as though she had expected to surprise some one hiding there. Then she came back to Serge, disappointed, and continued:

'So you are quite alone? Have you been asleep? What amusement do you find in shutting yourself up all alone in the dark? Come along; it is time we went to dinner.'

The Abbe drew his feverish hands across his brow to wipe away the traces of the thoughts which he feared were plain for all the world to read. He fumbled mechanically at the buttons of his cassock, which seemed to him all disarranged. Then he followed his sister with stern-set face and never a sign of emotion, stiffened by that priestly energy which throws the dignity of sacerdotalism like a veil over the agonies of the flesh. Desiree did not even suspect that there was anything the matter with him. She simply said as they entered the dining-room:

'I have had such a good sleep; but you have been talking too much, and have made yourself quite pale.'

In the evening, after dinner, Brother Archangias came in to have his game of cards with La Teuse. He was in a very merry mood that night; and, when the Brother was merry, it was his habit to prod La Teuse in the sides with his big fists, an attention which she returned by heartily boxing his ears. This skirmishing made them both laugh, with a laughter that shook the very ceiling. The Brother, too, when he was in these gay humours, would devise all kinds of pranks. He would try to smash plates with his nose, and would offer to wager that he could break through the dining-room door in battering-ram fashion. He would also empty the snuff out of his box into the old servant's coffee, or would thrust a handful of pebbles down her neck. The merest trifle would give rise to these noisy outbursts of gaiety in the very midst of his wonted surliness. Some little incident, at which nobody else laughed, often sufficed to throw him into a state of wild hilarity, make him stamp his feet, twirl himself round like a top, and hold in his splitting sides.

'What is it that makes you so gay to-night?' La Teuse inquired.

He made no reply, bestriding a chair and galloping round the table on it.

'Well! well! go on making a baby of yourself!' said the old woman; 'and, my gracious, what a big baby you are! If the Lord is looking at you, He must be very well pleased with you!'

The Brother had just slipped off the chair and was lying on the floor, with his legs in the air.

'He does see me, and is pleased to see me as I am. It is His wish that I should be gay. When He wishes me to be merry for a time, He rings a bell in my body, and then I begin to roll about; and all Paradise smiles as it watches me.'

He dragged himself on his back to the wall, and then, supporting himself on the nape of his neck, he hoisted up his body as high as he could and began drumming on the wall with his heels. His cassock slipped down and exposed to view his black breeches, which were patched at the knees with green cloth.

'Look, Monsieur le Cure,' he said, 'you see how high I can reach with my heels. I dare bet that you couldn't do as much. Come! look amused and laugh a little. It is better to drag oneself along on one's back than to think about a hussy as you are always doing. You know what I mean. For my part, when I take to scratching myself I imagine myself to be God's dog, and that's what makes me say that all Paradise looks out of the windows to smile at me. You might just as well laugh too, Monsieur le Cure. It's all done for the saints and you. See! here's a turn-over for Saint Joseph; here's another for Saint Michael, and another for Saint John, and another for Saint Mark, and another for Saint Matthew——'

So he went on, enumerating a whole string of saints, and turning somersaults all round the room.

Abbe Mouret, who had been sitting in perfect silence, with his hands resting on the edge of the table, was at last constrained to smile. As a rule, the Brother's sportiveness only disquieted him. La Teuse, as Archangias rolled within her reach, kicked at him with her foot.

'Come!' she said, 'are we to have our game to-night?'

His only reply was a grunt. Then, upon all fours, he sprang towards La Teuse as if he meant to bite her. But in lieu thereof he spat upon her petticoats.

'Let me alone! will you?' she cried. 'What are you up to now? I begin to think you have gone crazy. What it is that amuses you so much I can't conceive.'

'What makes me gay is my own affair,' he replied, rising to his feet and shaking himself. 'It is not necessary to explain it to you, La Teuse. However, as you want a game of cards, let us have it.'

Then the game began. It was a terrible struggle. The Brother hurled his cards upon the table. Whenever he cried out the windows shook sonorously. La Teuse at last seemed to be winning. She had secured three aces for some time already, and was casting longing eyes at the fourth. But Brother Archangias began to indulge in fresh outbursts of gaiety. He pushed up the table, at the risk of breaking the lamp. He cheated outrageously, and defended himself by means of the most abominable lies, 'Just for a joke,' said he. Then he suddenly began to sing the 'Vespers,' beating time on the palm of his left hand with his cards. When his gaiety reached a climax, and he could find no adequate means of expressing it, he always took to chanting the 'Vespers,' which he repeated for hours at a time. La Teuse, who well knew his habits, cried out to him, amidst the bellowing with which he shook the room:

'Make a little less noise, do! It is quite distracting. You are much too lively to-night.'

But he set to work on the 'Complines.' Abbe Mouret had now seated himself by the window. He appeared to pay no attention to what went on around him, apparently neither hearing nor seeing anything of it. At dinner he had eaten with his ordinary appetite and had even managed to reply to Desiree's everlasting rattle of questions. But now he had given up the struggle, his strength at an end, racked, exhausted as he was by the internal tempest that still raged within him. He even lacked the courage to rise from his seat and go upstairs to his own room. Moreover, he was afraid that if he turned his face towards the lamplight, the tears, which he could no longer keep from his eyes, would be noticed. So he pressed his face close to the window and gazed out into the darkness, growing gradually more drowsy, sinking into a kind of nightmare stupor.

Brother Archangias, still busy at his psalm-singing, winked and nodded in the direction of the dozing priest.

'What's the matter?' asked La Teuse.

The Brother replied by a yet more significant wink.

'Well, what do you mean? Can't you speak? Ah! there's a king. That's capital!—so I take your queen.'

The Brother laid down his cards, bent over the table, and whispered close to La Teuse's face: 'That hussy has been here.'

'I know that well enough,' answered La Teuse. 'I saw her go with mademoiselle into the poultry-yard.'

At this he gave her a terrible look, and shook his fist in her face.

'You saw her, and you let her come in! You ought to have called me, and we would have hung her up by the feet to a nail in your kitchen.'

But at this the old woman lost her temper, and, lowering her voice solely in order that she might not awaken Abbe Mouret, she replied: 'Don't you go talking about hanging people up in my kitchen! I certainly saw her, and I even kept my back turned when she went to join his reverence in the church when the catechising was over. But all that was no business of mine. I had my cooking to attend to! As for the girl herself, I detest her. But if his reverence wishes to see her—why, she is welcome to come whenever she pleases. I'd let her in myself!'

'If you were to do that, La Teuse,' retorted the Brother ragefully, 'I would strangle you, that I would.'

But she laughed at him.

'Don't talk any of your nonsense to me, my man! Don't you know that it is forbidden you to lay your hands upon a woman, just as it's forbidden for a donkey to have anything to do with the Pater Noster? Just you try to strangle me and you'll see what I'll do! But do be quiet now, and let us finish the game. See, here's another king.'

But the Brother, holding up a card, went on growling:

'She must have come by some road that the devil alone knows for me to have missed her to-day. Every afternoon I go and keep guard up yonder by the Paradou. If ever I find them together again, I will acquaint the hussy with a stout dogwood stick which I have cut expressly for her benefit. And I shall keep a watch in the church as well now.'

He played his card, which La Teuse took with a knave. Then he threw himself back in his chair and again burst into one of his loud laughs. He did not seem to be able to work himself up into a genuine rage that evening.

'Well, well,' he grumbled, 'never mind, even if she did see him, she had a smacking fall on her nose. I'll tell you all about it, La Teuse. It was raining, you know. I was standing by the school-door when I caught sight of her coming down from the church. She was walking along quite straight and upright, in her stuck-up fashion, in spite of the pouring rain. But when she got into the road, she tumbled down full length, no doubt because the ground was so slippery. Oh! how I did laugh! How I did laugh! I clapped my hands, too. When she picked herself up again, I saw she was bleeding at the wrist. I shall feel happy over it for a week. I cannot think of her lying there on the ground without feeling the greatest delight.'

Then, turning his attention to the game, he puffed out his cheeks and began to chant the De profundis. When he had got to the end of it, he began it all over again. The game came to a conclusion in the midst of this dirge. It was he who was beaten, but his defeat did not seem to vex him in the least.

When La Teuse had locked the door behind him, after first awakening Abbe Mouret, his voice could still be heard, as he went his way through the black night, singing the last verse of the psalm, Et ipse redimet Israel ex omnibus iniquitatibus ejus, with extraordinary jubilation.

XI

That night Abbe Mouret slept very heavily. When he opened his eyes in the morning, later than usual, his face and hands were wet with tears. He had been weeping all through the night while he slept. He did not say his mass that day. In spite of his long rest, he had not recovered from his excessive weariness of the previous evening, and he remained in his bedroom till noon, sitting in a chair at the foot of his bed. The condition of stupor into which he more and more deeply sank, took all sensation of suffering away from him. He was conscious only of a great void and blank as he sat there overpowered and benumbed. Even to read his breviary cost him a great effort. Its Latin seemed to him a barbarous language, which he would never again be able to pronounce.

Having tossed the book upon his bed he gazed for hours through his open window at the surrounding country. In the far distance he saw the long wall of the Paradou, creeping like a thin white line amongst the gloomy patches of the pine plantations to the crest of the hills. On the left, hidden by one of those plantations, was the breach. He could not see it, but he knew it was there. He remembered every bit of bramble scattered among the stones. On the previous night he would not have thus dared to gaze upon that dreaded scene. But now with impunity he allowed himself to trace the whole line of the wall, as it emerged again and again from the clumps of verdure which here and there concealed it. His blood pulsed none the faster for this scrutiny. Temptation, as though disdaining his present weakness, left him free from attack. Forsaken by the Divine grace, he was incapable of entering upon any struggle, the thought of sin could no longer even impassion him; it was sheer stupor alone that now rendered him willing to accept that which he had the day before so strenuously refused.

At one moment he caught himself talking aloud and saying that, since the breach in the wall was still open, he would go and join Albine at sunset. This decision brought him a slight feeling of worry, but he did not think that he could do otherwise. She was expecting him to go, and she was his wife. When he tried to picture her face, he could only imagine her as very pale and a long way off. Then he felt a little uneasy as to their future manner of life together. It would be difficult for them to remain in the neighbourhood; they would have to go away somewhere, without any one knowing anything about it. And then, when they had managed to conceal themselves, they would need a deal of money in order to live happily and comfortably. He tried a score of times to hit upon some scheme by which they could get away and live together like happy lovers, but he could devise nothing satisfactory. Now that he was no longer wild with passion, the practical side of the situation alarmed him. He found himself, in all his weakness, face to face with a complicated problem with which he was incompetent to grapple.

Where could they get horses for their escape? And if they went away on foot, would they not be stopped and detained as vagabonds? Was he capable of securing any employment by which he could earn bread for his wife? He had never been taught any kind of trade. He was quite ignorant of actual life. He ransacked his memory, and he could remember nothing but strings of prayers, details of ceremonies, and pages of Bouvier's 'Instruction Theologique,' which he had learned by heart at the seminary. He worried too over matters of no real concern. He asked himself whether he would dare to give his arm to his wife in the street. He certainly could not walk with a woman clinging to his arm. He would surely appear so strange and awkward that every one would turn round to stare at him. They would guess that he was a priest and would insult Albine. It would be vain for him to try to obliterate the traces of his priesthood. He would always wear that mournful pallor and carry the odour of incense about with him. And what if he should have children some day? As this thought suddenly occurred to him, he quite started. He felt a strange repugnance at the very idea. He felt sure that he should not care for any children that might be born to him. Suppose there were two of them, a little boy and a little girl. He could never let them get on his knees; it would distress him to feel their hands clutching at his clothes. The thought of the little girl troubled him the most; he could already see womanly tenderness shining in the depths of her big, childish eyes. No! no! he would have no children.

Nevertheless he resolved that he would flee with Albine that evening. But when the evening came, he felt too weary. So he deferred his flight till the next morning. And the next morning he made a fresh pretext for delay. He could not leave his sister alone with La Teuse. He would prepare a letter, directing that she should be taken to her uncle Pascal's. For three days he was ever on the point of writing that letter, and the paper and pen and ink were lying ready on the table in his room. Then, on the third day, he went off, leaving the letter unwritten. He took up his hat quite suddenly and set off for the Paradou in a state of mingled stupor and resignation, as though he were unwillingly performing some compulsory task which he saw no means of avoiding. Albine's image was now effaced from his memory; he no longer beheld her, but he was driven on by old resolves whose lingering influence, though they themselves were dead, still worked upon him in his silence and loneliness.

He took no pains to escape notice when he set foot out of doors. He stopped at the end of the village to talk for a moment to Rosalie. She told him that her baby was suffering from convulsions; but she laughed, as she spoke, with the laugh that was natural to her. Then he struck out through the rocks, and walked straight on towards the breach in the wall. By force of habit he had brought his breviary with him. Finding the way long, he opened the book and read the regulation prayers. When he put it back again under his arm, he had forgotten the Paradou. He went on walking steadily, thinking about a new chasuble that he wished to purchase to replace the old gold-broidered one, which was certainly falling into shreds. For some time past he had been saving up twenty-sous pieces, and he calculated that by the end of seven months he would have got the necessary amount of money together. He had reached the hills when the song of a peasant in the distance reminded him of a canticle which had been familiar to him at the seminary. He tried to recall the first lines of it, but his recollection failed him. It vexed him to find that his memory was so poor. And when, at last, he succeeded in remembering the words, he found a soothing pleasure in humming the verses, which came back to his mind one by one. It was a hymn of homage to Mary. He smiled as though some soft breath from the days of his childhood were playing upon his face. Ah! how happy he had then been! Why shouldn't he be as happy again? He had not grown any bigger, he wanted nothing more than the same old happiness, unruffled peace, a nook in the chapel, where his knees marked his place, a life of seclusion, enlivened by the delightful puerilities of childhood. Little by little he raised his voice, singing the canticle in flutelike tones, when he suddenly became aware of the breach immediately in front of him.

For a moment he seemed surprised. Then, the smile dying from his face, he murmured quietly:

'Albine must be expecting me. The sun is already setting.'

But just as he was about to push some stones aside to make himself a passage, he was startled by a snore. He sprang down again: he had only just missed setting his foot upon the very face of Brother Archangias, who was lying on the ground there sleeping soundly. Slumber had overtaken him while he kept guard over the entrance to the Paradou. He barred the approach to it, lying at full length before its threshold, with arms and legs spread out. His right hand, thrown back behind his head, still clutched his dogwood staff, which he seemed to brandish like a fiery sword. And he snored loudly in the midst of the brambles, his face exposed to the sun, without a quiver on his tanned skin. A swarm of big flies was hovering over his open mouth.

Abbe Mouret looked at him for a moment. He envied the slumber of that dust-wallowing saint. He wished to drive the flies away, but they persistently returned, and clung around the purple lips of the Brother, who was quite unconscious of their presence. Then the Abbe strode over his big body and entered the Paradou.

XII

Albine was seated on a patch of grass a few paces away from the wall. She sprang up as she caught sight of Serge.

'Ah! you have come!' she cried, trembling from head to foot.

'Yes,' he answered calmly, 'I have come.'

She flung herself upon his neck, but she did not kiss him. To her bare arms the beads of his neckband seemed very cold. She scrutinised him, already feeling uneasy, and resuming:

'What is the matter with you? Why don't you kiss my cheeks as you used to do? Oh! if you are ill, I will cure you once again. Now that you are here, all our old happiness will return. There will be no more wretchedness.... See! I am smiling. You must smile, too, Serge.'

But his face remained grave.

'I have been troubled, too,' she went on. 'I am still quite pale, am I not? For a whole week I have been living on that patch of grass, where you found me. I wanted one thing only, to see you coming back through the breach in the wall. At every sound I sprang up and rushed to meet you. But, alas! it was not you I heard. It was only the leaves rustling in the wind. But I was sure that you would come. I should have waited for you for years.'

Then she asked him:

'Do you still love me?'

'Yes,' he answered, 'I love you still.'

They stood looking at each other, feeling rather ill at ease. And deep silence fell between them. Serge, who evinced perfect calmness, did not attempt to break it. Albine twice opened her mouth to speak, but closed it immediately, surprised at the words that rose to her lips. She could summon up nothing but expressions tinged with bitterness. She felt tears welling into her eyes. What could be the matter with her that she did not feel happy now that her love had come back?

'Listen to me,' she said at last. 'We must not stay here. It is that hole that freezes us! Let us go back to our old home. Give me your hand.'

They plunged into the depths of the Paradou. Autumn was fast approaching, and the trees seemed anxious as they stood there with their yellowing crests from which the leaves were falling one by one. The paths were already littered with dead foliage soaked with moisture, which gave out a sound as of sighing beneath one's tread. And away beyond the lawns misty vapour ascended, throwing a mourning veil over the blue distance. And the whole garden was wrapped in silence, broken only by some sorrowful moans that sounded quiveringly.

Serge began to shiver beneath the avenue of tall trees, along which they were walking.

'How cold it is here!' said he in an undertone.

'You are cold indeed,' murmured Albine, sadly. 'My hand is no longer able to warm you. Shall I wrap you round with part of my dress? Come, all our love will now be born afresh.'

She led him to the parterre, the flower-garden. The great thicket-like rosary was still fragrant with perfume, but there was a tinge of bitterness in the scent of the surviving blossoms, and their foliage, which had expanded in wild profusion, lay strewn upon the ground. Serge displayed such unwillingness to enter the tangled jungle, that they lingered on its borders, trying to detect in the distance the paths along which they had passed in the spring-time. Albine recollected every little nook. She pointed to the grotto where the marble woman lay sleeping; to the hanging screens of honeysuckle and clematis; the fields of violets; the fountain that spurted out crimson carnations; the steps down which flowed golden gilliflowers; the ruined colonnade, in the midst of which the lilies were rearing a snowy pavilion. It was there that they had been born again beneath the sunlight. And she recapitulated every detail of that first day together, how they had walked, and how fragrant had been the air beneath the cool shade. Serge seemed to be listening, but he suddenly asked a question which showed that he had not understood her. The slight shiver which made his face turn pale never left him.

Then she led him towards the orchard, but they could not reach it. The stream was too much swollen. Serge no longer thought of taking Albine upon his back and lightly bounding across with her to the other side. Yet there the apple-trees and the pear-trees were still laden with fruit, and the vines, now with scantier foliage, bent beneath the weight of their gleaming clusters, each grape freckled by the sun's caress. Ah! how they had gambolled beneath the appetising shade of those ancient trees! What merry children had they then been! Albine smiled as she thought of how she had clambered up into the cherry-tree that had broken down beneath her. He, Serge, must at least remember what a quantity of plums they had eaten. He only answered by a nod. He already seemed quite weary. The orchard, with its green depths and chaos of mossy trunks, disquieted him and suggested to his mind some dark, dank spot, teeming with snakes and nettles.

Then she led him to the meadow-lands, where he had to take a few steps amongst the grass. It reached to his shoulders now, and seemed to him like a swarm of clinging arms that tried to bind his limbs and pull him down and drown him beneath an endless sea of greenery. He begged Albine to go no further. She was walking on in front, and at first she did not stop; but when she saw how distressed he appeared, she halted and came back and stood beside him. She also was growing gradually more low-spirited, and at last she shuddered like himself. Still she went on talking. With a sweeping gesture she pointed out to him the streams, the rows of willows, the grassy expanse stretching far away towards the horizon. All that had formerly been theirs. For whole days they had lived there. Over yonder, between those three willows by the water's edge, they had played at being lovers. And they would then have been delighted if the grass had been taller than themselves so that they might have lost themselves in its depths, and have been the more secluded, like larks nesting at the bottom of a field of corn. Why, then, did he tremble so to-day, when the tip of his foot just sank into the grass?

Then she led him to the forest. But the huge trees seemed to inspire Serge with still greater dread. He did not know them again, so sternly solemn seemed their bare black trunks. Here, more than anywhere else, amidst those austere columns, through which the light now freely streamed, the past seemed quite dead. The first rains had washed the traces of their footsteps from the sandy paths, the winds had swept every other lingering memorial into the underbrush. But Albine, with grief at her throat, shot out a protesting glance. She could still plainly see their lightest footprints on the sandy gravel, and, as they passed each bush, the warmth with which they had once brushed against it surged to her cheeks. With eyes full of soft entreaty, she still strove to awaken Serge's memory. It was along that path that they had walked in silence, full of emotion, but as yet not daring to confess that they loved one another. It was in that clearing that they had lingered one evening till very late watching the stars, which had rained upon them like golden drops of warmth. Farther, beneath that oak they had exchanged their first kiss. Its fragrance still clung to the tree, and the very moss still remembered it. It was false to say that the forest had become voiceless and bare.

Serge, however, turned away his head, that he might escape the gaze of Albine's eyes, which oppressed him.

Then she led him to the great rocks. There, perhaps, he would no longer shudder with that appearance of debility which so distressed her. At that hour the rocks were still warm with the red glow of the setting sun. They still wore an aspect of tragic passion, with their hot ledges of stone whereon the fleshy plants writhed monstrously. Without speaking a word, without even turning her head, Albine led Serge up the rough ascent, wishing to take him ever higher and higher, far up beyond the springs, till they should emerge into the full light on the summit. They would there see the cedar, beneath whose shade they had first felt the thrill of desire, and there amidst the glowing stones they would assuredly find passion once more. But Serge soon began to stumble pitiably. He could walk no further. He fell a first time on his knees. Albine, by a mighty effort, raised him and for a moment carried him along, but afterwards he fell again, and remained, quite overcome, on the ground. In front of him, beneath him, spread the vast Paradou.

'You have lied!' cried Albine. 'You love me no longer!'

She burst into tears as she stood there by his side, feeling that she could not carry him any higher. There was no sign of anger in her now. She was simply weeping over their dying love. Serge lay dazed and stupefied.

'The garden is all dead. I feel so very cold,' he murmured. But she took his head between her hands, and showed him the Paradou.

'Look at it! Ah! it is your eyes that are dead; your ears and your limbs and your whole body. You have passed by all the scenes of our happiness without seeing them or hearing them or feeling their presence. You have done nothing but slip and stumble, and now you have fallen down here in sheer weariness and boredom.... You love me no more.'

He protested, but in a gentle, quiet fashion. Then, for the first time, she spoke out passionately.

'Be quiet! As if the garden could ever die! It will sleep for the winter, but it will wake up again in May, and will restore to us all the love we have entrusted to its keeping. Our kisses will blossom again amongst the flower-beds, and our vows will bud again with the trees and plants. If you could only see it and understand it, you would know that it throbs with even deeper passion, and loves even more absorbingly at this autumn-time, when it falls asleep in its fruitfulness.... But you love me no more, and so you can no longer understand.'

He raised his eyes to her as if begging her not to be angry. His face was pinched and pale with an expression of childish fear. The sound of her voice made him tremble. He ended by persuading her to rest a little while by his side. They could talk quietly and discuss matters. Then, with the Paradou spreading out in front of them, they began to speak of their love, but without even touching one another's fingers.

'I love you; indeed I love you,' said Serge, in his calm, quiet voice. 'If I did not love you, I should not be here: I should not have come. I am very weary, it is true. I don't know why. I thought I should find that pleasant warmth again, of which the mere memory was so delightful. But I am cold, the garden seems quite black. I cannot see anything of what I left here. But it is not my fault. I am trying hard to be as you would wish me and to please you.'

'You love me no longer!' Albine repeated once more.

'Yes, I do love you. I suffered grievously the other day after I had driven you away.... Oh! I loved you with such passion that, had you come back and thrown yourself in my arms, I should almost have crushed you to death.... And for hours your image remained present before me. When I shut my eyes, you gleamed out with all the brightness of the sun and threw a flame around me.... Then I trampled down every obstacle, and came here.'

He remained silent for a moment, as if in thought. Then he spoke again:

'And now my arms feel as though they were broken. If I tried to clasp you, I could not hold you; I should let you fall.... Wait till this shudder has passed away. Give me your hands, and let me kiss them again. Be gentle and do not look at me with such angry eyes. Help me to find my heart again.'

He spoke with such genuine sadness, such evident longing to begin the past anew, that Albine was touched. For a moment all her wonted gentleness returned to her, and she questioned him anxiously:

'What is the matter with you? What makes you so ill?'

'I do not know. It is as though all my blood had left my veins. Just now, as I was coming here, I felt as if some one had flung a robe of ice around my shoulders, which turned me into stone from head to foot.... I have felt it before, but where I don't remember.'

She interrupted him with a kindly laugh.

'You are a child. You have caught cold, that's all. At any rate, it is not I that you are afraid of, is it? We won't stop in the garden during the winter, like a couple of wild things. We will go wherever you like, to some big town. We can love each other there, amongst all the people, as quietly as amongst the trees. You will see that I can be something else than a wilding, for ever bird's-nesting and tramping about for hours. When I was a little girl, I used to wear embroidered skirts and fine stockings and laces and all kinds of finery. I dare say you never heard of that.'

He was not listening to her. He suddenly gave vent to a little cry, and said: 'Ah! now I recollect!'

She asked him what he meant, but he would not answer her. He had just remembered the feeling he had long ago experienced in the chapel of the seminary. That was the icy robe enwrapping his shoulders and turning him to stone. And then his life as a priest took complete possession of his thoughts. The vague recollections which had haunted him as he walked from Les Artaud to the Paradou became more and more distinct and assumed complete mastery over him. While Albine talked on of the happy life that they would lead together, he heard the tinkling of the sanctuary bell that signalled the elevation of the Host, and he saw the monstrance trace gleaming crosses over the heads of kneeling multitudes.

'And for your sake,' Albine was saying, 'I will put on my broidered skirts again.... I want you to be bright and gay. We will try to find something to make you lively. Perhaps you will love me better when you see me looking beautiful and prettily dressed, like a fine lady. I will wear my comb properly and won't let my hair fall wildly about my neck any more. And I won't roll my sleeves up over my elbows; I will fasten my dress so as to hide my shoulders. I still know how to bow and how to walk along quite properly. Yes, I will make you a nice little wife, as I walk through the streets leaning on your arm.'

'Did you ever go to church when you were a little girl?' he asked her in an undertone, as if, in spite of himself, he were continuing aloud the reverie which prevented him from hearing her. 'I could never pass a church without entering it. As soon as the door closed silently behind me, I felt as though I were in Paradise itself, with the angels whispering stories of love in my ears and the saints caressing me with their breath. Ah! I would have liked to live there for ever, in that absorbing beatitude.'

She looked at him with steady eyes, a passing blaze kindling in her loving glance. Nevertheless, submissive still, she answered:

'I will do as you may fancy. I learned music once. I was quite a clever young lady and was taught all the accomplishments. I will go back to school and start music again. If there is any tune you would like to hear me play, you will only have to tell me, and I will practise it for months and months, so as to play it to you some evening in our own home when we are by ourselves in some snug little room, with the curtains closely drawn. And you will pay me with just one kiss, won't you? A kiss right on the lips, which will awaken all your love again!'

'Yes, yes,' he murmured, answering his own thoughts only; 'my great pleasure at first was to light the candles, prepare the cruets, and carry the missal. Then, afterwards, I was filled with bliss at the approach of God, and felt as though I could die of sheer love. Those are my only recollections. I know of nothing else. When I raise my hand, it is to give a benediction. When my lips protrude it is to kiss the altar. If I look for my heart, I can no longer find it. I have offered it to God, and He has taken it.'

Albine grew very pale and her eyes gleamed like fire. In a quivering voice she resumed:

'I should not like my little girl to leave me. You can send the boy to college, if you wish, but the little girl must always keep with me. I myself will teach her to read. Oh! I shall remember everything, and if indeed there be anything that I find I have forgotten, I will have masters to teach me.... Yes, we will keep our dear little ones always about our knees. You will be happy so, won't you? Speak to me; tell me that you will then feel warm again, and will smile, and feel no regrets for anything you have left behind.'

But Serge continued:

'I have often thought of the stone-saints that have been censed in their niches for centuries past. They must have become quite saturated with incense; and I am like one of them. I have the fragrance of incense in the inmost parts of my being. It is that embalmment that gives me serenity, deathlike tranquillity of body, and the peace which I enjoy in no longer living.... Ah! may nothing ever disturb my quiescence! May I ever remain cold and rigid, with a ceaseless smile on my granite lips, incapable of descending among men! That is my one, my only desire!'

At this Albine sprang to her feet, exasperated, threatening. She shook Serge and cried:

'What are you saying? What is it you are dreaming aloud? Am I not your wife? Haven't you come here to be my husband?'

He recoiled, trembling yet more violently.

'No! Leave me! I am afraid!' he faltered.

'But our life together, our happiness, the children we shall have?'

'No, no; I am afraid.' And he broke out into a supreme cry: 'I cannot! I cannot!'

For a moment Albine remained silent, gazing at the unhappy man who lay shivering at her feet. Her face flared. She opened her arms as if to seize him and strain him to her breast with wild angry passion. But another idea came to her, and she merely took him by the hand and raised him to his feet.

'Come!' said she.

She led him away to that giant tree, to the very spot where their love had reigned supreme. There was the same bliss-inspiring shade, there was the same trunk as of yore, the same branches spreading far around, like sheltering and protecting arms. The tree still towered aloft, kindly, robust, powerful, and fertile. As on the day of their nuptials, languorous warmth, the glimmer of a summer's night fading on the bare shoulder of some fair girl, a sob of love dying away into passionate silence, lingered about the clearing as it lay there bathed in dim green light. And, in the distance, the Paradou, in spite of the first chills of autumn, sighed once more with passion, again becoming love's accomplice. From the parterre, from the orchard, from the meadow-lands, from the forest, from the great rocks, from the spreading heavens, came back a ripple of voluptuous joy. Never had the garden, even on the warmest evenings of spring-time, shown such deep tenderness as now, on this fair autumn evening, when the plants and trees seemed to be bidding one another goodnight ere they sank to sleep. And the scent of ripened germs wafted the intoxication of desire athwart the scanty leaves.

'Do you hear? Do you hear?' faltered Albine in Serge's ear, when she had let him slip upon the grass at the foot of the tree.

Serge was weeping.

'You see that the Paradou is not dead,' she added. 'It is crying out to us to love each other. It still desires our union. Oh, do remember! Clasp me to your heart!'

Serge still wept.

Albine said nothing more. She flung her arms around him; she pressed her warm lips to his corpse-like face; but tears were still his only answer.

Then, after a long silence, Albine spoke. She stood erect, full of contempt and determination.

'Away with you! Go!' she said, in a low voice.

Serge rose with difficulty. He picked up his breviary, which had fallen upon the grass. And he walked away.

'Away with you! Go!' repeated Albine, in louder tones, as she followed and drove him before her.

Thus she urged him on from bush to bush till she had driven him back to the breach in the wall, in the midst of the stern-looking trees. And there, as she saw Serge hesitate, with lowered head she cried out violently:

'Away with you Go!'

And slowly she herself went back into the Paradou, without even turning her head. Night was fast falling, and the garden was but a huge bier of shadows.

XIII

Brother Archangias, aroused from his slumber, stood erect in the breach, striking the stones with his stick and swearing abominably.

'May the devil break their legs for them! May he drag them to hell by their feet, with their noses trailing in their abomination!'

But when he saw Albine driving away the priest, he stopped for a moment in surprise. Then he struck the stones yet more vigorously, and burst into a roar of laughter.

'Good-bye, you hussy! A pleasant journey to you! Go back to your mates the wolves! A priest is no fit companion for such as you.'

Then, looking at Abbe Mouret, he growled:

'I knew you were in there. I saw that the stones had been disturbed.... Listen to me, Monsieur le Cure. Your sin has made me your superior, and God tells you, through my mouth, that hell has no torments severe enough for a priest who lets himself succumb to the lusts of the flesh. If He were to pardon you now, He would be too indulgent, it would be contrary to His own justice.'

They slowly walked down the hill towards Les Artaud. The priest had not opened his lips; but gradually he raised his head erect: he was no longer trembling. As in the distance he caught sight of the Solitaire looming blackly against the purplish sky, and the ruddy glow of the tiles on the church, a faint smile came to his lips, while to his calm eyes there rose an expression of perfect serenity.

Meantime the Brother was every now and then giving a vicious kick at the stones that came in his way. Presently he turned to his companion:

'Is it all over this time?' he asked. 'When I was your age I was possessed too. A demon was ever gnawing at me. But, after a time, he grew weary of it, and took himself off. Now that he has gone I live quietly enough.... Oh! I knew very well that you would go. For three weeks past I have been keeping watch upon you. I used to look into the garden through the breach in the wall. I should have liked to cut the trees down. I have often hurled stones at them; it was delightful to break the branches. Tell me, now, is it so very nice to be there?'

He made Abbe Mouret stop in the middle of the road, and glared at him with a terrible expression of jealousy. The thought of the priest's life in the Paradou tortured him. But the Abbe kept perfect silence, so Archangias set off again, jeering as he went. Then, in a louder voice, he said:

'You see, when a priest behaves as you have done, he scandalises every other priest. I myself felt sullied by your conduct. However, you are now behaving more sensibly. There is no need for you to make any confession. I know what has happened well enough. Heaven has broken your back for you, as it has done for so many others. So much the better! So much the better!'

He clapped his hands triumphantly. But Abbe Mouret, immersed in deep reverie, with a smile spreading over his whole face, did not even hear him. When the Brother quitted him at the parsonage door, he went round and entered the church. It was grey and gloomy, as on that terrible rainy evening when temptation had racked him so violently. And it still remained poverty-stricken and meditative, bare of all that gleaming gold and sighing passion that had seemed to him to sweep in from the countryside. It preserved solemn silence. But a breath of mercy seemed to fill it.

Kneeling before the great Christ and bursting into tears, which he let flow down his cheeks as though they were so many blessings, the priest murmured:

'O God, it is not true that Thou art pitiless. I know it, I feel it: Thou hast already pardoned me. I feel it in the outpouring of Thy grace, which, for hours now, has been flowing through me in a sweet stream, bringing me back, slowly but surely, perfect peace and spiritual health. O God, it was at the very moment when I was about to forsake Thee that Thou didst protect me most effectually. Thou didst hide Thyself from me, the better to rescue me from evil. Thou didst allow my flesh to run its course, that I might be convinced of its nothingness. And now, O God, I see that Thou hast for ever marked me with Thy seal, that awful seal, pregnant with blessings, which sets a man apart from other men, and whose mark is so ineffaceable that, sooner or later, it makes itself manifest even upon those who sin. Thou hast broken me with sin and temptation. Thou hast ravaged me with Thy flames. Thou hast willed that there should be nought left of me save ruins wherein Thou mightest safely descend. I am an empty tabernacle wherein Thou may'st dwell. Blessed art Thou, O God!'

He prostrated himself and continued stammering in the dust. The church triumphed. It remained firm and unshaken over the priest's head, with its altars and its confessional, its pulpit, its crosses, and its holy images. The world had ceased to exist. Temptation was extinguished like a fire that was henceforth unnecessary for the Abbe's purification. He was entering into supernatural peace. And he raised this supreme cry:

'To the exclusion of life and its creatures and of everything that be in it, I belong to Thee, O God; to Thee, Thee alone, through all eternity!'

XIV

At that moment Albine was still wandering about the Paradou with all the mute agony of a wounded animal. She had ceased to weep. Her face was very white and a deep crease showed upon her brow. Why did she have to suffer that deathlike agony? Of what fault had she been guilty, that the garden no longer kept the promises it had held out to her since her childhood's days? She questioned herself as she walked along, never heeding the avenues through which the gloom was slowly stealing. She had always obeyed the voices of the trees. She could not remember having injured a single flower. She had ever been the beloved daughter of the greenery, hearkening to it submissively, yielding to it with full belief in the happiness which it promised to her. And when, on that supreme day, the Paradou had cried to her to cast herself beneath the giant-tree, she had done so in compliance with its voice. If she then had nothing to reproach herself with, it must be the garden which had betrayed her; the garden which was torturing her for the mere sake of seeing her suffer.

She halted and looked around her. The great gloomy masses of foliage preserved deep silence. The paths were blocked with black walls of darkness. The distant lawns were lulling to sleep the breezes that kissed them. And she thrust out her hands with a gesture of hopelessness and raised a cry of protest. It could not all end thus. But her voice choked beneath the silent trees. Thrice did she implore the Paradou to answer her, but never an explanation fell from its lofty branches, not a leaf seemed to be moved with pity for her. Then she resumed her weary wandering, and felt that she was entering into the fatal sternness of winter. Now that she had ceased to rebelliously question the earth, she caught sound of a gentle murmur speeding along the ground. It was the farewell of the plants, wishing one another a happy death. To have drunk in the sunshine for a whole season, to have lived ever blossoming, to have breathed continual perfume, and then, at the first blast, to depart, with the hope of springing up again elsewhere, was not that sufficiently long and full a life which obstinate craving for further existence would mar? Ah! how sweet death must be; how sweet to have an endless night before one, wherein to dream of the short days of life and to recall eternally its fugitive joys!

She stayed her steps once more; but she no longer protested as she stood there amidst the deep stillness of the Paradou. She now believed that she understood everything. The garden doubtless had death in store for her as a supreme culminating happiness. It was to death that it had all along been leading her in its tender fashion. After love, there could be nought but death. And never had the garden loved her so much as it did now; she had shown herself ungrateful in accusing it, for all the time she had remained its best beloved child. The motionless boughs, the paths blocked up with darkness, the lawns where the breezes fell asleep, had only become mute in order that they might lure her on to taste the joys of long silence. They wished her to be with them in their winter rest, they dreamt of carrying her off, swathed in their dry leaves with her eyes frozen like the waters of the springs, her limbs stiffened like the bare branches, and her blood sleeping the sleep of the sap. And, yes, she would live their life to the very end, and die their death. Perhaps they had already willed that she should spring up next summer as a rose in the flower-garden, or a pale willow in the meadow-lands, or a tender birch in the forest. Yes, it was the great law of life; she was about to die.

Then, for the last time, she resumed her walk through the Paradou in quest of death. What fragrant plant might need her sweet-scented tresses to increase the perfume of its leaves? What flower might wish the gift of her satinlike skin, the snowy whiteness of her arms, the tender pink of her bosom? To what weakly tree should she offer her young blood? She would have liked to be of service to the weeds vegetating beside the paths, to slay herself there so that from her flesh some huge greenery might spring, lofty and sapful, laden with birds at May-time, and passionately caressed by the sun. But for a long while the Paradou still maintained silence as if it had not yet made up its mind to confide to her in what last kiss it would spirit away her life. She had to wander all over it again, seeking, pilgrim-like, for her favourite spots. Night was now more swiftly approaching, and it seemed to her as if she were being gradually sucked into the earth. She climbed to the great rocks and questioned them, asking whether it was upon their stony beds that she must breathe her last breath. She crossed the forest with lingering steps, hoping that some oak would topple down and bury her beneath the majesty of its fall. She skirted the streams that flowed through the meadows, bending down at almost every step she took so as to peep into the depths and see whether a couch had not been prepared for her amongst the water lilies. But nowhere did Death call her; nowhere did he offer her his cold hands. Yet, she was not mistaken. It was, indeed, the Paradou that was about to teach her to die, as, indeed, it had taught her to love. She again began to scour the bushes, more eagerly even than on those warm mornings of the past when she had gone searching for love. And, suddenly, just as she was reaching the parterre, she came upon death, amidst all the evening fragrance. She ran forward, breaking out into a rapturous laugh. She was to die amongst the flowers.

First she hastened to the thicket-like rosary. There, in the last flickering of the gloaming, she searched the beds and gathered all the roses that hung languishing at the approach of winter. She plucked them from down below, quite heedless of their thorns; she plucked them in front of her, with both hands; she plucked them from above, rising upon tip-toes and pulling down the boughs. So eager was she, so desperate was her haste, that she even broke the branches, she, who had ever shown herself tender to the tiniest blades of grass. Soon her arms were full of roses, she tottered beneath her burden of flowers. And having quite stripped the rose trees, carrying away even the fallen petals, she turned her steps to the pavilion; and when she had let her load of blossoms slip upon the floor of the room with the blue ceiling, she again went down to the garden.

This time she sought the violets. She made huge bunches of them, which she pressed one by one against her breast. Then she sought the carnations, plucking them all, even to the buds; massing them together in big sheaves of white blossoms that suggested bowls of milk, and big sheaves of the red ones, that seemed like bowls of blood. Then, too, she sought the stocks, the patches of mirabilis, the heliotropes and the lilies. She tore the last blossoming stocks off by the handful, pitilessly crumpling their satin ruches; she devastated the beds of mirabilis, whose flowers were scarcely opening to the evening air; she mowed down the field of heliotropes, piling her harvest of blooms into a heap; and she thrust bundles of lilies under her arms like handles of reeds. When she was again laden with as much as she could carry, she returned to the pavilion to cast the violets, the carnations, the lilies, the stocks, the heliotrope, and the mirabilis by the side of the roses. And then, without stopping to draw breath, she went down yet again.

This time she repaired to that gloomy corner which seemed like the graveyard of the flower-garden. A warm autumn had there brought on a second crop of spring flowers. She raided the borders of tuberoses and hyacinths; going down upon her knees, and gathering her harvest with all a miser's care, lest she should miss a single blossom. The tuberoses seemed to her to be extremely precious flowers, which would distil drops of gold and wealth and wondrous sweetness. The hyacinths, beaded with pearly blooms, were like necklets, whose every pearl would pour forth joys unknown to man. And although she almost buried herself beneath the mass of tuberoses and hyacinths which she plucked, she next stripped a field of poppies, and even found means to crop an expanse of marigolds farther on. All these she heaped over the tuberoses and hyacinths, and then ran back to the room with the blue ceiling, taking the greatest care as she went that the breeze should not rob her of a single pistil. And once more did she come downstairs.

But what was she to gather now? She had stripped the parterre bare. As she rose upon the tips of her shoes in the dim gloom, she could only see the garden lying there naked and dead, deprived of the tender eyes of its roses, the crimson smile of its carnations, and the perfumed locks of its heliotropes. Nevertheless, she could not return with empty arms. So she laid hands upon the herbs and leafy plants. She crawled over the ground, as though she would have carried off the very soil itself in a clutch of supreme passion. She filled her skirt with a harvest of aromatic plants, southernwood, mint, verbenas. She came across a border of balm, and left not a leaf of it unplucked. She even broke off two big fennels which she threw over her shoulders like a couple of trees. Had she been able, she would have carried all the greenery of the garden away with her between her teeth. When she reached the threshold of the pavilion, she turned round and gave a last look at the Paradou. It was quite dark now. The night had fully come and cast a black veil over everything. Then for the last time she went up the stairs, never more to step down them.

The spacious room was quickly decked. She had placed a lighted lamp upon the table. She sorted out the flowers heaped upon the floor and arranged them in big bunches, which she distributed about the room. First she placed some lilies behind the lamp on the table, forming with them a lofty lacelike screen which softened the light with its snowy purity. Then she threw handfuls of carnations and stocks over the old sofa, which was already strewn with red bouquets that had faded a century ago, till all these were hidden, and the sofa looked like a huge bed of stocks bristling with carnations. Next she placed the four armchairs in front of the alcove. On the first one she piled marigolds, on the second poppies, on the third mirabilis, and on the fourth heliotrope. The chairs were completely buried in bloom, with nothing but the tips of their arms visible. At last she thought of the bed. She pushed a little table near the head of it, and reared thereon a huge pile of violets. Then she covered the whole bed with the hyacinths and tuberoses she had plucked. They were so abundant that they formed a thick couch overflowing all around, so that the bed now looked like one colossal bloom.

The roses still remained. And these she scattered chancewise all over the room, without even looking to see where they fell. Some of them dropped upon the table, the sofa, and the chairs; and a corner of the bed was inundated with them. For some minutes there was a rain of roses, a real downpour of heavy blossoms, which settled in flowery pools in the hollows of the floor. But as the heap seemed scarcely diminished, she finished by weaving garlands of roses which she hung upon the walls. She twined wreaths around the necks and arms and waists of the plaster cupids that sported over the alcove. The blue ceiling, the oval panels, edged with flesh-coloured ribbon, the voluptuous paintings, preyed upon by time, were all hung with a mantle, a drapery of roses. The big room was fully decked at last. Now she could die there.

For a moment she remained standing, glancing around her. She was looking to see if death was there. And she gathered up the aromatic greenery, the southernwood, the mint, the verbenas, the balm, and the fennel. She broke them and twisted them and made wedges of them with which to stop up every little chink and cranny about the windows and the door. Then she drew the white coarsely sewn calico curtains and, without even a sigh, laid herself upon the bed, on all the florescence of hyacinths and tuberoses.

And then a final rapture was granted her. With her eyes wide open she smiled at the room. Ah! how she had loved there! And how happily she was there going to die! At that supreme moment the plaster cupids suggested nothing impure to her; the amorous paintings disturbed her no more. She was conscious of nothing beneath that blue ceiling save the intoxicating perfume of the flowers. And it seemed to her as if this perfume was none other than the old love-fragrance which had always warmed the room, now increased a hundredfold, till it had become so strong and penetrating that it would surely suffocate her. Perchance it was the breath of the lady who had died there a century ago. In perfect stillness, with her hands clasped over her heart, she continued smiling, while she listened to the whispers of the perfumes in her buzzing head. They were singing to her a soft strange melody of fragrance, which slowly and very gently lulled her to sleep.

At first there was a prelude, bright and childlike; her hands, that had just now twisted and twined the aromatic greenery, exhaled the pungency of crushed herbage, and recalled her old girlish ramblings through the wildness of the Paradou. Then there came a flutelike song, a song of short musky notes, rising from the violets that lay upon the table near the head of the bed; and this flutelike strain, trilling melodiously to the soft accompaniment of the lilies on the other table, sang to her of the first joys of love, its first confession, and first kiss beneath the trees of the forest. But she began to stifle as passion drew nigh with the clove-like breath of the carnations, which burst upon her in brazen notes that seemed to drown all others. She thought that death was nigh when the poppies and the marigolds broke into a wailing strain, which recalled the torment of desire. But suddenly all grew quieter; she felt that she could breathe more freely; she glided into greater serenity, lulled by a descending scale that came from the throats of the stocks, and died away amidst a delightful hymn from the heliotropes, which, with their vanilla-like breath, proclaimed the approach of nuptial bliss. Here and there the mirabilis gently trilled. Then came a hush. And afterwards the roses languidly made their entry. Their voices streamed from the ceiling, like the strains of a distant choir. It was a chorus of great breadth, to which she at first listened with a slight quiver. Then the volume of the strain increased, and soon her whole frame vibrated with the mighty sounds that burst in waves around her. The nuptials were at hand, the trumpet blasts of the roses announced them. She pressed her hands more closely to her heart as she lay there panting, gasping, dying. When she opened her lips for the kiss which was to stifle her, the hyacinths and tuberoses shot out their perfume and enveloped her with so deep, so great a sigh that the chorus of the roses could be heard no more.

And then, amidst the final gasp of the flowers, Albine died.

XV

About three o'clock the next afternoon, La Teuse and Brother Archangias, who were chatting on the parsonage-steps, saw Doctor Pascal's gig come at full gallop through the village. The whip was being vigorously brandished from beneath the lowered hood.

'Where can he be off to at that rate?' murmured the old servant. 'He will break his neck.'

The gig had just reached the rising ground on which the church was built. Suddenly, the horse reared and stopped, and the doctor's head, with its long white hair all dishevelled appeared from under the hood.

'Is Serge there?' he cried, in a voice full of indignant excitement.

La Teuse had stepped to the edge of the hill. 'Monsieur le Cure is in his room,' she said. 'He must be reading his breviary. Do you want to speak to him? Shall I call him?'

Uncle Pascal, who seemed almost distracted, made an angry gesture with his whip hand. Bending still further forward, at the risk of falling out, he replied:

'Ah! he's reading his breviary, is he? No! no! don't call him. I should strangle him, and that would do no good. I wanted to tell him that Albine was dead. Dead! do you hear me? Tell him, from me, that she is dead!'

And he drove off, lashing his horse so fiercely that it almost bolted. But, twenty paces away, he pulled up again, and once more stretching out his head, cried loudly:

'Tell him, too, from me, that she was enceinte! It will please him to know that.'

Then the gig rolled on wildly again, jolting dangerously as it ascended the stony hill that led to the Paradou. La Teuse was quite dumbfounded. But Brother Archangias sniggered and looked at her with savage delight glittering in his eyes. She noticed this at last, and thrust him away from her, almost making him fall down the steps.

'Be off with you!' she stammered, full of anger, seeking to relieve her feelings by abusing him. 'I shall grow to hate you. Is it possible to rejoice at any one's death? I wasn't fond of the girl, myself; but it is very sad to die at her age. Be off with you, and don't go on sniggering like that, or I will throw my scissors in your face!'

It was only about one o'clock that a peasant, who had gone to Plassans to sell vegetables, had told Doctor Pascal of Albine's death, and had added that Jeanbernat wished to see him. The doctor now was feeling a little relieved by what he had just shouted as he passed the parsonage. He had gone out of his way expressly to give himself that satisfaction. He reproached himself for the death of the girl as for a crime in which he had participated. All along the road he had never ceased overwhelming himself with insults, and though he wiped the tears from his eyes that he might see where to guide his horse, he ever angrily drove his gig over heaps of stones, as if hoping that he would overturn himself and break one of his limbs. However, when he reached the long lane that skirted the endless wall of the park, a glimmer of hope broke upon him. Perhaps Albine was only in a dead faint. The peasant had told him that she had suffocated herself with flowers. Ah! if he could only get there in time, if he could only save her! And he lashed his horse ferociously as though he were lashing himself.

It was a lovely day. The pavilion was all bathed in sunlight, just as it had been in the fair spring-time. But the leaves of the ivy which mounted to the roof were spotted and patched with rust, and bees no longer buzzed round the tall gilliflowers. Doctor Pascal hastily tethered his horse and pushed open the gate of the little garden. All around still prevailed that perfect silence amidst which Jeanbernat had been wont to smoke his pipe; but, to-day, the old man was no longer seated on his bench watching his lettuces.

'Jeanbernat!' called the doctor.

No one answered. Then, on entering the vestibule, he saw something that he had never seen before. At the end of the passage, below the dark staircase, was a door opening into the Paradou, and he could see the vast garden spreading there beneath the pale sunlight, with all its autumn melancholy, its sere and yellow foliage. The doctor hurried through the doorway and took a few steps over the damp grass.

'Ah! it is you, doctor!' said Jeanbernat in a calm voice.

The old man was digging a hole at the foot of a mulberry-tree. He had straightened his tall figure on hearing the approach of footsteps. But he promptly betook himself to his task again, throwing out at each effort a huge mass of rich soil.

'What are you doing there?' asked Doctor Pascal.

Jeanbernat straightened himself again and wiped the sweat off his face with the sleeve of his jacket. 'I am digging a hole,' he answered simply. 'She always loved the garden, and it will please her to sleep here.'

The doctor nearly choked with emotion. For a moment he stood by the edge of the grave, incapable of speaking, but watching Jeanbernat as the other sturdily dug on.

'Where is she?' he asked at last.

'Up there, in her room. I left her on the bed. I should like you to go and listen to her heart before she is put away in here. I listened myself, but I couldn't hear anything at all.'

The doctor went upstairs. The room had not been disturbed. Only a window had been opened. There the withered flowers, stifled by their own perfumes, exhaled but the faint odour of dead beauty. Within the alcove, however, there still hung an asphyxiating warmth, which seemed to trickle into the room and gradually disperse in tiny puffs. Albine, snowy-pale, with her hands upon her heart and a smile playing over her face, lay sleeping on her couch of hyacinths and tuberoses. And she was quite happy, since she was quite dead. Standing by the bedside, the doctor gazed at her for a long time, with a keen expression such as comes into the eyes of scientists who attempt to work resurrections. But he did not even disturb her clasped hands. He kissed her brow, on the spot where her latent maternity had already set a slight shadow. Below, in the garden, Jeanbernat was still driving his spade into the ground in heavy, regular fashion.

A quarter of an hour later, however, the old man came upstairs. He had completed his work. He found the doctor seated by the bedside, buried in such a deep reverie that he did not seem conscious of the heavy tears that were trickling down his cheeks.

The two men only glanced at each other. Then, after an interval of silence, Jeanbernat slowly said:

'Well, was I not right? There is nothing, nothing, nothing. It is all mere nonsense.'

He remained standing and began to pick up the roses that had fallen from the bed, throwing them, one by one, upon Albine's skirts.

'The flowers,' he said, 'live only for a day, while the rough nettles, like me, wear out the very stones amidst which they spring.... Now it's all over; I can kick the bucket; I am nearly distracted. My last ray of sunlight has been snuffed out. It's all nonsense, as I said before.'

He threw himself upon one of the chairs in his turn. He did not shed a tear; he bore himself with rigid despair, like some automaton whose mechanism is broken. Mechanically he reached out his hand and took a book that lay on the little table strewn with violets. It was one of the books stored away in the loft, an odd volume of Holbach,* which he had been reading since the morning, while watching by Albine's body. As the doctor still remained silent, buried in distressful thought, he began to turn its pages over. But a sadden idea occurred to him.

* Doubtless Holbach's now forgotten Catechism of Nature, into
which M. Zola himself may well have peeped whilst writing this
story.—ED.

'If you will help me,' he said to the doctor, 'we will carry her downstairs, and bury her with all her flowers.'

Uncle Pascal shuddered. Then he explained to the old man that it was not allowed for one to keep the dead in that fashion.

'What! it isn't allowed!' cried Jeanbernat. 'Well, then, I will allow it myself! Doesn't she belong to me? Isn't she mine? Do you think I am going to let the priests walk off with her? Let them try, if they want to get a shot from my gun!'

He sprang to his feet and waved his book about with a terrible gesture. But the doctor caught hold of his hands and clasped them within his own, beseeching him to be calm. And for a long time he talked to him, saying all that he had upon his mind. He blamed himself, made fragmentary confessions of his fault, and vaguely hinted at those who had killed Albine.

'Listen,' he said in conclusion, 'she is yours no longer; you must give her up.'

But Jeanbernat shook his head, and again waved his hand in token of refusal. However, his obstinate resolution was shaken; and at last he said:

'Well, well, let them take her, and may she break their arms for them! I only wish that she could rise up out of the ground and kill them all with fright.... By the way. I have a little business to settle over there. I will go to-morrow.... Good-bye, then, doctor. The hole will do for me.'

And, when the doctor had left, he again sat down by the dead girl's side, and gravely resumed the perusal of his book.

XVI

That morning there was great commotion in the yard at the parsonage. The Artaud butcher had just slaughtered Matthew, the pig, in the shed. Desiree, quite enthusiastic about it all, had held Matthew's feet, while he was being bled, kissing him on the back that he might feel the pain of the knife less, and telling him that it was absolutely necessary that he should be killed, now that he had got so fat. No one could cut off a goose's neck with a single stroke of the hatchet more unconcernedly than she could, or gash open a fowl's throat with a pair of scissors. However much she loved her charges, she looked upon their slaughter with great equanimity. It was quite necessary, she would say. It made room for the young ones who were growing up. And that morning she was very gay.

'Mademoiselle,' grumbled La Teuse every minute, 'you will end by making yourself ill. There is no sense in working yourself up into such a state, just because a pig has been slaughtered. You are as red as if you had been dancing a whole night.'

But Desiree only clapped her hands and turned away and bustled about again. La Teuse, for her part, complained that her legs were sinking under her. Since six o'clock in the morning her big carcass had been perpetually rolling between the kitchen and the yard, for she had black puddings to make. It was she who had whisked the blood in two large earthenware pans, and she had thought that she would never get finished, since mademoiselle was for ever calling her away for mere nothings.

It must be admitted that, at the very moment when the butcher was bleeding Matthew, Desiree had been thrilled with wild excitement, for Lisa, the cow, was about to calve. And the girl's delight at this had quite turned her head.

'One goes and another comes!' she cried, skipping and twirling round. 'Come here, La Teuse! come here!'

It was eleven o'clock. Every now and then the sound of chanting was wafted from the church. A confused murmur of doleful voices, a muttering of prayers could be heard amidst scraps of Latin pronounced in louder and clearer tones.

'Come! oh, do come!' repeated Desiree for the twentieth time.

'I must go and toll the bell, now,' muttered the old servant. 'I shall never get finished really. What is it that you want now, mademoiselle?'

But she did not wait for an answer. She threw herself upon a swarm of fowls, who were greedily drinking the blood from the pans. And having angrily kicked them away, and then covered up the pans, she called to Desiree:

'It would be a great deal better if, instead of tormenting me, you only came to look after these wretched birds. If you let them do as they like there will be no black-pudding for you. Do you hear?'

Desiree only laughed. What of it, if the fowls did drink a few drops of the blood? It would fatten them. Then she again tried to drag La Teuse off to the cow, but the old servant refused to go.

'I must go and toll the bell. The procession will be coming out of church directly. You know that quite well.'

At this moment the voices in the church rose yet more loudly, and a sound of steps could be distinctly heard.

'No! no!' insisted Desiree, dragging La Teuse towards the stable. 'Just come and look at her, and tell me what ought to be done.'

La Teuse shrugged her shoulders. All that the cow wanted was to be left alone and not bothered. Then she set off towards the vestry, but, as she passed the shed, she raised a fresh cry:

'There! there!' she shrieked, shaking her fist. 'Ah! the little wretch!'

Matthew was lying at full length on his back, with his feet in the air, under the shed, waiting to be singed.* The gash which the knife had made in his neck was still quite fresh, and was beaded with drops of blood. And a little white hen was very delicately picking off these drops of blood one by one.

* In some parts of France pigs, when killed, are singed, not scalded,
as is, I think, the usual practice in England.—ED.

'Why, of course,' quietly remarked Desiree, 'she's regaling herself.' And the girl stooped and patted the pig's plump belly, saying: 'Eh! my fat fellow, you have stolen their food too often to grudge them a wee bit of your neck now!'

La Teuse hastily doffed her apron and threw it round Matthew's neck. Then she hurried away and disappeared within the church. The great door had just creaked on its rusty hinges, and a burst of chanting rose in the open air amidst the quiet sunshine. Suddenly the bell began to toll with slow and regular strokes. Desiree, who had remained kneeling beside the pig patting his belly, raised her head to listen, while still continuing to smile. When she saw that she was alone, having glanced cautiously around, she glided away into the cow's stable and closed the door behind her.

The little iron gate of the graveyard, which had been opened quite wide to let the body pass, hung against the wall, half torn from its hinges. The sunshine slept upon the herbage of the empty expanse, into which the funeral procession passed, chanting the last verse of the Miserere. Then silence fell.

'Requiem oeternam dona ei, Domine,' resumed Abbe Mouret, in solemn tones.

'Et lux perpetua luceat ei,' Brother Archangias bellowed.

At the head walked Vincent, wearing a surplice and bearing the cross, a large copper cross, half the silver plating of which had come off. He lifted it aloft with both his hands. Then followed Abbe Mouret, looking very pale in his black chasuble, but with his head erect, and without a quiver on his lips as he chanted the office, gazing into the distance with fixed eyes. The flame of the lighted candle which he was carrying scarcely showed in the daylight. And behind him, almost touching him, came Albine's coffin, borne by four peasants on a sort of litter, painted black. The coffin was clumsily covered with too short a pall, and at the lower end of it the fresh deal of which it was made could be seen, with the heads of the nails sparkling with a steely glitter. Upon the pall lay flowers: handfuls of white roses, hyacinths, and tuberoses, taken from the dead girl's very bed.

'Just be careful!' cried Brother Archangias to the peasants, as they slightly tilted the litter in order to get it through the gateway. 'You will be upsetting everything on to the ground!'

He kept the coffin in its place with one of his fat hands. With the other—as there was no second clerk—he was carrying the holy-water vessel, and he likewise represented the choirman, the rural guard, who had been unable to come.

'Come in, too, you others,' he exclaimed, turning round.

There was a second funeral, that of Rosalie's baby, who had died the previous day from an attack of convulsions. The mother, the father, old mother Brichet, Catherine, and two big girls, La Rousse and Lisa, were there. The two last were carrying the baby's coffin, one supporting each end.

Suddenly all voices were hushed again, and there came another interval whilst the bell continued tolling in slow and desolate accents. The funeral procession crossed the entire burial-ground, going towards the corner which was formed by the church and the wall of Desiree's poultry-yard. Swarms of grasshoppers leaped away at the approaching footsteps, and lizards hurried into their holes. A heavy warmth hung over this corner of the loamy cemetery. The crackling of the dry grass beneath the tramp of the mourners sounded like choking sobs.

'There! stop where you are!' cried the Brother, barring the way before the two big girls who were carrying the baby's coffin. 'Wait for your turn. Don't be getting in our legs here.'

The two girls laid the baby on the ground. Rosalie, Fortune, and old mother Brichet were lingering in the middle of the graveyard, while Catherine slyly followed Brother Archangias. Albine's grave was on the left hand of Abbe Caffin's tomb, whose white stone seemed in the sunshine to be flecked with silvery spangles. The deep cavity, freshly dug that morning, yawned amidst thick tufts of grass. Big weeds, almost uprooted, drooped over the edges, and a fallen flower lay at the bottom, staining the dark soil with its crimson petals. When Abbe Mouret came forward, the soft earth crumbled and gave way beneath his feet; he was obliged to step back to keep himself from slipping into the grave.

'Ego sum—' he began in a full voice, which rose above the mournful tolling of the bell.

During the anthem, those who were present instinctively cast furtive glances towards the bottom of the empty grave. Vincent, who had planted the cross at the foot of the cavity opposite the priest, pushed the loose earth with his foot, and amused himself by watching it fall. This drew a laugh from Catherine, who was leaning forward from behind him to get a better view. The peasants had set the litter on the grass and were stretching their arms, while Brother Archangias prepared the sprinkler.

'Come here, Voriau!' called Fortune.

The big black dog, who had gone to sniff at the coffin, came back sulkily.

'Why has the dog been brought?' exclaimed Rosalie.

'Oh! he followed us,' said Lisa, smiling quietly.

They were all chatting together in subdued tones round the baby's coffin. The father and mother occasionally forgot all about it, but on catching sight of it again, lying between them at their feet, they relapsed into silence.

'And so old Bambousse wouldn't come?' said La Rousse. Mother Brichet raised her eyes to heaven.

'He threatened to break everything to pieces yesterday when the little one died,' said she. 'No, no, I must say that he is not a good man. Didn't he nearly strangle me, crying out that he had been robbed, and that he would have given one of his cornfields for the little one to have died three days before the wedding?'

'One can never tell what will happen,' remarked Fortune with a knowing look.

'What's the good of the old man putting himself out about it? We are married, all the same, now,' added Rosalie.

Then they exchanged a smile across the little coffin while Lisa and La Rousse nudged each other with their elbows. But afterwards they all became very serious again. Fortune picked up a clod of earth to throw at Voriau, who was now prowling about amongst the old tombstones.

'Ah! they've nearly finished over there, now!' La Rousse whispered very softly.

Abbe Mouret was just concluding the De profundis in front of Albine's grave. Then, with slow steps, he approached the coffin, drew himself up erect, and gazed at it for a moment without a quiver in his glance. He looked taller, his face shone with a serenity that seemed to transfigure him. He stooped and picked up a handful of earth, and scattered it over the coffin crosswise. Then, in a voice so steady and clear that not a syllable was lost, he said:

'Revertitur in terrain suam unde erat, et spiritus redit ad Deum qui dedit illum.'

A shudder ran through those who were present. Lisa seemed to reflect for a moment, and then remarked with an expression of worry: 'It is not very cheerful, eh, when one thinks that one's own turn will come some day or other.'

But Brother Archangias had now handed the sprinkler to the priest, who took it and shook it several times over the corpse.

'Requiescat in pace,' he murmured.

'Amen,' responded Vincent and the Brother together, in tones so respectively shrill and deep that Catherine had to cram her fist into her mouth to keep from laughing.

'No, indeed, it is certainly not cheerful,' continued Lisa. 'There really was nobody at all at that funeral. The graveyard would be quite empty without us.'

'I've heard say that she killed herself,' said old mother Brichet.

'Yes, I know,' interrupted La Rousse. 'The Brother didn't want to let her be buried amongst Christians, but Monsieur le Cure said that eternity was for everybody. I was there. But all the same the Philosopher might have come.'

At that very moment Rosalie reduced them all to silence by murmuring: 'See! there he is, the Philosopher.'

Jeanbernat was, indeed, just entering the graveyard. He walked straight to the group that stood around Albine's grave; and he stepped along with so lithe, so springy a gait, that none of them heard him coming. When he was close to them, he remained for a moment behind Brother Archangias and seemed to fix his eyes, for an instant, on the nape of the Brother's neck. Then, just as the Abbe Mouret was finishing the office, he calmly drew a knife from his pocket, opened it, and with a single cut sliced off the Brother's right ear.

There had been no time for any one to interfere. The Brother gave a terrible yell.

'The left one will be for another occasion,' said Jeanbernat quietly, as he threw the ear upon the ground. Then he went off.

So great and so general was the stupefaction that nobody followed him. Brother Archangias had dropped upon the heap of fresh soil which had been thrown out of the grave. He was staunching his bleeding wound with his handkerchief. One of the four peasants who had carried the coffin, wanted to lead him away, conduct him home; but he refused with a gesture and remained where he was, fierce and sullen, wishing to see Albine lowered into the pit.

'There! it's our turn at last!' said Rosalie with a little sigh.

But Abbe Mouret still lingered by the grave, watching the bearers who were slipping cords under Albine's coffin in order that they might let it down gently. The bell was still tolling; but La Teuse must have been getting tired, for it tolled irregularly, as though it were becoming a little irritated at the length of the ceremony.

The sun was growing hotter and the Solitaire's shadow crept slowly over the grass and the grave mounds. When Abbe Mouret was obliged to step back in order to give the bearers room, his eyes lighted upon the marble tombstone of Abbe Coffin, that priest who also had loved, and who was now sleeping there so peacefully beneath the wild-flowers.

Then, all at once, even as the coffin descended, supported by the cords, whose knots made it strain and creak, a tremendous uproar arose in the poultry-yard on the other side of the wall. The goat began to bleat. The ducks, the geese, and the turkeys raised their loudest calls and flapped their wings. The fowls all cackled at once. The yellow cock, Alexander, crowed forth his trumpet notes. The rabbits could even be heard leaping in their hutches and shaking their wooden floors. And, above all this lifeful uproar of the animal creation, a loud laugh rang out. There was a rustling of skirts. Desiree, with her hair streaming, her arms bare to the elbows, and her face crimson with triumph, burst into sight, her hands resting upon the coping of the wall. She had doubtless climbed upon the manure-heap.

'Serge! Serge!' she cried.

At that moment Albine's coffin had reached the bottom of the grave. The cords had just been withdrawn. One of the peasants was throwing the first shovelful of earth into the cavity.

'Serge! Serge!' Desiree cried, still more loudly, clapping her hands, 'the cow has got a calf!'

THE END

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